  Title: The Philosophical Theory of the State Author: Bernard Bosanquet Language: English Produced by gdurb Transcriber’s Note: The text is that of the first edition, with the errata incorporated. Because there are no page breaks, footnotes are placed under the paragraphs or quotations to which they relate, and renumbered accordingly. Page numbers have been inserted into the text in braces. THE PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY OF THE STATEBYBERNARD BOSANQUETC’est le peuple qui compose le genre humain; ce qui n’est pas peuple est si peu de chose que ce n’est pas la peine de le compter. (Émile, livre 4.) LONDON MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITEDNEW YORK THE MACMILLAN COMPANY1899 All rights reserved GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO.To: CHARLES STEWART LOCH {vii} PREFACE.The present work is an attempt to express what I take to be the fundamental ideas of a true social philosophy. I have criticised and interpreted the doctrines of certain well-known thinkers only with the view of setting these ideas in the clearest light. This is the whole purpose of the book; and I have intentionally abstained from practical applications, except by way of illustration. It is my conviction, indeed, that a better understanding of fundamental principles would very greatly contribute to the more rational handling of practical problems. But this better understanding is only to be attained, as it seems to me, by a thorough examination of ideas, apart from the associations of practical issues about which a fierce party spirit has been aroused. And, moreover, it is my belief that the influence of the ideas here maintained upon practical discussion, would be, in a certain sense, to detach it from philosophical theory. The principles which I advocate would destroy so many party prejudices, would put the mind in possession of so many clues to fact, that practical “social” issues would in consequence be considered as problems of life and mind, to be treated only with intimate experience, and by methods adequate to their subtlety. The {viii} result would be that such discussions would be regarded, if one may use the expression, more respectfully, and would acquire an independence and completeness worthy of their importance. The work of the social reformer should no more be regarded as a mere appendix to social theory than that of the doctor is regarded as a mere appendix to physiology. Such a division of labour is, of course, no hindrance to the interchange of facts and ideas between theory and practice. On the contrary, it tends to promote such an interchange, by increasing the supply on either side, and improving the intellectual communication between them. It will occur to philosophical readers that the essence of the theory here presented is to be found not merely in Plato and in Aristotle, but in very many modern writers, more especially in Hegel, T.H. Green, Bradley, [1] and Wallace. [2] And they may be inclined to doubt the justification for a further work on the same lines by one who can hardly expect to improve upon the writings of such predecessors. [1] See especially the chapter in Ethical Studies entitled “My Station and its Duties.” [2] See Lectures and Essays by the late Professor Wallace, especially p. 213, “Our Natural Rights,” and p. 427, “The Relation of Fichte and Hegel to Socialism.” On this point I should like to make a brief explanation. To begin with, it is a truism that every generation needs to be addressed in its own language; and I might even plead that the greatness of a tradition justifies some urgency in calling attention to it. But further, as regards T.H. Green in particular, whom in many points I follow very closely, I had two special reasons for desiring {ix} to express myself independently. One of these is to be found in my attempt to apply the conceptions of recent psychology to the theory of State coercion and of the Real or General Will, and to explain the relation of Social Philosophy to Sociological Psychology. For a short discussion of the Imitation Theory, which the purpose of the present work would not permit me to include in it, I may refer to a paper which will shortly appear in Mind. My other reason lay in the conviction that the time has gone by for the scrupulous caution which Green displayed in estimating the value of the State to its members. I have referred to this subject in the body of my work (ch. x.); but I desire to emphasise my belief that our growing experience of all social “classes” proves the essentials of happiness and character to be the same throughout the social whole. Scepticism on this point is the product, I am convinced, of defective social experience. Indeed, it seems worth while to observe that the attention which is now rightly paid to such disadvantages, affecting the poorer classes of citizens, as it may be possible to remedy, has given rise to a serious confusion. The zeal of the advocate has led him to slander his client. In proving that under such and such conditions it would be no wonder if “the poor” were bad, he forgets to observe that in fact they are generally just as good as other people. The all-important distinction between a poor home and a bad home is neglected. And yet it seems probable that, omitting the definitely criminal quarters, there is no larger proportion of bad homes among the poor than among the rich. Such terms as “den” and “slum” {x} are too freely used, with an affectation of intimacy, for homes in which thousands of respectable citizens reside. Our democratic age will be remarkable to posterity for having dimmed the time-honoured belief in the virtues of the poor. There was cant, no doubt, in the older doctrine, but it was not so far from the fact as the opposite cant of today, and it is time that the truth in it should be revived. I must repeat that these remarks are not intended to be controversial. There is nothing in them which serious men of all schools may not accept. They are meant to defend my attitude in treating the Real Will, and Freedom in the greater Self, as matters of universal concern, and not merely as hopes and fancies cherished by “educated” persons. Indeed, although it would be churlish for a student to disparage literary education, it must never be forgotten that, as things are today, the citizens who live by handicraft possess a valuable element of brain-culture, which is on the whole denied to the literary class. Whatever, therefore, may be wanting in the following pages, it is not, I think, the relation of their subject-matter to the general life of peoples. The social student should shun mere optimism; but he should not be afraid to make the most of that which he studies. It is an unfortunate result of the semi-practical aims which naturally influence social philosophers, that they are apt throughout to take up an indifferent, if not a hostile, attitude to their given object. They hardly believe in actual society as a botanist believes in plants, or a biologist believes in vital processes. And hence, social theory comes off badly. No student can really appreciate an object for which he is always apologising. There is a {xi} touch of this attitude in all the principal writers, except Hegel and Bradley, and therefore, as I venture to think, they partly fail to seize the greatness and ideality of life in its commonest actual phases. It is in no spirit of obscurantism, and with no thought of resisting the march of a true social logic, that some take up a different position. They are convinced that an actual living society is an infinitely higher creature than a steam-engine, a plant or an animal; and that the best of their ideas are not too good to be employed in analysing it. Those who cannot be enthusiastic in the study of society as it is, would not be so in the study of a better society if they had it. “Here or nowhere is your America.” Bernard Bosanquet {xiii} CONTENTS.CHAPTER IRISE AND CONDITIONS OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY OF THE STATE 1-161. Meaning of “Philosophical Theory” 1 2. Philosophy and the “State,” 3 a. The Greek City-State 4 b. Type of mind implied in it 5 c. Type of political philosophy suggested by it 