The Philosophical Theory of the State

by Bernard Bosanquet

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?