PREFACE xxiii
from the one previously existing. With a serious disturbance the process of readjustment may take a long time.
A political system, as we have seen, involves a set of relations between territorial groups. How the study of this as an equilibrium system may be approached in African societies is illustrated in the last two essays of this book, on the Nuer and the Tallensi. Within the community, the political constitution must also be studied as an equilibrium system. Dr. Gluckman's essay on the Zulu shows how the former system of a balance between the power of the chief, on the one side, and public sentiment, on the other, has been replaced by one in which the chief has to maintain as best he can some sort of balance between the requirements of the European rulers and the wishes of his people.
No attempt can be made to indicate the great variety of equilibrium situations that can be studied in the political systems of African peoples. It must suffice to draw attention to the need of studying political organizations from this point of view.
In writings on political institutions there is a good deal of discussion about the nature and the origin of the State, which is usually represented as being an entity over and above the human individuals who make up a society, having as one of its attributes something called 'sovereignty', and sometimes spoken of as having a will (law being often defined as the will of the State) or as issuing commands. The State, in this sense, does not exist in the phenomenal world; it is a fiction of the philosophers. What does exist is an organization, i.e. a collection of individual human beings connected by a complex system of relations. Within that organization different individuals have different roles, and some are in possession of special power or authority, as chiefs or elders capable of giving commands which will be obeyed, as legislators or judges, and so on. There is no such thing as the power of the State; there are only, in reality, powers of individuals—kings, prime ministers, magistrates, policemen, party bosses, and voters. The political organization of a society is that aspect of the total organization which is concerned with the control and regulation of the use of physical force. This, it is suggested, provides, for an objective study of human societies by the methods of natural science, the most satisfactory definition of the special class of social phenomena to the investigation of which this book is a contribution.