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

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Part II
(Conclusion)
The structures of voluntary associations and the inter-individual and inter-communal relationships in a differentiated society

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Chapter V
The structural diversity of voluntary associations and the character of individualized inter-individual and inter-communal relationships

§ 1 - The transcendental character of our systematic categories and their relation to the individuality-structures of the societal relationships.

Why we were in need of preliminary transcendental distinctions in our systematic inquiry into the societal structures.

In the course of our inquiry into the individuality-structures of human society the broad outlines of a system are beginning to show themselves. We did not start from a pre-conceived elaborate systematic scheme into which all the different types of societal relationships were forced. Only a few preliminary distinctions proved to be indispensable to penetrate to the field of inquiry, because they were supposed to be of a transcendental character, and thus to be the very condition of any well-founded systematic investigation. A further systematic classification of human societal structures is only valuable, if it derives from the theoretical disclosure of these structures themselves, and has not been externally imposed on them in a subjective a priori way. This is a methodological postulate discussed in our epistemology¹.

In the first (Dutch) edition of this work I even restricted the preliminary distinctions to those between communal and inter-individual or inter-communal relationships, and between natural and typically historically founded communities. The further foundational systematic categories were not developed before the present chapter, as a result of the structural investigations

1 Vol. II, Part 2, pp. 554 ff.

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contained in the previous chapters of the second part of this volume. Now it is doubtless true that all foundational systematic distinctions introduced in my structural examinations are only discovered in confrontation with the societal structures of individuality themselves. Nevertheless, it stands to reason that we could not arrive at any systematic division of our enquiry without laying the really transcendental preliminary distinctions at its foundation. From this methodical point of view the initial restriction of the latter was indeed arbitrary. This is why in the English edition I have abandoned this restriction and introduced all of the preliminary distinctions together in the first chapter.

The transcendental social categories as the points of reference for the individuality structures.

All the same, the question may be asked why in the theory of the societal structures we were in need of such preliminary distinctions, which apparently intersect the radical types of these structures. Have we not established that the radical types are the ultimate genera of a well-founded classification of the individuality structures?

The answer must be that our preliminary transcendental distinctions do not pertain to supreme genera embracing different radical types of societal relationships. Rather they refer to transcendental societal categories which, in the plastic dimension of the temporal order, lie at the foundation of the individuality-structures proper. Transcendental categories are the real points of reference of the latter. Our inquiry into the structures of individuality of things and events was in the last analysis also related to such foundational categories as thing, event, enkaptic intertwinement, internal structural causality and enkaptic causality, and their closer categorial distinctions (natural and cultural, or historically founded things and events, etc.).

The only reason why the preliminary categories of human societal relationships required special attention was that they cannot be reduced to those of natural things and events, whereas the latter in structural subject-object relations appeared to function in the former.

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The transcendental social categories as the connecting links between the modal and the plastic dimension of the temporal order of creation in its reference to the social human relationships.

One should guard against a confusion of these transcendental categories with those of Aristotelian metaphysics, Kantian epistemology or Husserlian phenomenology. They are neither related to a metaphysical idea of being, nor to a constitutive formative function of a transcendental subject of experience, either in its Kantian or in its Husserlian sense. Apart from the structures of individuality and those of the modal aspects they lose any ontological meaning within our experiential horizon.

In a certain sense we can say that they are the connecting link between the modal and the plastic dimension of the temporal order of creation in its reference to the social human relationships. This is why the most fundamental societal category, viz. the correlation between communal and inter-communal or inter-individual relationships already revealed itself in the modal structures of our social experience and appeared to be ultimately founded in the modal aspect of social intercourse. In the same way the contrast between differentiated and undifferentiated societal relationships proved to be founded in the modal structure of the historical aspect. This is to say that these transcendental categories pertain both to the modal and to the plastic horizon of our social experience, and, in the former, refer to social human relations as such in their different modal meanings, and in the latter, to their plastic structures of individuality.

The other societal categories, viz. those of natural and (historically founded) organized communities, and those of institutional and non-institutional communal relationships, are not found in the modal structures of social experience. They give the primary categories a typical direction to the structures of individuality, without themselves being individuality structures in a proper sense. They urge themselves upon any serious analysis of the different societal structures of individuality as necessary typical categories founded in the temporal order of creation. As such they lie implicitly at the foundation of our naïve experience of social relationships.

There cannot exist any ordered human society without the basis of natural and institutional communities, which are sharply distinguished from free associations. This primary state of affairs is even more fundamental than that concerning the typi-

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cal structures of individuality of the societal relationships. We have seen that neither the undifferentiated nor the differentiated institutional communities which imply a typical historical foundation, are an essential condition of every human society. And as to the natural communities we have established that there may be particular types of a non-institutional character (e.g., such which are founded in a neighbourhood, in a bio-spatial sense).

This is why, when we consider the necessary conditions of human society as such, the categories of natural and institutional communal relationships, in their contrast with non-natural and non-institutional organizations, urge themselves upon our social experience as transcendental conditions of every further determination of the societal relationships. It is true that real natural communities prove to display the same radical type. But it is not their radical type as such, but their common biotic foundation, in contrast to all organized communities, which is implied in the transcendental societal category of natural communal relationships. For in this category is revealed the temporal order in the genesis of human communal bonds. In the genetical order historically founded communities are always preceded by natural ones, irrespective of the typical individuality structures of the former. And this is also the reason why the transcendental division of the natural communities into institutional and non-institutional is more fundamental than their common radical type. For, as to their genetical order, institutional natural communal relationships precede those of a non-institutional character.

The same state of affairs can be established with respect to the genetic order of institutional organized communities and free associations in a differentiated society. Only the former can give that necessary stability to a differentiated society which is the condition of the genesis of voluntary associations. It may be that the condition of a society which is involved in the process of differentiation does not yet allow the acknowledgment of the freedom to form voluntary associations. But there is no instance of a differentiated society which could exist without the stable foundation of institutional organized communities. And this factual state of affairs has a transcendental basis in the necessary conditions of human society as such, irrespective of the typical structures of individuality realized in it. For the primary condition of a society is its relative stability, and the latter cannot be

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provided by voluntary associations but only by institutional communities.

The systematic categories of societal form and enkaptic social interlacement.

Thus we may conclude that our preliminary systematical distinctions were not derived from an arbitrary method of logical classification but were indeed systematic categories of a strictly transcendental character. It stands to reason that this also holds good with respect to the categories of societal form and social interlacement which - apart from their typical variable realization - we have continually applied in our former investigations. Their transcendental character appeared from the explanation of their real meaning. Every societal relationship, irrespective of its typical structural principle, implies a genetic and an existential societal form as the necessary condition of its realization. These forms turned out to be typically founded in the modal structure of the historical aspect and to have an inner connection with the general norm-character of the structural laws of societal relationships. They proved to be the nodal points of enkaptical interlacements between the social relationships which have a different radical typical, or at least a different geno-typical inner structure. And these enkaptical relations themselves appeared to be founded in the plastic dimension of the temporal order, which guarantees the continuous temporal coherence between the societal structures of individuality, notwithstanding their inner sphere-sovereignty. This is sufficient to establish the transcendental relation of the two categories concerned to these individuality structures.

*

The above introductory explanation of the transcendental foundation of our general systematic categories was necessary to justify our systematic division of the societal individuality structures, which intersects the radical types of the latter.

It was especially necessary to justify our subsequent subsumption of all voluntary associations under the same category, notwithstanding the immense diversity of their inner nature. For at first sight it might seem that at least this category is nothing but a ‘general concept’, which lacks any foundation in the transcendental horizon of human experience, and is handled as a kind of logical genus proximum to the effect that the inner

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structural boundaries of the different types are obliterated. This erroneous impression might be strengthened by the fact that the term ‘voluntary associations’ implies indeed a close connection with human purposes. And we have continually emphasized that the internal structural principles of the societal relationships are not to be traced from a teleological point of view. Does this statement lose its validity with respect to voluntary associations? If so, there could not be any question of a transcendental foundation of the category concerned. For we have seen that really transcendental categories of societal relationships are the necessary points of reference for the individuality structures of the latter. If, however, the voluntary associations really belong to a transcendental societal category, we are in need of a more detailed analysis of the transcendental relation between their undeniably purposive character and their internal structural principles.

And since this category evokes all these fundamental questions which could not be answered in the first chapter, we preferred to postpone the transcendental explanation of all our systematic categories in their mutual coherence until the present stage of our inquiry. In the first (Dutch) edition of this work I had not yet arrived at a clear insight into the transcendental foundation of these categories. But the problem concerning this foundation has occupied me from the very outset. For, so long as it lacked a satisfactory solution, there seemed to remain an inner antinomy between the theory of the internal structural principles of the societal relationships and the systematic categories under which they were subsumed.

§ 2 - The constitutive significance of purpose in the genetic forms of voluntary associations and its relation to their internal structural principles. the genetic relation between these associations and the individualized and differentiated inter-individual relatonships.

In order to gain a clearer insight into the transcendental character of the societal category which embraces all differentiated voluntary associations, we have first to realize its connection with the category of societal form. For it is evident that the first category solely pertains to the genetic form of organized communities which can only originate in the free individualized and differentiated inter-personal relations. This genetic form,

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however, must have a typical relation to the individuality-structures of these communities, if it is to be considered as a typical category on the same footing as that of the institutional organizations. For the category of societal form, as such, lacks this typical character. As soon, however, as it assumes a typical transcendental relation to a well defined category of societal structures of individuality, its rôle as a typical connecting link between the modal and the plastic dimension of our social experience is assured. And in this case we can also explain the particular function of purpose in this category.

This consideration gives us an opportunity to revert to Tönnies' theory concerning ‘Gemeinschaft’ and ‘Gesellschaft’, this time to elucidate the kernel of truth in his conception of the voluntary associations.

According to him it is the ‘Kürwille’, the arbitrary will, which predominates in these associations. They are the rational products of the ‘Gesellschaft’, in contradistinction to the ‘Gemeinschaft’, although in some of them (e.g., in trade unions) there are some remnants of ‘Gemeinschaft’ to be found¹.

The truth in this view is that they are really the products of an individualizing and rationalizing process in the inter-individual and inter-communal relations of human society.

No longer enclosed in undifferentiated institutional communities with their collective patterns of thinking, volition and belief, the individual man acquires a relative autonomy in the inter-individual relationships with his fellow men; he is thus enabled to seek for free forms of organized cooperation according to a rational plan of means and ends. The purposes pursued in these organizational forms are to be freely chosen and as such display an immense variety, in accordance with the enormous increase and variation of human needs in the process of cultural disclosure. It is, therefore, necessary for the genetic forms consti-

1 Einfürung in die Soziologie (1931), p. 108. Tönnies adopts Weber's ideal-typical method of investigation, and consequently he does not sufficiently distinguish the field of these free associations from that of the organized institutional communities. He classes the modern State, for instance, and the institutional Church, with the ‘normal’ or ‘ideal concept’ association, cf. Einführung in die Soziologie, pp. 112-132. We find no trace of an inquiry into the internal structures of the societal relationships in his work. As we have repeatedly established, the ‘ideal typical’ method in its subjectivistic levelling character is useless for such an inquiry.

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tuting the voluntary associatory communities to display an abstract character. Only the establishment of a specific purpose and of the means to realize it can give them a typical relation to the particular inner nature of the organized community to be constituted.

As to their juridical aspect they imply a social compact or another type of contract, whose abstract figure, viewed apart from its specific ends, functions in the typical sphere of common private law. For we have seen that only in this private legal sphere, proper to the body politic, can the juridical relations be abstracted from any non-juridical qualification. This confirms our former statement that in the temporal order the State, as an institutional organized community, has priority over the differentiated voluntary associations, which have lost any foundation in the institutional communities of primitive society.

We have already observed in § 3 of the first chapter that besides the associatory forms of voluntary organization which give rise to communities in which the supreme authority belongs to all members together, there are also authoritarian forms. The latter constitute communities whose members are subject to an authoritative order which does not derive from their united will, but is imposed upon them by the founders. In this case membership originates from a labour contract, a contract of enrolment (as in the case of a private tuitional community), etc. and not from an associatory agreement. But, apart from its civil legal aspect, such a labour contract or contract of enrolment is, just as an associatory agreement, only a genetic form constituting a communal relation. Because of this contractual constitution of their membership these communities, too, are in principle to be considered as voluntary associations, though we have observed that they may assume an indirectly compulsory character in their existential forms.

This contractual character of their genetic forms is indeed a transcendental condition of all differentiated voluntary associations, because of their originating in the individualized and differentiated inter-individual relationships. The process of individualization and differentiation in the inter-individual and communal societal relations has proved to be typically founded in the opening or disclosure of the modal meaning of the historical aspect, and as such to have a transcendental basis in the temporal order.

As the inter-individual relationships lack in principle any

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communal and authoritative character, they cannot give rise to organized communities but in an inter-individual genetic form. And in the nature of the case this form is a contractual one.

