Ross, E. A.: Sin and Society

Social Control and Public Opinion

In the same year that Roosevelt took office, Edward Alsworth Ross—known as E. A. Ross—published [Page 793]his book Social Control. Ross was one of a group of pioneering American sociologists who rejected the evolutionary model of human progress propounded by the British philosopher and sociologist Herbert Spencer. For Ross and his contemporaries, social progress was not circumscribed by the laws of nature, but could be directed and enhanced by reform-minded social scientists working in tandem with government. Ross dismissed as a “common delusion” the idea that people's innate capacity for goodness is sufficient to maintain social order. Rather, social stability depends on a core of values that brings together diverse individuals under communal ideals. These communal ideals operate as a collective mind that regulates behavior and encourages desired conduct.

President Roosevelt evidently read and approved of Social Control (Ross, 1965, p. ix). Like much of Ross's early work, the book addresses the problem of order in a newly modernized America. At the center of Ross's sociological vision is social control: the internalization of behavioral, moral, and ideological standards. In the book, Ross outlines the formal and informal forces that sustain social order in highly differentiated societies.

The formal force that directly maintains social order is law, described by Ross (1959, p. 57) as “the cornerstone of the edifice of order.” Legal sanctions are certain, corporal (in the main), irresistible, and detached; but in complex societies, law is perceived as inflexible, even clumsy.

The informal force of social order is public opinion; that is, the psychological pressure exerted by society in order to encourage or discourage conduct. Public opinion has many advantages over the more mechanical force of law: it is nuanced, flexible, immediate, and cheap. The transgressions that public opinion polices are moral, not legal, enabling it to apply pressure in anticipation of wrongful conduct. As Ross (1959, p. 43) notes, “Its premonitory growl is more preventive than the silent menace of justice.” Yet public opinion also has myriad faults. It lacks clarity, both in terms of the behavior it requires and the sanctions it imposes; it is instinctive, impulsive, and passionate; it is crude in technique and indefinite in purpose.

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