Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/601



ORGANIC THEORY OF SOCIETY 587

best key to the times from which the theory sprang, for there is nothing like duplicity to make heated controversy. Duplicity has the effect of putting both sides in the right, of making both share in what is right, so that I might venture to say that any historian who wishes to explain a critical conflict in human progress must fail utterly if he cannot detect a shared duplicity, although a duplicity maintained from its different sides, in the positions of the contestants. The history of the United States is a pertinent case, for, as has been said, the contract theory notably in the form given by Locke was most influential at the begin- ning and has played an important part ever since. In an illu- minating article, " The Compact Theory and Constitutional Construction," recently contributed by my colleague, Professor Andrew C. McLaughlin, the great controversies of American history are shown to have involved the contract theory, and Pro- fessor McLaughlin is not blind to what I have called the "shared duplicity " of opponents. 1 Calhoun, for example, is shown more than once to have contradicted himself, or to have said one thing and meant another, his defense of state rights by appeal to an indivisible sovereignty being a boomerang of the first power. He claimed for the state only what his opponents were claiming for the federation, and so, in spite of his leaning to the individ- ualism of the contract theory, he was contributing to the devel- opment of the organic, the wholly naturalistic theory which has supplanted, or is supplanting, that of contract. Good history, I repeat, when it deals with conflicts, particularly with great epoch- making conflicts, consists in showing that opponents are double, that is, as much in conflict with themselves as with each other.

So, to continue, both Locke and Rousseau, to say no more of their great forerunner Thomas Hobbes, were philosophers of revolution ; Locke by separating the state and the government as end and means respectively, and basing only the government on contract, on an amendable contract ; Rousseau by virtually reducing the contract that makes the state not the government to a mere fiction, to a pure principle; and both by the possi- bilities which they realized for emphasis by later thinkers. And

'See American Historical Review, April, 1900.