The typical difference between a contract of association and agreements which are not directed to the formation of voluntary organized communities, is to be characterized as follows: the former is a collective inter-individual act of consensus constituting a unified will of a whole, bound to a common purpose, whereas the latter lack this effect.

Tönnies has overlooked this difference when he supposed that all associatory bonds originating in the ‘Gesellschaft’ are based on the egoistic contractual principle do ut des. The German jurists Binding and Triepel, on the other hand, have denied any contractual character to the genetic form of an association and called it a ‘Vereinbarung’, i.e. a unifying volitional act. They held to the view that a contract is in the nature of the case restricted to two parties which have opposite interests and aims. They, too, were of the opinion that it is always based on the principle do ut des. This is certainly not true since a contract as such is nothing but a form of volitional agreement which is not bound to a specific content and only requires at least two parties. A contract may be to the benefit of only one of the parties and have a typically moral qualification as to its contents. There are collective contracts which harmonize opposite interests of the parties, and such which are entered into on account of one and the same interest of all the parties concerned. In addition Binding and Triepel do not restrict their concept ‘Vereinbarung’ to volitional agreements which are directed to the constitution of an organized community. They even extend it to an agreement between two parties involved in a law-suit to finish the latter, because also in this case the will of the parties is directed to the same purpose. Thereby the arbitrary character of their distinction between a ‘Vereinbarung’ and a contract is only accentuated.
If we restrict the meaning of the first term to the genetic forms of communities (inclusive of some institutional ones), it can only signify a typical kind of contractual agreement. But then it lacks a transcendental sense since institutional communities, insofar as they are compatible with such a typical genetic form, are not bound to the latter as their necessary genetic condition. Only voluntary associations are strictly bound to the genetic form of a ‘Vereinbarung’ in which the above-mentioned establishment of the purpose of the association gives the contractual form its typical relation to the inner nature of the organized community constituted by it. And it is this typical purposive genetic form combined with the principle of free joining and leaving which distinguishes the category of free associations fundamentally from that of the institutional communities.

The Humanist natural law doctrine has thus rightly concluded that any organized community originating in com-

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pletely individualized inter-individual relationships must have a contractual form of constitution. Its fundamental error was only the assumption that the institutional communities, too, can only arise from such individualized inter-individual relations and that the latter correspond to an original ‘state of nature’.

It is true that in a modern individualized and differentiated society the agreement of the future marriage partners is an essential condition for constituting the institutional conjugal bond. But this agreement is in the nature of the case not a contract of free association in which the establishment of a specific purpose is constitutive. And in most countries it is not sufficient to constitute a marriage. As to the State, the natural law doctrine of its contractual genesis has been generally relinquished. With respect to the Church-institution it still plays an important rôle in the civil law doctrine. We shall revert to this question later on.

The internal leading function of the voluntary associations can never be identical with the purpose that its founders had in view.

The purpose that the founders of a voluntary association have established in the articles of the latter does not coalesce with the internal leading function of the organized community, originating from the act of foundation. This purpose and the established means to realize it can only mean the free choice of the type of association and give form to its internal structural principle. The latter is not the result of the act of formation but its transcendental condition. The foundation of a modern mining industry, e.g., necessarily establishes an organized community of a supra-arbitrary structure. In this structure the foundational function is an historical (subjective-objective) organization of power comprising capital, management, division and coördination of labour. The economical administration of the organized process of production, in its necessary economically qualified subject-object relations, plays the rôle of the leading function. This structural principle, lying at the foundation of every organized industrial undertaking concerned in the process of production, assumes a particular geno-type by the specific object of production. The genetic and existential forms in which it is realized not only give it a positive shape in the internal relations of the organized community, they also embrace the external relations of the latter and thus function as true nodal points of enkaptic interlacements.

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This is a second reason why the establishment of purpose and means of the voluntary association can never be identical with the internal structure of the community concerned. Its constitutive function in the genetic form of the latter gives the category of free association its typical relation to the internal structure of individuality to be realized in a necessary correlation of communal and inter-individual relationships. In addition its formative rôle is to a high degree dependent on the general patterns of genetic and existential societal forms which prevail in a certain developmental phase of human society, and belong to the positive order of the latter.

The subjective purpose of the founders of a modern department store is to buy commodities wholesale and to sell them retail to the public in order to make profits. The foundation of the department store is the established means to realize this purpose as it may be circumscribed in the genetic form of a joint stock company. But the societal relationships between sellers and purchasers are of an inter-individual character and are sharply distinguished from the internal structure of the business as an economically qualified labour community, historically founded in an organization of economic power. The establishment of purpose and means of the association implies a free choice of this type of organized community. But the formation of the latter is bound both to its internal structural principle and to general patterns of societal forms, which are beyond the subjective arbitrariness of the founders. Only within the scope between these supra-arbitrary limits can the subjective purposive plan of the founders play an individual formative rôle.

The interlacement of internal communal and external inter-individual relations in the establishment of purpose and means of a voluntary association. The internal structure of a trade union.

The state of affairs which revealed itself in the two above adduced examples of voluntary associations applies to all types of this societal category. We may formulate it in the general thesis: The purpose of a voluntary association is not restricted to the internal life of the organized community to which it refers. It is necessarily directed to the correlation of internal communal and external inter-individual relationships.

Even if the purpose should seem to concern only the inner sphere of the association, as in the case of a closed club, the

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established means to realize it necessarily imply external inter-individual relations. For the aim of the founders could not be a formative factor if it abstracted the internal leading function of the voluntary community from the inter-structural interlacements in human society. The genetic form itself in which the establishment of aim and means plays a constitutive rôle appeared to be a nodal point of such intertwinements. It is only within the latter that the distinction between the internal and the external relations of an association makes sense.

A clear insight into this state of affairs is of fundamental importance for a structural analysis of the voluntary associations. To complete this insight we shall consider the rôle of purpose and means in two other types of this category. This will give us occasion to elucidate the typical relation between the purpose and the leading function of the constituted voluntary community in some other respects, which cause particular difficulty in the case of an exclusively teleological view of the associations.

When the workmen in a particular branch of industry form a trade union primarily for the improvement of the labour conditions in this industrial branch, it is at once clear that their purpose implies both internal communal and external inter-communal relations. The labourers must be organized in a union of a typical internal structure in which their solidarity can only be maintained in relations of authority and subordination. And on the other hand their purpose is necessarily directed to their collective action outside of their organization in the inter-communal negotiations entered into on an equal footing with the organized or unorganized employers. It may be that these inter-communal relationships give rise to more or less permanent organs, composed of representatives of labourers and employers, and instituted by a collective contract. Such an organized cooperation with the employers may from the outset be implied in the purpose of the founders of the trade-union.

Besides, an association of some size like a trade-union will not restrict its efforts to one single purpose. But the qualifying or leading function in its internal structure must display a unitary character.

The internal leading function of a trade-union, in its typical coherence with the foundational function, is to be defined as a moral bond of solidarity between the labourers typically founded in their organized historical vocational power to elevate labour to an essential and equivalent partner in the process of produc-

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tion. Purposes like the promotion of the intellectual and bodily development of the members, etc., can as such never qualify the internal community. They may also be pursued in associations of a quite different structure of individuality. Only the chief aim has a typical relation to the internal leading function of the community, without being identical with the latter. But it will not always be easy to indicate one single chief purpose. As a matter of fact a multiplicity of aims can only get its coherence and inner articulation in chief and secondary ends by its relation to the structural principle of the community to which it gives a first positive form.

The typical relation between purpose and internal structure in a criminal organization. Sinzheimer's legal sociological and Hauriou's ‘institutional’ view of a criminal association.

The establishment of the purpose of a voluntary association is a subjective act of the founders, in contradistinction to the structural principle of the organized community, which is a supra-arbitrary structural law. This explains how the subjective purpose may give the internal leading function of the organization a fundamentally illegal and criminal form, and that nevertheless the internal community remains bound to some typical moral, juridical, economical, and social normative principles which are indispensable to maintain the organizational bond between the members.

The German sociologist Hugo Sinzheimer has overlooked this irrefutable state of affairs. In order to demonstrate that empirical sociology of law can investigate the societal human relationships apart from any normative legal viewpoint, he adduces the figure of a criminal organization. From a sociological point of view, the latter may be no less important than lawful associations¹. I can agree with this statement. But it does not provide any argument in favour of his basic tenet. In the first place it is not possible to establish the factual existence of a criminal organization without the aid of norms functioning in a societal order.

A sociological positivist would doubtless reply that we may consider these norms only as factual rules of behaviour prevailing in a society which has accepted them. This may be granted. But this positivist viewpoint (which is not Sinzheimer's)

1 De Taak der Rechtssociologie (Haarlem, Tjeenk Willink & Zn.), p. 21.

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cannot explain the undeniable fact that an organized gang of robbers, in its internal communal relations, maintains some fundamental norms of the ‘normal’ society which it does not respect with regard to outsiders. It is in vain to consider this only as a question of utility. There exists a ‘code of honour’ and an internal authoritative order in these organizations which cannot be explained in a utilitarian manner only, for it has a supra-arbitrary foundation in the structural principle of their internal communal sphere. This structural principle is in itself independent of the criminal purpose of the association and is not different from that of a ‘lawful’ industrial labour organization. Just as the latter it has its foundational function in a power-formation of capital and division and coordination of labour by a managing intellect; in the same way it has its leading function in the economic administration of the undertaking; and it embraces relations of authority and subordination inherent in any business organization.

This implies a typical complex of normative (pre-positive) principles in the internal communal sphere, which are not different from those of a lawful industrial labour community and are indispensible to maintain the communal bond. But the criminal purpose of the organization and the maxims established to realize it give to this structural principle and to the different modal normative principles implied in it, an illegitimate positive form so that the association assumes the character of an organized community of professional crime, which may even display some traits of a military organization.

Maurice Hauriou, from the viewpoint of his ‘institutional theory’, also stressed the difference between the purpose of the founders of an association and the internal ‘institutional idea’ of the community. But, as we have seen earlier, he does not take into account the internal structural principles but replaces them by speculative neo-Platonic Ideas, which, via their attractive influence upon man in his social milieu, embody themselves in the organized communities as ‘idées d'oeuvre’.

From this metaphysical viewpoint the criminal associations cause a particular difficulty. Hauriou finds no other way out to explain their ‘institutional’ nature but the assumption of ‘bad Ideas’ by the side of the ‘good Ideas’, though subordinated to the latter. But, apart from the fact that this assumption contradicts the very fundamentals of the neo-Platonic doctrine of Ideas, it cannot solve the difficulty. For Hauriou overlooks that a ‘bad

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Idea’ cannot explain why even an organized gang of robbers in its internal communal sphere maintains some normative principles of behaviour which have a supra-arbitrary foundation in the divine world-order.

Evil does not possess an independent power but can only derive its attractive force from the divine creation. It can only deform but not build a societal community and even its deforming power is derived from the creation of man in the image of God.

In an organized gang of robbers it is the criminal purpose of the undertaking which deforms the positivation of a structural principle which as such is good. But apart from the latter the gangsters could not realize any communal relationship.

*

If the typical relation between the established purpose of the association and the supra-arbitrary principle of the latter is lost sight of, and the subjective purpose is considered the only factor which determines the typical internal nature of the voluntary association, there is nothing left but an eradication of the boundaries between the internal communal and the external inter-individual relations. Then the latter are also misinterpreted in a subjectivistic sense, as we shall show presently. Such a misconception is implied in the view that the types of organized communities that come into existence in the form of a free association are exclusively to be conceived from the viewpoint of an inter-personal contractual agreement. This view prevails in the nominalistic theory of natural law, as well as in modern juridical positivism.

Tönnies also holds this view of the ‘Körperschaften’ originating from the free inter-personal relations. In his opinion the contract containing the external rational purpose is the exhaustive explanation of the nature of such associations, at least if they do not contain any remnants of what he calls a ‘communal mind’. This is a second reason why from the outset I objected to adopting his contrast between ‘Gemeinschaft’ and ‘Gesellschaft’, although I readily admit that it contains an important element of truth. The point is that Tönnies ignores the internal structure of voluntary associations. He calls their internal unity a ‘construction of thought’¹. The organized whole formed in

1 Op. cit., p. 98.

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this way is in his opinion really the sum of internally unconnected individuals who, in spite of all organization, continue to be separate and single. This view cannot be correct. But it must be admitted that the non-institutional societal units meant here have arisen from the free inter-personal relations. And it is true that their internal communal bond may be of a superficial character. They will always betray their inter-individual origin in the form of their organization.

The process of individualization in the inter-personal relations as the emancipation of the individual man from the all-sided temporal embracement by the undifferentiated societal relationships. Once again Tönnies' antithesis between ‘Gemeinschaft’ and ‘Gesellschaft’.

Let us once again consider this genetic coherence between the voluntary associations and the differentiated inter-individual relations in its typical historical foundation. The elements of truth in Tönnies' view will thereby come to the fore in their real significance.

