THE PARADOX OF POLITICAL OBLIGATION: SELF-GOVERNMENT.
1. To every-day common sense there is something paradoxical in the
phenomena of political obligation; however it may acquiesce in
what, although not satisfactorily explicable, is plainly seen to
be necessary. Where, indeed, we meet with any form of absolutely
despotic government, we have not so much a paradox as a defect;
for, although government may exist in such a shape, it is open to
question how far true political obligation can be said to arise
under such a system. In as far as it does so, we shall find that the
fact is due to unacknowledged conditions and relations, which we
shall more easily analyse as they appear in free or constitutional
states. It would then be easy to show, if we were interested in
doing so, that the principles which will have been recognised as
operative in the freest states known to history, are and have
been, in various degrees, at the root of the common life of every
state or community which has held together effectively enough to
be treated as in any sense a political whole. But this would be a
historical investigation, unnecessary for the purpose of pure {54}
social theory. In this we may fairly start from the highest form of
political experience, in which, as we shall see, the mere defects
of political immaturity being outgrown, the paradox of political
obligation emerges with intensified emphasis.
Let us take as our starting point, then, the conception of
“self-government,” to which, it will be admitted on all hands, the
thought and feeling of mature communities has clung both in ancient
and modern times, as in some way containing the true root and ground
of political obligation. We shall find in it a striking illustration
of the strength and weakness of wide-spread popular notions. A
universal popular notion cannot but have a hold of some essential
truth, otherwise it could not survive and spread, and form a working
theory for an immense area of experience. On the other hand, a
popular notion, as such, cannot be critical of itself and aware of
its own foundations; and so in defending and applying itself it is
pretty sure to plunge deep into fallacy. “Self-government” is an idea
which will be found, as has been said, to contain the true ground and
nature of political obligation. But the rough and ready application
of it which, for example, represents the individual as simply one
with the community, and the community therefore as infallible in its
action affecting him, is a pure example of fallacy, and may be justly
characterised as a confusion pretending to be a synthesis. Of this
idea as of so many we must say that those who have pronounced it to
be self-contradictory have understood it much better than most of
those who accept it as self-evident.
In the conception of self-government then we {55} have the paradox of
obligation in its purest form. As applied to the individual himself,
it gives the paradox of Ethical Obligation. As applied to the
individuals who compose a society, it gives the paradox of Political
Obligation. This must be the preliminary distinction by which we
approach the subject; but we shall find that the two problems and the
two cases cannot be ultimately separated, although they are to be
distinguished in a certain respect.
The paradox of Ethical Obligation starts from what is accepted as
a “self,” and asks how it can exercise authority or coercion over
itself; how, in short, a metaphor drawn from the relations of some
persons to others can find application within what we take to be the
limits of an individual mind. [1]
[1] On this problem, see below, p. 139.
The paradox of Political Obligation starts from what is accepted as
authority or social coercion, and asks in what way the term “self,”
derived from the “individual” mind, can be applicable at once to the
agent and patient in such coercion, exercised _prima facie_ by some
persons over others. Both relations and their connection have been
pointed out by Plato. [1]
[1] _Republic_, 430, 431.
Our object in the present chapter is to enforce the reality of the
difficulties which attach to the idea of political self-government,
so long as current assumptions as to the union of individuals in
society are maintained. And for this purpose we are to examine the
views of some very distinguished philosophers to whom the paradox
has appeared irreconcilable, and law or government has seemed {56}
essentially antagonistic to the self or true individuality of man;
while the term self, if applied to the collective group by or within
which government is undoubtedly exercised, appears to them an empty
and misleading expression. The curious and significant point, to
which we shall call attention, is, in brief, that while maintaining
law and government to be in their nature antagonistic to the self of
man--whether as pain to pleasure or as fetters to individuality--they
nevertheless admit with one voice that a certain minimum of this
antagonistic element is necessary to the development of the sentient
or rational self. We have here a dualism which challenges examination.
2. The attitude towards law and government which Bentham adopted
(1748-1832) was in a great degree that of the philanthropic reformer.
