Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation

G. Will, Not Force, Is the Basis of the State

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

122. But if the law which regulates private relations and its administration are so equally applied to all, that all who are capable of a common interest are prompted by that interest to conform to the law, the result is still only the loyal subject as distinct from the intelligent patriot, i.e. as distinct from the man who so appreciates the good which in common with others he derives from the state—from the nation organised in the form of a self-governing community to which he belongs—as to have a passion for serving it, whether in the way of defending it from external attack, or developing it from within. The citizens of the Roman empire were loyal subjects; the admirable maintenance of private rights made them that; but they were not intelligent patriots, and chiefly because they were not, the empire fell. That active interest in the service of the state, which makes patriotism in the better sense, can hardly arise while the individual’s relation to the state is that of a passive recipient of protection in the exercise of his rights of person and property. While this is the case, he will give the state no thanks for the protection which he will come to take as a matter of course, and will only be conscious of it when it descends upon him with some unusual demand for service or payment, and then he will be conscious of it in the way of resentment. If he is to have a higher feeling of political duty, he must take part in the work of the state. He must have a share, direct or indirect, by himself acting as a member or by voting for the members of supreme or provincial assemblies, in making and maintaining the laws which he obeys. Only thus will he learn to regard the work of the state as a whole, and to transfer to the whole the interest which otherwise his particular experience would lead him to feel only in that part of its work that goes to the maintenance of his own and his neighbour’s rights.

123. Even then his patriotism will hardly be the passion which it needs to be, unless his judgment of what he owes to the state is quickened by a feeling of which the ‘patria,’ the fatherland, the seat of one’s home, is the natural object; and of this feeling the state becomes the object only so far as it is an organisation of a people to whom the individual feels himself bound by ties analogous to those which bind him to his family, ties derived from a common dwelling-place with its associations, from common memories, traditions and customs, and from the common ways of feeling and thinking which a common language and still more a common literature embodies. Such an organisation of an homogeneous people the modern state in most cases is (the two Austrian states being the most conspicuous exceptions), and such the Roman state emphatically was not.

124. But, it will be said, we are here again falling back on our unproved assumption that the state is an institution for the promotion of a common good. This granted, it is not difficult to make out that in most men at any rate there is a sufficient interest in some form of social well-being, sufficient understanding of the community between their own well-being and that of their neighbours, to make them loyal to such an institution. But the question is, whether the promotion of a common good, at any rate in any sense appreciable by the multitude, is any necessary characteristic of a state. It is admitted that the outward visible sign of a state is the presence of a supreme or independent coercive power, to which, habitual obedience is rendered by a certain multitude of people, and that this power may often be exercised in a manner apparently detrimental to the general well-being. It may be the case, as we have tried to show that it is, that a power which is in the main so exercised, and is generally felt to be so, is not likely long to maintain its supremacy; but this does not show that a state cannot exist without the promotion of the common good of its subjects, or that (in any intelligible way) the promotion of such good belongs to the idea of a state. A short-lived state is not therefore not a state, and if it were, it is rather the active interference with the subject’s well-being, than a failure to promote it, that is fatal to the long life of a state. How, finally, can the state be said to exist for the sake of an end, or to fulfil an idea, the contemplation of which, it is admitted, has had little to do with the actions which have had most to do with bringing states into existence?

125. The last question is a crucial one, which must be met at the outset. It must be noticed that the ordinary conception of organisation, as we apply it in the interpretation of nature, implies that agents may be instrumental in the attainment of an end or the fulfilment of an idea of which there is no consciousness on the part of the organic agents themselves. If it is true on the one hand that the interpretation of nature by the supposition of ends external to it, with reference to which its processes are directed, has been discarded, and that its rejection has been the condition of growth in an exact knowledge of nature, on the other hand the recognition of ends immanent in nature, of ideas realised within it, is the basis of a scientific explanation of life. The phaenomena of life are not ideal, in the sense in which the ideal is opposed to that which is sensibly verifiable, but they are related to the processes of material change which are their conditions, as ideas or ideal ends which those processes contribute to realise, because, while they determine the processes (while the processes would not be what they are but for relation to them), yet they are not those processes, not identical with any one or number of them, or all of them together. Life does not reside in any of the organs of life, or in any or all of the processes of material change through which these pass. Analyse or combine these as you will, you do not detect it as the result of the analysis or combination. It is a function or end which they realise according to a plan or idea which determines their existence before they exist and survives their disappearance. If it were held, then, that the state were an organised community in the same sense in which a living body is, of which the members at once contribute to the function called life, and are made what they are by that function, according to an idea of which there is no consciousness on their part, we should only be following the analogy of the established method of interpreting nature.

