Transcriber’s Note: The text is that of the first edition, with the
errata incorporated. Because there are no page breaks, footnotes are placed under the paragraphs or quotations to which they relate, and renumbered accordingly. Page numbers have been inserted into the text in braces.
THE PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY OF THE STATE
BY
BERNARD BOSANQUET
C’est le peuple qui compose le genre humain; ce qui n’est pas peuple est si peu de chose que ce n’est pas la peine de le compter. (Émile, livre 4.)
LONDON MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
NEW YORK THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1899
All rights reserved
GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO.
To: CHARLES STEWART LOCH
{vii}
PREFACE.
The present work is an attempt to express what I take to be the fundamental ideas of a true social philosophy. I have criticised and interpreted the doctrines of certain well-known thinkers only with the view of setting these ideas in the clearest light. This is the whole purpose of the book; and I have intentionally abstained from practical applications, except by way of illustration. It is my conviction, indeed, that a better understanding of fundamental principles would very greatly contribute to the more rational handling of practical problems. But this better understanding is only to be attained, as it seems to me, by a thorough examination of ideas, apart from the associations of practical issues about which a fierce party spirit has been aroused. And, moreover, it is my belief that the influence of the ideas here maintained upon practical discussion, would be, in a certain sense, to detach it from philosophical theory. The principles which I advocate would destroy so many party prejudices, would put the mind in possession of so many clues to fact, that practical “social” issues would in consequence be considered as problems of life and mind, to be treated only with intimate experience, and by methods adequate to their subtlety. The {viii} result would be that such discussions would be regarded, if one may use the expression, more respectfully, and would acquire an independence and completeness worthy of their importance. The work of the social reformer should no more be regarded as a mere appendix to social theory than that of the doctor is regarded as a mere appendix to physiology. Such a division of labour is, of course, no hindrance to the interchange of facts and ideas between theory and practice. On the contrary, it tends to promote such an interchange, by increasing the supply on either side, and improving the intellectual communication between them.
It will occur to philosophical readers that the essence of the theory here presented is to be found not merely in Plato and in Aristotle, but in very many modern writers, more especially in Hegel, T.H. Green, Bradley, [1] and Wallace. [2] And they may be inclined to doubt the justification for a further work on the same lines by one who can hardly expect to improve upon the writings of such predecessors.
[1] See especially the chapter in Ethical Studies entitled “My Station and its Duties.”
[2] See Lectures and Essays by the late Professor Wallace, especially p. 213, “Our Natural Rights,” and p. 427, “The Relation of Fichte and Hegel to Socialism.”
On this point I should like to make a brief explanation. To begin with, it is a truism that every generation needs to be addressed in its own language; and I might even plead that the greatness of a tradition justifies some urgency in calling attention to it. But further, as regards T.H. Green in particular, whom in many points I follow very closely, I had two special reasons for desiring {ix} to express myself independently. One of these is to be found in my attempt to apply the conceptions of recent psychology to the theory of State coercion and of the Real or General Will, and to explain the relation of Social Philosophy to Sociological Psychology. For a short discussion of the Imitation Theory, which the purpose of the present work would not permit me to include in it, I may refer to a paper which will shortly appear in Mind.
My other reason lay in the conviction that the time has gone by for the scrupulous caution which Green displayed in estimating the value of the State to its members. I have referred to this subject in the body of my work (ch. x.); but I desire to emphasise my belief that our growing experience of all social “classes” proves the essentials of happiness and character to be the same throughout the social whole. Scepticism on this point is the product, I am convinced, of defective social experience. Indeed, it seems worth while to observe that the attention which is now rightly paid to such disadvantages, affecting the poorer classes of citizens, as it may be possible to remedy, has given rise to a serious confusion. The zeal of the advocate has led him to slander his client. In proving that under such and such conditions it would be no wonder if “the poor” were bad, he forgets to observe that in fact they are generally just as good as other people. The all-important distinction between a poor home and a bad home is neglected. And yet it seems probable that, omitting the definitely criminal quarters, there is no larger proportion of bad homes among the poor than among the rich. Such terms as “den” and “slum” {x} are too freely used, with an affectation of intimacy, for homes in which thousands of respectable citizens reside. Our democratic age will be remarkable to posterity for having dimmed the time-honoured belief in the virtues of the poor. There was cant, no doubt, in the older doctrine, but it was not so far from the fact as the opposite cant of today, and it is time that the truth in it should be revived.
I must repeat that these remarks are not intended to be controversial. There is nothing in them which serious men of all schools may not accept. They are meant to defend my attitude in treating the Real Will, and Freedom in the greater Self, as matters of universal concern, and not merely as hopes and fancies cherished by “educated” persons. Indeed, although it would be churlish for a student to disparage literary education, it must never be forgotten that, as things are today, the citizens who live by handicraft possess a valuable element of brain-culture, which is on the whole denied to the literary class. Whatever, therefore, may be wanting in the following pages, it is not, I think, the relation of their subject-matter to the general life of peoples.
The social student should shun mere optimism; but he should not be afraid to make the most of that which he studies. It is an unfortunate result of the semi-practical aims which naturally influence social philosophers, that they are apt throughout to take up an indifferent, if not a hostile, attitude to their given object. They hardly believe in actual society as a botanist believes in plants, or a biologist believes in vital processes. And hence, social theory comes off badly. No student can really appreciate an object for which he is always apologising. There is a {xi} touch of this attitude in all the principal writers, except Hegel and Bradley, and therefore, as I venture to think, they partly fail to seize the greatness and ideality of life in its commonest actual phases. It is in no spirit of obscurantism, and with no thought of resisting the march of a true social logic, that some take up a different position. They are convinced that an actual living society is an infinitely higher creature than a steam-engine, a plant or an animal; and that the best of their ideas are not too good to be employed in analysing it. Those who cannot be enthusiastic in the study of society as it is, would not be so in the study of a better society if they had it. “Here or nowhere is your America.”
Bernard Bosanquet
Caterham, March, 1899.
{xiii}
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I
RISE AND CONDITIONS OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 1-16
1. Meaning of “Philosophical Theory” 1
2. Philosophy and the “State,” 3 a. The Greek City-State 4 b. Type of mind implied in it 5 c. Type of political philosophy suggested by it 5
3. Transition from City-State to Nation-State. Law of Nature 9
4. Rise of Nation-States and of modern political philosophy. Rousseau 11
CHAPTER II
SOCIOLOGICAL COMPARED WITH PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY 17-52
1. Problems of Social Physics and of Idealism 17
2. Social Theory as influenced by special sciences 19
(i) Mathematics 19
(ii) Biology 21
(iii) Economics 27
(iv) Jurisprudence and the theory of Right 34
(a) Law as “ideal fact” 34
(b) Sociological analysis of Law 36
(v) Idea of the “spirit of laws” or mind of peoples;
Anthropology in widest sense 39
(vi) Psychology 42
(vii) Connection of points of view and kinds of fact 47
3. Comparison of Psychological Sociology and Social Philosophy 48
CHAPTER III
THE PARADOX OF POLITICAL OBLIGATION; SELF-GOVERNMENT 53-78
1. The conception of self-government 53
2. Law and Liberty in Bentham 56
3. Examination of Mill’s “Liberty” 60
(i) Mill’s idea of Individuality 60
(ii) His view of the authority of Society over the Individual 61
(iii) His applications of his principle 66
4. Views of Herbert Spencer 69
(i) Spencer and Bentham on Natural Right 70
(ii) Liberty and restraint in Spencer and Huxley 71
5. Mill’s criticism of Self-Government 73
CHAPTER IV
THE PROBLEM OF POLITICAL OBLIGATION MORE RADICALLY TREATED 79-102
1. Nature of above theories not expressed by term Individualism. “Theories of the first look” 79
2. Rousseau’s earlier Essays 84
3. Problem of the Contrat Social 87
4. Conflict of ideas in Rousseau’s statement 89
5. Nature of his solution 91
6. Reality of the “Moral Person” and conception of Civil Liberty 94
CHAPTER V.
THE CONCEPTION OF A “REAL” WILL 103-123
1. The Supreme Will in Hobbes and Locke 103
2. Meaning of the General Will for Rousseau 107
3- The General Will contrasted with the Will of All 111
4- The General Will and the work of the Legislator 117
CHAPTER VI
THE CONCEPTION OF LIBERTY AS ILLUSTRATED BY THE FOREGOING SUGGESTIONS 118-154
1. Liberty as the condition of our being ourselves 118
2. Illustrated by the idea of Nature and Natural 128
3. Phases of idea of Liberty 133
(a) Juristic phase = “absence of restraint” 134
(b) Political phase = “rights of citizenship” 135
(c) Positive connection of (a) and (b) 136
(d) Philosophical phase = “being oneself in
fullest sense” 137
(e) Danger and justification of using same term
for (a) and (d) 142
4. Liberty as attribute of the will that wills itself 146
5. This “real” will identified with State 149 (a) State in this sense is social life as a whole 150 (b) How State is force as extension of “individual” mind 152
CHAPTER VII
PSYCHOLOGICAL ILLUSTRATION OF THE IDEA OF A REAL OR GENERAL WILL 155-179
1. Object of the Chapter 155
2. Connection between social and mental groupings 156
(1) Analogy between them 156
(i) Associations of persons and of ideas 156
(ii) Organisation of social groups and of ideas 159
(2) Identity of social and mental groupings 170
(i) Social groups as an aspect of mental systems 170
(ii) Individual minds as structures of
appercipient systems 173
(iii) Social whole as a system of mental systems 175
CHAPTER VIII
NATURE OF THE END OF THE STATE AND CONSEQUENT LIMIT OF STATE ACTION 180-234
1. Distinction between Individual and Society irrelevant to question of Social Means and End 180
2. True contrast: Automatism and Consciousness 181
3. End of State, and Means at its disposal qua State 184
4. State can only secure “external” actions 186
5. Principle of the hindrance of hindrances 190
6. State action as the maintenance of rights 201
(a) System of rights from standpoint of community 203
(b) From standpoint of individuals. “Position” 204
(i) As Rights or recognised claims 206
(ii) As Obligations or recognised debts 206
(c) Rights as implying Duties 208
(i) When Duty = Obligation 208
(ii) When Duty = Purpose, which is source of Right 209
(d) Rights, why recognised claims? 210
(i) A “Position” involves recognition 210
(ii) No right based on individual caprice 212
7. State action as punishment 216
(i) Punishment as reformatory 221
(ii) Punishment as retributory 223
(iii) Punishment as deterrent 228
Conclusion. State Action as exercise of a General Will 232
CHAPTER IX
ROUSSEAU’S THEORY AS APPLIED TO THE MODERN STATE: KANT, FICHTE, HEGEL 235-255
1. Rousseau’s literary influence in Germany 235
2. Freedom and Social Contract in Kant 238
3. Freedom and Social Contract in Fichte 244
4. Freedom in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right 247 (a) Supposed reactionary tendency in Hegel 248 (b) Relation of analysis and idealisation 290
5. The Philosophy of Right as a chapter in the Philosophy of Mind 252
CHAPTER X
THE ANALYSIS OF A MODERN STATE. HEGEL’S “PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT” 256-295
1. Logic of Society as an ideal fact 256
2. Sphere of Right or Law and its sub-divisions 258
3. The Letter of the Law 260
4. The Morality of Conscience 262
5. Social Ethics 266
(i) Social Ethics as an actual world 266
(ii) Social Ethics as the nature of self-consciousness 267
6. Sub-divisions of Social Ethics. The Family 269 (a) Depends on natural fact 269 (b) Is factor in the State 270 (c) Ethical and Monogamous Household 271 (d) Relation to Property 272
7. Bourgeois Society. Justice, State Regulation, and Trade Societies 272
8. The State proper, or Political Constitution 280
9. Public discussion and public opinion 285
10. Criticism of such an analysis of the Modern State 287
CHAPTER XI
INSTITUTIONS CONSIDERED AS ETHICAL IDEAS 296-334
1. The individual soul and the social mind 296
2. Institutions as common substance of minds 297
3. The Family and Property as elements of mind 299
4. The District or Neighbourhood as an element of mind 304
5. Class as an element of mind. “The Poor” as an ethical idea 310
6. The Nation-State as an element of mind 320
7. Morality of public and private action 322
8. Humanity as an element of mind 328 (a) Humanity not predicable of mankind as a whole 328 (b) Humanity does not = mankind as a true community 329 (c) Dichotomous expressions for humanity and mankind 330 (d) The self beyond any actual society; Art, Philosophy, Religion 332
INDEX 335
{1}
CHAPTER I.
RISE AND CONDITIONS OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY OF THE STATE
1. First, it will be well to indicate, in a very few words, what is implied in a “philosophical theory,” as distinguished from theories which make no claim to be philosophical. The primary difference is, that a philosophical treatment is the study of some thing as a whole and for its own sake. In a certain sense it may be compared to the gaze of a child or of an artist. It deals, that is, with the total and unbroken effect of its object. It desires to ascertain what a thing is, what is its full characteristic and being, its achievement in the general act of the world. History, explanation, analysis into cause and conditions, have value for it only in so far as they contribute to the intelligent estimation of the fullest nature and capabilities of the real individual whole which is under investigation. We all know that a flower is one thing for the geometrician, another for the chemist, another for {2} the botanist, and another, again, for the artist. Now, philosophy can of course make no pretension to cope with any one of the specialists on his own ground. But the general nature of the task imposed upon it is this: aiding itself, so far as possible, by the trained vision of all specialists, to make some attempt to see the full significance of the flower as a word or letter in the great book of the world. And this we call studying it, as it is, and for its own sake, without reservation or presupposition. It is assumed, then, for the purpose of a philosophical treatment, that everything, and more particularly in this case the political life of man, has a nature of its own, which is worthy of investigation on its own merits and for its own sake. How its phases come into being, or what causes or conditions have played a part in its growth, are other questions well worthy of investigation. But the philosophical problem is rather to see our object as it is and to learn what it is, to estimate, so to speak, its kind and degree of self-maintenance in the world, than to trace its history or to analyse its causation.
