IT might be observed that in what we have just been saying two different concepts of the State alternately appear: the concept of the Ethical State, and the concept of a purely political and non-moral State. The two definitions have been used in this way deliberately, without any reserve or hesitation, because both are true.

A principle not sufficiently appreciated, but which should be introduced as a fundamental of method into modern thinking and established and diffused therein, is that to understand a philosophical proposition the latter should be carried back to its historical origin, and interpreted in the light of the situation that provoked it. Of every doctrine we should ask: against whom, or against what, was it first put forward? As the point has otherwise been stated: the true significance of a philosophical assertion may be determined by the polemical tendency expressed or implicit in it. Studied in any other way, it has no meaning or—what amounts to the same thing—it has a meaning that is vague and elusive, and hence gives rise to arbitrary or capricious interpretations.

The proposition here confronting us may be thus formulated: “The State knows no law except its own power.” Now applying the principle laid down above, we must recognise that this theory of the State was advanced at various times and on various occasions: by the age of the Renaissance—to keep to the most celebrated instances—which was engaged in conflict with political theories surviving from the Middle Ages; three centuries later, by Romanticism and the Restoration, in conflict with the political theories of rationalists and Jacobins; in our own day, finally, by Nationalism and Imperialism in conflict with old-fashioned humanitarian ideas—“ideas of ’89” (though this last debate is probably nothing more than the tail-end of the preceding). In circumstances where many people were thinking of the State as a moral and religious institution, subject therefore to the norms of Christian piety, it was salutary to shout loud enough for every one to hear that “States are not run by prayer-books”; that they do, indeed, require virtues, but not Christian virtues: political virtues rather.

This was the truth discovered by Machiavelli, and it remains as a permanent conquest of the human race. It is an eternal truth, the soundness of which must be reasserted whenever we are confronted by intellectual positions similar to those it originally combated. Similar, in fact, if not identical, was the position of the rationalists, encyclopaedists and Jacobins of Revolutionary times—a composite moralism that subordinated the State if not to the Christian, at least to the humanitarian, virtues of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. And against this idea prevailed the varied negation of conservatives and reactionaries from Galiani to Heller, and of historico-philosophers from Hegel to Marx who taxed the new democratic ideals with hypocrisy and vacuousness, reasserting that the State is authority, and politics a struggle of forces (forces of nations or of classes, as the case may be). And this too was a permanent conquest for humanity. It too is an eternal truth, which in our times is being repeated by the offspring of those thinkers, similarly varying in tendency as reactionaries or revolutionaries, as nationalists or communists—by Treitschke, by Maurras, by Lenin. But the other proposition is also true and just as true: that “the State is a moral value,” that “the State is an ethical institution.” And this truth likewise becomes apparent if we recall the circumstances in which such formulae were enunciated or repeated. Without going too far afield, we may briefly mention the great conflict between Church and State, between Reformation and Counter-reformation, between laic society and theocratic society, between the immanentist unitarian conception of government and the transcendental dualistic conception of government. People were assigning to the State the care of the bodies of its citizens, and to the Church the care of souls; to the State material power and the “secular arm,” and to the Church the surveillance of morality and education. Worse yet, the State was sometimes considered as a brute power, sinful and even wicked, which the Church was to restrain, educate, redeem! To all such it was important to reply that the State is the true Church, that it has souls and not only bodies in its keeping, that it exercises its own account the prerogatives of morality and education, which it delegates to no one and with which it is invested by no one. It is not surprising that this ethical conception of the State should stand out most strikingly in that one of the modern philosophies which first tried seriously to bridge the hiatus between heaven and earth and to express transcendent values in terms of immanence. From the philosophy of Hegel, the notion made its way into science, and into the political journalism of Germany and other countries.

So then the State may support two different and even contrary definitions, both of which will be true? The State is purely political—pure force, power, utility, devoid of moral character? And at the same time the State is an ethical institution—the State is morality?

Obviously these two conflicting definitions, predicated one after the other, are not thinkable in connection with each other unless we think dialectically—unless, that is, we keep them concurrent side by side in their parallel duality but combine them in a spiritual process whereby the State is taken, in a first phase, as pure potency, pure utility; and thence rises to morality—not repudiating its former character but negating it, preserving it by transcending it. If we do not think dialectically (which means philosophically), we always have those two contrary definitions on our hands; and we can do nothing but repeat one after the other, in reciprocal contradiction, or vainly try to suppress now one and now the other, only to find them persistently and forever bounding up again, the one from the other, the other from the one. Unless we think philosophically and dialectically, we shall fail, however hard we try, in completely reconciling them. We may prove this from the case of Treitschke. This German writer owes his fame to his theory of the Power-State—and such his theory is, unquestionably. And yet we could demonstrate just as well that Treitschke held the theory of the Morality-State. Treitschke was not deeply and thoroughly trained in philosophical niceties; so he is continually modifying and contradicting the first theory with the second without ever finding a harmonious synthesis to unite them.

For that matter, as we become more expert in dealing with the problems of practical philosophy and with the history of ethics, we discover that the problem of the State cannot be considered as a special problem of ethics standing all by itself. It is all very well to speak of a State, and to speak of it metaphorically as an entity. But at bottom the State is nothing but man in the practical phase of his activity. Outside man practically operative the State has no reality whatever. Now the great antithesis which has agitated ethical research throughout the history of ethics is the antithesis between utilitarian action and moral action. As is well known, thinkers tried to get out of the dilemma by reducing the second to the first—utilitarianism; and then by reducing the first to the second—abstract absolutism. Finally they discovered that neither the one term nor the other could be eliminated, but that both had to be dialectically combined. The opposing conceptions of an egoistic State and a moral, humanitarian State correspond exactly to the two opposing unilaterals represented by utilitarianism and abstract absolutism. With these in fact they are respectively identical.