iv. A completely new vista reveals itself to the student of social theory when he turns from biological analogies and economic conditions to consider the wealth of experience and of ideas which is furnished to him by Jurisprudence and the Science of Right. He knows, indeed, by this time, that the obvious aspect of a province of fact will not be the only one, and that a unity will certainly be traceable between all the facets of social existence. But none the less, he will be able to restrain the itch to explain things away, and he will fairly and candidly give weight to the significance and suggestiveness of the mass of history and of reflection which is now brought before him.
a. For here, as the plainest and most unmistakable data of experience, we are confronted with ideal facts. The vast mass of documents which form the basis of the Science of Right—a more complete and comprehensive set of records, perhaps, than any other branch of social science can boast—bears witness in every case to one social phenomenon at least, to a formal act of mind and will, aimed at maintaining some relative right or {35} hindering some relative wrong, and stamped with what in some sense and in some degree amounts to a social recognition. Theorists have said too hastily, though with a sound meaning, that right is independent of fact. It would be as true to say that reason is independent of civilisation, or the soul independent of culture. Right is not exhausted in the facts of past history; but it is at every moment embodied in facts; and to comprehend that the social phenomena which are among the most solid and unyielding of our experiences, are nevertheless ideal in their nature, and consist of conscious recognitions, by intelligent beings, of the relations in which they stand, is to make a great step towards grasping the essential task of science in dealing with society. From the beginning of social theory the facts of law have been set in opposition to the idea of a natural growth. It has been observed that, as a definite institution maintained by formal acts of will, society is artificial, conventional, contractual. We all know to-day that there is much more than this to be said about the nature and principles of social growth. Nevertheless, it remains true that the social whole has an artificial aspect, an aspect of will and of design, of the agreement and mutual recognition of free conscious beings. And in so far as the history of law has resulted in the conception of natural right, this in no way derogates from the artificial or ideal character of society as above understood. For “natural” right belongs to a “nature” which includes and does not exclude that action of intelligence in virtue of which society may be termed artificial; and is {36} merely the revelation of the principle towards which the social will is working, and which in some degree it has always embodied.
Therefore the facts of Jurisprudence and the Science of Right, or of “Natural Right,” as the issue and outcome of Jurisprudence, necessarily counterbalance the extreme ideas of continuous growth and natural causation which social science derives from other analogies. We are reminded that, after all, we are dealing with a self-conscious purposive organism, which is aware of a better and a worse, and has members bound together by conscious intelligence, though, it may be, not by conscious intelligence alone. At one time the ideas of Jurisprudence, such as Sovereignty or Contract, were considered sufficient by themselves to equip a social theory. And if they are now seen to need completion from both sides,—from the side of lower nature, and from the side of the national spirit and culture,—this should not make us neglectful of the important truths which the facts of law and recognised obligation, more than any others, establish on solid ground.
b. It is of course the case that Law has been treated from the standpoint of economic history in the same way as the other phenomena of civilised life. It may be taken simply as the form into which substantive relations crystallise, under the influence of economic conditions or of other elementary social forces. And obviously such a view has its truth. The social will, like the will of any one of us from day to day, is formed not in vacuo, but as the focus of all the influences which penetrate our being. It is a fair object of {37} research to ascertain the economic or other social meaning of the statutes which we find on the statute book; and it is because they have so much meaning that they are excellent object-lessons in the play of the social consciousness and sense of right. But this focussing of social influences makes the laws not less acts of social will, but more. To suppose the contrary would be like supposing that nothing is a true act of will which embodies an individual’s distinctive purposes in life.
I will explain by an illustration the relative value of sociological analysis in dealing with the facts of positive law. I am indebted for it to M. Durkheim, whose writings appear to me among the most original and suggestive works of modern sociology. I regret that my immediate purpose does not justify me in stating and appreciating the whole very interesting theory of repressive and contractual law from which the point in question is selected.
