Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation / Reprinted from Green's Philosophical Works, vol. II., with Preface by Bernard Bosanquet

by Thomas Hill Green

113. Looking back on the political theories which we have discussed, we may see that they all start with putting the question to be dealt with in the same way, and that their errors are very much due to the way in which they put it. They make no inquiry into the development of society and of man through society. They take no account of other forms of community than that regulated by a supreme coercive power, either in the way of investigating their historical origin and connection, or of considering the ideas and states of mind which they imply or which render them possible. They leave out of sight the process by which men have been clothed with rights and duties, and with senses of right and duty, which are neither natural nor derived from a sovereign power. They look only to the supreme coercive power on the one side and to individuals, to whom natural rights are ascribed, on the other, and ask what is the nature and origin of the right of that supreme coercive power as against these natural rights of individuals. The question so put can only be answered by some device for representing the individuals governed as consenting parties to the exercise of government over them. This they no doubt are so long as the government is exercised in a way corresponding to their several wishes; but, so long as this is the case, there is no interference with their 'natural liberty' to do as they like. It is only when this liberty is interfered with, that any occasion arises for an explanation of the compatibility of the sovereign's right with the natural right of the individual; and it is just then that the explanation by the supposition that the right of the sovereign is founded on consent, fails. But the need of the fictitious explanation arises from a wrong way of putting the question; the power which regulates our conduct in political society is conceived in too abstract a way on the one side, and on the other are set over against it, as the subjects which it controls, individuals invested with all the moral attributes and rights of humanity. But in truth it is only as members of a society, as recognising common interests and objects, that individuals come to have these attributes and rights; and the power, which in a political society they have to obey, is derived from the development and systematisation of those institutions for the regulation of a common life without which they would have no rights at all.

114. To ask why I am to submit to the power of the state, is to ask why I am to allow my life to be regulated by that complex of institutions without which I literally should not have a life to call my own, nor should be able to ask for a justification of what I am called on to do. For that I may have a life which I can call my own, I must not only be conscious of myself and of ends which I present to myself as mine; I must be able to reckon on a certain freedom of action and acquisition for the attainment of those ends, and this can only be secured through common recognition of this freedom on the part of each other by members of a society, as being for a common good. Without this, the very consciousness of having ends of his own and a life which he can direct in a certain way, a life of which he can make something, would remain dormant in a man. It is true that slaves have been found to have this consciousness in high development; but a slave even at his lowest has been partly made what he is by an ancestral life which was not one of slavery pure and simple, a life in which certain elementary rights were secured to the members of a society through their recognition of a common interest. He retains certain spiritual aptitudes from that state of family or tribal freedom. This, perhaps, is all that could be said of most of the slaves on plantations in modern times; but the slavery of the ancient world, being mainly founded on captivity in war, was compatible with a considerable amount of civilisation on the part of the slaves at the time when their slavery began. A Jewish slave, e.g., would carry with him into slavery a thoroughly developed conception of right and law. Slavery, moreover, implies the establishment of some regular system of rights in the slave-owning society. The slave, especially the domestic slave, has the signs and effects of this system all about him. Hence such elementary consciousness of rights—of powers that are his own to make the best of—as the born slave may inherit from an ancestral life of freedom, finds a stimulus to its inward development, though no opportunity for outward exercise, in the habits and ideas of civilised life with which a common language enables the slave to become conversant, and which, through the sympathy implied in a common language, he to some extent makes his own. Thus the appearance in slaves of the conception that they should be masters of themselves, does not conflict with the proposition that only so far as a certain freedom of action and acquisition is secured to a body of men through their recognition of the exercise of that freedom by each other as being for the common good, is there an actualisation of the individual's consciousness of having life and ends of his own. The exercise, manifestation, expression of this consciousness through a freedom secured in the way described is necessary to its real existence, just as language of some sort is necessary to the real existence of thought, and bodily movement to that of the soul.

115. The demand, again, for a justification of what one is called on by authority to do presupposes some standard of right, recognised as equally valid for and by the person making the demand and others who form a society with him, and such a recognised standard in turn implies institutions for the regulation of men's dealings with each other, institutions of which the relation to the consciousness of right may be compared, as above, to that of language to thought. It cannot be said that the most elementary consciousness of right is prior to them, or they to it. They are the expressions in which it becomes real. As conflicting with the momentary inclinations of the individual, these institutions are a power which he obeys unwillingly; which he has to, or is made to, obey. But it is only through them that the consciousness takes shape and form which expresses itself in the question, 'Why should I thus be constrained? By what right is my natural right to do as I like overborne?'

116. The doctrine that the rights of government are founded on the consent of the governed is a confused way of stating the truth, that the institutions by which man is moralised, by which he comes to do what he sees that he must, as distinct from what he would like, express a conception of a common good; that through them that conception takes form and reality; and that it is in turn through its presence in the individual that they have a constraining power over him, a power which is not that of mere fear, still less a physical compulsion, but which leads him to do what he is not inclined to because there is a law that he should.