5 3. Transition from City-State to Nation-State. Law of Nature 9 4. Rise of Nation-States and of modern political philosophy. Rousseau 11 CHAPTER IISOCIOLOGICAL COMPARED WITH PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY 17-521. Problems of Social Physics and of Idealism 17 2. Social Theory as influenced by special sciences 19 3. Comparison of Psychological Sociology and Social Philosophy 48 CHAPTER IIITHE PARADOX OF POLITICAL OBLIGATION; SELF-GOVERNMENT 53-781. The conception of self-government 53 2. Law and Liberty in Bentham 56 3. Examination of Mill’s “Liberty” 60 4. Views of Herbert Spencer 69 5. Mill’s criticism of Self-Government 73 CHAPTER IVTHE PROBLEM OF POLITICAL OBLIGATION MORE RADICALLY TREATED 79-1021. Nature of above theories not expressed by term Individualism. “Theories of the first look” 79 2. Rousseau’s earlier Essays 84 3. Problem of the Contrat Social 87 4. Conflict of ideas in Rousseau’s statement 89 5. Nature of his solution 91 6. Reality of the “Moral Person” and conception of Civil Liberty 94 CHAPTER V.THE CONCEPTION OF A “REAL” WILL 103-1231. The Supreme Will in Hobbes and Locke 103 2. Meaning of the General Will for Rousseau 107 3- The General Will contrasted with the Will of All 111 4- The General Will and the work of the Legislator 117 CHAPTER VITHE CONCEPTION OF LIBERTY AS ILLUSTRATED BY THE FOREGOING SUGGESTIONS 118-1541. Liberty as the condition of our being ourselves 118 2. Illustrated by the idea of Nature and Natural 128 3. Phases of idea of Liberty 133 4. Liberty as attribute of the will that wills itself 146 5. This “real” will identified with State 149 (a) State in this sense is social life as a whole 150 (b) How State is force as extension of “individual” mind 152 CHAPTER VIIPSYCHOLOGICAL ILLUSTRATION OF THE IDEA OF A REAL OR GENERAL WILL 155-1791. Object of the Chapter 155 2. Connection between social and mental groupings 156 CHAPTER VIIINATURE OF THE END OF THE STATE AND CONSEQUENT LIMIT OF STATE ACTION 180-2341. Distinction between Individual and Society irrelevant to question of Social Means and End 180 2. True contrast: Automatism and Consciousness 181 3. End of State, and Means at its disposal qua State 184 4. State can only secure “external” actions 186 5. Principle of the hindrance of hindrances 190 6. State action as the maintenance of rights 201 7. State action as punishment 216 Conclusion. State Action as exercise of a General Will 232 CHAPTER IXROUSSEAU’S THEORY AS APPLIED TO THE MODERN STATE: KANT, FICHTE, HEGEL 235-2551. Rousseau’s literary influence in Germany 235 2. Freedom and Social Contract in Kant 238 3. Freedom and Social Contract in Fichte 244 4. Freedom in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right 247 (a) Supposed reactionary tendency in Hegel 248 (b) Relation of analysis and idealisation 290 5. The Philosophy of Right as a chapter in the Philosophy of Mind 252 CHAPTER XTHE ANALYSIS OF A MODERN STATE. HEGEL’S “PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT” 256-2951. Logic of Society as an ideal fact 256 2. Sphere of Right or Law and its sub-divisions 258 3. The Letter of the Law 260 4. The Morality of Conscience 262 5. Social Ethics 266 6. Sub-divisions of Social Ethics. The Family 269 (a) Depends on natural fact 269 (b) Is factor in the State 270 (c) Ethical and Monogamous Household 271 (d) Relation to Property 272 7. Bourgeois Society. Justice, State Regulation, and Trade Societies 272 8. The State proper, or Political Constitution 280 9. Public discussion and public opinion 285 10. Criticism of such an analysis of the Modern State 287 CHAPTER XIINSTITUTIONS CONSIDERED AS ETHICAL IDEAS 296-3341. The individual soul and the social mind 296 2. Institutions as common substance of minds 297 3. The Family and Property as elements of mind 299 4. The District or Neighbourhood as an element of mind 304 5. Class as an element of mind. “The Poor” as an ethical idea 310 6. The Nation-State as an element of mind 320 7. Morality of public and private action 322 8. Humanity as an element of mind 328 (a) Humanity not predicable of mankind as a whole 328 (b) Humanity does not = mankind as a true community 329 (c) Dichotomous expressions for humanity and mankind 330 (d) The self beyond any actual society; Art, Philosophy, Religion 332 INDEX 335{1} CHAPTER I.RISE AND CONDITIONS OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY OF THE STATE1. First, it will be well to indicate, in a very few words, what is implied in a “philosophical theory,” as distinguished from theories which make no claim to be philosophical. The primary difference is, that a philosophical treatment is the study of some thing as a whole and for its own sake. In a certain sense it may be compared to the gaze of a child or of an artist. It deals, that is, with the total and unbroken effect of its object. It desires to ascertain what a thing is, what is its full characteristic and being, its achievement in the general act of the world. History, explanation, analysis into cause and conditions, have value for it only in so far as they contribute to the intelligent estimation of the fullest nature and capabilities of the real individual whole which is under investigation. We all know that a flower is one thing for the geometrician, another for the chemist, another for {2} the botanist, and another, again, for the artist. Now, philosophy can of course make no pretension to cope with any one of the specialists on his own ground. But the general nature of the task imposed upon it is this: aiding itself, so far as possible, by the trained vision of all specialists, to make some attempt to see the full significance of the flower as a word or letter in the great book of the world. And this we call studying it, as it is, and for its own sake, without reservation or presupposition. It is assumed, then, for the purpose of a philosophical treatment, that everything, and more particularly in this case the political life of man, has a nature of its own, which is worthy of investigation on its own merits and for its own sake. How its phases come into being, or what causes or conditions have played a part in its growth, are other questions well worthy of investigation. But the philosophical problem is rather to see our object as it is and to learn what it is, to estimate, so to speak, its kind and degree of self-maintenance in the world, than to trace its history or to analyse its causation. Yet such phrases as “what it is” and “for its own sake” must not mislead us. They do not mean that the nature of any reality which we experience can be appreciated in isolation from the general world of life and knowledge. On the contrary, they imply that when fully and fairly considered from the most thoroughly adequate point of view, our subject matter will reveal its true position and relations with reference to all else that man can do and can know. This position and these relations constitute its rank or significance in the totality {3} of experience, and this value or significance—in the present case, what the form of life in question enables man to do and to become—is just what we mean by its nature “in itself,” or its full and complete nature, or its significance when thoroughly studied “for its own sake” from an adequate point of view. Further illustrations of the distinction between an adequate point of view and partial or limited modes of consideration, and of the relations between the former and the latter, will be found in the following chapter. 