ABSTRACT

Never do we find the social pressure uniform through a long period. There are times when society holds the individual as in a vise, and times when he wriggles almost from under the social knee. The most likely and obvious cause of such vicissitudes is change in social need. The supply of social control is evoked, as it were, by the demand for it, and is adjusted to that demand. Next to change in social need, the vicissitudes of control are connected with partial dissociation due to the rise and strife of classes. The social substance running smooth and unbroken from top to bottom, social control may be moral and mild. In older countries, however, the good places are occupied, escape from one's lot is more hopeless, and social order implies a formidable enginery. With the partial paralysis of social control, there is found normally a greater energy of individual reaction against wrong.