A New Critique of Theoretical Thought. Deel 3. The Structures of Individuality of Temporal Reality

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Part II
Structures of individuality of temporal human society

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Chapter I
The basic problem in the structural principles of temporal human society

§ 1 - Introduction. the structural principles of human society as the transcendental conditions of our experience of variable factual societal relationships. The basic problem of sociology as a totality-science.

Our investigation of the structures of individuality is now to be focused upon the structural principles of the various typical relationships in human society. We may establish that this part of our inquiry is to be viewed as foundational for any special science which examines these societal relationships under a specific theoretically abstracted modal viewpoint. In the first place, however, it is foundational for empirical sociology, which lays claim to the scientific investigation of societal relationships as such, either in the totality of their appearance, or in the sense of a supposed specific sociological viewpoint which is to be distinguished from the psychological, historical, economical, juridical and other specific scientific points of view.

This cannot become clear so long as our theoretical experience of these relationships is not made into a critical problem. Under the influence of the Humanistic science-ideal both in its natural scientific and its historicist conceptions. Modern sociology of the last century has supposed it could, as a theoretical science, establish and examine human societal relationships as pure facts, apart from any normative view starting from the order of divine creation. Insofar as positive societal norms were taken into consideration, they were usually viewed as subjective axiological psychical or mental reflections of ‘objective’ factual relations in human society, as such capable of ‘causal explanation’. And insofar as at present a ‘normative sociology’ is acknowledged, it is emphasized that it can only set forth the ideal socio-cultural

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world as it ought to be, whereas theoretical sociology studies the societal universe as it is¹.

It stands to reason that this familiar separation between social facts and ‘ideal’ social norms leaves no room for structural principles of human society lying at the foundation of the factual societal relationships. Since these structural principles can only be of a normative qualification and, as such, are not subject to historical change, they are in principle eliminated from theoretical sociology. Any idea that they determine the very nature of the different communal and inter-communal or inter-individual relationships is foreign to this current view.

The historicist conception of ‘socio-cultural phenomena’ does not permit the acceptance of societal structures of individuality which, as such, are not subject to historical development, since they are exactly the transcendental conditions for every possible experience of factual societal relationships. As a result, the whole question concerning the inner nature of the different types of societal ‘groups’ and inter-communal or inter-individual relationships is eliminated.

1 F. Oppenheimer, System der Soziologie I, I, p. 69. Normative sociology is called here ‘social philosophy’.

The pseudo-natural scientific concept of structure in modern sociology.

Instead, sociologists operate with ‘ideal types’ in the sense of subjective generalizing constructions, as explained in an earlier context of our inquiry. And insofar as theoretical sociology speaks of structures of society, this term is not meant in our transcendental sense, but much rather in the pseudo-generic sense of ‘constellation’ or ‘composition’ of different ‘elements’.

Such conception of structure betrays its origin from natural scientific thought, even with those sociologists who emphasize the methodological difference between natural sciences and cultural sciences. It precludes the insight into the basic problem of sociology, which lays claim to a theoretic total view of human society, in contradistinction to all special socio-cultural sciences. For in what sense is this total view to be understood? It cannot be a simple addition of the viewpoints from which human society is examined. Theoretical sociology has often referred to biology, as an example of a theoretic science giving a real synthesis of all specific natural scientific viewpoints. Sociology should do the

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same with respect to all specific socio-cultural sciences¹. But this argument fails if it is viewed as a real solution of the basic problem of sociology as a total science of society.

As a specific science, biology cannot solve the basic problem of the structural unity of a living organism in the modal diversity of its different aspects. It cannot, as such, explain the inner structural relation between the vital aspect and the mathematical and physico-chemical aspects of the living whole. This is a genuine philosophical problem, whose solution is dependent upon the cosmonomic basic Idea lying at the foundation of every theoretical total view of temporal reality, though it is to be tested by its confrontation with experiential states of affairs. Neither can the basic problem of theoretical sociology be solved by referring to a presumed causal interaction between the different modal aspects of human society. We have seen in an earlier context that the structural relation between the different aspects of an individual whole cannot be viewed as a mutual causal encroachment of one modal function upon the modal spheres of the others. Any assumption of the contrary necessarily lands us in a kind of mythology. If a structural causality is meant within and between individual societal totalities, it should be observed that such an integral causality pre-supposes the total view of theoretic sociology, which appeared to be exactly the basic problem of the latter. In any case one should be aware that such an integral structural causality exceeds the boundaries of theoretical thought. It can only be handled as a transcendental Idea, not as a specific scientific concept. It can never yield a scientific explanation of a structural whole.

Thus it is nothing but a scientific mystification when it is assumed that the structural unity of a society as a whole, and of every specific ‘group’, is the result of a causal interaction between its ‘components’. Even when these ‘components’ are taken in a ‘socio-cultural’ sense, as is done by the famous social scientist Sorokin, and are conceived as a structural constellation of interacting subjects (persons), meanings-values-norms, and social ‘vehicles’ or ‘conductors’, the assumption of a causal interaction can never explain the structural unity of the individual totality. In fact it can be established that Sorokin handles the notion of socio-cultural causality in different specific scientific meanings (psychological, historical and even mechanical

1 Cf. for example, Fr. Oppenheimer, op. cit., I, 1, pp. 132 ff.

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concepts of causality are used promiscuously!). He does not know the transcendental Idea of a structural causality, according to which the real internal causal processes within an individual societal whole of typical structure occur in conformity to the typical groupage of its different aspects, without any encroachment upon the modal sphere-sovereignity. And this is the more deplorable because Sorokin, in contradistinction to most positivistic social scientists, is fully aware of the indispensible rôle of norms and values in human society, and his sociological system is admirable in many respects.

Sorokin's over-estimation of the rôle of legal norms in all organized groups.

The fundamental lack of a philosophic foundation of his sociology in a theory of the structures of individuality, in the sense explained in this Volume, is clearly seen in his over-estimation of the rôle of legal norms in all ‘organized groups’, irrespective of their inner nature. According to him the central trait of an organized interaction (group, institution, or social system) is the presence in it of law-norms ‘as the conduct-regulating and behavior-controlling aspect of the component of meaning-values’¹. It may be granted that every organized community has its own legal norms, which regulate the conduct of its members and organs in the juridical aspect. But it is a quite different thing to say that these legal norms are the central characteristic of all of the organized ‘groups’. It will appear from the examination of different structural types of organized communities that it is only a particular secondary radical type, in whose inner structure the juridical aspect plays indeed the central and leading rôle. It is not possible to ascribe the same qualifying trait to organized communities of a radically different type without levelling out in principle their typical inner nature. A similar lack of structural analysis is revealed in Sorokin's other typological classifications of ‘socio-cultural interactions’ and in his more detailed analysis of the different societal ‘groups’. This must be established even with respect to a sociological system which shows a clear awareness of the constitutive rôle of norms in the societal relationships. Thus this statement will be all the more applicable to systems which try to reduce the social norms to natural laws.

1 Society, Culture and Personality (New York and London, 1947) p. 70.

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This fundamental lack of insight into the real societal structures of individuality coheres with a factual elimination of the modal structures of the different aspects of human society. This is the very reason why the typical sociological problem of totality could not be viewed in its proper sense. This problem primarily includes that of the philosophical basic denominator under which the different modal aspects of human experience are to be grasped in the theoretic view of totality. This is clearly shown by the fact that all the -isms in the philosophical view of empirical reality which our transcendental critique has laid bare as a consequence of the immanence-standpoint, reappear in the different sociological systems.

In his system of general sociology Sorokin tries to explain these -isms from the many-sided character of the ‘socio-cultural universe’: ‘Since the universe itself is many-sided’, so he remarks, ‘there must logically be several standpoints, each of which specializes in the study of one of the main aspects. Such a specialization is found, as a matter of fact, in any basic science, from physics and chemistry to biology’. According to him, the net result of such divergence is a more adequate and many-sided knowledge of man's socio-cultural world. And he thinks this must be emphasized in order to avoid the frequent mistake of interpreting this diversity as a sign of the immaturity of sociology¹. Exaggerations of a specific viewpoint in the mechanistic or biologistic schools are to be corrected by the criticism of other sociologists.

But this very minimizing of the divergence between the different sociological schools betrays a fundamental lack of insight into the real character of the totality problem in sociology. If the appearance of the different -isms were to be nothing but a specialization in the study of one of the main aspects of human society, their divergence could be reduced to that of the specific viewpoints of the different special sciences concerned with the study of societal relationships. But the various sociological -isms are exactly characterized by the absolutization of a specific modal aspect in order to grasp human society in the theoretical view of totality. Such absolutizations cannot be corrected by other absolutizations. The very problem is how a general sociology may avoid them; this is to say, from what standpoint a sociological view of the totality of the different modal aspects is possible.

1 Op. cit. p. 24.

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Sorokin's solution of the totality-problem in general sociology.

Sorokin himself tries to solve this problem from the philosophical standpoint of H. Rickert. He is of the opinion that sociology is a cultural science which, in contradistinction to the natural sciences, has to deal with the ‘super-organic’ or ‘mental’ vital phenomena to be found only in man and the man-made world. The socio-cultural universe is constituted by meaning, values and norms, which are superimposed upon the biotic properties of man and which, though different from the two other ‘components’ of this universe (viz. the human subjects of social interaction and the material vehicles of this interaction), none the less also give the latter their socio-cultural sense.

As a generalizing cultural science, sociology is distinct from the individualizing science of history. By its view of totality it differs from the other generalizing social sciences, as economics, politics, and the science of religion, each of which deal only with a specific compartment of the socio-cultural universe.

In our analysis of the modal structure of the historical aspect in Vol. II we have already subjected this neo-Kantian view of culture and human society to a detailed critique. We have seen that it is destructive to the insight into the different modal aspects of human society. In fact we may establish that, in his confrontation of sociology with the other ‘socio-cultural sciences’, Sorokin nowhere pays attention to these modal aspects, but only to concrete societal phenomena. He observes that ‘economics studies only business organizations as a variety of society; political science analyzes the state as a specific kind of society; the science of religion investigates the church as a special form of society. General sociology, on the other hand, is concerned with society as a genus(!), with the properties and relationships that are found in any society, be it a business firm, a church, a state, a club, the family, or anything else’.

It must be clear that by thus posing the problem of the total view of sociology, its very kernel is lost to sight. This problem is just as well present in a scientific analysis of a particular societal whole, as a business organization, a State, a family, a Church, etc., as it is in a theoretical research of the interrelations between ‘all the main varieties of society with one another’. A scientific research of a business organization as an individual totality is sociological in its nature, as well as that of a State, a family, a club or a Church. Special social sciences such as econo-

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mics, jurisprudence, philology, ethics, theology and so on, can never grasp the total structures of these societal figures on their own hand, since their scientific viewpoint is determined by a specific modal aspect of our social experience.

On the other hand, sociology is confronted with the problem of a theoretical total view of human society when it studies the various interrelations between the particular types of societal relationships. Can we speak of human society in the sense of an individual whole encompassing all the particular societal types as it parts? This problem shows a close relation to that regarding the theoretic total view of the modal meaning-aspects of our social experience and is, just like the latter, of a transcendental character. It is really the same problem which in the one case refers to the modal structures, in the other case to the typical structures of individuality. Thus it must be clear that it cannot be solved by sociology on its own account, but only by the transcendental critique of theoretical thought in its application to the theoretical total view of the structural types of societal relationships.

The uncritical character of sociological universalism.

From the outset this transcendental basic problem has been overlooked by sociology. Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte introduced a universalistic view of human society and they supposed they could do so, without any metaphysical or religious prejudice, from a genuine positivistic standpoint. Society was proclaimed to be an ‘organic whole’ encompassing all particular societal relationships as its parts. This universalistic view was taken over from the irrationalistic freedom-Idealism with its historical mode of thought, but combined with the rationalistic and naturalistic science-ideal of the Enlightenment, which contradicted it in principle. Thus the individualistic natural law view of human society was criticized and rejected seemingly only for its lack of insight into the societal facts and laws. But is it really a fact that human society in its temporal horizon shows the character of an individual whole encompassing all the specific societal relationships as its parts? This question is not to be answered by referring to the universal coherence of all societal relationships within a ‘cultural community’. The latter restriction implies a new problem, namely whether in our disintegrated and secularized modern Western culture there can be any question of a genuine cultural community as was

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found in medieval Christian society. Comte realized this problem and was of the opinion that his positivistic philosophy was destined to solve it, because the positivistic ideas were able to reintegrate Western culture by assuring it a mental solidarity. But in his time this was not a fact, but a belief.

Apart from this question it should be considered that a cultural community (taken not in its abstract modal sense, but as a real social whole), can at best be a whole of a particular radical type which shows a historical qualification. As such, it cannot assume the universalistic rôle of an all-embracing societal community. That this truth was overlooked is only to be explained from the historicistic idea of culture, which appeared to lack any tenable definition of its meaning. As to the universal coherence of the different societal relationships I must observe that this interrelation implies the very problem of the theoretical total view of human society. The universal interlacements of all temporal societal relationships cannot detract from the irreducibility of their different radical and geno-types. It is not to be understood how in a highly differentiated modern society there could exist any temporal societal whole able to encompass all of these radically different types as its parts. It will appear that even in a primitive undifferentiated society this cannot be the case.

Gurvitch's universalist construction of all-inclusive societies.

Since such all-inclusive societal wholes are not given in the temporal horizon of human experience, universalistic sociologists are obliged to construe them. Georges Gurvitch has introduced the distinction between functional or particular, and super-functional or all-inclusive groups, and proclaimed that the latter are historically realized in all-inclusive societies. As all-inclusive groups are regarded the nation, the ‘international society’, and ‘humanity’(?), and in ‘backward societies’ the tribe, the city(?) and the empire. These super-functional groups are distinguished from the ‘all-inclusive societies’ in the sense that the latter represent ‘total social phenomena’, while the former are only groups of super-functional character. There is no other explanation given of all-inclusive societies than that their types are more concrete than the nation, the international society and humanity, which can be treated more in abstracto

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as general types, just as the groups which are parts of them.¹ It is already completely obscure what is meant by all-inclusive or super-functional groups in a differentiated society. What, for instance, have we to understand by ‘the international society’ as a collective unit of all-inclusive character, what by humanity? And is a nation really an all-inclusive social whole? Can it for instance include the Roman Catholic Church, or even a kinship whose members have a different nationality, or a State with different national groups, or industrial world-concerns as the Royal Dutch Shell Corporation and the Philips companies? And wherever has ‘humanity’, as a super-functional ‘group’, been integrated into an all-inclusive temporal society? The latter is, according to Gurvitch, the historical integration of all particular groups which are its constitutive ‘elements’ and receive from it ‘its historical characteristics’. ‘Groups of the same kind integrated, for example, in archaic, capitalist, fascist or other societies, vary not only as functions of the instable equilibria, constituted by the forms of sociality immanent in them, but also as functions of definite historic epochs of cultural spheres (Oriental, Occidental, etc.), to which belong the inclusive social types’.²

Thus it appears that an all-inclusive society is to be understood as a cultural community of a definite historical epoch, which is supposed to integrate all particular groups that are its ‘elements’. But as soon as we try to realize this historical conception by means of the given examples, it turns out to be completely confused. A fascist or a capitalist ‘society’ is hardly to be conceived as a cultural unity encompassing all types of societal relationships. Fascism is a totalitarian political ideology, which is quite different from societal reality. It could only be realized in the structure of a State which, according to Gurvitch himself, is only a functional or particular group. As an ideological community it was restricted to the circle of its adherents, which by no means can be identified with a totality of societal relationships as meant by sociological universalism. The concept ‘capitalist society’, on the other hand, is oriented to the absolutization of the economic-technical viewpoint in the Marxian system of sociology. It may be granted that a capitalist mode of industrial production, in its realization, exercizes a powerful in-

1 Sociology of Law (Londen, 1947) p. 184.

2 Op. cit. p. 183.

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fluence upon social life in its non-industrial structures insofar as the latter have enkaptic functions in industrial relationships. But this does not mean that ‘capitalism’ is to be conceived as the qualifying characteristic of an all-inclusive society which integrates all kinds of particular societal relationships into an individual whole. The latter assumption is nothing but a historicist and universalist construction which lacks any foundation in our experiential horizon.

Oppenheimer's universalist construction of human society.

We will consider another universalist construction of human society, that of the German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer. We have already mentioned his attempt to explain the possibility of general sociology, as a non-philosophical empirical total science of human societal life, by reference to biology. All special natural sciences could be integrated into biology ‘because they all, without exception, in the last analysis are related to the same object (Gegenstand): viz. to the process of life in general. This enormous immortal individuum, life, extending itself in space and time, is their “Gegenstand”’.

In the same way sociology has to become the total science of the ‘social process’. According to Oppenheimer, the latter is the activity of ‘human masses’ (Betätigung menschlicher Massen). Human mass is the substance of this process and its activity is the expression of its moving force¹. A human mass, however, is not to be viewed as a mass of individuals. There exists, strictly speaking, only one single individuum in an absolute sense, viz. ‘Life’ in its one-ness, disclosing itself in the innumerable forms of plants, animals, and men. From this single and all-inclusive ‘Life’ originate the species as rather separate unities. And a society, as a human mass, is nothing but a species, living socially, i.e. united by psychical interactions. It is therefore a ‘piece of life’, which lives in a better and higher sense than an individual man. For, the latter is subject to death, while species and human society are ‘immortal’, enjoy ‘eternal life’, because in the change of generations they renew themselves continually.

Thus the universalist construction of human society is founded upon the metaphysical substance-concept. ‘Life’ is elevated to a metaphysical entity, an immortal ‘individuum’, and ‘human

1 System der Soziologie (Jena, 1922) Vol. I, 2 p. 443.

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society’ is considered a secondary immortal substance, originating from the primary substance, just as the vegetable and animal species!

We may observe once again that the metaphysical substance-concept precludes any insight into the modal dimension of our experiential horizon. After having been hypostatized to an immortal substantial individuum, the biotic modality is deified to the absolute origin of plants, animals, mankind and human society in its all-inclusive sense. Thus Oppenheimer is not aware of the analogical character of the life-concept in its application to human society. Through the elimination of the modal aspects he arrived at the untenable thesis that in the last instance physics, chemistry and biology have the same ‘Gegenstand’, viz. the ‘immortal individuum’, life. Thereby he overlooked the fact that the living organism of a cell has a structure of individuality, whose different aspects are irreducible in their modal meaning, so that the physico-chemical aspect is never to be subsumed under the biotical modality. Similarly he does not consider that if human society is to be an individual temporal whole, it must have a structure of individuality in which the different modal aspects are united in a typical groupage. As a result, the transcendental problem concerning the possibility of a theoretical total view of human society is eliminated by a dogmatic metaphysical vitalism, and the universalist construction of human society ends in pure mythology!

The three forms of universalism.

A consistent sociological universalism cannot be satisfied by the conception of a particular human society as an all-inclusive whole, embracing all types of societal relationships as its parts. It must necessarily proceed to the assumption of an all-inclusive temporal community of mankind. This was already the opinion of Comte.

It may be that this sociological universalism is founded in an ontological universalism which considers all that exists within the temporal horizon as a part of the ‘universe’, whereas the latter is conceived as an individual whole endowed with actual, or at least potential being.

It may also be that sociological universalism is accompanied by an axiological universalism, which ascribes a higher value to the assumed whole of temporal human society than to the individual man.

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But it is not necessary that these three forms of universalism present themselves in mutual combination. Plato, for instance, was a consistent universalist in an ontological sense. But in his view of human society he only appeared to be an inconsistent universalist, since he considered the Greek polis as the all-inclusive whole of social relationships.

And in his dialogue Phaedo he clearly rejected the axiological universalistic view of this polis by arguing, in a mythical depiction of the life after death, that the philosopher has a higher value than the good citizen. Therefore it is necessary to insist on a sharp distinction between these three forms of universalism.

As to the universalistic view of mankind as the all-inclusive temporal whole of human society, we must establish that this view is incompatible with the plastic dimension of the temporal world-order. We cannot accept it without abandoning in principle the irreducible structures of individuality of societal life and the modal structures of its different aspects, pre-supposed in them. This view lacks any foundation in our experiential horizon and is nothing but an a priori philosophical construction.

Christian thought has often fallen prey to this sociological universalism by considering it as a consequence of the Biblical vision that mankind has originated ‘from one blood’. From the latter is was concluded that mankind is a great family community bound by the ties of universal kinship and including in principle all kinds of societal relationships. This is a serious error to which we shall recur in a later context.

The three transcendental problems of a theoretical total view of human society.

For the present we must restrict ourselves to an elucidation of the transcendental problems involved in a theoretical total view of human society. We may formulate them as follows:

1.	Where is the basic denominator to be found needed for a comparison of the different types of societal relationships, set apart and opposed to one another in the antithetic Gegenstand-relation of theoretical thought?
2.	How is their mutual relation and coherence to be viewed?
3.	Where do they find their radical unity and totality of meaning, or in other words, from which starting-point can we grasp them in the theoretical view of totality?

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Our general transcendental critique of theoretical thought has brought to light that the philosophical immanence-standpoint can only result in absolutizations of specific modal aspects of human experience. Similarly we may establish that on this standpoint every total view of human society is bound to absolutizations both of specific modal aspects and of specific types of individual totality. This will appear from our following structural analysis.

From the Christian transcendence-standpoint the radical unity and meaning-totality of all temporal societal structures of individuality is only to be found in the central religious community of mankind in its creation, fall and redemption by Jesus Christ. This starting-point excludes in principle every universalist sociological view, which seeks the unity and all-embracing totality of all types of societal relationships in a temporal community of mankind. Neither a nation, nor the Church in the sense of a temporal institution, nor the State, nor an international union of whatever typical character, can be the all-inclusive totality of human social life, because mankind in its spiritual root transcends the temporal order with its diversity of social structures.

This was the firm starting-point from which Christianity by the spiritual power of its divine Master broke through the pagan totalitarian view of the Roman empire, and cleared the way for a veritable and salutary revolution of the social world-view. The radical meaning of this Christian revolution would be frustrated by identifying it with the Stoic idea of mankind as a temporal community of all-inclusive character. It is true that the natural law doctrine of Hugo Grotius used this Stoic idea as a foundation for international law and that this idea broke through the classical Greek absolutization of the polis. But it could never become the starting-point for a social world-view which hits any absolutization of temporal societal life at its roots. It could not clear the way for a theoretical examination of the basic structures of individuality determining the inner nature of the different types of societal relationships.

It is only from the Biblical Christian transcendence-standpoint that the three transcendental basic problems formulated above can be solved in a way which precludes absolutizations. The basic denominator for a theoretical comparison of the different structural types of human society can here only be the temporal world-order rooted in the divine order of creation. The mutual

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relation between the social structures of individuality is only to be viewed as that of an inner sovereignty of each structure within its own orbit, balanced by its coherence with the other structures in cosmic time; the latter guarantees enkaptic external functions of any particular social relationship in all the others, insofar as their different structural principles are realized.

And this theoretical total view is only possible from the starting-point that the different societal structures of individuality find their radical unity and meaning-totality beyond cosmic time in the central religious community of mankind.

It is indeed our transcendental basic Idea in its application to the theoretical total-view of the societal structures of individuality which gives this solution to the three transcendental problems formulated above.

The principle of structural sovereignty of every type of societal relationship within its own inner orbit, and the undifferentiated societies.

But when we try to apply this Idea to the factual societal relationships realized in the different phases of the evolution of human social life, there seems to arise a serious difficulty.

At first sight it might appear that this Idea presupposes a differentiated condition of human society which, as explained in Vol. II, is dependent upon the opening-process of its historical or cultural aspect. How then can we apply it to primitive or undifferentiated societies? Does not it appear from this difficulty that our whole view concerning the validity of constant structural principles for the factual societal relationships is at best of an ideal-normative character, and should be eliminated from any explanation of society as it factually is?

I think this conclusion would be quite premature. When we establish that a matrimonial community, a State, a Church, etc. have a constant inner nature, determined by their internal structural principles, we do not mean that all of these societal structures of individuality have been realized in every phase of development of mankind. We only mean that the inner nature of these types of societal relationships cannot be dependent on variable historical conditions of human society. This is to say, as soon as they are realized in a factual human society, they appear to be bound to their structural principles without which we could not have any social experience of them. We shall see presently that this does not detract anything from

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the great variability of the social forms in which they are realized.