2. In a certain sense it would be true to say that wherever men have lived, there has always been a “State.” That is to say, there has been some association or corporation, larger than the family, and acknowledging no power superior to itself. But it is obvious that the experience of a State in this general sense of the word is not co-extensive with true political experience, and that something much more definite than this is necessary to awaken curiosity as to the nature and value of the community in which man finds himself to be a member. Such curiosity has been awakened and sustained principally if not exclusively by two kindred types of associated life—the City-state of ancient Greece, and the Nation-state of the modern world. It will throw light on the nature of our subject if we glance rapidly at the characteristics to which it is due that political philosophy began in connection with the former, and revived in connection with the latter. In considering the Greek city-states in connection with the birth of a. A Greek city-state presented a marked contrast to the modes of human association which prevailed in the non-Greek world. It differed from them above all things by its distinct individuality. No doubt there was a recognisable character in the life and conduct of Egypt or of Assyria, of Phoenicia or of Israel. But the community which has a youth, a maturity, and a decadence, as distinct as those of a single human being, and very nearly as self-conscious; which has a tone and spirit as recognisable in the words and bearing of its members as those of a character in a play; and which expresses its mind in the various regions of human action and endurance much as an artist expresses his individuality in the creations of his genius—such a community had existed, before the beginnings of the modern world, in the Greek city-state, and in the Greek city-state alone. A political consciousness in the strict sense was a necessary factor in the experience of such a commonwealth. The demand for “autonomy”—government by one’s own law,—and for “isonomy”—government according to equal law—though far from being always satisfied, was inherent in the Greek nature; and its strenuousness was evinced by the throes of revolution and the labours of legislation which were shaking the world of Greece at the dawn of history. The very instrument of all political action was invented, so far as we can see, by the Greeks. The simple device by which an orderly vote is {5} taken, and the minority acquiesce in the will of the majority as if it had been their own—an invention no less definite than that of the lever or the wheel—is found for the first time as an everyday method of decision in Greek political life. b. Such a type of experience implies a corresponding type of mind. It is not surprising that science and philosophy should owe their birth to the genius from which politics sprang. For politics is the expression of reason in the relations that bind man to man, as science and philosophy are the expression of it in the relations which link together man’s whole experience. The mind which can recognise itself practically in the order of the commonwealth, can recognise itself theoretically in the order of nature. And ultimately, though not at first (for curiosity is awakened by objects perceived in space and time, before attention is turned to the very hinge and centre of man’s own being), science passes into philosophy; and mind, and conduct, and the political consciousness, are themselves made objects of speculation. It has become a commonplace that this transference of curiosity from the outer to the inner—really, that is, from the partial to the total world—took shape in the work of Socrates, who invested with the greatness of his own intelligence and character a movement which the needs of the age had rendered inevitable. And thus there arose the ethical and political philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, the successors of Socrates, just at the time when the distinctive political life of Greece was beginning to decay. c. This philosophy, like all genuine philosophy, {6} was an interpretation of the experience presented to it; and in this case the interpretation was due to minds which were themselves a part of the phenomena on which they reflected. Such minds, hostile as they may feel themselves to the spirit of the age, and however passionately they may cry out for reform or for revolution, are none the less its representatives; and their interpretation, though it may modify and even mutilate the phenomena, will nevertheless be found to throw the central forces and principles of the time into the clearest light. So Plato’s negative treatment of the family, and of other elements which seem essential to Greek civilisation, was no bar to his grasping, and representing with unequalled force, the central principle of the life around him. The fundamental idea of Greek political philosophy, as we find it in Plato and Aristotle, is that the human mind can only attain its full and proper life in a community of minds, or more strictly in a community pervaded by a single mind, uttering itself consistently though differently in the life and action of every member of the community. This conception is otherwise expressed by such phrases as “the State is natural,” i.e. is a growth or evolution, apart from which the end implied in man’s origin cannot be attained; “the State is prior to the individual,” i.e. there is a principle or condition underlying the life of the human individual, which will not admit of that life becoming what it has in it to be, unless the full sphere or arena which is constituted by the life of the State is realised in fact. The whole is summed up in the famous expression of Aristotle, “Man is a creature formed for the life of the City-state.” The {7} working out of this idea, as we find it in Plato’s commonwealth, is bizarre to our minds; but its difficulty really lies in its simplicity and directness; and there is no sound political philosophy which is not an embodiment of Plato’s conception. The central idea is this: that every class of persons in the community—the statesman, the soldier, the workman—has a certain distinctive type of mind which fits its members for their functions, and that the community essentially consists in the working of these types of mind in their connection with one another, which connection constitutes their subordination to the common good. This working or adjustment obviously depends in the last resort on the qualities present in the innermost souls of the members of the community; and thus the outward organisation of society is really as it were a body which at every point and in every movement expresses the characteristics of a mind. We must not pause here to follow up the consequences of such a conception; but it will be seen at once, by those who reflect upon it, to imply that every individual mind must have its qualities drawn out in various ways to answer to—in fact, to constitute—the relations and functions which make up the community; and that in this sense every mind is a mirror or impression of the whole community from its own peculiar point of view. The ethical assumption or principle of Plato’s conception is, that a healthy organisation of the commonwealth will involve, by a necessary connection, a healthy balance and adjustment of qualities in the individual soul, and vice versa. An attempt will be made to illustrate this principle further in the latter portion {8} of the present work. The general nature of Plato’s conception—the characteristic conception of Greek political philosophy—is all that concerns us here. It is important to observe that during the very genesis of this philosophical conception of society, an antagonistic view was powerfully represented. The individual could not freely find himself in the community unless he was capable of repudiating it; the possibility of negation, as a logician might express it, is necessary to a really significant affirmation. Thus we find in the very age of Plato and Aristotle the most startling anticipations of those modern ideas which seem diametrically opposed to theirs. We find the idea of nature identified not with the mature fulness, but with the empty starting point of life; we meet with the phenomena of vegetarianism, water-drinking, the reduction of dress to its minimum, in short, the familiar symptoms of the longing for the “return to nature,” with all that it implies; we find law and political unity treated as a tissue of artifice and convention, and the individual disdaining to identify himself with the citizenship of a single state, but claiming to be a stranger in the city and a citizen of the world. To prove that these ideas were not without their justification, it is enough to point out that in some instances they were accompanied by a polemic against slavery, which, as a form of solidarity, was upheld in a qualified sense at least by Aristotle. The existence of this negative criticism is enough to show how distinctly the Greek intellect set before itself the fundamental problem of the relation between the individual and society, and of how high a quality was the bond of union which {9} maintained this relation in such intimacy among minds of a temper so analytic. 