CHAPTER I

DEMOCRACY AND

LEADERSHIP

BY

IRVING BABBITT

_Author of “Rousseau and Romanticism,” “The Masters of

Modern French Criticism,” “The New Laokoon,” etc._

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

The Riverside Press Cambridge

COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY IRVING BABBITT

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

SECOND IMPRESSION, JANUARY, 1925

The Riverside Press

CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS

PRINTED IN THE U.S A.

Such legislation [against private property] may have a specious

appearance of benevolence; men readily listen to it, and are

easily induced to believe that in some wonderful manner everybody

will become everybody’s friend, especially when some one is heard

denouncing the evils now existing in states, ... which are said

to arise out of the possession of private property. These evils,

however, are due to a very different cause--the wickedness of human

nature.

Aristotle: _Politics_, 1263b, 11.

Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and

appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within,

the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal

constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be

free.

Burke: _Letter to a member of the National Assembly_.

The fundamental article of my political creed is that despotism or

unlimited sovereignty or absolute power is the same in a majority

of a popular assembly, an aristocratical council, an oligarchical

junto, and a single emperor--equally arbitrary, cruel, bloody and

in every respect diabolical.

John Adams: _Letter to Thomas Jefferson_ (13 November, 1815)

Den einzelnen Verkehrtheiten des Tags sollte man immer nur grosse

weltgeschichtliche Massen entgegensetzen.

Goethe: _Sprüche_.

PREFATORY NOTE

Parts of this book were used in a series of four lectures that I gave

at Kenyon College on the Larwill Foundation in March, 1920. I called

the series “Democracy and Imperialism.” In April, 1922, I gave four

lectures at the Leland Stanford University on the West Foundation. This

series, which I entitled “The Ethical Basis of Democracy,” contained

some of the same material as the Kenyon series, altered, however,

in form and with considerable additions. Finally, I drew on certain

chapters of the volume for a course of public lectures delivered at

the Sorbonne (March-May, 1923) under the title “Les Ecrits politiques

de J.-J. Rousseau.” I desire to thank the authorities of these

institutions for various courtesies extended to me in connection with

the giving of the lectures.

I. B.

Cambridge, Massachusetts _February, 1924_

CONTENTS

Introduction 1

I. The Types of Political Thinking 27

II. Rousseau and the Idyllic Imagination 70

III. Burke and the Moral Imagination 97

IV. Democracy and Imperialism 117

V. Europe and Asia 158

VI. True and False Liberals 186

VII. Democracy and Standards 239

Appendix A: Theories of the Will 319

Appendix B: Absolute Sovereignty 331

Bibliography 337

Index 345

INTRODUCTION

According to Mr. Lloyd George, the future will be even more exclusively

taken up than is the present with the economic problem, especially

with the relations between capital and labor. In that case, one is

tempted to reply, the future will be very superficial. When studied

with any degree of thoroughness, the economic problem will be found

to run into the political problem, the political problem in turn into

the philosophical problem, and the philosophical problem itself to be

almost indissolubly bound up at last with the religious problem. This

book is only one of a series in which I have been trying to bring out

these deeper implications of the modern movement. Though devoted to

different topics, the volumes of the series are yet bound together by

their common preoccupation with the naturalistic trend, which goes

back in some of its main aspects at least as far as the Renaissance,

but which won its decisive triumphs over tradition in the eighteenth

century. Among the men of the eighteenth century who prepared the way

for the world in which we are now living I have, here as elsewhere

in my writing, given a preëminent place to Rousseau. It is hard for

any one who has investigated the facts to deny him this preëminence,

even though one should not go so far as to say with Lord Acton that

“Rousseau produced more effect with his pen than Aristotle, or Cicero,

or Saint Augustine, or Saint Thomas Aquinas, or any other man who ever

lived.”[1] The great distinction of Rousseau in the history of thought,

if my own analysis be correct, is that he gave the wrong answers to

the right questions. It is no small distinction even to have asked the

right questions.

Rousseau has at all events suggested to me the terms in which I have

treated my present topic. He is easily first among the theorists of

radical democracy. He is also the most eminent of those who have

attacked civilization. Moreover, he has brought his advocacy of

democracy and his attack on civilization into a definite relationship

with one another. Herein he seems to go deeper than those who relate

democracy, not to the question of civilization versus barbarism,

but to the question of progress versus reaction. For why should men

progress unless it can be shown that they are progressing towards

civilization; or of what avail, again, is progress if barbarism is, as

Rousseau affirms, more felicitous? If we thought clearly enough, we

should probably dismiss as somewhat old-fashioned, as a mere survivor

of the nineteenth century, the man who puts his primary emphasis on

the contrast between the progressive and the reactionary, and turn our

attention to the more essential contrast between the civilized man and

the barbarian. The man of the nineteenth century was indeed wont to

take for granted that the type of progress he sought to promote was

a progress towards civilization. Some persons began to have doubts

on this point even before the War, others had their doubts awakened

by the War itself, and still others have been made doubtful by the

peace. An age that thought it was progressing towards a “far-off divine

event,” and turned out instead to be progressing towards Armageddon,

suffered, one cannot help surmising, from some fundamental confusion

in its notions of progress. One may be aided in detecting the nature

of this confusion by the Emersonian distinction of which I have made

considerable use in my previous writing--the distinction, namely,

between a “law for man” and a “law for thing.” The special praise that

Confucius bestowed on his favorite disciple was that he was “always

progressing and never came to a standstill.” What Confucius plainly

had in mind was progress according to the human law. What the man of

the nineteenth century meant as a rule by the term was no less plainly

material progress. He seems to have assumed, so far as he gave the

subject any thought at all, that moral progress would issue almost

automatically from material progress. In view of the duality of human

experience, the whole question is, however, vastly more complex than

the ordinary progressive has ever suspected. Progress according to the

natural law must, if it is to make for civilization, be subordinated to

some adequate end; and the natural law does not in itself supply this

end. As a result of the neglect of this truth, we have the type of man

who deems himself progressive and is yet pursuing power and speed for

their own sake, the man who does not care where he is going, as some

one has put it, provided only he can go there faster and faster.

If progress and civilization do not mean more than this, one might

be justified in sharing Rousseau’s predilection for barbarism. The

reason he gives for preferring the barbaric to the civilized state is

in itself extremely weighty: the barbaric state is, he maintains, the

more fraternal. The fraternal spirit is the fine flower, not merely

of genuine philosophy, but of genuine religion. One should be ready

to make almost any sacrifice in order to attain it. My endeavor has,

however, been to show that Rousseau’s fraternity is only a sentimental

dream. The psychic impossibility involved in this dream is obvious, one

may even say, glaring. For example, Walt Whitman, one of the chief of

Rousseau’s American followers, preaches universal brotherhood among men

each one of whom is, like himself, to “permit to speak at every hazard,

Nature without check with original energy”;[2] in other words, Whitman

proposes to base brotherhood, a religious virtue, on expansive appetite.

I have tried here and elsewhere to show that democratic fraternity, as

a Rousseau and a Whitman conceive it, and progress, as the utilitarian

conceives it, are, however much they may clash at certain points,

nevertheless only different aspects of the same naturalistic movement.

This movement may be defined in its totality as humanitarianism. I

ventured the assertion several years ago that something is omitted in

this movement, and that the something may turn out to be the keystone

of the arch.[2] The error that results from this central omission

assumes many forms. I choose almost at random a very crude form--the

form in which it is finally reaching the man in the street. A writer in

a widely circulated magazine, “Photoplay,” devotes several editorial

paragraphs to denouncing the people who say “don’t”; they are, he

complains, mere destroyers, the enemies of every generous creative

impulse. Only in so far as one gets rid of the don’ts does one fulfil

the saying of the Teacher, “I am come that ye shall have life, and

that ye shall have it more abundantly.” Mr. Henry Ford would no doubt

dismiss such utterances as part of the great Jewish plot to destroy

Gentile civilization. It was not, however, a Jew, but Madame de Staël

who declared that everything expansive in human nature is divine. This

notion of a divine expansiveness has a long history in the Occident

anterior to Madame de Staël, a history that in some of its phases goes

at least as far back as the Neoplatonists.

In any case the assertion that one attains to more abundant life (in

the religious sense) by getting rid of the don’ts sums up clearly,

even though in an extreme form, the side of the modern movement with

which I am taking issue. This book in particular is devoted to the

most unpopular of all tasks--a defence of the veto power. Not the

least singular feature of the singular epoch in which we are living

is that the very persons who are least willing to hear about the

veto power are likewise the persons who are most certain that they

stand for the virtues that depend upon its exercise--for example,

peace and brotherhood. As against the expansionists of every kind,

I do not hesitate to affirm that what is specifically human in man

and ultimately divine is a certain quality of will, a will that is

felt in its relation to his ordinary self as a will to refrain. The

affirmation of this quality of will is nothing new: it is implied in

the Pauline opposition between a law of the spirit and a law of the

members. In general, the primacy accorded to will over intellect is

Oriental. The idea of humility, the idea that man needs to defer to a

higher will, came into Europe with an Oriental religion, Christianity.

This idea has been losing ground in almost exact ratio to the decline

of Christianity. Inasmuch as the recognition of the supremacy of will

seems to me imperative in any wise view of life, I side in important

respects with the Christian against those who have in the Occident,

whether in ancient or modern times, inclined to give the first place

either to the intellect or the emotions. I differ from the Christian,

however, in that my interest in the higher will and the power of veto

it exercises over man’s expansive desires is humanistic rather than

religious. I am concerned, in other words, less with the meditation

in which true religion always culminates, than in the mediation or

observance of the law of measure that should govern man in his secular

relations. Moreover, I am for coming at my humanism in a positive and

critical rather than in a merely traditional manner. To this extent I

am with the naturalists, who have from the start been rejecting outer

authority in favor of the immediate and experimental. One should have

only respect for the man of science in so far as he deals in this

critical fashion with the natural law--and no small part of human

nature itself comes under the natural law. The error begins when an

attempt is made to extend this law to cover the whole of human nature.

This is to deny not merely outer authority, but something that is a

matter of immediate experience, the opposition, namely, of which the

individual is conscious in himself, between a law of the spirit and

a law of the members. Deny or dissimulate this opposition and the

inner life tends in the same measure to disappear. Carlyle’s contrast

between the Rousseauism of the French Revolution and true Christianity

is also the contrast between humanitarianism in general, in either its

sentimental or its utilitarian form, and any doctrine that affirms

the higher will. “Alas, no, M. Roux!” Carlyle exclaims. “A Gospel

of Brotherhood not according to any of the four old Evangelists and

calling on men to repent, and amend _each his own_ wicked existence,

that they might be saved; but a Gospel rather, as we often hint,

according to a new fifth Evangelist Jean-Jacques, calling on men to

amend _each the whole world’s_ wicked existence and be saved by making

the Constitution. A thing different and distant _toto cœlo_.”

My own objection to this substitution of social reform for self-reform

is that it involves the turning away from the more immediate to

the less immediate. In general I have sought in my attack on the

utilitarian-sentimental movement to avoid metaphysical and theological

assumptions, and to rely on psychological analysis supported by an

immense and growing body of evidence. My humanism is in this sense

not only positive and critical, but, what will be found to come to the

same thing, individualistic. Under existing conditions, the significant

struggle seems to me to be not that between the unsound individualist

and the traditionalist, nor again, as is currently assumed, that

between the unsound individualist and the altruist, but that between

the sound and the unsound individualist. To be a sound individualist,

one needs, as I take it, to retain one’s hold on the truths of the

inner life, even though breaking more or less completely with the past.

