YOUR issue of January, 1943 (Vol. LIII, No. 2), contains, under the title "The Three Types of Law," an analysis of "the essence of law and justice" which is, in the light of modern psychological knowledge, so reactionary that I would beg leave to criticize it in the following short note. The author of this article, Dr. Georg Schwarzenberger, appears to me to go wrong at the outset of his analysis in that, instead of looking for a reason (and therefore a source) of law in the universal social nature of man, he sets off upon the well-worn path of artificial distinctions in sociology, and corresponding artificial divisions of law. Social philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries felt impelled to begin their studies of society with a postulated "state of nature" which never existed and which they nearly all admitted, explicitly or implicitly, did not exist. The "state of nature" was an abstraction which the philosopher found convenient to his theory and which varied with the content of his philosophy. It represented his idea of what fundamental human nature would be like if it were stripped of all that society confers upon it, and it merely served to emphasize the particular departure from "nature" which the philosopher wished to stress. Thomas Hobbes emphasized a wise and necessary departure from natural anarchy into social order. Rousseau beheld a fall from natural grace which could only be redeemed by canalizing our best common will through a sovereign state. For liberal Mr. Locke the "state of nature" was a measure for the falling-away of "unnatural" and vicious men. Each philosopher made his choice. And so little was known about essential human nature that each could paint it more or less as he wished. Today we know too much for the bel sauvage, or "mere nature," to be our starting-point. Human nature is with us in society; and we have the means of studying its motivation. But Dr. Schwarzenberger neglects these means when he follows a more modern but equally artificial distinction ("vital" as he thinks it "for the understanding of legal as of other social phenomena") -that between "society" and "community." A "society" is separated from a "community" because of its "intention," which, according to Macmurray, "lies beyond the nexus of relation which it establishes"; its object is "the adjustment of diverging interests and the achievement of a common task." A "community" is separated from a "society" because its purpose is "continuation and perpetual integration"; its members "are united in spite of their individual existence, whereas the members of a society remain isolated in spite of their association"