Transcriber’s Note: The text is that of the first edition, with the
errata incorporated. Because there are no page breaks, footnotes are
placed under the paragraphs or quotations to which they relate, and
renumbered accordingly. Page numbers have been inserted into the text
in braces.
THE PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY OF THE STATE
BY
BERNARD BOSANQUET
C’est le peuple qui compose le genre humain; ce qui n’est pas
peuple est si peu de chose que ce n’est pas la peine de le
compter. (Émile, livre 4.)
LONDON MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
NEW YORK THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1899
All rights reserved
GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO.
To: CHARLES STEWART LOCH
{vii}
PREFACE.
The present work is an attempt to express what I take to be the
fundamental ideas of a true social philosophy. I have criticised
and interpreted the doctrines of certain well-known thinkers only
with the view of setting these ideas in the clearest light. This is
the whole purpose of the book; and I have intentionally abstained
from practical applications, except by way of illustration. It is
my conviction, indeed, that a better understanding of fundamental
principles would very greatly contribute to the more rational
handling of practical problems. But this better understanding is
only to be attained, as it seems to me, by a thorough examination
of ideas, apart from the associations of practical issues about
which a fierce party spirit has been aroused. And, moreover, it
is my belief that the influence of the ideas here maintained upon
practical discussion, would be, in a certain sense, to detach it from
philosophical theory. The principles which I advocate would destroy
so many party prejudices, would put the mind in possession of so many
clues to fact, that practical “social” issues would in consequence
be considered as problems of life and mind, to be treated only with
intimate experience, and by methods adequate to their subtlety. The
{viii} result would be that such discussions would be regarded, if
one may use the expression, more respectfully, and would acquire an
independence and completeness worthy of their importance. The work of
the social reformer should no more be regarded as a mere appendix to
social theory than that of the doctor is regarded as a mere appendix
to physiology. Such a division of labour is, of course, no hindrance
to the interchange of facts and ideas between theory and practice.
On the contrary, it tends to promote such an interchange, by
increasing the supply on either side, and improving the intellectual
communication between them.
It will occur to philosophical readers that the essence of the
theory here presented is to be found not merely in Plato and in
Aristotle, but in very many modern writers, more especially in Hegel,
T.H. Green, Bradley, [1] and Wallace. [2] And they may be inclined
to doubt the justification for a further work on the same lines
by one who can hardly expect to improve upon the writings of such
predecessors.
[1] See especially the chapter in _Ethical Studies_ entitled “My
Station and its Duties.”
[2] See _Lectures and Essays_ by the late Professor Wallace,
especially p. 213, “Our Natural Rights,” and p. 427, “The Relation of
Fichte and Hegel to Socialism.”
On this point I should like to make a brief explanation. To begin
with, it is a truism that every generation needs to be addressed
in its own language; and I might even plead that the greatness of
a tradition justifies some urgency in calling attention to it. But
further, as regards T.H. Green in particular, whom in many points
I follow very closely, I had two special reasons for desiring {ix}
to express myself independently. One of these is to be found in my
attempt to apply the conceptions of recent psychology to the theory
of State coercion and of the Real or General Will, and to explain the
relation of Social Philosophy to Sociological Psychology. For a short
discussion of the Imitation Theory, which the purpose of the present
work would not permit me to include in it, I may refer to a paper
which will shortly appear in _Mind_.
My other reason lay in the conviction that the time has gone by for
the scrupulous caution which Green displayed in estimating the value
of the State to its members. I have referred to this subject in the
body of my work (ch. x.); but I desire to emphasise my belief that
our growing experience of all social “classes” proves the essentials
of happiness and character to be the same throughout the social
whole. Scepticism on this point is the product, I am convinced, of
defective social experience. Indeed, it seems worth while to observe
that the attention which is now rightly paid to such disadvantages,
affecting the poorer classes of citizens, as it may be possible
to remedy, has given rise to a serious confusion. The zeal of the
advocate has led him to slander his client. In proving that under
such and such conditions it would be no wonder if “the poor” were
bad, he forgets to observe that in fact they are generally just
as good as other people. The all-important distinction between a
poor home and a bad home is neglected. And yet it seems probable
that, omitting the definitely criminal quarters, there is no
larger proportion of bad homes among the poor than among the rich.