An act is a crime, [1] we are told, for the pure sociologist, when it offends the strong and definite collective sentiments of society. This is the strictly causal view of the matter. The act is a crime because it offends; it does not offend because it is a crime. And the corollaries are valuable. It is idle to distinguish, on such a basis, between the reformatory, the retributive, and the deterrent views of the reaction which is punishment. [2] An offensive act is in itself at once an exhibition of character, an injury, and a menace. If a man {38} assaults me in the street, and I knock him down; how futile to ask if my action is meant to cure him of his insolence, to punish him for having hit me, or to prevent him from hitting me again! The real fact is that I am offended, and I react by way of injury and negation against that which offends me. Now, this view, I think, illuminates the subject. By going back to the simple operative cause, as it may be supposed to exist especially in the mind of a tribe in an early stage of development (M. Durkheim is chiefly referring to religious offences), we have got a plain type of mental reaction, easy to imagine and to understand. In this type we see at once the unity of aspects which the forms of law, and legal or philosophical theory, tend later to dissociate in a fictitious degree. And moreover we are reminded that a law must have something behind it; some positive sentiment or conviction, without which it would be unaccountable and unmeaning.
[1] Durkheim, Op. cit., livre I., ch. ii.
[2] See ch. viii. below.
But when all this is said, it must not be supposed that penal law has been reduced to the level of a strong and definite collective sentiment, or a crime to the level of an annoyance. The simplest penal law of a self-existent social group is different from the anger of a crowd or mob. There is in it some sense of permanence, and permanence means responsibility and generality—a distinction of right and wrong. The fact of formally constituting a crime, i.e. of announcing a law, implies that mere distaste is no ground of punishment. The law means that there is something worth maintaining, and that this is recognised, and that to violate this recognition is not merely to be unpopular, but to {39} sin against the common good, and to break an obligation. With less than this there is no true crime.
Thus, if I am right, the relation of pure “sociological” causation to juristic facts is the well-known relation of the more abstract to the more concrete sciences, usually illustrated in logic by the relation of the physical and the musical account of musical sound. For the pure physicist, a harmony and a discord are only two different combinations of shakings. For the musician they are not only opposite effects, but are causes of divergent consequences. So with the relation between a strong collective sentiment and a true law. A strong sentiment, as such, is a mere fact, a mere force; and as such the sociologist regards it. A law involves the pretension to will what is just, and is therefore a sentiment and something more, viz., the point of view of social good. It aims at a right and implies a wrong, and demands to be apprehended and judged on this ground. A mere force cannot by its reaction constitute a crime; for that a law is necessary. The ideal aspect of law as recognition of right is no less actual, no less solid and verifiable, than the facts of sentiment or necessity which may have suggested and sustained it. In this way the relation of sociological causation to the facts of Jurisprudence is typical of the whole relation of Sociology conceived as a natural science, to the larger facts with which social theory has to deal.
v. But the ideas involved in mere legality, though they bear emphatic testimony to the conscious and artificial aspect of the social whole, have always {40} been regarded with some justice as the type of what is empty and formal. To treat a law as a command with a penalty annexed, or to enunciate the tendency of social progress as being from status to contract, may convey important meanings, but is obviously very far short of the whole truth. And, indeed, generalisations of this kind, though characteristic of a certain class of reflective Jurisprudence, do not at all represent the highest level which has been reached within the science of right itself. But yet, as we pass beyond these everyday working conceptions, we are beginning to leave the central ground of Jurisprudence, and to move towards a point of view which deals more completely with life and culture. The need and occasion for such a point of view may be measured by that revival of national individuality which was referred to in the last chapter as constituting the true ground and occasion for the rebirth of genuine political philosophy in modern times. Montesquieu’s investigation into the “spirit of laws,” and his treatment of a law as something deeper than a command, following upon the similar endeavours of Vico, was in fact a recognition of the fundamental unity of a national civilisation, which, on its political side, even Hobbes and Locke had already attempted to explain by help of the inadequate instruments furnished to them by legal theory. Montesquieu’s and Vico’s conceptions were only the forerunners of the many-sided study of civilisation which characterised the latter part of the eighteenth century, following up the problem which was enunciated in Rousseau’s paradox, that “law itself must be created by the social spirit which it aims at creating.” To recognise the social spirit {41} of a people, as the central unity behind its law and culture and politics, was the principle of the various researches dealing with formative art, poetry, language, religion, and the state, which marked the close of the eighteenth century (compare Wolf’s theory of Homer as the utterance of a racial mind), and laid the foundation of nineteenth century idealism.
