Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/784

 768 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

As to the limits of private property, Aristotle touches the subject only incidentally 3 when he criticises the opinion of Socrates as lacking in clearness and precision. Socrates had, indeed, said that " property must go so far as to satisfy the needs of a sober life." According to Aristotle, a sober life can be very miserable, and one ought to say " sober and liberal ; " i. e., a life equally distant from luxury and suffering.

The most noteworthy point is that Aristotle, like Plato, con- ceives the complete structure of the state as a constant and neces- sary equilibrium with its composition and inner organization. Aristotle, however, who lived in the midst of an imperialistic development, understands that new institutions must agree with the new social conditions. Neither the primitive communality of tribes and clans, nor the regulations of the old city, are any more suitable to the Greek state, or even to the Gneco-oriental. But he realizes that if the primitive forms of communality have dis- appeared, conditions of existence must be assured to each member and each group which are at least as advantageous as those which they formerly enjoyed. This is necessary in the interest of the interior equilibrium as well as in the interest of the transformed and enlarged state. Therefore he assures to every citizen a moderate existence and therefore he interests every one of them in the defense of the interior -state and of the boundaries. This empire remains a unified communality, co-ordinate in spite of its more extended limits.

Thus the two greatest thinkers of Greek antiquity, who differ in so many points, foresaw the great sociological law which con- nects the problem of the social frontier with the very organization of society. The interest of the individual and that of society met in the empire, as formerly in the city, in the tribe, and in the horde.

But how much more extensive and more complex was the social mass united by the same tie! Not only was movable property differentiated from landed property; not only existed public property side by side with private property; not only did wages and serfdom extend under different forms ; but capital and labor assumed collective forms. In Greece as in Egypt there were

' Book II. chap. 3, 5.