There is much to say under this head, but I
confine myself to my subject. To the true economist, society is
a living being, endowed with an intelligence and an activity of
its own, governed by special laws discoverable by observation
alone, and whose existence is manifested, not under a material
aspect, but by the close concert and mutual interdependence of
all its members. Therefore, when a few pages back, adopting the
allegorical method, we used a fabulous god as a symbol of
society, our language in reality was not in the least
metaphorical: we only gave a name to the social being, an organic
and synthetic unit. In the eyes of any one who has reflected
upon the laws of labor and exchange (I disregard every other
consideration), the reality, I had almost said the personality,
of the collective man is as certain as the reality and the
personality of the individual man. The only difference is that
the latter appears to the senses as an organism whose parts are
in a state of material coherence, which is not true of society.
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