Note 110 — Part III GROUP ORGANIZATION DEMOCRACY’S METHOD (continued 2)
Reading edition
De Maeztu tells us, “Rights do not arise from personality. This idea is mystic and unnecessary. Rights arise primarily from the relation of the associated with the thing which associates them....” Authority, Liberty, and Function, p. 250.
Mr. Barker substitutes purpose for personality and will as the unifying bond of associations, and says that we thus get rid of “murder in the air” when it is a question of the “competition of ideas, not of real collective personalities.” (See “The Discredited State,” in The Political Quarterly, February, 1915.) This seems a curiously anthropomorphic, so to speak, idea of personality for a twentieth-century writer. The article is, however, an interesting and valuable one.
See also Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, I, 472.