Yet such phrases as “what it is” and “for its own sake” must not mislead us. They do not mean that the nature of any reality which we experience can be appreciated in isolation from the general world of life and knowledge. On the contrary, they imply that when fully and fairly considered from the most thoroughly adequate point of view, our subject matter will reveal its true position and relations with reference to all else that man can do and can know. This position and these relations constitute its rank or significance in the totality {3} of experience, and this value or significance—in the present case, what the form of life in question enables man to do and to become—is just what we mean by its nature “in itself,” or its full and complete nature, or its significance when thoroughly studied “for its own sake” from an adequate point of view. Further illustrations of the distinction between an adequate point of view and partial or limited modes of consideration, and of the relations between the former and the latter, will be found in the following chapter.
2. In a certain sense it would be true to say that wherever men have lived, there has always been a “State.” That is to say, there has been some association or corporation, larger than the family, and acknowledging no power superior to itself. But it is obvious that the experience of a State in this general sense of the word is not co-extensive with true political experience, and that something much more definite than this is necessary to awaken curiosity as to the nature and value of the community in which man finds himself to be a member.
Such curiosity has been awakened and sustained principally if not exclusively by two kindred types of associated life—the City-state of ancient Greece, and the Nation-state of the modern world. It will throw light on the nature of our subject if we glance rapidly at the characteristics to which it is due that political philosophy began in connection with the former, and revived in connection with the latter.
In considering the Greek city-states in connection with the birth of
political philosophy, there are three points which press upon our
attention:{4}
a. the type of experience which they presented;
b. the type of mind which that experience implied; and
c. the type of interpretation which such a mind elicited from
such an experience.
a. A Greek city-state presented a marked contrast to the modes of human association which prevailed in the non-Greek world. It differed from them above all things by its distinct individuality. No doubt there was a recognisable character in the life and conduct of Egypt or of Assyria, of Phoenicia or of Israel. But the community which has a youth, a maturity, and a decadence, as distinct as those of a single human being, and very nearly as self-conscious; which has a tone and spirit as recognisable in the words and bearing of its members as those of a character in a play; and which expresses its mind in the various regions of human action and endurance much as an artist expresses his individuality in the creations of his genius—such a community had existed, before the beginnings of the modern world, in the Greek city-state, and in the Greek city-state alone. A political consciousness in the strict sense was a necessary factor in the experience of such a commonwealth. The demand for “autonomy”—government by one’s own law,—and for “isonomy”—government according to equal law—though far from being always satisfied, was inherent in the Greek nature; and its strenuousness was evinced by the throes of revolution and the labours of legislation which were shaking the world of Greece at the dawn of history. The very instrument of all political action was invented, so far as we can see, by the Greeks. The simple device by which an orderly vote is {5} taken, and the minority acquiesce in the will of the majority as if it had been their own—an invention no less definite than that of the lever or the wheel—is found for the first time as an everyday method of decision in Greek political life.
b. Such a type of experience implies a corresponding type of mind. It is not surprising that science and philosophy should owe their birth to the genius from which politics sprang. For politics is the expression of reason in the relations that bind man to man, as science and philosophy are the expression of it in the relations which link together man’s whole experience. The mind which can recognise itself practically in the order of the commonwealth, can recognise itself theoretically in the order of nature. And ultimately, though not at first (for curiosity is awakened by objects perceived in space and time, before attention is turned to the very hinge and centre of man’s own being), science passes into philosophy; and mind, and conduct, and the political consciousness, are themselves made objects of speculation. It has become a commonplace that this transference of curiosity from the outer to the inner—really, that is, from the partial to the total world—took shape in the work of Socrates, who invested with the greatness of his own intelligence and character a movement which the needs of the age had rendered inevitable. And thus there arose the ethical and political philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, the successors of Socrates, just at the time when the distinctive political life of Greece was beginning to decay.
c. This philosophy, like all genuine philosophy, {6} was an interpretation of the experience presented to it; and in this case the interpretation was due to minds which were themselves a part of the phenomena on which they reflected. Such minds, hostile as they may feel themselves to the spirit of the age, and however passionately they may cry out for reform or for revolution, are none the less its representatives; and their interpretation, though it may modify and even mutilate the phenomena, will nevertheless be found to throw the central forces and principles of the time into the clearest light. So Plato’s negative treatment of the family, and of other elements which seem essential to Greek civilisation, was no bar to his grasping, and representing with unequalled force, the central principle of the life around him. The fundamental idea of Greek political philosophy, as we find it in Plato and Aristotle, is that the human mind can only attain its full and proper life in a community of minds, or more strictly in a community pervaded by a single mind, uttering itself consistently though differently in the life and action of every member of the community. This conception is otherwise expressed by such phrases as “the State is natural,” i.e. is a growth or evolution, apart from which the end implied in man’s origin cannot be attained; “the State is prior to the individual,” i.e. there is a principle or condition underlying the life of the human individual, which will not admit of that life becoming what it has in it to be, unless the full sphere or arena which is constituted by the life of the State is realised in fact. The whole is summed up in the famous expression of Aristotle, “Man is a creature formed for the life of the City-state.” The {7} working out of this idea, as we find it in Plato’s commonwealth, is bizarre to our minds; but its difficulty really lies in its simplicity and directness; and there is no sound political philosophy which is not an embodiment of Plato’s conception. The central idea is this: that every class of persons in the community—the statesman, the soldier, the workman—has a certain distinctive type of mind which fits its members for their functions, and that the community essentially consists in the working of these types of mind in their connection with one another, which connection constitutes their subordination to the common good. This working or adjustment obviously depends in the last resort on the qualities present in the innermost souls of the members of the community; and thus the outward organisation of society is really as it were a body which at every point and in every movement expresses the characteristics of a mind. We must not pause here to follow up the consequences of such a conception; but it will be seen at once, by those who reflect upon it, to imply that every individual mind must have its qualities drawn out in various ways to answer to—in fact, to constitute—the relations and functions which make up the community; and that in this sense every mind is a mirror or impression of the whole community from its own peculiar point of view. The ethical assumption or principle of Plato’s conception is, that a healthy organisation of the commonwealth will involve, by a necessary connection, a healthy balance and adjustment of qualities in the individual soul, and vice versa. An attempt will be made to illustrate this principle further in the latter portion {8} of the present work. The general nature of Plato’s conception—the characteristic conception of Greek political philosophy—is all that concerns us here.
It is important to observe that during the very genesis of this philosophical conception of society, an antagonistic view was powerfully represented. The individual could not freely find himself in the community unless he was capable of repudiating it; the possibility of negation, as a logician might express it, is necessary to a really significant affirmation. Thus we find in the very age of Plato and Aristotle the most startling anticipations of those modern ideas which seem diametrically opposed to theirs. We find the idea of nature identified not with the mature fulness, but with the empty starting point of life; we meet with the phenomena of vegetarianism, water-drinking, the reduction of dress to its minimum, in short, the familiar symptoms of the longing for the “return to nature,” with all that it implies; we find law and political unity treated as a tissue of artifice and convention, and the individual disdaining to identify himself with the citizenship of a single state, but claiming to be a stranger in the city and a citizen of the world. To prove that these ideas were not without their justification, it is enough to point out that in some instances they were accompanied by a polemic against slavery, which, as a form of solidarity, was upheld in a qualified sense at least by Aristotle. The existence of this negative criticism is enough to show how distinctly the Greek intellect set before itself the fundamental problem of the relation between the individual and society, and of how high a quality was the bond of union which {9} maintained this relation in such intimacy among minds of a temper so analytic.
3. Many writers have told the story of the change which came over the mind of Greece when the independent sovereignty of its City-states became a thing of the past. For our purpose it is enough to draw attention to the fact that with this change the political or social philosophy of the great Greek time not only lost its supremacy, but almost ceased to be understood. From this period forward, till the rise of the modern Nation-states, men’s thoughts about life and conduct were cast in the mould of moral theory, of religious mysticism and theology, or of jurisprudence. The individual demanded in the sphere of ethics and religion to be shown a life sufficing to himself apart from any determinate human society—a problem which Plato and Aristotle had assumed to be insoluble. Stoicism and Epicureanism, the earliest non-national creeds of the western world, triumphantly developed the ideas which at first, as we saw, were little more than a rebellion against the central Socratic philosophy. Cosmopolitanism, the conception of humanity, the ideal of a “Society of Friends”—the Epicurean league—from which women were not excluded, and the precept of “not expecting from life more than it has to give,” take the place of the highly individualised commonwealth, with its strenuous masculine life of war and politics, and its passionate temper which felt that nothing had been accomplished so long as anything remained undone.
With this change of temper in the civilised world there is brought into prominence a great deal of {10} human nature which had not found expression through the immediate successors of Socrates. In the period between Aristotle and Cicero there is more than a whisper of the sound which meets us like a trumpet blast in the New Testament, “neither Jew nor Greek, barbarian nor Scythian, bond nor free.” But the unworldliness which took final shape in Christianity was destined to undergo a long transmigration through shapes of other-worldliness before it should return in modern thought to the unity from which it started; and the history of ethics and religion has little bearing upon true political theory between the death of Aristotle and the awakening of the modern consciousness in the Reformation.
In so far as the political ideas of antiquity were preserved to modern times otherwise than in the manuscripts of Plato and Aristotle, the influence which preserved them was that of Roman Jurisprudence. The Roman rule, though it stereotyped the state of things in which genuine political function and the spur of freedom were unknown, had one peculiar gift by which it handed to posterity the germs of a great conception of human life. This is not the place to describe at length the origin of that vast practical induction from the working of the “foreigners’ court” at Rome which obtained for itself the name of the Law of Nations, and which, as tinged with ideal theory, was known as the Law of Nature. Whatever fallacies may be near at hand when “natural right” is named, the conception that there is in man, as such, something which must be respected, a law of life which is his “nature,” being indeed another name {11} for his reason, and in some sense or other a “freedom” and an “equality” which are his birthright—this conception was not merely a legacy from Stoic ideas, which had almost a religious inspiration, but was solidly founded on the judicial experience of the most practical race that the world has ever seen.
4. In order that the forces which lay hidden in the conception of Natural Right and Freedom, like the powers of vegetation in a seed, might unfold themselves in the modern world, it was necessary that conditions should recur analogous to those which had first elicited them. And these earlier conditions were those of the Greek City-state; for it was here, as we have seen, that the conception of man’s nature had flourished, as the idea of a purposive evolution into a full and many-sided social life, while in Stoic philosophy and Roman juristic theory it had become more and more a shibboleth and a formula which lost in depth of meaning what it gained in range of application.
To restore their ancient significance, expanded in conformity with a larger order of things, to the traditional formulae, demanded just the type of experience which was furnished by the modern Nation-state. The growth of Nation-states in modern Europe was in progress, we are told, from the ninth to the fifteenth century. And it is towards and after the close of this period, and especially in the seventeenth century when the national consciousness of the English people, as of others, had become thoroughly awakened, that political speculation in the strict sense begins again, {12} after an interval extending back to the Politics of Aristotle. To let one example serve for many; when we read John of Gaunt’s praises of England in Shakespeare’s Richard II., we feel ourselves at once in contact with the mind of a social unity, such as necessarily to raise in any inquiring intelligence all those problems which were raised for Plato and Aristotle by the individuality of Athens and Sparta. And so we see the earliest political speculation of the modern world groping, as it were, for ideas by help of which to explain the experience of an individual self-governing sovereign society. And for the most part the ideas that offer themselves are those of Roman Jurisprudence, but distorted by political applications and by the rhetoric of Protestant fanaticism. As Mr. Ritchie [1] points out, the conception of natural right and a law of nature makes a strange but effective coalition with the temper of the Wycliffite cry
“When Adam dalf, and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?”
The notions of contract, of force, of representation in a single legal “person,” are now applied separately or together to the phenomenon of the self-governing individual community. But the solution remains imperfect, and the fundamental fact of self-government refuses to be construed either as the association of individuals, originally free and equal, for certain limited purposes, or as the absolute absorption of their wills in the “person” of a despotic sovereign.
[1] Natural Rights, p. 8.
The revival of a true philosophical meaning {13} within the abstract terms of juristic tradition was the work of the eighteenth century as a whole. For the sake of clearness, and with as much historical justice as ever attaches to an attribution of the kind, we may connect it with the name of a single man—Jean Jacques Rousseau. For it is Rousseau who stands midway between Hobbes and Locke on the one hand, and Kant and Hegel on the other, and in whose writings the actual revival of the full idea of human nature may be watched from paragraph to paragraph as it struggles to throw off the husk of an effete tradition. Between Locke and Rousseau the genius of Vico and of Montesquieu had given a new meaning to the dry formulae of law by showing the sap of society circulating within them. Moreover the revived experience of the Greeks came in the nick of time. It was influential with Rousseau himself, and little as he grasped the political possibilities of a modern society, in matters of sheer principle this influence led him on the whole in the right direction. His insight was just, when it showed him that every political whole presented the same problem which had been presented by the Greek City-state, and involved the same principles. And he bequeathed to his successors the task of substituting for the mere words and fictions of contract, nature, and original freedom, the idea of the common life of an essentially social being, expressing and sustaining the human will at its best.
According to the view here indicated, the resurrection of true political philosophy out of the dead body of juristic abstractions was inaugurated by {14} Vico and Montesquieu, and decisively declared itself in Jean Jacques Rousseau. The idea which most of us have formed of “the new Evangel of a Contrat Social” is not in harmony with this representation of the matter. Was it, we may be asked, a genuine political philosophy which inspired the leaders of the French Revolution? And the question cannot be evaded by denying all connection between the theory and the practice of that age. The phraseology of the revolutionary declarations [1]—which will strike the reader accustomed to nineteenth century socialism as exceedingly moderate and even conservative in tone—is undoubtedly to a great extent borrowed from Rousseau’s writings.
