The Philosophical Theory of the State

by Bernard Bosanquet

In modern States, in which this struggle is on the whole behind us, our district or locality asserts its full indifference. Its “negative” here becomes a “positive.” That is to say, on the whole, [1] and under some reasonable reservations as to evidence of intention to accept duties, and to renounce incompatible ones, men are full members of the district to which they choose to belong. The challenge thrown down by the indifference of space has resulted in a recognition of universal humanity. Our district is our neighbourhood. We will look a little more closely at the ethical idea implied. We notice at once, at least in English experience, that each of us belongs to a variety of districts which are concentric as regards him. Each of these districts represents a different purpose, and we are told that for practical purposes great confusion results. But it is a useful training to be made aware of the distinct purpose of each {307} organised locality which surrounds us—to have the care of our health, of public order, of education, of the relief of the destitute, and of religion according to our view of it, represented by different, or possibly different, boundary lines on the map. Each of these boundaries indicates some common element of thought and feeling—some common interest—in the mind of the neighbourhood, and the difference of the boundaries, where they differ—the difference, e.g., between the civil and ecclesiastical parish—may have a long growth of ideas behind it. At any rate, all these are moral or physical needs, which, like our household necessities, draw us out of ourselves, and reveal us to ourselves as cases of a larger mind.

[1] Settlement, scholarships, fellowships, and charities generally, “close” to localities, and perhaps domicile, maintain qualifications in contradiction with actual residence, and in case of allegiance even depending in part on birth. But some fixity is, of course, convenient; and I believe that intention plus residence will cancel almost any opposing qualification.

Every locality, then, is, however imperfectly and unconsciously, a body which has a mind. It is, as an idea which enters into us, the spiritual reflection of our adjacent surroundings, both human and natural, as the family is of our animal parentage. The neighbourhood is for the mind its immediate picture of the world, the frame into which its further vista of society as a whole must be fitted, or, in other words, its sphere of direct relations. The family is a group of natural relations; but the neighbourhood consists of relations which are as natural in a different way, not through blood, but through contact. It is not a selection, but rather a specimen of life as a whole, for it must include as a rule all the necessary elements of the social fabric. It includes all that comes to us by direct sense-perception from day to day; all our chance meetings and dealings with those outside our household, and probably the nearer {308} and more reliable illustrations of all social and political problems. For it is a context of life which we know and feel in its total working, which is impossible with what we only gather from writings or from hearsay.

As such a reflection of our direct surroundings, it colours our whole basis of feeling, A peculiar tinge of happiness, anxiety, depression, or resolution attaches to the streets or fields which we pass through day by day, and the faces which we meet. How far these feelings are true interpretations of what we see, and how far they spring from superficial or sentimental associations, is one of the greatest tests of the mind and heart. Do we see the body of a soul, the symbols of character and happiness, in the houses, the streets, the tillage, the workshops, or the gardens?

No other element of mind can be the substitute for the neighbourhood. It is the faith in which we live, so far as embodied in our contact with a sensuous world. It is a microcosm of humanity, in which, by the very indifference of space, we are liable to the direct impact of all possible factors. It is particularly the sphere of charity and courtesy, of the right behaviour in immediate human relations of all possible kinds.

The District or Neighbourhood, in short, as an ethical idea, is the unity of the region with which we are in sensuous contact, as the family is that of the world bound to us by blood or daily needs. Local self-government, for example, acquires a peculiar character from the possibilities of intimate knowledge of each other among those who carry it on. A man’s whole way of living {309} is in question when he sets up to be locally prominent, and though the result may often be corruption or vulgarity, [1] these are only the failure of what, at its best, is a true type of the relation of fellow-citizens.

[1] The recriminations or interested intimacies of a vestry or parish council rest at bottom on the personal knowledge which, rightly used, gives security to local life.

As with the family, we may illustrate the significance of Neighbourhood by the case in which it fails to be duly recognised, and that in which nothing else is recognised.

To a great extent, in the life of modern cities, especially when supplemented by suburban residence, the principle is disregarded. In a great city, the actual neighbourhood is more than can be dealt with, and has often no distinctive physical character—at least no attractiveness—and the idea of a special relation to it falls away. The fact, indeed, is less universal than is often asserted, and nearness in space, together with local government, retain and will retain a certain predominance over the mind. The total disregard of an ethical purpose connecting us with the surroundings nearest to us in bodily presence, tends to deprive the general life of its vitality, its sensuous health, strength, and beauty. In many ways, circuitous perhaps, but ultimately effective, it may be that this factor of immediacy will regain a proper place in the national mind. We may observe that in as far as electoral districts are treated as mere circumscriptions of such and such numbers of electors, the life of a neighbourhood is disregarded. To make the constituency a mere {310} number (Hare’s scheme) would be the climax of this tendency.

In the ancient City-state, on the other hand, the district was all powerful. The State was almost a sensuous fact. The members of the State were essentially friends and neighbours, who for business or pleasure were meeting all day long. When the district thus absorbs the State, there is a want of what we call freedom, though there may be enough of sensuous unconstraint. The State and its ideal purposes are not clearly set above all flesh and blood. A great legal system is not created till the State ceases to be a neighbourhood. Individual intimacy [1] and the “hard case” obscure the idea of universal law. The possibility of representative government, of a political faith which does not work by sight, is not conceived. The district, as a natural fact, was at first only a degree more liberating than the natural fact of kinship. [2] It was not conceived that man, as man, belonged “neither to this place nor to Jerusalem.” With the ideal unity of a modern nation such conceptions harmonise much more readily, and the neighbourhood can lend them flesh and blood without hiding them.