The Philosophical Theory of the State

by Bernard Bosanquet

In the one case, (i.) for “duty” should be read “obligation,” i.e. a demand enforceable by law. This simply means that every “position” may be regarded as involving either powers secured or conditions enforced, which are one and the same thing differently looked at. Roughly speaking, they are the same thing as differently looked at by one person, and by other persons. My right {209} to walk along the high road involves an obligation upon all other persons not to obstruct me, and in the last resort the State will send horse, foot and artillery rather than let me be causelessly obstructed in walking along the high road.

It is also true that every position which can be the source of obligations enforceable in favour of my rights is likewise a link with obligations enforceable on me in favour of the rights of others. By claiming a right in virtue of my position I recognise and testify to the general system of law according to which I am reciprocally under obligation to respect the rights, or rather the function and position, of others. My rights then imply obligations both in others, and perhaps in myself, correlative to these rights, and in me correlative to the rights of others. But it cannot strictly be said that the obligations are the source of the rights, or the rights of the obligations. Both are the varied external conditions of “positions” as regarded from different points of view.

But (ii.) there is a different sense in which every right implies a duty. And this, the true meaning of the phrase, is involved in what we have said of the nature of a “position.” All rights, as claims which both are and ought to be enforceable by law, derive their imperative authority from their relation to an end which enters into the better life. All rights, then, are powers instrumental to making the best of human capacities, and can only be recognised or exercised upon this ground.

In this sense, the duty is the purpose with a view to which the right is secured, and not merely {210} a corresponding obligation equally derived from a common ground; and the right and duty are not distinguished as something claimed by self and something owed to others, but the duty as an imperative purpose, and the right as a power secured because instrumental to it.

(d) We have treated rights throughout as claims, the enforcement of which by the State is merely the climax of their recognition by society. Why do we thus demand recognition for rights? If we deny that there can be unrecognised rights, do we not surrender human freedom to despotism or to popular caprice?

(i.) In dealing with the general question why recognition is demanded as an essential of rights, we must remember what we took to be the nature of society and the source of obligation. We conceived a society to be a structure of intelligences so related as to co-operate with and to imply one another. We took the source of obligation to lie in the fact that the logic of the whole is operative in every part, and consequently that every part has a reality which goes beyond its average self, and identifies it with the whole, making demands upon it in doing so.

Now, we are said to “recognise” anything when it comes to us with a consciousness of familiarity, as something in which we feel at home. And this is our general attitude to the demands which the logic of the whole, implied in our every act, is continuously making upon us. It is involved in the interdependence of minds, which has been explained to constitute the mind of which the visible community is the body. A teacher’s {211} behaviour towards his pupils, for example, implies a certain special kind of interdependence between their minds. What he can do for them is conditioned by what they expect of him and are ready to do for him, and vice versa. The relation of each to the other is a special form of “recognition.” That is to say, the mind of each has a definite and positive attitude towards that of the other, which is based on, or rather, so far as it goes, simply is, the relation of their “positions” to each other. Thus, social positions or vocations actually have their being in the medium of recognition. They are the attitudes of minds towards one another, through which their several distinct characteristics are instrumental to a common good.

Thus, then, a right, being a power secured in order to fill a position, is simply a part of the fact that such a position is recognised as instrumental to the common good. It is impossible to argue that the position may exist, and not be recognised. For we are speaking of a relation of minds, and, in so far as minds are united into a single system by their attitudes towards each other, their “positions” and the recognition of them are one and the same thing. Their attitude, receptive, co-operative, tolerant, and the like, is so far a recognition, though not necessarily a reflective recognition. Probably this is what is intended by those who speak of imitation or other analogous principles as the ultimate social fact. They do not mean the repetition of another person’s conduct, though that may enter in part into the relation of interdependence. They mean the {212} conscious adoption [1] of an attitude towards others, embodying the relations between the “positions” which social logic assigns to each.

[1] To call this imitation is something like calling fine art imitation. Really, in both cases, we find a re-arrangement and modification of material, incident to a new expression. The process, if we must name it, is “relative suggestion” rather than imitation.

(ii.) But then the question of page 210 presses upon us “If we deny that there can be unrecognised rights, do we not surrender human freedom to despotism or to popular caprice?”