THE ANALYSIS OF A MODERN STATE. HEGEL’S “PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT.”
1. We are about to analyse a modern State into groups of facts which
are also ways of thinking. And a question may arise in what sense the
connection is to be understood which will be alleged to bind together
these groups of facts or points of view. When it is urged that group
_b_ or view _b_ is suggested and made necessary by the shortcomings
of group _a_ or view _a_, does this imply that group a or its idea
came into existence first, and group _b_ or the notion of it sprang
up subsequently or as an effect of the former? And could such a
relation be reasonably maintained as between the component parts of a
unity like the State?
An answer may be indicated as follows. We are dealing, in society
and in the State, with an _ideal fact_. As a fact, a form of life,
society has always been a many-sided creature, meeting the varied
needs of human nature by functions no less varied. As an ideal fact,
however, its advance has partaken of the nature of theoretical
progress. In the continuous attempt to deal satisfactorily {257} with
the needs of intelligent beings, the mind, the intelligent will, has
thrown itself with predominant interest now into one of its functions
and now into another. And this has not been a chance order of march.
Obviously, what it has emphasised and modified in the second place
has depended both positively and negatively on what it had emphasised
and modified in the first place. Positively, because when one step is
thoroughly secured the next may be definitely attempted. Negatively,
because the definite attainment of one step exposes the limitations
of what has been achieved, and the need for another. At every stage
the will is dissatisfied with the expression of itself which it has
created. Till some public order has been established, morality can
hardly find expression; but when a legal system is thoroughly in
force it becomes apparent how far the letter may fall short of the
spirit. We see the same action of intelligence in pure theory. Every
conquest of science leads to a new departure. It suggests it by its
success, and demands it by its failure.
Now, in science it may or may not be the case that the connection
which has led to a discovery enters permanently as a discernible
factor into the structure of knowledge. The re-organisation of
experience may sweep away the steps which led to it. But in the
living fact of society this is not so. Its many sides are actual and
persist, and the emphasis laid from time to time on the principle
of each--_e.g._ on positive law, on family ties, on economic
bonds--merely serves to accent an element which has its permanent
place in the whole. Thus, there must always be family ties and
economic bonds. But at one time everything tends to be construed
{258} in terms of kinship, at another time in terms of exchange.
And the tendency means a difference of actual balance between the
functions as well as a different theory. The positive and negative
connection of elements like these, the true place and limit of each,
is permanently rooted in human nature, but may be elucidated by the
explicit logic of their attempt and failure to give the tone to the
whole social fabric. It follows that the social whole grows, like
a great theory, in adequacy to the needs which are its facts; and
the dissatisfaction of the will with its own expression, in other
words, the contradictions which practical intelligence is continually
attempting to remove, becomes more like suggestion than flat
contradiction--or change, as we say, becomes less revolutionary. It
may seem to be a difference between the social whole and a scientific
theory that the former, as it grows, creates new difficulties, by
creating new and freshly contradictory matter, as in the social
problems of civilisation; while the latter, as we imagine, deals with
an unchanging experience. But this distinction is less true than it
appears, and the comparison with the growth of a theory will always
throw light on the true nature of the will and its continuous effort
to satisfy itself.
2. Right or Law may be taken in the widest sense as including the
whole manifestation of Will in an actual world--“the actual body of
all the conditions of freedom,” [1] “the realm of realised freedom,
the world of mind produced out of itself, as a second nature.” [2] It
is a merit of the German {259} term “_Recht_” [3] that it maintains
the connection between the law and the spirit of law, [4] and almost
of itself prohibits the separation between positive law, and will,
custom or sentiment, which underlies such a theory as Austin’s.
[1] Hegel, _Philos. of Mind_ (E. Tr.), p. 104. Cf. defs. quoted from
Green, p. 203 above.
[2] _Rechtsphil_., sect. 4.
[3] Cf. the Greek’s idea of “_nomos_.”
[4] See ch. ii. above on Montesquieu and Rousseau.
This whole sphere of Right or Law, the mind as actualised in Society
and the State, naturally divides itself on the principle which has
just been explained, into three connected groups of ideal facts
or points of view. The first, or simplest and most inevitable, of
these, may be called the “letter of the law” as we come upon it most
especially in the law of property--Shylock’s law--the sheer fact, as
it seems, that the world is appropriated by legal “persons.”
The second, obviously conditioned by the first both positively and
negatively, may be described as the morality of conscience; the
revolt of the will against the letter of the law, though this was
its own direct expression of itself (_e.g._ in taking things as
property); and its demand to recognise as right nothing but what
springs from itself as the good will.
And thirdly, there is the reality or concrete experience in which
the two former sets of facts, or ideas, find their true place and
justification--the completed theory, so to speak, which adjusts and
explains the narrower views founded on one-sided contact with life.
This is indicated to consist in “social observance,” or “ethical use
and wont”; the system of working mind where the true will appears as
incarnate in a way of living. This, {260} like the others, it must
be remembered, is a fact, though akin to a theory. Not only does it
explain and justify the other factors, but its existence has enabled
them to exist, as theirs has also been essential to it. And yet each
of the three, as one aspect of society which under certain influences
may catch the eye, has at times claimed--is, indeed, constantly
claiming--predominance, and has thus brought into relief its own
defects and the need of the complementary ideas. We will speak of
these moods of mind or kinds of experience in their order, expecting
a further sub-division when we come to treat of the third.
3. “Law,” then, in the directest possible sense--the minimum sense,
so to speak--is the hard literal fact that it is a rule of the
world we live in for things to be appropriated by persons. This is
the first or minimum change of the world from mere matter into the
instruments of mind, and it is a necessary change. Things have no
will of their own, and it is by having a will asserted upon them that
they become organs of life. In the same way, it is by assertion in
external things that the will first becomes a fact in the material
world. Property is “the first reality of freedom.” [1] It is not
the mere provision for wants, but the material counterpart of will.
Contract belongs to this sphere, the sphere of property. It is an
agreement of persons about an external thing--a “common will,” but
not one “general” or “universal” in its own nature like that involved
in the State.
[1] _Rechtsphil_., sect. 41. Not, in its developed form, the first
in time. Hegel lays stress on the fact that true, free, property was
hardly realised even in his own day.
{261} Thus, it is a confusion of spheres to apply the idea of
contract to the State, for the State is an imperative necessity of
man’s nature as rational, while contract is a mere agreement of
certain free persons about certain external things. The idea of the
social contract is a confusion of the same type as that by which
public rights and functions were treated as private property in the
middle age. The attributes of private property are nothing more than
the conditions of “personal” existence, and absurdity results if they
are transferred to functions of the State.
