common experience and
tradition. It is the role of history to preserve this body of common
experience and tradition, to criticise and reinterpret it in the light
of new experience and changing conditions, and in this way to preserve
the continuity of the social and political life.

The relation of social structures to the processes of competition,
conflict, accommodation, and assimilation may be represented
schematically as follows:

SOCIAL PROCESS SOCIAL ORDER

Competition The economic equilibrium
Conflict The political order
Accommodation Social organization
Assimilation Personality and the cultural heritage

3. Classification of the Materials

The materials in this chapter have been selected to exhibit (1) the role
which competition plays in social life and all life, and (2) the types
of organization that competition has everywhere created as a result of
the division of labor it has everywhere enforced. These materials fall
naturally under the following heads: (a) the struggle for existence;
(b) competition and segregation; and (c) economic competition.

This order of the materials serves the purpose of indicating the stages
in the growth and extension of man's control over nature and over man
himself. The evolution of society has been the progressive extension of
control over nature and the substitution of a moral for the natural
order.

Competition has its setting in the struggle for existence. This struggle
is ordinarily represented as a chaos of contending individuals in which
the unfit perish in order that the fit may survive. This conception of
the natural order as one of anarchy, "the war of each against all,"
familiar since Hobbes to the students of society, is recent in biology.
Before Darwin, students of plant and animal life saw in nature, not
disorder, but order; not selection, but design. The difference between
the older and the newer interpretation is not so much a difference of
fact as of point of view. Looking at the plant and animal species with
reference to their classification they present a series of relatively
fixed and stable types. The same thing may be said of the plant and
animal communities. Under ordinary circumstances the adjustment between
the members of the plant and animal communities and the environment is
so complete that the observer interprets it as an order of co-operation
rather than a condition of