His principle of the greatest happiness of the greatest number is
said [1] to have been derived from Beccaria, whose work on “Crimes
and Penalties” had great influence throughout Europe. And Howard,
“the philanthropist,” who was just twenty-two years Bentham’s senior
(1726-1790), represented a revolt against the abuses of the treatment
of criminals at that time, by which Bentham, who eulogised him as
“a martyr and apostle,” was strongly affected. The movement which
Bentham led was, in short, markedly hostile to the existing system
of law, and to the reasonings of its advocates. And substantial as
his knowledge and constructive genius proved to be, it never lost
the character which the direction of his approach to the subject had
marked upon it, a character of suspicion and antagonism, which is
{57} expressed in his description of law as a necessary evil, and
government as a choice of evils. [2]
[1] Professor Holland in _Encycl. Brit_., art.; Bentham.”
[2] Bentham, _Principles of Legislation_, p. 48.
Pain being the ultimate evil, it is clear why, on Bentham’s
principles, every law is an evil. For every law, for him, is
contrary to liberty; and every infraction of liberty is followed by
a natural sentiment of pain. [1] Against those who would deny the
proposition that every law is contrary to liberty he brings a charge
of perversion of language, in that they restrict liberty to the right
of doing what is not injurious to others. They give the term, that is
to say, a partly positive implication. For him then liberty has the
simplest and apparently widest meaning, [2] which includes liberty to
do evil, and is defined, we must suppose, purely as the absence of
restraint. And he therefore has no doubt whatever that the citizen
can acquire rights only by sacrificing part of his liberty. And in
this there is an appearance of truth, if we forget that in saying
that a part of one’s liberty is sacrificed it is implied that one
had, to begin with, a certain area of liberty, of which a portion
is abandoned to save the rest. But the idea of any such antecedent
liberty is just such a fiction as Bentham himself delighted to
expose. It is true, however, that some degree of restraint on what
we can _now_ easily imagine ourselves free to do, is involved in
political society. The point on which we have to fix our attention,
for the purposes of social theory, is the remarkable representation
of this state of things under the figure, as it were, of an amount of
general liberty, {58} which is increased by subtraction, or which can
only attain its maximum by the conversion of a certain edge or border
of it, so to speak, into constraint. This border of constraint is
implied to be capable of a minimum, such as to condition a maximum of
liberty, or possible individual initiative; a relation which, being
at first sight contradictory, demands further analysis. For it would
appear that if the sacrifice of some liberty is to be instrumental
to the increase of the whole amount, that whole can hardly be a
homogeneous given quantity, like, for instance, a piece of land; for
such a one must surely be diminished by the subtraction of any part
of it. It must, one would infer, be something which has a complex
nature like that of a living plant, such that certain restrictions or
negations which are essential to its prosperity are dictated by its
individual characteristics (which must be positive), and express the
same principle with them; and therefore are wholly relative to the
positive type and phase of the plant to be cultivated. Only in some
such sense can it be intelligible how constraint is instrumental to
effective self-assertion.
[1] Bentham, _Principles of Legislation_, p. 94.
[2] It is not really the widest, as will appear in the sequel.
But if this is so, the restrictive influences of law and government,
which are the measure of the constraint imposed, cannot be alien to
the human nature which they restrict, and ought not to be set down
as in their own nature antagonistic to liberty or to the making
the most of the human self. The root of the difficulty obviously
lies in assuming that the pressure of the claims of “others” in
society is a mere general curtailment of the liberty of the “one,”
while acknowledging, not {59} contrary to fact, but contrary to
the hypothesis of that curtailment, that the one, so far from
surrendering some of his capacity for life through his fellowship
with others, acquires and extends that capacity wholly in and through
such fellowship. On the above assumption the terms of the paradox
of self-government become irreconcilable, and government is made an
evil of which it is impossible to explain how it ministers to the
self which stands for the good. So long as to every individual, taken
as the true self, the restraint enforced by the impact of others is
alien and a diminution of the self, this result is inevitable.
It is instructive, therefore, to note Bentham’s uncompromising
hostility to all the theories of philosophical jurists. The common
point of all their theories, from Hobbes and Grotius to Montesquieu
and Rousseau, not to mention Kant and his successors, has lain in the
fact that their authors divined under the forms of power and command,
exercised by some over others, a substantive and general element of
positive human nature, which they attempted to drag to light by one
analogy after another. But neither Montesquieu’s “eternal relations,”
nor the “Social Contract,” nor “General Will,” nor “Natural Rights”
of other thinkers find favour in Bentham’s eyes. One and all they
are to him fiction and fallacy. He can understand nothing in law but
the character of a command; he can see no positive relation of it to
human nature beyond the degree in which it dispenses with the pain of
restraint while increasing the pleasure of liberty.
