Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/266

 252 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

Altogether and here is the important point of our study the transformations of doctrines relating to the nature of societies, and especially to their internal and external limits and frontiers, are always in correlation with the constitution of property and of social classes, and with the enfeeblement and abolition, or the restoration and reinforcement, of the intersocial frontiers. States whose frontiers are more or less rigid are only vaster forms of private proprietary sovereignty.

With the scholastics, and notably with Thomas Aquinas (1227-74), the metaphysical conception makes its return into the domain of the social theory. The doctrines of Aristotle again begin to bear upon the Platonic idealism and the Chris- tian mysticism. Then sovereignty and property cease, at least in part, to be recognized as absolute. The law, organ of reason, interferes with their institution and with their exercise. This movement is accentuated through the influence of the juris- consults.

The doctrines of free will and of necessity are mutually checked, and against the debauchery of reasoning and of the empi- ricism of the Jesuits and of Machiavelli (1469-1527) positive science regains its foothold upon the question of the influence of environment and of races upon the distribution, structure, and evolution of the human species. In the Six Books of the Republic, by J. Bodin (1577), this illustrious precursor of Montesquieu brought the problem of the influence of environ- ment upon human nature and upon social forms to the observa- tion of relations which establish themselves naturally between the surrounding physical nature and the population. In chap, i of Book V, pp. 663 ff., 1 he occupies himself particularly "with the principles which are necessary in accommodating the republican form to the diversity of men and to the means of knowing the nature of peoples." He studied the influence of the environ- ment, and especially of climate, upon the physical and moral nature, and upon the political forms of men in societies. " It is necessary," said he, "to accommodate [we always say today "to adapt"] the form of the political action to the nature of the

'Pays edition, Paris, 1580.