As to undifferentiated societies, this implies that their types of societal relationship also have structural principles, determining their inner nature, and differring fundamentally from those of differentiated types.

This view is doubtless ruled by the Biblical Idea of divine creation of all things after their proper nature. But it is again and again confirmed by the social facts themselves.

The inner nature of a matrimonial bond urges itself upon man because it is not his own creation. Doubtless the factual matrimonial relationship between a man and a wife may be bad enough. Man and wife may break the marriage bond. But it is impossible to make such a factual behaviour into a social norm, because it contradicts the very nature of a matrimonial relation and the latter is a fundamental institution of every human society. The bolshevist authorities were obliged to capitulate to the ‘logic of the social facts’ when they saw that the communist doctrine of marriage as a free companionship, dissoluble at any moment by the will of each of the parties, in its practice led to a fundamental desintegration of the Russian society.

In the same way the inner nature of a State, of a university, of a Church, of an industrial enterprise, or, in an undifferentiated society, of a sib, a tribe, or a guild, cannot be identified with the variable and changing factual relationships in which their internal structural types are realized. The latter urge themselves upon man and cannot be transformed by him. This is why the real structural principles of human society can never be replaced by constructed ‘ideal types’, in the sense of Max Weber.

The only reserve to be made with respect to the application of our transcendental Idea of social totality to undifferentiated societies, is that the societal basic principle of the sovereignty of each structural type within its own inner orbit cannot be applied to the mutual relation of undifferentiated types which appear to have the same inner nature. But this does not detract from the universal validity of this principle as such, which only refers to the relation of structural types of a different radical or geno-type.

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§ 2 - The societal forms and their relation to the structural principles of the different types of societal relationships.

The totality-character of the societal forms is disregarded by the so-called formal sociology.

All typical structures of individuality of human societal relationships are of a normative qualification. This is what distinguishes them in principle from animal types of symbiosis. This also implies that they require a human shaping on a cultural basis and can only be realized in particular societal forms which differ with the various cultural areas and the level of historical development of the latter. These societal forms are the social products of the process of human shaping and exhibit the same typical totality-character as the typical structural principles to which they give a positive form. This is to say that in principle they function in all the modal aspects of our social experience and are not exhausted in their historical or cultural modality, though they are always typically founded in the latter.

This is why any attempt at a delimitation of the sociological field of research from that of the specific social sciences by restricting the former to the forms of human societal life, was doomed to fail. We have explained this in detail in our analysis of the modal structure of the historical aspect in the second Volume. In addition it appeared that in the so-called formal sociological school of Simmel, v. Wiese and other sociologists, the concept ‘social form’ was conceived in the pseudo-natural scientific sense of a more or less constant ‘element’ of every complicated societal relationship whatever. The latter was supposed to be composed of such ‘elements’ in more or less intricate combinations. But even these ‘elementary’ societal forms, if they are to be really understood in a societal sense, turn out to exhibit a typical totality character involving the transcendental problems explained in the preceding section. This is why they cannot be examined in an abstract general way, but only within the typical structures of individuality and their mutual interrelations. Apart from the latter, they are nothing but pseudo-generic concepts which, combined with their erroneous interpretation as ‘social elements’, necessarily lead sociology astray.

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The difference between the transcendental structural principles of human society and the subjective sociopolitical principles (maxims).

The typical structural principles to which the social forms give a positive shape should be sharply distinguished from the subjective socio-political pinciples. The latter are results of human reflection on the fundamentals of human society and the maxims of their concrete formation in accordance with a particular cultur-historical situation. In this sense one speaks of liberal, socialistic, fascistic, communistic, Roman Catholic, Calvinistic, etc. principles for societal life. These subjective social principles are always to be tested to the normative structural principles founded in the temporal divine world-order, which determine the inner nature of the different societal relationships and the mutual relations between the latter.

It is undeniable that the process of formation of human society is influenced to a high degree by the subjective social principles which have acquired a socio-cultural control over the majority of the members of a cultural community. But it would be incorrect to overestimate their rôle. Subjective social principles may contradict the essential structural principles of human society founded in the divine world-order. The latter is the order of reality, which can never be set aside without destructive consequences for human societal life. This is also the reason why veritable positive structural norms are constitutive for the factual societal relationships. They are not merely ‘ideal’ standards for valuating the latter, but really give a positive form to their inner nature. It is true that this formation can occur in a better or worse way in proportion to its being guided by better or worse subjective social principles. But apart from the typical structural principles which determine the inner nature of the different societal relationships, there can be no question of real positive societal norms.

The societal forms and the factual societal relationships. The temporal duration of both.

The societal forms are therefore nothing but the forms which the typical structural principles assume in the process of their positivization. As such they are not identical with the individual factual societal relationships, since they belong to the law-side of human societal life. But they are the necessary link between the structural principles and the factual transitory societal rela-

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tionships subject to them. As products of human formation, and in contradistinction to the structural principles, they themselves have a certain temporal duration, which is distinct from that of the factual relationships presenting themselves within their positive social frame.

Though they have a typical historical foundation and, as such, are variable in time, they must have a relative constancy because otherwise they would not be able to maintain a positive order in the configuration of the factual societal relationships.

The societal forms do not only positivize the inner radical- and geno-types of the latter. They are also the real nodal points of the complicated interlacements between the positivized structural types. For we have seen that no single structure of individuality can be realized in isolation and that everywhere the intertwinements between the different structural types, already guaranteed on the law-side by the cosmic order of time, are realized within typical forms.

Constitutive or genetic, and existential social forms.

Social forms are to be distinguished in proportion to their having a genetic or an existential character.

Genetic forms are such which constitute a social relationship; existential forms determine the pheno-typical traits of a constituted social relationship during its existence. Both give rise to different variability-types of the structural types, which receive from them their positive figures. A family, for instance, is genetically interlaced with the matrimonial community of the parents. This conjugal community is interlaced with the State by its modern genetic social form of the civil nuptial performance and the marriage-contract and (in preponderantly Roman Catholic countries) with the Church by the genetic social form of the ecclesiastical performance and nuptial benediction¹. In this sense we speak of a civil or an ecclesiastic marriage. In an undifferentiated society, marriage often has a close interlacement with the sib-structure by its constitutive genetic form of a contract of sale.

Through their modern existential social forms both the matrimonial and the family communities exhibit a great number of variability-types, which determine the pheno-typical traits of matrimonial and family life. An industrial labourer-family shows a different pheno-type from that of a farmer-family in

1 In England the Anglican Church, as the Established Church, has also the competence to perform or ‘celebrate’ a marriage.

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which a certain patriarchic trait is conserved, as a consequence of the close intertwinement of family-life with the farm-business. Both differ considerably from a pastoral family, etc. An industrial or agrarian business in its turn is interwoven with the life of the city or the village, with the State and the Church, with international life, etc., both in its genetic and its existential forms.

So it must be evident how much the social scientist will be at fault in this intricate system of enkaptic interlacements, if he considers only the variable forms of societal relationships, without paying attention to the constant transcendental structural types realized in them. And it is no wonder that a positivistic sociology is not able to detect any constant difference in nature between the various structural types of societal relationships. As the social forms, both in their constitutive and existential functions, vary with the historical development and bring the different societal structures into interlacement, it is impossible from them alone to gain any insight into the inner structural differences between the various types.

If, for example, we consider the former Dutch East- and West-Indian companies, we observe that in the social form of trade-companies, constituted with the consent of the States General, they exercized a genuine State-authority in the settled areas and possessed a fleet and an army.

When we consider the medieval existential form of the Church, we must conclude that the latter was so much interwoven with the secular government and with the administration of secular justice that at first sight it showed all the traits of a State.

Add to this the modern variability-types of State, Church, industrial business, school, university, etc., originating from the typical genetic and existential forms in which they are realized. All this may suffice to establish that it is impossible to detect firm boundaries between the different types of societal relationships if we do not penetrate behind the social forms to the internal structural principles positivized by them.

So it is quite understandable that in his work De la Division du Travail Durkheim, led astray by the evolution of the social forms, concluded that the modern State is involved in a process of inner transformation from a primitive ‘segmentary’ to a differentiated ‘organic’ type. This was supposed to occur by replacing the antiquated uniform territorial divisions through a functional system of divisions according to the different branches of socio-economic service, organized in autonomous syndicates.

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This is also the reason why Max Weber restricted his ‘ideal type’ of the State to the modern State forms, because, from his historicist point of view, he did not see the possibility of construing an ‘ideal type’, embracing also the antique and medieval forms of ‘political life’. Historicism does not raise the primordial question whether the medieval feudal system could indeed realize the State-idea, if, in other words, the feudal regna may be considered as ‘real States’. Historicism lacks any transcendental criterion of the body politic and must consequently also speak of the old Germanic, Greek and Roman ‘gentilitial States’, because the ancient sibs and gentes doubtless exercised political functions.

If we consider a beautiful embroidery from behind, we do not discover any pattern in the confused criss-cross of the interlacements. Similarly we cannot discover the structural patterns of the different types of societal relationships if we pay attention only to the genetic and existential forms in which they are interlaced with one another.

§ 3 - Some preliminary transcendental distinctions.

As our examination is primarily concerned with the structural principles of the various types of subjective societal relationships, the current general concept of ‘social groups’ and their general classifications are not available to us. The reason is that this current concept, and the various current criteria of a general classification of ‘groups’ lack any transcendental foundation in the plastic dimension of the temporal order. They are, therefore, arbitrary from the transcendental viewpoint and preclude a real insight into the social structures of individuality¹.

This is why we must try and find some other preliminary distinctions of a general character which will enable us to gain a systematic survey of the various structural types of societal relationships. It would certainly be premature to suppose that they are exhaustive. But, to my mind there should be no doubt that they are serviceable for a provisional division of the main types. Their transcendental relation to the societal structures of individuality will be explained in a later context.

1 If the term group is to have any scientifically delineated sense, it should only be applied to the positivized societal relationships on the basis of a transcendental distinction of the latter according to their internal structural types.

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Communal relationships and inter-individual or inter-communal relationships. Their correlativity.

In the first place we have to pay attention to the structural distinction between communal and inter-individual or inter-communal relationships, inherent in every temporal human society as such, as its transcendental condition. In the first (Dutch) edition of this work this distinction was denoted by the Dutch terms ‘gemeenschaps’- and ‘maatschapsverhoudingen’, corresponding to the German terms ‘Gemeinschaft’ and ‘Gesellschaft’, though the current meaning of these German words is quite different from that intended in my own distinction.

It is impossible to render the Dutch terms adequately by the English words ‘community’ and ‘society’, because especially the latter has quite different meanings from that of the Dutch word ‘maatschapsverhouding’. Although the English term ‘community’ is no more an exact equivalent of the Dutch word ‘gemeenschap’ in the sense intended by me¹, I have retained it for lack of a better suitable word. But it is all the more necessary to define the meaning which I shall ascribe to it.

By ‘community’ I understand any more or less durable societal relationship which has the character of a whole joining its members into a social unity, irrespective of the degree of intensity of the communal bond.

By inter-individual or inter-communal relationships I mean such in which individual persons or communities function in coordination without being united into a solidary whole. Such relationships may show the character of mutual neutrality, of approachment, free cooperation or antagonism, competition or contest.

It is doubtless possible that within communal relationships, too, such traits may reveal themselves in the factual attitude of the members with regard to one another. But the intrinsic difference is that, as long as the communal bond exists, these traits occur between members of the same whole, so that the

1 Most Anglo-Saxon social scientists use the term community especially in the sense of a ‘territorial group’. Cf. for example H.P. Fairchild, Dictionary of Sociology (1944), p. 52; R.M. Mac Iver, Community (1917), p. 22; Reuter and Hart, Introduction to Sociology (1933), p. 129; A. McClung Lee, New Outline of the Principles of Sociology (1946), p. 248, all quoted bij J.P. Kruyt, Gemeenschap als Sociologisch Begrip, p. 6 (Mededelingen der Kon. Ned. Akademie v. Wetensch., Nieuwe Reeks, Dl. 18 no. 3, 1955).

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factual behaviour of the latter continues to be subject to the positivized structural principle of the community, and continues to be experienced as such. If within a marriage bond, husband and wife factually behave as if they were only in a neutral or antagonistic inter-personal relationship of a particular type, this has a quite different societal significance from that of the behaviour of a man and woman who are really so related to one another. This is why any idea according to which all typical societal relationships are supposed to be composed of the same elementary social relations or forms of interactions, though in different combinations, is destructive to the insight into the real structures of individuality within a human society.

Our general systematic distinctions are by no means to be interpreted in this sense.

In addition it should be observed that there exists a strict correlation between communal and inter-communal or inter-personal relationships. This is to say that in the temporal order every communal relation has a counterpart in inter-communal or inter-personal relationships, and conversely. The same individual persons who in one respect are members of the same community may in another respect be in an inter-personal or inter-communal relation to one another.

In considering the factual societal behaviour of people it should not be overlooked that it occurs within the cadre of an intricate net-work of typical structures of correlated communal and inter-communal or inter-personal relationships. By eliminating the structural principles of the latter, positivistic and historicist sociology must necessarily arrive at an erroneous view of the societal facts. This has given rise to superficial and untenable generalizations, especially in the dynamic theory of society.

We refer, for instance, to Sumner Maine's theory, according to which the developmental line of societal life is to be described as an evolution from status to contract; or to Durkheim's above mentioned view of the fundamental transformation of society; or to Tönnies' theory concerning the evolution of human society from ‘Gemeinschaft’ to ‘Gesellschaft’, to which we shall return presently.

Organized and un-organized communities (‘Verbände’ and natural communities).

If a community is typically founded in a historical power-formation which is organized, we speak of an organized com-

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munity. The German sociological term denoting such communities, is ‘Verband’.

The organization provides a community that lacks a natural foundation with a more or less continuous existence, whereby it becomes independent of the duration of life of its individual members. Unorganized communities, on the other hand, have a typical biotic foundation. They are natural communities; and since they lack a typical historical foundation they are to be found at all times, though they may show very different social forms, and in a primitive society may be intersected by artificial systems of kinship. Natural communities in this sense are marriage, cognate family (in the narrow sense of the bond between a set of parents and their children) and the cognate family bond in its broader sense, which, as we shall see in our analysis of its typical individuality-structure, has natural boundaries with respect to its extent (the degrees of natural kinship belonging to it).

It may be that neighbourhood also gives rise to a natural community, especially in the case of colonists. But one should guard against confounding such a natural community with an undifferentiated organized vicinage, which is doomed to disappear in the process of societal differentiation and which has a quite different structural type, viz. that of a guild or an artificial brotherhood.

The concept ‘natural community’ requires a sharp delimitation if it is to be scientifically applicable. It loses any distinct meaning if it is oriented to the Aristotelian conception of the ‘social nature’ of man. In this case even the State is called a ‘natural community’ because man is conceived of as a ζῷον πολίτιϰον, which can realize his substantial human form only through the cultural education of the polis.

For the same reason I shrink from calling a friendship a natural community, because the term friendship (with its confusing difference of degrees) lacks a univocal sense. If friendship is typically founded in a feeling of sympathy, we must remark that feeling, insofar as it is not of a biotically founded instinctive character, can be hardly viewed as a typical firm basis of a natural community. And a typical biotical foundation of friendship is certainly lacking¹. Similarly the term ‘natural

1 Cf. Dietrich Bonhoeffer's poem Der Freund (Widerstand und Ergebung, Briefe und Aufzeichnungen aus der Haft, München, 1952, p. 269):

Nicht aus dem schweren Boden
wo Blut und Geschlecht und Schwur
mächtig und heilig sind,
wo die Erde selbst
gegen Wahnsinn und Frevel
die geweihten heilgen uralten Ordnungen
hütet und schützt und rächt, -
nicht aus dem schweren Boden der Erde,
sondern aus freiem Gefallen
und freiem Verlangen des Geistes,
der nicht des Eides und des Gesetzes bedarf,
wird der Freund dem Freunde geschenkt.
[A friend is a gift to a friend
not from the heavy soil where blood and
race and oaths are mighty and holy,
where the earth itself watches over the sacred
hallowed and ancient ordinances
and defends and avenges them,
not from the heavy soil of the earth,
but from free choice and the free desire
of the heart, which are not in need of
an oath or a law.]

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community’ loses any definite sense if it is applied to the social relation between all of the individual undertakings belonging to the same branch of industry or agriculture in order to construe a ‘natural foundation’ for a public legal organization of such a branch.

We have observed that communities which are typically founded in a historical power-formation with a durable organization, by means of the latter have a continuous existence independent of the lease of life of their members. A natural community, such as a cognate family and a kinship bond in its broader natural sense, may have a restricted continuous existence, but this continuity lacks the supra-individual character of an organized community. It is only an organization which can make a community independent of the lease of life of all its individual members. This is not so in the case of the natural family as a bond between parents and children. By the death of the parents this bond is irrevocably broken leaving only the bond of kinship, which equally lacks the supra-individual character of an organized community.

Durable organization necessarily implies the societal relation of authority and subordination in its different modal aspects. This relation is also found in the matrimonial community and the family in its narrowest sense. But here it lacks, as such, the typical historical foundation of a power-organization. Once again

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we must reject the conception of this authoritative relation as an ‘element’ of all ‘compound’ societal relationships. The truth is that it is only found in organized communities in the sense defined above, and in addition in some natural communities (not for example in the natural kinship community in its broader sense, nor in a natural community founded in neighbourhood). Moreover the relation of authority and subordination is only to be understood from the structural types of the different communities in which it is inherent. The natural authority of the husband or the parents, for example, is radically different from that of a magistrate in a State, or from that of a manager of a factory. One cannot level out these differences in nature without losing sight of the most fundamental states of affairs in human society.

In the inter-individual and inter-communal relationships any relation of authority and subordination is lacking. This does certainly not mean that here the individuals and communities are coördinate to one another in a position of social equality. The natural law ideas of freedom and equality have an abstract juridical meaning and could only be realized in the civil law aspect of the inter-individual and inter-communal relationships. In any other respect these relationships show a great inequality in the position of the parties, caused by age, sex, class or rank, disposition, trade or profession, fortune, political or industrial power, etc.

All these differences in social position lack a real integration within the inter-individual and inter-communal relationships. As to the former, they are to a more or less considerable degree also due to the difference in function or position which the individual persons hold within organized communities. This is to be explained from the unbreakable correlation between communal and inter-individual relationships and the enkaptic functions of the former within the latter. It is, for example, undeniable that a prime Minister, a cardinal or the chief manager of an industrial world-concern occupy a much stronger position in the inter-individual relationships than a mine-labourer or a simple bank-employee. But, whereas in a community all individual differences in position are in the last instance integrated into the unity of a societal whole, the inter-individual and inter-communal relationships present the picture of a non-integrated inequality and diversity in social position between the different parties.

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This is the reason why no single inter-personal or inter-communal relationship can occur without finding its counterpart in a communal bond. A human society cannot exist as an unintegrated diversity alone. The unbreakable correlation between unity and diversity is founded in the temporal world-order itself.

But this transcendental correlation, which is a condition of any possible human society, should not be confounded with the relation of a societal whole and its parts, as is done by a consistent sociological universalism. A community in the sense defined above is indeed an individual whole, which embraces its parts and integrates any social diversity occurring within its internal structure into a higher communal relationship. But if an inter-communal or inter-individual relationship is conceived of as a part of an all-embracing societal whole, this is tantamount to its theoretical transformation into a communal relation. This is to say that its inner nature is eliminated and its enkaptic interlacement with communal relationships is misunderstood.

Sociological individualism as an absolutization of the inter-individual relationships.

While sociological universalism is to be understood as an over-estimation of the communal relationships, the absolutization of the inter-individual relationships is characteristic of the individualist view of human society. The latter will always seek to construe society from its supposed ‘elements’, i.e. from elementary interrelations between human individuals. From this standpoint the reality of communities (especially of organized communities) as societal unities is generally denied. The latter are only considered as fictitious unities resulting from a subjective synthesis of manifold inter-individual relations in human consciousness.

This sociological individualism may be founded in an ontological and axiological individualism. But this is no more necessary than the combination of a sociological universalism with an ontological and axiological universalism. A genuine ontological individualism is, for example, found in Leibnitz' metaphysical monadology, which was doubtless combined with an axiological individualism rooted in the individualist conception of the Humanistic ideal of human personality. But it may occur that such a monadic ontological individualism is accompanied by a universalist view of temporal human society.

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Hobbes was doubtless a sociological individualist. Nevertheless he ascribed axiological primacy to the State as a fictitious super-person construed by a compact between the individuals.

One should especially guard against an all too frequently occurring identification of the contrast between sociological individualism and sociological universalism with that between nominalism and realism in the famous contest concerning the reality of ‘universalia’. Though it is true that sociological individualism is usually accompanied by a moderate or extreme nominalism, the latter may also occur with sociological universalism. In itself the contest between nominalism and realism is not concerned with the question whether human society is to be viewed as a whole with parts or as a constellation of interrelations between individuals.

If the correlativity between communal and inter-individual or inter-communal relationships is indeed a transcendental condition of every human society, it follows that both sociological individualism and universalism must result in an elimination of the societal structures of individuality.

As to individualism we must observe that it can never arrive at the transcendental Idea of a genuine communal whole lying at the foundation of its structural parts. As soon as it is attempted to construe a community from elementary relations between individuals, the whole dissolves itself into a plurality of elements and its structural principle is lost to sight.

According to its structural principle community in its different types doubtless belongs to the law-side of human society. It is not a natural fact but a normative task, which can be realized in a better or worse way. For this reason it is quite understandable that in our time the adherents of a consistent a-normative conception of empirical sociology in the sense of Max Weber show a tendency towards the complete elimination of the idea of community from their field of research¹. It is true that these sociologists especially mean the idea of community as it was understood by Ferdinand Tönnies, whose conception we shall criticize presently. But their arguments for the rejection of the idea mentioned clearly show that they implicitly reject the conception of community in our sense.

It should, however, be borne in mind that the elimination of

1 Cf. Kruyt in his above mentioned treatise published in the Mededelingen der Kon. Ned. Akademie van Wetenschappen.

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the normative idea of community implies that of the inter-communal and inter-individual relationships insofar as the latter can no more be conceived in their proper societal sense apart from their normative structural principles. This is due to the very correlativity of these two foundational kinds of relationships. Apart from its structural principle no single societal relationship can be theoretically established and examined in its factual realization without denaturing its societal meaning.

Tönnies' conception of ‘Gemeinschaft’ and ‘Gesellschaft’.

As our fundamental distinction between communal and inter-personal or inter-communal relationships differs in principle from Tönnies' antithetic conception of ‘Gemeinschaft’ and ‘Gesellschaft’, it is necessary to consider the latter more in detail. For it is Tönnies' connotation of these German terms which has been epochal in continental European sociology since the appearance of his book in which he first introduced his conception¹. Tönnies employs the terms ‘Gemeinschaft’ and ‘Gesellschaft’ respectively²) to bring out a contrast between an essential ‘social organism’, on the one hand, in which the individual is ‘naturwüchsig’ (i.e. arising spontaneously, as in an organic process) ingrown, and the mechanical aggregate of transitory social ties and relations, on the other, which must be viewed as the artificial products of human arbitrariness.

The members of a true ‘Gemeinschaft’ are essentially and intrinsically united, and remain so in spite of external separation. The members of a ‘Gesellschaft’, in contrast, are intrinsically separated, and this in spite of all artificial bonds.

To characterize the opposition between ‘Gemeinschaft’ and ‘Gesellschaft’ Tönnies coined the pregnant terms ‘Wesenswille’ and ‘Kürwille’.

1 Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1st ed. 1881; this book has already appeared in a 6th and 7th ed., Verlag Karl Curtius, Berlin). In his work Soziologie als Wirklichkeitswissenschaft the German social scientist Hans Freijer observed that the influence of Tönnies' fundamental distinction has been so universal that it operates almost in an anonymous and underground way. Cf. also Tönnies' Einführung in die Soziologie (Stuttgart 1931), p. 14.

2 Gemeinschaft is something like community; Gesellschaft resembles ‘association’, but there is no exact rendering of these terms possible. Cf. Sorokin, Society, Culture and Personality, pp. 116-117 (Harper Bros., New York, 1947).