We have seen that all voluntary associations, in whose genetic form the establishment of aim and means plays a constitutive rôle, pre-suppose a process of individualization in the inter-personal societal relations. This individualization guarantees the separate individual person, as such, a sphere of private liberty in his temporal life outside of all institutional communities.

On a closed level of historical development human society is dominated by the undifferentiated communal relationships, embracing the whole temporal existence of the individuals except their natural communal and inter-communal bonds. Even in their inter-individual relations the individual persons are not present as such, but only in their inclusion by the special institutional organizations as members of different sibs and tribes or of various joint families. The inter-individual relations really function primarily between the undifferentiated social units, and secondarily between the individual members of the latter.

In the above-mentioned individualizing process of the inter-individual relations a real emancipation takes place. The individual spheres of liberty of the separate individual persons are recognized as falling outside of all institutional communal bonds. This individualizing process cannot start before the process of differentiation and integration begins to operate in human so-

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ciety. Then the undifferentiated forms of interlacement of societal structures are gradually dissolved. Under the influence of romanticism Tönnies considered the latter as natural communal bonds, in which the true ‘spirit of community’ is operative in an unadulterated and energetic form. He overlooked that these primitive societal forms shut people off in a kind of exclusive ‘symbiosis’ within comparatively narrow boundaries. These undifferentiated types of institutional communities are incompatible with the thought that individual men, as such, should have an individual sphere of social liberty withdrawn from any communal sphere.

Consequently there is doubtless a close connection between the rise of organizations constituted by an associational agreement or by a one-sided private act of foundation for a special purpose, and the breaking up of the undifferentiated institutional communites. But the result is that the inter-individual relations are no longer enclosed within the narrow limits of the tribe or the primitive ethnic community but, in principle at least, the individual may enter into free relations with other people wherever his new contacts may carry him. And in itself this is not fatal to human society but, on the contrary, it is completely in line with the opening-process of history and the vocation of man. To the latter point we shall revert presently.

The contrast between a large city and the country.

There is no doubt that this individualizing process has been much faster and more intense in the culture of a large city than in the country. In the country all kinds of remnants of undifferentiated societal relations may have been retained in a tenacious tradition connected with a certain dependence on the soil. This is suggestively illustrated by the simple comparison of a more or less patriarchal family of agriculturists with the family relations in a metropolis, where the differentiating and individualizing process has developed to an extreme degree of intensity.

It is true that, in contradistinction to a medieval town, a large modern city is as such not a community. But the medieval town could only be an institutional community by means of its guild-organization, which after all retained a primitive, relatively undifferentiated character. This does not detract from the fact that, as centres of trade and industry, these towns displayed developmental tendencies which in comparison with the medieval coun-

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try must be called progressive. But these very tendencies necessarily led to the future dissolution of the guild-system and the breaking down of the town as a closed community.

The modern city has not dissolved all communal bonds into inter-individual relationships in which men are reduced to isolated individuals. Rather it shows the picture of a very complicated system of enkaptic interlacements between natural, political and ecclesiastic institutional bonds of community, inter-individual relationships of a cosmopolitan character, an immense variety of voluntary associations that may or may not give rise to differently qualified labour-communities, etc. The only really integrating communal bond in this extremely differentiated enkaptic system of societal relationships is the political bond of municipality; but it cannot make the modern metropolis in all of its differentiated communal and inter-individual relationships into a real communal whole.

In this respect the modern large city has a typically different character from a village in the country which has more or less retained the traits of a natural community, founded in biotic neighbourhood. In the metropolis the spirit of the natural communities no longer dominates societal life. The enormous expansion and individualizing of the inter-individual relationships has to a large degree deprived the latter of that intimate character which is characteristic of the inter-individual social life in an out of the way village. This is why, viewed apart from the central commandment of love, the metropolitan inter-individual societal relations display, at least preponderantly, an impersonal trait.

The Christian view versus the individualistic idea of inter-personal relations.

Viewed from its structural basis, and not from the sinful subjective way of its realization, this process of expansion and emancipation in the coordinated inter-individual relations does not have an un-christian and dissolving character. On the contrary, the Christian religion has laid the foundation of a world-wide expansion of the individualized inter-individual relations. By laying bare the religious root of mankind in creation, fall and redemption, it has revealed the meaning-fulness of the idea of community, in opposition to all narrow-minded nationalism and to all kinds of deification of particular temporal societal relationships. For the true idea of the free inter-personal relations, as

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conceived from the Biblical standpoint, does not start from an idea of man as a self-sufficient, autarchical ‘individuum’, but from the religious supra-temporal unity of the human race founded in creation. According to its transcendental structure every temporal societal relationship should be an expression of this supra-temporal community, which reveals its full sense in the corpus Christi.

In the individualized opened inter-personal relations men are not socially united in a special temporal community, but they are nevertheless bound together in the transcendent unity of mankind. There is no question of a depreciation of these inter-individual relationships in the New Testament. In the parable of the merciful Samaritan, Jesus intentionally chooses such an inter-individual relationship to answer the question who is one's neighbour. The Jews and the Samaritans did not entertain any private temporal communal bonds with each other. But Jesus revealed their radical community, which implies that the central commandment of love also has validity outside of the temporal communal relations. Even in the most extreme differentiation and individualization of these free inter-personal relations man is never an autarchical self-contained ‘individual’. The self-insufficiency and fundamental dependence of every single man assumes larger and larger proportions. The reason is that the opening-process in society is accompanied by an immense increase of the individual man's needs and thereby of his dependence, his reliance on others. For the means to satisfy these needs can only be produced in a highly differentiated process of division of labour.

Hegel's dialectical idea of the ‘bürgerliche Gesellschaft’.

Hegel conceived the unbreakable correlation between the individualizing process in the inter-individual relations of ‘civil society’ (‘bürgerliche Gesellschaft’) and the increasing interweaving of the interests of individual persons, as a ‘strategem of reason’ (List der Vernunft).

In his dialectical idealistic conception of ‘civil society’ he tries dialectically to reconcile the naturalistic-individualistic construction of the free inter-personal relations, devised by Thomas Hobbes, with the Humanistic idea of law and morality in Kant's individualistic conception of the ideal of autonomous personality.
Both conceptions are finally combined into a higher synthesis in Hegel's own universalistic freedom idealism of the ‘objective spirit’,

[p. 584]

objectifying itself dialectically in history. Thus he considers the individualizing process in the inter-individual social relations which started in the 16th and 17th centuries in the Western world, primarily to be an inevitable development of the selfishness of the ‘individual’, in the sense of Hobbes' naturalistic view of society. The same natural necessity, however, causes the antagonistic principle of interdependence and solidarity to assert itself. Conceived within the categories of Hegel's metaphysical logic, the dialectical unity of the ‘particular’ and the ‘universal’ finds its expression in this process. The particular purposes of the egoistic individual must assume the form of universality in order to come to themselves. In the ‘beziehungsreiche Bezogenheit’ of all individual interests the welfare of others is promoted together with the selfish purpose of the individual person.
The particular purpose assumes the form of universality, though in ‘civil society’ this universality remains restricted to the external relations¹ (i.e. the free inter-personal relations in our sense).
This ‘civil society’ embraces all the individuals in the interwovenness of its totality. Thereby the moral Idea finds its expression in the social movement. This morality is still dominated by the compelling necessity of satisfying economic needs. It is the child of need and merely rational considerations, but it elevates civil society above blind natural necessity into the sphere of freedom. The ethical Idea as the substantial unity of subjectivity and objectivity (the latter intended in the sense of the legal and the moral norms), here diverges into these two dialectical moments. Subjectivity strives after the unlimited pursuit of its selfish economic interests, in its ‘free arbitrariness’, not from a blind natural urge only.
This ‘free arbitrariness’ of subjectivity is the sphere of its abstract subjective right. But in this it is confronted by the legal and ethical norm of universality, as its dialectical opposite. Thus the ‘bürgerliche Gesellschaft’ drives the individual out of family life and raises him to a higher spiritual level of development pointing beyond itself to Hegel's ‘Vernunftstaat’. In this ‘Vernunftstaat’ the moral ideal reveals itself again in its substantial unity, because here the antithesis between subject and norm has been cancelled in the no longer formal but substantial moral freedom of everybody as a part of the whole. Hegel's conception of ‘civil society’ does not only embrace the ‘free inter-personal relations’, in our sense, but also the State in the external intellectual conception of the ‘Aufklärung’ (as the organized administration of justice and ‘Polizei’), together with all the voluntary associations². In this view three main struc-

1 Cf. Vol. III of Hegel's Encyclopädie der phil. Wissenschaften (2nd ed.) §§ 523 and 534.

2 Cf. ibidem, § 523: ‘die in sich entwickelte Totalität dieses Zusammenhanges (i.e. of the individuals and their private interests) ist der Staat als bürgerliche Gesellschaft oder als äusserer Staat’. [The totality that has developed in this coherence is the State as civil society or the external State.]

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tures are distinguishable within the ‘bürgerliche Gesellschaft’¹:
1. the economic system of needs and their satisfaction in the economic process of labour, in which all the individuals cooperate in mutual dependence;
2. the system of the civil legal order and administration of justice, guaranteeing the work of all the individuals to be bound to those universal civil requirements by which subjectivity is subjected to the norm of universality;
3. the system of ‘Polizei’ (police) in the wider sense of ‘Verwaltung’ (i.e. public administration), as the factor of power suppressing all disturbing moments in the social development that are contrary to the requirements of external universality, and promoting the moments conducive to the private welfare of everybody.
In this conception civil society is from the outset made a preamble to the ideal State, as the ‘totality of substantial morality’ and the final stage in the development of ‘objective Spirit’. The internal structure of this society is conceived as a complex of economic purposes regulated by civil juridical and administrative legal rules.
The family and civil society are dialectically elevated to a higher unity in the totality of the absolute State. Hegel from the outset conceives of the economic system of the needs of society in the modern form of the capitalistic system. The complete development of individual entrepreneurial dispositions and of private interests are predominant here. And with a keen eye Hegel sees how the unrestrained development of mechanical production inevitably makes a whole class of the population dependent on the capitalists².

Hegel fully realized that the increasing differentiation in social needs necessarily entails an increasing division of labour. In the latter the individuals form social classes according to the kind of work they share of their own free choice in the process of labour. The ‘reason immanent in society’ (‘immanente Vernunft’) finds expression in this grouping into social classes. For in the infinite variety of individual purposes general features appear in a common occupation. Thus the social coherence is differentiated into special systems of needs, the means of their satisfaction, and labour; and the individuals have to integrate themselves into one of these systems. Social class distinctions can be reduced to a logical triad:

1.	the substantial or agricultural class;
2.	the reflecting or formal class, the class of manual labourers and manufacturers, and

1 Cf. Enc. §§ 524, 529 and 533.

2 Cf. Paul Vogel, Hegel's Gesellschaftsbegriff (Berlin, 1925).

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3.	the general class which does not depend on a natural soil like the first, nor, like the second, on the free treatment of a material in adaptation to the variable demand of a market, but looks after all those interests relating to the maintenance and the ordering of civil society as a whole.

Hegel's view of the corporative vocational classes.

Hegel is of the opinion that the formation of voluntary associations in our sense, or ‘Korporationen’ (as he styles them), is of a more fundamental importance only for the second social class, that of the manual labourers and manufacturers. The typical productive work of this social class is dependent on the variable demand of a market. Consequently they run the risk of losing themselves in the striving after more or less insignificant private interests, and of entirely failing to see the higher, general concerns.

Corporative joining together is the remedy against this evil. In the social corporation the individual citizen leaves the sphere of his private interest to cooperate in the service of the comparative universality of the organized corporative group interest. This is the highest form of public spirit attainable in civil society. But in principle it remains below the level of the State, in which society, just like the family, can only have the position of a part within the whole.

Hegel conceives free associations only in the sense of ‘corporative occupational classes’. The ‘corporation’ is the only seat and guarantee of ‘vocational class honour’. Any one who is no member of any recognized corporation has no such ‘honour’. He is isolated; and to maintain himself he must concentrate all his attention on the selfish aspect of his occupation. His sustenance and enjoyment of life are entirely dependent on the uncertainty of his individual income. His selfish diligence tries to outstrip all others with any means that promise to be successful, without taking account of the interests of the others. He does not feel obliged to live in accordance with his social station because there is no ‘social station’ for him.

The mere fact that his occupational fellows have much in common with him is not sufficient to make him a conscious member of a ‘class’. Only the corporation strives after reconciling the sharp antithesis in civil society between individual interest and the demand of universality in the form of civil law. Each of its members recognizes the private welfare of any other member

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as a right which he helps to guarantee and to maintain. Just like the sanctity of the marital and the family bond, the corporative class-ethics must be maintained, if civil society is not to be doomed to decay.

Criticism of Hegel's view of society.

