POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

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POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

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Political Philosophies

By
CHESTER C. MAXEY

Miles C. Moore Professor of Political Science
Whitman College

*,J*

***

REVISED EDITION

.f;

. *

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

REVISED EDITION, COPYRIGHT, 1948,

BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

All rig/its reserved — no part of this book may be reproduced in
any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except
by a reviewer mho wishes to quote brief passages in connection
with a review written for inclusion in magazine or newspaper*

Printed in the United States of America

FIRST EDITION, COPYRIGHT, 1938
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

Reorinted May, 1949; January, 1950
Fifth Printing, 1956

Thus can the demigod, Authority ',

Make us pay down for our offence by weight.

The words of heaven; — on whom it will, it will;

On whom it will not, so: yet still 'tis just.

— Measure for Measure

FOREWORD TO FIRST EDITION

O arouse interest in political philosophies it is necessary
to reanimate dead men, forgotten issues, and fading ideas
in such a way as to make them vivid and real to mod-
ern minds. The method which, in my experience, has tended
to accomplish this result most consistently is embodied in this
book.

Repeated experimentation in presenting political philosophies to
groups of various kinds, including college classes, revealed that
four kinds of material invariably received closer attention and were
more largely remembered than any others. These were: (1) a lively
biographical sketch of the man behind the philosophy; (2) a concise
exposition of the nature and significance of his work; (3) a para-
phrased summary of his major writings and doctrines; and (4) a
few characteristic quotations in which he would speak for himself.
It was also found that, with a little ingenuity, these materials could
be woven into a context in which the philosophy would appear as
an integral part of an animated historical scene.

Continued use of this method ultimately produced a survey of
political philosophies which seemed sufficiently different and also
sufficiently useful to justify its transfer to the printed page. This
book is the outcome of that endeavor. The reader will quickly
note that there has been no attempt to write a critical treatise on
political theories or an exhaustive history of political thought. The
aim has been -merely to tell the story of the most illustrious political
thinkers and their works in such a way as to make them live again
in the conscious appreciation of the reader.

Few of the political classics are widely read to-day. Many, by
reason of archaisms of style and vocabulary, have become almost
unreadable.- Special students peruse them comprehendingly, but
the ordinary reader knows them not. It is hoped that the present
volume may contribute to a better understanding and a wider ap-
preciation of these immortal works of human genius. Readers
desiring to extend their acquaintance with the political classics will
find convenient citations in the footnotes and at the end of each
chapter. The chapter-end references also include many standard

VII 1

FOREWORD TO FIRST EDITION

commentaries and other works of a secondary nature which should
be helpful In further reading.

I am under a heavy obligation to the meticulous scholarship of
Dr. Edward McChesney Sait of Pomona College, whose patient
and kindly reading of the manuscript has corrected numerous errors
and prevented many others. I hasten to add, however, that the
defects and shortcomings of the book are entirely of my own making.

CHESTER C. MAXEY

August, 1938

FOREWORD TO SECOND EDITION

The primary purpose of this book, as was stated in the preface
to the first edition, is to serve as a text for undergraduate students.
The book embodies a method of presenting the subject of political
philosophies which I have found effective in my own teaching,
and which, during the past ten years, many of my professional col-
leagues have been kind enough to commend. For that reason, no
drastic changes have been made in the present edition. Minor
textual revisions have been made in Chapters I-XXVIII, but the
only chapters wholly rewritten are XXIX-XXXV, which deal
with the political ideologies of the twentieth century. World events
since 1938 obviously require a new presentation and a new evalua-
tion of contemporary political thought. In addition to the fore-
going changes, all of the chapter-end bibliographies have been
revised in order to include more recent reference material.

CHESTER C. MAXEY

July, 1948

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publishers
and authors for permission to reprint selections from their copy-
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ix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Rotisseau; and The Federalist by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and
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tianity by F. J. Foakes-Jackson; The History of the Christian Church to
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from Plato to the Present by R. H. Murray,

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^ History of Political Theories: Ancient and Mediaeval by W." A, Dunning;
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A History of political Theories from Rousseau to Spencer byrW* AT Dunning;
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dmt by Walter Lippmann; and Politics by Heinrich von Trcitschkc.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi

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CONTENTS

I. REASON AND AUTHORITY
II. OUT OF THE PAST
III. INCOMPARABLE ATHENS .
• IV. THE FIRST UTOPIAN
** V. THE FIRST POLITICAL SCIENTIST .
VI. ROMAN POLITICAL IDEAS
VII. "ViciSTi GALILEE"

VIII. LORDS TEMPORAL AND SPIRITUAL<^LS ^^^r-^r^lQS
STRANGE INTERLUDE ^-^y^V^^r^*" .

X. THE GREAT REVOLT

NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL* SOVEREIGNTY
XII. THE DIVINITY THAT DOTH* HEDGE A KING .

XIII. THE RIGHTS OF MAN

XIV. FOR GOD AND KING
XV. VOICES OF FREEDOM

XVI. SEVENTEENTH CENTURY INTELLECTUALS
.XVII. THE ENLIGHTENMENT H0^^1r£'^
XVIII. NATURE'S
f"XIX. REVOLUTION ,

XX. AMERICAN ECHOES ....

XXI. A CENTURY OF CHANGE . ^ ,,^-^l!>
XXII. THE UTILITARIANS*^^: """^
QCIII.'A NEW IDEALISM^

"H.

&XIV. UTOPIA AGAIN
XXV. HISTORICAL JURISTS

£XVL APPEAL TO SCIENCE . . . . . /
XVII. THE CHALLENGE OF PROLETARIANS tV*"*^*-.
£VIII. THE NEW NATIONALISM ....

£XIX. DISILLUSION

XXX. THE STREAMS OF DOCTRINE ....
£XXL THE FASCIST STATE
XXII. THE NAZI STATE .

CXIII. THE COMMUNIST STATE v"1 A\4 ' 663

•CXIV.* THE. DEMOCRATIC STATE ** 675

XXV. THE WORLD ORDER , • . 692

INDEX , . » ., 707

POL::T::CAL PHILOSOPHIES

CHAPTER I

REASON AND AUTHORITY

llEWILDERED by the contradictions of life, Oliver Alden,
t"le ^ero °f George Santayana's novel. The Last Puritan, was
even more bewildered by the study of philosophy. It was a
subject, he thought, that cc belonged to the shady side of the world:
it was all a chaos of talk, of argument, of opinion.'5 1 Political
philosophies were particularly disappointing. ccHe had read prodi-
giously in the major historians 'and philosophers, never with the
joy of finding a great revelation, but often with satisfaction and
always, he thought, with profit: because the wildest errors were
instructive if you understood how people had come to embrace
them. It was the living, however, that disappointed him most.
What the Germans called Wissenschqft wasn't knowledge but the-
ory; and this flow of theory, while it carried any amount of learning
in its controversial currents, was absolutely arbitrary in its direc-
tion. It moved with the Zeitgeist in the direction of a trade wind.
Yet this professional science, or fashionable theory, was proclaimed
in a surprising tone of authority, and with the expectation of brow-
beating the world into accepting it until the Zeitgeist and the path
of national consciousness should take another turn." l

Every student of political thought must have felt at times a simi-
lar sense of disillusionment. Much of what is called political philos-
ophy displays the qualities that Oliver Alden disliked. It is fre-
quently partisan and Jesuitical. Very often it does little more than
reflect the "direction of national consciousness, or more accurately,
perhaps, of ^national impulse. In many cases it is as deficient in
knowledge as jt is long on theory. Its most vital quality oftentimes
is a dogmatic eloquence and nothing more. Yet, granting all this,
it is none the less a fact that political philosophies are to-day and
have always been one of the great moving forces of human be-

1 Op. cit.j pp. 437, 509.

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

havior. What men have thought, or thought they thought, about
government has so vastly shaped their deeds that the political life
of mankind, without an understanding of Its underlying and moti-
vating ideologies, is largely barren of meaning. For the student
of history, political philosophies provide an indispensable key; for
the student of contemporary public affairs and the inquirer who
wishes to peer into the future, they provide an equally valuable
guide. History may not repeat itself, but in every age there is a
large carry-over of past political thinking and a heavy seeding of
ideas that will bear fruit in years to come,

The institution of government is one of the major facts of social
evolution. Nothing has Influenced the history of the human race
more decisively; nothing has challenged the human mind more
provocatively. In facing such an overwhelming reality as the in-
stitution of government men are inexorably impelled to inquiry
and rationalization; for government is a fact with respect to which
they must daily order and adjust their lives. Men think about
government because it thrusts itself upon them. They cannot avoid
thinking about it, if they think at all. And as they think, so to a
very large extent do they also act.

Affirmatively or negatively, and often in both ways, the members
of every social system are forced, by the very fact of being members
of a social order, to elect certain courses of behavior in relation to
government; and the courses thus adopted are often profoundly
influenced by prevalent political ideas and doctrines. Most persons
do not originate a political creed of their own., but accept, fre-
quently without real understanding, the ideas of others which seem
to be in harmony with their own particular interests, prejudices,
and points of view. For this reason political thinkers whose teach-
ings have been widely welcomed and followed must be classed
among the moulders of human destiny* Not less than soldiers,
statesmen, scientists, and religious leaders have they shaped the
course of human life. '

The authors of great political philosophies have been men of
every kind and condition, actuated by motives as vay led and com-
plex as men can have. Detached intellects, seeking truth for its
own sake, have not been numerous, and intellects unaffected by
personal circumstance and social experience have been even more
rare. The origin and nature of government, its forms and func-

REASON AND AUTHORITY

tions., powers and duties, means and ends have been viewed in. so
many different lights and treated with so little respect for reality
that truth has often been obscured and the actual meaning of
political phenomena sadly misconceived. But this has not dimin-
ished the importance of political philosophies in the processes of
history, nor does it detract from their value in explaining how mod-
ern government has come to be what it is.

II

Nobody invented government or consciously planned its intro-
duction into human society. Professor F. H. Hankins, a competent
student of the subject, is of the opinion that the question of exact
political origins is unanswerable in the present state of knowledge.1
He states, however, that modern political society is the culmina-
tion of three principal stages of social evolution — tribalism, feudal-
ism, and nationalism — and thaf the factors chiefly influencing
social development from first to last have been the feeling of kin-
ship, attachment to territory, social stratification, physical force,
and the consciousness of kind. It would be interesting to review
the technical arguments of anthropologists and sociologists as to the
precise way in which these or other factors worked together to
produce the institution of government, but it would be a confus-
ing digression. For our purpose the important thing is to realize
that somewhere along the road from savagery to civilization there
has been established among every people a system of regulative
authority which has come to be a distinct and dominant part of
the social whole.

Many students of political origins believe that permanent sys-
tems, of authority and social regulation first appeared in family or
kinship groups, and that these in the course of social development
were transformed into political institutions. Be that as it may, the
time came, in groups having competent leadership and authority,
when kinshipTcould not be the basic social tie. Success in husbandry,
trade, and war had multiplied their possessions, added to their
membership, ao.d extended the territories over which they could
assert dominion. With these changes came a more complex social
structure and a less personal relationship between the individual
and the group than could be accounted for by any principle of blood

1 An Introd Action to the Study of Society (rev. ed., 1935), p. 723.

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

kinship. Men began to feel a unity in the occupation of a common
territory, in the possession of identical or kindred languages, in the
worship of the same or similar gods, in the practice of common or
related customs, in the habitual associations of social and economic
intercourse, and particularly in subjection to a common authority
which regulated the most important social relationships.

Gradually there emerged the political group- -that is to say, a
group differentiated by a system of institutional life in which estab-
lished social authority, regularly organized and applied, was the
paramount cohesive force; in other words, a group having a recog-
nized system of government. This system of government was not,
in the earlier stages at least, particularly set apart as a unique and
isolated element of the social structure. In many instances it was
integrated with war organization, land ownership, religious prac-
tice, and other vital aspects of group life. But it was government
none the less, because it spoke ahd acted for the community as a
whole and wielded .authority as a social function.

It was but a short s^ep» to the next stage of political development.
The institution of government, whatever its original form and how-
ever linked with other communal processes,, made for greater soli-
darity and permanence in every phase of social existence aud tended
to beget a feeling that unity under a common authority was a dis-
tinctive characteristic of societal life. Settled habits of economic
and social existence furthered these tendencies, and gradually
there appeared populous and highly organized communities, per-
manently located in regions which they claimed as their own to
the exclusion of all others, and maintaining within these bounds an
institutional system of authority to which all must submit and give
allegiance as a matter of recognized social obligation. The first
communities of this kind seem to have been city-states springing
up in such favorable areas as the valleys of the Nile, the Tigris, and
the Euphrates rivers. In course of time conquest, alliance!, inter-
marriage, and various other consolidating factors wrought forth
larger entities, which absorbed scores of small communities and
exercised authority over imperial domains. With the establish-
ment and administration of political authority as a dominant
and decisive factor in community life came the first definite
emergence of special problems of government to engage the
human mind.

REASON AND AUTHORITY

III

Men undoubtedly lived under some sort of political authority
many hundreds of years before they began to glimpse the porten-
tous significance of this development in the institutional life. But
when simple societies grew into complex states and tiny com-
munities extended themselves into vast empires, thinking minds
were shaken into action. The tasks of government were greatly
multiplied, its scope enlarged, and its powers hugely increased.
Ancient customs, traditional forms, and long-accepted processes
were rudely disturbed and sometimes grossly violated. The iron
hand of authority appeared less in the aspect of communal usage
and ever more in the character of superimposed might. Reason
was forced to challenge the pretensions of such authority. Minds
that could conceive of justice, liberty, contract, property, and other
ideas resting on social morality and wisdom could not passively
resign themselves to the arrogant sway of unmitigated might.

In the moment when reason thus began to question the right of }
man to rule over man, political philosophy was born. History 1
knows not when or where the first political thinking was done, nor
has it a satisfactory record of early political ideas. As far back, how-
ever, as recorded history takes us we find conspicuous traces of
genuine political thinking and convincing evidence of its antiquity.
Some time in the early dawn of things political, government had
claimed justice as its affair, and thus had stirred inquiring minds to
address themselves to the problem of justice; had asserted authority
over one phase or another of domestic life, thus arousing considera-
tion of the question of political obligation against family obligation;
had intruded upon the domain of religion and thereby started the
perennial issue of ecclesiastical versus political authority; had up-
held or upset certain gradations of rank and class and in so doing
stirred up the hornet's nest of caste and privilege; had exacted
tribute frotn'its subjects and inaugurated thereupon the eternal
controversy over taxation.

How loi%, prior to the appearance of the state upon the stage
of history, intellectual effort had been directed upon such questions
we do not know. Long enough in some portions of the world, it
seems clear, for notable bodies of thought to have developed. In
the fragmentary survivals that have come down to us from the

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

literatures of the earliest civilizations we find evidence of great
social struggles and great battles of ideas. The funclamenlal issues
were in many instances strikingly similar to those which have pro-
duced the systematic political philosophies of later times, and the
ideas expressed in such literary remains as we have are indicative
of once-existent clusters of political thought; of genuinely significant
scope and content. The endeavor to rationalize political authority;
to explain and justify existing facts of political life or supply a basis
for a better political order; to theorize, ponder, and conclude,,
seems to have been coeval with the rise of systematic government.
In the speculations of political philosophers, rulers and rebels,
statesmen and politicians, reformers and reactionaries, and political
actors in every role have found shibboleths and doctrines appro-
priate to their wants and needs.

History contains no more vital story than that of the great politi-
cal philosophies, for nothing more truly reveals the soul of man in
any age than his thinking on the problem of government. Nothing
more accurately measures the fitness of mankind for that millennial
society which some have called the Kingdom of Heaven and others
the Republic of Utopia than the philosophies which reflect its
efforts to construct a framework of reason for the process of author-
ity.

REFERENCES

Barnes, H. E., Sociology and Political Theory (New York, 1924)*

Burns, C. D., Political Ideals (London, 1915), Chap, L

Ford, H. J., The Natural History of the State (Princeton, 1915).

Gettell, R. G., Problems in Political Evolution (Boston, 1915).

Gettell, R. G., History of Political Thought (New York, 1924), Chap, L

Goldenweiser, A. A., Early Civilization (New York, 1922).

Hankins, F. H., An Introduction to the Study of Society (rev, e.dL, New York,

1935), Chap. XV.

Linton, R., The Study of Man (New York, 1936), Chaps. IX-XIV.
Lowie, R. H., The Origin of the State (New York, 1927). -
MacLeod, W. C., The Origin and History of Politics (New York, 1931),
Oppenheimer, F., The State; Its History and Development Viewed Sociologically

(Indianapolis, 1914). , r

Sait, E. M., Political Institutions: A Preface (New York, 1938), Chaps, V-

VII.

CHAPTER II

OUT OF THE PAST

I

WESTERN civilization readily acknowledges its debt to the
parent cultures of Egypt and Asia for arts, crafts, letters,
sciences, and religions, but not for political ideas and
institutions. All of these pre-European civilizations,, according to
the view frequently expressed by European and American scholars,
were politically sterile; produced nothing in the realm of political
thought and practice worthy of serious attention. Professor W. W.
Willoughby, in his well-known treatise on ancient political theories,
accepted the common dicta of Hegel, Janet, Rawlinson, Muller,
and other classic authorities on ancient cultures to the effect that
the principal contribution made to political thought by the early
non-European civilizations was the imperial idea, which, "as they
exemplified it in practice, was one quite different from that which
the modern world knows." l

Even that dubious achievement is more than many Western
historians have been willing to ascribe to the political genius of
the precursors of European civilization. To them, as to Kipling,,
East was East and West was West and never the twain could meet
on a common ground of political ideology, because, forsooth, the
peoples of the East were not by nature political-minded, whereas
those of the West were by nature lavishly endowed with talents
for political thought and action. Wherefore, it followed from this
premise, the Western races were not only destined for world su-
premacy but also for unique preeminence in the philosophies of
politics.

Sweeping generalization of this sort is an untrustworthy vessel
for cruising scantly explored seas of human experience. The pro-
digious labors of archaeologists and historians during the past

A

quarter-century have dredged up facts which impeach the validity
of all former generalizations respecting the political life and thought
of the ancient world. It is no use pretending that Egyptian and
Asiatic political thought ever reached the high stage of systematic

i The Politic -d Theories of the Ancient World (1903), p. 20.

7

8 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

fructification that has distinguished the political thought of the
West: but it is no use pretending, cither, that the ancient prc-
European civilizations were unpolitical and produced neither po-
litical ideas nor principles of governmental practice. The closer
and fuller acquaintance with the civilizations of remote milleniiuns
which we now enjoy reveals an astonishing abundance of political
ideas among the peoples of those vanished eras, and shows that
both in thought and practice they anticipated, paralleled, and
possibly to some extent laid foundations for ideas which" subse-
quently appeared in European political consciousness. It was in
those ancient political systems that the human mind first came to
grips with the problem of government and first attempted to formu-
late ideas to account for the phenomena of politics and to systema-
tize the exercise of political authority.

II

The story of ancient Egypt is not the story of a kingdom, an
empire, a period, or a people; it is the story of a civilization lasting
more than three thousand years and encompassing within its span
of time many kingdoms, empires, periods, and peoples. Just when
that civilization dawned, and whether It was original or derived,
as has been suggested, from an older Mediterranean culture, we do
not know. We do know, however, that as far back as there Is any
trace of civilization on the marvelously fertile margins of the Nile
there are also traces of political life and political institutions.

In the most remote times of which there Is authentic record the
territory of the Nile Valley was inhabited by numerous local clans,
each giving allegiance to its own tribal chieftains and worshipping
its own local deities. Gradually, in the course of generations, these
petty and independent political entities underwent a process of
consolidation. Conquest doubtless played a potent part in effecting
this progressive amalgamation of microscopic political societies,
but some credit also must be given to such factors as tfie intermar-
riage of ruling families, the similarities of religious, beliefs and
usages, and voluntary federation for protection against Invaders
from the surrounding deserts. About 3500 B.C., according to the
more modern reckoning, the loose galaxy of tiny city-states which
fringed the banks of the life-giving river was definitely welded Into
a single body politic, which is sometimes known to history as the

OUT OF THE PAST

Old Kingdom. Thenceforward the story of Egypt revolves about
the rise and fall of dynasties., the growth and decay of empires, and
all the manifold mutations of political institutions. «

Thirty dynasties, more or less, are"^compnseomthe chronology
of Egypt from the founding of the Old Kingdom to the Alexandrian
conquest which marked the end of truly independent and Egyptian
Egypt. During those three thousand years Egypt was far from being
the stagnant theocracy of popular supposition. The succession of
dynasties was not simply a passing of power from monarch to mon-
arch, but was often a phase of convulsive political processes as full
of interest and significance as any the world has known. Egypt
had her struggles between central and local authority, her con-
flicts between crown and nobility, her quarrels between church
and state, her contests between classes and masses, her revolutions

and counter-revolutions, her tides of reform and waves of reaction,

j •

her creative statesmen and pettifogging politicians, her periods of
intelligent progress and her periods of dark reactionism. Indeed,
the more we learn of Egyptian civilization during the three mighty
milleniums when Egypt was the radiant center of civilization, the
more reason do we find for the belief that political ideas and politi-
cal processes were transcendently influential in the shaping of her
economic and social life.

Entirely too much emphasis has been given to the theocratic
externals .of Egyptian state organization and procedure. Profes-
sor Willoughby, for example, quotes with approval the ancient
saying of Diodoms that "The Egyptians respect and adore their
kings as the equals of the Gods53; and then proceeds to develop the
argument that "no discussions of the reasonableness or utility of
political authority in general nor considerations of the relative
merits of different forms of governmental control" could be ex-
pected under a regime where "Divine sanction was supposed to
support every exercise of political power.3"' x" In like manner the
priest, John of Salisbury, in 1159 A.D. argued that the Roman Em-
pire was a theocracy, because, as he said in his Policraticus, "Augus-
tus Caesar wa$ to such a degree subject to the priestly power of the
pontiffs that in order to set himself free from this subjection and
have no one at all over him, he caused himself to be created a pontiff
of Vesta, and thereafter had himself promoted to be one of the

1 Willoughby, op. cit., p. 19.

10 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

gods during his own life-time.3' 1 Modern historians do not so in-
terpret the imperialism of Octavian; but modern historians prove
the theocratic character of ancient Egypt by the same kind of evi-
dence that the mediaeval champion of papal supremacy used to
prove that the priestly power was superior to the secular in ancient
Rome. The superficial evidence of theocracy in Rome was over-
whelming, but we know that the Roman government was essen-
tially secular. The same may have been true in Egypt.

In reconstructing the institutional life of bygone peoples from
surviving fragments of their civilization it is easy to be mistaken.
A historian of the remote future, striving to recapture1: the essential
character of an American civilization nearly three thousand years
dead and having for evidential purposes such limited material as
inscriptions on the fragmentary remains of mouldering monu-
ments and public buildings, the miscellaneous plunder of rifled
graves and tombs, and the chance remains of onee great collections
of books and documents, might very plausibly interpret our present
political system as a thorough-going theocracy.

On surviving coins of our republic he would find on one side the
inscription "In God We Trust" and on the other the lovely profile
of a goddess called "Liberty"; in exhumed numbers of the, Congres-
sional Record he would discover that all proceedings in Congress
were prefaced by the prayer of an official chaplain; in resurrected
presidential proclamations and state papers he would find language
ascribing to God all the blessings of the American people in peace
and war, and beseeching the favor of God in all future enterprises;
in recovered law books and legal documents he would find that the
Holy Bible was used to swear in presidents, governors, witnesses in
court, and public functionaries generally; from similar sources he
would learn that the properties of churches and religious institutions
were exempt from taxation; and in surviving copies of school his-
tories, Sunday school leaflets, and other literature of the common
people he would discover that the American people were "taught to
believe that all of their presidents and other great public men were
devout Christians guided by the clergy in every thoaght and deed.
With such reiterated evidence of theocracy at hand our imaginary
archaeologist of time unborn might be easily persuaded that the
great American Republic had no genuinely secular government,

1 J. Dickinson, The Statesman's Book of John oj Salisbury (1927), p. 64,

f
i\

OUT OF THE PAST 11

* >

We who live under American institutions smile at the thought of
such a fantastic interpretation of our political system; we know that
the average American thinks of government not as a divinely or-
dained and managed institution but as a thoroughly secular affair
with very practical bearings upon mundane matters of property,
business, and personal freedom. May it not be possible that the
ancient Egyptians would have found similar amusement in the
thought that remote posterity might misread the theocratic aspects
of their'system of government? Government in old E|y&pt was not so
different in its practical bearing upon everyday affairs from govern-
ment to-day. By means of government the Egyptians validated land
titles, settled boundary works, regulated water rights, conserved na-
tional resources against the peril of famine, constructed public build-
ings, preserved order, punished crimes, maintained armies and
navies, levied and collected taxes, and performed scores of similar
functions in common with the governments of the present time.

Religion may have been a somewhat more potent force in shaping
governmental policies and regulating governmental processes in
Egypt than among the Greeks, the Romans, and later European
peoples, though it would be difficult to prove conclusively that such
was the case. The Egyptian religions did not doom the masses to
enforced and slavish obedience to the will of a despotic theocracy
any more than Christianity has done at various times in the history
of European countries. Bushels of florid adjectives have been em-
ployed in imaginary descriptions of the brutal drafting of the
multitudes to build the great tombs and temples which Egypt has
left to the world; but some modern authorities say there is consider-
able evidence that much of this construction work was done in sea-
sons of inundation, when all farm work was suspended on account
of the benevolent overflow of the Nile and the idle population came
gaily to the task of public building in a spirit of holiday and ad-
venture. The Egyptian peasant of the olden times was not ground

*% &

under the heel of oppression any more than the fellah of to-day.
He toiled mightily, of course, and knew not the meaning of politi-
cal freedo'na; btit Egyptian officialdom, judged by the standards of
the time, was fairly benevolent, just, and wise; and the Egyptian
serf, despite the exactions of the tax-gatherer and the landlord,
sang and danced and feasted as men in health and security have
done since the birth of time. <J

12 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

The political Ideology of ancient Egypt has not been as well
preserved as Its religious ideology, for the very obvious reason that
only temples and tombs have resisted the ravages of time. But the
few political ideas which have sifted down through the ages are elo-
quent in praise of noble principles and ideals of government and
show much evidence of reflection upon the reasonableness and
utility of political authority. The mighty Horemheb, dynamic
militarist who made an end of the chaos resulting from a generation
of religious controversy under his immediate predecessors., TiUankh-
amon and Akhaton, inscribed his formulary on the imperishable
stone of a stela at Karnak: "My majesty Is legislating for Egypt
to prosper the life of her inhabitants"— a doctrine to which Jeremy
Bentham and the English Utilitarians could have subscribed with
enthusiasm. And being a doer,pf the word as well as a prodaimer,
Horemheb proceeded to put his Ideal into operation by attacking
that thorniest of all political problems, tax administration. He in-
troduced new tax regulations, standardized the revenues to be col-
lected, and provided drastic penalties for extortion and bribery on
the part of tax collectors — a program which savors not of theocratic
absolutism but of enlightened political administration.

The Egyptian legal code has not come down to us, but many
of the writings which have survived are so larded with admoni-
tions to public officials to exercise patience, maintain impar-
tiality, and do justice that it is difficult to escape the feeling that
Egyptian political thinking reached high stages of idealism. A good
example of the standards of justice enjoined upon the officialdom
of the middle dynasties is found in the famous Precepts of Plah~
Hotep, which must have been a popular and widely read treatise
in its day because five copies have been recovered. It purports to
consist of the sage sayings of an old vizier, wearied by public life
and seeking permission of the king to allow his son, after due in-
struction, to succeed to the vizierate, "If thou hast, as a leader,"
says Ptah-Hotep, "to decide on the conduct of a greal number of
men, seek the most perfect manner of doing so that Jtjiy own con-
duct may be without reproach. Justice is great, mvariablc, and
assured. ... To throw obstacles in the way of the laws is to open
the way to violence, ... If thou art a leader of peace, listen to
the discourse of the petitioner. Be not abrupt with him; that would
disturb him; that would trouble him. . . . The way to obtain a

OUT OF THE PAST 13

i — _,_,

clear explanation is to listen with kindness. . . . Let thy thoughts
be abundant^ but let thy mouth be under restraint, and thou shalt
argue with the great." 1 In the same spirit as these humane coun-
sels of the old vizier is a charge supposed to have been delivered
by a king upon the appointment of a vizier: "Forget not justice.
It is an abomination of god to show partiality. This is the teaching.
Therefore do thou accordingly. Look upon him who is known to
thee like him who is unknown to thee; and him who is near the king
like him is afar. Behold, a prince who does this, and he shall endure
in this place." l

Systematic political philosophies Egypt probably did not develop.
But she cannot be denied credit for generating great political ideas.
What the world owes to the political thought of Egypt we can never
know. In connection with the temple at Heliopolis was a college
to which, tradition says, came Solon, Thales, Pythagoras, Plato,
and other great masters of Greek thought to study the wisdom of
the ancient Egyptians, and whence they are said to have derived
many of the resplendent doctrines of Greek philosophy. We may,
if we choose, dismiss this as one of the romantic fictions of history;
but we cannot doubt that the Greek world and many and frequent
contacts with the great mother civilization of the Nile or that Greek
thought borrowed generously from the store of ideas accumulated
during Egypt's three thousand years of political grandeur,

III

Of the political life and thought of the lusty civilizations which
flourished in the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers between
the years 3000 B.C. and 500 B.C. we know even less than of the politi-
cal aspects of Egyptian civilization. Historians tell us with impres-
sive unanimity that the city kingdoms of the Sumerians and the
successive empires of the Babylonians, Assyrians, and Chaldeans
were military despotisms resting upon theocratic principles quite
uncongenial to political thinking. We shall not quarrel with this
opinion, though we may doubt whether the work of reclaiming the
long-burifed records of the ancient civilizations of the Two Rivers
has gone far enough to justify final conclusions.

To suppose that civil government would be a secondary and rela-

1 Quoted in I. A. Wing and others, The Building of Our Social Structure (1928), pp, 28-
30.

14 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

tively inconsequential factor in the intellectual activities of peoples
as highly organized and as deeply involved in political processes
of life as were these old Semitic social systems is hardly more plaus-
ible than would be a similar supposition in regard to the Middle
Ages in Europe, which, despite their theological preoccupations
and theocratic tendencies, produced such notable political treatises
as the Policraticus of John of Salisbury, the DC Rcgimim Princifmm of
Thomas Aquinas, the Defensor Pads of Marsiglio of Padua, and I he
De Monarchia of Dante. Government in the ancient Mesopctumian
empires had its armies to raise, its foreign relations to carry cm, its
irrigation canals to construct and maintain, its highways to builcl,
its criminal laws to enforce, its commercial affairs to regulate, its
property rights to validate and protect, its civil wrongs to settle, its
taxes to collect as well as its ecclesiastical functions to perform.
The king, it is true, did claim sacerdotal prerogatives of the highest
character and did succeed in clothing his secular activities with
religious sanctions; but so did Roman emperors once upon a time,
and Russian czars, German kaisers, and, if the records be not amiss,
French and English kings of pro-revolutionary vintage,

In spite of all theocratic pretensions on the part of royalty and
prelacy, and in spite of popular acquiescence therein, the business
of government is so overwhelmingly of the earth earthy that its
secular characteristics will prevail over all efforts to relegate them
to the background. Striking confirmation of this is found in the
famous code attributed to Hammurapi, the monarch who ruled in
Babylon about 2100 B.C. The renowned laws of Hammurapi cannot
be regarded as royal fiats pure and simple. As Professor Breasted
says, "The great king finally saw how necessary it was to bring into
uniformity all the various and sometimes conflicting laws and busi-
ness customs of the land. He therefore collected all the older written
laws and usages of business and social life, and arranged them sys-
tematically. He improved them or added new laws where his own
judgment deemed wise, and he then combined them -info a great
code or body of laws." * From the nature of its origin this code
must be viewed as a social product, embodying the/csults of many
generations of political experience, usage, and thought. If religion
absorbed so much of the thought of the Babylonian people as is
sometimes assumed, their legal code should bear little evidence of

1 J. H. Breasted, Ancient Times (1916), pp. 130-131.

OUT OF THE PAST 15

secular notions. But consider, if you will, a few random selections
from the code of Hammurapi: *

"If any man has borne false witness in a trial, or has not established
the statement that he has made, if that case be a capital trial, that man
shall be put to death. If any man has borne false witness in a civil law
case, he shall pay the damages in that suit.

"If a patrician has stolen an ox, sheep, ass, pig or ship, whether from
a temple or a house, he shall pay thirtyfold. If he be a plebeian, he
shall return tenfold. If the thief cannot pay, he shall be put to death.

"If a man has committed highway robbery and has been caught,
that man shall be put to death. If the highwayman has not been caught,
the man that has been robbed shall state on oath what he has lost and
the city or district governor in whose territory or district the robbery
took place shall restore to him what he lost.

"If a man has taken a wife and has not executed the marriage con-
tract, that woman is not his wife. If a^man has divorced his wife, who
has not borne him children, he shall pay over to her as much money as
was given for her bride-price anfl the marriage portion which she
brought from her father's house, and so shall divorce her. If a man has
married a wife, and she has borne him. children, and that woman has
gone to her fate, her father shall lay no claim to her marriage portion.
Her marriage portion is her children's only."

Does it seem probable that a society in which law and political
authority were viewed as incontrovertible expressions of the will of
the gods — gods more irrational, malign, and immoral than the
men who worshipped them — does it seem probable, we repeat,
that the legal code of such a people would impose no higher penalty
for rifling a temple than for stealing from a private house, would
impose heavier duties of restitution upon offenders of the patrician
class than upon the common people, would compel public officials
(presumably passive instruments in the hands of the gods) to reim-
burse from their own pockets private citizens who may have suf-
fered loss through the failure of the officials to catch the real of-
fender, or would safeguard the property rights of a divorced wife or
of the children of a deceased wife? Could a people devoid of all
conception of civil justice or of the reasonableness and utility of
political authority develop such a body of laws?

IV

The most complete literature left by any of the ancient peoples
is that fascinating compendium of Hebrew writings which the

16 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

Christian world has chosen to lump together as the Holy Bible. It
is to be regretted that the average Christian reverences the 'Bible
too deeply to understand it. Obsessed with a belief in its sacro-
sanct character, he fails to appreciate the superb historical, socio-
logical, and literary qualities of the Great Book. Few Biblical
scholars of any repute to-day hold the Bible to be the Word of God
in the sense that God wrote it or even dictated the writing of it;

*

but that the Bible contains the literary remains of one of the most
gifted and articulate races that ever attained civilization is a fact
too patent for even the most rabid skeptic to deny. Within the pur-
view of its sixty-six books may be found history, biography, philos-
ophy, poetry, folklore, romance, and even erotica of matchless
power and beauty. But where are its political treatises? The com-
mon assumption is that there^are none; and, speaking strictly, that
is true.

The Hebrew people are said to have lacked political genii us and
to have been motivated chiefly by religious ideas and aspirations.
The Israelite state is said to have been an Oriental theocracy resting
not upon the will of its rulers or of its people, but upon the will of
Jehovah, who is described by Willoughby as "the legislative source
of the basic principles by which society was bound together and
controlled." 1 Yet it is recorded in the First Book of Samuel 2 that
the elders of Israel, not content with Jehovah's management of
their temporal affairs, "gathered themselves together, and came
unto Samuel [Jehovah's personal representative] unto Ramah, and
said unto him, Behold, thou art old, and thy sons walk not in thy
ways: now make us a king to judge us like all the nations. But
the thing displeased Samuel, when they said make us a king to
judge us. And Samuel prayed unto the Lord. And the Lord said
unto Samuel, Hearken unto the voice of the people in all that they
say unto thee: for they have not rejected thec, but have rejected
me, that I should reign over them- . . , Now therefore hearken
unto their voice : Howbeit yet protest solemnly unto tftcfii and shew
them the manner of the king that shall reign over tjxcm," Samuel
did as he was told, and warned the people of their Mly with a word-
picture of monarchial tyrannies which should have sent a shudder
up the spine of every father in Israel. Nevertheless, the Scripture
says, "the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel; and they

1 Op' ""'•> P- 24" 2 1 Samuel, vli, be, x.

OUT OF THE PAST 17

said. Nay; but we will have a king over us; that we also may be like
other nations; and that our king may judge us, and go out before
us, and fight our battles."

Now when Samuel reported back to the Lord how intractable
the children of Israel were about this king business and asked for
further instructions, Jehovah, regardless of his previous declara-
tion that this would be a repudiation of his rule, took a very com-
plaisant and urbane attitude, and "told Samuel in his ear the day
before Saul came, saying . . . thou shalt anoint him to be cap-
tain over my people, Israel, that he may save my people out of the
hand of the Philistines : for I have looked upon my people, because
their cry is come unto me."

Is this not a most astounding narrative to find in the literature of
a people said to have taken their law and government directly
from the mouth of the Most High? What manner of god must
have been this Jehovah, to bow to popular clamor and give his
precious people a kingly government that was destined to lead them
straight to the altars of strange and alien gods? Did ever an Egyp-
tian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Hindu, Greek, or Roman god make
such a concession to the principle of vox populi vox Dei? Was ever a
real theocracy founded upon such affable deference to popular will
on the part of regnant deity? The Scriptures, to be sure, maintain
the fiction that the kings of Israel were merely temporal agents
of Jehovah, but the vehement thunderings of the prophets down
the ages show how empty that fiction was and how completely
the people and their rulers were swayed by ideas of a different
sort.

Political motivation was an unquenchable element in Hebrew
psychology. No catastrophe, not even captivity, exile, and utter
loss of their homeland could extinguish the passionate will to power
of the Jewish race. In the face of adversities such as utterly annihi-
lated Greek and Roman political consciousness, the Jews preserved
not only tteir racial and religious unity but also their almost fanati-
cal belief in the ultimate restoration of the Jewish state. The Messi-
anic expectation of the Jews were certainly as much political as
religious, and the political promises they held forth were undoubt-
edly among the chief reasons for the credibility attached to them
by an exceptionally incredulous race. The average Jew, and prob-
ably also the average Jewish priest and prophet, never for a mo-

18 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

- .— _,.._,. - _- TI-- L- ,_ _ — - II ' I I 'I I— '-""• ""• -^~~^-°°°°™«"^l**^— ^^^^^"^"°"" «' ' "•' ' h ' ' " ** 'in ,,,|rtj

ment doubted that the Messiah would establish a political regime
that would surpass the power and glory of all kingdoms of the
earth. The Messianic prophecies are full of that sort of vaticination,
"And in that day," intones the majestically eloquent Isaiah, u there
shall be a root of Jesse which shall stand for an ensign of the people;
to it the Gentiles shall seek; and his rest shall be glorious. And it
shall come to pass in that day, that the Lord shall set; his hand
again the second time to recover the remnant of his people, which
shall be left, from Assyria, and from Egypt, and from Pathros, and
from Gush, and from Elam, and from Shinar, and from Haxnath,
and from the islands of the sea. And he shall set up an ensign for
the nations, and shall assemble the outcasts of Israel, and gather
together the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth,35
Then in language of sublime and awful eloquence the prophet
foretells the destruction of all the kingdoms of the world save Israel,
which "shall blossom and bud, 'and fill the face of the world with
fruit.35 To a people familiar with the splendors of Asiatic imperial-
ism, a people living on the high road between Egypt and Assyria
and Babylonia, a people who had suffered oppression and desola-
tion at the hands of those mighty monarchies such words were defi-
nite political promises. Little wonder they had scant welcome for
a Messiah who came saying, "My kingdom is not of this world."

No distinct literature of political thought, in fact no single treatise
of exclusively political nature was ever produced by the ancient
Hebrews; but the Bible is a well-stored magazine of political ideas,
So abundant and varied are the political ideas which make appear-
ance in its pages, so typical are the factors in its political subject-
matter, and so weighty is the authority accorded to it by Christian
peoples that political controversialists have found it a never-failing
source of substantiation for every kind of doctrine, The Bible has
been used to support the doctrine of divine right of kings and to
disprove it, to justify democracy and to subvert it, to vindicate the
temporal supremacy of the church and to dispute "ftf to uphold
religious liberty and to deny it, to defend slavery ap4 to oppose it,
to condone revolution and to condemn it, to champion Communism
and to assail it, to sanction Prohibition and to combat it, And,
being what it is— the assembled literature of a many-sided and agile-
minded people— the Bible has generously furnished ideas for all
protagonists.

OUT OF THE PAST 19

•

V

The Chinese are Oriental people whom the West has likewise
credited with few political ideas of any consequence. "While it is
the habit of writers generally/' says Senator E. D. Thomas, "to
give China, as Dunning and Janet do, high place in the science of
ethics and morality, the slight considerations given to political
China are buried in such terms as 'Oriental Empire,' or in stress-
ing the morals, ethics, religion, and personal habits of propriety,
they are forgotten. . . . Several writers give brief but worthy
mention to Confucius and Mencius. But the moral and ethical
teachings of these great teachers are so heavily stressed that the
ordinary student of political theories assumes that the field needs
no further investigation." 1

Senator Thomas' own timely arsd valuable book on Chinese
Political Thought bids us revise ouj: judgments of Chinese political
institutions and ideas. To dismiss China as an Oriental empire in
which political thought could not flourish betrays as little compre-
hension of the true inwardness of Chinese political life as to deny
that England has a constitution because it is not found embodied
in a single written instrument. Although there is not, according to
Thomas, a sharp distinction in Chinese political thought between
political and moral ideas, "the political duty is the supreme duty.
The prince's or the subject's duty to the State is made a moral duty
as it undoubtedly has been wherever patriotism has developed.
This has made for political morality, which is the highest of all
moralities in the eyes of the Chinese when there is a conflict between
duty to the State and any of the other many duties which propriety
demands." *

The great thinkers of China did not neglect political thought,
nor were political ideas alien to the Chinese people. Confucius
was much occupied with public affairs and held several important
public offices during his long career. He taught that man should
be brought into harmony with nature through education and the
proper organisation of government. Government he viewed not
as an institution "resting upon the absolute will of a divinely ordained
emperor, but as one resting upon natural reason and sound virtue.
In this doctrine he was essentially at one with Socrates, Plato, and
scores of political thinkers who followed in their train.

1E, D. Thomas, Chinese Political Thought (1927), pp. 7-9.

20 POLITICAL PHILOSOFU1 KS

Lao Tzu, the Old Philosopher-, agreed with Confucius thai reason
and virtue in conformity with the great principles of nature are the
essential cornerstones of the institution of government, but fell that
the Confucian system of striving to altain the ideal through the
formulation and observance of a multitude of meticulous rules of
propriety was a mistake. A true prototype of Rousseau, Lao Tzu
contended that man must be divested of all the artificial encum-
brances of civilization and return to that ideal state: of natural being
from which he had emerged in the building of civilisations* In this
Arcadian Natumich it was believed that reason, virtue*,, and good
government were one and inseparable.

MenciuS; like his revered master, Confucius, was an exponent of
the doctrine of natural reason and virtue as the basic ingredients
of the state. Said he: "The Emperor Slum [mythical emperor-sage
of Chinese antiquity] was but a man, and I also a num. . » , He
who exerts himself will also become such as Shun was,'1 (Jhuang
Tzu, a renowned disciple of Lao Txu, rebelled against the con-
ventionalism and artificiality of the Confucian system, and went so
far as to condemn all government. An institution,, he argued,
which imposed restraints on nature or created arbitrary standards
of conduct was contrary to the great scheme of things— a doctrine
which libertarian thinkers of all ages have embraced with ardor,

The Chinese mind seems never to have accepted the. notion that
political authority was of supernatural derivation or that; the em-
peror was in any unique way a sacerdotal personage. Regicide and
revolution were not only practiced, but were justified, and some-
times extolled, by the philosophers. Mencius declares that a ruler
who departs so far from the canons of reason and virtue as to be
worthy of death is in no wise different from an ordinary person.
Not only is the ruler to be held responsible for the quality of govern-
ment, but he may be brought to account by his subordinates, Con-
fucius, though opposed in theory to regicide and revolution, cites
without disapproval a number of instances in Chinese "history where
kings and rulers were put to death, , ,

The Chinese conception of imperial authority Appears to hav<
been that the emperor was a super-patriarch, the great and bcnevo
lent father of his people; and when he ceased to be that, papula
disapproval might assert itself against him, Confucius, who prob
ably reflects the Chinese political mind as accurately as any of th

OUT OF THE PAST 21

Chinese thinkers lays down in his Analects the following essentials
for a sound and proper government: (1) to provide adequately for
the economic needs of the people; (2) to maintain a military force
sufficient to sustain the existence of the people; (3) to retain the
support and confidence of the people.

The ideal of an "economically prosperous and flourishing people
was ever present in Chinese political thought. The first duty of a
ruler, say all the sages, is to prosper his people and conduct his
government so as to promote the welfare of all. "The earth provides
enough for all. If all do not get it, it is the fault of the government."1
And still we hear that paternalism is a modern idea !

Though the imperial government of China was autocratic in
form and often in practice, Chinese society has ever been essentially
democratic in structure. The autocracy of the emperor was more
that of a pater jamilias than of a Divinely sanctioned despot. True,
the emperor ruled as the Son of Heaven, but, be it remembered, as
the son of a Chinese and not of a Christian heaven. Heaven to the
Chinese mind was not the mystic abode of an invisible and unap-
proachable God, but a system of natural laws and relationships
expressing the Perfect Mind and the Perfect Will. The state was an
integral and indispensable part of this system, and at the apex of
the state stood the emperor; but his authority was not supported
by the mandates of God, but by the proximity of his conduct to
that exalted fatherhood which he symbolized and was supposed
to realize in the social process. In the vast and sublimated family
of which the emperor was deemed to be the paternal head, the
voice and will of the people could be felt and might at times out-
weigh the voice and will of the emperor.

VI

Hindu political thought has received perhaps shabbier treatment
at the hands of Western commentators than the political thought
of any other Oriental people. Most of our information about
Hindu political institutions and ideas has emanated from sources
which could scarcely achieve a detached view of the political side
of Indian life and character. The people of India have been repre-
sented as being so intensely preoccupied with fantastic and stupe-
factive religions as to be inherently unfitted for political responsi-

1 E. D. Thomas, op. cit.3 p. 70.

22 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

•

bilities, and the political history of India., from the accounts of
Western writers, would seem to be a delirious talc, full of the sound
and fury of desolating civil wars and bloody religious struggles,, but
signifying nothing except sordid nusgovcrnmenl until the British
took hold and put things in order.

To understand India and Indian political history one must apply
to his eyes corrective lenses through which lie may see certain facts
not generally comprehended outside of India,. The first is that India
neverjwasji single country and never kncw^tho ine{umjyg of religious,
economic, IsooaT^o^^ Likellurope, it luis" afways

"I HawtX* *****'*"***•', «»^«««W.«*™»»»»«»W-, WKW/w,^,,, w,**!** /

btrrra^vast continental area (the size and population being about
the same as those of Europe minus Russia) made up of many races,
religions, and political entities. The second corrective fact to be
noted is that India has had mudi the same sort of history as Kurone

rp -I . t 1 . •"T'-x.™^-"''^^ — """^j^,,^^— """" "7""~» .«-'••"".."«- „ J „„„„,.*

1 akmg the history of Europe as a wh<>le, which is the wliyl^KslmiiH
take the history of India, one may find in any corresponding period
of time in Europe just about as many bloody wars, dynastic strug-
gles, and religious broils as may be found in India, The third cor-
rective fact to be observed is that the backwardness of India as
compared with Europe is of rdativ^fTEm^

r i ! •ittAi. x*"'""1"""^,^^ n ' J

from about the middle of the nineteenth century, when (lie Western
world began to reap the full fruits of the Industrial Revolution.

It was the misfortune of India to be in a state of disorder not un-
like that of Europe during the Thirty Years' War or the recent
World War at a time when powerful European states embarked
upon world-wide programs of economic imperialism. Being better
organized at the time than any of the countries of India and, thanks
to the Industrial Revolution, far better implemented, the Euro-
pean powers were able to overrun India almost at will, much as
the invading Huns and Moors had been able to do in Europe in
earlier centuries. Superior organization, wealth, and technological
equipment reduced India to dependency with quite th£,samc easy
success as, at various periods in European history, they might have
reduced Europe to dependency had there been a sufficiently potent
and aggressive non-European power seeking a foofcold'in Europe.

The ensuing dependence of India should not, therefore, blind us
to the fact that the political history of India is more ancient than
that of Europe and not unfruitful in political ideas. During its many
centuries of political independence the Indian continent witnessed

OUT OF THE PAST 23

the rise and decline of states of every conceivable form and magni-
tude, from tiny village commonwealths to mighty empires com-
parable in area, population, and power with any the world has
known. "The Hindu Pericleses, Caesars, Justinians, Charlemagnes
and Frederic Barbarossas,55 says Eenoy Kumar Sarkar, "could
easily challenge comparison with their western peers on their own
terms.55 l

The Maurya Empire of Chandragupta and Asoka in the fourth
and third centuries, B.C., was considerably more extensive than the
present British Empire in India, and was in its day one of the great
states of the world. It carried on diplomatic relations with Egypt
and the states of Greece and was respected by them as an empire
of world stature. TEelErnpire of the Hindu-Tartars in the north and
northwest of India in the first and second centuries of the Christian
era was also a state of world rai}k, maintaining diplomatic rela-
tions with the rulers of China on the one hand and with those of
Rome on the other. The southern empire of the Andhras, B.C. 200
to A.D. 250, was another Indian state of great power and magnitude/
which enjoyed equal relations with the leading contemporary states
of Europe and Asia. So one might continue the enumeration, nam-
ing one by one the great kingdoms and empires which have made
the history of India rich and varied in political experience.

It would seem incredible that such long-continuing, far-sweeping,
and widely, diverse political processes should produce no political
thought. cc Unfortunately,53 to quote Mr. Sarkar again, "the impres-
sion has gone abroad since the days of Max Miiller that the litera-
ture of the Hindus deals mainly with vague idealism, unpractical
mysticism, and other-worldly absurdities — at best metaphysical
philosophy. Besides, a few stray passages from one or two ancient
Hindu authors have been erroneously taken to be the watchword
of all Hindu thought. Sanscrit literature is in reality the literature
of every human activity from cooking, dancing, painting, cattle-
breeding, gardening, and grooming to erotics, thieving, burglary,
warfare, navigation, and manufacture of military implements.
Needless to observe, political and socio-legal treatises occupy a
great deal of space.5' 2

XB. K. Sarkar, "Hindu Political Philosophy," Political Science Quarterly, Vol. xxxiii
(1918), pp. 482-500.
2 Ibid., p. 488.

24

'Mr. Sarkar, in the essay just quoted, informs us that writings on
political theory and practice are to be found in nearly every branch
of Sanscrit literature, and that there are a number of outstanding
special treatises on politics and public administration which are
comparable in every respect with those which adorn the, literatures
of European countries. Not many of these, however, have been
translated into English, and none of them are well known to the
western world.

Among the leading doctrines of Hindu political thought, as
condensed by Mr. Sarkar, are the following: (1) the idea that rulers
are not all men elevated to high position in order that they may
protect the interests of the people; (2) the idea that it is the duty of
rulers to consult the people, keep in touch with their affairs, and
consider matters brought forward by thorn; (3) the, idea that it is
the duty of the people to cooperate in the administration of govern-
ment, obey the laws, and lend aid in their enforcement; (4) the idea
that the proper functions of government include any activity which
may be expedient according to social needs; (5) the idea that
rulers should be guided and controlled by the advice of ministers
and counselors; (6) the idea that the kingship is a secular institu-
tion, subject to constitutional limitations and checks imposed
through the ministry and people; (7) the idea that the governed
have a right to resist and overthrow tyrannical government; (8) the
idea that military service and valor are of supremo importance in
regulating and controlling the processes of government; (9) the
idea that warfare should be conducted in as humane and chival-
rous a manner as possible; (10) the idea that; the first acquisition of
man through the state, and therefore perhaps the primary object of
government, is property; (11) the idea that the second acquisition
of man through the state is dharma, a comprehensive Sanscrit term
embracing the concepts of law, justice, duty, and virtue rolled into
one.

This concept of dharma is most interesting. It is tKc"philosophic
fructification of danda, which may be taken to me/an the physical
potency of the state to employ coercive means of Effecting its will
By danda, out of political society, is begotten dharma in the sense of
positive law, and also in the sense of natural law, moral law, and
ethical jurisprudence. Out of the same wedlock is begotten dharma
in the sense of theoretical and practical justice, and also in the

OUT OF THE PAST 25

•

sense of civic duty and political virtue.1 The ability of the Hindu
mind to spin out so elastic and many-sided a political concept
argues a very considerable facility of political imagination and no
little faculty of political invention. It cannot be said that Hindu
political ideas have had any great influence upon Western political
thought, but the extent of their influence upon the past and present,
and possibly upon the future, political life of India no Western mind
is wholly; competent to measure.

REFERENCES

Breasted, J. H., Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt (New

York, 1912).

Frazer, J. G.3 Indian Thought Past and Present (London, 1898).
Gettell, R. G., History of Political Thought*(New York, 1924).
Ghoshal, U., History of Hindu Political Theories (London, 1923).
Johns, C. H. W., Babylonian and Assyrian Laws., Contracts, and Letters (New

York, 1904).

Sarkar, B. K., Political Institutions and Theories of the Hindus (Leipzig, 1922).
Thomas, E. D., Chinese Political Thought (New York, 1927).
Wallis, L., Sociological Study of the Bible (Chicago, 1912).
Willoughby, W. W., The Political Theories of the Ancient World (New York,

1903).
Wing, I. A., and others, The Building of Our Social Structure (Chicago, 1928).

1 B. K. Sarkar, " Hindu Theory of Property, Law, and Social Order," International
Journal 'of Ethics, Vol. xxx (1920), pp. 311 ff.

CHAPTER TIT

INCOMPARABLE ATHENS

1

IN the history of political ideas the place of Athens is unique,
From this incomparable City of the Violet Crown cmanuled the
world's first systematic political philosophies, and also many of
the world's most dynamic and permanently vital political ideas,
Hellenic culture was universal throughout the Mediterranean lit-
toral; Hellenic art and literature flourished wherever Greeks made
their abode; Hellenic commerce encircled the sous; Hellenic swords
were everywhere unsheathed'; Hellenic institutions of government
spread to hundreds of cities in Europe,, Asia, and Africa; but Hel-
lenic political philosophies flowered almost exclusively in Athens.
In the realm of political thought the Athenian mind was the sover-
eign mind not only of Greece but of all antiquity, and, some would
say, of all time.

It was not by accident., nor yet perhaps by reason of innate quali-
ties of mind that the Greek peoples inhabiting the tiny Plain of
Attica came to be politically sensitized beyond any other aggregation
of people the world has ever known. The conquering Aryan nomads
who came pouring into the region of the Aegean about 1500 B,C.
had few positive qualities betokening political fertility, but on
the other hand they had equally few encumbrances and inhibi-
tions. At the time of their first appearance upon the scene of their
subsequent preeminence they were nothing more than a colloca-
tion of racially related tribes of roving herdsmen. Such govern-
> ment as they had was inchoate and unsolidified. Owing to their
nomadic habits of life they had escaped the 'formalizing and con-
gealing effects of the temple-state and priest-king stagja of political
development. Kings and priests they had, to be sure; but such
kings and such priests! Their kings had no palaces; n$ courts, no
lands, and no authority save as leaders in battle. And their priests
formed no hierarchy , had few supernatural attributes, and exerted
little influence in temporal affairs.

Social organization was primarily familial. Each head of family
enjoyed patriarchal prerogatives within his own sept and, if his

26

INCOMPARABLE ATHENS 27

family were of sufficient importance, a certain titular prestige
throughout the tribe. In time of war the head of one of the great
families became a sort of general in chief, but lesser generals were
nupecous and often demonstrated their independence, like Achilles,
by sulking in their tents. Greater and lesser families — nobles and
commons — were to be found in each tribe, but these were not
sharply differentiated or definitely set apart.

Having no political antecedents, no sacred traditions to main-
tain, no* long-established and complicated institutions to perpetu-
ate, the Greek tribesmen were able to accommodate themselves to
almost any set of conditions. Upon penetrating the Aegean penin-
sula they found a full-grown but easily conquerable civilization,
and simply moved in and took possession. Here were magnificent
cities— Cnossus, Tiryns, Mycenae — walled towns, cultivated fields,
industries, houses of trade, temples, and mystic religious rites, and
elaborate social and political usages. As military masters the
barbaric Aryan raiders settled down upon this pre-Hellenic (prob-
ably Semitic) social order and proceeded to absorb civilization.
Not, however, as slavish copyists, but as learners unhampered by
the past and prone to innovation and experiment. By this contact
with an old civilization their political development was greatly
speeded up, but not by the wholesale adoption of what they
found in Greece. They retained their embryonic political institu-
tions and rapidly developed them to meet new conditions.

Had the story of Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria, or Persia been re-
peated, there would have been a gradual consolidation and coales-
cence of city-states and tribal domains to form at last a vast Greek
empire. But this did not occur until after the apogee of Greek
civilization, when Macedonian might forged a fitful hegemony
destined to expire almost in birth. Topography militated against
Greek political unity. The invading Greek tribesmen found in
the Aegean area a scrambled conglomerate of rugged mountains,
isolated frsfteys, inthrust arms of the sea, and marginal islands.
Each conquering band fell heir to a more or less insulated section
of territory arid there proceeded to erect an independent com-
monwealth. That rivalry which is natural among kinsmen tended
to prevent voluntary amalgamation, and the transitory contacts
between the different tribes did not encourage involuntary uni-
fication. Hence they not only remained separate, but separatism

28 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

became the very keynote of their political behavior. All their
politics were local politics, and local politics, as we know from
modern experience, engender the most violent passions and the
most intense interest. The rivalries were so numerous, the feelings
so hot, and the collisions so frequent that public affairs outranked
all other interests.

This preoccupation with politics was greatly accentuated by
the social and political structures evolved by most of the, Greek
states. We have already noted that the invading tribesmen were
of two classes — nobles and commoners. These, upon the comple-
tion of the conquest, became free citizens, while the conquered
aboriginal population was reduced to the status of serfdom or
slavery. The free citizens rarely constituted more than half and
often much less than half of the total population; but they alone en-
joyed political rights and privileges. Though monarchial forms
were preserved in some of the ©reek states, the actual power of
government soon fell into the hands of the nobility. But in course
of time the patricians began to peter out. In most of the Greek
states they got their estates hopelessly encumbered with indebted-
ness and were too soft and stupid to maintain themselves either as
military or economic overlords. So the commoners came into
power. In some places only rich commoners were admitted to
participation in public affairs, and this resulted in a form of govern-
ment known as oligarchy. In other places, of which Athens was
the most conspicuous example, political rights and privileges to
the fullest extent were accorded to all free-born citizens. This re-
sulted in a form of government known to the Greeks as democracy,
meaning rule by direct action of the citizenry. Often in the
factional struggles which characterized Greek politics a proemial
Hitler would get the masses behind him, unseat the existing author-
ities, and install himself as ruler of the state. Such a government
was called a tyranny, not so much because of its arbitrary as be-
cause of its extra-legal character. — ~ <*

Greek political thought was begotten of democracy, especially
Athenian democracy, In Athens, with a total population of be-
tween 300,000 and 400,000, the citizens and their families num-
bered not more than 160,000, and of these scarcely more than 30,000
were adult males qualified to participate in public affairs, No
slave, no freedman, no resident alien, and no Greek, unless he

INCOMPARABLE ATHENS 29

could establish descent from an Athenian citizen, could take part, in
public assemblies, cast a vote, hold an office, appear in a court of
law, or enjoy any of the privileges of membership in the body pol-
itic. It was a closed communion of which none could partake who
lacked the requisite genealogical qualifications.

"One obvious result," says Mr. H. G. Wells, "of this monopoli-
zation of the state by the class of citizens was that the patriotism of
these privileged people took an intense and narrow form. They
would form alliances, but never coalesce with other city states.
That would have obliterated every advantage by which they lived.
There would have been no more fees, no more privileges. The nar-
row geographical limits of these Greek states added to the inten-
sity of their feeling. A man's love for his country was reinforced
by his love for his native town, his religion, and his home; for
these were all one. Of course slaves did not share in these feelings,
and in the oligarchic states very bften the excluded class got over
its dislike of foreigners in its greater dislike of the class at home
which oppressed it. But in the main, patriotism in the Greek was
a personal passion of an inspiring and dangerous intensity." l

To the foregoing reasons for the extraordinary development of
political consciousness among the Greeks, and particularly the
Athenians, may be added their religion and their economic life.
Fortunately the hearty Aryan herdsmen who overran the Aegean
lands were not encumbered by an Oriental religion, or by over-
much religion of any kind. Their gods capered and laughed like
human beings, and were in truth little more than human beings of
heroic mould. Their idea of compliance with the will of the gods
was not subjection to a metaphysical and incomprehensible abso-
lute, but conformity with natural forces which men could perceive
and understand, and of which their gods were symbolic represen-
tations. Of mysteries they had many, but of mysticism very little;
of religious rites they had an abundance, but of theological dogmas
almost n6iiC. Hence their political ideas were undefiled by reli-
gious obfuscation, and their priestly class, by comparison with the
corresponding\lass in Babylonia or Egypt, was small and incon-
sequential— chiefly guardians of shrines and ceremonial function-
aries.

Economically Greek society, and notably Athenian society, re-

i H. G. Wells, The Outline of History (New York, 1930), p. 290.

30

POLITICAL PHILOSOIM'intS

fused to become permanently stratified. Agricultural resources,
except in a few sections, were too meager to permit the. rise of a
permanently dominant landed aristocracy; but manufacturing and
commerce opened roads to wealth and power for all classes. Dili-
gent artisans, clever tradesmen, and even slaves made fortunes
and rose to positions of consequence in the potteries, metal industries,
textile factories, shipyards, mercantile establishments, and financial
houses which sprang up all over Greece, As economic power
changes hands political power tends to do the* same, zwul as a
consequence of constant mutations of economic structure the
political life of Greek states was in a correspondingly continuous
state of flux. Government was a decisively important factor in
the economic struggle, and was Involved in every clash of eco-

nomic forces.

IT

H

Of the hundreds of city-states which flourished in ancient Greece,

Athens is the only one the world fondly loves to remember. Others

In their day were perhaps just as populous, just; as mighty in war,

just as prosperous in their economic affairs, just; as well-governed,

just as great in every material way; but not one can be mentioned

In the same breath with Athens as a center of Intellectual and artistic

achievement. Nor can any other compare, with Athens In richness of

political experience and boldness of political thought* More per-

fectly in Athens than anywhere else in the Hellenic world "Greek

patriotism blended the emotions of school and family, of religion

and politics, into one passionate whole." * Never before, and possi-

bly never since, in human history has such complete identification

of the individual and communal been achieved.

Athens was slow in taking her place among the states of Greece
because she had much to overcome. The soil of Attica was thin and
the terrain unsuited to either extensive or Intensive agricultural de-
velopment. The countryside lay open to marauders "by iand and
sea, and not until there was a communal solidarity and- power suffi-
cient to convert the Acropolis into an Impregnable /trorighold was
there any respite from pillage and spoliation. Of necessity, there-
fore, the settlements in the vicinity of the Acropolis coalesced into a
strong state, and the kings who ruled from this Attic Gibraltar were

*R. H. Murray, 77zt History of Political Science from Plato to the Present (1926), p. 1*

INCOMPARABLE ATHENS 31

*

able to bring all the petty kingdoms of the surrounding territory
under their sway.

But kings were not destined to survive in the Athenian state. By
713 B.C. monarchy had given way to aristocracy, which, subject to
the numerous mutations incident to the transformation of the city
from a bucolic garrison into an emporium of world trade, endured
until about 508 B.C.., when an aroused populace, taking advantage
of factional struggles within the ruling class, forced through consti-
tutional reforms which converted the government into a democracy.
The active management of the Athenian state was now in the hands
of its citizens. Every adult male citizen was ipso facto a member of
the general assembly of citizens which wielded

O J -» gtn.p*****

He might also be called upon for service in the aikasteries, or courts,
which consisted of 6,000 citizens drawn by lot from the general body
of citizens and divided into ten panels to function as judicial tri-
bunals. For this duty the citizen received a fee equivalent to a day's
wages for a skilled laborer. Fees were also paid, in the later history
of Athens, for attending the general assembly. While this practice
gave poor citizens the same chance to take part in government as
the wealthy, it also had a tendency to put citizenship on a merce-
nary basis. Some historians have criticized the Athenian citizenry as
a rabble of fee-seekers and bribe-takers.

In addition to the assembly and the courts the principal organs of
government were the archons, the generals, and the councils, es-
pecially the Council of Five Hundred. The archons originally
functioned as a board of magistrates, but in time their work was
absorbed by the assembly. The ten generals may be likened to
ministers of state in modern governments. The assembly elected
them and determined their powers and duties. The Council of Five
Hundred was a preconsidering, proposing, and supervising body
elected by the citizens.

Radically different was the scheme of government in Sparta, the
chief contender with Athens for supremacy in Hellas and the im-
placable rival who finally brought the Athenian Empire to ruin.
Sparta was a& agricultural state with a monarchial form of govern-
ment that was in reality dominated by a military junta. Full citizen-
ship belonged only to the Spartans, who were descendents of the
original conquerors. They were a minority of the total population,
and were trained warriors ready for instant action. By a most rigid

32 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

system of athletics, military exercise, diet, and education, the
Spartan boy was trained from early youth for warfare and govern-
ment. Women were subject to a correspondingly severe course of
training for motherhood, and of the children born to them only the
strong were permitted to live. Below this ruling class was a middle
class called the perioikoi, who had civil but no political rights; and
beneath these was a class of agricultural serfs called hdol^ who had
no rights at all.

The machinery of government in Sparta consisted of two kings,
who reigned but did not rule; a senate of twenty-eight members in
addition to the kings; a popular assembly composed of all adult male
citizens; and finally a board of five cphors. The ephoratc was the
focus of authority in the Spartan system. The senate was essentially
a judicial bodya and the assembly, though potentially supreme,, did
not meet frequently and delegated most of its power to the ephors.

This Spartan regime had a curious fascination for the Athenian
mind. In the martial organization, repressive discipline, standard-
ized education, social regimentation, ancl concentrated authority of
the Spartan state, Athenian thinkers, disillusioned by the vagaries
and excesses of democracy, were prone to see qualities essential to a
sound polity. Yet Athens to-day enjoys a glorious immortality,
while Sparta is all but forgotten and would be entirely unrcmom-
bered were it not for the part she played as chief adversary of
Athens in the dramatic struggle for preponderance in the Greek
world. Spartan government was potent but ephemeral; Athenian
government was impotent and equally ephemeral, but Athenian
ideas of government would never die.

The climax of Athenian power came between the years 490 and
404 B.C. Turning back the second Persian invasion at the battle of
Marathon in 490, "The Athenians broke the spell of the Persian
name; for they bravely faced perhaps six times their number and
proved once for all the supremacy of Greek over Oriental The vic-
tory filled the Athenians with self-confidence and made them ag-
gressive. Within a day their stature had grown heroic, and the
memories of that day inspired them thereafter to brifve danger in
the forefront of Hellas." : Thus began the imperial age of Athens,
Under the leadership of Themistocles, a political genius of towering
ability, the city began to gird itself for the inevitable third Persian

1 G. W. Botsford, A History of Greece (1899), p. 112.

INCOMPARABLE ATHENS 33

1>

invasion. The finances of the state were strengthened and put in
order, a navy of two hundred triremes was built, and a defensive
league of Greek states, including Sparta, was effected. In the spring
of 480 B.C. the invaders appeared with an army estimated to number
between three hundred thousand and a million men and fleet of
more than a thousand ships of war. At the celebrated pass of Ther-
mopylae the Persian host was checked by a handful of Spartans, and
in the bay of Salamis the fleet was destroyed by the Athenians and
their allies. On land the war continued until the following summer
when the Spartans and Athenians in alliance overwhelmed the
Persian forces at Plataea.

From this titanic struggle Athens emerged as leader of the mari-
time states and Sparta of the land states. Athens promptly con-
verted the Delian Confederacy into a naval empire which Spartan
militarism could not allow to go unchallenged. Both foresaw the
inevitable day of collision and began to make preparations for it.
One of the first moves of the Spartans was to undermine the power
of Themistocles, the super-statesman whose genius had made Athens
a foe to be feared as much as Persia. By a political conspiracy, said
to have had its source in Lacedaemonian plots, this Hellenic Wash-
ington was forced into retirement, but in 460 B.C. a worthy successor
stepped into his shoes. The name of Pericles is affixed to the golden
age of Athens. Under the leadership of Pericles as general and head
of the state Athens reached the peak of imperial prowess. The first
war with' Sparta and her allies ended with complete victory for
Athens in 451 B.C. The material prosperity of the city was never
greater. Sculpture, architecture, letters, and philosophy prospered
in like degree, and the masterpieces of art and literature which
appeared during the thirty years of Pericles' ascendancy in Athens
have never been surpassed in number or quality in any time or place
since the world began.

Even as the pinnacle was reached storm clouds appeared on the
horizon. In 431 B.C. Sparta launched another drive against Athens,
and this instead of coming quickly to a decisive issue stretched out
into a war bl^endurance. The popularity of Pericles declined, fac-
tional politics accomplished his suspension from command of the
army, and in 429 B.C. he died of the plague. The fortunes of Athens
soon began to ebb. An inconclusive peace to last for fifty years was
patched together in 421 . It lasted only eight years. In 413 hostili-

34 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES ^

ties were resumed, and in 404 Athens was beaten into submission.
Sparta now was supreme and Athens was her chattel.

III

On the morrow of her political splendor., as a melancholy anti-
climax, came the immortal political philosophies of Athens. It was
as though the ordeal of defeat and humiliation on the heels of unex-
ampled brilliance and power was a necessary ferment in the matura-
tion of political ideas. Between the three imperishable names in
Greek political thought— Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and the rise
and fall of Attic imperialism there is an interestings if not signifieantj
chronological correlation.

Socrates was born in 469 B.C.— nine years before Pericles came
into power in Athens — and was put to death in 399 H.a~" live years
after the final eclipse of Athens fas an independent; power. Plato was
born in 427 B.C., which was two years after the death of Pericles,
and died in 347 B.C., just at the time Macedonian militarism was
beginning to sweep all before it. Aristotle was born in 384 B.C.,
when Sparta was at the height of her overlordship in Hellas, and
died in 322 B.C., which was one year after the death of Alexander
the Great. Socrates, the teacher of Plato, saw Athens rise to the
summit of political greatness and plunge clown into the lowest pit of
political debility and shame. Plato, the teacher of Aristotle, wit-
nessed the decline and fall of Athens, the judicial murder of Soc-
rates to placate the Athenian populace, the overthrow of Sparta by
the Theban alliance, and the fateful rise of Macedonian autocracy.
Aristotle, the teacher of Alexander the Great, lived through the
culmination and collapse of Spartan power and saw his native
Macedonia become mistress of Greece, then mistress of the world,
and finally mistress of nothing but glorious imperial memories.

Greek political thought had its beginning long before the time
of Socrates. Regarding human society as part of an intelligible
and orderly cosmos, Greek thinkers very early rationalised the
state. They saw it not as a mystic and divinely ordained instru-
mentality for the government of man by powers not/of this earth,
but as part of the natural order of things, fulfilling nature's require-
ments for living as earthlings must if they would enjoy the best
life has to offer. It was as natural and necessary as the family, was,,
in fact, an enlarged and sublimated family, fusing the individual

INCOMPARABLE ATHENS 35

•

and the community into a harmonious and perfect whole. As a
part to the whole was the citizen to the state, and he was in duty
bound to conform his behavior with patterns prescribed by the
state, not because the state spoke with the absolute imperative of
supernal authority, but because it was the supreme embodiment of
right reason among men. Thus, though the Greek must obey, he
might also question and criticize. Conceiving the state to be the
acme of rational being did not mean that this or that existing state
must always be so regarded. Reason might challenge the validity
of things as they were found, and creative intelligence might point
the road from imperfection to perfection. Hence, according to
Willoughby, the Greeks were "led to construct ideal polities as the
crowning point of their philosophies."1

The Greek conception of law was similarly genial and rationalis-
tic. Law, in the broadest sense, was understood as a rule or principle ,
ofbehavior fo'which men should Conform because it was part of the
natural "order "oFtKmgs. All Greek notions of law "Bore" the stamp of
tfiislunciamental idea?" Of the three words commonly used to con-
note law — themis, dike, and nomos — the first referred primarily to
that which is ordained by Heaven, Fate, or Nature; the second, to
that which is abstractly right and just; and the third, to secular
laws originating either in established usage or governmental enact-
ment. Like the Common Law of England, the greater part of
Greek law remained for centuries unwritten, being reduced to
concrete activation by ad hoc pronouncements of magistrates spe-
cially revered for learning and wisdom. As in England at a later
time, this tended to heighten the feeling that law was common
sense and right reason in the form of specific rules of human action.

Political ideas as intrinsically idealistic as the foregoing could
not escape challenge in the age of rampant materialism which fol-
lowed the defeat of Persia and the rise of Athens to economic and
political priority in the Mediterranean world. Success — material
success — became the keynote of this period of expansion and em-
pire. Business prospered as never before, and the old aristocracy
was supplanted>by a grasping, pushing, bustling breed of go-getters
?or whom democracy was but a means to the all-absorbing end of
3elf-aggrandizement and self-enrichment. What was a democracy
*.n name became a plutocracy in fact. Even the age of Pericles,

i W. W. Willoughby, The Political Theories of the Ancient World (1903), p. 59.

36 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

with all its shining achievements in art, arehiteeture, literature,
and philosophy, was a time of declining civic virtue and growing
laxity of individual honor. Perieles himself was a, demagogue grown
to the stature of statesmanship, and he maintained his power in
Athens by methods not unrelated to those of the modern political

boss.

In this milieu there arose in Athens about 430 n.<j. a species of
teachers who came to be known as Sophists, They were not a, body
of philosophers united by devotion to common principles and ten-
ets, but were sharp fellows who made a good living by acting as
private tutors in rhetoric, argumentation,, eloquence, and other
subjects of instruction. Although the Sophists had no common
creed, they all reflected the cynical realism of the day, As Wil-
loughby says, "they taught truth not; for its own sake, but as a means
to an end. Indeed they pretty nearly taught; that there was nothing
absolutely and universally true, "that there were no principles ab-
stractly valid, no canons of conduct everywhere and under all cir-
cumstances binding. They recognized no distinction between the
idea of right and the formal laws in which it might find itself em-
bodied. Because they saw these forms differing at different times
and among different peoples they rejected the idea that there are
abstract principles of justice which are everywhere valid. . . «
Man, they said, is the measure of all things, , , „ By man they
meanf Efta»kin^ as universally con-

ceived. That is, according to their view each individual, with all his
accidental and peculiar desires and characteristics,, was qualified
upon the basis of those desires and characteristics, to pass judgment
upon what was right and wrong for him to do, , . . Instead of
being instructed to see principles of natural or universal right cm-
bodied in the civil laws and customary morality of his country^ the
citizen was taught to discover only particular decrees which were
in the main the product of the selfish desires of those who had orig-
inally issued or sanctioned them. . - . Holding such a position as
this the Sophists were necessarily led to declare superior strength
to be the sole basis for a legitimate exercise of poWfcr, For if there
were no universal principles of justice to be enforced, and if self-
interest were the sole actuating motive in human conduct, political
right necessarily rested upon a simple basis of might.59 *

1 Op. ciL, pp. 76-77.

INCOMPARABLE ATHENS 37

9 " ' ' ' '"" ' ' •- • — "' -;

Against the current of this baneful stream of political ideology
Socrates set himself like a stubborn bastion. Born in Athens about
469 B.C., he was the son of a stonemason and a midwife, people of
the working class. He was given the customary education of an
Athenian youth and embarked on life as a sculptor, which in that
day was as much a skilled trade as an artistic calling. He also served
in the army in several campaigns and was a member of the govern-
ment in minor capacities. As a sculptor he did not succeed too well
and soon gave it up for teaching, his true forte.

At first he was regarded as a Sophist, and was in some respects
akin to them. Unlike the Sophists, however, Socrates charged no
fees, offered no course of study, and kowtowed to no man. Devot-
ing himself to an unrelenting search for truth, he adopted a unique
mode of procedure. Wandering about the city in company with
a group of friends and disciples, upon whose bounty he probably
depended for a living, he would encounter some one who could be
drawn into a discussion. It was not difficult, for the streets of Athens
served as a public forum and were thronged with men ready to dis-
cuss anything at any time. Socrates would then start grilling his
opponent with questions and would continue until he had demon-
strated that his opponent's position was untenable. The method
was novel — often infuriating to opponents thus publicly unhorsed —
and Socrates was an eccentric and striking figure. "With his enor-
mously bald head, protruding eyes, flat nose, and thick lips, he re-
sembled the satyr masks displayed in the shop windows at Athens;
big-bodied and bandy-legged, he stalked like a pelican through the
streets. But the pupil who looked beneath the satyr mask saw in
the soul of the master images of fascinating beauty to remind him
of the absolute perfection of God." 1 Such a man was bound to be
a sensation, and the shrewish reputation of his wife, Xantippe, did
not diminish the piquancy of public interest in this exotic figure.

Socrates left no writings; what we know of his thought comes
from the \Vritings of his pupils, notably Plato, Isocrates, and Xeno-
phon. His method of reasoning was inductive and utterly irrever-
ent. ccWitfc tHIb frost of his tantalizing irony he nipped many a
promising blossom of political omniscience." 2 He cared for noth-
ing but facts and sound reasoning based on facts. Men, he taught,

i G. W. Botsford, op. «'*., p. 225.

52 W. A. Dunning, A History of Political Theories: Ancient and Mediaeval (1 902), p. 22.

ffjp«— «»»^^

38 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

must be guided exclusively by knowledge; true knowledge, which
penetrates beneath the surface of things, disregards the motives and
interests of passing periods and personalities, and arrives at (ruth
that is universal and eternal. Like a true Greek, he believed that
mankind was destined by nature for political soeiely, but he could
not believe that the prevailing system of government in Athens
rested upon sound principles. The basic premise of Athenian democ-
racy was that all citizens were equal and equally qualified to take
part in government. Upon this, Socrates made unremitting war,
contending that only those possessing" the deepest, wisdom and the
highest virtue should be entrusted with the. administration of gov-
ernment.

With such unorthodox doctrines and correspondingly monstrous
ideas in the field of ethics and religion, he corrupted the youth of
Athens. King Demos could not endure such a pestiferous gad-fly;
so he must die. Anytus, the tanficr, nursing a personal grievance,
led a trumped-up prosecution against him. The verdict, a foregone
conclusion from the beginning, was death by the. cup of hemlock
which subsequent ages have made a symbol of the fallacy of trying
to exterminate ideas by killing the man who advocates them,

REFERENCES

Agard, W. R., What Democracy Meant, to the Gmh (Chapel Hill, N. Q.
1942).

Barker, E., Greek Political Theory, Plato and IKsPndwemrs (2nd cd, London,

1925).

Bonner, R. J,, Aspects of Athenian Democracy (Berkeley, Cal, 1933),
Cook, T. I., A History of Political Philosophy (New York, 1936), Chap. II,
Dunning, W. A., A History of Political Theories: Andenl and Mediaeval

(New York, 1902), Chap, I.

Farrington, B,, Science and Politics in the Ancient World (New York, 1940),
Gettell, R. G., History of Political Thought (New York, 1924), Chap. III.

Greenidge, A. H. J., A Handbook of Creek Constitutional History (London,
1896).

Mcllwain, G, H., The Growth of Political Thought in the West ("Mew York,
1932).

Sabine, G. H., A History of Political Theory (New York, t#J7), -Chaps, ML

Taylor, A. E., Socrates (London, 1933).

Willoughby, W. W., Political Theories of ihe Ancient World (New York, 1903),

Chaps. IV-VL
Zirnmern, A. E., The Greek Commonwealth (3rd ccl, Oxford, 1922),

to

CHAPTER IV

THE FIRST UTOPIAN

I

IN Plato Socrates lived again. Not in the sense that the pupil was
an unvarying facsimile of the master; not even in the sense, as is
often said, that Plato was the literary and philosophiiL^exejcutor
of the great querist; but rather in the sense A^JjthcLIll^^

of Plato so complet^ spirit of his teacher

^tJungj^TC^^ The unrivalled pro-

tagomsTwKosi^niatchless logic, flashing irony, and sovereign intel-
lect dominate the writings of Plato was no mortal of flesh and bone,
but an apotheosized Socrates, sneaking not only what the actual
Socrates might have spoken but also what the resplendent imag-
ination of Plato would have him say. vHow much of what is ascribed
to Socrates in the works of Plato is of genuine Socratic origin and
how much is of Platonic invention, we cannot tell; but it is certain /
that the genius of Plato deserves no less credit than the influence
of Socrates.
\Superficially Plato was everything that Socrates was not. An

HUt"""^ ,j»>»""'""™i™™*aac, , r,jri*T*w •»™»"«— "° '" , * *— '

. *•"««».«•,„«**"* i . w*^~ ^"""-u,' nmn, ^j*glfc4-«r«^*>"1J'V*A*'J— *"""l»l ««•<**» iMM'Miuiu'qi""' B™ iOTrt««*«"«~W"l~»**'**" *"'"*"* "~

aristocrat, claiming descent Froffltne hair-mythical oolon, first great

<**™*NlMXENS>!'V-. */*

lawgiver o'f Athens- a gentleman of leisure, pursuing no vocation,

^***W_ ^^^CLutfW*"^ ' HIE* uri"*^* ^'ita^m^*8^^^^)**™^^^"'*'*'^^ ^"^ ^"^

but winning such renown as an athlete and intellectual prodigy that
his true name, Aristocles, was supplanted by the nickname " Plato,"

"XBrfMlrtsaifisO-w-praUiiaa tt!ifil)ia{Ww*«J'''>" p*"* *

celebrating the breadth of his shoulders and the expanse of his brow;
^a traveled cosmopolite who visited and studied in many cities of

* /**^*ill>H*<»»<***^^ <,<hrtf**"rf""«**,.<,«*, »«"»w .»»«'"' "*" "*

Greece, Italy, and Egypt;|a man of striking presence, if portraiture
is to be believed, handsome as Apollo— that such a personage should
fall under the spell of a hideous, deformed, impecunious day laborer
posing a? a philosopher is no less a superlative tribute to the intellect
and personality of Socrates than to the inherent greatness of Plato

•

f

Plato came under the tutelagejof Socrates in parly manhood. He
was twenty-eight years of age when his master paid the ultimate
penalty for freedom of thought and speech, £md that anguishing
event seems to have launched him fully up<pn his own lustrous

39

40 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

*

/x

career as teacher, writer, publicist, and philosopher. I le founded in
Athens a school called the Academy, from the grove named Aca-
demicus, where it was the habit of Plato to meet his pupils!** There
he taught more or less regularly until his death at the age of eighty/*
No cloistered pedagogue, however, was this towering genius; he was
also a man of affairs whose opinions were valued and whoso advice
was sought by persons in high places. Often during his long and
busy life he was called in as a consultant and expert adviser to rulers
and legislative bodies throughout the Greek world, and his prestige
seems to have been so great as to have led him to believe he could
secure somewhere the adoption of his plan for an ideal common-
wealth. Two trips to Sicily arc said to have been made for this ox-
press purpose, and on the second of these he was actually able,
so tradition says, to persuade JDionysius II, the ruling tyrant, to

; r ^"-"T^"-*^^

give him a free hand in reorganizing the government of Syra-
cuse, but failed of his purpose" jjccausc his reforms word too

ttWBIfcliWWnS**"^^ ^lu»»"*" ' "tl Ml**.', i Lumta »•"*» »» «'«».i • I - .!•,(,,,

drastic for^a^^magogic dictator?^-whp..Bjmist> at all costs' prcs
serye his oojgulanty .

<The writings of Plato touch every phase of the thought of his
time, and constitute an imposing compendium of Greek learning
and culture. So thoroughly was Greek life identified with state life
that few of the works of Plato, and of other Greek writers as well,
wholly escape the infiltration of political thought, even when deal-
ing with subjects remote from politics. But it is not necessary to scan
all of Plato's works in order to get the gist of his political philosophy;
\ this may be found in three treatises which deal primarily with polit-
ical matters— the Re^blic, the Statesman, and th^laws.m

In these three, as in most of has """ot'Kerwritings" Plato employs his
characteristic, one might almost say his personally copyrighted,
^2i2i^.3iyie of lE^H^" Philosophical treatises are generally
expected to BTpainfuiiy systematic and so prosaically profound
withal as to stagger the lay reader. Indeed, the learned doctors are
much disposed to frown upon such wanton brothers of the craft as
strive to popularize they writings by recourse to a limpid and fluent
style. But here was a philosopher who wrote for the nfan in the
street, in language he could understand, and in a form as lively and
compelling as the gusty bouts of conversation which were a daily
occurrence on the streets of Athens— a form adapted from the
drama and possessir!* many of the same gripping qualities as the

• - THE FIRST UTOPIAN 41

_ _ _. .-.._,-. - ,^ __._ ,.

comedies and tragedies which brought the multitudes trooping
eagerly to the theaters. Discursive and unprecise Plato may some-
times be, but he is rarely dull or pedantic. The characters who ap-

'4

pear in his dialogues, with the exception of those composed near the
end of his life, are not mere dummies performing for a clever ven-
triloquist, but vital human beings whose conversation sparkles as
though it had come from the animated pen of a novelist. Adeiman-
tus, Glaucon, Thrasymachus, Appolodorus, Crito, Philebus, and
their companions are just such people as one might have met in the
Athens of Plato's day. Even the peerless Socrates refuses to turn into
a verbose and tiresome paragon. Ranging over the whole empire
of ideas, the dramatis personae of these enthralling dialogues, alight-
ing first upon this and then upon that topic of current interest,
carry their adventurous discourses through lush valleys of expe-

nB

rience, across barren deserts of dogma, into deep forests of uncer-
tainty, over perilous heights of theory, through raging torrents
of controversy, striving ever to gain the elusive goal of perfect
knowledge.

To the thrill of intellectual exploration is added the thrill of
search for the ideal, which is Plato's method of arriving at truth.
The ideal, in the Platonic sense, is not to be discovered by the simple
process of choosing the most satisfactory of a number of existing
alternatives, or by the even more simple process of permitting the
imagination, expanded by the heat of emotion, to picture things as
one might wish them to be. •^TheJEJatonic ideal is the perfectjdea,
proved so by a ruthless process of comparison and criticism.^ is the
l idea that withstands every test of knowledge, every test of specula-
tion, every test of logic, and from this acid bath emerges untar-
nished. Such an idea, accoiding to Plato, may be taken as uncon-
ditionally and universally true. Only absolute ideas (ideals) such
as these should be used as bases for generalization, and upon such
ideas alone should be laid the foundations of political thought and
the principles of political action. ^The Republic, the Statesman, and the
Laws are, therefore, simply the recorded conversations of groups of
characters qu&ting for ideas, and the political structures conceived
by them are structures only in idea; but if the ideas of which they
are made measure up to the standard of the ideal, they not only may
become structures in reality but will be better structures than any
men have ever made.

42 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

II

Republic, says Benjamin Jewell, Is the greatest of all the works
1^1^ the center around which the other dialogues may be
grouped/ Ve No where in Plato is there a deeper irony or a greater
wealth of humor or imagery, or more dramatic power* Nor in any
other of his writings is the attempt made to Interweave life and
speculation, or to connect politics with philosophy." l I The dia-
logue opens with Socrates as narrator recounting the events and
discussions of the previous day; when he wont clown to the Piraeus
(the port of Athens) along with Glaueon to witness a festival (here,
Turning their steps homeward, after the procession, they are over-
taken by Polemarchus, son of Gephalus, who insistently urges them
to come to his father's house and stay the day, at the close of which
will come the night celebration, including a torch race and oilier
events worth seeing. Meanwhile there will be rest, food, and a
chance for a good talk. The invitation being accepted, Socrates and
Glaueon accompany Polcmarehus to the home* of ( Vphalus where,
in addition to the members of the family, they find a number of
guests.

Immediately the verbal tilting begins. Questioned by Socrates as
to the compensations of old age, the venerable Cephalus quotes a
line of Pindar saying thatVcHope cherishes the soul of him who lives
injustice and holiness . . .," and declares that the peace of mind
resulting from having had enough wealth to escape all temptation
to do wrong to others is the greatest comfort of his declining years,

"Well said, Cephalus/' interposes Socrates; "but as concerning1
justice, what is it? — to speak the truth and pay your debts— no more
than this?"

Here is a bone for rapacious minds to tussle over. What is jufe

u#iW***'*1**W'^*"f1' " u lff W

tice? Socrates avers that speaking the truth and paying, your dphtS "

fn^^^,^ ****M*™««»«www^^ -KW-'WM.W^,,,^ 7!,"- "**""•" *»*""* *

isnot a correct definition of jmjige, and the other colloquists are dis-

'*^B5mwm&l^rti»^wW^«^mr" ^^^^«wwwvawii*™»rt foVtw^BWamaafiwrw «, T JMJII wi KMBMWWI**.* »Wi*^MiirW™«™^)' "'"fiiiMfl^jy JL

posed to argue the point. The youthful Polcmarchus, inheriting the
argument from Cephalus, who retires to look after the sacrifices,, is
first to challenge the position of Socrates, and is quickly put to rout*
Then Thrasymachus, ccthe personification of the Sophists, accord*
:ng to Plato's conception of them/1 2 breaks into the argument with

r'i

1B. Jowett, The Dialogues of Plato (4 vols., 1902), Vol. ii, p. xvIL
2 Ibid.3 p. xxvii.

' J

THE FIRST UTOPIAN 43 '""

a roaring accusation that Socrates is merely juggling with words.
"This sort of nonsense will not do for me/3 he shouts, "I must have
clearness and accuracy,"1 Socrates meets the charge meekly and k
courteously, but deftly proceeds to impale the blusterer on the spit
of his own faulty logic and turn him over and over until he is ruin-
ously charred by the scorching flame of dialectic. The brothers
Glaucon and Adeimantus then enter the fray and are successively
made to run the gauntlet of merciless and devastating interrogation.
Hour upon hour the heady discourse runs on, spinning out the
entire day. ^Does justice consist merely in giving to every man his
own? No ; for that would often be to give a man the means of doing
harm to himself and others. Does it consist in giving to each man
what he deserves — to the good man, good; to the evil man, evil?
No; for that would mean that it migjit be just to do evil; and a good
man is not just if he does evil at all. Does it consist in giving to each
man his rights under the law? No; for the laws dojiot befer equally
upon all, and those who rule the state and make the laws often con-

!*"*%** '' L* "** '',», ''" ' •flu'"' , ' «' '"""'...I."-" „ ^,, ',„.„, „ , ,-,,, , «... •«*'

sider only, their , own, selfish advantage. ""The doing of such things

may give the appearance of "Justice, Jorjustice as actually adminis-^

* '*"•" « ""'" """"* ••" • «««««••»•«••— fc~««»-,ifc«iMi««—w»l-wll

tered is a mean betwera^he^bestjand the worst — a middle course
wfuch men pursue because they are either too weak to obtain justice*

w^m™^^^^'&SB!i^s^^^^^r>^^'?W W'Ttt ru- J^q^

or not strong enough to do injustice at will. True justice cannot be
of such quality; it must be of such nature that the just man will be
happier in poverty and defeat than the unjust man in riches and
honor /*

How can we see into the nature of true justice? By looking at the
state, says Socrates, much more readily than by looking at the in-
dividual, for (as all Greeks were ready to agree) the state is merely a
magnification of the individual. Therefore, suggests Socrates, ccif we
imagine the State in process of creation also; and when the State is
completed there may be hope that the object of our search will be
more easily discovered." Thus Plato has Socrates embark upon the §
task of constructing in idea a commonwealth in which true justice
shall prevail. *' .

But this id<^iL^tai£^ than imaginary; it is to be a state

««•_«— «*»••«• "*" ' -~— — ~*~*™**"^ ^^'^"""•"""""•"""W*"^^ ««omfc«,

which not only should but could bef The true creator of states is %
necessity; therefore the philoso^e^^lljollow necessities in the
fabrication qf his ideal ^tate arrangements. ^Thej)rirnary necessities %

X """ '*"%!»#*-' '**r''.t<r™f ^^MWW""* "" " ^^""^W*™1 Kunwi Hi ^*Nmwitf,Hi ' '

., p. 12.

44 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

are'food, clothing, and shelter. These are. hotter supplied by spe-
cialized labor than by each person's trying to follow many oeeupa-
i tions. XHence the state, even in its most: elementary form, should
have husbandmen, weavers, shoemakers, builders, and other arti-
sans to provide the basic necessities^ Exchange* of goods is a neces-
sity that follows very closely upon the heels of specialised produc-
tions; and this requires tradesmen and merchants, and also seamen
if trade be carried overseas. Common laborers would also he re-
quired for tasks requiring great strength. With these needful mem-
bers to satisfy all the basic necessities, the state existing- in Arcadian
simplicity should be a complete and healthy organism,

ft. «.« iw " W ,

Actual states, however, arc not like that. The simple life does not
\ long endure. When their necessities arc; well supplied, the people
; di^oyi^r new wants. T^airf food-is not enough; they nmsf (latter the
palate with gastronomic delights. rPlg.in clothing will not do; they
mustJbedSck themselves with finery and ornaments. Plain houses
do not.satisfy; they ifiustabound in luxury and be filled with super-

i*. " "'"""MM. Mt^"^ "V ,*rfB#*l*''W*fctt * * , '" * F 'L ' Ht I u L

t Bl^«i«lwW ^totfUatP ^hMintf*^ ^^^*». i ' f '^ J ^K '' ^ I'W1 i | i«H ' *t ti. i \ , t u.H 'l

"fluous effects. PraT^H6mHyXl"divej\sions are seonutl: they must

ua f \ **nJo. B-I 9"™*^^k i rj"1*1 '** a t , , i ' ) t 1 I J& tf< J

\ tfr1 St ^ **^Ht ^^BkitMhiiliiA* ' TWBai)*' Nffl* hW l* 11 t t,UiB| j|i i f ' * *&, t- | * W| F ' *J » ,*) M l W1'* "*" "V

jgratify Ihe^ senses with every , conceivable Jndulg<mc^/ yiUju* suite
<^«,rnr^n — ^^n^gregation of people with a passion ulr uivITimTed^

large part ofTEs po'ptxlatidii'is" made up of persons not

.

essential to its existence-partisans^ traders^s(U"vaats^ prostitutes,
actors, artists, arid others who thrive upon the insatiable appetite of
the community for an ever-mounting quality of basically useless
articles and services. Soon the territory which formerly sufficed to
support the state becomes too small; it covets a slice of its neigh-
bor's territory, and its neighbor returns the compliment with in-
terest. "Then, without determining as yet whether war docs good
or harm, thus much we may affirm, that we now have discovered
war to be derived from causes which are also the causes of all the
evils in States, private as well as public*93 *

Even though the state may escape the mania for possession and
the consequent urge to expansion, may preserve its original condi-
tion of healthy simplicity, it cannot escape thq danger of war. It

and'mustbe prepared

™^ffl»^ ^Hta&wtf**^ ^^^^vaMrtwa^*^ ^x n *" * '«» *w*to¥*f1' ^ 1^^><'' ** % *^, * * V ¥ ' '

a"fiack- Therefore-life healthy stale will have
y^^^

iers as theskiTled shoemaker is from the farmer who cobbles

1 Ibid., p. 53.

. THE FIRST UTOPIAN 45 •

own footwear.' These ideal soldiersjcnu^y^

of Jiie state — specialljjdraiaedj^ of the veryjtiighe&t^,

physical ancTmehtal fitness, j ^

m 1 1 JUtmWM" ' "' rmtovtru- m tM^tqgaia,m,,maaill^^^^ •.^n^iEM-^rntiiiiiiiin aa-TT-4J'u"iTOnrtr'T-i mintim ilii u iiLni*iilia>fr|

In this class of guardians Plato finds his solution of the problem of :
political authority. The guardians are to be supermen in physique,
mind, and character, and to the most capable of them"* are to be |
entrusted the command of the army and the leadership of the stated
\In early -youth they will be chosen, says the aixMJ^dLoLtMs firgt*^^
Utopia.", and by the same rigorous process of scientific selection that
men have shown to be practicable in picking animals to be trained
for special uses. First they choose animals that are well bred in
view of the purpose M mind, and then by a- careful process of ob-
servation and experiment they weed out those appearing to lack
the special qualities desired. pljijh^ °L— * -ij

state must ^ elected* ^^ :
^""TKen comes the most im iJfc:tant thing of all— Uhe education of the ,

X ^Hjjf {J fl ' \

^_^_ I, _, ^

guardians. T^v^must b>e healthy, strong, fearlessTfief ce to the foe '

+^s -. -^nmgyr ^fa*ii* \[ei^^! '^ "r^n^^ ^ ' " "*"' ^ w Vr^"1 J ^ i^jsr***0 X^^^^T*^"" '•Jr^t'^* " ~ , ' ( "^

and^yet gentle to the citizens and ^^one^anpther, tijie^ and^Jrust-
worthy^ ujter|;£^^ "self-contr oiled ,at 'all

tnnes, clear-hJaHgd, wisga and aBove a5TScioderateTn""their indul-
gence in the joys of foo37 drink, and love. Even with the best of raw
material, can education produce such paragons as these specifica-
tions call for? Yes, answers Plato, human nature is infinitely plastic^

j *^*™^i^iiw«»— -«-«&»-i«n.»^»»_™^,-»rtw * f:

ajad^mfiiai^ly^ cagable^ By jjhysical, edj^^pr^x9S^Sta^™S%5n ^
the ^body^ .. stejl^^the^couragej and quiclken the sword ^ by. jnental
educa,tion^you .caDLjemand knowledge and ""deepen wisdom: by

i, v^inuai i ,) ii < " "* 'UM*IS|V """irtrnin n r «,,Vflill nwr-ntmd^B,, j«i"*i*«.™w«^ <t*WF-<* «- t >• •"'""" <"'^'"""*i f i *M ' i "N1 "»" «ials*r»uB» "w i" •«*» " " ir"u< ^ "-™1" ' "WSJHS J •^ * """&

;„ self-control, moderation, and

details of Plato's audacious program of education occupy
most of the second and third books of the Republic, and are fasci-
natingly modern in many respects. He would rigidly censor the

*'*~™«ww»ww,m,»™<.«»^'» •>'"« • >*-*"•"' "'" -/*"'•"•*********» »*»«•»»» .^nJ'JJ

instruction of guardians from early childhood, permitting them to

'""'"", I *, ,,„,<, , . ,„ | ., „, »«.,,- .f «''"">• *""*""" ™*""""'""'"1 *'" "' '""""""J1 ""'"•«»»-«» ™, »„,».., »r>, |., T JWf* "

come into contact with no influences detrimental to the ends sought

"/ *, , ^.ttj »*. lid*. i*« »* - ' "'15**«H-m \> >' /»^imK«"ft"»"«"«^ t»p **^,, ,,,,„, H^IHH "W^ ,,^«*j*»«,^W1(*HW1^ * '"i^^fBtWim*"-* ' » t ' *•"> ' ^ l"'t'""**'""1** '(WM,M,

in their educations Nurses and parents would be forbidden to tell
them tales which might teach wrong morals or create psychological
twists; everything of baneful tendency would be eliminated from
their reading; religious instruction would omit all mention of hell
(for these guardians must not fear death) and would teach of gods
loving righteousness and rewarding good deeds; gymnastics would

46 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

perfect the body, and ii^ary^ajniog:, would/teach, the art of war;
carefully planned and rigidly enforced dietaries would nun a tain
their health and instill habits of temperance; and finally philosophy,
the queen of sciences, would enlarge their knowledge and ermoblc
their minds.

So far, so good; but would these guardians continue* to be the
noble and unselfish protectors and filers. that their education had
designed them to be? Would they not, as \^W:hch)gs sometimes do,
turn upon the sheep and behave like wolves? This, thinks the master
of the discourse, would depend upon their manner of life as well as
upon their education: </

"Then now let us consider what will he their way of life, if they arc
to realize our idea of them. In the first place, none- of I hern should have

V^dptttKHtfW wty^^Y j i n rt » | )•*<!« a.WW**w* wwwrti'^ortT****0*^**"''1^

anyP£2^^ own beyond what is absolutely necessary; neither

sBomdthey liavFal^ against anyone who has"

*,«^^«~-^^-~~'™^'~''~-~-''';;'~; ........ "',""", '",1^.""" " i • ° ,' '" '" . ,-,

a mind to enter; their provisions should™,* only such as are required by

,„,,,,,, , 1 1», "•«»»'" <«'<*» A ipr

trained warriors, who arc men of temperance and courage; they should

" "JJ-»«M" I**1"1* H"U <**M»m ~*f« I" ffi* ,.,, i^WU|kli3^ ,^j|»MWi*u* * ^ , , r *^<^Kmr^Jttofci ^|WMWW«IW

agree to recede from the citizens a fixed ,rate of nay, enough to nuvet the

^^maimmmmfiMXut**l*>*^^ """ *"' ".,, » ' *, m,»,,»W-"*" »

expenses jrfjfac^£acand^ iness and live to-

getEer like soldiers in a camp.VGold and silv<*r we. will tell th<kui they

^^.^.-^ --•-""-«-—-, .,«„ „„, ...... .,..* . , . i . , , * ,r%^>

1/have^oni^C.jod; the diviner metal is within them, and I hey have there-

l'f fore nolneed ofthe dross which is current amoim1 meiu and oudit not to

*i xi^r*°v**^™\-'*'**~>^e>^^^ ,

pollute trie divine by any such earthly admixture; lor that commoner

metal has been the source of many unholy deals, but their own is mule-

filed. And they alone of all the citizens may not touch or handle silver

- or gold, or be under the same roof with them, or wear th«*m, or drink

^from them. A^id this will be their salvation, and they will be the saviors

i ^Lt^LStateXBut should they ever acquire homes""dF "land's or moneys of

| •C™*wffm™™™)iWBWWtt««»^ It, J

\ their own, thej/j/^ and huslmndmen in-

^ or Tnstciicl' ,p;f alliesh of 'the other

, citizens; hating and being hated, plotting and being plotted against,

r 3^le life in much greater u^rror of internal than, of

m ,^**" **«*{ \s.-^» ""«*,.<" ' N3-*- 'VW^"»'VM,,,- ...... ;-,„„„„',> *«..,,,-,.,.<- ,. • ,

ie^ and the hour of rum both to themselves and to the rest
ofthtateTwllbeafhand." l

Adeimantus, however, is unconvinced. Other men, he argues,

ff

,

but the guardians must be content with privation
\ ^d^Penu£y- Yerthey are the possessors of all power and authority,,
I and hence the^MlE^ of others and of their own mis*

ery. Will they not realize this and refuse to endure it?

l/toV*., pp. 103-104. ; *

THE FIRST UTOPIAN 47

Ah, but you miss the point, Adeimantus. These guardians will
not find their happiness in the same things as other men.. They are

of a Hifferent order. Their happiness will come from the satisfaction <j
,».—"«••" • -*-•"- -a, *

of being guardians — a function they wil1 deljLgJ^^e^-p^rform, the j;
role they have been bred and trained for, the only life they know^Jf
If they could find happiness in the things that delight other men^
they would not be guardians any more than husbandmen, potters,,
and cobblers would be what they are if they could find pleasure in
the guaVdian's way of life.N Our guardians very likely will be the
happiest of men, because they will have the happiness that nature
assigns to them as custodians of the happiness of all. o We must not
conceive for our guardians a sort of happiness that would make
them anything but guardians,, or for other men a sort of happiness
that would make them, anything bujt what they are. o "Qur aim. in
founding the State was not the disproportionate happiness of any__
one class, but the greatest happiness of the whole." }

To each according to what nature has fitted him to be and to
have— is that to be Plato's definition of justice? Just when the dis-
cussion appears to be skirting the borders of conclusive definition,
Polemarchus and Adeimantus are seen to put their heads together
in whispered conference, whereupon the latter turns to Socrates and
demands that he amplify in one particular his proposal that among
the guardians all things shall be in common. What about women
and children? he inquires. The Master demurs; the discourse should
have a limit, he suggests.

ccYes, Socrates, said Glaucon, and the whole of life is the only limit
which wise men assign to the hearing of such discourses. But never
mind about us; take heart yourself and answer the question in your own
way: What sort of community of women and children is this which is to
prevail among our guardians? and how shall we manage the period be-
tween birth and education, which seems to require the greatest care.
Tell us how these things will be.

"Yes, my simple friend, but the answer is the reverse of easy; many
more doubts arise *about this than about our previous conclusions. For
the practicability of what is said may be doubted; and looked at in an-
other point of view, whether the scheme, if ever so practicable, would be
for the best, is also doubtful. Hence I feel a reluctance to approach the
subject, lest our aspiration, my dear friend, should turn out to be a
dream only," 2

i Ibid., p. 106. 2 Ibid., pp. 138-4 39.

„»*"•*

48 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

V

V

The hesitation of Socrates only whets the desire of the auditors
to have him discuss this delicate subject, and they refuse to let him
off. Very well then, he will take them back to the stalling point
of the discussion. The guardians are to function as watch-dogs of
the herd; that was agreed, was it not?xl)o we separate clogs along
lines of sex in the work of hunting and herding?7 No; they all share
alike in the work, and must have the same breeding, feeding, and
training. So it must be among our guardians., if women are to have
the same duties as men, which of course, they must if the g*u;jrclian
class be perpetuated. Only in the begetting and bearing of children
is there any radical differenc6 ""between male and female, and this
does not prove that the nature of woman is such that she should
have a radically different life. Women are like men in (heir npti-^
tudes and abilities, and theyftvary as men vary. One woman is
pugnacious, another is not; one is athletic, another not; one is
musical, anotlkrnytf :.<jne is matcrnaLanother not; one has the gift

' •* t^krfWw.'V "*• '-^^«™*-~OT"'~«™'-— >^^***u*»"1"''"'-'«-' " n— ««««<i*w*" V}

of healing, another not; one is pibJlrxsophieal, another not; and one *
may have the temper of a guardian, an&^vW>tlier not. ""*

The problem is to select women of suitat5ftsjeinpermnent and
ability for guardians, give them the right kind on§4uc1iti()n3 and
then mate them with the male guardians; for the seeretSjf success
in state-building is to develop ever better citizens who shatf^pro-
create still more excellent descendants.^ To this end, wives and
children among the guardians will be in common; but this does not
imply promiscuity. Matrimony will be a sacred thing— even more
so than now — but it will be different A In order to encounure mat*

>;i *

ings between those best fitted to produce children of the desired
quality the rulers will arrange periodic festivals for hymeneal pur-
•poses, and will authorize on each of these occasions such a number
;of matings as may be necessary to keep the population of the state
'at just the right figure/ These acts of coition will be sanctified by
impressive and holy ceremonies designed to emphasise the noble
purpose of the union and to eliminate all elements of lust and
obscenity. To insure the frequent mating of the very best of both
sexes and also to serve as an incentive to superior achievement,
arrangements will be made to allow those of the highest quality

4% ^M*? A *

and the best records to engage more often in the ceremonies of
cohabitation than those, of lesser merit. What more powerful urge
to excellence could the ingenuity of man devise?

i

— THE FIRST UTOPIAN 49

The offspring of these matirigs" are not to be deemed the children
of the couple9 who are their biological parents, but the children of
the state. At birth children will be taken to a nursery and cared for
in common by the nurses and mothers of the state. All persons
who mated between the seventh and tenth months before a child
was born will be its parents. Thus no parents will lavish affection
upon one child to the exclusion of others, but will love all children
as their own; and instead of being concerned only for the welfare of V
*hose of their own blood, will strive for the happiness and welfare

•> JT j,

of all. The guardians of the state then will come to be one great
family in wKIch^eaeh will regarcT all otherTaFEmfolk, and wnT'say

^-"WhmuMMawatjMHii^ fjur^ijxtv - im^^^m-*

of every individual, "It is well with my own," or, "It is ill with

my own." United in common ioys and common sorrows, such a

* ^~\ * j~*-, „.*•' "i"v , >•"'•" *.-» ^ ,^-» "'"""-*«- .«..» - '-" ' "**.,«..-^

thing as semsncTe^falf^ and family interests

:>e unknown ' in ,f his exalted* bbfl^Tof ci tizeiis . "^^
Important above all things is the welfare of the children. When
committed to the nurture and education of their biological parents,
children do not fare equally well. Some parents are proficient in

A J M ,J, - JT - •• -~ — «-v-~»«— >«— ««~— -

diej^araig^ children, and some are quite the opposite; some love

their children too much to train them properly, and others too

little; some have the means to do well by their children, and others

do not. In the ideal state children of the guardian class will be ;

smancipated from all parental handicaps. Loved and cherished

by all parents, they will nevertheless be nurtured and educated by

.ione. They are children of the state, and the state will see to their

apbringingjjvill provide equal advantages Tor all, and will employ

*:he most skilled and experienced nurses and the most competent

':eachers to mould them into future citizens.

T

"Is such an order of things possible?" Glaucon inquires, "and
low, if at all?" ' ^

"Until philosophers are kings," answers Socrates, "or the kings ; l '

««lW»»l»i^ijMl»l*»*">«""'^^

and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy,
and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those common
latures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are com-
pelled to stand aside, cities will never have rest from their evil^1—
10, nor the human race, as I believe; and then only will this our
jtate have a possibility of life and behold the light of day. Such was
:he thought, my dear Glaucon, which I would fain have uttered if
t had not seemed too extravagant; for to be convinced that in no

50 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES - \

ji

. other State can there be happiness private or public is indeed a

hard thing." 1

Now we are sure the man must be a visionary theorist; for who

( but a dreamer would propose to entrust the government of the

i state to philosophers — those impractical pretenders to wisdom

x whom the public regards with contemptuous amusement? But

hold a moment. Not to the philosophers who are but to the philoso- ,

^*ai-*~mlimm**mi*i>M*imWv^^im*™*' "^"*°*****"**~w""''ffViilBrw'l, , I<!« «i ,, „ ,.,,,, MwiMMWrt****' " 1

phers whoought to be would Plato entrust the guidance of the state.

JriitA™»ttftiM't]3*^aat'J'g''>tMt ''*^^:^*^™Ma™**'B^ei^ k |«,(tHl||,.j|s^JM^^W W^l*WI/''1'1' WIHIVM.W- if "" ' ' ' " W W& '

Such men are rare, and most generally arc spoiled in youth by
faulty education3 and particularly by that most corrupting of all
educators, public opinion. The true philosopher is a lover of wis-

•*• — 1--WB«»«l«~>»'''""'»»«»'"»«~«Wnw,,,..<.H m-» <»«I»H ""*** ' ,.

dom and not of opinion: is above all pettiness, avarice, vanity,

%^^w***.l*'rHJ<wWr uv^vu^fa^totito^^i^ ttwwwuHiifi *u-** iW*^' "" )"u •***"•<* ^UO^^IW^IJ^LIWII i > utvu,***, ,„„*, , M + * *fe ^ > , / f

envy, and hatefulness: fears not death., but counts bis own life "as

11J«1»a.»*.*ffl«as,,,»Sr, UM..JWUW" JLUlk «U«ri.ku.ftw»ft,jUJui «»yu, II li—l,, «.. WM -« ,,, , ,« ,„."«»««" . H 1« • n ! «• n » " ' '. HI, . < , , ' W>

naughtj is _ generous, friendly^ agreeable, just; worships beauty in

^^jj^^SP* "" 1 I I I | , I I n!^**** * ' || ^

"Sli its forms, and practices moderation.;1' When qualified by age and

„„ .rfimrtKit* *'» ^IB-JW **,•,*, -..^ £aut*m-uirtjuJUi»» "-^ ''i'iif"w' M i ' 1"""'^ltl i ' ' ' «*" * r I il

M "^ ^l« ^ "1*™r 'JflW*^ ^ J

training, this man should be our super-statesman. Unfortunately,
- he tells us, at present men do not dedicate themselves to philosophy

11 according to the measure of their endowments and remain true to
it; they are swayed by false ideas of success, and seek to win the
applause of the multitude.) If any man becomes a philosopher now
it is in spite of and not because of our social system. Only the chil-
dren offer a hope of better things. If they could be separated from
adults, given a wholly new point of view, and educated in the prin-
ciples of true wisdom, it might be possible to inaugurate an ideall

J state with a perfect constitution and with community' of women,/*

1 children, and property. ^f^"

TWould such a state, once established, endure forever? It might

Vffl**G^"~*~*™~*«---^***"Xa^^»--'-" " "**-s,» , »- "--,,.. - Q '

says Socrates, if the guardians could learn and apply to the utmost
the principles of genetics and education; but so long as these things
are not fully understood or properly employed, then4, is a prob-
ability that the ideal state would jgradually degenerate into such
orms of government as now exist, I

—..i -„ $& i i.»'M*4^n '

These may be classified as timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, a^d
tyranny. The first step downward from the ideal state would come
with the abandonment of communism and the establishment of
private property. The guardians, becoming mercenary, would ap-
propriate the land, divide it among themselves, and reduce to
servitude the former freemen. The chief concern of the guardians;'

L p. 168.

V*'-

•'' *

THE FIRST UTOPIAN 51

would be war, and the government would be in the hands of a war-
rior class of landed gentry. Such is timocracy, of which Sparta is the
best examgle. — —

Timocracy gradually transforms itself into oligarchy. Wealth t?
accumulates and men decay. Riches come to be concentrated in the

• 5 ajhk I*-1" " ' I L «*»

hands of a few great families or individuals, and eventually they
s6Ize"contrOl of the state. At- first they have easy going, but in the

-long run the passion for possession proves to be their downfall. The
rich become ever richer and fewer and the poor ever poorer and

.jiiore numerous.) Finally comes a time when the condition of the
poor is so desperate and their hate of the plutocrats so bitter that ^
any little spark will kindle a revolution. Thus the oligarchs are
overthrown and the rule of the people — a democracy — proclaimed. %/"

Every one now hails the advent of a golden age of liberty and
equality; but the weaknesses of democracy soon become apparent. ^5

; The people are not capable of self-government. Freedom "Hegeher- r ^
afes into laxity and lawlessness, while equality levels the good and / ;
the competent to the same rank as the evil and the incompetent/
The common people select the rulers and decide all issues at elec- j
tion; the only way to rise to power is to flatter and beguile the 1
people. For such humbuggery a class of charlatans called politi- \
cians have a special talent, and they accordingly become the rulers i
of the state, exploiting the people while pretending to serve them.
After a while one trickster excels all the rest, and becomes the spe-
cial darling of the people. He promises everything — remission of \
debts, confiscation of wealth, distribution of land, and anything else
to play on the cupidity of the people. The people trust him, exalt
him, pour authority upon him, give him the janizaries Tie asks to
trample down opposition; and, lo, he flowers into a tyrant, a dicta-
tor bent on plunder and personal aggrandizement. Democracy now"!

* •* ^-^ ^"•^ sBartW«l«m!i«»*^^«l«^w t r UHH im\# *\ j«tMft^sjIwiff w^Wi.^^^ t ^Jjf

gives way to tyranny. Liberty vanishes and equality.is forgotten.^
TKeTstate is enslaved By a despot who can be dislodged only by
iloodshed and violence. There is no happiness, no justice.

. ' III

The Statesman, and the Laws may be dealt with more briefly. They
are works of Plato's later years, after he had suffered personal dis-
llusionment through the failure of his attempts to inaugurate the
instocracy of his dreams under the patronage of Dionysius II of

52 POLITIGALJPHILOSOPMIKS^ ^ ^

Syracuse, and after he had witnessed the completion of the cycle of
political degeneration in Athens. Disillusionment coupled with ad-
vancing years may have chilled his poetic enthusiasm and venomcd
the barbs of his irony, but they did not impair the clarity of his
vision or shake his loyalty to the ideal lie still seeks the City of
Light, hoping, if not believing, that philosophers may he kings and
kings philosophers.

In the Statesman we find Thcodorus, Socrates, (he Kleatie
Stranger, and Young Socrates discoursing on the qualities neces-
sary for a perfect ruler. The search for these qualities carries the
discourse through a review of the ideals set forth in the Rrfnhtic, but
is not content to stop there. A still more ideal conception of the
state is found in the type of government which, as the Kleatie
Stranger explains, existed hva former cycle of history when (Joel
ruled over men and cared for tliern. For some reason incompre-
hensible to men this cycle of life came to an end, and men came to
accept the types of government now found in the world Some of
these are superior to others; monarchy and aristocracy rank ahead
of democracy, and democracy ahead of oligarchy and tyranny,
"But are any of these governments worthy of the name? Is not gov-
ernment a science, and are we to suppose that scientific government
is secured by the rulers being many or few, rich or poor, or by the
rule being compulsory or voluntary?" **

\ True political science can be achieved only under a, rulcf who will
]not require instruction or restriction by law. He will be learned,
wise, impartial, upright, diligent, fully competent, and masterful*^
a veritable prototype of the Divine Ruler of the previous time when
men lived like gods. Present forms of government exist because
"men despair of the true king ever appearing among them; if be
were to appear they would joyfully hand over to him the reins of
government.35 With the coming of such a king there would be a re-
birth of that former Elysian state of human society, and the present
imperfect forms of government would be swept away. So ran the
Messianic dream of the Greek philosopher four centuries before the

'jt

Galilean Christ began to teach of the coming of tho Kingdom of

In the Laws] Socrates, who plays but a minor r61e in the
man., disappears Entirely. As his work became more expository aoi

* B. Jowett, The* Dialogues of Plato (4 vols., 1902), VoL Ui, p. 525, -j

THE FIRST UTOPIAN 53

«

dogmatic^ Plato seems to have felt that the character and method of
Socrates were inappropriafe, though he retained the dialogue form
as his vehicle. The colloquists in the Laws are three — an Athenian
Stranger, Cleinias, a Cretan, and Megillus, a Lacedaemonian. The
scene is laid in Crete, and the three speakers are companions on a
long walk from Cnossus to the cave and temple of Zeus, who is sup^
posed by the Cretans to have been the author of their laws, in
Lacedaemon, Apollo is assumed to have been the giver of the laws.
The Athenian Stranger is curious about these beliefs and questions
his companions concerning them. This serves to launch the trio
upon a prolix and tedious dialogue in which the Athenian plays the
part of protagonist and expositor.

The general purpose of Plato in this dialogue is to construct a sys-
tem of laws for a complete polity. Tradition has it that this treatise
was not published until after Plato's death, and the disjointed and
uneven character of the work lend credence to the supposition that
it was left in an unfinished state. "In a tedious way specific laws are
laid down for the regulation of the most trivial of human actiofis
and interests. Unfortunately, moreover, these legislative minutiae
are given in no coherent order, and are without any very evident at-
tempt to apportion the amount of discussion according to their rela-
tive degrees of importance. Particular laws are taken up at random,
apparently as they happen to occur to the mind; sometimes they are
preceded by elaborate introductions, but at other times, and more
often, are brought up and dismissed without comment." l

Most interesting, however, is the retreat from communism which
appears in this final work of Plato — not a full retreat, but a new
economic policy which strangely parallels a similar compromise
with reality in the thinking of certain modern exponents of com-
munism. Instead of the complete community of property demanded
in the Republic, Plato now proposes an equal division of land with
safeguards to prevent the concentration of ownership. Each land-
holder would hold his allotment subject to the superior title of the
state, could not alienate it, and would be obliged to use it under
governmeiital regulation for the benefit of society as a whole. In-
heritance would be strictly regulated to forestall the building up of
large estates; the use of money would be forbidden; and the charg-
ing of interest would be made illegal.

i W. W. Willoughby, The Political Theories of the Ancient World, p. 121.

54 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

I

Community of wives and children is also abandoned in the ///rw.
Marriage is to be permitted, but under stringent state, control and
supervision. Every married couple would be placed under the
superintendence of a state official with power to observe and regu-
late their conduct. The first ten years of married Hie would be con-
secrated to the bearing of children for the state; after that, state
supervision of marriage would cease, Children up to the. seventh
year would remain with their parents, but at: the age of seven would
be given over to the state for much the same sort of education as is
prescribed in the Republic. Women would still receive the same
education as men and take an equal part in public allairs, but would
noTbe entirely released from domestic duties, as proposed in the

Republic.

Two classes of citizens arc provided for—freeinen, who would be
forbidden to engage in any trade, or industry, and industrial work-
ers, who would carry on the strictly economic operations of com-
munity life. The freemen, corresponding with the guardian class in
the Republic, would devote themselves wholly to public affairs', while
the industrialists would produce and distribute: the material necessi-
ties of life. All commodities produced by the land would be appor-
tioned among the citizens by the state, and no buying or selling for
profit would be permitted.

Abandoning the idealistic aristocracy of the Republic, Plato reeom-
mends in the Laws the establishment of a popular assembly and an
executive council chosen by popular vote, but with provisions which
would give the upper hand to the wealthier classes, <&n elected
body of -jbirt^ between the ages of Ufty and seventy

would have general supervision of the laws and would classify the
citizens according to their wealth. There would also bo a, supreme
tribunal of censorship. To make up this tribunal the ten oldest
members of the board of thirty-seven woulcf each choose a younger
man to be associated with them, and these twenty, would review all
legislative measures and see that nothing should be done to change

the fundamental character of the state,

«

IV

What can a present-day commentator add to the superlatives
which two dozen centuries have piled up as a cenotaph to the
memory of Plato? Simply to recognize that after a lapse of time

*>s

THE FIRST UTOPIAN 55

4

which has rubbed out the achievements of unnumbered hosts of
men who have won wars, builded empires, amassed fabulous for-
tunes, invented amazing machines, written books of vast acclaim,
and done other deeds of high renown, the ideas of the prodigious
Principal of the first Academy still hold sway over the minds of men,
is greater praise than any lavish outpouring of adjectives could
bestow. There was much in Plato of the ephemeral and the pro-
vincial, but the midrib of his political philosophy was timeless and I
universal*. As a Greek of the post-Periclean period he was an anti-
expansionist, a disbeliever in democracy, a condoner of slavery, a
foe of commercialism, and an admirer of Lacedaemonian milita-
rism; but as an analyst of social and political institutions and a seeker
of the ideal he was the forerunner and inspirer of most of the anti-
materialistic political philosophies, reconstructive political theories,
and radical political programs which have appeared in subsequent
ages.

Something of Plato is to be seen in all the Utopias, and many of
the authors of imaginary commonwealths are scarcely more than
second-rate imitators of the great Athenian. Nearly all melioristic
thought, especially that favoring education and eugenics as the
most practicable modes of bettering human society, reaches back
to Plato. Milton, Locke, Rousseau, Goethe, and other great
apostles of social idealism have drawn heavily upon hirer. His
mordant analysis of the fatal tendencies of free enterprise in an
acquisitive society has been echoed again and again in the history
of western civilization^/ Our own day, wrestling with difficulties
said to result from economic disbalance, a polite name for unre-
strained profiteering, is hearing afresh the ancient doctrines of
Plato, and is beginning to doubt, as he doubted, whether it is pos-
sible to give free rein to men's passion for material possessions and
material power without destroying, sooner or later, the common
weal.

Virtually all socialistic and communistic thought has its roots in
Plato. Were he alive to-day Plato would be the reddest of Reds, and
would no dbubt hasten to Russia with the same expectant enthu-
siasm he displayed in answering the call of the ancient tyrant of
Syracuse, For, as Professor Jaszi points out, "the ideal State of
Plato and that of the Russian Communists have many elements in
common; both regard private property as the sole source of all evil;

56 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES ;

both would eliminate wealth and poverty; bolli favor a collr live
education of the children, exempted from paternal rare; boUi re-"
gard art and literature only as a means of State education; both ,
would control all science and ideology in the interest of (he State;
both have a rigid central dogma, a kind of State religion to which
all individual and social activity must be subordinated. And if one
would object that this analogy is unjustilied regarding the spiritual
idealism of Plato and the matter-of-fact materialism and violence
of the Communists, I would answer that Plato had no doubt what-
ever that this scheme would have been capable of realization only
under the protection and violence of armed force; thai is the reason
why his political vision of the ideal State, was intimately connected
with the expectation of a tyrant- a type of philosophical superman
— who would give body to Ivs idea.'1 '

Such comparisons can be carried too far, but Professor J;fsxi is on
safe ground in noting that the Russian experiment, embodies several
of Platp's favorite political ideas, tie might in fact have gone farther
anoshown that there is no essential incompatibility between the
historical materialism of Marx and Lenin and the idealism of Plato,
There was nothing abstruse and other-worldly about, Plato's ideal-
ism; it rested on truly materialistic foundations* Since Plato\s time
idealism has come to be a synonym for purely abstract 1 1 unking. In
that sense Plato was no idealist at all. The ideal for Plato was 'tie
idea that every test of reason and experience had proved valid, In
modern terminology it migly^h^^Aj^ jh;vl he was an uiclealsf
rather jthanan idealist. And there was no clroam-slufl'in his method
of checking the soundness of ideas. He went directly to the material
I world and demanded conformity with concrete fads. The ideal
' represented what he conceived to bo the best that was cononVES

possible for the kind of men who inhabited the world as it was.

t i i

Plato did, of course, propose to modify human nature, but on
within the limits of concrete reality as indicated by experience with
genetics and education. His super-citizens and super-rulers were
not superhuman; they were men selected* bred, trained, and en-
vironed for particular social functions. Plato's analysis <5f the factors
in the growth and decline of states and their cycles of change re-
veals a genuine appreciation of the materialistic forces of historical !

1K. F. Geiser and O. Jaszi, Political Philosophy Jrom Plato to Jar my Bmtlwm (1,927),
p. 4.

THE FIRST UTOPIAN 57

*

car »on. Like Marx and Lenin, he proposed to work with history
and . rot against it. His Republic was such a state as history itself
would produce did men have the wisdom and courage to apply the
teachings of reason to human affairs.

Communist Russia will neither prove nor disprove the correctness
of Plato's political theory. It departs from Plato in too many im-
portant respects to justify any such broad conclusions. Notwith-
standing this, there is enough of Plato in the Soviet system -to evoke
profound reflection on the deathless might of vital political ideas.

REFERENCES

Agard, W. R., What Democracy Meant to the Greeks (Chapel Hill, N. C.,

1942).

Barker, E., Political Thought of Plato and Aristotle (New York, 1906).
Coker, F. W., Readings in Political Philosophy (rev. ed.. New York, 1938),

Chap, I.

Cook, T. I., A History of Political Philosophy (New York, 1936), Chap. III.
Dunning, W. A., A History of Political Theories: Ancient and Mediaeval (New

York, 1902), Chap. II.

Farrington, B., Science and Politics in the Ancient World (New York, 1940),
Foster, M. B., Masters of Political Thought (Boston, 1941), Chap. II.
Geiser, K,, F., and Jazi, O., Political Philosophy from Plato to Jeremy Bentham

(New York, 1927), Chap. I.

Gettell, R. G., History of Political Thought (New York, 1924), Chap. III.
Jowett, B., The Dialogues of Plato (4 vols., London, 1902).
Mcllwain, C. H., The Growth of Political Thought in the West (New York,

1932), Chap. II.
Murray, R. H., The History of Political Science from Plato to the Present (New

York, 1926), Chap. I.

Nettleship, R. L., Lectures on the Republic of Plato (London, 1901).
Plato, Laws (tr. by R. G. Bury, 2 vols., New York, 1926).
Sabine, G. H., A History of Political Theory (New York, 1937), Chaps.

1II-IV.

Taylor, A. E., Plato, the Man and His Work (3rd ed., New York, 1929).
Wild, J., Plato's Theory of Man (Cambridge, Mass., 1945).
Willoughby, W. W,, Political Theories of the Ancient World (New York,

1903), Chaps. VII-IX.

/-?• ,: .f

CHAPTER V

THE FIRST POLITICAL SCIENTIST

I

VERY one, said the poet Coleridge, is born cither a Plato
nist or an Aristotelian; which might be supplemented by the
almost equally true observation that every cme may be at
one time a Platonist and at another an Aristotelian, So universal
are the qualities of these two giants of Greek philosophy, and so
perfectly do they typify our characteristic modes of reasoning, that
the average person, who cares very little for the niceties of dialec-
tic, may, and often does, shift his mental gears from the Platonic
high to the Aristotelian low, andrwV<? versa, without knowing it. Yet
Coleridge was right in the main. The average", person is born with,
or very early in life acquires, certain traits of mind which predispose
him on the whole to incline cither to the general-to-par tin ilar reason-
ing process of Plato or the particular-to-general process of Aristotle,
That Plato, the teacher, and Aristotle, the pupil, should repre-
sent such polar opposites of intellectual method is in some ways
more remarkable than the affinity between Socrates, the* teacher,
and Plato, the pupil.

j Aristotle was not a native Athenian, though much of his life
was spent in the Attic metropolis. He was born (384 n.o.) in the
Thracian city of Stagira, where his father, Nichomachus, was
physician to the king of Macedon. The boy studied medicine under
his father and other physicians, and upon the death of the father in
366 B.C. he went to Athens and enrolled under Plato in the Acad-
emy. The young Stagirite seems to have made a deep impression,;
upon the sixty- two-year-old master of the Academy, who is said to
have called Aristotle the intellect of his school iand to have remarked
somewhat ruefully that this indocile pupil spurned him as colts do !
their mothers. However that may have been, the relations between
the two men were always cordial, andj Aristotle always respected
and honored Plato, even when adversely criticizing his doctrines.
For twenty years he remained a member of Plato's circle, and seems
to have expected, upon the death of Plato in 347 B.C., to succeed
to the headship of the Academy. &

THE FIRST POLITICAL SCIENTIST 59

-.« , , , — . — . — — ,

When this position went to Speusippus, the nephew of Plato,
Aristotle repaired to the court of Herrnias, tyrant of Atarneus,
where he served as court physician and tutor, and married, so it
seems, the sister or niece of the ruler. In 342 B.C. Herrnias was
overthrown by a revolution and killed, and Aristotle lost his job.
Very soon, however, he was summoned to the court of Philip,
king of Macedon, to be tutor to the crown prince, Alexander,
then thirteen years of age. There he remained until 336 B.C.,
when he "returned to Athens and founded a school of jus^own^called
the Lyceum. This school he conducted for twelve years, during

•^*™^"*'1M*,~»»™,^aiM— a sir, "-~J -• "^ »„„ '

which time he had the favor and backing of Alexander and the
Macedonian court, but encountered much hostility among Athen-
ians, who looked upon their Macedonian masters as alien oppres-
sors. The death of Alexander led Jx> anti-Macedonian riots in
Athens, and Aristotle was obliged to flee the city. He took refuge
in the city of Chalcis in Euboea, where he died in the year 322 B.C.

— _

Countless admirers have acclaimed Aristotle as "Xh£^ Master
of Them That Know," and have ascribed to him the most pro-

3US"5JHH!>

found and encyclopaedic mind of all antiquity. } Such fulsome praise
may have been unduly extravagant, but the fact remains that few
men have spoken authoritatively on so many different subjects,
and none, perhaps, has ever approached the solitary eminence of
the Stagirite as a court of final appeal in things intellectual. (^For
centuries Aristotle on logic, Aristotle on mechanics, Aristotle on
physics, Aristotle on physiology, Aristotle on astronomy, Aristotle
on metaphysics, Aristotle on ethics, Aristotle on art, Aristotle on
poetry, Aristotle on economics, and Aristotle on politics was almost
the last word — the unimpeachable authority than which none was
more authentic." His information was so much vaster and more
exhaustive, his insight so much more penetrating, his deductions
so much more plausible than was true of any of his contemporaries
or any of his successors prior to the advent of modern science that
he bepame the all-knowing master in whom the scholastic mind
could find no fault, ] ^

"*7

Though many of the writings of Aristotle have been lost, those
which have been recovered disclose a mind of prodigious erudition
and amazing versatility. Of the products of his pen there is record
of six treatises on various phases of logic, twenty-six on different
siibjects in the field of natural science, four on ethics and morals3

60 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

three on art and poetry, one each on metaphysics., economics,
history, and politics, and four or more on miscellaneous subjects.
His learning ranged the entire gamut of Greek civilization., and he
was master of every subject he treated. Our concern is solely with
the treatise on politics, wfcdch some commentators have declared
to be his masterpiece, "whether this be true or not, it clearly en-
titles him to be recognized as the father of political science.

The easy approach to the method of Aristotle is through its di-
vergence from that of Plato. }> The latter, as we have seen, proceeded '
upon the assumption that ultimate reality is to be found in the
ideal. To him the things men called real were merely imperfect
reflections of faultless ideas— ideas which the human mind, by
correct reasoning, could achieve and comprehend, and from which
by logical deduction it could arrive at conclusions of a truly realistic
character. This is sometimes termed the philosophy of universal '

a JJM^tll!^a'!aa'^^~^

forms. ^Aristotle's thought was based on the contrary assumption
that reality is not to be found in perfect ideas as such. Everything
we know, experience? and perceive, said Aristotle, has its own essen-
tial substance or reality. By numerous and careful observations and
comparisons of things as they are he thought it possible to get at
their inward reality, and thus from many revealing facts to draw
general conclusions. This is sometimes called the philosophy of
individual substances./

':l When Aristotle came under the tutelage of Plato, he already had
the training of a physician and had formed the physician's habit
of basing conclusions upon repeated observations of objective phe-
nomena, and by bitter experience, no doubt, had learned the wis-
dom of limiting his generalizations to the ambit of his facts. From
the same background of early training and experience he had also
acquired an insatiable intellectual curiosity and with it an over-
powering avidity for the accumulation of factual material. JELato
he found teaching that truth was to be found,* not in concrete and
particular things but in general ideas, not in the actaal but the
ideal — searching for absolute beauty beyond all beautiful things, ,

absolute good beyond all good things, absolute civic virtue beyond j

i

all civic excellence. As he went along in the Academy, Aristotle *
no doubt perceived many discrepancies between Plato's doctrines

THE FIRST POLITICAL SCIENTIST 61'

^ _. _m iim ^^^-—r- ---— -.-.--nTT- >.'-« .-„-- -.„- ™.nw— — m ,™

and observed facts, and was impelled thereupon to evolve his own
system of thought. He did not wholly repudiate Plato, but parted
company with him on the point that what we see and experience is
unreal. iEvery material thing or experience, he held, is a part or an
expression of reality, and this reality may be discovered by the
scientific method of observation, comparison, and conclusion. <\

Thes£_dif£erences in point of view and method of thought de-
prive the political philosophy of Aristotle of the attractive literary
qualities which constitute so large a part of the charm of Plato, v
Where Plato lets his imagination take flight, Aristotle is factual
and dull; where Plato is eloquent, Aristotle is exact; where Plato
leaps from general concepts to logical conclusions, Aristotle slowly
works from a multitude of facts to conclusions that are logical but
not final; where Plato gives us an ide^l commonwealth that is the
best his mind can conceive, Aristotle gives us the material requisites
out of which, by adapting them to circumstances, a model state
may be constructed. Like Plato, Aristotle views the state as a
natural product of the necessary social relations of human beings,
and with Plato he agrees that the function of the state is to secure
for men the good life, not only .in material ways but in aesthetic
and ethical ways as well; but he is completely and aggressively at
variance with Plato in respect to the control of the state over the
individual. He had no high-flown notions about sacred and inalien-
able private rights — that idea was foreign to Greek thought —
but he believed that the individual could not live the best life of
which he was capable if he were as completely assimilated to the
state as Plato would have him.

For use of the scientific method in his studies Aristotle probably
had ampler facilities and more extensive resources than any man of
his time or any time prior to the past century. ,ff At the court of
Macedonia, where he grew to manhood and received his early
education^ his father was a prominent and powerful personage.
Everything that money and power could provide in the way of
teachers, books, and other means of study were available to the
young medical student. During his years in Athens as a pupil in
the Academy Aristotle is said to have practiced as a physician;
but, as he apparently was a man of means, this must have been a
scholarly avocation as much as a vocation. His position at the
court of Hermias was different from that of the ordinary physician

62 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

_ _ _ _ _^^___i '\.

or tutor; he was by this time a famous scholar, a man of sufficient
eminence to marry into the ruling family, and there is no doubt
that he served as a sort of consulting expert to the tyrant. Here
again, to aid him in the prosecution of his studies, he had at his
beck and call all the resources of his government. Going from this
post to that of tutor to Alexander was like stepping up from the
court of one of the Balkan countries to that of one of the great
powers of the world. Macedonia was at this moment the greatest
and most powerful of Greek states and just upon the threshold of
a world empire. Every aid to scholarship and research that all-
powerful political authority could command was placed at his dis-
posal and was continued by Alexander when he came to the throne,
Returning to Athens to open his school, he was in the exceptional

^ **™»A«i~M!a«»jiM»;ro«,Kits!^ fmia^

position of having the per$9nal friendship and patronage of the
most powerful monarch on earth, and for twelve years this relation-
ship continued.)

I That Aristotle did not neglect these incomparable opportunities
is amply evident from his writings. On their very face they bear
proof of the fact that behind them lay an accumulation of fact-
material such as the world had never seen and was not to see again

,BBMiitf»»«™«'»"^^ O

for many centuries. As a basis for the Politics he collected and di-

- 1 i ' * i $r

gested 158 Greek constitutions,) it being his beliefTtfaFEfy analytical
and comparative study of concrete political experience it should
be possible to arrive at sound conclusions as to the most appropriate
form of constitution for any given type of political society. The
result was a treatise bristling with citations and replete with illus-
trative detail; not very readable, but so impressively authentic
that it stands to-day, as it has through all the intervening centuries,
as a masterpiece of political science.

Ill

f _

!*The Politics was intended to serve a very practical purpose, j
Scores of Greek colonies had been planted throughout the Kleditef-
raitean area. These were organized as cit^commogw^
the supervision and patronage of the mother state, but had their
own constitutions and enjoyed well nigh autonomous government.
These and the parent states as well were frequently engaged in the
business of making and remaking their constitutions — as frequently
in fact as American cities adopt new charters and American states

THE FIRST POLITICAL SCIENTIST 63

•> i — • — • — • — ' " ~

new constitutions. Somewhere in the Greek world the framing -and
revising of constitutions was going on all the time, just as some-
where in the United States to-day the drafting of city charters and
state constitutions is constantly taking place. It was also a common
practice then as now to call in outside experts to assist with the ob-
stetric mysteries of ushering in the new dispensation^ and as a
consequence there came to be a numerous guild of consulting pub-
licists offering themselves for hire as legislators or constitution-
makers. Aristotle mentions a number of these by name in the
Politics, and there is no doubt that he and Ms associates jn the

J rcfote^<MWf|'ima'a8>«^

Lyceum were also brothers of the craft., as a sideline to education.
It was for the practitioners of this profession that the Politics
was written. It is best appreciated when one studies it topically,
bringing together under a common head all of the comments
touching the same subject. The ^r^atiseopens with a considera-
tion of the origin of the state and the nature of political society.
Although he did not have the anthropological and historical data

**-' "**M>®4*Mtoto^<a^,^lMa>sia9to^ S-T ^^^jamMOSVleS^^^^^8^^ Uji.

^ak*aMtafla^^ *M1'"* Mlfc- *MViauHL4|lr

which have enabled modern political scientists to make fairly plaus-
ible guesses as to the beginnings of government. Aristotle arrived

^"^ ^"^ ^~^ w*BaiiWw*«-WLtfm^ wrtwtawiWiMifcJ Mi^W-6*"^

j_o^clusion_that few modern students of politics have cared to
dispute — namely that c^thej?^ of nature, and that

magjsjbjr; nature Apolitical animal.5' l The state is the whole of
whjch the family and the individual are pa^g^^^

^^^^"w-.^,, .^^^^^ , ,,, jy» " »" *""'"" ;"""

this is that ttuejnaiviaual, when isolated, is not self-sufficing; and

"iwiiw •* ( rf 'j'LjW) T'lMrt "> r '*** ^n"*****""' *i H""*** 1^«saijs,.rt1Ujm( ir^Buegsjfto^e i, W«M™ w»|»™i*««iwMa«im»w^ <,

therefore he isjikeji part in relation tonEEFvv^te

,,, , ,.;• -*»*"•" ""•"" ~^" ~ ^ i'~*~>~"'i'^"'^-'~-»-^--..~^-«™,»^»,.^»^ ' " "*" " ' " ""

unable to live in society^ or who has no need because he is sufficient

I, I. N •>»" •> "" ""' "l^0h" -*11™ '•" - ' •* t t*H, ijflw- W4<IM» WwiK 1 V^U^W"'*-'*'-""'1*' ^l»«~l'1U^«ml'll^tB*w^'™^"^lrt^™1™ Blp WXWn.nw^iB.CfH,.,^ ^

for "himself , must be either a beast or a god: he is "no part of tKe

.-»-«"" """""•""•""'"-' »_„„,,. O -t

*SJ >& K n '^"W'fl mir-j^n- ^ W-HP/BB.MI.TM.,,.,, M „ i 1 ->• »" - ~*

State." 2 -.™_-™_... ,,-... •

In this thoroughly Hellenic view Aristotle and Plato were in en-
tire accord. 'Male and female were united in domestic economy in

<aWa^«Ea»#t!B!^^ J Hj,

order to satisfy certain imperative needs; households were united
in villages to satisfy a wider range of needs; and families and vil~ '
lages were united in states in order to satisfy all the needs of man;
and this union has continued in existence "for the sake of the good
life. . . i For man when perfected is the best of animals, but when
separated from law and justice^ he is the worst of all; since armed
injustice is the more dangerous, and he is equipped at birth with

1 Aristotle's Politics (World's Greatest Literature. 1900). Vol. xvii, p. 3.

8 Ibid.

64 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

~ " ~ - ~' " r •-••-'"••' ' " »"""""" V" \M

the .arms of intelligence and with moral qualities which he may use

Qj ^tiaaaattaaiiaUva&£ato*j'' JL jsynt**1"** -i -"M^^i^**^**81 •

for the worst ends. Wherefore, if he have not virtue, he is the most

J y J

unholy and the most savage of animals, and the most full of lust
and gluttony. But justice is the bond of men in States, and the
administration of justice, which is the determination of what is
just, is the principle of order in political society." 1

H To examine political society intelligently, says Aristotle, we must
first inquire into the elements of which it is composed. The state is
made up of households, which in turn consist of slaves and freemen,
husbands and wives, parents and children, money-making activi-
ties, and property. A study of these will give a clue to the nature of
the state and the principles of politics. •$

; First as to slaves. Some persons, remarks Aristotle, think slavery
is unjust and contrary to nature, but he is of the opinion that it is
quite in accord with the laws of nature and the principles of justice.
Many persons, he asserts, are" intended by nature to be slaves; from
the hour of their birth they are marked for subjection. > Not that
they are necessarily inferior in strength of body or mind, but they
are of a servile nature, and so are better off when they are ruled by
other men. They lack somehow the quality of soul that distinguishes
the freeman and master. Wanting in their make-up is the ineluc-
table capacity for self-determination which a ruling class must have,
and therefore it is clear that nature has intended them to be used as
instruments in the hands of others. Consequently it is just that they
should be held as property arid used as other property is used, as a
means of maintaining life. •;/'"

To students of American history this doctrine has a familiar
The learned apologists for Negro slavery in the old South drew their
best arguments from Aristotle. His weaving together of the ethical

^ j^HUHUun i ,„ „ i. , I » > W« i I „ r *

and the economic in such a manner that the latter would derive

jX*

from" the former* furnished them with the most cogent brief ever
made in defense of human bondage. What matter if the underlying
assumptions were a trifle dubious? The assumptions of a ruling
class always seem good until its power is broken, and then it needs
no master dialectician to demonstrate their falsity. From the first
lashswinger down to the latest labor-driver, assumptions of innate
superiority have always been made by those who live by the toil of
others. Having the power to rule, they doubt not that they are

* Ibid.

THE FIRST POLITICAL SCIENTIST 65

— ' » " ~~~ ' " """"" ~~~ ^— — — —

superior beings having a just right to rule. There is but one answer
to such reasoning, and that is to be found in the logic of force — a
truth which Aristotle did not fail to perceive, as is shown by his
repeated insistence that only persons truly slaves by nature can be
justly held in bondage.

_From the discussion of slavery — a form of property— Aristotle
passes to the consideration of property in general and the art of
money-making. A more explosive subject is not to be found in the
whole range of political inquiry, but' Aristotle seejfts unaware that

vs'

philosophers are supposed to handle it gingerly. "With one bold leap
he lands at the vortex of all controversy over the acquisition and
ownership of property. Is there justification for private property?
.Yes, he answers, up to a certain point there is the best of all possible
justifications: it is nature's own way of assuring man^lhe where-
withal to live. Men must eat, be clad, have shelter; and in order to
doloTKey must acquire property? The instinct to do so is as natural
and proper as the provision nature makes in supplying wild animals
with the impulses and the means of satisfying the needs of suste-
nance and reproduction. Soot is apparent that the art of acquisition
in order to live, and, indeed, to live well, is founded upon a univer-
sal law of nature. But — now he poises a thunderbolt — but this does
not justify that species of acquisition known as the art of making
money. Here, contends Aristotle, we have a form of acquisition
that is contrary to nature and capable of great harm.

He concedes that the exchange of goods is desirable in order that
the necessaries of life may be more advantageously shared by all,
and that the use of money greatly facilitates exchange. But the
abuses of money, he thinks, are greater than its benefits. When the
use of coin was discovered, men learned to employ it not alone for
the easy and proper distribution of goods but also for piling up un-
natural and unconscionable profits. v Instead of striving to acquire
property in order that they might live well, men plunged into a
competitive struggle to heap profits upon profits and thus swell
their hoards of money so as to be able to gratify their desires without
limit. In ihe end the multiplication of profits and the accumulation
of fortunes became the primary objectives of life, corrupting the
social system and 'militating against the good life. £ With Plato he

.money is the root of all evil," and holds that

nothing will more surely work for the ultimate destruction of the

66 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

state than placing its system of production and distribution in the
hands of a class who operate it solely for the sake of profits, i

For 'this subversive heresy the Politics of Aristotle probably de-
serves to be placed among the forbidden books ; but what is a gener-
ation which has seen calamitous depression follow swiftly upon the
heels of delirious profit-snatching, 'which has seen governments reel
and flounder and sometimes utterly collapse under the demoralizing
pressure of an overextended money economy, which has seen a
threat of communism spread terror among the capitalistic states of
the world— what is such a generation going to say in answer to the
accusing postulate of the ancient Stagirite? And why clo some of the
most cautious leaders of economic thought now tentatively advance
the hypothesis that stability, that consummation most devoutly,
sought by "a troubled and brawling world, is not to be achieved
without some means of restraint upon the race for profits? Was
Aristotle right, after all?

If he was unorthodox in his politico-economic ideas, the master
of the Lyceum was sufficiently conservative in his notions of family
polity to satisfy the staunchest Tory^ In this he stands at the op-
posite pole from Plato. No feminist, he categorically denies the
equality of the sexes in any way. |The male, he affirms, "is by na-
ture better fitted to command than the female,* just as the elder and
fullgrown is superior to the younger and more immature-'^1 The
husband and father should, therefore, rule over the wife and chil-
dren. Woman's glory, he says, quoting with approval a popular
line of verse, is silence; but this is not equally the glory of man, %No
equality of education for the sexes and no equality of civic re-
sponsibility will characterize his scheme of political society^ Over
the children the father will hold sway as one with royal authority,
over the wife as one having constitutional authority, though in both
•cases the rule should be temperate, wise, and just. % ;

IV -

s Having considered what he regards as the basic ingredients of po-
g litical society, Aristotle then proceeds to discuss "what form of polit-
ical community is best of all for those who are able to realize their
ideal of life.5 V To do this it is necessary to examine such constitu*
tions as actually exist in well-governed states, and also the best the

i Kid., p. 20, l Ibid., p. 22.

THE FIRST POLITICAL SCIENTIST 67

-' - » — ~

theorists have imagined. Plato's Republic is the most challenging
of the latter, and this Aristotle promptly places under the micro-
scope.

Will community of property and of women and children accom-
plish the objects Plato has in mind? Aristotle thinks not. Plato
seems to believe that the greater the unity of the state the better,
and with this premise his practical-minded pupil disagrees. There
may be, he declares, too much unity — so much, indeed, as to de-
stroy the state itself. Differentiation of function is one of the great
laws he finds in nature, and by constricting a state in disregard of
this law one may produce a monstrosity. By making all citizens
equal and exactly alike you would have something which would be
useful for one purpose but not for the many purposes which a state
must serve. Thus you would destroy the self-sufficiency of the state,
which is its raison d'etre. For as the individual is less self-sufficient
than the family because the unity of his nature prevents him from
doing so great a variety of things, and the family for the same reason
is less self-sufficient than the state, so by limiting the variety and
magnifying the unity of the state you would cause it to decline in
self-sufficiency and eventually cease to be a state. /

Nor would communism increase the devotion of each to the wel-
fare of all and banish dissension from the life of the state. It is a fact

tf

of common observation, says /Aristotle, that things common to the
greatest number have the least care bestowed upon them, and that
people think of the common interest only when they as individuals
are "some way concerned in the common interest. With wives,
children, and property in common, men would not be likely to say
"mine33 and "not mine" in the same instant of time, as Plato sup-
poses; they would have no sense of "mine" and "not mine," but an
overdeveloped sense of "all" and the things of all. Every citizen
would have a thousand sons who could not be his individually and
whom he in common with others equally their parents would f
equally neglect. Moreover, there would be many occasions for
quarreling and bickering. Jealousy and^ violence would not be
eliminated i>y Plato's scheme (^controlling sex relations, and might
be increased by it. Nor would it be possible, since nature has a
habit of producing children who resemble their parents, to prevent
parents from discovering or trying to discover their own children
and making trouble about them.

68 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

Much the same would be the consequences of communism with
respect to property. A more fruitful source of discord could not be
imagined. People are much more inclined to quarrel with those
with whom they have frequent and close contacts than with more
casual and distantly removed associates. Add to this the further in-
timacy which would result from holding and using property in
common and you would have the community in a constant broil.
Lands would not be so well cultivated, flocks so well tended, or
households so well managed as with private ownership. Individuals
not only would be neglectful of property shared in common with the
rest of the citizenry, but also would be bereft of the values which in-
dividual ownership has as a spur to achievement, a prompter of
self-respect, and a means of altruistic services to one's fellows. fin
one sense, however, property should be common: that is, its benefits
should be common. But this should not be sought by the destruction
of private ownership, but by subjecting private owners to wise legis-
lation which would create in them a disposition to bestow upon the
community the benefits accruing from their properly.

"Let us remember that we should not disregard the experience of
ages; in the multitude of years these things, if they were good, would
certainly not have been unknown; for almost everything has been
found out, although sometimes they are not put together; in other
cases men do not use the knowledge which they have." } In this
quotation we have the crux of Aristotle's dissent from Platonic ideal-
ism. For him, hard-headed assaycr of facts, there can be no New
Jerusalem, but only progressive adaptations of human institutions
taken as they are. Plato can limn out conceptual commonwealths to
conform with the absolute perfection of his dreams, because he sees
human nature as infinitely plastic and infinitely perfectable; but
Aristotle sees human nature as plastic only within thq orbit of its
inborn potency and perfectable only to the extent of its ability to
build on things as they are. Plato seeks a superman, who will create
a state as good as ought to be; Aristotle seeks a super-science, which
' will create a state as good as can be.

_r,1 „ iWlmSJMlW IBftsBMlPWin-—-^ . ™ " , _ , «

1 his austerely critical and exactmgly scientific poinrt of view is
maintained throughout all the eight books of the Politics. After dis-
posing of Plato, Aristotle turns his lens upon the ideal states of
Phaleas of Chalcedon and Hippodamus of Miletus; then upon the

1 Ibid., p. 29.

THE FIRST POLITICAL SCIENTIST 69'~

- » —— ____^ ______ ___ __,

best existing states — Sparta, Crete^and^Ca-rthage — then upon the

o -.1 * ' •—-" -*"•—-< ..,_.rf-- ' 1^— 1~*~*'~""^.^™«;sL. *

works of the historic lawgivers, such as Solon and Draco. We shall
not attempt to follow him through this maze of scientific appraise-
ment, but shall note in passing a few of the acute observations which

^ A *O fi i-w *m ; s i * ) ,eir w«v ,

account for his tremendous, reputation among scholars.

lBlto)^ftHjt»all™'""BS'J' """t*""ahp*^i!..,.. t»LBj sat***1*''11"™"1'* 1*W"' ' M9*sso" JL IM"lUs* "**'°JalMU •"•mfia «• wn *- w « nan*. WB iiwmwusfwjwmihk ^ «_»»„, wJwwS^^HBiujiujimn « i j it i rn n *i j *'r I ')

*" "In the Spartan state he finds many shortcomings. A ruling class
with leisure to devote to public affairs is essential to a well-ordered
state (a truth most unwelcome to democracies, but most profoundly
true nevertheless) 5 but the Spartans have not found out the secret of
managing their subject populations. They must learn how to attach
their serfs and slaves to them with such loyalty that they will not
revolt when their masters are preoccupied with foreign wars. This
one lesson the slavocracy of the American South did learn and learn
remarkably well. Never in history w^f a subject population under
stronger temptation to betray their masters than the Negro slaves
during the Civil War, and never did a subject population cleave
more loyally to their overlords.

The Spartans also pamper their women too much to suit Aris-
totle, allowing them to live in luxury and indulge in every sort
of intemperance. Like most warlike races, they have a con-
spicuous weakness for women (don't take Aristotle's word for
it; look up the record of the conquering races), and succumb to
petticoat government because they are unable to resist the be-
guilements of the voluptuous creatures. The men, of course, keep

•

up a pretense of lordship, but "what difference does it make

•*• « •»""• --fut^ „„„.., > , »-.•'»' '"" """ " " ' ' ' "<" " " "

whether women rule, or the rulers are ruled by women? The re-j
suit is the same." 1

i H' -1

The Spartan constitution is also defective in permitting judges to
hold office for life. This ccis not a good thing, for the mind grows old
as well as the body." 2 But most fatal of all defects, perhaps,, is the
inequality of property in Sparta. Most of the land has passed into
the hands of a few; some citizens are tremendously rich,- but the ma-
jority are poor. The laws encourage large families by exempting
fathers of three sons from military service and fathers of four sons
from all state burdens; and most of these children necessarily fall
into poverty owing to the unequal distribution of property. As a
consequence a large portion of the citizenry is swayed by basely ma-
terial, if not venal, motives, and in many instances it has happened

1 Ibid., p. 42. *Ibid.> p. 45.

'70 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

that the highest offices have fallen into the hands of men so poor as
to be unable to resist the temptations of office.

Of the Cretan and Carthaginian constitutions Aristotle has much
the same to say, for both resemble that of Sparta in many particu-
lars. Of the renowned lawgivers and their work Solon is the only
one about whom he has much to say, and that is generally critical,
Solon, he thinks, is given credit for much he did not do. He intro-
duced democratic elements into the Athenian constitution, but was
careful to see that the magistrates should be drawn only from the
notables and men of wealth. He deserves credit, however, for giving
the people power to fill offices by election and call the magistrates to
account, which was an admirable means of saving the people from
despotism and keeping them loyal to the government.

r V

The subject of citizenship next engages the attention of the
writer, and after some comment on the varying bases of citizenship
in the different Greek states, he passes on to a classification of gov-
ernments. (Supreme authority, he finds, is in the hands of one, or of
a few, or oTmany. In its true form the first condition results in a,
monarchy, the second in an aristocracy, and the third in a constitu-

^^iatKSaaiiSII»m^iama^!aifi^lfMili J _ ttrtdMtaflKg^^ •/ J '^mtt^^^^^^^^i^^^^

-—-"——"—«—— ^BJ***^^ ^^WLWIW1WI'WH»a^^ ^^ HfVM'<t#toHlmf , , „

tional government or polity. But for each of these true forms there

^-""""^^ f < •

is a perverted form: for monarchy, tyranny; for aristocracy, oli- ,
garchy; and for constitutional government, democracy.- As states
vary in the stages of their advancement from primitive condition!
and in the peculiar circumstances of their local history and develop-
ment, so, it will be found, do they vary in constitutional structure,
Wherefore the many variants of the six basic forms of government,
The science of politics is concerned with all of these, for it is the
business of that science "to consider what kind of government
would be best and most in accordance with our aspirations, if there
were no external impediment, and also what kind of government
is adapted to particular states. For the best is often unattainable,
and therefore the true legislator and statesman ought to be ac-
quainted, not only with (1) that which is best in the abstract, but
also with (2) that which is best relatively to circumstances. We
should be able further to say how a State may be constituted (3)
under any given conditions; . . . [and] to know (4) the form of
government which is best suited to States in general; for political

THE FIRST POLITICAL SCIENTIST 7T

t --- - ' - _ --"I-!— ... -V ' ___________ .„ _ _ _____ - _ - _______ -| ___ ± ____ __ - __ _______ _ _,_,,_. _________ |;_ __________

writers, although they have excellent ideas, are often unpractical:" l
The reason, he goes on to say, why there are so many forms of
government is that every state contains many different elements.
In the multitude of citizens some will be poor, some rich, and some
in the middle condition; some will be husbandmen, some traders,
and some artisans; some will be of the military order and some will
be civilians. ftA constitution is an organization by which the citizens
distribute offices among themselves according to the .power j/yhich
different classes possess (the doctrine of the class struggle), and
hence there must be as jnany forms of constitution as there are
methods of distajbu ting jpffices . I Starting from this principle, Aris-
totle proceeaTtolinfold'tfie effective causes of each type of political
differentiation, showing the various combinations and permutations
of power-groups which determine tfre structure of the state. The i
most potent cause of all, he finds,^is the^dktri^tion_of wealth (here
is the fountain-head of the doctrine"

Economic groups, whether their cohesiveness springs from the pos-
session of wealth or the lack of it, are the most frequent and power-
ful causes of variation in the political process. Men claim the right
to share in government on four grounds — freedom, wealth, virtue,
and good birth. Good birth is but a product of ancient wealth and
virtue, and so there remain only freedom, virtue, and wealth; and
the greatest of these is wealth, for it limits the other two. /

"Now- in all States there are three elements; one class is very rich,
another very poor, and a third in a mean. It is admitted that modera-
tion and the mean are best, and therefore it will clearly be best to pos-
sess the gifts of fortune in moderation; for in that condition of life men
are most ready to listen to reason. But he who greatly excels in beauty,
strength, birth or wealth, or on the other hand who is very poor, or very
weak, or very much disgraced, finds it difficult to follow reason.
Again, those who have too much of the goods of fortune, strength,
wealth, friends, and the like, are neither willing nor able to submit to
authority. The evil begins at home: for when they are boys, by reason
of the luxury in which they are brought up, they never learn, even at
school, the habit of obedience. On the other hand, the very poor, who
are in thff opposite extreme, are too degraded. So that the one class can-
not obey, and ,can only rule despotically; the other knows not how to
command and must be ruled like slaves. Thus arises a city, not of free-
men, but of masters and slaves, the one despising and the other envying-
and nothing can be more fatal to friendship and good fellowship in

"Ibid., p. 86.

"72 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

States than this: for good fellowship tends to friendship; when men are
at enmity with one another, they would rather not even share the same
path. But a city ought to be composed, as far as possible, of equals and
similars; and these are generally the midjdlejclasses. Wherefore the city
which is composed of middle-class citizens is necessarily be^t-g^verned;
they are, as we say, the natural elements of a State, And this is the class
of citizens which is most secur-eHm a State, for they do not, like the poor,
covet their neighbor's goods; nor do others covet theirs, as the poor
covet the goods of the rich; and as they neither plot against others, nor
are themselves plotted against, they pass through life safely. Wisely then
did Phocylides pray —

'Many things are best in the mean; I desire to be of a middle con-
dition in my city.5

,v cc Thus it is manifest that the best political community is formed by
citizens of the middle class, and that those States are likely to be well-
administered, in which the middle class is large,- and larger if possible
than both the other classes, of at any rate than either single; for the
addition of the middle class turns ;the scale, and prevents either of the,)
extremes from being dominant. Great then is the good fortune of a
State in which the citizens have a moderate jmdjsufficicnt property; for
where some possess much, and the others nothing, there may arise an
extreme democracy, or a pure oligarchy; or a tyranny may grow out of
either extreme — either out of the most rampant democracy, or out of an
oligarchy; but it is not likely to arise out of a middle and nearly equal
condition. I will explain the reason of this hereafter, when I speak of the
revolution of States." l

In this well-known passage we have the heart of Aristotle's polit-
ical ideology. The salvation of political society lies in the enthrone-
ment as rulers of that salutary middle class which represents the
happy mean between wealth and poverty. The aim is not prima-
rily to equalize wealth and social condition, but to secure the gov-
ernment of society by the class least given to excesses of any sort,
and therefore most likely to govern well. On theoretical grounds
the validity of this thesis may be

mediocrity is no shining ideal forTEeTmnS^ a state. But
when one reviews the history of nations and undertakes to name the I
stable, durable, and well-administered political societies in which
the rich or the poor alone have guided the destinies of the state; or
when one attempts to enumerate the states of any consequence
which have collapsed from internal causes so long as they had a
vigorous and uncorrupted middle-class government, one quickly

1 Ibid. t pp. 102-103.

THE FIRST POLITICAL SCIENTIST

begins to have a better opinion of the reasoning of the ancient
physician of Stagira.

Sage old John Adams, who knew his history well and likewise his
Aristotle, adopted as the cardinal principle of his political philos-
ophy the Aristotelian doctrine of thet(^old£nmean;^Afraid of rich
and poor alike, he urged the American people to devise a system of
governmental mechanics which would impartially restrain the
rapacity of both classes. In the system of checks and balances he,
and many of his contemporaries, believed that such a scheme of
government had been found; but those checks and balances have
not worked altogether as the founding fathers anticipated, and there
are many modern students of American institutions who fear that
their ultimate effect may be to neutralize the power of the middle
class to such a degree that the futur^ of the American state will be
determined by cataclysmic struggles between the rich and the poor.

No lover of democracy was this" classical panegyrist of the middle
class. Although admitting that democracy would be more likely to
have a numerous and influential middle class than any form of
polity prevailing in his time, Aristotle's preference was decidedly for
what might be termed ^§aadsto£Xac^^ the

founders of the American Republic, he would severely exclude the
propertyless masses from all share in government and would with
equal severity hammer down the privileges and immunities of the
rich. Indeed, he declares that the encroachments of the rich are
more destructive to the state, and more to be feared, than those of
the poor. "There only can the government ever be stable where
the middle class exceeds one or both of the others, and in that case
there will be no fear that the rich will unite with the poor against
the rulers. For neither of them will ever be willing to serve the
other, and if they look to some form of government more suitable to
both, they will find none better than this, for the rich and poor will

Sent t0 rule in turn> because th-eY mistrust one another.55 l •;
rreek political experience nothing occupied a more promi-,
nent place than revolutions, and to this subject Aristotle devotes
many pages of his Politics. First he analyzes the causes of revolutions.
They are: (1) that universal passion for privilege and prerogative*,
which causes men to resent and rebel against conditions which
(unfairly in their opinion) place other men above or on a level with

1 Ibid., p. 105.

-74 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

them in rank or wealth; (2) the overreaching insolence or avarice
of rulers or ruling classes which causes men to react; against them;

(3) the possession by one or more individuals of power such as to
excite fears that they design to set up a monarchy or an oligarchy;

(4) the endeavors of men guilty of wrongdoing to foment a revolu-
tion as a smoke-screen to conceal their own misdeeds, or of men A
fearing the aggressions of others to start a revolution in order to
anticipate their enemies? ''(5) the disproportionate increase of any
part (territorial, social, economic, or otherwise) of the state, causing
other parts to resort to violent means of offsetting this preponder-
ance; (6) the dissensions and rivalries of people of different races;
(7) dynastic and family feuds and quarrels; and (8) struggles for
office and political power between rival classes and political factions

or parties. r

Revolutions may have been more frequent and easier to excite in
the microcosmic polities of Greece than in the huge national states
of later times, though the chronicles of Latin America,, of southern
and eastern Europe, and of modern Asia leave sonic doubt as to

that. {There can be no doubt, however, of the acutcness of Aristotle's

**•**" %, ». — .,. /"

insight into the basic causes of revolutions. (One or more of the fac-
* tors enumerated by him will be found to have been among the pro-
yokingjorces of virtually every political revolution of which history
has any recor^lmd quite as evidently so among the Nordic peoples
as among the supposedly more volatile races. What caused the
'./American Revolution? Not what the school books usually say—-
those were only superficial causes. The real cause was the failure of
the British government to perceive that the American colonists were
victims of an inferiority complex which made them extraordinarily
sensitive about their alleged rights, to which the British attached no
especial importance and thought incompatible with the general
economic and political well-being of the Empire, In other words,
Aristotle's Cause One. What caused the American Civil War? Not
the crusade of the Abolitionists, or the fear of the South that slavery
would be abolished, but fear of the growing economic and political
preponderance of the North which would ultimately make it im-
possible for the South to direct its own political and economic des-
tiny. John C. Calhoun plainly said so again and again in his
speeches in the Senate. In other words, it was Aristotle's Cause
Five.

THE FIRST POLITICAL SCIENTIST 75'

Just as illuminating as Aristotle's analysis of the causes of revolu-
tions is his discussion of the means of preventing them. The first
essential, he says, is jealously to maintain the spirit of obedience to
law; "for transgression creeps in unperceived and at last ruins the
State, just as the" constant recurrence of small expenses in time eats
up a fortune." l The second thing is not to maltreat any classes of
people excluded from the government, but to give due recognition
to the leading spirits among them — a policy which the British, since
the American Revolution, have perfected into one of the fine arts of
statecraft. No one knows so well how to disarm opposition as Old
Mother England. Discontented dominions she reconciles with vary-
ing degrees of home rule and gaudy roles in the pageantry of im-
perialism; disaffected parties and social classes she placates with the
soothing syrup of compromise an<j[ the pink pills of unctuous
ceremony.

The third device for preventing revolutions, according to Aris-
totle, is to keep patriotism at fever pitch. The c 'ruler who has a care
of the State should invent terrors, and bring distant dangers near,
in order that the citizens may be on their guard, and, like sentinels
in a night-watch, never relax their attention.33 2 This precept has
been well mastered by Comrade Stalin, and was the best trick in
the whole repertoire of that virtuoso of practical politics, Adolph
Hitler.

The fourth expedient is to counteract the discontent that arises
from inequality of position or condition by arrangements which will
prevent the magistrates from making money out of their positions,
by liirdjiag the tenure of office and regulating the distribution of
honors so that no one person or group of persons will become dis-
proportionately powerful or distinguished, and by preventing glar-
ing inequalities of wealth and regulating the* economic structure of
the state so that the pqor will have a chance to risejo competency.

Fifth, and finally, this: ". . . of all the things which I have men-
tioned, that which most contributes to the permanence of constitu-
tions is the adaptation of education to the form of government, and;
yet in our own day this principle is universally neglected." 3 The
young, in other words, must be trained in the spirit of the constitu-
tion, whatever that constitution may be; must be disciplined to
social habits consonant with the maintenance of that constitution;

P- 131. 2 lbid^ PJ 132. 3 Ibid^ pp

76 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

must learn to think and act as integral parts of a particular form of
political society.

Can modern political science prescribe any surer remedies than
these to counteract the virus of revolution?

VI

For all his devotion to the practicable and attainable, Aristotle is
no crass materialist. The function of government, he constantly
reiterates, is to enable men to live the good life, and the good life, as
he defines it, is the life of the spirit. "Some think,53 he says, "that a
very moderate amount of virtue is enough, but set no limit to their
desires of wealth, property, power, reputation, and the like. To
whom we reply by an appeal to facts, which easily prove that man-
kind does not acquire or preserve virtue by the help of external
goods, but external goods by the help of virtue, and that happiness,
whether consisting in pleasure or virtue, or both, is more often
found with those who are most highly cultivated in their mind and
in their character, and have only a moderate share of external
goods, than among those who possess external goods to a useless
extent but are deficient in higher qualities; . . . Let us assume
then that the best life, both for individuals and States, is the life of
virtue, having external goods enough for the performance of good
actions.35 1

It is evident then, he points out, that the form of government is

* V

best in which every man, whoever he is, can act for the best and live
happily. This is not attainable in the same way in all states, and the
good lawgiver should make a careful study of states and races of
men in order that his enactments may always be adapted to the req-
uisites ^f the particular society with which he is dealing. It is pos-
sible though, he thinks, to sketch in a general way what should bep
the elements.., ,of ,,a, model JSt ate. It must have economic resource!
sufficient to supply^ the needs of its population, population sufficient
(though not oversufficient) to perform the necessarily varied func-1
tions of community life, and territory sufficient to enable its inhabi-
tants to live temperately and liberally in the enjoyment of leisure

and well situated for defense and communication. It should have

i

ample access to the sea, and should be a maritime state with a naval1
force commensurate with the scale of its enterprises, It should bej

* Ibid., pp. 165-166. * !

THE FIRST POLITICAL SCIENTIST 77

* _ _ _ .. _ ________ _ . -. - — ------ - ----- - .. , -._-.,,-„-..-,. — .1 — ..— .1 ,-.! I.-I Ml^—

located also where the climate is temperate and congenial to both
physical and mental activity.

In addition Jo these basic requirements the model state should

""""""' '"" "x ^ ^ „,.«!•— "* " """"

have a properly sgecializeBT'Txrdy pfjnhabitants — husbandmen to
provide food, mechanics and artists for the services of skill, soldiers
to bear arms, tradesmen to carry on the work of exchange, priests
to supervise the state religion, and public men to carry on the
political and judicial functions. Of each class there should be a
sufficient number to serve the needs of the state, and no more.
Husbandmen, artisans, and traders would be excluded from par-
ticipation in government; this function would be monopolized by
the warriors, priests, and public men. The members of this ruling
class in early life would serve as warriors, in middle life as civil
servants, and in old age as priests. *The ownership of land would
also be confined to them, in order that land might not be com-
mercialized.

The site of the city should be chosen with a view to public health,
political convenience, and strategic requirements, and the ground-
plan should be laid out for beauty, though not at the sacrifice of
defense. <

of the model state must be determined

by the kind of life we wish its citizens to pursue and the kind of
happiness we wish them to enjoy. Since we wish them to live the
good life, practice virtue and moderation, and follow reason in all
they do, we must give them an education directed to those ends.
In youth they must be taught to obey, so they may be qualified to
rule when they are older. Purely military education, such as the
Spartans have, is not enough; for it does not develop all of a man's
powers, and conspicuously neglects the virtues of peace, which are
temperance, justice, and intellectual culture. We must train the
body, the appetites, and the mind, thus making the well-rounded
man.

Marriage also must be subjected- to strict regulation in the model
state. The age of marriage must be fixed to prevent the marriage
of person^ who are too young or too old, and persons physically or
temperamentally disqualified should also be forbidden to marry.
Deformed or deficient children should not be allowed to live, nor
should parents be allowed to have children in excess of the popula-
tion requirements of the state. Abortion may be used to control

-78 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

_ . . . .. . ... . . ._ _.. .. .r^ ... _ i ,„„_,„, __^ il

the- size of families, provided it is done before sense and life have
begun. Couples should not be allowed to have children after one
or both have become too old to produce children of prime intelli-
gence and physical ability.

VII

I
>t

I How unlike, and yet in some respects how like, the ideal state
of Plato is this model commonwealth of Aristotle! Plato's state is
a fabric of abstract ideas to be translated into reality by a philoso-
pher-king who will sweep away all existing institutions and employ
genetics and education to create a new and better race of men in a
perfect social order; Aristotle's is a fabric of materials already ex-
isting, thoroughly tried, well understood, and lying at hand ready
for use by any intelligent statesman who dares to try his skill at
weaving them into patterns approximating the ideal. Yet both
thinkers display the same ethical fervor, the same passion for
order, the same love of moderation, the same devotion to justice
and reason, the same confidence in education, the same faith in
humanity, and the same concern for the realization of the good
life. '

For a modern commentator to add a single cubit to the stature
of Aristotle is quite as impossible as to enhance the fame of Plato.
As in the case of his immortal teacher, the greatness of Aristotle is
amply attested by the number of those who follow in his train. ( As
Plato is father to the idealists, romanticists, revolutionists, and
Utopians of political philosophy, so Aristotle is father to the realists,
scientists, pragmatists, and utilitarians. All who believe in new

•-n « i ^

worlds/ for old fare disciples of (Plato;) all who believe in old worlds
made new l^y the tedious and toilsome use of science are disciples
f . of Aristotle. ^

REFERENCES

Agard, -W. R., What Democracy Meant to the Greeks (Chapel Hill, N. C.,

1942).

Aristotle, The Politics (tr. by H. Rackharn, New York, 1923). -
Barker, E.5 Political Thought of Plato and Aristotle (New York, 1906),

Chaps. V-XI.

Cherniss, H., Aristotle's Criticism of Plato and the Academy (Baltimore, 1944).
Coker, F. W., Readings in Political Philosophy (rev. ed., New York, 1938),

Chap. II.

THE FIRST POLITICAL SCIENTIST 79

* i — - . i .- "... , 1 1

Cook, T. I., A History of Political Philosophy (New York, 1936), Chap. IV.
Dunning, W. A., A History of Political Theories: Ancient and Mediaeval

(New York, 1902), Chap. III.

Foster, M. B., Masters of Political Thought (Boston, 1941), Chap. III.
Jowett, B., The Politics of Aristotle (Oxford 1885).
Geiser, K. F., and Jazi, O., Political Philosophy from Plato to Jeremy Bentham

(New York, 1927), Chap. II.

Getieli, R. G., History of Political Thought (New York, 1924), Chap. III.
Mcllwain, C. H., The Growth of Political Thought in the West (New York,

1932), Chap. III.

Newman, W. L., The Politics of Aristotle (4 vols., Oxford, 1887-1902).
Sablne, G. H., A History of Political Theory (New York, 1937), Chaps. V-VL
Willoughby, W. W., Political Theories of the Ancient World (New York, 1903),

Chap. XL
Zimmern, A. E., The Greek Commonwealth (3rd ed., Oxford, 1922).

CHAPTER VI

ROMAN POLITICAL IDEAS

I

K)MAN civilization is not notable in the history of political
thought for the originality of its conceptions. Roman politi-
cal thinkers were expounders and transmitters rather than
creators of political ideas. There is no Roman political theorist who
can be ranked with Plato and Aristotle, and those who rose above
the level of mediocrity were few indeed. The influence of Roman
political thought is not to be measured by its intrinsic qualities so
much as by its educative power. For many centuries Roman teach-
ers and writers were the chief medium through which Greek politi-
cal philosophy was interpreted and spread throughout the world.
Roman thinkers undoubtedly imparted to Greek political philoso-
phy something of their own special temper and attitude; but the
true political greatness of Rome lay not in her thinking but in the
vigor and reach of her doing. By the example of her institutions, by
the utilization of principles that were not always objectively under-
stood, and by the practical testing of ideas the Greeks had toyed
with but had not validated by experience, Rome exerted a profound
influence on political practice. In the long run, by the indirect
road of practical experience, Rome contributed more to the enrich-
ment of political thought than by her own political philosophies.

For students of political science Rome means law and jurispru-
dence. The Romans evolved the most complete and minutely per-
fected system of law known to the ancient world; yet, as Profes-
sor Willoughby remarks, they "failed to make any but the slightest
of conscious attempts to determine, and arrange in their logical
relations, the fundamental concepts upon which their body of law
depended." 1 Philosophical ideas they were quite content to bor-
row from the Greeks; where Hellenic thought stopped, they halted
their own speculative flights and descended to the terra firma of
practical politics and administration. In view of this powerful in-
clination to the practical, it is remarkable that we find any political
theorists of note in the Roman era.

1 The Political Theories of the Ancient World > p. 215.

HO

ROMAN POLITICAL IDEAS 81

» _ _ .-- .- ..—...._ _ - - .-...- - - - . -,_ - __

What Rome gave the world was not political theory, but the
materials for political theory. In the secularization of law she laid
foundations on which many of the salient doctrines of European
and American political thought have been built. Among these
may be mentioned the idea of positive law, the doctrine of private
rights, the theory of sovereignty, the concept of the state as a legal
entity, and the principle of the delegation of political authority
on a contractual basis.