Such terms as “den” and “slum” {x} are too freely used, with an
affectation of intimacy, for homes in which thousands of respectable
citizens reside. Our democratic age will be remarkable to posterity
for having dimmed the time-honoured belief in the virtues of the
poor. There was cant, no doubt, in the older doctrine, but it was not
so far from the fact as the opposite cant of today, and it is time
that the truth in it should be revived.
I must repeat that these remarks are not intended to be
controversial. There is nothing in them which serious men of all
schools may not accept. They are meant to defend my attitude in
treating the Real Will, and Freedom in the greater Self, as matters
of universal concern, and not merely as hopes and fancies cherished
by “educated” persons. Indeed, although it would be churlish for a
student to disparage literary education, it must never be forgotten
that, as things are today, the citizens who live by handicraft
possess a valuable element of brain-culture, which is on the whole
denied to the literary class. Whatever, therefore, may be wanting
in the following pages, it is not, I think, the relation of their
subject-matter to the general life of peoples.
The social student should shun mere optimism; but he should not
be afraid to make the most of that which he studies. It is an
unfortunate result of the semi-practical aims which naturally
influence social philosophers, that they are apt throughout to take
up an indifferent, if not a hostile, attitude to their given object.
They hardly believe in actual society as a botanist believes in
plants, or a biologist believes in vital processes. And hence, social
theory comes off badly. No student can really appreciate an object
for which he is always apologising. There is a {xi} touch of this
attitude in all the principal writers, except Hegel and Bradley,
and therefore, as I venture to think, they partly fail to seize the
greatness and ideality of life in its commonest actual phases. It is
in no spirit of obscurantism, and with no thought of resisting the
march of a true social logic, that some take up a different position.
They are convinced that an actual living society is an infinitely
higher creature than a steam-engine, a plant or an animal; and that
the best of their ideas are not too good to be employed in analysing
it. Those who cannot be enthusiastic in the study of society as it
is, would not be so in the study of a better society if they had it.
“Here or nowhere is your America.”
Bernard Bosanquet
Caterham, March, 1899.
{xiii}
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I
RISE AND CONDITIONS OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 1-16
1. Meaning of “Philosophical Theory” 1
2. Philosophy and the “State,” 3
a. The Greek City-State 4
b. Type of mind implied in it 5
c. Type of political philosophy suggested by it 5
3. Transition from City-State to Nation-State. Law of Nature 9
4. Rise of Nation-States and of modern political philosophy.
Rousseau 11
CHAPTER II
SOCIOLOGICAL COMPARED WITH PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY 17-52
1. Problems of Social Physics and of Idealism 17
2. Social Theory as influenced by special sciences 19
(i) Mathematics 19
(ii) Biology 21
(iii) Economics 27
(iv) Jurisprudence and the theory of Right 34
_(a)_ Law as “ideal fact” 34
_(b)_ Sociological analysis of Law 36
(v) Idea of the “spirit of laws” or mind of peoples;
Anthropology in widest sense 39
(vi) Psychology 42
(vii) Connection of points of view and kinds of fact 47
3. Comparison of Psychological Sociology and Social Philosophy 48
CHAPTER III
THE PARADOX OF POLITICAL OBLIGATION; SELF-GOVERNMENT 53-78
1. The conception of self-government 53
2. Law and Liberty in Bentham 56
3. Examination of Mill’s “Liberty” 60
(i) Mill’s idea of Individuality 60
(ii) His view of the authority of Society over the Individual 61
(iii) His applications of his principle 66
4. Views of Herbert Spencer 69
(i) Spencer and Bentham on Natural Right 70
(ii) Liberty and restraint in Spencer and Huxley 71
5. Mill’s criticism of Self-Government 73
CHAPTER IV
THE PROBLEM OF POLITICAL OBLIGATION MORE RADICALLY TREATED 79-102
1. Nature of above theories not expressed by term Individualism.
“Theories of the first look” 79
2. Rousseau’s earlier Essays 84
3. Problem of the _Contrat Social_ 87
4. Conflict of ideas in Rousseau’s statement 89
5. Nature of his solution 91
6. Reality of the “Moral Person” and conception of Civil Liberty 94
CHAPTER V.
