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 204 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

sharpest conflicts of opinion and practice in politics and busi- ness will have to be fought out on lines drawn from the base just indicated. For instance, old-fashioned Jeffersonian democ- racy was a political philosophy which assumed precisely the individualism rejected above as an optical illusion. All the modern variations of Jeffersonian democracy, in spite of their stalwart and salutary traits, are weak from the implications of this impossible individual, and they are foreordained failures in just the proportion in which they ignore the composite, depend- ent, social character of the individual. On the other hand, all the socialisms, from the mildest to the most radical, imply the opposite misconception, viz., that society is the only real exist- ence, and that the personal units have no separate and distinct claims or character sufficient to modify theories devoted solely to the perfection of social organization. All socialisms tend to gravitate toward programs which magnify social machinery, and minimize the importance of the personal units. All such ques- tions as that of municipal control of public utilities ; the relation of the state to education, morals, the dependent classes, religion ; the relation of the public to corporations and combinations, to artificial encouragement of industries by tariffs, patents, treaties, and other devices ; with the thousand and one variations of the problems continually confronting every modern community; imply and involve assumptions about the relation of society as a whole to the personal units. Of course, very few persons will bring these fundamental considerations, in their naked academic form, into the arena of practical politics or business; but every person who influences politics or business will, consciously or unconsciously, throw into the scale the weight of his prejudice about this matter of the personal unit vs. the social whole. The sort of work that the sociologist has to do is needed as a means of reducing the weight of both kinds of prejudice, and of substituting for each a just conception of the intrinsic relation between the personal units and the social whole.

Accordingly, while we must emphasize this, so to speak, diffused social personality of the apparently individual units, and while the fact that each person realizes himself very largely at a