This phase or view of law as, in its letter, an ultimate and absolute
rule, may be illustrated, Hegel says, by the Stoic notion that there
is only one virtue and one vice; by the Draconic conception that
every offence demands the extreme penalty; and by “the barbarity
of the formal code of honour, which found in every injury an
unpardonable insult.” It might also be illustrated by Austin’s theory
of law as a command enforced by a penalty; or by the theories which
account for property simply by the fact of occupancy or of labour
mixed with the thing. The common point of all these views is that
they treat the law, not as a part of a living system, [1] ultimately
resting on the will to maintain a certain type of life, but as
something absolute in its separateness, and equally sacred in all its
accidents and inequalities.
[1] See _e.g._ above, p. 232, how the idea of a system of rights may
modify punishment.
Now, this emphasis and idea of law, being the exaggeration of a
single and direct necessity, the {262} necessity of order and
property, may be called “primitive” or barbarous, but it cannot of
course be identified with the earliest state of social authority
known to history or to anthropology. There we should probably find
law undifferentiated from custom and from religious sentiment,
and consequently, though rigid enough, not in any such one-sided
absoluteness as we have been describing. All we can say is that
this is the way in which law must come to be regarded whenever its
living spirit is forgotten, and an unreal absoluteness is assigned
to it; and this connection of principle verifies itself as a fact in
recurrent historical phenomena, and in fallacies which perpetually
reappear.
4. Within the whole fabric of right or realised will, the element
which naturally asserts itself by antagonism to the letter of the
law is the morality of conscience, conscientiousness, or the idea of
the Good Will. It is connected with the letter of the law, as Hegel
puts it, by the various degrees of wrong. The will, that is to say,
finds itself at variance in or with [1] the order of law and property
which it has created as its direct and necessary step to freedom. Its
realised theory, so to speak, is found to break down at a certain
point, by being in contradiction with the needs which it was created
to meet. “_Summum jus, summa injuria_”. We may object that the
anti-legal will is simply wrong. This may be so, and again it may
not be so. What the will has awakened to, whether right or wrong, is
{263} that it can acquiesce in nothing which does not come home to it
as fulfilling its own principle. What so comes home to it is what it
calls “good,” and it cannot accept any order or necessity which it
cannot will as good, _i.e._ as satisfying its own idea.
[1] “In it,” when my will does not conflict with right as such, but
claims the right in an object A to be mine and not yours--a civil
dispute. “With it,” when my will rebels, and by its act, so far as
in it lies, denies and destroys the whole fabric of right, _e.g._
takes the object A, without alleging a right to it--theft, a criminal
offence, cf. p. 230.
When this phase of reaction is pushed to its logical extreme, we
have the modern doctrine of my conscience and my pure will. It is
the conflict of the inner self with the outer world, expressed in
history through the Stoic and through some forms of the Christian
consciousness (especially the Protestant consciousness), and in
philosophy through the Kantian doctrine of the good will, uttered in
the famous sentence, “Nothing can possibly be conceived in the world
or out of it which can be called good without qualification except
a good will.” [1] Nothing is worth doing but _what_ one ought, and
_because_ one ought.
[1] Kant, _Grundlegung zur Metaphysik d. Sitten_, sect. I.
The criticism to which this principle has been subjected is familiar
to students of ethics. Its point is, in brief, that there is no way
of connecting any particular action with the mere idea of a pure
will. The forms assumed by evasions of this difficulty, which we fall
into when we desire wholly to separate the inner from the outer, or
the “ought” from the “is,” are treated by Hegel with unsurpassable
vigour and subtlety, as indeed the annihilating criticism of this
conception is primarily due to him. The essence of the matter is
that the pure will directed towards good for the sake of good,
having no real connection with any detailed conduct, may be alleged
by self-deception in support of any behaviour whatever, and out of
this may spring the {264} whole sophistry and hypocrisy of “pure
intention.” He makes the shrewd observation, [1] which is still of
interest, that the extreme Protestant doctrine of conscience may take
the form of ethical vacuity or instability, and that this had in his
time been the cause of many Protestants going over to Rome, to secure
some sort of moorings, if not precisely the stability of thought.
[1] _Rechtsphil_., sect. 141.
Still, out of all this one-sidedness, there survives the permanent
necessity that an intelligent being can acquiesce only in what
enters into the object of his will. It is his will which affirms the
aim to which his nature draws him, and he is absolutely debarred
from reposing in anything which does not appeal to his will. The
subjective will is the only soil on which freedom can be a reality.
So, within the general organism of Right or realised Free-will, we
have found two opposite groups of facts--for the aspirations of
intelligent beings are facts--or tendencies or theories, which are
connected by opposition, and yet are necessary to the expression of
the same underlying need--the letter of the law, and the freedom of
conscience.
5. Hegel’s name for the third term, which, as he puts it, expresses
the “truth” of these extremes, may be rendered “the Ethical System,”
or “the Moral Life,” or “Social Ethics.” It expresses “the truth” of
the extremes, as a good theory may express the truth of two one-sided
views. Only, as we have said, it is a fact as well as a theory, and
therefore is something which actually contains what these two views
demand, and does the work which they, and the facts they rely on,
{265} exhibit as necessary to be done. This relation is not obscure
or unprecedented. Every institution, every life, works as a theory,
and either masters its facts or fails to master them; though not
every theory is a life or an institution.
The German word which the above-mentioned phrases attempt to render
is “_Sittlichkeit_” The word takes its meaning from “_Sitte_” which
in common usage is equivalent to “custom.” Hegel’s use of the
term, in his later writings, as opposed to “_Moralität_” and as
indicating, in comparison with it, a fuller and truer phase of life,
is an intentional declaration of war against the Kantian principle
of the pure good will, and is the gist of Hegel’s ethico-political
view in a nutshell. The word would most naturally apply to the
life of a community in which law, custom, and sentiment were not
yet very sharply distinguished. According to accepted views, the
communities of ancient Greece, before they were stirred by the
reflective movement which is associated with the names of Socrates
and the Sophists, would be examples of a disposition and order of
life which the word “_Sittlichkeit_” might denote. And it was in
the Greek communities, as is shown by the work which he sketched
as early as 1802, [1] that Hegel found this suggestion of a whole
in which law and custom, duty and disposition, were absolutely at
one. He subsequently modified the conception in accordance with the
modern idea of freedom, by allowing a greater emphasis and relief to
its {266} component parts, and insisting (against Plato’s _Republic_
for instance,) on the principle of individual choice, initiative,
and property, as necessary to the complete communion of intelligent
beings. As we have just seen, indeed, he introduces reflective
morality or conscientiousness into the sphere of Right, to represent
the full nature of mind, which is only exhibited in a consciousness
which pursues its aims of its own choice and for their own sake.