[1] See the very interesting collection of documents in the Appendix to Professor Ritchie’s Natural Rights.
Perhaps the truth of the matter may be approached as follows. The popular rendering of a great man’s views is singularly liable to run straight into the pit-falls against which he more particularly warned the world. This could be proved true in an extraordinary degree of such men as Plato and Spinoza, and still more astonishingly, perhaps, of the founder of the Christian religion. The reason is obvious. A great man works with the ideas of his age, and regenerates them. But in as far as he regenerates them, he gets beyond the ordinary mind; while in as far as he operates with them, he remains accessible to it. And his own mind has its ordinary side; the regeneration of ideas which he is able to effect is not complete, and the notions of the day not only limit his entire range of achievement—where the strongest runner will get to must depend on where he starts—but float about unassimilated {15} within his living stream of thought. Now all this ordinary side of his mind will partake of the strength and splendour of his whole nature. And thus he will seem to have preached the very superstitions which he combated. For in part he has done so, being himself infected; in part the overwhelming bias of his interpreters has reversed the meaning of his very warnings, by transferring the importance, due to his central thought, to some detail or metaphor which belongs to the lower level of his mind. It is an old story how Spinoza, “the God-intoxicated man,” was held to be an “atheist,” when in truth he was rather an “acosmist”; and in the same way, on a lower plane, the writer who struggled through to the idea that true sovereignty lay in the dominion of a common social good as expressed through law and institutions, is held to have ascribed absolute supremacy to that chance combination of individual voices in a majority, which he expressly pointed out to have, in itself, no authority at all.
But there is something more to be said of cases, like that under discussion, where a great man’s ideas touch the practical world. If the complete and positive idea becomes narrow and negative as it impinges upon every-day life, this may be not only a consequence of its transmission through every-day minds, but a qualification for the work it has to do. The narrower truth may be, so to speak, the cutting edge of the more complete, as the negation is of the affirmation. And the vulgar notion of popular sovereignty and of natural right may have been necessary to do a work which a more organic social theory would have been too delicate to achieve. {16} Like the faith in a speedy second coming of Christ among the early Christians, the gospel according to Jean Jacques may have taken for the minds of Revolutionary France a form which was serviceable as well as inevitable at the moment. If, as we said above, the great man is always misunderstood, it seems to follow that when his germinal ideas have been sown they must assert themselves first in lower phases if they are ever to bear fruit at all. And therefore, while not denying the influence of Rousseau on the Revolution, we shall attempt to show that he had another and a later influence, more adequate to the true reach of his genius.
{17}
CHAPTER II.
SOCIOLOGICAL COMPARED WITH PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY.
1. There is no doubt that Sociology and Social Philosophy have started, historically speaking, from different points of view. The object of the present chapter is to ascertain the nature and estimate the importance and probable permanence of the difference between them. I propose first to explain the difference in general; then to review the sources of social experience, which in other words are facets or aspects of social life, by which social theory has been influenced, and with which it has to deal; and, finally, to form some idea of the distinctive services which may be rendered by sociology and social philosophy respectively in view of the range of experience which it is the function of social theory to organize.
Beginning with Vico’s [1] New Science, there has been more than one attempt in modern Europe to inaugurate the Science of Society as a new departure. But the distinctive and modern spirit of what is known as Sociology, and under that {18} name has had a continuous growth of half a century at least, first found unmistakable expression in Auguste Comte. The conception which he impressed upon the science to which he first gave the name of sociology or social physics, was a characteristically modern conception. Its essence was the inclusion of human society among the objects of natural science; its watchwords were law and cause in the sense in which alone Positivism allowed causes to be thought of—and scientific prediction. [2] It is true that the large conception of unity which Comte embodied in his philosophy had very much in common with the principles insisted on by the Greek social philosophers. The close interdependence of all social phenomena among each other, the unity of man with nature, and the consequent correlation of moral and political theory with the organised hierarchy of mathematical and physical sciences, are ideas which Comte might have borrowed directly from Plato and Aristotle. Nevertheless the modern starting-point is wholly different from that of antiquity. The modern enquirer—the sociologist as such—was to ask himself, according to Comte, in the language of physical science, what are the laws and causes operative among aggregations of human beings, and what are their predictable effects? The ancient philosopher—the ethical and metaphysical theorist—had before him primarily the problem, “what is the completest and most real life of the human soul?” The work of the latter has been revived by modern idealist philosophy dating from Rousseau and Hegel, and finding a second {19} home in Great Britain, as that of the former has developed itself within the peculiar limits and traditions of sociological research, flourishing more especially upon French and American soil. The continuance of these two streams of thought in independent courses, though not without signs of convergence, is a remarkable phenomenon of nineteenth century culture; and it will be one of the problems which the present chapter, and in a larger sense the whole of the present work, must deal with, to consider how far it is necessary or desirable that they should blend.
[1] J. D. Rogers in Palgrave’s Dict. of Pol. Econ., art. “Social Science.”
[2] See Gidding’s Sociology, p. 6.
2. Every science, no doubt, is to some extent, the playground of analogies; but the complexity and the unmateriality of human relations has forced this character upon social theory in an extraordinary degree. It is impossible to account for the tendencies of sociological as well as of philosophical thought without making some attempt to pursue the line of investigation suggested by Mr. Bagehot in his Physics and Politics. Predominant modes and types of experience necessarily colour the whole activity of the mind, and, as indicated above, this influence more especially affects a province of research which is not prima facie accessible to direct experiment or sensuous observation. I must, therefore, endeavour to review, in a brief outline, the principal branches of experience which have furnished ideas for application to social theory, and to indicate the leanings in speculation upon society, which have been due to preoccupation with one or another special analogy.
i. The Newtonian theory of gravitation is the entrance gate to the modern world of science. {20} “When the Newton of this subject shall be seated in his place” [1] is the aspiration of the modern investigator in every matter capable of being known. It is not surprising, therefore, that the inclusion of human society within the range of matters capable of being definitely understood, should have been symbolized by demanding for social science a completeness of explanation and a power of prediction analogous to those displayed by astronomy or by mathematical physics. Representative of this conception is the title, Social Physics—for Comte the alternative and equivalent to the name Sociology. It is easy to see both the merits and the dangers of such an ideal, which, as the embodiment of perfection in a natural science, is presupposed by the attitude of sociology down to the present day. Is a science necessarily a natural science, and is a natural science necessarily an exact science?—these are the fundamental questions involved in the adoption of a mathematical ideal for the study of society. No fault can be found with it on the ground of its implying the highest degree of harmony and precision; the only question is whether an adequate type of comparison is afforded for, let us say, the growth of an institution, by the law of a curve. The general conception, indeed, of a continuity between human relations and the laws of the cosmic order is thoroughly in the spirit of Plato, and betokens a scientific enthusiasm worthy to be the parent of great things. And especially in the sphere of economic science, where certain relatively simple hypotheses have proved on the whole to be effective instruments {21} of explanation, an analysis of intricate phenomena has been effected, which in some degree justifies the aspiration after the ideal of an exact science.
[1] De Morgan, Budget of Paradoxes, p. 355.
ii. But it has been recognised from the earliest days of political speculation that, within the general ideal of a perfect natural science, the more special analogy of the living organism had a peculiar bearing upon social phenomena. Beginning in the ancient world with the comparison between individuals as “members” of a social whole, and the parts or organs of a living body, or even the constituent elements of a mind, this analogy has been extended and reinforced in modern times by what amounts to the new creation of the biological and anthropological sciences. The sense of continuity thus intensified and implying all that is understood by the modern term evolution, has brought an immense material of suggestions to sociological research, but has imposed upon it at the same time a characteristic bias from which it is just, perhaps, beginning to shake itself free. This characteristic may be roughly stated as the explanation of the higher, by which I mean the more distinctly human phenomena, by the lower, or those more readily observed, or inferred, among savage nations, or in the animal world. Any one familiar with logic will be aware that there is a subtle and natural prejudice which tends to strengthen such a bias by claiming a higher degree of reality for that which, as coming earlier in temporal succession, I presents itself in the light of what is called a I “cause.” So strong has been this bias among sociologists, that the student, primarily interested in the features and achievements of civilised society, is {22} tempted to say in his haste that the sociologist [1] as such seldom deals seriously with true social phenomena at all; but devotes his main attention to primitive man and to the lower animals, occasionally illustrating his studies in these regions by allusions, showing no great insight or mastery, to the facts of civilized society. Such a complaint becomes less and less justified as the years go by, and sociology recovers its balance as against the overwhelming influence of the sciences of lower life. How far the approach from this “lower” or more purely natural side will remain in the end characteristic of sociological science, is an integral part of the main problem concerning its nature and destiny with which we have to deal in the present work. But it remains true to say and very important to observe, that no such serious successes have as yet been won in the name and by the special methods of sociology as have been achieved by many investigators approaching their problems directly and with an immediate interest; whether in the sphere of political economy proper, or in dealing with various questions of social and ethical importance, such as pauperism, charity, sanitation, education, the condition of the people, the comparative study of politics, or the analysis of material and geographical conditions in their reaction upon social and artistic development.
[1] By a “sociologist as such” I mean a writer who is professedly dealing with sociology as such. Any independent researches, such as Mr. and Mrs. Webb’s Industrial Democracy, may of course be ranked under the heading “Sociology.” But works of this kind do not, as a rule, attach themselves to the peculiar method and language of sociological writers.
On the other hand, there is no doubt that the {23} epoch and influence of which we speak has bequeathed a legacy of imperishable value to the theory of society. In a word, it has made us sensitive to the continuity of things, and therefore also to their unity. It has shown us the crowning achievements of the human race, their States, their Religion, their Fine Art, and their Science, as the high-water mark of tendencies that have their beginnings far back in the primitive organic world, and in their original sources have also a connection with each other—as in the practical aspects of religion,—which too easily escapes notice in their highest individual development. The “return to nature” and the “noble savage” have been invested with a significance which can never be forgotten, and which criticism can never set aside. This is the sum and substance of the general contribution which the latter half of the eighteenth century and the greater part of the nineteenth have made to sociology through the science of life and of man.
More particularly, it is necessary to notice the double operation of biological influence on sociology, according to the unit from which the analogy is drawn.
a. The idea which still bulks most largely in the popular mind, as contributed by biology to social theory, is unquestionably that of the struggle for life or the survival of the fittest. It should be noticed that the social application of this analogy rests entirely on the comparison of a human society, not to the individual animal organism, and still less to the individual mind; but to a whole animal species or even to the aggregate of all animal species, so far as they or their members are in competition with one another. One whole side of the sociological {24} doctrine, which Mr. Spencer has advocated with unwearied persistence, is founded upon this application of the biological analogy, and the paradox which he has made his principle professes to be borrowed directly from the dealings of nature with the individuals of the animal species. This paradox, that benefits should be assigned inversely as services in infancy but directly as services among adults, is his ultimate sociological basis; the modification of which, to suit human society, by the introduction of benevolence or altruism, so to speak, on the top of it, only serves to display its inadequacy. But we may take it that the analogy of the struggle for life has made it clear that, in any given position, life can be maintained only in virtue of definite qualities adapted to that position. And formal as this principle is when taken by itself, its application in human society can never be unnecessary.
b. A more recent school has insisted on the complementary analogy, which might be taken as resting upon the comparison of a society with an individual organism. Here, it must be remembered, lay the resemblance which, in this region of ideas, first caught the eye of social philosophers in antiquity. But it is alleged that the aspect of co-operation can be traced as between individual members of the animal world no less than between the parts of a single organism, and it is affirmed that the view which sees nothing but internecine competition in the animal kingdom has been too rough and too superficial in its reading of the facts. And therefore it is suggested that the phenomena of social fellowship, no less than those of individual competition, have their source {25} and root in the world of lower nature; and perhaps sociology is now not far from the recognition that competition and co-operation are simply the negative and positive aspect of the same general fact—the fact of the division of labour, of essentiality of function, and of uniqueness of true individual service. If it is suggested by the one organic analogy that life depends upon qualities adequate to the position which is to be filled, it is made obvious by the other that the qualities which satisfy the claims of a certain position are those, in general and in principle, by which a function is discharged in the service of the whole.
In Mr. Spencer’s doctrine the two sides above indicated have been brought into very marked relation by a suggestive criticism, [1] which he has taken special pains to answer. If human society corresponds to an individual organism—as is, in many ways, Mr. Spencer’s well-known doctrine—how is it that the absolute central control in which the perfection of an organism consists is, for Mr. Spencer, a note of imperfection when it appears in a human society? And the answer is in effect that human society corresponds in many of its features rather to a local variety of a species than to an individual organism. It is essentially discrete, not individual, and at this point, therefore, the analogy of the individual organism gives way to that of the group or species.
[1] Sociology, i. 586.
