Society

SOCIETY. - From the Latin socius, the term s. was initially used by Roman law to indicate the universitas personarum (also called ordines, sodalicia, collegia, corpora), that is, associations of several persons united for a lawful purpose with the intention of constituting a single subject having legal personality (cf. D. 3, 4, 1; 47, 22, 1). More specifically, s. expresses, in the treatise on obligations, "that consensual and bilateral contract (or even, on occasion, plurilateral), without effects on the position of the contracting parties in relation to third parties, by virtue of which two or more persons undertake to pool goods and activities for the purpose of dividing among themselves, according to a pre-established proportion, the profits and losses" (V. Arangio-Ruiz, La s. in diritto romano, Naples 1950, p. 63). These meanings passed into the modern codes of civil law and into canon law. Through the work of Roman philosophers, the use of the term s. acquired a greater breadth, as the Latin equivalent of the word xxxvovix, which Greek thought had made the object of its speculation from the 5th century B.C. onward: Cicero, for example, states: "nati sumus ad societatem" (De fin., IV).

I. SOCIETY IN ANCIENT THOUGHT

The philosophical problem of human sociality is posed by the questioning of the sophists, whether the constitution of the πόλις, and therefore its laws, are the product of nature (φῶσι) or of mere convention (νῶμω): their answer was decidedly individualistic, but not in agreement in establishing the value of s. Protagoras in fact saw in political activity the field for the affirmation of individual ἀρετή, open to all through education; nevertheless he has recourse to the fundamental sentiments of justice and moral fear (δίκη καὶ ἀνδῶς) to explain the possibility and the value of political life (cf. Plato, Protog., 320 ff.). But the disintegration of Pericles' Athenian polis during the Peloponnesian War induced the sophists to deny all value to the State, to its laws and traditions: according to Thrasymachus (id., Respubl., 338 e) the law of the State is a mere instrument of power for subjugating the weak; according to Callicles (id., Gorgias, 483 c) it is the weak who make use of the laws against the strong; for Lycophron (cf. Aristotle, Polit., III, 9, 1280 b) the State derives from a convention of mutual guarantee for the maximum increase of individual interests. The sophistic tendency had its logical developments in the Cynic school, which declared man essentially antisocial and affirmed his full individual self-sufficiency (cf. Diogenes Laertius, VI); and in the Cyrenaic school, which considered social living as a function of individual pleasure (id., II), thus opening the way to the utilitarian sociology of Epicurus (v.). Epicureanism celebrated the pleasure of friendship and posited the State as the product of a calculation of utility, and therefore deriving from a social contract (id., X), in which the wise, while securing the maximum well-being for themselves, also determine civil progress (cf. Lucretius, De rerum natura, V, 1103 ff.).

To these individualistic conceptions there were opposed, first, Plato and Aristotle, and later, the Stoics. For Plato « the polis exists because none of us is self-sufficient, but needs many things » (Respub., II, 11). Need leads to association and to a progressive organic division of labor: from this derives the polis as an associative organism, with the requirement of defense and government (ibid., III, 2). Having arisen from need, the polis nevertheless does not find its meaning in the satisfaction of particular utilities, but has in itself and for itself a universal value, as the concrete expression of the idea of the good, cause and principle of all becoming (ibid., VI, 19; VII, 3), and as the actualization of the idea of man in his three constitutive parts, the rational, the irascible, the concupiscible. Citizens must live solely for the statal whole, sacrificing every particular interest: hence no private property and no family (ibid., V). For Aristotle ὁ ἀνθρώπος φῶσι ταλτικῶν ζῶσιν (Polit., I, 2, 1253 a 3): by his rationality man is capable of beatitude; but he cannot attain the fullness of his rational life except in the polis. The polis is therefore the end toward which all human development tends. Aristotle applies the observational method of the genetic process of sociality in its various forms toward the attainment of human self-sufficiency or beatitude (ibid., I, 2, 1252, 630). The requirement of « living » leads man to the search for the daily goods necessary to his life, and therefore to the constitution of the family (φίλια), whose necessity and nature are given by the same natural differences between male and female, between master and slave, requiring mutual completion through union (ibid.). The necessity, for life, of other goods leads families to mutual aid and therefore to the constitution of the village (χώμη; l. c. 1252 b 12). But mere living cannot suffice for man, because he is made for « living well » or perfectly, that is, for the full exercise of all his rational capacities: hence the necessity of the further union of villages into the polis. « The polis is that perfect one », formed of several villages, having so to speak the highest summit of all self-sufficiency (αὐτάχεται), arisen for the sake of living, but essentially constituted for perfect living » (ibid.). The polis, identifying itself with the very « entelechy » (v.) of man, is a whole of value, and is therefore « prior, by nature, to families and to each one of us » (ibid., 1253 a 19): nevertheless it requires, for its very existence, the full development and efficiency of each individual, of the family institution, and the defense of private property (ibid., II, 1-2, 1261 a-1264 b). It is an organism composed of « matter » and « form ». Aristotle places particular interest in the study of social matter, since it is from the concrete situation of social matter that there arises not only the possibility of self-sufficiency (ibid., II, 1 1261 b), but the very emergence of the form or constitution in its various modalities (ibid., IV, VI) and its very changing (ibid., V). For Aristotle, therefore, one cannot establish the ideal form of the State, but only distinguish theoretically good constitutions from depraved ones (ibid., III), and tend practically toward a constitution which, responding to the concrete social situation, may adapt itself with just laws and wise education to elevate this situation morally toward the full exercise of all the practical and theoretical virtues that permit the attainment of the greatest possible beatitude (ibid., VII, VIII).

