THE TEACH YOURSELF BOOKS

EDITED BY LEONARD CUTTS

POLIEICAL THOUGHT
 Uniform with this volume
and in the same
series

Teach Yourself: The British Constitution

Teach Yourself: Ethics
Teach Yourself Good English
Teach Yourself To Express Yourself
Teach Yourself: Guidebook to Western Thought
Teach Yourself: History of Philosophy
Teach Yourself: The Law
Teach Yourself: Learning, Remembering and Knowing
Teach Yourself Local Government
Teach Yourself Logic
Teach Yourself: Parliament
Teach Yourself Philosophy
Teach Yourself Psychology
The Teach Yourself Speaker and Debater
Teach Yourself Speech Training
Teach Yourself To Study
Teach Yourself To Think
 BENCH YOURS EUF

ONcd dG nae
HOU Gir
By
C. L. WAYPER
M.A., Ph.D.

THE ENGLISH UNIVERSITIES PRESS LTD

102 NEWGATE STREET
LONDON, E.C.1
 First Printed 1954
This Impression 1964

All Rights Reserved

PRINTED AND BOUND IN ENGLAND

FOR THE ENGLISH UNIVERSITIES PRESS LTD
BY HAZELL WATSON AND VINEY LTD, AYLESBURY
 CONTENTS
Introduction ii
Political Thought—What it is and Why it Matters

CHAPTER I
How it all Began I
The Greeks, Plato and the Organic View of the State.
The debt of Political Thought to the Greeks—Greek Character-
istics—the Language—the Polis—the Variety of Greek Political
Thought.
Plato’s Life and Writings—his Political Philosophy, the Human
Predicament—the Existence of the Good—the Soul and the
Possibility of Knowledge—the Soul and its Thirst for the Good
—the State as the Means to the Good—the Organisation of the
State to Ensure the Good—the State and the Individual.
The Greeks and the Organic Theory of the State.

CHAPTER II
The State as Machine 42
Hobbes; Locke; The Utilitarians—Bentham, Mill.
The Failure of the Rational-Natural Tradition—the Tradition
of Will and Artifice—the State as Machine.
Hobbes’s Life and Writings—his Political Theory, his View of
Man-—his View of the State—his Importance.
Locke’s Life and Writings—his View of Man—the State of
Nature—the Social Contract—the Nature of the State, its Form
—its Characteristics—his Importance.
Bentham’s Life and Writings—the Principle of Utility—Ben-
tham’s Idea of the State—his Importance.
Mill’s Life and Writings—his Alterations in Utilitarianism—
the Reluctant Democrat—his Importance.

CHAPTER III
The State as Organism 130
Rousseau, Hegel, Green.
The Inadequacy of the Tradition of Will and Artifice—the
Organic View of the State.
Rousseau—the Conflicting Interpretations—his Idea of Nature
—his Idea of the State—his Place in Political Thought.
Hegel’s Life and Writings—Spirit and Dialectic—his Idea of
the State—an Appraisal of Hegelianism.
Green’s Task—the Hegelian in Green—the Individualist in
Green—his Achievement.
vl CONTENTS

CHAPTER IV
The State as Class 194
Marx, Lenin, Stalin.
Marx’s Appeal—his Message—Dialectical Materialism—Histori-
cal Materialism—his Economic Analysis—an Appraisal of
Marxism.
Lenin’s Task—his Theory of Imperialism—his Restatement of
Diaiectical Materialism and of Revolutionary Marxism—his
Adaptation of Marxism to Russia—his Idea of the Party—the
Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
Stalin as Marxist Scholar—Socialism in One Country—the
Totalitarian State—Stalin and Revolution—Stalin and Lenin.

CHAPTER V
Conclusion 247
 INTRODUCTION
(Poxitica, THoucHT—Wuat IT Is AND Wuy ir Matrers)
Piss Thought is thought about the State, its structure,
its nature, and its purpose. Its concern is with nothing less
than “the moral phenomena of human behaviour in
society.” It seeks not so much an explanation of the existence of
the State as a justification of its continuance. What is the State
and why should I obey it? What are the proper limits of its
authority and when may I refuse to obey it? How is the author-
ity of the State with which I cannot dispense to be made com-
patible with the liberty without which I am less than a man?
These are the questions which political thought is for ever
striving to answer.
To these questions it can never give definite, once-and-for-all
answers that will convince everyone. For it is so difficult to separ-
ate the purpose of political life from the purpose of life itself
that the answers we give to these questions, or political theory,
in the last analysis depends upon our conceptions of right and
wrong. And because it is thus a branch of ethical theory it can
never convince all, for there has always been and presumably
always will be fundamental disagreement over first principles.
Hence it is better to speak of political thought than of poli-
tical science. There was deep wisdom in Maitland’s comment:
“When I see a good set of examination questions headed by the
words ‘Political Science,’ I regret not the questions but the title.”
For science demands general laws by the aid of which we can
reach exact results. Yet the student of politics seeking such laws
would be like the alchemist vainly searching for the elixir that
would turn everything into gold. For as Graham Wallas said:
“He cannot after twenty generations of education or breeding
render even two human beings sufficiently like each other for
him to prophesy with any approach to certainty that they will
behave alike under like circumstances.”’ We must say, then, with
Burke that there is no science of politics any more than there
is a science of esthetics, for “the lines of politics are not like the
Vili INTRODUCTION
lines of mathematics. They are broad and deep as well as long.
They admit of exceptions; they demand modifications. No lines
can be laid down for civil or political wisdom. They are a matter
incapable of exact definition.”
But if, to quote Sir Ernest Barker, ‘each professor of political
thought is apt to feel about all the other professors, if not about
himself, that they argue from questionable axioms, by a still
more questionable process of logic to conclusions that are un-
questionably wrong,” what, it may well be asked, is the value of
political thought? Answers of an extreme nature have frequently
been given to that question. One is that it has no value, that it
is arid and abstract, that as Bacon says, “like a virgin consecrated
to God, it is barren.” It is, it is maintained, a convincing illustra-
tion of that peculiarity of philosophers which Berkeley noticed,
their habit of first kicking up a dust and then complaining that
they cannot see. It is, as Burke tells us, “the great Serbonian
bog ’twixt Dalmatia and Mount Cassius old, where armies whole
have sunk.” Another is that it is damnably dangerous, dealing
darkness and devoted like the devil to disaster. The words of the
Old Testament preacher, “In the day of prosperity rejoice, and
in the day of adversity consider,” have been interpreted to mean
that consideration is either the prelude to or the proof of adver-
sity. “Happy is the nation which has no political philosophy,”
Leslie Stephen wrote, “for such a philosophy is generally the
offspring of a recent, or the symptom of an approaching, revo-
lution.” “One sure symptom of an ill-conducted state is the pro-
pensity of people to resort to theories,” said Burke; and Hegel
added that “the owl of Minerva takes flight as darkness falls.”
Men of the camp and cabinet agreed with men of the cloister.
Napoleon and Metternich imputed the disasters of the age to the
currency of too facile generalisations in political philosophy, and,
like their 2oth-century totalitarian successors, drew the con-
clusion that an open season should be declared on owls. Yet a
third answer to the question what is the value of political
thought is that it is the distilled wisdom of the ages which one
has only to imbibe sufficiently to be translated into a rosier
world where men stumble not and hangovers are unknown.
A less extreme answer to the question why should we study
political thought is, however, possible. Reasonable students of
political thought who neither believe that they are dealing with
 INTRODUCTION ix
dynamite nor disturbing the dust will not set their sights too
high. They will not expect to graduate automatically in wisdom,
to lay bare in solitude all the secrets of political power, and to
emerge from the study to handle the reins of authority, not with
the fumbling touch of the amateur but with the assurance and
skill of the master. They will know that philosophers, as history
shows, have revealed as little aptitude for kingship as kings have
for philosophy. But to shun absurd pretension is not to admit
insignificance, and no one need apologise for indulgence in the
study of man in his social and political relations. And if that
study is not necessarily a guarantee of wisdom, it might at
least be expected to be some protection against folly. There is
no sovereign inoculation against nonsense, for men, as Hobbes
saw, cling to their privilege of absurdity. Nevertheless, the
student of political thought has met and seen exposed the
specious solution, has encountered and been made to see in its
true light the claptrap, knows the terrible power of words to
cloak reality, and is aware of the duty that lies upon him of
penetrating to that reality in spite of the torrent of words which
may drum on his ears and drum up his emotions. ‘Do you not
feel sovereignty coursing through your veins?” a French Revo-
lutionary orator asked his hearers. No doubt many of them
thought that they did, but the student of political thought might
have been expected to content himself with Harvey’s theory of
the circulation of the blood. “We don’t want higher bread
prices, we don’t want the same bread prices, we don’t
want lower bread prices,” the Nazi orator raved, and his
audience agreed with him that National-Socialist bread prices
represented all their longing. Again a student of political
thought might be expected to have been at once less hard to
please and more discriminating. For he would have learned to
beware of “‘things that featly blear our eyes,” would be aware
with Thucydides of “the use of fair phrases to arrive at guilty
ends.”” Moreover, the very harshness of the 20th century will
confirm for him the truth of Aristotle’s remark that the poli-
tical art is the most important of all arts, and he cannot there-
fore believe that its study will be the least significant of studies.
Rather will he turn with renewed interest to the masters, eagerly
conscious of the fact that to go to school with the great is never
an experience to be avoided but a privilege to be sought.
Answers to the question: “What is the State and why do men
xX INTRODUCTION

obey it?” have been of two kinds. One is that the State is an
organism of which men themselves are parts and which is there-
fore greater than they are. It is real and they are merely abstrac-
tions. The other is that it is a machine which men create for
their own purposes and which is therefore no other than they
are. They are real and it is merely a device. Both views are
dealt with in this book. At different periods in history, now the
one, now the other has been generally accepted. The idea of the
State as an organism was hit upon by the Greeks. By the Stoics
it was applied to humanity as a whole. It was then taken over by
Christianity, and throughout the Middle Ages reigned supreme.
It was challenged at the time of the scientific revolution of the
17th century, which led to the development of the “mechanistic”
view of the State. This view was maintained throughout the
Enlightenment of the 18th century, to be rejected again by
Rousseau and by the German Romantics, who stressed the
“organic” view as against the “bloodless” and “soulless”
mechanistic doctrine. Once again came the swing of the pen-
dulum, if for no other reason than that political and ecclesias-
tical reactionaries, such as Adam Miller and de Maistre, so
enthusiastically embraced the organic doctrine in the hope of
using it to repress the new liberal forces which they so much
disliked. The mechanistic view yet again came into favour, only
to be strongly attacked by the organic view strengthened by 19th-
century biological theories and by 2oth-century totalitarian prac-
tices. Both views still persist and still contend for domination
over the minds of men.
This division of political thinkers into upholders of the or-
ganic and mechanistic views of the State is not, however, the
only possible classification of such thinkers. A further classifi-
cation may prove yet more helpful, one which stresses the dif-
ference as well as acknowledges the similarities between Aris-
totle and Hegel, and Plato and Rousseau. This would allot poli-
tical thinkers to three different traditions. The first is the
Rational-Natural tradition. According to this, Society and the
State can be understood only when they are related to an abso-
lute standard, which exists in nature and which is therefore
outside human control, but which, nevertheless, can be known
by men through the use of their Reason. Society, according to
this tradition, must copy the pattern offered by nature which
Reason has apprehended, and if we want to know whether laws
 INTRODUCTION Xi
and institutions are good, we have only to ask if they are close
copies of the existing natural standards. The second is the tradi-
tion of Will and Artifice. According to this, Society and the
State are artificial and not natural. They are genuinely free
creations of man and not a copying of something that already
exists in nature. Therefore, according to this tradition, it is not
the Reason of man but the Will of man that is required to pro-
duce the State, and human will has freedom to alter society.
The third is the tradition of Historical Coherence. According to
this, both of the other traditions are defective. Since natural
laws have to be changed to suit civil society, the Rational-
Natural tradition, it maintains, is really neither rational nor
natural. And since man’s will is always limited by the will of
others and by what has been willed previously, the tradition of
will and artifice, it declares, attributes too much importance
both to will and artifice. Hence the tradition of Historical
Coherence attempts to combine the earlier traditions, to fuse
Reason and Will as in Rousseau’s “General Will” and Hegel’s
“Rational Will.” It emphasises the importance of historical
growth and denies that absolute standards exist. Goodness and
Justice, it avers, consist of the coherence of the part with the
whole, and if we want to know what is goodness we must seek
conformity not with the will and desire of society at any given
moment, but with the standard of coherence in that society as it
has developed historically over the years. The State, according
to this tradition, is not a copy of the natural world. But to some
extent it can be seen as natural because it is the result of an
historical evolution that can be thought of as part of nature. To
some extent, however, it can be regarded as artificial, for it is
the result of men not following but transforming nature. All
believers in the State as a machine belong to the Will and Arti-
fice tradition. Believers in the State as an organism may belong
either to the Rational-Natural tradition or to the tradition of
Historical Coherence.
In terms of this triple division, this book begins with an
examination of the Rational-Natural tradition of the Greeks. It
passes to the Will and Artifice tradition of the 17th century and
on to the tradition of Historical Coherence of the 18th and 19th
centuries. It moves to the consideration of a political thought
that is essentially hybrid, of the thinking of the Communists,
beginning with Marx, who belonged to the tradition of Will
xii INTRODUCTION
and Artifice to which the State is a machine, and ending with
Stalin, who would seem to be most at home in the tradition of
Historical Coherence according to which the State is an or-
ganism. The book concludes with a brief discussion of the possi-
bility of the peaceful co-existence of the varying views of the
State thus outlined.
 CHAPTER I

HOW TLD ACE BEGAN

(THe Greeks, PLato, ARISTOTLE, AND THE OrGANIC VIEW OF
THE STATE)
THE GREEKS

The Debt of Political Thought to the Greeks

Piece Thought, as we know it in the West, was the
invention of the Greeks. Before the Greeks governments
and subjects had of course existed, but hardly politics as we
understand them. Not all Eastern despots devoted themselves, as
did the Burmese kings, to those great tasks of true kingship—
building pagodas, collecting vassals’ daughters, and raiding their
neighbours for white elephants, occupations little calculated to
produce great political thought. Not all Eastern rulers and
thinkers have been indifferent to the welfare of society just as
not all Western rulers and thinkers have been concerned with it.
One of the earliest of all legal codes resulted from the determina-
tion of Hammurabi, god-king of Babylon, to “uphold justice
in the land.” Ancient India speculated much on the function
of kingship and the proper education of kings, even suggest-
ing that they should, as it were, work in the mills before tak-
ing over the management. Chinese thought about man and
society was as profound and as subtle as any such thinking in
the West.
But Eastern thought was thoroughly authoritarian. The laws
of Hammurabi were the laws of God, to be obeyed, and not ques-
tioned by mortal men. Similarly the justice sought by old Testa-
ment Jews was the justice of Jehovah, not the justice of Man.
Indian and Chinese thought, while more secular, was not less
authoritarian. Indian thinking accepted only the possibility of
absolute monarchy and no one has ever insisted more than did
Confucius on the necessity of establishing a universal orthodoxy.
He justified, for instance, the execution of Shao-cheng Mou:
“His dwelling serves as a gathering place for his disciples, form-
ing a party; his theories serve to beautify unorthodoxy and please
2 POLITE CAI. iH OUir

the multitude; his stubborn arguments are sufficient to upset the

right and constitute a new and independent theory—he is thus a
villain among men and must be eliminated.” “He who is not in
office,” he taught, “has no concern for administrative duties.”
Hence there developed that traditional Chinese readiness to leave
politics to the Superior Men who were Confucius’s ideal. And we
can read of the general criticism directed against a chance
traveller who dared to mention politics after dinner at the inn—
“the mandarins have to attend to affairs of State; they are paid
for it. Let them earn their money then. But don’t let us torment
ourselves about what does not concern us. We should be great
fools to want to do political business for nothing.’”” No Greek
could have said that, and it is not surprising that Chinese political
thought, profound as it is, has a passivity which is alien to the
West. It is this element of passivity that is so characteristic of
Eastern thought. An idea, however exalted, of the public good
is not sufficient for the development of political thought as the
West understands it. Freedom to discuss it, and eagerness to dis-
cuss it and to apply it, are also essentials, and it was left to the
Greeks to combine the three.

Greek Characteristics
Indeed, in all that is required for the development of political
thought the Greeks were both first and supreme. “You Greeks
are always boys; there is not an old man among you; you are
young, in your souls,” said the Egyptian priest in Plato’s
Timeus. He was right. They never lost the boy’s insatiable
curiosity. They were a race of seekers after unknown truths.
Thales, Anaximander, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides,
Zeno, all speculated about the origin and nature of the universe.
Xenophon wanted to know why there were fossils in the Sicilian
rocks. Herodotus wanted to know about soils and climates and
customs, and about everything under the sun. “All men want
to know,” said Aristotle, and he added, “the feeling of wonder
makes the true philosopher, for this is the only source of
philosophy.” For ages before the Greeks men had successfully
curbed the longing to know which Aristotle ascribes to all men.
But what he wrote was true of all Greeks, and it is because it
is that Greece is one of the mainsprings of Western civilisation.
To great curiosity, the Greeks allied great faith in reason. They
believed that life and the world were rational and that the
 HOW UT ALL BEGA'N 3

laws that governed them might be apprehended by man. They

were the first to call the Universe a “cosmos,” an “‘order,” and
so ruled by law. Homer sees behind the gods an order to which
even they must conform, and it is because the Greek tragedians
shared his view that Whitehead called them the true founders
of scientific thinking. No people was ever better at disentangling
the essential from the accidental, for it was the law rather than
any particular application of it that might be to their immediate
advantage that fascinated them. Indeed, there is a Pythagorean
proverb: “A new diagram, that means a step forward, but we
do not draw it to make a threepence.” And no people was ever
better at seeing the universal in the particular, as the speeches
with which Thucydides studs his History show.
Their attachment to intellectual truth was as great as their
curiosity and their faith in reason. In ordinary life they never
felt it necessary to tell the truth if it appeared to them that a lie
would do better. To win a momentary advantage they might
hope to deceive others. But in all that mattered in life they
never sought to deceive themselves. They insisted on the real
explanation even if it was unpleasant. And they would have said
with Phedra in Euripides’ Hippolytus :

“T his is the truth I saw then, and see still,

Nor ts there any magic that can stain
The white truth for me, or make me blind again.”

They had a great instinct for criticism. “The unexamined

life,” said Socrates, “is unlivable for a real human being.” Not
till the Stoics did they produce a philosophy based on obedience.
They had a passion for analysis and a hatred of woolly thinking.
They liked exact definition, even though they made Socrates
drink the hemlock. Aristophanes laughs at ‘“‘that native way of
ours, that ‘just what mean you?’ that always pops out’; but it
is doubtful if he thought it such a bad way at that.
Their great instinct for criticism of everything, including
themselves, was inseparable from their great faith in rational
discussion. “The great impediment to action is, in our opinion,
not discussion, but the want of that knowledge which is gained
by discussion preparatory to action,” Pericles said, and those
words that he uses of the Athenians can in some measure apply
to all Greeks. “‘No greater calamity could come upon a people
4 POLITICA HOUSGBF

than the privation of free speech,” Demosthenes says, and Euri-

pides proclaims:

“This is true liberty, when free-born men,

Having to advise the public, may speak free.”

Such was their faith in rational discussion that Aristotle can

say: “the many of whom each individual is but an ordinary per-
son, when they meet together may very likely be better than the
few good, if regarded not individually but collectively”; and
never fear the irrational behaviour of the crowd. Indeed, it can
even be argued that Rhetoric—the characteristic invention of an
argumentative people—was their most typical art. Certainly not
the least of what we owe to them can be ascribed to their great
regard for intellectual truth, their great clarity and steadiness of
vision, their great instinct for criticism and their great enthusi-
asm for rational discussion.
Above all, they were great humanists. Cicero was justified in
telling his son who was starting for Athens: “You are going to
visit men who are supremely men.” Man is the centre of their
thoughts, as their religion so clearly shows. “One is the race of
gods and men,” says Pindar—a view which exalts men as much
as it reduces gods. Their sculpture and painting concentrated on
the problem of depicting the human form. The inexhaustible
theme of their poetry from Homer onwards is man. Their
philosophy very typically moved from the problem of the
cosmos to the problem of man. “The noblest of all investiga-
tions is the study of what man should be and what he should
pursue,” Socrates maintained, and Plato and Aristotle agreed
with him. In all Greek literature there is nothing more Greek
than Sophocles’ noble line: “A wondrous thing is man—none
more wondrous.” “Other nations,” it has been well said, “made
gods, kings, spirits; the Greeks alone made men.”
With their great interest in man they could not but be great
individualists. Indeed, for evil as well as for good, no greater
individualists have ever lived. The right to think their own
thoughts, the right to speak them publicly, the right to act
according to conscience so far as the welfare of others allows,
were for them the most precious of rights. In the end individual-
ism destroyed them. Yet their discovery of the individual, their
realisation that a man’s chief contribution to national life is his
 HOW IT ALL BEGAN 5

personality developed to the highest degree, is perhaps their

supreme gift to the generations that came after them.
But if they were great individualists they were keenly aware of
the importance of society, and if they refused to be stifled by
tradition they were not indifferent to it. In their regard for the
“nomoi,” the old laws, and in their reluctance to countenance
any changes in them they were a veritable race of Burkes. Had
they been less interested in the individual or less concerned with
the community, their fascination for us would have been much
less than it is. Others have been great individualists or great be-
lievers in the State. No people has ever joined as they did such
keen regard for the individual and such deep concern for the
State. It is as much because of this as because of their eager
curiosity, their passionate belief in reason, their scientific spirit,
their fresh, critical outlook, and their humanism that the Greeks
have continued to be the inspiration of so many succeeding
generations.

The Language
If these were the qualities that made the Greeks the masters
of political thought, they were fortunate in that in their lan-
guage they had the perfect vehicle for the expression of these
qualities. Greek is the finest of all languages in which to express
abstract terms, for it is at once the clearest, the most flexible,
and the most subtle instrument of expression ever devised.
Whereas English would have to content itself with a series of
consecutive sentences, Greek groups ideas into one long period,
so intelligibly and with such complete command of structure
that it seems almost architectural in character. A Greek sentence,
said the disgruntled schoolboy, is like nothing so much as a lot
of little pieces of string, all tied together in one enormous knot.
That very tying together helped the Greek to his exact grasp
of logical relationships and to his unique clarity of thought.
Greek is clear and exact; it is direct, vigorous and simple; it
expresses in the briefest possible way the fundamentals of any-
thing with which it is dealing. Yet it is so subtle that it has
many shades of meaning as yet untranslated. No one could say
of the Greeks, as Lowell said of the Germans, that they used
“fog as an illuminating medium.” For their language is unkind
to the traffickers in nonsense, as French was unkind to the
propagandist of the Croix de Feu and German kind to Nazi
6 POLITICAL -haouUGcHT
ravings. When we add for good measure that Greek is a tongue
of outstanding delicacy and beauty of sound, we will not be
tempted, in speaking of the qualities of the Greek spirit, to
forget the language which expressed it and preserved it, and
which, it is fair to add, played its part in forming it as well.

The Polis
Brilliant in spirit and fortunate in language, the Greeks, by
accident or by some singularly gracious gift of the gods, hit
upon that organisation of life which focused as nothing else
could have done their great energy, and allowed them to make the
most of their great gifts. That organisation was what the Greeks
knew as the Polis, a term for which there is no exact translation
but which we render most inadequately as the City State. It
was much more than we mean by a city and a great deal more
than we understand by a State.
The Polis was, of course, inseparable from the City. France,
not Paris, is the State. But Athens, not Attica, was the Polis. It
was small—about the size of a small English county. Only three
Poleis had more than 20,000 citizens—Athens and Syracuse and
Acragas. Poleis of 10,000 citizens were not numerous. Rich and
important, Aigina never had more than 2,500 citizens. In some
districts there were as many as four Poleis in an area eight by
twelve miles. Aristotle analysed the constitutions of 158 Poleis—
and we may be sure that there were at least ten times as many.
All kept their populations restricted. Hesiod even appealed for
the single-child family, and public opinion never frowned upon
abortion, infanticide, exposure, and homosexuality. Nor was it
consciousness of the niggardliness of nature alone that made the
Greeks deplore large populations. They desired to live “‘in the
leisure of free and abstemious men”; and they wanted a sufh-
cient number of citizens to make cultural life feasible, but not too
many to make direct participation in government impossible.
They strongly agreed with Aristotle that “ten men are too few
for a city; a hundred thousand are too many.”
Above all, the Polis was free. Its liberty was the breath of life
to the Greeks. The Melians, saying in the face of overwhelming
Athenian might: “it were surely great baseness and cowardice in
us who are still free not to try everything that can be tried be-
fore submitting to your yoke,” were typically Greek. So were
the two Spartans who offered their lives to the Persian king in
 TO OWe a ge eA) bry Gra N! a

palliation of the execution of the two Persian envoys at Sparta,

saying, “you have never tasted liberty . . . if you had you would
urge us to fight for it, not from afar with javelins, but with axes
at close quarters.” It is, indeed, because the sovereignty of the
Polis was so fundamental to it that the Greeks never formed a
nation—the very idea of the Polis being as much opposed to it
as the idea of caste in India. The better is the enemy of the
good, and in all that makes life thrilling and whole the Greek
was convinced that he had the best.
Its size and sovereignty made the Polis the most intimate and
intense form of political grouping that has ever existed. Its im-
_ Pact upon its citizens was much more direct than the impact of
a great modern State can ever hope to be. This is obviously so
in a democratic Polis where the citizen was a member of the
Sovereign Assembly, where he might be chosen by lot to be the
Chancellor of the Exchequer, where he could reckon on holding
office every so often, where he might find himself in command
of a campaign as one Athenian leather-merchant did after ex-
pressing trenchant criticism of the conduct of operations. But it
is no less true of the non-democratic Poleis. There the citizen’s
sense of belonging to the Polis, of being a member not a subject
of it, was as acute. There his sense of living in immediate con-
tact with it was as strong. There his devotion to it was as ardent
—in its way Simonides’ epitaph on the Spartan dead at Thermo-
pylz, “Go, stranger, tell the Lacedemonians that we lie here
obedient to their commands,” is as eloquent as the famous
Funeral Oration of Pericles. To the Greek, therefore, the Polis
had a much more concrete meaning than the State has for us.
In it things that appear to us abstract and wearisome necessities
were vivid and immediate, so that even the paying of income
tax became less objectionable because less remote. Rich men in
the Polis were not required to pay supertax but were expected to
produce a play, or to commission a warship, and however
strong their reluctance to part with money may have been, ir is
not unreasonable to believe that they felt more satisfaction in
contemplating the plays they had produced or the warships they
had fitted out than those who pay surtax today do in contem-
plating their tax returns.
As a result of this intimacy and directness, the Polis had a
much fuller meaning for the Greek than the State has for us.
He identified it with all human values. It was so much a part of
8 POLITICAITHOUGHT.
his life that it was impossible to think of him apart from it, so
that the Greeks never found it sufficient to know a man’s name
and his father’s but always required the name of his Polis as
well. The Polis was so much a part of his life that it was im-
possible to think of it apart from him, so that the Greeks did not
speak of Athens, Sparta, or Melos, but always of the Athenians,
the Lacedemonians, and the Melians. No Greek belief was
stronger than that it is only in the Polis that men worthy of the
name can live. Indeed, the Greek word “‘to live’? means also “‘to
take part in communal life.” (It is interesting to note in the
modern Greek word “‘politeuma,” which means culture, perhaps
the last trace of this old conjunction of life and politics.) And
the name they gave to a man uninterested in the Polis was
“idiotes’—from which comes our word ‘“‘idiot.’”’ For life to be
worth living must have meaning, and only in the Polis, they
were sure, did it acquire meaning. The life of the Polis, they
believed, was essential to the whole man. When Aristotle said
that man is a political animal, he meant that it is the charac-
teristic of man to live in a Polis; and if he does not, he is not
truly man. The Polis alone made the good life possible and was
therefore the greatest education in virtue that man could ever
know. This is what Simonides meant when he said: ‘‘The Polis
teaches the man.” It was Church, University, State all in one.
There where the Polis was not, slavery and barbarism reigned;
here where it added colour and passion and intensity to life, man
could alone fulfil his nature.
From life so intensely lived and sovereignty so ardently cher-
ished sprang rivalry and bitter enmity both within and without
the Polis. “‘Stasis,” or virulent faction, was its great internal prob-
lem, so that revolutions were as frequent as in our lifetime they
have been in South America—and much more significant. War
was its great external problem, so that no civilisation, perhaps
not even our own, great as is its claim in this respect, has shown
more conclusively than the Greek how wolfish man can be to
man. Yet the very defects of the Polis were an added stimulation
to the Greeks. The knowledge that any action of his Polis to-
day might lead to defeat in war and to enslavement or death to-
morrow; and the very rapidity of the constitutional changes that
took place before his eyes quickened his interest in political life.
And if in a world of antagonistic Poleis death was never far
away, there was also glory in it—as the Blackfoot chief said
 HOW IT ALL BEGAN 9

when, from the peace of the reservation, he sighed for the days
of tribal warfare. If in spite of the smallness of the Polis there
was never anything parish pump about the mentality of the
Greeks, that was not least because the decisions they were con-
stantly called upon to take were not parish-pump decisions.

The Variety of their Political Thought

Such a vivid and intense life in the Polis, such a concentrated
experience of political change, when allied to the great intellec-
tual virtues of the Greeks, could not but produce great political
thought. Hence it is fitting that we pay our tribute to them
whenever we use the word “political,” a derivation from the
Polis, for whatever else of the Polis has vanished from the
memory of man, politics and political thinking remain as its un-
dying legacy to all future ages.
In their political thought they could not of course step outside
their age any more than we can step outside ours. And it may
be suggested that if the Polis did so much to make possible their
political thought, it also did something to limit it. Only with
the Stoics, who were not the truest of Greeks, did ideas of the
Cosmopolis or World-State emerge. Yet only in minor ways can
it be said that Greek political thinking was restricted by the
Polis. Indeed, it would be truer to say that it was coloured by
it rather than confined by it. For the Greeks found all the main
answers that have been given to the question why should men
obey the State.
We will find in them the view we associate with Marx that
class determines the form of the State and that class is itself de-
termined by economic interests. Plato tells us that “any city,
however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the
poor, the other of the rich.” Aristotle likewise says that the
economic structure of the State will condition its nature. Here,
too, we will find the view of the State as a machine, a product
of man’s will for his own convenience, “‘a guarantor of men’s
rights against one another” as the Sophist Lycophron, whom
Aristotle attacked, maintained. Incidentally, there is also here
the view of the State as contract. Glaucon, in the Republic,
speaks of ‘“‘the common view” that men “make a compact of
mutual abstinence from injustice” —a view which the Epicureans
shared. Here is the view of the State as force. Thrasymachus, in
the Republic, says that “Justice is simply the interest of the
6) POLIUTTGCA Gaal HO GG ret

stronger.” The Athenian ambassadors, in Thucydides, tell the

Melians: “You know as well as we do that right, as the world
goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the
strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must,”
and add, “‘of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by
a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can.”
Here is the view of the State as will. Aristotle says of the
Politeia: “Its intrinsic strength should be derived from the fact
not that a majority are in favour of its continuance (that might
well be the case even with a poor constitution) but rather that
there is no single section in all the State which would favour a
change to a different constitution.” In the belief of the Epicu-
reans that the State exists to secure the largest possible private
good which is identified with pleasure, we can see a fore-
shadowing of the Utilitarian State. And is it fanciful to see some-
thing of Rousseau’s distinction between the General Will and
the Will of All in the distinction the Greek drew between the
Nomoi and the possibly transitory expressions of the popular
will, or in Aristotle’s insistence that that form of government
is good which acts in the interests of the whole and bad which
acts in its own interests?
But, above all, we will find in the Greeks the view of the
State as an organism, as a whole which is more important than
its parts. With Plato we have the typically organic view that the
happiness of the State is not the same as the sum of the dif-
ferent happinesses of its members: “Our duty as regards happi-
ness is to see if our State as a whole enjoys it, persuading or
compelling these our auxiliaries and guardians to study only
how to make themselves the best possible workmen at their own
occupation, and treating all the rest in like manner, and thus,
while the whole city grows and becomes prosperously organised,
permitting each class to partake of as much happiness as the
nature of the case allows to it.” For Plato, the State is happy if
it conforms to an absolute standard which is to be found in
nature by the use of man’s reason. The extent to which an
given State does so conform, and not the happiness of individual
citizens, is the criterion whereby we must judge of the happiness
of States. To Aristotle, too, though he will not admit any more
than will Plato that it is an organism beyond the capacity of
man to influence, the State is still an organism, the whole greater
than the part. “The Polis is prior in the order of nature to the
 MOwW IT ALL BEGAN A

family and the individual. The reason for this is that the whole
is necessarily prior to the part.” The idea of the whole must
first be there before the part can be understood. It is this view of
the State as an organism, this that has been termed the Rational-
Natural view of the State, that is the greatest and most typical
Greek contribution to political thought. It is this that will now
be examined in the work of Plato, still the acknowledged master
of political thought.

PLATO, 427-347 B.C.

His Life and Writings
Plato was born in Athens in 427 B.c., one year after the death
of Pericles, and he died there in 347 B.c., ten years before the
battle of Chzronea which gave Philip of Macedon the mastery
of the Greek world. The Athens into which he was born was
still the greatest of Greek ‘‘Poleis,” “the educator of Hellas.”
Sophocles was then at the height of his powers; Aristophanes
was beginning to entrance the Demos; the Parthenon had been
finished but ten years before. But it was in an Athens from
which virtue was passing that he grew up, an Athens strained in
the Peloponnesian War, an Athens where democracy was be-
ginning to pass into those extremist forms which he so merci-
lessly satirised. He was a schoolboy when the great expedition
sailed to disaster at Syracuse; he was a young man of twenty-
three when defeat ended the war and the democracy in Athens
fell.
Born into a family which on both sides was one of the most
distinguished in Athens, as old-established and as prominent
politically as the Cecils in England, reared in the household of
his stepfather who was one of the leading figures in Periclean
Athens, Plato might seem predestined for an active life in the
service of his State. So he thought himself. “When I was a
young man,” he says in the Seventh Letter, which was written
towards the end of his life, “I felt as many young men do: I
thought that the very moment I attained my majority I should
engage in public affairs.” The opportunity soon presented itself.
A revolution overthrew the democracy in Athens and established
the rule of the Thirty. Among them were Plato’s kinsmen, and
they asked him to join them, thinking, in his own words, that
“politics and I were a fit match.” But their behaviour was such,
I2 POLITICAL TAOCVCGuT

he writes, that “my blood boiled at it,” for “as I looked I saw
those men in a short time make the former democratic govern-
ment seem like a golden age.” Another revolution soon brought
the democrats to power, and although at first they won Plato’s
respect by their “considerable leniency,” they nevertheless com-
mitted the act which decisively drove him from active political
life. They executed his friend Socrates on a charge of corrupting
the youth of Athens.
Socrates, whom the Oracle at Delphi had pronounced to be
the wisest of mankind, was regarded by Plato as the best of men.
As we see from Plato’s Dialogues, on all those who loved him
his personality had an extraordinarily powerful effect. “When I
hear him,” Alcibiades says in the Symposium, “my heart leaps
in me more than that of the Corybantes; my tears flow at his
words, and I see many others that feel just as I do... . And
with this man alone I have an experience which no one would
believe was possible for me—the sense of shame. He is the only
one that provokes it. For I know in my own heart that I cannot
gainsay that I ought to do as he bids me and that when I leave
him it is my vice to yield to the favours of the many. . . . Often
I would be glad if I should not see him again in this world, but
if this should happen I know well that I should be more miser-
able than ever; the truth is, I do not know what to do with
him.” Questioning all whom he could induce to listen to him so
that he might arrive at truth, and incidentally exposing the pre-
tensions and revealing the inadequacies of those who claimed to
have found it, Socrates was the gadfly of Athens. Meno varied
the image and told him: “Not only in shape but in everything
else too you are exactly like that flat sea fish, the sting ray. It,
too, numbs with its shock whoever comes near it and touches
it, and that is just what you have done to me now, I think.”
But men will not always reconcile themselves to continual
stinging, and Socrates’ condemnation, however much to be re-
gretted, is not altogether surprising. His death was perhaps the
most important event in Plato’s life, turning him from
politics to philosophy. Henceforward, he tells us: “I was
compelled to say, in praising true philosophy, that it was
from it alone that one was able to discern all true justice,
public and private. And so I said that the nations of men will
never cease from trouble until either the true and genuine breed
of philosophers shall come to political office or until that of the
 FLOW LT ALLE BeEIG AON 13

rulers in the states shall by some divine ordinance take to the

true pursuit of philosophy.”
In his wretchedness Plato left Athens for nearly twelve years,
travelling to Megara, Cyrene, Italy, and perhaps Egypt, and
establishing that connection with Sicily ae gave him later
in life the chance, however slender, of making a King a
Philosopher and thereby of translating his ideas into practice. He
returned to Athens in 387 B.c., and, in a grove outside the city,
founded the Academy, over the door of which it is said ran the
inscription : “No one without a knowledge of mathematics may
enter here.” In this insistence on the discipline of exact study
Plato’s Academy can be called the first of Western universities.
It might be regarded as the first of Western universities in this,
too, that it hoped to provide men who, nurtured by their aca-
demic training, would become leaders of their communities,
lawgivers and statesmen. It would have been unnatural in the
extreme for a Greek to neglect the State, and Plato had behind
him a family tradition of service to remind him of the philoso-
pher’s duty to society. Thus, very typically, he can write in the
Republic that the philosopher cannot count his the greatest of
achievements ‘‘if he does not find a state that fits him: for in
the state that fits him he himself will attain greater proportions
and along with his private salvation will save the community as
well.”
It was in this spirit that members of the Academy legislated
for various States. And it was in this spirit that Plato himself
answered the call when it came to him from Syracuse to help in
the fashioning of the Philosopher King. In this luxury-loving
Sicilian city, in which he had previously experienced a life that
“consisted of a vast amount of eating Italiate and Sicilian cook-
ing, stuffing oneself twice a day and never sleeping a single
night alone, together with all the usual practices which go with
this sort of life,” he had unpromising material. There were,
moreover, other difficulties which should have been obvious, but
which he had insufficiently foreseen. On his first visit to Sicily
he had become friendly with Dion, a young man of whose
character and ability he thought very highly and who eagerly
embraced his philosophy. It was Dion who, now very influential
at the court of the young Dionysius II, urged Plato in 367 to
come to Sicily to help him be the philosophic adviser of the
new prince. But Dion’s very presence proved embarrassing as
14 POLITICAL TALOUGHT

perhaps not unnaturally it gave rise to the suspicion that there

might be plans not only for turning a King into a Philosopher,
but conceivably also as an alternative for turning a Philosopher
into a King. Moreover, Plato sadly underestimated the difficulty
of persuading a young despot with a war on his hands to de-
vote the time to and develop the taste for mathematics. Plato
still, however, cherished the hope “‘that he might come to desire
the life of philosophy,” though not even his patience and opti-
mism could have allowed him to regard the banishment of Dion,
the sequestering of his estates, and the forced marriage of his
wife to another man, as the first tottering steps of a begin-
ner in philosophy. He left Sicily having accomplished nothing
—unless we except that message of apology which he was to
carry to Dion wherein Dionysius urged that Dion should re-
gard banishment not as a punishment but as a holiday abroad,
thoughtfully, however, forbearing to add that he should look
upon the loss of his lands and of his wife as a happy release
from the cares of property and the thraldom of wedlock.
In spite of that experience, Plato returned to Sicily, only to
find that Dionysius’s aversion for mathematics was if anything
greater. Grateful to escape with his life, Plato made no further
excursions into politics, though when a very old man he
was asked to go again to Sicily to straighten out the chaos into
which that country was now plunged. Even more striking than
the fact that so old a man was asked to tackle again what he
had previously tried and failed to do was the marked tone of
regret that characterises his refusal. Clearly we must say that the
Sicilian episodes show Plato as blind to the realities of power,
and as too ready to allow himself to be deceived into thinking
that perhaps there was a chance when reason and experience alike
denied it. Yet the justification of his actions that he gives in the
Seventh Letter is very revealing—and very Greek. ‘And
chiefly,” he writes, “I was urged by a sense of shame in my
own eyes that I should not always seem to myself a kind of
argument pure and simple, never willing to set my hand to
anything that was an action.”
Plato failed, then, to find a state that fitted him, and accord-
ing to his own view his achievement thus fell short of the high-
est. Nevertheless, it was very great. In his lifetime he was re-
nowned not only for his work in the Academy but for his
writings. This perhaps is paradoxical as he himself was con-
 HOW idl? AIAG BEIG SAN 15

temptuous of books—reflecting in that the attitude of his civilisa-

tion, the Greek being a seeing and hearing rather than a reading
public. Moreover, he tells us in the Seventh Letter that he has
never put his philosophy into writing and never will. Yet if he
never produced a final system of philosophy, he conveyed
enough in what he did produce, and that so brilliantly, to win
him a lasting reputation. For his mastery of words was such as
to fascinate that race whose ideal was that of Achilles—to be a
speaker of words as well as a doer of deeds. He was a supreme
poet—his epitaph on the Eritrean exiles in Persia is as beautiful
as anything in Greek poetry. He was a superb dramatist, with a
sure grasp of form and movement, an unfailing command of
vivid detail and gripping situation. And he found that form for
his writings which gave fullest play to his great literary gifts.
He wrote in dialogue form, generally representing Socrates as
his chief speaker. His Dialogues were the artistic presentation of
political and philosophical problems, and were instinct with life.
We are given a fascinating glimpse of a slave hunt in the
Protagoras, and are shown the absurdity of Protagoras pacing
the courtyard while his disciples fall over themselves so as not to
get in front of him when he turns to retrace his steps. Or we
are made vividly aware in the Republic of the uncouth manner-
isms of Thrasymachus. For Plato is intensely preoccupied with
life, to a degree quite inconsistent with his own theory that the
true philosopher does not think about people but meditates on
abstract reality. In practice he is as much in love with the con-
versation of “people in the city” as Socrates had been, and his
Dialogues show it, whether they be pure comedy as in
Euthydemus or tragedy as in the Phedo. Hence they live and
move and enthral as do few philosophical works.
It is worth emphasising that they were not of course intended
to be exhaustive treatises, compelling acquiescence by the very
power of their logic, as Aristotle sought to make his works.
They were rather designed to give flashes of illumination, to
make the reader imaginatively understand a particular approach,
to give no more than indirect indications of the approach to the
good life. They were not so much philosophy as the stuff of
which philosophy is made. By 362, when he returned from his
last visit to Sicily, Plato had written the following Dialogues:
Crito, Apology, Euthyphro, Laches, Lysis, Charmides, Phedo,
Georgias, Meno, Protagoras, Phedrus, Symposium, Euthydemus,
 16 POLITICAL THOUGHT
and Republic. In his later years he wrote the Theateus, Par-
menides, Philebus, Sophist, Statesman, Timeus, Laws, and the
half-finished Critias. Of these the greatest is the Republic, which
is also the greatest book in the history of Political Thought. It
is mainly from the Republic that the following account of his
political thought is given.

His Political Philosophy—The Human Predicament

In his contemporary world, Plato saw “stasis” everywhere—
cities so divided that their citizens stood “‘in the state and posture
of gladiators” against one another. He saw unrighteousness
rampant and injustice enthroned. He saw ignorance supreme
and parading up and down in the guise of knowledge. And he
saw everywhere, too, the predicament in which men found
themselves. Doing what their natures suggested to them, they
found not what they sought, but turmoil and strife and agony
and death. This was so because to be mistaken seemed part of
their very natures. They desired, as all men must, “the good for
man”; “that which would make any man’s life happy,” “that
without which man can never know peace.” But they looked for
it in the wrong places. They sought it in pleasures, in health, in
long life, in wealth, in power. They chose evil because they
thought that would be a good for them. And they were not cor-
rected by those who led them. Even the best of these were un-
helpful. Themistocles and Pericles were accounted great states-
men, but they failed to make their people “better and gentler.”
Moreover, at the end their people disgraced them, and their
very ingratitude was a proof of the failure of government, of the
poverty of statesmanship. For what sort of teamster would we
call him who undertook to train a team of horses and ended by
having them run away and throw him? In fact, the very leaders
made matters worse. They directed attention precisely to those
wrong things to which man anyhow was so likely to be attracted.
They confirmed him in his mistakes. Pericles filled the city with
“harbours and dockyards and walls and such trash,” not with
good men. All goods are of two kinds: unlimited, as for instance
Beauty and Wisdom; and limited, as for instance Power and
Wealth. Beauty and Wisdom are unlimited because my pos-
session of them in no sense diminishes yours or is diminished by
yours. My appreciation of art does not preclude your apprecia-
tion, and is in no way lessened by yours. Power and Wealth
 HOW IT ALL BEGAN 17

are limited because my possession of them very much diminishes

yours or is diminished by yours. My desire for power un-
doubtedly precludes yours and my hopes of gaining it are greatly
lessened by yours. Unlimited goods, because they are unlimited,
cannot cause strife. But limited goods, because they are limited,
must always cause strife. If we yearn for Power or Wealth our
struggle will be protracted and os precisely because they are
limited, whereas Wisdom and Art are not. It was to the limited
goods that Pericles directed the attention of his people, and it
was from this pursuit of the limited goods that sprang all the
troubles that plagued the race of men.
The root cause, then, of men’s troubles is that they are led by
ignorant men who pretend to knowledge but who are in fact as
ignorant as themselves. They are led by those who do not know
where they are going. At best those leaders have formed opinions
about things which not surprisingly are unsound. They are like
men who, sitting bound in an underground cave with a fire
burning behind them by the light of which shadows of people
walking about outside are cast on the wall in front of them,
have earned a certain distinction for remembering which
shadows came first, which last and which together, and for
guessing which were coming next. They are like the keeper of
the great strong beast, who has learned all its moods and pas-
sions, how to approach him and how to touch him, when he is
most savage and when most gentle, what makes him the one
and the other and the sounds that he makes to express each,
and who finally calls his knowledge wisdom and constructs it as
a system or an art. They are like sailors on a ship who argue
about their course and clamour to be the steersman while the
true navigator is bound to the mast and called a useless, star-
gazing fool. This is the predicament of men, that they con-
stantly mistake their good and that their mistakes go uncor-
rected and are even made worse by their leaders. And from
this predicament they will never escape until they realise that
power is in the hands of the ignorant, that power in the hands
of the ignorant is poison, that ignorance and opinion must give
way to knowledge, that there are indeed those who do not
merely have opinions about things but who know, and who are
capable of exercising power, even if at the moment they do
not, and that it is into their hands, however reluctant they may
be, that power must be placed.
18 POL LEICA DML HO UG Ho

The Existence of the Good

The early Greek philosophers were particularly concerned with
two outstanding problems—the problem of Variety and the
problem of Change. The variety that they saw was such that the
world seemed unintelligible, and they felt impelled to try to
reduce all the varieties to one substance, to “‘find the one in the
many.” Some thought that one substance was water, some air,
or fire, or earth. For Anaximander it was the infinite; for Pytha-
goras number. The definitions of the one substance differed, but
there was general agreement that, whatever it was it was divine.
The change that they noticed constantly taking place seemed to
them a particular form of the problem of Variety. The idea of
change, they concluded, assumes the idea of permanence, since
however much an object changes there must be some part of it
that does not or we would be compelled to speak not of a
changed, but of an entirely new object. What does not change,
they said, must be the permanent character of the object. Tri-
angles, for instance, change, but the quality of triangularity is
permanent. Geometrical character, in this case, was the per-
manent quality that did not change. Further, they believed that
there could be ‘‘doxa”’ or empirical observation about the chang-
ing, but that “Episteme’—or real knowledge—could be had
only about that which was permanent. Heraclitus, who main-
tained that all things change, that the world is in a state of per-
manent flux, that “we cannot step twice into the same river,”
added the further idea that natural law was the permanent char-
acter of all things; that is, that there was a natural order in the
world ordained by God.
It was against this common background of philosophical
speculation that Plato worked out his Theory of Ideas. He also
‘saw in the actual world constant flux, a perpetual flow of ever-
changing appearances. He also sought to make the world intelli-
gible by finding the permanent in the changing. The perma-
nent character of anything he calls the Idea, or as some who are
dissatisfied with this translation prefer to call it the Form. If
we use the word Idea it is as well to remind ourselves that Plato
did not mean by it as we do a thought existing in the mind, for
such a thought, he would maintain, is as transitory as any event
in the outside world. An Idea in Plato’s sense is not part of the
world of time and space. It is eternal, it is the final and inde-
 HOW Teh AE ED BEGAN 1g

pendent reality. Because it is eternal it must be different from

the object in which it appears. The Idea of a horse will be dif-
ferent from any particular horse. The Idea of a Polis must be
different from any particular instance of a Polis. But although
it is different from the things in which it appears, it cannot
exist without those things. There could not be an Idea of a horse
if no horse existed. Hence Plato’s Ideas are not to be regarded
as transcendent. They could not exist in an ethereal world of
their own. They are, on the contrary, immanent in the transi-
tory nature of things, as the Idea of a horse is immanent in
horses. An Idea, then, is eternal though it can only exist in time.
It is permanent though it is not separate from the world of
change. It is in fact the law according to which a thing behaves,
for that is permanent and does not change with the changing
thing, that is not separate from the thing but is nevertheless
distinguishable from it.
The Idea, then, is what makes things what they are. All horses
in the world, however much they differ, have one quality in
common—that quality by reason of which they are horses, or
horsiness. We recognise them as horses because they “‘partake”
of this quality, horsiness. The Idea of Horsiness is thus the
source of the common quality that all horses possess. It is also a
perfect example of a horse. In some degree all actual horses are
imperfect—in the Idea of a horse is no imperfection. Conse-
quently if we want to know what is a good horse, we must dis-
cover how closely it approximates to the Idea of a horse. More-
over, the Idea is an end as well as a source. Only metaphoric-
ally can one say that all horses strive to become more and more
like the idea of a horse. But artists strive to make their art more
and more like that Idea of Beauty, by virtue of which all things
that “partake” of it are beautiful. And citizens should seek to
make their Polis more and more like that Idea of the Polis
which is laid up in heaven.
The world of Ideas is, Plato maintains, the real world: the
familiar world is a world of shadows. Of course we believe our
own everyday world to be the only real world, for we are like
the prisoners in the cave who have never seen the light and of
whom it must be said: “Then surely such persons would hold
the shadows of those manufactured articles to be the only reali-
ties.” Our dimness of vision is to be deplored, but the fact of the
existence of this real world of archetypes in which there is a
20 POLUTECAL “Ff HOUrGatT

model of each class of things is not to be denied. Moreover,

Plato urges, if we were not so blind we would see that beyond
these Ideas, these models, these archetypes, there is the Idea of all
Ideas, the model of all models, the prototype of all archetypes—
the Idea of the Good, the final and independent reality existing
“itself by itself.” This Idea is the source of all goodness. It is that
by virtue of participation in which men are good.
It is impossible to have certain knowledge of things that are
constantly changing. We can merely form opinions about them.
Only of the permanent, of the Idea, of the law, can we have
genuine infallible knowledge. Hence, Plato concludes, the good
exists, whatever men may think about it. And because it exists
they have at least the hope of escaping from their predicament.
That they were unable to do, so long as they had only opinion
to go by. For there was nothing to choose between the many
opinions that men had formed about the good life. They were
all mistaken and all misleading. But if men can comprehend
the Idea of the Good, they will have laid hold of truth, they will
have passed from mere opinion which confirmed them in evil to
knowledge which will draw them irresistibly to good, and only
in following after good will they find respite from their many
afflictions.

The Soul and the Possibility of Knowledge

Plato has so far told us that the Good exists, and that only
of it can there be true knowledge. But he has not shown us how
men can acquire that knowledge. This he now proceeds to do
by elaborating that doctrine of the Soul with which his doctrine
of Ideas is inseparably connected.
The Body, he says, is not the whole of man. It is indeed his
less important part. The most important part is his Soul which
may truly be said to be divine. Plato is here of course using
divine in the old Greek sense, something which is immortal in
its own right, not because of any gift of the gods. Because the
Soul is immortal it existed before it became incarnate, just as it
will continue to exist after it leaves the body, which is its tem-
‘porary dwelling-place. It’s real home is its abode when not in-
carnate, and that is the higher world of Ideas. Before its incar-
nation it thus had knowledge of the Ideas among which it lived.
And after its incarnation it is reminded of those Ideas through
the senses when it sees those earthly things which “partake” of
 EOwW LT ALD BEGAN oD

the Ideas. Hence the part played by the senses in the acquisition
of true knowledge is very subordinate. It is only apparently
through the senses that men learn truth. In fact, it is only be-
cause the Soul recollects what it has known in a previous life
among the original models or archetypes or Ideas that men can
have knowledge of these Ideas. These recollections of the Soul
are the only genuine form of knowledge, and because men pos-
sess Souls they have therefore the possibility of arriving at it.

The Soul and its Thirst for the Good

Not all Souls, however, are capable of recollecting the Ideas
they knew in their previous life. For not all Souls are pure—
indeed, there is a good deal of alloy in the incarnate Soul. That
Soul has three parts—Reason, which is located in the head;
Courage or Spirit, which is located in the breast; and Desire,
which is located in the belly. Of these, Reason is incomparably
the most important, for it partakes of the eternal, it is ‘“‘the
most divine’ in man; whereas Courage and Desire belong en-
tirely to the world of time and space. It is Reason, therefore,
which sees the truth and which directs the activity of the good
Soul according to the vision which it has seen. It is Reason
which is ‘‘the inward man,” the rational element in us that is
our real personality. Courage is, on the whole, obedient to the
dictates of Reason and will help it to establish its ascendancy.
But Desire is strong, wilful, contentious, turbulent, and chaotic.
It is constantly in arms against Reason. And Reason like a
charioteer who is driving two horses, one tractable and one wild,
has ever to fight a great battle to discipline the unruly steed with
the help of the horse that is broken to harness. That Soul, then,
is good in which Reason predominates over Courage and De-
sire. Indeed, that Soul in which Reason existed alone would be
the best copy of the Idea of man. In the world of men such
a pure Soul is not to be found. But all Souls in which Reason
is master are sufficiently sensitive to recollect the Ideas they
knew in their former existence, and thus to give to men know-
ledge of the good.
But if not all Souls are capable of recollecting the Ideas they
once knew, all Souls are driven by Eros, or passionate longing
for a good not yet attained. That (ose will drive the best of
Souls, in which Reason commands, to know and to identify
themselves with the Reality behind all Reality, the Idea behind
Pal .——2
 22 POLITICA LSTA UGE

all Ideas, the Idea of the Good. But even those corrupt Souls, in
which Courage rules or Desire, will be driven by Eros to seek
the good, although they will not themselves be aware of it. All
they will themselves be aware of is that they are impelled to seek
a good, that is, a good suited to themselves—a further distinction
for the Spirited Soul or an added indulgence for the Pleasure-
loving Soul. But although of themselves they will not under-
stand it, they will be unable to enjoy the objects of their longing
until Reason is in her rightful position of authority. For in-
stance, a man of courage or spirit who sought satisfaction in the
service of a Caligula would brutalise not fulfil himself. The very
means whereby he sought to become the better man would
ensure that he became the worse. Similarly the pleasure-loving
man will fail to find the pleasures he seeks. For if the appetites
are left to themselves either one will so tyrannise over the rest as
to starve them, or each desire will so struggle with all that none
will find satisfaction. Only when Reason commands will each
receive its fair satisfaction.
Plato can even make an ironic joke to drive home the point
that only under the guidance of Reason will the pleasure-loving
Soul find its fulfilment—the tyrant, he calculates, has 729 times
less pleasure than the philosophic man. Indeed, this is a point
which Plato repeatedly stresses because, as he says in the Laws,
it is not gods but men whom we have to lead into right living,
and we must therefore allow for the universal desire of men
for pleasurable existence. When Reason rules, all will enjoy the
greatest share of goods appropriate to their nature. But when
Reason rules, man is following the Idea of the Good. Therefore
not only is it possible for men to acquire knowledge, but they
have a passionate desire for it, an unquenchable thirst for the
Good, although only a few of them can realise that this is indeed
the case.

The State as the Means to the Good

The qualities of the Soul, says Plato, are innate and inherent.
They are a matter of birth, and no two persons are born alike.
Their due balance, however, is a matter of training and restrain-
ing. Men are not born with that balance: they must be disci-
plined into it and prevented from violating it. The force neces-
_ sary to do this must be all-embracing and life-long, and can only
be the State, whose true function is thus education in the widest
 HOW LT ALL BEG AN 23

sense of that term. Nothing is more typical of Plato than this

insistence that it is the State that makes the man. It is con-
stantly emerging in his writings. We see it in his view that every
type of constitution produces its own type of man, or in his
declaration that those who blame the Sophists for the degenera-
tion of the young are themselves the greatest Sophists, for it is
the influence of the State, not the teaching of private individuals,
that educates men.
But it is not the State as it actually exists that can help men to
achieve the due balance in their souls. For the actual State
denies rather than fulfils men. In it the Rational Soul will be
less good than it might be, and possibly even more evil than it
might be expected to be. It will be less good because it will lack
that society which is necessary for the full development of the
philosophic nature, the State in which the Philosopher will
attain “greater proportions.” It might be more evil because in
existing society the very vigour of the Rational Soul is an added
danger to it. “We know it to be true,” Plato writes, “of an
seed or growing thing, whether plant or animal, that if it fails
to find its proper nourishment or climate or soil, then the more
vigorous it is the more it will lack the qualities it should possess.
Evil is a worse enemy to the good than to the indifferent; so it
is natural that bad conditions of nurture should be peculiarly
uncongenial to the finest nature, and that it should come off
worse under them than natures of an insignificant order. So is
it, then, with the temperament we have postulated for the
hilosopher: given the right instruction, it must grow to the
full flower of excellence; but if the plant is sown and reared in
the wrong soil, it will develop every contrary defect, unless
saved by some miracle.” Similarly, in the actual State the
Courageous or Spirited Soul will not develop as it should. For,
as Sparta shows, it will become proud and ambitious, will
admire duplicity and low cunning, will become mean and de-
ceitful and a prey in secret to all the passions which in public
it denies. Again, in the actual State the Appetitive or Desirous
Soul will not get what it hopes for. In a State such as Athens it
will apparently enjoy the maximum of freedom, for there even
the horses and asses are gorged with freedom, and the citizens,
constant only in inconstancy, living “from day to day in the
gratification of the casual appetite,” are everything by turns and
nothing long. But all this is but the guarantee of such strife as
24 POLITICAL THOUGHT

will stunt even the Desirous Soul, the prelude to tyranny which
will deny it the satisfactions for which it longs.
If we would avoid ill-fitting clothes, we must not cut our cloth
from a poor pattern. If we want the balanced Soul, it is not the
actual State that will help us to achieve it, but the good State that
is modelled on the Idea of the Polis laid up in heaven. Only in
the good State will the Rational Soul reveal its divine origin, and
the Courageous and Desirous Souls fulfil themselves to the
greatest extent that their natures will allow. And then it will be
apparent that the State, albeit the good State, is the only means
whereby men may achieve the Good.

