Methods of social study / by Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

  • Sidney Webb
Date:
1932
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Methods of social study / by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    which the twentieth century Guy Fawkes had so catastrophically terminated, would be opened by the new King, with all its old habits and traditions, and with paraphernalia and ceremonies exactly re¬ sembling those which had marked the preceding session. To apprehend the British Parliament, with any approach to accuracy or completeness, requires vastly more than looking at the men and women, the buildings and the paraphernalia, in which it, for the moment, takes material form. Any adequate com¬ prehension of it demands a study of its history and its functions, an understanding of its relations to other social institutions and to the public at large— a knowledge of its spirit as well as of its form. Of every other social institution in Great Britain or the United States, the same might be said. “The most established customs and institutions55, sums up an American professor of sociology, “are only states of mind which find expression in customary action.551 Can we say that social institutions have an exist¬ ence independent of the human beings who are con¬ cerned with them? This would be going too far. They are independent of particular men, but not of the human society of which they form part. “They have accordingly the sort of permanence that human 1 Sociology, by E. L. Hayes, 1930, p. 31. “It is often said that the Pilgrims in the Mayflower brought over to these shores their English institutions. They did, but where did they bring them? Were they packed in a cedar chest? Were they stowed in the hold of the Mayflower? No, they were in the minds of the pilgrims.” (Ibid, p. 396.)