In the concluding portions of this essay we have to consider certain practical attitudes which spring from the theoretical views already discussed. Their most characteristic common feature is a direct result of the inability, caused by the lack of a Compositive theory of social phenomena, to grasp how the independent action of many men can produce coherent wholes, persistent structures of relationships which serve important human purposes without having been designed for that end. This produces a ``pragmatic''8.1 interpretation of social institutions which treats all social structures which serve human purposes as the result of deliberate design and which denies the possibility of an orderly or purposeful arrangement in anything which is not thus constructed.
This view receives strong support from the fear of employing any anthropomorphic conceptions, a fear so characteristic of the scientistic attitude. This fear has produced an almost complete ban on the use of the concept of ``purpose'' in the discussion of spontaneous social growths, and it often drives positivists into an error similar to that they wish to avoid: having learned that it is erroneous to regard everything that behaves in an apparently purposive manner as created by a designing mind, they are led to believe that no result of the action of many men can show order or serve a useful purpose unless it is the result of deliberate design. They are thus driven back to a view which is essentially the same as that which, till the eighteenth century, made man think of language or the family as having been ``invented,'' or the state as having been created by an explicit social contract, and in opposition to which the Compositive theories of social structures were developed.
As the terms of ordinary language are somewhat misleading, it is necessary to move with great care in any discussion of the ``purposive'' character of spontaneous social formations. The risk of being lured into an illegitimate anthropomorphic use of the term purpose is as great as that of denying that the term purpose in this connection designates something of importance. In its strict original meaning purpose indeed pre supposes an acting person deliberately aiming at a result. The same, however, as we have seen before,8.2 is true of other concepts like ``law'' or ``organization,'' which we have nevertheless been forced, by the lack of other suitable terms, to adopt for scientific use in a nonanthropomorphic sense. In the same way we may find the term purpose indispensable in a carefully defined sense.
The character of the problem may usefully be described first in the words of an eminent contemporary philosopher who, though elsewhere, in the strict positivist manner, he declares that ``the concept of purpose must be entirely excluded from the scientific treatment of the phenomena of life,'' yet admits the existence of ``a general principle which proves frequently valid in psychology and biology and also elsewhere: namely that the result of unconscious or instinctive processes is frequently exactly the same as would have arisen from rational calculation.''8.3 This states one aspect of the problem very clearly: namely, that a result which, if it were deliberately aimed at, could be achieved only in a limited number of ways, may actually be achieved by one of those methods, although nobody has consciously aimed at it. But it still leaves open the question why the particular result which is brought about in this manner should be regarded as distinguished above others and therefore deserve to be described as the ``purpose.''
If we survey the different fields in which we are constantly tempted to describe phenomena as ``purposive'' though they are not directed by a conscious mind, it becomes rapidly clear that the ``end'' or ``purpose'' they are said to serve is always the preservation of a ``whole,'' of a persistent structure of relationships, whose existence we have come to take for granted before we understood the nature of the mechanism which holds the parts together. The most familiar instances of such wholes are the biological organisms. Here the conception of the function of an organ as an essential condition for the persistence of the whole has proved to be of the greatest heuristic value. It is easily seen how paralyzing an effect on research it would have had if the scientific prejudice had effectively banned the use of all teleological concepts in biology and, for example, prevented the discoverer of a new organ from immediately asking what purpose or function it serves.8.4
Though in the social sphere we meet with phenomena which in this respect raise analogous problems, it is, of course, dangerous to describe them for that reason as organisms. The limited analogy provides as such no answer to the common problem, and the loan of an alien term tends to obscure the equally important differences. We need not labor further the now familiar fact that the social wholes, unlike the biological organisms, are not given to us as natural units, fixed complexes which ordinary experience shows us to belong together, but are recognizable only by a process of mental reconstruction; or that the parts of the social whole, unlike those of a true organism, can exist away from their particular place in the whole and are to a large extent mobile and exchangeable. Yet, though we must avoid overworking the analogy, certain general considerations apply in both cases. As in the biological organisms we often observe in spontaneous social formations that the parts move as if their purpose were the preservation of the wholes. We find again and again that if it were somebody's deliberate aim to preserve the structure of those wholes, and if he had knowledge and the power to do so, he would have to do it by causing precisely those movements which in fact are taking place without any such conscious direction.
In the social sphere these spontaneous movements which preserve a certain structural connection between the parts are, moreover, connected in a special way with our individual purposes: the social wholes which are thus maintained are the condition for the achievement of many of the things at which we as individuals aim, the environment which makes it possible even to conceive of most of our individual desires and which gives us the power to achieve them.