It may help to a fuller understanding of my present attempt to deal

in a fashion at once critical and humanistic with the problem of the

will in its bearing on the political problem if I say a few words

at this point about certain previous stages in my argument. In the

opening chapters of “Literature and the American College” I seek to

discriminate between the humanist and the humanitarians of either the

utilitarian or the sentimental brand. These two sides of the movement

I sometimes term the Baconian and the Rousseauistic after the names of

the men who seem to me to have prefigured them most completely in their

writings and personalities. The humanitarian is not, I pointed out,

primarily concerned, like the humanist, with the individual and his

inner life, but with the welfare and progress of mankind in the lump.

His favorite word is “service.” The current tendency to regard humanism

simply as an abbreviated and more convenient form for humanitarianism

can only be the source of the most vicious confusions.

In “The Masters of Modern French Criticism” I attempt to carry a stage

farther my defence of a critical humanism. Though the basis of the

inner life is the opposition between a lower and a higher will, the

higher will cannot, after all, act at random. It must have standards.

Formerly the standards were supplied by tradition. The man who accepted

Christian tradition, for example, was in no doubt as to the kind and

degree of discipline he needed to impose on his lower nature. He thus

achieved some measure of moral unity with himself and also with other

men who accepted the same discipline. If the individualist, on the

other hand, is to have standards, he must rely on the critical spirit

in direct ratio to the completeness of his break with the traditional

unifications of life. He is confronted at the outset with the most

difficult of philosophical problems--that of the One and the Many. For

it is obvious that standards cannot exist unless there is an element

of oneness somewhere with which to measure the infinite otherwiseness

of things. The special theme of “The Masters” is the problem of the

One and the Many and the failure of Sainte-Beuve and other eminent

French individualists to deal with it adequately and so to achieve

standards in a modern fashion. The results of the critical endeavor

of the past century may be summed up most completely, perhaps, in the

word relativity. The failure of criticism to attain to any centre of

judgment set above the shifting impressions of the individual and the

flux of phenomenal nature is a defeat for civilization itself, if it be

true, as I have tried to show, that civilization must ultimately depend

on the maintenance of standards. In “The New Laokoon” I have sought to

exhibit the anarchy that has supervened in literature and the arts with

the progressive decline of standards. Superficially, this anarchy seems

above all an anarchy of the emotions. On closer scrutiny, however,

emotional anarchy itself turns out to be only a sign of something

subtler and more dangerous--anarchy of the imagination. In “Rousseau

and Romanticism,” a book that is closely connected in argument with

“The New Laokoon,” the problem of the imagination receives special

treatment. I come here to another distinctive feature of the type of

humanism I am defending. I not only have more to say of will and less

of reason than the humanist in the Græco-Roman tradition, but I also

grant a most important rôle to imagination. If one does not, like

Diderot, dismiss as “artificial” the conflict between a natural or

expansive will and a specifically human will or will to refrain, if,

on the contrary, one insists on this conflict as a primordial fact of

consciousness, one will be led, I believe, to the further conclusion

that the outcome of this “civil war in the cave” will be determined by

the attitude of the imagination; that the imagination, in other words,

holds the balance of power between the higher and the lower nature of

man. In the light of history (one need not go any farther back than

the Great War) man’s pretence to be governed by reason in any ordinary

sense of the word seems a bad jest. The critical observer is forced

to agree with Napoleon that, not reason, but “imagination governs

mankind.” It does not follow that mankind need be governed, as it has

been very largely during the past century, by the Napoleonic quality of

imagination.

The complaint has been made that the word imagination has been used

in so many senses that it has ceased to have any meaning. My own

understanding of the term may perhaps be made clearer by a brief

historical survey. The Latin word (_imaginatio_) from which our word

is derived is itself a rendering of the Greek phantasy or fancy

(φαντασία). Fancy means literally “what appears”; in other words,

either the various impressions of sense, or else a faculty that stores

up these impressions and is therefore closely related to memory.

Greek philosophy gave a rather low rating to “fancy” or appearance

in comparison with reality, which it inclined to identify with

reason or mind. To the Stoic in particular it seemed both feasible

and imperative that reason should hold sway over all the impressions

that beat upon the gateway of the senses and make a severe selection

among them. “How easy a thing it is,” says Marcus Aurelius, “to put

away and blot out every ‘fancy’ [i.e., impression] that is disturbing

or alien, and to be at once in perfect peace.” The disparagement of

fancy in this sense is already found in Plato. He hopes to attain a

truth that is “firm and not pulled around this way and that by our

‘fancy.’”[3] A chief source of Christian humility, on the other hand,

was the conviction that man is unable by his own resources to achieve

any such truth, the conviction, above all, that mere reason cannot

prevail over the deceits of the senses. Pascal, for example, gives

to the word imagination about the same meaning that the Stoic gave

either to it or its Greek equivalent, and like the Stoic he disparages

imagination; only to this disparagement he adds the disparagement of

reason. What he opposes to an imagination that is only a “mistress of

error” and to a reason that is impotent to resist this error is the

“heart,” by which he means the illumination of the higher will in the

form of grace. This inner revelation has itself the support of outer

revelation. Here, he holds, one may find at last a firm footing of

truth and reality. He does not admit that imagination has any part

either in outer revelation or in the life of the “heart.” He has this

much at least in common with Plato that he believes it possible to

draw a firm and fast line between imagination (or mere appearance)

and reality. Strict psychology, however, scarcely warrants any such

sharp discrimination between the true and the illusory. It forces one

rather to conclude with Joubert that “illusion is an integral part of

reality.” This conclusion, however damaging it may be to mere dogma,

does not force one to forego standards. But in that case one needs to

attend to another possible meaning of the word imagination, the second

main meaning, one is tempted to say, that the word has actually had

in Occidental thought. The word in this other meaning stands less for

what one perceives, either inwardly or outwardly, than for what one

conceives. Conceit, it should be remembered, was in older English usage

not only a complimentary term, but one of the synonyms of imagination.

The process by which the term has come to have its present unfavorable

meaning of vain imagining has its adequate historical explanation

into which I need not here enter. Now to “conceive” is, in an almost

etymological sense, to gather things together, to see likenesses and

analogies and in so far to unify what were else mere heterogeneity. The

imagination, says Coleridge somewhat pedantically, is the “esemplastic”

power--the power, that is, that fashions things into one. The passages

in which Coleridge expounds this view of the imagination afford,

perhaps, the best example in English of what I have called the second

main meaning of the word. For an instance of the other main meaning we

may turn to Addison’s papers on the imagination in the “Spectator.”

Addison not only tends to reduce imagination to outer perception, but,

encouraged by the Latin rendering of the Greek “fancy,” to narrow outer

perception itself to visual perception.

If we mean by imagination not merely what we perceive, but what we

conceive, it follows inevitably that the problem of the imagination

is closely bound up with that of the One and the Many and therefore

with the problem of standards; for it is impossible, let me repeat,

to achieve standards, at least along critical lines, unless one can

discover in life somewhere an abiding unity with which to measure its

mere variety and change. Because “illusion is an integral part of

reality,” we are not justified in assuming that every unity that the

imagination may conceive must therefore be dismissed as illusory. A

somewhat paradoxical person might indeed affirm that, even though

one did not raise directly the question of reality at all, it would

still be possible to have standards; that one might measure men

accurately enough for most practical purposes simply by the quality

of their illusions--and their disillusions. However, in spite of the

fact that absolute unity and reality must ever elude us and that the

absolute in general must be dismissed as a metaphysical dream, we may

still determine on experimental grounds to what degree any particular

view of life is sanctioned or repudiated by the nature of things and

rate it accordingly as more or less real. God, according to Synesius,

communicates with man through the imagination. Unfortunately the

devil communicates with him in the same way and the test of these

communications is not, strictly speaking, in the imagination itself.

To determine the quality of our imaginings, we need to supplement the

power in man that perceives and the power that conceives with a third

power--that which discriminates. All divisions of man into powers

or faculties are, I am aware, more or less arbitrary, but, though

arbitrary, they are inevitable, if only as instruments of thought; and

the threefold division I am here employing will, I believe, be found

practically one of the most helpful.

In emphasizing the importance of the power in man that discriminates,

I mean this power, working not abstractly, but on the actual material

of experience. I may perhaps best sum up my whole point of view by

saying that the only thing that finally counts in this world is a

concentration, at once imaginative and discriminating, on the facts.

Now the facts that one may perceive and on which one may concentrate

are not only infinite in number, but of entirely different orders.

This is one reason why material progress, so far from assuring moral

progress, is, on the contrary, extremely difficult to combine with it.

This progress has been won by an almost tyrannical concentration on the

facts of the natural law. Man’s capacity for concentration is limited,

so that the price he has paid for material progress has been an

increasing inattention to facts of an entirely different order--those,

namely, of the human law. The resulting spiritual blindness has been an

invitation to Nemesis. One may have some inkling of the nature of this

Nemesis from the Great War and other similar symptoms that have been

multiplying of late in our Western societies.

It goes without saying that the partisans of “progress” have not

admitted their spiritual blindness. They have accepted as valid

substitutes for the traditional standards and the moral unity that

these standards tended to promote certain new unifications of life that

display great imagination, indeed, but an imagination that has not

been sufficiently tested from the point of view of reality. These new

schemes for unifying men flourished especially in connection with the

so-called romantic movement. It is therefore no small matter that the

leaders of this movement can be shown to have erected deliberately a

cult of the creative imagination on the ruins of discrimination. Any

one who takes seriously the creations of this type of imagination, an

imagination that is not disciplined to either the natural or the human

law, but is, in Young’s phrase, free to wander wild in its own realm

of chimeras, falls into mere conceit or vain imagining. Conceit has

always been the specifically human malady, but never, perhaps, more

so than to-day. The outstanding trait of the men of our period may

seem in retrospect to have been the facility with which they put forth

untried conceits as “ideals.” We have all grown familiar with the type

of person who is in his own conceit a lofty “idealist,” but when put to

the test has turned out to be only a disastrous dreamer.

Though man is governed by imagination, fortunately it does not follow

that he must be governed by conceit. There remains the distinction

between the mere visionary and the man of vision. This distinction

acquires its full importance only when related to the question of

leadership. A main purpose of my present argument is to show that

genuine leaders, good or bad, there will always be, and that democracy

becomes a menace to civilization when it seeks to evade this truth. The

notion in particular that a substitute for leadership may be found in

numerical majorities that are supposed to reflect the “general will” is

only a pernicious conceit. In the long run democracy will be judged,

no less than other forms of government, by the quality of its leaders,

a quality that will depend in turn on the quality of their vision.

Where there is no vision, we are told, the people perish; but where

there is sham vision, they perish even faster. The worst difficulties

of the present time arise, I am sometimes tempted to think, even less

from lack of vision than from sham vision. Otherwise stated, what

is disquieting about the time is not so much its open and avowed

materialism as what it takes to be its spirituality.