To describe the magnificent success which {60} attended the use of
this rule of thumb in the practical work of reform does not fall
within our immediate subject. Our purpose was merely to illustrate
the paradox implied in the conception of self-government, by pointing
out how fundamentally hostile to one another Bentham took its
constituent elements to be.
3. The same point may be further insisted on by examining the main
ideas of Mill’s “Liberty,” without by any means professing to give
a full account of Mill’s opinions on the relation of individuals
to society. What indeed is instructive in his position, for our
immediate purpose, is that, having so deep a sense, as he has, of
social solidarity, he nevertheless treats the central life of the
individual as something to be carefully fenced round against the
impact of social forces.
i. Mill’s idea of Individuality is plainly biassed by the Benthamite
tradition that law is an evil. It is to be remembered that Anarchism
of a speculative kind, the inevitable complement of a hide-bound
Conservatism, was current in the beginning of this century, as in
Godwin and Shelley. Thus we find concentrated in a few pages of
the “Liberty” [1] all those ideas on the nature of Individuality,
Originality, and Eccentricity, which are most opposed to the
teaching derived by later generations in England from the revival of
philosophy and criticism. It is worth while, after reading Mill’s
observations upon the relation of individuality to the Calvinistic
theory of life, [2] to turn to the estimate expressed by Mark
Pattison [3] of the force of individual character generated by {61}
the rule of Calvin at Geneva. That the individuality, or genius,
the fulness of life and completeness of development which Mill so
justly appreciates, is not nourished and evoked by the varied play
of relations and obligations in society, but lies in a sort of inner
self, to be cherished by enclosing it, as it were, in an impervious
globe, is a notion which neither modern logic [4] nor modern art
criticism will admit. In the same way, the connection of originality
and eccentricity, on which Mill insists, appears to us to-day to be
a fallacious track of thought; and in general, in all these matters,
we tend to accept the principle that, in order to go beyond a point
of progress, it is necessary to have reached it; and in order to
destroy a law, it is necessary to have fulfilled it. Here, however,
is the heart of the point on which we are insisting. If individuality
and originality mean or depend upon the absence of law and of
obligation; if eccentricity is the type of the fully developed self,
and if the community, penetrated by a sense of universal relations,
is therefore a prey to monotony and uniformity, then it needs no
further words to show that law is a curtailment of human nature, the
necessity of which remains inexplicable, so that self-government is a
contradiction in terms.
[1] pp. 35-9.
[2] _Ib._, p. 35.
[3] _Essays_, vol. I., “Calvin.”
[4] See below, p. 79.
ii. How then does Mill bring the two terms into relation? How does
he represent the phenomenon that, in the life of every society,
the factors of self and of government have to be reconciled, or at
anyrate to coexist?
To find the answer to this question, the whole {62} of the chapter,
“Of the limits of the authority of society over the individual,” [1]
should be carefully studied. A few characteristic sentences may be
quoted here.
[1] _On Liberty_, ch. iv.
“What, then, is the rightful limit to the sovereignty of
the individual over himself? Where does the authority of
society begin? How much of human life should be assigned
to individuality, and how much to society?
“Each will receives its proper share, if each has that
which more particularly concerns it. To individuality
should belong the part of life in which it is chiefly the
individual that is interested; to society, the part which
chiefly interests society.”
Every one who lives in society, he continues in effect, is bound
not to interfere with certain interests of others (explicitly or
implicitly constituted as “rights”), and is bound to take his fair
share of the sacrifices incurred for the defence of society and
its members. These conditions society may enforce, at all costs to
recalcitrants. Further, it may punish by opinion, though not by law,
acts hurtful to others, but not going so far as to violate their
rights. But acts which affect only the agent, or need not affect
others unless they like, may be punished, we are given to understand,
neither by law nor by opinion. Mill expects his conclusions to be
disputed, and the following is the conclusion of the passage in which
he explains and re-affirms it:
“... when a person disables himself, by conduct purely
self-regarding, from the performance of some definite
duty incumbent on him to the public, he is guilty of
a social {63} offence. No person ought to be punished
simply for being drunk; but a soldier or policeman should
be punished for being drunk on duty. Wherever, in short,
there is a definite damage, or a definite risk of damage
either to an individual or to the _public, the case is
taken out of the province of liberty, and placed in that
of morality or law_.” [1]
[1] Italics are mine.