3. Many writers have told the story of the change which came over the mind of Greece when the independent sovereignty of its City-states became a thing of the past. For our purpose it is enough to draw attention to the fact that with this change the political or social philosophy of the great Greek time not only lost its supremacy, but almost ceased to be understood. From this period forward, till the rise of the modern Nation-states, men’s thoughts about life and conduct were cast in the mould of moral theory, of religious mysticism and theology, or of jurisprudence. The individual demanded in the sphere of ethics and religion to be shown a life sufficing to himself apart from any determinate human society—a problem which Plato and Aristotle had assumed to be insoluble. Stoicism and Epicureanism, the earliest non-national creeds of the western world, triumphantly developed the ideas which at first, as we saw, were little more than a rebellion against the central Socratic philosophy. Cosmopolitanism, the conception of humanity, the ideal of a “Society of Friends”—the Epicurean league—from which women were not excluded, and the precept of “not expecting from life more than it has to give,” take the place of the highly individualised commonwealth, with its strenuous masculine life of war and politics, and its passionate temper which felt that nothing had been accomplished so long as anything remained undone. With this change of temper in the civilised world there is brought into prominence a great deal of {10} human nature which had not found expression through the immediate successors of Socrates. In the period between Aristotle and Cicero there is more than a whisper of the sound which meets us like a trumpet blast in the New Testament, “neither Jew nor Greek, barbarian nor Scythian, bond nor free.” But the unworldliness which took final shape in Christianity was destined to undergo a long transmigration through shapes of other-worldliness before it should return in modern thought to the unity from which it started; and the history of ethics and religion has little bearing upon true political theory between the death of Aristotle and the awakening of the modern consciousness in the Reformation. In so far as the political ideas of antiquity were preserved to modern times otherwise than in the manuscripts of Plato and Aristotle, the influence which preserved them was that of Roman Jurisprudence. The Roman rule, though it stereotyped the state of things in which genuine political function and the spur of freedom were unknown, had one peculiar gift by which it handed to posterity the germs of a great conception of human life. This is not the place to describe at length the origin of that vast practical induction from the working of the “foreigners’ court” at Rome which obtained for itself the name of the Law of Nations, and which, as tinged with ideal theory, was known as the Law of Nature. Whatever fallacies may be near at hand when “natural right” is named, the conception that there is in man, as such, something which must be respected, a law of life which is his “nature,” being indeed another name {11} for his reason, and in some sense or other a “freedom” and an “equality” which are his birthright—this conception was not merely a legacy from Stoic ideas, which had almost a religious inspiration, but was solidly founded on the judicial experience of the most practical race that the world has ever seen. 4. In order that the forces which lay hidden in the conception of Natural Right and Freedom, like the powers of vegetation in a seed, might unfold themselves in the modern world, it was necessary that conditions should recur analogous to those which had first elicited them. And these earlier conditions were those of the Greek City-state; for it was here, as we have seen, that the conception of man’s nature had flourished, as the idea of a purposive evolution into a full and many-sided social life, while in Stoic philosophy and Roman juristic theory it had become more and more a shibboleth and a formula which lost in depth of meaning what it gained in range of application. To restore their ancient significance, expanded in conformity with a larger order of things, to the traditional formulae, demanded just the type of experience which was furnished by the modern Nation-state. The growth of Nation-states in modern Europe was in progress, we are told, from the ninth to the fifteenth century. And it is towards and after the close of this period, and especially in the seventeenth century when the national consciousness of the English people, as of others, had become thoroughly awakened, that political speculation in the strict sense begins again, {12} after an interval extending back to the Politics of Aristotle. To let one example serve for many; when we read John of Gaunt’s praises of England in Shakespeare’s Richard II., we feel ourselves at once in contact with the mind of a social unity, such as necessarily to raise in any inquiring intelligence all those problems which were raised for Plato and Aristotle by the individuality of Athens and Sparta. And so we see the earliest political speculation of the modern world groping, as it were, for ideas by help of which to explain the experience of an individual self-governing sovereign society. And for the most part the ideas that offer themselves are those of Roman Jurisprudence, but distorted by political applications and by the rhetoric of Protestant fanaticism. As Mr. Ritchie [1] points out, the conception of natural right and a law of nature makes a strange but effective coalition with the temper of the Wycliffite cry “When Adam dalf, and Eve span, The notions of contract, of force, of representation in a single legal “person,” are now applied separately or together to the phenomenon of the self-governing individual community. But the solution remains imperfect, and the fundamental fact of self-government refuses to be construed either as the association of individuals, originally free and equal, for certain limited purposes, or as the absolute absorption of their wills in the “person” of a despotic sovereign. [1] Natural Rights, p. 8. The revival of a true philosophical meaning {13} within the abstract terms of juristic tradition was the work of the eighteenth century as a whole. For the sake of clearness, and with as much historical justice as ever attaches to an attribution of the kind, we may connect it with the name of a single man—Jean Jacques Rousseau. For it is Rousseau who stands midway between Hobbes and Locke on the one hand, and Kant and Hegel on the other, and in whose writings the actual revival of the full idea of human nature may be watched from paragraph to paragraph as it struggles to throw off the husk of an effete tradition. Between Locke and Rousseau the genius of Vico and of Montesquieu had given a new meaning to the dry formulae of law by showing the sap of society circulating within them. Moreover the revived experience of the Greeks came in the nick of time. It was influential with Rousseau himself, and little as he grasped the political possibilities of a modern society, in matters of sheer principle this influence led him on the whole in the right direction. His insight was just, when it showed him that every political whole presented the same problem which had been presented by the Greek City-state, and involved the same principles. And he bequeathed to his successors the task of substituting for the mere words and fictions of contract, nature, and original freedom, the idea of the common life of an essentially social being, expressing and sustaining the human will at its best. According to the view here indicated, the resurrection of true political philosophy out of the dead body of juristic abstractions was inaugurated by {14} Vico and Montesquieu, and decisively declared itself in