Among the visionaries who have usurped the credit that belongs only to

the man of vision, Rousseau seems to me to have been, at least in these

recent ages of the world, the most conspicuous. The Nature to which

he invites us to return is only a conceit. This conceit encourages

one to substitute for the vital control, which is the true voice of

man’s higher self, expansive emotion. Ideally this substitution is to

be marked by a triumph of the fraternal spirit. Actually, as I have

sought to prove, the outcome of yielding to a mere expansive conceit

of the emotions is not fraternity, but a decadent imperialism. I have

made a considerable use of the word imperialism in this work and in

a somewhat broader sense than is familiar to English and American

readers. My justification lies in the fact that one finds behind every

other form of imperialism the imperialism or push for power of the

individual. In this respect, at least, I am in accord with Bergson, who

declares that “imperialism is, as it were, inherent in the vital urge.

It is at the bottom of the soul of individuals as well as of the soul

of peoples.”[4] By his cult of _élan vital_ Bergson is in the direct

line of descent from Rousseau. One must note, however, an important

divergence between master and disciple that is all to the advantage of

the latter. Bergson does not hope to base on _élan vital_ a fraternity

that must be sought rather in the exercise of _frein vital_. On the

contrary, _élan vital_ is, he avows frankly, imperialistic. According

to the new Bergsonian beatitude, not the meek in spirit, but those

who have the most vigorous vital urge are to inherit the earth. It is

hard to overlook the affinity between this world-famed philosophy, as

interpreted by its author, and the vulgar admiration for “punch.”

My application of the epithet decadent to the type of imperialism that

has been promoted by the glorification of instinct from Rousseau to

Bergson calls for a word of comment. That there are various types of

imperialism, even if we use the word, not in the psychological, but

in the more familiar political sense, appears evident. For example,

the imperialism that made the Romans masters of the world is not of

the same kind as that which prevailed when they cringed beneath a

Tiberius or a Nero. Yet it is possible to trace the process by which

the older imperialism finally took on a decadent cast. The critical

moment for Rome was the moment of triumph when the leaders of the State

no longer felt the restraining influence of dangerous rivals like

Carthage. At the same time they were beginning to grow individualistic

in the sense that they were beginning to throw off the traditional

controls. As a result of all this emancipation, “men’s desires,” in

Montesquieu’s phrase, “became immense.” It has been usual to regard

as the most significant symptom of this inordinateness the growth of

luxury. “Luxury,” says Juvenal, “more cruel than the foeman’s arms,

fell upon us, and is avenging the conquered world.” A still graver

symptom, however, was the appearance of leaders who were ever more and

more ruthless in the pursuit either of their personal advantage or

that of some class or faction. The new spirit that was undermining the

Roman constitution manifested itself even less, as Cicero notes, in

acts of injustice and cruelty to the vanquished peoples than in the

rage of civil strife. It can scarcely be maintained of the Romans who

thus precipitated the decadence that they exercised to any serious

degree their _frein vital_, or will to refrain. The right opponents of

these anarchical individualists, one may venture to affirm, were not

the mere traditionalists, but the individualists who had qualified for

true leadership by setting bounds to their expansive lusts, especially

the lust of domination. Rome declined because she failed to produce

individualists of this type in sufficient numbers. Certain analogies

may be discovered between this Roman dilemma and the dilemma with which

we are now confronted in America. We, too, seem to be reaching the

acme of our power and are at the same time discarding the standards of

the past. This emancipation has been accompanied by an extraordinary

increase in luxury and self-indulgence. Persons who postpone everything

else to their “comfort” and to commercial prosperity are probably more

numerous in America to-day than they were in ancient Rome. Disturbing

as this symptom may be, it is less so than the increasing rôle played

in our national life by “blocs” with highly unethical leaders--leaders

who seek to advance the material interests of some special group at the

expense of the whole community. The actual gravity of this symptom may

perhaps be exaggerated; if it should prove, however, to be something

more than a passing phase, it portends the end of our constitutional

liberties and the rise of a decadent imperialism. The more one

ponders either the modern American or the ancient Roman situation,

the more surely will one be led from imperialism in the political, to

imperialism in the psychological sense. In other words, one will be

forced, if one wishes to get at the root of the matter, to turn from

the merely peripheral manifestations of the push for power to the inner

life of the individual.

My views as to the relation between the Rousseauistic movement and

imperialism may perhaps be still further elucidated by a comparison

with the views on the same subject of two recent European writers, the

German, Oswald Spengler, and the Frenchman, Ernest Seillière. Spengler

has developed in his chief work, “The Downfall of the Occident,” the

thesis that the Western world, especially Western European “culture,”

is now engaged in a sort of rake’s progress that starts with Rousseau

and his return to nature. The goal of this decadence, as Spengler

describes it, is not unlike what I have termed a decadent imperialism.

Moreover, we are not only on a descending curve, but it is a fatal

curve. He has actually appended to the first volume of his book a

table exhibiting the degree of degeneracy that the Occident will have

attained about the year 2000. The whole conception not only implies

a philosophy of history, but a philosophy of history that has, in my

judgment, gone mad. This conception is based in any case on an utter

denial of the quality of will in man on which I myself put supreme

emphasis. In spite therefore of certain superficial resemblances in

our respective views, Spengler and I are at the opposite poles of

human thought. My own attitude is one of extreme unfriendliness to

every possible philosophy of history (in the more technical sense of

the term), whether it be the older type found in a Saint Augustine or

a Bossuet, which tends to make of man the puppet of God, or the newer

type which tends in all its varieties to make of man the puppet of

nature. “The Downfall of the Occident” seems to me a fairly complete

repertory of the naturalistic fallacies of the nineteenth century;

it is steeped throughout in the special brand of fatalism in which

these fallacies culminate, and as a result of which the Occident is

actually threatened with “downfall.” One is justified in my opinion

in dismissing Spengler as a charlatan, even though one be forced to

add that he is a charlatan of genius. The immense sale of his books

in Germany, if it is indicative of a real influence, is a depressing

symptom.

The second writer I have mentioned, M. Seillière, merits a very

different judgment. In about a score of volumes he has been tracing

with great psychological finesse the influence of Rousseau on the

literature and life of the past century. This influence he associates

with what he calls an irrational imperialism. In short, the results

of his survey are on the negative side very similar to my own. On

the positive or constructive side, on the other hand, M. Seillière

and I diverge sharply. What he opposes to an irrational imperialism

is a rational imperialism; by which he means “the social army on the

march towards the conquest of power by the coördination of individual

efforts.”[5] In his general position, as revealed in such utterances,

he seems to me to strike back through the utilitarians to Hobbes

and ultimately, in some respects, to Machiavelli. The essential

contrast for me is not, as for M. Seillière, that between a rational

and an irrational imperialism, but between imperialism and that

quality of will in man which is, in every possible sense of the word,

anti-imperialistic. M. Seillière, again, seems as much bent on running

together Stoical and Christian ethics as I am on separating them and

insisting on their final incompatibility. Stoicism in both its ancient

and modern forms I regard, at least in its total trend, as false and

impossible; whereas I hold that at the heart of genuine Christianity

are certain truths which have already once saved Western civilization

and, judiciously employed, may save it again.

I wish also to say a few words at the outset regarding certain

possible misapprehensions of my method. The most serious of these

misapprehensions may arise if one looks either in this volume or in

the previous volumes of the series (with the partial exception of

“The Masters of Modern French Criticism”) for rounded estimates of

individuals. I have not attempted such estimates. Still less have I

attempted rounded estimates of historical epochs--for example, of

the nineteenth century. It is even less sensible, perhaps, to indict

a whole century than it is, according to Burke, to indict a whole

people. I am attacking, not the nineteenth century in general, but the

naturalistic nineteenth century and its prolongation into the twentieth

century, along with the tendencies in the previous centuries, from the

Renaissance down, that prepared the way for naturalism. My treatment

of this whole naturalistic trend has seemed, even to critics who are

not altogether unfriendly, to be negative, extreme, and one-sided.

I hope I may be pardoned if I reply briefly to each of these three

charges.

As to the charge that my treatment of naturalism is one-sided, there is

a sense, it must be admitted, in which it is not only one-sided, but

one-sided to the last degree. There is, however, a humanistic intention

even in the one-sidedness. I dwell persistently on the aspect of human

nature that the naturalists have no less persistently neglected in

the hope that the way may thus be opened for a more balanced view.

Moreover, what the naturalists have neglected is not something that is

on the fringe or outer rim of human experience, but something, on the

contrary, that is very central. The naturalistic effort during the past

century or more has resulted in an immense and bewildering peripheral

enrichment of life--in short, in what we are still glorifying under

the name of progress. I have no quarrel with this type of progress

in itself, I merely maintain that no amount of peripheral enrichment

of life can atone for any lack at the centre. Furthermore, though I

assail the naturalists for what seems to me a vital oversight, I have,

let me repeat, at least one trait in common with them--I desire to be

experimental. I seek to follow out the actual consequences of this

oversight, to deal with it, not abstractly, but in its fruits. If

certain readers have persisted in seeing in my books something that

I myself have not sought to put there, namely, rounded estimates of

individuals and historic epochs, the misapprehension has no doubt

arisen from the very abundance of my concrete illustrations.

As to the charge that I am negative, I have already said that the

element in man that has been overlooked by naturalistic psychology

is felt in relation to his ordinary self negatively. If instead

of taking the point of view of one’s ordinary self, one heeds the

admonitions of the inner monitor, the result is two of the most

positive of all things: character and happiness. This is the great

paradox of life itself. For being negative in this sense I am not in

the least apologetic. There is, however, another sense in which I may

seem negative and about this I feel somewhat differently. The type of

criticism that prevailed about the beginning of the nineteenth century

proposed to substitute the “fruitful criticism of beauties for the

barren criticism of faults.” I may be accused of reversing too sharply

this maxim even by some who admit that the proper remedy for the lax

appreciativeness of the modern movement is a criticism that displays

a tonic astringency. I am constantly calling attention to the defects

of certain eminent personalities, it may be urged, and at the same

time have little or nothing to say of their virtues. My method is even

in this respect, I believe, legitimate, provided that it be properly

understood, though I myself cannot help regretting that it should make

me appear so constantly unamiable.

The charge that I am extreme touches me even more nearly than the

charge that I am negative and one-sided; for I aim to be a humanist

and the essence of humanism is moderation. There is, however, much

confusion on the subject of moderation. A man’s moderation is measured

by his success in mediating between some sound general principle and

the infinitely various and shifting circumstances of actual life. The

man who is thus rightly mediatory attains to one of the most precious

of virtues--urbanity; though one must add that probably no virtue

has been more frequently counterfeited. When an intellectually and

spiritually indolent person has to choose between two conflicting

views he often decides to “split the difference” between them; but he

may be splitting the difference between truth and error, or between

two errors. In any case, he must dispose of the question of truth or

error before he can properly begin to mediate at all. Otherwise he will

run the risk of resembling the English statesman of whom it was said

that he never deviated from the straight and narrow path between right

and wrong. Some of the casuists whom Pascal attacked had managed to

assume a moderate attitude towards murder! One may fancy oneself urbane

when in reality one is in danger of being numbered with the immense

multitude that Dante saw in the vestibule of Hell--the multitude

of those who are equally “displeasing to God and to the enemies of

God.” To be sure, it is not always easy in any particular instance to

distinguish between the humanist and the mere Laodicean. Thus Luther

denounced Erasmus as a Laodicean, whereas to us he seems rather to have

shown real poise and urbanity in his dealings with the religious and

other extremists of his time.

