It is often argued that a theory of liberty which starts from the effort of the individual to attain happiness must break down because it fails to remember that society also has rights, and that these are necessarily superior to those of its component parts. Any organization, it is said, is more than the units of which it is composed. A nation-state like America or England is not merely a body of Englishmen or Americans, but something beyond them. It has a life and a reality, needs and purposes, which are not exhausted by the sum of the needs and purposes of its individual members. The liberty of each citizen is born of, and must be subordinated to, the liberty of that greater whole from which his whole meaning is derived. For the rights of each of us depend upon the protective rampart of social organization. It is because the State enforces our rights as obligations upon others that we have the opportunity to enjoy them. We are free, it is said, not for ourselves but for the society which gives us meaning. Where our interests conflict with the obviously greater interest of the society, we ourselves must give way. It is, I think, true to say that an individual abstracted from society and regarded as entitled to freedom outside its environment is devoid of meaning. None of us is Crusoe or St. Simeon Stylites on his pillar. We are born to live our lives in London or New York, Paris or Berlin or Rome. Our liberty has to be realized in a welter of competing and co-operating interests which only achieve rational co-ordination by something not unlike a miracle. The need to give way to others, to accept, that is, restraint upon our right to unfettered activity is inherent in the nature of things. But the surrender we make is a surrender not for the sake of the society regarded as something other than its members, but exactly and precisely for men and women whose totality is conveniently summarized in a collective and abstract noun. I do not understand how England, for instance, can have an end or purpose different from, or opposed to, the end or purpose of its citizens. We strive to do our duty to England for the sake of Englishmen; a duty to England separate from them, and in which they did not share, is surely inconceivable.