Abstract

**Excerpt 1: Nations, Milieus, and Morphological Phenomena ** Nations are not alone in the world—no more than any type of society. Whether or not they have regulated their relations with other societies is one of the dominant facts of their life, one which must be analyzed… . International facts—we should insist upon saying intersocial facts—do not correspond to limited social groups, with exceptions to this rule when there is an official recognition by the country’s laws. They are entirely of a physiological order, even when they lead to demographic alterations of societies as in the case of war—changes so radical they can result in total annihilation. They can be compared to the phenomena in the life of relations between animals. A society is an individual, other societies are other individuals. So long as they remain individualistic, it is not possible to form a superior individuality between them. Utopians generally overlook this observation grounded in fact and common sense. But conversely, societies are not irreducible individualities and, as we have seen, synoecisms are the rule. This process is the root of great nations. The possibility of societies to merge is, in general, scorned by the conservatives of the societies of their time… .