… is from page 262 of the 1981 Liberty Fund edition of the 1936 J. Kahane translation of Ludwig von Mises’s great 1922 volume, Socialism:
Organization is an association based on authority, organism is mutuality. The primitive thinker always sees things as having been organized from outside, never as having grown themselves, organically. He sees the arrow which he has carved, he knows how it came into existence and how it was set in motion. So he asks of everything he sees, who made it and who sets it in motion. He inquires after the creation of every form of life, the authors of every change in nature, and discovers an animistic explanation.
The notion that society is created consciously, or that it requires some ‘head’ or master or leader or sovereign to keep it orderly and operating smoothly, is indeed a primitive one.