There is nothing more mysterious in the fact that, for example, money and the price system enable man to achieve things which he desires, although they were not designed for that purpose, and hardly could have been consciously designed before that growth of civilization which they made possible, than that, unless man had tumbled upon these devices, he would not have achieved the powers he has gained. The facts to which we refer when we speak of purposive forces being at work here, are the same as those which create the persistent social structures which we have come to take for granted and which form the conditions of our existence. The spontaneously grown institutions are ``useful'' because they were the conditions on which the further development of man was based--which gave him the powers which he used. If, in the form in which Adam Smith put it, the phrase that man in society ``constantly promotes ends which are no part of his intention'' has become the constant source of irritation of the scientistically minded, it describes nevertheless the central problem of the social sciences. As it was put a hundred years after Smith by Carl Menger, who did more than any other writer to carry beyond Smith the elucidation of the meaning of this phrase, the question ``how it is possible that institutions which serve the common well are and are most important for its advancement can arise without a common will aiming at their creation'' is still ``the significant, perhaps the most significant, problem of the social sciences.''8.5
That the nature and even the existence of this problem are still so little recognized8.6 is closely connected with a common confusion about what we mean when we say that human institutions are made by man. Though in a sense man-made, that is, entirely the result of human actions, they may yet not be designed, not be the intended product of these actions. The term institution itself is rather misleading in this respect, as it suggests something deliberately instituted. It would probably be better if this term were confined to particular contrivances, like particular laws and organizations, which have been created for a specific purpose, and if a more neutral term like formations (in a sense similar to that in which the geologists use it, and corresponding to the German Gebilde) could be used for those phenomena, which, like money or language, have not been so created.
From the belief that nothing which has not been consciously designed can be useful or even essential to the achievement of human purposes, it is an easy transition to the belief that since all institutions have been made by man, we must have complete power to refashion them in any way we desire.8.7 But, though this conclusion at first sounds like a sell-evident commonplace, it is, in fact, a complete non sequitur, based on the equivocal use of the term institution. It would be valid only if all the ``purposive'' formations were the result of design. But phenomena like language or the market, money or morals, are not real artifacts, products of deliberate creation.8.8 Not only have they not been designed by any mind, but they are also preserved by, and depend for their functioning on, the actions of people who are not guided by the desire to keep them in existence. And, as they are not due to design but rest on individual actions which we do not now control, we at least cannot take it for granted that we can improve upon, or even equal, their performance by any organization which relies on the deliberate control of the movements of its parts. Insofar as we learn to understand the spontaneous forces, we may hope to use them and modify their operations by proper adjustment of the institutions which form part of the larger process. But there is all the difference between thus utilizing and influencing spontaneous processes and an attempt to replace them by an organization which relies on conscious control.
We flatter ourselves undeservedly if we represent human civilization as entirely the product of conscious reason or as the product of human design, or when we assume that it is necessarily in our power deliberately to re-create or to maintain what we have built without knowing what we were doing. Though our civilization is the result of a cumulation of individual knowledge, it is not by the explicit or conscious combination of all this knowledge in any individual brain, but by its embodiment in symbols which we use without understanding them, in habits and institutions, tools and concepts,8.9 that man in society is constantly able to profit from a body of knowledge neither he nor any other man completely possesses. Many of the greatest things man has achieved are the result not of consciously directed thought, and still less the product of a deliberately coordinated effort of many individuals, but of a process in which the individual plays a part which he can never fully understand. They are greater than any individual precisely because they result from the combination of knowledge more extensive than a single mind can master.
It has been unfortunate that those who have recognized this so often draw the conclusion that the problems it raises are purely historical problems, and thereby deprive themselves of the means of effectively refuting the views they try to combat. In fact, as we have seen,8.10 much of the older ``historical school'' was essentially a reaction against the type of erroneous rationalism we are discussing. If it failed it was because it treated the problem of explaining these phenomena as entirely one of the accidents of time and place and refused systematically to elaborate the logical process by which alone we can provide an explanation. We need not return here to this point already discussed.8.11Though the explanation of the way in which the parts of the social whole depend upon each other will often take the form of a genetic account, this will be at most ``schematic history'' which the true historian will rightly refuse to recognize as real history. It will deal, not with the particular circumstances of an individual process, but only with those steps which are essential to produce a particular result, with a process which, at least in principle, may be repeated elsewhere or at different times. As is true of all explanations, it must run in generic terms, it will deal with what is sometimes called the ``logic of events,'' neglect much that is important in the unique historical instance, and be concerned with a dependence of the parts of the phenomenon upon each other which is not even necessarily the same as the chronological order in which they appeared. In short, it is not history, but Compositive social theory.
One curious aspect of this problem which is rarely appreciated is that it is only by the individualist or Compositive method that we can give a definite meaning to the much abused phrases about the social processes and formations being in any sense ``more'' than ``merely the sum'' of their parts, and that we are enabled to understand how structures of interpersonal relationships emerge, which make it possible for the joint efforts of individuals to achieve desirable results which no individual could have planned or foreseen. The collectivist, on the other hand, who refuses to account for the wholes by systematically following up the interactions of individual efforts, and who claims to be able directly to comprehend social wholes as such, is never able to define the precise character of these wholes or their mode of operation, and is regularly driven to conceive of these wholes on the model of an individual mind.
Even more significant of the inherent weakness of the collectivist theories is the extraordinary paradox that from the assertion that society is in some sense more than merely the aggregate of all individuals their adherents regularly pass by a sort of intellectual somersault to the thesis that in order that the coherence of this larger entity be safeguarded it must be subjected to conscious control, that is, to the control of what in the last resort must be an individual mind. It thus comes about that in practice it is regularly the theoretical collectivist who extols individual reason and demands that all forces of society be made subject to the direction of a single mastermind, while it is the individualist who recognizes the limitations of the powers of individual reason and consequently advocates freedom as a means for the fullest development of the powers of the interindividual process.