126. The objection to such a view would be that it represents the state as a purely natural, not at all as a moral, organism. Moral agency is not merely an agency by which an end is attained, or an idea realised, or a function fulfilled, but an agency determined by an idea on the part of the agent, by his conception of an end or function; and the state would be brought into being and sustained by merely natural, as opposed to moral, agency, unless there were a consciousness of ends—and of ends the same in principle with that served by the state itself—on the part of those by whom it is brought into being, and sustained. I say ‘ends the same in principle with that served by the state itself,’ because, if the state arose out of the action of men determined, indeed, by the consciousness of ends, but ends wholly heterogeneous to that realised by the state, it would not be a moral institution, would not stand in any moral relation to men. Now among the influences that have operated in the formation of states, a large part, it must be admitted, are simply natural. Such are the influences of climate, of distribution of mountain and plain, land and water, &c, of all physical demarcations and means of communication. But these, it is clear, are only organic to the formation of states so far as, so to speak, they take a character, which does not belong to them as merely natural, from agencies distinctively human.

127. ‘Human, if you like,’ it may be replied, ‘but not moral, if a moral agency implies any reference to a social or human good, to a good which the individual desires because it is good for others, or for mankind, as well as himself. In the earth—hunger of conquering hordes, in the passions of military despots, in the pride or avarice or vindictiveness which moved such men as Louis XI or Henry VIII to override the semi-anarchy of feudalism with a real sovereignty, what is there of reference to such good? Yet if we suppose the influence of such motives as these, together with the natural influences just spoken of, to be erased from the history of the formation of states, its distinguishing features are gone.’

128. The selfish motives described must not, any more than the natural influences, be regarded in abstraction, if we would understand their true place in the formation of states. The pure desire for social good does not indeed operate in human affairs unalloyed by egotistic motives, but on the other hand what we call egotistic motives do not act without direction from an involuntary reference to social good,—‘involuntary’ in the sense that it is so much a matter of course that the individual does not distinguish it from his ordinary state of mind. The most conspicuous modern instance of a man who was instrumental in working great and in some ways beneficial changes in the political order of Europe, from what we should be apt to call the most purely selfish motives, is Napoleon. Without pretending to analyse these motives precisely, we may say that a leading one was the passion for glory; but if there is to be truth in the statement that this passion governed Napoleon, it must be qualified by the farther statement that the passion was itself governed by social influences, operative on him, from which it derived its particular direction. With all his egotism, his individuality was so far governed by the action of the national spirit in and upon him, that he could only glorify himself in the greatness of France; and though the national spirit expressed itself in an effort after greatness which was in many ways of a mischievous and delusive kind, yet it again had so much of what may be called the spirit of humanity in it, that it required satisfaction in the belief that it was serving mankind. Hence the aggrandisement of France, in which Napoleon’s passion for glory satisfied itself, had to take at least the semblance of a deliverance of oppressed peoples, and in taking the semblance it to a great extent performed the reality; at any rate in western Germany and northern Italy, wherever the Code Napoléon was introduced.

