The Psychology of Nations / A Contribution to the Philosophy of History

by G. E. Partridge

No American can of course be expected to see the question of government otherwise than through American eyes. He is to some extent prejudiced and bound to the ideas of liberty, individualism, and democracy, whatever his variety of party politics be. Democracy he may regard as an assumption, but it will seem now even more than ever a necessary assumption upon which to build a working conception of government.

We have to look somewhere in actual life for the elements and principles of government. Why should we not look for them in American life, where government has grown up comparatively free from traditions and prejudices and where it has been by all the ordinary tests successful? There has been something both ideal and generic in American life. Whatever personal equation may be involved in saying this, the point of view has some objective justification. It is a genetic method, at least. In early American life society was simple, and life was earnest, and we see government and the individual in their essential relations to one another.

In this primitive and yet modern society we see the individual as a collection of functions, so to speak, existing in a group. The individual also has various desires, which do not appear to be wholly in agreement with his social functions. Some of these desires of individuals are strongly antagonistic to society. In this society, government is plainly the means of protecting the individual or the group, by the suggestion or the exertion of lawful force, from the threat of lawless force. Law is a means of enabling and also compelling the individual to perform the various functions which belong to him as an individual or as a member of the group. To some extent the law also aids the individual in performing his functions. But this simple social order already shows certain basic disharmonies. It is an experimental regulation of the individual. Every restriction the individual helps to put upon other individuals by participating in or acquiescing in the establishment of government and law reacts to limit his own freedom, in ways which he cannot wholly predict. Freedom of the individual, even in the simplest social order, becomes greatly limited, if not necessarily, at least naturally—and indeed necessarily, since the only choice appears to be between lawful and lawless limitation of freedom. From the beginning, therefore, there can be no perfect satisfaction of individual desires or of either general or individual needs, in the ordered social life. Society as a whole regulates the conduct of the individual both by aiding and by inhibiting his activities, and must do so. In doing this, it is plain, it promotes all or most of the functions of the individual. Ordered society widens the total sphere of action of the individual. The individual left to himself tends to become an end-in-himself. Law makes him to a greater extent a means. In doing this it serves him and it also uses him, and there can never be any guarantee, in any individual case, of what the sum of these services and restraints shall be. Society uses the individual in part, but not exclusively, in his own service. The good and the evil, the necessity and the dilemma of all government are outgrowths of this primitive service of the social organization and this original disharmony among the wills of individuals and the will of the group to serve the individual and also at the same time certain general purposes which may not in any given case coincide with either the desire or the need of the individual. For this reason we conclude that there can be no perfect government. All government is experimental and exists by compromise.

What, then, in the most general way, can we say is the legitimate function or purpose of government? Hocking says that government is the means of assuring the individual that his achievements will be permanent. To this end it puts order into the structure of society. In our view something similar, but not identical with this, is true. We can say that in its complex forms it is in principle only what we found it to be in its primitive or simple forms. Government is ideally a means of aiding all the functions of every individual. Functions, let us observe and not primarily desires are served. These functions are such functions as the individual has as a member of every group to which he naturally belongs. Government, then, so to speak, has no standing of its own. Its proper function is to facilitate all other functions. Neither individuals nor governments have any rights as abstracted from the sum of functions which they essentially are.

If this be true, we can certainly define no one best and eternal type of government, any more than a fixed and perfect plan of life for an individual can be defined. Government might be supposed properly to change according to the functions which from time to time were most important for the society in question. Social life, under government, differs from a free and unorganized social life mainly in that a certain objectivity is acquired in regard to the functions of the individual. The individual becomes a creature of functions rather than of desires and needs. Common interests, or the interests of the group are served, we say; in doing this the individual is made to serve his own interests, perhaps, but the most outstanding fact is that in this organized life the immediate desires of the individual are likely to be thwarted. Regularity is put into conduct, and conduct is made to serve multiple and distant ends. The functions of the individual, left to the desire of the individual, will seldom be harmoniously performed. They will lack precisely objective consideration. But in the organized social life there will also be no perfect order and harmony, no final balance of functions. Everything is still relative and experimental. Government is a system in which any one individual at any moment may gain or may lose. But on the whole, under the good government, both more freedom for the individual and better conditions and better life for the individual will presumably be obtained than in any possible disordered or unorganized society. But government will really add nothing that does not already belong to the functions that naturally develop in any social group.

The actual functions of governments are, therefore, highly complex, because it is in some way involved in all the functions of the individuals themselves. Governments will be judged good or bad in two particulars: according to the completeness with which they include all the social functions, and as regards their efficiency in facilitating these functions. We must not make the mistake of judging a government merely by its form. Under the same constitution and holding the same ideals, there is room for widely different forms of activity on the part of the government, and great differences in efficiency and in the functions performed. The same functions may be performed and the same degree of efficiency reached apparently with different organizations. Cleveland shows, for example, how our own government might become much more efficient and make radical changes in the mechanism of the legislative and executive functions without sacrificing any principle we hold to, and perhaps without any change in our constitution.

It is this idea of the proper functions of government and the relative adequacy of existing governments to perform them that seems to be deeply questioned. Life has suddenly grown more complex. The individual is brought face to face with new demands upon him. He becomes, it may be, a member of new groups, having new functions. Government also, and correspondingly, expands. The question is not now of the efficiency of government in doing what it has hitherto undertaken; we wish to feel sure that government is adequate to meet the requirements of a rapidly changing social order. That just now is indeed a very vital question. Governments, we say, may be obliged to adapt themselves to entirely new tasks. Society assumes new external relations, and therefore we should expect that new organs would be needed for performing these new functions.

In all this we have been making objective valuations of government. An ideal or a definition of government in terms of its functions and the degree of efficiency in the performance of them might still, we ought to observe, leave a wide scope for preference in regard to forms, and other subjective valuations. Even between aristocratic and democratic forms, there may be still room for valid appreciations on æsthetic or moral grounds. Our objective valuations of government must in fact in various ways impinge upon fundamental questions in which no purely scientific considerations will be wholly decisive.

We can certainly find no precise way of valuing in detail or in their totality existing or proposed forms of government. Our most valid method, however, appears to be to refer at every step the functions of government back to the functions of the individuals who make up society. Every phase of legitimate government must thus go back to the individual, and his desires and functions. If we do this we shall see again why in national life we have the same kind of experimental problem that we have in the life of the individual. There can be no perfect adjustment among the acts of an individual, and no final valuation of them. There is no perfect balance between present use and future good, between individual and social values, between desires or needs and functions. The reason for this, we say, is that life is so complicated and made up of so many functions and of so many conflicting desires that it cannot be conducted according to any single principle or combination of principles. If we think of government as only a phase of the widest social living, and so as being through and through of the nature of the life of the individual, we ought to have the right point of view for all practical consideration of it. We must not expect consistency or perfection in government, and we can have no hope of passing absolute and final judgments upon it. Radical politics, in our present situation, must be regarded as one of our greatest dangers.

Democracy has become the "great idea of the age." It is our own fundamental principle, so we of all people ought to be able to understand and to defend it—and to define it. Yet many writers complain and more imply that the idea of democracy has never been very clear, and perhaps not even very sincere. Sumner says that democracy is one of the many words of ambiguous meaning that have played such a large part in politics. Democracy, he says, is not used as a parallel word to aristocracy, theocracy, autocracy, and the like, but is invoked as a power from some outside origin which brings into human affairs a peculiar inspiration and an energy of its own.