Principalities

People can be viewed, understood, and studied as individuals, and people can be viewed, understood, and studied as social groups. As a lawyer William Stringfellow needed to understand the manner in which individual citizens acted in regard to the law. In other words, how did the individual believe and behave in relationship to social expectations.

It was this experience that gave him insight into the base nature of social organizing. And in this regard he derived his understanding of the power dynamics that are at play in all social organizations. That any time two or more people get together and make a pact to accomplish a common goal, they give birth to a social entity that has repeatable and observable behaviours. These each have their own minor significances within the greater context of other socially agreed upon entities that have, do, and will come into being. And since they each have minor roles to play he settled upon a designation that people have recognized even in the ancient past, namely, principalities.

14th Century Russian Principalities