Bernard Bosanquet

“ We have treated rights throughout as claims, the enforcement of which by the State is merely the climax of their recognition by society. Why do we thus demand recognition for rights? If we deny that there can be unrecognised rights, do we not surrender human freedom to despotism or to popular caprice? ”

“ The neighbourhood is for the mind its immediate picture of the world, the frame into which its further vista of society as a whole must be fitted, or, in other words, its sphere of direct relations. The family is a group of natural relations; but the neighbourhood consists of relations which are as natural in a different way, not through blood, but through contact. It is not a selection, but rather a specimen of life as a whole, for it must include as a rule all the necessary elements of the social fabric. It includes all that comes to us by direct sense-perception from day to day ”

“ It is plain that the unity of myself with others in a common good is the same in principle as the unity of myself with myself which I aim at in aiming at my own good. Thought and language, we should bear in mind, unite me to myself just as they unite me to others, and they expand my being by binding my own life into a whole no less than by making intercourse possible between my fellow men and myself. ”

“ For the force of the State proceeds essentially from its character of being our own mind extended, so to speak, beyond our immediate consciousness. Not only is the conduct of life as a whole beyond the powers of the average individual at his average level, but it is beyond the powers of all the average individuals in a society taken together at their average level. We make a great mistake in thinking of the force exercised by the State as limited to the restraint of disorderly persons by the police and the punishment of intentional law-breakers. The State is the fly-wheel of our life. ”

“ We may be determined by something which not only is not ourself—for in the greatest moments of life, when our being touches its maximum, we, in a sense, feel an impulse which is not ourself—but it is not ourself as something which has got hold of us by force, and operates upon us by conflict and violence, without having the kind of power needed to carry us away and sweep our whole self harmoniously into its current. ”

“ Any system of institutions which represents to us, on the whole, the conditions essential to affirming such a will, in objects of action such as to constitute a tolerably complete life, has an imperative claim upon our loyalty and obedience as the embodiment of our liberty. The only question that can arise is whether the system is that which it pretends to be. But even if rebellion is a duty, it can only be so because the imperative obligation, as we recognise it, is irreconcilable with the particular system which claims our obedience in its name. ”

“ The family and the neighbourhood sustain and colour the individual life, but the vocation stamps and moulds it. The more definite and articulate summons of the organising world—in which of course intelligence is active, ever discerning new purposes in old routine—elicits a deeper response from, or takes a more concrete shape in, the particular centre of consciousness. The individual has his own nature communicated to him as he is summoned to fit himself for rendering a distinctive service to the common good. ”

“ It would be as true to say that reason is independent of civilisation, or the soul independent of culture. Right is not exhausted in the facts of past history; but it is at every moment embodied in facts; and to comprehend that the social phenomena which are among the most solid and unyielding of our experiences, are nevertheless ideal in their nature, and consist of conscious recognitions, by intelligent beings, of the relations in which they stand, is to make a great step towards grasping the essential task of science in dealing with society. ”

“ All State action is at bottom the exercise of a Will; the real Will, or the Will as logically implied in intelligences as such, and more or less recognised as imperative upon them. And, therefore, though in the form of force it acts through automatism, that is, not directly as conscious Will, but through a system which gives rise to acts by influences apparently alien, yet the root and source of the whole structure is of the nature of Will, and its end, like that of organic automatism, is to clear the road for true volition; it is “forcing men to be free.” ”

“ Or, as we might say, the man does not altogether cease, however ignorant or interested, to possess a man’s leaning towards making the real best of himself, though his private interest may at times so master his mind as to throw the higher or common good into the second place. Thus, the relation of the general will to a community is plainly apprehended by Rousseau much in the spirit of the doctrine that man always aims at something which he takes to be good. And so the General Will is as much implied in the life of a society as some sort of will for good in the life of an individual. ”

“ But, applied to responsible human beings, such a theory, if really kept to its distinctive contention, is an insult. It leads to the notion that the State may take hold of any man, whose life or ideas are thought capable of improvement, and set to work to ameliorate them by forcible treatment. There is no true punishment except where one is an offender against a system of rights which he shares, and therefore against himself. And such an offender has a right to the recognition of his hostile will; it is inhuman to treat him as a wild animal or a child, whom we simply mould to our aims. ”

“ But it is to be noted at this point that a high-class secondary automatism, with which all along we have compared the system of rights as engrained in the habits of a people, retains a very close connection with consciousness. We do not indeed will every step that we walk, but we only walk while we will to walk, and so with the whole system of routine automatism which is the method and organ of our daily life. At any interruption, any hindrance or failure, consciousness starts up, and the end of the whole routine comes sharply back upon us through our aberration. ”

“ We saw before that the individual providing for himself in the Bourgeois Society also acts for others. But this unconscious necessity is not enough; it needs the Corporation to bring it to a conscious and thoughtful social ethics. Of course the Corporation needs the higher superintendence of the State, or it would ossify, shrink into its shell, and be degraded into a wretched guild. But in and for itself the Corporation is no closed guild; it is rather the bringing of an isolated trade into an ethical connection, and its admission into a sphere in which it wins strength and honour. ”

“ Not only in Aristotle’s trenchant expressions to the effect that the City State is a natural growth, but in the whole of Plato’s careful analysis of moral and social life, we find society depicted as a living and growing creature, in which man’s nature expands itself from more to more, having its own essence progressively communicated to it. And so we find that the peculiar naturalness of the primitive and the simple is only an illusion, caused by the greater difficulty of recognising the larger individuality which comes both of and to itself in the later and more complex phases of life. ”