Jean Jacques Rousseau. The idea which most of us have formed of “the new Evangel of a Contrat Social” is not in harmony with this representation of the matter. Was it, we may be asked, a genuine political philosophy which inspired the leaders of the French Revolution? And the question cannot be evaded by denying all connection between the theory and the practice of that age. The phraseology of the revolutionary declarations [1]—which will strike the reader accustomed to nineteenth century socialism as exceedingly moderate and even conservative in tone—is undoubtedly to a great extent borrowed from Rousseau’s writings. [1] See the very interesting collection of documents in the Appendix to Professor Ritchie’s Natural Rights. Perhaps the truth of the matter may be approached as follows. The popular rendering of a great man’s views is singularly liable to run straight into the pit-falls against which he more particularly warned the world. This could be proved true in an extraordinary degree of such men as Plato and Spinoza, and still more astonishingly, perhaps, of the founder of the Christian religion. The reason is obvious. A great man works with the ideas of his age, and regenerates them. But in as far as he regenerates them, he gets beyond the ordinary mind; while in as far as he operates with them, he remains accessible to it. And his own mind has its ordinary side; the regeneration of ideas which he is able to effect is not complete, and the notions of the day not only limit his entire range of achievement—where the strongest runner will get to must depend on where he starts—but float about unassimilated {15} within his living stream of thought. Now all this ordinary side of his mind will partake of the strength and splendour of his whole nature. And thus he will seem to have preached the very superstitions which he combated. For in part he has done so, being himself infected; in part the overwhelming bias of his interpreters has reversed the meaning of his very warnings, by transferring the importance, due to his central thought, to some detail or metaphor which belongs to the lower level of his mind. It is an old story how Spinoza, “the God-intoxicated man,” was held to be an “atheist,” when in truth he was rather an “acosmist”; and in the same way, on a lower plane, the writer who struggled through to the idea that true sovereignty lay in the dominion of a common social good as expressed through law and institutions, is held to have ascribed absolute supremacy to that chance combination of individual voices in a majority, which he expressly pointed out to have, in itself, no authority at all. But there is something more to be said of cases, like that under discussion, where a great man’s ideas touch the practical world. If the complete and positive idea becomes narrow and negative as it impinges upon every-day life, this may be not only a consequence of its transmission through every-day minds, but a qualification for the work it has to do. The narrower truth may be, so to speak, the cutting edge of the more complete, as the negation is of the affirmation. And the vulgar notion of popular sovereignty and of natural right may have been necessary to do a work which a more organic social theory would have been too delicate to achieve. {16} Like the faith in a speedy second coming of Christ among the early Christians, the gospel according to Jean Jacques may have taken for the minds of Revolutionary France a form which was serviceable as well as inevitable at the moment. If, as we said above, the great man is always misunderstood, it seems to follow that when his germinal ideas have been sown they must assert themselves first in lower phases if they are ever to bear fruit at all. And therefore, while not denying the influence of Rousseau on the Revolution, we shall attempt to show that he had another and a later influence, more adequate to the true reach of his genius. {17} CHAPTER II.SOCIOLOGICAL COMPARED WITH PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY.1. There is no doubt that Sociology and Social Philosophy have started, historically speaking, from different points of view. The object of the present chapter is to ascertain the nature and estimate the importance and probable permanence of the difference between them. I propose first to explain the difference in general; then to review the sources of social experience, which in other words are facets or aspects of social life, by which social theory has been influenced, and with which it has to deal; and, finally, to form some idea of the distinctive services which may be rendered by sociology and social philosophy respectively in view of the range of experience which it is the function of social theory to organize. Beginning with Vico’s [1] New Science, there has been more than one attempt in modern Europe to inaugurate the Science of Society as a new departure. But the distinctive and modern spirit of what is known as Sociology, and under that {18} name has had a continuous growth of half a century at least, first found unmistakable expression in Auguste Comte. The conception which he impressed upon the science to which he first gave the name of sociology or social physics, was a characteristically modern conception. Its essence was the inclusion of human society among the objects of natural science; its watchwords were law and cause in the sense in which alone Positivism allowed causes to be thought of—and scientific prediction. [2] It is true that the large conception of unity which Comte embodied in his philosophy had very much in common with the principles insisted on by the Greek social philosophers. The close interdependence of all social phenomena among each other, the unity of man with nature, and the consequent correlation of moral and political theory with the organised hierarchy of mathematical and physical sciences, are ideas which Comte might have borrowed directly from Plato and Aristotle. Nevertheless the modern starting-point is wholly different from that of antiquity. The modern enquirer—the sociologist as such—was to ask himself, according to Comte, in the language of physical science, what are the laws and causes operative among aggregations of human beings, and what are their predictable effects? The ancient philosopher—the ethical and metaphysical theorist—had before him primarily the problem, “what is the completest and most real life of the human soul?” The work of the latter has been revived by modern idealist philosophy dating from Rousseau and Hegel, and finding a second {19} home in Great Britain, as that of the former has developed itself within the peculiar limits and traditions of sociological research, flourishing more especially upon French and American soil. The continuance of these two streams of thought in independent courses, though not without signs of convergence, is a remarkable phenomenon of nineteenth century culture; and it will be one of the problems which the present chapter, and in a larger sense the whole of the present work, must deal with, to consider how far it is necessary or desirable that they should blend. [1] J. D. Rogers in Palgrave’s Dict. of Pol. Econ., art. “Social Science.” [2] See Gidding’s Sociology, p. 6. 2. Every science, no doubt, is to some extent, the playground of analogies; but the complexity and the unmateriality of human relations has forced this character upon social theory in an extraordinary degree. It is impossible to account for the tendencies of sociological as well as of philosophical thought without making some attempt to pursue the line of investigation suggested by Mr. Bagehot in his Physics and Politics. Predominant modes and types of experience necessarily colour the whole activity of the mind, and, as indicated above, this influence more especially affects a province of research which is not prima facie accessible to direct experiment or sensuous observation. I must, therefore, endeavour to review, in a brief outline, the principal branches of experience which have furnished ideas for application to social theory, and to indicate the leanings in speculation upon society, which have been due to preoccupation with one or another special analogy. i. The Newtonian theory of gravitation is the entrance gate to the modern world of science. {20} “When the Newton of this subject shall be seated in his place” [1] is the aspiration of the modern investigator in every matter capable of being known. It is not surprising, therefore, that the inclusion of human society within the range of matters capable of being definitely understood, should have been symbolized by demanding for social science a completeness of explanation and a power of prediction analogous to those displayed by astronomy or by mathematical physics. Representative of this conception is the title, Social Physics—for Comte the alternative and equivalent to the name Sociology. It is easy to see both the merits and the dangers of such an ideal, which, as the embodiment of perfection in a natural science, is presupposed by the attitude of sociology down to the present day. Is a science necessarily a natural science, and is a natural science necessarily an exact science?