SOURCE: An introduction to Robert E. Park: The Crowd and The Public and Other Essays, edited by Henry Eisner, Jr., The University of Chicago Press, 1972, pp. viixxv.

[In the following essay, Eisner discusses Park's contribution to sociological theory.]

Robert E. Park's doctoral dissertation, Masse und Publikum (The Crowd and the Public), was published in 1904. A perfect copy, recently encountered in a large university library, was yellowed and brittle but apparently undisturbed by any reader for sixty-five years. This may be symbolic of the attention paid, explicitly at least, by American sociology to the earliest work of one of its most influential pioneers. Seldom cited, the dissertation is sometimes even omitted from Park bibliographies. But as Everett C. Hughes has remarked, "The results of Park's work in those four years of study in Germany are diffused throughout American and even world sociology, even unto today." To read The Crowd and the Public today is to experience the excitement of uncovering a seminal work—of discovering links between several intellectual traditions, both European and American; of seeing the initial formulation of concepts and interests found in later writing; and of sharing in the labors of a mind at work during the initial stages of a developing field. In addition, there are glimpses of figures who have long since dropped from view, such as Pasquale Rossi.

As a synthesizing effort, The Crowd and the Public cites and explicates the ideas of many, but it is perhaps the influence of Simmel and Le Bon which, in different ways, appears to be most dominant. On the conceptual and substantive levels, many of Park's later concerns emerge in this first work: competition, self-awareness, reciprocal interaction, process and change, characteristics of the sect, significance of strikes, focusing of social attention, social epidemics, and many more.

As Park relates it, he was led to the writing of The Crowd and the Public by a chain of circumstances beginning with his work as a newspaperman after college graduation. "The newspaper and news became my problem"—a problem that led him back to school at Harvard to study philosophy and then to Europe in search of "a fundamental point of view from which I could describe the behavior of society, under the influence of news, in the precise and universal language of science." While in Berlin for Simmel's lectures, Park encountered a treatise by Kistiakowski which seemed the first direct approach to the problem interesting him. Since Kistiakowski had studied under Wilhelm Windelband, Park sought out Windelband and wrote Masse und Publikum under his direction.

In its totality, The Crowd and the Public might be considered most relevant for two areas of sociology: collective behavior and basic theory, that is, the nature of sociology and the social bond.

Quite beyond the particular elements named in the title, there can already be seen developing in Park's first work a conception of sociology and its units of analysis. As with the specific topics of crowd and public, Park's later conception of the field is well under way. By analogy with the physical sciences, he seeks to identify the smallest meaningful particle for social analysis. Because of the role phenomenon, this particle cannot be the individual—in an important sense the individual is not the same in all his group memberships. Thus, the basic units must be the types of relationships existing between individuals. The perspective is strongly reminiscent of Simmel, with whom Park had studied, and would today be seen as social-psychological. Although subordinate to the conceptualizing of crowd, public, and other groups, an inquiry into the nature of social bonds runs throughout The Crowd and the Public. Each of the three chapters can be seen as analyzing a type of social unity: one derived from similarities; one from differences; and one from common norms, traditions, and culture. Unity based on similarities and differences immediately brings Durkheim to mind, but the use of the two principles of unity is very different for each writer. They are culturally structured for Durkheim, but seen as emergent interaction by Park. These two elements of social unity are referred to again in the famous Park and Burgess Introduction to the Science of Sociology.

Of interest is the question why the third theme, that of the General Will, was introduced. On one level, it emphasizes the traditional, stable, and normative element in all the other groups to which crowd and public are conceptually opposed. On another level, its use seems implicitly to admit the weakness of a strictly interactionist approach to social life. There is something in operation here which is more than simply the crystallization of past interactions. An example is Park's idea that public opinion, the product of the public, cannot create the fundamental norms under which the public operates. These norms are socially prior, existing at another level of reality. Nor do similarities in individual values imply common norms; the norm must be acceptable by all as applicable to all—Park's derivation from Rousseau is reminiscent of Angeli's distinction between "common" and "like" values, a recent expression of a theme of long standing in social analysis. From another viewpoint, the General Will chapter introduces a more strictly sociological perspective, which is all the more interesting because it is laboriously derived from nonsociological sources, in contrast to the essentially social-psychological framework of the first two chapters. Park's subsequent evaluation of cultural and interactionist approaches has been ably summarized elsewhere. The Crowd and the Public demonstrates an early recognition of the deficiencies of each perspective used alone.