The true Greek renaissance, initiated in the age of Winckelmann, forcing modern minds into contact with Hellenic ideas in their original form, and no longer through Latin intermediaries, furnished a type and focus for these researches by bringing before the thoughts of students the brilliant individuality of the ancient city-state, the crude traditions of which had already exercised the most powerful influence on Rousseau, and through him on the Revolution. At the same time the organic sciences were full of activity. The life-work of Goethe marks the parallelism of the two movements. It is plain that the doctrines of Comte were no more than a very one-sided attempt to formulate the significance of the fermentation around him, and that deeply as he felt the unity of the social being, his expression of it ignored half the lesson of the times. Thus the generalities of Jurisprudence are vitalised and completed by the work of the sciences of culture; and the conception of a national mind and character takes its unquestioned place in modern social theory. It may be well at this point also to call attention to the researches which later historians have directed to what may be called “Comparative Politics”; the relations, that is, of communities under government with respect to the {42} mode in which they are governed. [1] For this branch of inquiry once more, though narrow and empty by itself, yet does aid in bringing to light the purposive and conscious character of society, and in correcting the tendency to treat it altogether as a “natural” phenomenon.
[1] Freeman’s Comparative Politics, and Seeley’s Introduction to Political Science.
vi. “And so the whirligig of Time brings about his revenges.” French Sociology to-day is a psychological science, though its founder banished psychology from his sociological method. Nothing is more instructive than to watch the gradual pressure of the various points of view which are emphasised by the various departments of social experience, as they reveal, under criticism, their tendency to complete themselves and one another by suggesting the only category which is adequate to them as a whole. As every serious student of social matters knows by his own experience, it is impossible to touch a physical fact, or a statistical datum, or a legal enactment, in reference to its social bearing, without its at once, so to speak, coming alive in his hands, and attaching itself to an underlying relation of mind as the only unity which will make it intelligible, and correlate it with other experiences, by themselves no less fragmentary. In statistics, for example, you touch a moving creature, as if through the holes in a wall, at this point and the other, and write down where you have touched him. [1] But to see the creature as he is, and combine your information of all kinds in a just and complete idea, you {43} must get him into the open. And that, when the question is of a life, you can only do by reconstructing his mind, for even to see a social unit with your eyes gives you a fragment only, and not a whole. On Fridays, we are told, the passenger traffic returns of French railways, omnibuses, and steamers show a decline. [2] What dumb fact is this? People do not like to travel on Fridays, or prefer to travel upon other days. What is this preference? The only unity that can really afford an explanation, that can correlate this irregular fragment of fact with the whole to which it belongs, is the living mind and will of the society in which the phenomenon occurs. Explanation aims at referring things to a whole; and there is no true whole but mind. Necessarily, therefore, with widening experience and deepening criticism, mind has become the centre of the experiences focussed by sociology.
[1] Cf. Aspects of the Social Problem (Macmillan, 1895), C.S. Loch on “Returns in Social Science,” p. 287.
[2] Tarde, Les Lois de l’Imitation, p. 115.