At all events the differences of doctrine I debate in the following

pages are of a primary nature and so not subject to mediation. Between

the man who puts his main emphasis on the inner life of the individual

and the man who puts this emphasis on something else--for example,

the progress and service of humanity--the opposition is one of first

principles. The question I raise, therefore, is not whether one should

be a moderate humanitarian, but whether one should be a humanitarian

at all. In general I commit myself to the position that we are living

in a world that in certain important respects has gone wrong on first

principles; which will be found to be only another way of saying that

we are living in a world that has been betrayed by its leaders. On the

appearance of leaders who have recovered in some form the truths of

the inner life and repudiated the errors of naturalism may depend the

very survival of Western civilization. The truths of the inner life

may be proclaimed in various forms, religious and humanistic, and have

actually been so proclaimed in the past and justified in each case by

their fruits in life and conduct. It is because I am unable to discover

these truths in any form in the philosophies now fashionable that I

have been led to prefer to the wisdom of the age the wisdom of the ages.

CHAPTER I

THE TYPES OF POLITICAL THINKING

According to Aristotle, a government, if it is to endure, must

reflect the _ethos_ or body of moral habits and beliefs of the

governed. There is no abstract and ideal political form, as the French

Jacobins inclined to believe, that may be imposed to advantage on

all communities. If we attempt to apply the Aristotelian principle

of the necessary relation between the government of any particular

community and its ethos to the governments that have actually existed

in the past, our first impression is of an endless diversity in

political forms as in everything else. But if we penetrate beneath this

bewildering surface variety, we shall discover, as I have tried to show

elsewhere, that human experience falls, after all, into a few fairly

distinct categories. The view of life that prevails at any particular

time or among any particular people will be found, on close inspection,

to be either predominantly naturalistic, or humanistic, or religious;

and it will also be found that political forms tend to vary accordingly.

If, for example, a people is deeply religious, a government with a

more or less strongly marked theocratic element is probable. Fustel de

Coulanges has shown how closely allied the government of the ancient

city-state was at the outset with traditional religious forms, and then

how government tended to change when the hierarchy that traditional

religion had established, first of all in the family and then in the

State, was gradually undermined by individualistic and equalitarian

tendencies. The yielding of religious control to an anarchical

naturalism led in the political order to the triumph of naked force

and to the decline of ancient civilization. As Christianity prevailed

over this effete paganism, a new religious ethos gradually took shape

and, corresponding to it, arose a theocratic conception of government

that was to prevail throughout the mediæval period. During that period

Europe enjoyed, in theory and to no small extent in practice, a genuine

religious communion. The Church had succeeded in creating symbols that

in a very literal sense held sway over men’s imagination and united

them from the top to the bottom of society in the same spiritual hopes

and fears. Every one might, as Villon relates of his aged mother,

enter the great cathedral and see depicted on one hand the torments

of the damned and on the other the bliss of paradise, and, like her,

he would normally be filled by the former images with fear and by the

latter with joy and gladness. As a result of this imaginative control

exercised over all classes the Church did not need the support of

physical force: purely spiritual penalties, especially excommunication,

sufficed. Henry IV at Canossa is usually taken to typify the extreme

triumph of the theocratic idea.

The Church is no negligible factor even to-day. When Cardinal Mercier

visited America, it was reported in the press that engineers and

firemen knelt on the platform of the Pennsylvania Railway Station in

New York to receive his blessing. Here is at least some survival of

the older loyalty, a loyalty utterly different in essence that of

these same men to their unions. Still, if one compare the power of the

Church to-day with its power in the Middle Ages, one becomes aware of

a change in the ethos, not of this or that country merely, but of the

whole of the Occident. The older religious control has been giving

way for several centuries past to individualistic and centrifugal

tendencies, and the danger is now manifest that in the absence of any

new integrating element, what may triumph in our modern world, as it

finally triumphed in the ancient world, is the principle of naked force.

The theocratic conception of government always implies a divine grace

or sanction somewhere; but as to the channel through which this grace

is received important differences of opinion are possible. In the

Middle Ages, for example, some held that the only channel of grace

was the Church and so tended to subordinate the Emperor, the head

of the temporal order, to God’s vicar upon earth, the Pope. Others

maintained that the Emperor derived his sanction, not through the

Pope, but immediately from on high. This latter form of the theocratic

conception is best set forth, perhaps, in Dante’s “De Monarchia.” Dante

desires coöperation and ultimate unity of the two powers, secular and

spiritual, but without confusion.

Dante and other political theorists of the Middle Ages who accepted

the theocratic idea, but wished at the same time to keep separate the

things of God and the things of Cæsar, showed themselves in so far true

Christians. We need to remember, however, how much in the Christian

tradition itself goes back ultimately, not to Judæa, but to Greece

and Rome. There is no small element of truth in the common assertion

that Saint Augustine is the Christian Plato and Saint Thomas Aquinas

the Christian Aristotle. Yet we need to emphasize at this point certain

important differences between the Platonic and Aristotelian type of

political thinking and the type that prevailed during the mediæval

period. In a certain sense, Aristotle and Plato are in their true

spirit nearer to us than to the men of the Middle Ages. The mediæval

view of life rests on a belief in a supernatural revelation. This in

turn is made the basis of an absolute outer authority; whereas Plato

and Aristotle belong, as I have said, to an age of free critical

inquiry. They are, in short, true “moderns.” For, as I have tried to

show elsewhere, to be critical and individualistic in one’s outlook

on life and to be modern come to very much the same thing. In seeking

to make of Aristotle a prop of outer authority, Saint Thomas and

other men of the Middle Ages were therefore using Aristotle in a

very un-Aristotelian way; and the confusion continued when the men

of the Renaissance, on breaking with tradition in favor of a more

individualistic and experimental attitude, inclined to repudiate

Aristotle as the chief source of the scholastic logomachy. Bacon, for

example, practically never gets behind the scholastic Aristotle to the

real Aristotle.

Plato, then, differs from the mediæval thinkers in dealing critically

with the political problem in the “Republic” and elsewhere. He arrives,

however, at a conception that is on the whole theocratic; so that if

one looks, not to the method, but to the conclusions, one is forced

to agree in part with those who assert that the Middle Ages already

begin in Plato. Add the all-important distinction between the things

of God and the things of Cæsar and the class of Guardians in the

“Republic” would work out into something very similar to a monastic

order. It is hard, again, not to see in the Nocturnal Council and

the House of Reformation of the “Laws” a first adumbration of the

Inquisition. In general Plato’s growing sense of the dependence of

man on God foreshadows Augustine and the reign of grace. Aristotle,

on the other hand, remains the chief example in the past of a thinker

who has treated in a way at once critical and humanistic the problems

of government. Before writing his “Politics,” he had made detailed

studies of the history and constitutions of one hundred and fifty-eight

city-states, and in general rests his conclusions upon a great body of

actual political experience. One may disagree with these conclusions--I

disagree with them in essential particulars--but the method itself for

any one who aspires to be modern would seem to be impeccable. Even when

we differ from Aristotle, we should differ from him on Aristotelian

grounds. We have been enlightened concerning certain problems by an

enormous mass of experience in both the East and the West that he did

not have at his command. We have been enlightened by the Christian

experience above all and the great new principle it brought into

the Occident, namely, the separation of the temporal and spiritual

powers, and all the consequences that flow from this principle either

directly or indirectly, especially the idea of individual liberty that

ultimately rests on this distinction, and of which neither Aristotle

nor Plato has any adequate conception.

We have been enlightened since the time of Aristotle not merely by the

Christian experience; we also have more or less available an enormous

mass of experience unknown until recently to the Occident--that of the

Far East, especially India and China. Here again we find political

institutions that reflect views of life that are predominantly either

naturalistic, humanistic, or religious. Perhaps no country has ever

been more religious than India. India has always been the home of

religion, good, bad, or indifferent; and so one is not surprised to

find the theocratic view of life set forth more uncompromisingly

perhaps than in any other book of the world in the “Laws of Manu.” The

precepts of this work have probably never been applied in their full

rigor, but they have always been of great aid to the Brahmin caste in

maintaining what would seem to us a veritable spiritual tyranny. In

controlling men by an appeal to their religious hopes and fears without

any need of physical compulsion, the Brahmin caste has perhaps been

even more successful, and that down to our own day, than the Church

of mediæval Europe. It has been alleged that the Montagu Act (1919),

designed to give a greater measure of self-government to the Hindus,

would in practice simply play into the hands of the Brahmin theocracy.

Buddhism, another product of ancient India, is interesting from the

point of view of our present topic for two reasons: first, because

Buddha, even more perhaps than Plato or Socrates, worked out a positive

and critical view of life; secondly, because he displayed this

positive and critical spirit in the field of religion. His kingdom,

like that of Jesus, and unlike that of Plato, is not of this world. He

does not seek, like the Plato of the “Republic,” to achieve ideal good

in the secular order and with the aid of political institutions. Buddha

did not set out to reform society directly, but established a religious

order in which caste and other like distinctions did not exist. Later

Buddhism, especially Buddhism of the so-called Great Vehicle, is a vast

and complex movement that departs widely from the positive and critical

spirit of the founder. Lamaism, the very corrupt form of the doctrine

that prevails in Tibet, marks an extreme of theocratic interference

with the secular order. In a country like Burma, where something of the

older and more individualistic form of the faith still survives, the

distinction between spiritual and temporal is fairly well maintained.

In general the rival pretensions of Church and State have led to

less frequent and less serious political clashes in Buddhist than in

Christian lands. It is, indeed, this aspect of Christianity that more

than any other seems to justify Christ’s saying that he brought not

peace, but a sword.

India has never seen an important humanistic movement. The nearest

approach to it, perhaps, is the doctrine of the middle path that Buddha

proclaimed in the religious life itself. It is difficult to imagine

a more complete contrast in this respect than that between India and

China, which in its central tradition, of which Confucius is the chief

exponent, has always been humanistic. The bathing ghats at Benares

suggest something almost as remote from ordinary Chinese psychology

as from our own. Confucius is less concerned with the other world than

with the art of living to the best advantage in this. To live to the

best advantage in this world is, he holds, to live proportionately

and moderately; so that the Confucian tradition of the Far East has

much in common with the Aristotelian tradition of the Occident. In

one important respect, however, Confucius recalls not Aristotle, but

Christ. Though his kingdom is very much of this world, he puts emphasis

not merely on the law of measure, but also on the law of humility. He

was humble both in his “submission to the will of Heaven” and in his

attitude towards the sages of old. He aspired at most to be the channel

through which the moral experience of his race that had accumulated

through long centuries and found living embodiment in these sages

should be conveyed to the present and the future; in his own words, he

was not a creator but a transmitter. A man who looks up to the great

traditional models and imitates them, becomes worthy of imitation in

his turn. He must be thus rightly imitative if he is to be a true

leader. No one has ever insisted more than Confucius on a right example

and the imitation that it inspires as the necessary basis of civilized

society. This insistence would seem justified by the force of his

own example which has moulded, for seventy generations or more, the

ethos of about a fourth of the human race--and that with little or no

appeal to the principle of fear either in this world or the next. The

Confucian influence seems, indeed, to offer more warrant than anything

in our Occidental experience for the belief that man may after all be a

reasonable animal.

