Truth
Government, Consent and Revolution: Politics and the Moral Instinct
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, 19 September 2010
Moral Instinct and the Early Community
Humans are not solitary animals That is obvious. We live together with other people in communities, families, clans, tribes, cities, nation states and empires. The fact that we do live communally has been a problem for philosophers, and a related problem was how human groups should best be governed. It is called political philosophy. Despite the Declaration of Independence, political truths are not self evident.
Religion was an important aspect of government in early human societies, but not explicitly so, because religion was not seen as anything other than a group habit—part of its culture. When society began to get bigger through the merging of tribes into larger political groups, religion became increasingly explicitly important. Scott Atran (In Gods We Trust, 2002) said commitment to common supernatural agents serves to bind a community together letting them cooperate trustingly. The supernatural agent acts as a moral “Big Brother” to inhibit cheats and free riders.
But should any cheats be exposed, the actual power that punishes is the human group itself. So the supernatural power emerges in practice as a metaphor for the community. The community applies the moral sanctions to its members, and gains from their strict application.
God embodied as the primitive community is suggested by many studies that link religiosity with intolerance of dissent and rough justice. The primordial community felt how important social unity was, and it must have had such a feeling as an instinct bred into the humans that constituted it. The community was personified as the tribal god, and respect for this idea was the central belief in the communal culture.
The perpetuation and strengthening of such a commitment carried on through to the age of imperialist religion, feeding the aggressive fanaticism and militancy of fervent believers, and their excessive authoritarianism, dogmatism, nationalism, racism and prejudice, all of it suiting the ambitions of the secular princes looking to expand their rule by conquest. In the west, it is exemplified by fundamental Christians, mainly now Protestants of various kinds, but formerly Catholics.
While the people who espouse fundamentalist ideas are from poor and least educated of society, they are incited by cleverer, educated but unscrupulous people out to get a following to line their own pockets and get some political leverage, who use their converts as tools for their authoritarian right wing ambitions.
The poor people who gravitate towards fundamentalism dislike progress because, already insecure, they are nervous that, for them, progress will lead to even less security. So, they cleave to tradition, and, as progress often leaves behind outdated traditions, they see dangerous changes actually happening around them, and seek permanence, even though permanence leaves them poor, while progress offers at least some chance of improvement. Nothing is more permanent than God and His Word, these people have been taught, so fundamentalism is rational to them. Permanence is, of course, the status quo and those whom it suits are manipulating religious dupes for their own benefit.
Much of religious commitment is acted out ritually, and amounts to an undertaking to fulfil a promise to help others in the community in the future when they might need the help. The communiy used to be self contained as the tribe, but the merging of tribes into bigger political entities, with the approach of imperialism, meant that the religious community could not cover everyone, but became simply the congregation of each church or temple. The congregations of British churches for centuries remained about the size of the primordial human tribe, the adult population of a village—about 150. Throughout feudal times, most people were tied to their village, and identified with it. The state was a hierarchical community of such communities. Thus religion served during feudalism to bind members of the community together, as it had done as tribal culture throughout the millennia of the Paleolithic period. It helped to keep people alive in times of famine and plague.
M Argyle and B Beit-Hallahmi have shown that strong commitment to a church still results in less cheating, crime and free riding between members of the congregation. That kindness, however, does not necessarily extend to the wider community. G Allport pinpointed the prejudice to others that religious commitment entails. All too often ingroup morality is utterly abandoned in respect to outgroups. Christ’s parable of the Good Samaritan is plainly directed against this phenomenon. For Jews, the Samaritans were the outgroup and were not typically extended mercy by Jews, nor expected to offer any to Jews. The outsider Samaritan puts the insiders, the Jewish priest and levite to shame. Christ was saying that group morality should be universal among humans. The proper ingroup for us all is the whole of humanity.
It is something fundamentalists do not get, or reject when they do. Either way they are not being Christian despite the piety or deep faith they boast of. Indeed, R Stark and G Glock found that 86 percent of Catholics and 79 percent of Protestants could not name a single prophet from the Jewish scriptures, otherwise known as the Christian Old Testament. It suggests that the much vaunted high percentages given for the proportion of Christians in the USA, would not be so impressive if a few simple questions were added to verify that these people actually know anything about the religion they profess. Of the supposed 90 percent or so of Americans who claim to be Christian, it seems from Stark and Glock that only around seventeen percent would know enough about their faith to justify their claim to be Christians.
Religion therefore came about with a sound basis in the mutual help required of the primordial human group, but the mistrust of other human groups introduced a xenophobia into religion that princes made use of in the age of growing states and ultimately imperialism. What follows is a history of the struggle to regain control from the princes of the human group for its members.
The Greeks to Luther
Plato (427-347 BC, The Republic) and Aristotle (384-322 BC), 24 centuries ago first tackle these problems. Both treat the community as higher than the person, and this must be correct. Humans have been socialized by living in human groups for so long that it is impossible now for them to revert to solitary living and remain human. Humanity therefore depends on society, and the destruction of society is the destruction of humanity. Even so, the unit of humanity remains the individual person, and Greek philosophers were concerned with the concept of justice—that the individual should not be gratuitously mistreated by the rulers of a state.
Plato was an Athenian aristocrat, and his ideal republic was an ideal aristocratic state, a caste system with slaves at the bottom of society, and philosophers at the top. Between were guardians, professional soldiers, and craftsmen. Only the professional rulers, the philosophers, were fit to rule, and were to have a special upbringing and training, and be free of all commitment except to the general good. For Aristotle the point of the state was to give its citizens a proper moral education teaching them how to be happy and virtuous, and thus fitted for citizenship. Rulers ought to eschew selfishness, and rule on behalf of all, but slavery was natural, liberating freemen from labour and allowing them to spend their time thinking.
S Augustine (354-430), the greatest Catholic theologian of Romans times had been a Manichaean and strongly preferred a dualistic interpretation of Christianity. In The City of God, the city in question was the world ordained by God to be under the spiritual rule of the Church. Against it was the wicked secular world of the Devil, The City of the Earth. The Pope on a state visit to Great Britain in 2010, made a speech warning the British against “aggressive secularism”, so ancient Church dogma dies hard. Secularism is the practical separation of church and state, something almost perfected in Britain nothwithstanding the queen being the head of the church as well as the head of state. The biggest Christian organization in the world still wants to impose Catholicism on Britain if it can.
Following Augustine, doctrinaire Christianity with its hatred of things secular and pagan, especially its loathing of classical scholarship, rapidly led to the collapse of order throughout Europe, and the destruction of classical civilization, causing the thousand years of the theocratic Dark Ages in Europe.
