erate rationalism in any form. It must be kept out. But it also raises its brazen face in the group itself. Mere rationalizing about the effectiveness of the organs of the church may cause Ärgernis. Where that rationalizing entails a challenge, a demand for a change not sufficiently documented by group theology, there is a taint of rationalism in the air. Where a minority sets itself over against the group, there it is a stench in the nostrils of the Gemeinde, who call it Selbstüberhebung. It is the ancient superbia; it is heresy. In the presence of heresy, Lutheran theology remembers Luther's own estimate of reason, other people's reason: Die Vernunft ist eine Bestie, sie muss geschändet werden.20 Rationalism, then, for the group, is dissent from the group consensus sociologically, and theologically from the group creed. It is within the group der Geist der stets verneint; it is the spirit which prevails outside, the spirit of the others. The spiritual man it is not. But thrice damned are the Masons and all fraternal orders. In the roaring forties, when the parochial organization of charity began to be inadequate, they tried to reorganize and rearticulate it. They grafted the principle of fellowship and mutual aid upon an adventitious and somewhat godless "society." They thus borrowed from the fellowship what they gave to the society, and also coaxed godly Germans from their Gemeinschaft into a bad Gesellschaft. That was bad enough; it threatened the Gemeinde in its integrity, its sole stewardship of the trust of caritas. But did they not also, for their nondescript crowd, adopt some continental American God and Supreme Being as their protector, some secret hocus-pocus as their symbol? That supreme being is not Christ, that mystery is not baptism, and their faith is no faith, for "cursed he who puts his faith in man." They have been, as our Lutherans see it, the real enemies of the Christian religion in America, and they have debauched the church. They are responsible for the adultery of American Christianity with the deistic rationalism of the eighteenth "Cf. Luther on the "Superbi Hospites, Non Cives," W. A., III, 83, 7; cit. Holl, pp. 250–51; and Theolog. Quartalsschrift, passim; also 1910, pp. 52 ff., 61. John 10, 35 "gilt uns tausend mal mehr als alle Wissenschaft." century; the religion of the brotherhood of man is their nefarious work. Their religion is deism and their church is the state."7 No German Lutheran of the Missouri Synod may call brother a Mason or any member of a fraternal order. He who dies in that brotherhood must go unshriven by his church. The minister has no calling to go with his body, and to speak at his grave is dangerous in the extreme. For is not a non-denominational prayer constructive blasphemy? Thus, from the relative rationalism of the others the Gemeinde and its church protects its members to the very grave. Our Lutheran may not have remained a good German in saeculo; his soul may not go to heaven at that. But neither has he been an Elk or an Odd Fellow, a Shriner or a Mason. He was not a joiner, he has kept himself unspotted from the world, and the gospel of the new Americanism has touched him not. 27 (Masons.) The outlawry of consociation with the Masons was the work of Rev. Walther, and one of the most decisive steps taken to conserve the sectionalism of the Lutheran mind. For the fraternal orders must be considered one of the most potent solvents of creed sectionalism, their group also the integrator of a new American lay religion in the above-characterized sense. For the modern attitude of the group toward lodges, see Theolog. Quartalsschrift, VIII, Fg., 60 ff.; XV-XVI, Jahrg., 43 ff., 121 ff.; XVIII, Fg., 731 ff. Also Paul Pieper, Die Christusfeindschaft der Logen, N. W. Pub. House, 1923. [To be continued] THE CONCEPT "SOCIAL FORCES" IN AMERICAN SOCIOLOGY SECTION V. THE "INTEREST" CONCEPT FLOYD N. HOUSE ABSTRACT With the publication of his General Sociology in 1905, Small advertised a new type of classification of human motives, designated by the term "interest." He gave Ratzenhofer credit for the term and for the general idea, but Small's interests concept seems to be something quite different from anything he found in Ratzenhofer's writings. Ellwood, Blackmar and Gillin, Ross, and Southard and Jarrett have referred with approval and with varying degrees of emphasis to the interests concept as developed by Small; most of these writers treat it as a term designating a class of social forces which subsist alongside of the more elementary social forces. The interest concept is one which is still at the time of writing involved in a process of competition with several others for prestige and utilization. We have embodied in numerous passages in other sections of this paper discussions of Small's attitude on the social forces question, together with quotations displaying his point of view. We have also quoted classifications of social forces by Blackmar and Gillin' and Ellwood" which make use of the interest concept; it will not be necessary to repeat them here. We have also quoted a passage from Ross' Moot Points in Sociology,3 which embodies a classification of what he called "interests," but without any particular emphasis upon the term. Ross had published this article in the American Journal of Sociology before Small's General Sociology appeared in print. Small contends, however, that he was not influenced in his use of the interest concept by any other writer except Ratzenhofer, and an examination of Small's summary of Ratzenhofer's presentation of "interests," in General Sociology, will convince anyone that he took the suggestion he received from Ratzenhofer and manufactured something quite different out of 1A. J. S., November, 1925. 