Social scientists want to understand not only social structure and history; they want to understand the varieties of individual men and women that are historically selected and formed by the social structures in which they live. The biographies of these people cannot be understood without reference to the historical structures in which are organized the milieux of their everyday lives. It is now possible to trace the meanings of historic transformations not only for individual ways of life but for the very characters of a variety of human beings. As the history-making unit, the nation-state is also the unit within which types of men and women are formed: it is the man-making unit. That is one reason why struggle between nations and between blocs of nations is also struggle over the types of human beings that will eventually prevail; that is why culture and politics are now so intimately related, and that is why there is such need and such demand for the sociological imagination. The problems of social and historical psychology are in many ways the most intriguing that we can today confront. For it is in this area, it happens, that the major intellectual traditions of our time, in fact of Western civilization, have now come to a most exciting confluence.
There is no end to arguments about the relations between “psychology” and “the social sciences.” Most of the arguments have been formal attempts to integrate a variety of ideas about “the individual” and “the group.” No doubt they are all useful, in some way to somebody; fortunately, in our attempt to formulate the tasks of social science, they need not concern us. For however psychologists may define their field of work, the economist and the sociologist, the political scientist, the anthropologist and the historian, in their studies of human society, must make assumptions about “human nature” and as well, by their studies, imply a variety of conceptions of man. These assumptions and implications now usually fall into the borderline area of “social psychology.”
Interest in this area has increased because, like history, psychology is so fundamental to work in social sciences that in so far as psychologists have not turned to the problems involved, social scientists have become their own psychologists. Economists, long the most formalized of social scientists, have become aware that the old “economic man,” hedonistic and calculating, can no longer be assumed as the psychological foundations of an adequate study of economic institutions. Within anthropology there has grown up a strong interest in “personality and culture”; within sociology as well as psychology, “social psychology” is now a busy field of study. Psychiatry — the most problematic field of both medicine and social study — has become a confusion of perspectives, drawn from virtually all social, biological, and psychological fields of study.
In reaction to these intellectual developments, some psychologists have taken up a variety of work in “social psychology,” others have attempted, in a variety of ways, to redefine psychology so as to retain a field of study apart from obviously social factors, and some have confined their activities to work in human physiology. I do not wish to examine here the academic specialties withinpsychology — a field now greatly torn and split — much less to judge them.
There is one style of psychological reflection which has not usually been taken up explicitly by academic psychologists but which none the less has exerted influence upon them, as well as upon our entire intellectual life. In psychoanalysis, and especially in the work of Freud himself, the problem of the nature of human nature is stated within the broadest of frameworks. In brief, during the last generation, two and one-half steps forward have been taken by the less rigid of the psychoanalysts.
First, the physiology of the individual organism was transcended, and there began the study of those little family circles in which such dreadful melodramas occurred. Freud may be said to have discovered from an unexpected viewpoint — the medical — the analysis of the individual in his parental family. Of course, the “influence” of the family upon man had been noticed; what was new was that as a social institution it became, in Freud’s view, intrinsic to the inner character and life-fate of the individual.
Second, the social element in the lens of psychoanalysis was greatly broadened, especially by what may be called sociological work on the superego. In America, to the psychoanalytic tradition was joined one having quite different sources, which came to early flower in the social behaviorism of George H. Mead. But then a limitation or a hesitancy set in. The small-scale setting of “interpersonal relations” is now clearly seen; the broader context in which these relations themselves, and hence the individual himself, are situated has not been. There are, of course, exceptions, notably Erich Fromm who has related economic and religious institutions and traced out their meaning for types of individuals. One reason for the general hesitancy is the limited social role of the analyst; his work and his perspective are professionally tied to the individual patient; the problems of which he is aware and of which he can readily become aware, under the specialized conditions of his practice, are limited and limiting. Unfortunately, psychoanalysis has not become a firm and integral part of academic research.1
The next step forward in psychoanalytic studies is to do fully for other institutional areas what Freud began to do so magnificently for kinship institutions of a selected type. What is needed is the idea of social structure as a composition of institutional orders, each of which we must study psychologically as Freud studied certain kinship institutions. The psychiatry, the actual therapy of “interpersonal” relations, has already begun to raise questions about a troublesome central point: the tendency to anchor values and norms in the supposed needs of the individuals per se. For if the individual’s very nature cannot be understood without close reference to social reality, then we must analyze it in such reference. And such analysis includes not only the locating of the individual, as a biographical entity, within various interpersonal milieux — but the locating of these milieux within their social structure.
On the basis of developments in psychoanalysis, as well as in social psychology as a whole, it is now possible to state briefly the psychological concerns of the social sciences. I list here, in the barest of summary, only those propositions which I take as the most fruitful hunches, or, at the least, as legitimate assumptions on the part of the working social scientist.2
(1) The external biography of an individual cannot be adequately understood without references to the institutions within which it is enacted. For this biography consists of acquiring, of dropping, of modifying, in a very intimate way, of moving from one role to another. One is a child in a certain kind of family, one is a playmate in a certain kind of child’s group; a student, a workman, a foreman, a general, a mother. Much of human life consists of playing such roles within specific institutions. To understand the biography of an individual, we must understand the significance and meaning of the roles he has played and does play; to understand these roles we must understand the institutions of which they are a part.