129. It is thus that actions of men, whom in themselves we reckon bad, are ‘overruled’ for good. There is nothing mysterious or unintelligible in such ‘overruling.’ There is nothing in the effect which we ascribe to the ‘overruling,’ any more than in any effect belonging to the ordinary course of nature, which there was not in the cause as it really was and as we should see it to be if we fully understood it. The appearance to the contrary arises from our taking too partial and abstract a view of the cause. We look at the action e.g. of Napoleon with reference merely to the selfishness of his motives. We forget how far his motives, in respect of their concrete reality, in respect of the actual nature of the ends pursued as distinct from the particular relation in which those ends stood to his personality, were made for him by influences with which his selfishness had nothing to do. It was not his selfishness that made France a nation, or presented to him continuously an end consisting in the national aggrandisement of France, or at particular periods such ends as the expulsion of the Austrians from Italy, the establishment of a centralised political order in France on the basis of social equality, the promulgation of the civil code, the maintenance of the French system along the Rhine. His selfishness gave a particular character to his pursuit of these ends, and (so far as it did so) did so for evil. Finally it led him into a train of action altogether mischievous. But at each stage of his career, if we would understand what his particular agency really was, we must take account of his ends in their full character, as determined by influences with, which, his passion for glory no doubt co-operated, but which, did not originate with it or with him, and in some measure represented the struggle of mankind towards perfection.

130. And not only must we thus correct our too abstract views of the particular agency of such a man as Napoleon. If we would understand the apparent results of his action, we must bear in mind how much besides his particular agency has really gone to produce them, so far as they were good; how much of unnoticed effort on the part of men obscure because unselfish, how much of silent process in the general heart of man. Napoleon was called the ‘armed soldier of revolution,’ and it was in that character that he rendered what service he did to men; but the revolution was not the making of him or his likes. Caesar again we have learnt to regard as a benefactor of mankind, but it was not Caesar that made the Roman law, through which chiefly or solely the Roman empire became a blessing. The idiosyncrasy, then, of the men who have been most conspicuous in the production of great changes in the condition of mankind, though it has been an essential element in their production, has been so only so far as it has been overborne by influences and directed to ends, which were indeed not external to the men in question—which on the contrary helped to make them inwardly and spiritually what they really were—but which formed no part of their distinguishing idiosyncrasy. If that idiosyncrasy was conspicuously selfish, it was still not through their selfishness that such men contributed to mould the institutions by which nations have been civilised and developed, but through their fitness to act as organs of impulses and ideas which had previously gained a hold on some society of men, and for the realisation of which the means and conditions had been preparing quite apart from the action of those who became the most noticeable instruments of their realisation.

131. The assertion, then, that an idea of social good is represented by, or realised in, the formation of states, is not to be met by pointing to the selfishness and bad passions of men who have been instrumental in forming them, if there is reason to think that the influences, under the direction of which these passions became thus instrumental, are due to the action of such an idea. And when we speak thus we do not refer to any action of the idea otherwise than in the consciousness of men. It may be legitimate, as we have seen, to consider ideas as existing and acting otherwise, and perhaps, on thinking the matter out, we should find ourselves compelled to regard the idea of social good as a communication to the human consciousness, a consciousness developing itself in time, from an eternally complete consciousness. But here we are considering it as a source of the moral action of men, and therefore necessarily as having its seat in their consciousness, and the proposition advanced is that such an idea is a determining element in the consciousness of the most selfish men who have been instrumental in the formation or maintenance of states; that only through its influence in directing and controlling their actions could they be so instrumental; and that, though its active presence in their consciousness is due to the institutions, the organisation of life, under which they are born and bred, the existence of these institutions is in turn due to the action, under other conditions, of the same idea in the minds of men.