Among the Greeks the ultimate sanction of law was deemed to
be religious or ethical; the idea of law as the juridically sanctioned
command of a definite human superior never took form in the
Hellenic mind. The Romans, however, brought law down from
the clouds. They had an empire to administer, and little time to
waste on vaporous theories. To reconcile law with ethics and re-
ligion throughout their polyglot domains, was manifestly impos-
sible; so they did the practical thing — divorced law from ethics and
religion. Roman citizens and subjects were bound to obey the law,
not primarily because it was just, right, consistent with ethical
principles, or sanctioned by religion, but because it was the com-
mand of supreme political authority speaking the will of the body
politic. The intricate and interesting processes of juridical evolu-
tion by which the Romans arrived at this simple attitude toward
law cannot be described here. Suffice it to say that there was rela-
tively little of speculation and theory about it, and much of the
practical business of trial and error.

In much the same way the Romans reached other views which
came to be basic ingredients of the political philosophies of later
times. Legal rights, as a matter of common practice, were seen to
be derived from concrete rather than abstract sources. The con-
suls, praetors, tribunes, senators, and other officials wielding high
authority were the real determiners of rights and obligations among
men; not the gods, or abstruse ideals, or general principles of ethics.
Moreover, these officials were ordinary human beings elevated to
posts of power by the vote of patrician or plebeian assemblies.

Hence it* was natural to assume and act as though the magis-
trates were the possessors of power delegated to them by the people,
and to view the people as the ultimate source of political authority
and the individual citizen the ultimate entity of legal contempla-
tion and action. So, as Professor Gettell puts it, "The Romans sep-

•82 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

arated state and individual, each having definite rights and duties.
The state was a necessary and natural framework for social exist-
ence; but the individual, rather than the state, was made the center
of legal thought, and the protection of the rights of the individual
was the main purpose for which the state existed. The state was
thus viewed as a legal person, exercising its authority within definite
limits; and the citizen was viewed as a legal person, having rights
which were to be safeguarded against other persons and against
illegal encroachment by the government itself." *

In practice this theory was more or less inarticulate, and was not
worked out with much advantage to the individual citizen; but it
had a deep influence upon political ideology in later times. Since
the state was viewed as a collectivity, it was easy to endow it with
the attributes of a corporation and treat it as though it were a juridi-
cal entity with specially allocated functions and restrictively de-
fined powers. Through this corporate entity, the people as a body
mediated the common will; therefore the supremacy of the people
was embodied in the state, and the head of the state thus became
the principal vehicle of popular sovereignty. For that reason, what-
ever was ordained by the head of the state must be deemed as hav-
ing the force of law. Here we touch the roots of the juridical doc-
trine of sovereignty.

In sharp contrast with the foregoing were two other concepts
which slowly took form in the Roman mind. As their territories
expanded and their foreign commerce increased, the Romans had
to deal with many subject peoples, with many resident aliens in
their own country, and with alien legal systems in transacting busi-
ness in foreign countries. Since Roman law applied only to Roman
citizens, the Romans had to find principles and rules of law to
apply in their many relations with persons not subject to the law
of Rome. This they accomplished by the development of what
came to be known as the jus gentium or law of nations. Observing
identical or similar principles and practices in the various bodies
of alien law with which they came into contact, they assumed that
these constituted a common law for all nations, and treated them
as such in their intercourse with alien peoples.

This highly useful expedient was a prominent factor in the evo-
lution of the doctrine of natural law. Gradually, through their

1 History of Political Thought (1924), p. 68.

ROMAN POLITICAL IDEAS 83-

i — — — —~ " ' ~ ~~~

contacts with alien legal systems and their familiarity with Greek
thought, the Romans began to believe that certain legal ideas and
principles were planted by nature in the minds and hearts of all
men. Recalling the Greek doctrine of natural reason as the basis
of justice, and perceiving the many principles and rules apparently
common to the laws of all peoples, they postulated a universal
higher law and called it the jus naturale or law of nature. The
chief characteristics of the law of nature were its inherent reason-
ableness, its universal application, its freedom from technicalities,
and its intrinsic fairness and justice. No attempt was made to
reduce it to a code or to define its terms; it was simply taken for
granted and allowed to remain in the abstract. Its great impor-
tance in political thought did not begin until after Rome had passed
from the scene.

T>
II'

Having noted some of the broader characteristics of the Roman
contribution to political thought, we shall now turn to three Roman
political thinkers of special prominence. These are: Polybius, the
(•rreek historian, who was captured by the Romans in 167 B.C. and
lept seventeen years in Rome as a political hostage; Cicero, the
r-enowned essayist and orator; and Seneca, the great teacher and
writer, who was for five years chief minister of the emperor Nero.

Polybius is chiefly known for his History of Rome, an opus of forty
books, which was much more than a chronological history. Polyb-
ius tells us that his chief purpose in writing was to enable students
to understand why it was that the whole world fell under the power
of Rome in the short space of less than fifty-three years. The power
and greatness of Rome were the result, he thought, of an excep-
tionally stable system of government.

Polybius accepted the sixfold classification of true and degenerate
forms of government that had come down from Plato and Aristotle,
and advanced the theory that unmixed systems of government are
subject to more rapid degeneration than mixed. None of the three
primary fopms of government (monarchy, aristocracy, and de-
mocracy) is, he said, inherently stable. Each contains elements
which cause it quickly to decline into the corresponding degenerate
form. But the Roman constitution tends to counteract this fatal
tendency by a happy mixture of principles drawn from all three of

84 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

the primary forms of government. The monarchical principle is
exemplified by the consuls, the aristocratic by the senate, and the
democratic by the popular assemblies. The powers of government
are about equally divided between these three. The consuls possess
supreme military power and very considerable powers of civil ad-
ministration; the senate controls the purse and has lar,ge powers of
inquisition and adjudication; the popular assemblies have the
power of bestowing offices, passing or repealing laws, deciding upon
peace or war, and determining the penalty when persons are on
trial for serious offenses. Neither, however, can exercise its powers
freely and without hindrance from the others. Each checks and is
checked by the other two, and this results in an equipoise which
retards the cycle of growth and decay. Both Plato and Aristotle had
touched upon this idea, the latter being especially partial to mixed
forms of government; but Polybius deserves remembrance as the
first to state the famous check'-and-balance theory in a full and
formal way.

The name and reputation of Marcus Tullius Cicero arc familiar
to every school boy. One of the most versatile men who ever lived,
Cicero's fame has been kept fresh by his oratorical, literary, and
statesmanly attainments rather than by his political philosophy; yet
the role of political philosopher was one he dearly loved to play,
He was the most renowned political theorist of his time and one of
the most influential both in his own and later times; but his political
thought was almost entirely unoriginal and had very few qualities
of permanence. He was influential because his works were distin-
guished by a beautiful style, and were more widely read than any
other political writings in the Latin language. His ideas were taken
from other men, but he gave them an immortality that their origina-
tors could not; because he wrote lasting literature, and an idea once
incorporated in Cicero's works was forever embalmed in the classics
of human expression. Cicero's best known political treatises are the
De Republica (The Republic), the De Legibus (The Laws), and De
Ojficiis (Offices).

The De Republica is a pale replica of Plato's Republic* Cicero was
an ardent Platonist, and was possessed of an ambition to duplicate
in Latin the masterpiece of that great idealist. The imitation is so
obvious and the parallelism so close at many points that one can
almost imagine Cicero sitting down with a copy of Plato's Republic

ROMAN POLITICAL IDEAS 85

and planning his dialogue, his arrangement of topics, and his
speaking characters after the pattern of the Greek prototype. The
ideas he develops are nots -however, exclusively Platonic. He was a
profuse borrower and gathered his material from a great variety of
sources. One translator — Professor C. W. Keyes — is of the opinion
that the comments on history and practical politics which appear in
the De Republica were taken largely from Polybius, and that many
of the philosophical and political theories were derived from the
eminent Stoic, Panaetius.1

"Res publica res populi" says Cicero; a state is the property of a
people, though not of a collection of people brought together in any
haphazard way. The essential feature of a state, he thinks, is the
association of a large body of people "in an agreement with respect
to justice and a partnership for the common good.35 2 This entity
Is not merely the creation of men Centering into a combination for
selfish material interests, but is the product of needs that lie deep in
human nature, and therefore is founded upon ethically sound prin-
ciples. Here Cicero is at one with the Greeks, though the Greeks
never distinguished between the state as a juridical fact and the
social aggregate out of which it is born. Not so the Roman juris-
consult; he naturally thinks in terms of legal nicety, and hence has
one pigeonhole in his mind for humans organized as political beings
and another for humans as social, but not political, beings. As a
Roman also, he thinks of the state as res populi, that is, a thing of the
people, deriving its ultimate authority from them and employing
its powers in their interest.

But this inclination to popular sovereignty does not preclude the
recognition of legal or political sovereignty as well. The people
truly may be the ultimate source of political authority; but, he
declares, there must be, in every well-governed state, some instru-
mentality or agency to express and enforce the will of the people.
Deriving supreme coercive power from the people themselves, this
authority — be it a monarch, an aristocracy, or a popular assembly

is the legal sovereign of the state, and its mandates have the force

law. So Speaks the typical Roman.
-.The Greek classification of the types of government is adopted by
dicero, and also the Greek judgments as to their respective merits.
'I do not approve any of them when employed by itself," says

1 Cicero's De Rebublica (Keyes' Translation, 1928), p. 8. 2 Ibid^ pp> 64_6r

86 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

Scipio, the protagonist of Cicero's dialogue, "and consider the form
which is a combination of them all superior to any single one of
them.55 l Which, of course, is what Polybius had said a good many
years before. If compelled to adopt a single unmixed form of gov-
ernment, Cicero would prefer monarchy, because, as he makes
Scipio say, it is most like the paternal rule out of which the state
issues. Aristocracy would be his second choice, and democracy a
poor third. He takes Plato's view of the frailties of democracy, and
cites Plato to clinch the argument.

A large portion of the De Republica is given over to the discussion
of justice. Cicero treats at length the varying conceptions of law
and justice prevailing among different peoples, reviews the con-
flicting opinions of the great jurists and scholars, and concludes
with this classic statement of the doctrine of natural law: "True
law is right reason in agreement with nature; it is of universal ap-
plication, unchanging and everlasting; it summons to duty by its
commands, and averts from wrongdoing by its prohibitions. . . ,
It is a sin to try to alter this law, nor is it allowable to try to repeal
any part of it, and it is impossible to abolish it entirely. We cannot
be freed from its obligations by senate or people, and we need not
look outside ourselves for an expounder or interpreter of it. And
there will not be different laws at Rome and at Athens, or different
laws now and in the future, but one eternal and unchangeable law
will be valid for all nations and all times, and there will be one
master and ruler, that is, God, over us all, for he is the author
of this law, its promulgator, and its enforcing judge. Whoever
is disobedient is fleeing from himself and denying his human
nature, and by reason of this very fact he will suffer the worst
of penalties, even if he escapes what is commonly called pun-
ishment.53 2

Cicero wrote the De Legibus as a sequel to the De Republica, In
Plato's great trilogy the Laws were not so related to the Republic; but
Cicero's evident intention was that his De Legibus should provide
the actual constitution and detailed legislation to supplement the
philosophical principles set forth in the De Republica. In addition
to a lengthy discussion of the nature of law and its obligations, the
treatise outlines a complete code of laws for a well-constructed and
well-administered state. This is based to a large extent on the laws

llbid., p. 83, a/hV/., p. 211.

ROMAN POLITICAL IDEAS 87

•fr • — _ . . _ _ __ _| . ^ — — _ _ __ _ _ . _ , _ _ _ __i

and customs of Rome, though some imaginary provisions are in-
troduced.

The De Officiis is much less significant than the other two members
of Cicero's trilogy. It is said to have been based to a very marked
degree upon a book written by the Greek Stoic, Panaetius. It pur-
ports to be a letter from Cicero to his son, offering advice and in-
struction on the responsibilities and duties of citizenship. Many of
the views set forth in the other works are repeated here, notably
his idea of popular sovereignty and his belief that rulers should
serve the people and bear in mind the good of the whole state.
The author deplores the part played in public affairs by the in-
dustrial and commercial classes, and negatively sanctions tyranni-
cide.

Cicero's outstanding service in political thought undoubtedly was
his splendid statement of the doctrine of natural law. The Stoic
philosophers had conceived this idea, but Cicero made it a perma-
nent part of the world's intellectual treasures. The selection which
we have quoted from the De Republica is but a sample of the many
beautiful passages of similar import which freely adorn his numer-
ous works. These were extensively copied and quoted, and thus
became a familiar part of both ancient and modern political litera-
ture. In summing up the value of Cicero's political writings, Pro-
fessor Willoughby says that "one is forced to confess that the largest
element consists rather in the part played by them in the transmis-
sion of Greek ideas to Roman thought, than in the creation of dis-
tinctly new theories," l Ultimately, however, thinks the same
writer, the influence of Cicero was very great, because, in bringing
the legal thought of Rome into contact with Greek ideas of justice
and equity, he contributed immensely to the growth and perfection
of Roman jurisprudence.

Seneca was essentially a moral rather than a political philosopher.
Cicero represents Roman thought in the latter days of the Republic;
Seneca, who lived about a century later, represents the ideology of
the early Empire. Seneca wrote no strictly political treatises, and
this itself is significant. Political idealism was in decay, and think-
ing men had little faith in political roads to salvation. The state
was no longer viewed as a moral being, was no longer regarded as
an essential instrumentality of moral advancement. Despotism had
1 Op. «*., p. 288.

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

superseded self-government, and the Roman slate had become the
tool of avarice, corruption, and self-aggrandizement. The people
were as bad as their rulers; in fact, the most vicious rulers were the
most popular. Civic virtue was dead.

Seneca's writings reflect the pessimism of this period. He still
believes that the good man owes a moral duty to society, but he
refuses to identify society with the state. Society, as he conceives it,
is that universal fellowship of mankind which nature ordained in
the creation of the first communities. "This fellowship/' in the
words of Seneca, "remained unspoiled for a long time, until avarice
tore the community asunder and became the cause of poverty, even
in the case of those whom she herself had most enriched. ... But
the first men and those who sprang from them, still unspoiled, fol-
lowed nature., having one man as both their leader and their law,
entrusting themselves to the control of one better than themselves.
For nature has a habit of subjecting the weaker to the stronger.
. . . That is why it was to the mind that a ruler was assigned; and
for that reason the greatest happiness rested with those peoples
among whom a man could not be the more powerful unless he were
the better. . . . Accordingly, in that age which is maintained to
be the golden age., Posidonius holds that the government was under
the jurisdiction of the wise. They kept their hands under control,
and protected the weaker from the stronger. They gave advice,
both to do and not to do; they showed what was useful and what was
useless. Their forethought provided that their subjects should lack
nothing; their bravery warded off dangers; their kindness enriched
and adorned their subjects. For them ruling was a service, not an
exercise of royalty. No ruler tried his power against those to whom
he owed the beginnings of his power; and no one had the inclina-
tion, or the excuse, to do wrong, since the ruler ruled well and the
subject obeyed well, and the king could utter no greater threat
against disobedient subjects than that they should depart from the
kingdom." 1

In the fabled golden, age, as thus described, Seneca saw the na-
tural fellowship of mankind and the political organization of society
perfectly merged. But the golden age was gone, and this happy
union no longer prevailed. Political society existed in a debased
and degenerate form, but still surviving above and apart from the

1 Seneca, Epistolas Morales (Loeb Classical Library), Vol. ii, pp. 397-399.

ROMAN POLITICAL IDEAS 89

_ n _ ...._,— . - _ 11 1. i __ r_ ______

low-fallen governmental institutions of the day was the great na-
tural society of humanity at large. Service to this great society was
a solemn and noble duty; by such service one could do more good
than by service to the state.

The political ideas of Seneca foreshadowed, and materially fos-
tered the growth of, two important trends in later political thought.
His harking back to the golden age and glorifying the perfection of
things in the unspoiled state of nature were influential in the Uto-
pian ideologies and the :cback to nature'3 philosophies of subsequent
ages. And his separation of society from the state helped lay the
foundation for the dualism of St. Augustine and other political
theorists of the Roman Catholic Church.

REFERENCES

Abbott, F. F., Roman Political Institutions (Boston, 1901).

Abbott, F. F., Society and Politics in Ancient Rome (New York, 1909).

Bryce, J., Studies in History and Jurisprudence (New York, 1901), Vol. ii,

pp. 128-157.
Coker, F. W., Readings in Political Philosophy (rev. ed., New York, 1938),

Chaps. III-IV.

Cook, T. L, A History of Political Philosophy (New York, 1936), Chap. V.
Dunning, W. A., A History of Political Theories: Ancient and Mediaeval (New

York, 1901), Chap. IV.

Foster, M. B., Masters of Political Thought (Boston, 1941), Chap. IV.
Gettell, R. G., History of Political Thought (New York, 1924), Chap. IV.
Greenidge, A-. H. J., Roman Public Life (New York, 1901).
Mcllwain, C. H., The Growth of Political Thought in the West (New York,

1932), Chap. IV.
Murray, R. H., History of Political Science from Plato to the Present (New

York, 1926), Chap. I.
Sabine, G. H,, A History of Political Theory (New York, 1937), Chaps.

VIII-IX.

Sait, E. M., Political Institutions: A Preface (New York, 1938), Chap. X.
Willoughby, W. W., The Political Theories of the Ancient World (New York,

1903), Chaps, XIV-XIX.

CHAPTER VII

"VICISTI GALILEE"

I

THOU hast conquered, O pale Galilean," chants the melan-
choly pagan of Swinburne's Hymn to Proserpine; ccthe world has
grown gray from thy breath." A grayer world for the aver-
age man than that of pre-Christian Rome could exist only in the
pensive fancy of a disillusioned poet. For the fortunate few there
was undoubtedly color and pleasure in the gorgeous drama of Latin
imperialism, but not even the most lavish dispensation of bread and
circuses could conceal or allay the grinding misery of the masses.
The fruits of Roman social and political economy had ripened and
were ready to drop from the tree. A new cycle of growth and decay
was about to set in, and, as Swinburne rhetorically expressed it,
Time and the Gods were at strife.

Roman civilization was not destroyed by Christianity any more
than Christianity was corrupted by Roman civilization. Nor did the
Roman system of polity give way to a Christian order of society or
break down under the pressure of Christian political ideas. What
actually occurred was a blending of Roman and Christian ideas and
institutions in such a way as to deflect the social and political proc-
esses of the western world into new and uncharted paths. A few
centuries of Christianity made it clear that profoundly significant
changes had taken place, and that the new order, though seemingly
springing from the same soil as the old, was bearing fruits of a radi-
cally different nature. Of these facts there has never been any lack
of appreciation, but of the intrinsic character of the steps between
the old and the new, especially in the realm of political thought
there has seldom been a satisfactorily clear understanding.

In the beginning Christianity was just another cult — in fact, just
another Jewish cult, of which there were many throughout the
Roman Empire, equally obscure to the non-Semitic mind and
equally undeserving of notice from a philosophical point of view.
Solely on account of their political repercussions did Rome pay any
attention to Jewish religions. The Jews were a political-minded and
militant race, persuaded by their prophets that they were destined

90

cc

VICISTI GALILEE53 91'

for world dominion and fanatically determined not to be cast into
the melting pot of Romanization. Far in excess of other subject
peoples under the Roman eagle were they prone to rebellion and
political conspiracy. "Palestine," says Mr. F. J. Foakes-Jackson,
"was a hot-bed of anti-Roman sedition, " 1 which, as he further ex-
plains, permeated the entire Roman world. Jewish colonies were to
be found in all the great cities, and the marvelous Roman roads and
the universal order which Rome maintained made it easy for these
widely dispersed bodies of malcontents to keep in touch with one an-
other and with the homeland. The focus of Jewish patriotism was,
of course, their religion, an intensely and narrowly nationalistic
creed which not only spurned the uncircumcised as followers of false
gods but condemned them ultimately to be vassals of the "chosen
people." So potent, indeed, was the #ienace of Jewish nationalism
that generous concessions had been made to the Jews both in reli-
gious and civil matters. Jewish soldiers in the Roman armies were
permitted to observe the Sabbath in strict compliance with the
Mosaic law; Jews in civil life were fully protected in their peculiar
religious observances and were allowed to maintain their own
ecclesiastical organization. The civil government of Judea was also
autonomous to a considerable degree and committed to the hands
of native rulers.

Being thus keenly conscious of the political ramifications of Jewish
religious movements, it might be supposed that the Roman au-
thorities immediately would have detected the political significance
of the Messianic cult of the Nazarene. But it was not so, either dur-
ing the lifetime of Jesus or in the early formative period of the Chris-
tian church. Apparently the Christian movement in its early stages
created so small a stir as to escape notice. Jesus was an itinerant
teacher not ostensibly different from many who preceded and fol-
lowed him. Such men were common in Judea, and Jesus was less an
agitator and disturber than most of them. His teaching was in ac-
cord with Judaistic principles; he proclaimed that he came to fulfill
and not to destroy; and his Messianic claims were not put on a po-
litical basis-. The conventional Jewish conception of the Messiah was
repugnant to him and he steadfastly refused to be drawn into any-
thing resembling a patriotic movement— a fact itself sufficient to
arouse hostile suspicions among the ecclesiastical politicians of

1 The Rise of Gentile Christianity (1927), p. 93.

-92 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

Jewry. What was his game? Was he pro- or anti-Roman? If the
former, might it not be a good counter-move to frame charges of sedi-
tion against him and entangle him with the Roman government?
That, at any rate, is what happened. But Pilate could find no fault
in him, and was relieved to be able to turn him over to his own
people. If he was not anti-Roman, he was not worth bothering
about; and if it would placate Jewish opinion to allow him to die on
the cross, it was good policy to do so.

Did the disciples of the Galilean thereupon part company with
Judaism? Not at all; theirs was no separatist movement, but a pro-
gram of boring from within. Their Master was a Jew; his mission
was to Jews; and so they conceived theirs to be. They continued to
attend the synagogues and to observe the rabbinical law, making no
break with Jewish community life. To an outsider they were indis-
tinguishable from other Jews. Their first converts were made among

n

Jews, and their sole apparent purpose was to persuade the Jewish
people that Jesus was in fact the Christ. A small and informal fel-
lowship of devout Jews who had fallen under the spell of a unique
personality and thought they saw in him the fulfillment of the
promises of their prophets, in the Jewish world they made no great
splash and in the Gentile world none at all. So it might have con-
tinued, had not the Jewish priesthood, scenting (unjustifiably, per-
haps) a political purpose in the new movement, made an effort to
suppress it. Persecution was just what Christianity needed to give
it power. Forced into opposition to the established hierarchy, the
followers of Jesus became aggressive, built an organization of their
own, developed a missionary fervor, began to seek proselytes among
the Jews in all parts of the Roman Empire, and finally undertook to
carry their gospel to the Gentiles.

Still the Roman government remained indifferent to the Chris-
tian movement. Religions per $e did not interest Caesardom, but
only their political implications; and Christianity seemed to carry
no political threat. Its churches were few and widely scattered, and
the bitter opposition which it aroused among the prelates of Juda-
ism appeared to be a sufficient guaranty of its innocuous character.
The Princeps Senatus and his military junto could rest in peace so
far as this puny sect was concerned. Little did they dream that a
Hellenized Jew named Saul, most ferocious of all of the rabbinical
persecutors of Christians, would suddenly change front and furnish

"VICISTI -GALILEE" 93

i _^___

the driving genius necessary to transform Christianity from a pro-
vincial cult into a world religion, from an other-worldly holiness
movement into mighty temporal force sufficient to conquer empires
and make puppets of their rulers.

II

The conversion of the Apostle Paul marks the first great turning
point in the history of Christianity. Next to Jesus, he was undoubt-
edly the greatest personality in the early history of the Christian
movement, and many competent scholars assert that Paul more
than Jesus is responsible for what Christianity has become. To an
unsystematic Hebrew heresy he gave a system of theology which
raised it to an intellectual plane above contemporary religions; to a
loose-jointed ecclesiastical structure hp imparted sound organization
and efficient administrative procedure; to a movement character-
ized more by zeal than sound statesmanship he supplied balanced
leadership and far-seeing strategy; to a body menaced by factions
and demoralized by dissension he brought harmony, unity of pur-
pose, and effective cooperation. A curious and remarkable com-
bination of visionary and realist was this tentmaker of Tarsus. Evi-
dently a man of education and position, he insisted upon making his
living by manual labor; swayed by dreams, trances, and occult ex-
periences of the most fantastic kind, he was nevertheless capable of
broad views, shrewd judgments, keen analyses; severe to the point
of asceticism in his moral standards, he could display a charming
urbanity and counsel tolerance and indulgence when expediency
so required; eccentric almost to the point of absurdity in many of his
ideas, he rarely failed in difficult situations to show the most remark-
able balance and presence of mind. Under the guiding hand of this
paradoxical genius Christianity took a course of development which
made the Christian church a force for empires to reckon with.

Despite the amazing genius of Paul, however, and the missionary
fervor of the new faith as well, Christianity marched only westward.
The East was terra clausa, and has always remained so. Eastward the
obstacles were insurmountable; westward the obstacles were many
and great, but there were equally numerous facilities for overcom-
ing them. "Foremost among the facilities," remarks Abbe Du-
chesne, "come universal peace, uniformity of language and ideas,
and rapid and safe communication. Philosophy, bv the blows it

94 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

had struck at the old pagan legends, and by its impotence to replace
them, may also be reckoned as a useful auxiliary; the Fathers of the
Church speak of paganism in the same tone as Lucian. Finally, the
religions of the East, by feeding the religious instinct, had prevented
its perishing and kept it alive, to await the new birth of the gospel." :
The Roman Empire at the time the propagation of Christianity be-
gan had achieved political and cultural unity, but had no universal
religion. Over the many local and provincial governments which
Roman arms had woven into a single fabric there was one supreme
authority; among the many diverse peoples who made up the popu-
lation of the empire, Greek or Latin, or both, were widely spoken;
among the educated classes everywhere the literature and philoso-
phies of Greece and Rome were a common possession; but there was
no corresponding uniformity of religion. True, the worship of
Caesar, introduced by Augustus as a state religion, was everywhere
required; but this was more a patriotic than a religious exer-
cise. None of the old religions was displaced by Caesar worship,
and every person, provided he satisfied the formal observances
of the state religion, was free to follow his own fancy in matters of
faith.

Of the ancient Roman religions scarcely anything remained
save perfunctory ceremonies. Contact with Greek philosophies
and the mystic religions of Egypt and Asia had weakened the hold
of the original Latin creeds, and the dilution of Roman citizenship
by the admission of hosts of persons not of Roman birth rapidly
completed the undoing of the ancestral faiths. Among the intel-
lectuals it became fashionable to reject religion entirely and es-
pouse one of the many systems of philosophy then bidding for popu-
larity; and those who could not be satisfied with philosophy were
wont to embrace one of the imported religions. Many took up the
Egyptian mysteries of Isis and Serapis; a great number were at-
tracted by the Persian cult of Mithraism; various Syrian and Chal-
dean religions claimed a great many; and not a few became con-
verts to Judaism. All over the empire sprang up organizations for
the practice of these and many other forms of religious faith, all of
which existed side by side without any one claiming priority or the
right of monopoly.

1 Abbe L. M. O. Duchesne The Early History of the, Christian Church (3 vols., 1909-
1924), Vol. i, p. 7.

"VICISTI GALILEE"

>

Only the well-to-do classes, however, could really make much of
the freedom which this regime of tolerance offered. The masses, as
a rule, were too ignorant to absorb philosophies and too poor to
indulge in the elaborate and expensive rituals of the Oriental re-
ligions. Here, then, was fertile soil for the growth of a new reli-
gion. Coincident with the decline of the old tribal religions carne
the economic submergence of the masses, leaving them in a condi-
tion both of spiritual desolation and material misery. Precisely at
this juncture Christianity appeared on the scene. Its creed was
simple and easy to understand; it required no temples and involved
no costly ceremonies; and its teachings were exactly what the lowly
wanted to hear and believe. Welcome indeed to the under-privi-
leged and oppressed was the doctrine of the fatherhood of God
and the brotherhood of man; even more so the doctrine of salva-
tion through the sacrificial death of the Son of God, made mani-
fest in the flesh in the person of a humble village carpenter; and ab-
solutely thrilling the doctrine of the resurrection, which made death
but the portal to life and bliss everlasting. No such consummation
of the earthly pilgrimage was promised by any other religion.

Among the lower classes, therefore, Christian propagandists
met with great success. Slaves, serfs, artisans, common soldiers,
and other humble folk flocked to the Galilean cult in great num-
bers, and occasional converts were made among the upper classes.
Everywhere Christian societies were established and Christian serv-
ices begun/ Lacking buildings for public worship, it became cus-
tomary to assemble in private places known only to the brethren.
Sometimes, too, it was necessary to preserve secrecy in order not
to get the proletarians involved in complications with their supe-
riors. Naturally this aroused suspicion. Memories of terrible up-
risings of the lower classes were still vivid in the ruling-class mind.
Why all this secrecy on the part of the Christians? Why their
strong appeal for the rabble? And why, above all else, did they
obstinately refuse to worship Caesar as every loyal Roman should?
Their persistence in this disloyal attitude promptly confirmed the
suspicions, of every nervous patriot against them, and the august
Roman prototypes of our modern patriotic societies began to howl
in fearful rage for their blood.

Upon precisely the same terms as they extended toleration to
Jewish, Egyptian, Persian, and other religionists the Roman author-

.96 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

ities were ready to extend toleration to Christians; but upon such
terms as the Christians demanded, never. The first duty of man,
from the Roman point of view, was to the state; after that came duty
to God and fellow men. Worship of Caesar, who was merely the
transient embodiment in human form of the sovereignty and
majesty of the state, was not deemed inconsistent with any religious
beliefs one might hold. But to the Christian, at that time, man's
first duty was to God; to worship Caesar at all would be to deny the
primacy of God. To the Roman ruling class this was nothing short
of treason against the state, while to the Christian the Roman atti-
tude was equally treason against God and conscience. The
Christian could not yield without sacrificing the heart of his reli-
gion; the Roman government could not yield without abandoning
the central principle of Roman polity. So the Roman authorities
proceeded as a matter of higfi civic duty to stamp out this Bolshe-
vik movement which was insidtously undermining the loyalty of
the citizenry and menacing the security of the state. But the more
they stamped, the more persistently did Christianity spread and
the more fanatical did the followers of Christ become.

We cannot pause here to review the nearly three centuries of
persecution which Christianity had to endure at the hands of the
Roman government; but for the sake of what is to follow we must
reiterate the point that these persecutions were far less religious
than political. Had they not persisted in their refusal to do homage
to Caesar, the Christians might have adhered to any theology and
followed any form of worship that struck their fancy. The Roman
government would not have molested them on religious grounds
alone. And had they not learned eventually to play the game of
politics, had they never taken any part in the scrimmage of factions
and parties in Roman public affairs, the Christians might have
quieted the fears of officialdom and secured a prompt and per-
manent release from persecution. But in that case Christianity
might never have become the official religion of the Roman Empire.
For it was politics, not piety, that got Christianity to the top of the
heap. Somewhere between 54 AJD. and 323 A.D. the nature of the
Christian movement underwent a profound metamorphosis; it
became a religio-political rather than a purely religious movement,
and thereby hangs a tale which modern doctors of divinity are dis-
posed to treat with great reticence.

"VICISTI GALILEE" 97

n _™— —————— ^——

III

The Roman Empire was a republic transformed, during the
early centuries of the Christian era. Into a dictatorship by the mili-
tary absolutism of the Caesars. Nominally the so-called emperor
was simply princeps senatus — chief or prince of the senate — elected
by that body to perform the functions of head of the state. Ac-
tually, however, the princeps bore about the same relation to the
senate that Benito Mussolini, as prime minister, bore to the Italian
parliament. Possession of the imperial office was determined by
military might and political intrigue. Whoever could win the back-
ing of the army, and especially of the Praetorian Guard, and could
keep the people in line, could seize the office of "prince" and have
his way with the senate. Once in power, he could be dislodged only
by death or rebellion. Aspirants to the imperial purple eschewed
no means that would further their ends; conspiracy and assassination
became common and not particularly censured methods of climbing
into the seat of authority; and every vacancy in the office of em-
peror was followed by a mad scramble for succession. Thus the Ro-
man state became a boiling whirlpool of factional rivalry and Mach-
iaevellian intrigue; scores of ambitious politicos, both in civil and
military life, were constantly bidding for popular favor and conniv-
ing to secure every conceivable advantage in the struggle for power.

Willingly or unwillingly — the record does not speak clearly on
this point— the Christian church was sucked into this maelstrom
of political machination. Persecution probably had the effect of
imparting to Christian propaganda a political significance which
It did not originally possess, thereby heightening popular interest
in Christianity and incidentally revealing to Christian leaders the
practical advantages of political connections and political power.
Be that as it may, the fact remains that as the Christian church
multiplied adherents, acquired wealth and property, and per-
fected its organization, its secular concernments and contacts grew
to the point where it could scarcely escape entanglement in the all-
pervasive politics of the empire. The time came, in other words,
when Christians were too numerous, too well-placed, and too well-
solidified to be ignored by political strategists, and when Chris-
tian ecclesiastics could not be indifferent to the practical oppor-
tunities which gravitated into their hands.

98 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

.As an upshot of the growing political consequence of the Chris-
tian church there came a gradual relaxation of the policy of sup-
pression. Persecution became spasmodic, seldom occurring at all
unless Christians happened to be suspected of affiliation with
political alignments hostile to the party in power, and finally
was abandoned altogether. Christianity took its place as a regu-
larly licensed religion with legal privileges and powers comparable
with those enjoyed by other religious bodies. Thenceforward the
material progress of the cb arch was much accelerated, though the
same cannot be said of its spiritual progress. The Christianity,
which in 313 A. D. was freed from all oppressive and discriminatory
legislation by edict of the Emperor Constantine, and which in
380 A.D. was proclaimed the official and only lawful religion of the
empire by the Emperor Theodosius, had departed far from the
simple creed of Jesus and the robust theology of Paul. By masterly
tactics in the arena of politics it'had captured an empire, had be-
come the most formidable engine of religio-political authority the
world had ever known; but for this triumph it had paid an enor-
mous price, the evidence of which was borne on its very face. No
longer was it pure Galilean Christianity, but a hybrid thing in
which a residue of Christian elements were mingled with borrow-
ings from almost every pagan creed which it had supplanted in
the struggle for supremacy. The Christian church had conquered,
but not the Galilean. *

The Roman Empire was destined shortly to bisection, the east-
ern half maintaining Its capital at Byzantium (later Constan-
tinople) and the western half continuing its capital at Rome. The
church likewise was divided, the eastern branch forming the Hel-
lenic or Greek Catholic Church and the western branch the Roman
Catholic Church. Our chief concern is with the latter.

The bishop of Rome very early had acquired a unique priority
among Christian prelates, partly because of the assiduously culti-
vated legend that the first incumbent of this episcopal chair was the
Apostle Peter, who supposedly had endowed it with the paramount
sacerdotal authority he was alleged to have received directly from
Christ; but mainly, we may be sure, because of ti^e close conjunc-
tion of the Roman see and the high politics of the imperial capital.
The division of the empire increased rather than diminished the
prestige of the bishop of Rome; for the Western Empire soon began

"VICISTI GALILEE35 9"9

to disintegrate, and this brought the Roman primate to the fore in
a remarkable way. Not only could he assume to be the successor of
Peter, but also, because of his special position at the capital, of the
pontifex maximus, or chief priest, of pre-Christian Rome. In the
disorders arising from the unending civil wars and barbarian in-
vasions which afflicted the Western Empire, the bishop of Rome
was, therefore, about the only person whose claim to general au-
thority was widely recognized. In many instances where the old
civil regime had broken down the Roman bishop was called upon
to function as a civil ruler, and this priority was further accentuated
by the fact that many of the invading tribes of barbarians had been
wholly or partially Christianized, and consequently held the bishop
of Rome in special esteem.

Formally the Western Empire canje to an end with the deposi-
tion of Romulus Augustulus in 476. By this time the bishops of
Rome had so enormously enlarged their influence and so thoroughly
consolidated their authority that they were able to establish a new
empire upon the ruins of the old — an empire remarkably similar in
some points of construction to the Roman Empire of old, yet differ-
ent in many respects from any empire that ever existed. The bishop
of Rome became the pope, imperial head of an ecclesiastical hier-
archy embracing all of western Christendom. Like a Roman em-
peror, he was chosen by a senate (the college of cardinals), and
further, like a Roman emperor, he actually ruled as an autocrat.
From the throne of St. Peter he declared the will of God and made
law in matters spiritual for the whole body of the western church;
from the same eminence he also governed large secular dominions
which had become the property of the papacy, and further pre-
sumed to interfere in and exercise pervasive authority over the
temporal government of vast domains belonging not to the papacy
but to feudal potentates throughout all of the western world. For,
according to the political theory then in process of evolution, a
universal empire still existed despite the partitioning of Europe
into scores of separate political entities.

IV

Of purely political thought the patristic age of the Christian
church produced next to none, although there was no dearth of
scholars and writers who gave utterance, in theological and reli-

TOO POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

gio'us works, to political views which clearly foreshadowed the
major tenets of the political doctrine subsequently adopted by the
church. Greek Christianity, being confined to the politically
vigorous and long-surviving Byzantine Empire, devoted itself almost
exclusively to philosophical speculation concerning religious doc-
trines and dogmas; but Latin Christianity, being established in the
politically feeble and rapidly crumbling Western Empire, was
forced to occupy itself with problems of government and admin-
istration. Even in the pietistic and inspirational literature of the
early Roman Church the political concerns of the clergy thrust
themselves forward. This is impressively illustrated by the case of
St. Augustine, the man declared by Mr. Foakes-Jackson to be
"the most important figure in church history since St. Paul." *

This sainted African bishop was born in the Roman province of
Numidia (in northern Africa) in 354 A.D., of a pagan father and a
Christian mother. The father, 'an impoverished Roman official,
perceived that the boy was a brilliant student and sacrifice! every-
thing to give him the best education possible. He was specially
trained as a rhetorician and launched upon what promised to be
a great career as a scholar. Although his mother had diligently
instructed him in the Christian faith, he was apparently so little
impressed that he grew to manhood without making any Christian
professions. If his morbidly self-revealing Confessions are to be
believed, he became a dissolute rake and sowed a bounteous crop
of wild oats. He imputes to himself almost every sin in the catalog,
including the acquisition of a mistress and the fathering of an ille-
gitimate son.

Upon finishing his education, he set up as a teacher of grammar
in his home town, and about the same time embraced the Mani-
chaean religion, which was a combination of Zoroastrianism and
Christian Gnosticism. But as he proceeded with his philosophic
studies he became increasingly dissatisfied with Manichaeism and
with life in his native city. In the spring of 383, therefore, he mi-
grated to Rome. There his only contacts were with Manichaeans,
and as a result his discontent grew more intense. Soon he was
invited to go to Milan as a teacher of rhetoric, whereupon he broke
with Manichaeism and became a skeptic. Later he took up neo-

1 F. J. Foakes-Jackson, The History of the Christian Church to 461 A.D. (7th ed., 1924),
p. 490.

cc

VICISTI GALILEE" 101

Platonisrn. But his life in Milan soon brought him into contact
with the great Ambrose, Christian bishop of Milan, the prelate
who had dared to defy the Roman emperor and declare that the
emperor had no jurisdiction over a Christian church, saying that
in matters of religion bishops were wont to judge emperors, not
emperors bishops. To the compelling eloquence of this majestic
and magnetic man Augustine yielded and was converted to Chris-
tianity. Immediately he became an active and zealous churchman.
After spending some time in literary work at Rome., he returned to
his native Africa where he was made bishop of Hippo. The re-
mainder of his life was devoted to the service of the church, whose
leading champion in the field of letters he quickly became. He
died in 430 A.D., at the moment the Vandals were laying siege to
his city. „

St. Augustine was a prolific author, but it is not difficult to name
his greatest book. This distinction clearly belongs to The City of
God (De Civitate Dei), of which it has been said that it laid the foun-
dations of the Holy Roman Empire and paved the way for the
complete subjection of the state to the church.1 In 410 A.D. Alaric
the Goth captured and sacked the city of Rome. For three days
the pillage lasted, and when It was done the world stood aghast at
the portentous significance of the event. The Eternal City had
'alien; the hub around which civilization had turned for upwards
Df eight centuries had gone to smash; the once proud mistress of
die whole Mediterranean world had been brought to the nadir
3f shame and humiliation. Such, the foes of Christianity were
promptly heard to say, was the penalty Rome must pay for de-
serting her ancient gods. Had she shunned the debilitating faith
D£ the Nazarene and remained steadfast in her old ways, she never
vould have come to such a fate. To refute this sophistry and pro-
/ide a political credo for Christians, St. Augustine wrote The City
}J God.

Neither Rome nor any other city, he contended, had ever been
saved by its gods. It was absurd to expect such a thing. Christian-
*ty could nt>t save Rome, but it did do much to mitigate the hor-
rors of the barbarian conquest, and the very people who now scoffed
at Christianity were among those who had fled to the churches for

1Gf. R. H. Murray, The History of Political Science from Plato to the Present (1926)
x 43; also J. Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire (rev. ed.} 1904), p. 94n.

102 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

protection, well knowing that the Goths were Christians and would
respect the Christian sanctuary. No weakness of Christianity was
responsible for what had happened; God, in His infinite providence,
had permitted the destruction of Rome as a step in the fulfillment
of His ultimate plan of establishing the City of God among men.

The vicissitudes of empire, reasoned the mitered African doctor,
do not have their origin in chance. The God who marks the spar-
row's fall also regulates the rise and fall of empires. It is all part of
a divinely foreordained plan. The details of this plan may not
always be clear to human beings, but its objective is the Civitas Dei
(City of God), wherein men shall realize eternal peace and see God
as He is.

We live, however, in a world of dual character, consisting of an
earthly commonwealth (civitas terrena) and a heavenly common-
wealth (civitas superna). The former, which includes any ter-
restrial authority not deriving directly from the will of God, has
worldly wisdom and worldly power, but is dependent upon the
latter for the attainment of perfect justice. The celestial common-
wealth is not to be viewed as a kingdom in the skies, but as a heav-
enly regime on earth, the saved being its citizenry and God its
ruler. These two may exist side by side and frequently intermingle
and overlap. Because it deals with spiritual things, the church serves
as a concrete embodiment of the heavenly commonwealth, and the
state, because it deals with material things, bodies forth the earthly
commonwealth. Ideally the two should be so completely fused
that the distinction between secular and spiritual would disappear.
That, however, is not yet practicable. The church strives to realize
on earth the civitas superna, and the state, in so far as it is Christian,
is linked with the church and functions as its secular arm. In this
capacity the state has authority from God; otherwise it is nothing
but wholesale brigandage.

Rights, according to St. Augustine, are of two kinds, divine and
human. The latter flow from the laws of the state acting within its
proper sphere. When it acts in this sphere, men are duty bound to
obey it; but not when it acts in the sphere of religion or morality.
In this field the church is supreme and is responsible only to God.
But this fact does not justify a refusal to be bound by the laws of
earthly sovereigns by simply alleging them to be ultra vires. Only the
church can determine such matters.

"VICISTI GALILEE" 103'

"Dim as the outline of the De Cwitate Dei may be," says a recent
writer on the history of political science, uSt. Augustine had un-
questionably drawn a new ideal of the Kingdom of God on earth,
in which the Empire should take its place within the Church, and
the Church through it should govern the world.55 1 No other figure
in Roman Christianity exerted a greater influence upon the politi-
cal ideology of mediaeval Europe than this scholarly African
prelate of the fourth century. The De Cwitate Dei became the book
of the hour, and was widely read by laity and clergy alike. It made
a deep impression upon Charlemagne, Otto the Great, and other
mediaeval princes, and doubtless was a potent factor in determin-
ing their attitude toward the church.

Of course the dual polity idea was not St. Augustine's alone.
Many others interpreted the conditiqns of the time in much the
same way, but none expressed their views so eloquently and con-
vincingly as the author of The City of God. He wrote, though pos-
sibly not intending it, the political platform of the Roman Church.
Pope Gelasius some sixty years later declared that, although in
pre-Christian times secular and spiritual authorities apparently
had been united, a true union of the two could occur only in Christ
acting both as King and Priest. But Christ had chosen to divide
them, commanding his followers to render unto Caesar the things
that were Caesar's and unto God the things that were God's. To
the state was assigned the temporal sphere of authority and to the
church the spiritual. In its own sphere each authority was inde-
pendent of the other; but there were many particulars in which
they were mutually dependent, and some points where they came
into conflict. Divine authority, however, was higher than human
authority, and was therefore bound to prevail.

REFERENCES

Bryce, J,, The Holy Roman Empire (rev. ed., New York, 1904), Chaps.

III-IV.

Burns, C. D., Political Ideals (London, 1915), Chaps. IV-V.
Carlyle, R. \y., and A. J., History of Mediaeval Political Theory in the West

(6 vols., New York, 1903-1936).
Coker, F. W., Readings in Political Philosophy (rev. ed., New York, 1938)

Chap. V.

Cook, T. L, A History of Political Philosophy (New York, 1936), Chap. VI.
1 R. H. Murray, op. cit.s p, 43,

104 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

Dunning, W. A., A History of Political Theories: Ancient and Mediaeval (New

York, 1902), Chaps. V-VI.
Figgis, J. N., The Political Aspects of Augustine's "City of God" (London,

1921).

Foster, M. B., Masters of Political Thought (Boston, 1941), Chap. V.
Gavin, F., Seven Centuries of the Problem of Church and State (Princeton, N. J,,

1939).

Gettell, R. G., History of Political Thought (New York, 1924), Chap. V.
McCabe, J., St. Augustine and His Age (New York, 1 903) .
Mcllwain, C. H., The Growth of Political Thought in the West (New York,

1932), Chap. V.
Murray, R. H., The History of Political Science from Plato to the Present (New

York, 1926), Chap. II.

Rommen, H. A., The State in Catholic Thought (St. Louis, 1945).
Ryan, J. A., and Boland, F. J., Catholic Principles of Politics (New York,

1940). '
Sabine, G. H.3 A History of Political Theory (New York, 1937), Chaps,

X-XI.
Smith, A. L., Church and State in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1913).

ffljt *l J4"^

••i^,: '

CHAPTER VIII

LORDS TEMPORAL AND SPIRITUAL

I

THERE are many definitions of mediaevalism — almost as
many as there are writers on the subject — and, of course, cor-
respondingly numerous and varied explanations of feudal-
ism and the Holy Roman Empire. From the standpoint of political
thought the professorial minutiae which furnish bases for this wide
assortment of opinions are of no great importance. To follow the
main channels of political thought in the mediaeval period we have
only to keep our attention fixed upon certain major forces which
basically conditioned the political processes and moulded the politi-
cal ideology of the Middle Ages. These are: (1) the polity and politi-
cal theories of the Roman Catholic Church, (2) the rise and spread
of feudalism, (3) the revival of the imperial idea, and (4) the begin-
nings of nationalism.

Of the political turn in the development of the Roman Church we
have already spoken, but somewhat more is needed to explain the
prompt and seemingly pusillanimous surrender of secular rulers to
the temporal pretensions of the vicars of Christ. In the present age
of spiritual individualism it is difficult to appreciate the powerful
hold of the clergy upon mediaeval society. It is an ancient axiom
that men are moved by their fears as much as by their faiths, and
the fears, let us remember, of the people of mediaeval Europe were
many and terrifying. Greatest of all was the fear of everlasting tor-
ture in hell. Pre-Christian religions had paid but slight attention to
the question of life after death. Some sort of shadowy existence in
the nether regions was assumed to be the fate of departed souls; but
there was nothing very real about it, nor did it involve such con-
siderations as the resurrection of the body and the last judgment of
the soul. Upon these points, however, Christianity was not only ex-
plicit but highly expansive. The future life was a certainty and the
Christian preachers knew all about it. On the Last Day the dead
would rise and face the final judgment of God. For the redeemed
there would be eternal life in a heaven of seraphic delights; for the
damned, eternal life in a hell of inconceivable horror. Redemption

105

106 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

from hell was not exclusively a matter of how one lived; no matter
how righteously a man lived, he must take proper steps to propitiate
the wrath to come or he would be lost; and no matter how sinfully
he lived, if he took those steps, he could be saved.

The Roman Church claimed to have been invested with the func-
tion of segregating the saved from the unsaved. Had not Christ, in
those memorable verses of the sixteenth chapter of Matthew, said
unto Peter: "That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build
my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I
will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and whatso-
ever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and what-
soever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven" ? And
was not Peter the first bishop of Rome, founder of the Roman
Catholic Church? For the believing Christian, prince or pauper,
this closed the argument. Obviously no man could hope to enter
into heaven without the blessing of the Roman Church, and no man
branded with the censure of the church could expect to escape from
hell. Equipped with this invincible weapon of authority over the
credulous — and there were few of any other type after the eclipse of
the classical cultures — the church was ready to measure arms with
any secular ruler who might question her right to the supreme
loyalty of all Christians.

Nor did she lack other resources to reinforce this potent weapon
of sovereignty. She had organization — the best in the western world
at the time — wealth, and brains. Her organization had been built
up in the closing decades of the Roman Empire, when, as custodian
of the official religion of the Caesars, she had enjoyed the assistance
of that titanic political mechanism in stamping out opposition and
consolidating her strength; her wealth was partly a heritage of im-
perial days and partly the result of tithes collected from the faithful
by the obedient clergy of every land; her brains were due princi-
pally to two facts: first, that she had obtained a virtual monopoly of
education, and, second, that she alone, in the turbulent days of
feudal Europe, seemed able to offer to able and ambitious men a
career in which the rewards would be great and sure. •"

The feudal society of the Middle Ages has been ascribed to so
many different sources that one may safely conclude that it is of
composite origin. Undoubtedly its roots run back into the pre-
Christian days of the Roman Empire. In the Roman system of pa-

LORDS TEMPORAL AND SPIRITUAL 107

* _. _ _ ^ ^ __ _ ^ ^ __i . _ _ _ ^

tron and client, and similarly in the Roman system of military
tenures and the sacred hierarchy instituted by the early Caesars, we
see palpable antecedents of feudal institutions. But the Teutonic
idea of personal rather than political allegiance, and of rights and
duties attaching to individuals as such and not as members of the
state, must also be credited with a considerable contribution to the
growth of feudal society. Nor would there seem to be any doubt
that the Christian Church, through the caste patterns which ob-
tained in its priestly hierarchy, materially abetted the growth of the
feudal idea, and that to a degree at least, as Bryce observes, knight-
hood was constructed on the analogy of priesthood.

The important thing for us to consider is not what caused feudal
society, but what feudal society caused to happen to political au-
thority. The anarchy following the disintegration of the Western
Empire placed the small landowner in a defenseless position, and the
most immediately practicable thing for him to do in order to gain
security was to consign his estate to a neighboring baron and receive
it back as a fief. This would entitle him to the shelter of the baron's
castle and the aid of the baron's troops. In order to augment their
military strength, large landholders, who almost invariably were
nobles, found it expedient to apportion their estates among the
neighboring gentry as fiefs. The holder of the fief, known as a vassal^
was bound to bear arms for his lord or suzerain, to aid him in various
other ways, and to render unto him certain dues in money and
military service. The suzerain on his part was bound to protect the
vassal from attack and maintain him in possession of his estate. By
the infinite elaboration of this practice of infeudation and by its in-
tricate intertwining with the political and ecclesiastical institutions
of the time, there developed an order of society in which political
authority was more confusingly segmented than the parts of a
Chinese puzzle. Except for serfs and others in thraldom, everybody
was the vassal of somebody, often of several somebodies; and every-
body, save those of lowest rank, was in turn likely to be at the same
time the suzerain of one or more somebodies. A man might become
the vassal t)f one suzerain in respect to this property, of another in
respect to that, and of a third in respect to the other; and he might
then become the suzerain of subvassals in respect to all or portions
of the estates held in fief from his various suzerains. Europe became
a Dismal Swamp of individual feudal allegiances. The only au-

108 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

thbrily which had any uniform or universal recognition was that of
the church, which was supposed to be essentially spiritual. How-
ever, the church, by reason of its ownership of vast amounts of real
property, became itself involved in the tortuous intricacies of the
feudal system, a fact which eventually proved to be the most vul-
nerable point in its organization.

The disintegration of the dominions of Charlemagne added fur-
ther confusion. This Prankish conqueror, by seizing one domain
after another, had become overlord of most of the territory now in-
cluded in France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Switzerland, west-
ern Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia^ and northern Italy. Being
the most powerful potentate in Europe and a zealous Christian, he
was Invited to Rome in the year 800 to act as mediator in a contro-
versy between Pope Leo III and certain of his political opponents,
In celebration of the satisfactory settlement of the dispute the pope
held a magnificent religious service in St. Peter's on Christmas Day.
While Charlemagne was kneeling at the altar, Leo placed a crown
on his head and saluted him as "Ernpcror of the Romans.33 Though
he always protested that he was taken entirely by surprise by this
papal coronation, Charlemagne did not decline the honor and con-
tinued to bear the title until his death. Theoretically he had become
the successor of the Caesars, but actually he was no such thing. The
old Roman Empire was dead beyond resuscitation, for one thing;
and the legal competence of the pope to bestow secular crowns of
any kind was certainly open to question.

Upon Charlemagne's death in 814 the imperial title began to
cause trouble and continued to be a source of violent controversy
until its final abolition by Napoleon nearly a thousand years later,
Soon after the death of Charlemagne his empire was partitioned
among his descendants and quickly melted away; but the glamor-
ous title of Emperor survived the dissolution of the empire and fur-
nished occasion for numerous rivalries and disputes until 924, when
the last of the Carolingians died. In the me!6e which followed, the
German king, Otto, was besought by the pope to invade Italy and
make an end of the anarchy which existed there, and the imperial
crown was held out as a lure. Otto accepted the invitation, did the
job assigned to him, and forthwith received the title of Emperor
from the pope in 962.

This second reestablishment of the empire is usually said to mark

LORDS TEMPORAL AND SPIRITUAL 109

the beginning of the Holy Roman Empire. Otto undoubtedly be-
lieved that he had been invested with all of the functions of the
Caesars and a few additional ones into the bargain; the papacy,
however, took a different view of the matter, and so did the numer-
ous feudal potentates over whom Otto claimed suzerainty. Ab-
stractly, however, the doctrine of what Bryce calls the c 'mystic dual-
ism55 was pretty generally accepted. All Christians supposedly were
under a dual regime. The pope was God's earthly representative in
matters spiritual and the emperor in matters temporal. Each in his
sphere had universal authority, and no conflict between them was
possible because each was indispensable to the other and would aid
and support the other.

While popes and glory-seeking potentates were vainly striving to
reestablish universal government in Europe, the unstayable march
of events was laying the foundations of nationalism. The different
Latin dialects which had been spoken in various parts of the Roman
Empire were gradually crystallizing into national languages —
French, Spanish, Italian, and other Romance tongues. The Ger-
manic dialects were likewise evolving in the same direction. Eng-
lish, German, Danish, and other Teutonic tongues were beginning
to be definitely differentiated. At the same time powerful feudal
lords, by means of conquest, marriage, and inheritance, were
building up domains to correspond roughly with the dispersion of
languages. Linguistic and cultural kinship were beginning to be
associated with territorial unity. Memories of Rome and the past
were becoming dim; in every part of Europe people were develop-
ing a new and particularistic historical consciousness. Roman
legions no longer maintained stability and order; whatever was
done in this direction was done by the local lords. The Greek spirit
of local patriotism, long repressed by the hand of universal govern-
ment, was beginning to bloom again.

It was out of the turmoil born of the complex interactions of these
colliding forces — the church, the feudal system, the empire, and
incipient nationalism — that mediaeval political thought was
produced. *

II

No such loving condominium as that supposed to be shared by
the Roman Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire ever

110 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

_ _ u_^ . _.__^r,._ _ ^ f

existed in fact, or could exist so long as both were directed by hu-
man beings. Even lovers have their quarrels; and the church and
the empire soon discovered that their alliance was a marriage not
of love but of convenience. The church, despite its spiritual ideals,
had become so encumbered with material possessions and so pre-
occupied with the management of its vast properties that it was for
all practical purposes a secular concern. As such it was involved
in almost every move of the stormy politics of the period and stood
in constant need of potent allies. The empire, as an empire, was a
fiction of course; but the emperor was a mighty feudal lord with
grandiose monarchical ambitions, who could make excellent use of
the imperial title and the friendship of the papacy in pushing toward
the realization of his coveted goal of general suzerainty.

Not only does politics make strange bedfellows; it just as often
causes the best of bedfellows to fall out. So it was in the case of the
church and the empire. They were too intimate and too much
alike in motive and interest to escape estrangement. Both were
inextricably entangled in the delirious complexities of the feudal
system; both were extravagant in their feudal claims and jealous
of their pretended rights. Feudal proprietors — kings, dukes, barons,
or whatever they might be called — were accustomed to grant fiefs
to churchmen as well as to laymen. Thus bishops, abbots, and other
clergymen became vassals of secular lords and subject to secular
obligations. It was not uncommon likewise for an abbot or other
head of a monastery, in order to secure military protection, to trans-
fer the property of the brotherhood to a neighboring baron and
receive it back as a fief. On account of the rule of celibacy in the
clergy fiefs held by clergymen could not be hereditary as secular
fiefs were, and consequently, when one of these fiefholding clergy-
men died, there was Invariably a controversy over the choosing of
his successor. Was this a spiritual or a secular function?

In the polity of the church from earliest times, bishops had been
chosen by the clergy of the diocese, abbots by the members of
the monastery, and so on. The church contended, therefore, that
the right of filling vacancies in fiefs held by clergymen belonged to
the clergy, as only the incumbent of a clerical office could hold the
fief. The view of the secular suzerains was that the clerical quality
of the appointment was secondary to its essentially feudal and
secular character, and hence that the incumbent could not take

LORDS TEMPORAL AND SPIRITUAL 111

t _ . _ _ _

possession of this property without the approval of the feudal over-
lord. When the clergy refused to comply with their wishes, the
secular lords often refused to hand over the property to the person
designated as the successor by the ecclesiastical authorities. The
church either had to yield or resort to measures of retaliation, of
which there were chiefly three. Some rival lord might be induced
to attack the renegade and thrash him into submission; he might
be cast out of the church by excommunication; or his dominions
might be placed under an interdict which prohibited all religious
services and sacraments on which the salvation of the soul depended.
The success of the church in the employment of these three measures
depended as much upon its political as upon Its spiritual power.
Without political allies it had to rely entirely upon its ability by
threats of wrath to come to terrorize tjie subjects of the recalcitrant
into revolt. This was effective only in proportion as the arrogant
lord was himself credulous enough to fear hell fire or too weak to
terrorize his people into ignoring the commands of the church.

In addition to this controversy over investiture., as it was called,
there were many other points of friction between temporal and
spiritual authorities. One particularly thorny matter was the taxa-
tion of church property; another was the attempted performance of
civil functions such as the coining of money and the collection of
taxes by clergy in their capacity as vassals of secular lords; a third
had to do with the discharge of feudal obligations by clergymen
holding secular fiefs.

At first the church distinctly had the better of it. No temporal
lord was strong enough to prevail against her. Her enormous
wealth, her universal and smoothly functioning organization, her
highly centralized polity, and her hold upon the superstitions of
classes and masses, enabled her to rout all opposition. In the famous
controversy between Pope Gregory VII and Emperor Henry IV
over the question of investiture the pope's order of excommunica-
tion brought such a tremendous combination of forces into the
field against the emperor that he feared to lose his crown and came
hurrying to Canossa where the pope obliged him to appear at the
door and kneel in the snow as a penitent pilgrim for three successive
days before he would receive him. Some years later the political
situation changed, and Henry had his revenge. He captured Rome
and forced Gregory into exile. This contretemps, instead of break-

112 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

ing the might of the popes, served only to increase their bid for
temporal power. Between the death of Henry IV in 1106 and that
of the Emperor Frederick II in 1250 emperors contended with
popes on substantially equal terms; but there was a marked decline
of ability in the line of emperors from that time forward, and the
papacy was left in command of the field,

Not for long, however, were the popes to enjoy unopposed su-
premacy. By 1300 strong national monarchies were appearing on
the scene, and the rulers of these were not slow to challenge the ;
temporal pretensions of the Vatican. Edward I of England and
Philip the Fair of France made an issue of the clerical claim to ex-
emption from taxation. These predatory princes had no such rank
and prestige as the emperor, but they proved to be far tougher
antagonists for the papacy.,, National feeling had grown to the
point where the church began to be looked upon as an alien and
parasitical institution, a feeling in no degree diminished by the
notorious abuses which had crept into the management of the
church and the practices of the clergy. It was so obviously not a
holy institution that even the ignorant and the superstitious began
to place patriotism above piety. National monarchs now were able
to risk excommunication, interdict, and other papal weapons with
out much fear of serious consequences.

In laying hands on Philip the Fair of France the pope caught a
Tartar, who fought with most un-Christian vindictivcness. When
the French clergy, ordered by the pope not to pay taxes to the king,
withheld the revenues of their estates, Philip countered by forbid-
ding the exportation of gold and silver from his realm, a measure
which so quickly and greatly curtailed the revenues of the papacy
that the Holy Father was glad to compromise the matter. Subse-
quently, when the pope ordered Philip to free a certain prisoner
held by him, the king immediately summoned the estates-general
and won their promise to support him instead of the pope. Having
had continuous trouble with Pope Boniface VIII, Philip decided
to have a pope of his own making. Accordingly, upon the death of
Boniface in 1303, he framed up a deal whereby the archbishop of
Bordeaux was to be chosen pope and would thereupon transfer

«L *• if*

the papacy to France. This deal went through in 1305, and lor
seventy-two years thereafter the papacy functioned under the offi-
cious patronage of the French court. From this blow the papacy

LORDS TEMPORAL AND SPIRITUAL 113

never recovered. During the long "Babylonian Captivity5' at
Avignon its influence shrivelled both politically and spiritually.
The Protestant Revolt was still a century and a half away, but the
doom of universal authority both in politics and religion had al-
ready been sounded.

Ill

From the foregoing summary of political alignments in mediaeval
Europe it is easy to understand why the political thought of the
period should be classified as simply pro-papal and anti-papal.
There was no other question of looming significance; it seemed to
occupy the thoughts of men to the exclusion of all else. Of the
scores of writers who composed polemic or philosophical treatises
on this boiling subject we shall deal ,with only a few of the most
typical and prominent on each side.

Foremost in point of time on the papal side of the controversy,
and possibly foremost in point of practical influence, is the great
Hildebrand, better remembered as the Pope Gregory who brought
the emperor to his knees at Canossa. The doctrines of this imperi-
ous pontiff were conceived long before he assumed the papal dia-
dem. Among his many writings is a very brief statement called the
Dictatus Papae, which contains an excellent epitome of his political
ideas. The pope, he declares, possesses a unique title and a unique
office. He is the only universal bishop, and as such has complete
authority over all other prelates. Without his sanction no council
of the church may speak authoritatively for Christendom, and no
book is authoritative without his approval. None may nullify a
decree of the pope or pass judgment on his acts, but the pope as the
vicar of God may nullify the decrees of all other earthly powers.
He may depose emperors and absolve subjects from obedience to
unjust sovereigns. The Roman Church is infallible and no one may
be considered a Catholic Christian who does not agree with that
church.

Next in the list of papal champions we have John of Salisbury,
the English* priest whose Policraticus is said to be "the earliest elab-
orate mediaeval treatise on politics. " 1 Little is known about the
life of this first English political theorist. He was born at Salisbury
in England in the year 1115, and seems to have gone to Paris about

1 J. Dickinson, The Statesman's Book of John of Salisbury (1927), p. xvii.

114 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

1136 to study under Abelard and other great teachers of France,
About 1150 he was appointed secretary to Theobald, Archbishop
of Canterbury, and continued in that position when Thomas
Becket succeeded Theobald. Diplomatic and political work rather
than secretarial routine seems to have been his principal employ-
ment in the see of Canterbury, and it is known that he went on
several missions to Rome and other continental ^centers. In 1176
he was made bishop of Chartres, which diocese he held until his
death in 1180. He was evidently a man of great erudition, and
thoroughly familiar with the Latin classics. Greek classics at that
time were available only indirectly and incompletely through the
Latin. John's knowledge of Plato and Aristotle therefore leaves

much to be desired.

The Policraticus, or Statesman's Book, was finished in 1159, and, as
Dr. Dickinson points out in the preface of his translation, is purely
mediaeval, being "the only important political treatise written
before western thought had once more become familiar with the
Politics of Aristotle," It is interesting, therefore, and significant to
note, as the same writer reminds us, that John touched very lightly
upon feudal theories, though feudalism was then at its highest de-
velopment, but laid heavy emphasis upon the classical Roman
conception of the state. In this he was not only a true churchman
but was keeping alive a doctrine which secular rulers later were
destined to borrow from the church and employ to her very great
discomfiture. John of Salisbury views the state as an organic entity
and likens it to the human body, saying, "The place of the head in
the body of the commonwealth is filled by the prince. ... The
place of the heart is filled by the Senate. . . . The duties of eyes,
ears, and tongue are claimed by the judges and governors of prov-
inces. Officials and soldiers correspond to the hands. Those who
always attend upon the prince are likened to the sides. Financial
officers and keepers (I speak now not of those who are in charge of
the prisons, but of those who are keepers of the privy chest) may be
compared with the stomach and intestines. . . . The husband-
men correspond to the feet, which always cleave to the soil, and
need the more especially the care and foresight of the head, since
while they walk upon the earth doing service with their bodies,
they meet the more often with stones of stumbling, and therefore
deserve aid and protection all the more justly since it is they

LORDS TEMPORAL AND SPIRITUAL 115

who raise, sustain, and move forward the weight of the entire
body.33 1

But the sovereign of the body, says the secretary of Canterbury,
is the soul, and the analogue of this in the state is the practice
of religion and the worship of God. "And therefore those who
preside over the practice of religion should be looked up to and
venerated as the soul of the body,53 x and manifestly should have
rulership over the whole thereof. The primacy of the church
is thus made clear beyond question. The prince, by divine gov-
ernance, is placed at the apex of the commonwealth, "sometimes
through the secret ministry of God's providence, sometimes by
the decision of His priests, and again it Is the votes of the whole
people which concur to place the ruler in authority." 2 But the
Scriptures show that notwithstanding^ mode by which the ruler
comes into power, he is always regarded as having been ordained
by God and is held responsible for doing the will of God. "For
all power is from the Lord God, and has been with Him always,
and is from everlasting. The power which the prince has is
therefore from God, for the power of God is never lost, nor
severed from Him, but He merely exercises it through a sub-
ordinate hand, making all things teach His mercy and jus-
tice." 3

Law, says John, is but the interpreter of God's equity and justice,
and the prince is merely the minister of the common interest and
the bond-servant of equity. Apart from that which law or equity
enjoins or the calculation of the common interest requires, he can
have no will in public matters. He bears the sword of justice and
sheds blood blamelessly as the agent of the divine will. This sword,
however, "the prince receives from the hand of the Church, al-
though she herself has no sword of blood at all. Nevertheless she
has this sword, but she uses it by the hand of the prince, upon whom
she confers the power of bodily coercion, retaining to herself au-
thority over spiritual things in the person of the pontiffs. The prince
is, then, as it were, a minister of the priestly power, and one who
exercises that side of the sacred offices which seems unworthy of the
hands of the priesthood. For every office existing under, and con-
cerned with the execution of, the sacred laws is really a religious
office, but that is inferior which consists in punishing crimes, and
PP-

116 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

which seems to be typified in the person of the hangman. Where-
fore Constantine, most faithful emperor of the Romans, when he
convoked the council of priests at Nicaea, neither dared to take the
chief place for himself nor even to sit among the presbyters, but
chose the hindmost seat." *

Our next champion of the papal cause is Thomas Aquinas, the
sainted Aristotle of the Middle Ages. Doctor Angelicus and Doctor
Universalis he was frequently styled, and the catholicity of his
scholarship did not belie such titles. Born in 1227 of a noble family
in the old kingdom of Naples, Aquinas devoted himself from early
youth to the pursuit of learning. He studied in Cologne and Paris
under the greatest masters of the day, and entered the Dominican
order, to the service of which he gave the remainder of his life. As a
teacher and writer he quickly gained a prodigious reputation and
was soon recognized as the intellectual paladin of the church. The1}
Roman Church had now become a gigantic temporal organization!
with political difficulties to face in every part of Europe. The
Crusades had shaken the foundations of feudalism, and the spirit
of nationalism was beginning to ferment among the children of
the church. The revival of classical learning was also on its way,
the works of Aristotle and other great philosophers of Greece
having been lately recovered and made available to the world"

again.

"In this new world, " says Doctor Jaszi, "the Roman Catholic
Church urgently needed a comprehensive and systematic theory
which would put the early traditions of Christianity in harmonyt
with the exigencies of the world diplomacy of the papal power,1
This task was admirably accomplished by St. Thomas, not so much
by the originality of his ideas or the brilliancy of his analysis, as by
his extraordinary gift for combining and unifying very different
elements of thought in an apparently logical and convincing sys-
tem. This endeavor of the great scholastic is vigorously charac-
terized by? Bluntschli in saying that his work was an attempt to j
graft the theological idea of the church and the highness of thej
pope, as a noble twig, on the wild stem of the Aristotelian theory;
of state. In order to accomplish this task he built a gigantic edifice,
of thought in which he amalgamated certain Platonic traditions i
and the whole system of the great Stagirite with the Roman law,i

1 Ibid., p. 9.

LORDS TEMPORAL AND SPIRITUAL 117

*

the Bible, and the writings of the Fathers and other great theolo-
gians of the Church." ^

This scholastic confection is to be found chiefly in St. Thomas'
unfinished treatise, De Regimine Pnncipum (The Rule of Princes), and
his Commentaries on the Politics of Aristotle. Professedly he is a disciple
of Aristotle, basing his political philosophy on the Aristotelian prem-
ise that man is naturally and necessarily a social animal. Man
could not exist without society, he declares, and society must have
government. The sine qua non of good government is unity; and the
greater the unity, the better the government. This, he opines, is the (
teaching of history, though it is true that united power has evil as
well as good possibilities. To guard against the former, the right
sort of person must be secured as monarch, and his power must be
so limited that he cannot become a .tyrant") Should this fail, the
despot may be deposed, though revolution is to be discouraged as
being generally a greater evil than the one it seeks to cure. The
ruler's supreme duty is to secure the welfare of his people, and in
doing this he will find his greatest happiness; for then the people will
love and sustain him and desire to retain him in power.

By beautiful examples of syllogistic art the Neapolitan scholastic
deduces the following conclusions as to the nature of law: (1) that,
"since law is a rule and standard of human action, it is necessarily
related to reason "; (2) that, "since law is the rule of human con-
duct, the ultimate end of which is happiness, and, indeed, the com-
mon happiness, it is necessarily always ordained for the common
good"; (3) that, "since law ordains the common good, law can be
created by the reason, not of any individual, but of the multitude,
or of the prince acting for the multitude"; (4) that "since law is
established as a rule which is to be applied to those upon whom it is
imposed, it is necessary, in order that it may have obligatory force,
that it should be promulgated and brought to the notice of those
who are subject to the law." 2 Four kinds of law are recognized as
embracing all law — eternal law, natural law, human law, and di-
vine law. Eternal law is the law by which God governs the uni-
verse; natural law is the rule of reason which man evolves by
participation in eternal law; human law is natural law made active

1 K. F. Geiser and O. Jaszi, Political Philosophy Jrom Plato to Jeremy Bentham (1927)
pp.- 91-92.

* Quoted from excerpts of Aquinas' Summa Theologica in Coker, Readings in Political
Philosophy (1938), pp. 21 1-214.

118 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

*t

in" earthly affairs by the application of human reason; divine law
consists of special revelations to supplement the other three types.
The first and the last are of special concern only to theologians, but
in reviving and refurbishing the Roman doctrine of natural law and
in stressing the rational and volitional elements in human law, St.
Thomas made a far-reaching contribution to political thought. His
conception of natural law does not pre-suppose the existence of uni-
versal and immutable canons of right reason, but rather of a body
of rational precepts which may change and grow as human reason
and human conditions undergo change and development. Human
law — the ordinary law which governs men in society — should be a
rational outgrowth of natural law, but this does not mean that any
irresponsible person's cogitations can give birth to law. The reason
which furnishes the sanction for human law must have its origin in
the thought and will of society as a whole or in some person au-
thorized to speak and act for society as a whole.

Though it be an indispensableingredient in human society, poli-
tical authority, according to theCThomistic view, like all authority,
is derived from God. jIVIan's dominion over man is held to be of two
kinds : one which restilts from sin and takes the form of slavery, and
one which results from the social instinct that God has implanted in
man, and takes the form of civil government. The Christian meta-
physician of the thirteenth century furnished slave-owners their
most comforting argument. Whereas Aristotle had justified slavery
solely on the ground of inequalities of ability, the sainted Domini-
can saw it*as a divine expedient for the punishment of sin, a right-
eous and holy institution which followers of the lowly Nazarene
could conscientiously defend.

The second type of dominion Aquinas divides into four classes:
(1) sacerdotal and royal, (2) royal, (3) political, and (4) economic.
Only the first of these requires our attention. Sacerdotal and royal

l[ authority, says the learned doctor, is the highest type and is exem-
plified only in the papacy. The purpose of government, he asserts,
is to elevate man to his true end, which is the life of highest virtue,
Human wisdom and virtue are not sufficient for this, "and conse-
quently pure royal authority must be reinforced by priestly au^
thority under the law of Christ. The pope, as the head of Christ's

f church, has authority covering all matters of sin, and this places him
on a plane a.oove all kings and civil rulers. He is the royal head of a

LORDS TEMPORAL AND SPIRITUAL 119

system of government which transcends all temporal affairs, and in-
cludes within its jurisdiction all Christian peoples and their sov-
ereigns. Temporal authorities are to be obeyed in so far as their
limited power is sufficient for the realization of the Christian state,
but beyond this point papal supremacy is not to be denied.

IV

Philip the Fair of France was surrounded by a group of smart
lawyers whom some historians credit with being the actual rulers of
the country. That the king did closely follow their advice is estab-
lished beyond doubt. These clever jurisconsults., through the study
of Roman law, had conceived a tremendous admiration for the
unified and absolute authority enjoyed by Roman emperors, and
had fortified themselves with arguments to show that such author-
ity should be enjoyed by temporal monarchs. They were ready,
therefore, when Philip became embroiled with Pope Boniface VIII",
to rush to his aid a powerful battery of plausible arguments to put
the pope entirely in the wrong. Two of these impious French jurists
deserve particular mention. They are John of Paris and Peter
Dubois.

John of Paris wrote an elaborate treatise on kingly and papal
power in which he laid down the proposition that the authority of
the kings of France was traceable to pre-Christian times; that the
Franks never had acknowledged the suzerainty of the Roman em-
peror, the pope, or anybody else. A universal church with a mon-
archical head may be necessary in ecclesiastical affairs, thinks John,
but that such universality of authority is necessary or desirable in
secular affairs he categorically denies. He advances many strong
reasons, both theoretical and practical., to support the thesis that
diversity of authority is not only desirable but inevitable in secular
affairs. He emphasizes such things as the differences of race, lan-
guage, and economic interest which exist among the various
peoples, the unavoidable conflicts between them, and the fact that
property, the feudal basis of dominion, is local in its origin. Even as
to the property of the church situated in different countries, he
argues that the pope is to be regarded as a steward, not as an owner.
Should the pope be unfaithful in this stewardship, John says he may
be deposed.

Much less polite were the arguments of Peter Dubois. Supposing

120 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

that the pope does have a valid theoretical claim to primacy over
temporal rulers, he says, What of it? It takes force to exercise au-
thority, and the pope has no force to back up his pretensions. The
pope's job, he sarcastically remarks, is to save souls, not to command
armies. Let him, therefore, keep his meddling fingers out of politics,
where he only contrives to send a lot of innocent people to hell, and
concentrate on his priestly function, in which he might do some good.
Still another reason why popes ought to keep out of politics, he
says, is that they almost invariably are decadent old men who have \
no capacity for temporal affairs and lack the family connections and
inherited influence necessary to success in secular government. The
wise thing, then, for the popes would be to mind their knitting and
turn over their temporal interests to powerful princes such as the
king of France, who can look after them properly.1

Seventeen years after Philip had moved the papacy to Avignon
Pope John XXII got into a violent row with King Lewis of Bavaria,
By a decisive victory over Frederick of Austria in 1322 Lewis
mounted to the top of the pile in Germany and made ready to seize
the imperial crown. The pope had other ideas about the matter,
however; and, when Lewis ignored his opposition, the man of God
grasped his trusty weapon and let go both barrels — excommunica-
tion and interdict — against the unruly monarch. But the broadside
had little effect. National feeling in Germany was with Lewis—the
pope was looked upon as a tool of France — and Lewis was also able
to enlist the aid of the powerful Franciscan order, which was at the
time engaged in a furious controversy with the pope on its own ac-
count. Two Franciscan friars, William of Ockham and Marsiglio of
Padua, became confidential advisers of Lewis and wrote in behalf of
his cause a series of diatribes against the pope.

William, though the more prolific writer, made no particular
contribution to political thought; but Marsiglio has been character-
ized as "the most original thinker of the fourteenth century," "a
man who pierced the fundamental secrets of statesmanship more
deeply than any of his contemporaries" and one who "not merely
divined the Europe of his own day, but also . . . -divined the
Europe of ages unborn." 2 Of the life of this remarkable man very

1 This and the preceding paragraphs are based largely on W. A. Dunning, A History
of Political Theories: Ancient and Mediaeval (1902), pp. 225-229.

2 R. H. Murray, The History of Political Science from Plato to the Present (1926), p. 81.

LORDS TEMPORAL AND SPIRITUAL 121

little Is known. He was born at Padua about 1270, studied for holy
orders, and is also said to have studied and practiced medicine. He
taught in the University of Paris and was rector of the University in
1312. He is also said to have seen service as a soldier. Where he ac-
quired his heretical ideas is not known. Upon the excommunication
of Lewis of Bavaria., Marsiglio and his friend and collaborator., John
of Jandun, left Paris and attached themselves to the court of the
Bavarian monarch, presenting Lewis at the same time with a book
which they had just written and called Defensor Pads. Through
Lewis, Marsiglio secured the appointment of archbishop of Milan,
but for some reason never took office. Of the remainder of his life
there Is no record, save that he died and was buried, in the Fran-
ciscan church, at Munich about 1349.

The Defensor Pads (The Defender of tfie Peace) , though written in
collaboration with John of Jandun, is generally held to be primarily
the work of Marsiglio. As its title implies, the purpose of the work
is to point the way to the restoration of universal peace, which the
authors hold to be the greatest need of human society. Law, they
say, has its origin in the people; that is to say, in the whole body or
at least the most important part of the citizens. The head of the
government should be elected or appointed by the people, and
should be circumscribed in such a way that he cannot put himself
above the laws. He should be made responsible to the people for all
breaches of law, and in case of serious offense they should have the
right to put him to death.

The cause of most of the turmoil which afflicts Europe is said to be
the papacy. By a series of usurpations, it is argued, the pope has
gained a fictitious power which he uses with disastrous consequences
to the peace of nations* To correct this, all clergy, including even
the pontiff himself, should be deprived of all coercive authority and
all power to impose the observance of divine law. Even heretics
should be condemned by civil rather than ecclesiastical tribunals.
Wishing to see the clergy practice holy poverty, the Defensor Pads
recommends the suppression of tithes and the seizure by the secular
authorities of the property of the church. Not only its wealth but
even its independence should be taken from the church, think these
radical friars, for they boldly propose that all benefices shall be
filled by the civil authorities. The pope they would reduce to the
same rank as other bishops and would allow him no power to inter-

122 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

pret the Scriptures or define dogmas. His primacy should be en-
tirely of the honorary kind, and he should be elected by the Chris-
tian people or their representative. The supreme authority of the
church should be a council summoned by the emperor.

Returning to the Greek and Latin point of view, the Defensor
Pads holds the political state to be the greatest of all institutions
being responsible on the one hand for man's welfare in this world
and on the other to safeguard it for the world to come. Christ did
not confer temporal functions on the church, it is said, and did not
intend to. The term ecclesia in the original Greek, as used by St.
Paul and possibly by Jesus himself, did not refer to clergy or
churches, but to an assembly of the whole body. Wherefore it may
be reasoned that the body politic is the ecclesia, and the clergy just
one portion of the whole. rWhat the clergy get from God is the
quality of priesthood; the right to perform priestly functions in any
given place must come from the body politic through its properly
constituted civil authorities. "To live and live well — that is, as is
befitting for man — has been customarily regarded under two aspects
— the temporal or mundane, and the eternal or celestial. What
eternal life is, the whole company of philosophers have not been
able to show; nor is it among the things which are manifest in them-
selves; therefore, the philosophers have not concerned themselves
with teaching the things which pertain to that sort of life. But con-
cerning living and living well, in the mundane sense of the good life,
and concerning the things which are essential to that life, renowned
philosophers have given an almost complete demonstration. They
have reached the conclusion that for fulfilling that life a civil com-
munity is necessary; for perfect life cannot be attained otherwise.33 1

"Such," remarks Noel Valois of the Defemor Pacts, "is this famous
work, full of obscurities, redundancies and contradictions, in which
the thread of the argument is sometimes lost in a labyrinth of rea-
sonings and citations, both sacred and profane, but which never-
theless expresses, both in religion and politics, such audacious and
novel ideas that it has been possible to trace in it, as it were, a rough
sketch of the doctrines developed during the periods of the Refor-
mation and of the French Revolution. The theory was purely
democratic, but all was ready to be transformed, by means of a

1 From excerpts of the Defensor Pads in Coker, Readings in Political Philosophy (1 938),
p, 247.

LORDS TEMPORAL AND SPIRITUAL 123

T>

series of fictions and implications, into an imperialist doctrine; arid
in like manner it contained a visionary plan of reformation which
ended, not in the separation of the church from the state, but in the
subjection of the church to the state." l

The poet Dante should perhaps be given brief mention among
the anti-papal thinkers of the Middle Ages, not because of the
imposing character of his political writings, but because it is signif-
icant that this superb literary genius, perhaps the greatest of medi-
aeval times, should have written anything of a political nature and
particularly of an anti-papal nature. The De Monarchic, of Dante
was a scholarly work which he wrote in Latin for the purpose of
making an argument for a universal empire. Sickened by the in-
terminable wars and fratricidal conflicts of his day, his mind turned
back to the pax Romana. The only way4o put an end to the anarchy
resulting from the countless rivalries of princes and peoples is, he
thinks, for all to be joined together as semi-autonomous member of
an all-inclusive super-state over which a universal emperor would
preside. In such an empire there would be no place for a papacy
exercising secular power, for the emperor would derive his power
directly from God without papal intervention. After an exhaustive
examination of papal claims, he comes to the conclusion that none
of them are tenable anyhow, and that the pope has never received
from God, from any emperor, or from any popular grant, any share
in temporal authority.

Some writers have professed to see in Dante's De Monarchia a
forerunner of latter-day philosophies of international government;
but it is well not to impute too much to the vision of the great
Florentine. Certain similarities do exist between the De Monarchia
and some contemporary doctrines of internationalism, but the
evidence of kinship is not too convincing.

REFERENCES

Bryce, J., The Holy Roman Empire (rev. ed., New York, 1904), Chaps.

VII, XXL
Carlyle, R. \V., and A. J., History of Mediaeval Political Theory in the West

(6 vols., London, 1903-1936).

Chesterton, G. K., St. Thomas Aquinas (London, 1943).
Coker, F. W., Readings in Political Philosophy (rev. ed., New York 1938)

Chaps. VI-IX.

1 Noel Valois, "Marsilius of Padua," Encyclopaedia Britannica, llth ed.

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

„_, _ ._ , . ,_,,.. T /x- \r i -in '••/'A

T* T * EX.-.*, ,-•< , * A- -;-r/'~ /J*"^ir fr.f'fi" * \PW i orlv lvJ5o)

'W } ^w S si ~tt i JL ' JL » in i » 1L !•*• tat «**• u i, in c o* *j ^ jLc tf *. i ^ -^ TI \-" T T A, *-^ j. xi. • AX fcj' \j j •

^^ d.i,»rJL*l*«l*.-«-'*'-'-*'^l)^l'^ * W< * ^ ' -?

VII-IX.

Dickirji.-r., ].. J;;/ 5:u*f;r:.:r;j ^;c.<: cr jckn of Salisbury (New York, 1927).
Durir.liiz. U". A.» J H::tir; •"/ P'Micd Theories: Ancient and Mediaeval
.'Nc\v York. 1:'02.. Chans" VI I-X.

Foster. M. B., J»/^.J^rj $ Pdiiicd Thngki (Boston, 1941), Chaps. VI-VII.
Gavin, F., Sei'?r. Ctr.tUTies ^f the Proh^m of Church and State (Princeton, N. J.,

jf c-"i -h. ~f

i /J ' .

Geiser, K. F.. and Jazi, O.; Pditical Philosophy from Plato to Jeremy Bentham
iXew York, 192™;, Chaps. III-IV.

GetielL R. G., Hist cry cf Political Thought (New York, 1924), Chaps. VI-
VII.

Jarrett. B., Sodd Theories cf the Middle Ages 7200-1500 (London, 1926).
Jenks, £., Lan* and Politics in :he Middle Ages (2nd ed., London, 1913).
McKwain, The Growth of Political Thought in the West (New York, 1932),

Chaps. Ill, M.

Mever, H., The Philosophy rf St. Thomas Aquinas (St. Louis, 1944).
Murray. R. H.. A Histor; cf Political Science from Plato to the Present (New

York, 1926;, Chap. 'ill.

Rommen, H. A,, The State in Catholic Thought (St. Louis, 1945).
Ryan, J. A., and Boland, F. J., Catholic Principles of Politics (New York,

1940).
Safaine, G. H., .4 History of Political Theory (New York, 1937), Chaps,

xiv-xvi.

Smith, A. L., Church and State in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1913).
Taylor, H, O.5 The Mediaeid Mind (3rd ed.^New York, 1919).
Tout; H. F., The Empire and the Papacy (London, 1914).

CHAPTER IX

STRANGE INTERLUDE

I

i'1

s

WITH the swirling torrent of controversy between church
and state racing headlong toward that precipice of vio-
lence, whence it would dash into a furious cataract of
savagery and bloodshed, there intervened, before the final denoue-
ment, a strange interlude in the course of political thought; one of
the most formative and yet paradoxical periods in the entire history
of political literature. The closing decades of the fifteenth and the
first two or three of the sixteenth centuries constitute one of the
most memorable epochs of change in the story of western civiliza-
tion; a time of momentous beginnings, and of equally momentous
endings of much that had been counted fundamental since the end
of classical civilization.

In this Protean span of time the art of printing was born, and
something like eight million books, so it is estimated, were scattered
broadcast throughout western Europe. Such a deluge of reading
matter the world had never before experienced. The same period
saw the discovery of America, the first circumnavigation of the
globe, the opening of unknown continents, the rise of unforeseen
possibilities of commerce, and the first stages of the inevitable shift
of the theater of world events from the Mediterranean to the At-
lantic. The revival of classical learning, commonly known as the
Renaissance, reached its culmination in this same epoch; and the
European mind once and for all shook itself free from the shackles of
mediaevalism and sought inspiration in the great models of Greek
and Roman antiquity. The year 1453 witnessed the capture of
Constantinople by the Turks, an event which marked the fall of the
Byzantine Empire and the breaking of the last tie between the
polities and politics of ancient and of modern times. Feudal society
by this time" was also hastening to ruin, and the Roman Catholic
Church, had ceased, except in name, to be either catholic or
Roman. It was an age also of prophetic changes in the realm of
science. Alchemy, astrology, and numbers were rapidly throwing
off the trappings of magic and taking on the guise of true sciences,

125

126 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

Much of the spade work for the revolutionary celestial mechanics
of Copernicus and Galileo had already been done^ and the results
were soon to be apparent Ancient sanctities and verities were all
dead or dying, and new ones were in the agonizing process of being

oorn.

In this remarkable period of intellectual emancipation men's
minds ventured forth upon many expeditions of experimentation
and Inquiry, and dared to grapple with many uncertainties which
previously, in satisfied reliance upon dogmatic absolutes, they had
carefully steered around. No less in the realm of political thought
than In other fields of intellectual activity were new furrows plowed
and new figures added to the immortals of history. In political
thought this was the era of Machiavelli and More, two men whose
achievements and writings ,will be remembered as long as oppor-
tunism and utopianism remain in the vocabulary of political science
As opposite in most respects as plus and minus, both Machiavelli
and More are typical of the age in which they lived, the one of its
materialism and the other of its idealism. And both, we may con-
fidently say, are representative of its "universality and its viability;

II

/.

• Piccolo Machiavelli is perhaps the most universally reprobated

* figure in the history of political literature; the man whose precepts
are universally disavowed in principle, but regularly followed in
practice. Yei Machiavelli himself was a moral man according to
the conventions of his time, and apparently also a person of con-
siderable culture and charm. The obloquy which has been heaped
upon Mm is the result of one book— one of many that he wrote—

j The Prince. Machiavelli was born in Florence, of well-to-do parents,

In the year 1469. His father was a lawyer of some consequence, and

the boy apparently was educated from youth for a public career.

In 1494 he entered the public service in the capacity of clerk in

chancery, and advanced so rapidly that in 1498 he attained one of

the highest posts in the government, that of second chancellor and

secretary. This post he held continuously until 1512. Florence

during this time was an independent republic, and MachiavelFs

position and reputation were such that he was entrusted with many

Important and delicate responsibilities of state. It is known that he

was scot on diplomatic missions to several foreign courts, including

STRANGE INTERLUDE 127

that of Louis XII of France, of the Emperor Maximilian I, and of
Pope Julius II. It is of record also that in October, 1502, he was
sent as an envoy to the camp of the ill-renowned, but undeniably
brilliant and successful, Cesare Borgia, Duke of Valentino.

It is commonly assumed that Machiavelli's association with this
illegitimate but superbly endowed son of Pope Alexander VI was a
decisive factor in shaping his political thought, but there is little to
sustain such an hypothesis. Cesare Borgia was a ruthless and able
man who, in utter disregard of conventional Sunday school ethics,
had built up the best governed principality in Italy; but his meth-
ods were neither better nor worse than Machiavelli had seen in
Florence and elsewhere in his political experience. Realpolitik was
the common practice of Machiavelli's time, andjBorgia was simply
a shining example of what could be achieved by intelligent and as-
siduous observance of the principles of that philosophy. If he served
as a model for Machiavelli's fictional prince, it was doubtless be-
cause he exemplified the ideas of practical men more perfectly than
any other ruler of the period,

Had Machiavelli possessed any unshattered ideals before his as-
sociation with Gesare Borgia, he was soon to have an experience
that would leave no room for ideals in the soul of any man. When
Pope Alexander VI died, the new pope, Julius II, felt constrained to
halt the growing temporal power of his predecessor's bastard son,
and therefore organized a holy alliance to attack and overthrow the
Duke of Valentino. In the ensuing hostilities the Holy Pontiff him-
self took the field at the head of an army to subdue the cities which
had rebelled against papal authority. Machiavelli was appointed as
representative of his government to accompany the pope on this
pious enterprise, and he saw enough in the course of the campaign
to make a confirmed cynic of any man.

The year 1512 brought Machiavelli's public career to an abrupt
and violent end. The Medici family some years before had been
driven from power in Florence. In exile they had hatched plans to
regain control of the city, and events now developed to favor the
execution, of those plans. The Florentine Republic had unwiselym-
curred the hostility of Spain, which at the moment was backing'the
expatriated Medici as useful pawns in her complicated game of in-
ternational poTMcsT'A Spanish army promptly invaded Italy and
threatened Florence. The terrified citizenry immediately overthrew

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

tiiQir government and invited the Medici to return and take pos-
session. Machiavelii, along with other officials of the fallen govern-
ment, was unceremoniously thrown out of office, and shortly there-
after. being suspected of plotting against the Medici government,

was ciaoDed into prison.

M, i. 4

There he languished for a year, but was finally released through
the influence of potent political friends. As a condition of his release,
however, he was compelled to retire from public life and abstain
from ail political activity. He accordingly took up his residence on a
small farm which he owned at San Casciano and lived the life of an
exile. During the daytime, he tells us, he occupied himself with
farm work, but when evening came he would shed his peasant garb
and array himself in his court dress. Having thus become a gentle-
man again, he would spend the evening in reading the works of
great authors of the past and in writing down the results of his re-
flections upon them. His most notable literary works were produced
at this time, though the quantity and variety of his literary output
indicates that his pen must have been busy all his life. Gradually
the hostility of the Medici relaxed and he was allowed to return to
public life. From 1521 onward we find him again employed hi
diplomatic work, and he was making an active bid for the recovery
of his old office when, in June, 1527, he was suddenly seized with a

fatal Illness and died.
f
J Although Machiavelii is chiefly remembered on account of The

Prince, his fame in his own day rested on his other writings as well.
He produced a number of popular novels, songs, poems, and come-
dies, the last-mentioned being often side-splitting farces of the bed-
room variety. He wrote also an authentic and well-received history
of Florence, a fFeatise on the art of war, and a commentary on re-
publican government called Discourses on Liyy, which must be re-
garded as the companion piece of The Prince, the two having been
written during his enforced rustication at San Casciano when he
was inspired by his own misfortunes to give thought to the problem
of political realities. That there was a studied purpose behind these
two works., and especially so In the case of The Prince, Is abundantly
clear. By these literary endeavors Machiavelii hoped that he might
gain the attention of the Medicean rulers of Florence and win their •
favor, In a very flattering way he dedicated The Prince to Lorenzo ,
de Medici, but there Is no evidence that Lorenzo ever acknowledged

STRANGE INTERLUDE 129

or took notice of it. But the fact that the author had a selfish motive
in writing the book did not affect the integrity of his mental proc-
esses. There can be no doubt that what he wrote in The Prince he
sincerely believed, not because he was a depraved politician seeking
to ingratiate himself with a powerful prince, but because he pos-
sessed the type of mind that does not tremble before facts however
hideous they may be and believed that candid recognition of facts
and intelligent use of them might lead to the unification of Italy.
He does not condemn Christian ethics per se; he simply points out
that they do not win wars, quell conspiracies, secure diplomatic vic-
tories, or accomplish any of the other difficult tasks of statecraft. In
this he may have been utterly wrong, though the facts of history are
easy to read in his favor. Three hundred and fifty years after
Machiavelli wrote The Prince the unification of Italy was accom-
plished, and the methods employed to this end by Cavour, Gari-
baldi, and Victor Emmanuel were such as Machiavelli might have
commended. Let us not, therefore, too rashly condemn the exile of
San Casciano; let us seek, rather, to understand him and profit by
the counsels he has to offer.

Ill

The Prince purports to be a practical handbook explaining the
technique of successful rulership; "which work," says Machiavelli in
his dedicatory preface, CT have not embellished with swelling or
magnified words, nor stuffed with rounded periods, nor with any
extrinsic allurements or adornments whatever . . . ; for I have
wished either that no honor should be given it, or else that the truth
of the matter and the weightiness of the theme shall make it accept-
able.13 This is no sham modesty such as authors are sometimes ac-
customed to exhibit in prefaces. Machiavelli was telling the plain
truth about his book. A more brutally frank, direct, and simple dis- ;
cussion of the problems of managing a state could not be imagined.
The dumbest head that ever wore a crown could readily grasp every
word of it. No fine-spun theories, no abstruse speculations, no com-
plex doctrines find room in its twenty-six brief chapters, but only
tried and practical rules of experience, rules amply tested in the
laboratory of everyday affairs. Machiavelli ransacks history, par-
ticularly the history of the Greek, Roman, and Italian states, for in-
stances to prove his points, and, as might be expected, meets with *

LITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

no meaner success. Like Aristotle, he had a genius for amassing
facis to overwhelm his reader.

The average man's conception of Machiavellism would probably
be summed up In such well-known aphorisms as might makes right,
the end i:i:::^.es the n:ta*is, or necessity knows no law; but there Is more to
the political thought of the tough-minded ex-chancellor of Florence

.i. *"""

than such phrases imply. When, showing his familiarity with Aris-
totle, Machiavelli divorced politics from ethics and religion, he
grounded his case on premises which, articulately or inarticulately,
are accepted and acied upon by thousands who would resent the
Imputation ihat ihey are Machiavellian. The first of these premises
is the ancient Greek assumption that the state is the highest form of
human association and endeavor, the most necessary of all institu-
tions for the protection and promotion of human welfare; and hence
that reasons of state should outrank all other kinds of individual or
social obligation. The second is the no less ancient doctrine that
self-interest In one form or another, particularly material self-
interest, is the most potent of all factors of political motivation; and,
consequently, that the art of statecraft lies In cold calculation of the
elements of self-interest entering into any given situation and intel-
ligent use of the most practical means of meeting the difficulties
which may arise from conflicting Interests.

Both of these doctrines had grown old and respectable in the serv-
ice of practical politics long before Machiavelli5 s time, without In-
curring the special ire of political moralists. B,ut Machiavelli In-
sisted upon pressing them to their utmost logical Implications, He
had no patience with ethical camouflage, and no fear of reality. If
It was a fact that public affairs could not be safely and capably
managed on ethical principles, he was quite ready to be done with
ethics and quit pretending. Why pretend to serve both God and
Caesar, when you know It can't be done; why bother with ethical
justifications at all?

For Machiavelli, there Is no middle ground. Either the state
stands on the same footing as a private Individual and must be gov-
erned by the same canons of morality, or It stands on a wholly dif-
ferent footing and is to be judged by utterly different principles of
conduct. If the state Is bound to the same ethical standards as the in-
dividual, it '"s wrong for the state, or any one acting in behalf of the
state, to put national security, public order, and common welfare

STRANGE INTERLUDE 131

•n t

l,

above ordinary considerations of right and wrong. It is wrong -to
tell a lie; hence it is wrong to lie in order to save a kingdom or pre-
serve a nation from disaster. It is wrong to break promises and vio-
late agreements; hence the rulers of the state must always keep their
word even though the security and independence of the nation be
endangered thereby. It is wrong to steal or rob; hence the state
must never seek gains by stealth or force. It is wrong to take human
life, save in self-defense; hence the state must never kill except in de-A3
fense of its own existence.

No wonder moralists abhor MachiavellL Under his witherii
logic moral platitudes crumble. Is it argued that it is right for trie
state to kill as a punishment for crime? Then reasons must be
given to sustain the right of the state to take life under these
circumstances. And what reasons can be given? Does the state
require the life of a murderer as a measure of revenge or as a .
means of safeguarding the public interest? If the former, it does
an act for which there can be no moral justification; if the lat-
ter, it does an act which can only be justified on the ground that
public interest is so much more important than private interest
that a man has not even a right to life if his continuing to live be in
conflict with public interest. The moralist is forced to hold the
state to the same ethical standards as the private individual or in
the last analysis to stand on precisely the same ground as Machia-
velli? If it is right under any circumstances whatever for the state
to do things not permitted to a private individual, it is only because
the state is a collectivity supposedly acting in the interest of the
public, and that is exactly the basis of the Machiavellian conten- v
tion that the state cannot be bound by ordinary canons of morality.
If, however, the moralist refuses to grant the state immunity from
the conventional rules of private morals, he makes himself absurd.
The state which under no circumstances is permitted to do what a
private individual may not in propriety and honor do, invites dis-
aster and destruction. Such a state could neither govern its own
people nor hold its independence. Its subjects could defy it with
impunity, and rival states could despoil and destroy it at will. In a
world in which the Golden Rule was universally observed by men
and nations alike, it might be well to hold states to the same high
standards of behavior that we expect of private individuals; but
a competitive world where the Golden Rule is quite as often

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

honored In the breach as In the observance the state which places
ethics before expediency Is virtually signing its own death warrant.

Machiavelli avoids this embarrassing dilemma by the simple
expedient of holding that the state knows no ethics. Whatit doesjs ,
nelth^£et^ It is of the

neuier gender so far as right and wrong are concerned. Nothing
that the state ever does can be right in the moral sense, for it is not
a moral being; and by the same token nothing that it does can ever
be wrong. In the realm of statecraft and in the affairs of govern-
ments there Is but one criterion by which to judge the character of
an action, and that Is by its results. If the results are good, the
action cannot be called wrong, nor is it necessarily right; the safe
thing to do Is to call it expedient; and If the results are bad, to say
the action was Inexpedient.

However well we may be acquainted with the general gist of the
Machiavellian philosophy, we are still unprepared, until we read
his book, for the Icy candor with which he advises rulers to follow
the counsels of expediency. Public men are of necessity opportu-
nists. That Is a fact of common observation. But we do not like to
think of them as seasoned and accomplished knaves. If we take
the Machiavellian view, that is unnecessary. But if we insist, as
many do, that our lustrous political heroes measure up to the same
ethical standards as Sunday school superintendents, we are bound
to be sadly disillusioned when some painstaking researcher tells us
exactly how their glamorous deeds were accomplished. We may
even refuse to believe the truth, and denounce him as a ghoul, a
defamer of the dead.

All clear-minded political thinkers are in substantial agreement
with Machiavelli as to the practical impossibility of subjecting
states and statecraft to the same rules of morality as private indi-
viduals. Curiously enough, however., very few have had the cour-
age to be as unflinchingly candid as he. And some who have de-
nounced Machiavelli most vehemently have stooped to Jesuitical
quibblings in order to justify Infringements of moral law on the part
of states and statesmen of their own liking. On the whole, we seem
to prefer that sort of sophistry. It helps us preserve*"' bur faith in
things as they are. When a political thinker refuses to deal in
sugar-coated pellets and tells us the bitter truth, w<£thank him not,
and often raise a cry against him and stone him false prophet

STRANGE INTERLUDE 133

It was rude of Machiavelli to sever politics and ethics and to pro-
pose the rule of expediency as the guiding principle of statecraft,
but it was a service of enormous value to political science. Realism
is the first step in scientific political thinking.

Unless we can achieve an uncommon degree of objectivity,
there is much in Machiavelli to make us wish we had never read
him. He is so despairingly uncomplimentary to human nature and
so cynically deflating to our pride. (The prince who would suc-
ceed, he unabashedly declares, must "know how to do wrong, and
to make use of it or not according to necessity. Therefore, putting
on one side imaginary things concerning a prince, and discussing
those which are real, I say that all men when they are spoken of,
and chiefly princes for being more highly placed, are remarkable
for some of those qualities which bring them either blame or praise/""?
, . . And I know that every one will confess that it would be most
praiseworthy in a prince to exhibit all the above qualities that are
considered good; but because they can neither be entirely possessed
nor observed, for human conditions do not permit it, it is necessary
for him to be sufficiently prudent that he may know how to avoid
the reproach of those vices which would lose him his state; and also
to keep himself, if it be possible, from those which would not lose
Mm it; but this not being possible, he may with less hesitation
abandon himself to them. And again, he need not make himself
uneasy at incurring a reproach for those vices without which the
state can only be saved with difficulty, for if everything is considered

/

carefully, it will be found that something which looks like virtue,
if followed, would be his ruin; whilst something else, which looks
}ike vice, yet followed, brings him security and prosperity." 1
CCbe prince is advised, therefore, to be generous or niggardly

<S™n»-'- _ ^

according to the state of public opinion as to lavishness or economy;
to be cruel or clement as expediency dictates; to keep faith only
when no disadvantage will result from so doing; to strive cease-
lessly and by all manner of means, to win glory and renown; and -
above all to avoid being despised and hated. The question may
arise "whether it be better to be loved than feared or feared than
loved? It may be answered that one should wish to be both, but,
because it is difficult to unite them in one person, it is much safer to
be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed

1 The Prince (Everyman's Library, 1908), pp, 122-123.

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

Nevertheless a prince ought to inspire fear in such a
.,^«- thai, if he does not win love, he avoids hatred; because he can
endure very well being feared whilst he is not hated, which will
alwavs be as long as he abstains from the property of his citizens

and their women.55 1 ^ *

Again: "Every one admits how praiseworthy it is in a prince to
keep' faith, and to live with integrity and not with craft. Neverthe-
less our experience has been that those princes who have done
^reat things have held good faith of little account, and have known
how to circumvent the intellect of men by craft, and in the end
have overcome those who have relied on their word. . . . But it
is necessary to know well how to disguise this characteristic, and to
be a great pretender and dissembler; and men are so simple and so
subject to present necessities, that he who seeks to deceive will
always find some one who will allow himself to be deceived. . . .
Therefore it is unnecessary for a prince to have all the good qualities
I have enumerated, but it is very necessary to appear to have them.
And I shall dare to say this also, that to have them and always
observe them is injurious, and that to appear to have them is use-
ful; to appear merciful, faithful, humane, religious, upright, and
to be so, but with a mind so framed that should you require
not to be so, you may be able and know how to change to the

opposite." 2

Characteristics of some of the greatest figures of history are de-
scribed in the foregoing passages. Condemn the author of Tk
Prince as a cynic, if you must; but do not make the mistake of doubt-
ing his knowledge of history and biography. The pages of his book
are packed full of authentic historical facts which sustain his thesis,
and he is never content until he has piled up a mountain of evi-
dence which tends to carry conviction even against the will of the
reader. His appeal is exclusively to the intellect, and not the
slightest trace of sentiment is infused into the cold light of his reason.
At times, however, a sort of elfish humor is to be detected in his
pungent corspaents on some of the political idiosyncrasies of the
genus homo. jThe prince is counselled, for example, to avoid flat-
Iterers. Kno\Ving that love of flattery is the greatest weakness of
persons in authority, and that flattery has the same intoxicating
affect as alcohol, inflating the ego and disarming the judgment

ij&£, pp. 134-135. 2 Ibid., pp. 141-143.

STRANGE INTERLUDE 135

Machiavelli winks broadly at the reader when he tells the prince
that the only way to guard against the danger of flatterers is to let
men understand "that to tell you the truth does not offend you." x
Like a doctor who delights to tell a patient that the boil on the
back of his neck will have to be lanced, Machiavelli's sardonic sense
of humor is gratified by the thought that only by the most painful
treatment conceivable is this vice of rulers to be cured. Do kings,
prime ministers, presidents, governors, and even rulers of pettier
status relish this cure? Yes, just as they relish having teeth filled,
tonsils excised, and other painful afflictions for their own good. A
man may tell you he welcomes the truth, but be careful just the
same how you let him have it.

Of course it would not do, as Machiavelli points out, for a ruler
to listen to everybody; the ruler who lets any Tom, Dick, and
Harry tell him the truth will lose the respect of his subjects. He
should listen only to the wise men of his country, but those whom
he chooses to hear he should grant full liberty of telling him the
truth. Indeed, he should reward his councilors in proportion to
the candor of their advice, and should suspect all who deal in com-
pliments and pleasantries as self-seeking sycophants. He should not
only be a good listener, but an aggressive and constant inquirer;
and if he should find that any one, on any consideration, has with-
held truth from him, "he should let his anger be felt." 2 But this
truth, declares Machiavelli, is not only self-evident but universally
true, "that a prince who is not wise himself will never take good
advice.5' 3 For "prince" substitute "mayor," "governor," "presi-
dent,35 "prime minister," or any other official title, and you will
have an explanation of the most egregious follies that have been
committed in the course of human government.

In The Prince Machiavelli dealt exclusively with monarchical
government and its problems. In the Discourses on Livy he dealt in
like manner with republican government. By no means was he
the implacable foe of popular government that might be supposed
from reading The Prince alone. His interest in monarchy, as the
closing chapter of The Prince clearly shows, was primarily due to
his belief that conditions were exceptionally favorable for the unifi-
cation of Italy under a strong monarch. Machiavelli had a broader
and stronger feeling of patriotism than most of his contemporaries,

1 Ibid., p. 1 91 . 2 Ibid., p. 1 93. 3 Ibid.

!3n POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

and believed tha: strong leadership might weld the Italian people
into a united nation. He was one of the first to visualize the na-
tional state and to advance a program for the realization of this

design.

R-Diiblican government did not seem so -well suited to this pur-
pose as monarchy, but that did not argue to Machiavelli that repub-
lican government was always Inferior. As a matter of fact, he
points out. there are certain conditions wherein republican govern-
ment may be not only the best but the only possible form of govern-
ment. Such conditions undoubtedly prevail, he thinks, when there
Is a substantial equality of property and wealth within the state;
for then political power, which derives from property and wealth,
is so widely dispersed that a monarchy cannot be maintained.

It may also be said for republican government, In Machiavelli's
opinion, that it is more conducive to uniform and widespread mate-

I * JL

rial prosperity than any other form of government; for It tends to
equalize the opportunities for gain, whereas in a monarchy the ruler
and the nobility tend to absorb most of the wealth of the country.
Republican government Is also more likely, according to the cynical
Florentine, to keep faith better than monarchical government, not
because the honor of republics Is so much greater as because their
processes are slower. Nor does the Ingratitude of republics exceed
that of princes, thinks he. On this point he spoke with knowledge,
for he had tasted both. \J5till another point in favor of republics, In
Ms opinion, Is their greater adaptability to changing circumstances.
The character of a prince, once formed, rarely changes, and there-
fore the quality of his reign varies little from beginning to end; but
republics change their rulers often, and hence stand a chance to
get rulers who will be men of the hour and well fitted for a particu-
lar situation or problem of government. Monarchies, fie indicates,
are easier to establish than republics, and usually represent the
first stage of political development. A republican government is
not possible until conditions have become settled, the people united
and secure, and habits of adjustment fixed by education and expe-
rience. Hence republican government must follow, not precede,
monarchical government. Once established on a firm foundation,
however, it is more likely to endure. In a monarchy, said Machia-
velli, there was no place for liberty; but In a republic, under settled
and orderly conditions, there was opportunity for reason and wis-

STRANGE INTERLUDE * 137

dom to work, and for that reason liberty was a proper element of
republican government.

Economic determinism was one of the most prominent features
of Machiavelli's political thought. Aristotle had separated ethics
and politics, and had written large the idea of economic interest as a
crucial factor in political processes; but he did not surpass Ma-
chiavelli in devotion to the belief that men are deeply actuated by
material motives., In all political behavior, according to the Floren-
tine, whether it be idealistic or the opposite, the influence of the
economic factor usually may be perceived. Back of all struggles for
liberty, self-government, and the rights of man there always lurks,
in his opinion, some sort of economic interest in the outcome. ,'
Probe deep enough and you will never fail to find it. Like a somber
melody, this displeasing theme recurs again and again in the writ-
ings of Machiavelli. It sets him distinctly apart from the ancients,
even Aristotle, who, for all their realism in some respects, did not
doubt that reason could teach men to love the good life and to
strive unselfishly to attain it. And it also differentiates him from
the mediaevalists, who saw in the state only a means of effecting
God's will on earth and of preparing men for life after death. \

* *• t* * i, v ,

i n i » v f i

' ' j "" ""* " -

• ; , . "' .* ' lV':>

Though granting the immensity of his influence upon the theory
and practice of politics, most writers on political thought have
seemed to feel that they were expected to speak deprecatingly of
Machiavelli. He "was clear-sighted, not far-sighted/3 writes the
Rev. Dr. Murray. "He never . . . saw things as they might be;
he saw them as they were — as less than they were — and hence,
missing possibilities, he missed statesmanship. In truth, he com-
mitted the fundamental blunder of a low-strung mind; he mistook
cunning for the craft of the statesman in the large sense of the term.
C. J. Fox reached a statesmanlike standpoint when he enunciated
the axiom that 'what is morally wrong can never be politically
right,5 an axiom that eternally condemns the Florentine." l Pro-
fessor Jaszi is even more acrimonious., referring to Machiavelli as
a great patriot who became the propounder of an immoral and
untrue doctrine, and then exclaiming: "At the same time by the

*R. H. Murray, The History of Political Science, pp. 128-129.

L1T1CAL PHILOSOPHIES

;,^Qt^ a^j e^rhu-iastic glorification of political crime he must

jjfcjl' C^i-w/1 I*Z A '^i*-^ •* J* tta4* ^ '**»^ Hr-ate *. ** W* *W *• ** *»'"L 1V*-Jw ^^ JU

ar the resDonsibilitv of having made from the diffused crimes of

T 4 ' f*

isolated orlr.oeiv criminals, a compact philosophical doctrine
which corrupted public opinion in many parts of the world and
-hich envenomed still more an unscrupulous political practice." l
These are severe strictures to be passed upon a mere merchant
f words. Was the pen of Machiavelli so mighty and his doctrine
so diabolical as to merit such odious tributes? Must we agree with
Fox ,'who did not practice what he preached), that "what is morally
wrong can never be politically right"? And if so, what, pray tell, is
morally wrong? Was it morally wrong for President Washington
to refuse to live up to our treaty of 1778 with France, thus violating
our solemn, written pledge and deserting the ally who had made
American independence possible? His proclamation of neutrality
in 1793 was hardly consistent with the Golden Rule, but it saved his
country from involvement in a war that would have been dangerous
to its liberty and paralyzing to its commerce. Is failure to keep
faith moral or immoral under such circumstances? Was it morally
wrong for President Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclama-
tion in violation of the solemn and explicit promise made in his
first inaugural address to the effect that he would not interfere with
slavery either directly or indirectly? The political and military
situation demanded the action which Lincoln took, but he had to
break his word in order to do it. Was he moral or immoral? Was
it morally wrong, to cite another example, for Theodore Roosevelt
to double-cross Colombia in the Panama Affair? By subsequently
paying Colombia $25,000,000 to soothe her wounded feelings and
expressing regret over what had happened, the United States mani-
fested a very guilty conscience; but no blot seems to have attached
to the reputation of Mr. Roosevelt. His action assured the building
of the Panama Canal — by the United States. Was it moral or
immoral?

Such inquiries should not be pressed too insistently, for they lead
to places where even parsons find the going rough. Perhaps it were
better, then, to attempt to speak as dispassionately of Machiavelli
as he did of the political man. Obviously there are some things for
which we must give him credit. He was one of those rare beings
who can view human behavior as objectively as the zoologist looks

1 K. F, Gcsser and O. Jaszi, Politital Philosophy, p. 119.

STRANGE INTERLUDE 139

upon the behavior of lower animals. He did not de-moralize politics
—that had been done centuries before — but he did debunk the
sanctimonious cant of holy frauds in high places with a pitiless
candor that is not undeserving of admiration. He must also be

iuin if** **'

given credit for being a sincere and ardent patriot, and one of
the forebears of modern nationalism. His passion for the practi-
cal as against the theoretical undoubtedly did much to rescue
political thought from the scholastic obscurantism of the Middle
Ages, and entitles him to recognition as the first, if not the noblest,
of the great pragmatists.

V

While Machiavelli in retirement at San Casciano was composing
The Prince and the Discourses on Livy, a brilliant young English
courtier was writing a book that was destined to mean as much to
the literature of political idealism as did the works of the unregener-
ate Italian to the political literature of materialism. Sir Thomas
More was fortunately born and thrice fortunately educated. His
father was a judge on the King's Bench, and an intimate of the
great and the near-great. Through the influence of his father the
boy (born in 1478) received his early education in the household of
the archbishop of Canterbury; then he was sent to Oxford where he
became a close friend of the great humanistic scholar, Erasmus.
For a time young More thought of becoming a monk and subjected
himself to the ascetic usages of the Carthusian order, but he fell in
love and made a very happy marriage, whereupon his adolescent
attack of anchoritism quickly passed away. After finishing at
Oxford he studied law in London and became a member of Parlia-
ment. His brilliant and charming qualities attracted the attention
of Henry VIII and he became one of the king's special favorites. In
rapid succession he was knighted, made a member of the Privy
Council, treasurer of the Exchequer, speaker of the House of
Commons, and finally in 1529 was appointed to the exalted office
of Lord Chancellor, being the first person not of the clergy to hold
this eminent post.

If More's rise was rapid, his fall was even more so. Henry ex-
pected much of his good friend the Lord Chancellor, and, when
Here's conscience would not permit him to support the monarch
in his controversy with Parliament and the pope over the divorce

140

LITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

question. Henry's affection for his friend was transformed into
venomous hare. More was forced to resign his office in 1532, and
thereupon became one of the most contumacious leaders of the
opposition. After the break with Rome he refused to take the pre-
scribed oath of allegiance to the king as head of the newly formed
national church. For this he was committed to the Tower, and in
1535 he was convicted of treason and beheaded.

The Utopia was written in 1515 or 1516, when More was about
ihirtv-seven vears old and in the heyday of his good fortune and

* 4 *

DODularitv. It has been variously described as a fantastical ro-

A **

mance, a satire on English society, a prophetic vision, and a treatise

on government. We may not apprehend the purpose for which the

book was written, bui we cannot mistake the influences surrounding
the fortunate young officeholder at the time of its composition. The
voyages of Christopher Columbus and Americus Vespuccius had
stirred men's imaginations and enlarged their oudooks upon life as
nothing else had done in centuries. Vespuccius5 story of his ad-
ventures, first published in 1507, was still a best seller. New ex-
ploring expeditions were constantly being fitted out, new discoveries
were constantly being reported, and popular interest in strange and
distant lands was at fever pitch. Equally stimulating to minds sen-
sitized by education was the tremendous impetus given to the re-
vival of classical learning by the dispersion of Greek scholars
through western Europe as a result of the fall of Constantinople in
1453. These brought to western scholarship not only the letter of
Greek learning, which had long been available, but its unique and
precious spirit. Plato, Aristotle, and other great masters of Hellenic
thought began to take on new meaning for Englishmen, French-
men, Spaniards, and Germans. Philosophy, which during the
Middle Ages had degenerated into casuistry, was restored to its
former estate of creative and beneficent wisdom. Contempora-
neously with these developments the Roman Catholic Church began
Its amazing fall from the topmost heights of moral and temporal
ascendancy, and the Holy Roman Empire was perceived to deserve
no single one of its three glamorous titles. It was also a period of
economic distress and readjustment in England, wheie the old sub-
sistence type of agriculture was being supplanted by large-scale
sheep-raising, which required vast estates devoted exclusively to
pasturage. If the spirit of realism was in the air, as exemplified in

STRANGE INTERLUDE 141

Machiavelli, so also was the spirit of reform, which could have no
worthier exponent than Sir Thomas More.

The name " Utopia" More coined by combining Greek words
meaning "nowhere." The name of the fictional traveler, Raphael
Hythloday, who gives More the picturesque account of Utopia
which he pretends to be passing on to the reader, is also from the
Greek and means "knowing in trifles." In the first division of the
book More tells how he was sent to Flanders as ambassador of
Henry VIII to treat with the Prince of Castile, and how during an
interlude in the negotiations he went to Antwerp and there became
acquainted with an eminent citizen named Peter Giles. One day
while returning from mass he observed Giles conversing on the
street with an elderly stranger who had the appearance of being a
seafarer. Giles makes More acquainted with the interesting
stranger, and he proves to be none other than Raphael Hythloday,
a learned Portuguese who had been on three voyages with Americus
Vespuccius and, since leaving Vespuccius, had spent years wander-
ing among strange lands and peoples. Giles, More, and Hythloday,
still standing on the street corner, are soon lost in the mazes of a
fascinating conversation. The stranger descants at length upon
social and political conditions as he has observed them in European
countries, especially England, in the course of his travels, and re-
peatedly reminds his hearers that things are done much better in
the island of Utopia, which he has lately visited. They doubt if
this can be true, but insist that he tell them all about this wonderful
land. This will take a long time, so the trio adjourn to a cafe for
dinner, and there Raphael tells the story of Utopia.

By this ingenious bit of stage management More makes an op-
portunity in the first half of his book for his imaginary spokesman
to criticize the existing institutions of England, and in the second
half to propose a program of reform by describing the model com-
monwealth of Utopia.

VI

Using the Portuguese wanderer as his mouthpiece More satiri-
cally discourses upon the defects of European political institutions,
and particularly those of England. The criminal justice of England
is the first thing attacked. It is pictured as shockingly cruel and
unfair, the punishment being too severe and the remedies ineffec-

142 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

tual. "Ir. rhis . . . not only you in England, but a great part of the
world imitate some ill masters that are readier to chastise their
scholars than to teach them. There are dreadful punishments

e

n

acted against thieves, but it were much better to make such good
previsions bv which every man might be put in a method how to
jive, and so be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and of
dvine for it." 1 The existing social order in England and other
countries, says the returned voyager, not only predisposes but
forces people to crime. Thousands of disabled war veterans, in-
capacitated for their former trades and too old to learn new ones, are
turned loose to make shift as best they may. Great numbers of
idle nobles fatten on the labor of the poor, allowing them as little
revenue as possible and compelling them also to bear the cost of the
huge companies of idle retainers who hang about the manor halls.
Laborers, as soon as their lord dies or they themselves fall sick, are
turned out of doors. \\Tiat else can such hapless people do but
resort to thievery?

Some worthy persons, says Raphael, have attempted to argue

with him that these things must be; that the nobility must be spe-

cially favored and cherished, because they have a nobler sense of

honor than is to be found among tradesmen or plowmen, and

hence are the main reliance of the country in time of war. " 'You

may as well say/ replied I, cthat you must cherish thieves on the ac-

count of wars, for you will never want the one, as long as you have

the other; and as robbers prove sometimes gallant soldiers, so sol-

diers often prove brave robbers; so near an alliance is there between

these two sorts of life. But this bad custom, so common among you,

of keeping many servants, Is not peculiar to this nation. In France

there is a yet more pestiferous sort of people, for the whole country

Is full of soldiers, still kept up in time of peace, if such a state of a

nation can be called a peace; and these are kept in pay upon the

same account that you plead for those idle retainers about noble-

men; this being the maxim of those pretended statesmen that it is

necessary for the public safety to have a good body of veteran sol-

diers ever in readiness. They think raw men are not to be depended

on, and they sometimes seek occasions for making war, that they

may train up their soldiers In the art of cutting throats; or as Sallust

observed, for keeping their hands In use, that they may not grow

: Utopia (World's Greatest literature, 1901), Vol. xxxii, p. 10.

STRANGE INTERLUDE 143

dull bv too long an intermission. But France has learned to its cost,
how dangerous it is to feed such beasts.3 " l

Sanguine Sir Thomas! After four hundred years, and many a
ghastlv lesson, France has yet to learn the unprofitableness of mili-
tarism. Nor has any other nation learned that lesson. All talk of
peace and disarmament, but always with the proviso that nothing
can be conceded which will menace their security. Your descrip-
tion of the armed camp that was Europe in the sixteenth century is
as appropriate to-day as then.

Mother thing that conduces to crime in England, according to
Raphael Hythloday, is the increasing removal of land from cultiva-
tion bv building up vast estates devoted to pasture. Finding that
more money is to be made from sheep-raising than from ordinary
farming, nobility, gentry, and even clergy are acquiring every acre
of ground they can get hold of for pasturage. As soon as a piece of
land falls to one of these large estates houses are wrecked, towns are
destroyed, tenants are turned out, and the land is removed from
cultivation. The poor evicted peasants have nothing left to do but
beg or steal. Moreover, flocks of sheep having been decimated by
disease, the price of wool has risen to such a point that poor crafts-
men who used to make a living in the textile trades are no longer
able to buy supplies for their work. These too have been forced to
join the ranks of the unemployed, and are therefore likely recruits
for crime. Poverty and misery are also augmented by the loose
spending of the rich. Not only among the nobility, but among
people of all classes who have means, lavish spending is the rule.
They buy expensive clothing, load their tables with costly foods,
consume vast quantities of liquor, and waste money on gambling
and other frivolous amusements. Not many are sufficiently wealthy
to stand the pace for long, and when those accustomed to high liv-
ing suddenly find themselves short of means, they are often inclined
to take to crime in order to replenish their funds.

"Though to speak plainly my real sentiments.,5 ' continues the
philosophical traveler, after rejecting the suggestion that he should
become the counselor of some reigning prince, "I must freely own,
that as long as there is any property, and while money is the stand-
ard of all other things, I cannot think that a nation can be governed
either justly or happily; not justly, because the best things will fall to
1 Rid., p. ll.

1 » 4

i-r-r

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

o

£- t;>e worst men: nor happily, because all things will be
divided among a few and even these are not in all respects happy),
the rest oeins left 10 be absolutely miserable. Therefore when I re-
fiect en the \vise and good constitution of the Utopians, among
whom all things are so well governed, and with so few laws; where
virtue hath its due reward, and yet there is such an equality- that
everv man lives in plenty; when I compare with them so many other
nations that are still making new laws, and yet can never bring
their constitution to a right regulation, where notwithstanding
every one has his property; yet all the laws that they can invent
have not the power either to obtain or preserve it, or even to enable
men certainly to distinguish what is their own from what is an-
other's; of which the many lawsuits that every day break out, and
are eternally depending, give too plain a demonstration; when, I
say, I balance all these things in my thoughts, I grow more favorable
to Plato, and do not wonder that he resolved not to make any laws
for such as would not submit to a community of all things: for so
wise a man could not but foresee that the setting all upon a level was
the only way to make a nation happy, which cannot be obtained so
long as there is property7: for when every man draws to himself
all that he can compass, by one title or another, it must needs
follow, that how plentiful soever a nation may be, yet a few di-
viding the wealth of it among themselves, the rest must fall into
indigence.5' 1

Utopia, as Raphael describes it for More and Giles, is a crescent-
shaped island about five hundred miles in length and two hundred
miles wide, and so well protected by natural and artificial defenses
that no hostile forces can enter it. Originally it was the jutting arm
of a peninsula, but its ancient conqueror, Utopus, perceiving the
benefits to be derived from insularity7, compelled his subjects to dig
the channel which now separates it from the mainland. Here in this
detached situation the Utopians have developed the best govern-
ment in the world. (Gould English readers fail to get so broad a
hint? England too might become a Utopia.)

u There are fifty-four cities in the island, all large and well built: the
manners, customs, and laws of which are the same, and they are all con-
trived as near in the same manner as the ground on which they stand
will allow. The nearest lie at least twenty-four miles distant from one

1 Ibid., p. 3d.

STRANGE INTERLUDE 145

another, and the most remote are not so far distant, but that a man can
go on foot in one day from it to that which lies next it. Every city sends
ifaree of its wisest senators once a year to Amaurot, to consult about
their common concerns; for that is the chief town of the island, being
situated near the centre of it, so that it is the most convenient place for
their assemblies. The jurisdiction of every city extends at least twenty
miles; and where the towns lie wider, they have much more ground: no
to\vn desires to enlarge its bounds, for the people consider themselves
rather as tenants than landlords. They have built all over the country,
farmhouses for husbandmen, which are well contrived, and are fur-
nished with all things necessary for country labor. Inhabitants are sent
by turns from the cities to dwell in them; no country family has fewer
than forty men and women in it, besides two slaves. There is a master
and a mistress set over every family; and over thirty families there is a
magistrate.

c£ Every year twenty of this family come back to the town, after they
have stayed two years in the country; and in their room there are other
twenty sent from the town, that they may learn country work from those
that have been already one year in the country, as they must teach those
that come to them the next from the town. By this means such as dwell
in those country farms are never ignorant of agriculture, and so commit
no errors, which might otherwise be fatal, and bring them under scar-
city of corn. But though there is every year such a shifting of husband-
men, to prevent any man being forced against his will to follow that
hard course of life too long, yet many among them take such pleasure in
ii, that they desire leave to continue in it many years. These husband-
men till the ground, breed cattle, hew wood, and convey it to the towns,
either by land or water, as is most convenient . . . They sow no corn,
but that which is to be their bread; they drink either wine, cider, or
perry, and often water, sometimes boiled with honey or licorice, with
which they abound; and though they know exactly how much corn will
serve every town, and all that tract of country which belongs to it, yet
they sow much more, and breed more cattle than are necessary for their
consumption; and they give that overplus of which they make no use
to their neighbours. When they want anything in the country which it
does not produce, they fetch that from the town, without carrying any-
thing in exchange for it. And the magistrates of the town take care to
see it given them; for they meet generally in the town once a month,
upon a festival day. When the time of harvest comes, the magistrates

* i ^^

in the country send to those in the towns, and let them know how many
hands^they will need for reaping the harvest; and the number they call
for being sent to them, they commonly despatch it all in one day.

He that knows one of their towns knows them all, they are so like
one another, except where the situation makes some difference. I shall
therefore describe one of them; and none is so proper as Amaurot; for
as none is more eminent, all the rest yielding precedence to this, because

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

: sou are

_ council, so there was none of them better

1 having lived five years altogether In it.
n the side of a hill, or rather a rising ground; Its figure is
fcr from the one side of it, which shoots up almost to the
t;o rtf the hill. It runs down In a descent for two miles to the river Anider;
b;:: i: is a lirtle broader the other way that runs along by the bank of
that river. . . . The town Is compassed with a high and thick wall. In
\\ hich there are many towers and forts; there Is also a broad and deep
dry ditch, set thick with thorns, cast round three sides of the town, and
the river Is Instead of a ditch on the fourth side. The streets are very
convenient for all carriage, and are well sheltered from the winds. Their
buildings are s:ood, and are so uniform, that a whole side of a street looks
like one house. The streets are twenty feet broad; there lie gardens
behind ail their houses; these are large but enclosed with buildings, that
on ail hands face the streets; so that every house has both a door to the
street, and a back door to the garden. Their doors all have two leaves,
which, as they are easily opened, so they shut of their own accord; and
there being no property among them, every man may freely enter into
any house whatsoever. At every ten years' end they shift their houses
by'lot." '

Every person in Utopia (man or woman) is obliged to learn a
trade, the narrator explains, and must labor six hours a day but no
more. In addition, each is trained from childhood in the arts of
agriculture and must serve his regular turn at farm labor. Sur-
rounding each city, as detailed in the quotation above, is an area of
farm land which produces, in addition to its own requirements.
what is needed for the sustenance of the city. The farm-district de-
livers its products to storehouses in the city and receives in return
industrial products needful for farm life. The city must supply the
farm-district with agricultural laborers during harvest, and must
also see thai every city dweller serves his allotted time in farm work.

Although children customarily learn the trades of their parents,
they are not obliged to do so3 and many are permitted by special
arrangement to learn other trades. Even adults may change their
vocations if they care to do so. According to their various aptitudes
and abilities both men and women find employment in agriculture
industry, and none are allowed to be idle unless incapacitated
by illness or old age. The family is the basic unit of social organiza-
tion, and also of economic activity. Parents, children, and grand-
children dwell together in large family mansions, and for each

L, pp. 35-38.

STRANGE INTERLUDE 147

family there is appointed a master and a mistress. Houses are as-
signed to families by lot, and are changed in the same manner every
ten years. Families are organized into groups of thirty, each of
which annually elects a magistrate called a syphogrant or philarch.
Over every ten syphogrants is another annually elected magistrate
called the tranibor or archphilarch. The magistrates collectively
choose the chief magistrate of the city, who is called the prince. The
choice is made from a list of four names approved by the people of
the four divisions of the city. One might say, then, that the prince is
nominated by the people and elected by the magistracy. He holds
office for life, but may be removed for cause. The tranibors meet
every third day as a council or senate, and oftener if necessary. At
these meetings two syphogrants are always present to represent and
speak for their order of officialdom, but the particular two are
changed daily, so as to give all a chance to be heard. No action may
be taken on any public matter until it has been first debated three
separate days in the senate. Each city and its adjacent farm terri-
tory sends each year three representatives to a national assembly,
which is the supreme governing body of the land.

The life of the people, though organized on a family basis, is
thoroughly communistic— a feature of Utopian life which Hythlo-
day explains in some detail. The members of each unit of thirty
families have their noon and evening meals together in the common
refectory of their syphogrant's spacious manor house. The meals are
prepared by cooks who draw their supplies from the common store.
It is not forbidden— in truth, very little seems to be forbidden in
Utopia— for each to cook for himself, but it is not worth the trouble,
and none do it. From the common storehouse also the heads of each
family draw such clothing, furniture, and other necessaries as may
be required by their family. These requisitions are never excessive,
though each is at liberty to draw without let or hindrance. For in
Utopia there is no such thing as fear of want or ambition to keep up
with the Joneses. There is plenty for all and nothing that one may
iiavc that another may not likewise possess; hence there is no dis-
position to accumulate in excess of immediate needs or to indulge in
ostentatious display.

The working day is so divided that the three hours immediately
iore and after noon are devoted to labor; the rest of the day is
given over to recreation, education, eating, and sleeping. Public

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

lectures of an educational character are given In the morning before
work is begun, and all are at liberty to attend, though not compelled
to do so. Only those who have been dedicated to literary pursuits
are obliged to attend these lectures. The evenings are spent in
reading, playing games, listening to music, conversation, and like
pursuits. Youths who show an early aptitude for arts or sciences are
excused from manual labor In order that they may devote them-
selves to these higher callings; but if they fall to make good, they are
again reduced to the ranks of labor; which, one may say paren-
thetically, would not be a bad idea to adopt In non-Utopian com-
monwealths.

Trade and commerce of the usual sort are not carried on In
Utopia. "Every city is divided Into four equal parts, and in the
middle of each there Is a market-place: what is brought thither, and
manufactured by the several families, is carried from thence to
houses appointed for that purpose. In which all things of a sort are
laid by themselves; and thither every father goes and takes what-
soever he or his family stand In need of, without either paying for
it, or leaving anything in exchange. There is no reason for giving
a denial to any person, since there is such a plenty of everything
among them; and there is no danger of a man's asking for more
than he needs; they have no inducements to do this, since they are
sure that they shall always be supplied. . , . Near these markets
there are others for all sorts of provisions, where there are not only
herbs, fruits, and bread, but also fish, fowl, and cattle." l

Money does not exist In Utopia, and is not needed. Children are
taughi to look upon gold and silver as worthless, fit only for gauds
and baubles; and criminals are made to wear chains and bells made
of these metals as badges of infamy. Equally despised are gold and
silver among the people at large, and are never used for any but the
basest purposes such as chamber vessels and even less rnentionable
things. The important use the Utopians have for gold and silver is
to further their ends in international relations. They hoard gold
and silver and use them to buy off their enemies, purchase merce-
nary soldiers, or sow dissension among their foes. After they have
accumulated supplies enough to last the country for two years, they
exchange part of their surplus goods for gold and silver to be held
in reserve against such needs as have been mentioned.

j pp. 45-46.

STRANGE INTERLUDE 149

Slavery is tolerated among the Utopians, but is not hereditary.
Consequently there is no permanently servile class among the
Utopians. They condemn to slavery prisoners of war taken in
battle, persons found guilty of serious crimes, and persons con-
demned to death in other countries and redeemed by purchase to
be slaves in Utopia. Slaves are kept at perpetual labor, and native
Utopians condemned to slavery as a punishment for crime are
treated worse than other slaves.

Marriage is strictly regulated by the state, and severe punishment
attends all lapses from chastity before marriage. The minimum ages
for marriage are eighteen for women and twenty- two for men.
There is a quaint custom in Utopia of having officially approved
chaperones exhibit bride and bridegroom to each other in dishabille
before the marriage is conclusively contracted. Europeans would
think this indecent, but among the Utopians it serves a useful and
moral purpose. Being thus and with all propriety assured of the
absence of concealed defects in the physique of the other party, both
parties are able to complete the marriage in good faith and without
fear of regret. Should concealed defects be disclosed, the marriage
can be called off and a future action for divorce thus averted. Polyg-
amy is not permitted in Utopia, and divorce is frowned upon. In
justifiable cases, however, marriages may be dissolved after careful
inquiry into the facts by the civil authorities.

Laws are few in Utopia, and crimes are rare. There is no need
for an elaborate body of laws, says Raphael Hythloday, because
there are no private possessions to protect and regulate, no rules of
contract that need to be enforced, and no obligations that can be
broken with any advantage to the violator. No persons can have
anything that another might want and not be able to have, save
only another's wife or husband. Therefore, the only crime specifi-
cally punishable by law in Utopia is adultery; all other punishments
are left to the sound discretion of the Senate to be tempered accord-
ing to circumstances of fact.

War the Utopians regard as an unmitigated evil, and never
engage in it unless forced to defend themselves or their friends
from unjust aggressors or to assist oppressed peoples to throw off
the yoke of tyranny. Neverthelesss they do believe in preparedness,
and rigorously discipline themselves in all the arts of war, both men
and women being obliged to submit to military training. "The

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

only design of the Utopians In war Is to obtain that by force, which
if It had been granted them in time would have prevented the war;
or If that cannot be done, to take so severe a revenge on those that
have Injured them that ihey may be terrified from doing the like
for the time to come. By these ends they measure all their designs.
, . .'? : Consequently they rely as much on craft as on force of arms.
As soon as war is declared they secretly circulate in the enemy5 s
country oilers of lavish rewards for the assassination of the prince
and the high civil and military leaders of the enemy state. By similar
methods they endeavor to corrupt the morale and undermine the
loyalty of the whole population of the enemy country, and they think
there is nothing base about such practices, because, in their opinion,
they shorten wars and prevent great slaughter. Fighting with plots
and propaganda is not, as would seem, such a modern invention
as is often supposed. Had the Utopians known of poison gas, they
undoubtedly would have used it with gusto and good conscience.

In religious matters, the returned voyager points out that one of
the most ancient laws of Utopia says that no man ought to be
punished for his religion. Toleration is the only law about religion
that is rigorously enforced. Many religions are practiced, and none
suffers discrimination. Persons trying to stir up religious contro-
versy are severely punished and often are banished from the coun-
try; but this is not because of their religious views, but because in
trying to inflame the people on religious matters they excite civil
discord. The Utopians do not believe that all religions are equally
true, but they think that under a regime of religious liberty men
will discover for themselves the true and the false religions. For all
their tolerance in religion, the Utopians have a horror of atheism,
and men who disbelieve in a wise and overruling Providence andj
doubt that punishment or reward is meted out in the hereafter for
the deeds and misdeeds of this life, are never raised to positions of
honor and trust.

Priests in Utopia are men of eminent virtue, and hence are few
in number. "They are chosen by the people as the other magis-
trates are, by suffrages given in secret, for preventing of factions;
and when they are chosen they are consecrated by the College of
Priests. The care of all sacred things, the worship of God, and an
inspection into the manners of the people, are committed to them.

p. 77.

STRANGE INTERLUDE 151

p

It is a reproach to a man to be sent for by any of them, or for them
to speak to him in secret, for that always gives some suspicion. All
that is incumbent on them is only to exhort and admonish the
people; for the power of correcting and punishing ill men belongs
wholly to the Prince and to the other magistrates. The severest
thing that the priest does is the excluding those that are desperately
wicked from joining in their worship." l Which indicates that
More, though a good enough churchman to lose his head rather
ihan recognize his king as head of the church, was as much de-
voted to the principle of separating church and state as the rebel
friar Marsiglio. He doubtless also would have been willing to go to
die block rather than recognize the pope as head of the secular
government of his country.

VII

Such in sketchy outline is the book which has given its name to all
imaginary and idealistic programs of social reform. It is easy to say
that More's utopianism is simply Platonic communism reduced to
sixteenth-century Anglican terms; but that does not tell the whole
truth about it. The Tudor chancellor's debt to Plato is obvious and
great; but he departed from Plato in some very fundamental mat-
ters. Plato's ideal commonwealth is a military aristocracy ruled over
by a philosopher king; the common people, those engaged in trade
and manual labor, had no voice in its government. More's ideal
commonwealth is a republic with ultra-democratic institutions;
never was a government more truly of, by, and for the people. The
people not only choose their own rulers, but have the final power of
decision on all important matters. cTt is death," explains Raphael
Hythloday, "for any to meet and consult concerning the State, un-
less it be either in their ordinary Council, or in the assembly of the
whole body of the people. These things have been so provided
among them, that the prince and the tranibors may not conspire
together to change the government and enslave the people; and
herefore when anything of great importance is set on foot, it is sent
to the syphogrants; who after they have communicated it to the
families that belong to their divisions, and have considered it among
themselves, make report to the Senate." 2 This is nothing less than

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

eavernmezi: by popular referendum., the boldest vision of democ-
racv tha: anv political thinker has attained.

More re:ecrs also Plaio's communism of women and children. It
is not that his mind Is insufficiently daring to take such a hurdle, or
tha: he is :oo much swayed by the religious sanctions attached to
marriage in his day. Secularization of marriage has no terrors for
him, as Is shown by his bestowing the power of granting divorces
upon the Utopian senate; but he is an Englishman, not a Greek, and
therefore regards the monogamous family not merely as a holy in-
stitution but as the basic cellular material of the social aggregate.
The family to him represents communism in action; and he would
extend that communism to the higher ranges of social organization,
thus transforming the state into one vast family.

His devotion to religious toleration also differentiates More from
Plato. The Greek would completely amalgamate civic and religious
duty. In his thought the state takes the place of God, and men are
expected to venerate, worship, and serve the state In a spirit of de-
votional mysticism. No other religion could have a place In this
state, and none would be tolerated. The Englishman would entirely
divorce politics and religion. His Utopians are a deeply religious
people; but, as we have seen, their priests have no secular functions
and their princes no ecclesiastical functions. Nor are Utopians ex-
pected to display any sentimental fervor in their loyalty to the state.
Cold reason and appreciation of the material advantages of Uto-
pian citizenship are supposed to take the place of blind loyalty. In
time of war neither physical nor psychological pressure Is used to in-
duce citizens to enter the army. Those who freely volunteer are ac-
cepted; the thought that there would be any reluctance to volunteer
to defend so Incomparable a state never seems to have occurred to
the author.

It cannot be said that More solves the basic difficulties of com-
munism any more successfully than other collectivistic theorists; but
his influence has been none the less great on that account. He not
only invented (or better, perhaps, revived in more palatable guise) a
literary form which has been the progenitor of an uninterrupted
stream of Utopian literature from his day to our own; but he also
definitely fixed the attention of meliorative thought upon such pro-
foundly important fields of reform as criminology, land tenures,
public health, education, religious toleration, and popular govern-

STRANGE INTERLUDE 153

ment Bacon's New Atlantis, Harrington's Oceana, Campanella's
City of the Sun, Cabet's Voyage to Icaria, Morris3 News from Nowhere,
Buder's Erewhon, Bellamy's Looking Backward, Howells5 A Traveller
:mm Altruria, and scores of other accounts of imaginary common-
wealths are all in a measure descended from More's Utopia. In like
manner his vision must be given credit for much of the socialistic
program-making of the last century and for many of the social re-
forms which have been accomplished during the same period.

That two such personalities as Machiavelli and More should have
been contemporaries, and that both should have exerted a profound
Influence upon the course of both theoretical and practical politics
in all subsequent time, is a striking paradox; but is it more para-
doxical than human nature itself? Does not every man have in him
something of both Machiavelli and More, something of both realist
and idealist? And does not every statesman who achieves undying
greatness exhibit to a marked degree the contradictions which we
find in these two great political thinkers? In your Napoleons, Bis-
marcks, and Disraelis do you not have idealistic pragmatists, and
in your Lincolns, Gladstones, and Cavours, pragmatic idealists?

REFERENCES

Burnham, J., The Machiavellians: Defenders of Liberty (New York, 1943).-
Butterfield, H., The Statecraft of Machiavelli (London, 1940)./"
Campbell, W. E., Morels Utopia and His Social Teaching (London, 1930).
Chambers, R. W., The Saga and Myth of Sir Thomas More (London, 1927).
Coker, F. W., Readings in Political Philosophy (rev. ed., New York, 1938),

Chap. XI.

Cook, T. L, A History of Political Philosophy ' (New York, 1936), Chap. X.
Dunning, W. A., A History of Political Theories: Ancient and Mediaeval (New

York, 1902), Chap. XII. .

Dyer. L., Machiavelli and the Modern State (Boston, 1904). ^
Foster, M, B.? Masters of Political Thought (Boston, 1941), Chap. VIII. -
Gtiser, K. F., and Jazi, O., Political Philosophy from Plato to Jeremy Bentham

(New York, 1927), Chap. VI.
Machiavelli, N., The Prince and the Discourses (Mod. Lib. Ed., New York,

1940).

Marcu, V., Accent on Power: the Life and Times of Machiavelli (New York,
1939).

J., Machiavelli (London, 1897). /
Murray, R, H., History of Political Science from Plato to the Present (New

York, 1926), Chap. IV.
Sabine, G. H., A History of Political Theory (New York, 1937), Chap. XVII,

CHAPTER X

THE GREAT REVOLT

I

THIS Is no place to rehearse the history of the so-called, and
possibly miscalled, Protestant Reformation. No political
thinkers of first magnitude arose In connection with this
movement: but it did set in motion chains of events and let loose
swarms of Ideas thai were fated 10 mould the political thinking and
condition the political behavior of all succeeding generations. The
great revolt, which dates from that October day in 1517 when Mar-

t^j *• »

tin Luther posted his ninety-five theses on the church door at Wit-
i *

tenbere;, turned out In the end to be almost as much a political as a
religious rebellion., and the political doctrines to which its gave cur-
rency have shaped the course of human events even more than its
religious ideology. Religiously, it divided the western world Into
two never friendly and often bitterly hostile camps , brought to life
the seeds of sectarianism which had lain dormant since the Nicene
Creed received the cachet of Roman officialdom in 38 15 and
wrecked forever both the spiritual and the temporal hegemony of
the Roman pope. Politically, it completed the dissolution of the
Holy Roman Empire, hastened the proliferation of independent
national states, fanned up furious conflagration of warfare and per-
secution which ffutted the entire structure of feudal society, and re-

•— ^ ^ •*

leased a torrent of radical ideas that have defied the most strenuous
efforts of constituted authority to choke them down.

«

Martin Luther, It seems, had at the beginning no definite ecclesi-
astical program, and certainly he never so much as dreamed of the
political consequences of the upheaval which his pious contumacy
set on foot. Only two doctrines of any political importance appear
in his voluminous writings. One is his unequivocal insistence upon
the generic differentiation of secular and spiritual occupations and
authorities, and the other is his equally positive demand that all
good Christians submit to the established system of government.

Both of these doctrines Luther came to very slowly, and then only
under the unrelenting pressure of events. He had at first no purpose
10 challenge the supremacv of the papacy or to effect a separation of

154

THE GREAT REVOLT 155

tburch and state. But, after the papal prelates undertook to bully
jjjm into submission, he began to study church history, and as a
consequence carne to the conclusion that there was no historical
foundation for the claims of the Roman pontiffs. Promptly upon
reaching this conviction he seized upon all the sustaining arguments
he could find in the writings of men like Marsiglio and Ockham and
beffan to lash out with great vehemence against the dogma of papal
supremacy. In his Address to the German Nobility he appealed to the
princes and knights of Germany to take matters into their own
hands and reform the abuses of the church. There was nothing
sacred about a clergyman, he said, save the duties he was to per-
form; and, if he was an offender against the law, the civil govern-
ment had the same right to punish him as any other culprit.

But when his demand for direct action began to beget violence,
Luther took alarm. Revolting peasants destroying and plundering
monasteries and castles, and fanatical Anabaptists proposing to
sweep away the whole fabric of institutional religion, filled him with
apprehension. Vehemently again he appealed to the nobility, this
time urging that they put down all insurrectionary movements with-
out pity. Which advice they adopted with alacrity and executed
with such ruthless and summary obedience that in the summer of
1525 alone more than ten thousand peasants were slain in the holy
cause of law and order. It was now revealed to Luther that secular
authority is sanctioned by God. It must be so, he reasoned, both for
Christians and non- Christians; for Christians, because the Scriptures
declare that the powers that be are ordained of God and enjoin
obedience to them; for non-Christians, because they have not the
guidance of the Holy Spirit and need the iron hand of authority to
keep them in peace and order. Despite this bow to secular power,
Luiher takes strong ground against interference by secular authori-
ties in matters of belief, and argues that the eradication of heresy
should be left entirely to the clergy.

The political philosopher of the Reformation, in so far as any
deserves that tide, was the scholarly professor of Greek in the Uni-
versity of Wittenberg, Philip Melanchthon. A faithful disciple of
Luther, he was intellectually both his superior and in many re-
spects his opposite. Melanchlhon was a deep student of the classics
and especially of Aristotle, and in his hands the intellectual case of
die Reformation takes on a more pleasing and a more rational

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

a«5f*cc. Secular authority, according to the Melanchthonian view,
is Vne orcduct of natural law and natural right. The principles of
natural riffht, which are epitomized In the Decalogue, have been
implanted" In the mind, he thinks, by God Himself. Social and
political Institutions growing out of these principles are in accord
with the will of God: and it is the duiy of the Christian to yield obe-
dience to such Institutions. Secular government, says the Witten-
berg professor, is clearly deduclble from principles of natural law
and right, and is further supported by explicit Scriptural sanc-
tions. The functions of the secular authorities include the pro-
tection of property, the safeguarding of liberty, the maintenance of
order, the punishment of criminal offenders, and the promotion
and preservation of true morality and religion among the people.
Neither property nor liberty, however, are absolute rights. Prop-
erty may be confiscated, If the owners abuse it (this to justify Prot-
estant princes In confiscating the property of monasteries); and
liberty may be denied or abridged. In order to preserve the status
quo. As to the suppression of heresy, Melanchthon differs from
Luther. Heresy, he holds, is equivalent to blasphemy, which Is a
serious crime. Therefore It is the duty of the civil powers to root it
out and punish the offending persons.

From the Swiss republic of Geneva and its Protestant pope, John
Calvin, came the most dynamic political thought of the Reforma-
tion. His Institutes of the Christian Religion, published in 1535, was
designed, says Dunning, "as a complete guide to the soul that
sought to live according to God's Word; and it furnished, indeed, a
much safer resort, in many respects, than the Bible itself. For Cal-
vin, like many other great leaders of the Reform, greatly dreaded
the fanatics who derived from the Scriptures revolutionary social
doctrines, and he shaped an interpretation that was based on
the jurists3 postulates of order and authority.35 1

Predestination is as much an integral part of the political as of
the religious thought of the expatriated French lawyer. God, he
reasoned, has ordained the creation of the world; by His will it is
organized; by His wisdom It is directed. For man God has planned
a complete career 5 and all his actions are foreordained. Such is the
order of nature, and man can by no means change it. This natural
order Is productive of natural rights and natural law, and is the

1 W. A. Dunning ,4 History &f Political Theories from Luther to Montesquieu (1905), p. 26,

THE GREAT REVOLT 157

foundation of all legal and moral relations between men. The
Decalogue is simply a summation of natural law, which, according
to Calvin, implies: (1) natural rights guaranteed by God (includ-
ing the right to law, to liberty, and to freedom of religion), (2) a
compact for the recognition of these rights, and (3) a right of re-
sistance when any one violates the rights so guaranteed and recog-

nized.
The Christian church and the Christian state, according to

ihe view of Calvin, are also created by God. The two were de-
signed for wholly different purposes, and, though performing con-
current functions., must be kept autonomous and distinct. The
mission of the church is spiritual, and its authority should include
no element of secular concern; that of the state is temporal, and its
jurisdiction should be confined to the physical and external exist-
ence of man. But the two are equally sacrosanct, princes and
magistrates being, in his opinion, just as much lieutenants of God
as ministers of religion. The church wields no sword to punish
malefactors or protect itself against the corroding menace of im-
piety, blasphemy, and heresy. Hence it is the solemn duty of secu-
lar rulers to nourish and safeguard religion. To this end and also
to that of preserving property., order, and liberty, it is the duty of
all Christians to sustain and obey the secular rulers, even " those
who domineer unjustly and tyrannically," for they "are raised up
by Him to punish the people for their iniquity. . . . But in that
obedience which we hold to be due to the commands of rulers, we
must always make the exception, nay, must be particularly careful
that it is not incompatible with obedience to Him to whose will
the wishes of all kings should be subject, to whose decrees their com-
mands must yield, to whose majesty their sceptres must bow. . . .
We are subject to the men who rule over us, but subject only in the
Lord. If they command anything against Him., let us pay not the
least regard to its nor be moved by all the dignity which they pos-
sess as magistrates — a dignity to which no injury is done when it is
subordinated to the special and truly supreme power of God." 1

What a portentous exception! Let temporal rulers command
anything against God, and no Christian is bound to pay the least
attention to it. But who is to decide what is or is not "against

y. Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, Excerpts from Goker, Readings in
PtlMed Philosophy (1938), pp. 342, 344,

:.— POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

Him"."' Xo: th? ru>r> themselves: not the church; not anvbodv in

^ t

a posiuon o: au:horky: for Protesiantism allows no one to stand
between the individual and his God. Guided by the still small
voice of his own conscience, the Individual must decide for himself
whether the commands of his rulers are against God, and as con-
science decrees must he shape his behavior. It is from such philoso-
phies that the most terrible revolutions spring, and also the most
dangerous radicalisms.

II

In the realm of poliiics\ProtestantisjgJfinds itself always impaled
upon one horn or the other of an unavoidable dilemma. Denying
the supremacy of spiritual over temporal authorities and standing,
as it does, for the separation of church and state, it must either
acknowledge the supremacy of the latter in cases of conflict be-
tween religious and political duty, or it must, if it would in such
cases deny the supremacy of the state, take refuge in the antinomian
doctrine of Individual judgment. No Protestant religionist has ever
been willing to concede the right of the state to final authority In
moral and religious matters. Luther, Melanchthon, Zwingli, Cal-
vin, Knox, and all of the other great leaders of the Protestant move-
ment were united in the opinion thai moral law was superior to
secular law, and thai it was the duty of political sovereigns to be
guided by die higher law; but their only means of imposing checb
upon the supreme pretensions of temporal rulers was to absolve the
Individual from the duty of obedience to the political authorities
in case of conflict between his own conception of right and things
commanded by his rulers. During the height of the struggle against
the Roman Church this amounted to no check at all. Without the
aid of powerful monarchs the Protestant Revolt had no hope of
success; and therefore, as a matter of expediency, Reformation
leaders usually acquiesced In the absolutism of the princes who
were the champions of their cause. The arbitrary doings of Catholic
rulers they might indignantly challenge, but not the equally arbi-
trary doings of Protestant potentates. The result was not only to
give ^ great impetus to political nationalism, but also to enable
ambitious and energetic rulers to fortify themselves in the exercise
of absolute authority. The tyrannies of Protestant princes were
indulgently overlooked by partisans of the Protestant cause, and

THE GREAT REVOLT 159

those of Catholic princes were tolerated with equal complaisance by
Catholic religionists. National states under absolute monarchs
became the characteristic form of government throughout Europe;
and the controversies — dynastic, religious, territorial, and other-
wise— which were engendered by the rivalries of these aggressive
princes soon plunged the peoples of Europe into an interminable
series of international wars.

The excesses to which national monarchs went in the use and
abuse of their swollen authority led inevitably to a reaction against
monarchical power. In the latter part of the sixteenth century
appeared a number of vigorous polemics against the absolutist
assumptions of kings. None of these had any great influence upon
the practical politics of that time, but they are important landmarks
in the history of political thought because they not only foreshadow
but in large measure lay the foundations of the anti-monarchical
philosophies of subsequent decades.

Francis Hotman, a distinguished French jurist, in 1573 published
a treatise entitled Franco-Gallia, in which he undertook to prove
historically that France never had recognized the monarchical
principle, but that the people from very earliest times had chosen
and deposed kings, enacted fundamental legislation, and trans-
acted other important political business. Hubert Languet or
Duplessis-Mornay (it is not certain which) published in 1579
,4 Defence of Liberty Against Tyrants, which assumed to prove that
subjects are not bound to obey when the monarch commands what
is contrary to the law of God. The thesis of the author was that the
monarch's right to rule is contractual, being based on a covenant
with the people, as was supposed to be the case with the kings of
the Old Testament. Sovereignty is declared to belong to the people
by divine right, and the people, therefore, are said to have a right to
resist when the king rules heretically.

In the same year George Buchanan, who might be styled the
political philosopher of Presbyterianism, published his treatise,
On Sovereign Power Among the Scots. Political society, reasoned this
stern disciple of John Knox, arises out of man's need to escape from
die woes of the state of nature. The impulse to political association
tor the^ betterment of life was implanted in the human breast by
U>d Himself, and it is accordingly the duty of a monarch to rule in
such a way as to promote not only the material but the moral well-

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

bcinsr of the Deoplc. The king's right of rulership, says Buchanan,
rests upon a compact with the people, who, through their repre-
sentatives in council, should circumscribe the king with enlightened
laws, and who, through independent judges, should interpret those
laws properly. The fact that the compact between king and people
confers a hereditary right to rule makes no difference; tyrants may

be ooDOsed and put 10 death.

* jt •*

In 1599 a Spanish Jesuit named Juan de Mariana wrote a book
called 0/2 Kinsskito and the Education of a King, which he dedicated to

*j «i *"* ^-^ "^

Philip III of Spain. According to Mariana government grows out
of a pre-political state of nature, monarchical government being the
earliest type to develop. The power of the monarch at first is un-
restrained by law, but as the evolution of political life proceeds
legal restraints become necessary, because neither the wisdom of the
monarch nor the character of the people is perfect. Monarchy re-
strained by law is declared to be the best form of government,
though it has a tendency to degenerate into tyranny. When that
occurs, the people have a right to resist; for royal power originated
by grant of the people, and they did not grant away all of their
power but reserved certain basic prerogatives to themselves. And
even if this were not true, the common sense of mankind would
argue for the supremacy of the people.

Shortly after the close of the century — in 1610 or thereabouts — a
German jurist of the city of Emden by the name of Johannes Ai-
thusius wrote an influential book called Systematic Politics. In this
lie explained social and political organization in terms of contract
between the members of society reciprocally, the purpose of the
contract being the establishment of law and the ordination of au-
thority. Althusius undertook to define sovereignty as the supreme
power of doing whatever pertains to the spiritual or physical wel-
fare of the members of the state. This power, he said., inheres in
the people as an aggregates and political obligation runs not to
raiers but to the body politic.

The importance of these radical doctrines of the sixteenth century
is found in the tremendous vogue of such ideas as the state of nature,
the social compact, the right of revolution, popular sovereignty,
and representative government in the democratic philosophies
which became the focii of the great political controversies of the
seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Rivers of blood

THE GREAT REVOLT 161

were fated to flow in attack and defense of ideas first definitely
shadowed forth in the writings just reviewed.

REFERENCES

Allen, J. W., A History of Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century (London,

1928).

Boehmer, H., The Road to Reformation: Martin Luther to the Tear 1521 (Phila-
delphia,. 1946).
Coker, F. W., Readings in Political Philosophy (rev. ed., New York, 1938),

Chaps. XII-XIII.
Cook, T. L, A History of Political Philosophy (New York, 1936), Chaps

XI-XIII.
Dunning, W. A., A History of Political Theories from Luther to Montesquieu

(New York, 1905), Chaps. Ill, V, VI.
Gavin, F., Seven Centuries of the Problem of Church and State (Princeton, N J

1939).

Gettell, R. G., History of Political Thought (New York, 1924), Chap. VIII.
McGovern, W. M., From Luther to Hitler (Boston, 1941), Chap. II.
Murray, R. H., The History of Political Science from Plato to the Present (New

York, 1926), Chap. V.
Sabine, G. H., .4 History of Political Theory (New York, 1937), Chaps.

XVIII-XIX.
Waring, L. H., The Political Theories of Martin Luther (New York, 1910).

CHAPTER XI

NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL

SOVEREIGNTY

I

AID the turmoil of contention and warfare that grew out of
ihe Protestant Reform, when religious discord was Inducing
violent social convulsions and threatening the unity and
stability of long-established political institutions, an unimpassioned
. French lawver was forging a philosophy of order and Integration
which in time would come to rank as one of the great landmarks
of political thought /Jean Bodin belongs to the immortals^ In an age
of bigotry and fanaticism he walked by the steady light of reason;
in an age of distraction and dissension he exalted unity- and order;
In an age of irrational creeds he was a believer in none, but an un-
relenting foe of intolerance; in an age of intellectual sterility he was
an enlightened and independent thinker animated by the true
spirit of philosophy.

Of the life of this exce£tionaj.__maii our information Is disappoint-
ingly meager. ^He was born, so the record states, at Angers, Fi^Qce,
In the year IJSOi studied law at the University of Toulouse., and
remained there for a time as a lecturer on jurisprudent Soon the
metropolis beckoned, and he took up the practice of law In Paris.
\By nature a scholar, as much of his careeer In the capital was de-
voted to learned pursuits as to the practice of his profession. His
literary work quickly attracted attention, and his ingratiating per-
sonality brought him Into favor with the monarch, Henry III, who
appointed Mm king's attorney at Laon In 1576, the year In which
his great treatise on the state was published. After taking up his
residence In Laon he was elected to represent the third estate of
Vermandols In the estates-general of Blois, where he served with
distinctive intelligence and impartiality. When a combination of
nobles and clergy sought to compel the king to bludgeon his sub-
jects Into Caiholicism5\Bodin supported the monarch; but, when
the king sought permission to alienate public lands contrary to the
general interest, Bodin opposed hlmf In 1581 Bodin was made
secretary to the due d'Alengon's mission to England to seek the

162

SOVEREIGNTY 163

(•^

i

hand of Queen Elizabeth. With the termination of this abortive
expedition Bodin's public career came to an end. He resumed his
legal and literary work in Laon and died there, of the plague, in

1596.

XA mind of fascinating inconsistency is disclosed by Bodin's writ-

iiFsf xHe was truly a child of the paradoxical age in which he lived,
an age that was neither I^^^^^2L^^crn^> kut displayed
striking characteristics of bflth. Bodin was undoubtedly one of the
most original and enlightened thinkers whose name appears in the
dironicles of political thought; but in some matters he was as
credulous as the most benighted child of the Middle Ages/ His
works on religion were so broad and tolerant as to draw fire from
every quarter and cause him to be attacked as a Catholic, a Cal-
\inist, a Jew, a Mohammedan, and an atheist; but his book on
sorter)7 shows him to have been a believer in witchcraft, astrology,
and numerology. His actual religious beliefs are unknown, but he
eschewed all dogma and probably was not more than a deist, if
that; yet he believed in demonology, and is reputed to have de-
clared that from his thirty-seventh year he had enjoyed the guidance
of a friendly demon who would touch his left ear if he purposed
doing wrong and his right ear to indicate that he was about to dfo
right.

\The versatility of the man is also noteworthy. History, juris-
prudence, and politics were the fields he specially cultivated; but
his essays on money and public finance entitle him to recognition
as cfoe of the fathers of modern economic thought, and his writings
on education and religion were highly regarded in their day. He
could also turn as neat a trick with Latin verse as any of his con-
temporaries, as is attested by his famous translation of Oppian's
CynegeticonJ

^Bodin's position as a political thinker is the result of two com-
manding works — A Method for the Easy Understanding of History, pub-
lished in 1566, and Six Books Concerning the State, published in 1576.
The first is a commentary on the interpretation and significance of
history, and the second is a treatise on the nature of the state/
Bodin did not take a cosmic view of history, seeking to find its first
causes and unfold its governing laws; but he was much interested
in the rational writing of history and in its intelligent interpretation."*
He insisted that impartiality in judging and recording events was

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

one of the necessarv Qualities of a historian, and held that history

* * *

would supply the answer to many questions if men would only
study the subject dispassionately and intelligently.^ One of his fa-
vorite doc nines was that the study of history is necessary to explain
the origin and naiure of law. The actual law of every people he
regarded as but an imperfect expression of the ideal law of nature,
and It was his theory that by a comparative study of the beginnings
and development of the legal systems of all countries it would be

s

possible to discover true law/ Not without justice, therefore, is
Bodin sometimes called the father of comparative _and4iIstoriclL
jurisprudence.

*fci£ i ill t*»"rt* ' J ' ^tow*1 ana/m^m^JS^ufme^i

History, Bodin thinks, is heavily freighted with destiny that yields
to the human will. Alan is the maker of events, and therefore is the
maker of his own history. Nevertheless Bodin does not fail to per-
ceive and discuss the influence of such factors as climate, moun-
tains, watercourses, rainfall, soil, and winds, all of which are largely
beyond man's control. In appreciation of these potent factors of
political causation he excels Aristotle and points the way for
Montesquieu and later exponents /the doctrine that physical envi-
ronment is the matrix of political institutions.
\If, as Dunning says, Bodin was the first writer to evolve a philos-
ophy of history in the modern sense, it may be said with equal ve-
racity that his Six Books Concerning the State is the first truly modern
treatise on the science of politics /"Bodin fabricates no ideal com-
monwealth, offers no panacea for the ills of the body politic, ad-
vances no dogmas to prop up existing political structures. \His
quest is for a scientific explanation of the phenomena of politics,
and for a system of polity constructed in the light of this knowledge
and in conformity with its principles.""**

Jean Bodin's unique contribution to political thought un-
doubtedly was the doctrine of sovereignty. Although the genealogy
of this idea is traceable back as far as the Roman law, Bodin was
'' the first to define it clearly and embody it in a philosophy of poli-
tics. Living in a period of political chaos, and conceiving that the
religious pud other disturbances of the time were attributable in the
tlast analysis to the impotence of political authority, Bodin naturally
arrived at a view of the state which exalts unity ajid power. His

SOVEREIGNTY 165

1 — ,..—

primary concern in fact is not to explain the state, but to justify
authority/ The individual and his liberties does not figure in Bodin's
scheme of things>"Astate," he writes in the opening passages of his
Six Books, "is anasSSoatign of families and the.V ^mrnnrino^c:

dividual man thus is identified with the state only through member-
ship in a basic social group, which Bodin, like Aristotle, holds to be
the outcome of the necessities of man's being. Not just an aggrega-
tion of individuals is this Bodinianstate, but a collectivity made up
of a huge series of social groups or associations united to form a body
corporate. The family is the basic cell of this structure, which in-
cludes the trade guild, the church, and all forms of association less
inclusive than the state. These lesser groups may be held together
by friendship, kinship, custom, mutual agreement, or some other
cohesive tie; but the state, Bodin contends, is bound together only
by force. -1

"Indeed a citizen is no other than a free man who is bound by the

supreme power of another. For hpfnr^ %r*\r &••*+& ^v. ~« i \

f.l_ „„%. . , , ... . " uciul c in7 state or commonwealth took
form, each paterfamilias had final power of life and death over his chil-
dren and wives. Afterwards strength and the desire to rule, as well as
avarice and the passion of revenge, armed one against the other, and the
issue of war forced the conquered to serve the pleasure of the more
powerM He who showed himself a valiant leader ruled then not only
over his household but also over his enemies and allies-the latter as
conquered friends, to each of whom was given freedom to live as he

which is d C- Hfer ^1S enemks) as slaves' Thus that complete liberty
h' \* eriyed Irom nature, was taken away, even from the victors by

whom the latter had chosen as their leader; at least their liberty was
araimsned; tor each, even in his private capacity, had to recognize the
greme authority of another. Thus we see the origin of slaves°and sub!
jects citizens and foragners, prince and tyrant. . . .

In this it seems to me that Aristotle, Demosthenes, and Cicero are
wrung , lor, loliowing Herodotus (I think) they hold that kines first
ootained preferment nn a^^™,^«. ~r *i — : +_.,. * °

u Th °f their rePutati^ ^ integrity and

'

VC thus Picture<l to us heroic and golden ai- this I

by ositive uments and

and kin§dorns' before Abraham's time, were

®* B°°h> 1U°ted in Coker' Read^ in Political Philosophy
pp. 371-372.

l!:/} POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

Abhrvi^h modern anthropology does not fully support Bodlirs
vieu , a> -;aied in the foregoing quotation, that armed force Is In ail
cases the creator of political authority, the researches of scientific
students of human origins do disclose a sufficient number of cases in
which force has been the sole or a principal factor, to acclaim Bodin
as a remarkably acute analyst of social forces. Since Aristotle no
man had penetrated so far beneath the surface of social processes,
and Bodin exhibits in some respects a keener appreciation of the
sociological elements of political evolution than the august Staglrite
himself. \To Bodin the state is morejhan just the accidental crea-

ture of sociaiJhixfSy, ofLwhich military might is the mngt .pgtprvt; it

is the supreme andjinal product of social jev
it alone gossessesjovergignty.^

\t'Sovereignty;'J says Bodin, ;*is supreme power over citizens and
subjects, unrestrained by laws.35 1 This power, he argues, is not only
supreme but perpetual; for, if it be limited as to time or as to scopes
it cannot be supreme. It Is a power which has Its origin in the people
acting as a corporality, and originates in the will of the people, who
may themselves retain it/'lt Is customary, however, to commit this
power in whole or In part, temporarily or permanently, to the cus-
tody of princes and other functionaries of government. \If it is be-
stowed for a term of years, at the pleasure of any one, or in any form
so that the possessor is not legibus soluta — unrestrained by laws —
that functionary, no matter how^greaFtEe power he enjoys, does not
possess sovereignty; for only he has sovereignty ccwho, after God3
acknowledges no one greater than himself.53 L^

Is our philosopher merely toying with abstractions? He does not
so Intend. Very carefully he rules out of consideration all meta-
physical and theological elements by explicitly pointing out that
when he speaks of supreme power legibus soluta he means unre-
strained by civil laws. <£As for the laws of God and of nature,
princes and people are equally bound by them, so that no one who
attempts to abrogate or weaken them can escape the judgments of
divine sovereignty.-'What we have said as to the freedom of sov-
ereignty from the binding force of law does not have reference to
divine or natural law." 3 But law which has its origin in definite
human sources and Is executed by human agencies does not come
within these categories; such law sovereignty necessarily transcends,

1 Ibid., p. 374. » Ibid., p. 375. « Ibid., p. 376.

SOVEREIGNTY ]67

It becomes clear upon reflection that Bodin conceives sovereignty
to be the highest will that can exist in human society > The first and
foremost function of sovereignty, he declares, "is to give laws to
citkens generally and individually, and, it must be added, not
necessarily with the consent of superiors, equals, or inferiors." '
\3uch aiithority could not be subject to law, because it is the source
of law. Nor is it to Bodin an abstruse and nebulous thing, but is per-
fectly capable of being defined and bestowed in quantum. \ It may
be a product of the individual will of a supreme war lord or of the
blended wills of the people in the aggregate, but it is for him a con-
crete reality just the same/ Human society consists of individuals
associated in groups, and in every group there is a capacity for ulti-
mate and indefeasible volition with respect to the affairs of that
group/ The state, like every other association of human beings, pos-
sesses such a capacity; and since the state is the all-inclusive entity
its volitional capacity must overmatch all others. That is sover-
eignty-human will at its highest point of development \It is
the unity which stands above all diversity in human society the
centripetal force which exceeds any countervailing centrifugal
forces./ °

Thus it becomes clear that Bodin conceives of sovereignty as a
legal competence or quality that inheres in the stateA True and
perpetual sovereignty, he holds, can exist only in an aristocratic or
democratic state where there is an endless continuity of persons in-
vested with supreme political authority; but he believes it to be pos-
sible nevertheless for sovereignty to be bestowed upon one individ-
ual m such a manner as to make it transferable by heredity, thus
justifying the exercise of absolute authority by hereditary monarchs '
it may be difficult for us to agree with Bodin that such a legal qual-
ity as he supposes sovereignty to be, has any real existence; but even
awigh it is nothing more than a legal fiction, we must recognize
aat its influence has been tremendous.

Taking sovereignty as a starting point, though its existence be
imagmary, it is easily possible to lay down foundations for law
, umty, and authority that nothing less than a political earth-
q«ake can unsettle. By virtue of its sovereignty the state is excepted
** all legal compulsionMt owes obedience to no earthly superior
** can be subjected to no will but its own. Without its own con-

'**, p. 379.

LITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

pent i: rnav not be sued or made responsive to any legal process
whatsoever, iniernai or external./ Its fiat is law, binding upon all
subject 10 its jurisdiction, regardless of ethical or any other con-
siderations. Moreover, the Individuals or organs of government
which possess and exercise sovereignty, when acting In their politi-
cal capacities, are themselves invested with Immunities which place
them OR a higher legal level than ordinary citizens. For whatever
share they have In the exercise of sovereignty they cannot be held
accountable to any private citizens, nor may it be denied that their
official acts are the acts of the state.

Fiction though it be, sovereignty supplied the necessary keystone
for the incomplete arch of nationalism. It not only linked but sup-
ported national unity and Independence. It gave legal sanction to
the concentration of authority and the supremacy of national gov-
ernment as the vehicle of supreme authority.

Bodin was not unaware of some of the strictures that would be
lodged against the doctrine of sovereignty, and he made an en-
deavor to anticipate and answer such as he foresaw. They involved
mostly questions of right and wrong, particularly where sover-
eignty is held to be vested in a monarch. Is such a monarch bound
by the laws? Is he bound by his own oath and promises? Is he
bound to respect rights of property? No sovereign, answers Bodin,
is bound by laws that he has made or that Issue from the sovereignty
vested in him> Divine law and natural law govern all sovereigns,
but no human authority enforces these bodies of law/ If morality
and reason do not hold sway over the monarch, he is subject to no
restraint; for who other than the possessor of sovereignty Is in posi-
tion authoritatively to interpret or execute the precepts of morality
and reason? As to oaths and promises, Bodin holds that the sover-
eign Is not bound when he has sworn to himself or to his subjects,
because the nature of sovereignty Is such that It cannot be restricted
by oaths or pledges. If It could, it would not be sovereignty. "We
must not confuse laws and contracts >Law depends upon the will of
Mm who holds supreme power In the state, and who can bind sub-
jects by law, but cannot bind himself/A contract between a prince
and his subject has mutual binding force, so that It cannot be de-
parted from save with the consent of both parties; in this the prince
seems to have nothing above his subjects, except that the purpose of
a kw to which he has sworn having ceased to exist, he is no longer

SOVEREIGNTY 169

bound either by the law or by the oath which he took with regard
to the law.vA well-advised prince will not suffer himself to be bound
bv oath to observe the laws, for in such case he does not possess the
supreme authority in the commonwealth." 1 *
\As to property, Bodin is less certain of the unrestricted will of the
sovereign. Sovereignty, he insists, is political rather than proprie-
zarv and the supremacy of the sovereign is presumably to be con-

* A

fined to the political sphere/ In making the distinction between the
political and the proprietary, Bodin follows the classic differentia-
tion of the Roman law between imperium and dominium; but just how
that would be applied in the case of a Louis XIV he does not make
plain. In his reaction against Anabaptist communism, Bodin strove
10 secure property against subversion by any color of right, but suc-
ceeded no better than many other philosophers who have at-
tempted the same thing. Transcendent political power, whether in
the hands of a prince or a proletariat, will not be hobbled by juristic
doctrines of the sacredness of property. ^Sovereignty is unrestrained
action sanctioned by law: Before this, no rights can stand,

III

Though the world chiefly remembers Bodin as the father of the
doctrine of sovereignty, he was not a man of one idea\ He attempted
the fabrication of a complete structure of political thought, and in-
troduced into the building many materials in addition to sover-
eignty. He was one of the first to appreciate the distinction between
die state and the government of the state, and he sharply criticized
Aristotle for not having perceived and made the distinction more
clearly. He points out that the form of government does not neces-
sarily conform with the form of state at all. The form of state, he
asserts, is determined by the allocation of sovereignty, there being
three basic forms — monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. Any of
these might, however, have a government of different form/ Thus a
state which, from the standpoint of sovereignty, is democratic, as in
the case of England in our own day, might have a monarchical form
of government. So also a state with a republican government
(e.g., Fascist Spain) might vest sovereignty in one person as chief
of state. By insisting upon such distinctions Bodin did much to

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

introduce clarity and accuracy inio political thinking. His personal
^reference seems :o have been for a monarchical form of govern-
ment, but as to form of state he indicated no positive preference.

Bo din also v.TGte some interesting chapters on revolutions. In
this he mav have been influenced by the work of Aristotle, but he
surpassed the Greek in his grasp of the role of revolutions in staie
life. Aristotle viewed revolutions as abnormal, the normal condi-
tion o: the stare being in his opinion thai of stability and balance.
This Bodin rejects as impossible. ^His conception of the state en-
visaees a natural cycle of iifel^Like human beings, states, he thinks,
are born, mature, decline, and die! Change is inevitable and con-
tinuous. It may come slowly and imperceptibly, or it may come
suddenly and violently. \So long as it does not affect the supreme
Dower — sovereign tv — no change is TO be deemed a revolution; but

x c^ * o" *

when there is a change in the location or possession of sovereignty,

there Is then a true revolution/ The basic causes of revolutions are
to Bodin deeply occult, being in some way connected with the
movements of the heavenly bodies. Whether this Is to be viewed as
a hangover In Bodin;s thinking of the occult notions of mediaeval
astrology, or a brilliant anticipation of modern theories linking
human events with sunspot and solar energy cycles, the reader may
decide for himself. It is noteworthy, however, that Bodin was suffi-
ciently scientific in his outlook to cite climatic and topographic
factors as important contributing causes of revolutions. The man
was in reality more modern than many moderns.