The Organisation of the State to Ensure the Good

From all that Plato has told us the first characteristic of the
good State will be immediately apparent. It must be properly
led. Power must not be given to those who will abuse it either
for their own selfish interests or in pursuit of a misconceived
common good such as wealth or power, erroneously seen in
terms of those unworthy ends which make most appeal to their
own diseased souls. For wealth and power are limited goods,
“goods that can be fought for,” as Aristotle calls them, and the
individual or the State that pursues them does so at the expense
of others and so stirs up strife. Power must rather be given to
those who will use it aright to turn men’s souls to the pure light
of truth, It must be given to philosophers, for as philosophy is,
as Socrates called it, the art of the “tendance of the soul,” so it
must also be the art of the tendance of the State. As the safety
of the ship depends upon the skilled pilot, so the welfare of the
State depends upon the developed philosopher. For the good the
philosopher pursues is unlimited, it is wisdom which is not
sought at anyone’s expense, and which therefore creates no con-
tention. On the contrary, the greater the philosopher’s wisdom,
the better for everybody if they can take advantage of it by
making him control the State. And in innumerable images, such
as that of the Cave, of the Ship, of the Custody of the Beast, of
the Cook and the Doctor, and in myths such as that of the races
of Gold, Silver and Iron and of the Soul making its choice of a
“demon”’ before incarnation, Plato seeks to drive home the abso-
lute truth of his challenging assertion which is the central part
of the Republic: “Until, then, philosophers are kings, or the
kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of
 HOW IT ALL BEGAN 25

philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one,

and those commoner natures who follow either to the exclusion
of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never cease
from evil—no nor the human race, as I believe—and then onl
will our State have a possibility of life and behold the light of
day.”
Philosophic natures, Plato knows, are extremely rare. He fre-
quently insists that no one can become a philosopher who does
not have very specific natural gifts. And he knows, too, that such
natures will be very reluctant to possess power. For politics are
an affair of the twilight, they concern the relations of men in the
dimness of the cave, and what man who has enjoyed the steady
light of the sun would eagerly return to the flickering firelight of
the cave? “The man whose mind is really set upon the things
that are,” he says, “has not leisure to look down at the concerns
of men, and to fight with them, and fill himself with envy and
bitterness.” But because “the philosopher living in fellowship
with what is divine and orderly grows himself orderly and
divine as far as man is able,”’ he must be made to leave ‘“‘the isles
of the blest’? and return to the cave, to the world of shadows
and half-truths and ordinary people. In the perfect social order
he can be legitimately forced to assume authority, for in mould-
ing others he is still further developing himself, and in service
he is paying the rent that he owes to the State for his own de-
velopment. Of course, as it is only in the perfect State that the
philosopher could get the right education, so it is only in the
perfect State that he would be fully responsible to the com-
munity. He will feel no gratitude to existing States, for if he has
been fortunate enough to develop himself unspoiled, it was in
spite and not because of them that he did so. Therefore in
actual States philosophers are unlikely to engage in political
activity, but will rather confine themselves to the life of privacy
and contemplation: “staying quiet and doing their own work,
as though standing behind a wall in a storm of wind-driven dust
and sleet; when they see others infected by lawlessness, they are
content if they can live out their life here pure of injustice and
unholy acts, and say good-bye to it cheerfully and pleasantly, full
of good hope.”
The first characteristic, then, of the good State is that in it
power will be given to those not who want it most but who
desire it least, to the philosophers who will, nevertheless, exer-
26 POLITICAL THOUGHT
cise it best. Perhaps it should be added to relieve those who are
oppressed by the prospect of the Professor in politics as, for in-
stance, Bismarck was by Gladstone, that for Plato the
‘philosophos” was not what in any academic sense we might
understand by a professor of philosophy today. He was a
“kaloskagathos”—a gentleman, the finest product of “‘paideia,”
a lover of culture, the most highly educated and cultivated of
personalities. His was the noblest of natures, the most rational of
souls. He was quick to understand, eager to know, of great in-
tellectual power, indifferent to external goods or to display,
magnanimous, courageous, self-controlled, and a friend and
kinsman of “truth and justice.” “A love of truth and a hatred of
falsehood that will not tolerate untruth in any form” was his
master passion. Like Confucius’s “Superior Man,” with whom
he had so much in common, he was one who would follow the
“Kingly Way,” cleaving to righteousness and forsaking wrong.
And it should be noted as well that Plato thought of his philos-
opher-kings not as lawgivers but as administrators. He believed
that there must always be an element in the State in which the
founder’s spirit lives on, but he did not anticipate the con-
tinuous emerging of the original creative gifts which the law-
giver-philosopher who founds the State must clearly possess. It
is significant that in the Republic Socrates and his friends are
portrayed as the engineers of the toy model of the State. “Let us
convince, first and best, the guardians,” they say. Before there is
a philosopher-king there must be an original philosopher to make
the copy of the Idea of the Polis that is laid up in heaven. The
function of the philosopher-kings, then, is to keep the State as
close as possible to the philosopher’s sketch of the Ideal State.
They must, for instance, watch against the coming into the State
of undue wealth and poverty. They must see that the State does
not grow too big. They must ensure that the different classes
fulfil their functions, and, above all, they must make certain
that no innovation in education is allowed in the State. But if
the guardians are not autocratic lawgivers, their work, though
it may seem negative in form, is positive enough in content, It
is nothing less than to nourish and shape souls. To believe that
legislation could help them in that would be to imagine that
inadequate means can produce desired ends. Politicians and
quacks may content themselves with curing symptoms and
ignoring causes. True doctors cannot. The root of human
 HOW -T ALL -3-E GAN 27

trouble is defective education, and the cure for those troubles is

education that is not defective. When men have this they will
find that laws are not needed, for they will be just without them.
And here the parallel between the thought of Plato and of
Confucius may be noticed again. For Confucius also is sure that
right training will do away with the need for constant legisla-
tion—indeed, he states that when that is needed it will be in-
effective, saying, “Where the Prince is virtuous laws are un-
necessary; where the Prince is not virtuous laws are useless.”
Again, both Plato and Confucius are agreed about the import-
ance of right customs. In the Republic Plato displays a respect
for age, and insistence on piety towards parents, on proper hair-
dressing, clothing, footwear, and posture that Confucius would
most cordially endorse.
The good State must not only be properly led, it must be
properly defended. Therefore the second characteristic of the
good State will be the presence below the guardians, in whose
hands supreme power is concentrated, of a class of professional
soldiers. Plato calls them guards, thus by implication restricting
their function to defence. Courage is their main virtue. They
must be keen to see, swift to catch, and strong to destroy the
enemy. And like the watchdogs that they are they must com-
bine two contradictory qualities—mildness to their friends and
ferocity towards their enemies. Accustomed to warlike sights
and sounds at an early age, taught to be indifferent to danger
and contemptuous of death, they will be able “to see bloody
slaughter” and yet hold their ground. They will be men of fine
quality, and they will live with the best of men. But they will
not themselves be the best of men. Theirs are the Spirited Souls
which are attracted by honour. And they will not rule, but will
obey the rulers whom they considerably outnumber.
The good State must also be properly fed. This is the task of
the appetitive natures who long for material goods. The good
State, therefore, will have as its third characteristic the existence
of a class of producers below the philosopher-kings and the
guards. This class includes not merely those who in Marxian
terminology are the workers, but all property owners, business
men and shopkeepers, farmers and craftsmen. All who produce
wealth belong to it, and all the wealth of the community belongs
to them. It will not, however, exhibit too great a disparity of
wealth, for too great wealth and too great poverty would usher
28 POLITICAL. LHi0
Ue mT
in the class war that had ruined so many Poleis. It will contain
by far the majority of the community, but for all that Plato
does not say much about it. He is, however, kinder to artisans
than is Aristotle, for at least he allows them to be citizens. But
at best they are second-class citizens, in every way passive objects
of government. A good indication of the value Plato attached to
them is his provision that a soldier who disgraces himself by
showing cowardice should be degraded into their ranks. The
normal Greek punishment for such an offence was loss of civil
rights. This third class cannot claim a virtue special to itself, as
wisdom is the virtue of the first and courage of the second. But
it shares in a virtue which characterises the other classes as well
—prudent self-control, which indeed it is specially important for
it to have. Less noble than the guards, the producers will like
them obey unquestioningly the commands of the guardians; like
them they will have no part in politics. But they will be content
because they will have the wealth that they desire, and they will
be doing the job for which they are fitted.
Proper leadership, proper protection, proper provision are in-
dispensable to the good State. But the State which has them
may claim not only to be good but to be founded on human
nature. For men are by nature divided into those who love
Reason and who are fit to rule, those who love Honour and
who are fit to fight, and those who love Pleasure and material
goods and who are fit to work. Indeed, it is only because they
have these attributes that the functions of the good State can
be adequately discharged, for Plato is never in any doubt that
the social order to be stable must reflect the constitution of
human nature, must provide satisfaction for men’s normal de-
sires. The good State, therefore, accepts human nature as it is,
and does not seek to convert all men to the ideal of one type.
It drafts each to his proper place and seeks to make sure that he
stays there. But if it is founded upon and accepts human nature,
it also fulfils human nature. In it the guardians will have the
satisfactions of knowledge, of contemplation of the Idea, and of
developing themselves still further in moulding the character of
others. In it the guards and the producers will find the fullest
satisfaction of their desires made possible through the directing
power of a Reason which the State provides for them because
they cannot provide it for themselves. Hence though they still
pursue limited ends which in their very nature lead to strife,
 HOW fT ALL BEGAN 29

this will not now result because Reason commands. Thus a

greater share of the goods appropriate to the, nature of each
than is possible in any other State will be enjoyed by all in this
good State which accepts human nature, builds upon human
nature, and fulfils human nature.
Here in the good State is enshrined Plato’s ideal of Human
Excellence. He is a passionate specialist. He believes that every-
thing in life has its own peculiar and special function to per-
form, and that it can only be used with excellence in that pecu-
liar and special function. He believes also that every man has
his predominant character and that there is no two-fold or mani-
fold in man. It is clear that only in following his predominant
character can man achieve excellence. Moreover, Human Ex-
cellence is equivalent to Justice. Knowing oneself, understanding
one’s own mixture of faculties, knowing the predominant one
and following that, in fact doing the work for which one is best
fitted, is minimum Justice. Doing that work “in a certain way,”
in such a way that each of the component elements within a
man does its own work, in the way in which it would be done
in the good State, is true Justice. Understandably, then, Plato |
dislikes democracy. For its ideal is not Human Excellence based *
on specialisation, but the denial of it based on the versa-
tility which Pericles lauded in the Funeral Speech. And because
it is this, it is Injustice projected into the political system. The
Good State is thus the Just State, because it fulfils the idea of
Human Excellence. It will also be the Efficient State, because in
it everybody does only what he is best at. But we must be careful
net to conclude, as has sometimes been done, that Plato con-
fuses the Just State with the Efficient State. That would be to
put the cart before the horse. For Plato the State is efficient be-
cause it is just, it is not just because it is efficient. In it the
individual will be the just individual. In it will be the fullest
harmonious co-operation of various elements which together
form a whole. In it each of those elements, because it does what
it is best at, makes for the best working of the whole. “The in-
tention was,” says Socrates, “that each individual should always
be put to the use for which Nature intended him, one to one
work, and then every man would do his own business, and be
one and not many; and so the whole city would be one and not
many.” Thus whereas ignorance and stasis, the first leading to
the second, characterise the actual State, specialisation and har-
30 POLIELCA L Tio
UG HY

mony, the first also leading to the second, characterise the good
State in which men can live out their days in peace, contempla-
tion, and happiness.
Convinced that the best should rule and that each should
occupy the place and do the work for which he is best suited,
Plato knows well enough that even the best fall from grace and
that men show the greatest reluctance to remaining in their due
places. Certain precautions, of an educational, social, biological,
and religious kind, are, he feels, necessary to ensure that all, in-
cluding the guardians, shall do as they must if the State is
indeed to be the good State.
Of these the most important is the educational. There are no
constitutional safeguards in Plato’s Republic against the abuse of
unlimited power. If those who possess power wish to misuse it,
then, in Plato’s view, irreparable damage to the State has already
been done. Their minds must be so directed towards the good
and so strengthened against evil that they will not wish to mis-
use it. Thus the only safeguard against the abuse of power
worth anything at all lies in the character and minds of those
who exercise it. Mr. Attlee, it might be noticed in passing, when
he spoke the words that U.N.E.S.C.O. has taken as its slogan,
“Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of
men that we must seek to prevent them,” was being a good
Platonist. To develop character and train the mind is the business
of education, which becomes the most important function of the
State. Because this is so, much of the Republic is devoted to the
problems of education. About the art of government or legisla-
tion as we would understand it, nothing is said there. For poli-
tics in the modern sense of the word we look in vain. Instead we
find a long discussion of poetry and music, which must seem
to us excessive even though we remember Hitler’s love of Wagner
and suspect that there might, after all, be a connection between
the “Ring of the Nibelungs” and the destruction into which
Hitler dragged his country and Europe. Instead we find a long
discussion about the value of abstract science and the principles
of education, so that it is no exaggeration to say, as Rousseau
did, that the Republic is not a political system but the finest
treatise on education ever written.
It is typical of Plato that he makes no provision for the educa-
tion of the lowest classes. They may be presumed to reap some
incidental benefits from the care lavished on the education of
 EFOW obT ALL BEGAN 31

others, but if so it is only incidental and unconsidered. For the

guardians and the guards Plato prescribes a careful training
through the emotions, by means of gymnastics, a rigorous
physical training which included a knowledge of medicine and
dieting, and music, a subtle shaping of the imagination through
all the arts. From the earliest days, he maintains, children must
be submitted to the moulding influence alone of all that is noble
and good. It cannot be hoped that they will grow strong and
straight if they are “reared amongst images of vice, as upon un-
wholesome pastures, culling much every day by little and little
from many places and feeding upon it, until they insensibly
accumulate a large mass of evil in their inmost souls.” All bane-
ful influences must be removed from them. Poets, for instance,
who feel impelled to tell the story of Kronos eating his sons and
daughters, to advertise the adulteries of Aphrodite, to amuse
with amorous adventures of Zeus, king of gods and men, and
his ingenuity in slipping away from his jealous consort, the ox-
eyed Hera, must be forbidden the State. During their youth the
guardians and guards will study mathematics, for this is a
means of “purging and rekindling an organ of the soul which
would otherwise be spoiled and blinded, an organ more worth
saving than ten thousand eyes, for by it alone the truth is seen.”
But they will not confine themselves to that empirical observa-
tion which is good enough for shop-keeper, soldier, and sailor,
for that will not “lead the soul to look upwards.” They will
rather study mathematics scientifically, for it is scientific study
which makes “‘the natural intelligence useful instead of useless.”
Mathematics provide both a development of logical thinking, a
mental gymnastic and an actual introduction to truth. Of course
immature minds cannot open and grow under the influence of
mathematics, as will more mature minds. But they can gain
something, so long as it is remembered that they should not be
forced to study, but introduced to it as to a game, and that ath-
letic exercise in this period is of outstanding importance.
After selection, about the age of twenty, the more promising
will undergo another course of education lasting ten years. This
will comprise an intensified study of mathematics and of “dia-
lectic.” “Dialectic,” as Plato originally used it, meant no more
than oral discussion by question and answer. Then it came to
mean the process by which man’s mind tries to reach truth by
means of question and answer, either by discussion with others
32 POLITICAL THOUGHT

or by “inner dialogue” with itself. Finally by dialectic Plato

implied the living embodiment of truth itself. A dialectician,
he says, is one who “can give account both to himself and
others of the essential nature of any given thing.” And in the
ten years between twenty and thirty the main objective of edu-
cation will be to “bring within the compass of a single survey the
detached sciences in which they were educated as children so as
to show the co-relation which exists between them, and the
nature of real existence.” A further selection is followed by
another five years’ study of dialectic, to see who is capable of
freeing himself from sense perception and pressing on to true
Being, of converting, as Plato says, the soul to reality.
But even now the education of the ruler is unfinished. After
fifteen years’ study of dialectic come fifteen years of practical
experience, of schooling in action and further training in char-
acter. All along the pupils have been under the closest of super-
vision and at least since the beginning of their adult education
exposed to special temptation, “tried more thoroughly than gold
is tried in the fire,” so that the incorruptibility and self-control of
the future leaders can be established beyond all doubt. And in
this final period of fifteen years’ practical experience they are
once again “put to the test to see whether they will continue
steadfast notwithstanding every seduction, or whether possibly
they may be a little shaken.” In particular they will be watched
to see that dialectic has not, as it were, turned sour in them. For
young philosophers, like young puppies, like to tear things to
pieces, and the speculative spirit which is desirable may become
the spirit of revolution which is not.
Now, at the age of fifty, those who have stayed the course,
who “through their whole life have done what they thought
advantageous to the State and inflexibly refused to do what
they thought the reverse,” are “‘to be introduced to their final
task, and must be constrained to lift up the eye of the soul, and
fix it upon that which gives light to all things; and having
surveyed the essence of good, they must take it as a pattern, to
be copied in that work of regulating their country and their
fellow-citizens and themselves, which is to occupy each in turn
during the rest of life; and though they are to pass most of their
time in philosophical pursuits, yet each when his turn comes
is to devote himself to the hard duties of public life, and hold
office for their country’s sake, not as a desirable but as an un-
 HOW IT ALL BEGAN 33
avoidable occupation.” With the original material, “philo-
sophical, high-spirited, swift-footed, and strong,” thus perfected,
the rulers will exercise power in the best interests of the whole,
the ideal State will be realised, and its people, balanced in soul,
will be just and happy.
The second of the precautions that Plato takes against the
abuse of power and the tendency of men to lust after functions
other than those for which they are naturally best suited is a
social one. The guardians and the guards are to live a life very
different from that of the producers, one in which they must
forgo all that makes life for the ordinary man worth living.
They are not to own any property, for from the union in the
same hands of political and economic power have sprung so
many of the troubles of the world. If there is not a complete
divorce between ruling and owning, rulers will not rule for the
good of all but will use their power to increase their wealth, and
owners, who lack the qualifications necessary for the proper exer-
cise of power, will seek to seize control of the State. Signifi-
cantly enough, when Plato analyses the corruptions of the ideal
State he traces them all to that degeneration of men which leads
to the union of political and economic power. Everything, there-
fore, used by guardians and guards will be held in common.
They will have no private homes, but will live a hard barrack-
room existence, receiving that bare maintenance deemed neces-
sary for soldiers on unending garrison duty. Theirs, moreover,
is a thorough-going Communism which extends even to wives
and children. The rulers mate for a season, but do not marry for
life, and their children are taken from them and put into public
nurseries so that the parents do not even recognise them as their
own. For as history has so clearly shown, family affairs too fre-
quently distort the attention and undermine the integrity of
rulers, and it would seem that the only way of ensuring that
love of family will not take precedence over love of the State is
to abolish the family altogether. Thus deprived of property, of
homes, and of family life, nothing can come between them and
their service to the State. They will discharge their work as they
should, and others, contemplating the extent of their sacrifice
and preferring ee comfort and children to the stud-farm
and the study, will not envy them nor, at that price, wish to
discharge it for them.
The third of the precautions which Plato feels to be desirable
34 POLITICAL THOWGEHT

in his good State is a biological one. He is a believer in eugenics,

and since the duty of guardians and guards is to “beget children
for the State,” it follows that they cannot be allowed to mate
when and with whom they like. They must beget children when
the State directs and with partners whom it chooses. ‘““The best
of both sexes ought to be brought together as often as possible,
and the worst as seldom as possible,” Socrates says, “and the
issue of the former unions ought to be reared, and that of the
latter abandoned.” ‘An ingenious system of lots,’ Plato believes,
can be contrived to reconcile the worst to the infrequency of
their marital relations—possibly one may reflect that it would
have had to be very ingenious indeed to serve its purpose ade-
quately. Brave men “will be allowed to enter into marriage
relations more frequently than others will, and to exercise more
than the usual liberty of choice in such matters, so that as many
children as possible may be obtained from a father of this char-
acter.” A distinguished soldier on active service may claim special
privileges. “No one whom he has a mind to kiss,” says Plato,
“should be permitted to refuse him that satisfaction.” Prefer-
ences of others will not be considered. But brave eugenist as he
is, Plato acknowledges that the children of the best may not be
the best, though the chances are that they will, and that the
children of producers may be natural guardians or guards,
though the chances are that they won’t. Where this happens, the
children must be transferred to the classes for which they are best
fitted. Plato’s classes, therefore, are not the closed hereditary
classes which they have been made out to be.
For good measure Plato adds a precaution of a religious kind
to ensure the right working of his State. He introduces an alle-
gory or myth which is to be incorporated in the traditions of the
State, so that in time it will be accepted by all, including the
guardians, and will reconcile all to their particular status in the
State. The myth teaches that God mixed gold, silver, and iron
in men, and that those mixed with gold are the rightful rulers,
those with silver the true guards, and those with iron the proper
producers. Hence each should accept the place which corre-
sponds to the very nature that God has given him, and so pro-
mote the stability and justice of the State. Myths in the Republic,
like parables in the Bible, show us truth in a graphic and in-
timate way. But this particular myth has done much to dis-
credit Plato. For his description of it has been frequently mis-
 HOW IT ALL BEGAN 35

translated “‘noble lie,” and used to suggest that he is instilling

?

false opinions into minds unable to resist them. The translation

of Vaughan and Davies, “a single spirited fiction,” suggests
more truly what Plato meant. He was not attempting to incul-
cate a belief which was false and known to be false, but which
would, nevertheless, make it easier for the ruling class to sup-
press incipient discontent. He was trying to convey one of the |
most important of political truths—nothing less than the idea of |
Human Excellence, the truth that men are not born equal but |
with very different capacities, and that that will be the best State
in which those different capacities are directed to the task for
which they are best suited. Plato knew the importance of tradi-
tion and of the unseen. If, therefore, he was able to mould a
religious tradition, that would, he felt, be one way of helping to
preserve the good State. But that State was not founded on a
lie. On the contrary, it was the vision of Truth itself that had
given it birth.
This, then, was the Idea of the Polis that Plato believed to be
laid up in heaven. Did he hope that it could be built on earth?
Here his language seems contradictory. He tells us “the city is
founded in words; for on earth I imagine it nowhere exists.”
Yet he also says: “It is not impossible; nor do we speak of
things that are impossible, though even by ourselves they are
admitted to be difficult.” Actually the contradiction is more ap-
parent than real. His republic is an archetype, and when Plato
is thinking of it as such he knows that it can never exist in this
world and says so. But an archetype is also a criterion whereby,
in this case, existing States can be judged. Actual phenomena,
as he says in the Phedo, “‘Aim at being,” even though they fall
short and are unable to be like their archetypes. There is no
reason why they should not be strengthened in their aim, why
they should not approach the archetype more nearly than they
do at the moment, even though they can never reach it fully.
Hence Plato can say that it is not impossible, though difficult,
to make changes in existing States which will make them ap-
proximate more closely to the archetype. For in his republic
we have at least a vision of the good. And some day somewhere
that State may come into being which, imperfect as it must
necessarily be, will still be a sufficiently close copy of the Idea
to justify the title of the Good State.
36 PODDERLCA Dat OG er

The State and the Individual

Plato’s theory of the State is an organic theory. He compares
the State to the natural body of a man, saying that when a
finger is hurt the whole body feels the pain, and that when a
member of the State is hurt all will likewise suffer. That State
for him is the best in which the unity is that of the natural man.
Moreover, he was not, of course, a liberal, as his attitude to truth
shows. He emphatically did not believe “that the best test of
truth is the power of thought to get itself accepted in the com-
petition of the market.”’ Rather he believed in a Gresham’s law
of ideas—that the bad would drive out the good, and he en-
deavoured in ways of which liberalism could never approve to
make sure that they did not. He even expelled the poet from the
republic, a proceeding which to Western democratic eyes is
unpleasing—even though we should perhaps agree that this was
only because to the Greeks the poet was far more than he is to
us, since the cape of the Muse was also the mantle of the
Prophet, and that all that Plato was seeking to do was to take
the poet out of the pulpit. He was no democrat but the most
formidable opponent that democracy has ever had. He attached
little value to and took little interest in the majority of pro-
ducers. And so it might well seem that he sacrificed the indi-
vidual to the State.
Some of the views and practices to be found in the Republic
would certainly suggest that he did. He says that the happiness
of the whole is more important than that of the part, that the
happiness of the State comes before that of any one of its three
classes. He does not even allow to his two highest classes the
right to their own bodies, which, as the regulations for marriage
in the Republic show, are nothing more than the incidental
means to the procreation of the State. He insists that his lowest
class obey the rulers without question so that “the desires of
the vulgar many may be controlled by the desires and wisdom
of the cultivated few,” and he makes the cultivated few give
up all their private interests to those of the State. He says that
the life of every individual has meaning only from the function
he performs in the organism of the State. He maintains that the
supreme good is the unity of the whole.
Nevertheless, it would be wrong to conclude that Plato sacri-
ficed the individual to the State. It is worth remembering that
the Republic is not primarily a discussion of Justice as applied
 HOw “kT ALL BEGAN 37

to the social order. Its real interest is in Justice in the individual,

and Justice is examined in the State only because the State is the
individual writ large. For Plato is concerned not with civics but
with souls—a concern not to be found in writers who can be
legitimately accused of sacrificing the individual to the State.
We cannot forget, either, that in the good State the individual is
not denied but is fulfilled. The image of the teamster that Plato
applied to Themistocles and Pericles he would have applied to
himself. If individuals in his republic had been ungrateful, he
would have seen in that a condemnation of it. And they
would be ungrateful if they felt frustrated. But Plato is sure that
they do not feel frustrated because they are fulfilling themselves as
they can in no other way. And perhaps it can be agreed that in
his republic is a better realisation of the principle ‘from each
according to his ability, to each according to his needs” than has
ever been achieved anywhere, certainly not excluding the
U.S.S.R. The State, that is, exists for the perfection of the indi-
viduals within it, and the development of the individuals within
it perfects the State. We look in vain in the Republic for any
difference between the laws of public and private morality. The
State conforms to the ideal of the individual man, and leaves to
a later age the assertion that what is morally wrong can be
politically right. Moreover, Plato’s portrayal of the Unjust States
hammers home the lesson that it is the falling away in personal
conduct that leads to the lowering of tone in public life and to
the passing of power into unfit hands for “constitutions are not
born of oak and rock, but grow out of the characters in each
city.” It is, incidentally, one of these Unjust States, the Tyrant
State, the caricature of his republic, that is to be compared with
the Totalitarian States of the 2oth century. It, like them, is
driven by that fundamental vice that Plato calls “pleonexia,” the
hunger tormore and more, which leads to the corruption of the
soul. To compare his republic to them is to miss the whole
point of Plato’s teaching, which is that the purpose of the State
is the production of noble characters, that the true greatness of
States is to be measured by the personal worth of their citizens.
And at last he leaves us with the idea that even though his,
republic cannot exist on earth man can by contemplating the
eternal pattern build himself into the true State, can realise the’
State within himself. So the “celestial city,” like the Kingdom of
God, is really within us, and in our daily actions it is up to us
38 POLITICAL THOUGHT
to try to fulfil its laws, “so far as is possible to live like an
immortal,” as Plato says in the Laws. George Herbert’s “Who
sweeps a room, as for Thy laws, makes that and the action fine”’
is thoroughly Platonic. “It is unimportant whether the perfect
state exists anywhere or will exist in the future,”’ Plato says,
“for the just man fulfils the law of that state and of no other.”
Anyone who can write that has not sacrificed the individual to
the State. He has founded human personality not on man-made
law but on eternal standards.

The Greeks and the Organic Theory of the State

It is unfortunate that limitations of space preclude a full analy-
sis of Aristotle’s contribution to political thought. For his mind
was in no way inferior to Plato’s. His conception of growth, his
belief that everything moves to a perfect embodiment of itself
and that the nature of anything is not what it is here and now
but what it is capable of becoming under the best possible cir-
cumstances, has been one of the most fruitful ideas in political
thought. He began that method of observation and of deducing
general conclusions from actual practice which has, as it were,
anchored political thought to earth. His interest in the
“Politeia,” his concern with the best good in existing circum-
stances, his conviction that we must take States as they are and
do the best we can with them, his belief that political thought
must combine a knowledge of political good and of political
mechanics, his insistence on the value of the rule of law or
“disembodied wisdom,”’ his realisation that some constitutions
would not grow in certain soils, all played a great part in the
development of political thought.
But, after all, the stamp of the master is plainly to be seen in
the pupil. For Aristotle man is a political animal, one who
can only fulfil himself in the Polis. So Plato had believed. For
Aristotle the State is a moral institution, existing not that man
might live but that he might live the good life. From that view
Plato never wavered. For Aristotle every true State must seek
the welfare of all its members, not of a part only—and it was
Plato who first taught this. In spite of Aristotle’s criticisms,
usually niggling though occasionally trenchant, of Plato, the
difference between them is more formal than real.
Above all, Aristotle accepts the organic view of the State. The
individual, he says, is to the State as the bodily organ is to the
 HOw? At AC, BEGAN 39

body, citizen and bodily organ being equally insufficient by

themselves. ‘“The State,” he writes in a famous phrase, “‘is prior
to the individual.”’ We cannot, that is, conceive of the part until
we have first conceived of the whole to which the part belongs.
The part has meaning only in relation to the whole, as the hand
has meaning only in relation to the body. And as a hand is not
a hand unless it is attached to the body, so man is not man
unless he is attached to the State. Again, when Aristotle speaks
of the deformity of States it is to the analogy of the body that
he turns. He reminds us that the exaggeration of any part of
the State is like the exaggeration of any part of the body. And
he criticises Plato because he says that Plato has not sufficiently
realised that differentiation of parts is characteristic of the higher
kind of organisms.
Moreover, as with Plato so with Aristotle, the charge that he
sacrifices the individual to the State is misleading. For if to
Aristotle the State is natural in the sense that without it men
will not fulfil their nature, if it is natural in the sense that men
cannot make it entirely as they would wish, cannot, for in-
stance, determine its size according to the whim of the mo-
ment; if it is an organism, it is nevertheless one the growth of
which they can help and the character of which they can change.
The very intimacy of the Polis is such that in it the individual
is not sacrificed but fulfilled. Hence for Aristotle it is true to say
that the good of the State and the good of the individual are |
indistinguishable. He makes it plain that his State is a genuine
whole, and that in any genuine whole there is no distinction
between the general welfare and the welfare of the parts. He
clears himself of the charge that Plato lays himself open to,
namely that there is a difference between the happiness of the
State, which is important, and the happiness of the citizens,
which is not. “Happiness,” he says, “is not a conception like
that of evenness in number that may be predicated of the whole
number without being predicated of its component parts. . . .”
And it is worth remembering that the Greeks were in less
danger than we are of seeking the good of citizens in power and
in riches which in the nature of things cannot be shared by all.
Like Plato, Aristotle uses the same word justice to denote the
virtue of the individual and the virtue of the citizen. Like Plato
he refuses to set the State above morality. “The same things are
best for individuals and States,” he writes. Clearly, for Aris-
40 POLITICAL THOUGHT

totle as for Plato, the State and the individual are complementary
not contradictory.
But if this is so, there is, nevertheless, an important point to
be noticed in both Plato and Aristotle. The Organic Theory of
the State, as a complete theory of the State expressed in terms
of the fulfilment of men in and through it, must provide for the
fulfilment of all men, not merely of some men. But it is mani-
festly impossible that all men should rule. Some must be ruled.
Hence, as Aristotle saw quite clearly, the Organic Theory of
the State implies a belief in the permanent inequality of men—
“for wherever a single common whole is formed out of a num-
ber of elements, a ruler and a ruled is to be found.” If all men’s
natures must be fulfilled and if some men must be ruled, it fol-
lows that some men must be natural leaders and some men
must be by nature led. Plato’s republic is based on the most
thorough-going acceptance of this fact. Aristotle’s exclusion from
his state of mechanics and slaves, his distinction between parts
that are integral and parts that are contributory, the one being
citizens and the other not, similarly reflects it. This view that
some must be naturally the ruled and some naturally the rulers
is really an unavoidable result of organic teaching. It is true that
Plato and Aristotle do not sacrifice the individual in the way
that he might be said to be sacrificed, for instance, by Hegel. It is
true that their State exercises a much more direct and more
lively appeal than does Hegel’s. But it is also true that Plato
and Aristotle show what some will regard as an essential weak-
ness of the Organic Theory of the State, though to others it
will be no more than the truth, namely its deep conviction of the
permanent inequality of men which so readily lends itself to
the belief that some men are by nature no more than the in-
struments of others. My little toe is less important than my
right hand, and my right hand less important than my head. If
the analogy of body and State be taken too seriously, it can so
easily follow that some classes of citizens are regarded as so
much less important than others that concern for their welfare
soon disappears. If one can accept the idea of Human Excellence,
can believe that each acquires significance only in the making
of his own highly specialised contribution to society, and
can also believe that that contribution accords most miracu-
lously with the structural needs of society, no doubt the Organic
Theory of the State may seem sufficient. If one cannot, how-
 HOW tT ALL BEGAN 41

ever, accept the idea of Human Excellence and all that it implies,
the weakness of that theory will be clear.
Not the least importance of Plato and Aristotle is that in them
we see the Organic Theory of the State in all its strength, and
that at the same time we see its limitations clearly revealed. Yet
nothing more inspiring in political thought has ever been writ-
ten than these first and greatest works in the Rational-Natural
tradition. As long as we are interested in the affairs of man in
society, we will constantly find ourselves returning to the men
who made political thought, to the masters whose voices can
still reach over the years, from whose wisdom we can still draw
strength for the tasks of today and inspiration for the days
ahead.
 CHAPTER II

THE STAT EAS MACHINE

(Tuomas Hoszes; Joun Locke; THe UTILirar1IANs—JEREMY
BENTHAM, JoHN Stuart Mir)
The Failure of the Rational-Natural Tradition
us Rational-Natural view of the State which we have seen
in the works of Plato and Aristotle inspired tne Cos-
mopolis, or World State, of the Stoics and reappeared in
the great work of the Jurists of the Roman Empire. Thence it
passed over into Christianity, and was supreme in the Natural
Law theory of the Middle Ages, even though admittedly then
the State as we know it did not exist. At intervals in that long
period another view of the State, the view of the State as Will
and Artifice, strove for expression. It is to be seen in the so-
called “Hard” Sophists, who taught that there are no ideal
models to copy and that Justice is made by man himself. It is to
be seen in the teaching of Epicurus who held that the State
was not a divine inspiration guiding man’s footsteps to Eternal
Truth, but no more than a device of his own making to enable
him to put up with one of life’s major inconveniences—the
existence of other people. It is the idea behind the Roman con-
ception of Lex or Law which at first sight seems to correspond
to the Greek idea of Nomos or Law, but which is in fact funda-
mentally different from it, Lex being thought of as creating
something new while Nomos was thought of as discovering
something that was already there, namely Eternal Truth. It
appears again in the Hebrew and Christian conceptions of
Divine Will and Creation, and it is reflected in St. Augustine’s
view of the peace of God. It strongly coloured the writings of
the Nominalists of the 13th and 14th centuries, of William of
Occam, Duns Scotus and Marsilius of Padua, for whom civil
society is artificial, a mere contrivance of men to ensure peace
and order, and what they themselves call Justice.
But it was only in the 17th century, when the individualism of
the Nominalists reached full blossom, that the hold upon poli-
tical thinking of the Natural-Rational view of the State began
 THE STATE AS MACHINE 43

appreciably to relax. For by the 17th century the growth of scep-

ticism had undermined men’s belief in a Natural Law un-
changing and absolute, since scientific discoveries had radically
changed accepted views of Nature, Reason, and Artifice. To
17th-century philosophers the world was no longer composed,
as it was to the Greeks, of living organisms. Nature was re-
garded as a machine, though a machine that was designed by
God who could not himself be a machine. To some 17th-cen-
tury thinkers men could not be regarded as machines either, for
they have intelligence. Because of this, for instance, Galileo
concludes that man as well as God must be conceived as being
outside nature. But to others, as to Descartes and Hobbes, even
men are machines and only God is outside the natural world and
is not a machine.
It is understandable how widespread this view of nature as
a machine should be, for the 17th-century was the beginning
of the machine age. It is now that the windmill, the pump, the
printing-press, the lock, the mechanism of the clock, captured
the imagination of the Western World. More and more, men
spoke of the energy of a substance, less and less of its soul or life.
To the Greeks, Reason was not that which all men have in
little and philosophers in large; it was the natural order itself,
the very principle of the universe which ‘“‘goeth through all
things by reason of its pureness.” For the r7th-century thinker,
however, it had become a faculty by which men draw conclusions
from their observations. It was no longer something which tells
man what he ought to do, still less what he wants to do; rather
it was that which taught him how to achieve what his passions
desired. As Hume was later to say, “Reason is and ought to
be the slave of the passions.” To the Greeks, whatever was the
work of man was but a copy of already existing Reality. To the
17th century, what man made was genuinely original and
creative. As God created the world from nothing, so whatever
man makes he also creates from nothing.

The Tradition of Will and Artifice

This new idea of Nature, of Reason, and of Artifice combined
to create a new view of the State as being the result of Will and
Artifice. Since Nature itself is a mechanism, society and the
State must obviously be mechanisms. The artist who creates
these machines is man, and who wishes therefore to understand
44 POLITICAL THOUGHT

the State must clearly begin by understanding its maker, man.

His creation, the State, is a genuinely free creation, not a copy-
ing of something already existing. His act in creating the State
is not an act of reason or science, it is not dependent on any
knowledge of absolute standards, because these do not exist, and
Right and Justice, for instance, come into being only with the
State. It is an act of will and of artifice.
This view of the State as Will and Artifice begins with the
individual being sovereign over himself, and is an attempt to
answer the questions: How can men compose such a State?
Why should they want to compose such a State? What sort of
State can such individuals compose? The State, it concludes,
must be the result of a genuine agreement on the part of in-
dividuals, a creative agreement which for the first time brings
law and order into the world. It substitutes order for chaos and,
as the price of the benefit, it extracts from man acknowledg-
ment of obligations that he never knew before. But these obliga-
tions are no more than he has consented to, and indeed the only
basis for their existence is his consent. Men want the State, this
view maintains, because it provides something which Nature
does not—that is, peace, order, and possibly prosperity. The lack
of order, which it is for the State to remedy, arises not because
men are bad but because they are men. The State’s task is not
to remove a defect of, but to impose a necessary check on,
human nature. In civil society, therefore, man’s slogan must be
not “follow nature’ but “reject nature.” And the State that
men make, since it must essentially be a limitation of their
sovereignty over themselves, must establish a will over them
that is superior to theirs. But there can be no question of its
creating a superior reason—Will, not Reason, is the nature of the
State. It will thus be an authoritarian State in the sense that its
distinguishing characteristic will be the possession of supreme
power—although of course its authoritarian nature will be more
emphasised by some of the writers of this school than by others.
But it will be authoritarian only because the people have con-
sented in this way to limit their own sovereignty.

The State as Machine

This conception of the State as a machine continued to make
an appeal to men long after the 17th century; its adherents to-
day are numerous. Naturally many of the ideas of the 17th cen-
 THE STATE AS MACHINE 45

tury are not acceptable to contemporary thinkers who regard

the State as a machine. Nevertheless, they still retain the essen-
tials of the 17th-century view. Indeed, all to whom the State is
a machine have sufficient in common for it to be seen that they
belong to this same Will and Artifice tradition of the State that
we have been discussing.
Thus all see the State as something made by man to suit his
particular purposes. Either implicitly, or more usually explicitly,
they distinguish between State and Society as of course Organic
theories of the State do not, regarding the State not as the
whole of society but only as a special organisation of society.
This distinction is extremely important to them, not least be-
cause it enables them—how satisfactorily is a matter of opinion
—to meet the charge that men do not in fact construct States but
are born into them, and that in consequence it is absurd to
maintain that States which may have existed for centuries are
merely machines, no more than governmental devices. Society,
they admit, may be a natural growth, but at some stage of that
growth, they say, it creates what it finds necessary for its con-
tinued survival, namely the State which is therefore to be re-
garded after all as a machine. Because in Mechanistic theories
the State is something made by man, he must obviously be more
real than his creation. A machine is not alive as an organism is
—what significance and unity it possesses it derives purely from
its creator. It is therefore something which exists for man, not,
as Organic theories would have it, something for which man
exists. It is something which establishes a superior will, not a
superior reason, as Organic theories would have us believe. What
characterises it is its possession and exercise of supreme regulat-
ing power. And this power it uses, not to create a common or
general good, which does not exist, but to harmonise interests
which do. The good of us all, Mechanistic theories of the State
insist, may be inter-dependent, but it remains our good and is
never that of a collective entity which we call the Community
or the State.
It is the purpose of this chapter to examine these views in
the writings of Thomas Hobbes, perhaps the greatest of Eng-
lish Political Theorists; of John Locke, who for a century was
the acknowledged master of English and American, and even to
some extent of European, political thought; and of the Utili-
tarians. whose intellectual dominance in the first half of the
46 POLITICAL THOUGHT
tgth century was as great as was Locke’s in the 18th century,
and who exercised an influence on the course of events as great
even as his.
THOMAS HOBBES, 1588-1679

His Life and Writings

In the year of the Armada, Hobbes said, his mother gave
birth to twins—himself and fear. He might perhaps have more
truly said himself and pugnacity. He never thought it necessary
to introduce much discrimination into the catholicity of his dis-
likes—brushes with Aristotle, the medieval schoolmen, Oxford
mathematicians, the Pope and the Church of Rome in particular
and all Churches in general, were not enough to satisfy his com-
bative instinct, and at the age of eighty-five we find him translat-
ing the I/iad and the Odyssey into English verse with the charit-
able intention of providing his critics, who in their previous
encounters with him had only been able to reveal their folly, some
slight opportunity of displaying their wit. We may suspect that
his parade of fear served its purpose in enabling him to say to his
seidieed: “Human nature is as I say it is. Just look at me.” And
we may even reflect that not every philosopher would have the
courage to draw attention in himself to what are normally con-
sidered defects of character in order to prove the validity of his
theory.
He was the son of a vicar, which may explain his very
thorough knowledge of Scripture and conceivably also his lack of
enthusiasm for religion. He was educated at Malmesbury, which
was near his home at Westport, and at Oxford, of which his
main recollection seems to have been the “frequency of insig-
nificant speech” he encountered there. On leaving the Univer-
sity he became tutor to the heir of William Cavendish, later
Earl of Devonshire, thus establishing a connection that was to
last for most of his life, and one which brought him into con-
tact with leading figures of his day, such as Ben Jonson, Bacon
and Clarendon at home, and Galileo abroad.
Though before he was fifty-two his only published work was
a translation of Thucydides, he had long felt an interest in
philosophy, an interest which was greatly stimulated by his dis-
covery of the world of mathematics. His first philosophical work,
The Elements of Law, was finished in 1640, but not published
until 1650. With the outbreak of the Civil War, he removed to
 THE STATE AS MACHINE 47

Paris, writing De Cive, which was published in 1642. Here

he became for a time tutor to Charles II, a post for which he
might have been considered remarkably fitted since he believed
on hygienic grounds in getting drunk once a month. But he
held it for a short time only, for his suspected atheism seemed
far too immoral even to that émigré court, which so enthusi-
astically practised the precept that profligacy is the prerogative
of princes. However, his energies were not diverted by his brief
excursion into royal pedagogics, and his masterpiece, the
Leviathan, was published in 1651.
The following year he was back in Protectorate England, in
which, to his surprise, he seems to have found a closer resem-
blance to his Leviathan than he had been able to discern in
France. In England he rejoined the Devonshire household,
where he remained for the rest of his life, publishing De
Corpore in 1655 and De Homuine in 1659. Charles II, in
whom Hobbes’s theory of human nature seems to be at least as
well illustrated as in Hobbes himself, and who liked to be
amused, received him at court after the Restoration. “Here
comes the bear to be baited,” Charles would say when Hobbes
appeared, and since the bear could always be relied upon to give
a handsome performance when baited, Charles thought him well
deserving of the handsome pension that he gave him. Hobbes
died at Chatsworth at the age of 91, full of years, full of works,
and full, if not of honour, at least of notoriety.
In the dedication of the Leviathan to Francis Godolphin,
Hobbes spoke of the possibility of his labour being “generally
decried.” In this he was not mistaken. Soon after the publica-
tion of Leviathan, his critics were in full cry after him, sounding
the note of horror at his materialism and indignation at his des-
potism that has rung down the years. The role of major devil
in modern political thought was not open to him, as Machia-
velli had already been cast for the part, but if the wickedness of
another had deprived him of pride of place, it was very gener-
ally recognised that he was Machiavelli’s worthy if necessarily
junior satanic colleague. Clarendon protested at his “lewd prin-
ciples.” Whitehall found Leviathan “as full of damnable
opinions as a toad is of poison,” “a rebel’s catechism,” “‘good
doctrine for a Popish Cabal.” Bramhill thought it “right dog’s
play,” and believed that it would “put all to fire and flame.”
“Nilus after a great overflowing,” he wrote, “doth not leave
 48 POLITICAL THOUGHT
such a confusion after it as he doth; nor a Hog in a Garden of
Herbs.”” Rosse was convinced that it would reduce all to “the
condition of those who live under the Turk, the Muscovite,
Prester John, and the Mogul.” What else, Cowley asked, could
be expected of “the Monster of Malmesbury’’?
To those who, after the Plague and the Fire of London, were
looking around for the cause of the wrath of God so plainly re-
vealed, it appeared that any community which had not de-
cisively spewed forth Hobbes and his damnable doctrines must
expect to invite the attentions of the Avenging Angel, attentions
which a committee of bishops sought to avoid in future by con-
sidering, albeit fruitlessly, ways and means of ensuring that a
life that was so obviously poor, solitary, nasty, and brutish, would
not be further prolonged. Yesterday his was “the meanest of all
ethical theories” justifying ‘“‘the most universal of absolutisms.”’
And today Professor Willey can portray him as that devout if
disputatious disciple of peace whose every statement was in-
spired by hatred of schoolmen and clerics or by love of that
ordered living in a stable commonwealth of which the violence
of Civil War in England and the selfish irresponsibility of revo-
lution in France deprived him, and whose effortless skill in
suiting his views to his circumstances must have been the ad-
miration and the hopeless envy even of the Vicar of Bray.
But though his critics are legion and his confessed admirers
few, Hobbes continues to be read and to make a powerful
appeal. Though the exaggeration he allowed himself, the savage
arrogance which is rarely far from his pages, may offend, the
profound, incisive mind must attract, and his style, perhaps more
elaborate, more sonorous, richer in imagery than we are accus-
tomed to, but powerful and pungent enough to halt even our
punyang age, must see He possessed in full measure the
“powerful eloquence” which he said “procureth attention and
consent,” and without which he believed ‘“‘the effect of reason
will be little.” Indeed, he is one of the great stylists of English
political philosophy, worthy to rank with such masters of Eng-
lish prose as Hooker and Milton and Burke.
In his pages the pertinent, the profound, and the pithy are
waiting at every turn to reward the eager traveller. It is per-
haps unlikely that he will ever be quoted extensively on those
calendars which conceive it to be their duty not merely to in-
dicate the date but to suggest a profound reflection for the day,
 LRESSTATE AS MACHINE 49

a fate to which he has, nevertheless, exposed himself, for the

Leviathan alone is as full of quotations as Hamlet. “Words,”
we read, “are wise men’s counters; they do but reckon with
them, but they are the money of fools,” or “Where men build
on false grounds, the more they build the greater is the ruin,”
or “The understanding is by the flame of the passions, never
enlightened, but dazzled.” Here is homely, convincing common
sense. “If Livy says the Gods made once a cow speak, and we
believe it not, we distrust not God therein, but Livy.” “Men give
different names to one and the same thing, from the difference of
their own passions: as they that approve a private opinion, call it
opinion; but they that mislike it, heresy; and yet heresy signi-
fies no more than private opinion; but has only a greater tincture
of choler.” Here is keen historical insight. Every schoolboy
knows the passage: “If a man consider the original of this great
Ecclesiastical Dominion, he will easily perceive that the Papacy
is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sit-
ting crowned on the grave thereof.”” And of how much of the
world’s history must we regard this as an illuminating text:
“And from hence it comes to pass, that where an invader hath
no more to fear than another man’s single power; if one plant,
sow, build, or possess a convenient seat, others may probably be
expected to come prepared with forces united to dispossess, and
deprive him, not only of the fruits of his labour, but also of his
life, or liberty. And the invader again is in like danger of
another’? Certainly a history of international relations could
well be written under his inscription: “Men have no pleasure,
but on the contrary a great deal of grief, in keeping company
where there is no power able to overawe them all.”
Again and again one finds the contemporary relevance of his
words almost breath-taking. Those engaged today in building
up the defences of the West would echo from the heart his
words: “For all men are by nature provided of notable multi-
plying glasses, that is their passions and self-love, through which
every little payment appeareth a great grievance; but are destitute
of those prospective glasses, namely moral and civil science, to
see afar off the miseries that hang over them, and cannot with-
out such payments be avoided.” Those who since the second
world war have tried in vain to construct an international agree-
ment on the control of atomic energy are bitterly aware of “‘this
easy truth, that covenants being but words and breath, have no
50 POLITICAL THOUGHT

force to oblige, contain, constrain, or protect any man, but what

it has from the public sword.” Those who are wondering how
best democratic institutions may be handed over to primarily
primitive and possibly plural communities would have no diff-
culty in agreeing with him when he says: “To put an infant into
the power of those that can promote themselves by his destruc-
tion, or damage, is not tuition but treachery.”
One could multiply his aphorisms a hundredfold, as one could
his comments on which we would do well to ponder today.
But enough has been said to make it clear that he does not
belong to those writers whose message is merely for their age.
Of course he was influenced by the Civil War just as he was in-
fluenced by the schoolmen whom he so much disliked. Even
profound and original thinkers cannot abstract themselves from
their environment, as Plato and Aristotle make plain. But it
is one thing for a thinker to be influenced by his age and
another for him to be limited by it. Hobbes was no more limited
by his age than Plato and Aristotle were by theirs. He was con-
cerned with the particular problems of the 17th century, and
the reflections of a great mind on contemporary problems can
never lack interest. But he was more concerned with the general
problems of mankind. Like every great artist, he was attracted
by the universal in the particular—the local problem is of in-
terest only because it reveals the general problem of human
existence in a clear and familiar way. It is because this is so,
because he is no more dated than Shakespeare or Plato or Aris-
totle, that he has confounded his critics and will do so as long
as men feel, or are able to express, any interest in the questions:
“What is man?”, “What is the State?”, and “Why should he
obey it?”

His Political Theory—His View of Man

The Universe, for Hobbes, is a machine, a machine made up
of particles moving according to a mechanical law which he
believes that Galileo has shown can be determined. This move-
ment, or motion as he calls it, is the very principle of the Uni-
verse. Man is a microcosm, an epitome of the great Universe.
He also is a machine, more complicated than plants or beasts,
but composed as they are, and as the Universe is, of moving
particles. It is Hobbes’s ambition to find the law according to
which these particles move in man, and in man in relation with
 LHE STADE AS MACH INE 51

his fellows, as he believes that Galileo has found it for the Uni-
verse. Hence his insistence that any study of political society
must begin with a consideration of the nature of man. Hence
his reminder that “Read thyself” is advice which all men and
particularly all statesmen should bear in mind, advice which
they would find easier to follow when once they had read his
works. Hence his claim, “T ground the civil rights of sovereigns,
and both the duty and liberty of subjects, upon the known
natural inclinations of mankind.” Everything in man, including |
his thought, is, he believed, derived from his senses. Sense was |
itself but motion: “Original fancy, caused, as I have said, by the
pressure, that is, by the motion, of external things upon our
eyes, ears, and other organs thereunto ordained.” From sense
man acquires memory and imagination and prudence, all of|
which may be regarded as his receptive powers. These in their
turn generate further movements in man’s brain which may be
called his active powers; these are his emotions or passions.
What man desires he calls Good, and Pleasure is the move-
ment in his mind that accompanies it. What he dislikes he
calls Evil, and the movement in his mind that accompanies it he
calls Pain. Good and Evil, then, cannot be fixed and finite enti-
ties even for any individual because each individual’s desires are
not constant but changing. Still less can Good and Evil be the
same for all men. Men call the succession of emotions in their
minds prompting them to do or abstain from doing anything
deliberation. And when a decision is reached men may be said
to will whatever they decide upon.
Thus man is compelled by that very principle of motion which
is operative in the Universe to will what he desires and only
what he desires. It is impossible for him to will what another
desires. He can be moved only by the desire to get what he
wants and to preserve himself, and by the fear that he will be
unable to get what he warts or to preserve himself. It is an
illusion to think that he has any feelings which can be ascribed
to other factors than these. Laughter and sympathy, for in-
stance, may seem more generous emotions. But Hobbes would
have agreed with the remark that W. S. Landor in his Imaginary
Conversations ascribes to Lord Chesterfield that ‘‘Half the
pleasure in the world arises from malignity, and little of the
other half is free from its encroachments.” Laughter, he says,
is not a sign of good nature. It is caused “either by some sud-
52 POLITICAL THOUGHT

den act of men’s own that pleaseth them; or by the apprehension

of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof
they suddenly applaud themselves.” “Tt is,” he adds, “incident
most to them that are conscious of the fewest abilities in them-
selves; who are forced to keep themselves in their own favour
by observing the imperfections of other men.” As for the pity
that man sometimes feels, that “‘ariseth from the imagination
that the like calamity may befall himself.”
When man is successful in achieving what he wills, he is said
to enjoy Felicity. This is not to be equated with Pleasure as the
Utilitarians imagined that it was. It is “continued success in
obtaining those things which a man from time to time desireth,”
and therefore it can give man no rest, for it is not a final end, but
“a continued progress of the desire from one object to another;
the attaining of the former being still but the way to the latter.’
It is a man’s power that assures him success in the pursuit of
Felicity, his lack of power that is the cause of his failure. Thus
life is “‘a perpetual and restless desire of power after power that
ceaseth only in death,” since “man cannot assure the power and
means to live well which he hath present, without the acquisi-
tion of more.”
The individual whom Hobbes has thus described is completely
self-centred. For Hobbes every single man is an absolutely soli-
tary individual. Since knowledge comes from the senses and
different senses cannot see the same world, a man and his world
must be one and different from the world of other men. Differ-
ent individuals have absolutely separate worlds, separate
pleasures, truths, goods, and they belong to no order, moral or
politic. Hobbes, so frequently portrayed as the great absolutist, is
perhaps the greatest individualist in the history of political
thought. His is an extreme doctrine of individualism embracing
everything. He is a Nominalist of the school of Occam, and his
individualism is quite unqualified—more so, indeed, than that
of any other writer.
The individual whom he describes has, however, the possi-
bility of breaking down his solitude because he has the power of
speech. For in making a language men must agree that certain
sounds mean certain things. Moreover, language is not only a
means of communicating with others, it is the way in which we
become conscious of our own thoughts. For “a name is a word
taken at pleasure to serve as a mark that may raise in our
 ‘

THE STATE AS MACHINE 53

minds a thought like some thought we had before.” Moreover,

in this way men are enabled to pass from names to definitions,
to arguments and to reason, which is “nothing but reckoning,
that is adding and subtracting, of the consequences of general
names agreed upon for the marking and signifying of our
thoughts.” It is this faculty of reasoning which, together with
religion, distinguishes man from the brute.
Reasoning, however, is artificial, while the passions are natural
—man therefore is not primarily a creature of reason but of the ©
passions. Moreover, man’s reasoning is fallible—“‘as in arith-
methic, unpractised men must, and professors themselves may
often, err, and cast up false; so also in any other subject of
reasoning, the ablest, most attentive, and most practised men
may deceive themselves and infer false conclusions.” And
Hobbes is very well aware that if man has the ability to reason
he has also “the privilege of absurdity; to which no living
creature is subject but man.” “‘And of men,” Hobbes adds,
“those are of all most subject to it that profess philosophy. For it
is most true that Cicero saith of them somewhere: that there
can be nothing so absurd but may be found in the books of
philsophers.” Nevertheless, Reason will help man in his pursuit
of Felicity. But not even its assistance will enable him to over-
come the difficulties that he will find in his way, which spring
both from the circumstances in which he finds himself and
from an inherent defect in his own character.
Circumstances place him among fellow-men whose very exist-
ence makes it difficult for him to satisfy his desires. For many
will want what he wants, and will therefore be his deadly ene-
mies. Moreover, men seek to outdo one another, for “man,
whose joy consisteth in comparing himself with other men,
can relish nothing but what is eminent.” This urge to excel
necessitates ‘‘a perpetual contention for Honour, Riches, and
Authority.”” Contrasting men with bees and ants, Hobbes says,
“Men are continually in competition for honour and dignity,
which these creatures are not; consequently amongst men there
ariseth on that ground, envy and hatred and finally war.”
Roughly speaking, the powers of men are equal, the ingenuity
of David always being sufficient to offset the strength of Goliath.
Therefore men will always live in a condition of perpetual fear,
of competition and war.
This will be the more certain because of an inherent defect
P.T.—3
54 POLITICAL THOUGHT
in man’s intellect, vainglory or pride. This is “a vain conceit
of one’s own wisdom” and strength. For “‘such is the nature of
men, that however they may acknowledge many others to be
more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned; yet they will
hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves; for they see
their own wit at hand, and other men’s at a distance.”’ Men are
thus apt to think themselves stronger than they are, to under-
estimate the necessity of fighting continually for what they
want, to fear less than they ought to fear the frustration of their
desires and even sudden death. Blinded by their brilliance, car-
ried away by their conceit, Desire will outstrip Prudence in them
and death will be their reward.
This, then, is the state of nature in which man lives. Neither
right nor wrong, justice nor injustice, have place in it. Force
and fraud are its cardinal virtues, and the only rule that men
acknowledge is “the good old rule, the simple plan, that he
should take who has the power, and he should keep who can.”
“In such condition,” says Hobbes, “there is no place for in-
dustry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently
no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodi-
ties that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no
instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require
much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account
of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all
continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man,
solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Man’s vainglory or
pride unfits him for success in such a condition, but the condi-
tion itself is the result not of his defects but of his very nature.
The state of nature, as Hobbes sees it, is “‘the ill condition which
man by mere nature is actually placed in.” And the problem for
Hobbes is how to extricate him from a position which the very
principle of the Universe, motion, has apparently designed for
him.

His View of the State

Men would, Hobbes is sure, do anything to get out of this
desperate position in which they find themselves.
They can, he believes, get out of it because they are creatures
of passion and imagination, reason and will.
Passion and imagination teach them “‘the fear of death” and
“desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living;
 THE STATE AS MACHINE 55

and a hope by their industry to obtain them.”

Reason teaches them to obey Natural Laws, of which Hobbes
enumerates nineteen that “concern the doctrine of civil society.”
The most important of these are that men should seek peace,
without which they will not find Felicity, but that when they
cannot obtain peace they should “use all helps and advantages
of war,” that they should surrender their equal right to pos-
sess all things, provided that all do likewise, that all men should
keep the engagements that they make to do this, and that no
man should be understood to have so acted as to make the fur-
ther attainment of his Felicity impossible. All these Natural
Laws or Articles of Peace can, Hobbes says, be “‘contracted into
one easy sum, intelligible even to the meanest capacity; and that
is ‘Do not that to another which thou wouldst not have done
to thyself.’ ”
Two things are to be noticed about these Natural Laws. First,
they are not Natural Laws as commonly understood. For the
great tradition of Natural Law that goes back to the Stoics is
that of an Eternal Justice, a Perfect Morality, of which actual
law is the imperfect reflection. Natural Law is thus a measuring- |
rod to apply to existing laws to find how far short they fall of
the ideal. But Hobbes’s Natural Laws are merely “counsels of;
prudence.”’ They are what men who are able in calculating the |
changes and chances of this life would seek to do in pursuit of
Felicity. They are, to those less able, Mr. Hobbes’s ready
reckoner, obviating mistakes in calculation. In writing of
Natural Laws as he does, Hobbes is in fact saying that there are
no such things as moral rights, no clash between a man’s duty
and a man’s interest, but only an appeal from man drunk to
man sober, only a difference between bad and good calculation.
Secondly, Hobbes’s Natural Laws do not imply that there is such
a thing as a common good. They merely seek to bring into
_ being those common conditions which are necessary to fulfil
each individual good.
Will, finally, enables men to take the action that their reason
dictates to compose a society. What is necessary is a ‘“‘will not to
will,’ not to insist on one’s will on every occasion, to accept a
limitation of the will. This can be arranged if men agree to
transfer by means of a contract their absolute right to will what-
ever they like to some agreed-upon third party. Such a third
party must have a particular characteristic. He must be the
 56 POLITICAL THOUGHT
representative of each individual—that is, an artificial person dis-
tinct from the natural man. He can then will and act in place
of each individual. But he must of course be the representative,
having authority from him who is represented. His will cannot
be the common will of all, for there is no such thing. But his
representative will is a substitute for the conflicting individual
wills, and this substitution is the only way in which many men
can find unity. ‘‘A multitude of men are made one person when
they are by one man, or one person, represented; so that it be
done with the consent of every one of that multitude in particu-
lar. For it is the unity of the representer, not the unity of the
represented, that makes the person one. And it is the representer
that beareth the person, and but one person: and unity cannot
otherwise be understood in multitude.”
Such a contract must be perpetual and irrevocable, but it is
not easy to make it so. Though begot by Reason on Fear, it is
contrary to men’s instincts. Moreover, men are notorious back-
sliders. Therefore ‘it is no wonder if there be somewhat else
required, besides covenant, to make their agreement constant
and lasting.” That something is “a common power to keep them
in awe, and to direct their actions to the common benefit.”’
Clearly “covenants without the sword are but words.” The
representative of the people must also, then, be all-powerful over
the people. Thus man, who is born free, solitary, and in intel-
lectual and moral isolation, voluntarily accepts limitation of
sovereignty to achieve something else. He composes a society by
human agreement, an artifice. “This is the generation of that
reat Leviathan, or rather, to speak more reverently, of that
mortal God, to which we owe under the immortal God our
peace and defence. For by this authority, given him by every
particular man in the Commonwealth, he hath the use of so
much power and strength conferred on him that by terror there-
of he is enabled to form the wills of them all to peace at home
and mutual aid against their enemies abroad. And in him con-
sisteth the essence of the commonwealth; which, to define it, is
one person of whose acts a great multitude, by mutual cove-
nants one with another, have made themselves every one the
author, to the end he may use the strength and means of them
all, as he shall think expedient, for their peace and common
defence.”
Hobbes believes that the third party, who is the beneficiary of
 ‘

THE STATE AS MACHINE 57

the contract, the recipient of power, should be a king. As a

man he will be selfish like all men, but the self-indulgence of
one will be cheaper than the self-indulgence of many. There
will be a limit to the number of mistresses of even the most
amorous monarch, and an end even to the regality of their ex-
travagance, but the goods of the State will be exhausted more
readily than the ingenuity of a sovereign assembly in turning
them to private ends. Moreover, “in a monarchy the private
interest is the same with the public.” A king cannot be rich,
lorious, or secure, if his people are poor, contemptible, or weak.
And as he has got to the top, all his ambition lies in strengthen-
ing the State; whereas members of a democratic or aristocratic
sovereign assembly may be prompted by ambition to intrigue
against the State in the hope of seizing power, to the great
danger of the community. Indeed, Hobbes says “other govern-
ments were compacted by the artifice of men out of the ashes
of monarchy after it had been ruined by seditions.”” Hobbes’s
personal prejudices are, however, unimportant. His is a doctrine
of the absolute State, not of the absolute king. So long as it is
admitted that Leviathan possesses absolute power, whether
Leviathan be one, few, or many is a minor matter.
The characteristics of Leviathan are unmistakable. He is the
sole source of laws, and he is of course the sole interpreter of
laws. He is not subject to civil laws, although so long as he does
not repeal them he is bound by them. Hobbes has no use for
the traditional medieval idea that the king should be subd lege,
subject to the condition that he should obey the law. Nor has he
any use for the idea of fundamental law, of a law that cannot be
changed. “I could never see in any author,” he wrote, “what a
fundamental law signifieth.” Leviathan is the creator of Right
and Justice. His edicts, or laws, therefore, can never be unjust
or immoral—‘‘for the law is all the right reason we have, and
. is the infallible rule of moral goodness.” Laws may, how-
ever, be inequitable or unnecessary. If they conflict with the
Natural Laws, the articles of peace, they will be inequitable. If
they forbid activity which is not dangerous to the peace, they
will be unnecessary. But they will still be law, for law is always
and only that which is the command of the sovereign. The Law
of Nature can never be pleaded against Leviathan, for the pur-
pose of the Law of Nature is the creation of Leviathan, who
alone can interpret it. The Law of God can never be pleaded
58 POLITICAL THOUGHT

against Leviathan, for of that also Leviathan is the sole inter-

preter. Conscience can never be pleaded against Leviathan, for
“the Law is the public conscience by which man hath already
undertaken to be guided. Otherwise in such diversity as there
is of private consciences, which are but private opinions, the
commonwealth must needs be distracted, and no man dare to
obey the sovereign power, further than it shall seem good in his
own eyes.” There is, indeed, only one limitation on Leviathan’s
powers. He cannot command a man to kill himself. To do so
would be the only act which would be a breach of the covenant
on the sovereign’s part—for it would imply that men can be
said to seek Felicity in the extinction of all possibility of Felicity.
And of course Leviathan must maintain himself—man owes no
obligation to an authority that fails to protect him. If Leviathan
fails to protect, men are then back in the state of nature and
free to obey a de facto monarch. But while he exists, nothing can
stand against him and nothing must be allowed to try. It is
typical, for instance, that Hobbes greatly dislikes associations—
“which are,” he considers, “‘as it were many lesser common-
wealths in the bowels of a greater, like worms in the entrails of a
natural man.”
Nevertheless, Leviathan is not such a one that he can tolerate
no liberty. There is liberty under him. It is that which man
enjoys in the silence of the laws. Leviathan has no passion for
undue interference. “For the use of laws is not to bind the
people from all voluntary actions; but to direct and keep them
in such a motion, as not to hurt themselves by their own im-
petuous desires, rashness or indiscretion; as hedges are set, not
to stop travellers, but to keep them in their way.” Men can
expect the liberty “to buy and sell and otherwise contract with
one another; to choose their own abode, their own diet, their
own trade of life, and institute their children as they themselves
think fit; and the like.” Though it would be wrong to see in
Hobbes an early exponent of Jaisser-faire. He believed that the
distressed “ought not to be left to the charity of private persons”
—they were Leviathan’s responsibility. And he held that “there
ought to be such laws as may encourage all manner of arts, such
as navigation, agriculture, fhe and all manner of manufac-
ture which requires labour.”
Hobbes believed, too, that intellect and conscience were be-
yond the reach of Leviathan. Leviathan could certainly com-
 THE STATE AS MACHINE 59
mand men’s behaviour and demand that they perform whatever
ceremonies the public worship of the State dictates. But he
should not inquire into private beliefs. Hobbes would have
agreed with the letter that Lord Burghley wrote in 1584 to Arch-
bishop Whitgift, protesting against “these your Grace’s pro-
ceedings so vehement and so general against ministers and
preachers, as the Papists are thereby generally encouraged, all
ill-disposed subjects animated, and thereby the Queen’s
Majesty’s safety endangered,” criticising the Lambeth Articles,
“which I have read, and find so curiously penned, so full of
branches and circumstances, as I think the inquisitors of Spain
use not so many questions to comprehend and to trap their
preys.” Leviathan, Hobbes wrote, “cannot oblige men to be-
lieve.” “Thought,” he said, “is free.” We need only recall
Hobbes’s own vigorous stand against the authority of Aristotle
to convince us that he is an opponent of all authority in
philosophy, belief, opinion. Justification for the existence of the
secret-thought police to be found in 2oth-century totalitarian
States is not to be sought in him.
This is Leviathan, the King of the Proud, with whom no
power on earth can compare. It may be protested, Hobbes says,
that such a power has never been acknowledged. But what, he
asks, does that matter? “For though, in all places of the world,
men should lay the foundation of their houses on the sand, it
could not thence be inferred that so it ought to be. The skill of
making, and maintaining commonwealths, consisteth in certain
rtles, as doth arithmetic and geometry; not, as tennis-play, on
practice only: which rules, neither poor men have had the
leisure, nor men that have had the leisure have hitherto had the
curiosity, or the method to find out.”
It may be said, Hobbes agrees, that men will not like Levia-
than. Of course they will not, he says, when they give rein to
the pride that is in them, “not considering that the state of man
can never be without some incommodity or other; and that the
greatest that in any form of government can possibly happen to
the people in general, is scarce sensible in respect of the miseries
and horrible calamities that accompany a civil war, or that dis-
solute condition of masterless men, without subjection to laws
and a coercive power to tie their hands from rapine and
revenge.”
In any case, he says, what can they do about it? For ‘“‘who-
60 POL? KIC Aden Hole «aur
soever thinking sovereign power too great, will seek to make it
less, must subject himself to that power that can limit it; that is
to say, to a greater.” If they reflect, they will see how great are
its blessings. It will give them peace and the possibility of
Felicity. More it cannot do. It cannot ensure Felicity, “for there
is no such thing as perpetual tranquillity of mind while we
live here; because life itself is but motion, and can never be
without desire, nor without fear, no more than without sense.”
There is an old Chinese tale concerning the man in Hell about
to be reincarnated who said to the King of Reincarnation: “If
you want me to return to the earth as a human being, I will go
only on my own conditions.” “And what are they?” asked the
King. The man replied, “I must be born the son of a cabinet
minister and father of a future scholar of the First Class in the
examinations, I must have 10,000 acres of land surrounding
my home and fish-ponds and fruits of every kind and a beauti-
ful wife and pretty concubines, all good and loving to me, and
rooms stocked to the ceiling with gold and pearls and cellars
stocked full of grain and trunks chockful of money, and I myself
must be a Grand Councillor or a Duke of the First Rank, and
enjoy honour and prosperity and live until I am a hundred years
old.” The King of Reincarnation replied, “If there was such a
lot on earth, I would go and be reincarnated myself, and not
give it to you!”” Hobbes would have strongly approved of that
story. But peace is worth having for itself. If the price, which is
Leviathan, seems high, it is, after all, the price of life and is
not too high to avoid death.
Hobbes’s state of nature in which life is so wretched has fre-
quently been criticised. But he would not have been impressed
by the criticism that men have never lived without someone in
authority over them. If that could be proved, it would still not
affect his argument that this is how men would live if they had
no authority over them. Nor would he have been very much im-
pressed if proof were available that men had, in fact, so lived.
If you want to pile Pelion on Ossa, he would have said, go
ahead, but there really is no need. There is quite sufficient evi-
dence, he would have maintained, that this is how men would
behave in the absence of a sovereign. Hobbes, in fact, was not
concerned with the history of the State, but with its validity.
And he cannot be proved wrong by denying the existence of
the state of nature.
 THE STATE AS MACHINE 61
It has frequently been pointed out, too, that the Social Con-
tract is unhistoric and impossible, that the story of primitive
societies has shown conclusively that men move from status to
contract, which is possible only at a comparatively late stage
of their evolution. Hobbes would have been as indifferent to
these criticisms as to the criticisms of his state of nature. For the
doctrine of the social contract, which was a self-evident axiom
of 17th-century political thought, was not as a rule under-
stood historically. It was understood ina logical not a chrono-
logical sense. It was concerned with theorigin of the State, not
in time but in reason. It was seeking notthe beginning, but the
principle of the State, its raison d’étre.
It was an attempt to
answer the question, ‘““Why do men obey the State?” not ‘“‘What
is the historical origin of it?” In employing it Hobbes was
saying, “This is how I can best explain my idea of the State,”
and his device is legitimate since his is an analytical and not an
historical problem. Denial of the reality of the contract can
prove him wrong no more than can denial of the reality of the
state of nature.
It has often been stated that what Hobbes has to say of
Natural Laws is confusing and, anyhow, unnecessary. The
charge is made that he deliberately switches the cards, that he
calls powers rights, then treats them as if they were rights in the
accepted moral sense; that his Law of Nature is both a brute
instinct and a moral ideal, and that he takes advantage of either
meaning to suit his case. It is true that he does not always define
his terms with that force and clarity of which none can doubt
him capable. It is true that he occasionally shifts his ground,
thereby seeking an advantage that he would be the first to deny
to others. But he is a remarkably consistent thinker, and his
remarks on Natural Laws are neither as confusing nor as un-
necessary as all that. In particular they serve as a forceful re-
minder of the fact that Leviathan’s authority is legitimate only
because of the consent of each individual. Men can be forced to
obey a de facto sovereign power. But they have no moral obliga-
tion to do so in the sense that they have a moral obligation to
obey the Leviathan that they have authorised to act for them.
Hobbes’s remarks on Natural Laws and Natural Rights may
help us to remember that very important distinction.
From the time of Spinoza, who wrote that the monster of
Hobbes’s state of nature could never become the man of the
62 POLITICA LDH OU Grr

compact, critics have commented that even if men were capable

of making a social contract they would not make a contract such
as this. Locke’s words, ‘‘This is to think that men are so foolish
that they take care to avoid what mischiefs may be done to
them by polecats and foxes, but are content, nay, think it safety,
to be devoured by lions,” are well known. Yet, as George Ber-
nard Shaw once pointed out, history is full of examples of men
who embraced death in order to avoid destruction. Moreover, for
Hobbes as for Burke, “politics ought to be adjusted, not to
human reasonings, but to human nature; of which the reason is
but a part, and by no means the greatest part.” Given such an
individual as the one with whom Hobbes starts, no other con-
tract than this is conceivable. Admitting the fact that man’s
nature is constant, only such a contract as this can ensure that
the natural result of man’s nature, namely chaos, will not also
be constant. The reflection of a lantern can be changed by the
insertion of a lens through which its rays must pass without any
alteration being made to the lantern itself, and the chaos which
is the normal result of a man’s quest for Felicity in a world in
which he is not alone can be changed into peace without any
alteration in man himself—but only by insertion between man
and the screen of the world of the artificial lens, which is
Leviathan.
Like all who have written at length, Hobbes is open to criti-
cism in detail. It may be true that he fails to distinguish between
State and Government, that he confounds the legal absolutism
of the State with governmental absolutism, that he does not see
that changes in the forms of Government do not imply the dis-
solution of the State. His tribute to virtue, “that which gives to
human actions the relish of Justice is a certain Nobleness or
Galantness of courage (rarely found) by which a man scorns to
be beholding for the contentment of his life, to fraud or breach
of promise,” is unexpected, ungrudging—in spite of the “rarely
found,” and inconsistent with his view of man. So is the warmth
of the words he uses in his conclusion: “I have known clearness
of judgment, and largeness of fancy; strength of reason, and
graceful elocution; a courage for the war, and a fear for the
laws, and all eminently in one man; and that was my most
noble and honoured friend Mr. Sidney Godolphin; who hating
no man, nor hated of any, was unfortunately slain in the be-
ginning of the late civil war, in the public quarrel, by an un-
 THE STATE AS MACHINE 63
discerned and an undiscerning hand.” But when all is said, his
work is of the very greatest importance, and Leviathan is, in
Professor Oakeshott’s words, “the greatest, perhaps the sole,
masterpiece of political philosophy written in the English
language.”