In dealing with the political problem, Confucius is inevitably led to

brush aside, as of slight account, everything except the question of

leadership. “The virtue of the leader,” he says, “is like unto wind;

that of the people like unto grass. For it is the nature of grass to

bend when the wind blows upon it.”[6] Now the true leader is the man

of character, and the ultimate root of character is humility. This

Confucian conception has such a central soundness that I shall need

to return to it later. At the same time, Confucianism, like all great

doctrines, has its characteristic weaknesses. The chief of these, we

scarcely need to be reminded, is that the present seems to be held

in a perpetual spiritual mortmain by the past. A purely traditional

humanism is always in danger of falling into a rut of pseudo-classic

formalism. Confucius himself had a deep and genuine perception of what

is specifically human in man which he defines as a principle of inner

control; this principle, however, at least if we accept as ancient

and authentic all that is in the “Li-Ki” or Book of Rites, is from

the start too much associated with outer forms and, at times, with

the rules of etiquette. Some of the prescriptions are not much more

closely related to the decorum which is at the centre of every truly

humanistic doctrine than the information, which has also been piously

handed down to us, that Confucius ate ginger at every meal, and that

he always changed countenance in a thunderstorm. We desire a spirit

that is more free, flexible, and imaginative, such as is found in

Greek humanism at its best. We are also likely to feel something more

modern and, therefore, more congenial to us in the highly untraditional

and individualistic Buddha. Still Confucius, though traditional, is

not dogmatic; he is not even systematic. His extreme reticence about

ultimate things that so irritated his translator, the Christian

dogmatist, Dr. Legge, seems, now that we are coming more and more to

appreciate the psychological method of dealing with certain problems,

a merit rather than a defect. As a result of all that is summed up

in Confucianism, China has, perhaps, in spite of all its corrupt

mandarins and officials of the past and present, planted itself more

consistently than any other country on moral ideas, and this fact is

not unrelated to its long survival. The Greeks have disappeared; for

the Greeks of to-day can be regarded only in a very qualified sense

as the descendants of the Greeks of the age of Pericles: whereas the

descendants of the Chinese of the age of Confucius are still with us to

the number of several hundred millions. Their civilization has numerous

and grave peripheral faults. At the same time, it is likely to have a

secret strength as long as the Chinese refuse to “drop their pilot,” as

long as they hold fast, in other words, in spite of pressure from the

West, to what is best in the Confucian tradition.

I have been considering thus far, in both East and West, various

religious and humanistic views of life, whether on a traditional or a

positive and critical basis, and the corresponding types of political

thinking. It remains to consider the naturalistic view of life and

its political implications. The naturalist no longer looks on man as

subject to a law of his own distinct from that of the material order--a

law, the acceptance of which leads, on the religious level, to the

miracles of otherworldliness that one finds in Christians and Buddhists

at their best, and the acceptance of which, in this world, leads to the

subduing of the ordinary self and its spontaneous impulses to the law

of measure that one finds in Confucianists and Aristotelians. The rise

of the individualistic and critical spirit and the resulting break with

the mediæval and theocratic ideal, from the Renaissance on, might have

assumed a religious or humanistic character; it has actually been in

the main naturalistic. One important outcome of this naturalistic trend

has been the growth of the national spirit. The Protestant religion

itself, if one takes a sufficiently long-range view, appears largely

as an incident in the rise of nationalism. If one wishes, however,

to study, in its purest form, the new nationalistic spirit that was

destined finally to destroy the religious unity of mediæval Europe,

one needs to turn to Machiavelli. He will probably remain the best

type in either East or West of the unflinching political naturalist.

To understand Machiavelli, one needs to study him in his relation to

traditional religion. Christianity, especially in its Pauline and

Augustinian forms, has always tended to oppose a stark supernaturalism

to a stark naturalism; so that when an austere Christian, such as

Pascal, considers man in his fallen estate, man unsupported by divine

grace, he quickly arrives at conclusions regarding the secular order

and its political problems that are, if possible, more Machiavellian

than those of Machiavelli himself. One seems to have no alternative

except to get rid of ethics in getting rid of theology. Moreover,

the Church, as an actual institution, had such a monopoly of the

higher life of man that to seek, like Machiavelli, to give the State

a basis independent of the Church was to run the risk of giving it a

basis independent of morality. Furthermore, Machiavelli was, within

certain limits, an extraordinarily shrewd observer. His views reflect

the failure of Christianity to control men’s actual deeds, either in

his own time or in the mediæval past with which he was familiar. His

intention, as he proclaims it, is “to follow up the real truth of a

matter rather than the imagination of it, ... because how one lives

is so far distant from how one ought to live, that he who neglects

what is done for what ought to be done sooner effects his ruin than

his preservation.”[7] The statesman should, therefore, be sternly

realistic. As a matter of fact, any one who neglects men’s ideals and

fine phrases and attends solely to their actual performance is always

likely to seem a bit Machiavellian. There is, for example, a strong

Machiavellian element in this sense in Thucydides.

The conclusions to which Machiavelli was led by his special type of

realism are familiar. The rules of ordinary morality may hold in the

relations between man and man, but have only a secondary place in

the relations between state and state; what prevails in these latter

relations is the law of cunning and the law of force. The ruler who

wishes to succeed should, therefore, blend harmoniously in himself the

virtues of the lion and the fox.[8] The true essence of any doctrine

is revealed finally in the kind of personality in which it becomes

incarnate. Machiavelli, as is well known, saw the perfect incarnation

of his own conception in Cæsar Borgia. He relates, in one place, the

detestable treachery by which Borgia trapped and then had strangled

several of his political enemies, and then says elsewhere: “When all

the actions of the duke are recalled, I do not know how to blame him,

but rather it appears to me, as I have said, that I ought to offer him

for imitation to all those who, by fortune or the arms of others, are

raised to government.”[9] One should mark especially the meaning that

Machiavelli attaches to the word virtue. He begins an account of the

mediæval tyrant, Castruccio Castricani, in which the main traits that

emerge are ruthlessness and cruelty, by praise of his “virtue.” The

virtue of the Machiavellian political leader plainly has very little

in common with humanistic virtue and nothing at all with religious

virtue. Christian virtue in particular has its foundation in the law of

humility. The man who takes on the yoke of this law enters, at the same

time, into a realm of free conscience; he has ceased to be subject to

any mundane state and has become a member of a heavenly commonwealth or

City of God. This divided allegiance seemed to Machiavelli a source of

weakness and effeminacy. Humility should give way to patriotic pride.

The ruler above all should have no conscience apart from the State and

its material aggrandizement. Any one who consents to become a passive

instrument in the service of any corporation, political, commercial, or

religious, to the point of practising a morality different from that

which should rule the individual, is in the Machiavellian tradition.

Machiavelli is the ancestor of the German who puts the fatherland

“over all,” and of his equivalent the one hundred per cent American,

and in general of those who are so patriotic that they are ready to

back their country right or wrong. He embodies, more completely than

any one else, what is usually defined as the realistic tradition in

European politics. Yet one cannot grant that either Machiavelli or his

spiritual descendants, the _Realpolitiker_, are thoroughgoing realists.

The Nemesis, or divine judgment, or whatever one may term it, that

sooner or later overtakes those who transgress the moral law, is not

something that one has to take on authority, either Greek or Hebraic;

it is a matter of keen observation. Without asserting that there is

no such thing as reason of state and that public and private morality

should coincide precisely at all points, nevertheless, one may affirm

that it is chimerical to set up a dual code in the Machiavellian sense,

to suppose that men can, as a rule, be ruthless in the service of

country and at the same time upright as individuals. To be merely a

naturalistic realist, to combine, that is, a clear perception of the

facts of the material order with spiritual blindness, leads practically

to imperialistic dreaming. Machiavelli relates how at the time he

was composing “The Prince” he was wont, after a day spent in petty

occupations on his small property at San Casciano, to pull off his

peasant clothes and don court attire in the evening, and then, retiring

into his study, escape from the trivialities of the present to the

imperial glories of ancient Rome. This particular land of heart’s

desire is still that of a certain number of Italians.

Perhaps the most important followers of Machiavelli, in actual

practice, have been found among the Germans from Frederick the Great

to Bismarck. For the student of political theory, on the other hand,

the most significant line of development runs rather through England.

Hobbes is possibly even more lacking in ethical perception, even more

naturalistic in his conception of human nature, than Machiavelli

himself. Strip man of the conventions that have been imposed upon him

from without, says Hobbes, and what one discovers as his essence is

“a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth

only in death.”[10] Hobbes reflects, to some extent, in his philosophy

the cynicism and disillusion that had been engendered in many by

the civil convulsions of seventeenth-century England. If one is to

retain a rose-colored view of human nature, it is not well, it should

seem, to see it at too close range in periods of great upheaval. La

Rochefoucauld, who is also in the Machiavellian tradition by his

insistence on the egoistic element even in what appear to be man’s

fairest virtues, was influenced, we are told, in no small measure by

his participation in the Fronde.

Though Hobbes is Machiavellian in his emphasis on the law of cunning

and the law of force, he is, unlike Machiavelli, not merely systematic

but metaphysical. He seeks to develop the postulates of naturalism

into a logical and closed system. The difference between the two men

is related to Pascal’s distinction between the geometrical spirit and

the spirit of finesse. Hobbes’s extreme confidence in reasoning of

the abstract or geometrical type (_la raison raisonnante_) strikes

one as rather un-English, but in other respects he belongs to the

great English utilitarian tradition, and points the way to Locke,

who is himself, in essential respects, a dogmatic rationalist. For a

striking fact about the English utilitarian is that, while professing

to appeal from mere theory to experience, he repudiates that whole

side of experience that belongs to the realm of the human law. Wishing

to be thoroughly positive and critical, he inclines to identify this

experience with the traditional forms in which it had become embedded

and so to reject it as mere myth and fable; and herein he is at one

with the traditionalists themselves who do not admit that the truths

of the human law can be disengaged from certain special forms and,

like the truths of the natural law, dealt with in a purely critical

fashion. As I have tried to show elsewhere, the positivists have

failed signally thus far to live up to their own programme. Hobbes,

for example, opposes to the dogmas and metaphysical assumptions of the

traditionalists other assumptions that are almost equally metaphysical.

One needs to consider what some of these assumptions are, for, in one

shape or other, they have pervaded most political thinking from the

time of Hobbes to our own day, even the thinking of those who at first

sight seem most opposed to him.

One may take as the first of these metaphysical assumptions the

conception of absolute and unlimited sovereignty. When anything

absolute is set up, we may know that we are running into metaphysics;

for precise observation of life does not give anything absolute. The

only thing that approaches the absolute in man is his ignorance, and

even that is not quite absolute. Hobbes’s assertion of absolute and

unlimited sovereignty recalls the mediæval notion of sovereignty with

a most important difference: it rests upon force and is in this sense

imperialistic; it does not, like the sovereignty of the Middle Ages,

have a supernatural sanction. For the mediæval sovereign, whether Pope

or Emperor, if not responsible to the people, is responsible to God,

who is, finally, the only absolute and unlimited ruler. Furthermore,

the individual in the State of Hobbes has no refuge from its despotic

control in religion, or, what amounts to the same thing, in a domain of

conscience set apart from the secular order. Hobbes subordinates the

spiritual to the temporal, and, in his dealing with the rival claims

of Church and State, is, like Machiavelli, not only unmediæval but

un-Christian.