The political system that emerged in Europe after the fall of Rome was feudalism. The feudal state mainly was an absolute monarchy, and social thought was channelled into religion. Society was ruled autocratically by the Lords Temporal or the nobility, a military class called the First Estate, the nominal chief of whom was the king. Other estates were the Lords Spiritual or the bishops, and the Commons, the townsmen—mainly artisans, merchants and unskilled laborers—and the peasantry. The feudal system was hierarchical, so the lesser lords were dominated by the greater ones, the ranks of the church were similar, and workers were ranked as masters, journeymen, apprentices, and unskilled workers.
The lord owned the land which was worked by the peasants who were tied to it, and so were effectively his slaves. The peasants were deprived of all political rights but paid most of the duties. The peasants paid rent to the lord, by service on the land or by money if they had any. Technology was poor, and there was little incentive to improve it, for it could never reduce the exploitation of the peasant, but merely resulted in a higher rate of exploitation. They often rebelled against their exploitation in society and its unfairness, but they were up against a military caste and had little chance of ever succeeding.
Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) and the Scholastics were interested only in justifying the rule of the Church, using mainly a distortion of Aristotelianism to do it, but Aquinas made strides forward in his attempts to harmonize reason with faith, using it trying to prove the existence of God. A novel emphasis on reason helped us emerge from the Dark Ages.
Another factor, though, was the influence from the east, from Islam, then an enlightened religion in many places, and the effect it had on the nobles who returned from the various crusades with such eastern habits as washing regularly. Ibn Khaldun, writing in the fourteenth century, had already noticed, from his extensive survey of history until then, that successful rulers had to be reasonably just, if they wanted to avoid plots against them and popular sedition. Greedy rulers also inclined to create greed within their own kingdom, again causing instability once people generally felt no transactions could be honest.
It was the growing power of the townsmen from whom the new economic system of capitalism was emerging that led to the demise of feudalism in the period of European revolutions. First had to come the Reformation, led by Martin Luther (1483-1546). Luther was, of course, a Catholic, and like Augustine, was a dualist. Three centuries before Luther, Catholics had wiped out the rival religion of Catharism, a dualist religion close to Bogomilism. But the Albigensian crusade and the Inquisition had merely spread Catharism far and wide—it became the religion of the travelling artisans—and made it into a secret religion that Christians denigrated as witchcraft.
Protestantism was a syncretic homunculus of Catharism and Catholicism which adopted some of the worst features of both, or had to distort each other’s good features to get them to fit together. Catholics called Catharism Manichaeism, emphasizing its dualist nature. Luther brought dualism into his own theology, particularly his theories of society and government. Following Augustine, a Manichaean for ten years before becoming a Christian, he held that government was divinely instituted because of human sinfulness. It was needed because most humans were evil, a rather convenient doctrine for the religion of a considerable empire. Like Thomas Hobbes, later, Luther saw religion as a dam needed to hold back humanity from cascading into savagery.
There were two regiments or kingdoms, God’s spiritual one, and the Devil’s material one, the world. His dual view of most humans as contemptibly wicked and government as divinely appointed stuck to the plain imperial convenience as Catholicism. No form of popular rebellion was ever justified however monstrous or evil a government was:
I will always hold by that party which suffers rebellion, however unjust its cause, and be opposed to that party which makes rebellion, however just its cause may be, for there can never be rebellion without the spilling of blood and other atrocities.Martin Luther
Can Luther be blind to the innocent blood spilt and the utter misery and atrocities caused by tyrants? Or does he simply excuse it because all rulers, even tyrants, are divinely appointed? Josephus, the Jewish historian relates the speech of Eleazar, the leader of the Zealots defending Masada against the Roman legions:
My loyal followers, long ago, we resolved to serve neither the Romans nor anyone else but only God…
Eleazar knew his Zealot army had come to the end of the line. They had been rebelling against Roman rule and had been defeated. The Romans would take them captive, make them slaves or kill them. Rather than suffer surrender, ignominy and loss of their principles, they committed mass suicide, something Christians admire in a Christian context. And, both the Essenes and Jesus Christ, both had the same belief—that God only was the legitimate ruler of Judaea. The plain implication is that Roman rule was illegitimate, and rebellion against Roman rule was a proper response to it. Then what happened to Jesus? He was crucified as the king of the Jews—a rebel king! All Christians have deliberately ignored this, or refused to listen.
For Luther, the simple exhortation by the Christian God that Christians must live by love is negated by any evil tyrant merely on the hypothesis that God must have appointed monstrous tyrants to their position, and cannot therefore be challenged or forced out of power in any circumstances. Human beings are forbidden to take any action to right appalling wrongs and horrors. In the peasant war (1525), Luther indeed stood out against the peasants.
It goes right along with the way Christianity was adapted to be an imperial religion by the suppression of the rebellious nature of Christ and his followers themselves. Christ was not crucified by the Romans as a challenger to Caesar, but by the Jews out of their rejection of God. The Jews were, of course, a seditious people who rebelled several times against Rome. No serious historian can avoid the fact that Jesus was among the Jewish rebels.
What Luther did concede was that the subject was not obliged to obey a tyrant. They could refuse to obey when they could not find it in themselves, as a matter of conscience, to obey the king’s command as contrary to divine law, or as imposing what the subject should believe. So, refusal was proper, but not resistance, according to Luther, thereby extending the list of Christian martyrs!
The theory of the two regiments could not bear out in practice. What happened—not surprisingly perhaps for those of a skeptical and realistic outlook—the Devil took over the supposedly spiritual regiment. The state came to dominate the church. The US is today’s prime example, where many Protestant churches are extensions—propaganda and militancy arms—of the Republican Party. What many US protestants fail to notice, absorbed as they are by the “do nothing” slogan “Faith Alone” is that Luther did not believe or teach that only faith was sufficient for Christian salvation. Protestants were not to be only concerned with personal salvation, but had to do good in the world, for God had imposed on all Christians, while in the temporal world, the duty to serve their neighbors in the spirit of Christian love. And Christian love between human beings is equal, so that a good deed by a rich man is no different in quality from a good deed by a pauper.
Luther’s rejection of rebellion under any circumstances was shared by other Protestant reformers like Calvin who also strongly believed God had put the king on the throne—the divine right of kings. Even a cruel or tyrannical king could not be challenged because the tyranny was God’s intention. God enthroned the despot to punish a nation of sinners. When Calvin ruled Geneva, he put his belief into practice, incinerating Servetus as a troublemaking rebel.