THE CONCEPTION OF A “REAL” WILL 103-123
1. The Supreme Will in Hobbes and Locke 103
2. Meaning of the General Will for Rousseau 107
3- The General Will contrasted with the Will of All 111
4- The General Will and the work of the Legislator 117
CHAPTER VI
THE CONCEPTION OF LIBERTY AS ILLUSTRATED BY THE FOREGOING
SUGGESTIONS 118-154
1. Liberty as the condition of our being ourselves 118
2. Illustrated by the idea of Nature and Natural 128
3. Phases of idea of Liberty 133
_(a)_ Juristic phase = “absence of restraint” 134
_(b)_ Political phase = “rights of citizenship” 135
_(c)_ Positive connection of _(a)_ and _(b)_ 136
_(d)_ Philosophical phase = “being oneself in
fullest sense” 137
_(e)_ Danger and justification of using same term
for _(a)_ and _(d)_ 142
4. Liberty as attribute of the will that wills itself 146
5. This “real” will identified with State 149
_(a)_ State in this sense is social life as a whole 150
_(b)_ How State is force as extension of “individual” mind 152
CHAPTER VII
PSYCHOLOGICAL ILLUSTRATION OF THE IDEA OF A
REAL OR GENERAL WILL 155-179
1. Object of the Chapter 155
2. Connection between social and mental groupings 156
(1) Analogy between them 156
(i) Associations of persons and of ideas 156
(ii) Organisation of social groups and of ideas 159
(2) Identity of social and mental groupings 170
(i) Social groups as an aspect of mental systems 170
(ii) Individual minds as structures of
appercipient systems 173
(iii) Social whole as a system of mental systems 175
CHAPTER VIII
NATURE OF THE END OF THE STATE AND CONSEQUENT LIMIT OF STATE ACTION 180-234
1. Distinction between Individual and Society
irrelevant to question of Social Means and End 180
2. True contrast: Automatism and Consciousness 181
3. End of State, and Means at its disposal _qua_ State 184
4. State can only secure “external” actions 186
5. Principle of the hindrance of hindrances 190
6. State action as the maintenance of rights 201
_(a)_ System of rights from standpoint of community 203
_(b)_ From standpoint of individuals. “Position” 204
(i) As Rights or recognised claims 206
(ii) As Obligations or recognised debts 206
_(c)_ Rights as implying Duties 208
(i) When Duty = Obligation 208
(ii) When Duty = Purpose, which is source of Right 209
_(d)_ Rights, why _recognised_ claims? 210
(i) A “Position” involves recognition 210
(ii) No right based on individual caprice 212
7. State action as punishment 216
(i) Punishment as reformatory 221
(ii) Punishment as retributory 223
(iii) Punishment as deterrent 228
Conclusion. State Action as exercise of a _General Will_ 232
CHAPTER IX
ROUSSEAU’S THEORY AS APPLIED TO THE MODERN STATE:
KANT, FICHTE, HEGEL 235-255
1. Rousseau’s literary influence in Germany 235
2. Freedom and Social Contract in Kant 238
3. Freedom and Social Contract in Fichte 244
4. Freedom in Hegel’s _Philosophy of Right_ 247
_(a)_ Supposed reactionary tendency in Hegel 248
_(b)_ Relation of analysis and idealisation 290
5. The Philosophy of Right as a chapter in the
Philosophy of Mind 252
CHAPTER X
THE ANALYSIS OF A MODERN STATE. HEGEL’S “PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT” 256-295
1. Logic of Society as an _ideal fact_ 256
2. Sphere of Right or Law and its sub-divisions 258
3. The Letter of the Law 260
4. The Morality of Conscience 262
5. Social Ethics 266
(i) Social Ethics as an actual world 266
(ii) Social Ethics as the nature of self-consciousness 267
6. Sub-divisions of Social Ethics. The Family 269
_(a)_ Depends on natural fact 269
_(b)_ Is factor in the State 270
_(c)_ Ethical and Monogamous Household 271
_(d)_ Relation to Property 272
7. Bourgeois Society. Justice, State Regulation, and
Trade Societies 272
8. The State proper, or Political Constitution 280
9. Public discussion and public opinion 285
10. Criticism of such an analysis of the Modern State 287
CHAPTER XI
INSTITUTIONS CONSIDERED AS ETHICAL IDEAS 296-334
1. The individual soul and the social mind 296
2. Institutions as common substance of minds 297
3. The Family and Property as elements of mind 299
4. The District or Neighbourhood as an element of mind 304
5. Class as an element of mind. “The Poor” as an ethical idea 310
6. The Nation-State as an element of mind 320
7. Morality of public and private action 322
8. Humanity as an element of mind 328
_(a)_ Humanity not predicable of mankind as a whole 328
_(b)_ Humanity does not = mankind as a true community 329
_(c)_ Dichotomous expressions for humanity and mankind 330
_(d)_ The self beyond any actual society; Art,
Philosophy, Religion 332
INDEX 335
{1}
CHAPTER I.