His Importance
Hobbes’s significance can hardly be overrated. His work is the
first statement of complete sovereignty in the history of political
thought. The State in the ancient world seeks to model itself
on standards to be found in Nature; it therefore reflects a moral
order that already exists, but does not create something that is
new. Political authority in the Middle Ages was regarded as the
expression of Justice. It was limited by the august, divine law of
which it was the imperfect reflection. It was limited, too, by the
law of the community. The king, in the traditional medieval
view, was under no man, but he was under the law. He was
supreme in the affairs of State, in the sphere that the great medi-
eval lawyer, Bracton, calls gubernaculum or government. But in
the sphere that Bracton calls jurisdictio or law he was limited,
limited by an unassailable law that set bounds to his discretion,
bound by oath to proceed by law. Thus in the Middle Ages there
was legal limitation of government, though there was not poli-
tical control of government. To get the latter required a revolu-
tion—the English Civil Wars—and when the fighting had died
down and the smoke cleared away, the beginnings of political
control of government could be seen but the legal limitation of
government had vanished. In its place was absolute sovereignty,
recognising nothing superior to itself, bound by no moral law,
wielding indeed, as Bishop Atterbury said at his trial in 1723,
“a greater power than the sovereign legislature of the universe;
for He can do nothing unjust.” It was of this power as exer-
cised by the king in Parliament in England that DeLolme
said that it could do anything except turn a man into a woman
or a woman into a man. And there is something in the view that
it lost one empire, the American colonies; that it would have
lost another if practice had not departed from theory in the nick
of time; that it furnished the basis for much oppressive class
legislation. If rgth-century evolution, on the whole, made it re-
markably safe in England, it is difficult to feel that Professor
MclIlwain is being quite absurd in fearing that the future may
64 POLITICAL THOUGHT
yet find some new mischief for it to do. Certainly no one in the
2oth century has the right to feel that the difficulty expressed
by Alexander Hamilton in The Federalist—“In framing a gov-
ernment which is to be administered by men over men, the great-
est difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government
to control the governed, and in the next place oblige it to control
itself”’—is a purely academic one.
Hobbes’s is the farst clear statement of this new view. Even
Bodin, often regarded as the first to maintain explicitly the doc-
trine of State sovereignty, acknowledged that his absolute king
should be subject to the common custom, the law of nature and
the law of God. It was left for Hobbes to maintain that justice
is created by law and that law is not the reflection of justice, and
to preach the absolute and unrestricted sovereignty of the State.
Philosophers are likely to have enough to answer for at the Last
Judgment without being made to assume a responsibilty that is
rightly to be borne by the course of events. Nevertheless, Hobbes
must shoulder some of the blame, as he may claim some of the
credit, for that marked deviation from medieval English poli-
tical thought and medieval English political practice that was
completed in the 17th century.
Secondly, even if Hobbes makes Leviathan all-powerful, he
never forgets that it is something artificial. The State, he teaches,
is a machine, an artefact, a contrivance of man. His very use
of the contract is important here. The contract takes all mystery
from the State, for there is nothing less mysterious than a con-
tract. It presupposes the consent of all the parties to it, and the
State becomes clear and understandable if political obligation
can be explained in this way. Once men view the State as some-
thing made by themselves, they may think that they can build
something other and better than Leviathan. The important thing
is that they should see the State as a machine. There is no
doubt that Hobbes helps them to do this.
Thirdly the Leviathan is not merely a forceful enunciation of
the doctrine of Sovereignty and of the machine view of the
State, it is also a powerful statement of Individualism. Hobbes
does not let us forget that the State exists to serve man’s needs
and that its moral authority derives from the consent of the
governed. Hobbes is no liberal or democrat, but he is an indi-
vidualist, not because he believes in the sanctity of individual
man, but because for him the world is and must always be made
 THE STATE AS MACHINE 65
up of individuals. For him there is no such thing as the People,
and no common will, no general will, no common good exists.
Nor does Leviathan feed upon individuals. On the contrary, the
sole justification for its existence is that it preserves them. The
State is not the end of the individual, but the individual is most
certainly the end of the State.
Fourthly, Hobbes is the first modern thinker to view the State
as the conciliator of interests. In this he is the forerunner of the
Utilitarians. It is no accident that Jeremy Bentham borrowed
heavily from him here just as he did from Hobbes’s ideas on
Felicity. Succeeding ages have usually disagreed with him, but it
is no exaggeration to say that they have found in him a mine
well worth their while to work for the richness of the ore that
it yields.

JOHN LOCKE, 1632-1704

His Life and Writings
Next to Hobbes, Locke is the greatest figure in the history of
English political thought. Born in 1632, the son of a Puritan
Somerset lawyer who served in the Parliamentary Army during
the Civil War, Locke was educated at Westminster and Oxford
—of which his recollections, like those of Hobbes, were not the
most complimentary. The writings of Descartes awakened his
interest in philosophy, and his friendship with Robert Boyle
aroused his enthusiasm for the natural sciences. He became a
student of medicine and then physician to Lord Ashley, later
Earl of Shaftesbury. This association with the brilliant but
erratic Shaftesbury was to influence Locke’s life just as his con-
nection with the Devonshires had influenced Hobbes’s, and it
gave him what Hobbes lacked, direct experience of practical,
political affairs. For two years he held the important post of
secretary to the Council of Trade and Plantations, of which
Shaftesbury was president.
But if he had experience that was denied to Hobbes, Hobbes
had rude health that was denied to him, Finding his political
work more than he could cope with, Locke left England in
1675 and spent four years travelling in France. Back in England,
he rejoined Shaftesbury for a short time, only to conclude that
Oxford was better for his health than the energetic, and indeed
dangerously unstable, presence of his patron. While he was at
66 POLE NGAL WO
UG EEE
Oxford Shaftesbury joined Monmouth in his rebellion, escaping
the attentions of Judge Jeffreys by fleeing to Holland. Locke,
though so guarded in his behaviour and cautious in his com-
ments at Christ Church that Dr. Fell, the Master, wrote of him,
“T believe there is not in the world such a master of taciturnity
and passion,” judged that his health would benefit from yet
another continental trip, and retired to Holland. Not surpris-
ingly deepening suspicion by his action and accused of com-
plicity in Monmouth’s rebellion, Locke showed himself as timor-
ous as Hobbes was never tired of suggesting that he himself was,
adopting am assumed name, and not returning to England, in
spite of the pardon that was offered him, until the downfall of
the Stuarts.
In Holland, Locke was again involved in Whig politics, help-
ing with the plans for William of Orange’s expedition to Eng-
land. But invigorated by the sharp Dutch air and stimulated by
the keen Dutch intellectual life, he found time to complete his
studies. In 1689 his first Letter Concerning Toleration was pub-
lished in Latin, an English version being published anonymously
in the same year. That year also he returned to England. In
1690 his greatest work, the Essay Concerning Human Under-
standing, which had been nineteen years in gestation, appeared.
This was followed in the same year by the two Treatises on
Civil Government, the first being a refutation of Sir Robert
Filmer’s Patriarcha, and the second containing his own con-
structive ideas on the problem of political obedience. Both
treatises appeared anonymously, but they were well known to
be his work. In that year, too, his Second Letter on Toleration,
and in the next year his Third Letter on Toleration, came out,
and in 1693 his tract Some Thoughts Concerning Education was
published. Theology and political economy occupied him
largely in his declining years. Moreover, he retained his inter-
est in and his connection with practical affairs. In 1695, when
his paper against the Licensing Act helped to decide the issue,
he played an important part in establishing the freedom of the
press. In 1696, together with Newton, he helped to stabilise the
currency, their joint advice resulting in the Recoinage Act of
that year. In that year, too, he became a Commissioner to the
Board of Trade and Plantations. His health once again failing
he retired to Oates, in Essex, where he died in 1704, recognised,
not as he thought that perhaps he might be, as an ‘“under-
 THE STATE AS MACHINE 67
labourer” occupied in “clearing the ground a little and removing
some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge,” but as
the great interpreter of the age, and indeed as possibly not the
least of its builders.
The parallel between his life and that of Hobbes is striking.
Each studied at Oxford, for which each had little use. Each on
leaving the University formed connections which influenced his
whole life. Each wrote against a background of hectic political
life and finally of revolution. Each sought safety abroad; each
peacefully ended his life in England, an acknowledged public
figure. But there the resemblance ends. For though their views
of human nature were not too dissimilar their conclusions were
widely divergent; and in the reputations that were theirs they dif-
fered as much as men may. Hobbes, much the greater thinker,
roused the wrath and resentment of Englishmen; Locke won their
enthusiastic regard. His was the perfect justification for their per-
fect revolution—typically English alike in its lack of bloodshed,
its respect for property, and its refusal to push matters to their
logical conclusions. To the 18th-century Whig he was the Law
and the Prophets. Bishop Warburton hailed him as ‘‘the honour
of this age and the instructor of the future.’ Mr. Justice Best
gave him the grave salutation of the English Bench, telling the
jury of his “pure spirit” and “invaluable and immortal works.”
Nor was Locke’s influence limited and his reputation confined
to England. His voice spanned the Atlantic, rang in the ruins of
empire, and spoke confidently to the future in the Virginia Bill
of Rights and in the American Declaration of Independence.
Echoing again in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man,
it reached across the Channel and pealed over the babel of
tongues. After its willing tribute to Locke, Europe was often to
be moved by the thought of British power, but was rarely again
to acknowledge the power of British thought.
No one would call Locke’s Essays on Civil Government as
exciting as the Leviathan. He lacks the colour and the sparkle
and the power of Hobbes. His prose has none of the richness of
texture that is Hobbes’s, as his mind has none of Hobbes’s pene-
tration and profundity. Yet his appeal is a considerable one. He
is neither boring nor banal. He is decently and decorously dig-
nified, but he is never stilted. He has all the virtues of sobriety,
and if those who appreciate its limitations occasionally long for
a headier vintage, those virtues wear well and are important
 68 POLITLCAES THOUGHT

and very real. He is modest and unpretending. But together

with something of the greyness of his Puritan father, he has all
the Puritan’s strong individuality and sturdy common sense, all
the Puritan’s deep instinct for setting bounds to the power of
the State. And if it is not because of the charm of his pen that
he ranks with the immortals, if indeed he was contemptuous of
style, referring, for instance, to Montaigne’s “peculiar sort of
language” which seemed to him nothing but “pride and vanity,”
nevertheless his writing is vigorous and clear. And his touch can
be light, as his comment on Barclay’s advice that even tyrants
must be resisted with respect reveals: ‘He that can reconcile
blows and reverence may, for aught I know, deserve for his
pains a civil, respectful cudgelling wherever he can meet with
it.” He is not, then, to be classed with those bétes noire of
Disraeli, “the nebulous professors who appear in their style to
have revived chaos.” On the contrary, his prose is an appropriate
and serviceable instrument for one whose genius lay in consoli-
dating ground rather than in winning new positions.
Above all, he is a mirror in which Englishmen may find them-
| selves faithfully reflected. His individuals, with their virtues and
vices, are as recognisably English as Hobbes’s are not. The very
insularity which makes his teaching inadequate as a universal
answer to the problems of political obedience understandably in-
creases his attraction for the English-speaking peoples. And in an
age which is suffering, as is our own, from a surfeit of sovereignty,
it is good to return to a thinker who is as convinced as he is of
the bound’s beyond which sovereignty must not trespass. In an
age that is increasingly intolerant, a declining liberalism can
renew itself by turning again to this apostle of toleration who
insisted that tne things that belong to Cesar and the things that
belong to God are easily distinguishable. So long as there are
men who believe that few things have been more important and
more damnable in our lifetime than the construing of the com-
mand, “Render unto Cesar the things that are Czsar’s and unto
God the things that are God’s” into ‘Render unto Cesar who
is also God the things that are Czsar’s and God’s,”” Locke can
be assured of his appeal.

His View of Man

Locke’s view of man is summed up in his Essay on Human
Understanding. Desire, he says, is the spring of all human action.
 THE STATE AS MACHINE 69

Desire is a feeling of uneasiness identified with pain, a feeling

of which men want to rid themselves. The object of all human
action is to substitute pleasure for pain. This is the view of human
nature which was copied by Bentham, which was later worked
out more thoroughly and called “psychological egoistic hedon-
ism.” In Locke’s words, “What has an aptness to produce
pleasure in us is what we call good, and what is apt to produce
pain in us we call evil.”
So far his is a straightforward if not a very lofty view of man.
But he adds to it a theory of morals which is not straightfor-
ward, is confused and confusing, and far from consistent with
the view of man with which he begins. This is also to be found
in his Essay on Human Understanding, in three chapters
of which he demonstrates to his complete satisfaction that there
are no universally binding moral laws. History shows clearly, he
says, that the morality of one society is i immorality of
another. ““The saints who are canonized among the Turks,” he
points out, “lead lives which one cannot with modesty relate.”
This conclusion is in keeping with his view of man; it is, indeed,
the only conclusion that is compatible with it. Yet in the last of
those three chapters he commits himself to the view that morals,
like mathematics, is a demonstrable science, subject to ascertain-
able, universal laws—a conclusion which, even though he did
not think that mathematics were absolutely certain, one can
only regard as very surprising and difficult to reconcile with the
opinions he had begun by putting forward.
Moreover, as though to show that his conclusion is not merely
an unconsidered afterthought which it would be charitable to
forget in quickly passing by, Locke tells us what these universal
laws are. They are the Divine Law and the Natural Law. The
Divine Law is God’s will for man’s behaviour, which is made
available to man both by divine revelation and by the use of his
own reason, and which is, above all, to be looked for in the
New Testament. The Natural Law is also an eternal law, the
criterion of good and evil, discoverable by reasoning and com-
manding men to carry out the will of God.
It is typical, too, of the very contradictory nature of his theory
of morals that, having said that men are incapable of desiring
anything but pleasure, he maintains that they ought to act so as
to produce the greatest amount of public or general happiness,
and contends that the criterion of the goodness and the badness
790 POLITVUCAL, Tito
We HT

of their actions is their result expressed in terms of public hap-

piness.
It must, then, be obvious that Locke’s view of human nature
is nothing like so profound, and certainly nothing like as con-
sistent, as that of Hobbes. His problem, however, is very much
the same as that of Hobbes. Why do such men as his wish to
form civil society, and how can they do so? Locke’s answer to
that problem is very different from Hobbes’s. It is essentially a
justification, though written before the event, of the Glorious
Revolution of 1688, a revolution which Hobbes would have
regarded as anarchic and deplorable in the extreme.
In putting forward that answer, in advancing that justifica-
tion, Locke makes use, as did Hobbes and so many thinkers of
that 17th century to which the feudal contract was still a lively
memory and the commercial contract comparatively new and
very appealing, of the state of nature and of the Social Contract
as devices which will help him to make clear his ideas. As with
them, they are conscious abstractions rather than attempts to
construct the actual origin of society, and it is therefore, even
though he occasionally seems to believe in their actual histori-
city, no more valid a criticism of him than of them to point out
that the state of Nature never existed and that the Social Con-
tract never took place.

The State of Nature

The state of nature, says Locke, is a state in which men are
equal and free to act “as they think fit, within the bounds of
the law of nature.” But it is not a state of licence, for though
in it man is “free from any superior power on earth,” neverthe-
less in it he has “the law of nature for his rule.”” From this
Natural Law he derives certain natural rights, rights to life,
liberty, and property. His right to liberty is his right to do what-
ever he wants so long as that is not incompatible with the Law
of Nature. It is, therefore, conditional on “his having reason
which is able to instruct him in that law.” For “to turn him
loose to an unrestrained liberty before he has reason to guide
him is not allowing him the privilege of his nature to be free,
but to thrust him out amongst brutes, and abandon him to a
state as wretched and as much beneath that of a man as theirs.”
His right to property is his right to anything with which he has
mixed his labour, provided he makes good use of it, since
 THE STATE AS MACH ANE 71

“nothing was made by God for man to spoil or destroy.” But

Natural Law not only accords man rights, it imposes duties
upon him. It commands him “when his own preservation comes
not in competition” to do what he can to preserve others. And it
demands that he should keep his promises, for ““Truth and keep-
ing of Faith belong to men as men and not as Members of
Society.”
This state of nature, then, in which men have rights and
acknowledge duties, is moral and social in character. Conse-
quently it is wrong to conceive of it, as Hobbes did, as a state of
war. It will not, that is, be a state in which life is normally soli-
tary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Nevertheless, it has its inconveniences. For if it is not a state
of war, it is unfortunately a state in which peace is not secure.
It is constantly upset by the “corruption and viciousness of de-
generate men.” It is, therefore, a “condition which, however
free, is full of fears and continual dangers.” It leaves unsatisfied
three important wants—the want of an “established, settled,
known law,” the want of a “known and indifferent judge,” the |
want of an executive power to enforce just decisions. Since pro-
duction is so complicated that it cannot easily be said what was
the contribution of different agents to the making of a joint
product, an arbitrator, judging by an agreed upon law and able
to enforce his decisions, is clearly necessary if men are to live
amicably together. Without such an arbitrator men in the state
of nature are, after all, “but in an ill condition,” and “are
quickly driven into society”—though the speed of the drive, un-
like that of the Gadarene swine, is not of course such as to
allow them to take no interest in their future condition and
ultimate destination.

The Social Contract

To get out of the state of nature, Locke says, men make a
contract to enter into civil society. This is a contract of all with
all. This is a social, or more truly a political, contract, since it
establishes political society; it is not a contract made with the
government which is to be set up. And it is the only contract
which is necessary.
It is a contract to which all must consent. But though itself
unanimous, all parties to it agree henceforth “to submit to the
determination of the majority’—since unless men agree to
 72 POLITICAL THOUGHT

majority rule, decisions cannot be taken and the State cannot

survive.
It is a contract which, once made, is irrevocable. He who has
signed it “can never again be in the liberty of the state of nature,”
Locke writes, “unless, by any calamity, the government he was
under comes to be dissolved, or else by some public acts cuts
him off from being any longer a member of it.”
It is a contract to which each generation must consent. For
“a child is born a subject of no country or government.” “Every
man’s children being by nature as free as himself, or any of his
ancestors ever were, may, whilst they are in that freedom, choose
what society they will join themselves to, what commonwealth
they will put themselves under.” But, Locke adds dryly, if they
depart from the land of their birth they will not of course
“enjoy the inheritance of their ancestors.”
The contract they make is one in which men give up some,
but not as Hobbes would have it all, of the rights they possessed
in the state of nature. For it would be stupid to imagine that in
“quitting the state of nature’ men would agree “that all but
one should be under the restraint of laws; but that he should
still retain all the liberty of the state of nature, increased with
force, and made licentious by impunity.” All they agree to is to
“give up every one his single power of punishing to be exer-
cised by such alone as shall be appointed to it amongst them, and
by such rules as the community, or those authorised by them to
that purpose, shall agree on.” Hence the contract is no more
than a surrender of certain rights and powers whereby man’s
remaining rights will be protected and preserved. It is, th not
general as with Hobbes, but limited and specific.
This contract does not, as with Hobbes, put an end to the
Law of Nature as it does to the state of Nature. Man in the
State continues to be under that law, as he was before. As Locke
expresses it—‘‘the obligations of the law of nature cease not in
society.”
This contract, moreover, is the first step to the drawing up of
a trust. People, having formed a society, must then institute a
government. They do not do this by making a contract with
the Government—that, as Rousseau was so clearly to point out,
would be to invest government with too much dignity and
authority. Men do this by drawing up a trust which creates
Government as “only a fiduciary power to act for certain ends.”
 THE STATE AS MACHINE 73
Thecommunity is thus both creator and beneficiary of the trust.
Admittedly as creator of the trust the community might be said
to make a covenant with the trustee or the Government. But as
beneficiary of the trust, the community makes no contract with
the trustee who accepts a unilateral obligation towards it. The
acceptance of the trust by the Government is at the same time
its undertaking not to exceed the limits laid down by the trust.
Because Locke nowhere expressly denies that there is a contract
between Government and People, and because his language is
somtimes lacking in clarity, he has frequently been misunder-
stood. But there is no doubt that in his use of the word “trust”
he is expressing precisely the idea which Milton had in mind
when he wrote “‘the power of kings and magistrates is only de-
rivative, transferred and counted to them in trust from the
people to the common good of them all, to whom the power yet
remains fundamentally and cannot be taken from them without
a violation of their natural birthright.”
Perhaps there is one final point to be noticed about Locke’s
idea of the Social Contract. It is closer to Rousseau’s than to
Hobbes’s. Both Locke and Rousseau maintain that the institution
of government is not a contract. Both believe that the contract
does not remove the supreme power from the people. Lecke
writes of the “supreme power that [in spite of the institution of
overnment] remains still in the people.” Rousseau speaks of
the “inalienable sovereignty of the people.” The similarity must
not, of course, be pressed too far—but it exists to a greater degree
than has often been admitted.

The Nature of the State—Its Form

_ For the three great lacks of the state of nature—the lack of a
known law, of a known judge, of a certain executive power—
the three appropriate remedies would seem to be the establish-
ment of a legislative, of a judicial, and of an executive authority.
In civil society, or the State, Locke notes the existence of three
powers, but they are not, as would naturally be expected, the,
above three. There is first of all the legislative, which he calls |
“the supreme power of the commonwealth.” Secondly there is
the executive, which includes the judicial power. The legisla-|
ture need not always be in session, but the executive must be.
Hence, he concludes, they “come often to be separated”’; no bad
thing, “because it may be too great a temptation to humar
74 POLITICAL THOUGHT
frailty, apt to grasp at power, for the same persons who have the
power of making laws to have also in their hands the power to
execute them.”
This is as far as Locke goes in enunciating the doctrine of the
separation of powers which is enshrined in the American Con-
stitution—and it is not very far. That doctrine, as in the Ameri-
can Constitution, is usually understood as implying that none
of the powers is superior to any of the others, whereas for Locke
the legislature is unquestionably the superior power. That doc-
trine, too, tends to make States in which it is applied hesitant
and weak—a result which Locke would not necessarily have
desired even though admittedly he was concerned to prevent the
State becoming unduly strong. In any case, it is worth remem-
bering that it is Montesquieu, not Locke, who is the author of
the famous classification of powers into executive, legislative, and
judicial.
The third power that Locke recognises is what he calls the
federative—the power that makes fadera or treaties, that which
is concerned with the State’s external relations. In theory there
is a distinction between it and the executive power, a distinction
which the danger of divided command will ensure that in prac-
tice is ignored.
It is, perhaps, to be regretted that Locke has not more to tell
us about the federative power. He realises the great importance
of foreign policy, and knows that its formulation, execution, and
control presents a very special kind of problem to constitutional
States, for, as he says, the federative power “‘is much less capable
to be directed by antecedent, standing, positive laws than the
executive; and so must necessarily be left to the prudence and
wisdom of those whose hands it is in to be managed for the
public good.”’ But though he notices the existence of the prob-
lem, he has nothing constructive to say about it. Possibly, indeed,
we might have to add that far from helping us to solve it,
Locke’s influence has been such as, in one most important case,
to make it worse. It is commonly agreed that the Constitution
of the United States of America emphasises the weaknesses in-
herent in the democratic conduct of foreign affairs. It does this
even more by the vagueness of its clauses dealing with foreign
policy, vagueness which is, as it were, a standing invitation for
the executive and the legislature to struggle for the privilege of
conducting American foreign policy, than by the unique consti-
 THE STATE AS MACHINE 75

tutional devices it insists upon. The Founding Fathers were

great disciples of Locke, and it may not, therefore, be too fanci-
ful to see in the all-important vagueness of the American Con-
stitution in this respect a reflection of the vagueness of his views
on the federative power.
However, the form of the State is really for Locke a second-
ary matter. It may be a democracy, an oligarchy, an hereditary
or an elective monarchy. Far more important than its form are
its characteristics, for unless it can claim certain well-marked
characteristics it is not a Political Society, it is no true State.

Its Characteristics
The first and most important characteristic of Locke’s State is
that it exists for the people who form it, they do not exist for it.
Repeatedly he insists that “the end of government” is “the good
of the community.” “Political power,” he says, “I take to be a
right of making laws with penalties of death, and consequently
all less penalties, for the regulating and preserving of property,
and of employing the force of the community in the execution
of such laws, and in the defence of the commonwealth from
foreign injury, and all this only for the public good.” The State,
in fact, is a machine which we create for our good and run for
our purposes, and it is both dangerous and unnecessary to speak
of some supposed mystical good of State or country independent
of the lives of individual citizens.
Locke goes further and insists that all true States must be
founded on consent. It is true that he assumes that a minority
will consent in all things to the rule of the majority, who have,
he asserts, “a right to act and conclude the rest.” It is true that
he regards the consent of representatives as an adequate substi-
tute for the consent of all. It is true that he is driven to admit
that consent may be tacit rather than open and express, and that
ultimately he is prepared to declare that a man gives tacit con-
sent to a government by being simply within its territories.
Nevertheless, it is both important and typical of him that he
loses no opportunity of insisting on the importance of consent
and displays considerable mental ingenuity in proving that men
have consented to obey their rulers when it is in their interests
to do so, and that when those rulers act harmfully they are
doing so without the consent of their subjects.
The true State, too, Locke insists, must be a constitutional
 76 ¥
POLITICAL THOUGHT

State in which men acknowledge the rule of law. For there can
be no political liberty if a man is “subject to the inconstant, un-
certain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man.” Government
must therefore be by “established standing laws, promulgated
and known to the people, and not by extemporary decrees.”
This must be the more insisted upon because in every State,
Locke realises, the Government must possess discretionary or
emergency power. So long as it is understood that this emer-
gency power, which in England is called prerogative, is “nothing
but the power of doing public good without a rule,” its existence
in States will be beneficial and not harmful. But it can only be
supplementary to, and never a substitute for, the rule of law.
The very necessity for the existence of prerogative is indeed one
reason the more why men should never forget that “where the
law ends tyranny begins.”
Yet another most important characteristic of Locke’s true
‘State is that it is limited, not absolute. It is limited because it
derives power from the people, and because it holds power in
trust for the people. As “only a fiduciary power to act for certain
ends,” its authority is confined to securing those ends. It is
limited, moreover, be Natural Law in general and by one most
important Natural Law in particular. Civil Law, for Locke, is
merely the restatement of Natural Law in detail and by author-
ised legislation. Civil Law, he says, adds nothing to our know-
ledge of right and wrong. All it adds is immediate punishment
for wrong-doing and greater detail than Natural Law will give
us. Thus Civil Law can never conflict with Natural Law, which
remains as a standard of right and wrong superior to all powers
within the State—‘‘an eternal rule to all men, legislators as well
as others.” This applies to the external actions of States, since
all men are united in one great natural community under
Natural Law, and of course it applies to all their internal actions
as well. Hence “the legislative, though it be the supreme power
in every commonwealth, is not, nor can possibly be, absolutely
arbitrary over the lives and fortunes of the people.” The particu-
lar Natural Law which limits the power of the State is that
which gives men a right to their property. The right to property,
Locke insists, is a natural right which is in existence before poli-
tical institutions. Indeed, he says, “the reason why men enter
into society is the preservation of their property,” and he is never
in any doubt that “the legislative acts against the trust reposed in
 THE STATE AS MACHINE i
them when they endeavour to invade the property of the sub-
ject.” Thus circumscribed by the existence behind positive law
of moral principles which must override all positive law, the
State can wield no absolute authority. As though to emphasise
its limitations throughout the Treatises on Civil Government
the word “‘sovereignty” never occurs.
The State, then, should exist for the good of the people, should
depend on their consent, should be constitutional and limited in
its authority. If it is not for the people’s good, if it does not de-
pend on their consent, if it is not constitutional or if it exceeds
its authority, it can, Locke says, be legitimately overthrown. For,
he says, anticipating Rousseau’s idea of the permanent sover-
eignty of the community, “there remains still in the people a
supreme power to remove or alter the legislative when they find
the legislative act contrary to the trust reposed in them.” This
power the people exercise by “appealing to heaven,”’ by resort-
ing “to the common refuge which God hath provided for all
men against force and violence”—namely by rising in revolu-
tion. “The true remedy of force without authority,” he writes,
“is to oppose force to it.’ He believes that a distinction must be
made between “‘the dissolution of the society and the dissolution
of government,” and he is confident that the latter does not
entail the former. Nor need it be feared, he says, that he is un-
duly encouraging rebellion. People will put up with many ills
before they will embark on the dangerous course of revolution—
they “are not so easily got out of their old forms as some are
apt to suggest.” ‘There is one thing only,” he writes, “which
gathers people into seditious commotions, and that is oppres-
sion.” Persistently mistreat people and you must expect trouble—
“cry up their governors as much as you will for sons of Jupiter,
let them be sacred and divine, descended, or authorised from
heaven, give them out for whom or what you please, the same
will happen.” Revolution, however, Locke is sure, ought never
to be the act of a minority, for if it were it might indeed be
thought that he was, as he strenuously denied, pleading for the
“liberty for ambitious men to pull down well-framed constitu-
tions, that out of their ruins they may build themselves for-
tunes.”
Three further characteristics of the good State remain to be
noticed. It is a tolerant State, which as far as can be will re
spect differences of opinion. It is a negative State, which does not
78 POLITICAL THOUGHT
seek to improve the character of its citizens nor to manage their
lives, but which merely strives to secure their independence. Yet
it is also a “‘transformer’’ State, transforming selfish interest
into public good. Though it does not change man’s character it,
nevertheless, makes him behave as God would have him to, for
it holds in check his self-interest and is the mechanism whereby
men acting as they must are in the end brought to act as they
ought to do—that is, for public happiness. Men will always seek
to gain pleasure and to avoid pain. By regulating artificial pains,
i.e. punishments, the State can see to it that the pleasure of
doing things which do not contribute to the public happiness will
be less than the attendant pain. The State thus brings pressure to
bear on the individual in such a way that he acts for the public
good, and the end—public happiness—is achieved even though
the individual’s motive—indeed, precisely because the individ-
ual’s motive—is to do good to himself.
These are the characteristics without which the State is un-
worthy of the name. Locke knows how few States have pos-
sessed them. Conquest and violence, he is aware, have long
stalked the world, and tyranny, which is “the exercise of power
without right,” whispers its enticements not merely to mon-
archies, but to all governments. But only where these charac-
teristics can be observed can men be said to have entered Civil
Society. And only where Civil Society exists will men understand
that “the end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to pre-
serve and enlarge freedom.” Only there will the age-old conflict
of Authority and Freedom be perfectly resolved.

Locke’s Importance
It is not difficult to criticise Locke, since he has not troubled
to remove the contradictions and confusions from his writings.
He was quite prepared to regard moral laws as finished and
finite and their study as an exact science, and at the same time
to see them merely as temporary and conditional, the relative
products of different stages of society. He was ready to use words
in different and not always defined senses. Property, for instance,
as he speaks of it, may mean no more than we mean by it, or
may imply nothing less than the life, liberty, and estate of the
citizens. He is by no means averse to using terms so carelessly as
to cloud his meaning. He attributes supreme power to no less
than three sources—to the community, to the legislature, to a
 THE STATE AS MACHINE 79

single person if the executive is vested in him and if he has also

a share in the legislature.
Some of his ideas, too, are incompatible with others. His psy-
chological egoistic hedonism is, for instance, incompatible with
his utilitarianism, since if men can only desire their own happi-
ness it is senseless to suggest that the general happiness is desir-
able. And if Locke is aware here, in speaking of the innate and
unchangeable selfishness of man which is nevertheless supposed
to be capable occasionally of altruism, of a contradiction that
should be explained, there are occasions when he seems blind
to the incompatibility of his various ideas. He is undoubtedly
naive in saying that his theory of consent is connected with his
theory of Natural Law. His theory of consent means that justice
and injustice are what men call justice and injustice—an action
is right if it is considered right. This is of course a complete
rejection of a Natural Law theory, according to which justice
and injustice exist even though men deny them. Clearly where
consent is part of the theory of institutions Natural Law must
be absent.
Nor can it be denied that many of his ideas must today ap.
pear inadequate. His definition of property leaves much to be
desired—‘“‘the grass my horse has bit, the turf my servant has
cut, and the ore I have digged in any place where I have a
right to them in common with others, become my property with-
out the assignation of anybody.” Ritchie’s comment, ‘‘My horse
and my servant are thus equally with my labour the means by
which I acquire property; so that the capitalist employer of
labour would, according to this clause, be fully entitled to the
entire product created by his servants, if he can manage to get
it,” is Justified.
When Locke says that “the very being of anyone within the
territories of a Government” implies consent to that Govern-
ment, it is obvious that he has so emptied the word “consent”
of meaning that every Government that has ever existed could
legitimately claim to have been based on consent. It is clear, too,
that his social contract has become little better than a farce.
Moreover, the 20th century has had greater opportunity than
the 17th to know that there are many pitfalls in the path of
those who are content with the definition of democracy as gov-
ernment by consent. In authoritarian countries the consent that
the regime can normally count upon is all but unanimous—
80 POLITICAL THOUGHT
thanks to the use of monopoly of mass propaganda and to the
forcible suppression of dissentients. If consent, then, be the hall-
mark of democracy, Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Bolshevik
Russia must be regarded as being much more democratic than
those countries in which Governments have perforce to recon-
cile themselves to persistent, vigorous and often widespread
opposition.
Locke, moreover, though a great fighter for freedom, was too
disinterested in equality. His was the essential Whig faith, the
belief in individual liberty combined with denial of social equal-
ity. To the 20th century he must therefore appear forgetful of
the fact that while liberty may be very much more important
than equality, and while too much insistence on equality may
be most dangerous to liberty, nevertheless liberty itself is un-
likely to survive long if equality is treated with too cavalier a
contempt. Locke had forgotten what to Harrington was the
greatest commonplace of political theory—the impossibility of
freedom in a society where too great gulfs of class and wealth
exist.
And Locke was, as all would agree, far too rationalistic. He
was blind to the emotional forces that hold societies and states
together. It is not merely the understandable desire to inherit his
father’s property that keeps an Englishman an Englishman and
a Frenchman a Frenchman. In affirming that “all men are in
the state of nature and remain so, till, by their own consent, they
make themselves the members of some political society,”’ Locke
is expressing that extreme individualism of the Stoics which is so
much less convincing than Aristotle’s conception that men are
by nature social and political beings.
Yet when all criticisms are made, Locke’s worth and import-
ance remain beyond dispute. His is the last great voice of one
great tradition and the first great voice of another great tradi-
tion.
Though his theory of the state of Nature is not identical with
that of his medieval predecessors, the Middle Ages believed, as
he did, that all merely human authority is limited—by the Law
of God and the Law of Nature. “In the court of conscience,”
Aquinas wrote, “there is no obligation to obey an unjust law.”
The Middle Ages held, as Locke held, that only the community
was the legitimate source of political power. They maintained,
as he did, when they began to think of the law not as imme
 THE STATE AS MACHINE 81
morial custom, but as something made, that it should be made
by the community—as Bracton said that the English law was
made, by the King “with the counsel and consent of the great
men and the approval of the commonwealth.” They were sure,
as he was, that however august was the King’s authority, it was
limited not absolute. No distinction was commoner in medieval
political thought and literature than that between the King, who
ruled according to law, and the tyrant, who ruled against law.
It is typical of medieval practice as well as theory that even
strong Kings in time of war could never be sure of getting their
way. Edward I told the Earl of Norfolk who was reluctant to
join his expedition. “By God, sir Earl, you must either go or
hang.” And the reply, justified by the event, came, “By God,
sir King, I will neither go nor hang.” In insisting on the sacro-
sanctity of property also, Locke was carrying on that medieval
tradition which regarded property and feudal institutions as
something autonomous, not within the province of political
power, a tradition which finds expression in the insistence of
Magna Carta that the King cannot take action against the person
or property of his subjects except by process of law, a tradition
which survived in all its vigour so that when Sergeant Heyle
told the Commons in 1593 that the Queen “hath as much right
to all our Lands and Goods as to any Revenue of her Crown,”
we read “the House hawked and spat and kept a great coil to
make him make an end.” Locke’s work is the very important
continuation into the modern world of the great medieval tradi.
tion of political liberty.
But it is also the ey striking formulation of the principles
of the Liberal State, a very strong plea that the function of gov-
ernment is to remove oppression and increase liberty. He laid
down the essential theses of liberalism—that the people is the
source of all political power, that government cannot be justified
unless it possesses their free consent, that all governmental |
measures are to be judged by an active citizen body, that men |
are reasonably moral and responsible and that the main object
of government is to help them when they require it, but not to
run their lives for them, and finally that the State must be re-
sisted if it steps beyond its proper authority. The 2oth century
cannot share the confidence of the rgth that these theses are and
ought to be of universal application. But Englishmen can believe
that thanks to fortunate historical circumstances they can at
82 POLITICAL THOUGHT
least be applied to them. With their assistance Englishmen tamed
Leviathan, and if in the 20th century Leviathan has cast off his
chains to go devouring through the world, they may well feel
that, after all, Locke has the root of the matter in him and that
any sound and healthy political system will incorporate the
greater part of the principles that he laid down.

THE UTILITARIANS

Perhaps it was neither Hobbes nor Locke, but a school which

owed something to both of them, which made the greatest
English contribution to political thought, though paradoxically
it never produced a thinker as great as the one nor as typically
English as the other. This was the Utilitarian school, which for
over a hundred years, from the middle of the 18th to the middle
of the r9th century, dominated English political thought.
The founder of Utilitarianism was David Hume; Priestley,
Hutcheson, Paley professed it; it was fed from the foreign
springs of Helvetius and Beccaria. But it was first around Jeremy
Bentham, the most typical Utilitarian of them all, that a school
began to form. His association with the energetic, able, and un-
compromising James Mill, who converted him to Radicalism,
and who, as the friend of Malthus and Ricardo, led Benthamism
into ever closer relationship with the Classical Economists,
brought into being that remarkable group of men whom today
we generally refer to as the Utilitarians or as the Philosophic
Radicals.
They were great individualists who made their own con-
tribution to the development of Utilitarian theory. Nevertheless
they have the characteristics of a school. Heine once deplored
the habit of Englishmen of neglecting general principles in poli-
tics. He must, at least in this particular, have approved of the
English Utilitarians, who were all firm believers in general prin-
ciples. They were all sure that all men seek happiness, that
pleasure alone is good, that the only right action is that which
produces the greatest happiness, and that the sole justification
of the State is that it makes possible this greatest happiness.
They were all philosophic radicals, the theorists of representa-
tive democracy and of universal suffrage.
They had not merely their common faith and inexorable con-
clusions. They had also their active party representatives. In
Grote, Roebuck, Buller, Molesworth, and for a short time in
 THE STATE AS MACHINE 83
John Stuart Mill, they had their spokesmen in Parliament. In
Chadwick they had their greatest representative in the adminis-
trative machine. In Molesworth, in Buller, and to some extent
in Gibbon Wakefield, they had their delegates in the Empire.
They were always in a minority and they were never popular.
They were too coldly intellectual, too frigid and scholastic, and
men were not flattered by their view of mankind. But for long
they were without serious competitors. Their great contempo-
raries—Rousseau, Kant, St. Simon, Marx—were unhonoured in
England; their critics at home were unconvincing. In conse-
quence, their influence was out of all proportion to their num-
bers. Indeed, the English-speaking world today still bears wit-
ness to their teaching—in the words of G. M. Young, “it would
be hard to find any corner of our public life where the spirit of
Bentham is not working today.” The nature of that teaching
and the extent of that influence can best be seen in a study of
the two greatest representatives of Utilitarianism—of Jeremy
Bentham, the master, and John Stuart Mill, the greatest and the
most errant of his followers.

JEREMY BENTHAM, 1748-1832

His Life and Writings
Bentham seems the caricaturist’s dream of a philosopher. In
infancy he was the prodigy who, escaping from his walk, made
the footman light candles and draw up his chair to the table so
that he might immerse himself in the joys of Rapin’s History of
England. In age he was the hermit of Queen’s Square with his
“sacred teapot” called Dick, who in the intervals of grinding
away at reams and reams of barely decipherable studies written
in the most peculiar of technical jargons “vibrated,” as he put
it, from one odd room to the next and exercised himself with
his regular ‘“‘ante-jentacular” and “‘post-prandial” “circumgyra-
tions.”
He came of a family of wealthy lawyers and he himself was
intended for the law. His father was convinced from his early
promise—he was learning Latin at three—that he was a future
occupant of the Woolsack.
Not surprisingly, in view of his early education, he found his
teachers lacking and his contemporaries stupid. It is not recorded
what they thought of him. Doubtless his unfavourable impres-
sions of Oxford were coloured by his involuntary association at
84 POLITICAL THOUGHT
Queen’s with prospective parsons whose ideas of preparing
themselves for their vocations might have been thought even in
that age and place peculiar. One drank till, as Bentham said,
“his eyes turned purple.” Another enlivened his theological
studies by holding Bentham upside down at arm’s length, there-
by demonstrating the strength of muscular Christianity and the
superiority of theology over philosophy. Perhaps by way of
escape he sought the society of Methodists in the University, but
his talents were still to be saved for the law. The University,
whose tolerance was large enough to embrace drunkenness and
horse-play, was appalled at the immorality of Methodist hymn-
singing and prayer-meetings, and its action in expelling the
Methodists saved Bentham from any temptations to which he
may have been exposed of throwing in his lot with them.
Nevertheless, in Bentham’s eyes, Oxford town more than
made up for the deficiencies of Oxford University. For, return-
ing to record his vote in the University parliamentary election,
he found in a bookshop Priestley’s Essay on Government, which
contained the phrase which Priestley had taken from Hutcheson,
“the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” “It was,” he
says, “‘by that pamphlet and this phrase in it that my principles
on the subject of morality, public and private, were determined.
It was from that pamphlet and that page of it that I drew the
hrase, the words and the importance of which have been so
widely diffused over the civilised world. At the sight of it I
cried out as it were in an inward ecstasy, like Archimedes on the
discovery of the fundamental principles of hydrostatics, Eureka.”
On leaving Oxford, Bentham took chambers in Lincoln’s Inn,
where on the {go a year that his father allowed him he lived
what he said was “truly a miserable life.”” His career as a bar-
rister was short and inglorious. His father had a case or two
waiting for him, which his son promptly “‘put to death,” advis-
ing, for instance, that a suit upon aheh £50 depended should
be dropped and the money saved. Instead of preparing for prac-
tice, he let chemistry and physics intrigue him, and even the
fond father had to admit that visions of the Woolsack had
faded so completely as to leave not a rack behind.
Yet Bentham’s time was not being wasted. He was becoming
more and more convinced that every man should; and that he in
particular must, devote himself to the furtherance of human
happiness. ‘““Has a man talents? He owes them to his country in
 THE STATE AS MACHINE 85
every way in which they can be serviceable,” he wrote. And
again, “I would have the dearest friend I have to know that his
interests, if they come in competition with those of the public,
are as nothing to me. Thus I will serve my friends—thus I
would be served by them.”
Moreover, he was being filled with the assurance that his par-
ticular job in life was to labour at the reform of the law, since
he was rapidly becoming sure both that legislation was the
most important of man’s activities and that he, Jeremy Bentham,
was possessed of a genius for it. “Have I a genius for legisla-
tion?” he asked. “And have I indeed a genius for legislation?
I gave myself the answer, fearfully and tremblingly, ‘Yes.’ He
was right. In Dicey’s words, he was “‘in very truth the first and
greatest of legal philosophers.” f
|He was, then, primarily a law reformer, intent on applying
the scientific method to the field of law, on uniting law and
science so that the whole human race might be rescued from
superstition. He was only indirectly a political philosopher,
though his work as law reformer led him to economics, logic,
psychology, penology, theology, politics, and ethics.
He had almost a ‘Chinese box” mind, which led him con-
tinually from one project to the next and which rarely allowed
him to finish anything. As Wilson wrote to him, “Your history
since I have known you has been to be always running from a
good scheme to a better. In the meantime, life passes away and
nothing is completed.” Much of what he was engaged upon
appeared as “fragments” or “introductions.”’ Such was his first
published work, the Fragment on Government, which appeared
in 1776. Such is perhaps his greatest book, the Introduction to
the Principles of Morals and Legislation, which came out in
1789. He was most reluctant to publish, but fortunately his
friends saw to it that he did. And, working steadily every day,
he was amazingly prolific. His printed works in the standard
Bowring edition fill eleven octavo volumes closely printed in
two-columned pages, the best known of which being, besides
the Fragment and the Introduction, the Defence of Usury, the
Discourse on Civil and Penal Legislation, the Essay on Political
Tactics, the Theory of Punishments and Rewards, the Treatise
on Judicial Evidence, the Papers upon Codification and Public
Instruction, the Book of Fallacies, the Rationale of Evidence, and
P.T.—4
86 POLITICAL THOUGHT
the Constitutional Code. His unpublished MSS. are almost as
voluminous.
That huge mass of material is still today a quarry well worth
working. But it cannot be pretended that the study of Bentham,
however rewarding, is the easiest and the most entertaining of
studies. He could, when he so desired, write vigorously and
well, as his demonstration of the impossibility of absolute equal-
ity, one of the best in the history of political thought, shows:
“If equality ought to prevail today it ought to prevail always.
Yet it cannot be preserved except by renewing the violence by
which it was established. It will need an army of inquisitors and
executioners as deaf to favour as to pity; insensible to the
seductions of pleasure, inaccessible to personal interest; endowed
with all the virtues, though in a service which destroys them all.
The levelling apparatus ought to go incessantly backward and
forward, cutting off all that rises above the line prescribed. A
ceaseless vigilance would be necessary to give to those who had
dissipated their portions, and to take from those who by labour
had augmented theirs. In such an order—that of prodigality,
there would be but one foolish course—that of industry. This
pretended remedy, seemingly so pleasant, would be a mortal
poison, a burning cautery, which would consume till it de-
stroyed the last fibre of life. The hostile sword in its greatest
furies is a thousand times less dreadful. It inflicts but partial
evils, which time effaces and industry repairs.”
But over-elaboration and too great a love of dissection and
detail spoil his later works. Moreover, in the interests of scien-
tific accuracy he thought it necessary to develop what he called
a “new lingo,” and what, understandably enough, his critics re-
ferred to as “this new peculiar branch of the great art of regenera-
tion.” Words and phrases such as annuality, trienniality, benefi-
cialness, interest comprehension, pleasurably operating, potential
impermanence, competition excluding, undangerousness, decepti-
tiously evidential, nonspuriousness, virtually universal suffrage
plan, right and left hand complimentive distribution, pretty
general civility proposition principle, break out like an ugly rash
on most of his pages. When his critics said of him that he had
adopted the language of Babel as the proper vehicle for the doc-
trines of political confusion at least as far as the language was
concerned they were not far wrong.
Bentham, who had hoped that “torches from the highest
 THE STATE AS MACHINE 87
regions” would light themselves at his “farthing candle,” was
disappointed that his Fragment on Government did not win a
still greater recognition. Yet it had one effect of the greatest
importance. It won him the friendship of Lord Shelburne, and
it was at Shelburne’s home at Bowood that he met Etienne
Dumont, who published a French translation in 1802 of his
writings on legislation. The French National Assembly had
already conferred the title of citizen upon Bentham for his
“ardent love of humanity”—he had offered to set up his Panop-
ticon, his prison or “mill for the grinding rogues honest and
idle men industrious,” in France and to become “gratuitously
the gaoler thereof.” Now the publication of the Traités de
Législation civile et pénale gave him an international reputation
long before he had established a national one. When he visited
France in 1825, he was given a triumphal reception. As many
copies of his books sold in St. Petersburg as in London, and the
Emperor Alexander called for his co-operation in drafting a legal
code. The Cortes of Spain and Portugal voted that his works
should be printed at the national expense. Even distant South
America felt his influence. 40,000 copies of Dumont’s Traités,
so Bentham said, were sold in Paris for the South American
trade. General Mirando, whose hope of liberating Venezuela
led him to death at the hands of the Inquisition, proposed to
make Bentham the legislator of his new State. Santander was
his professed disciple. Bolivar, as exile, addressed him in the
most fulsome terms, and as dictator of Colombia paid him the
compliment of banning his books. There is more truth than
exaggeration in the words that Hazlitt wrote of him as late as
1825—“‘His name is little known in England, better in Europe,
and best of all in the plains of Chili and the mines of Mexico.
He has offered constitutions for the new world and legislated
for future times. Mr. Hobhouse is a greater name at the hust-
ings, Lord Rolle at Plymouth Dock, but Mr. Bentham would
carry it hollow, on the score of popularity, at Paris or Pegu.”
Yet if recognition was slower in coming to him at home than
abroad, circumstances were conspiring to ensure that his in-
fluence in England would be greater and more lasting than any-
where else. In his youth he had been a Tory sympathiser. He
“never suspected that the people in power were against reform.”
He “supposed they only wanted to know what was good in
order to embrace it.”” But the rejection of his Panopticon scheme,
88 POLITLCAL THOUGHT
which he had offered to the Government, made him see the
Sinister Interest of Privilege in every path. Consequently when
he became acquainted with James Mill in 1808 he was ready to
make that alliance with Radicalism which was to be such an
excellent means of perpetuating his influence and of carrying
through the reforms he had advocated.
This Radical School thus established was, incidentally, not
only the means of ensuring his influence, but of building up a
legend which does not conform to fact. That legend claims
that his genius suffered from the seclusion of his life. In J. S.
Mill’s words, he knew “neither internal experience nor external;
the quiet, even tenor of his life, and his healthiness of mind,
conspired to exclude him from both’’—hence he was “not a great
philosopher but a great reformer in philosophy.”
None of his English school, however, knew him before he
was sixty, an age at which it is not always easy to judge even
from the conduct and conversation of philosophers what their
experience has embraced. We know now that as a young man
he proved the truth of the old Stoic saying that “‘the contest
between a young girl and a beginner in philosophy is an un-
even one’”’—he was very much in love with Mary Dunkly. And
from his letters we must conclude that he had acted upon the
advice which he gave to his brother, that a wise man will
appreciate that address with ladies will be increased by consider-
able familiarity with those that are not. We can no ‘he pic-
ture him, as his school did, as a man of the most fugitive and
cloistered virtue, who never knew the tug and tussle of the
passions, whose only concession to the emotional in life was the
gentle, dispassionate proposal of marriage which he made to a
lady whom he had not met for sixteen years, and which clearly
expected, as it received, the answer “‘no.” In spite of the legend,
we can no longer account for whatever defects there may be in
coher philosophy by speaking of the secluded character of
is life.
Bentham lived to be eighty-two, working hard to the end,
“codifying like any dragon,”as he himself said. His ambition had
been no small one. “J. B. the most ambitious of the ambitious,”
he wrote, “His Empire—the Empire he aspires to—extending to
and comprehending the whole human race, in all places—in all
habitable places of the earth, at all future time.” He died happy
in the thought that that ambition was well on the way to being
 THE STATE AS MACHINE 89
realised. In the words of Leslie Stephen—‘‘he is said to have
expressed the wish that he could awaken once in a century to
contemplate the prospect of a world gradually adopting his prin-
ciples and so making steady progress in happiness and wisdom.”
And—typical gesture—he crowned a life of service by directing
that his body be dissected in the interests of that science which
was his god, that knowledge which he was convinced would
supply the answer to all man’s problems.

The Principle of Utility

Today we understand by “utility” that which is contrasted
with the merely ornamental, agreeable, or pleasant. Bentham,
however, meant by it not what is opposed to the pleasant or
agreeable, but exactly what is pleasant or agreeable. He used it,
in fact, as a synonym for our word “good,” or our word “value.”
But what does Bentham mean by goodness or utility? Every-
thing that brings happiness is good, he tells us, and nothing that
doesn’t bring happiness is good. “An adherent to the Principle
of Utility,” he says “holds virtue to be a good thing by reason
only of the pleasures which result from the practice of it: he
esteems vice to be a bad thing by reason only of the pains which
follow in its train.”
The doctrine of Utility, therefore, is a hedonistic doctrine.
When Bentham spoke of the good and bad consequences of an
action he simply meant the happy or painful consequences of
that action. He accepted the association principle of Hartley that
all ideas are derived from the senses as the result of the operation
of sensible objects on these, and he conceived of life as being
made up of interesting perceptions. All experience, he believed,
was either pleasurable or painful, or both. Pleasures were simply
individual sensations. But happiness he thought of not as a
simple individual sensation. Rather it was a state of mind, a
bundle of sensations, Every pleasure was prima facie good and
ought to be pursued. But happiness was not the piling up of all
pleasures. It was the net result—that is, it sometimes entailed
the rejection of some pleasures indulgence in which would have
painful consequences.
The doctrine of Utility is a doctrine of a quantitatively con-
ceived hedonism—it can recognise no distinction between
pleasures except a quantitative one. If good equals happiness,
then one action is better than another only if it produces more
go POLITIUCAT THOMGBt

happiness. We can only speak of one pleasure being greater in

quantity than another—otherwise we would be appealing to
another standard of goodness. When we say that “poetry is better
than pusithalfpenny,” we may either mean that it gives a dif-
ferent and better kind of pleasure or that it gives more pleasure.
If we accept the principle of Utility, however, we can only mean
the latter.
If the only difference between pleasures is a quantitative dif-
ference, how are we to measure pleasure and pain? No linear
measurement can be applied to them, and it is obviously im-
possible to measure them by weight. Yet if we believe that the
goodness and badness of actions is determined by the pleasures
and pains that they produce, it is essential to be able to compare
pleasures and pains. The doctrine of Utility must therefore also
be a doctrine which teaches how pleasures can be measured. To
enable us to do this, Bentham gives us his famous “‘felicific
calculus.” When we measure pleasures, he says, we must take
account of their intensity and duration. We must take note of
their certainty or uncertainty, since a pleasure that is more cer-
tain is greater than one which is less certain. Their propinquity
or remoteness must also come into our calculations, a pleasure
that is closer or more easily available being greater than one
which is farther away and more inaccessible. We must consider
their fecundity and their purity, since one pleasure is greater than
another if its chances of being followed by sensations of the same
kind are better and if its chances of being followed by sensations
of the opposite kind are less.
This doctrine of Utility is a doctrine which is concerned
with results not with motives. It maintains that the motive
of an action is irrelevant to its goodness or badness—not, as
Dr. Johnson held, that its goodness and morality depends
upon the motive with which it is done. However, Utilitarians
are prepared to compromise with the view that motive matters
at least to this extent that they will admit that the motive
of an action can be considered relative to its goodness or
badness where it has an effect upon its results. If men act
habitually from good-will they agree, their actions are likely
to have better consequences than are the actions of men who
act habitually from ill-will. Bentham, moreover, believes that
consequences may be both “primary” and “secondary.” The
pain which the robbed man feels at the loss of his money is a
 DEES EACLE =A'S 9M A‘CHOIN E gt

“primary” evil. The alarm felt by all other holders of money,

the suggestion that robbery is easy which may affect the con-
duct of others and thus weaken the “‘tutelary” motive of respect
for property, are “‘secondary’’ evils. These secondary evils may
be more important than the primary evil—as the example of
a single man refusing to pay his taxes might be infinitely more
harmful to the State than the loss to the Treasury of his personal
contribution would suggest. A man’s intentions or motives,
Bentham says, are of the greatest importance in determining
these secondary consequences of actions, and must therefore
be taken into account by the legislator. In spite, however, of this
compromise, it is clear that according to the doctrine of Utility
we cannot say whether an action is good until its consequences
are known.
It would seem to follow that Utilitarians cannot say that a
whole class of actions is bad, but that only particular actions
‘are bad. Circumstances must always be taken into account, and
there are no uniform and certain consequences that can be said
to follow actions of a certain class. If this be so, a difficulty
arises of which the Utilitarians were well aware. If each action
is to be judged separately, haven’t we abolished a criterion of
goodness, haven’t we discounted morality in favour of expe-
5 . “Ve . . .

diency? Yet the doctrine of Utility aims also at being a doctrine

of morals.
Different Utilitarians attempt to meet this difficulty in differ-
ent ways. Paley and Mill argue that Utilitarian theory can, after
all, give us a principle by which we can say that whole classes
of actions are good or bad. An action, they say, is to be
accounted good not because of its immediate happy consequences
but because of its general or long-term happy consequences. If
men ask themselves what would be the consequences if the same
sort of action were generally permitted, they can determine what
sort of actions are good and what bad. The accumulated ex-
perience of mankind will tell men what the probable conse-
quences of certain kinds of action will be, will provide a rough,
general rule whereby whole classes of actions can be judged.
Bentham, however, asserted that since we can make an accurate
estimate of the consequences of any particular action, generalisa-
tions about conduct are entirely unnecessary to a moral theory.
He believed in “moral arithmetic,” in the replacement of a
general principle by an exact calculation.
g2 POLITICAL THOUGHT

The doctrine of Utility tells us, further, whose happiness or

pleasure is to be sought—though there is more than a little
vagueness about this, and there is remarkably little unanimity
in the views of the Utilitarians on this point. Bentham gives
four distinct answers to the question whose happiness is to be
aimed at. Like Hobbes, he is a believer in psychological egoistic
hedonism, holding that no man ever desired anything, because
no man could ever desire anything, but personal happiness. He
tells us first, therefore, that a man aims always and only at his
own personal happiness. But secondly he tells us that man ought
to aim at the happiness of everybody in general, since he says
that an action is good whenever it results in a balance of happi-
ness to somebody. Thirdly he says that man should strive to
bring about the greatest happiness of the greatest number—a
slogan which owes some of its success to its ambiguity, since if
read in one way it could even justify the slavery of the Greek
City State. Fourthly, in his later writings he says that man
should seek the “greatest possible happiness.” This last view,
which was held by J. S. Mill, is on the whole that which is most
characteristic of the Utilitarians.
This doctrine of Utility is one which tells us how to regulate
our conduct—even though according to Bentham, somewhat
paradoxically, no action can be disinterested and the conception
of duty—that which you are punished for not doing—does not
really exist. It tells us what is a right action as well as what is a
good action. A good action is one which results in a maximum
of pleasure—a definition which, incidentally, allows the inflic-
tion of pain if in the end a balance of pleasure is obtained, an
idea which is the basis of the Utilitarian theory of punishment.
A right action is one which would produce a larger balance of
pleasure or a lower balance of pain than any other action pos-
sible in the circumstances. All actions whatsoever must be good
or bad. All actions to which there is an alternative must be right
or wrong. It is always bad to produce more pain than pleasure.
It is always wrong to choose that of two actions which produces
less pleasure than might have been the case in the circumstances.
Whether a bad action is right and a good action wrong depends,
then, on the circumstances. A bad action, which produces more
pain than pleasure, is nevertheless right if the only alternative
produces still more pain.
This doctrine of Utility, moreover, is supposed to be universal
 THE STATE AS MACHINE 93

—all other explanations of man’s conduct are merely this doc-

trine in disguise. Bentham says, for instance, of the principle of
ascetism, which finds any action good which has painful conse-
quences and any action bad which has pleasurable consequences,
that it is “‘merely the principle of utility misapplied.” Ascetics,
Bentham says, derive a perverted pleasure from their asceticism.
Therefore asceticism is explicable in terms of hedonism, while
hedonism is not explicable in terms of asceticism. Hence hedon-
ism, or the principle of Utility, must be the true explanation of
men’s actions. If we say that conscience is the guide to the good-
ness and badness of actions, there are moments when conscience
itself is uncertain and what we fall back upon then is, Bentham
says, the principle of Utility. Whatever has been achieved of
stability in the past, J. S. Mill agrees, has been achieved by the
tacit acceptance of the principles of Utilitarianism. Behind every
criterion of goodness has always been the principle of Utility.
Finally the doctrine of Utility is supposed to be objective, veri-
fiable, unequivocal, and clear. The author of the Federalist,
Bentham wrote, had said that justice was the end of govern-
ment. “Why not happiness?” he asks, ““What happiness is every
man knows, because what pleasure is every man knows, and
what pain is every man knows. But what justice is this is what
on every occasion is the subject-matter of dispute.” It was in-
deed because the principle of Utility seemed to present a crite-
rion of goodness that was objective and not subjective, that was
verifiable and not esoteric, that was, above all, easily recognised
by everybody that Bentham chose it to combat the conscience or
moral sense theory that held the field. According to that theory,
moral judgments are self-evident judgments, they owe nothing
whatever to experience, they cannot be questioned or doubted.
Goodness cannot be translated into any other terms—it cannot,
for instance, be happiness—and men know what is good by in-
tuition. For all who believe in the moral sense theory, in the
Law of Nature, Right Reason, or Natural Justice, Bentham has
the utmost contempt. ““The fairest and openest of them all,” he
regards as the man who says, “I am of the Elect! God tells the
Elect what is right. Therefore if you want to know what is
right, you have only to come to me.” Wanting to make the con-
duct of human relations an exact science, it was in the principle
of Utility, so immeasurably simpler and clearer as he thought
than any other theory, that Bentham found his greatest guide.
 94 POLITICAL THOU GT

Bentham’s Idea of the State

The explanation of anything in terms of a limited end will be
a limited and incomplete explanation. The Utilitarian explanation
of the State is a complete explanation in terms of an unlimited
end. It is an explanation which does not confine itself entirely to
vague generalities, such as the assertion that the State exists to
fulfil personality. The State, Utilitarians tell us, is a group of
persons organised for the promotion and maintenance of Utility
—that is, happiness or pleasure. This principle of Utility, not any
inherently improbable Contract, is all that is needed to explain
why men obey the State. What does it matter, Utilitarians ask,
if our ancestors did or did not sign a bond? It is not their signa-
tures but the principle of Utility that binds us. Utilitarians do
not leave us with a phrase, but give us a complete, fully worked-
out theory of the nature and purposes of the State.
The Utilitarian explanation of the State is not only an explana-
tion in terms of an unlimited end, but also in terms of the par-
ticular character of the State which differentiates it from man’s
other activities. A theory which maintains that the end of the
State is the promotion of Utility simply identifies the end of the
State with the end of human life. Yet clearly the State has a
articular part to play in human life, and such a theory does not
tell us what. If the State is an institution for the furtherance of
Utility, so is every other institution, and a theory which does
not tell us how it differs from these will not help us very much.
Bentham and the Utilitarians tell us in what way the State is
peculiar—it is the sole source of law, which is the most certain
of the four ‘sanctions,’ or overriding motives, which govern
the lives of men. These are the physical sanction, which oper-
ates in the ordinary course of nature; the moral sanction, which
arises from the general feeling of society; the religious sanction,
which is applied by “the immediate hand of a superior invisible
being, either in the present life or in a future”; and the political
sanction, which operates through government and the necessity
for which is the explanation of the State.
Thus for Bentham the State is primarily a law-making body,
a group of persons organised for the promotion and maintenance
of happiness, and acting through law to that end. Law is com-
mand and restraint, and as such is opposed to liberty. But it is
necessary, and if it is simply explained people can be brought
to realise that it is necessary, for the promotion of happiness—
 TRE SCAST EB AS SMeAVe
EE TN) E 95

which is, of course, its sufficient justification. Its great task is to

reconcile interests—“so to regulate the motive of self-interest
that it shall operate, even against its will, towards the production
of the greatest happiness.” This it does by attaching artificial
pains, or punishments, to certain actions of a particular kind
which would not be conducive to the general happiness. It can-
not, and it ought not to try to, concern itself with all actions
which would not be conducive to the general happiness. For
law in its very nature is limited, and its nature shows the
bounds which any true State must set to its actions. Law should
take cognisance of and turn into offences only those bad, adult,
other-regarding actions the punishment of which will increase
the net balance of pleasure or decrease the net balance
of pain. It
should not, for instance, try to stamp out drunkenness, for this
would lead to a complexity of laws of excessive rigour and
would entail the use of an army of spies. Offences such as
drunkenness, Bentham says, produce no general alarm, but such
laws as would be directed against them undoubtedly would, and
in addition new and more dangerous vices would appear. Moral-
ity, which like law aims at the production of happiness, must
concern itself with such matters as with all self-regarding actions,
but they are beyond the province of law. “Legislation and
morals,” as Bentham puts it, “have the same centre but not the
same circumference.”
Because law is command, it must be the command of a
supreme authority. Indeed, it is only when such an authority is
habitually obeyed that Bentham is prepared to admit the exist-
ence of civil society. His State, therefore, is a Sovereign State.
It is the hallmark of a Sovereign State that nothing it does can
be illegal. To speak of it as exceeding its authority is an abuse
of language. This is true of the freest as well as of the most des-
potic of States, although a written constitution, he will admit,
can limit governmental power.
His State, too, is the sole source of rights. The individual can
never plead Natural Law against the State, for the Law of
Nature is “‘nothing but a phrase.” He can never take his stand
on “Natural Rights,” for they do not exist. Natural Rights, says
Bentham, are “simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible
rights rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.” It is, however,
perhaps worth noticing that Bentham contrives to give to the in-
dividual much of what he had enjoyed under Natural Law and
96 POLITICA L. TH OGFT

Natural Rights. In his regard for property he is so true to the

teaching of Locke that not even his bétes noires, sinecures, are to
be abolished without compensations. He justifies this as being
essential to the security of the individual, and it can fairly be
argued that what he has taken away by his attack on natural
rights he gives back by way of insisting on security. Moreover,
he justifies opposition to the State if that opposition will produce
less pain than continued obedience. In that case, he says, it is
the individual’s “duty and interest” to “enter into measures of
resistance.” But even then he will not say that the individual has
the right to resist, for he is true to his theory that rights cannot
be maintained against the State.
It will appear from this that Bentham’s State is not one in
which liberty is regarded as an end in itself. For liberty which
is often thought of as one of the fundamentals of all government
is not of such importance in the Utilitarian scheme of things.
Happiness is the only ultimate criterion and liberty must sub-
mit itself to that criterion. The end of the State is the maximum
happiness not the maximum liberty.
Like Paley, Bentham distinguishes between Natural Liberty,
which is my liberty to do whatsoever I will and which clearly
cannot be enjoyed in any sort of social or political life, and
Civil Liberty, which is my liberty to do whatsoever I will so
long as it is consistent with the interests of the community to
which I belong. If laws are of the right kind—that is, of a Utili-
tarian sort—they will increase Civil Liberty; Natural Liberty
they will of course decrease. Neither Paley nor Bentham are,
however, quite consistent here. In both there is the presumption
that everything that derogates from Natural Liberty is in some
measure undesirable, a presumption which comes from the
belief that the individual is the best judge of his own happiness
and should therefore be left as free as possible to judge every-
thing for himself. That presumption cannot be justified on their
own principles. For the proposition that a man is the best judge
of his own happiness cannot be proved by reference to the
ae of Utility, and in any case it is not the individual’s
appiness which is the criterion of Utility. That criterion is the
greatest amount of happiness altogether. Therefore, in spite of
the personal predilections of the pioneers of Utilitarianism, it is
wrong to suppose that the Utilitarian doctrine necessarily leads
to laisser-faire. Utilitarianism can justify no restriction except
 THE STATE AS MACHINE 97

that which will produce a greater amount of happiness than its

absence—but all restrictions, however great they may be, that do,
it must of course demand. A good law is not one which increases
liberty but one which increases happiness. And as Sidgwick saw,
there may be a conflict between happiness and liberty. Paley and
Bentham tend to think this unlikely. But their belief is not based
on the principle of Utility, and because of their own attachment
to latsser-faire it is the more important to remember that the
State for them is not primarily concerned with liberty at all.
Indeed, it is obvious how much more highly Bentham thought
of security than of liberty. “‘Give me liberty or give me death”
would have appeared to him the cry of a fool, for it was the
price of heroism not its value that he understood. ‘‘Wars and
storms are best to be read of,” he said, “but peace and calms
are better to endure.”
Yet Bentham never forgets that his State is a contrivance
whereby man seeks to ensure happiness. It is not therefore a
State which, like Aristotle’s, is prior to the individual. On the
contrary, the individual is prior to it. He is endowed with
reason, and is himself before ever he comes into the State, which
thus in no sense can be regarded as more real than he is himself.
The State, moreover, is a trustee for the individual. And,
more important, it is a democratic State. For Bentham, who was
originally a Tory, slowly and somewhat reluctantly came to be-
lieve that ‘“‘the sinister interest’’ of the few must be overcome
by calling in the general interest as the only possible corrective.
When at last he applied his “self-preference principle,” which
asserted that “‘in the general tenor of human life, in every heart,
self-regarding interest is predominant over all other interests put
together,” he came to the following remarkable conclusion: “At
no time have the constituent members of the governing body, at
no time has the monarch, at no time has the hereditary aristo-
cracy, at no time have the proprietors of seats in the House of
Commons, at no time have the clergy, at no time have the
judges, had any better endeavour or desire than to swell each
of them his own power to its utmost possible pitch.” At no
time have they because at no time could they. But if everybody
controlled everybody else, nobody would predominate; every-
one’s self-interest would be suppressed except when it coincided
with the interests of all; and whatever was done would be that
which all approved.
98 PORPITICAL THOUGHT

There is still, however, a difficulty that he has to face. Since

men can only safely be counted upon to advance their own
interests—Bentham even says “whatsoever evil it is possible for
man to do for the advancement of his own private and personal
interest at the expense of the public interest—that evil sooner
or later he will do, unless by some means or other, intentional
or otherwise, he be prevented from doing it’”—and since direct
democracy in large countries is impossible, how can it be assured
that the representatives of the people will not legislate merely
in their own selfish interest? Only by “minimising” confidence
in them, by “maximising” control over them, by “making pub-
lic functionaries uneasy,” by enforcing every constitutional de-
vice—universal suffrage, annual Parliaments, vote by ballot, the
election of the Prime Minister by Parliament, the appointment
of civil servants by competitive examination—whereby the de-
pendence of their representatives on the people would be in-
creased. But if it be remembered that “‘if it be true, according
to the homely proverb, that the eye of the master makes the
ox fat, it is no less so that the eye of the public makes the states-
man virtuous” all would be well.
Bentham’s, furthermore, is a State in which all men have
equal rights. All men have the right with all others to promote
policy; all must be equal before the law; to ensure a greater
equalisation of property is one of the State’s most urgent tasks.
Not that he believes that men are by nature equal. Indeed, this
is another of those “anarchic fallacies” on which he pours such
a torrent of abuse. But his perception that inequalities are in-
evitable did not blind him to the fact that too great inequality is
an insuperable obstacle on the road to the greatest happiness.
He recognised, and he was right in recognising, that a society
which is without gross inequalities of fortune is happier than
one which is not.
There is yet one more characteristic of Bentham’s State which
must be noticed. Though according to his principles the State
can take far-reaching action so long as that will increase pleasure
or decrease pain, though he himself, as has been said, passed
“from an uncritical individualism to an uncritical collectivism,”
his State is nevertheless fundamentally a negative one. It has no
integral relation with the moral life of the citizen. It seeks to
change his behaviour: it cannot change him. It cannot help
him to develop his character, to bring out the best that is in him.
 4

THE STATE AS MACHINE 99

For it is not the State that moulds the citizens, it is the citizens
that mould the State.