In the latter half of the sixteen century, the Huguenots in France, and Knox and Buchanan in Scotland, began to wonder about it. In the seventeenth century, Oliver Cromwell, a devout Protestant, led the English rebellion against Charles I, duly chopping off his head, something that would have horrified Luther. After the Glorious Revolution of 1688, that established a constitutional monarchy in England, the Church of England eliminated references to merely passive obedience from the creed (1689).
With the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment, the mix of classical Greek philosophy and the humanism inherent in the secular teachings of Christ revived the concern to protect the individual from abuse by the government or society. It is present even in the work of philosophers from Hobbes and Rousseau to Marx who put the community before the person.
Is it possible to allow for individual freedom in a community? Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau invoked the notion of a “social contract” as the basis of government authority, and why it should be obeyed.
Hobbes and the Right to Dissent
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) saw humans as always competing for symbols of status. Civilization confines this competitive urge, but outside civilization, humanity would be, and once was, in a “state of nature”. If it was a Garden of Eden existence, then why was it left behind? If it was a savage state, then how could such savages change their nature for sufficiently long to draw up any form of social contract, as the various social contract theories require? Hobbes famously did consider the state of nature to be savage…
…no arts, no letters, no society, and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
If such a horrible state existed in reality, it must have pertained to some period in the ascent of man when human ancestors were solitary animals, living together only in temporary family groups headed by a matriarch until her offspring were big enough to move on. Only this state could have preceded any social contract because the whole point of the latter was notionally to bring the solitary human predecessor into a society with others. A human community of any kind must require such a notional social contract. Now our closest cousins in the animal world are the chimpanzees which are social animals themselves living in small groups or communities. It suggests that our common ancestor with the chimpanzees was also a social animal. The social contract must therefore have been agreed between prehumans, not humans. We entered humanity already socialized.
Chimpanzee groups have a leader or alpha male, and a social hierarchy, the leader having high status allies, and his wives being high status females. Even so, the rule of the alpha male is at least partially by consent, because there are times when the group rebels against him and the former alpha male is overthrown by some rival. The deed is a conspiracy between subgroups of apes within the group because the current alpha male and his allies cannot be overhtown by a solitary rival. he too must have allies.
It seems then that there was a social order rather like this when the human like apes became human. The community as a whole would have been normally content with a rather shallow hierarchy, but, should discontent arise, the group or part of it would rebel against the status quo and change it by force if needs be. It seems that the earliest sort of human society must have been a nepotistic élitism with a degree of choice exercised at intervals. The primordial leader is a leader only by social convention, but the realistic alternatives are limited.
Hobbes did not agree. He felt all humans were equal, not on the grounds that no inequalities exist between us, plainly they do, but because no one can ever be immune to being overhtrown by others. Though these others are inferior in status, so long as they can muster enough strength, such as numbers, they can demand and achieve equality, though individually and objectively they may not be equal to the one overthrown. As status is of central importance to humans, it is the desire of all of us to be of as high a status as we can achieve. We are rarely satisfied by what we have. We “can relish nothing but what is eminent”.
Hobbes thinks that morals are whatever people approve of—conventions. Modern evolutionary psychology has shown a distinction between human conventions which can be broken with little or no feelings of guilt by most people, and instinctive morality, which is intrinsic to most of us having been chosen by evolutionary adaptation to allow us to associate in groups, and that we break only with an uncomfortable feeling of guilt.
In the “state of nature” every adult is responsible for their own security, and on occasions that of their offspring. Self preservation is the first law of nature. The second law for human beings is that this personal responsibility is given up when we join together in a society. Then every man is “contented with so much liberty against other men as he would allow other men against himself”. In other words, society is a convention to restrict certain acts so that we can live together without fearing each other. Any such agreement is a social contract, but one which could never be implemented from a “state of nature” because it could never be implemented without it breaking down. Efforts to enforce it would simply degenerate into a free for all, like the brawls in the nineteenth century western bars of US cowboy movies. The “state of nature” would have asserted itself.
The only way it could work was by transferring the power of enforcing the contract to a third party, someone or some group of men with the power to force dissenters to comply. So, the individual decides not to protect himself for the good of society, but leaves it to the alpha male, the chief, the sultan, the king, to organize with his allies or nobles to do on behalf of everyone else.
Each one who has joined must agree to obey the leader. Obedience is a social obligation, if peace and cooperation is to be achieved in society. Everyone in society has rights, but they have given them to the sovereign to use on their behalf. They therefore have no rights of their own remaining. The sovereign has each indiovidual’s rights, and acts of the sovereign are the accumulated acts of everyone in the community. Hobbes’s thinking leads to every sovereign being a tyrant, and we have voluntarily given ourselves up to tyrannical rule.
But as people have renounced their individual rights purely to have peace and security, it follows that they can reclaim them as soon as the group leader himself, through his acts, begins to disturb the peace of his subjects. They can withdrawn their consent to allow the king to act on their behalf. They can rebel!
For long, the Christian nobility of Europe had felt secure in the Church’s doctrine of the divine right of kings—the first law of imperial religion. King’s ruled by God’s will, and as Luther argued, no one could actively resist their ruler except by refusing to obey, and passively accepting the consequences whatever they might be. Though Hobbes had upheld the authority of the ruler, it was from quite a different approach. Kings ruled only with the consent of their subjects. God had nothing to do with it. Having given their consent, subjects were bound by it, so they were no better off in practice, but Hobbes’s new argument gave them a notional ability to withdraw their consent.
Hobbes also brings us to the crux of society—its purpose is personal security. Together we are safer from a premature death or injury, safer in our supplies and resources, and safer in being able to act cooperatively to solve problems that are intractable for solitary animals. We have evolved into society from a less secure world, and, when society itself becomes intolerable, the point of it has gone, and we can notionally secede from it. Nowadays, as we cannot return to solitary living, it can only mean we have to revolt against the way society is established and change it or die in the attempt!
Hobbes saw humanity always as individuals, not as a hive. Yet, paradoxically, most of us do not see ourselves as particularly individual in our political and social context. Even elections are being seen as increasingly phony—an illusion. We live in the roles we have assumed in society, rather than as peculiarly individual, and we are conditioned not to rock the boat. Only periodically do people begin to think and question, begin to mistrust the deal they have in society, and incline to see it as valueless. But who then are such people questioning in mass society? Who are their social enemies, and why have they become enemies when all of us came into society for peace and security? Once it was the nobility, the allies of the king who had become incompetent or despotic. Now, it is those who enrich themselves, those who procure an unfair proportion of socially accumulated wealth. The financiers!