"Crowd" and "public" will be recognized immediately as two of the traditional units treated by collective behavior, a field which Park himself named and launched as a distinct specialty within American sociology. The Crowd and the Public was not intended to do this, however, but to investigate the properties of two kinds of collectivities. Nevertheless the common features which distinguish them from other kinds of groups provide an implicit definition of the area encompassing both, for crowd and public represent "the processes through which new groups are formed" serving "to bring individuals out of old ties and into new ones." Crowd and public do not have traditions and customs, but lead to their generation. Indeed, this all seems less ambiguous than the initial definition in the well-known chapter 13 of the Introduction to the Science of Sociology: "Collective behavior, then, is the behavior of individuals under the influence of an impulse that is common and collective, an impulse, in other words, that is the result of social interaction." Here, all social behavior would seem to be "collective behavior."

The thrust of The Crowd and the Public clearly anticipates the actual use of the collective behavior concept in the Introduction, including a redefinition later in chapter 13 where it is described as "the processes by which societies are disintegrated into their constituent elements and the processes by which these elements are brought together again into new relations to form new organizations and new societies." The idea of collective behavior resulting in social and cultural change has remained central to the concept through the present.

The other fundamental elements or connotations of collective behavior may also be derived from Park's earlier ideas. Spontaneous, short-lived, ephemeral are adjectives often applied to collective behavior groupings. Park saw crowd and public as groups without a past or a future; once formed, they either disperse or are transformed into stable groups subject to a normative order. And if such groups are seen as "without tradition" and as acting to change me institutional order, it may be possible to deduce them as existing apart from, outside of, or in "gaps" in that order. Today, tentative agreement on what constitutes collective behavior would focus on the idea of extra-institutional behavior. Some kinds of this behavior, panic, for example—do not necessarily lead to changes in the institutional order.

Park's emphasis in The Crowd and the Public on the concept of the General Will heightens the contrast between the stable normative order and collective behavior existing apart from it. In his later work, Park used Sumner's conception of the mores to represent the stability to which collective behavior is conceptually and empirically opposed. Written before Folkways appeared, The Crowd and the Public ingeniously uses concepts from political philosophy to emphasize supra-individual tradition, custom, and norm.

Crowd and public, then, are for Park the two basic categories of change-inducing, extra-institutional behavior. That they remained central to his thinking is reflected in their prominence in chapters 12 and 13 of the Introduction and in his "Collective Behavior" entry in the 1935 Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Park also frequently taught a course under the title "Crowd and Public." Other kinds of collective behavior—the sect, the mass movement, revolution—are mentioned in passing in The Crowd and the Public. Park's later development of these other forms can be seen fundamentally as extensions of the two basic concepts. "The sect, religious or political, may be regarded as a perpetuation and permanent form of the orgiastic (ecstatic) or expressive crowd." "All great mass movements tend to display, to a greater or less extent, the characteristics that Le Bon attributes to crowds." "A revolution is a mass movement which seeks to change the mores by destroying the existing social order." Social movements share the characteristics of both the crowd and the public. In addition to the above quote citing Le Bon, Park wrote, "When these changes [in public opinion] take a definite direction and have or seem to have a definite goal, we call the phenomenon a social movement."

After a theory of collective behavior has defined its units, some explanation of their behavior is called for. Explanations may be categorized as emphasizing internal or external factors. For example; is a riot explained by looking at processes of interaction, communication, leadership, etc., within the acting collectivity, or should the focus rest on the discontents, political structure, etc., objective or perceived, in the social setting?

Following Simmel's overall emphasis on types of interpersonal interaction and Le Bon's specific assertions about crowd dynamics, Park in The Crowd and the Public clearly concentrates on "internal" factors. Certainly the setting is not ignored: "Precisely because the crowd proves to be a social power whose effect is always more or less disruptive and revolutionary, it seldom arises where there is social stability and where customs have deep roots. In contrast, where social bonds are removed and old institutions weakened, great crowd movements develop more easily and forcefully." Crowd and public appear "wherever a new interest asserts itself;" conflict of interests produces a public. Like Le Bon in The Crowd, however, Park does not expand these remarks on the setting, and they are not an integrated or major part of the analysis. Later, in the Introduction, "social unrest" does of course become a key concept, although it is presented ambiguously as both a characteristic of the setting and a form of collective behavior. In The Crowd and the Public the two kinds of collectivities are differentiated entirely in terms of internal dynamics; individual psychological differences alone lead to participation in crowd or public. There is no explicit statement as to what, if anything, in the social setting would tend to produce one or the other kind of collectivity. A clue may be offered however, by the argument in chapter 3 that a minimal normative frame-work must be present if the public is to operate. Is Park suggesting that normative ambiguity, inadequacy, and breakdown extending beyond a certain point will produce a crowd rather than a public?