RISE AND CONDITIONS OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY OF THE STATE
1. First, it will be well to indicate, in a very few words, what is
implied in a “philosophical theory,” as distinguished from theories
which make no claim to be philosophical. The primary difference
is, that a philosophical treatment is the study of some thing as a
whole and for its own sake. In a certain sense it may be compared
to the gaze of a child or of an artist. It deals, that is, with the
total and unbroken effect of its object. It desires to ascertain
what a thing is, what is its full characteristic and being, its
achievement in the general act of the world. History, explanation,
analysis into cause and conditions, have value for it only in so
far as they contribute to the intelligent estimation of the fullest
nature and capabilities of the real individual whole which is under
investigation. We all know that a flower is one thing for the
geometrician, another for the chemist, another for {2} the botanist,
and another, again, for the artist. Now, philosophy can of course
make no pretension to cope with any one of the specialists on his
own ground. But the general nature of the task imposed upon it is
this: aiding itself, so far as possible, by the trained vision of all
specialists, to make some attempt to see the full significance of
the flower as a word or letter in the great book of the world. And
this we call studying it, as it is, and for its own sake, without
reservation or presupposition. It is assumed, then, for the purpose
of a philosophical treatment, that everything, and more particularly
in this case the political life of man, has a nature of its own,
which is worthy of investigation on its own merits and for its own
sake. How its phases come into being, or what causes or conditions
have played a part in its growth, are other questions well worthy of
investigation. But the philosophical problem is rather to see our
object as it is and to learn what it is, to estimate, so to speak,
its kind and degree of self-maintenance in the world, than to trace
its history or to analyse its causation.
Yet such phrases as “what it is” and “for its own sake” must not
mislead us. They do not mean that the nature of any reality which we
experience can be appreciated in isolation from the general world of
life and knowledge. On the contrary, they imply that when fully and
fairly considered from the most thoroughly adequate point of view,
our subject matter will reveal its true position and relations with
reference to all else that man can do and can know. This position and
these relations constitute its rank or significance in the totality
{3} of experience, and this value or significance--in the present
case, what the form of life in question enables man to do and to
become--is just what we mean by its nature “in itself,” or its full
and complete nature, or its significance when thoroughly studied “for
its own sake” from an adequate point of view. Further illustrations
of the distinction between an adequate point of view and partial or
limited modes of consideration, and of the relations between the
former and the latter, will be found in the following chapter.
2. In a certain sense it would be true to say that wherever men have
lived, there has always been a “State.” That is to say, there has
been some association or corporation, larger than the family, and
acknowledging no power superior to itself. But it is obvious that
the experience of a State in this general sense of the word is not
co-extensive with true political experience, and that something much
more definite than this is necessary to awaken curiosity as to the
nature and value of the community in which man finds himself to be a
member.
