The Polish Peasant--Its Theoretical Underpinnings

The theoretical scheme underlying The Polish Peasant may be best understood as an attempt to go beyond both a purely individualistic or subjectivistic approach to sociological data and a generalized "objectivistic" interpretation of social life and social change in which acting, feeling, thinking individuals would be granted no analytical attention. They wished to avoid the trap of psychologistic interpretation found, for example, in the work of their contemporary Franklin Giddings, where most of humankind's travail is considered as the result of "consciousness of kind" and similar psychological constructs. Yet they also wished to avoid a type of theorizing of a certain positivistic variety, which emphasized the determinant influence of geography, climate, or race on human behavior, or of a vulgar Marxism. In short, they objected to seeing people as playthings of forces over which they had no control.

In their attempt to do justice to both objective and subjective factors, they developed a scheme in which only the conjoint interplay of individual attitudes and objective cultural values was seen as adequate to account for human conduct. By attitude they understood, "a process of individual consciousness which determines real or possible activity of the individual in the social world." An attitude is a predisposition to act in relation to some social object; it is not a purely psychic inner state. A social value, on the other hand, is understood as "any datum having an empirical content accessible to the members of some social group and a meaning with regard to which it is or may be an object of activity." The authors specified further that only certain classes of values, namely those that are embodied in norms and rules of conduct, come within the purview of sociological investigation. These values consist of the ". . . more or less explicit and formal rules of behavior by which the group tends to maintain, to regulate, and to make more general and more frequent the corresponding types of actions among its members. These rules [are] . . . customs and rituals, legal and educational norms, obligatory beliefs and aims, etc."

The main focus of their investigation is social change. They proceed to show that it is always the result of an interplay between attitudes and values. As they put it, "The cause of a social or individual phenomenon is never another social or individual phenomenon alone, but always a combination of a social and an individual phenomenon. Or, in more exact terms: The cause of a value or of an attitude is never an attitude or a value alone, but always a combination of an attitude and a value."

Thomas and Znaniecki formulated this basic approach in a variety of ways, as when they speak, for example, of the "reciprocal dependence between social organization and individual life organization." But their underlying stress on conjoint investigation of the objective and the subjective dimensions of social behavior remains constant throughout their work. It will be remembered from earlier chapters of this book that this general orientation is closely related to the social psychology and sociology of Cooley and Park and that it has its roots in the pragmatic philosophy of William James, Mead, and Dewey. What is perhaps less obvious is that it is closely related to Marx's stress that people make their own history but they don't make it as they please; they are constrained by the play of social forces they encounter on their scene of action. It is also closely related to Robert K. Merton's later insistence that social actions need always to be explained in terms of individual choices between socially structured alternatives.

To Thomas and Znaniecki the influence of external or objective factors upon human conduct assumes importance only to the extent that they are subjectively experienced. Hence, it is the task of the analyst to try to show how subjective predispositions, or attitudes, molded by experience, determine the response of individuals to the objective factors that impinge upon them. Thus, it is not the social disorganization of city slums that determines deviant behavior of recent immigrants, but it is experienced loosening of normative constraints in the slum that results in deviant reactions in individual slum dwellers.

In an effort to conceptualize a set of basic dispositions that could then be related to the interplay of attitudes and values, the authors developed their well-known classification of the four basic human wishes: (1) the desire for new experience; (2) the desire for recognition; (3) the desire for mastery; and (4) the desire for security. Though this classification is more often cited than any other discussion in The Polish Peasant, it seems to be among the least valuable aspect of the work. To establish such lists of basic wishes or drives is a sterile enterprise. Other authors have established similar lists consisting of ten or many more such basic predispositions which are equally plausible and equally powerless to account for the complicated motivational repertory of the human animal. (Indeed, both Thomas and Znaniecki became quite sceptical about this aspect of methodology in The Polish Peasant at a later stage in their careers.)

