Plato would certainly have thought this strange: his _Republic_ is a tract on the proper education of a ruling class. Dante, in the turmoil of thirteenth century Florence, seeking order and stability, addressed himself not to the conscience of Christendom but to the Imperial Party. The great state builders of modern times, Hamilton, Cavour, Bismarck, Lenin, each had in mind somebody, some group of real people, who were to realize his program. The agents in the theory have varied, of course; here they are the landlords, then the peasants, or the unions, or the military class, or the manufacturers; there are theories addressed to a church, to the ruling classes in particular nations, to some nation or race. The theories are always, except in the liberal philosophy, addressed to somebody. By comparison the liberal philosophy has an air of vague unworldiness. Yet the regard of men for it has been persistent; somehow or other with all the lapses in its logic and with all its practical weaknesses it touches a human need. These appeals from men to man: are they not a way of saying that men desire peace, that there is a harmony attainable in which all men can live and let live? It seems so to me. The attempt to escape from particular purposes into some universal purpose, from personality into something impersonal, is, to be sure, a flight from the human problem, but it is at the same time a demonstration of how we wish to see that problem solved. We seek an adjustment, as perfect as possible, as untroubled as it was before we were born. Even if man were a fighting animal, as some say he is, he would wish for a world in which he could fight perfectly, with enemies fleet enough to extend him and not too fleet to elude him. All men desire their own perfect adjustment, but they desire it, being finite men, on their own terms. Because liberalism could not accommodate the universal need of adjustment to the permanence and the reality of individual purpose, it remained an incomplete, a disembodied philosophy. It was frustrated over the ancient problem of the One and the Many. Yet the problem is not so insoluble once we cease to personify society. It is only when we are compelled to personify society that we are puzzled as to how many separate organic individuals can be united in one homogeneous organic individual. This logical underbrush is cleared away if we think of society not as the name of a thing but as the name of all the adjustments between individuals and their things. Then, we can say without theoretical qualms what common sense plainly tells us is so: it is the individuals who act, not society; it is the individuals who think, not the collective mind; it is the painters who paint, not the artistic spirit of the age; it is the soldiers who fight and are killed, not the nation; it is the merchant who exports, not the country. It is their relations with each other that constitute a society. And it is about the ordering of those relations that the