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The ‘Wesenswille’ is the natural unity of volition in all the members of a ‘Gemeinschaft’. Building on natural instincts it is formed in an inner community of feelings, love and hatred, likes and dislikes, ideas and beliefs. The ‘Kürwille’ or ‘arbitrary volition’, in contrast, is a merely external agreement made in order to reach a specific external goal. In it the mutual profit (do ut des) is paramount and an inner unity of will is lacking¹.

True ‘Gemeinschaften’ are found in marriage and the family (in the narrower sense of the bond between a couple of parents and their children), in domestic relationship and mark-community, in sibs and villages, in ancient and medieval cities, with their guilds and religious community, and in the medieval Church. They always precede the individualistic ‘Gesellschaft’ and are either authoritarian or associatory in character or show a combination of both types. ‘Gesellschaft’ is a modern rationalistic factor in human society, excercising a destructive influence upon the foundations of culture. It marks the decline of civilization and is antagonistic to all real ‘Gemeinschaft’. There are two main periods of cultural development: a period of ‘Gemeinschaft’ is followed by a period of individualistic ‘Gesellschaft’. The former is characterized by concord, customs, and religion. The latter is characterized by convention, politics and public opinion, as expressed in typical forms of ‘Gesellschaft:’: in a large modern city, with its trade and industry; in national life, with its calculating politics; and in cosmopolitan life, consciously proclaimed in concepts by rationalistic science, adopted by literature and the press, and passing in this way into public opinion.

In the modern rationalized Western society there are only residues of true ‘Gemeinschaft’ in family-life, in the State, in the Church, in the trade-unions, etc. Nevertheless the period of ‘Gemeinschaft’ is over. We are now in the period of ‘Gesellschaft’ with its prospect of the dissolution and decline of human culture. Thus it appears that with Tönnies the contrast between ‘Gemeinschaft’ and ‘Gesellschaft’ assumes the character of a central theme in the philosophy of history, a theme which dominates his whole view of cultural development.

It is evident that this view implies an axiological standard incompatible with the Idea of historical development explained in

1 Cf. F. Tönnies Fundamental Concepts of Sociology, Engl. translation by C. Loomis, New York 1940, p. 17.

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our analysis of the opening-process of the historical law-sphere.

The glorification of the undifferentiated medieval corporations and the depreciation of the process of differentiation and integration inherent in the disclosure of human culture show a strong influence of Romantic philosophy. And the pessimistic view of the period of ‘Gesellschaft’ is doubtless inspired by the Marxian conception of the dialectical development of the capitalist society. The idea according to which true ‘Gemeinschaft’ grows as a natural ‘organism’ is taken from Schelling and the Historical School. It is a strongly deceptive trait in this view that really natural communities, such as marriage and the cognate family, are bracketed with undifferentiated organized communities as the sibs, the guilds, the medieval cities, the medieval vicinages, etc. For it is evident that the latter cannot maintain themselves in the historical process of differentiation and integration of human society; whereas really natural communities may disclose their inner nature all the more purely when they are freed from the artificial intersections caused by the primitive sibs and patriarchal domestic communities. Of course this does not detract from the fact that in the modern highly differentiated, but at the same time strongly secularized Western society the natural communities are threatened by other serious dangers. Insofar Tönnies' view indeed contains an important moment of truth that we shall be better able to examine at the close of our examination of the structural principles of the different societal relationships. But this cannot make his conception of ‘Gemeinschaft’ and ‘Gesellschaft’ acceptable as such. This conception is destructive to the insight into the transcendental correlativity between communal and inter-individual or inter-communal relationships. By reducing all organized communities which do not correspond to his romantic idea of ‘Gemeinschaft’ to mere contractual relations, Tönnies in principle eliminates any examination of their inner nature and structural principles.

The transcendental significance of the general distinction between differentiated and un-differentiated societal relationships for the historical examination of human society.

We have to add some further general systematic distinctions to those introduced and explained above. They will also appear to be indispensable if we wish to do justice to the element of truth in Tönnies' conception.

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In the first place the difference between differentiated and undifferentiated societal relationships appears to be foundational for every examination of the historical development of human society (usually styled: ‘social dynamics’, in contradistinction to ‘social statics’).

That this distinction is really of transcendental significance has been shown in detail in the analysis of the opening-process of the modal structure of history in the second Volume. Though the distinction as such is generally accepted in sociology, there is a great divergence in its interpretation, elaboration and historical-philosophical appreciation. In this respect the view of Tönnies, for example, is diametrically opposed to that of Spencer or Durkheim. The main defect of the current views is their pseudo-biological or -mechanistic foundation. Nowhere is the distinction oriented to the societal structures of individuality founded in the plastic dimension of the temporal world-order.

Institutional communities and voluntary associations.

Secondly we have to introduce the systematic distinction between institutional and non-institutional communities. As the terms ‘institute’ or ‘institution’ lack a univocal meaning in sociology (especially since Durkheim's extremely broad interpretation of the words), it is again necessary to give a sharp, definition of the sense in which I shall use them.

By ‘institutional communities’ I understand both natural and organized communities (in the sense defined above) which by their inner nature are destined to encompass their members to an intensive degree, continuously or at least for a considerable part of their life, and such in a way independent of their will. According to the Christian view their differentiated basic types are founded in a special divine institution.

The natural familistic community (both in its broader and in its narrower sense) is one into which man is born. The same holds good with respect to the State; although one can get citizenship also in other ways, no citizen is able to change his nationality at will. The institutional community of the Church receives the children of Christian parents as its members by baptism and as such they continue to belong to this community through a bond independent of their will, until they reach their years of discretion. This institutional trait is lacking in the sects which reject infant-baptism and are sometimes even without any institutional organization.

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Similarly the institutional conjugal community embraces husband and wife by a bond independent of their will. According to its inner structural principle it is a bond which is destined to unite them for life. When there are particular circumstances which make it necessary to dissolve it, it is the institutional character of the conjugal community which requires supra-individual rules for divorce. In any case the inner nature of this institution is independent of the subjective conceptions of the matrimonial bond, which in course of time may strongly vary. A scientific examination of the development of such conceptions and their influence upon the formation of the positive norms regulating this institution presupposes the supra-arbitrary structural principle of the latter. By eliminating this principle scientific research lacks any point of reference which alone makes it possible to relate the different conceptions to the same institution¹. The institutional character of the conjugal bond precludes any possibility of transforming the latter into a voluntary association.

In a secondary sense the institutional character must also be ascribed to the undifferentiated organized communities, which also embrace their members by a bond independent of their will. The reason is, as we shall explain in a later context, that in their undifferentiated societal form, in which different structural principles are interlaced, an institutional structural principle always has the leading rôle, either that of kinship or that of a political community.

As observed, the term ‘institution’ is usually taken in a much broader sense, especially by French sociologists.
Emile Durkheim viewed the ‘institutions’ as the specific field of research of sociology². He identifies them with the whole of the ‘social facts’, conceived as facts which, independent of the consciousness of the individuals, originate from a ‘collective consciousness’ (conscience collective), and as such impose themselves upon the individuals. He distinguishes the corporative institutions (insti-

1 It is in vain to seek for some common characteristics in the different subjective conceptions which science might combine to a so-called ‘empirical’ concept of the marriage bond. The so-called ‘common traits’ are, as such, quite arbitrary and can never determine the inner nature of the institution.

2 Les Règles de la Méthode Sociologique (9th ed. 1938, Préface p. XXIII): ‘La sociologie peut être définie: la science des institutions, de leur génèse et de leur fonctionnement’. [Sociology may be defined as the science of institutions, of their origin and functioning].

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tutions corps) from the durable collective manners of behaviour (institutions choses), such as law, morals, language, occupational customs, etc., and the collective modes of existence (such as styles of building, traffic, etc.). The all-inclusive ‘institution-corps’ is society as a whole, endowed with a collective consciousness.
The famous Roman Catholic social scientist and jurist Maurice Hauriou, founder of the so-called institutional school of law, followed Durkheim in this broad conception of the term institution.
He, too, calls all organized and un-organized communities ‘institutions-corps’, in contradistinction to the ‘institutions-choses’. But he rejects Durkheim's conception of the collective consciousness, which this sociologist employs to account for the independent existence of the institutions with respect to the individuals.
Hauriou tries to base this supra-individual rôle of the social institutions on metaphysical Ideas, conceived in a neo-Platonic sense. With him these Ideas play more or less the rôle of the structural principles of societal relationships in our sense, though Hauriou has not at all analyzed the social structures of individuality. To account for their influence in the positive formation of the corporative societal relationships Hauriou takes refuge to Alfred Fouillée's conception of ‘idées-forces’ (operative ideas in a psychological sense)¹. The metaphysical Ideas of corporative relationships are historically realized by means of operative ideas (idées d'oeuvre) which exercize a psychological influence upon an élite of ‘entrepreneurs’, thereby stirring them to concentrate their energy for the purpose of realizing them. The metaphysical Ideas concerned are themselves called ‘institutions’ or ‘institutional Ideas’. By means of the operative ideas they are ‘embodied’ or ‘incorporated’ in the factual institutions of human society as soon as their influence has expanded from the élite to the whole of individuals to be embraced by the corporation.
Naturally I shall not deny that sociologists are entitled to employ the terms ‘institution’ and ‘institutional’ in a more extensive sense than I do, provided that they define what they understand by the words. But this terminology actually gives rise to serious objections if it leads to a levelling out of the fundamental structural difference which we express by the distinction between institutional and non-institutional or voluntary communities.

Among the differentiated organized communities only the State and the Church have an institutional character in the sense defined above. All the others display the nature of voluntary associations, though we shall see that some of them may be realized in forms impeding the full disclosure of this voluntary character. They originate from the free differentiated inter-personal and inter-communal relationships, though with respect

1 Fouillée, too, rejects the conception of a collective consciousness of human society, distinct from the consciousness of the individuals.

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to their inner structure they are not reducible to the latter. They are, consequently, based on the principle of freedom to join and leave. A compulsory membership, whereby they become compulsory organizations can never be derived from their inner nature. It may be the consequence of a specific kind of enkaptic interlacement with the State, exceeding their internal structural sphere, whereby they assume a public law function and are endowed with a public authority delegated by the State. It stands to reason that this can only occur with associations of a very important societal character, such as, for example trade-unions, which can be used in a so-called functional decentralization of the public administration.

As long as this is only a question of an enkaptic binding in the structure of the State, the compulsory character will not extend beyond the public law sphere, whereas the joining and leaving of the members of the association as such remains free. The compulsion then only has an indirect character and means that in the event of his not joining, a man lacks any influence upon public legal regulations or decisions affecting his interests, and will perhaps also be deprived of other advantages. Should, however, the compulsion to join assume a direct character and the organization as such consequently be transformed into a compulsory association, it would at the same moment lose its original inner nature and become a part of the State. Its qualifying or leading function is then modified in principle; it has assumed a radically different structure. And we have seen that the structural principles of societal relationships are not created by man but are founded in the divine order of creation.

Associatory and authoritarian forms of association. Indirectly compulsory organizations.

The non-institutional organizations which in modern differentiated society show an immense diversity in nature and formation, have either an associatory¹ (‘genossenschaftliche’) or an authoritarian (‘herrschaftliche’) form of government.

In the first case the highest authority is vested in all the members together. In the second case authority does not derive from the latter but is imposed upon them. Consider, for example, the

1 I intentionally avoid the adjective ‘democratic’ since this term pertains to the governmental form of the State only, and its extension to radically different organized communities implies the danger of levelling out the structural principles of the societal relationships.

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relation between employer, manager and labourers in a modern factory. As an organized community with its essential structural subject-object relation to the buildings and machines, a factory is not to be viewed as an organization with an associatory form of government. This might only be justified in the exceptional case that the labourers themselves have founded the factory and instituted the authoritative organs. But, as a rule, the organization intended shows an authoritarian form.

In addition it must be observed that the formal freedom of the labourers to join and to leave such an industrial organization is often frustrated by the situation of the ‘labour-market’, by their factual economic position and one-sided skill and training. This is why the authoritarian economically qualified labour organization in the modern Western forms of industrial life can hardly be considered as completely voluntary associations. They rather show some resemblance to institutional communities. Nevertheless it would lead to a fundamental confusion if we should bracket them with the latter. For it is not the structural principle of an economically qualified authoritarian labour organization which as such precludes a complete realization of the freedom to join and to leave. Much rather it is the positive social form in which it is realized on the historical basis of the modern capitalistic forms of production, which has given rise to a factual societal situation hardly to be justified. Here we are confronted with another form of indirect compulsion, a form not originating from the enkaptic interlacement of the organization with the State. When we call them indirectly compulsory organizations one should remember that this term cannot have a transcendental sense as is the case with our former systematic distinctions, since its meaning does not pertain to the structural principles of human society.

The State is the only differentiated community to which belongs a compulsory organization in its proper sense in accordance with its inner nature. This will become clear from our analysis of its structural principle.

Associatory and authoritarian forms of voluntary and indirectly compulsory organizations may be enkaptically inter-woven with one another in the genetic form of a free association. This will be the case when the established ‘purpose’ of the latter embraces the foundation of an organized labour-community, an instructional community, etc. We shall examine such inter-weavings in a later context.

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§ 4 - The naïve experience of the continuous unity and identity of supra-individual (organized) communities and of natural communities exceeding the two-oneness relation. The fundamental difference between the structure of a multiple human community and that of a thing.

It is undeniable that in naïve experience we conceive of organized (supra-individual) communities as being continuous and identical unities, which persist as such in spite of the change in their members.

The same holds good with respect to unorganized or natural communities exceeding the two-oneness relationship. But in this case with the restriction that the continuity of the whole is not experienced as a supra-individual bond, but as being bound to the life of particular members. It is certain that in naïve experience such a continuous whole presents itself only in the full inter-modal coherence of temporal reality, in which a rôle is also played by the actual subject-object relations between the community and the complexes of things objectively destined for its use.

A parochial or other local church-relationship, for example, is never experienced naïvely apart from its buildings, the relationship of a family in its narrowest sense is usually connected with its dwelling (cf. the Dutch term ‘huisgezin’¹ and the English term household), and an industry with its factory buildings.

In naïve experience, however, we are fully conscious of the variable nature of these subject-object relations, which are obvious actualization relations in the formerly defined sense². A change of buildings, for example, which objectively correspond to the destination of a multiple community, no more affects our naïve experience of the identity of the latter than the complete or respectively partial change of its members does. And if a typical subject-object relation (actualization-relation) is lacking temporarily or permanently, we still retain a notion of subjective relationship, as a continuous unity amidst the change in members. It must be admitted that the pre-theoretical attitude meets with some difficulty when there is no point of contact to be found in the objective reality of things. But this does not detract from the fact that the naïve experience of a multiple communal relationship is falsified in principle if it is inter-

1 ‘Huisgezin’ means a family sharing the same home.

2 Cf. pp. 147 ff. of this Volume.

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preted exclusively in terms of sense perception, as if it could consider only an objective sensorily perceived image (e.g., of people in a building) as a unity.

It is also erroneous to believe that only theoretical thought is able to comprehend a multiple community as a continuous whole and that naïve experience is only aware of individuals. Nothing is closer to naïve experience than the reality of the unifying communal bond, at least within institutional communities; and nothing is more foreign to it than the resolving of such relationships into individuals.

The fundamental error involved in the interpretation of the naïve experience of a communal whole in terms of a sociological individualism.

It is impossible to interpret the naïve experience of a multiple communal whole in terms of sociological individualism without transforming this pre-theoretical experience into a theory. And we have shown in detail in the first part of this Volume that this is tantamount to a fundamental misunderstanding of its inner nature.

Of course naïve experience is no more able to explain the continuous internal unity of a societal whole than it is able to explain that of natural things, works of art or other normatively qualified objective things.

Gierke points out, for example, that the medieval Germanic pre-theoretical conception of organized communities identified them with the totality of their united members¹. This identification was made even though medieval juridical sources clearly show a thorough awareness that the identical unity of a mark-community, for example, is not affected if the number of its inhabitants is reduced to 2 or 3.

Among primitive tribes the individual man is never considered apart from the communal whole to which he belongs. Very often

1 A parallel of this naïve conception of totality is furnished by the pre-theoretical view of the totality of a man's inheritance as including all separate objects belonging to it. Thus Gaius states in his Institutiones II, 54: ‘Olim rerum hereditariarium possessione velut ipsae hereditates usucapi credebantur, scilicet anno; lex enim XII tabularum soli quidem res biennio usucapi jussit, ceteras vero anno, ergo hereditas in ceteris rebus videbatur esse, quia soli non est, quia neque corporalis est, et quamvis postea creditum sit ipsas hereditates usucapi non posse...’.

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the sib or clan is the real unity taken into account within the tribal community. This is to say that here the inter-personal relationships are completely embedded in communal and inter-communal relationships, and are determined by the latter. The individual man as such, i.e. viewed apart from his particular sib and tribe, is here only known in the sense of the outcast, the outlaw. And where sibs are lacking, the natural families are the primordial social unities and never the individuals.

In the pre-theoretical attitude the members of a community are always viewed as embraced by the unifying bond of a whole. The latter is simply experienced without reflection, but always distinguished from the inter-individual or inter-communal relationships which are their correlates. It is meaningless to suppose that this experience is the result of a subjective synthesis of a given manifold of social interactions between individuals. A fortiori it makes no sense to assume that the communal whole as it presents itself to the naïve experiential attitude may be reduced to an ‘economical’ fiction of human thought. As the naïve experience of the social whole of a community precedes any reflection or theoretical analysis, it is an irreducible datum.

And it is this very datum which is unexplainable from the standpoint of a sociological individualism.

Why sociological universalism cannot account for the data of naïve experience.

This does not mean that sociological universalism would be in a better position to account for this datum of the pre-theoretical experience of communal relationships. For although this universalism departs from the idea of the societal whole and its inner articulation in individual parts, it eliminates in principle the experiential datum of the unbreakable correlativity between communal and inter-communal or inter-personal relationships. This very correlativity is essential in the naïve experience of both of the latter, irrespective of the differentiated or undifferentiated condition of human society.

When, living in a modern Western society, we retire into the intimate sphere of our family, our experience of the close community with our wife and children is co-determined by the contrasting experience of the inter-individual intercourse with persons not belonging to this intimate circle. Conversely, our experience of isolation in a foreign city or in a circle with which we are not acquainted is co-determined by the lack of those

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typical communal relationships experienced in our own city or in a familiar circle.

Similarly in an undifferentiated primitive society the experience of societal relationships is completely determined by the correlativity of ‘blood-friendship’ and tribal community on the one hand, and the relationships with persons of another sib or family, or with an inimical tribe on the other.

Any idea that this contrast between communal bonds and inter-individual or inter-communal relations is to be bridged by a universalist scheme of the whole and its parts, is foreign to naïve experience.

But this does not at all mean that this contrast lacks a deeper solution. It is the Biblical Christian starting-point alone which offers this solution by relating all temporal societal relationships in a concentric sense to the radical spiritual solidarity of mankind in creation, fall into sin, and redemption by Jesus Christ in the religious communion of the Holy Spirit. We have already observed that it is this very starting-point which precludes any absolutization either of the communal or of the inter-communal and inter-individual relationships, as they present themselves within the temporal order.

When we examine the latter kind of relationships more in detail it will appear that in the light of the central commandment of love, their typical structures of individuality lose any appearance of antagonism to the radical communal unity of the human race.

The dangerous implications of any sociological universalism.

The seemingly more Christian character of sociological universalism in its consistent sense, in comparison with sociological individualism, is only due to the fact that the former seeks an ultimate community in which all temporal divergences in the societal relationships are integrated, and in which the unity of mankind finds expression.

This seems to be a sublime ethical view especially captivating in a time which strives after an international integration of the world. It is readily forgotten that temporal communities are as much affected by sin as non-communal relationships and that in general more extensive communities show a lower level of morality than those of a more intensive character.

The chief point, however, is that the universalistic view is a

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false ideology because of its absolutization of the temporal communal relationships and its replacing the radical unity of mankind by a theoretically devised temporal one. Therefore it is in fact much more dangerous than the individualist view, since it is in principle a totalitarian ideology which implies a constant threat to human personality. It may be that in a universalist sociological system these implications seem to be completely avoided by very beautiful explanations of the ‘organic’ character of the societal whole and its inner articulation in autonomous individual parts and members. Universalism will always stress that true freedom and self-disclosure of human personality is only guaranteed by its ‘organic’ conception, in contradistinction to the ‘mechanical’ individualist view, in which the individual lacks true individuality.

But one should not be led astray by these biological analogies, notwithstanding any assurance on the part of the universalists that they are to be understood in a cultural scientific or ‘geisteswissenschaftliche’ sense.

The truth is that the human I-ness transcends every temporal societal relationship and that it is therefore impossible to conceive of the human person in its totality as an ‘organic’ member of a temporal societal whole.

In other words, the biological analogy fails at the critical point of the transcendental Idea of totality. Human society is neither to be viewed as an ‘organism’ nor as a ‘mechanism’. Both views affect the very human character of the societal relationships.

One should not object that the Christian view is at least universalistic with respect to the religious conception of the solidarity of mankind. This conception has nothing to do with sociological universalism in its proper sense. This appears convincingly from the fact that the membership of the ‘corpus Christi’ is completely independent of all temporal communal relationships, so that the latter are never to be viewed as ‘organic parts’ of this transcendent spiritual communal whole. This confirms our earlier statement that this religious conception is indeed incompatible with any form of sociological universalism.

The structural character of an organized communal whole. Its difference from a thing-structure.

The above considerations give rise to the question: what is the proper structural character of a multiple communal whole and particularly of an organized community?

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For it cannot be denied that at first sight an organized societal whole seems to show a surprising resemblance to the internal whole of a thing-structure, whose various types have been examined in the first part of this volume. Similar to the latter, an organized communal whole possesses a real continuous identity in spite of a complete change in its parts. It functions, just like the typical totality-structure of a thing, as a real unity in all of its modal aspects. And, in the same way as a plant or an animal, it has its own internal sphere of life.

This resemblance to a thing-structure is completely lacking in an inter-communal or inter-individual relationship; and to a much lower degree it is found in a natural multiple community, such as a family.

So it is no wonder that especially in the biologist trends of sociology the substance-concept was employed to explain the character of an organized communal whole as a living ‘super-organism’. In Kjellen's famous book Der Staat als Lebensform, for example, this substantialist view is applied to the State in an extremely consistent way. And since we have shown in the first part of this volume that the concept of substance is usually identified with that of a thing, this view led to a fundamental confusion between the societal structure of an organized community and the thing-structure. We shall return to this confusion in a later context.

In earlier publications preceding the first (Dutch) edition of this work I myself applied the term ‘thing-structure’ to organized communities precisely to emphasize the fundamental difference of my conception from any functionalist, substantialist, or dialectical structural view of such societal wholes. But this terminology was to a high degree inadequate and confusing; and therefore I abandoned it in all my later publications. I shall briefly account for this terminological change.

Although we have shown in detail that a thing-structure as it is experienced in the pre-theoretical attitude has nothing to do with a metaphysical substance-concept, the term ‘thing’, at least in its philosophical use, has an intrinsically restricted meaning. It is applicable only to a structural whole of a relatively permanent character which lacks subject-functions in the logical and post-logical aspects and therefore can be only an ‘object’ in the typical human societal relationships.

One might even prefer a more restrictive conception of the term, according to which it pertains only to ‘dead objects’, i.e.

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to structural wholes lacking a subject-function in the biotic aspect, irrespective of their typical qualification. But, in my opinion, no serious objection can be raised against a definition of the term which includes plants and animals.

An organized human community, on the other hand, has a radically different type of existence from that of a ‘thing’. This radical difference is not to be found in its lack of a ‘material body’ or in its supposed restriction to the ‘mental’ sphere. The human body is no more to be viewed as a ‘thing’ than a human community is, because it is qualified by the general act-structure in the sense briefly explained in an earlier context¹. And the temporal communal human relationships are not restricted to the so-called ‘mental’ aspects but function in the pre-logical modalities as well. This will be shown in detail in the sequel of our examinations.