Thomas and Znaniecki's incursion into general psychology by way of the so-called theory of basic wishes resulted in failure. Their development of the rudiments of a social psychology, on the other hand, has borne abundant fruit. They sharply distinguished psychical states from attitudes, assigning the study of the first to general psychology and of the second to social psychology. "By its reference to activity," they stated, "and thereby to the social world the attitude is distinguished from the psychical state. . . . A psychological process is . . . treated as an object in itself, isolated by a reflective act of attention, and taken first of all in connection with other states of the same individual. An attitude is a psychological process treated as primarily manifested in its reference to the social world and taken first of all in connection with some social value. . . . The psychological process remains always fundamentally a state of somebody; the attitude remains always fundamentally an attitude toward something."

Even if one conceives of social psychology as the science of social attitudes, it would still be possible to restrict one's focus largely to attitudes of individuals. This was, however, not what Thomas and Znaniecki had in mind. As they put it: "The more generally an attitude is shared by the members of the given social group and the greater the part it plays in the life of every member, the stronger the interest which it provokes in the social psychologist. . . . Thus, the field of social psychology practically comprises first of all the attitudes which are more or less generally found among the members of a social group, have a real importance in the life-organization of the individuals who have developed them, and manifest themselves in social activities of these individuals." What the authors are concerned with, in other words, are not the idiosyncratic responses of particular individuals, but rather attitudes that these individuals share to a greater or lesser extent with other members of the groups in which they are variously placed. Social psychology, in this view, is the "science of the subjective side of social culture."

On the other hand, the objective side of culture, the investigation of social values, is the proper domain of sociology. Social values are objective cultural data that confront the individual, as it were, from the outside. "These values cannot be the object matter of social psychology; they constitute a special group of objective cultural data . . . the rules of behavior, and the actions viewed as conforming or not conforming with these rules, constitute with regard to their objective significance a certain number of more or less connected and harmonious systems which can be generally called social institutions, and the totality of institutions found in a concrete social group constitutes the social organization of this group. And when studying the social organization as such we must subordinate attitudes to values. . . "

It was the peculiar genius of Thomas and Znaniecki to balance their emphasis on attitudes, subjectively defined meanings, and shared experience, by an equally strong emphasis on the objective characteristics of cultural values and their embodiment in specific institutions. This is why their analyses in The Polish Peasant move from consideration of microsociological units, such as primary groups and family structures, to the larger institutional settings in which these smaller units are embedded. Linking the study of primary groups to the larger institutional context, Thomas and Znaniecki studied the community in which primary groups in general, and the family and kingroups in particular, flourished; they then proceeded to investigate the still wider frame of social organization, which included the educational system, the press, voluntary organizations, and the like. Though each of these, they argued, could not be analyzed in isolation, each provided distinct arrangements of social values that assumed salience, in different and varying degrees, as objects to which attitudes were directed even as they themselves shaped these attitudes.

The main chord that Thomas and Znaniecki strike over and over again is the reciprocal relation between attitudes and values, between individual organization and social organization, between individual behavior and the social rules that attempt to control it. This meant to them a continued interplay involving not only individual adaptation but also disruption of social order. Like their contemporary Robert Park, they believed that equilibrium between individual desires and social requirements was at best a marginal and exceptional condition. In general, social controls and social norms never succeeded in completely suppressing individual efforts to break the bonds imposed by social organization. The dialectic of social change involved efforts on the part of the group to bend members to its requirements and, at the same time, attempts on the part of these individuals to break group-imposed constraints in order to realize aspirations not condoned by the norms of the group.

Thomas and Znaniecki were intent upon countering the prevalent moralistic pronouncements about such serious social problems as crime and delinquency by stressing that the roots of the problems were in social conditions rather than individual failings. Hence, when they introduced the notion of social disorganization they defined it as "a decrease of the influence of existing social rules of behavior upon individual members of the group." But they took pains to emphasize that this notion "refers primarily to institutions and only secondarily to men." That is, like Durkheim's notion of anomie, the concept of social disorganization refers primarily to a disordered state of society rather than to a condition of individuals. Moreover, they also pointed out that there was never a one-to-one association between social and individual disorganization, so that even in disorganized areas of a city, for example, one could expect to find a number of individuals who manage to organize their lives in a satisfactory manner. "The nature of [the] reciprocal influence [of life-organization of individuals and social organization] in each particular case is a problem to be studied, not a dogma to be accepted in advance." To Thomas and Znaniecki social disorganization never meant a static condition but rather a social process subject to a great deal of variation in impact and extensiveness.

From Coser, 1977:512-516.

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