The Philosophical Theory of the State

by Bernard Bosanquet

[1] See, e.g., Green’s Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation, p. 61.

{94} This use of the term “person” is one of the cases alluded to in ch. I., where an abstraction of law has preserved the seed of a philosophical idea of unity. How far the unity thus indicated is an empty fiction, or how far it is grasped as something vital, into which the individual mind goes out and in which it finds what its nature demands, is what we now have to consider further.

6. Chapters vii. and viii. of book I. of the Contrat Social show the outcome of Rousseau’s conflicting ideas in a very few remarkable propositions.

The question is whether the unity of a body politic is an arbitrary abstraction or a fundamental force and reality.

Rousseau is discussing in chapter vii. the guarantees which exist for a fulfilment of obligations by the sovereign (or whole) to its members and by the members to the sovereign respectively. As regards the obligation of the sovereign to its members, he runs straight into the fallacy referred to in ch. I. He contends, that is to say, that the whole is necessarily, by its constitution, that which it ought to be, and being composed of all the individuals can have no interest opposite to theirs as a whole, while, qua sovereign, it is debarred from any such special [1] action as might be hurtful to any single individual. This presupposes that the whole always acts according to its idea as a whole, and neither is “captured” by individual interests nor transgresses the limits set to its action by restriction to true public concerns. But if this were so, the State would be perfectly wise and {95} good; and we do not need to be told that a State, qua wise and good, could do no injustice to its members. The whole is of course liable to vices correlative to those which Rousseau is about to guard against when they arise in the individual.

[1] See below, p. 112.

And his view of individual disloyalty is decisive as to the vitality of his conception of political unity.

“Indeed,” he says, “each individual may, as a man, have a particular will contrary to or unlike the general will which he has as citizen; his particular interest may speak to him quite differently from the common interest; his absolute and naturally independent existence may make him regard what he owes to the common cause as a gratuitous contribution, the loss of which would be less injurious to others than its payment is burdensome to himself; and considering the moral person which constitutes the State as an abstraction (être de raison) because it is not a man, he would enjoy the rights of the citizen without consenting to fulfil the duties of the subject—an injustice the progress of which would cause the ruin of the body politic.”

“In order, then, that the social pact may not be a vain formula, it tacitly includes the covenant, which alone can confer binding force on the others, that whoever shall refuse to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the whole body, which means nothing else than that he will be forced to be free.”

In this passage Rousseau lays bare the very heart of what some would call political faith, and others political superstition. This lies in the {96} conviction that the “moral person [1] which constitutes the state” is a reality, as opposed to the natural idea that it is an abstraction or fiction of the reflective mind (an “ens rationis,” être de raison), because it is not an actual individual human being. The theories of the first appearance, as we have called them, are characterised by accepting as ultimate “the absolute and naturally independent existence” of the physical individual, and therefore regarding government as an encroachment on the self, and force as oppression. Whereas, if the social person is taken as the reality, it follows, as Rousseau points out, that force against the physical individual may become a condition of freedom. We saw even in Mill how extreme cases bring out the necessity for assuming a “real” will at variance with the individual’s immediate desire. [2] There is more to be said, of course, as to the limits within which force can be so applied. [3]