His Importance
Coleridge once said that until we “understand a man’s ignor-
ance we are ignorant of his understanding.” It is not too difficult
to reveal Bentham’s ignorance.
He was not an outstanding philosopher, though paradoxically
he occupies an important place in the history of philosophy. He
had, as it were, swallowed his first principles whole, but he
had never digested them. He took his theory of knowledge from
Locke and Hume, the pleasure and pain principle from Helve-
tius, the notion of sympathy and antipathy from Hume, the
idea of Utility from any of half a score of writers. Lacking
originality and fuli of prejudice in his speculations, he is as con-
fused and contradictory in his own theoretical adventures as he
is complacent. His Introduction to the Principles of Morals and
Legislation opens with a famous passage: “‘Nature has placed
mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain
and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought
to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. They govern
us in all we do. In words a man may pretend to abjure their
empire: but in reality he will remain subject to it all the while.
The principle of Utility recognises this subjection.” This is in-
deed an arresting passage, but when analysed its words will be
seen to have a far more definite ring than meaning. What does
the sovereign mastery of pleasure and pain mean—that men
should seek their own or anyone else’s pleasure? In saying that
pleasure and pain govern what we do as well as what we ought
to do, is he saying that all men always do their duty? And what
is meant by saying that the principle of Utility recognises this
subjection? If men always seek their own pleasure, isn’t it point-
less to say that they ought to do something else? How can men
have two different things as the absolute good—their own
pleasure and the happiness of mankind?
Bentham goes on to reduce confusion to chaos, a fact not
always appreciated as he himself is such a mint of precise ideas.
But the questions he leaves unanswered are legion. How can the
principle bea one is to count for one and nobody as more
than one” be derived from hedonism or even made consistent
with it? How can private interest be translated into public
 100 POLITICAL TH OGit

duty? How can it really be believed that even the closely

watched legislator, if as selfish as Bentham portrays him, will
forward his own interests only by forwarding the interests of
all? How are pleasures commensurable at all? How much in-
tensity, for instance, is to be counted against how much dura-
tion? Can any meaning be attached to a quantitative estimate of
things which are by their nature not quantities but qualities,
which differ in kind, not in amount? And if we admit, as
Bentham does, that the intensity of a pleasure depends on the
person experiencing it, are we not after all introducing a sub-
jective element into what is presented to us as a purely objective
felicific calculus?
Moreover, we do not need Carlyle’s indignation at what he
called the “‘pig philosophy,” to remind us that hedonism of this
_ kind is not very satisfactory, that happiness is much more than
pleasure. Kant’s two-fold end—that of meriting as well as re-
ceiving happiness—makes a greater appeal than hedonism,
which is concerned only with receiving happiness. Is it really
true to say that everybody knows what happiness is any more
than it is to suggest that men eat, not because they are hungry
but because they seek the pleasure that comes from satisfying
hunger? And is it not significant that happiness deliberately
sought is not obtained? If you want your own happiness, the
worst way of going about it is to seek it expressly. The story of
the old man who was fond of macaroons and who hid them be-
tween the books in his library because he said they tasted so
much better when he came upon them unexpectedly is worth
remembering. Aiming at other things, men may attain happi-
ness and other things; aiming at happiness, men may achieve
other things but they will not achieve happiness.
Besides, if in his portrayal of the hedonistic individual Ben-
tham seems to have left life out of the picture, since men feel
the conflict between duty and interest which he denies and the
prompting of conscience which he ignores, in his study of the
atomic individual he has left out both society and history. In
refusing to consider man as moulded by history and society, he
ignores the strongest forces that have made him what he is.
It can indeed be argued that he sees only three separate entities,
the Individual, Society, and Government, but that he never sees
the totality which is the State. And in his over-insistence on the
rational individual he has left out the emotions. So much is this
 4

THE STATE AS MACHINE Iol

the case that we can hardly recognise Bentham’s man as a mem-

ber of our species. We are not as rational as he is, nor can we
attempt, as he must, to calculate quantities of pleasure.
We cannot regard Bentham as “‘the greatest critical thinker
of his age and country.” We have to see in him as much of the
18th century as of the 19th. He was the typical philosophe of
18th-century France, unaccountably carried too far north by a
stork too stupid to appreciate national characteristics. His was
the philosophe’s unbounded confidence that knowledge, which
would soon be complete—he wrote “‘the age we live in is a busy
age; in which knowledge is rapidly advancing towards perfec-
tion”—was the answer to all the problems that have ever per-
plexed mankind. His was the philosophe’s collection of assump-
tions, never admitted as such and never examined, which shows
the extent of the gulf between the philosophe and the philoso-
pher. His was the philosophe’s rationalism and contempt for
tradition. It is significant that for long he was so little thought
of in his own country, and so highly regarded outside it wherever
the philosophes had made their way. It is significant, too, that
great as is his importance as a reformer of the law, not only were
many of the reasons he gave for his proposed reforms fallacious
but that English law has continued to resist his codifying and
to reject his fundamental principles.
But, after all, it is better to be right for the wrong reasons
than never to be right at all. Moreover, critical as one must be
of Bentham’s philosophy, it would be folly to ignore his achieve-
ment. This was great because, French philosophe as in so many
ways he was, he nevertheless contrived to fit in so well to the
structural needs of his English age. For his age, scared almost
out of its wits by fear of revolution, had decided that nothing
must change lest all be overthrown. Yet no age stood more in
need of reform. The great captains of the Industrial Revolution,
impatient of the history and tradition which seemed to them to
be expressed solely in hampering archaic laws, were demanding
that the efficiency, cheapness, and uniformity which they wor-
shipped in their industrial undertakings should also be intro-
duced into government and law. But if they were unwilling to
accept Burke’s Toryism and respect for landed nobility, they
had of course no more liking for the anarchism of Godwin and
Shelley, for Jacobinical principles and Natural Rights, for sen-
timent and rhetoric and revolutionary dogmatism which might
102 POULPTICAL TAOUGHrTE

be asserted even against themselves, than had the governing aris-

tocracy. They wanted reforms which would be sensible and
practical and far-reaching without being too far-reaching; re-
forms which would acknowledge the movement of power from
the aristocracy to themselves without doing anything to encour-
age its further movement from themselves to the masses.
In Bentham and his followers, who were also crying out for
efficiency, cheapness, comprehensibility and uniformity in the
law, they found the answer to their needs. Here were reformers
who were as bitterly critical of ““The Rights of Man” and the
bloody effects of the victory of that watchword in France, as
Pitt, Burke, or even Eldon himself. Here were reformers who
lacked the sentimentality of Cartwright, the bluster of Burdett,
the egotism and fiery oratory of Hunt, the obvious inconsistences
and unreliability of Cobbett. Yet they were as trenchant and
vigorous and fearless in their attack on aristocratic privilege as
any new industrialist could desire. It was exactly what he
wanted to be able to read in the Westminster Review—‘‘the rule
is good always to suspect the ‘higher orders’ and the higher the
more. They live only to pervert justice and right to the interests
of their own class; and if any good is gotten out of them, it
must be with a screw.’ His heart warmed to Bentham, who
complacently called himself “the most egregious and offensive
libeller men in power in this country ever saw,” when in The
Book of Fallacies he found such a devastating exposure of the
forces opposing reform. The very chapter headings of that book
speak with an eloquence Bentham could not always sustain—
“the wisdom of our ancestors, or Chinese argument,” “the Hob-
goblin argument, or no Innovation,” “Official malefactors’
screen,” “Attack me you attack Government,” “the Quietist, or
‘No complaint,’” “Snail’s pace argument,” “One thing at a
time,” “Slow and Sure,” and so on. And even if Bentham advo-
cated universal suffrage, he and his school were as fully con-
vinced as any captain of industry of the desirability and indeed
the inevitability of middle-class rule. James Mill had this to say
about it: “The opinions of that class of the people who are
below the middle rank are formed, and their minds are directed,
by that intelligent and virtuous rank, who come the most im-
mediately in contact with them, who are in the constant habit
of intimate communication with them, to whom they fly for
advice and assistance in all their numerous difficulties. . . . There
 THE STATE AS MACHINE 103

can be no doubt whatever that the middle rank is that part of

the community of which the opinion would ultimately decide.
Of the people beneath them, a vast majority would be sure to
be guided by their advice and example.”
Though he failed to codify the English law, it is very largely
because of him that Parliament has become the legislative in-
strument that it is today. Before him Parliament concerned it-
self very little with legislation. Indeed, in Blackstone’s Com-
mentaries, published in 1765, references to statutes are to a
modern mind astonishingly few. It was Benthamism which
brought to an end the era of legislative stagnation, and ushered
in that period of increasing legislative activity which has not yet
ended and under the cumulative effects of which we are living
our lives today. Bentham had, furthermore, such an enormous
influence on law reform that Maine says, “I do not know a
single law reform effected since Bentham’s day which cannot
be traced to his influence.” To that influence can also be attri-
buted the creation of adequate legal machinery for the protection
- of the equal rights of all citizens. His influence on penology was
almost as great—no one has ever done as much as he did to
tell us how to prevent as many offences as possible as efficiently
and as cheaply as possible.
His figure, too, can be seen behind all r9th-century measures
for Parliamentary Reform. He inspired the logic of political
democracy, as can be seen from that trenchant criticism of the
Reform Bill of 1832 published in 1837 by the Birmingham Poli-
tical Union, which begins: “The motive and end of all legisla-
tion is the happiness of the universal people.”” He supplied a new
measurement for social reform—the “maximising”’ of individual
happiness. Poor Law Reform owed much to him, as did the
measures introduced to improve public health. Edwin Chadwick,
whose work in scouring and scrubbing the nation was of such
great importance, was his faithful disciple. And if Chadwick’s
Jack of humour and sense of proportion—he was annoyed be-
cause in the middle of the Crimean War Napoleon III failed to
send for him again to continue a fascinating discussion on
sewage manure—repels us today, and if it is no longer so easy
to regard an infinite capacity for making drains as the genius
on which Englishmen pride themselves, since their ideal of a
w.c. on every landing and a wash-basin in every room seems
unimpressive compared with the American practice of two
104 POLITICAL THOUGHT

w.c.s on every landing and two wash-basins in every room,

nevertheless, anyone who has smelled an Eastern city and re-
sisted the conclusion that God gave Indians and Chinese noses
for some purpose which escapes the West must give thanks for
the Edwin Chadwicks of this world. Bentham’s great interest
in education, too, deserves for him an honourable place in the
list of the educational reformers of this country. Via the
Mechanics’ Institutes, he can even be regarded as one of the
pioneers of Adult Education. And if it was in Bentham’s smithy
that the tools of the law-reformer were tempered, it was here,
too, that some of the weapons of Socialism were forged. For the
principle of the greatest happiness and the practice of a legis-
lating Sovereign Parliament ultimately lent themselves even
more to the furtherance of collectivism than to the preservation
of individualism.
Moreover, Bentham, it may be maintained, increased English-
men’s belief in the essential reasonableness of Englishmen and
therefore their conviction that reform is infinitely preferable to
revolution. Gladstone could say that no great end could be
achieved in politics without passion, and the House of Commons
was rarely as sedate and decorous as a Victorian finishing school
for young ladies—one observer in the early roth century re-
ported that “the bestial bawlings of the Commons could be
heard 50 yards away”’—yet English political life was remarkably
placid throughout the 19th century. And if beer and fights
figured prominently in Eatanswill elections, nevertheless what
breaking of heads Englishmen cared to indulge in at election
time was not proof of their disbelief in, but was no more than
incidental to, their faith in the proposition that it is better to
count heads than to break them. The contribution of Bentham-
ism to the steadiness of British politics is not to be ignored.
It should be added that Benthamism strengthened another not
so desirable tendency of Englishmen, their habit, to which the
Anglo-Saxon peoples seem particularly prone, of seeing all
peoples as cast in their own mould and therefore as sharing
their own ideas, opinions, prejudices. For Bentham taught that
there were onl principles, always and abidingly true and
applicable to all men. He also taught that every political problem
demands immediate empirical investigation. In teaching both
lessons, Bentham anticipated Marx. He was, like Marx, an em-
pirical universalist. In England his universal principle, the
 THE STATE AS MACHINE TO05

a priort abstract element in his teaching, could be minimised

while immediate problems could be examined in all the detail
that would have delighted him. But when Englishmen turned
to foreign problems, lacking as they naturally did that detailed
knowledge which they could so easily acquire at home, they
were only too prone to believe that detailed investigation was
not, after all, necessary as they could fall back upon the general
principle that all men were fundamentally the same. Too apt
to believe this and too ready to ignore foreign traditions, Eng-
lishmen have frequently made rods for their own backs. Be-
lieving that all must attach the importance that they do to
things, they have frequently proved yes of reading aright
the international situation. They were, for instance, convinced
that the Great Exhibition of 1851 was the ceremonial opening of
an era of world-wide free trade, prosperity, and peace—a con-
viction which a little observation ought very quickly to have dis-
pelled. Believing that all will behave as they do, they have often
been blind to the facts of power. Because their Government does
not flout their public opinion, they have attempted to base the
League of Nations upon their belief that public opinion will be
all that is required to restrain the abuses of power. And when
they learn at last that all nations are not would-be Englishmen
who express English thoughts in unaccountably perverted
tongues, they are apt to cry out at the wickedness of the world
and to regard with unalterable mistrust those who have taught
them that lesson. It was said of Sir Edward Grey that he treated
all foreign diplomats as though they were if not old Etonians at
least old Wykhamists, and that when it was at last borne in upon
him that not all representatives of Balkan countries had had the
advantage of an English Public School education, he could
hardly bring himself to continue negotiations with them.
It can also be argued that Benthamism, with its congenital |
distrust of the representatives of the people, whom it regards as |
plunderers of the public to be kept on the straight and narrow
path only by the most rigid of controls, the most unremitting
of supervision, has done public life the great disservice of hasten-
ing the day of delegative democracy. It has helped to turn the
representative who, as Burke said, being a lover of freedom, is
himself determined to be free to serve his constituents with his
judgment, into the delegate whose judgment is in pawn to fore-
gone conclusions, who is the slave of committees and caucuses.
106 POLITICAL-LHOMG
Be

Bagehot warns us of the dangers of government by the consti-

tuencies: “The feeling of a constituency is the feeling of a domi-
nant party, and that feeling is elicited, stimulated, sometimes
even manufactured, by the local political agent. Such an opinion
could not be moderate, could not be subject to effectual discus-
sion, could not be in close contact with pressing facts, could not
be framed under a chastening sense of near responsibility, could
not be formed as those form their opinions who have to act upon
them. Constituency government is the precise opposite of par-
liamentary government. It is the government of immoderate
persons far from the scene of action, instead of the government
of moderate persons close to the scene of action; it is the judg-
ment of persons judging in the last resort, and without a penalty,
in lieu of persons judging in fear of a dissolution, and ever con-
scious that they are subject to an appeal.” If these dangers have
in our own lifetime become acute, a good measure of the blame
for this must be borne by Benthamism.
Benthamism has certainly the defects of its virtues. Even so
we can look back to it with gratitude. For in addition to all the
reforms that it encouraged, it liberated political theory from
medieval political vocabulary, and, above all, it provided one of
the most powerful of weapons against the coming of what Wil-
liam James used to call the “Bitch Goddess.” It insists that the
State exists for man, not man for the State. It proclaims that only
where there are happy citizens can the State be considered good.
“The interest of the community then is what?” Bentham asks.
And he answers, ““The sum of the interests of the several mem-
bers who compose it.”’ This is the greatest contribution of Ben-
thamism to political theory, that it sees every question in terms
of the men and women whose lives it will affect and never in
terms of abstractions. And Benthamism denies the infallibility of
the superior person who foists his own morality or type of hap-
piness upon others. Winnowing the grain from the chaff need
not be such a dusty process as to blind Englishmen to the debt
they owe to Jeremy Bentham.
JOHN STUART MILL, 1806-1873
His Life and Writings
Nothing would have seemed more absurd to Jeremy Bentham
and to James Mill than the proposition that it is better to travel
hopefully than to arrive. Yet by the time of the death of the
 THE STATE AS MACHINE 107

latter it is obvious not only that Utilitarianism is arriving, but

also that in the process the force, the exhilaration, the bounding
enthusiasm of its disciples is waning. Like many before and
since, Utilitarians were finding the taste of victory insipid after
the heady anticipations of the battle. Some gave up the cause,
refusing to be further associated with a victory which now unac-
countably seemed so little worth the winning. Others, who
would not forsake the faith, sought to reinterpret it in the new
conditions, while at the same time removing from it those things
which were offensive both to its critics and to their own con-
sciences. Of these the greatest was John Stuart Mill, the new
leader of Utilitarianism. It can hardly be said that he succeeded
in his task, for his removing, though he could never bring him-
self to admit it, was of such a wholesale kind that when he had
finished reinterpreting and refurbishing Utilitarianism, Utilitar-
ianism was singularly hard to find. If it can ever be said of any
grave philosopher that he so far forgot himself as to pour the
baby out with the bath-water, it can be said of him. Yet perhaps
because he is the least logical, he is also incomparably the most
satisfactory of the Utilitarians. For life is more real than phil-
osophic systems, and a life and a truth that is not always present
in more coherent and impressive philosophic systems is easily to
be seen shining through all his inconsistencies.
He was born in 1806, destined for the purple—to be “‘a suc-
cessor worthy of both of us” as his father James told Bentham—
and educated for that high position as few have ever been. He
was learning Greek by the age of three. By the time he was
eight he had read all Plato and Herodotus and most of Xeno-
phon and Lucian. With a little English, History, Arithmetic,
and Latin added by way of light relief, he persevered with
his Greek studies, reading Homer, Thucydides, Sophocles, Euri-
pides, Aristophanes, Demosthenes, Aischines, and Lysias, Theo-
critus, Anacreon, and Aristotle’s Rhetoric—his first ‘scientific
treatise on any moral or psychological subject.” It is pleasant to
record that he was most attached to Robinson Crusoe. But such
frivolities were not to be allowed to distract his attention, and
he was soon grappling with the more exacting disciplines of
logic, psychology, and political economy. His father was his
teacher and constant companion, and by a combination of sar-
castic tongue-lashing—he was “the most impatient of men”—
and protracted Socratic cross-questioning, John’s mental powers
108 POLITICAL THOUGHT
were soon astonishingly developed. And to complete the pro-
cess he was himself set to teach his brothers and sisters—always
under the reproving eye of his father.
He himself said, with characteristic modesty, that his educa-
tion proved that it is possible to instil into a child a greater
amount of knowledge than is usually acquired in childhood. It
may well be doubted how many childish minds, as well as
childish bodies, could stand the strain. Even John’s health suf
fered and he became a prematurely old man. The cost of that
education was high, but the achievement is not to be valued
lightly. John had certainly been trained to use his mind, and in
the enormous amount of work he produced, in which he used it
to such good purpose, his training may, after all, find its justi-
fication.
After a year in France, in which he learned to appreciate
things French and to deprecate many things English—in par-
ticular the English habit of ‘“‘acting as if everybody else was
either an enemy or a bore”—and in which incidentally he dis-
covered the joys of travel and the beauties of nature, he took
up his old studies, added Roman Law and began reading Ben-
tham. This last, he said “was an epoch in my life; one of the
turning-points in my mental history.” At sixteen he founded
the Utilitarian Society, an association of young men who met to
discuss Bentham’s ideas. He became a member of a small group
which met at George Grote’s house to discuss political economy,
logic, and psychology. He joined “The Speculative Debating
Society” and “The Political Economy Club.” At seventeen he
obtained a post in the office of the Examiner of India Corre-
spondence in the East India Company, thus beginning a con-
nection with the East India Company which lasted until its
abolition in 1853. His duties here gave him experience of the
actual conduct of affairs and brought him an adequate liveli-
hood, but were not so onerous as to make it impossible for him
to devote himself to what he considered more valuable matters.
He soon achieved distinction in the articles that he contributed
to the Westminster Review. At the age of twenty he edited
Bentham’s Rationale of Evidence—a task which he says very
simply “occupied nearly all my leisure for about a year.” Then,
really finding his feet in the morass of Bentham’s manuscript
notes, he undertook to see “five large volumes through the
press.”’ This, he says, greatly improved his style. It also proved
 ‘

TILES STATE AS MACHINE 109

too much even for his strong mind, and he fell into acute men-
tal depression. He became convinced of “the paradox of hedon-
ism’’—seek happiness directly and it will not be found. Seek
other things and it will be “inhaled in the air you breathe.”
He became convinced, too, that he had unduly starved the emo-
tions and that in future he must make “‘the cultivation of the
feelings one of the cardinal points in his ethical and philosophical
creed.” The poetry of Wordsworth and the philosophy of Cole-
ridge helped him to find himself. It was a changed Mill—a man
of deeper sympathies, of more generous feelings, of wider out-
look—who emerged from this mental depression. He himself
thought of it almost as a conversion—‘“‘And I am Peter, who
denied his master,” he said in later life when it was suggested
that there should be a meeting of Bentham’s followers.
That change in him was no doubt strengthened and confirmed
by his association with Mrs. Taylor, who became his wife in
1851 on the death of her husband. Victorian susceptibilities were
shocked by his open love for a married woman, and in his own
person he had full opportunity to realise the truth of his con-
tention that in England the yoke of law is light but that of
public opinion heavy. He spoke of her as being a greater thinker
than himself and a greater poet than Carlyle. Her judgment he
thought “‘next to infallible.” “If mankind continue to improve,”
he said, “their spiritual history for ages to come will be the
progressive working out of her thoughts and realisation of her
conceptions.” That regard is a better testimony to the greatness
of his heart than to the hardness of his head, but it is doubtless
true that Mrs. Taylor helped to humanise his revised version of
Utilitarianism.
After vainly trying, via the editorial chair of the London
Review (afterwards the London and Westminster Review), to
make an effective political force of men who had so little feeling
for the realities of English politics as to refer to themselves as
Philosophical Radicals, Mill began the publication of his greatest
works. In 1843 his System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive
appeared and had an immense success. In 1848 the Principles of
Political Economy, came out—with similar immediate and
exceptional success. These and his Essay on Liberty, which was
not, however, published until 1859 because of his wife’s death,
and which is beyond question the greatest and most compelling
of his works, were completed before his retirement, and it is
IIo POLITICAL THOMGHT

obvious that in the fifteen years left to him after his retirement
his energy and output were alike considerably less than they
were before. However, he published two further essays, the
Considerations of Representative Government of 1860, and the
Utilitarianism of 1861. Four years later appeared the Examina-
tion of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy; then in 1867 his
inaugural address on the value of culture, and in 1869 The Sub-
jection of Women. Two posthumous works, the Autobiography,
published in 1873, and the Three Essays on Religion, published
in 1874, increased his already great reputation and mark a fit-
ting close to a great career of scholarship and service.
If his retirement did not lead to any great outburst of literary
activity, it gave him the chance, hitherto denied him, of parlia-
mentary experience. He was the Radical member for Westmin-
ster in the Parliament of 1866-8. He was not a great success. It
was not only that his somewhat singular programme—he an-
nounced that he would expend all his popularity as a writer in
upholding unpopular opinions—was not best suited to achieve
parliamentary eminence, nor that he occasionally lacked reality
as in his attack on the ballot, the secrecy of which he said would
make men vote for their selfish interests and not, as they should,
for the good of the State. He was, said Disraeli, who portrayed
him as cruelly and as faithfully as only Disraeli could, “the
finishing governess.” Even Gladstone, who said, “When John
Mill was speaking, I always felt that I was listening to a saintly
man,” also wrote to Granville about him—‘“Mill has failed as a
politician—not so much from advanced views, as from errors of
judgment and tact.’ No doubt when he lost his seat in 1868 he
was glad to retire once more to private life and his own pursuits.
He died at Avignon in 1873, being active to the end. Green
echoes Gladstone’s remark that Mill was a saintly man. He con-
siders Mill to have been an “extraordinarily good man.” Perhaps
those comments are Mill’s truest epitaph. In the whole history of
Political Philosophy there are few more appealing characters
than his.

His Alterations in Utilitarianism

In his desire to safeguard Utilitarianism from the reproaches
levelled against it, Mill goes far towards overthrowing the whole
Utilitarian position. The strong anti-hedonist movement of his
day, personified by Carlyle, determined him to show that the
 ‘

THE STATE AS MACHINE ELE

Utilitarian theory, although hedonistic, is elevating and not de-

grading. Therefore he sought to establish the non-utilitarian
proposition that some pleasures are of a higher quality than
others. Bentham had denied this, maintaining “quantity of
pleasure being equal, pushpin is as good as poetry.” Mill offers
a singular proof that Bentham is wrong. Men who have experi-
enced both higher and lower pleasures agree, he says, in pre-
ferring the higher, and theirs is a decisive testimony. “It is
better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better
to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool
or the pig is of a different opinion, it is because they only know
their side of the question. The other party to the comparison
knows both sides.” Mill’s assertion that pleasures differ in
quality is no doubt a truer reflection of human experience than
is Bentham’s insistence to the contrary. It is, nevertheless, non-
utilitarian. If pleasures differ qualitatively, then the higher
pleasure is the end to be sought and not the principle of Utility.
As Sidgwick, who was so ruthless and logical a thinker, saw, if
we are to be hedonists we must say that pleasures vary only in
quantity, never in quality. Utilitarianism, because it is hedon-
ism, must recognise no distinction between pleasures except a
quantitative one.
In the course of proving his thesis that the principle of Utility
can admit a qualitative distinction of pleasures, Mill makes use
of the non-Utilitarian argument that pleasures cannot, in any
case, be objectively measured. The felicific calculus is, he says,
absurd, and men have always relied upon the testimony of
“those most competent to judge.” “There is no other tribunal
to be referred to even on the question of quantity. What means
are there of determining which is the acutest of two pains or
the intensest of two pleasurable sensations except the general
suffrage of those who are familiar with both?” Mill was of
course right in maintaining the absurdity of the felicific calculus
—but if it is admitted that pleasures can no longer be measured
objectively, a vital breach has been made in the stronghold of
Utilitarianism.
Mill is concerned to establish the fact that pleasures differ in
quality as well as in quantity, so that he can maintain the fur-
ther non-Utilitarian position that not the principle of Utility but
the dignity of man is the final end of life. In his Liberty he
makes the non-Utilitarian complaint that “individual spon-
10 4 POLITICAL THOUGHT

taneity is hardly recognised by the common modes of thinking

as having any intrinsic worth, or deserving any regard on its
own account.” He approves of Humboldt’s doctrine of “‘self
realisation.” “It really is of importance,” he says, “not only
what men do, but also what manner of men they are that do
it.” “What more or better can be said of any condition of
human affairs,” he asks, “than that it brings human beings
themselves nearer to the best thing they can be?” To Bentham
and to James Mill that would have sounded dangerously like
that intuitionist gibberish which they were so constantly attack-
ing. Not self-realisation but the achievement of pleasure and the
avoidance of pain was the end that they set before men. Mill,
on the contrary, is in effect saying that one pleasure is better
than another if it promotes the sense of dignity in man. Thus
our criterion of goodness is no longer the principle of Utility.
We must now say that actions are good if they produce a higher
sense of dignity in man. Mill is here introducing a conception
of the good life as something more than a life devoted to
pleasure. Speaking of “‘the paradox of pleasure,” that happiness
is to be found only indirectly, he says, ““Aiming thus at some-
thing else, they find happiness by the way.” This is to place
moral ends above happiness, which becomes not indeed a state
of pleasures but a state of mind which ensues when one pursues
some moral end. Mill’s introduction into Utilitarianism of this
moral criterion implies a revolutionary change in the Bentham-
ite position. Mill has once again made the State a moral insti-
tution with a moral end. Not utility but the promotion of virtue
in the individual is what it must aim at. Thus Mill has de
fended Utilitarianism only by abandoning the whole Utilitarian
position.
Mill’s non-Utilitarian interest in the sense of dignity in man
leads him to give a non-Utilitarian emphasis to the idea of moral
obligation. Bentham had conceived of this as being merely the
product of past associations of the selfish desires and anticipa-
tions of men. To Mill, to whom Bentham’s view is far too simple
and naive, moral obligation is something very different. Fear,
memory, self-esteem, he admits, play their part in its composi-
tion, but so do love, sympathy, religious emotion and occasion-
ally even self-abasement. Thus Mill not only makes a real allow-
ance for the emotional basis on which the State is founded, but
goes far to admit T. H. Green’s contention that public duties
 4

THE STATE AS MACHINE 113

and responsibilities cannot logically be derived from private

rights and interests. For Mill the sense of moral obligation can-
not be explained in terms of the principle of Utility. Thus while
his ethics are certainly more satisfying than Bentham’s, Mill is
responsible for yet another important alteration in Benthamism.
This wish to encourage man’s better self leads Mill to his non-
Utilitarian interest in liberty, of which he gives two contra-
dictory interpretations, each having this in common—that it is
non-Utilitarian. To strict Utilitarians liberty is always subordin-
ated to the principle of Utility. To Mill it is something funda-
mental, more of an end even than the principle of Utility itself.
It is that passionate conviction, glowing through its pages that
has made Mill’s Essay on Liberty the great English classic that
it is, with which only Milton’s Areopagitica is fit to be compared.
No finer defence of liberty of thought and discussion has ever
been written. Believing that it is man’s mind that changes society
and that only free discussion can nourish fruitful ideas, he says
that all mankind minus one lacks the right to coerce the single
dissentient. For if it suppresses his opinion it injures the human
race. The opinion suppressed may be true and “if not sup-
pressed for ever, it may be thrown back for centuries.” It may
be partly true, in which case it is a necessary corrective to the
accepted body of truth. It may be false, but controversy will
strengthen true conviction. A creed accepted because of author-
ity is a “mummery stuffed and dead.” There is no slumber like
that of a deep-seated opinion, and it can only be to the advan-
tage of mankind to disturb it. Then they will acquire “the
clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by
its collision with error.” It will be seen that Mill is a firm be-
liever in the survival of the fittest in the world of ideas, and that
he is convinced that truth is fittest to survive. But even if men
will not accept the inherently truthful, authority, Mill believes,
cannot help. Call in Cesar to save Christ and he at once de-
stroys Him.
But important and powerful as is Mill’s advocacy of freedom
of discussion, this is not the main theme of his Liberty. Above
all, Mill wants to promote the development of individual men
and women, for he is convinced that all wise and noble things
come, and must come, from individuals. To Mill there can be
no self-development without liberty. It is this connection be-
tween liberty and self-development which interests him most,
II4 POLITICAL THOUGHT

and even though he goes on to argue that liberty is also neces-

sary for the happiness of society, it is clear that liberty is not
to be expressed in terms of Utility, but is yet more fundamental
than it.
Mill’s first definition of liberty, and that to which he generally
keeps, is that it is the sovereignty of the individual over him-
self. It is “being left to oneself.” “All restraint qua restraint is
an evil,” he says. No interference with the individual’s liberty
of action is justified except to prevent him from harming others.
Mill divides all actions into two categories. There are those
actions which concern only the individual performing them, or
self-regarding actions. There are those actions which affect
others, or other-regarding actions. And he concludes that there
should be no interference with self-regarding actions, but only
with such other-regarding actions as produce positive, demon-
strable harm to others. Mill will also admit, as a natural develop-
ment of this position, that it is legitimate to oblige a man to
bear his share in maintaining society—conscription is not to be
regarded as an unwarranted infringement of his liberty. Mill’s
whole view is non-Utilitarian. It rests on the presumption that
all restriction is evil—a presumption that cannot be justified by
the principle of Utility. Nor, though he says that interference
with the individual for his own sake is almost certain to be ill-
judged, does he prove that there are sound Utilitarian reasons
ae society should not concern itself with self-regarding actions.
Indeed, it is obvious that in insisting that self-regarding actions
should not be interfered with, Mill is not being strictly Utili-
tarian. He is introducing a criterion other than that of Utility—
the criterion, again, of self-development.
Mill’s second definition of liberty is that “liberty consists in
doing what one desires.” This is obviously very different from
the definition of liberty as being left to oneself. You would be jus-
tified, Mill says, in preventing a man crossing a bridge that you
knew to be unsafe. “Liberty consists in doing what one desires,
and he does not desire to fall into the river,”’ he tells us. The man
desired to cross the bridge, but it is legitimate to frustrate this
desire so that the greater desire, which can be imputed to him,
of not falling in the river can be achieved. This definition of
liberty throws the door open to any amount of interference. If
once it be admitted that somebody may know better than you
know what you desire, and that liberty is to do what you desire,
 PMESSTATE AS MACHINE II5

then even the activities of the Grand Inquisitor, torturing a

man’s body to prevent him being damned and thereby ensuring
to him the salvation he desires, can be justified. Mill has gone
far towards admitting the extremist idealist contention that one
can be forced to be ae Bentham and James Mill would have
been astounded and appalled at such apostasy as this on the
part of one so carefully chosen and so tirelessly and so meticu-
lously educated for the purple. In both his enthusiasm for and
his definitions of liberty, Mill, then, makes the greatest of changes
in Benthamism.
He makes yet another change of great importance in Ben-
tham’s teaching. Bentham, impatient of tradition, ignorant of
history, and seeing the world as an extension of himself, had
been convinced that his doctrines were of universal application.
Mill, who recognises in his essay on Coleridge how wrong the
philosophes were in tearing away the past, who admits that
within any community there exists a feeling of allegiance, a
strong and active principle of cohesion which can be explained
only in terms of centuries long gone by and not in terms of
Utility, who even agrees that the existence of a feeling of nation-
ality is a necessary part of this cohesion, is not a universalist at
all, but an historical relativist. He sees, for instance, as Bentham
never does, that the people for whom a form of government is
intended must be willing to accept it, able to keep it standing,
and capable of the restraint and action necessary to achieve its
end. The difference between their respective justifications of
democracy is typical of the two men. Bentham justifies de-
mocracy because of the nature of man, regarding him as so in-
herently selfish that any other form of government will be gov-
ernment in the sinister interests of the governing class. Mill,
while not denying that no other form of government than de-
mocracy can be trusted to keep the interests of the people always
before it, is nevertheless very sure that not all peoples are fit for
democracy. He explicitly says that democratic institutions cannot
be recommended for a society whose citizens have not got the
requisite quality of character. Thus whereas Bentham justifies
democracy because of the nature of man, Mill justifies it be-
cause of the condition of man.
Mill’s historical relativism enables him to emphasise something
of the highest importance. He says, as does Bentham, that poli-
tical institutions are the work of men. But he emphasises, far
116 POLITICAL DH OMG Er
more than does Bentham, that Will is the basis of all institutions,
including the State. And this Will, for him, is not only de-
pendent on numbers, it has a qualitative foundation, and the
Will which makes institutions takes on the form of a belief,
almost of a religion. Hence Mill can say, as Bentham never
could, “one person with a belief is a social power equal to
ninety-nine who have only interests.” Not the least important.of
Mill’s alterations in Benthamism is that he comes to regard the
State as a product of will rather than of interest, and that he
recognises, as Bentham did not, that mechanistic theories of the
State are fundamentally inadequate if they leave out the human
will or if they neglect the personality of men.
In all these alterations that he makes in Benthamism, Mill
may think that he is defending it, but in fact he is destroying it.
Nevertheless, he introduces one change which is sounder Utili-
tarianism than Benthamism itself. In his writings the negative
character of the State largely disappears. In his Polztical
Economy Mill reveals a clear appreciation of the weakness of
the assumption that the pursuit of individual happiness will re-
sult in social happiness. This assumption, he realises, ignores
the fact that men differ in strength and ignores, too, the effect
of historical conditions. If men’s environment represents the
accumulated inequality of the past, then they do not start equal
in the race of competition. Land, industry, knowledge are the
monopoly of a small minority. The whole legal system has been
made for and by that small minority. This being so, Mill shows
a good deal of sympathy for Socialism and wishes to use the
State to remove obstacles in the way of the individual’s develop-
ment and to make life tolerable for the masses. Mill has none
of Bentham’s regard for property. There is for him no sacred-
ness attaching to landed property. It is to be judged entirely by
its utility, and by this test it must be concluded that private
property in land is not expedient, it is unjust. Similarly Mill
advocates compulsory education supported by the State out of
taxation—and even though he does not wish to see the curricu-
lum laid down by the State he insists that there must be general
inspection by the State. He is ready to limit the right of in-
heritance, maintaining that no one must have more than a cer-
tain maximum. He supports factory legislation, at least in the
case of children. He thinks that practical monopolies should be
controlled by the State. He would limit working hours, and, in
 THE STATE AS MACHINE 117

general, he goes far in asserting the right of the State to inter-

vene in economic affairs. In all this he is being far more Utili-
tarian than Bentham, showing that on the grounds of general
happiness, far more State activity is necessary than ever Bentham
contemplated in his Jaisser-faire State. Though even here, when
he is being more Utilitarian than Bentham, it should be noticed
that Mill’s non-Utilitarian principles make their appearance. In
all disputed cases he regards the presumption as being against
the State—a view which cannot be justified according to the
principle of Utility. And he remains in favour of private enter-
prise since only through the struggle for personal independence
can man develop the moral qualities essential to a man—an in-
telligible point of view, but one which depends on a scale of
values which is non-Utilitarian.

The Reluctant Democrat

In his Liberty and Representative Government, Mill shows
himself very distrustful of democracy, yet he is both a democrat
and the greatest of English writers on democracy. No one has
been less blind to the faults of democracy. No one has insisted
more vigorously that it is not suitable for all peoples. But no
one has been more convinced that where it is possible it is the
best of all governments.
He is a democrat because he believes, as did Bentham, that
such is the innate selfishness of men that each individual’s
rights and interests are best defended by himself. “The passion
of the majority,” he was sure, “is needed to conquer the self-
interest of the few.’’ However, he is not entirely consistent here.
He admits that rulers are governed as much by the habitual sen-
timents of their class and by the traditions of their office, as by
their selfish interests. And in his System of Logic he says that
accountability is not necessarily the best way of obtaining iden-
tity of interest between ruler and ruled.
He is a democrat because he believes, as also did Bentham,
that freedom is the means to prosperity and that without pros-
perity there can be no happiness. He would have heartily agreed
with Bronterre O’Brien when he said, ‘“‘Knaves will tell you that
it is because you have no property you are unrepresented. I tell
you, on the contrary, it is because you are unrepresented that
you have no property.”
But Mill is a democrat above all, not because he believes that
Pit.—5
 118 POLITICAL THOUGHT
democracy makes men happier, but because he is convinced that
it makes them better. ‘“‘One of the benefits of freedom,” he says,
“4s that under it the ruler cannot pass by the people’s minds,
and mend their affairs for them without amending them.” For
he knows that the development of character depends on the
exercise of character, and it is because of the beneficial effect of
citizenship upon the citizen that it is so important. The only
education in citizenship that is worth anything at all is actually
being a citizen. Being responsible, serving on juries, casting
one’s vote, these are, Mill says, as necessary to the political
animal as is the air that it breathes to the natural animal. In
the whole history of Political Thought there is no loftier con-
ception of voting than his—“In any political election, even by
universal suffrage, the voter is under an absolute moral obliga-
tion to consider the interests of the public, not his private ad-
vantage, and give his vote to the best of his judgment, exactly
as he would be bound to do if he were the sole voter, and the
election depended upon him alone. His vote is not a thing in
which he has an option; it has no more to do with his personal
wishes than the verdict of a juryman. It is strictly a matter of
duty; he is bound to give it according to his best and most
conscientious opinion of the public good. Whoever has any other
idea of it is unfit to have the suffrage. Instead of opening his
heart to exalted patriotism and the obligation of public duty, it
awakens and nourishes in him the disposition to use a public
function for his own interest, pleasure, or caprice: the same
feelings and purposes, on a humbler scale, which actuate a despot
or oppressor.”
But although Mill is sure that however poorly fitted men may
seem for democracy they can only learn to swim in the water,
he is sufficient of a Utilitarian, or perhaps one should say he
has sufficient common sense, to say keep out of the water if you
are certain of being drowned. His view that the only education
in citizenship that is worth while is actually being a citizen is
not incompatible with his other view that democracy is not
possible for all peoples. But where society is ready for de-
mocracy, then he is certain that all its adult members, women
as well as men, must participate in it. He was the advocate of
women’s suffrage. He was the first to speak for that in Parlia-
ment. He was intimately connected with the London Committee
of the Society for Women’s Suffrage. No one can be denied to
 THE STATE AS MACHINE 11g

be a democrat who sees as he does what an important part de-

mocracy has to play in that development of individual men and
women which for him is the object of political association. “The
worth of a state in the long run,” he writes in a noble passage,
“is the worth of the individuals composing it; a state which
postpones the interests of their mental expansion and elevation
to a little more of administrative skill, or of that semblance of
it which practice gives in the details of business, a state which
dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instru-
ments in its hands even for beneficial purposes, will find that
with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and
that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed
everything will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the
vital power which, in order that the machine might work more
smoothly, it has preferred to banish.”
By the mid rgth century, however, it was not as easy as for
Bentham to concentrate exclusively on the theoretical virtues
of democracy. For by then a democracy had existed for long
enough for its practical drawbacks to be obvious. In 1835 De
Tocqueville published the first part, and in 1840 the second, of
his Democracy in America, the most brilliant and penetrating
study of America eyer written. Mill called it “the first analytical
inquiry into the influence of Democracy.” He was so impressed
with its profundity that for many years he maintained a cor-
respondence with De Tocqueville, a correspondence in which
incidentally he makes his most violent comment on things poli-
tical. “For my part,” he writes, “I would walk twenty miles to
see Palmerston hanged, especially if Thiers were to be strung up
along with him.”
The coming of democracy De Tocqueville regarded as inevit-
able, but he believed that it rested with man to make it a good
or an evil thing. Democracy in America, he found, safeguarded
the interests of the majority and greatly developed the faculties
of the people; but it resulted in a general want of merit in
legislative and public functionaries, and it produced a tyranny
of the majority which, in Mill’s words, did not “take the shape
of tyrannical laws, but that of a dispensing power over all laws.”
“The people of Massachusetts,” he added, “passed no law pro-
hibiting Roman Catholic schools, or exempting Protestants from
the penalties of incendiarism; they contented themselves with
burning the Ursuline convent to the ground, aware that no jury
120 POLITICAL THOUGHT

would be found to redress the error. The laws of Maryland still

prohibit murder and burglary; but in 1812, a Baltimore mob,
after destroying the printing office of a newspaper which had
opposed the war with England, broke into the prison to which
the editors had been conveyed for safety, murdered one of them,
left the others for dead, and the criminals were tried and
acquitted.” In no country, De Tocqueville considered, was there
less independence of thought than in America. Once public
opinion has settled a question, there can be no further discus-
sion of it for, he says, “Faith in public opinion is a species of
religion, and the majority its prophet.” Mill comments, “The
right of private judgment, by being extended to the incompe-
tent, ceases to be exercised even by the competent; and specula-
tion becomes possible only within the limits traced, not as of
old by the infallibility of Aristotle, but by that of ‘our free and
enlightened citizens’ or ‘our free and enlightened age.’ ”
De Tocqueville’s general conclusion, with which Mill agreed,
was that as mankind advanced towards democracy there might
be not too great liberty but too ready submission; not anarchy
but servility; not too rapid change but “Chinese stationariness.”’
The danger was that man would lose his moral courage and his
pride of independence. He might not be able to resist the
temptation to give the State too much power. He might “on
condition of making itself the organ of the general mode of
feeling and thinking, suffer it to relieve mankind from the care
of their own interests, and keep them under a kind of tutelage;
trampling meanwhile with considerable recklessness upon the
rights of individuals, in the name of society and the public
good.” Democracy, in fact, might be but the prelude to a new
era of slavery. As Nietzsche was later to say, “the democratisation
of Europe will tend to produce a type prepared for slavery in
the most subtle sense of the term.”
Nor was De Tocqueville’s the only voice critical of American
democracy. Others were appalled at the materialism of a civi-
lisation in which it had to be said that the whole of one sex
was devoted to dollar hunting and the whole of the other to
breeding dollar hunters. Dickens commented with all a novelist’s
freedom on the dollars, demagogues and bar-rooms which
played such a part in American life. His listing in Martin
Chuzzlewit of the New York papers—the New York Sewer,
the New York Stabber, the Family Spy, the Private Listener, the
 THE STATE AS MACHINE I2I

Peeper, the Plunderer, the Keyhole Reporter, the Rowdy Jour-

nal, is an extreme, but legitimate, caustic comment on the cul-
ture of democracy. Perhaps it is as well that he did not know
that Seward, the American Secretary of State, was to come into
a Cabinet meeting gleefully waving the latest Dime Novel, por-
traying the exploits of one Seth Jones, Indian fighter and scout.
Dickens says of the democratic politician, “(He was a great poli-
tician, and one article of his creed, in reference to all public
obligations involving the good faith and integrity of his coun-
try, was ‘run a moist pen slick through everything, and start
fresh.’ This made him a patriot.” “Liberty,” he concludes,
“pulls down her cap upon her eyes, and owns oppression in its
vilest aspect for her sister.”
Mill was convinced that what was true of America was true
of England also. Moreover, he believed that human nature “‘is
so poor a thing.” In his Essay on the Subjection of Women he
asks us to consider how vast 1s the number of men in any great
country who are little better than brutes. That whole essay, as
Fitzjames Stephen says, “goes to prove that of the two sexes
which between them constitute the human race, one has all the
vices of a tyrant and the other all the vices of a slave.” He is
convinced of “the present low state of the human mind.” He
writes of “the extreme unfitness of mankind in general, and of
the labouring classes in particular, for any order of things that
would make any considerable demand upon their intellect and
virtue.” Men, he thinks, are so little given to reflection and so
little capable of contro] that they are blind to the obvious effect
of the “devastating torrent of children” on “the niggardliness of
nature,” which for him is so fundamental a fact. He says, in
words which the 20th century will certainly one day have to
recall, that “the niggardliness of nature, not the injustice of
society, is the cause of the penalty attached to over-population.”
He is appalled at the “common, uncultivated herd,” but he is no
less dissatisfied with those who think themselves apart from it.
He never lost that disillusion which at seventeen he expressed in
a letter which bears all the arrogance of youth with none of its
mitigating generosity—‘‘at Yarmouth dined with a leading Radi-
cal; not much better than a mere Radical.” The best he could
find to say of the people of England who might, he thought, be
sufficiently advanced to have a democratic government was that
122 POLITICAL THOUGHE

in England “the higher classes do not lie; and the lower, though
mostly habitual liars, are ashamed of lying.”
Holding such views of his fellows, it is not surprising that Mill
is afraid of the stifling effect of public opinion, “whose ideal of
character is to be without character.” England, he says, is no
longer producing great individuals—her greatness now 1s all col-
lective. “Men of another stamp,” he writes, “made England
what it has been, and men of another stamp will be needed to
prevent its decline.” Pressure of society, he fears, is even de-
humanising men. He laments, “by dint of not following their
own nature they have no nature to follow; their human capaci-
ties are withered and starved; they become incapable of any
strong wishes or native pleasures, and are generally without
either opinions or feelings of home growth, or properly their
own.”
De Tocqueville’s warnings could not but make more urgent
these fears. Indeed, the example of America was the more chal-
lenging as the Founding Fathers themselves had been so suspi-
cious of the people. To Hamilton the people was “‘a great beast.”
Adams said, “The People unchecked is as unjust, tyrannical,
brutal, barbarous and cruel as any King or Senate possessed of
uncontrolled power.” If, now, in America, “‘the first minds of
the country are as effectually shut out from the national repre-
sentation, as if they were under a formal disqualification,” it
seemed as if Schiller was right in saying that the State where
majority and ignorance rule must collapse (“Der Staat muss
untergehn, frih oder spat, Wo Mehrheit siegt und Unverstand
entscheidet”’), and that the future was indeed grim.
The question Mill asks himself, then, is: How can I make
democracy safe for the world, how can I ensure that this inevit-
able process will be for the good and not the evil of mankind?
And his answer is well summed up in words which Lord
Lothian once used with telling effect to an Indian audience,
“Democracy is not a gift to be conferred, but a habit to be
acquired. It cannot succeed unless it produces a race of aristo-
crats—and an aristocrat I would define as one who puts more
into life than he takes out of it.”
Mill was certain that democracy can produce aristocrats so
defined. His basic assumption is that men are made what they
are by their education. When he says in his autobiography that
any child of normal intelligence, having the advantage of his
 THE STATE AS MACHINE 123

training, would have developed as he did, he is not being falsely

modest, but is speaking the simple truth as he sees it. Therefore
he believes that right education can make men aristocrats. And
by education he Ce not mean that which is exclusively con-
cerned with books and academic studies. ““The main branch of
the education of human beings,” he says, “is their habitual em-
ployment.” He is an advocate of industrial as well as of poli-
tical democracy. He believes, too, in education “in and through
the exercise ood duties.” Because if men realise democracy
democracy will realise men, it should follow, he thinks, that
democracy need never be short of those natural leaders without
whose vision any people under any form of government will
perish. And he believed that such aristocrats would be listened
to if only men would make one all-important distinction—the
distinction between False and True Democracy. “The de-
mocracy of numbers,” which has been condemned, as he points
out, by all the great masters of political thought “as the final
form of the degeneracy of all governments,” is False Democracy.
The principle, “Every man to count for one; no man for more
than one,” is, he thinks, a principle of False Democracy. For it
implies the belief that any man is as good as any other, a belief
which not only ignores the obvious differences of intelligence
and virtue between men but which Mill believes to be ‘“‘almost
as detrimental to moral and intellectual excellence as any effect
which most forms of government can produce.” “Exclusive
Government by a class” is False Democracy. The principle of
one man one vote, would mean such a government, a government
of the least educated class, of the manual labourers.
True Democracy will give due weight and influence to all the
different elements of society, and will thus obviate the undue
preponderance of any. It will give men of worth plural votes—
“but it is an absolute condition that the plurality of votes must
on no account be carried so far that those who are privileged by
it, or the class, if any, to which they mainly belong, shall out-
weigh by means of it all the rest of the community.” It will
insist on Proportional Representation. It will abolish the ballot
since “people will give dishonest or mean votes from lucre,
from malice, from pique, from personal rivalry, even from the
interests or prejudices of class or sect, more readily in secret
than in public.” It will have a Second Chamber in which will
be especially represented those factors in the national life which
124 POLITICAL THOUGHT

will never be adequately represented in an assembly popularly

elected, so composed as to “incline it to oppose itself to the class
interests of the majority, and qualify it to raise its voice with
authority against their errors and weaknesses.” True Demo-
mocracy will never allow M.P.s to be paid, since thereby “the
calling of a demagogue would be formally inaugurated.” It will
insist that representatives are true representatives and not mere
delegates. It will not ignore the “radical distinction between
controlling the business of government and actually doing it,”
but will realise that the true function of a Parliament is not to
administer but to watch and supervise the administration. It
will recognise the limits of the State’s authority and will leave
individuals to do things whenever they can do them better than
the State, whenever, even if they cannot do them as well as the
State, it is nevertheless desirable that they should do them as a
means of self-education, and whenever there is a danger of
adding unnecessarily to the Government’s power. It will never
be blind to the danger of a powerful bureaucracy, aware that
“the governors are as much slaves of their organisation and
discipline as the governed are of the governors.” And it will be
alive to the danger of majority tyranny, for it will know that
“the silent sympathy of the majority may support on the scaffold
the martyr of one man’s tyranny; but if we would imagine the
situation of a victim of the majority itself, we must look to the
annals of religious persecution for a parallel.”
Mirabeau once declared that “Representative Assemblies can
be compared to maps which reproduce all the elements of a
country in their due proportions so that the greater elements
do not make the smaller elements disappear altogether.” It was
in the sense that he spoke of Representative Assemblies that the
British Government in the 18th century could claim to be repre-
sentative. The theory of representation held in England prior
to the Reform Bill of 1832 was that representation should be of
interests and not numbers, and it was precisely because the
franchise was unequally and capriciously distributed that the
House of Commons was said to be a real epitome of the nation.
It was claimed that whereas under a system of universal suf-
frage every section of the people in a minority would have no
be eve te, under the existing system there was no section
of the community that had not the chance to return a member to
Parliament.
 THE STATE AS MACHINE 125

Eighteenth-century Englishmen were extremely reluctant to

exchange this representation of interests for a representation of
numbers. “I see as little of policy or utility, as there is of right, in
laying down a principle that a majority of men, told by the
head, are to be considered as the people, and that as such their
will is to be law,” Burke declared. Coleridge denounced the
authors of the Reform Bill as doing “the utmost in their power
to raze out the sacred principle of a representation of interest,
and to introduce the modern and barbarising scheme of a dele-
gation of individuals.” Canning was emphatic that, “For my
part I value the system of parliamentary representation for that
very want of uniformity which is complained of—for the variety
of right of election.” And Francis Horner, no Conservative, said,
“T see a good deal of practical benefit result, even to the interest
of liberty and popular rights, from the most rotten parts of the
constituent body.”’ There is indeed much to be said for Bage-
hot’s claims that “the English Constitution of the last century,
in its best time, gave an excellent expression to the public opinion
of England,” and that “the representation of the working classes
then really existed.”
The iaites between this old view of the Constitution and
Mill’s True Democracy are obvious. It is a paradoxical conclu-
sion that this old view of representation which, in supporting the
Reform Bills he himself was actively concerned to abolish, might
yet have played an important part in reconciling Mill to de-
mocracy. Without it he might never have been a democrat. With
it to shape his distinction between False and True Democracy
there can be no doubt that he is entitled to be regarded as a
democrat, albeit by 2oth-century standards a reluctant democrat.