This summary of Hegel's view of ‘civil society’ has been somewhat elaborate, because all modern theories about the structure of social life, and also Tönnies' theory of ‘Gesellschaft’, have been more or less influenced by it. This is sufficient to indicate its importance. Hegel has given a masterly interpretation of the historical development of the modern individualized inter-individual societal relations. He has integrated his insight into some essential features of this development, into his universalistic Humanistic freedom idealism. He has evaluated the influence of the Christian idea of free inter-personal relations on the individualizing process in modern social relations; he has shown that in the ancient Greco-Roman culture such an individualizing process was impossible since the religious value of the individual personality was not yet recognized.

But notwithstanding all these important elements of truth, Hegel's Humanistic conception of modern society is unacceptable to us. In a universalistic way it is oriented to a deified national State so that it cannot correctly conceive of the peculiar integrational tendencies in the individualized free inter-individual relations. Hegel's logicistically founded scheme of three social classes has a speculative-constructive character. The economic motives in free society are considered to be the primary forces in individual development though unconsciously directed by the ‘moral idea’. This is an exaggerated conception of the significance of the economic motives oriented to the idea of the homo economicus. Historical materialism was to transform this liberalist assumption into the thesis that the foundational rôle belongs to the technical-economic forms of production as supra-individual driving forces of society.

Thus the individualizing-process is misrepresented and, as a consequence, Hegel's account of the internal structural diversity of the voluntary organizations is also defective. The latter are forced into the constructive scheme of the three occupational classes. This scheme from the outset unjustifiably restricts Hegel's theory and renders it insufficient as a truly philosophical structural theory of the inter-individual relationships, and the voluntary associations arising from them.

[p. 588]

Nevertheless, one of the most important elements of truth in this theory is the insight into the peculiar generalizing and integrating tendency in the free societal purposes, which forms the necessary counterpart of the increasing individualizing tendency. Here Hegel has really discovered a structural law of modern society which (though often misinterpreted in a natural-scientific sense) has found general recognition in sociological theory. It is this law which first demands our attention.

§ 3 - Individuality structures in the individualized free inter-individual and inter-communal relations, and the integrating tendencies in modern society.

The structural law Hegel discovered had best be called the normative law of correlative differentiation and integration in the inter-individual societal relations founded in the opened historical development.

We have already seen that this structural law also holds for the development of the organized communal relationships. For the dissolution of the undifferentiated organized communities proved to be accompanied by the rise of integrating institutional communities, which pull down the partition-walls between different ethnical groups and unite them into a higher differentiated whole. But in the free inter-individual societal relations, as such, this' structural law cannot manifest itself in the same way. Integration cannot result here in a transformation of non-communal relations into communal ones. How then does this law operate in the inter-individual spheres of human society?

Individuality-structures in the differentiated inter-individual and inter-communal relationships.

Let us first consider the individuality-structures displayed by the differentiated inter-individual or inter-communal societal relations. For it would be a fundamental misunderstanding to suppose that at least the latter lack such structural types. If this were so, they could not belong to the full temporal reality of societal life. For this reality necessarily reveals itself in individuality-structures in which the modal structures of the law-spheres are only implied or pre-supposed a priori.

Free market relations, publicity, the differentiated fashions (in dress, recreation, conversation, etc.), sports and competition, the press, the various kinds of traffic, public musical and thea-

[p. 589]

trical performances, private philanthropy, diplomacy, international political relations, electioneering propaganda of political parties, missionary activity, etc., imply a rich variety of structural types in the differentiated inter-individual and inter-communal relationships. That the latter are necessarily correlated with (voluntary or institutional) organized communal relationships does not detract from their own structural typicalness.

Just like those of a differentiated communal character, the individuality-structures of the differentiated inter-individual or inter-communal relationships possess two radical functions of which the leading function has the qualifying rôle. Fashion, e.g., as an inter-individual societal phenomenon, is qualified by a typical function of social intercourse, just like ‘sports’. Such phenomena as a free market, publicity, market competition, etc. are economically qualified, social philantropy is of a moral qualification, missionary activity is qualified as an activity of faith, etc. All these structures are of a typical historical foundation.

Also individual acts display different individuality-structures according to their inter-individual side. Saluting a friend in the street, e.g., is qualified as a typical act of social intercourse although, as a concrete act, it functions in all the law-spheres. A purchase agreement or a lease-contract is economically qualified¹, a public performance of music is aesthetically qualified, giving an alms in public is morally qualified, etc. In this sense the free inter-individual relations, too, may be said to have an internal structure. But this structure does not include people in a solidary internal unit as to their temporal existence, as is done by the structure of a community. The structure of an inter-individual relationship, as such, is not based on an organization, but the individuals functioning in it are left to act in essential coordination, although they are dependent on one another. In the inter-individual or inter-communal spheres human actions inter-lock either in cooperation or in antagonism. They are either pointed in one direction (e.g., in following fashions), or they supplement one another (in the process of the social division of labour), or they are at strife with each other (competition in the

1 Such an agreement is not juridically qualified. Only in their enkaptical interlacement with State-positivized ‘civil law’ do social agreements acquire a civil juridical aspect. As explained earlier, civil law is not identical with inter-individual private law, but it is essentially private law, integrated by the State, and leaving the internal structure of economically qualified inter-individual law intact.

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market, relations of war, etc.). The positivized structural norms act as regulators in this process, and the normative leading functions of the various structures of inter-individual relationships also open the latter's pre-logical functions in an anticipatory direction. Therefore any attempt to explain the inter-individual relations as ‘natural phenomena’, as was done by the older mechanist trend in sociology, rests on a fundamental misconception.

Primitive and opened inter-individual societal structures.

We shall now explain in what way the law of integration reveals itself in the differentiated typical structures of the individualized inter-individual societal relationships. Therefore it is necessary to consider once again the difference between these differentiated structures and those of primitive inter-individual social relations.

We have seen that the latter are as yet undifferentiated and wholly interwoven with the undifferentiated order of the narrow tribal or folk-community. Primitive inter-individual societal relations consequently possess the same isolating and limiting character as these organized communities themselves. The inter-individual social customs and manners vary from tribe to tribe. Everything outside the primitive folk-relationship is experienced as something alien or even hostile. Each tribal relationship has its own vertically individualized, isolated, miniature ‘society’.

Compare with this state of affairs modern individualized ‘society’ based on Western civilization, and it is at once evident that the modern positive structural norms of inter-individual relationships show an opposite tendency: their sphere of validity tends to horizontal expansion all over the civilized world, and not to vertical isolation. Even the modern State is unable to set vertical limits to this horizontal expansion though, as an institutional organized community, the body politic itself exhibits an integrating character. In principle modern inter-individual relations have international tendencies.

In the positivizing process of their structural types organized or un-organized ‘leading groups’ generally come to the fore. As such, they do not possess any societal authority implying a claim to obedience, but they take the lead in inter-individual social life, and are generally followed and imitated.

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The integrating character of fashion. Fashion and national dress.

‘Fashion’ is a very interesting example of social imitation. Its proper nature asserts itself quite obviously in the horizontal inter-individual societal relations. Here fashion integrates the way in which people dress, their inter-individual behaviour in general, the choice of their recreations, etc., without uniting the individuals to a temporal societal unity. On the contrary, fashion in this sense is experienced as a dividing factor in human society. Originally it was a means used by the higher classes to distinguish themselves from the lower classes, although the latter are always eager to imitate them. Think of Schiller's Ode an die Freude:

‘Deine Zauber bindet wieder
Was die Mode frech geteilt.’

The fashion-norms of dress are very variable, they even vary with the seasons. They are not formed by some casual ‘individuals’, but by the ‘leading circles’ who possess organized power in social intercourse, by the ‘leading’ houses in Paris, London, Vienna, etc. These circles cannot create real norms of fashion in a perfectly arbitrary way. They remain bound to dynamical principles of social taste, distinction, efficiency, founded in historical development, as well as to the individuality structures of the societal relations in which the various types of dress are worn. These principles leave ample scope to the formative phantasy of these designers of fashion. Models that do not reckon with these principles will not easily find acceptance in society. Extravagances of fashion never have a normative function.

Norms of fashion in inter-individual societal relations have a patent expansive, international character, although their positive forms may display an extraordinary capricious variability. They overstep the boundaries of the national communities and express the idea of modern world citizenship albeit in a very external sense. In a restricted area there may still exist a ‘national dress’, which had better be styled a ‘folk-dress’ since it is characteristic of an ethnical group, rather than of a nation as a whole. But there is no national fashion in dress. Modern fashion is intrinsically international and the avowed enemy to ‘national costumes’, making the latter to a kind of atavism in modern society. Fashion is the great cosmopolitan ruler representing a powerful integra-

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ting factor in inter-individual social relations, notwithstanding its capriciousness.

It is meaningful to point these things out emphatically, in opposition tov. Jehring, who in his work Der Zweck im Recht treats fashion as a social excrescense, in contrast to ‘folk-dress’. Fashion he considers as originating solely in impure motives of class pride and vanity¹. But he forgets that modern society displays an integrating process in every sphere. This process is incompatible with the preponderance of historical-ethnical peculiarities in social forms of inter-individual intercourse, and is in itself certainly no sign of decadence, but the necessary condition of an expansive development of the inter-individual societal relationships. Nor is it as such a symptom of the impersonal ‘mass-man’, since it leaves scope to the expression of personal individuality.

In the modern reaction of fascism and national socialism an artificial national element - in fact nothing but a device of the ruling totalitarian party - was made to dominate even the inter-individual relations of social intercourse (witness the ‘German’ and ‘Italian fascist’ manner of saluting). This was a foolish set-back of the normal development of modern inter-individual social life, caused by the setting up of national barriers (also in the economically, scientifically, and aesthetically qualified relations).

The differentiating factors in the integrating tendency of individualized inter-individual relations are the individuality-structures of the latter. Fashion in general, e.g., as an integrating structure, is only radical-typically qualified by its leading function in the social relations of intercourse. It is geno-typically and pheno-typically differentiated according to particular subject-object relations and its interweaving with other structural types of inter-individual relations: there is, e.g., a fashion in sporting clothes, in evening dress, in travelling clothes, lounge-suits and street-dresses, etc. This differentiation, however, is no longer predominantly dependent on national or local peculiarities², but it bears an expansive cosmopolitan character.

1 Op. cit. II, p. 188.

2 The climate and other natural factors to some degree continue to cause a separation. In Indonesian society, e.g., even the social forms of intercourse among Europeans are influenced by climatic factors, in the first place with regard to clothing.

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This statement holds good for all opened individuality structures in the modern inter-individual relations of human society. In the first place in all the types of the latter qualified by the function of social intercourse, and not solely in those belonging to fashion, the differentiational process is indissolubly bound up with an international integrating tendency, imparting a cosmopolitan character to the forms of social intercourse. In civilized modern society the national character is becoming less and less decisive for the differentiated forms of inter-individual intercourse; the recent reactionary phenomena, mentioned above, may be left out of account because they have disappeared since the break-down of the totalitarian political systems which gave rise to them. National or local forms of inter-individual intercourse and customs which have no typical foundation in climatic or other natural factors, are increasingly experienced as obsolescent peculiarities that are gradually dying out. Only where modern ‘civilized’ man enters into social contact with people of a more or less isolated culture, the vertical contrast between the different cultural characters is also fully revived within the inter-individual relations of human society.

The correlation between the modern integrating and differentiating tendencies reveals itself perhaps even more strongly in the typical economically qualified inter-individual relationships. Here modern technical development and modern world traffic are the great integrating factors. The differentiation is brought about chiefly according to the international branches of trade, industry, etc. The typical integrating tendencies within these economically qualified structures of inter-individual relationships are founded in the economic power of the leading entrepreneurial groups.

The economically qualified integration of contractual law in the different branches of the inter-individual industrial relationships.

This state of affairs is clearly revealed in the inter-individual legal relations of industrial and commercial life. The increasing integrating significance of so-called customary stipulations, standard-contracts, general conditions, etc. in the individual economically qualified agreements has left only very little scope to the private autonomy of the contracting parties in this typical sector of inter-individual relationships. In the so-called contrats d'adhésion the contents of the agreement are even completely

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one-sidedly established by the organized industrial groups; those who want to make use of their economic services are obliged to accept their contractual conditions because they have no other choice. It is evident that the organized leading groups have no single legal competence to impose their integrating contractual rules upon the individual parties of an agreement. These rules can only assume the character of customary law because they are usually accepted by the contracting parties themselves. It is only their leading rôle in the inter-individual relationships of industrial and commercial life, based upon their organized economic power, which enables the organized groups to bring about a horizontal integration in the contents of the individual agreements. And this integration is differentiated according to the horizontal branches of industry or trade.

This does not mean an intrinsical transformation of civil law into an economically qualified ‘social law’, as Duguit supposed. The integrating process in the economically qualified inter-individual relationships does not pertain to the internal sphere of civil law, but to that of inter-individual industrial and commercial law, which is only enkaptically interwoven with the former. We have already seen that outside of the internal sphere of civil law there is no question of any abstract ‘equality’ of the (coordinated) subjects in the inter-individual societal relations. Everywhere differences in talent, social-economic position, etc. assert themselves in the latter.