For the Stoics too man is naturally political (cf. Stobaeus, Ecl., II, 226 ff.); but the polis is no longer concretized in a determinate social matter, since it expands to comprehend all universal rationality, governed by the immanent eternal divine law. The Platonic-Aristotelian conception of the State, as spiritual unity and supreme human value, thus reaches its summit, but at the same time tends to dissolve into the most complete individualism. Each one in fact must live in himself and in his own autonomous isolation the objective universal rationality, and only thus does he insert himself into the universal value of the unity of all rational beings. Stoic cosmopolitanism is characteristic of this attitude. The merit of Stoicism is having placed outside the statal institution the ultimate foundation of the rational unity toward which natural human sociality tends, and having recognized the rational value of every man; but its radical individualistic-rationalistic conception prevented it from understanding the social value of individual persons and the human meaning of the historical concreteness of sociality. The insertion, accomplished through Cicero, of Aristotelian and Stoic thought into the great Roman juridical tradition, causes the immutable natural law to descend into the historical concretization of the law of nations and of civil law. Each individual and people, participating in themselves the principles of natural law, actualizes them in the social institutions necessary to their life and progress, determining in a fundamental coincidence of customs (ius gentium) a multiform variety corresponding to the different circumstances and to the degree of civilization (ius civile). The Roman respublica, with its capacity to respect the natural values implicit in the ius gentium and to apply perpetually the ius traditum to the exigencies of new circumstances, historically actualizes the universal values of human sociality, according to the rational nature of all men (cf. De republica, II, 1 ff.).

II. SOCIETY IN CHRISTIAN THOUGHT

Only with Christianity does the problem of the s. acquire that profound human significance which Greek-Roman naturalism and rationalistic objectivism could not discover. In Christianity the s. is essentially a communion of persons through knowledge and love. The communion among men presupposes the recognition of God as common Father, and is a preparation for eternal communion with God himself. For Christianity there is a human solidarity in good and in evil: as all men have sinned in Adam, so can they rise again in Christ (Rom. 5, 12 ff.) and cooperate with Christ in the coming of the Kingdom of God in themselves and in others. With Christianity, therefore, the synthesis between the concept of s. and that of history is brought about, whereby the individual person comes to expand in space and time in the living communion of the Mystical Body (v.), which through earthly vicissitudes tends toward the fullness of its perfection (Eph., 1, 22 ff.; 4, 1 ff.): this is a supernatural organism that expresses itself in an organic visible society, the Church (ἐκκλησία, s.), dynamically open to all men, in order to realize the Kingdom of God in space and time.

The historico-social conception of Christianity finds its first organic elaboration in St. Augustine. The root of the s. and of the development of the historical process lies in the intimate act of free love of the human person: «Fecerunt itaque civitates duas amores duo, terrenam scilicet amor sui usque ad contemptum Dei; caelestem vero amor Dei, usque ad contemptum sui» (De civit. Dei, XIV, 28). Personal activity presupposes, however, divine Providence, whereby even the earthly s. tends to bring about the providential divine plan in favor of the increase of the heavenly city, or rather of that part of it «quae in hac terra peregrinatur et vivit ex fide» (ibid., XIX, 17). Insofar as it lives on earth, the heavenly City comes to find itself in that social conditioning proper to the earthly city, and therefore cannot estrange itself from the latter's historical process; it must rather, by its educative work, lead the earthly city to its own end willed by God, establishing that external peace among men which guarantees the free development of the heavenly City itself (ibid.).

Through the work of St. Thomas, Scholasticism accomplished the synthesis between the Greek-Roman social conception (Aristotle, the Stoics, Cicero) and that of Christianity. The result was a system (social philosophy), intimately connected with moral philosophy, in which the natural forms of sociality assume a value of their own in the finality of a good that the person must naturally set for himself in order to achieve his own perfection and tend toward the attainment of the ultimate absolute good; and a system (social theology), in which God, responding to a natural capacity of the rational creature, elevates individual persons to the supernatural life of charitable communion realized in the Church, and thus renders them fit to express, in the very natural forms of sociality, not only the moral virtues, which permit true friendship and the increase of human progress, but above all the theological virtues, which elevate justice and friendship to the supreme values of charity. To determine the characteristics of human sociality, one must distinguish between the natural necessity of friendship and the natural necessity of s. The love of friendship is essential to the concept of the created person, to whom is intrinsic the exigency for communion, through knowledge and love, with God and with other created persons according to the degree of mutual likeness, natural or acquired, and of concrete possibility of an actual form of living together (Sum. Theol., 1ᵃ, q. 60, a. 5; 1ᵃ-2ᵃᵉ, q. 27, a. 3 and q. 28, a. 1). This natural friendship must be brought about by the person through free deliberation, becoming elective friendship: only the constant will of the honest good permits its full and perfect realization (amicitia boni honesti), while the imperfection of moral life determines imperfect and extrinsic types of friendship (amicitia boni utilis et boni delectabilis; cf. In Eth., VIII, lect. 2ᵃ, n. 1561, lect. 3ᵃ, n. 1563 ff.). Natural friendship, which is an essential property of all rational creatures, has in the human person a wholly particular significance: men indeed, individuals of one and the same nature, can communicate in a common will of goods suited and proportionate to them; and by their natural perfectibility they have the exigency to realize their own perfection through the progressive attainment of finite goods, which can only be brought about through mutual and organic collaboration (In Eth., 1, lect. 1ᵃ, n. 4; De reg. princ., 1, 1). The natural friendship of human persons therefore entails the exigency of s., that is, a conscious union among several persons to attain a common good, through common and organic operative effort. The s. is not a real substance existing outside the reason and will of the individuals who compose it, but is a unitas ordinis (In Eth., 1, lect. 1ᵃ, n. 5), perpetually caused by the ratio practica and by the common will of a determinate good. «Bonum commune est finis singulorum personarum in communitate existentium» (Sum. Theol., 2ᵃ-2ᵃᵉ, q. 58, a. 9): toward it, therefore, the activities of individuals are directed, as parts toward the whole, whereby the s. assumes in a certain way an operation of its own, within the limits of the particular end that individuals have set for themselves to realize in common. The common goods that individual persons can propose to themselves are definite, participating simultaneously in several s., without being totally absorbed by them; thus there is determined a plurality of s. variously interfering with one another in the social complex (De reg. princ., 1, 14; Sum. Theol., 2ᵃ-2ᵃᵉ, q. 47, a. 10). Nevertheless the ratio practica demands that this plurality be composed into a unity of a higher order, which comprehends it without destroying it, and allows all the particular goods and ends of the various s. to become a common patrimony in that supreme public good, coinciding with the ultimate end realizable on earth, that is, the greatest earthly happiness (In Eth., I, lect. 2ᵃ, n. 10 ff.; Sum. Theol., 1ᵃ-2ᵃᵉ, q. 96, a. 3).

