Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/101

 A SOCIOLOGICAL VIE 'W OF SOVEREIGNTY 87

purpose as with the detailed processes of the state's evolution. It is an inductive, comparative study of historical societies with reference to the part played by sovereignty, and its aim is to discover the actual laws governing the emergence of the state. The legal view is the view of the lawyer and the judge whose problem is a practical one. He must decide between two claim- ants for control in a definite matter of life, property, or other privi- lege. For this reason the legal view is entirely separated from the scientific purpose of sociology, and, if projected by the legal mind into social theories, it tends to abstract the state from the remainder of society and to set it overhead as something external and mechanical. Political science, which has borrowed its con- cepts from jurisprudence and has been prosecuted by lawyers, falls also into this fault.

The sociological view, beginning as it does with primitive society, finds that the state, as conceived by the philosopher and the lawyer, does not there exist. It is blended and confused with other institutions. The sociologist must, therefore, look first for the germ which later was differentiated out from society and became the state, and, second, for the stages of growth of this germ and the exact point when it can properly be called the state. He looks not for an ultimate repository of sovereignty which comes into play on occasion, as does the lawyer, but he looks for a constant pervasive psychic influence existing every- where in society and affecting all social relations. He looks, not for an event, but for a "flow." The object which he seeks is dynamic, evolutionary. If this be so, sovereignty is but a branch, a differentiation, from this primitive sociological psychic influence. We have found this primitive all-pervasive principle to be private property, which originates with man's self-con- sciousness and is the beginning and basis of all social institu- tions. Private property is but another name for that coercive relation existing between human beings through which the pro- prietor comands the services of others. This also is sovereignty, and in mediseval law 1 "the one word dominion has to cover both proprietary rights and many kinds of political power ; it stands

1 MAITLAND, Doomsday Book and Beyond, p. 344.