The only radical difference between a human community and a ‘thing’ is to be found in the fact that the former has subject-functions in all the modal aspects of human experience and human social existence. This implies that a communal whole can never be a societal object. It can only be realized in a more or less durable social coherence of typical human acts and typical modes of human behaviour which are determined and unified by the inner structure of individuality proper to this community. This realization is doubtless bound to objective social ‘vehicles’ or ‘conductors’ in the sense meant by Sorokin, and especially to the structural lingual subject-object relation. But such is not only a condition of the realization of a community but of all human societal relationships.

1 Cf. this Volume pp. 87 ff. Naturally a human body is not to be identified with a corpse.

§ 5 - The problem concerning the unity and identity of an organized community in Greek and medieval realistic metaphysics.

In the preceding section we have established the data of naïve experience, with regard to the conception of a community as an identical whole and its correlativity with the inter-communal and inter-individual relationships. We shall now engage in a more detailed inquiry into the development of the philosophical conceptions of the unity of organized communities.

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The influence of the form-matter motive upon the Greek conception of the polis. Protagoras' depreciation of the gentilitial organization.

In Greek philosophy the view of human society was in the last instance ruled by the form-matter motive. After the rise of a real State-institution which destroyed the political power of the undifferentiated gentilitial and tribal organizations, the Greek πόλις or city-state was generally considered as the all-inclusive whole of Greek society. This was due to the fact that this polis had become the centre of the cultural religion of the Olympian Gods and the centre of Greek culture. By the formative power of the city-state the Greek citizen was supposed to be elevated in principle above the uncivilized barbarian.

It was doubtless Protagoras, the founder of the sophistic trend of thought, who gave this common view its first philosophical expression.

By depreciating nature as the unfolding of an orderless vital process in the sense of the Greek matter-motive, he at the same time depreciated the ancient gentilitial and tribal organizations. As the centres of the older natural religions, the latter had preceded the State-formation. Protagoras viewed them as unstable social products of nature lacking law and morality. According to him legal and ethical norms can only originate from the nomos (legislation) of the polis, not from nature.

It should also be observed that Protagoras, insofar as we can reconstrue his views, rejected an individualistic conception of the polis. He conceived of the latter as a real communal whole whose laws, viewed as the expression of the general opinion of the democratic community, impose themselves upon the citizens irrespective of their individual opinion.

It is only with the later sophists that a radical individualist conception of the ṕolis is found. And this radical individualism as it is represented by Polos, Thrasymachos and Kallikles, had its background in a shift of the primacy from the nomos to nature. But the latter is conceived in Protagoras' sense of an orderless vital process in which the stronger individuals have a natural right to oppress the weaker. It is the Greek matter-motive unchecked by the form-motive which dominates this radical individualism.

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The dialectical tension of the form-matter motive in Plato's universalist conception of the ideal State.

In order to secure the polis and its laws against this ethical nihilism Plato and Aristotle combated the sophistic opposition between nature and nomos. They sought to found the political order of the city-state in a metaphysical way. Both of them held to the (inconsistent) universalist view of the polis as the all-inclusive whole of Greek society. They understood that it is impossible to conceive of the State in its factual existence without a normative principle which determines its essential nature. They were, in other words, completely aware of the impossibility of a purely positivistic concept of human societal relationships. And both of them held to the dialectical basic-motive of Greek thought in their conception of the relation between the factual development of the polis and the normative principle of its nature. They viewed the deformation of factual political life as a necessary consequence of the Anangkè (fate) of the matter-principle, whose power is opposed to that of the formative divine Reason. Both of them were especially concerned with the problem of the identical unity of the societal whole in the diversity of its parts, without finding a satisfactory solution.

In his construction of the ideal State in his dialogue Politeia Plato sought this unity in a harmonious hierarchical order of the three ranks of Greek society. This order should be in an analogous conformity to his construction of the harmonious order of the three parts of the human soul, and in accordance with his conception of the idea of justice in its concentric relation to the central Idea of the Good.

But, as I have shown in detail in the first volume of my Reformatie en Scholastiek in de Wijsbegeerte, his trichotomistic construction of the human soul was itself penetrated by the dialectical dualism of the form-matter motive. It could not actually account for the idea of a whole.

Similarly there remains an unsolved tension, in his idealist conception of the polis, between the idea of the political whole, as a public order on the one hand, and the private relationships in the conjugal and family-communities and the private agricultural and commercial business, on the other.

In fact the problem of the societal whole was insoluble in the universalist conception of the Greek polis because of the radical difference in nature between the State and the non-political communities and inter-individual relationships.

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Nevertheless Aristotle seemingly succeeded in a consistent universalist construction. But this could only occur at the cost of a complete levelling out of the structures of individuality of human society.

The metaphysical foundation of the universalistic view of the polis in Aristotle.

Aristotle viewed human society, from its smallest unity, the ‘household’, to the city-state (πόλις), as founded metaphysically in the substantial form of human nature. The complete unfolding of this essential form is the natural end of man's existence. But as the individual man is not able to realize this essential end in isolation, the disposition to communal life is implied in his rational nature. This innate social impulse (ὁϱμή) is realized in a hierarchy of lower and higher levels of communal life, in which every lower community strives for its perfection in a higher association. The ultimate perfection of communal life is found in the polis, which is therefore the perfect human society and embraces all the other communities as well as the individual men, as its parts determined by the whole.

This implies that, according to the teleological order of human nature, the State is prior to the household and the village (as an association of households) and also prior to the individual man. This does not detract from its being posterior to the lower communities in terms of time.

According to its essential aim, as it is founded in the substantial form of human nature, the State ought to provide its citizens with all things belonging to a good (i.e. a perfect) human life (τὸ εὖ ζῆν).

Every community is established for some good end, since men always act to obtain a good. The State, however, though being a species of the general concept ‘community’ (ϰοινωνία), and as such, logically distinct from other species of this genus, is in the natural ethical order the highest, embracing all the others. The reason is that it aims at the highest human good, i.e. the perfection of man's rational-ethical nature.

The household as an economic community and its three forms of authority.

Viewed according to its development in time, the State origin-

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ates from the household (οἰϰία), but this is only possible because in this lowest community the germ of State-formation is already implied. As the form-principle takes priority over the matter-principle and consequently in the teleological order the perfect community is prior to the imperfect, the nature of the household can only be conceived in a part-whole relation to the polis.

This is an inevitable consequence of the universalist view of human society. But at the same time it is a consequence which in principle precludes any insight into the radical difference in nature between a natural and an organized institutional community. The State is conceived of as the perfect natural association of villages, which themselves are nothing but associations of households.

One should keep in mind that Aristotle does not consider the conjugal bond and the natural family in its narrowest sense as different (though closely genetically interwoven) communities. His philosophic explanation of the nature of the State takes its starting-point in the οἰϰία, i.e. the Greek domestic community forming an individual household. The relationship of husband and wife and that of parents and children are only viewed as parts of the domestic community, whose primordial relationship is that of master and slave.

This is due to the fact that the household is in the first place considered as an economical unity concerned with providing man with the basic material means of well-being; and secondly as a community serviceable to the propagation of the ‘human species’. The science of domestic management is economics (oiko-nomia, i.e. the laws of the household). According to Aristotle, politics shows an analogy to ‘economics’. It is true that he warns against losing sight of the specific difference between the State and the household. But in his universalist view of the polis this difference cannot be of a radical character.

It is in the first place a difference in scale and secondly a difference in governmental form. As to the latter the household is a monarchy (although including aristocratic and despotic relations, as we shall see), ruled by one head, whereas the Greek polis has a number of rulers.

But this is nothing but a question of extent and number. The only qualitative difference to be found in Aristotle's political theory is taken from his metaphysical view of the teleological natural order. The State is the perfect community directed to

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the good life¹ and should be ‘autarchical’², i.e. self-sufficient, whereas the lower communities are by nature non-autarchical since they require their perfection by the State.

According to the teleological natural order, the essential nature of a community is determined by the natural purpose to which it is directed. The household as the most primitive and lowest community is the natural association for supplying the lower daily needs and sexual propagation. Several households sooner or later unite in order to supply more than this. The village, however, is itself only adequate to supply the minimal material needs of this enlarged community. Therefore the State arises from a union of villages to provide men with a good or perfect cultural and ethical life. Its citizens are the heads of the particular households.

1 Cf. Pol. I, 1280b: ϰοινωνία τοῦ εὖ ζῆν.

2 That this autarchy is meant as a normative requisite appears from the fact that Aristotle recognizes the possibility that a state lacks this property. In Pol. VI, 1291a, for example, he remarks that a polis which has too small a number of subjects is not autarchical.

The universalist view of the conjugal and family-bond.

By viewing the household as the germ of the State, Aristotle emphasizes its inherent relation between the natural ruler and the natural subject, which he supposes to be first of all the relationship of master and slave. In comparison to this relation that of husband and wife and that of parents and children are not equally specific. In order that the race may exist at all there must be a union of male and female, which are driven by instinct to mate and produce posterity. Such mating and propagation, however, is not peculiar to men and does not differentiate them from the animals.

It is true that Aristotle recognizes that the human conjugal bond is also a moral relation, at least among free persons, where it involves friendship and mutual service. But he does not consider the irreducible typicalness of this relation, neither does he pay attention to the irreducible character of the natural moral affection between parents and their children. It is the universalist view which leads him to the conclusion that these moral relations require their expansion and perfection in the community of the State. They are not ends in themselves but only means to the formation of good citizens.

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To him friendship is a general condition of every communal life. It can, therefore, attain to perfection in the State alone¹.

For the same reason Aristotle stresses the relation between authority and obedience, even in the conjugal and kinship bonds, in terms of political forms of government. So he speaks of the aristocratic character of the husband's authority over his wife and the monarchical character of the paternal authority over the children, whereas the authority of the master over his slave is of a despotic nature. Consequently the chief characteristic of the household is found in its being an organization that keeps persons of incomplete capacity or development in proper order. Its unity is guaranteed by the general relation of ruler and ruled, to which we shall return presently. Its head directs the activities for the getting and spending of wealth. He is the economist and has to concern himself not only with production but with the use of what is produced, with a wise administration of his property. Property is necessary both to existence and to citizenship. But as it is only a means to the end of a good life, it appears once again that the household, as an essential economic unity, requires its completion and perfection by the State.

This may suffice to show the destructive consequences of Aristotle's universalist construction for the insight into the structures of individuality of human society. The truly natural communities of marriage and family are conceived of as dependent parts of an economically qualified organized whole, which in its turn is considered as a constituent part of the State. I do not overlook that his view of the conjugal bond has its background in the common Greek conception of a married wife as a children-bearer and domestic drudge, and, viewed from this background, is even to be called progressive in an ethical respect. But this cannot detract from its fundamental failure with regard to the inner nature of this natural community.

1 Cf. Pol. III, 1280b: διὸ ϰηδεῖαι τ᾽ ἐγένοντο ϰατὰ τὰς πόλεις ϰαὶ φϱατϱίαι ϰαὶ ϑυσίαι ϰαὶ διαγωγαὶ τοῦ συζῆν· τὸ δὲ τοιοῦτον φιλίας ἔϱγον· ἡ γὰϱ τοῦ συζῆν πϱοαίϱεσις φιλία. Τέλος μὲν οὖν πολέως τὸ εὖ ζῆν, ταῦτα δὲ τοῦ τέλους χάϱιν. Πόλις δέ ἡ γενῶν ϰαὶ ϰωμῶν ϰοινωνία ζωῆς τελείας ϰαὶ αὐτάϱϰονς. Cf also Eth. Nicom. VIII c. 9 and 11.

Is there a connection between Aristotle's universalist view of the polis and the undifferentiated structure of the earlier Greek society?

In a later context we shall examine the question in how far the Aristotelian view of human society is influenced by the un-

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differentiated condition of the former gentilitial and tribal organization and of the ancient agrarian domestic community. This influence might explain why his universalist construction of the polis does not show the dialectical tensions of Plato's Politeia, which doubtless takes into account the radical difference between the State as a public institution and all private communities. It might explain why Aristotle, in contradistinction to Plato, views the undifferentiated agrarian domestic community as the primary foundation of the polis and exclusively considers the heads of the households as citizens endowed with political competence. It might finally explain why the Aristotelian view of human society, with its ‘organic’ construction of the polis from lower communities, so admirably suited the scholastic conception of the undifferentiated medieval society; and why even contemporary scholastic theories of the State which consider the medieval society as the admired model of their organic anti-absolutistic view of the State-institution, appeal to Aristotle.

It is readily forgotten that Aristotle's universalist view of the polis, however ‘organically’ it was construed, was no less absolutistic than Plato's. The conception of the household as a part of the political community, for example, led him to the consequence that the polis should regulate human procreation. Plato was of the same opinion.

The corporative occupational classes in Aristotle's ideal State.

It is true that Aristotle treated only the households and the villages as essential parts of the organism of the State. He considered voluntary associations only as contingent organizations with special ends. Nevertheless, in his ideal State he proposed an absolutistic division of its citizens into compulsory corporative occupational classes and after the Spartan pattern would have the government regulate common meals in which all citizens should be obliged to participate¹.

Just like Plato, Aristotle is of the opinion that a well ordered State should be based upon a division of labour among the different occupational classes. But, whereas Plato in his project

1 See Gierke, Deutsches Genossenschaftsrecht I, p. 30. Also cf. K. Hildenbrand, Geschichte und System der Rechts- und Staatsphil. Bnd. 1, p. 335 and A. Menzel, Griechische Staatssoziologie Z.F. öff. R. Bnd. XVI, 1936, p. 23.

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of the ideal State denies to the governors any private household and property, Aristotle, on the contrary, makes the latter an essential condition of the governmental functions.

According to him, the rulers need an independent private economical position which allows them leisure to devote themselves to political affairs. As a consequence, Aristotle considers it as a corruption of the governmental system if the supreme authority is in the hands of a majority of poor citizens, since the latter are inclined to seek their own profit and to oppress the other classes. We shall see that this viewpoint led him to the introduction of non-political criteria for the distinction of intrinsically political forms of government. From his universalist standpoint Plato also did so. But in Aristotle this confusion was co-determined by his view of the ‘household’ as the primordial part of the State.

The conception of the organized societal whole as a real unity whose identity is guaranteed by its constitution (taxis). The State as a unity of political order (unitas ordinis).

If the polis is to be viewed as the whole of all societal relationships, what then guarantees its inner unity and identity?

It stands to reason that realistic Greek metaphysics, in its universalist view of human society, held to the reality of the all-embracing whole of the polis. But this reality is to be understood as the reality of its normative eidos or essence, in Aristotle founded in an objective teleological world-order. Although, as explained earlier, sociological universalism as such is not to be identified with a realistic view of the eidè, the latter doubtless rules the Platonic and Aristotelian conception of the reality of a social whole.

This clearly appears when we compare the Platonic and Aristotelian conceptions with the modern so-called transpersonalist universalistic view of an organized community.

Plato and Aristotle certainly did not conceive of the inner unity of the polis as a ‘collective person’, nor were they familiar with a juridical concept of an organ. Gierke, Karl Hildenbrand¹, Rehm and others have demonstrated this convincingly. The

1 K. Hildenbrand, Geschichte und System der Rechts- und Staatsphil. Bnd. I (1860), p. 23 ff. The place in Plato's Crito cited by Menzel (Beiträge zur Gesch. der Staatsl. 1929, p. 164) does not speak of the State as a person, but rather identifies State and laws.

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speculative-universalistic construction of an organized community as an ‘Überperson’ or ‘Gesammtperson’, which we shall discuss later on, does not originate in Greek realistic metaphysics; it is a modern irrationalistic product of Romanticism, with its dialectical view of the relation between the individual and the community. It presupposes the universalist turn in the conception of the Humanistic personality-ideal, explained in the second part of the first Volume.

In our Prolegomena we learned that irrationalism rests upon an absolutizing of the individual subject-side of temporal reality at the cost of the general law-side. Such a view cannot be joined with the depreciation of individuality inherent both in Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics. An organized community is in realistic metaphysics a composite structural order, metaphysically grounded in an objective Idea or eidos.

In Plato's dialogue Politeia the State is conceived of as a real mesokosmos connecting the mikrokosmos of the individual man with the makrokosmos, the universe. As observed above, the inner unity of the ideal State is guaranteed by the harmonious hierarchical order of the three ranks of Greek society: the wise rulers, the military rank, and the rank which has to provide society with the necessary material means. This order is conceived of as an order of justice according to which every rank fulfils its proper task, without interfering with that of the others, in order to guarantee an harmonious cooperation in the interest of the whole. In the dialogue, The Laws, Plato intends to project a scheme of government which is realizable in the necessarily imperfect condition of real men and as much as possible approaches the ideal outlined formerly. Here the unity of the whole is sought in a well balanced constitution combining the monarchical and the democratic principles of government under the supreme rule of the law. By such a constitution conflicts between the different social groups may be eliminated and thereby the stability of the whole ensured. In other words, Plato considers the unity of the polis only under the viewpoint of the relatively best system of government. He does not consider it in the light of the inner typical structure of the State as such. His only concern is to answer the question by what kind of political governmental form the unity of human society, as a supposed all-inclusive whole, may be ensured.

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The Aristotelian solution of the problem and its influence upon the Stoic construction.

In the last instance this is also Aristotle's concern. But he tries at the same time to give a general solution to the problem concerning the unity and identity of the State, irrespective of the question by what kind of governmental form this unity may be best realized.

This solution is no more than in Plato oriented to the inner typical nature of the State as such. Rather it is applicable to any species of the genus ‘organized community’. According to Aristotle it is the generic relation of ruler and subject that joins a plurality to the unity of a community. From his explanation of this relation it clearly appears that he does not even restrict it to human society. Much rather he conceives it as a general metaphysical relation which is also applicable to composite substances, such as plants, animals and individual men, whose material bodies are ruled by a soul as substantial form¹. We shall see presently that this conception was taken over in the Stoic construction of the organized communities. It has doubtless a point of contact in Plato's construction of the unity of the three ranks of his ideal State, in correspondence with the relation of ruling and being ruled in the three parts of the rational soul.

In an organized community the ordering of the relation between the ruling part and the subjects is called taxis (τάξις). Aristotle understands this term in the sense of a law (nomos)² concerning the distribution of political authority and benefits. It is this taxis which, according to him, guarantees the identity of the State, although the individuals who are its citizens may change.

When this taxis or constitution, undergoes a fundamental change, because the control in the State shifts to another social group, the identity of the community is lost and another State arises³.

1 Cf. Pol. I, 1254a 28: ὅσα γὰϱ ἐϰ πλειόνων συνέστηϰε ϰαὶ γινέται ἕν τὶ ϰοινόν, εἴτε ἐϰ συνεχῶν εἴτε ἐϰ διῃϱημένων, ἒν ἅπασιν ἐμφαίνεται τὸ ἄϱχον ϰαὶ τὸ ἄϱχόμενον; Pol. I, 1254a 24: ϰαὶ εἴδη πολλὰ ϰαὶ ἀϱχόντων ϰαὶ ἀϱχομένων ἐστίν.

2 Pol. III, 1257a 18: ἡ γὰϱ τάξις νόμος.

3 Pol. III, 1276b 2: ἔιπεϱ γὰϱ ἐστὶ ϰοινωνία τις ἡ πόλις, ἐστὶ δὲ ϰοινωνία πολιτῶν πολιτείας, γινομένης ἐτέϱας τῷ εἴδει ϰαὶ διαφεϱούσης τῆς πολιτείας ἀναγϰαῖον εἶναι δόξειεν ἄν ϰαὶ τὴν πόλιν εἶναι μὴ τὴν αὐτήν.

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In this sense the τάξις is the εἶδος of a polis, its essential form, though the State is not a natural substance.

Aristotle is obviously not thinking in terms of a functional juridical point of view. His concern is rather with a structural change in what modern political theory calls: ‘Verfassung im materiellen Sinn’¹ (Schmitt, Smend, Heller and others), the politeia, as Aristotle calls it.

This taxis, or constitution, however, is itself conceived in a universalist sense. Properly speaking, it is not meant as the inner political order of the State, but much rather as that of society in its totality, whose identical unity the taxis is supposed to ensure. The distribution of political power is only a means to the realization of the end of the perfect society, viz. the good or perfect life of its members. As this ultimate end embraces human life in its totality, there is not any inner material restriction of the competence of the polis as the supreme legislator. Such a restriction can only be established by the inner structural principle of the State-institution, which determines the inner nature of the latter. But the universalist view of the polis is to be maintained only by eliminating this structure of individuality.

It is true that Aristotle, just like Plato in his dialogue on the Nomoi, emphasizes that the aiming at perfect virtue requires the rule of law or of principle, which is reason. But, since this law is not conceived of in the inner limitation of the typical structural principle of the State, it cannot guarantee any restriction of the typical sphere of competence of the latter. Instead, Aristotle as well as Plato, only pay attention to the ideal postulate that the distribution of political competence among the citizens should occur in conformity to the principle of a just division of labour, according to the different abilities of the individuals. It should occur in such a way that persons of equal virtue have equal competences, and those who are unequal, unequal competences. Thus is justice secured. No actual State entirely conforms to this principle. Nevertheless its taxis may more or less approach to the rule of reason. So the governmental forms can be classified into two groups. Those which aim at the good of the community as a whole are relatively acceptable, whereas those which aim at the good of the rulers alone are corrupted.

1 ‘Material constitution’, opposed to ‘formal juridical constitution’.

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The influence of the universalist view upon Aristotle's theory of the governmental forms of the State.

Generally in accordance with Plato, Aristotle assumes three forms of relatively good government, each of which has its corresponding perversions. They are monarchy, aristocracy and timocracy (in which latter those who have adequate property qualification equally share in political power). Their perversions are tyranny, oligarchy or plutocracy, and democracy, respectively.

We shall not engage here in a detailed enquiry into this theory of governmental forms. Instead, we will in the present context only point to the fact that the universalist conception of the taxis or constitution results in the introduction of unpolitical criteria of the governmental forms of the State.

This is the reason why neither Plato nor Aristotle were able to do justice to the democratic form. Aristotle based his distinction between oligarchy and democracy upon the criterion of nobility and wealth, on the one hand, and freedom and poverty, on the other. He assumes that a democracy which attributes equal political power to all free citizens, irrespective of their abilities and economic measure of possession, must necessarily result in a rule of the poor, who misuse their authority for their own profit. So he overlooks the fact that a democratic form of government is not intrinsically connected with the socio-economic distinction between the haves and the have nots. Nor does democracy, as such, imply that all citizens have an equal share in the government of the State, irrespective of their abilities. It is in itself an intrinsically political form of government, which, like any other, is liable to deformation, but cannot be justly characterized by its corruption. A temporary connection between democracy and a political rule of the proletariat is a phenomenon which can only be explained from an enkaptic interwovenness between the structure of the State and that of the non-political, economically qualified relationships. But this interlacement can never determine the inner political nature of democracy, nor does it necessarily imply a misuse of political power. During the Persian wars the Athenian democracy gave a splendid example of patriotism and public spirit. In the days of Aristotle it was doubtless in a condition of decline.

But Aristotle's universalist view of the Greek polis did not permit him to distinguish the inner political organization of power and its enkaptic interlacement with non-political relation-

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ships. This is why he rejects the political criterion according to which in a democracy, in contrast to a monarchy, aristocracy, and oligarchy, the influence of the people is guaranteed by the principle of majority. In his opinion the latter is only a usually occurring consequence of the rule of the poor, and not the primary criterion of the democratic form of government. When the rich rule on the ground of their socio-economical position, oligarchy is the necessary result, and when the poor, as such, have the political power, democracy follows¹. Because, generally speaking, a small minority is rich and the majority poor, democracy is generally the rule of the majority, and oligarchy that of the minority. In other words, even the rule of a rich majority would remain oligarchic and that of a poor minority democratic. Here the confusion of political and non-political criteria is clearly evident².

1 Cf. Pol. III, 1279b 11, and in particular 1280a, 1: ἀναγϰαῑον μὲν ὅπου ἀν ἄϱχωσι διὰ πλοῦτον ἂν τ᾽ ἐλάττους ἂν τε πλείους, εἶναι ταύτην ὀλιγαϱχίαν, ὅπου δ᾽ οἱ ἄποϱοι, δημοϰϱατίαν.

2 This very kernel of Aristotle's view of democracy is apparently overlooked by Rehm, Geschichte der Staatsrechtswissenschaft (Handbuch des öffentlichen Rechts, Einleitungsband, 1e Abt.), pp. 96ff., where he opposes Aristotle's supposed purely political conception of the criterion of democracy to that of constitutional law.