The fundamental forms of sociality are given by the two fundamental needs of the person, namely living and living well. To "living" corresponds the natural form of domestic society, or family, which finds the fullness of its meaning in the education of children, who represent the "commune bonum amicitiae coniugalis," and in which paternal authority is an inviolable participation in the paternitas divina, directed toward the formation of perfect men (In Eth., VIII, lect. 12ᵃ, n. 1719 ff.; Sum. Theol., 2ᵃ-2ᵃᵉ, q. 10, a. 12; q. 92, a. 1). To "living well" corresponds civil society, or the State, as a self-sufficient society, in whose harmonious unity the particular goods of individuals, of families and of the other societies that compose it find their full efficacy and their ordering to the common good, and in whose historical perpetuity the work of generations is preserved and handed down. (De reg. princ., 1, 15; Sum. Theol., 1ᵃ-2ᵃᵉ, q. 96, a. 1). Nevertheless the State by itself is not capable of directing men to the ultimate supreme personal good, that is, to the "bonum divinum," and therefore "homo non dirigitur ad communitatem politicam secundum se totum et secundum omnia sua" (ibid., 1ᵃ-2ᵃᵉ, q. 21, a. 4 ad 3; q. 96, a. 3). Only in a society that has as its end the same bonum divinum can human persons realize that perfect friendship which is in the need of the created person. This supreme society must guide the State, so that its earthly good may be effectively ordered to the divine good of persons. If this religious form of sociality was expressed in the ancient world only imperfectly through the sacerdotal authority, subject to the political authority, after the Christian Revelation it is expressed perfectly, and on a supernatural plane, in the Church (cf. De regim. princ., I, 14).

III. SOCIETY IN MODERN THOUGHT

At the beginning of the modern age, individualistic and naturalistic tendencies brought about the split between ethics and politics (Machiavelli (v.)), the denial of the natural value of s. and the rejection of the supernatural order and, consequently, of the Church. Hobbes (v.) set himself the problem of reconciling the natural egoism of the individual with the absoluteness of monarchical power, resorting, to this end, to the theory of the social contract, already defended by medieval nominalism: individuals, under the impulse of fear, renounce their unlimited natural right, subjecting themselves to the absolute and unlimited right of a single one, whose will determines social living through civil law. Thus begins the juridical conception of s., as an organism deriving from positive law, and whose value lies entirely in the physical coercibility of external acts contrary to public utility. This conception, adopted by rationalism and empiricism (v.), passed into liberal doctrine (v. LIBERALISMO), even though the Hobbesian theory had to yield before the aristocratic-republican theory of Spinoza and the democratic one of Locke and Rousseau. The inadequacy of the juridical conception drove rationalism in the 18th century to the search for an a priori social order, safeguarding individual rights, to be imposed even by revolution. Thus there gradually took shape, in opposition to the historical political order, a set of problems concerning strictly social individual relations, which later had its full development in socialism (v.). At the same time English empiricism concerned itself with finding in the very sentiments of individuals the root of their social relations: from the altruism of Cumberland (v.) and the moral sense of Shaftesbury (v.) and Hutcheson (v.) down to the sympathy (v.) of Hume (v.) and Smith (v.).

With the 19th century, three conceptions of the nature of sociality came to be clearly formulated: the naturalistic, the historicist and formalistic, and the personalistic.

1. Naturalistic conception of s

After Comte (v.), positivism (v.) sought to interpret all social facts in the light of deterministic laws, denying all value to the human person and all normativity to sociology (v.). Various theories have resulted, according to the nature of the laws invoked to explain the rise and evolution of social facts: a) Mechanistic or energetic physical theories. S. is considered as a physical body of which individuals are merely atoms or forces, mutually interfering according to the laws of mechanics (cf. L. F. Ward, Mechanics of society, in Journ. of Sociol., 2 [1896], pp. 234 ff.) or of dynamics. b) Biological theories. The social body is a living organism, governed by biological laws, according to the Darwinian principle of the struggle for the spontaneous selection of the better organisms, whether races or classes (G. Ratzenhofer, Die soziologische Erkenntnis, Leipzig 1898), or according to the laws of adaptation of living beings to their environment (cf. H. H. Frost, The functional sociology of E. Waxweiler, Berkeley 1934). c) Psychological theories. S. is determined by individual and inter-individual psychological laws, or is a reality with its own psychological laws, determining the individual: the imitation theory of G. Tarde; the Volkerpsychologie of M. Lazarus and H. Steinthal; the relationism of the Chicago school (E. A. Ross), of R. M. Mac Iver, of P. A. Sorokin; the theory of instincts (W. Mac Dougal); social behaviorism and the theory of attitudes (W. I. Thomas, F. Znaniecki, L. L. Bernard); psychoanalysis (v.); psychodynamic analysis (Kardiner, Linton); American socio-psychology (F. H. Giddings, J. M. Baldwin, Ch. Cooler, E. Faris, C. A. Ellwood); the psychology of madness of the Italian criminological school (Lombroso) and of the Frenchman G. Le Bon; the social theory of G. Mead (Mind, self and society, New York 1934), etc. d) Sociological theories. S. is a reality standing on its own, governed by its own laws, determining all individuals. This reality is of an empirical order and consists in the collective consciousness preceding and determining individual consciousnesses through social pressure. « One diminishes s. when one sees in it only a body organized with a view to determinate vital functions. In this body lives a soul: it is the ensemble of collective ideals » (E. Durkheim, Jugements de valeur, Paris 1924, p. 136); « s. is a specific reality; it is part of nature, and is its highest manifestation » (id., Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, 3rd ed., Paris 1937, p. 25). The merit of the proponents of the naturalistic conception of s. is to have promoted the scientific study of man's social conditioning, investigating the laws that regulate the concrete formation and evolution of social matter, whose importance Aristotle and Plato had already emphasized. But the positivist claim to make this scientific investigation consist in the integral interpretation of man's social value is to be rejected: such a claim subjects the person to determinism, and is incapable of explaining the characteristics of spirituality, rationality, freedom, universality, and normativity immanent in the social process.

