Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/377

 A SOCIOLOGICAL VIEIV OF SOVEREIGNTY 363

United States, where aristocracy had no hold, this movement has been influenced more by doctrines of natural rights and by the desire to attract immigrants. These classes have also been com- pelled to organize in labor unions in order to acquire partnership in the control of industry, and possibly also in sovereignty. The tendency here is quite similar to that of aristocracy. The feudal chiefs, having lost their private control through absolu- tism, regained it collectively through partnership with the sover- eign ; so the unpropertied and salaried classes, having lost individual control of transferable property through the growth of great industry and monopoly, are now in various countries regaining that control by the use of their newly acquired universal suffrage and partnership in government. This is the third form of the state, democracy. The alternative to democracy is a caste system. Both are wage systems, which follow the dis- appearance of serfdom and the occupation of the soil ; but caste is private coercion, democracy is partnership in state coercion. Following the breakup of feudalism in England, the aristocracy, having lost private control over their serfs, attempted through sovereignty to fasten the caste system upon the ex-serf in the form of sumptuary laws and statutes of laborers which were aimed to suppress the standard of living and to keep wages at a minimum. This policy, successful in India, failed in England, and the way was left open for the later development of plutoc- racy and democracy.

From what precedes it appears that the state cannot properly be under the exclusive control of a single person or class. Such would be the perverted forms of the state designated by Aristotle as tyranny, oligarchy, ochlocracy. The state is rather the partnership of different classes in government. This partner- ship is not sporadic and chanceful, but is definite, organized, intended. Here is the significance of the structure or "constitu- tion," or "government," as distinguished from the state. The state is the coercive institution of society controlled by those classes which have acquired partnership in determining the sover- eign will. Government is the particular machinery or form of organization constituted for shaping and executing the coercive