But Mr. Spencer does not really mean that a human society has no more intrinsic bond between its members than the local group of an animal species. To indicate its true nature he {26} gives us a good word—but a word only—the word “super-organic.” [1] It is a significant term, and brings us perhaps to the limit of what biological sociology is able to suggest with regard to the unity of a human commonwealth, and points us to something beyond. It is remarkable that when the facts of true human society are more thoroughly realised than by Mr. Spencer, but the clue of the individual organism and the co-operative side of animal life is not followed up, there is a tendency to sever the links which unite man to “lower” nature, and to represent the ethical and cosmic processes as absolutely opposed. We see this point of view decidedly adopted by Mr. Huxley, [2] and its adoption perhaps indicates the inception of an epoch in which sociology will cut itself free from a good deal of pseudo-scientific lumber. Nevertheless, a patient and careful study will continue to recognise the elements both of competition and of co-operation as ineradicable and inseparable moments in human society as in the animal world; the essential meaning of competition in its higher forms being the rejection and suppression of members who are unable to meet the ever advancing demand for co-operative character and capacity; and the study of parasitism [3] and of regressive selection will continue to {27} be a warning against the attempt to emancipate mankind from the sterner general conditions of the cosmic order. It will be recognised that there is an adaptation to conditions which consists in degradation; but the failure will be understood by comparison with the only true “survival of the fittest,” [4] being that which reveals the full unity and significance of organism and environment. It is important to observe that, at least in the two eminent biologists just alluded to, the doctrine of the individual self—of the relation between self-assertion and self-restraint—is altogether of an uncivilised and anti-social type. Biological categories do not, in their case at least, appear to have afforded any suggestion for the treatment of the social self as more and greater, in a positive sense, than the self which is less bound up with social obligations. As for the denying spirits in Plato’s Republic, so for both Mr. Spencer and Mr. Huxley, “nature” is essentially self-assertion, and “society” self-restraint. [5] Here again we touch the same limitation which met us in Mr. Spencer’s term “super-organic,” and we feel that a different point of view must be brought to bear.
[1] Sociology, vol. I., ch. i.
[2] Evolution and Ethics, p. 82.
[3] Geddes, in Encyclo. Brit., vol. xviii. 253a: “Further details of the process of retrograde metamorphosis and of the enormously important phenomena of degeneration cannot here be attempted; it must suffice if the general dependence of such changes upon simplification of environment—freedom from danger, abundant alimentation and complete repose, etc. (in short, the conditions commonly considered those of complete material well-being)—has been rendered clearer.”
[4] Cf. Sutherland, Origin and Growth of the Moral Instinct, vol. I., pp. 28, 29.
[5] Huxley, Evolution and Ethics, p. 31; Spencer, Man v. State, p. 98.
iii. Political Economy existed before modern Sociology was born, and is still the only part of it which is obviously and indisputably successful as a science of explanation. The triumphant development of this theory reacted even upon Hegel’s political philosophy, by suggesting to him the distinction between “Bourgeois Society” and “The {28} State.” A fortiori, it could not but have a serious influence on the growing science of sociology itself, the ideal of which might not unfairly be regarded as the extension to society as a whole of that type of investigation which had proved so successful in economic matter. From this influence has arisen the tendency in sociological research which has been called by the name of the economic or materialist view of history and consequently of society. Primarily connected with the name of Marx, it may also be illustrated by many contentions of Buckle and Le Play, and has become, indeed, the formula of a school. In sum, the point of view amounts to this: that the fundamental structure of civilisation, the type of the family, for example, and the order relations and development of classes in society, have been and must be determined by the primary necessities of human existence, and the conditions of climate and nutrition under which these necessities are met. Economic facts alone, it is suggested, are real and causal; everything else is an appearance and an effect.
Before saying a word as to the true importance of this point of view, we may profitably correct the commonplace idea of its nature. Materialism, in a strict philosophical sense, means the conviction that nothing is real but that which is solid, or, perhaps, which gravitates. By a not very convincing analogy from this idea, all those passions and necessities which we speak of in a quite loose and popular way as connected with the body, may be and often are regarded as “material” in opposition to energies which it seems pleasanter {29} to ascribe to incorporeal mind. But it should be noted that this secondary usage, especially in a time when no one denies the physical correlation of all psychical activity, has no important ethical implication. Like the “flesh” or the “body” of St. Paul’s religious language, the “bodily” or “material” needs and appetites of man are an element of mind, the rank and value of which must be determined on other grounds than the notion that they are connected in some peculiar degree with “physical” conditions. The economic view of history has been called and has called itself materialist partly because of the commonplace usage, which I have just described, by which certain passions and necessities, which it takes to be fundamental, are apt to be called material as opposed to ethical or ideal—a wholly unjustified opposition—and partly from the notion, which I referred to at the beginning of this chapter, that the success of political economy was in some way analogous to that of the mathematical science of abstract matter.
Stripping off, then, the unjustified suggestion of philosophical materialism, [1] what we have in the economic view of history, amounts pretty much to what is expressed in the saying that while statesmen are arguing, love and hunger are governing mankind. Climate and natural resources make a {30} difference to history; occupations determine the type of the family; an agricultural and an industrial society will never exhibit the same relations between classes, and very vast commercial operations cannot be carried on by the same methods or by the same minds which sufficed for the retail trade of a petty shop. But when it is clearly seen that economic needs and devices are no detached, nor, so to speak, absolutely antecedent department of human life [2]—a fact which the epithet “materialist” has done something to obscure, for, in truth, in economics there is no question of genuine material causation—then it becomes obvious that we have not here any prior determining framework of social existence, but simply certain important aspects of the operations of the human mind, rather narrowly regarded in their isolation from all others. If we seriously consider the import of such an economic conception as the “standard of life,” it becomes plain that the contrast too commonly accepted [3] between the mechanical pressure of economic facts and the influence of ideas [4] stands in need of a completely fresh criticism and of entire restatement. Discounting, however, the exaggerations which have arisen from confused notions of materialism, and from the genuine achievements of economic science, we have remaining, in the point of view under consideration, a thoroughly just assertion of man’s continuity with {31} the world around him. Undoubtedly man lives the life of his planet, his climate, and his locality, and is the utterance, so to speak, of the conditions under which his race and his nation have evolved. The only difficulty arises if, by some arbitrary line between man and his environment, the conditions which are the very material of his life come to be treated as alien influences upon it, with the result of representing him as being the slave of his surroundings rather than their concentrated idea and articulate expression. Do we think that Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare would have been greater or more free in their genius if one had not been the voice of Greece, another that of Italy, and the third that of England? The world in which man lives is himself, but is constituted, of course, by presentation to a mind and not by strictly physical causation; and even where strictly physical causation plays a part, as in the bodily effects of a hot climate or of a certain kind of nutrition, still it cannot determine a type of human life except by passing into the world which a human being presents to himself.
[1] Quite probably there may be in the Marxian view an echo of true materialism—the idea that will and consciousness are “epiphenomena” i.e. are effects which are not causes generated by molecular movements. Such a view cannot be criticised here, only it may be pointed out that, on such a basis, the “bodily” passions, etc., are in no way more “material” than, e.g., the moral “categorical imperative,” and therefore no more causal.
[2] See note 4.
[2] Cf. e.g. Durkheim, Annee Sociologique, 1897, p. 159.
[4] I.e. as if economic conditions were a sort of iron girders put up to begin with and civilisation was the embellishment of them. It is the old story of forgetting that the skeleton is later than the body, and is deposited and moulded by it.
The exclusive importance which has been attached to considerations of this kind in recent social theory is partly due to an unfounded opinion of their novelty. It is somewhat striking, though following naturally enough from the sort of schism in the world of letters which modern sociology and ancient social philosophy represent, that the firm and well balanced handling of these problems which we owe to Plato and Aristotle is for the most part ignored by modern sociologists.
{32} The entire social conception of those writers is a continued application of the principle, fundamental in their whole philosophy, that “form” is the inherent organising life of “matter,” so that the better life of a commonwealth can be nothing but the flower and crown of the possibilities inherent in its material conditions and industrial and economic organisation. The law which is ultimately to reveal itself as the spring of all righteousness in the State, has its most obvious and external symbol—so Plato tells us—in the economic exchange of services; and every circumstance of site, and industry, and trade, and the racial type of the citizen, helps to constitute, both for him and for Aristotle, the living organic possibility from which, in some appropriate individual form, the higher life is to spring. If we ask ourselves what then is the difference between the ancient view of economic causation, and that of the “materialist” historical school, we shall find the answer in the absence, from the former, of that unreal isolation upon which we observed above. The relation of “matter” or “conditions” to “form” or “purpose” is not, for the Greek thinker, the pressure of an alien necessity, of a hostile environment, but the upspringing of a life, continuous in principle through all its phases. The thought of the legislator fixes in the shape of distinct consciousness and will, what the assemblage of conditions embodies as a physical or instinctive tendency, as the artist, to use an ancient simile, finds the statue in the marble. Working with this idea, the connection is far more thoroughly, because more sympathetically, traced than it can be when we think that our science is but laying bare the fetters of humanity. And following {33} in the spirit of the Greek thinkers themselves, modern students of antiquity have devoted themselves to eliciting the positive connection of conditions with history, up to a point of success of which the common run of modern sociologists appear to have no conception. When we reflect how typical and, comparatively speaking, how readily isolated and exhausted is the history of Ancient Greece in the greatest age, it seems extraordinary that the considerable and minute researches which have been bestowed upon its geographical, commercial, and economic conditions should not be commonly drawn into account with a view to the illustration of the relations between natural resources, commercial and economic development, and historical greatness. [1]
[1] I have never, for example, seen the great work of Ernst Curtius, on the geography of the Peloponnese in connection with its historical development, referred to in any sociological treatise; nor, again, Duncker, nor Büchsenschütz, nor Mr. Newman’s edition of Aristotle’s Politics. Boeckh’s Treatise on the Public Economy of Athens receives only a word of contemptuous notice in M’Culloch’s Literature of Political Economy.
However this may be, here at any rate, in the analysis of economic and quasi-economic conditions in their bearing upon the life of peoples, we get a real subject-matter which is perhaps, so far as can yet be seen, the territory least disputably belonging to the pure sociologist. It is not really a sphere of natural causation, but it is a sphere of certain simple and general conditions in psychical life, corresponding to external facts which admit of more or less precise statement, and, we may hope, of reduction to fairly trustworthy uniformities. Such for instance are M. Durkheim’s investigations on the effect of {34} density of population upon the division of labour, [1] or Professor Gidding’s observations upon the causes and limiting conditions of the aggregation of populations. [2] We now proceed to a branch of experience which seriously strains the working conceptions of the sociologist.
[1] De la Division du Travail Social, Alcan, 1893.
[2] Principles of Sociology, bk. II., ch. i. Few things are more interesting in this respect than Mr. Poore’s observations in Rural Hygiene on the mechanical conditions of modern city life, as regards drainage and water supply, with their results in encouraging an overcrowded and insanitary mode of living.
iv. A completely new vista reveals itself to the student of social theory when he turns from biological analogies and economic conditions to consider the wealth of experience and of ideas which is furnished to him by Jurisprudence and the Science of Right. He knows, indeed, by this time, that the obvious aspect of a province of fact will not be the only one, and that a unity will certainly be traceable between all the facets of social existence. But none the less, he will be able to restrain the itch to explain things away, and he will fairly and candidly give weight to the significance and suggestiveness of the mass of history and of reflection which is now brought before him.
a. For here, as the plainest and most unmistakable data of experience, we are confronted with ideal facts. The vast mass of documents which form the basis of the Science of Right—a more complete and comprehensive set of records, perhaps, than any other branch of social science can boast—bears witness in every case to one social phenomenon at least, to a formal act of mind and will, aimed at maintaining some relative right or {35} hindering some relative wrong, and stamped with what in some sense and in some degree amounts to a social recognition. Theorists have said too hastily, though with a sound meaning, that right is independent of fact. It would be as true to say that reason is independent of civilisation, or the soul independent of culture. Right is not exhausted in the facts of past history; but it is at every moment embodied in facts; and to comprehend that the social phenomena which are among the most solid and unyielding of our experiences, are nevertheless ideal in their nature, and consist of conscious recognitions, by intelligent beings, of the relations in which they stand, is to make a great step towards grasping the essential task of science in dealing with society. From the beginning of social theory the facts of law have been set in opposition to the idea of a natural growth. It has been observed that, as a definite institution maintained by formal acts of will, society is artificial, conventional, contractual. We all know to-day that there is much more than this to be said about the nature and principles of social growth. Nevertheless, it remains true that the social whole has an artificial aspect, an aspect of will and of design, of the agreement and mutual recognition of free conscious beings. And in so far as the history of law has resulted in the conception of natural right, this in no way derogates from the artificial or ideal character of society as above understood. For “natural” right belongs to a “nature” which includes and does not exclude that action of intelligence in virtue of which society may be termed artificial; and is {36} merely the revelation of the principle towards which the social will is working, and which in some degree it has always embodied.
Therefore the facts of Jurisprudence and the Science of Right, or of “Natural Right,” as the issue and outcome of Jurisprudence, necessarily counterbalance the extreme ideas of continuous growth and natural causation which social science derives from other analogies. We are reminded that, after all, we are dealing with a self-conscious purposive organism, which is aware of a better and a worse, and has members bound together by conscious intelligence, though, it may be, not by conscious intelligence alone. At one time the ideas of Jurisprudence, such as Sovereignty or Contract, were considered sufficient by themselves to equip a social theory. And if they are now seen to need completion from both sides,—from the side of lower nature, and from the side of the national spirit and culture,—this should not make us neglectful of the important truths which the facts of law and recognised obligation, more than any others, establish on solid ground.
b. It is of course the case that Law has been treated from the standpoint of economic history in the same way as the other phenomena of civilised life. It may be taken simply as the form into which substantive relations crystallise, under the influence of economic conditions or of other elementary social forces. And obviously such a view has its truth. The social will, like the will of any one of us from day to day, is formed not in vacuo, but as the focus of all the influences which penetrate our being. It is a fair object of {37} research to ascertain the economic or other social meaning of the statutes which we find on the statute book; and it is because they have so much meaning that they are excellent object-lessons in the play of the social consciousness and sense of right. But this focussing of social influences makes the laws not less acts of social will, but more. To suppose the contrary would be like supposing that nothing is a true act of will which embodies an individual’s distinctive purposes in life.
I will explain by an illustration the relative value of sociological analysis in dealing with the facts of positive law. I am indebted for it to M. Durkheim, whose writings appear to me among the most original and suggestive works of modern sociology. I regret that my immediate purpose does not justify me in stating and appreciating the whole very interesting theory of repressive and contractual law from which the point in question is selected.