The rationalizing process in modern society. Technical progress and science as rational integrating factors.

Modern technical progress is one of the most powerful integrating factors in the modern individualized and differentiated inter-individual societal relations. In this process the social rôle of science as a necessary integrating factor is implicitly set in the clearest light, together with the enkaptic inter-structural interlacements of the different types of inter-individual societal relationships. As a concrete social phenomenon, presenting itself in the correlation of inter-individual and organized communal relationships, ‘science’ displays a theoretically-logically qualified (and materially differentiated) individuality-structure founding that of modern technical progress.

The opening and individualizing process in the free inter-individual societal relations is at the same time a rationalizing

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process of human society. As such, the latter is no more a symptom of apostasy and decadence than the process of integration, provided that is is accomplished harmoniously, and not by overstraining theoretical thought. Rather it is destined to disclose and to realize the potentialities and dispositions inherent in the social relations according to the divine world-order.

The individualizing, differentiating and integrating process in the free inter-individual relations as well as in the internal organizational relationships cannot dispense with the support of science in the long run. Even the formation of positive norms in the different normative modal aspects of the inter-individual societal relations needs the aid of science, when the process mentioned above progresses.

As far as the formation of law is concerned, the Historical School had a correct insight into this state of affairs. In the description of the development of law this school set in the light that the class of scientific jurists began to play a necessary part in the formation of law when juridical relations became more and more complicated. But this insight did not warrant the inference that theoretical jurisprudence is a formal source of positive law, as Puchta and Jhering (in the second volume of his Geist der Römischen Rechtes) supposed. For juridical science as such, lacks the competence to form law. The juridical concept of competence is an essential moment of the concept ‘source of law’.

The growing influence of individualistic tendencies in modern society during the first half of the XIXth century and the irreconcilable struggle of the Christian idea of inter-individual relationship against them.

The correlated differentiating and integrating tendencies in the modern inter-individual societal relationships cannot fail to result in an individualistic process of disintegration in modern society, if they are not counter-balanced by a due unfolding of the organized institutional communities and voluntary associations. This disintegration is what actually happened under the leading of the Humanistic science-ideal in the first phase of industrial revolution. The rationalized and absolutized idea of free inter-individual relations dominated the entire industrial sector of Western society and gave it an extremely individualistic and merciless capitalistic form. It is true that the process of differentiation and integration tends to increase the interweaving of

[p. 596]

individual interests. But in the free inter-individual societal relations the unrestrained striving after separate interests gave rise to fierce antagonism, which even lacked the remedy indicated by Hegel, viz. the formation of organized occupational classes.

The process of unlimited one-sided technical rationalization in economically qualified industrial life sharpened the contrast between the interests of labour and capital to a real class-struggle. Labour was viewed apart from the human personality as market ware, and in the factories the labour-community was to a high degree affected by the individualist, exclusively contractual viewpoint. The unlimited competition on the market made the Hobbesian picture of the state of nature, as a condition of ‘homo homini lupus’, into a terrible reality.

As the inter-individual societal structures are indissolubly interwoven with those of the institutional relationships, family and kinship as well as the State were also affected by this morbid process of disease in ‘free society’. Societal groups for the promotion of private interests tried to seize the political power to make the institution of the State subservient to their social ends. The factor of private economical interest and the poisonous ideology of the dogma of class struggle penetrated the political party system. Family- and kinship-life of the labourers were denatured by the encroachment of the impersonally rationalized industrial labour-relations. In international political relations the ‘sacred egoism’ of the separate States was elevated to the highest law.

Such individualistic tendencies in social development form an irreconcilable antithesis with the Christian idea of free inter-individual relations. The civitas terrena revealed itself in this individualistic process of distintegration, and Christianity was doomed to decay whenever it thought of making a truce, or concluding a peace-treaty with this kingdom of darkness.

The counter-tendencies in the forms of horizontal organization of modern society. The so-called Christian solidarism and its universalist view of industrial life.

For reasons of self-preservation it is necessary for modern society to develop counter-tendencies against the unbridled operation of individualism. This is what modern society is actually doing in the formation of voluntary associations or

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unions which direct the typical integrative tendencies in horizontal forms of organization.

These organizational forms are to be observed in the most different sectors of free societal life, in science and fine arts, in sports and the different branches of instruction, in journalism, philantropy, etc. But the most impressive image of this organizational integrating process is to be found in the economically qualified societal relationships. Both employers and labourers in trade, traffic and industry have organized themselves according to the various branches of the latter, though in all these branches organization has not arrived at an equal level of development.

In addition, trusts, large business concerns, etc. have been formed, which often display an international character. And although cartels are not organized communities, they often exercise an international restraining influence on unbridled competition, though they may also imply serious dangers to healthy market relations. The increase of collective bargaining stimulated the idea that employers and labourers should try and find new horizontal forms of organized cooperation. The aim was to give expression to their solidarity in taking to heart the common interests in the different branches of industrial life and to strengthen the communal bonds between employers and labourers in the separate industrial undertakings.

It was especially the Christian conception of social solidarity which inspired this idea, frankly in opposition to the Marxian dogma of class-struggle. In different countries it has exercised a salutory influence upon the integrating tendencies in modern industrial societal relationships. Nevertheless, it must be granted that this movement of Christian solidarism had not completely emancipated itself from the universalist-romantic view of human society, current in the so-called Christian-historical trend of thought in the period of the Restauration. Especially the conception of an entire branch of industry as a ‘natural community’, which was considered as an autonomous and ‘organical’ part of the ‘national whole’, revealed an after-effect of this romantic view, which could eventually be synthesized with the Aristotelian-Thomistic view of society.

It was overlooked that a branch of industry necessarily displays a correlation between organizational-communal and inter-communal or inter-individual relationships, and that the latter can never be transformed into the former. It was further over-

[p. 598]

looked that a national community can never encompass the internal industrial relationships, notwithstanding their enkaptical intertwinement with national life.

This universalist misconception resulted in the erroneous idea that a public legal organization of industrial life was to be considered as a natural development of the true inner nature of the different branches of industry, as ‘natural communities’. From an ‘organical’ view of human society it was concluded that the horizontal organizations of these industrial branches could lay claim to a public legal competence on their own account by virtue of an ‘historical right’, consequently a competence not derived from the legislator. Here we meet with the appeal to the medieval guilds, whose public legal autonomy preceded the rise of the modern State as a res publica. Some Christian politicians, influenced by the Germanist wing of the Historical School, had argued that this political autonomy should be attributed also to modern industrial organizations in line with the organic development of history. This original (not derived) public legal competence should only be accommodated to the modern ‘organic’ State-idea by acknowledging the sovereign power of the body politic to test the autonomous compulsory regulations of the industrial associations to the public interest.

This ‘organical view’ was readily accepted by the movement of Christian solidarism both in its Roman Catholic and Protestant trends. In the Netherlands the Protestant Christian league of trade unions interpreted the principle of sphere-sovereignty (Dutch: ‘souvereiniteit in eigen kring’) of industrial life in this sense. But in this way this principle was completely misunderstood since it was viewed apart from its structural foundation in the temporal order of reality. It was overlooked that medieval political autonomy, so long as it was viewed as a subjective right of the guilds, only suited to an undifferentiated society and that a public legal authority is never to be derived from the inner nature of a private organization of industrial life in its different branches. Here, too, it appears that a universalist denaturation of the genuine Christian idea of social solidarity necessarily leads to an eradication of the structural principles of the different types of societal relationships.

A public legal organization of industrial life, as it was introduced in the Netherlands by the Public Industrial Organization Act of 1950, can as such never belong to the inner sphere-sovereignty of industry and agriculture as economically quali-

[p. 599]

fied sectors of the societal process of production. Within a State's territory any public legal authority exercised by organs composed of representatives of organizations of employers and trade unions, is derived from the legislator. A public legal organization means an organization of the industrial and agricultural branches which is typically qualified by the leading juridical function of the State. The organs of such an organization may have a delegated autonomy, whose limits are completely dependent on the public interest in the previously defined sense. But any confusion of this autonomy with the inner sphere-sovereignty of the economically qualified private industrial and agricultural relations must lead either to a deformation of public legal authority, or to an absorption of free industrial and agricultural life by the political sphere of the State.

The international tendencies in the political integration of modern society.

By means of a public legal industrial organization the State can strengthen the integrating tendencies revealing themselves in the formation of private horizontal organizations in the different branches of industry, agriculture, etc. In line with the modern view of public industrial ordering, the State will not be satisfied with such a horizontal public legal integration but combine the latter with a compulsory vertical organization of the processes of national production which intersect the horizontal branches of industry and agriculture. In both respects the integrating function of the body politic continues to be restricted by its own internal structural principle, as we have explained in an earlier context. By means of a public legal industrial organization, the State can only bind the industrial (and agricultural) relationships insofar as the latter are enkaptically interwoven with its own structure.

And the same restriction holds good for its integrating function with respect to the other non-political spheres of societal relationships which lack an institutional character.

Meanwhile, even the typical political integration of these relationships under the leading viewpoint of public interest displays international tendencies which, especially since the second world-war, have assumed a considerable extent. The two terrible world-wars have clearly shown the increasing interdependence of the individual States and the untenability of the dogma of political sovereignty in its earlier sense, based on an individu-

[p. 600]

alistic view of the international political relations. The latter display an integrating tendency similar to that of non-political inter-individual relationships. The big powers have the leading rôle in this process, especially in the international military integration of the defensive means of the weaker States. This process is only checked by the recent division of the world into two opposite camps of political ideology. The first principle, formulated in the second article of the Charter of the United Nations, according to which all the members of this international organisation are considered on the footing of sovereign equality, does certainly not pertain to questions of international security. On the contrary, the leading position of the big powers in this international political sector is clearly confirmed in article 23 of the Charter concerning the composition of the Security Council.

In the present context we are, however, not further concerned with questions of international security, but much rather with the integrating function of the U.N.O. in the non-political spheres of human society. The first article of the Charter mentions as one of the purposes of the United Nations: to achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all, without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion; and to be a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations in the attainment of these common ends.

The enormous activity developed by the U.N.O. and its sub-divisions in the performance of this integrating task is well known. This might raise the question as to whether at least the U.N.O. is not to be viewed as an all-inclusive society embracing all human societal relationships in a supreme unit. So long as the teleological viewpoint supersedes the structural analysis of the different societal relationships the semblance of such a supreme unit of modern society might lead us astray. The truth is, however, that the U.N.O. is nothing but a voluntary association of individual States; its internal structure is qualified by an international public legal function and founded in an historical international organization of power. Though its structural principle is consequently of the same radical type as that of the State, it lacks the institutional character of the latter. In addition it lacks any monopolistic organization of armed force and a territory. And for lack of an independent armed force it can-

[p. 601]

not exercise real governmental authority over the States which are its members. So it is far from being a civitas maxima. And even a civitas maxima would lack the character of an all-inclusive societal whole of mankind.

The established purposes and means of this international organization (viz. the U.N.O.) cannot define its inner nature, which gives an internal restriction to its integrating task with respect to the international relations in the non-political spheres of human society. It is the juridically qualified principle of international public interest which determines the inner nature of this integrating function. The latter displays a promoting and supporting political character and not the compulsory trait of a governmental State regulation, which eventually can impose an ordering deemed to be necessary from the viewpoint of public interest (though the binding force of such a measure cannot exceed the inner boundaries of the State's competence).

The radical Christian idea of human freedom and the tension between the individualistic and the binding integrating tendencies in modern society.

Against the individualistic tendencies in free society God's conserving grace thus calls into play antagonistic organizational tendencies of an integrating character.

In this way the divine world-order is also maintained in the individualized inter individual societal relations. But if this process develops under the predominant leading of an apostate attitude of faith absolutizing temporal interests, there is no harmonious cooperation between the free development of inter-individual relations and the increasing integrative significance of organizational bonds.

Indeed it appears that modern social development displays the picture of a continuous tension between the two tendencies, alternately overstraining the one or the other at the expense of the sound development of both. After a period of extreme individualism modern society is now threatened by a communistic universalism which seeks to realize a totalitarian community of mankind by means of the State's power, although in its ideology the State is completely depreciated. More than a third part of the human race is delivered to the political power of this totalitarian ideology.

Western democracy is in fear of this tremendous adversary and seeks to defend itself by an international integration of its

[p. 602]

military forces. Nevertheless, by military means alone the freedom of man is not to be protected. It should not be forgotten that communism in its Marxian and Bolshevist sense is primarily a spiritual power, a secularized eschatological faith in the final liberation of mankind in a future classless society. It should be borne in mind that, viewed from this spiritual background, it has originated in the dialectical process in which Western thought has been involved since the religious Humanist basic motive of nature and freedom began to reveal its driving power in Western history. And the historical rise of Humanism was closely connected with the dialectical process in which Christian thought was involved by the introduction of the dualist scholastic basic motive of nature and grace.

