Recent Developments in European Thought

by Unknown

A.D. LINDSAY

Political Philosophy or the philosophical theory of the State has closer relations with history than any other branch of philosophical inquiry. It is indeed distinguished from history in that it can disregard the success or failure, the historical development of this or that state. For it is concerned not with historical happenings but with ideals, not with the varying extent to which different states have approximated or fallen short of their purpose, but with that purpose itself, not, in short, with states but with the State. Yet this need not involve that the ideal, the State, is always and everywhere the same. Ideals are born of historical circumstances and fashioned to meet historical problems, and the would-be timeless ideals which political philosophers have put before us have always borne clear marks of the country and time of their origin. The ideal which men have set themselves in political organization has varied from time to time. That such variation is inevitable will be clear if we ask ourselves what we can possibly mean by an ideal state. That states fall short of their ideal because of the imperfections of their citizens is clear enough. All political life demands a certain standard of moral behaviour, of capacity to work for a common good, and an understanding of the results of our own and other people's actions. Were human selfishness completely overcome, the state would still be necessary to correct individual shortsightedness. The policeman, exempt from the cares of apprehending criminals, would still be needed to control traffic. But imagine, not that all citizens attained a certain standard of moral and intellectual behaviour, as the ideal demands, but that they were all perfectly good and perfectly wise, should we need any kind of government at all? Is not the supposition of perfection so far removed from any state of affairs we can really think of or plan for, that it cannot enter into our reckoning, ideal or practical? Every ideal takes certain facts of human life for granted whilst it tries to improve others. All ideal states, Plato's as well as others, assume certain facts about human nature and human society. These facts may and do vary. The Greek city state assumed that a state must be small, if it was to have the intensive life they demanded. The Roman Empire was a denial of the anarchy to which the Greek ideal had led, but it lost in intensity what it gained in extent. All political ideals assume a certain sociological background on which the state is based and from which spring the problems which the state is intended to solve. As this sociological background varies from time to time, the State, the purpose which men set before themselves in political organization, will vary also. The Greek city state and the mediaeval state were not different approximations to the same ideal. They were the expressions of different ideals. They rested on different assumptions, e.g. as to the place of authority in society. With the disappearance at the Reformation of one of the great assumptions on which the mediaeval state had been based, a new theory of the state was inevitable. The national state of the seventeenth century was something new in history, and Hobbes differs from Aristotle, not because Hobbes is perverse and Aristotle right, though Hobbes often is perverse, but because the political problems which Hobbes and Aristotle had to face were not the same.

Two great historical facts at the end of the eighteenth century, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, profoundly modified the basis of political organization. The modern state in consequence differs in many important respects from any that have preceded it. It does not rest on the common acceptance of authority, either religious, as did the mediaeval state, or personal, as did the seventeenth-century state. Unlike the Greek city state, it is large. Its administration is concerned with millions who cannot be in personal relations to one another, or share the same intensive life.

With the nineteenth century, then, a new chapter in the development of political theory begins as the peculiar problems of the modern state develop. Professor Dicey, in his Law and Opinion in England, has divided the century into two periods of political thought—Individualism and Collectivism—one marking the decrease, the other the increase of the power and authority of the state. When our period begins, the day of individualism was passing. Ever since the Reformation it had, in spite of Burke, dominated political theory. Two forces had given it strength—one idealistic, one scientific. It represented the revolt of the individual conscience against the claims of authority, and as such was a theory which attempted to limit the power of government over the individual, whether by an appeal to natural rights in Locke and Tom Paine, or to the greatest happiness of the greatest number in the Utilitarians, or to the super-eminent value of individual liberty as set forth in John Stuart Mill's noble panegyric. The French Revolution gave a notable impetus to this side of individualism, with its passionate assertion of the principle that political institutions exist for man, not man for political institutions, and that all government must be tested by the life which it enables each and every one of its citizens to live. Individualism in this sense is concerned with the discovery of principles by which the power of government over the lives of its members may be limited. It is not necessarily a theory of the nature of society. Hobbes, however, was an individualist as well as Locke, and for Hobbes the individual was the scientific unit from which societies and states were built up—the starting-point for a scientific treatment of society. As the French Revolution gave a fresh impulse to idealistic individualism, the Industrial Revolution reanimated the scientific, for it displayed the economic man, Hobbes's hero, come to life and a respectable member of society. With him came the growth of political economy, apparently the first really scientific study of man. From Political Economy Darwin borrowed the conception of the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest, and from the new biology the doctrine of Evolution through individual competition returned to reinforce with the prestige of the new science the economists' conception of society.