[1] The _System d. Sittlichkeit_. The _Rechtsphil_. was not published
till 1817, in its earliest form. See Wallace, _Hegel’s Philosophy of
Mind_, p. 187.
The Ethical System, then, or Social Ethics, is put forward as the
ideal fact which includes, and does the work of both the literal law
and the moral will, alike in practice and as a theory. It is the idea
of freedom developed (i.) into a present world, and (ii.) into the
nature of self-consciousness.
For (i.), in the first place, the ethical system, or the ways of
acting which make up social ethics, constitute a present and actual
world. So far it partakes of the nature of the literal law and order,
the system of property-holding, which, as we have seen, is all but
a natural fact. Social Ethic, we might say, _is_ a physical fact.
The bodily habits and external actions of a people incorporate it.
It transforms the face of a country, “domesticating the untamed
earth.” [1] Each individual has his own bodily existence in a
determinate mode as a part of the ethical life of society. The rules
and traditions of ethical living are, as has been said, “the nature
of things.” They are as hard, as “objective” an order as “sun,
moon, mountains, rivers, and all objects of nature.” [2] Man lives
according to them before he knows that he {267} does so, and always,
in a great degree, independently of knowing that he does so. As this
group of facts, or considered from this point of view, the ethical
system is the body of the moral world.
[1] Aeschylus, _Eumenides_, I. 14. [2] _Rechtsphil_., sect. 146.
(ii.) But it is also and no less the very nature of
self-consciousness. It is as much a demand of man’s intelligence
or an inner and universal law as the “pure will” itself. [1] The
difference between them is that the Ethical System is a _system_,
a world, though from the point of view of will regarded as inner,
that is to say, as something which is the motive and fulfills the
demand of consciousness. Thus, it bears the character of a thoroughly
systematised theory, as contrasted with the idea of a good will,
which is a mere general point of view. And it is because of this
systematic character that it is enabled to connect the individual
or particular will with the universal spirit of the community. It
is only in a system that a particular fact can be connected with
a universal law, as the planetary motions are with the law of
gravitation. The particular will, as we have explained above, is
universalised by its relation to a systematic purpose which it partly
implies and partly realises. A man wishes for this thing or that
thing, but not at any price. The reservations to which his wish is
subject, by reason of other purposes and postulates of life, are
known to him only in part; but if they could be stated in full, they
would constitute the system of his life as realised in the universal
life of the community. It is precisely {268} analogous to the process
which a common judgment of perception has to go through in becoming a
scientific truth--the implications have to be stated in full, and the
perception modified in accordance with them. And when this is done,
we have no longer a fact, but a science.
[1] On all this portion of the subject, see Mr. Bradley’s Essay, “My
Station and its Duties,” in _Ethical Studies_.
Regarded from this point of view, as the substance of the individual
Will, the Ethical System is the Soul of the moral world.
In analysing the Ethical System, we shall say nothing of “duties”
or “virtues.” Duty is in each case what the relation requires--the
attachment of the universal system of will to the individual life.
Virtue is a habit of such action, considered as embodied in the
nature of an individual. The idea of virtue and virtuousness is not,
in Hegel’s view, altogether suitable to the members of an ethical
commonwealth. It belongs rather to a time of undeveloped social life,
when ethical principles and the realisation of them are ascribed to
the nature of peculiarly gifted individuals. Virtue or excellence, to
the Greek moralist, for instance, suggested doing something better
than the average, or being in some way specially gifted, and it is
still apt to indicate the desire to be some thing exceptional, and
not simply to find yourself in genuine service. The meaning of the
words to-day tends to narrow itself to certain special relations, and
does not indicate that life of the member in the whole, which is the
essence of what we really value.
The Ethical System, or the Order of Social Ethics, then--the mind and
conduct of the citizen in Christendom--may be regarded as affirming
freedom {269} in three principal aspects, necessarily connected, and
supplementing one another. Outwardly these aspects are different
groups of facts--different institutions; inwardly they are different
moods or dispositions of the one and indivisible human mind.
Thus, Hegel’s analysis regards the social whole or system of social
ethics from three points of view. First, in respect of the Family;
secondly, in respect of what he has entitled Bourgeois Society; and
thirdly, in respect of the Political Organism, or the State in the
strict sense.
It is to be borne in mind that, like the three principal divisions in
the sphere of Right, these headings represent explicit theories of
society, as well as groups of facts.
6. Beginning once more, within an ordered social sphere, at the
ethical factor which stands nearest to the natural world, and has
taken, so to speak, the minimum step into the realm of purpose and
consciousness, we start from the family. As the family exists in a
modern civilised community, it is something necessary to society and
the State, but absolutely distinct from both.
It first _(a)_ represents the _fact_ of the natural basis of social
relations, being the embodiment of natural feeling in the form of
love, both as between the parents, and as embodied for them in the
children. It is in accordance with Hegel’s general views of the
meaning of a system that he sees this element of mind primarily
represented by the family, as an organ preserved and differentiated
_ad hoc_, and not, or not merely, distributed indefinitely throughout
the community. Thus, the modern family represents for him a higher
stage {270} of civilisation--an organ to a fuller embodiment of
mind--than the clan or tribe, or, in short, than any form of
community in which the _whole_ bond of union rests on merely natural
feeling, kindness, generosity, or affection. In the nation, indeed,
a tinge of natural affection, a colouring of unity by kinship,
survives, just as feeling runs through the experience of the
individual mind. But the distinctive character of the State is clear
intelligence, explicit law and system, and so the natural basis of
feeling, though necessary to be preserved and spiritualised, achieves
these needs in the family as a special organ, and not in the State as
such.
All those theories, therefore, which tend to assimilate the State to
a family by a sort of levelling down of the former or levelling up of
the latter (Plato’s _Republic_, the phalanstery, paternal government,
and the like) involve for Hegel a mere confusion of relations. They
recognise an element which is essential to society, and may truly
be said to be even its foundation. But they do not see its right
place in the whole, and do not understand that in order to attain a
stronger and deeper unity (which is, in short, a stronger and deeper
mind) the different elements must be allowed a greater emphasis and
relief, and their respective characteristics must not be slurred or
scamped.
