ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS:
SOCIAL THEORY
Volume 66
SOCIAL THEORY AND
CHRISTIAN THOUGHT
First published in 1958
This edition first published in 2015
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1958 Werner Stark
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ISBN: 978-0-415-72731-0 (Set)
eISBN: 978-1-315-76997-4 (Set)
ISBN: 978-1-138-78403-1 (Volume 66)
eISBN: 978-1-315-76337-8 (Volume 66)
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First published 1958
by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd
Broadway House, 6874. Carter Lane
London, EC4
Printed in Great Britain by
The Burleigh Press, Bristol
Werner Stark 1958
Nihil obstat | CAROLUS DAVIS, S.T.L.
Censor deputatus |
Imprimatur |  GEORGIUS L. CRAVEN Eps. Sebastopolis
Vic. Gen. |
Westmonasterii, die 28a Aug. 1958. |
UXORI DILECTISSIMAE
A BOOK whose aim it is to explore some of the border country between sociology and theology does not, in my opinion, need to be preceded by any specious justification or apology. All who are acquainted with the history of ideas know that there is an ever-present tendency on the part of theologians to add a body of social doctrine to their religious philosophy, and that there is an equally persistent desire on the part of social philosophers to understand the rle played by religion in the common life of men. Figures like Martin Luther who were leaders in divinity but could not find any clear-cut attitude to the problems of social organisation are rare exceptions to a general rule, and perhaps it is true to say that some of the weaknesses of their religious systems were not entirely unconnected with their failure to confront and to comprehend the implications of mens social mode of life.
The mutual relation of theology and sociology is thus a subject of the first importance, and a great book could be written about it. Ernst Troeltschs famous work, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, though a classic, is already out of date, and there is need for a new exploration of the field which he so brilliantly investigated. The present publication would like, in all modesty, to provide a few preliminary sketches to the grand picture which, it is hoped, somebody will undertake to paint some day. Its author is well aware that he is not able to contribute much; but perhaps he may assume that his labours have not been entirely useless and that he has drawn attention to a few features in the landscape which had not been previously noticed.
All the seven or eight essays brought together in this volume were published before, although the first two (to which I have now given the common title Social Theory and Christian Thought) appear here for the first time in an English version. They were originally articles in the Revista Internacional de Sociologia. The essay on Pascal was printed in The Hibbert Journal (and also in Notas y Estudios de Filosofia); that on Kier-kegaard in The Sociological Review; that on Bergson in the Revue Internationale de Philosophie; and that on Newman in the Newman Centenary Essays of 1945. The papers on Scheler and Meinecke were written and served as introductions to English translations of works by these authors which appeared in the Rare Masterpieces of Philosophy and Science. I am grateful to all the editors and publishers concerned for their kind permission to re-issue the respective studies in this form.
I am dedicating the book to my wife in gratitude for many years of happy co-operation.
| Manchester, 1958. | W. STARK |
CONTENTS
A LL social theory, however complex and sophisticated the form in which it may at times appear, stems in the last analysis from a simple human experience: the experience of family life. This experience is apt, first of all, to impress upon the observing mind the essential unity of the group. It is true that the men and women who are joined together in wedlock are, and in a sense remain, separate personalities, in spite of their common life; but as soon as we regard them as fathers and mothers, actual or potential, they appear as incomplete parts of an integral whole and are only what they are by virtue of the fact that they belong to the vital unit which contains them. As the legal lore of the Germanic peoples so graphically expressed it: husband and wife, one body, one life. The case of the children is even more convincing: their very existence depends upon, and is derived from, the existence of the group. The primacy of being, as the philosophers express it, is manifestly not theirs: their being is merely secondary, mediate, consequential. They prove, in Aristotles terminology, that the whole is prior to the parts. These impressions have inspired the social philosophy technically known as realism: when we speak of society, we are not using a convenient shorthand expression for a complex diversity, for a multiplicity which is a (more or less fictitious) unity merely in our mind, but we are referring to a concrete and corporate entity which really is, is in the ontological, or at least the metaphysical, meaning of the term.
To this social philosophy there corresponds, on the descriptive or investigational level, an organological sociology, such as we find it, for instance, in Herbert Spencer. Society is an organism, and the members of it must be understood as so many organs of it which function, and co-function, in it. This way of thinking is also apt to spill over into politics. For if the centre of life resides within the social whole, that whole must be held together at any price, if it is well integrated (conservatism), or must be organised or re-organised, if it appears to be disordered (socialism).
Very different are the consequences if the observing mind fixes its attention, not on the vital function, but on the inception of family life. Every marriage begins with a contract; every marriage contract consists in the meeting of two independent wills. Hence from this point of view the family does not appear as something that makes the individuals who belong to it, but, on the contrary, as something that is made by them. The rles are here reversed: the parts are prior to the whole. Indeed, under this aspect it is doubtful to what extent it is legitimate at all to speak of a whole. A contract, it is true, is binding, but it does not swallow up or annihilate the persons who bind themselves: in any case, it is difficult to see how it can create a new objective and tangible reality, a new thing. Is the noun family or society not merely a collective name which allows us to speak without waste of time and in one breath of the various people who are comprised in it, without having expressly to refer to them, one by one, by their individual names? Those who have answered this question in the affirmative, have developed the social philosophy traditionally known as nominalism. Society is to them no real entity in the ontological sense of the word; it is a fiction. Real are only the individuals whom we can see and hear and touch.
