The Philosophical Theory of the State

by Bernard Bosanquet

[2] Cf. the English workman’s phrase, “a good tradesman,” i.e. a competent member of his trade.

If the family is the first basis of the State, the classes or estates are the second. The Corporation or Trade Society is a second family to its members. It is the very root of ethical connection between the private and the general [1] interest, and the State should see to it that this root holds as strongly as possible. [2]

[1] “We can only say that these men, if they leave us, will bitterly regret it. … The man who is so unselfish as to care nothing for himself or his fellow-men will soon find himself, as years creep over him, and grey hairs and glasses, completely cut out.”—“Branch Trade Report (Birmingham) to National Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives, January, 1896.”

[2] Sects. 201 and 255. I omit Hegel’s characterisation of the classes, which has a good deal in common with theories which represent occupations as determining character. The contrast between agricultural and industrial or commercial life, between country and town, is of great importance in his view. He almost seems to confine Bourgeois industrialism as such to the life of town-dwellers; though, again, ultimately the whole division into classes is characteristic of Bourgeois Society (cf. sects. 256 and 305).

“If,” Hegel writes, [1] “in recent days the “Corporation has been abolished, this has the significance {280} that the individual ought to provide for himself. This may be admitted; but the corporation did not alter the individual’s obligation to earn his livelihood. In our modern States the citizens have only a limited share in the universal business of the State; but it is necessary to permit the ethical human being a universal activity over and above his private end. This universal, which the modern State does not always provide for him, he finds in the Corporation. We saw before that the individual providing for himself in the Bourgeois Society also acts for others. But this unconscious necessity is not enough; it needs the Corporation to bring it to a conscious and thoughtful social ethics. Of course the Corporation needs the higher superintendence of the State, or it would ossify, shrink into its shell, and be degraded into a wretched guild. But in and for itself the Corporation is no closed guild; it is rather the bringing of an isolated trade into an ethical connection, and its admission into a sphere in which it wins strength and honour.” [2]

[1] Sect. 255.

[2] It is obvious that this treatment of associations arising among classes in industry and commerce does not apply in principle exclusively to trade or professional societies. It would include, e.g., Friendly Societies and Co-operative Societies, by which members of the economic world bind themselves together for help, recognition, and the assertion of their general interests.

8. The State proper, or political constitution, presents itself to Hegel as the system in which the family and the Bourgeois Society find their completion and their security. He was early impressed, as we have seen, with the beautiful unity of the ancient Greek commonwealths. And the first and last idea which governs his representations of the modern State is that of the Greek commonwealth enlarged as it was from a sun to a solar {281} system. The family feeling and the individual interest are in the modern State let go, accented, intensified to their uttermost power; and it is out of and because of this immense orbit of its elements that the modern State has its “enormous strength and depth.” It is the typical mind, the very essence of reason, whose completeness is directly as the completeness of each of its terms or sides or factors; and secure in the logical confidence that feeling and self-consciousness, the more they attain their fulness, must return the more certainly to their place in the reasonable system which is their very nature. As ultimate power, the State maintains on one side the attitude of an external necessity towards the spheres of private life, of the family, and of the economic world. It may intervene by force to remove hindrances in the path of the common good, which accident and immaturity may have placed there. But, in its essence, the State is the indwelling and explicit end of these modes of living, and is strong in its union of the universal purpose with the particular interests of mankind. It is, in short, the incarnation of the general or Real Will. It has the ethical habit and temper of the family as a pervading basis, combined with the explicit consciousness and purpose of the business world. In the organism of the State, i.e. in as far as we feel and think as citizens, feeling becomes affectionate loyalty, and explicit consciousness becomes political insight. As citizens we both feel and see that the State includes and secures the objects of our affections and our interests; not as separate items, thrown together by chance, but as purposes transformed by their relation to the common good, into {282} which, as we are more or less aware, they necessarily pass. This feeling and insight are the true essence of patriotism. It is easier to be magnanimous than to be merely right, and people prefer to think of patriotism as a readiness to make great sacrifices which are never demanded. But true patriotism is the every-day habit of looking on the commonwealth as our substantive purpose and the foundation of our lives.

The division of functions in the State is a necessary condition of its rational organisation. But, as Rousseau had insisted, it is altogether false to regard these separate functions as independent, or as checks on one another. There could be no living unity, if the functions of the State were ultimately independent and negative towards each other. Their differentiation is simply the rational division of labour. The State is an image of a rational conception; it is “a hieroglyph of reason.”

Sovereignty, therefore, resides in no one element. It is, essentially, the relation in which each factor of the constitution stands to the whole. That is to say, it resides only in the organised whole acting qua organised whole. If, for example, we speak of the “Sovereignty of the People” in a sense opposed to the Sovereignty of the State—as if there were such a thing as “the people” over and above the organised means of expressing and adjusting the will of the community—we are saying what is, strictly speaking, meaningless. It is just the point of difference between Rousseau’s two views. We saw that Rousseau clearly explained the impossibility of expressing the general {283} will except by a determinate system of law. But what he seemed to suggest, and was taken to mean, by popular Sovereignty, was no doubt just the view which Hegel condemns. It is essentially the same question as how a constitution can be made. Strictly, a constitution cannot be made except by modification of an existing constitution. If, to put a case, you have a multitude new to each other in some extra-political colony, they must assume a constitution, so to speak, before they can make one. Law and constitution are utterances of the spirit of a nation.