and almost immeasurable advance in historical studies. The technique
needed to turn raw materials into the finished article kept pace with
the supply, and men learned to write the history of their own country,
their own party, and their own beliefs, as impartially as that of other
lands and other creeds. But the Great War has ravaged the placid
pastures of scholarship no less than the fields of France and Belgium.
Too many historians in every belligerent country have lost their heads
and degenerated into shrieking partisans. International co-operation in
the pursuit of truth, which is the condition of progress in history no
less than in science, has been rudely shattered by the clash of arms.
With all but the calmest minds, national self-consciousness and national
self-righteousness have rendered frankness in dealing with the record of
our late allies and fairness in dealing with our late enemies difficult
if not impossible. Many years will elapse before the European atmosphere
regains the tranquillity in which alone the disinterested pursuit of
truth can nourish. Meanwhile it is a source of legitimate satisfaction
that while the world was rocking to its foundations two English
historians, Sir Adolphus Ward and Mr. William Harbutt Dawson, were
narrating the development of Germany in the nineteenth century with a
steadiness of pulse unsurpassed in the piping times of peace. The
historian is a man of flesh and blood and may love his country as
ardently as other men; but, if he is to be worthy of his high calling,
he must trample passion and prejudice under his feet and walk humbly and
reverently in the temple of the Goddess of Truth.
FOR REFERENCE
Gooch, _History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century_ (Longmans).
VI
POLITICAL THEORY
A.D. LINDSAY
Political Philosophy or the philosophical theory of the State has closer
relations with history than any other branch of philosophical inquiry.
It is indeed distinguished from history in that it can disregard the
success or failure, the historical development of this or that state.
For it is concerned not with historical happenings but with ideals, not
with the varying extent to which different states have approximated or
fallen short of their purpose, but with that purpose itself, not, in
short, with states but with _the_ State. Yet this need not involve that
the ideal, _the_ State, is always and everywhere the same. Ideals are
born of historical circumstances and fashioned to meet historical
problems, and the would-be timeless ideals which political philosophers
have put before us have always borne clear marks of the country and time
of their origin. The ideal which men have set themselves in political
organization has varied from time to time. That such variation is
inevitable will be clear if we ask ourselves what we can possibly mean
by an ideal state. That states fall short of their ideal because of the
imperfections of their citizens is clear enough. All political life
demands a certain standard of moral behaviour, of capacity to work for a
common good, and an understanding of the results of our own and other
people's actions. Were human selfishness completely overcome, the state
would still be necessary to correct individual shortsightedness. The
policeman, exempt from the cares of apprehending criminals, would still
be needed to control traffic. But imagine, not that all citizens
attained a certain standard of moral and intellectual behaviour, as the
ideal demands, but that they were all perfectly good and perfectly wise,
should we need any kind of government at all? Is not the supposition of
perfection so far removed from any state of affairs we can really think
of or plan for, that it cannot enter into our reckoning, ideal or
practical? Every ideal takes certain facts of human life for granted
whilst it tries to improve others. All ideal states, Plato's as well as
others, assume certain facts about human nature and human society. These
facts may and do vary. The Greek city state assumed that a state must be
small, if it was to have the intensive life they demanded. The Roman
Empire was a denial of the anarchy to which the Greek ideal had led, but
it lost in intensity what it gained in extent. All political ideals
assume a certain sociological background on which the state is based and
from which spring the problems which the state is intended to solve. As
this sociological background varies from time to time, _the_ State, the
purpose which men set before themselves in political organization, will
vary also. The Greek city state and the mediaeval state were not
different approximations to the same ideal. They were the expressions of
different ideals. They rested on different assumptions, e.g. as to the
place of authority in society. With the disappearance at the Reformation
of one of the great assumptions on which the mediaeval state had been
based, a new theory of the state was inevitable. The national state of
the seventeenth century was something new in history, and Hobbes differs
from Aristotle, not because Hobbes is perverse and Aristotle right,
though Hobbes often is perverse, but because the political problems
which Hobbes and Aristotle had to face were not the same.
Two great historical facts at the end of the eighteenth century, the
French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, profoundly modified the
basis of political organization. The modern state in consequence differs
in many important respects from any that have preceded it. It does not
rest on the common acceptance of authority, either religious, as did the
mediaeval state, or personal, as did the seventeenth-century state.
Unlike the Greek city state, it is large. Its administration is
concerned with millions who cannot be in personal relations to one
another, or share the same intensive life.