Rousseau, it will be remembered, speaks of the 'social pact' not merely as the foundation of sovereignty or civil government, but as the foundation of morality. Through it man becomes a moral agent; for the slavery to appetite he substitutes the freedom of subjection to a self-imposed law. If he had seen at the same time that rights do not begin till duties begin, and that if there was no morality prior to the pact there could not be rights, he might have been saved from the error which the notion of there being natural rights introduces into his theory. But though he does not seem himself to have been aware of the full bearing of his own conception, the conception itself is essentially true. Setting aside the fictitious representation of an original covenant as having given birth to that common 'ego' or general will, without which no such covenant would have been possible, and of obligations arising out of it, as out of a bargain made between one man and another, it remains true that only through a recognition by certain men of a common interest, and through the expression of that recognition in certain regulations of their dealings with each other, could morality originate, or any meaning be gained for such terms as 'ought' and 'right' and their equivalents.

117. Morality, in the first instance, is the observance of such regulations, and though a higher morality, the morality of the character governed by 'disinterested motives,' i.e. by interest in some form of human perfection, comes to differentiate itself from this primitive morality consisting in the observance of rules established for a common good, yet this outward morality is the presupposition of the higher morality. Morality and political subjection thus have a common source, 'political subjection' being distinguished from that of a slave, as a subjection which secures rights to the subject. That common source is the rational recognition by certain human beings—it may be merely by children of the same parent—of a common well-being which is their well-being, and which they conceive as their well-being whether at any moment any one of them is inclined to it or no, and the embodiment of that recognition in rules by which the inclinations of the individuals are restrained, and a corresponding freedom of action for the attainment of well-being on the whole is secured.

118. From this common source morality and political subjection in all its forms always retain two elements in common, one consisting in antagonism to some inclination, the other consisting in the consciousness that the antagonism to inclination is founded on reason or on the conception of some adequate good. It is the antagonism to inclination involved in the moral life, as alone we know it, that makes it proper to speak analogically of moral 'laws' and 'imperatives.' It must be remembered, however, that such language is analogical, and that there is an essential difference between laws in the strictest sense (laws which are indeed not adequately described as general commands of a political superior, sanctioned by liability to pains which that superior can inflict, but in which a command so sanctioned is an essential element), and the laws of conscience, of which it is the peculiar dignity that they have no external imponent and no sanction consisting in fear of bodily evil. The relation of constraint, in the one case between the man and the externally imposed law, in the other between some particular desire of the man and his consciousness of something absolutely desirable, we naturally represent in English, when we reflect on it, by the common term 'must.' 'I must connect with the main drainage,' says the householder to himself, reflecting on an edict of the Local Board. 'I must try to get A.B. to leave off drinking,' he says to himself, reflecting on a troublesome moral duty of benevolence to his neighbour. And if the 'must' in the former case represents in part the knowledge that compulsion may be put on the man who neglects to do what he must, which is no part of its meaning in the second, on the other hand the consciousness that the constraint is for a common good, which wholly constitutes the power over inclination in the second case, must always be an element in that obedience which is properly called obedience to law, or civil or political obedience. Simple fear can never constitute such obedience. To represent it as the basis of civil subjection is to confound the citizen with the slave, and to represent the motive which is needed for the restraint of those in whom the civil sense is lacking, and for the occasional reinforcements of the law-abiding principle in others, as if it were the normal influence in habits of life of which the essential value lies in their being independent of it. How far in any particular act of conformity to law the fear of penalties may be operative, it is impossible to say. What is certain is, that a habit of subjection founded upon such fear could not be a basis of political or free society; for to this it is necessary, not indeed that everyone subject to the laws should take part in voting them, still less that he should consent to their application to himself, but that it should represent an idea of common good, which each member of the society can make his own so far as he is rational, i.e. capable of the conception of a common good, however much particular passions may lead him to ignore it and thus necessitate the use of force to prevent him from doing that which, so far as influenced by the conception of a common good, he would willingly abstain from.

119. Whether the legislative and administrative agencies of society can be kept in the main free from bias by private interests, and true to the idea of common good, without popular control; whether again, if they can, that 'civil sense,' that appreciation of common good on the part of the subjects, which is as necessary to a free or political society as the direction of law to the maintenance of a common good, can be kept alive without active participation of the people in legislative functions; these are questions of circumstances which perhaps do not admit of unqualified answers. The views of those who looked mainly to the highest development of political life in a single small society, have to be modified if the object sought for is the extension of political life to the largest number of people. The size of modern states renders necessary the substitution of a representative system for one in which the citizens shared directly in legislation, and this so far tends to weaken the active interest of the citizens in the common weal, though the evil may partly be counteracted by giving increased importance to municipal or communal administration. In some states, from the want of homogeneity or facilities of communication, a representative legislature is scarcely possible. In others, where it exists, a great amount of power, virtually exempt from popular control, has to be left with what Rousseau would have called the 'prince or magistrate.' In all this there is a lowering of civil vitality as compared with that of the ancient, and perhaps of some exceptionally developed modern, commonwealths. But perhaps this is a temporary loss that we have to bear as the price of having recognised the claim to citizenship as the claim of all men. Certainly all political ideals, which require active and direct participation by the citizens in the functions of the sovereign state, fail us as soon as we try to conceive their realisation on the wide area even of civilised mankind. It is easy to conceive a better system than that of the great states of modern Europe, with their national jealousies, rival armies, and hostile tariffs; but the condition of any better state of things would seem to be the recognition of some single constraining power, which would be even more remote from the active co-operation of the individual citizen than is the sovereign power of the great states at present.