But _(b)_ in the second place, the family is a factor in the rational
whole, the State, though its function _par excellence_ is that of
the natural basis of society. Hence its nature and sanction is
ethical--it rests neither on mere feeling on {271} the one hand,
nor on mere contract on the other. It has a public side, and the
acceptance of a universal obligation by a declaration in explicit
language (language being the stamp of the universal), in face of the
community, is an essential part of marriage, and not a mere accident
or accessory, as the votaries of feeling have urged. This view is
aimed against the confusion which finds the sole essence of marriage
in feeling. This is a perpetually recurring contention, represented
in Hegel’s day by Friedrich von Schlegel’s _Lucinde_, which argues
that the form of marriage destroys the value of passion. Hegel’s
analyses are everywhere directed against this inability to grasp the
distinct sides of a many-sided fact.
_(c)_ The ethical aspect of the family [1] shows itself in the nature
and organisation of the household, as an institution embodying
permanent interests and relations of the two persons who are its
head, and as an organ of public duties in the bodily and spiritual
nurture of the children. The permanent and equal relation of the
heads of the household, involved in its nature as the ethical aspect
of the family, implies monogamy, and it is the monogamous family
alone which can count as a true element of the ethical order.
[1] Cf. Green’s _Principles of Political Obligation_, p. 235.
_(d)_ The household, being the true and operative ethical organ
which makes parentage into family, is the unit which demands to be
respected and protected by the State against the less differentiated
forms of consanguinity, such as the clan. The true family starts
from marriage and the foundation of a household, and in the early
{272} development of law we find the State, with a just instinct,
protecting the household against the clan, _e.g._ by conferring the
power of bequest. This power, though now it may imply a discretion
mainly hostile to the family, presented itself in early law rather
as a means of perpetuating the separate household as against the
pretensions of the clan to interfere with its property.
Thus, the monogamous family is naturally and necessarily, to some
extent, a unit in respect of property; the children, at least, being
inevitably under tutelage and incapable of self-support, even if
economic equality asserts itself as between husband and wife. This
peculiar relation in respect of property is rooted in the unique
nature of the household, as an organ for the guardianship of immature
lives, and as a unity of feeling rather than of explicit thought. It
is noticeable that progress tends to introduce the distinctions of
property within its unity [1] (though for children this can never go
very far), and very slightly to introduce the relations of the family
into the outside world. In as far as such distinctions come to be
made, the nature and functions of the household being undisturbed, a
somewhat higher intensity of ethical union is rendered necessary, and
will no doubt assert itself.
[1] Married Women’s Property, Protection of Earnings of Children,
Property assigned by understanding within household to young children.
7. When the man (or woman [1]) arrives at maturity and leaves the
safe harbour of the family, he finds himself, _prima facie_, isolated
in a world {273} of conflicting self-interests. He has his living
to make, or his property to administer. He is tied to others, in
appearance, only by the system of wants and work, with the elementary
function which is necessary to it, viz. its police functions and the
administration of justice.
[1] Hegel would say only or chiefly the man, who is for him the
natural earner and chief of the household.
It is this phase of social life, and the temper or disposition
corresponding to it, which Hegel indicates by the expression
Bourgeois Society. [1] It presents itself to him as the opposite
extreme of life and mind to that embodied in the family. It is an
aggregate of families--for the units of the Bourgeois Society are
heads of households--as seen from the outside, in the great system
of industry and business, where a man has to find his work and do
it. It is, in mind, the presence of definite though limited aims,
calculation and self-interest. [2]
[1] _Bürgerliche Gesellschaft_. “Society,” Wallace points out, is
here opposed to “community,” and indicates a looser phase of union.
[2] Cf. the merchant in Wilhelm Meister’s _Lehrjahre_, viii. 2. “I
can assure you that I never reflected on the State in my life. My
tolls, charges, and dues I have paid for no other reason than that it
was established usage” (cited from Wallace, _Hegel’s Philosophy of
Mind_, p. cci.).
Bourgeois Society is the aspect of the social whole insisted on by
the classical political economy, by which, as an achievement in
the way of reducing complex appearances to principles, Hegel was
much impressed. It is, again, the view of society embodied in the
conception of the purely police State, and its principle is confused
with that of the State proper by one set of theorists, as that of the
family is by another.
It is the peculiarity of Hegel’s view--probably {274} the most
definitely original, as it is the most famous, of all his political
ideas--to contend that this aspect of society, with the form of
consciousness belonging to it, is necessary to a modern State.
According to his logic, indeed, it is inevitable that every true
whole shall have an aspect of “difference,” of breaking up into
particulars.
The principle of the ancient State, as concentratedly expressed in
Plato’s _Republic_, was weak and undeveloped, and fell short of the
true claims of intelligence, [1] just because it dared not really let
the individual go--let him assert himself as himself. “Subjectivity”
was a principle fatal to it. Not that there was an iron oppression
in the States of antiquity. The individual was, for an onlooker,
magnificently developed. His limitations were in him, and did not
oppress him; but for all that, free choice and the career open to
talents were not for him.
[1] “Was not ideal enough” (Hegel, _Geschichte der Philosophie_,
ii. 254). The “notion” for him necessarily involves identity,
differentiation, and re-integration; and in this respect the ancient
State falls short of a true notion, while the modern realises it.
The modern demand--such is Hegel’s conception--is harder and higher.
The individual’s life is not predetermined by his birth, but he is
thrown face to face with economic necessity, which is a form of the
universal end. He has to strip off his crudeness and vanity, and, of
himself, mould himself into something which fulfils a want. This is
a step without which there can be no true freedom--the giving one’s
self by one’s own act a definite place in the region of external
necessity, the “becoming _something_” or attaching oneself to {275}
a definite class of service renderers. Thus, we are startled to
find culture or education treated in general, and in respect of
its indispensableness, under the head of the Bourgeois Society.
For culture is the liberation from one’s own caprices, and the
acceptance of a universal task. It is a severe process, and therefore
unpopular, but it is a necessary one if we are to have true freedom.
The criticism that such a world and temper is the world and temper
of self-interest does not appeal strongly to Hegel. We shall have to
treat of it more fully below. [1]
[1] See p. 291.
It may be noted in passing that the insecurity of life, which may
seem to attach to dependence on the vast system of wants and work,
is more and more seen, as modern economic relations develop, not to
be insecurity at all, except in as far as “culture” in the form of
industrial training is absent. There is, indeed, in modern life,
nowhere any absolute and oyster-like stability. The highest stability
to be anywhere attained is that due to fitness for service in the
interdependent system of needs. [1]
[1] I may refer to _The Standard of Life_, by H. Bosanquet, essay on
“_Klassenkampf_”.
Therefore, as Hegel saw, but in more ways than he saw, the system
of Bourgeois Society--the economic and industrial world--is not a
separate reality, but only an appearance within a larger system.