We may note some significant points in this development, although, indeed, the whole course of modern sociology is one single illustration of what has just been said. Discussions of the problem in what the differentia of society consists, no longer deal with organic or economic conceptions, but with such ideas as the “Consciousness of kind,” [1] the “Mind of a Crowd,” [2] “Imitation” and “Invention,” [3] similarities and differences in the social consciousness, [4] “Social logic” and society considered as a syllogism, [5] and the imitative and {44} inventive person. [6] The work of M. Tarde in particular is typical of the whole movement, and his phrases have largely been adopted whether in agreement or in controversy. For him the one fact coextensive with the social character is “Imitation”—the means by which ideas and practices spread throughout groups and masses of intelligent beings. For the characteristic of knowable phenomena, in his view, is Repetition, and Imitation is the means and vehicle of Repetition in social matters. Here, however, we have accounted only for generalisation, and differentiation needs a separate origin. This will be supplied by the idea of “Invention;” Invention and Imitation, therefore, are the general form of all social process, the matter on the other hand being analysable as Belief and Desire. Every institution is a belief, [7] every activity is a want or desire. In the Logique Sociale these conceptions of the general medium and process of social life are pushed home into the actual formative operation of the social mind and will. Society, we are told, may be compared not indeed to an organism, but rather to a brain; it is a cooperative mind, a syllogism, in which the principles held by one part are modified and applied by another. M. Tarde’s extreme illustrative hypothesis corresponds strangely with one thrown out by Mr. Sidgwick. Mr. Sidgwick [8] has simplified an ethical question by supposing only a single sentient conscious being in the universe; for M. {45} Tarde there is, we might say, no single being at all; the typical social man is a hypnotical creature, a somnambulist acting under suggestions from others, though he does not know it, and is under the illusion that he is himself. [9] Nothing could be of higher interest than to see the necessities of social science thus working themselves out, on slippery and unfamiliar ground, by the sheer force of facts and experience. That a science of man must be a science of mind seems no longer disputable.
[1] Giddings, p. 17.
[2] Le Bon, Psychologie des Foules.
[3] Tarde, Les Lois de l’Imitation.
[4] Durkheim, La Division du Travail Social.
[5] Tarde, La Logique Sociale.
[6] Baldwin, Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental Development.
[7] Perhaps this expression originates with Fustel de Coulanges in La Cité Antique.
[8] Methods of Ethics, p. 374.
[9] Les Lois de l’Imitation, p. 83.
On the substance of this development there is one observation which inevitably suggests itself to any critic who approaches the problem from the philosophical side.
Necessarily, as the relation of the individual to society is the root of every social problem, psychological sociology consists to a great extent in exercises upon the theme of identity and difference. These exercises have hitherto been for the most part unconscious and involuntary. And the high degree of substantial truth which is attained by inquirers who have not thought the logic of identity worthy of a single glance, is the strongest possible confirmation of the common experience that it is safer to neglect theory than to be careless of facts. Nevertheless, it has now become apparent, that a point has been attained at which logical criticism is absolutely essential, or if not logical criticism, at least some reference to the familiar and well-established results of ancient or modern social philosophy.
For it is a universal characteristic of the {46} sociological movement before us, that identity and difference are referred to different spheres, and the “one” and the “other” are regarded as reciprocally exclusive atoms. [1] The difficulties and fallacies which thus arise are innumerable. Thus we have the contagious common feeling of a crowd [2] taken as the true type of a collective mind, obviously because it is not understood how an identical structure can include the differences, the rational distinctions and relations, which really constitute the working mind of any society. So again we have one type of law marked off as corresponding to social similitude, [3] while a different type corresponds to the social division of labour; simply because the category of resemblance has been substituted for that of identity, and is treated as exclusive of differentiation; with the result of a really terrible distortion of facts in the attempt to separate the whole sphere of penal enactment from that which deals with industrial organisation. So with the entire set of notions of “Imitation,” “Repetition” and “Invention.” [4] The separation of Imitation and Invention is simply the popular exclusion of Difference from Identity; while the treatment of Repetition as the characteristic of knowable phenomena and the mode of utterance of social Imitation means the restriction of rational Identity to its barest form, and the exclusion from {47} social theory of absolutely every case of true cooperative structure. For true cooperative structure is never characterised by repetition, but always by identity in difference; it is the relation not of a screw to an exactly similar screw, but of the screw to the nut into which it fastens.
[1] M. Tarde’s view just mentioned might seem to conflict with this. But note that he regards the man influenced by others as under an illusion in thinking that he is himself: i.e., with Spencer and Huxley, he regards the “self” and the “other” as irreconcilable factors.