Locke and the English Revolution
John Locke (1632-1704) in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding thought human beings were born with a mental blank slate—they could have no knowledge based on experience of the world, and had no innate or instinctive knowledge. It is not true. We do have instincts. In particular, we have a moral instinct. Before Locke, many, often churchmen, accepted we had an innate human morality. Locke rejected it.
He had stepped out of the quagmire that was the Dark Ages when the church allowed people only to think of God and nothing abstract save the parallel world of spirits and the fact of our entering it at death. He remained a Christian, but barely. Christ was the Messiah, and the righteous lived on at death, but otherwise only the material world was of any importance in our lifetimes, and could be investigated empirically:
Our portion lies only here in this little spot of earth where we and all pur governments are shut up.
We should follow the precept of Christ to love one another not because God has commanded it, but because we can all end up safer and happier. Doing it makes us feel better people, and we all feel better because we know we benefit from doing it. It is therefore not particularly altruistic to do it. Being loving and caring in our dealings with others gives us a selfish satisfaction, but the gain we have from it is real.
Lord Shaftesbury, a liberal politician and statesman, the founder of the Whig party, took Locke in as an adviser and a physician. On the restoration of the monarchy with Charles II, the Anglican Church became obligatory for all the English unless they wanted to suffer the penalties prescribed for not complying. Shaftesbury opposed it. For him, belief was a private matter for each individual, and of no concern to the state. He was a believer in religious tolerance, but did not extend it to Catholicism:
Papists cannot be tolerated because all their opinions are absolutely destructive of all governments except the Pope’s. Papists, moreove, are not to enjoy toleration because when they have the power, they think themselves bound to deny it to others.
This is extended into a general principle in Adelphiasophism which considers the only thing not to be tolerated is intoleration, but unless it is a general principle, it is unfair. Any religion that has a dogma that God has established it alone, necessarily will not tolerate any other, and some religions will not tolerate others even when their God seems not to have issued any such directive. They all seem to put loyalty to their own god or religion above loyalty to the secular state or community, unless it is one of their faith communities.
Locke thought Catholics consistently put loyalty to the Pope above loyalty to the English government. For them, the only thing to be tolerated is Catholicism. At that time, England was in rivalry with France, a Catholic country, so Catholicism could have been the basis of treachery, especially as the king’s nominated successor was his brother, James, a committed Catholic. Shaftesbury tried to force Charles to exclude James from the succession, but failed in what was seen as an attempt at a coup, and fled to Holland where Locke joined him.
James II duly succeeded his brother and tried to impose Catholicism on to the English as Locke and Shaftesbury expected, dissolving parliament to get his way. The outcome was that the English decided to exert their right to choose again, as they had done in deposing Charles I. They rose up in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and replaced the Catholic king with a protestant one, William of Orange, and Mary, his wife, who was James II’s daughter.
It so happened that, at the earlier period, when Shaftesbury had tried to force the king to change the succession, Locke had started on a justification of what they expected could become a revolution. A few years later, there was a revolution, and Locke’s book emerged seemingly as a justification for that one. It was possible because in it Locke laid out universal principles of government. The liberal and constitutional tradition of politics aimed at harmonizing the operations of political power by:
- the rule of law
- government by consent
- checks and balances to safeguard individual freedom and rights.
King James followed the Stuarts generally in asserting the core belief of European kings, the divine right of kings—the ruling authority came from God and ought not to be challenged by mortal men. Locke wondered why there were rulers at all, and he decided, like Hobbes, there must have been a time when there were none. People lived in the “state of nature”. Perpetual competition between people—the weak opposed by the strong and the strong on guard against threats from rivals—became intolerable.
To resolve the problem people had formed societies, and entrusted rulers to protect their subjects from constant harassment. Locke emphasized that the ruled had entrusted the rulers via a “social contract”. That trust could be revoked if the sovereign was failing. All rulers ruled only with the consent of the ruled:
The liberty of Man in society is to be under no other legislative power but that established by consent in the commonwealth, nor under the dominion of any will, or restraint of any law, but what the legislation shall enact, according to the trust put in it.
Consent by the people to the rule of any government means they have the right to depose any government that betrayed the people’s trust. If the ruler would not yield peacefully, then rebellion by the people against unlawful rule was justified. The problem remained of knowing when a ruler had betrayed the people’s trust. For Locke, it was when any government was “inconstant, uncertain, unknown and arbitrary”:
Whenever the legislators endeavor to take away or destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves in a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved of any further obedience, and are left to the common refuge, which God hath provided for all men against force and violence—resistance.
The first fruits of Locke’s principle of resistance were in the revolutions in America and France at the end of the eighteenth century. Benjamin Franklin wanted the American people to justify their rebellion against George III by adopting the slogan:
Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.
But Locke was arguing that rebellion was sometimes necessary to preserve a basic right. It was not meant to destroy the whole social system, and to replace it with another. Locke was a conservative aiming to conserve the fundamental right of us all to be ruled by someone of whom we sufficiently approve—to preserve the right of consent.
Yet, he had himself in his Two Treatises of Government proposed the overthrowing of a previously held social principle—that of the divine right of kings—and replaced it with a new principle—that of the natural rights of man, broadly, those universal and essential things that ensure life is tolerable—the basic human needs of life, liberty and property:
- Life and liberty meant no ruler could kill or imprison innocent people, or stand aside while others did it unpunished
- Property meant no ruler could seize anyone’s property, other than by a lawfully agreed system of taxation, nor could he stand aside while others did so unpunished.
To ensure these provisions, Locke advocated an assembly of taxpayers to authorize taxation, and an independent judiciary to see that the sovereign power did not abuse people’s natural rights. Moreover, Locke denied that laws made by despots or governments that violate natural rights remain legal. Then…
…the people are at liberty to provide for themselves, by erecting a new legislative differing from the other by a change of persons or form or both, as they shall find it most for their safety and their good.
The laws made by any legislative had to be “fair and impartial”, and once they were instead putting society into bondage, government “visibly ceases”, and can be erected anew.