With the nineteenth century, then, a new chapter in the development of
political theory begins as the peculiar problems of the modern state
develop. Professor Dicey, in his _Law and Opinion in England_, has
divided the century into two periods of political thought--Individualism
and Collectivism--one marking the decrease, the other the increase of
the power and authority of the state. When our period begins, the day of
individualism was passing. Ever since the Reformation it had, in spite
of Burke, dominated political theory. Two forces had given it
strength--one idealistic, one scientific. It represented the revolt of
the individual conscience against the claims of authority, and as such
was a theory which attempted to limit the power of government over the
individual, whether by an appeal to natural rights in Locke and Tom
Paine, or to the greatest happiness of the greatest number in the
Utilitarians, or to the super-eminent value of individual liberty as set
forth in John Stuart Mill's noble panegyric. The French Revolution gave
a notable impetus to this side of individualism, with its passionate
assertion of the principle that political institutions exist for man,
not man for political institutions, and that all government must be
tested by the life which it enables each and every one of its citizens
to live. Individualism in this sense is concerned with the discovery of
principles by which the power of government over the lives of its
members may be limited. It is not necessarily a theory of the nature of
society. Hobbes, however, was an individualist as well as Locke, and for
Hobbes the individual was the scientific unit from which societies and
states were built up--the starting-point for a scientific treatment of
society. As the French Revolution gave a fresh impulse to idealistic
individualism, the Industrial Revolution reanimated the scientific, for
it displayed the economic man, Hobbes's hero, come to life and a
respectable member of society. With him came the growth of political
economy, apparently the first really scientific study of man. From
Political Economy Darwin borrowed the conception of the struggle for
existence and the survival of the fittest, and from the new biology the
doctrine of Evolution through individual competition returned to
reinforce with the prestige of the new science the economists'
conception of society.
For the first half of the nineteenth century all the forces inspiring
individualism seemed to work together, for economics and biology
breathed a benevolent optimism which promised that if the scientific
forces of individualism were left to work unchecked by state
restriction, they would of themselves produce that individual liberty
and free development which idealistic individualism desired.
The development of the industrial revolution, however, soon made
economic optimism impossible, and with its decay idealistic and
scientific individualism parted company. The former retained its concern
for individual liberty but came to see that its ideal was as much
threatened by economic dependence as by state control, that the choice
for most members of society was not one between state interference and
no interference at all, but between the state controlling or not
controlling the power of interference possessed by the economically
superior members of society. On such principles Henry Sidgwick
justified an extensive system of state control of industry, and for such
reason the strongest supporters of the rights of the individual have
been found among Socialists.
Scientific individualism, which found its unit in the economic man and
sought to absorb in economics both ethics and politics, was not in
essence affected by the discrediting of economic optimism. It painted
the struggle between individuals in gloomy instead of in attractive
colours, its 'scientific' prepossessions inclined it to a determinism
which led easily to the economic theory of history and even, by a
curious conversion of opposites, to the 'scientific socialism' of Karl
Marx. In its essence it is a denial of the real existence of politics.
For it is a theory of society which denies the possibility of a will for
the common good and therefore the possibility of political ideals.
It was this powerful and malignant theory which was attacked and
answered by the modern idealist school represented by Green, Wallace,
and Ritchie, and, in the present day, by Dr. Bosanquet. These writers
gave us a theory of the state based on the importance and reality of
social purpose. They went back to the theory of the Greek city state
expounded by Plato and Aristotle, finding modern reinforcement in the
teaching of Rousseau and more especially of Hegel. Their destructive
criticism of 'scientific' individualism was reinforced by the teaching
of anthropology and of historical jurisprudence, which emphasized the
part played in early forms of society by social solidarity and showed
the inability of individualism to account for the development of
society. Their destructive criticism was, however, the least part of
their achievement. They exhibited convincingly the state as the product
of will and purpose, based on man's moral nature and being in turn the
form in which that moral nature expresses itself. In a notable phrase of
Dr. Bosanquet's, a phrase to which he has given constant detailed
amplification, 'institutions are ethical ideas'; moral purpose may seem
to shine dimly enough in many actual institutions, but it is the only
light which shines in them at all, and only in that light can their
meaning and reality be understood.
The main principles of this idealistic school may be safely said to have
by this time established themselves against criticism. Of recent years
Social Psychology has done much to explain the gap between the
contemplated purpose and the actual working of institutions, and has
given precision and definiteness to those elements in human nature which
strengthen or weaken social solidarity. Economists have come to see that
economic relations are possible only within the framework of a society
which has its root in moral and political purpose, although within that
framework they may be theoretically isolated and studied by themselves.