His Importance
The predicament of a man who was constrained by a process
of indoctrination perhaps without parallel to profess loyalty to
a system of thought against which in his inmost being he re-
belled, who therefore persisted in believing that he was only re-
fining whereas he was in fact undermining that system, has often
been commented upon. Those for whom coherence and consist-
ency are the major virtues will not look with admiration upon
John Stuart Mill.
Moreover, it has to be admitted that Mill can be naive and
contradictory as well as confused. In his attempt to prove that
 126 POLYTLLCAL BHO GHie
happiness is desirable, he is responsible for one of the weakest
arguments in the whole gamut of political philosophy. “The
only proof capable of being given that an object is visible,” he
says, “‘is that people actually see it. In like manner, I apprehend,
the sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is de-
sirable is that people actually do desire it. No reason can be
given why the general happiness is desirable, except that each
person, so far as he believes it to be attainable, desires his own
happiness. This, however, being a fact, we have not only all the
proof which the case admits of, but all which it is possible to
require, that happiness is good: that each person’s happiness is
a good to that person, and that the general happiness, therefore,
is a good to the aggregate of all persons.”’ The difference which
Mill ignores here between the words visible and desirable is of
course fundamental. Visible can only mean what can be seen,
but desirable means what ought to be desired as well as what is
actually desired. Mill has only asserted that people do in fact
desire ee not proved that they ought to desire happiness.
And it is sophistry to suggest that because each man’s happiness
is a good to himself that it follows that the general happiness is
a good to the aggregate of all men. Anything that adds to my
happiness will add to the general happiness, but it does not fol-
low that anything that increases the general happiness will add
to mine. Mill’s attempt to show that each should pursue the hap-
piness of the whole as a means to his own pleasure completely
fails to reduce altruism to egoism, and merely shows how logic-
ally impossible it is to believe as he did that happiness is the sole
criterion of goodness and that men have only desired happiness.
For if men can only desire happiness which alone is good, it
must follow that whatever men desire is good. This is to abolish
the notion of goodness altogether, for if an action cannot be
bad it certainly cannot be good.
And if some of Mill’s proofs are inadequate, some, which it
is really much more important for him than for either. Bentham
or James Mill to provide, are entirely non-existent. He simply
assumes, as they had done, that men should be treated as equals.
But he makes pleasures differ in quality, as they did not, and it
is easy in consequence to argue that the happiness of those whose
higher faculties are well developed is worth more than the happi-
ness of those who know only lower pleasures. Plato’s republic
would provide a greater development of the higher faculties
 THE STATE AS MACHINE 127

than a democratic government in which the ignorant, selfish

majority prevailed. Failure to defend the principle of basic
equality of right among men is a real weakness in Mill’s defence
of democracy.
Few would deny that his view of liberty as the absence of
restraint is inadequate. An age which has realised as Mill’s was
only beginning to that in an industrial civilisation rules are in-
dispensable, and that if political power does not make them
private power will, demands a more positive view of liberty than
Mill was able to provide.
Similarly his individual will appear to the 2oth century far
too isolated and therefore unreal a figure. For Mill, who has
far more idea than his father or Bentham of the emotional and
historic forces that hold society together, has yet no appreciation
of the formative role of associations in society. He remains on
the whole hostile to corporate life within the State, although he is
willing to recognise trade unions so long as they remain purely
voluntary organisations.
Moreover, he himself goes far to admitting that he is hardly
justified in basing his philosophy upon the autonomous indi-
vidual when he attacks the ballot on the ground that publicity
will check men making selfish use of their vote. For if men
acting together are better in common than each would be indi-
vidually, then it would seem that society is better than the indi-
viduals who compose it. And there would seem to be something
wrong with a philosophy which makes so much of the autonom-
ous individual when the autonomous individual can obtain good-
ness only when he ceases to be autonomous.
One may add, too, that Mill’s acute sense of the weakness of
his fellows is a remarkably insecure foundation for his belief in
their liberty. It is, to say the least, difficult to reconcile his low
view of human nature with what must seem to a later age,
which has no longer the excuse that his had to believe in the
inevitability of progress, the wild optimism that enabled him to
write “‘all the grand sources, in short, of human suffering are
in a great degree, many of them almost entirely, conquerable by
human care and effort.”
Besides, powerful and valuable as is his defence of freedom
of opinion, it does not remove all doubts. He tells us nothing
about the problem that so concerned Milton in the 17th cen-
tury and ee is of vital importance to us today. Should we
128 POLITICAL THOUGHT
tolerate the intolerant? What should our attitude be towards a
small party working in the interests of a hostile foreign power
who would use the freedom accorded to them to make freedom
impossible for everyone else? Is there not a danger in attaching
too much importance to discussion? There will, no doubt,
always be believers in the eccentric theory that ignorance plus
flatulence equals knowledge. And men can be forgiven if they
sometimes respond to persistent probing as Doctor Johnson
occasionally did to Boswell when he used to ask questions which
the good Doctor declared were enough to make a man hang
himself. Too much discussion may be a sign of weakness and
instability; may, as Burke said, “turn our duties into doubts.”
Mill admitted as much in his essay on Coleridge—an admission
that is very difficult to reconcile with the views he put forward
in his Essay on Liberty. And we may well doubt if truth is as
easy to discover as Mill thought, and if man’s mind moves
society to anything like the extent that he believed.
Yet when all the criticisms that can be are brought against him.
he remains far and away the most satisfactory of the Utilitarians.
He touches depths that Bentham and his father never knew
existed. He has his own unreality, but he is much closer to life
than they are. Indeed, not the least of his importance is that,
though unintentionally, he so completely demonstrates the in-
adequacy of Utilitarianism, its ethical aridity, its blindness to
the emotions.
But if he does this, he shows also its real strength. He never
loses sight of the individual men and women who make up the
State. It exists for them, not them for it. Mill will have nothing
to do with organic theories of State and Society. Moreover, like
Locke, he is writing with Englishmen in mind, and his indivi-
dual men and women, despite their exaggerated and artificial
isolation, are recognisable Englishmen. And the problems which
interested him then concern them no less nearly today. He wishes
to determine the limits of collective control. Hence his much
criticised division of actions into self- and other-regarding. Yet he
never supposed that any other than a rough division was pos-
sible, and reliance on even so rough a rule seemed to him far
safer than granting absolute moral rights to the majority. He
was interested in the preservation of personality in the age of the
large-scale—and so are we. To Ritchie writing in 1891 it might
seem that Mill absurdly exaggerated the importance of eccen-
 THE STATE AS MACHINE 129

tricity. We, who have felt the full weight of radio and cinema
and newspaper, who have, as Nietzsche said, put the newspaper
in place of the daily prayer, who know with Berdieff how much
“the machine wants man to adopt its image and its likeness,”
who have seen the terrible dehumanising work of that manu-
factory of souls, the Totalitarian State, can only feel thankful
for Mill’s fine protest against machine-made uninspiring dull-
ness. He wanted to safeguard democracy against itself—a desire
which contemporary uneasiness would suggest is certainly astir
within us, even though we would naturally prefer to safeguard
other peoples against their democracy than ourselves against
ours. It would be to commit the sin of hybris and to invite the
adverse attention of the gods to assert too confidently that he
was necessarily wrong even in the means he suggested to this
end. At least this is sure, that when in the storm and stresses of
contemporary life Englishmen feel the need to refresh them-
selves in the faith of their fathers they will not think of Mill’s
works as they do of antimacassars and aspidistras—as dated and
done with, displeasing to God, unprofitable to man and fit only
to collect the dust.
 CHAPTER III

THE STATE AS ORGANISM

(Rousszau, HEGEL, GREEN)
The Inadequacy of the Tradition of Will and Artifice
owarps the end of the 18th and increasingly throughout
the rgth century men became dissatisfied with the theory
which regarded the State as a machine. It was, they be-
lieved, unrealistic to look upon individuals as so many isolated
atoms—as writers of the mechanistic school were only too apt
to do. It was profitless to study men apart from society. It was
wrong to set the desire for liberty which men feel against the
necessity for authority under which they labour, defining the
one solely in terms of the individual and the other in terms of
the State. So misleading, in fact, was the antithesis “State” and
“Individual,” so dear to the hearts of those who regarded the
State as a machine, as to make impossible any true analysis of
man’s relations with his fellows and with the State. Liberty is
not mere absence of restraint. It is doing something worth doing,
it is identifying ourselves with some law which we feel corre-
sponds to our truest desires, our real self, whether we call that
law the Law of Nature with the Stoics, the Divine Law with St.
Paul, the Law of Reason with Kant, or the General Will with
Rousseau. The State, they concluded, was not an enemy of
liberty, but the only means of achieving it. It was unworthy of
man to look upon him, as too often those who saw the State as
a machine did, as a creature dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure
and the avoidance of pain. That was to ignore that which in
man makes him desire to be something more and better than he
is, to forget that “Unless above himself he can exalt himself, how
mean a thing is man.” It was to overlook the truth that Lamar-
tine so well expressed :
““Borné dans sa nature, infini dans ses voeux
L’homme est un dieu tombé qui se souvient des cieux.”
Men thus felt a need for a more satisfactory answer to the
question: ‘““Why does the State exist and why should man obey
it?” than any that could be supplied by the machine theory of
the State. The r8th-century interest in history, the new tendency
 THE STATE AS ORGANISM I31

to give a general coherence to history in terms of growth and

decay, strengthened that need. So did the development of nation-
alism, since it is easier for men to fall down and worship a State
that is not presented to them as a mere machine of their own
making. The State accordingly began to be portrayed as the |
embodiment of the nation. The basis of the State became a
naturally homogeneous people, united by common descent and
community of ideas, traditions, loves. The State-organism be-
came the unconsciously evolved organisation which maintained
the unity of the nation and gave expression to its will. State-
personality was said to be attained when national self-conscious-
ness had developed and had revealed itself in the constitution.
The powerful attraction of new scientific discoveries made that
need yet more acute. Throughout history men have shown them-
selves quick to believe that a new scientific advance could some-
how be made of universal application. In the ancient world
Pythagorus, recognising the great importance of mathematics,
concluded that everything could be reduced to numbers. In the
17th century political and social theories were modelled on the
type of mathematics then so highly thought of, in the 18th
century on the physical sciences then developing, in the rgth
century on the natural sciences then making so great an advance.
To the “political algebra” of Rousseau, to the “social mathe-
matics” of Condorcet, succeeds first the “social physics” of St.
Simon, then the “social physiology” of Comte and finally his
“Natural History of Societies.” Though the modern theory of
evolution at first seemed to strengthen the machine view of the
State, it soon had the very opposite effect, and biology as well
as the tradition of historical cohesion and the growth of
nationalism fortified men’s demand for some more adequate
interpretation of the nature of the State. So did the economic
and industrial development which drew men ever tighter into
national societies as the 19th century wore on, and the break-
down of laisser-faire with men’s consequent conversion to the
advantages of collective responsibility and control. Reaction to
the very materialism of a scientific age also played its part in
making that demand still more insistent.
The Organic View of the State
A more satisfactory answer to man’s speculation about the
State was found in the organic view of the State, that view which
132 POL
Ti CA Ls TFLOUG
Hef,

regards the State no longer as a machine but as a living organ-

ism. The essentials of this view were already apparent under the
Greeks, though later writers were to make far greater play than
they had done with the parallel of the State and the human
body. In modern theorists who refer to the State as an organism,
no mere analogy or metaphor is intended. The State is regarded
not as being like an organism, a person, an individual, but as
actually being an organism, a person, an individual.
This view of the State was put forward by what may be
called the biological school of political theorists that flourished
in the 19th century. They pointed to the similarity of the growth
of living beings towards a higher life and the development of
political institutions. In both they found increasing differentia-
tion of the parts and growth in the variety of needs felt. As
higher forms of organic life are reached, they indicated, organ-
isms become more definitely and delicately controlled, activities
become increasingly self-directed until there emerges the self-
conscious individual, and from the different development of in-
dividuals many classes, genera and species are evolved. So it was,
they maintained, with political society. As the advance of civi-
lisation produces increased social needs and activities, the or-
ganisation of the State becomes more complex and is endowed
with greater power. The exercise of that power becomes more
obviously self-directed, that is in the interests of the State itself
rather than in the personal interests of those wielding the State’s
power, and finally States assume different forms in different
environments until definite classes, genera, species can be seen.
Sometimes, indeed, writers of this biological school displayed a
wealth of ingenuity in finding close biological parallels between
the State and the natural man. They spoke of the “tissues” of
the State, of its systems of nutrition and circulation, of organs
within it fulfilling specifically the functions of brain, nerve,
fibres, heart, muscles, even stomach and nose. The Foreign
Office of the State corresponded to this latter organ according
to Bluntschli—a comparison which in the light of Soviet prac-
tice might have more to recommend it than could at one time
have been thought. Bluntschli further maintained that the State
was of the masculine sex, while the Church was feminine.
Others who were more moderate than the writers of the bio-
logical school, who were wise enough to appreciate the limita-
tions of ingenuity, who were content to admit the differences be-
 THE STATE AS ORGANISM 133

tween plants and animals on che one hand and States on the
other, nevertheless maintained that the State was indeed an
organism. Plants and animals, they said, were only two species
of organisms, and together they did not exhaust the genus or-
ganism. The claim of the mollusc, they contended, to be an
organism would not be rejected because it isn’t a mammal, and
the claim of the State to be an organism need likewise not be
rejected because it isn’t an animal. In any case, they maintained,
in philosophical discussions the term “organic” must be allowed
to have a broader application than to the phenomena of biology.
There are, they said, three essential characteristics of an organ-
ism so understood. Firstly, there is an intrinsic relationship of
the parts to the whole. The parts, though they may retain a cer-
tain relative independence, become what they are by virtue of
their relationship to the whole. A part of a machine retains its
essential character even when separated from the machine. A
wheel is still a wheel though no longer working in a machine.
But a hand is no longer a hand when separated from the body.
In an organism when the parts cease to be parts they cease to be
organic, and the relationship of part to whole is therefore intrin-
sic, while in a machine the relationship of part to whole is not.
Secondly, in an organism development takes place from within.
There can be no such inner development in a machine which
may be altered by the substitution of new parts for old, but
which cannot grow. An organism, on the other hand, cannot be
altered by the substitution of new parts for old, but it can grow
and thereby gradually transform itself. Thirdly, the end for
which an organism exists lies within itself. It is the development
of its own life and that of other lives in which it is reproduced.
A machine, on the other hand, is a contrivance adapted to the
realisation of an end outside itself. An organism, therefore, is a
whole whose parts are intrinsically related to it, which grows
and develops from within and which has reference to an end
that is svete in its own nature.
The State, we are told, possesses these three characteristics,
and must therefore be regarded as organic. Its members, it is
true, do not “observe degree, priority and place” in quite the
way that members of an animal organism must do if that or-
ganism is to survive. It must be admitted that as Wordsworth
said in contrasting the sun and man:
134 POLITICAL THOUGHT
“He cannot halt nor go astray,
But our immortal spirits may.”

It must be further allowed that man’s highest development

sometimes seems in isolation from his social environment.
Goethe declared that he had to tread the wine-press alone, and
Hegel wrote: “In nothing is one so much alone as in
philosophy.”

“Two desires toss about

The poet’s feverish blood;
One drives him to the world without,
And one to solitude.”

That is true for all of us, for we must live within ourselves as
well as among our fellows. And there is a truth that the Stoics
would have recognised in the assertion with which Ibsen con-
cludes An Enemy of the People—that “the strongest man on
earth is he who stands most entirely alone.” Yet we are all,
even the strongest of us, very largely what inheritance and en-
vironment have made us. Indeed, it seems to be precisely in the
strongest of men that the spirit of the times most personifies
itself, so that Napoleon claiming to be the force of the French
Revolution could say of hinteelf “T am not a person, I am a
thing.” So much are we part of society that, as Comte said, it
is impossible even to give utterance to the “blasphemous” doc-
trine that we are independent of it, since the very expression of
independence involves the use of language which is itself de-
pendent on society. Thus the whole is essential to the parts, and
however lonely a man’s walk may seem, he can never completely
dissociate himself from society. He can therefore be said to
stand in an intrinsic relationship to it and to the State, which is
society organised as a sovereign political body. In the State, too,
we are told, we can sce that inner development which is charac-
teristic of an organism. Though the individual is moulded by
society, it is nevertheless through the development of individual
lives that society grows—that is, society, and with it the State,
develops from within. Further we are asked to see in the State
the third characteristic of an organism. It is an end in itself, and
that end, whether we define it as the full life, the good life, the
happy life, is included in its own nature. To regard it as an in-
 THE STATE AS ORGANISM 135

strument of something else is therefore false and pernicious.

Thus exhibiting all the characteristics of an organism, philo-
_sophically defined, the State, it is urged, is rightly to be regarded
as an organism.
Some who wished to differentiate the State still further from
the “natural” or “physical” organism, since this reveals no
knowledge of the type towards which it tends and is powerless
to accelerate or retard its own progress whereas the end of the
State is one that makes an appeal to the rational nature of its
members and one which their direct efforts must help to realise,
preferred to call the State a “‘Super-organism,” an ‘“‘Organism
of Organisms.” Others spoke of it as a “Moral” Organism. Yet
others referred to it as a “Real Person” or as a “Super Person,”
purifying or fulfilling the lesser persons of its citizens.
But however varied the nomenclature adopted by those who
believe in the organic view of the State, they hold certain be-
liefs in common. They regard the State as an end in itself,
something which subserves no other end. They see that end as
the full development of all the latent capacities of the State and
its members. They view the State as a whole which is greater
than the sum of its parts. In Ritchie’s words, “the body cor-
porate is mysterious, like the personality of the individual.”
Therefore the interests of the whole are not necessarily the same
as the sum of the interests of the parts. Thoroughgoing organic
theorists, indeed, hold that the parts can have no real interests
themselves, any more than hands or teeth or feet can have real
interests. As only the interest of the individual to whom these
belong matters, so only the interest of the State is essential. The
parts must accordingly be subject to the authority of the whole.
The parts may have some independent, if restricted, existence—
they may have rights within the State, but they can never have
rights against the State. The sovereignty of the State and the
liberty of the Individual, so the organic theorists believe, are
not really opposed. True freedom is to be found in obedience
to the State’s laws. Only when this is realised can the end of
the whole be seen to be also the end of every part, for when it
is realised and acted upon, the individual will be developing
himself to the highest level of which he is capable and the State
will be completely fulfilling itself. Further, organic theorists
make no distinction between State and Society, and they do not
regard all States as being equally good, since some are more
136 POLITICAL THOUGHT
completely integrated than others. The organic State is the ideal
towards which civilisation is moving, not the point from which
it starts, and not all States have advanced equally along that
road.
This, then, is the organic view of the State, a State which is
no mere contrivance of man, no mere device for getting things
done, but which in Burke’s glowing words is “to be looked on
with other reverence; because it is not a partnership in things
subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary
and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science; a partner-
ship in all art, a partnership in every virtue; and in all perfec-
tion. As the end of such a partnership cannot be obtained in
many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between
those who are living, but between those who are living, those
who are dead, and those who are to be born.”
It is the aim of this chapter to analyse the ideas of three
writers who in their very different ways illustrate the organic
view of the State, of Rousseau who still made use of a good deal
of mechanist terminology, who retained to the end a greater
love of individualism than, strictly speaking, is compatible with
organic doctrines, but whose contribution to the growth of the
modern organic theory is nevertheless of the greatest importance;
of Hegel who can be regarded as the representative par excellence
of the organic State, and of T. H. Green who adapted it to Eng-
lish needs and who, reflecting as did Locke the English belief
that logic is no necessary ingredient of political success, showed,
as also did Locke, that common sense can frequently be more
satisfactory in a political theorist than a ruthless determination
to work out ideas to their logical conclusions.
JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU, I712-1778
The Conflicting Interpretations
Few men have more affected the mind of the modern world
than Jean Jacques Rousseau. His, so Bergson tells us, was the
most powerful of the influences which the human mind has ex-
perienced since Descartes. He left the stamp of his strong and
original genius on politics, education, religion, literature, and it
is hardly an exaggeration to say with Lanson that he is to be
found at the entrance to all the paths leading to the present. Yet
there has been no writer about whom it has been more difficult
to find agreement than about Rousseau. He has been greatly
 THE STATE AS ORGANISM 137
lauded and more maligned. He has been hailed as the
philosopher who has seen most deeply into the nature of the
State since Plato. Yet much ef what the French, for whom the
writing of recent history is an expression of political faith, have
said of him had better remain untranslated. He was, for instance
for Voltaire, who dispensed with irony in commenting on one
whom the philosophes had wished to claim as their own and
who contented himself with expressing philosophical disagree-
ment in the measured language of cultured and considered con-
demnation, a “charlatan savage,” a “‘hoot-owl,” a ‘Swiss valet,”
a “bastard of the dog of Diogenes and the bitch of Herostratus.”
He has been regarded as the apostle of the Noble Savage, run-
ning wild in native woods, strong, magnificent, uncorrupted,
and free. Rousseau made him itch to go on all fours, said Vol-
taire. Yet he has also been portrayed as passionately pleading for
us to develop ourselves still further from the savage state, as a
greater Statue of Liberty beckoning men with torch aloft light-
ing their way to a greater freedom and a higher culture than
they have ever known. Even among those who share this latter
view, however, there is deep disagreement. “Rousseau believed
with passion in progress,” Laski writes. ‘“The idea of progress is
one which we certainly cannot attribute to him,” Cobban de-
clares. No eminent writer, it is said, has ever been so full of
contradictions. He tells us both that property is the root of all
evil and that it is a sacred institution. He pleads for individual
liberty and insists on absolute submission to the State. He wants
toleration for all and banishes atheists from his republic. His
work, comes the emphatic rejoinder, constitutes an essential
unity. He is said to be a great thinker, one of the greatest. He
never enjoyed “the distinction of knowing how to think,” Mor-
ley replies. He is the extreme individualist, the latest and great-
est of the individualist political theorists. Bonald declared that
he wished ‘“‘to make constant the inconstant, to order disorder,”
and Lamennais wrote that his work was “a sacrilegious declara-
tion of war against society and against God.” He is the extreme
absolutist, the precursor of 1gth-century German idealism. Con-
stant said of him: ‘He is the most terrible ally of despotism in
all its forms.’’ Duguit wrote: “J. J. Rousseau is the father of
Jacobin despotism, of Czsarian dictatorship, and the inspirer of
the absolutist doctrines of Kant and of Hegel.” He is both ex-
treme individualist and extreme absolutist. “‘A stern asserter of
138 POLITICAL THOUGHT

the State on the one hand,” Vaughan wrote, “a fiery champion

of the individual on the other, he could never bring himself
wholly to sacrifice the one ideal to the other.”
It is at least surprising to find that the man of whom so many
different views are possible is a brilliant and lucid writer, a
master of the finest prose. Indeed, there is none finer since Plato
in the whole history of political thought. We dare not believe
that he could not adequately express what he wanted to say.
But he had the dangerous gifts of epigram and paradox, and
the greatest of writers if he indulges them too frequently is open
to misunderstanding. Such phrases as: “Let us lay aside all the
facts, for they have no bearing on our problem,” ““The man who
meditates is a degenerate animal,” “Man is born free and is
everywhere in chains,” are more arresting, provocative, even
inspiring, than clarifying. Moreover, Rousseau rarely troubles
to define his terms very clearly, and indeed uses them—as, for
instance, the term ‘“‘nature’—in different senses at different
times. And because he touched so many fields of thought that
innumerable specialists have felt bound to take note of him, it
is not surprising that they have interpreted him to suit them-
selves. The anthropologist takes his “natural” man to be the
primitive man, the psychologist to be the unchanging man, the
moralist to be the ideal man to whose development all the ages
are leading. To the idealist philosopher the idealist in Rousseau
is of supreme importance, to the individualist thinker the indi-
vidualist in him alone matters. Knowing therefore the difficulty
of classifying Rousseau in any school of political thought, it will
be profitable to examine what he has to say, and then to sum
up those reasons which have seemed strong enough to justify his
inclusion among those who teach the organic theory of the
State.

His Idea of Nature

Rousseau grew up in the rigorously Calvinist atmosphere of
the small city state of Geneva, of which his father was a frugal
if somewhat unstable master-craftsman citizen. Throughout his
life, in spite of his conversion to Catholicism, in spite of Geneva
shaking off her errant son, his affection for his home remained
undimmed and strongly coloured his political thought. He him-
self was the most restless of men. Everything by turns and
nothing long, he was never completely at home in any profes-
 Deitebs SS)TsA; TEs AvS ‘O\R GrAtNiics\M 139

sion, in any science, in any religion. Now domestic servant,

engraver, tax collector, private tutor, now music copyist, diplo-
matic secretary, musical performer and composer, he was more
truly, as he said of himself, “the lonely wanderer.” He could
not tolerate external restraint. He was a man of great sincerity,
hating sham, loathing the life of the salons and of Parisian
society. He was a man of the deepest feeling, of great tender-
ness, of extreme susceptibility. Reverie he found easier than
reflection. What touched his heart straightway unloosed his
tongue.
When he came to Paris it seemed likely that he would ally
himself with the Encyclopedists. Had he done so he would have
been a made man. But he chose to unmake himself—he quar-
relled with them and he refused to be presented at Court. Back-
ground and temperament made him protest against the arti-
ficiality around him. The philosophes, he said, “know very well
what a citizen of London or Paris is, but not what a man is.”
And because their rationalism contented itself with what he
could not, he became increasingly aware that their rational
agnosticism was not for him. Voltaire, for instance, admired
Catherine of Russia, and was unimpressed by the trifling cir-
cumstance that she had murdered her husband. Against the
reason which could find excuses for that, Rousseau appealed to
conscience, to the moral sentiment of man. In the Discourse on
the Origin and Foundation of Inequality, he undertook to
show what was the nature of man. In what seemed little short
of deification of nature, he portrayed man as living in a past
golden age, prompted by conscience, not yet led astray by the
harlotries of reason, still uncorrupted by that perennial propa-
gator of evil, that confidence trick of the ages whereby the rich
induce the poor to accept them, that great deformer of man
which calls itself society. Yet that was not really his view of
man and his nature, that was not really his view of reason, that
was not really his view of society. Because he was the enemy
of one kind of reason, we must not conclude that he was the
enemy of all reason; nor must we believe that black men with
knobkerry and assegai in Africa, or red men with tomahawk
and scalping knife in America, represented for him the end of
all man’s striving.
It is true that his belief that nature is always right was the
foundation on which his whole thought rested. But he emphati-
140 POLITICAL THOUGHT

cally did not mean by this that animal desire should be man’s
only guide, that the nature of man was one with the nature of
the brute, that to be natural man must be a savage—in spite of
the passages in his writings in which he idealises the State of
Nature, passages which are so vivid and colourful precisely be-
cause they reflect his own passionate rejection of restraint.
There are, he thought, two original instincts that make up
man’s nature. There is self-love or the instinct of self-preserva-
tion, and there is sympathy or the gregarious instinct. Since
these instincts are more beneficial than harmful, it follows that
man is by nature good. But self-love and sympathy will fre-
quently clash, and when they do, how shall man know which to
follow? He will wish to satisfy both, since that is his nature, and
from this wish to do what will help others as well as what is
necessary for himself is born a sentiment which is natural to
man and older than reason, a sentiment which men call con-
science. But conscience is only a blind sentiment, a desire which
man feels to do right for himself and for others. It will not
teach man what is in fact right, but will merely make him
want to do what is right when he knows what that is. Con-
science itself requires a guide—and that guide is reason, which
develops in man as alternate courses of action present them-
selves before him. Reason teaches him what to do and con-
science makes him do it. Thus it is obvious that for Rousseau,
conscience and reason are in close attendance on man and to-
gether restrain the desire that is in him. Hence the “natural”
man will be one in whom strong conscience and steadfast
reason have successfully harmonised self-love and sympathy,
the “unnatural” man one in whom these elemental instincts
have been warped or suppressed while conscience sleeps and
reason errs,
Reason, however, will seek not only to harmonise but also to
develop man’s instincts, to give them the fullest expression. For
this, culture and society will be necessary. The freedom of action
that man alone enjoys distinguishes him from the brute. At first
sight it might seem that man living in a State of Nature must
have much more freedom of action than man living in society.
True, such a man will know independence, since he will be in-
dependent of the law of man and dependent only on those laws
of things to which all earthly creatures are subject. Yet he will,
in fact, be a slave to his appetites, in bondage to his pleasure.
 THE STATE AS ORGANISM 141
Only society can give full meaning to the freedom of action
-which is man’s, can turn independence into true liberty. In
society, indeed, man will be dependent on the laws of man as
well as on the laws of things. In society he will know duties as
he never knew them before. But in society he will gain what
independence could never give him, rights which are assured by
a strength greater than his own, unmeasured freedom to do not
what captivates his passing whim but what his inmost nature
demands. In society his “natural” sympathy, for instance, will
become rational benevolence. In society, if he can obey the law
not because he has to but because he wants to, if he can give
perfect obedience to his civil duty, he will attain moral liberty,
he will be really himself. As a gardener who clears away the
undergrowth from around the sapling and who by constant
attention helps it to become a finer tree than it would have been
without his loving care, so society will be to man. As the tree
so cared for will be more truly a tree than if it had been left
unaided, so man will be more truly “natural” than if left to live
out his life in a primitive state.
Perfection of man’s nature by his reason and through society
is man’s destiny. Why, then, has he never fulfilled it? Com-
pound of self-love and sympathy, with conscience added unto
them and reason to help, man has only to be true to himself to
make his way to the stars. But it is not easy for man to be true
to his nature. It is, in fact, so hard that Rousseau doubts if there
ever has been or ever will be a natural man. For man’s self-love,
which satisfies his real needs, is only too apt to become pride,
which creates imaginary and utterly insatiable needs, and which
is incompatible with man’s instinct of sympathy. From pride all
evil has grown and gone ranging round the world devouring
men. Pride seduces reason herself until, forgetting man’s true
nature, she proves the most reckless and irresponsible of guides.
She builds an imposing culture around nature, but she is like
the gardener whose art is to warp and twist the tree until he
imposes upon it a form not naturally its own. The society which
she develops, therefore, moulds man not according to but
against nature. And as the malformed tree is less truly a tree
than it would have been if left severely alone, so man in such a
society is less truly “natural” than if left in his state of nature.
We can now see what Rousseau means in exhorting man to
142 POLITICAL THOUGHT

return to nature. If he wishes to be saved, he must renounce

pride and content himself with that self-love which is natural
to him. He must rescue reason from pride, so that, leaving
conscience uncorrupted to follow the right and leave the wrong,
she will lead him to virtue, fulfilling, not distorting, his nature,
until it becomes plain to all that the most “natural” of men will
also be the most virtuous and the most cultured. It can be said,
then, of Rousseau that ‘‘nature” for him was ahead of, not be-
hind, political development. His protest, in his book Rousseau
Judge of Jean Jacques, that he had never intended to put the
clock back is valid. Far from seeing man’s nature as at its best
in the Noble Savage, it is clear that he viewed nature as did
Aristotle, for whom the nature of a thing was what it was
capable of becoming under the best possible circumstances. This
idea runs all through Rousseau’s work, giving it an underlying
unity. In the Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, he attacks the
false art which deforms nature and corrupts man. In the
Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality he por-
trays the natural man and shows how a society which denies his
nature warps him. In Emile he deals with the education that can
be expected to produce the natural man. In the Social Contract
he writes of the ideal state in which alone the natural man can
reach his full stature. In the Savoyard Vicar’s Profession of
Faith he speaks of the religion of the natural man. And if this
essential unity is rather the unity of poetry that one feels than
the unity of philosophy that one sees, that is no matter for sur-
prise when dealing with a man like Jean Jacques Rousseau, and
it is none the less unity for that.

His Idea of the State

It is in the Soctal Contract that Rousseau’s idea of the State is
most clearly seen. This work was originally planned as part of
a bigger whole which was never completed. It is, however, a
unity in itself. It is unlike his other works in that it was medi-
tated upon for years before it was written. It is much more
rational, much less emotional, than the rest of his writing. And
it is unquestionably much the most important of his works. In
it is to be found most boldly set out his recognition that “every-
thing is at bottom dependent on political arrangements, and
that no matter what position one takes, a people will never be
otherwise than what its form of government makes it.” In it
 THE STATE AS ORGANISM 143

is to be found most clearly his answer to the question, ‘‘What

is the State and why should I obey it?”
He starts with the belief that the family is the only “natural”
society. All other society, he thinks, is of man’s making and
artificial. But he rejects the view that society other than the
family must rest on force. It rests, he concludes, on agreement.
Men register their agreement to come together in society in the
Social Contract. The idea of some such contract was, of course,
a commonplace of political philosophy of his day. The Social
Contract was not, however, in his view a contract whereby the
first society was established—although at times he is tempted to
regard it as such. It is a contract whereby the right society will
be set up—in the future, not in the past; the society which will
substitute “justice for mere instinct,” which will give to “man’s
actions that moral character which they lacked before,’ which
will change man from “‘a stupid and limited animal” into an
“intelligent being and a man.”
The Social Contract is not a contract which men make with
their future ruler. The Government is merely their agent. Te
make a contract with it would not only give it a dignity to
which it ought not to pretend, it would place men under the
rule of some individuals or groups, which would be nothing but
slavery. Such a contract would defeat the ends for which men
come together, those ends being the fulfilment of their nature,
which slavery would make impossible. For men not only need
society in which to develop; without freedom they cannot de-
velop. Therefore their problem is to create a society “in such a
way that each, when united to his fellows, renders obedience to
his own will, and remains as free as he was before.”
This is possible, Rousseau says, where the law leads and men
do. not obey other men but obey only the law. “How can it
happen,” he asks, “that men obey without having anyone above
them to issue commands, that they serve without having a
master, that they are all the freer when each of them, acting
under an apparent compulsion, loses only that part of his free-
dom with which he can injure others?” “These wonders are
the work of the Law,” he replies. “It is to Law alone that men
owe justice and liberty; it is this salutary organ of the will of
all that makes obligatory the natural equality between men; it
is this heavenly voice that dictates to each citizen the precepts
of public reason, and teaches him to act in accordance with the
144 POLITICALATHOUGHT

maxims of his own judgment, and not to be in contradiction

to himself.” But what is the Law? Rousseau calls it the “uni-
versal voice.” It is the voice of the General Will. And what is
the General Will? Unfortunately it is not easy to answer pre-
cisely. Though it is the most important and most fertile idea in
all his political writings, Rousseau is very vague in what he
has to tell us about it.
If I join an association, I may continue to think only of my
own selfish interests. If I and all my fellow members do this,
there will not be much life in it. On the other hand,
I may begin to think not of my own selfish interests but of
its interests. Only if I and all my fellow members learn
to think in this way will the association grow strong and
live. If we do think in this way we will be generating a
public spirit or, as Rousseau would say, a General Will for the
association. What is true of lesser associations is true of the
State, and the General Will is thus the will of all the citizens
when they are willing not their own private interest but the
general good; it is the voice of all for the good of all.
Rousseau goes further and says that my will which wills the
best interests of the State is my best will, is, indeed, more real
than my will which wills my private interests. “The most
general will”—that is, the will for the good of the State—says
Rousseau, “is always the most just also.” All actions are the re
sult of will, but my will for the good of the State is morally
superior to any other will, private or associational, which may
from time to time determine my conduct. ‘
Rousseau has still something more of the greatest importance
to add. So far the General Will as he has defined it has been the
attribute of individual citizens—of all citizens willing their best
wills for the general good. But he also believes it to be an
attribute of the State itself. Every association, he thinks, which
calls forth the public spirit of its members, also calls into being a
“group mind” which is something other than and bigger than
the sum of the minds of the individuals composing it. Many who
have known the intimate life of associations have agreed with
him. Maitland, for instance, said that any who had experience of
committees came to recognise the emergence therein of an “It
that is not us,” of something that was not the same as the sum
total of the individual outlooks of the members of the commit-
tees. Rousseau called such a Group Mind developed by the State
 THE STATE AS ORGANISM 145

“Un Moi commun’’—a common Me. ““The body politic,” he

says, “is also a raoral being possessed of a will.” The General
Will it appears therefore is a “Group Mind,” as well as being
the compound of the best wills of all citizens willing the best
interests of the State.
It follows from all this that the General Will must be Sove-
reign. Since it is my best will, my own real will, I ought always
to want to follow it. If in fact I don’t, if the affections of the
flesh so war within me that what I should I do not and what I
should not that I do, then the General Will can legitimately
compel me to obey it. Indeed, it is the only authority that can
legitimately coerce me, for it is my own will coming back to me
even though I do not always recognise it as such, and in follow-
ing it I am fulfilling myself and am thus finding true freedom.
“Whoever refuses to obey the General Will shall be compelled to
do so by the whole body,” Rousseau writes. “This means nothing
less than that he will be forced to be free; for this is the condi-
tion which, by giving each citizen to his country, secures him
against all personal dependence.” Since also the General Will is
a Group Mind which is bigger than mine though mine is a part
of it, I must obey it on that score too. “If the State is a moral
person whose life is in the union of its members, and if the most
important of its cares is the care for its own preservation, it must
have a universal and compelling force in order to move and dis-
pose each part as may be most advantageous to the whole.” The
State, in fact, must have absolute power “‘as nature gives each
man absolute power over all his members also.’
The General Will, therefore, though by definition it can only
deal with matters of public, not private, interest, can alone be
the judge of what constitutes public or private interest. The
General Will, moreover, cannot allow anything to stand between
it and the complete loyalty of its citizens. It would, Rousseau
believes, be better that lesser associations than the State should
not exist, but if they do they must always be subordinate, and if
any conflict of loyalties should ever occur, citizens must always
obey the State. So jealous a God is the General Will that Rous-
seau thinks it should even substitute for the old religions of the
world a new civic religion which all who would remain mem-
bers of the State must accept, deviation from which, once ac-
cepted, should be an offence punishable with death.
The General Will must also, he says, be inalienable and indi-
146 POLITICAL THOUGHT
visible. Hence it cannot be represented in parliamentary insti-
tutions. “As soon as a nation appoints representatives,” he says,
““t is no longer free, it no longer exists.” England,hedeclared, was
only free during elections, after which it is “enslaved and counts
for nothing.” “The use which it makes of the brief moment of
freedom renders the loss of liberty well deserved,” he adds. Nor
can the General Will be delegated in any way whatever. Any
attempt to delegate it will mean its end. As he said: “The
moment there is a master, there is no longer a sovereign.”
Nothing less than all the people together can be trusted to will
the General Will. As Rousseau expressed it, it is only “the voice
of the people’ that is “the voice of God.”
The General Will must be a will which is general in every
sense and which is particular in none. It must take account of
the voice of every citizen, since it was agreed in the Contract
that each is received as an “integral part of our group.” It must
bind all equally, since that also is implied in the Contract in
which each surrenders his all on equal terms, so that it is “in
the interests of none to make them onerous to his fellows.” It
must deal only with the generalities of legislation, with the com-
mon cause and not with private interests—though it alone will
decide what is the common cause and what are private interests.
It is, in fact, only the fundamental laws that shape the consti-
tution of the State that Rousseau regards as law, and therefore
as the product of the General Will. All that we know as civil
and criminal law would not be law to him, but only decrees of
the Government and not to be invested with the sanctity of the
General Will.
It must follow from this that the General Will, as Rousseau
insists, cannot be an executive will. The people ought not to be
responsible for the details of Government. Those who make the
law should not carry it out, for it is the characteristic of the
Sovereign General Will that it must be impersonal, and the de-
crees of Government may frequently be particular and personal.
Hence Rousseau makes a clear distinction between the Govern-
ment and the Sovereign People. The People entrusts its
executive power to its agent, the Government, though it may
retain a limited right of supervision over it. As it is thus
subordinate to the Sovereign, the actual form of the Gov-
ernment is a matter of secondary importance, varying accord-
ing to the particular circumstances and needs of men. So
 THE STATE AS ORGANISM 147

long as the General Will is Sovereign, it dees not matter if the

Government is a democracy, an aristocracy or a monarchy—
whichever in the existing circumstances is most suitable will be
the best. Rousseau’s preference is clear. It follows from
the reasons he advances for separating the Sovereign and the
Executive that he can hardly regard democracy as the best form
of Government. Democracy, he believes, is too perfect for men—
as they are “it is contrary to the natural order that the majority
should govern and the minority should be governed.” Since men
are too imperfect for kingship, kings have a habit of becoming
tyrants. Hereditary aristocracy is, in general, the worst of all
forms of Government and elective aristocracy the best. But all
men are not alike, and what suits one will not suit another.
Variety in the forms of Government is therefore natural and of
little moment so long as one thing is constant—the Sovereignty
of the General Will.
The General Will, Rousseau adds, is infallible. In what he
says here, he is not at his happiest or most lucid. He means little
more than that the General Will must always seek the general
good. “The General Will is always right and tends to the public
advantage,” he says. He does not mean by this that whatever
the State does must always be right. If the General Will is always
right, it is not always known. It does not follow, he adds, “that
the deliberations of the people are always equally correct. Our
will is always for our own good, but we do not always see what
that is; the people is never corrupted; but it is often deceived,
and on such occasions only does it seem to will what is bad.”
For the raison d’état that has been put forward to excuse every
crime in the decalogue, Rousseau has no manner of use. “If it be
said,” he writes, ‘that a Government can sacrifice an innocent
man for the welfare of the whole, I hold this maxim for one
of the most execrable that ever tyranny has invented.” So that
in saying that the General Will is always right, Rousseau means
only that men must never forget that they come together for the
sake of the good life and should do nothing to make that good
life impossible. He is not saying “Because the State is moral, it
cannot deny itself and act immorally,” but “If the State acts
immorally it is denying itself and is no true State.” That is an
intelligible, even desirable, position to assume, though unfortun-
ately it is lacking in any clear indication of what constitutes
an immoral action and who is to determine its immorality.
148 POLITICAL THOUGHT
We now know a good deal about the General Will. It is the
result of all men willing their best wills for the good of the
State. It is the “Group Will” of the State. It is Sovereign. It has
certain marked characteristics. But still we do not know how
it is to be found, though we can appreciate from what Rousseau
had to tell us about its infallibility that finding it is unlikely to
be a simple matter. Unfortunately Rousseau cannot help us here.
He can never tell us how we can be sure of finding the General
Will. At times he seems to suggest that the General Will is to
be sought only when all unanimously agree—though he has
already told us that the Will of All is something very different
from the General Will. At times he implies that the General
Will is the will of the majority—though he tells us elsewhere
that this can only be so if “‘all the characteristics of the General
Will are still in the majority.” At times it appears that the resi-
due left when differences of opinion expressed by all the citizens
have cancelled one another out is to be a) as the General
Will. Yet again the General Will may be embodied in one man
—a Legislator who will show people what is good for them.
This, however, is only likely at the beginning of the State’s life,
and if it occurs the Legislator must not be regarded either as
Sovereign or as Magistrate. He is to be seen merely as the pro-
poser of laws, not compelling but persuading the people to
accept them, with God up his sleeve as the ace which will win
him the game. “This,” Rousseau says, “is what has in all ages
compelled the fathers of nations to have recourse to divine in-
tervention and credit the gods with their own wisdom, in order
that the peoples, submitting to the laws of the State as to those
of Nature, and recognising the same power in the formation of
the city as in that of man, might freely obey, and bear with
docility the yoke of the public happiness.” So much vagueness
about something as important as the finding of the General Will
is to be regretted. Rousseau, who has told us so much about the
General Will, has still not told us enough; indeed, he has left
us in such a position that nobody can be sure what the General
Will is on any particular question.
Rousseau’s inability to tell us exactly how we may find the
General Will perhaps reflects his belief that it would never
be easy for men to will it. The illustration of the General
Will that he gives in Emile is sufficient proof of that. There
he recounts the story of the Spartan pone who, on rushing
 THE STATE AS ORGANISM 149

to the runner to ask news of the battle and being told of

the death of her Sve sons, answered: “Vile slave, was it this I
asked thee?” Demanding how the battle had gone and learning
of the victory, she ran to the temple to give thanks to the gods.
Such a triumph of public over private interest could not, Rous-
seau knew, have been easy. Yet without that triumph there
could be no General Will. So difficult, indeed, did he think it
would be for men to will the General Will that he believed that
the majority would not be capable of it. His republic was not
for them. Not sufficiently intelligent, nor sufficiently public-
spirited to know liberty, they would know instead the yoke of a
master.
But Rousseau was sure that some men were capable of pos-
sessing liberty. They would find it, he was convinced, only in
States of a particular kind. Such States must be small, so that
when necessary all citizens could gather together. They must
be conservative, so that little legislation would be required. The
State in which alone freedom appeared to him to be possible
could be no other than the small, non-industrialised city-state of
the type that he knew at home in Geneva. Bentham was right in
saying that except for the laws of the Republic of San Marino,
the laws of no European State would be recognised as valid by
Rousseau. What he thought of larger communities can be seen
from his pregnant remark: “The greatness of nations, the extent
of states; the first and principal source of the misfortunes of the
human race.’ Rousseau was sure, too, that his Contract had no
meaning for those who failed to find the General Will. Failure
to arrive at it meant for him that the State was unable to accom-
plish the purposes of the Contract, the fulfilment of each indi-
vidual. When this proved to be so, the individual was free to
return to the State of Nature. But, above all, Rousseau was
sure that only where the General Will reigned could man’s
nature be developed, only there can his great challenge “Man is
born free but is everywhere in chains” be seen for what it is, not
a deplorable but a legitimate fact because man, who is not fully
human except as a citizen, can reach his full stature only in the
great community of the State. There, in greater freedom than
he had ever known, more truly man because of the blossoming
and fulfilment of his nature, perfected man would at last enter
upon that rich inheritance which had been locked away in the
bosom of the ages awaiting his coming.
P.T.—6
 150 POLITICAL THOUGBee

Rousseau’s Place in Political Thought

We can now try to answer the question: Where does Rousseau
stand in the history of Political Thought? His great debt to the
Greeks is obvious enough. His work is the long-delayed re-
assertion of the Aristotelian view that man is a political animal
whose nature can be fulfilled only in the State, which is there-
fore no longer the result of his vice but the condition of his
virtue, the chief agent of morality. Plato’s voice rings strongly
through his words, telling us again that subjection to the State
is a matter of ethics rather than of law. Nor can it be doubted
that his attachment to the city-state is as much the result of
Greek inspiration as of Genevan example.
Rousseau believes, then, as did the Greeks, that the full life of
man is possible only in society. He also believes that ultimately
only the individual matters. His Emile makes it clear that the
pupil is to be educated for his own sake, not for that of others.
His sense of independence is to be stimulated, he is to be taught
to regard himself always as an end and never as a means. Simi-
larly Rousseau has Mme de Wolmar declare in the New
Héloise: ““Man is too noble a being to serve simply as the instru-
ment for others, and he must not be used for what suits them
without consulting also what suits himself. It is never right to
harm a human soul for the benefit of others.” In this spirit he
repudiates, as we have seen, the doctrine of raison d’état. In the
margin opposite Helvétius’s view that “all becomes legitimate
and even virtuous on behalf of the public safety,” Rousseau
writes: “The public safety is nothing unless individuals enjoy
security.” His Protestant background, his powerful, eager, if
somewhat peculiar conscience, his hatred of “the hideous head of
despotism” which would never allow him to associate himself
with the Benevolent Despots, his love of liberty which found
such passionate expression as his assertion: “When a man re-
nounces his liberty he renounces his essential manhood, his
rights and even his duty as a human being,” which led him to
comment on Aristotle’s view that some men are slaves by nature,
that men can only be slaves by nature if they have first been
made slaves against nature, and which led him to prefer the
abuse of liberty to the abuse of power—these are real in Rousseau
and must not be forgotten in the insistence that only in society
did he believe that the good life can be lived.
From his writings, in short, two answers to the question,
 THE STATE AS ORGANISM 151

“What is the nature of the State and why do I obey it?” emerge.
The first is that the State is a collective person, and that I obey
it because only in so doing am I really myself, am I truly free.
The second is that the State is an association entered into by
man, or even a mechanism built by man for his own purposes,
and that I obey it to achieve those purposes and only in so far
as I persuade myself that I am achieving them. The first answer,
corresponding to his doctrine of the General Will, reflects an
organic view of the State; the second, corresponding to his use
of the Social Contract, reflects a mechanistic view. Rousseau
tries to hold both, which is why so many conflicting interpreta-
tions of his work are possible.
But we must ask if the two views to which Rousseau is
attracted can really be held simultaneously, and, if not, which
of the two we must regard as claiming his major allegiance. Can
the State be both organism and association or machine? Can the
General Will be made in any worth-while sense compatible with
the Social Contract? The answer must surely be that the two
views are not compatible and that not all of Rousseau’s strict
qualifications can make them so. For if the General Will is
supreme, the Social Contract is unnecessary and meaningless,
and if the Social Contract is necessary and significant, the
General Will cannot be supreme. In insisting on both the
General Will and the Social Contract, Rousseau is not so much
demonstrating his skill as synthesiser as illustrating the danger
of falling between two stools, in that he retains a sufficiently
lively sense of the importance of the individual conscience to
make him accept only with hedging and with reluctance the im-
plications of the organic State, but a sense far too weak to give
any encouragement to the individual to resist the collective
majesty of the State.
Actually there can be little doubt that ultimately it is the
organic view of the State that Rousseau embraces. That is to be
seen in his description of the State as “‘a moral and collective
body,” “‘a common me.” It can be seen clearly in his doctrine
that my best will is not necessarily my actual will and that since
there can be no infringement of my liberty in my being com-
pelled to obey my own will even though I do not recognise or
acknowledge it as such, I can be forced to be free. It is reflected
in his determination that no association or Church be allowed
to come between the individual and the State. It is apparent in
152 POLITICAL-THOUGHT

what he says of Christianity, every word of which breathes the

recognition that the most uncompromising enemy of the organic
State is a religion with other-worldly values. It is particularly
clear in his insistence that all within the State shall conform to
the Civil Religion on pain of expulsion or death, and in his view
that the State may teach compulsorily those doctrines which are
held by the majority. And if further proof be required, it is plain
to be seen in Rousseau’s ideal of Patriotism, in those declarations,
which are alive with the organic thinker’s passionate love for
the whole of which he is a part, that “the patriotic spirit is an
exclusive spirit which makes us regard as a stranger and almost
as an enemy any who is not a fellow citizen,” or that “a child,
when first opening its eyes, should see its motherland, and
should be able to see nothing else until its death.”
The frontispiece of the first edition of the Social Contract was
a picture of Leviathan with his head cut off. Yet we must con-
clude that against Leviathan Rousseau was unable to provide
adequate safeguards for the individual. He failed to reconcile
the two views he held that the good life was possible only in
society and that ultimately only the individual mattered. On the
contrary, he succeeded only in dwarfing the individual. If he
had succeeded in reconciling those two views, then one of the
most common and compelling criticisms—namely that they are
utterly unable to make provision for the individual conscience
and for individual longings for liberty—could no longer be
brought against the organic theorists. As such a man as he was
failed to reconcile them, at least that criticism of the organic
school still stands, and perhaps one must even conclude that it
cannot be answered. In any case, we do not need the undoubted
fact that organic theorists who followed him drew much of
their inspiration from him to make us hail him as an upholder
of the organic State. His own work bears the hall-mark of the
true organic writer, and accordingly it is with the organic theo-
rists of the State that he must be classed.
GEORGE WILLIAM FREDERICK HEGEL, 1770-1831
His Life and Writings
The most outstanding advocate of the organic theory of the
State and one of the most important and influential thinkers of
modern history was Hegel. Born in 1770 in Wiirtemberg, he
passed his youth in the intoxicating days of the French Revolu-
 THE STATE AS ORGANISM 153

tion, with which for some time he felt a warm sympathy, as did
so many young men of his generation, but against which he ulti-
mately strongly reacted. Private tutor, lecturer at Jena University,
headmaster in Nuremberg, he became on the publication of his
three-volume work on the Science of Logic the most loudly
acclaimed of German philosophers. Appointed to a professorship
in Heidelberg, he wrote his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical
Sciences, the fullest treatment of his general philosophical system
that he ever produced. From there he accepted the chair of philo-
sophy at Berlin University, of which he later became president.
Here he acted as the official philosopher of Prussia, exercising
an influence such as few professors have ever done, becoming
as it were the academic voice of Prussianism, just as von Roon
and von Moltke were to be its military and Bismarck its political
voice. Here he wrote his Philosophy of Right, and gave the
lectures which after his death were published as the Philosophy
of History, working out that theory of the State which has gone
marching down the years, siring new and strange political philo-
sophies, and giving ever louder expression to his own convenient
conviction that the heir of all the ages was the Prussian monarchy
and that the latest files of time were those daily thumbed over
by the busy bureaucrats of Berlin.
By so many for so much of the rgth century he was hailed
not merely as the official philosopher of Prussia, but as the
philosopher of the age, just as Aristotle and St. Thomas
Aquinas had for so long been regarded as the philosophers of
their times. Critics called him “‘a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating,
illiterate charlatan, who reached the pinnacle of audacity in
scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying non-
sense.” They applied to his writing Shakespeare’s words “such
stuff as madmen tongue and brain not.” They said of his theory
of the State that it grew “‘not in the gardens of science but on
the dunghill of servility.”” German philosophers have always
been as notorious for the acrimony of their philosophical dis-
cussions as for the weightiness of their philosophical writing.
But most believed that he had synthesised all knowledge as
Aristotle and Aquinas had done in their day, that he had found
the fundamental laws which govern all reality. He said of him-
self: “Although I could not possibly think that the method
which I have followed might not be capable of much perfecting,
of much thorough revising in its details, I know that it is the
154 POLITICAL THOUGHT

only true method. It is clear that no method can be accepted as

scientific that is not modelled on mine.” He was sure that he
had solved all the riddles of the universe. His modest opinion
of himself was accepted as no more than the truth, so much so
that after his death his devoted pupils wondered what was left
for philosophy, mourning like Alexander the restricted state of
the world. Even English philosophy, which traditionally was of
that empirical kind which he so disliked and which he regarded
as a trashy over-the-counter commodity fit only for a nation of
shop-keepers, felt his influence, and in Green, Bradley, and
Bosanquet tackled the difficult problem of how to express his
philosophy in English without making it appear gibberish.
Although there is some truth in Lord Acton’s words that
“Ideas . . . are not the effect, but the cause of public events,”
political philosophers have not usually exercised a very important
immediate effect on the world of practical politics. They have,
as a rule, done more to interpret an existing world than to shape
a new one. Hegel himself believed that it was the function of
philosophy to explain but not to create. “When philosophy
paints its grey in grey,” he wrote, “‘one form of life has become
old, and by means af}its grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only
known. The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the
shadows of evening are fallen.”
Yet few philosophers have had a greater effect on the everyday
world than he had. For he displayed a remarkable insight into
the political realities of his time. He foresaw, for instance, the
industrial, constitutional State then painfully struggling into life.
He once said: “Political genius consists in identifying yourself
with a principle,” and with a sure instinct he identified himself
with the principle of nationalism. His teaching that each people
had its particular genius, its own “spirit of the people,” that
each people had its own peculiar political institution which had
grown as it grew, and that the institutions of one people could
not be imposed on another, even his contradictory message that
some nations less virile than others had forfeited their right to
political independence which thereby safeguarded that liberty
which a people seeking national liberty has always highly prized
—the liberty to deny liberty to others, all was bound to make a
tremendous appeal to that nationalism which was to prove itself
the strongest of 1gth-century forces.
Later German statesmen were proud to acknowledge their
 THE STATE AS ORGANISM 155

debt to him. Bismarck’s work, with its insistence on the organic

nation State, maintained by force, directed by an all-powerful
monarchy and bureaucracy, admitting in international rela-
tions no principle higher than its own welfare, bears the clear
reflection of Hegelian inspiration. So, too, does Nazism and
Fascism. Their extreme nationalism, with their attendant, un-
principled conduct of international relations and their glorifica-
tion of war as the purger and purifier of society, their acceptance
of the constantly exercised, all-pervading power of the State,
their authoritarianism, their acclamation of the Leader or Hero,
their stress on the importance of guilds and corporations in the
Corporate State, their insistence, seen clearly in Hitler’s constant
reference to his intuition and in Mussolini’s frequent assertion
that theory follows not precedes action, that instinct plays a
greater part than reason in political life, are directly derived from
Hegel. And if through Bismarck and the triumph of an armed
and organic nationalism, Hegel’s influence can be seen leading
to Nazism and Fascism, through Marx and Engels it can also
be shown operating strongly on Lenin, Stalin, and Communist
Russia. Marx, whose powers of vituperation were as highly de-
veloped as his instinct to make use of them, was very gentle in
his criticism of Hegel, seeing in his philosophy of the State “‘the
most logical and the richest’? ever produced. Even today Com-
munists regret the little attention shown to Hegel in this coun-
try, contrasting British neglect unfavourably with official Soviet
Russian recognition of his merit. Indeed, it can very plausibly
be argued that Russia today is, after the collapse of Germany,
Italy, and Japan, the most outstanding example of the Hegelian
organic State.
Hegel’s great influence on philosophy, on political philosophy,
on politics, is not, then, to be denied. Unfortunately he is as
difficult to understand as he is important. Language has fre-
quently been accorded pride of place among the major arts of
deception. Chinese scholars of old were not above indulging in
the genial joy of writing so obscurely as to tax the erudition of
their correspondents. But it has been left for German philoso-
phers, appealing to a people conditioned by language and lean-
ing to the view that obscurity and profundity are synonymous
terms, to make occasional Chinese academic naughtiness their
habitual practice, and there is no more trenchant commentary
than Hegel’s works on that most inappropriate of Nazi slogans :
156 POLITICAL THOUGHT
“Deutsch sein heiszt klar sein’—‘‘to be German is to be clear.”
A technical terminology more shapeless, ugly, and impenetrable
than any other jargon, a truly awful style made still more un-
seemly by a love of ponderous paradox, yet adequately matched
by that wonderfully involved construction that makes the
Philosophy of Right such a difficult book to follow, these are
the hall-marks of Hegelian writing.
Moreover, the clearest, most subtly exact and delicate of writ-
ing would have been none too clear to convey Hegel’s message.
His idea of the State is naturally enough merely part of his
general philosophy, and at the very least anyone who would
understand it must take into account a view of world history and
its patterns that is usually learned, sometimes convincing (as, for
instance, his presentation, in the Constitution of Germany, of
German history since the Treaty of Westphalia), at times ter-
ribly thin and inaccurate (as, for instance, his whole treatment
of Oriental history), but always involved and confusing. And to
the very considerable difficulties presented by the language and
by the construction of his books and by his highly peculiar his-
toricism, there is yet one further difficulty in understanding him,
that involved in grasping what he claimed to be a new kind of
logic, the dialectic which seemed to promise all things to all
men, but which, it is not surprising to learn since its appeal was
so universal, was not capable of precise definition. Realising,
then, his importance and the difficulty of explaining him clearly,
we must look more closely at his view of world history and at
the new method of interpreting it which he introduced.
Spirit and Dialectic
Hegel starts with the assumption that the universe is a coher-
ent whole. In this organic unity what he variously calls the Idea,
or Spirit, or Reason, or the Divine Mind, is the only reality.
Everything, including matter and the external world, is the crea-
tion of this Idea or Spirit or Reason. Hence it is true to say that
“Reason is the sovereign of the world.” It is the nature of this
Spirit or Reason, Hegel tells us, to know all things. As befits
one who borrowed so much from Aristotle, Hegel is using nature
here in the Aristotelian sense of that which anything becomes
when fully developed. At the beginning of the world-process the
Spirit or Reason does not, in fact, know anything; its nature is
as little achieved as is the nature of Aristotle’s man before he
 THE STATE AS ORGANISM 157