However, no one in any society can be absolutely free. Everyone’s freedom ceases at the point when it begins to injure someone else’s freedom. In knowledge too there were limits, and wise men understood what the limits were. Plainly, by entering into a community with others, everyone accepts the limit to their freedom. They are no longer solitary animals free to do anything they choose. Society circumscribes human freedom out of necessity. Without it so doing, we would revert to solitariness and savagery. Accepting social restrictions allows us to be civilized. By knowing the limitations of freedom in society, we can accept how much freedom we can have—we will not expect more than we can have, and will know therefore what can properly be strived for. Instead of making futile efforts, we can make fruitful ones.
Montesquieu and the Spirit of Laws
Montesquieu (1689-1755) was a French noble whose parents made a beggar at the castle gates his godfather so that he would always remember that the poor were his kinfolk. He did not forget it. He wrote On the Spirit of Laws in which he argued that human institutions do and should vary because nature and reason do not demand the same solutions in different places and climates—geographical determinism. He thought different practices were good or bad by their nature, so that slavery is bad by its nature, and torture is by its nature not necessary. On one occasion, when asked to explain the usefulness of torture to the tyrant, he exclaimed:
I hear the voice of nature crying out against me!
Importantly, he did not allow that the mere existence of a law meant it was just, and should therefore be obeyed. By analogy, he explained that to say so was to say that a circle’s radii were not all equal until someone had drawn one. A circle is not defined merely by delineating it, and a law is not just merely because it is in the statute book.
Montesquieu decided that, when men pursue certain aims, it must be right for them to do so. It seems a strange principle, justifying anything men generally do, but inasmuch as instinctive acts are meant, it must be true, and, as it has now been shown that, as social animals, we have a moral instinct, it is simply an expression of it.
Unlike Locke, Montesquieu felt that justice and liberty were absolutely good, but he accepted they were difficult to implement absolutely. In fact, absolute liberty applies to the solitary animal, not to society, and justice applies within society and not to the solitary animal. Moreover, to be free must allow people the freedom to be in error. Human error cannot be eliminated. People ought not to be punished or blamed when they make mistakes, but only when mischievous acts are deliberate.
Liberty consists only in the power to do what we ought to will, and in not being made to do what we ought not to will.
Then again a despot might be kind and successful, but that is no justification for tyranny, for it is wrong in principle. A human being might individually be dishonest, but such faults ought not to be projected on to the mass of humanity, as the Church had done with Original Sin, for most people were honest. Societies were natural organisms, and they were what interested Montesquieu rather than human society in general. Human groups had come together for an original purpose—mutual security and cooperation. What was interesting then was what made them different.
Montesquieu was less bothered about the letter of the law than its spirit, and the spirit with which it was administered. When government was adminsitered in a spirit of fear, honor and virtue, the outcome was respectively a tyranny, a monarchy and a republic. Monarchy was the ideal as long as the noble class felt shame at dishonor, for then they ruled honorably. A republic aimed to rule in such a way that the social aims of the community were fulfilled, but the virtue required for a decent republic was harder to come by than the honor required for a decent monarchy. Either way, the separation of the legislative, executive and judicial functions was essential for successful government.
Though Montesquieu favored monarchy over a republic, he had strong ideas about how the citizen should be treated:
The state owes to every citizen an assured subsistence, proper nourishment, suitable clothing, and a mode of life not incompatible with health…
And when a section of the economy is depressed, and the workers are hard up…
…the state must provide them with immediate help—whether it be to prevent the people from suffering, or whether it be to prevent them from revolting.
He was anticipating the welfare state.
Rousseau, Paine and the General Will
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s most famous work is the Social Contract in which he sought the most appropriate government for men as they are. In a less well known work, Émile, he sought a way, by appropriate education, of making a “Natural Man” uncorrupted by social vagaries. Both works were directed against the then universal idea of the divine right of kings, by which the rule of monarchs was absolute because God had put them there.
The opposite idea was that the rights of citizens was absolute through the natural rights of man. Neither seemed satisfactory from historical experience, monarchy too often ending in despotism, while individual freedom seemed to mean anarchy. John Locke saw government by consent as the solution, and that required a notional social contract to be agreed between the members of any society:
Each of us puts his person and all his powers in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an individual part of the whole.J-J Rousseau
The crux of the idea is that of the “general will”. It is not any sum or average of the separate personal wills, but must have the support of everyone with goodwill, whose reason, experiences and consciences persuade them it is for the common good. The general will “must both come from all and apply to all”, and “what makes the will general is less the number of voters than the common interest uniting them”.
In contrast, the “will of all” is just the total of all the selfish individual wills, and so allows for personal interests, but each individual, as a member of the whole community, ought to be able to understand the general good. In practice, the uneven distribution of the powers of persuasion spoil many people’s understanding of the general good, especially in these days of the mass media.
The general will is, or ought to be, sovereign. It must remain in the community as a whole, and cannot be delegated or exercised through representatives, or surrendered by the community in any way. People only able to elect representatives occasionally are not free except during the election. It follows that everyone in the community must be personally involved in ruling it, so the ideal state has to be small like the Greek city states. Now, modern communications and personal computers should make it possible for larger states to be run on these principles.
Factions and parties inhibit the expression of the general will—as people in places with only two parties to choose from, as in the USA and the UK, know only too well—so all citizens should be free to express their own thoughts. But factions and parties cannot be prevented, so as many as possible must be encouraged to inhibit the formation of large blocs with excessive power. It is essential that the power of the parties should be equal, so that none dominate.
Rousseau taught:
- freedom and equality are indispensible
- government must rest on the moral purpose of the whole community
- the moral basis of government was more important than institutional forms.
Rousseau thought religion was necessary, but thought full religious plurality, including unbelief, was intolerable. Even so, any religion should be tolerated as long as nothing in their dogmas contradicted the duties of citizenship. Atheists would be banned, but because atheism is antisocial! In this Rousseau was as reactionary as Luther and the Catholic Church. Yet he realized that much human unhappiness came from the friction between the state and the individual. He blamed it on the imperfections of society rather than the person. Humans were basically good, and would behave well in a good social environment. If they were not behaving well, then their circumstances needed examining to find the source of their problems.
Citizens had to be themselves moral and conscious of their duty to serve the common good as a prime civic virtue. Rousseau did not advocate absolute equality, nor an even distribution of wealth, but he opposed a society that was unbalanced to the extent that some people were grossly wealthy while others had little, nothing or, these days, less than nothing (through debt). Rousseau did not sound consistent in that he could not make his mind up whether the middle class needed preserving and religion imposed, or whether a revolution was necessary to return the common to the poor. But the generality of the people in their unity was ultimately sovereign via the general will.