2. Historicist and formalistic conception of s

In opposition to naturalistic extrinsicism and determination, historicism and formalism consider s. in its formal element, rational or vitalistic, as the expression of a creativity that makes it be in historical becoming. For Christianity, in social activity there is necessarily that same teleologism, rationality and freedom that is present in all personal activity. St. Augustine had already considered s. and history as the product of divine providence and human freedom. G. B. Vico (v.) saw the rise and development of s. in the light of a logical dynamism whose principle is both Providence, through the eternal ideas present in the human mind, and the human person who with his freedom progressively certifies the true in the gradual development of utilities, thus determining, socially and historically, the finite human good. All s. and history « lead to a general unity, which is the unity of the religion of a provident divinity, which is the unity of the spirit, that informs and gives life to this world of nations » (Scienza nuova seconda, II, Bari 1942, p. 50, n. 915).

With Hegel, by contrast, historicism is understood in an immanentistic sense, as self-revelation in the dialectical process of the Idea (v.). The subjective Spirit, expressing itself in the abstract values of the individual person, finds liberation from its limit and its abstractness in the full dedication to the concrete universal values of the objective Spirit, expressing themselves in the family, in civil s. and finally perfectly in the State, « which is the end and actual reality of the universal substance and of the public life that is consecrated to it » (Grundlinien der Philos. des Rechts, part 2, § 157).

For Marx (v.) it is economic activity that produces s. with all the values determining individuals, and it is economic dialectics that makes history (v. MATERIALISMO DIALETTICO; MATERIALISMO STORICO).

F. Tönnies distinguishes a twofold will: the natural, organic will inherent in being (Wesenwille), and the will of choice or reflected will (Willkür, Kürwille): from the first is expressed the social form of the "community," from the second that of "society." Community and society are the two categories through which human life is expressed, and the process of their interference produces the historical process (cf. Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, Leipzig 1887). H. Freyer interprets these categories of Tönnies on a historico-objective plane: from the primitive, homogeneous community, in which the whole of the group forms an indivisible "we," one passes to society, as a heterogeneous complex of groups bound together by the power that dominates them, so that "society is a form of domination" (Herrschaftsgebilde; cf. Einleitung in die Soziologie, ibid. 1931, p. 136). O. Spann (Gesellschaftslehre, 3rd ed., ibid. 1931) considers society as a Platonic idea, that is, a totality (Ganzheit) of spiritual essence, one and at the same time multiple inasmuch as it is capable of making individual persons live from its fullness by the force of the domination that is expressed from its very essence. O. Spengler (Untergang des Abendlandes, Munich 1923; Der Staat, ibid. 1933) defends a historical evolutionism in which the State is understood as a concrete reality, the incarnation of a living culture, in which the direct experience of a collective "we" is affirmed. To this collective consciousness G. Lehmann (Das Kollektivbewusstsein, Berlin 1928) tends to attribute an ontological reality in order to make it the basis of a sociology understood as a philosophy of the Spirit; analogously F. Jerusalem interprets the spiritual solidarity of men by recourse to a collective spirit of which they are the bearers (Grundzüge der Soziologie, Berlin 1930).

The historicist and formalist conception of society has rightly brought out the universal and active element inherent in society and determining its historical process, and the inconsistency of rationalistic apriorisms or physical determinisms. Nevertheless, by recourse to an impersonal element, which by its activity creates society and through it individual values, it too resolves itself into a negation of the person. Society cannot fundamentally be anything but the production of the persons who compose it; and if in it there are universal values and a historical process, these cannot be explained except through the universal value and the dialectical nature of reason, proper to every single person. The various social forms have their principle in the normativity of reason, which sets before itself those ends, and therefore those social forms answering to the same human nature. To explain, therefore, the whole value of man's social and historical life and all the teleologism intrinsic to it, it is necessary to ground metaphysically the human person in its relationship with transcendence.

IV. PERSONALIST CONCEPTION OF SOCIETY

Axiological, spiritualist and scholastic personalism (v.) considers the social process as a communion of consciousnesses in view of finite values or goods to be attained, according to a hierarchy and a dynamism of universality tending toward the absolute Value. The person essentially involves sociality, and from the different forms of society that it itself produces it draws the very values that perfect it and therefore make it the principle of social perfecting.

Max Scheler (v.) considers values (v.) according to an emotional apriorism: they are revealed gradually in the progressive evolving of physical and moral persons, and are found perfectly in God. The subjective element that leads to communication and to sensing the progressive hierarchy of values is sympathy (v.), which is intrinsic to the vital being itself (Wesen und Formen der Sympathie, 2nd ed., Bonn 1923). In its lower degree sympathy is simple affective contagion (Gefühlsansteckung) and gives rise to animal associations (Herde) and to the crowd (Masse), without any emotional intuition of values, and therefore cannot be the principle of community. In its second degree sympathy expresses an experience lived in common (Miterleben) and gives rise to the "vital community" (Lebensgemeinschaft), such as the family, the people, the classes, humanity, the profession (Der Formalismus in der Ethik, 3rd ed., Halle 1927, pp. 547-48): this is a degree of communion of consciousnesses in a "we" of value. By pure reasoning persons form society: it is opposed to community, inasmuch as it is founded on a simple contract (ibid., p. 549), but by giving prominence to personal individuality it permits the perfect communion of consciousnesses in the "community of love" (Liebesgemeinschaft). This is the "autonomous and spiritual union of simple individual persons in an autonomous and spiritual collective person (Gesamtperson)" (ibid., p. 555); such are the Church and the Nation.