Such curiosity has been awakened and sustained principally if not
exclusively by two kindred types of associated life--the City-state
of ancient Greece, and the Nation-state of the modern world. It will
throw light on the nature of our subject if we glance rapidly at the
characteristics to which it is due that political philosophy began in
connection with the former, and revived in connection with the latter.
In considering the Greek city-states in connection with the birth of
political philosophy, there are three points which press upon our
attention:{4}
_a_. the type of experience which they presented;
_b_. the type of mind which that experience implied; and
_c_. the type of interpretation which such a mind elicited from
such an experience.
_a_. A Greek city-state presented a marked contrast to the modes
of human association which prevailed in the non-Greek world. It
differed from them above all things by its distinct individuality.
No doubt there was a recognisable character in the life and conduct
of Egypt or of Assyria, of Phoenicia or of Israel. But the community
which has a youth, a maturity, and a decadence, as distinct as those
of a single human being, and very nearly as self-conscious; which
has a tone and spirit as recognisable in the words and bearing of
its members as those of a character in a play; and which expresses
its mind in the various regions of human action and endurance
much as an artist expresses his individuality in the creations of
his genius--such a community had existed, before the beginnings
of the modern world, in the Greek city-state, and in the Greek
city-state alone. A political consciousness in the strict sense
was a necessary factor in the experience of such a commonwealth.
The demand for “autonomy”--government by one’s own law,--and for
“isonomy”--government according to equal law--though far from
being always satisfied, was inherent in the Greek nature; and its
strenuousness was evinced by the throes of revolution and the labours
of legislation which were shaking the world of Greece at the dawn of
history. The very instrument of all political action was invented,
so far as we can see, by the Greeks. The simple device by which an
orderly vote is {5} taken, and the minority acquiesce in the will
of the majority as if it had been their own--an invention no less
definite than that of the lever or the wheel--is found for the first
time as an everyday method of decision in Greek political life.
_b_. Such a type of experience implies a corresponding type of mind.
It is not surprising that science and philosophy should owe their
birth to the genius from which politics sprang. For politics is
the expression of reason in the relations that bind man to man, as
science and philosophy are the expression of it in the relations
which link together man’s whole experience. The mind which can
recognise itself practically in the order of the commonwealth,
can recognise itself theoretically in the order of nature. And
ultimately, though not at first (for curiosity is awakened by
objects perceived in space and time, before attention is turned to
the very hinge and centre of man’s own being), science passes into
philosophy; and mind, and conduct, and the political consciousness,
are themselves made objects of speculation. It has become a
commonplace that this transference of curiosity from the outer to the
inner--really, that is, from the partial to the total world--took
shape in the work of Socrates, who invested with the greatness of
his own intelligence and character a movement which the needs of
the age had rendered inevitable. And thus there arose the ethical
and political philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, the successors of
Socrates, just at the time when the distinctive political life of
Greece was beginning to decay.
_c_. This philosophy, like all genuine philosophy, {6} was an
interpretation of the experience presented to it; and in this case
the interpretation was due to minds which were themselves a part
of the phenomena on which they reflected. Such minds, hostile as
they may feel themselves to the spirit of the age, and however
passionately they may cry out for reform or for revolution, are none
the less its representatives; and their interpretation, though it
may modify and even mutilate the phenomena, will nevertheless be
found to throw the central forces and principles of the time into
the clearest light. So Plato’s negative treatment of the family, and
of other elements which seem essential to Greek civilisation, was
no bar to his grasping, and representing with unequalled force, the
central principle of the life around him. The fundamental idea of
Greek political philosophy, as we find it in Plato and Aristotle,
is that the human mind can only attain its full and proper life in
a community of minds, or more strictly in a community pervaded by a
single mind, uttering itself consistently though differently in the
life and action of every member of the community. This conception
is otherwise expressed by such phrases as “the State is natural,”
_i.e._ is a growth or evolution, apart from which the end implied
in man’s origin cannot be attained; “the State is prior to the
individual,” _i.e._ there is a principle or condition underlying
the life of the human individual, which will not admit of that life
becoming what it has in it to be, unless the full sphere or arena
which is constituted by the life of the State is realised in fact.