[Government] is not, and from its nature cannot be, the property of any particular man or family, but of the whole community, at whose expense it is supported…Tom Paine
For Tom Paine (1737-1809), rule by a “particular man or family” was a usurpation of communal rights, and something which did not alter those rights:
Every citizen is a member of the sovereignty and, as such, can acknowledge no personal subjugation, and his obedience can only be to the laws.
Rousseau’s “general will”, for Paine, meant the majority must be forbidden from imposing conditions on the minority that differ from the conditions it imposes on itself. More recently, it was realized in John Rawls’s “veil of ignorance”.
Individuals themselves, each in their own personal and sovereign right, enter into a contract with each other to erect a government, and that was the only way a government could legitimately arise, and the only principle by which it could exist.
Natural rights are those which accrue to every human being by dint of their very existence. Among them are rights of the mind and rights to act for their personal comfort and happiness, as long as they do not injure the natural rights of others. Civil rights accrue to us all because we are members of society. Each civil right stems from a natural right that the individual is unsuited or incompetent to safeguard, such as those relating to security and protection. People are not equal, but are born, and always continue, free and equal in respect of their rights. Political liberty consists in doing whatever does not injure others:
A Declaration of Rights is, by reciprocity, a declaration of duties also. Whatever is my right as a man is also the right of another, and it becomes my duty to guarantee as well as to possess.Tom Paine
The basis of political democracy is that the limits of liberty are determined only by law, and “the law is an expression of the will of the community”.
Strongly opposed to the French revolution and its instigators like J-J Rousseau and T Paine was Edmund Burke (1729-97), a firm conservative. But he did not pose unreason against Enlightenment reason, simply thinking the world and human society were too complicated to be reasoned out. Society is not a marble running along a smooth surface needing a suitable tilt this way or that to steer it towards some desired destination, but it is moving on a surface deeply cut by deep ruts from centuries of past experience. The social marble is likely to go its own way despite the careful reasoning and adjustments of the rationalists. Tinkering with the trajectory of the social marble is likely to sap the vigor of social life by leaving people confused and frustrated. People will effectively abandon society becoming like “flies of a summer”—people tend to the “free for all” existence of a solitary animal, and society is inclined to collapse.
Social progress does not consist in breaking up society and building it again from scratch, but in building on the values and traditions it already has. Instead people have, for centuries, if not for millennia, been dealing with problems as they arose, and building up traditional solutions—community was organic! An organic community was indispensible to human freedom. Burke thought this timeless tradition was as important as reason.
The present is real, the future hypothetical. The perfect society is a dream of the future, but we can achieve a less perfect but more practicable outcome from where we are now, through realizing what is possible. A grossly corrupt society might require a revolution, but steady fruitful change is preferable. The mood of the successful politician is to move steadily, testing each step empirically before advancing rather than setting theoretical goals and engineering society to try to meet them. Change should therefore be organic.
Hegel (1770-1831) realized that individual interests and personal freedom were, notwithstanding their individual nature, only achievable within a social framework because humans were social not solitary. Freedom of speech, for example, presumes an audience. It is meaningless outside of society. Society can be assumed to have been built up from the solitary stage, through the care for young, especially by the mother, bringing about a family unit, then clans, tribes, and so on. So rights and duties grew up with the growth of society, through the same process. Human society is an assembly of communities. The state is the highest level, and “individuals have duties to the state in proportion as they have rights against it”.
Hegel saw that what is called “mind” in German but often translated as “spirit” in English needs a social context. It manifests itself in social structures, not just in an individual’s head, in traditions and institutions.
The Italian nationalist philosopher, Joseph Mazzini (1805-72), emphasized that people had duties besides rights. Society would be much improved if everyone took their duties seriously. Then rights were worth something. Everyone has a duty to humanity, to their country and to their family. People should be encouraged to improve themselves by education. The importance of the state was that each one of them should be ruled by their own people, untroubled by interference from other states—self determination. That is the best way to allow liberal democracy, humanitarianism, peace and international cooperation to evolve.
A revolution is often needed to establish a state, but thereafter, force ought not to be used internally or externally. Nation states should be sovereign and equal, and should work together in harmony. Sovereignty implies independence, but inequality of the power of states precludes equality and harmony.
Mill and Personal Liberty
J S Mill (1806-73) expounded the essentials of personal freedom in his essay, On Liberty, but can also be seen as a socialist in his concern for the bad effects of capitalism such as the exploitation of the poor.
The liberalism of the French and American revolutions, voiced in the UK by J S Mill, asserted the individual against government authority, but equally against the tyranny of mass opinion. In the mid-nineteenth century, Mill thought liberty was under attack. It had indeed been attacked from time to time by the political right, but a greater danger was “the tyranny of the majority” in the phrase of Alexis de Tocqueville. De Tocqueville had just written Democracy in America, noting that a danger to liberty was not overt attacks on it, such as illiberal legislation, but a tyranny “not over the body but over the mind”, Mill’s phrase. De Tocqueville had seen something in the American character, but Mill was speaking of the oppressive social intolerance of the British Victorian middle classes depicted in the period adaptations of contemporary writers like Jane Austin and Mrs Gaskell. Mill thought this “yoke of opinion” had become too oppressive, and could eventually prepare the way for an invasion of illiberal legislation. In contradistinction, Mill argued that:
The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is to prevent harm to others His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.
It is a principle that contradicts the utilitarianism that Mill was brought up with and helped to expound. Utilitarianism would permit enforcement of a law opposed to smoking because by so doing the misery caused by lung cancer and the general ill health of those who smoke is reduced. Yet Mill’s new principle would regard any such action as an infringement of the smoker’s personal rights by the tyranny of the majority. However, the appreciation that others can be harmed by smoking too, puts even Mill’s new principle into doubt, for by this principle it is still wrong to cause harm to others, though one is free to harm oneself. Indeed, even without our knowledge of the danger of passive smoking, the argument can be made that all self harm and self abuse harms society in general, by adding to the social costs of sickness and health care, perhaps, and so society is justified in curbing such personal rights.
Be that as it may, the liberty of private thought entrains liberty of public expression. Mill believed it was good to have truth spreading, but no one can tell by simple inspection that what they hear or read is true. Language used to communicate can also be used to deceive. Nor, despite the convictions of the religious, can we trust our feelings, because what we feel is reliable might be far from it. What allows us to have confidence in a statement is that it passes intact the test of searching criticism. Falsehoods, on the other hand, will be exposed by searching criticism. It follows that everything must be open to the maximum possible questioning and criticism, both to uphold the good and to expose the bad. Mill thought silencing the expression of an opinion was peculiarly evil:
If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth. If wrong, they lose what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and liveliest impression of truth produced by collision with error…
And:
There is the greatest difference in presuming an opinion to be true, because with every opportunity for contesting it, it has not been refuted, and assuming its truth for the purpose of not permitting its refutation.