—these are the fundamental questions involved in the adoption of a mathematical ideal for the study of society. No fault can be found with it on the ground of its implying the highest degree of harmony and precision; the only question is whether an adequate type of comparison is afforded for, let us say, the growth of an institution, by the law of a curve. The general conception, indeed, of a continuity between human relations and the laws of the cosmic order is thoroughly in the spirit of Plato, and betokens a scientific enthusiasm worthy to be the parent of great things. And especially in the sphere of economic science, where certain relatively simple hypotheses have proved on the whole to be effective instruments {21} of explanation, an analysis of intricate phenomena has been effected, which in some degree justifies the aspiration after the ideal of an exact science. [1] De Morgan, Budget of Paradoxes, p. 355. ii. But it has been recognised from the earliest days of political speculation that, within the general ideal of a perfect natural science, the more special analogy of the living organism had a peculiar bearing upon social phenomena. Beginning in the ancient world with the comparison between individuals as “members” of a social whole, and the parts or organs of a living body, or even the constituent elements of a mind, this analogy has been extended and reinforced in modern times by what amounts to the new creation of the biological and anthropological sciences. The sense of continuity thus intensified and implying all that is understood by the modern term evolution, has brought an immense material of suggestions to sociological research, but has imposed upon it at the same time a characteristic bias from which it is just, perhaps, beginning to shake itself free. This characteristic may be roughly stated as the explanation of the higher, by which I mean the more distinctly human phenomena, by the lower, or those more readily observed, or inferred, among savage nations, or in the animal world. Any one familiar with logic will be aware that there is a subtle and natural prejudice which tends to strengthen such a bias by claiming a higher degree of reality for that which, as coming earlier in temporal succession, I presents itself in the light of what is called a I “cause.” So strong has been this bias among sociologists, that the student, primarily interested in the features and achievements of civilised society, is {22} tempted to say in his haste that the sociologist [1] as such seldom deals seriously with true social phenomena at all; but devotes his main attention to primitive man and to the lower animals, occasionally illustrating his studies in these regions by allusions, showing no great insight or mastery, to the facts of civilized society. Such a complaint becomes less and less justified as the years go by, and sociology recovers its balance as against the overwhelming influence of the sciences of lower life. How far the approach from this “lower” or more purely natural side will remain in the end characteristic of sociological science, is an integral part of the main problem concerning its nature and destiny with which we have to deal in the present work. But it remains true to say and very important to observe, that no such serious successes have as yet been won in the name and by the special methods of sociology as have been achieved by many investigators approaching their problems directly and with an immediate interest; whether in the sphere of political economy proper, or in dealing with various questions of social and ethical importance, such as pauperism, charity, sanitation, education, the condition of the people, the comparative study of politics, or the analysis of material and geographical conditions in their reaction upon social and artistic development. [1] By a “sociologist as such” I mean a writer who is professedly dealing with sociology as such. Any independent researches, such as Mr. and Mrs. Webb’s Industrial Democracy, may of course be ranked under the heading “Sociology.” But works of this kind do not, as a rule, attach themselves to the peculiar method and language of sociological writers. On the other hand, there is no doubt that the {23} epoch and influence of which we speak has bequeathed a legacy of imperishable value to the theory of society. In a word, it has made us sensitive to the continuity of things, and therefore also to their unity. It has shown us the crowning achievements of the human race, their States, their Religion, their Fine Art, and their Science, as the high-water mark of tendencies that have their beginnings far back in the primitive organic world, and in their original sources have also a connection with each other—as in the practical aspects of religion,—which too easily escapes notice in their highest individual development. The “return to nature” and the “noble savage” have been invested with a significance which can never be forgotten, and which criticism can never set aside. This is the sum and substance of the general contribution which the latter half of the eighteenth century and the greater part of the nineteenth have made to sociology through the science of life and of man. More particularly, it is necessary to notice the double operation of biological influence on sociology, according to the unit from which the analogy is drawn. a. The idea which still bulks most largely in the popular mind, as contributed by biology to social theory, is unquestionably that of the struggle for life or the survival of the fittest. It should be noticed that the social application of this analogy rests entirely on the comparison of a human society, not to the individual animal organism, and still less to the individual mind; but to a whole animal species or even to the aggregate of all animal species, so far as they or their members are in competition with one another. One whole side of the sociological {24} doctrine, which Mr. Spencer has advocated with unwearied persistence, is founded upon this application of the biological analogy, and the paradox which he has made his principle professes to be borrowed directly from the dealings of nature with the individuals of the animal species. This paradox, that benefits should be assigned inversely as services in infancy but directly as services among adults, is his ultimate sociological basis; the modification of which, to suit human society, by the introduction of benevolence or altruism, so to speak, on the top of it, only serves to display its inadequacy. But we may take it that the analogy of the struggle for life has made it clear that, in any given position, life can be maintained only in virtue of definite qualities adapted to that position. And formal as this principle is when taken by itself, its application in human society can never be unnecessary. b. A more recent school has insisted on the complementary analogy, which might be taken as resting upon the comparison of a society with an individual organism. Here, it must be remembered, lay the resemblance which, in this region of ideas, first caught the eye of social philosophers in antiquity. But it is alleged that the aspect of co-operation can be traced as between individual members