to slip downwards, while retaining its form and titles. In this case more of the power is retained by the orders nearest to the former autocrat than is acquired by those more distant. Since the power thus gradually percolates, a continuity and graduation of superiority and inferiority must develop itself. This is in fact the way in which in oriental states the social forms often arise. The power of the superior orders disintegrates, either because it is essentially incoherent, and does not know how to attain the above emphasized proportion between subordination and individual freedom; or because the persons comprising the administration are too indolent or too ignorant of governmental technique to preserve supreme power. For the power which is exercised over a large circle is never a constant possession. It must be constantly acquired and defended anew if anything more than its shadow and name is to remain.
The other way in which a scale of power is constructed up to a supreme head is the reverse of that just described. Starting with a relative equality of the social elements, certain elements gain greater significance; within the circle of influence thus constituted certain especially powerful individuals differentiate themselves, until this development accommodates itself to one or to a few heads. The pyramid of superiority and inferiority is built in this case from below upward, while in the former case the development was from above downward. This second form of development is often found in economic relationships, where at first there exists a certain equality between the persons carrying on the work of a certain industrial society. Presently some of the number acquire wealth; others become poor; others fall into intermediate conditions which are as dependent upon an aristocracy of property as the lower orders are upon the middle strata; this aristocracy rises in manifold gradations to the magnates, of whom sometimes a single individual is appropriately designated as the “king” of a branch of industry.[1] By a sort of combination of the two ways in which graded superiority and
- ↑ Of course such developments take place not in clear cut form nor in strict accordance with a scheme of explanation, but always in devious courses and obscured by all sorts of collateral phenomena. The sociological type which we derive from all this is always an abstraction, but not other than those at the basis of every science. The object of a special science seldom occurs in the purity and isolation in which it is scientifically treated, but in reality always mixed and entangled with phenomena to which other branches of science are devoted, so that each special science treats only an abstraction. It is therefore better to acknowledge freely that this is the case with the new science of sociology.
