sociological monism consists merely in the statement that for the personal absolutist there is no inherent difficulty in the conception of a genuine self which includes other lesser selves. This is true; but it is far from a proof that all social groups, or even some social groups, actually and literally are selves. This paper undertakes first to indicate the insufficiency of the empirical arguments advanced for the conception of the social group as literally a self; second to show the compatibility of the pluralistic conception of society with the monistic (absolutistic) philosophy of the universe.
I. Fundamental to both these purposes is a clear statement of what must be meant by the doctrine that a social group is literally a person. The doctrine evaporates into sheer metaphor unless it means that a social group is a being aware of itself as unique, or individual, relatively persistent or identical, and changing. In Fite’s pregnant (and Hegelian) phrase a self or person must exist for himself and not merely as an appearance to others. Now all the arguments known to me for the self-conception of society fall far short of establishing the truth that a social group is in this sense a person. Such arguments seem to fall into two groups:
1. There is first the consideration, eloquently urged by Royce, that a man may love his country—church or country—and be loyal to it and sacrifice himself for it as if it were a self. In other words, Royce argues (and in my opinion very effectively) that a society is regarded by its members as a self. But this certainly does not prove that a society is a self. Laski, for instance, in asserting that “certain personalities, England, France, Germany are real to the soldiers who die for them’”[1] certainly need not mean that England, France and Germany are literal “personalities.” For nothing is literally person or self which is not for itself, more fundamentally than for other men, a person.
2. The second group of arguments includes all those which set forth and illustrate the manifest fact that persons associated together bring about effects which are not the mathematical resultant of their separate ideas and volitions added or subtracted after any mechanical fashion. Royce makes use of this argument (and, unjustifiably as it seems to me, calls on Wundt as witness) in his insistence that because it is “the social mind” or “community which produces languages, customs, religions …—mental products which can be psychologically analyzed, which follow psychological laws and which exhibit characteristic processes of mental evolution—processes that belong solely to organized groups of men” that we are therefore
- ↑ The Problem of Sovereignty, Chap. I, p. 4.
