The Theory of Social Revolutions eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 153 pages of information about The Theory of Social Revolutions.

The Theory of Social Revolutions eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 153 pages of information about The Theory of Social Revolutions.

Administration is the capacity of cooerdinating many, and often conflicting, social energies in a single organism, so adroitly that they shall operate as a unity.  This presupposes the power of recognizing a series of relations between numerous special social interests, with all of which no single man can be intimately acquainted.  Probably no very highly specialized class can be strong in this intellectual quality because of the intellectual isolation incident to specialization; and yet administration or generalization is not only the faculty upon which social stability rests, but is, possibly, the highest faculty of the human mind.  It is precisely in this preeminent requisite for success in government that I suspect the modern capitalistic class to be weak.  The scope of the human intellect is necessarily limited, and modern capitalists appear to have been evolved under the stress of an environment which demanded excessive specialization in the direction of a genius adapted to money-making under highly complex industrial conditions.  To this money-making attribute all else has been sacrificed, and the modern capitalist not only thinks in terms of money, but he thinks in terms of money more exclusively than the French aristocrat or lawyer ever thought in terms of caste.  The modern capitalist looks upon life as a financial combat of a very specialized kind, regulated by a code which he understands and has indeed himself concocted, but which is recognized by no one else in the world.  He conceives sovereign powers to be for sale.  He may, he thinks, buy them; and if he buys them; he may use them as he pleases.  He believes, for instance, that it is the lawful, nay more! in America, that it is the constitutional right of the citizen to buy the national highways, and, having bought them, to use them as a common carrier might use a horse and cart upon a public road.  He may sell his service to whom he pleases at what price may suit him, and if by doing so he ruins men and cities, it is nothing to him.  He is not responsible, for he is not a trustee for the public.  If he be restrained by legislation, that legislation is in his eye an oppression and an outrage, to be annulled or eluded by any means which will not lead to the penitentiary.  He knows nothing and cares less, for the relation which highways always have held, and always must hold, to every civilized population, and if he be asked to inform himself on such subjects he resents the suggestion as an insult.  He is too specialized to comprehend a social relation, even a fundamental one like this, beyond the narrow circle of his private interests.  He might, had he so chosen, have evolved a system of governmental railway regulation, and have administered the system personally, or by his own agents, but he could never be brought to see the advantage to himself of rational concession to obtain a resultant of forces.  He resisted all restraint, especially national restraint, believing that his one weapon —­money—­would be more effective in obtaining what he wanted in state legislatures than in Congress.  Thus, of necessity, he precipitates a conflict, instead of establishing an adjustment.  He is, therefore, in essence, a revolutionist without being aware of it.  The same specialized thinking appears in his reasoning touching actual government.  New York City will serve as an illustration.

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The Theory of Social Revolutions from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.