It is the political
aspect of Socialism.
_Reading_.--Burke, _Warren Hastings_, Fourth Day, the passage
beginning, "He have arbitrary power!"
SECTION II.--_Of the theory that Civil Power is an aggregate formed by
subscription of the powers of individuals_.
1. The Greeks had a name [Greek: eranos], which meant a feast where
the viands were supplied by each guest contributing in kind. If, in a
party of four, one man brought a ham, another a rabbit, a third a dish
of truffles, and a fourth a salmon, no one would expect that, when the
cover was raised, there should appear a pigeon-pie. That would not be
in the nature of an [Greek: eranos]. Now not only Hobbes and Rousseau,
but Locke and a great multitude of modern Englishmen with him, hold
that the power of the State is an aggregate, the algebraic sum of the
powers whereof the component members would have stood possessed, had
they lived in what is called, by a misleading phrase, "the state of
nature," that is, the condition of men not subject to civil authority.
These powers,--either, as Hobbes and Rousseau virtually say, _all_ of
them, or, as Locke and the common opinion has it, only _some_ of them,
--men are supposed to resign as they enter into the State.
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