Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/599

 paper, however, did not become known beyond the small public of the Philosophische Monatshefte (1888). I have especially, and to a greater degree than M. Tarde, insisted upon the radical difference between a physiological division of labor and that division which is a cardinal phenomenon of society. I said: If we justly call it a division of labor that England manufactures cotton and China produces tea, and that the two countries exchange their products, then there is not and has not been a common labor or function preceding this division and dividing itself, as in the case of an organism; no state of society being historically known where China and England were one whole, working in harmony upon the spinning-wheel and upon the tea plant. This is far from being true; each had its own historical development, until they met in the mutual want of barter; and even this consideration implies that the countries themselves may justly be said to entertain trade and commerce with each other, though this is hardly more than a  with respect to a country like China. It may be objected that there is a better analogy, if we think of a primitive household, where labor is indeed one and is shifting among members of the community, while at a later stage it splits up into several families, some cultivating the soil, some becoming warriors or priests, or artisans and tradesmen. And in the same way a village community, even an independent township like the ancient or mediaeval city, and a whole territory of which a city is the center, may reasonably be conceived of as one real household, of which all single households form organic parts. They would thus be contrasted with modern society, which is more adequately conceived of as a mere aggregate of individual households, each pursuing its own interest, maybe at the cost of all the others. This is my own objection, and this view is contained in my own theory of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, meaning the dualism of that primitive economical condition, surviving in many respects down to our own days, on the one hand, and “commercial” or “capitalistic” society, of which the germs are traceable in any form of what, with an abstract term, may be called communism, on the other. It is the former sense that even modern political economy