Preface to the New Edition of 1920

The “social question” is not something that has just cropped up, nor can it be solved by any handful of people or a parliament—and stay solved. It is a part of our recent civilization and it has come to stay. It will have to be solved over again for each moment of the world's historical evolution. This is because man's life has entered on a phase in which something that starts by being a social institution turns again and again into something anti-social, and has in turn to be reconstructed.