Park's specific explanatory mechanisms for the characteristics of crowd behavior seem to derive from two sources: (1) the similar assertions of Sighele and Le Bon with regard to suggestibility, unanimity, intolerance, emotionality, etc., and (2) a synthesis of various psychological approaches seen by Park as dealing with kinds of imitation. Clearly present in the second category are ideas of crowd milling and circular reaction which subsequently were given increasing prominence in the Introduction and in Herbert Blumer's landmark discussion of this whole approach in the Outline of the Principles of Sociology, a book initially edited by Park himself.

Park's description of the public in The Crowd and the Public is more difficult to follow, but like his discussion of the crowd, it includes all the basic elements of "public" later to appear in the Introduction: reasoned discussion of issues, based on opposed interests, but carried out within a framework understood by all—a "universe of discourse," to use Park's later phrase.

In The Crowd and the Public, the fundamental distinctions between the two types are simply stated: the crowd suppresses the differences among its members and uncritically, emotionally, unanimously fixes its attention upon some object; the public is the polar opposite in its recognition of individual differences in value and interest, in its engaging in rational discussion and debate, and in arriving at a consensus which does not impose unanimity on its members. Suggestibility is "precisely the characteristic trait of the crowd"; it results in the crowd finally becoming "the plastic instrument of its leader, whose suggestion is followed without any resistance." Park implies that this does not happen in the more critical and rational public, although he does mention the manipulation of what is commonly called "public opinion."

Park's distinction between crowd and public directly raises another important continuing issue in collective behavior theory: rationality, or the lack of it. Without here defining rational or irrational, the characteristics imputed to crowd behavior by Sighele and Le Bon would usually be seen as irrational: suggestibility, emotionality, intolerance, rapid reversals of attention, lack of critical ability, expression of base instincts, etc. Furthermore, within the Western intellectual tradition such attributes are negatively judged. Looking at popular riots and revolutionary movements, the early European writers did not like what they saw and condemned such outbursts for the irrational features perceived in them. While Park is explicitly aware of the danger of political bias in these interpretations, he seems to accept Le Bon's analysis as a "scientific" attempt and does not alter it in any significant way. Generally uncritical references to Le Bon, except for objection to the lack of precision, continue in the Introduction; and Blumer's account heightens, if anything, the portrayal of the maddened and irrational mob. In The Crowd and the Public Park is careful to state that his analysis of the difference between the two kinds of collectivity does not imply a judgment, but this can only be taken as a formal disclaimer.

Despite his acceptance of the Le Bon-Sighele portrayal of crowd behavior, however, Park's inclusion of the public within the category of change-inducing groups radically altered the thrust of their tradition, for an irrational mechanism of change is now balanced by a mechanism that is rational and reasonable, even if the conditions giving rise to one or the other are not made clear. As already remarked, Park incorporates elements of both the crowd and the public in his later discussion of social movements, and if a reading-between-the-lines guess may be ventured, there is somewhat more emphasis on the relative rationality of movements.

Finally, any perspective on collective behavior must handle the problem of relating such behavioral mechanisms to everyday, institutionalized behavior. This poses no logical difficulties for Park in The Crowd and the Public—the whole point of the central section is to relate concepts from contemporary individual psychology, emerging social psychology, imitation theory, and the interactionist orientation of Simmel so that crowd, public, and all other forms of social behavior can be explained in the same terms. While much of the specific material is now dated, there remains a theoretical unity often lacking in subsequent collective behavior theory.

In The Crowd and the Public, then, Park dealt with four fundamental, continuing issues in collective behavior: (1) conception and definition of the field and its units; (2) specific explanations of those units, explanations tending to stress either factors internal to the units, or external to them, in the social setting; (3) the rationality issue; and (4) the relationship between collective behavior and other kinds of social behavior.

