ABSTRACT
“The very varied benefits which men can in course of time confer on one another by mutual intercourse do not resemble. … a convergent series of which the formula can be found, but a divergent series which cannot be totaled. And the common good has seemed to us to consist in conditions which make possible the development of this indefinite series. Trustfulness between partners struck us as the most obvious of these conditions.… What we have met with is a contradiction between, on the one hand, the growth of this state of trustfulness and, on the other, the indefinite development of the relations between men, the enlargement of the area which they cover and the diversification of their content. The contradiction is one, clearly, between the effects sought and the condition necessary to their achievement. This contradiction has become steadily clearer; the quest for the climate of trustfulness raises in the mind the picture of a closed, narrow circle of neighbors who are very much alike, who value highly a type which each strives to realize and who are very proud of a common denominator which all wish to maintain. This picture.… strikes our minds with extraordinary vividness.… [A]lmost everyone subconsciously wishes to recover the warmth of the…small, closely-knit society which was the school of the species. This unavowed regret is the root of nearly all utopias, both revolutionary and reactionary, and every political heresy, left or right…[T]he small society, as the milieu in which man is first bound, retains for him an infinite attraction; but…any attempt to graft the same features on a large society is Utopian and leads to tyranny. With that admitted, it is clear that as social relations become wider and more various, the common good conceived as reciprocal trustfulness cannot be sought in methods which the model of a small, closed society inspires; such a model is, on the contrary, entirely misleading.”
