planets in a constellation would form a community if they were aware of
the connections of the activities of each with those of the others and
could use this knowledge to direct behavior.
We have made a digression from consideration of the state to the wider
topic of society. However, the excursion enables us to distinguish the
state from other forms of social life. There is an old tradition which
regards the state and completely organized society as the same thing.
The state is said to be the complete and inclusive realization of all
social institutions. Whatever values result from any and every social
arrangement are gathered together and asserted to be the work of the
state. The counterpart of this method is that philosophical anarchism
which assembles all the evils that result from all forms of human
grouping and attributes them _en masse_ to the state, whose elimination
would then bring in a millennium of voluntary fraternal organization.
That the state should be to some a deity and to others a devil is
another evidence of the defects of the premises from which discussion
sets out. One theory is as indiscriminate as the other.
There is, however, a definite criterion by which to demarcate the
organized public from other modes of community life. Friendships, for
example, are non-political forms of association. They are characterized
by an intimate and subtle sense of the fruits of intercourse. They
contribute to experience some of its most precious values. Only the
exigencies of a preconceived theory would confuse with the state that
texture of friendships and attachments which is the chief bond in any
community, or would insist that the former depends upon the latter
for existence. Men group themselves also for scientific inquiry, for
religious worship, for artistic production and enjoyment, for sport,
for giving and receiving instruction, for industrial and commercial
undertakings. In each case some combined or conjoint action, which has
grown up out of “natural,” that is, biological, conditions and from
local contiguity, results in producing distinctive consequences--that
is, consequences which differ in kind from those of isolated behavior.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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