enters the Polis. Gradually, however, as it develops throughout

the history of the world, it learns to know more and more, until
it is led, finally and inevitably, to its goal which is perfect know-
ledge of everything, another way of saying, since it itself is every-
thing, perfect knowledge of itself. As Hegel puts it: ‘The truth
is the whole. The whole, however, is merely the essential nature
reaching its completeness through the process of its own de-
velopment. Of the Absolute it must be said that it is essentially
a result, that only at the end is it what it is in very truth.”
History is the process by which the Spirit passes from know-
ing nothing to full knowledge of itself, is the increasing revela-
tion of the purposes of the Rational Mind. ‘“‘The history of the
world therefore,” says Hegel, “presents us with a rational pro-
cess.” The Spirit on the way to its goal makes many experiments.
Everything is, as it were, a mask which it tries on, which proves
useful to it for the time being, and which it ultimately discards.
“The universal mind at work in the world,” he writes, “‘has
had the patience to go through these forms in the long stretch
of time’s extent, and to take upon itself the prodigious labour
of the world’s history, where it bodied forth in each form the
entire content of itself which each is capable of grasping, and by
nothing less could that all-pervading mind ever manage to be-
come conscious of what itself is.” Or as he expresses it more
briefly in his famous aphorism: “The rational is the real and
the real is the rational.”’
It is to be noted that he is using ‘‘real” here in the sense of the
important, or the fundamental. “In common life,” he says, “any
freak of fancy, any error, evil and everything of the nature of
evil, as well as every degenerate and transitory existence what-
ever, gets in a casual way the name of reality.” But it is not
right to speak of that as “reality”; it is only “idle, worthless
existence.” Nevertheless, though he understands by “reality”
that which is underlying and significant, not that which is
merely empirical, he does not hesitate to conclude that “the in-
sight to which philosophy is to lead us is that the real world is
as it ought to be.” Hence in his theory of the State he rejects
Fichte’s teaching that only the ideal State is rational whereas
existing States are irrational, and he maintains on the contrary
that actual, existing States are rational and are accordingly to
be treated with all reverence. Hegel’s strong tendency to idealise
the actual is thus a logical consequence of his conviction that
158 POLITICAL THOUGHT
whatever happens happens because the Spirit needs it and that
whatever the Spirit needs is right.
A doctrine which teaches that everything is as it ought to be
and which idealises the actual has strongly marked conservative
tendencies. But obvious and important as Hegel’s conservatism
is, we cannot conclude that his teaching is exclusively or even
mainly conservative. For he believes that ep heme is experi-
mental and destined to be transcended. Each form adopted by
the Spirit helps it along the road to complete self-fulfilment, but
each form represents only one step along that road and there are
many, many more ahead. Throughout history the Spirit is in-
cessantly giving birth to itself, suffering, dying, and rising to
new glory. Thus Hegel’s is a doctrine of change, and of change
constantly for the better, a promise of assured progress. Change
is thus as strongly marked a characteristic of his teaching as
conservation. Indeed, if we had to find a heraldic device suitable
for him, there would be a strong case for making it the pheenix
constantly reborn, rising anew from the flames, rather than the
changeless, timeless ow] settling at Minerva’s ear.
But Hegel not only tells us that history is the record of the
march of the Spirit through the world, he explains in detail the
process by which the Spirit changes from one being to another.
In doing so, he introduces his famous principle of dialectic. The
word “‘dialectic’” is from the Greek “‘dialego’”’—to discuss or
debate. As demonstrated by the constant questioning of Socrates,
it was the process of exposing contradictions by discussion so as
ultimately to arrive at truth.
It was not, however, thus that Hegel viewed dialectic, though
another classical example might help us to understand what he
meant by it. The Greeks had observed that anything if pushed
too far will tend to produce its opposite. Absolute monarchy
they noted, if pushed to the extreme of despotism, leads to vio-
lent reaction and to the establishment of democracy. Democracy
if taken to the extreme of mob rule results in the climbing to
power of a dictator. Later it was suggested that the rhythm of
change was rather more complicated than the early Greeks had
believed, that it was a triple instead of a dual rhythm. Monarchy
changed first into aristocracy and only then into democracy. De-
mocracy changed into dictatorship and only then into monarchy.
It was these ideas of the later Greek thinkers rather than the
Socratic notion of dialectic which inspired Hegel. He believed
 THE STATE AS ORGANISM 159
that every being, except, that is, Reason or the Spirit when it has
reached its goal, contains not only itself but in some sense its
opposite. He believed also that the rhythm of change was triple
not dual. But he breaks away from the everlasting classical
treadmill. His conception of the triple rhythm of change is one
that not only permits, but insists on the idea of growth. Every
being, as Hegel expressed it, is to be understood, not only by
what it is but by what it is not. The opposite of Being is Non-
being, and Being and Non-being are alike summed up and
carried further towards reality in Becoming. Each stage, or
thesis, reached by the Ideal, until it has arrived at its goal, must
fall short of perfection. Its imperfections will call into being a
movement to remove them, or antithesis. There will be a
struggle between thesis and antithesis until such time as a syn-
thesis is found which will preserve what is true in both thesis
and antithesis, the synthesis, in its turn, becoming a new thesis,
and so on until the Idea is at last enthroned in perfection. The
thesis “Despotism,” for instance, will call into being
“Democracy,” the antithesis, and from the clash between them
the synthesis “Constitutional Monarchy,” which contains the
best of both, results. Or the thesis, the family, produces its anti-
thesis, bourgeois society, and from the resultant clash the syn-
thesis, the State, emerges in which thesis and antithesis are raised
to a higher power and reconciled.
The synthesis will not, Hegel insists, be in any sense a com-
promise between thesis and antithesis. Still less will it be an
outright victory of one over the other. Both thesis and antithesis
are fully present in the synthesis, but in a more perfect form
in which their temporary opposition has been perfectly recon-
ciled. Thus the dialectic can never admit that anything that is
true can ever be lost. It goes on being expressed, but in ever
new and more perfect ways. Nor, since everything is rational,
can the dialectic ever admit that there can exist contradictions
which can never be solved. Reality, in Hegel’s words, may be
like a “‘Bacchic dance in which there is not one of the con-
stituents that is not drunk”; but the drunkards are divinely
guided and reel always in the direction of home, and the end
of all dialectical debauches is the attaining of the absolute which
can be eternally contemplated without any imperfection or con-
tradiction appearing in it.
It might be thought that this view of dialectic is not so very
160 POLITICAL THOUGHT
unlike that of Socrates, according to which contradictions are
obstacles in the way of truth which we endeavour to remove
when we become aware of them. Hegel would deny the simi-
larity emphatically. For him contradictions are not obstacles
preventing us reaching truth, but are essential to our very
understanding of truth. Without them there would be no pro-
gress. He feels so strongly about this that in his dialectic he
claims to have invented a new logic, a synthetic logic which is
very different from the old analytic logic. This new synthetic
logic, he maintains, eliminates the law of contradiction, accord-
ing to which two contradictory propositions cannot be true at
the same time. According to the new logic, then, something
may at one and the same time be both true and false. “In itself
it is not, so to speak, a blemish, deficiency or fault in a thing if
a contradiction can be shown in it,” he writes. “On the con-
trary, every determination, every concrete, every concept is a
union of moments which pass over into contradictory moments.
Finite things are contradictory in themselves.” Moreover, it is
not men who remove these contradictions, but Reason herself.
It is not us, but the very force within the thesis and antithesis,
which is Reason, which promotes development. Contradiction,
or the dialectic, is therefore a self-generating process—it is “the
very moving principle of the world.”
Because it is this, dialectic is a theory which explains how it is
that history is the story of the continuous development of the
Spirit. Since all the former steps of the Spirit are preserved in
the new ones taken, it emphasises the essential continuity of that
story of the increasing revelation of the Spirit. But, typically, it
also stresses the very opposite of the continuity of the historical
process. It explains also that history is the story, not only of the
quiet unfolding but of the bounding forward of the Spirit.
Ideas, institutions, things change slowly and almost impercept-
ibly until a point is reached beyond a their very nature is
suddenly transformed—as water after a gradual process of heat-
ing will suddenly become steam. This moment of sudden
change, when seen in human history, might seem to involve in
the catastrophic collapse of the old order such anarchy as would
refute the view that change is always for the better. Certainly in
such moments of change men may be extremely unhappy. But
collapse, however apparently catastrophic, will not prevent what
was true in the old order persisting, nor should it blind us to
 THE STATE AS ORGANISM 161
the fact that its attendant anarchy is but the path to a good
greater than any known before. As for man’s apices that,
says Hegel, in what seems an odd echoing of the view “Happy
the people which has no history,” is no criterion, “The history
of the world,” he writes in the Philosophy of History, “is not the
theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it,
for they are periods of harmony—periods when the antithesis
is in abeyance.” Dialectic thus claims to be a new system of
synthetic logic, replacing the old system of analytic logic, a
principle of selfmovement through contradiction towards the
final goal of perfect realisation of Spirit, a conception of ordered,
rational progress which explains away periods of apparent an-
archy accompanying the collapse of old orders as being them-
selves the misunderstood signs of progress to higher goods, a
\theory which is both essentially conservative and fundamentally
-revolutionary.
His Idea of the State
Against this background of Hegel’s doctrine of Spirit and
Dialectic, we can now turn to his view of the State and find his
answer to the question: ‘What is the State and why do I obey
it?” From what he has already said, his answer to that question
must clearly be an answer in terms of the Spirit seeking its goal.
But it is, after all, men with their interests and passions who
compose the State. Hegel does not deny the existence of these
interests and passions. On the contrary, he speaks of them very
frankly. In words of which Gladstone was later to make con-
siderable use, he wrote: ‘““We assert, then, that nothing has
been accomplished without interest on the part of the actors,
and if interest be called passion, we may affirm absolutely that
nothing in the world great has been accomplished without pas-
sion.” Therefore Hegel’s answer to the question: “What is the
State and why do men obey it?” is an answer in terms, not
only of the Spirit seeking its goal, but of men seeking to satisfy
themselves in activity. “Iwo elements,” he writes, “therefore
enter into the object of our investigation, the first, the Idea, the
second, the complex of human passion; the one the warp, the
other the woof of the vast arras-web of Universal History.” All
things, according to Hegel, are forms assumed by the Spirit on
its way to self-knowledge. Through its multiple embodiments
it progresses from the inorganic world to the organic world of
162 POLITICAL THOUGHT
plants and animals, until it eventually comes to an imperfect
consciousness in Man. Man is the highest physical or animal
embodiment it has ever attained, or ever will attain, Hegel adds.
Beyond Man there will be no further physical evolution.
But man is never a lone individual. He lives with others, and
is dependent on them, as they are on him. Hence it is mean-
ingless to consider him apart from the congeries of institutions
which serve his needs and which are themselves the embodi-
ment of the Spirit as it makes its way through the world. The
earliest of these institutions which history reveals is the family,
serving man’s sensual needs, affording him and his a primitive
protection, providing a precarious provision for simple needs. It
is a unity which, as in China even in our own lifetime, is re-
garded by its members as being more real than themselves. The
family, a unity incorporating the rational idea of mutual love,
is thus the thesis from which Hegel begins his analysis of the
State.
But the family is too small for the adequate satisfaction of
man’s wants, and as children grow up they leave it for a wider
world. That world is what Hegel calls the world of bourgeois
society, and it is the antithesis which is called into being by the
original thesis, the family. Unlike the family, which is a unity
regarded by its very members as being more real than them-
selves, bourgeois society is a host of independent men and
women held together only by ties of contract and self-interest.
Whereas the characteristic of the family is mutual love, the
characteristic of bourgeois society is universal competition. But
however cold and unattractive in comparison with the family
bourgeois society might seem, there is a rational meaning to be
discerned in it as well as in the family. The whole process of
trade and industry in bourgeois society becomes a new organisa-
tion for the supply of human needs, so that man in that society is
producing for his family, satisfying his own wants and at the
same time serving his fellows, which makes bourgeois society
take on a rational and universal significance. Moreover, bour-
geois society evolves laws, even though not necessarily just laws;
it creates a police force; and becomes more and more State-like
in form. As it develops it produces guilds and corporations,
which teach their members to think not of their own interests
but of the interests of the whole to which they belong, and
which, because they do this, reveal, not the social instinct, which
 THE STATE AS ORGANISM 163
is competitive, but the State instinct, which is co-operative. The
thesis, the family, a unity held together by love, knowing no
differences, is thus confronted by the antithesis, bourgeois so-
ciety, an aggregate of individuals held apart by competition,
knowing no unity, even though it is manifestly struggling to-
wards a greater unity which it has nevertheless not yet attained.
The synthesis, which preserves what is best in thesis and anti-
thesis, which swallows up neither family nor bourgeois society,
but which gives unity and harmony to them, is the State. It
does this because it is a super-organism, which is both family
and society raised to a still higher power, and in which each, by
consciously identifying himself with the whole, wills the inter-
ests of the whole, which he recognises as his own. Hence in
Hegel’s peculiar language it can be said: “The essence of the
modern State is that the Universal is bound up with the full
freedom of particularity and the welfare of individuals, that the
interest of the family and of bourgeois society must connect
itself with the State, but’also that the Universality of the State’s
purpose cannot advance without the specific knowledge and will
of the particular, which must maintain its rights. The Universal
must be actively furthered, but on the other side subjectivity
must be wholly and vitally developed. Only when both elements
are there in all their strength can the State be regarded as arti-
culated and truly organised.”
There are several characteristics of this State that we must
notice. To begin with it is no exaggeration to say that it is
divine. It is the highest embodiment that the Spirit hs reached
in its progress through the ages. It is “the Divine Idea as it
exists on earth.” In all sobriety it can be called “the march of
God on earth.” It follows that Hegel makes no attempt, as does
Rousseau, to square the circle and admit the possibility of a
social contract. The notion that the State, which is the product
of a long, unconscious but nevertheless divinely guided growth,
can be explained in terms of a contract Hegel rejects with the
utmost contempt.
The State also is an end in itself. It is not only the highest
expression to which the Spirit has yet attained, it is “the final
embodiment of Spirit on earth.” There can thus be no spiritual
evolution beyond the State, any more than there can be any
physical evolution beyond man.
The State, too, is a whole which is far greater than the parts
164 POLITICAL THOUGHT
which compose it and which have significance only in it. “All
the worth which the human being possesses,’ Hegel writes in
the Philosophy of History, “all spiritual reality, he possesses only
through the State.” Individuals, therefore, must obviously be
completely subordinated to the State. It “has the highest right
over the individual, whose highest duty is to be a member of
the State.”
The State, moreover, is unchecked by any moral law, for it
itself is the creator of morality. This can be seen clearly in its
internal affairs and in its external relations. Firstly it lays down
what shall be the standard of morality for its individual citi-
zens. It goes without saying that they can never plead con-
science or the moral law against it. Kant had believed that they
could, that the individual conscience or the “‘practical reason’ of
the individual was the guide of guides to cling to. Hegel, going
beyond Kant to Jean Jacques Rousseau, maintained that con-
science can only tell us to do what is right. It cannot tell us
what is right. Conscience itself must be informed by the tradi-
tions of the community. “The wisest men of antiquity,” he says,
“have laid it down that wisdom and virtue consist in living
conformably to the customs of one’s people,” which are indeed
“the collective reason of the past.” And the State is the truest
interpreter of the tradition of the community. Only it can tell
us what is good, and conformity with its decrees, or Social
Ethics, is thus the highest morality. ““What the absolute aim of
Spirit requires and accomplishes, what Providence does,” Hegel
writes, “transcends the imputation of good and bad motives.
Consequently it is only formal rectitude, deserted by the living
Spirit and by God, which those who take their stand upon
ancient right and order maintain.” More simply, whatever the
State does is right, however high the apparent cost. And if the
innocent are sometimes hurt, what else is to be expected? We
can only say of the State: “So mighty a form must trample
down many an innocent flower; it must crush to pieces many
an object in its path.”
Secondly, the State can recognise no obligation other than its
own safety in its relations with other States. Its own welfare is
its “highest law.” “It is a generally acknowledged and well-
known principle that the particular interest of the State is the
most important consideration,” he declares in the Philosophy
of Right. Against this no plea based on hypothetic morality can
 THE STATE AS ORGANISM 165
be allowed. In the Ethics he writes categorically: ‘The State is
the self-certain, absolute mind which acknowledges no abstract
rules of good and bad, shameful and mean, craft and decep-
tion.” International Relations, therefore, are relations between
Sovereign States who believe that what is in their own interests
is right and that the only sin is to act knowingly against those
interests. “The fundamental proposition of international law
[that treaties should be kept inviolate] remains a good inten-
tion,” he writes. “States look upon the stipulations which they
make with one another as provisional.” Hence “when the par-
ticular wills of States can come to no agreement, the controversy
can be settled only by war.”
Moreover, war “is not to be regarded as an absolute evil.”
“The universal love of mankind” is an “‘insipid invention.”
War is itself virtuous activity. If one may misquote Acton, it
can be said that for Hegel peace corrupts and everlasting peace
would corrupt everlastingly. “War is the state of affairs which
deals in earnest with the vanity of temporal goods and concerns
—a vanity at other times a common theme for edifying ser-
monising. War has the higher significance that by its agency the
ethical health of peoples is preserved in their indifference to the
stabilisation of finite institutions; just as the blowing of the wind
preserves the sea from the foulness which would be the result
of a prolonged calm, so also corruption in nations would be the
product of prolonged, let alone ‘perpetual’ peace.’ Moreover,
“successful wars have prevented civil broils and strengthened the
internal power of the State.” Indeed, the very weapons with
which wars are fought are, Hegel maintains, thoughtfully
breathed into being by the Spirit in its royal progress. The gun,
for instance, he tells us, “is not a chance invention.” It can be
said of it as of gunpowder: “Humanity needed it, and it made
its appearance forthwith.” In the most real of senses, then, guns
and gunpowder do indeed bear the stamp ef civilisation. It can
be no surprise after this to read that the rights of uncivilised
peoples are a mere formality—‘“‘the civilised nation is conscious
that the rights of barbarians are unequal to its own and treats
their autonomy as only a formality.”
We cannot dismiss these views as an unpleasing but unim-
portant Prussian prejudice, nor even explain them away by sug-
gesting that in periods of mounting communal emotionalism,
such as was the German War of Liberation, safe scholars fre-
 166 POLITICAL THOUGHT
quently react in a way more savage than serene. For Hegel’s
teaching is not merely based on his observation of the practices
of his day, although as one who had aspired to be regarded as
the German Machiavelli, he was not of course blind to them. It
is a statement of inescapable necessity logically deduced from
his general philosophy. On the one hand he held that the State
was the final abode on earth of the Spirit. “Each State stands
for and embodies an idea,” he said, “or to be more exact, each
State embodies a particular phase of the Universal Idea.” Yet
on the other he believed that the World Spirit or Reason making
its way through history required the existence of a multiplicity
of States. No single State, he taught, could ever embody the
whole Universal Idea. But at different times different dominant
States helped to carry the Spirit forward. “In history,” he wrote,
“the Idea unfolds its various phases in time and the dominant
phase at any epoch is embodied in a dominant people.’ Only
through the conflict of States could such dominant peoples
emerge and the Spirit reach more perfect fulfilment.
War, then, plays an important part in world history. Hegel
makes Schiller’s expression “Die Weltgeschichte ist das Welt-
gericht” (‘World history is the world court of justice”’) his own.
In war it is the World Spirit which itself decides which of the
contesting States is its true embodiment and which gives the
victory. Success in war justifies war and is conclusive proof that
the victorious State is the truer personification of the World
Spirit than its defeated opponent or opponents. There is, how-
,ever, a qualification to be made here. The State chosen for vic-
tory by the World Spirit is never conscious of its destiny. Hence
no State can urge in justification of a war it has begun that it
is acting merely at the behest of the World Spirit, though it can
always make that claim in justification of a war it has won.
Hitler could not claim in 1939 that he was the mouthpiece of
the World Spirit hurling its gage of battle at the feet of lesser
embodiments of itself. Had he won in 1945 he could, however,
have excused his aggression in 1939 by triumphantly claiming
that Germany was acting then as the World Spirit dictated.
Unpleasant as is his doctrine, Hegel could not conceivably have
held any other view than this. A genuine pacific settlement of
disputes between States would presuppose the possibility of
State interests being reconciled in the light of some higher in-
terest. But as no such higher interest is possible, genuine, peace-
 THE STATE AS ORGANISM 167

ful settlements are out of the question. However, whether or

not we can share Hegel’s optimism that in the long run the
State which is the fullest embodiment of the Spirit and which
is chosen to carry on its development will prevail, we can un-
doubtedly agree that Hegel is whole-hearted in his view that
the State and only the State is the creator of morality.
Yet this State, which is divine, which is an end in itself, which
is a whole greater than its constituent parts, and which deter-
mines morality but is itself unchecked by it, is, Hegel insists,
a means of enlarging not restricting freedom. He goes further
and says that only in the State can man find freedom, while
without it he is completely in subjection. Freedom, he adds, is
the outstanding characteristic of the modern State. He criticises
the Greeks because they did not recognise that the State must
rest on respect for personality. Their acceptance of slavery he
saw as a proof of their failure here. He claims that it has been
left for the youngest of historic peoples, the Germans, “‘to attain
to the consciousness that man, as man, is free.” Indeed, so highly
does he think of Freedom that he writes: “The history of the
world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of
Freedom.” What, then, does he mean by Freedom?
The Spirit, he says, is free, for it has its centre in itself and
self-containedness is the very essence of Freedom. Matter, on the
other hand, is not free, for it is subject to the law of gravity
and always tends to a point outside itself. Therefore the develop-
ment of the Spirit is the development of Freedom, and human
history is thus the history of Freedom. Human history cul-
minates in the State in which the Spirit finds its final embodi-
ment. Therefore the perfect State is the truly free State, and the
citizen who gives perfect willing obedience to the perfect laws of
the perfect State has perfect Freedom.
Yet even the perfect laws of the perfect State may seem some-
thing external to the individual and imposed on him, and if they
are imposed on him, how can he be free? Hegel answers they
are not external to the individual, not imposed on him by any
outside force, but are what he himself wills. The individual
is also an embodiment of the Spirit, though not of course as
perfect an embodiment as the State. He has sufficient of the
Spirit in him to wish to identify himself completely with it,
but not sufficient to make that identification automatic, easy,
or even possible without help. He is capable of acting self-
168 POLITICAL THOUGHT
ishly, with no thought for others, following the instincts of the
brute. When he acts in such a manner he is out of relation with
the scheme of things. The Spirit is sleeping within him, and he
is not free but a slave to error and desire. Only when he seeks
to identify himself with the Spirit is he doing what he would
really wish to do, is he acting not according to momentary de-
sire but according to his real will. Only in so far as he succeeds
in acting according to his real will, in grasping the purposes of
the Spirit and willing those purposes as his own, is he free.
Freedom for the individual can thus never be the abstract and
uneducated power of choice, but only the willing of what is
rational, of what the Spirit would desire, and the power to per-
form it.
But how shall man know what his real will is? How can he
identify himself with the Spirit if he can be led astray by brute
desire and selfish interest? The State is there to tell him. It is
the schoolmaster which brings him knowledge of the Spirit, of
Absolute Reason. His real will impels him to identify himself
with the Spirit. The Spirit is embodied in the State. Therefore
it is his real will to obey the dictates of the State. Indeed, the
dictates of the State are his real will. Thus the commands of the
State give man his only opportunity to find Freedom. It does
notnecessarily follow, however, that he will avail himself of that
opportunity. He may obey the State because he is afraid of the
consequences of disobedience. If he obeys because of fear, he is
not free, he is still subject to alien force. But if he obeys be-
cause he wishes to, because he has consciously identified him-
self with the will of the State, because he has convinced him-
self that what the State demands he would also desire if he knew
all the facts, then he is subject only to his own will and he is
truly free. The State, says Hegel, is “that form of reality in
which the individual has and enjoys his freedom provided he
recognises, believes in and wills what is common to the whole.”
To do justice to Hegel, which is not always easy, it must be
admitted that this proviso is of the very greatest importance.
He certainly believes that the State will help men to fulfil them-
selves, but he also believes that only when men fulfil themselves
will the State itself develop. The State is necessary to make
men free, but free men are necessary to make the State perfect.
We must, however, still remember that freedom for Hegel is
obedience, even though voluntary obedience, to the State.
 THE STATE AS ORGANISM 169
Freedom so defined is, to say the least of it, an authoritarian
kind of freedom, which is not made less authoritarian by the
fact that Hegel’s State is, unlike Rousseau’s republic, a State
rich in associations, guilds, corporations, and a State which is
constitutional and not arbitrary. None of the associations, not
even the Church, has the smallest right against it, and
the Constitution, though important because it enshrines the
rule of law, in fact detracts very little from its omnipotence.
After this, Hegel can hardly surprise us when he adds that
Freedom has nothing whatever to do with the right of people
to elect their own officials or make their own laws, or with such
degenerate matters as freedom of speech or of the Press.
It is clear that Hegel, in writing thus of the State, is referring
to no particular State. We must not be misled by his personal
feelings: infatuation for Italy is as legitimate, or, to write more
accurately, no more illegitimate than predilection for Prussia.
Hegel is speaking of the ideal State—the State in idea as it
exists nowhere in time and place. In such a State the Spirit can
contemplate itself with continual complacence, unable to dis-
cover in itself contradiction or flaw, all-knowing, all-powerful,
eternal, God at last entered into His heaven.
But what is entirely true of the ideal State is always to some
extent, Hegel maintains, true of the actual State. For however
much it may be declared to violate right principle, it “possesses
always, if it belongs to the developed States of our times, the
essential elements of its true existence.”’ Actual States, he in-
sists, will always be more rational, will always be truer embodi-
ments of the Spirit, than the individuals who compose them.
Therefore those individuals can never have the right to resist
what they consider to be unjust, and the State here and now
possesses all those characteristics which we have seen to be
those of the State in idea.
“The State,” Hegel said, “must be comprehended as an or-
anism.” In all essentials his is the most complete organic view
of the State. It is a natural growth. It is a whole greater than
the parts which are intrinsically related to it and which have
meaning only in so far as the whole gives them meaning. It is
an end in itself. It develops from within, shaped by the rational-
ising of the Spirit and helped on by that very development of its
citizens which it alone makes possible. And this is true of
existing States as well of the State in idea. Since this is the
170 POLITICAL THOUGHT

State’s nature, the question, ““Why should I obey it?” is as intel-

ligent as the question, ‘““Why should my hand obey me?” It
would be no true hand if it did not, and I would be no true man
if I did not. My hand is fulfilled in me, and I am fulfilled in the
State, and there is nothing more to be said about the matter.

An Appraisal of Hegelianism
Except for a few such as Bosanquet and Bradley, Hegel’s
view of the State has never made a strong appeal to English-
men. It is of course such a contradiction of their traditional
political thinking and such a condemnation of their most popu-
lar political practices that they have tended to regard it as some-
thing that is useless, that is dangerous, and that ought to be
abolished. They have seen it—as did Hobhouse, who wrote his
attack on it, The Metaphysical Theory of the State, to what
seemed to him the most appropriate of accompaniments, the
thudding of German bombs dropped by Zeppelins in raids on
London—as something sired in war and giving issue to bigger
and better wars. Yet it is difficult to deny it all virtue.
To begin with, it is not a static theory of the State. It portrays
the State as a relative organisation expressing at each stage of its
development the degree of rationality at which mankind has
arrived. One hardly knows whether to call his theory of the
State a conservative theory which nevertheless admits the neces-
sity of growth, or an evolutionary theory which nevertheless
stresses the importance of conservation. In any case, his view of
the developing State is one which must command respect.
Hegel’s teaching is valuable, too, because it insists on man’s
dependence on society. Individualism, treating the State as an
aggregate of isolated units, largely ignores man’s social charac-
ter. Too often the State, in the theories of Individualism, is hos-
tile to those lesser liberties of associations which, like cells, go
to make up the State. Hegel redresses the balance. He is right
in showing how much man is influenced by society. He made
the idea of liberty richer by showing that man’s conception of
it largely depends upon the institutions which have trained him
and given him his education. In this his idealism is thoroughl
realistic, and has been confirmed by recent psychology, atieh
has proved how the early impressions made on our minds always
remain.
It can also be said of him that he made politics something
 THE STATE AS ORGANISM 171

more than a mere compromise of interests, and that he made law

something more than mere command. It is not an ignoble doc-
trine that the police State is inadequate and that the State must
be viewed as part of man’s moral end.
Finally his whole work is a valuable reminder that we would
do well not to minimise the importance of the natural growth
of a community. He said, for instance, of Constitutions: “What
is called making a constitution is a thing that has never hap-
pened in history; a constitution only develops from the national
spirit identically with that spirit’s own development.” Both
Germany and Japan have taught the world how dangerous the
organic State can be, and it has been frequently wished that
they had drunk a good deal less deeply of Hegelian springs.
But perhaps it is to be regretted that the makers and the ad-
mirers of the Weimar Constitution had not pondered longer
over what Hegel had to say about Constitutions. And perhaps
a closer knowledge of the PAilosophy of Mind might have sug-
gested to General MacArthur the unwisdom of his loudly an-
nounced conviction that he had successfully “processed” Japan
into Western democratic modes of thought and Western demo-
cratic practices.
But if something may be said in favour of Hegel, much must
also be said against him. His claim to have revised the law of
contradiction and to have substituted for it, in the Dialectic,
a new and more fruitful logic, is singularly unconvincing. His
Dialectic is not a new method of logic. Whatever in any vague
sense seems contrary to anything else, as punishment is to crime
or centrifugal to centripetal force, he claimed as illustrations of
dialectical contradictions. Yet it is obvious that such oppositions
have nothing to do with logical contradictions—they can be ex-
plained by non-contradictory statements in complete conformity
with the principles of the old logic at which Hegel affected to
sneer. Moreover, the Dialectic is a method of reasoning which
is capable of much too easy and general interpretation to claim
scientific accuracy. Any historical situation may be interpreted to
represent thesis or antithesis or synthesis, according to its poli-
tical evaluation by the interpreter. The Dialectic, therefore, pro-
vides a wonderful instrument for always being right. It enables
all defeats to be regarded as the beginnings of victory. For in-
stance, for two years after 1933 German Communists refused to
recognise that Hitler’s victory had been a defeat for the German
172 POLITICAL THOUGHT

Communist Party. We may very well doubt the value of a

method of analysis which enables Hegel to worship the State as
God and Marx to damn it as the Devil. We may even conclude
that just as the doctrine of Natural Law was popular in the
18th century because it allowed all men to deduce from Nature
those principles of justice which appealed to them, so the Dia-
lectic became popular in the 19th and 2oth centuries because it
enabled men to deduce from history those theories of man in
relation to the State which they wished to see generally accepted.
If the Dialectic is unconvincing, the uses to which Hegel puts
it are frequently unpleasant. With a wave of his wizard’s wand
he turns things into their opposites with the practised ease of the
most polished necromancy. “The aim of science,” he says, “is
knowledge of objective truth”; and adds: “The State must
protect objective truth.” This seems a promising enunciation of
a famous liberal doctrine. But before we know where we are, we
have arrived at the position “the State has, in general, to make
up its own mind concerning what is to be considered as objective
truth,” and all that is left of the liberal creed is a skeleton dis-
appearing disconsolately over the horizon.
Hegel turns the edge of the principle of freedom by identify-
ing freedom with obedience. He turns the edge of the principle
of equality by identifying equality with discipline. He turns the
edge of individual personality by treating human beings as
merely conduit pipes of the divine energy and merging them in
the State. Freedom, equality, personality—the magic wand has
turned them all into their opposites, and the aridity of the
achievement must dull our appreciation of the wizardry of the
artist.
Few of us, moreover, could agree that the State is the chosen
representative of God, even though we recognise the great im-
portance of the part it has played in bringing about the order
which is necessary for all intellectual development. For the State
has not been the sole factor in furthering this growth of ration-
ality. It would be completely unhistorical to ignore the part
played, for instance, by the Church in this. It is plain that
actual States frequently imperil all that has been won in this
respect in the past, and every day it is becoming more obvious
that the claim that each Sovereign State is sufficient for its
members is the greatest danger to modern civilisation. The
Juggernaut, passing in triumph over the crushed bodies of its
 THE STATE AS OR'GANISM 173

devotees, has become an offence to civilised consciences, and

the Deity incarnate in Sovereign States which are all strongly
attached to the practice of mutual throat-cutting, and who can
therefore only advance through the suicide as it were of dif-
ferent forms of itself, is not a Deity which can command our
respect. For such a devouring Spirit, William James’s appellation
of ‘“‘Bitch Goddess” would not indeed be too strong. Men may
find it wiser to limit rather than to insist on the sovereignty of
each State. For if the world can progress only through the con-
tinued suicide of different forms of God, its progress is likely to
be most reminiscent of that of the Gadarene swine, and in this
atomic age, to misquote T. S. Elliot, mankind to end not with
a whimper but with a bang.
One great value of Hegel’s evolutionary view of the State is
that from it naturally follows the belief that everything should
be open to criticism. Yet by assuming the operation of the
Divine Mind even in imperfect States, Hegel builds up a strong
presumption against any criticism of existing States. He is too
strongly inclined to the view that whatever is is right because
it represents the historic process at any given moment of its
evolution. When such a view is accepted too passively, that pro-
cess itself is in danger of coming to an end.
But all criticism of him can be summed up in the charge that
while he sought to give a more satisfactory definition of Liberty
than that provided by those who regard the State as a machine,
he in the end sacrifices the individual to the Great Leviathan.
Far from curbing Leviathan, he has merely dressed it in the
garments and given it the airs of Mr. Pecksniff, and made it
oppress us for our own good. Preaching the fulfilment of
humanity, he has opened the floodgates wide to those surging
tides of inhumanity that have threatened since he wrote to en-
gulf the world. Ardent apostle of Reason, he has done more
than most to prepare the way for that age of Unreason in which
we live. The evil that he has done has lived after him and is
writ large in the world today.

THOMAS HILL GREEN, 1836-1882

His Task
About the 1870s, as Dicey has taught us, a great change took
place in the nature of English legislation. From the 1830s it
bore the stamp of the individualism that saw in “the systematic
174 POLITICAL THOUGHT
extension of individual freedom” the cure for “the evils which
bring ruin on a commonwealth.” From the 1870s it carried the
mark of the collectivism “which favours the intervention of the
State, even at the sacrifice of some individual freedom, for the
purpose of conferring benefit upon the mass of the people.”
This trend towards collectivism did not necessarily imply the
undermining of Utilitarianism, the prevailing pabee
philosophy of the mid-century; for the individualism that was
expressed in the doctrine of laisser-faire was not an essential part
of that political philosophy which, as Herbert Spencer pointed
out, could lend itself perhaps even more readily to justify col-
lectivism than individualism. Indeed, Socialism in England has
not hesitated to acknowledge its indebtedness to the Utili-
tarianism which, in Dicey’s words, provided it with a legisla-
tive dogma—the principle of Utility, a legislative instrument—
the active use of parliamentary sovereignty, and a legislative ten-
dency—the extension and improvement of the mechanism of
government.
Yet in the period of transition from individualist to collectivist
legislation, Utilitarianism tended to be discredited. It had been
too closely associated with prejudice against State action, and
men who were now more ready than formerly to listen to
Southey maintaining that the State could if it would prevent
the greater al of social evils, to Arnold protesting against
“one of the falsest maxims which ever pandered to human self-
ishness under the name of political wisdom—I mean the maxim
that civil society ought to leave its members alone, each to look
after their several interests, provided they do not employ direct
fraud or force against their neighbour,” to Carlyle fulminating
against laisser-faire as ‘‘false, heretical and damnable if ever
aught was,” could not remain entirely unaffected by their con-
tempt for Hedonism and by their exhortations that men should
follow higher paths than Utilitarians could tread. Arnold’s plea
that men should follow not their ordinary but their best self,
Carlyle’s insistence that true liberty consisted in man’s “finding
out or being forced to find out the right path, and to walk
thereon,” while not widely popular, no longer seemed such un-
godly heresies in the 1870s. Even those curious racial theories—
theories of the Folk which became so familiar in the 20th cen-
tury, which are to be found in Past and Present, wherein
Carlyle preaches the doctrine of the strong, silent man and in
 THE STATE AS ORGANISM 175

which he proves himself surely the noisiest advocate of Silence,

the most eloquent Apostle of ihe Inarticulate that the world has
ever seen—are not entirely unacceptable in the 1870s. For by
now the mental climate of the century is clearly changing, and
is foreshadowing that odd mixture of hysterical emotionalism,
of racialist mumbo-jumbo, and of sound community feeling
which we know as late-Victorian Imperialism.
Possessed of too much common sense to soar to these high
altitudes, in which giddiness is no uncommon affliction, and dis-
credited by its close association with Jaisser-faire individualism,
Utilitarianism in the latter part of the century was at a temporary
disadvantage. Hegelian philosophy, waiting at hand to replace
it, had now the opportunity to do so. But before this could be
done those things which made it difficult for Englishmen to
adopt it must first be removed from Hegelianism. This was
the task of T. H. Green.

The Hegelian in Green

It is obvious how very much Hegelianism Green’s writings
contain. Green wholeheartedly believed in the existence of
Hegel’s Divine Spirit or Reason. This to him was “‘the vital
truth which Hegel had to teach.” He believed that this Divine
Spirit or Reason was constantly pushing forward to its goal,
which was perfect realisation. History, therefore, for Green as
for Hegel, was a constant progress which embodies the “eternal
consciousness.” He believed that the Divine Spirit reaching its
goal was full Reality, that what men call the “ideal” is more
real than is actual life. In words that Hegel might have written,
he declared: ‘““To anyone who understands a process of develop-
ment, the result being developed is the reality.” He insisted, as
Hegel did, that when man holds fast to the ideal his grasp of
reality is strongest. He maintained with Hegel that all institu-
tions, communities, associations were embodiments of the Divine
Spirit. He accepted Hegel’s view that every new embodiment of
this Divine Spirit was a fuller embodiment than the one preced-
ing it. Each step taken by the Spirit on its march through the
world was more real than the one before. The association was
more real than the family, the State was more real than the
association. He believed that men also were at least partial em-
bodiments of this Divine Spirit. While not minimising human
frailty and human passions any more than did Hegel, believing
176 POLITICAL THOUGHT
as did Hegel that in great men, the agents of history, they were
“overruled” for good so that he can write that while Cesar
may have been actuated by desire for power and glory he, never-
theless, founded the Empire which brought to the world the bless-
ing of Roman Law, he held firmly to the idea, as did Hegel,
that the Divine Spirit in him constituted man’s real self. With
Hegel, Green accepted the view that the State was the latest and
fullest existing embodiment of the Divine Spirit, an embodi-
ment of the greatest possible significance to man since it helped
him to increase in himself that measure of the Divine Spirit
which he already possessed. Without the State in fact, Green
believed, man is not really man at all. Only in the State can he
fully express himself, can his nature be developed to its fullest
capacity. Hence he must clearly look upon the State, not as an
evil made necessary because of his own inherent viciousness, but
as a good made indispensable because of his own inherent virtue;
not as a chaining of the Devil, but as a releasing of the God
within him. The political life of man, Green concludes in words
which almost paraphrase Hegel’s, is ‘‘a revelation of the Divine
Idea.”
It is clear, too, that in Green, as in Hegel, there is a very full
realisation of the majesty and might of the State. The State,
Green insists, is the only source of actual rights. “Ideal rights,”
he says, “may be conceived which are not in the State; only
when they are in it do they become rights.”
Green’s State, like Hegel’s, isa community of communities, but
again like Hegel’s there is no question but that it is supreme
over all the communities it contains. “The members of the State
derive the rights which they have as members of other associa-
tions from the State, and have no rights against it,” he declares.
And, like Hegel’s, Green’s State differs from all the associations
within it in that in it alone the General Will is fully realised.
Like Hegel, Green is very concerned with the problem of
Freedom, and his view of Freedom bears a strong resemblance to
Hegel’s. For both, man is most free when he most completely
identifies himself with the Divine Spirit. Freedom, Green says,
is not being left alone to do what one likes, since all depends
on what one likes to do. Man is free only when he is following
his “true” good, and his “‘true’”’ good is also “social” good since
it can only be achieved when the good of others is also realised.
Freedom, then, Green writes, “is a positive power or capacity of
 THE STATE AS ORGANISM 177
doing or enjoying something worth doing or enjoying and that,
too, something we do or enjoy in common ze others.” Or
more simply, Freedom is “the liberation of all the powers of
men for the social good.” But men are capable of pursuing
social good only because of the Divine Spirit that is in them.
Therefore Freedom is identification of oneself with the Divine
Spirit. Since Green agrees that the Divine Spirit finds its highest
embodiment in the State, it is obvious how close is his ap-
proach to the Hegelian thesis that true liberty is realised in the
State.
Finally, Green’s view of the importance of Society is very
similar to Hegel’s. “Without society no person,” he writes
epigrammatically. He believed with Hegel that each community
develops its own standard of morality which moulds the moral
outlook of its citizens. Hence an action which would be moral
for a Chinese would be immoral for an Englishman. The impli-
cation that what is is right seems clear, that the individual
should be more influenced by the moral code of his community
than by any purely abstract code. At all events, Green says, it is for
the community and not for the individual conscience to declare
what acts should be committed. So long as the moral conscious-
ness of the community was not offended man had the natural
right “to drive at any pace through the streets, to build houses
without any reference to sanitary conditions, to keep his children
at home or send them to work analphabetic,” and only when it
became offended did man lose that natural right. There is here
almost as full a realisation of the importance of the community
as anything to be found in Hegel. This helps Green to see, as
Hegel does, that no reform will endure which ignores national
sentiments, character, and institutions. But it also carries him
far towards Hegel’s views. It is significant, for instance, that
when Green speaks of the obligations of the citizen, these are
not to other actual citizens but to some “real” entity called
Society. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that there 1s a very
great deal of Hegelian mysticism in Green’s thinking about
Society.
In these views of his on History, on Man, Society and the
State, Green is not of course influenced solely by Hegel. His
Hegelianism is intermingled with a good deal of Aristotelianism,
as might have been expected of an Oxford scholar bred on the
classics. Nevertheless, his is a sufficiently stiff dose of Hegelian-
178 POLLTLGAL) THPOl)
6 HIT
ism, and almost certainly it would have proved too unpalatable
for Englishmen to swallow had it not been diluted by a very
strong measure of English common sense, had Green, similar
in so many things to Hegel, not differed from him radically in
so many more.
The Individualist in Green
In his lectures on the English Commonwealth, Green quoted
the remark of Vane the regicide: “The people of England have
been long asleep. I doubt they will be hungry when they
awake”; and he added: “If they should yet awake and be
hungry, they will find their food in the ideas which, with much
blindness and weakness, he vainly offered them, cleared and
ripened by a philosophy of which he did not dream.” Here
we have, as it were, the two streams that came together in
Green. The one is Hegelianism—the philosophy of which Vane
did not dream. The other is Radical Individualism, which could
find so much to admire in Vane and the English Puritans. In
spite of his Hegelianism, Green remained a Radical and an
Individualist. It is typical of him that he was a friend of Chart-
ism and an opponent of that “national honour” in whose
name so many crimes have been committed. On being asked as
an undergraduate to join a University Rifle Corps against
Chartism, he replied that he would “like to learn the use of the
arm in order that he might desert to the people if it came to
such a pass.” He thought that Palmerston had done “about as
much harm as it is possible for an individual Englishman to do”
—until, that is, Disraeli came along, and then he wasn’t sure.
It was because of his Radicalism, because he was at least as
much an Individualist as he was an Hegelian, that Englishmen
listened to his teaching.
For all his belief that the State was the embodiment of the
Divine Spirit, he never regarded the State as an end in itself.
It was a means to an end, and that end was the full moral de-
velopment of the individuals who compose it. He believed pas-
sionately with Kant that every man has a worth and a dignity
which forbids his exploitation for any purposes whatever. “The
life of the nation,” he insisted, “has no real existence except as
the life of the individuals composing it.” “To speak of any pro-
gress or improvement or development of a nation or society or
mankind except as relative to some greater worth of persons,” he
 THE STATE AS ORGANISM 179

wrote, “is to use words without meaning.” It is typical of him

that he regards the function of the State as being negative, not
positive. It is not to make men moral, since morality consists in
“the disinterested performance of self-imposed duties,” it is to
remove the obstacles which prevent men becoming moral.
It is true, of course, that in order to remove obstacles the
State must interfere to such an extent that what appears negative
in form soon seems most positive in content. “To any Athenian
slave, who might be used to gratify a master’s lust,’”’ he wrote,
“it would have been a mockery to speak of the State as a realisa-
tion of freedom; and perhaps it would not be much less to speak
of it as such to an untaught and underfed denizen of a London
yard with gin-shops on the right hand and on the left.” It was
for the State to see that the mental and physical malnutrition,
together with the gin-shops, were removed. “To uphold the
sanctity of contract,” he said, “is doubtless a prime business of
government, but it is no less its business to provide against
contracts being made which from the helplessness of one of the
parties to them, instead of being a security for freedom, become
an instrument of disguised oppression.” In acknowledging that
as its business, the State was assuming no inconsiderable powers
of intervention, Green’s indignation at the moral degradation
which for so long Society had so easily accepted shines through
his words: “We content ourselves with enacting that no man
shall be used by other men as a means against his will, but we
leave it to be pretty much a matter of chance whether or not
he shall be qualified to fulfil any social function, to contribute
anything to the common good, and to do so freely.” Indeed, he
would gladly have echoed Carlyle’s “that one man should die
ignorant who has the capacity of knowledge, that I call a
tragedy, though it should happen, as by some computations it
does, a thousand times a minute.” If the State was to intervene
to prevent that tragedy, to ensure that everyone should be
qualified to contribute something to the common good, its inter-
vention was likely to be steady, constant, and far-reaching, and
its purpose would clearly be positive.
The negative form in which Green speaks of the State as the
remover of obstacles is nevertheless significant. It is a reminder
that in the final analysis what matters most in life must remain
within the province of the individual—the development of his
moral nature—‘‘the fulfilment of a moral capacity without which
 180 POLITICAL THOUGHT
man would not be man.” It is a reminder, too, that the limits
of State action are, after all, very strictly defined; indeed, far
more strictly defined than ever they can be by Utilitarianism.
The State can do everything which will help, but it must do
nothing which will hinder the free development of moral per-
sonality. “The true ground of objection to ‘paternal govern-
ment’ is not that it violates the Jazsser-faire principle and con-
ceives that its office is to make people good, to promote moral-
ity,” he adds, “but that it rests on a misconception of morality.
The real function of government being to maintain conditions
of life in which morality shall be possible, and morality con-
sisting in the disinterested performance of self-imposed duties,”
paternal government “does its best to make it impossible by
narrowing the room for the self-imposition of duties and for the
play of disinterested motives.”
| There can thus be no question that for Green the State is
- not an end in itself, but is only a means to the development of
men. And as though to leave not the shadow of doubt about
it, Green is never tired of insisting that institutions exist for
men not men for institutions. They are important for the effect
they have on their members. ““The value of the institutions of
civil life,” he emphasises, “lies in their operation as giving
reality to the capacities of will and reason and enabling them
to be really exercised.”
After his insistence on the importance of individual men and
women, it is hardly surprising to find that in spite of the aura
of mysticism which surrounds his conception of Society, the
State for Green is not something other and greater than the
sum of the wills of its citizens. He does not see in it, as Rousseau
did, “Un moi commun,” a common me.
It is true that he believes in the existence of the General Will.
Indeed, he is convinced that this General Will is the real basis
of the State. Legal Sovereignty, he agrees with Austin, must
reside in the supreme authority within the State, in that body
which recognises no power above itself. But behind this legal
Sovereign is the General Will, and this General Will, not force
or fear, is what really determines the habitual obedience of a
eople. Men habitually obey only those institutions which, per-
bas unconsciously, they feel represent the General Will. And
this is true irrespective of the form of government the State may
possess, since even an absolute monarchy must inspire loyalty
 THE STATE AS ORGANISM 181

and voluntary suvmission in its subjects. ““There’s on earth a

yet auguster thing, Veiled though it be than Parliament or
King,” Green quotes. This is the General Will, the true Sove-
reign of the community.
Green thinks, then, sufficiently highly of the General Will.
But his is no metaphysical or vague definition of it. He writes
of “that impalpable congeries of the hopes and fears of a people,
bound together by common interests and sympathy, which we
call the General Will.” He calls it ‘‘the common consciousness
of a common good”’; “a sense of possessing common interests, a
desire for common interests on the part of a people.” It is obvious
that for him the General Will is the will for the State, not the
will of the State. His General Will is certainly not that in whose
name so many crimes have been perpetrated, which has proved
such an excellent stick, not only with which to beat minorities,
as Dean Inge saw, but with which to bludgeon whole com-
munities into obedience, that it has become almost the accredited
villain of modern political thought.
Believing that will not force is the true basis of the State, yet
knowing that there are States in which force not will is pre-
ponderant, Green has to admit, although he has already told us
that the State is the latest and fullest embodiment of the Divine
Spirit, that “actual States at best fulfil but partially their ideal
function.” And he is prepared to draw from the vital distinction
between the State in idea and the State in fact conclusions which
Hegel can never admit. Hence while Green rejects Rousseau’s
view that the General Will is entirely in abeyance in all existing
States, he also rejects Hegel’s view that the laws in existing
States are synonymous with the General Will. The State, there-
fore, as it exists is not necessarily a completer embodiment of
the Divine Spirit than the individual. The ideal State would be,
of course, but there may be a great difference between the
actual and the ideal State. Green thus cannot be accused of
sacrificing the individual to the State, as Hegel can. There is a
very important difference between his and Hegel’s idea of Free-
dom, similar as at first they might seem. For Hegel, Freedom is
the voluntary identification of self with the laws of the State.
For Green, Freedom is the right of a man to make the best of
himself. This may mean voluntary identification of self with the
laws of the State. If the State is a good State, if it is adequately
fulfilling its function, it will mean this. But it might not mean
P.T.—7
182 POLITICAL THOUGHT
this. It might even mean that the individual, albeit in fear
and trembling, will be compelled to go up against the State
—a possibility which Hegel could never but which Green readily
admits.
Nowhere does Green more obviously differ from Hegel than
in this belief that the individual may be justified in disobeying
the State. It is true that Green does nothing to make the path
of the resister easy. He is not concerned to build broad highways
for would-be resisters, for of all broad highways they
would, he believed, lead quickest to the everlasting bonfire.
Rather he insists there can never be any right to disobey the
State, for the State alone is the source of rights. He is emphatic
that resistance can never be justified merely because legislation
runs against personal inclinations. “There can be no right to
disobey or evade any particular law on the ground that it inter-
feres with any freedom of action, any right of managing his
children” or “doing what he will with his own,” Green says.
“If upon new conditions arising or upon elements of social good
being taken account of which had been overlooked before, if in
any of these ways or otherwise the reference to social well-being
suggests the necessity of further regulation of the individual’s
liberty to do as he pleases, he can plead no right against this
regulation, for every right he has possessed has been dependent
upon the social judgment of its compatibility with general well-
being.” He warns men that in resisting the State they should
always be aware that they will probably be wrong and the State
almost certainly right, for the State will be speaking with the
wisdom of the ages, and that may be presumed to be greater
than the wisdom of individual men. He tells them that they
should always know that resistance maybe utterly disastrous,
since it may tempt men to unleash the bonds of that mighty
demon Anarchy. He commands them, wherever they have the
fortune to enjoy constitutional government, to put up with ob-
jectionable laws until they can repeal them constitutionally,
for the common good will suffer far more from resistance than
from conformity to even a bad law for the time that must elapse
before it can be changed. Even where the blessings of constitu-
tional rule are unknown men should, he says, feel justified in
disobeying the State only when certain conditions obtain. If the
legality of the command objected to is doubtful, if there are no
means of agitating for its repeal, if the whole system of govern-
 THE STATE AS ORGANISM 183
ment is so bad, because so perverted by private interests, that
temporary anarchy is better than its continuance, or if anarchy
is unlikely to follow resistance, then only should the State be
disobeyed.
But when all warnings are uttered, Green will ultimately agree
that there are occasions when man, if he is to be true to himself
and at whatever cost, must refuse to give obedience to the State.
Knowing all that can be urged against it, Green says, if you
must resist you must, and the choice can be no one’s but yours.
You will never have the right to resist, but you may be right
in resisting. And if you are, it will be your duty to resist—and
the poorer citizen you if you don’t. Your resistance, of course,
can be justified only on social grounds, on the ideal of the com-
mon good, because in existing circumstances your full moral de-
velopment would be impossible. But if you are convinced of all
this you must act. Normally your resistance should be based on
popular and widespread discontent. But you may dispense even
with this since your action is not to be determined according to
the Chinese saying: “Where there are many persons their pres-
tige is great.” Yours may be the Daniel’s part to dare to stand
alone, for where popular sentiment is apathetic it may be your
duty to act in the interests of the common good.
Not content with admitting that Luther’s “Ich kann nichts
anders” (I can do no other) is a cry which if need be every
man worthy of the name must be prepared to raise against the
State, Green goes on to re-enunciate something like a doctrine
of Natural Rights on behalf of individuals within the State.
Utilitarians and Idealists had joined in attacking the idea of
Natural Rights as rhetorical nonsense and unreal, a view which,
as far as those rights were concerned which Locke had thought
were man’s in the State of Nature, Green would have unhesi-
tatingly accepted. But he believes that men may have certain
claims which ought to be recognised as rights, even if in fact
they are not. Such claims are those which must be granted if
man is to fulfil his moral nature, and such claims Green calls
Natural Rights. Since these Natural Rights “arise out of and
are necessary for the fulfilment of man’s moral capacity,” they
are not based on the claims of an earlier against a later state
of Society, but are rather an appeal from a less developed to a
more mature Society. They are therefore “ahead of, not behind,
political development.”
184 POLITICAL THOUGHT
But how are we to tell what these Natural Rights are? We
are not to listen to “some remote philosopher’s view of it.” We
must take into account the common good that is actually recog-
nised by Society, for our idea of the good life for all, on which
we must base the Natural Rights we wish to put forward, must
depend not on our own idea of good alone, but on what we
believe our fellow citizens will recognise to be for the common
good. We “must be able to point to some public interest, gener-
ally recognised as such, which is involved in the exercise of the
power claimed as a right, to show that it is not the general
well-being, even as conceived by our fellow citizens, but some
special interest of a class that is concerned in preventing the
exercise of the power claimed.”
The confusion of Green’s utterances on Natural Rights is to
be regretted. “Rights,” he tells us, “are made by recognition.
There is no right but thinking makes it so.” Yet he also tells
us that there are Rights which ought to be recognised—which
seems to imply that Rights are not made by recognition. Perhaps
we must conclude that he should not have spoken of Natural
Rights since he can only mean unrecognised powers, which
according to his definition are not Rights at all. There seems,
moreover, some incompatibility in what he says about the de-
termination of Rights. In determining Rights, he says, it is only
what Society thinks that matters. Yet he adds that only what is
necessary for the individual’s full moral development is impor-
tant. Man’s full moral development is possible only in Society,
yet what Society wants may not always coincide with what is
necessary for man’s full moral development. And finally, if we
agree that all Green is saying is that the appeal from the State
as it is to the State as it ought to be is the appeal to the State
as it might reasonably be expected to be, remembering that its
citizens are neither devils nor gods but men in a world of men,
a difficulty still remains. Apart from the indication that the
remote philosopher would not be the best of guides, we are left
unaided to answer the question: Who is to be the judge of
what might reasonably be expected? It cannot, then, be denied
that what Green has to tell us about Natural Rights is lacking
in that crystal clarity which is to be desired in all philosophers.
But neither can what he says be regarded as anything but a
strengthening of the individual against the State. There is no
confusion, no lack of clarity, no lack of firmness in his conclu-
 THE STATE AS ORGANISM 185

sion that “there may be cases in which the public interest is best
served by a violation of some actual law.” In this and its
attendant view that the judgment of conscience is morally the
court of last resort, Green stands poles apart from Hegel.
Green’s view here is a necessary and logical consequence of the
distinction which he makes between the de jure sovereign,
which is Rousseau’s sovereign, residing solely in the General
Will and which, unlike Rousseau, he believes is to be found to
some degree in most States, and the de facto sovereign, which
is the remnant of laws in every State which are not the product
of the General Will but which proceed from the particular will
of some ruler who depends on force and who procures obe-
dience through fear. For the implication of this distinction is
the rejection of Hegel’s view that the willing of a common good
acquires moral significance only within the State, the rejection
of Hegel’s view that “‘civil society” has no moral significance
until it comes under the control of the State, and the return to
the earlier view of Locke and the Natural Law philosophers that
Society itself is moral and embodies a system of rational justice
not because of the State’s power but because of the developing
moral conscience of its members. Hence in spite of his Hegel-
ianism, Green reverts to the old English tradition of individual-
ism, in which the importance of the individual’s moral conscience
is understood and the State’s authority suspect. His is the faith
which to Hegel would have been the heresy of heresies, that in
the final analysis there exists within the community an ethical
system which is independent of the State and which gives the
individual a standard whereby to criticise the State itself. How
this leads him to conclusions that would have been anathema to
Hegel, his views on associations and on International Relations
will make still further clear.
In Green’s State as in Hegel’s the supremacy of the State over
the associations it contains is unquestioned. But there is a sig-
nificant difference between them in the reasons for it and the
nature and exercise of it. For Hegel, associations are important
because they embody the State instinct which is co-operative, not
the principle of “bourgeois society” which is competitive. In so
far as they do this they prepare men for that voluntary obedience
which they must give to the State. “The more there is of the
more, the less there is of the less,” the old Spanish proverb says.
Since the whole value of associations lies in the fact that they
186 POLITICAL THOUGHT
develop the State instinct in man, they can never assert them-
selves against the State. For Green, however, associations are im-
portant because they fulfil the individual. They existed before
the State came into being, and have their own system of rights
which arise from their very nature as associations. The State
must be supreme over them because it must co-ordinate and
adjust them. But it must also preserve them. “‘A State,”’ he says,
“presupposes other forms of community, with the rights that
arise out of them, and only exists as sustaining, securing and
completing them.” Thus, while for Hegel if associations do not
result in the State, they are no true associations; for Green if
the State does not preserve associations, it is no true State. In
both Hegel and Green the fact of the State’s supremacy is
unquestioned. But in the one the exercise of the supremacy of
the State is unlimited because of its own nature and the nature
of associations. In the other the exercise of the State’s supremacy
is limited by its own nature and the nature of associations.
And if Green’s State must preserve the rights of the lesser
communities within it, it must respect the rights of the larger
community outside it. Just as Green believes that there can be
an ethical system within the community independent of the
State, so he thinks that even in the absence of a super-State
there can be a common General Will of humanity, “the com-
mon consciousness of mankind,” from which can be formulated
an ethical code whereby to judge the morality of the State’s
behaviour to its neighbours. In existing circumstances he knows
that this cannot be complete, nor its sanctions absolutely
effective. But he is sure that such a code exists and that it can
be still further developed. As consciousness of common interest
had in the process of time led to the General Will fashioning
within the State an ever more complete ethical system, so out-
side the State it would in time lead to the more complete formu-
lation of international ethics. An international ethical code is, he
believes, the obvious extension of the ethical system accepted
within the State. Both spring from a common source—man’s
desire as a moral being to fulfil himself.
It is obvious how emphatically Green rejects the Hegelian
thesis that such an international code is impossible, that the
State can never seek to base its external actions on morality be-
cause it is itself the sole source of morality and what it does in
its own interests is the whole of morality. Four of Hegel’s propo-
 THE STATE AS ORGANISM 187
sitions, in particular, Green takes exception to: to the proposi-
tion that war is not evil, that it is a necessary consequence of
the existence of States, that no higher form of Society than the
State can ever be conceived, and that International Law is a
contradiction in terms.
War, he asserts, is always an evil which violates man’s right
to life. There may, he admits, be circumstances in which peace is
a still greater evil, where war is the only means of maintaining
conditions necessary to the moral development of men. But such
circumstances, he is convinced, will be very rare, and where they
exist they are the result of some greater evil that has taken place
in times past. The Italian War of Liberation was an evil made
necessary by the still greater evil of former Austrian occupation.
Even where it is hard to tell where guilt lies, Green says with
that humility which is one of the rarest virtues of political
philosophers, that is “only a reason for more general self-re-
proach, for a more humbling sense (as the preachers say) of
complicity in the radical (but conquerable because moral) evil of
mankind which renders such a means of maintaining political
freedom necessary.” Of those “who from time to time talk of
the need of a great war to bring unselfish impulses into play,”
he comments: “They give us reason to suspect that they are
too selfish themselves to recognise the unselfish activity that is
going on all around them.” And as for the argument that war
is necessary as providing opportunities for noble endeavour, he
writes: ‘Till all methods have been exhausted by which nature
can be brought into the service of man, till society is so or-
ganised that everyone’s capabilities have free scope for their de-
velopment, there is no need to resort to war for a field in which
patriotism may display itself.”
He roundly denies that “the wrong which results to human
society from conflicts between States can be condoned on the
round that it is a necessary incident of the existence of States.”
The State, he said, is ‘an institution in which all the capacities
that give rise to rights have free play given to them, and the
more perfectly each State attains this object, the easier it is for
others to do so.” Or again, “‘no action in its own interest of a
State which fulfilled its idea could conflict with any true interest
or right of general society.” Thus he concludes: “It is not the
State as such, but this or that particular State, which by no
means fulfils its purpose, and might perhaps be swept away and
188 POLITICAL THOUGHT
superseded by another with advantage to the ends for which
the true State exists, that needs to defend its interest by action
injurious to those outside it.”
Finally, Green is willing to admit the possibility of the State’s
supersession by other and perhaps higher forms of Society. “It
is easy,” he writes, “‘to conceive a better system than that of the
great States of modern Europe with their national jealousies,
rival armies, and hostile tariffs.”” And while acknowledging how
far mankind is from realising “the dream of an international
court with authority resting on the consent of individual States,”
he believes ‘that there is nothing in the intrinsic nature of a
system of independent States incompatible with it, but that on
the contrary every advance in the organisation of mankind in
States in the sense explained is a step towards it.”” Much as he
owes to Hegel, Green could hardly have more effectively marked
the gulf that lies between them.
Though his preference for popular control and participation
in government is admitted, it has nevertheless been claimed that
the seeds of authoritarianism are to be detected in Green’s
writings. It has been said that he did not claim that good gov-
ernment must be popular government, that he admitted that
Dictatorship might act according to the General Will, that as
his sole criterion was the common good this could be as well
provided for by an authoritarian as by a constitutional govern-
ment.
There seems some evidence for this view. Whether in the
absence of public control private interests could be kept from
ousting pilblie good, whether good citizenship was possible
without active participation in politics, these, for instance,
seemed to Green “questions of circumstances which do not per-
mit of an unqualified answer.” Green is too good an Hegelian
not to see the importance of historical differences between States,
too humble and at the same time too wise to think that all is
dross that is not Liberalism.
But if Hegelianism makes him aware that he ought not to
give an unqualified answer to the questions he raises, individual-
ism in fact compels him to give one. He says of the Reform
Act of 1867: “We who were reformers from the beginning
always said that the enfranchisement of the people was an end
in itself. We said, and we were much derided for saying so, that
only citizenship makes the moral man; that only citizenship
 TOE Shas ORF AS) OR GANTSM 189

gives that self-respect which is the true basis of respect for

others, and without which there is no lasting social order or
real morality.” Instinctive loyalty is too little to demand from
citizens. They must be “intelligent patriots,” longing to serve
their country. “The citizens of the Roman Empire,” he wrote,
“were loyal subjects, the admirable maintenance of private rights
made them that; but they were not intelligent patriots, and
chiefly because they were not the Empire fell.’”” Only active
interest in the service of the State can make intelligent patriots,
and only participation in the work of the State can produce that
active interest.
We cannot doubt where Green stands. We musi not in listen-
ing to the grudging admission forget the triumphant assertion.
Green, though all his instincts urge him to, will not deny that
there may be good government which is not self-government.
But he loudly proclaims his conviction that the best government
can only be self-government. Un-Hegelian in his refusal to con-
sider the State an end in itself, as something other and greater
than the sum of the individuals who are its citizens, as neces-
sarily a completer embodiment of the Spirit than the individual,
un-Hegelian in his insistence that the individual may have the
duty to act against the State, that the State must preserve the
rights of the lesser communities within it and respect the rights
of the greater community of which it is itself part, Green
is no less un-Hegelian in this, that for the passive voluntary
identification of self with an authoritarian State which Hegel
demands, he substitutes an active participation in a democratic
State which his individualism requires, Green, the individualist,
who judges State, Society, General Will by their worth for the
development of individual morality and individual character,
who so notably and so nobly dedicated himself to social and
political service in the City of Oxford, would not have been
true to himself had he done less—and would certainly have
made much less of an appeal than he did to Englishmen.

His Achievement
“Tf it be individualism to see in every political movement the
fate of human beings and in every controversy over institutions
the weal or woe of fellow citizens, then there are few more de-
clared individualists in political philosophy than T. H. Green,”
writes Maccunn. Yet there can be no doubt that T. H. Green
190 POLITICAL THOUGHT

belongs to the Idealist school of political philosophers. He re-

jects the Mechanistic theory of the State as being too artificial,
and as overlooking the importance of the historical growth and
development of communities. He rejects the Force theory of the
State, since he is convinced that will not force is the true basis
of political obligation. He accepts the Organic theory of the
State, even though, as has been seen, only with many qualifica-
tions. He regards the State as natural since man is necessarily a
social animal. He sees Freedom not as the absence of restraint
but as a process of self-development by freely obeying laws and
customs which are seen to embody a rational scheme of Justice
within the Community. He believes the State to be essentially
good, because it is an indispensable guide enabling men to
understand their own moral obligations, calling upon the best
in them and providing them with a code of duties in discharg-
ing which they can find true freedom.
He is, then, we must admit, an Idealist, but an Idealist who
can be hailed as an Individualist. Perhaps that is why we must
further agree that he is the most easy of Idealists to criticise—
though we might add in so many ways the most difficult to dis-
agree with. We may say that his theory that institutions are the
embodiment of reason is dangerous since it may so easily lead
to the view that whatever is is right. We may believe that his
theory of Sovereignty, combining as it does the ideas of Austin
and of Rousseau, is unsatisfactory. Sovereignty, he says, is
supreme power, but it is only supreme power when supported
by the General Will. Hobhouse’s criticism is called for: “In so
far as it is will, it is not general, and in so far as it is general,
it is not will.” We may find singularly unconvincing his theory
that in great men the bad is “overruled” for good—seeing in it
an uncomfortable reminder of the truth of Frederick the Great’s
assertion that however bad the means used to attain an end may
be there will always be found some philosopher to whitewash
them. We may consider his whole approach much too rational.
He neglects the subconscious factors that influence men’s actions
in States, just as in his theory of Punishment he appears to
forget their emotions. His ieee of man as almost pure con-
sciousness is as unreal as the Utilitarian’s picture of man the
pleasure-seeker or the classical economist’s picture of economic
man. We may think his economic views are inadequate and
unsatisfactory since he is content with demanding land reform
 THE STATE AS ORGANISM 19gI

while he sees no danger in concentration of capital. And recent

events suggest that Mrs. Partington attempting to sweep back
the waves with her mop was a supreme pessimist compared with
those who believe, as he was tempted to and as Article XI of the
League of Nations maintained, that world public opinion will
suffice to stop the excesses of power. We have seen the difh-
culties into which his theory of Natural Rights lead him. It
might seem that he continually takes away with one hand what
he gives with the other, a trick that would be readily seen
through were it not for the fact that like the juggler he success-
fully manages to keep everything in the air anyhow. When he
agrees that the judgment of conscience is morally the court of
last appeal, yet insists that the individual can never have a right
against the community but only a duty to improve the com-
munity, this must appear an elaborate attempt to have it both
ways. It must also incidentally be a strong reminder of the difh-
culties under which all believers in the organic State labour of
making adequate provision for the operation of the individual
conscience. And if practically we find Green’s views not unsatis-
factory, logically we can hardly regard them as very convincing.
But however much we are impelled to criticise him, so many
of his conclusions are convincing and satisfactory, even if more
so than the logical process whereby he arrives at them. Ben-
thamism had built on selfishness and had ignored man’s capa-
city for sacrifice. In spite of appearances, it had made no ade-
uate provision for the limiting of the State’s authority. Against
all probability, it had asserted the identity of the interests of the
individual and of the group, but in any case it was convinced
that a true theory of politics could be based on interest alone.
Green called on the best that was in man. He showed that when
man gave of his best there could be no conflict between his true
interests and the interests of the true State. He taught men to
see that faith in their own moral development and faith in their
fellow-men mattered far more to them than any particular interest
they might have. In his distinction between outward acts and
inward will, between what is better done even from the wrong
motive and what is only valuable because of its motive, he gave
men a far sounder criterion whereby to judge State action than
did Mill with his doctrine of self-and-other-regarding actions.
In doing so he gave the individual a far more effective protection
against the undue exercise of the State’s power than anything
Ig2 POLITICAL THOU
GH tT

with which Utilitarianism could provide him. Idealism had

sacrificed the individual to the State, had made the State an end
in itself and the sole source of morality, had emphasised the
antithesis between the State and its neighbours, seeing morality
in raison d’état and virtue in war. Green teaches men that the
individual need not be sacrificed to the State, which is neither
an end in itself nor the sole source of morality. And he shows
them that it is not true to say of States, as the Corinthians said
of the Athenians, ‘“‘to describe their character in a word, one
might truly say that they were born into the world to take no
rest themselves and to give none to others.”’ The sole law be-
tween States is not the law of the jungle, war is evil, and an
immoral action remains an immoral action even if committed
by the State, Correcting and supplementing both Utilitarianism
and Idealism, Green gives men a common-sense criterion which
they can apply to States. Every State, he shows them, can be
judged by its practical content here and now. It will be a good
State if it contains the largest possible number of happy, moral
human beings.
So far Green has endeavoured to give what he has to say a
universal application. Yet we cannot be unaware that his good
State and his good citizens are recognisably English. It is very
revealing that he hopes “for a time when the phrase [the educa-
tion of a gentleman] will have lost its meaning, because the sort
of education which alone makes the gentleman in any sense will
be within the reach of all. As it was the aspiration of Moses
that all the Lord’s people should be prophets, so, with all
seriousness and reverence, we may hope and pray for a condition
of English society in which all honest citizens will recognise
themselves and be recognised by each other as gentlemen.” His
whole approach is demonstrably English, even to the warning
against the remote philosopher. No German who had survived
that far could have read further in Green. And any Frenchman
who had arrived with Green at the point where he discusses a
right that ought to be a Right but wasn’t a Right and couldn’t
be a Right, must have closed the book and gone sadly away con-
vinced, as he had always suspected, that the English fog found
its fitting counterpart in what the English in their conceit called
their minds. Even the view that Natural Right implies an appeal
from the State as it is to the State as it might reasonably be
expected to be, becomes less opaque when addressed to English-
 4

THE STATE AS ORGANISM 193

men who do in fact ask their State to justify itself continually,
but who, perhaps by way of reaction to the violence of their
earlier history, and perhaps because of the protection of their
mother, the sea, have for many years shown themselves remark-
ably reasonable in their politics without necessarily taking the
trouble, or even possessing the capacity, to define what they
mean by reasonableness.
Here, then, is Green’s achievement, that he gave Englishmen
something more satisfying than Benthamism at a price they
were prepared to pay, that he left Liberalism a faith instead of
an interest, that he made Individualism moral and social and
Idealism civilised and safe. Englishmen at least will consider
that achievement no inconsiderable one.
 CHAPTER IV

THE STATE AS CLASS

(Marx, Lenin, STALtn)

KARL MARX, 1818-1883

Passes ho have sought to interpret the world: what
matters, however, is to change it,” Marx declared. Judged
by the standard he himself would have applied, Marx
must be regarded as one of the most important, because most
influential, political philosophers who have ever lived. He did,
indeed, offer an interpretation of the world, but much more
important from his point of view he can claim to have fashioned
one of the great formative forces of history. Recognition came
slowly to him in his own life-time. His Communist Manifesto,
published in 1848, began to exercise an appreciable influence
only after the founding of the First International in 1864. But
thereafter his stature grew and grew and his influence reached
out to the four corners of the earth, until today millions in
Europe and in Asia accept his teaching as revelation and look
upon him as the God of the New Age. Their voices acclaiming
his godhead and venerating his disciples swell into the most
menacing roar that civilisation as it has been developed in the
West has ever heard.
The Appeal
His, then, has been a shattering impact on the world. Men
continue to die gladly in answer to his appeal. Wherein lies his
secret?
The age in which he was writing was one of great physical
and technical achievement. Marx is almost lyrical in his enthu-
siasm for its technical perfection. ““The bourgeoisie,” he writes
in the Communist Manifesto, “has been the first to show what
man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders
far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic
cathedrals. . . . The bourgeoisie . . . draws all nations into civi-
lisation. . . . It has created enormous cities . . . and thus rescued
a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural
 THE STATE AS CLASS 195
life . . and, during its rule of scarce 100 years, has created more
massive and more colossal productive forces than have all pre-
ceding generations together. Subjection of nature’s forces to
man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agri-
culture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing
of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole
populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century
had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered
in the lap of social labour?”
It was an age that was becoming increasingly rationalist and
materialist, an age which at once valued technical achievement
and confidently anticipated that such achievement would be-
come bigger and better. Max Beerbohm’s cartoon in which he
portrays a stout, prosperous, complacent Victorian gentleman
contemplating a future in which he sees a stouter, more pros-
perous, more complacent edition of himself is typical of it. It
was an age in which the products of technical achievement were
very unevenly spread, an age of growing wealth for many and,
so it seemed, of increasing misery for more. It was an age in
which religion was no longer exercising its former appeal, and
the world had grown colder in consequence. It was an age in
which civilisation was not as impressive as technical achieve-
ment. Greek slavery, Marx maintained, at least produced an
aristocracy of marvellous taste, a culture which still thrills the
world. Industrial slavery, on the contrary, could claim for itself
no more impressive purpose than “to transform a few vulgar
and half-educated upstarts into ‘eminent cotton spinners,’ ‘ex-
tensive sausage makers’ and ‘influential blacking dealers.’ ”’ It
was an age that was repulsive in its banality, warping in its
effect on the mind, destructive of many of man’s finer feelings.
“God says “Take what you want from the world and pay for
it,’ runs the Spanish proverb. Marx saw the achievement of
bourgeois civilisation and saw also the cost. It has left intact,
he wrote, “no other bond between man and man but naked
self-interest, but callous ‘cash-payment.’ It has drowned the
sacred awe of pious ecstasy, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of bour-
geois sensibility, in the ice-cold water of egoistic calculation. It
has dissolved personal dignity into exchange value . . . torn off
the veil of feeling and affection from family relationships and
reduced them to purely financial connections.” Seeing the enor-
mous growth of capitalism, Marx values it correctly. Aware of
196 2OLITI CAS THOUGHT
the transformation of things that it has produced, he is not
blind to the transformation of men that it has entailed.
An age, then, of achievement and suffering, of strident scien-
tific assurance and fading religious faith, of apparent fulfilment
and of a great and growing emptiness, an age of which it could
be said as Milton said of his time, “the hungry sheep look up
and are not fed”—this was the age in which Marx lived. It
was because he was able to fill that emptiness that he has gone
striding the world like a giant to this day.
Marx was not, of course, the first Socialist writer of the 19th
century. There was a rich crop of Socialist ideas before he
wrote; its very abundance bearing witness to the spiritual empti-
ness of the age. St. Simon and Guizot were spreading the idea
of the class war; Proudhon the notion that property is theft;
Fourier the conception of the middle classes as commercial
despots; Sismondi the view of the inevitability of crises, booms,
and slumps; Owen the faith that the new factory era would
be one of co-operation instead of competition. Marx was bit-
terly contemptuous of such men—“Utopian” Socialists he called
them in scorn because they attacked the wrongs in the Capi-
talist system, not the system itself, and because they could never
say how their Utopias could be either attained or maintained.
They conjured up visions of beautiful roses, but, preparing no
soil for the rose trees, left them to feed merely on beauty.
Marx, who was the most bitter, indeed scurrilous of dispu-
tants, was not in the habit of being just to his opponents.
Much more can be said for the Utopian Socialists than he
allowed. They voiced those irrational longings of the empty
soul from which so much of the driving force of Socialism
comes. They provided him with many a useful brick and tool.
They popularised the idea of a socialist society. They elaborated
the labour theory of value. But they failed where he succeeded
because they did not see that two requisites of Socialism as a
serious political factor were a doctrine which maintains that
real social forces are making for Socialism and a permanent
contact with a source of power which can be harnessed for
revolutionary socialist activity. They failed, too, because they
were unable to present their ideas with anything approaching
Marx’s religious fervour.
Marx succeeded because he was such an explosive compound
of Hebrew prophet and scientific propounder of political and

*
 THE STATE AS CLAS'S 197

economic theory. It is Marx the Hebrew prophet who is so

filled with a religious conviction of the rottenness of Western
civilisation that he makes denunciation the keynote of the
Communist Manifesto and of Das Capital. It is Marx the scien-
tific propounder of political and economic theory who produces
alike a theory of party tactics and a philosophical theory of the
inevitable course of social development. Sometimes the two ele-
ments in him, Hebrew prophet and social scientist, support each
other. It is not fanciful to suggest that the Jewish belief in the
opposition between the chosen people and the Gentiles
strengthens his belief in the opposition between the proletariat
and the bourgeoisie, that the firm Jewish faith in the inexorable
divine judgment on Gentiles increases his confidence
in the in-
exorable judgment of Dialectical Materialism on Capitalism,
that the Jewish certainty of the ultimate restoration of the chosen
people in the Messianic Kingdom confirms his certainty of the
eventual achievement of the classless society. Sometimes the two
elements in him contradict each other, and discrepancy between
the moral point of view of the prophet and the scientific point
of view of the social scientist becomes plain. As prophet he is
filled with fury at the wickedness of those who have acted in a
way that as scientist he maintains was indispensable for the
progress of the race.
But illogicality is not always a source of weakness, and though
we would be surprised if Darwin overflowed with compassion
for the animais and plants which had been eliminated in the
struggle for life, it is different with Marx. His compassion and
his moral indignation are vital to his success. He filled the empti-
ness of his age because he gave to his teaching both the force
of religious conviction and the certainty of apparently scientific
proof. To many to whom the old faiths could make no appeal,
his terrestrial paradise of Socialism meant a new ray of light, a
new meaning of life. To those who followed him he was indeed
the prophet of a new religion, holding out to men at once a
system of ultimate ends embodying a meaning of life and form-
ing absolute standards by which action should be judged, a path
of salvation for the chosen to tread, and paradise on earth as
the victor’s crown. To this day the Marxist’s characteristic atti-
tude towards opponents, who are regarded as being not only in
error but in sin, bears the authentic stamp of full-blooded
religions.
 198 POLITICAL THOUGHT
But preaching alone would never have won Marx the success
that has been his. Something other than religious fervour was
demanded by his rationalistic and materialistic age which would
not tolerate any creed that had no scientific or pseudo-scientific
pretensions. It was because his message was also a most masterly
analysis of the social processes, because he claimed to be reveal-
ing the laws of historical development, because he proclaimed
that socialistic deliverance from the ills of the world was a cer-
tainty amenable to rational proof, that he became so wildly
successful. Preaching alone would have appealed only to the
few, analysis of the development of man in society to still
fewer. But a combination of the two, preaching that could claim
to be analysis, analysis that carried with it a religious devotion
to man’s deepest needs, generated an enthusiasm and won a
passionate allegiance that spread widely the conviction of even-
tual victory.