As to the practical side of government Bodin gave utterance to
many shrewd judgments and sound conclusions. He noted, for
example, a distinction that has become exceedingly important In
modern administrative Iaw3 between merely ministerial offices and
functions and those involving the exercise of that discretion which
appertains to sovereignty. This distinction is now a crucial one in
determining the legal responsibility of public officials In nearly all
systems of government. Bodin also discussed at great length the
problem of public revenues, and anticipated several of the classic
doctrines of modern economic thought as to prices and international
exchange. The communistic proposals of Plato and More he took
especial pains to combat, but did not fall to recognize the danger of
unequal distribution of wealth and to point out the necessity of pre-
venting such a thing if the stability of the state is to be maintained. 7

SOVEREIGNTY 171

\\nother striking and essentially modern feature of Bodin's poli-
tical thought is his conception of citizenship. Citizens, according
10 his view, have but one thing in common, and that is their com-
mon subjection to sovereign authority.-1 The Greeks and Romans
usually regarded citizens as the favored associates of a fellowship
devoted to the commonweal; but to Bodin citizens were subjects

. <J •*

nothing more. \No right of participation in government, no im-
munities or powers, no equality of condition or privilege went along
dth citizenship according to his view — nothing but the duty of
bsolute obedience. That, except as modified by special constitu-
tional provisions, is the view which obtains in the modern world.
The citizen to-day is one who bows to supreme authority. We talk
much of the rights and privileges of citizenship; but we have to
look to express constitutional guarantees for most "of these, and
constitutional guarantees may under various circumstances be
suspended or set aside by supreme authority. \The right to vote, to
hold office, to own property, and enjoy other civil prerogatives are
not inalienable attributes of citizenship. /xMany of them must be
expressly granted, and all of them may be abridged or curtailed/
But the duty of obedience is always implicit in the fact of citizen-
ship, and is never abrogated or decreased.

IV

Bodin's rank among political thinkers steadily rises as he recedes
into the past. In his lifetime he won a reputation as a distinguished
savant and lawyer, but none thought of rating him with such peer-
less figures as Aristotle and Plato. After his death years passed
before his true stature was appreciated. Even so recently as 1906
Professor Dunning felt that there was "substantial and well-founded
agreement among historians and critics" on not more than one
point about Bodin's work; namely, that he "brought back political
theory to the form and method from which it had gone far astray
since Aristotle, and gave to it again the externals, at least, of a
science.35 * Then he goes on to say, £CMachiavelli had, as we have
seen, taken some steps in that direction. Bodin completed the move-
ment which the Italian initiated. In Machiavelli the method of
historical research and contemporary observation was fully appre-

PP P0^12?Unriing> A Hist°Ty °f Politicd Theories from Luther to Montesquieu (1905),

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

c

rro

ciared, bus in its application it became little more than mere em-
piricism, and produced rather a body of principles for the practical
oncuc: of government than a theory of the state. Bodin supplied,

rn the stores of his systematic philosophy, precisely the factors
which were lacking in the Florentine's make-up, and, without
neglecting the principles of political practice, so grouped and corre-
lated and generalized them as to present a comprehensive political
science — Sta&dekre as well as Politik" 1

Dr. Murray, a quarter of a century later, is much surer of the
enduring greatness of Bodnfs thought. The doctrine of sovereignty,
thinks this English commentator, not only marks the beginning of
but provides the indispensable foundation for the political philos-
ophies that have grown out of modern nationalism. "Machia-
velli/' writes Murray, "could have written his two important books
at any time. Bodin could not have written the Republique much
before the closing quarter of the sixteenth century. So long as the
Holy Roman Empire lasted in its pride of place3 it was utterly im-
possible to conceive of any such thing as the sovereignty of the
monarch of a particular country. Stage by stage we ascend the
mediaeval pyramid. At its base there are villeins, and then free men
chiefly in towns- Above them stand the squires, and then the peers.
Above these are the kings, and above them all at the apex of the
pyramid stood the Holy Roman Emperor. In this rough manner
we may conceive mediaeval society. In 1348 this pyramid received
an earthquake shock [the Black Death], and from the effects of it
there was no real recovery. True, it took time to reveal the fissures
in the fragments of the stones. Time undoubtedly revealed them,
and revealed them increasingly. What the Black Death had begun,
the labors of Copernicus and Columbus completed. Very slowly
men like Pierre Du Bois perceived that the Holy Roman Empire
was in a position of unstable equilibrium. His plan, however, was
simply to substitute a Holy French Empire for the Holy Roman
Empire. It was reserved for Bodin to point out that the days of
universal empires, whether Roman or French, had altogether
passed away. The day of nascent nationalism had arrived, and with
its arrival it was high time to devise a theory of sovereignty, To
this task Bodin addresses himself in his Republique^ and it consti-
tutes his most permanent achievement.

SOVEREIGNTY 173

"On its appearance the Republique found no lack of appreciation.
Men noted in it the growing sense of naturalism in political theory,,
and they also noted in it the notion that expediency is triumphant
in politics. Publicists like Paruta and Loyseau noted in it the ele-
ment that political thought just then most urgently required. No
doubt such theologians of the League * as Possevin and Guillaume
Roze attacked it with all the virulence at their command. On the
oiher hand, Montaigne bestowed on it his considered approval,
which was emphatically endorsed by Grotius and Hobbes, Filmer
and Pufendorf. xThe history of the seventeenth century centres
around that problem of sovereignty that Bodin was the first to state
with, any measure of preciseness." 2 /

And he might have added, the history of the eighteenth, nine-
teenth, and thus far of the twentieth centuries. Nationalism is still
the basic fact of the world's political organization, and sovereignty
is the philosophic cornerstone of nationalism. XBodin's theory of
sovereignty has been challenged again and again; the modern
pluralists have indicted it as conceived in error of analysis and born
of sin against the most sacred rights of man /but still the peoples of
the world persist in behaving as though it were true. Two cata-
clysmic world wars and two agonizing periods of post-war re-
adjustment, all in large measure attributable to excesses of na-
tionalism and abuses of sovereignty, have been unable to shake their
devotion to the sovereign national state.\It would be pressing the
argument too far to say that all this is the outgrowth of Bodin's
thought, but it is not too much to say that he was the first to per-
ceive the inexorable logic of nationalism and to fashion a system
of political thought that would aid enormously in fostering national
self-government and supremacy. /

v
V

As the career of Bodin drew to a peaceful close at Laon, pundits
m the Low Countries were marking with amazement the precocious
genius of an eleven-year-old boy in the University of Leyden. Born
in the city of Delft on Easter Sunday, 1583, the wonder child of
Leyden was destined to give the world a philosophy of international

* The famous Holy League, formed under the leadership of Henry of Guise for the
suppresson of heresy and the destruction of the Huguenots.

185-186 may* The Hi<!t*y °f Political Science from Plato to the Present, pp, 178-179,

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

to go hand in hand with Bodlxrs philosophy of national
lay :he basis for modern international law and in-
ternational political ideology. History knows this prodigious
youngster as Hugo Cretins, the Latin nom deplume which he adopted
at the University, but he was christened Huig van Groot. The van
Groor family was an unusual one. Wealth had been in the family

a

for several generations, but it was for public service and intellectual
attainments that it was especially distinguished. The father of
Hugo was a man of great learning, having taken the degrees of mas-
ter of arts, master of philosophy, and doctor of laws at Douay. He
was a highly successful lawyer, and was also much interested in
education, being one of the three governing directors of the Uni-
versity of Leyden. He took personal charge of his son's education
up to the age of seven, and then, perceiving that the boy had quali-
ties of genius, placed him under the best tutors available. At the
age of eight the young prodigy was producing Latin verses which
claimed the admiration of the most exacting critics, and at the age of
eleven he was ready for matriculation in the University of Leyden.

At the University the boy added materially to his reputation as
an intellectual wonder; so much indeed that at the age of fifteen he
was honored by an appointment to accompany a special embassy of
Dutch officials to Paris. This legation was headed by the great
Barneveld, who had conceived an affection for the brilliant lad and
was to be a decisive factor in his future career. During the year
that he was in France with this diplomatic mission young Grotius
learned the French language, received a doctor's degree from the
University of Orleans, made the acquaintance of the leading schol-
ars and statesmen of the Gallic kingdom, and won the special favor
of the reigning monarch, Henry IV. Returning to his native land,
he took the degree of doctor of laws at the University of Leyden and
thereupon, being yet only sixteen years of age, embarked upon the
practice of law at The Hague. Success and honors followed rapidly.
Soon he was pleading before the highest tribunals of the land and
winning cases that established him as one of the leaders of his pro-
fession. At the same time he continued his literary scholarly in-
terests, and produced poetry, dramas, and learned treatises which
brought him an international reputation. At the age of twenty he
was made official historian of the Dutch Republic, to write the story
of its valiant struggle for independence from Spain; and shortly

SOVEREIGNTY 175

thereafter he was appointed advocate general of finance for the
provinces of Holland and Zealand. At thirty he was made pension-
ary (chief magistrate) of Rotterdam and was also selected to be one

< *

of a diplomatic delegation to go to England and conduct negotia-
tions of great importance to his country. Though the diplomatic
negotiations came to naught, Grotius remained in England sev-
eral months and improved his time by making a wide circle of
friends.

Such unbroken sunshine as had favored the career of Grotius up
to this point could not last forever. Soon after his return from Eng-
land clouds began to descend — clouds of religious bigotry and
fanaticism. It all grew out of a ridiculous doctrinal controversy be-
tween iwo Protestant factions, which Grotius, on account of his
official position, could not escape being drawn into. Arminius, a
professor of theology in the University of Leyden, started the trouble
by teaching doctrines as to predestination, atonement, and saving
grace that were far too liberal for the orthodox Calvinistic taste. He
was answered by Gomar, another Leyden professor, and soon the
fat was in the fire. Pastors and people declared themselves to be
either Arminians or Gomarists, and scores of congregations were
rent in twain by the dispute. So widespread and bitter did the con-
troversy become that political complications were inevitable. Prince
Maurice of Orange, seeking an opportunity to strengthen the posi-
tion of his house in Dutch politics, sided with the Gomarists, who
were in the majority. Barneveld and many other leading patriots
were aligned with the Arminians.

Grotius took no part in the theological aspects of the quarrel,
though his sympathies were with the Arminians; nor did he become
involved politically until his official position made action necessary.
The legislative assembly of the Dutch states, fearing that the row
aright lead to civil disturbances, decided to stop it, and appointed
Grotius to prepare an edict commanding toleration and forbidding
ministers to discuss the disputed questions from their pulpits. The
Gomarist party took violent offense at this edict and refused to obey
it. Thereupon Barneveld, the grand pensionary, secured the adop-
tion of a measure authorizing the use of troops to suppress disorders.
Barneveld and Grotius thus incurred the unrelenting hatred of the
Gomarists and gave Prince Maurice the means of executing a bold
stroke to clinch his popularity with the majority parry. Pretending

LITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

to ac: in the interest of public order and security, he suddenly placed
Barneve'd and Grotius under arrest and charged them with con-
spiracy against the peace of the state. This occurred on August 29,

Barneveld was brought to trial on the charge of treason on March
7, 1619, convicted and put to death. Grotius was tried on the same
charge on the 18th of May, and escaped the death penalty largely
because Barneveld had insisted thai the responsibility was primarily
his. The sentence imposed on Grotius exacted the forfeiture of all
his properw and condemned him to life imprisonment. He was
immediately transferred to Loevenstein prison to begin the sen-
tence. He spent two years in this somber bastille and might have re-
mained there for life had it not been for the courage and ingenuity
of his wife.

As a political prisoner Grotius was allowed to have his wife in
prison with him and was also allowed to bring in food, linen, books,
and other articles for his use. It was customary for such things to be
brought to the quarters occupied by Grotius in a large chest which
was always under heavy military guard. The chest would be left
until the Grotiuses had emptied its contents and filled it with articles
to be carried out of the prison. Since there were two rooms in the
apartment they occupied and Grotius was not always present in the
main room when the guards brought and carried away the chest
Madame Grotius conceived the idea that her husband might some
day be substituted for books and be carried to freedom. She care-
fully rehearsed Grotius for the attempt and made discreet arrange-
ments for Ms reception on the outside. Then one day in the spring
of 1621 she called the guards to remove the chest as usual, made a
distracting joke about Arminlan books when they complained about
its weight, calmly watched them lock the door which might seal her
own fate and her husband's too, and resigned herself to whatever
might come. The ruse was completely successful, and Grotius, with
the aid of friends, quickly made his way to Paris in April, 1621,
Fortunately the vengeance of the authorities did not extend to
Madame Grotius, and she was shortly able to join her husband in
the exile which was to continue for the remainder of his life.

Through Influential connections in Paris, Grotius was able to se-
cure for a time a small and irregular pension from the French king,
but this, even If It had been promptly and fully paid, was Insufficient

SOVEREIGNTY 177

for his needs. The tragic role of impoverished gentility was now to
be his until the end of life. His intellectual fecundity, however,
suffered no Impairment on account of the straitened circumstances
into which he had fallen. Before he had been in Paris a year he had
rwo treatises ready for the press and a third in preparation. In the
spring of 1623 he began work on a plan he had long had in mind to
rate something on the rights of war and peace, and by June, 1624,
it was nearly finished. A year later it was published in Latin under
the now immortal title De Jure Belli ac Pads. It was the master work
of his life, now venerated as the first thorough and comprehensive
book on international law. The appearance of this book greatly
promoted Grotius' fame, but brought him no money. His material
circumstances becoming increasingly unbearable, Grotius began to
cast about for some appointment that would pay him a living. He
had hoped that some turn in political events might enable him to
reenter the service of his own country, but of this there appeared not
to be the slightest chance. So in 1630 he reluctantly renounced his
Dutch citizenship and went to Sweden, where he was appointed
counselor to the queen. This was shortly followed by an appoint-
ment to be Swedish ambassador to Paris, and Grotius thereupon
returned to the French capital.

The next ten years were spent in Paris as Swedish ambassador.
They were years of distinguished diplomatic achievement, but also
of continuous financial difficulty. The ambassadorial stipend was
uncertain and small, and Grotius steadfastly refused to stoop to
the then common practice among diplomats of accepting bribes
from other sovereigns as a means of supplementing the official
Income. In 1645, feeling that his usefulness was at an end, he asked
to be recalled and returned to Stockholm. He was urged to remain
there in the service of the Swedish crown, but apparently had other
plans. He embarked for Lubeck on August 12, 1645, but never
reached his destination. A heavy storm forced the ship to put into
port near Danzig, and Grotius set out for Lubeck by wagon. En
route he was suddenly taken ill and died at Rostock on the 29th of
August,

Now that he was dead his native land was ready to receive him
back. The body was taken to Delft and buried in the Nieuwe
which by virtue of this immortal entombment has become
international shrine.

1~<? POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

VI

Few penmen have ever lived who were more prolific or more
versatile than Hugo Groiius. He cultivated all fields of learning,
and achieved distinction as a poet, dramatist, classicist, historian,
theologian, and jurist. Only in the field of international jurispru-
dence, however, did he win enduring fame. His De Jure Praedas
:' The Lax of Priz*}* -Mare Liber urn (The Free Sea), and De Jure Belli ac
Pads ( The Law of War and Peace} constitute a trilogy to which hom-
age will be paid so long as there is a law of nations. In relation to
international law Groiius stands in the same position that Littleton,
Coke, and Biackstone have in relation to the Common Law of Eng-
land. His De jure Belli ac Pads was the first commentary of a com-
prehensive and authoritative character upon the legal practices
obtaining in international relations.

The rules and principles he enunciated were sometimes his own
inventions, but more frequently they were restatements of widelv

*

prevalent usages or of principles of natural law. What Grotius did
was in reality more valuable than the invention of a system of inter-
national law. He looked out upon a European scene that appeared
to be chaos incarnate and saw beneath the anarchic panorama the
rudiments of universal law. These became the theme of his dis-
course, and he pressed them home with a logic and an eloquence,
reinforced by astounding erudition, that were unanswerable. The
age in which he lived was one of almost continuous warfare; the
mediaeval empire was desperately striving to postpone the inevit-
able by recourse to alliance and intrigue; the Catholic Church was
battling mightily to retain its temporal as well as its ecclesiastical
hegemony; the Protestant movement was split into warring fac-
tions; and the rising national commonwealths of Europe were in-
cessantly fighting over territorial, dynastic, and commercial matters
as well as over differences of religion. Yet underneath this regime
of violence and disruption the creative vision of Grotius beheld and
made others behold the inchoate outlines of a system of interna-
tional jurisprudence.

Three in number were the bed-sills upon which the learned exile
bulk his edifice of thought— the law of nature, the law of nations,
and the doctrine of sovereignty. Starting with a truly Aristotelian
conception of the inherently social nature of men, Grotius posto-

SOVEREIGNTY 179

laied law as a necessary concomitant of societal existence. Even
brigands, he declared, have need of regulatory measures, and
therefore of some sort of makeshift system of law and justice in their
common relations. Even greater, he argued, is the need for law and
instice in higher types of human society. Law and society, there-
fore, ao hand in hand; one cannot exist without the other. Man
k a reasoning animal, and human society is the product of reason.
Hence it follows that law, which is an essential and natural corollary
of society, is also an outgrowth of reason. Wherever there is social
life there is reason, and likewise law — natural law.

Bv this process of thought Grotius reached the conclusion that
ihere is a body of universal law — the universal law of nature, or
right reason — which is uniformly applicable to all peoples, and is as
authoritative and absolute as Supreme Reason itself. "The law
of nature, again, is unchangeable — even in the sense that it cannot
k changed by God. Measureless as is the power of God, neverthe-
less it can be said that there are certain things over which that power
does not extend. . . . Just as even God, then, cannot cause that
two times two should not make four, so He cannot cause that which
is intrinsically evil be not evil. . . . Furthermore some things be-
long to the law of nature not through simple relation but as a result
of a particular combination of circumstances. Thus the use of things
in common was In accordance with the law of nature so long as own-
ership by individuals was not introduced; and the right to use force
in obtaining one's own existed before laws were promulgated.33 1
From this quotation it is apparent that Grotius thought of man-
kind as being subject to a body of eternal principles which are part
of the very nature of God Himself, and which are therefore inher-
ent in all things terrestrial as well as in all things celestial. This
law of nature must apply to all peoples and govern their mutual
relations.

The law of nature, said Grotius,, must be clearly distinguished
from the law of nations. "The distinction between these kinds of
law is not to be drawn from the testimonies themselves . . . , but
from the character of the matter. For whatever cannot be deduced
from certain principles by a sure process of reasoning, and yet is
dearly observed everywhere, must have its origin in the free will of
2 The latter type, which Grotius called " volitional" law, was

& Jure Belli ac Pacis (Kelsey trans., 1 925), p. 40. 2 Ibid., pp. 23-24*

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

based, not upon absolute reason, but upon mutual consent evi-
denced by ; 'unbroken cusiom and the testimony of those who are
skilled In it/' : Grotlus had much difficulty In maintaining this
distinction, and even more difficulty with the jus gentium, which was
the third leg of his tripod.

The Roman jits gentium was a body of private law* which had been
evolved In the administration of justice between aliens or between
aliens and citizens. Grotlus treated it as public law, governing the
relations between peoples: and reasoned by analogy that a similar
body of law had grown up in Europe. His analogy was bad and
much of his discussion without point as to international law. Never-
theless his performance was impressive and stimulated thinking
In broader terms about the legal side of International relations.
Ideally, according to Grotlus, precepts receiving the common con-
sent of nations should not be Inconsistent with the law of nature.
If a rule was commonly observed by universal consent, it must be
for universal advantage, and how could that be true if it were
contrary to the law of nature? But Grotius wras so strongly con-
scious of the principle of sovereignty that he could not dogmatically
deny that accepted usages had the force of law simply because they
lacked the sanction of universal reason. He felt compelled to admii
that If the element of common consent was present, a rule must be
recognized as law from the practical standpoint, irrational though
it might be.

When he came to face the concept of sovereignty, Grotius had a
still more difficult time. He could not ignore it, because it was a
political, if not a legal, fact. Furthermore he had to face the fact
of war. If he held war to be under all circumstances Incompatible
with law, he must ipso facto deny the validity of both the law of
nations and the law of nature. For It was a self-evident fact that
war and many of its usages existed by reason of common consent,
either express or implied; also that war in many instances was
not in conflict with prevailing standards of right reason. So Grotius
undertook to reconcile law and war. "The end and aim of war/3
he said, "being the preservation of life and limb, and the keeping or
acquiring of things useful to life, war is in perfect accord with those
first principles of nature. If in order to achieve these ends it is
necessary to use force, no inconsistency with the first principles of na-

1 Ibid.s p. 40.

SOVEREIGNTY 181

lure is involved, since nature has given to each animal strength suf-
ficient for self-defense and self-assistance. . . . Right reason, more-
over and the nature of society ... do not prohibit all use of force,
but only that use of force which is in conflict with society. . . . 3' 1
But to outlaw force in conflict with society there must be some
authoritative basis of differentiation between the social and the
anti-social use of force. For this the concept of sovereignty was in-
dispensable. To legalize the use of force without the sanction of
organized society would be to make every person the judge of the
propriety and legality of his own acts of violence. Hence it was
necessary for Grotius to declare that the use of force could not be
regarded as legal unless it had the sanction of social authority; but,
when he undertook to define and locate social authority, he could
find no more satisfactory starting point than Bodin's doctrine of
sovereignty. Therefore he laid down the postulate at the outset of
his treatise that lawful war can occur only when two conditions
are satisfied: first, that it shall be waged under the authority of
one who holds the sovereign power in the state; and, second,
that it shall be conducted in conformity with certain regularizing
formalities.

In defining sovereignty Grotius followed Bodin so far as to say,
"That power is called sovereign whose actions are not subject to
die legal control of another, so that they cannot be rendered void
by the operation of another human will.53 2 This supreme power,
in his opinion, was a necessary product of social life. Because so-
ciability is instinctive, he declared, men associate together perhaps
quite involuntarily. From primitive forms of association they pro-
ceed consciously to the formation of organized groups, and each
member, upon entering such a group, assumes an obligation to
maintain the group. By this social compact the community is made
sovereign. The people of a community may retain sovereignty in
their own hands, exercising it through responsible magistrates, or
they may yield it to a prince or king to be exercised by him as he
sees fit. Furthermore they may grant it to their rulers conditionally
or unconditionally; may divide or concentrate it as they prefer.
In arguing the possibility of limited and divided sovereignty Gro-
tius differed from Bodin, who conceded nothing of sovereignty to
political authorities devoid of total and supreme power.

lHtid., pp. 52-53. 2 Ibid,, p. 102.

182 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

At this point in his theory Grotius ran into heavy seas. If sover-
eignty meant supreme authority, so far at least as external rela-
tions were concerned, how could a sovereign state be subject to
international law? To this question Grotius gave as good an answer
as has ever been made. The state, he repeated, is a community of
human beings organized to do for the individual what he is in-
capable of doing for himself. By voluntary agreement, according
to the theory of social compact, each individual subjects himself
to the sovereignty of the state and to the law that issues therefrom.
Hence, Grotius argued, the national will has its origin in the free
will and reason of the citizens of the state. Similarly, he contended,
the nations of the world constitute a community — not of individ-
uals., but of states. This community of nations, he said, exists by
reason of the same basic social necessities that have summoned
individual states into being and stands in the same need of law.
Such being the case3 it should logically follow that every nation
taking its place in international society voluntarily subjects itself
to the necessary and generally accepted law of international society.

It is easy to pick flaws in this logic. In the first place, it begs the
question by assuming too much. The nations of the world were
far from constituting an international community in the time of
Grotius., and probably have not yet fully reached that stage of de-
velopment. In the second place, it presses the analogy between
national and international community life farther than the facts
justify. The individual in becoming a member of a national staie
entirely divests himself of all attributes of sovereignty and of all
right to oppose his will to that of the state; the sovereign state, be-
coming a member of the international community, surrenders
none of its sovereignty and freely claims the right, in matters vital
to its to oppose its will to that of the whole world.

But these very weaknesses in the logic of Grotius have become an
imperishable crown of glory; for by predicating international law
upon a hypothetical community of nations, he not only gave a tre-
mendous impetus to juridical thought which treats the usages of
international life as though they were the law of a community of
nations., but also traced out the only path by which a world of in-
dependent sovereign states may move in the direction of order
and integration. Grotius was but one of many thinkers whose
minds were marching in this direction, and scientifically his work

SOVEREIGNTY 183

deserves no more acclaim than that of Vitoria, Suarez Avala
Genrilis, and others who both preceded and followed him' but his
writings did more to crystallize attention on the problems of inter
national jurisprudence than those of any other man, and so he has
come to be called the "Father of International Law."

REFERENCES

Altai. J. W., Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century (London 1928)
C°kCha7x\^Xvfl ^ POMCd mi°SOpky (rev- ed'> New York, 1938),
XIV-xVl^^ °fPolitical Philos°Phy (New York, 1936), Chaps.

Theory from Luther to

Th°Ugkt-from Gersm to tiotius (Cambridge,
GetteU, R. G., History of Political Thought (New York 1924} Than VTT
LittlephnJ.M., The Political Theory of the Schoolmen andGrotius (New York,'

McGovern, W. M., From Luther to Hitler (Boston, 1941) Chap

'

Sk
Vreeland, H., Hugo Grotius (New York, 1917).

CHAPTER XII

THE DIVINITY THAT DOTH
HEDGE A KING

FEW theories have served political society more usefully than
ihe much-belabored dogma of the divine right of kin^s.
This view Is now unpopular, but it is In accord with the well-
attested facts of history. For much that they now enjoy of solidarity
and stability, of internal security and tranquility, of functional
energy and efficiency In their governmental processes, modern
national states are deeply Indebted to the dominance, during the
formative period of national polities, of the divine right theory. I:
was an utterly false theory, but an Immensely serviceable one,

4 4 <* *

Only an unsophisticated or a theologically blinded mind could
believe that rulers actually were Invested with divine qualities;
only a Jesuitical mind could find in such a belief an Infallible ra-
tionale of political absolutism; but the practical utility of political
theories is not always to be guaged by their truth or falsity. Some-
times a wholly false theory may possess dynamic properties which
enable It to shape the course of human events more profoundly, and
sometimes more beneficently, than other' theories of greater truth
and less viability. It was so of the theory of divine right.

The western world at the end of the mediaeval period trembled
on the brink of anarchy. Universal authority was no more: that of
the Holy Roman emperors was dying of pernicious anemia, and
that of the popes was being blasted to fragments by the combined
forces of nationalism and ecclesiastical reform. National authority,
on the other hand, was not yet fully born. National dominions were
as yet Incompletely consolidated, and national spirit, though at
times very intense, was generally disposed to be incoherent and
uncertain of purpose. Thinking men clearly perceived the need of
widespread and powerful authority; but the bases of authority were
as obscure and baffling as the causes of the Black Death. Indeed the
people of the time had perhaps more fixed and definite Ideas about
the causes of the plague than they had about the sources and sanc-
tions of political authority.

184

DIVINE RIGHT OF KINGS

185

To some extent authority was still exercised by virtue of feudal
right, but feudal prerogative was in decay and progressively de-
clining to minimal proportions. To a certain extent also, authority
u-23 predicated upon ecclesiastical claims, both Catholic and Prot-
estant; but these were disputed, and were being rapidly under-
sued. In some instances authority was derived from the corporate
privileges of trade guilds and municipalities, but these were limited
h scope and entirely uncorrelated in function. Some shadowy
remnants of authority also adhered to the imperial crown, but
isse served no purpose save to cast doubt upon the validity of all
pretensions to authority. National princes, of course, were vigor-
ously asserting the right to wield supreme and conclusive authority
but their claims rested upon little more than the right of might'
Into this welter of uncertainty and vociferation the theory of divine
right of kings struck like a positive chemical reagent, and precipi-
'ated a definite, solid dogma which men not only could believe but
could use as a practical means to practical ends. It was, for the
circumstances, undoubtedly the simplest, the most plausible, and
me most practicable doctrine of political authority.

Dr. J. N. Figgis 1 has shown that the doctrine of divine right of
kings was lineally descended from the claims of divine right put
:3rth in support of the authority of popes and emperors. Christian
political ideology, especially after the promulgation of the mystic
togustmian concept of the Ciuitas Dei, tended to regard all author-
•iv as an emanation of the will of God. That of the popes must be
A it the papacy was historically and sacerdotally the sort of in-
amnon it assumed to be. No other hypothesis could satisfactorily
splain or justify the exercise of such authority as the bishops of
<ome had arrogated to themselves. The popes were obliged either
a advance the claim of divine right or recede from all pretensions
•o primacy both in church and state.

Similarly the mediaeval empire was bound sooner or later to
f rt to the claim of divine right. All Christians acknowledged
-ana as their true lord and sovereign; but Christ dwelt in heaven;

° T SU2erainty was more or less an abstraction. On earth the
^reign authority of Christ was exercised by his representatives
^epope was concededly the spiritual representative of Christ on

«, and, if the dualistic theory were correct, the emperor was his

ftfta* Right of &.nSs (2nd ed., 1914), Chap. III.

1*6 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

temporal representative. But the emperors, having military migl-T

A A "*• *•' * J*"^"*

at their command ; were not disposed to attach overmuch impor-
tance to the theoretically divine origin of their authority until they

*

found themselves being blotted out of the picture by popes asserting
that spiritual supremacy gave ihem authority over temporal rulers.
Then the emperors perceived the practical value of the divine right
theory and proceeded to give it high place in their arsenal of argu-
ments. If the pope could argue that he was the head of Christen-
dom, by divine appointment, and supreme over church and state,
the emperor could reply that secular authority was equally of
divine appointment, that Christ had enjoined obedience to the
secular powers, and. indeed, that the committing of secular au-
thority to the emperor vested in him a higher authority over tem-
poral matters than could be vested in the pope, whose jurisdiction
embraced non-mundane things alone.

Thus as a counter-theory to the divine right of the papacy the
divine right of secular authority became one of the buttressing
dogmas of the Holy Roman Empire. Doubtless there also lingered
in men's minds vague memories of Caesarism and its deified em-
perors, and this may have added a grain or two of credibility to die
notion of divinely ordained secular authority. Ho\vever that may
be, it is not difficult to understand why, upon the decline of the
Holy Roman Empire, the Idea of the divine right of national
monarchs should naturally succeed to that of a divinely appointed
emperor. Patriotism cannot bear the thought of alien rule; and, as
national spirit grew in volume and intensity, it was inevitable thai
the religious mind — and the mind of the Reformation period was
no less religious than that of mediaeval times — should see In the
king the personification of God's will as to political rulershlp.
Kings could wield real physical power; they were the pacifiers of
the state, who had put down Internal strife and established security
and order; they were, moreover, the leaders of their people in war,
the defenders of national honor and independence, the symbols of
national unity and greatness. If God approved of nations at al-
and this no patriot could doubt — He surely must have sanctioned
and blessed the kingship.

Of equal plausibility were the various other foundations upon
which the doctrine of divine right was predicated. Feudalism,
though on the wane, was still a potent influence upon the thoughi

DIVINE RIGHT OF KINGS 187

— • "'" '~ ~~ ~ ' ~~ "^ . -- - . - .._—.-•- ,_ - — _____ _„_- — ,.. -,

,f the time. The distinction between a nation as a political entity
ond as a feudal estate was not yet wholly clear. To the king as
supreme and heriditary landlord belonged the time-hallowed rights
of feudal suzerainty over the nation as a whole, and it was natural
that this should enhance the belief in the unique, if not sacerdotal,,
character of royal authority. Added to this was the juristic doctrine
Q-" sovereignty, which was beginning to gain wide acceptance.
Sovereignty and the divine right of kings fitted together like hand

and glove.

Bodin and the other philosophical expounders of the theory of
sovereignty had not insisted that sovereignty must in all cases reside
in the monarch. To them sovereignty was a quality belonging to a
t>eople viewed as a juristic entity. To the non-legal mind, however,
ibis abstruse concept was unintelligible, whereas the idea of sover-
eignty vested in a king was simple and easily grasped. That kind
of sovereignty was visible to the naked eye, and at the same time
satisfied the postulates of supremacy, indivisibility, inalienability,
and so forth which make up the framework of the theory of sover-
eignty. Though sovereignty, from a purely juristic standpoint, is
not a supernatural attribute, the idea of absolute authority is so
commonly associated in popular thinking with extra-human sanc-
tions that the ascription of sovereign authority to monarchs greatly
abetted the growth of the doctrine of divine right of kings. History,
100, could be summoned to the support of the doctrine. The Bible,
at that time, was pretty generally accepted as authentic history,
and Biblical accounts of the beginnings and development of human
society did not lack instances which could be cited in favor of the
theory of divine right of kings.

Being founded, therefore, upon assumptions which were wholly
rational according to the beliefs of the age, and upon practical con-
siderations wholly consistent with the facts of its political life, the
divine right dogma carried all before it, and left upon the political
consciousness of western peoples the impress of behavior-patterns
which the passing of more than three centuries has not sufficed to
erase,

II

The divine-right theory has appeared in numerous forms, all of
which have won the adherence of multitudes of conscientious and

18S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

rational beings. Most naive of all variants of the theory Is that which
credits the ruling monarch with descent from a divine parent or an-
cestor. This notion rarely fails to arise somewhere in the early stages
of political development, especially among primitive or semi-civi-
lized peoples. In this form the doctrine must have been a consider-
able factor in the regularization and permanent rooting of political
authority among peoples on the way to state life. Being of divine
genealogy, the king not only must be obeyed but worshipped as
well. His person is sacred, and the authority he wields must be
sacrosanct. Sophistication and advancement in culture tend to dis-
credit this childlike faith in the divine descent of royalty-, and sup-
porters of the dogma of divine right are forced to seek more subtle
explanations of the divine basis of monarchical power. For this
purpose, in Christian countries. Scriptural proof has done yeoman
service.

In creating Adam, according to one of the earlier forms of Scrip-
tural demonstration, God not only fashioned the first man but the
first paterfamilias. As head of the first family Adam was invested
with paternal authority, having received the same with the breath
of his body from the empirical Jahveh himself. From Adam this au-
thority was transmitted by inheritance to his patriarchal successors
through the generations until finally it came to repose in the hands
of reigning monarchs, who must therefore be regarded as patri-
archal overlords enjoying by divine sanction the same familial au-
thority which Adam had received directly from the Almighty.

For minds which did not doubt the perfect historicity of the He-
brew Scriptures^ this hypothesis was entirely satisfactory; but for
those which could not take their Scripture in undigested lumps, a
less strained exposition of the Scriptural basis of divine right was
necessarv. This was found in the universal belief that the Bible*

«c *

whether good history or not, did contain the authentic word of God
for the regulation of human conduct. This no Christian would
deny. The Bible was the court of last appeal on all questions of
man's duty under the will of God. By a discriminating selection of
Biblical texts, therefore, it was easily possible to convince the pious
that the rule of kings was founded on the express approval of the
Lord Jehovah. "Counsel is mine, and sound wisdom," declaims
the Lord of Hosts in the fifteenth chapter of Prbverbs : "I am under-
standing; I have strength. By me kings reign, and princes decree

DIVINE RIGHT OF KINGS 189

. — — ' — "" ~~ '"" """" ' ~~ : " — -•—* -- «-»™r "" " ™™ " .. . _ -

:iKdte. Bv me princes rule, and nobles, even all the judges of the
*arih.'1 If such gleanings from the Old Testament — and there were
raanv of like tenor — did not suffice to convince the Christian, there
Were the infallible words of the meek and lowly Nazarene himself,
commanding his followers to £ 'render unto Caesar the things which
^ Caesar's/5 and his even more conclusive remark in reply to
Pilate's boast of power to send him to the cross: "Thou couldest have
no power ai all against me, except it were given thee from above."
\nd if these were not enough, there were the apostolic admonitions
of St. Peter and St. Paul, saying ccThe powers that be are ordained
of God, Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the
ordinance of God."

The philosophic mind, however, would not be content with He-
brew history and Scriptural quotations. It demanded a demonstra-
tion of the validity of the divine-right theory in terms of natural
reason. For this mind too there was a seductive garb in which to
oresent the doctrine of divine right. God, it solemnly premised, is
the author and director of the universe, and necessarily also of hu-
man society. God, therefore, must have foreseen the need of order,
iustice, and regulative authority in human society and made due
provision for it. Such institutions of authority as develop in human
society must consequently be part of God's unfolding plan and con-
astent with His will. From savagery upwards to civilization every
step in the progress of the race has been a step in the direction of
more potent and more highly centralized authority. If such is the
law of nature, it is also the law of God, and royal power is to be
viewed as a product of natural evolution under the guidance of God.
Kings are God's viceroys and the only legitimate rulers of men.

As to which of these various modes of proving the case of the di-
vine right of kings had the most influence, we need not pause to
speculate. Their combined weight was sufficient to fasten the idea
upon the European mind in a way to produce tremendous conse-
quences. European peoples accepted monarchy as a divinely or-
dained institution, acknowledged the indefeasibility of rulership by
hereditary right, absolved kings (and therefore political authority)
irom accountability to any but God alone, and humbly accepted
unquestioning and obsequious obedience as the portion assigned to
them by the decree of the Supreme Ruler. Kings, taking advantage
of the absolute authority which thus fell into their laps, lorded it

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

over their subjects like oriental despots; ignored law, justice, honor,
and decency; stifled liberty and fattened on tyrannical exploitation
of the realms they claimed to rule as deputies of a just and merciful
Gocl But they also consolidated political power, welded discord-
ant and heterogeneous populations into vast national communities,
built up great and powerful states, furnished a nexus for the growth
of patriotism, laid the foundations of national cultures, and, most
important of ail from the modern point of view, made unquestion-
ing obedience and unquestioning belief in the sacred character of
supreme authority the first article in the creed of patriotism and the
first duty of a loyal citizen.

Ill

Not many lustrous names adorn the history of the divine right
doctrine. No Platos, Aristotles, Aquinases, Bodins, Mores, or even
Machiavellis enlisted their talents in its behalf. Millions of men be-
lieved it, and multitudes of writers espoused and defended it; but
not one gained immortality through his efforts. It was based upon
premises just as true and deductions just as logical as many other
theories of government which have shed everlasting fame upon their
originators and propounders. But the partisans of the divine-right
theory, instead of gaining credit, have gained something akin to
reproach. They have been put down as destroyers of human rights
and foes of human progress.

The most illustrious name in the list of divine-right protagonists is
undoubtedly that of the poet Dante, whose De Monarchia was rat-
ten for the purpose of demolishing the temporal pretensions of the
papacy and proving that monarchical power centered in a universal
emperor who was ordained of God. No more forceful and lucid
argument for secular supremacy was ever penned. Subsequent ex-
ponents of the theory of divine right found in the De Monarchia a
rich store of ammunition both for attack and defense; yet the repu-
tation of Dante rests mainly upon his other works. Gladly would
men forget the book which places the lover of Beatrice among the
champions of kingship by divine right. But it was a great book
which ably espoused a great theory of government. Man could only
fulfill his destiny, according to the fundamental postulate of the
great Florentine writer, and could only realize the full measure of
his endowments, when united with other men in social life. With-

DIVINE RIGHT OF KINGS 191

ut peace, order, and justice there could be no social life; and, with-
out monarchy, if experience proved anything, there could be no
oeace order, and justice. It was God's will that men should live
under conditions propitious for the realization of the best that is in
tlipm and hence that they should live in a social system providing

i^L A \^ i*f* J

the utmost peace, order, and justice. History showed that this was
best attained under powerful monarchs such as the Roman em-
perors were; hence monarchical authority must be ordained of God.
Supporting this line of reasoning with an abundance of historical
material, Dante produced a document that exercised a great in-
fluence upon the development of the divine-right theory.

In England royal power was earlier established upon an impreg-
nable basis and was fated to meet an earlier challenge than in other
European countries. The able Tudor line made royal rule virtually
absolute in the Island Kingdom, but, being practical governors
rather than doctrinaire theorists, did not bother much to inquire into
the religious, ethical, or philosophical implications of their achieve-
ment. There was protest and inclination in some quarters to resist;
but the Tudors succeeded in passing on to the first of the Stuarts a
kingdom in which royal authority was firmly established. Before he
fell heir to the English crown the pedantic James I had reigned some
years in Scotland and had enjoyed no little success in quelling
"Presbyterian HildebrandisnV 5 in that turbulent realm. So he came
to the throne as well-schooled in absolutism as any of his predeces-
sors had been.

But he was not the man for the spot, The fear of domestic an-
archy and the danger of foreign conquest, which had helped the
Tudors consolidate their power, no longer figured in the equation.
Moreover, James was an alien and was strongly suspected of Rom-
ish leanings. James believed that his succession to the English
ihrone was a triumph for the principle of legitimacy and hence for
that of divine right, whereas for the English it had been merely an
expedient to avoid civil war. The more he suffered in popularity,
the more vociferously did James insist upon the indefeasibility of his
royal powers and prerogatives. It became a sort of obsession with
Mm. In 1598, five years before his accession to the crown of Eng-
land, he published a tract entitled The True Law of Free Monarchies.
In this he upheld the dogma that kings rule by divine right, and
supported his arguments by appeal to the Scriptures, to the law of

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

nature, and to the law of Scotland. In 1607 he traversed the same
ground again in a tract called An Apology for the Oath of Allegiance.
and in 1615 he entered the lists a third time with a pamphlet en-
tided DtCLsrstioE of King James I . . . for the Right of Kings. By these
literary efforts James became ihe most conspicuous champion of the
divine-right theory in his day, and became also the chief target of
the slcwlv rising; opposition to that theory. Neither he nor anv of hk

4 *^S i A ^ »«*^.JL V XJ,i l.iJL.^1

dynast}- were ever completely able to overcome the ill-will and
suspicion which these ill-timed products of the royal pen helped
engender.

Perhaps the most artful and effective controversialist on the roval
side of the struggle in England was a country knight named Sir
Roben Filmer. Filmer was a Cambridge man who lived the life of
a prosperous rural squire until the Puritan Revolution aroused his
combative spirit and fired him with zeal to answer the attacks that
were being made upon the monarchy. Then he rushed into the fray
with a series of pamphlets and books which soon placed him in the
forefront of the royal apologists. Filmer's best known work is his
Patriarchy which was not published until twenty-seven years after
his death in 1653. As the title of the book indicates, Filmer sup-
ported the principle of divine right on a patriarchal theory; one
quite different from the patriarchal theory of the present day, but
one widely entertained in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
He started with the proposition that God had bestowed patriarchal
authority upon Adam as head of the first family. From Adam he
traced the descent of this authority through successive generations
to Noah, and from Noah lie traced it through Noah's three sons,
Shem, Ham, and Japheth, to the three continents of whose inhabi-
tants they were the supposed progenitors. In direct line from the
three sons of the ancient amphibian, Filmer explained, patriarchal
authority has descended to the heads of tribes and then of nations.
This, of course, was preposterous history, but it was the kind of
history that the faithful of his day devoutly believed, and, indeed}
thai not a few of the fundamentalists of our own day still believe.

But It was not as a creative thinker that Filmer was most effective.
His peculiar forte was to let the wind out of the arguments of the
anti-monarchists. He met them on their own ground and turned
their own best arguments to their disadvantage. The idea of popu-
lar sovereignty he ridiculed as fantastic and impossible. If all the

DIVINE RIGHT OF KINGS 193

people had to consent to the exercise of sovereignty, he acutely
pointed out, government would be a never-ending melee. If, on
the other hand, the consent of only a majority were necessary, he
thought the case would be just as bad. What assurance could there
be that majorities would govern wisely and justly or that they
would contain those members of the population best fitted by in-
telligence, ideals, and experience to wield sovereign authority?
Wkh Bodin he took the position that sovereignty must be indivisible
or it is not sovereignty at all. How could this be possible, he in-
quired, under popular rule?

As to tyranny, he thought popular government was more danger-
ous than absolute monarchy. The tyranny of the many, he as-
serted, was just as real and even more intolerable than the tyranny
of one. If it was bad for one man to be above legal control, it was in-
finitely worse for many to be so situated. The idea that govern-
ment must be regulated by law and not by the capricious will of
man, he met by pointing out that in the last analysis it is always the
capricious will of man which determines the meaning and applica-
tion of law, and that a government of laws rather than men would
necessarily preclude such things as the power of pardon and the
functions of courts of equity. He vigorously combated also the argu-
ment that absolute monarchy was inconsistent with natural right
and natural law. The rule of one he held to be in entire accord with
the law of nature. Proof of this he found in the institutions of primi-
tive peoples and in the habits of lower animals. There was abun-
dant evidence that men and animals both in the less artificial
stages of their development instinctively and naturally preferred
the rule of one to the rule of many. Since it appeared to be natural
for God's creatures to behave in this way, it must be inferred that
the rule of kings was approved of God. No wonder Sidney, Milton,
Locke, and other advocates of popular sovereignty regarded Filmer
as a dangerous antagonist and directed heavy broadsides against
him. He was as devastating as an army to the popular cause.

On the continent of Europe the flood-tide of royal absolutism
came in France during the gorgeous reign of Louis XIV and found
its intellectual avatar in the resonant Bishop Bossuet. This mellif-
luous ornament of the Chapel Royal was appointed in 1670 to be
tutor to the dauphin, Louis XIV's only son. The relief from eccle-
siastical duties which this appointment afforded gave Bossuet op-

194 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

portunlty for scholarly endeavor, and he Improved his time
writing a series of treatises for the Instruction of his royal pupil.
Among The works which took shape under his pen in this period
were two of undoubted significance in the story of political thought:
the Discourse on Universal History and the Politics as Derived from tks
JVrv Words of the Holj Scriptures.

The first of these Is an account of God's dealings with man
through all the ages as seen through the eyes of the very reverend
author of the tract. It Is Important because It constitutes a land-
mark In the critical writing of history. It was one of the first at-
tempts in Europe to state the meaning of history In universal terms
and to draw broad philosophical conclusions from a comparative
study of the history of nations. The Politics purported to be a code
of rights and duties drawn up in the light of the conclusions reached
in the Discourse. Making large use of Scriptural quotations to but-
tress Ms conclusions, Bossuet laid down a body of universal prin-
ciples to govern the conduct of the God-appointed ruler. Had these
principles rested upon any sanction other than that of the Bible
Itself, they might have cost the learned bishop the favor of the Grand
Monarque, for they severely condemned practices that were in
common vogue at the French Court. Bossuet did not for a moment
question the divine right of kings; he was fulsome In his praise and
defense of that .great principle; but he held that even the authority
of kings must yield to the rational precepts of God. Indeed the
primary object of Bossuet's writings seems to have been to prove
the rational basis of all authority. Philosophy, he argued, demon-
strates the existence of God and the fact that He directs the course
of human events. History In turn demonstrates that God governs
human affairs not so much by direct intervention as by civil and
ecclesiastical institutions which He has ordained and which, there-
fore, must be obeyed as the earthly representatives of the Almighty.
The most ancient and most natural form of government, and hence
the one most approved of God, was in his opinion that of kings.
This conclusion he bolstered with a most impressive array of Scrip-
tural citations, showing that the authority of kings was of a paternal
character — sacred and absolute, but withal subject to the canons of
right reason. Though the king was in reason bound to obey the
laws, Bossuet held that he could not be coerced for failing to do so.
There was no right of resistance or rebellion. The only recourse

DIVINE RIGHT OF KINGS 19

-f the people, when an incumbent of the divine office abused hi
DOWCTS was to protest and pray, leaving the rest to God.

*

IV

Bv the time Bossuet wrote his ringing paragraphs the theory o
divine right was already on its way to the limbo of discredited doc
trines. Its work was done. Intellectually it was still as valid as an)
tkeorv of the opposition, but intellectual validity could not save it
What if there was better historical evidence, sounder philosophical
groundwork, and clearer Scriptural sanction for the theory of gov-
ernment founded upon divine approbation than for the theory ol
government based upon an elusive social compact? The divine
dieorv had outlived its social usefulness, and had to go. The social

*

compact theory still had its great work to do, and was therefore
bound to prevail.

Of the genuine utility of the divine theory, however, and of its
tremendous influence upon the development of national polities
and political ideas, there can be no doubt. Western society, emerg-
ing from the chaos of the Middle Ages into the more violent chaos
of die Protestant upheaval, had desperate need of a principle that
would furnish not so much a rational as a workable basis for law,
order, justices and obedience. And the empirical nationalism of the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had need also, tremendous need,
cf a principle that would materialize that unique and mysterious
unity of life-processes which bind a people to

One flag) one land^ one heart, one hand,
One Nation evermore!

The divine-right theory met these needs and thus became an

indispensable pier for the bridge between mediaeval and modern

limes. Without it the Reformation must have plunged Europe into

aiienninable disorder for want of a means of checking the anti-

lomian consequences of the breakdown of both imperial and papal

authority. Without it feudalism might have prolonged its grip

ipon western society (as indeed it did in countries like Germany

ad Italy where consolidation of authority was slow to arrive), thus

ong delaying the social and political integration necessary for the

1 * *

'eauzation of constitutional government and democracy. Without
t nationalism must have spent itself in tumultuous but vain en-

196 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

deavors to weld kindred lands and peoples into potent corporalities
capable of surviving the shock of the impending struggle for the
rights of man and of providing a theater in which that titanic
drama might be fully enacted. Without it ecclesiasticism mi^ht
have continued its deadening sway over the communal processes
of western peoples, thus strangling that free development of so-
cieties which has done so much to liberate the human mind and
spirit and promote the progress of the arts and sciences.

For these excellent services we are greatly indebted to the divine-
right theory. But not all its services were good. There came a time
when it impeded the advancement of society towards the goal of gen-
eral well-being, when it furthered tyranny and oppression. There
came a time also when national security was so well established and
national unity was so fully accomplished that national consciousness
had opportunity to become aware of the discrepancies between
monarchical theory and practice, and when the forces stirring the
common man to a sharper consciousness of his political and eco-
nomic power were such that the voice of the people could not be
silenced. Then the divine-right doctrine had to go. But it did nor
go without a struggle — a bitter and bloody one in most countries—
nor without bequeathing to posterity certain patterns of though
which were heavily freighted with destiny.

We no longer believe in the divine right of kings, but millions of
loyal citizens and true the world over agree with the dictum cf
Disraeli that :cthe divine right of government is the keystone of
human progress" and concur in the conclusion of the United
Lutheran Church that "The State is a divine institution . . .M
Christo et Patriae proclaims the motto of a well-known American
institution of higher learning — "For Christ and Country.53 The
state, be it noted, is not only placed in apposition to the Savior of
Man but takes the climactic position in the phrase. This is typical
not alone of American thought but of national thought and feeling
universally. One is not even qualified to become a citizen of the
United States in the judgment of the Supreme Court unless he will
place loyalty to the state above loyalty to Christ, a decision which
was applauded by multitudes of good Americans.

Yes, the doctrine of divine right of kings is dead, but it prevailed
long enough to implant in men's minds a belief in the sacredness of
supreme political authority, and that idea goes marching on, more

DIVINE RIGHT OF KINGS 197

nowerful than ever before because it has received the blessing of
^mocracy. No longer do we believe in the divinity that doth hedge
a kin**, but of the divinity that doth reside in the sovereign people
-he average man has not the faintest doubt.

Xor have we wholly abandoned the ancient superstition that
God specially intervenes In the affairs of men to set up systems of
government to His peculiar liking. Every year on the seventeenth
G; September the American people are regaled with scores of im-
passioned speeches reminding them that the God-ordained Con-
Stitution of the United States issued from the hands of its framers
on ihat day, 1787. For the celebration of Constitution Week in
!?23 the American Bar Association published a pamphlet in which
:i undertook to point out the precise moment at which God Inter-
vened in the proceedings of the Constitutional Convention of 1787.
After describing the difficulties of the Convention the pamphlet
reproduces Franklin's curious motion that the clergy of the city be
invited to offer prayers in the Convention every morning "implor-
ing the assistance of Heaven and its blessing on our deliberations.5'
"And from this time on," says the Bar Association pamphlet, "the
Convention began to make progress in the framing of that docu-
ment which Gladstone declared to be cthe greatest piece of work
ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.3 "
It would be a shame to spoil such a pious fable, but the serious
student of history may be interested to know that Madison's De-
istoj pp. 259-260, tell a somewhat different story. Franklin's reso-
iudon was presented on June 28, 1787, but was never brought to a
vote. In the brief debate on the resolution Hamilton and several
others expressed doubts as to the wisdom of such a resolution, say-
ing it would lead the public to think the internal difficulties of the
Convention to be greater than they actually were; and Mr. Wil-
liamson made the caustic remark that true reason for the. failure to
lave the clergy pray for the Convention was that there were no
imds to pay the fees which they would expect and demand. Ran-
iolph then made a substitute motion that a sermon be preached on
se Fourth of July and thenceforward that dally prayers be said.
Eais was seconded by Franklin, and after a number of desultory
tmarks the Convention adjourned for the day without taking a
*oie on the question. It was never brought up again.

think it absurd that men of the fifteenth and sixteenth cen-

198 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

turies should nave believed so Implicitly in the divine right of kines
as to be willing to bleed and die for C£God and King Charles'': bu:
how much less absurd are we of the twentieth century who believe
so devoutly in the divine right of government that we drape the
fiao1 upon the altar and go forth to war in full confidence that God

•C? •*

will preserve and prosper the precious government which He has
instituted among us? Henry Adams once remarked thai the for
law of politics Is paradox, and that perhaps is enough to say about
men's Ideas of God's relation to political Institutions.

REFERENCES

Allen, J. W.j A History of Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century (London,

1928), Part II, Chap. X; Part III, Chaps. II-III, VI-VII.
Cook, T. L, A History of Political Philosophy (New York, 1936), pp. 44"-

448, 457-460.
Dunning, \V. A., /I History of Political Theories from Luther to Montesquieu

(New York, 't 905), Chap. VI.

Figgis, J. N., The Divine Right of Kings (2nd ed., Cambridge 1914).
Gettell, R. G.3 History of Political Thought (New York, 1924), Chap. XL
Gooch, G. P., Political Thought in England from Bacon to Halifax (London,

1914), pp. 160-164.
Sablne, G. H., .4 History of Political Theory (New York, 1937), pp. 391-39",

CHAPTER XIII

THE RIGHTS OF MAN

I

OBEDIENCE/3 Napoleon Bonaparte is quoted as having said
on one occasion, "is man's destiny; he deserves nothing
better, and he has no rights.53 1 In uttering this brutal apho-
rism the glorifier of big battalions was saying nothing new; save for
a few humanists and a varied assortment of wild-eyed radicals the
sreat political thinkers of the past had spoken their disbelief in the
rights of man in terms no less positive than the Corsican. The

O

ancient mind, and likewise the mediaeval mind, simply could not
«?rasp the idea of individual rights. The individual in the Greek
world existed primarily as an ingredient of his family and his city;
In ihe Roman world the individual, as Cicero was wont to put it,
existed primarily for the advantage and use of the state; in the
mediaeval world the individual was first of all a communicant
of the church and a link in the chain of feudal relationships. Indi-
vidual rights, in so far as they were recognized at all, were depend-
em almost entirely upon the societal status of the person claiming
them; as a mere human being he had no rights whatever.

It was the peculiar destiny of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries to let loose upon the world a swarm of explosive ideas
that would exalt the rights and liberties of man above all other con-
siderations, and would accord to the individual a status of im-
munity from the impositions of political authority and a rightful
function of participation in the process of government. The time
would come when crimes done in the name of liberty would justly
summon forth the avenging knife of a Charlotte Corday, when
nations would be convulsed by the insane fury of revolution, when
the little finger of a demagogue would be thicker than the thigh of
a king, and when despairing peoples would finally turn to dictator-
ship to save them from the excesses of democracy and liberty. But
die time would also come when free peoples, saturated with the
doctrines of democratic political philosophies, would learn in a
measure the difficult art of self-government, and would provide

lE.Ludmg, Napoleon (1926), p. 168.

199

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

tor the welfare of the common man more generously and more
solicitously than government ever before was known to do. But all
this was in the womb of the future. At the outset no man could
measure the potentiality of the ideas upon which the rights of man
were predicated or could possibly foresee their Protean influence on
the destinv of the human race.

a

The seeds of the radical political philosophies which germinated
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were committed to the
soil some decades before they actually took root. There could be no
experimentation with democratic theories while nations were in the
ihroes of birth, no dallying with abstractions in the midst of the
earth-rocking struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism.
What counted then was power — power to establish independence
and hurl back invasions, power to maintain order and exact
obedience, power to regiment the body politic and consolidate the
patriotic impulses of the citizenry. Monarchical institutions, theo-
retically founded upon divine right, satisfied these requirements
better than any other, and inexorably prevailed. But not without
question and dissent. Calvin had advised his followers to yield im-
plicit obedience to civil rulers up to the point where their commands
ran against God, at which point the duty of obedience ceased and
the right of resistance began. John Knox, even more explicitly
than Calvin, had denied the right of kings to command impiety,
and had even declared that kings had no right to rule unjustly,
saying that it was the duty of Christians to resist such monarchs,
George Buchanan, drawing his inspiration from Knox, had rea-
soned that tyrants may be opposed and even put to death for viola-
tion of their covenant with the people to rule justly and according
to law. The unknown author of The Defence of Liberty Against
Tyrants had also insisted upon the contractual basis of monarchical
authority, as had Althusius and several others. The Spaniard,
de Mariana, had evolved government from a prepolitical state of
nature, opining that restraints upon kingly powers and preroga-
tives are an invariable consequence of the natural process of politi-
cal evolution.

None of these anti-monarchical doctrines could achieve great
praciical force, however, until after national security and stability
had become so firmly grounded that regal authority could be chal-
lenged without danger to national independence. The England of

THE RIGHTS OF MAN 201

Charles I and the France of Louis XVI were so thoroughly nation-
alized that revolutionary upheaval could not dissolve the bonds
of nationhood or permanently impair their independence. Do-
mestic issues In these states could be fought to ultimate conclusions,
and radical theories tried out to the fullest extent. So it was that
rhese two countries became the stages upon which were enacted
ihe dramatic and bloody struggles in which political theories pro-
claiming the sacredness of constituted authority went down before
theories exalting the rights of man. First in England and then in
France monarchical authority overreached itself and stirred up a
hornet's nest of radical opposition which was destined to effect its

ruin.
Anti-monarchical radicalism developed along several lines. In

England the gradual perfection of the Common Law and the con-
comitant rise of the concept of the supremacy of law resulted in a
slowly-dawning conviction that the king like other persons should be
subject to the reign of law. Both in Parliament and in the country
at large the judges found ever-increasing support for their de-
mands of freedom from royal interference in the interpretation
and administration of the law, and intransigeant jurists like Sir
Edward Coke attained vast popularity by their stand for judi-
cial independence. Coke not only defied his royal master, who
theoretically was the source and fountain of all justice, but, upon
being removed from office, secured an election to Parliament,
where he took a leading part in formulating the famous Petition
of Right of 1628, one of the great landmarks of English constitu-
tional development. He, with Pym, Hampden, Eliot, and other
parliamentary leaders, was largely instrumental In spreading the
idea that every English citizen possessed certain fundamental legal
rights which should not be arbitrarily curtailed.

A second line of radical thought emerged from the religio-politi-
cai controversies following in the train of the Protestant Reform.
Religious dissent almost invariably begat political dissent, for
authority wielded in behalf of one religious body inevitably drove
all oiher religious factions into opposition and resistance. Protes-
tants became rebels in Catholic countries, Catholics in Protestant
countries. Protestant sects not only quarrelled among themselves
but engaged in political duels of the grimmest sort. When royal
authority was used in England and Scotland to force the general

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

acceptance of the episcopal system of the Established Church.
Presbyterians and Independents became bitter opponents of both
Crown and Church; and when, under the Parliamentary regime,
Presbyterianisrn rode in the saddle, Established Church men.
Catholics, and Separatists became defiers of authority. Thus was
political radicalism assimilated to holy causes and the idea of
individual rights in the political sense associated with the idea of
individual conscience before God.

A third stream of radical thought there was, too, and one which
proceeded from minds almost wholly philosophical. Men of the
stamp of James Harrington, Benedict Spinoza, and Samuel Pufen-
dorf held aloof from the arena of political and religious controversy,
and worked out their doctrines by processes essentially rationalistic.
After centuries of slumber the scientific spirit was being reawak-
ened; men who prized intellectual honesty could not prostitute
their minds to political partisanship. That such men more often
than not arrived at conclusions incompatible with absolutism may
suggest perhaps that no mind can be wholly indifferent to its
surroundings or wholly uninfluenced by its sympathies; but it also
indicates, and most significantly, that intellectual leaders were
seeking to explain and justify political authority on other grounds
than material necessity and religious sanction; were, indeed, grop-
ing for criteria which would measure the rights of political author-
ity by its service to mankind.

II

To find a rational basis for the notion of individual rights, men
have mrned to four principal doctrines : the doctrine of social con-
tract, the doctrine of natural rights, the doctrine of popular sov-
ereignty, and the doctrine of revolution. Ideas more freighted widi
seismic potencies never found shelter in the human skull. Thev

f

have shaken ancient and venerable political systems to ruin, and
have raised a perpetual challenge to authority. Arbitrary political
power still exists in the world, but its theoretical bases, save in
pre-war Japan and other feudal states, bear striking evidence of
the pervasive influence of the idea of individual rights. Political
authority, in twentieth century dictatorships, may be exercised in
simple terms of command and obedience, but it is claimed on no
such terms. It is not all gesture when a Stalin hands down a COE-

THE RIGHTS OF MAN 203

containing a lengthy bill of rights, or when a Hitler ap-
to the electorate in a predetermined referendum. Modern
dictators make no concessions to the rights of man, but all proclaim
themselves steadfast spokesmen and servants of the masses. Ruth-
'ess though they be in trampling human rights., they do it never-
ieless in the name of the people as a whole, whose voice and will
they profess to utter.

This is a very different sort of absolutism from that of the olden
dav when the pious churchmen of England unctuously sang:

if

The rich man in his castle,

The poor man at his gate,
God made them, high or lowly

And ordered their estate.

The High and the Lowly, in the political as well as the economic
sense, are with us still, but not as in a God-ordained estate. The
High, in government, have acquired a keen awareness of the Lowly
and a deep respect for their political might. For, if the revolu-
tionary frenzies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries proved
nothing else, they did conclusively demonstrate the ultimate frailty
of all political systems that ignore the common man and his beliefs
as to his own rights. And the common man, all over the world, in
proportion as he has assimilated the volcanic ideas of social con-
tract, natural rights, popular sovereignty, and revolution^ has de-
manded and received a larger and more decisive role in the affairs
of state.

Yet none of these earth-shaking doctrines was ever anything more
than a theory, insubstantial and fine-spun at the best. Not one of
them could be scientifically demonstrated to be true; not one was
dialectically invulnerable. They were believed not because men
knew them to be true, but because they represented what men
wanted to believe, indeed had to believe, in order to find grounds
for rejecting the ancient verities and destroying the social and politi-
cal systems which rested on them, They were doctrines of faith
rather than fact, and their power was perhaps the greater because
of their appeal to the heart as well as the head.

Great grandfather of all doctrines of human rights is the theory of
social contract. Whose was the first mind in which this hoary idea
look form can never be known. It seems to be almost as ancient
as the race and to antedate all systematic political philosophies.

LITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

. E. D. Thomas has found traces of it in the writings of several of
the ancieni sasres of China, and it is also shadowed forth in the spec-
ulation? of a number of the oldtime pundits of the Hindus. In Euro-
pean thought i: first appeared among the Greek Sophists, but did
not attain controversial importance until after students of the Ro-
man and the English law had thoroughly worked out the legal con-
cepts underlying the idea of contract. Political thinkers then could
not fail to perceive the applicability of the principle of contract 10
the relation of ruler and subject and to evolve theories of political

origins which mieht furnish a rational foundation for such a
~ -*

hypothesis.

The first postulate of the social contract theory was that there ex-
isted, at some unremembered time in the past, a prepolitical state of
nature in which men lived without government and every man did
that which was right in his own eyes. As to the precise character of
human relations in this state of nature there were sharp differences
of opinion. Some theorists painted a lovely picture of presocial man
living in an idyllic, Eden-like condition; others conceived of the
state of nature as a condition of brutish anarchy in which even-
man's hand was against his fellows and the only law was the law of
fist and fang; still others saw it as a state of primitive simplicity in
which men had little need of government because they had no com-
munity concernments which required regulative authority. Bui
all agreed upon one point: that man in the state of nature was free,
utterly and absolutely free, and, so far as his own might and clever-
ness could avail, subject to no will but his own.
, The second postulate of the social contract theory was that at some
unspecified point in their development men abandoned the state of
nature, surrendered their freedom, and by contract or compact set
up governments to wield authority over them. As to the causes of
this departure from nature and the elements of the social conuaci
which superseded nature's law, the learned professors were hope-
lessly at variance. Theorists who viewed the state of nature as a
condition of Arcadian bliss reasoned that the growth of complex
social conditions, such as might be incident to the multiplication of
population^ the rise of private property, and the development of
trade and commerce, caused men to institute government in order
to preserve and maintain the beneficent advantages enjoyed in the
state of nature. Those who viewed the state of nature as one of de-

THE RIGHTS OF MAN

205

pravity and violence argued that men were forced to establish gov-
ernment in order to attain security, establish law and order, and
safeguard their liberties and property. Those who conceived the
sate of nature as one of troglodytic unsophistication thought that it
was simply and naturally abandoned when men advanced in cul-
rure to the point where they were able to perceive the advantages of
social life and organization. One guess was as good as another, and
the embattled savants who banked on the social contract doctrine
;o prove a case did not fail to do their guessing according to the case
they set out to prove.

• Similar fabrication of premises to fit conclusions already reached
was to be observed in the divinations of social contract theorists re-
specting the intrinsic character of the social contract. One school of
dogmatists was perfectly sure that it was a contract by and between
their rulers whereby the people's obligation to obey ceased when the
ruler failed in the performance of his contractual obligations- an-
other was equally positive that it was a contract between the people
only whereby they mutually agreed to a certain regime of govern-
ment, and that the ruler, being the subject of the contract but not a
party to it, could not possibly vitiate it; that could only be done
through the agency of the parties themselves. Here again one guess
was as good as another, and most of the guessing was shaded by the
partisanship of the guesser.

. It is easy to ridicule the social contract theory. As a scientific ex-
planation of the origin and nature of political institutions it ap-
proaches absurdity. No such state of nature as that imagined by the-
orists of the idyllic school ever could have existed, and no such state
01 nature as that imagined by the violent anarchy school or by the
primitive simplicity school could have existed under circumstances
that would have made possible the formulation of a definite and
comprehensive political compact. History does not record a single
authenticated instance of state-making by contract among men
emerging from a prepolitical state of nature, and modern anthro-
po ogicaJ research adds proof that such a phenomenon is scarcely
wthm the realm of possibility. Not only has no social contract of an
express character ever been turned up by the labors of scientific
roesngators, but likewise few conditions from which the formation
« an implied contract could be reasonably inferred. So far as we
KWW anything at all about the nature of ante-social man (if there

p

206 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

ever was such a being), we know nothing to warrant die inference
that he possessed ihe Intellectual wherewithal to make a definite
contract ofanv sort, much less one of such scope and complexity as

*• "* J» rf

political compact must be. The idea of contract is itself a social
roduct, and could not have developed until long after men had
builded societies and forged political mechanisms for their regula-
tion.

Let not, however, the evidential shortcomings of the social
contract doctrine blind us to its tremendous importance. Those
shortcomings were not apparent to the men of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, nor are they fully apparent to the average man
of our own day. More exactly than any other theory ever advanced
it expressed what the average man is likely to think logically should
have happened in the formation of the state, and therefore what he
Is prone to believe did happen. The doctrine was plausible, and
men wanted mightily to believe it. The virtual breakdown of politi-
cal society following the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West
and the subsequent emergence of a number of national political en-
tities In which the feudal element of affiance played a large part
gave plausibility to the view that the state was a conscious creation
of human intelligence and will. Added to that element of plausi-
bility was the discovery and exploration of the American continents,

t 4 L '

which had brought Europeans for the first time Into contact with
primitive peoples and had supplied much data (not always cor-
rectly understood or Interpreted) to confirm the belief in an original
non-political state of nature. Thus the social contract doctrine came
to be accepted as a great and significant truth which must be fol-
lowed not only In wrecking the old order of political society, but?
most important of ail, in building the new.

A logical corollary of the theory of social contract is the doctrine
of natural rights. Once it be conceded that men were born free and
lived anciently in a non-social state, it follows as an easy deduction
that they came into the world with certain natural rights. They
were born, and therefore had a right to be; they were born uncon-
strained, and therefore had a right to liberty; they were born naked
and stationless, and therefore were by nature equal; they were born
with certain Instincts and needs5 and therefore had a right to the
pursuit of happiness for the satisfaction of these inborn urges. Im-
bued with such ideas, it was easy to dogmatize. Manifestly men

THE RIGHTS OF MAN

207

had such rights, could not justly, unless they gave consent, be de-
prived of them; they were inherent— inalienable— sacred. The
individual and his rights loomed above all other considerations;
society and its concerns were secondary. Government must be
regarded as a necessary evil, to be endured because it had to be
but never to be allowed to encroach upon individual rights one
inch beyond the minimal necessities of law and order. For un-
warranted invasion of individual rights kings might be deposed
high magistrates removed, official authority ignored, and duly
enacted laws set aside.

. There are, of course, no such things as inherent and inalienable
rights. They are purely a figment of the imagination, wish-fulfill-
ment in political thinking. Universally recognized and respected
rights could not possibly exist in a state of nature where every man
was bound to do only that which was right in his own eyes. When
men talk of rights which other men must concede, they are talking
of something that calls for universal rules and means whereby they
may be enforced. The notion that one person of his own natural
nghi may lay indefeasible inhibitions upon the behavior of all other
individuals will not bear close inspection; the measure of individual
ngfatm a state of anarchy can be none other than individual might
conning, or self-denial. Only by collective action can men lay down
™-ersal rules of conduct and give them body and viability- the
Himpt to trace human rights to any other source is sheer fantasy
-Nevertheless it is not the rights we have, but those we think we
ia«, that actuate our political behavior, and for that reason the
;eneral acceptance of the doctrine of natural rights is one of the
aa momentous occurrences in history. It wholly reversed the
.reek and Roman postulate that the supreme expression of human
mergence, the finest product of human endeavor, is to be found
n ite state, and launched the western world upon an era in which
adrnduahsm would be magnified at the expense of collectivism
;k functions of the state would be cut to an irreducible minimum,
ad salvos of applause would greet the electrifying heresy of Thomas
ajne: Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the
jaces of kings are built upon the ruins of the bowers of paradise »
he worship of liberty would almost supplant the worship of God
JdauIhoM would voice approval when Theophilus Parsons'
to** say, "Polmcal liberty is by some denned, a liberty of doing

208 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

whatever Is nor prohibited by law. The definition is erroneous A
tyrant may govern by laws . . . political liberty is the right even-
man in the State has, to do whatever is not prohibited bv law*
TO WHICH HE HAS GIVEN HIS CONSENT." Carried over into tb*
sphere of economic thought, the cult of liberty would bring forth
the mighty doctrine of laissez jaire and lay the theoretical ground-
work for economic philosophies of free enterprise and for the
capitalistic institutions of the machine age. But for the general ac-
ceptance of the doctrine of natural rights and its concomitant doc-
trine of personal liberty, Adam Smith would have been a prophe*
crying in the wilderness and the school of economic thought which
derives from him would have perished at birth. The capitalistic
society of the nineteenth century could not have taken form, and
the bulwarks which have been built against socialism never could
have touched bed rock. Nor, of course, would it have been possible
for the inordinate excesses of individual liberty to have caused that
profound reaction which seems to be sweeping the world again
towards collectivism.

Popular sovereignty is a doctrine that goes inevitably with the
theories of social contract and natural rights. When Thomas Jeffer-
son wrote in the Declaration of Independence that all government
derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed" ar,d
Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address spoke of "this govern-
ment of the people, by the people, and for the people/3 they were
merely giving utterance to what seemed to them to be self-evident
truths. Accepting as they did the doctrines of social contract and
natural rights, they could scarcely escape the conclusion that sov-
ereignty lies with the people and vests in them the supreme power
of political decision and action.

From this hypothesis prodigious consequences have flowed. In
pursuance of the theory of popular sovereignty the structures and
processes of government have been radically transformed. Wide-
spread has been the effort to subject public officials to an increasing
degree of popular control. Universal suffrage, direct election of
public functionaries, the definite limitation of official tenures, the
direct primary, the initiative, the referendum, the recall, and nu-
merous other democratic mechanisms have as their primary object
the realization of popular sovereignty. The voice of the people has
indeed become the voice of supreme authority— unquestionable,

THE RIGHTS OF MAN 209

_ ' ' ' ~~ * ' ~~ ~ " — -- — - - -...-•-. ---._.-..— II r, -...,_ . ,™ ----—- — -J-I^TT- ...._ - „ ,.,

Legislators in democratic countries are increasingly
^xoected to function merely as phonograph discs to record and
produce the voice of the people; executives to be glorified bell-
-rfK 10 do their bidding, and judges to conduct bloody assizes

l.jtij ?**•"

the mob howls for the sacrifice of a detested scapegoat.

Popular sovereignty, in so far as it is attainable by mechanical
ineans js now a fact. Daily the voice of the people rolls out its
-"-Vacations to the rulers of the world, a confusion of tongues that
-'-fies interpretation and confounds statesmanship. Popular sov-
ereignty has resulted not in the solution but in the creation of prob-
:ei£S, niore baffling problems than the world has ever known before.
The fourth member of the titanic quartet of doctrines which
•ATOu^ht the triumph of democracy has suffered of late a vast decline
:f popularity. When popular government was yet a dream and the
rights of man an insubstantial hope, no dogma was more zealously
espoused or more righteously upheld than the sacred right of revo-
lution. It was a logical and necessary deduction from the other
iree. If government originated in voluntary contract, if men were
possessed of inherent and inalienable rights, if the people were sov-

Jt

ereisn and supreme, what conclusion could be more rational than
iat the people, in the event they should become convinced that
their government was destructive of their rights and liberties, should
have a right (to quote the Declaration of Indepencence) "to alter
or to abolish it, and to institute a new government., laying its foun-
dations on such principles and organizing its powers in such form,
as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happi-

5* 1

less r

That was good American political doctrine until it was taken
literally by eleven states which wished peaceably to secede from the
Union and set up a government seeming to them "most likely to
effect their safety and happiness." But since the Civil War it has
been taboo, and since radical socialists have begun to advocate
revolution as an appropriate mode of overthrowing capitalistic
society and inaugurating the collectivist milleniums it has been
outlawed by statute. A special fury is visited upon all who dare to
advocate openly the overthrow of government by force or violence.
Yei one must insist that it is logically unassailable, and that its

fellow doctrines lose all practical meaning if it be abandoned.

Thomas Jefferson was under no misapprehensions on that point and

210 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

"emphatically said in the famous letter to William S. Smith ';G* *
forbid that we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion
The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The pa**"
which is wrong; will be discontented in proportion to the importance
of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such mi;
conceptions it is lethargy*, the forerunner of death to the pub\
liberty. . . . What country can preserve its liberties if their mien
are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the
spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. . . . The tree of liberty
must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots an^
tyrants. It is its natural manure/' How can social contracts be
dissolved and remade, how can men secure their natural rieh«
how can the will of the people overcome intrenched opposition, if
there is no right of revolution?

Such in brief review are the political ideas which have so laroelv
made the political societies of the contemporary world. Manv
other ideas, many sounder and more scientific ones, have appeared
in later years, but few of equal fecundity and power. We shall
understand these things better after a review of the times and the
men that produced them.

REFERENCES
Cokei, F. W.; Readings in Political Philosophy (rev. ed., New York, 193S,

. XIV.

Dunning, W. A., A History of Political Theories from Luther to Monttswa

^Xew York, 1905), Chaps. II, IV, VI.

Figgis, J. N., Studies in Political Thought jrom Gerson to Grotius (2nd ed.,
Cambridge, 1923), Chaps. IV-VIL

Gooch, G. P., English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century (2nd cd.,

Cambridge, 1927). '

Laski H. J., "The Rise of Liberalism" in Encyclopaedia of the
Sciences (New York, 1930-1934), Vol. I, pp. 103-124.

CHAPTER XIV

FOR GOD AND KING CHARLES

I

STRANGE to modern ears are the uproars of receding ages,
and peculiarly strange those seventeenth-century outbursts
of sedition and civil war which marked the complacent and
phlegmatic people of England with the stigma of revolutionary
radicalism. Not England, but Russia, is for our day the malevolent
author of dangerous doctrines, just as was France for our forebears
cf the nineteenth century. But nothing can deprive the historic land
;f the Tory and the Dole of her rightful preeminence. She was the
first, and in some respects the most shocking, of madcap nations.
The year 1689 marks the end of a forty-seven-year phase in English
history which parallels in many striking respects the revolutionary
experiences of France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
and of Russia in the twentieth. And certainly the social changes
'ATOught and the political doctrines put into currency by the English
Revolution were as far-reaching in their consequences as their
counterparts of later upheavals.

Historians tell us that England was bent for revolution from the
moment the bungling son of Mary Stuart ascended the throne in
1603, This pedantic bigot certainly did nothing to allay the dis-
affection which had slowly gathered force during the final phases
of the Tudor pageant, and he bequeathed to his son, Charles I, a
terltage of trouble that would have appalled a man of genius.
But Charles was not appalled. His was one of those narrowly logical
natures which make a virtue of consistency in all circumstances.
Pious, sincere, and of good intention, he knew he was right and that
all opposition was the work of rascals. Of the arts of accommoda-
tion he understood little and cared less. The breach between the
Puritan and conservative wings of the English Church, which had
ton opened by the maladroitaessjDf his father, he not only failed
to heal but enormously widened; the Catholic question, which
had handled with little skill, Charles mismanaged altogether;
^e foreign policies of the father had embroiled the country in un-
»pular and costly wars, and those of the son gave added cause for

211

212 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

disaffection; the finances of the country, which James had left in
bad condition, his heir administered with a prodigal indifference
to economy of outlay or equity of taxation; the corruption of justice
to which James had resorted to accomplish his ends Charles car-
ried to the point of outrageous tyranny; the bitter quarrel with.
Parliament in which the first Stuart had become most unwisely
involved the second attempted to terminate by the assumption of
despotic prerogatives.

\Vhen5 therefore, in August, 1642, the king made answer to an
accusator>T resolution of the House of Commons by raising the royal
standard at Nottingham in defiance of all opposition, he precipi-
tated not merely a civil war but a social convulsion of first magni-
tude. Arrayed against the king were forces that would not shrink
from the destruction of the old order if need be to win. The right-
eous fanaticism of the Puritan divines and their hosts of followers
knew no bounds; and the country squires. Parliamentary politi-
cians, lawyers, and intellectual radicals who were likewise mainly
opposed to the king were scarcely less determined and desperate.
But the royal cause was not without defenders. Charles might be
a sorry excuse for a ruler, but the Crown was an institution mat
meant much to great numbers of Englishmen. The Church was a
national institution, beloved not alone by the placemen who con-
stituted its clergy but by multitudes of loyal laymen. The peerage
and most of its beneficiaries were necessarily bound up with the
Crown, as also were the great mercantile interests of the Iand3 al-
ways cautious and conservative. These great vested interests knew
what they had to fear from an attack upon Crown and Church.

In these embattled forces lay the making of a tremendous land-
slip in the political and social structure of English society. For
forty-seven years the struggle went grimly on. Neither side was
able to gain a decisive advantage until Cromwell emerged to give
drive and discipline to the Parliamentary party, whereupon events
began to move with dizzy pace. The fall of the monarchy, the be-
heading of the king, the establishment of the Commonwealth, the
ten-year dictatorship of the dour Oliver, the restoration of Charles
lly the quarter-century of profligate reaction under this frivolous
genius, the accession of James II, the second popular upheaval,
and the final founding of the constitutional monarchy under the
House of Orange constitute the dramatic high lights of the story.

FOR GOD AND KING CHARLES 213

. • — ~ — •

But there were deeper effects. "The economic life of the nation
. suffered seriously as a result of the Civil War. Thousands of
individuals had been ruined; public works had been abandoned, in
cases destroyed altogether. . . . Thousands of acres had been
thrown out of cultivation. Little respect was shown to the civil
"avr. crime and violence had increased steadily; murder, arson, and
highway robbery were common events of daily life. These were only
symptoms of a deeper malady, the general decay of civilization." 1

The intellectual life of the country was correspondingly disturbed,
for the contest was not merely a trial of arms but a war of ideas. The
role of the printing press was as significant as that of the sword, and
books won as many victories as bullets. In the radical doctrines out-
lined in the preceding chapter the anti-monarchists found muni-
tions appropriate for their assaults upon the ancient verities, and
these became the subject-matter of a deluge of partisan books and
pamphlets. Defenders of the royal cause returned the fire with an
qual quantity of polemic literature in which the monarchy, the
established church, and the privileged classes were held to be the
very groundwork of order, justice, religion, and civilization. Not
much of this ferocious inkslinging rose above the level of brawling
partisanship, though each side produced a few writers who made
great and lasting contributions to political thought. On the Parlia-
mentary side John Milton and John Locke particularly deserve to be
remembered for the depth and nobility of their thinking as well as
for the great influence they exerted; while of those who declared for
;*God and King Charles" none can compare with Thomas Hobbes.

II

The life of Thomas Hobbes almost completely spanned the Eng-
lish revolutionary period. Born in 1588, he was fifteen years old
when James I mounted the English throne, and when he died in
!6793 in his ninety-second year, the Restoration was on the wane
and the country was beginning to gird itself for the last phase of the
straggle. And he not only lived his four-score and twelve years, but
n?ed much of the time in the shadow of great events and in the pres-
ence of great figures. Few men have enjoyed longer or more event-
itil lives, and perhaps none so exceptional in qualities of body and
as Thomas Hobbes.

B.Terry, The History of England (1903), p. 365.

214 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

We often hear of child prodigies and sometimes of nonagenarian
prodigies. Thomas Hobbes was both. At the age of fourteen he
achieved distinction by translating the Medea of Euripides from
Greek into Latin verse; at the age of eighty-eight he astonished the
literary world with a polished translation of Homer into rhymed
Iambic verse In English; and, when death claimed him in the midst
of his ninety-second year, he was still In full possession of his literary
powers and busily engaged In turning out manuscript for his pub-
lisher. No less remarkable was die physical vitality of the man.
Despite a life of Indulgence (he was wont to boast that he had been
drunk a hundred times and did not blush to acknowledge an illegiti-
mate daughter), he played tennis regularly until well past the age of
seventy and seemingly never experienced the decline of physical
powers which normally accompanies senility.

Hobbes was the son of an Irascible English vicar whose stonnv
career forced him to place his children in the care of an elder brother
a prosperous glove-maker at Malmsbury. Here Thomas was placed
in school and seems to have had a succession of excellent masters,
At the age of fifteen, having already distinguished himself by his
translation of Euripides, he was entered in Magdalen College, Ox-
ford,, then under Puritan domination. Hobbes apparently recoiled
from Puritan discipline and learning. At any rate he acquired the
reputation of being an indifferent scholar and took five years to
graduate instead of the customary four. It is said that he would fol-
low none but his own methods and scorned the opinions of his
tutors.

In 1608, twenty years of age and just graduated from Oxford,
Hobbes became a tutor in the family of William Cavendish, Baron
Hardwick and later Earl of Devonshire. This attachment to the
Cavendish family continued for many years and was one of the
great formative influences of his life. In 1610 it became his duty to
accompany the son and heir of the family on a grand tour of the
European continent. During the year of travel which followed
Hobbes learned French and Italian and came into contact with a
number of leading continental scholars. This led to the discovery
that the philosophy he had been taught at Oxford was considerably
out of date and inspired him to seek to remedy his deficiencies by an
intensive course of study to which he applied himself for many
years. His connection with the Cavendishes brought him into con-

FOR GOD AND KING CHARLES 215

'

nth Bacon, Ben Jonson, and other English intellectuals and
upplied further incentive to intellectual endeavor. It was not
1628, however, when he was forty years of age, that he ven-
"-red to produce anything for publication. This was a translation of
rnucvdides, and was very well received. In 1631 he went abroad a
time as tutor-companion, his protege being the son of the
Cavendish with whom he had toured in 1610. This turned
-VT to be a very long tour, and Hobbes was abroad much of the
-hie during the next six years, thus having opportunity to renew
rJd contacts with continental scholars and make new ones, notably
\rith Galileo and Mersenne.

When Hobbes returned to England in 1637, the country was on
the verge of civil war. Hobbes was now forty-nine years of age, and
a rovalist by association if not conviction. He wrote a few mild

* *

pamphlets in support of the royal prerogative and soon found him-
self, as he believed, in imminent peril. The Long Parliament in No-
vember, 1640, demonstrated its ascendency by sending Laud and
Stafford to the Tower, and Hobbes, visioning a like fate for himself,
stood not upon the order of his going. Paris offered safety; and he
got there as fast as he could.

The fears which sent the timorous Mr. Hobbes posting off to
Paris appear to have been largely imaginary. He was not the
inarked man he supposed himself to be; but, not being one to take
risks, he chose to spend the next eleven years as a royalist emigre in
France and Holland. Here he lived a more or less irregular life as
the guest of friends among his compatriots and scholarly associates.
For wo years or more he was mathematical tutor to the exiled
arince of Wales, who was later to take the Crown as Charles II.
Previous sojourns abroad had served to arouse Hobbes5 interest in
mathematics and the physical sciences, and he had conceived a plan
or a monumental opus in which he would treat natural phenomena
n terms of motion. The project involved the writing of three books,
me dealing with physical bodies as universally explicable as motion
s* mechanical action, one with the human species as a particular
tudy in bodily motions as manifested in the characteristic phe-
iomena of individual being, and a third and crowning treatise on
ne state as a regulative mechanism for the intelligent and benef-
it direction and control of human life. This unique and daring
Acme of treating physical, anthropological, and sociological phe-

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

nomena as one coherent whole Hobbes no doubt would have exe-
cuted according to his original plan had it not been for the civil war
and the circumstances of his exile. The latter brought renewed con-
tacts with the scientific circles of the continent and deflected his
though: 10 independent siudies in mathematics and physics, while
the former heightened his interest in political theory and inspired
him to reverse his plan of approach and begin at once a treatise on
the state.

Of Hobbes' writings outside the field of politics this sketch will
not take note, save to say that he produced between 1640 and 16"5
— that is, between his 52nd and 91st years — a series of essavs on

^

mathematical and physical subjecis which stamp him as one of the
notable scientific inquirers of his age. Even greater is the recogni-
tion which must be accorded to his influence as a political thinker,
in 1642 appeared his first major work on politics, a small treatise in
Latin entitled De Give. Intended only for scholars^ this work was
privately printed, and circulated in a very limited way. But it was
so enthusiastically praised by the intellectuals who read it thai
Hobbes felt assured of the intrinsic soundness of his grand project
and deferred further publication of the treatise on politics until k
should have time to complete the other two members of the pro-
posed trilogy. This opportunity was long postponed. In 1642 what
had been civil discord in England flamed up into revolution., and bv
%/1644 the royal cause had suffered reverses which prompted thou-
sands of the king?s followers to flee the country. Association with
these newer refugees turned Hobbes3 mind again to politics, and i:
was not long before he "conceived his new design of bringing all Ms
powers of thought and expression to bear upon the production of an
English book that should set forth his whole theory of civil govern-
ment in relation to the political crisis resulting from the war." l He
De Give, though it contained the core of Hobbes3 political though;
was a highly recondite work in Latin, not as yet in general circula-
tion even among scholars. What Hobbes now proposed to do was
to amplify and popularize this work so as to give it point with refer-
ence to the English civil war. He did far more. When the new work
entitled Leviathan, appeared in 1651, it did not take long for the
world to discover that an enduring masterpiece of political thong!
had been wrought.

114 Thomas Hobbes," Encyclopaedia Britannica (llth ed.), Vol. xiii, p. 547.

FOR GOD AND KING CHARLES 217

The Leviathan at once became a storm center, and Hobbes' fame
~ minted to great heights. Blinded by the resentment which the
Ocular tone of the book had aroused among the Anglican clergy,
"4obbes? royalist friends turned against him, and the French court
**ok deep offense at his severe strictures on the Roman Church.
Hi* fellow emigres now shunned him, and there were whispers of an
rrack upon his life. Never a person to brave physical dangers,
Hobbes once more sought safety in flight. Quickly making his way
""ad to London, he threw himself on the mercy of the Parliamen-
-arv regime, and Cromwell, who was already too much a dictator to
be displeased by Hobbes' absolutist doctrines, quietly allowed him
:a :ake up residence in England.

Hobbes now sought retirement and peace to devote himself to
scientific and philosophical studies, but he was too famous a per-
sonage to be allowed to disappear from public view. He was able to
complete and publish, in 1654, the long-deferred first volume of the
projected trilogy, which was issued under the title De Corpore. More
2nd more, however, the true significance of the Leviathan was pene-
trating the Puritan mind, and this was furthered by the publication
in 1654 of a paper which Hobbes had drafted back in 1646 in an-
swer to a discourse by Bishop Bramhall on "Liberty and Necessity."
The paper had been intended for private circulation only, but a
;opy had been stolen from one of Hobbes5 acquaintances and pub-
lished without the knowledge or consent of its author. Bramhall,
supposing that Hobbes had authorized the publication, promptly
took up the cudgels against him and promised to expose him in his
true character. This was the beginning of a long series of critical
controversies in which Hobbes was attacked by many of the leading
scholars of the time, not alone by reason of his political doctrines
iwt also on account of the heretical character of his general scien-
tific and philosophical beliefs. In 1658 he managed to bring out the
& Hmine, the third member of his trilogy, and this along with the
De Corpore was denounced just as unmercifully as his political writ-
ings, Although these broadsides enhanced rather then impaired
Hobbes5 fame as a pundit, he acquired incidentally the reputation
of being an atheist, and this rallied the protagonists of all the war-
ring faiths of the time against him.

Had the Puritan regime continued, Hobbes undoubtedly would
Save suffered proscription; but by 1658 the tide of reaction had defi-

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

/

nitelv se: in, and ::: IcoO came the Restoration bringing to the
throne h;> quondam pupil Charles II. By this time the royalist
r/errxn: had lost its religious fervor, and the materialism of
jbb-^N vv"25 in fuL" >:ep wi:h the spirit of the hour. Ever a personal
:;'tVwriti- cf Charles, Hcbbes now became the intellectual lion of the
Re^oratlon. Charles granted him a pension and made him a repj-
lar attache of the court. Thus at the age of 72, in the enjoyment of
fame, security, and means, Hobbes entered the final phase cf
his amazing career. He might have enjoyed repose and retirement,
but the tremendous drive of his bodily and mental energies would
not allow it. For reasons of expediency the king placed a muzzle
upon his political work, and he turned therefore to more academic
fields and poured forth during the next nineteen years a succession
of treatises in physics, history, law, and classical literature which
would have been sufficient in themselves to establish the fame of a
lesser man. At the age of eighty-four he wrote his autobiography ID
Latin verse, a work said to be distinguished by £:its playful humor,
occasional pathos, and sublime self-complacency." l At eighty-five
he put out an authoritative and well-received translation of four
books of the Odyssey, and at eighty-seven he astonished the world
of letters by bringing out complete translations of the Iliad and the
Odyssey. In the middle of his ninety-second year a brief illness
struck the pen from his hand: and death came before he had time to
taste the feebleness and futility of old age.

By those who knew him intimately Hobbes is described as a man
of singular attractions. Handsome, witty, generous, loyal, epi-
curean in taste and mode of life, and yet withal a brilliant and pro-
found thinker, he was regarded as the personification of all but one
(physical bravery) of the most prized virtues of Cavalier England
But by his enemies, and especially by the Puritan clergy of the
Restoration Period, he was held to be the personification of evil-
atheist, libertine, monarchist, foe of human rights, a veritable Satan
incarnate.

Ill

All that is memorable in the political philosophy of Thomas
Hobbes may be found in the De Give and the Leviathan. Either book
would be sufficient to secure its author a high place in the pantheon

1 Ibid., p. 551.

FOR GOD AND KING CHARLES 219

of political thought, but the De Cive never could have achieved the
prodigious fame which came to the Leviathan. Although Hobbes
translated the De Give into English about the same time that he pub-
lished the Leviathan, it was too much a work of austere philosophy to
become the focus of popular controversy as the Leviathan did. The
latter contained almost every fundamental idea that appeared in the
De Cke and much to boot. In the Leviathan Hobbes gave more ex-
tended consideration to theological and ecclesiastical problems
bearing on politics and wrote with a provocative vigor which was
bound to send the hounds baying on his trail. The very title of the
book was a challenge, and the frontispiece contained the massive
figure of a crowned giant made up of tiny human figures and !
bearing in one hand a sword and in the other a crozier, the emblems
of temporal and spiritual authority. Who could fail to be intrigued I
by the thing or to glimpse something of its significance? It was a
took that simply had to be read and that, being read, either capti-
vated the reader with its trenchant style and remorseless logic or
shocked him to fury by. its cool dissection of human frailties and its
impious liberties with traditional verities.

Hobbes was not an atheist, nor perhaps a confirmed skeptic; but
his method and point of view were such as to convince the pious
that he was in very truth the Anti-Christ. He was first of all a con-
vinced materialist, utterly rejecting the supernatural and contend-
ing that all phenomena could be studied and understood in terms
of finite natural forces. Geometry was his hobby— in fact his grand
passion— and he firmly believed that all problems could be solved
fay the methods of geometry. Precedents and authorities he dis-
trusted entirely; for observed facts, however, he had deep respect
and for reason a reverence amounting almost to worship. He fre-

"""^LSjss^si^

^^f5j^^^2?e rcad^^^chjsjhey. Schoolmen "and
Diversities were among his pet aversions; and he delighted in bait-
ing them as much as the professional debunkers of the present day.

H ft T ¥ Tl TTs i^ ^"1 j^% Trt 1 /^ 1 *

vi unction, moral fervor, and sentimental idealism he had none

_
a^assionJbrs^

and was the master of a robust and compelling
English style.

c!5L*£J>S^ into the nature of

the state by a study of the nature of man as a sentient, acting phe-

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

-era-no::. The behavior of man, according to the initial postulate
o'rhe'book. is a rgqducToTexternal for c eloper atingu£onthe organs
" -rnediaiely as in die Tast and Touch; or

' <en<e --e

v'lii in Seeing. Hearing, and Smelling: which pressure, by the
lV^ai=o "V 'he Nerves, and other strings, and membranes of the

j.i.JT'tAJ.U' i*o*» vj*. >.i*.«~ ,

body, continued inwards to the Brain, and Heart, causeth there a
resistance, or counter pressure, or endeavour of the Heart to deliver
itself: which endeavour because Outward, seemeth to be some matter
without "-And this seeming or fancy, is that which men call Sense; and
con"?steih, as to the Eye. in a Light, or Colour figured; To the Eare. in
a Sound- To the Nostril!, in an Odour; To the Tongue and Palat, in a
Sarcw/and to the rest of the body in Heat, Cold, Hardness, Softness?.
and such other qualities as we discern by Feeling. All which quali-
ties called Sensible, are in the object that causeth them but so many
several motions of the matter, by which it presseth our organs di-
versely. Neither in us that are pressed, are they any thing else, but
divers motions. ... But their apparance to us is Fancy, the same
waking, that dreaming. ... For if those Colours, and Sounds,
were in" the Bodies, or Objects that cause them, they could not bee
severed from them, as by glasses, and in Ecchoes by reflection, wee
see they are; where we know the thing we see, is in one place; the
apparance, in another. .And though at some certain distance, the
reall, and very object seem invested with the fancy it begets m us;
Yet still the object is one thing, the image or fancy is another So
that Sense in ail cases, is nothing els but original fancy, caused (as I
have said) by the pressure, that is, by the motion, of exteraail
things upon 'our Eyes, Eares, and other organs thereunto or-

dained." l

Standing thus upon the same fundamental ground as the modern

behaviorists, Hobbes completely rejected the doctrine that the hu-

man species is capable of thought or behavior independent of the

external stimuli which set the faculties of sense in motion. What we

are and what wedojte thought, ar^prim^j^he_,c^Qnie^uenceof

"^^rlja^doTto the forces environing our lives. Men, he declared,

""measure all things by themselves, and ascribe to other men and even

to inanimate objects qualities which, as a result of their sensory ex-

periences, they find in themselves. Imagination he defined as simply

a survival of sensory stimuli— the retention of "that motion which is

(Everyman's Library, 1914), pp. 3-4.

FOR GOD AND KING CHARLES 221

• ' ~~

in the internall parts of a man . . . when he Sees, Dreams,
i ]yiernory is the same thing, save that it signifies that the sen-
^n- stimulus is fading; experience is the memory of many things; a
-rprTal process or train of thought is merely a succession, accidental

a^jL u A** *™* $T

^ intended, of fancies resulting from motions within us as a conse-
^ence of sensory stimuli; speech is the transfer of a train of thought
JVo verbal form, words being devices to label our thoughts, insure
•w remembrance, and effect in others sensory stimuli similar to
-t^ewehave experienced; Reason is but the addition of thought to
^jurfit to constitute a total, or the subtraction of thought from
•bought to give a remainder.2 Such in the opinion of the tough-
minded realist of Malrnsbury is the primary social equipment of
nan, the earth-stuff of politics. Man is entirely a creature of cir-
."uiastance; prone to every inconsistency of character that might re-
T-ldrom the varied impulses set in motion by the manifold stimuli
aifecting his sensory apparatus; capable of colossal errors of reason
and judgment, violent storms of passion, and abysmal excesses of
iniquity as well as of straight thinking, rational behavior, and lofty
virtue. Moreover,

"Nature hath made men so equall, in the faculties of body, and
mind; as that though there bee found one man sometimes manifestly
stronger in body, or of quicker mind than another; yet when all is
reckoned together, the difference between man, and man, is not so con-
siderable, as that one man can thereupon claim to himselfe any benefit,
to which another may not pretend, as well as he. For as to the strength
of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by
secret machination, or by confederacy with others that are in the same
danger with himselfe,

"And as to the faculties of mind, (setting aside the arts grounded upon
words, and especially that skill of proceeding upon generall and infalli-
ble rales, called Science; which very few have, and but in few things; as
noi being a native faculty, born with us; . . .) I find yet a greater
quality amongst men, than that of strength. For Prudence, is but
experience; which equall time, equally bestowes on all men, in those
iMngs they equally apply themselves unto. . . .

"From this equality of ability, ariseth equality of hope in the attaining
of our Ends. And therefore if any two men desire the same thing, which
nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies; and in the
way to their End (which is principally their owne conservation, and
sometimes their delectation only,) endeavour to destroy, or subdue one

p. 5. 2 See ibid., pp. 64-66.

ll'-J

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

«r

,:no:her. And from hence it comes to passe, that where an Invader ra^
r:o rri^re- tn feare, than another man's single power; and if one pla*^
sow, build, or possesse a convenient Seat, others may probably be ?\
pected to come prepared with forces united to dispossesse, and' deprive
him, not only of the fruit of his labour, but also of his life, or libertv"
And the Invader again is in like danger of another. ...

"Hereby it Is manifest, that during the time men live without a coin-
men Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which ;?
called Warre; and such a wane, as is of every man, against everv rra^
For Warre, consisteth not in Battell onely, or the act of fightino-;'bur :?
a tract of time, wherein the Will to contend by Battell is sufficient^
known: and therefore the notion of Time, is to be considered in the
nature of Warre: as it is in the nature of Weather. For as the nature of
Foule weather, lyeth not in a shower or two of rain; but in an inclina-
tion thereto of many days together; So the nature of Warre, consisted
not in actual fighting; but in the known disposition thereto, durine all
the time there is no assurance to the contrary. ...

"To this warre of every man against every man, this also is conse-
quent; than nothing can be Unjust. The nojions of Right and Wrong;
Justice and Injustice have there no place. Where_there_js no common
* Power, therajsjioj-avr; where no JLaw^n^Jnjustice. ''Force andTraud,
aretn Warre the two Gardinall venues. Justice and Injustice are none
of the Faculties neither of the Body, nor Mind. . . . They arc qualities,
that relate to men in Society, not in Solitude. It is consequent also to
the same condition, that there be no Propriety [property-], no Domin-
ion, no Mine and Thine distinct; but onley that to be every man's, thai
he can get; and for so long, as he can keep it." 1

These brief quotations lay bare the underpinning of the Hobbes-
ian system of political thought. The intrinsic nature of man, the
factors determining his processes of thought and action, and the
conditions under which his life must be lived all conspire to produce
a perpetual struggle, which, but for the restraining power of po-
litical authority, would be likely at any moment to break forth
,, into anarchical violence. J^O£ji}£^ there-

i fore, men have been driven to set over themselves a common au-
thority, a veritable leviathan, that can restrain their anarchical
impulses and lift them out of the miserable condition of plunder,
assassination, and fear that is the natural state of man outside the

them.

1 Ibid., pp. 63-66.

society. For this purpose men have created

— «-"«•«»,,,„,„, i^«,i,««.j»«u»«»l«~-»«<™»™*"'™^^" "W""^"- •""»»' U'WVi.UMItAWWtMJiM.Hi.i/u.uftuiuu,,,,,

id appointed rulers to have dominion over

FOR GOD AND KING CHARLES 223

ie state of nature being, as Hobbes conceived it, a condition of

__ J _^ _

_ it followed according tolus

reasoning that natural right and natural law could be of little con-
sequence. "The Right of Nature,55 said he, ". . . is the Liberty
each man hath, to use his own power, as he will himselfe, for the
preservation of his own Mature; that is to say, of his own Life; and
consequently, of doing anything, which in his own Judgement,
and Reason, hee shall conceive to be the aptest means thereunto.5' l
TkJ£W_o^^ character; first

that every man should, so far as possible, seek to attain his ends by
peaceable means, thus inviting to himself the least possible violence
but that when peace is not possible he should seek and use all the
kips and advantages of war; second, that he should be willing, as
far as may be necessary for his own defense and welfare, to surrender
his absolute liberty and be content with as much liberty against
oilier men as he would allow them against him. Thus it may be

said' 32J^i£^

vo_altCTnatiycs: (1) that each man insist upon his own absolute
liberty and rely solely upon his own power and resources for de-
fense against invasions of his liberty, or (2) that each man contract
with every other man to divest himself of part of his liberty and set
up a common power to conserve the liberty of all.

Organized human society, argued the nimble-minded author of
ik Leviathan, is everywhere a product of contractual relationships
bom of the second, and only rational, alternative which natural
law offers to men. That such contracts are not to be found in
express form cannot alter the case. Wherever^ organizedjociety
^JSl^of mch a contract must necessarily be mfer7p7
there could be no organi^cf soci<^

go vernedjmd their 'rul^'for h is one that"

"

must of necessity be antecedent to the"existoaoBof rulers; nor does
it make any difference that it may have been entered into under
fear and duress. Under the law of nature it is the only alternative to
individual self-reliance. Hence it is a fully binding contract, and
can only be discharged by performance or mutual release.

We now perceive ^Lj^nn^s^al^le^irection qf_ Hobbes'
thought. FOTjumjDdhkalsoc^ty

Rid., p. 66. " ~ ""' """""" """"" —

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

>ocia; contract thai men have been obliged to make in order to
escaoe the reien of violence which results from unrestrained liberty.
Rulers are not panics 10 this contract but objects of it invested
with authority and power to compel the parties to perform their
obligations under it. If it were not so, if there were no supreme and

M"*1

independent authority 10 enforce compliance with the social con-
tract, it would be a vain and futile gesture. Any man could ignore
it at will, and the members of a commonwealth would find them-
selves in the same position as though they had not covenanted at
all. In order, therefore, to have a society in which law, order, and
justice may be possible it is necessary to have a coercive power set
over ail men In such a way as not to be subject to their capricious
passions and determinations.

"The onlv wav" declares Hobbes £Cto erect such a Common Power

ji s

. . . is, to conferre all their power and strength upon one Man, or upon
one Assembly of men, that they may reduce all their Wills, by plurality
of voices, unto one Will; which is as much as to say, to appoint one Man,
or an Assembly of men, to beare their Person; and every one to owne,
and acknowledge himselfe to be Author of whatsoever he that so beareth
their Person, shall Act, or cause to be Acted, in those things which con-
cern the Common Peace and Safe tie; and therein to submit their Wills,
every one to his Will, and their Judgements, to Ms Judgment. This is
more than Consent, or Concord; it is a re all Unitie of them all, in one
and the same Person, made by Covenant of every man with every man,
in such manner, as if every man should say to every man, I Authorise and
give up my Right of Governing my selfe, to this Man^ or to this Assembly of men,
on this condition, that thou give up thy Right to him^ and Authorise his Actions
in like manner. This done, the Multitude so united in one Person, is
called a COMMON-WEALTH, in latine CIVITAS. This is the generation of
that great LEVIATHAN, or rather (to speake more reverently) of that
Mortals God, to which we owe under the Immortale Gody our peace and
defence. For by this Authentic given him by every particular man in
the Common- Wealth, he hath the use of so much Power and Strength
conferred on Mm, that by terror thereof, he is inabled to forme the wills
of them all . . . And in him consisteth the Essence of the Common-
wealth; which (to define it) is One Person, of whose Acts a great Multitude^
by mutual! Covenants one with another, ham made themselves every one the Author^
to the end he may use the strength and means of them all^ as he shall think ex-
pedient^ for thdr Peace and Common Defence.

"And he that canyeth this Person, is called SOVERAIGNE, and said to
have S&veraigne Power; and every one besides, his SUBJECT." 1

* Hnd.t pp. 89-90.

FOR GOD AND KING CHARLES 225

Upon this foundational ideology Hobbes proceeded to build an
elaborate superstructure. From the intrinsic nature of the common-
wealth as analyzed by him he deduces the_jiec^;^
obligad^ ( Being bound, every man to

ven- man, those who have instituted a commonwealth and agreed
:o submit their wills to the will of a sovereign have not the right,
wiihout the permission of the sovereign to make a new compact
and appoint a new sovereign to rule over them. They have mutu-
ally agreed to subject their wills to that of the sovereign, and can-
no! lawfully, therefore, will to do anything in respect to the com-
monwealth that is in conflict with the supreme will of the sovereign.
Any attempt to do so on the part of any portion of the members of
the commonwealth would be a clear violation of the social contract.
Neither may it be contended that the sovereign, by reason of egre-
gious acts of omission or commission on his part, may be deemed to
have forfeited the prerogatives conferred upon him by the social con-
tract because the sovereign is not a party to the contract and hence
cannot violate it. Though he be, in sooth, a creature of the contract,
he is above and apart from it. Nothing short of an agreement, bind-
ing every man to every man, to dissolve the social contract and re-
turn to a state of complete individual liberty could lawfully undo the
effects of the social contract and deprive the sovereign of his supreme
authority. So long as organized society stands, no revolution or
social change contemplating anything less than unanimous consent
to revert to the state of nature could vitiate the rights of the sovereign.
^ The possession of sovereignty, according to Hobbes, carries with
it the right of immunity from civil or criminal action, the right of
public censorship, the right of making laws to regulate all personal
and property relationships, the right of adjudicating all controver-
sies involving questions of fact or of civil or natural law, the right of
making war or peace, the right of commanding the military forces,
the right of choosing ministers, counselors, and other public offi-
cials^ the right of punishing offenses and rewarding merit, and
the right of bestowing honors and regulating social precedence.

These are the Rights, which make the Essence of Soveraignty;
and which are the markes, whereby a man may discern in what
Man or Assembly of men, the Soveraign Power is placed, and re-
sideth. For these are incommunicable, and inseparable." l

1 Ibid., pp. 94-95.

226 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

•;Bu: a man may here object, that the Condition of Subjects is vcrv
miserable: as being obnoxious to the lusts, and other irregular passior'"
of him, or them that have so unlimited a power in their hands. And
coinniorJy they that live under a Monarch, think it the fault of Mor-
archy; and they that live under the government of Democracy, or otber
Sovereign Assembly, attribute all the inconvenience to that forme of
Commonwealth; whereas the Power in all formes, if they be perfect
enough to protect them, is the same; not considering that the estate cr
Man can never be without some incommodity or other; and that th*
greatest, that in any forme of Government can possibly happen to the
people in general!, is scarce sensible, in respect of the miseries, and hor-
rible calamities, that accompany a Chill Warre; or that dissolute con-
dition of masterlesse men, without subjection to Lawes, and a coerciw1
Power to tye their hands from rapine and revenge." l

Of right and liberties, therefore, Hobbes could not concede the
members of the commonwealth a very generous portion. Every
member, according to his reasoning, retained his freedom of wiE
in so far that he might follow his own inclinations if he chose, but
ail had agreed 10 submerge their wills in that of the sovereign and
to sanction every act of the sovereign as their own. Hence it fol-
lowed that a man's liberty to follow his own inclinations gave him
no right to oppose his will to that of the sovereign, and when in the
pursuit of his own inclinations he came into conflict with the will
of the sovereign, the latter must of right prevail. The only absolute
and indefeasible rights men in a commonwealth could claim would
be those which by the law of nature could not be covenanted away.
The chief of these, thought Hobbes3 was a man's right to defend
his own body. But that did not mean that he could not contract
to allow the sovereign to take his life in the proper exercise of au-
thority, but merely that he could not bargain away his right to
resist assaults upon his person or to abstain from the necessities of
life.

But—

"The obligation of Subjects to the Soveraign, is understood to last as
long, and no longer, than the power lasteth, by which he is able to pro-
tect them. For the right men have by Nature to protect themselves,
when none else can protect them, can by no Covenant be relinquished
The Soveraignty is the Soule of the Common-wealth; which once de-
parted from the Body, the members doe no more receive their motion
from it. The end of Obedience is Protection; which wheresoever a man
1 Snd., p. 96.

FOR GOD AND KING CHARLES 227

^ . _ .

seetfa. it, either in his own, or in anothers sword3 Nature applyeth his
obedience to it, and his endeavour to maintain it. And though Sover-
aientv, in the intention of them that make it, be immortal!; yet it is in
its" own nature, not only subject to violent death, by forreign war; but
also tlirough the ignorance, and passions of men, it hath in it from the
verv institution, many seeds of natural mortality, by Intestine Discord."1

Thus far we have touched only those features of Hobbes' political
ihought which may be regarded as the core of his system. The
Le:iathan embraces much more. It set out to be a systematic and
comprehensive treatise on politics and neglected nothing which the
author conceived to be within the ambit of this science. The various
forms of commonwealth are exhaustively discussed. The crite-
rion of classification is whether sovereignty be vested in one per-
son or in more than one. If in one person, the commonwealth is a
monarchy; if in an assembly representative of all., it is a democracy;
if in the spokesman of part of the people only, it is an aristocracy.
The virtues and failings of each of these three types of state organiza-
tion are fully treated, and with characteristic Hobbesian acuteness.
Hobbes clearly inclines to favor monarchy, as being conducive to
more unified, energetic, and efficient government than the other
types. It unites, he says, public with private interest more perfectly
limn democracy or aristocracy, which exhibit a fatal inclination
towards factionism, inconstancy, corruption, and inertia. Elected
inonarchs and limited monarchs he regards not as sovereigns but
as ministers of sovereigns. Hereditary monarchy with unrestricted
power is to be preferred over such governments, and this despite the
fact that it presents peculiar and troublesome difficulties in the
matter of succession. These, nevertheless, may be largely avoided
by recognizing that succession to sovereign power should always be
determined by its present possessor. No one else can have any right
approaching his, and if, upon his death, the question of succession
is 10 revert to any assembly of all or part of the people, it means a
return to chaos and confusion.

Few political thinkers after Aristotle perceived more clearly
than Hobbes the intimate relation between economic and political
life. His famous quip, to the effect that if the geometric axiom prov-
ing that the three angles of a triangle constitute two right angles
had been unfriendly to the rich all books on geometry would have

- 116,

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

*• ^-^

been burned, has been a perpetual joy to the economic determln-
ists. It is essential to the life of a commonwealth, he tells us, thai
there be an adequacy of material commodities to satisfy the needs
and wants of the people, and further that these be properly dis-
tributed among the people. That the provision and distribution
of economic ^oods is within purview of sovereign authority he has
no doubt whatever. ::For where there Is no Common-wealth, there
Is ... a perpetual warre of every man against his neighbour;
And therefore every thing Is his that getteth It, and keepeth It fay
force; which is neither Propriety [In the sense of private ownership],
nor Community [common ownership]; but Uncertainty. Which is so
evident that even Cicero, (a passionate defender of Liberty,) In a
publique pleading, attributed! all Propriety to the Law Civil . . .
Seeing therefore the Introduction of Propriety is an effect of Com-
mon-wealth; which can do nothing but by the Person that repre-
sents It, It is the act onely of the Soveraign; and consisteth In the
Lawes, which none can make that have not the Soveraign Power.
And this they well knew of old, who called that No/ios, (that is to
say, Distribution,) which we call Law; and defined Justice, by dis-
tributing to every man his own" l

The deduction which Hobbes makes from these premises is that

^iJiaxJsjiQjnherent right_of property, and that it is the function of
I the state, and also its necessary duty, to regulate the ownership

; and distribution of land, to control and regulate foreign and domes-

tic commerce, to control the coining and circulation of money, and
to levy tribute upon wealth for the support of the commonwealth.
/ In respect to law Hobbes had many acute observations to make,

^' Natural law and civil law he regards as mutually complementary,
each containing the other; but civil law differs from natural law In
that it comprises those rules which are applied to subjects by the
command of the sovereign. Such law may be spoken, written, or
traditional; the form does not matter so long as it has the will of
the sovereign behind it. Apart from the law of nature, however,
nothing can be viewed as law unless it be applied to men In some
way that is to be universally obeyed. %t_is the

nl^Uoikdarej^
it. The sovereign, however, is above tht law and accountable only
God under the law of nature?) This latter boay of law arid a11

. 130-131.

FOR GOD AND KING CHARLES 229

_ , ._

'aws ''consisting in the Morall Vertues, as Justice, Equity, and all
*-bits of the mind that conduce to Peace, and Charity . . ." l
Hobbes refuses to classify as positive law, which, clearly antici-
-arins Austin, he defines as rules that "have been made Lawes
W the Will of those that have had the Sovereign Power over

't „ 5! 1

-e

eaken or tendjs^ First he

oonTTthinking perhaps of certain monarchs of his own day)
lack of energy, aggressiveness, and mastership which causes
some rulers to fail to seize and exercise the full power necessary to
;he proper government and defense of the commonwealth. Second
he mentions the demoralizing and poisonous effects of certain erro-
neouSj if not positively seditious, doctrines. Among these is the
otion that every private individual is a competentjudge^ good

n

and evil actions aronseQi^^

conscience is^ajsin. Only in the state of nature, avers
Hobbes, could such a thing be possible. In organized society there
can be but one standard of right and wrong for every person, and
ihat is the civil law. Private conscience and private judgment may
have a play in purely private matters, but in matters where man's
relation to society is concerned they have no place whatsoever, j

tf

Pernicious and dangerous also is the belief that faith and sahc-
liiy are not to be attained by study and reason, but only by super-
natural inspiration or infusion. v Nothing causes more distraction?
and disorder in a commonwealth than a body of men obsessed with ;
rhejiotionjh^^ them and reveale^H^ truthrto '

jienj. Such deluded mortals belittle the work of education, disci-
pline, and reason, and insist that true holiness, true knowledge of
right and wrong, can be had only by jrj^ernatm^al exgeriences.
Viciously jabbing at the Puritans, Hobbes declares that such absurd
notions have "proceeded chiefly from the tongues, and pens of un-
learned Divines; who joyning the words of the Holy Scripture to-
gether, otherwise than is agreeable to reason, do what they can, to
make men think that Sanctity and Natural Reason, cannot stand
together." 2 All of which makes for dogmatic self-righteousness,
disrespect for authority, and disobedience of laws the holy one can-
not reconcile with the vagaries of his own conscience. Men who

P. 151. 2 Ibidm9 pp. 172-173.

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

•' »

:o v.aik and talk with God are a disruptive force in anv so-
cietal relationship, and Hobbes will have none of them in his com-
monwealth. jiSIL^^ cannot be main-

tained v.'herejthe^indiv^

Eaually menacing to the peace and security of the state are the
doctrines that the sovereign is subject to the civil laws, that even-
individual has an indefeasible right to his own property, and thai
the sovereign power may be divided. 3!i£-sovereig^ is

subject to the law of nature, which is divine and cannot be abro-
gated by any man; but being the author of the civil law, the sover-
eign could not in the nature of the case be subject to it. To attempt
to enforce the civil law against the sovereign is to deny the existence
of sovereignty and undermine the cornerstone of the common-
wealth. The doctrine that rights of private property run against
the sovereign is equally specious and equally dangerous. The com-
monwealth is the source of property, and if the sovereign is unable
to intrude upon private property rights, he cannot perform the
essential functions of sovereignty, neither defend the people against
foreign enemies nor restrain them from doing injury to one an-
other. The notion that sovereignty may be divided is, thinks
Hobbes? patently fallacious. To divide a thing whose essence is
unity is to destroy it utterly. ''

The third_jiidfourth_Mgarts QLtheJLemathan* which Hobbes en-
titled ccOf a Christian Common-wealth" and "Of the Kingdome
of Darknesse," excited more interest and controversy in his own
day than they do in ours. He was so devastatingly critical of die
theological absurdities of the time, so cogently insistent upon the
supremacy of temporal authority, so skeptical of supernaturalism
in all its forms and pretenses, and so savagely disparaging to the
Roman Church in particular that his name became anathema to
the pious of all creeds. Nor has time yet effaced the libels heaped
upon this mild and genial country tutor for the liberties he took
with the pet dogmas of the righteous of his day. Along with Ma-
chiaveill Voltaire,, and Paine he occupies a pedestal in the Chris-
tian hall of infamy.'1

IV

Scholars still quarrel about the rank of Thomas Hobbes among
die avatars of political thought. One declares that "His work

FOR GOD AND KING CHARLES 231

piaced him at once in the front rank of political thinkers and his
theorv became from the moment of its appearance the centre of
animated controversy and enormous influence throughout western
Europe." 1 A second informs us that "Hobbes's biographer could
onlv find a solitary supporter, while his assailants were countless.
•Hobbism,5 in fact, stood for atheism, materialism, despotism., or,
indeed, for any other -ism that the fancy of the age suggested." 2
A third says, uThe theory of Hobbes had little immediate following
In English political thought, although it probably influenced Crom-
well to assume dictatorial power. . . . His doctrines ,were not
revived in England until the second half of the eighteenth century,
in the works of Bentham and Austin. His comparison of the State

"»'

to a human organism was taken up later by Spencer and "the so-
ciologists. On the continent, however, his doctrines were developed
Immediately by Spinoza." 3 A fourth opines that "His whole
philgsoghica^system is very near to that_oO^lachiavelli; he may
be regarded as an ethical materialist who reduces all the aspirations
of human nature to a brutal egoism and, for the most part the
satisfaction of animal appetites.53 4 A fifth more tolerantly suggests
thai "His main virtue, as also his supreme defect, is his realism^ if
we use that term of a capacity of seeing with great clearness and
honest}* everything in human behaviour which one without faith
or emotion can see. He was almost overwhelmingly sensible.33 5

The great difficulty in evaluating the work of such a thinker as
Hobbes is that few appraisers of his thought can be as objective and
unsentimental as was Hobbes himself. Every one is prone to see
according to what lies behind his own eyes, and so was Hobbes; but
he did succeed In achieving a degree of scientific detachment that
not many political thinkers have attained. That he should be
grossly misunderstood by the bitter partisans of his own time was
inevitable, and that he should be better understood with the on-
rush of democracy in later times is scarcely probable. His system
of thought turned out, as Dr. A. D. Lindsay correctly notes, to be
ua vindication of the absolute rights of whatever government

1 W. A. Dunning, A History of Political Theories Jrom Luther to Montesquieu (1905), p. 300.
SR. H. Murray, The History of Political Science from Plato to the Present (1926), p. 216.
:R. G. Gettell, History of Political Thought (1924), p. 221.
4^K. F. Geiser and O. Jaszi, Political Philosophy from Plato to Jeremy Bentham (1927),

jj*** i «-**•««

* A. D, Lindsay, Introduction to Everyman's ed. of Leviathan, p. xi.

232 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

happens to be in power"; : though it would be scarcely just to sav
that he embarked upon his inquiry with that objective definitely
fixed In mind. Science was his major passion and reason his con-
suming occupation. That he was in the rovalist camp mav have

^^ dk * •*• « ™*

colored his views somewhai, but not enough to deflect him from

conclusions which were highly offensive to many of the truly de-
vout and sincere royalists of the time. In the other camp he might
not have been Impelled to write on politics, but his fundamental
Ideas could not have been essentially different so long as he adhered
to his materialistic philosophy. Absolute truth was his goal, and
rigorously logical analysis and synthesis were the means by which
he sought to reach that goal.

That explains, perhaps, the formidable character of his system
of political thought, and likewise the bitter and often hypercritical
opposition It has engendered. Though he seemed, superficially, tc
be nothing more than the advocate of a partisan cause in the Eng-
lish civil war, his doctrines cut to the vitals of causes on which men
almost universally have been ready to stake life and fortune. His
theories may not square with modern scientific knowledge, and
were not without flaw by the scientific lights of his own day; but
their scientific bases were no less plausible than those of rival polit-
ical doctrines, and they had the additional advantage of dispensing
entirely with theological hocus-pocus and historical fancy. Nor can
it be said that many political theories of later times, despite enor-
mous advances in scientific knowledge, are more firmly grounded
upon unimpeachable facts than are those of Hobbes.

Hspbbes simply could not be Ignored, and cannot be ignored^even
now. ) Puritan and Cavalier alike might condemn him, but Crom-
well and Charles II could both take comfort in his doctrines. Never
did a thinker state a stronger case for political absolutism or more
powerfully support the thesis that the consent of the governed Is not
necessary to the exercise of sovereign authority. Never did a pub-
licist produce theories more damaging to the cult of liberty and

^

democracy. "Bolshevist, Fascist, and other modern exponents of the
macht-politik are as much in his debt as the Bourbons and Stuarts of
bygone centuries. There is, Indeed, very little in the anti-demo-
cratic political philosophies of the twentieth century that
Hobbes did not say three hundred years ago.

1 Ibid., p. ix.

FOR GOD

better

_.. of necessity fell back on the Hobbesian conception of social f
Compact and sovereignty in order to find justification for the use of
:0rce in quel ing the secession of the South. There was no other '
position to take; for, leaving ethical and economic factors aside The
.North had no case against the South other than the contention that
*e truon could not legally be dissolved by the action of pa t ofthe
saoa. If there 1S any legal right at all in ? £**

s:ve ideas, seditious utterances, and revolutionary movement^
must be rooted in juridical theories holding, with Hobbe, A JV
— is an entity which absorbs the wills of all its memb

WSl^ f\ TTl£l hpr-tol io + t-.^ i

vv eta a. lilaLCIld.ilsr. hf1 \\,^P|C jjjc/^ -i -*>,-, 4.* T

-^e_M.as_aiso a rationalist: and ra-
- — > — copious doses was needed

thought out of _ the academic obfuscations in

tics. .\or was his materialism founded upon callous i

completely as Machiavelli did.
man is naturally sel

the state— and, md<^d~L7no other

_—_i__1l*T ^ _

^SSLman

x-i^.X,

pressesThe*
Mffi§elfwhat is ri^ht

_ t I^"*'^~~<~™*«n«>u«a&ta«--Hlll(

oLSSiI?9bey or

T "^^^^™™BS**IBWi^''*Wsl*>»l»'W!«t(»«BWi^ „

of the

ein -com!.'

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

Libertarians have been hard put to meet this argument. In fact
they never have completely met it. Theoretically, of course. It is
conceivable that men might be so enlightened and ennobled bv
education and religion as to need no master but the individual con-
science, but most of us are not yet ready to pension the police and
take cur chances on the good work of the schools and churches.
Pending the arrival of the millennium, therefore, the champion of
individual freedom must strike a bargain with his lovely principles
and admit that in some respects at leasi men still have need of an
omnipotent temporal overlord. Hence the amusing artifice of sav-
ing the face by attempting to draw a line between the things that
are Caesars and the things that are not. Our Lord refused to try it,

it 0-

and in that respect at least Thomas Hobbes was indeed sacri-
legious; for his answer to the dilemma which Jesus bequeathed to his
followers was: Render unto Caesar that which Caesar commands,,
and unto God also that which Caesar commands.

Does it seem to be a brutal and irreverent doctrine? Well, what of
the position of those who deny it? One concedes that it is properly
within the province of the state to forbid the sale of alcoholic bever-
ages, but passionately denies its right to forbid the sale of watered
securities. His neighbor vehemently denies the right of the state to
violate his conscience by compelling him to do military service, bur
believes it is perfectly proper for it to violate the consciences of
people who do not agree with him as to what should be taught in the
schools. Seldom do two individualists agree, in the absence of co-
ercive authority, as to where the line shall be drawn. The social
idealist, who also is often an individualist, generally recoils from the
manifest evils of untrainmeled individualism and paradoxically
espouses some program of mildly socialistic reform, evidently be-
lieving in his simplicity that it is possible to empower the state to
work weal but not woe. Thomas Hobbes was too keen a logician
and too clear an analyst of social processes to become entangled in
such difficulties. For him there was no middle ground; there was
^ to embrace

the former.

-1^»»»—«—-»«j(U(—JJ •"•"**''" ^""""H

I he influence of Habbes was quite perceptible in nineteenth-
century legal thought. His doctrine of sovereignty and his idea of
positive law were fully embodied in the legal philosophy of the great

Victorian professor of jurisprudence, John Austin. \ Austin exerted a

FOR GOD AND KING CHARL E S 235

great influence upon legal thought and practice in the last century,
and a considerable portion of the older judges and/practitioners of
to-day follow Austin, who in turn followed Hobbes. By repudiating
the classical doctrine of the law of nature and making clear that
gjy man-made jaw can feejiflfecth^injiuma^a^^^
such ro pave the way for Bentham and the great moyemenTfor
scientific legislation of which he was the guiding genius.'

ppliticdjthought has_beenfcrtilized by the

' "~'"

wralDHQbbes7~THe -

logical schools of political thought has already been mentioned.
Likewise his contribution to the doctrine of economic determinism."
I: may be said also that Hobbes_COTa^etd^_demolidi^_the doc-

that his^pv_e£wheiming"materiaT-

^_

dispelled the fogs of mysticism i
political thought. ....... "-"

Altogether we are forced to conclude that this debonair and ver-

•1 , , f i " "~* •—"""•—-'———»'— -«.•—».*„ _ ™,_ ,«,, „„» „ —-w™. «„ „_ ^^ ^.^ * \*M.

sank tutor, who_spentjhe. major_Eart of his life impartingTudi:
nientary learning to succeeding generationlof CavendishTdrs" wls
one of the great political thinkers of the English race, one whose
name will endure as long as men trouble their minds about matters

political.

REFERENCES

' PUbltd5t> ^ Mm °f

Coker F. \V Readings in Political Philosophy (rev. ed. New York, 1938)
unap. XIX. '

Cook,_T. I History of Political Philosophy (New York, 1936), Chap

D

' vn '

Thought (New Yorki 1924); Chap- XI

Lindsay, A. D. (ed.), Leviathan (Everyman's Library, London 1914)

T "

Plat° to the

Political Theory (Ncw York> 1937), Chap.
Stephen, L, Hobbes (London, 1904).

CHAPTER XV

VOICES OF FREEDOM

I

X the terrific duel between Cavalier and Roundhead, as in
every great social cataclysm, the Issues were often much con-
fused. It was a contest not alone of rival sects, divergent creed^
warring social classes, and contradictory theories of government.
but also of embattled power-groups ready to appropriate any con-
venient argument which might furnish a plausible rationale of the
means employed to gain their ends. The absolutism of Hobbes
was not, as we have seen, unwelcome to the dour rebel dictator,
Oliver Cromwell. Nor was the libertarianism of the Puritan dis-
putationists less agreeable at times to Royalist partisans than to
the gimlet-eyed theocrats of the Cromwellian camp.

Despite these inconsistencies, it is a fact, nevertheless, that the
voice of freedom spoke mainly for the cause of Parliament and the
Insurgent masses as against the monarch and the favored classes.
At stake in the struggle was not merely the possession of sovereign
authority, but also the right of that authority to have dominion
over the individual conscience, to stand between man and God
suppress liberty of thought and deed, and govern by arbitrary ukase
without the consent of the nation. The Presbyterian mind could
accommodate itself to dictatorship as a temporary expedient to re-
store order and stamp out reactionary plottings, but to acquiesce
In absolutism as a rightful and integral part of the political edifice
was unthinkable. As Lord Protector, Cromwell wielded dictatorial
powers, but only by the Hitler technique of violently distorting
the Instrument of Government by which he was clothed with exec-
utive authority. No dictatorship was ever contemplated by that
most interesting example of Puritan Staatslehre. On the contrary
It provided for a government of definitely limited powers with a
council of state and a popularly elected parliament to restrain
the chief executive. And when Cromwell, forced to action by
the dilly-dally failure of the people's representatives to vote sup-
plies for the army and navy, invoked the coordinate powers of
his office to dissolve the parliament and rule single-handedly,

236

VOICES OF FREEDOM 237

there were howls of protest from thousands of liberty-lovers who
denounced the Lord Protector as bitterly as they had formerly
excoriated Charles I.

Of the innumerable host of verbal gladiators whose partisan pens
5amed high in the cause of freedom and spread subversive ideas
abroad in the land, two in particular, because of their eminence and
their unending influence upon the political thought of mankind,
shall engage our attention here. They are John Milton, poet,
scholar, and civil servant, and John Locke, physician, philosopher,
and officeholder — illustrious Brain Trusters of the seventeenth
century.

II

Biographers of John Milton dwell mostly on his poetic genius,
mourning the twenty years he gave to political occupations as a
nagic and irretrievable loss to English literature. Between the
ages of 32 and 52 Milton's energies were so absorbed by the exac-
tions of public office and the writing of political tracts that his
poeiic output shrank like a stream in a drought-smitten land. But
who can say that Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Ago-
nisies would have fulfilled the youthful promise of Lycidas^ L? Allegro,
and // Penseroso had not those two decades of soul-wracking strug-
gle with tremendous human affairs intervened between the poet's
early and mature periods of lyric fecundity? And who will declare
thai the pen which so nobly vindicated the rights of man in the
Arfopagitica and the Tenure of Kings and Magistrates would have been
better employed in the production of pretty metrical embroideries?

John Milton was dedicated from early youth to an intellectual
career. The poet's father had been sent to Oxford and there had
embraced the Church of England in disregard of the wishes of his
father, an ardent and uncompromising Roman Catholic. For this
apostasy the son was disinherited and cast off. Going to London,
he became a scrivener, an occupation akin to the modern profes-
sion of solicitor, and managed to accumulate a comfortable fortune.
Doubly devoted to the church of his choice by reason of the pen-
alty he had paid for deserting the Romish communion, he was
pleased to hope and plan that his son and namesake, born in 1608,
might become a minister of the Church of England. Young John
Milton was therefore sent early to school and was also provided

23S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

with special tutelage a: hcrne. Having the intellect to respond to
this forcing process, he was ready for college at the age of 16, and
was sent to Cambridge in 1625.

Milton's career in the university had a profound effect in shap-
ing the course of his later life. He was so utterly intellectual, per-
haps so much a prig, that he could not happily adjust himself 10
the crude and boisterous under .graduate life of the time. His shy
and fastidious habits together with his youthful and effeminate
appearance won him the sobriquet of "The Lady of Chrisfs3" thus
stamping him in modern campus jargon as a "pansy" or ::cookie."
He was assigned, moreover, to a tutor whose narrow scholasticism
and bigoted ecclesiasticism were utterly revolting to his free-ranging
rnind. Biographers of Milton trace his repugnance to the Estab-
lished Church and his subsequent swing to Xon-conformism very
largely to the influence of this detested mentor. But in spite of
these maladjustments Milton achieved distinction as a student and
remained three years after graduation to take the M.A. degree.
If his university experience had done nothing else, it had settled
the young scholar's mind on one point: he could never become a
clergyman. That was entirely out of consideration. Nor had he
discovered a definite leaning to the law or any other recognized
profession. Literature was the thing which most attracted him, and
that was no profession at all.

Happily his father's material circumstances and sympathetic
understanding of his difficulties and aspirations made it possible
for him to return to the parental domicile and take all the time he
wanted to equip himself for a career in letters. Six years he lived
on his father's bounty, "communing," it is said, "with nature and
with books" 1 and writing such things as he felt inspired to under-
take. In this period the young poet produced a quantity of no-
table verse, including Comus, L? Allegro,, II Penseroso^ and Lycidas.
which brought him considerable fame and established his reputa-
tion as a luminary of genuine quality and great promise in the
literary firmament. It was now time for him to make the conven-
tional European tour of the English gentleman and scholar. So in
16373 with papa still paying the bills, Milton set forth on a long
and leisurely tour of the continent. In course of his journeys he
visited Paris, Geneva, Florence, Naples, Rome, and other centers

1 Mark Pattison, Milton (1879), p. 15.

VOICES OF FREEDOM 239

it and culture, where he was received as a distinguished English
and introduced into the most select literary circles.

Returning to England in August, 1639, Milton found the country
rr, the verge of civil war. Though his sympathies were entirely with
-,e Parliamentary cause, he refrained at first from taking any part
h the struggle. One of his boyhood tutors, Thomas Young, was an
acdve pamphleteer on the Puritan side and obtained Milton's aid
h several things he put out. In 1641, however, Milton dropped all
aretense of neutrality and appeared in the lists with five pamphlets
in his own name. In these he launched a scorching attack on the
prelacy of the Established Church, particularly denouncing their
insistence upon episcopal government in that hallowed institution.
Thenceforward until 1660, when the restoration of the Stuarts re-
tired him from the political arena, Milton's amazing genius was
devoted to polemics and public office. Throughout this long leave
of absence from poesy the erstwhile "Lady of Christ's53 kept the
presses hot with prose compositions of such virility that even to-day
their power is remarkable.

In 1643, just as he was beginning to make a splash as a political
writer, Milton contracted as strange a marriage as modern history
records. His bride, Mary Powell, was a girl of seventeen, almost
eighteen years his junior. Worse than that, she was the daughter
of Royalist parents who had taught her to despise almost everything
that Milton held sacred and important. Incompatibility was in-
evitable, and within three months the young bride deserted her
husband and returned to her own family. Milton besought her
TO come back to him, indeed ordered her to do so, but all he got for
his pains was a point-blank refusal. So now he had a personal
wrong as well as intellectual convictions to inflame his pen.

Within a month after the breach with his wife he brought out an
heretical pamphlet advocating divorce by civil instead of canon
law. This stirred the ire of the regular clergy and there was talk of
prosecuting him, but nothing came of it. Immediately he turned his
fire upon the universities, urging drastic reforms in education,
and dien turned again to the subject of divorce and gave the Church
and die clergy another broadside. This was too blunt a challenge
to be ignored. The heresy hunters called attention to the fact that
Ws various pamphlets had appeared without the license of the offi-
cial censor as required by law, and demanded that he be prose-

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

cured. The maner was taken up In Parliament and referred to com-
mittees bo:h In the House of Commons and in the House of Lords,
Facing the issue squarely, Milton immediately published, without
license or registration, the Areopagitica, a Speech of Mr. John A/&V.
jcr the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing. This was not merely an eloquent
and impassioned plea for freedom of the press; it was sheer defi-
ance. But no action was taken against the author; the revolution
by this time was getting too hoi to handle.

After the battle of Xaseby in 1645 it was evident that the Stuart
cause was lost. The Powell family, quick to see the advantage now
of a connection with a prominent Puritan personage, contrived to
effect a reconciliation between Milton and his wife. He not only

_ _ i*

took back his wife, but took in the whole Powell family, who had
gone down with the Royalist cause and were now virtually desti-
tute and friendless. The death of his father a few months later put
Milton in easy economic circumstances and enabled him to follow
his political interests with complete freedom.

Upon the beheading of Charles I in 1649 he rushed to the defense
of the revolutionary government with a pamphlet entitled The
Tenure of Kings ami Magistrates. For this performance he was re-
warded with a political job, being made Secretary for Foreid
Tongues to the Council of State of the new Commonwealth.
Though the proper duties of this office were those of a clerk and
translator^ much more was expected of Milton. His prodigious
talents were drafted into service as propagandist extraordinary for
the nation. From this eminence he carried on a never-ending war
of words against the enemies of the Cromwellian regime. Un-
doubtedly the most notable product of his versatile and speeding
pen in this period was the Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio, written in
Latin in reply to a calumniatory tract which had been put out by
the Dutch scholar Salrnasius at the instance of the exiled royal
family.

About 1650 Milton began to have trouble with his eyes and was
warned by his doctor that he must give up all close work or suffer
total blindness. Placing his duty to the Commonwealth first, he
refused to consider the relinquishment of his office or the curtail-
ment of his work. In 1652 the penalty fell upon him. In the same
year his wife died in childbirth, leaving three small daughters to life
care. In darkness and sorrow he went doggedly ahead with his

VOICES OF FREEDOM 241

smcial duties, using secretaries in the place of eyes. In 1656 he
named again and in 1658 the second wife died, also in childbirth,
Laier in the same year Oliver Cromwell was gathered to his fathers
osd office of Lord Protector was bestowed upon his feeble son
Richard. The Commonwealth was doomed; the restoration of the
Smari dynasty was merely a matter of time. But Milton could not
believe the great cause lost. With all his furious eloquence and dia-
lectic skill he strove to persuade the nation that the old regime must
no: come back. First he indited a vigorous pamphlet demanding the
separation of church and state, and in February, 1660, he de-
livered his final volley, The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free
tiwnonwealth, and the Excellence Thereof compared with the Inconvenience
md Dangers of readmitting Kingship to this Nation.

It was all in vain. In three months Charles II was on the throne,
and Milton was out of office, a fugitive from the officers of the
Crown. Why Milton was not run down and prosecuted by the
SGvernment of Charles II remains to this day an unsolved mystery.
It is sometimes claimed that influential friends intervened in his
behalf, but the more plausible explanation is that the government,
having become convinced of his harmlessness, did not wish to excite
animosity by making a martyr of him.

The remainder of Milton's life was spent in retirement and
poverty. Most of his fortune had been invested in the securities of
me Commonwealth, which the restored monarchy refused to recog-
nize. Good fortune returned to him in 1663 in the form of a third
marriage by which he secured a devoted and sympathetic care-
taker for the remainder of his days. Though most of Milton's life in
Ttirement was occupied with the composition of those great poetic
masterpieces which have won him a rank second only to Shake-
speare in English letters, the old lion of political controversy was
not wholly stilled. In 1673, sensing a growing reaction against the
'Gstoration government because of its inclination toward Roman-
an, Milton came out with a pamphlet inveighing against popery
ad arguing for toleration. In 1 674, at the age of 65, he was dead

III

In Milton's political writings there was little that was original or
JQvd, but his ideas were the outgrowth of a consistent philosophy
* liberty and were fused into a potent body of thought. The major

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

premise of his libertarian doctrine was tne ancient postulate of
natural freedom and natural rights. All human beings, Milton
declared, are by Harare free-born and endowed with reason and
the righ: to work cur their own destiny. Pursuing these natural
rights and endowments, they form commonwealths and choose
magistrates to serve as their agents. Rulers, therefore, have no
powers but those delegated to them and must exercise their author-
ity under the restraint of law. Royalist debaters, arguing agalns;
the legality of tyrannicide, contended that the act of the people h
forming a commonwealth and bestowing authority on the mon-
arch was an act of God. So be It, for the sake of argument, retorted
Milton: "then why may not the people's act of rejection, be as well
pleaded by the people as an aci of God, and the most just reason to
depose him?" l Moreover, he insisted, oppressive government
which stifles and destroys the faculties of the individual for self-
development is raw tyranny and may be justly resisted and over-
thrown. Self-development, in the Miltonian view, was the most
sacred of natural rights; hence his valiant and ceaseless battle for
freedom of speech and religious liberty. That truth would ulti-
mately prevail over error he had not the slightest doubt. Further-
more, the realm of conscience was for him the realm of God, which
no mortal government had the right to invade.

But with all his devotion to liberty Milton was no Leveller, no
Indiscriminate advocate of mass rule. The Puritan Revolution
was in no sense a proletarian movement; It was definitely an up-
rising of the middle classes whose social and economic advancement
made them no longer amenable to the political and religious he-
gemony of the great nobles and churchmen. Milton was wholly
middle-class in derivation and largely so in thought. Though he
fully accepted the abstract doctrine that political power and author-
ity belong to the people, he was equally persuaded that the people
must act through forms of organization suitable to the time and
occasion. Liberty was a fetish with him, but not democracy. There
might be times when democracy was not the proper form of organi-
zation for the effectuation of the common will. He had DO doubts
whatever as to the propriety of the Cromwellian dictatorship and
vigorously defended it as the only appropriate and practicable
means of realizing the will of the nation.

1 The Tmun of Kings- and Magistrates, Prose Works (Wallace Ed., 1925), p. 339,

VOICES OF FREEDOM 243

Of all Milton's prose writings the best remembered is the Areo-
V;f0. It is also probably the most characteristic of his approach

^ «"* it, *

--"oolirical questions. The title, borrowed apparently from the
imbatitic Discourse of Isocrates, refers obviously to the Areopagus,
*v*i famous hill in Athens on which the highest judicial tribunal
w To the mind familiar with classical allusions no further explana-
*°-n was needed. Milton was addressing his plea for freedom of the
:ress not simply to Parliament, but to that body as the supreme
vdicial authority7 of the nation. His argument was predicated on
-bur bed-rock points: (1) that censorship and suppression dis-
-ourage all true scholarship and learning; (2) that they are futile,
merelv placing a premium on the bootlegging of bad books; (3) that
T^ieilbent and fair administration of such laws is impossible; and
-i . that they proceed often from ulterior motives or give them re-
iease and scope.

"I do not deny," says Milton, countering the argument that un-
licensed printing is dangerous, "but that it is of greatest concernment in
the church and commonwealth, to have a vigilant eye how books de-
mean themselves as well as men ... for books are not absolutely dead
things, but do contain a progeny of life in them to be as active as that
soul whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the
purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I
know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous
dragon's teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up
armed men. And yet, on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as
good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a rea-
sonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book kills
reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man
lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious lifeblood of a
master spirit, imbalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond." 1

Moreover,

". . . how shall the licensers themselves be confided in, unless we con-
fer upon them, or they assume to themselves above all others in the land,
the grace of infallibility and uncorruptedness? And again, if it be true,
that a wise man, like a good refiner, can gather gold out of the drossiest
volume, and that a fool will be a fool with the best book, yea, or without
a book; there is no reason that we should deprive a wise man of any
advantage to his wisdom, while we seek to restrain from a fool that which
being restrained will be no hindrance to his folly." 1
z, ibid., pp. 296-297,

244 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

Many a Puritan was ready to go as far In coercion as anv hench-
man of the king. To such Milton spoke, as well as to the Rovalist-

when he penned the following passage:

"' Impunity and remissness for certain are the bane of a common-
wealth: but here the greai art lies, to discern in what the law is to b:d
restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only Is to \vcrk
If every action which is good or evil in a man at ripe years were to b*
under pittance, prescription, and compulsion,, what were virtue but a
name, what praise could then be due to well doing, what s^amercv to be
sober, just, or continent? Many there are that complain of divine Provi-
dence for suffering Adam to transgress. Foolish tongues! when God
gave Mm reason, he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choos-
ing; he had been else a mere artificial Adam, such an Adam as he is ir
the motions. We ourselves esteem not of that obedience, or love, or eifr,
which is offeree; God therefore left him free, set before him a provoking
object, ever almost In his eyes; herein consisted Ms merit, herein the
right of reward, the praise of his abstinence. Wherefore did he creare
passions within us, pleasure round us, but that these rightly tempered
are the very ingredients of virtue? They are not skilful considerers cf
human things, who imagine to remove sin by removing the matter of
sin. . . . Though ye take from the covetous man Ms treasure, he has
yet one jewel left; ye cannot bereave Mm of Ms covetousness. Banish ail
objects of lust, shut up all youth Into the severest discipline that can be
exercised in any hermitage, ye cannot make them chaste that came no:
thither so. ... Suppose we could expel sin by this means, so much we
expel of virtue; for the matter of them both is the same; remove that and
ye remove them both alike.'5 1

Strange-sounding Puritanism Is this to us of a generation that
remembers only the Puritan attempt to create a society policed by
the godly. Surely it cannot be John Milton, high prophet of Puri-
tan England, speaking! Better argument against blue-laws could
not be phrased by the most subtle libertarian. But Milton it is in
very truth; the prophet whom Puritan England and Puritan Amer-
ica heard but did not follow, because their faith in mankind did
not equal his; because they did not believe, as did he, in liberty
enlightening the world, setting reason on the throne, and inspiring
and impelling men to the supreme virtue of self-discipline and self-
control. The Milton doctrine of liberty they could warmly applaud
in the abstract, but in practice they inclined, as the consciously
righteous of all generations have done, to the Hobbesian vTiew that
morality must be enforced by law and authority.

* Ibid.

VOICES OF FREEDOM

• — .

In The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates Milton set out to prove
•'That is it lawful, and hath been held so through all ages, for any
-,vho have the power, to call to account a tyrant, or wicked king-
and. after due conviction, to depose, and put him to death "

In laying the groundwork of his case he entered upon an analysis
of social origins and gave an interesting exposition of the compact
theory of the state.

*

"No man who knows aught," he wrote, "can be so stupid as to deny
that all men were naturally born free, being the image and resemblance
oi God himself, and were, by privilege above all creatures, born to com
maud, and not to obey: and that they lived so, till from the root of
Adam s transgression, falling among themselves to do wron°- and vio
lence, and foreseeing that such courses must needs tend to the destruc
tion of them all, they agreed by common league to bind each other from
mutual injury, and jointly defend themselves against any that gave dis
turbance or opposition to such agreement. Hence came cities towns
and commonwealths. And because no faith in all was sufficiently bind-
nig, they saw it needful to ordain some authority, that might restrain by
force and punishment what was violated against peace and common
tight This authority and power of self-defence and preservation being
originally and naturally in every one of them, and unitedly in all- fb?
ease, for order, and lest each man should be his own partial judge, they
communicated and derived either to one, whom for the eminence of hi
wisdom and integrity they chose above the rest, or to more than one
whom they thought of equal deserving: the first was called a king the
other magnates: not to be their lords and masters ... but to be their
deputies and commissioners, to execute, by virtue of their intrusted
power, that justice, which else every man by the bond of nature and of
covenant must have executed for himself, and for one another. .

It being thus manifest, that the power of kings and magistrate's is

DOthine1 Hke hnt -M/ho* ^«1 • J ,-. "••"^i.au.aLca ifc

Miig ci&e out wnat only is derivative, transferred, and committed to
^ ™ trust from the people to the common good 'of all, in wTom t£
-t remains fundamentally, and cannot be taken from them, with-
^.tion of their natural birthright, ... it follows from neces-
, that the titles of sovereign lord, natural lord, and the like
,rm«,a««^ or flatterieSj not admitted by emperors and kin '

^i 1 c* 1 1 1 r xx jJ *L. iji.T». T Tii ** ^^

of Jews and ancie

has as §ood a righ< to his
t0 WS ******"*> is ^0 make the subject

Tmure °ftt«gs and Magistrates, ibid., pp. 331-334.

246 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

Then reasoning that if a private Individual may be disinherited
for violation of law, so may a king, Milton proceeded 10 this sweep-
in denial of divine riht:

*** Thirdly, it follows, thai, to sav kines are accountable to no^ W

* rf — * *-** •»• A \~, lO" \J, ,

God, is overturning all law and government. For if thev mav renis* *-

—*>—»' J ^ *-*«J W ^ ^

give account, then all covenants made with them at coronation, all oarlx
are in vain, and mere mockeries; all laws which they swear to keep, made
to no purpose." 1

The foregoing samples are not only typical of Milton's political
ideas; they contain the very core of his thought. That he added to
the world's stock of political doctrines little that was new, is easv 10
perceive. But the magnitude of his influence is not to be measured
by the originality of his thinking. What he said, though not orig-
inal, was said with more force and conviction than it had ever been
said before, and was fortified with the marvelous erudition and dia-
lectic skill of one of the greatest minds the English race has pro-
duced. Above all else among the requisites of a rational and right-
eous political order Milton esteemed liberty, and above all liberties,
liberty of mind and soul. "Give me,55 he cried in the Areopagit-
ica, "liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to con-
science, above all liberties." 2 That impassioned appeal for liberty
reverberated throughout the English-speaking world; and for what
we have of freedom of speech and press and religious worship in the
British and American constitutional systems of to-day, we are im-
measurably indebted to the overwhelming eloquence and logic of
Milton's political tracts. Milton, the political thinker, deserves
our homage no less than Milton, the poet.

IV

Few men are privileged to influence the thought and action of
their own and subsequent times as considerably as John Locke,
Not alone in political thought, but in economics, education, theol-
ogy, and metaphysical philosophy did the luminous intellect of this
seventeenth-century doctor of medicine pencil out lines of thought
that multitudes were destined to follow. Born at Wrington, Somer-
setshire, in 1 632, John Locke was the son of an attorney and land-
owner of modest means who in 1642 enlisted in the Parliamentary

2 Areopagitica, ibid., p. 318.

VOICES OF FREEDOM 247

: and served as captain of a company of volunteers. "From the
-Vie' that I knew anything," Locke is quoted as having said in later
'it * ;;I found myself in a storm, which has continued to this time."
His education was begun with tutors in the home and was con-
-:-ued at near-by public schools. In 1652, at the age of 20, he en-
ured Christ Church College, Oxford.

Locke's career in the university was not particularly distin-
-r-sned Oxford at that period was under the domination of the

jjj! l^i^* ^ \^\** * JL

fanatical and intolerant left wing of the Puritan party, and -Locke
;:und their narrow discipline little to hisjaste. Though his repug-
nance did not carry him over to the opposition, it dulled his en-
iiusiasm for formal studies and caused him, as he said, to seek the
company of gay and liberal spirits from whom he gained a great
knowledge of things not taught in books or sanctioned by the uni-
versity authorities. Though Locke made no effort to distinguish
rinself in scholastic exercises while at Oxford, he appears to have
done a great deal of stimulating reading. Hobbes and Descartes
•re the writers who stirred him most, though not to the point of
ncriiical imitation. He took his B.A. in 1656 and stayed on to take
1658. Then he was given an appointment as tutor in
rhetoric, and philosophy at Oxford.

ut teaching was not to the liking of this unregimented scholar.
After the Restoration he considered taking orders in the Church of
England, but could not bring himself to endure the restraints of an
ecclesiastical career. Science had always beckoned him, so he de-
rided 10 take up the study of medicine. To learn the profession he
became assistant to David Thomas, an eminent physician then prac-
icing at Oxford. After a few years of apprenticeship Locke became
i fuU-fledged medical practitioner, but continued his close associa-
ion with Thomas.

In 1666 occurred an incident which altered the whole course of
Locke's career. Lord Ashley, soon to become Earl of "Snaftesbury,
:ame 10 Oxford for his health and took treatments from Dr.
Faoinas. Through Thomas,, Locke and Shaftesbury 'Became ac-
raainted. This casual acquaintance quickly ripened into warm
rimdship, and in 1667 Ashley invited Locke to come to London as
iis personal physician and confidential secretary. The next fifteen
:ears of Locke'sJife were spent in the Ashley menage.
Ashley was one of the towering public men of the day. In the

248 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

Puritan Revolution he had first fought in the Royalist armies; then.
seeing In the king's cause, as he thought, a menace to the Protesta:/
religion, he had gone ever to the Parliamentary side and had V--

fmrff ~~*' ^""'' '

conie a field-marshal in the rebel forces. After Naseby he support:
Cromwell for a time, but joined the extreme Presbyterians ar.d
Republicans In opposition to the dictatorship of the Lord Protects:.
As an opposition leader he took an active part in the overthrow •;;'
Richard Cromwell and became a prominent factor In the resror:-
tion of Charles II; which movement, be it remembered, was :r^-
tially constitutionalist and not absolutist In character. Ashley a:
once took a high place In the councils of the restored monarchy and
quickly mounted higher. In 1672 he was made Earl of Shaftesburv
and was elevated to the post of Lord Chancellor.
;f iJLocke profited enormously from his connection with Shaftesbur. ,
Socially he was brought into contact with most of the great figure
of the day In politics, science, and letters. Through his Intimate rela-
tions with Shaftesbury he was afforded an inside view of public affair?
and gained a very considerable personal prestige, as It was \videlv
believed that he was Shaftesbury 's confidential adviser, which h
all probability he was. Shaftesbury had Locke appointed to ruo
positions in the government — Secretary of Presentations (an office
having charge of church matters under the Lord Chancellor's juris-
diction) and Secretary to the Council of Trade and Foreign Planta-
tions. In addition to carrying the burden of these offices along wi±
his medicai duties and other responsibilities In the Shaftesbur;
family Locke applied himself to various philosophical studies and
took part in the proceedings of the Royal Society, of which he was
elected a member In 1668.

In 1673 Shaftesbury was dismissed from office and Locke's career
took another turn. As a champion of Protestantism Shaftesbury had
persistently opposed the popish trend of the government and had
also incurred the ill-will of the monarch, it is alleged, because of Ms
attempts to stop the granting of money to the king's mistresses.
Immediately upon his dismissal from office he went into battle and
became the acknowledged leader of the opposition. Locke went GUI
of office with his patron, but, finding his health seriously impaired
did not remain In England. The character of the ailment which
laid hold of him at this time has been the subject of some difference
of opinion among his biographers, some pronouncing it tuberculosis

VOICES OF FREEDOM 249

2nd others chronic asthma. Thinking he might benefit by a change
;f climate. Locke repaired to France for rest and treatment. It was
;:' iirie avail, however; he remained a semi- invalid the rest of his life.
Striving to placate the growing opposition, Charles II restored
^.aftesbury to office in 1679. Locke immediately returned from
r ranee and resumed his old position, continuing in office until 1681
v.hffi Shaftesbury, in excess of zeal to secure Protestant succession in
England, became implicated in intrigues which caused him to be
-rested and tried for treason. Though acquitted, he was forced to
.eave die country. Locke promptly relinquished his place in the
?;vemment and retired to Oxford, but lived in constant fear of
persecution. In 1683, feeling that action against him was immi-
r.er.L he sought asylum in Holland, where he lived not merely in
retirement but in actual concealment in order to avoid extradition
:-j England. During this enforced exile Locke made his first serious
appearance as an author. He was now fifty-four years of age, well
pas: the normal age of great intellectual and literary fecundity, and
~ constant ill-health. But with Locke the last years of life were the
-osi fruitful. The period from 1683 to his death in 1704 witnessed
ie production of practically all the great philosophical wo^ks which
nave made his name great in the history of human thought.

During the exile in Holland Locke was prominently identified
rob schemes concocted by English political emigres for the over-
sow of the House of Stuart and became well acquainted with
'Aifliam, Prince of Orange. When William, after the Revolution of
!iss; was invited to ascend the English throne, Locke hurried back
to his homeland, sailing on the same ship with Mary, the princess
consort. Under the new regime Locke was offered the post of arn-
Mssador to Brandenburg, but declined on account of poor health
.ne office of Commissioner of Appeals, which he did accept, obliged
im to live in London, and the insalubrity of the London climate
son compelled him to surrender this post and retire to the country
inenceforth practically all of his time and energy were devoted to
ptoosophical and literary labors. In 1696 he was persuaded to ac-
«pt a commissionership on the Board of Trade, but the frequent
oils to London which this appointment required entailed a strain
a could not long endure. In 1 700 he resigned and did not again ap-
£» in public life. Death came in 1704, interrupting the comple-
140 of the Fourth Letter on Toleration.

250 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

Locke?s writings number over thiriy separate titles, spreading over
such dissimilar fields as politics, economics, education, theolosv.
philosophy, natural science, horticulture, and biography. In at leas:
four of these fields — politics, education, theology, and philosophy—
his work ranks among the highest achievements of the human mind.
In the political field the principal works of this frail intellectual
genius are: A Letter on Toleration (1689), Two Treatises of Governme^
(1690). A Second Letter on Toleration (1690), A Third Letter on Toler-
ation (1692), A Fourth Letter on Toleration (posthumous), and
damental Constitutions of Carolina (written in 1673 in connection
his labors as Shaftesbury's secretary, but not published until

V

Taken as a whole Locke's intellectual labors, in whatever field
they chanced to lie, may be epitomized as a superlative appeal IQ
reason. * Rationality was at once the keynote of his life and the cen-
tral purpose of all his mental questing? When he wrote of Christian-
ity, it was to demonstrate that common sense and reason were ihe
only adequate grounds on which the Christian faith could be ac-
cepted. When he wrote on education, it was to plead for methods
that would lead ihe pupil to a rational discernment of truth. When
he wrote on metaphysics, it was to seek the true bases of perception,
knowledge, and understanding. When he wrote on government. I:
was to explore the reasonableness of political authority and to ex-
plain what forms and processes of government were or were not h
accord with the dictates of reason.

This deeply ingrained trait of mind and soul is beautifully ex-
emplified in the four Letters on Toleration. Locke's philosophical
defense of religious liberty in these four epistles is in the opinion of
Mr. A. C. Fraser, the renowned Scotch logician, "the most far-
reaching of his contributions to social polity." Milton had argued
for toleration on the ground that repression was futile and vicious,
defeating its own ends and balking the development of true moral-
ity. Other forerunners of Locke had advocated toleration on
grounds of fair play, public policy, or sectarian interest. But for the
dispassionate doctor-politician these pleas were entirely insuffi-
cient. The real justification for toleration, Locke reiterated again
and again — the one impregnable and unanswerable argument-
is the frailty of the human intellect and the limitations of human

VOICES OF FREEDOM 251

- ' ~ "" '" " " ** • I • I - I- -I I — _.. . — |l — — _!•. | •!..• - , m .^ ,^_,

understanding. Men may think they are right, but they cannot
,v,-x it. Knowledge, Locke contended in the Essay Concerning
H"iman Understanding, is neither innate nor revealed, but consists of
T],e perception of relations among ideas. And ideas, he had further
declared, are all born of experience, without which they are but
emw words. Experience, however, is such a treacherous jade,
^resenting herself in so many deceptive guises, that we can be sure3
no: of rational finalities and certainties, but only of reasonable
probabilities. How, then, can error be condemned as immoral or
hfresv as a sin? By what color of right or reason can authority
impose its affirmations on those who disagree?

A well-aimed ripost was this, to counter the all-assuming ab-
solutism of Hobbes. In substance agreeing with Hobbes as to the
fallibility of human nature, both in its mental and moral aspects,
Locke insisted that it was improper to deduce from this premise
eiiher the reasonableness or the -necessity of absolute authority.
The author of the Leviathan could see "no possibility of morality in
human society without uniform and universal standards enforced
by supreme authority. Otherwise, in his view, there would be
naught but a chaos of individual judgments and self-interested
actions. Be it so, answered Locke; yet what assurance could one
have of the rightness of precepts enjoined by sovereign authority?
Are crowned heads or mitred thatches less prone to err than com-
mon noddles? If so, where is the proof? Supernatural explanations
v;iil not do; Hobbes himself had rejected all such puerile fancies.
Kings and bishops accordingly must be possessed of purely finite
minds nowise exempt from the shortcomings of human under-
standing. And in experience they are wont to be less well equipped
for rational judgments than the average clodhopper in the fields.
Were it not better., then, to practice toleration, trusting that from
the free competition of a multitude of ideas relative truth may
emerge? Can more be expected in this mundane sphere?

This was indeed a tough morsel for authoritarians to chew.
Their attempted rationalization of absolutism was revealed as an
absurd non sequitur, whereupon they promptly forgot or ignored Mr.
Hobbes and fell back upon the fantastic mythology of Filmer's ex-
position of the divine right of kings. Locke's bold empiricism could
not be met in the open field of fact and reason. He had made a case
toleration that no honest and unprejudiced mind could deny.

252 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

* " ' '»*n

* The most complete and systematic of Locke's political writi^nv
Is the volume entitled Tni$ Treatises of Government* published in 1£*~*
as a vindication of ihe Whig Revolution. As the title indicates, :r*
book encompasses two distinct treatises. The first Is a point-bv-
poini refutation of Fllmer* s Pciriarcha; the second Is a careful a^~
scholarly exposition of Locke?s own constructive political idpa*
The firs i treatise need not detain the modern reader long-. Sir
Robert Fllmer would now be wholly unremembered If Locke bad
not taken the trouble to answer him. But at the time Locke wrote
it seemed important to smash Filmerlsm and smash Ii hard. Poor
Fllmer had been thirry-six years in his grave, but his book on the
divine right of kings had achieved a great posthumous vosue
among the reactionaries, particularly the Jacobites and hi?h
churchmen, because of its subile and vigorous championship of
legitimacy and divine ordination. These dialectical dexterides
Locke proceeded to let the wind out of once and for all. \Vhen he
had finished with Fllrner there was not enough lung-power lefi
among all the legitimists and pretenders of England to reflate the
jaunty balloon of divine right.

The second treatise opens, as would be expected In a scientific
study, with a consideration of the nature of political power and the
origin of the state.* In common with most scholars of his time Locke
espoused the social compact theory of the state! For this he had ihe
respected authority of a line of thinkers extending clear back to
Greek and Roman times; and, best of all, he had also the authority
of Hobbes, the one truly scientific defender of the reactionary
cause. But Locke was too good a logician to give away his case by
accepting the speculative premises either of Hobbes or of the ex-
1 treme radicals as to the character of the original state of nature.
Tor him the state of nature anteceding the social contract was not
-a Hobbesian condition of strife in which every man was arrayed
against every other; nor was It a state of idyllic concord and happi-
ness in which social frictions were adjusted by voluntary and mutual
concession on the part of the noble savages of the presocial era."
Rationalist to his finger tips, Locke preferred to plant his feet on
solid middle ground. *The original state of nature, he tells us? was
"a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of
their persons and possessions as they think fit, within the bounds of
the law of Nature, without asking leave or depending upon the will

VOICES OF FREEDOM 253

cf any other man/5 l Furthermore, it was £t"A state also of equality,'
^herein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having
mere than another. . . ." l Thus far he is in agreement with
Hcbbes,

-But," he goes on to say, announcing his dissent from the theory
of the great absolutist,

-though this be a state of liberty, yet it is not a state of licence; though
man in that stare have an uncontrollable liberty to dispose of his person
or possessions, yet he has not liberty to destroy himself, or so much as any
creature in his possession, but where some nobler use than its bare preser-
varion calls for it. The state of Nature has a law of Nature to govern it
which obliges every one, and reason, which is that law, teachesVlI man-
kind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no
:ne ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions; for
men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise
Maker; all servants of one sovereign Master, sent into the world by His
order and about His business; they are His property, whose workman-
ship they are made to last during His, not one another's pleasure.
And that all men may be restrained from invading other's rights, and
from doing hurt to one another, and the law of Nature be observed,
which willeth the peace and preservation of all mankind, the execution
of the law of Nature is in that state put into every man's hands, whereby
even- one has a right to punish the transgressors of that law to such a
degree as may hinder its violation. . . . And thus, in the state of
Nature, one man comes by a power over another, but yet no absolute
or arbitrary power . . . , but only to retribute to him so far as calm
reason and conscience dictate, what is proportionate to his transgres-
sion, which is so much as may serve for reparation and restraint."*

The siate of nature was thus explained as a condition of right and
reason; non-political, but not non-socialXln Locke's state of nature *
there was no jungle war of every man against every man, no senti-
mental human brotherhood, but a reign of law predicated upon
reason and equality.- Equality in what? Why, obviously, in inde-
pendence of domination by others; certainly not in qualities of
Draix^and physique, or in rank and possessions. Let this basic
equality be destroyed, and there would be no reason in human rela-
tions, no law of nature. To preserve this natural and legal equality
o! man, said Locke, each individual must recognize and respect the
equality of every other; must, in brief, concede to every man that

*jQlffi Locke Two Treatises of Civil Government (Everyman's Library, 1924), p. 118.
*«.j pp. 119—120.

254 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

•which he c:a:m? for himself. Bv the law of nature equality of aer-

* •*• ' A ""'

sonai independence is every man's birthright. To defend it Is his
most sacred duty: to transgress Ii Is a flagrant wrong inviting acd
justifying redress. Xo person and no government may rightfully

infringe upon it. 'This equality of Independence embraces life,
liberty, and property. Such are the inherent and Inalienable rights
of man.* Thus in a nutshell we have the momentous doctrine of
natural rights, Locke's greatest contribution to political though:
and one of the most explosive ideas that ever found lodgment in the
human mind."

That Locke, the denier of Innate Ideas, should be the doughty
champion of Inherent rights." Is one of those curious paradoxes
which attest the human quality7 of even the greatest Intellects. In
the realm of metaphysics Locke dealt objectively with things as he
thought they were; in the realm of politics he dealt subjectively \vith
things as his Whiggish preconceptions subtly beguiled him to be-
lieve they were, because In a rational society of the Whig pattern
they ought so to be. The hand Is subdued to the dye It works in,
says the old adage. * Locke was not the first political thinker, nor
yet the last, to fall a victim to the fallacy of wish-fulfillment." That
is the commonest of all pitfalls for the man who advocates a cause,
be the nature of that cause what it may. But the doctrine of nat-
ural rights was none the less potent by reason of Its obviously parti-
san cast. In shaping political behavior ideas squarely contrary to
proved or provable facts may have more Influence than absolute
truth. It was so with the Lockelan concept of natural rights,
Dynamite could not have been more devastating to the ancient
foundations of political authority. Imbued with a fanatical belief
in the rights of man, revolutionists of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries were destined to blast the old order to smithereens and
plunge the western world into a headlong career of experimenta-
tion with democracy*

Though not a condition of violence and anarchy, Locke's state
of nature^ as we have noted above, fell considerably short of being
a condition of Arcadian bliss. * It was attended with many incon-
veniences. Because of differences of understanding, of moral stand-
ards,, and of personal Interest, disputes were bound to arise, even
among those sincerely desirous of following the law of nature. *
Though in principle each was empowered to maintain his own

VOICES OF FREEDOM 255

rights, taking justice into his own hands if his rights were violated,
this was very unsatisfactory. It made each man the judge in his own
case and militated against cooperation for the common good.
. Recognizing these shortcomings of the state of nature and per-
ceiving that the remedy lay in the formation of civil government,
men in the state of nature, according to Locke, voluntarily com-
pacted and agreed "to join and unite into a community for their
comfortable, safe, and peaceable living, one amongst another, in a
secure enjoyment of their properties, and a greater security against
any that are not of it'J l This compact, Locke takes particular pains

10 point out, did not involve an agreement to surrender any natural
rights except that of executing the law of nature and redressing
one's own wrongs. And in surrendering this one right men yielded

11 to society as a whole, not to any particular individual or group.
Society having been invested by the social compact with the right
to execute the law of nature and do justice between men, it became
the function of society to decide what acts were in violation of the
law of nature and to prescribe and administer appropriate reme-
dies. Beyond that point, however, political authority could not
justly go. 'The business of political society was to preserve, not in-
vade, men's natural rights of life, liberty, and property.- Which did
not mean, be it reiterated, that the function of the state was to
secure men equality of any kind save equal immunity from wrong-
ful coercion or spoliation in the exercise of the inherent rights of
life, liberty, and property.

The idea of sovereign authority, as developed by Bodin and
Hobbes and other exponents of the leviathan state, was wholly
alien to Locke's concept of political society. His concern was not
to exalt political authority, but to describe its limitations. His «
political community was the product of the voluntary consent of
its members, and his rulers were mere agents of the community
having none but delegated powers. . "In all lawful governments "
he asserted, "the designation of the persons who are to bear rule
• • • had its establishment originally from the people . . all
commonwealths, therefore, with the form of government estab-
lished, have rules also of appointing and conveying the right to
those who are to have any share in the public authority; and who-
ever gets into the exercise of any part of the power by other wavs

1

p. 164.

236 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

than what the laws of the community have prescribed hath no ri^
to be obeyed, . . . since he is not the person the laws have a>

*

pointed, and, consequently, not the person the people have con-
sented to." : Moreover though a magistrate or ruler be properly
appointed by law to exercise political authority, he may, by ;;the
exercise of power beyond right, which nobody can have a right
to," l become a tyrant. ""Wherever law ends, tyranny begins, if the
law be transgressed to another's harm; and whosoever in authority
exceeds the power given him by law. and makes use of the force he
has under his command to compass that upon .the subject which die
law allows not, ceases in that to be a magistrate, and acting without
authority- may be opposed, as any other man who by force invades
the right of another/5 2 Xot persons, we thus perceive; not rnon-
archs., prelates, privileged castes, or even elected rulers are in
Locke's view the embodiment of sovereignty; but law — law rooted
in common consent.

But common consent does not require unanimity. On such
terms organized society would be impossible, a fact which Locke
was quick to recognize, saying, "When any number of men have
consented to make one community or government, they are thereby
presently incorporated, and make one body politic, wherein the
majority have a right to act and conclude the rest. . . . For that
which acts [actuates] any community, being only the consent of
the individuals of it, and it being one body, must move one way, it
is necessary the body should move that way whither the greater
force carries it, which is the consent of the majority, or else it is
impossible it should act or continue one body, one community,
which the consent of every individual that united into it agreed
that it should; so every one is bound by that consent to be con-
cluded by the majority.3' 3 Otherwise "this original compact,
whereby he with others incorporates into one society, would signify-
nothing, and be no compact if he were left free and under no other
ties than he was in before in the state of Nature." 3

That there is such a thing as supreme power within the allotted
sphere of government Locke manifestly does not deny, but he
locates it in the wiU of society as expressed in law having the sanc-
tion of the majority and executed by agents definitely responsible
thereto. * Significantly foreshadowing the rise of the parliamentary

1 ****** PP- 217-218. 2 Ibid^ p> 219. a 2bid.t pp. 164-165.

VOICES OF FREEDOM 257

svsiem. Locke assigned to the legislature the supreme power in gov-
ernment; but not arbitrary or absolute power. The legislature must
respect the inalienable rights of the individual. Its power extends
onlv to those things committed to government by the social com-

* •

pact. The natural rights of man must ever be regarded as consti-
lutional limitations on the authority of all lawmakers and all

rulers. *

Secondary to the legislative function, though equally vital in the
actual operation of government, Locke placed the executive func-
tion in which, anticipating by two centuries Goodnow's Politics and
Administration, he included both the administrative and the judicial
processes. A third process of government he also differentiated,
embracing war, peace, foreign relations, and other exterior con-
cerns. This, quaintly, he styled the federative function.

Especially interesting and noteworthy in Locke's treatment of
governmental organization and functions was his advocacy of the
organic separation of powers. "And because," we read in the
Second Treatise,

"it may be too great temptation to human frailty, apt to grasp at power,
for the same persons who have the power of making laws to have also in
iheir hands the power to execute them, whereby they may exempt
themselves from obedience to the laws they make, and suit the law, both
in its making and execution, to their own private advantage, and
thereby come to have a distinct interest from the rest of the community,
contrary to the end of society and government. Therefore in well-
ordered commonwealths, where the good of the whole is so considered as
it ought, the legislative power is put into the hands of divers persons
who, duly assembled, have by themselves, or jointly with others, a
power to make laws, which when they have done, being separated again,
they are themselves subject to the laws they have made. . . . But be-
cause laws that are at once, and in a short time made, have a constant
and lasting force, and need a perpetual execution, or an attendance
thereunto, therefore it is necessary that there should be a power always
in being which should see to the execution of the laws that are made,
and remain in force. And thus the legislative and executive powrer come
often to be separated.'5 x

Mighty in effect as most of Locke's political theories were, none
shook the bedrock of legitimism and authoritarianism as violently

i f*

as the famous doctrine of revolution. Standing foursquare on the
proposition that sovereignty can exist only in the community as a

H 190-191.

25S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

whole, Locke insisted thai political authority is a trust which must
be directed to the ends for which men have abandoned the state of
nature and entered into the social compact. Failing this, c;when the
legislative, or the prince, either of them act contrary 10 their trust
. . . by this breach of trust they forfeit the power the people had
put into their hands for quite contrary ends, and ii devolves to the
people, who have a right to resume their original liberty, and by the
establishment of a new legislative (such as they think fit), provide
for their own safety and security, which is the end for which they are
in society. What I have said here concerning the legislative in gen-
eral holds true also concerning the supreme executor, who having
a double trust pui in him, both to have a part in the legislative and
the supreme execution of the law: acts against both, when he goes
about to set up his own arbitrary will as the law of society,55 1 And
if it be said, Locke continues, that this doctrine lays a foundation for
unceasing discord and rebellion in the state' (which is precisely
what Hobbes had said), then "they may as well say, upon the same
ground, that honest men may not oppose robbers or pirates, because
this may occasion disorder or bloodshed. . . . The end of govern-
ment is the good of mankind ; and which is best for mankind3 that
the people should always be exposed to the boundless will of tyr-
anny, or thai the rulers should be sometimes liable to be opposed
when they grow exorbitant in the use of their power, and employ ii
for the destruction, and not the preservation, of the properties of
their people? " 2

Revolutionist that he was in the sense expressed in the foregoing
quotations, "Locke was no radical/ either in his own time or ours.
The intemperate doctrines of the Levellers, Fifth Monarchy men.
Anabaptists, and other gentry of the lunatic fringe were as repug-
nant to him as to Hobbes. Much water had gone over the dam
since the day of Praise-God Barebone. Locke was defending, not die
Puritan Revolution but the Whig Revolution; and the Whig Revo-
lution, as Daniel Webster pointed out, was a revolution "in favor of
property as well as of other rights." I

That this was true, the writings of Locke fully attest,' The chief
object of political society, he repeatedly affirmed, was the protection
and preservation of property. In the state of nature, according to
his theory, all things were in common, no man having private

'#., pp. 228-229. 2 Ibid., p. 233,

VOICES OF FREEDOM 259

. ,. — ' ~ * " ' ' 1 1 1— 1 1 i

Jomiriion exclusive of the rest of mankind. By nature every man
"^ad dominion over his own person and nothing more; but when by
VTS own labor he removed from its natural state something that
-\acure hath provided and left In it, he hath mixed his labor with
-v and joined to it something that is his own., and thereby makes it
V- property/5 ! The appropriation of the things of nature in this
manner Locke ranked as one of the inherent rights of man which all
*rould respect. In the state of nature of course It was the function of
each man to safeguard his own right of property, but this had not
been satisfactory. It was, Indeed, the constant insecurity of prop-
f*rtv under this regime of self-help that had chiefly induced men to
enter Into the social compact, each resigning to the commonwealth

his right to punish offenses against his property.

* i— ' f

Thus, reasoned the acute Doctor Locke, it became^the solemn
durv of the state to preserve and protect the property ancf property
rXhts of every member of society up to the point at least where no
harm was done to others. By no means, however, did that signify
thai the state was to guarantee equality of possessions. When by
mutual consent, asserted Locke, men agreed to use gold and silver
as a medium of exchange, they agreed ipso facto to a form of prop-
eriv which could be stored up In excess of present needs and uses.
Hence :sit Is plain that the consent of men have agreed to a dis-
proportionate and unequal possession of the earth . . . they hav-
ing, by consent, found out and agreed in a way how a man may,
rightfully and without Injury, possess more than he himself can
make use of by receiving gold and silver, which may continue long
in a man's possession without decaying for the overplus, and agree-
ing those metals should have value." 2

It Is clear, then, that the right of revolution, as viewed by Locke,
vtes merely the people's original right of self-help invoked to over-
throw a government which had defaulted in its obligations to the
community, more especially in those pertaining to property. For,
as he takes pains to say, "The reason why men enter Into society is
ie preservation of their property; and the end ... is that there
nay be laws made, and rules set, as guards and fences to the proper-
ies of all the society, to limit the power and moderate the dominion
if every part and member of the society.5' 3 When in this respect
Tiers become recreant to their trust, "they put themselves into a

p. 130. 2 2bid.3 pp. 140-141, 3 Ibid., pp. 228-229.