The whole is summed up in the famous expression of Aristotle, “Man is
a creature formed for the life of the City-state.” The {7} working
out of this idea, as we find it in Plato’s commonwealth, is bizarre
to our minds; but its difficulty really lies in its simplicity and
directness; and there is no sound political philosophy which is not
an embodiment of Plato’s conception. The central idea is this: that
every class of persons in the community--the statesman, the soldier,
the workman--has a certain distinctive type of mind which fits its
members for their functions, and that the community essentially
consists in the working of these types of mind in their connection
with one another, which connection constitutes their subordination
to the common good. This working or adjustment obviously depends in
the last resort on the qualities present in the innermost souls of
the members of the community; and thus the outward organisation of
society is really as it were a body which at every point and in every
movement expresses the characteristics of a mind. We must not pause
here to follow up the consequences of such a conception; but it will
be seen at once, by those who reflect upon it, to imply that every
individual mind must have its qualities drawn out in various ways to
answer to--in fact, to constitute--the relations and functions which
make up the community; and that in this sense every mind is a mirror
or impression of the whole community from its own peculiar point of
view. The ethical assumption or principle of Plato’s conception is,
that a healthy organisation of the commonwealth will involve, by a
necessary connection, a healthy balance and adjustment of qualities
in the individual soul, and _vice versa_. An attempt will be made
to illustrate this principle further in the latter portion {8} of
the present work. The general nature of Plato’s conception--the
characteristic conception of Greek political philosophy--is all that
concerns us here.
It is important to observe that during the very genesis of this
philosophical conception of society, an antagonistic view was
powerfully represented. The individual could not freely find himself
in the community unless he was capable of repudiating it; the
possibility of negation, as a logician might express it, is necessary
to a really significant affirmation. Thus we find in the very age of
Plato and Aristotle the most startling anticipations of those modern
ideas which seem diametrically opposed to theirs. We find the idea
of nature identified not with the mature fulness, but with the empty
starting point of life; we meet with the phenomena of vegetarianism,
water-drinking, the reduction of dress to its minimum, in short, the
familiar symptoms of the longing for the “return to nature,” with all
that it implies; we find law and political unity treated as a tissue
of artifice and convention, and the individual disdaining to identify
himself with the citizenship of a single state, but claiming to be a
stranger in the city and a citizen of the world. To prove that these
ideas were not without their justification, it is enough to point out
that in some instances they were accompanied by a polemic against
slavery, which, as a form of solidarity, was upheld in a qualified
sense at least by Aristotle. The existence of this negative criticism
is enough to show how distinctly the Greek intellect set before
itself the fundamental problem of the relation between the individual
and society, and of how high a quality was the bond of union which
{9} maintained this relation in such intimacy among minds of a temper
so analytic.
3. Many writers have told the story of the change which came over the
mind of Greece when the independent sovereignty of its City-states
became a thing of the past. For our purpose it is enough to draw
attention to the fact that with this change the political or social
philosophy of the great Greek time not only lost its supremacy,
but almost ceased to be understood. From this period forward, till
the rise of the modern Nation-states, men’s thoughts about life
and conduct were cast in the mould of moral theory, of religious
mysticism and theology, or of jurisprudence. The individual demanded
in the sphere of ethics and religion to be shown a life sufficing
to himself apart from any determinate human society--a problem
which Plato and Aristotle had assumed to be insoluble. Stoicism
and Epicureanism, the earliest non-national creeds of the western
world, triumphantly developed the ideas which at first, as we saw,
were little more than a rebellion against the central Socratic
philosophy. Cosmopolitanism, the conception of humanity, the ideal
of a “Society of Friends”--the Epicurean league--from which women
were not excluded, and the precept of “not expecting from life more
than it has to give,” take the place of the highly individualised
commonwealth, with its strenuous masculine life of war and politics,
and its passionate temper which felt that nothing had been
accomplished so long as anything remained undone.