The member of it is not so detached as he may seem, or think. He is
within, and sustained by, the general life of the State, as the aims
which are his motives in “business” or industry are within {276} and
inseparable from the whole structure of his intelligence.
Thus, the world of Bourgeois Society--a world, on the whole, of cash
nexus and mere protection by the State--has a structure or tendency
of its own which brings it back by necessary steps to connection with
the State proper or explicit and determinate social unity. It is,
we must observe, posterior to the State in time. It is only within
the State proper, and resting on its solid power, that such a world
as that of Bourgeois Society could arise or be conceivable. Its
priority to the State is, like that of the family, the priority of
comparative narrowness or simplicity, of dealing with fewer factors,
and of representing human nature in a more special, though necessary,
aspect. And for this very reason it could not exist by itself. It has
not the many-sided vitality indispensable to anything which is to
hold its own in the actual world.
The working of the Bourgeois Society, then, exhibits an inevitable
connection with the State proper, and, so to speak, leads up to it.
In the first place, the economic world implies the administration
of justice. In this, as involving a developed system of civilised
law, there is an advance on the “letter of the law” in its crudest
and most barbarous acceptation. The system of law of a modern
State is, and still more ought to be, [1] a fairly reasonable and
intelligible definition of the rights and relations of persons.
By this determination the economic system of particular wants and
services enters upon a first {277} approximation, as it were, to a
unity of principle. The law only professes, indeed, to _protect_
property and exchange, but in doing so it unavoidably recognises
that the particular want has a general bearing; for the developed
system of law only comes into existence to enable wants to be
supplied, and takes its definite shape according to the system of
wants. We may illustrate this first approximation to universality,
which law confers upon the particulars of private interest, by a
suggestive view which M. Durkheim has propounded. [2] He has pointed
out that the current formula for social change, “from status to
contract,” has a subtler significance than is apt to be recognised.
For contract is not really indeterminate, as if it arose _in vacuo_
without a precedent. It runs in forms determined by social experience
through law and custom; and thus the law, which professedly aims at
protecting property and exchange, necessarily regulates them by the
modes in which it chooses to protect them.
[1] Hegel pleads strongly for codification.
[2] _De la Division du Travail Social,_ 225 ff.
A more intimate relation to the State proper--to a definite
principle, as we might say, of common good--grows out of the
interests of Bourgeois Society which take the shape of what a German
calls “Police and Corporation,” _i.e._ State regulation and Trade
Societies.
The basis of State regulation is the emergence of aspects of common
interest in the system of particular interests. The region of
particular interests (supply and demand) has an accidental side,
and the State has a right and a duty to protect the general good
against accidental {278} hindrances. On the whole, no doubt, the
right relation between producer and consumer arises of itself, but
miscarriages may occur which call for interference on behalf of the
explicit [1] principle of the general good. The _general_ possibility
of the individual’s obtaining what he wants is a public interest, and
the State has a right to intervene with this end in view, both by
execution of necessary public works, by sanitary inspection and the
like, and by inspection and control of fraud in the case of necessary
commodities offered for sale to the general public. For the public
offer of goods in daily use is not a purely private concern, but a
matter of the general interest. If indeed there was complete official
regulation, there would be a risk of getting work like the Pyramids,
that represented no private want at all; but yet, in the system of
private wants, there is a public interest that demands vigilance.
[1] The _explicit_ idea of common good always belongs in Hegel to the
State proper.
A similar approximation of Bourgeois Society to the State is
constituted by the “Corporation,” which rests on the facts of class.
Every member of the Bourgeois Society belongs by his vocation to a
class, and this breaking up into classes is a consequence of the
division of labour which prevails in the economic sphere, disguising
the common good as private interest or necessity. But in the
formation of classes society begins as it were to recover from the
dispersion which private interest has occasioned. As a member of his
class [1] or {279} “estate,” the citizen acquires solidarity with his
fellows, and his particular interest becomes _ipso facto_ a common
one. As a member of the class, again, he is, or ought to be, a member
of his “trade society” or “corporation.” In this he finds his honour
or recognition, [2] a definite standard of life (apart from which
he is apt to assert himself by aimless extravagance, for want of a
recognised respectability), a standard of work, insurance against
misfortune, and (as a candidate for admission) the means of technical
education.
[1] The term “_Stände_” it must be remembered, has for a German the
association of elements of the representative assembly; “états”,
estates of the realm.
[2] Cf. the English workman’s phrase, “a good tradesman,” _i.e._ a
competent member of his trade.
If the family is the first basis of the State, the classes or estates
are the second. The Corporation or Trade Society is a second family
to its members. It is the very root of ethical connection between the
private and the general [1] interest, and the State should see to it
that this root holds as strongly as possible. [2]
[1] “We can only say that these men, if they leave us, will bitterly
regret it. ... The man who is so unselfish as to care nothing for
himself or his fellow-men will soon find himself, as years creep over
him, and grey hairs and glasses, completely cut out.”--“Branch Trade
Report (Birmingham) to National Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives,
January, 1896.”
[2] Sects. 201 and 255. I omit Hegel’s characterisation of the
classes, which has a good deal in common with theories which
represent occupations as determining character. The contrast between
agricultural and industrial or commercial life, between country and
town, is of great importance in his view. He almost seems to confine
Bourgeois industrialism as such to the life of town-dwellers; though,
again, ultimately the whole division into classes is characteristic
of Bourgeois Society (cf. sects. 256 and 305).
“If,” Hegel writes, [1] “in recent days the “Corporation
has been abolished, this has the significance {280}
that the individual ought to provide for himself. This
may be admitted; but the corporation did not alter the
individual’s obligation to earn his livelihood. In our
modern States the citizens have only a limited share in
the universal business of the State; but it is necessary
to permit the ethical human being a universal activity
over and above his private end. This universal, which the
modern State does not always provide for him, he finds
in the Corporation. We saw before that the individual
providing for himself in the Bourgeois Society also acts
for others. But this unconscious necessity is not enough;
it needs the Corporation to bring it to a conscious and
thoughtful social ethics. Of course the Corporation needs
the higher superintendence of the State, or it would
ossify, shrink into its shell, and be degraded into a
wretched guild. But in and for itself the Corporation is
no closed guild; it is rather the bringing of an isolated
trade into an ethical connection, and its admission into
a sphere in which it wins strength and honour.” [2]
[1] Sect. 255.
[2] It is obvious that this treatment of associations arising
among classes in industry and commerce does not apply in principle
exclusively to trade or professional societies. It would include,
_e.g._, Friendly Societies and Co-operative Societies, by which
members of the economic world bind themselves together for help,
recognition, and the assertion of their general interests.
