The Greek city state failed conspicuously to solve the problem of inter-state relations, and its philosophers, instead of recognizing the failure and trying to remedy it, made their ideal state even more self-centred and autonomous than the existing states around them.  Modern Idealism, just because it glorifies the state as the necessary upholder of moral relations, has often found it hard to regard the state as in its turn a member of a moral world.

Again, the Greek city state, just because it was small, could take up into itself all the various social activities of its members.  The state, in the sense of the Community in its political organization, directed and inspired Society, and the distinction between society and the state was not of great importance.  In the modern world the boundaries of political organization are not nearly as definite boundaries in society as are the boundaries of the Greek city state.  There are all manner of associations whose members are of different states and whose purposes are but to a small degree inspired or controlled by political organizations.  Modern states are not all or completely nation states, and the nation is not as pervading and dominating an entity as was the Greek polis.  This is not to say that the non-political associations could do without the state, as some recent writers have contended.  Churches, e.g., could not exist were there not law and government.  Yet it is impossible to maintain that in any real sense they are upheld by the state.  They clearly get their inspiration from other sources.  The difficulty is not evaded if we go behind both political and non-political organization to the community in which both exist and which upholds them both.  For what in this reference is ‘the community’?  In regard to the political association it is the special solidarity of people living in a certain area; in regard to the non-political organization it is the solidarity of a section of the world-wide society, marked off from the rest on a non-territorial basis.  The community in the two cases is not the same.  Hence there arises in the modern state, as there arose in the mediaeval, a conflict of loyalties between the state and non-political associations.  If we divide the world into states whose lines of division follow the divisions of the organization of force, we are faced with a host of problems concerning the proper place in society of these force-bearing organizations, and their relation to other associations.

In considering both sets of problems, international and internal, we may either begin with the division of the world into states, each of which will be an approximation of the State which we are studying, or we may regard the whole world as in some sort one society, covered with a network of overlapping associations of all kinds.  On the former view the world is thought of as consisting of a number of independent communities, each shaping and controlling the various