2 Ibid., XXXI (September, 1925), 169. * Ibid., p. 166. it. Extended deliberation over the precise assignment of credit which should be made to each of several writers in connection with a particular idea is indeed a futile occupation for the historians of a science, and we may, without further preliminaries, proceed to devote one section of the present paper to the examination of the interests concept, taking Small's presentation in General Sociology as the principal exhibit. It is the impression of the present writer, based on his general reading in the literature of sociology and related fields, that it is especially Small's formulation of the interest concept which has given to that concept the considerable prestige which it now enjoys, not only with academic sociologists, but with social workers and others.* It has been possible to select a series of passages from General Sociology which set forth Small's conception of "interests" so clearly that comment by the present writer is largely superfluous. We therefore reproduce these passages with very little comment. It should be stated by way of preface, however, that Professor Small gives the fullest credit, in his General Sociology and in other writings, to Ratzenhofer for the general concept "interests" as a tool of sociological analysis and explanation. Just where the ideas furnished by Ratzenhofer leave off, and where Small's own developments of the interest concept begin, would require a close and extended comparison of the writings of the two men to determine. The writer has not made such a comparison, but it may be remarked that Small has laid before us the most important data for such a study in his General Sociology. In any case it appears to be from the parts of General Soviology which are epitomized in the following paragraphs that the term "interests" found its way into familiar use among American sociologists. One does not observe any type of man long without beginning to suspect that one may find in it every other type of man more or less disguised. One gets hold of the idea that all of these men are alike; that the one is doing what all are doing, and that all are doing what the one is doing. We get the *See, for example, the extended passage in Southard and Jarrett, The Kingdom of Evils, pp. 402-6, in which the authors express their approval of Small's definition and use of the interests concept. notion that, if we could look below the surface of these lives in turn, we should find that the conduct which on the surface seems so unlike and unrelated is really the same essential activity, with variations to be accounted for after slight attention to the surroundings in which they occur.5 All men, . . . . from the most savage to the most highly civilized, act as they do act, first, because of variations in the circumstances of their environment, both physical and social; second, because of variations and permutations of their six elementary interests. I name these, for convenience, health, wealth, sociability, knowledge, beauty, and rightness. 6 Of course, this analysis of human interests is from the standpoint of the observer, not of the actor. Real human beings are not such prigs as to start saying: "Go to now. I propose to secure health, wealth, sociability, knowledge, beauty, and rightness." It is only the rare individual, even in relatively advanced society, whose powers of abstraction are so developed that he can say: "I want food." Most men know simply that they are hungry and want the particular food that will satisfy today's cravings; or they want work, because its wage will buy today's dinner. Still less do men want the other groups of interests, but all men act for reasons which the few reflective men may trace back to combinations of motives conveniently classified in our six groups. The precise type and balance of motive is a distinct problem in each social situation." The above sixfold classification seems to have been original with Small, and he has apparently developed it as a logical generalization from which Ratzenhofer's more concrete categories of "interests," which are the ones he uses in the second passage we shall quote below, could be derived. The following transitional reasoning is also apparently Small's own: Two general propositions are pertinent with reference to the whole subject of the differentiation of interests within the state: 1. The various institutions, political, ecclesiastical, professional, industrial, etc., including the government, are devices, means, gradually brought into existence to serve interests that develop within the state. 2. Each of these devices, and even their accidental variations and subordinate parts, are likely to be transformed, in the minds of the persons who get their status in society by working with them, into ends, to be cherished and defended and perpetuated on their own account.8 "Op. cit., pp. 178–79. In later years Small substituted the term "prestige" to stand for the content of this interest. |