88 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
for ownership, lordship, sovereignty, suzerainty." Up to this point, therefore, in European history the state had not yet clearly emerged. Private property is strictly competitive, a necessity of the struggle for life, and has no ethical implication. Neither is it subject to the will of any person outside the proprietor him- self. When, therefore, order and right are injected into property, we may say the state has appeared. Sovereignty and private property, then, constitute the two branches of this all-pervasive social relation, coercion, or dominion.
But private property, contrary to the legal view, is not the creature of the state, nor is it subject to the state. It is pristine and anterior. It springs from the very nature of man. The state is rather the creature and offspring of private property. It arises quite late in the history of property, with the rise of reflective thinking and the capacity for rational cooperation. The legal view, seeing only the unity and immense power of the modern state, has reversed both the historical and the psycho- logical order. The state is not sovereign, except to the extent that it has actually become so, i. e., except as it has actually extracted coercion from private property, and has, at the same time, acquired for itself the organization for expressing and enforcing its will. The state expresses the cooperative or mutual-veto will of that part of society which is politically organized for this purpose. Private property expresses the individual will of the several private owners, or of the private chief, whether patriarch, pope, suzerain, boss, or industrial monopolist, who is at the head of the particular institution. The sociological view, being strictly inductive, does not impart to the theory of the state that which is potential and ideal, but only that which is actual and historical. At the same time, by recognizing the state as a process and not an entity, it allows for its further growth and extension, and even its ultimate absorp- tion of all private property. Only in the latter event could it be rightly said that the state is absolute and ultimate, as maintained by the legal view.
The sociological view is also more closely connected with biology than are the others. The connection with biology