Whence, one may inquire, does the sovereign of Hobbes derive a power

so unlimited and irresponsible as to be subversive not only of liberty

in the temporal order, but also of the “liberty wherewith Christ hath

made us free.” The reply is that the sovereign holds his unlimited

and irresponsible power, not by the grace of God, but as a result of

a contract with the people; and here emerges another metaphysical

assumption, that of the social contract, which dominated to an

extraordinary degree the political thinking of several generations.

This involves, in some form or other, the assumption of a state of

nature, in which man is isolated and unsocial, in opposition to a

state of society where men escape from their isolation on the basis

of a convention or contract. Just as Machiavelli is infinitely below

Aristotle in setting up two codes of morality, one for the State and

one for the individual, so Hobbes marks a great retrogression from

Aristotle in accepting this mythical contrast between man in society

and man as he is naturally. According to Aristotle, it is natural for

man, being as he is a political animal, to live in society. Hobbes,

also, as we have just seen, by running together the things of God

and the things of Cæsar, compromises the chief advance in political

thinking that has been made since Aristotle. As a whole, his work may

be described as an attempt to justify metaphysically what would result

practically in a violent materialism.

To the social contract, unlimited sovereignty, and the state of

nature, we need to add natural rights if we wish to complete the list

of abstract and metaphysical conceptions that have dominated so much

modern political thinking. The rights that man possesses in the “state

of nature” would not seem very valuable, since his life in this state,

as conceived by Hobbes, is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”;

and since, as a result of the dominance of self-love, every one is

at war with every one else (_bellum omnium contra omnes_). From the

point of view of theory, it is, however, important that man has in the

state of nature unlimited liberty, in the sense that he has unlimited

sovereignty over his own person, and can, therefore, transfer by the

social contract this unlimited sovereignty to the State. Men also

tend to be equal in the natural state, since the physically weak may,

according to Hobbes, develop a cunning that will in the conflict of

egoisms put them more or less on a level with the strong. The state

of nature according to Hobbes may, then, be defined as liberty,

equality--and war.

Natural rights and the freedom and equality that are supposed to be

based upon them become increasingly important with the tendency that

appears about the time of Hobbes to interpret more optimistically the

state of nature. The origins of this tendency are complex. Perhaps the

most important single influence was the revival of Stoical philosophy

and the Stoical views regarding _jus naturale_ and _jus gentium_ that

had been incorporated in Roman law. The underlying driving power

behind the “return to nature” from the Renaissance down was the rise

of the new astronomy and the growing triumphs of physical science.

The success of the great revolt on naturalistic lines against the

Christian and mediæval dualism was due even less perhaps to scientific

discovery, and to the type of progress that resulted, than to the

positive and critical method by which the progress and the discoveries

had been achieved, a method that was in direct conflict with the

dogmatic and uncritical affirmations of the traditionalists. In the

political theorists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,

the naturalistic and Stoical elements are combined in almost every

conceivable proportion with elements that derive from the traditional

supernaturalism. A mixture of this kind is especially evident in the

“De Jure belli et pacis” (1625) of Grotius, the father of international

law. The great nationalities, that were arising with the breakdown of

mediæval theocracy, were plainly in a state of nature as regards one

another, so that it was even more important to determine, in the case

of the nation than in the case of the individual, whether there can

prevail in the state of nature any other law than the law of cunning

and the law of force. If one is to refute Machiavelli and Hobbes,

one must show that there is some universal principle that tends to

unite men even across national frontiers, a principle that continues

to act even when their egoistic impulses are no longer controlled by

the laws of some particular state supported by its organized force.

Whether one starts with a state of nature in which men are conceived

as mere isolated units, and then imagines a contract of some kind by

which they pass from a state of nature into society, or whether one

asserts with Aristotle that man is a political animal, and that it is,

therefore, natural for him to live in society, one needs in either case

to define with some care the principle of cohesion among men. According

to the true Christian, the final counterpoise to egoism, in virtue

of which alone men may be drawn to a common centre, is submission

to the will of God, a submission that is conceived in terms of the

inner life. The attempt to find a bond of union among men in a “rule

of reason,” and the association of this rule of reason with nature,

is, strictly speaking, not Christian, but Stoical. It is as natural

for a man to serve other men, says Marcus Aurelius in his exposition

of Stoical “reason,” as it is for the eye to see. This doctrine of

service, which the Stoic deems at once rational and natural, does not

involve the inner life in the Christian sense. The final appeal is

to something outside the individual--namely, to what Cicero, a main

source of Stoical influence upon the modern world, calls the “common

utility” (_utilitas communis_). The community that one serves may

again, according to Cicero, be either one’s country or mankind at large

(_societas generis humani_). Stoical utilitarianism is in general

highly rationalistic. English utilitarianism, on the other hand (and

England is the chief source of utilitarian doctrine in modern times),

puts far greater emphasis on the principle of pleasure, and in general

on the instinctive side of man, an emphasis that is less Stoical than

Epicurean. Cumberland, for example, seeks to refute Hobbes not merely

by an appeal to right reason, but by asserting the presence in man of

an instinct to promote the common good; thus to serve the community,

says Cumberland, combining the new utilitarian conception with the

older theology, is to fulfil the will of God.

One finds, however, in writers like Cumberland only the beginnings of

the transformation in the very basis of ethics that has taken place

in connection with the great movement, partly utilitarian, partly

sentimental, that I have defined in its totality as humanitarianism.

What is singular about the representatives of this movement is that

they wish to live on the naturalistic level, and at the same time to

enjoy the benefits that the past had hoped to achieve as a result

of some humanistic or religious discipline. They have contradicted

religion by asserting in substance that man, in order to rise above

his selfish impulses, does not need conversion and the system

of supernatural sanctions on which conversion has traditionally

rested. They have also sought to refute the egoistic naturalists

of the type of Machiavelli and Hobbes, who have maintained that the

most fundamental impulse in man is the push for power. The rise of

emotional ethics may be studied, especially in the England of the early

eighteenth century, in connection with the deistic movement. The trend

of deistic moralists like Shaftesbury and Hutcheson is all towards what

we should call, nowadays, altruism and social service. With the decline

of the doctrine of total depravity, the age of theology is beginning to

give way to the age of sociology. The word beneficence gains currency

about this time. The sympathetic man, the good-natured man, the man of

feeling are emerging and are being held in ever-increasing estimation.

Those who believed in the intrinsic evil of human nature on either

theological or naturalistic grounds were still numerous and aggressive.

The divergent views concerning the goodness or badness of human nature

were combined in almost every conceivable proportion in different

individuals. They were so combined in Pope and Voltaire, for example,

as to introduce into their writings a central incoherency. A curious

attempt to combine the new expansiveness with an attack on the school

of Shaftesbury and an affirmation of the egoistic element in man

that reminds one of Hobbes and La Rochefoucauld and Machiavelli, is

found in Mandeville’s “Fable of the Bees.” With the growth of the new

philosophy, man was encouraged to indulge more freely his natural

desires. At the same time, scientific discovery was making increasingly

possible the satisfaction of these desires. It was gradually developing

a vast machinery designed to minister to man’s material comfort and

convenience and destined to culminate in the industrial revolution.

Mandeville warned the English, who were entering an era of commercial

and imperialistic expansion, that this expansion, with its concomitant

growth of luxury, would, so far as the individual is concerned, be

an expansion of vice and selfishness. The Stoical notion that mere

“reason” can control the selfish passions, he refutes. The assertion of

Shaftesbury that there inheres in the natural man a “moral sense” or

will to serve, that can prevail over the will to power, or instinct of

sovereignty, as he terms it, he dismisses as “romantic and chimerical.”

He recommends ironically as a remedy a return to the Golden Age and

its diet of acorns. The true remedy, he professes to believe, is the

most austere Christianity and its renunciation of the lusts of the

flesh. The real sting of his argument, however, is in the new turn

that he gives to the Machiavellian idea of the double standard. The

multiplication of wants, which is bad, considered from the point of

view of the individual, may, if properly directed by government, make

for the greatness of the State. Private vices are public benefits:

Thus every part was full of vice.

Yet the whole mass a paradise.

. . . . . . . . . . . Luxury

Employ’d a million of the poor,

And odious pride a million more;

Envy itself and vanity,

Were ministers of industry.

Mandeville concludes:

Fools only strive

To make a great an honest hive.

In Shaftesbury and Mandeville, we see clearly revealed, for perhaps

the first time, the opposition between the romantic idealist and the

Machiavellian realist. Much of Shaftesbury’s doctrine stands in close

relation to that of the ancient Stoics, notably Marcus Aurelius and

Epictetus, so that there is truth in Mandeville’s accusation that

Shaftesbury “endeavored to establish heathen virtue on the ruins of

Christianity.” Shaftesbury, for example, does not go beyond Stoicism

when he hopes, in Mandeville’s phrase, to “govern himself by his

reason with as much ease and readiness as a good rider manages a well

taught horse by the bridle.” But Mandeville is not entirely wrong in

discovering in Shaftesbury a flattery of human nature beyond what the

Stoics or other pagan moralists ever attempted. “He imagines that

men without any trouble or violence upon themselves may be naturally

virtuous. He seems to expect and require goodness in his species as we

do a sweet taste in grapes and China oranges.” On the basis of this

natural goodness which displays itself in an instinctive affection

of man for his own species, Shaftesbury was the first “to maintain

virtue without self-denial.” The word sympathy first became current

largely as a result of its use by the Greek Stoics, but there is a

wide gap between Stoical sympathy and the incipient sentimentalism of

a Shaftesbury. So far from encouraging emotional effusion, the Stoic

aimed at “apathy,” and in his more austere moments would have us serve

men, but refrain from pitying them.[11] The moral æstheticism that is

beginning to appear in Shaftesbury, though it has no strict parallel

in classical antiquity, is Epicurean rather than Stoical. The more

advanced type of sentimentalist has, in order to display his “virtue,”

merely to palpitate deliciously.[12] As a matter of fact, the love or

sympathy on which the romantic idealist puts so much emphasis is, as I

shall try to show later, a subrational parody of Christian charity.

The moral sense of Shaftesbury and his disciple Hutcheson was developed

by Hume and Adam Smith and other exponents of emotional ethics, and is

not unrelated to the emphasis that the later utilitarians put on the

principle of pleasure. Though Mandeville denied that sympathy of the

humanitarian type can prevail over the “instinct of sovereignty,” it

is well to remember that he was himself an emotional moralist. He even

recognizes among man’s natural passions a passion of pity that may on

occasion be violent. One has only to exalt this passion of pity and,

at the same time, to take seriously Mandeville’s occasional praises

of ignorance and the simple life, to be in sight of the primitivistic

solution of the problem of luxury and of civilization itself that

Rousseau was to set forth in his two Discourses. Mandeville is on

the side of decorum, and yet he admits that decorum is not only

“artificial,” but is, as Rousseau was to say later, only the “varnish

of vice” and the “mask of hypocrisy.” He affirms that vice in general

is nowhere more predominant than where arts and sciences flourish, and

that we shall find innocence and honesty nowhere more widely diffused

than among the most illiterate, the “poor silly country people.” “Would

you banish fraud and luxury? Break down the printing-presses and burn

all the books in the Island, except those at the Universities where

they remain unmolested.”