This axiological conception rightly brings out the two fundamental principles of sociality: the essential tendency of the person toward communion and the existence of objective values that necessitate and specify communion; principles which are already present in the Thomistic doctrine of natural friendship and of human sociality as a plurality and hierarchical unity of forms. But natural friendship is not brought about by an irrational emotionality: it is reason that brings objective ends into the interiority of the person and moves the will to bring about natural friendship, committing it normatively. It is therefore not possible — on the human plane — to make a real distinction between society and community, and between vital community and community of love, because "society is at bottom communion: its exact term is community, the consciousness of individuals of being in communion with one another" (L. Sturzo, La s., Bergamo 1949, p. 34). One can agree only to a distinction of degree of moral perfection, corresponding to "amicitia boni honesti" and to "amicitia boni utilis et delectabilis": a society is in fact truly a "community" when the persons who compose it, living their moral dignity, raise the pursuit of particular goods to a service of fraternal friendship, and the formalism of an earthly justice to an authentic moral value (cf. F. Perroux — R. Prieur, Communauté et société, Paris 1941; E. Mounier, Rivoluzione personalista e comunitaria, Italian trans., Milan 1949).

The forms of sociality "follow the natural ends of human activity, they are therefore their projecting themselves into concrete reality, their consolidating in ever more closely corresponding to human needs, their organizing themselves as permanent means for the attainment of further ends, and also their transforming themselves if they are no longer adequate to the impulse to act that arises ceaselessly in man" (L. Sturzo, op. cit., p. 52). Human reason, as the expression of natural law, is the principle of the actualization of three fundamental forms of society, intrinsically connected to three essential goods of human nature: "its affectivity and continuity (family), its guarantee of order and defense (politics), its ethical and finalistic principles (religion). These three fundamental forms are, in their essentiality, constant in all civilizations and in all times" (ibid.). Particular prominence is assumed today by the social form deriving from professional activity (v. PROFESSIONE), which brings about, through work (v.), individual and social perfecting (cf. Codice sociale di Malines, Rome 1944, p. 67 ff.; Morale professionale, ibid. 1948): it can nevertheless be considered as a secondary form of sociality, necessarily connected with the political one. Economic activity in itself does not give rise to a social form, because it is in direct function with the individual, familial, political and religious good: from it is expressed the natural right of private property (v.); nevertheless it can give rise to secondary forms of sociality such as castes, classes, corporations, trade unions (v.). Only the subordination of economic values to the higher values of the person makes economic conditioning a means of authentic human perfection. The forms of society have not always found concrete expression in autonomous social institutions, since their realization and development depend on the conditions of the social matter: the religious form found its full — and supernatural — realization in the Church only through Christian Revelation.

Society presents itself as a concrete reality; and persons, being born, find it as a fact that conditions them: yet it does not exist except in the rationality and will of persons, who make it their own, receiving it from previous generations, and give it life, bringing their contribution of novelty, which determines the historical process. A communion of persons, society is realized in the will for a common good and for a unity of rational order, which constitutes persons in an organic reciprocity of rights and duties. This order demands an autorité (v.) because without a unifying principle a single direction of wills toward the same end is not possible; but it also demands a liberté (v.) that allows everyone to bring their personal contribution to social life and to realize those other ends that transcend the very end of society. Attained for the achievement of the natural ends of the person, the social order has its value in the natural order, which reason determines and imposes. The natural order does not contain a priori an ideal social order, but only the general fundamental principles, which reason itself is bound to apply continually according to changing historical circumstances. For a correct social order, which may be a means of true human perfection, there is need of the constant will for the good, of knowledge of the natural principles according to concrete social conditioning, and of knowledge of the laws determining that conditioning itself. It is the task of social philosophy to examine natural law in all its aspects; of the social sciences to establish the laws of social conditioning; of sociology to know the laws of concrete society; of political science to realize the best social order in concrete circumstances.

The importance of the Church for a sound social order is evident from the fact that she is a teacher of truth, a sanctifier of human persons, and has the mandate to guide men to the achievement of their ultimate divine end. « It is the incontestable competence of the Church, in that aspect of the social order where it approaches and comes to touch the moral field, to judge whether the foundations of a given social order are in accord with the immutable order, which God Creator and Redeemer has manifested through natural law and Revelation...; because the Church, guardian of the Christian supernatural order, in which nature and Grace converge, must form consciences, even the consciences of those who are called to find solutions for the problems and duties imposed by social life. From the form given to society, whether consonant or not with the divine laws, the good or evil in souls also depends and insinuates itself » (Pius XII, Messaggio Pentec., 1941, n. 3).

1945; various authors, Per la comunità cristiana, Rome 1945; I. Giordani, Il messaggio soc. di Gesù, 4 vols., Milan 1947; various authors, La société, su XXe siècle, edited by G. Gurvitch, 2 vols., Paris 1947; L. Sturzo, La vera vita, Rome 1947; J. Leclercq, Le fondement du droit et de la Société, 3rd ed., Louvain 1947; various authors, Le catholicisme social face aux grands courants contemporains, in Semaine Sociale de France, Paris 1947; L. Sturzo, La s. sua natura e sue leggi, Bergamo 1949; L. Taparelli, Saggio teorico di diritto naturale, I, 8th ed., Rome 1949, pp. 157 ff.; id., Del metodo sociologico, Bergamo 1950; A. Cuvillier, Manuel de sociologie, 2 vols., Paris 1950; V. Fallon, Principi di economia sociale, Italian trans. Turin 1950; J. Martin, Cristianesimo e democrazia, Italian trans. Milan 1950; various authors, Personamologia e sociologia, Padua 1951; various authors, Persona e S., Padua 1951; L. Stefanini, Personalismo sociale, Rome 1952; A. Olivetti, S., Stato, Comunità, Milan 1952; various authors, Umanesimo e mondo moderno, Rome 1953.

