A SOCIOLOGICAL VIEW OF SOVEREIGNTY I 5
influencing the acts of another by means, not of his own strength, but of the opinion or the force of society." And a legal right, after the same manner, is defined as " a capacity resid- ing in one man of controlling, with the assent and assistance of the state, the actions of others." '
It will, no doubt, be agreed that private appropriation pre- ceded the right of appropriation, and this is all that is here claimed. It came as an innovation, resisted by the existing organization of society, and only later, when it had shown its capacity for survival, did it acquire social sanction. In holding, therefore, that social institutions originated as private property, this origin is necessarily placed in advance of the origin of that social consciousness or general will which, through social acquiescence, creates a social or moral right, and still further in advance of the state which creates a legal right ; but it is placed after those instinctive and imitative modes of association and appropriation into which the factor of self-consciousness does not enter. John R. Commons.
Syracuse University.
(To be continued.) ■ Holland, Jurisprudence, pp. 70, 71.
