Universal Social Right
Chapter 5
Origins of societies
142. After classifying societies principally by their internal constitutive elements, we should expound the rational laws governing societies. But first we must discuss their more general origins. These furnish another way of classifying societies, or at least provide something that can be added to already determined classifications, in which the origin of societies was only indirectly and partially considered.
143. Later we will discuss at length the origins of particular societies and
propound their Right. Here, as we said, we deal only with their more general
origins which, it seems to me, can be reduced to the following three:
1. The wills of the members, who of themselves freely move to associate in
order to procure a good or avoid an evil (tacit or expressed convention).
2. A good available to a few in a shared way, so that, if they want to possess
the good, they must first acknowledge communion in it. This is the case of
co-heirs, or hunters who simultaneously kill an animal which cannot be shared
between them unless they first acknowledge it as common property.
3. Finally a moral obligation arising from rational law or a positive law. The
will of a master must be included in this last origin; his will gathers his
servants into a society in the jural way we have shown.(25)
144. Clearly, each of these origins can be subdivided, and thus necessarily furnish very varied circumstances which deserve the consideration of a jurist-philosopher. But we will deal with this when discussing Right in particular societies in the remaining books.
Notes
(25) Austrian legislation mentions nearly all these principal origins when speaking about the communion of real goods: `Communion has its basis either in chance or in law or in the declaration of final will or in a convention' (§825). Only donation made to and accepted by many people would be lacking. Buying and selling, which many undertake, can be reduced to agreement or considered as the act of a society already formed, not the act forming it.