reek city state failed conspicuously to solve the problem of
inter-state relations, and its philosophers, instead of recognizing the
failure and trying to remedy it, made their ideal state even more
self-centred and autonomous than the existing states around them. Modern
Idealism, just because it glorifies the state as the necessary upholder
of moral relations, has often found it hard to regard the state as in
its turn a member of a moral world.

Again, the Greek city state, just because it was small, could take up
into itself all the various social activities of its members. The state,
in the sense of the Community in its political organization, directed
and inspired Society, and the distinction between society and the state
was not of great importance. In the modern world the boundaries of
political organization are not nearly as definite boundaries in society
as are the boundaries of the Greek city state. There are all manner of
associations whose members are of different states and whose purposes
are but to a small degree inspired or controlled by political
organizations. Modern states are not all or completely nation states,
and the nation is not as pervading and dominating an entity as was the
Greek _polis_. This is not to say that the non-political associations
could do without the state, as some recent writers have contended.
Churches, e.g., could not exist were there not law and government. Yet
it is impossible to maintain that in any real sense they are upheld by
the state. They clearly get their inspiration from other sources. The
difficulty is not evaded if we go behind both political and
non-political organization to the community in which both exist and
which upholds them both. For what in this reference is 'the community'?
In regard to the political association it is the special solidarity of
people living in a certain area; in regard to the non-political
organization it is the solidarity of a section of the world-wide
society, marked off from the rest on a non-territorial basis. The
community in the two cases is not the same. Hence there arises in the
modern state, as there arose in the mediaeval, a conflict of loyalties
between the state and non-political associations. If we divide the world
into states whose lines of division follow the divisions of the
organization of force, we are faced with a host of problems concerning
the proper place in society of these force-bearing organizations, and
their rela