Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/379

 A SOCIOLOGICAL VIEW OF SOVEREIGNTY 365

suffrage working in the machinery of representative or plutp- cratic government, and is being remedied by such democratic remodeling as civil-service reform, secret ballot, corrupt-prac- tices acts, primary-election laws, etc. The machinery of government is much more than machinery — it is the organized participation of political classes, based on property interests, in the exercise of sovereignty. It is the very source and genesis of order and right. It is the means whereby the unity of sover- eignty, the "social consciousness," the "state consciousness," is originally established through the cooperation of the various polit- ical classes which participate therein. It, therefore, marks off the state from absolutism or despotism, where the will of one man dominates the people, restrained only by custom rather than by the legalized internal checks and balances of orderly sovereignty. We can now see more clearly how it is that sovereignty and private property together constitute the coercion, or dominion, of society, and we can judge of the adequacy of Professor Bur- gess' statement' that "sovereignty is the absolute, unlimited, universal power over the individual subject and all associations of subjects." Sovereignty is not original (historically), for it is derived from private dominion. It is not absolute, unlimited, and universal, because it is limited by so much of coercion as still remains in private hands. And those who retain it as pri- vate parties are the same as those who regulate it through sover- eignty. Sovereignty and private property must always be in control of the same classes of individuals, since those who have the sovereignty are able wholly to dispossess the others. A prime aim of sovereignty is the protection of property. The fallacy consists in failing to distinguish between potential and actual sovereignty. Sovereignty could possibly encroach entirely upon private property, but it goes only as far as the actual struc- ture of government and the partnership of propertied classes in the state has provided.' Coercion, either public or private, is

■ Political Scitnce, p. 52.

'"At any one time the state actually exercises, through its governmental organi- zation, only those powers which it has drawn to itself by formal adoption." There is "no capacity for legal action irrespective of state organs." (WiLLOUGHBV, pp. 194- 292.)