Sociology, after many false starts, inspired by the mistaken belief that
a scientific treatment of society should interpret higher forms in the
light of lower, has now found it possible to study the manifold variety
of institutional and social life on the basis provided by idealistic
philosophy.
As a theory of society, in short, this philosophy holds the field. It
has been criticized of late years as a theory of the state, and as these
criticisms show both where the idealistic theory was in some respects
defective and also where the chief problems for political philosophy in
the future are to be found, I shall devote the greater part of my
lecture to these considerations.
The idealistic school drew their inspiration from the theory of the
Greek city state, and in their conception of the function of the state
they assumed an essential identity between the Greek city state and the
modern nation state. In so far as these two types of state have been the
most self-conscious types of society that have existed, and have
therefore displayed explicitly the purpose that is implicit in all
society, the identification has been sound and fruitful; in so far,
however, as the identity is pressed to imply that in the modern state
the definite political or governmental organization should play the same
function as it did in the Greek city state, the identification has been
mistaken.
The Greek city state failed conspicuously to solve the problem of
inter-state relations, and its philosophers, instead of recognizing the
failure and trying to remedy it, made their ideal state even more
self-centred and autonomous than the existing states around them. Modern
Idealism, just because it glorifies the state as the necessary upholder
of moral relations, has often found it hard to regard the state as in
its turn a member of a moral world.
Again, the Greek city state, just because it was small, could take up
into itself all the various social activities of its members. The state,
in the sense of the Community in its political organization, directed
and inspired Society, and the distinction between society and the state
was not of great importance. In the modern world the boundaries of
political organization are not nearly as definite boundaries in society
as are the boundaries of the Greek city state. There are all manner of
associations whose members are of different states and whose purposes
are but to a small degree inspired or controlled by political
organizations. Modern states are not all or completely nation states,
and the nation is not as pervading and dominating an entity as was the
Greek _polis_. This is not to say that the non-political associations
could do without the state, as some recent writers have contended.
Churches, e.g., could not exist were there not law and government. Yet
it is impossible to maintain that in any real sense they are upheld by
the state. They clearly get their inspiration from other sources. The
difficulty is not evaded if we go behind both political and
non-political organization to the community in which both exist and
which upholds them both. For what in this reference is 'the community'?
In regard to the political association it is the special solidarity of
people living in a certain area; in regard to the non-political
organization it is the solidarity of a section of the world-wide
society, marked off from the rest on a non-territorial basis. The
community in the two cases is not the same. Hence there arises in the
modern state, as there arose in the mediaeval, a conflict of loyalties
between the state and non-political associations. If we divide the world
into states whose lines of division follow the divisions of the
organization of force, we are faced with a host of problems concerning
the proper place in society of these force-bearing organizations, and
their relation to other associations.
In considering both sets of problems, international and internal, we may
either begin with the division of the world into states, each of which
will be an approximation of _the_ State which we are studying, or we may
regard the whole world as in some sort one society, covered with a
network of overlapping associations of all kinds. On the former view the
world is thought of as consisting of a number of independent
communities, each shaping and controlling the various forms of social
life within its own borders, upholding their moral world, and each being
as a whole single entity a member of the community of states. On the
latter we start with the solidarity and will to co-operate which
pervades in all manner of degrees the whole world society, and regard
the organization of force which marks the state as being the mark of a
settled and determined form of that will to co-operate which is
characteristic of all forms of human association. How dominant and
determinant over other forms of association is that special form which
controls organized force--that is the problem before us. We are
concerned in technical language with the problem of sovereignty.
Let us consider first the problem of international relations. The
doctrine of sovereignty, formulated in the seventeenth century and
crystallized by Austin at the beginning of the nineteenth, made
sovereignty the hallmark of the state. The person or persons, to whom
the bulk of a given society render habitual obedience, either do or do
not render habitual obedience in turn to some other person or persons.
If they do not, the society constitutes a sovereign state; if they do,
it is only part of a sovereign state. The world therefore was regarded
as containing a number of sovereign independent states. As sovereignty
and law necessarily went hand in hand, there could be no law between
sovereign states. There could only be world-wide law if there were one
world-wide state. So long as there are more states than one, there are
communities between whom there is no law. The doctrine of sovereignty
was in its inception individualist, but in so far as concerns the
implications, though not the basis of sovereignty, it was taken over by
Hegel and by the English idealist school with the exception of T.H.