Was Aristotle aware of the fundamental difference and correlativity of communal and inter-individual relationships? His distinction between commutative and distributive justice.

We have seen that the concept of taxis, by which Aristotle sought to account for the inner unity and identity of an organized community, has the character of a general metaphysical idea. Its application appeared not to be restricted to the human societal relationships. Much rather it was also intended to explain the unity of a composite substance which has the nature of a community of non-substantial (and consequently not separately existing) components (ϰοινωνία ἐϰ συνεχῶν). It should be observed that in the discussion of the substance-concept in Aristotle's Metaphysics the concept of taxis does not occur in this terminology. Nevertheless, in its material meaning it does occur when Aristotle points to the relation of soul and material body in his argument that the substantial unity of the whole is guaranteed by its ‘essential form’, which rules its ‘matter’.

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This is to say that the concept of taxis, in its application to an organized community, was nothing but the metaphysical idea of the essential form in an analogous application. In consequence, the inner difference between a human societal community and a natural substance is only sought in the former's composition of substantial unities. In fact an organized community is considered as an analogy of a natural substance and in this way the insight into the real nature of a human community was precluded.

Nevertheless the question arises whether Aristotle has not shown a real insight into the fundamental difference between communal and inter-individual relationships. In the first (Dutch) edition of this work I thought so on the ground of the sharp distinction made by him between two forms of justice, viz. commutative and distributive justice. Aristotle, I argued, sharply distinguishes between the justice to be exercised in the internal relationships between subjects and rulers, and that which has to find expression in the inter-individual relationships between coordinate persons in contracts and private wrongs. The former he called δίϰαιον διανεμήτιϰον or justitia distributiva, and the latter he styled δίϰαιον διοϱϑώτιϰον or justitia commutativa.

Is this really so? Let me begin with recognizing that the individualist trend in the Humanist doctrine of natural law has indeed never acknowledged that distributive justice has a juridical sense. Hugo Grotius already remarked that it pertains to the distribution of benefits, which are not the object of a really juridical obligation. Therefore, he was of the opinion that this form of justice does not belong to the strict legal sphere, but rather to morality. And the four main principles in which he summarizes natural law in its strictly juridical sense¹, are indeed only legal principles pertaining to inter-individual relationships. A fortiori the juridical sense of distributive justice is denied by Hobbes. And, generally speaking, we may establish that in modern philosophy of law all the trends that have lost the insight into the fundamental difference between communal law and inter-individual private law, have no room for Aristotle's distinction between commutative and distributive justice.

Nevertheless, it may be seriously doubted that Aristotle him-

1 In the Prolegomena of his work De Jure Belli ac Pacis.

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self had a real insight into the fundamental difference and correlativity between communal and inter-individual relationships. If so, this would have meant an abandonment in principle of his universalist view of human society. And this cannot be supposed.

Let us, therefore, consider his conception more in detail. It takes its start from Aristotle's general concept of justice in its application to societal life.

In general, justice requires the application of the principle of equality (τὸ ἴσον) in giving each his due. But justitia distributiva demands that in the distribution of honours and benefits we take into account the inequality of personal properties and conditions. It requires the employment of a geometrical proportion determining the relation of value between unequal terms. Justitia commutativa, on the other hand, guards that in exchange transactions (ἐν τοῖς ουναλλάγμασι) the objective value of the exchanged commodities is equal, which equality only consists in an arithmetical proportion. The same holds good with respect to the retribution of a wrong, in which case the exchange of value and counter-value is of a compulsory character.

In fact it does not appear that this distinction between commutative and distributive justice was inspired by a clear insight into the difference between communal and inter-personal relationships. It is true that the former kind of justice, in addition to the retribution of wrong, especially pertains to voluntary transactions of exchange. But in the Aristotelian view, these transactions, however inter-individual in character, are in principle a component of the all-embracing communal life in the polis.

The whole Aristotelian conception of commutative justice has its background in his aversion to commercial trade and interest. In his opinion the latter threaten the virtue of the community, because they are to be viewed as unnatural methods of enrichment and are not primarily directed to mutual and equal service, which is a communal duty. Interest (tokos) cannot rightly arise from money, because the latter, being inanimate, is not able to beget (tokouein). And commercial trade which has its aim in profit making is unworthy of a citizen since it stimulates the striving for wealth as an end in itself, whereas wealth can only be a means to the fulfilment of the task of the good citizen. Viewed in this light, the Aristotelian distinction between commutative and distributive justice can indeed have nothing to do

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with the fundamental difference between communal and inter-individual relationships.

Naturally the terms may be retained to signify the different standards of justice which should be employed with respect to private relationships in the sphere of civil law and to public law relations of a communal character. But in this case the terms assume a quite different meaning from that intended by Aristotle. The Aristotelian conception of commutative justice, implying a fundamental condemnation of commercial trade and interest, is by no means serviceable in a modern society. It presupposes the Aristotelian ideal of an autarchical all-inclusive polis, based on the economy of undifferentiated agrarian households.

*

In the High Middle-Ages the Aristotelian theory of the organized communities was accommodated to the Christian conception of the human race, reborn in Christ, and profoundly described by the apostle Paul as the ‘body of Christ’, with its Head and individual members. This synthesis was performed by Thomas Aquinas within the cadre of the scholastical basic motive of nature and supra-natural grace. Such a procedure must result in a partial subversion of the Christian view by Greek immanence-philosophy. But the scholastic synthesis was prepared by an infiltration of Greek societal conceptions in the patristic time. To gain a sharp insight into this methodical deformation of the religious starting-point of the Christian view of human society, we shall once again confront the latter with the Greek metaphysical conception of a perfect community.

The radical opposition between the Christian view of the body of Christ and the Greek view of the perfect community.

We have seen that the Christian religion struck a decisive blow at the very foundation of the entire ancient view of human society.

Behind all the temporal societal relationships it revealed the religious root of the human race. It disclosed the transcendent religious bond of unity of the latter in the creation, the fall into sin, and the redemption by Jesus Christ, the Head of the reborn human race, who in the mystery of the incarnation is truly God and truly man.

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This was not a metaphysical theory of a temporal human community, but was the death blow to the Aristotelian view of a perfect community. The latter implied a transformation of the divine world-order into a metaphysical order of reason and, in its theory of the substantial form of human nature, it arrested the transcendental societal Idea of mankind in the Idea of a rational and moral perfection, attainable in the State alone.

The Christian view did not place a new community (the Church in its transcendent religious sense) on a parallel with, or if need be, above all temporal relationships, as a merely higher level in the development to human perfection. Nor did it project a cosmopolitical temporal community of mankind beyond all boundaries of families, races and States, in the Stoic fashion.

Instead, it laid bare the religious meaning-totality of all social relationships, each of which ought to express this meaning-totality according to its own inner structure. Without this insight into the radical spiritual foundation of human societal life, the differentiation of structural principles of temporal society cannot be understood in its true meaning.

The critical point in any Christian view of this temporal society is the question what position is to be ascribed to the Church, as an organized institution. It is beyond doubt that the latter, in its inner nature, is not to be viewed apart from the corpus Christi in its transcendent religious sense as the radical communion of reborn mankind in Jesus Christ.

Nevertheless, it may neither be identified with the religious fulness of the body of Christ, nor with the temporal expression of the latter in those societal relationships which as such have a radically different type from that of the organized Church-institution. We shall return to this question when we engage in a detailed analysis of the structural principle of this institutional community. In the present context we have only to point to the serious danger of a totalitarian view of the Church-institution after the pattern of the Greek universalist conception of the polis. The former would then be conceived as the ‘perfect’ society of the whole of Christian life, just as the State, according to the Greek conception, was viewed as the perfect society of natural rational and ethical life.

This danger was all the more serious because, with respect to pagan society, the Church-institution was indeed an entirely new figure. This society could not but view this Christian institution as the centre of a new Christian empire, which was a threat to

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that of the Roman emperor. Jesus' solemn declaration that His Kingdom is not of this world could not be comprehended since this Kingdom appeared to have a mighty influence upon the view of secular authority.

In contrast to the absolutistic idea of the Roman empire, the proclamation that God must be obeyed rather than man was indeed a radical innovation. For the first time, fundamental limitations were imposed upon the competence of the State-authority, limitations both with respect to the new Church-institution and to the natural family-life of the Christians, who laid claim to the freedom of a Christian education of their children; limitations above all with respect to the spiritual centre of personal human life, which was conceived of as being independent of any temporal societal condition of the individual person.

It is undeniable that this Christian standpoint, rooted in the confession of God's sovereignty as Creator, the apostasy of the ‘natural man’, and Christ's kingdom in the hearts of the members of a new mankind, implied a radical revolution in the entire view of temporal human society. If from the very beginning this religious starting-point in its pure and original sense had also ruled the theoretical Christian view of the societal relationships, there might have been no question of a partial falling back into the universalist conceptions of Greek immanence-philosophy.

Even in its partial compromise with the latter, Christian thought brought a real gain to the philosophy of human society by contributing new and undestructible ideas.

It broke in principle the shackles of the immanence standpoint by its insight into the impossibility of restricting the social bond of mankind to the temporal horizon of earthly life, and by viewing the latter in the central light of the ‘corpus Christi’. No one can deny the enormous influence of the Christian idea of office, in its contradistinction to the ancient conception of authority; the significance of the delimitation of the competences of the Church and the State, already sharply enunciated in the theory of Gelasius; the significance of the religious elevation of manual labour, the value of the application of Augustine's antithesis between the civitas Dei and civitas terrena, and so on.

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Why this religious basic Idea could not be successfully worked out in a radical Christian theory of social relationships during the Middle-Ages. The universalist view of the holy Roman empire.

And yet, with Troeltsch, we must frankly admit that the Christian theory of society, as it developed in the High Middle Ages, in a more or less closed form, must not be viewed as more Christian than it really was.

Various factors prevented the basic Christian Idea of the kingdom of Christ from being developed purely.

The Church fathers had already synthesized Christian thought with the Stoic-Aristotelian view of man as a rational social animal, with Stoic ethics and natural law doctrine.

The historical development of the temporal Church during the Middle Ages led to its elevation to a top position of power. Transformed into a hierarchical sacramental institution of grace, it arrogated to itself absolute authority over the souls of its members, and gradually identified itself with the ‘invisible Church’ in its central religious sense as the ‘body of Christ’.

Add to this the undifferentiated condition of the medieval secular society after the dissolution of the Carolingian empire, already discussed in the second volume. In this historical condition the Church institution was indeed the only integrating factor of Western culture. The feudal system caused a close interlacement of spiritual and secular authority. In the period of the so-called ecclesiastically unified culture, this whole complex of historical causes resulted in a factual supremacy of the hierarchical ecclesiastic authority over the entire political and social life.

At this time a view of society developed which ascribed a really universalistic position to the temporal institutional Church (wrongly identified with the Church as a religious-transcendent ‘organism’). This universalist view of the ecclesiastic institution pertained to the spiritual side of social life. But it was combined with a universalist conception of the secular social relationships. This view was to a high degree influenced by the idea of the holy Roman empire introduced in the Carolingian period. This empire was supposed to embrace Christianity as a whole, both in its spiritual and secular social relationships. In consequence it must have a spiritual and a secular head and the only question was to which of them was to be ascribed the supremacy, to the pope or to the emperor? The debate about this problem

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was not concerned with the relation between the Church and the State as two separate institutions. The universalist view of the holy Roman empire did not allow such a distinction, apart from the fact that after the decline of the Carolingian empire a real State-institution no longer existed. It was rather the conception of the Corpus Christianum transformed in a temporal sense which ruled the discussion. The famous theory concerning the two swords is a clear evidence of this state of affairs.

In this respect Thomistic philosophy posed a new problem by combining the universalist view of the ecclesiastical institution with the Aristotelian conception of the State as the whole of natural society. This problem presupposed the new scholastical basic motive of nature and grace.

Thomas Aquinas' synthesis of the Christian idea of the corpus Christi with Aristotle's metaphysical theory of society.

The theory of the organic character of human society and of the development of the social and political disposition in man was already familiar to patristic thought. But here it was conceived in a predominantly Stoic-Christian manner. In Thomas Aquinas it acquires its foundation in the Aristotelian conception of the ‘substantial form’ of human nature.

On the basis of the Aristotelian metaphysico-teleological idea of development, the household was proclaimed to be the germ of the State. The medieval guilds, corporatively closed occupational groups, were theoretically conceived as organic components of the city State. The State (both the city State and the holy Roman empire) was again viewed as a perfect, autarchical community (societas perfecta).

Of course, in Thomas Aquinas the State is only societas perfecta in the natural sphere. In all matters relating to salvation it is subordinate to the sacramental institute of grace; but even this relation between State and Church is formally conceived of according to the metaphysical rational order of matter and form.

Both the institutional Church and man's function of faith are hypostatized in the ‘sphere of grace’.

Within the ‘sphere of nature’ the rational and moral nature of man is hypostatized, and in the essential form of man, as its implication, the State, conceived of as an organic ‘unitas ordinis’¹,

1 Man is also conceived of as a ‘unitas ordinis’. P.E. Kurz, in his Individuum and Gemeinschaft beim Hl. Thomas Aquinas (1932) is of the opinion that this concept does not have an ontological significance. Cf., however, A. Menzel, Griechische Staatssoziologie (Z.f. öff. R. XVI, 1936) pp. 7 ff, and our explanation of the Aristotelian concept of taxis, pp. 206 ff. of this Volume.

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of which all other forms of society are merely dissimilar components.

Thomas accepts the entire Aristotelian view concerning the taxis, as the principle of unity of organized communities. In consequence he also considers the controlling part as the lawful factor which holds the various components of the corporative organism in a continuous coherence and unity, leading them to the immanent goal of the bond, the communal good¹.

Unhesitatingly Thomas subordinates all non-political natural relationships to the State, which, as the perfect natural community, is higher than all others known and produced by reason². The State includes them as its organic - although heterogeneous - constituents.

In the Church fathers the view was still prevalent that the State is based upon the power of the sword, instituted by God because of sin to restrain the wickedness of man. Thomas gave this view a strongly Aristotelian turn.

In Aristotle the State was necessarily based upon the rational and moral essential form of man, because he conceived of the volitional activity of the soul as exclusively belonging to its affective and desiring activity, which in itself is not inclined to follow the leading of reason in choosing the mean (μεσότης) between two extremes. By means of its laws the State must help to accustom the individual to virtue³. This conception was adopted by Thomas in his commentary on Aristotle's Politica and it does not appear that he abandoned it in his later works⁴.

Within the cadre of this teleological and metaphysical view of human society, Thomas was no more in a position than was Aristotle to investigate the internal structural principles, which,

1 De regimine principum I, cap. 1. In complete accordance with Aristotle, the social concept of unity of order is conceived here in analogy to the unitas ordinis to be found in the human body, the universe and the individual, in which latter the soul rules over the body and in the soul the rational part rules over the affective and desiring impulses.

2 The Commentary on Aristotle's Politica (Parmenser ed., Bnd. 21), p. 266.

3 Eth. Nicom X, cap. 10, pp. 1180a 29 ff.

4 Comm. Arist. Pol., pp. 367, 370, 371, 400, 424.

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grounded in the divine world-order, prescribe its own internal typical law to each societal relationship.

The Thomistic theory of organized communities has no room for sphere-sovereignty, but only for the autonomy of the lower communities. The difference between these two principles.

This realistic metaphysical theory does not have any room for the principle of the internal sphere-sovereignty of each typical structural relationship of human society after its own inner nature. It can at the utmost allow for the autonomy of non-political relationships within the State and for the autonomy of the State with respect to the Church.

In accordance with Aristotle, the goal of the State is sought in the universal good of perfection. And we have already established that in the universalist view of ‘natural society’ this idea does not possess any inner structural limitation. Placed in the cadre of Thomas' scholastical motive of nature and grace, it includes the supplying of citizens with all temporal goods, which as necessary or desirable commodities form a natural basis for the striving after the eternal good of salvation. The only formal limitation of the task of the State lies in the reserve that it only has to supply what its citizens cannot acquire individually or in the lower associations.

But just as the State is the perfect society in the natural sphere, the Church-institution is the societas perfecta in the supra-natural sphere of grace. And, in accordance with Thomas' conception of the relation between nature and grace, the State is subordinate to the Church, which alone can elevate natural life to the supra-natural level of perfection. So the universalist view of human society, already expressed in the pre-Thomistic idea of the holy Roman empire, acquires its typical elaboration within the new scholastical basic motive of nature and supra-nature.

The supremacy which in this Thomistic view is ascribed to the Church-institution implies that to the State is in principle denied any competence of interfering with ecclesiastical affairs. But in addition, the final judgment concerning the question which affairs pertain to the natural and which to the supra-natural sphere, can only belong to the Church. Since in the Thomistic view the autonomy of natural reason is only of a relative character and human nature is in need of its supra-

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natural perfection, it is the supra-natural ecclesiastical institution which alone can establish the Christian principles of government. And, as the infallible interpreter of natural ethical law, this Church alone is in a position to pass judgment concerning the limits of competence of the State¹.

This is how Thomas seeks to evade the absolutistic consequences of the Aristotelian conception of the polis. And it is indeed undeniable that by its transplantation in Thomas' scholastical cadre of thought with its basic motive of nature and grace, the Greek absolutization of the State is broken through.

Thomas recognized unassailable subjective natural rights of the individual man apart from the State. To the Aristotelian thesis that the individual and the lower natural communities are parts of the polis, he adds the reserve: ‘insofar as they belong to the same order as the latter’. Positive law, which, according to Thomas, can only be formed by a perfect society, is, in his opinion, bound to natural law and cannot be valid if it is in contrast with the latter.

But, in the natural sphere, the individuals and the lower communities are not in a position to establish such a violation of natural law by the legislator. If the State is of the opinion that its laws are in conformity to natural law, the citizen has to give precedence to the judgment of the political authority. It is only the Church to which belongs the final judgment if the citizens of the State pretend that their natural rights are violated.

Moreover, the above mentioned reserve added to the Aristotelian conception of the individuals and the lower communities as parts of the State, has only significance with respect to the ‘supra-natural order’. It does not mean that Thomas assumes an internal natural sphere of the lower communities which is exempt from the legal authority of the State. The latter view would have in principle contradicted his universalist conception of human society.

Taking into account the privileges and customary freedom of the medieval corporations, Thomas could accept their autonomy. But autonomy is not identical with internal sphere-sovereignty of the different types of societal relationships. The fundamental difference between the two is that autonomy only occurs in the relation of a whole and its parts, whereas sphere-sovereignty pertains to the relation between social structures of a different

1 De reg. princ. I, 14 ff. Cf. also Summa contra Gentiles 3, 17, 19.

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radical or geno-type, which in principle lacks the character of a part-whole relation. Sphere-sovereignty is only determined and limited by the inner nature of the social relationship itself and is thereby grounded in the divine world-order. The limits of autonomy belonging to the parts of the State, on the contrary, cannot be grounded in the inner nature of these parts. The reason is that this nature is dependent on that of the whole itself. We shall recur to this point in detail.

§ 6 - The problem concerning the identical unity of organized communities in the older individualistic and universalistic nominalist theories¹.

In opposition to metaphysical realism, nominalism, at least in its rationalistic-individualist trend of sociological thought, must deny the metaphysical foundation of social relationships.

1 In his Gesellschaftslehre (3e ed. 1930, p. 98) Othmar Spann considers it illegitimate to oppose individualism and universalism, except in a metaphorical sense, as nominalism and realism: ‘Denn nicht um die ontologische und logische Frage des Allgemeinbegriffes (der Idee) handelt es sich hier, sondern um eine Zergliederung gesellschaftlicher Erfahrungstatsachen’. [For this contrast is not concerned with the ontic or logic problem of the universal idea, but with the analysis of social matters of experience.]
This observation is incorrect in two respects, although we ourselves have established in an earlier context that the sociological contrast between individualism and realism is quite different from that between nominalism and realism.
In the first place we shall subsequently show that in its view of human society not all nominalism is individualistic. In the course of its development nominalism has brought forth numerous trends which often formed polar contrasts. Modern irrationalistic nominalism, for example, has developed its own method for the so-called Geisteswissenschaften and is predominantly universalistic in a sociological sense. And in the view of human society held by the nominalistic Stoa, we shall also discover a universalistic undercurrent.
In the second place Spann overlooks the fact that every theory concerning the structure of human society is based upon a specific conception of the basic structure of reality. What he calls the ontological question really lies at the foundation of every analysis of empirical societal facts. Human society belongs to reality.
It is correct to speak of nominalistic and realistic theories of society, but it is illegitimate to identify the former with individualism. The realistic metaphysical theories analysed above appeared in fact to imply a universalist view of society.

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The older individualistic nominalism, in Plato's dialogue Politeia represented by Glaucon, only conceived of the individual sensory thing as really existing. It could only stigmatize the realistic conception of an organized community as mystical metaphysics. The individual was conceived here as an in-dividuum, as a being, enclosed within itself and preceding every societal relationship. The State could then only be considered an aggregate of individuals, not an ‘organic whole’ whose unity is guaranteed by a metaphysically founded order of ruling and obeying.

Insofar as individualistic nominalism did not simply repudiate social life, as did the radical Sophists and the Cynics, it had to seek a construction to justify any bond between the individual and the requirements of communal life. Especially the compulsory authority of the State was in need of such a construction.

The rationalistic-nominalistic concept of function in the theory of organized communities, in opposition to the Aristotelian metaphysical realistic concept of substance.

The Aristotelian theory, based on a teleological and metaphysical order of reason (lex naturalis), viewed authority as a necessary pre-requisite of every community and grounded it in the essential nature of man as a ‘social animal’. Communal life, as such, is implied (metaphysically) in this essential human nature. According to the teleological world-order, everything is justified that is necessary for the existence of a community; to this end authority is of primary importance, since without it no ‘unity of order’ is possible.

In this way the authoritative structure of organized communities also received its metaphysical foundation in the substantial form of human nature.

This metaphysical concept of substance cannot be employed as an ontological foundation in a nominalistic theory of society. The latter is ex origine functionalistic; it seeks to comprehend an organized community in a theoretical concept of function.

The Aristotelian concept of substance tried to explain the structure of an individual whole, although it did so in an inadequate manner. The nominalistic concept of function, as demonstrated in volume I, part II, is not in any way concerned with such structures of individual totality; it is exclusively

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oriented toward abstract modal aspects of reality, not comprehended in their cosmic coherence.

Functionalism must thus construe human society in terms of a specific modal viewpoint, for example, as a functional psychical interaction between individuals, or in terms of a legal contract (the so-called social compact).

The Aristototelian theory of the social impulse in the essence of human nature could be readily transformed into a theory of a non-metaphysical naturalistic or functionalistic-idealistic stamp. In this denatured form it could be made the starting-point of a nominalistic construction of organized communities.

This was already done in the Stoic theory of the appetitus socialis, which was founded in a universalistic ontology. So did also the Averroistic nominalism of the late Middle Ages, as found for example in John of Jandun and Marsilius of Padua, who grounded the authority of the State, together with the entire legislation, in the general will of united individuals.

The universalist theory of societal relationships of the Roman Stoa and their functionalist and nominalist conception of the unity of the corpora ex distantibus.

The Stoics denaturalized the Aristotelian εἴδη to the naturalist and nominalist λόγοι σπεϱματιϰοί¹. The Aristotelian transcendent divine Nous, the unmoved mover of the cosmos, was replaced by the immanent world-logos. The materially conceived cosmic πνεῦμα (pneuma) of the world-logos permeates matter and binds the cosmos into a unity; it is at the same time the basic principle of the forming and moving ποιοῦν, i.e. the causal activity of the world-logos. And through the ποιότητες, or special qualities, the latter forms the ‘matter’ (the ὑποϰείμενον, as the basic principle of the πασχεῖν, i.e. the passive undergoing), which itself lacks qualitative properties, into individual things.

In his theory of entelechies Aristotle conceived of the cosmos as a hierarchical structure of materially realized forms, which through the teleological and metaphysical order reveal a striving (ὄϱεξις) toward the highest form of perfection. The Stoics transformed this metaphysical ὄϱεξις into a naturalistic σύνδεσμος (material coherence)².