8. The State proper, or political constitution, presents itself to
Hegel as the system in which the family and the Bourgeois Society
find their completion and their security. He was early impressed,
as we have seen, with the beautiful unity of the ancient Greek
commonwealths. And the first and last idea which governs his
representations of the modern State is that of the Greek commonwealth
enlarged as it was from a sun to a solar {281} system. The family
feeling and the individual interest are in the modern State let go,
accented, intensified to their uttermost power; and it is out of
and because of this immense orbit of its elements that the modern
State has its “enormous strength and depth.” It is the typical mind,
the very essence of reason, whose completeness is directly as the
completeness of each of its terms or sides or factors; and secure
in the logical confidence that feeling and self-consciousness, the
more they attain their fulness, must return the more certainly to
their place in the reasonable system which is their very nature.
As ultimate power, the State maintains on one side the attitude of
an external necessity towards the spheres of private life, of the
family, and of the economic world. It may intervene by force to
remove hindrances in the path of the common good, which accident and
immaturity may have placed there. But, in its essence, the State is
the indwelling and explicit end of these modes of living, and is
strong in its union of the universal purpose with the particular
interests of mankind. It is, in short, the incarnation of the general
or Real Will. It has the ethical habit and temper of the family as a
pervading basis, combined with the explicit consciousness and purpose
of the business world. In the organism of the State, _i.e._ in as
far as we feel and think as citizens, feeling becomes affectionate
loyalty, and explicit consciousness becomes political insight. As
citizens we both feel and see that the State includes and secures
the objects of our affections and our interests; not as separate
items, thrown together by chance, but as purposes transformed by
their relation to the common good, into {282} which, as we are more
or less aware, they necessarily pass. This feeling and insight are
the true essence of patriotism. It is easier to be magnanimous than
to be merely right, and people prefer to think of patriotism as a
readiness to make great sacrifices which are never demanded. But true
patriotism is the every-day habit of looking on the commonwealth as
our substantive purpose and the foundation of our lives.
The division of functions in the State is a necessary condition of
its rational organisation. But, as Rousseau had insisted, it is
altogether false to regard these separate functions as independent,
or as checks on one another. There could be no living unity, if the
functions of the State were ultimately independent and negative
towards each other. Their differentiation is simply the rational
division of labour. The State is an image of a rational conception;
it is “a hieroglyph of reason.”
Sovereignty, therefore, resides in no one element. It is,
essentially, the relation in which each factor of the constitution
stands to the whole. That is to say, it resides only in the organised
whole acting _qua_ organised whole. If, for example, we speak of the
“Sovereignty of the People” in a sense opposed to the Sovereignty of
the State--as if there were such a thing as “the people” over and
above the organised means of expressing and adjusting the will of the
community--we are saying what is, strictly speaking, meaningless.
It is just the point of difference between Rousseau’s two views. We
saw that Rousseau clearly explained the impossibility of expressing
the general {283} will except by a determinate system of law.
But what he seemed to suggest, and was taken to mean, by popular
Sovereignty, was no doubt just the view which Hegel condemns. It is
essentially the same question as how a constitution can be made.
Strictly, a constitution cannot be made except by modification of
an existing constitution. If, to put a case, you have a multitude
new to each other in some extra-political colony, they must assume
a constitution, so to speak, before they can make one. Law and
constitution are utterances of the spirit of a nation.
The form of State which Hegel analyses is a modern constitutional
monarchy, with an executive (ministers sitting in the chambers, as
he is careful to urge) and Chambers or Estates representing the
classes developed in the civic community. Representation, he urges,
is of bodies or interests rather than of masses of individuals, and
the Corporations or Trade Societies have also an important place
directly, by their touch with the departments of the executive
government. [1] The general principle is, as indicated above, that
the problems of connection between considerable particular interests
and the universal interests of the community are, so to speak,
prepared on the ground of the Corporation and Bourgeois Society for
a solution in the interest of the common good by the Legislative and
the Executive Government.
[1] Much as through inspectors and commissions the opinion of Trade
Unions, Friendly Societies, and Co-operators is elicited by our
Government Departments with a view to legislation, independently of
the House of Commons.
The logical division of power, in his language, {284} is that the
Legislature has to establish universal principles, the executive has
to apply these principles to particular cases, and the prince has to
bring to a point the acts of the State by giving them, “like the dot
on the i,” the final shape of individual volition.
The distinction of States into Monarchy, Aristocracy, and Democracy,
Hegel refuses to regard as applicable to the modern world. At best,
it could only apply to the undeveloped communities of antiquity. The
modern State is a concrete, and, according to its principle, all the
elements of a people’s life are represented in it as an indivisible
unity.
A curious point is Hegel’s insistence on the function of the personal
Head of the State. By a junction of the extremes, he connects it with
the recognition of free individuality, which is usually regarded as
the democratic principle of the modern world. There is no act, we may
say in illustration, according to the modern idea of an act, if it is
not done in the end by an individual, though in a developed political
system the monarch’s action may only consist in signing his name.
It is at least remarkable to compare this view with the tendency to
one-man government in the administration of the United States of
America.
The State, then, is on one side the external force and automatic
machinery implied in the maintenance and adjustment of the rights and
purposes of the family and the Bourgeois Society as an actual life.
On the other side, and most essentially, it is that connection of
feeling and insight, working throughout the consciousnesses of {285}
individuals as parts in a connected structure, which unite in willing
a certain type of life as a common good in which they find their
own. It has the same content as that of Religion; but in an explicit
and rationalised form as contrasted with the form of feeling. Only
the separation of Church and State, and the division of the Churches
against one another, have made it possible for the State to exhibit
its own free and ethical character in true fulness, apart from both
dogmatic authority and anarchic fanaticism.
9. Publicity of discussion in the assembly of the classes or estates
is the great means of civic education. It is not in the least true
that every one knows what is for the good of the State, and has only
to go down to the House and utter it. It is in the work of expression
[1] and discussion that the good takes form by adjustment of private
views to facts and needs brought to bear by criticism. “The views a
man plumes himself on when he is at home with his wife and friends
are one thing; it is quite another thing what happens in a great
assembly, where one shrewd idea devours the other.” [2]
[1] It is a remarkable point in English politics to-day that
legislation is practically in the hands of the Government
departments. Bills are rejected or “knocked about in Committee”; but
the mass of organised knowledge necessary to initiate legislation in
a complex society can hardly be found outside the gathered experience
of an office which has continuity in dealing with the same problems.
