The Philosophical Theory of the State

by Bernard Bosanquet

[1] Cited in Dreyfus-Brisac’s edition of the Contrat Social, p. 39.

[2] Note the value of “natural law” as a middle term equivalent to the general and rational features of positive law, and forming a step by which the “natural” is carried beyond the supposed “state of nature.”

Upon this reversion to ancient usage there followed the movement of the age of romantic genius and of organic science, and with Goethe’s Erdgeist and Wordsworth’s religion of Nature the restriction of the natural to the primitive and simple was destroyed. Nature still remains a point of view under which we regard what relatively speaking “comes of itself,” but it has ceased to exist as a question-begging predicate, attached to pre-social or extra-social conditions of man.

3. Liberty, as understood by the writers who were discussed in ch. iii. of the present work, is related to the State much as Nature, in the mouth of story-telling theory, is related to civilised society. We saw that Seeley in his Introduction to Political Science [1] lays it down that “perfect liberty is equivalent to total absence of government.” And this no doubt fairly represents our first notion of the matter, when cleared of the limitations imposed upon it by practical life, which {134} limitations—really a first hint of the truth—we are apt to mistake for mere sophistications and imperfections. We noted in Rousseau the surviving contrast between natural liberty on the one hand and civil or moral liberty on the other, and we observed that the expanding idea of what was natural could not be prevented from covering the ground of the civil or moral life. The thread of connection, or rather the ferment of expansion, we found to be, in the case of nature, the idea of self-origination. That was natural which came of itself.

[1] Seeley, quoted p. 91 above.

(a) In the simple ideal of liberty, as equivalent to the absence of all government—for we must not forget that it is an ideal, obtained by neglecting the facts of life which run counter to it—there is clearly embodied a claim which commands our respect. The claim is so self-evident and so convincing to average human feeling—Mr. Spencer would indeed say, with some truth, to animal feeling in general—that its precise nature is seldom stated in distinct language. We have assumed above that the root of it lies in the claim to be ourselves. But it is safer to take it in the shape which it actually has for the average consciousness, and this is the negative shape, as a claim to be free from constraint. [1] If we ask, “What is constraint?” the answer is founded on the current distinction between myself and others as different minds attached to different bodies. It is constraint when my mind is interfered with in its control of my body either by actual or by threatening physical {135} violence under the direction of another mind. A permanent and settled condition of such constraint, by which I become in effect the instrument of another mind, is slavery. And it will not lead us far wrong if we assume that the value put upon liberty and its erection into something like an ideal comes from the contrast with slavery. The ideal of positive political freedom presupposes more complex experiences. But Homer already knows that “Zeus deprives a man of half his manhood when he becomes a slave.”

[1] We must assume, I suppose, that in Seeley’s sentence “Government” = “Constraint,” or its vraisemblance is lost.

This, then, we may take as the practical starting point in the notion of freedom. It is what, with reference to a formed society, we may call a status; the position of a freeman as opposed to a slave; that is, of one who, whatever oppression he may meet with de facto from time to time, or whatever specified services he may be bound to render, normally regards himself and is regarded by others as, on the whole, at his own disposal, and not the mere instrument of another mind.

Thus the juristic meaning of the term liberty, based on the normal distinction between one self-determining person and another, we may set down as its literal meaning, and so far the English writers, of whom Seeley is the latest type, are on solid ground when they define liberty as the absence of restraint, or perfect liberty as the absence of all government (in the sense of habitual constraint by others).

(b) It is obvious that the above definition would be wholly inadequate to the simplest facts respecting the demands which have through all history been asserted and achieved under the name of political {136} liberty. A man may be a long way more than a slave and yet a long way less than a citizen. If, as Seeley says, the English writer of the verses, “Ah, Freedom is a noble thing,” only meant by Freedom, being out of prison, it is certain that he meant much less than the Greek historian who two thousand years before used almost the same words. “The right of equal speech,” he wrote, “demonstrates itself in every way as a noble thing.” [1] By this, as his words and their occasion make plain, he meant a certain determinate security for the positive exercise of activities affecting the welfare of the social whole, and some such security is always understood to be involved in the notion of political liberty. But we will content ourselves at this point with noting the distinction and connection between the negative or juristic, and the varyingly positive or political conception of liberty. For the latter is, in its degree, a case of that fuller freedom which we are about to trace to its embodiment in the state; and the phenomena of political liberty are covered, of course, by the point of view which we shall take in indicating the state as the main organ and condition of the fuller liberty.