269 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

state of war with the people, vrho are thereupon absolved from ar/;
farther obedience, and are left to the common refuge which God
haih provided for all men against force and violence.15 1

VI

:'"< If, as critics are \voni to opine, there is little thai is absolutely orij-
inal in :he political philosophy of John Locke — few ideas and doc*
^/*" trines that had not been previously conceived and declared to LIP
world — it is none the less a fact that this frail and bookish physician
of seventeenth-cermiry England must be ranked as one of the feu-
political thinkers whose work will never die./That the ideas he em-
ployed first sprouted in other minds subtracts from his prodigious
stature not a mite. Begetter of ideas he may not have been, but it 15
undeniably true that he was one of the foremost combiners of idea*
and coxnpounders of systematic thought that the world has ever
known. Laying hold of abstruse and impotent concepts thai had
been floating around in the back eddies of European political
thought for many generations, he wove them into a cohesive and
kinetic body of doctrine that has gripped the political consciousness
of Europe and America for two tremendous centuries. The eish:-
eenth and nineteenth centuries bore the impress of Locke's polid-
cal thought more completely and persistently than that of any other
political ideologist, and to-day at the beginning of the second third
of the twentieth century the question which occupies serious stu-
dents of government more than any other is whether free peoples
can forsake the principles of Locke and still remain free.

Political democracy owes John Locke a debt of incalculable mag-
nitude. His was an unfailing arsenal of ideas and arguments whence
eighteenth-century smashers of autocracy drew7 most deadly intel-
lectual munitions; his were the theories and ideals by which nine-
%/ icenth-century makers of constitutional democracy sought to shape
popular institutions. The Two Treatises of Government, says"\Parring-
ton? "became the textbook of the American Revolution./* 2 The
Declaration of Independence is but a thunderous transcript of this
mighty book, Locke must also be numbered among the makers of
the French Revolution, for it was from his incomparable rational-
ization of the Whig Revolution that Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau,
and other fomenters of that tremendous upheaval derived much of

1 Ibid. 2 V. L. Parrington, The Colonial Mind (1927), p. 189.

VOICES

--- - - _ __

•'-PS fundamental thought. And \vu_ r

TV order, American and French r*?' - . the demolition of the

feeding them came to draft i^olutwn*to and the generations

::aed again and again to the Writi'^^,^ ^°Ve™ment' *«*
-radons of popular sovereignty *f of L°cke for authentic inter-
'" -nt most distinctive contributing C°nstlltutlonal government.
-Rewords of Professor William A ^Locke to Political theory,"
-^al rights." ' If not the most Hi t- Unmng> "1S his d°ctrine of
^amic. and it may well deserve * ^ ve.' rt was surely the most
d-utional limitation on sovereign n ° be Called both- EveT con-
T-aard of individual liberty, ever/ '. CVery constitutional safe-
p,-er>- barrier against arbitrary and , ^ jaCCOrded to Property,
-arion of rights in the written C0n ^ " authority> eveiT dec-
ruries is predicated upon this siln ^, tltutlons of the last two cen-
-,hich made individualism an invino'w stuPendous postulate,

vitalitv- into the wishful creed of / J Polltic^ fact and breathed

T ' +u , .ais^zfaire.

To an age that sees menace m , .

carious and almost unpardonable n * nghtS °f Pr°Perty il is a
::ined liberty of property and libertv f X *** L°CkC Sh°Uld have
rishts of possession more important th Person' seemingly holding
ie \\Tiiggish mind of the good Do ^anTnghts of humanity. 'j But to
JTJJIJ- in this, nor any conceivable G therC "** n°"incon-

Locke was an economic realist who Hlm?airment of human ri£hts-
lecrion between property and pOvv dy Perceived the causal con-

nmdmdes of the middle class who?' ^ " Seemed- to him' as to
:ro?ertied aristocracy, that the On suffered the tyrannies of a
and die pursuit of happiness lay in 1 ^ S^r^ty of life, liberty,
To this end he sought a complete ar,?- democratlzation of property.
:f property, beyond the reach of ^ mdefeasible individualization
•Atom the vicissitudes of politics m[ I ' CaSte' °rder' or sovereign
«rv- man freedom of property a5f PaiSe tO power' Guarantee
ieorv- there would be little cause tn aCCOrding to the Lockeian
He would be amply able to look oTT7 * Ms °ther liberties'

Tte is a plausible theory even to . '

almost overwhelmingly persuasive T!' "* L°cke's thne Jt was
cons of property which are charaot • ^ corPorate aggrega-
te unknown in the seventeenth StIC °f modern capitalism
o ^ The kal

of property was probably as hbM ^^ The kgal ownershiP

co^entrated then as now,

m Luther to Montesquieu (1905), p. 364.

262 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

pos-Ibly more so: but :: v/as In the main individual o\vner$h;-
racher than corporaie ownership, and the actual control \vas far-
mere widely dispersed than In ihe great collectivities of the Dreser/
cay. What we have in modern society to an ever-Increasing extent >
the collective ownership of property In private hands under a sv=-
tern of management which vests control In largely Irresponsible
and autocratic minorities. This of course Is the very antithesis :f
the Lockeian theory of ownership and control, which was that even-
man should be the undisputed lord and master of his own ooise--

"*" JL. *""

slons In so far as this dominion worked no Injury to other men. If
Locke were living to-day with the same middle-class point of view
that was his In the seventeenth century, ii is entirely probable thai
he would apply his doctrine of property rights in a somewhat differ-
ent manner. He would no doubt Insist upon the natural and In-
alienable right of property, but he would recognize that in order to
secure and safeguard this right for the middle class, to say nothing
of the common rabble, It Is necessary to have a degree of social
control over great corporate combinations of property that was not
requisite In the non-Industrial seventeenth century.

Quite as Influential as the doctrine of natural rights, though
possibly less unique, wa$ Locke's concept of constitutional govern-
ment based on the consent of the governed and Implemented by
majority rule. Never before had a political thinker made so clear
and cogent a case for the proposition that the rule of man over
man, unless founded on the consent of the subjects. Is without legal
basis or justification. Never before had the necessity- and practi-
cability of government by majorities, through representative agen-
cies acting under strictly delegated powers, been so convincingly
stated. To an unusual degree Locke possessed the faculty of making
the view espoused by him appear to be supremely reasonable, the
one and only sensible view to take; and in this particular his consti-
tutional theories were more insinuating than some of his more
abstract cerebrations. The reformist mind of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries was absolutely captivated by the Lockeian
philosophy of constitutional government; so much so that though
the shaping hand was that of a Walpole, a Jefferson, a Garnbetta,
or a Cavour, the voice was invariably the voice of Locke.

Credit must also go to Locke for the clarification and develop-
ment of the principle of separation of powers, which was to iffi-

VOICES OF FREEDOM 263

print an indelible mark on American political Institutions. Neg-
lected since Polybius, this plausible hypothesis was taken up by
die persuasive secretary-doctor and treated in his characteristically
lucid and rational manner. Political thinkers and practical states-
men both were profoundly impressed. Following the trail broken
by Locke5 Montesquieu evolved the famous tripartite theory of
governmental functions; and following both Locke and Montes-
cuieu, the designers of American governmental structures — local,

* * •*

state, and national — gave us the threefold system of organization
•A'hich has had more to do with the peculiar and esoteric develop-
ments of American government and politics than any other factor
save possibly our federal plan.

/'Succinctly stated, tthe imperishable achievement of Locke as a
'political thinker lies in this: That he gave the world a systematic,
rational, and eminently realizable philosophy of individualism.
popular sovereignty,, and constitutional government. In an age in
which the dissonant tongues of Communist, Fascist, Nazi, Techno-
crat, and New Dealer unite in pouring scorn upon this glorious
iriad of libertarian doctrines, the author of the Two Treatises of
Government may seem to be losing ground. Indeed, it would some-
times appear that the trend of the times is back to Hobbes and the
philosophy of the Leviathan. Absolutism stalks the earth again, dis-
guised, to make it more palatable, as proletarian dictatorship,
Totalitarian state, corporative commonwealth, and planned econ-
omy. The paramount question to-day is not whether we shall have a
regimented society. We have it. In fact, we have had it for a long
lime, as thousands of luckless investors and unemployed workmen
can sadly testify. The crucial question is whether we shall have
private or public regimentation, or something in between; demo-
cratic or authoritarian regimentation. The rugged individualism
which we hear so often praised and dispraised is but a hectic memory.
It ceased to exist a generation ago. Shall we then conclude that
Locke's philosophy of individual liberty has no place in modern
? Not at all! I* *s more vital now than ever before. The greatest
;er of modern life is the submergence of the individual, a sub-
mergence no less probable in a regime of democratic collectivism
ihan in one of autocratic stamp,

Let us, therefore, read Locke again, and read him more pene-
tratingly. We shall find in his pages much to ponder and much to

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

apply to the problems of modern society. We shall discover, perhaps
to our surprise, that Locke sought not liberty for ihe strong, the
favored, or the fortunate alone, but liberty for every man regard-
less of his circumstances In life; and thai he looked upon government
as a necessary and proper agency of ihe majority to secure and con-
serve the liberty of all. It may be thai we live in a world In which
that Ideal Is unattainable, but It Is an Ideal we must ever strive to
attain, lest we lose the finest fruits of civilization. And whatever
the future order of society may be, we are assured that there will
be more liberty and security for the individual than could have
been the case had not the western mind for two long centuries been
deeply Impregnated with the political philosophy of John Locke.

REFERENCES

Coker, F. \V., Readings in Political Philosophy (rev. ed.. New York, 193^
Chaps. XVIII, XXL

Cook, T. I.5 .1 History of Political Philosophy (New York, 1936), Chap. XIX.
Dunning W. A., A History of Political Theories from Luther to Montesquieu

(New York, 1905), Chaps. VII, IX.
Flynn, J. S.5 The Influence of Puritanism on the Political and Religious Thought

of the English (London, 1920).
Gelser, K. F._, and Jaszi, O., Political Philosophy from Plato to Jeremy Bentk&n

(New York, 1927), Chap. IX.

Gettell, R. G., History of Political Thought (New York, 1924), Chap. XL
Gooch, G. P. 5 English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century (rev. eel,

Cambridge, 1924), pp. 150-155, 204-207, 265-270.
Lamprecht, S. P., The Moral and Political Philosophy of John Locke (New

York, 1918).
Larkln, P., Property in the Eighteenth Century^ with Special Reference to England

and Locke (London, 1930).
Laski, H. J.3 Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham (London,

1920), Chap. II.

Morley, H. (ed.), English Prose Writings of John Milton (London, 1889).
Sabine, G. H.5 .4 History of Political Theory (New York, 1937), Chaps. XXV-

XX VL

Saurat, D.s Milton, Man and Thinker (New York, 1924).
Sherman, C. L. (ed.). Treatise of Civil Government and A Letter Concerning

Toleration by John Locke (New York, 1937).

CHAPTER XVI

SEVENTEENTH CENTURY INTELLECTUALS

THE seventeenth century was a bloody century. It was the
century of the Thirty Years' War, the English Civil War
the Anglo-Dutch wars, the repeated wars of Louis XIV
tae wars of Spam and the Dutch Republic, the internecine wars of
:ne German pnnces, the various wars of Russia, Sweden, and Po-
axa, the far-flung wars of colonization, and of other wars too
numerous to reate. There was scarcely a year of general peace
throughout the whole century. Carnage, chaos, and des truction
reigned unchecked. Never did the outlook for western civili
seem more dark and uncertain.

.

But remarkable to say, the seventeenth century was also a cen-
mry of unparalleled intellectual advancement. If war° never
ce^ed.. neuher did intellectual ferment. It was the century of
Galdco, Newton, Descartes, Kepler, Harvey, Boyle, and other Ireal
pioneers of saence to whom we are indebted for the foundaS
i modern technology. It was the century of Bacon, Spfnoza
I^jbruz Pascal, Locke, and other founders of modern sysS
pMosophy. It was the century which witnessed the crowning

D T alS°,the "^ °f Ce™es
"' ' ^ *"** °ther authors of

Casting off, at last, the shackles of mediaevalism, the Eurooean
d m the seventeenth century found wings and began toTo"
mg above the blanketing fog of obscurantism which had envS'

Sr Tght ^ ^ dCCadenCe °f the classic^ cul^e"
Really sought to gam the sunlit heights of rationalism. For the
tot tune, almost, m twelve dismal centuries men began to explore

th°Ught CSCape the 1uestin^ sPirit °f this

°ther

r?Yl P T • i jf^"o.pa3 uian orner learned dlsci-

oid. Political thought is ever prone to be the handmaiden

266 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

of political causes. Nevertheless it is one of the shining glories of
the seventeenth century thai it fostered, more extensively than anv

&

previous century of the Christian Era, the awakening of the scien-
tific spirit in political thought. As in all ages, there was no lack of
partisan political thought in the seventeenth century. Hobbes and
Locke and Milton were great political thinkers and made invalu-
able contributions to the political enlightenment of mankind, but
they were all to some extent special pleaders — advocates devoted to
the rationalization of causes. Contrast their approach to politics
with that of Spinoza, who opened his Political Treatise with ihe an-
nouncement that he proposed "to investigate the subject-matter of
this science with the same freedom of spirit as we generally use in
mathematics," and then added that he would labor carefullv *:noi

^ «r

to xnock, lament, or execrate, but to understand human actions"

> *• *

and would view human passions :csuch as love, hatred, anger, envy,
ambition, pity, and other perturbations of the mind, not hi the
light of vices of human nature, but as properties, just as pertinent to
it, as are heat, cold, storm, thunder, and the like to the nature of
the atmosphere. . . ."

You do not encounter this attitude of scientific detachment in
politics much before the seventeenth century, and none too much of
it then. But the dispassionate Jewish philosopher did not stand
alone. Of his noteworthy contemporaries there were many who
adopted the same objective point of view. Especially conspicuous
for this characteristic were Harrington and Pufendorf. These three
— James Harrington, the English country squire; Benedict de
Spinoza, the Amsterdam lens-grinder; and Samuel Pufendorf, die
German university professor — we shall take as typical, in the realm
of political thought, of the pure intellectualism of the seventeenth
century. If not as to specific doctrines, certainly as to spirit and
approach, these thinkers must be counted among the most in-
fluential forebears of modern political science.

II

By the logic of social status James Harrington should have been
a hard-bitten Tory. By the logic of education and experience he
should have been an uncompromising revolutionary. Actually he
was neither. He was one of those rare mortals who in the thick of
furious events can preserve the calm and even balance of the true

^EVENTEENTH CENTURYTHOUGHT 267

scientist. He wore no man's collar, bore no party label, cham-
pioned no cause save that of truth, espoused no doctrine but that

—. 4- v*» f^ f"% C* /F\^IB

of reason

SJl i V.W.I-J *-"'—•

Harrington was born at Exton, Rutlandshire, in January 1611
He was descended from a long line of titled ancestors and numbered
among his kinfolk many of the ranking peers of the time. In 1 629 he
was entered in Trinity College, Oxford, where he came under the
tutelage of William Chillingworth, a renowned theologian and dis-
putationist. Chillingworth, after having been converted from
Protestantism to Romanism, had reasoned his way back to the
Protestant fold and become a doughty champion of that schismatic
faith. How greatly he influenced the unemotional Harrington is a
matter of speculation. Apparently not much.

Before Harrington became of age his father died. Being the eldest
son. he inherited the paternal estate and became economically in-
dependent. Leaving the university, he embarked on the conven-
tional European tour of the English gentleman, visiting in course of
his travels Holland, Flanders, Denmark, France, and Italy In
Holland, it is said, Harrington developed his first interest in public
questions. The low countries were at the time convulsed in a great
struggle for political and religious liberty. Harrington's English
friends happened to be partisans of the Prince of Orange and he
was frequently seen at the court of that embattled patriot. During
tis stay in Holland Harrington joined the Dutch army and is said
to have served with valor in the field. However, he did not allow
this politico-military interlude to arrest his travels long. In Italy he
tarried long at Venice and became much interested in the Venetian
system of government, which he afterward used in many respects
for a model.

Returning to England, Harrington took up the active manage-
ment of his estates. He became acquainted with Charles I and went
occasionally to the royal court, but took no active part in public af-
fairs, preferring apparently the r61e of a gentleman scholar Charles
developed a great affection for Harrington and solicited his advice
But Harrington declined to be drawn into the controversy between
the King and Parliament. He made it plain that, although ab-
stractly he preferred a republic to a monarchy, he was in this con-
troversy entirely neutral. Owing to his neutrality and the fact that
he was also known as a personal friend of the King, Harrington was

268 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

appointed as an attendant of Charles when he was brought from
Newcastle in 1646 after his surrender and arrest. Thus Harrington
became a groom of the King's bedchamber, but he did not swerve

C 1 • T * "" 1 * r-¥— ' i 11 1 "" T *" • 1 •» •-

Irani his neutrality DV a riair. I cough he served me King loyally,
he refrained from taking sides, and used his influence so far as pos-
sible to effect a compromise. On account of this he came under the
suspicion of the and-monarchists, and, when the King was trans-
ferred to Hum Castle, Harrington was dismissed from his service.
He assumed that his connection with the royal household was ended.
But, when he went to say farewell to Charles upon the latter s re-
moval to Windsor, the King, as Harrington prepared to kneel and
take his leave, grasped the hand of the beloved servitor, drew him
into the carriage, and Insisted that he be taken along.

The wish was granted, and Harrington accompanied his royal
master to Windsor. As a condition for remaining in the Kings
retinue, however, Harrington was required to take an oath that he
would do nothing to help Charles escape. This he refused to do,
feeling perhaps that such an oath would not only compromise his
neutrality, but would force him to become a participant In the pro-
scription of a personal friend. For this refusal Harrington was dis-
missed from the King's service and cast into prison; but General
Ireton, one of the Puritan high command, promptly obtained his
release. Harrington then returned to the King and was with him
on the scaffold.

After the beheading of Charles I, Harrington retired to his estate
and set to work upon Ms great book, Oceana. He took no part In
politics or political controversy, but did hope that his book might
exert some Influence upon the formation of a system of government
to succeed the monarchy. England was now free to choose whatever
form of government she mighi think best; and Harrington's aim
was to produce a treatise that would point the way to a govern-
mental scheme founded upon sound principles. While the book
was in the press, it was seized and condemned by agents of the
Cromwellian junta. Harrington secured Its release by appealing 10
Cromwell's daughter, to whom he explained that the book was not
a treasonable document but a political romance and would be
dedicated to Cromwell himself. It was published in 1656, and was
widely read and discussed. But It won no great favor with any
party or faction. It did not suit the Royalists, because it advocated

SEVENTEENTH CENTURY THOUGHT 269

a republican form of government; it did not suit the Puritans be-
cause It did not sufficiently vindicate the Commonwealth. Har-
rington devoted the remainder of his life to the task of popularizing
:he ideas set forth in his book. In 1659 he and some of his friends
formed the Rota Club to push his views as to the rotation of magis-
trates and election by ballot. This organization was disbanded by
die Restoration government. Harrington also wrote an abridge-
ment of the book and a number of tracts and articles explaining
and defending its doctrines.

When the Restoration brought Charles II to the throne,, Har-
rington again took refuge in his study. But suspicion had marked
him for a victim. The King or some one close to him had a notion
that the author of Oceana was plotting against the government. In
1661 Harrington was arrested on the charge of treason and taken
to the Tower. No formal accusation was made, and he was never
brought to trial. His sister instituted habeas corpus proceedings in his
behalf, and to avoid the service of the writ the King had Harrington
secretly transferred to the island of St. Nicholas opposite Plymouth.
Mistreatment incidental to this incarceration impaired his health;
and he became temporarily insane. Charles then magnanimously
restored him to his family; but Harrington never fully recovered his
faculties. He died at Westminster in 1677 at the age of 66.

Ill

James Harrington is a one-book genius. His reputation and in-
fluence rest entirely upon the Oceana. Politics was the only field of
scholarship that he specially cultivated, and Oceana was his magnum
opus. His other writings were little more than commentaries on his
first and greatest work. But the Oceana is truly a great book and
well deserves the attention of the modern student of political
thought. Harrington correctly described it as a political romance.
However, taste in romantic writing has materially changed since
Harrington's day, and the modern reader is apt to find the Oceana
rather forbiddingly tedious. We read the book to-day for the re-
markably acute and fertile political ideas with which it is packed
from cover to cover.

The plan of the book is simple. It is divided into five sections.
The first, called "The Preliminaries'3 contains the philosophical
arguments upon which the subsequent fictions are predicated.

27Q POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

This Is the most Important part of the book for the modern reader.
The second section, called :;The Council of Legislators,35 Is a brief
account of the composition and procedure of the constituent bodv

*

which framed the constitution of the imaginary Commonwealth cf

Oceana. The third section, entitled ::The Model of the Common-
wealth of Oceana/' is a prolix analysis of the constitution of Oceana
in the form of narrative setting forth the debates and determination
of the fictitious Council of Legislators. The fourth section, styled
'"The Corollary/' is the story of how the constitution of Oceana was
proposed and adopted and of the auspicious inauguration of the
new government. The last section, called "Description of Oceans'"
Is a short postscript depicting the unexampled felicity and prosper-
ity of Oceana under her ideal government.

Oceana was England — England governed according to the
dictates of sound principle and right reason, as conceived by the
calm and lofty mind of the eminent Mr. Harrington. That is why

* ^-* t

the book aroused so much Interest. The characters of the romance
bore fictitious names, but they were personages taken from English
public life both past and contemporary. Harrington's nomencla-
ture was but a thin disguise, and was intended so to be. Every one
knew that Olphaus Megaletor, the Lord Archon, was Oliver
Cromwell; that Leviathan was Hobbes; Verulamius, Francis Bacon:
Morpheus, James I; Corannus, Henry VIII; Parthenla, Queen
Elizabeth; and so on through the list. In the guise of fiction Har-
rington had rewritten the history of his country and given it a new
and challenging interpretation. More than that, he had cast a
horoscope of its future, were certain principles and ideals followed
in the construction of the new political edifice. Would the bigwigs
of the Revolution (especially Cromwell) take up these suggestions
and try to make act Oceana out of a sadly buffeted England? No,
they would not. But whether or no, the Harrington book had to
be read and discussed by all who made any pretense of sophisti-
cation. It offered not only a philosophy but a program. And nei-
ther Its philosophy nor its program was too visionary for practical
minds.

The gist of Harrington's political philosophy is quickly grasped.
It Is the Aristotelian idea of economic balance. Not the tyrannies
of the monarch, the corruptions of the court, the oppressions of the
ruling caste, the contumacy of the people, or the rivalries of reli-

SEVENTEENTH CENTURY THOUGHT 271

£:ous sects were, in Harrington's opinion, the fundamental causes of
the iniestine disturbances of the English state, but a change In the
balance of property. "Domestic empire is founded upon dominion.
Dominion is property, real or personal ; that is to say, in lands, or in
money and goods. Land, or the parts and parcels of a territory, are
:;e!d by ihe proprietor or proprietors, lord or lords of it, in some pro-
portion: and such . . . as is the proportion or balance of dominion
:r property in land, such is the nature of the empire." l Upset this
proportion or balance, and you precipitate serious, if not violent,
disturbances in the state.

Developing this thesis, Harrington classifies states according to
the distribution of lands. "If one man be the sole landlord of a ter-
ritory, or overbalance the people ... he is grand signior . . .
and his empire is absolute monarchy. If the few or a nobility, or a
nobility with the clergy, be landlords, or overbalance the people to
the like proportion, it makes the Gothic balance . . . and the
empire is mixed monarchy. . . . And if the whole people be land-
lords or hold the lands so divided among them that no one man, or
number of men, . . . overbalance them, the empire ... is a
commonwealth.53 2 The law fixing the balance in lands, Harrington
says, i:is called the agrarian . . . and is of such virtue that where-
ever it has held, that government has not altered, except by consent.
. . . But without an agrarian [law], government, whether monar-
chical, aristocratical, or popular, has no long lease.55 2

Harrington emphasized the agrarian balance because England
was then an agricultural country with the bulk of its wealth in
land. But he extended the doctrine of economic balance to non-
agricultural states as well, saying, "in such cities as subsist mosdy
by trade, and have little or no land, as Holland and Genoa, the
balance of treasure may be equal to that of land in the cases
mentioned." 3

Mate no mistake about it, Harrington avers; the true basis of
stable and enduring political authority will be found in a proper
distribution of wealth. To substantiate the point he summons the
testimony of the great political pundits of the past, notably Aris-
tode and Machiavelli, whom he regards as the best authorities.
For seventeenth-century England, indeed for seventeenth-century

(World's Greatest Literature, 1901), Vol. xxxii, p. 186.

'-Ibid., p. 187.

2~2 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

Europe, this doc nine of economic balance was a new departure ir.
political thought. Men had ceased to think of political institution
In terms of economic reality. For the ultimate bases of political
authority some had turned 10 divine right, others to various forms

*

of covenant or social contract, still others to military force. AT.
these Harrington declares false and misleading. You may set up a
state on any basis you choose, but unless you make it conform to the
economic balance it "is but of short continuance, because against
the nature of the balance, which, not destroyed, destroys that which

opposed it." i

For the ideal state, then, we must find the ideal balance of eco-
nomic forces, for "The perfection of government lies upon such a
libration in the frame of it, that no man or men in or under it can
have the interest, or, having the interest, can have the power tc
disturb it with sedition." 2 This ideal can be attained, says Har-
rington, only by the establishment of an "equal commonwealth/'
which, according to his description is one in which there is an equal
and perpetual agrarian law, "establishing and preserving the bal-
ance of dominion by such a distribution, that no one man or num-
ber of men, within the compass of the few or aristocracy, can come
to overpower the whole people by their possessions in lands," 3 and
in which there is equal rotation in the super-structure of government
so that succession to magistracy is conferred "for such convenient
terms, enjoying equal vacations, as take in the whole body by pans,
succeeding others, through the free election or suffrage of the
people.'5 3 Of all then existing states, thought Harrington, Venice
came closest to the ideal, but she had not arrived at the full perfec-
tion of equality "because her laws supplying the defect 4 of an
agrarian are not so clear nor effectual at the foundation, nor her
superstructures, by the virtue of her ballot or rotation, exactly 1>

brated. , . ." 5

But an equal commonwealth does not imply equalitarianism
Far from it. The equality is in the balance of economic forces, not
in the distribution of land or wealth among individuals. A gov-
ernment "of the people, by the people, and for the people"; a
levelling government, which would secure equal privileges

1 Ibid., p. 186. 2 Ibid., p. 202. 3 Ibid., p. 205.

4 I.e., substitute. Venice, being a commercial state with little domain, could
no agrarian law. 5 Ibid.9 p. -

SEVENTEENTH CENTURY THOUGHT 273

. - ' •

^sessions for all men, was the very antithesis of the Harrington
:-&a of an equal commonwealth. The foundation of such a com-
monwealth would be unbalance, or rather overbalance. For Har-
rhffton was a believer in natural aristocracy. Take twenty men,
;3v5 he, and form them into a commonwealth. They can never
associate in such a way but that differences between them will
crsD out. Some will be abler than the rest in this, that, or the other
^articular. Some will have greater wisdom, greater capacity for
leadership, greater energy, superior qualities in many other re-
ssecrs. These will constitute a natural aristocracy, and should
be so recognized in the composition of the state. Should the aris-
tocracy be overbalanced by those of inferior qualifications the
basis of government is unsound. The true secret of balance is to
recognize the natural inequalities of men and so adjust their
mutual relationships as to secure a perfect equation of natural
dualities and forces. Upon this basis the institutions of government
should be erected.

How 10 do this? Look first to the agrarian law, or distribution
of wealth. It should serve and protect the interests of both the few
and the many. For the Commonwealth of Oceana, Harrington
proposed a scheme to prevent overconcentration of wealth while
at the same time permitting the accumulation of substantial for-
nnes. Primogeniture was to be abolished. No man was to be
allowed to bequeath or inherit an estate exceeding the revenue of
1000 pounds a year, or to accumulate in his lifetime an estate ex-
ceeding the same annual revenue. Under this plan, he reasoned,
;i \vould be impossible for the few to accumulate enough to over-
balance and oppress the many, and unlikely that the many would
have any incentive to combine and dispossess the few.

To maintain and perpetuate this happy economic balance Har-
rington recommended a system of government accurately reflecting
the economic balance and periodically shuffling the cards of author-
ity so as to preclude the use of power to disturb or upset the estab-
lished balance. The imaginary government of Oceana consisted of
"the Senate debating and proposing, the people resolving, and the
magistracy executing, by an equal rotation through the suffrage
of the people given by the ballot." l The Senate was composed of
representatives of the "equestrian class," i.e., citizens having an

2- POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

income of 100 pounds a year or more; the People was an assemble
made up of representatives of all classes. The function of the Sen-
ate was to initiate, debate, and propose measures 10 the People; the
function of the People was to receive measures proposed by :hr
Senate and conclusively resolve and decide. The Senate and the
People together possessed the sovereign power of Oceana, but OILY
when acting jointly. The People alone could initiate nothing; ie
Senate alone could decide nothing. The members of both bodies
were chosen by an intricate and highly selective series of election*
bv lot and bv ballot. The chief magistrates, of whom there were

* ^

six (one for each major phase of public administration), were
elected by the Senate. In addition there were four great councils

i ^J

serving partly as administrative and partly as advisory bodies. Pro-
vision was made for annual^ biennial, triennial, and extraordinary

elections to fill vacancies in public office. Terms of office were
limited, and in many cases the terms were overlapping. Continued
incumbency by one person in a single office was also restricied.
Almost continuous rotation of the official personnel was therefore
the rule.

IV

Xo such Utopian fantasy as the Commonwealth of Oceana could
hope to conquer the practical imagination of Oliver Cromwell.
That Harrington supposed it possible and wrote it for that purpose
simply testifies that, great though he was as a political theorist, he
was no man of affairs. He had a philosophy and a program, both d
which lav in the bounds of actual attainment, but not in his time.

4 *

Revolutionary leaders and revolutionary governments are gen-
erally too preoccupied with the desperate business of holding on 10
power 10 dally with millennial experiments. Harrington's book
stirred up a lot of interest in intellectual circles, but practical mea
ignored it, save when they thought it seditious. Such is the way of
political philosophies, and also of practical men.

But political philosophies have a way of living long after the
practical men who ignore them are gathered to their fathers. Their
fruiis do not ripen immediately but are preserved oftentimes 10 a
long and unending future. The theorist of to-day is very apt to be
the g^iide of to-moiro\v5s men of action. Harrington was such a
theorist. The dream-born Commonwealth of Oceana still reposes

SEVENTEENTH CENTURY THOUGHT 275

benveen the covers of his book, but many of the ideas and principles
he wove into his dream have been translated into reality and are
extant in the world to-day as living political institutions. Harring-
ton has been preserved from oblivion, says Dunning, "only by the
appreciation of a small circle of readers. Yet to the few who have
/31 10 die essence of Harrington's thought it has been very rich in
practical suggestions; and so it happens that the actual institutions
ia which the commonwealth idea has been realized in England and
.America present a remarkably large aggregate of resemblances to
ihe establishments of Oceana" l

Harrington was not the originator of the doctrine of economic
determinism, did not profess to be. He ascribed it to earlier political
thinkers and gave them due credit, especially Machiavelli and
Arisiode. Nevertheless it may be truthfully stated that Harrington
brought this ancient idea out of a long slumber and gave it renewed
vigor and viability. As Parrington says, "The influence of the
Qciana upon later political thinkers was profound. In grasping and
applying the principle of the economic interpretation of history
Harrington laid the foundation of modern political theory." 2 The
quotation does not overstate the fact. The Oceana supplied founda-
r'onal ideology for a distinguished company of later political think-
ers. Locke owed much to Harrington, as did Montesquieu, Hume,
Burke, and other European publicists of the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries. In America John Adams and Daniel Webster
-4-ere acknowledged disciples of Harrington, and all who belonged
tj their school of thought drew inspiration directly or indirectly
from the same source.

Constitutional practice as well as political thought from, say,
! 30 to 1850, showed the influence of the Oceana to a pronounced
degree. Voting and officeholding were everywhere made contin-
gent upon the ownership of property (usually land), and govern-
mental structures were contrived to weight the participation of
individuals and classes in proportion to economic interest. This
stake-in-society principle was destined to be swept aside by the
onrush of equalitarianism and universal suffrage following the
French Revolution. But political democracy did not bring eco-

*».A. Dunning, A History of Political Theories from Luther to Montesquieu (1905),

pp. 2^3-254.

aV. L. Panington, The Colonial Mind (1927), p. 269.

2"6 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

•-- — - . _ . . . — ii — —- .^ .^— ^-^^— ^^^— , — I,,,

nomic democracy. The economic balance in the Machine
went against the common man; and governments, though demo-
cratic in form, were aciuailv dominated bv the "interests.52 A;

<* <t J 1+ 4u«_

though to vindicate Harrington's thesis, the history of these govern-
ments has been a story of storm and travail; and the twentieth cen-
tury now beholds a world-wide movement to achieve a stable
balance in economic life and redesign governmental structures :o
conform thereto. The twentieth century expresses its objectives in
such terms as "occupational representation/3 "economic parlia-
ments," "corporative commonwealths," ""'controlled capitalism,'"
or '"planned economy"; but its ultimate goal is the same that Har-
rington sought in the Commonwealth of Oceana — economic equi-
librium worked out in political patterns.

Various other ideas to which Harrington gave utterance have
been tremendously influential in the political masonry of the las:
two centuries. He crudely shadowed forth the principle of separa-
tion of powers, which as developed by Locke, and more especially
by Montesquieu, became the cornerpost of American political
science. The complementary idea of checks and balances, which
became an unquestioned axiom of American political doctjines was
taken by John Adams and other publicists of the patristic period
almost verbatim from the Oceana. The conception that liberty can
be maintained only where there is a government of laws and not of
men is likewise derived from Harrington, who laid that down as a
fundamental apothegm in "The Preliminaries" and returned to it
again and again throughout the book. The idea of limited tenure
and rotation in office, so eagerly seized by the paladins of democ-
racy and so widely used in democratic governments, was one of die
outstanding features of the Commonwealth of Oceana. So was the
principle of the secret ballot, virtually unheard of in Harrington's
day, but now in common use throughout the world.

The small circle of readers, who, according to Dunning, have
saved the philosopher of Exton from oblivion, were engaged in no
missionary enterprise. They read Harrington's book because of is
abundant wealth of ideas, most provocatively stated and cogently
argued. What they found in the Oceana they propagated with en-
thusiasm and persistence, because they were convinced by what
they read. All of which points to no moral save that a political
theorist may be fortunate in writing for an appreciative circle

SEVENTEENTH CENTURY THOUGHT 277

intelligentsia rather than producing syndicated fodder for the half-
literate masses.

V

In ranking philosophical writers according to their contribu-
tions to the liberation of the human mind one would have to give a
high place to the renegade Jew, Baruch, or (as he rechristened
himself) Benedict, de Spinoza. This remarkable genius was born
at Amsterdam on November 24, 1632, of parents who had fled
from Portugal to The Netherlands in order to escape the persecu-
tions of the Catholic Church. Of a moderately prosperous merchant
family which stood high in the Jewish community of Amsterdam,
Baruch was early put to school under rabbinical tutors. Through
ihese teachers he acquired a thorough familiarity with the Talmud
and the philosophical writings of the leading scholars of Jewry. To
get beyond this limited field it was necessary to learn Latin, which
•was not included in the Jewish educational scheme. .After picking
up the elements of Latin grammar from various sources, Spinoza
became a pupil of the brilliant but erratic Franz van den Ende, a
physician who supplemented a precarious professional income by
taking students in Latin. Van den Ende taught Spinoza Latin and
a good deal besides. Excellent Latinist though he was, his major
intellectual passion was for the natural sciences, which he ap-
proached from a definitely materialistic point of view. From this
heretical tutor, who was finally hanged in Paris as a conspirator,
Spinoza gained his first introduction to the kingdom of scientific
thought.

With Latin as a key the eager-minded Jew could now unlock the
whole treasury of philosophy and science. He promptly attacked
and devoured the writings of Descartes, and forthwith decided to
DC done with rabbinical theology. The synagogue saw him ever
more seldom, and finally not at all. Soon he was counted an apos-
tate, and by some an atheist. The fathers of Israel decided that
something ought to be done about it, and summoned him before
Hie authorities of the congregation for examination. Failing to
*cure a recantation, yet wishing to avoid damaging publicity, the
orthodox leaders of the Jewish community offered Spinoza an an-
nual pension of 1,000 florins if he would keep his thoughts to him-
oett, make a show of conformance, and occasionally appear in the

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

synagogue, li was a fair proposition for a man who cared more for
comfort than truth, but Spinoza was not that sort of Jew. Like
many of his race, he was of the martyr breed which can be neither
bought nor intimidated. He stood fast on his convictions, and,
with solemn curses pronounced against him, was expelled from the
society of his people. This was on July 275 1656.

For certain \ioient brethren, however, mere excommunication
of the offending member was not enough. They determined, in
modern gangster style, to "'take him for a ride." Pouncing on him
one evening as he was leaving the Portuguese synagogue, they
nearly accomplished their purpose. Fortunately the dagger missed
its mark; and Spinoza escaped and took refuge with a Christian
friend who lived some distance outside the city. This friend be-
longed to the Arminian sect called Collegiants, then under the ban
of the dominant Gomarists. In this simple community Spinoza
took up his residence and continued his studies. Because official
and professional careers were closed to Jews, it was the custom for
every Jewish youth of that time to be taught a skilled trade. Spi-
noza had learned the craft of lens-grinding and was highly profi-
cient in it. So when his means of livelihood were cut off by expulsion
from Jewry, he took up the trade of lens-grinding and by ii sup-
ported himself to the end of his life. His special skill was in grinding
lenses for optical instruments, which were in great demand; and
since the market for his skill was unimpaired by his heretical ideas,
he had no difficulty in earning an income sufficient for his modesi
needs. Soon after joining the Collegiant brotherhood, he decided to
sever all connection with Judaism and thereupon changed the
Hebrew praenomen Baruch to the Latin equivalent Benedicts
signing himself Benedict de Spinoza.

Following Ms excommunication Spinoza devoted himself to a
period of intense thought and study. A small group of kindred
spirits gathered about him and he gradually became the leader of
a school of thought. Finding himself unable to go along with
Descartes, lie had slowly rejected the Cartesian philosophy and
evolved a system of his own. When the Collegiant brotherhood
removed to the vicinity of Leyden, Spinoza went with them, con-
tinuing Ms lens-grinding and Ms philosophical studies. In a limited
circle he had by this time become a scholar of note and carried on
an extensive correspondence in which he exchanged ideas with

SEVENTEENTH CENTURY THOUGHT 279

friends of similar interests. Slowly and critically all the while he
continued the construction of his system of thought, seeking neither
eminence nor fame. But his reputation grew despite his retiring
modesty. Various things that he had written were shown to friends
and widely talked about, though withheld from publication. In
1663. at the request of his friends, he prepared and published an
essay on certain aspects of Descartes5 philosophy. This faintly
bodied forth his own system of doctrine and drew much attention.
Having won the friendship of influential patrons at The Hague and
desiring to effect the publication of his works under favorable aus-
pices, Spinoza moved in 1663 to Voorburg, a village about two
rnlies from the capital. Unhurried, he continued work on the
Ethics : which was to be main axis of his system.

It was while in residence at Voorburg that Spinoza wrote and
published his first and most famous political dissertation — the
Tractatus Tkeologico-Politicus or, in English, the Theologico-Political
Treatise. The book was issued anonymously and the printer and
place of publication were also concealed. Soon after its appear-
ance in 1670 the book had the custodians of the sacred cows run-
ning for their guns. It was an eloquent and powerfully reasoned
plea for liberty of thought and speech, which was a thing the good
people of church and state did not approve at all. In 1671 it
was officially damned by the synod, and in 1674 it was banned by
the states-general of Holland. Finally it gained the supreme acco-
lade of all free-thinking books; it was placed on the Index Expurga-
lorius of the Roman Catholic Church. Thus assured of a wide
circulation, the book went through a long series of bootleg editions
and enormously added to the prestige of its author, who was known
despite the fact that his name did not appear on the title page or
an where in the volume.

Shortly after the publication of the Theologico-Political Treatise
Spinoza moved into The Hague and took humble lodgings which
he occupied until his death in 1677. There he lived simply and
frugally, spending most of his time in study and writing. His spread-
ing renown- attracted many eminent visitors, whom he received
cordially, but did not allow to draw him from his retreat. In reli-
gion he was beyond the pale of any church; in politics he professed

10 be republican; but he studiously refrained from direct participa-

* .

lion in controversial matters. His reputation had grown so great.

289 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

regardless of the fact that his major philosophical works were still
unpublished, that in 16~3 he was invited to occupy the chair of
philosophy at the University* of Heidelberg and was assured thai
he would be allowed the utmost freedom of speech. Knowing, how-
ever, that he could not fully preserve his independence in such a
position and that it would limit his time for research, he declined

A ""

the offer. In 1675 he took steps to publish his Ethics, but immedi-
ately the report got about that he was putting out a book to prove
there was no God. A great commotion ensued; and Spinoza, feel-
ing that nothing would be gained by publication under such cir-
cumstances, relegated the manuscript to his files where it was found
after his death. The last literarv work he undertook was the Traaa-

*

tits Politicus* or Political Treatise^ which remained unfinished at his

*• **

death.

For some years Spinoza had been a victim of tuberculosis, but
had continued his labors despite constant ill health. His condition
was not deemed alarming, however, and when he suddenly passed
awav on Februarv 20, 1677, his friends were shocked bv the sudden-

4' » J •> *

ness of the event. It was indeed a tragedy, for he was a young
man, only 44 years of age. With loving care his manuscripts were
gathered and published, and then for the first time the world per-
ceived the full gigantic stature of Spinoza's intellect. But it did not
approve. A century was to pass before the reproaches of atheism
abated sufficiently to permit a true appreciation of his work.

VI

Our concern here is with the political thought of Spinoza, which,
though different., is distinguished by the same intellectual integ-
rity which characterized his metaphysical speculations. Spinoza,
says Edward Gaird, "exhibits to us the almost perfect type of a
mind without superstitions, which has freed itself from all but rea-
soned and intelligent convictions . . . ; and when he fails, it is not
by any inconsistency, or arbitrary stopping short of the necessary
conclusions of his logic, but by the essential defect of his princl-
ples.33 1 This quality is abundantly manifest in his two essays oa
government.

The Theologico-Political Treatise was written3 according to its
sub-title3 to show that freedom of thought and speech not only may

* Encyclopaedia Britannica (llth ed.)» Vol. v» p. 421,

SEVENTEENTH CENTURY THOUGHT 281

^ranted without prejudice to piety and public peace, but may
not be withheld without danger thereto. The high and mighty
may be defeating their own ends when they suppress freedom of
thought and speech, but they dislike to be reminded of it. For
men really never want to stamp out intellectual liberty until they
have reached an emotional state in which they crave the vengeful
satisfaction of striking at a hated thing regardless of consequences.
!i is a fact that Spinoza was not the first nor yet the last to demon-
strate, a fact fully attested by the history of seditions and heresies
since the earliest dawn of political society, that repression is irra-
tional and futile. But it is a lesson that repressers never learn, be-
cause, until passion has dethroned reason, they do not become
repressers.

This explains the outburst of wrath and denunciation that greeted
Spinoza's superlatively reasoned appeal for freedom of thought
and speech; and explains also the stupid endeavors to silence it by
means of the very stupidities it had exposed. The bigwigs of poli-
tics and religion were wroth; they wanted to hit something, as men
mad with rage usually do. That suppression and persecution could
not stamp out the hated heresies and might give them even
wider currency did not matter. It was the emotional satisfaction
of hitting back that they craved, even more than the quelling of
repugnant ideas.

The modern reader will find much of interest in the Theologico-
Political Treatise. It has been called the "first document in the
modern science of Biblical criticism, " x and is too modern for most
Christian sects even to-day. Spinoza set out to show that religion
has to do with matters wholly outside the realms of science and
philosophy^ and hence can assert no rightful authority in those
spheres; also that religion cannot be endangered by liberty of
thought and speech in scientific and philosophical matters, because
the business of religion is not with intellectual certainty, but with
the inculcation of divine character in human lives. To demonstrate
diis ihesis he made an exhaustive analysis of the Bible, particularly
the Old Testament, striving to dispel the multitude of superstitions
that generations of ecclesiastics had read into or out of the Scrip-
tures, and showing, as he stated in the preface, "that the Word of
God has not been revealed as a certain number of books, but was

1 Ibid., Vol. xxv, p. 690.

PHTIOSOPHTF^

-L i 1 J, JLj \_/ O V-/ JL JL JL JL J__j O

displayed to the prophets as 2 simple Idea of the Divine mind,
namely, obedience to God In singleness of heart, and In the prac-
tice of justice ana charity, . . . ;' : Xo thing in the Bible, as Spinoza
read its pages, was repugnant to rationalism, and he became con-
vinced "that the Bible leaves reason absolutely free, that It has
nothing in common with philosophy. In fact, that Revelation and
Philosophy stand on totally different footings.*'" l

It is difficult to see how any true Christian could quarrel with
this position. But remember that Spinoza, with a single stroke,
had brushed aside the pet superstitions of the professional religion-
ists of ail sects, and had said, moreover, that "'superstition's chief
victims are those persons who greedily covet temporal advantages.
, . /" 2 No wonder the clergy turned their Big Berthas against
the Theologico-Pdiiical Treatise and had It banned from legitimate
circulation. It shed too much light In comfortably dark places.

\\Tien Spinoza came to face the problem of state Interference
with liberty of thought and speech, he was on different ground. In
politics there was no authentic Word to be interpreted. It was
necessary to get down to the essence of things and see by what
canons of principle and reason, If any, state interference with Intel-
lectual freedom might be justified. Spinoza attacked the problem
by examining first the foundations of the state. As a scientist
should, he began with an inquiry Into the essential nature of human
existence on this planet. Was there a prepolltlcal state of nature,
bestial or Idyllic, from, which the original rights of man might be
deduced? Why bother with such romantic myths? The one un-
questioned and undeniable right of man — Inherent and inalien-
able., if you please — Is the right of self-preservation. Postulate this
and you have a sufficient foundation for a rational system of politi-
cal thought.

Self-preservation, says Spinoza, is the sovereign right of every
individual. icWe do not here acknowledge any difference between
mankind and other individual natural entities, nor between men
endowed with reason and those to whom reason is unknown; nor
between fools, madmen, and sane men. Whatsoever an individ-
ual does by the laws of its nature It has the sovereign right to do,
inasmuch as it acts as it was conditioned by nature, and cannot

1 Works of Spinoza (Elwes Ed, 2 vols., 1887), Vol. i, p. 9.
* Ibid., p. 4.

SEVENTEENTH CENTURY THOUGHT 283

• - -

act otherwise. Wherefore among men, so long as they are consid-
ered as living under the sway of nature, he who does not yet know
reason, or who has not yet acquired the habits of virtue, acts solely
according to the laws of his desire with as sovereign a right as he
who orders his life entirely by the laws of reason." l

Bui that is not the whole story by any means. Though men are
born in ignorance and have to learn the right way of life, meanwhile
preserving themselves as best they can by blind impulse, yet expe-
rience teaches and reason affirms the interdependence of nature as
a whole, and even more emphatically, the interdependence of men
themselves. This, however, is a fact that men have to learn. Nature
bids every man live securely and beyond the reach of fear, and
"there is no one \vho is not ill at ease in the midst of enmity, hatred,
anger, and deceit, and who does not seek to avoid them as much
as he can." 2 Without mutual assistance and the aid of reason this
Is most difficult. Thus men came to perceive that if they wash to
enjoy to the fullest extent the freedom which is their natural heri-
zase, they must so unite that "their life should be no more condi-
tioned by the force and desire of individuals, but by the power and
will of the whole body." 2 Impelled by this desire and need for
union, men enter into social life and become bound by the social
compact — not, however, by the Hobbesian compact to establish
the leviathan state or the Lockeian compact to establish the emas-
culated state. Spinoza's compact is quite different. It is a com-
pact "made valid by its utility, without which it becomes null
and void." 3 It is foolish, says the ever-rational Spinoza, to expect
or require a man to keep a compact that does him more harm than
good, or to keep a compact when the violation of it does him less
harm than good. "This consideration should have great weight in
forming a State." 3

The aim of the social compact, then, should be a state in which
each man, or at least the great majority of men, will have more to
gain than lose. A body politic formed on this basis violates no
natural right, and the covenant can always be strictly maintained.
Such a state will have natural and rightful dominion over its mem-
bers, and will be justified in compelling them to obey "under pain
of severest punishment." 4 In entering the compact the members
have acted as reason and necessity required, and are obliged to obey

ll&&,p.201.

2

>. 202.

3 jffoV., p. 204. 4 Ibid., p. 205.

234 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

the sovereign or become public enemies. Having chosen the social
compact as the least of two evils, the individual is bound to stand
by it. There is little likelihood that the sovereign, under the cir-
cumstances, will persistendy impose irrational commands; it can
enforce its commands only so long as the people acquiesce, which
will be onlv so long as the utility of the compact is preserved.

Having followed Spinoza thus far in his analysis of political
fundamentals, one wonders how he is going to provide for freedom
of thought and speech. For, under his utilitarian social compact,
how can there be any individual right to stand against the com-
munal will which, for the greater good of all, all must obey?

Never fear, Spinoza has a way out of the difficulty. It is this: The
social compact is merely an ideal, never fully attainable in mun-
dane affairs. As an actual fact no one ever does or can wholly
transfer his power and rights to the sovereign. He could not if he
would, for then he would cease to be a man. Hence, there can never
be ::a power so sovereign that it can carry out every possible wish.
It will always be vain to order a subject to hate what he believes
brings him advantage, or to love what brings him loss, or not to be
offended at insults, or not to wish to be free from fear, or a hundred
other ihings of the sort, which necessarily follow from the laws of
human nature. So much, I think is abundantly shown by experi-
ence: for men have never so far ceded their power as to cease to be
an object of fear to the rulers who have received such power and
right; and dominions have always been in as much danger from
their own subjects as from external enemies,53 l

One thing the sovereign can never control is the mind of man,
"If men's minds were as easily controlled as their tongues, every
king would sit safely on his throne, and government by compulsion
would cease; for every subject would shape his life according to die
intentions of his rulers, and would esteem a thing true or false, good
or evil, just or unjust, in obedience to their dictates.33 2 But a man
cannot abdicate his reason even with his own consent, for reason
remains despite all attempts to surrender it. Since men cannot be
made to think according to the dictates of the sovereign power, it
is folly to try to make them speak according to such commands.
Men who think will speak their thoughts regardless of prohibi-
tions, and in such fashion as to produce disastrous results. Ii is not

1 Ibid., p. 2! 4. s Ibid., p. 257.

SEVENTEENTH CENTURY THOUGHT 285

a question of the right of the state to control their speech, but of
the wisdom of it. The purpose of government £'is not to rule, or
strain, by fear, nor to exact obedience, but contrariwise, to free
even' man from fear, that he may live in all possible security; in
other words to strengthen his natural right to exist and work with-
out injury to himself and others." l Government which stifles
free speech, by that act denies its raison d'etre.

Liberty of speech does not, however, imply liberty of action.
Spinoza is emphatic on this point. Though it is evident that "com-
uleie unanimity of feeling and speech is out of the question, it is
impossible to preserve peace, unless individuals abdicate their
r>ht of acting entirely on their own judgment. Therefore the

iZii

individual justly cedes the right of free action, though not of free
reason and judgment; no one can act against the authorities without
danger to the State, though his feelings and judgment may be at
variance therewith; he may even speak against them, provided he
does so from rational conviction, not from fraud, anger, or hatred,
and provided that he does not attempt to introduce any change in
his private authority." 1 Not all opinions and utterances can be
thus sharply separated from actions. This Spinoza freely admits,
saying that opinions which "by their very nature nullify the com-
pact by which the right of free action was ceded," 1 must be re-
garded as seditious. But this admission is followed by the follow-
ing credo:

"If we hold to the principle that a man's loyalty to the State should be
judged, like his loyalty to God, from his actions only — namely, from his
charity towards his neighbours; we cannot doubt that the best govern-
ments will allow freedom of philosophical speculation no less than of
religious belief. I confess that from such freedom inconveniences may
sometimes arise, but what question was ever settled so wisely that no
abuses could possibly spring therefrom? He who seeks to regulate
everything by law, is more likely to arouse vices than to reform them.
It is best to grant what cannot be abolished, even though it be in itself
harmful. How many evils spring from luxury, envy, avarice, drunken-
ness, and the like, yet these are tolerated — vices as they are — because
they cannot be prevented by legal enactments. How much more then
should free thought be granted, seeing that it is in itself a virtue and
that it cannot be crushed ! Besides, the evil results can easily be checked,
as I will show, by the secular authorities, not to mention that such free-
dom is absolutely necessary for progress in science and the liberal arts:

.} p. 260.

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

:::> :o advantage unless his judgment be

entirely free and unhampered/' L

The unfinished Puttied Treaiise was undoubtedly planned as a
svsteinaric and comprehensive critique of political science. The
plan of the work, as outlined by Spinoza in a letter 10 a friend, was to
begin with the subject of natural rights and from that point of de-
parture work through the problems of sovereignty, political objec-
tives, forms of government, and legislation. The untimely death of
:he author prevented the execution of this design, and his illness
during most of the time he was at work on it prevented more than a
sketchy treatment of the chapters he was able to draft. Neverthe-
less there is enough in the Political Treatise to give a fair idea of
Spinoza' political thought, especially when amplified by the Tkeo-
logico-Political Treatise which it was intended to fulfill.

Spinoza opens the Political Treatise with a pungent criticism of the
point of view customarily adopted by political philosophers and
theorists, who, says he, "conceive of men, not as they are, but as they
themselves would like them to be. Whence it has come 10 pass that,
instead of ethics, they have generally written satire, and that they
have never conceived a theory of politics, which could be turned to
use, but such as might be taken for a chimera, or might have been
formed in Utopia, or in that golden age of the poets when, to be
sure, there was leasi need of it. Accordingly, as in all sciences,
which have a useful application, so especially in that of politics,
theory is supposed to be at variance with practice; and no men are
esteemed less fit to direct public affairs than theorists or philoso-
phers." 2

Insisting upon absolute, stark realism as the starting point,
Spinoza announced that he was "resolved to demonstrate by a cer-
tain and undoubted course of argument, or to deduce from the very
condition of human nature, not what is new and unheard of, but
only such things as agree best with practice.5' 3 Statesmen, he
pointed out, had written far more happily on politics than philoso-
phers. They took experience for their mistress and taught nothing
inconsistent with practice. Justly, perhaps, might they be accused
of being more crafty than learned and even of plotting against man-
kind, but that did not alter the fact that they had come closer to
truth than philosophers. "No doubt nature has taught them, thai

3 Ibid., p. 261. 2 Ibid., p. 287. 3 Ibid., p. 288,

SEVENTEENTH CENTURY THOUGHT 287

vices will exist, while men do"; hence they have made a specialty of
the an of anticipating and capitalizing human weaknesses.

The fundamental fact of politics is that "men are so situated that
they cannot live without some general law." 1 This results from the
sarore of man and the nature of the environment in which he is
placed. The power whereby these things be, is the very power of
God himself; whence it follows that every natural thing or operation
:$ Intrinsically right. Reverting then to the concepts set forth in the
Theologico-Political Treatise, Spinoza repeats the demonstration that
natural right is the right to be or do whatever is consonant with the
laws of nature. Ignorance, stupidity, passion, and desire, as well as
reason and virtue, are parts of nature, and hence must be accounted
parts of natural right. It is also a part of nature that men should
strive to preserve themselves, better themselves, achieve greater se-
curity and liberty. Instinct and reason both teach them that these
objects may be best attained in organized society. Hence, the state;
which is also based on natural right.

Between the state and the individual, then, there is no debatable
ground. In so far as the individual is unable, pursuing his own im-
pulses and reason, to safeguard himself and advance his own wel-
fare, the state has rightful authority over him. Many coming to-
gether and uniting their strength, have more natural power, and
knee more natural right, than each separately. Conversely, men
sundered by hatred and violence have each less natural power and
ierefore less natural right than men united in the bond of state-
hood. This greater right of the organized multitude is called do-
minion. Since "every citizen depends not on himself, but on the
commonwealth, all whose commands he is bound to execute, and
iie] has no right to decide, what is equitable or iniquitous, just or
unjust. But, on the contrary, as the body of the dominion should,
so to speak, be guided by one mind, and consequently the will of the
commonwealth must be taken to be the will of aU; what the State

decides to be just and good must be held to be so decided by every

«j..j_. j /

individual. And so, however iniquitous the subject may think the
commonwealth's decisions, he is none the less bound to execute

•"

Is not the political state, then, contrary to reason? No, replies
Spinoza; the state is reason magnified. The highest reason impels

lJUd' * Ibid., pp. 302-303.

258 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

men :o enter the commonwealth: sound reason dictates that it be
maintained; "reason altogether teaches to seek peace, and peace
cannot be maintained, unless the commonwealth's general laws be
kept unbroken. And so, the more a man Is guided by reason, that 15,
the more he Is free, the more constantly he will keep the laws of the
commonwealth, and execute the commands of the supreme author-
In" whose subject he is. Furthermore, the civil state is naturally or-
dained to remove general fear, and prevent general sufferings, and
therefore pursues above everything the very end, after which every
one, who is led bv reason, strives, but in the natural state strives

*> * •* *

vainly. Wherefore, if a man who Is led by reason, has sometimes to
do by the commonwealth's order what he knows to be repugnant
to reason, that harm is far compensated by the good, which he
derives from the existence of a civil state. For it is reason's own
law, to choose the less of two evils; and accordingly we may
conclude, that no one Is acting against the dictate of his own
reason, so far as he does what by the law of the commonwealth
is to be done." 1

What a perfectly monstrous doctrine ! cries the apostle of liberty.
It Is sheer absolutism, no less. Spinoza Is worse than Hobbes, his
logic more subtle and relentless. Away with him! But wait. The
state can do wrong, Spinoza says. It does wrong when it violates rea-
son. "For were the commonwealth bound by no laws or rules . . .
we should have to regard It not as a natural thing, but as a chi-
mera.53 2 The commonwealth is founded in reason; its reason for
being Is to allay fear and bestow liberty, to enable men to enjoy life
more abundantly; when It goes into reverse, disregards the reason of
Its existence, it ceases to be a commonwealth. "For the person or
persons that hold dominion, can no more combine with the keeping
up of majesty the running with harlots drunk or naked about the
streets, or the performances of a stage-player, or the open violation
or contempt of laws passed by themselves, than they can combine
existence with non-existence." 2 But the redress of wrongs perpe-
trated by the state "pertain not to civil jurisprudence, but to the law
of nature, since they cannot be vindicated by the civil law, but by
the law of war." 2 In other words, the appropriate remedy for
wrongs of state Is revolution. Successful revolution is its own vindi-
cation; it Is one with natural law and natural right.

2 Rid., p. 310.

SEVENTEENTH CENTURY THOUGHT 289

Solnoza did not advocate revolution or attempt to furnish ethical
Tustificaiion for it. To him it was merely a natural phenomenon —
"-he inevitable consequence of the state's failure to follow those laws
or nature which make for the stability and survival of states. If
those holding dominion in the commonwealth choose to disregard
the laws of nature in respect to sovereignty, they are the authors of
their own destruction, just as the man who swallows strychnine,
whether in ignorance of its qualities or not, is the author of his own
fate. A man wTho wishes to survive and prosper must obey the laws
of narure; so also must a state.

There are good commonwealths and bad ones in Spinoza's opin-
ion, but no ideal ones. The best commonwealth is the one wrhich is
so founded and conducted as to assure its subjects "the utmost self-
preservation.55 1 Sedition, lawlessness, and injustice "are not so
much to be imputed to the wickedness of the subjects, as to the bad
siate of a dominion. For men are not born fit for citizenship, but
must be made so." 1 In general it is to be observed that states estab-
lished by a free multitude are best, while those founded on conquest
are usually worst. Machiavelli has shown how a clever prince,
actuated solely by lust for power, may fortify his throne and wield
tyrannical authority; but this merely proves, according to Spinoza,
die folly of trying to remove a tyrant without removing the causes
which make him a tyrant, and, further, how cautious a people
should be in entrusting authority to one man.

At considerable length in the Political Treatise Spinoza descants on
monarchy and aristocracy. The best methods of organizing and
managing both forms are treated, and many sound and practical
suggestions are made. Genuine monarchy he deems impossible,
what is called so being in fact a form of aristocracy. From his treat-
ment of aristocracy, it is evident that he favored a balanced system
in which the power of the ruling class would be subject to many
checks. Of democracy Spinoza had written only five paragraphs
when death struck the pen from his hand. In the Theologico-Potitical
Treatise he had said he believed democracy "to be of all forms of
government the most natural and the most consonant with individ-
ual liberty.55 2 It is therefore a great loss to the world to have been
deprived of the cool and luminous wisdom he might have added to
lie literature of this stormy subject.

1 find., p. 313, 17J«/., p. 207.

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

VII

Spinoza the metaphysician and moral philosopher has over-
shadowed Spinoza the political thinker. Envenoming prejudices
originating with orthodox theologians to whom his ideas touching
religion and his searching criticisms of the Scriptures were proof of
atheism, have damned him for the godly, in political as well as
religious thought. Uncritical enthusiasm for his seeming irreligion
has obscured for the ungodly the deep significance of both his re-
ligious and political doctrines. Spinoza came as close to truth, as
any thinker of his age, probably closer. Yet he remains, even to-
day, one of the least understood, or most misunderstood, of mortals.
Truthj apparently, is not what the world wants of a philosopher,
but reasons for believing what it wants to believe.

The political thought of Spinoza was simply an extension to the
political sphere of his famous doctrine of pantheism. Nature and
God, according to his fundamental postulate, were one. The es-
sence of the universe was unity. Everything in the universe was but
a form or manifestation of the all-creative and all-pervading Power
from which all things derive. Transposing this idea to the realm of
politics, Spinoza saw the state as an utterly natural phenomenon.
It was the product of human nature acting in response to the varied
factors, forces, and conditions which make human nature what it is
— human nature governed by natural law and exercising its nat-
ural rights. Among living things the supreme law is self-preserva-
tion and the second is self-satisfaction — the will to exist and the will
to enjoy. These qualities are but expressions of the Infinite Power
of which they partake. For a rational foundation of political au-
thority, therefore, one must start with self-interest — sheer human
selfishness.

This, for some, is crass materialism; for others it is sordid realism;
but for the objective student of political phenomena it is simply &n
attempt to come to grips with facts, and no derogation either of
God or humanity. The first concern of the scientist is not to dis-
cover how things should be, but how they actually are, and why.
Spinoza's ideal commonwealth, had he visioned such a thing, un-
doubtedly would have been a New Jerusalem of loving fellowship
and mutual accord. Spinoza was as kindly and self-effacing a man
as ever breathed. But he was not dealing in wishes and dreams.

SEVENTEENTH CENTURY THOUGHT 291

He was trying to explain things as they are and to perceive how,
taking them as they are, they may be utilized to the best advantage.
In the Kingdom of Heaven or the Republic of Utopia men may be
divested of all ego, purged of all self-seeking; but here on earth
human behavior is primarily egoistic and naturally self-seeking.
True, men may be educated to altruism and unselfishness, but
only under conditions which render those qualities natural to
human character. This last is the core of the Spinozan concept of
ihe state.

He regards human nature as neither noble nor depraved. It is
simply what it is — first, concerned with self-preservation and next
with self-aggrandizement. Man is a political animal, therefore,
only in the sense that he finds political existence more congenial to
his nature than non-political existence. In all cases, Spinoza thinks,
ii is the lesser of two evils. Men embrace the state because they have
10 choose between that and destruction at the hand of a conqueror,
or between that and ruinous anarchy. Political life affords greater
security and greater liberty than would otherwise be possible.
Political life is therefore natural to men; it affords greater oppor-
mnity to satisfy the basic urges of human nature. The determining
factor is power. If, as individuals, men had power adequate for
self-preservation and self-satisfaction, they would never submit to
authority. Not having that power, they seek the aid of a greater
power to which they must submit or take the consequences of non-
submission. The ambit of individual rights is no greater, then, than
individual power, and, correspondingly, the rights of sovereign
authority are limited only by its power.

Thus far Spinoza was a materialist, and in full accord wTith
Machiavelli and Hobbes. That might makes right, he thoroughly
believed. Science proved it; so did philosophy. But Spinoza was a
truer scientist and a more penetrating philosopher than any of his
materialistic predecessors. He did not stop with the precept that
might makes right. He asked, and also answered, the question,
What kind of might makes what kind of right? Might, he found to
be of many differing species and degrees., and the right resulting
from the application of might he also found to be of widely varied
character. There was intelligent might and unintelligent might,
creative might and destructive might, democratic might and auto-
cratic might. There was despotic right and communal right, equi-

'709

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

table ri^ht and inecuitable right, beneficent right and baneful

right. Were these equally approved by science and philosophy?
By no means, said Spinoza. They should be tested by their utility,
not for the few but the many. That system of might (government,
is best which provides the utmost of security and freedom for ihe
crreat mass of its subjects; which, in other words, liberates human
nature so far as can be with safety and liberty for all.

If that be materialism, the world has seen too little of it. Spinoza
believed that intelligence should rule the world, and would, if it
could be freed from the trammels of superstition and dogma. He
was not afraid of human nature at its worst, if only intelligence
were at the helm. But he was very much afraid of human nature
in governments pretending to be founded on divine right, con-
tractual right, or doctrinaire abstractions of any sort. His aim in
writing on politics was to still the winds of doctrine, bring sover-
eignty out of the mists of legalism, annihilate the absurd and vicious
pedantries of political theory, and lead rulers and subjects to see
that the state is a practical thing, justified only by its practical
results. No will-o'-the-wisp Utopia could lure him from the solid
path of fact and reason. Yet he was serenely confident that if men
would truly establish commonwealths on factual foundations and
then follow- the dictates of practical intelligence, they could indeed
build more stately mansions of common weal than had ever been
known among mankind.

Poor Spinoza was born about 300 years too soon. The world was
no more ready for his political than his religious philosophy. It did
not welcome his ideas, but could never ignore them. No great
iconoclast is ever acclaimed as a prophet and teacher by contem-
porary generations. Nor is he ever passed over in silence. His
radicalism and irreverence always draw fire from the snipers of the
Old Guard. Battling valiantly against his iconoclasms, these
doughty defenders of the true faith never fail to give currency 10 his
ideas. "So it was with the political ideas of Benedict de Spinoza.
No cult of political pragmatism bears his name, but his utilitarian
concept of the state gradually permeated the thought of the world,
and later, through the genius of such theorists as Bentham and
Mill, was evolved into a dynamic system of political philosophy.
His name is not associated with the monistic doctrine of sovereignty,
but nineteenth-century jurists, such as Austin and Jellinek, built

SEVENTEENTH CENTURY THOUGHT 293

largely on the foundations that he prepared. Modern political
psychology does not acknowledge his parenthood. Yet the fact
remains that his analysis of the underlying psychology of political
behavior was the first of its kind and Is modern even by the stand-
ards of the present day. Unfortunately for Spinoza's reputation as
a political philosopher the Theologico-Political Treatise was limited
to a narrow field of inquiry and the Political Treatise was but a frag-
ment of the work originally planned. Had he been able to complete
the latter, especially the portions that were to treat the subjects of
democracy and laws, he might not be dismissed, as he frequently is
to-day, as a great philosophic genius who incidentally touched upon
political subjects.

VIII

The world's first professor of international law should be an in-
teresting study; and he is, if for no other reason, because of the
unending dispute among scholars as to whether he is a figure of
great significance or of no significance at all. Samuel Pufendorf was
born near Chemnitz, In Saxony, on January 8, 16323 the same year
In which Spinoza and Locke were born.

Being the son of a Lutheran pastor, Pufendorf was sent to the
University of Leipzig to study theology. The narrow dogmatism of
me divinity school went against his grain, and he rebelled. There-
upon he quitted Leipzig and transferred to the University of Jena,
where he took up the study of jurisprudence. At Jena he came un-
der the influence of Erhard Weigel, an eminent mathematician and
student of natural philosophy. Weigel is credited with having Intro-
duced Pufendorf to the doctrine of natural law and inspiring his
great detachment of mind by teaching him the methods of mathe-
matics. If that be true, Weigel should also be credited with having
nearly ruined Pufendorf s work for posterity by causing him to com-
mit the folly of trying to apply mathematical modes of demonstra-
tion to juristic concepts.

After completing his studies at Jena, Pufendorf sought a teaching
position. Finding none in his own country, he accepted a proffered
appointment as tutor in the family of the Swedish minister to Den-
mark. He had barely arrived in Copenhagen when war broke out
Detween the two countries. Following the custom of the time,, the
Danes arrested and imprisoned the whole Swedish diplomatic

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

establishment except the minister himself, who was lucky enough to
escaoe the country before he could be taken. Pufendorf was kept In
-•ail el^ht months, bur was not mistreated save that he was deprived

ifcjy S.V '

of all access to books and libraries. To occupy his time he under-
took to review in his mind all his studies of jurisprudence. As a re-
sult of his rejections he gradually evolved a system of jurisprudence
of his own. For diversion he committed this to writing, though with
no intention of publishing it.

Upon his release from prison Pufendorf went with the sons of his
employer 10 the University of Leyden in Holland. He showed some
of his friends there the manuscript he had written during his cap-
tivity* and was urged to have it published. Acting on this suggestion
he revised the work and had it published in 1660, under the title
Element or urn j urisprudentiae univer satis libri duo — Two Books on the Ele-
ments of Universal Jurisprudence. The volume attracted much atten-
tion, and as a consequence in 1661 the Elector of the Palatinate5 to
whom the book had been dedicated, created a new- professorship of
natural and international lawT at the University of Heidelberg and
appointed Pufendorf to the post. It was the first university chair
devoted exclusively to the law of nations.

Pufendorf held this position until 1670 when, at the invitation of
the king of Sweden, he accepted a professorship at the University of
Lund. While holding this appointment, he wrote and published Ms
well-known Eight Books on the Law of Nature and of Nations. In 1677
Pufendorf went from Lund to Stockholm to take the post of royal
historiographer. With this change of occupation his work in the
field of jurisprudence virtually ceased, and he became primarily an
archivist and historian. In 1686 he was called to Berlin to serve as
historiographer to the Great Elector, Frederick William of Bran-
denburg. This position he held until his death in 1694.

IX

Pufendorf was a voluminous writer, but much of his work lies out-
side the domain of political thought. To get the essence of his politi-
cal theory we need only consult his Elements of Universal Jurispru-

dence. His later treatise on The Law of Nature and of Nations acquired
a somewhat greater reputation, but is in reality little more than an
elaboration of the Elements. In the preface to this book Pufendorf

acknowledged his debt to Grotius and Hobbes, admitting that he

SEVENTEENTH CENTURY THOUGHT 295

had drawn largely from both, but stating at the same time that in
some particulars he disagreed with both. As a matter of fact he took
his stand about midway between them and endeavored so far as
possible to reconcile their widely divergent doctrines.

In common with practically all seventeenth-century political
thinkers Pufendorf accepted the hypothesis of a prepolitical state of
nature and made natural law the sheet-anchor of his system of
thought. With Hobbes he agreed that the state of nature was a mis-
erable condition, but did not vision it as a war of every man against
even' man. On the contrary, he deemed it a state of general peace,
though not of general well-being. It fell short of that because the
majority of men in the state of nature did not, he thought, observe
the law of nature, but were actuated by impulse and passion.

\\Tiat was the law of nature? Even among the learned, said
Pufendorf, there was no agreement. But he thought he could de-
scribe it, even though he could not define it:

"Although, when man comes into the light of day, his mind is found
to be imbued with no knowledge of affairs, nevertheless, his intellect
thus disposed God has so shaped that, after his powers have begun to
exert themselves simultaneously with advancing years, from the in-
spection of natural matters he conceives certain notions serviceable to a
richer knowledge to be erected upon them later; and from the contem-
plation of himself, he recognizes what actions, as being in harmony with
his own nature, the Creator has wished him to perform, and what to
avoid, as being repugnant to the same. ... By experience, therefore,
it is well established that, when, out of a state of infantile ignorance, the
light of reason in man reveals itself with a little greater clarity, and turns
kself to the contemplation of its own nature, his reason which has not
been corrupted by emotions or vicious habits, dictates to him that it is
right, indeed, for him to care for and save himself as far as he can;
nevertheless, because he has observed that he has been destined by the
Creator to cultivate society with other men, it is necessary so to modify
Ms care for himself as not to become himself unsociable with others, or
not to have society among men disturbed. It is this very thing which we
call the law of nature. This law, as has been said, comes to be known,
without any supernatural aid, from a consideration of the nature and
condition of man. Nor does this nature cease to be known because many
have not the strength of natural capacity which would enable them to
investigate the same by their own processes of reasoning, or because
knowledge of it is acquired by most men through information derived
from others. For it is sufficient that the perspicacity of but mediocre
intelligence can deduce it, and the rest of men, when, under the in-

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

struction of others, they have compared their acquired knowledge of h
\vith ;he condition cf their own nature, are able to observe that this law
necessarily harmonizes with them. And as human society coalesces ar.d
is preserved by the law of nature, so this is by no means the least fruit cf
societies already established, that, in them, through instruction frc~
others and by its very exercise, even the duller may learn the lav; cf
nature." l

This prolix passage reveals much of both the strength and weak-
ness of Pufendorf as a political theorist. His prolixity, though not a
blemish but rather a grace of style for the seventeenth century, has
made him all but unreadable for subsequent ages. Concealed, how-
ever, in his circumambient phraseology was a genuine idea. The
state of nature was a primitive condition comparable with child-
hood—the childhood of the race, as it were. The law of nature com-
prehended those norms of behavior which experience and reason.
the latter growing out of both experience and instruction, showed
men, as they advanced in enlightenment, to be essential for their
own good and the good of the social entity of which nature designed
them to be a part. Grotius had defined natural law as the dictate of
right reason, universal and immutable, unchangeable even by God
Himself. Hobbes had defined it as a body of principles, discovered
by reason, which restrain men from any act incompatible with
peace, security, and self-preservation. Pufendorf was closer to
Hobbes than Grotius; but his natural law was the product of reason
and experience in society, whereas that of Hobbes was the product

of individual reason.

Holding this view of natural law, Pufendorf rejected the Grotian
concept of international law as including, in addition to natural law,
the common usages and customs of nations in their mutual dealings,
and maintained that international law was merely part of natural
law. Likewise he rejected the Hobbesian concept of war as the
natural condition of international society, and argued that peace
was more in harmony with natural law than war. Unfortunately
he felt obliged to admit so many exceptions and qualifications to the
normal condition that his thesis was largely vitiated.

In explaining the transition from the state of nature to political
society Pufendorf was particularly shrewd and ingenious. Primary
societies, such as the family, the church, or trade guilds, he attrib-

* Tin Elements of Universal Jurisprudence (Carnegie Classics of International Law,
pp. 239-240.

SEVENTEENTH CENTURY THOUGHT 297

...

M-Pfi to the instinctive social Impulses of mankind; but the state, he

L* tw»-i

Aisled, was the product of a deliberate compact — in fact, of a two
^bld compact; first a contract between the individual members to
establish and maintain a civil society, and second a contract be-
nveen the citizens and their rulers regulating the duties of the for-
mer and the powers of the latter. Upon this concept of the nature
of the state Pufendorf erected his theory of sovereignty.

Authority over things which are one's own Pufendorf defined as
liberty; authority over others and things belonging to others he
called sovereignty. "Now sovereignty,55 he said, ccis either absolute
or restricted. It Is the former, when its acts cannot be rendered void
bv anv third person who is superior, nor be refused obedience on
the part of those over whom sovereignty is exercised, upon the basis
of some right which has been sought or retained by a pact entered
Into at the time when the sovereignty was established. It is the
latter, when one or the other, or both of these3 can take place. For
one's sovereignty admits of restriction in a twofold fashion, either
when, by him who has a superior sovereignty, the power of the one
who exercises his sovereignty Is checked, or those who obey are
absolved from the obligation of taking specific orders; or when
those who have put themselves under some one's command, have
by a pact made for themselves the express reservation that they are
unwilling to be bound by his orders in certain things. Such re-
striction Is not at all repugnant to nature. For3 since he to whom
sovereignty Is given possesses otherwise no right over me, and there-
fore holds by my mere free will whatever authority he has over me,
i: is assuredly patent that it rests with me how far I care to admit his
sovereignty over me. And yet these restrictions ought not to be of
such a kind that they overturn the purpose of sovereignty and re-
duce it to absolutely nothing3 or render unavailing the pact between
the ruler and the ruled. ... In the second place, sovereignty is
either private or public. The former belongs to persons as private in-
dividuals for the use of each as such. . . . Public sovereignty is that
which comes to persons in their public capacity for the use of civil
society. If this sovereignty be supreme in the state It has an adjunct
authority, which men call eminent, over the persons and property of
subjects, an authority which is stronger than any rights whatsoever
of individuals, but one to be exercised only for the public safety." 1

l&id.t pp. 56 57.

298 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

Herein Pufendorf aligned himself with Grotlus rather than
Hobbes. The absolute and unqualified dominion of man over man
his reason could not sustain. Yet he could not go the whole distance
with Grotlus and hold sovereignty to be a mere right of governing
which was disposable like property on any conditions whatsoever.
Pufendorf s sovereignty, though capable of limitation. Is absolute
when social welfare requires It, bu$ not so when social welfare, as
understood by reasonable men, is violated. Vague and elusive
though it was as an Intellectual concept, this was a practical so::
of sovereiemrv bv which men could readily live and adjust their

s^, J *

affairs.

On the whole Pufendorf was a very practical sort of thinker,
seldom pressing a doctrine to its logical extremes If It could not be
made to square with expediency and reality. Slavery he explained
and justified as a form of limited liberty, of which there were many
other species. The servitude might be based on contract, inherit-
ance, punishment, and various other lawful restrictions on liberty.
Private property he declared essential to the existence of society and
In full accord with the law of nature. The right of occupation or
asserting possession was sufficient to establish ownership under the
law of nature, there being a tacit pact that each would recognize
this ri^ht in others in order to avoid strife and promote security.

C'

The transmission of title to the successors of owners who had ac-
quired property by virtue of occupatio caused endless difficult}-; and
"when men multiplied and separated Into States, it rested with
these same States to determine the effects of proprietorship and to
include It within definite limits, . . ." l

In the field of international law. In which his influence was con-
siderable, Pufendorf was remarkable for the boldness with which
he departed from particularism and postulated a universal law of
which the law of nations was but a component part. Yet it was
characteristic of Mm to compromise this grand ideal with such
sweeping concessions to the practical that his readers had difficulty
In keeping sight of the ideal. In treating of war, for example, he
took the position that peace was the relationship of states prescribed
by natural law. Logically, then, war was illegal and inadmissible.
But Pufendorf declined to take this position. Instead, perceivin
as a practical man that states were ever engaged in "just" wars,

i Ibid., pp. 36-37.

SEVENTEENTH CENTURY THOUGHT 299

legalized war under certain conditions, saying, "since the obligation
«-/ observing; the law of nature ceases when that other does not

•WJ*- ^* iw'^ ^5

observe the same law toward me, there arises thence, as a sort of
subsidiary status for man, war, when our safety cannot be secured
except by force.53 1 Which was letting down the bars as far as any
practical statesman could wish.

X

Pufendorf had an enormous vogue in his own time and his popu-
larity continued well into the eighteenth century. That he exerted
a oreai influence upon the development of political thought, es-
pecially juridical thought, there can be no doubt, though there are
sharp differences of opinion as to whether his influence was funda-
mental and progressive. Some writers on international law assert
ihat he contributed nothing to the development of that science,
going so far in some instances as to say that his influence has re-
larded rather than promoted international jurisprudence. Others
feel thai, for all its shortcomings, his theory of international law was
a forward step in legal philosophy, and that his acute comments on
ihe necessity of attempts at amicable settlement before war is jus-
rlned, have done much to further international conciliation by
mediation, arbitration, and other means.

Pufendorf s was an insinuating rationalism, though by no means
so brutally logical as that of Hobbes or so rigorously scientific as
thai of Spinoza. Like Locke, he was eminently persuasive. He
shocked no one, offended no one. He rejected divine right and
relegated divine law to the background, yet suffered no anathemas
irorn the pious. Why? Because he imported morals into nature,
treated moral obligation as a phenomenon of nature, and virtually
identified morals with natural law. Sharing Spinoza's pantheism,
he made God and nature one; but looking on nature, he saw whaz
ought to be; whereas Spinoza saw what actually was. Not unnat-
urally, therefore, Pufendorf rather than Spinoza came to be the
honored herald of eighteenth-century deism, which combined pan-
theism and idealism in a moral order making God synonymous
with goodness.

In Pufendorf s thought the state became a moral entity, and the
relation of states to one another was the same as that of individuals

.p. 13.

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

in the state of nature, They were bound by the law of nature, which
dictated moral behavior. If among states, as among Individuals.
the law of nature was not observed, might there not be implied, £5

with Individuals, a theoretical social compact— a society of nations

. to secure adherence to the law by which all were bound? In this

suggestion Pufendori launched an idea of vast possibilities. It was
notTa formal league of nations that he had in mind so much as a
body of states coming to regard themselves as component parts of
an international social order under the reign of law. Subjectively
to a very considerable extent, and also to a notable degree In express
terms, die practices of modern states reflect the acceptance of that
concept. Xot that states do noi frequently ignore their obligations
as members of the international community and thumb their noses
at international society. They do. But the disapprobation visited
upon them when they do; and their not infrequent hesitancy to
incur this disapprobation, are evidences that the Pufendori doc-
trine has penetrated the consciousness of mankind.

Pufendorf is also credited by some with being the father of the
modern sociological school of jurisprudence. His linking of sover-
eignty with the promotion of social welfare, and his definition of
law as "a notional norm for actions, showing how far they should be
conformed to the will of some super lor/5 l afford a basis for this
view. Through progressive enlightenment, he argued, men come to
accept the social mode of existence and the obligations it Im-
poses, and thus arrive at a realization of what reason requires in
the way of conformity. The "notional norm," as explained by
Pufendorf, is a standard or rule of action "envisaging to the In-
tellect the will of a superior relative to doing or avoiding some-
thing.55 I In other words, It Is a rationalization of social necessity

or expediency.

All his life a teacher and academician., Pufendorfs writings were
addressed primarily to intellectuals, and by intellectuals was he
chiefly read. His works ran through several Latin editions and were
translated Into English, German, and French. In England his in-
fluence is not easy to trace, but in Germany it was profound; also in
France. Diderot and the Encyclopedists drew heavily from Pufen-
dorf, and through them his Influence was transmitted to Rousseau
and the thinkers of the French Revolution.

i/6/rf., p. 153.

SEVENTEENTH CENTURY THOUGHT 301

REFERENCES

Ccker, F. W.3 Readings in Political Philosophy (rev. ed., New York, 1938),

Chap. XX.
^g j^ ^\>3 Spinoza's Political and Ethical Philosophy (Glasgow, 1903).

D'^rmff, W. A., A History of Political Theories from Luther to Montesquieu

Txw York, 'l 905), pp. 248-254.
Ge;ser, K. F., and Jaszi, O.3 Political Philosophy from Plato to Jeremy Bent ham

* (New York, 1927), Chap. VIII.
MorleVj H. (ed.}9 Ideal Commonwealths (London3 1893).'
Pollock F., Spinoza, His Life and Philosophy (2nd ed., London, 1899).
5abine,'G. H*, A History of Political Theory (New York, 1937), Chap. XV.
Smith. H. F. Russell, Harrington and His Oceana (Cambridge, 1914).
Spinoza, Benedict de, Writings on Political Philosophy, edited by A. G. A,
Balz (New York, 1937)5 "Introduction" by the editor.

CHAPTER XVII

THE ENLIGHTENMENT

I

CIVILIZATION has Its seasons of sowing and Its seasons of
harvest. The seventeenth century was for the most pan a
time of planting and germination; the eighteenth was pre-
eminently a century of fruition and reaping. This was true on well-
nigh every front of human enterprise, and notably so In the spheres
of science and philosophy. The scientific rationalism which had Its
birth and adolescence In the seventeenth century came to maturity
In the eighteenth. This growth of enlightenment, this movement to

O ^

enlarge the area of human understanding and enthrone reason as
the sovereign guide in human affairs, was by the Germans called
the Aufkldrung, by the French the Eclaircissement, and by the English
the Enlightenment.

As the eighteenth century added to the discoveries and advances
of its predecessor, men began to believe that Intelligence might free
the world of vice, disease, poverty, and Injustice if science and reason
were given full rein; If church and state and all social institutions
were subjected to rational analysis and criticism with a view to Im-
provement. Scientific curiosity overflowed all bounds. Experi-
mentation became an avocation for all who professed any degree
of sophistication. Every educated gentleman's kitchen became a
laboratory and Ms drawing-room a museum. Science and phi-
losophy were the absorbing topics of conversation In boudoir and
parlor. Princes gained kudos by subsidizing scientists and literary
men and attaching them to their courts. To shine in reflected glory
was better than not to shine at all. Benjamin Franklin, a provincial
savant of lowly origin, hobnobbed with kings and had all the
grandees of Paris at his feet. The fame of Goethe raised the petty
court of Saxony to International eminence. Catherine of Russia was
credited with a ten-strike when she lured the great Diderot 10
St. Petersburg. Frederick the Great, no paragon of self-abnegation,
swallowed pride in great gulps to placate the vanity of Voltaire and
keep him at Potsdam.

It Is said to be half of the greatness of Frederick that he umade

302

THE ENLIGHTENMENT 303

^___^^^~ I I 1^ ^^— • ^^^—111^ • — ^ i^— ^^^ • — ^^^— — I I II .I^^_^0_B m • 1^— «« I^._.«« B!^ ^^_K«*^H

*oom for the Aufklarung" To be an enlightened ruler was his
oft-avowed aim, and he professed himself "the first servant of his
," reigning not by divine right but by virtue of rational neces-
Monarchs all over Europe were infected by the same spirit of
-adonalism. Charles III of Spain, Joseph II of Austria, and even the
Imperious Catherine II of Russia ardently embraced the Aufkla-
r:nv and pronounced themselves liberals. They would be enlight-
ened autocrats, welcoming criticism and seeking the guidance of phi-
losophers and scientists. Writers hailed the coming of a golden age
of humanitarianism and spoke of "free humanity" and "cosmopol-
itanism'' more enthusiastically than of nationalism and patriotism.

But rhe Big Reform never came off. The old order was too
deeply intrenched. Enlightened despotism could not shake it. Rulers
who tried tempering absolutism with moderation and reason found
themselves faced with a choice between autocracy and impotence.
Strong monarchs, such as Frederick and Catherine, solved the prob-
lem by professing liberalism and practicing autocracy; but weaker
ones, such as Joseph II and Charles III, vacillated and were lost.
Having the noblest ideals and best intentions rulers ever avowed,
they were the least popular and least respected kings of their day.
The old regime persisted; it would die before It would change.

The era of the Enlightenment failed, therefore, to attain Its ob-
jectives. Its importance lies not in what It created but in what It
destroyed. Its ideal was reform; its effect was revolution. It sought
die gradual substitution of a society swayed by truth and reason for
one dominated by ancient absolutes, but it taught doctrines that
could result only in the demolition of the social system it hoped to
save. By the final decade of the century it had so completely done
its work that social and political structures in many European
countries were ready to collapse at the first violent shock. This
came first, as we know, in France. The intellectuals of the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries had sowed the wind and reaped the
whirlwind.

Many immortal names are associated with the Enlightenment —
poets, essayists, philosophers, scientists, and statesmen. It would
be impossible to name them all, and unfair to mention one above
the rest. In the field of political thought a veritable host of writers
dedicated their pens to the cause of enlightenment, and of those
who made lasting contributions none were more influential or more

304 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

representative than the charming and persuasive Frenchman,
Charles Louis dc Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu; and the brilliant
Scotsman, David Hume

II

The life-history of the Baron de Montesquieu is quickly told. It
is the placid story of a life devoted to scholarship, letters, and polite
society — a life almost wholly devoid of adventure or romance out-
side the bounds of ihe intellectual; a life on which fame and forrase
smiled early and often, and which ran its course as untroubled as a
summer day.

Charles Louis de Secondat, as he was christened at birth, was of
noble lineage. His father was Jacques de Secondat. second son of
the Baron de Montesquieu: his mother was Francoise de Penel,
heiress of the estate of La Brede near Bordeaux, where Charles
Louis was born on January 183 1689. Both parents were of the an-
cient aristocracy which esteemed and practiced the precept cf
noblesse oblige., and the son was given an education designed to in-
culcate that ideal. At the age of seven his mother died and he in-
herited her estate, assuming the title Baron de la Brede which went
with it. Private tutors were provided for the young nobleman, and
in 1700 he was sent to the school of the Oratorian Brethren at Juiliy
where he remained eleven years. Then he took up the study of law
and was admitted to the grade of counselor in 1714. The following
year he married. It was a business transaction rather than a love
match, the lady being an heiress whose fortune materially aug-
mented the properties of de la Brede. Despite the absence of ro-
mantic love, however, it is said that the parties to the marriage
became cordial friends and remained so throughout life.

In 1716 fortune called again at Charles Louis5 door. His fathers
elder brother, holder of the title of de Montesquieu and president of
the parliament of Bordeaux, died bequeathing his fortune, his title,
and his judicial office to young La Brede on condition that he take
the name of Montesquieu. He accepted and was thereafter known
as Baron de Montesquieu. For twelve years he continued as chief
magistrate at Bordeaux, but his heart was not in the job. Society
and literature were the things he loved, and he indulged them even
to the neglect of Ms judicial responsibilities.

Dabbling in literature on the side, he wrote and published in 1721

THE ENLIGHTENMENT 305

his firsi book, the Persian Letters. Purporting to consist of the letters
of two Persians traveling in France, this was a biiing and piquantly
licentious satire on the follies of politics and religion and European
society in general. The book made an enormous stir and ran
through many editions. Though it was published anonymously, the
fact that Montesquieu was the author became generally known.
His reputation as a literary man was made. His judicial duties be-
came increasingly irksome, and finally he sold his office and moved
10 Paris where he could devote himself to social and literary in-
terests exclusively.

In 1723 Montesquieu set forth on a long tour of Europe. He
visited Austria, Hungary, Italy, Germany, and England, carefully
observing men and Institutions wherever he went. In England he
spent eighteen months, making the acquaintance of leading states-
men and scholars and studying English political institutions, then
regarded as the freest in the world. During this residence in Eng-
land he conceived a great admiration for English country life and
also for the political constitution of the English nation. When he
returned to France, Instead of taking up his abode in Paris, he went
back 10 his estate at La Brede and sought as nearly as possible to
live like an English county squire.

At La Brede Montesquieu passed the remainder of his days,
dividing his time between the supervision of his properties and his
all-absorbing studies and literary pursuits. In the social season he
made occasional visits to Paris, but he could not long resist the call
of his library and his increasingly ambitious literary projects. Many
writings Issued from the pen of Montesquieu during this fruitful
period. The most important were the Considerations on the Causes of
ike Greatness and Decline of the Romans in 1734, the Dialogue of Sulla
sr.d Berates in 1745, and The Spirit of Laws in 1748. The last named
was Ms masterpiece. It dwarfed all else that he had done and
gained him a place among the immortals. He wrote little more, but
lived long enough to know something of the prodigious fame that
would accrue to the author of The Spirit of Laws. Death (probably
from pneumonia) came suddenly in 1755, his 66th year.

Ill

It would be hard to name a book that has ever achieved speedier,
wider, or more lasting fame than The Spirit of Laws. It has been

306 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

rated as the foremost prose work of the eighteenth century, which Is
extravagant praise Indeed; for no century In the world's historv

— • • * *

produced more excellent prose, or a greater abundance of it. Ths
Stzri; of LG&J rnay or may not have been the ne plus ultra of eight-
eenth cenmry prose, but none will deny thai ii was deserving of
extravagant praise, li had content and it had style, both of super-
lative quality. It is no exaggeration to pronounce it the most read-
able treatise on political science ever wriiten. And, in striking
contrast with most of its contemporaries, it is quite as readable in
the twentieth century as it was in the eighteenth. Moreover, it was
of the type that loses little in translation. In English, German,
Spanish, or any other tongue it retained practically all of the fluency
and sparkle of the French original. Were the content of the book as
relevant to the immediate concerns of modern society as it was to
the interests of the eighteenth century, it would be a best-seller
to-dav.

*

Unlike many of the works reviewed in these pages3 The Spirit of
Laws was the child of slowly ripening scholarship and infinitely
patient craftsmanship. Montesquieu spent nineteen years writing
it and had been gathering materials for some years before attempt-
ing the actual construction of the book. Every fact was checked as
carefully as possible with the facilities at his command; every idea
was weighed and tested with all of his intellectual resources; even"
sentence and every phrase was cut and polished to gem-like trans-
parency and brilliance. A more quotable book was never written,
It was a treasure trove of political epigrams, large numbers of which
are still doing yeoman service in the world. At the same time it was
scholarly and in certain respects original and profound. It was the
sort of book, in short, that every reader could get something from and
every thoughtful reader a very great deal.

have first of alls" said Montesquieu in the preface of the bookj
"considered mankind, and the result of my thoughts has beetij that
amidst such an infinite diversity of laws and manners, they were not
solely conducted by the caprice of fancy.

"I have laid down the first principles, and have found that the partic-
ular cases follow naturally from them; that the histories of all nations
are only consequences of them; and that every particular law is con-
nected with another law, or depends on some other of a more general
extent.

"When I have been obliged to look back into antiquity I have en-

THE ENLIGHTENMENT 307

deavored to assume the spirit of the ancients, lest I should consider those
thirds as alike which are really different, and lest I should miss the differ-
ence of those which appear to be alike.

>i have not drawn my principles from my prejudices, but from the
-arare of things.

••Here a great many truihs will not appear till we have seen the chain
which connects them with others. The more we enter inio particulars,
die more we shall perceive the certainty of the principles on which they
are founded. . . .

"I write not to censure anything established in any country whatso-
ever. Every7 nation will here find the reasons on which Its maxims are
founded; and this will be the natural inference, that to propose altera-
tions belongs only to those who are so happy as to be born with a genius
capable of penetrating the entire constitution of a state.

"It is not a matter of indifference that the minds of the people be en-
Hsfhtened. The prejudices of magistrates have arisen from national
prejudice. In a time of ignorance they have committed even the great-
est evils without the least scruple; but in an enlightened age they even
tremble while conferring the greatest blessings. They perceive the
ancient abuses; they see how they must be reformed; but they are sen-
sible also of the abuses of a reformation. They let the evil continue, if
they fear a worse; they are content with a lesser good; if they doubt a
greater. . . .

'The most happy of mortals should I think myself could I contribute
10 make mankind recover from their prejudices. By prejudices I here
mean, not that which renders men ignorant of some particular things,
but whatever renders them Ignorant of themselves." l

Thus the reader is warned that he is entering upon no conven-
tional excursion in political didactics, no steamy exercise in apolo-
getics. He is invited, on the contrary, to shed his preconceptions
and peer into the nature of things; to look at facts, unplumbed
oceans of facts; to examine their causes and constituents, to perceive
their significance and relationships, and to see what principles
underlie or emerge from them. This will not be a treatise on gov-
ernment alone, but on social existence as a whole.

Laws are concrete social facts — crystallizations of social experi-
ence, by-products of social adjustment; "necessary relations,53 said
Montesquieu in the opening sentence of his first chapter, "arising
from the nature of things." 2 If, therefore, you would know the
truth about human society, seek the "spirit55 of laws — the soul and

1 The Spirit of Laws (World *s Greatest Literature, 1900), Vol. xi, pp. xxxi-xxxiii.
J.» p. 1.

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

essence of their be:::g. Do no: accept them merely as the com-
mands of a superior cr as the dictates of reason. Find out how fnev
came 10 be. Go back to their first beginnings: trace out the rela-
tionships of cause and erfect in their origin and development: dis-
cover what functions ihey perform, what principles are inherent in
them. Such, in brief, is Montesquieu's approach. From, ihe stucv

m

of laws as relationships proceeding from social existence he pro-
posed to build a chain of truth by which men could act intelligently
and without prejudice in reconstructing the social order, not alone
in France, but anvwhere throughout the world.

J + '— •

Synthesis is as important 10 him as analysis. He writes from the
point of view not of the mere critic, bur of the lawmaker who would
utilize the results of criticism to formulate legislation appropriate tc

ihe characteristics and needs of anv given societv. He would K*G-

* v*-" * *

vide bricks and mortar, and also architectural designs, for ihe
modern Solon or Lycurgus. And the materials he would supply,
the plans he would recommend, would be such as take form in the
matrix of nature. Let men follow nature, make intelligent use of
what nature prescribes, and they shall see the truth and find the
wav to construct beiter social systems.

*' *

He opens the treatise, therefore, with a discussion of laws in

JL - "

general; their relation to different beings, their types and charac-
teristics. The entire universe is regulated by laws, he observes. The
Creator has so ordained; it is the only way creative intelligence

could function. So ":all beings have their laws: the Deity His laws,

"*_J 4

ihe material world its laws, the intelligences superior to man their
laws, the beasts their laws, man his laws.55 l \Vherever there are
relations between things, there are laws governing those relations.
"Particular intelligent beings may have laws of their own making,
but they have some likewise which they never made"; 2 which
arise, like the laws of inanimate nature, from relations in which the
intelligence or non-intelligence of the subject is no factor. "Man,
as a physical being, is like other bodies governed by invariable laws.
As an intelligent being, he incessantly transgresses the laws estab-
lished by God, and changes those of his own instituting.53 2 For the
nature of an intelligent being requires it to be a free agent; and
since its intelligence is finite and limited, it is prone to err. Hence
"the intelligent world is far from being so well governed as the

l/«£, p. I. 2 /^ pp. ?~3.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT 309

physical." : Man ;:Is left to his private direction, though a limited
being, and subject, like all finite intelligences, to ignorance and
error: even his imperfect knowledge he loses; and as a sensible
creature, he is hurried away by a thousand impetuous passions.
Such a being might every instant forget his Creator; God has there-
tore reminded him of his duty by the laws of religion. Such a being
is liable at every moment to forget himself; philosophy has provided
a?ainsi this by the laws of morality. Formed to live in society, he
might forget his fellow-creatures; legislators have, therefore, by
political and civil laws, confined him to his duty.5'1 1

Before there were such laws, however, there was human exist-
ence. Men lived then under the laws of nature; laws which derived
irzeir quality from character of the human animal and his mode of
life. What sort of creature was man in this primitive state of nature
and what were the laws of nature? In his most primitive condition
man would not have knowledge; he would have only the faculty of
knowing. The first thing he would think about would be self-
preservation, and he would adapt all his behavior to that end. He
would not, as Hobbes had supposed, be a ravening wolf seeking to
conquer and destroy. His supreme passion would be to save him-
self, and he would be a fear-stricken savage "trembling at the mo-
rion of a leaf, and flying from every shadow"; 2 he would become
aggressive only as wolves do in fact, when spurred by hunger or con-
fronted by danger from which there was no flight. The first law of
nature, then, would be peace and security.

The second thing pre-social man would think about would be the
satisfaction of his wants. Sustenance would be the first of these, but
there are many more. Actuated by fear, he would tend to shun his
fellow-creatures; but, finding that they also shunned him, would
lose his fear and find satisfaction in contact with others of his kind.
This would constitute the second law of nature. The pleasure de-
rived from contact with other men would be enhanced by the at-
traction of the sexes. The mutual pleasures resulting from sex con-
tacts would give rise to a third law of nature, the law of association.
At this point knowledge would have developed to a state where in-
telligence could function. Men would have not only an impulse to
unite, but reasons for doing so. Thence would arise the fourth law of
nature, the rational desire to live in societies.

2 Ibid., pp. 4-5.

j

10 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

"As soon as man enters into a state of society he loses the sense of
his weakness; equality ceases, and then commences the state of
war.*' : Strife develops along two lines. Individuals in society lose
their timidity; the human ego expands; the individual gains a con-
sciousness of power, a desire for personal aggrandizement; each Der-
son is thus impelled to convert to his own special benefit the advan-
tages of the society to which he belongs. Thus in society there
develops a state of war between individuals. Societies themselves
undergo a similar transformation. Each begins to feel its strength,
forgets its fears, becomes aggressive. \Vhereupon we have a staie of
war between nations. These two states of war give rise to positive
law: the law of nations, governing the relations between societies;
political law, governing the relations of individuals to societies:
civil law, governing the relations between individuals within socie-
ties. The foundation stones of all these bodies of law are, or should
be, simple and practical cases of reason applied to human relations.
They should be adapted to the people for whom they are framed;
related to the nature and principle of their government; accommo-
dated to climate, terrain, and industry; varied according to the state
of liberty, the kind of religion, and the established usages and in-
stitutions of society.

Here was a different note in political thought. Before Montes-
quieu political writers had pretty generally taken their stand on
absolutes fortified by sweeping generalizations. There were no-
tables exceptions, such as Spinoza and Pufendorf, but they were far
ahead of the times in which they lived, and did not, moreover, heap
up colossal mountains of facts to support their views. The conven-
tional approach to politics was dogmatic. The state of nature was
this or that, according to what the writer wanted to prove. The
social compact was a compact for absolutism or a compact for
liberty, depending on which cause the writer espoused. Sover-
eignty was unlimited and indivisible, or the opposite, as the writer
found convenient for his case. Law was a rule of abstract and uni-
versal reason or the binding command of a rightful superior as
suited the goal the writer set out to attain. Montesquieu sought not
to prove, but to explain; not to vindicate or condemn, but to show
how and why things had come to be as they were; not to describe
ideals, but to discover natural principles which could be utilized

1 Ibid., pp. 4-5,

THE ENLIGHTENMENT 311

•'-•' me betterment of human institutions. Absolutes and abstrac-

A1^* **^

"ans had no place In his philosophy; he was interested in the rela-
*ions of things and how these relations bear fruit in widely differing
Institutions and laws. The problem of political science, as he con-
ceived it, was not to discover a thread of truth and reason common
;: all situations, but to find out what was true and rational in each
oarucular situation, and from this to evolve a body of principles for
ie guidance of the legislator in any situation.

The plan of the treatise Is easy to follow. It embraces six primary
divisions of inquiry: (1) laws in relation to systems of government,,
2'i laws in relation to climate and soil, (3) laws in relation to man-
ners and customs, (4) laws in relation to commerce and money, (5)
la;vs in relation to population, (6) laws In relation to religion. After
an exhaustive exploration of these subjects the book closes with a
comparative summary of the various species of law, their distinct
objects and functions, and the way in which laws ought to be made
and applied.

The first inquiry, dealing with laws in their relation to govern-
ment is the most extensive. Montesquieu distinguished three major
types of government — despotic, monarchical, and republican — and
classified republican governments as either democracies or aristoc-
racies. Each of these basic forms of government, he says, has Its own
peculiar nature or structure; and its laws, which are its fundamental
institutions, conform to that nature. More important yet, each has
its own peculiar principle or motive force which makes it work as it
does.

Democracy first engages Montesquieu's attention. Since this is a
:onn of government in which supreme power is possessed by the
vhole body of people, says he, the laws fundamental to this govern-
ment are those establishing the right of suffrage. The regulation of
ie right to vote should be the foremost concern of the legislator in
iraming a democratic government. "The people . . . ought to

•ft _,

rave the management of everything within their reach: that which
exceeds their abilities must be conducted by their ministers.35 l
Paough the people do not have the ability to conduct the adminis-
tration themselves, they are well qualified to choose their magis-
trates and call them to account. The great peril in a democracy Is
me failure to draw a proper line between the functions the people

J pp. 9-10.

312 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

are capable of performing and those which should be delegated :t»
magistrates. In a popular government, says Montesquieu, "public
business must be carried on with a certain motion, neither too quick
nor too slow. But the motion of the people Is always either too re-
miss or too violent. Sometimes with a hundred thousand arms thev
overturn all before them; and sometimes with a hundred thousand
feet they creep like Insects/' x He commends the wisdom of Sclcr.
who divided the people of Athens Into four classes, not for voting,
but for eligibility to office; the purpose being to confine popular
selections to those qualified for public service. Social classes are
bound 10 occur In a popular state. The legislator should perceive
this and make suffrage arrangements accordingly; c;on this il;e
duration and prosperity of democracy have ever depended/' : To
allow the intelligent and propertied classes to be engulfed by the in-
digent and ignorant multitude Is fatal.

The principle of a democracy, in the Montesquian sense, is virtue
or probity. ;:\Vhat I have here advanced," he writes, ::is confirmed
by the unanimous testimony of historians, and is extremely aojee-
able to the nature of things."3 2 Unless there be a universal sense c:
rectitude, a democracy is doomed. There Is less need of this In other

j *

kinds of government where those who command and those \\\&

obey are not one and the same. But in a democracy, i;\Yhen virrue
Is banished^ ambition Invades the minds of those who are disposed
to receive It, and avarice possesses the whole community. The ob-
jects of their desires are changed; what they were fond of before has
become Indifferent; they were free while under the restraint of laws,
but they would fain now be free to act against law; and as each ci:i-
zen is like a slave who has run away from his master^ thai which was
a maxim of equity he calls rigor; that which was a rule of action he
styles constraint; and to precaution he gives the name of fear. Fru-
gality, and not the thirst of gain, now passes for avarice. Formerly
the wealth of individuals constituted the public treasure, but now
this has become the patrimony of private persons. The members cl
the commonwealth riot on the public spoils, and its strength is only
the power of a few, and the license of many." 2

Montesquieu had reference to the degradation of democracy in
the ancient world, for modern democracies were not then born; bur
the decay of virtue and the consequent "riot on public spoils"

1 Ibid. 2 Ibid., pp. 20-2!

crspe

THE ENLIGHTENMENT 313

— — • II. I .... . . ll.l. I. • -.— . - - . I •••.!..•, I . - .. - - - -. - _.-_..

v- ceen in twentieth-century democracies as well. We call it "pres-
r^e politics/5 "raiding the pork-barrel," '"shaking the plum tree/5
..^•-t^butin0" the patronage/5 and various other euphonious eva-

iM«|Htl.Buf **-*" 1^J JL ^"*

• '-^ Montesquieu \vould be more candid; he would call these
-Vin25 the rotting of democratic virtue.

The virtue which constitutes the principle of a democracy is not
ar inieilectual quality, but an emotion., and is rooted in the love of
Tu^alitv and equality, declares Montesquieu. The laws of a denaoo
-a^v should be designed to foster and perpetuate these qualities.
To this end he advocates laws preventing the concentration of
rty and wealth. The object of such laws should not be to
exact equality of economic status, but to forestall extreme
hecuaiities. Moderate riches he regards as an excellent thing for a
democracy. Frugality goes along with equality. Extreme poverty
and extreme wealth destroy the sturdy character which comes from
the Dractice of systematic and intelligent economy. Therefore he
-.vould have laws which c: should set every poor citizen so far at his
ease as to be able to work like the rest, and every wealthy citizen in
such mediocrity as to be obliged to take some pains either in pre-
servina; or acquiring a fortune.55 l

In an aristocracy the situation is quite different. There the

suDreme power is lodged in the hands of a special class or group of

citizens, and the rest of the people are their subjects. The form of

:he government should be determined by the number of people in

ihe governing class. If they are numerous, there must be a senate

cr other governing body 10 act in matters where the whole body of

nobles cannot. This in turn will call for some system of selecting

ine legislators and magistrates. Cooptation is not desirables for it

crJy perpetuates abuses. The best rule is to compensate greatness

:f power by brevity of duration. A year at most is as long as the

aristocratic magistrate or legislator can safely be allowed to hold

cifice. It is wise to have the largest possible number of the nobility

share in the exercise of power. Then the governing party or faction

nill be least disposed to oppress any others. It is also prudent in an

aristocracy to remove all invidious distinctions between the nobility

and the mass of people. C£ Aristocratic families ought, therefore, as

xuch as possible, to level themselves in appearance with the people.

The more an aristocracy borders on democracy, the nearer it ap-

lK&.*p. 46,

314 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

preaches perfection: and, in proportion as It draws towards monar-

chv, the more It Is imoerfect."1 !

• - i.

While virtue Is requisite In an aristocracy, it is not so viral, savs
Montesquieu, as in a democracy. :;An aristocratic government has
an Inherent vigor, unknown to democracy. The nobles form a
body, who by their prerogative, and for their own particular in-
terest, restrain the people. , . ,:3 2 The problem is how to prevent
abuses resulting from the excesses of the nobility. How can the
nobility be restrained? In two ways, Montesquieu responds. Thev
may be restrained by a very eminent virtue, which puts them in
some degree on a common footing with the people; or by an inferior
virtue, which puts them on a common level among themselves.
The essence of both of these forms of virtue is moderation. Hence
moderation, founded on virtue, not proceeding from indolence
or pusillanimity, is the cardinal principle, the very soul, of an aris-
tocracy.

The laws of an aristocracy c:rnust tend as much as possible to
infuse a spirit of moderation, and endeavor to re-establish that
equality which was necessarily removed by the constitution." :
There are two principal sources of trouble In an aristocracy — gross
inequality between rulers and subjects and similar inequality be-
tween different members of the governing class. The laws ought to
prevent or repress the hatred and jealousies deriving from these in-
equalities. One class should not be accorded privileges which are
honorable only as they are ignominious to others. For example,
caste barriers In the matter of marriage are not only Inconsistent
with the principle of an aristocracy but absolutely dangerous to its
security and permanence. The same is true of special privileges in
respect to taxation or benefits from the public treasury. Taxes
should fall in proportion to wealth, and emoluments of all kinds
should be scaled in Inverse ratio to riches. In fact Montesquieu
doubts whether the nobility should receive any pecuniary compea-
sation for public service; they should be content with honor. It Is
most essential too that the nobility should not have the power 10
levy taxes; the temptation to exploit the people would be too great
He would also debar the nobles from all kinds of commerce, in order
that they might not fortify their political power with economic
power. Excess of wealth and excess of poverty among the nobility

i Ibid,, p. 15. 2 xbid.9 p. 22. * Ibid., p. 49,

THE ENLIGHTENMENT 315

are ihe most pernicious conditions that can occur in an aristocracy,
and the laws should be aimed to prevent their occurrence. The
nobility should not be allowed to fall into debt, or, on the other
Vand to accumulate vast estates. There should be substantial

0t jt SwX-^ •*" ^** *

equality among them, and everything should be done to prevent
rivalries and quarrels.

A monarchy, as defined by Montesquieu, is where a single person
governs under fundamental laws; i.e., a constitutional monarchy.
The narare of the government is determined by the laws regulating
ihe intermediate, subordinate, and dependent powers. These laws
Dertain to the prerogatives, powers, and functions of the peerage,

A.

the clergy, the municipal corporations, and other channels through
which the power of the monarch flows. Such establishments are
essential to a monarchy. Do away with them and you soon have
eiiher a popular or a despotic government. The intermediary
agencies serve as a restraint on both monarch and people, and thus
tend to preserve the government in its true form.

The principle of monarchical government, Montesquieu explains,
is honor — honor in the sense of aspiration for preferments and titles*
In a republic this would be bad, but in a monarchy it is a salutary
thing. ;£It is with this kind of government as with the system of the
universe, in which there is a power that constantly repels all bodies
from ihe center, and a power of gravitation that attracts them to it.
Honor sets all parts of the body politic in motion, and by its very
action connects them; thus each individual advances the public
good, while he thinks only of promoting his own interest.*5 1

The laws of a monarchy should be congenial to the principle of
honor. They should sustain and preserve the intermediary estab-
lishments of the monarchy., particularly the nobility. The nobility
should be hereditary, and it is often desirable to permit them to
preserve their estates undivided. Special privileges should go with
ihe lands as well as the persons of the nobility. And these privileges
should be confined to the nobility and be incommunicable to any
other class. Commerce should be favored and encouraged for the
people, that the prosperity of the country may be sufficient to sus-
tain the monarch and his court. But the mode of taxation should be
less odious than the taxes themselves. Monarchical government has
advantages over both the republican and despotic forms, but care-

1 Ibid., p. 25.

316 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

nil attention to :he laws is necessary to secure these advantaee>.
The executive power in a monarchy can act with greater expedition
than in a republic and is more permanent than in a despotism. One
of the necessary means of maintaining the proper balance in a mon-
archy and thus preserving its excellencies is a judiciary that will
serve as a depositary of the laws, safeguarding them against im-
proper infraction and altering them 10 meet chans^inaj needs.

In a despotic government power is invested in a single Derson
unrestrained by law. The form of government follows the whim of
the despot. He is likely, says 'Montesquieu, to be lazy, voluptuous,
and ignorant. Hence it will be natural for him to delegate tis
power to a vizier or chief minister. In this form of government
virtue, moderation, and honor are wanting; the central principle
or motivating force is fear. The despot and his favorites fear :he
people, fear any who may rise to distinction, fear each other. Thev
can rule only by keeping their subjects in fear. Blind, passive obedi-
ence is what they require. "When the savages of Louisiana are de-
sirous of fruit, they cut the tree to the root, and gather the fruit.
This is an emblem of despotic government.'*5 1 In this kind of gov-
ernment there is no occasion for a great number of laws. Their
single purpose is repression. They are needed only to bolster up
arbitrary might.

One of the most delightful portions of The Spirit of Laws is Mon-
tesquieu's treatment of education in relation to the principles of
government. Each form of political society, according to his view,
requires its own special form of education. He refers not alone to
the formal education provided in the schools, but the informal edu-
cation of the home, the church, and other social institutions. In a
monarchy the emphasis should be placed upon those things that
contribute to pride of rank and a knightly sense of duty. The
properly educated person in a monarchy may set a value on Ms
fortune, but never on his life; may never conduct himself to appear
inferior to the rank he holds; will abstain from things forbidden by
honor more rigorously than if they were forbidden by law. Educa-
tion in a despotism must aim to inculcate servility and obedience,
which, if fact, is the negation of education for good citizenship. It
is in republican government, especially democracy, that education
is most important. Here it must inculcate the virtue of self-renun-

1 Ibid., p. 57.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT

— ---

ration, preference of public to private interest, love of law and love
c: country. Should it fail in this, the republic is doomed.

At great length Montesquieu descants on the theme that civil
and criminal law, sumptuary legislation, and likewise laws re-
specting luxury and the condition of women should be adjusted to
the type of government prevailing in a country. Severity of punish-
-?r.:s: he thinks, naturally and properly varies in proportion as
wveramems favor or discourage liberty. Forms of procedure and
methods of judicial administration vary in like manner Should a
country fail to fit its judicial administration and its substantive law
o: crimes and civil rights to its governmental system, the results will
~e most unfortunate. There will be no satisfactory standards of jus-
tice, and the administration of justice will defeat its own purposes
\\hcdier and in what manner a country should encourage or dis-
courage luxury depends upon the kind of government it has
Democracies and aristocracies, striving for equality or moderation"
snould repress luxury and foster frugality. Hence they should have
severe sumptuary laws designed to that end. In a monarchy how-
ever. luxury is both proper and desirable, and hence there should be
:e-.v sumptuary laws. The same is true of despotic states, though in
a monarchy luxury is a use of liberty, whereas in a despotism it is an
aouse of servitude. "Hence arises a very natural reflection. Re-
puoiics end with luxury; monarchies with poverty " 1 The status
o: women in marriage, in respect to property, and in the matter of
sexual continence should also be regulated according to the charac-
ter 01 the government. Republican governments find it necessary
to place women under severe restraint, not only proscribing vice
out the very appearance of it. They must also regulate dowries and
women's estates, so that marriage will not contribute to the rise of
:«ury. But in monarchical countries there is little need to restrain
me conduct of women or limit their property rights. Luxury is
appropriate to such a state and the etiquette of monarchical society
sufficiently regulates their conduct. They are, in truth, a means of
Demoting luxury. In despotic states, however, women are them-
-l«s an object of luxury, and should accordingly be kept in most

T \ ThCre " n° P°lite S°de1* t0 -gulate their be-

To give them property rights would be dangerous to the
of the government.

.,?. 98.

318 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

How is one form of government transmuted into a different
By the operation of perfectly natural causes, Montesquieu think-,
\\Tien there is any substantial deviation from its central principle
forces are set to work which in time undermine and transform ins
governmental system. Governments can be made stable onlv in ^

* *""

far as their constitutions and laws sustain and promote the princi-
ples on which they are founded. Montesquieu perceives no inevita-
ble cycles of growth and decay, has no feeling that revolutions are
deplorable and should be prevented. Change, in his view, is some-
thing that happens or does not, according to the facts and forces
involved in the situation. It is all a matter of relationships. Recog-
nizing that certain things precipitate and hasten change while
others retard and prevent it, the intelligent legislator will plot his
course accordingly. Does he wish to perpetuate a democracy? an
aristocracy? a monarchy? a despotism? He will follow policies
suitable to the desired result. Does he wish the opposite? Naturaliv
then he will adopt contrary policies. Republican government, for
example, cannot be maintained under circumstances adverse to die
principle of a republic. One of the essential factors In a republic,
In Montesquieu's opinion, was a relatively small territory. Should
a republic expand its territory and population. It would eventually
cease to be a republic unless some countervailing element were
Introduced. Federalism, Montesquieu thought, might have such
an effect and render large republics possible.

Unquestionably the most influential portion of Montesquieu's
work was his discussion of liberty. Ever striving for precision of
ideas., he makes a distinction between political liberty and personal
liberty. What Is the meaning of liberty? That, he reminds us, is a
question men have always debated, and will, so long as they fail ro
distinguish between liberty and unlimited freedom. "We must have
continually present to our minds the difference between independ-
ence and liberty. Liberty is a right of doing whatever the laws
permit3 and if a citizen could do what they forbid he would be no
longer possessed of liberty, because all his fellow-citizens would
have the same power." l Political liberty is not native to any form
of government, and is found only In moderate governments. Ex-
perience shows that every man invested with power is apt to abuse
It. To establish political liberty, therefore. It is necessary to set up

'&, pp. 150-154.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT 319

checks on political authority, so that "no man shall be compelled
to do things to which the law does not oblige him, nor forced to
abstain from things which the law permits.5' l

;:ln every government there are three sorts of power: the legislative;
the executive in respect to things dependent on the law of nations; and
the executive in regard to matters that depend on the civil law.

*:Bv virtue of the first, the prince or magistrate enacts temporary or
perpetual laws, and amends or abrogates those that have been already
enacted. By the second, he makes peace or war, sends or receives em-
bassies, establishes the public security, and provides against invasions.
Bv ihe third, he punishes criminals, and determines the disputes that
arise between individuals. The latter we shall call the judiciary power,
and the other simply the executive power of the state.

• * • * • • •

:;\Vhen the legislative and executive powers are united in the same
person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty;
because apprehensions may arise, lest the same monarch or senate
should enact tyrannical laws, to execute them in a tyrannical manner.

i:Again, there is no liberty, if the judiciary power be not separated
from the legislative and executive. Were it joined with the legislative,
ihe life and liberty of the subject would be exposed to arbitrary control;
for the judge would then be the legislator. Were it joined to the execu-
tive power, the judge might behave with violence and oppression.

'There would be an end of everything, were the same men or the
same body, whether of nobles or of the people, to exercise those three
powers, that of enacting laws, that of executing the public resolutions,
and of trying the causes of individuals." 2

In this much-quoted passage Montesquieu stated, as he believed,
the British recipe for political liberty. He was in error as to the
actual working of the English constitution, but not as to its spirit.
British liberty had been achieved by the erection of constitutional
barriers against arbitrary power, and there was a feeling that the
courts should be independent and the crown and parliament bal-
anced against one another, though full organic separation had not
taken place and never did. Conversant with the spirit of the British
constitution, the founders of American political institutions were
easily convinced of the correctness of Montesquieu's analysis and
were further persuaded that all encroachments on liberty, both in
England and the colonies, were due to failure to go the whole dis-
tance with Montesquieu and effect an actual organic separation of

1 Ibid. 2 Ibid.

520 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

powers. Moritesciiieu's doctrine became for them a greai guiding
principle. They incDrporaied It and the corollary principle of

checks and balances in :he American constitutional system,

*

f-/-. ?rt"\'^ r">~\A ~-i •»• '~n ry< **Tn r\t "*^o!TT'!!

'-'U1 ir_j*v *L t^j.\7 (-»*. w iJ-i v,j-J"L vy— ~JVJAi- Li

On personal liber tv Montesquieu had manv shrewd comments :o

A. * jL *

make. This libertv. he stales, conies not from ihe arrangements of

a f i* .^ ^" *

the constitution, but from manners, customs, received examples,
and even from particular civil laws. In essence it is the security or
sense of securitv that people have. To establish and preserve this

* JL A, -L

liberty it is necessary that criminal justice be so regulated that
punishment flows naturally from the nature of the crime, not from
the caprice of the authorities. Arbitrary violence, even as the pun-
ishment for a crime, is the death of liberty. Secrecy of procedure
against persons charged wirfi crimes is of the same sort. It destroys
tranquillity and undermines security. Where liberty is properly
safeguarded i: punishments are derived from the nature of the thine,
founded on reason, and drawn from the very source of good and
evil.55 i Public accusations and orderly proceedings are equally
essential. Freedom of speech he rates as another essential of liberty.
To hold people eruiltv of treason for indiscreet or even seditious

i 1 O '

utterances is the very negation of liberty. "Words do noi constitute
an overt act; they remain only in idea . . . and sometimes more
is signified by silence than by any expression whatever." 2 By the
same reasoning, he argues, we should be very circumspect in the
prosecution of witchcraft and heresy. All such prosecutions impugn
not a man's actions but his character. If a man may be punished
for his character he is always in danger. Security cannot exist.
Fundamental also to the preservation of liberty is equity in the
levy and collection of taxes. The revenues of the government should
be fixed with regard to the needs of both the state and its people.
The forms of taxation also bear a direct relation to liberty. "A
capitation is more natural to slavery; a duty on merchandise is
more natural to liberty, by reason it has not so direct a relation to
the person." s Confiscations, exemptions from taxation, the farming
of revenues, and various other practices are viewed in their relation
to liberty.

Involved In the discussion of liberty was the question of slavery.
In dealing with this topic Montesquieu abandoned the scientific de-

1 Ibid., p. 187. 2 Ibid., p. 193. « Ibid., p. 215.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT 321

J . I . — •• —~ P. I II - II— I I— I- ••• — • -. — • I .11. • .-(—.••. .!• • I . -_ I,, ,| ^ ,|

racbment which characterizes most of his book and let his moral
fervor show through. That slavery may be legal he readily con-
cedes, but that it is rationally justifiable on any ground whatsoever
re eloquently refuses to grant. Its origin can be explained, but iis
«c^ntific soundness cannot be proved. It is contrary to nature and
*o ail principles of government, though it is more tolerable in a des-
potism than in any other kind of government. "Aristotle endeavors
to urove that there are natural slaves., but what he says is far from

n*-oyin°" it." x In countries where climatic conditions render men

£•*•»• j

unwilling to work without coercion slavery may be more reconcil-
able to reason. "But as all men are born equal, slavery must be
accounted unnatural., though in some countries it be founded on
natural reason; and a wide difference ought to be made between
such countries, and those in which even natural reason rejects it, as
Europe, where it has been so happily abolished. ... I know not
whether this article be dictated by my understanding or by my
heart. Possibly there is not that climate upon earth where the most
laborious services might not with proper encouragement be per-
formed by freemen. Bad laws have made lazy men, and they have
been reduced to slavery because of their laziness.53 l

Montesquieu's theories about the effects of climate, soil, geog-
raphy, and other aspects of physical environment upon social and
political institutions were not wholly original with him. Preceding
thinkers, especially Bodin, had pioneered in this line of study, but
none before Montesquieu had possessed enough facts to go far. In
die light of present-day scientific knowledge Montesquieu's fact-
material presents many deficiencies, but he had enough to give the
world its first really conclusive treatment of the environmental

theory. He was able to trace out definite cause-and-effect relations

/

between temperature, humidity, topography, soil fertility, natural
resources, and the social behavior of human beings. He saw, or
thought he saw, a clear and unmistakable correlation between phys-
ical environment and the characteristics of the population. Some
environments he believed, predispose humanity to passivity and in-
dolence, while others make for energy and activity; some foster in-
stability and emotionalism, while others are conducive to solidity
and rationality. The most interesting, and perhaps the most gen-
erally applauded, of all his theories of environmental influence was

240 241.

522 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

thai pertaining to liberty. At much length and with great ingenu-
kv Montesquieu endeavored 10 demonstrate that some environ-

* * "*

merits are favorable and others hostile to liberry. The colder cli-
mates, on the whole, he thought favorable to liberty; the warmer
climates unfavorable. Vast areas unbroken by river systems, moun-
tain ranges, and other natural barriers he deemed uncongenial to
liberty as compared with regions where nature had divided the land
into sections tending- to many small, compact, and largely independ-
ent communities. Being quite flattering to the peoples and nations
of Europe and North America, who could regard their lands and
climes as the natural abode of liberty, these deductions attained a
vast popularity.

Nowhere in The Spirit of Laws is Montesquieu more in harmony
with modern concepts of society than when dealing with laws in re-
lation to the morals and customs of a nation. Every people^ he tells
us, evolves a general spirit peculiar to itself. To a large extent this is
a product of its morals, manners, standards5 and customs. In cer-
tain departments of life this spirit is more potent than law. It is

futile to make laws inconsistent with it. follv to try to modifv bv law

' > * *•

institutions and forms of behavior rooted in the underlying subsoil
of social habit. c: Hence it follows that when these manners and cus-
toms are to be changed; it ought not to be done by laws; this would
have too much the air of tyranny: it would be better to change
them by introducing other manners and customs." l Law, he goes
on to say, "is not a mere act of power"; 1 it is a rule of action predi-
cated on social relationships. The penalties inflicted by law should
derive from the necessities of social relationships. When they do not,
the law is bound to be more honored in the breach than in the ob-
servance. ''Folkways" and "mores35 were terms unknown to
Montesquieu's generation; fifteen decades or more were due to pass
before social scientists would analyze the social process sufficiently
to isolate those factors and measure their influence on human be-
havior. It is a truism of social science to-day that laws running con-
trary to the folkways and mores of a people are vain and empty
words. Montesquieu perceived that truth in 1748, and demon-
strated it.

Montesquieu's chapters on economics are interesting because
they reveal a mind saturated with ancient doctrines coining to grips

id., pp. 298-299.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT

-

viih the upthrust facts of a changing order. Accepting and gener
ally approving, the mercantilist policies of his time, he nevertheless
perceived and pointed out the advantages and benefits of free trade
He recognized the function of money in the process of exchange and
accurately described the advantages flowing from its use particu
lariy in miernational trade. He noted the fluctuations of the pur
chasing power of specie, and argued that Spain was no richer after
appropriating the gold of Mexico and Peru because buving power
o: gold rell m proportion to the increase of gold in circulation He
istmguished between what he called "real" money and "ideal"
money, ihe former being specie and the latter what is now called
representative money. He argued very cogently against price-
nxmg by legislative fiat and showed that its results were invariably
cad. He was opposed to public debts and vigorously combated the
theory mat : a nation could borrow itself into prosperity. He rejected
die older theories of interest and anticipated Adam Smith and the
classical school of economists in the argument that interest is a

1 the hire of money and an essential factor in

Of the relation of the state to religion Montesquieu had a great

C°nCeded rdii0n a m

d t y,

-it ori not think it the proper function of the legislator to prescribe

a idigum for the people. Though holding Christianity the truest of
* rehgions, he did not think it equally suited to all^oc eties and

e

r ' ^ a m°re Suitable reliSion for a despotism

Ctosnamiy. The Christian religion was appropriate to
** ed governments, Catholicism for monarchies, and Protestant-
- ifc republics. His idea of the proper relation between ?he "ate
and religzon was that of reciprocal action. The state should not in-

6P C f reHgi0n ^^ ^ aUth°ri^ *** M^nce of

' ^e rh should not encroach up°n the SP^ of

toW ^ POHtiCal P°Wer iS WCak ^ Sufficient.

A, ' " '^ ^ th°Ught' PrimarUy a 1*™ of expe-

P

anv T Underu° °b%ati0n t0 rCCdVe a11 reli=io- °rto
^U h ^ gr WhateVer" Jt ^^ indeed' end-?er its

SI thU°mg S°; f°r '<there ^ SCarC^ a^ but P—cuting re-
-yons that have an extraordinary zeal for being established in other

324 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

places because a religion that can tolerate others seldom thinks c:
its own propagation^, . . .'' : Bui if a state should decide to admits,
new religion or :o have a diversity of religions, it should by all means
enforce the rule of toleration, ""not only that they shall not embroil
the state, but that they shall not raise disturbances among them-
selves."' :

IV

"We have had.*' said Albert Sorel, speaking of Montesquieu's

place in French literature, "sublimer philosophers, bolder thinkers,
more eloquent \vriters. sadder, more pathetic, and more fertile
creators of fictitious characters, and authors richer in the invention
of images. We have had no more judicious observer of human so-

-j

cieties, no wiser counsellor regarding great public interests, no man
who has united so acute a perception of individual passions with
such profound penetration Into political institutions — no one, in
short, who has employed such rare literary talent in the service of
such perfect good-sense/" 2

A just and splendid tribute, but one which really understates the

case.

Montesquieu's rank among the immortals is not to be determined
by comparing him with others. Like Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli.
and Bodln, he stands apart, In unique and solitary eminence. There
Is no other like him. He was, it is true, a Frenchman of the eight-
eenth century, limited, as all men are, by circumstances of race,
culture, and epoch; but the essence of his work was timeless and
universal. He left behind much more than a literary masterpiece,
much more than a political philosophy; he left what only a few c:
the rarest minds In human history have given the world — a method
by which his own Ideas or those of any other political theorist mighi
be validated. Montesquieu was often mistaken In his facts, often in
error In his deductions; but these were petty faults resulting from
the Inadequacy of his Information or the fallibility of his judgment
in particular cases. His method., however, was sound; so sound that
critics could only complain that he had made politics too compli-
cated. And so he had, for all classes of political speculators who
could not be bothered to be scientific. The abstract reasoner, the
facile logic-chopper, the hasty empiricist, and all their many breth-

1 Ibid., Vol. ii, p. 52. 2 A. Sorel, Montesquieu, pp. 28-2S.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT 325

ren were ruled out by the clinical method of Montesquieu. Uni-
versal reason, universal rules, and universal truth have little place
ir. clinical technique; it seeks the particular meaning of particular
ficts in particular situations. Generalizations and rules grow out of
2 given set of facts in a given relation and are good for that alone.
The way to truth by this method is not the quick and easy path of
-ure reason, but the long and tortuous road of tedious Investigation,
careful analysis, and cautious synthesis. But it is the surest road to
:rjii that man has ever found.

Montesquieu's influence was instant and widespread, though not
always In directions he would have wished. Less than two years
after the appearance of The Spirit of Laws the twenty-second edition
of the book was run. It was quickly translated Into English, Ger-
man. Spanish, Italian, and other European languages. Educated
persons everywhere read it, discussed it, and drew from it what they
v,ould or could. It was attacked, defended, and imitated. But it
had less effect in molding the political thought of the eighteenth
century than would be expected from its tremendous popularity.
The eighteenth century was not ready for a political philosophy
which based its conclusions on the objective study of political phe-
nomena: a philosophy which dispensed with ideals, junked natural
rights, disregarded sovereign prerogatives, Ignored hypothetical
social contracts, and sought only to discover and explain the prin-
ciples Involved in the actual working of political societies as they are.
Not until the revolutionary turmoils of the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries had swept away the accumulated rubbish of
ine old order could Montesquieu truly come into his own.
^ .Although the deeper effects of Montesquieu's thought were de-
rerred, it would be a mistake to suppose that his immediate influence
v/as insignificant. The eighteenth century could not assimilate the
Montesquian philosophy, nor the first half of the nineteenth century
ICT that matter, but they did not escape its influence. Montesquieu
was widely read by his contemporaries, but not understood.
"Thinkers and politicians/3 says Sorel, "accepted in Montesquieu
what suited their turn, but his method escaped them. They may be
sera invoking his authority in details, while despising his spirit; and
putting into practice reforms that he advocated, while violating the
roles he prescribed." l It was inevitable that this should occur, be-
lRid* p. 170.

326 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

cause there \VSLS something In The Spirit cj Lau;s for every Iniere-
and everv school of thought; something which. lifted from Its r>*r*

tf ^ -* — J •* ***"'' M'-*-Wi.L 1^

In the fundamental structure of the authors philosophy, could be
employed as a prop for almost every point of view.

Catherine the Great was an admirer of Montesquieu and de-
clared that his book was her manual of government, but all she
ever found in it was a body of precepts to strengthen autocrat::
power. Frederick the Great read Montesquieu's works with keen
insight and followed their counsels just so far as they suited hi*
methods of government. Louis XVI was a professed and probabr;
sincere disciple of Montesquieu, but applied his doctrines so unin-
telligently as to hasten the Revolution. The authors of the Ameri-
can Constitution were familiar with Montesquieu and adopted hi*
doctrine as to the separation of powers with copy-book literalness,
but did not equally value his concept of the general principles
underlying republican government. The chief thinkers of the great
epoch of revolution which extended from 1789 to 1848 were all
acquainted with The Spirit of Laws, It was quoted on all sides of the
great controversies of that hectic era. Radicals renounced Montes-
quieu's moderation and gradualism, but found use for his theories
of republicanism. Moderates drew from him their strongest argu-
ments against destructively sweeping reforms, but failed to perceive
the reconstructive implications of his moderatism. Reactionaries
claimed him as their own, but mistook, as an argument for the static
quo., his emphasis on the idea that every nation has its own peculiar
spirit or genius which should not be interfered with by law.

As Montesquieu lay on his death-bed conscious of the rapidly
approaching end of life, an attending clergyman addressed to him
this consoling thought: "No man, better than you. Sir, can realize
the greatness of God.3; "No man," responded Montesquieu,
"knows better the littleness of man." The littleness of man and ihe
greatness of the web of forces shaping and conditioning the social life
of man — these are the central pillars of Montesquieu's political
thought. To lay bare the facts of this cosmic process and to instruct
men how to use them more intelligently were the objects of Ms
quest. He was famous in his own day, but not understood; he is
famous to-day, and better understood, because the historical and
evolutionary schools of political thought of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries are the fulfillment of his work. Our admiration

THE ENLIGHTENMENT 327

for Montesquieu the thinker Is heightened by our admiration for
Montesquieu the artist. He approached his task not only In the
spirit of a philosopher but also with the deliberate and painstaking
craftsmanship of the artist. "If this work meets with success/' he
v.TOte In the final paragraph of the preface to The Spirit of Laws, "I
shall owe it chiefly to the grandeur and majesty of the subject.
However, I do not think that I have been totally deficient in point
:f genius. When I have seen what so many great men, in France,
in England, and in Germany have said before me, I have been lost
in admiration; but I have not lost my courage: I have said with
C'orreggio, £And I also am a painter.' "

V

r,

On July 4, 1776, a day not uncelebrated in history, a dying man
in Edinburgh entertained his most Intimate friends at a farewell
dinner. It was not a morbid or doleful occasion, though the host
and all his guests fully realized that in a few more days or maybe
weeks he would be dead. It was a gathering of old friends and
boon companions, eminent citizens of the Republic of Letters. The
host was David Hume, since ranked by many as the greatest philos-
opher who ever wrote in English, and undeniably deserving to be
classed with Montesquieu as one of the two most enlightened men
pf the eighteenth century. At this last supper Hume, despite the
iniestinal cancer that relentlessly numbered his days, was the life of
ihe party, and communicated his gaiety to the rest of the company.
Death might treat a philosopher the same as a fool, but a philoso-
pher at least could die without a whimper. When Adam Smith,
who was one of the guests, remarked upon the malevolence of the
world, Hume playfully protested that it was not so. "Here am I,"
he quipped, "who have written on all sorts of subjects that are cal-
culated to excite hostility. But I have no enemies— except all the
Whigs, all the Tories, and all the Christians.53 l

Humor often depends upon the grotesque way in which it reveals
ibe truth. Though David Hume was far from being universally
hated, it was true that few men of his generation had poked up so
siany nests of hornets. He was the most penetrating critic of the
eighteenth century, the most overwhelmingly crushing to all species
of prejudice and dogma; and yet a man of great tolerance and

1 J. Y. T. Greig, David Hume (1934), p. 42.

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

seniaiitv. in whom there was little of rancor or venom even for
those 'vho vilified and misused him. When Adam Smith cculd
write of a man, as he did of Hume, ""'Upon the whole, I have al-
wavs considered him, both in his lifetime and since his death, as

uf *

approaching as nearly to me idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous
man, as uerhaps the nature of human frailty will permit," : one
cannot doubt that here was indeed a man.

David Hume was born in Edinburgh in 1711. His family v;as
of ihe petty nobility and possessed sufficient property, with the
practice of frugality, to keep them in comfort. But David was a
younger son, ineligible to inherit the family estate, and hence was
expected to fend for himself. He was given the best preparatory
education within the means of the family and ai the age of ten \vas
matriculated in Edinburgh College, the nucleus around which the
great university of modern times has developed. Hume seems to
have pursued the standard classical and philosophical courses then
offered, but, following the fashion of the time, did not graduate.
At the age of fourteen he took up the study of law, which he found
exceedingly distasteful. Out of respeci to the wishes of his family
he went through the motions of reading law for three or four years,
but finally gave it up as a bad job.

What to do? His master passion, as he relates in his autobiog-
raphy, was to be a literary man — a calling not lavish in buttering
any man's parsnips. The family could not sympathize with his
ambitionSj but were indulgent. He remained at home several
years studying and writing as he pleased. Finally the situation
became intolerable. He had become an embarrassment 10 his
family and to himself. Rebelling against the straight-laced Calm-
ism of the Scottish kirk, he was denounced as an atheist and
brought down upon Ms head the wrath of the whole community,
He determined to quit Scotland. The family gave him a small
allowance and found him a job with a firm of merchants in Bristol
Early in 1734 he journeyed to Bristol3 but stayed scarcely long
enough to warm an office stool. To tie himself to the humdrum
routine of a business career was the least of his intentions. Scotch
parsimony would enable him to live on his allowance and be free.
And free David Hume resolved to be, comfort notwithstanding.

1 David Hume, Essays Moral and Political (ed. by T. H. Green and T. H. Grose, 2
vds., 1898), Vol. i, p. 14.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT 329

For some years a book had been taking form In Hume's mind.
• would go to France and write that book. There he could live
cheaply and obscurely and yet have access to books and libraries.
Accordingly Hume made his way to France in the summer of 1734.
Af:er tarrying briefly at Paris, he went to Rheims, where he spent
a year of intensive work. Then, desiring still further retirement, he
moved 10 the remote town of La Fleche. There he spent two years
cf concentrated labor, finishing the book in 1737. It was entitled
Trtstise of Human Nature, and is now acknowledged to be one of the
world's enduring masterpieces of philosophy.

At the ripe age of twenty-six, with his first and possibly greatest
:c:eilecrual creation in manuscript, Hume returned to England to
secure a publisher. No luck. He was unknown, without influential
friends, and too jealous of his Independence to seek a wealthy pa-
n-on. After a year of peddling his wares, he found a printer who
was willing to take a chance. The book made its bow in 1 739. If we
may believe Hume, no book ever failed more completely. It was
"dead-born from the press,33 he said. Few bought it, fewer read it,
and none understood it. Undaunted by this collapse of his hopes,'
Hume set to work on other things. In 1741 he brought out a collec-
tion of miscellaneous papers entitled Essays Moral and Political.
These random essays caught the popular fancy and sold so well that
asecond edition, Including several additional essays, was Issued in
F42. A little fame and, best of all, a little money came to Hume as
a result of the publication of the Essays. He was no longer a gamble
lor his publisher. In 1748 he put out a third edition of the Essays. A
copy of this came into the hands of Montesquieu, who read it and
sent Hume a copy of The Spirit of Laws as a token of regard. A cor-
dial exchange of letters followed; and Hume assisted In the publi-
cation of an English edition of The Spirit of Laws, while Montesquieu
used his good offices to bring Hume's Essays to the attention of
French readers. In 1754 a French translation of the Essays was
published In Amsterdam. This was widely circulated; and on the
continent of Europe Hume soon gained a vast reputation as a politi-
cal iheorist. In England, however, the political essays attracted
jess attention than the religious and moral numbers of the volume,
m consequence of which Hume's rank as a political thinker was not
so high In England as on the other side of the Channel.
Between the writing of the Essays and the publication of the first

350 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

volume of his H:s:crj, of England in 1754 Hume was variously oc-
cupied. He sought and failed to secure a professorship, firsi a:
Edinburgh and then at Glasgow. He served for a time as tutor and
companion to the demented Lord Annandaie. He presided over the
Advocates* Library in Edinburgh for some months. He was secre-
tary to General St. Clair on the expedition to France in 1746 and in
the embassy to Vienna and Turin in 1748. All the while, however,
he was studying and writing, being mainly concerned with the re-
vision and republication in more popular form of the ill-faied
Treatise of Human \aiure.

In turning to the writing of history Hume forsook philosophy and,
to a large extent, political theory; but he gained fame and fortune.
He was handsomely paid for his historical works and accumulated a
substantial fortune. Written with a pronounced Tory bias and
virulently critical of England and English institutions, Hume's his-
tory was, nevertheless, a literary triumph. Distinguished and fluent
in style, it was the first historical work in English to emphasize the
sociological and cultural aspects of national life, and to present a
comprehensive and correlated survey of historical facts. When
translated into French, it greatly embellished the already lustrous
reputation of its author on the continent of Europe.

In 1763 Hurne was appointed secretary to the British embassy in
Paris, which post he retained three years. The salons of Paris hailed
him as the greatest literary genius of England and showered flatten*
and kudos upon him. Hume showed his true greatness by keeping
his head and emerging unscathed from this trial of character. In
1766 he returned to England as secretary to General Conway and
resided two years in London. Having achieved financial independ-
ence, he now took residence in his native city and lived there until
his death in 1776. It was during this last phase that he became in-
volved in the famous imbroglio with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Per-
suaded by friends of the volatile Genevan to assist in securing Mm a
refuge in England3 Hume brought Rousseau with him to England
in 1766 and did all he could to see the exile happily established.
Paranoiac that he was, Rousseau soon conceived the belief that
Hume, under the guise of friendship, was conspiring to ruin him.
Publicly charging Hume with bad faith, Rousseau announced that
all friendship between them was at an end. This brought a sharp
but dignified reply from Hume and impelled him to denounce

THE ENLIGHTENMENT 331

Rousseau in letters to friends in France. Both men and their
partisans then rushed to print with vindicatory letters, articles, and
pamphlets. At the height of the rumpus Rousseau's wild Imagina-
tion caused him to fear that he was marked for assassination, and
he hastily fled to France. Hume then tolerantly concluded that
Rousseau was crazy and abandoned the quarrel.

VI

Opinion about David Hume, English and American opinion in
particular, is often prejudiced by his onslaughts upon religion and
his reputed reactionism in politics. Hume was the most devastating
anti-religionist of the age. Few defenders of the faith could tilt with
him on even terms, and none was really prepared to meet him on
his favorite thesis — the social inutility of religion. In common with
ail ihe distinguished company of eighteenth-century deists, Hume
rejected revealed religion, in fact any kind of religion assuming per-
sonal relationships between deity and humanity, as intellectually
untenable. Such views were too common among the intellectuals of
ihe eighteenth century to excite the bitter objurgations that fell
upon Hume. To true believers Hume was the very incarnation of
Satan himself, for he dared to deny not only the intellectual validity
of religion but its ethical and moral validity as well. Religion, he
said, made men bad — bad individually and bad collectively. It was
part of the Intrinsic nature of religion, he asserted, to operate
against the growth of positive moral standards of the highest char-
acter. And he argued the point with great vigor and cogency, find-
ing no dearth of fact material to support his thesis. This was too
much for even liberal religionists to tolerate.

In politics Hume was frequently denounced as a turncoat, on
account of his apparent swing from Whiggism to Toryism. Actu-
ally his turning was more nominal than real. The Integrity of his
iuadamental political ideas was never compromised. What did
change was his application of doctrines to particular issues and
situations. In early life he called himself a Whig, in later life he
wished to be known as a Tory. But he was a Tory in English poli-
tics alone, and not a consistent Tory there. He was for the Ameri-
can colonies against the Tory government of the mother country.
"In metaphysics/3 says Greig, "theory of knowledge, economics,
ethics and religion, and in politics so far as it concerned Americans.,

332 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

he deserved rather to be dubbed a Radical: he depended. -not upon,
authority, but upon his own reasonings; he accepted no scheme c:
things because established and defended by the Fathers; he disin-
tegrated and destroyed many settled notions by an acid logic c:
his own/' : \Vha: drove Hume from ihe \\Tiig to the Tory camp
was no: a revolution in his own political thinking, but a reaction
against Whig fanaticism. Early in life he had distinguished the re-
ligious from the political Whl^s and Tories. The political \Vhio-

-_2 -L '*— ' A *•*

was, in his opinion, a lover of law and liberty, moderate in all his
views and actions: but the religious Whig was a sentimental and
opinionated enthusiast devoid of all liberality and reason. The
political Torv was a narrow-minded reactionary set against al'

j^"^ * ** "— f

progress and reform, \vhereas the religious Tory was on the whole a

person of broad and tolerant views. As he advanced in years and
experience Hume found the political Whig increasingly indistin-
guishable from the religious Whig, and the political Tory more and
more akin to the religious Tory. In the shuffling of events and
alignments the Tories, in his judgment., had become more rational
and liberal; the Whigs less so. So he became a Tory, but did not
go with them on questions like the American controversy, in which
he believed them irrational and unwise. There was reason, then,
for him. to sav that he was hated bv both.

f *

Hume took the position in the Treatise of Human Mature that the
science of human nature must be treated by the experimental
method. The Treatise was an endeavor to supply a theory of knowl-
edge compatible with that view. In politics he was not so much
inclined to experimentaiism, because he was less sure of the method
of knowledge in the political sphere. In his political writings,
therefore, he was more a destructive critic than a constructive the-
orist. But in spirit and point of view he was beyond doubt the first
truly modern political thinker who wrote in English. Doctrinaire
theories and glittering generalities were pulverized by his level-
headed skepticism. Dogmas and systems left him cold. Succumbing
to the fashion of the age, he toyed with the idea of a perfect com-
monwealth and wrote a brief essay on that theme. But he was

*

apologetic about ii, and remarked that the innovator in politics
should ^ adjust his innovations, as much as possible, to the ancient

fabric, and preserve entire the chief pillars and supports of the

1 Op. n'L, p 376.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT 333

constitution/5 because uAn established government has an infinite
advantage by that very circumstance of its being established: the
bulk of mankind being governed by authority, not reason, and never
attributing authority to anything that has not the recommendation
cf antiquity." l Objecting to ideal commonwealths as "plainly
-imaginary," he presented as cca form of government, to which I
cannot in theory discover any considerable objection/5 l a scheme
for grafting republican government on to existing British institu-
tions.

Writing on The First Principles of Government., Hume cut straight
to die heart of Machtpolitik when he pointed out that in the submis-
sion of the many to the few "force is always on the side of the gov-
erned, ihe governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It
:s therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this
maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments,
as well as to the most free and most popular." 2 Sovereignty, in
other words, was for him, as for the political scientist of to-day,
primarily a matter of psychology. Opinion, the sustaining prop of
sovereignty, he classified under two heads: "opinion of interest53
and "'opinion of right." The former he defined as the sense of ad-
vantage that people have with respect to a given political system
and the persuasion that no other government which might be sub-
stituted for it could be more advantageous. The second type of
opinion consisted, he averred, of a sense of right to power and right
10 property. The sense of right to power might originate in various
ways, but was invariably an outgrowth of long established politi-
cal arrangements. The sense of right to property required, he sup-
posed, no comment; all political writers recognized the importance
of property in the foundation of political institutions, and many
were inclined, mistakenly, to esteem it the sole or principal founda-
tion. Corollary, though secondary, to these factors in the formation
of opinion were self-interest, fear, and affection. These could mod-
ify and condition the operation of the basic factors., but could have
no force without the preexistence of the basic factors.

The modern political scientist knows more about the interplay
of psychological forces in the determination of political behavior
than did Hume, and has a more adequate vocabulary to describe
the phenomena he observes, but in fundamental concepts he has

1 David Hume, Essays Moral and Political, op. cit.> pp. 480-482. * Ibid., p. 110.

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

not yet proceeded far beyond the underlying postulates of the heret-
ical philosopher of Edinburgh.

Explaining the origin of the state Hume strikingly anticiDated
the modern sociological and historical schools of political thought.
Political society is begotten, he asserted, of the necessity to ad-
minister justice, but does noi spring into existence full-born. "Gov-
ernment commences more casually and more imperfectly. It ;5
probable, that the first ascendant of one man over multitudes began
during a state of war; where the superiority of courage and gen:u5
discovers itself more visibly, where unanimity and concert are
most requisite, and where the pernicious effects of disorder are most
sensibly felt. The long continuance of that state, an incident com-
mon among savage tribes, enured the people to submission; and if
the chieftain possessed as much equity as prudence and valour, he
became, even during peace, the arbiter of all differences, and could
gradually, by a mixture of force and consent, establish his author-
ity." l Following that, "opinion," as described above, came into
play and perfected the foundation of authority. It was an amazinglv
shrewd guess, and agrees in substance with the views of a great
number of modern students of political origins.

Hume's rare insight into the bases of political motivation is

further manifested in his treatment of the subject of distribution of

power. It is a correct political maxim, he informs us, Cithat every

man must be supposed to be a knave," 2 though in fact no such

thing is true. The explanation of the paradox lies in the fact "that

men are generally more honest in their private than their public

capacity, and will go to greater lengths to serve a party, than where

their private interest alone is concerned. Honour is a great check

upon mankind: But where a considerable body of men act together,

this check is, in a great measure removed; since a man is sure to be

approved of by his own party, for what promotes the common

interest; and he soon learns to despise the clamour of adversaries.

To which we may add, that every court or senate is determined

by the greater number of voices; so that, if self-interest influences

only the majority (as it will always do), the whole senate follows the

allurements of this separate interest, and acts as if it contained nor

one member who had any regard to public interest and liberty." ~

If we would counteract this natural and inevitable tendency to

1 Ibid., pp. 115-116. *Ibid., pp. 118-119,

THE ENLIGHTENMENT 335

i - • i -ii i — — —

V^yerv, Hume reasons, we must skillfully divide and distribute

£**•* -*•***• ^ ?

*he powers of government so that the separate interest of each
rrrnup can be realized only when it concurs with the general public

£,- -" k *— ' i

interest. Failure to do this, was in his opinion, the chief defect of
The British constitution. Too much power was concentrated in the
House of Commons.

Of political parties Hume had a very poor opinion. Their influ-
ence, according to him, was directly contrary to that of laws —
disturbing, demoralizing, destructive. Originating though they do
in differing attachments respecting persons or interests, "Nothing
is more usual than to see parties, w^hich have begun upon real
differences, continue even after that difference is lost. When men
are once enlisted on opposite sides, they contract an affection to
the persons with whom they are united, and an animosity against
their antagonists: And these passions they often transmit to their
posterity." l The British system of government, Hume said, was
so constituted as to be especially productive of party divisions and
to perpetuate these long after the original cause of division had
disappeared. The balance between the republican and mon-
archical elements of the constitution was so delicate and uncertain,
the differences of interest between various classes of the population
§5 marked and continuing, that the party system was an unavoid-
able affliction. Whigs and Tories both, he pointed out, had boxed
ihe compass of principle, but were still vigorously contending for
sower.

A

On the stormy subject of liberty Hume, who loved liberty as
much as any man alive, declined to traffic in balmy abstractions or
categorical absolutes. Regarding controversial topics in politics
he was apt, he warned his readers, "to entertain a suspicion that the
world is still too young to fix many general truths in politics, which
will remain true to the latest posterity," 2 and hence "that no man
m this age was sufficiently qualified" 2 to make a valid comparison
01 civil liberty and absolute government. To his way of thinking the
essence of liberty was not so much freedom as order, security, and
justice. Free government might or might not constitute a sure
guarantee of these things- it must also be admitted that there were
instances of absolute governments in which property was secure,
industry was encouraged, arts flourished, and order and justice

, p. 129. 2 Ibi^ pp. 156-157.

0

336 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

-~™ -.r._U _ . — — ., •. • , !•! !•

firmlv founded. All forms of government were capable of '"rn^-nvp

* ""^ * JT^ **" •**•*• A fajtj^ ^ \ i,^ M

inent and were being improved; but monarchical o-overnir*—

seemed to have some advantages over republican govermner? :*~

respeci to liberty. It was more stable, more continuous, and ipr(^
congenial 10 steady advancement in the essentials of true liberty
Free governments in the past had been given to excesses ruinous r
liberty — such as ;:the practice of contracting debt, and
the public revenues, by which taxes may, in time, become aho-
gether intolerable, and ail the property of the state be brought into
the hands of the public." 1 A danger, be it noted, that has us;
wholly disappeared in the twentieth century.

Perhaps the best piece of critical writing Hume ever did was his
essay on The Original Contract. The controversy between the divine
origin theorists and social contract theorists amused him greatly.
Both sides were blowing soap bubbles, he thought; both doctrines
were purely speculative — equally rationa!5 equally devoid of fac-
tual foundation, equally absurd in practical consequences.

If all that happens is comprehended in the plans or intentions
of God with regard to the world, the divine origin theory is true-
It could not be true in any other sense, he was sure. But even
though true in the sense above stated, it was preposterous and made
God ridiculous. For, said Hume, it made God as much responsible
for bestowing power upon an unspeakable tyrant as upon a wise
and benevolent ruler, and further meant that a constable, no less
than a king, "acts by divine commission, and possesses an inde-
feasible right.55 2

The contract theory, even more plausible than the divine origin
theory, was shown to be quite as fallacious. In the sense that noth-
ing short of popular acquiescence could enable a ruler to associate
a people together and subject them to authority, it could not be
denied that the contract doctrine was correct. But to deduce from
that, as many of the contract theorists did, that contemporary rulers
had no authority save by the consent of their subjects, or that sub-
jects were freed from the duty of obedience whenever they chose to
hold their rulers derelict in their contractual obligations, was, said
Hume, utterly foolish. To postulate a contractual relationship
between rulers and subjects, there being no specific and recorded
agreement to which reference might be made, required inferences

1 Ibid., p. 162. 2 JIM n, 444.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT

- — " — „

-.vithout any foundation in possible or probable fact. You had to
infer either that the original contract, supposititiously made at some
remote time in the past, was binding not only upon its makers but
upon all future generations, or that each subsequent generation had
voluntarily (by implication) given its consent. Both hypotheses
were unsupported by any shred of objective fact, and, if true, only
served :o expose the absurdity of the contract theory. If you as-
sumed ±e original contract binding on succeeding generations, you
ruled out the possibility of self-determination; if you assumed 'die
implied consent of each generation of subjects, you legitimized the
very authority you wished to deny.

The true interpretation of the social contract, Hume pointed out
should be historical and sociological. "No compact or agreement'
it is evident, was expressly formed for general submission; an idea
far beyond the comprehension of savages: Each exertion of author-
ity in the chieftain must have been particular and called forth by
the present exigencies of the case: The sensible utility, resulting from
this interposition, made these exertions become daily more fre-
quent; and their frequency gradually produced an habitual and if
you please to call it so, a voluntary, and therefore precarious ac-
quiescence in the people." ' Virtually all governments of which
i-ere was any record in history, he showed, were founded without
any pretense of open and voluntary consent of the people Even
v,r.en force or fraud were not employed to obtain the initial submis-
aon. the situation was invariably such that the people had to
cioose between submission and the more terrible alternative of the
complete dissolution of all government. "It is vain to say, that all
governments are or should be founded on popular consent, as much
as me necessities of human affairs will admit. ... I maintain
tnat human affairs will never admit of this consent; seldom of the
appearance of it. . . . My intention here is not to exclude the con-
seat of the people from being the one just foundation of govern-
ment where it has place. It is surely the best and most sacred of
any. I only pretend, that it has very seldom had a place in any
aegree, and never almost in its full extent." 2

If not consent, what then is the true basis of authority? The
answer, according to Hume, is societal evolution. He did not use
*at phrase, but he described the fact. And what is more impor-

^•'PP-445-446- •/«*, pp. 449-450.

35,8 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

taut, he showed how political society might develop so that con-
sent, from being- a minor and largely negative factor, might emerge
as a paramount factor. '"Bid one generation of men go or! the
stase, and another succeed, as is die case with silkworms and but-

'•»• ^ *

teriiies, the new race, if they had sense enough to choose their
^overnmentj which surely is never die case with men, might volun-
tari'v, and bv general consent, establish their own form of civil

, - 4 — t " **

oolitv. without anv regard to the laws or precedents which ire-

ir™*^ jt *• * •"•* A.

vailed among their ancestors. But as human society is in perpetual
flux, one man every hour going out of the world, another coming
into it, it is necessary, in order to preserve stability in government.
that the new brood should conform themselves to the established
constitution, and nearly follow the path which their fathers, tread-
ing in the footsteps of theirs, had marked out to them. Some inno-

o •*• •*

vations must necessarily have place in every human institution, and
It is happy where the enlightened genius of the age gives these a
direction to the side of reason, liberty, and justice. . . .:; l Sub-
iects, in short, must consent to authority and consent to obev, no:

j> _.< •> * * *

because it is a religious duty or because they have definitely agreed
to do so, but because it is the only way society can exist; the only
wav, indeed, that society can advance from lower to higher forms

^ j j J *^

of civilization. In this way Hume made the Whig doctrine of
original contract do service to the Tory doctrine of passive obedi-
ence, though he was far from being an unqualified exponent of
the latter. That resistance might be justified in certain cases
he candidly admitted. The only question was as to the degree
of necessity for resistance. Hume was so keenly aware of the
appalling destructiveness of revolution that he would not grant
that anv but the most extraordinary circumstances could warrant

* **

resistance.

No account of Hume's political thought would be complete with-
out some mention of his economic writings. Six of the Essays Moral,
Political and Literary dealt with commerce, money, interest3 taxes,
public credit, and kindred economic subjects. On the subject 01
money Hume rejected the theories of the mercantilist school, which
confused money and wealth, and treated money realistically as a
medium of exchange. His discussion of the correlation of money
and prices was a distinct advance in economic thought. Equally

1 Ibid., p. 452-

THE ENLIGHTENMENT 339

a.-ute was he In analyzing the phenomenon of Interest. The old
-heorv that low Interest proceeds from an abundance of money he
T:::cized as unsound, and demonstrated that Interest rates depend
-~: Upon one but several interrelated factors in the economic life

*^ ' v ^

;: a nation. Generally favoring free trade, he made reservations
levenheless in instances where he thought protection necessary to
further certain specific trade policies. As to taxes, he argued that
-jnsumption taxes, particularly on luxuries, were best. For public
:eb:s. especially those created by the sale of securities, he had a pro-
found distrust. The inflationary effect of such debts was as bad,
lie thought, as the issuance of fiat money, and had the additional
disadvantage of creating a leisure class of public bondholders.
T;;ere was, In his opinion, no surer way to bring a nation to ruin
ian by piling up public indebtedness.

VII

Xo school of political thought, no resplendent body of doctrine,
if associated with the name of David Hume. He was not that kind
of political thinker. Discovery and creation were not in his line.
He was an appraiser more than a formula ter of political ideas. He
analyzed political doctrines, clarified them, put them on trial, and
nade hash of such as could not survive the test of rational criticism.
His philosophy has been called one of the most powerful dissolvents
:: the eighteenth century.1 It was a needed dissolvent, however,
and prepared the way for Adam Smith, Burke, Bentham, Spencer,
Maine, and all who follow In their footsteps.

Like Montesquieu, Hume aimed not to destroy but to conserve
and improve the old order by intelligently gradual reforms. Like
Montesquieu, he was doomed to fail, and to be in some measure a
faeior in the ruin of w^hat he sought to preserve. Like Montes-
quieu, further, he was destined to exert a tremendous influence
in me period of reaction and reconstruction following the French
Revolution, and to prepare the ground for much of the charac-
leristic political thought of nineteenth-century industrialism. And
in common with Montesquieu he deserves to be recognized as a
genius of political insight and a perfect representative of the

G, Getiell, History of Political Thought (1924), p. 249.

340 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

REFERENCES

Becker, C., The Hec'jsr.ly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers 'Xe\v

Haven, 1932...
Coker. F. Vv'., Readings in Political Philosophy (rev. ed.. New York. i:/3* ,

Chap. XXII.

Cook T.'l., History cf Political Philosophy (New York, 1936], Chap. XXL

TTA • CT \\~ \ 4 History of Political Theories from Luther to 3/o?:to;;>.

j[ ^J ijt^jl.Jk-i j» .fc.jL*' Jfc *^« * r <F • jtJfcoij HtJ* "***«• ^f ^ ^r ^ t*> at

(New York, 1906;, Chaps. XI-XII.

Fletcher, F. T. H., Montesquieu and English Politics (New York, 1940;.
Geiser, K. F., and Jazi, O., Political Philosophy from Plato to Jeremy Bez:'^

(New York, 1927), Chap. X.
Greif*, J. Y. T., David Hums (London, 1931).
Hendel, C. W., Studies in the Philosophy of David Hume (Princeton. X. J,,

1925).

Ilbert, C. P., Montesquieu (Oxford, 1904).

Martin, K., French Liberal Thought in the Eighteenth Century (Boston, 192$;.
Sabine,"G. H., .4 History of Political Theory (New York5 1937), pp. 551-560,

597-606.'

Sorei, A., Montesquieu (2nd ed.5 Paris, 1889).
Spurlin, P. M., Montesquieu in America, 1760-1801 (University3 La.s 1940,.

CHAPTER XVIII

NATURE'S CHILD

I

KASON could not win. The "enlightened genius of the age/3
10 which Hume and Montesquieu pinned their faith, was
greater than in any previous century, but it could not func-

t;OIL it was bogged down in the trammels of an obsolete and de-
cadent political system. When that system collapsed, reason was
trapped in the ruins. Unreason could function — and did, mightily.
Intuition, sentimentalism, and romanticism required no factual
foundation; called for no intellectual discrimination; had small
need to compromise with actuality; were cumbered by no crushing
complex of established institutions. Their appeal was straight to
the feelings of men, and the feelings of men in the eighteenth cen-
tury demanded a mighty change.

Yet the eighteenth was not in reality an unusually hard century
10 live in. Compared with many that preceded and some that fol-
lowed ii, the eighteenth century stands relatively high in enlighten-
ment, tolerance, and human well-being. Gallons of purple ink have
been spilled in descriptions of the grinding misery of the masses in
pre-Revolutionary Europe (especially in France) and of the out-
rageous tyrannies visited upon them. Conditions were bad, un-
doubtedly; but not so bad as they had been, nor so bad indeed, in
some respects, as they were yet to become. Even in France, where
the tornado first struck, though discontent was universal, there was
no such universal wretchedness as sentimental historians have been
wont to depict.

The French peasantry had many real grievances (when has the
farmer not had grievances?) . Their lot was one of incessant toil and
frugality; but the great majority had been emancipated from serf-
dom, a constantly increasing number of them owned the land they
Tilled, and most of them enjoyed creature comforts superior to those
of iheir forefathers. Not hopeless even was the status of the agri-
cultural laborer. His wage was not less than elsewhere in Europe,,
nor less proportionately than in post-Revolutionary times. Many
a farm hand was able to save enough to buy a small piece of land.

341

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

on c:

ave.

Townsmen had their grievances too, but their condition was far
from atrect Dovertv and servitude. The professional and comrner-

**J A **

cial classes had many valuable privileges, and many were able to
accumulate substantial fortunes. The working classes, though les
advantageously circumstanced, were no more exploited and lived
on no lower level than the workers of nineteenth-century industrial
socierv. The French nobility were hated by the lower classes n:

>

more on account of wrongs perpetrated by them than by reas
their strutting pretensions to power they did not actually h
The clergy were also despised, though they had long since foregone
most of their claims of temporal authority and had largely ceased
the persecution of heretics and dissenters. The crown was likewise
unpopular — as much because of abuses from its failure to govern
as because of Its deliberate tyrannies.

No, the French Revolution was not an explosion that occurred

j

because the condition of the masses had become unbearable. They

had borne much worse In former times, and would bear as bad or

worse conditions In times to come. The French Revolution came

because institutional structures which for generations had held

in equipoise the dynamic forces of society rotted and crumbled.

When these retaining walls went down, the tumultuous strean

of social forces leaped Its banks and swept all before it. Reason

would have kept It carefully diked and channeled — reinforcing

weakened buttresses, relieving dangerous pressures, artfully tam-

ing Its torrential pace, slowly and gently conducting it to l:s

appointed goal. But reason did not hold office or wield power.

It could criticize but not correct the deficiencies of the ancient

order.

In France and generally throughout Europe there was a seedling
discontent. Injustice and tyranny were no more prevalent than
before— less so, in fact — but, as the eighteenth century ran on,
men became Increasingly unwilling to endure what formerly had
seemed tolerable, If not Inevitable. Ideas and standards of life were

HO

being revolutionized. The very great and genuine advancement cl
human well-being which distinguished the late seventeenth and
early eighteenth centuries satisfied no one; in truth merely sharp-
ened the desire for rapid and sweeping change. Having tasted the
fruits of amelioration, men wanted to shake the tree and gather the
whole crop at once. Utopia beyond the skies or In some remote

NATURE'S CHILD 343

c

century would not do". What use merely to dream of a better world?
Let it become a fact, here and now.

Thus developed the psychosis of revolution. Every ancient in-
siiration, every special privilege, every social maladjustment that
delayed the dawn of the millennium became an obstacle to be
struck down. What before had been accepted as unfortunate but
necessary in the order of things, now became unspeakable
oppression, fundamentally and diabolically wrong. The comfort-
able bourgeoisie developed even greater heat than the submerged
proletariat. They were educated, articulate, and deeply conscious
c: discriminations suffered at the hands of the more favored
classes. The cool and balanced reason of a Hume or a Montesquieu
might point the true and practical way to better things, but that
was not the direct and immediate way. Passions were inflamed
and reason speaks a language that passion does not follow.

And there was no lack of writers whose appeal was principally
:o rhe emotions. Voltaire, with his bitter shafts of satire; Diderot,
•Aith his effervescent brilliance; Helvetius, with his contagious ir-
reverence; Holbach, with his solemn sincerity; Chastellux, with his
irradiant aspirations; d'Argenson, with his reformist enthusiasms;
Morelly, with his communistic dreams — these and many of lesser
renown made men feel their wrongs and passionately desire to set
:nem right. But of all the purveyors of sentimentaiism none had so
great an influence, none had such witchery with words, as the sub-
lime lunatic, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Just prior to the French
Revolution, says Albert Sorel, every enlightened Frenchman had
in his library the works of Voltaire, Buffon, Montesquieu, and
Rousseau. The last two were the most consulted, he states, Mon-
lesqnieu furnished the most quotations, but Rousseau gained the
most disciples.

II

^Biographies of Rousseau can only approximate the truth. He
did not tell the truth about himself. In his morbidly self-revealing
Confessions he tried to do so, and thought he had. But he was utterly
incapable of knowing himself or of discriminating between fact and
iancy. Nor did any of his close associates understand or interpret
torn much more adequately than he did himself. The modern
science of abnormal psychology is a great aid in probing the dark

344 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

recesses of Rousseau's mind and genius, but with all this newer
li^ht much darkness still remains. Neurotic all his life, much of the
time definitely usvchooaihic, and in the later phases certabiv

* i ^ •*• «

paranoiac — Rousseau defies explanation. Nature's child, he called
himself; and that, perhaps, is as near the truth as we may hope to

come.

Born at Geneva, Switzerland, June 28, 1712, Jean-Jacques was
the offspring of respectable, commonplace parents, who endowed
him chiefly with handicaps. The father was a watchmaker,, amply
competent in his trade, but volatile and thriftless. The mother,
charrnin^ daughter of a Protestant pastor, died of puerperal fever

^3 '*--'

following the birth of Jean-Jacques. Kinfolk cared for the mother-
less boy up to his tenth year — lovingly, but most haphazardly.
When he was ten, his father wounded another citizen in a strcei-
fight and fled from Geneva to escape punishment. Young Rousseau
was then taken into his mother's family and put to school under a
pastor at Boissy. After two years he was brought back to Geneva
and apprenticed to a notary, only to be dismissed after a few weeks
because his master despaired of his ever being able to learn ihat
simple calling. Then he was apprenticed to an engraver, who suc-
ceeded, by dint of many beatings, in forcing the young good-for-
nothing to learn the rudiments of the engraving trade. But, when
he was sixteen, Rousseau rebelled and ran away, thus beginning a
wandering career that lasted to the end of his life,

A tramp and beggar, fleeing from Geneva to escape capture and
return to the hated master engraver, Rousseau chanced to call ai
the door of the Catholic priest at Confignon (just over the border in
Savoy) and ask for food. He was taken in, generously fed, and in a
jiffy converted to the Roman faith. The priest then sent him 10 a
Madame de Warens at Annecy, a young widow whose good works
included caring for homeless proselytes. She kept him a few days
and sent him on to a monastery at Turin, where he was to be suit-
ably educated as a Roman Catholic. But the amiable lady was not,
as she may have supposed, rid of this vagabond youth. Fate had de-
creed that the lives of Rousseau and Madame de Warens should be
long and strangely intertwined. At Turin Rousseau did not get
along well. His conversion had been more of the stomach than the

C? ninrffHi- M|fr»«ag«liM>M'"Btea*«™Bam(M1M'^^ ^(E-ni'mUB'ri^ H JB^anron^wn

" heart, and he found the regime of the monastery quite repellani

fj f bM-wujfli ^ , aw^irfwiwui^i'.!*""*1

** Indocile pupils were not kept; and Jean-Jacques was soon

NATURE'S CHILD 345

~ " ~^~^ ~ ' ~ ~ ^~~~^ ' _^— ^— ^^_

He found employment for a time as a domestic servant in
in, but got into trouble and had to quit. Having conceived a
)olbov "crush" on Madame de Warens, though she was thirteen
r^ his senior, Rousseau made his way back to Annecy and ap-
peared again at her door.

Madame de Warens took him in again and decided to give him
an education. To this end she placed him in a near-by seminary,
where he spent some months studying the classics and music. In the
^v.0- of 1730 Madame de Warens sent him on a trip to Lyons, ap-
oarentlv hoping to be rid of him. When he returned, he found that
;~ne had gone to Paris without leaving an address. What do do?
Find Madame de Warens, of course. Vagabonding wras a pleasure
anvhow. So Rousseau took to the road again and roamed the coun-
rvfar and wide in search of his beloved. In 1731 he found her com-
fcnably established at Chambery. Such devotion could have but
one reward. The kind lady took him in, not merely as a ward but as
a lover. He lived with her and largely on her bounty until 1740.

The de Warens household was a strange one. Nominally a Prot-
estant converted to Catholicism, Madame de Warens seems to have
been in reality a deist with highly unconventional ideas of morality.
A lively, though highly irregular, intellectual atmosphere prevailed
In her circle of intimates; and the impressionable Jean-Jacques dur-
ing his liaison with her acquired a weirdly assorted stock of ideas.
In 1737 he made a brief visit to Geneva to receive his small portion
of his mother's dowry. Though not long away from Chambery, he
was gone long enough for his goddess to take another lover. She was
broad-minded, though. When Rousseau returned she welcomed
aim and bade him remain as second-place Iover5 which for a time
he did.

But his neurotic nature could not stand the strain of second rank.
He became ill and set off to Montpellier to consult a famous physi-
cian. Having an eye for psychic as well as physical maladies, the
doctor refused to prescribe any medicine. He tried suggestion and
diet, but the patient was soon bored and pleading to return to his
beloved patroness. She wrote him to stay where he was, but by
February, 1738, he could endure the torment no longer and re-
turned 10 Chambery in disregard of Madame de Warens3 wishes.
This time she refused to take him in, but made arrangements for him
to live on the neighboring property of Les Charmettes. Here Rous-

546 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

seau resided for two years, mostly in solitude. Books \vere his chief
companions, and it Is probable that most of his philosophical edu-
cation was acquired In this rustic retreat.

Bv 1 "40 Rousseau had become convinced thai he had no longer a

f rf — ^

olace In the life of Madame de Warens and cast about for something

to do. Through Madame de Warens It was arranged for him to go

»— • w

to Lvons as a tutor in the family of a certain Monsieur de Malbv.

d &

„ He proved to be a poor teacher and hated the work. After a year he
! resigned, paid a brief visit to Madame de Warens, vagabonded a
while, and in August, 1742, turned up in Paris. Using friendships
and contacts acquired In the provinces, he managed to get along,
and shortly came under the eye of the Influential Madame de Bros-
lie. Admiring some of his poetic effusions and thinking he might
have a future, she pulled the wires and got him appointed secretary
to the French ambassador at Venice. He spent eighteen months in
Venice, but could not get along with his chief. In August, 1 744, he
was dismissed and returned to Paris.

Talent could take a man far in the Paris of the 1740's; influence
could take him farther. Talent and Influence together constituted a
sure-fire recipe for success. Jean-Jacques had few resources In the
way of Influence; just enough, with obsequious and assiduous culti-
vation, to keep himself from starvation and get a little recognition.
His talents did the rest. During his first years in the metropolis
Rousseau was scarcely more than a polite beggar, managing now
and then to pick up a few sous copying music and doing literary
hack-work. Haunting the cafes, boulevards., and salons he gradu-
ally widened his circle of acquaintances among the educated classes
and gained friends who could give him an occasional boost. During
this period he took as his mistress the illiterate laundress, Therese
Levasseur, who was to be his companion for life and whom in 1770
he would finally marry — after she had, borne him five children, aH
of whom were disowned and sent to the foundling asylum.

In 1745 Rousseau wrote an opera which, through the influence of
friends, he managed to get performed in one of the noted salons of
the city. This gave him some repute and advanced his standing in
literary circles. Bv 1746 he had come into contact with Dideroi

j1 «

and d3 Alembert, and was invited to write for the projected Encyclo-
pedia. In 1750 came the event which raised him from obscurity and
transformed him into a world figure. Accidentally reading In the

NATURE'S CHILD 347

Mercure de France, in October, 1749, the announcement of a prize
offered by the Academy of Dijon for the best essay on the question
whether the advance of the sciences and arts had purified or cor-
rupted morals, Rousseau resolved to try for the award. He imme-
diately fell into a trance, he tells us in his Confessions, and in a flash ^
c: inspiration perceived a great truth — "That man is naturally good
zr.d that our social institutions alone have rendered him evil," Setting to
work at once on this therne and writing with the fervor of a religious
zealot he quickly composed his essay and sent it in. In August,
r50, the award was announced. Jean-Jacques Rousseau had won
:he prize of a gold medal and 300 francs. At a bound he had leaped
irom obscurity to fame.

The glamorous career which now beckoned was one to which the
erratic genius of Rousseau was unequal. Much as he relished fame
and adulation and even money, he could notjive _accprdingf to the
pav of normal men. He could not work as other men worked love

asjheyjpught, or_play asjthey played. Abnor-

^ m """"^^WewHHuuj^a^uHj,, amngm ^[(ai^^ Fna^|lffi^ia^iiHirea.»HMM«»i»tMa^^ 'Ililililllll

i^5L££centric — t^ie victim of

compiexes^and^delusions. A good" position in the receiver general's

office was made for him; but he gave it up. Writing was the only-
work he was fit to do; and thatjmljrja.s, emotion moved him/ In
T54 he returned to his native city, was received with a great ova-
tion. Formally renouncing Romanism, he again accepted the Cal-
vinistic creed, and was restored to citizenship in the Republic of
Geneva. This sensational gesture concluded, he \vent back to Paris
and became a ward of the famous Madame d'Epinay. The next
eight years were mostly spent in the little cottage at Montmorency
which she provided for him. These were the years in which he f
wrote his greatest books — The New Heloise, Emile, and the Social .'