of the animal world no less than between the parts of a single organism, and it is affirmed that the view which sees nothing but internecine competition in the animal kingdom has been too rough and too superficial in its reading of the facts. And therefore it is suggested that the phenomena of social fellowship, no less than those of individual competition, have their source {25} and root in the world of lower nature; and perhaps sociology is now not far from the recognition that competition and co-operation are simply the negative and positive aspect of the same general fact—the fact of the division of labour, of essentiality of function, and of uniqueness of true individual service. If it is suggested by the one organic analogy that life depends upon qualities adequate to the position which is to be filled, it is made obvious by the other that the qualities which satisfy the claims of a certain position are those, in general and in principle, by which a function is discharged in the service of the whole. In Mr. Spencer’s doctrine the two sides above indicated have been brought into very marked relation by a suggestive criticism, [1] which he has taken special pains to answer. If human society corresponds to an individual organism—as is, in many ways, Mr. Spencer’s well-known doctrine—how is it that the absolute central control in which the perfection of an organism consists is, for Mr. Spencer, a note of imperfection when it appears in a human society? And the answer is in effect that human society corresponds in many of its features rather to a local variety of a species than to an individual organism. It is essentially discrete, not individual, and at this point, therefore, the analogy of the individual organism gives way to that of the group or species. [1] Sociology, i. 586. But Mr. Spencer does not really mean that a human society has no more intrinsic bond between its members than the local group of an animal species. To indicate its true nature he {26} gives us a good word—but a word only—the word “super-organic.” [1] It is a significant term, and brings us perhaps to the limit of what biological sociology is able to suggest with regard to the unity of a human commonwealth, and points us to something beyond. It is remarkable that when the facts of true human society are more thoroughly realised than by Mr. Spencer, but the clue of the individual organism and the co-operative side of animal life is not followed up, there is a tendency to sever the links which unite man to “lower” nature, and to represent the ethical and cosmic processes as absolutely opposed. We see this point of view decidedly adopted by Mr. Huxley, [2] and its adoption perhaps indicates the inception of an epoch in which sociology will cut itself free from a good deal of pseudo-scientific lumber. Nevertheless, a patient and careful study will continue to recognise the elements both of competition and of co-operation as ineradicable and inseparable moments in human society as in the animal world; the essential meaning of competition in its higher forms being the rejection and suppression of members who are unable to meet the ever advancing demand for co-operative character and capacity; and the study of parasitism [3] and of regressive selection will continue to {27} be a warning against the attempt to emancipate mankind from the sterner general conditions of the cosmic order. It will be recognised that there is an adaptation to conditions which consists in degradation; but the failure will be understood by comparison with the only true “survival of the fittest,” [4] being that which reveals the full unity and significance of organism and environment. It is important to observe that, at least in the two eminent biologists just alluded to, the doctrine of the individual self—of the relation between self-assertion and self-restraint—is altogether of an uncivilised and anti-social type. Biological categories do not, in their case at least, appear to have afforded any suggestion for the treatment of the social self as more and greater, in a positive sense, than the self which is less bound up with social obligations. As for the denying spirits in Plato’s Republic, so for both Mr. Spencer and Mr. Huxley, “nature” is essentially self-assertion, and “society” self-restraint. [5] Here again we touch the same limitation which met us in Mr. Spencer’s term “super-organic,” and we feel that a different point of view must be brought to bear. [1] Sociology, vol. I., ch. i. [2] Evolution and Ethics, p. 82. [3] Geddes, in Encyclo. Brit., vol. xviii. 253a: “Further details of the process of retrograde metamorphosis and of the enormously important phenomena of degeneration cannot here be attempted; it must suffice if the general dependence of such changes upon simplification of environment—freedom from danger, abundant alimentation and complete repose, etc. (in short, the conditions commonly considered those of complete material well-being)—has been rendered clearer.” [4] Cf. Sutherland, Origin and Growth of the Moral Instinct, vol. I., pp. 28, 29. [5] Huxley, Evolution and Ethics, p. 31; Spencer, Man v. State, p. 98. iii. Political Economy existed before modern Sociology was born, and is still the only part of it which is obviously and indisputably successful as a science of explanation. The triumphant development of this theory reacted even upon Hegel’s political philosophy, by suggesting to him the distinction between “Bourgeois Society” and “The {28} State.” A fortiori, it could not but have a serious influence on the growing science of sociology itself, the ideal of which might not unfairly be regarded as the extension to society as a whole of that type of investigation which had proved so successful in economic matter. From this influence has arisen the tendency in sociological research which has been called by the name of the economic or materialist view of history and consequently of society. Primarily connected with the name of Marx, it may also be illustrated by many contentions of Buckle and Le Play, and has become, indeed, the formula of a school. In sum, the point of view amounts to this: that the fundamental structure of civilisation, the type of the family, for example, and the order relations and development of classes in society, have been and must be determined by the primary necessities of human existence, and the conditions of climate and nutrition under which these necessities are met. Economic facts alone, it is suggested, are real and causal; everything else is an appearance and an effect. Before saying a word as to the true importance of this point of view, we may profitably correct the commonplace idea of its nature. Materialism, in a strict philosophical sense, means the conviction that nothing is real but that which is solid, or, perhaps, which gravitates. By a not very convincing analogy from this idea, all those passions and necessities which we speak of in a quite loose and popular way as connected with the body, may be and often are regarded as “material” in opposition to energies which it seems pleasanter {29} to ascribe to incorporeal mind. But it should be noted that this secondary usage, especially in a time when no one denies the physical correlation of all psychical activity, has no important ethical implication. Like the “flesh” or the “body” of St. Paul’s religious language, the “bodily” or “material” needs and appetites of man are an element of mind, the rank and value of which must be determined on other grounds than the notion that they are connected in some peculiar degree with “physical” conditions. The economic view of history has been called and has called itself materialist partly because of the commonplace usage, which I have just described, by which certain passions and necessities, which it takes to be fundamental, are apt to be called material as opposed to ethical or ideal—a wholly unjustified opposition—and partly from the notion, which I referred to at the beginning of this chapter, that the success of political economy was in some way analogous to that of the mathematical science of abstract matter. Stripping off, then, the unjustified suggestion of philosophical materialism, [1] what we have