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Furthermore, it will be seen on closer examination that not only may force sometimes be spontaneous; rather, it is always in its essence, in the last analysis, wholly spontaneous. For external forces cannot be set in motion except by virtue of some force which masters those agencies. Legal coercion could not be exercised by any number of men unless they were in possession of the instrumentalities by which it could be effected; force is therefore in its essence nothing but the action of the will itself, employing such agencies as are within its reach, the force being great or little as those agencies are great or little. The will does not determine .the strength of the agencies, for it is beyond its control. The will has a certain latitude in determining the amount of force that shall be exerted at a given moment, but cannot increase the force beyond the maximum allotted to it by the operation of immutable natural laws.

This brings us to the specific force of moral and legal right, that is, if right be treated, for the present purpose, not as an objective, intellectualized concept denuded of volitional content, but as a phase of the human will, a dynamic, psychological conception. Only in the latter sense are we at all justified in speaking of force as an attribute of right.

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The Distribution of Force in a Society. The first distinction likely to occur, in seeking a classification of force, is doubtless that between physical or actual and psychic or volitional force, the former operating upon the physical person or upon physical objects and the latter operating only in the region of motives. But this distinction, though important, relates to the degree or quantity of force rather than to its kind, and is secondary, in any consideration of the nature of force and its distribution.

First may be considered bodily force, which arises merely from the strength and endurance of the human frame. We need not inquire into the obscure biological principles which insure for some men greater strength than others; it is sufficient to say that the distribution of bodily

3 Throughout this paper "force" is used in the ordinary mechanical sense of compulsion or pressure, or the agency exciting such pressure, not in the sense of a metaphysical entity supposed to cause social phenomena. "Social force," as here conceived, is thus clearly distinguishable from that other concept of "social force" which has been criticized, perhaps properly, as unscientific. See "The Social Forces Error," by Edward Cary Hayes, American Journal of Sociology, xvi, 613 (Mar. 1911).

force is virtually unrelated to the distribution of the other kinds of force of which we shall speak.

A second form of force may be called appetitive force. The conception may seem novel but seems a necessary link in the chain here constructed. The desires of men give rise to forces which have a most far-reaching effect on the constitution of society. Men's appetites, bodily and mental, determine the habits of a society and lay the foundation for a complex of moral, economic, and political pressures. In a society that lives for conquest the military class will surely be stronger than any other. In a society that lives for trade the commercial class will be supreme. The appetites of large numbers of people exert their pressure upon the life of the community as a whole, and may have a preponderating influence upon its interests. From an economic point of view it is not the producers alone who have power, on the contrary the consumers dictate what shall be produced and in what quantity. The distribution of appetitive force can be described only by answering the question what needs are regarded as most imperative, what appetites are shared by the largest number, what appetites are shared by people in possession of the largest economic resources for gratifying them. The answer to this question will thus be determined in part by the distribution of the other branch of economic force, wealth force or productive force.

Productive force is the force exerted by those who create things, whether goods or services, to satisfy human wants. Productive capacity varies so widely that some men are strong and others weak. Production, moreover, both limits consumption and is limited by it, and while it might look, therefore, as if neither producers nor consumers could secure a preponderance of power, in practice it works otherwise, as the advantage will usually be found on one or the other side. It is normally, however, the producer who accumulates the surplus fund, and his possession of that fund turns the scale in his favor. He is thenceforward in a position to dictate somewhat to the consumer and to other producers. This advantage is passed on to subsequent owners of his wealth who have succeeded to the power he exercises without doing anything to earn it.

The chief factor in economic force is wealth, whether producers' or consumers' wealth, so the distribution of economic force is generally

synonymous with the distribution of wealth. That distribution is determined by the distribution of productive ability as evaluated by the consumers' wants. Likewise the economic force of wealth is in large measure shifted or delegated to the producers ministering to the wants of the wealthy class, who derive their power from the implied consent of the wealthy class to their operations.

Moral force is appetitive force raised to the higher level of desires directed not toward immediate practical ends but the ultimate welfare of society. All degrees of elevation are thus possible to moral force. But the efficacy of the force and its elevation may be wholly different things. Moral force may be efficacious on a low place of exaltation. The efficacy may be secured merely by the concurrence in the same person of a lower form of moral force and of economic or political force. For it is an error to suppose that the arguments of moral force are addressed only to the conscience; they are addressed also to the fear of those in authority and to the discretion which seeks to retain the good will of the economically powerful. The normal intermingling of moral and economic force is evidenced by the virtues common to morality and to economic life, which express the valuation of moral ideals in terms of the actual economic order. A supermundane, disinterested morality seeks to disentangle itself of these worldly ties. It expresses, however, only the aspiration to a purer economic system,-though the aspiration be unconscious, which should witness the economic salvation of virtue. In a society of elevated tastes and habits the appetitive and productive activities of men would be lifted to the level of purified conscience, a high value would be set upon the worthiest personal capacities, and wealth and virtue would coalesce. The actual distribution of moral force roughly conforms to the actual distribution of economic power. The ideal distribution of religion, transcending the facts of social life, which would give virtue its reward in heaven, merely shifts from this world to the next the realization of that which the moral system regards essential to its vindication.