It will probably occur at once to the reader that, considered as a
practical rule, the view here maintained would by no means curtail
unduly the province of social interference. We should rather
anticipate that it would leave an easy opening for a transition
from administrative nihilism to administrative absolutism; and some
such transition seems to have taken place in Mill’s later views.
This tendency to a complete _bouleversement_ is the characteristic
of all conceptions which proceed by assigning different areas to
the several factors of an inseparable whole, which then reasserts
itself in its wholeness within the area of either factor to which
we may happen to attend. Indeed, even in the passage before us, the
defence of individuality has already well-nigh turned round into
its annihilation. Every act that carries a definite damage to any
other person belongs to the sphere of law, and every act that can
be supposed likely to cause such a damage, to that of morality; and
individuality has what is left. The extraordinary demarcation between
the sphere of morality and that of liberty is to be accounted for,
no doubt, by the Benthamite tradition which identified the moral and
social sanctions; so that in this usage the sphere of morality means
much the same as what, {64} in the first passage referred to, was
indicated as the sphere of opinion.
Now, it is obvious that the distinction which Mill is attempting to
describe and explain is one practically recognised by every society.
The question is whether it can be rightly described and explained
by a demarcation which, if strictly pressed, excludes individuality
from every act of life that has an important social bearing; while,
owing to the two-sided nature of all action, it becomes perfectly
arbitrary in its practical working as a criterion. For every act
of mine affects both myself and others; and it is a matter of mood
and momentary urgency which aspect may be pronounced characteristic
and essential. It may safely be said that no demarcation between
self-regarding and other-regarding action can possibly hold good.
What may hold good, and what Mill’s examples show to be present to
his mind, is a distinction between the moral and the “external”
aspects of action, on the ground of their respective accessibility
to the means of coercion which are at the disposal of society. The
peculiar sense in which the term “external” is here employed will
explain itself below. [1]
[1] See ch. viii. below.
For our present purpose, however, what we have to observe is merely
that the demarcation between individuality and society, contrived in
defence of the former, has pretty nearly annihilated it. And thus we
see once more how overwhelming is the _prima facie_ appearance that,
in the idea of self-government, the factors of self and government
are alien and opposed; and yet how hopeless it remains {65} to
explain the part played by these factors in actual society, so long
as we aim at a demarcation between them as opposites, rather than at
a relative distinction between them as manifestations of the same
principle in different media.
iii. A few words may here be said on the applications by which Mill
illustrates his doctrine, in order to point out what confusion
results from relying on a demarcation which cannot strictly be made.
It will be noted in the first place that he objects altogether to
the attempt to prevent by punishment either immorality or irreligion
as such. [1] This objection a sound social theory must uphold. But
if we look at Mill’s reason for it, we find it simply to be that
such an attempt infringes liberty, by interfering with action which
is purely self-regarding. Without entering further upon the endless
argument whether this or any action is indeed purely self-regarding,
we may observe that by taking such ground, Mill causes the above
objection, which is substantially sound, to appear as on all fours
with others which are at any rate very much more doubtful. Such is
the objection on principle to all restrictions imposed upon trade
with a distinct view to protecting the consumer, not from fraud,
but from opportunities of consumption injurious to himself. The
regulation or prohibition of the traffic in alcoholic liquors is of
course the main question here at issue; and it may be admitted that
Mill’s discussion, with the many distinctions which he lays down,
is full of shrewdness and suggestiveness. But the ultimate ground
which he takes, as above stated, is quite different from the genuine
reasons which exist {66} against attempting to enforce morality by
law and penalty, and introduces confusion into the whole question of
State interference by ranking the two objections together. Closely
analogous are his objections to the statutes respecting unlawful
games, [2] which, whether wise or unwise, are quite a different thing
from an attempt to punish personal immorality as such. And lastly,
the same principle is illustrated by his whole attitude to the strong
feeling and the various legal obligations which determine and support
the monogamous family. In maintaining the general indissolubility
of marriage, and supporting the parental power, the State is
interfering, for him, with the freedom of parties to a contract, and
conferring power over individuals, the children, who have a right to
be separately considered. Such interference is for him _ipso facto_
of a suspected nature. It is an interference hostile to liberty; and
whether it is or is not an external condition of good life, which
the State is able effectively to maintain, is a question which he
does not discuss. Throughout all these objections to authoritative
interference we trace the peculiar prejudice that the criterion of
its justifiability lies in the boundary line between self and others,
rather than in the nature of what coercive authority is and is not
able to do towards the promotion of good life. On many points indeed,
when the simple protection of “others” is concerned, Mill’s doctrine
leads to sound conclusions. Such, for example, is the problem of
legislation after the pattern of the Factory Acts.
