The Individual and Society

Mises: "...society is nothing but the combination of individuals for cooperative effort."
[Pic: Jan te Horst, Market Traders]

"Society is cooperation; it is community in action.
    "To say that Society is an organism, means that society is division of labour. To do justice to this idea we must take into account all the aims which men set themselves and the means by which these are to be attained. It includes every interrelation of thinking and willing man. Modern man is a social being, not only as one whose material needs could not be supplied in isolation, but also as one who has achieved a development of reason and of the perceptive faculty that would have been impossible except within society. ...
    "Historically division of labour originates in two facts of nature: the inequality of human abilities and the variety of the external conditions of human life on the earth. ...

 

Bastiat: "In the state of isolation, our wants
exceed our productive capacities. In society,
by virtue of exchange, our productive
capacities exceed our wants."

"Once labour has been divided, the division itself exercises a differentiating influence. The fact that labor is divided makes possible further cultivation of individual talent and thus cooperation becomes more and more productive. Through cooperation men are able to achieve what would have been beyond them as individuals, and even the work which individuals are capable of doing alone is made more productive. ...

    "The greater productivity of work under the division of labour is a unifying influence. It leads men to regard each other as comrades in a joint struggle for welfare, rather than as competitors in a struggle for existence. It makes friends out of enemies, peace out of war, society out of individuals. ...

    

"Society is not mere reciprocity. There is reciprocity amongst animals, for example when the wolf eats the lamb or when the wolf and she-wolf mate. Yet we do not speak of animal societies or of a society of wolves. ... Society exists only where willing becomes a co-willing and action co-action. To strive jointly towards aims which alone individuals could not reach at all, or not with equal effectiveness — that is society.

    "Therefore, Society is not an end but a means, the means by which each individual member seeks to attain his own ends. That society is possible at all is due to the fact that the will of one person and the will of another find themselves linked in a joint endeavour. Community of work springs from community of will. Because I can get what I want only if my fellow citizen gets what he wants, his will and action become the means by which I can attain my own end. Because my willing necessarily includes his willing, my intention cannot be to frustrate his will. On this fundamental fact all social life is built up.

"The principle of the division of labour revealed the nature of the growth of society. Once the significance of the division of labor had been grasped, social knowledge developed at an extraordinary pace ... The doctrine of the division of labour as put forward by eighteenth-century economists ... But the Doctrine of the Harmony of Interests had already anticipated its far-reaching application to social theory. ...

    "Once it has been perceived that the division of labour is the essence of society, nothing remains of the antithesis between individual and society. The contradiction between individual principle and social principle disappears."

~ Ludwig Von Mises, from the essay 'What is Society?' excerpted from his book Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis