More accurately, they live in the same world, but
they think and feel in different ones.
It is to these special worlds, it is to these private or group, or
class, or provincial, or occupational, or national, or sectarian
artifacts, that the political adjustment of mankind in the Great
Society takes place. Their variety and complication are impossible to
describe. Yet these fictions determine a very great part of men's
political behavior. We must think of perhaps fifty sovereign
parliaments consisting of at least a hundred legislative bodies. With
them belong at least fifty hierarchies of provincial and municipal
assemblies, which with their executive, administrative and legislative
organs, constitute formal authority on earth. But that does not begin
to reveal the complexity of political life. For in each of these
innumerable centers of authority there are parties, and these parties
are themselves hierarchies with their roots in classes, sections,
cliques and clans; and within these are the individual politicians,
each the personal center of a web of connection and memory and fear
and hope.
Somehow or other, for reasons often necessarily obscure, as the result
of domination or compromise or a logroll, there emerge from these
political bodies commands, which set armies in motion or make peace,
conscript life, tax, exile, imprison, protect property or confiscate
it, encourage one kind of enterprise and discourage another,
facilitate immigration or obstruct it, improve communication or censor
it, establish schools, build navies, proclaim "policies," and
"destiny," raise economic barriers, make property or unmake it, bring
one people under the rule of another, or favor one class as against
another.
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