V. THE SOCIETY OF PRIMITIVE PEOPLES

1. The idea that evolutionist ethnologists and sociologists had formed of primitive society was extremely a priori and alarming. According to them, in the mutual relations between men the most bestial egoism reigned, "the struggle for life"; in those between groups, the "bellum omnium contra omnes" (the war of all against all); in those between the sexes, unlimited promiscuity; in matters of property, boundless communism. In primitive society there would have existed no juridical order, no moral or religious ideal, but all this would have developed slowly, because man himself slowly became man, stripping himself of his original animality.

How did they explain authority and law in primitive society? The myth of "group marriage" cast its shadow, as Malinowski wrote, over all the arguments and descriptions of the juridical-evolutionist ethnologists, and undermined their juridical reconstructions with the related concepts of "group responsibility," "group justice," "group property," in short, with the axiom of the absence of individual rights and responsibilities among primitive peoples. In the explanation of social achievements, everything was attributed to the "mass" and nothing to the individual, who, according to them, was completely immersed in the "mass," obeyed passively, automatically, the commands of the community, its traditions, public opinion, its decrees. This mentality has existed down to the present day, particularly in the French sociological school. Durkheim, its founder, maintained the totemist origin of human societies, admitting a primitive pan-totemistic stage of humanity and seeking in human collectivism the sole origin of religion.

2. These evolutionist theories, which derived in part from an a priori approach of a philosophical and biological nature and in part from insufficient documentation, have been shown to be entirely groundless by more thorough and better documented comparative research; indeed, at times the opposite has been proven. There is a great variety of types of primitive society, depending on the different configuration that the relations between individual, family, extra-familial groups and the State assume within them, on the form of economy, of property, of religious and moral life with pseudo-religious and moral ideas, beliefs and practices, and therefore on a different juridical structure and a different spiritual, artistic, moral and religious life. Nevertheless, four fundamental types of primitive society can be distinguished, of which one is older and from which the others derive independently. In treating of them here, while referring to the entries: DIRITTO; DONNA; FAMIGLIA; INCESTO; INDISSOLUBILITÀ; INDIVIDUO; MATRIMONIO; MONOGAMIA; PARENTELA; POLIANDRIA; POLIGINIA; PRIMITIVI; PROSTITUZIONE; PUDORE, we limit ourselves to illustrating the form of the State and the concept of authority among primitive peoples.

a) It is today indisputable that the oldest form of primitive society known to us, and from which it is possible to glimpse the primordial one, is that proper to the peoples called gatherers. It is formed by small groups of 30-70 persons of common blood with their wives and children: a large family. One obviously cannot speak of a "mass." Similar groups are found at every 30-50 km. of distance, each group possessing a territory of that extent.

The sexes enjoy equality of rights: there is between them a natural and equitable division of labor, which, however, is not something immutable or founded on magical or superstitious reasons. The Andamanese, for example, whose ordinary task is the daily hunt, does not hesitate to do his wife's work. If necessary, he takes care of the children, lights the fire and tends it, and even goes to gather wood and to draw water, essentially feminine chores. He also builds the hut, if it is a matter of a shelter more important than usual.

Every family has its own house or shelter; it possesses certain things as its own. The economy is familial and of the sippe. Marriage is monogamous and according to local exogamy. The children depend on the authority of the parents, which is exercised equally for sons and for daughters according to their age of development, giving them sustenance and education, an authority tempered by a great love, which is mutual. Much care is taken of the aged parents. The family, however, is patriarchal. The authority of the father of the family is everywhere the only stable authority, though not absolute. Among the Yamana, for example, if the husband were to treat his wife unworthily, there would be the intervention of her relatives, with the cessation of his arbitrariness and possible punishment.

The family has a very clear physiognomy of its own before the State, which exists only in germ and of which it performs almost all the activity. Among the gatherer peoples, for example, among the so-called Yamana, the Andamanese, the Bambuti of Africa, the State is reduced to the local group, although there may also be the idea of a tribe (several local groups speaking their own dialect) and of a people. There is no stable chief in the local group; if one exists, his authority is limited by law and by traditional customs, and is not one of command. Of the Yamana of Tierra del Fuego, Koppers, their explorer, wrote: "As I have said, the Yamana lacked every kind of chief. Even the local groups had no stable chief. For the feasts of the initiation of the youth, the oldest and most esteemed man of the group was chosen as temporary chief, and his commands were respected." Among the Bambuti there exists the chief of the local group or sippe; among the Andamanese there also exists that of the tribe, but their authority is weak and limited. The chief of the group among the Bambuti is the eldest of the elders; he ordinarily exercises his authority by settling the daily questions and quarrels among the members and families of his sippe and between it and the other sippi, giving his counsel and his help; he divides the common game; he offers the sacrifice; he directs the initiation; he takes part in the wedding. In its most ancient form the chief is not the magician, as has been observed among the Yamana. Indeed, among these, while for the initiation of the youth the most worthy man was chosen, for the direction, instead, of the school of the sorcerer-physicians and of the men's feast (Kina), a sorcerer-doctor had to be chosen.

In primitive society justice is left to private vengeance. Human life is protected by the institution of vengeance, which falls to the kinship of the slain person, and cannot be carried out by the closest relatives but by the more distant ones, according to the Yamana, because the closest relatives are not immune from co-responsibility in the crime. The slain person lived with them and therefore it is they who have most offended him and are thus the most responsible. The gatherer peoples do not know war, since they have no chiefs, nor military weapons of offense and defense, nor fortified places, nor war canoes; they have no skill in hurling or throwing stones or javelins, nor has a term been found to indicate war or the warrior. In the case of a warlike clash, if it can be so called, among the Yamana, when someone has been wounded the retreat is sounded by both sides; thus "the war" ends.

In the practical life of every member of the community, but especially of the chief, where one exists, justice and altruism are required. The sentiment of liberty and independence of the individual and of the family is very strong. No commands are given to others and one does not like to receive them. Nevertheless, nomadism makes these primitive peoples helpful to one another, as has been observed among the Fuegians, because, not knowing whom one might meet in a place, or even though having to seek refuge with someone, one is reluctant to meet a person or their respective friends, whose hostility one might have incurred.