Recent work in collective behavior, in dealing with the issues discussed above, has departed from Park's founding contributions, but it has also returned to them, sometimes in surprising ways. For perhaps thirty years, Park's conception of the field, its units, and its explanatory principles held unchallenged dominance among sociologists. These principles are still those most frequently relied upon both in general introductory course treatments and in texts for the field of collective behavior itself. The 1957 Turner and Killian Collective Behavior acknowledged that "the ideas in the book reflect most directly the tradition established by Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess, and subsequently extended by Herbert Blumer." Although Kurt and Gladys Engel Langs's Collective Dynamics (1961) discusses various traditions of analysis, it seems essentially to represent a combination of Le Bon via Park with a Freudian orientation. The first radical attempt to reorient collective behavior theory became apparent with the appearance of Smelser's book in 1963, which according to one opinion "should prove to be the contribution most relevant to research in the seventies." Turner has recently directed important criticisms at traditional approaches, particularly those derived from Le Bon and Freud; he has tried to bring together the explanations of collective behavior and those used elsewhere in sociology, as well as to account more realistically for observed crowd behavior. Somewhat earlier, collective behavior was viewed by Swanson as activity directed toward problem-solving. Although he wrote from within the Park tradition, Swanson altered the focus of concern by stressing that differing group perceptions of the problem situation led to different kinds of collective behavior.

Among the challenges to the Park tradition posed by these varied approaches, there is little agreement in regard to the focal issues previously suggested. Perhaps all theorists would agree on some scale of complexity and stability in collective behavior, with crowds, panics, and fads at one end and organized social movements at the other. Some theorists indeed argue that social movements are too patterned and enduring to be included within the general topic. Turner suggests instead of a typology, a continuum of increasingly complex responses to increasingly severe breakdowns or inadequacies in the normative order. Smelser's units include panic, craze, hostile outburst, norm- and value-oriented movements. Perhaps one source of enduring confusion is the fact that some of the units suggested appear to be behavioral processes (e.g., panic), while others (e.g., the crowd) are collectivities. If some commonly treated units are sorted out according to these categories, a tentative agreement might be established as follows:

PROCESSES	Panic	Craze or Fad	Hostile Outburst or Riot	Intended Social Change (Reform- Revolution)
COLLECTIVES	Mass/Crowd	Mass	Crowd	Social Movement

The concept of the public is missing from this array. Such an exclusion can be justified on two grounds. By the accident of scholarly jurisdiction, the study of public opinion and communication has become since Park's day a separate field with its own body of concepts, theory, and research. More important, if collective behavior refers to extra-institutional behavior, the public-opinion process would not be included, since in democratic, and perhaps in all modern societies, it is a vital part of the institutional order.

The most dramatic changes to occur since Park's work have been concerned with explanations of collective behavior, both in regard to the external-internal focus and to explanatory mechanisms. A general tendency has been to increase attention paid to the settings producing collective behavior, and to try to differentiate their features. Thus Swanson argued that differential perceptions, along several dimensions, of problems in the social environment would produce the different responses of panic, dynamic crowd, social movement, public, and mass behavior. Smelser has a standard set of six "determinants" operative in producing any kind of collective behavior. Four of these determinants refer to the setting: structural conduciveness, structural strain, precipitating factors, and social control. (These are formal categories whose contents differ for various kinds of collective behavior.) In Turner's current formulation, the significant feature of the setting appears to be increasing severity of normative inadequacy ranging from situations in which norms are lacking or ambiguous through those in which prior organization is disrupted to those where satisfaction of needs dictates that the normative order be set aside.

Park's emphasis was on the internal mechanisms active in both crowd and public; this approach, ultimately deriving from Le Bon, long remained dominant. Smelser has been the most vocal revisionist here. Two of his six determinants, the spread of a generalized belief and mobilization for action, call attention to internal processes, but Smelser insists that, for the theory, it is not important what kind of internal processes fulfill these conditions. It is only necessary that some sort of interaction, communication, and leadership appear. Turner's "emergent norm" label for his approach directs attention to an internal process: inherent in any instance of collective behavior are formation of a new collective definition of the situation, development of new norms appropriate to it, legitimation or justification of these norms, and attempts to enforce conformity. This approach is congruent to Swanson's earlier and less fully developed ideas; it also awakens interesting echoes of Park. Although part of Turner's theory is a rejection of the Le Bon-derived explanation of crowd which Turner finds both theoretically and empirically untenable, his emergent norm process in its most general terms might be seen as roughly parallel to Park's concept of the public with its lack of unanimity, more rational approach, and development of new norms.

