“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.
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