The Philosophical Theory of the State

by Bernard Bosanquet

CHAPTER IV.

THE PROBLEM OF POLITICAL OBLIGATION MORE RADICALLY TREATED.

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.

[1] See Nettleship’s Remains, i. 160.

If then we are to coin an expression which will indicate the common features of the theories outlined in the previous chapter, we may venture upon some such phrase as “prima facie theories,” or “theories of the first look.” By this I do not mean that they stand in the same rank with the views of the Greek thinkers, who, undisturbed by previous speculation, saw the great facts of social experience with a freshness and wholeness of vision with which they can never be seen again. The “first look” of our own day is of a different kind. It is the first look of the man in the street or of the traveller, struggling at a railway station, to whom the compact self-containedness and self-direction of the swarming human beings before him seems an obvious fact, while the social logic and spiritual history which lie behind the scene fail to impress themselves on his perceptive imagination.

We see then that these theories of the first appearance are mainly guided by this impression of the natural separateness of the human unit. For this reason, as we noted, the experience of self-government is to them an enigma, with which they have to compromise in various ways. And because their explanations of it are not true explanations but only compromises, they rest on no principle, and dictate no consistent attitude. For Bentham all solid right is actually in the State, {81} though conceived by himself as a means to individual ends; for Mill, it is divided between the State and the individual, by a boundary which cannot be traced and therefore cannot be respected; for Herbert Spencer all right is in the individual, and the State has become little more than a record office of his contracts and consents.

The assumption common to the theories in question is dictated by their very nature. It is not precisely, as is often supposed to be the case, that the individual is the end to which Society is a means. Such a definition fails to assign a character which is distinctive for any social theories whatever. For Society, being, at the lowest rate, a plurality of individuals, whatever we say of the individual may be construed as true of Society and vice versa, so long as all individuals are understood in the same sense as one. Thus the “means” and the “ends” are liable to change places, as, for practical purposes, we saw that they did in Bentham. The ethical term “altruism” illustrates this principle. It shows that by taking “the individual” as the “end,” nothing is determined as to the relation between each individual and all, and it remains a matter of chance how far it is required of “each” individual, in the name of the welfare of “the individual,” to sacrifice himself to “all.”

The fact is that the decisive issue is not whether we call the “individual” or “society” the “end”; but what we take to be the nature at once of individuals and of society. This is the question of principle; and views which are at one in this have nothing which can in principle keep them apart, {82} although they may diverge to the seemingly opposite poles of the liberty of each and the welfare of all. We have observed this sliding from one narrowness to its opposite, as between Bentham, Mill, and Herbert Spencer.

The root idea then, of the views which we have been discussing, is simply that the individual or society—it makes no difference which we take—is what it prima facie appears to be. This is why we have called them “prima facie” theories, or “theories of the first look.” It would be a long story to explain how a first look can be possible in the eighteenth or nineteenth century A.D. But in brief, the history of thought shows certain leaps or breaks in culture; when the human mind seems to open its eyes afresh, or to emerge on a new platform, from which new point of view all its adjustments have to be re-made and its perceptions re-analysed. In these new stages a great advance is involved; but the advance is potential, and the possible insight has to be paid for by an initial blindness.

Such an occasion it was on which the legislator or economist or natural philosopher of the modern world turned his gaze upon man in society. He saw him as “one of millions enjoying the protection of the law,” [1] and society as the millions of which he is one. Such an onlooker inevitably proceeds to treat the social whole as composed of units A, B, C, etc., who, as they stand, and just as they seem to us when we rub against them in daily intercourse, are taken to be the organs and centres of human life. From this assumption all {83} the rest follows. Each of us, A, B, C, and all the others, seems to be, and to a great extent in the routine of life actually is, self-complete, self-satisfied, and self-willed. To each of us, A, B, or C, all the rest are “others.” They are “like” him; they are “repetitions” of him, but they are not himself. He knows that they are something to himself; but this “something” is still “something else,” and even in ethical reflection he is apt to call his recognition of it “altruism”—an indefinite claim and feeling, touching his being at its margin of contact with neighbouring circles, the centres of which are isolated.