Contract. ~~~ ——~~*

— — «^— ™«^^

The tremendous vogue of Rousseau's writings and the revo-
utionary character of his doctrines finally stirred the comatose
authorities of the Old Regime to action. InJL7^hjs_bQoksAvere_ ,/
fffiiiHL3Sest ordered. Even in Geneva his books were

burned, and the officers of the law instructed to seize him i

*•**"*"* ^iwwmiTOawwapiisw^mwq^imw*^ '» ^iMHsfca, 3tautto|BSl^^ &^*^mxrms «HJW L*imit&a^m^J^vn^i*ilwm w,

tered Genevese territory. Many refuges were open to him. but he

«*WgPrflW«WriaMMHB«WBlV iMUWUmUUiuwiiti Mg^UlUJ 1 *ltall „ t|u ^yi^teK^ai. (ILCIUtlM AJ****"*"1 ^'BMUNaB * ***^ ^- '

chose to settle in a little village near Berne, in Switzerland. Un-
happy in this exile, he decided to accept the offer of English friends,
including the philosopher Hume, to provide a home for him in Eng-

348 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

land. Journeying to London with Hume In 1766. he was lionized in
London, and finally found a home on a small country place in
Derbyshire- The year In England was the most tragic episode of
Rousseau's life. With insanity slowly fastening its grip upon him. hs
managed to quarrel with pretty nearly all his benefactors; and
finally turned on Hume with accusations of treachery that precipi-
tated the sad controversy described above. Under the preposterous
delusion that his life was in danger, Rousseau in May, 176", se-
cretly fled to France: whereupon the hearty and tolerant Hume
wrote a letter to Turgot beseeching his aid and that of the French
government In the protection of the demented exile.

Eleven vears of life remained — eleven vears of wandering and

» * ^

gradual lapse into deeper insanity-. The simple Therese stayed wii
Mm through it ail, and in 1770 he made her his wife. The authori-
ties seemed to have forgotten him; old friends and admirers pro-
vided for his simple needs; and he went his way undisturbed. Lucid
intervals came and went; but sane or Insane he continued to write,
and with no loss of literary power. The Confessions, the Dialog^
and the Reveries, and the Considerations on the Government of Poland are
among the products of this final phase. At last, on July 23 1778, a
stroke of apoplexy took him off.

Ill

The Year I, month of Frimalre. By order of the Commune God
is dethroned and all the churches of Paris are closed. It is decreed
that all Frenchmen shall hereafter worship Reason. The Cathedral
of Notre Dame is refitted for the new religion — -converted Into a
temple of Reason. To inaugurate the newr faith, a beautiful girl
from the Opera is chosen to impersonate the goddess of Reason and
after elaborate ceremonies Is enthroned in the choir of the ancient
church. All former things have passed away. Reason reigns supreme-

Not, however, the dispassionate reason of Montesquieu, but the
furious reason of Rousseau — the reason of feeling, of sentiment, of
impulse, of romanticism, of revolution. The man of empurpled
Imagination — the man of dreams and hallucinations, of trances and
rhapsodies, of inspirations and ideals — had won the day. The man
who glorified primitive ignorance, and argued that the arts and
sciences spring not from our virtues but our vices; who scorned
astronomy as the child of superstition, geometry as offspring ol

NATURE'S CHILD 349

avarice, physics as the product of vain curiosity, and morals as the
upshot of perverted pride— that half-mad genius, Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, had done an incredible thing. He "may be said/3 in the
words of Hilaire Belloc, ££to have grasped all the material of the
::me and to have worked in It that mysterious change whereby the
inorganic clusters into organic form, lives and can produce itself.55 1
:Thai mysterious change" was not in fact so unfathomably mys-
:?rious as Mr. Belloc would make it seem. What Rousseau had
done, with consummate artistry and eloquence, was to say what
multitudes of people had long been feeling but had not the ideas
and language to express; and to supply an overwhelmingly plausible
raiionale for these long-suppressed popular sentiments. Thus giving
tongue to the wrongs and frustrations, grievances and disillusion-
menis, sufferings and aspirations of the masses, he made them feel
more strongly and more unitedly, and thereby girded them for
action. Unscientific and unlearned, not philosopher, not even a
student of passable attainments, he was a theorist of matchless
appeal and unquestionably the most powerful propagandist who
ever drew a quill. The amplified voice of millions who wanted
change, he spoke with demonic fury and yet with a dulcet persua-
siveness that enslaved the will like the magic tunes of the Pied Piper
of Hamelin.

A further source of his power was his lowly origin and his humble,
mendicant way of life. He was not merely the people's advocate,
he was bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh. Off and on a
vagrant all his life, he mixed freely with the common folk, shared
the vicissitudes of their lives, felt as they felt, took an ignorant
laundress as his mistress and forced haughty ladies and great gen-
tlemen to treat her with respect. When fame came his way, and
opportunity for wealth, he remained the hapless and improvident
Rousseau of the vagabond days, affecting poverty even when he
was not poor and a guileless simplicity even when he was most
His plain Armenian garb in the midst of the dress-parade

eighteenth-century drawing-rooms, his fierce passion for inde-
pendence (never realized), his eternal persecution complex, and his
obvious inability or unwillingness to climb when he had the chance
—these all exalted him in the eyes of plain people. Such a man
they could trust and believe.

1 Hilaire BeUoc, Robespierre (1901), p. 28,

350 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

The political thought of Rousseau makes sense only when viewed
as protesi and wish-fulfillment. As protest it was sublime. As wish-
fulfillinem it was perfect. Treatment and embellishment changed
as he went along;, argument varied and stumbled, doctrines were
as curiously mixed as a mulligan stew; but the underlying thesis
never changed. It was the grand idea, the trance-inspired postula:e
of the prize- winning Discourse on the Arts and Sciences — that man is hv
nature good and has been degraded by the impact of social insti-
tutions. Theme-song of all his political writings, that obsessive
doctrine thrust itself to the fore even when he wrote, as in the Socid
Contract., to prove the necessity of civil society. "Man is born free/5
proclaims the opening sentence of the Social Contract; "and every-
where he is in chains.35 l How does this come about, the writer
inquires? Can it be legitimate? Not, he replies to his own question,
if it is based on force. Compelled by force to obey, a people is jus-
tified in resorting to force to recover its liberty — what the sword
gives the sword may take away. "But the social order is a sacred
right which is the basis of all other rights. Nevertheless this right
does not come from nature, and must therefore be founded on
conventions." l

"Give us back ignorance,, innocence, and poverty, which alone
can make us happy . . . ," 2 Rousseau had pleaded in the Discourse
on the Arts and Sciences. But his plea was not for the ignorance, inno-
cence, and poverty of man in society. That would be folly — degra-
dation. It was the ignorance, innocence, and poverty of pre-social
man, the unspoiled child of nature, that Rousseau sought to re-
I capture. In the primitive state of nature, as pictured in his fertile
\ imagination, men lived "free, healthy, honest and happy lives." 3
I All they needed to know nature taught them; all they needed 10
possess or use nature provided. Crude and unsophisticated they
undoubtedly were, but pure and noble. Living according to the
precepts of nature, they were robust and healthy; guided by nat-
ural instincts, they were unsullied by immorality; seeking to ac-
quire only what was demanded by their natural needs, they ac-
cumulated no property and were free of the corrupting struggles
of commerce and industry. Living in this state of happy savagery
men enjoyed substantial equality; there were few relations to beget

1 Rousseau. Social Contract and Discourses (Everyman's Library, 1913), pp. 5-6.

2 Ibid.9 p. 152. 3 IMd., p. 214.

NATURE'S CHILD 351

eq

uallty. They were free, because there was no occasion for
-•rpresslon, no means for its accomplishment.

*Had the talents of Individuals been equal, this Idyllic state of
T^rjre might have been maintained. But some were stronger than

— "•*•*• **-* J O

others, more industrious, more skillful, more crafty, and more
selfish. With such faculties the more gifted Individuals contrived
;c outdo their fellows — invented arts by which, with less labor,
iey could produce or acquire more than their less fortunate
:re:hren, appropriated land and goods to their exclusive use and
enjoyment, accumulated riches, and gained permanent advantages
:ver the mass of men. ijThen, by clever sophistry, the rich persuaded
poor to join them in setting up a commonwealth, ostensibly to
ihe weak, restrain the ambitious, and secure every man in
Ms possessions, but actually to legitimize and perpetuate the
dominion of the rich over the poor. "Such was, or may well have
been," said Rousseau in the Discourse on Inequality, "the origin of
society and law, which bound new fetters on the poor, and gave
new powers to the rich; which irretrievably destroyed natural
liberty, eternally fixed the law of property and inequality, converted
clever usurpation into unalterable right, and, for the advantage of
a few ambitious Individuals, subjected all mankind to perpetual
labour, slavery and wretchedness." 1

The starting point of reform — not only political reform, but all
reform; economic, social, moral, hygienic, educational — \^as to
Rousseau, therefore, as plain as a giant signboard. Get back to na-
turej and follow nature's laws. That was the beginning of all wis-
dom. No more In his political than in his non-political writings did
he harp away on that idea. Shorn of their romantic embroidery
and lyric extravagances, the Emile is but a plea for naturalism in
education and the New Heloise an argument for the same thing In
morals. To every problem approached in his voluminous works is
applied the same sovereign remedy.

But by the time he came to write the Social Contract Rousseau
recognized the impossibility of a return to nature in civil society.
The golden age of equality and justice was a lovely dream, but not a
real hope. In the wilds of America the noble savage might yet en-
joy the boon of ignorance, innocence, and poverty, but in Europe
men were inextricably prisoned in the tangle of civilization. Return

r.a p. 221.

352 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

to nature was out of the question. If there was any salvation fcr
Europe, ii must be found In principles of political obligation which
would reconcile authority and liberty, remove inequality, furnish a
basis for pure justice, establish natural rights, and so far as practi-
cable restore to men In society the benefits of the pre-political state
of nature. To the task of conducting an Inquiry into the nature of
the state and discovering the essential principles of truly legitimate
political society, the eloquent Jean-Jacques set himself In the Socid
Contract. The sub-title of the book was Principles of Political Right, It
would have contributed to a better understanding of the author's
purpose if that had been the sole title.

He is no longer content 10 cry, "Back to nature !" In politics, he
knows full well, that can never be. \Vhat he now seeks Is a formula
to explain political society in terms agreeable to the rights and in-
terests of the common man and a philosophy of democracy that will
rationalize for man In society the liberty and equality- of pre-social
existence.

The needed formula was easy to find. The social contract theory
lay at hand ready for use. More than a century of amplification and
reiteration In the hands of such renowned publicists as Locke,
Hobbes5 Grotlus; and Pufendorf had made it generally known, if
not generally understood. The philosophy was not so easily conie
upon. A ready-made philosophy of democracy did not exist.
Locke had come as close to contriving such a philosophy as any
man. On the matter of liberty7 he left little to be desired, but on
equality he was sadly deficient. He gave it no place at all in his
scheme of things — was, in fact, an aristocrat. Rousseau was there-
fore faced with the necessity of evolving a democratic philosophy
of his own, one suitable to the building of a thoroughly democratic
society. Being a theorist rather than a scholar^-a romantic theorist
at that — hT-3i5rS5fpff:ocee3Ty the method of compiling and com-
paring facts and then drawing conclusions. His method was that of
abstract speculation, and he used facts only to fortify his theoretical
postulates. Facts he ever regarded as unreliable, non-essential, and
evanescent. His quest was for underlying principles that were fixed
and unchangeable.

Had Rousseau been as good a logician as he was a rhetorician he
might have produced a theory of democracy that could have with-
stood the assaults of criticism and provided a rational working basis

NATURE'S CHILD 353

:or

popular government. Romanticist that he was, he stumbled
often and badly, throwing himself open to ridicule and contempt.
Yet he was so passionately sincere and so eloquently sure of the at-
tainability of his dreams that his power as a propagandist suffered
Hole by reason of his lapses in logic. To the people of his generation
lie spoke more as a prophet than a philosopher, and aroused the en-
thusiasm and veneration that attends the seer. "'Women would
fight," says Josephson, uto secure a glass he had drunk from, a piece
of cloth he had knitted. The great people of the kingdom . . .
sought his acquaintance, and a generation of youth, even of aristo-
cratic youth, soon grew up largely under his maxims.55 1 He was in V
truth the founder of acult, and a cult has small need either of facts \
or logic.

**•* ^

In the Social Contract he waxes rapturous about the golden age of
Ignorance and innocence, but does not dwell upon it as in his other
works. His direction now is forward, not backward. He is pointing
the way to the transformation of contemporary society so that men
will be as free and equal as they were in the state of nature. Civil
society is a stubborn fact that cannot be waved aside, or magically
replaced by aboriginal conditions. But how did it originate and
upon what principles wras it founded? "Since no man has a natural
authority over his fellow, and force creates no right, we must con-
clude that conventions form the basis of all legitimate authority
among men.55 2 A well-worn axiom that, accepted by the great
majority of eighteenth-century political thinkers, absolutist and
libertarian alike. The crux of the matter lies in the nature of the
agreement by which society was erected. Did men bargain away
their freedom and equality? Grotius had said they could and (
Hobbes that they did.

They are wrong, Rousseau declares. To say that a man gives him-
self gratuitously to another is absurd; only a crazy person would do ^
thatj and such a one cannot be held on his contracts. To say that a
man sells himself to another, assumes a quid pro quo. What does the
supposed seller get from his rulers? Protection? Peace? In name,
yes; but in reality he gets war, extortion, oppression, and other
miseries worse than the dissensions of the pre-civil condition. Did
men ever knowingly and willingly make such a bargain? Could

*M. Josephson, Jean- Jacques Rousseau (1932), p. 294.

2J J, Rousseau, Social Contract and Discourses (Everyman's Library, 1913), p. 9.

354 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

they? The very thought of It Is preposterous. Moreover, eve- ::

men had been guilty of such folly, they could not bind iheir childre-
and their children's children.

Renounce liberty! Ir can't be done. "To renounce libenv i? tn
renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of hurnaniry and ever
Its duties. For him \vho renounces everything no Indemnity Is 30?.
sible. Such a renunciation Is incompatible with man's nature" ~o
remove liberty from his will is to remove all morality from his acn

Finally, It is an empty and contradictory convention that sets ^

***£•'*

on the one side, absolute authority, and, on the other, unlimited
obedience. Is It not clear that we can be under no obligation to a
person from whom we have the right to exact evervthino? :: -

l— ' * O

Men may lose their liberty through conquest, may submk to the
dominion of the conqueror In order to save their lives. Does this
give the victor legitimate sovereignty over the vanquished? Xo.
Force gives no right that force may not destroy. Moreover, there Is
no right to kill, except as between nations. A nation might possiblv
spare the lives of captives In return for their promise to surrender
their liberty, but no Individual could gain lawful dominion over his
fellow men In that manner. And when a nation forces captives Into
servitude, the obligation to obey assumes the continuance of the
right to kill In case of disobedience; which is simply to say thai the
basis of the obligation is force. And the legitimacy of force can al-
ways be rendered null and void by countervailing force.

To find the foundations of legitimate authority, then, one must
always go back to an original contract or convention. This Is Rous-
seau's bed-rock principle. On this he proceeds to erect his theory
of the state. The nature of "the original contract was not hard for
him to discover. It must have been, he declares, the sort of contract
that the situation demanded. And what was that? Whv, obviouslv,

tt J * *

the kind of contract that men abandoning the state of nature would
be naturally impelled to make.

i, Rational men would never abandon the state of nature 'without
good cause. It must be presumed, therefore, that conditions arose
which made it difficult, with the resources at the disposal of each
individual, to maintain their primordial freedom and equality.
The object of the first contract, then, was £cto find a form of asso- ,
ciation which will defend and protect with the whole common

1 Ibid., p. 10,

NATURE'S CHILD 355

••-•rce the person and goods of each associate, and In which each,
v;Hle uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and
-einain as free as before." l How could this perfect reconcilia-
-*~n of liberty and authority be accomplished? It was very simple,
*rrrrdmcr to Rousseau. Each gave himself unreservedly to the 1

ji'^. 'L-xJ* *— *• ;Tj * +

v;hole community — surrendered all his rights and liberties. Thus
v;as equality preserved. But in giving himself to the coaaajjnunity as
a whole, each gave himself to nobody in particular /*^Thus was
iiberrv preserved. Coming into political ^society, therefore, each
ir/rnber uputs his person and all his power in commori/iinder the
supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate ca-

* •*"""'„ v. - * ' v a

-aciiv, we receive each member as anmdivisible part of the whole.33 2

I 0 -"

This strange medley of fancies was ingenious, if not convincing —
and to millions it was more convincing than the most infallible logic.
Blending the social contract theories of Hobbes and Locke, follow-
ing Hobbes in the doctrine of complete alienation and Locke in
ie doctrine of popular consent, the nimble-minded Jean-Jacques
had evolved a theory that logic could easily refute, but could not
demolish. ( The people by mutual contract had alienated all their

^fcBMIfc V

liberties, but not to any definite human superior. They had trans- \
ferred their freedom from themselves as individuals to themselves
as a collectivity. Each was an equal and indivisible part of the
corporate entity, and the_sQvereijSpa was the general will. Sticklers
:br logic might ask how the individual, after having parted with all
his rights and set up an all-powerful body politic, could claim any
liberty whatsoever. Could a more complete subjection of the indi-
vidual to the state be imagined? Rousseau's answer is that the
individual, though utterly absorbed in the state3 remains free be-
cause of the very fact that the state and the individual are insepa-
rable. The state, in his view, is composed of equal individuals, none
having authority over another, who equally participate in the gen-

ihjr

era! will, which is the sole fount of legitimate authority. Pressed to
explain how the general will could be formed and applied without
detriment to the free and equal status of any member of the body
politic, Rousseau can answer only by evasion. But the fallacies of
ids theory did not lessen its appeal. / Men wanted liberty and equal-
ity to coexist, and hailed with delight the theory which proclaimed
this a fact under the benign sway of the popular state.

14, *Ibid.9 p. 15.

356 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

That sovereignty may be used to establish equality, is thinkable
at least; thousrh it has never been done, and, as the experience of
Soviet Russia clearly shows, is enormously difficult, even when the
intent and will to do it are powerful and real. But that sovereignty
and liberty can exist together, and that sovereignty can wipe out
the incompatibility of liberty and equality, is, for the mind heedful
of the logic, utterly inconceivable. Only a supple imagina-

» lion, by the logic or reality, could accomplish such a iea:,

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was jusi the man for the job; his bizarre and
agile imagination knew no limit or law. He could not only think
the unthinkable, but, by the magic of his literary genius, could
make it seem plausible.

Did sovereignty (absolute and unlimited political authority) ex-
tinguish the possibility of individual liberty? Very well; he would
redefine sovereignty in such a way as to include liberty. Supreme
authority was established by the social contract. That would cot
be disputed, would it? Supreme authority was vested in the body
politic, was it not? Men in the state of nature would not and could
not divest themselves of liberty in any other way. Men freely en-
tered Into the social pact and merged their wills Into
will, which is the concrete manifestation of sovereignty. In so doing
vlhe individual agreed with the public (of which he was one) to
Identify his will with the general will in ail matters of public con-
cern. The freedom of the individual could not be impaired, says
Rousseau, because the public, being what it is, can have no will or
Interest against its members. Should an individual, then, conceive
that he has an Interest different from the common interest as ex-
pressed in the general will, it is just and proper to compel him to
obey the general will. "This means nothing less," he explains, "than
that he will be forced to be free; for this is the condition which, by
giving each citizen to his country, secures him against all personal
dependence." 4 If he were free to disobey, he would not be free,
That freedom wo'uld wreck the social contract and revive the state of
nature in which he would have to rely upon himself alone. But/if he
is compelled to obey, he is free, because the power of the whole body
politic protects him from the aggressions of other men. Presto! There
you have it ! Sovereignty and liberty are one^ojovemgn^ no lib-
* \\ erty. Man is enslaved by a monster of his own making ; yet he is free !
y l ibid.,, p. 18.

NATURE'S CHILD 357

Having thus demonstrated the absoluteness of popular sover-
eignty. Rousseau has no difficulty in proving it indivisible, inalien-j ^'
able, imprescriptible, and infallible. Bodin or Hobbes could not'
have done it better. It is indivisible because the general will would
201 be general if it were divisible. It is inalienable and impre-
scriptible because "the Sovereign, who is no less than a collective
being, cannot be represented except by himself: the power indeed
say be transmitted, but not the will." * It is infallible because the
general will of the people can never be against the common good.
However much a people may be mistaken or deceived, it never
wills evil to itself. Hence, "the general will is always right and tends
:3 the public advantage." 2

This concept of the generaLwill. deserves closer attention. It is
±e crux of RousseauTsystem and probably his most distinctive
contribution to political thought. He does not define it with pre-
cision and is often ambiguous in speaking of it. It is the will he
a^ which '^^^25^fr2ffi^i^idaEEl^to415» s and what
mases it general is less thejmrnber of voters than the common
atenst_uniting them7r*r7t must not be confused with the totality
of individual wills. Rousseau is very emphatic about that. Indi-
^f.wiUs added to§e£her cannot, he insists, constitute the gen-
traTwill, because individual wills take account of private and par-
ticular matters, whereas the general will only takes account of
common concerns. The general will, then, would seem to be the
will of the people functioning as a body politic— the will of society
viewed as a living and rational political organism. j

With this fictionf of the general will Rousseau provides an ethical ^ v
basis for democracy. As a reality the general will does not exist—
could not, any more than the corporate will or any other collec-
Hve will. All corporations, political or otherwise, are fictions of
the law; even more fictitious is the supposition which endows
a corporation wjth personality and will apart from its membership.
But these may be very convenient and useful as well as very danger-
ous and disastrous fictions^Depicting the state as a corporate entity
01 which every citizen is an equal member and as having a will
independent of individual wills, yet being the will of all as a whole/
Kousseau supplies an insinuatingly rational moral sanction for the
acts of democratic government. It is plainly to be seen, if his theory
' M ' p- 22- 3 Kid., P. 25. • im., pp. 27-28.

358 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

be accepted, that the obligation to obey Is predicated upon the so-
cietal nature of the authority. Obedience Is due and can be jusiv
exactedL not because the state is divinely ordained, or has con-
tractual authority over Its subjects, or is infallibly right In its de-
terminations; but simply and solely because it speaks for society as
a whole and decrees for the individual what is willed for him by
supreme power emanating from all Individuals. Man's obligation
to the state is, in other words, his obligation to the greatest ar.d
most inclusive common interest men can have. Higher obligation
than this could not be, or obligation more righteously enforceable
by coercion.

Pursuing the same line of speculation, Rousseau arrives at a so-
ciological conception of law. There can be, he says, no genera:
Will directed to a particular purpose, either within or outside the
state. "But," he proceeds, "when the whole people decrees for the
whole people, it Is considering only itself; and if a relation is then
formed, it is between two aspects of the entire object, without there
being any division of the whole. In that case the matter about
which the decree is made is, like the decreeing will, general. This
act is what I call a law." 1(jhe distinguishing mark of true law,
therefore, Is that it cc considers subjects en masse and actions In the
abstract, and never a particular person or action.33 1 It migk In-
deed make provision for particular things, but only by general
action^ For example, it might create privileges, but could not be-
stow them on any specific persons; might set up ranks and classes
of citizens, but could not designate specific persons as members of
them; might establish a monarchical government, but could not
choose a king or name a royal family. It is of no consequence,
then, he remarks, to raise such questions as whose business It is to
make laws, whether the prince is subject to the law, whether me
law can be unjust, or whether we can be both free and subject to
the laws. Uniting universality of will with universality of object
law is the mandate of society in its entirety — a sufficient answer to
all questions. Where the state is governed by laws, Rousseau pro
poses to call it a republic regardless of its form of government. A
government of laws would be a government by the public— res

publica in reality.

But what of the rights of man? If the social will, expressed In law.

* Ibid., p. 33.

NATURE'S CHILD 359

is unconditionally obligatory upon all members of the body politic,
can there be any individual rights? This question troubled Rous-
seau a lot. Individual freedom was as precious in his eyes as life
liself. Yet his theory of the state constrained him to say: £:If the
Srate 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 preser-
vation, it must have a universal compelling force: in order to move
and dispose each part as may be most advantageous to the whole.
. . . Each man alienates, I admit, only such part of his powers,
goods and liberty as it is important for the community to control;
bu: it must also be granted that the Sovereign is sole judge of what
is important." l

Does this preclude the possibility of individual rights? Not at all,
replies the wizard of words: the rights of the individual are im-
plicit in the very nature of sovereignty itself. The obligations which
subject the individual to the social body are binding only because
they are mutual and involve matters of general rather than particu-
lar concern. The sovereign community, therefore, "cannot impose
upon its subjects any fetters that are useless to the community,
nor can it even wish to do so; for no more by the law of reason than
by the law of nature can anything occur without a cause." 2 Every-
ihing outside the sphere of community interest thus remains to the
individual as absolutely as in the state of nature. No contest be-
tween the individual and the state can arise; for when the state
attempts to deal with a particular individual in a matter of individ-
ual concern, it is acting ultra vires. It is "acting no longer as Sov-
ereign, but as magistrate." 3 And therefore may be resisted? Rous-
seau does not say so, but clinches the point with this reassuring bit
of verbal prestidigitation:

•'When these distinctions have been once admitted, it is seen to be
untrue that there is, in the social contract, any real renunciation on the
part of individuals, that the position in which they find themselves as a
result of the contract is really preferable to that in which they were
before. Instead of a renunciation, they have made an advantageous
exchange: instead of an uncertain and precarious way of living they
have got one that is better and more secure; instead of natural inde-
pendence they have got liberty, instead of power to harm others
security for themselves, and instead of their strength, which others
might overcome, a right which social union makes invincible. Their
1 Ibid., p. 20. a Ibid^ p. 21. * Ibid., pp. 28-30.

360 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

very life, which they have devoted to the State, is by it constantly De-
tected; and when they risk it in the State's defence, what more are th*v
doing than giving back what they have received from it? ?5 :

The free-born individual, nature's noble savage, could oniv re-

#

gret; in the face of this ardent rationalization, thai he had not tv;o
lives to lay on the altar of the state !

Rousseau makes much of the distinction between the state and

\ government. The former is the commonwealth as a juristic whole,

I It is sovereign and supreme. The latter is merely an "intermediate

,^ - body set up between the subjects and the Sovereign, to secure their

^ mutual correspondence, charged with the execution of laws and the

maintenance of liberty, both civil and political." 2 The legislative

power, he maintains, belongs to the people and is no part of the

government. An assembly of the whole people, as in "the city-states

of old, is in his thought the only true legislature. Representative

bodies may serve as stewards of the people, but cannot represent

the general will. Sovereignty, being inalienable, does not admit

of representation and no act of a representative body can be law in

fact until it has been ratified by the people. The executive power,

however, cannot belong to the whole people, "because it consists

wholly of particular acts which fail outside the competency of the

law, and consequently of the Sovereign, whose acts must always

be laws.55 2 This power is vested in governors — kings, princes, etc.—

commissioned by the sovereign to perform acts of administration

as its agents. Thus government., as Rousseau uses the term, refers

i *" only to the chief executive or supreme administration. The individ-

7 uals under the government, who are entrusted with the work cf

administration, are magistrates. But after he had labored valiantly

with these distinctions and put much literary art into them he used

them to no good purpose.

His treatment of forms of government is one of his poorest per-
formances. He has nothing to say; and, though he says it grace-
fully, the vacuity of his mind in this division of his subject is pain-
fully apparent. Even on the fancy-loosing theme of democracy, he
is commonplace and uninspiring; doubting, in fact, if direct popular
government is possible except in very small countries. Scores of
writers had said this before Rousseau, and if he added anything at
all to their ideas, it was his insistence that sovereignty is demo

i Ibid. 2 Bnd.> p. 49.

NATURE'S CHILD • 361

u

crauc regardless of the form of government. Following Montes-
quieu, he stresses the Importance of climate, soil, and topographv
in determining the form of government best suited to each particu-
lar country and shows good sense in concluding that the question
••\Vhat absolutely is the best government?53 is unanswerable. Not
frms, but results, he says, are the criteria by which to judge a
government. "What Is the end of political association? The preser-
vaiion and prosperity of Its members. And what Is the surest mark
cf their preservation and prosperity? Their numbers and popula-
ti3iL Seek then nowhere else this mark that Is in dispute. The rest
being equal the government under which, without external aids,
without naturalization or colonies, the citizens Increase and multi-
ply most, is beyond question the best. The government under which
a people wanes and diminishes is the worst. Calculators, It is left
for you to count, to measure, to compare.15 \^~~

Can this explain the teeming multitudes of China and India, or
the zeal of Mussolini and Hitler to boost the birth rate?

Having taken the position that sovereignty ceases to be sov-
ereignty when it acts in particular matters, Rousseau has to sum-
mon all his skill as a word-juggler in order to explain how govern-
ment could get started at ail. He accomplishes the feat by
imagining the sovereign people assembled to enter into the social
contract. They vote to form a body politic and establish a certain
form of government. That is an act of all applying to all, and is law
in the truest sense. Having done this, the character of the assembly
is instantly changed. It is no longer a constituent assembly, but an
organ of government. As such it proceeds to set up a system of
government; establish particular offices, and name particular indi-
viduals to occupy those offices. These are not acts of the general
will; hence they are not law, but governmental decrees/ According \
ra Ms reasoning, then, it would seem that all governments must \
originate In direct and pure democracy, and that no government
can have an Indefeasible foundation in law.'

Proceeding from the inception to the operation of government
Rousseau did another bit of intellectual trapeze work in the effort
10 square theory with reality. He had said/£CThe Sovereign, having
no force other than the legislative power, lets only by means of the
laws; and the laws being solely the authentic acts of the general

1 /i&. pp. 73-74.

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

s

will. ihe Sovereign cannot act save when the people Is assembled." :
Assuming that to be irue. how could sovereignty- ever be anvihin<
but an abstraction? Could the whole people ever be assembled? If
assembled, could they agree as to what should constitute the gen-
eral will? If unanimous agreement was impossible, could a major-
ity bind the minority? If so, how could it be contended that sov-
ereignty belonged only to the people as a whole or that law
exclusively an act of the general will?

A clear and rational thinker never would have laid such a

_ .

for himself, but for the ebullient imagination of Jean-Jacques Rous-
seau no traps existed. He stepped over all snares by the simcle
device of fabricating facts to fit his theories. True, he concedes.
the whole people, save in very small states, cannot be easily and
frequently assembled. But it was done in Greece and Rome, ani
presumably could be done again. If, however, the state cannon be
reduced to a size to permit such assemblies, "there still remains
one resource; this is, to allow no capital, to make the seat of govern-
ment move from town to town, and to assemble by turn in each the
Provincial Estates of the country." 2 Added up, these piecemeal
assemblies would constitute an assembly of the whole people. Bui
what if they disagree? That's easy, says our romancer: "There is
but one law which, from its nature, needs unanimous consent. Tnis
is the social compact; for civil association is the most voluntary of
all acts. Every man being born free and his own roaster, no-one,
under any pretext whatsoever, can make any man subject without
his consent. ... If then there are opponents when the social com-
pact is made, their opposition does not invalidate the contract, but
merely prevents them from being included in it. They are foreigners
among citizens. When the State is instituted, residence constitutes
consent; to dwell within its territory is to submit to the Sovereign." 2
By this master stroke of casuistry Rousseau managed to eai his
cake and have it too. Such men as wish to enter into the social con-
tract come together and agree to form the body politic. That makes
it unanimous. Thenceforth general will is supreme. Dissenters are
perfectly free to choose — between submission or exile. Having ex-
ercised this choice by remaining in the state, they come under lie

""

social contract. " Apart from this primitive contract, the vote c:

the majority binds all the rest.'5 4

* Ibid., p. 78. 2 Ibid., p. 80. 3 Ibid., pp. 93-94. * Ibid., p. 94.

NATURE'S CHILD

363

Does anyone remain unconvinced — doubting whether he can be
free, yet forced to conform to wills not his own and obey laws he
has not agreed to? Let Rousseau clarify the matter :

-The citizen gives his consent to all the laws, including those which
are passed in spite of his opposition, and even those which punish him
;vhea he dares to break any of them. The constant will of all the
members of the State is the general will; by virtue of it they are citizens
and free. When in the popular assembly a law is proposed, what the
people is asked is not exactly whether it approves or rejects the proposal,
but whether it is in conformity with the general will, which is their
v;Il Each man, in giving his vote, states his opinion on that point;
and the general will is found by counting votes. When therefore the
opinion that is contrary to my own prevails, this proves neither more
nor less than that I was mistaken, and that what I thought to be the
general will was not so. If my particular opinion had carried the day
I should have achieved the opposite of what was my will; and it is in
that case that I should not have been free." l

Previously, as noted above, Rousseau had taken pains to dis-
iinguish the general will from the vote of the majority, saying "what
makes the general will is less the number of votes than the common
interest uniting them." Was this inconsistent with his later asser-
tion that the votes must be counted and the determination of the
majority accepted as the general will? Rousseau will not admit it.
His case for majority rule, he says, presupposes "that all the quali-
:;es of the general will still reside in the majority- when they cease
D do so5 whatever side a man may take, liberty is no longer pos-
sible/1 1 This amounted either to begging the question by assuming
tne vote of the majority to be equivalent to the general will, or to
reducing the whole proposition to absurdity by denying the possi-
bility of liberty if that assumption were not true.
^ Despite his enthusiasm for^^ogularjovere^ Rousseau iscnoL
hopef^L^" the Possibility of maintaining such apolitical system.
In die natural life of every democratic state there comes a time, he
dunks, when "the social bond begins to be relaxed and the state
to grow weak, when particular interests begin to make themselves
:elt andthe smaller societies to exercise an influence over the larger.
• • .** 2^Then "the common interest changes and finds opponents:
opinion is no longer unanimous; the general will ceases to be the
of all; contradictory views and debates arise; and the best ad-

*, PP. 93-94. «/W.,p.91.

364 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

vice is not taken without question." x On the eve of ruin, the stare
then "maintains only a vain, illusory and formal existence .
the social bond is broken, and the meanest interest brazenly lav;

" * HI *"

hold of the sacred name of 'public good5 . . . and iniquitous
decrees directed solely to private interest get passed under the
name of laws." 1

It is the natural propensity of states, according to Rousseau, :o
degenerate. "As the particular will acts constantly in opposition
to the general will," he theorizes, c:the government continual^
exerts itself. The greater this exertion becomes, the more the con-
stitution changes; and, as there is in this case no other corporate
will to create an equilibrium by resisting the will of the prince:
sooner or later the prince must inevitably suppress the Sovereign
and break the social treaty. This is the unavoidable and inherent
defect which, from the very birth of the body politic, tends cease-
lessly to destroy it, as age and death end by destroying the human
body." 2 This inevitable termination may, he believes, be post-
poned, but not averted. It is too deeply rooted in the fallibilities
of human nature to be avoided by any artificial plan of political
organization or procedure. Frequent assemblies of the people to
reaffirm the social contract and pass upon the continuance of the
existing government may retard the decline of the body politic, but
in the long run it is bound to come.

Though not fundamental in his concept of the state, one of the
most appealing to revolutionary minds of all Rousseau's flights of
imagination was his dream of a civil religion. Bayle and other
anti-religionists had argued that religion could be of no use to the
body politic; clerical thinkers had contended, on the contrary.
that Christianity was the main anchor and support of the state.
Rousseau rejects both of these views, and undertakes to show ''that
no State has ever been founded without a religious basis, and . . .
that the law of Christianity at bottom does more harm by weak-
ening than good by strengthening the constitution of the State."

In the earliest times, he says, "men had no kings save gods, and
"""no government save theocracy.53 4 Religion and politics were one
and inseparable. Each state had its own special cult, and even-
war between rival states was also a war between rival theologies.
Conquered peoples were made to adopt the religion of the victors.

* Ibid., p. 91 . 2 Ibid., pp. 74-75. 3 Ibid., p. 1 17. 4 Ibid., p. 1 13.

NATURE'S CHILD 36i

^rr\

u* —

or

The universal empire of Rome changed all this. The Romans
spread their religion among all their subject peoples and also
adopted various features of the religions of the vanquished. Thus,
radually, the civilized world carne to have practically the same
religion. Then came Christianity, and with it the idea of c 'separat-
ing the theological from the political system.55 l The upshot was the
bug struggle for supremacy between church and empire, which
resulted in the ruin of both. With rise of national polities came a
resurgence of the old idea of a national religion completelv inte-
grated with the national political system. Christianity could not
accept this, and the conflict between temporal and spiritual author-
ities continued.

These difficulties, says Rousseau, would all disappear if people
were more exact in their ideas of religion. According to his analy-
sis there are three kinds of religion: (1) the religion of man, which 'is
the "purely internal cult of the supreme God and the eternal obli-
gations of morality" ; 2 (2) the religion of the citizen, which is the
peculiar cult of a single country, having its dogmas, forms, and
rites prescribed by law; (3) the religion of the priest, "which gives
x^ien two codes of legislation, two rulers, and two countries, renders
them subject to contradictory duties, and makes it impossible for
them to be faithful both to religion and citizenship." 2 All three
have their defects, he thinks, but the third is wholly bad and ought
to be stamped out. The second is good in that it unites love of
country with love of its tutelary god, and service to country with
service to the deity. It is bad, however, in that it makes men nar-
row, superstitious, and intolerant, and provokes religious wars.
The first, the religion of man, is above criticism save that it has no
practical relation to mundane affairs and causes people to neglect
the duties of citizenship and allow the government of the state to
fall Into the hands of evil and ruthless men. "We are told that a
people of true Christians would form the most perfect society
imaginable. I see in this supposition only one great difficulty:
that a society of true Christians would not be a society of men. I
say further that such a society, with all its perfection would be
neiiher the strongest nor. the most lasting: the very fact that it was
perfect would rob it of its bond of union; the flaw that would de-
stroy it would lie in its very perfection." 3

I/W*>P 115- »/*.*, p. 117. «fl«/..ii8.

366 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

A religion such as pure Christianity, which seeks the highest
Individual morality, is deficient, says Rousseau5 in respect to corr-
munal obligation. \\Tiile it makes men conscious of their dutv r-

^j » **

other individuals, it does not inculcate that sense of social obliga-
tion, that consciousness of communal solidarity and responsibilirv

" * •>

which Is essential to the well-being of the state. For that purpose
there should be ua purely civil profession of faith of which the Sov-
ereign should fix the articles, not exactly as religious dogmas, bn:
as social sentiments without which a man cannot be a good citizen
or a faithful subject. While it can compel no one to believe them.
it can banish from the State whoever does not believe them— 1:
can banish him not for impiety, but as an antisocial being, incapable
of truly loving the laws and justice, and of sacrificing, at need, his
life to his duty." 1

Such a religion the Paris Commune, inspired by Rousseau,
attempted in 1793 to establish. That attempt failed, but something
similar to the civil religion of Rousseau has grown up in the mod-
ern world. Passionate nationalism, exalting duty to the state above
all other duties, has subordinated all cults and creeds. Unquestion-
ing loyalty to the state, unfaltering obedience to its mandates, and
unremitting devotion to its service have become the supreme obli-
gation of man. He is not obliged to worship the state; in som?
countries he may disbelieve in the government of the day; bu:
nowhere is it permissible to blaspheme and revile the state itself.

IV

It is easy to pass judgment on Rousseau. So many have done it,
with such radically different conclusions, that one has little diffi-
culty in finding excellent authority to support any view. Paradoxi-
cal in life, the inscrutable Jean-Jacques has continued through the
years to be at once the joy and despair of critics. He is so easy to
shoot at; so difficult to bring down! His scholarship is so deficient^
his logic so feeble; yet his intuition is so uncanny, and so often right!

"In the field of politics," wrote Profesor Dunning, "Rousseau's
teaching was suggestive rather than conclusive; but the stimulating
force of his suggestions long remained a cardinal fact of literature

t *

and history. His fancies, fallacies, and quibbles often appeaiea
more strongly than the sober observation and balanced reasoning

. 121.

NATURE'S CHILD 367

-,*" Montesquieu to the Zeitgeist of the later eighteenth century. Both
*-P pure philosophy of politics and the practical statesmanship of
-he time illustrate this. His spirit and his dogmas, however dis-
<r;ised and transformed, are seen everywhere both in the speculative
sterns and In the governmental reorganizations of the stirring era
;ha: followed his death." l

Bv contrast with this faint-praising judgment let us note the
panegyric of Air. G. D. H. Cole who, after pronouncing the Social
Course' 10 be "still by far the best of all textbooks of political phi-
icsophy," 2 declares that "Rousseau's political influence, so far from
\eina dead, is every day Increasing; and as newT generations and
new classes of men come to study his work, his conceptions, often
hazy and undeveloped., but nearly always of lasting value, will
assuredly form the basis of a new political philosophy, in which.
iev will be taken up and transformed. This philosophy is the work
of die future; but rooted upon the conception of Rousseau, It will
srreich far back into the past. Of our time, it will be for all time;
i:s solutions will be at once relatively permanent and ceaselessly

^reressive." 2

And against this oracular encomium let us place the bitter ques-
:;on of Lord Morley: lc Would it not have been better for the world
if Rousseau had never been born? "

Such a question assumes what need not be granted at all. It as-
sumes not merely that the influence of the scribbler from Geneva
v;as enormous, but that it was almost wholly evil. It assumes3 most
certainly, that if Rousseau had not lived and performed his political
incantations, the awful insanities of the French Revolution might
have been averted. It assumes further that without Rousseau nine-
teenth- and twentieth-century democracies would have avoided
those doctrinaire extremes which have brought them often to the
verge of catastrophe.

None of these assumptions is proved, or can possibly be proved.
That Rousseau or any other individual could have caused the
French Revolution is preposterous. Avalanches of such magnitude
ire not set in motion by one man, seldom in fact by one generation
cf men. That the French Revolution might have taken a different
ionn had the public mind not been saturated with the fuming doc-

: VV. A. Dunning, A History of Political Theories from Rousseau to Spencer (1920), p. 38.
- Social Contract and Discourses (Everyman's Library, 1913), "Introduction," p. xli.

368 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

" ' ' ™ "l"^ ^— ^™ - -~ "^— ^M— ^» . -lF>^ ^ •^^^••B^^^^^^^^— ^^^^^^^— _ — ^^^^^^^^_^_««^_«_^B^^^_^^^B^^^B«.^_^H,n, ^^^™.» ^^^^ . I II l^^^« ^_ ^^^

trlii es of Rousseau Is quite probable. But that it would have
less Irrational or less destructive Is pure fancy. No one
Revolution Is revolution — pregnant in any form with unlimiter
possibilities of aberration and ruin. If, under the Influence o
seau3 the French Revolution was turned into paths that led
aster? It must be remembered that the Revolution was not ail bad
To Rousseau as much as to any other must be credited the good a*
well as the evil which issued from that terrific holocaust. And as to
the baneful effect of Rousseau's political philosophy in the subse-
quent evolution of democratic government, there is ample and
obvious justification for the charge. But in all fairness one mu*t
remember that there were democracies two thousand years before
Rousseau was born, and that in some respects they exhibited faults
strikingly similar to those for which modern democracies are said
to be indebted to the demented genius of Montmorency.

\Vhatever crimes may be laid at his door, whatever glories mar
be claimed as his due, it is beyond dispute that in the sphere of
political thought Rousseau performed one service of incalculable
importance. That was his formulation of a plausible and largelv
realizable theory of p^ular^soverelgrity. "The common interest
and the general will/3 says Dunning, "assumed, through his ma-
nipulation, a greater definiteness and importance than philosophy
had hitherto ascribed to them. They became the central features
of almost every theory of the state. Through those concepts a way
was opened by which the unity and solidarity of a population be-
came the necessary presupposition of scientific politics. Rousseau
thus contributed largely to promote the theory of the national
state." 1

He did more than contribute to the theory of the national state.
His theory called for a national state under the sway of the popular
will, regardless of its form or system of government. Above all his
predecessors Rousseau made room in the scheme of things political
for the average man, and as Josephson truthfully says, he "gave
impetus^ especially during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
to the tendency of men, In greater numbers than ever before, to act
as members of the sovereignty.33 2

Other concepts of sovereignty went into discard. Political au-
thority could find no more impregnable foundation than the SOY-

1 W. A. Dunning, op. tit., p. 39. 2 jyj t Josephson, op. ciL3 p. 356.

mam.

NATURE'S CHILD 369

ereignty of the masses expressed through the general will. Xo source
of power could be more right, no authority more absolute. That
concept of sovereignty maintains its grip on the modern mind
despite all attempts to overthrow it, despite all changes in the rela-
tion of the average man to the government of the day. Little does
:r matter that the average man, acting as a member of the sover-
eignty, prefers the rule of a Fiihrer in a totalitarian state to thai of a
parliament in a democratic commonwealth. That is no derogation
d popular sovereignty; for as Rousseau proved, contrary to his
acknowledged intent and wish, popular sovereignty recks not of
individual liberty or dissenting minorities. So long as the solidarity
d ihe body politic is maintained, perverted and distorted though
:; be, the sovereignty of the people cannot be denied. It is, for men
en this earth, the absolute of absolutes.

REFERENCES

Babbitt, L, Rousseau and Romanticism (Boston, 1919).

Coker, F. W., Readings in Political Philosophy (rev. ed.? New York 1938)
Chap. XXIII.

Cook, T. L, A History of Political Philosophy (New York. 1936), Chap
XXII.

Dunning, W. A., .4 History of Political Theories from Rousseau to Spencer

'.New York, 1920), Chap. L
Geiser, K. F., and Jaszi, O., Political Philosophy from Plato to Jeremy Bentham

i New York, 1927), Chap. XL

Josephson, M., Jean Jacques Rousseau (New York, 1931).
Morley, J., Rousseau (2nd ed., 2 vols., London, 1883).
Murray, R. H., The History of Political Science from Plato to the Present (New

York, 1926), Chap. VIII.

Sabine, G. H., A History of Political Theory (New York, 1937), Chap.
XXVIII.

Vaughan, C. E. (ed.), The Political Writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau (2
vols., Cambridge, 1915).

CHAPTER XIX

REVOLUTION
1

THERE had been a revolution in England. That faci was over-
looked by those on whom the French Revolution burst like a
mine exploded without warning. Also there had been some-
thing like a revolution in America. The significance of that vras
similarly unapparent to rninds oblivious of the potent chemistry c;
social forces. "Revolutions/3 Wendell Phillips once said, ;;are no-
made; they come.33 Yes, they come — after men have been saturated
with ideas and had experiences that make it possible for them to
come. They come, in short., when the time is ripe for them to come.
And that time is when the minds and wills of a sufficient number of
people have been prepared for desperate measures.

The preparation of the French people for revolution had been
going on for many years before the meeting of the estates-general
on that fateful 5th of May, 1789. Into this preparation went so
many elements that it is impossible for each to be isolated and
weighed. Into it went the impacts of the societal pattern upon mul-
titudes of individuals over successive generations, and the cumulat-
ing reactions of those multitudes as year followed year. Inio i:
likewise went a militant host of upsetting ideas which, after two
centuries- of vigorous propagation, had penetrated every level of
society. By furnishing ideas and furthermore by furnishing dramatic
examples of ideas in action, ihe English and American revolutions
bore as a mighty draft upon the French conflagration, and fanned 11
to higher temperatures than they themselves had ever reached,

The doctrines of Milton and Locke were moderate in comparison
with the rabid dogmas of such Puritan left-wingers as Lilburne and
Winstanley. But revolutionists on coming into power in England,
though they had dallied with some of the extreme ideas of die
Levellers, had not adopted them; had, in fact, halted far short of die
logical limits of the middle-class philosophies of Milton and Locke.
Radical American writers, such as Roger Williams and Theophfe
Parsons, had gone as far to the left as there was room to go, but ihe
American Revolution itself was not radical It liberalized but did

370

REVOLUTION

r.oi destroy the old social order. The French interpretation of the
English and American upheavals was, however, emphatically radi-
cal. \Vhen men like Sieves and Condorcet, imbued with the inebriat-
ing doctrines of Rousseau, came to write the platform of revolution
in France., they saw in the political history and ideology of Eng-
iasd and America partial, if not total, exemplifications of what they
-.i-ished 10 see in France. And when men like Danton, Marat, and
Robespierre (literal believers in the levelling creed of Liberty.' Fra-
ternity., and Equality) were shot into power by the very blasts which
smashed the Old Regime, they found in the violence of the Eng-
lish and American upheavals many precedents to justify the sweep-
ing deeds of destruction and reconstruction on which they were bent.
When the Revolution struck in France, political philosophy
ceased. Shrill and fanatical journalists became the political men-
tors of the nation. In England and America, on the contrary, serious
political thinking and writing were greatly stimulated. Shocked by
ihe headlong stampede of the French revolutionists, moderate men
like Burke and Hamilton, who had done valiant service in the cause
of political freedom, took stock of their ideas and emerged on the
side of conservatism, if not reaction. More radical men like Paine
aad Jefferson, whose service in the cause of liberty had been no less
ersineni, thrown on the defensive by the dizzy turn of events in
France, took stock of their ideas also, and emerged on the side of
revolution and popular sovereignty. Thus was precipitated among
the English-speaking peoples on both sides of the Atlantic a pro-
longed and bitter debate on the issues and merits of the French
Revolution, and at bottom on the validity of the democratic prin-
ciple itself. The flames of partisanship leaped high, and the fate of
mmistries and presidential administrations was more than once de-
lermined by the varying turns of this war of words. The best brains
of both nations were drawn into this boiling controversy, and many
notable treatises on politics were produced. On the conservative (
side none wrote more resonantly or saw more clearly the essential
sues at stake than Edmund Burke. On the radical side Thomas
Fame made it his special business to reply to Burke. No one could
nave done it better. Few men have ever lived who could shape sen-
tences into thunderbolts as deadly as those of Thomas Paine, and
ever excelled the purity and nobility of his ideals of human

372 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

' '•"""' i •*!>»<

II

Edmund Burke Is one of ihe best known figures In English historv.
and one of the few politicians of eighteenth-century England whose
renown has not faded. Much uncertainty shrouds Burke1 s orieii

<*} **

and early years, but there is pretty general agreement among ri
biographers on the major facts. He was born In Dublin, probabiv
on January 12, 1729. His father was a practicing attorney In Dub-
lin, and a Protestant In religion. Of his mother little is known save
that she was of the Nagle family and was a Roman Catholic. Ed-
mund and his two brothers were brought up as Protestants, while
their sister followed the faith of her mother. After attending a pre-
paratory school conducted by an English Quaker at Kildare, Ed-
mund Burke was entered In Trinity College, Dublin, In 1743. He
made no special record as a student at Trinity', but seems to have
acquitted himself as creditably as the average youth.

Burke took his degree at Trinity In 1748, and in 1750 went 10
London to study law. Of the next ten years little has been learned.
He soon abandoned his legal studies and began to dabble in litera-
ture. Thereupon his father, who was determined to make a lawyer
of him, cut off his allowance. In some way Burke managed to eke
out a living and continue his literary work. In 1756 he gained recog-
nition by the publication of two essays: A Vindication of Natural £-
ciety and the Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas on the Sub-
lime and Beautiful. In the same year he married the daughter of ihe
well-known Dr. Nugent of Bath and launched the Annual Register, a
project which brought him a little money and more than a little
prestige. The Annual Register was a yearbook of political and eco-
nomic Information, carefully compiled and edited. A compendium
of that sort was very much needed, and Burke's standing in political
and literary circles was much enhanced by his connection with it*

In 1759 Burke became acquainted with William Gerard Hamil-
ton, who was soon to be made Secretary for Ireland. When Hamfl-
ton took up his post in Dublin he made Burke a member of his staff.
Burke remained with Hamilton to the conclusion of his term of
office, gaining much experience in the ways of practical govern-
ment. In 1765 Burke was made private secretary to Lord Rocking-
ham, the newly appointed prime minister. The Rockinghain min
istry lasted only a few days more than a year, but that was

REVOLUTION 373

enough to get Burke started In politics in his own right. Through
:be influence of the ministry he gained a seat in the House of Com-
mons as member for the pocket borough of Wendo ver . He made his
frst speech in the House of Commons on January 27, 17665 and
from that hour until his farewell to the House in 1794 he was one of
the outstanding parliamentary leaders of the Whig Part)-.

In his parliamentary career Edmund Burke experienced the
usual vicissitudes of public life He took part in great affairs and
Deny ones, won victories and suffered defeats, sat with the majority
and with the opposition, was cheered and hooted, turned out of
ofBce and jockeyed In again. But he was never obscured, and sel-
dom ignored. Never popular, as Chatham, Fox, and Sheridan were
Dopular, In real force he towered above them all, and many would
say above any man who ever sat in the House of Commons. The
sources of his strength were many. Foremost among them was his
personal independence. He would go with his party and strive to
do the bidding of his constituents when he thought them right.
\\Tien he thought them wrong, he would do what Edmund Burke
±oughi right and tell them, as he did the voters of Bristol, that he
would be no weathercock ccto Indicate the shiftlngs of every fash-
ionable gale.53 That his independence was genuine was attested
by die unbending probity which governed every decision he made.
He was so conspicuously a man of honor that not even his unfortu-
nate practice of living beyond his means and getting himself hope-
lessly sunk In debt could sully his reputation. His debts were not
those of a cheat or wastrel, but those of a high-minded gentleman ,
whose position imposed obligations his Income could not meet and /
who would not stoop to sinecures, reversions, and other forms of ,;
graft by which most politicians of his day were accustomed to sup- >
piemen t their incomes.

But the most formidable of Burke's qualities were his literary
genius and his intellectual power. He is rated as one of the world's
greatest orators, but he was a failure as a rabble-rouser and seldom
effective as a parliamentary debater. His oratory was great because
it was great literature uttered by a man of great character and
force of intellect. It was the kind of oratory that lives in print long
after the occasion of its utterance has passed and long after
the speaker has mouldered into dust. Burke' s orations axe un- .
surpassed in richness of imagery, magnificence of diction, sweep of

374 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

imagination, and flowing nobility of style. They fell on the ear,
said Viscount Morley, "with the accent of some golden-tonsraed
oracle of the wise gods.:? And what made them truly and per-
manently great was the passionate sincerity' and compelling cogencv
of their Intellectual content. Burke has been called the greatest
political thinker of the English race, and by some the greatest polit-
ical thinker since Aristotle. He was a great thinker, though not
notably an original, subtle, or systematic thinker. His greatness as
a thinker lay in his remarkable ability to apply broad philosophical
concepts to specific and concrete problems of statecraft. In that he
has never been surpassed.

Burke has often been said to have given the world a perfect model
of the philosopher in politics, and academic philosophers have some-
times expressed regret that politics prevented him from devoting
his superb faculties of thought and composition to philosophy In its
more esoteric forms. Burke himself had no such regret. Fine
scholar and real philosopher though he was, he was first of all a
fighter of political battles. For the mere bookworm in politics he
had nothing but scorn. His public life was spent entirely on the
battle-front; rhetoric, learning, and philosophic insight were Ms
armaments. As ends in themselves they were nothing. The cause

was the thing!

Edmund Burke fought for many causes, and in the course of his
campaigns delivered Innumerable speeches and wrote many pam-
phlets, essays, and books. The immediate issues of the combats in
which he was engaged have long since ceased to matter, but Ms
orations and writings are still read with appreciation and will al-
ways rank among the masterpieces of English prose. For Edmund
Burke was not merely a master of the inscrutable art of literary
expression, not merely a profound and logical political thinker; he
was one of those rare mortals whose clairvoyant minds lay hold ci
things eternal. Whatever the issue of the hour, there was but one
cause for Edmund Burke. That was the ever-old and never-old
cause of justice, humanity, and order.

Of the many political battles which Burke fought, three are most
remembered. These are his futile twelve-year struggle for sanity
and liberalism in the treatment of the American colonies, Ms epic
impeachment of Warren Hastings for high crimes and misdemean-
ors in the government of India, and his thunderous barrage agamst

REVOLUTION 375

'-A French Revolution. Whether It is just to charge Burke u?ith
-, as many did, for his denunciation of the French revolu-
we shall presently discuss. There can be no question about

4* battle for conciliation with the colonies and the Impeachment

^rtn*'w i**-***1*

-; Warren Hastings. In these affairs we see Burke at his best, plead-

-3- \\iih supernal eloquence for honesty, decency, fairness, and

ih-i**|p*fc JL

-2^5eein<r Intelligence in the management of public affairs.

The Impeachment of Warren Hastings ended with the parlia-
Tntarv session of 1794. Shaken by the sudden death of his son and
•.vorried by other private troubles, Burke gave up his seat in the
House of Commons and sought retirement. He was worn out and
had not long to live, but the bitter attacks of his enemies and his anx-
i:us concern over the prospective negotiations for peace with France
kesi the pen in his hand almost to the day of his death, July 8, 1797.

Ill

It was a painful surprise to crusaders In the cause of liberty and
human rights when Edmund Burke came out against the French
Revolution. Not only were they shocked and disappointed; they
were bitterly Incensed at what seemed to them treason to the highest
nd noblest of human causes. They felt the same way about Wash-
h?ton, Hamilton, John Adams, and others whose memorable serv-
ices on the side of freedom in the American Revolution were difficult
:o reconcile with their subsequent hostility to the French Revolution.
Had the former myrmidons of liberty changed? Had Edmund
Burke, in particular changed? Had conditions changed, or had his
position on the American Revolution been misunderstood?

Such questions are difficult to answer. It is hard to know what
any man thinks, and why he thinks as he does. So far as there Is any
evidence to go on, it would appear that Edmund Burke had changed
—to the extent at least of becoming more fixed in his naturally con-
sorative outlook. It is also true that the French Revolution was far
nm being an exact counterpart of either its American or English
edecessors. Doctrinally it did not, perhaps, reach any wilder
extremes, but in actuality it did. In violence and destructlveness It
compared with all former political storms as a raging typhoon to a
stirring breeze. It would also seem that Burke5 s attitude toward
the revolt of the American^colomes i had been misinterpreted. Cer-
rainly it had by radicals such as Jefferson and Paine.

IT

UX

3~6 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

Edmund Burke was never a radical, never anything but an
llsh^Whig ^'ith a consuming passion for orderly constitutional e^7
ernment wisely and liberally administered. In the Speech or. r'-~m
dilation with the Colonies he had uttered the opinion that a \vt~>
people could not be indicted; but he had also said it was EG* *
question with him whether the British government had a right ^
make the Americans miserable, but whether it was not the expfdi^r
thing to make ihem happy. That emphasis on the expedient rathr-
than the abstractly or even legally right course of action is ±*
master key to Burke5 s political philosophy.

Not in the Machiavellian sense ::

condoning whatever may be advantageous in promoting a particu-
lar policy or reaching a particular objective, but in the profound?:
sense of shaping the course of action to conform with the basic an:
permanent elements of the institutional life of a people. Political
society for Burke was not a thing instituted by conquest, contract,
or any single act of will, human or divine. It was an organic growth
with roots reaching back into an indefinite past and tendrils shoot-
ing forward to an Indefinite future. The art of statecraft was no*-

t^B i « *rw - ™ -" «*h * -m' * *

merely to perceive the continuity of the body politic, but to perceive
those elemental ingredients In a given society which make for visor
and perpetuity, for stability and order, for justice and morality, and
then to hew out policies in keeping with those fundamentals. This
conception of the state and statesmanship Burke never expressed
more succinctly than in his speech In the House of Commons on
May 11, 1792, on Fox's motion for leave to present a bill repealing
the disabilities of the Unitarians.

C'I never govern myself," Burke said on this occasion, "no ration^
man ever did govern himself by abstractions and unlversals. 1 do n:t
put abstract ideas wholly out of any question, because I well know, ib:
under that name I should dismiss principles; and without the guide and
light of sound well-understood principles, all reasonings in politics, as
in everything else, would be only a confused jumble of particular facts
and details, without the means of drawing out any sort of theoretical GT
practical conclusion. A statesman differs from a professor in an univer-
sity; the latter has only the general view of society; the former, the
statesman, has a number of circumstances to combine with those general
ideas, and to take into his consideration. Circumstances are infinite, are
infinitely combined; are variable and transient; he who does not take
them into consideration, is not erroneous, but stark mad — dot opffsffi *

REVOLUTION

w Tu^ne iKsaniat—hc is metaphysically mad. A statesman, never losln^
sight of principles, Is to be guided by circumstances; and judging con-
:rary to the exigencies of the moment, he may ruin his country forever.

-I go on this ground, that government, representing the society, has
2 general superintending conirol over all the actions, and over all the
publicly propagated doctrines of men, without which it could never
provide adequately for all the wants of society; but then it is to use this
power with an equitable discretion, the only bond of sovereignty. For
:: Is not, perhaps, so much by the assumption of unlawful powers, as by
:he unwise or unwarrantable use of those which are most legal, that
pvernmenis oppose their true end and object; . . . The object of the
statejsjas far as may be) the happiness of the whole. What makes mul-
dtudeTbT men utterly miserable can never answer that object; indeed it
contradicts it wholly and entirely; and the happiness or misery of man-
kind estimated by their feelings and sentiments, and not by any
theories of their rights, is, and ought to be, the standard for the conduct
of legislators towards the people. This naturally and necessarily con-
ducts us 10 the peculiar and characteristic situation of a people, and to
a knowledge of their opinions, prejudices, habits, and all the circum-
stances that diversify and colour life. The first question a good states-
nan would ask himself, therefore, would be, how and in what circum-
stances do you find the society, and to act upon them.

-The foundations on which obedience to governments is founded are
not 10 be constantly discussed. That we are here, supposes the discus-
sion already made and the dispute settled. We must assume the rights
of what represents the public to control the individual, to make his will
and Ms acts submit to their will, until some intolerable grievance shall
make us know that it does not answer its end, and will submit neither
to reformation nor restraint. Otherwise we should dispute all the points
of morality, before we can punish a murderer, robber, and adulterer;
we should analyze all society. ...

"\Vhether anything be proper to be denied, which is right in itself
Because it may lead to the demand of others which it is improper to
grant;— abstractedly speaking, there can be no doubt that this question
ought to be decided in the negative. But as no moral questions are ever
abstract questions, this, before I judge upon any abstract proposition,
must be embodied in circumstances; for since things are right or wrong,
rnorally speaking, only by their relation and connection with other
icings, this very question of what it is politically right to grant depends
upon this relation to its effects. It is the direct office of wisdom to look
to the consequences of the acts we do ; if it be not this, it is worth nothing,
11 is out of place and of function; and a downright fool is as capable of
government as Charles Fox." *

Burke <World'* Classics Ed., 6 vols, 1906-1920), Vol. in,

378 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

These unimpassioned passages from a speech In the House c:
Commons on a relatively unimportant domestic question take U5
to the heart of Burke' s political thought. His remarks on the Uni-
tarian question were brief and virtually extemporaneous. The re-
sounding cadences and ornate flourishes of his more studied effort

C_5

are entirely missing. Motley has said of Burke that "He had the
style of his subjects." The Unitarian question presented no imperial
theme; no dramatic opportunities, no clash of earth-rocking issues.
It was a simple question of whether a minor religious sect should be
relieved of certain political disabilities. Accordingly we find Burke
speaking simply, dispassionately, and informally — and, as would be
expected, revealing himself more clearly and directly than in the
orations and essays into which he poured all of his magnificen:

rhetorical genius.'

The political philosophy of the temperate little speech on the
Unitarians was not different from the underlying philosophy of the
Speech on Conciliation or the underlying philosophy of the Reflections :?.
the Revolution in France. Intellectually Burke was wholly conslsteni
Judging from emotional tone, however, one might easily fail to per-
ceive his consistency of thought. In the Speech on Conciliation Burke
was denouncing the benighted folly of a government that refused to
recognize that "the only bond of sovereign authority' 3 Is the exercise
of power "with an equitable discretion53; in the Reflections on &
Revolution in France he was denouncing the insane fury of a people
tearing the social fabric to shreds in denial of scthe rights of what
represents the public to control the individual"; in the Speech imik
Petition of the Unitarians he was denouncing nothing at all. In ai
three his intellectual footing was the same — a sweeping negation of
all " abstractions and universals" and a dogged insistence that cir-
cumstances must determine the application of principles.

There is no doubt, however, that in the Reflections on the

in France Burke lost control of his emotions. It was not simply tk
events in France that infuriated him, but the fact that English sym-
pathizers with the Revolution were doing all they could to plunge
their cwn country into the maelstrom. Starting with the purpose cf
rebuking English revolutionaries, his temperature mounted as tk
discussion progressed until finally his wrath exploded in the most
blasting and vitriolic invective to be founc? in the political literature
of any people. To rebuke seditious fellow countrymen was noz

REVOLUTION -379

enDurfi; he must arraign the whole French nation and shriek his
v ,re of everything done in furtherance of the Revolution. To say
that this classic of excoriation produced a sensation is putting it
ruldly. Eleven editions of the Reflections were sold in a year, and the
*-rrv ^ales before the end of the Revolution ran above 30,000.

j,^.*-.* — v*JL 3

Reactionaries were delighted and rewarded Burke with paeans of
:ra:se. Radicals were infuriated and accused him of every crime in
the catalog. Burke had delivered a tremendous blow against the
Revolution, but his passions had betrayed him into fallacies and ex-
cesses which not only invited attack but laid him open to crushing
replies. The philosophical framework of the Reflections was good —
consistent in every respect with Burke's previously stated political
ideas — but it was swallowed up in rhetorical effusions which seri-
ously damaged its effectiveness in the arena of reason.

Scattered through the Reflections, however,, are many temperate
and beautiful expositions of Burke's fundamental political phi-
losophy. On the subject of natural rights, for example, he has this
;Q sa:

"Government is not made in virtue of natural rights, which may and
do exist in total independence of it; and exist in much greater clearness,
and in a much greater degree of abstract perfection: but their abstract
perfection is their practical defect. By having a right to everything they
want everything. Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to
provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be
provided for by this "wisdom. Among these wants is to be reckoned the
want, out of civil society, of a sufficient restraint upon their passions.
Society requires not only that the passions of individuals should be
subjected, but that even in the mass and body, as well as in the individ-
uals, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will
controlled, and their passions brought into subjection. This can only
be done by a power out of themselves; and not, in the exercise of its func-
tion, subject to that will and to those passions which it is its office to
bridle and subdue. In this sense the restraints on men, as well as their
liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights. But as the liberties and
resirictions vary with times and circumstances, and admit of infinite
modifications, they cannot be settled upon any abstract rule; and
noiMng is so foolish as to discuss them upon that principle." 1

On the perennial theory of social contract, this was his dithy-
rainbic outburst:

1 Works of Edmund Burke (Standard Library Ed., 4 vols., 1906), Vol. ii} pp. 332-333,

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

'•"Society Is indeed a contract. Subordinate contracts for obiects -:
mere occasional interest may be dissolved at pleasure — but ihe sta-«
ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership aere^-
ment in a irade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some oth*-
such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and T-
be dissolved by the fancy of the parties. It is to be looked on with o:hr
reverence; because it is not a partnership in things subservient onlv n
the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It ^
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 bom,
Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the erea:
primaeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the hisier
natures, connecting the visible and invisible world, according to a fixed
compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical anc
all moral natures, each in their appointed place. This law is not subie::

•**

to the will of those, who by an obligation above them, and infinizelv
superior, are bound to submit their will to that law. The munichsl
corporations of that universal kingdom are not morally at liberty a:
their pleasure, and on their speculations of a contingent improvement.
wholly to separate and tear asunder the bonds of their subordinate
community, and dissolve it into an unsocial, uncivil, unconnected chaos
of elementary principles. It is the first and supreme necessity only, a
necessity that is not chosen, but chooses, a necessity paramount to de-
liberation, that admits no discussion, and demands no evidence, which
alone can justify a resort to anarchy. This necessity is no exception ID
the rule; because this necessity itself is a part too of that moral and
physical disposition of things, to which man must be obedient by con-
sent or force; but if that which is only submission to necessity should
be made the object of choice, the law is broken, nature is disobeyed,
and the rebellions are outlawed, cast forth, and exiled from this \vcr:d
of reason, and order, and peace, and virtue, and fruitful penitence
into the antagonist world of madness, discord, vice, confusion, and
unavailing sorrow." l

With this lofty and mystical exegesis of the societal bond Burke
no doubt imagined that he had put the social contract theory to
sleep for good. But he had not. The radicals refused to be im-
pressed. Indeed they drove on him with such vigor and made such
capital of his vagueness that he felt obliged to return to the fray. In
1792 he published his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs. This was
an attempt to vindicate his strictures on the French Revolution and
set forth his own political doctrines more definitely. In reality n
added nothing to what he had already said, though it did serve to
emphasize and clarify certain aspects of his thought.

llhid., pp. 368-369.

REVOLUTION 324

Burke made It clear in this paper that he took no stock In any
ieories of popular sovereignty. He was willing to concede that
soliiical Institutions might have originated in the consent of the gov-
erned, but in regard to contemporary political society he deemed
such original acts of agreement utterly meaningless. Men, he as-
sened, are born subject to an established society. They do not
consent 10 its authority and are not free to do so. To postulate such
a thing, he insisted, is to postulate anarchy. Born in society-, men
are born with obligations to society. From those primary obliga-
tions men can no more free themselves than they can free themselves
c: their obligations to their parents.

The idea of majority rule Burke put down as an absurdity. He

1|l _ -*r-- .- I-— — «—' If" *

v;:inld agree with Rousseau that unanimous consent might be neces-
sary to establish the state, but once that was done the people as in-
dividuals ceased to have wills that could be counted and aggregated
into a general will or even a majority will. By the social compact
individual will was obliterated. Standing in the place of the former
inass of independent individuals was organized society". The in-
dividual was subject to organized society regardless of his will. In
answer to the contention that the social compact might prescribe
majority rule Burke asserted that such a thing could never happen.
A political order constituted on that basis, he said, simply could not
r-nction. Aristocracy, not democracy, was in his view, the law of
nature. When men associate together for any purpose,, he declared,
it Is quickly found that some are better fitted for leadership than
others. Having advantages of birth, wealth, intellect, and so on,
iese constitute a natural aristocracy. The same is true in the state;
and if the natural aristocracy be not allowed to govern, the state
will fall into anarchy.

Though a genuine lover of liberty, Burke wrould have nothing to
do with any abstract philosophy of liberty. Liberty and authority7,
as he conceived them, were equally subject to the limitations of the
political system, which was not an artificial creation but the product
of a long process of social evolution. Both had their foundation in
the constitution, which, as conceived by Burke, was the long ac-
cumulated law and custom of the land. By these, he contended^ life,
liberty, and property are protected as social experience and expe-

dv B

icncy dictate. No particular form of constitution was recom-
mended for this purpose. Burke was not interested in constitutions

383 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

from a theoretical standpoint; he was Interested only In actual or-
ernment and actual constitutions. The British constitution, haviV-
"slowly broadened down from precedent to precedent/"5 \\*on H
greatest admiration. It was a natural growth, wrought by sener-
tions of adjustment to experience. Its principles of check and
ance afforded, he thought, real protection to life, liberty, and
erty, because they were not mere hypotheses but established^/^
of action.

IV

As a creative and systematic political thinker Edmund Burke
cannot be rated high. An unrelenting foe of all theories and
dogmas, of all reforms and Innovations, and indeed of ail principles
not verified by actual experience, his mind declined airy flights of
speculation and deprecated all attempts at the systematic rational-
ization of political Institutions. He looked upon human society with
the time-sense of a geologist, expecting and seeking no progress
other than that wrought by those cosmic forces which hold ;:ail
physical and all moral natures, each in their appointed place/5

Burke's influence, however, was very great. It is also true thai
he made a very substantial contribution to political thought. Thai
his influence was in the main conservative or reactionary, and thai
his contribution was primarily negative, must be admitted. Never-
theless he takes rank as one of the ever-luminous orbs in the galaxy
of political thought. When Burke appeared in the lists against the
French Revolution, political thought had almost succumbed to the
maudlin romanticism of Rousseau. Montesquieu was in eclipse;
likewise Hume, Spinoza, Hobbes, and other great realists of the
past. History was "bunk,53 reason despised, and facts mere obstacles
to be swept aside. Visions and rhapsodies were the thing. Wishes
were elevated as ideals, and the attainment of such ideals was
sought with small regard for either sense or morality.

It was the task of Edmund Burke to dash cold water upon politi-
cal dreamers and waken them to an appreciation of the significance
of society as a going concern, the product not of paper formulas but
of long ages of growth and adjustment. It was his task also to make
clearer than ever before the infinite complexity of political life and
the dangers of reckless tinkering with established institutions. He
understood, better perhaps than any man who ever lived, the un-

REVOLUTION

predictability of political behavior, and drove home, with over-
whelming force, the warning that reforms are prone to go amiss
because men rarely behave in a given set of circumstances as they
are expected to behave and theoretically ought to behave. Human
beings, he reiterated again and again, are creatures of circumstance,
and without taking all circumstances Into account you cannot
ioiow which way they will leap.

Equally useful and influential was the service of Burke in dis-
solving the fogs of dogma surrounding the concept of human
rights. He not only rejected the doctrine of inherent, absolute, and
indefeasible rights; he shattered it beyond repair, showing that the
more perfect such rights are in the abstract, the more difficult they
are to realize in practice. The only rights men can actually enjoy,
he made clear, are rights created, recognized, and protected by
society, and these are possible only by reason of the restraints im-
posed by society. Freedom Is to be found not In weakening the
social bond but in strengthening it, not in setting man against the
state but In reconciling man to the state and working out natural
compromises conferring such liberty as may be consistent with the
welfare of society.

Burke also performed a critical service of much importance by
indicating more definitely and emphatically than any man before
him had done the defects of democratic society. A sovereign people,
he repeatedly reminded his readers, is an unchecked and uncheck-
afale force. It can do no wrong, politically or morally. For Its deeds,
whether of commission or omission, all are responsible. This means
that no one is in fact responsible, because no one feels or can be held
to any degree of culpability for the acts attributable to the will of the
multitude. The follies and tyrannies of the masses, he pointed out,
are quite as real and quite as monstrous as those of the classes.
What is worse, rebellion against a popular regime is more than
treason; it is sacrilege. Furthermore, any penalties or punishments
that might be visited upon a stupid or iniquitous people would be
a perversion of the true purpose of the state5 which is to benefit the
people in general.

A classless society Burke believed impossible; and if possible, a
sure instrument of despotism. With prescient anticipation of events
to come, he argued that the leveling of the whole population to one
class3 by eliminating all the mitigating checks and restraints of a

3P4 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

stratified society, would merely smooth the way for :ithe most com-
pletely arbitrary power that ever appeared on earth.'3 Democracy
was the first step In that direction. Reaction from that, when It had
broken down, would not be the restoration of the old system of
divided and balanced authority, but the concentration of authority
In a dictator and the establishment, in modern phraseoloev, of a

•L ^ j j WP

totalitarian state.

Though he sired no esoteric school of political thought, Edmund
Burke has been and still continues to be an inexhaustible fount of
inspiration and ideas for conservative thinkers of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, especially those of the historical and organismic
persuasions. Conspicuously apparent is his influence on the writ-
ings of such outstanding publicists of the conservative wing as
Maine, Freeman, Seeley, Sidgwick, Mallock, Lecky, Godkin,
Belioc, Lieber, Burgess, Savigny, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Treiiscke,
The modern assault upon the ideological foundations of democracy
comprehends much that Burke did not know, but he remains
nevertheless the most eloquent and forceful of all apostles of aris-
tocracy.

V

Thomas Paine Is one of those incredible personages whose careers
pale the hues of the most romantic fiction. A man of three countries
and a leading figure In some of the most dramatic events In the
annals of each, he was the eighteenth century's foremost crusader
in the cause of liberty and one of the greatest in the entire history'
of mankind.

If ever a man was a born genius It was Thomas Paine. He came
into the world in the village of Thetford, England, on the 29th of
January, 1737. Poverty7 was his lot at the beginning as it was to be
to the end of life. His father was a Quaker who worked at the trade
of staymaker; his mother was the daughter of a Thetford attorney.
Beyond the fact that they were industrious and of good repute,
little is known of his parents or their families.

Thomas Paine had his only schooling in the grammar school at
Thetford, and rebelled against the little he had. Particularly ob-
noxious to him was the study of Latin, which he pronounced sheer
nonsense. The bent of his mind was for the sciences, but he had
little opportunity for these or any other formal studies. He was

REVOLUTION 385

~aken from school at the age of thirteen and put to work under his
father to learn the staymaker s trade. Disliking this, he went to sea
:^ 1756, as one of the crew of a privateer in the war against France.
\i the end of the voyage he went to London and became a journey-
man staymaker. At Sandwich in 1759 he married Mary Lambert
and removed with her to Margate, where she died the following

rear.
Footloose again and weary of his uncongenial trade, Paine then

employment in the excise service. After some preparatory
he received the desired appointment in December, 1764.

» *

The next year he was dismissed from the service on account of
alleged irregularities in his reports, but was reinstated in 1766 and
shortly transferred to Lewes, where he secured quarters with an
a^ed Quaker named Ollive, who operated a small tobacco shop.
Ollive died in 1769; and Paine in 1771 married his daughter,
Elizabeth, and assumed the management of the tobacco business
in addition to his duties in the excise.

The years 1772-1774 brought Paine's affairs to a critical turn.
Aroused by the grievances of the excisemen, he wrote in 1772 a
pamphlet appealing to Parliament to correct the abuses of the
excise service. Then he went to London and spent the entire winter
of I "72-1 773 trying to enlist members of Parliament in behalf of
his proposed reforms. Unsuccessful as a lobbyist, he returned to
Lewes. The tobacco business had not prospered in his absence, and
Ms creditors were threatening imprisonment if he did not settle his
accounts at once. To make matters worse, he was discharged from
ihe excise service in April, 1774. The reason given in the order of
dismissal was that he had quitted his post without leave and gone
off on account of debts he had contracted. Paine immediately sold
everything he possessed and turned the proceeds over to his credi-
tors. Shortly thereafter, for reasons which neither would ever
divulge, Paine and his wife separated never to meet again.

Drifting to London in search of work, Paine had the good fortune
to make the acquaintance of Benjamin Franklin, then stationed in
London as political agent for the American colonies. Attracted by
Fame's character and abilities. Franklin urged him to migrate to
America and make a new start. Paine accepted the advice and
sailed for Philadelphia in October, 1774, bearing a letter from
Franklin to his son-in-law, Richard Bache.

386 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

._.-__--• - - • • - ••! I " I

Thirteen months after he stepped on the wharf at Philadelphia
Thomas Paine's name was known in every American household and
his fame was spreading rapidly over Europe. On the recommenda-
tion of Franklin and Bache, he was employed as editor of the newlv
founded Pennsylvania Magazine early in 1775. Before he had time
thoroughly to warm the editor's chair, the Battle of Lexington was
fought. Quaker though he was, Paine was so deeply convinced of
the righteousness of the colonial cause that he instantly expressed his
readiness to shoulder a musket and go to the front. By the autumn
of 1775 he had made up his mind, far ahead of general opinion even
among the leaders of the Revolution, that independence was the
only rational destiny for the revolting colonies. At once he pro-
ceeded to put his convictions on paper. The result was the electrify.
ing pamphlet entitled Common Sense, issued on January 10} !77S,
"Never was a pamphlet written," says one of Paine's biographers,
"that wrought such wondrous effects as did 'Common Sense,5 To it
the American people owe their independence. Within six months of
its publication the colonies affirmed their freedom through the
drafting and signing of the Declaration of Independence.55 1

What Paine had done was not merely to advocate independence,
but to write a brief so eloquent and compelling that wavering minds
could seize no other alternative. Into his passionate appeal for
"common sense" he compressed a whole philosophy of liberty and
presented the unpalatable alternatives to independence with such
damning clarity that compromise seemed insane. Within ihree
months of its publication more than 120,000 copies of Common Seme
were sold, and it is estimated that the total circulation reached 5Q03-
000. Many prominent Revolutionary leaders, including Washing-
ton himself, acknowledged that Common Sense had changed their
views on the subject of independence. Paine might have made a
good deal of money from the sales of this pamphlet, but he donated
all the proceeds to the colonial cause and actually paid the pub-
lisher for copies distributed to his friends.

Disdaining to be a mere sideline patriot, Paine's next step was to
enlist with the Pennsylvania troops, and, when this short term of
service expired, he went to Fort Lee, New Jersey, and reenlisted
under General Nathaniel Greene. On September 19, 1776, Greene
made Paine his aide-de-camp. In this capacity Paine participated

1 W. M. Van der Weyde, The Life and Works of Thomas Paine (1925), p. 31.

REVOLUTION 387

.v Washington's disastrous retreat to the Delaware River and was
several times under fire. It was during this campaign, writing on a
drum-head by the light of a camp-fire, that he composed that im-
mortal address to the army which thousands of American school-
bovs have committed to memory. Opening with gripping phrase,
-These are the times that try men's souls,53 Pained poured out his
scorn on the "summer soldier" and "sunshine patriot53 and pleaded
ivith the army and the people at home to stand firm in this crisis of
ieir affairs. Washington was so inspired by it that he ordered it
read before every regiment of the army, and it is said that Paine' s
Crisis as much as Washington's strategy was responsible for the sur-
prising victory at Trenton.

Paine was obviously too valuable a publicist to be left in the
array. The political administration of the provisional government
had imperative need of such talents as his. In January, 1777, he
was made secretary of a commission to negotiate with the Indians of
Pennsylvania, and in the following April he was appointed secretary
to the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the Continental Congress.
Paine served in this office until January 6, 1779, when he resigned
in consequence of a difference with the Committee and the Congress
ever the tangled affairs of Silas Deane, one of the special commis-
sioners to France. In November, 1779, Paine was made clerk to the
Pennsylvania Assembly and continued in that position until Febru-
ary, 1781, when he went to France as secretary to John Laurens.
Wiih very material help from Paine, Laurens succeeded in negotiat-
ing with the French government for a large quantity of money and
solitary supplies which arrived in America just in time for the
Yorktown campaign, which ended the war.

The war over, Paine retired from public life. He had donated
most of his earnings to the Revolutionary cause and paid his own
expenses on the mission to France. Congress reimbursed him to the
extent of $3,000, the legislature of New York gave him a 300-acre
farm near New Rochelle, and the legislature of Pennsylvania re-
warded him with an honorarium of 500 pounds. He purchased a
small place at Bordentown, New Jersey, and settled down to follow
Hs bent for mechanics. Like Franklin and Jefferson, he was much
interested in inventions, and developed several of proven merit, in-
cluding a smokeless candle, a mechanical crane, a planing machine,
and an iron bridge. The iron bridge changed the whole course of

388 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

his life. Encouraged by the reception accorded this invention L-
America, Paine sailed for Europe in 1787 to raise capital for ifc
manufacture of his bridge. He stayed long enough in Paris to enlls:
the enthusiastic interest of Jefferson, then American minister re-
France, and secure the endorsement of the French Academy of
Sciences. Then he went to England, where he expected to raise ire
necessary money. The British government in 1788 granted him a
patent on the bridge, and in June, 1790, the finished span, 110 fee:
long, was put on exhibition in London. It was the first structure c:
its kind made of materials other than wood or stone.

At this juncture his principal backer failed in business and Paine,
despite his preoccupation with the bridge project, was sucked in:;
the maelstrom of the French Revolution. During a brief visit to
Paris in 1790 he had met his former companion in arms, Lafayette,
who at the moment was one of the foremost leaders of the French
Revolution. Lafayette wished to send Washington the key of the
Bastille as a token of regard and a symbol of their common devotion
to the cause of liberty. He entrusted it to Paine, who expected soon
to return to America. Unable to sail as he had planned, Paine sen
it to Washington by a mutual friend. It is still on exhibition among
the Washington relics at Mt. Vernon.

Back in London, Paine found the nation seething with comro
versy over the French Revolution. It was rumored that Edmund
Burke was writing a pamphlet against the Revolution and Paine
told his friends that, if Burke' s pamphlet was published, he would
reply to it. Burke's Reflections came out on November 1, 1790, and
Paine immediately went to work on his reply. This appeared in Feb-
ruary, 1791, under the title of The Rights of Man. Burke countered
with his Uppeal from the New to the Old Whigs; and Paine replied to
this with Part II' of The Rights of Man. This titanic debate produced
a tremendous sensation, and Paine became as clearly the head and
front of the pro-Revolutionary party as was Burke of the opposition,
So long as English radicalism amounted to nothing more than
talk, it was unmolested; but, when in 1792 it flowered into an or-
ganized movement to overthrow the monarchy and establish a
republic, the authorities decided that it was time to do something.
Paine was the most conspicuous figure In the republican move-
ment, and the government moved against him first. The charge
of seditious libel was filed against him, and he was summoned ic

REVOLUTION

389

appear in court and defend. About this time four different con-
frltuencies in France elected him as one of their deputies in the
c:riing Xational Convention. Persuaded by friends, among whom
vos the poet William Blake, that he could not hope for a fair trial
Li England, Paine decided to go to France and take his seat in the
Convention. Hurriedly slipping away in September, 1792, in order
to escape arrest, he was soon in Paris and in the thick of the Revolu-
r^n. Taking his seat in the Convention, he was appointed a mem-
:er of the committee to frame a republican constitution and took
a leading part in the work of both the committee and the Conven-
:::n. Meanwhile the prosecution in England had been carried to
a conclusion. Paine was found guilty of libeling the Crown and
sentenced to a heavy fine and imprisonment should he again set
root on English soil.

Paine's Utopian dreams were soon to be dashed. He was too
humane and rational to travel far with the madmen whom the
Revolution had swept into power. On the question of ihe death
penalty for Louis XVI Paine voted in the negative and urged that
±e deposed monarch be exiled to the United States, and thus in-
curred the dislike of Marat, Robespierre, and their kind. After the
fall of the Girondist moderates with whom he had aligned himself,
Paine was doomed to be a victim of the Terror. On December 27*
!"?3, he was arrested on the charge of being a "foreigner35 and
irown into the Luxembourg prison. There he languished until
November 4, 1794, daily expecting to be led out to the guillotine.
Orders for his execution were actually issued, but through some
inexplicable slip were not carried out.

Paine had every reason to suppose that the American govern-
ment would intervene in his behalf. But nothing was done. His old
friend Jefferson had lately resigned the office of Secretary of State,
and Washington, another friend on whom he counted, was des-
perately trying to maintain the neutrality of the infant republic
and induce the British to evacuate the army posts they held on its
soithern frontier. It was politically inexpedient in that juncture
10 do anything for a man condemned in England as a public enemy
and proscribed in France. To make the case worse, Gouverneur
Morris, the American minister to France, had a personal grudge
against Paine and would do nothing for him. In August, 1794,
aawever, Morris was replaced by James Monroe. As soon as

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

Monroe learned of Paine's plight, he went into action and soc-
secured his release. Paine had fallen desperately ill in prison ar^d
was near death when Monroe got him out. Monroe took Pair^
into his own home and kept him until his health was sufficient/.
mended for him to look after himself.

Before his arrest Paine had begun a treatise on religion. He
continued work on this while in prison and finished it while con-
valescing in Monroe's home. It was published in 1795 under th
title The Age of Reason. This famous book brought down upon
Paine's head the curses of the pious all over Christendom. It was 2,
beautiful restatement of the creed of deism, passionately appealir^-
for rationalism in religion. But the believing world chose to brand
Paine as an atheist, and still does, though he stood at the opposite
pole of belief. Paine also wrote his little tract on Agrarian jus:b
while recuperating in Monroe's home.

Paine wished to return to America with Monroe in 1797 and
journeyed to Havre to take the ship with him. On arriving there
he was told that there was danger of his being taken off the ship
by the British and sent to England to settle his accounts with
British justice. He decided to stay in France. Finally in 1802,
when it seemed safe for him to make the journey to America, he
returned to the land he had helped make free. But he was net
welcomed. Other heroes occupied the stage, and it was not good
politics at the time to befriend the author of The Age of Reasm.
After repeated disappointments in his endeavors to secure a re-
munerative appointment, Paine retired to his farm at New Ro-
chelle. There he lived in penury and declining health until 1806,
when he moved into New York City in order to obtain medico
attention. He died in New York on June 8, 1809.

VI

Thomas Paine was not a thinker's thinker. For the cognoscenti te
was just a partisan pamphleteer. For the common man, however,
he was not simply a propagandist but an intellectual mentor d
more authority than the most learned professor. In the academic
sense Paine was no scholar and had no great acquaintance with tne
literature of political thought. But he had the gift of tongues, acd
with it a remarkable ability to clarify and simplify every subject be
discussed. Where he got his political ideas no one knows. He prct>

REVOLUTION 391

ably did not know himself. Much of his thought seems traceable
to Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau. Perhaps he studied the
works of those writers very closely, but most likely he did noc. His
mind collected ideas like a magnet and made them his very own.
Some no doubt he got from books; others were plucked from the
;:ps of men encountered in his cosmopolitan way of life; not a few
were the product of his own observations and reflections.

Borrowed or not, Paine's ideas were always delivered with a
deadly punch. He thought and wrote in straight lines, and with a
velocity that struck like thudding fist. Language for him was first
of all an instrument for ramming home ideas. He could gild the
liiy as neatly as any man who ever lived, but never allowed rhe-
torical frills to impede the march of his thought. There is brilliant
and beautiful imagery in all his writings, but no obvious striving
for effect retards the tempo even in his most fervid outbursts. Onlv
an educated man could read Burke with appreciation and under-
standing, but any dunce who could spell out words could follow
Paine without missing the slightest shading of his thought. This
quality of simplicity, clearness, and directness combined with a
forceful, but infinitely graceful, flow of speech is manifest in all of
Paine's writings, and is especially marked in Common Sense, The
Rights of Man, and Agrarian Justice, which are Ms most abiding
political works. Burke's sonorous sentences were tapestried by the
most gorgeous imagination in the history of political literature;
Paine's flashed with beauty like a gleaming sword swung in battle"
They clashed like gods, and the echoes of their great debate are
still resounding in the ears of the world.

Being first of all a polemicist, Paine did not attempt in any of his
ratings to round out a complete and balanced philosophy of the
stare. His main concern was to make a case or refute an attack, but
in the course of his argument he rarely failed to set his feet on funda-
mental concepts and principles. In Common Sense, though his imme-
diate purpose was to convince the American people of the folly of
reconciliation with England and the necessity for independence, he
founded his argument on more than political expediency. He
viaoned the American people not simply independent but with a
republican form of government, and wrote to persuade them not
only of the benefits of independence but of the villainy of monarchi-
cal institutions.

tle

392 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

Monarchical government was Invariably bad, he reasoned, be-
cause it violated the first principle of political science, namely, the
distinction between society and government. "Some writers/' said
he, "have so confounded society with government, as to leave
or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different
but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, an
government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness
positively, by uniting our affections, the latter negatively, by restrain-
ing our vices. . . . Society in every state is a blessing, but govern-
ment even in Its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state
an Intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same
miseries by a government , which we might expect in a country witkmi
government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish
the means by which we suffer. Government, like dress. Is the badge
of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built upon the ruins of the
bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uni-
form and Irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver;
but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a
part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest;
. . . Wherefore, security being the true design and end of govern-
ment, it unanswerably follows, that whatever form thereof appears
most likely to insure it to us, with the least expense and greatest
benefit, is preferable to all others." l

Monarchy, said Paine, could never measure up to that test, be-
cause it was established by usurpation and grew strong by despoil-
ing Its subjects. Government originated, he explained, when people
in a "state of natural liberty" banded together by mutual consent
to form a society for cooperation in common concerns. At first no
government was necessary; there were few public affairs and ever)*
one was impelled by the sense of duty and the fear of public disap-
proval to obey the common regulations. But as the society grew in
numbers and complexity, conscience alone was insufficient to com-
pel obedience. Then, by common consent, agents were selected to
wield authority in behalf of the society as a whole. Such was the
origin of government; "namely, a mode rendered necessary by the
inability of moral virtue to govern the world; here too, Is the design
and end of government, viz., freedom and security. And however
our eyes may be dazzled with show, or our ears deceived by sound;

1 Common Sense (Patriot's Ed., 1925), pp. 97-9S

REVOLUTION 393

However prejudices may warp our wills, or interest darken our un-
derstanding, the simple voice of nature and reason will sav, 'tis

X*-

The earliest governments in the world, according to Paine, were
not monarchical. " Government by kings was first introduced into
the world by the heathen, from whom the children of Israel copied
the custom. It was the most prosperous invention the devil ever set
on foot for the promotion of idolatry. The heathen paid divine
honors to their deceased kings, and the Christian world hath im-
proved on the plan by doing the same to their living ones. How im-
pious is the title of sacred Majesty, applied to a worm, who in the
midst of his splendor is crumpling into dust ! " 2 The first kings got
into power, he thought, either by lot, by election, or by usurpation.
If by lot or by election, heredity succession was excluded. Its sub-
sequent establishment could be nothing short of usurpation. "As
to usurpation, no man will be so hardy as to defend it; and that
William the Conqueror was an usurper is a fact not to be contra-
dicted. . . . But it is not so much the absurdity as the evil of hered-
itary succession which concerns mankind. Did it ensure a race of
good and wise men, it would have the seal of divine authority, but
as it opens the door to the foolish, the wicked, and the improper, it
hath in it the nature of oppression. ... In England a King hath
Hide more to do than to make war and give away places; which, in
plain terms, is to impoverish the nation and set it by the ears. A
pretty business indeed for a man to be allowed eight hundred thou-
sand sterling a year for, and worshipped into the bargain 1 Of more
worth is one honest man to society, and in the sight of God, than all
the crowned ruffians that ever lived.53 3

The mixed form of government in England, which Englishmen
generally admired as the world's finest exemplification of a con-
stitutional monarchy, Paine ridiculed as a pompous absurdity. It
was composed, he said, of certain survivals of monarchical and
aristocratical tyranny so blended with newer republican materials
as to cancel out to zero. As a contribution to the freedom of the
state, in a constitutional sense, they amounted, in his judgment, to
exactly nothing. "Wherefore, laying aside all national pride and
prejudice in favor of modes and forms, the plain truth is, that it is
wholly owing to the constitution of the people, and not the constitution of the

1 Ibid., p. 101. 2 ftfa9 pp. 108-109. 3 Ibid., pp. 118-122.

394 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

—— - — — • ' •• •' ~ ••— - — . — - ...._._... — • — ii - ..I - _

government* that the crown is not as oppressive in England as in
Turkev.55 1

*

Needless to say, Paine's Common Sense did not make sense to the
gentry, but the common people understood him perfectly and
quoted his trenchant phrases like verses of the Scriptures. Therp
were many in America, even after independence became a fact who
favored the establishment of a monarchy, and at certain critical
junctures there was serious talk of a coup (Petal with that in view
But Common Sense had so thoroughly indoctrinated the masses with
anti-monarchical ideas that practical men knew better than to trv
it. So bitter against monarchy had the American people become
that the courtly formality of the universally beloved Washington
drew vicious shafts of suspicion and satire.

Paine undoubtedly chose The Rights of Man as the title of his re-
ply to Burke because of the latter5 s emphatic and repeated denial
of the existence or possibility of such rights. In Part I of his reply
Paine proceeded at once to this bone of contention. Burke, quotin?
the act of Parliament at the accession of William and Mary, had
declared that the English people had renounced their sovereign
rights and agreed to "submit themselves, their heirs and posterities,
for ever" to the authority of the crown; and by inference had argued
that a similar renunciation had been agreed to at an early time by
the people of France. To this Paine replied that it was nonsense.
The English Parliament of 1688 may have had a right to put Wil-
liam and Mary on the throne and establish the conditions of their
tenure and authority, but to bind all posterity — that was impossible.

"There never did, there never will, and there never can, exist a
Parliament,, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in
any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and con-
trolling posterity to the 'end of time,' or of commanding forever how the
world shall be governed, or who shall govern it; and therefore all such,
clauses, acts or declarations, by which the makers of them attempt 10
do what they have neither the right nor the power to do, nor the power
to execute, are in themselves null and void.

"Every age and generation must be free to act for itself, in all cases^
as the age and generations which preceded it. The vanity and pre-
sumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and in-
solent of all tyrannies.

"Man has no property in man; neither has any generation a property
in the generations which are to follow. . . .
1 Ibid., p. 106.

REVOLUTION 395

"Everv generation is, and must be, competent to all the purposes
\vhich its occasions require. It is the living, and not the dead, that are
to be accommodated. When man ceases to be, his power and his wants
cease with him; and having no longer any participation in the concerns
of this world, he has no longer any authority in directing who shall be
its o-overnors, or how its government shall be organised, or how ad-

niinistered.

UI am not contending for nor against any form of government, nor
for nor against any party, here or elsewhere. That which a whole
nation chooses to do it has a right to do. Mr. Burke says, No. Where,
then does the right exist? I am contending for the rights of the living^
and against their being willed away, and controlled and contracted for,
bv the manuscript authority of the dead; and Mr. Burke is contending
for the authority of the dead over the rights and freedom of the living." 1

Burke had further insisted that cc Government is not made in
virtue of natural rights . . ."; that rights were mere abstractions
which impeded practical government. Government, he had said,
was a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants,
and the only right men could claim was that their wants should be
met by that wisdom. The French Declaration of Rights he had shoved
aside as "paltry and blurred sheets of paper about the rights of

man.53

"Does Mr. Burke,5' inquired Paine, umean to deny that man has
any rights? If he does, then he must mean that there are no such things
as rights any where, and that he has none himself; for who is there in
the world but man? But if Mr. Burke means to admit that man has
rights, the question then will be, what are those rights, and how came
man by them originally?

"The error of those who reason by precedents drawn from antiquity,
respecting the rights of man, is that they do not go far enough into
antiquity. They do not go the whole way. They stop in some of the
intermediate stages of an hundred or a thousand years, and produce
what was then done as a rule for the present day. This is no authority

at all. ...

'The fact is, that portions of antiquity, by proving everything, es-
tablish nothing. It is authority against authority all the way, till we
come to the divine origin of the rights of man, at the Creation. Here
our inquiries find a resting place, and our reason finds a home. . . .

"Every history of the Creation, and every traditionary account,
whether from the lettered or unlettered world, however they may vary
in their opinion or belief or certain particulars, all agree in establishing
one point, the unity of man; by which I mean that all men are of one
1 The Rights of Man (Patriot's Ed., 1925), pp. 20-21.

396 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

degree, and consequently thai al! men are born equal, and with
natural rights. la ihe same manner as if posterity had been con
by creation instead of generation . . .; and consequently, every child bo
into the world must be considered as deriving its existence from God.
The world Is as new to him as it was to the first man that existed, and
Ms natural right in it is of the same kind. . . .

"Hitherto we have spoken only ... of the natural rights of man,
We have now to consider the civil rights of man, and to show how the
one originates from the other. Man did not enter society to become
worse than he was before, nor to have fewer rights than he had before.
but to have those rights better secured. His natural rights are the foun-
dation of his civil rights. But in order to pursue this distinction with
more precision, it is necessary to make the different qualities of natural
and civil rights.

"A few words will explain this. Natural rights are those which apper-
tain to man in his right of existence. . . . Civil rights are those which
appertain to man in right of his being a member of society.

"Every civil right has for its foundation some natural right pre-
existing in the individual, but to the enjoyment of which his individual
power is not, in all cases, sufficiently competent. Of this kind are all
those which relate to security and protection.

"From this short review, it will be easy to distinguish between that
class of natural rights which man retains after entering into society, and
those which he throws into the common stock as a member of society,

"The natural rights which he retains, are all those in which the
power to execute is as perfect in the individual as the right itself. Among
this class, as is before mentioned, are all the intellectual rights, or rights
of the mind: consequently > religion is one of those rights.

"The natural rights which are not retained, are all those which,
though the right is perfect in the individual, the power to execute them
is defective. They answer not his purpose. . . . He therefore deposits
his right in the common stock of society, and takes the arm of society',
of which he is a part, in preference and in addition to his own. Society
grants him nothing. Every man is proprietor in society, and draws on
the capital as a matter of right." 1

No man had written so confidently about human rights since the
time of Locke a hundred years before. And Paine was far more
lucid than the great defender of the Whig Revolution, and in
some respects more cogent. His practical and unpedantic mind
refused to bother with an imaginary state of nature and a hypo-
thetical social contract. Man was a fact. Surely he had a right to
be a man! That merely meant a right to be and do whatever was
requisite for human existence as conditioned by nature herself,

., pp. 64-71.

REVOLUTION7 397

M>^^M»^^

Society was a fact— a man-created fact. It greatly modified the
position of man In the world. Should one assume that society had
no function at all— just accidentally happened in the course of hu-
man experience? No man of the eighteenth century believed that,
-o: even Burke. His concept of society assumed the presence of a
purpose in the slow and complex processes of history and justified
society on the basis of Its service to mankind. Should one assume,
then, that the function of society was to make the condition of
man better or worse? That question, said Paine, could be answered
In only one way. If the function of society was not to better the con-
dition of man, it was an outrage upon intelligence and decency.

Reason must assume, therefore, that society existed, and had been
created, to serve The needs of man. How silly, then, the contention
that society destroyed the rights of man ! It destroyed nothing, took
away nothing. Nor did it grant anything. There was nothing to
grant. The rights of man were complete before society was formed.
AH society did— and that was its primary function— was to perfect
cenain rights which man had always possessed but could not fully
realize without the aid of social and political organization. Any
society, any system of government, which failed in this, failed in
its fundamental purpose and deserved to be destroyed.

This was not particularly subtle reasoning, but it was of a kind
that plain and humble men could fully understand and approve.
In their view it left Mr. Burke and his aristocratic friends not a leg
to stand on. They bought Paine's book as fast as the presses could
ton it out. In Paine's lifetime, it is estimated, over a million copies
oi The Rights of Man were printed and sold in England alone.

Paine was too good a propagandist, too keenly aware of the limi-
tations of the average mind to get himself wound up in nebulous
abstractions about the social contract. There was only one thing
that mattered. That was the legitimacy of government contrary to
the popular will, and Paine quickly threw it out of court.

"It has been thought/5 he observed, "a considerable advance to-
ward establishing the principles of freedom, to say, that government is
a compact between those who govern and those who are governed: but
tins cannot be true, because it is putting the effect before the cause; for
as man must have existed before governments existed, there necessarily
was a time when governments did not exist, and consequently there
could originally exist no governors to form such a compact with.

398 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

"The fact therefore must be, that the individuals themsekes* each in -:;
own personal and sovereign right, entered into a compact with each other *<-
produce a government: and this is the only mode in which eovernrne*r?
have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a righ

to exist.'3

\v

V

When Burke denned government as c;a contrivance of humar
visdonr5 and argued that the rights of man consisted of the ad-
vantages flowing from the discriminating judgments of political

reason as to relative good and evil, Paine5 s retort was that he was
talking nonsense with " astrological, mysterious importance."

"As the wondering audience whom Mr. Burke supposes himself
talking to, may not understand all this learned jargon, I will undertake
to be its interpreter. The meaning, then, good people, of ail this, is,
that government is governed by no principle whatever; that it can maks
evil good, or good evil, just as it pleases. In short, that government i
arbitrary power." 2

s

Arbitrary power was the thing Paine hated above all else on
earth; next to that he hated superstition. No man ever fought
these twin demons more implacably or delivered more telling blows
against them. His political creed was simply that of emancipation
for the individual — not emancipation from society, but from gov-
ernment. In most cases, society, which was natural and self-regu-
lating, would care for his needs better than government:

"To understand the nature and quantity of government proper for
man, it is necessary to attend to his character. As Nature created him
for social life, she fitted him for the station she intended. In all cases
she made his natural wants greater than his individual powers. No one
man is capable, without the aid of society, of supplying his own wants;
and those wrants acting upon every individual, impel the whole of them
into society, as naturally as gravitation acts to a center.

"But she has gone further. She has not only forced man into society,
by a diversity of wants, which the reciprocal aid of each other can
supply, but she has implanted in him a system of social affections, which,
though not necessary to his existence, are essential to his happiness,
There is no period in life when this love for society ceases to act It
begins and ends with our being.

"If we examine, with attention, into the composition and constitution
of man, the diversity of his wants, and the diversity of talents in different
men for reciprocally accommodating the wants of each other, his pro-

1 Ibid., p. 74. * Ibid., p. 160

REVOLUTION

399

pensiiy to society, and consequently to preserve the advantages resulting
from it, we shall easily discover that a great part of what is called sevens
ment Is mere imposition.

"Governmenr is no farther necessary than to supply the few cases to
which society and civilization are not conveniently competent; and
instances are not wanting to show, that everything which government
can usefully add thereto, has been performed by the common consent
of society, without government." 1

In the little pamphlet on Agrarian Justice, which was one of his
later political writings, Paine retreated somewhat from his faith in
ie ::common consent of society53 as the best regulator of human
affairs. Here he was attacking the problem of poverty and propos-
ing a cure. Poverty, he stated, is a product of civilization, the re-
suk of private property, especially private property in land.' Never-
theless he thought private ownership of land necessary in order to
secure the proper cultivation of the earth and provide sustenance
for its inhabitants. The trouble was that cultivation had resulted in
land-monopoly. The gain issuing from the utilization of land by
private individuals had caused men to lose sight of the distinction
between ownership and use, and "the common right of all became
confounded into the cultivated right of the individual." 2 There
was no hope of ever changing that, but the injustice done to the dis-
possessed might, Paine thought, be redressed. To this end he pro-
posed a plan. By the levy of a 10% inheritance tax he would
create a national fund. From this fund he would pay every person
50 years of age or more the sum of ten pounds a year, and to every
person on arrival at the age of 21 he would pay 'the sum of fifteen
pounds as part compensation for the loss of his natural inheritance.
Paine reasoned that the fund was financially well within the
capacity of the country to establish and maintain,' and that it would
alleviate poverty by giving every person a little money to start ia
Iile and providing for his minimum needs after he had reached the
age where his earning capacity began to decline. That this pro-
posal, the world's first old age pension plan joined with a share-the-
wealth program, should have come from one of the most uncom-
promising individualists the world has ever known, is one of those
curious paradoxes that so frequently enliven the study of political
thought. In his own view Paine was not at all inconsistent. The
individual was still his main concern; to secure the individual

*.&&, pp. 240-241. * Miscellaneous Works (Patriot's Ed., 1925), p. 13.

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

against poverty and gain him a measure of economic justice, >
was ready to enlist the coercive power of the state. More than or-
Individualist has become a socialist by a similar shift of merra!
gears. It is one of the easiest of all reversals to make.

VII

It Is courting criticism to place Thomas Paine high among -&*
paladins of political thought. Intramural philosophers have n-*
welcomed him to iheir secluded quadrangles, and practicing states-
men have seldom turned to him for wisdom. But a man whose polit-
ical writings sold into the hundreds of thousands and even millions
of copies cannot be ignored. Whether or not he was an original and
profound thinker, there is no denying that Thomas Paine was one
of the most widely read, and one of the most influential, political
writers who ever lived. Others had more weight with intellectuals,
but Paine swayed the masses as few men have ever done. Nor did
he merely popularize the ideas of other men. The stamp of intel-
lectual Integrity and power Is manifest in everything he \vroie.
Like Shakespeare, he borrowed unhesitatingly from even- con-
venient source; but he was no slavish copyist. He borrowed with
rare discrimination, and imparted to what he borrowed qualities
It did not originally possess.

It was never his aim to mine new veins of political thought or con-
struct a system of political theory. Like his great antagonist. Burke.
he was first of all a fighter. In politics he was the champion of
freedom and democracy, and every line he wrote was Inspired by
some particular cause in which h<. had enlisted. His role was no;
to lead men into new and unfamiliar ways of thought, but to dis-
lodge the enemy on established and familiar ground. In that role
he did not fail. That the writings of Paine stirred the depths of
English and American society and generated much of the drive
which lay behind the democratic reform movements of the early
nineteenth century, is a fact that cannot be disputed. Proof of
this is furnished by the reactionaries themselves. To them Paine
was the most hated of all radicals, unfailingly denounced as ilik
common enemy of mankind."

Paine's most useful, and perhaps most distinctive, contribution
to democratic thought was that, in the language of Parrington, he
gave cca fresh significance and vitality" to the theory of natural

REVOLUTION 401

rizhts "by the assertion of the doctrine of continuous reaffirrnation
•;: me social compact." 1 Refusing to be sunk in a mire of leeal
ieions based on a supposititious social contract in the misty past, he
i-nply asserted what every rational democrat could readily under-
<:and and believe: namely, that every individual comes into the
world with rights that none but himself and his own generation can
limit or contract away. Logically it followed, then., that the people
a: any rime might rightly change their government and adopt
another more conformable to their wishes. It followed also that
no constitution or law could be so hallowed by time or sanctified
by established right as to overrule the will of a majority of the
people. Regardless of the past, regardless of juridical niceties, the
s:ate3 according to Fame's doctrine, must be recognized as an
instrumentality of contemporary popular will. The state was made
for ican, not man for the state.

Paine came back to this point again and again. The only justifi-
cation of the state, he repeated over and over, was its social utility.
I: existed to serve men in offices they could not perform for them-
selves. "\Vhen it ceased to serve, it was a useless encumbrance; when
it went beyond the necessary functions of service, It was pure tyr-
anny. Bentham himself did put the utilitarian concept of the state
more clearly or forcibly. It was for Bentharn and his followers to
evolve the full philosophy of utilitarianism. Paine was no utilitarian
at all by their criteria. But It is a fact none the less that his persist-
ent hammering home of the social utility- doctrine did much to pre-
pare a popular welcome for their philosophy when It finally emerged.

Few men did more than Thomas Paine to make political democ-
racy a fact, and certainly no man can be said to have done more to
shape the ideas with which the common man in England and
America approached the responsibilities of government when the
power finally came into his hands. The masses were more his pupils
than of any other political writer of the eighteenth or nineteenth
centuries, not excepting even Rousseau. He taught the masses to
believe, as he believed, in democracy as the infallible producer of
economic justice. He did not foresee, nor did any who accepted the
gospel of democracy In his time, the coming of an age of Industrial
autocracy In which political democracy alone would not be enough
10 guarantee the rights of man.

1V. L. Panington, The Colonial Mind (1927), pp. 332-333.

402 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

REFERENCES

Burke, E., Works (World's Classics Ed.3 6 vols., London, 1906-1920;.
Cobban, A., Edmund Burke and the Revolt against the Eighteenth O--

(London, 1929J.
Coker, F. W., Readings in Political Philosophy (rev. ed.s New York, t—;

Chap. XXIV.

Comvay, M. D.3 The Life of Thomas Paine (2 vols., New York, 1892>.
Cook, T. L5 A History of Political Philosophy (New York, 1936), (>r-

XXIV. ' ""

Dunning, W. A., ^4 History of Political Theories from Rousseau to Spencer i'Xev,-

York, 1920)', Chaps. Ill, V.

MacCunn, J., The Political Philosophy of Edmund Burke (London, 1913;.
Murray, R. H., The History of Political Science from Plato to the Present ,Xe*,v

York, 1926), Chap. IX.

Murray, R. H., Edmund Burke: a Biography (London, 1931).
Paine, T., Works (ed. by M. D. Conway, 4 vols., New York, 1894-1836
Sabine, G. H., A History of Political Theory (New York, 1937), pp. 607-6r

CHAPTER XX

AMERICAN ECHOES

I

ON the American side of the Atlantic there was not, before
the end of the nineteenth century, much to inspire univer-
sal philosophies of politics. \Vhile there was no dearth of
political literature and political discussion, there was little in the way
f comprehensive and systematic political thinking. Shoals of books
and pamphlets on political subjects rolled from American presses,
inc the editorial sanctum and lecture platform resounded with
political debate; but the ideas which bestrode the American arena
v;ere mostly European ideas in .American garb. Few could be
counted as remarkable contributions to the world's stock of political
Ideas, and fewer still were wholly native to American soil. The
American scene was essentially provincial, and so was its political
thought. But there was, nevertheless, on the American side of the
ocean an immense amount of thinking down to fundamentals in
political matters and a positive genius in the adaptation and am-
pliation of borrowed ideas. If the New World echoed the Old,
ie echoes not infrequently returned from the American sounding
board with augmented volume and strangely altered tone.
^ The chronicles of American political thought naturally divide
iemselves into six major periods. These are: ihe colonial period,
the period of the Revolution, the formative period, the period of
agrarian democracy, the period of the struggle over slavery- and
s:a:es! rights5 and the period of modern industrialism. All but the
last of these belong to the preponderantly provincial era of Ameri-
can political thought and will be treated as such in the present
chapter. Recent American political thought will be dealt with as
pan of the latter-day thinking of the world in general.

II

^ The aggrieved colonials who precipitated the American Revolu-
tion did not conceive themselves to be contending for new and un-
precedented rights, and had little consciousness of the Utopian
nussion with which they are often credited. They stood, as they

403

404 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

saw it, on Incontestable ground, demanding rights which were as
concretely and positively established as anything could be. They
claimed nothing ihat had not been recognized in the colonies for
a century or more and which they supposed had been equally recog-
nized in the mother country. How they came to believe what mil-
lions of Englishmen, including many who sympathized with the
colonial cause, did not believe, cannot be understood without m
examination of the trends of political thought in the colonies prior
to the controversy which led to the Revolution.

The foundations of practically all the British colonies in the re-
gion of the North Atlantic were laid between 1607 and 1700, a
period which included most of England's major political disturb-
ances. Emigrants to the colonies, from whatever class of the pop-
ulation they came, were, in consequence of this fact, politically
sensitized to a high degree. Every political idea that appeared in
England was promptly transported to the colonies and put to work.
But the colonies, being isolated and remote, obviously presented
very different situations from those obtaining in the mother coun-
try. Applying old ideas to new conditions, and being largely out
of touch with the homeland while doing so, the colonists inevitably
arrived at conclusions at variance with doctrines obtaining in the

mother country.

On five points of major importance the colonists came to think
in terms unfamiliar to the average Englishman, though basing their
ideas in every instance upon concepts imported from England and
believing apparently that they were following English opinion
First, they developed a much firmer faith in the contract theory of
political origins and an unshakeable belief in the contractual nature
of the governmental institutions of the colonies themselves. Second,
they came to have an extraordinary respect for written instrument
of government as definite and rightful sources of political authority,
Third, they became accustomed to the idea of changing political
powers and structures whenever conditions seemed to require,
Fourth, they achieved, in the northern and central portions, a
largely Galvinistic conception of secular and ecclesiastical relations*
Fifth, they began to question the basic legality of their subject

to English law.

From the prominence it had in the English civil disturbances of
1642-1688 it was to be expected that the social contract doctrine

fftf»i,ll', ,

^fiAL •.,

*h& ';

,t #l*.'v

AMERICAN ECHOES i£ 405

«r ^ *

would occupy a large place in colonial thought. It was
moreover, that colonial conditions and experiences should give their
verdict in favor of the Lockeian over the Hobbesian interpretation
of that tremendous postulate. Government In the wilds of the west-
ern continent either had to be improvised by the men on the spot
or authorized by some act assuming to extend the sovereignty of a
European nation to the new hemisphere. When the settlers cov-
enanted among themselves, as In the Mayflower Compact and the
Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, there was no doubting the
contractual character of the proceeding or the mutuality of obliga-
tion between subjects and rulers. When the king chartered a trad-
ins company and gave it political authority In the domains assigned
to It there was again a situation which seemed to partake of the
nature of a contract. The powers which company officials could
wield over the colonists were definitely limited by the charter.
Furthermore, as a matter of actual fact, the power of the king him-
self to exercise authority in realms beyond the sea was greatly at-
tenuated. His ability to apply coercion in those distant lands was
largely dependent upon the willingness of the American settlements
to accept his sovereignty. Here again was a situation to confirm
the belief in mutual covenants between subject and ruler. In
course of the colonial years the governmental arrangements of the
English colonies were frequendy changed. Charter terms were
modified; charters were revoked and replaced by new charters;
charters were transformed into wholly political imtniments, the
authority of the monarch supplanting that of the trading company;
and in one instance the charter itself was transferred to the colony
and held as a fundamental instrument of government. In conse-
quence of these experiences it seemed quite evident to the Ameri-
can population that political institutions, and their own In particu-
lar, were the product of specific agreements under which subjects
tad rights as well as obligations.

Political authority,, in the colonial view, was both an ascending
and a descending phenomenon. By compact it ascended from the
governed through the consent of wills; by delegation from the sov-
ereign It also descended from above. Delegation originally was from
the king, whose authority was deemed to be contractual. But, as
rime went on, delegation from the monarch seemed less in accord
nith the facts than delegation by the terms of a definite and partial-

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

lar written instrument. Hence the colonists came to think of sov-
ereignty as vested, not in a certain person or body of persons but
in the fundamental law of the body politic. The issue in so manv
political disputes of the colonial period turned upon the provisions
of a charter, statute^ or other written law that the American mind
came naturally to the idea of a sovereign constitution binding rulers
and subjects alike. From this it was an easy step to the doctrine
that the only just government was one of laws, not of men, and to
the belief that hypothetical speculations as to the original social
contract did not matter. For, according to the colonial view the
civil society in which they were placed did not go back to a pre-
historic social contract, but rested upon specific acts of consent
of recent and continuing character.

Political experimentation became as natural for the population
of the American colonies as it was unnatural for the people of the
mother country. Whenever change is frequent the trial-and-error
attitude is bound to arise. Frequent changes had to be made in the
political institutions of the American colonies for the simple reason
that social and economic conditions were changing too rapidly for
any permanent establishment of governmental arrangements to be
made. The hundred years from 1620 to 1720 saw the unbroken
wilderness between the seaboard and the Appalachian mountain
chain transformed into a string of highly organized common-
wealths extending from New Hampshire to Georgia. Everything
was in flux, and political systems were of necessity tentative and
temporary. In every colony political history was a story of old
forms and processes of government being constantly revised or su-
perseded. Thus the colonial mind became conditioned to political
change and lost all fear of innovation.

Democracy gained a place in colonial political thought not
through the preference of the colonists for democratic principles in
theory but through their actual experience in community life. To a
large extent this was attributable to the Calvinistic doctrines which,
save in the South, prevailed in their ecclesiastical institutions. Cal-
vinism insisted upon one thing above all others: the absolute free-
dom of the individual conscience. No political or ecclesiastical
hierarchy was allowed to mediate between the individual and
his God. The church was a company of communicants who had
covenanted to dedicate themselves to God and conduct their lives

AMERICAN ECHOES 407

according to Bible precepts and principles. The Individual congre-
gation was the controlling unit of organization and owed obedience
10 God alone. The members of the congregation regarded them-
selves as a brotherhood voluntarily bound together in solemn cove-
nant. Elders, deacons, and clergy only by the consent of the breth-
ren and all vital questions must be referred to them for decision.
Though in practice there were numerous deviations from this
democratic norm of church government. It was the general rule,
particularly In the New England and central colonies. Since the
congregation was virtually coextensive with village and urban com-
munities, as these arose, the democratic polity of the church was
almost unconsciously transferred to the civil government of local
communities. The town meeting in the political sphere corre-
sponded with the congregation In the ecclesiastical. In the southern
colonies the democratic principle did not find fertile soil, but on
the rapidly extending frontier, where individualism and equality
were indisputable facts, it was received as truth from God.

Though at first the colonists accepted without question the Im-
perialist dictum that, being English subjects, they were as fully sub-
ject to English sovereignty and English law In the colonies as In the
homeland, they gradually came to doubt and challenge that asser-
tion. At the outset of the colonial era the laws of England made
no provisions for the government of overseas dominions. Since,
up to that time, England had no colonies to govern, both the com-
mon law and the acts of Parliament were silent on the subject. It
was assumed, however, that English subjects owed allegiance to
their home government wherever they might go or be and could
not sever that allegiance by removing beyond the seas. Hence it
was assumed to be properly within the prerogative of the king to
extend to English subjects in the colonies the same rights and priv-
ileges that the home population enjoyed and to hold them to the
same standard of compliance with English law. In course of time,
however, it became apparent that the whole body of English law
could not be applied in the colonies as in England. There were
local conditions with which the home authorities were not and could
not be familiar. These required special treatment. The home gov-
ernment recognized this fact and made a practice of delegating
to the various colonial governments a limited power of action in
matters of local concern. But in the exercise of this power they had

408 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

to stay within bounds. Any act of a colonial government contra-
vening the laws of England was null and void and might be set aside
regardless of the wishes of the colonial population. This unsatis-
factory state of affairs deflected colonial thinking to new lines of
rationalization. The colonial governments, it was argued, were not
in the same position as political subdivisions such as boroughs or
municipal corporations. They were not subdivisions at all, but
new political communities which had voluntarily consented to sub-
mit to the English crown and be governed by English law. There-
fore, the argument ran, they were coordinate, not subordinate,
governments and were bound by English law only to the extent of
their consent. This doctrine made rapid headway in the years just
preceding the Revolution.

Ill

When Mother England decided, about the middle of the eight-
eenth century, that she had not taken sufficient parental Interest in
the affairs of her North American offspring and sought to draw
them closer to her, she found them, to her vast surprise, no longer
wanting to be mothered. A century and a half of rather casual
concern about the management of colonial affairs, had begotten
the inevitable consequences of parental neglect. The children had
learned to shift for themselves and preferred to do so. Not that they
had any active wish to disavow their parentage and withdraw from
the family circle. Quite the contrary. Pride of family and lineage
was exceedingly strong among the colonies, in fact second only to
their pride in themselves; which, unhappily, had grown to such
proportions that they could not willingly preserve the family con-
nection on any other basis than equality. When the mother coun-
try refused this concession a rupture became inevitable, and in the
end it meant not only a rupture of political connections, but a break
with the theories of government then prevalent In England.

Since the Revolution of 1688 English political thought had cooled
to a settled and rigid constitutionalism pragmatically adjusting the
prerogatives of Crown and Parliament and laying the rights and
duties of Englishmen almost wholly in the lap of the latter. That
British subjects could have autonomous rights, underived from any
grant of Parliament, imprescriptible by Parliamentary authority
was wholly incompatible with the legal theory on which the English

AMERICAN ECHOES

constitutional system had come to be predicated. The colonists,
reading history in the light of their own experience and preposses-
sion for equality, insisted that they not only had such rights but
had enjoyed them from the very first. That these claims were not
in accord with accepted constitutional theory and practice daunted
them not at all. There was an earlier and more congenial body of
English political doctrine to fall back upon, and they turned ac-
cordingly to the writings of the great English revolutionists (espe-
cially Locke) as to the pages of Holy Writ. Here they found a per-
fect brief for their case; and, after Thomas Palne's devastating
attack, in Common Sense, on monarchical institutions, even con-
stimiional monarchy, there wras no longer any respect among the
American patriots for the conservative principles of English consti-
tutionalism. American political thought had gone completely
revolutionary.

The rebels knew7 exactly what they didn't want. They didn't
want to be taxed by a government three thousand miles across the
sea, a government in which they had no direct voice. Nor did they
want their commerce controlled by such a government, or their
liberties of person and property dependent upon prosecutors and
judges subject to Its bidding. But, when they objected to the stamp
tax or the Impost on tea and cried, £CNo taxation without represen-
tation,53 they wrere met with the argument that the taxes were fair
and reasonable (wrhlch was true; they were not excessive or even
burdensome); that Parliament represented not certain sections or
classes, but the whole English nation (which was also true in legal
theory) ; and furthermore that the fact that the colonies elected no
members of Parliament was no discrimination, because the same
was true of many important subdivisions of England Itself. When
they objected to the Navigation Acts and other trade regulations,
they were told that these were for the good of the Empire as a
whole, would benefit the colonies as much or more than any other
part of the Empire (which in fact they did), and were constitution-
ally within the province of Parliament. And when they most ve-
hemently objected to the Writs of Assistance and other enforcement
measures., they were reminded of the sanctity of law and the neces-
sity of rigorous suppression of violations.

There was no "out" for the resisters but to appeal to a higher law
than the British Constitution. Protagonists of the Puritan and Whig

410 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

Revolutions the century before had vindicated their course by
claiming the sanction of natural rights and the social compact
If these were good arguments for Pym, Hampden, Cromwell, and
William of Orange, they were equally good for the colonial cause.
Moreover, as we have already observed, the political experience of
the colonies had been such as to impart to these doctrines in the
New World a freshness and reality they did not possess in the Old.

The colonial view was vigorously and eloquently expounded.
Militant pens wrere busy in all of the colonies; most prominently
however, in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. James
Otis and Samuel and John Adams of Massachusetts; John
Dickinson, James Wilson, and Thomas Paine of Pennsylvania;
and Thomas Jefferson of Virginia are the men who wrote most
cogently and effectively on the colonial side.

James Otis, best known for his philippic against the Writs of
Assistance, wrote in 1764 the first widely circulated pamphlet
rationalizing the colonial position. In this, after discussing various
theories of the origin of government — divine grace, force, property,
compact — and dismissing them all, Otis said, "Let no man think
I am about to commence advocate for despotism^ because I affirm
that government is founded on the necessity of our natures; and
that an original supreme Sovereign, absolute, and uncontrollable,
earthly power must exist in and preside over every society; from
whose final decision there can be no appeal but directly to Heaven.
It is therefore originally and ultimately in the people. I say this su-
preme absolute power is originally and ultimately in the people; and
they never did hi fact freely, nor can they rightfully evoke an ab-
solute, unlimited renunciation of this divine right." l From this
premise, which excluded the possibility of a Hobbesian compact
or any other constraint upon popular sovereignty, Otis deduced
the conclusion that no constitutional arrangement that ever was
or could be established in England could lawfully deprive the
colonists of their inherent and natural rights as men. The only
valid basis of government was the consent of the governed; and
they could never lawfully renounce their right of consent. Where-
fore it followed that the people of the colonies were free to object
to the acts of Parliament and had a right to insist that no legislation
be enforced upon them without their consent.

1 Quoted in B. F. Wright, A Source Book of American Political Theory (1929), pp. 46-47,

AMERICAN ECHOES 411

In so far as propagandist*! could do the work, Samuel Adams,
more than any other man, was the father of the American Revolu-
tion. Indefatigable agitator and voluminous writer for the news-
papers, Samuel Adams voiced the spirit and thought of the Revolu-
tion twenty years before it arrived, and by his persistent opposition
to Toryism In all forms he roused the American populace to vigilant
concern for their liberties. Politics was Ms game — in fact his bread
and butter — but he was not too occupied with the practical side to
master the theoretical. He was a diligent student of the great poli-
tical classics and bolstered his arguments with liberal citations from
Grotius, Pufendorf, Montesquieu, Hume5 Locke, and other great
political thinkers. Much of his heavy ammunition was drawn from
Locke. On Locke's doctrine of natural rights Adams squarely
rested his contention that the colonists could not be lawfully taxed
without iheir own consent. Property, Locke had said, was one of
the inalienable rights of man, and the preservation of property the
chief end of government. How, then, could any constitution validly
authorize the taking of property without the consent of the owner?
The English constitution, said Adams, was never designed to es-
tablish authority, in Parliament or elsewhere, to violate the rights
of man. Its purpose, from Magna Charta down, was to perfect and
safeguard those -rights. Obviously, therefore, any statute infringing
upon them was null and void. The rights of the colonists, he trium-
phantly proclaimed, were even more fully protected than the rights
of other Englishmen: for they were surrounded with the additional
paling of the colonial charters, which conferred immunities beyond
the reach of Parliament.

John Adams, though chiefly remembered as the second president
of the United States, was one of the most prolific political essayists
of his generation, and one of the most acute. Unlike his doctrinaire
kinsman, he took little stock in abstractions and generalities, such
as natural rights and social contracts. In the revolutionary struggle
he stood with the radicals in action but not In thought. Though
not quarreling with the natural-rights-social-compact theory in
the large, he thought it had little bearing on the controversy be-
tween England and the colonies. The real issue, as he saw it,
was one of practical constitutional principles. Great Britain had
reached a point in her constitutional development, he believed,
where former concepts must be reconsidered and adapted to new

412 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

™"^^^^^^^^^"^^^^^^^^^^™"^^^™^~™'^^^^^~— " """ _^ '.._ -I P^ >V^ -^H^M^^^^^M..^^^^^ .^^^^^^^^^

situations. The Empire could no longer be conducted on a parent-
child basis, but must be acknowledged as a partnership of equals
which In fact It had become. The British constitution, he felt'
should be looked upon as the fundamental law of the Empire'
determining the equal rights and duties of the partners. In that
case an act of any partner in derogation of the equal position
of another would be null and void, and should be so adjudged bv
the courts.

John Dickinson has been called the "spokesman of the Colonial
Whigs 3" a title which places him somewhere between the radicals
and the Tories. He was perhaps the most conciliatory of all ad-
vocates of the colonial cause. Gripped by the grand Idea of imperial
unity, he was ready to concede almost everything to the mother
country except the right to tax the colonies against their will. That
no true Whig could allow; for the essence of Whiggism was the
special rights of property. The Whig approved without reservation
the dictum of Locke that the chief end of government was the pro-
tection of property, and believed that control of the purse by those
subject to the exactions of government was a vital and inalienable
right. When, therefore, the English Parliament undertook to lew
taxes to which the colonies objected, John Dickinson was stirred to
battle. If Parliament could extinguish the right of consent in the
colonies it might do the same at home, and there would be no
security for property anywhere. In his widely read Letters from a
Pennsylvania Farmer Dickinson (who was a wealthy lawyer and a
gentleman farmer) undertook to show that the tax program of the
English ministry was a gross infraction of the constitutional rights
of property owners in the colonies. The mere fact that a hundred
years of acknowledged precedent declared the contrary only fired
his zeal to prove the point. He would grant the right of Parliament
to levy an "imposition" for the regulation of trade, if the primary
purpose was not to raise money. But where the fundamental object
was to mulct the owner of his property to enrich the public treasury,
Mr. Dickinson said nay. This was a violation of the "unalterable
right of property/' which belonged as much to Americans as Eng-
lishmen. Almost to the last Dickinson counseled moderation, hop-
ing, no doubt, that English Whigs, eloquently led by Pitt and
Burke, wrould prevail upon Parliament to see the American view
and avoid a rupture. But when it finally became apparent that the

AMERICAN ECHOES 413

ministry was going to ride down all opposition, Dickinson put in
with the radicals and plumped for revolution.

James Wilson is one of the almost forgotten men of American
history'. A Scotsman who, after graduation from the University of
Edinburgh, emigrated to Philadelphia, read law under John Dick-
inson, became a leader at the bar and an even greater leader in
public affairs, Wilson is remembered, if at all, by reason of his
service In the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and his later
service on the Supreme Court of the United States. To the keen
legal mind of Wilson also should be credited the argumentation
underlying the resolution of the First Continental Congress which
denied the power of Parliament to make binding la\v for the Ameri-
can colonies. In a paper published In August, 1774, Wilson, after
restating Locke's doctrine of natural rights, derived as a conse-
quence the postulate "that the happiness of society is the first law
of every government." This law, he continued, must "control
every political maxim" and "regulate the legislature itself.35 Unless
this law be paramount and be faithfully observed, there is no
liberty. Then he raised the question., Could the supremacy of the
British Parliament Insure the happiness of the American colonies?
Obviously not. Not even when they wanted to do so could Par-
liaments assure the happiness of overseas populations, because
they could not have a sufficiently close knowledge of colonial
conditions and needs. To protect themselves against the errors
and misdeeds of Parliament the people of England had certain
means of control and restraint. These were not shared by the
American colonists, who If bound by the acts of Parliament, were
bound as slaves, not as freemen. But the colonists were not slaves;
they were free English citizens. Hence it must follow that the
acts of Parliament were not legally binding upon them without
their consent.

Of Thomas Paine we have already spoken at length in Chap-
ter XIX. Despite his prodigious contribution to the American Revo-
lution, Paine cannot be counted as strictly an American political
thinker. The American Revolution was only six months ahead
when Paine arrived in Philadelphia. In the debate leading up to
the outbreak of rebellion he had no part3 and though his Common
Sense and Crisis were unquestionably the most powerful political
documents put out during the war, they could scarcely be called

414 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

indigenous. Their arguments reflected a universal rather than a
purely American point of view.

The name of Thomas Jefferson is indelibly associated with the
Declaration of Independence. Actually the Declaration was the
handiwork of a committee consisting of Jefferson, Franklin, Adams
(John), Livingstone, and Sherman; but, because Jefferson pre-
pared the first draft and the philosophy and phraseology of the
final document are largely his, the chief authorship is generally
imputed to him. It was his greatest contribution to the literature
of the Revolution, the greatest perhaps by any man. In two hun-
dred words it summed up the whole philosophy on which the rebel
cause was founded. It was the philosophy of the English Revolution
epitomized by Jefferson, and indeed broadened; for by changing
the Lockeian trinity — life, liberty, and property — to life, liberty,
and pursuit of happiness, Jefferson incorporated in the American
credo a note of humanitarianism which was lacking in seventeenth-
century Whiggism. Jefferson was only thirty-three when he drafted
the Declaration. His greatest service to the cause of democracy in
America and his most extensive political writings were to come in
the period after independence had been achieved. We shall deal
with his political ideas more at length in our survey of that period.

IV

Long before independence was won it became apparent that the
political philosophy of the Revolution would be exposed to a severe
test as soon as the American people had fully embarked on the bil-
lowy seas of self-government. Not even the crisis of war and inva-
sion had deterred the states from ominous adventuring in the un-
broken wilderness of majority rule. Instead of acquiring caution
from these experiences, they were seemingly bestirred to greater
rashness. Finding themselves, at the close of the struggle for inde-
pendence, bound together in a loose federation devoid of restraining
authority, they plunged into an orgy of inflation, debt-cancellation,
property-confiscation, and ruinous commercial rivalries which cast
a paE of depression upon the land. Business was paralyzed; fortunes
and savings were swept away; nothing was secure, not even titles to
land. The intended beneficiaries of this leveling legislation quite
often suffered as much as its intended victims. Their expected gains
melted away in the universal demoralization of economic life.

AMERICAN ECHOES 415

The swing of the pendulum Is not always swift, but It Is as certain
as anything in the sphere of political behavior. Having tasted
popular rule and found it bitter; having tested the democratic dog-
mas of the Revolution and found them disillusioning, multitudes of
Americans began to wish for a change. A reaction, led by men de-
voted to the Interests of property and business, had definitely set in
by 1785. By 1787 It had gained sufficient momentum to force the
calling of the Philadelphia Convention to propose revisions to the
Articles of Confederation, and by the end of the following year it
was strong enough to secure the ratification of the new Federal
Constitution framed by that assembly of delegates.

In the struggle over the new Constitution American political
thought rose to stratospheric altitudes. Never before and never
since has political debate In this country attained so high a plane of
philosophical inquiry and argument. The doctrines of the Revo-
lution had been well learned, so well In fact that the conservative
reaction could not hope to win on discontent alone. A majority of
the population might welcome a change, but they were not ready
for a return to the old order. They would be glad to see the federal
system Improved, rendered "more adequate to the exigencies of the
Union/3 but they were still passionately attached to natural rights,
popular sovereignty, and the other great watchwords of the Revolu-
tion. Not even for stability and prosperity would they surrender
these priceless boons. Popular leaders like Samuel Adams, Patrick
Henry, Luther Martin, and Thomas Jefferson, though conceding
the necessity of stronger and better coordinated government, In-
sisted that this be accomplished within the framework of the Dec-
laration of Independence. The Federalists had to meet them on their
own ground; not only had to attack their fundamental tenets, but
had to provide a substitute philosophy of freedom which would
serve to lure moderately inclined men from the Anti-Federalist to
the Federalist camp. Thus was the discussion raised from the level
of mere expediency to one of fundamental political theory.

Relying upon the trusty armaments of the natural rights school,
Anti-Federalist writers and speakers insisted that the federal system
must be founded upon the principle of equality. The existing con-
federation, they said, was a compact between equals; territory,
population, wealth made no difference. It had required the consent
of all the states to make it, and under its terms they stood on an

416 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

equal footing. It could not be dissolved without the consent of the
state legislatures: and, if dissolved, the states were merely thrown
back into their original condition of independence and equality.
Even though an attempt were made to form a new union by disre-
garding the state legislatures and appealing directly to conventions
elected by the people, the principle of equality could not be escaped;
for that would simply be a return to the state of nature wherein
political communities, like individual men, are equally free and
equally independent. After thus denying the underlying validity of
the new Constitution, the Anti-Federalists proceeded to smite it hip
and thigh, sparing no detail in their withering assault.

The defense of the Constitution against this frontal attack pro-
duced America's greatest political treatise. Alexander Hamilton,
James Madison, and John Jay were its authors. In a series of articles
published in New York newspapers between October, 1787, and
April, 1788, they expounded and defended the theory of balanced
and limited government with an opulence of intellectual and liter-
ary genius which has placed The Federalist, as this collection of
papers has come to be known, high among the world's masterpieces
of political literature. It is one of the few American books on gov-
ernment which have achieved world-wide repute and recognition.
Since the articles were all signed with the pseudonym Publius, there
has been some question as to the apportionment of honors among
the authors. Modern historical scholars generally ascribe 51 articles
to Hamilton, 29 to Madison, and 5 to Jay, and agree that it was
Hamilton who planned the series and supervised their publication.
The writing of the most difficult and profound portions of the work
fell, however, to Madison.

The twin pillars upholding the proposed constitutional structure
were a federal plan subordinating state equality to national unity
and a threefold scheme of checks and balances in the organic ar-
rangements of the governmental system. Both were innovations;
both went down to the very bedrock of political theory. Common
to both was the fundamental concept of division and limitation,
denying concentrated authority even to a sovereign people. To
justify in principle these basic ideas and defend the Constitution in
every other essential was the task to which the authors of The Federal-
ist addressed themselves. But instead of taking up one by one, with-
out logical sequence, the chaotic multitude of objections that were

AMERICAN ECHOES 417

being flung at it the brilliant and orderly mind of Hamilton con-
ceived the magnificently simple plan of a systematized series which
would give the reader a clear and connected analysis first of the
general principles and then of the detailed provisions of the new
governmental plan. In carrying out this design the authors trav-
ersed the whole field of political science and produced a complete
and well-knit treatise on government.

The Philadelphia Convention had witnessed a sharp cleavage
between the dogmatic idealism of the radical group and the unbend-
ing conservatism of the reactionaries. Between the two, fortunatelv

j 7

there stood a masterly faction of moderates, who skillfully brought
the two extremes of opinion together on the great compromises that
make up the foundation stones of the Constitution. Essentially
conservative, keenly realizing the need of strong and stable govern-
ment, yet having a strong prepossession for individual rights (espe-
cially rights of property), these moderates perceived the possibility
of uniting the American people in a system of government that
would concentrate power where concentration was needed for uni-
formity and strength, but would still constrain and circumscribe in
directions necessary for the protection of both state and individual
rights. They won the Convention to their view and framed the
Constitution on that principle. In The Federalist Hamilton and
Madison, both leading members of the Philadelphia Convention,
supplied a rationale for the work of that assembly.

The point of view adopted by the authors of The Federalist was
consistently that of the practical statesman considering theories and
principles in the light of human experience over the whole span of
history; testing every institution by the known realities of actual,
everyday government. This calm and analytical approach is ad-
mirably illustrated by the tenth paper of the series, in which Madi-
son put popular government under the microscope and revealed its
danger points.

"Among the numerous advantages promised by a well-constructed
Union/' wrote the scholarly Virginian, "none deserves to be more
accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the vio-
lence of faction. The friend of popular governments never finds himself
so much alarmed for their character and fate as when he contemplates
their propensity to this dangerous vice. . . , The instability, injustice,
and confusion introduced into public councils, have, in truth, been the

418 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

mortal diseases under which popular governments have everywhere
perished; as they continue to be the favorite and fruitful topics from
which the adversaries to liberty derive iheir most specious declama-
tions. . . .

"By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting
to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by
some common Impulse of passion, or of Interest, adverse to the rights of
other citizens, or 10 the permanent and aggregate interests of the
community. . . .

"The latent causes of faction are . . . sown in the nature of man; and
we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity,
according to the different circumstances of civil society. A zeal for
different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and
many other points, as well of speculation as of practice ; an attachment
of different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and
power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been in-
teresting to human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties,
Inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more
disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their
common good. So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall Into
mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents Itself,
the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to
kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.
But the most common and durable source of factions has been the
various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and
those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests In
society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under
a like discrimination. A landed Interest, a manufacturing interest, a
mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests,
grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different
classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of
these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of
modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the
necessary and ordinary operations of the government." l

Had those lines appeared in this morning's paper instead of the
New York Packet of November 23, 1787, they could not more per-
fectly explain the bedlam of competing interest-groups which
threatens the solvency and stability of the American nation — the
endless turmoil born of the relentless drives of veterans, farmers,
labor unions, utilities, and hordes of other "factions" to sat-
isfy their particular interests regardless of all other considerations;
the muddled course of the ship of state, zig-zagging aimlessly hither

1 The Federalist (Everyman's Library, 2911), No. x.

AMERICAN ECHOES 419

and yon In response to the multitude of rival hands at the helm.
It was not merely a prophetic utterance but one founded upon a
close and penetrating study of the governments of the past.

"There are two methods/". Madison pointed out? "of curing the

mischiefs of faction: the one. bv removing; Its causes; the other, bv con-

••' * i*j j <* *

trolling its effects.

"There are again two methods of removing the causes of faction: the
one, by destroying the liberty which Is essential to its existence [the
method of Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler]; the other, by giving to every
citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests [a
classless societvl.

* — '

"It could never be more trulv said than of the first remedv, that It

« ,7

was worse than the disease. Liberty is to faction what air Is to fire, an
aliment without which It instantly expires. But it could not be less folly
to abolish liberty, which Is essential to political life, because It nourishes
faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is es-
sential to animal life, because it imparts to fire Its destructive agency.
"The second expedient is as Impracticable as the first would be un-
wise. As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty
to exercise it, different opinions will be formed. As long as the connec-
tion subsists between his reason and his self-love, his opinions and his
passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former
will be the objects to which the latter will attach themselves. The diver-
sity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate,
is not less an Insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of Interests. The pro-
tection of these faculties is the first object of government. From the
protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the
possession of different de^**«es and kinds of property Immediately
results: and from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of
the respective proprietors, ensues the division of the society Into different
interests and parties." l

Observe how fully Madison grasped the realities of human
nature and their inescapable effects on political behavior. Also
note how clearly he saw through the natural rights theory and used
it to reinforce his argument. One basic cause of factional strife is
liberty. By abolishing liberty factionlsm can be suppressed. But
the extinction of liberty is worse than the evils of faction. The
second basic cause of factionism5 wherever there is sufficient liberty
of thought and action, is the enormous variation of human faculties,
motives, and interests. Mould human behavior to a single pattern?

1 Ibid.

420 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

It cannot be done, and should not be attempted. The faculties with
which men are endowed by nature make up the very substratum of
those natural rights which it is the first duty of government to pro-
tect and conserve. How, then, may faction be combated?

"The inference to which we are brought,55 said Madison, "Is, that
the causes of faction cannot be removed, and that relief is only to be
sought in the means of controlling its effects.

cclf a faction consists of less than a majority, relief Is supplied by the
republican principle, which enables the majority to defeat its sinister
views by regular vote. It may clog the administration, it may convulse
the society; but it will be unable to execute and mask its violence under
the forms of the Constitution. When a majority is Included in a faction,
the form of popular government, on the other hand, enables It to sacri-
fice to its ruling passion or Interest both the public good and the rights
of other citizens. To secure the public good and private rights against
the danger of such a faction, and at the same time preserve the spirit
and the form of popular government, is then the great object to which
our inquiries are directed. . . .

"By what means is this object obtainable? Evidently by one of two
only. Either the existence of the same passion or Interest in a majority
at the same time must be prevented, or the majority, having such co-
existent passion or interest, must be rendered, by their number and
local situation, unable to concert and carry Into effect schemes of op-
pression. If the Impulse and the opportunity be suffered to coincide,
we well know that neither moral nor religious motives can be relied on
as an adequate control. They are not found to be such on the injustice
and violence of individuals, and lose their efficacy in proportion to the
number combined together, that Is, in proportion as their efficacy
becomes needfull.

"From this view of the subject it may be concluded that a pure de-
mocracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of
citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can
admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or
interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a
communication and concert result from the form of government Itself;
and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker
party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies
have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been
found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and
have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in
their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of
government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to
a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time
be perfectly equalised and assimilated in their possessions, their opin-
ions, and their passions.

AMERICAN ECHOES 421

•*A republic, by which 1 mean a government la which the scheme of
representation takes place, opens a different prospect and promises the
cure for which we are seeking.55 l

The remainder of the article endeavored to show how, bv the

* *

refinements of representation in an Indirect system of government,
the tendency to factionlsm rnlghi be offset; and especially how the
new Constitution, by confiding certain Interests to the national and
others to the state or local governments and by employing Indi-
rect and constitutionally limited modes of action, would promote
thai end.

We have quoted at length from this essay, because it is not only
one of the best in The Federalist^ but one of the most penetrating
discussions of the fundamentals of free government In all the pages
of political literature. Blending a close observation of actual polit-
ical phenomena with a thorough knowledge of history and an
assiduous study of the great classics of political thought, Madison
unerringly cut to the very core of the problem of popular govern-
ment. How to maintain liberty and yet have a government of suffi-
cient strength and independence to withstand the pernicious drives
of self-centered pressure groups3 a government responsive to the
popular will but Immune to the vices of demagogy and factlon3 a
government of and by all the people and likewise for the equal
advantage and benefit of all — that has ever been and is to-day the
unsolved problem of free government.

The authors of The Federalist did not hold up the newr Constitu-
tion as a perfect solution of this age-old problem, but they did
argue, and with great cogency, that It was better designed to that
result than the Articles of Confederation^ better perhaps than any
previous instrument of government in the his tor}7 of the world.
Beholding on a large scale in American political life to-day the very
evils which the Fathers thought the Constitution would cure, it is
natural to rate them as poor prophets. But we must not forget the
assumptions on which their judgment was based. They assumed,
and had no reason to assume the contrary, that their country would
remain a sparsely populated agricultural nation; that fortunes
would remain small and that concentrated wealth would never
play a large part in public affairs; that the ownership of property
would continue to be widely diffused; that a great urban proletariat

422 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

would never appear on American soil; that slavery was a dying
Institution and would gradually disappear; that public office would
always be the privilege of the upper classes and that the spoils sys-
tem would never corrupt the American nation; that the suffrage
would always be restricted to taxpayers or property owners; and
that the American population would always be chiefly composed
of native Americans of Anglo-Saxon descent. On these assumptions,
their predictions regarding the Constitution were well founded.
The fact that the Constitution has survived, though not without
considerable adaptation, the greatest social and economic trans-
formation In the history of mankind Indicates what might have
happened had the conditions of political society remained as the

Fathers expected.

An exhaustive review of The Federalist, though it would be highly
Illuminating In connection with the constantly recurrent cry
against the subversion of the Constitution, is beyond the purpose
of this chapter. We must confine ourselves here to its fundamental
Ideology. The argument of the tenth essay of the series was directed,
as we have seen, to the necessity of dissipating the force of pressure
politics and justified the new federal plan on the ground that It
would go far to accomplish this result. The very same argument
was later employed in defense of the principle of checks and bal-
ances in the organic structure of the new government. This thesis
is most fully set forth In the fifty-first number, which is attributed
to Hamilton or Madison and expresses a view which both certainly

entertained.

It was desirable, wrote the ever lucid Publius, "to lay a due
foundation for that separate and distinct exercise of the different
powers of government, which to a certain extent is admitted on all
hands to be essential to the preservation of liberty. . . ." Concen-
tration erf power was manifestly dangerous, and therefore each
department should have "a will of its own" and be so constituted
that its members should have ccas little agency as possible" in the
affairs of the others. In spite of this, no doubt, each would gradually
find ways of trespassing across the boundary lines.

"But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several
powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who adminis-
ter each department the necessary constitutional means and personal
motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defence

AMERICAN ECHOES 423

must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger
of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The in-
terest of the man must be connected with the constitutional riefhis of the

i—*?

place. It may be a reflection on human nature that such devices should
be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is govern-
ment but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were
angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern
men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be
necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered bv

rf '_ j U— y j

men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the
government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to
control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary
control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the
necessity of auxiliary precautions." i

Such was the political philosophy of the Fathers of the Constitu-
tion— a hard-headed realism which dismissed vapory abstractions
and lofty Ideals as untrustworthy and unattainable, predicated the
science of government upon the vices rather than the virtues of
human nature, and devoted its ingenuity to the invention of a
political system that would safeguard liberty and promote the
common welfare in spite of the follies and perversities of mankind.

V

By dint of their genius for practical politics the Federalists won.
Not only did they C£put over53 the Constitution, but they gained and
held control of the new government for twelve years. Immediately
upon their access to power they embarked upon a program of cen-
tralizing legislation which provoked bitter opposition from the ir-
reconcilable states5 rights group and alienated many of the moder-
ates who had greatly aided in the adoption of the Constitution. In
the national interest the Federalist Party, led by Hamilton, vigor-
ously pushed through measures levying a protective tariff., estab-
lishing a national bank, providing for the full payment of the debts
of the old Confederacy, assuming the debts of the states, and
levying excises upon whiskey and other commodities. The reaction
was instant and violent, extending even to Washington's cabinet,
where Hamilton and Jefferson, as the latter said, were "pitted
against one another like game-cocks.55 Feeling would have run to
high temperatures without extraneous influences; but the Federal-
ists had scarcely grasped the reins of office when the French Revo-

1 Op. rit.t No. II.

424 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

lution burst upon the world and excited a tremendous resurgence
of democratic sentiment. The gorgeous shibboleths of 376 were
brought out of retirement, polished to newT luster with the powerful
abrasives of French revolutionary philosophy, and employed as
rallying-cries by the Anti-Federalist opposition.

The unpopularity which the aggressive nationalism of the Feder-
alist regime normally would have evoked was greatly enhanced by
the Jay Treaty, which was popularly construed as a surrender to
England; by the neutrality policy, which the Francophile portion
of the population denounced as a violation of our treaty obligations
to France and a base betrayal of the cause of democracy; and most
of all by the incredibly stupid Alien and Sedition Laws which, in
ruthless disregard of civil liberties, surpassed the most repressive
acts of the British government In colonial times. Once more cast
In the agreeable role of crusaders for the rights of man, the Anti-
Federalists (now calling themselves Republicans, to emphasize the
monarchical leanings imputed to the Federalists) carried all before
them In the elections of 1800.

Acclaimed by multitudes as a second American Revolution, the
triumph of the Jeffersonian party did not materialize the great
reversal which had been expected. The states' rights people and
the rapidly growing artisan and small farmer classes which had
rallied to the Republican banner had anticipated a return to easy-
handed ways of the old Confederation. But that was not to be.
The Federalists were still intrenched in the judicial branch of the
national government and had sufficient numbers in Congress to do
a lot of braking. Moreover, Jefferson the President proved a
somewhat different person from Jefferson the opposition leader.
Though never forsaking his democratic philosophy and often sorely
beset by doubt on points of constitutional authority, Jefferson was
first of all a practical politician and statesman. Better than any
man of his time he understood the rule of expediency; and it hap-
pened during his eight years in office that expediency directed him
upon certain courses as contrary to the dogmas of his party as any
the Federalists had pursued. His Embargo and Non-Intercourse
Acts Invoked federal authority to the ultimate degree and set the
Federalists shouting for states' rights and individual liberty.

In the two administrations of Madison a sharp cleavage appeared
among the Republicans. The ccyoung war hawks of the West," led

AMERICAN ECHOES 425

by Clay, were national expansionists who differed little In funda-
mental thought from the Hamiltonlan school of former times, but
could not unite with the Federalist remaant which had shrunk to
a bitter and irreconcilable New England faction concerned with
sectional interests only. Madison, a Federalist of 1788, had gone
with Jefferson in the struggle of 1800, but was still enough a Federal-
ist 10 succumb to the pressure of Clay and his followers. Party
harmony was somewhat restored under Monroe, but the rupture
was too fundamental for permanent alleviation. Unerringly fol-
lowing the path to power., the great financial and propertied In-
terests had moved into the Republican Party and largely gained
control over It. Radicals began to refer to themselves as Demo-
cratic Republicans with the emphasis on the tc Democratic." The
Clay and Adams people in order to call attention to their constitu-
tional principles began calling themselves National Republicans
with the emphasis on the "National."

The election of John Qulncy Adams In 1 824. by a coalition of
National Republicans In the House of Representatives after Jack-
son, the leading Democratic Republican candldate3 had won a
plurality of both popular and electoral votes, precipitated the final
break. Forswearing the appellation "Republican/3 the Jackson
people proclaimed themselves the Democratic Party and achieved
a smashing victory In 1 828, by appealing to the common people to
arise and drive the hated aristocrats from power. Jackson stood for
equalitarian democracy, undiluted and unrefined. His election.
In the opinion of ardent exponents of popular sovereignty, marked
the third American Revolution. The National Republicans were
obliterated. In 1834 the remnants of the National Republican fac-
tion combined with various Democratic malcontents to form the In-
stable Whig Party, a prototype, in theory., of English Whiggism.

The political thought of this fascinating period of our national
history consisted in the main of reaffirmations and elaborations of
the democratic creed of Jefferson answered by a defiant rear-guard
of the slowly retreating stake-in-society school of Hamilton and the
patristic period, Thomas Jefferson and John Taylor stand out as the
best representatives of the democratic view, while John Marshall
and Daniel Webster are undoubtedly the foremost of the conserva-
tives.

The collected writings of Thomas Jefferson number many vol-

426 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

umes. From youth to old age his pen was never Idle. Government
was the principal theme of his literary labors, though he wrote on
many other subjects as well. Extensive as were his political writings,
his only systematic work on government was .Votes on Virginia, writ-
ten In 1781-1782 In response to a request from the secretary of the
French legation for Information regarding the government and
economic conditions of that commonwealth. In this book Jefferson
fully expounded the theory of agrarian democracy to which. In spite
of the many inconsistencies of his political career, he remained
faithful all his life. Deeply read In the political classics, and espe-
cially Influenced by the Idealistic doctrines of the seventeenth and
eighteenth century liberals both of England and France, Jefferson
found in the agrarlanism of the French Physiocrats a system that
seemed to fit American conditions perfectly. Laissez fairey produit
net, and impot territorial were more than theories in America; they
were actual conditions which" it must be the design of political
science to preserve and perpetuate.

Wealth, according to the physiocratic doctrine, Is produced only
by agriculture and the other extractive industries. Manufactures
and commerce merely exploit what these have produced. The only
real addition to the wealth of a community is found in the excess of
the mass of agricultural products over their cost of production, i.e.,
produit net. Statecraft should aim, therefore, to keep manufactures
and commerce at an indispensable minimum. They and the pro-
fessions are "sterile" occupations, drawing their sustenance en-
tirely from the extractive industries (principally farming) which are
impoverished when the non-producing occupations are expanded
beyond what is absolutely necessary. This doctrine appears in Jef-
ferson's writings again and again. Let the mercantile principle pre-
vail in Europe if need be, was his dictum In Notes on Virginia; for
America there was another and better principle. Here was "an Im-
mensity of land courting the industry of the husbandman. Is it best
then that all our citizens should be employed in its improvement, or
that one half should be called off from that to exercise manufactures
and handicraft arts for the other? . . . Generally speaking the pro-
portion which the aggregate of the other classes of citizens bears in
any state to that of its nusbandmen is the proportion of its unsound
to its healthy parts, and is a good enough barometer whereby to
measure its degree ot corruption. . . . The mobs of great cities add

AMERICAN ECHOES 42™

just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the
strength of the human body. It Is the manners and spirit of a people
which preserve a republic in vigor, A degeneracy in these is a can-
ker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution. 5% 1

The physiocratic doctrine of laissezfaire stemmed from the great
principle of natural rights, which was axiomatic in Jefferson's politi-
cal thought. Granting that all individuals have natural rights, even
if they have unequal natural capacities, it is plain, said the physio-
cratic philosophers, that they will be most likely to benefit fully
from the capacities they have when they are equally free to use the
capacities with which nature has endowed them. Therefore it was
both politically and economically wrong for the state to intervene
in human affairs beyond the necessities of peace, order, and the ful-
fillment of contracts. This was in full accord with Jefferson's deepest
convictions. Fully aware though he was of the dangers of weak gov-
ernment., he feared the abuses of authority more. In the Notes on
Virginia he argued against the concentration of all powers of gov-
ernment in a single legislative body, but later in life he displayed less
confidence in checks and balances. His experience in office had con-
vinced him that "Mischief may be done negatively as well as posi-
tively," as he said in a letter to John Adams in 1815. The greatest
security7 against the abuse of power, he came at last to believe, was
to place the control of government as fully and directly as possible in
the hands of the people. However dangerous this might be in
Europe, where "in the hands of the canaille of the cities ... it
would be instantly perverted to the demolition and destruction of
everything public and private," in the democracy of farmers and
villagers, virtually all property owners, which Jefferson visioned for
the United States, it was not only safe but necessary that the people
rule themselves. Thus only could they be armed against the sinister
forces constantly at work in every society to control the state and
through it the rights and liberties of the people.

There would be abuses in a democracy, to be sure. The cure for
such abuses, said Jefferson, was more democracy. Keep the govern-
ment continually close to the people and abuses would ultimately
be rectified. Universal manhood suffrage, popular election of ex-
ecutives and judges as well as legislators, local self-government (in-
cluding of course states' rights), universal free education, religious

1 Notes on Virginia (1784), p, 302.

423 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

freedom, freedom of speech and of press — these were the great
talismans bv which democracy would succeed.

« #

The real philosopher of Jeffersonian democracy was not Jefferson
but the now obscure John Taylor (1750-1824) of Caroline County,
Virginia — always referred to as John Taylor of Caroline to distin-
guish him from others of the same name. Taylor did what Jefferson,
busy with a thousand things, had not the time nor perhaps the in-
clination to do. He produced a systematic and comprehensive argu-
mentum for the popular movement. Though overshadowed by
more colorful figures In the pages of American history, Taylor was
rated high among the democratic leaders of his day. He was three
times elected to the United States Senate and served several terms in
the Virginia legislature, but, unlike many of his better-known con-
temporaries, he did not make politics a career. He was first of all a
gentleman farmer of the classic Virginia type, second a student of
political philosophies, and third a reluctant incumbent of public
office periodically drafted to represent his county and state in legis-
lative councils. Taylor wrote numerous political pamphlets and
three outstanding books. The latter are: An Inquiry into the Principles
and Policy of the Government of the United States (1814), Construction Con-
strued (1820), and New Views of the Constitution of the United States
(1823).

As though to atone for the want of literary grace, Taylor's works
are impressively solid and analytical. Farmer-like, Taylor must dig
deep into the soil of politics and lay bare the root structure of the
state. A disciple of Jefferson, professing the same physiocratic creed
and the same belief in agrarian democracy as the best means of real-
izing the ideal nature -regime of the physiocratic school., he was not
content with unsubstantiated theory. He must get down to realities
— especially economic realities and base his theory on close reason-
ing from fundamentals.

The Inquiry was written to expose the fallacies of The Federalist
and John Adams3 Defense of the Constitution. As much an economic
deterrninist as Madison, Hamilton, or Adams, Taylor disputed their
deductions and endeavored to show that their economic interpreta-
tion of history was not in accord with the facts. To Adams3 theory
of inevitable aristocracy resulting from differences inherent in hu-
man nature and Hamilton's doctrine of inevitable aristocracy re-
sulting from differences of wealth, he makes the same answer — not

AMERICAN ECHOES 429

proved. They assume that the social and economic Inequalities
found among men are the direct result of their natural inequalities.
The assumption, Taylor insists^ does not square with the facts. Xo
such correlation exists. In God-given abilities the rich and well-
born are not as a matter of fact invariably or even usually superior
to the poor, nor are the poor and lowly more generally made of in-
ferior stuff than the upper classes. CiA theory or hypo thesis, cannot
pretend even to plausibility^ unless it is deduced from some general
law of nature. One which sets out upon the foundation of heredi-
tary orders or inalienable exclusive privileges, violates the law,
which has determined that talents shall not be inheritable,, nor
merit transferable. 3? 1

The true cause of social and economic inequality, said Taylor,
is not biological inequality. Whatever results biological inequality
may have, it does not inevitably operate to produce aristocracies

either of birth or wealth. The real bases of aristocracy mav readily

* • »

be perceived; they are quite unrelated to the intrinsic merits and
abilities of individuals. In every society there is a struggle for power
— individual against individual, group against group — each grasp-
ing for the means of mastery in order to satisfy certain potent de-
sires. Wealth means power; so does political authority; and each is
a means to the other. Hence in every political society persons hav-
ing wealth strive for control of the sovereign power in order to pre-
serve and augment what they have; persons wanting wealth do the
same in order to gain what they have not; and persons having au-
thority' but not wealth strive to use their political power for material
gain. In the resulting struggle luck favors some; brutal rutHessness
is an advantage to some; shameless cunning aids some; and thor-
oughgoing selfishness is the talisman of success for all. Thus by ex-
ploitation added to exploitation a ruling class arises, regiments
society to its own taste, and devotes its wealth and power to the
perpetuation of its established system of despoiling the masses.
This, declared Taylor, is the real origin of every class system, every
aristocracy, in history.

The remedy? Very simple, said Taylor; complete democracy,
economic and political, would do the work. "The more power is
condensed, the more pernicious it becomes. . . . The more it is

1 Inquiry, from excerpt in B. F. Wright, A Sowrci Book of American Political Theory,
(1929) p. 352.

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

divided, the farther it recedes from the class of evil moral beings.
By a vast number of divisions, applied to that portion of power, be-
stowed on their governments by the people of the United States;
and by retaining in their own hands a great portion unbes towed,
with a power of controlling the portion given; the coalescence of
political power, always fatal to civil liberty, is obstructed. Small
dividends are not as liable to ambition and avarice, as great divi-
dends. Self- interest can only be controlled by keeping out of its
hands the arms with which it has universally enslaved the general
interest. But it universally gets these arms by persuading mankind,
that the danger is imaginary, and the remedy useless; and hierarchy,
feudality, hereditary orders, mercenary armies, funding and bank-
ing, have successively inflicted upon them the expiations of an
opinion so absurd.33 J

Happily for John Taylor, he did not live to see the transformation
of the United States from an agrarian democracy to an industrial
republic. Had the economic system of his day survived — with its
abundant supply of cheap land, its subsistence farming, its handi-
craft system of manufactures, its simple and small-scale financial
processes, and its widely dispersed rural population — his dream of
social justice might have been realized. Such things were not to be,
in America or elsewhere throughout the world. The economic and
political developments of the ensuing century were destined to undo
all that had been accomplished by the Jeffersonian movement, and,
ironically, to prove to the hilt the soundness of Taylor's insight into
the underlying forces of political society. That Taylor's diagnosis
was right, modern social scientists would generally agree; that his
prognosis was right is another matter. Whether democracy is suited
for industrial society, is one of the great unsolved problems of
political science.

It is a paradoxical turn of the tides of political warfare that has
brought the party of Jefferson and Jackson to a position of agree-
ment in many respects with John Marshall, and the party which de-
rives from Hamilton, Marshall, Webster, and Lincoln to approval
of certain fundamental doctrines of the Jeffersonian school. Writing
in 1927, Vernon L. Parrington pronounced Marshall ccas stalwart
a reactionary as ever sat on the Supreme Court bench." 2 But the
Roosevelt New Dealers have found as much support in the judicial

1 Ibid., p. 353. 2 The Romantic Revolution in America (1927), p. 23.

AMERICAN ECHOES 431

opinions of John Marshall as In the contemporary decisions of
Chief Justice Hughes or such reputed liberals as Justices Brandeis
and Cardozo. It often happens in politics that the reactionism of
yesterday becomes the liberalism, even the radicalism, of to-day.
John Marshall was the last of the eighteenth-century Federalists
and the first of the nineteenth-century nationalists.

The best of John Marshall's political thought is incorporated in
his judicial opinions. He \vrote little else of importance. \\Tiile
Jefferson and Jackson were marching from triumph to triumph, and
Taylor was their prophet, John Marshall in full lordship over the
Supreme Court was handing down decisions that quietly pulled the
sharpest fangs of the democratic movement. That the Constitution
of the United States was an act of popular sovereignty, Marshall re-
peatedly affirmed in language far too sweeping for those to whom
popular sovereignty meant strict construction and states' rights. In
Marshall's view the Constitution was the fundamental law adopted
by the whole people of the United States; not a mere covenant be-
tween certain corporate entities known as states, nor the act of the
people of the several states independently. Drafted by a convention
of delegates speaking for the states, it had been referred to the people
for ratification; and the people, proceeding in the only manner pos-
sible, had chosen delegates to special conventions whose ratifica-
tions were intended to creaie, and did create, a nation. Thus the
Constitution was the act of the people as a nation, and not of the
people of thirteen separate nations.

By this constituent act the people of the United States, according
to the Federalist view which Marshall vigorously maintained, had
established not a direct democracy but a representative republic
predicated upon checks and balances and constitutional guaran-
tees designed to protect personal and property rights against inva-
sion from any source whatever. The people had elected, in other
words, to limit themselves as well as their rulers and intended those
limitations to be observed and enforced by all officers of the govern-
ment. Granting this premise, it followed, as Marshall cogently rea-
soned in his monumental opinion in Marbury r. Madison, that the
courts had no choice but to decline to enforce a statute found to be
in conflict with the Constitution. That this resulted in giving the
Supreme Court the last word on all issues of constitutionality, in
effect making the Court the one incontestable custodian of the

432 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

popular will, seemed to Marshall nor a derogation of popular sov-
ereignty, but a perfect fulfillment of the purpose of the people when
they adopted the Constitution. Who better than the Supreme Court
could dispassionately and impartially interpret and maintain the
juxtaposed powers and rights which the people had decreed?

Though a property-conscious Federalist, fearful of majority rule
and implacably opposed to direct election, manhood suffrage, and
all the apparatus of democracy, Marshall was far from being the in-
flexible and "stubborn autocrat3' that radical critics have so causti-
cally denounced. No narrow-gauged reactionary could have writ-
ten, as he did in McCulloch u. Maryland in 1819:

"The subject is the execution of those great powers on which the
welfare of the nation essentially depends. It must have been the inten-
tion of those who gave these powers, to insure, as far as human pru-
dence could insure, their beneficial execution. This could not be done
by confining the choice of means to such narrow limits as not to leave
it in the power of congress to adopt any which might be appropriate,
and which were conducive to the end. This provision is made in a con-
stitution, intended to endure for ages to come, and consequently to be
adapted to the various crises of human affairs. To have prescribed the
means by which government should, in all future time, execute its
powers, would have been to change, entirely, the character of the in-
strument, and give it the properties of a legal code. It would have been
an unwise attempt to provide, by immutable rules, for exigencies which,
if foreseen at all, must have been seen dimly, and which can best be
provided for as they occur. To have declared, that the best means shall
not be used, but those alone, without which the power would be nuga-
tory, would have been to deprive the legislature of the capacity to avail
itself of experience, to exercise its reason, and to accommodate its legis-
lation to circumstances."

A Supreme Court judge writing thus to-day would be definitely
classed on the liberal side. John Marshall was a liberal, but of
eighteenth-century vintage. To the end of his life he resisted the
leveling force of democracy; but he believed both in liberty and
popular rule. The former, especially as to property, was his supreme
passion, and he was convinced that liberty would be forever inse-
cure unless popular rule were restrained, controlled, and guided by
a sovereign constitution invoking reason as the supreme and ulti-
mate regulator of human affairs. That reason might be swayed by
self-interest Marshall was too realistic not to know; but as a child of

AMERICAN ECHOES 433

the eighteenth century he could not fail to regard reason as the
least frail of human attributes.

The political thought of John Marshall, fragmentary and un-
original though it was. has been a tremendous factor in the evolu-
tion of the American political system. To it we owe the victory of
nationalism over localism, much of the elasticity which has enabled

* *

the Constitution to survive the vicissitudes of fourteen decades, and
also much of the bias toward property rights which has favored the
rise of modern plutocracy.

The last, and in many ways the most superb, representative on
American soil of realistic liberalism of Harrington, Locke, Hume,,
Burke, and Montesquieu was Daniel Webster. More famed (and
defamed) as an orator, lawyer, politician, and statesman than as a
political thinker, Webster would enjoy a less depreciated fame if
his philosophic attainments were better remembered. He was not
an original thinker, not a writer of scholarly political treatises; but
he was broadly and soundly grounded in the political classics, had
a clear grasp on fundamental facts and principles, and was pos-
sessed of a stately imagination and a moving eloquence both In
speech and writing. With these endowments Webster became the
undisputed intellectual leader of New England Industrialism. In
the earlier part of his career, before he was engrossed with presi-
dential ambitions and the arid legalism of the slavery question, his
speeches and writings display a philosophic cexture which stamps
him as one of America's foremost political thinkers.

Webster appeared on the political scene in a time of sweeping
change. The NewT England of the small farmer, the trading village,
the mercantile adventurer, and the hardy shipmaster was being
rapidly supplanted by the industrial magnate, the factory town, and
the urban proletariat. At the start Webster aligned himself with
the older mercantile and shipping interests; but, as time made sure
the dominance of industry and the interests of his constituents re-
quired protective tariffs, credit expansion^ and other governmental
ministrations, he abandoned his laissezfaire principles and became
a staunch defender of paternalistic benefactions for the manufac-
turing and financial interest, But through it all his point of view,
until he was finally trapped in the treacherous bog of constitutional
legalism surrounding the slavery issue, was that of economic realism.
Harrington was the master thinker who lighted his footsteps. The

434 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

doctrine of economic determinism, he said in his speech on The
Basis of the Senate, "is as old as political science itself. It may be
found in Aristotle, Lord Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, and other
writers. Harrington seems, however, to be the first \vriter who has
illustrated and expanded the principle, and given to it the effect
and prominence which justly belong to it. To this sentiment, Sir, I
entirely agree. It seems to me to be plain, that, in the absence of
military force, political power naturally and necessarily goes into
the hands which hold property. In my judgment, therefore, a re-
publican form of government rests, not more on political constitu-
tions, than on those laws which regulate the descent and trans-
mission of property." l

In this excerpt we have the core of Webster's political thought —
the one article of faith from which he never deviated. The first
object of political society, he said in the same speech, was "the
protection of something in which the members possess unequal
shares"; hence it followed that the voice of individuals and classes
in government should be proportioned to their stake in the common
interest, i.e., property. Believing thus, Webster opposed the aboli-
tion of property qualifications for voting and office holding, upheld
the judicial veto, distrusted unrestrained popular assemblies, and
unstintingly approved the Federalist principle of checks and
balances.

It is only fair to state, however, that a high concentration of the
ownership or control of property was not included in the premise
from which Webster reasoned. Inequality he accepted as inherent
in the order of nature and the proper object of governmental solici-
tude and protection; but he believed none the less in the desirability
of a wide distribution of property and heartily endorsed the dictum
of Harrington that, if three-fourths of the property (landed property
in particular) of a nation were held by the common people, the
control of government could never be wrested from their hands. As
a practical politician, following the dictates of expediency, he sup-
ported measures which were destined to effect the very concentra-
tion of property that his theory rejected, though vaguely per-
suaded all the while that he was defending the interests of property
against pernicious and destructive equalitarianism. For Webster,
as for his great mentors, Harrington and Montesquieu, the prime

1 Works, Vol. iii, pp. 14-15.

AMERICAN ECHOES 435

desiderata In political society were order and stability; and. in

JL & * *•> „

common with these profoundly realistic teachers, he believed that
these objectives were attainable neither by the concentration BOF
the equalization of property, but only through a politico-economic
substructure broad enough to comprehend the major interests of
society and balanced in such a manner as to forestall domination
by any Individual, group, or class — a doctrine springing not only
from eighteenth-century liberalism, but from Hume, Spinoza,
Bodin, Machiavelli, and Aristotle.

VI

It Is no pleasure to review the political ideology of the slavery
controversy. From 1830 to the end of the Reconstruction Period
the foremost issues — economic, moral, political, and legal — occupy-
ing the attention of the American people were varying emanations
of the slavery1" question. An era more sterile of distinguished polit-
ical thinking has seldom occurred in the history of any people.
North and South public attention was riveted on narrow points of
constitutional construction or largely sentimental questions of
ethics and religion. Abolitionism, restrlctionisnij and state sover-
eignty were the principal issues between the two sections, and of
hundreds of combatants who joined in the furious debate on these
Issues the only notable political thinker was John C. Calhoun. This
gaunt and hard South Carolina Puritan, whose appearance re-
minded the noted Mrs. Trollope of a being who had never been
born and could never die? forged the political philosophy which
divorced the South from the creed of agrarian democracy, sapped
its loyalty to the Constitution and the Union, and sent It upon its
mad career of secession and rebellion.

Beginning his political career as a liberal constructionist, a Na-
tional Republican and an ally of Clay In the war measures of 1812,
Calhoun remained to all appearances a thorough-going HaniH-
tonian until the Tariff of 1828 aroused a storm of protest in South
Carolina and elsewhere in the South. This Tariff of Abominations,
so dubbed by its enemies, was regarded at the South as a deliberate
effort to chain the agrarian South captive to the chariot of Northern
capitalism. Straining the Constitution beyond reason and ignoring
the reserved and equal rights of the states, according to the Caro-
lina view, one section of the country was striving to exploit the

436 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

other. Calhoun' s destiny lay In the South, and his super-lambent
mind soon shaped a philosophy to vindicate not merely his personal
volte-face but that of his state.

Two ingeniously wrought and deeply founded credenda were the
outcome of Caihoun's dialectic labors, one in defense of slavery and
the other In justification of each state's right of self-determination
in regard to slavery and other vital concerns. A good case had to
be made for slavery; otherwise the case for states' rights, however
impregnable, would simply prove the right of the Individual state
to perpetrate a monstrous and Indefensible evil. No defense of
slavery had been attempted by either the Hamiltonlan or Jefferso-
nian schools of thought. On the contrary., It had been commonly
assumed that slavery was a dying Institution and would gradually
disappear In the South as it had In the North, The Invention of the
cotton gin and power-driven textile machines had defeated this
expectation. Cotton had become king in the South, and slavery,
according to the Southern view, was essential to the production of
cotton. The abolition of slavery would spell economic ruin for the
South; would reduce it not only to penury but to abject servitude
to the North. For an Institution so vital to the welfare of a great
section there must be a solid rational and moral foundation. Such
was the feeling of millions of high-minded people in the slave states,
and It was for these that the ratiocinations of John C. Calhoun
became an unquestioned profession of faith.

The Greeks, including Plato and Aristotle, had found no incon-
sistency between slavery and democracy; and to Greek political
philosophy Calhoun returned for a reconciliation of slavery with
democracy in nineteenth-century America. Accepting as axiomatic
truth the Aristotelian dictum that some men are by nature slaves,
the hard-headed South Carolinian unreservedly extended it to In-
clude the entire African race. The Negro, according to his basic
postulate, was of a servile nature, unfitted for freedom and incap-
able of existence in civilized society except as a bondsman. Slavery
in the South had not been an evil; on the contrary, CCI hold it to be a
good, as It has thus far proved itself ... and will continue to prove
so If not disturbed by the fell spirit of abolition. I appeal to the facts.
Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of
history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so
improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually. It

AMERICAN ECHOES 437

came to us in a low, degraded, and savage condition, and in the
course of a few generations it has grown up under the fostering care
of our institutions, reviled as they have been? to its present com-
paratively civilized condition. This, with the rapid increase of
numbers. Is conclusive proof of the general happiness of the race,
in spite of all exaggerated tales to the contrary." 1

Under the slave regime, Calhoun asserted, though the condition
of the blacks had been ameliorated, that of the whites had not been
corrupted. In moral virtues the people of the South were in no re-
spect inferior to their brethren of the North. That they lived by
slave labor debased them no more than living upon the profits of
wage-slavery degraded the industrialists of the North. CCI hold . . .
that there has never yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in
which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live by
the labor of the other. Broad and general as is this assertion, it is
fully borne out by history. «, . . The devices are almost innumer-
able, from the brute force and gross superstition of ancient times,
to the subtle and artful fiscal contrivances of modern. I might well
challenge a comparison between them and the more direct, simple,
and patriarchal mode by which the labor of the African race, is,
among us, commanded by the European. I may say with truth,
that in few countries so much is left to the share of the laborer, and
so little exacted from him, or where there is more kind attention
paid to him in sickness or infirmities of age. . . . There is and al-
ways has been in an advanced stage of wealth and civilization, a
conflict between labor and capital. The condition of society in the
South exempts us from the disorders and dangers resulting from this
conflict; and which explains why it is that the political condition of
the slave-holding states has been so much more stable and quiet
than that of the North." 1

Thus portrayed, slavery was a righteous and beneficent institu-
tion, imperiled by the growing political and economic power of
Northern capitalism. Concede the political and constitutional doc-
trines of Federalism, or even of Jefiersonian democracy, and slavery
was irretrievably doomed. Inevitably the richer and more popu-
lous section would impose its system on the helpless minority. Cal-
houn therefore turned his attention to fundamental political
theory. Upon what ground in principle and reason, he asked, were

1 Works (Cralk Ed., 1853), Vol. ii, pp. 630-633.

438 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

majorities entitled to override minorities? Camouflage it as you will,
he contended, every society is made up of individuals, each with his
own interests and objectives. Ckln asserting that our individual are
stronger than our social feelings, it is not intended to deny that
there are instances, growing out of peculiar relations . . . or result-
ing from the force of education and habit over peculiar constitu-
tions? in which the latter have overpowered the former; but these
instances are few, and always regarded as something extraordi-
narv. . . ."

s

t;But that constitution of our nature which makes us feel more in-
tensely what affects us directly than what affects us indirectly through
others, necessarily leads to conflict between individuals. Each, in con-
sequence, has a greater regard for his own safety or happiness, than for
the safety or happiness of others; and, where these come into opposition,
is ready to sacrifice the interests of others to his own. And hence, the
tendency to a universal state of conflict, between individual and in-
dividual . . . and if not prevented by some controlling power, ending
in a state of universal discord and confusion, destructive of the social
state and the ends for which it is ordained. This controlling power,
wherever vested, or by whomsoever exercised, is GOVERNMENT. . . .

