Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/424

 demand of social self-preservation this necessity confronts us in very primitive conditions. At the time when in Germany the earliest constitution of complete personal and property equality within the community had become obsolete, the landless man found himself without the active rights of a freeman. If he did not wish to remain without any connection with the community, it was necessary for him to attach himself to a lord, in order thus, as entitled to protection (Schutzgenosse), to participate indirectly in the public associations. The community had an interest in his doing this, for it could not tolerate an unattached man within its circuit; consequently Anglo-Saxon law expressly made it the duty of the landless man to attach himself to a lord. Likewise in mediaeval England the interest of the community demanded that the stranger should place himself under a protecting lord. From such very simple points of departure the conviction grew that men must in general be governed—better by unfit persons than not at all—that in general only the group must assume the form of superordination and subordination, so that it is consequently only a desirable accident if, in the objectively necessary position, the subjectively suitable individual has his place. As explanations or justifications of this order, which is supposed to be immanent in the nature of social beings, all the theories appear which, since Aristotle, teach that there are φύσει δοϋλοι who in general could not bear another kind of life than that of subordination, and that the organization of society after the form of superordination and subordination is merely an expression of this fact. At the same time the converse possibility is often overlooked, viz., that the actual subordination, resting upon quite other grounds than personal qualifications, has led to an adaptation of individuals and classes to this condition, i.e., to the now evidently actual quality and disposition for subordination.

Two lines of thought stand here over against each other, each of which may cite for itself a long series of facts from every department of social life, so that each represents a significant sociological formation.

In consideration of the actual unlikeness in the qualities of