In this entire dialectical process of Western thought the view of human society was continually swayed between the poles of universalism and individualism. All attempts to find a way out of this alternative were doomed to fail so long as the immanence standpoint was maintained, and the radical and integral freedom of the individual or the radical and integral community of mankind were sought in the temporal order of our earthly existence.

It is of no avail to disregard the fact that to a large extent the spiritual basis of the modern Western ideas of freedom and authority has been undermined by Historicism and relativism. The simple fact that the fascist and nazist totalitarian ideologies could be presented as the only real alternative over against the communistic system was a symptom of this process. And that this suggestion could acquire such a tremendous influence in many countries of central and Southern Europe should be a warning against an optimistic judgment of the real state of affairs. The truth is that since the decline of individualism, even in democratic countries new universalist ideas have penetrated the practical and theoretical view of society. They are presented as a mere historical necessity and adapted to the traditional democratic ideas, which have changed their sense, and in the prevailing theories of the State have been emancipated from their former foundation in an eternal natural law order.

This is why the integrating tendencies in the inter-individual or inter-communal relationships and in the voluntary organizations are readily interpreted as a process of socialization in which the idea of community gains the upperhand. Since this view of social development is emancipated from the structural principles of the differentiated societal relationships, it results

[p. 603]

in an overestimation of the integrating rôle of the national and international political communities.

Even the traditional doctrine of unassailable human rights is not able to check the absolutization of temporal communal relationships, if these rights themselves are interpreted in a universalistic sense. As soon as the inter-individual and inter-communal relationships are viewed as intra-communal, and the structural idea of internal sphere-sovereignty of the different orbits of societal life is replaced by those of autonomy or functional decentralization, there is no fundamental and radical defence against the totalitarian systems.

This radical defence is only found in the Biblical view of human freedom implied in the basic motive of creation, fall into sin and redemption by Jesus Christ. For it converts the whole view of temporal society; it excludes in principle both universalism and individualism, and it enables us to see the structural patterns in the complicated interlacements between inter-individual and communal relationships. The internal sphere-sovereignty of the different temporal structures of societal relationships is the expression of the transcendent destination of mankind. This is the only basis of a harmonious relation of authority and freedom in social development.

§ 4 - A more detailed examination of some types of free association.

The voluntary associations display an infinite structural variety. Some of them only touch man's temporal existence very superficially, such as ‘clubs’; others, e.g., the horizontal occupational organizations such as trade unions, etc., occupy a very important and extensive place in modern society and are at least partly animated by a strong spirit of community and solidarity. Here follows a discussion of the structure of two different types, one of which unites people only very superficially, the other more intensively.

The structural principle of the restricted club.

The typical foundation of the restricted club is an historical form of organized social¹ power exercised by the higher classes.

1 The adjective ‘social’ is here meant in the sense of ‘related to the modal aspect of social intercourse’.

[p. 604]

Its typical leading function is that of social intercourse within a closed communal circle. The special means of promoting this social intercourse in the club relationship are dependent on the special purposes that the founders wanted to realize within the typical structure of their society. The structural principle reveals itself in the typical structural coherence between the foundational and the leading function, and these functions are found in the historical law-sphere and that of social intercourse, respectively. All the really internal communal relations of this type ought to be determined by this structural principle in such a way that the latter finds expression in all the aspects of this societal relationship. Only the internal juridical aspect will be examined here.

The club relationship as such possesses its typical structure of authority which is fundamentally different from that in the organized communities hitherto investigated. The club's authority structure is qualified by its leading function as a communal relationship for select social intercourse. In the internal juridical aspect this structure expresses itself in the juridical authority over the individual members vested in the board and the general assembly. The typical internal juridical competences and duties of the members can never be conceived in their material juridical sense apart from the structural principle.

By suffering a member's mere bodily presence in the club's premises, while deliberately excluding him from any personal social intercourse, the club deprives such a member of his internal societal rights, even though such an internal juridical wrong cannot be redressed in a civil legal way. The provisions concerning the requirements for membership and the grounds of expulsion are of a typical internal juridical character, for these provisions cannot be conceived in their material juridical meaning apart from the structural principle of the club-relationship. Recall the ballot in connection with the social position of the applicant for admission, and the expulsion of a member on the ground of actions that are deemed incompatible with the standing of the club. But all this internal societal law has its reverse side in civil legal inter-individual relations. This will appear in the discussion of juridical sphere-sovereignty in the enkaptic interlacements of communal with inter-individual societal relationships.

[p. 605]

The structural principle of the political party and some sociological definitions of the latter.

We shall have to devote a more elaborate investigation to the structural principle of a political party, which we have chosen as a second example of the application of our method of analysis to structural types of voluntary associations.

We are not concerned here with the interesting investigations which in recent writings have been instituted into the political party from the viewpoint of positive political sociology¹. Our only concern is to try and find the transcendental foundation which alone makes the appearance of such a voluntary association possible. This type of association displays a very remarkable close enkaptic interlacement with the State, guaranteed by its primary aim of influencing the policy of the latter. This aim is essential both to the genetic and the existential societal forms of a political party and also gives to the inner structural principle of the latter its first positive shape. This is to say that it is meaningless to extend the concept of political party to primitive undifferentiated unions as is done, for instance, by Sorokin: ‘Under different names’, so he observes, ‘political parties have existed in practically all historical societies and in less crystallized form in many preliterate populations. As soon as two or more organized factions appear, each endeavors to attain this or that political, economic, or other goal... All such groups have the basic characteristics of a political party as a temporary league with one central goal and program. As soon as such groups are organized and endeavor to realize their purposes, political parties are established and the population differentiates along party lines’².

It should be noted that in this circumscription there is question of ‘the basic characteristics of a political party’ without any attempt being made to define these characteristics. On the contrary, by treating political, economic ‘or other goals’ of factions on the same footing, Sorokin even deprives the term ‘political party’ of its exclusively political sense and the only characteris-

1 Cf., for instance, M. Duverger, Les parties politiques (1951); R. Michels, Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der modernen Demokratie (2nd ed. 1925); R.T. Mc. Kenzie, British Political Parties (1956) and the older standard work of M. Ostrogorski, La démocratie et l'organization des parties politiques, (2nd ed. 1903).

2 Society, Culture and Personality. A System of General Sociology (1947), p. 219.

[p. 606]

tic that is left is the undefined term ‘organized faction’. However, there may be ‘factions’ in a Church, in a school, in a trade union, etc. They may even organize themselves in separate unions. Are all such ‘factions’ to be viewed as political parties? If so, one had better replace the latter term by the general word ‘party-formation’, used by the social scientists of the formal school to denote a relatively constant general ‘element’ of all societal relationships.

But if an exclusively political purpose is acknowledged as an essential characteristic of a political party, as is done in Ostrogorski's definition of the latter as a ‘grouping of individuals for the attainment of a political goal’¹, we have not yet really advanced in defining this type of associtaion. The adjective ‘political’ is multivocal and the purpose of a political party presupposes the inner nature of the latter, determined by its transcendental inner structural principle. Its primary goal, however, cohering (though not identical) with its inner structure of individuality, binds this structural principle undissolubly to that of the State as a res publica. This structural principle cannot be bound to a particular modern form of State government, such as the parliamentary system. But it is certainly confusing to speak of political parties in medieval society so long as there did not yet exist a real body politic with its principle of public interest.

1 La démocratie et les parties politiques, p. 642.

A primordial question. Can a political party have a normative structural principle? The political contrast between the parties, and political relativism.

Meanwhile, there is a primordial question to be answered before we engage in an investigation of the inner nature of the political party: Does not the latter imply a division of the State's people into opposite factions? If so, how can such a party have a normative structural principle of a supra-arbitrary transcendental character? This difficulty is indeed insoluble so long as the internal structural principle is not distinguished from the subjective purposes and factual behaviour of the actually existing parties.

In itself the rise of political parties is a manifestation of the interest and the feeling of responsibility of its founders and members with respect to State affairs.

In his famous work Modern Democracies James Bryce has

[p. 607]

rightly observed that political parties, notwithstanding the justified complaints lodged against them in their factual appearance, are indispensable in any large and free country. No single representative government can do without them. They awaken and maintain the public spirit in the people, they bring about a necessary order in the chaos of the enormous mass of electors. Party discipline, though it should be bound to certain limits, has proved to be a remedy against political egoism and corruption¹. We may add to Bryce's observations that the divergence of opinion concerning the principles of policy of the State is a necessary result of the individualizing process of human society, which proved to be implied in the process of disclosure of the latter. There can be nothing wrong in such a divergence so long as it does not concern the supra-arbitrary fundamentals of the State and of the societal order in general. Within this scope no single subjective political opinion of a party can as such lay claim to absolute validity. Therefore, a debate between different parties may contribute to a mutual correction and to finding a common basis of cooperation in practical questions of policy, without eliminating the fundamental divergence of political viewpoints. This is the considerable value of the parliamentary debate in the framework of the modern parliamentary system.

But this state of affairs should not be interpreted in the sense of a universal axiological relativism, which Kelsen has ascribed to democracy as its life- and world-view, in contradistinction to autocracy, which is supposed to be founded in the belief in an absolute verity². The truth is that no single political total view is independent of a religious basic motive, which rules both the practical life- and world-view and the theoretical view of temporal reality. If indeed democracy, or at least modern parliamentary democracy, should be deemed to be incompatible with the belief in an absolute Truth, this would be tantamount to its inner dissolution as a political governmental system. For a consistent axiological relativism cannot allege a single ground for the maintenance of the State and the entire societal order, which impose themselves upon everybody, and are incompatible with anarchism as an axiological view. Such a relativism cannot provide any argument for the superiority of democracy to

1 Op. cit. Vol. I, ch. XI. Bryce adduces different interesting examples which corroborate the latter thesis.

2 Vom Wesen und Wert der Demokratie (1920), Allgemeine Staatslehre, pp. 396 ff.

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an autocratic system of government. It cannot even account for the democratic majority principle.

If democracy should imply that, for lack of an absolute standard, no single political belief may lay claim to a higher legal appreciation than the others, it contradicts itself by attributing prevalence to the opinion of a parliamentary majority. For the principle of proportionality to which Kelsen appeals¹ is not warranted from a relativistic point of view. And if the relativist should try to base the rule of majority upon the necessity of binding legal rules and decisions, we must observe that this very necessity is not to be justified from a relativistic standpoint.

If, however, every theoretical and practical political conception concerning the State and the principles of a just government in the last instance is dependent on a religious basic motive, which transcends any theoretical axiological relativism, no single political party can start from the latter. For this would be tantamount to a flat abandonment of its claim to superiority in comparison with other parties. Of course, this does not mean that a subjective political aim or program can as such lay claim to absolute validity. It only implies that without the belief in an absolute supra-theoretical Truth and in supra-arbitrary political norms any struggle between political parties becomes meaningless.

It is true that modern Historicism has to a high degree undermined the belief in eternal ideas or values and even has led to the fundamental crisis of Humanism amply described in the first volume of this work. But we have shown that this Historicism itself did not originate in an independent theoretical thought, but much rather in the religious dialectic of the Humanist basic motive. Theoretically it may result in a complete relativism and nihilism, but practically it cannot maintain this relativism which even destroys its own foundation, viz. the absoluteness of the historical viewpoint as such. A political party is concerned with practical policy though it cannot do without the aid of political theory. Therefore it cannot hold to an axiological relativism in the sense of Kelsen. It must appeal to a supra-relativistic starting-point in the central religious sphere of human existence, irrespective of the question as to whether or not it pretends to be neutral with regard to religion.

This has nothing to do with the untenable assumption that the

1 Allgemeine Staatslehre, p. 370.

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factual grouping of a population into different political parties coincides with the differentiation into ‘religious groups’; this assumption is no better than the opposite supposition that party-grouping coincides with the occupational or class-differentiation. Opposite political parties may start from the same religious basic motive and it may be that the same party embraces Christians and atheists. But this does not detract from the fact that the radical antithesis between the Biblical basic motive and the apostate religious starting-points is of decisive importance to the ultimate division of the political views. For it rules the most fundamental divergence in the total view of human society and in the conception of the place of the State within the temporal societal order. It is only the influence of the dualistic scholastic motive of nature and grace which may cause this fundamental line of division to be blurred.

From the above it should not be concluded that it is always and in every condition necessary to form separate Christian parties. It may be that this is factually impossible or undesirable, just as this may be the case with respect to the formation of Christian trade-unions or other Christian associations.

But it is certainly a serious misconception to suppose that the Christian religion has nothing to do with the formation of political parties, or that according to its inner nature a political party is sinful and lacks a structural principle in the temporal world-order. As to its supra-arbitrary inner nature a political party is no more sinful than the State or any other social relationship. It is only the human formative activity and its subjective purpose which can give the structural principle of this type of association a sinful direction.

The typical foundational function in the structural principle of a political party.

How then are we to conceive of this inner structural principle? Its typical foundational function is doubtless of a disclosed historical character. It may be circumscribed as an organization of the unifying power of a political conviction concerning the principles which have to guide the policy of the State and its administrative parts.