What is being weakened by the realism of Mandeville, as well as by the

idealism of Shaftesbury, is the sense of the inner life. And by the

inner life, I mean the recognition in some form or other of a force in

man that moves in an opposite direction from the outer impressions and

expansive desires that together make up his ordinary or temperamental

self. The decisive victories of both rationalistic and emotional ethics

over the traditional dualism were won in the eighteenth century. At

the same time, we must not forget that we have to do with the final

stages of a secular process. The political reflex of this process is

the passage from a Europe that was unified in theory, and to some

extent in practice, by the Roman theocracy to a Europe made up of great

territorial nationalities governed in their relations to one another

by international law. As conceived by Grotius, international law rests

largely upon naturalistic foundations. The publication of his work was

followed in a few years by recognition of the new Europe in the Peace

of Westphalia (1648). Within the bounds of each separate nationality,

the essential aspect of this secular process is the passage from divine

right to popular right, from the sovereignty of God to the sovereignty

of the people. In the long period of transition, supernaturalist and

naturalistic views are blended in almost every possible proportion.

For example, Protestants, especially the Calvinists, and Catholics,

especially the Jesuits, borrowed naturalistic concepts such as a state

of nature, natural rights, and the social compact, but only that they

might affirm more effectively the principle of divine sovereignty, with

its theocratic implications, in the spiritual order.

Some, to be sure, saw the danger of thus making secular power seem to

receive its sanction, not from above, but from below. Thus Filmer says

in his “Patriarcha”: “Late writers have taken up too much upon trust

from the subtle schoolmen who, to be sure to thrust down the king below

the Pope, thought it the safest course to advance the people above the

king.” A doctrine that was opposed to Jesuitical encroachments of this

kind, and played an important rôle in the rise of nationalism, was

that of the divine right of kings and of passive obedience. The strict

subordination of the spiritual to the temporal power, urged by Erastus,

had been encouraged by Luther himself. And Luther’s own attitude was

related to that of mediæval theorists like Occam, who had sought to

exalt the Emperor and depress the Pope. The monarchs, however, to whom

the Lutheran inclined to give jurisdiction in matters religious (_cujus

regio, ejus religio_), were not like the Emperor universal; they ruled

by hereditary right over certain limited territories. The theocratic

state of Calvin again is related to the mediæval theory that exalted

the Pope at the expense of the Emperor; but here also there is lacking

the element of universality. Practically both the Lutheran and the

Calvinistic state tend to run together the things of God and the things

of Cæsar, and to leave the individual without any _civitas dei_ in

which he may take refuge from the secular power. There is, then, this

justification for the opinion of those who look upon Protestantism in

all its forms as only an incident in the rise of nationalism.

A defence of divine right that should receive attention as an example,

though a very imperfect one, of an important type of political

thinking, is the work of Filmer I have just mentioned: “Patriarcha,

or the Natural Power of Kings” (1680). The arguments in favor of the

patriarchal view of government have indeed never been adequately set

forth in the Occident. In spite of all that has been urged by Aristotle

and others, we must, if we go by the actual experience of mankind,

conclude that the patriarchal conception has enormous elements of

strength. It has been the normal conception of great portions of the

human race over long periods of time. Such a study as that of Fustel de

Coulanges on the Greek and Roman city-state, and its derivation from

the religion of the family, aids us to understand political and social

institutions that still survive in countries like China and Japan.

Unfortunately, Filmer does not apply an adequate psychological analysis

to the patriarchal conception and uncover its deep roots in the

actual facts of human nature. He is at once too naturalistic and too

theological. By his very sub-title, he proclaims that the patriarchal

power is “natural,” and, at the same time, he seeks by somewhat

grotesque speculations to prove that the actual power of kings is based

on their direct descent from Adam.

Filmer seems to have missed the point seriously in seeking to show that

the basis of patriarchal and royal power is natural. A more powerful

and consistent champion of divine right is Bossuet in his “Politique

tirée de l’Ecriture Sainte” (1709). He asserts, indeed, that all laws

are founded on the first of all laws, that of nature, conceived as

a law of equity and right reason. But in general he opposes to the

oncoming naturalistic tide a thoroughgoing supernaturalism. Men are

born, not free and equal, but subjects, first of all to their parents.

Parental authority itself is the image of that of God, who is the only

absolute sovereign. Parental authority serves, in turn, as a model for

that of the king. The king’s power does not depend upon the consent and

acquiescence of his people. It is independent of the Pope. But though

absolute, it is not arbitrary; for it is controlled from above. Bossuet

exalts the monarch in the secular order only to humble him in the

sight of God and to lay upon him the weight of an almost intolerable

responsibility. “Behold,” he says, “an immense people brought together

in a single person, behold this sacred, paternal, and absolute power;

behold the secret reason which governs all this body of the State. You

see the image of God in kings and gain from them the idea of royal

majesty. And so, oh kings, exercise your power boldly; for it is

divine and salutary to mankind; but exercise it with humility. It is

laid upon you from without. At bottom it leaves you weak, it leaves you

mortal, it leaves you sinful; and burdens you in God’s sight with a

heavier reckoning.” Kings, after all, he goes on to say, are but gods

of flesh and blood, of clay and dust. Earthly grandeur may separate

men for a moment, but they are all made equal at the end by the common

catastrophe of death.

This exercise of the royal office in humble subordination to God was

scarcely achieved even by a Saint Louis. As for Louis XIV, one is

tempted to say that he took to himself the first part of Bossuet’s

doctrine (_l’état c’est moi_) and overlooked the humility. Bossuet, in

asserting the immediate derivation of the royal power from God, goes

back, like other champions of divine right, to the mediæval theorists

of the Empire. But there was only one Emperor whose sway was supposed

to be universal, whereas there were a number of kings equally absolute

in their pretensions, ruling by hereditary right over great territorial

nationalities, and clashing, not merely in their secular ambitions, but

also, as a result of the Reformation, in their religion. Practically

the rulers of these nationalities were in the state of nature with

reference to one another, whatever one may conceive the state of nature

to be. Bossuet pushed his love of unity to the point of encouraging

religious persecution, as manifested, for example, in the Revocation

of the Edict of Nantes (1685). Yet his doctrine not only failed to

provide an adequate offset to a centrifugal nationalism, it seemed by

its insistence on the liberties of the French king and clergy (_les

libertés gallicanes_) to make against unity in the Church.

In asserting the Gallican liberties, Louis XIV and Bossuet were

setting themselves against the main trend of the Church since the

later Middle Ages. The fourth article of the Declaration of the French

clergy, made in 1682 and subscribed by Bossuet, declares that the

judgment of the Pope is not definitive without the consent of the

Church. But this type of limited and constitutional Catholicism had

been compromised by the breakdown of the conciliar movement. Every

significant change from that day to this has been in the direction of

greater papal centralization. The theorist of this ultramontane type

of Catholicism and the enemy of Bossuet and Louis XIV is Joseph de

Maistre. His book on the Pope (1819) looks forward to the final triumph

of the doctrine of papal infallibility in the Vatican Council (1870).

A main element in Christianity from a fairly early period is what one

may term Roman imperialistic organization. This element de Maistre

develops into a thoroughgoing papal imperialism. The supreme ruler by

divine right is the Pope. Temporal rulers, so far as they profess to

be Catholic, should recognize his hegemony. This conception of rigid

outer authority de Maistre proceeds to establish on the ruins of every

type of individualism. In contrast to Bossuet, who was in the great

central Christian tradition, so much so that one is tempted to call

him the last of the fathers of the Church, de Maistre, though a man of

admirable character, reveals in his writings little sense of the inner

life, not much more, it might be maintained, than the rationalists of

the eighteenth century whom he was assailing. The subordination of the

true Christian is based on humility and charity. The subordination at

which de Maistre aims is primarily social. The chief need of society is

order, and order, as de Maistre conceives it, must be achieved largely

by fear and repression. The ultimate support of the whole social

structure, as he tells us in a celebrated chapter, is the executioner.

He champions the agencies of the Church that are most frankly

ultramontane and anti-individualistic--the Index, the Inquisition, and

the Jesuits.

Bossuet pushes the doctrine of the divine right of kings about as far

as it will go, and no one is ever likely to go beyond de Maistre in

asserting the divine right of the Pope. The reply to the absolute and

unlimited sovereignty, whether of Pope or King, based on divine right,

was the assertion of the absolute and unlimited sovereignty of the

people, based on natural right. The doctrine of popular sovereignty is

found even in the Middle Ages, notably in Marsilius of Padua, and at

the beginning of the seventeenth century is worked out along rather

radical lines by Althusius. Practically, however, the most important

precursor of Rousseau in the development of this doctrine is Locke.

The first of his two “Treatises of Government” (1690) has lost its

interest along with the special form of the doctrine of divine right

that he sets out to refute, that of Filmer’s “Patriarcha”; the second

Treatise, however, remains a chief landmark of political thinking. To

understand this work in its derivation, one needs to go back to the

contrast between nature and convention established by the early Greek

thinkers, and to the conception of a law of nature that grew out of

this contrast, largely under Stoical influence, and became embodied

in Roman law; finally one needs to trace through the centuries the

process by which the Roman juristic conception finally became, in

writers like Locke, the doctrine of the rights of man. The doctrine of

natural rights, as maintained by Locke, looks forward to the American

Revolution, and, as modified by Rousseau, to the French Revolution.

Locke has to defend natural right not merely against the partisans of

royal prerogative, but also against Machiavellian realists like Hobbes.

For Hobbes, the state of nature is liberty, equality, and war. He

would, therefore, in the interests of peace have the individual enter

into a contract by which he renounces once and for all his liberty or

unlimited sovereignty over his own person, and enjoy equality under

a despot. For Locke, on the other hand, though he has an occasional

primitivistic touch, the state of nature is liberty, equality, and

reason. It is “a state of peace, good-will, mutual assistance, and

preservation.”[13] In fact the law of nature is identical with the will

of God[14] (or, as Pope was to say a little later, “The state of nature

was the reign of God”). Locke, indeed, so runs together the spiritual

and the temporal order that he speaks of an “appeal to heaven” when he

means an appeal to force. He recognizes, however, certain disadvantages

in the state of nature, especially in its bearing upon the safety of

private property. If property is to be fully secured, men need in

addition to the natural law a positive law to be administered by

impartial judges who require in turn the force of an organized state

to give their decisions due execution. The first aim, therefore, of

the contract by which men substitute a settled government for the

state of nature, is to secure the common good, which is taken to be

identical with the protection of property. The source of property

itself, and this is a point of extreme importance to which I shall need

to return later, is manual labor. The will of the people, conceived

as the will of the majority, is to be supreme. This will, however, is

to be expressed not directly but through the legislative, which as

the organ of the popular will is to dominate both the executive and

the judiciary. Practically, Locke’s treatise reflects the upshot of

the revolution of 1688, the transfer, namely, of the final power of

the State from the King to Parliament. The legislative is especially

vigilant in its control over the executive in all that relates to the

common interest, that is, the safety of property. (Taxation without

representation is tyranny).