1 Logoi spermatikoi, i.e. material germinal forms originating from the divine world-logos.

2 Cf. J. Sauter, Die philosophischen Grundlagen des Naturrechts (Wien 1932) p. 47: ‘Die Welt ist ja hier kein compositum substantiale, sondern eine Substanzeinheit, bestehend aus “causa et materia”’. [The world here is not a compositum substantiale, but a substantial unity consisting of causa et materia.]

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The levels of cosmic being are now reduced to mere evolutionary modalities of the world-logos, of the cosmic πνεῦμα, which with a peculiar tension (τόνος) permeates matter internally and limits it externally into individual things. This πνεῦμα expresses itself in inorganic nature as ἕξις (cohesive power), in the vegetable world as φύσις (growth) and in the animal and human sphere as ψυχή (soul), which in man includes the λόγος (reason).¹

The human λόγος is, however, no longer the metaphysical essential form of man; it is only the product of a progressive development, which is gradually concentrated (συναϑϱοίζεται) out of perceptions and representations².

All the emphasis is laid on the individuality of all that exists. The Stoics gave expression to the notion of the absolute diversity of all things. In modern times this was formulated by Leibnitz as the principium identitatis indiscernibilium and was incorporated into his monadology.

The interesting nominalistic theory of organized communities, developed on this philosophical basis by the middle and late Roman Stoa³, acquired considerable influence among Roman jurists.

This theory joins with the well-known division of things into three classes, viz. σώματα ἡνωμένα (corpora unita, continua), σώματα σύνημμενα (corpora coniuncta, composita), and οώματα ἐϰ διεστώτων (corpora ex distantibus).

This division is nothing but a naturalistic transformation of the one made by Aristotle in his general doctrine of taxis, as the unifying bond of every community⁴.

The first class contains the things whose unity is constituted by a simple revelation of the world-soul or deity (spiritus unus) respectively in the ἕξις, or the φύσις, or the ψυχή, or the logos, of things determined by sensory qualities (ποιότητες), i.e. inorganic things, plants, animals and men.

The second class, that of the corpora coniuncta or composita includes all inorganic things, composed of various corpora unita,

1 Cf. Joh. von Arnim, Stoicorum veterum fragmenta II, nr 458.

2 Ibidem.

3 Since it does not affect the topic under discussion I will not go into the important differences between the middle and older Stoa.

4 Cf. the preceding section pp. 208 ff.

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and whose unity lies in the ψυχὴ τοῦ τεχνίτου, i.e. the conception of their creator (e.g., buildings, wagons, ships, and so on).

The συνήμμενον, viewed from a physical standpoint, (‘physical’ in the organological-stoical sense, not in the sense of mathematical physics!), does not display an inner fusion of parts (ϰϱᾶσις δἰ ὅλων), as in the case of the ἡνώμενον. Its parts are coordinate to each other (παϱάϑεσις), and without the concept of its creator it cannot exist as a unity¹. Consequently the unity of the corpora coniuncta lies in the concept that the craftsman had of it and which he incorporated into his work.

The ψυχή assigns in the concept the proper place to each part. A component of the συνήμμενον is that which functions in the way in which the craftsman had conceived of it.

The class of the corpora ex distantibus, the universitates rerum aut personarum, includes all things which, without mutual sensory points of contact, naturally exist as corpora singula et finita, and yet can be called by a single name (uni nomini subjecta)².

This class includes the communal relationships of human society, as well as objective collections made up of things or animals, e.g. a flock of sheep (as a commercial object), a library, etc.

The single name that can be used to characterize such relationships is then the formal expression of the τόνος (tenor) which binds the individual members into a unity.

1 For the linguistic significance of the term συνήμμενον cf. Brehier, Theorie des incorporels dans l'ancien Stoicisme (Paris, 1928).

2 Cf. for example, Pomponius 1. 30 D. 41, 3. For a complete survey of the source material of the Corpus Juris Civilis see Göppert, Über einheitliche, zusammengesetzte und Gesammtsachen nach römischem Recht, 1871.

The identity of an organized community is conceived of by the Stoics in a predominantly functional-juridical sense.

Although, with respect to organized communities, the late Roman Stoics speak of an internal social instinct in this τόνος, it is evident that they lay the emphasis on the functional-juridical bond, externally holding the individuals together³.

3 P. Sokolowski in his Sachbegriff und Körper in der klassischen Jurisprudenz und der modernen Gesetzgebung (1902), p. 48 ff, rightly opposes the view of Gierke (Genossenschaftsrecht III, 1881, p. 32/3) and Göppert, that the corpora ex distantibus are limited to human communities and animal herds, only developed and held together by the psychical social impulse.

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Thus in his Epist. 102 (bib. XVII, 2) Seneca writes: ‘Quaedam (corpora) ex distantibus, quorum adhuc membra separata sunt, tanquam exercitus, populus, senatus, illi enim, per quos ista corpora efficiuntur, jure aut officio cohaerent, natura diducti et singuli sunt.’

Undoubtedly the reference is here to the legal order which as an external bond brings unity to the individuals.

In a similar sense Cicero (republica 1, 39) writes: ‘res publica res populi, populus autem non omnis hominum coetus... sed coetus multitudinis juris consensu et utilitatis communione consociatus’¹. And further: ‘Lex civilis societatis vinculum, jus autem legis aequale; quid enim est civitas nisi juris societas?’ (Ibid. 49).

1 This definition is formally the same in Thomas Aquinas, but its material sense is different. Cf. also Heinrich Wiegand, Die Staatslehre des Thomas von Aquin (Rechtsidee und Staatsgedanke 1930), p. 213.

Why the Stoic conception of the social nature of man cannot explain the inner unity and authoritative structure of organized communities. How it differs from the realistic-metaphysical theory.

The theory of the social τόνος, working internally in all individuals, doubtless introduced a universalistic motive in the Stoical theory of society. Although it was thus oriented to the idea of the whole and its parts, it could not explain the inner typical unity and authoritative structure of the organized communities.

On the one hand, this theory of the inner tonos originated in a pantheistic universalism which, in keeping with a naturalistic monism, permits the essences of all individual things to fuse together².

2 According to the Stoics, the individuality and the particular properties of things are not determined by the inner tonos, but rather by the external tonos. Cf. Nemesius, De natura hom. c. 2, p. 29: εἰ δὲ λέγοιεν, ϰαϑάπεϱ οἱ Στωϊϰοὶ, τονιϰὴν τινα εἶναι ϰίνησιν πεϱὶ τὰ σώματα, εἰς τὸ ἔσω ἅμα ϰαὶ εἰς τὸ ἔξω ϰινουμένην, ϰαὶ τὴν μὲν εἰς τὸ ἔξω μεγεϑῶν ϰαὶ ποιοτήτων ἀποτελεοτιϰὴν εἶναι, τὴν δὲ εἰς τὸ ἔσω ἑνώσεως ϰαὶ οὐσίας. The inner tonos consequently only determines the being and the inner union of things, not their individuality and particular qualities (ποιότητες).
In sharp opposition to realistic metaphysics, with its plurality of substantial forms, the Stoics, in their naturalistic monism, taught the substantial unity of all things in accordance with their foundational view of being.
In a similar sense Simplicius wrote in his In Categorias Arist. 68 E: οἱ δέ Στωιϰοὶ δύναμιν, ἢ μᾶλλον ϰίνησιν τὴν μανωτιϰὴν ϰαὶ πυϰνωτιϰὴν τίϑενται, τὴν μὲν ἐπὶ τὰ ἔσω, τὴν δὲ ἐπὶ τὰ ἔξω ϰαὶ τὴν μὲν ἐπὶ τοῦ εἰναι, τὴν δὲ τοῦ ποιὸν εἰναι νομίζουσι αἰτίαν.
This firmly establishes the fact that in Stoicism the appetitus socialis, as the inner working tonos in the individuals, can never be the foundation of social relationships in their particular inner structure. The Stoics can only seek the construction of the latter in terms of an external functional point of view.

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The consequence is that, when applied to human society, this view cannot recognize in the natural order of the world any structural boundaries between the different types of communities which delimit their inner specific nature. Rather it reveals an evident cosmopolitan tendency¹.

And, on the other hand, the autarchical sage, the ideal man of Stoic ethics, does not require any external means for his happiness. His subjective ethical inclination to live in accordance with the lex naturalis is supposed to make him completely independent of positive human social relationships. This ethical ideal worked together with the afore-mentioned cosmopolitan tendency. It deprived the State, as well as the other particular societal relationships, of the position they held in Aristotle. It was in particular diametrically opposed to the Platonic ideal State, with its three classes and its absolute orientation of individual ethos to State ethos.

According to Diogenes Laertius and Plutarchus, Zeno, Cleanthes and Chrysippus devoted considerable attention to the State and generally valued the beneficial operation of positive law in the laws of the body politic². In spite of this, however, they relegated all specific social relationships, including the State, to a lower position. The autarchical sage did not need the State for his perfection. In fact he was permitted to break the positive laws of the body politic, if he was able to justify his action on the ground of the eternal natural law.

Stoic philosophy never abandoned its cosmopolitan idea of a kingdom including both gods and men; an idea which recognized no boundaries between the various relationships of society. In keeping with the Stoical monistic-pantheistic world picture,

1 The remark of Troeltsch in his Die Soziallehren der Christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen (1919) p. 68: ‘Der radikale Individualismus und Universalismus ist an sich gliederungslos’, is of importance here, although Troeltsch wrongly relates it to the Christian idea of human community.

2 Diogenes Laert, VII 433, Plutarchus, de Stoic. rep. 2.

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only this universalist idea could serve as the ideal of society.

According to Plutarchus, the main idea in Zeno's Politeia (written under Cynic influence) is that, without any distinction between particular States, nations and laws, humanity is to form a united society and world-kingdom, enabling men to live together under the common law as a grazing herd¹. In this kingdom of sages there will not be any marriage, family, temple and judicature.

The imperial idea, as first realized in the Macedonian kingdom, and later in the Roman empire, can only find favour with the Stoics insofar as it broke through the limits of the closed city State. In this form, too, the idea of the State was placed on a lower level than the idea of a kingdom, including gods and men, without any political organization. When the Roman Stoics spoke about the inner social instinct of living beings, out of which the various social groups arise, they thereby viewed veritable organized communities, such as gentes and States, in the same way as the coordinate inter-individual societal relations².

The Stoics were unaware of the peculiar inner structure of organized communities as corpora, with a typical continuous unity amidst change in membership³. When the Roman Stoics wished to develop a theory of organized communities, they obviously had to seek the proper ground of the latter's specific unity in the external tonos of the functional legal order, which they undoubtedly viewed as being grounded in the lex naturalis.

The Stoic doctrine concerning the appetitus socialis appeared to be unable to account for the structural unity of a specific social whole. Especially the compulsory authority of the State lacked any foundation in this doctrine, since the Stoical theory of natural law taught the original freedom and equality of all men in the ‘golden age of innocence’, which was considered as the natural condition of mankind⁴.

1 Plutarchus, Alex. M. fort. I, 6.

2 Cf. Antoninus in his Inner Dialogues (ad se ipsum) 9, 9.

3 Cf. Sokolowski, Op. cit. E 512, Anm. 128, who in my opinion lays too much emphasis upon the inner tonos as the foundation of communal organizations.

4 As is generally known, the old legend of the ‘aureum saeculum’ was developed in detail in Plato. Seneca developed the idea of an uncorrupted natural state, which he says he had taken from Posidonius in his Ep. XIV. He conceived of this natural state as a society under the leadership of the best and not as an aggregate of a-social individuals.
This does not mean, however, as Schilling (Naturrecht und Staat nach der Lehre der alten Kirche, 1914, p. 22/3) affirms, that a real authoritative structure or State is recognized in this natural society. Schilling arrives at this conclusion by eliminating the typical structure of the State as a compulsory organization. Leading of the best can also occur in coordinated inter-individual societal relations without any implication of authority and subordination. According to the Stoics, the State is not grounded in nature, but it is only a remedy for the restraint of the evil inclinations of human nature.

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It is true that the natural state of innocence, without property and inequality, was not the final goal for the Stoics. It is certain, however, that with them the State, founded on the power of the sword, is not based upon nature but upon convention.

That the Stoics thought the State existed for the purpose of bridling human dissoluteness, caused their political theory to be favoured by the Church-fathers.

We have seen that the case was entirely different in the metaphysical teleology of the Aristotelian theory of the State. In it the relation of authority and subordination was implied in the social nature of man, grounded in his substantial essential form. And Plato, too, considered this relation to be founded in the metaphysical order. Plato's and Aristotle's entire philosophy of the State and of law was based upon the principle of inequality of individual men.

Slavery was, therefore, justified in principle and the distinction between the ruling and the ruled classes was considered to be essential also to the ideal State.

The structure of authority was not in any way conceived of in a functional juridical way. As explained in the previous section, both Plato and Aristotle viewed the relation of authority and subordination as a general characteristic of every composite organism¹. Aristotle introduced the distinction between τό ἄϱχον and τὸ ἀϱχόμενον for all organisms ὅσα ἐϰ πλειόνων συνέστηϰε ϰαὶ γίνεται ἕν τι ϰοινόν, and Plato, too, viewed the individual person as a ‘community’, in which the soul ought to rule the body, and within the soul reason ought to rule the passions².

1 Plato even called the hierarchical structure of the three parts of the soul, the ‘State in man’.

2 Pol. 1254b. Compare also Dr W. Andreae, Staatssozialismus und Ständestaat (1931) p. 17 ff. In their psychology the Stoics also speak of reason as ἡγεμονιϰόν, but their psychology is not, as in Plato, oriented to the idea of the State. The late Stoic theory of organized communities shows no special relation to this psychology.

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The metaphysically founded societal theory of these thinkers was not cosmopolitan; it viewed the Greek city State as the only all-inclusive community necessary for the rational and moral perfection of man.

The uniting of the theory of the social instinct in human nature with the construction of a social contract.

In Stoicism, on the contrary, the relation of subordinate to ruler can have no other basis than a functional juridical one¹. This explains the particular emphasis in Cicero's definition of the State, that the tie binding the multiplicity of individuals into a unity is in essence the legal order.

To Cicero and all antiquity the positive legal order is the same as that sanctioned by the State. And to the Stoics it is precisely the positive laws which serve to restrain human dissoluteness, while natural law does not permit essential subordination.

This Stoical theory of organized communities is easily joined with the later nominalistic notion of a contract as the only natural-law ground for authority in the State and in general for the inequality in human society.

The nominalistic trend of late scholasticism prepared the way for a fusion of the theory of the social impulse of human nature with the individualistic construction of a contract, as the only basis of the civil State.

This conventional construction, however, was to some degree already present in Roman Stoicism², influenced by the republican theory of Roman jurists, who sought the origin of the

1 Polybius, who had a great influence on Macchiavelli, defended the thesis that all authority rests upon the right of the strongest; this was doubtless the view of the radical Sophists, and not that of the Stoics.
Cf. Hirzel Ἄγϱαφος νόμος in Abh. der philolog. hist. Klasse der Kgl. Sächs. Ges. der Wissensch. XX, Leipzig (1903), 91, Anm. 4.

2 Cf. Cicero, De Rep. 111, 13: ‘Sed cum alius alium timet, et homo hominem et ordo ordinem, tum quia nemo sibi confidit, quasi pactio fit inter populum et potentes, ex quo existit id quod Scipio laudabat, conjunctum civitatis genu’.

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authority of the State in the consensus populi¹, on which they also based the validity of positive law.

In Greek philosophy the contract theory was only developed by the nominalistic-individualistic school of Epicureanism. According to Plato, however, its germ can already be found in the Sophists². In contrast to the Stoics, the Epicureans had an atomistic and mechanistic view of the cosmos. They denied the appetitus socialis, even in the Stoical sense, and held that a community of men does not exist by nature but arises out of a voluntary association of individuals³. The State arises, according to this view, through a contract made by individuals in order to protect themselves against common dangers.

Under the influence of the mathematical science-ideal, which intended to construct the State more geometrico out of its simplest elements, this contract theory became the only possible juridical basis for organized communities in the Humanist theory of natural law. It was able to join forces with the Stoical theory of the social instinct in human nature, as in Hugo De Groot, and with a modern mechanistic and a-social view of human nature, as in Thomas Hobbes.

In this way developed the theory of positive law as the general will. No citizen can reproach the latter as unjust, because everyone gave his assent in the social contract. This intrinsically nominalist view was already defended by Marsilius of Padua in the XIV century, though he did not yet work it out consistently; it reached its pinnacle in the Humanistic theory of natural law, especially in Hobbes. It continued to play an essential role in Kant's political philosophy in the well-known adage: volenti non fit iniuria.

The contract-theory must result in the complete eradication of the inner structural differences in the relationships of human society. As early as the late Middle Ages, it was gradually applied both to the Church and to the State⁴.

As I have amply treated this development in my In den Strijd om een Christelijke Staatkunde, I need not go into more detail here.

1 Carlyle, A History of Medieval Political Theory in the West, Vol. I (1930), pp. 63 ff. Cf. also Cicero, De Rep. I, 32, 49.

2 Polit. II, 358, 359.

3 Epictetus, Diss. II, 20, 6, informs us that Epicurus defends the thesis: οὐϰ ἔστι φυσιϰὴ ϰοινωνία τοῖς λογιϰοῖς πϱὸς ἀλλήλους

4 Cf. Gierke, Joh. Althusius (3th ed.), pp. 127 ff.

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The influence of the juridical fiction theory of the canonists on the view of organized communities.

In the present context we need only notice the influence of the canonist conception of organized communities, as personae fictae.

Gierke has investigated the development of this fiction theory in detail in his standard work on German corporation law¹. He points out that the canonists were the first to conceive of organized communities in the concept of a person². The Roman jurists, who viewed corporations, as well as collectivities of objects, from the neutral point of view of the universitas, restricted the concept ‘person’ to the individual subject of private law.

The canonistic theory of corporations was solely based on the individual human personality and ascribed an actual will to the individual man alone. Therefore it considered an organized community a persona ficta. Innocentius IV, the most prominent defender of this fiction theory, expressly declared that the universitas (‘sicut est capitulum, populus, gens et hujusmodi’) as a unity, is a ‘nomen iuris et non personarum’, a ‘nomen intellectual et res incorporalis’. It is in other words merely a juridical construction since in reality only ‘natural persons’ exist.

This theory might seem to be under the influence of nominalism. The fictional character of a collective person is proved by appealing to the abstract conceptual character of universalia. Petruccius Senensis, for example, writes: ‘Universitas ut universitas, prout est nomen juris, est in abstracto, sicut et ‘homo in communi’, and Johannes Andreae (1270-1348) observes that the unity of the universitas is not real but only pertains to an ‘aggregation’.

Nevertheless, it would be premature to explain these theses in a really nominalist sense³. That the universalia, as such, only exist in abstracto was also the opinion of Aristotle and Thomas. Even the conception of the persona ficta as a nomen juris does not prove that these canonists were nominalists. We can only say that their juridical theory of the corporations was of an individualistic character and does not reveal any connection with

1 Cf. Deutsches Genossenschaftsrecht III, pp. 245 ff.

2 Op. cit., p. 278.

3 In the Dutch edition of this work I did so.

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the general idea of taxis in the realist-metaphysical conception of Aristotle and Thomas. This is why their doctrine concerning the persona ficta could readily be accepted in the nominalist theory of natural law.

The Christian conception of the (so-called invisibe) Church, as the corpus mysticum, whose head is Christ and whose members are all the faithful, was fundamentally transformed in this canonist theory. It was made to conform to the notion of a hierarchical institute of authority, in which the laity were not considered active members.

As ‘persona ficta,’ the hierarchical Church institute was supposed to receive its unity from above, through the will of Christ and His representative on earth, the Pope, under whom the entire clerical hierarchy is arranged. It is well-known, however, how in the late Middle Ages, nominalism rejected the canonic-legal theory and viewed the Church as a congregatio fidelium (the ‘democratic’ contra the hierarchical trend in scholasticism).

The canonist theory of organized communities, in keeping with the tradition of Roman law, sharply separated the collective unity of persons, as universitas, from the societas, as a social contract. Nevertheless, apart from its maintaining the supra-natural character of the Church with respect to the State, it fell into the absolutistic conception of Roman law, which could not allow any internal structural diversity in the universitates. In Roman law, from its very origin, the universitas personarum was a concept derived from public law, essentially identical with the concept of the State as a legal person. All other universitates could - at least in the imperial period - be constituted, as recognized corporations, only by a lex specialis. The latter fitted their organization entirely into the mould of the Roman State¹.

Although the theory of canon law recognized the limited autonomy of the separate corporations, it shared the opinion that there could not be a free formation of the latter in the State or in the Church. The faithful disciple of Innocentius IV, Hostiensis, taught that the freedom to form corporations is character-

1 Cf. Cohn, Vereinsrecht, p. 27 ff. and Gierke, Genossenschaftsrecht III, pp. 80 ff. Since Mommsen the romanists have disputed that the situation was the same during the republic. It is at present an open question whether or not corporations could be formed freely at least before the time of the emperors.

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istic of more or less anarchical situations like those in the Lombardian cities. And Johannes Andreae viewed independent corporations as being highly dangerous and opposed them by the monarchical principle: hoc enim expedit reipublicae, quod unus dominus sit et non plures¹.

1 Gierke, Op. cit., p. 290.

The union of the fiction theory and the individualistic contract theory in Humanistic natural law.

In a considerably modified form, the fiction theory was taken over into the Humanistic doctrine of natural law.

The canonists accommodated the Roman legal concept of a universitas to the Roman Church and its sub-divisions. The concept of the corporative universitas was, however, completely unsuited for this function. Thus, they essentially transformed this concept into that of a foundation. A foundation has no members and acquires its charter externally. The ecclesiastical institution, as persona ficta, is therefore conceived of as an individuum, a fictitious personified unity without internal multiplicity². As representatives of the ‘persona ficta’, the bearers of ecclesiastical authority are juridically conceived of as standing outside of the organized institution. According to the canonists, they function even in the internal affairs of the Church only as external representatives exercizing the rights and performing the duties of the ‘fictitious person’ which, as such, lacks legal capacity of acting. The internal side of the institutional Church is thus fitted into the mould of an individualistic representational theory³.

The Humanistic theory of natural law, which again placed the State in the centre, as a corporative unity, now took over the theory of ‘persona ficta’. But it accommodated the fiction-theory in such a way that the individuals, entering into the social contract (societas) were supposed to be united by the institution of an organ of authority into an artifical body as ‘persona ficta’. The canonical concept of foundation is again superseded by that of the individualistically conceived corporation. This construction was especially worked out in an ingenious manner by Hobbes. The fiction theory henceforth was to domi-

2 Roffredus of Benevent, Quaest. Sabbathinae 27, calls the universitas: quoddam individuum.

3 Cf. Gierke, op. cit., pp. 291 ff., pp. 309 ff.

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nate the various nuances of the nominalistic conception of organized communities.

It resulted in the denial of any real unity of the organized whole and conceived of a corporative unity as a mere juridical construction.

Wherever Humanistic natural law resulted in State absolutism, the mathematical science-ideal construed the State as a juridical totality whose sovereign authority embraces all other social relationships.

The transition from the individualistic state of nature to the civil State was construed in terms of a social contract, which may or may not be accompanied by an agreement of subjection to constituted rulers and (as in Pufendorf) by an agreement concerning the form of government. In order to guarantee a really sovereign power to the body politic represented by its head, this contract was so conceived that individuals not only abandoned their original freedom, but the very notion of societal relationships whose internal nature guarantees their inner independence from the State, was excluded. Even the temporal Church-institution must be resolved into the State-Leviathan (e.g., in Hobbes and Rousseau and in the late Middle Ages, though in a more implicit mode of argument, in Marsilus of Padua and John of Jandun)¹.

Some Humanistic exponents of natural law, inspired by the Humanist freedom-motive, were favourably inclined to grant freedom to non-political associations. They had a restricted view of the social contract and of contractual submission to political authority. Nevertheless, they continued to consider the State, as well as all other organized communities, to be based upon a social contract between individuals. They were able, at the very most, to recognize a formal juridical autonomy, belonging to associations other than the State, because of a sphere of freedom, outside of the latter's jurisdiction, guaranteed by natural law, and retained by every individual in the body politic.

1 By appealing to the idea of an organism, Marsilius of Padua and John of Jandun still took into account the medieval Germanic legal situation, in order to champion the desirability of autonomous intermediary corporations between the citizen and the State.

