Right in the true sense, Renouvier insists, belongs to a state of peace; in a state of war, such as our civilisation is perpetually in, it cannot be realised. The objection may be made that Renouvier is then justifying the means by the end. He emphatically denies this. By no means is this the case, for “the evil,” he remarks, “which corrects another evil does not therefore become good; it may be useful, but it is none the less evil, immoral, or unjust, and what is not just is not justifiable. Wars, rebellions, revolutions may lessen certain evils, but they do not thereby cease to be any the less evils themselves. Morally we are obliged to avoid all violence; a revolution is only justified if its success gives an indication of its absolute necessity. We must lament, from the standpoint of ethics or justice, the evil state of affairs which gives rise to it.[[23]]
[23] On this point, it is interesting to compare with the above the views of Spinoza in his Tractatus Theologico-politicus and Tractatus-politicus, and those of T. H. Green in his Lectures on Political Obligation.
Renouvier devotes a considerable portion of his treatise to problems of domestic morals, economic questions and problems of a political and international character. In all these discussions, however, he maintains as central his thesis of the supremacy of personality.
Under droit domestique he defends very warmly the right of the woman and the wife to treatment as a personality. He laments particularly the injustice which usually rules in marriage, where, under a cloak of legality, the married man denies to his wife a personal control of her own body and the freedom of self-determination in matters of sexual intercourse. So unjust and loathsome in its violation of the personality of woman is the modern view of marriage that Renouvier considers it little better than polygamy (which is often a better state for women than monogamy) or prostitution. It is less just than either, owing to its degradation of the personality of the wife. He remarked too in his Nouvelle Monadologie that love (in the popular sense), being so largely an affair of passion and physical attraction, is usually unjust, and that friendship is a better basis for the relationship of marriage, which should be, while it lasts among mankind, one of justice.[[24]] Consequently, it should involve neither the idea of possession nor of obedience, but of mutual comradeship.
[24] See particularly the notes in La Nouvelle Monadologie appended to the fourth part, “Passion,” pp. 216-222.
In the economic sphere Renouvier endeavours to uphold freedom, and for this reason he is an enemy of communism. Hostile to the communistic doctrine of property, he is a definite defender of property which he considers to be a necessity of personality. He considers each person in the community entitled to property as a guarantee of his own liberty and development. While disagreeing with communism, Renouvier is sympathetic to the socialist view that property might be, and should be, more justly distributed, and he advocates means to limit excessive possession by private persons and to “generalise” the distribution of the goods of the community among its members. Progressive taxation, a guarantee of the “right to work” and a complete system of insurance are among his suggestions. He is careful, however, to avoid giving to the state too much power.
Renouvier was no lover of the state. While regarding it as necessary under present conditions, he agrees with the anarchist idealists, to whom government is an evil. He admits its use, however, as a guarantor of personal liberty, but is against any semblance of state- worship. The state is not a person, nor is it, as it exists at present, a moral institution. One of the needs of modern times is, he points out, the moralising of the conception of the state, and of the state itself. Although, therefore, he has no a priori objection to state interference in the economic sphere, and would not advocate a mere laissez-faire policy, with its vicious consequences, yet he does not look with approval upon such interference unless it be “the collective expression of the personalities forming the community.”
The fact of living in a society, highly organised although it be, does not diminish at all the moral significance of personality. Rights and duties belong essentially to persons and to them only. We must beware of the political philosophy which regards the citizens as existing only for the state. Rather the state exists, or should exist, for the welfare of the citizens. In the past this was a grave defect of military despotisms, and was well illustrated by the view of the state taken, or rather inculcated, by German political philosophy. In the future the danger of the violation of personality may lie, Renouvier thinks, in another direction—namely, in the establishment of Communistic states. The basic principle of his ethic is the person as an end in himself, and the treatment of persons as ends. If this be so, a Communistic Republic which has as its motto “Each for all,” without also “All for each,” may gravely violate personality and the moral law if, by constraint, it treats all its citizens and their efforts not as ends in themselves, but merely means to the collective ends of all.
The moral ideal demands that personality must not be obliterated. Personality bound up with “autonomy of reason” is the fundamental ethical fact.[[25]] In the last resort, responsibility rests upon the individuals of the society for the evils of the system of social organisation under which they live. The state itself cannot be regarded as a moral person. Renouvier opposes strongly any doctrine which tends to the personalisation or the deification of the state.
[25] Note that Renouvier prefers this term to Kant’s “autonomy of will,” which he thinks confuses moral obligation and free-will.