Even a theorist of divine right like Bossuet admits the danger of an

uncontrolled executive. “Let us candidly confess,” he says, “that there

is no temptation equal to that of power, nor aught more difficult

than to refuse yourself anything when men grant you everything, and

think only of forestalling or even of stimulating your desires.” As

for Locke, he does not even deem it worth while to reply to those who

maintain that a ruler, though not limited by men, may be limited by his

responsibility to what is above him. For him, a king is in a state of

nature not only with reference to other kings, but with reference to

his own subjects; and being thus unrestrained he is at the same time

corrupted with flattery and armed with power. Though Locke is thus on

his guard against an uncontrolled royal will, it is hard to see that

he has taken any precautions against the opposite danger. However

moderately he himself may interpret the sovereignty of the people, it

is not easy to discover in his theory anything that will prevent this

sovereignty from developing into a new absolutism. The people exercises

not only legal control over its legislators, but has the right, if they

seem to be acting contrary to the people’s interest, to rise up against

them in insurrection. In the final analysis, the only check to the

evils of an unlimited democracy will be found to be the recognition in

some form of the aristocratic principle. Such a recognition is entirely

lacking in Locke. The very logic of natural rights runs counter to the

idea of deference and subordination, at least on any other basis than

that of force. In the state of nature, says Locke all men are equally

kings, and subject to nobody; and this equality does not suffer serious

diminution as the result of the social contract. Locke simply dodges

the political problem that seems so important to an Aristotle and a

Confucius, namely, the problem of leadership. It is characteristic of

the English that the radical and equalitarian side of Locke should be

slow to develop. The Revolution of 1688, of which he is the theorist,

gave the control of government to an oligarchy that owed its power

and prestige to the survival of the traditional subordinations. The

difficulties of the Whig position, that of carrying on government by

an aristocracy that lacks doctrinal justification, became manifest in

time. This aristocracy virtually abdicated at the time of the Reform

Bill (1832). The full results of the movement that was getting under

way in the time of Locke are becoming apparent in our own day. The

people, especially the people of the great urban centres, no longer

look up with respect to representatives who are themselves so imbued

with the utilitarian temper encouraged by Locke that they have perhaps

ceased to be worthy of respect. If the aristocratic principle continues

to give way to the equalitarian denial of the need of leadership,

parliamentary government may ultimately become impossible.

It is Locke’s aim to deal with human nature in a more empirical or

experimental way than his philosophical predecessors. At the same

time he has a strongly rationalistic side that reveals the Cartesian

influence. By their assertion of a “reason” in man that can prevail

unaided over the imagination and expansive desires, both Locke and

Descartes renew the Stoical position. The counter-assertion of Pascal

that unaided reason cannot win any such easy victory, that on the

contrary “imagination rules everything,” seems nearer to the observed

facts, and, therefore, more truly experimental. According to Locke,

imagination becomes embodied in customs and traditions that may from

the point of view of reason be dismissed as mere prejudice. By the

opposition that he thus establishes between reason and prejudice,

Locke becomes, along with Descartes, a main influence on the period of

European culture known as the Enlightenment. Although no one perhaps

did more for Locke’s French and European influence in general than

Voltaire, in the field of political theory, on the other hand, this

influence is perhaps best studied in Montesquieu.[15] Like Locke,

he stands for parliamentary control of the executive, especially in

all that relates to taxation and the initiation of money bills. He

tends, however, to separate more sharply than Locke the legislative,

the judiciary, and the executive, and to make the judiciary and the

executive more independent of the legislative, in such wise that the

different functions of government may serve as a system of checks

and balances upon one another. As is well known, it was this side of

Montesquieu that was most influential on early American political

theory. At the same time, only an unfriendly critic will see in the

framers of the American Constitution pure disciples of Montesquieu.

They possessed in a marked degree something that can scarcely be

claimed for Montesquieu--practical sagacity. Compared with the

political views of a Machiavelli those of Montesquieu have about them

an atmosphere of unreality; so much so that even the angelic Joubert

said that one might learn more of the art of government from a page

of Machiavelli than from a volume of Montesquieu. Moreover, our own

constitutional statesmen did not for the most part share Montesquieu’s

general philosophy. This philosophy as it appears in “L’Esprit des

Lois” (1748) suffers from certain inconsistencies, but on the whole it

shows, even when compared with that of Locke, a noteworthy advance in

the direction of a pure naturalism. The theological has given way still

further to the sociological point of view, so much so that Montesquieu

has been regarded by some as the founder of sociology. “He is the least

religious spirit that ever was,” says Faguet; and in truth he reveals

an almost total lack of sense of the values of the inner life. To be

genuinely religious or humanistic, one must assert whether in the form

of divine grace or of free moral choice, a power in the heart of the

individual that may lift him above physical nature. In the three main

forms of government that he recognizes--monarchical, republican, and

despotic--Montesquieu gives little weight to any such specifically

human factor. Though he does lip-service to Christianity, he leans

towards determinism and the empire of physical causes, putting special

stress, as is well known, on the relation between climate and national

character. His insistence, therefore, that laws must not be regarded

as anything absolute, but must coincide in their general spirit with

national character, is very different from the Aristotelian emphasis

on ethos. For though Aristotle recognizes the influence of climate,

he is on the whole less concerned with what nature makes of man than

with what man makes of himself. In Montesquieu’s view, even religion is

largely a matter of climate. Climate determines the parts of the world

that are to be Mohammedan or Christian,[16] and within Christianity

itself those that are to be Protestant or Catholic.[17] “Good sense”

is likewise, it would seem, a matter of climate.[18] This naturalistic

relativism implies a revolution in the very basis of ethics. As a

matter of fact, Montesquieu has the grace to warn us that he is not

using a word like virtue in the traditional meaning. “What I call

virtue in a republic,” he says, “is not a moral or Christian virtue,

it is the love of country, that is to say, the love of equality.” He

develops admirably the thesis that this republican love of equality

must not be pushed to a point where it becomes incompatible with the

necessary subordinations. The obvious reply of a Bossuet would be that

if subordination is to rest on any other principle than force, it

must imply the submission of man’s ordinary will to some higher will,

it must in other words be ultimately rooted in humility. To be sure,

Montesquieu seems at times to recognize the relation between republican

virtue and religious control. He says in a celebrated sentence: “Rome

était un vaisseau tenu par deux ancres dans la tempête--la religion et

les mœurs.” With the decay of this traditional ethos, luxury increased

and liberty declined.[19]

Montesquieu conceives in an external and formalistic fashion the honor

that is the informing principle of monarchy. It has little to do

with virtue either as he defines it or as it has been traditionally

understood. His treatment of this form of the aristocratic principle,

however faithfully it may reflect what aristocracy had actually become

in the age of Louis XV, can scarcely be said to do justice to the

implications of the maxim _noblesse oblige_. In the humanistic poise

that the gentleman (_honnête homme_) sought to combine with the cult

of honor, he discovers little more than a veneer of politeness that

dissimulates the scramble of courtiers for the royal favor.

Since laws and governments, according to Montesquieu, are relative,

and relative chiefly to physical causes, one might suppose that not

much is to be gained from human interference with the working of these

causes. As a matter of fact, there is another side of Montesquieu

that suggests that though man cannot modify himself from within along

humanistic or religious lines, he may be modified from without not

merely by climate but by institutions; and that these institutions may

be of a more or less progressive character. He displays, in short, the

usual confidence of the man of the Enlightenment in the final triumph

of reason over prejudice. His influence can be traced on those persons,

especially numerous towards the end of the eighteenth century, who

hoped to renovate society by an ingenious manipulation of political

machinery, and who had an almost unlimited faith in the efficacy of

paper constitutions.

I have just used the word progressive. As a matter of fact, the idea of

progress, which was to give its distinctive note to modern naturalism,

was just taking definite shape in the time of Montesquieu. Only the

barest beginnings of this idea can be found in the naturalism, whether

Stoic or Epicurean, of ancient Greece and Rome. The idea of progress

has its ultimate source in the first triumphs of scientific method in

the Renaissance. In its early English form, it is associated with the

Baconian influence and the founding of the Royal Society (1662), and

tends to be practical and empirical. In its early French form, it is

associated with the Cartesian influence, and tends to be more abstract

and logical. The Baconian and Cartesian currents come together in the

eighteenth century, especially in France. The result is an ever-growing

confidence in human perfectibility. The Abbé de Saint-Pierre is already

a fairly complete specimen of what one may term the professional

philanthropist. Diderot and other Encyclopædists set out deliberately

to substitute the Baconian kingdom of man for the traditional kingdom

of God. At the same time, the new doctrine did not have all that it

needed if it was to develop into what has been, for several generations

past, the true religion of the Occident--the religion of humanity.

The movement thus far had been predominantly rationalistic. Its main

achievement had been to develop, largely on Cartesian lines, the idea

of universal mechanism, and to oppose nature, conceived as a system

of constant and inflexible laws, to the providential interference

with natural law that had been asserted, in some form or other, by

the older dualists. A Christian supernaturalist like Bossuet was,

therefore, justified from his own point of view in putting at the very

centre of his defence of religion against naturalistic tendency the

idea of Providence. The substitution of the idea of law for Providence

is not in itself, from the point of view of the strict positivist, a

chimerical undertaking.[20] But in that case one would have needed,

if the truths of the inner life were to be retained, to assert two

laws--a law for man as well as a law for thing. The whole point of

the new movement, however, was that it did nothing of the kind. It

sought to bring both the natural and the human order under one law,

and then, following the lead of Descartes, to reduce this one law

to mathematical and mechanical formulæ. To be sure, in the deistic

movement, an important intermediary stage in the passage from the older

dualism to modern monistic conceptions, the idea of Providence is still

retained after a fashion. This deistic Providence, however, acts not

immediately, as in true Christianity, but mediately through the laws of

nature, which Providence was deemed, therefore, to have contrived with

a special view to man’s benefit. Hence the emphasis that most deists

put on the doctrine of final causes, and their consternation at an

event like the Lisbon earthquake which scarcely seemed to square with

their theory of a Providence that worked for man’s good through the

natural order.

The deistic movement, and indeed, as I have already said, the whole

naturalistic movement from the Renaissance down, had been thus far

predominantly rationalistic. Now it has been a constant experience

of man in all ages that mere rationalism leaves him unsatisfied. Man

craves in some sense or other of the word an enthusiasm that will

lift him out of his merely rational self. Even Voltaire, perhaps the

outstanding figure of the Enlightenment, declared that illusion is

the queen of the human heart. In the field of political thought, the

conception of the rights of man remained comparatively inert as long

as these rights were derived from a hypothetical state of nature

merely by a process of abstract reasoning. “Cold reason,” as Rousseau

declared, “has never done anything illustrious.” Rousseau had many

precursors, as appears from what I have already said about the English

background, yet it was he who more than any other one person put

behind the doctrine of the rights of man the imaginative and emotional

driving power it still lacked, and at the same time supplied the

missing elements to the religion of humanity. Among those who took

up the defence of the traditional order against Rousseau, Burke is

easily first, because he too perceived in his own way the truth that

cold reason has never done anything illustrious. He saw that the only

conservatism that counts is an imaginative conservatism. One may,

therefore, without being fanciful, regard the battle that has been

in progress in the field of political thought since the end of the

eighteenth century as being in its most significant phase a battle

between the spirit of Burke and that of Rousseau. And this opposition

between Burke and Rousseau will itself be found to turn, in the last

analysis, on the opposition between two different types of imagination.