The primitive state is careful not to limit the freedom of the individual and of the family more than is absolutely necessary; it performs only those functions for which the strength and authority of individual families are not sufficient. If in primitive society authority has few institutional tasks compared with those of more developed societies, it is nevertheless fair to note that this society too is based on order, on authority and on the active consciousness of order, that is, on the same social consciousness in its permanent, active, directive, unifying and responsible function, of every human society. The moral and juridical order in primitive society is founded on religion, according to which the grave crimes of men excite the wrath of God, who manifests it through lightning, storm, the rainbow, etc. From what has been said, one can conclude that primitive society, as it exists among the most archaic peoples of the Earth, is very different from, indeed diametrically opposed to, that imagined by the evolutionists. From this type of primitive society derive the types of nomadic pastoral peoples, totemist peoples and matriarchal peoples.

b) The society of the nomadic pastoral peoples of Asia and Africa (Turco-Mongols, Indo-Europeans, Hamito-Semites) is distinguished from that of gathering peoples primarily by its form of economy, because it produces its own means of subsistence by breeding large herds of livestock (sheep, goats, horses, cattle, camels), which provide dairy products, meat, means of transport and various ergological means. The nomadic herder feels the need to preserve and, if possible, to increase his herd, and therefore also the need for various persons to achieve this end. Hence comes his desire to have a large family and therefore also a second wife, if the first is sterile, and not to divide his herd by inheritance among his sons, who therefore, on marrying, remain in the paternal family under the authority of the father. The herd requires unity of command and order, so that in the figure of the father of the family, the patriarch, a strong patria potestas has developed. Thus the large pastoral family is patriarchal like that of gathering peoples, but is distinguished from it by the increased unity and cohesion of its members. It has also been observed, however, that the authority of the patriarch is not always absolute; among the Tibetan herders, for example, the wife is equal to the husband and the married sons are consulted in family affairs. A characteristic of the pastoral family is, as was said, the hereditary regime, influenced by the undivided preservation of the herd, which passes from the father, after his death, to the eldest son. Hence the right of primogeniture.

Several families of the same region unite in a group for the development and safeguarding of their pastoral economy, appointing a head of the group. The regional groups form a tribal association, which secures the herders to its groups. The tribe was originally a natural development of the large family, formed therefore among blood relatives. Since the individualism and independence of the individual and of individual families is very great, the authority of the heads of groups and tribes is reduced; indeed it depends essentially on the strength, the esteem and the personal prestige of the head.

The protection of the lives of individuals is left to private vengeance, which can bind even for many generations, since the whole clan is responsible for the crime or liable for the payment of a fine. Among the Yakuts, in the case of the murder of a member of the same group, the murderer was tied to a tree in the interior of a forest and left there to perish.

The unequal increase of livestock, the unequal skill in leading the herds and especially the danger they incur in times of drought and epidemics lead to the distinction between rich and poor. But given the strong family spirit, the poor easily find assistance among the rich and are placed in a position to regain the herds they have lost. Among the herders of Central Asia there is also the distinction into "white bones" and "black bones."

The initiation of the young becomes individual and only for young men, as among the Romans, or also for the young woman, as among the nobles of feudal China, who were perhaps of Turkish origin. Characteristics of pastoral society are the seasonal popular festivals with many common games, which among African herders also take on the appearance of military exercises. The combative and imperious psychology of the nomads and their contempt for agriculture and for every kind of occupation explain the great empires they founded in the world, imposing their dominion and their dynasties, which have their origin in their powerful family spirit.

c) Totemist society. — The type of totemism (v.), which gives a characteristic form to primitive society, is the social totemism of the clan, which is also the most widespread. Every tribe is divided into clans each having its own totem, to which every member feels bound by a sentiment of kinship and from which derive the name, the emblems, the law of exogamy. With respect to the totem every member of the clan must observe several taboos, that is, it is forbidden to touch it, kill it, eat it, every animal of the same species being understood as the totem. The clan forms an economic unit and a ritual unit. Every member of the clan is identified with the totem, whose forces the head concentrates magically. For this reason the heads can perform magical actions in the interest of the whole clan and of the whole tribe according to their totems and the natural symbols; they are therefore priest-chiefs.

The clan heads form the assembly of the tribe, in which all enjoy the same rights. Thus it is among the Narringeri of southern Australia. Among the members of the clan there is a great solidarity, which induces them to help one another: they gladly host one another, they spare one another in war. There is the division into age classes, which entails special distinctive marks and particular rights and duties. The sexes must observe determined laws of separation. At the age of puberty the young men all live together in a house reserved for them, to which women are forbidden access, and similarly the young women in a reserved house, with severe prohibition of access for men. The initiation of the young men consists principally in circumcision and, among some Australian tribes, also in subincision. For the young women there are the corresponding similar operations.

The family has little significance compared with the State; the authority of parents over children is exercised only in early infancy. The woman is in a situation of inferiority.

In the division of the clan, due to its great increase, the new clan remains in a certain dependence on the original clan, and also preserves its name. A clan can also have its own industry and engage in commerce. In the union with the matriarchate of two exogamous classes, the clan is subdivided into phratries and sub-phratries, in which the children belong not to the clan of the father, but to that of the grandfather, whereby the exogamous laws become very complicated (v. MATRIARCATO).