Nothing therefore should be beyond criticism, and nothing should be considered self evidently bad, for it only the criticism that makes such judgements valid, and they constantly need reiterating for novices to hear. Truths protected against criticism wither into dogmas:
He who only knows his own side of a case knows little of that.
The more diversity and contrast there is among individuals’ ways of life, the more progress there is likely to be towards the discovery of better ways of living. Moral opinion, in Mill’s view of liberty, should be directed against anyone whose actions hurt others, not against those who, without hurting anyone, is living or trying to live as distinctively as they can. What is to be avoided is the pressure of conformity from public opinion creating a society of imitative, unimaginative drones.
J W N Watkins (1924-99, in Political Ideas, Ed D Thomson) thought Mill, in the light of later experience, might have added that liberty does not come at no cost. The pursuit of truth is risky. It may yield great benefits or great dangers, and human inquiry cannot be controlled such that we get the benefits without the dangers. We have to abandon the pursuit of truth or accept the risks it entails. If it proves costly, we have to pay the price or forego it.
Marx and Class Struggle
Marx showed that the “general will” did not exist. Society did not consist of individuals whose opinions were equally valid and valuable, but of classes. In modern society organized on capitalist lines, there were two principle classes:
- the capitalist class or bourgeoisie
- the workers, or proletariat.
The economic interest of the bourgeoisie, the capitalist, financier and management class, is to get as much work out of the proletariat as possible—the work of the working classes is the source of wealth—while paying them as little as possible in wages because what is not paid in wages accrues to the bourgeoisie as profit. The workers, in contrast, want higher wages and more leisure time in which to enjoy them, and therefore shorter working hours, as well as safe and satisfying working conditions, a further debit from profits.
These class interests are opposed and irreconcilable. The classes are perpetually and continually at loggerheads, but the struggle is unequal because the bourgeousie has all the wealth and power, and particularly all the power of persuasion (propaganda) through their ownership of communications and the media, so they can feed misinformation to the employees and divide them. Their biggest success is to fool many workers that their interests actually coincide with those of their oppressors. In the the US it is the “American Dream”.
The workers are exploited by the capitalists—it never being more obvious than it is now that the banks have been given the content of national treasuries everywhere, and workers have to foot the bill—exploitation being the wealth earned by the effort of working that is taken by the employers as profit. Mostly workers accept this as the bosses’ reward for employing them, but that depends on the workers getting sufficient in wages, and their conditions of work and at home are tolerable. If not, the employers taking advantage of placid workers to erode their wages and conditions, the time arises when they realize they are being exploited and revolt.
Rich and poor are not absolute terms, especially over history because workers are mainly making useful things that add to the benefits of society, arms production and warfare being the exception. Everyone therefore usually gets better off over time. In Elizabethan times, someone with a bed was exceptionally rich. Now someone without one is exceptionally poor. So workers in a later era are better off than they were earlier in history, but relatively they are rarely better off because the rich are proportionately richer too. They are still being exploited to keep the rich where they are.
But the whole system of capitalist production is unstable because it is flawed. The central problem is that although wages have to be kept down while prices are allowed to rise to maximize profit, it is the wage earners that constitute the mass market. They ultimately buy what they have made, but they have to have the income to do it. If wages fall relative to prices, they cannot afford to buy all that was produced. It is a crisis of overproduction. Too much money is in the hands of the greedy ruling class, and not enough in the hands of the timid working class who therefore cannot buy. Employees are laid off, causing a slump or “depression”, usually euphemistically ameliorated nowadays into “a recession”.
Capitalism also needs a “reserve army” of unemployed to keep the labor market “flexible”, meaning that there is competion among workers for the jobs available. The employed worry that they might lose their jobs and become unemployed, so hesitate to ask for justified wage rises, while the unemployed are willing to get a job even at a reduced wage, so as not to let their families suffer starvation or the degradation of benefits. The pool of unemployed was also needed when capitalism went through the other extreme of a boom, often nowadays based on the ready availability of credit which banks may make available so that they can draw large bonuses for distributing it, or governments will borrow from banks to stimulate the economy out of a slump. As production rises, workers are needed and are drawn from the reserve army. Otherwise, there will be no wage competition, and the bosses will be obliged to lift wages, or cease production. The cycle of boom and bust is a feature of the instability of capitalism. It is no accident.
Recently a boom never seemed to end, and the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer boasted of the end of boom and bust, until the world wide bust came on bigger than ever before. Such a boom continues because the banks are making money available knowing they can never get it back in sub prime mortgages, and also in readily available credit card cash. It is all money that is not backed up by deposits, and sooner or later must crash, but meanwhile bankers have paid themselves $millions—in bonuses, not the junk bonds of packaged up sub prime loans—knowing full well that state treasuries will have to bale them out.
What about the labor supply in cases like this? When the home labor market saturates, traditionally manufacturers relied on immigrant labor as a cheap resource. As Marx wrote:
Do these workers come to this cold damp country, if they have good jobs in their own countries? Of course not. Those who come are those who have no job, and, what is more. little prospect of getting one.
The reserve army of unemployed is now international. Capitalism needs it. The modern mobility of capital also allows the manufacturers to move their factories overseas where labor is cheaper rather than bringing the labor here. But the immigrants who are already here and those still arriving out of hope, are still valuable to the bourgoisie in causing divisions among the working class, notably racism, directing tension away from the real criminals, the bankers and wealthy corporate bosses. Foreign workers are always maligned by local workers as competing for local jobs, but it is the employers, who cannot do without them, that should be attacked, not the foreigners themselves, who are doing what most of us would do in their situation—trying to keep life and limb together, and their families from starvation.
Marx was not unequivocally opposed to capitalism. It was a necessary stage in human economic development, but as technology advanced its flaws became more serious. Its driving force, for example, is to make things for sale at a profit, but there are many things that need to be done for the good of society as a whole that individuals, especially the poor, might not be willing to buy. And now, in the age of automation, many things can be made without any or many workers, so labor costs are minimal. The trouble is that again it highlights the fatal flaw in the system—when no one is paid, no one can buy. One can imagine a society in the not too distant future when few people will need to work at all, but then no one could buy anything!