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The external and individualistic conception of the difference between the organized communities according to the subjective goals of association implied in the social contract.

Contemplated from the individualistic point of view of the societas, contractual consensus was considered the only foundation of the internal authoritative structure of every organized community.

And whenever the different character of ‘free associations’ was considered, it was viewed exclusively from an external point of view in terms of the subjective goals of association. Individuals can unite for an infinite number of reasons. The character of free associations is therefore unrestricted in its potential diversity.

The State alone is distinguished in principle from the non-political associations; it is conceived of as a societas inaequalis, in contradistinction to the societates aequales. State absolutists employed this distinction to guarantee to the State absolute sovereignty over all the other communities. The liberalist trend in the Humanist doctrine of natural law, on the contrary, construed the State as a political association whose sovereign authority is bound to the exclusive aim of an organized protection of the innate natural rights of man to life, freedom and property. This old liberal idea of the body politic was defended by Locke and his followers. Nevertheless, Locke accepted, without reserve, the old idea of the salus publica, the ‘public interest’, as the ‘highest law of the State’. It was the salus publica conceived in the absolutist sense of Roman public law, and it was penetrated by the utilitarian idea of the ‘Staatsräson’.

Strongly antagonistic to the freedom of the individual, this idea formed an almost unrestrained threat to individual freedom. Especially in Chr. Wolff's theory of the police- and welfare State (although it was also based on the Lockian idea of innate rights and devoted much attention to the non-political forms of association), individual freedom in the last instance completely fell a victim to the salus publica in this absolutist and utilitarian sense.

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§ 7 - The problem of the unity of an organized community in modern sociology and philosophy of society.

Individualism versus universalism in the modern view of human society from the immanence-stand-point.

Our previous examination has shown that from the times of ancient Greco-Roman philosophy the problem of the identical unity of organized communities fascinated philosophic thought. The attempt was made to approach this unity by means of a realist metaphysical concept of form or order (taxis), or by means of a nominalistic concept of function. Both ways led to a misconception of the typical internal structures which determine the inner nature of the different types of societal relationships.

On the immanence standpoint, especially the following problems are permanent subjects of controversy: What is the relation between the total being of a human person and the temporal bonds of society? Is only the individual human being real or also the organized community? And if this question is solved in terms of the latter alternative, is the reality of an organized community equivalent to that of the individual man? If, on the contrary, human society is to be viewed as a functional interaction between elementary components, is it permitted to view human individuals as the true elements? Or are also these individuals to be resolved into functional interactions between more elementary components? Is a temporal communal whole the basis of the perfect individual existence of an individual person? Or is a human being a self-contained individual, whereas an organized community is merely a functional utilitarian union of the exclusively real individual human existences?

In all these fundamental questions earlier immanence-philosophy appeared to be driven into the dilemma of a universalist or an individualist conception of human society. But the same dilemma is met with in modern sociology and philosophy of human society.

Behind this alternative is hidden a common lack of insight into the different levels of our experiential horizon in its relation to human society.

In his Gesellschaftslehre Othmar Spann believes universalism is generally misinterpreted as the opposite of individualism. ‘Though the essential characteristic of individualism consists in the autarchy of individual man, so that the individual is everything and society is nothing, the fundamental trait in universalism is not the nullity of the individual, so that society is everything and the individual is

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nothing; society is not the exclusively real... we repeat that universalism is by no means the theory according to which the totality (especially the State) is everything. This is rather a mechanical (atomistic) conception of universalism which really deprives it of all meaning. Only extreme and misconceived forms of universalism can lead to such conclusions. At bottom the individual person must retain his inalienable inner value to universalistic thought, his own life, his moral freedom’¹.
With respect to this defence of universalism our first remark is that Spann on his part fails to do justice to individualism by qualifying it in all of its trends as the absolutization of the individual man to a self-contained substance. We shall see presently that in modern sociology there are other trends of individualism which have abandoned any substantialist conception of the individual man. They do not try to construe the organized communities out of autarchical individuals; much rather they seek to resolve every societal whole into a complex of elementary forms of social interaction, synthesized by human consciousness to a unity. And they recognize that these social interactions are constituents of the individual psychical life of man.
This undoubtedly modern functionalist individualism is, for example, found in the so-called formal school of sociology, especially in the German sociologists Simmel and v. Wiese; in the general theory of the State it is encountered for instance in Georg Jellinek; in the juridical theory of corporations, in Julius Binder in his earlier neo-Kantian phase of thought. And it strikes us that this form of sociological individualism is of the opinion that it has conquered the tradional dilemma of individualism and universalism. The very reason is that individualism was usually identified with the absolutization of the individual man, viewed as the atomistic element of society. That the conception of the individual man as a metaphysical substance has nothing to do with sociological individualism clearly appears from the fact that Aristotle held to this conception although his view of society is doubtless universalistic. Therefore, the usual characterization of sociological individualism sought the essential trait of the latter in the ascription of ‘autarchy’ to the individual substan-

1 Gesellschaftslehre (3th ed.) p. 99: ‘Wenn das Wesentliche des Individualismus in der Autarkie des Einzelnen besteht, wonach der Einzelne alles, die Gesellschaft nichts ist; besteht es für den Universalismus nicht in der Nichtigkeit des Einzelnen, wonach die Gesellschaft alles und der Einzelne nichts wäre, besteht es nicht in der alleinigen Wirklichkeit der Gesellschaft... der Universalismus ist also, wir wiederholen es, keineswegs jene Theorie, für welche der Einzelne nichts, die Gesamtheit (insbesondere der Staat) alles ist. Das ist vielmehr gerade eine mechanische (atomistische) Auffassung vom Universalismus, die ihn eigentlich sinnlos macht. Nur äuszerste und miszverständliche Formen des Universalismus können zu solchen Folgerungen kommen; grundsätzlich aber musz der Einzelne auch für das universalistische Denken seinen unverlierbaren inneren Wert, sein Eigenleben, seine sittliche Freiheit behalten.’

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tial being of man. But also with this addition the current characterization is insufficient.
In a general sense it can only be said that individualism seeks to construct organized communities out of their ‘elementary constituents’. What these elements are must be left out of account in a general characterization.
Even according to Spann's own view, we do no violence to universalism, if we view it as the opposite of individualism, in the sense that it does not try to construe the societal whole analytically out of its elementary constituents, but rather seeks to derive the ‘parts’ from the coherence of the whole.
Spann's observation concerning the ‘moral freedom’ and value of the individual in the universalistic view, is correct only in its medieval and modern idealistic-Humanistic trends. It does not concern sociological universalism as such, but rather the axiological viewpoint.
The Christian conception of human personality, in the Middle Ages, and the transpersonalistic Humanistic ideal of personality of post-Kantian idealism, kept universalism from completely sacrificing the ‘individual’ to the absolute value of a temporal community. Instead, the attempt was made to make the value of the individual personality even more intensive and rich than is possible in individualism. The transpersonalistic point of view ascribes to every individual, as ‘a part of the whole’, the tremendous value of the ‘Überperson’, identified with the totality of the highest community in society.
Nevertheless, even in this trans-personalist view universalism continues to absolutize temporal society at the expense of the radical religious unity of human personality.
We can agree with Spann's observation that universalism does not necessarily deify the State and that such a deification can only be a rudiment of individualism in an inconsistent universalism. The universalism of the Middle Ages, for example, did not absolutize a particular State; it identified the institutional Church with the supra-temporal kingdom of God, in the idea of the ‘Corpus Christianum’¹.
Spann himself sees in the State only a ‘Teilganzes’, which he qualifies as: ‘a partial whole, - a member of the total whole (i.e. Society) - in its function as “total organization of social life”, and as “manifestation of the unity of all organizations”, so that the remaining partial whole of Society is contrasted to it as the unorganized part’².
According to him, the State is thus an organic part of the total society, which includes universalistically conceived natural communities together with inter-individual and inter-communal societal re-

1 In his De Organische Idee in de Gedachtenwereld van Calvijn (A.R. Staatk., 2e Jrg. 1926, p. 35) Jos. Bohatec demonstrated that this term, at least insofar as it signifies both the ‘spiritual’ and secular organism, is not of medieval origin.

2 Gesellschaftslehre (3th ed. 1930, p. 566, cf. pp. 510 ff.).

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lations in our sense. Nevertheless, the State is indeed conceived of as the organized whole encompassing all other organized communities¹. Universalism is always characterized by the absolutization of one community to the highest, inclusive of all others as its parts. What is viewed as the total community is a matter of choice.

1 Spann speaks nevertheless of ‘arteigene Souveranität’ of the non-political communities. We shall subsequently see that this is not to be confused with sphere-sovereignty in our sense.

The individualistic nominalistic trends in modern sociology in their confrontation with the problem of the unity of an organized community.

In its conception of empirical reality, the modern individualist and nominalist view of organized communities is ex origine oriented to the classical Humanist science-ideal and its motive of the control of nature².

It reduces empirical reality to the ‘physico-psychical’ aspects and speaks of the real man as of a sensorily perceptible ‘individual’, or a natural scientific system of functional relations. All the normative aspects of reality are conceived of as subjective psychological modes of experience. As empirical phenomena, the different modalities of social norms are supposed to be nothing but causal emotional motives of an axiological feeling-character. They may or may not be supposed to refer to a supra-empirical sphere of Ideas, or values; but in any case a scientific view of societal reality should eliminate any idea of a divine world-order containing normative principles of social structures.

The unity and identical continuity of organized communities is here necessarily conceived of functionalistically. It may be explained in terms of an organized causal psychical interaction of individuals (as is done by the entire naturalistic psychological school of sociology), and eventually interpreted as a formal sociological category of consciousness, by which the infinite diversity of relations between individuals is synthesized to an ideal unity (Simmel, v. Wiese, Jellinek, and others). Or it may also be conceived of in a functional juridical sense, as in a particular trend of the Neo-Kantian theory of law (Kelsen), which identifies the unity of an organized community with the functional-

2 This is not only true of the Humanistic theory based on natural law insofar as it holds to the primacy of the mechanistic science-ideal; it is equally applicable to Kantian and Neo-Kantian rationalistic critical theories of empirical reality, and to the positivistic trends in modern sociology.

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logical unity in a system of legal norms, derived from a so-called original norm (‘Ursprungsnorm’)¹.

None of these points of view recognizes any real unity in an organized social whole.

Both the naturalist-psychological and the formalistic schools in modern sociology and jurisprudence are thus rooted in a naturalistic and individualistic conception of empirical reality.

Here follow some uttterances of prominent representatives of these schools, which may illustrate the above characterization of their view. Simmel, the father of formalistic sociology, held the reality of human society to be only a complex interwovenness of psychical interactions between individuals.
In his Über soziale Differenzierung he expressly states: ‘Ist die Gesellschaft nur eine in unserer Betrachtungsweise vor sich gehende Zusammenfassung von einzelnen... die die eigentlichen Realitäten sind, so bilden diese und ihre Inhalte auch das eigentliche Objekt der Wissenschaft, und der Begriff der Gesellschaft verflüchtigt sich’². [If society is nothing but a merely intra-mental synthesis of separate individuals... who are the true realities, they and their contents form the true object of science; then the concept of society vanishes.] And in his Soziologie: ‘Einheit im empirischen Sinne ist nichts anderes als Wechselwirkung von Elementen: ein organischer Körper ist eine Einheit, weil seine Organe in engerem Wechseltausch ihrer Energien stehen, als mit irgendeinem ‘äuszeren Sein’³. [In an empirical sense, unity is merely interaction between elements; an organism is a unity because of the interaction between energies of its organs being more intense than that with any exterior being.]
Essentially the same point of view is found in Leopold v. Wiese, who in his Allgemeine Soziologie I (1924) conceives of sociology as the theory of social relations and ‘Beziehungsgebilde’ (relational forms).
It is true that in the first chapter (p. 24) he tries to discard the antithesis between individualism and universalism as a false alternative and writes: ‘Es gibt nichts, das nur Individuum und nichts das nur Gesellschaft wäre; ebenso wie es nichts gibt, das nur Teil oder nur Ganzes wäre’⁴. But, he is actually only rejecting the older form of

1 For the development of this functionalistic conception in modern sociology and political sciences, cf. the first chapter of my Crisis in de Hum. Staatsleer (Amsterdam, 1931).

2 Über soziale Differenzierung, p. 10 (Leipzig 1906, 2e anast. Neudr., 1890). The concept ‘Gesellschaft’ as ‘the totality of human society’ is indeed universalistic and unacceptable also to us. Simmel's utterance, however, relates to any conception of a social whole as a unity.

3 Soziologie, pp. 5 ff.

4 ‘There exists nothing that is a mere individual, and nothing that is merely a society; in the same way there is nothing that is only a part or only a whole.’

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individualism which conceives of the individual as a static autarchical Substance¹. The modern theoretical concept of function is opposed to this substantial view. But in the last analysis the concept of function resolves both the individual and any kind of social whole into a complex of elementary functional relations, in which the bond of unity is exclusively sought in the categories of human thought. The latter is clearly evident in the following pronouncement concerning the various ‘group-formations’ in society: ‘Diese sozialen (zwischenmenschlichen) Gebilde bestehen nur in den Vorstellungen der Menschen. Sie setzen aber stets eine Mehrzahl von Menschen voraus, und ihre konkreteren Arten sind, abgesehen von ihren Symbolen, dadurch auch wahrnehmbar, dasz sie in Zusammenhang mit einer Mehrzahl von Menschen stehen.’ [These social (inter-human) formations exist only in the minds of men. But they always pre-suppose a plurality of men and, apart from their symbols, their more concrete species are also perceptible owing to the fact that they are connected with a plurality of men].
And on this basis v. Wiese arrives at the well-known individualistic misinterpretation of our naïve experience of these communal formations: ‘Für das naieve Auge ist ein soziales Gebilde nichts anderes als zwei, drei, mehrere, viele, sehr viele Menschen’². [To the naïve eye a social formation is merely two, three, more, very many people.]
Any attempt to construe a real social whole in terms of its elementary constituents is a form of individualism.
It really makes no difference whether the social element is sought in an individual as a ‘Ding an sich’, or in an elementary functional relation. In both instances the internal unity of a societal whole is relegated to the subjective human consciousness and its reality is denied.

1 Since in his Gesellschaftslehre (3e Aufl., 1930), p. 38, Spann does not distinguish functionalistic individualism from the older substantial individualism, his critique of v. Wiese's individualism is not entirely to the point.

2 Allgemeine Soziologie I (1924) p. 24. Vierkandt rightly opposes this view in his Gesellschaftslehre (2e Aufl. 1928), p. 323.

The revival of the concept of substance in modern universalistic theories. The idealistic irrationalistic conception of the State as ‘Überperson’, in contrast to the ancient impersonal and the modern naturalistic-biological conceptions.

At least in some metaphysical trends of modern universalism, the concept of substance was revived to comprehend the spiritual reality of organized communities. It is always a metaphysical concept of a totality that affords universalism its basis; the whole is never construed in terms of elementary constituents.

There is, however, a sharp distinction between the older

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(Greek and scholastic) and the modern forms of social universalism. We have seen that the former, as found in Plato and Aristotle, adopted a realistic metaphysical standpoint. They viewed an organized societal whole as a composite ‘corpus’, organic in structure, and rooted in a metaphysical form or eidos. Its inner unity was sought in the arrangement indicating the ruling or controlling part.

Modern metaphysical universalism, in contrast, chiefly arose out of irrationalistic, post-Kantian idealism. It broke radically with the objective realistic notion of ideas. We have shown in Volume I, part II¹, that this trend is essentially rooted in a transpersonalistic conception of the Humanist ideal of personality, which conceived of the individual personality as a dialectical moment in the totality of an (individual) higher collective person. An organized community is qualified as a ‘Gesammtperson’ and the State as an ‘Überperson’.

This signified a definitive break with the impersonal conception of older universalism and with the modern naturalistic-biological conception of a societal whole, as a living natural thing.

In the varied tissue of human society, universalism always seeks a higher self-sufficient whole, of which all others are merely organic ‘Gliedkörper’ (constituent bodies). But post-Kantian, transpersonalistic idealism hypostatizes temporal organized communities to supra-individual personalities and no longer views them as impersonal bodies or natural things.

1 Cf. Volume I, pp. 473 and 474.

The general will or the will of an organized social whole as the latter's substantial unity. Hegel's idea of the State.

The substantial bond of unity was now sought in a transpersonal communal will, capable of forming itself and operating through organs.

In Hegel the State becomes a person only in the monarch. In its ideal sense, as the ultimate synthesis of the dialectical antithesis revealing itself in civil society, the body politic is the highest realization of the ‘objective Spirit’, the reality of the ethical Idea, ‘der gegenwärtige göttliche Wille’ (the present divine will). As the dialectical realization of the Idea in history, this absolute State breaks through the boundaries of particular-

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ity in the family and civil society. The State's will is the real ‘communal will’. Through the latter the State proves its ‘objectivity’, its universal validity¹ and its absoluteness, that is, its real existence as a unity independent of the changing subjectivity of its individual members.

1 Recall what we have already said concerning the idealistic concept of objectivity as universal validity.

Gierke's theory of the ‘Gesammtperson’.

The Historical school, which viewed the State only as the political form of organization of a national community, did certainly not accept Hegel's absolutization of the ideal body politic. Especially in its Germanistic adherents the transpersonalistic view of the organized community acquired a pluralistic elaboration. With his teacher Beseler, Gierke became the enthusiastic advocate of a recognition of the autonomy of non-political and lower political associations. Nevertheless, he remained entrenched philosophically in a metaphysical universalistic theory of organized communities, which seeks the ‘substance’ of the latter in a ‘Gemeinwille’ or ‘allgemeiner Wille’ (a common or a general will).

Gierke also conceived of the different types of an organized social whole as full ‘organisch-gegliederte’ personalities, i.e. as persons with a ‘spiritual’ organic articulation², to which he ascribed a separate soul or spirit, in the will of the corporation, and a separate spiritual body, in the organization. Thus, he coordinated the corporate persons with natural persons, as living beings³. Gierke's interesting theory concerning the essence of human organized communities could not discover the inner structural principles of the latter, exactly because of the metaphysical character of his view. The most he could attain to on the ground of this theory was a formal juridical autonomy for the internal law of the ‘Verbände’. There could be no room

2 The concept ‘spiritual organism’ with its own corporative personality, originates in the philosophy of Schelling, which had a great influence on the Historical School.

3 The same idea is expressed by many others. Cf. Tönnies' Einführung in die Soziologie (1931) p. 19: ‘Körperschaften, d.i. Verbände, die für das Bewusztsein ihrer eigenen Mitglieder eine willens- und handlungsfähige Einheit, also insoweit eine dem einzelnen Menschen gleichartige Person darstellen.’ But in Tönnies this conception is only meant in a fictitious sense.

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for a real juridical sphere-sovereignty¹ We shall revert to this important point.

1 See the extensive critique of Gierke in my De Crisis in de Humanistische Staatsleer, pp. 114 ff.

Why also in its modern sense the dilemma of individualism and universalism is impossible on a radical Christian standpoint.

In an earlier context we have established that the dilemma occurring on the immanence-standpoint between social universalism and individualism is meaningless and impossible on a radical Christian standpoint. This general thesis also pertains to the modern forms in which this alternative presents itself.

Man's personality transcends the temporal horizon of reality and thereby all temporal things and relationships.

Anyone who ascribes a full real, supra-individual personality to temporal organized communities, forgets that the personality, insofar as it is not conceived of functionally, as in the concept of a legal person, but is conceived of in the full sense of the ego or self-hood, is not to be found in the temporal horizon of our cosmos, but only in the central religious sphere.

Trans-personalism essentially rests on an irrationalistic hypostatization of temporal communal relationships.

Modern individualism, on the other hand, even more radically misinterprets the full being of man and denaturalizes human personality. In its empiricistic trends it reduces man either to an atomistic self-contained natural thing, or to a functional system of elementary interactions operating according to natural laws; in its metaphysical trends, either to an autarchical metaphysical combination of matter-monads and a central soul-monad (as in Leibnitz), or to the idea of a self-sufficient moral individuum, which in its ‘pure will’ is considered to be identical with the general form of the ethical law (Kant), or to the idea of a self-sufficient moral ego (Fichte in his first period), etc.

In all of its nuances modern sociological individualism results in the denial of the inner communal structures of temporal society. Without reserve we can concede to the modern universalist Othmar Spann that on the basis of an isolated and self-enclosed individual we cannot arrive at a veritable inner cohecence in a communal whole².

2 Gesellschaftslehre (3th ed. 1930, pp. 87 ff.).

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As long as sociological and social philosophic thought remain entangled in the dilemma of universalism and individualism, the structural correlativity of communal and inter-communal or inter-individual relationships is lost to sight. This is even the case with Gierke, who was fully aware of the fundamental difference between these two kinds of social relations. The coordination of individual persons and collective persons led him to a sharp division between ‘Individualrecht’ and ‘Sozialrecht’. But when we detach this coordination from its speculative metaphysical foundation and reduce it to a separation of external inter-individual and internal communal relations, it appears to be in conflict with the structural coherence between them. We shall revert to this question in detail.

The imputation of the dilemma: individualism or universalism, to the Christian religion by Weber and Troeltsch.

It is very regrettable that, especially since Weber and Troeltsch, the so-called sociology of religion has tried to introduce the dilemma of individualism or universalism into the Christian religion. According to Troeltsch¹, individualism and universalism lie hidden in an inner tension in the basic religious idea of Christianity.

Calvinism, in connection with its doctrine of election², is qualified, for example, as a form of religious individualism³. In modern sociology Weber's and Troeltsch's views are as a rule faithfully adhered to on this point (cf. Schmalenbach).

The intrinsic error of this view will be shown in detail in a later context⁴.

1 Die Soziallehren der Christl. Kirchen und Gruppen (1919), pp. 39 ff.

2 Cf. Max Weber, Die Prot. Ethik und der Geist des Kap. (Tübingen, Mohr. 1934), pp. 93 ff., concerning the ‘innere Vereinsamung des einzelnen Individuums’ in Calvinism. Troeltsch, op. cit., pp. 623 ff.

3 Even the idea of the Covenant in the Old and New Testament is in dividualistically interpreted. This was influenced no doubt by the introduction of the idea of an individualistic contract in the protestant theological exposition of the doctrine of the Covenant. Cf. N. Diemer, Het Scheppingsverbond met Adam (Kok, 1935).

4 Provisionally let me point to Dr Kuyper's excellent observation in his Encycl. der Heilige Godgeleerdheid III, p. 190: ‘Reformed people have (therefore) always made confession of election as election in Christ, and Christ is confessed to be the head of the reborn humanity. Naturally the operation of the spiritual-real factor is also individual, but individual in connection with and as a result of the operation on the whole. Individuals do not exist in themselves; there only exist membra corporis generis humani.’ Are we to understand this statement in a universalistic sense? Certainly not. The term ‘universalism’ is an absolutization excluded by the Christian position.

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Observation: Weber has pointed out the very heterogeneous meanings of the word individualism (op. cit. p. 95, note 3). By arranging the various conceptions of individuality under these heterogeneous meanings, however, he causes a great terminological confusion. The concepts individualism and individuality, as such, have nothing in common. There is a ‘quantitative individualistic’ conception of individuality; but being rationalistic, this conception was essentially hostile to the inner appreciation of individuality.
In any case both Weber and Troeltsch, in speaking of Calvinism as ‘religious individualism’, intend the term ‘individualism’ to be understood in the sociological sense that the individual, in inner solitude and isolation, is placed completely on his own.
Compare, for instance Weber's statement (op. cit. p. 101): ‘The conflict between the “individual” and “ethics” (in the sense of Sören Kierkegaard) did not exist in Calvinism, though in religious matters it placed the individual completely on his own.’
The term ‘Calvinistic individualism’ is thus not in any way intended to signify a particular emphasizing of the individual value of the personality in Calvinism. This would mean the imputation of an axiological individualistic view to Calvinism.

The relation between the individual and Gemeinschaft (community) in dialectical-phenomenological sociology.

In recent times a dialectical-phenomenological school of sociology has developed which believes it has overcome the dilemma of individualism and universalism, by breaking with ‘objectifying’ (i.e. natural scientific) thought, as its supposed basis.