£CBut government, though intended to protect and preserve society,
has itself a strong tendency to disorder and abuse of its powers, as all
experience and almost every page of history testify. The cause is to be
found in the same constitution of our nature which makes government
indispensable. The powers which it is necessary for government to pos-
sess, in order to repress violence and preserve order, cannot execute
themselves. They must be administered by men in whom, like others,
the individual are stronger than the social feelings. And hence, the
powers vested in them to prevent injustice and oppression on the part
of others, will, if left unguarded, be by them converted into instruments
to oppress the rest of the community. That by which this is prevented,
by whatever name called, is what is meant by CONSTITUTION, in its most
comprehensive sense, when applied to GOVERNMENT." l

How, Calhoun inquires, can this tendency of government to be-
come an instrument of oppression be counteracted? To set up a
higher power to control the government is futile, and to enfeeble the
government by extensive limitations on its powers is to defeat the
very purposes for which it is ordained. The problem is to construct
a government which through its own organic processes will be pre-
vented from abusing its powers without being divested of the full
command of the resources of the community when necessary.

1 Disquisition on Government,, op. ciL, Vol. i, pp. 3-5.

AMERICAN ECHOES 439

"There Is but one way/' lie continues, u'in which, this can possibly
be done ; and that is, by such an organism as will furnish the ruled with
the means of resisting successfully this tendency on the part of rulers to
oppression and abuse. Power can be resisted only by power, — tendency
by tendency. Those who exercise power and those subject to its exer-
cise,— the rulers and the ruled, — stand in antagonistic relations to each
other. The same constitution of our nature which leads rulers to oppress
the ruled . . . will, with equal strength, lead the ruled to resist, when
possessed of the means of making peaceable and effective resistance.
Such an organism, then, as will furnish the means by which resistance
may be systematically and peaceably made on the part of the ruled5 to
oppression and abuse of power on the part of the rulers3 is the first and
indispensable siep towards forming a constitutional government." l

Upon this deep-laid foundation of political realism Calhoun pro-
ceeded to erect his remarkable doctrine of the concurrent majority.
The principle of separation of powers reinforced by checks and bal-
ances, which had been incorporated in the American Constitution
for the very purpose of counteracting the oppressive tendencies of
government, had, he claimed, failed in practice. It was of no avail
in protecting minorities when a ruling majority gained control of all
three branches of government. To realize the constitutional design
of the Fathers and afford truly effective protection for minorities a
different conception of checks and balances must be adopted.
Democracy presupposes equality, and not merely equality as be-
tween individuals but as between the various interests of the com-
munity. A government in which a numerical majority can trample
down all other interests is not truly democratic. To guard against
this there must be some provision "of a character calculated to pre-
vent any one interest or combination of interests, from using the
powers of government to aggrandize itself at the expense of the
others. . . . There is but one certain mode in which this can be
effected; and that is, by taking the sense of each interest or portion
of the community, which may be unequally and injuriously affected
by the action of the government, separately, through its own ma-
jority, or in some other way by which its voice may be fairly ex-
pressed; and to require the consent of each interest, either to put or
keep the government in action. This too, can be accomplished only
in one way, — and that is, by such an organism of the government, —
and if necessary for the purpose, of the community also, — as wil!3 by

* Ibid., p. 8.

440 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

dividing and distributing the powers of government, give to each
division or interest, through its appropriate organ, either a concur-
rent voice in making and executing laws, or a veto on their execu-

* * * T

tion." l

In this concise excerpt from Calhoun's Disquisition on Government
we have the rationale of nullification and secession. It was a mar-
velously ingenious and, to the Southern mind, an overwhelmingly
persuasive doctrine. It proclaimed democracy as its ideal and sta-
bility and justice as its ends — not the visionary Jeffersonian democ-
racy of equality among men, but the vital and practical democracy
of equality among economic interests; not the stability and justice
of consolidated authority, but the stability and justice of "live and
let live" as between the different interests of society. It promised
government devoted not to the interests of parts or sections of the
community, but to the interests of the whole; for a concurrent ma-
jority could be obtained only to serve the interests of the whole.
It promised the strongest conceivable government — backed by a
concurrent , majority — when the interests of the whole were at
stake, and utterly emasculated government when only those of
fractional elements of society' were involved. It promised, in a
word, a permanent solution of the age-old problem of Man ver-
sus the State.

To win freedom to apply Calhoun's political theories millions of
Southern men, non-owners as well as owners of slaves, sprang to
arms in the bloodiest civil war of modern times. They fought and
lost, and carried with them to defeat the most rigorously logical,
though not the most noble, system of political ideology evolved
upon the American continent during the nineteenth century.

Turning to the political thought of the anti-slavery movement,
we find little to admire. The North was inspired by a powerful
amalgam of moral fervor and economic interest, but lacked a solid
and coherent political philosophy. Only the Abolitionists were sure
of their beliefs, and their certainty rested more upon ethical than
purely political grounds. The outstanding political thinker of the
North was Daniel Webster, and no man had a stronger antipathy
to slavery; but his consuming political ambitions caused him to
avoid the slavery issue as much as possible and put the case of the
North on strictly legalistic grounds. Few in the North perceived
., p. 10.

AMERICAN ECHOES 441

the irreconcilability of slavery and democracy more clearly than
Abraham Lincoln, but the contrast between the Lincoln of the
"House Divided55 speech, confident that the Union must "become
all one thing, or all the other/3 and the Lincoln of the First
Inaugural, reiterating that ££I have no purpose, directly or indi-

rectlv, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states

* j *

'where it exists/3 shows how far he was from a compelling political
philosophy.

Webster's Second Reply to Hayne is undoubtedly the most cele-
brated literary effort on the Northern side. It is great oratory —
sublime in diction, majestic in movement, rich in imagery — but it
is not great political thinking. Masterly in its emotional appeal and
effect, it was in truth a very lame answer to the cold logic of Cal-
houn, via Hayne. Webster had not shaken a single one of the fun-
damental postulates of the concurrent majority theory. He had
delivered a noble and stirring oration; glowing with patriotic
fervor, deploring sectional discord, glorifying national unity under
the Constitution, but failing altogether to meet and demolish the
arguments of his opponents. Aware of this failure, Webster three
years later, in a much less renowned speech (The Constitution not a
Compact between Sovereign States),, undertook to explode the Calhoun
doctrine by sheer dialectic. Borrowing generously from Story's
Commentaries , which had been published only a month before, he
started with the proposition that sovereignty is in the people. The
Constitution, he argued, was ordained and established by the
people in their sovereign character — the whole people, not the
people acting by states. When thus instituted, the Constitution
became the supreme law of the land, obligatory upon the citizens
directly and individually, and not through the mediation of sover-
eign states. Furthermore, the Constitution, once in effect, became
an executed contract, indissoluble without the consent of all parties.
Though somewhat shaky in point of historical fact and scarcely
touching the issue of the tyranny of consolidated authority and
majority rule, this was a good lawyer's argument and materially
enhanced Webster's reputation. He was to undo it all, however,
in the lamentable Seventh of At arch Speech whereby he sought to con-
ciliate the South by upholding the constitutionality of the Fugitive
Slave Law. If Webster's interpretation of the Constitution was
correct, consolidated authority could be invoked against the anti-

442 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

slavery as well as the pro-slavery sections of the nation. Calhoun
must be right after all. Thereafter Webster's stature as a political
pundit shrank to pygmy size. North as well as South.

Abraham Lincoln cannot be ranked high as a political thinker;
even among American political thinkers his position is not out-
standing. All in all, however, he was the best produced on the
Northern side of the slavery controversy. He compounded no sys-
tem of political thought and added little to the doctrines prevalent
in his day; but he was by and large the clearest, the most honest,
and the most comprehendingly democratic of all Northern spokes-
men. Lincoln's Intellectual furniture was collected from many
sources. Though for many years a zealous Whig, acknowledging
the captaincy of Henry Clay and fully imbued with his leader's
concepts of national paternalism, he w-as at the same time instinc-
tively Jeffersonian In sympathy for the common man and faith in
democratic Institutions. Not a states5 rights man, he was neverthe-
less of the frontier and shared the frontiersman's jealous attachment
to local Independence and self-government. Fully respecting
property rights and accepting the principle of laissez faire as the
little man's surest guarantee of material opportunity, he was not
blind to the abuses of economic freedom and would not hesitate to
employ the strong arm of authority to redress the balance in the
interest of human rights and welfare.

Blending these divergent strains of political ideology, Lincoln
emerged a liberal opportunist In political practice and a humani-
tarian realist in political thought. He would preserve the Union
and save the Constitution at any cost; he would respect and safe-
guard the property rights of the slave-owner; but he would at the
same time fight the extension of slavery to the last trench and utilize
all the power of the national government to foster and maintain the
free-soil principle in the undeveloped territories of the West. Per-
ceiving as clearly as Calhoun the great truth that no government is
fundamentally stable which does not rest on the consent of the gov-
erned, he shrank from coercion to extinguish slavery; by the same
token he was fully willing to resist coercion to extend it. In govern-
ment "of the people, by the people, and for the people'5 he had
utmost faith, but that did not mean tyrannical majority rule. A
government that did not adequately protect the rights of minorities
was not, for Lincoln, a free government. By what manner of ra-

AMERICAN ECHOES 443

tionalization, then, could he justify his course in opposing secession
and crushing the South into submission?

It was not a complex or especially subtle bit of reasoning. Ac-
cepting Webster's i; executed contract53 theory, Lincoln regarded
the Constitution as a compact indissoluble except by universal
consent. Long before the adoption of the Constitution, he argued,
the American people had entered into a ufirm and perpetual5 ?
Union. It was the purpose of the Constitution to strengthen this
Union and make it irrevocably binding upon the individual states.
To admit the right of secession would be to reduce the Constitution
to a rope of sand. Therefore it was his sacred duty as chief execu-
tive to defend the Constitution and maintain the Union. Minorities
had rights, to be sure; but:

£:AI1 profess to be content in the Union, if all constitutional rights can
be maintained. Is it true, then, that any right, plainly written in the
Constitution, has been denied? I think not. Happily the human mind
is so constituted that no party can reach to the audacity of doing this.
Think, if you can, of a single instance in which a plainly written pro-
vision of the Constitution has ever been denied. If, by the mere force of
numbers, a majority should deprive a minority of any clearly written
constitutional right, it might, in a moral point of view, justify revolu-
tion— certainly would if such right were a vital one. But such is not
our case. All the vital rights of minorities and of individuals are so
plainly assured to them by affirmations and negations, guaranties and
prohibitions in the Constitution, that controversies never arise con-
cerning them. But no organic law can ever be framed with a provision
specifically applicable to every question which may occur in practical
administration. No foresight can anticipate nor any document of rea-
sonable length contain express provisions for all possible questions.
Shall fugitives from labor be surrendered by National or State author-
ity? The Constitution does not expressly say. May Congress prohibit
slavery7 in the Territories? The Constitution does not expressly say.
Must Congress protect slavery in the Territories? The Constitution
does not expressly say.

"From questions of this class spring all our constitutional controver-
sies, and we divide upon them into majorities and minorities. If the
minority will not acquiesce, the majority must, or the government must
cease. There is no other alternative; for continuing the government is
acquiescence on one side or the other. If a minority in such case will
secede rather than acquiesce, they make a precedent which, in turn,
will divide and ruin them; for a minority of their own will secede from
them whenever a majority refuses to be controlled by such a minor-
ity. . . .

444 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

"Plainly the central Idea of secession Is the essence of anarchy. A
majority held In restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and
always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions
and sentiments. Is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever
rejects ii does, of necessity fly to anarchy or to despotism. Unanimity
is impossible; ihe rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement is
wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy
or despotism, in some form Is all that is left.35 1

Here was realism fully matching that of Calhoun. Secessionists
could assert with much truth that Lincoln was begging the question
when he declared that minority rights were fully protected by the
Constitution and minimized the vital importance of issues not
specifically covered by the language of the Constitution; but they
could not deny that he had unerringly laid bare the weakness of
their position when he pointed out that the doctrine of minority
consent would impale a nation upon the horns of a dilemma in
which it must choose between anarchy or despotism. That Lincoln
was infallibly right, the difficulties of the Confederate states during
the rebellion fully demonstrated.

From the end of the Civil War to the eve of the twentieth cen-
tury American political thought was chiefly occupied in restating
the problem of sovereignty and rehashing the constitutional issues
of the war. Nothing in that sterile era is of sufficient importance to
require attention in this brief review.

REFERENCES

Carpenter, W. S., The Development of American Political Thought (Princeton.
1930).

Gettell, R. G., History of American Political Thought (New York, 1928).
Lewis, E. D., History of American Political Thought from the Civil War to the

World War (New York, 1937).

Merriam, C. E., A History of American Political Theories (New York, 1903).
Merriam, C. E., American Political Ideas, 1865-1917 (New York, 1920).
Parrington, V. L., Main Currents in American Thought (2 vols., New York,

1927), Vol. i, pp. 219-342; Vol. ii, pp. 5-304.

Wright, B. F., A Source Book of American Political Theory (New York, 1929).
1 "First Inaugural Address" in American Orations (4 vols., 1897), Vol. iv, pp. 16 ff.

CHAPTER XXI

A CENTURY OF CHANGE

I

N thought and mode of life the inhabitants of Western Europe
and North America in the closing years of the nineteenth
century had less in common with their eighteenth-century
forebears than the latter had with the ancient Greeks and Romans.
Never in the whole span of civilization had any epoch witnessed
such a complete transmutation of all the factors conditioning human
life as occurred in the nineteenth century, especially in the last fifty
years of that century. In two generations men were wrenched loose
from norms of thought and behavior of more than two thousand
years3 duration and flung headlong into a boiling chaos of innova-
tion and reconstruction. So swiftly did the wheel of change spin
around that thousands of elderly persons surviving in the early
twentieth century could remember a civilization almost as devoid
of mechanization as that which had adorned the banks of the Nile
five thousand years before.

The nineteenth is beyond all comparison the most bewildering
century of human experience. Ushered in by the French Revolu-
tion, it beheld the sweep of insurrection across the whole face of
Europe and to the utmost corners of the Americas; saw nascent
democracy smothered under black tides of reaction and later
triumphantly revived on new waves of revolution; beheld the new-
shaping of the map of Europe by the conquering hand of Napoleon,
the fatal restoration attempted by Metternich, and the subsequent
rise of virulent national rivalries compensated by the balance-of-
power system. Along with these ever-changing and ever-accelerated
cycles of political variation the nineteenth century experienced the
first phases of the anguishing process of trial and error in the making
of constitutions and the adjustment of political institutions to which
the world was forced by the needs of a gyrating social system.

In economic history the nineteenth is put down as the century
of the Industrial Revolution. Previous centuries had known much
of economic change, even of rapid economic change; and the latter
years of the eighteenth century had witnessed the beginnings of

445

446 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

Industrialization through the introduction of machinery. Suddenly,
however, in the nineteenth century a series of prodigious Inventions
completely undermined the ancient handicraft system and the
traditional agrarian economy, revolutionized the relation of em-
ployer and employee, created new and fabulous forms of wealth and
property, opened world markets to the products of local industry,
evoked new forms of business organization and procedure, produced
entirely new methods of finance, and forever ended the reign of the
old doctrines of political economy. Mechanization, capitalism, and
gigantism, the three furies of the Industrial Revolution, violently
recast the entire structure of economic society.

Pursuant to the economic revolution of the nineteenth centurv,

* 3

there occurred the most stupendous multiplication and shifting of
population in the history7 of mankind. Between 1800 and 1900 the
population of Europe Increased from 187,693,000 to 400,577,000;
that of the United States from 6,000,000 to 76,938,000. The great
bulk of this phenomenal increase took place in cities. At the open-
ing of the century less than 30% of the population of England and
Wales was concentrated in cities; by the close of the century the
proportion of urban dwellers had risen to 70%. In the United
States the proportion of urban population grew from less than 4%
in 1800 to 40% in 1900. Even where there was but a slight incre-
ment in the total population there was a striking drift to the cities.
In France, for example, where there was but a 3% gain in total
population between 1850 and 1900, there was a 25% gain in ur-
banization. There had been no such movement of population since
civilization began. Old mediaeval towns suddenly overflowed their
walls and burgeoned into teeming metropolitan centers; factory
towns sprang up at every convenient mill site and shipping point;
ancient country villages quickly grew into booming centers of trade
and industry or were abandoned to picturesque decay in the rush
of population to throbbing areas of urban life; cities multiplied so
enormously that In many sections the open countryside of former
times entirely disappeared and there was left in its place a sprawling
network of contiguous urban communities.

Marching in step with the new economic order were progressive
improvements in modes of transportation and communication and
in the material conveniences of urban life, which greatly accelerated
the concentration of population in cities. With the perfection of the

A CENTURY OF CHANGE 447

railroad, the steamship, the telegraph, the telephone, the trolley
car, illuminating gas, the electric light, central heating, and pres-
sure systems of water supply, all physical limits to city growth were
removed and the attractions of citv life decidedlv increased. And

* <*

concurrently with these developments came the extensive substitu-
tion of mechanical for manual labor in agriculture, which released
multitudes of farm boys and girls from bondage to the soil and sent
them headlong to the cities in quest of economic opportunity.

Profound changes in the social as well as the economic texture of
life were bound to result. Congestion of population in urban
centers created new and unforeseen ingredients not only the proc-
esses by which men produced and exchanged goods but in all the
processes by which they lived. There were new problems of health
and sanitation? new problems of family life, new problems of sex,
new problems of religion, new problems of education, new problems
in virtually every phase of existence. For countless millions of
people the folkways and mores by which social life had been ad-
justed for generations past were instantly swept away, and they had
to build new moorings and new guides in a wholly new complex of
social facts and forces.

Nor was it mechanical invention and other forms of applied
science which alone upset the equilibrium of the western world in
the nineteenth century. In the purely academic sciences, especially
those having to do with cosmic philosophies, the nineteenth century
saw eternal verities melt away like soft metal under the irresistible
heat of an acetylene flame. Darwin published the Origin of Species
in 18593 forcing the utter abandonment of long-cherished beliefs as
to the position of man in the kingdom of living things. Before the
end of the century biology, astronomy, geology, paleontology,
anthropology, ethnology, and archaeology had not only confirmed
the Darwinian hypothesis, but had revealed for the first time the
appalling complexity of the growth-processes of living organisms
and institutions. The simple assumptions on which men had al-
ways been able to found their thinking about human affairs were
no longer tenable; were, in fact, palpably absurd.

But science and technology were not merely destroying the old;
with equal thoroughness and rapidity they were introducing the
new. Medical science gave ever-increasing control over disease;
chemistry enormously enhanced the productiveness of farms, rnines^

448 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

and factories, and at the same time created Instruments of destruc-
tion such as men had never wielded before; steam and electricity
annihilated space and endowed men with mechanical power be-
yond the wildest dreams of ancient romancers: engineering spanned
rivers, tunneled mountains, harnessed waterfalls, scooped out
great canals for shipping and Irrigation, and built towering sky-
scrapers to house the teeming multitudes of the cities. How should
men employ these new-found faculties? This was a more racking
problem than how to forswear the past.

What to do politically with the new powers which science had
evoked, was made of more vital consequence by the sharp intensi-
fication of nationalism which carne along with the Industrial Revo-
lution. National sentiment and solidarity had been definitely on
the make for several centuries. Contributing to this result were
such factors as dynastic rivalries, territorial ambitions, native pride,
loyalty to the homeland, linguistic and cultural affinities, and re-
ligious bigotry. The powerful surge of popular feeling incident to
the French Revolution and the tremendous emotions engendered
by the Napoleonic wars whipped the flame of national spirit to still
higher temperatures. Then came the Industrial Revolution and
with It incomparably enlarged possibilities of economic nationalism.
Economic protection and economic advantage had been motivating
ingredients of nationalism under the old industrial order, but had
never attained the gigantic power which the Industrial Revolution
imparted to them. In the new order of things the national state
became an aggressive economic entity, bent on the conquest of
resources and markets to feed and sustain its insatiable capitalistic
growth. Peoples developed a new national consciousness — a pre-
potent conviction of the urgency of economic self-sufficiency and
the necessity of economic aggrandizement. The new technology
and the new capitalism provided means to these ends, means far
mightier than any which had ever before been subjected to the
human will. Should these prodigious j Inns be evoked and used to
the utmost in the attainment of national economic objectives? How
far were they forces of good and how far forces of evil? These were
questions which profoundly troubled thoughtful nineteenth-cen-
tury minds.

In former centuries, when tremendous decisions had to be made,
there had always been the authority of religion to fall back upon.

A CENTURY OF CHANGE 449

Although there had been a flood of skepticism in intellectual circles
during the eighteenth century, the authority of religion among the

masses had been little disturbed. In the nineteenth century, how-

« j

ever, the social power of the church began to languish; as a ruling
institution, it gave ground with every succeeding year of the Indus-
trial era. The Roman Catholic Church, In some countries, resisted

"* at

the secular trend more successfully than the Protestant denomina-
tions; but by the end of the century its power of control over the
lives and affairs of its adherents was conspicuously less than in
former centuries. Science shook religious faith to its foundations;
and although the great mass of men did not turn atheist or agnostic,
they became Increasingly Indifferent to religion and disregardful of
ecclesiastical authority. The fervid and Intolerant allegiance once
given to the church was largely transferred to the state. Pietism
declined and patriotism grewr large.

Another factor of change which contributed much to the con-
fusions of the nineteenth century was the rise of free public educa-
tion. By 1850 free elementary education had been provided in the
United States and all but one or two of the major countries of
Europe. By 1900 elementary education was not only free but com-
pulsory In every progressive country In the world, and extensive
provision had been made for free secondary and higher education.
For the first time In history the great submerged masses were sent to
school. Illiteracy became a disgrace, and education became increas-
ingly essential In every line of occupation. What the masses learned
at school (or what they failed to learn) we need not pause to dis-
cuss. They learned at least to read, and thus to know many oracles
Instead of only one or two. And the multitude of oracles who spoke
from the printed page proclaimed an astounding diversity of
truths, half-truths, and untruths. Wherefore it resulted that the
literate masses of the late nineteenth century, though vastly better
informed, were, if anything, less certain in their judgments and less
confident in their convictions than their Illiterate forebears of the
year 1800.

These nineteenth-century phenomena had their beginnings in
western Europe and the United States, but before the century
closed they were on their way to world-wide prevalence. By 1 900 the
modernization of Japan had been completed, and that of China was
well under way. Africa had been marked for Europeanization well

450 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

before the turn of the centurv. and British exploitation of India had

of •* A.

developed Into a program of modernization as well. Latin America
was graduallv swinging1 Into line, and Russia and the Balkan and

O * ._! ,_J

Near Eastern regions, though resisting Innovation, were upon the
eve of ereat transformations. It was indeed a new world which

— ^

raucously greeted the year 1900, but not a brave one. It was too
bewildered by Its modernity to be wholly confident of Its destiny,

II

The political thought of the nineteenth century was as jumbled
as Its material and intellectual progress. Unlike the political
thought of previous centuries it was not characterized by a few
dominant ideas, but was, on the contrary, a veritable Babel of
promiscuous and largely unrelated concepts and doctrines. Even to
attempt to present its main features In summary form Is to Invite,
quite justly, the charge of oversimplification. Yet the attempt must
be made3 for there is no other way to convey to the unspeclalized
mind an adequate appreciation of Its chaotic complexity.

There was inevitably. In the early part of the nineteenth century
especially, a large carry-over of eighteenth-century political
thought. Both the idealism and the realism of the eighteenth cen-
tury found expression in the continuing alternation of radical and
reactionary movements which disturbed the first half of the nine-
teenth century. In connection with these recurrent waves of revo-
lution and restoration all of the eighteenth-century doctrines of
democracy and absolutism were passionately restated and in some
Instances greatly amplified and strengthened. The philosophy of
constitutionalism was perhaps the most notable product of this
phase of nineteenth-century thought.

In revolt against the visionary impractlbility of eighteenth-cen-
tury idealism, but in deep sympathy with Its objectives, was the
philosophy of utilitarianism, which enlisted among its professors
some of the greatest minds of the nineteenth century and could
number in its achievements some of the grandest reforms in the his-
tory of mankind. Seeking to predicate just and righteous political
authority not upon reason or right in the abstract but upon its
actual benefit to the governed, the philosophy of utilitarianism laid
the foundations for a pragmatic approach to public affairs which
was to color the thought and actions of conservative as well as radi-

A CENTURY OF CHANGE 451

cai political leaders all through the nineteenth century. It was the
mother of many fantastic experiments and also of many solid
achievements.

The Industrial Revolution gave a tremendous push to the eight-
eenth-century doctrine of laissezfaire. With the collapse of the rela-
tively static economic order of the past came a dazzling multitude
of newT opportunities for wealth and a powerful incentive to individ-
ual Initiative. Free enterprise became the sacred talisman of the new
capitalism. State interference with or regulation of private business
was decried and denounced not onlv as an Invasion of individual

ut

libertv, but a violation of the most fundamental law of nature. A

* **

rabid school of radical political and economic writers arose to de-
fend and propagate this philosophy of rugged individualism, and
their influence was enormous. With the growth of huge corporate
units and the Increasing submergence of the Individual entrepreneur,
the doctrine of laissez faire lost its attraction for the Little Man,
ceased to be a philosophy of democracy and revolt, and became the
battle-cry of Big Business. As such it has come down to the twen-
tieth century.

The brutal degradation of the working classes, consequent upon
the ruthless competition of free enterprise, produced a sharp reac-
tion; and the nineteenth century saw a vigorous revival of Utopian
socialism, which had scarcely raised its voice since the time of Sir
Thomas More. What the nineteenth century saw was In fact much
more than a revival. Nineteenth-century Utopians refused to be
content with romantic dreams; with characteristic nine teen th-
centuiy elan., they undertook to transform dreams into realities and
establish ideal commonwealths among living men in their own
time. Utopian movements and experiments were launched In wild
profusion; and in the western hemisphere, where there was an
abundance of unoccupied land, dozens of communistic communi-
ties were established and failed.

Possibly by reason of the velocity with which old things were pass-
ing away, men began to have in the nineteenth century7 a sharper
consciousness of the past and a clearer perception of its significance
in the shaping of social institutions. This led to the rise of a vigorous
school of political thought which definitely rejected all Utopias, all re-
forms, all Ideals, and maintained that the only valid approach to the
problem of government was through the Baedeker of history. The

452 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

state, the members of this historical school insisted, was not an arti-
ficial thing, bui the product of long ages of adjustment and readjust-
ment. Through the mvstic chemistry of history certain forms and

^ji * * *

processes, certain complex Institutional arrangements, had become
specially adapted to the genius of particular peoples. To lay the
bungling hand of theoretical reform upon these delicate structures
was to invite disaster. This was noi a new view. It had been the
view of Burke and Montesquieu In the eighteenth century; Bodln
had emphasized the importance of historical development in the
sixteenth century; and numerous other writers, beginning as far
back as Polybius and Aristotle, had given great weight to historical
considerations. Xot until the nineteenth century, however, did the
historical view emerge as the cult of a widely dispersed and mili-
tantly aggressive group of thinkers.

Losing the historical method and closely akin to the historical
school, were the analytical jurists of the nineteenth century, who
gave a new turn to the study of law and legal institutions. Fusing
historical analysis and comparative jurisprudence, these scholars
produced a body of knowledge \vhich demolished the concept of
natural law as the quintessence of right reason and overturned many
other long-accepted rationalizations as to the authority and justifi-
cation of law.

The impact of the Darwinian theory of evolution was quickly felt
in the field of political thought. The historical school had fully-
prepared the soil to receive the evolutionary concept of political
origins and developments, and when the Darwinian biology burst
upon the world In 1859 Its. Implications were promptly transferred to
the realm of political science. For many centuries political thinkers
of various classifications and for widely different purposes had
likened the state to living organisms, particularly the human body.
Until the arrival of the Darwinian biology, however, these anal-
ogies were so largely fantastic and unreal as to have little conse-
quence in a practical way. Darwinism changed all this. It not
only supported the organismic idea, but definitely suggested the
processes by which the evolution of organic political structures
might have come about. The result was an immediate proliferation
of organismic theories and philosophies which, true or false, dis-
placed entirely, In minds susceptible to the appeal of the new scien-
tific approach, all of the older doctrines of state genesis and in-

A CENTURY OF CHANGE 453

trinsicality. Whether the state was viewed as a biological organism,
a psychological organism, a sociological organism, or an economic
organism, made no difference so far as large results were concerned.
In any aspect It was an organism functioning according to laws of
its own being. The acceptance of this concepi meant that all former
generalizations must be discarded and specific principles apropos
of the organic being of the state discovered.

Most disrupting of all nineteenth-century political ideas was the
scientific socialism of Marx and Engels. Dismissing with disgust the
futile idealism of the Utopian socialists, Marx and company set out
to build a socialist theory upon irrefutable postulates of science.
Fully accepting the implications of the Darwinian theory in the
social sphere, equally convinced of the truth of the Aristotelian doc-
trine of economic determinism, and profoundly swayed by earlier
contacts with German scholars of the historical school, Marx com-
pounded all of these elements into a materialistic interpretation of
societal evolution with emphasis upon class distinctions and class
struggles. Viewing the capitalist system as the outcome of the op- .
eration of definite laws of economic evolution, he proceeded, with
acute insight Into economic reality, to expound the theory that
under known economic laws the forces engendered by capitalism
Itself would terminate In class war in which the possessing classes
would be overthrown and the workers, through the Instrumentality
of a socialized state, would take over and administer all of the means
of production and distribution. This, as we have said, was the most
upsetting political philosophy of the nineteenth century. For the
first time proletarlanism was given an economic and political gospel
bottomed upon stubborn realism rather than vague Idealism; for
the first time socialism was given an Impressive scientific exposi-
tion; for the first time revolution was given a program of definite
political and economic pattern. The effects of Marxism were not to
be fully felt in the nineteenth century, but its challenge was recog-
nized and its corrosive work had begun long before the nineteenth
century ended.

The nineteenth century witnessed the coining of age of the doc-
trine of sovereignty which Bodln had advanced back in the six-
teenth century. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies there had been a marked growth of the spirit of nationalism,
and powerful national states had taken form in England, France,

454 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

The Netherlands, and transiently in Spain. The most of Europe
and America, however, remained to be nationalized. The great
outburst of popular feeling excited by the French Revolution set the
stone of nationalism rolling down hill. This was followed by the
destruction of the Holy Roman Empire by Napoleon, his almost
successful effort to found another universal empire, and a wave of
reaction against alien rule which stimulated coherent populations
everywhere to demand and seek political unity and independence.
As a result the nineteenth century beheld a long succession of wars
of liberation and consolidation out of which there flowered a full-
fledged philosophy of national sovereignty. This was destined to
prove a source of ceaseless conflict and confusion, and to engender,
in quest of order and stability, potent, but rival, philosophies of
Imperialism and internationalism.

Lastly we should note the beginnings, in the final decades of the
nineteenth century, of an embryonic science of politics. Really
scientific analysis of political phenomena could not occur until the
study of human life in all its phases had progressed far enough to
produce an abundant quantity of factual material with which the
political scientist might work. Towards the close of the nineteenth
century biology, anthropology, paleontology, ethnology, archae-
ology, and sociology had so far performed this service as to make
possible the formulation of tentative political generalizations of a
genuinely scientific character. As this process went on a significant
cleavage appeared In the ranks of political thinkers. The truly ob-
jective and dispassionate political thinker 3 bent solely upon scien-
tific discovery, had to be technically trained for his task and could
rarely find opportunity for the necessary special education and for
the fruitful prosecution of his labors in any environment but that of
the unlvefeity. Scientific political thought, therefore, went aca-
demic and retired to the seclusion of the library and seminar. Un-
scientific thinkers3 whose endeavors were usually devoted to the
advocacy of a cause, having neither the qualifications nor the in-
clination for scientific study and being concerned with conclusions
rather than underlying truth, gained a clear field in the realm of
political action and became the revered prophets of sadly muddled
multitudes. Scientific political scholars in the quiet of their book-
lined cells uncovered truths of tremendous importance to the work-
aday world, but these were largely ignored outside of collegiate

A CENTURY OF CHANGE 455

circles and were left to filter down to succeeding generations through
the slow process of class-room Instruction. The dynamic philoso-
phies of practical politics continued, far into the twentieth century,
to be the threadbare and scientifically discredited dcgmas of the
Victorian Era and before.

REFERENCES

Brlnton, C., English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century (London,
1933), Chap. I.

Coker, F. W., Recent Political Thought (New York, 1934), Chap. I.

Gabriel, R. H., The Course of American Democratic Thought (New York,
1943).

Hofstadter, R., Social Darwinism in American Thought, 7860-7915 (Phila-
delphia, 1944).

Kohn, H., Prophets and Peoples (New York, 1946).

Mayer, J. P., Political Thought in France from Sifyes to Sorel (London, 1943).

Moore, M. H., Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago,
1936).

Soltau, R., French Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven,
1933), Chap. I.

Zimmern, A., Modern Political Doctrines (London, 1939).

CHAPTER XXII

THE UTILITARIANS

THE nineteenth century had no Spinoza and no Hume, nor
any avowed disciples, in the field of political thought, of
these two master realists. But it had Bentham and the Eng-
lish Utilitarians, whose doctrines reflected in many ways the view-
points of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century realism. The utili-
tarian philosophy is often described as a nineteenth-century revival
of the classical hedonism of Epicurus, which in truth it was; but it
was a fruition also of the critical realism of such scholars as Spinoza
and Hume in the two preceding centuries.

The Benthamite cult was a revolt against the vapory idealism of
eighteenth-century rationalism. For an absolute idealism it sought
to substitute an absolute empiricism. Its leading expounders were
individualists who, convinced of the utter sterility of such concepts
as absolute rights, absolute sovereignty, and absolute justice, had
come to believe that in human affairs there was but one possible
absolute, namely, absolute expediency. Political institutions and
public policies were not to be rated as good or bad relative to some
visionary, and always arbitrary, conjecture of human rights and
obligations, but as more or less beneficial according to some fixed
standard of utility in human affairs. By their fruits, not by their
ideality, should they be judged. Did one ask what fruits should be
approved, or by what standards of evaluation the many fruits politi-
cal authority should be appraised? The answer, as would be ex-
pected of i^ilvldualists, was that the satisfactions of the individual
should furnish the yardstick of utility, and that for the whole of so-
ciety the controlling principle should be "the greatest happiness of
the greatest number."

England was made receptive to utilitarianism by the Industrial
Revolution. The rising magnates of shop and factory could but
resent the prescriptive rights of the ancient aristocracy, and con-
tinued to support the old order only because their fear of equalitar-
ian democracy exceeded their dislike of the feudal birthrights of the
nobility. The principle of utility offered them a splendid weapon

456

THE UTILITARIANS 457

of attack and also of defense. It made practical achievement the
decisive test of rightful authority, and who could point to greater
achievements than the barons of business? True, it Insisted that
practical achievement should redound to ccthe greatest happiness
of the greatest number"; but on that score the overlords of Industry
had everything to gain by comparison with, the feudal gentry, and
democracy as yet had few constructive achievements of which. It
might boast. Democracy, In fact, was still befuddled with meta-
physical hocus-pocus about the Rights of Man.

»The utilitarian group of theorists was never large, but It cut
an imposing figure in the political thought of the early and middle
portions of the nineteenth century. Jeremy Bentham, the founder,
with John Austin and John Stuart Mill, his most potent disciples,
were Its major prophets. Mill always insisted that the Utilitarians
did not constitute an esoteric school of political thought, but there
was none the less a unity in their thinking and a systematic cohe-
sion in their principles which betokened a marked community of
belief. In rarefied intellectual circles they gained few adherents, but
thev sowed In the minds of statesmen and reformers ideas of incal-

4*

culable Influence In shaping the courses of political action. *

II

• Jeremy Bentham is one of the oddest figures In the history of po-
litical thought, and one of the most important. As grotesquely
eccentric in appearance and character as a comic-supplement pro-
fessor, and in some ways equally outlandish in thought, he was an
easy target of ridicule for practical-minded men. Yet he was, in his
own esteem and In the opinion of his disciples, the foremost apostle
of the practical, and his ideas ultimately came to have much the
same sweeping influence in the sphere of practical government as
those of Adam Smith in the field of economics. * He was a profes-
sional reformer whose reforms were almost Invariably ahead of his
time; a source of ideas to be harvested by later generations. He||
lived most of his life and did his most Important intellectual work
in the eighteenth century, but his fame and Influence were delayed
until his old age in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. 1 1

Bentham was born in London in 1748, and fortunately to a
family of sufficient wealth to assure him of economic independence
for life. His parents were educated people and soon perceived in

458 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

their child the makings of an Intellectual prodigy. Accordingly he
was encouraged to early pupilage and was given ample assistance
In the way of books and tutors. At the age of three he began the
study of Latin and read such difficult treatises as Rapin's History
of England. \\Tien he was four he was taught French and took up
the study of the violin. At thirteen he was ready for college and
matriculated at Queen's College, Oxford, from which he was
graduated in 1763^ at the age of fifteen. His father and grandfather
had been successful lawyers and the young graduate was destined
for the same profession. He entered Lincoln's Inn and in due time
was called to the bar.

But during his apprenticeship young Bentham had lost interest
in the practice of law. Going down to Oxford to listen to Black-
stone's lectures and hearing many of the brilliant judgments of
Lord Mansfield delivered from the bench, he had acquired a pro-
nounced taste for jurisprudence and legal philosophy and this was
strengthened by a newly awakened interest in natural science. In-
stead of seizing the opportunity to make an auspicious beginning
at the bar, he whiled away his time with chemical experiments and
dreams of legal reform, and finally decided that the profession of
law was not for him at all. His father, though deeply disappointed,
was wise enough to let him follow his bent for scientific and philo-
sophical studies.

iBentham first gained public attention In 1776 by the publication
of an essay entitled Fragment on Government A This brilliant and slash-
ing attack upon Blackstone's paeans of praise for the British consti-
tution was at first published anonymously. Guessers attributed it
to Lord Mansfield, Lord Camden, Lord Ashburton, and other big-
wigs of the day. Bentham3 s father was so proud that he revealed
the identitjfc of the author and had the pleasure of seeing his son
acclaimed one of the most acute political essayists of the time. Lord
Shelburne, one of the outstanding and powerful figures in the poll-
tics of the country, was so impressed by Bentham's Fragment on Gov-
ernment that he made a protege of its author and frequently enter-
tained him as a guest and presented him to the best circles of society.
In this essay, though It was mainly devoted to destructive criticism
of Blackstone, Bentham definitely set forth the "greatest happiness"
principle which was to become pivot of his mature philosophy.

«In 1785 Bentham made a leisurely tour of Europe which took

THE UTILITARIANS 459

him to every country of Importance, Including Russia. He returned
to England in 1788 hoping to win a seat in Parliament, but was
disappointed in this ambition and apparently concluded that po-
litical success was not In his line. He was tremendously fascinated,

* i

however, by the problems of legislation and compensated Ms failure
In politics with the dream of becoming a super-lawgiver, after the
pattern of Solon and Lycurgus. In 1789 he published the Principles
of Morals and Legislation, a treatise upon which he had been work-
ing for many years. It was his greatest achievement and quickly
brought him world-wide fame. His grandiose dream seemed almost
on the verge of realization, for he was everywhere regarded as a
man of superlative wisdom and was consulted by rulers and states-
men In many countries. •

When the French Revolution crashed upon the world, Bentham
at once got Into touch with the revolutionary leaders In the hope of
guiding the revolutionary reforms In conformity with utilitarian
principles. In this he was doomed to disappointment. He was
honored In France, was made a French citizen in 1792, and wrote
a number of speeches for Mirabeau; but the Revolution wanted
none of his principles. Undiscouraged, he sought elsewhere the op-
portunity to realize his supreme ambition of drafting a comprehen-
sive and scientific code of laws for some existing state. To promote
this project he engaged In extensive correspondence with rulers and
statesmen all over the world. In 1817 he addressed a proposal to
the people of the United States, Inviting them to partake of the
benefits his system of codification would confer. In 1822 he made
an appeal to all peoples of liberal opinions to draw up a clear and
all-comprehensive body of law.

Next only to Bentham's interest in legislation was his concern
with criminal justice and prison reform. That his lafofe did much
to Inspire the great wave of moderation In the treatment of criminal
offenders which swept over the world in the nineteenth century can-
not be denied. His hand was in every sort of reform and innovation.
He was a partner of Robert Owen in the model factory village of
New Lanark; he advanced plans for constructing the Suez and
Panama canals; he pushed through Parliament a project for a
unique prison, the "Panopticon/5 which was designed to facilitate
the observation and control of convicts; he founded, in 18233 the
illustrious Westminster Review.

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

Benthaixfs fame could rest secure on the two books mentioned
above, but he was a prolific writer and his published works number
many volumes. He also left a great mass of unpublished manu-
script, much of which has not yet found its way into print. The last
fifty of his eighty-five years were devoted almost wholly to the pro-
duction of copy for the printer. With a large staff of secretaries and
research assistants about him, he combed the world for knowledge
in the fields of his special interest and heroically strove to bring
order out of the profusely variegated grist which came to his mill.
He died in 1832 — leaving his body to science, writh instructions that
it be dissected in the presence of his friends. The skeleton is still in
the possession of the University College, London.

Ill

Bentham's "felicific calculus." as several commentators have
whimsically dubbed it, appeared in his earliest writings and per-
sisted through the last of his political wTorks. It was the grand idea
upon which his whole system of political thought was erected. Re-
jecting as he did the whole ideology of natural rights and social
contract, yet holding as firmly to the dogma of Sovereign Reason as
any child of the Enlightenment, he had to find a formula for the ap-
plication of reason to human affairs that would dodge the pitfalls
of metaphysical abstraction and yet provide an objectively satis-
factory rule of determination. Spinoza and Hume undoubtedly
gave him the leading clues; Priestley's Essay on Government suggested
the "pain33 and "pleasure55 criterion; and Hutcheson's Moral
Philosophy furnished the phrase ("the greatest happiness of the
greatest number35) which arrested public attention. ^Bentham added
the concept of utility as a mathematical computation of satisfac-
tions worked out by balancing pains against pleasures and supplied
the ideology by which this was expanded into a system of political
thought. »

*Though he repudiated the Rights of Man and had no faith in
the goodness of human nature, Bentham was no whit less an indi-
vidualist than Paine, Rousseau, or Locke. "The community/*
he said, ccis a fictitious body, composed of the individual persons who

are considered as constituting as it were its members. The interest of

. .

the community then is, what?-— -the sum of the interests of the sev-
eral members who compose it. It is vain to talk of the interest of

THE UTILITARIANS 461

the community, without understanding what Is the interest of the
individual. A thing is said to promote the interest, or to be /or the
interest, of an individual, when it tends to add to the sum total
of his pleasures: or, what cornes to the same thing, to diminish the
sum total of his pains.15 1

The great problem of politics, as he posed it was to discover
a principle by which government could be so conducted as to aug-
ment the happiness of all individuals, or, if that was not feasible, of
the greatest possible number. Such, he had no doubtj would be the
certain result of the principle of utility. It could not be otherwise,
because the principle of utility recognized the all-controlling truth
that

"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. On the one hand
the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and
effects., are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in ail
we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our sub-
jection, will but serve to demonstrate and confirm it. In words a man
may pretend to abjure their empire: but in reality he will remain sub-
ject to it ail the while.3' 2

Thus taking it to be an incontrovertible fact of human psychology
that whatever men think they think or fee!5 they are actually swayed
by stimuli growing out of pain or pleasure, Bentham propounded
the principle of utility as follows:

££By the principle of utility is meant that principle which approves or
disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency it
appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party
whose interest is in question: or, what is the same thing in other words,
to promote or to oppose that happiness. I say of every action whatso-
ever; and therefore not only of every action of a private Individual, but
of every measure of government.33 3

With this principle as a lodestar,, the legislator (both in the
particular and the general sense of the term) had but to calculate
the pleasurable or painful consequences of an action, actual or pro-
posed, and he would know whether it was right or wrong, sound or
unsound. Guesswork would be unnecessary, according to Bentham;
for both pleasure and pain were believed to have dimensional

1 Principles of Morals and Legislation (Frowde Ed., 1879), p. 1.

p. 2. 3 Ibid,, p. 3.

462 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

characteristics which could be mathematically measured. Thus It
would be possible to give a definite mathematical value to any pain
or pleasure considered by itself, considered in relation to a single
individual^ or considered in relation to a group of persons. The
factors to be measured in evaluating pains and pleasures by them-
selves or in relation to single Individuals were intensity, duration,
certainty or uncertainty, propinquity or remoteness, fecundity
("the chance it has of being followed by sensations of the same
kind35), and purity ("the chance It has of not being followed by
sensations of the opposite kind35). To these, when a number of per-
sons would be affected, should be added the factor of extent ("the
number of persons to whom it extends").
The task of the lawgiver was simply to

"Sum up ail the values of all the pleasures on the one side, and those
of all the pains on the other. The balance, if It be on the side of pleas-
ure, will give the good tendency of the act upon the whole, with respect
to the interests of that individual person; if on the side of paln3 the bad
tendency of it upon the whole. ,

"Take an account of the number of persons whose interests appear
to be concerned; and repeat the above process with respect to each.
Sum up the numbers expressive of the degrees of good tendency, which
the act has, with respect to each Individual, in regard to whom the
tendency of It is good upon the whole: do this again with respect to each
individual, in regard to whom the tendency of it Is bad upon the whole.
Take the balance; which, if on the side of pleasure, will give the general
good tendency of the act, with respect to the total number or community
of individuals concerned; if on the side of pain, the general evil tendency,
with respect to the same community.

"It is not to be expected that this process should be strictly pursued
previously to every moral judgment, or to every legislative or judicial
operation. It may, however, be always kept in view: and as near as the
process actually pursued on these occasions approaches to it, so near
will such process approach to the character of an exact one." *

To convince the reader that accuracy and objectivity were truly
possible in such a calculation of tendencies rooted in pain and pleas-
ure, Bentham proceeded to enumerate and analyze the principal
pains and pleasures of mankind and then to give advice as to how
they might be evaluated. They were of two kinds, he said — simple
and complex. The simple ones were those which could not be re-
solved into others, and the complex ones were those which could

., p.31.

THE UTILITARIANS 463

be resolved Into various simple ones. Simple pleasures Included
the pleasures of sense, wealth, skill, amity, good name, power, piety,
benevolence, malevolence, memory, imagination., expectation, as-
sociation, and relief. Simple pains Included the pains of privation,
sense, awkwardness, enmity, ill repute, benevolence, malevolence,
memory, imagination, expectation, and association. All of the com-
plex pains and pleasures were compounds of the foregoing.

i All pains and pleasures, explained Bentham, are effects produced
in men's minds by certain exciting causes. Individuals, he pointed
out, differ greatly In iheir sensitivity to various causes of pain and
pleasure. Hence it was apparent that the quantity of pain or pleas-
ure experienced by any individual or group of individuals would
vary according to the factors determining sensitivity.* These factors,
which should be taken into account in every computation of pains
and pleasures, he enumerated thus: health, strength, hardiness,
bodily imperfection, quantity and quality of knowledge, strength
of Intellectual powers, firmness of mind, steadiness of mind, bent of
inclination, moral sensibility, moral biases, religious sensibility, -
religious biases, sympathetic sensibility, sympathetic biases, antl- '
pathetic sensibility, antipathetic biases, Insanity, habitual occupa-
tions, pecuniary circuxnstances, connections in the way of sym-
pathy, connections in the way of antipathy, radical frame of body,
radical frame of mind, sex, age, rank, education, climate, lineage,
government, and religious profession.

* ccThe business ,pf government," Bentham affirmed, ccis to promote!
the happiness of the society', by punishing and rewarding.55 1 It had
no other justification for existence. The selection of rewards and 4
punishments, particularly the latter, must therefore be regarded as
the crucial test of good government. For wrhen a government em-
ploys ineffectual means of promoting the happiness of society it
nullifies its very title to authority. Every just government, Bentham
accordingly would have said, had he been writing the American
Declaration of Independence, derives Its authority, not from the
consent of the governed, but from the utility- of its acts In promoting
the happiness of its subjects.

This might have been just as explosive a doctrine as the dogma
of inalienable natural rights, but in Benthanfs hands It was not.
Bentham probably would have agreed that general unhappiness

^ p. 70.

464 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

was a good ground for revolution, but he would have Insisted upon
a utilitarian definition of happiness and unhappiness. Discontent
and unhappiness were not synonyms In his vocabulary. (There
was no more merciless critic In England of the fallacies of- our
Declaration of Independence than Jeremy Bentharn, nor of the

later doctrinaires of the French Revolution. ; From the utilitarian

/

standpoint one did not arrive at a valid balance of pain over pleas-
ure, or vice versa ^ by following momentary outbursts of sentiment
or sweeping gusts of public opinion. Quite the contrary. The cor-
rect "utility" of any political system or of any law or other public
measure could be determined only by a scientific process of evalua-
tion in which all of the factors entering into the situation were duly
weighed and correlated. In such a computation, factors of sensi-
tivity would be important considerations in the weighting of pains
and pleasures, and might result in conclusions very different from
what would appear on the surface.

\ As a matter of fact Bentham was not greatly concerned about
systems of government as such. He could believe that a representa-
tive democracy would be most likely in the long run to secure the
greatest happiness of the greatest number and at the same time
agree that any other system, under the particular circumstances
of a given time, might be equally conducive to that result. His
design for Utopia was not a system of state organization but a com-
prehensive code of laws based on the principle of utility. Kings
and lords, he thought at first, might be just as readily converted to
such a program as the common masses. The ruling classes did not,
however, fall into line as willingly as he had hoped, and Bentham
ultimately came to believe that none but a democratic constitution
could insure the realization of the utilitarian program.

This conclusion, like most others, he reached by the pathway

of utilitarian dialectic. The central problem in framing a constltu-

\ tion was, he thought, the bestowal and control of power. Rulers

should be granted power to do good and deprived of power to do

evil. In seeking this end, three vital factors in the nature of power

should be taken into account — extension (the number and signifi-

^cance of the persons and things over which the power is to extend),

i duratioix^fBL^tmie during which the power is to be exercised), and

intensity (the metes by which the power is to be effectuated). In

order to insure the maximum of happiness and the minimum of

THE UTILITARIANS 465

unhappiness to subjects, power should be restricted as much as
practicable In all three of these manifestations. Obviously a demo-
cratic constitution would meet this requirement better than any
other. \

i Bentham was most fertile and most constructive in his criticisms
of existing laws, especially criminal laws, and in his suggestions for
reforms to rationalize and humanize the legal system. ^ fie was one
of the first and certainly one of the most convincing, students of
jurisprudence to enlarge and drive home the view that law is not
a system of eternal and infallible absolutes, but a man-made in-
stitution which should be intelligently adapted to varying needs and
circumstances?" 7 All punishment in itself/5 wrote Bentham, "is
evil. Upon the principle of utility, if it ought at all to be admitted, "
it ought only to be admitted in as far as it promises to exclude some
greater evil.55 l .

If the prevention of a greater evil was the only rational justifica-
tion for punishment., it was perfectly plain that in many cases it
should not be inflicted at all. It should never be inflicted, Bentham. _
said, where it was "groundless/5 i.e., where there was no evil for it '
to prevent; where it" was "needless/* i.e., where the evil might cease
or be prevented without it;* where it was "inefficacious/3 i.e., where
it could not be employed so as to prevent the evil; and where it was
"unprofitable/3 i.e., where it would produce evil greater than the
evil prevented. Applying these tests to the penal legislation of the
time, Bentham showed how grossly wide of the mark it was. Even
in cases where, under the principle of utility, punishment would be
clearly justifiable, there was in current practice no rational propor-
tion between the punishment and the offense. In fact, in a large
number of instances it was apparent that the punishment was re-
taliatory or revengeful rather than preventive or corrective. The
legislator guided by utilitarian principles would follow certain
purely objective canons of proportion between each offense and the
punishment thereof.

Bentham had a definite body of rules to suggest for this purpose,
and they were exceedingly keen in their perception of penological
values. In the first place, regardless of benevolent considerations,
the punishment should never in any case be less than sufficient to
outweigh the incentive for the offense. The Golden Rule, from the

p. 170.

466 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

utilitarian standpoint, was no better rule In penology- than the Old
Testament rule of eye for eye and tooth for tooth. It was just as
likely to be out of proportion on the benevolent side as the other
was on the malevolent side. Scientific penology (and that is what
Bentham thought utilitarian penology to be) should aim to adjust
the punishment to the offense in such a way as to restrain the
offender from committing it, or at least from repeating it. This was
not to be accomplished by applying the same general rule to all
committing the same offense. Individual offenders varied so greatly,
said Bentham, even though perpetrating the same crime, that the
adjustment should be made In each case separately. In doing this
attention should be given both to the quantity and the quality of
the punishment. The quality should be calculated to meet the re-
quirements of the Individual case both as to prevention and cor-
rection, and the quantity should be varied according to the circum-
stances.

In fixing the proportion between the punishment and the offense,
TBentham explained, careful attention should be given to certain
J governing principles. First, the quantity of the punishment should
be variable according to every possible variation in the profit or
mischief of the offense. Second, the punishment should be equable,
producing neither needless nor inefficacious pain. Third, the pun-
ishment should always be commensurate with other punishments
in like or similar cases. Fourth, the punishment should be "charac-
teristic" of the offense, i.e., it should be associated as closely as pos-
sible with the Ideas entering into the offense. Fifth, the punishment
should be exemplary, meaning that it should be of such nature and
should be administered in such a way as to be a lesson to the offen-
der and others. Sixth, the punishment should be "frugal" of pain,
not inflicting more than necessary to teach the desired lesson and
discourage the repetition of the offense. Seventh, the punishment
should always be subservient to reformation. Eighth, as far as con-
sistent with the foregoing rules, the punishment should disable the
offender with respect to future mischiefs. Ninth, the punishment
should compel the offender, as far as possible, to compensate those
injured by the offense. Tenth, the punishment should be popular —
should not be repulsive to public opinion and excite sympathy for
the offender. Eleventh, the punishment should always be remissi-
ble; for though clemency should never be necessary in scientific

THE UTILITARIANS 467

penology, the possibility of error should always be kept in mind and
the punishment fixed with a view to remission if mistakes should
occur.

* Benthanrs principle of utility has been scathingly condemned .
Moralists and idealists have united in denunciation of its :;baseI?
materialism. He judged human beings as though they were swine,

it was said. If wre ;ctake awav conscience, as Bentham does '3 com-

* -1 j ,

plains Robert H. Murray, "there is no such thing as a moral or an

immoral action, though there may remain acts that are generally
useful or the reverse. As there Is no Individual conscience, so there
Is no collective conscience. The culprit does not feel the censure of
the community.35 1 This view is scarcely fair to Beniham's ethics.
Bentham rejected moral judgments for the same reason that he
rejected natural rights, sovereignty, and other metaphysical ab-
solutes* He thought them worse than meaningless; they were prone,
In his opinion, to gross perversion and abuse in the hands of igno-
rant. Intolerant, and selfish men. What he sought was a standard of
right and wrong, and therefore a basis of authority, which could be
related to tangible and objectively measurable values. The senses,
he thought, were real, not Imaginary, and could be quantitatively
dealt with. \Vhen we examine Bentham's catalog of pains and

p-gnnmBeiiflaN^ m5SHBpHfc^™wR#^^ r^^^'^^tS^srn'f'imaBie^tmsi^gmams^mmaaiMafa

pleasures, we find that the latter include practically all of the con-
ventional Christian virtues. To Bentham these were significant as

*'J1 4T'""""*""^'"a'*"~"~"* im»*"«M™*" . « - t »

simple facts in the sensory experience of man. I hat conscience
approved or disapproved was of little consequence5 for conscience,
as the history of mankind would abundantly prove, was often a
treacherous guide. The transcendent purpose of government was
to augment the sum total of human happiness and diminish that of
unhappiness. Why not, therefore, place on one side of the equation
those factors of life which experience had proved to be conducive to
general pleasure and on the other those which likewrlse had been
shown tendful to general pain?

*The weakest points of Bentham5 s philosophy were that his psy-
chology was Inadequate and his reconciliation of Individual ' and
community satisfactions largely unsuccessful.^ His diagnosis of the
motivating forces of human behavior did not probe deep enough to
reveal the fact that pain and pleasure are superficial and often
artificial concepts expressing results but not disclosing causes, and

1 The History of Political Science (1926), p. 314.

J

468 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

hence are likely to prove misleading standards of utility* Nor was
Bentham able to cross the chasm between individual and social \
utility. He seemed to think that under the principle of utility there 'i
could be no antagonism between the individual and the state, ap-
parently because the sum total of individual satisfactions would
indicate the course invariably 10 be pursued by the state. But this
was to leave out of account the impossibility of a state policy in har-
mony with a calculus of pains and pleasures for each and every
member of the community. Either the state must impose upon all
the pain-pleasure reckoning of the majority or of the ruling classes,
or it must resign authority and give way to the arithmetic of anar-
chic individualism. Though he would not firmly grasp it, Bentham
inclined more to the first than the second horn of that dilemma j

Regardless of the shortcomings of his utility theory, Bentharn's
service to political thought was enormous. By his merciless skepti-
cism and cold analysis the preposterous fictions of history and logic
by which the social contract philosophers had bolstered up their
theory of the state were shorn of all respectability. More forcibly
and more clearly even than Hume or Spinoza he drove home the
truth that the basis of political society is eternally contemporary."!
Not some dubious occurrence in the ancient past nor some concep-
tual compact of pre-social vintage was to be deemed the cornerstone
of political authority, but the habitual obedience of men, and the
present underlying reasons for that obedience. For Bentham and
his disciples present obedience, and hence present authority, was
predicated upon the conscious or subconscious realization of the
utility of government. That, of course, was too simple an explana-
tion to contain the whole truth; but a conscious or subconscious
recognition of the utility of the state is undeniably an important
ingredient in the political psychology of every people. By bringing
this into clear relief, overstressing it perhaps, Bentham wrote large
the doctrine that government must justify itself and thus find its
title to authority in its direct and immediate service to mankind.
That was more revolutionary in many ways^more challenging to
The Powers That Be, than the volcanic doctrine of natoaLrights/
Not even those who rejected and ridiculed Bentham's pain-and-
pleasure criterion of utility could ignore the implications of his
pragmatic revolt against the unrealities of political dogma.

No less alterative was Bentham' s influence upon theories of sov-

THE UTILITARIANS 469

ereignty and law. Law, he Insisted., was not a mystic mandate of

'"'reason'5 or "nature/5 but simply the command of that authority
10 which the members of the community render habitual obedience.!
The right or capacity to issue and enforce such commands was
nothing more than a result of the habitual obedience. Law, there-
fore, was simply an expression of the wUl of one accustomed to re-
ceive obedience, and sovereignty was the faculty or capacity of
supreme will — supreme only because its commands were habitually
obeyed above ail others. Since the only ascertalnable will In human

rf» <*

affairs, according to Bentham5 was the will of human beings, he
argued that sovereignty must be vested In a definite human superior
whose commands are law so long as they are habitually obeyed.
Under this view the right to rule and the obligation to obey pro-
ceeded not from absolute and eternal canons of reason or nature,
but from simple facts of human association. There was no ethical
element involved. ^Bentham divorced politics and ethics almost as
completely as Machiavelli. He recognized no moral right to com-
mand and no moral duty to obey; nor did he see any moral con- t
sideratlons In the question of revolution. Sovereignty, as he defined
It, was merely a natural phenomenon^ Sovereign right to command
was limited only by the sovereign's ability to get his commands
obeyed; and the rightful liberty of subjects to resist was limited
only by their ability to gain enough support to make law enforce-
ment Impossible. t In determining how far either authority or op-
position to authority should be pressed, thought Bentham, the
principle of utility would prevail.

Here was a doctrine to rock the foundations of all accredited
political theory. With ruthless logic Bentham had brushed aside
the ancient verities of both radical and conservative thought; had I!
erased all distinction in principle between free and despotic polities;
had put It down that divine right, feudal right, historical right,
natural rlght5 contractual right, and constitutional right equally
and alike were rubbish and nonsense. There was no right to rule,
he had declared, and no right to be free; there was only the fact of
power and the circumstances which made that power a fact. \ It was
folly to put any trust in categorical absolutes; the task of Intelligent
statecraft and similarly of intelligent citizenship was to understand
the nature and laws of power and utilize them to beneficent ends.
Exceedingly unwelcome to romantic minds, both radical and reac-

470 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

tionary, was this pitiless realism. It was bitterly assailed; but its
influence could not be checked. Like a violent purge, it swept
through nineteenth-century political thought and cleared away a
multitude of obstructions to scientific thinking.

Benthanfs contribution to jurisprudence, especially criminal
jurisprudence, has already been mentioned. In this field his influ-
ence was immediate and lasting. No man did more to unravel the
complexities of mediaeval law or to introduce simplicity., clarity,
and practical good sense into legal thinking. His persistent and
contagious propaganda in behalf of codification was directly re-
sponsible for the widespread codification movement of the middle
and latter decades of the nineteenth century; and his utilitarian
theories of punishment started a wave of penological reform which
has not yet subsided. »

IV

One disciple of Bentham whose influence, though confined to the
•narrow sphere1 of jurisprudence, gradually colored the political as
well as the legal thinking of many of the outstanding publicists of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was John Austin, the father
of "positive" law and "determinate" sovereignty. Austin was born
In 1790 and died in 1859. At an early age he entered the army, but
resigned his commission In 1812 and took up the study of law. He
was called to the bar in 1818 but found he had no talent for the
practice of law and gave it up. In 1819 Austin married Sarah
Taylor, a member of a socially prominent family and a woman of
distinguished literary attainments. Mrs. Austin enjoyed a wide
friendship in intellectual circles, and among those most frequently
entertained at her home were Bentham, James Mill, and Grote.
Through these gentlemen Austin was brought into intimate contact
with the utilitarian cult.

In 1826 Austin was offered the chair of jurisprudence In the
newly founded University College of London. Feeling the necessity
of special preparation for this post, he went to Germany and spent
two years in study at Heidelberg and Bonn. There he made the
acquaintance of leading German intellectuals and became es-
pecially intimate with the great jurist, Savigny. Austin began his
lectures at the University College in 1 828 and made a deep impres-
sion on his classes, which included John Stuart Mill, Sir Samuel

THE UTILITARIANS 47!

Romilly, and others who were destined to become greai figures in
English public life. In 1832 he published his most important trea-
tise, The Province of Jurisprudence. In the same year he resigned Ms
professorship.

The remainder of Austin's career was of little consequence in Ms
philosopMc labors. In 1833 tie was made a member of a royal
commission to draw up a digest of criminal law and procedure. In
1834 he was asked to give lectures on jurisprudence and interna-
tional law before the benchers of the Inner Temple, but the attend-
ance was so small that the course was discontinued after a few
lectures had been given. In 1836 he was appointed royal commis-
sioner to Malta. Retiring from this post in 1838, he lived in France
during the next ten years. The revolution of 1848 caused Mm to
return to England, where he lived in semi-retirement until Ms
death. After Austin's death his wife republished Ms Province of
jurisprudence and certain supplementary papers under the title
Lectures on Jurisprudence, and it is through this volume and the
teachings transmitted by his pupils that his doctrines have made
their principal impact upon the world.

The word uAustinian55 is one of the common adjectives in the
vocabulary of modern public law. Every beginner in jurisprudence
is supposed to know its meaning whether or not he knows anything
much of John Austin and his system of thought. The tendency since
the turn of the twentieth century has been to acquaint students
with Austin's theories chiefly in order to refute them and maintain
different or contrary theories. That in itself is a significant thing.
That they must be continually refuted indicates the acuteness and
power of Austin's dogmas.

Bentham's utilitarianism and Austin's positivism wrere made for
each other like piston and cylinder. Austin's military training and
experience had so conditioned his mind that when he came into
contact with. Bentham's realistic theory of law it seemed an obvious
truth, needing only to be analytically elaborated and systematized.
His study of jurisprudence under German masters, added to his
naturally acute and rigorous intelligence, most admirably fitted
Austin for this task. 'Starting where Bentham left off, he contrib-
uted precision, order3 and meticulous logic to the utilitarian doc-
trine in the narrow but higMy important field of juristic thought.

The pivotal concept of Austinian positivism was its definition of

472 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

law. Austin soueht a definition that would eliminate all uncertainty

•~f j

as to what was and was not law. Accepting without question Ben-
tham's Idea that what imparts the quality of law to any rule or
mandate is the fact of habitual obedience, he removed from con-
sideration everything but man-made rules. The so-called laws of
nature and laws of God, whatever they were, could not be counted
among the rules which courts of justice had to administer. Habit-
ually obeyed they might or might not be; but the obedience, when
given, was from religious or ethical and not political motives.
When disobeyed, there was no sanction that judicial tribunals
could apply.

- Of man-made rules Austin discerned two great classes. One con-
sisted of £ 'rules set and enforced by mere opinion, that is by the opin-
ions or sentiments held or felt by an Indeterminate body of men in
regard to human conduct." 1 The other consisted of rules set and
enforced by political superior. Rules of the first type, said Austin,
could not properly be termed law; they belonged rather in the
category of "positive morality." The only rules which could be
truly regarded as "positive law33 were such as, In substance if not In

form, amounted to a command which might be followed by definite

\
punishment if disobeyed. A fairly precise definition, one would say;

but it was not yet sufficiently exact to satisfy the severe analysis 10
which Austin subjected every concept he put forth. There were,
he perceived, two species of commands. Some were "occasional"
and "particular"; not of general force or application. Others
created obligations "generally to acts or forbearances of a class" 2
The latter alone could be deemed "positive law.'x,

J

What Austin had done was to rule out of the domain of real law
not only divine law and natural law but also practically all of inter-
national law and large portions of constitutional law. In so doing he
achieved a degree of clarity and exactness unprecedented in the
annals of jurisprudence, but introduced into legal thinking a logical
fixity which has been the bane of evolutionary jurists ever since.
Entirely pre-Darwinlan in his grasp of social forces, Austin made
no place In his system for the gradual development of opinion into

|l«

law. A rule, according to his analysis, was either positive law or

1£t Lectures on Jurisprudence," in W. J. Brown (ed.), The Austinian Theory of Lam
(1906), Chap, i, par. 6.

2 ML, Chap, i, pars. 34, 37.

THE UTILITARIANS 473

not law at all. Legal obligation could exist only when the rule was
positive law. Moral obligation might exist in other cases, but with
that, law was not concerned.

The famous Austinian definition of sovereignty followed hard on
the heels of the concept of positive law. "The essential difference,'5
\\TOte Austin, "of a positive law (or the difference that severs it from
law which is not positive law) may be stated thus. Every positive
law is set by a sovereign person., or a sovereign body of persons, to a
member or members of the independent political society wherein
that person or body of persons Is sovereign or supreme.53 l This
called for a definition of sovereignty, which the author forthwith
supplied: "The notions of sovereignty and independent political
society may be expressed concisely thus. — If a determinate human
superior, not in the habit of obedience to a like superior, receive
habitual obedience from the bulk of a given society, that determi-
nate superior is sovereign in that society, and the society (including
the superior) is a society political and independent.35 2

Not since Bodin had any one so clearly and cogently stated the
principle of absolute, concentrated authority. Austin was exceed-
ingly careful to fortify his definition against ambiguity and obscu-
rity. The only authority he was willing to rank as sovereign was
that resulting from the "habitual obedience" of "the bulk of a given
society" to a "determinate human superior.33 All other authority
rested upon fictitious or illusory foundations and could be chal-
lenged as lacking the essence of real political power. If it was not
vested in a determinate human being or beings, there was no will by
which it could be invoked and exercised. If it did not rest upon
habitual obedience from the bulk of an independent political so-
ciety, it was fortuitous and uncertain. Austin's point of view was
purely factual. If the conditions of his formula could not be met,
how, asked he, could it be pretended that there was any will su-
perior to any other? Where was the unity and control necessary to
avert anarchy and establish and maintain law? The why of the
habitual obedience did not concern him much. He accepted with
little question Bentham's pain-and-pleasure hypothesis of political
motivation. But the deductions he drew from the facts as he inter-
preted them were not to be easily brushed aside.

Austin insisted that actual sovereignty was indivisible, and in

., Chap, ii, par. 219. 2 Ibid., Chap, ii, par. 221.

474 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

every Independent political community was definitely located In
certain ascertalnable human beings. He was at some difficulty In
maintaining this thesis In the case of federal governments like the
United States, bui he satisfied the requirements of his doctrine by
advancing the ingenious explanation that in composite states of this
sort sovereignty may be found In an aggregate of persons in whom
the totality of authority Is reposed. Beyond the ambit of positive
law Austin did not claim supremacy for the sovereign, but within
that sphere he asserted that its authority was single and absolute.
Liberties and rights could not exist in that sphere; those words, he
declared, wTere merely euphuisms describing the privileges vari-
ously conceded by sovereign authority to Its subjects.

^ The theory of legal sovereignty in its modern form was Austin's
most important contribution to political thought. He was far from
attributing to the state any moral, rational, or even political su-
premacy. What he did maintain was that given an independent
political society In which habitual obedience is established, there is a
single and ultimate personal will or there is no state at all. This
doctrine has become the chief bastion of the monistic nationalism
of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Though sub-
jected to a hurricane of criticism from the champions of political
pluralism, it still stands and with the rise to the totalitarian and au-
thoritarian state concepts of the post-war period seems to be gaining
strength.

V

In the two Mills, James (1773-1836), the father, and John Stuart
(1806-1873), the son, Benthamism found its most powerful prophet
and its most penetrating revisionist. "The century covered by these
two lives,33 says Dunning, "fixes very fairly the chronological
bounds within which the Benthamite utilitarianism rose, flourished
and passed away by absorption into later philosophic growths?? l
It is hard to decide which of the two exerted the greater influence,
although John Stuart Mill is commonly accounted a more profound
political thinker than his father.

c After a brilliant student career at the University of Edinburgh,
James Mill went to London in 1 802 in quest of fame and fortune,
and was richly rewarded with both. Fame attended his every step.

1 A History of Political Theories from Rousseau to Spencer (1920), p. 235.

THE UTILITARIANS 475

As an editor, essayist, historian, economist^ and psychologist he
gathered a reputation which made him one of the most renowned
personages of his time. Fortune also smiled upon him, and secured
for him, after the publication of his History of India in 1818* one of
the high-salaried posts In the India Service. Mill became ac-
quainted with Bentham in 1808 and soon was one of the great utili-
tarian's closest friends and disciples. So deeply devoted to Bentham
and his philosophy did Mill become that he conceived It to be his
mission to bring the teachings of the master to the attention of the
world. « He was a voluminous contributor to periodicals as well as a

M

writer of books, and was undeniably a great force in the populariza-
tion of utilitarian doctrines. His articles on that subject in the fifth
edition of the Encyclopaedia Bntannica in 1814 made a great impres-
sion and were regarded as an authentic exposition of the utilita-
rian view.

It cannot be said that James Mill added much to Benihanrs stock
of basic ideas, but he was a genius at dressing those ideas to achieve
the best effect. His version of utilitarianism was illuminated with
historical^ economic, and psychological analyses which Bentham
had been unable to supply. Largely because of a desire to place
utilitarianism on a sure and clear psychological and philosophical
foundation. Mill wrote, in 1 829, his Analysis of the Phenomena of the
Human Mind, which is said to have launched the u association^ t"
theory of modern psychology. 0 Seeking firmer economic bases for
the utilitarian gospel. Mill delved into economic theory and was
instrumental In stirring Ricardo, also one of Bentham3 s disciples, to
write his classic treatise on the Principles of Political Economy and Tax-
ation. Condensing and Interpreting Ricardo's views. Mill published
in 1821 his Elements of Political Economy, which is now honored as the
first English textbook on economics. Mill is also said to have con-
vinced Bentham that political reform must precede legal reform
and to have enlisted his aid in the formation of that influential
group of liberal reformers who came to be known as the philosophi-
cal radicals.

James Mill was greatly interested in education and wrote exten-
sively on that subject. In his son he determined to give the world an
example of what careful and intelligent education could do? and
therefore took upon himself the responsibility of the boy's tutelage
from the earliest years. At the age of three John Stjiart Mill was

476 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

taught Greek by his father; at the age of eight he began the study of
Latin, algebra, and geometry, and was also reading Xenophon,
Plato, Herodotus, Isocrates, and Diogenes in Greek and Gibbon
and Hume in English. At twelve years of age John Stuart began the
study of logic and read Aristotle's treatise on logic in the original
Greek. \Vhen he was thirteen the father concluded that the pro-
digious boy had sufficient background for the study of political econ-
omy and took him through Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and
Ricardo's Principles. The next year he was sent to France with
Samuel Bentham3 a brother of Jeremy, and there learned the French
language and studied higher mathematics, chemistry, and botany.
Returning to England at the age of fifteen, young Mill took up the
study of psychology and attended Austin's lectures on jurisprudence.
He decided he wanted to be a lawyer and began to study for the
bar. At the age of seventeen, however, he lost his interest In law and
entered the India Service as a clerk in the examiner's office under
his father.

The next thirty-five years of John Stuart Mill's life were spent in
the India Service. He rose to be one of the responsible undersecre-
taries of the India administration and for a long period had charge
of the drafting of all despatches and documents dealing with the
native States of India. Through this experience he gained a large
knowledge of the practical side of government and public adminis-
tration. Upon the dissolution of the India Company and the reor-
ganization of the India Service in 1858, Mill retired on a generous
pension. In 1865 he was elected to Parliament In one of the most
remarkable political campaigns in history. He refused to solicit
votes, put up money for election expenses of any sort, or engage In
any of the usual campaign activities. Moreover, he announced In
advance that if elected he would attend to none of the petty local
business on which legislative constituencies are wont to set such a
store. The novelty of this mode of campaigning was probably re-
sponsible for his election. ,But when he took his seat in Parliament
and proceeded to do exactly as he had promised, that was carrying
the joke too far to be amusing. Mill served three years in Parlia-
ment, making unpopular speeches on unpopular subjects and gener-

„ ally devoting himself to things he thought needed doing but no one
eke would do. He advocated minority representation, proposed

\ woman suffrage and representation for women, advocated a reduc-

THE UTILITARIANS 477

tion of the national debt, opposed the suspension of the writ of
habeas corpus in Ireland^ aroused the ire of the farmers by proposing
measures to prevent cattle diseases — and was defeated for reelec-
tion in 1868.

Such was John Stuart Mill's career in public service. His other
and far more famous career of essayist, philosopher, and reformer
was carried on "out of hours/3 so to speak. From early manhood
Mill was constant contributor to reviews and periodicals, and
gradually built up a literary and philosophical reputation that
classed him as one of the intellectual heavyweights of the Victorian
Era. Reared in inner household of utilitarianism and under the
personal instruction not only of his father but also of Bentham5
Austin, and Ricardo, it was inevitable that he should begin as a
doctrinaire utilitarian. About the time of taking his post in the
India Office he read Bentham's Principles of Morals and Legislation
and was so deeply impressed that he dedicated himself to the task
of perfecting and disseminating the Benthamite cult. With this in
mind, he took the lead in 1822 in the organization of the Utilitarian
Society. ; In this self-appointed mission, as we shall see. Mill was not
to succeed. He had neither the emotional nor the intellectual
equipment for the cold-hearted job of producing a definitive state-
ment of utilitarianism. Experiences during a visit to France shortly
after the revolution of 1830; a spiritual crisis in his late twenties;
the release from intellectual bondage following the death of his
father in 1836; and most of all, perhaps, his twenty-year courtship
of Mrs. Taylor, whom he married upon her husband's death in
1851, so humanized his mental processes that his interpretation of
utilitarianism ended in a revisionary compromise with idealistic
collectivism^

Mill wrote extensively on many subjects — logic, metaphysics,^
history, economics, and government. On the last-named topic his
most important works were his essays on Representative Government,
Liberty y Parliamentary Reform, Utilitarianism, and The Subjection of
Women. (In his political as in all his other philosophical writings
Mill exhibits an unresolved conflict between the intellectual furni-
ture inherited from the utilitarian preceptors whom he loved and
revered and the conclusions to which he was driven by his own
open-minded and sympathetic observations of fact. , While this con-

•dpf1

sistent want of consistency in time greatly impaired Mill's reputa-

478 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

tion as a thinker. It was in no small part the cause of the tremendous
attraction he had for the generation in which he lived — a generation
as sadiv confused as he was himself.

^

Thoroughly characteristic of Mill's retreat from utilitarianism is
his treatment, in the essay on Utilitarianism, of Bentham's calculus of
pains and pleasures. He begins by accepting the Bentham for-
mula almost without reservation:

"The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the
Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion
as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the
reverse of happiness. By happiness Is intended pleasure, and the ab-
sence of pain; by unhapplness, pain, and the privation of pleasure. To
give a clear view of the moral standard set up by the theory, much more
requires to be said; In particular, what things It includes In the ideas of
pain and pleasure; and to whai extent this is left an open question. But
these supplementary* explanations do not affect the theory of life on
which this theory of morality is grounded — namely, that pleasure, and
freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends; and that all
desirable things (which are as numerous in the utilitarian as in any
other scheme) are desirable either for the pleasure inherent In them-
selves, or as means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of
pain." *

Then —

"It Is quite compatible with the principle of utility to recognize the
fact, that some kinds of pleasure are more desirable and more valuable
than others. It would be absurd that while, in estimating all other
things, quality Is considered as well as quantity, the estimation of
pleasures should be supposed to depend on quantity alone." 1

With this and similar qualifications all along the line Mill saved
the face of Benthamism but confessed its essential fallacy. It was, in
fact, wholly incompatible with the Benthamite formula to admit
any but the quantitative basis of evaluating pains and pleasures.
Scientific legislation, as conceived by Bentham, must avoid ethical
judgments and confine itself to objective facts which could be quan-
titatively measured. Deviate from this severely amoral rule, and
you were immediately in the same boat with the metaphysicians,
theologians, and other ideologues whose doctrines were mainly
imaginative. If utility was a qualitative as well as a quantitative

1 Utilitarianism, Liberty, and Representative Government (Everyman's Library, 1910),
pp. '6-7.

THE UTILITARIANS 479

thing, it became of necessity as elusive as quicksilver and as variable
as conscience. Exactness was impossible and Bentham's whole sys-
tem was enveloped in fog. Mill's loyalty to the Inherited creed
would not let him see the naked truth, which was that the Bentham-
ite psychology of human motivation was far too simple and superfi-
cial to explain either the Individual or the social behavior of men,
and was not. therefore, a valid basis for a scheme of social control
in which the greatest happiness of the greatest number was to be
sought by weighing and employing forces supposedly emerging from
the factors of pain and pleasure alone. Yet his acuteness of percep-
tion and breadth of mind compelled him to recognize the flaws of
the "felicific calculus" in numerous concrete cases. Accordingly he
made exceptions and resorted to laborious rationalizations which
ultimately made him say:

"In the golden rule of Jesus of Nazareth, we read the complete spirit
of the ethics of utility. To do as you would be done by, and to love your
neighbour as yourself., constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian
morality. As the means of making the nearest approach to this ideal,
utility would enjoin, first, that laws and social arrangements should
place the happiness, or (as speaking practically it may be called) the
interest j of every individual, as nearly as possible In harmony with the
Interest of the whole; and secondly, that education and opinion, which
have so vast a power over human character, should so use that power as
to establish In the mind of every individual an Indissoluble association
between his own happiness and the good of the whole; especially be-
tween Ms own happiness and the practice of such modes of conduct,
negative and positive, as regard for the universal happiness prescribes;
so that not only may he be unable to conceive the possibility of happi-
ness to himself, consistently with conduct opposed to the general good,
but also that a direct Impulse to promote the general good may be in
every individual one of the habitual motives of action, and the senti-
ments connected therewith may fill a large and prominent place in
every human being's sentient existence." l

In this interpretation of utilitarianism very little of Bentham re-
mains. 'Bentham was concerned not with the Ought but the Is in
human motivation and behavior. His objective was a rule of legis-
lation that could be applied to things as they are at any level of
morality or any stage of civilization. • The resulting greatest happi-
might not be the kind of happiness men ideally ought to enjoy,
rifout it would be a kind they actually could and would most enjoy5

id., p. 16.

480 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

and would therefore be the best, under the circumstances, that
human society could give. Benthanrs principle of utility, in a so-
ciety of wolves would exalt wolfishness; in a society of saints it would
exalt saintliness, Mill was determined that saindiness should be
the criterion of utility in anv society whatsoever.

* ** *j

Mill was much more at ease in his essay on Liberty than in his de-
fense of utilitarianism. In closing the latter he vigorously rejected
the doctrine of expediency as the paramount guide in determining
the proper course of action for the state. The principle of utility,
he maintained, did not necessitate this conclusion at all. There
were, he insisted, various kinds and gradations of utility, and
among them "certain social utilities which are vastly more impor-
tant, and therefore more absolute and imperative than any others
are as a class (though not more so than others may be in particular
cases); and which therefore ought to be, as well as naturally are,
guarded by a sentiment not only different in degree, but also in
kind; distinguished from the milder feeling which attaches to the
mere idea of promoting human pleasure or convenience, at once
by the more definite nature of its commands, and by the sterner
character of its sanctions.53 l Liberty belonged in this category of
transcendent utilities.

The older utilitarians had not ranked liberty so high in then-
scale of values. Other things were equally vital in their view, and
they were not unwilling upon occasion to sacrifice liberty to other
ends. They lived in an age when tyranny was almost exclusively
the work of intrenched minorities, and could be overcome only
by curtailing their liberties and subjecting them to social control.
But John Stuart Mill lived in an age in which it was beginning to
be evident that majorities could work tyranny as well as minorities,
and just as harmfully to the common weal.. Protection for minorities
was becoming as important as protection against minorities. Mill
could not fall back upon the discredited doctrine of inalienable
rights; his utilitarian predecessors had made mince-meat of that.
There was only one road for him to take, and that was the road of
the Higher Utility. A distinction must be drawn between utility
redounding to the good of individuals and utility redounding to
the good of society, also between that tending toward the temporary
good of society, or a major part thereof, and that tending toward

1 HAL, p. 60.

THE UTILITARIANS 48!

the permanent good of society as a whole. This last must take
priority over all others and rank supreme In even' calculation of
values. N

Individual freedom of bodv and mind was of such vast social

nl

as well as individual importance. In Mill's opinion, that

"the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collec-

•* *

tively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number,
is self-protection. . . . The only purpose for which power can be
rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against
his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical
or moral. Is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be com-
pelled to do or forbear because it will be better for Mm to do so, be-
cause it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to
do so would be wise, or even right. These are good reasons for re-
monstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or
entreating him, but not for compelling him, or visiting him with any
evil in case he do otherwise. To justify* that, the conduct from which
it Is desired to deter him must be calculated to produce evil to some one
else. The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable
to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely
concerns himself, Ms independence is, of right, absolute." l

Here was a creed of individualism as far-reaching and uncom-
promising, apparently, as that of Locke or any other natural rights
philosopher. But Mill hastens to inform his reader that the rationale
of his individualism Is strictly utilitarian:

^jMrf^1^1"11 "* *"

"It is proper to state that I forego any advantage which could be
derived to my argument from the Idea of abstract right, as a thing In-
dependent of utility, I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all
ethical questions; but it must be utility in the largest sense, grounded
on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being. Those inter-
ests, I contend, authorise the subjection of individual spontaneity to
external control, only in respect to those actions of each, which concern
the Interest of other people." 2

Having taken this extreme position. Mill at once began his char-
acteristic maneuver of retreat under the cover of carefully reasoned
exceptions and qualifications. His doctrine of liberty manifestly
was Intended, he said, to apply "only to human beings In the ma-
turity of their faculties**; 2 not to children or other persons whose
immaturity or other deficiencies of mind, body, or character re-

1 IML, pp. 72-73. 2 Ibid., p. 74.

482 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

quired them to be taken care of by other people. For the same
reasons It could not be extended to backward peoples or races.
"Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with
barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means
justified by actually effecting that end. Liberty, as a principle, has
no application to any state of things anterior to the time when
mankind have become capable of being Improved by free and equal
discussion." 1

Nor was that all. Even In a civilized society as between mature
and Intelligent persons, said Mill, there was a sphere in which indi-
vidual liberty must be entirely subordinated to collective welfare.
The boundaries of this sphere \vere marked by (1) the individual's
obligation to do no harm to others and (2) the individual's obliga-
tion to bear his due share of the "labours and sacrifices" necessarv

4

to secure society or any of its members against harm. Realizing and
willingly granting that these boundaries must in many cases be
dimly lined and capable of almost indefinite expansion. Mill took
pains to establish the frontiers of the domain in which liberty
should be absolute and unimpaired. This Included "liberty of
thought and feeling," "absolute freedom of opinion and sentiments
on all subjects, practical or speculative, scientific, moral, or theo-
logical," "liberty of expressing and publishing opinions," "liberty
of tastes and pursuits," and freedom to unite with other persons for
purposes not involving harm to others. "No society," he went on
to say, "in which these liberties are not, on the whole, respected, is
free, whatever may be its form of government; and none is com-
pletely free in which they do not exist absolute and unqualified."
% Mill's chapter on freedom of thought and discussion is one of the
finest things on that subject in the annals of political literature, fully
equaling the heights attained by Milton, Spinoza, Voltaire, Rous-
seau, Paine, Jefferson, and other doughty champions of liberty to
think and speak. Hearken to these oft-quoted aphorisms: "We can
never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a
false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil stilL" 2
"All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility." 2
"Judgment Is given to men that they may use it. Because it may be
used erroneously, are men to be told that they ought not to use it
at all?"v s/*He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little

^SkJr

d., p. 73. 2 fljft^ p> 79, 3 IHdti pp>

THE UTILITARIANS 483

of that.""' 1 "Popular opinions, on subjects not paloable to sense,

i IT * *> JL -i *

are often true, but seldom or never the whole truth.55 2 ;;The fatal
tendency of mankind to leave off thinking about a thing when it Is
no longer doubtful. Is the cause of half their errors/' 3 "If the

_ j f°

teachers of mankind are to be cognisant of all that they ought to
know, everything must be free to be written and published without
restraint.'* 4 ::!vlen are not more zealous for truth than they often
are for error, and a sufficient application of legal or even of social
penalties will generally succeed In stopping the propagation of
either,'5 5 ccMankInd can hardly be too often reminded, that there
was once a man named Socrates, between whom and the legal
authorities and public opinion of his time there took place a memo-
rable collision.'5 6

As mentioned above. Mill had no doubt of the utilitv of absolute

•* t

liberty of thought and expression. In dealing with other liberties
he was much less sure. Though he stubbornly strove to maintain
the line of distinction between state interference for positive social
ends and solicitous proctorlallsm for the good of the individual
alone, he had a difficult time of it. He would not admit, for in-
stance, that the police power of the state should be used to punish
a person for gambling, drunkenness, or sexual Immorality or to
abridge his access to these evils, but he felt obliged to concede that
it might be justly used to combat the social consequences of such
acts. Which, for most practical purposes was to emphasize a dis-
tinction where no substantial difference existed. In the upshot,
therefore. Mill found himself in company with a good many of the
radical reformers and not without a considerable sympathy for
socialism. But his inbred distrust of authority, and especially of
democratically controlled authority, was too deep to allow him to
cross the road entirely. He was willing, as social necessity dictated3
to grant to government a much-widened sphere of authority', but
it must be a type of government that could be trusted to follow the
principles of utility as he conceived them. In the essay on Repre-
sentative Government Mill undertook to determine what form of gov-
ernment was best adapted to this purpose.

Miff's 'Representative Government is chiefly remembered to-day for
Its advocacy of proportional representation and woman suffrage,

1 Ibid,, p. 97. *Ibid., p. 103. * Ibid., p. 90.

« Ibid., p. 105. 4 Ibid., p. 99. 6 Ilnd,, p. 86.

484 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

which are yet sufficiently novel reforms In many parts of the world
to be deemed "advanced.51 The comprehensive and systematic
treatise In which Mill set forth his criieria of good government and
discussed with great acumen and wisdom the problems of govern-
mental structure and procedure, has been largely forgotten. The
question of forms and modes of government was eclipsed in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by the more Insistent
question of government regulation and control of industry. Not
yet, indeed, do many outstanding publicists attach proper Impor-
tance to political machinery and methodology. It is a safe predic-
tion, however, that future political scientists will largely blame the
failure of modern experiments In "controlled" or "planned"
economy on to failures of governmental technique resulting from
want of attention to fundamentals In political mechanics.

One school" of opinion holds that political Institutions are a
natural growth and must be taken as they are found; that like bio-
logical organisms, they cannot be effectually Improved by conscious
human innovation. The opposite school holds that government, as
Mill put It, is "wholly an affair of invention and contrivance55 and
poses c£a problem, to be worked like any other question of busi-
ness.55 l Mill rejected both of these views and took his stand on the
sensible middle ground that political institutions, though a nat-
ural growth, do not "resemble trees, which, once planted, care aye
growing3 while men 'are sleeping.5 In every stage of their existence
they are made what they are by human voluntary agency. Like all
things, therefore, which are made by men, they may be either well
or ill made; judgment and skill may have been exercised in their
production, or the reverse of these." 2 Yet in every case, he cau-
tioned, human judgment and skill must recognize that "political
machinery does not act of itself,55 but by ordinary men, and "must
be adjusted to the capacities and qualities of such men as are avail-
able.'3 2 Satisfied that this was the right approach, he made bold to
say: "To inquire into the best form of government in the abstract (as
it is called) is not a chimerical, but a highly practical employment
of scientific intellect; and to introduce into any country the best
institutions which, in the existing condition of that country, are capa-
ble of, In any tolerable degree, fulfilling the conditions, is one of the
most rational objects to which practical effort can address itself." 3

id., p. 175. 2 flMmt p> 177> 3 ibid., p. 181.

THE UTILITARIANS 485

"The first element of eood government." according to Mill, was

<^j u » u j

u*the virtue and Intelligence of the human beings composing the com-
munity.55 Hence, "the most important point of excellence which any
form of government can possess Is to promote the virtue and Intelli-
gence of the people themselves/' 1 If this was true, then the acid test
of governmental machinery was "the degree In which Ii Is adapted
to take advantage of the amount of good qualities which may at
any time exist, and make them Instrumental to the right purposes." 1

Mill then proceeded to reduce these generalizations to practical
terms. He was willing to concede that temporarily and In Isolated
cases a benevolent despotism might measure up to these standards,
but ideally and in the long run only a representative government
could do so. This did not mean that representative government
could be equally and uniformly applied to all peoples. It should be
adapted to the advancement of the people and their capacity for
self-government. Above all else, it should not be supposed that
representative government Implied democratic government. To
give ultimate sovereign power to the people, through the agency
of a representative assembly, was one thing; to give the people or a
representative assembly the function of governing was a totally
different thing. Wielding sovereignty — the supreme • power of
approval or disapproval — was a thing the people or their elected
representatives could and should do; but administering govern-
ment, with all Its intricacies and complexities, was beyond the
capacity of even the most intelligent and virtuous people or as-
sembly. "Instead of the function of governing, for which It is radi-
cally unfit, the proper office of a representative assembly Is to watch
and control the government; to throw the light of publicity on Its
acts; to compel a full exposition and justification of all of them
which any one considers questionable; to censure them if found
condemnable, and, if the men who compose the government abuse
their trust, or fulfill it in a manner which conflicts with the deliber-
ate sense of the nation^ to expel them from office, and either ex-
pressly or virtually appoint their successors. 35 2

Contemporary liberals did not share Mill's apprehensions as to
dangers of democracy. Until the widespread reaction against demo-
cratic government ensuing after World War I, devotees of the
creed of majority rule generally regarded Mill's critique of popular

/., p. 239.

486 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

Institutions as long outmoded. But the generations following both
world wars have found in Mill much, to approve. At the high tide of
democratic ideology it was difficult to believe that the most vul-
nerable points of democratic government are: "first, general igno-
rance and incapacity, or, to speak more moderately, insufficient
mental qualifications, in the controlling body; secondly, the danger
of its being under the influence of interests not identical with the
general welfare of the community*." l To-day even the warmest
supporters of democracy admit those weaknesses. A half-century of
experience with demagogism, bossism, and pressure politics has
brought democratic thought face to face with reality. Though it is
possible to take comfort in Mill's observation that democracy is no
more, and possibly somewhat less, conditioned by the two funda-
mental weaknesses just mentioned than any other form of govern-
ment, every7 clear-minded friend of democratic government to-day
recognizes that unless these weaknesses can be overcome the case
for democracy loses much of its force.

Mill believed it possible to organize democracy so as to offset
these shortcomings and at the same time preserve its essentially
democratic character. This was the basis of his argument for
minority representation and his advocacy of the Hare system of
proportional representation. That the majority should always pre-
vail over the minority and the minority be unrepresented and even
unheard was not, he declared, democracy at all, but tyranny. The
essence of democracy, in his view, was equality. If minorities were
not proportionately represented and could not make themselves
heard and felt, the principle of equality was grossly violated.
Minor groups were not to be placed in powers under his scheme of
government, but were to be accorded such participation as would
supply a salutary corrective to the excesses of the majority. The
same conviction of the importance of full representation and rectify-
ing balance lay behind his argument for the extension of the suffrage
to all interests, opinions, and grades of intellect, and to women as
well as men. "Democracy is not ideally the best form of govern-
ment,'5 he insisted, ". . . unless it can be so organised that no
class, not even the most numerous, shall be able to reduce all but
itself to political insignificance, and direct the course of legislation
and administration by its exclusive class interest. " 2

1 Ibid., p. 243. 2 Ibid., p. 277.

THE UTILITARIANS 48"

It would be Interesting and profitable, did space permit, to re-
view Mill's penetrating comments on such matters as election
methods, second chambers, executive organization, local govern-

•*" f i^X "" -~-^

ment federal government, and the government of dependencies.
On each of these subjects he was deeply provocative, and made a

tJ X r J. *>

contribution to political literature which modern students of gov-
ernment cannot afford to ignore.

VI

With John Stuart Mill the utilitarian school may be said to have
made Its exit, though Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900)., the eminent
professor of moral philosophy at Cambridge, built upon Bentham
and Mill and was looked upon as their disciple. Sidgwick, however,
was not a strict utilitarian and his principal work In the field of
political thought was an attempt to reconcile the utilitarian with
other philosophies of politics.

Though utilitarianism as a distinct body of thought passed from
the scene well before the end of the nineteenth century, its influence
did not die. The little circle of Benthamites dwindled and disap-
peared, but its members had done their work with surpassing effi-
cacy. Not a single phase of social thought remained untouched by
their speculations; and economics, politics, jurisprudence, penology,
r education, ethics, and even religion were profoundly affected by
their doctrines. The Idea of utility was of ancient and well-known
lineage; Bentham did not discover it or do much to strengthen Its
logical underpinnings. What he and his followers did— (and this is
what gave their utilitarianism Its remarkable velocity}-- was to
equip It with the paraphernalia of a science. All scientific thinkers
were obliged to reckon with it, if for no other reason than to refute
it; and many found It an abounding source of seminal ideas which
could be made to do service in other causes and other philosophies.

To politics and jurisprudence the chief service of nineteenth-
century utilitarianism was the crushing barrage it laid upon the
transcendental and metaphysical absolutes which blocked the road
to scientific thinking. In forcing political and legal thinkers to
meet the challenge of practical utility it forced them to scrap their
neat verbal rubrics and come to grips with the actualities of com-
munal existence. Reformers and opponents of reform alike were
compelled to justify their positions by arguing the question of

488 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

benefits, which, though It left much room for theory, left none at -
all for obscurantism. Of similar character was the service of utili-
tarianism to ethics, religion, economics., and education.

At the outset utilitarianism was emphatically laissez faire. It
demanded free trade, freedom of occupation, unrestricted com-
petition, inviolable private property, and other individualistic re-
forms. In the end, however, it worked to the furtherance of collec-
tivism; for, when individual liberty was found incompatible with
the greatest happiness of the greatest number, the utilitarian,
having no fixed position on the question of liberty, could logically
turn to authoritarian collectivism whenever it seemed a better
means of attaining the desired objective. As industrialization pro-
ceeded, utilitarians found themselves increasingly convinced of
the utility of enlarged governmental interference in the domain of
property and contract. Ultimately they were forced to make a
sharp distinction between individual and social utility, and to place
the latter on a higher plane than the former. This concept of para-
mount social utility and the arguments employed to sustain it,
though never pushed so far by the utilitarians themselves, were to
become leading factors in socialistic political thought.

Many streams of utilitarian influence may be traced down
through various channels of political thought to the present time,
and in almost every case it will be found that they have left a deposit
of reality, simplicity, and exactness which has made for more
honest and intelligent political thinking. These qualities of thought,
which were the greatest strength of utilitarianism, were unfortu-
nately its greatest weakness, too. It was guilty of the fallacy of
over-simplification. Its precision was too exact for the facts with
which it had to deal. Its realism was too superficial to be true.
These defects, which so greatly troubled the younger Mill, has-
tened its end as a system of political thought, but not until it had
done its invaluable work of getting political science down from the
stratosphere of meaningless verbalism and directed to the earthy
business of seeking the laws which govern the political relations of
actual men in actual life.

REFERENCES

Albee, E.s History oj English Utilitarianism (London, 1902).
Atkinson, CL M., Jeremy Bentham: His Life and Work (London, 1905).
Bain, A., John Stuart Mill: a Criticism (London, 1882).

THE UTILITARIANS 489

* Bentham, J., A Fragment on Government (ed. by F. G. Montague, Oxford,

1891).
Brinton, G., English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century (London,

1933), pp. 14-30, 39-103.

Brown, W. J. (ed.). The Austinian Theory of Law (London, 1906).
Coker, F. W., Readings in Political Philosophy (rev. ed.3 New York, 1938),

Chap. XXV.
Davidson, W. L., Political Thought in England: the Utilitarians (London,

1915).
v Dunning, W. A., A History of Political Theories from Rousseau to Spencer (New

York, 1920), Chap. VI.
Geiser, K. F., and Jaszi, O., Political Philosophy from Plato to Jeremy Bentham

(New York, 1927), Chap. XIII.

Gettell, R. G., History of Political Thought (New York, 1924), Chap. XXL
Mill, J. S., Utilitarianism, Liberty, and Representative Government (Every-
man's Library, New York, 1910).
Murray, R. H., The History of Political Science from Plato to the Present (New

York, 1926), Chap. X.

*'Sabine9 G. H.5 A History of Political Theory (New York, 1937), Chap. XXXI.
Spahr, M.j Readings in Recent Political Philosophy (New York, 1935), pp. 77,

131, 207-241.
Stephen, L., The English Utilitarians (3 vols., London, 1900).

CHAPTER XXIII
A NEW IDEALISM

I
IGHTEEXTH-CENTURY idealism, based on the doctrines

of natural law, natural rights, and social contract and finding
practical realization in political revolution and laissez Jaire
economics, was sadly deflated by nineteenth-century facts. Revo-
lution did not establish the rights of man; did not materialize the
glorious threefold hope of liberty, fraternity, and equality; did not
beget actual democracy or infallibly insure constitutional govern-
ment. Laissez jaire did not provide equality of opportunity or se-
cure to every man the fruits of his own labor; did not, in truth, effect
a genuine free play of natural economic forces. The nineteenth
century saw revolution degenerate into chaos and reaction; saw
democracy itself betray the grand ideals of the eighteenth century;
saw economic freedom converted into an instrument of power and
acquisition specially fitted to the hands of rapacious industrial
moguls.

The theories and ideals which had dominated the eighteenth
century would no longer do. Thinking men rebelled against them
and sought new answers to the ever deepening riddles of social life.
Fearing new expeditions upon the storm-tossed seas of speculation,
many conservative theorists turned back to the ancient platitudes
of authoritarianism. Visionary humanitarians, on the other hand,
sought escape in vain Utopian dreams and fantastic projects for the
founding of ideal communities. Bentham and his utilitarian dis-
ciples, striving for objectivity and practicality, proffered as a guid-
ing principle their famous calculus of pains and pleasures. Others,
fascinated with the possibilities of science, became convinced that
the physical sciences constituted the only dependable source of
truth about man and society, while some turned with equal confi-
dence to historical research and new readings of the human record.
Proletarian thinkers, revolting against the merely meliorative and,
as they thought, dilatory implications of the various doctrines of
reform, propounded new formulas of revolution and pinned then-
faith in class war and the violent logic of materialism.

^-— - 490

A NEW IDEALISM 491

But there was one group of nineteenth-century political thinkers
whose doctrines few understood at the time and few really under-
stand to-day, but \vhose Influence on modern political thought has
been enormous. These were the metaphysical Idealists. The chief
writers of this school were German and English university professors.
At first their doctrines gained notice only in academic circles, but,
as is often the case with professorial ideologies, were taken up by
enthusiastic disciples and widely disseminated. The greatest of f
the German Idealists undoubtedly was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich I
Hegel, and of the English idealists, Thomas Hill Green. Before ,
turning to the philosophies of Hegel and Green, let us briefly note
the work of their principal forerunners, Immanuel Kant (1724-
1804) and Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814).

Kant, who held the chair of logic and metaphysics at the Uni-
versity of Konigsberg for more than thirty years, wras not primarily
a political thinker. Although he wrote several political works
which attained much repute In his own day, these works actually
\vere less -influential in the political field than his strictly meta-
physical masterpieces. The Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and Tne
Critique of Practical Reason (1788). Kant's Ideas are important In
the history of political thought because they broke ground for
a profound reaction against eighteenth-century liberalism and
rationalism. Kant maintained that only pure reason can lead to
truth, and he excluded from pure reason almost everything de-
rivable from sensation and experience. Abstract reason rather
than concrete reason was thus made the gateway to knowledge.
If Kant were correct, men seeking truth In matters political should
disregard the external world of material things and experiences.
Kant said things do not present themselves to our minds, through
our senses, as they really are. So, relying on experience alone, we
only know things as they seem to be — never as they actually are.

Insisting that it is possible for the mind to arrive at important
general truths without sensory experience, Kant asserted that pure
reason could thus provide a body of principles for guidance in
actual affairs. Any law, Institution, or practice contrary to prin-
ciples grounded in pure reason was not merely mistaken but
morally wrong. For Kant contended that there is a universal
moral law, rooted in pure reason, that everyone ought to obey.
No man could have any true rights or liberties contrary to this law.

492 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

Fichte taught In several German universities and ended his ca-
reer as a professor of philosophy in the University of Berlin. He
began as a disciple and interpreter of Kant, but eventually took a
far more extreme position. He contended that the strictly subjec-
tive activity of the mind (Kant's pure reason) is itself the cause of
all of our ideas about the external world, and hence that mind alone
is real. The individual mind, he said, is merely part of a universal
and absolute mind, which is none other than God. The essence of
mind, according to Fichte, is will. Only the Universal Will can be
free; freedom for the individual mind or will can be no more than
freedom to identify itself with the Universal.

In his mature political writings Fichte argued that the principal
function of the state is to make individuals free by establishing in
the outward world the conditions necessary to further identification
with the Universal. This meant that it was the rightful business of
the state not only to remove obstacles which might stand in the way
of this consummation but to compel people to follow proper courses
of action to that end. But Fichte was not content thus to exalt the
state as a necessary means to the highest of all earthly goals; he
finally came to the view that the state is an end in itself.

At one stage of his thinking Fichte believed that the culmination
of political progress would come with the formation of a world
organization of states. However, as he became more authoritarian
in his idea of the state he also became more nationalistic. His
later doctrine was that each people has its own peculiar attributes
and capacities, and therefore that each state has a unique mission
to fulfill.

II

In 1793 the faculty of the University of Tubingen issued a certifi-
cate in theology to a young Herr Doktor whom it described as of good
ability, middling in industry and knowledge, but quite deficient in
philosophy. The recipient of this dubious accolade was Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who was destined to become the most
renowned professor of philosophy in Germany and whom many
have hailed as the outstanding philosopher of the nineteenth cen-
tury. The faint praise of the faculty of Tubingen was probably well
earned, for Hegel at Tubingen had shown little interest in the regu-
lar curriculum.

A NEW IDEALISM 493

a

Hegel was born at Stuttgart on August 273 1776. His father was
an official in the fiscal service of the little kingdom of Wiirttemberg
and thus was able to give him a good education. He was sent to the
grammar school at Stuttgart, where he did creditable but not dis-
tinguished work. In 1788, at the age of 18, Hegel entered the Uni-
versity of Tubingen as a theological student. He was not interested
in theology and neglected the prescribed studies, but made good
use of his time by reading widely in the Greek and Roman classics.
In 1790 he was awarded the degree of doctor of philosophy and in
1 793 received his certificate in theology.

Upon leaving Tubingen Hegel went to Bern, in Switzerland, as
a private tutor. In 1797 he took a similar position in Frankfort.
The death of his father, in 1799, brought him a small inheritance
which he decided to use as a ladder to a university appointment.
In January, 1801 he took residence at the University of Jena in the
hope of qualifying for a position there. Throwing himself whole-
heartedly into the fuming intellectual activity of the university
circles, he quickly won recognition. In August, 1801 he was li-
censed as a Priuatdozent, or private teacher, and began lecturing on
logic and metaphysics. His work was good and his reputation grew..
In 1805 he reached the coveted goal of a regular professorship.

Hegel's years at Jena are often pronounced the most decisive
influence in shaping the direction of his political philosophy. The
French invasion of Germany occurred in 1806. Napoleon was at
Jena in October of that year, the famous battle of Jena having been
fought on October 14th. Hegel, a passive observer of these stirring
events, is supposed to have conceived a profound admiration for
Napoleon as the embodiment of great historic forces and to have
modified his thinking accordingly. The facts seem to be, however,
that HegePs philosophical ideas had begun some years before to
assume the characteristic mould in which they were given to the
world, and that he was actually at work on the last sheets of his
Phenomenology of Spirit when the French invaders marched into Jena
on that memorable day in October, 1806. Hegel was undoubtedly
a child of his time, and was deeply influenced by the course of events
following the French Revolution; but he was too much the detached
scholar and too deeply immersed in the purely intellectual to be
swept from his bearings by any single event or personality.

The academic life of Jena was paralyzed by the war. Glasses

494 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

were suspended and most of the professors left. Hegel sought a
position at Heidelberg, but did not get it. For a year or so he was
the editor of a newspaper at Jena; then he obtained a position as
head of a gymnasium (secondary school) in Nuremberg. He held
this position from 1808 10 1816. While at Nuremberg he married
Marie von Tucher, who, though twenty-two years his junior, ap-
pears to have been just the person to balance his academic and
social interests. His Phenomenology of Spirit had been published in
1807. but its importance was not promptly recognized and conse-
quently it added little to his reputation. In 1816 he finished and
published the last volume of his Science of Logic. The completion of
this remarkable treatise brought widespread recognition, and
Hegel was immediately offered professorships at Erlangen, Berlin,
and Heidelberg. He chose Heidelberg and remained there until
1818, when he went to the University of Berlin to take the chair of
philosophy left vacant by the death of Fichte. At Berlin Hegel
quickly became a national and international figure. His doctrines
were in high favor with the Prussian government, and he was sig-
nally honored In many ways and attracted a large following. He
died suddenly, on November 14, 1831, after one day's illness of
cholera.

Hegel's teachings \vere disseminated through his many pupils,
his lectures., and most of all through his writings. His major writings
include treatises on metaphysics, logic, religion, the fine arts, his-
tory, and politics. For the student of political thought his out-
standing works are The Philosophy of Right (1821) and The Philosophy
of History (posthumously published in 1837).

Ill

A well-known, but probably apocryphal, legend quotes Hegel as
saying, "One man has understood me, and even he has not." Hegel
doubtless never said such a thing, but thousands of philosophy
students have heartily said it for him. Hegel's philosophy is one of
the most difficult exercises the mind can undertake. Hegel thought
it far from incomprehensible, and multitudes of disciples have be-
lieved they understood It; but the many divergent and conflicting
interpretations of Hegel lend color to the suspicion that few have
really comprehended his philosophy. Cynics have sometimes
charged that Hegel himself did not.

A NEW IDEALISM 495

The chief difficulty with Hegel's ideology lies in what he tried to
do and the method by which he tried to do it. His purpose was to V
reconstruct the whole fabric of rationalism and create a system of •
thought that would be in absolute harmony with the actual world. I

f/ 1 *

His method was to start with what he conceived to be definitely ';
and ultimately real and, upon that, to erect a superstructure that
would comprehend the universal and clearly reveal the identity of
the particular and the universal. In this undertaking he evolved
a system of concepts and terminology which, though enormously
fertile and provocative., have invited misunderstanding.

Hegel's attitude was determined by his ever-increasing disap-
pointment in the rationalismjrf the eighteenth century. As a vouth

JL _^)^^^B[^B|Hg^>^^^n(>MiiP^aBiff^*5Bp'pl°' **J "f 4

he had greeted the French Revolution with enthusiasm and had
accepted with much confidence its underlying dogmas. But as
terror, destruction, proscription, reaction, despotism, and war
poured from that boiling cauldron of social upheaval, he came to
feel that the idealism of the revolutionaries was fully as irrational as
the obscurantism of the reactionaries. Idealism divorced from
reality was, he decided, maudlin sentimentalism; reality uncon-
nected with idealism was a meaningless muddle. Between these
extremes of folly there must, thought Hegel, exist a sane and solid
middle ground where ideals and objective facts would be found in
complete accord. To the discovery and delineation of the perfectly
rational middle ground Hegel dedicated his masterly intellectual
talents. *

The key to IrtegePs political thinking is to be found in his first
book, 77^Pheiomenolo^2jL^mt . This was not a political treatise,
but a quest fc^r universal reality. Hegel started on rock bottom with
the fact of Consciousness and its bearings on reality'. There were,
he said,, six; attitudes of consciousness toward reality. These were:
simple consciousness, self-consciousness, reason-, spirit (Geisf), re-
ligion, and absolute knowledge.

Simple ,' consciousness, he stated, could apprehend reality only
through tjhe evidence of the senses, which was inadequate and mis-
leading. \ Consciousness could perceive no objective reality outside
itself. Seilf-consciousness, the perception of selfhood and individual-
ity, was I similarly limited in respect to permanent external reality.
Reason t therefore, had to come to the aid of consciousness and self-
consooiisness. Reason, as Hegel defined it, was none other than

496 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

the perception of the misleading nature of consciousness and self-
consciousness. Reason, he said, related itself to reality by observing
the external world, the phenomena of mind., and the nervous or-
ganism of man; and sought to find in them a common meeting-
place of body and mind. But reason, too, was misleading; for, find-
ing much in the world that was inconsistent with reason, reason was
invariably impelled to create a world of its own, a world of perfect
consistency and hence a world far removed from reality.

True and infallible perception of reality, said Hegel, was possible
only through GeisL The nearest English equivalent of this word is
"spirit/5 but Hegel apparently did not mean spirit in the sense
of soul or psyche. His Grist was something more tangible and
objective. It was a specially developed form of consciousness — con-
sciousness manifested, he said, as the indwelling essence of a com-
munity; not consciousness apart from its surroundings, but con-
sciousness wholly identified with its external environment and fully
harmonized with the vital and dominant feelings animating the
community in which it resided. Thus it was not individual con-
sciousness, not community consciousness; but consciousness emerg-
ing from a synthesis of individual and communal, experience. This
consciousness was not, as Hegel viewed it, an ethereal abstraction,
but a solid and objective fact of human life.

Grist, according to Hegel, furnished the basis fot a moral order,
and this moral order, working gradually toward a mtore perfect con-
ception of God, was religion. The final consummation of religion
would be absolute knowledge — Grist knowing itself as Grist and
comprehending all other forms of knowledge as parfs of itself.

This concept of Grist was basic in all of Hegel's political thinking.
It appeared in various aspects — Weltgeist (world-spirit), Volksgeist
(national spirit), J&itgrist (time-spirit). It fathered nearly all of his
political doctrines and dominated his idea of historical } evolution.
The state, Hegel tells us, is the shape assumed by Grist fln its com-
plete realization in phenomenal existence. The moral ordler, slowly
developing in the family and other forms of association! finds its
consummation in the state. "Summing up what has beefn said of
the state," he remarks in The Philosophy of History,

"we^find that we have been led to call its vital principle, as Actuating
the individuals who compose it— Morality. The state, its lawls, its ar-
rangements, constitute the rights of its members; its natural T features,

A NEW IDEALISM 497

Its mountains, air, and waters arc their country, their fatherland, their
outward material property; the history of this state, their deeds; what
their ancestors have produced belongs to them and lives in their mem-
ory. All is their possession, just as they are possessed by it; for it con-
stitutes their existence, their being,

"Their imagination Is occupied with the Ideas thus presented, while
the adoption of these laws, and of a fatherland so conditioned is the
expression of their will. It Is this material totality which thus consti-
tutes one Being, the spirit of one People. To it the individual members
belong; each unit is the Son of his Nation, and at the same rime — In as
far as the state to which he belongs is undergoing development — the
Son of his Age. None remains behind it, and still less advances beyond
it. This spiritual Being (the Spirit of his Time) Is his; he Is representative
of it; it is that In which he originated, and in which he lives." 1

In this passage we have the essence of the Hegelian concept of the
state. It is not only an organism evoked by the Volksgeist and the
^eitgeist but an actual juridical person embodying "a Spirit having
strictly defined characteristics, which erects itself into an objective
world, that exists and persists in a particular religious form of wor-
ship, customs, constitution, and political laws — in the whole com-
plex of its institutions — in the events and transactions that make up
its history." 2 This majestic being, said Hegel, "is the realized
ethical idea or ethical spirit . . . the will which manifests Itself,
makes itself clear and visible, substantiates itself . . . the will
which thinks and knows itself, and carries out what it knows, in so
far as it knows.33 3

Because It is, as Hegel declares, "the realized substantive will,
having its reality in the particular self-consciousness raised to the
plane of the universal,33 4 he concludes that the state is "absolutely
rational.33 There can be no higher rationality, he asserts, because
nothing can be more rational than consciousness and will working
themselves out in universal patterns. The substantive unity of the
state is, therefore, its own motive and absolute end. "In this end," he
proceeds^ "freedom attains its highest right. This end has the high-
est right over tlje individual, whose highest duty in turn is to be a
member of the state.33 4 So the state is said to be "the inarch of God

1 G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (trans, by J. SIbree, rev. ed., 1900), p. 52.

2 Ibid., pp. 73-74.

3 "The Philosophy of Right," excerpt In M. Spain-, Readings in Recent Political Philosophy
(1935), p. 188.

. 189.

498 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

*

in the world,7" and when thinking of the state we must not have In
mind any particular state but rather uthe idea, this actual God, by

• T f * * 1 T">

itsell." L For,

''Although a siate may be declared to violate right principles and to
be defective In various \vavs, it ahvavs coniains the essential moments

•i - »

of Its existence, if, that is to sav. It belongs to the full formed states of

* * # - '— j

our time. But as It Is more easy to detect shortcomings than to grasp
the positive meaning, one easily falls into the mistake of dwelling so
much upon special aspects of the state as to overlook its Inner organic
being. The state Is not a work of art. It Is In the world. In the sphere
of caprice, accident, and error. Evil behavior can doubtless disfigure
it in many ways, but the ugliest man, the criminal, the Invalid, the
cripple, are living men. The positive thing, the life, is present in spite of
defects, and it Is with this affirmative that we have here to deal.55 l

Hegel's doctrine of sovereignty proceeds directly from this exalta-
tion of the state as the external manifestation of ultimate conscious-
ness and will. Sovereignty, according to Hegel, does not result from
any contractual association of individuals, but from the necessary-
unity of the state Itself. Apart from the state, particular wills and
particular offices and functions can have no Indefeasible existence.
In themselves they fall short of completeness, and hence of positive
rationality and morality. The state, however, unites and harmo-
nizes the particular and the universal, fully expresses and realizes the
Weltgeist, Volksgeist, and Jfyitgeist as they actuate and condition its
members as a social entity. The state, therefore, must be deemed
sovereign and supreme.

The right of absolute decision unquestionably belonged to the
state. Hegel allowed no place for individual freedom against the
state. In his system the inalienable rights of man as an individual
were utterly obliterated. Man was to find his freedom within the
state and by reason of his Identity with it. Social freedom^ through
the state, was Hegel's ideal. He argued that man is necessarily a
social being and finds the highest values of life in social existence
and social relationships. Men do not, he insisted, value individual
freedom as highly as has been supposed, in fact seldom really desire
it; what they actually want is freedom in society, and this they can
have only through the state. The state restrains and represses, but
In so doing it enlarges the freedom of society as a whole and thus
enlarges the liberty of the individual. The state, accordingly,

1 Ibid.

A NEW IDEALISM 499

must be regarded as "the ethical whole and the actualization of
freedom.33 x

In bringing the sovereignty of the state to bear upon actual gov-
ernment Hegel worked out an interesting scheme of functional or-
ganization. The political state, he said, should be divided inio three
substantivejpranches — legislation, government, and constitutional
monarchy. These were visualized not as actual units of organiza-
tion., but as basic functions to be recognized in the practical shaping
and adjustment of organization. Legislation was defined as the *
power to fix and establish the universal; government as the power
which brings particular matters under the universal; constitutional
monarchy as the medium through which legislation and govern-
ment are brought into essential unity, and with which, through the
representative character of the prince, rests the right of final decision.

Hegel's monarch was to beno autocrat, but a constitutional sov-
ereign of most exalted position and function, the symbol and official
embodiment of the unity and supremacy of the state. "It is easy,3*
wrote Hegel, afor one to grasp the notion that the state is the self-
determining and completely sovereign will, whose judgment is
final. It is more difficult to apprehend this 'I will1 as a person. By
this it is not meant that the monarch can be wilful in his acts.
Rather is he bound to the concrete content of the advice of his
councillors, and, when the constitution is established, he has often
nothing to do but sign his name. But this name is weighty. It is
the summit over which nothing can climb." 2 The private life and
character of the monarch were of no consequence as affecting his
official function. Officially he represented the universality of the
constitution and laws, the juncture of the particular and the uni-
versal, and the sovereign faculty of self-determination and final
decision.

Hegel gave much attention to the organization of the legislative
and executive departments of government. The legislature, He
thought, should 'contain representatives of every important element
of the community, particularly economic interests and classes.
"The peculiar significance of classes or estates is this,33 he declared,
"that through them the state enters into and begins to share in the
subjective consciousness of the people." 3 The landed class, in his
opinion, had an especially significant r61e to play. It was the most

»/*«*., p. 192. »/te?., p. 199,

500 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

independent class in the community, secure against the uncertain-
lies of trade, the fluctuations of property, the covetousness of com-
mercialism, and the exigent pressures of political or economic de-
pendency. Its ethical character was, he thought, entirely natural
and therefore of the utmost value In the process of government. *

The business of the executive, said Hegel, was to apply the uni-
versal to the particular, and It should be so constituted as to facili-
tate this duty. Perceiving the functional difference between those
aspects of administration which have to do with questions of state
policy and those of a merely operative or managerial nature, he
advocated a centralized organization with a horizontal cleavage
between superior and inferior officials. That these might work in
harmony and the transition from universal to particular be effi-
ciently and faithfully accomplished^ he proposed that they be linked
together by "middlemen, whose activity in connection with those
below them must from the lowest to the highest executive officers
take the form of a continuous concrete oversight." 1

Regardless of his belief in Weltgeist, or world-spirit, HegePs ideas
of international relations bordered upon anarchy. : In the world
of practical affairs there was nothing more absolute than the abso-
luteness of the state., "A state,53 he explained,, "is not a private per-
son, but in Itself a completely Independent totality. Hence, the
relation of states to one another Is not merely that of morality and
private right. It is often desired that states should be regarded from
the standpoint of private right and morality. But the position of
private persons is such that they have over them a law court, which
realizes what is intrinsically right. A relation between states ought
also to be intrinsically right, and in mundane affairs that which is
intrinsically right ought to have power. But as against the state
there is no power to decide what is intrinsically right and to realize
this decision. Hence, we must here remain by absolute command.
States In their relation to one another are Independent, and look
upon the stipulations which they make with one another as pro-
visional.3 3 2

Can there be, then, no morality in international relations? Hegel
answered this question by distinguishing between the canons of
ordinary morality and those which bind the state. It must be ad-
mitted, he contended, "that the commonweal has quite another

1 Ibid., p. 194. 2 Ibid,, p. 202.

A NEW IDEALISM

authority than the weal of the Individual, and that the ethical
substance or the state has directly its reality or right not In ab-
stract but in a concrete existence. This existence, and not one of the
many general thoughts held to be moral commands, must be the
principle of its conduct. The view that politics in this assumed
opposition is presumptively in the wrong depends on a shallow no-
tion both of morality and of the nature of the state in relation to
morality." l States and peoples were in his opinion merely un-
conscious tools and organs of the Weltgeist, and it was only in the
final court of world history, therefore, that the morality of state acts
could be judged.

Quite as influential as his philosophy of the state has been Hegel's
doctrine of historical necessity. Striving to find a logic that would
avoid the fallacies which Hume had shown to exist in the common
practice of assuming a rational relationship between cause and ef-
fect, Hegel seized upon the ancient idea of opposites or contradic-
tories. Every event or force,, he reasoned, tends to generate an
opposing or contrary event or force. Between these opposites a
conflict ensues, and this conflict brings forth a new development
which dissolves and displaces the preexisting contradictories,
though it draws qualities from both. Then the new creation pro-
ceeds to raise its own contradictory, and thus the process goes on
forever. In this logic, or dialectic, as he termed it, of thesis, antith-
esis, and synthesis (sometimes called affirmation, contradiction,
and solution), Hegel thought he had found the supreme law of
history, the infallible key to the mystery of social evolution.

Thejx>urse of history and the development of human institutions
were,in Hegel's analysis, inexorably determioedTby this process of
eternal change. Truth and reality were not to be found in particu-
lar phenomena, Jbut in the path marked out by their reactions upon
one another in the sequence of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. , His-
torical development was not, therefore, just a matter of chance; nor
was it a thing consciously directed by human intelligence; it was in
fact the necessary and logical result of an eternal interplay of forces
following the threefold pattern of affirmation, contradiction, and
solution. In this principle of development he perceived, as he
thought, the final object of his search — an absolute union of nature
and mind in which the ideal could be seen as embodied in the real,
p. 204.

\

502 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

The most Important factor In the actual operation of his law
of development was none other than Geist, or spirit. {iThe mutations
which history presents/' said Hegel,

( 'have long been characterized in the general, as an advance to some-
thing better, more perfect. The changes that take place in Nature —
how infinitely manifold soever they may be — exhibit only a perpetually
self-repeating cycle. . . . Only in those changes which take place in
the region of Spirit does anything new arise. This peculiarity in the
world of mind has indicated in the case of man an altogether different
destiny from that of merely natural objects . . . namely, a real capacity
for change, and that for the better — an impulse of perfectibility. . . .
The principle of Perfectibility indeed is almost as indefinite a term as
mutability in general; it is without scope or goal, and has no standard
by which to estimate the changes in question: the improved, more
perfect, state of things towards which it professedly tends is altogether
undetermined.

ccThe principle of Development involves also the existence of a latent
germ of being — a capacity or potentiality striving to realize itself. This
formal conception finds actual existence in Spirit; which has the History
of the \Vorld for its theatre, its possession, and the sphere of its realiza-
tion. It is not of such a nature as to be tossed to and fro amid the
superficial play of accidents, but is rather the absolute arbiter of things;
entirely unmoved by contingencies, which, indeed, it applies and
manages for its own purposes. ... So Spirit is only that which it
attains by its own efforts; it makes itself actually what it always was
potentially. . . . The realization of its Idea is mediated by conscious-
ness and will. . . , Its expansion, therefore, does not present the
harmless tranquillity of mere growth, as does that of organic life, but a
stern reluctant working against itself. J> *

IV

Doing battle in Europe to-day are two fiercely antagonistic politi-
cal philosophies? Communism and Fascism. Both have drawn
fundamental concepts from Hegel. The essential core of Marxian
socialism is the dialectic of materialism which Karl Marx built
upon the foundational ideology of Hegel that he had learned as a
student in the University of Berlin. It was an easy transition from
the historical dialectic of Hegel to that of Marx. HegeFs formula
of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis was precisely the tool that Marx
needed. Hegel had found his contradictories in the realm of spirit,
but Marx read history differently. For him the principal assertive

1 The Philosophy of History, pp. 54-55.

A NEW IDEALISM 503

force In history was economic interest the contradictories the clash
of economic classes, and the solution or synthesis the victory of the
proletariat culminating In the creation of a communistic or classless
society.

Just as truly descended from Hegel is the mystical idealization
of the state, which characterizes modern fascism. It was Hegel
more than any other who revived the Greek idea of the state as the
organized life of culture, and who claimed for the state not merely
a distinct personality but a moral totality that gave it supremacy
over all things human. It was Hegel who pressed home the argu-
ment that Individual freedom can only exist in and through the
state, that the state is absolutely rational, and that compliance with
Its will is man's truest and Merriest freedom.

It will be many years before the full influence of Hegel's political
thought can be measured. His contribution,, which would not have
been of his own choosing, to the warring ideologies represented on
the one side by Lenin and Stalin and on the other by Mussolini
and Hitler, constitutes but one part of his significance, and is no
more paradoxical than his Influence In other directions. Both his
views and his methodology have deeply affected the social sciences.
His powerful reaction against the abstract and artificial approach
to human nature and human institutions has done much to further
the realization that social institutions are a natural growth and
must be treated as such.i At the same time, his attempt to Interpret
the social world, and especially the processes of history. In terms of
Geist has engendered a resort to abstract Ideology in the interpreta-
tion and writing of history. Divergent streams of thought have also
flowed from Hegel's subordination of the whole of civil society to
the state. Liberals, seeking an escape from the nihilistic individual-
ism of laissez jaire, have found in the Hegelian conception of the
state a plausible basis for programs of reform carried on by state
action. Conservatives, on the other hand, have found the same con-
cept suitable to the support of their interest in the promotion of
economic nationalism. •

The ' ultimate importance of Hegel's political philosophy will
be more clear when the transcendent nationalism of the early
twentieth century shall have run its course; for to Hegel especially
belongs the credit of providing nourishment for the ultra-nation-
alistic dogmas of the present time. His immediate purpose was to

504 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

clear avvav the Intellectual obstacles to national unification in Ger-

4

manv, but he did vastly more. He wrote the creed by which na-

» - * '

tionalism, not alone In Germany but in every other land, could be
elevated to the sphere of religion.

V

Like Hegel, Thomas Hill Green was a university professor and
spent his entire life in academic circles. Green is sometimes de-
scribed as a disciple of Hegel? but he did not so regard himself and
did not follow Hegel in any sense save that some of his views were
similar to those of Hegel. Green built on Kant rather than Hegel,
but fully shared Hegel's aversion to the empiricism of Hume.

<Green was born at Birkin in the West Riding of Yorkshire on
April 7, 1836. His father was a well-known clergyman in the
Church of England) The son was educated at home until the age
of fourteen and was then sent to Rubgy, where he remained five
years. Jn 1855 he entered Balliol College, Oxford, where he was
destined to spend the remainder of his life) Neither at Rugby nor
at Oxford was Green a preeminent scholar. The regular studies
did not appeal to him any more than to Hegel, but he read widely
and profitably in many fields. <At Balliol he came under the influ-
ence of the great Benjamin Jowett and by this inspiring contact
was fired to more definite and purposeful intellectual endeavors?)

Green was elected a fellow of Balliol in 1860 and continued in
this tutorial capacity until 1878, when he was chosen as Whyte
Professor of Moral Philosophy. In 1871 he married Miss Charlotte
Symonds, a sister of John Addington Symonds, the noted critic
and poet. ^Green's teaching at Oxford covered a wide range of
subjects, including history, ethics, logic, metaphysics, education,
and the history of philosophy^ He was not, however, just
pedagogue. He took an active part in public affairs, being for many
; years a member of the Oxford Town Council, a frequent campaign
\ speaker for the Liberal Party, a member of several important com-
\ missions, and a prominent worker in the temperance movement.
; Green was stricken with blood poisoning in March, 1882, and
died at the early age of forty-six. »His most important works, Prole-
gomena to EtMcT^^^T^ctures on the Principles of Political Obligation.,
were not published until after his death, but his influence had
already grown great through his teaching and public lectures, and

A NEW IDEALISM

was to become far greater as the character of his thinking
more widely known. Directly and indirectly, according to William
Henry Fairbrother, author of The Philosophy of Thomas Hill Greeny
Green's teaching became the most potent philosophical Influence in
England during the last quarter of the nineteenth century- . »

I Green represents a reaction, not only against eighteenth-century
rationalism, but also against certain Interpretations of nineteenth-
century science. t He was as much opposed to Spencer's evolution-
Ism as to Hume's empiricism. Jile had no quarrel with science as
such, and was not devoted to any species of transcendentalism; but
he did insist with all the force at his command that3 although man
be viewed as a part of nature and his actions be regarded as natural
phenomena, he cannot be fully understood when considered In that
light alone. « Green therefore attempted a complete reconsideration
of man in relation to his environment,^ his point of departure being
the basic postulate that the most conclusive fact differentiating man
from other living things Is self-consciousness.

« Human experience, said Green, consists not simply of the organic
processes of animal existence, but of those processes recognized as
being such. Knowledge, he argued, is not merely consciousness re- f
fleeting experience, but the work of the mind affirmatively discrim-
inating between truth and falsehood. * This was true, he believed,
because science had conclusively shown that the mind could dis-
tinguish between mere ideas and objective reality. For this reason
he believed in the existence of an intelligible system of thought
relations which might be termed ideal reality. To explain this phe-
nomenon. Green was drawn into the realm of metaphysics, and
postulated an eternal principle rendering all relations possible but
determined by none of them — in other words, God.

f Green's political thinking in a sense branched off the main line
of his philosophical speculations at the point where this concept of
Ideal reality was perfected; In another sense, however, his political
philosophy was the culmination of his whole system of thought.*
Continued employment of the faculty of apprehending Ideal reality
would and did, he contended, result in constantly better percep-
tion of human capacities, functions, and responsibilities, thus pro-
viding an ever-sounder basis for ethics. *By making actual the Ideals
thus conceived, good would be realized in a constantly increasing
measure.gr How were ideals to be made actual? By acts of will, an-

*u
"*.'

506 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

swered Green; by acts of will whereby men would identify them-
selves with certain motives or ideas of good.

But good in the ultimate and largest sense, said Green, could be
realized only in a society of persons who, though preserving their
individuality, discover that perfect good can be attained only as
separate personalities are integrated g^™^^^^!"^!^^ Hence he

'^"BH3!!!^aB™^aas%StaB^^

that social and political duties are a necessary part of
the law- of human existence, and that institutions of political and
social life are the concrete embodiment of moral ideas in the terms
of the day and generation in which they exist. The criterion by
which to test and evaluate these institutions was very simple. Did
they or did they not contribute to the development of moral char-
acter in the individual citizens? If they did, the basis of political
obligation was clear beyond a doubt.

VI

» Greenes Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation reveal an
attempt to restate political theory in all its branches in the light of
the foregoing concept of general will working toward rational moral
ideals, j "The value of the institutions of civil life/5 he stated at the
outset, "lies in their operation as giving reality to these [moral]
capacities of will and reason. * In their general effect they render it
possible for a man to be freely determined by the idea of a possible
satisfaction of himself, instead of being driven this way and that
by external forces: and they enable him to realize his idea of self-
perfection by acting as a member of a social organization in which
each contributes to the better-being of all the rest. So far as
they do in fact thus operate they are morally justified, and may
be said to correspond to the claw of nature,5 the jus naturae, ac-
cording to the only sense in which that phrase can be intelligibly
used." *

^Therefore the state, as conceived by Green, was not a definite
and concrete organization of final character, but an institutional-
ized expression of the general will actuated by a desire for the com-
I mon good. Its fundamental basis was not coercive authority, but

#

spiritual recognition by the citizens of what constitutes their true
and better nature, Cius^M// but not force was the central principle

J' ^^^^^™"*^ai'!B'™'""ll'Hlhm^||| .^.M^oumM ** •IIMPI|llirJ***' **" "^

of the state. This view is particulariy^emphasized in Green's analy-

1 Works of T. H. Green (ed. by R. L. NettlesHp, 3 vols., 1900), Vol. ii, pp. 338-339.

A NEW IDEALISM

sis of sovereignty. After a critical review of the various doctrines of
sovereignty, Austin's in particular, he said, :;That which deter-
mines this habitual obedience is a power residing in the common
will and reason of men as determined by social relations., as inter-
ested in each other, as acting together for common ends. It is a
power which this universal rational will exercises over the Inclina-
tions of the individual, and which only needs exceptionally to be
backed bv coercive force.55 l *

*

*Then going on to consider the grounds of political subjection,
he added, "Morality and political subjection . . . have a com-
mon source. That common source is the rational recognition by
certain human beings ... of a common well-being which is their
well-being, and which they conceive as their well-being whether
at any moment one of them is inclined to it or no, and the embodi-
ment of that recognition in rules by which the inclinations of the
individuals are restrained, and a corresponding freedom of action
for the attainment of well-being on the whole is secured." 2

From this position Green proceeded to his socialized conception

of rights. A right, he said, may be deemed to have a dual nature.

\

* On the one hand it may be regarded as the rational claim of an
individual to the free exercise of some faculty, on the other as a

5"""

concession of that claim by society7 and a power given the individual
to put it into effect., But these two aspects of a right, though dis-
tinguishable, were not separable. c,£Jt is only a man's consciousness
of having an object in common with others, a well-being which is
consciously his in being theirs and theirs in being Ms, — only the
fact that they are recognized by him and he by them as having this
object, — that gives him the claim described. But a claim founded
on such a common consciousness is already a claim conceded; al-
ready a claim to which reality is given by social recognition and
thus implicitly a right." 3

What, then, of rights against the state? If a right is intrinsi-
cally nothing more than a socially approved freedom, can there
be any rights which the state may not invade or any right to
act against the will of the state? Green was prepared to main-
tain that so long as the state holds true to its moral nature and
purpose, no rights against it can be admitted. S£But though," he
contended,

1 Ibid., p. 409. 2 Ibid., pp. 430-431. 3 find., p. 450.

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

"the state does not create rights. It may still be true to say that the
members of the state derive their rights from the state. Every right Is
derived from some social relation. . . . The state Is the complex of
social relations out of which rights arise, so far as those rights have
come to be regulated and harmonised according to a general law. . . .
Nor can the citizen have any right against the state, in the sense of a
right to act otherwise 0 n as member of some society, the state being
for its members the society of societies, the society in which all their
claims upon each other are mutually adjusted. . . . What does the
assertion that he can have no right to act otherwise than as a member
of his siate amount to? The only unqualified answer that can be given
... is one that may seem too general to be of much practical use, viz.
that so far as the laws anywhere or at any time in force fulfil the idea of a
state, there can be no right to disobey them; or, that there can be no
right to disobey the law of the state except in the Interest of the state;
I.e., for the purpose of making the state In respect of its actual laws
more completely correspond to what it Is in tendency or idea, viz. the
reconciler and sustainer of the rights that arise out of the social relations
of men.55 1

Reserving to the Individual the right of disobedience only when
disobedience would serve to make the state be more nearly its ideal
self, as Green has done in the foregoing passage, leaves the ground
for resistance very doubtful. Certainly no individual alone and no
combination of Individuals falling short of a majority would be
likely to be conceded to have a stronger claim to judge as to what
fulfills ccthe idea of a state53 than those actually in power. But
(Green was no advocate of the leviathan state, no believer in the
state as the march of God In the world; he was not even reconciled
to the paternalistic state. "The true ground of objection to 'paternal
government,' " he informs us, "is not that it violates the claissez
faire' principle and conceives that its office is to make people good,
but that It rests on a misconception of moral! ty^^he real func-
tion of government being to maintain conditions of life in which
morality shall be possible, and morality consisting in the dis-
interested performance of self-imposed duties, 'paternal govern-
ment3 does its best to make it impossible by narrowing the room
for the self-imposition of duties and for the play of disinterested
motives." 2 )

Returning to this point again in his discussion of state interfer-
ence, (Green made It clear that what he sought and believed he had

pp. 451-453. 2 xud., pp. 345-346.

A NEW I-DEALISM

found was a principle by which political authority might be con-
Jined and directed to meliorative purposes and to those
These are his words:

"The capacity for rights, then, being a capacity for spontaneous action
regulated by a conception of a common good, ... is a capacity which
cannot be generated — which on the contrary Is neutralized — by any
influences that Interfere with the spontaneous action of social Interests.
. . . For this reason the effectual action of the state, i.e., the com-
munity as acting through law, for the promotion of true citizenship,
seems necessarily to be confined to the removal of obstacles. Under this
head, however, there may and should be Included much that most
" states have hitherto neglected, and much that at first sight may have
the appearance of an enforcement of moral duties, e.g., the requirement
that parents have their children taught the elementary arts. . . . On
the same principle the freedom of contract ought probably to be more
restricted in certain directions than Is at present the case. The freedom
to do as they like on the part of one set of men may Involve the ultimate
disqualification of many others, or of a succeeding generation, for the
exercise of rights." l

The same doctrine conditioned Green's view of property and
property rights. ^Ihe rationale of property/5 he said, £C. . . is
that every one should be secured by society in the power of getting
and keeping the means of realizing a will, which in possibility is a
will directed to social good.^/

VII

The practical importance of Green's political thought emanated
from the Ideology represented in the foregoing excerpts from his
writings. His work was done and his Influence mainly felt at a time
when liberal thought was shell-shocked by the barrage of deadly
criticism that had wrecked the defenses of eighteenth-century

«!*>

rationalism. (Confronted by the advancing ranks of Hegelian state
totalism, utilitarian hedonism, Marxian socialism, and Spencerian
individualism, liberalism stood helpless and confused. Green re-
stored liberalism to respectable standing in the categories of polit-
ical faith, and gave it a working theory that enabled it to function
anew as a positive political principle.] It is not putting the matter
too strongly to say that Green's political philosophy has supplied
much of the intellectual groundwork, at least in English-speaking

i Ibid., pp. 514-515. 2 Ibid.* p. 526.

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES
countries, for old a?e pensions, unemployment insurance, work-

» -^J L •* JL *• J

men's compensation, factory regulation, and a vast amount of
other social legislation which has marked the trend away from
laisse^Jaire since ihe middle of the nineteenth cenmry. Green's
Influence was all the greater in that, while acknowledging the cor-
rectness of Hegel's view of the inseparability of the Individual and
the community, he idealized the state without deifying it and
identifying It with absolute right.

Liberalism In the eighteenth century had been mainly concerned
with the suppression of baneful state interference with Individual
liberty. Baneful private action in derogation of Individual freedom
presented a far more serious problem in the nineteenth century,
and for this problem the old liberalism had no solution. Bentham
had rejected the old idealism and predicated state action upon
social expediency measured by a calculation of individual pains and
pleasures. Spencer had not only upheld the ruthless Individualism
of laissezfaire, but had summoned biology to support the thesis that
It was nature's only way of progress. Proletarian theorists, especially
Marx, had countered ruthless individualism with an equally ruth-
less collectivism, j It was the peculiar service of Thomas Hill Green
to Inject into this turbid conflux of ideologies a liberal political
philosophy in which social expediency was the dominant principle;
a philosophy in which the concept of social expediency was raised
to an ideal by the Insistence of its author that expediency be de-
termined by the moral obligation of the state to create an environ-
ment favorable to the full realization of what is best in every In-
dividual. Thus was the principle of liberty revitalized and given
a positive social meaning rather^ than a negative, and often anti-
social, meaning. Thus also was the principle of obedience given a
rational moral foundation, and the principle of collectivism directed
to the ideal of Individual good. Armed with this philosophy,
liberalism became once more a potent force. Utilitarianism and
Icdssez faire individualism could not hold their ground against It,
and authoritarian collectivism has found It a hardy foe.

%The weakness in Green's philosophy of liberalism was that he
could set no bounds to mark the limits of social authority mediated
through the state. He gave moral sanction to the use of political
power for social betterment as determined by individual well-being,
but he failed to establish barriers which would preclude the use of

A NEW IDEALISM ' 511

state authority unguided by this Ideal. » His failure In this respect
was probably inevitable; for It is difficult to see how he could have
circumscribed the state's sphere of action without also limiting Its
capacity to realize the Ideal of social betterment, j The same reason-
ing by which Green justified state Interference and state control
may be, and has been, appropriated for much more radical and
sweeping programs of reform and reconstruction than he would
have approved.

REFERENCES

Barker, E., Political Thought in England from Herbert Spencer to the Present Day

(London, 1915), Chap. II.
Brinton, C., English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century (London3

1933), pp. 212-226.

Chin, Y. L., The Political Theory of Thomas Hill Green (New York, 1920).
Dewey, J., German Philosophy and Politics (rev. ecL, New York, 1942).
Dunning, W, A., A History of Political Theories from Rousseau to Spincer

(New York, 1920), Chap. IV.

Fair brother, W. H., The Philosophy of Thomas Hill Green (London, 1896).
Geitell, R. G.5 History of Political Thought (New York, 1924), Chap. XIX.
Green, T. H., Works (3 vols., London, 1900).
Harris, F. P., The Xeo-Idealist Political Theory (New York, 1944).
Hegel, G. W. F., The Philosophy of Right (tr. by S. W. Dyde, London, 1896).
Hobhouse, L. T., The Metaphysical Theory of the State (London, 1918).
Laski, H. J., The Rise of European Liberalism (London, 1936).
McGovern, W. M.5 From Luther to Hitler (Boston, 1941), Chaps. V, VI, VII.
Morris, G. S., HegeFs Philosophy of the State and of History (Chicago, 1887).
Muirhead, J. H., The Service of the State: Four Lectures on the Political Teaching

of T. H. Green (London, 1908).

Ritchie, D. G.. The Principles of State Interference (London, 1891), Chap. IV.
Sabine, G. H.,'^ History of Political Theory (New York, 1937), Chap. XXX.
Stace, W. T., The Philosophy of Hegel (London, 1924), Pt. IV, 2nd division.
Zimmern, A. (ed.). Modern Political Doctrines (London, 1939),

CHAPTER XXIV

UTOPIA AGAIN
I

a

T Is a paradox truly reflecting the perennial inconsistency of
the human mind that eras of lusty materialism have produced
the most starkly realistic political thinking and also the most
romantic political dreams. There seems to be an incorrigible dual-
ism In human nature, which causes men to see not only what they
see, but what they wish to see, as well. Wishful thinking being more
stimulated by the thwarting than the fulfillment of desires, it very
commonly happens that when civilization becomes most feverishly
money-mad, altruistic minds take wing to the land of dreams. A
Plato despairs of justice in the profit-snatching Athens of 4 B.C. and
gives the world the pattern of an ideal republic ruled by philosopher
kings. A More, revolted by the poverty and distress of the English
masses under the grasping hand of Henry VIII3 discovers the ficti-
tious land of Utopia, where all things are held in common and every
man Is king.

The nineteenth century witnessed a notable resurgence of uto-
pianlsm. Never in any previous period were more Utopian programs
put forward and more ardent converts made. ! Dozens of Utopian
books, both fictional and expository, became best sellers in the
middle part of the nineteenth century, and several of these inspired
active movements to realize the proposed scheme immediately.
These are now but little remembered, for utopianlsm has gone out
of style.j One great service, however, they did perform. I They
showed that social reconstruction is too complex a problem to be
solved by purely idealistic methods; that perfectionistic societies
cannot be made to order, not even by the saints themselves, I

But we should not, for this reason, undervalue the Utopian visions
of the nineteenth century. Fantastic they may have been, but they
wrere not futile, nor as utterly foolish as they are often pictured. } If
they showed what is Impracticable, they also revealed more sharply
than ever before the boundaries of the practicable. 1 If they ended
as empty dreams, they nevertheless gave the world such ideals of
justice and well-being as to cause multitudes of men to wish that

512

UTOPIA AGAIN 513

dreams might come true. If they demonstrated the folly of abstract
socialism., they did not fail at the same time to sow broadcast the
dragon's teeth of socialistic thought, from which in later years there
sprang a militant host of socialist torchbearers who spread the
gospel of collectivism to every corner of the earth.

Nineteenth-century Utopian thought flourished mainly in France,
England, and the United States. In this chapter we shall briefly
examine the works of Robert Owed, Charles Fourier, and Etienne
Cabet, undoubtedly the most influential Utopian teachers and
leaders of the nineteenth century.

II

An announcement that Henry Ford would found and finance a
communistic settlement in Central Africa would be no less sensa-
tional to-day than was the announcement in 1824 that Robert
Owen waSr' going to promote such an experiment in the wilds of
Indiana. /Like Henry Ford3 Robert Owen was the best known in-
dustrialist of his time, and the possessor of a large fortune accumu-
lated entirely through his own genius for business. Like Mr. Ford,
(Owen was an exponent of the high-wage theory and took a pater-
nalistic interest in the welfare of his_ employees. iAlso like Mr. Ford,
Owen was as unpredictable in his social and political ideas as in his
business methods. Owen's Indiana adventure was an act of im-
pulsive idealism on a par with the famous Ford Peace Ship which
set sail for Europe in 1916 with the confident expectation of "getting
the boys out of the trenches by Christmas," and it set as many
tongues wagging in as many different ways.

Robert Oweri was a remarkable person. Born of impoverished
parents in the Welsh village of Newtown, on May 14, 1771, he re-
ceived almost no schooling and at the age of eleven was appren-
ticed to a London merchant. This was the beginning of a phenom-
enal business career. In a short time Owen had advanced to a
responsible position with a Manchester firm and at the age of nine-
teen was employed by a man named Drinkwater to be superin-
tendent of a spinning mill in Manchester. The contract was to run
three years, at the end of which time Owen, if he made good, was
to be made a partner in the business. In the meantime Drinkwater
got a chance to take in a very wealthy partner on most favorable
terms., but Owen's contract stood in the way. Drinkwater offered

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

to buy Owen out? but Owen did not do business that way. He
voluntarily canceled the contract and withdrew from the business.

*

In 1 794, at the age of twenty- three, Owen with a group of part-
ners started a textile factory of which he became the manager. This
quickly developed into one of the foremost in the business and
brought Owen both wealth and recognition as a business leader.?

(^ ^J — - H

The experiences incident to his rise to affluence and the difficulties
of his daily business life had made Owen an eager student of social
problems. \ He became profoundly convinced, among other things,

that "Man's character is made for him, not by him/5 and hence

\

that pie improvement of environmental conditions was the key to

the perfection of mankind both individually and socially .j- After
trying some of his theories in a limited way in his own business,
Owen sought an opportunity to experiment with a whole commu-
nity. The cotton mill at New Lanark, Scotland, was offered for sale
in 1799, and Owen found the situation much to his liking. The mill
was the sole industry in a village of some 2,500 inhabitants, most of
whom were either mill workers or tradesmen catering to the mill
population. With a group of associates Owen purchased not only
the mill but the village as well.

* New Lanark, when Owen took it over, was a typical mill town —
ugly, insanitary, and impoverished. The mill hands, including
children from six years up, worked from six in the morning to seven
in the evening. The wages of the factory workers were scarcely
sufficient to keep body and soul together, and the village shopkeep-
ers cheated and overcharged the wage-earner at every opportunity.
Drunkenness and degradation were rife, and the death rate had
reached epidemic proportions.

Owen proceeded to transform this social ulcer into a model com-
munity. He cleaned the village from end to end, built a new drain-
age system, constructed comfortable dwellings for the factory
workers, and established a model school. He stopped the sale of
alcoholic beverages in the village, and drove out all private mer-
chants, setting up stores of his own in which goods were sold at cost.
In the cotton mill he voluntarily reduced hours of labor and raised
wages. Furthermore, he abolished the prevalent system of penalties
for faulty work and announced that the mill would be operated on
the Golden Rulel*

Derision and condemnation were Owen's first reward for these

UTOPIA AGAIN 515

altruistic Innovations, even among his own employees. But he
courageously stuck to Ms guns. When his partners balked, he
bought them out and got new partners, and continued to do so
until he got partners who would stay with him. Investments In the
New Lanark mill were made with the understanding thai all
profits above 5 % would be used for the benefit of the employees.
In 1806 a severe test came. The Jefferson Embargo Act cut off the
supply of American cotton, and practically every textile mill In
England was forced to shut down. Mill owners simply closed their
doors and turned their employees loose to shift for themselves.
Millions of workers suffered extreme privation and not a few died
of starvation. But Owen did not do business that way. He held
fast to the Golden Rule. He had to close his mill like all the rest,
but he retained every one of his employees and paid them full wages
for the duration of the shutdown. Owen never had to ask his em-
ployees for cooperation after that. They rallied loyally to his sup-
port and were an Important factor in making New Lanark a success.
(The miracle which Owen had wrought at New Lanark — It
seemed nothing short of that in the first decade of the nineteenth
century — brought him International fame and influence. His advice
was sought by statesmen and industrialists the world over. I To
expound his views he wrote, in 1813, a series of essays entitled .4
New View of Society J In these essays he told the story of New Lanark,
explained what had been done and why, and set forth his ideas for
the further betterment of industrial society. • He proposed., among

^

other things, an old age pension fund, a supervised recreation pro-
gram,, a community nursery for the care of children under school
age, a common school for the education of all children In the ele-
mentary branches of knowledge, a community church, and a hous-
ing plan that would give each worker a comfortable home with a
private garden. J

Vln 18173 in response to the request of a parliamentary committee,
Owen prepared and submitted his remarkable Report to the Committee
for the Relief of the Manufacturing Poor. In this prophetic document
he analyzed the economic and social effects of machine production
and proposed a plan to alleviate the poverty of the working classes. I
"The immediate cause of the present distress," said Owen,

C£is the depreciation of human labour. This has been occasioned by the
general introduction of mechanism into the manufactures of Europe

516 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

and America. . . . The introduction of mechanism into the manufac-
ture of objects of desire In society reduced zheir price; the reduction of
price Increased the demand for them, and generally to so great an
extent as to occasion more human labour to be employed after the
introduction of machinery than had been employed before." l

Then, pointing out how this tendency was greatly accelerated by

the boom Incident to the Napoleonic wars, he continued:

"Now, however, (new circumstances have arisen. The war demand
for the productions of labour having ceased, markets could no longer
be found for them;) and the revenues of the world were Inadequate to
purchase that which a power so enormous in Its effects did produce; a
diminished demand consequently followed. When, therefore, it became
necessary to contract the sources of supply, it soon proved that mechani-
cal power was much cheaper than human labour; the former, in con-
sequence, was continued at work, while the latter was superseded; and
human labour may now be obtained at a price far less than is absolutely
necessary for the subsisience of the individual in ordinary comfort.55 2

'One of three things, according to Owen, must result from this
condition. First, things might be left as they were and millions of
human beings consigned to whatever fate would come from starva-
tion wages or no wages at all. That was unthinkable. Second, the
use of machinery might be greatly diminished; but that as a practi-
cal measure seemed out of the question. Third, a plan might be
devised to provide security for the working classes against the vicissi-
tudes of machine production. * This, said Owen, was the only sen-
sible and practicable course to take, and he offered a plan which
he believed would accomplish the desired result. The central fea-
ture of his plan was the establishment of cooperative villages in
which the working population would be partly employed in in-
dustry and partly in agriculture. Each village would contain on
the average about 1,000 inhabitants and would occupy about 1,200
acres of land. (The aim would be to render each a practically self-
sufficient social unit. The farm lands, mills, and other productive
properties would be held and worked in common. There would
also be a common kitchen, common dining rooms, and appropriate
buildings for dormitories. Adequate facilities for education, wor-
ship, and recreation would of course be provided) All members of
the community were to be employed) according to sex, age, and

*" Report to the Committee for the Relief of the Manufacturing Poor," Part I, in
Owen's A. New View of Society and Other Writings (Everyman's Library, 1927), pp. 156-158.
»7fcW., pp. 159-160.

UTOPIA AGAIN 517

ability in the various occupations of farming, manufacturing^ and
managing the different establishments of the community. All would
share in the prosperity of the community and none would be un-
employed or in want. Owen went into great detail in preparing
plans for the physical layout and equipment of the community and
in estimating the cost of establishing such an enterprise.

Xeedless 10 say this communistic proposal was not cordially re-
ceived by the parliamentary committee, nor was it hailed with en-
thusiasm by the general public. Regardless of the many practical
objections which could be urged against it, nineteenth-century
England was far from ready for sweeping social reconstruction of
any sort. I Owen's report was politely received and promptly em-
balmed in the official archives. ) Owen was bitterly disappointed. I

Ie conceived the belief that the opposition of the clergy and of
orthodox religionists in general had militated against the approval
of his plan, and he came out with a blast against religion as the
enemy of social progress, which gained him the abiding ill-will of the
churchly portion of society. This was unfortunate, but inevitable}
Owen was a man of great ability who had done big things and be-
lieved he could do still bigger things.(^No man of his time had done
more to promote practical Christianity, and the conservative atti-
tude of professing Christians made him see red^

As disappointment accumulated in England, and especially after
factory legislation that he had prepared at the request of Parlia-
ment had been so emasculated that he felt obliged to repudiate it,
fjOwen turned his mind more and more to the possibilities of social
reconstruction in the New World. The United States was young, its
social institutions had not yet set to a fixed pattern, and there were
millions of square miles of unoccupied territory where a new start
could be madcp Why not give America a concrete example of the
better social order? It might change the whole history of the United
States and profoundly influence the future course of the world. It
was a thrilling possibility, and Owen, who was a man of action as
well as a dreamer, did not hesitate long. On 1824 he purchased for
$150,000 a 30,000-acre tract of land in toe new state of Indiana,
and announced the intention of founding there a settlement, to be
called New Harmony, which would be conducted on communis-
tic principles similar to his rejected plan for the relief of the indus-
trial poor)

518 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

Owen had no intention of living at New Harmony himself, but he
felt it his duty 10 go out and get the project properly started. (The
American public received him as a great popular hero and gave him
a tremendous ovation. He was invited to speak in dozens of cities,
and great throngs turned out to hear him whenever he spokeT) At
the city of Washington he addressed a select audience, assembled in
his honor in the Hall of Representatives,, which included the Presi-
dent of the United States, the judges of the Supreme Court, and the
members of the Senate and the House of Representatives. And his
message to this august assemblage of notables? Just communism,,
that was all.

The New Harmony settlement was duly inaugurated, and ap-
parently under the most auspicious circumstances, (Not planning to
remain himself, Owen took pains to recruit the best people he could
find to initiate the experiment. He issued a call for applications to
join the colony and was soon flooded with volunteers. He picked
a hundred of the best educated applicants, placed them under the
leadership of a little group of brilliant scholars he had chosen as
associates in the enterprise, and took them out to New Harmony
with him. This was his first mistake. There was too much brains in
the colony and not enough brawn; too many brilliant individual-
ists and not enough plodding cooperators)

(While Owen remained in the colony all went well, but as soon as
he took his departure dissension appeared. The Brain Trust he left
in charge split forty ways on everything) In two years they adopted
seven different constitutions and finally asked Owen to return as
dictator. When it came to agriculture and industry, on which the
colony must depend for self-support, they had little to contribute
and not much inclination to do what they could; when it came to
education and religion, however, they were there with bells, but
each bell rang a different tone. (Religion caused the bitterest dis-
putes."^ Believing in religious freedom, Owen had provided that
preachers of all sects should be welcome to come to the colony and
teach their doctrines and should be given free meals and lodging
while there. Believing also in the free discussion of religion, he had
further provided that this hospitality should be extended on one
condition: that at the end of the sermon any member of the con-
gregation might have the privilege of asking and requiring the
preacher to answer any question he might put. After a few experi-

UTOPIA AGAIX 519

ences with this rule the preachers all steered clear of New Harmony.
The members then began to dispute theological issues among them-
selves. IjsQQii there were several religious factions, each demanding
separate quarters. Owen gave in to these demands, and that was
the beginning of the end of communism at New Harmony. By 1 827
it was all over, and Owen had leased the land to private settlers?)
'Jpwen returned to England in 1829 minus some four-fifths of his
fortune. New Harmony had been an extravagant indulgence, but
Owen's idealism could take a lot of punishment) Though unable to
finance further communistic experiments, he continued to encour-
age and support them with every means in his power. After his re-
turn to England, however, he became so engrossed in the trade
union movement, the formation of cooperative societies, the promo-
tion of labor exchanges, the founding of kindergartens, the propa-
gation of spiritualism, and various other radical innovations that he
could give only a minor part of his time and energy to Utopian colo-
nization plans. The Owenite community at New Harmony inspired
imitation, and several other settlements of the same type were
started in various parts of the United States under Owen's advice
and approval. The most prominent of these were the Swedenbor-
gian colony, founded at Yellow Springs, Ohio, in 1824; the Nashoba
colony near Memphis, Tennessee, founded in 1825; and the Haver-
straw colony in New York, founded in 1 826. All of these were short-
lived, and only served to demonstrate more conclusively the in-
feasibility of the Owenite program.

f

(J3wen died in 1858, at the age of 87. He had lived greatly and
nobly, and in spite of his mistakes and failures had done more to
combat the blighting evils of industrialism than any other man of his
generation. Within his lifetime the star of Utopian socialism flashed
forth with radiant promise and then went completely out, but
Owen never lost faith in Utopias and never ceased to believe that
man, by taking thought and disciplining the will, could create a
society that would make an end of crime and poverty and injustice.,
a society in which the good in human nature could flower in full
perfection and beauty. The philosophy behind this lofty idealism
was perhaps a bit thin. In the sense of wishing to submerge the in-
dividual Owen was no communist at all. His dream was to release
the individual from the repressions and perversions of competitive
society. As a substitute he proposed a benevolent paternalism

520 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

which would eliminate the evils of the social struggle. The great

error in men's thinking about human character and behavior,
Owen held, was the doctrine of free will preached by philosophers
and the corollary doctrine of individual sin preached by Christian
theologians. This was the basis of his hostility to all forms of Chris-
tianity and his endeavor to propagate a new religion which would
recognize his fundamental thesis that society makes men what they
are. His interest in communism lay in his belief that it would incul-
cate the lessons of harmony and cooperation necessary to the de-
velopment of a sound social system?)

Ill

Charles Fourier (1772-1837) was the son of a wealthy French
merchant whose fortune was lost in the Revolution. To gain a live-
lihood Charles had to spend most of his life in the humble occu-
pations of shop clerk and traveling salesman. Keened to social
problems by the circumstances to which he had been reduced, he
devoted every spare moment to social studies and writings. Gradu-
ally he produced a number of writings that gained attention, and
by 1815 he had won a group of enthusiastic disciples who dissemi-
nated his ideas throughout the world.

Fourier's criticisms of the existing order of society as well as his
proposals for social reconstruction, unlike those of most Utopians,
were not based upon ethical or humanitarian considerations. He
was little moved by the sufferings of the poor or the injustices of un-
equal wealth. What did shock him to smoking indignation was the
disorder and wastefulness of the competitive system. The exploita-
tion of the underprivileged was too bad, but the waste of labor, ma-
terials, money, time — those were atrocious, damnable, and ought
to be corrected. So Fourier became an evangel of order, efficiency,
and economy in societal processes.

The central principle of God's universe, he reasoned, was har-
mony and order, and consequently there must be orderly and
harmonious connections between all existing things, including
mankind. God had created man and endowed him with certain
instincts and passions which he was intended to exercise. These,
according to Fourier's classification, were reducible to twelve fun-
damental senses and passions, as follows: sight, hearing, smell, taste,
touch, friendship, love, ambition, paternity, emulation, alternat-

UTOPIA AGAIN 521

ing, composite. In existing society these could not be exercised In
the orderly manner intended by the Creator, but In a properly
organized society they could.

Thus assuming human nature to be a fixed and unvariable thing,
and that he had laid bare Its elemental composition, Fourier pro-
ceeded to evolve a plan for reorganizing society' to fit human nature.
The cardinal Idea of this plan was a basic social unit composed of
persons voluntarily bound together by like sympathies and tastes
and desiring to be united in the pursuit of some particular branch of
art, science, or industry. This unit, to be known as a group, would
consist of at least seven persons entirely harmonized by the Identity
of their tastes and Interests. Larger groups, for the sake of greater
harmony and order, might be divided Into sub-groups known as
wings. A group might have three wings — the center and two ex-
tremes. The extremes would represent opposing poles of tendency
within the group, but would be held In harmonious union by the
center, which would represent a middle tendency and would be the
most numerous wing.

It was Fourier's idea, however, that groups would be kept rela-
tively small and the larger structures of society formed by linking
groups together on the same principle of homogeneity followed In
the formation of groups. Five or more groups thus joined together
would constitute what Fourier called a series, and a union of series
reaching a total of about 2,000 persons would result In what he
styled a phalanx. The phalanx would be the largest unit of social
organization, sufficiently large and diversified to be economically
self-sustaining and to afford each member ample opportunity to
exercise his inclinations and talents, yet small enough to preserve the
compactness and harmony essential to order and efficiency. In
other words, It would be a complete and perfect community.

Each phalanx, according to Fourier's specifications, would oc-
cupy about 5,000 acres of land — enough, supposedly, to provide
most of the necessities for its agricultural and industrial activity.
The members would dwell in a vast edifice called the palace or
phalanstery, which would provide appropriate residential quarters,
council rooms, libraries, workshops, storehouses, dining halls, and
what not for the various series and groups. Division of labor accord-
ing to aptitude and ability would be the rule for all. Food would be
prepared in common kitchens by those best fitted for culinary work.

522 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

and would be served In common dining halls by those best adapted
to that line of work. Buying would be done cooperatively, the
most skilled buyers acting for the entire community. Farming and
Industrial operations would be carried on in the same manner.
Equal education would be provided for all, but children would be
studied to discover their special talents and each would be given the
kind of education suited to his particular needs. Everything possible
would be done to make life agreeable and satisfying for all. The
buildings would be artistically and efficiently designed, the grounds
beautifully landscaped, and the gardens and fields admirably
planned and cultivated. For every taste appropriate satisfactions
would be found — art, music, literature, philosophy, as well as less
refined gratifications for those not up to the higher culture.

As conceived by Fourier, the phalanx was not truly communistic.
The property was held by the phalanx as a corporate body in which
the members held stock, but membership could be acquired without
owTning stock. Careful accounts were to be kept with every member,
and at the end of each year he would be paid his share of the profits.
The general basis of apportionment was to be four-twelfths to capi-
tal, five-twelfths to labor, and three-twelfths to talent or special
skill.

Fourier died In 1837, before his ideas had gained great momen-
tum; but a zealous band of disciples took them up and spread them
throughout the world. Looking backward upon Fourierism, it is
difficult to understand the appeal of this obviously artificial and un-
earthly scheme to rational minds. But the fact remains, neverthe-
less, that thousands of intelligent people, including some of the fore-
most minds of the century, were persuaded that Fourierism was not
only practicable, but practicable right now. Fourier converts were
not content merely to preach the doctrines of their master; they
must straightway put them into practice. A number of phalanxes
were founded In France, and some of these developed into strong
cooperative societies which still survive. It was in the United States,
however, that Fourierism had its real splurge. On the American
side of the Atlantic were millions of acres of cheap or free land, vast
empires awaiting settlement, and plenty of people eager to try any
new venture In colonization.

The Fourier cult was introduced In the United States by Albert
Brisbane (father of the renowned Hearst editor, Arthur Brisbane).

UTOPIA AGAIX 523

The son of a well-to-do landowner, Brisbane was sent to Europe to
finish his education and there, in 1832, came under the Influence of
Fourier. Returning to his native land, Brisbane immediately put his
hand to the plow of propaganda and soon had an interested au-
dience. In 1840 he published a book entitled The Social Destiny of
A fan, which was a very concise and readable summary of Fourier's
teachings and made a great impression. One of the earliest con-
verts was Horace Greeley, who became an ardent supporter of the
movement and threw the influence of his potent New York Tribune
behind it. Parke Godwin, editor of the New York Evening Post and
son-in-law of William Cullen Brvant. was another earlv convert

4 * '

whose personal prestige and editorial support aided materially in
getting the Fourier movement into high gear. In a short time a re-
markable group of distinguished Americans, including James Rus-
sell Lowell, Henry James, Theodore Parker, Thomas Wentworth
Higginson,, William E. Channing, and Charles A. Dana, had been
drawn into the fold. Under their leadership Fourierist societies
were organized in New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New
Jersey, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Michigan. The pur-
pose of these societies was not merely to popularize the Fourier gos-
pel but also to aid in the planting of cooperative colonies on the
phalanx plan. At least thirty-three Fourier colonies are known to
have been established in different parts of the Union, and there may-
have been more. Three of these Fourier experiments — the North
American Phalanx at Red Bank, New Jersey, the Brook Farm at
West Roxbury, Massachusetts, and the Wisconsin Phalanx or
Ceresco Colony near Fond du Lac, Wisconsin — were sufficiently
notable to command widespread attention and engender much
debate.

The Red Bank colony was organized by residents of New York
City and Albany with the advice and assistance of Brisbane, Gree-
ley, and Godwin. About ninety settlers took possession of the prop-
erty in September, 1 843, built a large mansion or palace, and estab-
lished a grist mill and other small industries. Fourier's principles
were followed quite literally, and the community seems to have en-
joyed moderate prosperity. Farming was the principal occupation
of the members. No friction appears to have arisen, but there was a
slow decline of enthusiasm and conviction as the substantial profits
which had been expected were gradually found to be unrealizable.

524 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

In September, 1854, the mill was destroyed by fire. Greeley offered
to rebuild ii3 but Fourierlsm was by this time on the wane through-
out the country and the Red Bank colonists decided to call it quits.

The Brook Farm was founded in 1841 by a Unitarian clergyman
named George Ripiey, who enlisted the cooperation of a number of
Transcendentalist writers and thinkers including Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Theodore Parker, Bronson Alcott,
Charles A. Dana, William E. Channing, Margaret Fuller, and John
S. Dwight. The colony was not originally established on Fourierist
principles, but was reorganized on that basis in 1844. About 200
acres of land were acquired and about seventy7 members took up res-
idence in the colony, among them Hawthorne, Dana, and Dwight.
Other celebrated members were frequent visitors. The colony
never reached a self-supporting basis, though it seems to have been
approaching that condition in 1846 when a disastrous fire ruined
the newly built phalanstery. Money could not be raised to rebuild
this indispensable structure, and it was decided to disband. On the
social and cultural side the Brook Farm experiment seems to have
been satisfying to the members, and was so attractive to outsiders
that hundreds of applications for admission had to be turned down.

From the economic standpoint the Ceresco experiment was prob-
ably the most successful of all the Fourierist colonies. It was founded
in 1844 under the leadership of a man named Warren Chase. Be-
ginning with twenty settlers, the number was increased to a maxi-
mum of 180. The colony was strictly agricultural, and cultivated
about 700 acres of land. Genuine material prosperity was achieved,
but the social and intellectual life of the community remained quite
sterile. One constant bone of contention split the community into
factions. This was whether the members should reside in isolated
households or in a common mansion. When the question was put to
vote the separate household faction lost but refused to give in. By
mutual agreement the colony was dissolved in 1850.

Fourierism had passed its meridian by 1850. Fourier's Utopia was
non-political, and was to be gained by voluntary cooperation within
existing political structures, which would be dissolved only when the
phalanx had generally superseded previous social units. Fourier did
not contemplate the survival of the political state. General accept-
ance of the phalanx was expected to dissolve the state and place the
management of ail common concerns in these voluntary associa-

UTOPIA AGAIN 525

lions. This was sailing close to anarchism, though Fourier can be
classified as an anarchisi no more than as a communist. He was es-
sentially a cooperationisi, rejecting both paternalism and individ-
ualism. More justly perhaps than any other man is he entitled to be
called the father of the modern cooperative movement. Despite the
fact that he was neither an anarchist nor a communist, and indeed
not strictly a socialist, certain of Fourier's ideas have been of enor-
mous service to all opponents of capitalist society. His cogent criti-
cism of the inefficiency and wastefulness of competitive capitalism
has become one of the major counts in the socialist indictment of
laissezfaire. His vision of the possibility of labor not for profit but for
love of the job has likewise become one of the cardinal tenets of
socialist doctrine. And his arraignment of the marriage system of
capitalist society has given socialist thinkers one of their most pro-
vocative arguments against the existing order.

IV

Less original in thought than Fourier3 but more appealing to the
proletarian mind, was his compatriot and near-contemporary,
Etienne Cabet (1788-1856). Cabet, who was educated both in
law and medicine, took an active part in the Revolution of 1830
and in recognition of these services was appointed attorney general
for Corsica. In that position he soon proved too radical for the
government of Louis Philippe and was removed from office. He
was then elected to represent his native city of Dijon in the Chamber
of Deputies and founded a radical newspaper called Populaire.
From his seat in the Chamber and through his newspaper, which
had a wide circulation among the lower classes, Cabet attacked
the government so violently that he was promptly exiled from
France. He took refuge in England, where he came under the in-
fluence of Robert Owen and was converted to communism. While
in exile he -wrote the book which made Mm internationally famous.
It was a Utopian romance entitled Voyage to Icaria. With highly
empurpled diction, in the sentimental style of the romantic tradi-
tion, it told the story of a young English nobleman who had dis-
covered the far-away land of Icaria where perfection had its home.

Closely following the pattern set by More's Utopia, Cabet scath-
ingly denounced the evils of the existing social system and painted
a lovely picture of the contrasting beneficence of Icarian society.

526 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

In Icaria evervthine; except the family was nationalized and regu-

* o i *

I a ted by a benign and unerring government. The right of inherit-
ance was abolished; national workshops replaced private factories;
national agricultural colonies supplanted private farming; wages
were regnlaied by the state; a progressive income tax was levied.
Appearing at a time of great social unrest, Cabet' s novel instantly
became the book of the hour, and he returned to France the ac-
knowledged leader of the French proletariat.

In 1847 Cabet issued an Invitation to the working people of
France to join him In an actual voyage to Icaria. He proposed to
acquire land and found an Icarian settlement somewhere on the
American continent. The response was enormous, and Cabet has-
tened to London to consult with Robert Owen whose previous ex-
perience in Utopian colonization was highly regarded. Owen
advised Cabet to try Texas, which had just been admitted to the
Union and was making lavish offers of land to attract immigration.
Cabet succeeded In negotiating with a Texas land company for a
gift of a million acres of land provided the colony took possession be-
fore July 1, 1848. With a vanguard of 68 persons he sailed for Texas
on February 3, 1848, and reached New Orleans early In March.

Upon reaching Texas the little company of Icarians began to
discover things about the land game as played in nineteenth-cen-
tury America. The tract allotted to them was set In a trackless
wilderness 250 miles from the nearest settlement. They had been
given a million acres all right, but not In a solid block. To spread
the settlement so its remaining holdings could be sold at a profit,
the company had given the Icarians alternate half-sections. More-
over, the contract required the colonists to erect a number of build-
ings which the remoteness of the site and the dispersion of their
holdings made utterly impossible before the terminal date of July 1 .
With the courage of desperation, however, they decided to make
the attempt. * After surmounting terrible hardships, they took pos-
session of a small portion of the promised estate, built a few cabins,
and started plowing. But before they could make any headway an
epidemic of malarial fever laid the whole community low. Thwarted
by man, paralyzed by disease, and threatened with starvation, the
colonists decided to return to New Orleans for the winter. At New
Orleans they were joined by some 500 new associates who had
followed the advance guard in accordance with Cabet's arrange-

UTOPIA AGAIN 527

merits. In a short time their funds ran low and there was a hot dis-
pute as to their future course of action. About half of the members
decided they had had enough and withdrew from the enterprise.
The remainder decided to go to Nauvoo,, Illinois, where there was a
chance to take over the lately abandoned property of the Mormons.

Driven out of Nauvoo by persecution the Mormons had left a
large tract of well-cultivated land with excellent buildings. Includ-
ing a mill and a distillery. The Icarlan colony arrived on the scene
in March, 1849, and leased about 800 acres of land. For several
years prosperity smiled upon them and they were able to purchase
the property and make many improvements. Communistic prin-
ciples were followed except in the matter of family residence., but
there was a common dining hall where all took their meals. A good
school was established, and a number of successful Industries were
carried on in addition to farming. The colony published its own
newspaper, and had a very respectable library. During this phase
the life proved sufficiently pleasant to attract a good many recruits.

There was trouble to come, however, over the age-old question
of government. The constitution of the colony provided that Its
affairs should be administered by a president and five directors
elected by the members, but the acts of this executive board were
subject to approval or disapproval by the general assembly. Cabet
was regularly elected president and for a long time exercised his
powers to the satisfaction of all. But Cabet was 61 years old when
the colony took possession at Nauvoo, and in a few years he began
to display some of the infirmities of old age. His Increasingly ar-
bitrary, inflexible, and intolerant disposition split the community
into pro- and anti-Cabet factions, and in 1 856 there was a rupture
which ended In the expulsion of Cabet and his followers from the
Nauvoo colony. Cabet died of apoplexy almost immediately there-
after. The loyal Cabetians migrated to St. Louis, where they ac-
quired a small tract of land and got along very well for a while.
Finally, however, a dispute arose over the question of dictatorial
versus democratic government, and in 1864 the colony was volun-
tarily dissolved.

The Nauvoo settlement began to disintegrate Immediately after
the expulsion of Cabet. Many felt that more land than could be
had at Nauvoo was necessary to meet the future needs of the colony,
and a large group of these dissenters removed to a location hi Iowa

528 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

about thirty miles up the Missouri River, where they acquired a
tract of 3?000 acres. There they had to face pioneer conditions
almost as adverse as those encountered in Texas. By sacrifice and
hard labor they managed to pay off their debts and build up a
prosperous colony. In this they were greatly aided by the good
markets created by the Civil War and the building of railroads into
their vicinity. Prosperity brought dissension in a new form. The
older generation which had fought and won the battle against the
wilderness was determined to use the growing profits of the colony
for material expansion and improvements; but the younger genera-
tion, which had grown up in relative ease and had absorbed a lot
of the philosophy of Karl Marx, wanted to spend money on socialist
propaganda and various other fantastic schemes. Being outvoted
by their elders, the "new dealers" went to law over the matter in
1878. They were able to prove in court that the charter of the
colony had been violated, and secured an order of dissolution. The
victorious party remained in possession of the property and reor-
ganized the colony. But they were unable to make it prosper and
soon sold out and moved to a farm near Cloverdale, California,
where they remained until 1887 when the community was volun-
tarily dissolved. The older crowd formed a new colony in Iowa,
which lasted until 1895, by which time, through death and with-
drawals, the number had become too small to continue.

Thus faded into the twilight of forgotten dreams another noble
expedition to the Land of Heart's Desire.

V

The Utopian ventures of Owen, Fourier, and Cabet represent the
most noteworthy, but by no means the most numerous, of nine-
teenth-century communistic experiments. The total runs into hun-
dreds, if not thousands. The shock of nineteenth-century industrial-
ism caused a world-wide revulsion against the competitive system,
and multitudes sought escape from the crushing realities of a de-
ranged and dissolving social system. On a smaller scale it was a
repetition of what had happened in the sixth century when the
disorder and insecurity attending the break-up of the classical civi-
lization drove multitudes to the cloistered refuge of monasteries and
nunneries.

The communistic settlements of the nineteenth century were of

UTOPIA AGAIN 529

two general types — religious and non-religious. Colonies of both
types were attempted in every part of the western world, but mostly
in the United States where there was an abundance of land to be
had on easy terms. The religious colonies, as for example those of
the Shakers, the Amanites, the Zoarites, the Mennonites, and the
Perfectionists, were as a rule more durable and successful than the
non-religious colonies. They had greater unity, and their economic
doctrines were sustained by a religious sanction. With a few minor
exceptions, however, they all gradually disintegrated, and for sub-
stantially the same reasons which caused the failure of the non-
religious communities.

