Physics and Society

Extract

Some seventy years ago, sixty-eight, to be exact, Walter Bagehot published a notable little volume entitled Physics and Politics, described in a subtitle as “Thoughts on the Application of the Principles of ‘Natural Selection’ and ‘Inheritance’ to Political Society.” Actually the volume sought to sketch in outline a natural history of political society, and to describe the process or processes by which later, more elaborate, and more liberal forms of association have emerged, from the dissolution of earlier, simpler, and more rigid, if not oppressive, forms.

Society, or at least political society, as Bagehot conceived it, is a kind of super-organism, having a social structure which is maintained by a social process. This structure is imbedded in and cemented by custom. Man is a custom-making animal. The process in this instance which is not otherwise defined, is what we know elsewhere as “the historical process.” Its function is to weave and reweave the web of custom and tradition in which the individuals who are destined to live together and eventually act together as a political unit, are ineluctably bound together.

Always there is a more or less inflexible tradition which imposes upon each new generation the pattern of the inherited social order. But always there are the liberating and individuating influences of other social processes—competition, conflict, and discussion—which represent what Bagehot describes as man's “propensity to variation,” or, to use a political rather than a biological term, his propensity for non-conformity, “which,” he adds, “is the principle of progress.”