(2) But the view of man as a social creature enables us to go much deeper than merely viewing the external biography as a sequence of social roles. Such a view requires us to understand the most internal and “psychological” features of man: in particular, his self-image and his conscience and indeed the very growth of his mind. It may well be that the most radical discovery within recent psychology, psychoanalysis, and social science is the discovery of how so many of the most intimate features of the person are socially patterned and even implanted. Within the quite broad limits of the glandular and nervous apparatus, the emotions of fear and hatred and love and rage, in all their varieties, must be understood in close and continual reference to the social biography and the social context in which they are experienced and expressed. Within the quite broad limits of the physiology of the sense organs, our very perception of the physical world, the colors we discriminate, the smells we become aware of, the noises we hear, are socially patterned and socially limited. The motivations of men, and even the varying extents to which various types of men are typically aware of them, are to be understood in terms of the vocabularies of motive that prevail in a society and of social changes and confusions among such vocabularies.
(3) The biography and the character of the individual cannot be understood merely in terms of milieux, and certainly not entirely in terms of early milieux — those of the infant and the child. Adequate understanding requires the setting of these milieux, both earlier and later, in their structural framework, taking into account any transformations of this framework that may occur within the span of the individual’s lifetime.
The understanding of social structure and of structural changes as they bear upon more intimate milieux enables us to understand the causes of individual conduct, feelings, and limitations on self-awareness, which men in specific milieux cannot themselves detect. The test of an adequate conception of any type of man cannot rest upon whether individuals of this type find it pleasantly in line with their own self-images. Often, in fact, it is because they live only in certain milieux that men do not and cannot be expected to know the causes of their condition and the limits of their selfhood. Groups of men who have truly adequate views of themselves and of their own social positions are indeed rare. To assume the contrary, as is often done by virtue of the very methods used by some social scientists, is to assume a degree of rational self-consciousness and self-knowledge that not even eighteenth century psychologists would allow. Max Weber’s idea of “The Puritan Man,” of his motives and of his function within religious and economic institutions, enables us to understand him better than he understood himself: Weber’s use of the notion of structure enabled him to transcend “the individual’s” own awareness of himself and his milieux.
The relevance of earlier experience, “the weight” of childhood, in the psychology of adult character is itself relative to the type of childhood and the type of social biography that prevail in various given societies. It is, for example, now quite apparent that the role of “the father” in the building of a personality must be stated within the limits of specific types of fathers and specific types of families, and in terms of the place such families occupy within the social structure of which these families are a part.
(4) The idea of social structure cannot be built up only from ideas or from facts about a specific series of individuals, their reactions to their milieux. Attempts to explain social and historical events, economics and political, religious, and military institutions, on the basis of psychological theories about “the individual” often rest upon the assumption that society is nothing but a great scatter of individuals and that, accordingly, if we know all about these “atoms” we can in some way add up the information and thus know about society. It is not a fruitful assumption. In fact, we cannot even know what is most elemental about “the individual” by any psychological study of him as a socially isolated creature. Except in the abstract building of models, which of course may be useful, the economist cannot assume The Economic Man; nor can the psychiatrist of family life (and practically all psychiatrists are, in fact, specialists of this one social area) assume the classical Oedipal Man. For just as the structural relations of economic and political roles are now often decisive for understanding the economic conduct of individuals, so are the great changes, since Victorian fatherhood, in the roles within the family and in the family’s location as an institution within modern societies.
(5) The principle of historical specificity holds for psychology as well as for the social sciences. Even quite intimate features of man’s inner life are best formulated as problems within specific historical contexts. To realize that this is an entirely reasonable assumption, one has only to reflect for a moment upon the wide variety of men and women that is displayed in the course of human history. Psychologists, as well as social scientists, should indeed think well before finishing any sentences the subject of which is “man.”
The human variety is such that no “elemental” psychologies, no theory of “instincts,” no principles of “basic human nature” of which we know, enable us to account for the enormous human variety of types and individuals. Anything that can be asserted about man apart from what is inherent in the social-historical realities of human life will refer mainly to the quite wide biological limits and potentialities of the human species. Within these limits and rising out of these potentialities, such a panorama of human types confronts us that to attempt to explain it in terms of a theory of “basic human nature” is to confine human history itself in some arid little cage of concepts about “human nature” — as often as not constructed from some precise and irrelevant trivialities about mice in a maze.
The very idea of some “human nature” common to man as man is a violation of the social and historical specificity that careful work in the human studies requires; at the very least, it is an abstraction that social students have not earned the right to make. Surely we ought occasionally to remember that in truth we do not know much about man, and that all the knowledge we do have does not entirely remove the element of mystery that surrounds his variety as it is revealed in history and in biography. Sometimes we do want to wallow in that mystery, to feel that we are, after all, a part of it, and perhaps we should; but being men of the West, we will inevitably also study the human variety, which for us means removing the mystery from our view of it. In doing so, let us not forget what it is we are studying and how little we know of man, of history, of biography, and of the societies of which we are at once creators and creatures. Realizing this, perhaps we should be at once more careful and less pretentious about the methods we would employ when we get down to our work.
Notes
- Another major reason for the tendency to apotheosize “interpersonal relations” is the sponge-like quality and limitations of the word “culture,” in terms of which much of the social in man’s depths has been recognized and asserted. In contrast with social structure, the concept “culture” is one of the spongiest words in social science, although, perhaps for that reason, in the hands of an expert, enormously useful. In practice, the concept “culture” is more often a loose reference to social milieux plus “tradition” than an adequate idea of social structure.
- For detailed discussion of the point of view expressed here, see Gerth and Mills, Character and Social Structure (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1953).
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