120. These considerations may remind us how far removed from any foundation in their own will the requirements of the modern state must seem to be to most of those who have to submit to them. It is true that the necessity which the state lays upon the individual is for the most part one to which he is so accustomed that he no longer kicks against it; but what is it, we may ask, but an external necessity, which he no more lays on himself than he does the weight of the atmosphere or the pressure of summer heat and winter frosts, that compels the ordinary citizen to pay rates and taxes, to serve in the army, to abstain from walking over the squire's fields, snaring his hares, or fishing in preserved streams, to pay rent, to respect those artificial rights of property which only the possessors of them have any obvious interest in maintaining, or even (if he is one of the 'proletariate') to keep his hands off the superfluous wealth of his neighbour, when he has none of his own to lose? Granted that there are good reasons of social expediency for maintaining institutions which thus compel the individual to actions and forbearances that are none of his willing, is it not abusing words to speak of them as founded on a conception of general good? A conception does not float in the air. It must be somebody's conception. Whose conception, then, of general good is it that these institutions represent? Not that of most of the people who conform to them, for they do so because they are made to, or have come to do so habitually from having been long made to; (i.e. from being frightened at the consequences of not conforming, not consequences which follow from not conforming in the ordinary course of nature, but consequences which the state inflicts, artificial consequences.) But when a man is said to obey an authority from interest in a common good, some other good is meant than that which consists in escaping the punishment which the authority would inflict on disobedience. Is then the conception of common good which is alleged a conception of it on the part of those who founded or who maintain the institutions in question? But is it not certain that private interests have been the main agents in establishing, and are still in maintaining, at any rate all the more artificial rights of property? Have not our modern states, again, in nearly every case been founded on conquest, and are not the actual institutions of government in great measure the direct result of such conquest, or, where revolutions have intervened, of violence which has been as little governed by any conception of general good? Supposing that philosophers can find exquisite reasons for considering the institutions and requirements which have resulted from all this self-seeking and violence to be contributory to the common good of those who have to submit to them, is it not trifling to speak of them as founded on or representing a conception of this good, when no such conception has influenced those who established, maintain, or submit to them? And is it not seriously misleading, when the requirements of the state have so largely arisen out of force directed by selfish motives, and when the motive to obedience to those requirements is determined by fear, to speak of them as having a common source with the morality of which it is admitted that the essence is to be disinterested and spontaneous?

121. If we would meet these objections fairly, certain admissions must be made. The idea of a common good which the state fulfils has never been the sole influence actuating those who have been agents in the historical process by which states have come to be formed; and even so far as it has actuated them, it has been only as conceived in some very imperfect form that it has done so. This is equally true of those who contribute to the formation and maintenance of states rather as agents, and of those who do so rather as patients. No one could pretend that even the most thoughtful and dispassionate publicist is capable of the idea of the good served by the state to which he belongs, in all its fulness. He apprehends it only in some of its bearings; but it is as a common good that he apprehends it, i.e. not as a good for himself or for this man or that more than another, but for all members equally in virtue of their relation to each other and their common nature. The idea which the ordinary citizen has of the common good served by the state is much more limited in content. Very likely he does not think of it at all in connection with anything that the term 'state' represents to him. But he has a clear understanding of certain interests and rights common to himself with his neighbours, if only such as consist in getting his wages paid at the end of the week, in getting his money's worth at the shop, in the inviolability of his own person and that of his wife. Habitually and instinctively, i.e. without asking the reason why, he regards the claim which in these respects he makes for himself as conditional upon his recognising a like claim in others, and thus as in the proper sense a right,—a claim of which the essence lies in its being common to himself with others. Without this instinctive recognition he is one of the 'dangerous classes,' virtually outlawed by himself. With it, though he have no reverence for the 'state' under that name, no sense of an interest shared with others in maintaining it, he has the needful elementary conception of a common good maintained by law. It is the fault of the state if this conception fails to make him a loyal subject, if not an intelligent patriot. It is a sign that the state is not a true state; that it is not fulfilling its primary function of maintaining law equally in the interest of all, but is being administered in the interest of classes; whence it follows that the obedience which, if not rendered willingly, the state compels the citizen to render, is not one that he feels any spontaneous interest in rendering, because it does not present itself to him as the condition of the maintenance of those rights and interests, common to himself with his neighbours, which he understands.