Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/806

790 well the arguments of earlier and contemporary political philosophers, but he writes in the spirit of a man who knows a dead issue from a living one, even when the two are talked about under the same name. This is illustrated in his treatment of the types of states, and in his classification of governments. He is genuinely modern in his search for essential likeness or unlikeness, and does not repeat the traditional folly of merely formal classification. To a still greater degree is this apparent in the treatment of sovereignty. I am not entirely satisfied with the shape in which he leaves the subject, but he has certainly parted company with the tradition of Hobbes, that sovereignty is the political holy of holies, into which it were profanation to enter or gaze; and he is superior to the merely legal conception that it is neither profitable nor possible to search out any reality more ultimate than sovereignty. I am surprised that he did not make his discrimination a degree more exact, and give sharp expression to the supremacy which is an attribute of the state, and on the other hand to sovereignty, which is the prerogative delegated by the state to the government. The idea is plainly enough implied, but I do not find that the author has so entirely emancipated himself from the ambiguous associations of the term sovereignty that he has felt the need of distinct words for the distinct things.

The book is essentially an elaboration of what may be called the psychological theory of the origin of the state, and the author does not disguise his acceptance of Green's principal thesis of "the general will." I notice with some amusement that, with all his acuteness, the author associates with the phrase, "the organic theory of the state," conceptions which he feels bound to repudiate. "Though refusing to the state an organic character, it may properly be described as a juristic person; and indeed the idea of its personality is the corner stone of the science of public law" (p. 134). Surely it is not worth while for those of us who like to use the words, "the organic character of the state," to quarrel with those who reject the words and in the same breath assert all that they mean!

In a word, whoever wants a better book than Bluntschli's Theory of the State may find it in Dr. Willoughby's "Study in Political Philosophy."