132. It is the necessity of a supreme coercive power to the existence of a state that gives plausibility to the view that the action of merely selfish passions may lead to the formation of states. They have been motive causes, it would seem, in the processes by which this ‘imperium’ has been established; as, e.g., the acquisition of military power by a tribal chieftain, the conquest of one tribe by another, the supersession of the independent prerogatives of families by a tyrant which was the antecedent condition of the formation of states in the ancient world, the supersession of feudal prerogatives by the royal authority which served the same purpose in modern Europe. It is not, however, supreme coercive power, simply as such, but supreme coercive power exercised in a certain way and for certain ends, that makes a state; viz. exercised according to law, written or customary, and for the maintenance of rights. The abstract consideration of sovereignty has led to these qualifications being overlooked. Sovereignty = supreme coercive power, indeed, but such power as exercised in and over a state, which means with the qualifications specified; but the mischief of beginning with an inquiry into sovereignty before the idea of a state has been investigated, is that it leads us to adopt this abstract notion of sovereignty, as merely supreme coercive power, and then, when we come to think of the state as distinguished by sovereignty, makes us suppose that supreme coercive power is all that is essential to a state, forgetting that it is rather the state that makes the sovereign, than the sovereign that makes the state. Supposing one man had been master of all the slaves in one of the states of the American Union, there would have been a multitude of men under one supreme coercive power, but the slaves and the master would have formed no state, because there would have been no recognised rights of slave against slave enforced by the master, nor would dealings between master and slaves have been regulated by any law. The fact that sovereign power, as implied in the fact of its supremacy, can alter any laws, is apt to make us overlook the necessity of conformity to law on the part of the sovereign, if he is to be the sovereign of a state. A power that altered laws otherwise than according to law, according to a constitution, written or unwritten, would be incompatible with the existence of a state, which is a body of persons, recognised by each other as having rights, and possessing certain institutions for the maintenance of those rights. The office of the sovereign, as an institution of such a society, is to protect those rights from invasion, either from without, from foreign nations, or from within, from members of the society who cease to behave as such. Its supremacy is the society’s independence of such attacks from without or within. It is an agency of the society, or the society itself acting for this end. If the power, existing for this end, is used on the whole otherwise than in conformity either with a formal constitution or with customs which virtually serve the purpose of a constitution, it is no longer an institution for the maintenance of rights and ceases to be the agent of a state. We only count Russia a state by a sort of courtesy on the supposition that the power of the Czar, though subject to no constitutional control, is so far exercised in accordance with a recognised tradition of what the public good requires as to be on the whole a sustainer of rights.

It is true that, just as in a state, all law being derived from the sovereign, there is a sense in which the sovereign is not bound by any law, so there is a sense in which all rights are derived from the sovereign, and no power which the sovereign refuses to allow can be a right; but it is only in the sense that, the sovereign being the state acting in a certain capacity, and the state being an institution for the more complete and harmonious maintenance of the rights of its members, a power, claimed as a right, but which the state or sovereign refuses to allow, cannot be really compatible with the general system of rights. In other words, it is true only on the supposition that a state is made a state by the functions which it fulfils of maintaining the rights of its members as a whole or a system, in such a way that none gains at the expense of another (no one has any power guaranteed to him through another’s being deprived of that power). Thus the state, or the sovereign as a characteristic institution of the state, does not create rights, but gives fuller reality to rights already existing. It secures and extends the exercise of powers, which men, influenced in dealing with each other by an idea of common good, had recognised in each other as being capable of direction to that common good, and had already in a certain measure secured to each other in consequence of chat recognition. It is not a state unless it does so.

133. It may be said that this is an arbitrary restriction of the term ‘state.’ If any other word, indeed, can be found to express the same thing, by all means let it be used instead. But some word is wanted for the purpose, because as a matter of fact societies of men, already possessing rights, and whose dealings with each other have been regulated by customs conformable to those rights, but not existing in the form to which the term ‘state’ has just been applied (i.e. not having a systematic law in which the rights recognised are harmonised, and which is enforced by a power strong enough at once to protect a society against disturbance within and aggression from without), have come to take on that form. A word is needed to express that form of society, both according to the idea of it which has been operative in the minds of the members of the societies which have undergone the change described (an idea only gradually taking shape as the change proceeded), and according to the more explicit and distinct idea of it which we form in reflecting on the process. The word ‘state’ is the one naturally used for the purpose. The exact degree to which the process must have been carried before the term ‘state’ can be applied to the people in which it has gone on, cannot be precisely determined, but as a matter of fact we never apply it except in cases where it has gone some way, and we are justified in speaking of the state according to its idea as the society in which it is completed.