[2] Le Bon, Op. cit.
[3] Durkheim, Op. cit.
[4] Tarde and Baldwin, Op. cit.
In the discussions of Egoism and Altruism the difficulty comes to a head. Some writers think Egoism prior to Altruism; others—the more wary and enlightened—incline to treat Altruism as a phase earlier than Egoism; M. Durkheim, whose eye for a fact is very keen, seeing the absurdity of both these suppositions, is determined to include the two characters in question from the very beginning in the human consciousness, [1] but, of course, as contents belonging to different spheres and consisting of contrasted elements. The conception of a whole held together by its differences, its identity consisting in and being measured by their very profoundness and individuality, is not at the command of any of these writers, although the greater part of M. Durkheim’s theory seems imperatively to demand such a conception.
[1] Division du Travail, 216.
vii. Before considering, in conclusion, the relation of Sociology as influenced by the above-mentioned sources and points of view, to social philosophy proper, it will be well to devote a few words to emphasising the way in which these “sources” ought to be regarded.
Every “source” of sociological science is at once a category, or point of view, and also a certain group of actual social conditions. This relation is effectively illustrated by the study of any social {48} unity which is such as to invite a thorough conspectus of its life from top to bottom of the social growth and underlying conditions. I repeat that the history and life of ancient Greece, a singularly complete working model of society on a very small scale, analysed with remarkable thoroughness, and individual throughout, is the prerogative example of such a treatment; but next to this, or in addition to it, a thoroughly careful study of local history, life, and conditions, in a limited region, [1] with which we are familiar from top to toe, is an essential propaedeutic to true social theory. To focus a number of groups of fact, and coordinate the points of view which they substantiate, into the conception of a living being, with its individual character and spiritual utterance, needs more than a merely literary or statistical study. But by making this effort we shall learn, as no economic charts or general scientific works can teach us, what a social life is, and in what sense it is true that all partial facts and experiences within it demand ultimate coordination in the category of mind. It is not meant that consciousness can make the weather hold up, but it is meant that no fact has a true social bearing except in as far as, sooner or later, it comes to form part of the world which a being capable of sociality and therefore intelligent, presents to himself as his theatre of action.
[1] Cf. Professor Geddes’ idea of a “Regional Survey,” with which visitors to his delightful “Summer School” become acquainted.
3. Thus it may seem that by mere force of facts a necessary solution has been arrived at, and that psychological sociology must be one and the same science with social philosophy.
{49} But this is not quite the case. Up to the present time these two sciences continue to approach their object-matter, as it were, from different ends, and whether the two views will ultimately amalgamate is perhaps mainly a problem of the personal division of labour. But a question of principle, with reference to the true nature of psychology, is indirectly involved. Only there seems no reason why two kinds of psychology should not exist.
Psychology, as at present conceived by its best working representatives, is a positive, though not a physical science. “For (the psychologist) the crude superstitions of Australian aborigines have as much interest and value as the developed and accurate knowledge of a Newton or a Faraday.” [1] Its aim is “the establishment of continuity among observed facts, by interpolating among them intermediate links which elude observation.” [2] If not a “physical” science, then, it is, in a common sense of the term, a “natural” science. It has the impartiality, and uses the watchwords—law, process, genesis—which belong to a natural science. And like every impartial science, to which process and genesis are watchwords, it tends to explain the higher by the lower. This springs from no malice aforethought, but from the conditions of the case. The lower is simpler, and usually comes first in time. It is naturally dwelt upon, as that into which it is hoped to resolve the more complex, and the explanation which is more adequate for the simple, is less adequate for the complex. No difference of higher {50} and lower is recognised by the impartial science, and its ideal, as a science, is inevitably the expression of the complex in terms of the simple; while, as far as genesis in time is insisted on, the bias towards temporal causation is pretty sure to operate by attaching a quasi-causal significance to the earlier phases.
[1] Stout, Analytic Psychology, Introduction.
[2] Ib. From a logical point of view this idea of explanation seems seriously defective. See Bradley’s Principles of Logic, p. 491.