Explicitly at least, the most important change in recent years on the issue of rationality has been rejection of the European insistence on viewing collective behavior as intrinsically irrational. Recognition of political and social bias in this viewpoint, more exact observation of episodes of behavior, and the lingering but final demise of the "suggestion" doctrine at the hands of psychologists all played their part. Few theorists today would attempt simply to reverse the long-standing bias and posit a rational collective behavior acting against the irrational institutional order, but modern emphasis on such processes as attempted problemsolving and definition of an ambiguous situation are examples of how far explanations have tended to move away from the earlier stress on emotional contagion and suppression of all critical abilities.

A curious treatment of rationality appears in Smelser's argument, however. Creation of a "generalized belief" which provides a basis for action is one of his determinants of collective behavior; application of the generalized belief to a real situation always involves a process called "short-circuiting." Smelser denies seeing collective behavior as essentially irrational, but his "generalized belief" could more aptly be labelled "overgeneralized," as it by definition contains conclusions more general than the evidence supports. Similarly, "short-circuiting" means that a conceptual jump from general notions to concrete action always bypasses levels of qualification, hence leading to unrealistic thought and action. Thus, emphasis on irrationality has reappeared by an entirely new route. And if Turner's emphasis echoes Park's idea of the public, this portion of Smelser's approach seems to recall the crowd with its irrational unanimity.

Finally, both Smelser and Turner attempt to use principles explaining collective behavior which are no different from those applicable to institutionalized behavior. Smelser's theory is based on a general scheme of categories capable of classifying all social behavior; collective behavior types are differentiated according to which of the various universal "components of action" they attempt to change or restructure. Part of Turner's critique of the continuing influence of the "contagion" tradition, within which Park is found, is the tradition's assumption that "crowds require a level of psychological explanation which organized groups do not require." For Turner the normative process is central in sociology; it applies to collective behavior as well as elsewhere.

In summary then, a survey of the present state of collective behavior theory suggests that departures from Park's approach have not as yet resulted in any new consensus about some of the most basic concerns of the field. There does appear to be tentative agreement on devoting increased attention to the social setting, dropping dated social-psychological concepts, and decreasing the emphasis on supposed irrational characteristics.

What has been gained and lost since Park's work appeared? What in it may be considered still valid or suggestive today?

A clue from one recent study suggests that models derived from different theoretical perspectives may be approximated at different stages of a collective episode. In attempting to account for the spread of a hysterical belief, investigators found that a "social isolate" theory based upon ideas of isolation and deviance, a "group influence" theory utilizing sociometric channels, and a "contagion" theory from classic collective behavior all seemed to fit successively as the episode developed. This suggests that some of the traditional concepts may still be useful, not as total explanations, but when restricted to specific conditions.

If the crowd is taken as a valid unit of analysis, current reorientations in theory appear to have done little to advance understanding of what actually takes place among its members. Criticizing a trend in current theory, Herbert Blumer insists that complete analysis of a crowd situation demands more than merely identifying "(a) the social conditions out of which crowds emerge, (b) the forms of overt behavior in which they engage, and (c) the social consequences of such overt behavior." Such an approach misses the significant "analytic consideration of collective excitement (the basic condition in crowd behavior)." Much of the flavor of crowd action does seem to have vanished in the most recent theoretical approaches. Perhaps there has been an over-compensation for the excesses of Le Bon.

Finally, even if Park's analysis of crowd and public no longer appears adequate, his emphasis on the rational and the irrational, unanimous and nonunanimous alternatives in change is still a valid point of reference. His focus on these alternatives is as pertinent to the problems of evaluating calls to political commitment as it is to the current renewal of interest in the modes and mechanisms of social change.

Three essays written by Park much later in his life—"Social Planning and Human Nature" (1935), "Reflections on Communication and Culture" (1938), and "Symbiosis and Socialization" (1939)—are included in this volume to illustrate the continuity and development of themes first appearing in The Crowd and the Public.