For the first half of the nineteenth century all the forces inspiring individualism seemed to work together, for economics and biology breathed a benevolent optimism which promised that if the scientific forces of individualism were left to work unchecked by state restriction, they would of themselves produce that individual liberty and free development which idealistic individualism desired.

The development of the industrial revolution, however, soon made economic optimism impossible, and with its decay idealistic and scientific individualism parted company. The former retained its concern for individual liberty but came to see that its ideal was as much threatened by economic dependence as by state control, that the choice for most members of society was not one between state interference and no interference at all, but between the state controlling or not controlling the power of interference possessed by the economically superior members of society. On such principles Henry Sidgwick justified an extensive system of state control of industry, and for such reason the strongest supporters of the rights of the individual have been found among Socialists.

Scientific individualism, which found its unit in the economic man and sought to absorb in economics both ethics and politics, was not in essence affected by the discrediting of economic optimism. It painted the struggle between individuals in gloomy instead of in attractive colours, its 'scientific' prepossessions inclined it to a determinism which led easily to the economic theory of history and even, by a curious conversion of opposites, to the 'scientific socialism' of Karl Marx. In its essence it is a denial of the real existence of politics. For it is a theory of society which denies the possibility of a will for the common good and therefore the possibility of political ideals.

It was this powerful and malignant theory which was attacked and answered by the modern idealist school represented by Green, Wallace, and Ritchie, and, in the present day, by Dr. Bosanquet. These writers gave us a theory of the state based on the importance and reality of social purpose. They went back to the theory of the Greek city state expounded by Plato and Aristotle, finding modern reinforcement in the teaching of Rousseau and more especially of Hegel. Their destructive criticism of 'scientific' individualism was reinforced by the teaching of anthropology and of historical jurisprudence, which emphasized the part played in early forms of society by social solidarity and showed the inability of individualism to account for the development of society. Their destructive criticism was, however, the least part of their achievement. They exhibited convincingly the state as the product of will and purpose, based on man's moral nature and being in turn the form in which that moral nature expresses itself. In a notable phrase of Dr. Bosanquet's, a phrase to which he has given constant detailed amplification, 'institutions are ethical ideas'; moral purpose may seem to shine dimly enough in many actual institutions, but it is the only light which shines in them at all, and only in that light can their meaning and reality be understood.

The main principles of this idealistic school may be safely said to have by this time established themselves against criticism. Of recent years Social Psychology has done much to explain the gap between the contemplated purpose and the actual working of institutions, and has given precision and definiteness to those elements in human nature which strengthen or weaken social solidarity. Economists have come to see that economic relations are possible only within the framework of a society which has its root in moral and political purpose, although within that framework they may be theoretically isolated and studied by themselves. Sociology, after many false starts, inspired by the mistaken belief that a scientific treatment of society should interpret higher forms in the light of lower, has now found it possible to study the manifold variety of institutional and social life on the basis provided by idealistic philosophy.

As a theory of society, in short, this philosophy holds the field. It has been criticized of late years as a theory of the state, and as these criticisms show both where the idealistic theory was in some respects defective and also where the chief problems for political philosophy in the future are to be found, I shall devote the greater part of my lecture to these considerations.