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of the tribes, then of the cities of antiquity, is still the essential basis of the great national societies of
today. In this way it has manifestly acquired ever more power and importance, since before the
formation of cities and nations the innumerable families or tribes spread across a territory such as
Gaul or the Teutonic empire were related to each other, as they are now in modern states such as
France and Germany. But this kinship did not yet have the power to establish a social bond between
them or the feeling of such a bond; they were and felt themselves to be foreign to one another,
whereas at present they feel themselves intimately and fraternally united. Civilization has thus
singularly increased the family in a national or interfamily sense of the word as much as it has
decreased the family in the narrow and specific sense of the word.
This gradual development of the genetic social circle was accomplished at the same time as the
increase in the professional circle. At first, occupational identity closely linked only a small number
of men, slaves, or women in each house or cave who were assigned to the same military, pastoral,
agricultural, or industrial task. Later, and precisely because the family tie was extended, the working
community came to be felt as a new source of affinities and social solidarity among people belonging
to different families, tribes, or cities. There is not, therefore, an inverse relationship between the
progress of the consanguinal bond and the progress of the social bond which is attached to labor, that
is, to the imitative reproduction of the same types of wealth and services.
And what I have said of the working community I could say just as well about cohabitation on the
same land and the communion of beliefs and desires. All these various causes of social aggregation
exist in germinal form from the beginning and develop harmoniously. However, those which have an
entirely social nature develop much more quickly and go much farther, so that there comes a time
when, under the influence of a respected authority, a common faith or aspiration in the same
civilization, peoples of the most diverse races aggregate or tend to aggregate into a sort of vast
supranational nation such as the Roman world, medieval Christendom, or the European federation of
tomorrow. But here we are not concerned with this glorious final stage, toward which these social
developments march with unequal though parallel strides, but with their first stage. From the
beginning, the inhabiting of the same cave or the same lake shelter, later the same tent, and the
covering of the same region as regular nomads with unvarying periodical wanderings was added to—
and not substituted for, as Sumner-Maine erroneously believes—consanguinity as the constitutive
element of the group thought of as the fatherland (patria tellus). From the beginning, similarly, those
who undertook the same tasks (weaving, sewing, milking, hunting, fishing, and so forth) felt
themselves drawn together. From family to family, the fishermen with the fishermen, the hunters with
the hunters, the weavers with the weavers, each was drawn to form a class, while their families
tended to form a nation. This was the first step toward internationalism as well as toward
nationhood. Another cause of the tendencies toward internationalism—and one that existed from the
very beginning—was the community of superstitions, which tended to unite in the same church the
dispersed worshippers of the same god. As for the communities of desire, of plans, of collective
interest, without them no human aggregate would ever have been possible; for they are the necessary
soul of every political society, of every state.
Thus, from the outset, the idea of nation, fatherland, class, Church, and state coexist and become
more precise and spread, though, I repeat, at different rates. Such is the concrete and living reality, the
subject of our studies to which not only historians, philosophers, jurists, moralists, and humanists
ought to contribute but also naturalists, anthropologists, and doctors. All the sciences meet in
sociology even though it assuredly has its own special domain—but not in the clouds or in the fog of
ontology.