With this change of temper in the civilised world there is brought
into prominence a great deal of {10} human nature which had not found
expression through the immediate successors of Socrates. In the
period between Aristotle and Cicero there is more than a whisper of
the sound which meets us like a trumpet blast in the New Testament,
“neither Jew nor Greek, barbarian nor Scythian, bond nor free.” But
the unworldliness which took final shape in Christianity was destined
to undergo a long transmigration through shapes of other-worldliness
before it should return in modern thought to the unity from which it
started; and the history of ethics and religion has little bearing
upon true political theory between the death of Aristotle and the
awakening of the modern consciousness in the Reformation.
In so far as the political ideas of antiquity were preserved
to modern times otherwise than in the manuscripts of Plato and
Aristotle, the influence which preserved them was that of Roman
Jurisprudence. The Roman rule, though it stereotyped the state of
things in which genuine political function and the spur of freedom
were unknown, had one peculiar gift by which it handed to posterity
the germs of a great conception of human life. This is not the place
to describe at length the origin of that vast practical induction
from the working of the “foreigners’ court” at Rome which obtained
for itself the name of the Law of Nations, and which, as tinged with
ideal theory, was known as the Law of Nature. Whatever fallacies may
be near at hand when “natural right” is named, the conception that
there is in man, as such, something which must be respected, a law
of life which is his “nature,” being indeed another name {11} for
his reason, and in some sense or other a “freedom” and an “equality”
which are his birthright--this conception was not merely a legacy
from Stoic ideas, which had almost a religious inspiration, but was
solidly founded on the judicial experience of the most practical race
that the world has ever seen.
4. In order that the forces which lay hidden in the conception
of Natural Right and Freedom, like the powers of vegetation in a
seed, might unfold themselves in the modern world, it was necessary
that conditions should recur analogous to those which had first
elicited them. And these earlier conditions were those of the Greek
City-state; for it was here, as we have seen, that the conception of
man’s nature had flourished, as the idea of a purposive evolution
into a full and many-sided social life, while in Stoic philosophy and
Roman juristic theory it had become more and more a shibboleth and
a formula which lost in depth of meaning what it gained in range of
application.
To restore their ancient significance, expanded in conformity with
a larger order of things, to the traditional formulae, demanded
just the type of experience which was furnished by the modern
Nation-state. The growth of Nation-states in modern Europe was in
progress, we are told, from the ninth to the fifteenth century. And
it is towards and after the close of this period, and especially
in the seventeenth century when the national consciousness of the
English people, as of others, had become thoroughly awakened, that
political speculation in the strict sense begins again, {12} after
an interval extending back to the Politics of Aristotle. To let one
example serve for many; when we read John of Gaunt’s praises of
England in Shakespeare’s Richard II., we feel ourselves at once in
contact with the mind of a social unity, such as necessarily to raise
in any inquiring intelligence all those problems which were raised
for Plato and Aristotle by the individuality of Athens and Sparta.
And so we see the earliest political speculation of the modern world
groping, as it were, for ideas by help of which to explain the
experience of an individual self-governing sovereign society. And
for the most part the ideas that offer themselves are those of Roman
Jurisprudence, but distorted by political applications and by the
rhetoric of Protestant fanaticism. As Mr. Ritchie [1] points out, the
conception of natural right and a law of nature makes a strange but
effective coalition with the temper of the Wycliffite cry
“When Adam dalf, and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?”
The notions of contract, of force, of representation in a
single legal “person,” are now applied separately or together
to the phenomenon of the self-governing individual community.
But the solution remains imperfect, and the fundamental fact of
self-government refuses to be construed either as the association of
individuals, originally free and equal, for certain limited purposes,
or as the absolute absorption of their wills in the “person” of a
despotic sovereign.
[1] _Natural Rights_, p. 8.
The revival of a true philosophical meaning {13} within the abstract
terms of juristic tradition was the work of the eighteenth century
as a whole. For the sake of clearness, and with as much historical
justice as ever attaches to an attribution of the kind, we may
connect it with the name of a single man--Jean Jacques Rousseau. For
it is Rousseau who stands midway between Hobbes and Locke on the
one hand, and Kant and Hegel on the other, and in whose writings
the actual revival of the full idea of human nature may be watched
from paragraph to paragraph as it struggles to throw off the husk of
an effete tradition. Between Locke and Rousseau the genius of Vico
and of Montesquieu had given a new meaning to the dry formulae of
law by showing the sap of society circulating within them. Moreover
the revived experience of the Greeks came in the nick of time. It
was influential with Rousseau himself, and little as he grasped the
political possibilities of a modern society, in matters of sheer
principle this influence led him on the whole in the right direction.