Let us consider this circumscription somewhat more in detail since it implies some questions we have first to pay attention to.

In the first place we have to observe that, according to its inner structural principle, a political party is not founded in the power

[p. 610]

of the sword, as is the State-institution, but only in that of a political conviction. As soon as a political party factually relies on military force, it turns into a revolutionary power opposing the power of the State and attempting to overthrow the existing authority of the government. This may be implied in the subjective purpose of a party, but it cannot belong to its inner nature. Its internal structural principle cannot contradict that of the State, which implies the monopoly of armed power within its territory. In other words, a military organization always exceeds the inner boundaries of a political party. If connected with the latter, it is an association sui generis, which is not to be identified with the party, as such, whose revolutionary political purpose gives it an illegitimate character, in a positive legal sense.

Another question is whether it makes sense to speak of an anarchistic political party. Strictly speaking this seems to imply a contradictio in adjecto since anarchism means a fundamental rejection of the body politic and of any form of political government. On the other hand, however, it should not be forgotten that the structural principle of an organized community is a structural law which because of its normative character does not exclude a factual behaviour contrary to its normative content. The only restriction to be made with respect to the applicability of the concept political party to a factual voluntary organization, is that the latter be not withdrawn from the internal sphere of validity of the structural norm concerned, because it displays a different inner nature.

It certainly makes no sense to include in the concept political party a trade-union or a merely philosophical association, though eventually both may strive after political purposes apart from their inner structure. But an anarchistic association whose primary purpose to influence the policy of a State is clearly expressed in its inner organization, falls doubtless within the structural boundaries of the concept concerned. As to its inner foundational function it is an organization of the unifying power of a political conviction concerning the principles of the State's policy, albeit that this conviction implies a fundamental rejection of the State. And since this foundational function is unbreakably bound to the internal leading function of a political party, which we shall investigate presently, the inner nature of such an anarchistic association corresponds to the structural principle of a political party.

*

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Secondly we must emphasize that the foundational function of the latter is fundamentally different from that of an occupational organization. An organization of the unifying power of a common economic-occupational interest can, as such, never be the typical historical foundation of the type of voluntary association whose structural principle is at issue in the present context. A farmer party, a labour party, or a middle-class party can never be real geno-types but only variability-types of political parties. This means that an occupational differentiation in the political party-formation can only be enkaptically interwoven with a differentiation according to political views. The danger of such a pheno-type of political party is that the political conviction of the members is easily ruled by the power of particular economic class-interests. Nevertheless, no single political party can function as an economically qualified occupational organization. Its structural principle is out of reach of human arbitrariness.

As a rule the membership of a party which shows a phenotypical interweaving with an occupational class is not restricted to those who factually belong to the latter. The English labour-party, for instance, and the Dutch labour-party which after the second world-war replaced the former social-democratic party, is only bound to social-democratic political principles that may be adhered to by persons of different occupational classes.

The leading function of a political party and the different meanings of the term ‘political’.

The leading or qualifying structural function of a political party organization is not so immediately evident as that of the previously analyzed types of voluntary association. As observed, the adjective ‘political’ is multivocal. It may mean:

1.	of or concerned with the State, the State's government or politics;
2.	a definite governmental organization;
3.	taking sides in politics^1.

The second sense, at least if it is restricted to the governmental organization of a real State, is rendered into Dutch by the word ‘statelijk’ i.e. displaying the structure of the body politic. The other meanings are ambiguous. They may have a theoretical-scientific meaning as well as a pre-theoretical,

1 Cf. Webster's New World Dictionary, College Edition 1953.

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practical sense. In the phrase ‘political party-organization’ the adjective ‘political’ cannot mean: ‘displaying a State's nature or governmental organization’, nor can it mean ‘theoretical political’. The leaders of the party are certainly in need of some theoretical political knowledge in order to be able to lead the party. A political party may even join with an institution¹ for scientific political studies in order to deepen the insight into its principles. But the ‘party bond’ cannot be of a theoretical political character, because the party functions as an organized community taking sides in practical politics.

This implies a practical view concerning the nature and value of the body politic and its relation to the non-political orbits of human society, the task of the State in a given political situation, its competence and the relation between authority and freedom, the public interest and its relation to particular group-interests, etc. Without such a common view, be it expressly formulated or not, the unity of conviction concerning the principles of policy would lack any stable character and the association would not be a real party community, but at the utmost an organization ad hoc for the realization of certain special transitory political purposes. As examples we may refer to the Anti-Corn Law League of 1838 and the Eastern Question Association of 1878 in England. So long as the questions concerned caused a crisis in political life, these associations could play an important rôle. But as soon as this crisis was over, they lost their reason of existence and were doomed to disappear.

According to its structural principle any real political party requires some total view of the State and its policy, as a guarantee of its relative stability. It is true that in every political party there may be a divergence of opinions concerning specific points of practical politics. There may be a difference between a more conservative and a more progressive trend, which should be bridged by a kind of compromise. There may even exist some divergence of opinion with respect to the fundamental view concerning the relation of the State to the non-political societal relationships. All such divergences cannot affect the inner unity of political conviction so long as they are capable of a compromise which can really unite the divergent opinions on a deeper basis of common principles.

1 The term ‘institution’ is used here in a general sense current in common speech, not in the transcendental systematic sense defined earlier.

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In the latter restriction lies the fundamental difference from a political compromise which opposing political parties, in their inter-communal intercourse, may make in a mutual political agreement ad hoc. Such an inter-communal compromise can never concern the established fundamental political principles about which each party must show a unity of conviction. No single party can allow itself to compromise about these principles without abandoning its ‘raison d'être’. Within the unity of such a political conviction we have thus to seek the typical leading function of the political party, according to its inner structural principle.

But which of its modal aspects should have the typical lead in this unity of conviction? In the first (Dutch) edition of this work I sought this internal leading function in the modal aspect of belief or faith. I arrived at this conclusion by considering that the fundamental political principles of a party are dependent on a common practical life- and world-view, and that the unity of the latter is in the nature of the case only guaranteed by a unity of belief. I immediately added that there could only be question of a political and not of an ecclesiastical belief. But on second thought this solution of the problem concerning the internal leading function of the political party's structural principle cannot be deemed satisfactory.

First, the adjective ‘political’ in the formerly defined sense, in which it applies to a party-organization, is not compatible with a pisteutical¹ qualification. This is already excluded by its essential relation to the State's policy. Both a voluntary association and an institutional community which are really qualified as a community of faith cannot exist without concentrating their activity in all its aspects upon affairs of belief. This implies that a fundamental divergence of the members in their conviction concerning the central religious questions, necessarily results in a dissolution of the particular communal bond. This certainly does not hold with respect to political parties which have not bound themselves to a particular confession. A common political belief which is concentrated upon the ultimate questions concerning the origin and the final aim of the State institution, of the authority of a government and of the freedom of man, is doubtless of great importance to the inner unity of a party. But it cannot be the qualifying function of the latter. And

1 ‘Pisteutical’ means here: functioning in the modal aspect of faith.

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it can only be of a really political character if it is directly or indirectly related to the party's practical political principles.

This does not detract from the fact that the fundamentals of any theoretical and practical view of the State, its place in the societal order, its political task and competence, etc. are dependent on a religious basic motive. But this does not imply that such a view is typically qualified by its aspect of belief. If the religious basic motive is of a dialectical character, as in the case of the Humanist motive of nature and freedom, it will tend to disperse the political views in opposite directions, as may appear, for example, from the dialectical contrast between liberalism and socialism.

Similar dialectical contrasts in the political views may occur in Christian parties when the Christian starting-point is affected by the dualist scholastic basic motive of nature and grace. Then it is possible that a Christian liberalism is opposed to a Christian socialism or a universalistic Christian solidarism. Such political divergences may occur between Christians of the same ecclesiastical confession. And this state of affairs can easily lead to the erroneous conclusion that practical policy has nothing to do with the religious starting-points. Nevertheless, it is only the ultimate contest between the religious basic motives which can give the political struggle between the different parties its final meaning and inspiration. For in the central religious sphere alone we are confronted with the absolute standard of Truth and Falsehood apart from which nobody can escape from a fundamental scepticism and relativism. And we have seen that the latter is incompatible with any political conviction.

If, however, it cannot be a common political belief which qualifies the unity of political conviction in the internal communal sphere of a political party, where have we then to seek its leading structural aspect? I think it should be sought in the modal normative sphere of morality. It may be that the inner unity of political belief is lacking in a party, though this is certainly not in accordance with its structural principle. But no political party can exist without a typical moral bond of political conviction. As soon as the latter is broken the inner communal sphere of a party is necessarily dissolved. For a community of political conviction cannot be maintained by the internal legal rules of the party-organization if the leading moral bond is lacking.

From this it appears once again how much Sorokin has over-

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estimated the unifying rôle of legal rules by seeking in them the central trait of any organized community¹. It is true that he adds the condition that these legal norms must be ‘effective obligatory and, if need be, enforced in the conduct of the interacting persons’. But this addition cannot make his view acceptable. The truth is that the internal legal order of a party-community is itself completely dependent upon the internal structural principle of the latter and that, as soon as the juridical viewpoint should take the lead in the inner life of the party, the latter would be doomed to dissolution.

The moral bond of political conviction is a retrocipatory (non-original) individuality-type in the moral aspect of experience. The nuclear or original type of individuality to which it refers is that of formative power in its typical politico-cultural sense, which appeared to be the historical foundational function of the party's structural principle. The term ‘political’ has an original typical historical meaning insofar as it is used in a modal sense. Every political party community is historically founded in its formative political power, which implies an historical vocation of a particular degree of responsibility.

The moral bond of political conviction, which in my present opinion is the typical guiding function of the party's inner communal sphere, implies moral duties of a particular political type and content, which are not to be understood apart from the typical formative vocational power of this kind of association. The common love towards the fundamental principles of policy, adhered to by the party, should produce a mind of politico-ethical solidarity among the members and a readiness to strengthen the party's political power by propagating its political views. This can never imply a blind obedience and self-surrender to the party's interests and insights. A totalitarian party discipline contradicts the internal structural law of this type of voluntary association exactly in its guiding moral aspect. It originates in a pseudo-religious commitment to the party's totalitarian political ideology, which includes the belief in its infallibility.

1 Op. cit., p. 70: ‘The central trait of an organized interaction (group, institution, social system) is thus the presence in it of law-norms’.

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The moral bond of political conviction and the organizational stratification. Pessimist sociological judgments of party-ethics.

Apart from such a totalitarian party ideology the integrity of the moral bond of common political conviction may be threatened by a form of organizational stratification which factually frustrates any influence on the part of the lower strata. Especially very big parties are subject to this danger. Sorokin is doubtless right when he observes that a stratification is in the nature of the case inherent in any organized ‘interaction’. But it is certainly not necessary that it results in a purely passive rôle of the lower strata of members. The judgment of modern political sociologists concerning the freedom of criticism in political parties is in general extremely pessimistic. Ostrogorski observes: ‘Life within the party is a long school of servile obedience. The lessons the citizen receives here, are lessons in cowardice and cravenness. The better the party is organized, the more demoralized are its members, and the lower the level of social life’¹. Sorokin remarks about the present forms of party organization: ‘The party, through suppressing independent thought and permitting little criticism, turns into a sort of fanatical sect in which dead dogmas replace living creative thought’. And a little further he adds the following destructive judgment: ‘Face to face with the party the individual is a negligible quantity, bound hand and foot by it. Any criticism of the party is regarded as a breach of party discipline and is followed by expulsion of critical heretics. Instead of educating the individual to liberty, the party trains him to servility’².

It is seriously to be doubted whether such generalizing observations are scientifically warranted. They are, for instance, certainly not applicable to all the political parties in the Netherlands. The overstrained party-discipline as it is found among the democratic countries, for example, in the United States of America or in the Australian labour-party, should not be elevated to an ‘ideal type’. No better grounded is in my opinion Sorokin's generalizing utterance: ‘the present form of party organization leads also to the selection of mediocrities and hypocrites as its leaders’. The only argument he adduces for this bold statement is that ‘independence of thought not being tolerated, individuals with creative minds, courageous and honest with themselves and

1 M. Ostrogorsky, op. cit., p. 642.

2 Sorokin, op. cit., p. 224.

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others, avoid joining the party’. It is certainly true that political individualists, irrespective of their being ‘creative minds’ or ‘mediocrities’, can hardly accommodate themselves to the moral discipline which is necessary in every party community. But it is certainly not justified to assert that ‘the present form of party organization’ (which of the different forms is meant here?) must lead to the selection of mediocrities and hypocrites as its leaders. Modern political history mentions various first rank politicians among the party-leaders.

