Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/592

 578 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

sociology, but of biology, so given nowadays to the doctrines of evolution ; or, again, to confine the attention to industrial organization ; or, finally, to examine Christianity and religious experience generally from the standpoint of the organic theory; but no one of these approaches to the question in hand is now intended. What I propose is a historical study historical, too, in the narrower sense, in the sense chiefly of man's development under law and government. 1

The organic theory, with reference to its legal implications, has been supplanting and fulfilling the famous theory of the social contract, the theory of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, peculiar to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but sur- viving far into the nineteenth, if not into the twentieth. The importance of this contract theory has been very great, and conspicuously in our own history. The minds, for example, of those who wrote and who ratified our American constitution were thoroughly imbued with it, and it has shaped many of our political actions since, the great controversies about state rights, as well as about individual rights, often being inspired by it, and the constantly recurring idolatry of the constitution being also referable to it. In our proposed historical study, then, the contract theory is a natural starting-point. We have first to see exactly what it was, and then to consider how its inner logic, by dint of the conditions and distinctions that were necessary to it and that it brought to consciousness, has led inevitably, although perhaps for a time unwittingly, to the organic theory; and, in the end, if the great practical movements of our political evolution do not come to mind as effective illustrations, if our study of the rise of the organic theory with the passing of the contract theory does not bring some light to bear even upon the central problems of political life today, then, in part at least yes, in large part our study will have been a failure.

As regards the names of the two theories, it is worth remark- ing, in passing, that they are not exactly coordinate, referring,

'In a recent book, Philosophy of History (Ann Arbor, 1899), especially chaps, yi viii, I have examined the conception of an organic society from some of these standpoints, and in an article, " Evolution and Immortality," published in the Monist, April, 1900, from the special standpoint of an interpretation of Christianity.