Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/584

564 mastered its details. . . . There was no book on which one could draw, and the persons whom I interrogated usually seemed surprised that a stranger should feel interested in inquiries of the kind.

M. Ostrogorski devotes the first volume to England. His aim is to show how British democracy has attempted to exercise public authority through "extra-constitutional organizations of the electoral masses." Vol. II carries out the same program for the United States.

The quality of the author's thought may be indicated by a few sentences from his concluding section (Vol. II, pp. 607-741):

When we take a comprehensive glance at the phenomena which have been successively brought under our notice, and try to find our bearings among them, nothing is visible at first but confusion. Going back to the starting-point, we see the state, in the hands of a class, and society, embodied in that ruling class, dominating the individual, and overwhelming him with the whole weight of social, religious, and political convention. But this threefold tyranny gives way and collapses under the pressure of manifold forces of a moral and material kind. The enthusiasm of self-revealed religious faith, the criticism of reason triumphantly asserting itself, the new appliances of industry, all combine to free the individual from his bonds. In vain do dethroned authority and relaxed social discipline call to their aid the religious tradition, social tradition, the emotions of the heart, the distress inspired by the future, in order to stop the progress of the individual. Everything conspires in his favor, obstacles vanish before him. The autonomous individual is finally proclaimed sovereign in the state. Left to himself in the political sphere, by the emancipating process of individualism, and powerless in his atomistic isolation, he fastens on the old party groove, and makes it his base of operations. Jealous of his new power, he is not content with being invested with it. To prevent a fresh attack from the old influences, which appear to him more odious than ever, the individual, weary of the moral action of man on his fellow-men, which has kept him for centuries in a state of dependence and submission, strives to regulate even this action, to make its effect subject to formal conditions. He tries to refer directly to himself, as to their source, all the relations in public life, within and without the legal sphere. On the other side of the Atlantic, where he became his own master sooner, he presses forward in this direction with exceptional energy.

But strange phenomenon the nearer he advances the nearer he appears to draw to the starting-point. In fact, after he has gone on for a time, it is seen that the rdle of the individual in the state dwindles to a small affair. He wields only a shadow of the sovereignty which is laid at his feet as pompously as it is hypocritically. He has, in reality, no power over the choice of the men who govern in his name and by his authority. The nation and its