Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/830

 A SOCIOLOGICAL VIEW OF SOVEREIGNTY.

CHAPTER XII.

INDUSTRAL PROPERTY AND CORPORATIONS.

The third original institution, or set of institutions, from which the state has sprung, was private property in slaves, serfs, land, and capital, or the industrial institution per se. Through- out social evolution during the empiric stage this institution was subordinate to the overshadowing institutions of the family, the monarchy, the church. But since the emergence of the reflect- ive stage and its abolition of slavery and serfdom, the industrial has taken a new and derived form, a change analogous to that which occurred in religion in the transition from the ethnic to the ethical, and in the state in the transition from absolutism to constitutionalism. These derived institutions are the merchants' and manufacturers' guilds and the more recent business corpora- tion.

The persuasive basis of industry is originally closely bound with the coercive basis of organization, both being grounded on the necessity of subduing nature to gain a livelihood. But in the empiric stage coercion was corporal — the direct ownership of slave and serf. Consequently labor was degraded and despised, and those whose lot it was felt no particular devotion to it. But in the reflective stage, with the freedom of labor, with inventions, machinery, and industrial technique, industry acquires an interest in itself and arouses a devotion which is susceptible to the sanc- tions of persuasion. The love of work is the persuasive basis of industry. Work has an interest for its own sake, and also an ulterior interest as a means to the sustaining of all the other institutions. A free man works because he finds an interesting outlet for his energies, and because he wishes to support wife, children, preacher, government. But in so far as this ulterior end is not voluntary but compulsory, in so far as this love of work is overshadowed by the necessities of the worker, the basis

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