In all these characteristics psychology is at one with sociology. And, therefore, though it is a gain that other points of view should be resolved into the point of view of mind, yet the positive bias of sociology is not transcended simply by this resolution.
Philosophy starts, we have said, as it were, from the other end. It is critical throughout; it desires to establish degrees of value, degrees of reality, degrees of completeness and coherence. Its purpose might be termed “Ethical,” but for the extreme narrowness of the meaning of that term. Society, for it, is an achievement or utterance of human nature—of course not divorced from nature in general—having a certain degree of solidity, so to speak; that is to say, being able, up to a certain point, to endure the tests and answer the questionings which are suggested by the scrutiny of human life from the point of view of value and completeness. Is the social life the best, or the only life for a human soul? In what way through society, and in what characteristics of society, does the soul lay hold upon its truest self, or become, in short, the most that it has in it to be? How does the social life at its best compare with the life of art, of knowledge, or of religion, and can the same principle be shown to be active in all of them? And what have {51} they in common, or peculiar to each, which has an imperative claim on the mind of man?
Now it was hinted above that there might be two kinds of psychology, or two tendencies within it. And if psychology were to be impelled, as it has been more than once in the past, by the recognition that where there is more of its object—of mind—its interest is greater and the rank of its object-matter is higher, then there would not be much to choose between the temper of psychology and that of philosophy. And as sociology has found itself driven forward into the territory of social “logic,” a name which at once suggests a critical and philosophical science, it may well be that sociological psychology will not remain wholly “positive” and impartial, but will assume, as in the hands of Professor Giddings, for example, it seems inclined to, at least a teleological attitude, testing social phenomena by the quantity and quality of life which they display.
But, at any rate, the points of view of sociology, and of social philosophy as above described, will continue to supplement each other. Philosophy gives a significance to sociology; sociology vitalises philosophy. The idea of mind is deepened and extended by the unity and continuity which sociological analysis, throughout all its many-sided sources, vindicates for the principle of growth and order down to the roots and in all the fibres of the world. Every natural resource and condition must be thought of as drawing forth or constituting some new element in the mind which is the universal focus; just as every shape and colour of the trees in the landscape or every note of a melody finds its {52} definite and individual response in the contemplative consciousness. The error lies, not in identifying the mind and the environment, but in first uncritically separating them, and then substituting not merely the one for the other, but wretched fragments of the one for the whole in which alone either can be complete.
Philosophy, on the other hand, in treating of society, has to deal with the problems which arise out of the nature of a whole and its parts, the relation of the individual to the universal, and the transformation by which the particular self is lost, to be found again in a more individual, and yet more universal form. In all these respects its view is what might be called teleological; that is to say, it recognises a difference of level or of degree in the completeness and reality of life, and endeavours to point out when and how, and how far by social aid, the human soul attains the most and best that it has in it to become. As long as these two points of view are clearly recognised, it is a matter of the mere personal division of labour whether they are brought to bear by the same thinkers and within the same treatises.
{53}
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.
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.
{79}
1. The reader will no doubt have observed that the theory dealt with in the last chapter belongs to the general type of what is currently known as Individualism. For several reasons I have preferred not to make use of this hackneyed word. In the first place, it is very hackneyed; and the employment of such terms takes all life and expressiveness out of philosophy. And, in the next place, Individualism may mean many things, and in its fullest, which is surely, for the student of philosophy, its truest meaning, it is far too good for the theories under discussion. An “Individual” may be “individual” or indivisible because he has so little in him, that you cannot imagine it possible to break him up into lesser parts; or because, however full and great his nature, it is so thoroughly one, so vital and so true to itself, that, like a work of art, the whole of his being cannot be separated into parts without ceasing to be what it essentially is. In the former case the “individual” is an “atom”; in the latter he is “a great individuality.” [1] The sense in which we shall make {80} use of the notion of the individual, so far as we use it at all, will be the latter and not the former. And, therefore, we shall as far as possible discard the hackneyed term “Individualism,” which embodies the former meaning only.