Whatever the social unit taken as an example—family, school, state, church—the reality of it is always in development and is intelligible only as a process. It never _is_, and always is, but only in so far as it realises itself in perfect liberty. This free realisation does not permit of the separation of its negativity from its positivity. In such a way, though realising itself as universal, the family or state can be thought of as a spiritual reality only in so far as it contains the particular element which offers an endless resistance to the process of universalisation. A society that perfectly unifies its spiritual diversity, abolishing every sign of variety, has inevitably gone to pieces since it loses all the spiritual forces that made it alive. Gentile goes so far as to say that in fact it is already dead. It is the eternally recurring opposition of interests and wills that permits the dialectic and dynamic unity of life to pulsate in any social constitution. Consequently the particularity of the will—to be resolved in the universal—consists in its negativity, without which the assertion of the universal could not exist as an act, for it would be a mere fact, not something due to the act of man but just something which _is_ by nature. There is no assertion of will which is not exclusion, suppression of its own negation. Thus society is empirically the agreement of individuals, and speculatively the realisation of will through an eternal process. Universal value is thereby identified as a process realising itself through the suppression of what is particular and negative. Society is not _inter homines_, but _in interiore homine_ and it can exist between men inasmuch as all men are spiritually one man, with one single interest: the eternal _increment_ of the patrimony of mankind. Now _society_ implies _authority_, a superior will imposed on the associated wills to unite them under a common law. Rousseau had conceived the state, the people as a passive body, reserving activity for the sovereign. Gentile having raised to speculative form the brilliant intuition that lies in the Contract, after having fully recognised it as Rousseau’s idea, now rejects his conception of the distinction between sovereign and subjects. What he actually denies is the passivity ascribed to the people, and the school is, as usual, the experimental ground of his notion.