Our pooling of experiences to make a common purpose somewhere is in no case other than fragmentary. We remain ourselves even when we join with others to attain some common object of desire. The ultimate isolation of the individual personality is the basis from which any adequate theory of politics must start. I reject, therefore, the idea of a real will, and, still more, the idea that there is a common will in society. It is a logical inference therefrom that I should reject also the doctrine that all state-action is, at bottom, the exercise of the real will of society. For, first of all, I see no reason to suppose that social life is ultimately the product of a single and rational mind organizing its activities in terms of a logical process. To speak of the “mind of society”, seems to me merely a metaphorical way of describing a course of action which is made valid by translation into fact. There are no governing principles in social life deliberately emerging from the interplay of its myriad constituent parts. Governing principles emerge; but they emerge through the wills of individual minds. And the state is magnified to excess when it is regarded as embodying a unified will. The state is a complex of rulers and subjects territorially organized and seeking, by the conference of power upon those rulers, effective co-ordination of social activities. They exercise the right to use force, if necessary, to that end. But no one, I think, can examine the course of history and say that the experience of any state indicates a permanent embodiment of the highest good we know in the purpose of the state. Our rulers, doubtless, aim at the good as they see it. Yet what they see as good may not be so recognizable to us, and may well provoke in us the sense that life would not be worth living if their view was to prevail. The unity of the state, in a word, is not inherently there. It is made by civic acceptance of what its rulers propose. It is not necessarily good because it is accepted; it is not necessarily right because it is proposed. Obedience ought always to be a function of the substance contained in the rules made by government; it is a permanent essay in the conditional mood.[3]