The Message
What was his message?
It is a revolutionary call to the working-class. ““The workers
have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
Workers of the world, unite!’’ It is a call for the working-class
to follow the leadership, though not to accept the dictatorship,
of the Communist Party, the vanguard of the proletariat. It is a
call for the working-class to adopt certain tactics, highly flexible
in kind and changing with changing circumstances, but con-
sistent in their revolutionary purpose. “The thing to do now,”
Marx wrote to Lasalle, “is to instil poison wherever possible.”
Thus it is laid down in the Communist Manifesto that Com-
munists must make use of all antagonisms between the bour-
geoisie of different countries and between different bourgeois
groups within every country. Thus the Communist Manifesto
has no interest in reform but only in revolution. Yet for pur-
poses of propaganda it is ready to simulate an interest in im-
mediate reforms that it does not feel—as Communists have done
from that day to this. Thus Communists ever since have under-
stood that the only consistency which has any meaning for them
is consistent devotion to the cause of Proletarian Revolution.
In the words of Yaroslavsky: “What coincides with the interest
of the Proletarian Revolution is ethical.’’ It is wrong to believe
that Communists accept the necessity of defending any form of
 THE STATE AS CLASS 199

capitalist government against any other form. Surprised indig-

nation, therefore, at the attitude of the Communists towards the
Social Democrats in the Weimar Republic when the Nazis were
on the attack is as out of place as it is at the Communist attitude
towards the last war prior to the German attack on Russia.
In both cases the Communists were mistaken, though they will
not admit it. But they were not inconsistent. The true Marxist
is inconsistent only if, in the opinion of his leaders, he acts in
such a way as to delay or prevent successful revolution. Marx-
ism is, furthermore, a call for the working-class to follow a cer-
tain strategy—to strike home and rise in revolt only in revo-
lutionary situations. Marx had as little patience as Lenin and
Stalin with revolutions which have no hope of success.
Of his call to the working-class to act, we need say no more
than that good action for him is action appropriate to the cir-
cumstances, and that, as he is never tired of insisting, circum-
stances change and new circumstances of course demand new
study. Marxism, however, is much more than this clarion call
to the working-class. It is also a means of knowing exactly, as
a resuit of detailed study of a particular kind of the stresses and
strains in existing societies, what are revolutionary situations.
And it is an assurance of the ultimate victory of the working-
class. What Marx offers here as a guide to action and as a
promise of success is a theory of Dialectical Materialism, a theory
of Historical Materialism, and an economic analysis that taken
together can fairly claim to be the greatest and most compelling
statement of Scientific Socialism ever made.

Dialectical Materialism
Nowhere unfortunately, does Marx tell us what he means by
“materialism.” But at least he makes it plain that his materialism
is dialectical not mechanical. In mechanical materialism evolu-
tion is the path taken by material things under the pressure of
their environment. In dialectical materialism, evolution is the
development of matter from within, environment helping or
hindering, but neither originating the evolutionary process nor
capable of preventing it from reaching its inevitable goal. Matter,
to the dialectical materialist, is active not passive, and moves by
an inner necessity of its nature. Therefore dialectical materialism
is more interested in motion than in matter, in a vital energy
within matter inevitably driving it towards perfect human
200 POLITICAL THOUGHT

society just as Hegel’s demi-urge drove forward to the perfect

realisation of Spirit. As Engels said: “The dialectical method
grasps things and their images, ideas, essentially in their
sequence, their movement, their birth and death.”
This motion, to the dialectical materialist who follows Hegel
very closely here, is made possible by the conflict of opposites.
Every stage of history which falls short of perfection carries
within itself the seeds of its own destruction. Each stage reached
in the march to the classless society, the thesis, calls into being
its opposite or antithesis, and from the clash between the two
a new synthesis emerges in which what was true in both thesis
and antithesis is preserved and which serves as a starting-point
for the whole process again until the classless society has been
achieved.
“Contradiction,” then, as Hegel says, “is the very moving
”

principle of the world.” But for the Marxist as for the Hegelian,
it works in a peculiar way. The change it produces takes place
gradually, imperceptibly, until a certain point is reached beyond
which it becomes sudden so that each synthesis is brought about
very abruptly. Water becomes ice, Feudalism Capitalism, Capi-
talism Socialism, as a result of a sudden qualitative change.
How closely Marx follows Hegel here is obvious. For Hegel
the universal substance is Spirit; for Marx it is Matter. Both
Spirit and Matter need to develop themselves and both do so
by means of an inner dialectic. For Hegel the inevitable goal is
the Idea fully conscious of itself; for Marx the inevitable goal is
the classless society, perfectly organised for production, sufh-
cient for itself. Neither Hegel nor Marx proves that the goal
which they state to be inevitable is indeed so. Both begin with
the assumption that it is and in both historical analysis serves to
illustrate but not to prove the initial act of faith. In both the
dialectic retains a strong element of mysticism. It is not too
much to say that the influence on Marxists of the Hegelian triad
of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, is that of a religious myth.
Not only does it greatly simplify social tensions, it symbolises
the continual growth and protest of what can be regarded as
the young forces of life against those that are old and grey, and
it gives assurance of victory as the final outcome of the struggle.
Lenin was justified in saying how impossible it is to understand
Marx without having studied Hegel. The only important dif-
ferences between them are that Marx applied the dialectic to the
 De Rao TAGE GAGS PC AL AGS 201

future and indulged in much pseudo-scientific fortune-telling

which Hegel would have been the first to condemn, and that, of
course, he completely rejected Hegel’s philosophic idealism. As
he wrote in the preface to the second edition of Das Capital: “In
Hegel’s writings, dialectic stands on its head. You must turn
it right way up again if you want to discover the rational kernel
that is hidden away within the wrappings of mystification.”
Not the least of the difficulties that confront the student of
dialectical materialism is that Marx and Engels never worked
out their ideas about it. Nowhere do they treat it in detail,
though it is of course assumed in all their writings. They are
clear only in their expressions of dislike for what has usually
been called materialism. Thus the opening sentence of Marx’s
Theses on Feuerbach reads: ‘The chief defect of all hitherto
existing materialism.” Thus, too, Engels spoke of the typical
materialists of his day as “vulgarising pedders” and “‘cobweb-
spinning flea-crackers”—definitions lacking in clarity but not
in contempt. Clarity might have resulted had Marx chosen a
different name for what he clearly regards as a philosophy very
different from that normally known as materialist.
But clarity is not always desirable. It might have made im-
possible such effective epigrams as: “It is not the consciousness
of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary,
their social existence determines their consciousness.”’ Marx be-
lieves that society is governed by inexorable laws. Thus he writes
in the preface to Das Capital of “tendencies which work out
with an iron necessity towards an inevitable goal.”’ Thus he said
that a country which was more highly industrialised than others
“simply presents those others with a picture of their own
future.” Yet this is hardly compatible with his theory of know-
ledge which insists that knowledge is indissolubly bound up
with action and that its function is to change the world. More-
over the third of his theses on Feuerbach runs: ‘“The material-
istic doctrine that men are the products of circumstances and
education, and that changed men are therefore the products of
other circumstances and a changed education, forgets that cir-
cumstances are changed by men and that the educator must
himself be educated.”’ Later in life he again maintains: “Man
makes his own history,” even though “he does not do so out of
conditions chosen by himself,” and he believed that those higher
departments, such as law and philosophy, of the superstructure
202 POLITICAL THOUGHT

of society, which is itself determined by the productive forces

of the substructure, are always seeking to free themselves from
their tether in economic interest and to evolve a professional
group at least partly independent of class bias.
It seems clear that he had the idea that man could become
the master of his own destiny—though he persuaded many that
he meant the exact opposite, that history is wholly predeter-
mined. Engels later admitted that he and Marx had overstated
the extent to which economic causes could be found for political
and legal institutions. In a letter to Bloch written in 1890, a
letter which he found so satisfactory that he repeated the gist of
it to Starkenburg four years later, he said: “Marx and I are
partly responsible for the fact that at times our disciples have
laid more weight upon the economic factor than belongs to it.
We were compelled to emphasise its central character in opposi-
tion to our opponents, who denied it, and there wasn’t always
time, place and occasion to do justice to the other factors in the
reciprocal interactions of the historical process.”
Yet in that letter Engels maintains that the economic situation
is “in the last instance the determining factor of history,” is
“finally decisive.” This is far from being as satisfactory as Engels
found it, since it is so clearly an attempt to have it both ways.
The problem remains. If man is really master of his destiny,
that can only be through the use he makes of his mind. But if
mind is only superstructure, it is itself determined by the pro-
ductive forces of the substructure, the operation of which is de-
termined by the dialectic. If there is really interaction between
them, then the whole thesis falls to the ground since we cannot
now be dealing with a purely economic factor but with one
which has been in part determined by non-economic factors, and
it cannot, accordingly, be said that the economic factor must
always be decisive. Marx, in fact, was wedded to two ideas, to
the idea that productive forces develop automatically, and to
the idea that in some way man’s mind develops them. It may
therefore be thought that obscurity is advantageous to poly-
gamists even of the intellectual variety, and that if Marx had
really attempted to work out the connection between mind and
material forces, he would have had to abandon his theory.

Historical Materialism
Historical materialism is the application of the principles of
 THE STATE AS CLASS 203

dialectical materialism to the development of society. Before out-

lining it, it is as well to deal with an immediate difficulty. The
name, though Marx used it, does not convey accurately what is
meant. It is, in fact, an economic interpretation of history,
according to which all the mass phenomena of history are deter-
mined by economic conditions. This view has no necessary con-
nection with materialism, with which Buckle’s belief that climate
is decisive in the history of man or Freud’s conviction that sex
is the determining factor, are as compatible as Marx’s contention
that economic causes are fundamental.
The theory begins with the “simple truth, which is the clue
to the meaning of history, that man must eat to live.’”’ His very
survival depends upon the success with which he can produce
what he wants from Nature. Production is therefore the most
important of all human activities. Men in association produce
more than men in isolation, and Society is thus the result of an
attempt to secure the necessities of life. But Society has never
accomplished that to the satisfaction of all its members, and has,
in consequence, always been subject to internal stresses and
strains. Hence man, not realising that unsatisfied needs are
merely the result of defective modes of production, has always
imagined another world in which those needs will be met, and
religion, which is no more than the shadow cast by a defective
economic system—‘‘the sob of the oppressed creature, the heart
of a heartless world, the spirit of conditions utterly unspiritual”’
—and which wall pass away with the defects that have produced
it, has been widespread. It is “the opium of the people,” not in
the sense that it is a drug administered to the exploited by the
exploiters, but that in a society where no one’s needs are fully
met religion is the resort of all.
Man’s attempts in recorded history to secure life’s necessities
can be grouped into four main stages. There is th abaaitive
communist or “Asiatic,” in which the forms of production are
slight and communally owned. There are the ancient, the
feudal, the capitalist, in all of which the 7 ols
= pl i | thus_perpetuating
ten$ion and conflict. In all stages of human life the forms or
conditions of production determine the structure of society. Thus
“the hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-
mill society with the industrial capitalist.” The structure of
society will in its turn breed attitudes, actions, and civilisations.
204 POLITICAL THOUGHT

Therefore “all the social, political and intellectual relations, all

religious and legal systems, all the theoretical outlooks which
emerge in the course of history, are derived from the material
conditions of life.”
We must, thensadistinguishehstueenthenioundalionsaache !
substructure—the productive forces—and the superstructure—
ff
religion, morals, sontce As Marx writes in The Pages
‘Upon the several forms of property, upon the social conditions
of existence, a whole superstructure is reared of various and
peculiarly shaped feelings, illusions, habits of thought and con-
ceptions of life. The whole class produces and shapes these out
of its material foundation and out of the corresponding social
conditions.” This is not to say that men, consciously or uncon-
sciously, act only from economic motives. It is only to say that
while other motives exist they are always subordinate to the
economic factor and in the long run ineffective. Nor is it to de-
clare that religions, metaphysics, schools of art, ethical ideas,
literary tastes, and productions are either reducible to economic
motives or of no importance. It is only to uncover the economic
conditions which shape them and to which they owe their rise
and fall. Generalising and popularising, it may be said that the
Theory of Historical Materialism holds that our daily work
forms our minds, that it is our position within the productive
forces which determines our point of view and the particular
sides of things that we see.
The forms of production which underlie society, the theory
further maintains, change according to necessities inherent in
them so as to produce their successors merely by their own work-
ing. The system, for instance, characterised by the “hand-mill”
creates an economic and social situation in which the adoption of
the mechanical method of milling becomes a practical necessity.
The “steam-mill” in turn creates new social functions, new
groups, new outlooks, which in time outgrow their own frame.
The factories which are necessary to solve the economic prob-
lems of the 18th century create the conditions of r9th-century
problems. These self-developing forms of production are, as it
were, the propeller which accounts first for economic and then
for social change, a propeller which requires no external impetus.
It follows, then, that until the stage of perfect production is
reached, all societies will be transitory. It follows, too, that each
stage is a step nearer perfection. Every society, Marx says, is con-
 TCH BS "ACT E cA0S* ©L.AiS'S 206

fronted with problems which it must face and solve—or collapse.

But the possibility of collapse is never considered, though no
great knowledge of history is needed to convince one that civi-
lisations can and do collapse. Indeed, in his Critique of Political
Economy Marx even says: “Mankind always takes up only such
problems as it can solve.” In the most literal sense of the word,
Marxism can certainly claim to be progressive. Each stage, how-
ever bad it may seem, is a necessary stage on the way to the
classless society. Marx said of Feudalism: “It is the bad side
which calls into being the movement which makes history, in
that it brings the struggle to a head. If, at the time of the
supremacy of feudalism, the economists in their enthusiasm for
knightly virtues for the beautiful harmony between rights and
duties, for the patriarchal life of the towns, for the flourishing
home industries in the country, for the development of industry
organised in corporations, companies and guilds, in a word, for
everything which forms the finer side of feudalism, had set
themselves the problem of eliminating everything which could
throw a shadow on the picture—serfdom, privileges, anarchy—
where would it all have ended? They would have destroyed
every element which called forth strife, they would have nipped
in the bud the development of the middle class. They would
have set themselves the absurd problem of blotting out eral
No stage will end until it has become a fetter on, rather than
a spur to, the forces of production. Men cannot therefore short-
circuit history and “overleap the natural phases of evolution.”
Finally, the productive forces inherent in any society develop
completely before a change takes place, and the change itself
will be sudden as when water turns into steam. In that sudden
revolutionary change the entire structure of society will be
eventually transformed, until the new society in its turn is over-
thrown and remoulded.
Marxism, then, is an optimistic doctrine of inevitable progress
and of the ultimate triumph of man. ‘“‘Man has only to know
himself, to measure all conditions of life against himself, to
judge them by his own character, to organise the world accord-
ing to the demands of his own nature in a truly human way,
and he will have solved all the riddles of our age,” is Engel’s
roud claim. But so far man has appeared in Marx’s picture
only as a Chinese painter of the old school would present him—
as a small, insignificant figure sitting at the foot of a rock or of
206 POLITICAL THOUGHT
a tree, dwarfed by the immensity of nature around him. The
underlying forces of production, of which he and his skill are
admittedly a part, are the explanation of the major historical
transitions. Has he no more important role in the historical pro-
cess of which he is part?
He has, for men are the agents through which the organisa-
tion of the world is adjusted to the changing needs of the powers
of production. In maintaining that, Marx is not thinking of men
as individuals. The great importance he attaches to production
leads naturally to his view that man as an individual has little
significance. Production is a collective act, and it is the collective,
therefore, not the individual that is the unit for Marx. In all
social structures until the classless society has been reached the
collective is the social class which, if conditions of life deter-
mine people’s thinking and behaviour, must be composed of
those whose conditions of life are similar.
As soon as mankind emerges from the primitive communist
state, it is seen that at every stage of society a particular class
gets control and exploits the rest. That it does so is no matter
of chance, but is the result of the inexorable law of history. The
class whic i j i
ominate the rest. When, for instance, the most important factor
‘in the forces of production is agricultural, land-owners will be

which ts ca
» then, ate tate, repression its char-
acteristic. As Marx expressed it in Das Capital: “After every
revolution marking a progressive phase in the class struggle, the
purely repressive character of the State power stands out in
bolder relief.” As the conditions of production change, the ex-
isting State ceases to meet the requirements of the new exploit-
ing class. The feudal state, based on status, is not an effective
instrument for capitalists, and is therefore replaced by the capi-
talist state based on contract. The collapse of the old order and
the arrival of the new State, with its moral and political beliefs
and its property relations suitable to the interests of the new
dominant class, is inevitable, but it will not happen automatic-
ally at the very moment when economic conditions justify it.
What will happen automatically is that a revolutionary situation
 THE STATE AS CLASS 207

will be produced, and within that revolutionary situation the

struggle between the new challenging and the old challenged
class will take place. The history of society is the history of class
war. }neniScanpiolass.WatWas.di0L.ab course new. St. Simon
and Guizot had both made use of it. What is, however, original
in Marx is the union of this idea yt Heed s dialectic. The rise
aid domination of each class, Marx teaches, 1s as necessary as
are the various phenomena of history hich: in Hegel’s view,
were needed by the Spirit on its way to its goal. Applying the
dialectic, it follows that each dominant class necessarily develops
its opposite, and from the clash between the two, baron and
serf, freeman and slave, burgess and journeyman, oppressor and
oppressed, the new ruling class emerges. This class war at last
reaches its simplest phase when the capitalist is face to face with
the proletariat. Capitalism, theathesisacalls-inta-beinguitonanti
thesis, organised labou a |
esis O e classless societ -history

yllic state will, SiGe eee be preceded by a transitional

period known as Socialism, iin which the San of ip pro-
etariat will gradually socialise natural resources and stamp out —
the last remnants of capitalism. In this period goods will still be
distributed, not according to need but according to work per-
formed. The dictatorship of the proletariat will be as much re
pressive as was the dictatorship of all preceding dominant classes.
The State continues to be the repressive organ of . class con-
trolling the means of production, but instead crea ofTor
theaapine
eT |
oppre majority et oppress theust grou
of former exploiters. The workers’ State will thus be far more
democratic than the bourgeois parliamentary | democracies. They,
indeed, were a sham and a contradiction in terms, since de-
mocracy cannot exist in any society which is divided, as it is
under capitalism, into two irreconcilably aor eens groups.
Marx must appear as a very unconvincing champion of de-
mocracy. He was a great autocrat, convinced of the infallibility
of his views. He could never have said as did Cromwell: “I
beseech ye in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that ye be
mistaken.” Belief in infallibility is not the hall-mark of the
democrat, nor is the view, so typical of him, that only the col-
lective mattered, not the individual who could never have rights
against it. But since he believed that revolutions were possible
208 POUMET NGA D TMH O UscaErT
only in the fullness of time when the proletariat would be both
the great majority and capable of taking over what was best in
capitalist, bourgeois, parliamentary democracy, he took for
granted that, as Engels said, democracy would be “the specific
form of the dictatorship of the proletariat.”
Under the loving care of the dictatorship of the proletariat,
Socialism will blossom into Communism. But of that Marx
tells us little, regarding it as “Utopian” to speculate on the
new society that was the goal of man’s desiring. Two things,
however, we can say of this golden age. Society will be organised
then and goods distributed on the principle “from each accord-
ing to his ability, to each according to his need.” And of course 4
there will no longer be a State. That instrument of clas |
oppression will have come to the end of its long march through
history, for there will be no more classes.
It is much to be regretted that Marx and Engels are so vague
and even confused in what they say of the State “withering |
away.” The highly interesting doctrine of the “withering away”
of the State is elaborated by Engels from Marx’s tentative expres-
sions. In 1874 Engels declared that the State, “‘as a result of the
social revolution of the future, would vanish,” because all public
functions would simply be changed from political into adminis-
trative ones. What this is supposed to imply is far from clear.
In 1877 he writes that by converting the means of production
into State property the proletariat would abolish the State as
State. This same seizure of the means of production would “at
once be its last independent act as a State.” This, if no less great
a tax on our credulity, is at least more definite, as it tells us
when to expect the State to wither away. In 1882 Engels adds
that when the State seizes the means of production there will
take place “the leap of humanity out of the realm of necessity
into the realm of freedom.” The prospect becomes still more
appealing, and the date remains no less definite. But two years
later there is an unfortunate retreat. The whole machinery of
the State, Engels says, will be relegated to the museum of an-
tiquities, along with the bronze axe and the spinning wheel.
This relegation, however, will no longer take place when the
means of production have been nationalised, but evidently at a
much later time. In 1891 he speaks of the victorious proletariat
“paring down the worst aspects of the State, until a new genera-
tion grown up in the new, free social conditions, is capable of
 THE STATE AS CLASS 209

putting aside the whole paraphernalia of State.” This is in his

preface to the new edition of Marx’s Civil War in France, in
which Marx wrote that the working-class “will have to go
through long struggles, a whole series of historical processes
which will completely transform men and circumstances alike.”
Engels, it is obvious, has transposed this idea which Marx in-
tended to apply to the period before the revolution to the post-
revolutionary era. “In Marx,” said Lenin, “you will find no
trace of Utopianism in the sense of inventing the ‘new’ society
and constructing it out of fancies.” In general this is true, but it
can hardly be doubted that the idea of the State withering away
belongs to the realm of fantasy and is as Utopian as anything
that Marx condemned in others.
“What I did that was new,” Marx claimed, “was to prove (1)
that the existence of classes is only bound up with the particular,
historic phases in the development of production; (2) that the
class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the prole-
tariat; (3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transi-
tion to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.”
Here, then, is Marx’s theory of Historical Materialism, not a
sovereign formula to be mechanically applied, but a working
hypothesis, a method of investigation which will help us to
understand the pattern of the past and to predict the path of
the future. In Das Capital he shows how he intended it to be
applied, and in Das Capital also he supported it with an economic
analysis of capitalist exploitation of Surplus Value.

His Economic Analysis

Marx’s famous theory of Surplus Value is an extension of
Ricardo’s theory according to which the value of every com-
modity is proportional to the quantity of labour contained in it,
provided this labour is in accordance with the existing standard
of efficiency of production. Labour power equals the brain,
muscle, and nerve of the labourer. Being itself a commodity, it
must command a price proportional to the number of labour
hours that entered into its production. This will be the number
of labour hours required to house and feed the labourer and to
bring up his family. This is the value of his services, for which
he receives corresponding wages. But labour is unique among
commodities because in being used up it creates more value
The employer therefore, once he has acquired the labourer’s
210 POLITICAYT THOUGHT

stock of potential services, can make him work more hours than
would be required to produce that stock. The value thus created
over and above what the labourer is paid for, Marx calls Surplus
Value, and he regards it as the source of all profit.
If his theory of Surplus Value is an attempt to explain prices
it soon runs into difficulties. For if, as Marx says, Surplus Value
is produced by the consumption of labour power, an industry in
which capital is invested in labour would be more profitable than
one in which capital is invested in machinery—which is absurd.
In Volume III of Das Capital, Marx tries to deal with this
difficulty. Competition between capitalists for more profitable
investments, he says, tends to equalise returns on invested capi-
tal. There is, as a matter of fact, no justification for the assump-
tion that there is a uniform rate of profit in a capitalist economy
at any given period, but even if there was, Marx is now ex-
plaining price as equalling the cost of production plus the aver-
age return on all the capital invested. This is clearly not the same
as his first definition of price, according to which the price of a
commodity is determined by the labour power put into it.
But perhaps it is fairer to Marx, who intensely disliked
economics and whose chapters devoted to economic theory are
the dullest in Das Capital, to regard his theory of Surplus Value
not so much as a theory of price but rather as a theory of the
Just Price. For all his apparent concentration on what is, it is
in what ought to be that his main interest lies. In spite of the
failure of his involved attempts to explain away the inherent
absurdities of the notion of Surplus Value, he can still make
use of that idea to show that the initiative, skill, intelligence of
the workers bring them no reward since they are turned solely
to the advantage of the capitalist who portrays them as his own
enterprise, foresight, providence, and organising ability. He can
still use the theory of Surplus Value to show that a competitive
system in which labour power is regarded as a commodity is
self-destructive, and that, as Engels wrote, the only salvation
is Socialism, “which will emancipate human labour-power from
its position as a commodity.” As a theory of price, the theory of
Surplus Value is rubbish; as an appeal that it is degrading to
treat labour as a commodity, it is powerful. “It is impossible,”
as Max Beer said, “‘to set aside the view that Marx’s theory
of value has rather the significance of a political and social
slogan than of an economic truth.” We can agree with him
 DHE SHIGA TLE A'S CLASS 211

that “unique as an investigator of the laws of the proletarian

movement, eminent and even a great pioneer as a sociologist,
Marx is, in respect of economic theory, predominantly an
agitator.”
Marx’s theory of Surplus Value is merely the introduction to
something that interested him far more, an examination not of
capitalism as it is but of capitalism as it was becoming. Using
nature in the Aristotelian sense of what a thing will become
when fully developed, we may say that it is with the nature of
capitalism that Marx is primarily dealing, and that his main
concern is to show that its nature is self-destruction. Capitalism,
according to him, is doubly doomed—doomed by the general
law of capital accumulation and centralisation which begins to
operate automatically as soon as capitalists appropriate Surplus
Value; doomed also by its own internal contradictions. According
to the law of capitalist accumulation there occurs “‘the concen-
tration of already formed capitals, the destruction of their indi-
vidual independence, the expropriation of capitalist by capitalist,
the transformation of many small capitals into a few large ones.”
This accumulation of capital is unavoidable, not because the
capitalist ‘“‘shares with the miser the passion for wealth as
wealth,” but because, “‘what in the miser is a mere idiosyncrasy
is, in the capitalist, the effect of the social mechanism of which
he is but one of the wheels.” ““To accumulate,” Marx says, “‘is
to conquer the world of social wealth, to increase the mass of
human beings exploited by him, and thus to extend both the
direct and the indirect sway of the capitalist.” To fail to accu-
mulate is itself to be thrust into the ranks of the exploited
masses. Competition, the growth of credit, the development of
a joint-stock system, technical improvements involving high ini-
tial capital cost, all speed up the accumulation and the cen-
tralisation of capital. But “poverty grows as the accumulation of
capital grows.” For technical improvement lessens the immediate
demand for labour, creates a pool of unemployed which keeps
down wages, and the lot of the workers becomes harder and
harder to bear until “‘they have nothing to lose but their chains.”
Moreover, the development of capitalism simplifies the class
struggle, since it leaves only two classes, the property owners
and the wage-earners, embattled against each other. Thus by
increasing the poverty of the great majority and by simplifying
the class struggle, the law of capitalist accumulation leads capi-
212 POLITICAL, TOW Grey

talism to the final and inevitable clash with the proletariat that
can have no other ending than the triumph of the oppressed.
As though to make assurance doubly sure, Marx demonstrates
that capitalism must destroy itself by its own internal contra-
dictions. It is too wasteful of men. Under the pressure of compe-
tition it becomes ‘a squanderer not only of flesh and blood, but
also of nerve and brain.” This waste must eventually cause a
breakdown of the mechanism of capitalism, which cannot work
without men. Of even greater importance, it creates abundance
and fails to cope with it. Capitalism can never resolve the funda-
mental contradiction that competition both makes inevitable the
greatest increase in the production of goods and by rationalisa-
tion of production methods and consequent lowering of wages
reduces the market for these goods, thus destroying the possi-
bility of existence for the over-developed enterprises it has itself
called into being. It completely fails to deal with the crises
it thus itself brings on. ““And how does the bourgeoisie get over
these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass
of productive forces, on the other by the conquest of new mar-
kets and by a more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That
is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more de-
structive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises
are prevented.’ Crises become bigger and bigger until they
endanger the whole community. Then, when it is demonstrated
beyond all doubt that capitalism cannot provide security “for its
slaves even within the confines of their slavish existence,” the
day of reckoning is at hand. The ringing tones of the Hebrew
prophet announce it: “Along with the constantly diminishing
number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolise
all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass
of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but
with this, too, grows the revolt of the working-class, a class in-
creasing in numbers and disciplined, united, organised by the
very mechanism of the process of Capitalist production itself.
The monopoly of Capitalism becomes a fetter on the mode of
production which has sprung up and flourished along with it
and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and
socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become
incompatible with their capitalist husk. This bursts asunder.
The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropria-
ters are expropriated.”
 EPPEDS TATE “A'S! “CiLJAS'S 213

Marx’s economic analysis has thus achieved its purpose, which

is to afford scientific proof of Historical Materialism and to
make good the claim of the Communist Manifesto: ‘The theo-
retical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on
ideas or principles that have been invented or discovered by
this or that would-be universal reformer. They merely express,
in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class
struggle, from an historical movement going on under our very
eyes.”’ Sustained by the triple assurance of Dialectical Material-
ism, of Historical Materialism and of an economic analysis of
the nature of capitalism, the Marxist can march confidently on,
firm in the faith that the trampling of proletarian feet is already
echoing across the promised land.

An Appraisal of Marxism
Through years of bitter poverty, Marx applied himself to the
task of constructing scientific socialism, and the magnitude of
his achievement cannot be denied by even his most unsympa-
thetic critic. He uncovered vital truths, and he foresaw important
developments that were hidden from his contemporaries. He
realised, as they did not, what was the relationship between the
trade-cycle and over-production and unemployment. He saw
that machine industry would grow too big to be confined within
national frontiers. He knew that the volume of trade is no true
test of national well-being. He was aware of the evil results that
can follow from making men mere minders of machines, and he
was right in believing that, by way of compensation, concen-
trating people in large factories or mines would produce in them
a strong psychological feeling of unity. He saw that indus-
trialisation must necessarily involve great changes in social re-
lationships. In showing that economic factors had been over-
looked by historians, he opened up new possibilities in historical
writing. It can certainly be agreed that his idea of the inter-
dependence of political and legal institutions with the prevailing
economic system is one of the most fruitful of rgth-century
conceptions. Perhaps it can even be admitted that because of this
he was the most important social philosopher of the whole 19th
century. There has been no more powerful attack on compla-
cency and squalor than his, and when we read, for instance, in
Townsend: “It seems to be a law of nature that the poor
should be to a certain degree improvident that there may be
Pets)
214 POLE TUCA Ly tH OUGHT

always some to fulfil the most servile, the most sordid, and the
most ignoble offices in the community. The stock of human
happiness is thereby much increased, whilst the more delicate
are not only relieved from drudgery, but are left at liberty with-
out interruption to pursue those callings which are suited to
their various dispositions,” perhaps we can add, and none more
necessary.
There is thus much that is true and worth-while in Marx, but
much also that must be criticised. There is the unresolved
dilemma in his conception of materialism. It can be agreed that
his is no crude fatalistic materialism. But there is no denying
the fact that the idea of economic forces operating independently
of man’s will is of the essence of his teaching. Where he deals
with the forces of production, or the stages of history or of social
consciousness, the language he uses is the language of deter-
minism. Where he deals with men or particular events, he
speaks of deliberate intent and conscious direction. He has it
both ways, surreptitiously as it were, though he will not allow
us to have it both ways more openly by claiming that both
material and non-material factors are of the utmost importance
in man’s development. His curious evasion of the possibility of
failure that lead Engels to the absurd contention that if Napo-
leon had never lived someone else would have appeared to do
his work for him is an illustration of the strength of determinism
in his teaching. It is no accident that he excludes the element of
chance, ten no very wide knowledge of history is needed to
convince most of us of the truth of Voltaire’s remark: “The
older one becomes, the more clearly one sees that King Hazard
fashions three-fourths of the events in this miserable world.”
Interesting as Marx’s theory of classes is, examination even of
Western civilisation will not support the view that economic
position always determines social eminence. It is, indeed, fre-
quently the very reverse, and in few countries is business achieve-
ment even today the only or the best avenue to social distinction.
Marx, too, is wrong in his static conception of classes. Classes
are not fixed and rigidly maintained blocks. There is constant
movement from class to class, so much so that perhaps the
most salient features of social classes is the incessant rise and
fall of individual families from one to another. No doubt this
fact is truer of some countries than others, so that Sorel could
write: “The English are distinguished by an extraordinary lack
 THE STATE AS CLASS 215

of understanding of the class war.” But it is certainly not true

only of Great Britain.
Marx believed that he had “‘scientifically proved” that the de-
velopment of capitalism would leave facing each other in irrecon-
cilable opposition two and only two classes. That has not been
so. He did not allow for the emergence of a new class of man-
agers and skilled technical advisers. As he could only judge by
past experience, he is not to be greatly blamed for this. But he
claimed to be able to foretell the future of capitalism and it
seems evident that he has failed to do so. The forecasts based
on his economic analysis of Surplus Value have similarly proved
wide of the mark. He declared that working men must become
ever poorer until the day of final reckoning. But real wages to-
day are higher than they were a century ago, not lower as they
should now be according to Marx. He said that capital would
be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. The development of
trusts seems to confirm this, but only superficially. Small busi-
nesses persist because new enterprises are constantly arising and
because there is a point at which the disadvantages of size out-
weigh the advantages of centralisation. In fact, the ownership
of capital is being more evenly spread throughout the com-
munity than at any previous period. Marx did not foresee the
possibilities of the Trade Union Movement and of the Social
Service State. Engels lived long enough to have some inkling of
the future. “The British working-class,” he wrote in disgust,
“is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, and it seems
that this most bourgeois of all nations wants to bring matters to
such a pass as to have a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois
proletariat side a side with the bourgeoisie.” To be mistaken
seems to be the fate of economists, of whom the New Yorker
once said: “These fellows have the whole thing down to an in-
exact science.” But Marx’s mistakes here are important. He was
convinced that the classless society was coming because he be-
lieved that the next phase of history would witness the revolu-
tionary clash of two completely opposed classes. As these have
not emerged, the classless society would still appear to be shim-
mering dejectedly on far-away horizons.
Nor should Marx’s serious historical faults be overlooked.
There is no justification for his division of history into four
main periods. The dialectic seems to demand it, and therefore
it is arbitrarily done, centuries difficult to fit into the division
216 POLITICAL THOUGHT
being conveniently forgotten in the process. Marx cannot be
blamed for not knowing what has only been learned since his
death—that modern anthropology would not substantiate his
description of primitive communism. But there is no excuse for
his view of the ancient world. The great achievements of the age
of the Antonines were well known when he was writing. It was
nonsense to say of such an age that Christianity was the expres-
sion of the frustrated hopes of the downtrodden proletariat. It
was even greater nonsense to speak of a movement from the low
level of such an age to a higher “feudal” level—merely to suit
the requirements of an imaginary dialectic. A philosophy of his-
tory which is based on the experience of a hundred years and
neglects the teaching of the previous thousand would not, Acton
warns us, be very satisfactory. We may apply his remark to
Marx, adding the reflection that Marx has never asked himself
why the development of capitalism should have occurred only in
Western Europe. If only material factors shape history, this de-
velopment of capitalism should be true of all civilisations all over
the world. That it is not true of other civilisations should teach
us that important as are the material factors that Marx stressed,
other factors influencing man’s development are to be neglected
only at our peril.
Marx was wrong in ignoring the psychological aspects of poli-
tics. Though his is an explanation of the State in terms of force,
nowhere does he give us any adequate treatment of the problem
of power. Nowhere in his work is there the realisation that men
desire power for the satisfaction of their pride and self-respect
and that for some men power must be regarded as an end in itself.
One must go further and say that nowhere does he show any real
appreciation of the defects in human nature. His most readable
pages are those in which he allows a deep compassion and a
righteous wrath to call forth the rolling thunder of the prophet.
Yet he hardly seems aware of man’s selfishness in any immediate
sense. Lenin once said: “The great socialists, in foreseeing the
arrival of the classless society, presupposed a person not like the
present man in the street.” That naive admission that human
nature is ignored by Marx is perhaps the most convincing proof
that great man as he was he yet knew not all things.
Yet it cannot be denied that the true and the false together
in him constitute one of the most tremendously compelling
forces that modern history has seen. Sometimes in alliance with,
 THE STATE AS CLASS 217

sometimes in opposition to, that other great force of the 19th

century, Nationalism, it has girdled the earth. For the power of
his message, for the inspiration of his teaching, and for his effect
upon future developments, Marx can be sure of his place in any
collection of the world’s great masters of political thought.

VLADIMIR LENIN, 1870-1924

His Task
It is not uncommon in the history of faiths to find that com-
mentaries on the original doctrine soon make their appearance,
and commentaries on the commentaries, until in course of
time fundamental parts of the faith are altered almost beyond
recognition. This has been true of Marxism, much of the inner
meaning of which has been radically changed by one of its most
fanatical, dogmatic, and apparently orthodox disciples who hap-
pened to be also one of the greatest political geniuses of modern
history. Yet Lenin was not a great theorist. The real Marxian
scholar among Russian revolutionaries was Plekhanov. Never-
theless, Lenin’s writings are formidably numerous, for he
assumed the task, as Stalin tells us in his Foundations of
Leninism, of bringing Marx up to date, of restating the faith
and rescuing the true revolutionary Marxism which had been
buried by the opportunists and revisionists of the Second Inter-
national, and of adapting Marxism to Russia. In accomplishing
it, Lenin set the feet of Marxists upon that Stalinist road which
the great majority of those who have not been liquidated seem
to have been content to tread hitherto.
Marx had taught that the development of capitalism and its
concentration in the hands of the few would leave two classes
embattled against each other—the possessors of capital and the
proletariat. Intermediate classes would be pressed down into the
proletariat, and the class struggle would grow ever more in-
tense. His prophecies, as Bernstein in the 1880’s had no difficulty
in showing, had proved singularly inept. The lower middle
classes had not been crushed out of existence: they had grown
stronger. The class struggle had not become more pronounced :
it had become so much less obvious that in 1914 socialist parties
all over Europe saw their interests no longer in the advocacy of
class war but in the active support of national war. Where
prophecies were so clearly wrong, it might reasonably be ex-
pected that the analysis which gave rise to them would come
218 POLITICAL THOUGHT

to be seen as mistaken. Lenin therefore hastened to the defence

of Marxism, bringing it up to date in the latest stage of capitalism,
and, by making use of hisTheory of Imperialism, explaining
away developments which were the very reverse of those which
Marx had foreseen.

His Theory of Imperialism

In his Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin
maintained that the lower middle classes and the skilled work-
men of advanced industriai countries were saved from the in-
creasing misery which Marx had foretold for them, and there-
fore forbore to prosecute the class war with vigour, only be-
cause of the colonial territories which their countries dominated.
Their relationship to colonial peoples was the relationship be-
tween capitalists and proletariat. They, who in the absence of
empire would have been the proletariat, were now the capital-
ists, and the genuine proletariat, sunk ever deeper in their
misery and degradation, were the wretched, exploited inhabitants
of colonial lands. This stage of Imperialism, Lenin asserted, was
in no sense a contradiction of Marx’s teaching but a fulfilment
of it, even though Marx himself had not sufficiently foreseen it.
As capitalism develops, Lenin says, units of industrial produc-
tion grow bigger and combine in trusts and cartels to produce
monopoly capitalism. The same process takes place in the finan-
cial world. Banks combine and become masters of capital that
the industrialists use so that monopoly capitalism is also finance
capitalism. Monopoly-finance capitalism is aggressively expan-
sionist. Its characteristic export is capital, and its consequences
are threefold. It results in the exploitation of colonial peoples,
whom it subjects to the capitalist law of increasing misery and
whose liberty it destroys. It produces war between the nations,
since it substitutes international competition for competition
inside the nation, and in the clash of combines and Powers seek-
ing markets and territory war becomes inevitable. And ultim-
ately it brings about the end of capitalism and the emergence
of the new order, since with the arming and military training
of the workers wars which begin as national wars will end as class
wars. Marx therefore, says Lenin, was not wrong. He had
merely paid insufficient attention to one stage, and that the
penultimate stage, of his own argument. That argument, how-
ever, was essentially correct, and the faithful could believe that
 THE STATE AS CLASS 219

all would come about as he had foretold.

Lenin’s Theory of Imperialism was a neat answer to criti-
cisms made against Marx, but it was fundamentally dishonest
in a way that Marx himself had indeed specifically condemned.
Marx said on one occasion: “It is a distorting speculation to
declare a later historical development to have been the cause of
a precedent event or development.” The consequences of a pro-
cess cannot precede the process itself. Yet this is exactly what
Lenin makes them do. When discussing economic institutions,
he had to choose a late opening date for the period of imperial-
ism. He could not put the dominance of industrial combinations
earlier than the first decade of the 2oth century. But when dis-
cussing the political consequences of industrial and financial
trustification, he had to choose an early opening date for the
period of imperialism which was in its heyday far earlier than
the first decade of the 20th century. The partitioning of the
New World, for instance, was complete much before the end
of the 19th century. The results, in fact, seem to be there long
before the cause—an anomaly confirmed by contemplation of
Great Britain which had the largest empire in the world and
which was never dominated by finance capitalism as Lenin de-
fines it. Lenin was aware of the awkwardness of making the
political consequences of an economic process precede the pro-
cess itself, and he sought to relieve embarrassment as card-
sharpers have frequently done—by shuffling the cards. He used
an early or a late date as the beginning of the period of im-
perialism to suit the changing needs of his argument.
Nor is that the only sleight of hand of which he is guilty. If
the real international is not the Communist but the Capitalist
through the development of international cartels, why should
that not lead—as Kautsky believed that it might—to an inter-
national sharing of markets, to an internationalisation of poli-
tical institutions which would reflect the economic international-
isation of interlocking combines, as an alternative to war?
Lenin, of course, will have none of this. He charges Kautsky
with not seeing that the partitioning of world markets is pro-
portionate to power, to the power of sovereign states and of the
economies which arise within them. Here he is smoothly sliding
the ace from his sleeve into his hand. He is smuggling in a poli-
tical factor—the power of sovereign States—which governs eco-
nomic evolution and is not governed by it. In so doing he is
220 POLITICAL. THOUGHT

contradicting his assertion that monopoly capitalism governs the

politics of the imperialist age and is saying that the politics of
the imperialist age govern the development of monopoly capi-
talism. That is both true and non-Marxist. His view is a credit
to his realism, though not to his honesty and least of all to his
Marxism. It is Kautsky the attacked, not Lenin the attacker,
who abides in this exchange by Marxian rules.
There remains a further ambiguity in Lenin’s Theory of Im-
perialism. History has so strikingly refuted it. Lenin argued that
investing capitalists pushed their governments into dangerous
diplomatic adventures and maintained that this was the root
cause of war in the age of imperialism. More frequently the
very opposite has happened. It was, for instance, the govern-
ments of Italy and of Russia who pushed their financiers into
situations which made war against Turkey and Japan extremely
probable. And at the time they did so they were importers of
capital, not exporters as, according to Lenin, expansionist States
should be. Financiers may have pushed Great Britain towards
the Boer War, but other interests, interests of power believed to
be threatened by Kruger’s flirtation with Germany, took her into
that war.
In other ways Lenin’s facts were wrong. He said that the
export of capital did not “develop formidable proportions until
the beginning of the 2oth century,” and that the greater part
of British capital was invested in the British colonies. He was
wrong on both counts. He insisted that there was an inseparable
connection between the export of capital and empire. The
Swiss surpassed all other nations in their holding of foreign
investments per head of the population, yet there is no Swiss
Empire. He held that the possession of empire allowed a labour
aristocracy in the mother countries to enjoy a high standard of
living by exploiting colonial workers. Yet Sweden and Den-
mark, which had no empire, maintained a standard of living
higher than that of France and Belgium, which had. He con-
tended that impoverishment and servitude accompany capital
when it is sent abroad. That of course sometimes happens, but
by no means as a rule. For a long time America, Canada, Aus-
tralia, New Zealand headed the list of capital-importing coun-
tries, and they are not notorious either for poverty or subjection.
Real poverty is to be sought where capital imports are low—
in Haiti, British West Africa, India, China. Indeed, as Pro-
 THE STATE AS CLA‘S'S 221

fessor Staley has conclusively shown, the correlation between

the movement of capital and poverty seems to be the direct
opposite of what Lenin declared it to be. His Theory of Im-
perialism, in fact, in so far as it is a defence of Marxism, is
both dishonest and untrue; in so far as it is true it is not a
defence but an effective renunciation of the teachings of the
master.

His Restatement of Dialectical Materialism and of Revolutionary

Marxism
It was his task, Lenin tells us in State and Revolution, “to re-
suscitate the real teachings of Marx.” He sought to do this in two
ways, firstly by reaffirming the fundamental faiths of dialectical
materialism which he believed were being undermined by the
contemporary attempts, as for instance in Studies in the Philo-
sophy of Marxism, to restate them in terms of the new physics,
and secondly by insisting that progress towards Socialism could
only be revolutionary, not evolutionary as Bernstein and the
revisionists maintained.
In Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Lenin examines at
length the nature of materialism and the dialectic, and con-
siders the relationship between Marxism and science. It is the
measure of his stature as a Marxist theorist that far from con-
taining any significant contribution to Marxism, it is in fact a
dreadfully dull, repetitive, dogmatic, and superficial survey,
chiefly of note for its crude notion of materialism, hardly dif-
ferent from the materialism of Feuerbach which Marx attacked.
There is nothing here of Marx’s subtle view, admittedly never
clearly worked out, that after all the human spirit will be able
to master its animal nature, that each of the higher departments
of the superstructure, such as law and philosophy, will seek to
evolve a professional group which shall be at least partly inde-
pendent of class bias and whose work stands in the most in-
direct and obscure of relationships to economic forces. There is
only here the strictest letter of economic determinism, accord-
ing to which everything is to be directly explained by existing
economic systems.
In State and Revolution, Lenin deals much more ably with
those who sought to make Marxism evolutionary. The vigour and
speed of State and Revolution is in most significant contrast with
i dreary repetitions of Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.
222 POLITICAL THOUGHT

For action, not theory, was his forte. He was one of the greatest
revolutionary strategists of all time, and nothing is more typical
of him than his unequivocal insistence on the necessity of revo-
lution—and than his violent denunciation, expressed in the
beautiful language that is one of the minor joys of the Com-
munist heaven, of those unblushing, impotent, insincere, dis-
honest, cynical, opportunist, vulgar people who A bee: him.
In later life Marx himself had thought it possible that in the
most advanced and favoured industrial communities, such as
Great Britain and the United States of America, and perhaps
also Holland, socialism might be achieved gradually, without
revolution. Engels, too, in his preface to the new edition of
Marx’s Class Struggles in France—published in 1895—has dis-
covered that street-fighting inevitably involves certain incon-
veniences, and is of the opinion that, after all, the faithful need
not necessarily feel committed to it. It is not, therefore, surpris-
ing if socialists who believed that Marx was wrong about the
lower middle classes being crushed out of existence, and who
thought it certain that many potential sympathisers were being
kept away merely by their fear and dislike of revolutionary violence
which in theory Marxists extolled, wished to revise Marx’s teach-
ings on revolution. They seized on what Marx had said about
the State “withering away,” and held it to justify their conclu-
sion that universal suffrage and increasing partnership in in-
dustry meant that socialism could be attained even without revo-
lution. It was obviously unnecessary to go to the unpleasant
lengths of forcibly abolishing a capitalist state which seemed to
be withering away rather quickly.
Lenin, who held in its extreme form the doctrine that the
whole of history is the result of the collision of opposing forces,
who believed that the very act of collision was both unavoidable
and right, saw in these ideas of Bernstein and the revisionists
an unpardonable sin against the light. He insisted that the
“withering away” referred to the “remains of the proletarian
State system after the socialist revolution.” It could not apply
to the State which exists before that revolution. By very defi-
nition the pre-Socialist State is a “special repressive force”
wielded by the possessing class. It will never of itself “wither
away” and can only be abolished—by revolution.
It is obvious here that in spite a Stalin’s insistence, in his
first lecture on the “Foundations of Leninism” delivered at
 THE STATE AS CLASS 223

Sverdlov University in 1924, that the view is incorrect that

Lenin revived the early revolutionary teaching of Marx as
against his later moderation, Lenin was in fact reverting to an
early, more revolutionary Marx. He points out that in the period
of imperialism the peaceful transitions to socialism which Marx
thought might be possible can no longer be expected, and he
is particularly impressed with the only number of the German-
French year-books which Marx published, in which he advo-
cates “merciless criticism of everything in existence,” above all
“criticism with weapons.” Restatement of materialist philosophy
was for Lenin a work of necessity for which he was not natur-
ally suited; restatement of revolutionary faith was a labour of
love by one than whom none better could be found.

His Adaptation of Marxism to Russia

It was Lenin’s third great task to adapt Marxism to Russia.
As a Russian of the Russians who need yield place to no one
in Russian history in his instinctive understanding of Russian
realities, and as a revolutionary strategist of genius, he realised
that in certain circumstances revolution was possible in Russia.
Those circumstances were Tsarist defeat in war and the exist-
ence to take advantage of it of a resolute, highly disciplined
group of professional revolutionaries, limited in number, wield-
ing ruthless terror, and impervious to the voice of reason or the
dictates of humanity. His interpretation of Marx convinced him
that war was inevitable. His knowledge of Russia convinced
him that Russian defeat was inevitable. Therefore it was for him
to create the party which would carry the revolution through to
its successful conclusion.
But in doing this he had to overcome a difficulty far greater
than that implied by the existence of the Russian secret police—
a difficulty arising from Marx’s own teaching. Russian revolu-
tionaries had accepted Marxism, seeing in it a revolutionary gos-
pel of unsurpassable force that was at the same time a compound
of economic theory, philosophy, and history exactly suited to
their taste. But Marx must have rejected Russian revolutionaries,
since the social and economic structure of Russia failed to fulfil
any one of the conditions which he regarded as essential for the
success, and even for the emergence, of his type of socialism.
True Marxists among Russian revolutionaries, such as Plek-
hanov, knew this and accepted the thesis that serious socialism
224 POLITICAL THOUGHT

can spring only from full-fledged capitalism. Therefore they

could not believe that there might be those short-cuts to revolu-
tion which Lenin’s analysis of the given situation led him to
think possible. For Marx had taught that there could be no such
short-cuts since revolutionary movements must arise spontane-
ously and cannot outrun the underlying industrial and economic
conditions which give rise to them. No society perishes before all
the forces of production which it contains are developed. There-
fore the bourgeois revolution must be completed before the
proletarian revolution could be begun.
It could be argued that this was not very adequate as a —
ing creed, as Gottschalk, Head of the Communist League, had
argued when he demanded of Marx: ‘“‘Why should we, men of
the proletariat, spill our blood for this? Must we really plunge
deliberately into the purgatory of a decrepit capitalist domina-
tion in order to avoid a medieval hell, as you, Mr. Preacher, pro-
claim to us, in order to attain from there the nebulous heaven
of your Communist creed?” But it was difficult to deny that
this was what Marx had taught. At most, Marx had claimed,
his teaching could only “shorten and lessen the birth pangs” of
the new order. It could not help a society to “overleap the
natural phases of evolution.” Consequently force, as Engels de-
voted three chapters of his book Anti-Diihring to showing, can
only supplement a revolutionary situation which cannot exist
until the proletariat are revolutionary and until they are sufh-
ciently developed to establish a er order which would in-
clude everything of permanent value in capitalism.
Nor could genuine Marxists like Plekhanov accept the method
which Lenin’s analysis of the situation led him to think neces-
sary—the creation of the narrow, disciplined, undemocratic
party. They could of course admit the truth of the contention
that unwise publicity today might mean Siberia for revolution-
aries tomorrow. But they were not convinced when Lenin said
to them: “Think it over a little and you will realise that ‘broad
democracy’ in party organisations, amidst the darkness of the
autocracy and the domination of the gendarmes, is nothing more
than a useless and harmful toy.” They feared that this was a
convenient excuse, and they believed that if democracy was de-
nied in the party there could be little hope that the masses
would receive the education in it which they held to be “a
necessary condition of socialism.”
 PHE STATE SAS CL A'S'S 225

Lenin, it is true, was much more interested in making men

carry out his policy than he was in justifying it theoretically.
Yet as a Marxist, and perhaps also as a Russian, he felt the
need of advancing some theoretical justification of it. How was
he to do so?
Marx had been both more verbose and more logical than
most men. But he had not worked out all the problems raised
by his doctrine of the relationships of man to the material world.
He left in happy obscurity the respective roles in revolutionary
policy of the spontaneous action of the masses, which is de-
pendent on the objective material situation, and of the conscious
leadership which is based on an understanding of the technique
of revolution. On the one hand he insists, as Lenin did, on
detailed analyses of particular situations to discover the actual
location of political and economic strengths and strains—as his
own studies of the Paris Commune and those of Engels on the
Peasants’ Revolt make clear. On the other hand he maintains
that revolutions are possible only in the fullness of time, when
material conditions have made the proletariat ready to assume
power. However, beyond the warning that both conscious
leadership and the spontaneous action of the masses are neces-
sary, Marx is silent as to how the balance between the two
should be maintained.

His Idea of the Party

Lenin adapts Marxism to Russia by seizing upon one side of
Marx’s teaching, what he has to say about conscious leadership,
and, in spite of his warning, ignoring the other, his views on
the spontaneous action of the masses. His is almost a classic
case of winning the tug-of-war by letting go of the rope. Even
so, he does not make the best case he could have made. The very
crudeness of the materialism he has advanced in his Materialism
and Empirio-Criticism makes it impossible for him to argue
that his idea of the revolutionary role of the party is a legiti-
mate deduction from Marx’s idea of the superstructure evolving
professional groups not obviously dependent on their classes.
Though even if he had adopted that line of argument, he would
have found it difficult to evade Marx’s insistence that the Com-
munist Party should be the vanguard but never the masters of
the workers. As it is, Lenin produces a new, non-Marxian theory
of the revolutionary function of intellectuals. Emancipation, he
226 POLITICAL THOUGHT
maintains, is to be the work of a band of intellectuals officering
the rabble, not, as Marxist dogma has it, the work of the pro-
letariat itself. The workers, he says, do not spontaneously be-
come socialists, but only trade unionists, and revolutionary
ideology must in consequence be brought to them by middle-
class intellectuals.
Several implications follow from Lenin’s idea of the Party
and from the justification he puts forward for it. The first is
that “ideas” and not the “material conditions of production”’ are
the effective causes of revolution—the very reverse in fact of
Marx’s teaching. The second is that force can be far more
effective than Marx and Engels will allow. The third is that the
revolution will always be violent, whereas for Marx the force
that the revolutionaries will command is likely to be so over-
whelming that the violence will be limited. Yet even now when
it seems so clear that Lenin was adopting an essentially un-
Marxian position, he still tries to reconcile it with orthodox
Marxism. He could not claim to be preparing the party to
bring about the bourgeois revolution, since he was preparing
it in such a way, and justifying it in such a manner, as to make
impossible any but his own version of the socialist revolution.
Yet he opposed Trotsky’s argument that the socialist revolution
could develop at once as the bourgeois revolution. It was in-
spired opportunism, not theoretical conviction, as he admitted,
that made him change his position and carry through the second
revolution in Russia in 1917. Yet his action then was not only
consistent with his own theory, but strictly speaking was the only
action that would have been. So that it can be said that Lenin’s
relegation to “‘the archives of ‘Bolshevik’ pre-revolutionary an-
tiques” of the idea that a time of preparation must elapse be-
tween the bourgeois and the proletarian revolutions is also one
of the implications which follow from his doctrine of the role
and the solidity of the Party even though he himself had not so
understood it.

The Dictatorship of the Proletariat

That doctrine has yet another implication of the greatest im-
portance. It necessitates a new version of Marx’s teaching on the
dictatorship of the proletariat. For Marx the State is an institu-
tion whereby one class oppresses the others. It is in this sense
that, after the revolution which abolishes capitalism, he speaks
 THE STATE AS CLASS 227

of the dictatorship of the proletariat just as before that revolu-

tion he would have spoken of the dictatorship of the middle
classes. Far from implying by it the establishment of a one-party
dictatorship State, Marx never doubts that his dictatorship of
the proletariat will be the most truly democratic State that the
world has seen. He writes in the Communist Manifesto: “The
first step in the revolution by the working class is the raising of
the proletariat to the position of ruling class and to establish
democracy.”” Engels is even more emphatic. He writes in 1891:
“If anything is certain, it is that our party and the working class
can only come to power under the form of the democratic re-
public. This is, indeed, the specific form for the dictatorship of
the proletariat, as has already been shown by the great French
Revolution.”
Engels was referring there to the Paris Commune of 1870.
What he and Marx approved in the Commune was the fact that
it was formed by universal suffrage, that its officials were elective,
responsible, and revocable—characteristics that are those also of
democracy in many capitalist States. But if Lenin was right and
Marx wrong in saying that the workers do not “develop” a
revolutionary consciousness but have to be told, it must follow
that if a revolution comes before they have been adequately in-
structed they will not be able to take control, nor would they
know what to do if they were. Therefore the small body of in-
formed, disciplined revolutionaries must themselves seize power
and hold and use it as their superior knowledge and revolu-
tionary consciousness dictates. The dictatorship of the prole-
tariat must become a dictatorship over the proletariat. Trotsky
was right, though by no means without responsibility for the
very thing he criticises, when he described Lenin’s idea of the
Party as “the replacement of the dictatorship of the proletariat
by a dictatorship over the proletariat, of the political rule of the
class by organisational rule over the class.’” Lenin admitted as
much when, in his commentaries on Marx’s The Civil War in
France, and Critique of the Gotha Programme of 1875, he makes
the dictatorship of the proletariat become the dictatorship of a
one-party State.
Yet he is as reluctant to accept this fully as he was to admit
that the socialist could at once follow the bourgeois revolution.
It is amusing to notice how, the greater and more important his
deviations are from Marx, the more insistently he tries to recon-
228 POLITICAL THOUGHT
cile his position with that of Marx. Trotsky makes no bones
about admitting that a minority cannot come into power demo-
cratically. That is what he meant when he said: ‘The real
kernel of the class revolution has come into irreconcilable
conflict with its democratic shell.” Radek, too, was honest in
saying: “The Soviet Government is no democracy, it is the form
of the government of the workers.” “Democracy,” he added so
that thereshould be no mistaking his meaning, “is the domination
by capital, a side-scene of the domination by capital.” But Lenin
still maintained Marx’s doctrine that the transformation of the
proletariat into the ruling class is equivalent to the establish-
ment of democracy. In State and Revolution he writes: “We
all know that the political form of the ‘state’ at that time [after
the Revolution] is complete democracy.” He was led into the
most violent of mental contortions by his attempt to square the
circle, to make the dictatorship of the proletariat a democracy
since Marx and Engels will have it so. Thus he tells us that the
proletarian State is “the most complete democracy”; that is,
that democracy is possible only within a State. Then he writes
that “full democracy” is possible only when this State has
ceased to exist. Finally he informs us that “‘full democracy” will
be realised only in order to disappear. He says only after the
State has ceased to exist ‘will democracy itself begin to wither
away”; that is, there will be a period when the Communist
society will be no State but will still be a democracy—in spite
of the fact that he has already said that “democracy is also a
State” and that “consequently democracy will also disappear
when the State disappears.” Lenin was adept at hair-splitting and
in sheltering when necessary behind a dense fog of words. But
not even Lenin can cover up the absurdity of these contradic-
tions.
There may, however, be real significance in Lenin’s attempt
to portray the dictatorship of the proletariat as democracy. His
was a complex character, and part of him undoubtedly wanted it
to be so. Two months after the Revolution he could, for instance,
write: “Every rank-and-file worker and peasant who is able to
read and write, who can judge people and has practical ex-
perience, can do organisational work.” And there is no reason
for thinking that he did not believe what he wrote in State
and Revolution, surprising as it is in one who had spent him-
self so much in dealing with problems of organisation and of
 THE STATE AS CLASS 229

power. He wrote: “The exploiters are naturally unable to sup-

press the people without a very complex machine for performing
this task; but the people can suppress the exploiters even with
a very simple ‘machine,’ almost without a machine, without a
special apparatus, by the simple organisation of the armed
workers.” He was, moreover, willing to allow a good deal of
freedom of discussion within the Party. He accepted defeat by
Bukharin and the Left Bolsheviks on the vital issue of Ger-
man peace terms in February 1918. He wrote in his essay on
Religion: “A political party cannot examine its members to see
if there are any contradictions between their philosophy and
the Party programme.” As far as the Party was concerned, he
preserved, too, the human touch that seems so absent in the
present monolithic Russian State—surprisingly enough since the
letter to Gorki in which he wrote: “It would not matter a jot if
three-quarters of the human race perished; the important thing
was that the remaining quarter Denia be Communists,”’ does
not suggest that humanity was one of his most eminent charac-
teristics. Thus he prevented the severe punishment which his
colleagues intended to visit upon the polyandrous Kollontai
when she neglected her revolutionary duties to go off to the
Crimea with a handsome young naval officer, saying merely
that the couple absent without leave should be sentenced to
spend five years together. And he disliked the new Soviet
bureaucracy almost as much as he had disliked the old Tsarist
autocracy. In considerable bitterness he called the Soviet Re-
public ‘a Work-State with bureaucratic excrescences,” and at
the end of 1922 he admitted: ‘We have taken over the old
State apparatus.”
His regrets were doubtless genuine, but the development he
regretted was the logical result of his own deviations from
Marxism. Since power abdicates only under the stress of counter-
power, as he so well knew, it was as vain to expect, as he did,
that the disciplined, undemocratic, minority Party which he had
called into being as the master of the people would blossom
forth into a democratic leadership of the people, as it was to
hope, as again he did, that after a revolution carried through
by such a Party the State would gradually wither away. His
own most significant actions were dictatorial through and
through. His famous revolutionary slogan, “All power to the
Soviets,” for instance, was a denial, not an assertion of demo-
230 POLITVCALSLEBPOUGHS?

cratic stirrings. It meant nothing more than “All power to the

Party through the Soviets.” He always insisted on the “narrow”
as against the “‘open” Party, opposing every scheme which
threatened its monopoly. And in his doctrine of “democratic
centralism”’ he insists on the subordination of lower to higher
party organs, even using this principle at the roth Party Congress
in 1921 to force unanimity on the Party. Trotsky was right when
he said of democratic centralism: “The apparatus of the party
substitutes itself for the party, the Central Committee substitutes
itself for the apparatus, and finally the dictator substitutes himself
for the Central Committee.” The violent denunciations of Lenin’s
The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky remind
one of nothing so much as the preacher’s note: ‘““Argument weak
here. Shout !”” Kautsky asked how the rule could pass from the
“vanguard of the oppressed” to the exploited majority of yester-
day. Lenin had no convincing answer for him, Nor had Stalin.
Marx’s statement that a socialist society can be established only in
a highly civilised and industrialised country remains unrefuted
—in spite of Lenin’s adaptation of Marxism to Russia. Yet, even if
his is a bastard Marxism, no one will minimise the significance of
what he bequeathed to Russia and to the world.

