ABSTRACT
The comparison of State and individual is as old as Plato; but until Rousseau the comparison stopped short at an insistence on the organic nature of the State. There is another direction in which the notion of corporate personality has developed which will make easier their discussion of it and which has itself been used as an attack on Rousseau and Hegel. The practical importance of such painful analysis became obvious after the last war. There might seem to be three types of statement applicable to associations without further analysis: statements about organisation; statements about legal or economic characteristics; statements in which the association is not the subject but the object of a psychological or moral attitude such as love or loyalty. The differences of past and future, of dream and waking, of “on earth” or elsewhere, are one and all immaterial.
