Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/16

2 particular case in court. He, therefore, goes no farther than the analysis of Austin, who says:

If a determinate human superior, not in a habit of obedience to a like superior, receives habitual obedience from the bulk of a given society, that determinate superior is sovereign in that society. ... The position of its other members toward that determinate superior is a state of subjection, or a state of dependence.

In political science there are three phases of sovereignty usually examined — the nature of sovereignty, its location in the body politic, and the particular action of sovereign authorities. The nature of sovereignty is strictly a problem of philosophy and sociology, and underlies, rather than constitutes, political science. Whether the state be based on contract, on force, or on the general will, these are the philosophical and sociological foundations of political science. The latter is properly limited to the problem of the location of sovereignty and the action of the authorities. The standpoint here is the same as the legal, but the view is widened by a comparative study of constitutions, and of the practical utility or expediency of state interference in particular fields, such as the family, the church, property, and morals.

A sociological view of sovereignty should take the two standpoints, analysis and development. In the analysis of government its true nature is to be determined, the state is to be distinguished from other institutions, and both sovereignty and the state are to be directly established upon the observed nature of man in society. This is something less than philosophical analysis, which includes also the purpose of the state as conceived by the philosopher. The sociologist, as such, is not concerned with the moral end of the state — with the goal to be attained — but with its actual qualities, and its concrete relations to other institutions. He deals, not with the idea of sovereignty, but with the concept, the idea being, in the words of Coleridge, "that conception of a thing which is given by a knowledge of