Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/103

 A SOCIOLOGICAL VIEW OF SOVEREIGNTY 89

appears in its use of the concepts "survival" and "organization." Organization, in biology, is the means of economizing the vital forces and increasing the chances of the organism for survival. The same is true of social organization, which economizes the social forces. But there is an important difference. Biological organization is physical and compact, and consists of bony, muscular, and other structure. Social organization is psychic, and consists of those coercive sanctions which subordinate individuals to a single will, notwithstanding their inclinations to satisfy their desires at cross purposes in their own private ways. Organization is not originally the free persuasive group- ing of men for mutual satisfaction, but is an alternative forced upon them by increasing population and increasing struggle for existence. Upon the utilitarian explanation, organization would be immoral, for it tends to suppress individuals to the passions of a few. As it is, organization is neither moral nor immoral simply necessary.

Here the sociological view leads from biology to the philo- sophical or ethical view. The ethical motive is, indeed, a human and not an animal attribute. But it cannot assert dominion during the period of struggle for survival. This is the period of subterfuge, diplomacy, strategy, brute force, keen intelligence. Only in the lulls of competition, or in the final victory of per- fected and centralized organization, is it possible to introduce the ethical purpose. The sociological view of sovereignty, there- fore, in distinguishing between that necessity which builds up organizations through survival of the fittest and that freedom which characterizes victorious monopoly, reveals the state as the peculiarly ethical institution, emerging after monopoly and free- dom have been reached, and then injecting into each monopolized institution in turn its conception of right ; and so the sociologi- cal view, in showing the relations between man as a creature of necessity and man as a free agent, furnishes the philosophical or moral view of the state with a firm foundation and a proper knowledge of its limitations.

JOHN R. COMMONS.

SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY.