The sociologist, the jurist, the political scientist use their concepts of society for their purposes, which are, in the sense which is now familiar to our reader, scientific purposes. But very often they lose sight of the character of these concepts, and treat these instruments of classification and description as substitutes for the actual reality which they are, by reason of their abstractness, utterly unable to reproduce. The sociologist talks of the collective mind, and of collective representations, as if they had a reality outside the thought and action of the individual; the jurist builds a philosophy of law, in which society is opposed to the individual as a being to another being, and law, as a product of society, at every point transcends the individual will. The political scientist deals with the community, or the association, or the State, as with concepts of which it were possible to give a philosophical definition, valid for all times, and from which the rules of perfect government could be rigorously deduced. Of these types of philosophical degenerations of legitimate scientific thought, it can be roughly said that, because of the peculiar cultural development of the various nations of Europe, the first belongs more particularly to England and France, the second to Italy and Germany; though they are all more or less common in European culture as a whole. As an Italian, Croce was particularly interested in the second, the philosophical degeneration of juridical thought, and therefore his particular treatment of the economic facts underlying the problems of political society naturally took the shape of an inquiry into the nature of law. But it ought not to be difficult for the English or American reader, for whom these problems are not part of a practically inexistent philosophy of law, but of a long tradition of political science and theory of government, to translate Croce's thought into terms of his own cultural experience.