forms of social life within its own borders, upholding their moral world, and each being as a whole single entity a member of the community of states.  On the latter we start with the solidarity and will to co-operate which pervades in all manner of degrees the whole world society, and regard the organization of force which marks the state as being the mark of a settled and determined form of that will to co-operate which is characteristic of all forms of human association.  How dominant and determinant over other forms of association is that special form which controls organized force—­that is the problem before us.  We are concerned in technical language with the problem of sovereignty.

Let us consider first the problem of international relations.  The doctrine of sovereignty, formulated in the seventeenth century and crystallized by Austin at the beginning of the nineteenth, made sovereignty the hallmark of the state.  The person or persons, to whom the bulk of a given society render habitual obedience, either do or do not render habitual obedience in turn to some other person or persons.  If they do not, the society constitutes a sovereign state; if they do, it is only part of a sovereign state.  The world therefore was regarded as containing a number of sovereign independent states.  As sovereignty and law necessarily went hand in hand, there could be no law between sovereign states.  There could only be world-wide law if there were one world-wide state.  So long as there are more states than one, there are communities between whom there is no law.  The doctrine of sovereignty was in its inception individualist, but in so far as concerns the implications, though not the basis of sovereignty, it was taken over by Hegel and by the English idealist school with the exception of T.H.  Green.  Idealism, indeed, always insisted that will, not force, was the basis of the state, but whereas in Green the state is constituted by the moral willing of individuals for a general good, in Hegel and in Bosanquet the conflicting willings of individuals are reconciled by their being taken up into the supra-personal will of the state.  With the former therefore the morality of individuals is the primary fact, the existence of the state the secondary; with the latter on the whole the existence of the state is the primary moral fact, the moral willing of individuals secondary.  Just because the wills of individuals are reconciled, not by each recognizing certain abstract principles of duty, but by being taken up into the supra-personal will of the state, where there is no such supra-personal will there is no reconciliation of conflicting wills and no morality beyond and outside the boundaries of communities.  Hence arises a conception of the state which fits into the absolutist doctrine of sovereignty which we have described.