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Adventures in Philosophy

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

Introduction & Directory

Political Philosophy Index


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Conditions of Social Life

by Woodrow Wilson

 

Co-operation is the vital principle of social life, not organization merely. I think I know something about organization. I can make an organization, but it is one thing to have an organization and another thing to fill it with live. And then it is a very important matter what sort of life you fill it with. If the object of the organization is what the object of some business organizations is, to absorb the life of the community for its own benefit, then there is nothing beneficial in it. But if the object of the organization is to afford a mechanism by which the whole community can cooperatively use its life, then there is a great deal in it. An organization without the spirit of cooperation is dead and may be dangerous....

Legislation cannot save society. Legislation cannot even rectify society. The law that will work is merely the summing up in legislative form of the moral judgment that the community has already reached. Law records how far society has got; there have got to be instrumentalities preceding the law that get society up to that point where it will be ready to record....Law is a record of achievement. It is not a process of regeneration. Our wills have to be regenerated, and our purposes rectified before we are in a position to enact laws that record those moral achievements. And that is the business, primarily, it seems to me, of the Christian....

All the transforming influences in the world are unselfish. There is not a single selfish force in the world that is not touched with sinister power, and the church is the only embodiment of the things that are entirely unselfish, the principles of self-sacrifice and devotion....America is great in the world, not as she is a successful government merely, but as she is the successful embodiment of a great ideal of unselfish citizenship.

 

Excerpted from Woodrow Wilson's Memorial Day Address, Arlington, Virginia, May 31, 1915.

The Presidency of Woodrow Wilson, by Kendrick A. Clements


 
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