An act is a crime, [1] we are told, for the pure sociologist, when it offends the strong and definite collective sentiments of society. This is the strictly causal view of the matter. The act is a crime because it offends; it does not offend because it is a crime. And the corollaries are valuable. It is idle to distinguish, on such a basis, between the reformatory, the retributive, and the deterrent views of the reaction which is punishment. [2] An offensive act is in itself at once an exhibition of character, an injury, and a menace. If a man {38} assaults me in the street, and I knock him down; how futile to ask if my action is meant to cure him of his insolence, to punish him for having hit me, or to prevent him from hitting me again! The real fact is that I am offended, and I react by way of injury and negation against that which offends me. Now, this view, I think, illuminates the subject. By going back to the simple operative cause, as it may be supposed to exist especially in the mind of a tribe in an early stage of development (M. Durkheim is chiefly referring to religious offences), we have got a plain type of mental reaction, easy to imagine and to understand. In this type we see at once the unity of aspects which the forms of law, and legal or philosophical theory, tend later to dissociate in a fictitious degree. And moreover we are reminded that a law must have something behind it; some positive sentiment or conviction, without which it would be unaccountable and unmeaning.
[1] Durkheim, Op. cit., livre I., ch. ii.
[2] See ch. viii. below.
But when all this is said, it must not be supposed that penal law has been reduced to the level of a strong and definite collective sentiment, or a crime to the level of an annoyance. The simplest penal law of a self-existent social group is different from the anger of a crowd or mob. There is in it some sense of permanence, and permanence means responsibility and generality—a distinction of right and wrong. The fact of formally constituting a crime, i.e. of announcing a law, implies that mere distaste is no ground of punishment. The law means that there is something worth maintaining, and that this is recognised, and that to violate this recognition is not merely to be unpopular, but to {39} sin against the common good, and to break an obligation. With less than this there is no true crime.
Thus, if I am right, the relation of pure “sociological” causation to juristic facts is the well-known relation of the more abstract to the more concrete sciences, usually illustrated in logic by the relation of the physical and the musical account of musical sound. For the pure physicist, a harmony and a discord are only two different combinations of shakings. For the musician they are not only opposite effects, but are causes of divergent consequences. So with the relation between a strong collective sentiment and a true law. A strong sentiment, as such, is a mere fact, a mere force; and as such the sociologist regards it. A law involves the pretension to will what is just, and is therefore a sentiment and something more, viz., the point of view of social good. It aims at a right and implies a wrong, and demands to be apprehended and judged on this ground. A mere force cannot by its reaction constitute a crime; for that a law is necessary. The ideal aspect of law as recognition of right is no less actual, no less solid and verifiable, than the facts of sentiment or necessity which may have suggested and sustained it. In this way the relation of sociological causation to the facts of Jurisprudence is typical of the whole relation of Sociology conceived as a natural science, to the larger facts with which social theory has to deal.
v. But the ideas involved in mere legality, though they bear emphatic testimony to the conscious and artificial aspect of the social whole, have always {40} been regarded with some justice as the type of what is empty and formal. To treat a law as a command with a penalty annexed, or to enunciate the tendency of social progress as being from status to contract, may convey important meanings, but is obviously very far short of the whole truth. And, indeed, generalisations of this kind, though characteristic of a certain class of reflective Jurisprudence, do not at all represent the highest level which has been reached within the science of right itself. But yet, as we pass beyond these everyday working conceptions, we are beginning to leave the central ground of Jurisprudence, and to move towards a point of view which deals more completely with life and culture. The need and occasion for such a point of view may be measured by that revival of national individuality which was referred to in the last chapter as constituting the true ground and occasion for the rebirth of genuine political philosophy in modern times. Montesquieu’s investigation into the “spirit of laws,” and his treatment of a law as something deeper than a command, following upon the similar endeavours of Vico, was in fact a recognition of the fundamental unity of a national civilisation, which, on its political side, even Hobbes and Locke had already attempted to explain by help of the inadequate instruments furnished to them by legal theory. Montesquieu’s and Vico’s conceptions were only the forerunners of the many-sided study of civilisation which characterised the latter part of the eighteenth century, following up the problem which was enunciated in Rousseau’s paradox, that “law itself must be created by the social spirit which it aims at creating.” To recognise the social spirit {41} of a people, as the central unity behind its law and culture and politics, was the principle of the various researches dealing with formative art, poetry, language, religion, and the state, which marked the close of the eighteenth century (compare Wolf’s theory of Homer as the utterance of a racial mind), and laid the foundation of nineteenth century idealism.
The true Greek renaissance, initiated in the age of Winckelmann, forcing modern minds into contact with Hellenic ideas in their original form, and no longer through Latin intermediaries, furnished a type and focus for these researches by bringing before the thoughts of students the brilliant individuality of the ancient city-state, the crude traditions of which had already exercised the most powerful influence on Rousseau, and through him on the Revolution. At the same time the organic sciences were full of activity. The life-work of Goethe marks the parallelism of the two movements. It is plain that the doctrines of Comte were no more than a very one-sided attempt to formulate the significance of the fermentation around him, and that deeply as he felt the unity of the social being, his expression of it ignored half the lesson of the times. Thus the generalities of Jurisprudence are vitalised and completed by the work of the sciences of culture; and the conception of a national mind and character takes its unquestioned place in modern social theory. It may be well at this point also to call attention to the researches which later historians have directed to what may be called “Comparative Politics”; the relations, that is, of communities under government with respect to the {42} mode in which they are governed. [1] For this branch of inquiry once more, though narrow and empty by itself, yet does aid in bringing to light the purposive and conscious character of society, and in correcting the tendency to treat it altogether as a “natural” phenomenon.
[1] Freeman’s Comparative Politics, and Seeley’s Introduction to Political Science.
vi. “And so the whirligig of Time brings about his revenges.” French Sociology to-day is a psychological science, though its founder banished psychology from his sociological method. Nothing is more instructive than to watch the gradual pressure of the various points of view which are emphasised by the various departments of social experience, as they reveal, under criticism, their tendency to complete themselves and one another by suggesting the only category which is adequate to them as a whole. As every serious student of social matters knows by his own experience, it is impossible to touch a physical fact, or a statistical datum, or a legal enactment, in reference to its social bearing, without its at once, so to speak, coming alive in his hands, and attaching itself to an underlying relation of mind as the only unity which will make it intelligible, and correlate it with other experiences, by themselves no less fragmentary. In statistics, for example, you touch a moving creature, as if through the holes in a wall, at this point and the other, and write down where you have touched him. [1] But to see the creature as he is, and combine your information of all kinds in a just and complete idea, you {43} must get him into the open. And that, when the question is of a life, you can only do by reconstructing his mind, for even to see a social unit with your eyes gives you a fragment only, and not a whole. On Fridays, we are told, the passenger traffic returns of French railways, omnibuses, and steamers show a decline. [2] What dumb fact is this? People do not like to travel on Fridays, or prefer to travel upon other days. What is this preference? The only unity that can really afford an explanation, that can correlate this irregular fragment of fact with the whole to which it belongs, is the living mind and will of the society in which the phenomenon occurs. Explanation aims at referring things to a whole; and there is no true whole but mind. Necessarily, therefore, with widening experience and deepening criticism, mind has become the centre of the experiences focussed by sociology.
[1] Cf. Aspects of the Social Problem (Macmillan, 1895), C.S. Loch on “Returns in Social Science,” p. 287.
[2] Tarde, Les Lois de l’Imitation, p. 115.
We may note some significant points in this development, although, indeed, the whole course of modern sociology is one single illustration of what has just been said. Discussions of the problem in what the differentia of society consists, no longer deal with organic or economic conceptions, but with such ideas as the “Consciousness of kind,” [1] the “Mind of a Crowd,” [2] “Imitation” and “Invention,” [3] similarities and differences in the social consciousness, [4] “Social logic” and society considered as a syllogism, [5] and the imitative and {44} inventive person. [6] The work of M. Tarde in particular is typical of the whole movement, and his phrases have largely been adopted whether in agreement or in controversy. For him the one fact coextensive with the social character is “Imitation”—the means by which ideas and practices spread throughout groups and masses of intelligent beings. For the characteristic of knowable phenomena, in his view, is Repetition, and Imitation is the means and vehicle of Repetition in social matters. Here, however, we have accounted only for generalisation, and differentiation needs a separate origin. This will be supplied by the idea of “Invention;” Invention and Imitation, therefore, are the general form of all social process, the matter on the other hand being analysable as Belief and Desire. Every institution is a belief, [7] every activity is a want or desire. In the Logique Sociale these conceptions of the general medium and process of social life are pushed home into the actual formative operation of the social mind and will. Society, we are told, may be compared not indeed to an organism, but rather to a brain; it is a cooperative mind, a syllogism, in which the principles held by one part are modified and applied by another. M. Tarde’s extreme illustrative hypothesis corresponds strangely with one thrown out by Mr. Sidgwick. Mr. Sidgwick [8] has simplified an ethical question by supposing only a single sentient conscious being in the universe; for M. {45} Tarde there is, we might say, no single being at all; the typical social man is a hypnotical creature, a somnambulist acting under suggestions from others, though he does not know it, and is under the illusion that he is himself. [9] Nothing could be of higher interest than to see the necessities of social science thus working themselves out, on slippery and unfamiliar ground, by the sheer force of facts and experience. That a science of man must be a science of mind seems no longer disputable.
[1] Giddings, p. 17.
[2] Le Bon, Psychologie des Foules.
[3] Tarde, Les Lois de l’Imitation.
[4] Durkheim, La Division du Travail Social.
[5] Tarde, La Logique Sociale.
[6] Baldwin, Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental Development.
[7] Perhaps this expression originates with Fustel de Coulanges in La Cité Antique.
[8] Methods of Ethics, p. 374.
[9] Les Lois de l’Imitation, p. 83.
On the substance of this development there is one observation which inevitably suggests itself to any critic who approaches the problem from the philosophical side.
Necessarily, as the relation of the individual to society is the root of every social problem, psychological sociology consists to a great extent in exercises upon the theme of identity and difference. These exercises have hitherto been for the most part unconscious and involuntary. And the high degree of substantial truth which is attained by inquirers who have not thought the logic of identity worthy of a single glance, is the strongest possible confirmation of the common experience that it is safer to neglect theory than to be careless of facts. Nevertheless, it has now become apparent, that a point has been attained at which logical criticism is absolutely essential, or if not logical criticism, at least some reference to the familiar and well-established results of ancient or modern social philosophy.
For it is a universal characteristic of the {46} sociological movement before us, that identity and difference are referred to different spheres, and the “one” and the “other” are regarded as reciprocally exclusive atoms. [1] The difficulties and fallacies which thus arise are innumerable. Thus we have the contagious common feeling of a crowd [2] taken as the true type of a collective mind, obviously because it is not understood how an identical structure can include the differences, the rational distinctions and relations, which really constitute the working mind of any society. So again we have one type of law marked off as corresponding to social similitude, [3] while a different type corresponds to the social division of labour; simply because the category of resemblance has been substituted for that of identity, and is treated as exclusive of differentiation; with the result of a really terrible distortion of facts in the attempt to separate the whole sphere of penal enactment from that which deals with industrial organisation. So with the entire set of notions of “Imitation,” “Repetition” and “Invention.” [4] The separation of Imitation and Invention is simply the popular exclusion of Difference from Identity; while the treatment of Repetition as the characteristic of knowable phenomena and the mode of utterance of social Imitation means the restriction of rational Identity to its barest form, and the exclusion from {47} social theory of absolutely every case of true cooperative structure. For true cooperative structure is never characterised by repetition, but always by identity in difference; it is the relation not of a screw to an exactly similar screw, but of the screw to the nut into which it fastens.
[1] M. Tarde’s view just mentioned might seem to conflict with this. But note that he regards the man influenced by others as under an illusion in thinking that he is himself: i.e., with Spencer and Huxley, he regards the “self” and the “other” as irreconcilable factors.
[2] Le Bon, Op. cit.
[3] Durkheim, Op. cit.
[4] Tarde and Baldwin, Op. cit.
In the discussions of Egoism and Altruism the difficulty comes to a head. Some writers think Egoism prior to Altruism; others—the more wary and enlightened—incline to treat Altruism as a phase earlier than Egoism; M. Durkheim, whose eye for a fact is very keen, seeing the absurdity of both these suppositions, is determined to include the two characters in question from the very beginning in the human consciousness, [1] but, of course, as contents belonging to different spheres and consisting of contrasted elements. The conception of a whole held together by its differences, its identity consisting in and being measured by their very profoundness and individuality, is not at the command of any of these writers, although the greater part of M. Durkheim’s theory seems imperatively to demand such a conception.
[1] Division du Travail, 216.
vii. Before considering, in conclusion, the relation of Sociology as influenced by the above-mentioned sources and points of view, to social philosophy proper, it will be well to devote a few words to emphasising the way in which these “sources” ought to be regarded.
Every “source” of sociological science is at once a category, or point of view, and also a certain group of actual social conditions. This relation is effectively illustrated by the study of any social {48} unity which is such as to invite a thorough conspectus of its life from top to bottom of the social growth and underlying conditions. I repeat that the history and life of ancient Greece, a singularly complete working model of society on a very small scale, analysed with remarkable thoroughness, and individual throughout, is the prerogative example of such a treatment; but next to this, or in addition to it, a thoroughly careful study of local history, life, and conditions, in a limited region, [1] with which we are familiar from top to toe, is an essential propaedeutic to true social theory. To focus a number of groups of fact, and coordinate the points of view which they substantiate, into the conception of a living being, with its individual character and spiritual utterance, needs more than a merely literary or statistical study. But by making this effort we shall learn, as no economic charts or general scientific works can teach us, what a social life is, and in what sense it is true that all partial facts and experiences within it demand ultimate coordination in the category of mind. It is not meant that consciousness can make the weather hold up, but it is meant that no fact has a true social bearing except in as far as, sooner or later, it comes to form part of the world which a being capable of sociality and therefore intelligent, presents to himself as his theatre of action.