Unless, that is, government taxed the rich to give everyone a living wage so that they could continue to buy, even though they were unemployed, and thus keep the economic system functioning. It shows that the present absurd but widespread policies to force people, by cutting benefits, into jobs that do not exist need to be reversed. We all need to accept that wealth will have to be distributed to the mass of purchasers in society just to keep it ticking over. It must also allows them to pursue their own interests, starting up their own businesses or working as artists, musicians, craftsmen, and so on, without penalizing them, at least until they have shown they are viable.
As it is, big capitalists tend to ruin small ones or buy them out and often suppress invention and creativity to maintain their own monopolies, like the internal combustion engine and oil monopolies and cartels. These are able to fix prices, so that another flaw of capitalism emerges—it ceases to be competitive, and simply milks the market as long as it can. Some of these giant capital accumulators are able to invest immense sums wherever they like, distorting currencies, distorting stock exchanges, destroying other enterprises and the economies of whole countries, according to what will make them even more profit, and generally being utterly irresponsible and utterly uncontrollable, because even governments have to pander to them. This is where we are now. Unrestricted, unregulated capital sloshes around the world making finaciers vast profits and creating economic mayhem, with no one, even governments willing to stop it.
These capitalists are also warmongers as we have seen so clearly in the last seventy years. War is nesessary as a partial solution for overproduction, and a way of keeping a mass of workers in none jobs who might otherwise be rising up in revolution, a way of stealing other people’s resources, and a way of redistributing people’s tax dollars into the bloodstaihned private hands of the caste of Warbucks.
An argument that modern democracies are classless, is made not on any fact that classes do not exist, but that people by their personal ability are free to move between classes. It is the myth of social mobility. For sure it is true in a few well publicized cases, but for most, it is an impossible dream, the American Dream again. Classes exist, and the wealthy class has the power of propaganda—now renamed public relations—to control public thought. Political theory and political practice are utterly contradictory in the supposed western democracies. The theory is that we choose our rulers by a majority of a free vote judged on the record of the rival parties and candidates. The practice is not at all the same. People do not rule themselves. Government at different levels is by an élite of specialists—a ruling caste—and inequality is socially necessary:
The formula “government of the people by the people” must be replaced by the formula “government of the people by an élite sprung from the people”.Prof M Duverger, Political Power
The élite in practice is scarcely “sprung from the people” but is “sprung from the bourgeoisie”, although the small degree of social mobility does allow a tiny proportion of working people to be embourgeoisified into it. Schumpeter was more accurate in saying:
Democracy is the rule of the politicians.
The politicians are a gang of opportunistic self seekers of the capitalist class or the managerial caste hoping to enrich themselves by serving their capitalist paymasters. Not all enter government. Many prefer or are obliged to stay influential in senior management, or as lobbyists, or journalists and form political “think tanks”, blogs or pressure groups. Their task is not to influence parliamentarians but to influence the mass of workers who constitute the arena of political struggle between the élite factions which, in fact, all represent the capitalist class. It is these élites who share the power of government, not the electorate who are deprived of any power of government other than to choose between the rival factions or parties at election times only.
Green, Beveridge and the Welfare State
The leading western democracies are all wealthy countries, all far more wealthy than they were at the end of the last world war when most of them introduced the welfare schemes that they are now demolishing because they cannot afford them! Among all that wealth, the capitalist ruling class and its élite, constituting around ten percent of the population, controls about 50 percent of the vast wealth of the country. The poorest ten percent have less than nothing, being in debt and possessing no assets, and the rest own the other half of the wealth, though most of it by far is in the richest half of this middle fraction.
John Maynard Keynes showed how the crisis of capitalism could be ameliorated given the will to do it, but the political élite always end up mismanaging Keynes’s principles to fulfil their own get rich quick ambitions and suit their role models in the rich class. In the UK, Sir William (later Lord) Beveridge proposed the principles of the welfare state state based on a national social insurance, and insurance against Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. The social insurance foreseen by Beveridge was a contract between the state and each individual:
The state should offer security for service and contribution. The state in organizing security should not stifle incentive, opportunity, responsibility. In establishing a national minimum, it should leave room and encouragement for voluntary action by each individual to provide more than the minimum for himself and his family.
The US President, Franklin D Roosevelt, spoke of instituting “freedom from fear”, and “freedom from want”. The contemporary source of the inspiration of Beveridge and Keynes was the Oxford philosopher, T H Green (1836-82), a Christian, humanist, and liberal, but an opponent of Darwin and Utilitarianism. Green realized that human freedom and fulfilment could be had only through society:
There is a work of moral liberation which society, through its various agencies, is constantly carrying on for the individual.
Here is the relationship between morality, the individual, and society that has emerged now, from the study of evolutionary psychology, as the moral instinct, so it is ironic that Green had considered himself opposed to Darwinsim. And indeed Green meant the small communities of mankind akin to the primordial group, not the confederation of them that became the state:
The other forms of community which precede and are independent of the formation of the state, do not continue to exist outside it, nor yet are they superseded by it. They are carried on into it. They become its organic members, supporting its life and in turn maintained by it in a new harmony with each other.
The state is not merely a collection of individuals, but their various communities, and it has to balance the interests not only of the individuals, but their various communities too. Like any human group, it exists to offer security to its members. So, welfare is a moral concept and obligation of any state, most of all of any that claimed to be moral. Politics, by the same social obligation, has to be moral politics to ensure the strengthening of society by requiring a moral treatment of everyone in society, the unexpurgated reaffirmation of Beveridge’s welfare principles. Welfare is an approach to equality that everone in society ought to support as a necessary stabilizing influence in a flawed system. Without a satisfactory welfare system allowing personal enterprise without penalties, the gross inequalities of present day capitalist society justifies an alternative solution—revolution!
What we have failed to achieve at all is a proper democracy, a mass democracy. The great historian E H Carr wrote that we are not defending democracy, in the perpetual wars we fight, because we have yet to get it ourselves! Some countries—we like to think our own—are more democratic than others, but even our own are not very democratic, if we are applying a high standard of it.
The ordinary citizen does not have power and cannot therefore exercise it. We still cannot properly consent to or dissent from our governments except for the brief time it takes us to register a vote or spoil a paper at election times. The men who asserted our natural rights did not envisage what we have as being sufficient—representative “democracy”. We have yielded our rights not to a sovereign but a professional managerial or political caste, who are out for their own personal gain more often than they are doing what their electors want, then using PR and the media to persuade the common people they want what they get. Our aim should be not to defend democracy but to erect it!
Further Reading
- More On Liberty by J S Mill
