Society according to this concept is merely a sum total of individuals, a plurality which breaks up into its single components.  Therefore the ends of a society, so considered, are nothing more than the ends of the individuals which compose it and for whose sake it exists.  An atomistic view of this kind is also necessarily anti-historical, inasmuch as it considers society in its spatial attributes and not in its temporal ones; and because it reduces social life to the existence of a single generation.  Society becomes thus a sum of determined individuals, viz., the generation living at a given moment.  This doctrine which I call atomistic and which appears to be anti-historical, reveals from under a concealing cloak a strongly materialistic nature.  For in its endeavors to isolate the present from the past and the future, it rejects the spiritual inheritance of ideas and sentiments which each generation receives from those preceding and hands down to the following generation thus destroying the unity and the spiritual life itself of human society.

This common basis shows the close logical connection existing between all political doctrines; the substantial solidarity, which unites all the political movements, from Liberalism to Socialism, that until recently have dominated Europe.  For these political schools differ from one another in their methods, but all agree as to the ends to be achieved.  All of them consider the welfare and happiness of individuals to be the goal of society, itself considered as composed of individuals of the present generation.  All of them see in society and in its juridical organization, the state, the mere instrument and means whereby individuals can attain their ends.  They differ only in that the methods pursued for the attainment of these ends vary considerably one from the other.

Thus the Liberals insist that the best manner to secure the welfare of the citizens as individuals is to interfere as little as possible with the free development of their activities and that therefore the essential task of the state is merely to coordinate these several liberties in such a way as to guarantee their coexistence.  Kant, who was without doubt the most powerful and thorough philosopher of liberalism, said, “man, who is the end, cannot be assumed to have the value of an instrument.”  And again, “justice, of which the state is the specific organ, is the condition whereby the freedom of each is conditioned upon the freedom of others, according to the general law of liberty.”

Having thus defined the task of the state, Liberalism confines itself to the demand of certain guarantees which are to keep the state from overstepping its functions as general coordinator of liberties and from sacrificing the freedom of individuals more than is absolutely necessary for the accomplishment of its purpose.  All the efforts are therefore directed to see to it that the ruler, mandatory of all and entrusted with the realization, through and by liberty,