[1] Cf. Professor Geddes’ idea of a “Regional Survey,” with which visitors to his delightful “Summer School” become acquainted.
3. Thus it may seem that by mere force of facts a necessary solution has been arrived at, and that psychological sociology must be one and the same science with social philosophy.
{49} But this is not quite the case. Up to the present time these two sciences continue to approach their object-matter, as it were, from different ends, and whether the two views will ultimately amalgamate is perhaps mainly a problem of the personal division of labour. But a question of principle, with reference to the true nature of psychology, is indirectly involved. Only there seems no reason why two kinds of psychology should not exist.
Psychology, as at present conceived by its best working representatives, is a positive, though not a physical science. “For (the psychologist) the crude superstitions of Australian aborigines have as much interest and value as the developed and accurate knowledge of a Newton or a Faraday.” [1] Its aim is “the establishment of continuity among observed facts, by interpolating among them intermediate links which elude observation.” [2] If not a “physical” science, then, it is, in a common sense of the term, a “natural” science. It has the impartiality, and uses the watchwords—law, process, genesis—which belong to a natural science. And like every impartial science, to which process and genesis are watchwords, it tends to explain the higher by the lower. This springs from no malice aforethought, but from the conditions of the case. The lower is simpler, and usually comes first in time. It is naturally dwelt upon, as that into which it is hoped to resolve the more complex, and the explanation which is more adequate for the simple, is less adequate for the complex. No difference of higher {50} and lower is recognised by the impartial science, and its ideal, as a science, is inevitably the expression of the complex in terms of the simple; while, as far as genesis in time is insisted on, the bias towards temporal causation is pretty sure to operate by attaching a quasi-causal significance to the earlier phases.
[1] Stout, Analytic Psychology, Introduction.
[2] Ib. From a logical point of view this idea of explanation seems seriously defective. See Bradley’s Principles of Logic, p. 491.
In all these characteristics psychology is at one with sociology. And, therefore, though it is a gain that other points of view should be resolved into the point of view of mind, yet the positive bias of sociology is not transcended simply by this resolution.
Philosophy starts, we have said, as it were, from the other end. It is critical throughout; it desires to establish degrees of value, degrees of reality, degrees of completeness and coherence. Its purpose might be termed “Ethical,” but for the extreme narrowness of the meaning of that term. Society, for it, is an achievement or utterance of human nature—of course not divorced from nature in general—having a certain degree of solidity, so to speak; that is to say, being able, up to a certain point, to endure the tests and answer the questionings which are suggested by the scrutiny of human life from the point of view of value and completeness. Is the social life the best, or the only life for a human soul? In what way through society, and in what characteristics of society, does the soul lay hold upon its truest self, or become, in short, the most that it has in it to be? How does the social life at its best compare with the life of art, of knowledge, or of religion, and can the same principle be shown to be active in all of them? And what have {51} they in common, or peculiar to each, which has an imperative claim on the mind of man?
Now it was hinted above that there might be two kinds of psychology, or two tendencies within it. And if psychology were to be impelled, as it has been more than once in the past, by the recognition that where there is more of its object—of mind—its interest is greater and the rank of its object-matter is higher, then there would not be much to choose between the temper of psychology and that of philosophy. And as sociology has found itself driven forward into the territory of social “logic,” a name which at once suggests a critical and philosophical science, it may well be that sociological psychology will not remain wholly “positive” and impartial, but will assume, as in the hands of Professor Giddings, for example, it seems inclined to, at least a teleological attitude, testing social phenomena by the quantity and quality of life which they display.
But, at any rate, the points of view of sociology, and of social philosophy as above described, will continue to supplement each other. Philosophy gives a significance to sociology; sociology vitalises philosophy. The idea of mind is deepened and extended by the unity and continuity which sociological analysis, throughout all its many-sided sources, vindicates for the principle of growth and order down to the roots and in all the fibres of the world. Every natural resource and condition must be thought of as drawing forth or constituting some new element in the mind which is the universal focus; just as every shape and colour of the trees in the landscape or every note of a melody finds its {52} definite and individual response in the contemplative consciousness. The error lies, not in identifying the mind and the environment, but in first uncritically separating them, and then substituting not merely the one for the other, but wretched fragments of the one for the whole in which alone either can be complete.
Philosophy, on the other hand, in treating of society, has to deal with the problems which arise out of the nature of a whole and its parts, the relation of the individual to the universal, and the transformation by which the particular self is lost, to be found again in a more individual, and yet more universal form. In all these respects its view is what might be called teleological; that is to say, it recognises a difference of level or of degree in the completeness and reality of life, and endeavours to point out when and how, and how far by social aid, the human soul attains the most and best that it has in it to become. As long as these two points of view are clearly recognised, it is a matter of the mere personal division of labour whether they are brought to bear by the same thinkers and within the same treatises.
{53}
CHAPTER III.
THE PARADOX OF POLITICAL OBLIGATION: SELF-GOVERNMENT.
1. To every-day common sense there is something paradoxical in the phenomena of political obligation; however it may acquiesce in what, although not satisfactorily explicable, is plainly seen to be necessary. Where, indeed, we meet with any form of absolutely despotic government, we have not so much a paradox as a defect; for, although government may exist in such a shape, it is open to question how far true political obligation can be said to arise under such a system. In as far as it does so, we shall find that the fact is due to unacknowledged conditions and relations, which we shall more easily analyse as they appear in free or constitutional states. It would then be easy to show, if we were interested in doing so, that the principles which will have been recognised as operative in the freest states known to history, are and have been, in various degrees, at the root of the common life of every state or community which has held together effectively enough to be treated as in any sense a political whole. But this would be a historical investigation, unnecessary for the purpose of pure {54} social theory. In this we may fairly start from the highest form of political experience, in which, as we shall see, the mere defects of political immaturity being outgrown, the paradox of political obligation emerges with intensified emphasis.
Let us take as our starting point, then, the conception of “self-government,” to which, it will be admitted on all hands, the thought and feeling of mature communities has clung both in ancient and modern times, as in some way containing the true root and ground of political obligation. We shall find in it a striking illustration of the strength and weakness of wide-spread popular notions. A universal popular notion cannot but have a hold of some essential truth, otherwise it could not survive and spread, and form a working theory for an immense area of experience. On the other hand, a popular notion, as such, cannot be critical of itself and aware of its own foundations; and so in defending and applying itself it is pretty sure to plunge deep into fallacy. “Self-government” is an idea which will be found, as has been said, to contain the true ground and nature of political obligation. But the rough and ready application of it which, for example, represents the individual as simply one with the community, and the community therefore as infallible in its action affecting him, is a pure example of fallacy, and may be justly characterised as a confusion pretending to be a synthesis. Of this idea as of so many we must say that those who have pronounced it to be self-contradictory have understood it much better than most of those who accept it as self-evident.
In the conception of self-government then we {55} have the paradox of obligation in its purest form. As applied to the individual himself, it gives the paradox of Ethical Obligation. As applied to the individuals who compose a society, it gives the paradox of Political Obligation. This must be the preliminary distinction by which we approach the subject; but we shall find that the two problems and the two cases cannot be ultimately separated, although they are to be distinguished in a certain respect.
The paradox of Ethical Obligation starts from what is accepted as a “self,” and asks how it can exercise authority or coercion over itself; how, in short, a metaphor drawn from the relations of some persons to others can find application within what we take to be the limits of an individual mind. [1]
[1] On this problem, see below, p. 139.
The paradox of Political Obligation starts from what is accepted as authority or social coercion, and asks in what way the term “self,” derived from the “individual” mind, can be applicable at once to the agent and patient in such coercion, exercised prima facie by some persons over others. Both relations and their connection have been pointed out by Plato. [1]
[1] Republic, 430, 431.
Our object in the present chapter is to enforce the reality of the difficulties which attach to the idea of political self-government, so long as current assumptions as to the union of individuals in society are maintained. And for this purpose we are to examine the views of some very distinguished philosophers to whom the paradox has appeared irreconcilable, and law or government has seemed {56} essentially antagonistic to the self or true individuality of man; while the term self, if applied to the collective group by or within which government is undoubtedly exercised, appears to them an empty and misleading expression. The curious and significant point, to which we shall call attention, is, in brief, that while maintaining law and government to be in their nature antagonistic to the self of man—whether as pain to pleasure or as fetters to individuality—they nevertheless admit with one voice that a certain minimum of this antagonistic element is necessary to the development of the sentient or rational self. We have here a dualism which challenges examination.
2. The attitude towards law and government which Bentham adopted (1748-1832) was in a great degree that of the philanthropic reformer. His principle of the greatest happiness of the greatest number is said [1] to have been derived from Beccaria, whose work on “Crimes and Penalties” had great influence throughout Europe. And Howard, “the philanthropist,” who was just twenty-two years Bentham’s senior (1726-1790), represented a revolt against the abuses of the treatment of criminals at that time, by which Bentham, who eulogised him as “a martyr and apostle,” was strongly affected. The movement which Bentham led was, in short, markedly hostile to the existing system of law, and to the reasonings of its advocates. And substantial as his knowledge and constructive genius proved to be, it never lost the character which the direction of his approach to the subject had marked upon it, a character of suspicion and antagonism, which is {57} expressed in his description of law as a necessary evil, and government as a choice of evils. [2]
[1] Professor Holland in Encycl. Brit., art.; Bentham.”
[2] Bentham, Principles of Legislation, p. 48.
Pain being the ultimate evil, it is clear why, on Bentham’s principles, every law is an evil. For every law, for him, is contrary to liberty; and every infraction of liberty is followed by a natural sentiment of pain. [1] Against those who would deny the proposition that every law is contrary to liberty he brings a charge of perversion of language, in that they restrict liberty to the right of doing what is not injurious to others. They give the term, that is to say, a partly positive implication. For him then liberty has the simplest and apparently widest meaning, [2] which includes liberty to do evil, and is defined, we must suppose, purely as the absence of restraint. And he therefore has no doubt whatever that the citizen can acquire rights only by sacrificing part of his liberty. And in this there is an appearance of truth, if we forget that in saying that a part of one’s liberty is sacrificed it is implied that one had, to begin with, a certain area of liberty, of which a portion is abandoned to save the rest. But the idea of any such antecedent liberty is just such a fiction as Bentham himself delighted to expose. It is true, however, that some degree of restraint on what we can now easily imagine ourselves free to do, is involved in political society. The point on which we have to fix our attention, for the purposes of social theory, is the remarkable representation of this state of things under the figure, as it were, of an amount of general liberty, {58} which is increased by subtraction, or which can only attain its maximum by the conversion of a certain edge or border of it, so to speak, into constraint. This border of constraint is implied to be capable of a minimum, such as to condition a maximum of liberty, or possible individual initiative; a relation which, being at first sight contradictory, demands further analysis. For it would appear that if the sacrifice of some liberty is to be instrumental to the increase of the whole amount, that whole can hardly be a homogeneous given quantity, like, for instance, a piece of land; for such a one must surely be diminished by the subtraction of any part of it. It must, one would infer, be something which has a complex nature like that of a living plant, such that certain restrictions or negations which are essential to its prosperity are dictated by its individual characteristics (which must be positive), and express the same principle with them; and therefore are wholly relative to the positive type and phase of the plant to be cultivated. Only in some such sense can it be intelligible how constraint is instrumental to effective self-assertion.
[1] Bentham, Principles of Legislation, p. 94.
[2] It is not really the widest, as will appear in the sequel.
But if this is so, the restrictive influences of law and government, which are the measure of the constraint imposed, cannot be alien to the human nature which they restrict, and ought not to be set down as in their own nature antagonistic to liberty or to the making the most of the human self. The root of the difficulty obviously lies in assuming that the pressure of the claims of “others” in society is a mere general curtailment of the liberty of the “one,” while acknowledging, not {59} contrary to fact, but contrary to the hypothesis of that curtailment, that the one, so far from surrendering some of his capacity for life through his fellowship with others, acquires and extends that capacity wholly in and through such fellowship. On the above assumption the terms of the paradox of self-government become irreconcilable, and government is made an evil of which it is impossible to explain how it ministers to the self which stands for the good. So long as to every individual, taken as the true self, the restraint enforced by the impact of others is alien and a diminution of the self, this result is inevitable.
It is instructive, therefore, to note Bentham’s uncompromising hostility to all the theories of philosophical jurists. The common point of all their theories, from Hobbes and Grotius to Montesquieu and Rousseau, not to mention Kant and his successors, has lain in the fact that their authors divined under the forms of power and command, exercised by some over others, a substantive and general element of positive human nature, which they attempted to drag to light by one analogy after another. But neither Montesquieu’s “eternal relations,” nor the “Social Contract,” nor “General Will,” nor “Natural Rights” of other thinkers find favour in Bentham’s eyes. One and all they are to him fiction and fallacy. He can understand nothing in law but the character of a command; he can see no positive relation of it to human nature beyond the degree in which it dispenses with the pain of restraint while increasing the pleasure of liberty.
To describe the magnificent success which {60} attended the use of this rule of thumb in the practical work of reform does not fall within our immediate subject. Our purpose was merely to illustrate the paradox implied in the conception of self-government, by pointing out how fundamentally hostile to one another Bentham took its constituent elements to be.
