The vague conceptualization of basic social phenomena seriously obstructs a clear understanding of many of the causes underlying national and international tensions. Significant contributions to the solution of these problems can hardly be expected as long as social scientists continue to operate with common-sense notions and the idols of the market place whose connotations are ever shifting with the changing intellectual fashions and political aspirations. Frequently these public concepts themselves are potent tools with which special interest and power groups may create and perpetuate conflict situations. Among the most fundamental, and at the same time potentially most dangerous, ideas are those of the nation, the people, and the ethnic group. In the following essay an attempt is made to formulate scientifically more adequate concepts within the frame of reference of sociological theory in the hope that social scientists in various fields might find them useful in their analysis of the highly complex social systems characteristic of modern times, and in the solution of certain practical problems affecting the national and international order.

Millions of men stand under arms to defend democracy Their weapons are fashioned by scientific technology which, now as always before, has placed its highest ingenuity at the service of its most important client: the military establishment. The state, the schools and the mass media do not shirk the task of indoctrination: they have employed every available technical device in order to spread awareness of the dangers which threaten democracy as well as national survival. Yet the flame of the martial spirit flickers but feebly in the heart of Western man, more feebly indeed than in any epoch of the West's dangerous history. Citizens respond dutifully to the call to arms. They cannot do otherwise in the face of the comprehensive controls and sanctions available to the state. Individual men among them are still capable of high feats of heroism at war, as high as those performed by warriors in ages past. Yet no one can deny that the democracies are loath to fight and that abiding popular aversion to war has forced democratic statesmen into a long series of diplomatic retreats. Science that has done so much to defend the democracies against aggression has also taught them that there is no defense against aggression and that its latest tools might prove as deleterious to the victor as to the defeated. More important still, science has taught men to value life as their highest possession and to abhor death, to abhor death not so much as the ineluctable fate of all living things but as the break in a process of expanding knowledge and possession of the physical environment. There is little in the history of our times to show that modern man is more averse to violence than were his forebears. There is some evidence showing that he views and handles violence with an impersonal detachment that would have shocked his ancestors inured to the precariousness and brutality of a prescientific civilization. Modern man, like all men before him, eschews violence that begets retribution, seeks to avoid pain and cherishes the good things upon earth. What sets him apart from preceding generations is his belief in his perfectibility upon earth and the dreadful and absurd finality of death.