This tendency more than justifies Hegel’s point of view. An act of
the “General Will” has not only, as he said, to be moulded by running
the gauntlet of public and critical discussion, but has even to be
first drafted by the help of immense piles of experience, which the
general mind does not possess, and could not deal with, but which,
nevertheless, enable its typical wish and intention to be embodied in
effective form.
[2] _Rechtsphil._, sect. 315.
{286} The free judgment of individuals based on the publicity of
political discussion is “public opinion.” In public opinion we
have an actual existent contradiction. As public, it is sound and
true, and contains the ethical spirit of the State. As expressed
by individuals in their particular judgments, on which they plume
themselves, it is full of falsehood and vanity. It is the bad which
is peculiar, and which people pride themselves on; the rational
is universal in its nature, though not necessarily common. Public
opinion is a contradictory appearance, in which the true exists as
false. It is no accident, but inevitable insight, that leads both of
these characters to be proverbially expressed, as in “Vox populi, vox
Dei,” contrasted with Ariosto’s
“Che’l Volgare ignorante ogn’un’ riprenda
E parli plu di qual che meno intenda”; [1]
or Goethe’s
“Zuschlagen kann die Masse
Da ist sie respektabel;
Urtheilen gelingt ihr miserabel.” [2]
or the “mostly fools” of Carlyle.
[1] “That the ignorant vulgar reproves everyone, and talks most of
what it understands least.”
[2] “The masses are respectable hands at fighting, but miserable
hands at judging.”
Now, as public opinion thus combines truth and falsehood, the public
cannot be in earnest with both, _i.e._ both cannot be its real will.
But if we restrict ourselves to its express utterance, we cannot
possibly tell what it is in earnest with--_because it does not know_.
Therefore, the degree of passion {287} with which a given opinion
is maintained throws no light on the question, on what points the
public is really in earnest, in the sense of the “real will.” This
can only be known from the substantive reality, which is the “true
inwardness” of public opinion. This substantive reality, the true
merits of any case, is not to be got by the study of mere public
opinion as expressed, but when it is successfully divined and
asserted, public opinion will always come round to it. If we ask how
it is to be divined or known, we must go back to the analogy of a
theory. The solution must be constructed so as to satisfy the real
facts or needs, and the real facts or needs only become known in
proportion as it is constructed, just as in scientific discovery.
The man who can see and do what his age wills and demands is the
great man of the age. Public opinion, then, demands to be at once
esteemed and contemned; esteemed in its essential basis, contemned
in its conscious expression. It is, however, the principle of the
modern world that every one is allowed to contribute his opinion.
When he has contributed it, and so far satisfied the impulse of
self-assertion, he is likely to acquiesce in what is done, to which,
he can feel, he has thrown in some element of suggestion or criticism.
10. In concluding this chapter, we will attempt to estimate the
nearness of such an analysis of the State to the actual facts of
life, admitting certain appearances against it, but rejecting
pessimistic views which rest on false abstractions.
I will state the difficulties as they appeared to T.H. Green, a
cautious and practical Englishman, {288} well experienced in local
politics, and acquainted with different classes of men. [1]
“To an Athenian slave, who might be used to gratify a
master’s lust, it would have been a mockery to speak
of the State as a realisation of freedom; and perhaps
it would not be much less to speak of it as such to an
untaught and under-fed denizen of a London yard with gin
shops on the right hand and on the left.”
“It is true that the necessity which the State lays on
the individual is for the most part one to which he is
so accustomed that he no longer kicks against it; but
what is it, we may ask, but an external necessity, which
he no more lays on himself than he does the weight of
the atmosphere or the pressure of summer heat and winter
frosts, that compels the ordinary citizen to pay rates
and taxes, to serve in the army, to abstain from walking
over the Squire’s fields, snaring his hares, or fishing
his preserved streams, to pay his rent, to respect those
artificial rights of property which only the possessors
of them have any obvious interest in maintaining, or even
(if he is one of the proletariate) to keep his hands off
the superfluous wealth of his neighbour when he has none
of his own to lose?”
“A conception does not float in the air. It must be
somebody’s conception. Whose conception, then, of general
good is it that these institutions represent?”
“Is it not seriously misleading, when the requirements of
the State have so largely arisen out of force directed
by selfish motives, and when the motive of obedience to
these requirements is determined by fear, to {289} speak
of them as having a common source with the morality
of which it is admitted that the essence is to be
disinterested and spontaneous?”
[1] _Principles of Political Obligation_, p. 8; cf. p. 127 ff.
I have quoted these passages--the whole section should be carefully
read--in order to state plainly a paradox which affects the theory
of society from beginning to end. It continually shows itself in the
pessimistic criticism of economic motive, political motive, and of
every-day social motive.
The whole question really depends on our understanding of the
relation of abstract and concrete. It is plain, as Green says, that
the idea of a common good has never been the sole influence operative
in the formation or maintenance of States. And, in as far as it has
operated at all, it has only done so in very imperfect forms. Green
goes so far as to say that Hegel’s account of freedom as realised in
the State does not seem to correspond to the facts of society as it
is, or even as, under the unalterable conditions of human nature, it
ever could be; though, no doubt, there is a work of moral liberation,
which society, through its various agencies, is constantly carrying
on for the individual.
Now, the truth of these criticisms may be granted in the same sense
in which we grant the imperfection of knowledge (as currently
conceived) or of morality--imperfections not accidental, but
inherent in each particular form of human experience. The conflict
of interests, the failure to reconcile rights, and the weight and
opaqueness, so to speak, of law and custom to the individual mind,
are contradictions of the same type and {290} due to causes of
the same kind as those which arise in the world of ethics and of
theory. And, though the new relations which spring up in society
are perpetually resulting in new contradictions, there is no reason
to compare the State unfavourably, in this respect, with Morality
or with Science. The contradictions, in fact, are the material of
organisation. [1]
[1] Take, for instance, the chaos of the medical charities of London.
It consists of endeavours to adjust help to needs, which endeavours
are themselves unadjusted to each other. Thus, precisely as in the
theoretical progress, the unadjustment of adjustments brings out ever
new contradictions which demand readjustment.
Without differing profoundly from Green in theory, therefore, we
venture to assign a greatly diminished importance to his criticisms.
This is due in part to the growth of a more intimate experience,
owing in some measure to his initiative, which seems to show the
essentials of life to be far more identical throughout the so-called
classes of society than is admitted by such a passage as that cited
above about the dweller in a London yard. [1] It is due, further,
and in connection with such experience, to the psychological
conceptions developed in previous chapters, according to which the
place of actual fear of punishment in maintaining the social system
is really very small, while {291} the place of a habituation, which
is essentially ethical, is comparatively large. These suggestions,
which lead us to lay decreasing stress on Green’s criticism of Hegel,
point wholly in the general direction of his own convictions, and
we may finally meet the general difficulty, which expresses itself
in pessimism, by considerations such as Green himself alleges in
mitigation of his own criticism.
