The Philosophical Theory of the State

by Bernard Bosanquet

As an ethical idea, then, the monogamous family, which is in the normal case also a household, has a unique place in the structure of the citizen mind.

Its peculiarity is in being a natural union of feeling with ideal purpose. That is to say, the ideal purpose, a permanent interest in a comparatively permanent and external life, attaches itself by imperceptible links to the most universal incident of animal existence. The mere remaining together of the units, a demand of their physical needs, is almost enough of itself to transform their inevitable {301} mutual dependence into a relation of intentional service, rooted in affection, and tinged with some degree of forethought.

And, being thus “natural,” the idea of the family has a hold like no other upon the whole man. In this respect it anticipates the powers which have been claimed for the love of beauty. The very animal roots of life, and every detail of man’s appetitive being, are made, without conscious effort or moralising interference, factors in a round of social service. The meal of a lonely individual [1] is perhaps, at best, a refined and lawful pleasure. But the family meal, quite apart from over-strained religionism, has in it, as a plain matter of fact, the fundamental elements of a sacrament, none the less effective that they are not thought of by that name. And both through maintaining the fitness of the parents for their life work, and through the training of the children to the same end, the natural ethics of the family have an indispensable logical hold upon the more explicit common good known to the social will.

[1] Note, however, what is said below of the secondary or transferred idea of the family. The solitary may partake of the family sacrament, so to speak, “by faith.”

And, in the last place, it should be noted that a feeling and atmosphere of this kind is not confined to members actually living in households formed by families. There is no race, it has been said, that parts with its children so readily, or retains their affections so permanently, as the Anglo-Saxon race. When the type and spirit are once formed, they are contagious and persistent; they {302} affect all who have seen or known them, and even those who have never formed part of a household bound by kinship.

If we contrast the idea of the household with monasticism as its repudiation, and with the tribal state or phalanstery as its exaggeration, we shall see its uniqueness in the strongest light. The naturalness of its foundation, and the completeness of the reciprocal interest (involving monogamy) on which its idea rests, distinguish it from all other forms of union or disunion in which the sexes are concerned. It may be added that the family, and it alone, has the right adjustment of population in its power. The fully trained and equipped human being can never be superfluous in the world. And the production of the fully trained and equipped human being depends on the capacity of forming a true family and meeting its requirements, and when this capacity and idea regulate the union of the sexes no growth nor apparent decrease of population need cause anxiety.

It seems as idle to discuss whether civilisation is conceivable without the family as whether human nature can change. All that we can attempt, as philosophers, is to ascertain the distinctive part which its idea plays in human life as such. There must be, we can see, some such idea—an ethical idea covering some such sides of life—while man is a spiritual animal. But by what precise “institution” such an idea might come to be represented in circumstances which we do not know, it would be beyond the modesty of philosophy to predict.

The institution of Property may be mentioned {303} as a corollary to the household-family. Its natural basis and ethical value are very markedly correlative to those of the latter. The outlook upon life which it essentially implies is co-extensive with that demanded by the household, although in the relations of acquisition and exchange many further rights and duties may attach to it. It depends on the fact that, in order to express a will in an individual life (which is incomplete except as the life of a household), there must be a power of moulding the material world in the service of ideas, which is conditioned by free acquisition and utilisation. The institution of property, then, as an ethical idea, consists in the conception of individual (properly speaking, household) life as a unity in respect to its dealings with the material instruments of living. It is not merely the idea of provision for the future; still less the certainty of satisfying wants as they arise from day to day. It is the idea that all dealings with the material conditions of life form part of a connected system, in which our conceptions and our abilities express themselves. It binds together the necessary care for food and clothing with ideas of making the most of our life and of the lives dependent upon us. A being which has no will has so far no property—a child has in practice, and a slave had by Roman law, property in a secondary sense—and a being which has no property has so far no actual will. The “person,” or responsible head (or heads), of a household, is the true unit to whom the idea of property attaches, because he is the unit to which we normally ascribe an individualised will, a single {304} distinctive shape of the social mind. A child has not yet such a will; a group of mature persons has more than one. The change which is passing over the household in consequence of the recognition of married women as individual wills is highly instructive on this point. They can hold and manage their own property, because it is admitted that they can have their own view of life. It is not proposed that young children should hold and manage property, because every one knows that they have no mature individualised view of life. The corporate person of the household is so far dissolved by legal recognition of its more individual components; and it is most important, theoretically, to note that its unity is not diminished by the recognition, but is raised to a higher power.

4. It might seem fanciful to say that our district is to our family as space to time; but it would suggest something of the point of view from which it is well to look at the structure of our ethical ideas. It is desirable to realise how the simplest characters of our surroundings and their necessary connections are ethically important, not because they impose anything upon us, but because they respond to something within us, or rather, to a possibility which is to be realised by the world, as in us its variety strives towards unity. Parentage, we saw, was a universal animal fact, and from it, in an experience capable of unity and permanence, springs the family household and all that it implies for our lives. One’s district, as an element of life, implies, of course, some stability—a home, not merely permanent as a {305} home, like the Scythian’s waggon, but located on some spot of earth. The nomad, we must suppose, to a great extent carries his neighbourhood—his tribe—along with him, and for that very reason the fact of neighbourhood has not its full effect on him.

But when a permanent home is fixed on some spot of earth, presumably with the beginnings of agriculture, a new condition begins to operate—the “indifference” of space. Perhaps we are surprised that “indifference” should be an ethical stimulus. But nothing is more instructive than to note how qualities of our surroundings, which by themselves seem negative or the barest natural necessities, spring into significance when taken up into the unity of life. Locality means a potential neighbourhood. It may be long before any one comes near you except your own cousinhood, your tribe or clan. But the indifference of space is a standing invitation, and it is pretty certain that some day strangers will become your neighbours, and that you will have to take up some mental attitude towards them. Historians and jurists have described to us the struggle between the principle of kinship and the principle of neighbourhood. When we read that a plebeian, in the eyes of a Roman patrician, simply could not make a real marriage any more than the beasts of the field, this is not, as it may have become by survival, intentional arrogance on the patrician’s part. It was rather the state of mind of Mrs. Transome towards Rufus Lyon, “sheer inability to consider him.” A proof of what a struggle it involved to reach a new attitude of mind as regarded the resident alien is given by {306} the half-way house at which it was found necessary to pause in the process. The recognition of kinship on the ground of residence was the fiction, we are told, by which the mind assisted itself to a positive attitude towards those whom the indifference of space insisted on bringing within its range. And the positive attitude towards which it was groping its way was of course the recognition of humanity, the equality of man in the truest sense which that ambiguous phrase will bear.