d) The matriarchal society is distinguished first of all by its economy, because the means of subsistence come from agriculture, carried on first with the hoe and then with the plow. It is further distinguished by the presence of the right of landed property, unknown to other primitive societies. Since agriculture is a female invention, the woman being the gatherer of plant foods in the most ancient civilization, it is the woman who owns the cultivated field, its products, as well as the house, the storehouse, the tools of labor, the ceramic utensils and other utensils necessary for family life. Property passes from the mother to the daughters. In marriage the woman, having to remain near her field, does not go to live in her husband's house, but he goes to visit her, ordinarily at night, as happened in Japan until the 7th century. In the full development of the matriarchate, the husband goes to live in the house and with the family of his wife, as is still customary among the Cham of Indochina and among certain tribes of Formosa. In his wife's family, however, he is like a stranger, while the brother-in-law, the wife's brother, holds a position of advantage in the family with respect to him and to his children. The woman enjoys great pre-eminence with respect to the man, a pre-eminence that the latter can reduce, re-establishing an equality of rights, when he works among his own people in order later to have his wife in his own house. There is a reversal of the woman's position in Melanesia, New Guinea and Australia, where, in the crossing of the matriarchate with totemism and with the culture of the gatherers, the woman loses the right to property, which passes to the maternal uncle or to the brother and comes by inheritance to the nephew. The woman turns into a kind of slave for labor, when the man seeks to have more wives in order to dispose of greater material resources of labor and of prestige. The system of two classes, in which one can no longer speak of matrilocal marriage, nor of patrilocal marriage, the two exogamous classes being in the same place (v. MATRIARCATO), is a recent form of matriarchate. Here not even service marriage is possible. The matriarchate has sometimes come to be a true gynecocracy, with the woman at the head of the assembly of the State, but generally she has had, even in this case, the man beside her in affairs of state. Thus it was among the Hurons of North America. In a matriarchal society there is the priestess, the seeress, the shamaness.

Among the Manchus there are separate male and female assemblies; in the female ones only the head of the male assembly may take part. In the matriarchal society the state is democratic. The village is governed by the assembly of the elders. If a chief exists, his presence is justified in a manistic sense. In mixed societies, resulting from the crossing of the fundamental ones, one may have the religious king, the magician king, joined in a manistic conception of their political authority. Thus it is in the feudal states and in certain African kingdoms.

3. Origin of primitive society

For the evolutionists, holding that man originated from the beast, the State existed first and then the family. According to them, as Cavazza wrote, man at the origin must evidently have been at the first step of the progressive evolution of the species: he was half man and half animal, he was only afterward man, and therefore less guided by instinct, more lost, almost abandoned by nature and established in his «original stupidity». «The instinct of imitation» remains his essential basis, because he has lost the sure guidance of animal instincts; but then the emergence of the «mystical concept of collectivity» would have arrived as a savior, and there would have been born «from the promiscuous and disorderly horde» not the natural family, biologically rational, human and economic, but the clan, the collective group, welded by irrational, magical, mystical bonds, and humanity, starting from its anti-instinctive, anti-logical, anti-rational beginning, would have begun the ascent, the progressive evolution.

But, as has been seen, this theory clashes with ethnological reality. Totemism cannot be taken as a basis for explaining the origin of the State, because it is not the most ancient form of society nor, much less, a social stage through which all peoples have passed. Moreover, in primitive society there is an individual differentiation, which acts naturally, as Beck has observed, also in social life. Therefore, the State is not before the family, but, on the contrary, the family is before the State. In fact, among the most archaic peoples the reality is, as Father Schmidt concluded on the matter, that the family is almost everything and the State almost does not yet exist, and in any case only in function of the family. It is not the State, therefore, that gave rise to the family and according to its own arbitrary will or power shared with it its rights, which it could therefore take away or restrict, but the family already exists tens of thousands of years earlier in the fullness of its rights and duties, in which time it also exercised in full the functions of the State, which existed only embryonically in its maternal womb. Thus it was for the whole period of the most archaic civilization. Such appears to us the social, economic and political constitution of the society of the most ancient humanity. And on the other hand there are no proofs or reasons to say that the present primitive societies are a degeneration of prehistoric societies, except in particular and well-demonstrable cases.

Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft der Völker, Regensburg 1924; W. Beck, Das Individuum bei den Australiern. Ein Beitrag zum Problem der Differenzierung primitiver Gesellschaftsgruppen..., Leipzig 1924; W. Koppers, Stammesgliederung und Strafrecht der hauptlinglosen Yamana auf Zemerland, in Atti del XXII Congr. internaz. degli americanisti, Rome, Sept. 1926, II, Rome 1928, pp. 155-73; id., La famille dans les civilisations primaires et secondaires, in Docum. de la vie intellectuelle, Juvisy 1930; H. E. Man, On the aborig. inhabitants of the Andaman Island, London 1932, p. 40; Br. Malinowsky, Crime and custom in savage society, ibid. 1932, p. 10, 3; R. Thurnwald, Die menschl. Gesellsch. in ihren ethnosoziolog. Grundlagen, Berlin 1931-35; O. Falsirol, Il totemismo e l'animalismo dell'anima, Naples 1941; F. Cavazza, Intorno all'orig. dell'umana sociabilità, in Ann. Lateran., Rome 1941, pp. 1-119; M. Hermanns, Die Nomaden von Tibet. Die sozial-wirtschaft. Grundlagen der Hirtenkulturen, Vienna 1949, p. 227 ff.; W. Schmidt, Das Menschenbild der Urkultur, in Wissenschaft und Weltbild, ibid. 1949; L. Sturzo, La t. Sua natura e leggi. Sociol. storicista, Bergamo 1949, pp. 89-90, 189; P. Schebesta, Die Bambuti-Pygmaden vom Ituri, II, Brussels 1938-50, pp. 311 ff., 332; W. Schmidt, Ehe und Familie im vermännlichen Mutterrecht, in Kultur und Sprache, Vienna 1952, pp. 259-79; J. Haeckel, Der heutige Stand des Totemismusproblems, in Festgabe dem IX. Intern. Kongress f. Anthrop. und Etnol., Wien 1952, ibid. 1952, pp. 33, 49; W. Koppers, Die ältest. Formen des Staates, in Atti del XIV Congr. internaz. di sociol., Rome 3 Aug., 3 Sept. 1930, IV, Rome 1952; Stegman von Trusvald, Der antike Autoritätsgriff im Licht der Sprachwissenschaft, ibid.

Luigi Vannicelli