[1] Pp. 48 and 50.
[2] P. 59.
But yet a strange nemesis attaches to grounds {67} alleged with
insufficient discrimination. Just as, by ranking inner morality and
outer action alike under the name of freedom, Mill is led to object
to interference which may be perfectly justified and effectual; so
by the same confusion he is led to advocate coercive treatment in
impossibly stringent forms, and in cases where it runs extreme risk
of thwarting a true moral development. We are amazed when he strongly
implies, in respect to the education of children and the prospect of
supporting a family, that moral obligations [1] ought to be enforced
by law. The proposal of universal State-enacted examinations by
way of enforcing the parental duty of educating children, to the
exclusion of the task of providing education by public authority,
in which Mill sees danger to individuality, opens a prospect of a
Chinese type of society, from which, happily, the good sense of
Englishmen has recoiled. And just the reverse of his proposal has
come to pass under the influence of the logic of experience. The
State has taken care that the external conditions of an elementary
education are provided, and, while doing this, has no doubt exercised
compulsion in order that these conditions may be a reality. But the
individual inquisition by examination is tending to drop out of the
system; and the practical working of the public education is more and
more coming to be that the State sees to it that certain conditions
are maintained, of which the parents’ interest and public spirit
leads them to take advantage. Sheer compulsion is not the way to
enforce a moral obligation.
[1] Pp. 62 and 64.
{68} Still more startling is the suggestion that it might be just to
interdict marriage to those unable to show the means of supporting
a family, on the ground of possible evil both to the children
themselves through poverty, and to others through over-population.
This is a case in which authoritative interference (except on account
of very definite physical or mental defects) must inevitably defeat
its object. No foresight of others can gauge the latent powers to
meet and deal with a future indefinite responsibility; and the result
of scrupulous timidity, in view of such responsibilities, is seen in
the tendency to depopulation which affects that very country from
which Mill probably drew his argument. To leave the responsibility
as fully as possible where it has been assumed is the best that law
can do, and appeals to a spring of energy deeper than compulsion can
reach.
Thus we have seen that by discriminating the spheres of
non-interference and interference, according to a supposed
demarcation between the sphere of “self” and of “others,” a
hopelessly confused classification has been introduced. Sometimes
the maintenance of external conditions of good life, well within the
power of the State, is forbidden on the same grounds as the direct
promotion of morality, which is impossible to it. In other cases
the enforcement of moral obligations is taken to lie within the
functions of the State, although not only is the enforcement of moral
obligations _per se_ a contradiction in terms, but almost always,
as in the cases in question, the attempt to effect it is sure to
frustrate itself, by destroying the springs on which moral action
depends.
{69} It is worth noticing, in conclusion, that in two examples,
[1] the one trivial, the other that of slavery, both theoretically
and practically very important, Mill recognises a principle wholly
at variance with his own. Here he is aware that it may be right,
according to the principle of liberty, to restrain a man, for
reasons affecting himself alone, from doing what at the moment he
proposes to do. For we are entitled to argue from the essential
nature of freedom to what freedom really demands, as opposed to
what the man momentarily seems to wish. “It is not freedom to be
allowed to alienate his freedom,” as it is not freedom to be allowed
to walk over a bridge which is certain to break down and cause his
death. Here we have in germ the doctrine of the “real” will, and a
conception analogous to that of Rousseau when he speaks of a man
“being forced to be free.”
