Civics: as Applied Sociology eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 145 pages of information about Civics.

Civics: as Applied Sociology eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 145 pages of information about Civics.
interests may be broadly defined; it is to emphasise his particular historic type, his social formation and influence in the civic whole, if not indeed to dominate this as far as may be.  We are all for progress, but we each define it in his own way.  Hence one man of industrial energy builds more factories or slums, another as naturally more breweries to supply them; and in municipal or national council his line of action, conscious or unconscious, remains congruent with these.  Representative government fails to yield all that its inventors hoped of it, simply because it is so tolerably representative of its majorities; and there is thus great truth in the common consolation that our municipal governments, like larger ones, are seldom much worse than we deserve.  Each social formation, through each of its material activities, exerts its influence upon the civic whole; and each of its ideas and ideals wins also its place and power.  At one time the legal and punitive point of view, directing itself mainly to individual cases, or the philanthropic, palliating sufferings, dispute the foremost places; and now in their turn hygienic or educational endeavours arise, towards treating causes instead of waiting for consequences.  Such endeavours are still undeniably too vague in thought, too crude in practice, and the enthusiast of hygiene or education or temperance may have much to answer for.  But so, also, has he who stands outside of the actual civic field, whether as philistine or aesthete, utopist or cynic, party politician or “mug-wump.”  Between all these extremes it is for the united forces of civic survey and civic service to find the middle course. [Page:  114] We observe then in the actual city, as among its future citizens, that our action is generally the attempt to mould both alike to some past or passing social formation, and, therefore, usually towards the type to which our interest and our survey incline, be this in our own city or more probably in some earlier one.  Even in the actual passing detail of party politics we are often reminded how directly continuous are the rivals with puritan London, with royalist Oxford; but still more is this the case throughout the history of thought and action, and the intenser the more plainly; for it is in his highest moments of conviction and decision that the Puritan feels most in sympathy with the law or the prophets of Jerusalem, the scholar with Athens; or that the man of action—­be he the first French republican or the latest imperialist—­most frankly draws his inspiration from the corresponding developments of Paris.  It is a commonplace of psychology that our thought is and must be anthropomorphic; a commonplace of history that it has been Hebraomorphic, Hellenomorphic, Latinomorphic, and so on by turns.

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Civics: as Applied Sociology from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.