Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/831

 A SOCIOLOGICAL VIEW OF SOVEREIGNTY 815

is not persuasive, but coercive, and where the latter element still exists it chokes the persuasive element and gives character to the institution. It is the gradual extraction of coercion from industry and its absorption by the state that permits this institu- tion to be separated out from the others and established upon its own persuasive motive, the love of work.

The material basis, from the very nature of the institution, is more inclusive in industry than in any other institution. Indus- try is concerned primarily with the material of nature, fitting it for use in all institutions. It produces food, clothing, and shelter for wife and children; weapons and munitions for the state; cathedrals for the church ; ballot paper for political parties. It thus prepares the primary material basis to which the other insti- tutions add their own peculiar increment of value. It is partly for this reason that in the empiric stage, when production is direct and not yet based on the roundabout methods of accumu- lated capital, the industrial institution is not yet differentiated out from under the domestic, the military, and the ecclesiastical institutions. Capital consists of tools in place of machinery ; land is more abundant than population ; and consequently the material basis of industry does not have an independent impor- tance and value. It is laborers who are scarce rather than land and machinery, and consequently industry is built upon slavery and serfdom rather than upon property in land and capital.' In the reflective period, however, with its wage system and over- supply of labor relative to land and capital, the latter becomes the basis of a newly differentiated institution, the industrial.

The organization of industry and its tendency to monopoly and centralization have the same basis and follow the same laws as those we have seen in other institutions. Yet the distinction between the empiric and reflective stages must be noted. In the former stage, as already stated, industry had not acquired its sepa- rate institution, but was subordinate mainly to the political insti- tution. Therefore, as the latter developed toward centralization,

•The disproportionate importance given to this principle by Loria, expanding on the suggestion of Henry George, cannot be accepted. He overlooks the equal importance of religious and moral beliefs. See translation by Keasbey, Loria, The Economic Foundations of Society.