[1] Pp. 57 and 61.
4. Before referring to Mill’s explicit utterances on the problem of
self-government, which are of the same general character as those
of Mr. Herbert Spencer, it will be well to note some instructive
points in the views of the latter thinker. The study of Mr. Spencer’s
writings, and more especially of those which appear most directly
opposed to the popular conceptions of the day, cannot be too strongly
urged upon the sociological student. And this for two reasons. In the
first place, no other writer has exhibited with equal vividness the
fatal possibilities of a collective governmental stupidity. That in
practice these possibilities are continually tending to become facts,
just as in theory they are {70} represented by recurrent fallacies,
[1] is a proof of the extreme arduousness of the demands made by the
task of self-government upon the people which undertakes it. And no
theorist is fitted to discuss the problem of social unity who has
not realised the arduousness of these demands in all its intensity.
And, in the second place, the student will observe an instructive
meeting of extremes between elements of Mr. Spencer’s ideas and
popular social theories of an opposite cast. The revival of doctrines
of the natural rights of man on a biological foundation [2] is a
case in point. An uncriticised individualism is always in danger of
transformation into an uncritical collectivism. The basis of the two
is in fact the same.
[1] As, for example, in Rousseau’s attempts to explain the action of
a collective mind, in which he constantly falls into the advocacy of
a soulless _régime_ of mass-meetings.
[2] _Man v. State_, p. 95.
i. A comparison of the conception of “right” as entertained by
Bentham and by Herbert Spencer forms a striking commentary on ideas
in which “government” is antagonistic to “self.” Bentham, seeing
clearly that the claims of the actual individual, taken as he
happens to be, are casual and unregulated, fulminates against the
idea of natural right as representing those claims. Right is for
him a creation of the State, and there can be no right which is not
constituted by law. And the truth of the contention seems obvious.
How, in fact, could individual claims or wishes constitute a right,
except as in some way ratified by a more general recognition?
But to Mr. Herbert Spencer the contrary proposition is absolutely
convincing, and, indeed, on {71} their common premises, with equal
reason. [1] It is ridiculous, he points out, to think of a people as
creating rights, which it had not before, by the process of creating
a government in order to create them. It is absurd to treat an
individual as having a share of rights _qua_ member of the people,
while in his private capacity he has no rights at all.
[1] _Ib_., p. 88.
We need not labour this point further. It is obvious that Mr. Herbert
Spencer is simply preferring the opposite extreme, in the antithesis
of “self” and “government,” to that which commended itself to
Bentham. If it is a plain fact that “a right” can only be recognised
by a society, it is no less plain that it can only be real in an
individual. If individual claims, apart from social adjustment, are
arbitrary, yet social recognitions, apart from individual qualities
and relations, are meaningless. As long as the self and the law are
alien and hostile, it is hopeless to do more than choose at random in
which of the two we are to locate the essence of right.
ii. And how alien and hostile the self and the law may seem we see
even more crudely enunciated in Herbert Spencer than in Bentham
or Mill, as the fundamental principle of the tradition has worked
itself more definitely to the front. “The liberty [1] which a citizen
enjoys is to be {72} measured, not by the nature of the governmental
machinery he lives under, whether representative or other, but by
the relative paucity of the restraints it imposes on him.” And so
we are astounded to find it maintained that the positive and active
element in the right to carry on self-sustaining activities is of a
non-social character, depending only on the laws of life, [2] and
if the matter were pushed home, would have to be identified, one
must suppose, with the more strictly animal element of the mind;
while only the negative element arises from social aggregation, and
it is this negative element alone which gives ethical character to
the right to live. Though these distinctions apply primarily to
the ground of the _right to live_, yet it appears inevitable that
they represent the point of view from which the active self or
individuality must be regarded on the principle we are pursuing.
The ground of the right to live, as here stated, is simply the
recognition that life is a good; and if the positive element of this
good is non-social and only the negative is of social origin, and
this alone is ethical, it seems clearly to follow that the making
the most of life--its positive expansion and intensification--is
excluded from the ethical aspects of individuality, and, indeed, that
individuality has no ethical aspect at all. Here is the ultimate
result of accepting as irreducible the distinction between the self
and government, or the negative relation of individuality and law.
