Lester Ward on Conflict as the Source of all Social Creation
Discussion
By Sinisa Malesevic:
"Lester Ward was profoundly influenced by Gumplowicz’s and Ratzenhofer’s theories and together with Albion Small was responsible for disseminating their ideas in the USA. In a Heraclitian manner, Ward (1913, 1914) argued that conflict is the source of all creation – physical, biological and social. He developed the concept of synergy, which was understood as a cosmic principle that ‘begins in collision, conflict, antagonism, and opposition, but as no motion can be lost it is transformed, and we have the milder forms of antithesis, competition’ which eventually can lead to compromise and cooperation(Ward, 1914: 175). In contrast to Social Darwinism, which understood group divisions in terms of inherent genetic qualities, Ward adopted Gumplowicz’s interpretation of the origins of class divisions and the state in the violent conquest of one group over another. He argues that all larger polities have emerged through violence. Initially the conquered group maintained its intensive dislike of its conquerors, but would gradually become coercively assimilated, whereby the emergence of shared ‘national sentiment’ would help unify the polity, thus creating the nation-state in the process. Ward saw violence and war both as the normal condition of social life,6and as the paramount genera-tors of social advancement. In his view, the sociological analysis of history shows that: War has been the chief and leading condition of human progress ... when races [social groups] stop struggling, progress ceases ... If peace missionaries could have their counsel prevail there might have been universal peace, nay general contentment, but there would have been no progress. (Ward, 1914: 240) However, not all forms of collective violence are seen as beneficial to social development. Ward distinguishes between revolutionary violence, which is interpreted as detrimental since it only destroys the long-built organic social order without being able to replace it with a better alternative, and warfare, which is in principle productive as con-quests create more complex social units. In his own words, the result of successful war is the preservation of ‘all that is best in different structures thus blended, and creating a new structure which is different from and superior to any prior structures’ (Ward, 1914: 247). Although Ward’s approach is broadly in agreement with Gumplowicz’s model, he clearly departs from Gumplowicz’s pessimism. Instead Ward was a firm believer in planned, state-directed, social progress. In this context he created the concept of ‘telic intelligence’ (telesis) which unlike ‘genetic intelligence’ that operates unconsciously, is seen as a conscious, scientifically developed social device to effect a positive, progressive change. Hence, Ward advocated the idea of telesis by which social evolution can be directed through the use of education and science."