His insight was just, when it showed him that every political whole
presented the same problem which had been presented by the Greek
City-state, and involved the same principles. And he bequeathed
to his successors the task of substituting for the mere words and
fictions of contract, nature, and original freedom, the idea of the
common life of an essentially social being, expressing and sustaining
the human will at its best.
According to the view here indicated, the resurrection of true
political philosophy out of the dead body of juristic abstractions
was inaugurated by {14} Vico and Montesquieu, and decisively declared
itself in Jean Jacques Rousseau. The idea which most of us have
formed of “the new Evangel of a _Contrat Social_” is not in harmony
with this representation of the matter. Was it, we may be asked,
a genuine political philosophy which inspired the leaders of the
French Revolution? And the question cannot be evaded by denying all
connection between the theory and the practice of that age. The
phraseology of the revolutionary declarations [1]--which will strike
the reader accustomed to nineteenth century socialism as exceedingly
moderate and even conservative in tone--is undoubtedly to a great
extent borrowed from Rousseau’s writings.
[1] See the very interesting collection of documents in the Appendix
to Professor Ritchie’s _Natural Rights_.
Perhaps the truth of the matter may be approached as follows. The
popular rendering of a great man’s views is singularly liable to run
straight into the pit-falls against which he more particularly warned
the world. This could be proved true in an extraordinary degree of
such men as Plato and Spinoza, and still more astonishingly, perhaps,
of the founder of the Christian religion. The reason is obvious. A
great man works with the ideas of his age, and regenerates them. But
in as far as he regenerates them, he gets beyond the ordinary mind;
while in as far as he operates with them, he remains accessible to
it. And his own mind has its ordinary side; the regeneration of
ideas which he is able to effect is not complete, and the notions of
the day not only limit his entire range of achievement--where the
strongest runner will get to must depend on where he starts--but
float about unassimilated {15} within his living stream of thought.
Now all this ordinary side of his mind will partake of the strength
and splendour of his whole nature. And thus he will seem to have
preached the very superstitions which he combated. For in part he
has done so, being himself infected; in part the overwhelming bias
of his interpreters has reversed the meaning of his very warnings,
by transferring the importance, due to his central thought, to some
detail or metaphor which belongs to the lower level of his mind. It
is an old story how Spinoza, “the God-intoxicated man,” was held to
be an “atheist,” when in truth he was rather an “acosmist”; and in
the same way, on a lower plane, the writer who struggled through to
the idea that true sovereignty lay in the dominion of a common social
good as expressed through law and institutions, is held to have
ascribed absolute supremacy to that chance combination of individual
voices in a majority, which he expressly pointed out to have, in
itself, no authority at all.
But there is something more to be said of cases, like that under
discussion, where a great man’s ideas touch the practical world. If
the complete and positive idea becomes narrow and negative as it
impinges upon every-day life, this may be not only a consequence
of its transmission through every-day minds, but a qualification
for the work it has to do. The narrower truth may be, so to speak,
the cutting edge of the more complete, as the negation is of the
affirmation. And the vulgar notion of popular sovereignty and of
natural right may have been necessary to do a work which a more
organic social theory would have been too delicate to achieve. {16}
Like the faith in a speedy second coming of Christ among the early
Christians, the gospel according to Jean Jacques may have taken for
the minds of Revolutionary France a form which was serviceable as
well as inevitable at the moment. If, as we said above, the great man
is always misunderstood, it seems to follow that when his germinal
ideas have been sown they must assert themselves first in lower
phases if they are ever to bear fruit at all. And therefore, while
not denying the influence of Rousseau on the Revolution, we shall
attempt to show that he had another and a later influence, more
adequate to the true reach of his genius.
{17}