The Social Organism

Answers

• Q35STATE

  Does treating the state as an artificial machine give its members grounds to redesign it?

  No. Society is a growth and not a manufacture; constitutions are not made but grow, so treating the state as a contrivance to be redesigned mistakes its nature.

  The whole of our industrial organization, from its main outlines down to its minutest details, has become what it is, not simply without legislative guidance, but, to a considerable extent, in spite of legislative hindrances. It has arisen under the pressure of human wants and activities. While each citizen has been pursuing his individual welfare, and none taking thought about division of labor, or, indeed, conscious of the need for it, division of labor has yet been ever becoming more complete. It has been doing this slowly and silently ; scarcely any having observed it until quite modern times. By steps so small, that year after year the industrial arrangements have seemed to men just what they were before — by changes as insensible as those through which a seed passes into a tree— society has become the complex body of mutually-dependent workers which we now see.

  OCR corrected by hand

  Econlib chapter text and Online Library of Liberty quote page; first published Westminster Review, January 1860.