jective preference, determine his acts, his
decisions, his judicial judgments; that he no longer behaves as though
he were absolute lord of the family property, but rather the manager of
it in the interest of the whole; that his position bears more the
character of an official station than that of an unlimited right. Thus
the relation between superiors and inferiors is placed upon an entirely
new basis. The family is thought of as standing above all the individual
members. The guiding patriarch himself is, like every other member,
subordinate to the family idea. He may give directions to the other
members of the family only in the name of the higher ideal unity.

C. CONFLICT AND ACCOMMODATION

1. War and Peace as Types of Conflict and Accommodation[233]

It is obvious that the transition from war to peace must present a more
considerable problem than the reverse, i.e., the transition from peace
to war. The latter really needs no particular scrutiny. For the
situations existing in time of peace are precisely the conditions out of
which war emerges and contain in themselves struggle in a diffused,
unobserved, or latent form. For instance, if the economic advantage
which the southern states of the American Union had over the northern
states in the Civil War as a consequence of the slave system was also
the reason for this war, still, so long as no antagonism arises from it,
but is merely immanent in the existing conditions, this source of
conflict did not become specifically a question of war and peace. At the
moment, however, at which the antagonism began to assume a color which
meant war, an accumulation of antagonisms, feelings of hatred,
newspaper polemics, frictions between private persons, and on the
borders reciprocal moral equivocations in matters outside of the central
antithesis at once manifested themselves. The transition from peace to
war is thus not distinguished by a special sociological situation.
Rather out of relationships existing within a peaceful situation
antagonism is developed immediately, in its most visible and, energetic
form. The case is different, however, if the matter is viewed from the
opposite direction. Peace does not follow so immediately upon conflict.
The termination of strife is a special undertaking which belongs neither
in the one category nor in the other, like a bridge which is of a
different nature from that of either bank which it unites. The sociology
of struggle demands,