Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/88

 76 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

another. Where, as among the Tartars, differentiation of castes or classes renders the interior organization more complex, there we see also limits or barriers between these castes and classes, just as is found between the different social strata in the most highly developed society, even those that tend strongly toward democracy. Why? Because it is impossible even to conceive of organization without limitation. This is the fundamental characteristic of every organized function. Whoever says organization or institution says structure; whoever says struc- ture says form and limit.

The internal organization of a society is correlative to its general structure, which corresponds to its surroundings. There is necessarily a transformation of group frontiers when there is a change in their interior system, this latter being a molecular change within the group, and the former being a molar change of the group, a change among groups, as masses or aggregates. It matters little whether these changes be hostile or peaceful, there will be some exchanges between parts of the group or between the groups, some manifestations of social life. The method alone may differ, the law remains the same.

In all these societies, barbarous or civilized, peaceful or war- like, contemporaneous or ancient, hunters or herdsmen, agricul- tural, commercial, or industrial, we find a common fundamental structure, in spite of the fact that there are all possible variations of it. Every society, large or small, nomadic or settled, has an exterior limit. In fact, it has many of them; that is, a given society has different limits according to its different internal and external functions. Unfortunately, up to this time political theorists have been struck only by the exterior limit that was most apparent and by the governmental limit. These political limits certainly are frontiers, but we shall see that they are con- tinually modified under the influence of most profound factors which harass and displace them, tending either to restrict or to extend them. Military needs and preoccupations have been so dominant up to this time that when there arises a question of boundaries, this word provokes by association the idea of a restrictive and prohibitive limitation, whereas limit or frontier i.i