“ We find the idea of nature identified not with the mature fulness, but with the empty starting point of life; we meet with the phenomena of vegetarianism, water-drinking, the reduction of dress to its minimum, in short, the familiar symptoms of the longing for the “return to nature,” with all that it implies; we find law and political unity treated as a tissue of artifice and convention, and the individual disdaining to identify himself with the citizenship of a single state, but claiming to be a stranger in the city and a citizen of the world. ”

“ But the work itself is in a different medium from anything which can be produced by compulsion, and is so far less vital as it is conditioned by the operation of force upon minds which demand no work of the kind.
But here we meet a difficulty of principle. Do we say that no external conditions are more than hindrances of hindrances to the best life? Do we deny that the best life can be positively promoted by external conditions; or if we admit this, do we still deny that it can be positively promoted by the work of the State? ”

“ The statesman’s function is to be wise for the community; the carpenter’s to carpenter for the community. But plainly the community for which the statesman knows that he has to be wise, must include the carpenter’s life and the conditions of his work, and the community for which the carpenter knows that he has to work must include some of the order and organisation which belong to it in the statesman’s vision. The individual, in short, is unique, or belongs to a unique class, not as an atom, but as a case of a law, or term of a connection. ”

“ Hegel calls such a critic—he is thinking especially of historians—“the psychological valet, for whom there are no heroes, not because they are no heroes, but because he is only a valet.” On the whole, a man is what he does. If his series of actions has the root of the matter in it, it is wrong either for him to be deterred, or for a critic to carp, because they bring him gain or glory, or gratify him by activity and excitement. To shrink from particular occasions of action because one’s self may find satisfaction in them is to fall back into the mere general willing of the abstract good. ”

“ Take, as we said above, the actual casual will of any individual at any given moment, especially if it is of a nature which, within the context of civilised life, we commonly pronounce to be wrong. Let it be, for example, an impulse of sensual passion. It is a commonplace that in such impulses the self can find no abiding satisfaction. They pass and leave him empty. They bring with them no opening out of fresh possibilities, no greater stability to the mind. Yet they have their meaning, and belong to human nature. They imply a need for union, and an attraction outside the immediate self. ”

“ He knows, indeed, by this time, that the obvious aspect of a province of fact will not be the only one, and that a unity will certainly be traceable between all the facets of social existence. But none the less, he will be able to restrain the itch to explain things away, and he will fairly and candidly give weight to the significance and suggestiveness of the mass of history and of reflection which is now brought before him. ”

“ In dealing with the general question why recognition is demanded as an essential of rights, we must remember what we took to be the nature of society and the source of obligation. We conceived a society to be a structure of intelligences so related as to co-operate with and to imply one another. We took the source of obligation to lie in the fact that the logic of the whole is operative in every part, and consequently that every part has a reality which goes beyond its average self, and identifies it with the whole, making demands upon it in doing so. ”

“ But again, the instinct which, in looking for what has power to grow or come of itself, lays hold of what is merely primitive or merely general, has in all great epochs of thought been met by a deeper insight.
It is not merely what we are born as, or what the world begins with, that comes of itself. The most ordinary conception of growth involves maturity, and the term nature in Greek and Latin, as in English, can indicate not only what we are born as, but what we are born for, our true, or real, or complete nature. ”

“ Is the social life the best, or the only life for a human soul? In what way through society, and in what characteristics of society, does the soul lay hold upon its truest self, or become, in short, the most that it has in it to be? How does the social life at its best compare with the life of art, of knowledge, or of religion, and can the same principle be shown to be active in all of them? And what have {51} they in common, or peculiar to each, which has an imperative claim on the mind of man? ”

“ No one could have had a more ardent actual faith in the reality of the greater self than Bentham and Mill.
But Society and the State present themselves at first sight as indefinite multitudes of persons. Institutions are many-sided facts; and an unreflective citizen could hardly say of what he takes them to be composed. And though law and custom approach more nearly to what we commonly understand by a “will,” yet they again are apt to be regarded as a sort of dead external weight with which the living volition of the ordinary man has little or nothing to do. ”

“ Taking the ideas of all concerned as they really are, we have the facts in space and time—buildings, appliances, hours of work and attendance, and so on—included in them. It is impossible to state the idea fully and correctly without including the environment on which it rests, and the activities in which it is realised. We are not to omit the facts in space and time from what we mean by an institution; the only thing is that we have not known them as they really are till we have known them as bound into unity by the mental systems of which they are the context or the expression. ”

“ We have seen that Self-Government can only be explained if the centre of gravity of the self is thrown outside what we are continually tempted to reckon as our individuality, and, if we recognise as our real being, and therefore as imperative upon us, a self and a good which are but slightly represented in our explicit consciousness, at its ordinary level. We have seen that all sound theory and all good practice are founded on the insight or on the faith [2] that the common self or moral person of society is more real than the apparent individual ”

“ When the district thus absorbs the State, there is a want of what we call freedom, though there may be enough of sensuous unconstraint. The State and its ideal purposes are not clearly set above all flesh and blood. A great legal system is not created till the State ceases to be a neighbourhood. Individual intimacy [1] and the “hard case” obscure the idea of universal law. The possibility of representative government, of a political faith which does not work by sight, is not conceived. The district, as a natural fact, was at first only a degree more liberating than the natural fact of kinship. ”

“ How much of human life should be assigned to individuality, and how much to society?
“Each will receives its proper share, if each has that which more particularly concerns it. To individuality should belong the part of life in which it is chiefly the individual that is interested; to society, the part which chiefly interests society.” ”