One hears much talk to-day about "socialisation" as the thing that
the age needs. But this socialisation will prove no true cure but a
quack remedy, possibly even a fatal one for social life, unless in
men's hearts, in men's souls, there dawns at least an instinctive
perception of the necessity for a threefold division of the body
social. If the body social is to function healthily, it must regularly
develope three organic divisions such as here described.
One of these three divisions is the economic life. It is the best
one to begin with here, because it has obviously, through modern
technical industry and modern capitalism, worked its way into the
whole structure of human society, to the subordination of everything
else. This economic life requires to form an independent organic branch
by itself within the body social,--relatively as independent as the
nervous and sensory system within the human body. Its concern is with
everything in the nature of production of commodities, circulation
of commodities, consumption of commodities.
Next comes the life of public right,--political life in the proper
sense. This must be recognised as forming a second branch of the
body social. To this branch belongs what one might term the true life
of the State,--taking "State" in the sense in which it was formerly
applied to a community possessing common rights.
Whilst economic life is concerned with all that a man needs from Nature
and what he himself produces from Nature,--with commodities and the
circulation and consumption of commodities,--the second branch of the
body social can have no other concern than what is involved in purely
human relations, in that which comes up from the deep-recesses of the
inner life and affects man's relation towards man. It is essential
to a right understanding of the composition of the social organism,
that one should clearly recognise the difference between the system
of "public right," which can only deal from inner and purely human
grounds with man-to-man relations, and the economic system, which is
concerned solely with the production, circulation and consumption of
commodities. People must become possessed of an instinctive sense for
distinguishing between these two in life, so that in practice the
economic life and the life of "right" will be kept distinct;--just
as, in man's natural organism, the lungs' function in working up the
outer air keeps distinct from the processes going on in the nervous
and sensory life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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