Apart from these factual questions we repeat that, especially in very big parties with hundreds of thousands or even millions of members, the integrity of the moral bond of political conviction may be in serious danger of being affected by a dictatorial power-formation of an élite or a leader, in consequence of an overstrained party discipline. If this really occurs, as in the case of the two big American parties, the leading moral political bond degenerates. But if it is factually broken, the inner party community is dissolved, since according to its structural principle it is a voluntary community of political conviction whose organized formative political power is dependent on the moral bond of this communal conviction. If the members have lost their moral confidence in the rightness of the party's principles, they will leave the party. Naturally it is possible that there are members who have joined the latter, not on the ground of their political conviction, but because of impure motives of personal interest. But as a rule such motives cannot be decisive for a durable choice of the party which the citizen wants to join. A different situation arises if a party has a revolutionary character, or has acquired a monopolistic position and gives a number of privileges and advantages to its members, as in the case of the Russian Communist party or the former Nazi party in Germany. But in the latter case the membership is bound to such rigorous requirements and the party control with respect to the reliability of the members is so sharp that it is a great risk to join without the real motive of political conviction.

In a country where the formation of parties is free, an abnormal situation with respect to joining may arise in consequence of a large scale immigration and subsequent naturalization of people who lack any knowledge of the political questions of their new country. In this case a strongly organized party may indeed succeed in recruiting a large number of new members who lack a political conviction and join because of personal

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interests only. A striking example of such a situation was found in the large cities of the U.S.A.¹. But this can only be a transitory phenomenon, whose abnormal character is evident from the viewpoint of the inner nature of a party community. Exclusively personal interests can never be viewed as a durable basis of a party's membership and they cannot explain the well-known loyalty of the American citizens to the party they have joined. This loyalty presupposes a moral confidence in the political standpoint of this party, albeit perhaps a blind confidence, which lacks the foundation of an independent political judgment.

It is true that in general the membership of a big party may imply the chance of participating in the distribution of positions, sinecures, and ‘spoils’, if the party has been successful in the election struggle. This especially applies to the American ‘spoil system’ in its former extreme shape, which gave rise to a serious corruption of public administration, particularly in the large cities. But it is hardly to be imagined that this system could influence the durable membership of the parties, since the result of the next election is always uncertain.

A more serious danger of corruption of a party's moral bond of political conviction is the external influence of so-called ‘pressure groups’ upon the party programs and the competition for the favour of the voters by deceitful slogans and promises. Especially opportunistic parties which lack a firm basis of political principles are liable to this danger. But a purely opportunistic political standpoint contradicts the inner structural principle of the party, since it cannot lead to the formation of any stable political conviction of its members.

1 Cf. the interesting analysis of this situation in Bryce's Modern Democracies II, Ch. 3.

The essential enkaptical interweaving between the political party and the State.

According to its inner nature the political party is a particular type of voluntary association. This implies that as such it can never be a part of the State. Its inner sphere-sovereignty is guaranteed by its structural principle. The moral bond of a common political conviction typically founded in the formative political power of this conviction is, as such, beyond the reach of the State power and the sphere of the State's competence. Naturally the public activity of a party may be prohibited. But

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the effect of such a prohibitive measure is very doubtful, since an underground activity of a formally illegal party may be relatively easily withdrawn from the State's control. It may even become much more dangerous to a government which has enacted the prohibition. In any case the party's internal social sphere of life, insofar as it is determined by its structural principle, is withdrawn from the State's original legal power.

Nevertheless, by its primary purpose, which essentially coheres with its inner structure, a political party is very closely enkaptically bound to the State. Especially in parliamentary democracies, by partaking in electioneering and in the negotiations concerning the formation of a new cabinet after the election, it has a typical enkaptic function within the inner constitutional sphere of the body politic. Insofar the political parties also have a function in the constitutional law of the State and are bound to public legal rules. When exercizing their public function as electors, the citizens are bound to the lists of candidates established by the parties. The parliamentary system of government is insolubly bound to the latter and the State government is to a high degree under their control.

It must be clear that this most spectacular side of party life does not belong to the inner sphere-sovereignty of this type of voluntary association. Its public legal functions are derived from the State, and the political power which the party possesses with respect to the State government depends in the last instance upon the nation in its public function as electorate. A very small party which does not yet partake in election, and has no single representative in Parliament, doubtless retains the inner nature of a political party provided that by propagating its political principles it strives after the realization of its primary aim: to influence the State's policy. The fact that, historically viewed, party organization in the modern representative democracies arose from local election commitees or associations is only a question of its genetic form. It cannot determine the party's inner nature and structure.

This fundamental difference between the inner nature of a party community and its enkaptical functions in the body politic should especially be borne in mind when we consider the position of a monopolistic party in the modern totalitarian States. At first sight it might seem that such a party is only and exclusively the chief and all-controlling organ of the body politic. But in fact we are confronted here with a form of extremely close enkaptic

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interlacement similar to that of a Church-State. As the chief organ of the State, the party rules the whole machinery of the body politic. But, as such, it remains bound to the structural principle of the latter. In its inner sphere, as a closed community (the Russian Communist party has limited its membership to 4.200.000 members), the party remains bound to its own structural principle and nature, which is qualified as a moral bond of common political conviction. In its enkaptical function as an organ of the body politic it cannot impose this conviction upon all the citizens of the State. If it wishes to propagate its political views, it is obliged to have recourse to the means of any other political party in a free democratic country, albeit that its political propaganda has acquired a legally sanctioned monopoly and may be supported by the financial means of the State. Even a monopolistic party cannot identify itself with the body politic.

The political party in its relation to so-called ‘religious groups’. The ambiguity of the terms ‘ecclesiastical’ and ‘confessional’ parties.

We have already observed that the differentiation of a population according to political parties may not be identified with that according to so-called ‘religious groups’. It is especially confusing to speak of ‘ecclesiastical’ parties. This term lacks a univocal sense. It may mean: factions which have formed themselves within a Church. It may also denote: political parties which have bound themselves to a particular ecclesiastical confession, or to the guidance of a Church authority, or strive after a privileged position of a particular Church. It is finally also applied to political parties which have expressly bound themselves to a Christian political belief in the formerly defined sense, without accepting any ecclesiastical binding.

As to the first meaning we must observe that the formation of factions within a Church is never to be justified from the viewpoint of the inner nature and structure of this latter. It is a strong indication of an inner schism which excludes a real unity of belief and confession. As to the second meaning we must observe that it may imply a serious confusion between the inner nature of a Church and that of a political party. An ecclesiastic confession does not permit itself to be bound to a particular political party conviction and party program. True, the Church has the indispensable prophetical task to oppose any manifestation of the spirit of apostasy in political life and to

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remind the State government that its authority derives from God and is subject to Him. But it is certainly beyond the competence of the ecclesiastical institution to establish principles of a Christian policy or to bind its members to a particular Christian party. For the political belief of the latter, as it is formulated in its program or declaration of principles, cannot be separated from the whole of its practical political views, and by giving its adhesion to such a program the Church would exceed the boundaries of its mandate. It is always the universalistic view of the temporal Church-institution rooted in the dialectical scholastic basic motive of nature and grace which is responsible for an eradication of these boundaries.

In its most consistent form an ecclesiastical party in the second sense cannot accept members who do not agree with the confession of the Church to which the party has bound itself. But such a consistent ecclesiastical binding of the membership will be hardly found. As a rule, a Roman Catholic or a specific Protestant ecclesiastic party will only have members who belong to the Church-community concerned. But if the membership is not formally bound to a specific Church confession, such a party will nevertheless reveal its ecclesiastical binding by subjecting itself to the guidance of a Church-authority or by striving after the elevation of a particular Church to ‘Established Church’. As an example we mention the Catholic national party (Katholieke Volkspartij) in the Netherlands. In the first article of its ‘general political program’ (established 22 December 1945) the essence and purpose of the party is formulated as follows: ‘The Katholieke Volkspartij is an association which is open to all Netherlanders. Its purpose is to promote the public interest in the Kingdom of the Netherlands by participating in political life. It is founded in the principles of the natural ethical law and the Divine Revelation, as to which it accepts the rules of the Ecclesiastical Doctrinal Authority’¹. Here we meet with a close enkaptical binding of the party to the Roman Catholic Church. Nevertheless, the former retains its own inner nature and structure. It

1 The Dutch text reads as follows: ‘De Katholieke Volkspartij is een vereniging, welke open staat voor alle Nederlanders en ten doel heeft het algemeen welzijn in het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden door deelneming aan het staatkundige leven te bevorderen. Zij staat op de grondslag van de beginselen van de natuurlijke zedewet en de Goddelijke Openbaring, waarbij zij de uitspraken van het Kerkelijk Leergezag aanvaardt’.

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cannot be viewed as a part of the R.C. Church. It is only its subjection to the doctrinal authority of this latter which gives it an ecclesiastic binding.

In its third sense the term ‘ecclesiastical party’ is completely misleading, since there is no question here of any binding of the party to a Church. As an example of a Christian party which really maintains its independence of any ecclesiastic authority we may refer to the ‘Anti-revolutionary Party’ in the Netherlands¹, whose political belief is expressed in the third article of its program of principles. This article reads as follows: ‘It avows the eternal principles revealed to us in God's Word also in the sphere of politics; in such a way, however, that the State government shall be bound to the divine ordinances neither directly, as in Israël, nor through the judgment of any Church, but in the conscience both of the government and the subject².

It is clear that what is said here about the way in which the State government is to be bound to the Word-revelation, similarly applies to the party. The political belief of the latter is related to the political principles contained in its program in the broader context of a life -and world view. This life- and world-view is rooted in the Biblical basic motive of the Reformation without the interference of the dualist scholastic motive of nature and grace. In this way the structural principle of the political party finds its clear expression in the faith aspect, not by means of a particular enkaptical binding of the party to a Church authority, but according to its own inner nature, i.e. within its internal sphere-sovereignty. The party is not qualified as a community of faith. Nevertheless its leading moral bond of political conviction appeals to a common political belief in a divine order of human society to be known in the light of the Word-revelation. Thereby the fundamental political principles contained in the program of the party, are subjected to the test of a trans-subjective order and the party fundamentally opposes any revolutionary political view which rejects this divine order. In this appeal

1 After the Labour party and the Catholic National party this party has the strongest representation in the Dutch Parliament.

2 The Dutch text reads: ‘Ook op staatkundig terrein belijdt zij de eeuwige beginselen, die ons in Gods Woord geopenbaard zijn: zó evenwel, dat het Staatsgezag ten onzent noch rechtstreeks, gelijk in Israël, noch door de uitspraak van enige Kerk, maar in de consciëntie beide van Overheid en onderdaan aan de ordinantiën Gods gebonden zij’.

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to a common political belief the moral bond of political conviction is deepened and strengthened. The loyalty to the party acquires a deeper sense and the danger of an overstrained party discipline is checked by the exclusion of any belief in the infallibility of a human authority.

It cannot be doubtful that in the great struggle between the totalitarian political ideologies and the anti-totalitarian political standpoints the latter are in need of a strong spiritual foundation. Therefore the real formative power of a political party is seriously weakened if the latter lacks a common political standpoint of faith. In the Anglo-saxon countries which hold to the tradition of the dual party system there is little interest in the deeper fundamentals of the party principles. In general, public opinion holds to a partly Christian, partly Humanist anti-totalitarian tradition in politics, and both parties will keep from a frank deviation from this tradition. Bryce observes that by means of its strong organization the party-system of the U.S.A. has greatly contributed to the unification and homogeneity of the population. If the parties had been based on religious or racial differences, the antithetical factors present in the strongly divergent groups of the population would have been strengthened, whereas now they have diminished. But on the other hand Bryce has shown that there is no question of a real political education of the party members by deepening their political conviction. The parties are ruled by an oligarchy and a blind obedience of their members to the party discipline replaces the reflection on the religious foundation of the political standpoint. This is not a reliable basis in the spiritual struggle against political ideologies which threaten the fundamentals of the Western democratic regimes.

On the European continent both the French revolution and the rise of Marxism have stimulated a more profound reflection on the spiritual fundamentals of political party formation. This is why the old English dual party system, with its simple division of the political standpoints into those of liberalism and conservatism, appeared to be unsatisfactory and, from a Christian point of view, unacceptable. The rise of Christian political parties was a result of the insight that in the last instance the struggle between the political standpoints is ruled by an unbridgeable contrast between the religious basic motives. So long as the Christian fundamentals of Western society do not seem to be seriously threatened, this primordial truth may be readily for-

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gotten. But traditional fundamentals are not a safe inheritance. They may be gradually undermined in the national conviction, especially in the present spiritual crisis of Western culture.

Public opinion, as a reflex of the national conviction, is doubtless influenced by the political education of a people, which is the primary task of the parties. By keeping from taking sides in the ultimate questions of political belief, these parties contribute to the secularisation of political conviction, whereby the religious basic motives operative in the anti-Christian political trends acquire free scope. This is the justification of a Christian party-formation on a non-ecclesiastical basis. The alternative is that the Churches take the lead in the political struggle against the anti-Christian political trends. But this must result in a division of the Christian parties according to ecclesiastical groupings. And we have shown that such a grouping contradicts both the inner nature of political parties and that of the Church-institution.