3. The same point may be further insisted on by examining the main ideas of Mill’s “Liberty,” without by any means professing to give a full account of Mill’s opinions on the relation of individuals to society. What indeed is instructive in his position, for our immediate purpose, is that, having so deep a sense, as he has, of social solidarity, he nevertheless treats the central life of the individual as something to be carefully fenced round against the impact of social forces.
i. Mill’s idea of Individuality is plainly biassed by the Benthamite tradition that law is an evil. It is to be remembered that Anarchism of a speculative kind, the inevitable complement of a hide-bound Conservatism, was current in the beginning of this century, as in Godwin and Shelley. Thus we find concentrated in a few pages of the “Liberty” [1] all those ideas on the nature of Individuality, Originality, and Eccentricity, which are most opposed to the teaching derived by later generations in England from the revival of philosophy and criticism. It is worth while, after reading Mill’s observations upon the relation of individuality to the Calvinistic theory of life, [2] to turn to the estimate expressed by Mark Pattison [3] of the force of individual character generated by {61} the rule of Calvin at Geneva. That the individuality, or genius, the fulness of life and completeness of development which Mill so justly appreciates, is not nourished and evoked by the varied play of relations and obligations in society, but lies in a sort of inner self, to be cherished by enclosing it, as it were, in an impervious globe, is a notion which neither modern logic [4] nor modern art criticism will admit. In the same way, the connection of originality and eccentricity, on which Mill insists, appears to us to-day to be a fallacious track of thought; and in general, in all these matters, we tend to accept the principle that, in order to go beyond a point of progress, it is necessary to have reached it; and in order to destroy a law, it is necessary to have fulfilled it. Here, however, is the heart of the point on which we are insisting. If individuality and originality mean or depend upon the absence of law and of obligation; if eccentricity is the type of the fully developed self, and if the community, penetrated by a sense of universal relations, is therefore a prey to monotony and uniformity, then it needs no further words to show that law is a curtailment of human nature, the necessity of which remains inexplicable, so that self-government is a contradiction in terms.
[1] pp. 35-9.
[2] Ib., p. 35.
[3] Essays, vol. I., “Calvin.”
[4] See below, p. 79.
ii. How then does Mill bring the two terms into relation? How does he represent the phenomenon that, in the life of every society, the factors of self and of government have to be reconciled, or at anyrate to coexist?
To find the answer to this question, the whole {62} of the chapter, “Of the limits of the authority of society over the individual,” [1] should be carefully studied. A few characteristic sentences may be quoted here.
[1] On Liberty, ch. iv.
“What, then, is the rightful limit to the sovereignty of the individual over himself? Where does the authority of society begin? How much of human life should be assigned to individuality, and how much to society?
“Each will receives its proper share, if each has that which more particularly concerns it. To individuality should belong the part of life in which it is chiefly the individual that is interested; to society, the part which chiefly interests society.”
Every one who lives in society, he continues in effect, is bound not to interfere with certain interests of others (explicitly or implicitly constituted as “rights”), and is bound to take his fair share of the sacrifices incurred for the defence of society and its members. These conditions society may enforce, at all costs to recalcitrants. Further, it may punish by opinion, though not by law, acts hurtful to others, but not going so far as to violate their rights. But acts which affect only the agent, or need not affect others unless they like, may be punished, we are given to understand, neither by law nor by opinion. Mill expects his conclusions to be disputed, and the following is the conclusion of the passage in which he explains and re-affirms it:
“… when a person disables himself, by conduct purely self-regarding, from the performance of some definite duty incumbent on him to the public, he is guilty of a social {63} offence. No person ought to be punished simply for being drunk; but a soldier or policeman should be punished for being drunk on duty. Wherever, in short, there is a definite damage, or a definite risk of damage either to an individual or to the public, the case is taken out of the province of liberty, and placed in that of morality or law.” [1]
[1] Italics are mine.
It will probably occur at once to the reader that, considered as a practical rule, the view here maintained would by no means curtail unduly the province of social interference. We should rather anticipate that it would leave an easy opening for a transition from administrative nihilism to administrative absolutism; and some such transition seems to have taken place in Mill’s later views. This tendency to a complete bouleversement is the characteristic of all conceptions which proceed by assigning different areas to the several factors of an inseparable whole, which then reasserts itself in its wholeness within the area of either factor to which we may happen to attend. Indeed, even in the passage before us, the defence of individuality has already well-nigh turned round into its annihilation. Every act that carries a definite damage to any other person belongs to the sphere of law, and every act that can be supposed likely to cause such a damage, to that of morality; and individuality has what is left. The extraordinary demarcation between the sphere of morality and that of liberty is to be accounted for, no doubt, by the Benthamite tradition which identified the moral and social sanctions; so that in this usage the sphere of morality means much the same as what, {64} in the first passage referred to, was indicated as the sphere of opinion.
Now, it is obvious that the distinction which Mill is attempting to describe and explain is one practically recognised by every society. The question is whether it can be rightly described and explained by a demarcation which, if strictly pressed, excludes individuality from every act of life that has an important social bearing; while, owing to the two-sided nature of all action, it becomes perfectly arbitrary in its practical working as a criterion. For every act of mine affects both myself and others; and it is a matter of mood and momentary urgency which aspect may be pronounced characteristic and essential. It may safely be said that no demarcation between self-regarding and other-regarding action can possibly hold good. What may hold good, and what Mill’s examples show to be present to his mind, is a distinction between the moral and the “external” aspects of action, on the ground of their respective accessibility to the means of coercion which are at the disposal of society. The peculiar sense in which the term “external” is here employed will explain itself below. [1]
[1] See ch. viii. below.
For our present purpose, however, what we have to observe is merely that the demarcation between individuality and society, contrived in defence of the former, has pretty nearly annihilated it. And thus we see once more how overwhelming is the prima facie appearance that, in the idea of self-government, the factors of self and government are alien and opposed; and yet how hopeless it remains {65} to explain the part played by these factors in actual society, so long as we aim at a demarcation between them as opposites, rather than at a relative distinction between them as manifestations of the same principle in different media.
iii. A few words may here be said on the applications by which Mill illustrates his doctrine, in order to point out what confusion results from relying on a demarcation which cannot strictly be made.
It will be noted in the first place that he objects altogether to the attempt to prevent by punishment either immorality or irreligion as such. [1] This objection a sound social theory must uphold. But if we look at Mill’s reason for it, we find it simply to be that such an attempt infringes liberty, by interfering with action which is purely self-regarding. Without entering further upon the endless argument whether this or any action is indeed purely self-regarding, we may observe that by taking such ground, Mill causes the above objection, which is substantially sound, to appear as on all fours with others which are at any rate very much more doubtful. Such is the objection on principle to all restrictions imposed upon trade with a distinct view to protecting the consumer, not from fraud, but from opportunities of consumption injurious to himself. The regulation or prohibition of the traffic in alcoholic liquors is of course the main question here at issue; and it may be admitted that Mill’s discussion, with the many distinctions which he lays down, is full of shrewdness and suggestiveness. But the ultimate ground which he takes, as above stated, is quite different from the genuine reasons which exist {66} against attempting to enforce morality by law and penalty, and introduces confusion into the whole question of State interference by ranking the two objections together. Closely analogous are his objections to the statutes respecting unlawful games, [2] which, whether wise or unwise, are quite a different thing from an attempt to punish personal immorality as such. And lastly, the same principle is illustrated by his whole attitude to the strong feeling and the various legal obligations which determine and support the monogamous family. In maintaining the general indissolubility of marriage, and supporting the parental power, the State is interfering, for him, with the freedom of parties to a contract, and conferring power over individuals, the children, who have a right to be separately considered. Such interference is for him ipso facto of a suspected nature. It is an interference hostile to liberty; and whether it is or is not an external condition of good life, which the State is able effectively to maintain, is a question which he does not discuss. Throughout all these objections to authoritative interference we trace the peculiar prejudice that the criterion of its justifiability lies in the boundary line between self and others, rather than in the nature of what coercive authority is and is not able to do towards the promotion of good life. On many points indeed, when the simple protection of “others” is concerned, Mill’s doctrine leads to sound conclusions. Such, for example, is the problem of legislation after the pattern of the Factory Acts.
[1] Pp. 48 and 50.
[2] P. 59.
But yet a strange nemesis attaches to grounds {67} alleged with insufficient discrimination. Just as, by ranking inner morality and outer action alike under the name of freedom, Mill is led to object to interference which may be perfectly justified and effectual; so by the same confusion he is led to advocate coercive treatment in impossibly stringent forms, and in cases where it runs extreme risk of thwarting a true moral development. We are amazed when he strongly implies, in respect to the education of children and the prospect of supporting a family, that moral obligations [1] ought to be enforced by law. The proposal of universal State-enacted examinations by way of enforcing the parental duty of educating children, to the exclusion of the task of providing education by public authority, in which Mill sees danger to individuality, opens a prospect of a Chinese type of society, from which, happily, the good sense of Englishmen has recoiled. And just the reverse of his proposal has come to pass under the influence of the logic of experience. The State has taken care that the external conditions of an elementary education are provided, and, while doing this, has no doubt exercised compulsion in order that these conditions may be a reality. But the individual inquisition by examination is tending to drop out of the system; and the practical working of the public education is more and more coming to be that the State sees to it that certain conditions are maintained, of which the parents’ interest and public spirit leads them to take advantage. Sheer compulsion is not the way to enforce a moral obligation.
[1] Pp. 62 and 64.
{68} Still more startling is the suggestion that it might be just to interdict marriage to those unable to show the means of supporting a family, on the ground of possible evil both to the children themselves through poverty, and to others through over-population. This is a case in which authoritative interference (except on account of very definite physical or mental defects) must inevitably defeat its object. No foresight of others can gauge the latent powers to meet and deal with a future indefinite responsibility; and the result of scrupulous timidity, in view of such responsibilities, is seen in the tendency to depopulation which affects that very country from which Mill probably drew his argument. To leave the responsibility as fully as possible where it has been assumed is the best that law can do, and appeals to a spring of energy deeper than compulsion can reach.
Thus we have seen that by discriminating the spheres of non-interference and interference, according to a supposed demarcation between the sphere of “self” and of “others,” a hopelessly confused classification has been introduced. Sometimes the maintenance of external conditions of good life, well within the power of the State, is forbidden on the same grounds as the direct promotion of morality, which is impossible to it. In other cases the enforcement of moral obligations is taken to lie within the functions of the State, although not only is the enforcement of moral obligations per se a contradiction in terms, but almost always, as in the cases in question, the attempt to effect it is sure to frustrate itself, by destroying the springs on which moral action depends.
{69} It is worth noticing, in conclusion, that in two examples, [1] the one trivial, the other that of slavery, both theoretically and practically very important, Mill recognises a principle wholly at variance with his own. Here he is aware that it may be right, according to the principle of liberty, to restrain a man, for reasons affecting himself alone, from doing what at the moment he proposes to do. For we are entitled to argue from the essential nature of freedom to what freedom really demands, as opposed to what the man momentarily seems to wish. “It is not freedom to be allowed to alienate his freedom,” as it is not freedom to be allowed to walk over a bridge which is certain to break down and cause his death. Here we have in germ the doctrine of the “real” will, and a conception analogous to that of Rousseau when he speaks of a man “being forced to be free.”
[1] Pp. 57 and 61.
4. Before referring to Mill’s explicit utterances on the problem of self-government, which are of the same general character as those of Mr. Herbert Spencer, it will be well to note some instructive points in the views of the latter thinker. The study of Mr. Spencer’s writings, and more especially of those which appear most directly opposed to the popular conceptions of the day, cannot be too strongly urged upon the sociological student. And this for two reasons. In the first place, no other writer has exhibited with equal vividness the fatal possibilities of a collective governmental stupidity. That in practice these possibilities are continually tending to become facts, just as in theory they are {70} represented by recurrent fallacies, [1] is a proof of the extreme arduousness of the demands made by the task of self-government upon the people which undertakes it. And no theorist is fitted to discuss the problem of social unity who has not realised the arduousness of these demands in all its intensity. And, in the second place, the student will observe an instructive meeting of extremes between elements of Mr. Spencer’s ideas and popular social theories of an opposite cast. The revival of doctrines of the natural rights of man on a biological foundation [2] is a case in point. An uncriticised individualism is always in danger of transformation into an uncritical collectivism. The basis of the two is in fact the same.
[1] As, for example, in Rousseau’s attempts to explain the action of a collective mind, in which he constantly falls into the advocacy of a soulless régime of mass-meetings.
[2] Man v. State, p. 95.
i. A comparison of the conception of “right” as entertained by Bentham and by Herbert Spencer forms a striking commentary on ideas in which “government” is antagonistic to “self.” Bentham, seeing clearly that the claims of the actual individual, taken as he happens to be, are casual and unregulated, fulminates against the idea of natural right as representing those claims. Right is for him a creation of the State, and there can be no right which is not constituted by law. And the truth of the contention seems obvious. How, in fact, could individual claims or wishes constitute a right, except as in some way ratified by a more general recognition?
But to Mr. Herbert Spencer the contrary proposition is absolutely convincing, and, indeed, on {71} their common premises, with equal reason. [1] It is ridiculous, he points out, to think of a people as creating rights, which it had not before, by the process of creating a government in order to create them. It is absurd to treat an individual as having a share of rights qua member of the people, while in his private capacity he has no rights at all.
[1] Ib., p. 88.
