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Social Order and Political Authority

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

John Dickinson
John Dickinson*
Affiliation:
Princeton University
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Extract

No present political tendency is more marked than the extension of law to cover ever wider fields of conduct. Political scientists and constitutional lawyers have come to recognize that this tendency can be properly assessed only by examining how law operates in contrast and connection with other agencies of order such as custom, ethics, religion, and economic forces. When one wishes to understand the failure of such laws as the Sherman Anti-Trust Act or the Volstead Act to accomplish the results expected of them, or when one wishes to form a judgment of the effects to be anticipated from the operation of a minimumwage law or from the codification of international law, it is important to understand the relation to the other forces which are giving direction to human conduct. There are regularities and patterns of adjustment in human behavior due to other causes than law administered by government; and these regularities not only work at times toward the same, or some of the same, ends which it is sought to attain by law, but at times they form a highly resistant part of the material against which law must work. An effort will be made in this paper to present the problem of law and government as part and parcel of the whole wider problem of social order, beginning with an attempt to understand the nature and operation of what may be called the “non-political” agencies of order. The task is facilitated by the contributions which anthropology has made to our knowledge of primitive peoples, and by the light which psychology has shed on the springs of conduct. We no longer have to rely like Hobbes and Rousseau on a naive theory of human nature or upon a fancy-picture of savage life. The outstanding result of the newer contributions has been to emphasize the central significance of the principle of relativity in the social no less than the physical sciences.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 23 , Issue 2 , May 1929 , pp. 293 - 328
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1929

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References

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68 It is to be noted that the efforts toward industrial “standardization,” referred to above, note 46, as representing the idea of “self-government in industry,” call for the organization, and depend upon the continued functioning, of a central organ within the industry, accompanying a more or less authoritative and impartial position, in the form of a committee to formulate rules and preside over their application. Agnew, P. G., “The National Safety Code Program,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, January, 1926Google Scholar. It is also to be noted that in most instances the impulse for the formation of such committees emanated from an outside source, the federal government.

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