[1] Not much stress should be laid on an isolated expression of this
kind, used in making clear the difficulties of a theory which on
the whole he supported, and putting these difficulties, as was his
custom, as high as possible. But it is worth noting that no one,
who really knows the class thus rhetorically alluded to, fails to
experience in them the same great relations and recognitions which
make life worth living for more fortunate persons, and, as they feel
very keenly, the experience is often more emphatic there than in the
richer class. Probably, in fundamental matters, there is as large a
proportion of persons untaught and bred up between temptations among
the rich as among the poor.
We may approach the matter in this way. The paradox is, that if you
scrutinise the acts which have made States, and which carry them on,
or which go on under and within them, you will every where be able
to urge that they spring from self-interest and ambition--not from a
desire for the common good. How then can we say that the State exists
for a common good? Hegel’s large conception of a social fabric and
the temper of mind which maintains it should have done some thing to
meet this problem. But we may come a little closer to the precise
difficulty.
Nothing is so fallacious as mere psychological analysis applied
to the estimation of the purposes which rule a mind. In every act
there is necessarily an aspect of the agent’s particular self.
One way or another he is satisfied in it. So the pessimistic or
superficial psychologist can always--not in some acts merely, but
in all--discover a form of self-seeking. Life is a whole made up
of particulars, and the universal is a connection within them, not
another particular outside them; it is a mistake of principle to
suppose that any act can be outside the tissue of aims, impulses, and
emotions which affect the sensitive self. Great purposes work through
these affections and transform them, but {292} cannot obliterate
them without obliterating life. “There is nothing degrading in
being alive.” [1] But there is a kind of eye which sees all these
particulars apart from the substantive aims which give them their
character, and treats them as if they were the sole determining
motives of the agent. Hegel calls such a critic--he is thinking
especially of historians--“the psychological valet, for whom there
are no heroes, not because they are no heroes, but because he is
only a valet.” On the whole, a man is what he does. If his series
of actions has the root of the matter in it, it is wrong either for
him to be deterred, or for a critic to carp, because they bring him
gain or glory, or gratify him by activity and excitement. To shrink
from particular occasions of action because one’s self may find
satisfaction in them is to fall back into the mere general willing of
the abstract good. And “the laurels of mere willing are dry leaves
that never have been green.”
[1] _Rechtsphil._, sect. 123.
We may illustrate these ideas from the life of the ordinary members
of States, and from the career of a great ruler or conqueror. [1]
[1] Green, _Principles of Political Obligation_, sects. 121 and 128.
The life of an English labourer, for example, may concern itself with
no such abstract ideas [1] as are expressed by the words “State” or
“common good.” But, to begin with, he is a law-abiding citizen. He
keeps his hands off others and their belongings by the same rule
by which he expects others to keep their hands off him and his
belongings. {293} [2] He recognises fairness of bargaining, and is
prepared to treat others fairly, as he expects them to treat him. He
is aware of his claims, that is to say, as depending on something in
common between himself and others; and if he does not practically
admit any such community, “he is one of the dangerous classes,
virtually outlawed by himself.” [3]
[1] Although the literary class are liable very seriously to
under-rate the significance of forms of thought unfamiliar to them.
[2] Habits, such as our habit of relying on security of life and
property, are secondarily automatic, _i.e._ are very intimately
connected with ideas. See chap. viii.
[3] Green, _Loc. cit_.
So far he is a loyal subject only. If he is to have a fuller sense
of a social good, he must either take part in the work of the State,
or at least be familiar with such work, through interest in his
fellows share of it, and in the organisations which connect his class
interests with the public good. His mind must not merely work in
its place in the social mind, but must be in some degree aware of
the connection between its place and the whole--of the appercipient
structure to which it belongs. He must, in short, have touch with
the connection which Hegel represents as that between the Bourgeois
Society and the State proper. And this, in modern States, is in
principle open to him.
And, further, he must have the feeling for his State, which is
connected with the idea of home and fatherland. In a modern nation
the atmosphere of the family is not confined to the actual family.
The common dwelling-place, history, and tradition, the common
language and common literature, give a colour of affection to the
every-day citizen-consciousness, which is to the nation what family
affection is in the home circle.
{294} Thus, it is not true that either the feeling or the insight
which constitute a consciousness of a common good are wanting to the
every-day life of an average citizen in a modern State. It may seem
full of selfish care, but this is only a narrow view. If we look at
the spirit of the whole life we shall see that it is substantially
dependent on the recognition of a good, and feels that dependence in
concrete form.
And, secondly, to take the paradox in its extreme shape, in which the
order of the State appears to arise out of the selfish ambition of
the most unscrupulous of men. The contradiction may be stated in the
form that the actions of bad men are “over-ruled” for good. But this
would mean that the “psychological” critic or historian had first
misstated the cause, and then had rectified his mis-statement by a
meaningless phrase. The great ideas and causes which were advanced,
for example, by the career of Napoleon, owed neither their nature nor
their existence to his selfish ambition. They did not, however, owe
them to any non-human cause; to any operation of ideas otherwise than
in the minds of men. They came into existence through the working of
innumerable minds towards objective ends by the inherent logic of
social growth, with various degrees of moral insight, and they were
promoted by Napoleon’s career in virtue of the common character which
united his aims, in so far as they had a reasonable side, with the
movement shaped by the ideal forces of the age. There is no reason
to doubt, if we do not wilfully narrow our view of the situation,
that a conception of good was as much operative in the cause as it is
present in {295} the effect--say, in the unity of Italy. We cannot
attempt to deal with the problem of the existence of evil, on the
ground of ethical and political philosophy; and we are not concerned
to deny or to minimise the presence of greed and selfishness as
distorting forces in the minds of men, or in the organisation of
States. All that we needed to show, was that what makes and maintains
[1] States as States is will and not force, the idea of a common
good, and not greed or ambition; and that this principle cannot be
overthrown by the facts of self-interest in ordinary citizens, or of
selfishness in those who mould the destinies of nations.
[1] Aristotle’s saying of the State, that it “_comes to be_ for the
sake of life, but _is_ for the sake of good life,” expresses in the
first instance an apparent contrast between origin and purpose of
States. But its real point is that the purpose is implied in the
origin, for the State is natural, and in every “natural” genesis its
purpose is implied; and the origin is implied in the purpose, for
the State, in the processes which maintain it, “originates,” _i.e._
renews its material basis, daily, and must do so in order to “be.”
{296}