Political force is not only that force which we see in an organized government, but the force of one person's control of another which furnishes the inner substance of which organized political power is merely the outward form. Political force, unlike economic force, extends

beyond particular transactions into a super-economic field; it demands a more general submission from the individual and offers a fuller expression of the desire for personal power. Its distribution follows that of economic and moral force, from which it is commonly derived.

Right has the Support of Collective Social Force. The foregoing survey of the distribution of force can be regarded as only tentative and preliminary-tentative because the different kinds of force so overlap and depend upon one another that an accurate presentation of the interrelations would necessitate an elaborate exposition that is not practicable in this place, and preliminary because the general propositions just laid down, which can be treated only as rough approximations to sound analytical principles, instead of solving the problem of the distribution of force, simply present that problem in a clearer light, and leave open the fundamental question which it will now be our endeavor to treat more fruitfully.

It has already been seen that economic, moral, and political force roughly conform to the same scheme of distribution and may therefore be treated, roughly at least, as different phases of a single social force. As the larger topic of our discussion is the relation between force and right, this conception of a single social force presents that topic in an altogether different aspect from what would be the case if a conflict rather than a unison of forces had to be taken into account. If, for example, there were a conflict between moral and economic force this conflict would have to be resolved before it could be determined what force right could call to its aid. Instead, there is no tangle of conflicting forms of force to be unraveled, for right rallies the collective social force to its support, and the force being homogeneous, the only conflict is that between the force and the obstacles it has to overcome, that arising from the struggle between competing forces similarly constituted for supremacy. We have therefore to consider the struggle for right in relation to this struggle of social force itself for supremacy.

The Problem of Social Force is More Psychological than Mechanical. It has been a common error to conceive of social force as similar to physical force, and consequently to treat the struggle of competing social

'So far as the writer is aware, the literature of social science offers no extended and scientifically thorough treatment of the subject.

forces as a blind mechanical process. This mistake results from the failure to perceive that the intensity of social force is determined by causes which are internal to its constitution, and that the problem is consequently not so much that of the external operations of a social force as that of the manner in which its strength is self-determined. Given two or more forces of fixed quantity, it is no doubt interesting to predict what will be the result of their collision, but as a matter of fact such forces never have a fixed quantity, and their intensity is governed by psychic causes which though elusive are important as constituting the very essence of the problem. There can therefore be no economic interpretation of history which arbitrarily abstracts from the complex of social force we have considered its quasi-mechanical activity and ignores the essential moral element of the complex. Nor can there be a valid economic interpretation of history which, though recognizing the moral element, and even correlating it with the mechanical after the fashion of pragmatistic philosophy, banishes it to a purely subjective realm and denies its efficacy as an agency co-operating with economic force in all the physical operations of the latter. Economic force is, indeed, determined by the tastes, habits, desires, and aptitudes of men, and when we consider the positive force thus generated within the human constitution we find that to define it solely in either economic or moral terms would be a misinterpretation; no simple physical formula will suffice to express the complex nature of social force, and we are driven to the selection of a broader conception, one more psychological than mechanical. 5

5 “Wenn wir fragen: giebt es denn überhaupt ein Völkerrecht? so treten uns zwei einander widersprechende, aber gleich unhaltbare extreme Anschauungen vom internationalen Leben der Staaten entgegen. Die eine, naturalistische (ihr gegenüber steht die ebenso falsche, moralisirende Auffassung der liberalen Theorie], als deren Hauptvertreter wir Machiavelli schon kennen gelernt haben, geht von dem Satze aus: der Staat ist Macht schlechthin, er darf Alles thun, was ihm nützlich ist; er kann sich also an kein Völkerrecht binden, seine Stellung zu anderen Staaten bestimmt sich rein mechanisch nach dem Verhältniss der Kräfte. Diese Anschauung kann man nur von ihrem eigenen Standpunkt widerlegen. Man muss ihr zunächst zugeben, dass der Staat physische Macht ist; will er das aber einzig und allein sein, ohne Vernunft und Gewissen, so kann er sich auch nicht mehr im Zustande eigener Sicherheit behaupten. Auch die Naturalisten geben zu, dass den Staat den Zweck hat, Ordnung im Inneren zu schaffen; wie kann er das, wenn er nach Aussen sich an kein Recht binden

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