JOSEPH VISSARIONOVITCH (DJUGASHVILI) STALIN,

1879-1953
As Marxist Scholar
Before the rising of the 7th November 1917, which deter-
‘mined the destinies of Russia and involved an abrupt departure
from accepted Marxist thought, Lenin consulted his holy books
much as Cromwell did before taking his fateful decision to
purge the Long Parliament. Lenin’s searching of the Marxist
scriptures to justify an action which he had already determined
to take, and which was in fact contrary to Marx’s own teaching,
is typical of the way in which Communist theory has become the
obedient handmaiden of Communist practice. As Communist
practice, like the practice of most of us, is very largely deter-
mined by day-to-day considerations which frequently change
very rapidly, it follows that Communist theory often ae the
compass with a rapidity that is disconcerting to those who are
not skilled navigators on Communist seas, and that is a sufficient
cause of embarrassment for anyone who wishes to synthesise
and interpret it. If it be any comfort, it can be borne in mind
 THE STATE AS CLASS 231

that the difficulty of keeping step in the quickly revolving dance

is undoubtedly much more embarrassing for Russian writers.
Changes in the Party line are frequently a matter of disconcert-
ing, violent, and even fatal surprise for those who are ill-advised
enough to proclaim today what they would have been punished
for not maintaining yesterday.
Until the late twenties, moreover, when events were arranged
and history rewritten to suit an autocrat’s wishes, Stalin’s repu-
tation as a Marxist scholar was deservedly poor. His essay,
Marxism and the Nationalities, suggested and supervised by
Lenin, certainly increased his prestige in the Party. But the
general view of him still remained that of Ryazanov who inter-
rupted him when he was engaging in a theoretical argument:
“Stop it, Koba. Don’t make a fool of yourself. Everybody knows
that theory is not exactly your field.” With Stalin the worst
elements of Communist theorising are exaggerated—the hair-
splitting, for which Lenin is so largely responsible, goes drearily
on, and massed illogicalities parade up and down, constituting in
their very number the big battalions to whom fearful men give
the crown of victory. The dialectical contradictions which as
thesis and antithesis are supposed to issue in a higher synthesis
become more obviously absolute opposites, which are resolved
only by the outright victory of one of them. Thus Stalin gives
as an example of the dialectic: “Lenin’s attitude towards the
right of nations to self-determination, including separation.”
“Lenin,” he says, “sometimes expressed the principle of national
self-determination in a simple formula: ‘Separation for amal-
gamation.’ Just think—separation for amalgamation. It smacks
even of the paradoxical.’’ Yet when all the verbiage is cleared
away all that he means is that oppressed peoples wanting to
separate from Russia should be ay amalgamated with her
—Georgia and the Ukraine yesterday; Latvia, Lithuania,
Estonia today. Instead of the clash of thesis and antithesis pro-
ducing some new synthesis, all that has happened here is that
the antithesis “amalgamation” has completely swallowed the
thesis “separation.” Thus Stalin informs the 16th Party Con-
gress in June 1930: “We are for the withering away of the State.
And yet we also believe in the proletarian dictatorship which
represents the strongest and mightiest form of state power that
has existed up to now. To keep on developing state power in
order to prepare the conditions for the withering away of state
232 POLITICAL THOUGHT

power—that is the Marxist formula. Is it ‘contradictory’? Yes,

‘contradictory.’ But the contradiction is vital and wholly reflects
the Marxian dialectic. Whoever has not understood this feature
of the contradictions belonging to our transitional time, who-
ever has not understood this dialectic of historical processes, that
person is dead to Marxism.” Yet here again the contradiction is
straightforward and absolute and to call it dialectical and claim
for it a higher logic is to deprive language and thought of its
meaning. In fact, in Stalinist theory it can safely be claimed that
if a conclusion follows logically from its premises, it must be all
right; while if it seems to contradict them, it is dialectical and
so must still be all right. Such mental contortions are of as little
interest as value. Legend has it that Confucius returning from
an interview with Lao-tze, unimpressed by his profound specu-
lations, said of him: “Who shall follow the footprints of the
dragon in the air?” It would indeed be as unprofitable to study
in detail the many convolutions of Stalinist theory—involved,
rapidly changing, disingenuous as it is—as Confucius believed
it would be to follow the flights of Lao-tze.
It is, however, worth while to consider two of the emendations
Stalin made to Lenin’s teaching—his doctrine of Socialism in
One Country and his views on revolution. Both have played an
important part in the development of contemporary Russia.

Socialism in One Country

In his Problems of Leninism, written in the autumn of 1924,
Stalin first concluded that it was possible to establish socialism
in one country even if the world remained capitalist. Russia was
strong enough to pick herself up by her own boot-strings. Her
efforts alone would suffice for the complete organisation of a
socialist economy since a proletarian government, controlling
industry and credit and supported by the great mass of the
people, could develop, as no other government could, her vast
spaces and great potential wealth. This belief in Socialism in
One Country, soon to become the party shibboleth, was none of
Lenin’s teaching. Lenin, and indeed Trotsky, looked upon
Russia as a powerful proletarian fortress which could be made
still stronger by further socialist advance and which could resist
protracted capitalist siege. But Lenin, who thought of socialist
society in essentially international terms, had never declared that
the embattled fortress could stand so indefinite a siege as to
 THE STATE: AS GLASS 233
make possible the full development of socialism within it, while
Trotsky had grimly foretold that, unless helped by international
revolution, socialism even in Russia must fail. Not only was
Stalin’s new doctrine of Socialism in One Country a departure
from Lenin’s thought, but it was a departure not long contem-
plated and hastily made. Early in 1924 Stalin could still write:
“For the final victory of socialism, for the organisation of so-
cialist production, the efforts of one country, particularly of a
peasant country like Russia, are insufficient.” It was a departure
hastily made to serve an immediate purpose, to provide Stalin
with a weapon to be used against Trotsky in the struggle for
power that took place between them after Lenin’s death.
In that struggle Trotsky’s theory of “permanent revolution”
found many adherents. According to that theory, put forward as
early as 1906, the anti-feudal or bourgeois revolution, which could
be expected to break out in Russia, would become almost imme.
diately an anti-capitalist and socialist revolution. Contrary, there-
fore, to accepted Marxist views, backward Russia and not the pro-
gressive Western countries would be the first to march along the
road to socialism. But she could not hope to get very far along
that road unaided. However, her influence and example would be
such that revolution having begun in Russia would spill over
into Europe. In this way the advanced Western countries, having
been helped by Russia, would in their turn help her to achieve
socialism. Therefore not Socialism in One Country but Social-
ism in One World must be the object of all true revolutionaries.
It was to defeat this theory, which had at least the merit of
foretelling the course which events actually took in the two revo-
lutions in Russia in 1917, that Stalin hit upon his doctrine of
Socialism in One Country. And a potent weapon he found it,
for together with his subtle manceuvring and his clear-sighted
appreciation of the realities of power, it gave him victory.
As would be expected of a hasty development decided upon
for an immediate purpose, Stalin’s ideas on Socialism in One
Country were not well thought out. He put forward no serious
answer to the criticisms levelled against it that the peasants
would resist the collectivisation it implied, that if standards of
living remained lower in Russia than in capitalist countries,
islstl must fail even in Russia; that in an economy of
scarcity which an isolated Russian economy in its present back-
ward condition must necessarily be, glaring material inequali-
234 POLILTLCA lL) TALO UG T,

ties between social groups were bound to arise. Nor was his
acceptance of the new doctrine unconditional. He insisted that
the victory of socialism in Russia could never be secure so long
as the surrounding capitalist powers threatened her. And he
continued to parade his belief in the nearness of world revolu-
tion. What he gives with one hand he thus at least partly takes
back with the other. And, perhaps strangest of all, there seems
on the surface little difference between his views and those he
was attacking. In both views there is acceptance of the necessity
of pressing ahead with plans for socialist reconstruction. In both
there is admission that socialism could not be achieved for a
very long time. In both there is agreement that hostile capitalism
might wreck what socialist development has already been ac-
complished. And in both there is the hope that world revolution
might come to the help of hard-pressed Russia. Apparently the
only point in dispute is whether the job which all admit must
be tackled and which all agree will be long, arduous, and danger-
ous, can be completed or not. That such an issue could arouse
much interest, let alone unloose great passions, might seem as
curious as that medieval schoolmen should be concerned with
the absorbing question: “How many angels can dance on the
point of a needle?”
Yet the differences which seem so slight are vital, and in spite
of all its ambiguities the doctrine of Socialism in One Country
is of great pape It was the recognition of the fact that
Russia was a force in her own right, not just a springboard for
world revolution as Trotsky considered her. And the Stalin who
regarded Russia as an end in itself was much more likely to win
her support than the Trotsky who viewed her merely as a means
to an end. To the old Bolshevik who agreed with Trotsky,
Western Europe was the real centre of the world, and Russia
a backward community on the edge of outer darkness which
might, nevertheless, help Europe but which must in its turn
await the saving strength of Europe. To Stalin, Russia was the
centre of the world. It was her destiny to become the centre of
a new civilisation superior to that of capitalist Europe. Isolated
and backward though she was, she nevertheless possessed the
truth that would save not only herself but the whole of
struggling mankind. Socialism in One Country was the 2oth-
century version of Moscow the Third Rome, the dream of r9th-
century Slavophils. It was the marriage of Russian revolution
 THE STATE AS CLASS 235

with Russian history. From that marriage was born the force
which carried Stalin to supreme power. And perhaps the truest
view of the purges that followed upon it is that they were the
terrible revenge taken by Russian history on revolutionaries who
had dared to deny her.

The Totalitarian State

The direct result of the adoption of Stalin’s policy of Socialism
in One Country was the growth in Russia of a totalitarian State
acknowledging not so much the dictatorship of a Party as of an
individual, working through a huge bureaucracy and dedicated
to the use of force, a Moloch to whom the majorityof Lenin’s
original companions have been sacrificed.
The growth of Stalin’s dictatorship can be seen in the chang-
ing nature of the Party. The Communist Party, while Lenin
lived, enjoyed a considerable measure of freedom of discussion
and even of action. It debated, at great length and with greater
virulence, the policy to be adopted towards the German peace
terms offered at Brest-Litovsk. Then, when a weak Russia was
involved in a life-and-death crisis, a group of Communist
leaders—Radek, Kollontai, Orinsky—published a daily paper in
Moscow expressly to defeat Lenin’s policy. Then, too, consider-
able discretion was left to Trotsky in his negotiations with the
Germans. Trotsky’s pre-revolution quarrels with Lenin, indeed,
seemed no bar to their intimate collaboration after it. Lenin, who
loved theoretical disputations, could conduct the fiercest of pole-
mics with Bukharin and yet remain friendly with him. Pravda,
the organ of the Party, ran a special discussion page to which
Trotsky, Kamenev, and Zinoviev never hesitated to contribute
articles highly critical of adopted policy.
There was no such Party freedom when Stalin became
supreme. Then no one dare proclaim himself an “‘oppositionist”
and ask for the right to criticise the policies of the Government.
On the contrary “the principle of hierarchical discipline’,
accepted in 1925, bound every level of the Party to present the
level beneath it with a unanimous mandate, made of the Party
rank and file mere cogs in the machine of government and
of the Party itself little more than an uncritical instrument of
centralised administration. It is indeed hardly surprising that
reporting to and consulting the Party became formalities
about which Stalin did not concern himself unduly. In the difh-
236 POLITICAL THOUGHT
cult years of war and turmoil from 1918 to 1925 Party Con-
gresses met annually. Since Stalin became all-powerful the 15th
Party Congress met in 1927 after a two years’ interval, the 16th
in 1930, the 17th in 1934, the 18th in 1939 and the rgth in 1952.
The growth of the dictatorship can be seen in the disappear-
ance of possible sources of resistance in both town and country.
In the town the trade unions have lost all freedom. The annual
conventions of the Miners’ Federation, of the Textile Workers,
of the Trades Union Congress, have not met since 1932. Since
January 1936 there has been no more collective bargaining in
the U.S.S.R., so that after a visit there in 1946 Morgan Phillips,
Secretary of the Labour Party, reported: “In Russia there is no
collective bargaining as the Trade Unions know it in Great
Britain. I am not sure that the workers’ organisations can be
regarded as ‘trade unions’ in the British sense that they are
free agents to speak and act as their members demand irre-
spective of Government stricture. The very fact that strikes are
iflegalseems to dispose of any pretence to freedom of action as we
know it.” In the country the peasants have been dragooned into
collective and co-operative farms, one reason for which has un-
doubtedly been the increased control over them which the State
can thus exercise. Everywhere it has become obvious that, in
spite of its grandiose title, the Union of Soviet Socialist Re-
publics, the Soviet has no independent existence in Russia to-
day. Stalin admitted as much in 1933 when he said: “From
the standpoint of Leninism the collective economies, and the
Soviets as well, are, taken as a form of organisation, a weapon
and nothing but a weapon.”’ As Buber so finely commented :
“One cannot in the nature of things expect a little tree that has
been turned into a club to put forth leaves.”
Before Stalin’s death the dictatorship even revealed pecu-
liarities which characterised the Fascist and Nazi dictatorships—
such as the habit of conducting huge plebiscites at which over-
whelmingly favourable votes were recorded, and the habit of ex-
pressing faith in the regime aiindulging in a nauseating worship
of the leader. Thus we read of elections at which Communist can-
didates polled 99-4 per cent of the total votes cast. Their record in
the 1946 elections was still more impressive. They polled 99-8 per
cent of the votes—a revolutionary advance of +4 per cent, all the
more remarkable as the electorate had been increased by several
millions, inhabitants of annexed territories, whom the Soviet
 THE STATE AS CLASS 237
press had very recently called authentic reactionaries, bourgeois,
and Nazis. This is indeed an outstanding achievement since
with the birth-rate and the death-rate in mind such high per-
centages warrant the conclusion that good Soviet citizens post-
pone both arrivals and departures so as not to interfere with
electoral arrangements. Perhaps the only discouraging feature
about figures so high was the extremely small margin left for
further revolutionary advance. Fortunately such a reflection is
one that need occur only to bourgeois minds. In the elections of
December 1947 Stalin, who stood for a Moscow constituency,
polled 131 per cent of the votes. Higher mathematics of this
sort offer such a scope for unlimited advance as is not dreamed
of in our philosophy. Thus we read, too, of the extraordinary
adulation of Stalin. His name, for instance, appeared ror times
on the title page of Pravda for the 17th December 1950. It
appeared 45 times on the first page of the Medical Worker of
the 28th December 1950. Perhaps, indeed, we should speak of the
deification rather than the adulation of Stalin. Here is an extract
from Pravda of the 28th August 1936:

“O Great Stalin, O Leader of the Peoples,

Thou who didst give birth to man,
Thou who didst make fertile the earth,
Thou who didst rejuvenate the Centuries,
Thou who givest blossom to the spring,
Thou who movest the chords of harmony;
Thou splendour of my spring, O Thou
Sun reflected in a million hearts.”

Prose is no less fervent: “Stalin, I say to the universe. Just

Stalin, and I need say no more. Everything is included in that
tremendous name. Everything: the party, the country, the
town, love, immortality—everything.” And the following gem
is not to be ignored: “I write books. I am an author. All thanks
to thee, O great educator Stalin. I love a young woman with
a renewed love and I shall perpetuate myself in my children
all thanks to thee, O great educator Stalin. I shall be eternally
happy and joyous, all thanks to thee, O great educator Stalin.
Everything belongs to thee, chief of our great country. And
when the woman I love presents me with a child, the first word
it shal] utter will be: Stalin.”
238 POLITICAL THOUGHT
The Stalin dictatorship has had its international reflection,
too. As early as 1924 the French Communist Souvarine was ex-
pelled from the Third International of World Communist Par-
ties, or Comintern—the first to be excluded because of lack of sub-
mission to Stalin. Thenceforward the Comintern increasingly re-
flected the Stalin line. Its 6th Congress in 1928 was the last at
which any variety of opinion was allowed. Today its successor,
the Cominform, is merely a rubber stamp of the Kremlin.
However much many convinced Communists must have disliked
it, the development of this bureaucratic, monolithic, Byzantine
autocracy that Stalin perfected, an autocracy incidentally which
is the only form of government the Russians have tolerated, was
necessary because ifsocialism was to be established in Russia,
the State must be made powerful enough to do it. The doctrine
of Socialism in One Country was thus a doctrine of force as the
mother, not the midwife, of the new society. This 2oth-century
strong totalitarian belief in force is perhaps the greatest differ-
ence between Stalinism and the traditional Marxian outlook.
Lenin had departed far from Marx’s view that force could play
only a subordinate role compared with the basic economic and
social processes. Stalin left it behind altogether.
Stalin made other changes, too, in Marx’s teaching. He virtu-
ally abandoned the classical Marxian theory of the State, accord-
ing to which the State is merely the repressive instrument of a
dominant class which will disappear when classes are abolished.
It is typical of him that in the 1936 Constitution to which he
gave his name the terms ‘State’ and “‘citizen” have been
brought back and a bi-cameral Parliament on the rgth-century
model set up, whereas in Lenin’s Constitution of 1921 the word
“State” has disappeared as being bourgeois and is replaced by
the word “Soviet,” while “citizen” has become “proletarian,”
“peasant,” and “soldier.” Stalin still paid lip-service to the be-
lief that the State will “wither away,” but that miraculous event
he postponed to the Greek Kalends. Engels had once believed
that this would happen as soon as the means of production were
nationalised and all class differences ended. This, said Stalin,
speaking on the 1936 Constitution, had already been accom-
plished in Russia, which was now a socialist, classless societ
free from exploitation. But there was still no sign of the State
withering away. In a report to the 18th Party Congress on the
toth March 1939, he explained why this was so. The State could
 THE STATE AS CLASS 239

not wither away, he said, because of “capitalist encirclement.”

The admission that the State remained necessary because of the
internal situation was avoided by linking internal trouble with
capitalist encirclement and speaking of those purged as capi-
talist agents. In putting forward this view, Stalin had to correct
not only Marx and Engels but also Lenin. Even for Stalin, public
correction of Lenin was not without its embarrassments. But he
managed it neatly by declaring that Lenin had intended to
enunciate the new doctrine in a second volume of his State and
Revolution. “Death, however, prevented him from carrying this
task into execution. But what Lenin did not manage to do
should be done by his disciples.” ‘Will our State,” he went on,
“remain in the period of Communism also? Yes, it will, unless
the capitalist encirclement is liquidated and unless the danger
of foreign military attack has disappeared. Naturally, of course,
the forms of our State will again change in conformity with
the changes in the situation at home and abroad. No, it will not
remain, and will atrophy if the capitalist encirclement is liqui-
dated and a Socialist encirclement takes its place.” It is, then,
only the world Socialist State which will wither away. Since
ah a State is ardently hoped for but not yet expected, the
Stalin State goes on developing its power, stoutly maintaining
the while that any who declare that this is a curious preliminary
to it emulating the Snark and softly and silently vanishing away
and never being heard of again are blind to the dialectics of
Marxism.
Two further consequences of the policy of Socialism in One
Country are worth noting. One is the strong condemnation of
the idea of “equality in the sphere of requirements and indi-
vidual life” as a “piece of reactionary petty bourgeois absurdity
worthy of a primitive set of ascetics, but not of a Socialist society
organised on Marxist lines” which is contained in Stalin’s
address to the 17th Party Congress in 1934. “It is only Leftist
blockheads,” he added for good measure, “‘who idealise the poor
as the eternal bulwark of Bolshevism.” Unequal returns, as he
saw, were necessary to encourage the skill and efficiency with-
out which the industrialisation which was essential to the suc-
cess of the policy of Socialism in One Country could not be car-
ried through. There was support for his view in Marx’s saying
that even in a classless society pay at first would be according to
labour and not needs. Yet a strong strand of equalitarianism
240 POLETICA Ly THOU GCiirr

runs through Marxism, typical of which is the practice on which

Lenin insisted that no member of the Party should receive more
than the wages of a skilled workman. And it is difficult to re-
sist the conclusion that the differentiation of wages which was
necessitated by the needs of industrialisation was carried by
Stalin to lengths incompatible with the spirit if not the letter
of Marxism.
The other result worthy of note is the strong growth of Rus-
sian nationalism which can hardly be regarded as a develop-
ment of Marxian views. It is first clearly seen in a speech which
Stalin gave to business executives in February 1931. The cold
Communist clichés which he used on that occasion warmed and
sprang to life only when he began to speak of the purely Rus-
sian motives for his policy. “We do not want to be beaten. No,
we don’t want to. Old Russia was ceaselessly beaten for her
backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol Khans, she was
beaten by the Turkish Beys, she was beaten by Swedish feudal
lords, she was beaten by Polish-Lithuanian Pans, she was beaten
by Anglo-French capitalists, she was beaten by Japanese barons,
she was beaten by all—for her backwardness. For military back-
wardness, for cultural backwardness, for political backwardness,
for industrial backwardness, for agricultural backwardness. She
was beaten because to beat her was profitable and went unpun-
ished. You remember the words of the pre-revolutionary poet:
‘Thou art poor and thou art plentiful, thou art mighty and
thou art helpless, Mother Russia.’ We are 50 or 100 years behind
the advanced countries. We must make good this lag in 10
years. Either we do it or they crush us.” Stalin here portrayed
Russia as the victim, whereas it had been Bolshevik practice to
depict others as her victims. That practice, as in Pokrovsky’s his-
tories, was now frowned upon and his books banned. The de-
velopment of Russian nationalism is seen in the wartime appeal
“Your Motherland needs you,” and in the resuscitation of old
Russian heroes, like Dimitri Donskoi, Peter the Great, Suvarov.
It is seen also, despite some post-war toning down, in Stalin’s
announcement, as an amateur philologist in the summer of
1950, of the doctrine of the superiority of the Great Russians
over all the other nationalities of the U.S.S.R. It is seen, above
all, in the close parallel between Soviet Imperialism and Tzarist
Imperialism which has startled the world since 1945.
 THE STATE AS CLASS 241

Stalin and Revolution

The policy of Socialism in One Country has brought Russia
far from the teaching of Karl Marx. Yet it would be wrong to
conclude that Russia today is no more than Tzarism writ large.
She retains a genuine interest in revolution, as we will see as
we turn to Stalin’s views on the subject. In his Dialectical and
Historical Materialism Stalin wrote: “Dialectics does not regard
the process of development as a simple process of growth, where
quantitative changes do not lead to qualitative changes, but as a
development which passes from insignificant and imperceptible
quantitative changes to open, fundamental changes, to qualita-
tive changes; a development in which the qualitative changes
occur not gradually, but rapidly and abruptly, taking the form
of a leap from one state to another.” The practical consequences
he deduces from this are as follows: “If the passing of slow
quantitative changes into rapid and abrupt qualitative changes is
a law of development, then it is clear that revolutions made by
oppressed classes are a quite natural and inevitable phenome-
non.” The change from capitalism to socialism, he believed he
has proved, can be achieved only by a qualitative change, by
revolution. There is no reason to regard this as merely lip service
to a once-held faith, revealing no interest let alone portending
no action. Admittedly from time to time, as international exi-
gencies dictated, Stalin declared that the socialist and capitalist
worlds could exist peaceably together. But his actions never sug-
gested that he really believed in that possibility. There is no
evidence to show that he ever compromised on essentials
or that he failed to hold firm the revolutionary faith that
he proclaimed so loudly at the 7th Congress of the Third Inter-
national in 1935, when he said: “The Congress will have a
great historic importance. It must open up broad revolutionary
perspectives to the millions of workers of the West, of the East,
of America, and of the colonial and semi-colonial countries; it
must mark the beginning of an era of war and of revolutions.”
On the contrary, he was very much concerned with the doc-
trine of revolution he inherited from Lenin. In his Foundations
of Leninism he used Lenin’s “theory of the uneven development
of Capitalism,” according to which in the period of world im-
perialism, the rivalries of the Powers and the basic problems
and contradictions of capitalism reach, as it were as the result
of forcibly feeding the colonial and semi-colonial countries, dif-
242 FOLITICAL THOUGHT

ferent degrees of acuteness in different parts of the world so

that revolution might break out, in some “weak link” of the
imperialist chain while capitalism remained strong elsewhere, to
prove that any country could become ready for socialism. Since
he accepted wholeheartedly Lenin’s idea of the revolutionary |
function of the small, highly disciplined, ruthless Party, he was
led to the conclusion that not only was revolution possible but
that it ought to take place. If it did not, that could only be be-
cause it had been betrayed—hence not only the vilification of
socialist leaders but the purging of communist leaders the
world over. He was also confirmed in his readiness to see revo-
lutionary situations where such did not necessarily exist—hence
his instructions to the German Communist Party in 1931-2 to
attack the Social Democrats, which in effect meant assisting the
Nazis in destroying the Weimar Republic.
Only in one way might it seem that he denied his belief in
the inevitability and necessity of revolution—when he envisaged
in 1924 the possibility, which then seemed “extremely hypo-
thetical” but which after 1945 became a matter of lively in-
terest to communists in Eastern Europe, of a peaceful transi-
tion to socialism in certain capitalist countries which might
become subject to what he called a “socialist encirclement.”
It has been argued that in saying this Stalin was not breaking
with traditional Marxist theory since Marx himself conceded
the possibility of a peaceful development of socialism in cer-
tain advanced countries. In fact, the breach is complete, since
the peaceful transition to socialism in countries subject to
socialist encirclement would obviously be made possible only by
external force—by the strength of the Red Army, not by the in-
ternal force, which alone Marx would have recognised as legiti-
mate, that was the result of the full working out of social and
economic processes. Stalin’s belief in revolution was a belief in
force. His belief in the possibility of a peaceful transition to
socialism through socialist encirclement was also a belief in
force. The differences were differences of degree not of kind.
But how, it may be asked, could Stalin’s doctrine of Socialism
in One Country be reconciled with his interest in revolution and
in the use of force in countries outside the U.S.S.R.? The answer
to that is not easy, and many will be of the opinion that Stalin
would have got further with the one if he had forgotten his
interest in the other. However, he clung to both, reconciling
 TIDES MAT EW AS: ICLAAS'S 243
them by thinking of world revolution only in the interests of
Russia. He never wrote off the possibility of world revolution,
but only the possibility of that revolution being other than a
Russian world revolution. World revolution, for Stalin, and in
the absence of proof to the contrary we must add for his suc-
cessors, is to follow from Russia’s strength, not from Russia’s
example, and as such it will inevitably follow the Russian pat-
tern. When it comes, it will usher in the Russian century. Until
it comes, its looming shadow will be one of the most potent
influences preparing the way for that century. Meanwhile for
millions the U.S.S.R. remains the true home of a crusading
faith, and what the world is facing in Russia today is not merely
Russian Imperialism but Russian Imperialism allied to revolu-
tionary faith. That compound of Imperialism and Faith, as
always in history, is capable of generating enormous force. The
Russia that Stalin fashioned is indeed a tremendous monument
to power.

Stalin and Lenin

Would Lenin have rejoiced in Stalin’s achievement? Perhaps
not. He would not have liked the bureaucracy, the inequality,
the nationalism, the deification of the leader and of course he
became increasingly critical of Stalin’s conduct.
Yet Stalin’s Russia is not a betrayal but a fulfilment of Lenin’s
Russia. The main characteristics of that Russia are the logical
result of Lenin’s basic assumptions. Rosa Luxemburg had no
difficulty in showing the bureaucratic tendencies inherent in
Lenin’s conception of the small party of professional revolu-
tionaries. He himself had maintained that “Soviet Socialist
Democracy is in no way inconsistent with the rule and dicta-
torship of one person; the will of a class is at times best realised
by a dictator, who sometimes will accomplish more by himself
and is frequently more needed.” And as Bertrand Russell saw,
his conception of Bolshevism was internally aristocratic and ex-
ternally militant, and from the concentration of power for which
he was striving “the same evils would flow as from the concen-
tration of wealth.’ Lenin could not have long prevented the
development either of inequality or of nationalism. As early as
1920 Russell could write: “Nationalism is natural and instinctive;
through pride in the revolution it grows again even in the breasts
of Communists.” He saw it in the Polish war. When Trotsky
244 POLITICAL THOUGHT
called for ‘Three cheers for our brave fellows at the front,” he
noted, ‘“‘the audience responded as a London audience would
have responded in the autumn of 1914.” He even appreciated
that “the reconstruction of Asiatic Russia has revived what is
essentially an imperialist way of feeling.” We must surely con-
clude that it was Lenin indeed who had made possible Stalin’s
Russia.

Khruschev and the Relaxing of the Dictatorship

Since Stalin’s death, however, considerable changes have taken
place in that Russia. At the 20th Congress of the Communist
Party of the U.S.S.R. his dictatorship was violently denounced.
In a lengthy and savage speech Khruschev claimed that Stalin
was himself responsible for the event which ushered in the great
purges of the mid-1930’s, the assassination of Kirov, Governor of
Leningrad, in 1934. He accused Stalin of having fabricated
charges of treason against Marshal Tukhachevsky and seven
other leaders of the Red Army in 1937 and then having them
executed without trial, of having murdered 5,000 innocent ofh-
cers and hundreds of Old Bolsheviks, including more than half
of the delegates of the 17th Congress of the Communist Party
of the U.S.S.R., and 70 per cent. of the members of the Central
Committee elected by that Congress. He declared that Stalin had
liquidated so many thousands of industrial managers and tech-
nicians that the Soviet economy was almost paralysed and called
him a master of mass repressions and terror, a monster who
would destroy colleagues of long standing if he imagined their
glances to be at all shifty. ““We never knew,” he said, ‘“‘when we
entered Stalin’s presence, whether we would come out alive.” In
short, if the ‘“‘cult of personality” was never so highly developed
as in Stalin’s Russia, it has never been so noisily repudiated as in
contemporary Russia.
A still more convincing proof of the relaxing of dictatorial
power than the attack on Stalin has been the marked weakening
of the secret police, now publicly denounced for their unconsti-
tutional use of torture to extract confessions. Almost as striking
evidence of the reality of change in the U.S.S.R. is the fact that
the struggle for power is becoming much less red in tooth and
claw. Beria, indeed, was executed for what was said to be his
attempt to seize control. Yet Malenkov, Molotov, Kaganovich,
Bulganin, when they clashed with Khruschev, were removed
 TEE SWAT BE A'S. Cl: ASS 245)

from high office, but not from all political activity, still less from
life.
But if it canot be doubted that Stalin’s dictatorship has been
considerably relaxed in contemporary Russia, neither can it be
doubted that Russia today has seen the consolidation of the rule
of the Communist Party. The challenges to that rule that seemed
to be developing from the Red Army and from the Bureaucracy
at the time of Beria’s death have been triumphantly removed.
Whatever relaxation may be visible in Russia today no criticism
of the Communist Party, its position in the country and its mono-
poly of power has yet been allowed. Nor has there been any sign
in Russia of lessening dedication to Communist ends. This,
Khruschev has told us, is only likely to happen when shrimps
learn to whistle, an accomplishment in the acquisition of which
they are expected to be some little while. This continued dedi-
cation of the U.S.S.R. to Communist ends of course implies con-
tinued acceptance of unremitting struggle with the world of
capitalism and continued faith in ultimate and complete victory
over that world.
But though this is so, Khruschev’s Russia has produced one
change in Soviet thinking of the greatest importance. It has
admitted that in an age of nuclear power war as a means of
conducting struggle is to be avoided. Struggle there is still to be,
but armed struggle as a means of promoting Socialism makes no
sense. It may well be that in this admission lies the greatest con-
tribution of Khruschev to the development of Marxist-Leninist
thought.
The non-Marxist will be impressed with the confusion of
thought that rejects total war on the one hand and that insists
on total victory on the other. To him it must seem that the correct
conclusion to be drawn from conditions which make total war
unacceptable is that total victory and total defeat are now totally
things of the past. But the Marxist who believes that he cannot
without destroying himself attack capitalism in arms, also be-
lieves that there exists a way in which with perfect safety to
himself capitalism can be made to destroy itself. Lenin taught
that it was only the possession by the highly industrialised coun-
tries of colonies that made it possible for their workers to avoid
the increasing misery which Marx had foretold for them, only
imperial rule that prevented capitalism’s slaves from rising in
their wrath to destroy it. If this is true, as every Communist
PT —9Q
246 POLITICAL THOUGHT
believes, then if capitalist countries are deprived of colonies, their
working men will soon feel the pinch and themselves destroy
capitalism. And by the faithful the troubles in Belgium that
followed withdrawal from the Congo were seen as proving the
truth of this thesis. Hence Khruschev’s rejection of war as a
means of advancing Socialism has not yet resulted in any greater
Soviet readiness to admit the possibility of the indefinite con-
tinued existence of non-Marxist countries. It is permissible to
believe that the realities of the nuclear world will one day force
that admission. But whatever the changes that have taken place
in the U.S.S.R. since Stalin’s death we are not yet entitled to
conclude that that day has already dawned.
 CHAPTER V

CON CEUSION
E have seen in the preceding chapters something of the
\\/ organic and of the mechanistic theory of the State as
it has been held by some of the great masters of poli-
tical thought. It may seem so obvious to the English that the
State exists for man that they regard it as proof positive of
German wrong-headedness if not of German original sin that
the Germans have held to the opposite view that man exists for
the State. Yet the masters who have preached the organic doc-
trine of the State have been neither patently wrongheaded nor
obviously greater exemplars of original sin than the rest of us.
And unless we are to believe that manifest stupidity is the
sovereign recipe for survival, we cannot conclude that a view
that has been accepted throughout the ages has nothing to be
said for it. On the contrary, we must acknowledge that both the
organic and the mechanistic views of the State have their
strength and weakness.
It cannot be denied that the organic view has the great merit
of corresponding to our experience of life at least in this that
it acknowledges that there is a warring within man’s members
so that too often he does what he would not and what he would
that he does not, and it appreciates that when he acts according
to his better self he can most truly be called man. It recognises
the different me in a way that mechanistic theory too frequently
does not. And more than mechanistic theory it recognises the
existence of the social me. It knows that the individual is never
an isolated atom, but is formed to a very large extent by the
society in which he lives. Mechanistic theory has sometimes
ignored man’s social character, and in it the State has not in-
frequently been hostile to those lesser liberties of associations
which organic theory has been very ready to admit are like
cells which go to form the whole living organism of the State.
Insistence on the political effects of environment in its broadest
sense, on the consequences of antecedent events, on the great
importance of political organisation and the close interdepend-
ence of citizens and the State, on the general truth that policies
must be bad if they disregard national character, environment,
248 POLITICAL THOUGHT
and history, and that the end of the State must be kept in view
and recognised as something still more important than the tem-
porary satisfaction of the possibly fluctuating demands of the
present generation, all may be no more than a commonplace
statement of the general causal interrelation of things, but it is
a statement to be found much more in the upholders of the
organic than the mechanistic view of the State. And more than
mechanistic theory, organic theory encourages both the best and
the social me, for in it the State, the greatest of man’s creations,
is used to help him to achieve the greatest development of which
he is capable. Because it encourages the best and the social me
it is a much more satisfactory explanation of the urge of public
duty than anything that Utilitarians, for instance, can rise to.
And even though too often in those who have insisted on the
unity of ethics and politics, ethics would seem to have become
political rather than politics ethical, the value of the view that
the State is an ethical institution with a moral end must be
admitted. Moreover, organic theory is a weighty reminder that
the view of liberty as being left to do what one likes is inade-
quate, that freedom to be worth while must be positively and
not negatively defined. In giving us that reminder it presents
us with a facet of the truth that extreme individualism could
never glimpse. If for no other reason than that it has redressed
the balance weighed down by extreme individualism, organic
theory is important.
If the organic theory of the State had not been impressive, it
would hardly have survived so long. Its weaknesses, indeed its
dangers, are, however, striking. In any theory in which the
State is real and the individual an abstraction, the danger of
the reality engulfing the abstraction is a great one. Organic
theory shows that too great an amalgamation of individual and
State is as dangerous an ideal as too great emancipation of indi-
vidual will. In it man, overshadowed by the State, too frequently
becomes less than man. He is treated as no more than a conduit
pipe for the divine energy, as a passive creature for whom things
must be done, not as a being who finds fulfilment in positive
activity. In it, naturally, the individual can never take up a
stand for conscience’ sake against the State, since if he did he
would be denying the superior reality of the State. Conscien-
tious objectors, for instance, would never be tolerated in any
State which regarded itself as organic. Such a State can never
 CONCLUSION 249

make a distinction between the good man and the good citizen,
for goodness in such a State consists only in serving the State.
It follows that in organic theory the citizen can have no rights
against the State, that that theory leaves man no safeguard for
liberty. It will allow no distinction to be made between society
and the State, so convinced is it that man is absorbed in his
relation to the political community. Hence not even society can
act as a cushion between man and the State. In fact, however
much it may seek to define liberty in a positive sense, it reduces
liberty to obedience to the State. In all this it defeats itself. For
it can never sufhciently appreciate that individual variation, un-
likeness, effort is as necessary for the welfare of mankind as
collective activity and mutual support. It tries to give social life
an ethical character. But it does not see that individuals must
continually re-create whatever spirituality there is in the social
whole. Moreover, it regards the State as the only conceivable
entity. Organic theory has been aware more than a great deal
of mechanistic theory of the existence and importance of asso-
ciations, but it never allows them a full and free growth. It has
never been aware of the possibilities of a larger entity than the
State. In organic theory the finality of the State is a shibboleth.
And since it is the sole source of morality, organic theorists have
rarely resisted the tendency to be bellicose in its interests. When
Hobhouse said of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: “In the bombing
of London I had just witnessed the visible and tangible out-
come of a false and wicked doctrine, the foundations of which
lay, as I believe, in the book before me. . . . Hegel himself car-
-ried the proof sheets of his first work to the printer through
streets crowded with fugitives from the field of Jena. With that
work began the most penetrating and subtle of all the intellectual
influences which have sapped the rational humanitarianism of
the 18th and igth centuries, and in the Hegelian theory of the
god-state all that I had witnessed lay implicit,” he was overstat-
ing the case. But there was some truth in what he said. We may
think that such a view of the State would have been dangerous,
anyhow. In days when the new tribalism appeals, when the
primitive gods and the customs of the folk have been called
upon, as in Germany, Italy, Japan, and Russia, to give warmth
and comradeship and protection in a world made cold by capi-
talist practice and classical liberal ideas, such a theory is doubly
dangerous. The call of the Nazis: “Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein
250 POLITICAL 2HOUGHT

Fuhrer”; the outburst of Hitler: “I need men for judges who

are deeply convinced that law ought not to guarantee the inter-
ests of the individual against those of the State; that their duty
is to see to it that above all Germany does not suffer”; the cry of
Mussolini: “For Fascism the State is an absolute, in whose
presence individuals and groups are the relative,” show clearly
the connection between Nazism, Fascism, and the organic theory
of the State. We can reflect, for good measure, that the organic
theory is necessarily undemocratic, since the toes cannot dictate
to the brain and since there is no representative government in
the individual organism. Moreover, in organic theory equality
is openly regarded as a delusion. For men fulfil different func-
tions, and those functions are not equally important for the
maintenance of the whole. Hence they are to be treated as equal
only to the extent to which the State itself decides that its in-
terests require them to be equal. When, in addition, we remind
ourselves that States have never in all history been as strong as
they are today, we may well doubt if a doctrine whose tendency
is inevitably to make them stronger is really desirable in the
2oth century.
The mechanistic theory of the State is strong where the or-
ganic theory is weak, weak where the organic theory is strong.
Its teaching, that the individual is real and the State only a
device, that there is no such thing as a common good of the
State which is something other than the good of all citizens, is
a very powerful and timely insistence that the State can justify
itself only in so far as it exists for the individuals who com-
pose it. The great merit, indeed, of the mechanistic theory lies
in its safeguarding of the individual. It recognises, of course,
that individuals differ in natural capacity and therefore in what
they have to offer to the State. But it will not agree that the
State has the right to sacrifice them in consequence. It separ-
ates State and society, so that society can on occasion act as a
support to the individual in his relationship to the State. It
agrees that men may have to resist the State on grounds of
conscience, knowing the anarchism latent in such an admission,
but believing it less dangerous than the assertion of perpetually
superior morality by the State. Mechanistic theory, moreover,
lends itself very well to the creation of democratic institutions,
thereby providing further safeguards for the individual. It can
reasonably be claimed, too, to be a better inoculation against
 CONCLUSION 251

the new tribalism, and to be perhaps a little bit less of a menace

to peace than organic theory. At least it does not make the
strong State unnecessarily stronger by giving it an almost reli-
gious devotion. And it is not committed, as is organic theory,
to the view that the State is the final end of man’s evolution.
It regards it merely as a device that has proved indispensable in
the past and that can give way to something else should some-
thing else prove indispensable in the future.
But like the organic theory, the mechanistic theory of the
State is of course very much open to criticism. There is nothing
spiritual about a machine, nothing that calls out the best in a
man. It is difficult to deny either that the State can or that it
should do this. Perhaps it is not an accident that States which
regard themselves as machines seem on the whole more con-
cerned with material than with spiritual values. Mechanistic
theory does not take account of the individual’s wish to be some-
thing better than he is. At least it does not consider that this is
something in which the State should have an interest or some-
thing which the State can do anything about. There is certainly
truth in the view that in mechanistic theories of the State an
adequate account of justice is possible only by surreptitiously
substituting the rational spiritual being for the isolated natural
being on whom the theory rests, so that the fundamental con-
tradiction of, for instance, Locke and Adam Smith is that they
work with natural units and treat them like rational units,
thereby demonstrating the inadequacy of the philosophic move-
ment that they represent. Indeed, it is never easy in mechanistic
theories to understand the alchemy whereby private interests are
turned into public duties. It may be added, too, that mechanistic
theory has rarely had a sufficient appreciation of the importance
of society in developing the citizen. Further, if there are dangers
in describing freedom as the pursuit of rational action, there is
aridity in defining it as the absence of restraint, and the fre-
quency with which mechanistic theories do this is significant.
And if organic theory lends itself so readily to the new tribal-
ism, it may be that mechanistic theory has done something to
bring about that new tribalism by lending itself so readily to
the view which Ford expressed: “‘We now know that anything
which is economically right is also morally right. There can be
no conflict between good economics and good morals.” Any-
how, it may be maintained that mechanistic theory is simply
252 POLITVCAL THOU GET

unreal, that it does not correspond to our experience. The citi-

zen, says Bradley, “‘sees the State every day in its practice refute
every other doctrine, and do with the moral approval of all what
the explicit theory of hardly anyone will morally justify. He sees
instincts are better than so-called ‘principles.’ He sees in the
hour of need what are called ‘rights’ laughed at, ‘freedom,’ the
liberty to do what one pleases, trampled on, the claims of the
individual trampled under foot, and theories burst like cob-
webs. And he sees, as of old, the heart of a nation rise high and
beat in the breast of each one of her citizens, till her safety and
her honour are dearer to each than life, till to those who live her
shame and sorrow, if such is allotted, outweigh their loss, and
death seems a little thing to those who go for her to a common
and nameless grave.” Some of the above criticisms might be
met by the reply that society is a living growth, an organism,
and that this living organism, society, creates for its own con-
venience the machine that we call the State. But not all the
above criticisms, and certainly not the last, could be refuted in
this way.
“The discovery of wisdom is the surpassing good,” Philo
wrote. “When this is found all the people will sing.” It will be
apparent that all wisdom is not with either the organic or the
mechanistic view of the State, and that mankind as yet has but
learned to croak. Nevertheless, all who think of these things
will be partisans, although it will be a matter of little profit and
conceivably of great harm if they allow themselves to think, in
their conviction that the one view is the better, that all who hold
the other are fools or knaves. Both views, it must be admitted,
can be held by men who are neither. Moreover, it must be
conceded that they correspond to existing States. Great Britain
and America are clearly examples of the mechanistic State, as
Italy and Germany yesterday and Russia today, with its State
worship and subordination of the individual to the State, are
examples of the organic State. Further, it must be agreed, the
differences between the organic and the mechanistic theories of
the State, and therefore between the States which embody these
theories, are fundamental. Much as we might long for one world
in which there will be a single moral and political system, we
have to admit that such a world does not yet exist and has
little prospect of existing in the immediate future. The world
in which we live is a world of States with such different moral
 CONCLUSION 253

beliefs that no compromise in principle is possible between them.

And the question we must ask, given differences which are
genuine, fundamental, irreducible, and incapable of compro-
mise and given the embodiment of these fundamentally opposed
points of views in first-class Powers, is: Can such different views
peacefully co-exist? Is the world committed to a series of ideo-
logical wars, tempered perhaps by tiredness, but leading inevit-
ably to the last battle of the Gods that Norse mythology fore-
told?
Kant did not believe that such radically different views could
live peacefully together. Accepting the sovereignty of each State
and rejecting the idea of a world State, he thought that inter-
national peace was possible only when all States were ruled on
something like the same internal principles. Lenin, in another
context, agreed with him. ‘‘We are living,” he said, ‘‘not merely
in a State, but in a system of States, and the co-existence of the
Soviet Republic side by side with imperialist States for a long
time is unthinkable. One or the other must triumph in the end.”
The experience of our own lifetime, too, must make us wonder
if Kant and Lenin were not right. The 2oth century has become
known as the century of violence because of the devastating wars
that have already taken place in it between organic and mechan-
istic States, the last of which has left in a yet stronger and more
menacing position the last remaining great organic State. Fur-
thermore that State has shown that it is at the moment in the
grip of a force compound of the expansive imperialistic zest of a
strong and growing State and of a proselytising faith. That
force wherever it has shown itself, as for instance in France at
the time of the Revolution, has come to be recognised as one of
the most explosive in history, big with tribulation for other
peoples. Russia, in effect, says today what Boissy d’Anglas
triumphantly said in France during the Revolution: ‘““There is
only one good way to administer a country, and if we have
found it why should other people not benefit by it?” Therefore
the words which Pitt applied to the French: “They will not
accept under the name of Liberty any model of government but
that which is conformable to their own opinions and ideas, and
all men must learn from the mouth of their cannon the propa-
gation of their system in every part of the world” can be legi-
timately applied to the Russians now. And we have learned in
bitterness in the last few years that no genuine agreement be-
254 POLIDITCALIT HOUSEHiT

tween the Russian and the Western world has proved possible.
Clearly, then, it would be stupid to believe that there is no
evidence whatever for the view of Lord Russell that “we are
now again in an epoch of wars of religion, but a religion is
now called an ideology,” and dangerous to be sure that such an
epoch will not demand blood as it did in the 16th and 17th
centuries.
But though it would be madness to forget that only with
mutual exhaustion, the spreading of the ideas of the Politiques
to whom the new religion of the State mattered more than the
old religion of the Church, and the development of Rationalism
to which all religions were equally false and all fanaticism folly,
did the epoch of religious wars come to an end, it is unnecessary
to believe that there is any historical law according to which
what has once demanded blood will always continue to do so.
History does not repeat itself, if only because men can read its
elementary lessons and determine not to repeat mistakes. To
avoid the sin of hybris let it be said at once that they are un-
likely to run out of mistakes to make in either the present or
the future. But there may be a limit to the price which even
fanaticism is prepared to pay to achieve its object; in an atomic
age the price to be paid would certainly be high. Indeed, the
very price which all must pay if those who deny the possibility
of the peaceful co-existence of the organic and mechanistic
theories embodied in their respective States are right is such that
it can itself be used as an argument to prove them wrong. For
if it becomes plain beyond all doubt that to follow the path of
proselytising faith will be to damage national interests, con-
sciously, deliberately, and devastatingly, even the most Messianic
of peoples might be expected to recoil. After all, men have
learned to get along together even though their views are as
irreconcilable as those of Catholics and Protestants, True Be-
lievers, and Infidels. There is much truth in the dissenting
opinion of Justice Holmes in the famous case of Abrams v. the
U.S.: “Persecution for the expression of opinions seems to me
perfectly logical. If you have no doubt of your premises or
your power and want a certain result with all your heart, you
naturally express your wishes in law and sweep away all oppo-
sition. But when men have realised that time has upset many
fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than the
believe in the very foundations of their own conduct that the
 CONCLUSION 255
ultimate good is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the
best test of truth is the power of thought to get itself accepted in
the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground
upon which their wishes can be safely carried out.” If men can
indeed remember that time has upset many fighting faiths, they
must also reflect upon the impossibility, or at least the very great
difficulty, of exporting either the organic or the mechanistic
view of the State. The West, for instance, has found in Ger-
many and Japan how difficult it is to convert a people who be-
lieved in the organic theory of the State to the mechanistic
theory. Hitler's New Order similarly showed the difficulty of
converting a people who believed in the mechanistic theory of
the State to the organic. And Soviet Russia today reveals the
contradiction that was to be found in Napoleonic France—the
assertion of the external rights of National Sovereignty and the
denial of the same rights to others. Those, too, who are under-
standably oppressed by the persistence and virulence of a com-
munism that seems impervious to argument might recall with
comfort the words of Herbert Spencer: ‘‘A wave of opinion,
reaching a certain height, cannot be stopped by evidence, but
has gradually to spend itself.”” Remembering all this, men may
find in it yet another reason for believing that situations will not
always be so strained and that both views of the State can exist
peacefully side by side.
Upon those who believe that they can, a very great responsi-
bility rests. They must make their view prevail that however
valuable Crusaders may be their rightful place is not in the
Foreign Offices of the world. They must never forget the cost
of Crusades nor allow others to forget it either. They must be-
ware of the common danger so well illustrated by the Vice-
Chancellor of Cambridge University in his opposition to the
scheme of the Eastern Counties Railway “to run excursion trains
to Cambridge on the Lord’s Day with the object of attracting
foreigners and undesirable characters to the University of Cam-
bridge on that sacred day . . . the Vice-Chancellor of the Uni-
versity of Cambridge wishes to point out to the Directors of
the Eastern Counties Railway that such a proceeding would be
as displeasing to Almighty God as it is to the Vice-Chancellor
of the University of Cambridge” —of acting as the assured but
unaccredited agents of God. They must expect less from poli-
tics, refusing to believe that God speaks invariably in the Cabi-
256 POLITICAL THOUGHT
net in London, the White House in Washington, or the Kremlin
in Moscow. And they must pay more attention to politics, taking
care not to allow those situations to develop that would encour-
age the devotees of ideological conflict. In this way they may
act as the new Politiques leading the way from an era of ideo-
logical conflict into one wherein practical adjustment of in-
terests is possible. If this does not happen, there will be without
question a new predicament of mankind, calling for a new
political philosophy to resolve it. But it would not profit us to
speculate about the ideas of the post atomic-war world.
 INDEX
Acton, Lord, 154, 216 Canning: on 18th-century consti-
Adams, 122 tution, 125
Alcibiades, 12 Carlyle, 100, 109, 110, 174, 179
American Constitution, 74-5 Chadwick, 83, 103, 104
Anaximander, 2, 18 Cicero, 4, 53
Aquinas, 80, 153 Coleridge, 99, 109, 115, 125, 128
Aristophanes, 3, 11, 107 Collective farms in U.S.S.R., 236
Aristotle, ix, 2, 4, 6, 8, 9, 10, 15, Comintern: reflection of rise of
24, 28, 42, 46, 50, 59, 80, 97, totalitarian State in U.S.S.R., 238
120, 150, 153, 156; and Plato, Communist Manifesto, 194, 197,
38-9; contribution to Political 198, 213, 227
Thought, 38; organic theory of Comte, 131, 134
State, 38-41 Confucius, 1-2, 232
Arnold, Mathew, 174 Cromwell, 207, 230
Athens; 45,6, 0%, 12,13, 23
Atterbury, Bishop, 63
Attlee, 30
Delolme, 63
Demosthenes, 4, 107
Augustine, St., 42
Descartes, 43, 65
Austin, 180, 190
Dicey, 85, 173, 174
‘Bacon, Francis, viii, 46 Dickens: on American democratic
Bagehot: on ‘‘constituency govern- culture, 120-1
ment,’’ 106; on 18th-century Disraeli, 110, 178
constitution, 125
Barker, Sir E., viii Engels, 155, 200, 201, 202, 208,
Beccaria, 82 214, 215, 224-8 pass., 238, 239,
Bentham, J., 65, 69, 106, 107, 108, 244
LUT eLI2s Insets. 165 117, Epicureans, 9, 10, 42
119, 126, 127, 149; and Social- Euripides, 3, 4, 107
ism, 104; characteristics of his
State, 96-9; idea of the State,
Federalist, 64, 93
94-6; importance of, 99-106; in-
Feuerbach, 201
fluence abroad, 87; influence at
home, 101-6; life and writings,
83-9; principle of Utility, 89- Galileo, 43, 46, 50, 51
93; the Philosophe, 101 Gladstone, 104, 110, 161
Berdieff, 129 Gottschalk: criticism of Marx, 224
Bernstein, 217, 222 Great Powers: as embodiments of
Bismarck, 153, 155 conflicting political philosophies,
Bluntschli, 132 252
Boissy d’Anglas, 252 Cae: characteristics of, 2-5:
Bracton, 63, 81 debt of Political Thought to,
Bradley, 170, 251 1-2; language, 5-6; political or-
Burke, vii, viii, 48, 62, 101, 102, ganisation of, 6-9; variety of
125, 128, 136 Political Thought, g—11
258 INDEX
Green, T. H., 110, 112; and asso- Lamartine, 130
ciations, 185-6; and the General Laws, 16, 22, 38
Will, 176, 180-1; and _ inter- Lenin, 155, 194, 199, 216, 231-3
national relations and war, 186- PaSS-; 235, 239, 241, 242, 243-4,
g; and limits of State action, 180; 253; adaption of Marxism to
and right to resist State, 182-3; Russia, 223-5; autocracy of,
Hegelianism of, 175-8; Indi- 230, 243; dictatorship of prole-
vidualism of, 178-89; organic tariat, 226-8; dislike of growing
theory of State, 190; place in bureaucracy in revolutionary Rus-
Political Thought, 189-93 sia, 228; freedom of discussion
Grey, Sir E., 105 within Party, 229, 235; his task,
217-18; idea of Party, 225-6; pre-
Hamilton, 64, 122 tence of democracy, 228; respon
Harrington, 80 sibility for growing bureaucracy
Hegel, viii, 40, 134, 136, 175, 176, in revolutionary Russia, 229-30;
177, 181, 182, 185, 186, 188, 189, restatement of Dialectical Mate-
200, 201, 207, 249; appraisal of, rialism and of Revolutionary
170-3; idea of State, 161-70; in- Marxism, 221-3; theory of Im-
fluence of, 154-5; life, 152-3; on perialism, 218-21; theory of un-
international relations and war, even development of capitalism,
165-7; on Social Ethics, 164; 241-2.
State as organism, 169-170; the Locke, J., 45, 46, 62, 96, 99, 136,
Dialectic, 156, 158-61, 171-2; 183, 185, 250; characteristics of
view of liberty, 167-9 his State, 75-8; compared with
Helvetius, 82, 99, 150 Hobbes, 67-8; form of his State,
Heraclitus, 2, 18 73-5; importance of, 78-82; life
Herodotus, 2, 107 and writings, 65-7; nature of his
Hitler, 155, 166, 171, 250, 255 appeal, 68; separation of powers,
Hobbes.) 1.5 1X) 4350455, 050075) OSs 74; social contract, 71-3; state of
70-3 pass., 92; characteristics of nature, 70-1; theses of liberalism,
Leviathan, 57-9; contemporary 81; view of man, 68-70
views of, 47-8; doctrine of Lothian, Lord: on democracy, 122
sovereignty, 57-8, 63-4; impor- Lowell, 5
tance of, 63-5; life and writings, Luxemburg, Rosa: criticism of
46-7; social contract, 61; univer- Lenin, 243
sal appeal of, 50; view of man,
50-4; view of State, 54-63 Mcllwain, 63
Hobhouse, 170, 190, 249 Maistre, de, x
Holmes, Justice, 254 Marsilius of Padua, 42
Homer, 3, 4, 107 Marx, K., 9, 83, 104, 155, 172, 218,
Horner, Francis, 125 221-3 pass., 225-8 pass., 230,
Hume, 43, 82, 99 238, 239, 241, 242; and democ-
Hutcheson, 82, 84 racy, 207-8, 227; appraisal of,
213-17; contradictions of capital-
Imperialism, late Victorian, 175 ism, 211-12; dialectical material-
James, William, 106, 173 ism, 199-202; Hebrew prophet
Johnson, Dr., 90, 128 in, 197; historical materialism,
202-9; nature of appeal, 194-8;
Kant, 83, 100, 130, 194, 178; con- study of revolution, 199; surplus
ditions of peace, 252 value, 209-10; withering away of
Kautsky, 219, 220, 230 State, 208-9
Khruschev, 244, 245, 246 Metternich, viii
 INDEX 259
Mill, James, 88, 102-3, 106, 107, Political Thought: Bacon on, viii;
1t25) 120, Barker on, viii; branch of ethical
Mill, John Stuart, 88, 91-3 pass., theory, vii; Burke on, viii; Hegel
191; alterations in Utilitarianism, on, viii; Metternich on, viii;
110-17; case for democracy, 115; Napoleon on, viii; not a science,
117-19; dangers of democracy, vii; Stephen (Leslie) on, viil;
419-22; democracy made safe for what it is, vii; what it owes to
world, 122-5; importance of, Greeks, 1-2
125-9; life and writings, 106-10; Priestley, 82, 84
view of liberty, 113-15. Protagoras, 15
Milton, 73, 113, 127, 196 Proudhon, 196
Mirabeau, 124 Pythagoras, 2, 18, 131
Montesquieu, 74
Moscow: the Third Rome, 234 Representation, 18th-century theory
Miller, Adam, x
of, 124-5
Mussolini, 155, 249 Republic, The, 9, 13, 15, 16, 24,
Napoleon, viii, 134, 214 26, 27, 30, 34, 36, 37
Ritchie, 79, 128, 135
Natural Law, 18, 42, 43, 55, 69,
Rousseau, 105) 305 725 73s) 7.75 3)
79s 95s 172,
185 130, 131, 136, 163, 164, 180, 181,
Nietzsche, 120, 129 185, 190; conflicting interpreta-
Nominalists, 42 tions of, 136-8; General Will,
144-9; idea of nature, 140-2; idea
Oakeshott, 63
of State, 142-50; individualist in,
O’Brien, Bronterre, 117
150; life, 138-9; place in Political
Thought, 150-2; social contract,
Paley, 91, 96, 97
143, 151; view of raison d’état,
Parmenides, 2
Pericles, 3, 16, 29, 37 147
Russell, Lord, 244, 253
Philo, 251
Pindar, 4
Pitt: on French Revolution, 253 Schiller, 122, 166
Pilato, 4256505, 107,, 120, 127, 150; Shaftesbury, 65, 66
Dialogues, 15-16; doctrine of the Shaw, G. B., 62
Soul, 20-2; effect of Socrates’ Shelburne, Lord, 87
death on, 12; family background Sidgwick, 97, 111
and early years, 11-12; founding Socialism: debt to Utilitarianism,
of Academy, 13; idea of Human 174
Excellence, 29-30, 35, 40, 41; eke Utopian, 196
organic theory of State, 38-41; Socrates, 3, 4, 12
organisation of good State, 24-35; Sophists, 23, 43
philosopher and the State, 24-6; Sophocles, 4, 11, 107
Sicilian journeys, 13-14; State Southey, 174
and education, 30-3; State and Soviet in U.S.S.R., 236
individual, 36-8, 39-40; State as Sparta, 23
means to good life, 22-4; the Spencer, Herbert, 254
Human Predicament, 16-17; Spinoza, 61
theory of Ideas, 18-20 Stalinin55, 19456209,). 2175) and
Plekhanov, 217, 223, 224 Lenin, 243-4; as Marxist theo-
Polis, 6-9, 19, 24, 26, 35, 38, 39 retician, 231-2; belief in revolu-
Political liberty, medieval tradition tion, 241-2; condemnation of
of, 80-1 equality, 239-40; cult of Leader,
260 INDEX
236-7; emergence of Totalitarian Thucydides, 3, 10, 107
State, 235-6; growth of Russian Tocqueville, De: on danger of
nationalism, 240; modern Slavo- democracy, 120; on democracy in
phil, 234; nature of Stalin’s America, 119
Russia, 243; Socialism in One Trade Unions in U.S.S.R., 236
Country, 232-5; Socialist en- Trotsky, 226-8 pass., 230, 232-5
circlement, 242; the Terror, 244; pass., 244; admission that Bol-
withering away of State, 238-9 shevik Revolution undemocratic,
State: as machine, x, 9, 44-5, 64, 228; criticism of Lenin's autoc-
75, 130, 249-51; as organism, x, racy, 227, 230; struggle with
IO-II, 40-1, 42, 130-6, 151-2, Stalin, 233-4; theory of per-
169-70, 246-9; Rational-Natural manent revolution, 226, 233, 234
tradition of, x, 41, 42; tradition
of Historical Coherence, xi; tradi- Wallas, Graham, vii
tion of Will and Artifice, xi, Whitehead, 3
William of Occam, 42, 52
4252 oF
Stephen, Fitzjames, 121 Wordsworth, 109, 133
Stephen, Leslie, viii, 89
Xenophon, 2, 107
Stoics, x, 3, 42, 55, 80, 130
Young, G. M., 83
Thales, 2
Themistocles, 16, 37 Zeno, 2
Uniform with this volume
and in the same series

Teach Yourself The British Constitution

Teach Yourself Ethics

Teach Yourself Good English

Teach Yourself to Express Yourself

The Teach Yourself

Guidebook to Western Thought

Teach Yourself: The Law

Teach Yourself Learning,

Remembering and Knowing

Teach Yourself Local Government

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 |
TEACH YOURSELF BOOKS
POLITICAL THOUGHT
INTRODUCTION
“What is the State and why should | obey it? What are
the proper limits ofits authority and when may | refuse |
to obey it? How is the authority of the State with which
| cannot dispense to be made compatible with the liberty
without which | am less than a man?”

HOW IT ALL BEGAN

The Greeks, Plato, Aristotle and the Organic View of

THE STATE AS MACHINE |

Thomas Hobbes; John Locke; The Utilitarians-Jeremy
Bentham, John Stuart Mill.
THE STATE AS ORGANISM
Jean Jacques Rousseau, Hegel, T. H. Green.

THE STATE AS, CEASS

Karl Marx, Lenin, Stalin.

CONCLUSION
“Much as we might long for one world in which there
will be a single moral and political system, we have to
admit that such a world does not yet exist and has little
prospect of existing in the immediate future. But,
remembering this, men may yet find reason for believing
that situations will not always be so strained and that
both the organic and the mechanistic views of the State
can exist peacefully side by side.”

118