Theodor Litt, in his remarkable book Individuum und Gemeinschaft, is one of the most prominent representatives of this modern sociological trend. Litt conceives of sociology as a philosophy of culture, which has to furnish the methodical and metaphysical foundations of the ‘Geisteswissenschaften’¹.

I am here exclusively concerned with Litt's treatment of the relation between human personality and the communal relationships of society. Litt's pretended solution of the dilemma between individualism and universalism, and his influence in modern sociology warrant a detailed treatment of his theory.

1 Cf. my Crisis in de Humanistische Staatsleer I, p. 48 ff., for a general critical treatment of this movement. ‘Geisteswissenschaft’ is also called ‘socio-cultural science’.

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Litt contends that the basic error of individualism and of universalism is that they absolutize one of the aspects of the spiritual world. They either hypostatize the individual experiencing ego, as a spiritual centre, or the sphere of objective social meaning (Sinn), through which the ego, in its intentional psychical acts, lives in a communal bond with other egos. The problem concerning the relation between the individual and society is insolvable as long as, in the manner of spatial objectifying thought, the ego and the ‘social world’ are opposed to each other as impenetrable substances.

As an alternative Litt proposes the adoption of dialectical reflexive thought¹. Litt combines the dialectical method with Husserl's method of phenomenological analysis of the ‘essences’.

According to Litt, sociology (as the fundamental Geisteswissenschaft) cannot proceed in the same way as does natural science. It cannot eliminate the spiritual structure of the ego and objectifyingly examine things by opposing them to thought as if they were alien to the knowing subject. Sociology must investigate the spiritual world in which the I-hood lives. In this world subject and object² are identical. In contrast to natural scientific thought, therefore, sociology may not first dissect spiritual reality into isolated elements and then seek to discover the coherence between them. Rather it must start with the totality, the coherence of spiritual reality, necessary for the understanding of the relative proper significance of these ‘moments’.
In scientific thought pertaining to the Geisteswissenschaften, which is nothing else but ‘die Selbstdurchleuchtung des Geistes’ (self-trans-illumination of the mind), a provisionally attained conceptual limit may never be viewed as definitive. The limits must continually be broken through dialectically, not in order to permit the discovered moments to [...]ow into each other without distinction, but only so that the limits are only dialectical moments in the spiritual totality. The ‘moments’ must be conceived of in a ‘spiritual structural unity’, connecting everything with everything not by exterior combination, but by an interlacement full of dialectical tensions; by an interpenetration of the relations of for and against one another³.

What is this ‘spiritual reality’ of which this dialectical-phenomenological sociology wants to explain the inner structure?

1 Cf. Volume I part 1, pp. 138 ff.

2 ‘Object’ is used here in the sense of theoretical ‘Gegenstand’.

3 Op. cit. pp. 21, 22: ‘die alles mit allem nicht durch äuszerliche Zusammenfügung, sondern durch ein an Spannungen reiches Ineinandergreifen, durch eine Durchdringung von Füreinander und Gegeneinander verbindet.’

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It consists, first of all, of the dialectical union of the psychical experience centered in actual egos and actualized in the temporal stream of consciousness, with the intended timeless social meaning, signified in the sensory symbolism of social forms of expression; in its ‘timeless objectivity’ this meaning actually possesses a trans-personal character.

The dialectical-monadic structure of the ‘ego’, as act-centre, is misinterpreted, according to Litt, both in the functionalistic and the substantialistic view. The ‘reciprocity of perspectives’.

According tot Litt, the ‘ego’, as a personal centre of experience, is a psychical totality; it is not to be resolved into its transcendental logical function, as is done by the critical school (i.e. in its conception of the theoretical knowing subject); nor to be hypostatized into a substance underlying psychical relations, as in realistic metaphysics.

The ego rather displays the dialectical structure of a monad living solely in its psychical acts; it is not to be understood as a self-contained ‘autarchical substance’. In this actual ego-centre, past experiences appear in perspective interwovenness with present experiences; the present is permeated with the past and is not mechanically separated from it. The situation in social reality is analogous; the ego is intertwined in a real reciprocity of perspectives with the other ego, the ‘thou’.

In this ‘Reziprozität der Perspektiven’, the experience of the ego is embedded in the ‘experience of the thou’, and vice versa: ‘These perspectives are not similar and comparable, they are correspondent; they determine and delimit one another reciprocally, they are interlaced with one another and they live in me and in you; and my immediate awareness of them, as well as yours, is at the same time an awareness of this interlacement’¹.

This interwovenness of I and thou in both of these experiences would not be possible if both did not possess an absolute individuality. Every ‘ego’ is individual and centred in its psychico-

1 Op. cit. p. 109/110: ‘Es sind nicht gleichartige, nicht vergleichbare, es sind zusammengehörige, sich wechselseitig bestimmende, miteinander verschränkte Perspektiven, die in mir und in dir leben; und mein, dein unmittelbares Wissen um sie ist zugleich ein Wissen um dieses Ineinandergreifen’.

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physical existence; at the same time, it is interwoven with other egos in its experiences.

This reciprocity of perspectives realizes itself in the symbolical expressive movement in which ‘I’ and ‘thou’ spiritually unite and understand each other in the world of timeless meaning, signified by the sensory figure of the form of expression.

This entire structure of the ego can only be comprehended in a phenomenological analysis of ‘essences’. This analysis, as a dialectical method of the ‘sciences of the human mind’, penetrates through the individual moments of spiritual life to the essential structural totality by which these moments are unbreakably interwoven, according to the intrinsic structure of their essence.

In keeping with this conception of the dialectical monadic structure of the ‘ego’, Litt must in principle reject the view of Simmel, v. Wiese and Max Weber, who seek to resolve the social ‘Gemeinschaft’ into a formal system of relations or interactions. For this view is individualistic insofar as it seeks to construe the societal whole of a community, in a natural scientific manner, out of elementary relations, synthesized into a mere idea of formal unity.

The dialectical structural totality of ‘spiritual reality’ can never be understood in this way.

The entire schema of form and content is, according to Litt, only applicable to natural scientific thought, which in its categories must construct an ordered objective reality out of confused sensory impressions.

In the spiritual world, in contrast, the ego itself has an actual existence only in a structural totality not produced by its own thinking. This totality, intelligible only in a reflexive analysis of ‘essences’, is rather a necessary condition for the ego.

The social interwovenness of the ego in the ‘Gemeinschaft’ (community) of a ‘closed sphere’.

The real relation between the ‘ego’ and the social ‘Gemeinschaft’ is, according to Litt, only to be comprehended in the dialectical concept of a social interwovenness (‘soziale Verschränkung’).

This social interwovenness of the actual ego-centres is given in the essential Gemeinschaft relationship, comprehended by Litt in the concept of the ‘closed sphere’ and sharply distinguished by him from all arbitrary forms of organization, in which the

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Gemeinschaft actively functions as a volitional unity¹. His phenomenological analysis is not concerned with organizations; it is solely concerned with the supra-individual ‘Gemeinschäfte’ in which the individual ego is interwoven according to its essential structure.

The influence of Tönnies' distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, summarized in the first paragraph of this chapter, is clearly in evidence here.

According to Litt, the elementary structure of a closed sphere (the so-called ‘closed sphere of the first degree’) is present ‘wherever in a multiplicity of vital centres (egos), - no matter how many more than two, - each stands in an essential, constitutive correlation and coherence with the others; consequently, each rounds off its relief against the others, just as all the others undergo its formative influences².

The ‘closed sphere’ in this sense stands in a dialectical essential coherence with the total system of symbolical expressive forms, necessary in the spiritual meaningful reality for mutual comprehension. As long as the ‘ego’ is in spiritual contact with the ‘thou’, with the one ‘thou’, by means of the sensory-symbolical expressive movements of the body, the ideal signified meaning-content is unbreakably bound to the unabbreviated living content of this one momentary vital relation.

It cannot possibly separate itself objectively from the complex of this particular physico-psychical total event.

In the social ‘Gemeinschaft’ (community) of a ‘closed sphere’ the symbolical signifying form for the first time acquires a sharp objective character, elevated above the momentary subjective expressive movement. Here, for the first time, the spiritual objectification in meaning and symbolical form becomes transpersonal, insofar as the expressive forms no longer change from person to person and from moment to moment. As objective symbols of a social totality, they remain constant in a fixed objective coherence, and acquire a clear distance with respect to subjective experiences.

Thereby it is also possible for a closed sphere to expand to

1 Op. cit. p. 392.

2 Ibid., p. 239: ‘wo von einer Vielheit von Lebenszentren (egos), gleichviel welcher Zahl oberhalb von zwei, jedes mit jedem in wesengestaltendem Zusammenhang steht, mithin ein jedes sein Relief nach der Seite aller übrigen hin rundet, wie umgekehrt alle übrigen seine formgebenden Einwirkungen erfahren.’

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an unlimited number of persons, in the successive sequence of generations and in the simultaneous expansion of its scope. It can thus become ‘a closed sphere of the second degree’. In this case it is no longer possible for every member to be in direct spiritual contact with every other. Neither can every member subjectively possess the full content of the spiritual treasures of the ‘Gemeinschaft’. Direct spiritual contact is limited to very narrow spheres (‘spheres of the first degree’). By far the greater part of the mutual social interwovenness between the individual personalities is now achieved indirectly through ‘soziale Vermittlung’ (social mediation), brought about both in a subjective personal way, and through objective symbolism (communication, etc.).

Subjective-personal social mediation is possible, because in every member of a closed sphere the totality of the social interwovenness with the other members, with whom he has been in direct contact, has acquired an individual form that determines the essence of this person. Consequently, through this mediation, new members are brought into indirect social interwovenness with the personality of these other members. In this manner every member incorporates into his personality something of the other persons with whom he is in direct contact.

The objective-symbolical ‘social mediation by means of communication of the information’, transmits in a very abbreviated form, and with a broad or narrow selection, only the important moments out of the social totality of the spiritual communal life, which moments every member must individually make his own.

The inner unity and continuity of the essential community is guaranteed with Litt by the ‘soziale Vermittlung’.

This ‘soziale Vermittlung’ is, therefore, the only real and proper means to realize the possibility of a spiritually filled supra-personal life of the social whole. Through it alone, the latter possesses an inner unity and continuity independent of the perishability and discontinuity of individual bodily existences¹.

This inner unity and continuity of a true communal relationship (a closed sphere) is not a subjective construction of thought, but a spiritual reality. Every ego of a closed sphere has a real share in the total experience, the ‘Gesamterlebnis’ of

1 Op. cit. p. 274.

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that sphere. This supra-personal life of the social whole cannot be individualistically constructed out of isolated elements.

Here the experience and actions of all the members are incorporated in the indivisible unity of a social totality. This totality does not allow of an absolute opposition of an ego's own experience and action to that of the others. Phenomenological analysis can show this structure of the total experience in an elementary form in every common activity of a ‘closed sphere’ (e.g., a consultation, a pronouncement, the making of a decision, and so on).

Critique of Litt's theory. A new type of universalism.

A critical comparison of Litt's viewpoint with earlier universalistic theories, developed in Romanticism and post-Kantian idealism, reveals that Litt unjustly reproaches the latter for employing the method of natural science. Litt himself by no means rises above the dilemma of individualism versus universalism. Notwithstanding his own assertions to the contrary, he holds a decidedly universalistic view.

At least in the theories of human society, proposed by Romanticism and the Hegelian school, the important dynamic dialectical motive of the essential social interwovenness in individual personalities was just as strongly developed as in Litt¹.

The dialectical method of the ‘Geisteswissenschaften’² was first applied to sociology in this circle; Litt is very decidedly dependent upon their method and way of thinking. He differs from the universalism of the Romanticists and Hegelians in that he no longer holds to the metaphysics of the Idea based upon the Humanist ideal of personality in its trans-personal conception.

For this reason Litt cannot conceive the continuous unity of a ‘Gemeinschaft’ metaphysically as an organically articulated ‘Gesamtperson’ or ‘Überperson’, but only as a structural unity of social interwovenness, guaranteed by the ‘soziale Vermittlung’, and centered nevertheless in individual physico-psychical personalities. So the unity of a veritable ‘Gemeinschaft’ is conceived of as a real structural totality without an I-hood, without a personality of its own.

1 Cf. my remarks concerning Gierke in my Crisis in de Hum. Staatsleer, p. 117.

2 The humanities, i.e. literature, philosophy, history, etc., as distinguished from natural science.

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In this way Litt does not break with the universalistic point of view but merely with its idealistic-transpersonalistic type. The individual personality is supposed to be only constituted in the social totality of a temporal ‘Gemeinschaft’, and - as we shall see - Litt also seeks to find a final or highest temporal community encompassing within itself all other relationships as subordinate parts.

Litt's disciple Siegfried Marck correctly remarks that Litt has produced ‘a new type of social universalism in contrast to the old dogmatic and ontological version’¹.

In its conception of the mutual relation between the various types of societal relationships, universalism always appeared to operate with the schema: whole and parts. It seeks an ultimate communal whole which includes all others as its members. Such a method appeared to be possible only if the internal structures of individuality, which determine the inner nature of the various societal relationships, are fundamentally eradicated.

In his analysis of the ‘essence’ of ‘Gemeinschaft’ Litt never goes beyond a dialectical general concept of a ‘closed sphere’. He never tries to give a theoretical explanation of the plastic structural principles of the different typical societal relationships. He is prevented from doing so by his universalistic position, upon which his dialectical phenomenological method is based.

1 Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff in der Rechtsphil. (Tübingen, Mohr 125), pp. 95 ff. Cf. also Alfred Vierkandt, who in the 2nd ed. of his Gesellschaftslehre (p. 334) calls Litt's standpoint an ‘immanent universalism’.

The elimination of the normative aspects in Litt's phenomenological analysis of the essence of a ‘Gemeinschaft’.

His conception of a ‘closed sphere’ does not disclose a veritable structure of authority inherent in every organized community and to most of the natural communities as such.

Apart from his elimination of the organization, this is understandable if we remember that an authoritative structure displays a normative character and Litt's method of phenomenological analysis begins with an explicit elimination of all normative distinctions. Litt defends this elimination on the ground that distinctions which from a normative point of view have a

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final and determining significance, are completely indifferent to a phenomenological structural analysis. They are indifferent because, with respect to its essential character, as a structural element of the totality of spiritual reality, what is of the most normative value is in no wise preferable to what is most reprehensible. A structural theory recognizes only one distinction which delimits the sphere of its judgments: that of the meaningful and the meaningless. The ‘meaningless’ (the natural aspects of reality as the Gegenstand of natural science) lies as such outside of the spiritual world which is to be examined by structural analysis¹.

This means that in its search for the spiritual structure of human society, this phenomenology begins by methodically eliminating the modal horizon of reality, a necessary condition for the plastic horizon of structures of individuality.

If the normative modalities are eliminated, the cosmic coherence of meaning cannot provide the basis for theoretical investigation. And it is this coherence which intertwines the law-spheres and alone makes the structures of individuality possible.

The phenomenological theory of structure wishes to discover real structural coherences in a sphere of meaning and of being which precedes all normative distinctions. It intends to leave the investigation of these distinctions to the normative special sciences, which must seek their foundation in this theory of structure (this is perfectly in keeping with the standpoint of Husserl!).

But Litt's argument that the normative and anti-normative are mutually exclusive, and yet pre-suppose the sphere of meaning in which they are enclosed, appears to be fallacious if we remember that the normative aspects of meaning have their law- and subject-sides, so that an anti-normative subjective behaviour can only occur within a normative law-sphere. What Litt calls ‘spiritual reality’ only functions in spheres of meaning of an essential normative nature and structure. An elimination of this normative structure results in the abolishment of any real sphere of meaning in the post-psychical aspects and the retention of an arbitrary cogitative construction, supposedly elevated above the cosmic order.

The entire conception that ‘spiritual reality’ is a dialectical structural union between psychical experiences, concentrated in

1 Op. cit. p. 29.

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physico-psychical egos, and a timeless objective coherence of meaning, is rooted in an a priori vision of reality. This view does not recognize cosmic time in its universal permeation of the aspects of meaning interwoven by it in an unbreakable meaning-coherence. Instead, it seeks the root of individual temporal existence, viz. the self-hood, in time.

Because Litt's basic concepts of social interwovenness and social ‘Vermittlung’ are not based on the essential internal structural principles of societal relationships, they cannot furnish any insight into the inner structural differences of the latter.

Even the concept ‘closed sphere’ cannot rightly be maintained in Litt's system if we remember that ‘Soziale Vermittlung’ and social interwovenness, as they are understood by him, cannot in principle be shut off within the inner boundaries of a particular ‘Gemeinschaft’.

Recall only the ‘soziale Vermittlung’ by means of the press or by leading politicians who stand in a narrow international spiritual contact with politicians of other countries and with leading personalities of quite different societal spheres. If the State did not possess its own typical structural principle of individuality, which qualifies and intrinsically limits the principle of social interwovenness, then the ‘soziale Vermittlung’ could certainly not guarantee the inner unity of a political community as a ‘closed sphere’.

Litt unintentionally admits this in the fifth chapter of his book when he treats ‘the system of closed spheres’. He recognizes that the ‘soziale Vermittlung’, guaranteeing the unity and continuity of the ‘closed spheres of the second degree’¹, causes the ‘closed spheres of the first degree’ (e.g., the families), which they include as parts, to overlap partially, that is to let their boundaries flow into each other.

But the same must be applicable to the mutual relation of ‘closed spheres of the second degree’, as the city and the nation. As soon as Litt considers the difference between these spheres, the only means of distinction he has at his disposal is the quantitative criterion of their scope.

1 That is every sphere in which the great number of members makes direct social interwovenness between all of its members impossible.

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The universalistic-historical conception of the ‘final or highest social unity’ in Litt's theory.

Dialectical thought must recognize that each smaller closed sphere is only a transitional stage leading to the larger sphere which contains a multiplicity of smaller spheres as its parts: ‘When we follow the successive stages of the more and more comprehensive social formations, our view must at last reach a vital unity whose spiritual movement nowhere exceeds its own boundaries. It cannot do so, for the simple reason that in the cultural process there does not exist a wider totality encircling this supreme, last sphere’¹.

The answer to the question what will function in this way as the ‘final societal unity’ is entirely dependent upon historical development: ‘If in the future historical evolution all nations and tribes of this earth should be united into one single complex unity, the whole of civilized humanity would constitute the one all-inclusive vital cultural totality’².

Even enmity or conflict between the component groups of the ‘highest social unity’ does not abolish this inner unity. Conflict merely demonstrates that such groups are socially interwoven. Otherwise they would be completely indifferent to each other's spiritual life.

It is true that Litt denies that this dialectical relation between the highest social totality and its component parts abolishes the inner seclusion and individuality of the latter. He means, however, that this relation is the same as that between the individual ego and the ‘closed sphere of the first degree’.

But if this were really the case, the closed spheres must be recognized as supra-individual ego-centra, as ‘Gesamtpersonen’. As we saw, this is contrary to Litt's intention. The life of a closed sphere is centred in individual persons, who retain their individuality bound to individual physico-psychical existence. But the ‘closed sphere’ of the second degree owes its inner con-

1 Ibid., p. 396: ‘Durch die Stufenfolge immer umfänglicherer Sozialgebilde aufwärts steigend gelangt die Betrachtung schlieszlich notwendig zu einer Lebenseinheit, deren geistige Bewegung an keiner Stelle über ihre “Grenzen” hinausführt, hinausführen kann, einfach weil es keine sie umfangende weitere Ganzheit des Kulturprozesses mehr gibt.’

2 Ibid.: ‘Sollte einmal der Fortgang der Geschichte alle Völker und Stämme dieser Erde in einem einzigen Zusammenhang verflochten haben, so würde die Kulturmenschheit das eine abschlieszende Lebensganze der Kultur darstellen’.

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tinuous unity only to the ‘soziale Vermittlung’, which does not imply any fundamental inner limitation, since it reaches beyond the limits of radically heterogeneous types of societal relationships.

Thus Litt's phenomenological sociology ends in a functionalistic universalism of a historicist type. In the final analysis, the inner limits between communal and inter-communal or inter-individual relationships, in our sense of the terms, are completely obliterated.

Litt's final social unity, in the sense of an historical cultural community, is in essence indifferent with respect to the internal limits of the various types of relationships. Much rather it is constituted solely in terms of inter-communal cultural relations between component groups.

The application of Litt's theory to jurisprudence and the theory of the State. Siegfried Marck and Rudolph Smend.

Litt's disciple Siegfried Marck, in applying Litt's sociological theory to the field of law, was only consistent when he rejected Gierke's sharply formulated distinction between the inner corporative law and the inter-individual law (‘Sozialrecht’ and ‘Individualrecht’)¹.

And when Smend² in his work Der Staat als Integration tried to apply Litt's theory of ‘Gemeinschaft’ to the body politic, the dialectical concept of a closed sphere was only of seeming service. The State was viewed as a universal integrational system, brought into a unity and coherence through the various subjective and objective integrational factors (Litt's ‘soziale Vermittlung’)³.

When, however, the question arose how to understand this institution in its typical internal structure, Smend had to appeal to the historicist view of the State as a functional territorial organization of power. And it now appeared that he was unable to comprehend the internal juridical stuctural aspect of this or-

1 Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff in der Rechtsphil. p. 137. Behind this, there also lurks a lack of insight into the coherence of meaning between the structural modal functions of a communal whole.

2 Formerly professor at the University of Berlin, later on in Göttingen, now emeritus.

3 Cf. my De Crisis in de Hum. Staatsleer, pp. 70 ff. for Smend's further distinction between personal, functional and real integrational factors.

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ganized community in the structural unity of its individual totality¹. I shall revert to this point in a subsequent chapter when we engage in analyzing the structural functions of the State.

Litt's conception of a ‘Gemeinschaft’ as a closed sphere could not account for the typical internal unity and continuity of the latter. The integrational factors of the ‘soziale Vermittlung’², if they are to reveal themselves as internal integrational factors of a communal whole, must themselves receive their inner delimitation from the typical structural principle of the latter. By eliminating this structural principle, however, the concept of ‘soziale Vermittlung’, with respect to its personal subjective and objective non-personal side, can only lead to the eradication of all typical structural limits between the societal relationships³.

1 Cf. my cited work, pp. 77 ff.

2 Social mediation.

3 Kelsen, on the basis of his functionalistic juridical standpoint has also criticitzed Smend's integration theory on this point. Cf. his Der Staat als Integration (1930), p. 40.

Summary

Our critical survey of the various attempts to explain the structure of a communal whole is now complete. The theories examined appeared to be unable to solve the fundamental problem of the structure of a community in accordance with the data of naïve experience.

The realistic metaphysical concepts of order and substance, the individualistic and universalist nominalistic concepts of function, the irrationalistic concept of an organic collective person or ‘Überperson’, and that of the dialectical structural unity of a ‘closed sphere’ were, each of them in turn, employed to explain the internal unity of an organized community theoretically. Litt in principle excluded the organization from his concept ‘Gemeinschaft’. In every case, however, the immanence-standpoint necessarily eliminated the modal structures of the different aspects of social experience and the plastic structures of individuality, thereby causing these theories to hover between the poles of individualism and universalism.

Immanence-philosophy cannot recognize the real religious transcendence of the human I-ness above all temporal societal

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relationships. Both universalism and individualism appeared to be irreconcilably opposed to such a view.

Naturally, our rejection of the above theories does not imply a denial of the elements of truth which they contain.

Especially Litt's theory of the social interwovenness in temporal individual human existence (partially oriented to Romanticism and German idealism) contains an important moment of truth that we have already recognized. But, this moment is distorted in the a-normative phenomenological context in which Litt has formulated it.

The situation is similar in the case of Plato and Aristotle. Their idea of the internal unity of order of an organized community was undoubtedly an improvement when compared with individualism. The older individualism, on the other hand, was relatively justified in its opposition to any radical universalism, sacrificing the independent centre of the individual personality to a temporal community.

But all such partial elements of truth cannot make true the theories in which they appear.

The immanence-standpoint prevented even the most productive and acute thinkers from correctly solving the basic question concerning the societal whole of a community: What guarantees the latter its inner unity and continuity amidst the change in its individual membership?

To solve this problem, insight must be gained into the inner structural principles of the communal relationships. Such principles are not arbitrary constructions; they are inherent in the plastic horizon of experience.