Green. Idealism, indeed, always insisted that will, not force, was the
basis of the state, but whereas in Green the state is constituted by the
moral willing of individuals for a general good, in Hegel and in
Bosanquet the conflicting willings of individuals are reconciled by
their being taken up into the supra-personal will of the state. With the
former therefore the morality of individuals is the primary fact, the
existence of the state the secondary; with the latter on the whole the
existence of the state is the primary moral fact, the moral willing of
individuals secondary. Just because the wills of individuals are
reconciled, not by each recognizing certain abstract principles of duty,
but by being taken up into the supra-personal will of the state, where
there is no such supra-personal will there is no reconciliation of
conflicting wills and no morality beyond and outside the boundaries of
communities. Hence arises a conception of the state which fits into the
absolutist doctrine of sovereignty which we have described.
The first thing to be said about this doctrine of the independent
sovereign state is that political facts have obviously outrun it. It was
derived from a study of the unitary state and will hardly fit any
federal state. It is manifestly absurd when applied to the British
Empire. If we disregard, as we must, the superficial legal facts and
look at the real nature of the British Empire, we must admit that the
Dominions are neither separate sovereign states nor parts of one
sovereign state, and that the unity of the Empire is a unity of will--a
willingness to co-operate which has not yet clothed itself in legal
forms, and which is not, for geographical and other reasons, as intense
as that will to co-operate which must be at the basis of a unitary
sovereign state. This must suggest to us that the willingness to
co-operate admits of degrees, and the relations of communities to one
another to have stability must reflect these degrees. The importance of
these considerations is obvious if we think of the problems with which
we are confronted at the present moment, when we are attempting to form
an international organization. The problems which have confronted the
Peace Conference have brought two things clearly to light. The first,
that the nation state is far too simple a solution of modern
difficulties. Self-determination will not carry us very far. There are
many cases where the boundaries dictated by nationality on the one hand
and by the need for common organization on the other do not coincide,
and where the only solution is one which impairs sovereignty in the old
sense. The second is that the League of Nations, if it is to mean
anything at all, will have to impair the sovereignty of the states which
join it without thereby constituting in itself a world state. Much of
the opposition to the League of Nations is concerned with this implied
impairment of sovereignty. Whether this opposition will weigh with us
will depend on whether we regard the independent sovereign state as the
be-all and end-all of political theory, or see that the fundamental fact
to be taken into account is man's readiness to co-operate for common
purposes. If we take the latter view, we shall still be holding to what
was the fundamental contribution of the idealist school, the teaching
that the basis of all political questions is moral. The essence of the
matter is how we are prepared to treat other people, for what purposes
we are prepared to act with them, how far we are prepared to recognize
and give settled organized recognition to our mutual obligations. The
political organization is the vehicle and not the creator of these moral
facts. As the facts vary, so will its forces. We may learn from the
Hegelian school to recognize the enormous importance of the state, the
great achievement of the human spirit which its organization represents,
and the folly of light-heartedly endangering its existence, without
making one form which it has taken in the nation state sacrosanct and
absolute.
Let us turn now to the second of our problems, the relation of the state
to associations, such as churches and trade unions, within its borders.
Here again we find a principle, originating in earlier individualist
theory, taken up into idealism. In the beginnings of modern political
theory in the seventeenth century, the absolutist doctrine of the state
was the outcome of the need of the times for strong government. A state
that was not master in its own house was felt to be incapable of the
hard task these troublous times set before it. The French Revolution
made no change in the attitude of the state to associations. New-born
democracy was not inclined to look favourably on the independence of
religious non-democratic associations, and the fact that Leviathan had
become democratic was thought to have transformed him into a monster
within whose capacious maw any number of Jonahs might live at ease or
liberty. Association against a tyrant might be a sacred duty; against
the people it could only be a suspicious superfluity. In a very
different way the Prussian state, centralized, efficient, and Erastian,
organizing the whole resources of the community under the guidance of
the state, enforced the same principle. The state is a moral
institution, it cannot surrender the inculcation and upholding of
morality to an alien or independent body. From all the sources of modern
idealistic political theory, Plato, Rousseau, Hegel, comes the same
principle of state absolutism over associations within the state. The
principle was put in idealistic form in the doctrine that the state is a
supra-personal will, absorbing in itself the activities of its members.