Liberty and self are divorced from the moral end, a tendency which we
noted even in Mill. Selves in society are regarded as if they {73}
were bees building their cells, and their ethical character becomes
comparable to the absence of encroachment by which the workers
maintain the hexagonal outline due to their equal impact on each
other as they progress evenly from equidistant centres. The self,
which has ranked through out these views as the end, to whose liberty
all is to be sacrificed, turns out to be the non-ethical element of
life.
[1] _Man v. State_, p. 15. Cf. Seeley, _Introd. to Political
Science_, p. 119: “Perfect liberty is equivalent to total absence
of government.” I have attempted to point out the fallacy of this
in a way applying to its practical and everyday meaning in my essay
on “Liberty and Legislation,” in the volume of essays called _The
Civilisation of Christendom_.
[2] _Man v. State_, p. 98.
Thus, when Professor Huxley speaks of “self-restraint as the essence
of the ethical process,” [1] while “natural liberty” consists in
“the free play of self-assertion,” we see how the whole method of
approaching social and ethical phenomena is turned upside down unless
the paradox of self-government is conquered once for all. The idea
that assertion and maximisation of the self and of the individuality
first become possible and real in and through society, and that
affirmation and not negation is its main characteristic; these
fundamental conceptions of genuine social philosophy [2] can only
be reached through a destructive criticism of the assumptions which
erect that paradox into an insoluble contradiction.
[1] _Evolution and Ethics_; pp. 27 and 31.
[2] For the Greek, it is society which is natural, positive, and
promotive of man’s individuality. See ch. ii. above.
5. We may now restate the essence of the problem of self-government
as it presents itself to the thinkers whom we have been reviewing.
On the assumptions which they accept, the annihilating criticism of
self-government in the first chapter of Mill’s Liberty is indeed
irresistible. He begins by pointing out that in times of political
immaturity, {74} the conception of political liberty consisted
in setting limits to the power which the ruler, considered as an
independent force opposed in interest [1] to his subjects, should
be suffered to exercise over the community. But as it was found
possible, in a greater and greater degree, to make the ruling power
emanate from the periodical choice of the ruled,
“some persons began to think that too much importance
had been attached to the limitation of the power itself.
_That_, it might seem, was a resource against rulers
whose interests were habitually opposed to those of the
people. What was now wanted was, that the rulers should
be identified with the people; that their interest and
will should be the interest and will of the nation. The
nation did not need to be protected against its own will.
There was no fear of its tyrannising over itself.”
Rousseau in some moods is the victim of this fallacy, and it is
widely triumphant to-day.
[1] So early an analysis of government as that made by Plato in the
_Republic_ shows indeed that this was never the sole theory, as it is
not the truest, of the cohesive forces of any community whatever. But
it has a certain validity, proportioned to the degree of political
imperfection.
But with the success of the democratic principle,
“elective and responsible government became subject to
the observations and criticisms which wait upon a great
existing fact. It was now observed that such phrases as
‘self-government’, and ‘the power of the people over
themselves’, do not express the true state of the case.
The ‘people’ who exercise the power are not always the
same people with those over whom it is exercised; and the
’self-government’ spoken of is not the government of each
by himself, but of each by all the rest. The {75} will of
the people, moreover, practically means the will of the
most numerous or the most active _part_ of the people;
the majority, or those who succeed in making themselves
accepted as the majority ... and precautions are as
much needed against this as against any other abuse
of power. The limitation, therefore, of the power of
government loses none of its importance when the holders
of power are regularly accountable to the community, that
is, to the strongest party therein. ... In political
speculations, the ‘tyranny of the majority’ is now
generally included among the evils against which society
requires to be on its guard.”
The paradox of self-government then, so far from being theoretically
solved by the development of political institutions to their highest
known maturity, is simply intensified by this development. When
the arbitrary and irrational powers of classes or of individuals
have been swept away, we are left face to face, it would seem, with
the coercion of some by others as a necessity in the nature of
things. And, indeed, however perfectly “self-government” has been
substituted for despotism, it is flying in the face of experience
to suggest that the average individual self, as he exists in you or
me, is _ipso facto_ satisfied, and at home, in all the acts of the
public power which is supposed to represent him. If he were so, the
paradox of self-government would be resolved by the annihilation of
one of its factors. The self would remain, but “government” would
be superfluous; or else “government” would be everything, and the
self annihilated. If, on the other hand, we understand the “self”
in “self-government” to stand for the whole sovereign group or {76}
community, which is usually called a “self-governing,” as opposed to
a subject, state, then we have before us the task of showing that
this self is a reality in any sense which justifies the acceptance of
what is done by the public power as an act of the whole community.
