Note 119 — Part III GROUP ORGANIZATION DEMOCRACY’S METHOD (continued 2)

No one has yet given us a satisfactory account of the history of the notion of sovereignty: just how and in what degree it has been affected by history, by philosophy, by jurisprudence, etc., and how all these have interacted. We have not only to disentangle many strands to trace each to its source, but we have, moreover, just not to disentangle them, but to understand the constant interweaving of all. To watch the interplay of legal theory and political philosophy from the Middle Ages down to the present day is one of the most interesting parts of our reading, but perhaps nowhere is it more fruitful than in the idea of sovereignty. We see the corporation long ignored and the idea of legal partnership influencing the development of the social contract theory, which in its turn reacted on legal theory. We find the juristic conception of group personality, clearly seen as early as Althusius (1557–1638), and revived and expanded by Gierke, influencing the whole German school of “group sociologists.” But to-day are not many of us agreed that however interesting such historical tracing, our present notion of sovereignty must rest on what we learn from group psychology?