POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 321 



deduced from the character assumed. It takes the fact of sove- 

 reignty and builds upon it and does not speculate how sovereignty 

 came to be, as did Hobbes and Locke and Rousseau. It starts 

 exactly where Aristotle started, with the dictum that every man is 

 a political animal." 



In another place he says: " So far, then, as the objective inter- 

 pretation is concerned, neither political economy nor politics can 

 pretend that it goes back to the primary facts in the social category. 

 Both frankly assume without explanation the phenomena of human 

 association." 1 



To the position thus taken that political science, in common with 

 the other special social sciences, requires the services of another 

 science to establish the fundamental principles and interpret the 

 primary facts with which it has to deal, two objections lie. In the 

 first place, it is not to be admitted that the politician takes sove- 

 reignty or any other primary political fact without inquiry as to its 

 origin. The historical or descriptive publicist or the writer upon 

 practical politics does not, of course, concern himself with the origin 

 and nature of political authority, or with the basis for political right. 

 But the political philosopher or theorist does, and many works exist 

 in which the origin of political power has been traced back of the 

 mere fact of its existence to its ultimate psychological genesis. In 

 the second place, in Giddings's statement of the case for sociology 

 as a science fundamental, and logically prior to political science, it is 

 incorrectly assumed that political societies result from an organic 

 development of antecedent groups that are without political organ- 

 ization, from groups, in other words, that are purely social in 

 character. As a matter of fact, though the time cannot here be 

 taken even to outline the argument, it is easily demonstrable that 

 the psychological basis upon which the state is founded is a senti- 

 ment of unity which exists in individual wills and that the political 

 unit is not a development from some lower social unit. The body 

 politic is not a development from the family or the tribe. It may 

 be that, historically speaking, the social group is earlier formed than 

 the political group. This is due to the fact that a degree of mutual 

 restraint and tolerance which is sufficient to maintain a slightly 

 coherent social group is more easily established than the mutual 

 cooperation and individual self-subjection which are necessary for 

 the creation of a political unit. But the social group does not by 

 a simple process of growth become a political group. Psycho- 

 logically as well as teleologically the state is independent of the facts 

 of mere social groups; and hence, that science which studies the 

 genesis and nature of social groupings cannot be fundamental to the 

 science of politics. 



1 Giddings, Principles of Sociology, p. 34. 