in the economic view of history, amounts pretty much to what is expressed in the saying that while statesmen are arguing, love and hunger are governing mankind. Climate and natural resources make a {30} difference to history; occupations determine the type of the family; an agricultural and an industrial society will never exhibit the same relations between classes, and very vast commercial operations cannot be carried on by the same methods or by the same minds which sufficed for the retail trade of a petty shop. But when it is clearly seen that economic needs and devices are no detached, nor, so to speak, absolutely antecedent department of human life [2]—a fact which the epithet “materialist” has done something to obscure, for, in truth, in economics there is no question of genuine material causation—then it becomes obvious that we have not here any prior determining framework of social existence, but simply certain important aspects of the operations of the human mind, rather narrowly regarded in their isolation from all others. If we seriously consider the import of such an economic conception as the “standard of life,” it becomes plain that the contrast too commonly accepted [3] between the mechanical pressure of economic facts and the influence of ideas [4] stands in need of a completely fresh criticism and of entire restatement. Discounting, however, the exaggerations which have arisen from confused notions of materialism, and from the genuine achievements of economic science, we have remaining, in the point of view under consideration, a thoroughly just assertion of man’s continuity with {31} the world around him. Undoubtedly man lives the life of his planet, his climate, and his locality, and is the utterance, so to speak, of the conditions under which his race and his nation have evolved. The only difficulty arises if, by some arbitrary line between man and his environment, the conditions which are the very material of his life come to be treated as alien influences upon it, with the result of representing him as being the slave of his surroundings rather than their concentrated idea and articulate expression. Do we think that Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare would have been greater or more free in their genius if one had not been the voice of Greece, another that of Italy, and the third that of England? The world in which man lives is himself, but is constituted, of course, by presentation to a mind and not by strictly physical causation; and even where strictly physical causation plays a part, as in the bodily effects of a hot climate or of a certain kind of nutrition, still it cannot determine a type of human life except by passing into the world which a human being presents to himself. [1] Quite probably there may be in the Marxian view an echo of true materialism—the idea that will and consciousness are “epiphenomena” i.e. are effects which are not causes generated by molecular movements. Such a view cannot be criticised here, only it may be pointed out that, on such a basis, the “bodily” passions, etc., are in no way more “material” than, e.g., the moral “categorical imperative,” and therefore no more causal. [2] See note 4. [2] Cf. e.g. Durkheim, Annee Sociologique, 1897, p. 159. [4] I.e. as if economic conditions were a sort of iron girders put up to begin with and civilisation was the embellishment of them. It is the old story of forgetting that the skeleton is later than the body, and is deposited and moulded by it. The exclusive importance which has been attached to considerations of this kind in recent social theory is partly due to an unfounded opinion of their novelty. It is somewhat striking, though following naturally enough from the sort of schism in the world of letters which modern sociology and ancient social philosophy represent, that the firm and well balanced handling of these problems which we owe to Plato and Aristotle is for the most part ignored by modern sociologists. {32} The entire social conception of those writers is a continued application of the principle, fundamental in their whole philosophy, that “form” is the inherent organising life of “matter,” so that the better life of a commonwealth can be nothing but the flower and crown of the possibilities inherent in its material conditions and industrial and economic organisation. The law which is ultimately to reveal itself as the spring of all righteousness in the State, has its most obvious and external symbol—so Plato tells us—in the economic exchange of services; and every circumstance of site, and industry, and trade, and the racial type of the citizen, helps to constitute, both for him and for Aristotle, the living organic possibility from which, in some appropriate individual form, the higher life is to spring. If we ask ourselves what then is the difference between the ancient view of economic causation, and that of the “materialist” historical school, we shall find the answer in the absence, from the former, of that unreal isolation upon which we observed above. The relation of “matter” or “conditions” to “form” or “purpose” is not, for the Greek thinker, the pressure of an alien necessity, of a hostile environment, but the upspringing of a life, continuous in principle through all its phases. The thought of the legislator fixes in the shape of distinct consciousness and will, what the assemblage of conditions embodies as a physical or instinctive tendency, as the artist, to use an ancient simile, finds the statue in the marble. Working with this idea, the connection is far more thoroughly, because more sympathetically, traced than it can be when we think that our science is but laying bare the fetters of humanity. And following {33} in the spirit of the Greek thinkers themselves, modern students of antiquity have devoted themselves to eliciting the positive connection of conditions with history, up to a point of success of which the common run of modern sociologists appear to have no conception. When we reflect how typical and, comparatively speaking, how readily isolated and exhausted is the history of Ancient Greece in the greatest age, it seems extraordinary that the considerable and minute researches which have been bestowed upon its geographical, commercial, and economic conditions should not be commonly drawn into account with a view to the illustration of the relations between natural resources, commercial and economic development, and historical greatness. [1] [1] I have never, for example, seen the great work of Ernst Curtius, on the geography of the Peloponnese in connection with its historical development, referred to in any sociological treatise; nor, again, Duncker, nor BÜchsenschÜtz, nor Mr. Newman’s edition of Aristotle’s Politics. Boeckh’s Treatise on the Public Economy of Athens receives only a word of contemptuous notice in M’Culloch’s Literature of Political Economy. However this may be, here at any rate, in the analysis of economic and quasi-economic conditions in their bearing upon the life of peoples, we get a real subject-matter which is perhaps, so far as can yet be seen, the territory least disputably belonging to the pure sociologist. It is not really a sphere of natural causation, but it is a sphere of certain simple and general conditions in psychical life, corresponding to external facts which admit of more or less precise statement, and, we may hope, of reduction to fairly trustworthy uniformities. Such for instance are M. Durkheim’s investigations on the effect of {34} density of population upon the division of labour, [1] or Professor Gidding’s observations upon the causes and limiting conditions of the aggregation of populations. [2] We now proceed to a branch of experience which seriously strains the working conceptions of the sociologist. [1] De la Division du Travail Social, Alcan, 1893. [2] Principles of Sociology, bk. II., ch. i. Few things are more interesting in this respect than Mr. Poore’s observations in Rural Hygiene on the mechanical conditions of modern city life, as regards drainage and water supply, with their results in encouraging an overcrowded and insanitary mode of living. |
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