"Social Planning and Human Nature" emphasizes the interplay and balance of the rational and nonrational; the traditional and static tendency in human life is juxtaposed with the shared problems, unrest, social movements, and political processes bringing about change. Park argues that the strength of cultural tradition and the nonrational, unpredictable qualities of human nature are formidable barriers to rationally planned change. On the other hand, the "Utopian" plan, whose rationality is so aggressively explicit that it usually appears irrational, can have paradoxical latent consequences. It may serve as a reference point for social criticism, thus aiding in the formation of public opinion and political power, or it may become a new myth giving cohesion to a social movement. Here the boundaries of the religious movement appear to fade into those of the secular political movement.

As the rational and nonrational are inextricably bound together, so are cultural constraint and social change. If plans for change are to be workable, they must be consistent with "local tradition and customary order." And yet the modern political process itself is precisely the deliberate disturbance of that customary social order. The new political products must ultimately be "assimilated, digested, and incorporated with the folkways of the original and historic society." Following Hume's usage, Park sees government resting upon opinion, opinion here including the mores and the culture as well as current responses to events and doctrines.

The other two essays written in 1938 and 1939 clearly show how Park's lifelong interest in communication and collective behavior was related to those other topics for which he is well known: the ecological, social, and moral orders; competition, conflict, and cultural assimilation; and community and urban life. In "Reflections on Communication and Culture," Park states that communication is a fundamental process in human affairs because meaning or interpretation is crucial to distinctly human interaction. Meaning is shared through the mechanism of culture which includes "all that is communicable."

The two basic forms of communication are pointed out again, the first more rational and the second more emotional; one communicating ideas, the other expressing feeling. The first form is exemplified in news; the other in art, literature, and currently, motion pictures. In general, the communication process promotes group stability by providing common understandings, regulating competition, coordinating the division of labor, and assuring intergenerational continuity.

The communication process also contributes to change. Unrest leading to collective behavior may be communicated either more rationally or more expressively. News provides a basis for action, while expressive communication increases understanding of different cultures, hence acculturation. If competition differentiates individuals and groups, communication integrates. By expanding shared understandings, this integration or acculturation causes change. Focal points in the communication process are the great cities: "If the market place is the center from which news is disseminated and cultural influences are diffused, it is, likewise, the center in which old ideas go into the crucible and new ideas emerge." In the modern world, groups previously in isolation are brought into self-conscious conflict, and the definitions which must result from this conflict lay the basis for further communication and acculturation.

"Symbiosis and Socialization" is a remarkable essay, containing in a few pages a lifework's reflections on the varied dimensions of social life. References range from Le Bon and Mannheim to G. H. Mead and the plant and animal ecologists. Park sees man as part of the web of life, sharing some characteristics with both plant and animal communities. But each of these forms of life has its unique elements. Only in plant communities does complete competition reign. Animal communities are social and sometimes elaborately organized; this would suggest that there exists a form of communication among members. The apparent similarities to human communication and human social behavior are, however, deceptive. At this point Park returns to Le Bon's simplest model of collective behavior, milling and interstimulation. Park now tests this model as an example of uniquely human behavior. The milling herd can never attain a focused, deliberate collective act. Instead, characteristically human collective behavior is that which is based on meaningful communication and results in the formation of institutions. These institutions in turn regulate and modify the basic ecological processes in which man participates together with other life.

The pages in this essay devoted to collective behavior both restate and refine Park's fundamental contributions to the field. In contrast to collective behavior based on meaningful communication, expressive collective behavior is seen as similar to animal milling: it does not result in concerted action directed toward a goal. Indeed, the communication which creates a consensus on group goals is really what underlay that vague phrase used by many writers, "the collective mind." The processes for reaching such goals are the crowd and the public, expressions of unanimity and diversity. From Karl Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia, Park draws the idea that society needs and creates its directing doctrines. He believed that the creation of such doctrines corresponded more closely with his concept of the public than with that of the crowd. Publics with their ideologies are characteristic of the modern political society and its rationality, rather than of traditional and familial organization.

Collective action under emergency conditions is also the origin of many social institutions developed out of the more organized form of collective behavior—social movements. "Not every social movement terminates in a new institution, but the necessity of carrying on programs initiated in some social emergency has been responsible for many if not most modern and recent institutions."

For Park, the trend of history and social evolution is inevitably toward an increasingly diverse, yet increasingly interdependent ecological, political, and moral order:

Thus the web of life which holds within its meshes all living organisms is visibly tightening, and there is in every part of the world obviously a growing interdependence of all living creatures; a vital interdependence that is more extensive and intimate today than at any other period in the course of the long historical process.