Organic Concept of Society

1

• Organic Concept of Society
• When we come to the final and perfect
  association....we have already reached the polis
  - an association which may be said to have
  reached the height of full self-sufficiency or
  rather to speak more exactly we may say that
  while it grows for the sake of mere life....it
  exists when once it is fully grown for the
  sake of a good life....
• ....Every polis exists by nature, having itself
  the same quality as the earlier associations from
  which it grew.....the nature of things consists
  in their end or consummation for what each thing
  is when its growth is completed we call the
  nature of that thing, whether it be a man or a
  horse or a family....
• ....From these considerations it is evident that
  the polis belongs to the class of things that
  exist by nature, and man is by nature an animal
  intended to live in a polis. He who is without a
  polis, by reason of his own nature and not of
  some accident, is either a poor sort of being, or
  a being higher than man....
• ....Man is a being meant for political
  association, in a higher degree than bees or
  other gregarious animals can ever
  associate....Nature makes nothing in vain and
  man alone is furnished with the faculty of
  language....
• ....Though the individual and the family are
  prior in the order of time, the polis is prior in
  the order of nature to the family and the
  individual. The reason for this is that the
  whole is necessarily prior in nature to the
  part....

• Atomistic Concept of Society
• God having made Man such a Creature, that, in his
  own Judgement, it was not good for him to be
  alone, put him under strong Obligations of
  Necessity, Convenience, and Inclination to drive
  him into Society, as well as with Understanding
  and Language to continue and enjoy it. The first
  Society was between Man and Wife, which gave
  beginning to that between Parents and Children
  to which, in time, that between Master and
  Servant came to be added.
• Conjugal Society is made by a voluntary Compact
  between Man and Woman....it draws with it a
  Communion of Interest....Though these Conjugal
  Bonds are more firm and lasting in Man than the
  other Species of Animals....it would give one
  reason to enquire, why this Compact....may not be
  made determinable, either by consent, or at a
  certain time, or upon certain Conditions, as well
  as any other voluntary Compacts....that it
  should always be for Life....to such as are under
  no Restraint of any positive Law, which ordains
  all such Contracts to be perpetual.
• ....Master and Servant are Names as old as
  History, but given to those of far different
  condition for a Freeman makes himself a servant
  to another, by selling him for a certain time,
  the Service he undertakes to do, in exchange for
  Wages he is to receive And though this commonly
  puts him into the Family of his Master, and under
  the ordinary Discipline thereof yet it gives the
  Master but a Temporary Power over him, and no
  greater, than what is contained in the Contract
  between em.....

2

• Organic Concept of Society contd
• If the whole body be destroyed, there will not be
  a foot or a hand, except in that ambiguous sense
  in which one uses the same word to indicate a
  different thing....
• ....All things derive their essential character
  from their function and their capacity and it
  follows that if they are no longer fit to
  discharge their function, we ought not to say
  that they are still the same things, but only
  that, by an ambiguity, they still have the same
  names. The whole is prior to the part in the
  sense that the part presupposes it the idea of
  the whole must first be there before the part can
  be understood, and, the whole itself must first
  be there before the part can have or exercise a
  function.
• ....We see that the polis exists by nature and
  that it is prior to the individual. The proof
  of both propositions is the fact that the polis
  is a whole, and that individuals are simply its
  parts. Not being self-sufficient when they are
  isolated, all individuals are so many parts all
  equally depending on the whole, which alone can
  bring about self-sufficiency. The man who is
  isolated - who is unable to share in the benefits
  of political association, or has no need to share
  because he is already self-sufficient - is no
  part of the polis, and therefore must be either a
  beast or a god.
• Man is thus intended by nature to be part of a
  political whole and there is therefore an
  imminent impulse in all men towards an
  association of this order....

• Atomistic Concept of Society contd
• ....Man being born....with a Title to perfect
  Freedom, and an uncontrouled enjoyment of all the
  Rights and Privileges of the Laws of Nature,
  equally with any other man....hath by Nature a
  Power, not only to preserve his Property his
  Life, Liberty, and Estate against the Attempts
  and Injuries of other Men but to judge of, and
  punish the breaches of that Law in
  others....there, and there only is Political
  Society, where every one of the members hath
  quitted his natural Power, resignd it up into
  the hands of the Community....the Community comes
  to be Umpire, by settled standing Rules,
  indifferent, and the same to all Parties and by
  Men having Authority from the Community, for the
  execution of those Rules....punishes those
  Offences, which any member hath committed against
  the Society, with such Penalties as the Law has
  established.
• ....And thus every Man, by consenting with others
  to make one Body Politick under one Government,
  puts himself under an Obligation to every One of
  that Society But such a Consent is next to
  impossible ever to be had....Thus that , which
  begins and actually constitutes any Political
  Society, is nothing but the consent of any number
  of Freemen capable of a majority to unite and
  incorporate into such a Society. And this is
  that, and that only, which did, or could give
  beginning to any lawful Government....
• ....The beginning of Politick Society depends
  upon the consent of the Individuals, to joyn and
  make one Society, who, when they are thus
  incorporated, might set up what form of
  Government they saw fit.

3
Atomistic Concept of Society contd ....Gover
nments may be dissolved when by the Arbitrary
Power of the Prince....without the
Consent....visibly ceases to govern....for the
securing of Mens Rights....the People are at
liberty to provide for themselves, by erecting a
new Government....by the change of Persons, or
Form, or both as they shall find it most for
their safety and good. ....Revolutions happen
not upon every little mismanagement in publick
affairs. Great mistakes....many wrong and
inconvenient Laws, and all the slips of human
frailty will be borne by the People, without
mutiny or murmur. But if a long train of Abuses,
Prevarications, and Artifices, all tending the
same way, make the design visible to the
People....they should then rouze themselves, and
endeavor to put the rule into such hands, which
may secure them to the ends for which Government
was first erected.... from The Second Treatise
of Civil Government by John Locke, edited by
Peter Laslett, Cambridge University Press 1960,
pp. 361-466
Organic Concept of Society contd ....Man
when perfected, is the best of all animals but
if he be isolated....he is the worst of
all....That is why, if he be without a polis,
he is a most unholy and savage being, and worse
than all others in the indulgence of lust and
gluttony. Justice belongs to the polis for
justice is an ordering of the political
association. from The Politics by Aristotle,
edited and translated by Ernest Barker, Oxford
University Press, 1958, pp 4-7.