The “sociologic concept of the State,” as Ludwig Gumplowicz termed it, is assured of ultimate general acceptance. Its opponents are strenuous and persevering, and I once called them “the sociologic root of all evil;” but the concept, none the less, is the basic principle of “bourgeoisie” sociology, and will be found of value in the study, not only of economics and history, but in that of Law and Constitutional History. I permit myself to make a few remarks on this point.
The earliest evidence of the recognition of the idea underlying the _law of previous accumulation_, may be traced back, at the latest, to the period of the decay of classical civilization, at the time when the capitalistic slave economy brought the city states to ruin as though their peoples had suffered from a galloping consumption. As in our modern capitalistic age, which resembles that period in many respects, there occurred a breach in all those naturally developed relations in which the individual has found protection. What Ferdinand Toennies calls the “community bonds” were loosened. The individual found himself unprotected, compelled to rely on his own efforts and on his own reason in the seething sea of competition which followed. The collective reason, the product of the wisdom of thousands of years of experience, could no longer guide or safeguard him. It had become scattered. Out of this need for an individual reason, there arose the idea of _nationalism_. This idea had its justification at first, as a line of development and a method in the newly born science of social government; but when later it became what Rubenstein (in his work _Romantic Socialism_) calls a “tendency,” it was not justified. The community, to use Toennies’ term, changed into a “society.” “Contract” seemed to be the only bond that held men together--the contract based on the purely rationalistic relation of service for service, the _do ut des_, the “Contrat Social” of Rousseau. A “society” would thus appear to be a union of self-seeking individuals who hoped through combination to obtain their personal satisfactions. Aristotle had taught that the State had developed, by gradual growth, from the family group. The Stoics and Epicureans held that individuals formed the State--with this difference, that the former viewed the individual as being socially inclined by nature, and the latter that he was naturally anti-social. To the Stoics, therefore, the “State of Nature” was a peaceful union; to the Epicureans it was a war of each against the other, with Society as a compelling means for a decent modus vivendi. With the one a Society was conditioned “physei” (by nature); with the other it was “nomo” (by decree).