We need not labour this point further. It is obvious that Mr. Herbert Spencer is simply preferring the opposite extreme, in the antithesis of “self” and “government,” to that which commended itself to Bentham. If it is a plain fact that “a right” can only be recognised by a society, it is no less plain that it can only be real in an individual. If individual claims, apart from social adjustment, are arbitrary, yet social recognitions, apart from individual qualities and relations, are meaningless. As long as the self and the law are alien and hostile, it is hopeless to do more than choose at random in which of the two we are to locate the essence of right.
ii. And how alien and hostile the self and the law may seem we see even more crudely enunciated in Herbert Spencer than in Bentham or Mill, as the fundamental principle of the tradition has worked itself more definitely to the front. “The liberty [1] which a citizen enjoys is to be {72} measured, not by the nature of the governmental machinery he lives under, whether representative or other, but by the relative paucity of the restraints it imposes on him.” And so we are astounded to find it maintained that the positive and active element in the right to carry on self-sustaining activities is of a non-social character, depending only on the laws of life, [2] and if the matter were pushed home, would have to be identified, one must suppose, with the more strictly animal element of the mind; while only the negative element arises from social aggregation, and it is this negative element alone which gives ethical character to the right to live. Though these distinctions apply primarily to the ground of the right to live, yet it appears inevitable that they represent the point of view from which the active self or individuality must be regarded on the principle we are pursuing. The ground of the right to live, as here stated, is simply the recognition that life is a good; and if the positive element of this good is non-social and only the negative is of social origin, and this alone is ethical, it seems clearly to follow that the making the most of life—its positive expansion and intensification—is excluded from the ethical aspects of individuality, and, indeed, that individuality has no ethical aspect at all. Here is the ultimate result of accepting as irreducible the distinction between the self and government, or the negative relation of individuality and law. Liberty and self are divorced from the moral end, a tendency which we noted even in Mill. Selves in society are regarded as if they {73} were bees building their cells, and their ethical character becomes comparable to the absence of encroachment by which the workers maintain the hexagonal outline due to their equal impact on each other as they progress evenly from equidistant centres. The self, which has ranked through out these views as the end, to whose liberty all is to be sacrificed, turns out to be the non-ethical element of life.
[1] Man v. State, p. 15. Cf. Seeley, Introd. to Political Science, p. 119: “Perfect liberty is equivalent to total absence of government.” I have attempted to point out the fallacy of this in a way applying to its practical and everyday meaning in my essay on “Liberty and Legislation,” in the volume of essays called The Civilisation of Christendom.
[2] Man v. State, p. 98.
Thus, when Professor Huxley speaks of “self-restraint as the essence of the ethical process,” [1] while “natural liberty” consists in “the free play of self-assertion,” we see how the whole method of approaching social and ethical phenomena is turned upside down unless the paradox of self-government is conquered once for all. The idea that assertion and maximisation of the self and of the individuality first become possible and real in and through society, and that affirmation and not negation is its main characteristic; these fundamental conceptions of genuine social philosophy [2] can only be reached through a destructive criticism of the assumptions which erect that paradox into an insoluble contradiction.
[1] Evolution and Ethics; pp. 27 and 31.
[2] For the Greek, it is society which is natural, positive, and promotive of man’s individuality. See ch. ii. above.
5. We may now restate the essence of the problem of self-government as it presents itself to the thinkers whom we have been reviewing. On the assumptions which they accept, the annihilating criticism of self-government in the first chapter of Mill’s Liberty is indeed irresistible. He begins by pointing out that in times of political immaturity, {74} the conception of political liberty consisted in setting limits to the power which the ruler, considered as an independent force opposed in interest [1] to his subjects, should be suffered to exercise over the community. But as it was found possible, in a greater and greater degree, to make the ruling power emanate from the periodical choice of the ruled,
“some persons began to think that too much importance had been attached to the limitation of the power itself. That, it might seem, was a resource against rulers whose interests were habitually opposed to those of the people. What was now wanted was, that the rulers should be identified with the people; that their interest and will should be the interest and will of the nation. The nation did not need to be protected against its own will. There was no fear of its tyrannising over itself.”
Rousseau in some moods is the victim of this fallacy, and it is widely triumphant to-day.
[1] So early an analysis of government as that made by Plato in the Republic shows indeed that this was never the sole theory, as it is not the truest, of the cohesive forces of any community whatever. But it has a certain validity, proportioned to the degree of political imperfection.
But with the success of the democratic principle,
“elective and responsible government became subject to the observations and criticisms which wait upon a great existing fact. It was now observed that such phrases as ‘self-government’, and ‘the power of the people over themselves’, do not express the true state of the case. The ‘people’ who exercise the power are not always the same people with those over whom it is exercised; and the ’self-government’ spoken of is not the government of each by himself, but of each by all the rest. The {75} will of the people, moreover, practically means the will of the most numerous or the most active part of the people; the majority, or those who succeed in making themselves accepted as the majority … and precautions are as much needed against this as against any other abuse of power. The limitation, therefore, of the power of government loses none of its importance when the holders of power are regularly accountable to the community, that is, to the strongest party therein. … In political speculations, the ‘tyranny of the majority’ is now generally included among the evils against which society requires to be on its guard.”
The paradox of self-government then, so far from being theoretically solved by the development of political institutions to their highest known maturity, is simply intensified by this development. When the arbitrary and irrational powers of classes or of individuals have been swept away, we are left face to face, it would seem, with the coercion of some by others as a necessity in the nature of things. And, indeed, however perfectly “self-government” has been substituted for despotism, it is flying in the face of experience to suggest that the average individual self, as he exists in you or me, is ipso facto satisfied, and at home, in all the acts of the public power which is supposed to represent him. If he were so, the paradox of self-government would be resolved by the annihilation of one of its factors. The self would remain, but “government” would be superfluous; or else “government” would be everything, and the self annihilated. If, on the other hand, we understand the “self” in “self-government” to stand for the whole sovereign group or {76} community, which is usually called a “self-governing,” as opposed to a subject, state, then we have before us the task of showing that this self is a reality in any sense which justifies the acceptance of what is done by the public power as an act of the whole community. But on the ground where we stand in the theories reviewed in the present chapter, no such self can be shown. Government, in fact and in principle, reveals itself as coercion exercised by “the others” over “the one.” And so long as this is the case, and as the government is alien to the self, not only do the rights of majorities remain without explanation, but no less is it impossible to say on what rational ground an entire community can apply coercion to a single recalcitrant member. We have seen that Mill would solve the problem by a demarcation, according to which the aim and ground of government is to protect the self from the impact of others, and leave it in its isolated purity. Herbert Spencer, it may be noted, [1] has recourse to one of those hypotheses of tacit consent which would reduce a community to the level of a joint-stock company, [2] minus a written instrument of association; which in the case of the State has to be replaced by Mr. Spencer’s estimate of purposes, which would probably be accepted with unanimity if the question were asked! Bentham alone, founding {77} himself on the actual nature of social life, genially overrides the whole question of individual right, and while maintaining law to be a necessary evil, and pouring scorn on all attempts to exhibit a positive unity throughout the selves which compose a society, makes the promotion of a free and happy life the sole criterion of governmental interference.
[1] Man v. State, p. 83 sq.
[2] It is a remarkable testimony to the inherent vitality of associations of human beings that even a joint-stock company often finds its work and aims so developing on its hands that it has to obtain additional powers from Parliament. It transcends, therefore, the limits of the shareholders original contract, and Herbert Spencer’s loud complaints of this procedure show how little he recognises the nature of social necessity.
On the basis of every-day reflection, then, we are brought to an absolute deadlock in the theory of political obligation. If, as popular instinct maintains, and as common sense seems somehow to insist, there is a theory and a justification of social coercion latent in the term “self-government,” we cannot find a clue to it in the reasoning of our most recent and popular political thinkers. Nor should we find a comprehensive theory, though we might find suggestions towards one, if we recurred to our more philosophical teachers, such as Hobbes and Locke, who are further from popular modes of thought. If there is anything satisfactory in the conception of self-government, every interpretation of it is at once condemned which does not give the fullest force to both terms of the paradox, at the same time that it exhibits their reconciliation. What this fullest force is, and the antagonism which it involves, we have seen in the present chapter. We must start from an actual self, which is capable of rebelling against law and government; and from an actual “government,” which is capable of tyrannising over the individual self. We must not treat the self as ipso facto annihilated by government; nor must we treat government as a pale reflection, pliable to all the vagaries of the actual self. Nor, again, must we divide the inseparable {78} content of life, and endeavour to assign part to the assertion of the individual as belonging to self, and part to his impact on others, as belonging to government. We must take the two factors of the working idea of self-government in their full antagonism, and exhibit, through and because of this, the fundamental unity at their root, and the necessity and conditions of their coherence. We must show, in short, how man, the actual man of flesh and blood, demands to be governed; and how a government, which puts real force upon him, is essential, as he is aware, to his becoming what he has it in him to be. And if we fail to destroy the assumptions which hinder us from doing this, we shall have to admit that the maturity of democratic institutions has only liberated us from arbitrary despotism to subject us to necessary tyranny; and though, in spite of such a failure, we might still acquiesce in “counting heads to save breaking them,” we should have to agree that this may indeed be the shrewdest device of political expediency, but that the difference between the two processes corresponds to no real capacity of the human individual for partaking, by the exercise of will and intelligence, in a peacefully organised and yet effectually governed whole. We shall then, in short, be compelled to agree with Bentham and Mill and Spencer that “self-government” and “the general will” are meaningless phantoms, combinations of hostile factors, incapable of being united in a real experience.
{79}
CHAPTER IV.
THE PROBLEM OF POLITICAL OBLIGATION MORE RADICALLY TREATED.
1. The reader will no doubt have observed that the theory dealt with in the last chapter belongs to the general type of what is currently known as Individualism. For several reasons I have preferred not to make use of this hackneyed word. In the first place, it is very hackneyed; and the employment of such terms takes all life and expressiveness out of philosophy. And, in the next place, Individualism may mean many things, and in its fullest, which is surely, for the student of philosophy, its truest meaning, it is far too good for the theories under discussion. An “Individual” may be “individual” or indivisible because he has so little in him, that you cannot imagine it possible to break him up into lesser parts; or because, however full and great his nature, it is so thoroughly one, so vital and so true to itself, that, like a work of art, the whole of his being cannot be separated into parts without ceasing to be what it essentially is. In the former case the “individual” is an “atom”; in the latter he is “a great individuality.” [1] The sense in which we shall make {80} use of the notion of the individual, so far as we use it at all, will be the latter and not the former. And, therefore, we shall as far as possible discard the hackneyed term “Individualism,” which embodies the former meaning only.
[1] See Nettleship’s Remains, i. 160.
If then we are to coin an expression which will indicate the common features of the theories outlined in the previous chapter, we may venture upon some such phrase as “prima facie theories,” or “theories of the first look.” By this I do not mean that they stand in the same rank with the views of the Greek thinkers, who, undisturbed by previous speculation, saw the great facts of social experience with a freshness and wholeness of vision with which they can never be seen again. The “first look” of our own day is of a different kind. It is the first look of the man in the street or of the traveller, struggling at a railway station, to whom the compact self-containedness and self-direction of the swarming human beings before him seems an obvious fact, while the social logic and spiritual history which lie behind the scene fail to impress themselves on his perceptive imagination.
We see then that these theories of the first appearance are mainly guided by this impression of the natural separateness of the human unit. For this reason, as we noted, the experience of self-government is to them an enigma, with which they have to compromise in various ways. And because their explanations of it are not true explanations but only compromises, they rest on no principle, and dictate no consistent attitude. For Bentham all solid right is actually in the State, {81} though conceived by himself as a means to individual ends; for Mill, it is divided between the State and the individual, by a boundary which cannot be traced and therefore cannot be respected; for Herbert Spencer all right is in the individual, and the State has become little more than a record office of his contracts and consents.
The assumption common to the theories in question is dictated by their very nature. It is not precisely, as is often supposed to be the case, that the individual is the end to which Society is a means. Such a definition fails to assign a character which is distinctive for any social theories whatever. For Society, being, at the lowest rate, a plurality of individuals, whatever we say of the individual may be construed as true of Society and vice versa, so long as all individuals are understood in the same sense as one. Thus the “means” and the “ends” are liable to change places, as, for practical purposes, we saw that they did in Bentham. The ethical term “altruism” illustrates this principle. It shows that by taking “the individual” as the “end,” nothing is determined as to the relation between each individual and all, and it remains a matter of chance how far it is required of “each” individual, in the name of the welfare of “the individual,” to sacrifice himself to “all.”
The fact is that the decisive issue is not whether we call the “individual” or “society” the “end”; but what we take to be the nature at once of individuals and of society. This is the question of principle; and views which are at one in this have nothing which can in principle keep them apart, {82} although they may diverge to the seemingly opposite poles of the liberty of each and the welfare of all. We have observed this sliding from one narrowness to its opposite, as between Bentham, Mill, and Herbert Spencer.
The root idea then, of the views which we have been discussing, is simply that the individual or society—it makes no difference which we take—is what it prima facie appears to be. This is why we have called them “prima facie” theories, or “theories of the first look.” It would be a long story to explain how a first look can be possible in the eighteenth or nineteenth century A.D. But in brief, the history of thought shows certain leaps or breaks in culture; when the human mind seems to open its eyes afresh, or to emerge on a new platform, from which new point of view all its adjustments have to be re-made and its perceptions re-analysed. In these new stages a great advance is involved; but the advance is potential, and the possible insight has to be paid for by an initial blindness.
Such an occasion it was on which the legislator or economist or natural philosopher of the modern world turned his gaze upon man in society. He saw him as “one of millions enjoying the protection of the law,” [1] and society as the millions of which he is one. Such an onlooker inevitably proceeds to treat the social whole as composed of units A, B, C, etc., who, as they stand, and just as they seem to us when we rub against them in daily intercourse, are taken to be the organs and centres of human life. From this assumption all {83} the rest follows. Each of us, A, B, C, and all the others, seems to be, and to a great extent in the routine of life actually is, self-complete, self-satisfied, and self-willed. To each of us, A, B, or C, all the rest are “others.” They are “like” him; they are “repetitions” of him, but they are not himself. He knows that they are something to himself; but this “something” is still “something else,” and even in ethical reflection he is apt to call his recognition of it “altruism”—an indefinite claim and feeling, touching his being at its margin of contact with neighbouring circles, the centres of which are isolated.