 Dilthey aims to combine these two approaches to liberalize the historicist perspective and give it a methodological rigor. To understand the role of the law in historical life we must consider it both as a cultural system that frames legal issues in universal terms and as an external organization of society that examines them in terms of the positive laws of particular institutions. The Historical School was wrong to regard individuals as completely subordinate to the bonds of family and state and to think that the positive laws of institutions define the full reality of life. The authority of the state “encompasses only a certain portion … of the collective power of the populace” and even when state power exerts a certain preponderance it can do so only “through the cooperation of psychological impulses” (1883/SW.I, 132).