Group Process

How can a group of people act in concert to a given end of which they are unaware as individuals? This is the problem of group process. Historians of all stripes tend to explain group action by a supposed concurrence of individual motives. This approach is radically wrong. A simple example will show why: the epochal decline of fertility across Europe that began in the 1870s (after a head start in France). As individuals, the Europeans of the 1870s had no better reasons for adopting marital birth control than did their predecessors from time immemorial. Together, on the other hand, they needed to defend against an imminent, and unprecedentedly massive, threat of overpopulation due to a recent sharp drop in the death rate, especially in child mortality. Their spontaneous collective defense was to cut back on births within marriage as much as they could without self-extinction and as fast as they could without social disruption. As that steep aggregate cutback was also smooth and steady, it follows that all married couples were in on it from the first, whatever their particular baby count.