Business ability sufficient to compete on even terms with sur-
rounding capitalistic institutions was almost invariably lacking.
Sooner or later mismanagement entered the picture, bringing
financial difficulties from which they could not extricate themselves.
Dissension crept in despite all educational, probationary, and
religious safeguards. In the colonies which lasted long enough for
children to grow up the younger generation proved a baffling
problem. Even when reconciled to the communistic system, the
young people often revolted against the particular communistic
creed of their elders; and in a good many cases they bitterly re-
sented the communistic life which set them apart from the rest of
mankind and got out of the colony as soon as they were able. Nor
could these communistic settlements be free to conduct their affairs
without regard to the rest of the world. They were set down in the
midst of a capitalistic society whose impact they could not escape.
Unable to be wholly self-sufficient, they had to buy and sell on the
outside; had to use money and credit; had to be chartered by the
government, obey its general laws, and assume the same burdens
of taxation as individual owners of property.

So it came to pass that the Brave New World which these many
pilgrims set out to find was shown to be an imaginary world peopled
only by beings wrought from the dreams of poets and seers.

REFERENCES

Cole, G. D. H., The Life of Robert Owen (London, 1930).
H^ftzler, J. O.3 The History of Utopian Thought (New York, 1923).
iilquit, M., History of Socialism in the United States (rev. cd., New York and
London, 1910), Parti.

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

Hinds, \V. A., American Communities and Cooperative Societies (2nd ed.,

Chicago, 1908).

Laidler, H. \\"., A History oj Socialist Thought (New York, 1927).
Lockvvood, G. B., The bV«f Harmony Movement (New York, 1905).
McCabe, ].. Robert Owen (London. 1920).

Xordhoff, C., The Communistic Societies in the United States (New York, 1875).
Owen, R.. -4 .\>^ View of Society and Other Writings (Everyman's Library,

New York, 1927).

CHAPTER XXV

HISTORICAL JURISTS

I

JURISTS are seldom ranked among the demigods of political
thought. Some political theorists have leaned heavily upon the
work of juristic thinkers, but they are relatively few in number.
On the part of the great majority of political savants., a sort of
cousinly recognition of the juristic scholar has been the chief evi-
dence of awareness of the significance of juristic thought. It Is true
that jurists have been principally occupied with Inquiries of a legally
technical nature, which, consequently, have been largely foreign to
the non-legal mind; but It is equally true that the main streams of
juridical thought have very commonly carried deposits of great im-
portance to political theory. Law and government go arm In arm,
and no philosophy of government can safely ignore the question of
the fundamental nature of lawT and of the authority behind it.

Of the great central problems of political thought, none Is more
vital than sovereignty. It is possible, as many have done, to adopt
a concept of sovereignty and then to explain law in terms of sov-
ereignty. But it is preferable, and usually more fruitful scientifically,
to explore the underlying nature of law and then consider sover-
eignty In terms of lawr. It is when the political thinker takes the lat-
ter appoach that he finds indispensable aid in the labors of juristic
scholarship.

The nineteenth century was congenial to legal scholarship, espe-
cially to legal scholarship using the historical method of inquiry,
The rise, in the nineteenth century, of great libraries, museums, and
universities with vast collections of source material provided better
facilities for historico-legal research than had ever existed before.
Moreover, nineteenth-century historical and legal scholarship was
deeply impregnated with the scientific spirit, a heritage from the
former century that was greatly activated by the astounding ad-
vances of science as the new century rolled on. The besetting vice of
historians and jurists in the past had been special pleading — writing
history and fashioning jurisprudence to prove a case or sustain a
cause. Nineteenth-century jurists did not wholly escape this agree-

531

532 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

able temptation, but a larger number than ever before caught the
lofty spirit of Bodin and Montesquieu, and devoted themselves
primarily to the quest for juridical truth.

The choicest fruits of nineteenth-century legal scholarship rip-
ened in Germany and England. A galaxy of great names in the
story of jurisprudence could be compiled from, the distinguished
figures in legal scholarship in these two countries alone. The list
would include Hugo, Savigny, Ranke, Bluntschli, Jhering, Jellinek,
Gierke, Maine, Maitland, Dicey, and many more; all of whom
made important contributions to both legal and political thought.
We choose for special consideration here the two whose influence
upon political thought seems to have been the most direct and ex-
tensive— Friedrich Karl von Savigny and Sir Henry James Sumner
Maine.

II

Born at Frankfort on February 21, 1179, Savigny was the scion
of an ancient and noble family. He was left an orphan at the age of
thirteen, but was carefully reared by a guardian. In 1795 he en-
tered the University of Marburg, where he studied law and juris-
prudence under Bauer and Weiss, two of the most eminent legal
scholars of the day. As was then the custom among German stu-
dents, he left his own university for a period of "visitation/5 as the
modern expression terms it, at other universities. During this time
he attended classes at Jena, Leipzig, and Halle. He returned to
Marburg, took his doctor's degree in 1800, and thereupon was ap-
pointed a Privatdozent. His chief subjects wrere criminal law and the
Pandects*

In 1803 Savigny published his first book, The Right of Possession.
This work was instantly hailed as a masterpiece, and Savigny5 s repu-
tation was made. The Right of Possession marked the end of the old,
uncritical study of Roman law, and is still regarded as one of the
great landmarks in the history of jurisprudence. Savigny married
In 1804 and set out on a long tour of Germany and France in which
he combined honeymooning with an exhaustive search for new
sources of information on Roman law. In 1808 he was appointed
professor of Roman law at Landshut, and in 1810 he was called to
the chair of Roman law at the University of Berlin. The remainder
of his life was given over to teaching, research, writing, and public

HISTORICAL JURISTS 533

service. While a professor at Berlin, Savigny served as a member of
the commission for organizing the Prussian provincial estates, a
member of the department of justice In the Staatsrath. and a mem-
ber of the supreme court of appeals for the Rhine Provinces. In
1842 he resigned his professorship In order to accept the post of
High Chancellor of Prussia, the highest office in the Prussian judicial
system. He held this position until 1848, when he retired in order
to devote himself exclusively to the study of jurisprudence. He did
not resume his teaching, preferring to give his energies entirely to
research and writing. Savigny died at Berlin on October 25, 1861.
Savlgny's most important writings in addition to his first book
are: Of the Vocation of Our Age for Legislation and Jurisprudence (1814),
History of Roman Law in the Middle Ages (1815-1831), System of Con-
temporary Roman Law (1840-1849), and Contracts (1853).

Ill

In relation to political thought Savigny's most influential work
was Of the Vocation of Our Age for Legislation and Jurisprudence . This
was a protest against the teachings of Bentham and many of the
French jurists, who treated law as something arbitrarily imposed
regardless of the culture and history of a people, and was directed In
particular against the codification cult on the one hand and the
natural law school on the other. Savigny Insisted that the only true
key to the understanding of law was the historical study of actual
law, taking careful account of its organic growth and development.

Savigny denied that his own or any other age had any peculiar
or exceptional "vocation" for lawmaklng. The people of every age3
he declared, find themselves encompassed and hemmed in by an
immense mass of legal rules and ideas which seem to be largely irra-
tional, inappropriate, and unjust. Dissatisfied, they would like to
apply the dissecting knife to the existing system and revise it to con-
form with some arbitrary pattern of utility, reason, or something
else.

"People . . . think," he remarked, "to annihilate it, by severing all
historical associations, and beginning an entirely new life. But such an
undertaking would be built on a delusion. For it is Impossible to anni-
hilate the Impressions and modes of thought of the jurists now living, —
impossible to change completely the nature of existing legal relations;
and on this twofold impossibility rests the indissoluble organic connec-

534 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

tion of generations and ases: between which, development only, not
absolute end and absolute beginning, is conceivable. There is no mode
of avoiding this overruling influence of the existing matter; it will be
injurious to us so long as we ignorantly submit to it; but beneficial, if we
oppose to it a vivid creative energy, — obtain the mastery over it by a
thorough grounding in history, and thus appropriate to ourselves the
whole intellectual wealth of preceding generations." l

The task of each generation, said Savigny, is to perfect itself in
historical knowledge and realistic understanding of the origin and
development of law and legal institutions, and then to apply this
knowledge and understanding intelligently in the reconstruction of
the existing legal system. He did not object to new laws or entirely
new systems of law, but believed that the quick-repair method of
codification, by Its Ignorance and neglect of the historical and social
roots of law, would do more harm than good; and that the abstract
dogmas of the natural law would lead to results as bad or worse.
"We meet with people dally/5 he wrote, "who hold their juridical
notions and opinions to be the offspring of pure reason, for no
earthly reason but because they are Ignorant of their origin. When
we lose sight of our individual connection with the great entirety of
the world and its history, we necessarily see our thoughts in a false
light of universality and originality. There is only the historical
sense to protect us against this, to turn which upon ourselves is in-
deed the most difficult of applications." l

In Savigny's opinion the earliest beginnings of law might never
be discovered, but there was ample evidence in history that the legal
institutions of a people attain a fixed character in the same way as
their language, manners., and social systems. He was very fond of
the analogy between law and language, and argued that the formal
rules and processes of law take shape like the grammar of a lan-
guage. "For law, as for language/5 he said, "there is no moment of
absolute cessation; it Is subject to the same movement and develop-
ment as every other popular tendency; and this very development
remains under the same law of inward necessity, as in its earliest
stages. Law grows with the growth, strengthens with the strength of
the people, and finally dies away as the nation loses its nationality." 2

This conception of law, instead of simplifying the problem,

1 Of the Vocation of Ow Time for Legislation and Jurisprudence (Hayward trans., 1831),
Sec, vlii.

2 Ibid., Sec. ii.

HISTORICAL JURISTS 535

greatly complicated it, a fact which Savigny clearly perceived and
admitted. The ultimate source of law, he maintained, was "the
common consciousness of the people." This concept was easy to de-
fend when only general principles of law were considered, but with
regard to the multitudinous details of the legal fabric it was ob-
viously inadequate. Savigny recognized this and had a most per-
suasive way of reconciling it with his doctrine of common con-
sciousness as the source of law. In the earlier stages of civilization,
he explained, law exists only in the consciousness of the community, '
but as civilization grows in complexity,

"What otherwise would have remained common, becomes appro-
priated to particular classes; the jurists become more and more a distinct
class of the kind; law perfects its language, takes a scientific direction,
and, as formerly it existed in the consciousness of the community, it now
devolves ^upon the jurists, who thus, in this department, represent the
community. Law is henceforth more artificial and complex, since it has
a twofold life; first, as part of the aggregate existence of the community,
which it does not cease to be; and. secondly, as a distinct branch of
knowledge in the hands of the jurists. All the latter phenomena are
explicable by the co-operation of those two principles of existence; and
it may now be understood, how even the whole of that immense mass
of detail might arise from organic causes, without any exertion of ar-
bitrary wiU or intention. For the sake of brevity, we call, technically
speaking, the connection of law with the general existence of the people
— the political element; and the distinct scientific existence of law — the
technical element." l

Legislation or codification that did not understand and respect
these two basic factors in the formation of law, did not intelligently
and scientifically accommodate itself to them, was, in Savigny5s
opinion., almost certain to have baneful results. Alterations of
existing law influenced primarily by high reasons of state were
almost invariably bad, he said, because of the displacement of really
communal rules by arbitrary, artificial, and nearly always unsuit-
able enactments. But alterations to amplify, clarify, and define the
existing law were different. "Here a kind of legislation may be
introduced, which comes to the aid of custom, removes . . . doubts
and uncertainties, and thus brings to light, and keeps pure, the real
law, the proper will of the people.5' 2

Savigny's jurisprudence had a definite and powerful influence

1 RM- 2 Ibid., Sec. Hi.

536 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

upon nineteenth-century political thought. ccHIs evolutionary
manifesto,'" said Professor G. P. Gooch, "popularised the concep-
tion of organic development, emphasised the continuity of history,
and shifted attention from the play of events on the surface to the
underlying moral and Intellectual Influences and the abiding in-
stitutions of national life.55 1 In the opinion of the same writer, how-
ever, Savigny was hostile to political liberty and "blind to the
immense practical utility of occasionally sweeping away legal rub-
bish, of simplifying, defining, and coordinating.53 1

If Savigny5 s gradualism left no room for the rapid readjustment
and deliberate advancement necessitated by a hastening Industrial
civilization. It may be stated nevertheless that his historical phi-
losophy and his view of the function of the courts and jurists in dis-
covering and declaring law strengthened the authority of judge-
made law everywhere. In the latter part of the nineteenth century
a younger and less dogmatic school of historical jurists challenged
Savigny's uncompromising conservatism and gave more attention
to the processes whereby law may be adapted to changing social
needs. Savigny* s conservatism was based in large degree upon his
idea of law as the peculiar product of the national soul. This idea
still flourishes, being a salient doctrine of the ultra-nationalistic
creeds of recent times, specially exemplified in the legal ideas of

nationalism.

IV

The career of Sir Henry Maine was parallel in some ways to that
of Savigny. Maine was born on August 15, 1822, of a substantial
English family; received a good preparatory education; and was
entered In Pembroke College, Cambridge, In 1840. He was a bril-
liant classical scholar and won many honors and prizes at the uni-
versity. Upon graduation in 1844 he became a tutor In Trinity Hall,
another of the famous colleges of Cambridge. After three years he
was appointed regius professor of civil law and held this chair until
1854.

Maine was called to the bar In 1850, and in 1852 was asked by
the Inns of Court to serve as one of a staff of lecturers offering in-
struction to candidates for the bar. The lectures delivered in this
capacity provided the basis for Maine's book Ancient Law, which

1 e'The Growth of Historical Science" in The Cambridge Modern History, Vol. xii

(1910), p. 819.

HISTORICAL JURISTS 537

was published In 1861. This book established Maine as one of the
foremost legal scholars of the time, and is still his best known and
possibly his most influential treatise.

In 1862 Maine was asked to serve as a member of the Viceroy's

*

Council in India, but refused. The offer was renewed the following

year and this time was accepted. Maine remained in India until
1869 and profited much from the experience. His regular judicial
duties provided abundant material for his legal studies, and in ad-
dition he engaged in extensive research in the legal institutions of
India and accumulated a store of knowledge which enriched his
later writings. Upon his return from India Maine was knighted
and made a member of the council of the Secretary of State for

i*

India.

Maine was appointed to the chair of historical and comparative
jurisprudence in Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 1869, He con-
tinued in this position until 1877, when he was elected master of
Trinity Hall, Cambridge. In 1887 Maine was appointed Whewell
Professor of International Law at Cambridge, but held the position
only a year. He died in 1888.

Sir Henry Maine was a prolific writer. His best known works
are Ancient Law (1861), Village Communities in the East and the West
(1871), Early History of Institutions (1875), Early Law and Custom
(1883), Popular Government (1885), and International Law (1888). His
Popular Government caused more controversy than any of his other
writings, because it was regarded as an attack on democracy. Maine
was no idolater at the shrine of democracy, and the general thesis
of his Popular Government was that democracy is not intrinsically
more stable than other forms of government and that there is no
necessary connection between democracy and progress. He denied
the reality of natural rights, doubted the possibility of progressive
reform through legislation, and held that equality might be an
obstacle to progress. Although this book dashed cold water upon
the enthusiasms of democratic partisans, its lasting influence upon
political thought was less than Maine's more strictly legal works.

V

Maine's outstanding contribution to jurisprudence, according
to Sir Frederick Pollock, was not that he was the propounder of a
system, but that he was the pioneer of a method — the comparative

538 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

study of Institutions. This method was as important to political
science as to jurisprudence. Maine went as far as Savigny or any
one else In his respect for history as a key to social truth, and went
beyond all of his predecessors and contemporaries in using com-
parative studies of the legal institutions of different peoples and
periods for ihe same purpose. Political science not only drew from
Maine's juridical studies much valuable material, but also found
that the methods employed In those studies could be profitably
used in other lines of Inquiry. And there was added value in Maine's
work in that, although he followed Savigny and the German school
In many ways, his work was done after the emergence of the Dar-
winian concept of evolution and hence gave new emphasis to the
Idea of organic evolution in the social sphere.

Existing theories of law, said Maine, were largely guess-work.
Their originators had "carefully observed the institutions of their
own age and civilisation, and those of other ages and civilisations
with which they had some degree of Intellectual sympathy, but,
when they turned their attention to archaic states of society which
exhibited much superficial difference from their own, they uni-
formly ceased to observe and began guessing. The mistake which
they committed Is therefore analogous to the error of one who, in
investigating the laws of the material universe, should commence
by contemplating the existing physical world as a whole, instead of
beginning with the particles which are its simplest ingredients/

55 1

"The rudiments of the social state,55 he went on to say, "so far as they
are known to us at all, are known through testimony of three sorts —
accounts by contemporary observers of civilisations less advanced than
their own, the records which particular races have preserved concerning
their primitive history, and ancient law. The first kind of evidence is
the best we could have expected. As societies do not advance concur-
rently, but at different rates of progress, there have been epochs at which
men trained to habits of methodical observation have really been in a
position to watch and describe the infancy of mankind. Tacitus made
the most of such an opportunity; but the Germany, unlike most cele-
brated classical books, has not Induced others to follow the excellent
example set by Its author, and the amount of this sort of testimony which
we possess is exceedingly small. . . . Other histories . . . which, have
been handed down to us among the archives of the people to whose
Infancy they relate have been thought distorted by the pride of race or
by the religious sentiment of a newer age. It is important to observe

1 Ancient Law (5th ed., 1888), pp. 114-115.

HISTORICAL JURISTS 535

that these suspicions, whether groundless or rational, do not attach to z
great deal of archaic law. Much of the old law which has descended tc
us was preserved merely because it was old. Those who practised and
obeyed it did not pretend to understand it; and in some cases they even
ridiculed and despised it. They offered no account of it except that It
had come down to them from their ancestors. If we confine our atten-
tion, then, to those fragments of ancient Institutions which cannot rea-
sonably be supposed to have been tampered with, we are able to gain a
clear conception of certain great characteristics of the society to which
they originally belonged." l

Thus it is clear that for Maine the study of ancient law was not
an end but a means^. His purpose was to lay bare the origin and
development of civilizations, and ancient law was the best available
instrument to that end. In the evolution of civilizations nothing
was more vital, thought he3 than the way In which the state was
first constituted and the modes of its subsequent growth and change.
Maine therefore addressed himself to this question. "Men are first
seen," he stated, C£ distributed in perfectly insulated groups, held
together by obedience to the parent. Law Is the parent's word, but
it is not yret in the condition of those themistes [judicial commands]
which were analyzed In the first chapter of this work. When we go
forward to the state of society in which these early legal conceptions
show themselves as formed, we find that they still partake of the
mystery and spontaneity which must have seemed to characterise a
despotic father's commands, but that at the same time, inasmuch
as they proceed from a sovereign, they presume a union of family
groups In some wider organisation. The next question Is, what Is
the nature of this union and the degree of intimacy which It In-
volves. It is just here that archaic law renders us one of its greatest
services and fills up a gap which otherwise could only have been
bridged by conjecture. It is full. In all its provinces, of the clearest
indications that society in primitive times was not what It Is as-
sumed to be at present, a collection of individuals. In fact, and In the
view of the men who composed it, It was an aggregation of families.
The contrast may be most forcibly expressed by saying that the
unit of an ancient society was the Family, of a modern society the
Individual." 2

Here was a point of real importance for political thinkers. If
Maine's anthropology was correct, many of the basic assumptions

1 Ibid., pp. 116-117. 2 JW-, p- 121.

540 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

of the social contract and natural rights philosophers were false.
And Maine Increased ihe difficulty" of defending these stalwart
dogmas by arguing that ancient political societies, by the operation
of natural forces, took the form of aristocracies. The state, accord-
ing to his evidence, was not merely the family grown large, nor even
a group of families banded together in political association. All
ancient societies, he said, "regarded themselves as having pro-
ceeded from one original stock, and even laboured under an in-
capacity for comprehending any reason except this for their holding
together in political union. . . . And yei we find that along with
this belief, or, if we may use the word, this theory, each community
preserved records or traditions which distinctly 'showed that the
fundamental assumption was false . . . that the primary group,
the Family, was being constantly adulterated by the practice of
adoption. . . . The composition of the state, uniformly assumed
to be natural, was nevertheless known to be in great measure
artificial.55 l

This contradiction between fact and theory was to be explained,
Maine said, by the circumstances usually attending the expansion
of a small group of kinsmen into a large political society. To the
primitive mind, kinship was the only conceivable basis of the social
bond. Ii was impossible, however, for any group of actual blood
relations to multiply sufficiently to exercise dominion on a large
scale. In order to grow in power and possessions, in some instances
in order merely to survive, the kinship group was obliged to add to
its numbers by extra-familial recruiting. This could be accom-
plished without violence to the blood tie in but one way. The out-
siders would feign themselves to be descended from the same ances-
tral stock as the group receiving them, and the insiders would not
question this pretense. Thus by a convenient legal fiction the prin-
ciple of kinship was preserved and the solidarity of the enlarged
group insured. But the preference for kinship was so strong that
this process could not go on indefinitely. As soon as they felt strong
enough, these growing societies "ceased to recruit themselves by
factitious extensions of consanguinity. They necessarily, therefore,
became Aristocracies, in all cases where a fresh population from any
cause collected around them which could put in no claim to com-
munity of origin.5' 2

*3 pp. 124-126. * Ibid., p. 127.

HISTORICAL JURISTS 541

As soon as possible, in other words, the community reverted to a
strict application of the kinship principle and admitted no one to
political rights and privileges except on the basis of blood connec-
tion. From that point forward added populations were treated as
inferiors and denied equality of right and privilege. By reason of
the discrimination thus practiced against them, the inferior classes
came to have a feeling of unity among themselves, which was based
not upon bl"ood kinship but upon common association in a local
situation. This, said Maine, gradually brought forth a new concep-
tion of political society — the idea that the essential bond of com-
munity life was membership in the population of a territory having
a common government. Maine called this the principle of local
contiguity, and said that it had come to be so widely accepted in
modern times that it was mistakenly assumed to be the principle on
which all political societies were originally formed.

Maine admitted uncertainty as to the precise way in which the
transition from the familial to the territorial state had been accom-
plished, but thought that "The movement of the progressive socie-
ties has been uniform in one respect. Through all its course it has
been distinguished by the gradual dissolution of family dependency
and the growth of individual obligation in its place. . . . Nor is it
difficult to see what is the tie between man and man which replaces
by degrees those forms of reciprocity in rights and duties which have
their origin in Family. It is Contract. Starting, as from one ter-
minus of history, from a condition of society in which all the rela-
tions of persons are summed up in the relations of Family, we seem
to have steadily moved towards a phase of social order in which all
these relations arise from the free agreement of Individuals. . . .
The word Status may be usefully employed to construct a formula
expressing the law of progress thus indicated. . , . If we . . . em-
ploy Status, agreeably with the use of the best writers, to signify
these personal conditions only, and avoid applying the term to such
conditions as are the immediate or remote result of agreement, we
may say that the movement of the progressive societies has hitherto
been a movement from Status to Contract." I

Maine's anthropology has been antiquated by the researches of
modern students of political origins, and his particular theories of
the beginnings and development of the state are no longer fully
W., pp. 163-165.

542 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

accepted. But, for forcing political theory to face the challenge of
anthropological Inquiry and for endeavoring to formulate a prin-
ciple of political obligation consistent with, the supposed actualities
of Institutional history, Maine must be honored with an award for
distinguished service. Present-day theorists do not wholly agree that
the family played the dominant part in primitive society that Maine
assigned to it or that the state emerged from the kinship group by
fictional devices or otherwise. Maine's doctrine of progress from
status to contract is also questioned. Contemporary political science
finds the question of political beginnings and development much
more complex than Maine had supposed and the evidence of prog-
ress according to any single principle increasingly, unconvincing.
Maine's method remains, however, an enduring monument.

REFERENCES

Allen, C. K.5 Legal Duties and Other Essays (Oxford, 1931), pp. 139-155.

Barker, E., Political Thought in England from Herbert Spencer to the Present

(London, 1915), Chap. VI.

Grant Duff, M. E., Sir Henry Maine: A Brief Memoir (London, 1920).
Kelsen, H., General Theory of Law and State (Cambridge, Mass., 1945).
Maine, H. S., Ancient Law (Everyman's Library, London, 1917).
Poundj R.9 Interpretations of Legal History (New York, 1923).
Savigny, F. K. von, Of the Vocation of Our Age for Legislation and Jurisprudence

(Hayward trans., London, 1831).
Vinogradoff, P., Collected Papers (Oxford, 1928), Vol. ii, Essay VIII.

CHAPTER XXVI

APPEAL T* SCIENCE

I

HE eighteenth-century wrecking-crew of scientists, philoso-
phers, and revolutionists did a thorough job. When the dust
of the great demolition had cleared and men set their hands
to the task of reconstruction, it was discovered that the intellectual
foundations of authority had been badly shattered. Undisputed
grounds of authority no longer existed, nor was there any generally
credited theory or principle on which rightful authority could be
safely and surely posited. Thinking men in the nineteenth century
early perceived the need for a new orientation of authority and
earnesdy strove to supply the need. Of the many efforts in this di-
rection none was more characteristic of nineteenth-century ten-
dencies than the appeal to science.

(The political mind of the nineteenth century was \vell prepared
for the appeal to science. \The savants of the Aujklarung had made a
cult of science, and in mathematics, physics, and astronomy in par-
ticular there had been such amazing progress hi the eighteenth cen-
tury as to foster the belief that all human problems might be solved
by scientific methodology. fThe nineteenth century saw science
move on to new and more spectacular triumphs, and in the begin-
nings of modern biology, geology, paleontology, and anthropology
found abundant promise of sciences which might penetrate the
mysteries of organic life, indeed of social life., as successfully as the
older sciences had solved the riddles of mechanics. (Science was
therefore mustered into the service of social theory, and scores of
political thinkers turned to science for basic postulates on which
they might build A In this chapter we shall deal with four of these
disciples of science — Saint-Simon, Comte, Bagehot, and Spencer.

II

(Not to many men in the history of political thought has it been
given to be hailed as the forerunner of so many lines of vital doc-
trine as are credited to the fecund genius of Claude-Henri de Rouv-
roy, comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825).} Though lacking the depth

543

544 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

of scholarship to achieve his avowed ambition of doing for social
science what Descartes. Bacon, and Xewton had done for the physi-
cal sciences, Saint-Simon's brilliant originality has won him the
glory of foreshadowing some of the notable ideas of modern political
thought, including socialism, positivism, technocracy, and inter-
nationalism. He was unquestionably the first nineteenth-century
thinker to envision a fully rounded science of society^

The career of Saint-Simon reads like fiction. A scion of one of the
great families of France, boasting descent from Charlemagne,\he en-
tered the army at seventeen and served under de Grasse in the
Yorktown campaign of the American Revolution. Military service
then took him to Mexico, where he wron attention with a plan for
building a Nicaragnan ship canal. Returning to France with the
rank of colonel, but disgusted with the Intellectual sterility of army
life, he resigned his commission and set out to do two things: (1)
edGcateJiimself for intellectual leadership and (2) make a fortune

sufficiexrTtb give him power and independence. In both of these

undertakings he was eminently successful. He sought the company
of philosophersjud scientists, seriously endeavoring in every way to
equip himself with learning. Already liberal in his views, he soon
became a convinced radical. When the Revolution came he gladly
renounced his titles of nobility and took the name of Charles Henri
Bonhomme, but refused to take an active part in politics. With
canny attention to the main chance, however, he took advantage of
the opportunity to speculate in confiscated church lands and
emerged from the epoch of depreciated currency with a substantial
fortune.)

Sairlf-Simon was now ready to launch himself as a leader of
opinion. He married, established a salon, extended bounteous hos-
pitality to scientists and scholars, and began to write scientific and
political papers. Incompatibility between himself and his wife re-
sulted in a divorce by mutual consent in less than a year. Then,
seeking a spouse capable of the high intellectual role required of the
wife of a great savant, he offered his hand to the famous Madame
de Stael; but she declined the honor. Lavish expenditures and
crooked business associates in a short time reduced him to penury,
and he was forced to take employment as a clerk in order to make a
living. In his declining years he was thrown out of work and lived in
abject poverty, escaping starvation only because a few loyal friends

_ APPEAL TO SCIENCE 545

provided for his simple needs. In adversity as well as prosperity,
however, Saint-Simon kept up his courage andjabored manfullv to

— - — ' - "™ ""^"'1"»v__ "

fiilfillthe "mission he had conceive<rfor|Limself . In MsTSetiiiie Saint-

circle of d)^amic^discigles_ who enlargedl^oii~Efs"\\:ork and trans-

mitted his doctrines to posten1}7H§^^

writings were Letters of a Resident of Geneva (1802), The Reorganisation

of European Society (1814), The Industrial System (1821), and The Xew
Christianity (1825),.

In less than ten years after his death Saint-Simon had been
clothed with the mantle of a major prophet, and Saini-Simonism
had become a. fashionable creed. His doctrines had been dissem-
inated just at the right time to make a powerful appeal to a genera-
tion disillusioned by the successive atrocities of Rousseauism, Bona-
partism, and Legitimism. To a large portion of the youth of the
18305s and 18403s it seemed that Saint-Simon had found the right
answer to the age-old problem of government.

{Saint-Simon had in fact just one great ideal but he varied it in so
many ways and wove it into so many different patterns that it ap-
pealed to widely divergent minds and inferests and thus gave rise to
various species of Saint-Sirnonism. |The great idea was simply that
human society must needs be intelligently — scientifically — organ-
ized and directed/ Liberalism, which at that time meant laissez
jain, was dismissed as sterile and hopeless. It left everything to the
invisible hand of chance. Reactionism, opposed to all that was new
and crying for the restoration of the old religio-feudal system of so-
ciety, was put down as self-convicted of irrationality. And middle-
of-the-road gentry who wanted to reconcile the old and the new
were ridiculed as nice old women who could not understand what
had happened. [What the world really needed, said Saint-Simon*
was a "positive55 political science or, as he often phrased it, a "phys-
ico-politics." This remarkable science, according to the outlines
dimly sketched by Saint-Simon, would be a synthesis of history,
scientifically studied, and all of the natural sciences, and it might
well start with the law of gravitation as its central principle/ This
science would constitute the absolute, supreme authority over men,,
and political scientists, divining and handing down its laws like
priests of the Middle Ages, would organize and control the world.

Pursuit of this gorgeous vision and of ways to deliver it alive

546 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

in the world led Saint-Simon Into many provocative by-paths of
theory. One thine that must be insured, if science was to rule the

* *^-? •'

world, was universal peace. To that end Saint-Simon proposed a
plan for international political and economic federation with a
supra-national parliament to regulate world affairs. Not only did
this embodv one of the favorite dreams of internationalism: it was

* •/

probably also the source from which the internationalism of so-
called ^scientific35 socialism was derived, for Saint-Simon strongly
emphasized the correlation between world peace and efficient
industrial production.

Saint-Simon was less interested in the political than in the in-
dustrial organization of the state. The primary thing was to organ-
ize industry so that the working members of society would receive
what they produced and not be burdened with the support of
numberless parasites, among whom he mentioned the king and the
royal family, the nobility, the chief landowners, all cardinals and
bishops, all high government officials both civil and military, and
all lawyers. Let societyj>e organized so that scientists, technicians,
and business men were at the head of things, and let the political
state be confined to the maintenance and protection of this organi-
zation— such was the ^is^j3f_Saint-SirnQ^_p^Jitical ideology.
What fo£in_the political government should take he did not clearly
indicate; but he was skegtical of democracy and scouted the idea
of popular sovereignty. He seems to have had in mind some sort of
benevolent despotism administered by scientists.
v_ Though he is ticketed as a precursor of modern socialism^ it is
doubtful whether Saint-Simon should be called a socialist at all.
Some of his disciples took the socialist and others the capitalist
path. Saint-Simon argued that there could be no real progress
toward a scientifically organized society without changes in the in-
stitution of private property; but he never suggested the confiscation
of private property, never proposed universal collective ownership
and operation of all instrumentalities of production and distribu-
tion. He simply declared that property must be regarded as a
public utility, and that the law of property should be altered when-
ever it was socially desirable.

Though widely pervasive, the influence of Saint-Simon has been
curiously paradoxical. He spawned reactionaries and radicals with
almost equal profusion. In Germany he was a source of inspiration

APPEAL TO SCIENCE 547

and ideas to Bismarck and also to Karl Marx; in France he was the
mentor of the great conservative, Auguste Comte, and die famous
socialist, Louis Blanc; in England he exerted a considerable in-
fluence upon John Stuart Mill and also upon Robert Owen and the
English socialists. Stemming from Saint-Simonlsm were move-
ments as far apart as neo- Catholicism and anti-clericalism, state
socialism and scientific capitalism. These paradoxes are In reality
not so paradoxical as they seem. There is often a kinship between
opposites, and between the opposites which sprang from Saint-
Simon's theories there was the common element of belief in the
authority of science. For that reason Saint-Simon must be regarded
as one of the great formative influences of nineteen tfa-centmy po-
litical thought.

Ill

Auguste Comte (1798-1857) is known to fame as the creator of
Positive Philosophy and the father of modern sociology. Educated
in the schools of his native Montpellier and the Ecole Polytechnique
at Paris, Comte was first a private tutor, then from 1818 to 1824
was secretary to Saint-Simon., and from 1833 to 1852 was an ex-
aminer and lecturer and writer on scientific and philosophical

subiects. While there can be no doubt that Comte owed a great

"^ • - ,

deal to Saint-Simon, he was a creative. tMmker in his own right and

went far beyond the doctrines received from his teacher. The writ-
ings upon which his fame and influence Chiefly rest are Course of
Positive Philosophy (1830-1842), System of Positive Polity (1851-1854),
and Catechism of Positivism (1852).

It is impossible to divorce Comte's political thought from his
Positive Philosophy, for the former, in his mind, was the outgrowth
and necessary sequel of the latter. From Saint-Simon Comte de-
rived two seminal ideas; (1) that social phenomena are governed
by laws like other natural phenomena and may be classified and
studied in the same way; (2) that the paramount purpose of phi-
losophy should be the discovery of the laws of social phenomena
and the rational reconstruction of political, religious, and ethical
systems. These formed the take-off for his own philosophical flights.

Comte's Positive Philosophy is predicated upon the assumption
that human thought in every branch of knowledge passes through
three distinct stages, which he termed the theological, the meta-

548 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

physical and the positive. The first is the stage in which everything
is explained in terms of supernatural causation; the second is the
stage In which everything is explained in terms of some abstract
force independent of personal volition; the third is the stage In which
men are not primarily concerned with ultimate causes, but seek to
establish facts and to discover and follow the laws of general and
particular character which govern the realm of fact. The positive
sta^e, It is apparent, was none other than the scientific stage. The

O 3 JL JL •• o

great function of the Positive Philosophy, declared Comte, was to
speed the end of the first two stages and lead men to an appreciation
of the possibilities of the positive method. With prodigious learning
and labor Comte proceeded to re-Interpret, re-classify, and re-
coordinate all branches of knowledge as parts of a whole new system
to which his three stages furnished the key. Most important of all,
from the standpoint of the social scientist, he undertook to demon-
strate that the science of society — sociology, he called It — should be
regarded as the capstone of the system, the central trunk from which
all others depend. He was even so bold as to classify the sciences In
hierarchical order, as follows: mathematics (including mechanics),
astronomy, physics, chemistry7, biology, and sociology.

Sociology, as defined and explained by Comte, is the science
which interprets the facts of human history, apart from those of in-
dividual human bioiog^% in terms of general laws and seeks by
studying those laws to discover a scientific technique of regulating
human society. Latter-day sociologists would be little disposed to
quarrel with this definition. Comte's method was historical. He
proposed a careful examination of every known fact and situation
in history from the standpoint of all Its antecedents. On these data
he would raise a body of empirical generalizations as to the laws of
social phenomena. These tentative laws would be checked against
the laws of human nature as disclosed by biology. Sociological
generalizations found to be consistent with human biology would
be recognized as positive laws of society; those found inconsistent
with biological laws would be rejected, It being evident in then-
case that history had been misinterpreted.

Contemporary sociologists would not be satisfied with Comte's
method alone., but would nevertheless find much value in it. And
they would heartily approve, because they have derived it from
Comte, his emphatic reiteration of the necessity of treating social

APPEAL TO SCIENCE 549

phenomena as a whole. Comte maintained that there are basic
correlations between all groups of social phenomena, and that you
could not, for instance, comprehend political Institutions without
considering at the same time their connections with economics,
religion, family, manners, and the whole gamut of things social.
Comte thought that reason was the catalyzing and determining fac-
tor in the march of social evolution, and that the historv of intellec-

' *

tual development would provide the key to social evolution. From
this conclusion the present-day sociologist, grounded in Darwinian
biology and Freudian psychology, would undoubtedly dissent.

In the application of his theory to the politics of his own day,
Comte proved himself rather less scientific than he imagined. He
was a conservative whose slogan was "Order and Progress." 1 He
could not enlist under the banner of reactionaries like Maistre,
because their doctrines "regarded Order as stationary, a conception
which rendered it wholly inapplicable to modern politics." * As an
alternative that would appeal to reasoning men, he offered a science
of society in which order and progress would be coexistent and
scientifically correlated. "In Sociology,53 he said, "the correlation
assumes this form: Order is the condition of all Progress; Progress
is always the object of Order. Or, to penetrate the question still
more deeply, Progress may be regarded simply as the development
of Order; for the order of nature contains within itself the germ of
all possible progress.55 2 This view led him to the defense of the status
quo,, and explains his strong opposition to violent and sweeping
change regardless of its necessity or merit.

Despite his conservatism, however, Comte's influence has not
been entirely conservative hi its effects. As with Saint-Simon, there
was a great deal of the universal in Comte's thought, and it has
spread in ever-widening circles, illuminating regions not intended
by its author. Comtian positivism made an indelible impression on
nineteenth-century political thought, and was a driving force in the
rise of the scientific approach. Comte's evolutionism helped greatly
in preparing the way for the later systems by which it was replaced.
His methodology inspired historians to use history as a laboratory
for the discovery of social laws. His sociology not only sired a new
science, but endowed it with a method to which it still very largely

1 A. Comte, A General View of Positivism (Bridges trans., 1908), p. 115.
p. 116.

550 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

adheres. Xo brief summary can possibly do justice to the many-
sidedness of the Comtian system. If we accept the dictum of John
Smart Mill that it contemplates spiritual and temporal despotism,
we should remember also that in the opinion of Emile Faguet we
meet Comte at even- step in modern thought. If both of these
judgments are correct, Comte is truly one of the most significant
thinkers of modern times.

IV

The political science of Saint-Simon and Comte and the many
who followed in iheir steps was, as they termed it, a " positive"
science. It assumed that intellectual endeavor, properly directed,
could discover laws as positively dominant in the social sphere as the
law of gravitation in physics, and further that intellectual endeavor
could teach men how to use these lawrs to effect socially desirable
results. Inevitably, therefore, the exponents of positivism became
advocates of some form of managed society. Proletarians naturally
turned to socialism or communism, and conservatives just as natu-
rally tended toward an aristocratic or ecclesiastical autocracy.
Until the arrival of the Darwinian biology positivism had no strong
opposition in scientific circles. It was the only political philosophy
which could plausibly pretend to be scientific. But the Darwinian
doctrine of evolution through natural selection entirely changed the
outlook of many scientific thinkers, especially in England. If the
Darwinian hypothesis of struggle for existence, variation of species,
and survival of the fittest was true, science must look upon political
institutions in a different light. They must be viewed as the natural
product of evolutionary processes among which conscious intellec-
tual insight and control counted hardly at all.

Accordingly there sprang up, first in England but rapidly spread-
ing throughout the world, a definitely anti-intellectual school of
scientific political thought. Scouting the possibility of an intellec-
tually managed society, the members of this school appealed to
science for support in their view of political society as an organic
growth resulting from forces not amenable to deliberate direction
and control. The function of science, these thinkers maintained,

inen how to organize and administer a perfect social

but how to understand existing social systemsand accom-

modate 1iieniselvesTol:He^natural forces shaping the development of

APPEAL TO SCIENCE 55!

existing societies. The most charming and persuasive writer of this
group, and by no means the least influential, was Walter Bagehot
(1826-1877), a brilliant English banker, economist, publicist, and
editor.

Bagehot had a versatile and prolific mind, but was primarily a
journalist and essayist rather than an original scholar. Family and
business connections afforded him close inside contacts with the
political life of his time and thus gave him unusual opportunities for
direct observation. He was trained both in law andj&nance, but
preferred to devote himself largely to literary^vorkTfor which he had
a decided gift. Aligned with the conservative wing of the Liberal
Party, he was open-minded, tolerant, and practical In his approach
to public questions. As editor of the Economist from 1860 to his
death In 1 877, he exerted a great Influence upon English economic
thought and practice, and his book Lombard Street (1873) Is said to
have clarified the principles of bank reserves to such an extent that
the whole banking system of England was placed on a sounder basis.
Bagehot's most significant contributions to political thought are
found in his The English Constitution (1867) and Physics and Politics
(1869). -

Much of Bagehot' s Influence was due to the Irresistible style with
which he wrote, but he was an adequate student, thoroughly famil-
iar with the best scientific and classical thought of his day, and had
the stimulating faculty 'of presenting old subjects in a new light.
In The English Constitution Bagehot started a new fashion In constitu-
tional Interpretation. Instead of describing the English constitution
In arid legal terms, he portrayed it as a living thing in action, and
emphasized not the formal structure, but the actual practice of daily
political life. The sparkle and zest of Its style and the freshness of Its
material, which was largely derived from Bagehot3 s personal ob-
servation of things in and behind the scenes in public life, gave this
book a tremendous popularity, and of course produced a flattering
abundance of Imitators. More than any other book of the century,
perhaps, it led men to realize that the study of government should
be a study of life.

Bagehot's Physics and Politics was his most widely influential book.
It should have been called Biology and Politics^ or even better Psy-
chology and Politics, for It was an attempt to explain modern political
phenomena In terms of biological and psychological evolution.

552 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

"Our mixid/? said Bagehot at the outset, C£ia some strange way acts
on our nerves, and our nerves in some equally strange way store up
the consequences3 and somehow the result, as a rule and commonly
enough^ goes down to our descendants. . , ." m Taking this as an
admitted fact, and without troubling to establish the likeness of so-
ciety to a biological organism, Bagehot proceeded to set forth the
implications of Darwinian biology in the evolu tiom of the political
mind. Disregarding as immaterial the new findings, of ethnology
and anthropology as to prehistoric man, le began his survey with
man in the patriarchal, and, as he assumed, :first stage of civili-
zation.

It was at ihis stage, Bagehot tells us, that man began to be trans-
formed into a political animal. Just how this transformation came
about, he did not pretend to know; buth*e\vras "very sure as to why
early polities prevailed and survived. Natural selec ton attended to
that. Men organized under leaders to whiom triey owed obedience
had a better chance to win in the struggle for existence,, and did win.
Moreover, in the struggle between rival polities3 those which were
most firmly united and best disciplined worn out and perpetuated
themselves. This experience did something to the: minds of those
who passed through it. The primary requisite for survival was group
solidarity, and everything was subordinated, to that end. Within
the group those individuals who could bes t adjust themselves to the
necessities of unity would prevail, and others naturally would imi-
tate them. Over a span of time this would result iti a "cake of cus-
tom" extinguishing individual freedom, of thouglt and reducing all
minds to one general pattern.

This mainly psychological "cake of custom," declared Bagehot,
was the principal factor in the making of modem nations. CCI want
to bring home to others," he wrote, "what every new observation
of society brings more and more freshly to myself— that this uncon-
scious imitation and encouragement of appreciated character, and
this equally unconscious shrinking from amd persecution of dis-
liked character, is the main force which moulds and fashions men in
society as we now see it. Soon I shall try tostuw that the more ac-
knowledged causes, such as change of climate-, alteration of political
institutions, progress of science, act principally through this cause;
that they change the object of imitation and trie object of avoidance,

1 Pkysia and Politics (World's Greatest Literature, 19 00)* Vol. xll, p. 6.

APPEAL TO SCIENCE 553

and so work their effect. . . . Society Is not founded upon a Volun-
tary system3 but upon an Involuntary. A man In early ages Is born
to a certain obedience., and cannot extricate himself from an in-
herited government." 1

£:It may be said," he continues, C£that these two tendencies of the early
world — that to persecution and that to imitation — must conflict; that
the imitative impulse would lead men to copy what is new, and that
persecution by traditional habit would prevent their copying it. But In
practice the two tendencies co-operate. There is a strong tendency to
copy the most common thing, and that common thing Is the old habit.
Daily imitation is far oftenest a conservative forces for the most frequent
models are ancient. Of course, however, something new is necessary for
every man and for every nation. We may wish, if we please, that to-
morrow shall be like to-day, but it will not be like It. New forces will
impinge upon us; new wind, new rain, and the light of another sun; and
we must alter to meet them. But the persecuting habit and the imitative
combine to Insure that the new thing shall be In the old fashion ; it must
be an alteration, but it shall contain as little of variety as possible. The
Imitative Impulse tends to this, because men most easily imitate what
their minds are best prepared for, — what Is like the old, yet with the
inevitable minimum of alteration; what throws them least out of the
old path, and puzzles least their minds. The doctrine of development
means this, — that in unavoidable changes men like the new doctrine
which is most of a 'preservative addition' to their old doctrines. The
Imitative and the persecuting tendencies make ail change In early
nations a kind of selective conservatism, for the most part keeping what
is old, but annexing some new but like practice — an additional turret
in the old style." 2

Must it be concludedj then, that conscious scientific innovation
and deliberate forward progress are impossible? No, replies Bage-
hot; in advanced civilizations there is a possibility of breaking the
"cake of custom" through "government by discussion.53 This pre-
supposes advancement to a condition of sufficient national inde-
pendence, security, and prosperity to permit some deconcentration
of sovereign authority and some freedom of thought and expres-
sion. Then tolerance is possible and conscious intelligence may
enter into the situation. But even then change is difficult and stub-
bornly resisted, for "One of the greatest pains to human nature is
the pain of a new idea. It is, as common people say, so 'upsetting3;
it makes you think that, after all, your favorite notions may be
wrong, your firmest beliefs ill-founded; it is certain that till now

1 Ibid., pp. 61-62. s ##-» p-

554 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

there was no place allotted In your mind to the new and startling
inhabitant, and now that It has conquered an entrance, you do not
at once see which of your old ideas it will or will not turn out, with
which of them it can be reconciled, and with wrhich it is at essential
enmltv. Naturally, therefore, common men hate a new idea, and

fit-' '

are disposed more or less to ill-Treat the original man \vho brings it.
Even nations with long habits of discussion are intolerant enough.
In England, where there is on the whole probably a freer discussion
of a greater number of subjects than ever was before in the wrorld,
wre know how much power bigotry retains.35 l

Therefore Bagehoi was not hopeful of rapid progress even in
nations where government by discussion had been achieved. Free
states, he pointed out, are exposed to the gravest dangers. Enemies
without stand ready to take advantage of every weakness, and forces
within are poised to destroy them. ceAs soon as discussion begins
the savage propensities, too, have been weakened by ages of culture,
and repressed by ages of obedience, as soon as a vital topic for dis-
cussion is well started the keenest and most violent passions break
forth.55 2 Consequently progress by discussion must always be slow
and dubious. "Though a few gifted people may advance much,
the mass of each generation can improve but very little on the gen-
eration which preceded it; and even the slight improvement so
gained is liable to be destroyed by some mysterious atavism — some
strange recurrence to a primitive past." 3

National progress was in fact, said Bagehot, very largely acci-
dental. One nation, by some fortuitous circumstance, had stumbled
on to the right track and gone forward, while another, no less ca-
pable of advancement, had by chance missed the road of progress.
Nevertheless, there was definite hope of progress for all nations
through the development of an "animated moderation/3 combin-
ing primitive energy of mind with cultured balance and so season-
ing this with "all the finer graces of humanity53 as to produce a more
dispassionate judgment.

Bagehofs was obviously the political philosophy of a Victorian
gentleman of liberal but not too liberal inclinations, who felt that
after all things must be much as they are and cannot be radically
improved by legislative reforms. Not dogmatically Zaissez fairs and
conceding the necessity of government intervention and regulation

1 Ibid., pp. 100-101. 2 Ibid^ p. in.

APPEAL TO SCIENCE 555

in some instances, he was none the less persuaded that "animated
moderation" in the form of individual self-discipline was the only
sure key to social progress. Though he did not doubt the capacity
of the masses to be moved by intellectual appeals, he believed this
to be of rare occurrence and for the most part prevented by the
ponderousness and complexity of the tradition-ridden social aggre-
gate. His treatment of the psychological factors in political behavior
was the most penetrating of his time and may be said to have in-
augurated the modern psychological school of political thought.

All of Bagehot's political writings wrere fertile with suggestion,
and his critical comments on existing political institutions revealed
a mind of remarkable clarity. His comparative study of the parlia-
mentary and presidential types of government was a masterpiece
of political analysis, and so effectively brought that subject to the
attention of political thinkers as to give rise to a large output of liter-
ature thereon. His keen perception of the unforeseen consequences
of principle of separation of powers as embodied in the Constitution
of the United States was an LUuminating revelation to American
scholars, and contributed much to the rise of a critical school of
constitutional analysis on these shores. He pointed out more
sharply than any previous political thinker the genuine importance
and value of symbolism as a force in determining political behavior,
and in so doing made a telling argument against utilitarianism. On
the great central problem of political science — the problem of Man
vs. the State — Bagehot also performed a notable and useful service.
Without pretending to solve the problem., he showed that while
individual liberty is essential to progress., it may also defeat progress.
Somewrhere and at some times, he stated, a line must be drawn
between liberty and authority. But he doubted that a sharp and
permanent line could ever be drawn. In a continuously changing
society the best that could be done, he thought, wras to draw the line
in specific cases as the wisdom of "animated moderation35 should
determine,

V

The Aristotle of Victorian England and of Victorian America,
too, was Herbert Spencer (1820-1903). No philosopher cast a
longer shadow in his own day, and few have flung a more galling
challenge to posterity. Nobody reads Spencer now. Crane Brinton

556 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

tells us, because he was not a scientist but "a salesman of ideas, and
we no longer like his goods.55 l True it is that twentieth-century
political thinkers and twentieth-century statesmen on the whole
exhibit no marked fondness for Spencer's goods, but they are still
being peddled and, what is more, sold. Social Statics, The Man
Versus the State^ The Proper Sphere of Government, Political Institutions,
and The Principles of Sociology , to mention only the more prominent
of the obese progeny of Spencer's political thought, still have be-
lievers, if not readers, in Lombard Street and Wall Street, and even
in the most exalted posts of government both in England and the
United States. The reaction against twentieth-century authoritari-
anism has given a new impetus to Spencer's doctrine. The political
philosophy of Herbert Spencer Is unread to-day, but not dead, and
will not be dead until the last word shall have been said on the tre-
mendous question of freedom versus authority. And it was read
enough during the last half of the nineteenth century to indoctrinate
the zealots of individualism for generations to follow.

Spencer was a very different sort of Englishman from the type
represented by Bagehot, the fine flower of wealth, position, and
classical education. Spencer was the son of a poor schoolmaster
who was unable to give the boy a university education or any higher
education at all except what he could grub out for himself. At the
age of seventeen Spencer went to work as a railway engineer and
followed that calling for ten years. On the side, however, he ap-
plied himself to intensive study and began contributing articles to
various publications. By 1848 he had gained sufficient recognition
to be appointed a sub-editor of the Economist, which post he held
until 1853. The remainder of his career was almost wholly given
over to writing and lecturing. He was the author of dozens of books,
several of which went through many editions, and was a constant
contributor to magazines and reviews. Spencer's social background
and irregular education had not a little to do with his dissident
approach to philosophical problems. All his life he remained keenly
class-conscious and manifested a positive dislike for the upper
classes and all their works. He held aloof from academic circles
and heaped ridicule upon the classical education of the English
gentleman. For the conventional standards of art and literature he
had little esteem and many shafts of caustic criticism. Early aban-

1 English Politicd Thought in the Nineteenth Century (1933), p. 239.

APPEAL TO SCIENCE 557

doning the religious doctrines of the Methodists and Quakers which
he had received from his parents, he reacted even more vehemently

f

against the religion of the Established Church.

The great task to which Herbert Spencer set himself was an at-
tempted synthesis of all scientific knowledge. Whether such a thing
can ever be done is a question on which twentieth-century scientists
are reluctant, in proportion to the breadth and fullness of their
knowledge, to give an opinion. In Spencer's time, when science was
just on the threshold of some of its most revolutionary findings, a
valid synthesis of scientific knowledge was obviously Impossible.
But Spencer was fully confident of his ability to do the job and
plunged into metaphysics, ethics, theology, biology, psychology,
and sociology without a doubt that he would emerge with the su-
preme law of the universe In his grasp. That he failed scarcely needs
saying, but he was so unconscious of failure and so ponderously
impressive that he succeeded In convincing many besides himself
that he had actually chalked the boundary between the Knowable
and the Unknowable and correctly divined the basic laws of cos-
mology. Thus, although he gave the world a rather pathetic cari-
cature of the great summation of knowledge at which he aimed, he
exerted a profound influence upon the thought of his generation
and bequeathed to succeeding generations a larger understanding
of the essential interrelationship of formerly dissociated depart-
ments of knowledge.

Spencer was the chief philosopher of nineteenth-century evolu-
tionism. He said that he had always been an evolutionist; and It is
a fact that, at least six years before the publication of Darwin's
Origin of Species, Spencer had published books and essays In which
evolution was held up as the central law of nature. The conclusions
of biologists such as Darwin, Wallace, Huxley, and Lewes were a
welcome confirmation of his theories, and he turned eagerly to
biology to amplify and sustain his philosophy. Although he ac-
cepted the Darwinian biology generally, he differed on certain
vital points. Though accepting, and indeed originating, the doc-
trine of natural selection, he did not agree with Darwin that selec-
tion takes place through accidental variation, but held that varia-
tion and adaptation were manifestations of purpose. Nor did he
accept the dictum of Weissmann as to the non-Inherltability of
acquired characteristics. Spencer always maintained, though

558 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

without convincing evidence, that It was perfectly reasonable to
Infer that structural adaptations were transmissible by heredity.

Spencer's political thought was the outgrowth of his evolution-
ism and was largely built around the points on which he differed
from the Darwinian thesis. Because he believed in purposive
rather than accidental variation, he was stoutly of the opinion that
It was unscientific for the state to interfere with or endeavor to
mitigate in any way the struggle for existence. Because he be-
lieved in the inheritance of acquired characters., he held that the
transmission of qualities acquired through natural selection would
produce a better society than the transmission of those result-
Ing from artificial modification. Spencer looked upon society
as an organism closely analogous to a biological organism and
subject to the same laws of evolution, and was more influential
than any other nineteenth-century writer in impressing this
organismic concept upon the political thought of his own and later
times.

The political writings of Spencer are too numerous and volumi-
nous for brief review, but we shall not miss much of importance if we
confine our attention to his Social Statics (1850) and The Man Versus
the State (1884). These contain the essence of all that was said in his
more pretentious political works. Social Statics embodies the political
Implications of Spencer's concept of evolution as a process resulting
from the perpetual antithesis of the two great forces of nature,
namely, the dynamic tendency toward change and the static tend-
ency toward equilibrium. "All evil,33 Spencer postulates at the
beginning of the book, "results from the non-adaptation of consti-
tution to conditions. ... Equally true is it that evil perpetually
tends to disappear. In virtue of an essential principle of life, this
non-adaptation of an organism to its conditions is ever being recti-
fied; and modification of one or both, continues until the adaptation
is complete. Whatever possesses vitality, from the elementary cell
up to man himself, Inclusive, obeys this law.53 l Hence it must
follow, according to Spencer's reasoning, that the perfect society
will appear only when man is fully adjusted to his environment;
In other words, when an equilibrium is reached between the
Individual organism and the social organism.

Though not positive that this state of static balance and per-

1 Social Statics (abridged ed.a 1897), p. 28.

APPEAL TO SCIENCE 559

fectlon could ever be entirely achieved. Spencer had no doubt
that it might and would be approached, if evolution were allowed
to take its natural course. The first principle to be recognized was
that genuine adjustment between the individual and his surround-
ings could occur only when there was such liberty of action as to
enable men to learn by experience what courses were best to pur-
sue. "For although it may be impossible ... for the intellect
to estimate the respective amounts of pain and pleasure consequent
on each alternative, yet will experience enable the constitution itself
to do this; and will further cause it instinctively to shun that
course which produces on the whole the most suffering, or, in
other words — most sins against the necessities of existence, and to
choose that which least sins against them.35 l Accruing experience
transmitted from generation to generation would, said Spencer,
inevitably and necessarily mould human faculties into complete
fitness for social life. When that final stage was reached, he
glowingly prophesied, government would disappear. It would
be unnecessary and superfluous, as there would be perfect
equilibrium and no antagonism between the individual and
society.

The chief duty of the state, then, according to Spencer, was to
place as few obstacles as possible in the way of evolution. Science
and laissezjaire were one and the same. "It is clear that any being
whose constitution is to be moulded into fitness for new conditions
of existence, must be placed under those conditions. This granted,
it follows that as man has been, and is still, deficient in those feel-
ings which prevent the recurring antagonisms of individuals and
their consequent disunion, some artificial agency is required by
which their union may be maintained. Only by the process of
adaptation itself, can be produced that character which makes
social equilibrium spontaneous. And hence, while this process is
going on, an instrumentality must be employed, firstly, to bind
men into the social state, and secondly to check all conduct
endangering the existence of that state. Such an instrumentality
we have in government." 2 Beyond these two functions, how-
ever, the state should not go. "For, if regarded as a protector, we
find that the moment it does anything more than protect, it be-
comes an aggressor instead of a protector; and, if regarded as a

1 Ibid., p. 43. *I&id., pp. 126-127.

560 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

help to adaptation, we find that when it does anything more than sus-
tain the social state, it retards adaptation instead of hastening it." 1

Spencer not only invested the doctrine of laissez faire with the
sanction of science but also with the sanction of religion. With all
his aversion to orthodoxy, he was not irreligious. That a purposive
and intelligent, though inscrutable. Power was shaping the course
of the universe he would not deny. The method by which that
Power worked to its appointed ends w^as evolution, and for evolu-
tion, therefore, Spencer conceived a truly religious reverence. Evo-
lution could do no wrong. It might appear cold and cruel; but,
wrhen everything wras taken into account, was not nature's way of
weeding out the unfit the most kindly way of all? . Could not men
believe in God and all the Christian virtues and yet see that no
other way but letting nature take its course could accomplish the
Divine purpose with less pain and suffering to the human race?
They could, and did — vast multitudes of them, particularly those
in fortunate circumstances which relieved them of the fear of being
weeded out. The underprivileged were not so sure of the ethical
strength of Spencer's position.

Being what he was, a Victorian Englishman of Methodist and
Quaker antecedents, Spencer could not reject altruism altogether
and insist that the struggle for existence be permitted to proceed
without alleviation. There was a place in his philosophy for human-
itarianism, but that place was not in the relations between the in-
dividual and the state. The place for altruism was in the family and
in the voluntary charities of large-hearted people. In these rela-
tions, he argued, altruism was in harmony with nature's law and
conducive to natural adaptation. Instead of checking, it aided
natural selection; for altruism in these forms meant self-discipline
and self-adjustment on the part of all persons concerned. Here
again Spencer's doctrine brought loud amens from the well-to-do
and pious members of society.

Fortified with the individualistic philosophy just outlined.
Spencer came out dogmatically against almost every form of state
interference with private enterprise. He would have no state
church, no state education, no poor relief, no sanitary supervision,
no factory legislation, no state-controlled monetary system, no
state-managed postal system — nothing that might conceivably im-

APPEAL TO SCIENCE 561

pede natural selection. But he was human after all. In one respect
laissezjaire annoyed him terribly. The frequent blowing of locomo-
tive whistles at all hours of the night interfered with his sleep, and
he vehemently demanded a law against it.

The Man Versus the State added nothing philosophically to Social
Statics, but dealt more directly with contemporary political issues.
Under the chapter title "The New Toryism' ' Spencer chided the
Liberal Party for abandoning its original laissezjaire attitude and
becoming more "coercive" than the Tories. Under the title "The
Coming Slavery" he deplored "every extension of the regulative
policy/' which, he said "involves an addition to the regulative
agents — a further growth of officialism and an increasing power of
the organization formed of officials." 1 The final result of this, he
had no doubt, "would be a revival of despotism.35 2 Under the title
of "The Sins of Legislators53 he wrote feelingly on "the mischiefs
wrought by uninstructed lawmaking" and concluded that "They
have their root in the error that society is a manufacture; whereas
it is a growth ... a structure which is in a sense organic.55 s Under
the title of "The Great Political Superstition53 he opened with this
arresting aphorism: "The great political superstition of the past
was the divine right of kings. The great political superstition of the
present is the divine right of parliaments." 4 This was followed by a
trenchant dissertation on the fallacy of the idea of popular sover-
eignty when viewed from the standpoint of science. "When that
'divinity5 which cdoth hedge a king,3 and which has left a glamour
around the body inheriting his power, has quite died away," he
wrote in closing: "when it begins to be seen clearly that, in a popu-
larly governed nation, the government is simply a committee of
management; it will also be seen that this committee of manage-
ment has no intrinsic authority. The inevitable conclusion will be
that its authority is given by those appointing it; and has just such
bounds as they choose to impose. Along with this will go the further
conclusion that the laws it passes are not in themselves sacred; but
that whatever sacredness they have, is entirely due to the ethical
sanction — an ethical sanction which, as we find, is derivable from
the laws of human life as carried on under social conditions.
And there will come the corollary that when they have not

1 The Man Versus the State (rev. ed., 1897), p. 315.

2 Ibid., p. 331. * IbM.> P- 371. 4 ##•» P- 377-

562 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

this ethical sanction they have no sacredness, and may be rightly
challenged.53 1

Xo reputable political thinker of the present time acknowledges
Spencer as his master. For the critical mind of to-day he is an ama-
teur scientist and a pseudo-philosopher. Science has learned a lot
about evolution since Spencer's day, and very little of what has been
learned tends to confirm the over-confident dogmas with which he
assumed to settle the great problems of human society. In fact we
know enough now to begin to realize how little we really do know,
and hence to be suspicious of all dogmas. One thing, however, we
do know with absolute certainty, and that is that Spencer's idea of
evolution as a process of adaptation progressively tending in the
direction of an ultimate condition of complete adjustment is con-
trary to all the facts we have. Science now teaches that evolution
is a process wherein each adaptation creates conditions calling for
new adaptations, and so ad infinitum^ to ends that no man can hope
to know — which completely explodes Spencer's synthetic theory
and demolishes his political postulates.

But we should not allow the magnitude of Spencer's failure to
obscure the real importance of his influence. He raised the organ-
ismic theory of the state to its highest stature; and, although he
failed to prove the analogy between human society and organic life
and, in his opposition to political amelioration, belied his own hy-
pothesis, he performed a valuable service in forcing home the truth
that society is a thing of slow and complex growth in many ways
not unlike an organism. Equally useful was his service in pointing
out with powerful and repeated emphasis the folly of much that
was called reform, and in making clear that its folly was mainly due
to ignorance or disregard of deep-rooted social habits. No man
ever pilloried more mercilessly the absurdity of trying to change
human character by legislative fiat. In the field of practical politics,
too, the influence of Spencer has been far more extensive than the
intrinsic strength of his doctrines would appear to warrant. He
supplied a scientific rationale for the dogma of laissezjaire, which,
though notably deficient in scientific foundation and proved so even
by the science of his own day, came at a time when the aggressive
plutocracy of the Gilded Age was eagerly seeking an up-to-date
philosophy of unrestrained individualism. Spencer's anti-intellec-

llbid.9 pp. 410-411.

APPEAL TO SCIENCE 563

tual evolutionism, with laissezfaire as its central principle, provided
the perfect antidote for the scientific authoritarianism of Comtian
positivism. Believers in free enterprise almost 10 a man flocked to
the standard of Spencer and have transmitted his cult to succeeding
generations.

VI

From the nineteenth-century appeal to science there emerged
two definite streams of political thought, typified by the four think-
ers whose ideas we have just reviewed. On the one hand appeared
a strong current of ideology which clung tenaciously to the eight-
eenth-century notion that the mastery of science could enable man
consciously to control his environment and determine his own
destiny, and sought in the new discoveries of science additional
support for this thesis. On the other hand appeared a swift and
rapidly mounting river of scientific thought which drew the con-
clusion that man must wait upon nature and learn to adapt himself
to nature's slow-working laws. Both of these systems of thought
gained myriads of adherents,, and both as we shall see, have power-
fully influenced the courses of political thought in the twentieth
century.

REFERENCES

Barker, E., Political Thought in England from Herbert Spencer to the Present Day
(London, 1915), Chap. IV.

Brinton, C., English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century (London,
1933), pp. 180-198, 226-239.

Caird, E., The Social Philosophy and Religion of Comie (Glasgow, 1885).

Dunning, W. A., History of Political Thought from Rousseau to Spencer (New
York, 1920), Chap. IX.

Hofstadter, R.5 Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1865-1915 (Phila-
delphia, 1944).

Mayer, J. P., Political Thought in France from Si eyes to Sorel (London, 1943).

McGovern, W. M., From Luther to Hitler (Boston, 1941), Chap. X.

Mill, J. S., Augusts Comte and Positivism (3rd ed., London, 1882).

Murray, R. H., Studies in the English Social and Political Thinkers of the
Nineteenth Century (2 vols., London. 1929).

Ritchie, D. G., The Principles of State Interference (London, 1891 ), Chaps. I-IL

Soltau, R., French Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven,
1933), pp. 203-215,

Spahr, M., Readings in Recent Political Philosophy (New York, 1935), Chap. VI.

Watson, J., Camte, Mill, and Spencer (New York, 1895).

CHAPTER XXVII

THE CHALLENGE OF PROLETARIANISM

I

COLLECTIVISTIG ideas are among the oldest in the history
of political thought, far antedating any articulate philosophy
of individualism. Thecollective idea, in one form or another,
had been uppermost in the political thinking of mankind in every
period prior to the eighteenth century. Pre-Hellenic political
thought never even glimpsed the idea of inalienable individual
liberty. The Greeks, although they did bring forth magnificent
ideals of liberty and democracy, were never quite able to divorce the
individual from the community. In Greek thought the state and the
individual could have no separate reality, because both were viewed
as aspects of an indivisible process of nature. Roman political
thought so exalted the ideas of law, order, and unity that little room
was left in the Roman mind for the concept of individual liberty.
During the Middle Ages, despite the spirit of individualism preva-
lent among the Teutonic peoples, individualism as a political doc-
trine made but little headway. The feudal system stood against it,
also the ecclesiastical system. The Protestant movement, which
wrecked so much of the hierarchical social system that descended
from the Middle Ages, was fiercely individualistic in both religious
and political ideas, but was accompanied by the rise of powerful
and highly centralized national monarchies which ruthlessly
checked the trend toward individualism.

It was the great glory of eighteenth-century radicalism that it
broke through this massive crust of collectivism and made a place in
the world for individual liberty of thought and action. From 1750
to 1850, though it took a succession of violent revolutions to do the
job, the doctrine of laissezfaire was progressively triumphant. The
only challenge came from reactionaries who had a passion for sta-
bility and order but nothing to offer in the way of social ameliora-
tion. Laissezjaire became, therefore, the flaming cross of all the
hosts of liberalism and reform. To liberal-minded men a return to
the old system of unrestrained authority would have seemed as great
a calamity as the abandonment of all scientific progress in order to

564

CHALLENGE OF PROLETARI ANI SM 565

restore the stability of the pre-mechanicai system of industry. Lib-
erty and progress, according to their dictum, went hand in hand.
and vou could not have the latter without the former,

it

But the nineteenth century had much in store that neither lib-

f

erals nor conservatives could foresee. It was to be the century of the
great Industrial Revolution; and, before this prodigious transmuta-
tion of the economic system had gone very far, it was distressingly
clear that individual liberty had as much capacity for the promo-
tion of evil as of good. Abuses of liberty on the part of economic
overlords had become as ruinous to the welfare of the subjected
masses as abuses of authority on the part of political overlords had
been in former, times. Moreover, economic overlords displayed an
odious ability to gain control of political authority and use it to
fortify their liberty of ruthless exploitation. To remedy these con-
ditions liberals had nothing to offer except tinkering reforms which
sometimes palliated but rarely cured the evils at which they were
aimed.

Naturally, therefore, as the capitalistic system bourgeoned and
grew reckless of human welfare, the conviction came to many minds
that liberty1- was a fine thing for those in circumstances to enjoy and
use it, but a sorry boon to those less fortunately placed in the eco-
nomic system. By this entering wedge of class-consciousness the
seed-bed of proletarian political thought was prepared .\The level-
ing of social classes, which eighteenth-century7 liberals expected to
be the result of liberty and democracy, had not come off. Instead
there had arisen a new upper class and a newr tyranny. The sub-
merged masses were just as submerged and just as numerous as be-
fore, and were held in bondage by sacred individual rights which,
ironically, belonged to them in common with all humanity, but
only their masters could exercise and enjoy. Small wonder, then,
that multitudes of men began to think contemptuously of the sacred
right of contract, the sacred right of property, and other hallowed
concepts of eighteenth-century individualism, and began to demand
that the power and authority of the state be used to limit the free
exercise of these rights. Small wonder that political thinkers began
to conceive philosophies shaped to the circumstances of the prole-
tarian struggle for economic justice. /

There was much proletarian sentiment but not much true prole-j
tarian philosophy prior to the middle of the nineteenth century.

566 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

Utopian socialism passionately voiced the liberal revolt against
laissezfaire, but relied on voluntary cooperation, rather than politi-
cal action, to correct the inequities of the economic system. Numer-
ous writers in addition to the Utopians criticized the capitalism and
advocated various paternalistic and even socialistic reforms, but the
bases of their doctrines were mainly ethical and idealistic, not de-
signing to pull the existing system up by the roots and replace it
with a radically different social structure. Not until Karl Marx did;

V

proletarlanlsm find a thinker capable of blending the diverse ingre-
dients of socialistic ideology into a militant system that had to be

reckoned with.

II

It is hard to deal temperately with a man whom millions revere as
a god and other millions despise as a devil. To speak dispassionately
of Karl Marx is to invite denunciation as a black reactionary by all
who worship at the Marxian shrine and denunciation as a Red or
Red-sympathizer by all who fear and hate the Marxian cult. If
Marx could be ignored, there would be no need to run this gauntlet
of violent antipathies; but there is no ignoring a man whose thought
has divided the world into two hostile camps. The only honest way
to deal with such a thinker is to throw emotion out of the window
and try to understand him.

Karl Marx was born of Jewish parents at Treves, Germany, on
May 5, 1818. His father was a moderately well-to-do lawyer, but
was descended from a long line of rabbis, as also was his wife. When
Karl was six years of age the Marx family repudiated Judaism and
became Christians. It may have been a nominal conversion so far as
the parents were concerned; but for Karl Marx it became ulti-
mately a deep intellectual and emotional rebirth. He not only
ceased to be a Jew; he became bitterly anti-Semitic and charged
Judaism with many of the iniquities cited against it by the Jew-
baiting Nazis of the Third Reich. Indeed, one of the sore trials of
Marx's life was the fact that the cast of his countenance was so char-
acteristically Hebraic that he could never be mistaken for anything
but a Jew.

Showing intellectual ability at an early age, Marx was sent to the
University of Bonn in 1835 and transferred to the University of Ber-
lin in 1836. He proved to be an excellent student, but could not

CHALLENGE OF PROLETARIAXISM 567

focus his Interest on anything in particular. Part of the trouble was
that he had fallen desperately in love with Jenny von Westphalen,
the daughter of a noble family in Treves, who had many suitors and
whose parents, as well as his own, were opposed to the match. Marx
defied them all, staged a whirlwind courtship., won the love of the
girl, and argued their parents into consenting to the betrothal before
he went off to the University of Berlin in 1836. At Berlin, follow-
ing his father's wishes, he took up the study of jurisprudence, but
soon forsook this for history and philosophy. This change of course
brought him under the influence of Hegel's teachings. Hegel had
been dead only five years, and his philosophy still dominated the
seminars of Berlin. Radicalism was much in the air at the univer-
sity, and Marx became a radical, though as yet he knew nothing of
socialism and had no interest in it.

In 1838, while Marx was still at the University of Berlin., his
father died, leaving his modest estate almost entirely to his wife.
Young Marx was anxious to get married and decided that he must
find a way to make a living. University teaching attracted him, and
he determined to secure a doctor's degree and seek a university ap-
pointment. For his graduate work he went to the University of
Jena, where in 1841 he was awarded the degree of Ph.D. in phi-
losophy, the subject of his dissertation being "The Difference be-V
tween the Democritean and Epicurean Natural Philosophy."

Marx had friends in the ministry of education who promised to
aid him in securing a university position, but a sudden change in the
ministry terminated the influence of his backers and ruined his
chances for a job. How much sometimes may hinge upon a balked •
career ! Had young Karl Marx succeeded in getting the job he
wanted, it is quite probable that The Communist Manifesto and Das
Kapital would never have been written. Marx would have been a
brilliant university professor and doubtless would have written pro-
found treatises of some sort, for he had the necessary learning and
mental ability; but in a comfortable academic chair it is unlikely
that he would ever have turned to proletarian economics.

Returning to Berlin in search of work, Marx secured temporary
employment on a publication called The German Tearbook. This
was his introduction to journalism. A little later he went on the
staff of The Rhenish Times at Cologne as a contributing editor. In
a short time he was advanced to the post of editor-in-chief. The

568 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

Rhenish Times was a liberal newspaper, favorable to reform but
not revolution. As Its editor Marx quickly discovered that his
training in law, history, and philosophy had not equipped him
to deal with economic questions. He was greatly humiliated when
the editor of rival paper attacked an article In which he had spoken
with some dogmatism on the subject of socialism and proved
that Marx knew practically nothing about that subject. Having
been offered the joint editorship of the Franco-German Yearbook at
Paris, then the center of socialist thought, Marx decided to accept.
It looked like a step upward in the journalistic profession and
would give him an opportunity to make a thorough study of
socialism. Sanguine of the future, he married Jenny von West-
phalen in 1843 and took her with him to Paris. After a few issues
the Franco-German Yearbook failed, and Marx was out of a job and
face to face with poverty.

At Paris, in September, 1844, Marx met Friederich Engels, a
young German radical whose father wras a wealthy textile manu-
facturer with mills both in Germany and England. Engels was
employed by his father In connection with the English mills, but
socialism was his supreme interest in life and to that cause he was
devoting all his spare time, energy, and money. Between Marx
and Engels there sprang up a friendship which culminated In one
of the most remarkable intellectual and spiritual partnerships in

, history. Marx was the. theorist of the team and Engels the propa-

, '. » -f~w«-,i, I

K lgandist and organizer. Marx now began to swing rapidly to the
left. In 1845 he wrote an offensive article which was published In
Germany. The Prussian government at once protested to the
French government and had Marx and several other radicals
expelled from Paris. He went to Brussels where he joined the
Communist League and in conjunction with Engels wrote and
published in 1847-1848 the famous Communist Manifesto.

When the Revolution of 1848 fell upon France, Marx rushed
back to Paris hoping to take part in the struggle and, if possible,
take the lead in getting his doctrines put into operation. He arrived
too late, however; for the tide of reaction was already beginning
to set in. Finding the political climate of France uncongenial, he
decided to take a chance on Germany where rumblings of revolu-
tion were distinctly audible. With a few associates he went to
Cologne and established a virulently revolutionary paper called

CHALLENGE OF PROLETARI AXISM 569

xy

The Xew Rhenish Times. This lasted six months. When the revolu-
tion collapsed in Germany, the paper was suppressed; and Marx
was prosecuted on the charge of treason. He pleaded his own case
before the jury and was acquitted, but was obliged to leave the
country. He went back to Paris, but was not allowed to remain.
Then he went to England, where Engels, employed in his father's
factory, could help him. Marx settled in London and lived there
until his death in 1883.

Marx's years in England were devoted mainly to the writing of
socialist books and pamphlets and the promotion of the Interna-
tional Workingmen's Association. He tried to support himself by
journalistic work, but seldom earned enough to meet expenses.
Engels came to his aid repeatedly, as he had often done before
Marx took up his residence in England. In fact, if it had not been
for the financial support of Engels, the Marx family would have
been on the verge of starvation much of the time. Marx was essen-
tially a scholar and thinker, and had no gift for money-making at
all. His London days were mainly devoted to researches carried on
in the British Museum and other libraries and to writing the
voluminous treatises which now stand as the hallowed scriptures
of proletarian socialism. The best known of the many published
writings of Marx are: The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), The Com-
munist Manifesto (with Engels) (1848), The Critique of Political
Economy (1859), Inaugural Address of the International Workingmen" s
Association (1864), Value, Price, and Profit (1865), Capital (Das Kapital)
(1867), and The Civil War in Frame (1870-1871).

Ill

It is doubtless true, as often asserted, that every stone of the
Marxian edifice was prefigured in the works of political and eco-
nomic thinkers antedating Marx, but that does not stamp Marx as a
secondhand philosopher or lessen the significance of what he did.
The important thing about,the work of Marx was not its originality,
but its synthetic power. !;He seized upon philosophic materials
which had been lying about loose and largely unused for many
years and fused them into a systematic whole that supplied the
proletarian movement with a dynamic theory and a tremendous
impulse to action. Proletarianism before Marx was mainly protest
and aspiration; proletarianism after Marx confidently put forth

570 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

the claim that science was on its side, knew what objectives it
wished to attain, had a definite technique of organization and
attack, and thus became militantly aggressive. It was the avowed
purpose of Marx to make socialism scientific. It has been said that
he succeeded only to the extent of making it pseudo-scientific,
but there is no denying that he made it a tremendous force.

Marx was primarily an economic theorist and was very little
concerned with political ideology as such. But he was not unaware
of the profound political implications of his economic creed and
touched upon political matters which seemed to have a bearing
upon his economic doctrines. In consequence of this the orthodox
followers of Marx have evolved a pretty definite political philoso-
phy, which doubtless reflects the views of their master quite faith-
fully and rightly classifies him as a revolutionary socialist.
/ The great supporting beams of the Marxian economic synthesis
were: (1) the doctrine of surplus value, (2) the doctrine of capitalist
concentration, (3) the doctrine of class conflict, (4) the doctrine of
the increasing proletarian impoverishment, (5) the doctrine of
recurrent economic crises, and (6) the doctrine of economic deter-
minism. <K

The essence of the theory of surplus value was that the true worth
. of every commodity is determined by the amount of socially useful
labor put into it; in other words, that labor creates all value. The
capitalist, since the Industrial Revolution the owner of the means of
production, returns to the worker only so much of the value created
by the worker as competitive conditions necessitate. The surplus
he appropriates to himself and this constitutes his profit — a toll
wrung from the grinding toil of the masses. Competition impels
the capitalist to beat down the worker's wage to the lowest possible
point. This can be more readily and fully accomplished in large-
scale units of industrial organization. Hence, because of the larger
profits in large-scale industry, there is a progressive tendency
toward consolidation, which results in the concentrator! of capital
in the hands of a very small class — the bourgeoisie.'^The poor grow
poorer and the rich richer until finally the workers are impelled
to organize and battle for their rights^ f

Then comes class war — proletariat against bourgeoisie. The
struggle may be short or long, but in the end the capitalist system
cuts its own throat. In the mad race far profits the industrial

"Hi,

CHALLENGE OF PROLETARIANISM 571

system goes on expanding, seeking additional markets, Increasing
production, and cutting wages as far as possible. Sooner or later
comes the time when there are no more markets, when supply
far exceeds demand, and when the purchasing power of the workers
is too low to help sustain the market. A crisis arrives, followed
perhaps by the crash of the whole ^capitalist system, or, if not that,
by measures bf adjustment and recovery which are bound to have
the effect of precipitating more serious and devastating crises In the
future. When the final collapse comes, as it is sure to do, the pro-
letariat will take over the industrial system and build a classless
society in which capitalism and profits will be no more.

This outcome, Marx argued, was the Inevitable culmination of
economic evolution. The character and development of human
society through all ages had been determined by economic forces.
The ruling class at every stage was the one which controlled the
production system. Subject classes striving to wrest this power
from the hands of ruling classes had set In motion and kept going
the perennial struggle of slaves against masters, plebeians against
patricians, serfs against feudal barons, journeymen against master
craftsmen, bourgeoisie against landed gentry, and finally pro-
letariat against bourgeoisie. When the proletariat had succeeded,
as economic law decreed it must, in overthrowing the bourgeoisie,
the economic struggle would end, for the means of production
would then be in the control of the producers themselves, the profit
system would be abolished, and no group would have power to
oppress another.

Now let us turn to the political Ideas which went along with the
Marxian economic philosophy. Government, Marx asserted, was/
an obstructive rather than a creative force In social evolution. It
was the means whereby the ruling class imposed Its will upon the
subject classes and strove to maintain Its privileged position in
economic matter§Q Getting control of the state and utilizing the
legal authority and patriotic sentiments associated with the state,
the ruling class in every stage of social development has been able r
to make its will into a law for all — "a will," said The Communist
Manifesto, "whose essential character and direction are determined
by the economic conditions of existence of your [ruling] class."
In that way the bourgeoisie had risen to supremacy in the modern
world. N\" Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie,35 again

572 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

quoting The Communist Manifesto, "was accompanied by a corre-
sponding political advance of that class. An oppressed class under
the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing associa-
tion in the mediaeval commune, here independent urban republic
(as in Italy and Germany), there taxable 'third estate3 of the
monarchy (as in France), afterwards, in the period of manufacture
proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute"' monarchy as
a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, corner stone of the
great monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has at last, since the
establishment of Modern Industry and of the world-market, con-
quered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive
political sway.V The executive of the modern State is but a com-

*

roittee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie." 1
Once it succeeded in gaining control of the state, Marx con-
tended, the ruling class made use of its legal authority to resist all
major change. Changes could be brought about only by revolu-
tion or by political pressures of sufficient strength to force the ruling
class to yield ground. Thus it occurred that political development
always lagged far behind economic development, and was generally
confined to narrow limits. The ruling class would yield only in
cases where the change in question was not incompatible with
its continued dominance as a ruling class. Radical and funda-
mental changes, therefore, must wait upon revolution. Revolution
was certain to come, however, because the forces of discontent

j

would eventually accumulate and break through all obstacles^

Revolution would come. Marx had no doubt of that. But how
would it come? And what would follow? For those questions, too,
he had confident answers. The proletariat must, organize for polit-
ical action and make revolution. "All the preceding classes that
got the upper hand," declared The Communist Manifesto., "sought to
fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large
to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot be-
come masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolish-
ing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also
every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing
of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy
all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property.

1The, Communist Manifesto in A Handbook of Marxism (E. Burns, ecL, 1935),
pp, 25-59

CHALLENGE OF PROLETARI AXISM 573

. . . All previous historical movements were movements

minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian move-
ment is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense
majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society,
cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superin-
cumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air." There-
fore "the first step in the revolution by the working class, is to
raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle
of democracy. The proletariat will use its political supremacy, to
wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all
instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the pro-
letariat organized as a ruling class; and to increase the total of pro-
ductive forces as rapidly as possible.53 1

The dictatorship of the proletariat would be the first step, Marx
said; but only the first^ It would be necessary for the proletariat to
seize the state to use it as an instrument of class domination in
order to overthrow the bourgeoisie and destroy the capitalist
system. The ultimate goal was not a proletarian dictatorship., but
a classless society. That goal was unattainable, however, so long
as the state survived, for the state by its very nature could never be
anything but an organ of class rale, , The proletariat would take
over the state and use it as an implement to abolish capitalism and
introduce collective ownership and control of the whole economic
system/' Then, " When, in the course of development, class distinc-
tions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated
in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, public power
will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called,
is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another.
If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is com-
pelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class,
if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as
such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then
it will, along with these conditions., have swept away the condi-
tions for the existence of class antagonisms, and of classes generally,
and will thereby have abolished its_ own ^supremacy as a class,
In the place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class
antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free de- /
velopment of each is the condition for the free development of all.

2 ML

" 2

574 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

The first step3 In other words, would be state socialism, and the
last step communism — absolute freedom from political authority
or restraint, complete and perfected laissez faire, in a voluntary
association of mankind in which there would be no economic
struggle, no class antagonisms^ because the production system
would be held and used by all for all.

The struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie would be at
first a national struggle. "The proletariat of each country must, of
course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie." l In the
long run, however, it would promote internationalism and develop
into an international movement. "The working men have no
country,53 cried The Communist Manifesto.

"We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the pro-
letariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be
the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself a nation, it is,
so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.

"National differences, and antagonisms between peoples, are daily
more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie,
to freedom of commerce, to the world-market, to uniformity in the
mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.

"The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still
faster. United action, of the leading civilized countries at least, is one
of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.

"In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another is
put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be
put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within
the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to
an end." l

It takes no great effort of imagination to see why the political as
well as the economic creed of Marx struck the world like a flaming
religion. It was a religion even more than a philosophy, and was
offered as a substitute for all existing loyalties. Patriotism was an
emotional snare to enslave the workers; religion was jcthe opium of
the people" ; the family was a bourgeois institution for perpetuating
property rights. The one supreme loyalty was loyalty to humanity
as a whole, symbolized by the red flag, which proclaims the univer-
sal blood-brotherhood of man!) Conversion to Marxism was like
conversion to religion, and the convert acquired the same fanatical
faith in the infallibility of the prescribed dogma. Impartial study

'

CHALLENGE OF PROLETARIAXISM 575

and criticism have brought out many flaws in the Marxian theory,
both economic and political: but to the orthodox Marxist these are
as the arguments of infidels to the Christian who knows he has re-
ceived the very Word of God.

The powerful appeal of Marxian thought was the result of several
definite qualities which it possessed in contrast with other collectivis-
tic philosophies. It was, in the first place, entirely a working-class
philosophy, utterly uncompromising in its hostility to capitalism.
It stood for communism^ which meant the destruction of every shred
of private ownership. Marx and Engels had considered using
"socialist" rather than "communist" in the title of the Manifesto,
and rejected it as too much associated with utopianism and various
halfway reforms. Secondly, it appeared to be severely scientific.
Its conclusions were based not upon ethical or moral considerations^
but upon what were claimed to be demonstrated laws of economics
and politics., borne out by the overwhelming testimony of history1.
Moreover, it adopted the evolutionary approach, scorning the
empiricism of the Utopian socialists and other idealists as unscien-
tific, and claimed to have discovered the true principle of social
evolution. Thirdly, -it largely avoided the sand- trap of social re-
construction. Marx was exceedingly reticent about the organiza-
tion and management of the new society, but fulsome and explicit
as to the means of getting there. This unwillingness to peer into the?
future was a source of great strength to the Marxian movement.
Opponents could not easily attack an undeclared program, and
proponents could not quarrel about it among themselves. Marxist
thought, therefore, was mainly concentrated on the attack upon
the capitalist system, while anti-Marxist thought was obliged to
meet this attack without much opportunity for counter-attack.
Fourthly, it glorified class-war, presenting it not only as necessary
to the overthrow of bourgeois tyranny but necessary to the fulfill-
ment of the high mission of emancipation assigned to the proletariat
in the scheme of social evolution. Fifthly, it combined ^Machia-
vellian materialism with a millennial righteousness. I The com-
"munStic 'society of the future would realize men's fondest dreams
of equality, freedom, and justice; but it could bfc attained only by
following the utterly non-moral laws of science. The end did not
merely justify the means; it actually endowed them with a higher
moral sanctity than the conventional canons of religion and ethics

576 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

which were as a rule antagonistic to communism. Nothing makes
men more completely fanatical than belief in a cause which reverses
moral standards and releases them from all traditional restraints
and inhibitions. .

Never has a system of social philosophy been subjected to a more
furious barrage of criticism than the Marxian creed has had to face.
Radical as \vell as reactionary, socialist as well as capitalist thinkers
have trained their guns upon it and blasted away with might and
main. For it has arrayed collectivist against collectivist almost as
fiercely as collectivist against individualist. The Marxian theory of
value has been shown to be true in part only; the Marxian dogma
of economic determinism has been found inadequate in many par-
ticulars, even failing to explain all economic phenomena; the
Marxian doctrine of class struggle has been proved to be inconsist-
ent with the facts of history and with the actual structure of society;
the Marxian prophecy of capitalist concentration and collapse has
proved to have been much too confident; the Marxian concept of
the state as primarily an implement of economic spoliation has been
shown to be grossly one-sided; the Marxian formula of revolution
'and reconstruction has been shown to be mistaken and illusory. De-
; spite all refutation, however, Marxism became and remains a power-
ful factor in the political and economic thought of modern times. ,
All socialistic thought since Marx has been Marxian, anti-Marx-
ian, or quasi-Marxian. And much of the anti-socialistic and non-
socialistic thought since Marx has been devoted either to the refuta-
tion of Marx or the adaptation of certain Marxian ideas to alien uses.

Orthodox Marxism, until the Russian Revolution of 1917, had a
somewhat uncertain career. Though its intellectual influence was
great and steadily increased, it was unable to make headway in the
world of practical politics. The first International Workingmen's >
Association, founded with the cooperation of Marx in 1864, lasted
only ten years. Both its internationalism and its communism were
too radical for the average member of the working class in all coun-
tries and yet too mild for rabid revolutionaries. The Second Inter-
national, founded in 1889, had a longer but not more triumphant
life. Its internationalism became so nominal, its communism so
academic, and its revolutionism so dilute that it was denounced
and repudiated by the Russian Bolsheviki, who, in 1919, established
the Third International to take its place. 4

CHALLENGE OF PROLETARI AX1SM 5"

Leninism and Stalinism have proclaimed themselves the true
successors to pure and unadulterated Marxism/ They emphasize
especially the revolutionary elements of the Marxian leaching,
preach class war, practice terrorism under the guise of class jwaiy
aim at the overthrow of all capitalist governments, and defend pro-
letarian dictatorship as a necessary expedient to effect the transi-
tion from capitalism to communlsmA Th^y also follow Marx as to
the necessity of breaking the hold of religion upon mass mind and
as to the necessity of mass education to prepare the people for com-
munism. u7he Bolshevik state is a proletarian state; the bourgeoisie
have l>een disfranchised and largely driven Into exile. Treason
against the working class has been made as grave a crime as treason^
against the state. In some respects the Bolsheviks have gone beyond
Marx; In some respects they have lagged behind or been deflected ,/\
to un-Marxian paths. But Marx, if alive to-day, would undoubtedly
find enough of Marxism in Soviet Russia to fill him with pride of
fatherhood, would-rejoice in the challenge she has flung into the
face of the capitalist world, and would believe (as do his faithful
disciples and also his most fearful adversaries) that the success of the
Russian experiment and its extension to other countries will seal the
doom of bourgeois society." -j

IV i

/ °j

I Socialists either gulped down the whole Marxian gospel or differ-

*IL

entiated themselves from that exciting cult. Those who chose the
latter course were almost as deeply influenced by Marx as those
who accepted him as masterj The same was true to a very marked
degree of those who steered clear of socialism altogether. Socialist
or anti-socialist, one could not be indifferent to Marxism. Socialists ^
who could not follow Marx were forced to face the Marxian chal- ^
lenge and construct a countervailing philosophy. Anti-socialists
likewise had to meet and refute the Marxian system of thought, ,
because it was the one variety of socialism which concentrated Its
attack upon the truly vulnerable aspects of capitalist society.

Qlie great majority of socialists went over to the Marxian side
and became theoretical Marxists\/But there was great difference of
opinion as to the practical implications of the theory. Socialists of
revolutionary tendencies held rigidly to the doctrine of class war
and insisted that the true Marxian goal could be reached only by

578 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

the complete overthrow of bourgeois society!/ The more moderate
socialists, on the other hand, \vere deeply impressed by the evolu-
tionary concepts of the Marxian credenda and felt that tactical con-
siderations called for a non-revolutionary program of gradual and
opportunistic reform!) tThus developed the cleavage between the
" orthodox" and "revisionist" schools of Marxian thought. \AI-
though the revisionists frequently forgot their Marxiaii philosophy
altogether when it came to practical programs, it was a constant
influence, sometimes positive and sometimes negative, upon their
thinking.)

Perhap/the most un-Marxian of the moderate socialists were the
so-called "socialists of the chair, '^ a group of German academicians
and reformers who flourished in the seventies and eighties of the
nineteenth century. These unmilitant theorists especially dissented
from the materialism of the Marxian political economy. Their
political economy was more a system of ethics than a mechanistic
science. The function of economic science, they held, was to estab-
lish economic justice. Vigorously combating laissez faire, they
argued that far-reaching governmental regulation of economic life,
especially on the side of distribution, was necessary to the attain-
ment of this end. They criticized the Marxian dictum that govern-
ment is merely an instrument of class domination, holding that this
could not be true of the democratic state. Their view was that the
democratic state represented society as a whole and reflected its
highest interests and qualities. Hence they felt that the democratic
state could be entrusted with the task of promoting economic jus-
tice. Their program of practical reform included public education,
governmental ownership and operation of utilities, social insur-
ance, compulsory settlement of labor disputes, minimum-wage
legislation, legislation against child labor, and many other reforms
not now regarded as necessarily socialistic or even radical. They
did not propose to do away with the profit system entirely or abolish
private property.

Somewhat similar to the academic socialists of Germany were the
Fabians in England. The Fabian Society was formed in 1884 by a
number of British intellectuals who agreed with Marx on many
points, but objected to his revolutionism. It was a highbrow move-
ment from the start and had little direct contact with proletarianism
until after 1900. Because of its revolutionary objectives, orthodox

CHALLENGE OF PROLETARIANISM

Marxism had difficulty In gaining a foothold In Great Britain. The
English labor movement was reformist rather than revolutionary In
purpose, and there was sufficient political freedom In Great Britain
to encourage the belief that the socialist goal might be attained
through (gradual methods/ The opportunist strategy- of the old
Roman general, Fablus, seemed, therefore, exactly suited to English
conditions, and it was to emphasize their devotion to Fabian tactics
that socialist intellectuals in England, led by Frank Podmore and
Edward R. Pease, founded the Fabian Society in 1883. George
Bernard Shaw, Sidney Webb, H. G. Wells, Graham Wallas, and
other distinguished figures later became members. Their chief alms
were to educate the electorate along socialist lines and work for the
victory of one small socialist reform after another until finally the
wrhole campaign should be won.

Fabian thought, though stridently anti-Marxian in some respects, _
was much affected by various Marxian concepts and actually fol-3
lowed Marx more largely than is often supposed. The Fabians"
adopted Marx's historical method and generally accepted his
theory of economic determinism, but arrived at different conclu-
sions as to the direction and meaning of economic evolution. They
observed, as he had observed, the growing integration of economic
organization and agreed with him that large-scale Industry had
outmoded laissez faire. But they refused to deduce from this the
Marxian conclusion that the emancipation of the working class
could come only through revolution followed by a transitional dic-
tatorship of the proletariat. The Fabians had great faith in democ-
racy. As they Interpreted history, democracy and socialism were
coefficient forces. The extension and perfection of democracy would
promote the growth of socialism. Economic evolution, as they
analyzed it, was not only dispossessing the working class but tending
also to eliminate the capitalist as owner and entrepreneur. Individ-
ualism was disappearing on both sides of the equation, and the
contest in the future would be between collectivized labor and
collectivized capital. The advantages of collectivized capital were
so great that society could not afford to destroy It. Therefore, -in a
democratic state, the Inevitable trend would be to subject It to in-
creasing government regulation and control and ultimately to take
over a large part ojf It as the proper possession of society.

The Fabians disputed the Marxian theory of value^ and held that

580 P OPTICAL PHILOSOPHIES

value is the product not of labor alone, nor of the inexorable inter-
action of supply and demand, but of the whole process of social life.
But thev agreed with Marx that invested capital could have no

t O

proprietary right in the values created by economic processes and
no valid authority over the income resulting from such values.
Value was a social product and it was the duty of society to dis-
tribute the resulting income fairly among all the members of society.
The state should be deemed the representative and trustee of all the
people for the execution of this duty.

True to the policy of opportunism, the Fabians refrained not only
from revolutionary activities but from totalism in every guise. It
was bad tactics from their standpoint to try to destroy the old and
install the new at one stroke. Step by step to socialism was the safe
and sure technique to which they were committed. They concen-
trated on specific, and usually halfway, measures of taxation, public
ownership, industrial regulation, and social amelioration. Many of
them were prominent literary men who carried on ceaseless propa-
ganda in behalf of socialistic reforms. Some went into politics and
sought election to local or national legislative bodies as advocates
of popular measures of reform. Some of them were influential in
the formation of the Independent Labor Party, which, in turn
helped to established the Labor Party. The latter took over virtu-
ally the whole Fabian program and became in a sense the militant
arm of the Fabian movement. Fabianism thus developed into a
semi-proletarian movement, but it opposed revolutionism almost as
vigorously as capitalism, discouraged class feeling, made room in its
ranks for bourgeoisie as well as proletarians, and thus alienated the
most radical elements of the working class. It is not going too far,
however, to give the Fabian movement credit for a large part of the
vast quantity of social legislation which has been enacted in England
since the 1880's.

Revisionist parties developed in practically every European coun-
try; and many writers and thinkers joined in the attempt to con-
struct a socialist theory alternative to revolutionary Marxism. In
Germany Eduard Bernstein was the leading critic of the Marxian
ideology. Bernstein's attack was directed against two Marxian
tenets in particular — the theory of value and the materialistic inter-
pretation of history. After exposing the contradictions between
Marx's earlier and later writings on the subject of value, Bern-

CHALLENGE OF PROLETARIANISM 581

stein endeavored to prove that Marx was unscientific In trying to
make a case against capitalism on the theory that the degree of
profit to the capitalist and injustice to the worker varies with the
quantum of surplus value wrested from the latter. Bernstein was
able to show that in many cases the most miserably paid workers
were the very ones from whom the least surplus value was taken,
and he arguecl, therefore, that something more than the return of
surplus value to the workers would be necessarv to effectuate social

A. j,

justice. In assailing the theory of economic determinism Bern-
stein did not deny the tremendous Influence of economic factors In
social evolution, but maintained that there were other factors of
equal importance. He was, in fact, sufficiently Gomtlan in outlook
to contend that conscious intellectual effort to translate Ideas into
desired results had always been and would always be an important
factor in shaping the course of history.

Marx was convinced of the hl£tQric_al inevitability of socialism;
Bernstein was not. Marx called upon the workers~of the~workTto
unite and assume the role assigned to them by the inexorable laws of
economics. Bernstein called upon them to unite and change the
course of social evolution, which, as he saw It, was not at all in the
direction of the self-induced collapse of capitalism. The capitalist
system, said he, was becoming constantly stronger and more stable;
large-scale, corporate organization was diffusing rather than con-
centrating wealth; and the number of bourgeoisie In proportion to
the proletariat was steadily increasing. Therefore capitalism had a
good chance of becoming permanent and reducing the proletariat
to lasting servitude. This tendency of capitalism must be resisted —
but not by revolution. The proletarians were not strong enough for
revolution. Their hope lay in the skillful use of the opportunities
given them by democratic government. Let them unite and use
their votes to secure reforms which would prevent the worst abuses
of capitalism. Their own votes would not be enough, but by adroit
maneuvers they might effect combinations with sympathetic ele-
ments among the bourgeoisie and thus add victory to victory until
the socialist program was fully carried out.

Jean Jaures, the great leader of the revisionist group In France,
thought much like Bernstein. He agreed with Bernstein that Marx's
theory of capitalist concentration was not in accord with the facts.
The rich might be growing richer, but they were not growing less

582 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

numerous, and the moderately well-to-do were increasing in num-
ber. Nor were the poor growing poorer and more numerous, in
Jaures5 opinion. Like Bernstein, he feared the coming of a capitalist
society in which the workers, though perhaps somewhat better off
materially than formerly, would be little more than serfs. With
machines constantly curtailing the number of manual workers
needed for production and the number of corporate 'shareholders,
professional people, and small business concerns steadily increasing,
Jaures, in common with Bernstein and most of the other revisionists,
felt that the ultimate prospect for the proletariat, if the capitalist
system were allowed to follow its natural course of evolution, was
just the opposite of what Marx had predicted. They agreed with
Marx, however, that the progressive exploitation of the working
class would tend to produce class conflict. This would occur, they
reasoned, even though the general economic condition of the work-
ing class were improved, because the better their condition, up to a
certain point at least, the more keenly would the workers be aware
of the injustice of capitalism. The growing resentment of the work-
ing class might in the end lead to revolution.

But Jaures did not advocate revolution any more than Bernstein.
He sincerely hoped it might be avoided. The correct strategy for
the working class, he declared, was for all working people to join
hands in a proletarian socialist party and work for a thoroughly
democratic system of government. The workers' party would find
that it could gain the support of large numbers of the petty bour-
geoisie who would have a common interest with the workers in
suppressing certain evils of capitalism. Such a political alliance by
one reform after another would be able gradually to eradicate the
abuses of capitalism and transfer the control of the economic system
from the bourgeoisie alone to the people as a whole. Where political
democracy did not exist or could not be brought about, this strategy
would be of no avail. Under such circumstances revolution would
be the only recourse of the workers, and Jaures recommended the
general strike as the best way of making revolution.

The revisionists gained and held the ascendancy in socialist circles
until World War I came along and knocked the whole socialist
movement to pieces. The Second International fell under the con-
trol of revisionists, whose proletarianism and internationalism,
though genuine, were secondary to their concern with national

CHALLENGE OF PROLETARIAXISM 583

socialist programs. Socialist political parties, dominated by re-
visionists, were formed in practically every country, and In Ger-
many, France, Italy, and a number of the smaller European coun-
tries achieved enough political weight to secure the enactment of
many items of their legislative program. In several countries they
gained strength enough to hold the balance of power and occa-
sionally slip into office. A number of the top-flight statesmen of
modern Europe came from their ranks. The first World War spelled
opportunity for the orthodox Marxists and catastrophe for the
revisionists. Socialists were compelled to choose between loyalty
to country and loyalty to proletarian principles. The revisionists
with few exceptions put country first and socialism second, and as a
result were swallowed up in a great tidal wave of economic impe-
rialism. The orthodox Marxists put socialism first, denounced the
war as a capitalist struggle, and went to jail In great numbers for
subversive and anti-patriotic activities. But, when the Revolution
came in Russia, the Bolsheviki, who were orthodox Marxians, had
a program and a technique which enabled them to put the moder-
ate socialists to rout and take possession of the Russian state. They
regarded all revisionists as traitors to the cause of proletarlanism,
and proceeded at once to "purify" the socialist movement. They
organized the Third International, to serve as a solid international
front for uncompromising Marxian communists, and encouraged
and aided the formation of communist parties all over the world.
The Second International survived in an emaciated state which
faithfully reflected the feebleness of the social democratic move-
ment It represented.

V

Orthodox Marxism, though too revolutionary for moderate
socialists, was too little so for proletarian minds eager to see Imme-
diate and sweeping results. These were largely attracted by such
philosophies as anarchism and syndicalism. Anarchism, a doctrine
of ancient origin and lineage, assumed a definitely proletarian char-
acter in the second half of the nineteenth century and inspired a
militant working-class movement. Syndicalism, a hybrid of anar-
chism, Marxism, and labor unionism, was a late nineteenth-cen-
tury development, originating in France and extending its Influence
to other European countries and to the United States.

584 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

Between philosophical and revolutionary anarchism there is a
wide gulf. In the first half of the nineteenth century anarchism was
widely embraced as a theory of ultimate and rational social destiny
which the fullness of time would bring to pass. Such writers as
William Godwin, Thomas Hodgskin, Pierre Joseph Proudhon,.
Josiah Warren, and Henry D. Thoreau extolled the intrinsic good-
ness of human nature and brought forth romantic visions of the
perfect life which might exist in an anarchistic society. But they did
not propose to do anything in particular to hasten the coming of the
perfect order. Absolute individual liberty in a voluntary society
was their ideal, but they did not regard it as immediately practica-
ble or advocate aggressive steps to bring it about. Very different
was the attitude of later anarchists, especially those twro Goliaths of
modern anarchistic dogma, Michael Bakunin (1814-1876) and
Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921). These two and their followers were
not content to do nothing more than make an intellectual argument
for anarchism; they advocated revolution and made comprehensive
plans for the reorganization of society by means of revolution.

Bakunin was the son of a Russian nobleman who had been deeply
influenced by eighteenth-century liberalism and had reared his son
in that tradition. Young Bakunin became an officer in the Imperial
Guard and saw service In Poland, but resigned his commission and
left the army because of the cruel and despotic measures used
against the Polish revolutionaries. He went to Germany, where he
studied Hegelian philosophy and came into contact with the leaders
of various radical movements. Later he went to Paris and became
acquainted with Proudhon and George Sand. By this time he was a
full-fledged revolutionary and was actively participating in the plots
of the Polish exiles. From Paris Bakunin proceeded to Switzerland,
where he resided several years and took a prominent part in the
socialist movement.

During Ms residence in Switzerland the Russian government
ordered Bakunin to return home. He refused and as a penalty all of
his property in Russia was immediately confiscated. Bakunin then
went back to Paris and in 1848 published a violent attack on the
Russian government. The French authorities promptly expelled
him from Paris. He went to Germany and plunged headlong into
the turbulent revolutionary struggle then going on in the German
states. For his share in the Dresden uprising of 1849 he was arrested

CHALLENGE OF PROLETARI ANISM 585

and condemned to death. Because he was a Russian subject the
death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment and he was
handed over to the Russian government. He lay In prison until
1855, when he was permanently exiled to Siberia.

Bakunin escaped from Siberia in 1861 and made his way, through
Japan and the United States, to England. After a short time he
went again to Switzerland and resided there until his death in 1876.
In 1869 Bakunin founded the Social Democratic Alliance, which
was soon united with Marx's International Workingmen's Associa-
tion. In 1872 the Marxists expelled the Bakunin faction from the
International and Bakunin then became the recognized leader of
the extreme left wing of the proletarian movement.

Bakunin was a prolific writer, mostly of tracts and pamphlets.
No complete edition of his writings exists and the principal collec-
tions are in French, German, and Spanish. In English translation
his best known work probably Is God and the State, posthumously
published in 1882.

Taking the evolutionary point of view, Bakunin started with the
postulate that history reveals a progressive development of the
human race from a condition of mere animal life toward one In
which animal instincts and impulses are subordinated to intelligent
principles and ideals. The central features of his thought were: (1)
an aspiration for complete Intellectual, political, social, and moral
freedom; and (2) a belief in the natural solidarity of men. Religion,
private property, and government he regarded as obstacles to the
realization of these ideals. In the lower stages of development
where restraint and coercion were necessary, they might be justi-
fied; but in an advanced society, they were not only unnecessary
but positively harmful. "The liberty of man/3 he said in God and
the State, "consists solely in this, that he obeys the laws of naturea
because he has himself recognized them as such, and not because
they have been imposed upon him externally by any foreign will
whatsoever, human or divine, collective or individual.35

Democratic government was just as objectionable to Bakunin as
autocracy. The essence of the thing was the same, he said, whatever
its form. Even by universal suffrage the many were subjected to the
will of the few, and the invariable result was the exploitation of the
workers by the owners of property. Private property, according to
his theory, could not exist without the state, and the state could not

586 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

exist without private property. Each sustained the other, and each
magnified the evils of the oiher. So long as either existed the work-
Ing class would be ground down and dispossessed. Even with the
right to elect their own officials the mass of people could not con-
trol the state, because the wealth of the propertied classes would be
used to fool the voters Into delivering the political mechanism into
their hands. Religion sanctified the alliance of private property
and political authority, and must therefore be regarded as equally
immoral and equally an obstacle to the attainment of higher levels
of moral and intellectual culture. "In a word/3 he said in sum-
mary, "we object to all legislation, all authority, and all influence,
privileged, patented, official and legal, even when it has proceeded
from universal suffrage, convinced that it must always turn to the
profit of a dominating and exploiting minority against the interests
of the immense majority enslaved."

In place of the existing order Bakunin proposed to substitute
what he termed federalism, socialism, and anti-iheologism. Others have
called these three anarchism, collectivism, and atheism. Under
Bakunin's program the state would be replaced by a free association
of autonomous groups, each having the right of secession. In these
groups all forms of property would be held in common and all op-
erations of production and distribution carried on by voluntary
cooperation. All members would be on the same footing, and there
would be no attempt to apportion benefits according to individual
differences in service to the group. Slackers and others recreant to
their cooperative obligations would be punished by expulsion from
the group. This penalty, thought Bakunin, would be so terrible that
hearty and spontaneous cooperation would be fully insured. With
the ideal of cooperation and equality firmly established, Bakunin
visioned local groups combining to form regional associations and
these federating in yet more general organizations until the whole
civilized world would be covered with a network of voluntary bodies
taking care of all the needs of life. The state would then be super-
fluous and anachronistic.

Evolution might ultimately produce such a society, but Bakunin
preferred not to wait. Evolution was too slow. Revolution must
come to its aid and clear the ground of all impeding obstacles. Not,
however, revolution in the sense of indiscriminate violence and
assassination. Bakunin thought of revolution as something to be

CHALLENGE OF PROLETARIAN ISM •

carefully planned and organized. Small secret societies of depend-
able anarchists would take the lead. Working through a coordinat-
ing center, they would launch the first uprising in the cities, each
seizing control of a predetermined area. Having conquered the
cities , they would then turn their attention to the rural districts.
These they would try to win by persuasion, but would not shrink at
violence if need be. No transitional period of state socialism or pro-
letarian dictatorship would be needed or permitted. On that point,
according to Bakunin, Marx was fatally wrong. Bakunin's plan
was that the property appropriated by the revolution should be im-
mediately distributed among the workers5 groups, every precaution
being taken to prevent the formation of anything resembling a po-
litical government. Only thus would the communistic system have
a chance to get started.

Kropotkin was also a Russian nobleman, a prince in his own
right. He was educated for the army and at the age of twenty be-
came a military official in Siberia. In connection with his military
training he became deeply interested in science. Wide reading also
made him familiar with the liberal writings of the French encyclo-
paedists. In his Siberian post he desired administrative rather than
strictly military work, and the only opportunity for this was in the
field of geographical exploration. Kropotkin headed several geo-
graphical survey expeditions and made notable contributions to
geographical knowledge.

Finally he became convinced that the army held no future for a
man interested in social betterment, so he resigned his commission
In 1867 and entered the University of St. Petersburg. Continuing
his interest in science, he became secretary of the Russian Geo-
graphical Society. Gradually, however, he was drawn Into radical
political movements. In 1872 he joined the International Working-
men's Association, but found its socialism too mild for his taste and
turned to anarchism. In 1874 he was arrested and imprisoned for
subversive propaganda. He escaped from prison In 1 876 and fled to
England. From England he went to Switzerland, then to Paris, and
then back to Switzerland. In 1881 lie was expelled from Switzer-
land and after some wanderings took up his residence in France.
In 1883 he was arrested on the order of the French government and
served a term in prison. In 1886 he settled in England and remained
there until the Russian Revolution of 1917. Returning to Russia,

588 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

he supported the moderate government of Kerensky. After the
triumph of the Bolsheviki he retired from political activity and de-
voted himself exclusively to literary work. His death occurred in

1921.

Kropotkin was the author of many books and of innumerable
articles and pamphlets. He was recognized as an authority on geog-
raphy, Russian life and literature., and sociology as well as the out-
standing; theorists of anarchism in recent times. Kropotkin3 s princi-
pal works on the subject of anarchism were The Place of Anarchy in
Socialist Evolution (1886), The Conquest of Bread (1888), Anarchism: Its
Philosophy and Ideal (1896), The State: Its Part in History (1898), and
Modern Science and Anarchism (1903).

Kropotkin, like Bakunin, was an evolutionist, but was a better
scientist and therefore used the evolutionary theory more effec-
tively than his predecessor. Geography was not the only science that
Kropotkin knew. He \vas a student of biology and anthropology as
well, and his geographical work was much influenced by his knowl-
edge of those subjects. His theory of anarchism revealed the same
influence. He believed, and marshaled an Impressive array of bio-
logical and anthropological data to prove, that anarchy was in
harmony with the true principles of natural social evolution.

Evolution, said Kropotkin, is not a steady and continuous march
from lower to higher forms. In organic life, especially with human
beings and human institutions, the factor of will must be taken into
account. It is possible for a human being to assert his will in such a
way as to impair or Impede the natural and normal development of
his body. It is likewise possible for human beings in society to use
their wills to hold back the natural forces of social evolution. The
forces of natural development strain to overcome such resistances,
and finally a crisis occurs. In the human body this may take the
form of an attack of illness in course of which the resistant factors are
broken down and natural development proceeds on its way. In
human society it may take the form of revolution, likewise breaking
down the forces opposed to natural development and speeding it on
its way. It followed, therefore, according to Kropotkin' s reasoning,
that revolution should not be viewed as abnormal and destructive
but as a natural and necessary aid to evolution. He summoned his-
tory to testify that revolution had often cleared the way for the
greatest eras of progress in the annals of mankind.

CHALLENGE OF PROLETARIANISM 589

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Most evolutionists had assigned to competition, struggle, and
adaptive survival the leading parts in the drama of life-develop-
ment. Kropotkin maintained that cooperation had been more im-
portant than any of these. Bringing to bear upon the subject a large
knowledge both of biology and sociology, he emphatically argued
that those individuals, species, and societies which best adapt them-
selves to environmental conditions are invariably distinguished by
a pronounced faculty of cooperation. Nature favors cooperation
and cooperative types, he said, and tends in the long run to elimi-
nate competitive species and competitive societies.

Kropotkin had no patience with the common belief thai without
strong government the world would be plunged into chaos. " Accus- .
tomed as we are,35 he wrote, "by hereditary prejudices and abso-
lutely unsound education and training to see Government, legis-
lation and magistracy everywhere around,

"we have come to believe that man would tear his fellow-man to
pieces like a wild beast the day the police took their eyes off Mm; that
chaos would come about if authority were overthrown during a revolu-
tion. And with our eyes shut we pass by thousands and thousands of
human groupings which form freely, without any intervention of the
law, and attain results infinitely superior to those achieved under gov-
ernmental tutelage.

"We know that Europe has a system of railways, 175,000 miles long,
and that on this network you can nowadays travel from north to south,
from east to west, from Madrid to Petersburg, and from Calais to Con-
stantinople, without stoppages, without even changing carriages. . . .
More than that: a parcel tossed into a station will find its addressee
anywhere, in Turkey or in Central Asia, without more formality needed
for sending it than writing its destination on a bit of paper. . . .

"All this was done by free agreement, by exchange of letters and
proposals, by congresses at which delegates met to discuss certain special
subjects, but not to make laws; after the congress the delegates returned
to their companies, not with a law, but with the draft of a contract to be

accepted or rejected.

"There were certainly obstinate men who would not be convinced.
But the common interest finally led to agreement without need for the
help of armies against refractory members.

"And the most interesting thing in this organization is, that there is
no European Central Government of Railways! Nothing! No minister
of railways, no dictator, not even a continental parliament, not even a
directing committee ! Everything is done by contract.5* 1

1P. Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread (London, 1906), pp. 166-184.

590 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

Private property was. In Kropotkin* s view, the greatest enemy
of cooperation. It was the principal cause of the strife and dis-
cord which kept men from working together harmoniously in the
conquest of nature and the building of a better world. The state,
allied as it was with private property, was equally hostile to co-
operation. In the early history of the race men had lived for
centuries without the state, and Its appearance upon the human
scene had been unnatural and disastrous. It had displaced reason
with unreason, justice with Injustice, freedom with tyranny. The
first and best law was custom; politically imposed law was not
well suited to human conditions and was almost invariably the
vehicle of economic exploitation. In order to reestablish freedom
and justice and equality, he asserted, private property and its
ally, the state, must be destroyed. Institutional religion must like-
wise go5 for it was naught but the handmaiden of political and
economic oppression.

After the revolution, what? Kropotkin's answer was much the
same as Bakunln's. Men would organize in voluntary groups
along the lines of their social and economic interests. Property
would be owned and enjoyed in common; all members would
have equal rights and privileges; the only penalty for failure to
live up to one's obligations would be expulsion from the group;
differences would be adjusted by arbitration. No individual would
be compelled to enter any cooperative group. The natural social
instinct plus the desire to enjoy the benefits of cooperation would
attend to that. Industrial groups would guarantee their members
complete economic security and as much comfort and luxury as
possible; Individual members in return would agree to give a cer-
tain amount of service per day between their twentieth and forty-
fifth or fiftieth years. Under such an arrangement Kropotkin
believed it would be possible to produce more goods of a better
quality than capitalism could ever hope to do.

Pointing to the large growth of powerful and successful voluntary
organizations in business, education, philanthropy, and other lines
of interest, Kropotkin argued that evolution was moving in the
direction of a voluntary society. "To-day," said he, "when

"groups scattered far and wide wish to organize for some object or
other, they no longer elect an international parliament of Jacks-of-all-
trades. No. Where it is impossible to meet directly or to come to agree-

CHALLENGE OF PROLETARI AXISM 591

mem by correspondence, delegates versed in the question at issue are
sent to treat, with instructions: "Endeavour to come to an agreement on
such and such a question, not with a law in your pocket, but with a
proposed contract which we may or may not accept.'

"Such is the method of the great industrial companies, the learned
societies, and the associations of every description, which already cover
Europe and the United States. And such should be the method of an
emancipated"* society. While bringing about expropriation, society
cannot continue to be organized on the principle of parliamentary repre-
sentation. A society founded on serfdom is in keeping with absolute
monarchy; a society based on the wage system and the exploitation of
the masses by the capitalists finds its political expression in parliamen-
tarism. But a free society, regaining possession of the common inherit-
ance, must seek, in free groups and free federations of groups, a new
organization, in harmony with the new economic phase of history." 1

Kropotkin did not believe, however, that this final goal could
be reached without a violent and destructive revolution. It was
the vocation of the anarchist to hasten the coming of that necessary
expedient. Conditions were such, he thought, that an uprising in
one country would quickly spread through the world and thus
speedily inaugurate the communist millennium.

Syndicalism, as has been indicated, was a blend of Marxism,
anarchism,, and labor unionism. The particular fusion of ideas
which produced the syndicalist philosophy was doubtless the result
of conditions peculiar to the proletarian movement in France.
After its emergence in that country, however, syndicalism became
an international force and exerted a strong influence upon the
proletarian movement in general. Although the philosophy of
syndicalism originated in the nineteenth century, its full develop-
ment and practical influence did not come until after 1900. We
shall therefore treat syndicalism more fully in connection with
twentieth-century political ideas.2

The principal tenets of the syndicalist doctrine, as set forth by
its two leading exponents, Femand Pelloutier (1867-1901) and
Georges Sorel (1847-1922), are: (1) that workers must unite not
simply to get better wages and working conditions, but to become
proprietors and masters of the industrial system; (2) that they
must organize as a class without reference to craft lines and must
keep their organizations separate from all other political,, economic,
and social movements; (3) that the labor union (syndicaf) should

1 Ibid., pp. 45-46. 2 See pp. 650-652.

592 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

be designed and developed to function boih as an instrument for
the overthrow of existing society and as a cell in the formation of
the new society; (4) that uncompromising and unceasing war must be
waged againsi the profit system; (5) that the tactics employed by
the workers in carrying on this struggle should be of the nature of
"direct action" — the general strike, sabotage5 the boycott, and
the union label were especially advocated because they could be
used without sacrificing the independent position of labor; (6) that
private property must be abolished and the state overthrown,
after which the workers3 unions would take over the equipment of
industry and carry on the processes of production and distribution.

VI

By the middle of the nineteenth century the old political radical-
ism had subsided to a mild and genial breeze. The raging whirl-
wind which had terrified conservatives like Burke had passed high
overhead and left the old order pretty much intact. Private prop-
erty was still safe and secure; liberty, for those who could use and
enjoy it, was amply buttressed by constitutional limitations; and
the masses, though they had the right to vote and hold office, were
showing little inclination to run amuck. The world still belonged
to the rich and well-born; the triumph of laissezfaire had merely
opened the doors for the newly rich and the newly well-born to
move in beside the ancient grandees and share the management of
society. Just at this juncture, when conservative souls were begin-
ning to breathe again and congratulate themselves on their narrow
escape, the red menace of proletarianism showed its fearsome
visage and threw the substantial gentry into another fit of alarm.
The Moloch of revolution was not dead, it seemed, but sleeping.

It was not the enthusiastic response of the working people to the
proletarian philosophies that made them so terrifying. There was
no such response. Orthodox Marxism was never able to recruit
more than a handful of followers in any country save Russia.
Anarchism made fewer avowed converts than Marxian commu-
nism. Syndicalism gained a considerable body of adherents, but
they were a minority even in the labor movement. Nor did the
moderate socialism of the revisionists and other non-revolutionary
collectivists generate sufficient appeal to do more than create
minor political parties.

CHALLENGE OF PROLETARI AXISM 593

The real causes of the fears engendered by the proletarian chal-
lenge were: (1) that It laid bare the worst aspects of capitalist so-
ciety, thus putting the existing system on the defensive; (2) that It
concentrated Its attack upon private property and political au-
thority, the two indispensable bulwarks of capitalism; (3) that it
proposed alternatives to capitalism, which, though unproved and
possibly quite Impracticable, promised the working class more than
any reforms capitalism could adopt wiihout self-destruction; (4)
thai it seized the weapon of materialism and turned It against the
social order which had made It powerful and deadly; (5) that it
counseled the complete abolition of capitalism and called upon the
proletariat to use the most ruthless Machiavellian tactics to that
end; (6) that it fomented discontent and spread subversive ideas
among the whole working population regardless of the fact that the
number actively entering into radical proletarian movements was
small.

That these fears were justified, the march of events in the twen-
tieth century has made abundantly plain. Proletarianlsm, though
not always following the paths marked out by its major prophets or
literally adhering to their doctrines, has become a mighty and ag-
gressive force against which capitalism is obliged to battle for its
life. For bringing on this fateful struggle the proletarian phi-
losophies of the nineteenth century must receive a large measure of
whatever praise or blame is to be bestowed.

REFERENCES

Bakunin, M., God and the State (tr. by B. R. Tucker, 5th ed.5 Boston, 1885).
Bober, M. M., Karl Marx's Interpretation of History (Cambridge, Mass.,

1927).

Carr, E. H., Michael Bakunin (London, 1937).
Chandler, A. R., The Clash of Political Ideals: A Source Book on Democracy,

Communism, and Totalitarianism (New York, 1940).
Chang, S. H., The Marxian Theory of the State (Philadelphia, 1931).
Coker, F. W.5 Recent Political Thought (New York, 1934), Chaps. II-IV,

VII-VIIL

Cole, G. D. H., What Marx Really Meant (London, 1934).
Cole, G. D. H., Fabian Socialism (London, 1943),

Destier, C. M., American Radicalism, 1865-1901 (New London, Conn., 1946).
Durbin, E. F. M., The Politics of Democratic Socialism (London, 1940).
Goldman, E.5 Anarchism and Other Essays (New York, 1910).
Graves, S., A History of Socialism (London, 1942).

594 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

Gray, A.. The Socialist Tradition: dieses to Lenin (New York, 1946).

Harley, J. H.% Syndicalism (London, n.d.).

Hook, S.; Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx (New York, 1933).

Hook, S., From Hegel to Marx (New York, 1936).

Hunter, R.T Vidence and ike Labor Movement (New York, 1914).

Laskl, H. J.: Karl Marx: An Essay (London, 1922).

LeRossignoI, J. E., From Marx to Stalin: A Critique of Communism (Nev

York, 1940).

MacDonald, J. R., Syndicalism: A Critical Examination (London, 1912).
Mayer, J. P., Political Thought in France from Sieyes to Sorel (London, 1943).
Ruble, O., Karl Marx, His Life and Work (tr. by E. and C. Paul, New York,

1929),
Sablne, G. H., A History of Political Theory (New York, 1937), Chap.

XXX1L

Schumpter, J. A., Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York, 1942).
Spargo, J.3 Syndicalism, Industrial Unionism, and Socialism (New Haven

1931).
Sweezy, P. M., The Theory of Capitalist Development: Principles of Marxian

Political Economy (New York, 1942).
Turner, J. K., Challenge to Karl Marx (New York, 1941).
Vizteliy, E. H.9 The Anarchists (New York, 1911).
Zenker, E. V., Anarchism: A Criticism and History of the Anarchist Theory

(New York, 1897).

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE NEW NATIONALISM

I

THERE has been something akin to nationalism ever since
groups of human beings first became conscious of things
setting them apart from others and binding them fast to-
gether among themselves. Before there were nations there were
tribes, and before tribes many varieties of less formal groupings in
which the awareness of kinship and community as against outsiders
generated tremendous emotions. The gang spirit has pervaded
mankind from the very earliest times. Nor have the underlying
causes of cleavage between group and group ever been fundamen-
tally different from those which separate the modern wrorld Into
contentious and warring national states. In all ages the chief differ-
ences tending to breed antagonism to other peoples and loyalty to
one's own have been race, language, religion, culture, and domain.
But there were countervailing forces In the ancient world and In
the modern world before the eighteenth century, which operated
to restrain the growth of nationalism and retard the permanent
formation of typically national communities.

For many generations in the early history of civilization tribalism
was prevented from developing into virulent nationalism by the
isolation and relatively infrequent contacts of alien peoples. When
advancing civilization brought closer relationships, the same result
was achieved by the generally recognized need of intertribal Inter-
course in order that each people might gain from others the various
Independently developed arts and crafts by which the conquest of
nature could be insured. With the next stage of development came
the great military empires of Egypt., Babylon, Assyria, Persia,
China, Macedonia, and Rome, which largely obliterated the older
social structures and again delayed the emergence of full-fledged
nationalism. In addition there occurred, sometimes simultaneously
with the formation of these vast dominions and sometimes subse-
quently as one of the end-results, the growth of widely disseminated
religions and languages which further impeded the upthrust of
national spirit.

595

596 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

Despite all these obstacles, however, there were occasions in those
older chapters of the human story when something very like modern
nationalism did crop out. There were times when the Egyptians,
the Jews, the Persians, the Greeks, and the Romans displayed a
genuine national consciousness and were animated by a deep pa-
triotic fervor. There were also times during the Middle Ages wrhen
such peoples as the English., the Spaniards,, the French, and the
Italians evinced a truly national psychology7. But these manifes-
tations of nationalism did not last. Not until the end of the fif-
teenth century had the forces opposing nationalism weakened
sufficiently to permit the progressive growth of essentially na-
tional political organisms. And not until near the end of the
eighteenth century were conditions ripe for a universal outburst of
nation-making.

Early nationalism was a compound of geographical integration
and racial, linguistic, and cultural affinity, reinforced now and then
by a common religious faith or an imposing dynastic establishment
or both. During the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth cen-
turies, under the convoy of these mounting influences, made doubly
potent by the gradual enfeeblement of all contrary forces, na-
tions multiplied and grew strong. But the essence of their na-
tionalism was neither political nor economic. Political nationalism
did not appear in full bloom until the French Revolution, and
economic nationalism did not arrive until the Machine Age had
immoderately quickened the intensity of international economic
rivalries.

Patriotism, as we know it to-day, was greatly quickened by the
French Revolution. Destroyed by that terrific cataclysm were the
monarchy, the aristocracy, the authoritarian church, and all other
institutions making against the fusion of the Gallic people into a
glowing union for Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality. Love of
country was assimilated to those grand ideals of the Revolution.
The patriot loved his country because it was his native land, its
people his people, its life his life, but he loved it most of all because
it represented the social incarnation of the noblest and purest as-
pirations of the human heart. The nationalism of Revolutionary
France was as contagious as smallpox. From 1789 to the 1860's the
European and American continents were the scene of a continuous
succession of both bloody and bloodless revolutions inspired by the

THE NEW NATIONALISM 597

great triune creed of freedom, democracy, and nationalism. Na-
tional independence and unity, individual liberty, and popular
sovereignty were the high causes for which men invoked the sword
or the ballot box and demolished the ancient order.

One flag., one land., one heart, one hand,
« One Nation ever more!

was the grand ideal not only of the American people for whom the
fervent Dr. Holmes wrote The Voyage of the Good Ship Union, but of
every people who had seen the glory of this new humanism. All
loyalties must be subordinated to national loyalty; all distinctions
of class or creed pr locality must be wiped out; all institutions must
be made subservient to the will and the welfare of the nation as a
whole.

Up to 1880 or thereabouts nationalism was closely identified with
the crusade for free and democratic government. Nationalism and
liberalism marched shoulder to shoulder. Everywhere the foremost
leaders in the cause of national independence and unity were also
the outstanding champions of democracy and constitutional gov-
ernment. Reactionary thinkers like Maistre and reactionary states-
men like Metternich set themselves implacably against the tide of
nationalism. It was the enemy of everything they stood for; the de-
stroyer not alone of universal authority of every kind3 but, they felt,
of all of the great social and moral values which might be derived
from universality and cosmopolitanism in church, empire, and
aristocracy. Even Napoleon, whose dreams of universal dominion
knew no bounds, camouflaged his grandiose designs with conspicu-
ous genuflections at the altar of nationalism and posed as a liberator
of peoples and a leveler of classes. The nationalism of this stormy
epoch produced an epidemic of sanguinary wars, both inter- and
intra-national — wars in the main, however, of political consolida-
tion, self-determination, and liberalization, and not primarily of
economic aggrandizement and expansion.

But after the middle of the nineteenth century, and especially
after 1880, the motivation and likewise the philosophy of national-
ism underwent a profound change. With national independence
and liberal, if not wholly democratic, government widely achieved,
national aspirations and interests began to center about economic
considerations. This tendency was much accelerated and national

598 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

antagonisms fanned to the flaming point by the onrushing industrial
and commercial revolution which pitted nation against nation,
capitalistic entity' against capitalistic entity, in a mad scramble for
materials and markets. Then emerged a new nationalism which
proclaimed the right of a nation not only to be but to grow, to gain
"a place in the sun," to fulfill its "manifest destiny,53 to "take up the
White Alan's Burden/3 to carry on its mission cwilisatrice. National
self-sufficiency, meaning not only sufficiency for security and
independence but sufficiency for any self-determined program of de-
velopment, became the driving motive of national policy. Liberal-
ism, though profusely acknowledged, was largely forgotten when
politicos came together behind the doors of chancelleries and con-
ference rooms. The most uncompromising of reactionaries became
the most ardent of nationalists. Big business and propertied in-
terests were not slow to see that the national state could be an
invaluable ally in the struggle for survival and expansion. So
nationalism grew into economic nationalism which in turn flowered
into economic imperialism.

The new nationalism even more than the old was a breeder of
wars — trade wars, tariff wars, currency wars, shipping wars, and
concession wars as well as wars of shot and shell. In truth it turned
peace into war; for the psychology of the economic warfare which
now filled the non-violent intervals between periods of armed con-
flict was hardly less belligerent than that of war. Peace, from the
opposite of war, was transformed into a mere prelude to or prolon-
gation of military hostilities, and was characterized by virtually the
same emotional atmosphere. Yet the moral ideals of the earlier na-
tionalism continued to be avowed and held before the world as the
hallmark of national aims and character. Not that the new national-
ism lacked expounders to equip it with rational and moral justifica-
tion. Able apologists it had in abundance, but their doctrines,
though cogent and credible, so violently discarded the conventional
ethics as to be unwelcome to any but the most frankly imperialistic
peoples. So when the great ordeal of battle came in the year 1 914 it
was the old rather than the new nationalism which furnished most
of the shibboleths. But it was the new nationalism that fought the
war and made the peace. And it is the new nationalism, beyond
any question, which now propels the world toward another gen-
eral massacre.

THE NEW NATIONALISM

II

Many as were the prophets of the new nationalism, hardly more
than two or three can be ranked as genuine political philosophers.
Mostly they were militarists, colonizers, journalists, orators, poets,
and politicians whose appeal was to the emotions rather than the
mind. Mostly, in fact, they had neither the equipment nor the
inclination to do otherwise. For the new nationalism could not be
defended on traditional intellectual grounds. Prevalent ideas of the
nature of the state, approved canons of political ethics, and the
democratic principles of self-determination and popular sovereignty
all had to be consigned to the scrap-heap, and a new political syn-
thesis provided. For this task not many who spread the seed of the
new nationalism had the necessary qualifications of intellectual and
moral courage.

Among the late nineteenth-century theorists whose writings con-
tributed to the new philosophy of nationalism mention should be
made of Alfred T. Mahan, the American naval officer wrho aroused
national consciousness to the importance of sea power as a factor in
the growth of empire; Sir J. R. Seeley, the English historian, who
championed the imperial expansion of Britain with a logic that the
Encyclopaedia Britannica declared " unanswerable"; Bernard Bosan-
quet, the English political theorist who adopted the Hegelian view
of the state as the sublimation of all virtue and authority, arguing
that the state may "legitimately do whatever is required for the
preservation and improvement of the organized life of the commu-
nity, and is the sole judge of what is so required " ; Benjamin Kidd,
the English sociologist, w^hose book, Control of the Tropics, attempted
a scientific justification of the subjugation of backward peoples;
Ludwig Gumplowicz and Gustave Ratzenhofer, the Austrian sociol-
ogists, who distinguished between superior and inferior races and
exalted war as a valid and necessary process in fulfilling the natural
and divinely appointed destiny of superior peoples; and the German
philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose lyrical gospel of the "super-
man" tended to inspire that of the super-nation.

None of the foregoing, however, or the many others who con-
tributed to the new philosophy of nationalism, can be placed on the
same plane with Heinrich von Treitschke, the famed professor of
history and politics at the University of Berlin from 1874 to 1896.

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

Treltschke It was, more than any other political thinker, who
rounded the new concept of nationalism Into a coherent system of
principles which the world could not ignore and would not reject.
It was almost inevitable that the most complete and closely rea-
soned philosophy of super-nationalism should come out of Ger-
many. The Intellectual soil of the Fatherland had been plowed and

___ r

harrowed for that crop by Fichte and Hegel, whose Idealization of
the state as a super-being endowed with almost divine personality
had produced a widespread belief in the state as a supreme moral
entity, veritably an end in itself. Further fostering this exaltation of
the state wTas the late and highly dramatic coming of national unity
In Germany, which aroused an ecstatic patriotism and a corre-
spondingly powerful faith in the mission of the new German state
not only In the consummation of German nationhood, but also in
putting Germany at once on an equal footing with the greatest
nations on earth. Treitschke was the child of his time and country.

Treltschke was born at Dresden in 1834, the son of an officer in
the Saxon army. An accident in early youth resulting in well-nigh
total deafness kept young Treitschke out of military service and
caused him to compensate his incapacity in that respect by an eager
and zealous application to the study of history, economics, and
political science. After studying at several German universities, he
became a lecturer in history at the University of Leipzig in 1857.
Later he taught at Freiburg and Heidelberg and in 1874 began his
long and distinguished career at the University of Berlin. Treit-
schke was a dynamic and convincing teacher, and his lectures pos-
sessed intellectual and literary qualities which attracted an enor-
mous following. He was perhaps the most celebrated and popular
German university professor of his day. He was also active in poli-
tics, serving several terms in the Reichstag, and was for many years
the editor of a nationally read political journal. Treitschke's most
important books are: German History in the Nineteenth Century (1879-
1894), Historical and Political Essays (1886-1897), and Politics (1897-
1898). The last named, a posthumous compilation of his university
lectures on political science, contains the fullest and best statement
of his theory of nationalism. Treitschke died in 1896.

In his early years Treltschke was classed as a liberal,, and was a
forthright opponent of the reactionary Bismarck. But, as he grew
older and more intensely nationalistic, he seems to have shifted

THE NEW NATIONALISM 601

ground. In the end he was Bismarck's staunchest supporter, and
there is justice in the charge that he stood forth as the unrelenting
enemy of every form of liberalism. Upon examining Treitschke Js
political philosophy, however, we shall perceive that Ms change
of front was more of the surface than the substance of his thought.
Treitschke took Aristotle as his model and grounded his views
upon the basic precepts of the immortal Father of Political Science.
He was also influenced, more deeply perhaps than he knew, by
Machiavelli. Easy indeed would it be for one enveloped in the
impenetrable silence which surrounded Treitschke's life to imagine
himself a cold intellect surveying and analyzing the contemporary
political scene with the disembodied insight of an Aristotle or a
Machiavelli.

Treitschke started, as Aristotle started, with the assumption
that man is by nature and necessity a political animal. ccWe can
imagine humanity, " said he, in the first chapter of his Politics,
"without a number of important attributes; but humanity without
government is simply unthinkable, for it would be humanity
without reason. Man is driven by his political instinct to construct
a constitution as inevitably as he constructs a language,35 1 Taking
that to be a fact, it must follow, he went on to say, that the political
institutions of a people, like its language, reflect the peculiar
genius of its inner life and likewise the adjustments it has made to
external circumstances. The state is the legal embodiment of a
people as a natural political fact. It is the legal manifestation of
their corporate unity and independence. Not only is the state a
legal entity; it is an historical entity as well. Such a union of people
as is seen in the state cannot be created by mere contract; it is the
result of living together generation after generation. Man is a
political animal because he is born into a society built by countless
generations of forebears, and finds himself obliged to live in that
society and transmit it, with such modifications as may be added
in his generation, to endless posterity. Each generation is heir to the
past and trustee for the future. It is not the right of a single genera-
tion, said Treitschke, to dispose of things political to suit itself

alone.

The state, according to our Teutonic Aristotle, represents this
historico-moral and politico-moral aspect of human society. From

1 Op. cit. (trans, by Dugdale and de Bilie, 2 vols., 1916), Vol. I, p. 3.

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

the juridical standpoint it is a legal person, but from the standpoint
of political science it is far more than that. "States must be con-
ceived/3 quoting again from the Politics of Treitschke, "as the
great collective personalities of history, thoroughly capable of
bearing responsibility and blame. We may even speak of their
legal guilt, and still more accurately of their individuality. Even
as certain people have certain traits, which they cannot alter how-
ever much they try, so also the State has characteristics which can-
not be obliterated." 1 Having personality, the state must necessarily
have the one outstanding attribute of personality, namely, will.
And since the state must be regarded as the great collective personal-
ity, it must have "the most emphatic will that can be imagined." l
' Upon this foundation Treitschke proceeds to erect his philosophy
of nationalism. If the state is a person, he asserts, "the necessary
and rational multiplicity of States follows.35 2 The fact of personality
necessarily implies the existence of other personalities; for person-
ality involves ego and will, qualities which cannot, exist in vacua.
Ego and will must be asserted against other beings having the same
qualities of personality or they become nothing but words. The
idea of a universal state is, therefore, in the able professor's opinion,
preposterous. "In a single State," he reminds us, "the whole range
of culture could never be fully spanned; no single people could
unite the virtues of aristocracy and democracy. All nations, like all
individuals, have their limitations, but It Is exactly in the abundance
of these limited qualities that the genius of humanity is exhibited.
The rays of the Divine light are manifested, broken by countless
facets among the separate peoples, each one exhibiting another
picture and another idea of the whole. Every people has the right
to believe that certain attributes of the Divine reason are exhibited
In it to their fullest perfection." 2

Nature has assigned to the state, Treitschke explains, a twofold
function. On the one hand it supplies the legal unity and armed
force which maintain law and peace and order among the "mani-
fold and eternally clashing interests of society"; on the other it
preserves and defends the independence of its people against exter-
nal aggression. In performing this function it assumes the "rational
task of a legally constituted people, conscious of a destiny, [which
is] to assert its rank in the world's hierarchy and in its measure to

i Ibid., p. 17. 2 Ibid., p. 19.

THE NEW NATIONALISM

participate In the great civilizing mission of mankind.33 * Obviously
the state cannot execute this function unless it has power to choose
its own course and compel submission on the part of Its subjects.
The essence of the state, therefore, "consists in its incompatibility
with any power over it." 2 This attribute of unqualified sovereignty7
is so rooted In the nature of the state that it may be deemed the
"verv standard and criterion" of state existence. Moreover, It

* *

carries the fundamental moral Implication that the state "cannot
legitimately tolerate any power above its own" 2 and the equally
fundamental moral and political implication that it must of right
enjoy cca temporal freedom entailing a variety of material resources
adequate to Its protection against hostile Influences." 2

Here we arrive at the heart of Treitschke's imperialism. Without
equivocation did he assert that the Intrinsic nature of the state gives
it the right to be self-sufficing. By this he meant and emphatically
declared that it has the right to be large enough to insure the con-
tinuance of the race and adequate in man-power and economic
resources to cc assert Its native strength as against any given group
of neighbors." 3 Otherwise, he maintained, it would always be "on
the verge of losing its characteristics as a State." 3

Was this a downright extenuation. Ignoring all moral considera-
tions, of the right of might? Treltschke did not think so. Machia-
velli's mistake, he thought, had been his failure to perceive that
political power is not an end in Itself, but an agency of that higher
morality which looks to the utmost welfare of mankind. For clear
thinking, he contended. It must be understood that "the moral
benefits for which we are indebted to the State are above all price." 4
It is evident beyond dispute, he says, that culture "matures more
happily in the broader conditions of powerful countries than within
the narrow limits of a little State"; 5 that "the material resources
favourable to Art and Science are more abundant in a large
State"; 5 and that history proves that ccin the normal course of a
people's development the zenith of its political power coincides with
that of its literary excellence." 5 The small state can perform no
service to mankind equal to that of a great commonwealth, and
"The entire development of European polity tends unmistakably
to drive the second-rate Powers into the background. . . . On
closer examination then, it becomes clear that if the State is power,

1 Ibid., p. 22. 2 Ibid., p. 26. 3 Ibid,, pp. 31-32. 4 Ibid., p. 34, 5 Ibid., p. 36.

604 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

only that State which has power realizes Its own idea, and this
accounts for the undeniably ridiculous element which we discern
in the existence of a small State.5' l Hence the supreme morality of
ultra-nationalism.

Having thus supplied an ethical basis for imperialism, it was in-
evitable that Treitschke should try to make a case for the political
tactics by which Imperialism seeks Its ends. Because of its sover-
eignty, he reasoned, no state can be absolutely bound, legally or
morallv bv any form of international agreement. Were it other-

* * ^ rf

wise, the state would lose its power of self-determination and thus
cease to be sovereign. When a state enters into a treaty, it has not
bound Itself irrevocably. It does no more than adopt a voluntary
self-restriction, involving the implied reservation that it may be
repudiated at will. The parties to every treaty know they cannot
contract away their sovereignty and still remain states. Hence
there can be no justification for charges of broken faith, immorality,
or even illegality, if one of them decides to renounce the agreement.
Treaties are made to gain certain values, and every state must be its
own judge of whether a treaty remains effective for those purposes.
This right cannot be challenged; for every sovereign state undoubt-
edly has the right at any time to declare war and thus terminate a
treaty. Granted that right, it must be admitted to have the inferior
right of termination without resort to war.

Though proclaiming that "the Ideal towards which we strive is a
harmonious comity of nations, who, concluding treaties of their own
free will, admit restrictions upon their sovereignty without abro-
gating it," 2 Treitschke had no confidence in arbitration or any
other form of international conciliation Involving submission to any
authority or judgment external to the state itself. "When a nation's
existence is at stake," he wrote, "there is no outside Power whose
Impartiality can be trusted. ... It is, moreover, a point of honour
for a State to solve such difficulties for itself. International treaties
may indeed become more frequent, but a finally decisive tribunal
of the nations is an impossibility. The appeal to arms will be valid
until the end of history, and therein lies the sacredness of war.33 3
The sacredness of war ! Is the man a fiend? Sanctity in mass
murder ! Can he defend so monstrous a doctrine as that? He can
and does. "The State." he protests, "is not an Academy of Arts. If

i/«£, pp. 33-34. 2 Ibid., pp. 27-28. 3 Ibid., p. 29,

THE NEW NATIONALISM

V

it neglects its strength in order to promote the Idealistic aspi
of man, It repudiates its own nature and perishes. This Is In truth"
for the State equivalent to the sin against the Holy Ghost.
However flexible the conception of sovereignty may be, we are not
to Infer from that any self-contradiction, but rather a necessitv to
establish in what its pith and kernel consists. Legally It lies in' the
competence to define the limits of Its own authority, and politically
in the appeal to arms. ... A defenceless State may be termed a
Kingdom for conventional or courtly reasons, but science, whose
first duty is accuracy, must boldly declare that in point of fact such
a country no longer takes rank as a State. This, then, is the only real
criterion. The right of arms distinguishes the State from all other
forms of corporate life, and those who cannot take up arms for
themselves may not be regarded as States. . . ." l

To a critic of his militarism Treitschke would have replied that
he was not a chauvinist but a realist; that he was not glorifying war
but simply pointing out the fact that states lacking the right and
the capacity to make war have for all practical purposes lost the
quality which makes a state a state, and the further fact also that
states lacking the will and the means to achieve self-sufficiency are
on the road to extinction. Only through military power, he was
convinced, could a state preserve Its statehood and fulfill Its ap-
pointed destiny.

Treitschke's shift from liberalism to reactionlsm scarcely appears
to be a reversal when we grasp his conception of political society.
The condition of man in the state, he affirmed, is one of mutual in-
terdependence, this interdependence being the consequence of the
natural and inevitable inequality of men as to ability, property,
attainments, and everything else. You cannot have human Inter-
course, he said, without various and infinite manifestations of in-
equality in family relations, economic conditions, class rivalries5 and
what not. It must be conceded, therefore, that the state presupposes
inequality. Even though it would, the state cannot banish inequal-
ity, and that is not Its function. The true function of the state,
according to Treitschke, is to bind men together despite their in-
equalities and antagonisms, and to maintain a balanced and orderly
society. "In short," as he put it, "all social life Is built upon class or-
ganization. Wise legislation may prevent it from being oppressive

1 Ibid., pp. 25-30.

606 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

and make the transition from class to class as easy as possible, but
no power on earth will ever be able to substitute a newT and arti-
ficial organization of society for the distinctions between its groups
which have arisen naturally and automatically." 1

Treitschke was a liberal in the sense that he favored "wise legisla-
tion55 to mitigate the evils of inequality as far as possible, but a re-
actionary in the sense that he opposed all attempts to sweep away
the class system entirely. All in all he thought that the conditions of
mutual interdependence under which political society exists tends
naturally in the direction of aristocracy. "To pur it simply," said
he, "the masses must forever remain the masses. There would be
no culture without kitchen maids. Obviously education could never
thrive if there was nobody to do the rough work. Millions must
plough and forge and dig in order that a few thousands may write
and paint and study. It sounds harsh, but it is true for all time, and
whining and complaining can never alter it." l Not only did Treit-
schke think class distinctions ineradicable; he also believed them to
be desirable and beneficial. cclt is precisely in the differentiation
of classes," he stated, "that the moral wealth of mankind is ex-
hibited. The virtues of wealth stand side by side with those of
poverty, with which we neither could nor should dispense, and
which by their vigor and sincerity put to shame the j aded victim of
over-culture. . . . Want is a relative conception. It is the task of
government to reduce and mitigate distress, but its abolition is
neither possible nor desirable." 2

It was not Treitschke's belief, however, that the state should be
used as an organ of class domination. On the contrary, he was most
emphatic in the declaration that it should stand above all social
antagonisms, maintaining unity and order and meting out justice.
In so doing it would necessarily take human beings as nature had
created them and treat them as nature required. But it was not
Treitschke's opinion that the state should compass the whole life of
its people. The Hegelian concept of the Leviathan state absorbing
the whole of social existence did not make sense to him. The only
purpose of the state, he said, was "to surround the whole, regulating
and protecting it." 3 Thus, although the state did not swallow up
the whole of society, it did perform a service of transcendant im-
portance. For it was only through the state, he believed, that the

., pp. 41-42. 2 jbidfy pp> 44.45^

THE NEW NATIONALISM 607

great natural forces by which a people must build its culture and
achieve its destiny could be harnessed and made to work. Because
of this belief in the crucial importance of the state, Treltschke
severely condemned Jews, Catholics, socialists, and all other groups
which stood apart from complete coalescence with the body politic.

111

o

The sturdy old pedagogue of Berlin is generally accounted the
most influential political thinker of imperial Germany. The stamp
of Treitschke's philosophy upon the German political mind since
1870 is as clear as the statecraft of Bismarck and Hitler. Nor have
the effects of this exaltation of the national state been confined to
Germany alone. National spirit has permeated the world, and
champions of virulent nationalism in many other countries have ap-
preciated the power of Treitschke's ideology and have made effec-
tive use of it. The new nationalism held the center of the stage in
Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and militant Japan, and has been
somewhat more than a negligible influence in the policies of Russia,
Great Britain, France, and the United States.

True, there emerged in the latter part of the nineteenth and the
first years of the twentieth century a vigorous and hopeful interna-
tionalism. Movements for the development and perfection of inter-
national law, organizations for the promotion of peace, and agencies
of international adjustment and conciliation sprang up in great
numbers. A vast and eloquent literature of internationalism came
into being during the same period. Hundreds of books and pam-
phlets were written on the theme that war is not only the great curse
of civilization but the supreme insanity7- of mankind, fatal alike to
victor and vanquished. The various biological, psychological., socio-
logical, and economic arguments for war were examined and re-
futed. Nationalism was put in the dock and condemned as the
enemy of peace, security, progress, and prosperity.

But in spite of all this valiant endeavor to down it, the new na-
tionalism prevailed. It brought on World War I; and, regardless
of all efforts, following the War, to implement the world for inter-
national cooperation, it could not be suppressed. It dominated the
Peace Conference, emasculated the League of Nations, debilitated
the World Court, made a mockery of the Kellogg-Briand Pact,
wrecked a long series of disarmament conferences, and set the stage

608 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

for a new Armageddon. First among the gods was Mars, and
Treltschke was his prophet.

REFERENCES

Barker, E., Nietzsche and Treitschke (Oxford, 1914).

Coker, F. W., Recent Political Theory (New York, 1934), Chap. XVI.

Davis, H. C. W., The Political Thought of Heinrich von Treitschke (New York,

1915).

Dewey, J., German Philosophy and Politics (rev. ed., New York, 1942).
Dunning, W. A., A History of Political Theories from Rousseau to Spencer (New

York, 1920), Chap. VIII.

Hausrath3 A., Treitschke: His Life and Works (London, 1914).
Hayes, C. J. H., Essays on Nationalism (New York, 1926).
Kohn, H., The Idea of Nationalism (New York, 1944).
Kohn, H., Prophets and Peoples (New York, 1946).
Spahr, M.5 Readings in Recent Political Philosophy (New York, 1935), pp. 297-

312.

Willoughby, W. W., Prussian Political Philosophy (New York, 1918).
Zimmern3 A. (ed.), Modern Political Doctrines (London, 1939).

CHAPTER XXIX

DISILLUSION
I

THE fhorning sun of January 1, 1901, illumined a hopeful,
If not entirely happy, world. Few regretted the passing of
the nineteenth century. Few had serious misgivings about
the future. The nineteenth had been a stupendous century. No
hundred-year span in the whole human record had been more
crammed with significant and memorable things. The first half ,
of the nineteenth century had been a period of unprecedented
storm and confusion — of general war and of social, economic, and
political revolution. But the second half of the century had been
different. Although there had been a continuation of travail and
ill-adjustment, although there had been no cessation of deep-work-
ing changes and innovations, there had been marked slowing of
the tempo of violent conflict. This gave men faith and courage to
face the future. The Victorian Era may have been just a momen-
tary pause in the onrush of the hurricane of social forces, but to
those who experienced its peace and prosperity it was a warrant of
confidence in better things to come. It was reasonable to hope and
believe, after fifty years of relative quiet, that the new century
could not fail to bring greater material progress and also greater
harmony among men.

Looking back with the wisdom of hindsight sharpened by the
ordeal of two world wars, we can see now that the optimism which
prevailed at the turn of the century was scarcely justified by the
facts. Beneath the surface all through the Victorian Era, and not
always wholly beneath, were signs to warn the thoughtful observer f
of trouble ahead. Bitter national rivalries several times threatened /
to precipitate a general war. The storm did not break, but thev
demonic forces of nationalism went uncurbed. Men could have
seen that this was true, but very few did. Men could have seen
and did see that great armies and navies were being created on
every hand, portentous instruments of destruction; but they chose
to believe that all of these ominous preparations would lead not to a
trial of strength but to an equilibrium of forces and a stabilization

609

610 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

of the existing order. In such a setting of unexampled peace and
prosperity as that In which the nineteenth century closed, it was
hard to believe that nations ever could be insane enough to use
their power to destroy everything that had made them great.

This illusion was no doubt strengthened by the economic pros-
pects of mankind at the turn of the century. Never had they seemed
more propitious. The hard times of the nineties had' passed, and
all signs seemed to point to a long and bountiful period of business
expansion. Currencies had been stabilized throughout the world
and virtually standardized. Unemployment had been largely
wiped out in all countries, and the menacing radicalisms which
had raised their heads in preceding political and economic crises
seemed to have subsided. Such mutterings of discontent as were still
heard among the agrarian and laboring classes could be dismissed
as rumbling echoes of dangers no\v receding into the past. Despite
increasingly nationalistic tariffs and other trade restrictions, world
trade was on the boom and world finance was ready and eager to
underwrite It. Though admittedly economic rivals, national states
could not carry economic rivalry to its ultimate political conclusions
without risking the loss of all economic security. This seemed un-
thinkable.

Most misleading of all were the apparently golden prospects of
democratic government. Democracy seemed to be winning on
every front and evolving gradually a vigorous perfection. Great
Britain, France, the United States, and many lesser countries
could be regarded as full-fledged, if not entirely perfect, democra-
cies. Even In Italy, Germany, Russia, Japan, and other ancient
strongholds of despotism, visible progress toward democratization
was thought to be in evidence. That popular self-rule was soon to
be the boon of mankind throughout the world could hardly be
doubted. And who could believe that democracy was not the
surest and quickest road to the universal brotherhood of man?

Yet it was a fact that the twentieth, unless it turned out to
be unlike all preceding centuries, could never be much more than
an heir of the past. The twentieth inherited from the nineteenth,
the eighteenth, and all former centuries certain societal structures,
certain cultural trends, certain material modes and means of
action, and certain sets of ideas. Could the twentieth century
escape Its heritage? Could it break sharply with the past and

DISILLUSION 611

march in wholly new directions? Could it realize only the dreams
and none of the despairs of its progenitors? Multitudes of people
at the beginning of the twentieth century wanted to believe some-
thing like that, and did. As a consequence, multitudes of people,
before the twentieth century was half spent, were more sadly
disillusioned than ever before in modem times. Not since the
breakup of thfe Roman world order has civilized man viewed his
earthly future as darkly as he does now at the midpoint of the
twentieth century.

II

The heritage of the twentieth century was as complex as could J
have been bequeathed by the whirling tangle of social forces released
in preceding centuries. It was a heritage neither of good nor of bad,
but of both, inseparably intertwined. The new age could not in-
herit the one without the other. In truth, no one could fifty years
ago or can now infallibly distinguish the good from the bad. The
end results of social forces are never clearly foreseeable. Moreover,
when in the long course of social evolution, results of a final charac-
ter are reached, the men who prejudged them as good or bad have
passed from the earth. A new set of men with a new set of values
judges from a new point of view whether the results have been good
or bad. Let us not, therefore, attempt to describe the heritage of the
twentieth century as good or bad; let us not even indulge the pleas-
antly deterministic temptation to say that it was bound to produce
the particular results that occurred; let us merely sum it up as a
revealing backdrop for twentieth-century political thought.

The twentieth century inherited the protean industrialism of
the nineteenth century and all of the sociological possibilities that
came along with it. Progressive advances in the technology of
production and distribution, and equally revolutionary changes in
the organization and control of the basic factors of economic life,
especially capital and labor, passed on to the twentieth century
an industrial system unlike anything the world had known be-
fore. Thus handed on to the twentieth century were colossal
empires of manufacturing, of merchandising, of transportation, of
communication, and of finance, intertwined with social and po-
litical structures that were partly new and partly old. Problems
of greater magnitude and intricacy than men had ever before

612 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

sought to solve by social mechanisms — problems of property,
problems of employer and employee, problems of fair trade,
problems of consumer protection, and many others — were in-
discriminately flung into the lap of the twentieth century for solu-
tion. What the twentieth century should have done with these
highly involved and technical problems, what It could have done,
and what it did do are questions that will be debased as long as
men wrestle with social issues. Only one thing is certain: the
twentieth century had to face those problems; it could not escape

them.

Alono- with the industrialism of its predecessor, the twentieth

"*• O

century also Inherited a rapidly rising tide of proletarlanism — not
merely proletarianlsm in the intellectual sense but as a widespread
social condition. In the early nineteenth century Thomas Jeff erson,
fearing the "canaille of the cities55 and perceiving the dangers in-
herent In a society made up largely of dispossessed urban population,
had dreamed and worked to establish an American society of small,
independent landed proprietors. All of this planning was undone in
the United States by advancing Industrialization and its faithful
consort, urbanization. The United States became a land of cities;
so did Great Britain and most of continental Europe; so did those
portions of the Orient where Industrialism spread. This concentra-
tion of population in urban centers was destined to reach its cul-
mination in the twentieth century. The major part of the popula-
tion in the Industrialized sections of the world came to consist of city
dwellers who had no landed property, never much property of any
other sort, and were utterly dependent for a livelihood upon their
daily earnings in salaries or wages. Unemployment, even for a brief
time, meant great distress for these urban proletarians; and eco-
nomic insecurity was their common lot, because the circumstances
of their employment were subject to the fortunes of an industrial
system and the whims of a management over which they had no
control. Proletarian politics and economics assumed a leading role
In the affairs of the twentieth century.

The twentieth century was likewise to witness the arrival of a new
agrarianism, another by-product of the new industrialism. Sub-
sistence farming gave way to commercial farming and manual-
labor farming to mechanized farming. The need for manpower
in agriculture underwent an enormous decline. More and more

DISILLUSION 613

people had to so to the cities to find employment; and the remain-

r j. <•— * if t

Ing farm population lost Its Independence and self-sufficiency, as It
no longer produced for Its own consumption but for sale in the
markets of the world. Economic Insecurity began to dog the farmer
almost as persistently as his proletarian brother of the cities.

The strident and swelling nationalism of the nineteenth century
came down to the twentieth century in a particularly aggravated

* J. * OO

form. Bv the close of the nineteenth centurv It had become national
* /

Imperialism, and not merely the dynastic Imperialism of the pre-
industrial ages., but aggressive economic imperialism. National
Independence, national unity, and national expansion had become
definitely linked with capitalistic concerns. A nation was still pri-
marily a politically united people, but in addition It had become a
people united behind tariff walls for subsidizing its own Industries;
united in financial and other measures for aiding its business Inter-
ests to invade and capture foreign markets, united In colonial
policies to secure needed raw materials and maintain sure outlets
for Its manufactured commodities, united in extending and pro-
tecting the Investments of Its citizens In colonial domains and foreign
countries, united in the promotion of shipping under Its own flag —
united, in short, as a gigantic economic organism not content with
political independence alone, but seeking economic independence
and oftentimes economic predominance. This was to prove the
most grievous heritage of the twentieth century1".

As though to render Its Industrial and nationalistic heritage the
more distressing, the twentieth century wras also heir to an increas-
ingly embittered conflict over the nineteenth-century Institution
of free enterprise. Economic nationalism and free enterprise are
incompatibles. The nineteenth century made a fetish of free en-
terprise and enshrined the doctrine of laissez faire as a veritable
law of God. But the nineteenth century also fostered economic
nationalism. It did not occur to nineteenth-century magnates of
industry, to nineteenth-century fanners, workers, and professional
people — in fact, It occurred to very few nineteenth-century thinkers
and writers — that the economic solidarity of a nation can be had
only at the price of collective control and regulation. This lesson
had to be learned in the twentieth century. One of the paradoxical
phenomena of the twentieth century would be the attempt of many
leading countries to avoid collectivism^ promote economic na-

614 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

tionalism to their own gain, and foster some sort of economic
internationalism all at the same time.

Down to the twentieth century also came many of the political
embroilments of the past. Democracy seemed to be winning, but
the final returns were not in. Autocracy held on In several Im-
portant sectors of the world; and In every country which had ac-
cepted the democratic principle there were still serious difficulties In
working out the constitutional arrangements essential to the needs
of a democratic society. The problem of representation had not
been solved, nor the problem of suffrage, nor that of elections.
Fully effective democratic control of the processes of government
was yet far from accomplished. There was universal dissatisfaction
with popularly elected legislatures, a symptom of grave shortcom-
ings of composition and procedure. In some democratic countries
the administrative system was so poorly constructed and so per-
meated with politics that honest and efficient management was a
rarity. Even the courts, usually the most respected and trusted
branches of democratic government, were often accused of bias
and incompetence, If not worse. Prominent and thoughtful leaders
of opinion, even in democratic countries, were still voicing doubts
about the ultimate success of democratic institutions, and there
were signs of anti-democratic reactlonism in many quarters. The
twentieth century was destined to witness a tremendous resurgence
of authoritarianism and an epic struggle for preservation of demo-
cratic government.

Ill

In the realm of political thought the heritage of the twentieth
century was a Babel of clamorous and contradictory "isms."
There was a large carry-over of the ideologies of rationalism, ir-
rationalisrn, metaphysical idealism, utilitarianism, proletarianism,
socialism, anarchism, individualism, positivism, evolutionism, rac-
ism, nationalism, and many more. It was the most variegated as-
sortment of doctrines any century had received from the past,
and the most confusing. Twentieth-century thinkers had great
difficulty in compounding them into systems. Philosophers could
put together no philosophy that would serve as an adequate
rationale for the unformed and swiftly changing political and
economic life of the time. Scientists could unfold no science suffi-

DISILLUSION 615

cient to explain the unknowns of social existence or direct Its
forward course. Moreover, the furious pace of events allowed little
lime or opportunity for detached thinking. Even before the twen-
tieth century had reached adolescence it \vas caught up In the
vortex of the first World War, and before it came to middle a^e It

s O

had passed through a prolonged and world-wide economic depres-
sion and a second World War. And the last named cataclvsm was

it

climaxed by the fission of the atom, the Invention of the atomic
bomb, and revolutionary possibilities of atomic energy as a practical
Instrumentality of both peace and war In the Immediate future.

Twentieth-century political philosophy could not keep abreast
of Its era. Things happened too fast. The changes were too sudden
and too revolutionary. Up to the middle of the twentieth century
no new philosophies had emerged. Although there was an abun-
dance of theorizing and rationalizing, they took the form of working
over old doctrines to fit new conditions and situations. The prole-
tarians stood pat on the dogmas of Marx and Engels; the Fascists
helped themselves to generous borrowings from Machiavelli,
Hobbes, Hegel, Treltschke, and various other useful sources; the
Nazis took what they wanted from Fascism and added certain
choice ingredients of traditionalism, evolutionism, and racism;
the constitutionalists, liberals, and democrats harked back to
eighteenth-century individualism and nineteenth-century utili-
tarianism; the jurists continued to debate the old question of the
nature of law and to explore the concept of sovereignty, drawing
heavily from Kant, Hegel, Savlgny, Austin^ Maine, Gomte, and
other thinkers of the past; the nationalists and Imperialists echoed
Burke, Mazzini, Fichte, Hegel, Treitschke, and other pioneers of
nationalistic thought; the Internationalists and cosmopolitans re-
traced the unlversalistic thought of all former ages; even the prag-
matists, the one largely American stream of thought in the twentieth
century, owed much to the empirical and utilitarian Ideologies of
the two preceding centuries.

The strictly political question which dwarfed all others as the
twentieth century moved forward was that which Herbert Spencer
had posed as the Man versus the State. In Spencer's nineteenth-
century view it had been the Individual man versus the state. As
seen by the twentieth century, the problem was that and much
more. It came to be increasingly apparent that the relation of the

616 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

individual man to the state was not separable from that of mankind
versus the state. It was fully clear, by the middle of the twentieth
century, that the whole of mankind was headed for some sort of

t y

collectivism. It also seemed clear, barring some unforeseeable
reversal of trends, that it would be state collectivism, chiefly if not
exclusively. The position of the individual man and his ultimate
fate in the world would hinge upon the collectivistic political system
to wrhich he belonged and upon its situation in a world of political
collectivities. The status of the individual in one system of state
collectivism would not necessarily be the same as in any other;
but one thing was certain: the circumstances of all men, everywhere,
would be state-determined, and would be determined by the
functioning of collectivism on a world-wide, as well as on a state-
wide, scale.

Would mankind be state-ridden or state-served? In principle
there was only one answer to that question. There was no disagree-
ment on the proposition that the only legitimate function of the
state is to serve its people and to serve mankind in general. But as
to the type of state most likely or unlikely to fulfill that ideal, there
was wide and violent disagreement. And there was similar disagree-
ment as to the methods, processes, and policies of state action most
suited to realize the general welfare. All twentieth-century political
theories tended, therefore, to fall into categories determined by
their author's partiality toward totalitarianism, Sovietism, or con-
stitutional democracy — the major state systems of the time.

REFERENCES

Barnes, H. E., Living in the Twentieth Century (Indianapolis, 1928).

Beard, C. A. (ed.), A Century of Progress (New York, 1933).

Reinsch, P. S., World Politics at the End of the Nineteenth Century (New

York, 1900).

Roucek, J. S. (ed.), Twentieth Century Political Thought (New York, 1946).
Slichter, S. H., Modern Economic Society (New York, 1931).
"The Latest Age," The Cambridge Modem History (Cambridge, 1910),

Vol. XII.

CHAPTER XXX

THE STREAMS OF DOCTRINE

I

THE main streams of twentieth-century political doctrine
flowed in the ancient river beds of individualism and collec-
tivism, democracy and .authoritarianism; but these were
abundantly fed, and sometimes deeply colored, by many tributary
streams of more recent origin. This contribution \vas highly im-
portant. It greatly swelled the volume of the principal flows, and
frequently changed their appearance to such an extent that they
seemed to take on a new and different guise. The later Ideologies
may not have fundamentally altered the older doctrines, but In
many Instances they added new twists; and one thing is certain:
they save twentieth-century political thought a new vocabulary

J ^tmJ

and a new jargon. Because of them, the student of twentieth-
century political thought must familiarize himself with the meaning

of such terms as traditionalism, Social Darwinism, racism, Irra-
tionalism, elitism, pluralism, pragmatism, and syndicalism.

II

One of the most influential streams of twentieth-century thought,
one almost too important to be considered merely as a tributary,
was that which emanated from the Darwinian theory of evolution.
There was nothing particularly new In the Idea of evolution; that
idea had been current in the world since the time of the Greeks,
and the German Idealists, especially Hegel, had given it a central
place in their systems. It was not the evolutionism of Darwin that
was revolutionary, but his explanation of how evolution works.
Previous explanations of the methodology of evolution had been
vague and not Intelligibly related to facts and forces men could see
in the world around them. Darwin's theory was strictly biological
and so were his explanations. The struggle for existence, natural
selection, variation, and the survival of the fittest were processes
that could be perceived by anyone with half an eye for what was
going on in organic life. Moreover, Darwin and other biologists
piled up mountains of evidence showing that they had always been

617

618 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

going on and had a definite causal connection with the origin and
development of biological species.

As for Darwin himself, his theory was purely biological. He
made no effort to draw philosophical or sociological inferences.
But other men did. It was impossible to escape the conclusion
(though Darwin did not press it) that man himself, on the biological
side, was a product of the Darwinian processes of Evolution and
was subject to those processes in his future development. Virtually
all biologists came to that conclusion. Social theorists did not lag
far behind. Among the leaders were Herbert Spencer, the English
philosopher and man of science, Walter Bagehpt, an English banker
and writer on social subjects, and Ludwlg Gumplowicz, an eminent
Austrian sociologist and university teacher. These and their many
disciples came to be known as Social Darwinists, because of their
belief that the social life of man is subject to the same Darwinian
principles of evolution as his physical life. The work of Spencer
Bagehot, and Gumplowicz was practically all done in the nine-
teenth century, but the impact of their doctrines carried over with
great force to the twentieth century.

Although the Social Darwinists disagreed widely among them-
selves on many points of evolutionary theory and often reached
widely divergent conclusions, they were in substantial agreement
on certain basic postulates. All agreed that human society in
all its forms is the product of some sort of struggle for existence or
survival; all agreed that the current development of social life
and Institutions is shaped by such a struggle; all agreed that natural
selection operates in some way to determine survival; all agreed
that survival is evidence of special fitness to meet the conditions
of life; and all agreed that man cannot change the methods of
evolution, cannot shape social development according to his own
arbitrary concepts but must get in line with the forces of evolution
and work with them. In short, the Social Darwinists stood solidly
for the proposition that the state and all other forms of social
organization are not something that is made but something that
grows. Thus they gave scientific aid and comfort to all kinds of
traditionalism and gradualism. They also stood solidly for the
proposition that growth is largely shaped and conditioned by the
vicissitudes of a blind struggle, thus providing a scientific basis for
irrationalism and anti-Intellectualism. They stood together, too,

THE STREAMS OF DOCTRINE 610

on the proposition that decisive factors in natural selection are
heredity and environment, thus supplying the footing for an almost
Indiscriminate eclecticism.

But acceptance of these basic postulates did not preclude dia-
metrically opposite conclusions as to their significance and out-
working. Spencer and the Social Darwinists of his persuasion
drew from them an argument for laissezfaire more dogmatic and
extreme than anything advanced by Adam Smith and die classical
economists. But Spencer's organismic concept of the state could be
used, and was freely employed, by thinkers at the opposite pole of
political belief to sustain the thesis that the state Is the all in all.
The Social Darwinism of Bagehot gave strong support to all
varieties of traditionalism, irrationalism, and authoritarianism; it
was also a convenient prop for collectivism. For Bagehot viewed
the struggle for survival as primarily a struggle between groups
and societies, and was of the opinion that natural selection favors
the most homogeneous, the most cohesive, and the best disciplined
groups. Gumplowicz built his whole system of sociology on Dar-
winian principles and reached the conclusion, later much elaborated
by his disciples, that conquest is the mother of political Institutions.

Social Darwinism also nourished another body of thought, not
in itself strictly political, but of tremendous import in twentieth-
century political ideologies. This was what has come to be known
as racism. The subject of race has always held the attention of
students of human kind, and there have been countless theories
of racial origins and endless explanations of racial differences. It
was inevitable that the Darwinian formula should be appropriated
to such purposes, and it clearly gave better answers than any
previous doctrine. Anthropologists and ethnologists were able to
accumulate a vast body of objective facts tending to show that the
anatomical and other physical differences between the various
species of mankind were the result of natural selection. Such marks
of race as the color of the skin, the texture of the hair, the shape of
the head, the form of the nose were conceived to be evolutionary
variations transmissible by heredity. Were there also mental, emo-
tional, and moral differences likewise transmissible from parents
to offspring? On this question there was a great dearth of objec-
tive evidence. But that lack did not deter the theorists at all

In the last half of the nineteenth century a number of writers

620 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

took up the theme that evolution not only has created the races of
mankind but has made them immutably unequal. The leading
advocate of this doctrine, and the most influential on subsequent
racial dogmas, was Count Arthur de Gobineau, a French diplomat
and man of letters. There were invisible differences between the
different races of man, according to Gobineau, as well as visible
ones; and the Invisible were by far the more important, because
they had to do with the qualities of mind, morals, and culture.
These invisible differences were innate and, of course, hereditary.
In the struggle for survival, said Gobineau, natural selection had
endowed each race with permanent characteristics, but the perma-
nent characteristics of some races were much superior to those of
other races. At the top of his scale Gobineau placed the white race,
then the yellow, and lowest of all the black. In like manner he
classified the subdivisions of the major races, placing the so-called
Aryans at the head of the white race. Gobineau had much to
say about the mixture of races. A little mixture of superior racial
stocks he thought good — likely to contribute to the evolution of
still better races; but too great a mixture, especially that which
results in the inundation of a higher race by a lower one, was wholly
bad. The chief cause of the decline of the great civilizations of the
past, Gobineau argued, had been racial degeneration caused by
the dilution of superior stocks by inferior ones.

The twentieth century saw racism after the style of Gobineau
grow into a world-wide cult. Shoals of books and essays were
produced on all phases of the subject. A few were scholarly, scien-
tific, and usually inconclusive; the great majority, however, were
purely doctrinaire. Influential schools of racial doctrine arose in
all countries, but it was in Germany, under the principal tutelage
of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, that racism came to be most
closely linked with actual public policy. Chamberlain was an
Englishman who became a German citizen and married the
daughter of Richard Wagner, the great composer. Not only was
Chamberlain an ardent disciple of Gobineau; he became deeply
imbued with the idea that the Germanic races, particularly those
resident in modern Germany, had shown themselves to be the
finest product of racial evolution. He wrote a book ( The Foundations
of the Nineteenth Century) to prove this point and to set forth at length
Ms whole racial philosophy. Probably no other book was more

THE STREAMS OF DOCTRINE 621

widely read in Germany in the first quarter of the twentieth century.
It was enthusiastically read and endorsed by Kaiser Wilhelm II,
who helped raise a fund to place a copy of it in every library in the
country.

In the main Chamberlain followed Gobineau, though lie added
many special touches of his own. One of these was anti-Semitism.
Chamberlain*conceded that the Jews are in some respects a superior
race, but held that their qualities are so different from those of the
Germanic peoples and so incompatible with Christian civilization
that intermarriage with Jews would lead to the decay of the German
race and of German, culture. Even the presence of Jews in the
German population was dangerous. Another idea which Chamber-
lain specially stressed was that the Germanic peoples, by keeping
themselves racially purer than the Latins and the Slavs, rescued
civilization from extinction in the chaos following the decay of the
Roman Empire and became the world's chief hope for the preserva-
tion and advancement of civilization. To succeed in this historic
mission, the German peoples not only must be united but must
keep their precious Teutonic blood pure and undefiled.

Chamberlain died in 1926, twenty-seven years after the publica-
tion of his The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century. In that interval
he gained a vast following in Germany. A younger group of German
race theorists, consisting of such figures as Hans Giinther, Eugen
Fischer, Fritz Lenz, and Alfred Rosenberg, took over his main
ideas and endeavored to bring them more fully into harmony with
the newer teachings of biology, anthropology, and ethnology. In
other countries similar attempts were made to reconcile the basic
doctrines of Gobineau and Chamberlain with orthodox science.
Prominent among the writers engaged in this enterprise were
Alfred P. Schultz, Lothrop Stoddard, Madison Grant, Homer Lea,
and Henry F. Osborn — all of them Americans. Racism gained
a large following in England, too, its leading proponents being
Grant Allen, Isaac Taylor, Lord Charles Beresford, and Cecil

Rhodes.

Also spawned by Social Darwinism were the eugenists, a school
of thinkers and writers devoted to the improvement of the human
species by the application of sound biological principles. The
eugenists hold that heredity is the principal factor in the evolution
both of the human body and of the innate capacities for thought

622 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

and action which make the difference between superior and inferior
individuals. Betterment of the human species, say the eugenists,
can come only when men recognize and abide by the lawrs of
heredity. Specifically, this means that persons \vho are physically,
mentally, or morally defective should not be allowed to reproduce
their kind. Since there was small likelihood that this could ever
be effected by voluntary methods, eugenists argued that it was not
only a proper function but a vital duty of the state to make and
enforce laws which would prevent the breeding of the unfit.
Eugenic doctrines gained enough momentum in many countries
to bring about the enactment of la\vs forbidding the marriage of
persons afflicted with certain physical and mental, ailments alleged
to be hereditary, requiring medical examination as a prerequisite
for marriage, and authorizing the sterilization of habitual criminals
and persons of low mentality. Not all of the eugenists were rac-
ists, but the more doctrinaire racists, especially in Germany, were
equally doctrinaire eugenists. In eugenics they saw a means of
giving practical application to their race theories.

Ill

The idea that feeling, instinct, and intuition are better guides for
political action than scientific reason \vas immensely popularized
by Rousseau in the eighteenth century. It was given a further lift
in the nineteenth century by the metaphysical idealists, especially
Hegel, who laid great stress upon unconscious reason, spirit, and
spiritual insight as bases of understanding. Before the end of the
nineteenth century this irrationalist trend had gone so far that con-
scious reason was entirely ruled out of court by many leading think-
ers. Schopenhauer, an eminent German philosopher, had formu-
lated the doctrine that the underlying cause of all that takes place
in the universe and on this earth is will; not conscious, rational
will, but blind, groping, struggling will. Consciousness, said Scho-
penhauer, is but a superficial aspect or phase of the all-perva-
sive and ever-driving energy that constitutes will. As conceived
by Schopenhauer, will has no definite purpose or goal and moves
in no comprehensible course; it merely acts, and that is all. Scho-
penhauer concluded, therefore, that the whole universe, including
man, must be utterly irrational, and that all attempts to subordinate
will to what men call reason are foolish.

