An army obviously possesses organisation, generally in a very high degree. The formal continuity of its existence enables the organisation impressed upon it by external authority to acquire all the strength that custom alone can give; while its material continuity enables its organisation to generate, in the individual soldiers, habits through which the inferior members are raised, as regards the moral qualities required for efficiency in the field, towards the level of the best.
The organisation of the whole army has two aspects and two main functions; the one is executive, the securing of the co-ordination of action of the parts in the carrying out of the common plan; the other is recipient and deliberative, the co-ordination of the data supplied by the parts through deliberation upon which the choice of means is arrived at. Deliberation and choice of means are carried out by the commander-in-chief and his staff, the persons who have shown themselves best able to execute this part of the army’s task. It is important to note that, in the case of such an army as we are considering, the private soldier in the ranks remains a free agent performing truly volitional actions; that he in no sense becomes a mechanical agent or one acting through enforced or habitual obedience merely. He wills the common end; and, believing that the choice of means to that end is best effected by the appropriate part of the whole organisation, he accepts the means chosen, makes of them his proximate end, and wills them.
This is the essential character of the effective organisation of any human group; it secures that while the common end of collective action is willed by all, the choice of means is left to those best qualified and in the best position for deliberation and choice; and it secures that co-ordination of the voluntary actions of the parts which brings about the common end by the means so chosen. In this way the collective actions of the well-organised group, instead of being, like those of the simple crowd, merely impulsive or instinctive actions, implying a degree of intelligence and of morality far inferior to that of the average individual of the crowd, become truly volitional actions expressive of a degree of intelligence and morality much higher than that of the average member of the group: i.e. the whole is raised above the level of its average member; and even, by reason of exaltation of emotion and organised co-operation in deliberation, above that of its highest members.
Here we must consider a little more fully the nature of the collective or general will, a subject that has figured largely in the discussions of political philosophers on the nature of the State. Rousseau wrote—“There is often a great difference between the will of all and the general will; the latter looks only to the common interest; the former looks to private interest, and is nothing but a series of individual wills; but take away from these same wills the plus and minus that cancel one another and there remains, as the sum of the differences, the general will.” “Sovereignty is only the exercise of the general will.” By this he seems to mean that a certain number of men will the general good, while many will only their private goods; and that while the latter neutralise one another, as regards their effects on the general interest, the former co-operate and so form an effective force to promote the general good. This doctrine was an approximation towards the truth, though like all Rousseau’s social speculations, his handling of it was vitiated by his false psychology, which set out from the fiction of man as an independent purely self-contained and self-determining absolute individual. Later writers do not seem to have improved upon Rousseau’s doctrine of the general will to any great extent.
The problem of the general will, like all problems of collective psychology, becomes extremely complex when we consider the life of nations; and it is, therefore, important to make ourselves clear as to the nature of collective volition by consideration of the relatively simple case of a patriot army. It is of course impossible to arrive at a clear notion of collective volition, until individual volition has been clearly defined and the nature of the distinction between it, on the one hand, and mere impulsive action, desire, and simple conflict of desires, on the other hand, has been made clear. The lack of such clear notions and adequate definitions has rendered much of the discussion of this topic by political philosophers sterile and obscure. In the light of the conclusions reached in my chapter on individual volition[31], the question of the nature of collective volition presents little difficulty. It was found that volition may be defined and adequately marked off from the simpler modes of conation by saying that it is the reinforcement of any impulse or conation by one excited within the system of the self-regarding sentiment. And in an earlier chapter[32] it was shewn how the self-regarding sentiment may become extended to other objects than the individual self, to all objects with which the self identifies itself, which are regarded as belonging to the self or as part of the wider self. This extension depends largely on the fact that others identify us with such an object, so that we feel ourselves to be an object of all the regards and attitudes and actions of others directed towards that object, and are emotionally affected by them in the same ways that we are affected by similar regards, attitudes, and actions directed towards us individually. It was shewn also that such a sentiment may become wider and emotionally richer than the purely self-regarding sentiment, through fusing with a sentiment of love for the object that has grown up independently. These facts were illustrated by consideration of the parental sentiment for the child, which, it was said, has commonly this twofold character and source, being formed by the compounding of the self-regarding sentiment with the sentiment of love of which the dominant disposition is that of the tender or protective instinct.
In a similar way a similarly complex sentiment may become organised about the idea of one’s family, or of any still larger group having continuity of existence of which one becomes a member. In the case of the patriot’s sentiment for his country or nation, the self-regarding sentiment and the sentiment of love may be from the first combined in the patriotic sentiment; since he knows himself to be a part of the whole from the time that an idea of the whole first takes shape in his mind.
In this respect the case of the soldier in a patriot army is relatively simple. As a boy he may have acquired a sentiment of loving admiration for the army; and, when he becomes a member of it, the dispositions that enter into the constitution of his self-regarding sentiment, become incorporated with this previously existing sentiment, so that the reputation of the army becomes as important to him as his own; praise and approval of it become for him objects of desire and sources of elation; disapproval and blame of it, or the prospect of them, affect him as painfully as if directed to himself individually, fill him with shame and mortification.
A similar complex sentiment, the sentiment of patriotism, becomes organised about the idea of his country as a whole; and, when war breaks out and the army is pitted against that of another nation, while the eyes of the whole world are turned upon it, it becomes the representative of the nation and the special object of the patriotic sentiment, which thus adds its strength to that of the more special sentiment of the soldier for the army[33]. When, then, the patriot army takes the field, it is capable of collective volition in virtue of the existence of this sentiment in the minds of all its members. The soldiers of a purely mercenary army are moved by the desire of individual glory, of increased pay, of loot, by the habit of obedience and collective movement acquired by prolonged drilling, by the pugnacious impulse, by the desire of self-preservation; and they may be led on to greater exertions by the influence of an admired captain. But such an army is incapable of collective volition, because no sentiment for the army as a whole is common to all its members. The soldiers of the patriot army on the other hand may act from all the individual motives enumerated above; but all alike are capable also of being stirred by a common motive, a desire excited within the collective self-regarding sentiment, the common sentiment for the army; and this, adding itself to whatever individual motives are operative, converts their desires into collective resolutions and renders their actions the expressions of a collective volition.
Each soldier of the mercenary army may desire that his side shall win the battle and may resolve that he will do his best to bring victory to his side, and he may perform many truly volitional actions; and, in so far as the actions of the army express these individual volitions towards a common result, they are the expressions of the ‘will of all,’ but not of the collective will; because these volitions, though they are directed to the one common end, spring from diverse motives and are individual volitions.
The essence of collective volition is, then, not merely the direction of the wills of all to the same end, but the motivation of the wills of all members of a group by impulses awakened within the common sentiment for the whole of which they are the parts. It is the extension of the self-regarding sentiment of each member of the group to the group as a whole that binds the group together and renders it a collective individual capable of collective volition.