But on the ground where we stand in the theories reviewed in the
present chapter, no such self can be shown. Government, in fact
and in principle, reveals itself as coercion exercised by “the
others” over “the one.” And so long as this is the case, and as the
government is alien to the self, not only do the rights of majorities
remain without explanation, but no less is it impossible to say on
what rational ground an entire community can apply coercion to a
single recalcitrant member. We have seen that Mill would solve the
problem by a demarcation, according to which the aim and ground of
government is to protect the self from the impact of others, and
leave it in its isolated purity. Herbert Spencer, it may be noted,
[1] has recourse to one of those hypotheses of tacit consent which
would reduce a community to the level of a joint-stock company, [2]
_minus_ a written instrument of association; which in the case of
the State has to be replaced by Mr. Spencer’s estimate of purposes,
which would _probably_ be accepted with unanimity _if_ the question
were asked! Bentham alone, founding {77} himself on the actual nature
of social life, genially overrides the whole question of individual
right, and while maintaining law to be a necessary evil, and pouring
scorn on all attempts to exhibit a positive unity throughout the
selves which compose a society, makes the promotion of a free and
happy life the sole criterion of governmental interference.
[1] _Man v. State_, p. 83 _sq_.
[2] It is a remarkable testimony to the inherent vitality of
associations of human beings that even a joint-stock company often
finds its work and aims so developing on its hands that it has to
obtain additional powers from Parliament. It transcends, therefore,
the limits of the shareholders original contract, and Herbert
Spencer’s loud complaints of this procedure show how little he
recognises the nature of social necessity.
On the basis of every-day reflection, then, we are brought to an
absolute deadlock in the theory of political obligation. If, as
popular instinct maintains, and as common sense seems somehow to
insist, there is a theory and a justification of social coercion
latent in the term “self-government,” we cannot find a clue to it
in the reasoning of our most recent and popular political thinkers.
Nor should we find a comprehensive theory, though we might find
suggestions towards one, if we recurred to our more philosophical
teachers, such as Hobbes and Locke, who are further from popular
modes of thought. If there is anything satisfactory in the conception
of self-government, every interpretation of it is at once condemned
which does not give the fullest force to both terms of the paradox,
at the same time that it exhibits their reconciliation. What this
fullest force is, and the antagonism which it involves, we have seen
in the present chapter. We must start from an actual self, which is
capable of rebelling against law and government; and from an actual
“government,” which is capable of tyrannising over the individual
self. We must not treat the self as _ipso facto_ annihilated by
government; nor must we treat government as a pale reflection,
pliable to all the vagaries of the actual self. Nor, again, must
we divide the inseparable {78} content of life, and endeavour to
assign part to the assertion of the individual as belonging to self,
and part to his impact on others, as belonging to government. We
must take the two factors of the working idea of self-government in
their full antagonism, and exhibit, through and because of this, the
fundamental unity at their root, and the necessity and conditions
of their coherence. We must show, in short, how man, the actual man
of flesh and blood, demands to be governed; and how a government,
which puts real force upon him, is essential, as he is aware, to his
becoming what he has it in him to be. And if we fail to destroy the
assumptions which hinder us from doing this, we shall have to admit
that the maturity of democratic institutions has only liberated us
from arbitrary despotism to subject us to necessary tyranny; and
though, in spite of such a failure, we might still acquiesce in
“counting heads to save breaking them,” we should have to agree that
this may indeed be the shrewdest device of political expediency, but
that the difference between the two processes corresponds to no real
capacity of the human individual for partaking, by the exercise of
will and intelligence, in a peacefully organised and yet effectually
governed whole. We shall then, in short, be compelled to agree with
Bentham and Mill and Spencer that “self-government” and “the general
will” are meaningless phantoms, combinations of hostile factors,
incapable of being united in a real experience.
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