THE STREAMS OF DOCTRINE 623

Nietzsche, a disciple of Schopenhauer and also a German, added
an idea which gave the doctrine of will high political potentiality.
He said that will, as manifested in living things, does have a pur-
pose, namely, to prevail and achieve dominance over other things.
Nietzsche called this the Will to Power. All living things, according
to Nietzsche, are actuated by the Will to Power; they struggle
unceasingly tc? overcome whatever opposes them or stands in their
way and thus gain ever more and more power. And they seek power
for power's sake, Nietzsche said; not for good, not for evil, not for
any reason save to satisfy their Insatiate craving for power. Scho-
penhauer's theory was pre-Darwinian; but Nietzsche was familiar
with the evolutionism of Darwin and blended it in with Ms theory
of will. Social evolution he viewed as nothing more than a never-
ending struggle for power, with natural selection favoring the
strongest and most ruthless. In the long run, thought Nietzsche, this
process would divide mankind Into two great classes — ordinary men
and supermen, the latter being so superior, because of the selective
evolutionary process that had produced them, that they would rule
the world. The supermen would be a race apart from ordinary
men, physically, mentally, and morally. Ordinary men would not
be able to match them in any way, and would be unable to do
otherwise than accept their domination. Of course the supermen
would be few In number compared with the ordinary men.

Another group of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
political thinkers whose ideas savored largely of irrationalisni and
Social Darwinism were the elitists, so called because of their central
doctrine that the state is always ruled and always must be ruled
by a small governing class termed the elite. The leading spokesmen
of this school were three university professors — Mosca_and Pareto,
both Italians, and Michels, a Swiss. Mosca contended that what-
ever the outward form of a political society (feudal, democratic,
capitalist, proletarian, or what not) there are always two classes,
the rulers and the ruled. The former always constitute a small
minority. It makes no difference, he said, that the constitution
may provide for universal suffrage, equality before the law, and
individual rights. The masses never can govern, never can be
organized so that they can govern. Minorities can be so organized,
and are. They gain and hold power over the masses, not by force,
but by adroitly manipulating the vanities, prejudices, and self-

624 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

Interest of the many. Mosca thought that the ruling class seldom
Is solidly united, but Is divided Into segments or sections which
struggle for pre-eminence In the state. It is through participation
in this struggle that individuals and groups attain positions of
power In the state. Although the basic motivation of every ruling
class or group is pre-eminence and power, |Moscaj>aid jhjsjs never
openly admitted, Onjhe^onfrary., each ruling^class orjgroup has a
"political formula" by which^ itJ^Y^^^j^tify *ts aspirations or
Its actual exercise of power.") This formula usually is a platitudinous
principle or ideal such as divine right, social contract, popular will,
democracy, social justice. Some ruling classes tend, he said, to be
liberal and others autocratic, depending on the factors conditioning
their tenure of power and the formula used to vindicate it. Mosca
himself favored a democratic regime, because he thought it obliged
the ruling class to be more moderate and more altruistic.

(Michels' doctrine of the "iron law of oligarchy" was based on the
fact, which he said was confirmed by all studies of human society,
that organization is both universal and indispensable. Without
organization, society not only cannot function but cannot even
exist, and this is conspicuously true of political society. To under-
stand how social and political systems really work, we must study
the phenomena of organization. Michels said that organization
necessarily requires leadership and that leadership always falls
into the hands of the few. This is just as true in churches, business
concerns, labor unions, and other voluntary organizations, said
Michels, as in the state; and just as true in democratic as in non-
democratic societies, A society may be perfectly democratic in
concept and purpose, but, he declared, it can never be democratic
in operation. The mechanics of organization make democratic
operation impossible. In large groups and societies, Michels
pointed out, the operation of the organization becomes a specialized
activity, and those having a special interest in that kind of thing
or a special talent for it take it in hand. Hence there arises within
every social organization a leadership of the minority. This leader-
ship nominally may represent the majority and be regarded as its
servant, but Michels was positive that it is never so in fact. The
majority never has as good means of controlling its leadership as
the leadership has of controlling the majority. This is because the
leaders, if they stand together, invariably can control the financial

THE STREAMS OF DOCTRINE 625

and disciplinary parts of the organization. With these the leader-
ship can always win any struggle with the rank and file of the
organization.

Pareto undertook a systematic presentation of the science of
society from the ^rationalist point of view. Logical or rational
conduct, he said, is that motivated by a deliberately held purpose
or goal which 4s pursued by means appropriate to the end. Non-
logical or irrational conduct, on the contrary, consists of actions
having no conscious motivation, or no feasible goal, or employing
means not suited to the attainment of a possible end. Pareto de-
voted a large portion of his great work. The Mind and Society, to data
tending to show that the actions which take place in political so-
ciety are more largely irrational than rational. Then he proceeded
to a close examination of irrational conduct. His studies led him to,
the conclusion that irrational conduct is mainly determined by
certain constant factors ("nuclei" or "residues'5) which change
very little from age to age and certain variable factors ("deriva-
tives") which are highly changeable. In Pareto's opinion the
constants are far more determinative than the variables. Indeed,
the variables, on careful analysis, are usually found to be nothing
more than verbal constructs— doctrines, dogmas, creeds, principles,
and the like — which men use to rationalize their irrational be-
havior. The constants are so deeply instinctive that men seldom
realize how fully they control human conduct. Among the con-
stants mentioned by Pareto are the instinct for combinations and
systems, the need for individual conformity with the group, the per-
sistence of groups and group ideologies, the innate tendency of all
individuals to guard and preserve those social conditions which they
identify with their own existence and interests, the urge for outward
expression of people's inner feelings about social conditions, and
the prevailing ideas and conventions about sex.

Every social system, said Pareto, is the scene of constant turmoil
and struggle, excited by the necessity of choosing courses of action
which will have utility in promoting the internal welfare of the
community and in increasing its strength in competition with other
communities. These issues are never settled by logical processes,
Pareto contended, but by the abiding power of the social "residues"
expressed, as a rule, through the elite classes of the community.
Every society, according to Pareto, is made up of classes. At the

626 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

bottom there Is the great mass of people; next above is the middle
class; at the top are the very few, who are the elite. Pareto was not
referring to economic stratification alone; he contended that there
is a lower class, middle class, and an elite for religion, science, art,
government, and, in truth, for every kind of human activity. The
elites determine the character of the society — the political elite its
government, the economic elite its commerce and industry, the
religious elite its faith, the scientific elite its technical achievement,
and so on. One of the most important aspects of the social proc-
ess, as seen by Pareto, is what he termed the circulation of the
elites. For reasons such as death, loss of wealth, inability to keep
abreast of change, decline of skill, and failure in competition,
every elite class is constantly losing members; but there is also a
constant pressure upward from members of the lower classes
striving to hoist themselves into the elites. In a perfectly free
society, said Pareto, this would result in a free and constant circula-
tion of the elites. But no society is perfectly free; all are made
more or less rigid and resistant to change by the social "residues."
Consequently the equilibrium of every society is subject to greater
or less disturbance all the time by reason of the forces working for
the freer circulation of the elites and those resisting it. If the rigidity
of the social system is so great that circulation of the elites is seriously
impeded, violence is likely to occur.

Twentieth-century pragmatism often has been viewed as merely
a more recent version of utilitarianism. It does have utilitarian
characteristics, but in one respect it stands in sharp contrast with
the utilitarianism of the nineteenth century. The utilitarianism of
Bentham and his disciples was wholly rationalistic, whereas the
pragmatism of James, Bergson, and Dewey proceeds on a footing
of irrationalism and Social Darwinism. The pragmatists have been
highly critical of all philosophies of determinism. They deny the
possibility of discovering any body of fixed and invariable laws
which predetermine all that takes place in the universe, in this
world, and in the affairs of mankind. Hence they also deny the
possibility of solving the problems of mankind by strictly ration-
alistic methods. The pragma tist view is that the universe including
all that pertains to man is inconceivably complex and unintelligible,
being made so by the fact that free will and chance are just as
weighty factors in what occurs as inflexible law. Accordingly the

THE STREAMS OF DOCTRINE 6;

pragmatists take the position that there can be no eternal verities.

Everything in the world is relative; the worth of ideas, doctrines,

if ^

principles, and practices depends on how they function in the given
situation. If they work well, they may be judged true, good, right,
beautiful, etc.; if they do not work well, they may be judged false,
evil, wrong, ugly, etc. For the pragmatists, therefore, the whole of
life, especially social life, is an experiment; this is the great truth
taught by Darwin's evolutionism. The Darwinian formula is for
them nothing more than a statement of nature's method of experi-
mentation. Its significance for the social sciences and philosophies,
the pragmatists say, is that no principles, theories, rules, laws, or
even facts should be taken as utterly final and definitive. The
practical implications of this view are that family, church, industry,
state — in fact, all social institutions — are to be regarded as experi-
ments, are to be evaluated according to their consequences rather
than their abstract principles, and are to be subject to continuous
modification through the use of trial and error methods.

IV

Political thought in the twentieth century was influenced in
many directions by the ideas advanced by the syndicalists, the
guild socialists, and the pluralists. The leading exponent of syndi-
calist doctrine was Georges Sorel, an engineer in the French civil
service. Near the turn of the century Sorel became interested in
Marxian socialism because of its reputedly ' scientific character.
Though accepting the underlying tenets of Marxism, he dissented
from the prevalent interpretations of that philosophy. In revolu-
tionary syndicalism (labor unionism, syndicat being the French name
for a labor union) as manifested in the French labor movement,
Sorel thought he had found the key which made Marxism "per-
fectly intelligible." He took the position that Marxism could not
be understood without syndicalism and that syndicalism was
meaningless without a clear comprehension of Marxism.

SorePs syndicalism was definitely anti-political. He rejected the
state entirely, seeing no gain from political action, even though
it might result in complete proletarian control of the state. His
plan of revolution called for the building of a unified working-class
organization for the purpose of industrial self-government. This
organization would stand apart from the state, would take no

628 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

part In political affairs, and would refuse to cooperate with the
state in any way. Using the general strike as its principal weapon,
this organization would destroy the state and set up a new social
system composed of autonomous economic groups.

Social classes, according to SorePs theory, are differentiated
as much by dissimilarity of cultures as by economic distinctions.
Each class, he said, separately evolves Its own peculiar social
characteristics, its own ethics, its own most effective modes of
action. Each strives to impose its own social system upon the
others. The propertied class uses the territorial state for this pur-
pose. By military force or electoral manipulations it gains control
of the state and uses It to dominate the working class. It is no ad-
vantage for the workers to wrest the state from * the bourgeoisie,
he Insisted; because the state, though useful to the bourgeoisie, is
entirely unsulted to proletarian rule.

To insure real proletarian rule, said Sorel, the workers must re-
place the state with a social system adapted to the special qualities
of their own class. The cardinal principle to be followed in forming
such a social system was grouping according to economic function.
Workers in each category of economic enterprise should be affiliated
in self-governing syndicates or unions, not merely to battle for
higher wages, shorter hours, and better working conditions, but to
manage and administer the industry as their very own. This scheme
of industrial self-government, Sorel maintained, would eliminate the
central political organization through which bourgeois tyranny is
imposed^ and, by giving the workers free control of their own func-
tion in society, would stimulate their creative and productive
faculties and thus would foster higher industrial efficiency.

The correct weapon of revolution for the proletarians, Sorel con-
tended, was the general strike. He was sure that this mode of
revolution was clearly indicated in the writings of Marx. Sorel
pointed out that Marx had explained that the proletarian revolu-
tion, though working an irrevocable transformation in society,
would be necessarily predicated on technological continuity.
Only the general strike, said Sorel, could accomplish such a pro-
found social change without interruption of the technological
processes of Industry. The workmen would lay down their tools,
paralyze the capitalist system, win their victory, assume control of
all industries, and then start anew, with the syndicalist system, at
the precise point where capitalism left off.

THE STREAMS OF DOCTRINE

The doctrine of proletarian violence was another of SorePs
deductions from Marx. The latter had reasoned that capitalism,
by virtue of its own intrinsic qualities, was doomed to destruction.
The task of the proletariat was to hasten this result and introduce
a new economic order. How, inquired Sorel, could the proletariat
play its proper part, if it did not strike at capitalism with all the
means at its5 disposal? And what means could be more effective
than violence? Capitalism did its fighting by subsidizing politicians
and newspapers. The workers, having no money, could not use
this weapon. But they had a better one; they could inspire fear.
Politicians, being craven and timid souls, would do almost any-
thing to avoid violence. By resort to violence the workers could
usually browbeat the politicians into wresting concessions from
their capitalist masters, or, better yet, wning concessions directly
from the masters themselves. Thus every industrial conflict would
be a vanguard fight of Marxian character preparing the way for
the final struggle In which capitalism would be totally van-
quished.

Violence, furthermore, would constantly remind both capitalists
and proletarians that there could be no compromise between them,
would arouse the warlike qualities of both, and thus would speed the
coming of the great revolution which was to usher In the new social
order. Violence thus employed was not base and degrading, but
an exalted and heroic measure— a very different thing from the use
of force to Impose a social order for the benefit of the exploiting
classes. Proletarian violence w^as not only sublimated by the cause
that it served, but was necessary to give the proletarians confidence,
self-respect, and a realization of their power.

The guild socialists shared SorePs dislike of the centralized
political state but not his revolutionism. The leading writers of this
group were English socialists (e.g., G. D. H. Cole, Bertrand Russell,
A. R. Orage, R. H. Tawney, S. G. Hobson, and A. J. Penty) who
hoped that gradual reforms would transform capitalist society Into
socialism but feared that true socialism could not be realized under
a centralized political system. Their Ideal society was a federation
of self-governing associations of persons mutually Involved in the
performance of related social functions. This concept was a reac-
tion against the overweening regimentation of state socialism.
Even if the state were democratic, said the guild socialists, the
socialist program could not succeed under state socialism, because

630 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

state ownership and operation of the means of production and
distribution would throw everything into the hands of professional
politicians and bureaucrats who, as a ruling class, would exploit the
masses as unconscionably as their former capitalist masters. This
result might be avoided, the guild socialists contended, by the
deconcentration of social organization, placing each of the major
activities of society in an autonomous and democratically governed
group somewhat analogous to the trade guilds of the Middle Ages.
Under such a guild system the political state would survive only
as an interlocking and adjusting organ as between the several
guilds. Hence the guild socialists argued that the state should be
deprived of its sovereignty and reduced to a status of equality with
the guilds, but they were unable to agree among themselves as to the
precise role of the state in the guild system.

All recognized the need of some central institution to look after
social needs exterior to the proposed guild associations and to
reconcile and adjust the differences of these bodies. But whether it
should be independent of them or interrelated with them, have
authority over them or divide authority with them, be all-powerful
in some matters and entirely powerless in others, they could not
decide. Two broad schools of opinion developed. The more
consistently pluralistic, whose leading spokesman perhaps was
Cole, held that sovereignty should be entirely extinguished and the
state reduced to the position of a coordinate functional group with
only the power necessary to perform its particular social function.
The other school, of which Hobson was the leading representative,
held that the state must continue as the residuary source of author-
ity, the final arbiter of social conflicts, and the special warden of the

J *

interests of the individual as a citizen apart from his interests as a
guild member, but should, while holding its sovereignty in reserve,
delegate most of its active functions and powers to the guilds.
/The pluralists concentrated their attention on the problem of
soVereignty. Some of them were also guild socialists, but the leading
^exponents of pluralism (e.g., A. F. Bentley in the United States,
A. D. Lindsay and Ernest Barker in England, Leon Duguit in
France, and Hugo Krabbe in Holland) were not much concerned
with socialism. The pluralistic doctrine owes its name to the
central contention of its adherents, namely, that social authority is
not, and from the nature of social institutions and processes can-

THE STREAMS OF DOCTRINE 631

not be, a unity, but is of a plural character and greatly divided.
The pluralistic view was new in statement and application, though
the idea itself was as old as the Middle Ages and had been antici-
pated in the writings of some of the ancients. It had been eclipsed,
after the rise of nationalism, by the idea of monistic, or unitary,
sovereignty, and lay fallow until the time came again when men
were disposed -to be critical of the pretensions of supreme political
authority. The seed-bed of modern pluralism was .prepared in the
late nineteenth century. :The penetrating juristic studies of Gierke
and Maitland had shown that associations of corporate character,
each with a definite collective consciousness and will, naturally
grow up within the fabric of any social system; and that these are
not, and perhaps cannot be, excluded from the function, within
certain limits, of making and enforcing law. The eminent French-
sociologist Durkheim had stresse3 the importance of functional,
particularly occupational, groups, and had argued for the represen-
tation of economic groups in the governmental process. Other
notable sociologists, such as Gumplowicz and Ratzenhofer in Aus-
tria, and Ward and Small in the United States, had similarly ex-
plored the atomic structure of political society and had attached
great weight to the dynamic influence of various sorts of interest-
groups. Paul-Boncour in France had delved into the history of
professional associations and had shown how such bodies tend
naturally and inevitably to acquire something analogous to sover-
eign power.

On these and other foundations of the same character the plural-
istic theorists based the following major postulates: (1) that the
state is Jbut one of numerous social, economic, political, and other
groupings through which men in society must seek to satisfy their
interests and promote their welfare; (2) that th^se different group-
ings are not mere creatures of the state but arise independently and
acquire power and authority not given by the state; (3) that the
functions of such voluntary associations as churches, labor unions^
trade organizations, professional societies, and the like are as neces-
sary and important as those of the state; (4) that the monistic state
is not only incapable of wielding absolute authority over such
bodies but is incapable of regulating their affairs intelligently or
administering them efficiently; (5) that the monistic concept of
sovereignty is a mere legal fiction which not only misses the truth

632 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

but does Incalculable harm in obstructing the evolution of society
along more natural and beneficial lines. The piuralists, like the
guild socialists, did not find it easy to dispose of the political state.
They argued that if it were denuded of its pretensions to sovereignty
and reduced to its proper status, a natural regeneration of society
would quickly follow. t Even If they had been whoUy right on
every point, their case had no chance in the reahn of practical
politics in the first half of the twentieth century. The two world
wars so enorniousf^magnlfied the need for potent general authority
that state functions and powers were everywhere enlarged at the
expense of other social groups, and the sovereignty of the state
became more absolute than ever before.

But the theoretical arguments of the pluralists did not go un-
•challenged. Many notable political thinkers came to the defense
of the monistic doctrine of sovereignty. Conspicuous among these
were Willoughby, Coker, and Dickinson. Did the pluralists seri-
ously propose, they inquired, to do away with all unity of authority
and uniformity of law In a great society? If so, how would they
prevent dangerous and destructive conflicts between divergent or
rival interest-groups? How would they deal with the explosive
differences which inevitably arise within such groups as well as
between them? Would religion be less sectarian in a pluralistic
society, labor less schismatic, professional groups less factional;
would capital and labor be less antagonistic, the agrarian interest
less aggressive, or other class or group lines less sharply drawn? And
how would the pluralists assure to each of their proposed functional
bodies the security and autonomy necessary to its existence as a
separate entity? How would they provide it the means to attain
its own ends but not ends hostile to the welfare of society as a whole?
And how would ifiey maintain national independence and carry
on foreign relations? Pluralists found such questions very difficult
to answer satisfactorily.

Not content with the mere refutation of pluralistic theories,
monistic thinkers proceeded to restate ths theory of sovereignty,
casting aside much of the confusing and misleading verbiage which
had accumulated since the time of Bodin. ~ Discarding all fictions
and abstractions relative to sovereignty, these modern disciples
of Bodin and Hobbes undertook to get down to simple facts. It
is a fact, they asserted, that an organized social whole presupposes a

THE STREAMS OF DOCTRINE 633

unity of authority in order to provide the basis for a legal system
coextensive with the social order, and this necessarily means that
there must be uniformity in the laws applied throughout the whole
social system and a final supreme source of law and legal determina-
tion to which all citizens, all officials, and all agencies of government
defer. Sovereignty in the legal sense means exactly that and no
more, said ths monists. All of the metaphysical abstractions in
which theorists of the past have indulged may be disregarded.
They are mere verbalisms which obscure the true meaning of
monistic sovereignty. What is the true meaning? Just this, said
the monists: that the paramount state is the social institution
through which men have chosen to express their preference for
a general authority which can prevail over the narrowness and
selfishness of individuals and interest-groups. This institution need
not be all-powerful or morally unquestionable; all it really needs
are the necessary means, legal and political, to perform its indis-
pensable social function.

V

Outside the field of strictly political theory were many twentieth-
century scholars and writers whose ideas made substantial con-
tributions to the main currents of political thought. This was
conspicuously true of the social psychologists and sociologists,
The social psychologists sought to discover the whys and wherefores
of human behavior, and obviously could not exclude political
behavior from their considerations. Most of the social psychologists
came to the conclusion that conscious reason has less to do with
shaping human behavior than emotions, impulses, and instincts.
Thus they were all in some degree irrationalists. Indeed, most of
the social psychologists did not credit man with much ability to
think rationally and objectively in social matters even though he
might make a deliberate and determined effort to do so. Social
life, they thought, has shaped the unconscious mind of man into
fixed patterns which cause him to act before he thinks and to em-
ploy reason to justify his actions. It becomes next to impossible
for him to escape from, the "instincts of the herd/' "the pressure
of the group/3 "the mass mind/3 etc. The social psychologists did
not deny that many of the behavior patterns imposed by social life
are altruistic, moral, and good; but they said that many are just

M

634 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

the opposite, and that none of them are rational and none can be
changed by rational processes. As to the betterment of human
society, most of the social psychologists placed their faith, if they
had any. In the group, especially the state, rather than the indi-
vidual. Some of them believed that social evolution ultimately
might produce societies in which the conditioning of the uncon-
scious mind would tend more to good than evil; some even went
so far as to hold that intelligent leadership by the educated few
might result in the acceptance of social and political devices and
processes which would largely counteract the irrationalism of the
masses.

r

The sociologists did much to clarify our knowledge of the origin
and development of the state, showing that it is not and never has
•been a special creation. The rise of the state from pre-political
society was shown to be a continuous evolutionary process, and the
sociologists made an important contribution by carefully analyzing
this process and describing its principal factors. More than any
other group of thinkers, the sociologists stressed the point, and
backed it with an impressive array of facts, that the state in action
is not an aggregation of individuals but a coagulum of inter-
est groups which sometimes cooperate for the common good but
more often vie with one another in the furtherance of their spe-
cial interests. Consequently, the sociologists have looked upon the
process of government as essentially a group struggle and have
insisted that political institutions which do not provide appropriate
means of adjusting group conflicts are seriously defective. In
their studies of social control the sociologists further emphasized
the group composition of political society and pointed out that con-
trol through the instrumentality of the state must reckon with such
long-established group controls as customs, folkways, and mores.
The sociologists gave much attention to the question of the province
of the state in human affairs. On this question their views ranged
all the way from anarchism to total collectivism, but the majority
took the relativist position that there is no inflexible principle by
which the proper role of the state can be determined. The facts of
social evolution seemed to point to the conclusion, in the judgment
of most sociologists, that the degree and character of state inter-
ference and control must depend on the circumstances existing in a
society at a particular time.

THE STREAMS OF DOCTRINE

REFERENCES

Barnes, H. E., Sociology and Political Theory (New York, 1924).

Brinton, G., Nietzsche (Cambridge, Mass., 1941).

Burnham, J., The Machiavellians: Defenders of Liberty (New York, 1943).

Coker, F. W., Recent Political Thought (New York, 1934).

Elliott, W. Y., The Pragmatic Revolt in Politics (New York, 1928).

Follett, M. P., The New State (New York, 1918).

Hofstadter, R., Social Darwinism in American Political Thought, 1&6Q-19J5

(Philadelphia, 1944).

McGovern, W. M., From Luther to Hitler (Boston, 1941), Chaps. VIII-X.
Merriam, C. E., and others, A History of Political Theories, Recent Tirnis

(New York, 1924).

Michels, R., Political Parties (New York, 1915).
Mosca, G., The Ruling Class (New York, 1939).
Pareto, V., The Mind and Society (4 vols.. New York, 1935).
Roucek, J. S. (ed.). Twentieth Century Political Thought (New York, 1946)*.

Chaps. I, III, VIII, XII.

Sorel, G., Reflections on Violence (New York, 1912).
Spahr, M., Readings in Recent Political Philosophy (New York, 1935), Chaps.

X, XI, XIII, XVI.
Zhnrnern, A. (ed.). Modern Political Doctrines (London, 1939).

CHAPTER XXXI

THE FASCIST STATE

I

PLATO would have liked the term "totalitarian state," and
could have made good use of it. It expresses more tersely
and realistically than any phrase of his own coining the
ancient idea of the all-absorbing and all-transcending body politic.
Greece and Rome were familiar with that concept, though none of
their political theorists carried the apotheosis of the state to such
fantastic extremes as the modern Fascists and Nazis. Greek political
thought, and to a less extent Roman political thought, enfolded the
individual so completely within the community that the ideajof

individual rights against the_state never gained_a_fjrm foothold.

That idea was of slow growth, and did not come of age until
near the end of the eighteenth century. But when it finally matured,
it swept the old idea of the authoritarian state into the background.
Individual liberty became the popular shibboleth of the nineteenth
century; and political theory, both conservative and liberal, was
largely applied to the task of forging constitutional limitations upon
authority. There were notable nineteenth-century exceptions,
however. There was Fichte, for example, and his idea of freedom
through state compulsion to follow the path of the Universal.
There was Hegel and his idealization of the state as the crowning
embodiment of the Zeitgeist^ the absolute of absolutes wrought by the
inscrutable hand of History, supreme beyond all question. There
was also Treitschke and his lyric nationalism, and there was Marx
with his scheme of using the all-powerful state as an instrument of
class war. And there were also philosophical idealists like Green
whose trust in the leviathan state reflected a wish for an irresistible
agency of social reform.

By the dawn of the twentieth century a vigorous revival of the
old idea of the paramount state was clearly in prospect. It was
bound to come, because the problems of economic nationalism were
inexorably forcing the state in all parts of the world to assume the
responsibility of supreme custodian of the general welfare. That it

arrived in the first quarter of the twentieth century was largely

636

THE FASCIST STATE

'"due to World War I and the continuing maladjustments of social
and economic life following thereafter. During the war patriotic
sentiment and military necessity extinguished dissent, suspended
normal rights and liberties, and invested the state with almost un-
limited jurisdiction over the affairs of its subjects. After the war,
despite all efforts to get back to "normalcy/5 strong government
was needed in piany countries in order to avert a complete collapse
of the social order. Italy was one of those countries. In the four
years immediately following the war the feeble parliamentary
regime of Italy did nothing but stumble from one grave crisis to
another. The Fascist Party stood hi violent protest against this
condition.

t

II

During the Fascist regime the twenty-eighth of October was the
grandest of red-letter days in the Italian calendar of anniversaries.
On that day, 1922, M^^^^Bla^SMlte moved upon Rome and
inaugurated the°Fascist Revolution. That sublime event, in fascist
ideology, marked the beginning of the most significant and glorious
era of Italian history; a turning point, indeed, of incalculable im-
portance not for the Italian people alone, but for the entire world.
Twenty- two years and six months Iater3 almost to the day, Mussolini
was put to death by a firing squad of his own people, and Italy
was in ruins. But the inglorious downfall of Italian Fascism was by
no means a true measure of the importance of the fascist movement
or of the durability of fascist ideologies. The latter certainly con-
1 stitute the most influential political thinking to come out of Italy
t since Machiavelli; and the fascist movement did not die with the
j defeat of Italy in World War II. There was fascism among Italy's
i conquerors as well as among her allies, and there is much of it still

I alive in the world.

The coup fetal of the Fascist Party in Italy was not truly a revo-
lution. It was a bid for power by a militant minority, efficiently
organized, adequately financed, ably led, and unscrupulously de-
termined to impose its will upon the nation, It succeeded as much
by virtue of the flabbiness of the opposition as by reason of its
own positive qualities. On its way to power it had no constructive
program, no consistent body of principles. The only thing it UJM-*
quivocallv promised was to rescue the country from the then im-

638 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

minent menace of Bolshevism. What It would offer as an alter-
native to Bolshevism or to the anemic parliamentary system which
it proposed to dislodge was not made clear. Nor did the frightened
financiers, industrialists, and professional people who rallied to its
support concern themselves overmuch with that. As always with
the panic-stricken, they preferred to risk dangers unknown to those
that loomed before their eyes. 9

Once installed in power, the first concern of the Fascist regime
was to consolidate its position and perpetuate itself in office. There
was Htde time for philosophical speculations. But, as the business of
destroying democratic Italy went forward and the outlines of the
new order became more definite, the practical value of philosophic
indoctrination became increasingly apparent. Thereupon, the Fas-
cist leaders, including Mussolini himself, set about the construc-
tion of a body of political theory to explain and justify their seizure
of power, and to serve as an authentic elucidation for the people of
Italy and for the world. Mussolini, a former journalist, addressed
himself to this task with much ardor and was one of the most
prolific expounders of fascist theory. The most noteworthy theore-
ticians, in addition to the voluble Benito, were two university
professors who became officeholders in the new r6gime. These were
Alfredo Rocco, onetime professor of law at the University of Padua
and later minister of justice under Mussolini, and Giovanni Gentile,
famed as the outstanding Hegelian philosopher of Italy and minister
of education from 1922 to 1924.

Before coining into power the Fascists had professed a high
disdain for theory; their cause needed no theoretical justification.
They were not, they said, theorists but men of action, and action
is always its own best justification. When they changed their minds
about the importance of theory, they found themselves in need of
ideas that could be woven together to form a systematic political
philosophy. It was much easier and also more expedient to take
Ideas from other men than to originate ideas of their own. And
there was no dearth of ideas to serve their needs. It was simply a
matter of turning to the books and taking what they wanted.

To trace all of the sources of the political philosophy now known
as fascism is not easy. It is a compound of many ingredients which

w*-

1 have been blended together with great ingenuity. We can perceive,
among others, borrowings from Machiavelli, Hobbes, Fichte,

THE FASCIST STATE

Hegel, Treitschke, Nietzsche, Marx, Sorel, Mosea, Schopenhauer,
Bergson, James, and Pareto. Consistency, if we are to believe
the authors of this philosophy, is not one of its virtues, nor per-
manence, either. Their aim, they say, is not a consistent theory, hot
a practical one; not an abiding theory, but a progressive one.' The
fascist theory of to-day, said Mussolini, is for to-day alone. "We
do not believe," he declared, "in dogmatic programmes, in that
kind of rigid frame which is supposed to contain and sacrifice .,

the changeable, changing, and complex reality We permit '

ourselves the luxury of being aristocrats and democrats, conserva- !
tives and progressives, reactionaries and revolutionaries, legali- !
tarians and illegalifarians, according to circumstances of time,
place, and environment— in a word, of the history in which we are I
constrained to live and act." 1

The siate> said Mussolini, is "the universal conscience and will
of man in his historical existence." Enlarging on this concept, he
added:

"Fpr^us Fascists, the State is not merely a guardian, preoccupied
solely with the duty of assuring the personal safety of the citizens; nor is
it an organization with purely material aims, such as to guarantee a
certain level of well-being and peaceful conditions of life; for a mere
council of administration would be sufficient to realize such objects.
Nor is it a purely political creation, divorced from all contact with the
complex material reality which makes up the life of the individual and
the life of the people as a whole. The State, as conceived of and as
created by Fascism, is a spiritual and moral fact in itself, since its
political, juridical and economic organization of the nation is a con-
crete thing: and such an organization must be in its origins and de-
velopment a manifestation of the spirit. The State is the guarantor of
security both internal and external, but it is also the custodian and
transmitter of the spirit of the people, as it has grown up through the
centuries in language, in customs and in faith. And the State is not
only a living reality of the present, it is also linked with the past and
above all with the future, and thus transcending the brief limits of
individual life, it represents the immanent spirit of the nation. The
forms in which States express themselves may change, but the necessity
for such forms is eternal. It is the State which educates its citizens in
civic virtue, gives them a consciousness of their mission and welds them
into unity; harmonizing their various interests through justice, and
transmitting to future generations the mental conquests of science^ of
art, of law and the solidarity of humanity. It leads men from primitive

1 Quoted in H. Finer, Mussolin? s Italy (New York, 1935), pp. 17-18.

640 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

tribal life to that highest expression of human power which is Empire:
it links up through the centuries the names of those of its members
who have died for its existence and in obedience to its laws, it holds up
the memory of the leaders who have increased its territory and the
geniuses who have illumined it with glory as an example to be fol-
lowed by future generations. When the conception of the State de-
clines, and dlsunifying- and centrifugal tendencies prevail, whether of
individuals or of particular groups, the nations where such phenomena
appear are in their decline." l

This essentially Hegelian conception of the state was likewise
espoused by Rocco, who, in a notable address entitled The Political
Doctrine of Fascism, styled the state a "spirituaHnheritance of ideas
and sentiments which each generation receives from those preceding
and hands down to the following generation. ; . . ." 2 Repudiating
what he called the "mechanical or atomistic" conception of the
state as a mere instrument whereby individuals may attain their
endss Rocco claimed for the fascist state a perfect synthesis of the
community and the individual, from which a nation would receive
"a life and scope which transcend the scope and life of the indi-
viduals identifying themselves with the history and finalities of the
uninterrupted series of generations." 3 Gentile expressed the same
idea in his essay on The Philosophic Basis of Fascism* where he spoke
of the state and the individual as "inseparable terms of a necessary
synthesis."

One thing is made clear by all of this word-weaving, namely,
that no such thing as inalienable individual rights can exist in a
fascist state. The unimaginative mind may have difficulty in
viewing the state as a mystic continuity of spirit bodied forth in
the dynamics of history,, may fail to understand why such a purely
abstract construct, such a verbal fiction, should be the Alpha and
Omega of man's earthly sojourn; but that it signifies the utter sub-
mergence of the individual would seem to be self-evident. Yet
fascist writers have insisted that the individual is not swallowed up
in the fascist state or shorn of liberty. If you agree with their con-
cepts of individualism and liberty, they have a point to argue. From

1 B. Mussolini, The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism (Day to Day Pamphlets,
No. 18, 1933), pp. 21-22.

2 See International Conciliation Pamphlet Mo. 223 (Carnegie Endowment for Inter-
national Peace, 1926).

3 Ibid.

4 Foreign Affain, Vol. vi (January, 1928), pp. 290-304.

THE FASCIST STATE

Nietzsche, Sorel, Pareto, and other theorists the apologists of fas-

i •**

clsm picked up the Idea of the social myth. None of the grea:
political concepts of the past (the divine right of kings, the social
contract, the rights of man, the general will; represented realities,
according to the myth theory. They were wholly imaginary, pure
myths; but they were myths that men believed to be true and warned
to live by. Hence, they were myths that largely determined die
nature of the social order. The fascist state, like all states of the
past, was, they said, the product of a myth.

The core of the fascist myth is the Hegelian do^ma of the state

/ i>3 O

as the ethical whole. The individual, according to this doctrine^

JO ~

can have no spiritual' and moral existence apart from the state and
hence can claim no freedom from its jurisdiction. Fascism has
made the most of this idea. "Our concept of liberty," Rocco ex-
plained, "is that the individual must be allowed to develop his
personality in behalf of the State, for the ephemeral and Infinitesi-
mal elements of the complex and permanent life of society determine
by their normal growth the development of the State. Freedom Is
therefore due to the citizen and to classes on condition that thev

fii

exercise it in the interest of society as a whole and within the limits
set by social exigencies, liberty being, like any other Individual
right, a concession of the State." * Mussolini expressed the same
thought as follows: "The individual in the Fascist State is not
annulled but rather multiplied, just In the same way that a soldier
in a regiment is not diminished but rather increased by the number
of his comrades. The Fascist State organizes the nation, but leaves
a sufficient margin of liberty to the individual : the latter is deprived
of all useless and possibly harmful freedom, but retains what Is
essential; the deciding power In this question cannot be the Indi-
vidual, but the State alone.95 2 Gentile asserted that true liberty is
realized only in a fascist state. The state, he maintained, Is not
"an entity hovering in the air over the heads of Its citizens. It Is
one with the personality of the citizens. . , . Fascism has Its own
solution of the paradox of liberty and authority. The authority of
the State is absolute. It does not compromise, it does not bargain,
it does not surrender any portion of its field to other moral or re-
ligious principles which may interfere with the Individual COD-

1 International Conciliation Pamphlet No. 223, p. 4.

2 B. Mussolini, op. cit., p. 24.

642 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

science. But on the other hand, the State becomes a reality only
In the consciousness of its individuals. And the Fascist corporative
State supplies a representative system more sincere and more in
touch with realities than any other previously devised and is
therefore freer than the old liberal State.35 1

Now we catch the meaning of fascist freedom. There is freedom
in the fascist state, but it is collective, not individual, freedom. The
supremacy of the state rests upon the same old cornerstone of
absolutism that Hobbes laid down in the seventeenth century, the
theory of individual self-realization through subjection to sovereign
authority. In one particular, however, the fascists disavowed
Hobbes. The trenchant old royalist of Malmsbury did not exclude
the possibility of a sovereign parliament or assembly, but fascist
writers have ridiculed the very thought of such a thing. The masses,
according to them, can have neither the moral nor the legal right of
self-government. Mussolini put it this way:

"Fascism combats the whole complex system of democratic ideology,
and repudiates it, whether in its theoretical premises or in its practical
application. Fascism denies that the majority, by the simple fact
that it is a majority, can direct human society; it denies that numbers
alone can govern by means of a periodical consultation, and it affirms
the immutable, beneficial, and fruitful inequality of mankind, which

J J y JVl'nf j' ' ' MI ' f**E ' f> '< ' M I'f ^ r"Wii i,""1 " Wl" ' ^

can never be permanently levelled through the mere operation of a
mechanical process such as universal suffrage, The democratic regime
may be defined as from time to time giving the people the illusion of
sovereignty, while the real effective sovereignty lies in the hands of
other concealed- and irresponsible forces." z

From this attack on majority rule, which resounds with the
teachings of Mosca, Michels, and Pareto, Mussolini turned to
democracy as he thought it should be. True democracy, he af-
firmed, is qualitative and not quantitative, and is to be achieved by
being actuated among the 'people through the conscience and will
of a few or even of one alone. This was not an argument for the
old-fashioned kind of aristocracy, but for the rule of the politically
elite. In every society, according to the elitist theory, there is a
class of persons uniquely fitted to govern; a class of persons endowed
with, the special talents and moral attributes necessary to govern
the state. Just as some persons have a special aptitude for painting,

1 Foreign Affairs, Vol. vi, pp. 300-304.
s B. Mussolini, op. cit.3 p. 14.

THE FASCIST STATE 643

music, science, or some other vocation, so the politically elite have
a special aptitude for government. Nature, so the theory runs, ob-
viously has intended the politically elite to rule; it is their special
function in the social system, and is not the function of any other
class. For this reason the politically elite have not only the right
but the solemn duty to govern the state. When the affairs of state
are in the haands of the politically elite, the people will have the
best government possible; every man will be doing his proper Job
in the social system; and thus true democracy, the democracy of
quality, will be achieved.

But how are these politically gifted persons to be discovered,
sifted from the mass 'of people, and elevated to office? Plato., the
forefather of all elitist theorists, had a lot of trouble with that prob-
lem; jDUt it did not stump Mussolini and Company at all. They
had an answer and a method right on tap for instant use. The
elite who would rule the fascist state would not be designated and
placed in office by any of the faulty methods of the past; not by
heredity, not by direct or indirect popular election, not by parlia-
mentary manipulation, but by the consecrated labors of the Fascist
Party. Gentile sounded the keynote when he spoke of the Fascist
Party as the "conscience of the State." In practice that came to
mean that the party monopolized the state — set its policies, made
its~laws, and administered its affairs. The party and the ruling
elite were one and the same. The original Fascist! were held to
have shown themselves to be the political elite of the nation; that
was the reason they were able to overcome all opposition and climb
to power. The party would continue to contain all of the true elite,
because, unlike liberal or democratic parties, it would not open its
membership to all comers. On the contrary, its membership would
be restricted, carefully recruited and screened, rigorously trained
and disciplined. The selective process would reach down to the
unspoiled youth of the nation, singling out the most likely for a long
period of education and training. Thus the unfit, the non-elite,
would be weeded out, and those finally admitted to full membership
in the party would unquestionably be those best fitted to rule.

Thus the party both supplies the governing class from generation
to generation and is the governing class at all times. In Italy, mem-
bership in the Fascist Party gave admission to a hierarchy parallel-
ing the governmental machine and completely dominant over it.

644 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

The leader of the party was also the head of the government; the
grand council of the party was the supreme assembly of the state.
All public offices from the lowest to the highest were reserved
for party members; all competing parties were outlawed and
liquidated.

Being the missionary arm of the totalitarian state and also its
palace guard, the ruling party, according to fascist cjoctrine, must
be an absolutely ascendant institution like the state itself. It must
not be expected to stoop to the baseness of ordinary electoral
competition, for its function is not to compete with other groups for
popular favor but to serve as trustee for the nation. There can
be only one party of such exalted character. To subject such a
party to the corrupting vicissitudes of electoral competition would
be to sacrifice its uniqueness and destroy its special capacity
for national service. For that reason electoral contests between the
ruling party and other parties must not be allowed. Elections (if
any) must not be struggles for power, but referenda on alternatives
proposed by the elite party. The people may properly be allowed
to choose between proposals or candidates presented by the party,
but not to choose between parties.

The real nature of the fascist political system is thus made
perfectly clear and simple. "Its name is dictatorship. But fascist
theorists have studiously shunnecT the name while praising the
thing itself. As the Fascist grand seignior, Mussolini was called
il Luce (the Leader) ; as ruler of Italy his title was il Capo del Governo
(the Head of the Government). These softening titles fooled no
one. In Italy and elsewhere everybody could see the truth of the
situation. Hence the vast concern of fascist theory with the ra-
tionalization of one-man power. There was, however, nothing
particularly new or subtle in the fascist utterances on this ancient
subject. .Fascist writers railed at great length about the imbecility
and ineptitude of parliamentary institutions; and then announced,
as though it were a new discovery, that successful government
requires vigor, clear-sightedness, singleness of purpose, dignity,
distinction, self-conclusiveness, and various other qualities com-
monly associated with effective executive action. Assuming these
qualities to be all-essential and also that a division of power in-
hibits them, fascist theorists concluded that

concentrated in one person. But to the man thus exalted tey

~—a **ami«>*f<l*a****>t^. ^a*******™******™^ •*• _^^*^*™~*a»«__rf

_ THE FASCIST^ STATE 645

impute the character not of a despot but of a demigod who per-
sonifies the state itself and voices its all-comprehending will.

Sieyes, laying down principles for the framing of a^constltutlon
for the Consulate in France in 1799, uttered this dictum: "Xo one
should hold office except with the confidence of the governed; and
no one should be appointed to office by those he has to govern.
Confidence should come from below, authority from above/5
Fascism heartily agrees and has put this principle to work under the
name of the principle of leadership. The main idea is thai the
masses as such can think and act only through leaders, which is
doubtless true; that they are incapable of choosing their own best
leaders, which is a highly debatable point; that the leadership of the
political elite realizes and reflects the most exalted spiritual and
moral qualities of the nation, a point not capable of definitive proof;
and that it is the highest civic duty of every- private citizen and
every official to yield unquestioning loyalty to his leaders according
to rank, the national leader being entitled to the highest confidence
and deference of all.

The fascist literature of Italy dealt quite fulsomely with the
corporative system of state organization. As finally shaped out by
the Corporation Act of 1934, this plan organized the life of the
nation on a politico-economic basis. Local workers were grouped
into workers' syndicates and local employers into employers5 syn-
dicates; these in turn were linked together in provincial federa-
tions of workers' and employers* syndicates; and the provincial
federations were finally joined in national federations and con-
federations. These were organized into

corporations ofwor^ each corpora-

tion having a council made up of representatives the component
workers' and employers' federations. The twenty-two corporation
councils sitting together constituted the National Council of
Corporations, which had vast power in the regulation and control
of commercial and industrial matters. The central committee of
the National Council included not only federation representatives
but the secretary of the Fascist Party and all of the Fascist ministers
of state. The Head of the Government (Mussolini) was also head
of the Ministry of Corporations and thus stood at the apex of the
organized economic life of the country as well as at the head of its
political institutions.

646 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

The great virtue of the corporative system, according to fascist
theory, was that it effected a^^c^jeconcU^
andjproletarianism^ thus creating a truly organic state. It" was
said of the corporative plan that it brought the individual into
relation with the state through his economic status and interests,
thus making citizenship mean something actual and vital; whereas
in other systems citizenship was said to be merely a political ab-
straction, assuming a civic individuality which did not in fact exist.
Of course the corporative idea was merely syndicalism in fascist
clothing. It was far removed from the anti-capitalistic, anti-politi-
cal syndicalism of Sorel, whose disciple Mussolini once was; nor did
it follow the free, democratic syndicalism proposed by the guild
socialists. It was, nevertheless, an ingenious scheme of industrial
and political regimentation built around the syndicalist idea of
.functional groups.

In one respect, however, fascism remained true to its Sorelian
heritage. It gloried in the doctrine of violence. Sorel extolled
violence not merely as an effective weapon of class warfare, but as a
stimulant ofj^ouxa^^ quali-

ties which he deemed essentiaJh&jDrol^^ Fascism on

its way to power in Italy justified its violent tactics as practically
and morally necessary to the success of a sacred cause. After achiev-
ing power, it defended the continued resort to violence as an essen-
tial prophylactic and disciplinary regimen requisite not alone for
the protection of the state but for the realization of the exalted
purposes for which the state was said to exist. Not only in internal
affairs was violence espoused as a virtue, but in International rela-
tions as well. "War alone/3 said Mussolini, "brings up to Its highest
tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the
peoples who have the courage to meet it. All other trials are sub-
stitutes, which never really put men into the position where they
have to make the great decision — the alternative of life or death.
Thus a doctrine which is founded upon this harmful postulate of
peace is hostile to Fascism.35 1 Mussolini made the "great decision"
for himself and for Italy, and the alternative turned out to be
death — for him, for his regime, and possibly for his country; but
not, at least not yet, for his philosophy.

Fascism from the beginning has been loud in its opposition to

Mussolini, op* cit.y p. 11,

THE FASCIST STATE 64?

socialism and communism. Mussolini was an ex-socialist and it
was the fear of communism more than anything else that gave him
the popular support necessary to seize power. Doctrinally die
fascists have always claimed to stand just as firmly against laissez
faire capitalism as against socialism and communism, but their
principal clamor has been against the latter. Thev bitterly de-

* v

nounced the materialism of the Marxian creed, and proclaimed that
spiritual rather than economic motives are the fundament
forces of society. The corporate state was held up as a paragon (
which would give private initiative ample freedom and at the
same time preserve and promote the well-being of all. Another
feature of the corporative system, which certainly commended it
highly to the fascists, was that it enabled the state to manage" the
whole economy as a national autarchy. Mussolini asserted that
every people who would survive and be great must be imperialistic;
a state which was not economically self-sufficient could never be
politically independent and powerful. Therefore the state must
control its imports and exports, arrange Its production, and when
necessary expand its dominions so as to make Itself as nearly as
possible a self-contained economic system.

Ill

It will be many years before the total and ultimate Influence of
the fascist ideology can be measured. There is no denying, how-
ever, that it has been world-wide. : Fascist movements appeared
in almost every country of the world, not excepting the United
States of America. The Nazis in Germany, the Falangists In Spain2
the Kuomintang Party In China, the Peronlsts in Argentina, the
Vargas regime in Brazil — in fact, authoritarian movements every-
where found Italian fascism a helpful model and borrowed freely
from it. It had just what they wanted to conceal the real Inward-
ness of their designs. It sugarcoated raw power with a mystical
idealism; it supplied a moral justification for violence; It exploited
patriotism to the limit; It subtly rationalized minority rule; it cap-
italized the widespread fear of communism and the equally wide-
spread dissatisfaction with democracy and laissez faire; It offered the
masses a new religion with a new god to worship. Because of these
qualities the fascist cult remains a potent force In the world, not-
withstanding: the annihilation of fascist states In World War II.

648 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

REFERENCES

Ascoli, M-, and Feller, A., Fascism for Whom (New York, 1938).

Borgese, G. A., Goliath: The March of Fascism (New York, 1937).

Catlin, C. E. G., New Trends in Socialism (London, 1935).

Goker,' F. W., Recent Political Thought (New York, 1934), Chap. XVII.

Dutt, R. P., Fascism and Social Revolution (New York, 1934).

Finer, H., Mussolini's Italy (New York, 1935).

McGovern. W. M., From Luther to Hitler (Boston, 1941), Chap. XL

Mussolini, B., My Autobiography (New York, 1928).

Mussolini, B., The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism (London, 1933).

Oakshott, M. J., The Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe

(New York, 1942), Chap. IV.
Parmelee, M.3 Bolshevism, Fascism, and the Liberal Democratic State (London,

-1935).
Roucek, J. S. (ed.) Twentieth Century Political Thought (New York, 1946),

• Chap. V.
Sabine, G. H., A History of Political Theory (New York, 1937), Chap.

XXXIV.

Salvemini, G., The Fascist Dictatorship in Italy (New York, 1927).
Schmidt, C. T., The Corporate State in Action (New York, 1939).
Silani, T. (ed.), What Is Fascism and Why? (London, 1931).
Steiner, H. A., Government in Fascist Italy (New York, 1938).

CHAPTER XXXII

THE NAZI STATE

I

HE Nazi State skyrocketed to world power and plummeted
to annihilation even more spectacularly than its Italian coun-
JL terpart. Barely twelve years intervened between the time
Hitler took the chancellorship of Germany and the day of final
reckoning for him and the Third Reich.

The two had

„ iT %

much in common ideologically as well as in political method and
practice — so much, in fact, that it was easy to make the mistake
of supposing that the Nazis were nothing more than phenomenally
successful imitators of the Fascisti. The Nazis may have borrowed
from their Italian forerunners in totalitarianism — probably did
to some extent — but they really did not need to do so. Every
significant ingredient of Nazi practice and Nazi philosophy was
available without importation from abroad. For more than a 1(
hundred years the German Fatherland had been nourishing po- ,'
litical ideas and usages perfectly suited to the Nazi requirements. $
Moreover,, what the Nazis may have borrowed from fascism was
much less important than what they added to it. In retrospect it is
easy to see that it was the distinctly Nazi contributions which made
German totalitarianism the most formidable implementation of
arbitrary power since the time of Napoleon and German political
thought the most corrosive of modern times.

There are parallels between Hi tier's rise to power and Mussolini's,
and parallels between the conditions in their respective countries
which enabled them to seize the truncheon of absolute authority.
But there is no parallel in the timing of their philosophies. As we
have already seen, the philosophy of fascism was concocted as an •
afterthought, a rationalization after the fact of seizing power and \
inaugurating a totalitarian regime. The Nazi ideology, by con-
trast, was more like a blue print made in advance. Gottfried
Feder's The Political and Economic Program of the National Socialist
German Workers Party was written in 1920, Hitler's Man Kampf in
1924-1927, Alfred Rosenberg's The Myth of the Twentieth Century in

649

650 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

1930. These are the major works of Nazi philosophy; all were
produced before the Nazis came to power; indeed, before they
were even close to power. After they gained power inJ^H^ the
Nazis were too busy with power politics and the administration
of government to devote much time and effort to philosophical
'speculations. But they were astonishingly faithful to the creed
they had previously espoused, and there seems to be no doubt that
they did all they could to put it into effect.

II

The fascist concept of the state, as we recall, was a synthetic
blend of the traditionalism exemplified by Burke and Savigny and
the" metaphysical idealism of Hegel. It was a potent mixture, but
not so potent as the' Nazi brew of state ideologies. The Nazis did
not altogether by-pass the traditionalist and idealist doctrines, but
found them less useful than other concepts and therefore stressed
them very little. Hitler repeatedly rejected Mussolini's idea that
the state is "a spiritual and moral fact in itself." More than once in
Mein Kampj he reiterated the point that the state should not be re-
garded as an end, but as a means. A means to what end? Hitler's
answer was that the highest purpose of the state is to preserve and
promote racial unity, racial purity, and racial development.1 This
explains why the Nazis found little to admire in Hegel, pretended
even to scorn him. Hegel had called the state the "march of God
in the world," whereas Nazi evolutionism upheld the thesis that
race marks the path of "Nature's will to breed life as a whole
towards a higher level.33 2 "We, as Aryans, are therefore able/'
said Hitler, "to imagine a State only to be the living organism of a
nationality. . . ." 3

Rejection of the Hegelian concept of the state did not, however,
prevent a large infiltration of Hegelian thought into the Nazi cult.
Hegel's mystical deification of the state, the Nazis would not accept;
but it could be transmuted, without thanks to Hegel, into an
equally abstruse exaltation of the Volk or nation. Nazi writers fre-
quently spoke of the Volk as a sort of metaphysical, supernatural
entity having a spiritual reality apart from the existence of its
members. They should have given Hegel credit, but they did not

1 See A. Hitler, Mein Kampf (Annotated trans., New York, 1939), pp. 585-601.

2 Ibid., p. 390. 3 Ibid., p. 595.

THE NAZI STATE 651

get their Idealism from Hegel directly. They got it second-hand,
partly no doubt from fascism and partly from various German
writers who were influenced by Hegel. After the Xazi Party came
Into power the distinction between the state and the Vdk was not
so strongly insisted upon as before. Since they had transformed the
German state Into a Volk state., the Nazis could more readily per-
ceive that the^ idealization of the state had its points.

The Nazis sometimes called their state a Voelkischer Fuehrerstaat^
meaning a national leader state. Perhaps they took the leadership
principle from the fascists; if so, they succeeded In giving It a very
special Nazi twist. The leader in Italy was head of the elite party
and head of the government but not head of the state; the legal
chief of state was the king. But In Nazi Germany the leader was
head of the party, head of the government, head of the state, ands
most important of all, head of the German nation considered as a
racial community i Thus Hitler was held to be the leader of the
German people as an ethnic group, the leader of the party which
best expressed the culture and will of the German race, and neces-
sarily therefore the head of the German state and the German gov-
ernment. Leadership was far more in Nazi Germany than just
a matter of authority from above and confidence from below; it
was the instrumentality through which nationality, state, and all
political processes were fused into one. The national leader was
hailed as the supreme embodiment of spirit and will of the German
people " and . hence " the Infallible head of their political system.!
Totalitarianism therefore acquired a sanctity In Germany that
was_nev.er attained in Italy.

German geopolitical theory also added somewhat to the pe-
culiarly Nazi view of the state. Though not initially a Nazi creation,
the so-called science of geopolitics was promptly enlisted in the
service of Nazi political theory. The great supporting pillars of
Nazi_ racial theory were the postulates that "blood" and "soil"
are" jflae- -most Important factors in shaping social evolution. When
Haushofer's elaboration and refinement of the geopolitical theories
of Mackinder and Kjellen advanced the doctrine that a nation Is a
living organism in geographical space, requiring Lebmsraum or
living space to realize its potentialities, the Nazis welcomed It as a
confirmation of their principle of "soil." Geopolitics was im-
mediately incorporated in the Nazi creed, and geopolitical studies

652 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

were promoted on a large scale. Not only was it proclaimed that
the Germans were a master race balked In the fulfillment of their
mission in the world by the lack of Lebensraum; it was asserted
that the Nazi state was different from all others in that it was a
soundly conceived and specially adapted instrument of geopolitical
science.

The Nazis could not unqualifiedly accept the traditionalist view
of the state as a spiritual stream of beliefs, ideas, and usages de-
scending from the indefinite past and going on to an indefinite
future. There were two varieties of German political tradition for
which the Nazis had no use, which in fact they were determined to
destroy. One was the monarchical tradition and the other the
particularistic tradition. They had no Intention of espousing any
principle which would strengthen the movement for the restoration
of the Hohenzollern dynasty or any other ruling family in Germany.
Nor did they propose to give doctrinal aid and comfort to the
continued splintering of Germany by the preservation of the numer-
ous petty kingdoms and principalities of the old federal union.
But they were animated nevertheless by a strong traditionalist
feeling. They professed a supreme devotion to the cultural and
racial heritage of the German people, and took pride in avowing
themselves determined trustees and guardians of priceless endow-
ment from the past.

Although the Nazis declined to glorify the state as such to the
same degree as the Italian Fascist!, they demeaned the individual
I just as fully. With the dictum of Kant and Fichte that the indi-

vidual they ardently agreed. ' One

of their axioms was that true freedom for the individual consists of
subordinating himself to the Volk and working for its welfare. How,
they asked, could any German be free unless the German nation
was free— free politically, free economically, free racially, free
geopolitically? The Nazis were also thoroughgoing totalitarians
in their view that it was the necessary and rightful function of the
state to exercise the minutest police supervision over the lives and
activities of all its citizens. They allowed no sphere of privacy to
any one; state regulation and control were extended to religion,
education, art, architecture, music, literature, science, recreation,
and even fashions. Needless to say they als^ established a com-
pletely authoritarian control over the economic life of the nation.

THE NAZI STATE 655

III

The most prominent feature of Nazi philosophy was its emphasis
on race and its insistence that race is the measure of all things.

T_tf

"All that is not race in this world is trash,55 1 said Hitler. Outside
of Germany such statements were deemed so ridiculous that marsv

*

did not take the trouble to find out what lay behind Nazi racism.
The Nazis conceived themselves to be standing on the solidest of
solid scientific ground in this matter. That solid ground was the
Darwinian theory of evolution. Nazi race theorists to a man were
evolutionists. They believed, as multitudes of persons all over the
world have come to "believe in the past century, that the struggle
for existence, natural selection, and the survival of the fittest consti-
tute the fundamental law of life — the way God does his work with
living things. They fully agreed with Herbert Spencer that this
law operates in social as well as in biological life, but they did not
follow Spencer's belief that the social struggle is between individuals.
They were far more impressed by Walter Bagehot's idea thai the
social struggle is essentially one between groups. Nor did they go
with Spencer on the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Spen-
cer held that such characteristics could be transmitted by heredity;
Darwin and most other evolutionists held to the contrary. The
Nazis stood firmly with Darwin on this point.

From these evolutionary premises many pre-Nazi race theorists,
especially Gobineau and Chamberlain, had made deductions as to
the nature and development of the races of mankind. Although
the influence of these race theories was world-wide, they were more
fully accepted in Germany than elsewhere. During the last years
of the nineteenth and the early years of the twentieth century the
doctrines of Gobineau and Chamberlain were widely disseminated
throughout Germany by official as well as unofficial methods. No
less a personage than Kaiser Wilhelm II urged every one to read
Chamberlain's Foundations of the Nineteenth Century and helped raise a
fund to place a copy of the book in every library in the land. So,
in making a fetish of race, the Nazis followed one of the main
currents of German thought. Even if they had been insincere in
their racial beliefs (which they certainly were not; they were too
deeply indoctrinate4 with Gobineau and Chamberlain to be in-

*n

1 Ibid., p. 406.

654 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

sincere), they would have been stupid not to have seen the practical
utility of such beliefs In German politics.

It was widely believed In Germany, as Gobineau and Chamber-
lain had taught, that not only the biological but the mental dif-
ferences of men are the result of natural selection in the struggle for
existence; that by this method nature produces superior races and
discards inferior ones; that every struggle between peoples furthers
this selective process, and takes the superior races farther on the
road to final perfection and supremacy; and that a mixture of
superior with inferior races is dangerous if not wholly bad, because
it dilutes the superior race and retards, perhaps even reverses,
the process of evolution. It was also generally believed that the
white race was superior to all others, that the Teutons were the
best of the white race, and the Germans the best of the Teutons.
It was likewise commonly held that the colored races, particularly
the black peoples, were definitely inferior; and that the Jews,
though superior in some respects, were far inferior in moral and
cultural qualities.

Nothing fundamental was added to this pre-existing body of
racial doctrine by the Nazi writers. What the Nazis did, with
appalling success, was to elaborate, refine, emotionalize, sublimate,
and effectuate. Thus, although they said little that had not already
been said about racial intermarriage, they had much to say about
the right and duty of the nation to forbid it, to purify itself by
expelling from its midst the members of inferior and incompatible
races (particularly Jews), and to rediscover its soul in the process
of forging a unification of the Nordic race. Race, said Rosenberg,
"is the outer form of the soul." Each race had a soul of its own,
he declared; and each must find its soul through the recognition
of its own supreme value. Transcendentalizing race in this fashion
was not new; Chamberlain had already done it; but Rosenberg
added new embellishments, one of which was an adaptation of the
social myth doctrine of Sorel. By recognizing racial truths and
values, by incorporating them in a life-myth, Rosenberg said it
would be possible to create a new human type in the twentieth
century.

Bagehot had said that the winner in the group struggle is always
the group in which there is the greatest internal cohesion and
cooperation. Reading this through racially tinted lenses, the

THE NAZI STATE

655

Nazis construed it to mean that a polyglot state could never com-
pete on even terms with one that was racially pure. They went
even farther, and attributed Germany's past defeats and failures
to the lack of that "sure herd instinct which is rooted in unity of the
blood and which guards the nation against ruin especially in
dangerous moments. . . .» 1 The presence in the German popu-
lation of large ^ion-Nordic elements, particularly the Jews, had en-
feebled the nation, it was said, and left it incapable of surmounting
great crises. Germany could never become great and strong, never
could realize her true possibilities as a nation unless these 'incon-
gruous elements were eliminated. This was the justification for the
policy of dispossessing, expelling, and exterminating the Jews. If
Germany had triumphed in World War II, the Nazis undoubtedly
would have applied the same rule to other subject races which,
their race scientists classified as inferior and unassimilable.

Another rule of political practice for which the Nazis found
justification on racial grounds was that of government by a minor-
ity. The superior races, particularly the Nordics, were said to
represent the climax of the evolutionary process. They were the
best that nature had produced, but she had not yet produced them
in great numbers. They were a minority in every population,
though they were better fitted to rule than any others and for the
good of the nation ought to rule. One of the glaring weaknesses of
democracy, according to the Nazi theorists, was majority rule,
which resulted always in government by the congenitally inferior
and incompetent.

Race also provided the Nazis a principle which enabled them to1
outdo Machiavelli in subordinating ethics to political expediency.
Whereas Machiavelli simply divorced politics and ethics, the
Nazis said that all ethical values depend upon race. No ethical
values can be valid for all races, according to their doctrine; for
races are different in all of the elements that enter into the mak-
ing of morals. Inferior races produce inferior ethics; superior races
superior ethics. Above all other races in ethical qualities and in-
sight stood the Nordics. Because of this, the Nordics could not be
judged by or be held subject to the lower ethical standards of other
races. Nor could inferior races presume to adopt Nordic moral
standards; only Nordics had the qualities to live by those stand-

1 Ibid., p. 598.

656 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

ards. It followed, therefore, that whatever the Nordics and their
Nazi leaders did in conformity with Nordic moral standards was
right, and furthermore that whatever they did in the interest of
Nordic supremacy was also right.

The aggressive nationalism of the Nazis was also strongly bol-
stered by their racial dogmas. Having persuaded themselves that
race is the paramount thing in social evolution, £hat evolution
works by struggle and natural selection, that the Nordic master
race had to gain supremacy, dominion, and room to expand or be
submerged by inferior peoples, the Nazis could hardly avoid the
conclusion that It was not only the duty but the wise policy of the
German nation and the German state to wage war whenever a

* r

favorable opportunity occurred to expand their territory and sub-
jugate inferior peoples. This would be doing no more than fol-
lowing nature's will; setting nature's laws in motion. "We ac-
knowledge," said Rosenberg, "the old saying that combat Is the
father of all things, not only as an empty formula but as the content
of our lives." 1

The Nazi concern with race reached far beyond the elimination
from Germany of the inferior and incongruous races and the up-
building of a Nordic world empire; the master race itself must be
constantly improved by ruthless application of the principles of
/eugenics. The Nazi race scientists accepted the axiom of the
eugenic theorists who held that heredity is nearly everything and
environment very little in the process of evolution. Hence it was
not merely a proper function but an absolute duty of the race-state
to see that heredity worked right. Inferior individuals, even of the
Nordic race, should not be allowed to reproduce their kind and
perpetuate their deficiencies. On the other hand, the reproduction
of superior individuals should be encouraged and aided in every
possible way. The practical execution of this policy was one of the
features of the Nazi system which greatly shocked the outside
world.) Laws were enacted and rigorously enforced, which pro-
vided for the sterilization of those who were victims of physical
or mental defects or diseases which Nazi medical authorities held

**

to be hereditary. It was also reported that euthanasia ("mercy
killing") was authorized for those with incurable ailments and
widely employed. Persons having certain diseases and disorders,

1 Quoted in M. Rader, JVb Compromise (New York, 1939), p. 164.

THE NAZI STATE

both physical and mental, were forbidden to many; and marriage
between members of the "master race53 and Jews and colored
persons was likewise banned. To encourage the procreation of
more and better children by the racially and eugenically superior
stocks, various forms of financial aid were extended to well qualified
couples begetting large families of children. Unmarried women of
the superior racial and physical stocks were also encouraged to have
children by males of corresponding excellence. Such children be-
came the wards of the state and special honor was paid to their
mothers.

IV

Along with the evolutionism, or Social Darwinism, of the nine- :
teenth century, the Nazis took over and elaborated the antir ,
intellectualism or irrationalism which had received a great impetus
from the naturalism of Rousseau. All of the liberal and rationalist *
ideologies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had proceeded
on the assumption that man, both individually and collectively, is a
rational creature, capable of following the light of reason to objec-
tive truth. Although Darwinism did not flatly refute this view, it
did not clearly and strongly confirm it either. Indeed, there were
some implications of the Darwinian thesis and some interpretations
of it which could nourish the conclusion that natural selection is
not, so far as man is concerned, a rational process. The German
idealists, though not Darwinists, had attached great importance to
unconscious mental processes as compared with conscious reason,
and many writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries (e.g., Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, James, Bergson, Sorel,
Mosca, and Pareto) had minimized reason and enlarged upon such
forces as will, instinct, and intuition.

The Nazis went all out for irrationalism. Most human beings?
they declared, even the literate and educated, are stupid and
irrational — seldom guided by intelligent self-interest in matters of
direct material concern to themselves. They have little capacity
for objective thought, and seldom think at all. Instead, they follow
emotion and prejudice. They are easily fooled, will believe the most!
preposterous lies if they are presented in an agreeable garb of,,
passion or sentiment. Obviously, said the Nazi writers, such pa-
thetically irrational creatures cannot govern themselves. Democ-

658 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

racy Is the greatest of all fallacies. What men need, and what they
really want In their inmost emotional natures, is to be led and
governed by the few who have the necessary understanding and
ability to think and act. Hence, the Nazis concluded, government
by the political elite is not a violation of the people's rights, but is
in perfect harmony with the nature of man.

Not only democracy, but any other system wjiich presumes
Intelligent action on the part of the masses, is scientifically unsound,
according to the Nazi view. Man is too irrational, they said, even
for communism. The communistic theory necessarily assumes,
they pointed out, that all men are primarily motivated by their own
economic interests and hence that all social institutions and proc-
esses are economically determined. This cannot be true, according
to the Nazis, for most men are not rational enough to know what
their true economic interests are or to follow them when told what
they are. Therefore communism will never do away with the
economic exploitation of the masses; will never achieve economic
democracy, as Marx prophesied; it will merely substitute a new and
worse system of exploitation for the old. Moreover, communism,
being wholly materialistic, misses the true basis of human action,
which, said the Nazis, are faith and vision and will.

It is a good thing, declared the Nazi theorists, that men are
not rational. If all men, or even a majority, were fully rational it
would never be possible to weld them together into strong social
communities of any kind. Men of thought, they asserted^ are
hesitant, irresolute, and unduly individualistic. They never can
successfully combine for action. The state which wishes to be
strong should see to it that its people never become too intellectual.
It should provide the kind of education which would make good
citizens rather than good thinkers. Physical training for strong and
i healthy bodies and moral training for good character should be the
main functions of education. After them should come training in
technical knowledge and skills of value to the state. The higher
studies, especially the liberal arts, should be discouraged except
for a few very exceptional persons. Those admitted to advanced
studies should be selected on the basis of racial purity and loyalty
to the state; mental ability was less important than these. Even the
leaders should not be overly intellectual. Of course they should
be more so than the rna;>ses; they should be sufficiently intelligent

THE NAZI STATE

659

and educated to understand and utilize the irrationality of the
people, to plan and execute programs, and to deal successfully
with the problems of state; but they should not be so highly edu-
cated as to lose the vigor, courage, and singleness of purpose that
are essential to leadership.

Irrationalism led the Nazis to attach great importance to SoreFs
Idea of the social myth. It was the Nazi view that since men are
not rational creatures and cannot live by reason, they must have a
substitute for reason — some faith or belief bv which thev can re«*u-

^ tf *j

late their behavior and guide their lives. The best substitute, the
Nazis thought, was a plausible social myth. It need not be true,
but it must possess the' kind of emotional appeal that would unite
the masses and inspire them to action. One of the primary functions
of the state, in their opinion, was to create and maintain such .
myths. The Nazi state had done this, they said, in exalting the
idea of race — a myth which they regarded as not only true but
as the most dynamic of all social myths. It was the special task
of the Nazi Party to use all of the means at their disposal and at the
disposal of the state to inculcate this myth and give it vitality.

Another conclusion to which the Nazis were led by their irra-
tionallsm was that nothing can be universally true for all human
beings. Men are too irrational to grasp universal truths, said the
Nazi theorists; and how can truth that a people cannot know,, be
truth for them? Their answer was that nothing can be correctly
called a truth for any people unless they are capable of seeing and
understanding it. Therefore, what is truth for one person or one
people is not truth for another. The whole matter is relative.
There are many truths; each people, according to its racial nature
and social conditioning, determines which of these many truths are
truths for it. The Nazis applied this doctrine not only to moral
truths and sociological truths, but to truth in the realm of mathe-
matics, physics, and other objective sciences. They insisted that
there was not only a distinctly German political science, economics,
etc., but also a distinctly German biology, physics, mathematics,
and chemistry. As regards morals, the Nazis put themselves fully
on record both In words and deeds. Jewish morals, Christian
morals, democratic morals — all morals save those dictated by the
innate moral sense of the German race — were denounced and
rejected. Irrationalism was likewise a factor In the Nazi adoption

660 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

of Sorel's doctrine of violence. Sorel had argued that proletarian
violence is a necessary and morally justifiable weapon of class war;
bv uslns: violence to force the capitalist classes to fight, the prole-

4 C?

tarians would have an earlier opportunity to smash them. The
Nazis were anti-proletarian and proposed to meet proletarian
violence with greater middle-class violence. To do this, they not
only had to convince the German middle classes^that it was ex-
pedient to employ violence against the proletarians but that it was
morally justifiable to do so. The moral relativism of the irrationalist
doctrine was a great help in this particular. The Nazis could argue
most persuasively that the middle-class aversion to violence was
an archaic survival of a moral code that belonged to a different
time, a different people, and a different situation. Morals, they
could eloquently insist, are not absolute and eternal, but are ex-
pressions of the needs of a people and a state under the conditions of
their existence at the time.

V

The virulence of Nazi hatred for communism was exceeded only
by the vehemence of their demands for a state-managed economy.
This was not an inconsistency, though many have deemed it such.
The Nazis had no objection to socialism; many of them were
thoroughly doctrinaire socialists. What they could not tolerate
was the proletarianism of the communist movement, especially
"the proletarianism of Russia. Nazism was a middle-class, rather
.than a working-class movement. The middle classes could not
line up for any brand of socialism that proposed to dispossess all
private owners and capitalists; but it could be wron over to an
inscrutable thing called "national socialism," which promised to
preserve and protect capitalism and at the same time use the
power of the state to correct all the shortcomings of capitalism and
manage the economic affairs of the nation so that common interest
would take priority over self-interest.

The Nazi lease of power did not endure long enough for their
economic conceptions to take conclusive form, but they diluted
private capitalism until hardly more than the name survived. Pri-
vate ownership was allowed to continue, but the state controlled
and supervised every step of the economic process. The business
man was told exactly what he might or might not do with his

THE NAZI STATE

capital and how much profit he might make. The same authori-
tarianism was applied to agriculture and to labor. The Nazis
professed a very special concern for agriculture. They deplored
the neglect of the nation's basic resource — its soil— and contended
that the rapid industrialization and urbanization of Germany had
weakened the nation by making it increasingly dependent on im-
ports. The Naz^is proposed to put German agriculture on an equal
footing with German commerce and industry, and the measures
they took to accomplish this added up to die almost complete
regimentation of the farmer. He lost his freedom to produce and
market his crops as he saw fit, even his freedom to bequeath, sell,
or mortgage his land as he wished. Labor was put Into a similar
strait-jacket. All pre-existing labor unions were outlawed, arid
all workers, "whether of brain or hand/3 were obliged to become
members of the so-called labor front, which was nothing more than a
state-managed hierarchy of employee organizations. State officials
determined all matters of wages, hours, and working conditions.
Strikes were forbidden, and all labor controversies were settled by
various forms of compulsory arbitration or adjudication.

VI

The defeat of Nazi Germany has not destroyed Nazism. That
much of the Nazi ideology should survive in Germany was to be
expected. It was a philosophy born of the defeat of Germany in
World War I, and, despite the fact that it was one of the chief
factors in the defeat of Germany in World War II, it still possesses
all the qualities to beguile a frustrated, despairing, and humiliated
people. Multitudes of Germans will not perceive its connection
with the disaster which befell them in 1945, and multitudes of
distraught persons in other countries may not see that point any
more clearly than multitudes of Germans.

Nazism is still dynamic and still dangerous because its con-
glomeration of mysticism, half-truth, prejudice, amoralism, and
statism is an invitation to destroy any disliked social order.

REFERENCES

Baynes, N. H., The Speeches of Adolf Hitler (New York, 1942).
Chandler, A. R., Rosenberg's Nad Myth (Ithaca, 1945).
Childs, H. L., The Nazi Primer (New York, 1938).

662 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

Dewey, J., German Philosophy and Politics (rev. ed.5 New York, 1942).
Ebenstein, W., The Nazi State (New York, 1943).
Helden, K., Dor Fuehrer (Boston, 1944).
Hitler, A., Mein Kampf (Annotated trans., New York, 1939).
London, K., Backgrounds of Conflict (New York, 1945), Chaps. I-V.
McGovern, W. M.9 From Luther to Hitler (Boston, 1941), Chap. XII.
Morstein-Marx, F., The Government of the Third Reich (New York, 1938).
Neumann, F., Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism

(New' York, 1942).
Oakshott, M., The Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe

(New York, 1942), Chap, V.

Pollock, J. K.3 Government in Greater Germany (New York, 1938).
Roucek, J. (ed.)5 Twentieth Century Political Thought (New York, 1946),

Chaps. VI-VIL

CHAPTER XXXIII

THE COMMUNIST STATE

I

NINETEENTH-CENTURY proletarlanism was of no im-
mediate political importance. Bold though It was in
doctrine, aggressive in propaganda, and vigorous in en-
deavor to organize the working population for class war, it had
little success in winning political victories. Proletarian thinkers
and leaders were deeply divided both on points of theory and on
the best tactics to' initiate and win the great revolution. The more
impatient favored "direct35 action by such means as an insurrec-
tionary uprising of the masses, the general strike, or destructive
sabotage; the more moderate and patient preferred "political"
action as exemplified in such tactics as party warfare, pressure
politics, electoral competition, and gradual legislative reform.

Political-actionists organized socialist parties and competed
vigorously in electoral struggles, but without conspicuous success.
Socialist parties won many seats in parliamentary assemblies, but
never a majority and seldom even a balance-of-power minority.
Pressure methods, as commonly employed by labor unions, were
slightly more successful in securing "progressive" legislation but
resulted in nothing more than piecemeal reforms at best. No form
of political action seemed capable of realizing the whole socialist
program. Direct-actionists made more noise than the polltical-
actionists and stirred up sharper conflicts, but they could show even
less in the way of practical achievement. They kept alive the spirit
of revolt and carried on an irritating, though not very damaging^
guerilla warfare against capitalistic institutions; but the great up-
rising of the proletariat just would not arrive.

Such was the proletarian picture at the outbreak of World War L
That great cataclysm upset all strategic calculations. Both capi-
talist and proletarian thought entirely misjudged the significance
and consequences of the war. At first it seemed to sound the death-
knell of proletarianism. Socialist parties, swept from their moorings
by the hysterical outburst of nationalism that accompanied the

war, forgot their proletarian principles3 joined their bourgeois

663

664 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

opponents in the hymns of hate, and allowed capitalism almost
without rebuke or check to manage the war and make the peace.
The few proletarian leaders who stood firm on their principles
and strove to arouse the working populations of all countries
against this £ 'capitalist war" paid for their indiscretion by death,
imprisonment, and exile.

But the pendulum was swinging toward proletarianism none the
less. The undue prolongation of the war resulted in a widespread
condition of social and economic prostration which halted the trend
to the Right and started a movement in reverse. The backswing
came before the end of the war in some countries and in others not
until the post-war crises set in. But in all cases it spelled opportunity
for proletarianism. Proletarian strategists did not in every instance
.see the opportunity when it came; in other cases they saw it clearly
enough and tried to take advantage of it, but failed. In Russia,
however, proletarian leadership gauged the situation correctly^ won
its way to power, and launched the first communist state in the
history of the world.

Russian capitalism rested on too shaky a base for a long and
destructive war. By 1917 Russia was at the end of her rope. It
was impossible for the Czar to maintain his authority at home, let
alone proceed with the war. The overthrow of the Romanoff
dynasty was accomplished almost without a struggle. The succeed-
ing provisional government was a middle-of-the-road regime which
could rule only with the consent of its radical or conservative
opponents. This meant opportunity for one or the other of these
two groups of extremists. Both saw it, both made ruthless bids for
power, and the radicals won. The Bolsheviki (Left Wing Socialists
and Communists) , led by Lenin and Trotsky, gained the support
of the Soviets of soldiers, sailors, and workingmen, the only cohesive
force left in Russia; smashed the faltering Kerensky government;
suppressed all counter-revolutionary movements; and hoisted
themselves to dictatorial authority. Proletarianism had won its
first great political victory. The order was immediately given to
inarch forward, not only in Russia, but throughout the entire world.
The Bolsheviki fancied themselves the vanguard of a world revolu-
tion which would quickly culminate in universal communism.

The expected world revolution did not materialize; but com-
munism succeeded in securely intrenching itself in Russia, from

THE COMMUNIST STATE

which point of vantage it set in motion wave upon wave of propa-
ganda and intrigue against the capitalist front. Though the cause
of proletarianism was not always well served by the missionary zeal
of the Soviets, it must be admitted that the proletarian movement
throughout the world, even in countries where communism seemed
to have little chance, was greatly heartened and sometimes directly
aided by the Russian government. Russian proletarianism extended
its authority from the Baltic to the Pacific and from the ice-packs
of the Arctic to the borders of India and Iran. It penetrated deeply
into the seething politics of China and appeared as a distinct threat
to imperialist Japan. On the western front it seemed likely for a
time to overrun Poland, Germany, Italy, and the whole region of
the Danube, but was held back by diplomatic and military combi-
nations among the western states. This check gave time for the
rise of anti-communist regimes in several of the countries threatened
by Bolshevism and for setting up an opposing barricade both of
armaments and ideologies. Italy and Germany in particular, by
reason of the breathing spell thus afforded, were enabled to re-enter
the European embroglio as aggressive military powers, hurling de-
fiance not only at communism but at every conceivable opponent
of their most unbounded national aspirations.

The effect of this was to upset the security arrangements which
had been so carefully contrived through the League of Nations,
the Locarno Pacts, and the Little Entente. France, finding herself
virtually isolated in Europe save for the uncertain friendship of
Great Britain, faced about and made an alliance with Russia. In
the elections of 1936, which followed soon thereafter, the French
people, disappointed at the failure of their conservative parties to
ease the difficulties of the great economic depression which had
seized the world in the 1930's went radical in a large way and turned
their government over to a Popular Front made up of Radical
Socialists, Socialists, and Communists. Great Britain, which had
turned from a Labor to a so-called National Government in 1 93 1 ,
and from that to a Conservative regime in 1 935, found herself in
1936 in the anomalous position of cooperating with communist
Russia and socialist France to avert the menace of an Italo-German
combination. Spain, in constant turmoil throughout the post-war
period, voted a communist government into power in 1936 and
was immediately convulsed by a desperate civil war in which

666 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

fascist rebels, with aid from Germany and Italy, were pitted against
republican communists receiving help from Russia and France.

So sharp was the cleavage brought out in the Spanish struggle,
so bitter the contest, and so fateful the outcome, that rumblings
of war echoed from Madrid to Tokyo. Once and for all, cried
the Nazi and Fascist leaders, the onward march of communism must
be stopped. To which the spokesmen of communism replied that
capitalist tyranny lurking behind the mask of fascist nationalism
must be forever scotched and destroyed. Liberal nations, abhorring
proletarian and fascist madness alike, were confronted with a grave
dilemma. They did not wish to take sides, but could they keep out
of the impending broil? Was neutrality possible? And if possible,
was it safe? Fascism and Russian communism were both avowed
, enemies of democracy and all it stood for. Victory for either would
be a defeat for democracy. Diplomatic intervention might be of
some avail in averting such an outcome, but the more powerful
democratic nations decided that the safest policy was to arm and

wait.

They did not have to wait long. They were not yet fully armed,
nor even well prepared psychologically, when World War II
broke out in 1939. At first it looked as though that conflict would
be a straight-out struggle between the democracies and the to-
talitarian states. Russia had momentarily removed herself from
the equation by a pact with Germany under which, as a reward
for her "neutrality," she shared the spoils of Germany's conquests
adjacent to the Russian borders. If Russia and Germany could
have remained at peace, the outcome of the war might have been
very different. But that was not to be. Germany turned on Russia
in the summer of 1941. Then it became a matter of political and
military necessity for the democracies to give all possible aid to a
regime as autocratic and as hostile to democracy as those of Hitler
and Mussolini. Every one knows the result. Communist Russia
emerged from the war the strongest military power of the eastern
hemisphere, and fully determined to use that power not only to
establish her own security, not only to make herself the overlord
of Europe and Asia, but to prosecute even more zealously than
before her world crusade for communism. Post-war conditions
favored her in many ways. Europe and Asia were economically
prostrate and politically desperate. To go Left was at least to

THE COMMUNIST STATE

repudiate ^ the past, and that was something multitudes wanted to
do. Russia established communist regimes in her satellite states:
Great Britain voted the Labor Party into power and entered upon
a program of proletarian socialism; strong communist parties
arose in France, Italy, and other western states; and communists
and nationalists battled for control of China. Proletarianism was
now a leading contender in the arena of world power.

II

The purely political thought of Russian proletarianism, though
not extensive, is thoroughly integrated and is laid on substantial
philosophical foundations. Nikolai Lenin., the now beatified saint
of Bolshevism, was not only a revolutionary leader of great sagacity
and practical ability, but was also a writer and thinker of excep-
tional penetration and power. He claimed to be nothing more
than a faithful disciple and authentic interpreter of Marx and
Engels, but he was also a thorough student of Hegel, and Ms
writings reveal a mind quite aware of the deeper philosophical
implications of the Marxian creed. Lenin was no mere oppor-
tunist. Long before the Russian Revolution he had a positive and
coherent political philosophy, and this philosophy, after he became
head of the Russian state, governed all his public decisions and
acts. It became and has remained to a very large degree the
political road map of Russian communism. ,

£

, Marx had prophesied the1', ultimate disappearance of the state.
In the communistic society which he envisioned as the culmination
of social evolution, the state, .said Marx, would be superfluous and
hence would be discontinued. Lenin fully accepted this postulate,
But Marx had also predicted a transition period between capitalism -t
and communism in which the state would be supremely important./'
Lenin accepted this dictum, too. All true believers in the Marxian
gospel likewise acknowledged these two fundamental articles of
faith, but there were wide differences of interpretation which split
the faithful into bitterly hostile sects, each of which claimed to be the
one true and authentic expounder of the Word.

Seizing upon the phrase so often used by both Marx and Engels,
"the State withers away," the different schools of Marxian thought
worked out interpretations to their own satisfaction. Evolutionary
socialists contended that revolution,, whether by direct or political

668 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

action, was not a necessary Item of the Marxian program. Gradual
evolution, according to their view, would duly effect the transition
to communism and thus fulfill the Marxian prophecy. Political
actionists, having great confidence in democracy and the practical
possibilities of political reform, argued that the withering away
of the state would come as the final result of a grand series of
socialistic measures which would leave it no functions to perform.
Opportunists held that the state would wither away r as the result
of paralyzing crises in capitalistic society, provided the proletarians
were alert and organized to take advantage of them as they oc-
curred. Anarchists and syndicalists, having no patience with any
sort of temporizing, contended that the proletarian revolution was
destined to wither the state by the direct and simple expedient of
abolishing it at a single stroke.

.'Lenin denounced all of these views as subversive heresies grossly
distorting the true Marxian doctrine, treasonable to the prole-
tariat, and philosophically and scientifically unsound. His inter-
pretation and his alone, he defiantly insisted, was the one correct
rendition of the Marxian prognosis. The whole philosophic system
of Marx, said Lenin, converges around the doctrine of dialectical
• materialism. !' Marx had applied Hegel's doctrine of development by
the process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis to the field of eco-
nomic and political life; Lenin, a careful student" of Darwinism,
was of the opinion that the Hegelian formula was scientifically
superior, in the realm of social speculation, to the Darwinian. 1
Dialectic or logic, as Lenin defined it, was far more than the formal
science of intellectual pattern-making; it was the understanding of
evolution in its fullest, deepest, and most universal aspects — the
correct mirroring, as he was wont to say, of the eternal development

of the world. To achieve scientific objectivity of understanding,

i
it was necessary, the declared, to deal exclusively with things inde-

<^^ &

pendent of mind, sensation, and experience; in other words, to deal
only with concrete material facts.) Ideas, Lenin asserted, whether
individual of social, are the result of matter acting on and in our
sense organsl A correct analysis of social processes must depend,
therefore, upon a full and thorough understanding of underlying

material facts and forces, and these in the main, he said, were

"«,

economic. \

f

This dialectic of historical materialism, said Lenin, was not only

THE COMMUNIST STATE 669

Marx's grandest contribution to social thought; it was the master
key to the correct interpretation of Marx's own system of economic
and political thought.^ Social change, according to Lenin's reading
of Marxism, is wrought by material forces, but comes neither
by gradual evolution nor spontaneous convulsion. Ii comes, he
persisted, when determined human beings, correctly reading the

chart of history and seeing that material facts indicate a possibilitv

^ *

of change, get in line with nature's law of development and
actually drive through to the attainable end. Some situations
may yield very limited results, while others may open the way for
sweeping revolution. The all-important thing for the proletariat,
he advised, was to see clearly whether the situation was favorable
to its objectives, "and then to act according to the material realities
of the occasion, moving as fast and as far as the circumstances would
allow, but never pressing beyond the limits of the materially
practicable.

Such being the scientific mode of social change, it must be clear,
Lenin argued, that a successful proletarian movement could not
depend on evolution alone; could not afford to temporize with.
reformist or opportunist expedients, or beguile itself with anarch-
ism's idle dream of immediately doing away with all political
administration. Proletarian victory could only come as the result
of carefully calculated revolutionary action, accurately timed and
rationally confined to objectively feasible steps. For such a program
Lenin was certain that Marx had provided an infallible chart and
compass. "The whole theory of Marx," wrote Lenin In The State
and Revolution, ccis an application of the theory of evolution — In Its
most consistent, complete, well considered, and fruitful form — to
modern capitalism. It was natural for Marx to raise the question
of applying this theory to the coming collapse of capitalism and to
the future evolution of future Communism." l

Marx had taught that capitalism cannot be Immediately followed
by communism. Between the two there must intervene what he
termed "the period of the revolutionary transformation of the
former into the latter." This transition period. In Lenin's thinking,
would be the most critical time for the proletarian regime. Al-
though capitalism was bound, as Marx had explained, to engender

1 From excerpt in A Handbook of Marxism (ed. by E. Burns, New York, 1935), pp.
740-741.

670 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

forces inducive of Its own downfall, these forces would not of them-
selves establish communism in the place of capitalism. They
might, in fact, if the proletarians misjudged the situation, result
in the restoration of capitalism in a modified and even more viru-
lent form. The supreme task of the proletariat, upon the collapse
of capitalism, was to carry through a revolution so complete that
capitalism could never return.
For this, said Lenin,

:cWe need revolutionary power, we need (for a certain period of
transition) the State. Therein we differ from the Anarchists. The
difference between revolutionary Marxists and Anarchists lies not only
in the fact that the former stand for huge, Centralized, communist
production, while the latter are for decentralized, small-scale produc-
tion. No, the difference as to government authority consists in this,
• that we stand for the revolutionary utilization of revolutionary forms of
the State in our struggle for socialism, while the Anarchists are against it.

"We need the State. But we need none of those types of State varying
from a constitutional monarchy to the most democratic republic which
the bourgeoisie has established everywhere. And herein lies the differ-
ence between us and the opportunists and Kautskians of the old, decay-
ing Socialist parties. . . .

"We need the State, but not the kind needed by the bourgeoisie, with
the organs of power in the form of police, army, bureaucracy, distinct
from and opposed to the people. All bourgeois revolutions have
merely perfected this apparatus, have merely transferred it from one
party to another.

"The proletariat, however, if it wants to preserve the gains of the
present revolution, and proceed further to win peace, bread, and free-
dom, must 'destroy,5 to use Marx's word, this 'ready-made5 State
machinery, and must replace it by another one, merging the police,
the army, and the bureaucracy with the universally armed people" 1

The correct strategy for the proletariat, then, was to seize control
of the state and continue the authoritarian system, using it for
proletarian ends. On no account, however, should the proletarians
allow themselves to be led astray by the illusion of democracy.
On this point Lenin was explicit and emphatic. Democracy and
proletarian revolution simply would not mix. "It is possible," he
wrote^ * "

eeby means of a successful insurrection in the centre or a mutiny in the
army, to defeat the exploiters at one blow, but except in very rare and

lee

Letters from Afar," ibid., pp. 774-775.

THE COMMUNIST STATE 671

particular cases, the exploiters cannot be destroyed at once. It is
impossible to expropriate at one blow ail the landlords and capitalists
of a large country. In addition, expropriation alone, as a legal or
political act, does not by far settle the matter, since it is necessary
practically to replace the landlords and capitalists, to substitute for
theirs another, a working class, management of the factories and es-
tates. ... It is inevitable that the exploiters should still enjoy a large
number of practical advantages for a considerable period after the
revolution. They still have money (since it is impossible to abolish
money at once), some moveable property (often of a considerable ex-
tent), social connections, habits of organization and management,
knowledge of all the secrets (customs, methods, means, and possibilities)
of administration, higher education, closeness to the higher personnel of
technical experts (wno live and think after the bourgeois style), and
incomparably higher knowledge and experience in military affairs
(which is very important) ....

"In these circumstances to suppose that in any serious revolution the
issue is to be decided by the simple relation between majority and
minority is the acme of stupidity, a typical delusion of an ordinary-
bourgeois Liberal, as well as a deception of the masses from whom a well
established historical truth is concealed. This truth is that in any and
every serious revolution a long, obstinate,, desperate resistance of the
exploiters, who for many years will yet enjoy great advantages over the
exploited, constitutes the rule." *

Here we reach the theoretical underpinning of Lenin's doctrine
of proletarian dictatorship. The freedom of a liberal or democratic
state plays into the hands of counter-revolution; hence there must
be no freedom in the proletarian state, at least not until the revo-
lution has completely liquidated the bourgeoisie. A dictatorial
government acting as trustee for the proletariat was what Lenin
advised for the transition period. The proletarian masses could
not directly govern themselves, or intelligently control and guide
the policies and processes of a complex modem state; this must be
confided to a relatively small body of organized, disciplined, and
clear-thinking leaders, the "armed vanguard" of the proletariat.

Lenin had no doubt that in Russia it was the special mission of
the Bolshevik Party to serve in the capacity of armed vanguard.
If, he reasoned, it was right for the proletariat to overtiirow the
bourgeois state and set up a state of its own, it was equally the
right of the party best fitted for proletarian rule to seize control
and administer the new regime in such a way as to make sure of

1 "Proletarian Revolution," ibid., pp. 834-835.

672 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

the communistic goal This was the objectively practical way to
success, and, being such, it was also the ethical way. The Bolshevik
Party was truly Marxian and truly revolutionary; social evolution
had presented it with an opportunity for power, and it would be a
betrayal of the proletariat for it to decline the dictatorial role which
the necessity of the situation demanded.

Sentiment and feeling, Lenin repeatedly insisted^ should have
no place in Bolshevik theory or practice. Every problem and
every situation should be approached dispassionately and objec-
tively. Theory and practice should be absolutely integrated with
reference to the ultimate goal. Violence should be used when
practical gains would result, likewise moderation. Compromise
and retreat should be governed by the same rule." To attempt to
leap at once to communism was sheer madness. Be patient, he
counseled; know when to wait, when to go slowly, and when to
strike rapidly and decisively and go forward. Above all else hold
on to power! Never risk the loss of the state. With the "armed
vanguard" in power, slowly but surely reconstructing the social
system, Lenin was confident that the coming of communism could
be only a matter of time. That, he said, was the teaching of Marx,
and the infallible law of history.

Ill

During his tenure as dictator Lenin instituted a New Economic
Policy, which was characterized as a "strategic retreat" from com-
munism. Such a course was entirely consistent with his political
theory and did not signify the abandonment of the communistic
goal. Since Lenin's death his words and ideas have come to be
even more venerated in Russia than those of Marx and Engels.
The fierce struggle, immediately following the passing of Lenin, was
not merely a contest between Stalin and Trotsky for control of
the governmental machine; also at issue was the question of which
would become the authentic and final interpreter of Leninism.
The triumph of Stalin and the policies followed under his dictator-
ship led many to suppose that a less revolutionary Leninism had
emerged. Trotsky had insisted that the Russian Revolution was
but a phase of a forthcoming world revolution which both Marx
and Lenin had foreseen, and for which Lenin had planned the
correct strategy. He demanded, therefore, that the Russian state

THE COMMUNIST STATE 673

devote itself unremittingly to the promotion of proletarian revolu-
tionary activity all over the world.

Stalin seemed to turn his back on all this. He not only dissolved
the Communist International, but appeared partial to definitely
nationalistic policies. Even by observers and commentators not
at all sympathetic with communism, it was often stated that Stalin's
purpose was not to spread communism throughout the world, but
to establish it safely and solidly in Russia. The adoption of a
pretentiously liberal constitution in 1936, the series of five-year
plans, the increased attention to Russian history and culture, and
various other trends and occurrences gave color to these supposi-
tions. Even as late as 1946 an American writer of considerable
prominence made the confident assertion that "the Soviet Union
is now pledged to a policy of democratic internationalism.55 1

It is becoming increasingly plain, however, that the Soviet policy
of democratic internationalism does not contemplate unreserved
cooperation with capitalist democracies. Lenin would have ap-
proved this intractability. Many times, in the most emphatic
language, he warned the communist faithful that capitalist democ-
racy was more than just a snare and delusion; it was the most
insidious danger the proletarian revolution has to face. A demo-
cratic republic with universal suffrage was the best instrument
capitalist tyranny could possess. Lenin pointed out that this was
not his opinion alone, but also that of Marx and Engels. Universal
suffrage in a capitalist democracy, he said, is simply not capable
of expressing the will of the working class and insuring its realiza-
tion; but the bourgeoisie, taking advantage of the belief of the people
that it does, can deceive them into believing themselves not ex-
ploited, can even deceive them into reaction against the proletarian
social order.

If the leaders of present-day Russia were in need of proving
themselves faithful disciples of Lenin, they could do nothing more
convincing than the courses now being pursued in their dealings
with the capitalist democracies.

REFERENCES

Burns, E. (ed.), A Handbook of Marxism (New York, 1935).

Coker, F. W., Recent Political Theory (New York, 1934), Chaps. III-IX.

1 Melvin Rader in J. S. Roucek (ed.), Twentieth Century Political ThmgM9 p. 31,

674 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

Eastman. M., Marx, Lenin and the Science of Revolution (London, 1926).

Florinsky, M. T., World Revolution and the U.S.S.R. (New York, 1933).

Graves, S., A History of Socialism (New York, 1942).

Gurian, W., Bolshevism: Theory and Practice (New York, 1932).

Harper, S. N., The Government of the Soviet Union (New York, 1938).

Lenin, N., Collected Works (New York, 1945).

Oakshott, M., The Social and Political Doctrines of the Contemporary Europe

(New York, 1942), Chap. III.

Rosenberg, A., A History of Bolshevism (London, 1939).
Roucek, J. S. (ed.)3 Twentieth Century Political Thought (New York, 1946),

Chap. II.

Schumpter, J. A., Capitalism, Socialism^ and Democracy (New York, 1942)
Stalin, J.3 Leninism (2 vols., London, 1941).

CHAPTER XXXIV

THE DEMOCRATIC STATE

I
S the r^idpoint of the twentieth century approached, demo-

cratic government seemed to be moving rapidly
toward the ultimate crisis which would determine its
downfall or survival. From the Whig Revolution of 1683 in
England down to the second decade of the twentieth century the

TI i*

forward march of democracy, though often violently challenged
and sometimes appreciably slowed, was never reversed. Slowly
but irresistibly, in every part of the world, democratic Ideas and
democratic institutions gained ground. This progress was halted
by World War I — a struggle which, in the words of one of Its most
eloquent leaders, was a war ccto make the world safe for democracy."
Historically as well as politically, this was a very inadequate in-
terpretation of the significance of World War I, but it had a tre-
mendous emotional appeal. For millions in the countries which
joined hands against Germany and her allies it became a sustain-
ing faith. Multitudes in the United States, Great Britain, France^
Italy, and other democratic countries devoutly believed that the
defeat of the central powers would destroy the remaining strong-
holds of autocracy and insure the security of democracy for all time
to come.

The military victory was won, but not the political victory. As
the final returns came In, it became shockingly clear that the
military victory had not made the world safe for democracy-
had, in fact, made it more unsafe than at any time since the Battle
of Waterloo. Russia, though throwing off the yoke of the czars, had
merely traded in the old model for a new and more efficient vehicle
of absolutism. Austro-Hungarian autocracy had buckled and gone
to pieces, but out of the ruins had sprung only one avowedly
democratic state — Czechoslovakia. The other succession states,
Hungary, Austria, and Jugoslavia, had made formal bows In the
direction of democracy but actually had relapsed into something
very close to absolutism. Throughout the Balkans, where before the
war there had been hopeful stirrings of democracy, the old order

675

676 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

had reasserted Itself with renewed truculence. Turkey, rising from
defeat to vigorous nationhood, had discarded a feeble sultanate
for a virile dictatorship. Italy, bitter over her treatment at the
Versailles treasure-hunt and rent with internal discord, had for-
gotten the ideals of Mazzini and Garibaldi and surrendered to a
Fascist dictatorship that was rabidly anti-democratic. Poland,
encircled by enemies, had sought safety in military despotism.
Germany, after vainly striving to solve her domestic and inter-
national difficulties under a democratic constitution, had resigned
herself to the fanatical autocracy of the Nazis.

In Europe democracy had survived only in Great Britain, France,
Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, Belgium, The Netherlands, and the
Scandinavian countries. It had survived in those countries, but it
was far from safe. In the Far East it had not even survived, for the
promising democratic movements in China and Japan had been
aborted by the forces of militarism and imperialism. Subversive
movements against democratic government sprang up on every
side, spreading even to the Western Hemisphere where the United
States stood guard as the self-knighted Sir Galahad of nations.
In 1939 the forces of absolutism struck again, and again the democ-
racies were forced to fight for survival. Again the democracies won
the military victory, and again, at the end of World War II just
as before, they lost the peace. The democracies had crushed
Germany, Italy, and Japan, but they had not crushed political
absolutism. In World War II as in World War I, the democracies,
for reasons of political and military expediency, had leagued them-
selves with Russia, the one great state of the world in which demo-
cratic ideas had never gained a foothold even among the most
radical elements of the population. The Russian Revolution had
been as much a revolution against democracy as against czardom;
Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and other Bolshevik leaders made this
perfectly clear In their writings and speeches. Events also made it
clear that the Russian people had no comprehension of democracy,
no interest in it, and no zeal for political freedom. The Russian
masses had always been subject to autocratic rule; it seemed a
perfectly natural system of government to them; they had no
objection to it per se; and, because of the geographic isolation of their
country, they actually had been less exposed to the ferment of
democratic ideologies than even the great masses of China and

THE DEMOCRATIC STATE

India. Regimentation under the dictatorship of the Communist
Party undoubtedly was a more beneficent regimentation in many
ways than they had ever known before; so it was not hard for
fanatical Marxian zealots to turn them against democracy., depicting
it, as the Bolshevik leaders always did, as the most dangerous of ail
enemies of the earthly paradise that communism was soon to
produce.

But the outcome at the end of World War II was verv different

«*

from that which followed World War I. In the first world con-
flict the democracies let Russian autocracy shift for itself; they
gave it very- little help, and in some degree actually contributed
to the weaknesses which caused its defeat and downfall. In the
second world war, however, the democracies, and especially the
United States, gave Russian autocracy unlimited help, really pro-
viding the means which enabled the dictatorship to double-rivet
its power, hold the country together until military victory was
achieved, and then project Russia into the post-war scene as the
military and political colossus of the Eastern Hemisphere. Thus
with their own hands the democracies preserved the regime and the
state which are leading the anti-democratic crusade throughout
the world today. Whether it was necessary to do this in order to
defeat the Axis powers, historians will long debate. It was done,
and being done, it divided the world more sharply than ever
before into two irreconcilable camps of political belief — irrecon-
cilable because of the conviction on each side that the other is a
deadly menace. To the communist regime of Russia and its
puppets throughout the world, democracy is a deadly menace
because of its freedom. Democratic socialism is just as dangerous,
from their point of view, as democratic capitalism. Political free-
dom is the chief bugaboo, not capitalism; for political freedom
guarantees opportunity for the opposition to the Bolshevik brand of
proletarianism to agitate, organize, undermine, and overthrow the
communist system. Because of the danger of counter-revolution,
the Kremlin does not tolerate freedom at home; because of the
supposed danger of bourgeois-incited war, it fears freedom abroad.
To the democratic peoples, Russian authoritarianism is a deadly
menace because of its obvious determination to crush and exter-
minate political freedom wherever it can. Its communism would
not excite so much apprehension if it were not accompanied by the

678 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

fierce determination to extinguish the freedom of mankind to choose
between communism and any other economic order.

So the issue narrowed down to the question of whether free,
democratic political society could meet the challenge of communist
authoritarianism on even or better than even terms. Democracy
had shown itself not to be too feeble to win two world wars; when
close comparisons were made there was ample evidence that the
political, economic, and military mistakes of the democracies in
the two world wars \vere more than matched by those of the
authoritarian states. Democracy had also shown itself to be no less
capable of coping with the problems of peace. It was apparent to
anyone who looked at the facts with an open mind that the democ-
racies had displayed no less ability than the autocracies to manage
the critical economic readjustments necessitated by the great de-
pression of the 1930's, and, moreover, that the democracies had
come through with less disruption of the normal courses of life and
less impairment of individual worth and integrity. Yet there were
those who doubted — even in the democratic countries there were
many who doubted that the democracies would be able to win the
final struggle against absolutism. A critical re-examination of
democratic theory had long been needed, and the crises through
which democratic government had to pass in the twentieth century
quickly brought this about. Arguments fully in step with modern
social conditions and conversant with the latest trends in science
and philosophy were evolved on both sides of the question. There
were also a large number of neutral thinkers who strove for an
objective revaluation of the whole theory of democracy in the
light of present-day realities.

II

' Democracy has been under discussion since the earliest begin^
nings of political thought. The Greeks explored the subject quite
critically and bequeathed to subsequent ages a body of theory and
judgment that has never grown old. But Greek political thinkers
were not equipped to say the final word on democracy or any other
system of government. Admirably scientific as were, for example,
the spirit and method of Aristotle, there was much that lay beyond
the range of his knowledge and technique. Aristotle's conclusions
on democracy rested on no better scientific foundation than his

THE DEMOCRATIC STATE 679

conclusions on medicine. Amazingly penetrating though they
were, considering the limitations under which he worked, they
were not and could not be definitive and Irrefutable.

From the time of Aristotle down to the seventeenth century
the approach on all subjects of political speculation was primarily
dogmatic. Controversialists, with rare exceptions., stood pat on the
doctrines of the ancients or argued from abstract assumptions of
little or no scientific validity. The seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries were distinguished by the attempts of many political
thinkers to employ scientific methodology in the field of political
inquiry, and by the dispassionate and unprejudiced endeavors of
a few such as Spinoza, Hume, and Montesquieu to follow wherever
science might lead. On the whole, however, it was the traditionalist
or the romanticist who captured the public fancy and gained the
great following. Science really did not come of age until the nine-
teenth century, and not until then do we find much endeavor to
weigh democracy in the scales of objective social law. But the
nineteenth century was unable to complete that task and the
twentieth has not yet done so. A good beginning has been mades

but nothing more.

The standard arguments against democracy, as Indicated by
the concurrence of opinion throughout the centuries, are: (1) that-
democratic government Is prone to indecision, feebleness, Insta-
bility, and stupidity because of the volatility, Irrationality, and
ineptitude of the masses; (2) that democratic society exalts medioc-
rity and inferiority, the masses being resentful of persons above
their level of intelligence and ability and preferring leaders of
their own kind; (3) that democracy easily falls prey to demagogism,
bossism, and vicious pressure politics, the shortsightedness and
narrow selfishness of the people themselves being the cause _ of
these things; (4) that majority rule tends always to become majority
tyranny since the intolerance and bigotry of the multitude can be
subject to no effective restraint; and (5) that democratic govern-
ment cannot be carried on without political parties, and that this
Invariably results in government by an invisible oligarchy.

Though reiterated over and over again, these postulates were
not even respectably empirical; they were sheer guesses. Not only
was there no genuinely scientific proof of their truth or falsity;
there was no impartial opinion that was widely accepted. In the

680 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

twentieth century for the first time were they largely exposed to the
microscopic eye of science, Many new tools and techniques for
the examination of political phenomena were available to twen-
tieth-century political scientists. Biology, psychology, paleontology,
anthropology, ethnology, and various corollary disciplines had at
last produced data of sufficient scope and validity to be useful in
political inquiry. Serious political thinkers clearly recognized the
importance of utilizing as far as possible the findings of every
branch of scientific inquiry that might have a bearing on social
life. Not always, however, did they equally recognize the many
possibilities of error from too confident reliance upon the work
of these exceedingly helpful sister sciences. Valuable aids though
they were, they were not yet exact sciences and some of them were
scarcely out of their swaddling clothes.

Political thought in turning to science as a guide was not, there-
fore, achieving certainty, but only better bases for speculation;
was not gaining proof positive, but only proof suggestive or indica-
tive of general tendencies, principles, or laws. This, unfortunately,
was not always clear to political theorists themselves. There were
political theorists who, from incautious enthusiasm or lack of full
understanding, were inclined to receive the pronouncements of
science as absolutely oracular. There were others who erred on the
side of caution and failed to grasp the significance of the newer
developments in science. And there were some who went the
whole distance with the irrationalists and decried the belief that
political problems could be solved by the methods of science. Nor
was political theory benefited by the well-meant labors of certain
biologists, psychologists, and other researchers in non-political
fields who, without adequate familiarity with political phenomena,
sometimes undertook to declare the political meaning of findings
made in their own special fields.

All of the foregoing defects appear in the twentieth-century
symposium on democracy, but it has been immensely worth
while none the less. Many of the errors have tended in the long
run to cancel one another; the gaps in the argumentation have
shown the need and the places for additional research; and the
misinterpretations have evoked counter-interpretations which
have highlighted the unrealized complexity of social problems.
We have not yet achieved a conclusively scientific elucidation of

THE DEMOCRATIC STATE 681

democracy; perhaps we never shall. Nevertheless we have learned
much that was not known before, or was but dimly known; and
we have made substantial progress towards an Intelligent under-
standing both of the possibilities and limitations of democratic
government.

Ill

Some of the recent theories regarding democracy have ended
in despair. Of these, none has presented a gloomier prospect for
popular government, for the whole human race in fact, than the
sad forebodings of the distinguished American historian, Henry
Adams. Although of a family that had played a conspicuous part
in the formation and development of American political institutions,
Adams was deeply troubled by what seemed to him the failures of
democratic government. There must, he thought, be more potent
"lines of force" operating in the world than the mere purpose and
will of man. Going to science for the answer to his question^
Adams thought the teachings of science justified the deduction
that there are two great principles which control and shape human
destiny. He termed them the law of degradation and the rule of

phase.3

The law of degradation Adams derived from Kelvin's second
law of thermodynamics, which postulates an ever-declining solar
system. Expended energy, according to that hypothetical law of
pre-atomic physics, can never be fully restored. Hence the con-
clusion that the physical universe is destined gradually to run down
and end in nothingness. The same law, said Adams, must apply
to man. Human activity and human thought he considered
nothing more than forms of energy and human society nothing but
a special manifestation of energy. It followed, therefore, that
human kind, along with the physical universe, was doomed to
progressive degradation.

The rule of phase was a corollary of the law of degradation. In
such a world as ours, Adams declared, there could be no such tMng
as fixity. Equilibrium was a mere appearance, a temporary phase
like everything else. In the long view equilibrium was essentially
instable and destined to change. Phase, as Adams defined It, had

* Cf Henry Adams, A Letter to American Teachers of History (1910); The Education of
Henry Adams: An Autobiography (1918); The Degradation of Democratic Dogm* (1919).

682 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

nothing in common with evolution. It did not signify directional
change or adaptation, but a flux forever subject to the law of
degradation. From phase to phase humanity was irrevocably
bound to proceed downward to the inevitable end of all things.

Adams thought of democracy as a phase, obedient to the in-
exorable law of degradation. It was a mistake,, he said, to consider
It of higher grade than any other form of government; it was not
the culmination of any sort of upward development. It was merely
a form of government reflecting the average of human nature, which
was low and bound to become ever lower. It was to be expected
that every democratic government would display its greatest vigor

and efficiency in Its earlv vears. Bui as time -went on. the law of

< * t *

degradation would effect a progressive decline until at last the
democratic phase gave way to some other phase.

"Obviously this philosophy was no more pessimistic about
democracy than any other form of government. It applied to all
things human. But Adams was particularly concerned with de-
mocracy and enlarged upon the theme of democratic degradation,
which caused him to be regarded as primarily anti-democratic.
Critics of Adams5 philosophy of despair were quick to remark that
it was no more damaging to democracy than to other political
systems, and they also pointed out numerous fallacies which cast
doubt on the validity of his theories however applied. It was
shown that he had begged the question by taking for granted as
cosmic law a theory of declining energy that science had not
definitively proved (in fact, is still being debated) ; that he had been
guilty of special pleading in using science to support his political
hypothesis without taking account of contradicting facts and prin-
ciples which also had scientific foundation; that, though denying
the reality of evolution, he had assumed it in order to prove the
reality of degradation; that he had overlooked the creative impli-
cations of science and had not considered the possibility of cyclical
evolution; that he had made use of very questionable analogies
between mechanical and social phenomena; and, finally, that even
if his law of degradation were true, he had assumed the decline of
political society at a much more rapid rate than the dissipation of
solar energy would seem to warrant.

Much more challenging to democracy than the morbid doubts
of Adams were the inferences drawn from certain of the newer

THE DEMOCRATIC STATE 683

trends of biological and psychological research. Biologists in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had devoted a great
deal of attention to heredity, and had raised questions of serious
import to the conventional theories of democracy. Biological
studies and experiments pointed very strongly to the conclusion
that qualities acquired through education, experience, and social
adaptation are not transmissible through the reproductive process.
If this were true, how could the general mass of mankind ever be
elevated to the intellectual and moral level essential, in a complex
and refractory world, to decent self-government? Despite all
efforts to the contrary, would not the inferior, the anti-social, and
the degenerate continue to breed true to type? And would not their
fecundity, for reasons not difficult to understand, be generally
greater than that of the superior types? In that case, what of the
prospects for democracy? Sooner or later would not the moron
population or worse completely inundate the superior human
species?

The answer to these somber questions wras found in biology itself.
Cautious biologists refused to leap to conclusions. They pointed
out that biology had not precisely determined how much of human
potentiality is congenital and how much is acquired. There was
not yet enough evidence to warrant final judgment on that point;
the science of genetics was new and had not yet fully charted the
laws of heredity, and there was a mounting body of evidence tend-
ing to show that atomic radiation could upset the genetic laws that
were known. Moreover, it was the opinion of the more conservative
biologists that there was still no conclusive proof that the laws of
heredity governing the transmission of physical traits applied in
like manner and degree to mental and moral qualities. Nor had it
been proved beyond doubt that the principles of heredity derived
from the study of plants and lower animals were entirely valid in
respect to human beings. Among human beings there were many
striking instances of genius begetting genius and equally striking
instances of its failure to do so. Conversely, there were among
human beings many convincing examples of inferiority breeding
true to type, but there were also impressive instances of inferiority,
or what clearly seemed to be such, producing the most astounding
geniuses. Before venturing to broad generalization, said the less
hasty biologists, such contradictions must be fully understood.

684 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

Biology was not yet able to supply the answer; hence, the biological
case against democracy remained unproved.

Psychology as well as biology was pressed into service against
democracy. Studies of crowd psychology7 had shown how the
normal patterns of individual behavior are distorted by group
impulses and emotions; how with individuals of much more than
average mental and moral perceptions, reason is dethroned and
blind passion takes control when they are exposed to" the emotional
stimuli of group or mass psychology. From this it was deduced
that though men as individuals may be guided by intelligence,
in social relations they will invariably respond to the irrational
instincts of the herd. They will be sheep-minded, ape-minded,
wcflf-minded — will exhibit always in their social reactions the
characteristic behavior of gregarious animals; which was inter-
preted to mean that men in the mass will always be credulous,
impulsive, panicky, intolerant, unconscionable, cruel, unjust, stu-
pid, and everything but rational.

Democracy comes off very badly in this analysis of crowd and
group psychology. It is true that democratic society affords little
room for detached and dispassionate individual judgment — not
less room, however, than other political systems, and perhaps a
great deal more. Democracy necessarily consists of mass organi-
zation, mass movements, and mass determinations. Does it in-
exorably follow, then, that democratic government must always
be a reflex of herd psychology — deceived by demagogues, charmed
by slogans and catchwords, inflamed by prejudices, harrowed by
fears, and forever impervious to fact and reason? The Fascists,
the Nazis, and most of the Bolsheviks, taking their cue from the
Social Darwinists, the irrationalists, and the elitists, said that the
answer to the question had to be yes. Were they right? Before
attempting to answer that question let us pursue the psychological
indictment of democracy to the end.

Psychology raised the further question of whether, irrespective of
herdmindedness and the like, the intelligence level of the masses
Is or can ever be high enough for democratic government to
operate successfully in the complex modem world* Modern psy-
chologists have devised various techniques for the measurement
of intelligence. The widespread use of such tests and measurements
began in the early years of the twentieth century. They were de-

THE DEMOCRATIC STATE 685

signed to ascertain innate intelligence, not acquired intelligence —
a very difficult thing to do. The first two or three decades of intelli-
gence testing yielded results highly unflattering to mental ability
of the average human being — and also yielded some startling con-
tradictions, for the follow-up showed that low scores in intelligence
tests did not invariably preclude later success in activities requiring
a high degree ^of intelligence, or failure on the part of high-scoring
persons to achieve such success. Obviously the tests were defective;
and of late years psychologists have been giving more attention
to die refinement and improvement of intelligence tests than to
broad generalizations as to intelligence level of the masses.

Nevertheless the psychological arraignment of democracy Is not
to be lightly put aside. It assails democracy at a vulnerable point.
Group psychology is an integral part of the democratic process;
and the rationality of group behavior is easy to question. But
psychology is still far from discovering all there is to know about
group processes. It has not by any means irrefutably established
the point that group psychology necessarily means bad government;
nor has it proved that public opinion, the political fulcrum of group
psychology, is less likely to be rational and wise than a monarch,
dictator, or elite group. Opponents of democracy claim those
things to be true, and sometimes assert that psychology has demon-
strated that they are; but scientific proof that would be accepted by
the great majority of psychologists throughout the world is never
put forward to sustain them. Furthermore, psychology has not
demonstrated, by any objective proof, that it is impossible through
better forms and techniques of democratic government, better
education of the masses, and better leadership to implement group
psychology so that it will serve human needs as \vell under demo-
cratic government as under any other political system. Group
psychology is not confined to democratic society alone; it is just
as potent in authoritarian societies. Does psychology prove that
group reactions are more rational and more prone to good under
despotic or oligarchic regimes than under democratic? The ques-
tion answers itself. Psychology proves no such thing; as yet it can-
not even pretend to prove that point one way or the other; it
does not begin to have enough data for such a task.

As to the results of intelligence testing, the science of psychology
does not claim that its findings are infallible or that they are

686 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

politically conclusive for or against democracy. As Indicated above,
intelligence testing is still far from an exact science. The kind of
Intelligence that it now is able to measure with reasonable accuracy
is not strictly political intelligence. It is a fact of common ob-
servation among students of politics that some persons with high
intelligence quotients on the standard psychological ratings seem
to have very little political intelligence. This does not mean that
the standard ratings are erroneous, but simply that they do not
measure all kinds of intelligence. It is coming to be increasingly
apparent that the mental faculties of human beings are not all of
one kind and cannot be" fully measured by a single test of any sort.

*r

The mental faculties of chief importance in democratic citizenship

» r

have not been made the subject of a specially designed testing pro-
gram, and therefore it cannot be said that there is any body of
knowledge showing whether the average person has the innate
intelligence requisite for democratic citizenship. As a matter of
fact, it cannot be determined at the present time just how much
power of logical thought is indispensable for intelligent citizenship.
Psychology and political science have not yet joined hands on that
problem.

Ethnology, which is the study of race characteristics and differ-
ences, has been the source of some of the most vehement arguments
against democracy. Nearly all of the more doctrinaire racists of
the twentieth century have been anti-democratic, and have drawn
heavily from ethnology to support their contentions. They have
maintained that political ability is as much a racial quality as the
color of the skin, the formation of the eye or nose, the shape of the
head, or any other physical mark of racial difference. All races,
according to this dogma, have their points of superiority and in-
feriority; but only a few, composing a small minority of the world's
population, have the special endowments needed for self-govern-
ment. It is argued therefore that it is sheer nonsense to try to propa-
gate democracy among the many peoples who have no capacity
for it. Moreover, it is alleged that democratic society fosters the
dilution of the superior races by the inferior, and consequently
should not be tolerated in a state striving for the best government.

These doctrines would be more impressive if ethnology were a
more exact and fully developed science. As yet, however, the un-
known so far exceeds the known in the field of ethnological inquiry

THE DEMOCRATIC STATE 687

that conscientious ethnologists recognize that there is still ground
for wide difference of opinion even on the physical criteria of racial
differentiation. As to the more elusive qualities entering into po-
litical aptitudes and abilities, ethnology is not equipped to speak
with any pretense of authority. It can theorize and no more.
There is no credible scientific proof that the white races are innately
superior in political genius or any other mental quality 10 the black,
brown, or yellow races. Nor is there any positive proof that they are
not. There is plenty of opinion both ways, but no absolute knowl-
edge. Neither is there any objective proof that any particular
branch or sub-group of the major races is or is not specially endowed
for self-government. "Some peoples have had more success with
democratic government than others, but the evidence now at hand
does not conclusively show whether the difference has resulted
from innate factors or factors acquired through social experience.
It does happen to be a fact, however, that the peoples who have
been most successful with democratic government have not been
racially "pure." The Americans, the British, the French, the Swiss
are not of one race but many. Does this prove that racial mixture
is better for democracy than racial purity? Ethnology does not
know; political science does not know. Nobody knows.
( Some, though not all, of the elitists have opposed democracy on
the ground that what is called democracy is never such in fact, but
merely a social myth. Regardless of the democratic form of a
political system, according to such theorists as Pareto and Michels,
the real determinations of the state are never shaped by the free
will of the people. The people may go through the motions of
deciding things, but in the last analysis the alternatives between
which they choose and the actual fulfillment of the choices made,
are determined by a relatively small number of persons who initi-
ate, organize, manipulate, and manage the sub-surface processes
of government. Forms of government are mere phantoms; actual
democracy is an impossibility.

By the same kind of analysis it can be shown that non-democratic
forms of government are also phantoms. No monarchy, no dic-
tatorship, no aristocracy is ever actually what it seems to be. There
are sub-surface processes in all systems of government. Hitler did
not rule Germany alone by any means, nor Mussolini Italy. There
was a governing class on which they were dependent, just as there

688 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

is a governing class In Russia (the Communist Party) on which
Lenin was dependent and on which Stalin later became equally
dependent. It does not argue against democracy as compared with

other systems to sav that It Is no less Illusory than they. To con-

* * *

stiiute an argument against democracy It would be necessary to

show that the illusions of democracy are more Incompatible with
good government than those of any other system. f That has not
been done.

IV

Twentieth-century champions of democracy were not content
merely to refute the arguments of the anti-democratic theorists.
TKey also endeavored to make an affirmative case for democracy.
Jn so doing they discarded most of the old-time paraphernalia of
democratic theory. For the many sophistries which have sprung
from such abstract doctrines as natural rights, the equality of man,
and the general will, they did not even bother to apologize. Their
position was that the sole measure of truth for any political doctrine
or any political system is conformity with objectively established
facts. They did not deny that many experiments with democratic
government have failed; but they insisted that candor should force
the opponents of democracy to admit the countervailing fact that
just as many experiments with non-democratic forms of government
have also failed. In the box score of success and failure, they main-
tain that history gives democracy just as good a record (they think
a better one) as any other form of government.

For the sake of argument, they say, let it be granted that the
elitists are right; that in a democracy, as in all other systems of
government, the reins of authority are inevitably gathered into the
hands of the few. Just wrhat does this prove? Does It prove that
the many are nothing but mechanical puppets of the few? May It
not also prove, just as logically, that the few are the servants of the
many? If facts have any place In logic, say the modern democratic
theorists, there are oceans of facts tending to indicate that demo-
cratic rulers cannot govern without the acquiescence of the many,
and, furthermore, that they actively consult the interests and
preferences of the many. Some democratic rulers achieve and hold
power by demagogic methods, and so do some dictators — in fact,
practically all dictators. Is democratic demagogy worse than auto-

THE DEMOCRATIC STATE 689

cratlc demagogy? Precisely how and why? Democratic theorists
assert that democratic demagogy is infinitely preferable to the auto-
cratic kind, because it does not destroy the freedom of the many to
repudiate and cast off demagogues in whom they have lost con-
fidence.

Grant also, if you wish, that democracy is merely a myth. Even
so, the democratic theorists contend that the democratic myth is
better than any other — more likely to foster the psychological and
legal checks necessary to restrain the abusive tendencies of concen-
trated authority; more likely to engender consistent attention to the
general welfare; more likely to afford every individual a fair chance
to realize his full pbtentialitles. In the history of democratic
countries, they sky, there is nothing to justify the conclusion that
democracy should be abandoned simply because it is a myth. If
we must live by myths, why not a myth of democracy? In what
respects is a democratic myth less worthy and less conducive to
public good than the myths of monarchy, aristocracy, proletarian-
ism, or totalitarianism?

Aware of the mistakes of incautious generalization, the new
democratic theorists avoid the mistake of claiming too much, which
had been one of the great faults of democratic theorists of preceding
centuries. They refused to take the position that democracy is the
ideal form of government for all peoples under all circumstances.
Democracy, they said, is a possible and preferable form of govern-
ment for peoples properly prepared for it by education and ex-
perience. In the long run, however, it is so much superior to other
forms that the achievement of democracy should be the goal of
statesmanship in every country and preparation for democracy a
fundamental policy in every state. "The modern long-time trend/3
wrote Charles E. Merriam in 1939, "is in the direction of de-
mocracy." l The reasons for this trend, said Merriam, are capable
of proof. It can be proved, he declared, that non-democratic
society does not insure the rule of the best, the most competent, the
most conscientious, because in the long run non-democratic society
is dominated by status rather than ability; whereas in democratic
society the influence of status is kept at the minimum. It can also
be proved, he continued, that government by consent even with
electoral processes at their worst is superior to government by force,

1 C. E. Merriam, The New Democracy and the New Despotism (New York, 1 939), p. 252.

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

which is the only alternative. Consent makes possible wiser public
decisions, broader and sounder planning, and better public ad-
ministration. It is likewise possible to prove, according to Merriam,
that democracy in the long run makes for greater social justice,
because it inevitablv tends to distribute the gains of comrnunitv

a *~^ rf

life more widely among the masses than any other system. Peace-
ful and constructive social change can be shown to be more readily
attainable in a democracy, said Merriam, because rof the greater
confidence of the masses in the integrity and responsiveness of their

government.

John Dewey, the leading American exponent of pragmatism,
was convinced that democracy possesses virtues not to be had under
any other system. The very fact that men are by nature unequal
in physical and mental endowments is one reason, he said, why
democracy is so necessary; without equality of treatment under
law and its administration, only the favored few could have a
fair opportunity to develop their talents and abilities. Society can
never reach its full possibilities unless every man has the same
chance as every other man to develop his potentialities, Dewey
said: for society needs the best it can get from all men. "The
foundation of democracy," in the words of Dewey, "is faith in the
capacities of human nature; faith in human intelligence and in the
power of pooled and cooperative experience." 2 He did not contend
that these forces had been perfectly implemented in any existing
democracy, or in any that ever had existed, but he did maintain
that any democracy at all would give them a better chance to
function and to grow than any authoritarian system. The supreme
merit of democracy, in Dewey3 s opinion, is that it frees the human
mind, thus fostering the experimentalism without which men can-
not successfully adapt themselves to a changing world.

Democracy as reinterpreted in the twentieth century is thus

seen to be more than a political formula, more than a system of

\\ *

government, more than a social order. Itjs a search for a way of

life in which the voluntary free intelligence and activity of men can
Be "harmonized and_co5rdinated with th^Jeast possible coercion,
and it is the belief that such a way of life is the best way for all
mankind, the way most in keeping with the nature of man and the

nature of the universe.

2 Intelligence in the Modern World: John Dewey s Philosophy, ed. by J. Ratner (New

York, 1939), p. 4-02.

THE DEMOCRATIC STATE 691

REFERENCES

Appleby, P. H., Big Democracy (New York, 1945).

Blaich, T. P., and others, The Challenge to Democracy (New York, 1942).

Bryn-Jones, D.3 Towards a Democratic New Order (Minneapolis, 1945).

Coker, F. W., Democracy* Liberty, and Property; Readings in the American
Political Tradition (New York, 1942).

Edman, I., and Schneider, H. W., Fountainheads of Freedom: the Growth of
the Democratic Idea (New York, 1941).

Gabriel, R. H., The Course of American Democratic Thought (New Yorks
1943).

Hattersly, A. F., ^4 Short History of Democracy (Cambridge, 1930).

Hook, S., Reason, Social Myths., and Democracy (New York, 1940).

Lindsay, A. D., Ths Essentials of Democracy (Philadelphia, 1929).

Mallock, W. H., The Limits of Pure Democracy (London, 1918).

Maloney, A. H., and others. Pathways to Democracy (New York, 1945).

Merriam, C. E., The Mew Democracy and the New Despotism (New York",
1939).

Merriam, C. E., What Is Democracy? (Chicago, 1942).

Merriam, G. E., Systematic Politics (Chicago, 1945).

Niebuhr, R., The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication
of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defense (New York, 1 944) .

Orton, W. A., The Liberal Tradition: A Study of the Social and Spiritual Condi-
tions of Freedom (New Haven, 1945).

Rappard, W. E., The Crisis of Democracy (Chicago, 1938).

Sait, E. M.3 Democracy (New York, 1929).

Smith, T. V., The Democratic Way of Life (Chicago, 1926).

CHAPTER XXXV

THE WORLD ORDER

1

I HE twentieth was not the first century in ^yhich thought
was given to a world order, but it was the first in which that
question had to be faced as an immediate and imperative
problem. It was, therefore, the first in which there was a large
amount of systematic thinking and writing about nationalism,
internationalism., world politics, and related subjects. It was not
merely that the attention of the twentieth century was focused on
these matters by iwo terrible world wars; the twentieth was the
first century in which there was a sufficient amount of quick and
close Intercommunication between all portions of the world to
provide the necessary foundations for a universal social order.

The world has known many civilizations, but there have been
only a few great areas of civilization. Until the twentieth century
there was nothing that could be truly called a world civilization.
One group of civilizations sprang up In the region of the Mediter-
ranean Sea, then spread to northern and western Europe and finally
to the Americas; another group originated in China and spread
throughout central and northwestern Asia; a third group de-
veloped In India and the Island regions of southwest Asia. Great
political societies arose in all of these areas of civilization, and there
were periods in the history of each when virtually the whole area
was dominated by a single empire. But no empire of world scope
ever took form, nor any world-wide league or federation of peoples.
Prior to the eighteenth century there were very few contacts be-
tween the peoples of the different civilization areas, and not until
the nineteenth century was well toward its meridian were the
contacts sufficiently continuous and important to result in genuine
world problems. The nineteenth century evaded or postponed these
problems, but the twentieth century could not.

The Industrial revolution which transformed the world from a
disconnected plurality of states, peoples, and cultures into a closely
Interconnected totality was the work of western civilization.
Western peoples developed the sciences, the technologies, the eco-

692

THE WORLD ORDER 693

nomic systems3 and the political structures which overwhelmed the
rest of mankind and progressively unified the material processes of
life. Western peoples created most of the world problems, and, as
would be expected, most of the thought dealing with world prob-
lems has been western thought. Of course western peoples looked
at world problems from the standpoint of western peoples, thought
about them in terms of their own civilization and social experience,
and propounded solutions agreeable with western concepts. On
the political side, western civilization had had its periods of tribal-
ism, of cosmopolitanism and universallsm, of feudalism, and finally
of virulent and aggressive nationalism. Concepts drawn from all
of these phases of western political evolution were conspicuous In-
gredients of- western thought about world problems and the world
order of the future.

t,

II

All thinking on world affairs has to reckon not only with the
doctrine but with the stubborn fact of nationalism. Nineteenth-
century political thought in Europe and the Americas was fervidly
and uncritically nationalistic. Twentieth-century thought became
highly critical of nationalism, but did not succeed in breaking its
spell. Nineteenth-century thinkers had been chiefly concerned
with the nation-state's right to be. Opposition to nationalism in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries came chiefly from the feudal,
dynastic, and ecclesiastical adherents of the social order which had
prevailed in Europe for nearly a thousand years. The feudal
nobility enjoyed a status everywhere in Europe that was more dear
to them than nationhood, and so did the dynastic rulers who were
the capstone of the feudal edifice. Nobility and royal ty, on account
of their status, were privileged persons in all countries and had a
common interest that was more European than national. The same
was true of the clergy of the Roman Catholic Church. Nationalism
had to combat those forces, and for that reason the earlier phi-
losophies of nationalism dwelt upon the idealistic and spiritual
aspects of the nation-state. The French philosopher Renan spoke
for all nineteenth-century apostles of nationalism when he said that
what makes a nation is not race, religion, a common language, or
even a common territory, but "a soul, a spiritual principle.53 As a
result, said Renan, of "the intricate workings of history," a certain

694 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

people come to have a spiritual affinity which sets them apart from
all other peoples. When this spiritual fusion occurs, the people
thus constituting a distinct nation not only have the right to be free
and determine their o\ra destiny, but It Is for the best Interests of
all mankind that they should. Each nation, he said, has something
unique to contribute, some special way of serving "the common
task of humanity55 that it can best execute as a separate instrument
In "that grand orchestral concert of mankind, which is, after all, the
highest ideal reality that we attain.55

The twentieth century did not care for this sort of talk. National-
Ism was now an accomplished fact. The wrorld was full of nation-
states — so full that the alignment now wrasf nation versus nation
rather than nation versus the old regime. The great political
struggles of the twentieth century were destined to arise between
rival nations and groups of nations. The right of national self-
determination was still at issue, but the setting was different. The
world was full of nation-states, some of which were great powers
and others small powers. The right of self-determination could not
mean the same for all. A big and powerful state, if unrestrained,
could easily "self-determine" a small one out of existence. Did the
right of self-determination mean that a state had the right to self-
determine not only its own independent existence but also Its own
growth and expansion? There were forthright Imperialists (always
they were citizens of the great powers) who answered that It did
mean precisely that. A nation's right to become, they persisted, was
just as vital as its right to be. Independence, without security and
self-sufficiency, was a mockery. Did not the Darwinian formula
show that life is basically a struggle for existence and survival?
Was not international conflict merely the top dimension of that
struggle? Why, then, should It be wrong for a state to do what It
must do in order to survive? The fact that some states never can
meet nature's requirements for survival should not diminish the
right of those who can. Most Imperialistic writers did not couch
their rationalizations In quite such brutal terms. Without a gener-
ous sugarcoating of "manifest destiny," "bearing the white man's
burden," "mission dvilisatrice" "spreading enlightenment and
Kultur" and similar altruistic catchphrases, imperialism could not
have been made palatable to the peoples of the great powers them-
selves.

THE WORLD ORDER 695

But the policies of the great powers veered constantly in the
direction of imperialism, however much they beat their breasts
and told the world they had a higher and nobler goal. And it
quickly became apparent that there was not room enough in the
world for all states, not even for all great powers, to cany out their
great spiritual missions, realize their desired material goals, or do
whatever else their particular brand of imperialism called for.
There simply were not enough continents, enough resources,
enough backward peoples to be rescued from ignorance and sin, or
enough of anything else for every state to have complete freedom
of self-determination. Uncurbed national imperialism obviously
meant world anarchy, and the rule among nations would be hog-
eat-hog. Even* the rankest imperialists could see that. The jonly
alternative was some sort of world order. But what kind of world
order? The more extreme nationalists would accept nothing that
would compromise the sovereignty of the nation-state, nothing
that would not justify a state's ultimate right to choose its own way
of pursuing its ends. The world order as conceived by them should
be a structure built by voluntary agreements imposing no collective
obligation that could not be escaped by unilateral determination.
Regional understandings, balance-of-power alignments, treaties of
alliance, bilateral arbitration agreements, reciprocal tariff and
trade agreements, and non-aggression pacts are characteristic of
this concept of the world order.

The nationalistic view of the world order resulted in diverse
principles of national policy. As characteristically nationalistic as
any of these principles was isolationism. This was not solely an
American policy; nor was it, in the United States or elsewhere, a
policy of withdrawal from participation in world affairs. It was
primarily a policy of national detachment and freedom of action.
American isolationism, as first outlined by President Washington
and as continuously reinterpreted in subsequent decades, was
pointed primarily against "entangling alliances." Washington's
Farewell Address warned his countrymen against "permanent
alliances with any portion of the foreign world," but expressly
approved "temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies."
Washington's idea was that in all circumstances the United States
should play its own cards as far as possible. This became the
historic foreign policy of the United States, but it did not lead to

696 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

uniform relations with all nations In all parts of the world. Playing
her o\vn cards meant one thing for the United States in relations
with European powers, another thing in relations with Latin
American states, still another thing in relations with the countries
of the Far East, and so on. Hence the United States was often
accused of having no consistent foreign policy. In one sense she
did not, and neither did any other country following the principle
of isolationism. Exactly the same thing was true of Great Britain's
balance of power policy, which was just as truly isolationist in
principle as the American policy of no entangling alliances. The
objective of the British policy was the highest attainable freedom
of action for Britain, by keeping herself In the makeweight position
In tlie ever-shifting alignment of great powers in Europe and Asia.
All great powers throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
made and remade ententes, pacts, and alliances so freely and
frequently that historians were hard put to keep the record up to
date3 let alone keep it straight; and the motivation In every instance
was basically isolationist — to gain a better position to play the cards
their own way. It was definitely not their purpose to sacrifice
national sovereignty or subordinate national Interest to collective
ends.

Isolationist thought did not envision a unified world order, but it
would not be truthful to say that it envisioned no world order at all.
Although the quest of every state was the utmost security and inde-
pendence, there were many reputable thinkers and statesmen who
sincerely believed that the ultimate outcome would be a stabilized
world society. The stabilization would come, it was believed, when
the whole world was embraced in a webwork of alliances in which
the counterpoised forces would be so equal that prolonged equilib-
rium would necessarily follow. The fundamental fallacy of this
belief was convincingly demonstrated by the sudden collapse of the
isolationist house of cards In the frantic fortnight preceding the
outbreak of World War I. The old isolationism never recovered
from the loss of prestige suffered at that time. However, in the
interlude between the two world wars new creeds of isolationism
were destined to arise. The most prominent of these were geo-
politics and Bolshevism.

Geopolitics Is sometimes said to be a system of global thinking
regarding the geographic factors in politics, but the practical

THE WORLD ORDER 697

applications of geopolitics have been far more national than global.
Geopolitics is not to be confused with political geography, which
is an objective science. Geopolitics is not objective; it is a body of
doctrine which postulates that geographic factors more than any
others determine the destiny of nations and from that premise
formulates concepts to correlate with national policies. Modern
geopolitical doctrines stem largely from the writings of Ratzel and
Haushofer in Germany, Kjellen in Sweden, Mackinder in Great
Britain, and Spykman in the United States. RatzePs epoch-making
treatise on political geography appeared just at the close of the
nineteenth century. It was not a geopolitical treatise in the present-
day sense, but it wras predicated on the principle of geographic
determinism. RatzePs view was that the evolution of human
society is largely conditioned by geographic factors., the struggle for
existence being mainly a struggle for space, and that organized
societies must plan their courses of expansion according to the limits
that nature has set.

Kjellen was a twentieth-century disciple of Ratzel. He amplified
the general theories of Ratzel and modified them in certain par-
ticulars. He agreed that the struggle for existence, especially on
the political level, is a struggle for space; but added that although
space is limited by nature, the abilities of particular peoples to
gain and utilize space vary greatly. Kjellen set forth certain con-
cepts about the utilization of space in Europe which made him
very popular in Germany, because they seemed to prove that the
German people were destined to dominate Europe from the
Scandinavian peninsula through the Balkans and then reach
over into the Middle East. Mackinder, as would be natural for
a Briton, looked upon the international scene as a struggle between
sea power and land power. In order to survive, according to his
theory, the maritime powers must prevent the domination of the
great land mass of Europe and Asia by a single power or com-
bination of powers. Mackinder said that the key to the situation
lay in the control of an area comprising eastern Europe and west-
ern Asia. This he called the "heartland." In terms of practical
realities, Mackinder's doctrine meant that the maritime powers
should drive a permanent wedge, both political and military,
between Germany and Russia. Haushofer made large use of the
work of Ratzel, Kjellen and Mackinder. His doctrines gained

698 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

special eminence because of his close association with the Nazi
regime in Germany. Haushofer accepted and turned to Germany's
advantage the geopolitical ideas of Mackinder. He agreed to the
sea-power versus land-power theory and also the c 'heartland3 9
theory, but maintained that the trend is in favor of land power
provided the continental peoples make proper use of the space
available to them. This could not be done if Europe remained di-
vided into a number of small countries none of which could be
self-sufficient. Haushofer then argued that the "heartland55 should
be united, preferably by a coalition of Germany and Russia, and
all of Eurasia brought under the dominion of the great land-mass
states. Spykman took the view that the international struggle is
primarily a contest between the peoples of the "rimlands55 of the
great continents and those of the "heartlands." The policy of a

*

state was necessarily conditioned, therefore., by its situation relative
to "rimland" or "heartland.35

One thing the foregoing and all other geopoliticians agreed upon,
namely, that every state, if it wishes to pursue an intelligent foreign
policy, should play its game according to the fall of the cards
geographically speaking^ and should never sacrifice a geographic
advantage or miss a geographic opportunity. That is why we must
classify geopolitics as isolationist. Mackinder counseled Britons,
Haushofer Germans, and Spykman Americans how to shape their
foreign policy so as to utilize to the utmost the geographic factors
favorable to national independence and self-determination. All
geopoliticians accepted and emphasized the space-struggle theory,
and felt that the primary consideration for every state involved was
to take care of itself and its own Interests.

Of Bolshevism little need be added to what has been said in
previous chapters. Communism was conceived by Marx and
Engels as a program for the world, and they formed the first
International Workingmen's Association as an instrument of inter-
national cooperation and collaboration for the proletarians of all
countries. When the Bolshevik Party gained power in Russia it
was not only world-minded in the propagation of communism but
was favorably disposed to other forms of internationalism. It was
the teaching of Marx, however, that communism and capitalism
were utterly irreconcilable, and that there must be no compromise.
Consequently, when the expected world revolution did not come

THE WORLD ORDER

off and the Bolsheviks found themselves Increasingly isolated in a
non-communist or strongly anti-communist world, their faith in

the wisdom of Marx was strengthened. A communist state,, they
concluded, must never get itself so entangled with capitalist states
that it would no longer be free to pursue its own goals or be a will-
ing party to international arrangements which might solidify the

capitalist world against communism. The only land of inter-

"»

nationalism in which communist Russia could unreservedly share
was communist internationalism. Thus Bolshevism turned to iso-
lationism as the only safe policy for communism.

Ill

The dream of a warless world has been common to all civiliza-
tions and has been accompanied in all by numberless plans to
realize it by reconstituting the social order. One of the earliest
ideas of this character to appear in western civilization was that
of internationalism. Although the concept of voluntary inter-
national cooperation and organization dates back as far as the
ancient Greeks, it did not reach its full stature until the twentieth
century. Throughout the Roman era and the subsequent mediaeval
period it was overshadowed by the cosmopolitan idea of imperial
unity. It took a long time for European thinkers to realize that the
complex forces of political evolution were inexorably taking their
continent to just the opposite destination. Occasional theorists
caught a sufficient glimpse of the future to perceive that universal
empires, universal churches, and universal cultures were on the
way out. Universal authority of all sorts was breaking down, and
numerous independent states were being formed. From the four-
teenth century onward, therefore, discussions of the problem of in-
ternational relations came to occupy an ever-growing prominence
in political thought. The terms of these discussions were definitely
international, not supernational. They dealt with such matters as
international cooperation, international organization, and inter-
national law. A great many theoretical plans were produced—
plans for international arbitration, international union or federa-
tion, international parliaments, international courts, and even inter-
national armies. Nothing practical came of these proposals until
the nineteenth century. The day of full-fledged Internationalism
could not come until the world was thoroughly nationalized, and

700 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

social and economic developments had made International rela-
tions a matter of continuous importance in the lives of all men.

The first genuinely international organization of the nineteenth
century grew out of the peace settlements following the final over-
throw of Napoleon in 1815. The \ictorious allies banded them-
selves together in an alliance to keep the peace and maintain the
status quo in Europe. It was provided that general congresses of the
participating powers should be held at periodic intervals or as
need arose to deal with problems common to all and to provide
methods by which they could cooperate in the prevention of war
and disturbances likely to lead to w^ar. This organization actually
functioned (some thought for good, others 'for bad) for several
years. But the spirit of rivalry among its own members was stronger
than the spirit of cooperation, and so it gradually fell apart. Howr-
ever, the habit of international conference and consultation sur-
vived, and the second half of the nineteenth century saw a large
number of general international conferences to deal with matters of
common concern. These wTere climaxed by the great Hague Con-
ference of 1899 which undertook to formulate codes of international
law on several subjects and to set up machinery to facilitate the
settlement of international disputes. At the instance of this con-
ference, a second Hague Conference was held in 1907 which greatly
amplified, if it did not perfect, the work of its predecessor.

The most fruitful progress in international organization in the
nineteenth century was the formation, through special international
conferences, of a large number of permanent international unions
to administer agreements regarding the management of common
affairs of a technical nature. Such organizations as the Inter-
national Postal Union, the International Metric Union, the
Universal Telegraphic Union, the International Office of Public
Health, the International Maritime Conference, the International
Institute of Agriculture, and the Union of Railway Freight Trans-
portation in Europe not only succeeded; they became indispensable.
They provided services which were of vital importance throughout
the world, but had little or nothing to do with political matters.
They made it apparent, however, that at least in technical matters
voluntary international organization could succeed.

It remained for the twentieth century to experience and evaluate
the most ambitious attempts at international organization, namely

THE WORLD ORDER 701

the League of Nations established by the Paris Peace Conference
of 1919 and the United Nations set up by the San Francisco Con-
ference of 1945. These were attempts at world-wide international
organization on a voluntary basis. Both were based on elaborate
and carefully drawn instruments which provided for permanent
organs of procedure and operation comparable with the legislative,
executive, and judicial institutions of a national state. Both were
given wide jurisdiction over both political and technical matters.
Both were provided with operating funds which could be admin-
istered independently. Although the League of Nations failed to
prevent World War II, its whole career could not be branded a
failure. The peoples of the world were not convinced that inter-
nationalism was- an unrealizable goal. On the contrary, they were
so hopeful of ultimate success that the United Nations, which was
originally an alliance against Germany, Italy, and Japan, was con-
verted into a permanent international organization designed
eventually to include all nations in its membership. The fate of
internationalism as a principle is therefore entirely bound up with
the fate of the United Nations, and the future of the United Nations
is not clearly predictable.

The literature produced by these two attempts to establish a
systematic world order based on the principle of Internationalism
was enormous. It came from almost every people on earth and was
written In virtually every language. Naturally, therefore, variety
was one of its outstanding characteristics. But there was agreement
on the fundamentals which differentiated Internationalism from
other species of doctrine about the world order. All international-
ists believed that the nation-state was a political entity of such Im-
portance that its independence and sovereignty should be main-
tained. For that reason, all internationalist concepts of a better
world order rested on the voluntary consent of nations. This put
the internationalist position squarely on a footing of rationalism.
If international organization, law, justice, order, and peace were
to come through the voluntary consent of nations, it had to be
assumed that nations not only are rational but can be Induced by
appeals to reason to surrender enough of their sovereignty to make
internationalism work successfully . Scores of Internationalist writers
dwelt on the theme that war is a form of collective insanity; that
victory in war is a great illusion; that the winner never really wins

702 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

and that humanity and civilization always lose. Once this fact
was fully and clearly brought home to the peoples of the world, the
Internationalists had no doubt that reason would assert itself; the
nations of the world would agree upon some sort of cooperative
plan by which their differences could be adjusted without recourse
to war.

Education, law, and organization were the means by which the
internationalists expected to be able to bring the world to its senses.
Educational work to that end was carried on by scores of peace
societies and similar organizations In all countries. Great sums of
money were poured into these enterprises; tons of peace literature
were disseminated in every language; exchange professorships,
scholarships for foreign students, tours of good will, international
assemblages and conferences of workers for peace, and numerous

*

other devices to promote international understanding were lavishly
financed. Much was done also to encourage the growth of inter-
national law. Internationalists were generally agreed that one of
the great weaknesses of international society was the lack of an
adequate body of law. True, there had been a considerable de-
velopment, since the sixteenth century, of international law, or
something called that; but it was deficient, the internationalists
said, in many particulars; it had not kept pace with the needs of
the modern world, and there were not appropriate tribunals to
administer it. Give the world a truly comprehensive system of
international law, soundly based on reason; set up effective inter-
national judicial machinery; and nations would no longer have an
excuse for war. All disputes could be settled by judicial procedures;
and nations would prefer to have them settled in that manner,
because the settlement would be quicker, fairer, cheaper, and better
for all concerned than war. Great efforts were made and large sums
of money expended to encourage the teaching of international law,
to promote international meetings of lawmakers and jurists, and to
secure the general acceptance of treaties of arbitration. Equally
great was the effort to foster the development of both private and
public organizations of an international character, the idea being
that the experience. of working together in any sort of international
Drganization would gradually build up a general confidence among
the peoples of the world in such modes of procedure.

It should be clearly understood, however, that the philosophy

THE WORLD ORDER

behind all of these international measures was not anti-national.
The internationalists did not contemplate the abolition of the
nation-state; most of them did not even propose to submerge it in
an international political structure. In their thinking the nation-
state was indispensable. It was a natural social unit, and was
better suited than any other to the requirements of modern com-
munal life. No internationalist program proposed to take away
from the nation-state any right or power which it did not volun-
tarily yield. It was not the purpose of internationalism, nor of the
League of Nations and the United Nations, the two greatest
achievements of internationalism, to superimpose a world order,
but rather to build one up through progressively rational, harmoni-
ous, and peaceful interstate relations. The League of Nations and
its successor, the United Nations, were never viewed as something
standing over their members but as something existing among them.

IV

Many who called themselves internationalists were not such in
fact. They were opposed to nationalism, and therefore styled
themselves internationalists. In reality, however, they were just as
much opposed to internationalism as to nationalism. They wanted
to see the whole human race brought into a system in which the
nation-state, if it survived at all, would be largely deprived of its
autonomy. Although they seldom went so far as to advocate a
world state with direct jurisdiction over everything everywhere on
earth, they invariably demanded a world authority competent to
deal directly with individuals rather than with states in matters of
world concern. This authority could be developed, most of the
universalists thought, by some sort of world federalism. Under a
world constitution, they said, there could be a division of power
between the central government for world affairs and the regional
and local governments for matters of narrower consequence. The
central government would derive its powers from the world con-
stitution and not by grant from the member communities. Every
human being would be a citizen of the world state, with rights and
privileges guaranteed by the world constitution. Through electoral
processes the world government would be made responsible to the
peoples of the world rather than to the states of the world; through
its own administrative and judicial machinery it would exert its

704 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

authority directly upon individual human beings all over the world.
World law, world justice, world police, and all other requisites
for universal government were also contemplated in most of the
schemes advanced by advocates of a world state.

Universalism undoubtedly made many converts, but in the sphere
of actual affairs it made no headway. Even if there had been a
sufficiently large body of world opinion to support practical steps
in the direction of world government, it would have been very
difficult to find the right steps to take. Assuming, as all universalists*
did, that the world state would be inaugurated by common consent
and not by conquest, the problem was how to transfer real authority
and real power from the sixty-odd nation-stages to a world state.
It could not be accomplished merely by adopting a' world constitu-
tion, for power does not reside on paper but in human beings
aligned for action. Experience with the Covenant of the League of
Nations and the Charter of the United Nations made it clear that
the crucial alignments from the standpoint of world unity are those
of the areas seating the states of greatest military power. What
steps could be taken to make sure that those crucial power align-
ments would operate differently within the framework of a world
state than they have within the structure of international organiza-
tions like the League and the United Nations?

The most effective step, according to universalist theory, would be
that of placing the world state in direct authority over every person
on earth in matters of world import, regardless of his affiliations with
lesser political units. The example of the central government of the
United States was frequently cited as proof that this would be
possible. It is true that the national government of the United
States has both constitutional authority and real power over every
American in federal matters; but it is not true that the states which
form the American federal union ever were separate and inde-
pendent nation-states. The original thirteen approximated that
condition for a brief time, and so did Texas; but the other thirty-four
were wards of the national government and were definitely attached
to it for a considerable period before their admission to the union.
Every student of American history knows that the addition of new
states to the union was a leading factor in strengthening the central
government. Many competent historians believe that the principle
of states' rights would have triumphed and that the union would

THE WORLD ORDER

not have endured very long if Its membership had been ___^_ijrT.
to the original thirteen states. In short, the analog}' between the
federal system of the United States and that of an Imaginary world
state, which would have to be formed under very different con-
ditions, is not close enough to warrant the conclusion that the same
or similar results would follow. Though it Is conceivable that a
world state might unite and assimilate America, Britain, Russia5
France, etc. much as the United States government has done with
New York, Rhode Island, California, Florida, etc., It is equally
conceivable that its efforts in that direction might heighten the
loyalties of the world's peoples to their nation-states, just as the
centralizing activities of the federal government have often excited
states' rights sentiment In the United States. And it must not be
forgotten that the United States of America is a product, not of
universalism or internationalism, but of a very fervid nationalism.
Political universalism of the sort described In the foregoing para-
graphs was effectively supplemented In the twentieth century by a
strong revival of religious universalism and humanitarianism.
Although there was no great amalgamation of religions, there was
a decided movement on the part of all faiths and sects to reach a
common ground of principle on the question of the Individual
conscience versus the state. That there is a higher law for the con-
science of man "than the sheer mandate of political authority was
the unanimous opinion of religious thinkers everywhere. The
difficulty was not one of theory, but of practice. Who was to say
what the higher law was? Who was to decide when it did or did not
apply? Who was to safeguard the individual's freedom to follow
the higher law? Such matters, some said, were in the province of
ecclesiastical authority, and argued that there should be a universal
ecclesiastical authority independent of aU states, even the world
state, which would have indefeasible jurisdiction in matters of
conscience. Others felt that questions of conscience were primarily
for the individual to settle according to his own lights and his
personal communion with the deity. If all men were deeply infused
with the ethos of religion, no state would ever succeed in command-
ing anything contrary to the conscience of mankind.

The pacifist humanitarians stood on virtually the same ground
as the religious universalists, save that their conception of conscience
was not a duty owed to the deity but a duty owed to humanity.

706 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES

When the state engages In war and other forms of violent coercion,
the humanitarian view holds that it violates the most fundamental
law of social life, namely, that high and constructive social goals
can be reached only by free men voluntarily associated in enter-
prises in which they truly believe. In the forum of conscience,
therefore, no man who has the good of humanity at heart can
support the state in war and other measures of violence.

REFERENCES

Angell, N., The Great Illusion (New York, 1933).

Brodie, B., The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and the World Order (New

York, 1946).

Bust-amente, A. S. de, The World Court (New York, 1935).
Carlson, K. S.3 The Process of International Arbitration (New York, 1946).
Carr, G. W.5 One World in the Making: the United Nations (Boston, 1946).
Curtis, L., World War: Its Cause and Cure (London, 1945).
De Ligt, B.} The Conquest of Violence (New York, 1938).
Dolivet, L., The United Nations: a Handbook of the New World Organization

(New York, 1946).

Donaldson, J.} International Economic Relations (New York, 1928).
Eagleton, C., International Government (New York, 1932).
Hill, N. L., International Administration (New York, 1931).
Hill, W. M., The Economic and Financial Organization of the League of Nations

(Washington, 1946).

Myers, D. P., Handbook of the League of Nations (Boston, 1935).
Newfang, O., World Federation (New York, 1939).
Patterson, E. M. (ed.), Making the United Nations Work (Philadelphia,

1946).

Russell, Fu M., Theories of International Relations (New York, 1936).
Streit, C., Union Now (New York, 1940).

INDEX

Academy: Plato's, 40.

Adams, Henry: on democracy, 681-682.

Adams, John: political ideas, 411-412.

Adams, Samuel: political ideas, 411.

Althusius, J., 160V

American Revolution, 403-414.

Anarchism, 583-592.

Ancient Law (Maine), 536-542.

Anti-Semitism, 621, 654-655.

Areopagitica (Milton), 243-244.

Aristotle: compared with Plato, 60-61;
doctrine of the Golden Mean, 71-73;
proposal for. model state, 76-78; life,
58-59; on citizenship, 70; on commu-
nism, 67-68; on constitutions, 68-70;
on the family, 66; on forms of govern-
ment, 71-72; on foundations of the
state, 63-64; on money, 65-66; on prop-
erty, 65-66; on revolutions, 73-76; on
slavery, 64-65; on the good life, 76;
Politics, 62-78; scientific method of,
61-62; writings, 59-60.

Athens: government of, 30-31; political
history, 26-34; political ideas, 34-38;
struggle with Sparta, 32-34.

Augustinian dualism, 102-103.

Austin, John: definition of law, 472; life,
470-471; on sovereignty, 473-474;
positivism, 471-472; quoted, 472^73.

Babylonia, 13-15.

Bagehot, Walter: comments on, 554-555;
government by "discussion," 553-554;
life, 550-551; on progress, 553-554;
Physics and Politics, 551-555; psycho-
logical theories, 552-553; quoted, 552-
554; Social Darwinism oi, 619, 654-655;
The English Constitution, 551; views on
custom, 552—554.

Bakunin, Michael: anarchism of, 584-
587.

Barker, E., 630.

Belloc, Hilaire: quoted, 349.

Bentham, Jeremy: comments on, 467-
470; conception of utility, 461-462;
"felicific calculus," 463; Fragment on
Government, 458; greatest happiness doc-
trine, 463-464; life, 457-460; on crim-

ciples of Morals and Legislation, 459-4t8;

quoted, 460-463, 465; writings, 458-
460.
Bentley, A. F., 630.

Bernstein, E., 580-581.

Bible, The: political ideas of, 16-18.

Bodin, Jean: doctrine of sovereignty, 166-
168; life, 162-163; on cilizensMp, 171;
on climate and geography., 164; on
forms of government, 169—170; on law,
168; on property, 169; on revolutions,,
170; on the state and government, 170,
philosophy of history, 163-164; quoted,
165-167, 169; Stx Books Concerning
the State, 164-169; theory of die state,
1 65-1 66 ; writings, 1 63-1 64.

Bolshevism, 670-672, 698-699.

Bosanquet, Bernard, 599.

Bossuet, Bishop: on divine right, 193—194.

Botsford, G. W.: quoted, 32, 37.

Breasted, J. H.: quoted, 14.

Brinton, Crane: quoted, 556.

Brisbane, Albert, 522-523.

Brook Farm, 524.

Buchanan, George, 159-160, 200.

Burke, Edmund : Appeal from the Xew to
the Old Whigs, 380-381; comments on,
382-384; concept of expediency, 376-
378; idea of historical continuity, 376-
377, 379; life, 372-375; on aristocracy,
381; on liberty, 381-382; on majority
rule, 381 ; on social contract, 380; polit-
ical attitude of, 375-376; quoted, 376-
377, 379-380; Reflations on the Revolu-
tion in France, 378-380; Speech on Con-
ctliction with the Colonies^ 376; Speech on
the Petition of the Unitarians., 376-378.

Cabet, Etienne: Utopian colonies of, 526-

528; life, 525; Voyage to Ifaria, 525-526.
Calhoun, John C: political ideas, 435-

440; quoted, 437-440.
Calvin, John: Institutes of the Christian Me-

ligion* 156-157; political ideas, 156-

158, 200; quoted, 157.
Ceresco colony, 524.
Chamberlain, H". S.: racism of, 620-6219

653.
Charlemagne, 108.

inology, 465-466; on measurement of _ .

pains and pleasures, 462-463; on sys- Charles I (of England), 211-212
terns of government, 464-465; Prin- China: political thought of, 19-20.

707

708

INDEX

Christian church: rise to political power,

95-98.
Christianity: political backgrounds of, 90-

103.
Church (Roman Catholic): temporal

claims of, 110-112.
Cicero: political ideas of, 84-87; quoted,

85-87; writings, 84.
City-states (Greek), 28.
Coke, Sir Edward, 201.
Cole, G. D, H.: quoted, 367, 629-630.
Collectivism, 564.
Colonies (American j : political ideas of,

404-408.

Common Sense (Paine), 386, 391-394.
Communism, 42-50, 141-153, 569-574,

663-673.

Communist Manifesto, 567, 569, 571-576.
Comte, Auguste: life, 547; positive philos-
ophy, 547-548; quoted, 549; scientific
* concepts, 547-548; sociology, 548-549.
Constitution (American): struggle over,

414-417.
Corporative system, Italy, 645-646.

Dante: De Monarchia, 123, 190-191.

Darwinian theory: relation to political
thought, 452-453, 617-622.

Declaration of Independence, 414.

Defensor Pads, 120-122.

Democracy: biological studies of, 682-
683; crises of, 675-678; defense of, 688-
690; doctrines of, 678-690; elitism and,
687-688; ethnological studies of, 686-
687; Greek, 28-29; JefFersonian, 424-
430; psychological studies of, 684-686;
views of J. S. Mill, 485-486.

Dickinson, John, 412-413.

Divine right doctrine, 184-198.

Dubois, Peter, 119-120.

Duchesne, Abbe L. M. O. : quoted, 94.

Duguit, Leon, 630.

Dunning, W, A.: quoted, 37, 156, 171,
231, 261, 275, 366, 368.

Egypt (ancient): political ideas of, 8—

13.

Eighteenth century, 341-343.
Elitists, 623-626, 642-643.
Engles, F., 568.
Enlightenment, The, 302-303.
Equality, 253-254.
Eugenists, 621-622, 656.
Evolution: relation to political thought,

452-453

Fabianism, 578-580.

Fascism: doctrines of, 637-647.

Feudalism: political consequences of,

107-109.

Figgis, J. N.: quoted, 185.
Filmer, Robert: answered by Locke, 252;

on divine right of kings, 192-193.
Finer, Herman: quoted, 639.
Foakes-Jackson, F. J.: quoted, 9-1, 100.
Fourier, Charles, 520.
Fourier colonies, 523. r
Fourierism, 520-525.
French Revolution, 341-343, 370-371;

423-425.

General will, 357-358.

Gentiles Giova*nni: quoted, 638-641.

Geopolitics, theories of, 651-652, 696-698.

Gettell, R. G.: quoted, 82/231.

Gobineau, Count Arthur de: racism of,
620, 653.

Gooch, G. P.: quoted, 536.

Greece (ancient) : political history, 26-30.

Greeley, Horace, 523-524.

Green, Thomas Hill: comments on, 509-
511; idealism of, 505; Lectures on the
Principles oj Political Obligation, 506-509;
life, 504-505; quoted, 506-509; on
rights, 507-508; on sovereignty, 506-
507.

Gregory VII: controversy with emperor,
111; Dictatus Papae, 113.

Greig, J. Y. T.: quoted, 327, 331-332.

Grotius, Hugo: contribution to interna-
tional law, 178-183; De Jure Belli ac
Pads, 178-183; idea of natural law,
178-179; life, 173-177; on the law of
nations, 179-180; on sovereignty, 180-
182; quoted, 179-181; writings, 178.

Guild socialism, 629-630.

Gumplowicz, L., 599, 618-619, 631.

Hague Conferences, 700.

Hamilton, Alexander, 416-417; 422-423,

Hammurapi: code of, 14-15.

Harrington, James: comments on, 274-
276; idea of economic balance, 270-
273; ideas of governmental organiza-
tion, 273-274; life, 266-269; Oceana,
269-274; quoted, 271-274.

Haushofer, K., 697-698.

Hebrews (ancient): political ideas of,
15-18.

Hegel, G. W. F.: comments on, 502-504;
concept of Geist> 495-496; concept of
the state, 497-498; doctrine of histori-

INDEX

709

cal necessity, 501-502; life, 492-494;
on governmental organization, 499-
501; on international relations, 500-
501; rationalism of, 494-495; The Phe-
nomenology of Spirit, 49 33 495-496; The
Philosophy of History, 496-497, 502; The
Philosophy of Right, 407-501; quoted,
496-502; on sovereignty, 498-499; writ-
ings, 493-494.

Hindu poHtical thought, 21-25.
Hitler, A.: poHtical ideas of, 650-661.
Hobbes, Thomas: _ absolutism of, 233-
234; De Give,, 216; doctrine of natural
rights, 223 ; doctrine of social contract,
223-225; influence of, 235; intellectual
methods, 220-222; Leviathan, 217, 219-
230; life, 213-218; on economic factors,
227-228; on individual judgment, 229-
230; on law," 228-229; on Hberty, 226-
22-7 ;-on property, 22KT6TalreEgion, 230;
on sovereignty, 225-226; writings, 215-
218.

Holy Roman Empire, 105-108.
Horemheb, 12.
Hotman, Francis, 159.
Hume, David: comments on, 339; eco-
nomic writings, 338-339; Essays Moral
and Political, 329, 333-339; historical
writings, 330; Hfe, 327-331 ; on distribu-
tion of power, 334-on Hberty, 335-336;
on origin of government, 333-334; on
poHtical parties, 335; on social con-
tract, 336-338; on social evolution,
337-338; poHtical attitudes of, 331-332;
relations with Montesquieu, 329; re-
ligious views, 331; Treatise of Human
Nature, 329, 332.

Icarianisrn, 525-528.

India: poHtical history, 22; poHtical

thought, 21-25.
Individual rights, 195-210, 498-499,

507-508.

Industrialism, 610-611.
International law, 178-183, 296-298,

500-501.

InternationaHsm, 699-703.
Investiture, 110-111.
Irrationalisni, 622-627, 657-660.
Isolationism, 695-699.

James I (of England), 191-192.
Jaszi, CX: quoted, 56, 137-138.
Jaur&,J., 581-582.

Jefferson, Thomas: Notes on Virginia, 426-
427; poHtical ideas, 414, 425-428.

John of Paris, 119.

John of Salisbury: life, 113-114; Poh-

aratwus, 113-118; quoted, 9-10, 115-

116.

Jowett, Benjamin: quoted^ 42.
Jurisprudence: relation to poHtical

thought, 531-532; comparative, 537-

538; historical, 531-542.

Kant, Immanuel, 491-492.

Kidd, Benjamin, 599.

Kinship: theory of, 537—541.

Kjellen, R., 697.

Knox, John, 200.

Krabbe, Hugo, 630.

Kropotkin, Peter: anarchistic doctrines,

587-591; quoted, 589-591; The Con-

guest of Bread, 588-589.

faire theory: of J. H. Green, §08-
509; nineteenth-century reaction to,
490; of Thomas Paine, 398-399; physio-
cratic doctrine of, 426-429; rise in nine-
teenth century, 45 1 ; of Herbert Spencer,
558-560; John Locke, 524.
Lao Tzu, 20.

LasM, Harold J.: on pluralism, 625-626,
Law: Austin's view, 472; Greek concep-
tion, 35; Roman conception, 81-83;
Rousseau's doctrine, 358; Savigny*s
view, 533; Maine's conception, 538.
Leadership principle, 645, 651.
League of Nations, 701.
Lenin, Nikolai: poHtical Ideas of, 667-672.
Leviathan, 217, 219-230.
Lewis of Bavaria, 120,
Liberty, 199-210, 242-246, 335-336, 480-

483, 498-499, 507-508.
Lincoln, Abraham: First Inaugural Ad-
dress, 443-444; political ideas, 442-
444.

Lindsay, A. B.: quoted, 231-232.
Locke, John: comments on, 260-264;
doctrine of social contract, 252ff .; influ-
ence, 260-264; Hfe, 246-250; on natural
rights, 254; on property, 258-259; on
revolution, 257-260; on supreme power,
256; on toleration, 250-251; quoted,
253, 255-266; Two TTIOIU&S of Gmxm-
ment* 252 ff.; views on the state erf na-
ture, 253^-254; writings, 250.
Luther, Martin: poHtical ideas, 154-155.

Machiaveili, Niccold: Discounts m
mjr-iy; life, 126-128; poEtkal ideas,
129-137; quoted, 133-135; Tkt
129-134; writings, 128-129.

710

INDEX

Mackinder, Sir H., 697-698.

Madison, James: political ideas, 417-
421.

Mahan, A. T_, 599.

Maine, Sir Henry: Ancient Law., 536-542;
comments on, 541-542; life, 536-537;
method of, 537-538; patriarchal theory
of, 538-540; quoted, 538-541; theory
of law, 538-539.

Mariana, Juan de, 160, 200.

Marshall, John: political ideas, 430-433;
quoted, 432,

Marsigiio of Padua: Defensor Pads, 121;
political ideas, 120-123.

Marx, Karl: economic doctrines, 570-571 ;
influence, 575-577; life, 566-569; politi-
cal doctrines, 571-574, 667-670; writ-
ings, 569.

Materialism, dialectical, 668.

Melanchthon, Philip, 155-156.

JVlencius, 20.

Michels, Robert: "iron law of oligarchy,"
624-625.

Mill, James, 474-476.

Mill, John Stuart: life, 475-477; on de-
mocracy, 485-486; on liberty, 480-483;
on political evolution, 484; on repre-
sentative government, 483-484; politi-
cal writings, 477-478; quoted, 478-486;
views on utilitarianism, 478-480.

Milton, John: Areopagitica, 243-244; doc-
trine of liberty, 242-246; life, 237-241;
political writings, 240-241; quoted,
242-246; social contract doctrine, 242;
Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 245—
246.

Monism, 632-633.

Montesquieu, Baron de: comments on,
324-326; economic ideas, 322-323;
life, 304-305; on aristocracy, 313-315;
on climate and geography, 321-322; on
custom and usage, 322; on democracy,
311-313; on despotism, 316; on educa-
tion, 316; on justice, 317; on liberty,
318-320; on monarchy, 315-316; on
political change, 318; on natural law,
307-308; on nature of law, 307; on re-
ligion, 323-324; on separation of pow-
ers, 319-320; on slavery, 320-321; on
social contract, 309-310; quoted, 306-
324; writings, 305; The Spirit of Laws,
305-324.

More, Sir Thomas: life, 139-140; politi-
cal ideas, 140-153; quoted, 141-153;
Utopia, 140-153.

Morley, Viscount: quoted, 367.

Mosca, G.: elitism of, 623-624.
Murray, R. H.: quoted, 30, 103,^1 37, 172-

173, 231, 467.
Mussolini, Benito: political doctrines, 638-

642.
Myth, social, 641.

Nationalism, 109, 453-454, 595-598, 693-

699.
Natural law, 82-83, 178-179, 254, 295-

296, 307-308, 346, 3D6.
Natural rights, 206-208, 254-255, 394-

397.

Naziism, 650-661.
New Harmony, 517-520.
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 599, 623.
Nineteenth century, 445-454.
Notes on Virginia (Jeflferson), 426-427.

Oceana (Harrington), 269-274.

Organismic theories, 452-453.

Otis, James, 410.

Owen, Robert: life, 513-515; New Har-
mony colony, 517-520; quoted, 515-
516; social ideas, 515-517; writings,
515-516.

Paine, Thomas: Agrarian Justice, 399-400;
comments on, 400-401; Common Sense,
386, 391-394; Crisis, 386-387; life, 384-
390; on laissez faire, 398-399; on mon-
archy, 392-393; on natural rights, 394-
397; on social contract, 397-399;
quoted, 392-399; The Age oj Reason, 390;
The Rights of Man, 388, 394-398.

Papacy, the: political controversies of,
105-123.

Pareto, V. : elitism of, 625-626.

Parrington, V. L.: quoted, 260, 275, 401,
430.

Parsons, T.: on natural rights, 207-208.

Patriarchal theory, 538-541.

Pelloutier, F., 591.

Pericles, 33.

Philip the Fair, 112-113.

Physiocrats, 426-429. J

Plato: classification of states, 50-51; com-
munism, 46-4p, 55-55; compared with
Aristotle, 6iyfdealism, 41; ideas of ed-
ucation, 45-46 ;J^fe, 39-40; political
theories., 40-57; teacher of Aristotle,
58-59; writings, 40-42.
pluralism, 630-633.

Policraticus (John of Salisbury), 114-118.

Political evolution, 3-4.

Politics (Aristotle), 62-78.

INDEX

Politics, science of, 454-455.

Polybius, 13-84.

Popular sovereignty, 208-209.

Positivism, 547-548.

Pragmatism, 626-627.

Prince., The (Machiavelli), 133-135.

Proletarianism, 564-593, 663-667.

Protestant Reformation, 154-161.

Psychology," social, 633.

Ptah-Hotep, 12-13.

Pufendorf, Samuel* comments on, 299-
300; on international law, 296, 298;
life, 293-294; quoted, 295-300; on nat-
ural law, 295-296; on sovereignty, 297-
298; writings, 294.

Racism, 619-621, 653-659.

Ratzel, F., 697. •

Ratzenhofer, G.} 599.

Red Bank colony, 523-524.

Reformation, the, 154-161.

Republic (Plato), 45-51.

Revolution: American, 403-414; doc-
trine of, 209-210; English, 211-213,
236-237; French, 341-343, 370-371;
Russian, 663-667.

Rocco, A.: quoted, 638-640.

Roman Catholic Church, 98-101, 105-
106.

Roman law, 81-83.

Rome: political ideas of, 80-89.

Rosenberg, A., 649, 654, 656.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: comments on,
366-369; Discourse on the Arts and
Sciences, 350-351; doctrine of general
will, 357-358; life, 343-348; on civil
religion, 364-365; on degeneration of
states, 364; on forms of government,
360-361; on individual liberty, 363; on
individual rights, 359-360; on law, 358;
on majority rule, 363; on origin of gov-
ernment, 361-362; on sovereignty, 356-
357; on the state and government, 360;
prize essay, 346-347; quoted, 350-365;
Social Contract, 351-356; writings, 347-
348.

Russia: Communist, 664-673.

\

Saint-Simon, Comte de: life, 543-545;

political philosophy, 545-547. •
Sarkar, B. K.: quoted, 23-24.
Savigny, F. K. von: conservatism, 536;

historical jurisprudence, 534-535; life,

532-533; protest against codification,

533; quoted, 533-535.

Schopenhauer, A,, 622-623.

Seeley, J. R., 599.

Seneca, 87-88.

Separation of powers, 83~84S 257S 319-
320, 417-421, 435-440.

Sidgwick, H., 487.

Social contract: doctrine of, 203-206,
242, 245, 255-256, 2S3-284, 309-310,
336-338, 352-355, 380? 397-339, 404-
405.

Social Contract (Rousseau), 351-366.

Social Darwinism, 617-622, 653.

Socialism: academic., 578; Fabian, 57S-
580; guild, 629-630; Marxian, 570-578;
moderate;* 578-583; scientific, 453;
Utopian, 512-529.

Social Slatics (Spencer), 558-560.

Sociology; contribution to political
thought, 634.

Socrates: in Plato's dialogues, 42-54; life,
34; political ideas, 37-38; teacher of*
Plato, 39.

Sophists, 36.

Sorel, Albert: quoted, 3243 326, 343.

Sorei, Georges: syndicalist theory, 591,
627; theory of violence, 629, 646.

Sovereignty: Austinian doctrine,, 473-.
474; Bodin's doctrine, 166-168;
Green's doctrine, 506-507; Hegel's doc-
trine, 498-499; Hobbes' doctrine; 225-
226; Rousseau's doctrine, 356-357;
modern views, 632-633; monistic doc-
trine, 632-633; nationalistic doctrines,
453-454; pluralistic doctrines, 630-632:
Pufendorf s doctrine, 297.

Sparta, 31-32.

Spencer, Herbert: comments on, 562-563 r
doctrine of laissezjaire, 558-560; evolu-
tionism, 557-558; life, 555-556; quoted,
558-562; Social Statics, 558-560; syn-
thesis of knowledge, 556-557; The Mm
Versus the State, 558, 561-562; writings,
556.

Spinoza, Benedict de: comments on, 290-
292; life, 277-280; on democracy, 289;
on freedom of speech, 282-286; on nat-
ural rights, 282-284; on revolution, 288;
on social contract, 283-284; Political
Treatise, 286-289; quoted, 282-289;
realism, 286-288; religious feeresies3
282; Thsologico-Political Treatise, 280™
286; writings, 279.
Stalin, J.: quoted, 673.
Statesman (Plato), 51-52.
Statesman's Book (John of Salisbury)., 114-
118.

712

INDEX

St. Augustine, 100-103.

St. Thomas Aquinas, 116-119.

Syndicalism, 591-592, 627-629.

Taylor, John: political works, 428; quoted,
429-430.

Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (Milton),
245-246.

The City of God (St. Augustine), 100-103.

The Federalist, 416-423.

Theocracy, 10-15.

The Rights of Man (Paine), 388-398.

The Spirit of Laws (Montesquieu), 305-324.

Thomas, E. D.: quoted, 19-21.

Totalitarianism, 636-637.

Traditionalism, 640, 650-652.

Treatise of Human Nature (Hume), 329, 332.

Treitschke, Heinrich von: comments on,
607-608; conservatism, 605-606; life,
599-600; on basis of the state, 601-602;
on imperialism, 603-604; on interna-
tionalism, 604-605; on militarism, 604-
605; on nationalism, 602; on social

classes, 605-607; Politics, 601-606;
quoted, 601-606; writings, 600.
Twentieth-century political thought, 611-
616.

Unions, international, 700.
United Nations, 701.
Universalism, 703-706.
Utilitarianism, 456-488.
Utopia (More), 140-153.
Utopian settlements, *517-529.
Utopian socialism, 512-529.

Valois, Noel: quoted, 122-123.
Violence: doctrine of, 629, 646, 659-660.

Webster, Daniel: political ideas, 433-435.

441-442.

Wells, H. G.: quoted, 29.
Willoughby, W. W.: quoted, 7, 9, 35, 36

80.

Wilson, James: political ideas, 413.
World state, 703-706.

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