Mr. Barker substitutes purpose for personality and will as the unifying bond of associations, and says that we thus get rid of “murder in the air” when it is a question of the “competition of ideas, not of real collective personalities.” (See “The Discredited State,” in The Political Quarterly, February, 1915.) This seems a curiously anthropomorphic, so to speak, idea of personality for a twentieth-century writer. The article is, however, an interesting and valuable one.
See also Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, I, 472.
[111]. See “Underlying Principles of Legislation.”
[112]. The teleological school of sociology is interesting just here. While it marked a long advance on older theories, the true place of selection of ends is to-day more clearly seen. We were told: “Men have wants, therefore they come together to seek means to satisfy those wants.” When do men “come together”? When were they ever separated? But it is not necessary to push this further.
[113]. I have tried not to jump the track from legal right to ethical right but occasionally one can speak of them together, if it is understood that one is not thereby merging them.
[114]. The old consent theory assumes that some make the laws and others obey them. In the true democracy we shall obey the laws we have ourselves made. To find the methods by which we can be approaching the true democracy is now our task; we can never rest satisfied with “consent.”
[115]. Although I do not agree with the form individualism takes in his doctrine.
[116]. Some of the pluralists are concerned, I recognize, with the fact rather than the right of sovereignty.
[117]. The trouble with the pluralists is that their emphasis is not on the fact that the group creates its own personality, but on the fact that the state does not create it. When they change this emphasis, their thinking will be unchained, I believe, and leap ahead to the constructive work which we eagerly await and expect from them.
[118]. It is also necessary to an understanding of the new international law. See [ch. XXXV], “The World State.”