134. It is a mistake then to think of the state as an aggregation of individuals under a sovereign; equally so whether we suppose the individuals as such, or apart from what they derive from society, to possess natural rights, or suppose them to depend on the sovereign for the possession of rights. A state presupposes other forms of community, with the rights that arise out of them, and only exists as sustaining, securing, and completing them. In order to make a state there must have been families of which the members recognised rights in each other (recognised in each other powers capable of direction by reference to a common good); there must further have been intercourse between families, or between tribes that have grown out of families, of which each in the same sense recognised rights in the other. The recognition of a right being very short of its definition, the admission of a right in each other by two parties, whether individuals, families, or tribes, being very different from agreement as to what the right consists in, what it is a right to do or acquire, the rights recognised need definition and reconciliation in a general law. When such a general law has been arrived at, regulating the position of members of a family towards each other and the dealings of families or tribes with each other; when it is voluntarily recognised by a community of families or tribes, and maintained by a power strong enough at once to enforce it within the community and to defend the integrity of the community against attacks from without, then the elementary state has been formed.

135. That, however, is the beginning, not the end, of the state. When once it has come into being, new rights arise in it (1) through the claim for recognition on the part of families and tribes living on the same territory with those which in community form the state, but living at first in some relation of subjection to them. A common humanity, of which language is the expression, necessarily leads to the recognition of some good as common to these families with those which form the state. This is in principle the recognition of rights on their part; and the consequent embodiment of this recognition in the laws of the state is their admission as members of it. (Instances of this process are found in the states of Greece and the early history of Rome.) (2) The same thing may happen in regard to external communities (‘external’ territorially), whether these have been already formed into states or no. It may happen through the conquest of one by another, through their submission to a common conqueror, as under the Roman empire, or through voluntary combination, as with the Swiss cantons and the United States of America. However the combination may arise, it results in new rights as between the combined communities within the system of a single state. (3) The extended intercourse between individuals, which the formation of the state renders possible, leads to new complications in their dealings with each other, and with it to new forms of right, especially in regard to property; rights as far removed from any obvious foundation on the suum cuique principle as the right of a college to the great tithes of a parish for which it does nothing. (4) The administration of the state gives rise to rights, to the establishment of powers necessary for its administration. (5) New situations of life may arise out of the extended dealings of man with man which the state renders possible (e.g. through the crowding of population in certain localities) which make new modes of protecting the people a matter virtually of right. And, as new rights arise in the state once formed, so further purposes are served. It leads to a development and moralisation of man beyond the stage which they must have reached before it could be possible.

136. On this I shall dwell more in my next course of lectures. What I am now concerned to point out is that, however necessary a factor force may have been in the process by which states have been formed and transformed, it has only been such a factor as co-operating with those ideas without which rights could not exist. I say ‘could not exist,’ not ‘could not be recognised,’ because rights are made by recognition. There is no right ‘but thinking makes it so’; none that is not derived from some idea that men have about each other. Nothing is more real than a right, yet its existence is purely ideal, if by ‘ideal’ is meant that which is not dependent on anything material but has its being solely in consciousness. It is to these ideal realities that force is subordinate in the creation and development of states. The force of conquest from without, the force exercised within communities by such agents as the early Greek tyrants or the royal suppressors of feudalism in modern Europe, has only contributed to the formation of states in so far as its effects have taken a character which did not belong to them as effects of force; a character due to their operation in a moral world, in which rights already existed, resting on the recognition by men of each other as determined, or capable of being determined, by the conception of a common good. It is not indeed true that only a state can produce a state, though modern history might seem to favour that notion. As a matter of fact, the formation of modern states through feudalism out of an earlier tribal system has been dependent on ideas derived from the Roman state, if not on institutions actually handed down from it; and the improvement and development of the state-system which has taken place since the French Revolution has been through agencies which all presuppose and are determined by the previous existence of states. But the Greek states, so far as we know, were a first institution of the kind, not a result of propagation from previously existing states. But the action which brought them into being was only effectual for its purpose, because the idea of right, though only in the form of family or tribal right, was already in operation.