Thomas Hill Green

“ Among the enlightened, indeed, there has of late appeared a tendency to adopt a theory very like that of Spinoza, without the higher elements which we noticed in Spinoza; to consider all right as a power attained in that 'struggle for existence' to which human 'progress' is reduced. But for one person, who, as a matter of speculation, considers the right of society over him to be a disguised might, there are thousands who, as a matter of practice, regard their own right as independent of that correlation to duty without which it is merely a might. ”

“ The great objection to the representation of the right of a sovereign power over subjects, and the rights of individuals which are enforced by this 'imperium,' as having arisen out of a contract of all with all, is that it conveys a false notion of rights. It is not merely that the possibility of such a contract being made presupposes just that state of things—a régime of recognised and enforced obligations—which it is assumed to account for. ”

“ A man who possesses nothing but his powers of labour and who has to sell these to a capitalist for bare daily maintenance, might as well, in respect of the ethical purposes which the possession of property should serve, be denied rights of property altogether. Is the existence of so many men in this position, and the apparent liability of many more to be brought to it by a general fall of wages, if increase of population goes along with decrease in the productiveness of the earth, a necessary result of the emancipation of the individual and the free play given to powers of appropriation? ”

“ He exchanges the natural liberty to do and get what he can, a liberty limited by his relative strength, for a liberty at once limited and secured by the general will; he exchanges the mere possession of such things as he can get, a possession which is the effect of force, for a property founded on a positive title, on the guarantee of society. At the same time he becomes a moral agent. Justice instead of instinct becomes the guide of his actions. For the moral slavery to appetite he substitutes the moral freedom which consists in obedience to a self-imposed law. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Thus for the sovereignty, in an impalpable and unnatural sense, of the general will, we get a sovereignty, in the natural and demonstrable sense, of the multitude. But as the multitude is not everywhere supreme, the assertion of its sovereignty has to be put in the form that it is sovereign 'de jure.' The truth which underlies this proposition is that an interest in common good is the ground of political society, in the sense that without it no body of people would recognise any authority as having a claim on their common obedience. ”

“ It is the radical fault of the theory which finds the origin of political society in compact, that it has to reverse the true process. To account for the possibility of the compact of all with all, it has to assume a society subject to a law of nature, prescribing the freedom and equality of all. But a society governed by such a law as a law of nature, i.e. with no imponent but man's consciousness, would have been one from which political society would have been a decline, one in which there could have been no motive to the establishment of civil government. ”

“ Thus to the grown man, bred to civil liberty in a society which has learnt to make nature its instrument, there is no self-enjoyment in the mere consciousness of freedom as exemption from external control, no sense of an object in which he can satisfy himself having been obtained. ”

“ Every act of the sovereign is according to him 'de jure,' not because all right is derived from a supreme coercive power and the sovereign is that power, but because the sovereign is the general will, which is necessarily a will for the good of all. The enactment of the sovereign could as little, on this view, be 'inequitable' or 'pernicious' as it could be 'unjust.' But this view necessitates a distinction between the sovereign, thus conceived, and the actually supreme power of making and enforcing law as it exists anywhere but in what Rousseau considered a perfect state. ”

“ Those who from time to time talk of the need of a great war to bring unselfish impulses into play, give us reason to suspect that they are too selfish themselves to recognise the unselfish activity that is going on all round them. Till all the methods have been exhausted by which nature can be brought into the service of man, till society is so organised that everyone's capacities have free scope for their development, there is no need to resort to war for a field in which patriotism may display itself. ”

“ The sectaries of the time of the Rebellion, in pleading a natural or divine right to resist the orders of the government, would have been as much condemned by Locke's theory as by that of Hobbes. But who can say when any popular action by which established powers, legislative or executive, are resisted or altered is an act of the 'sovereign people,' of the civil society acting as a whole, or no. Where government is democratic, in Hobbes' sense, i.e. vested in an assembly of all who will come together, the act of the 'sovereign people' is unmistakeable. ”

“ Has the individual no rights against enactments founded on such accepted views of social well-being?' We may answer: A right against society as such, a right to act without reference to the needs or good of society, is an impossibility, since every right depends on some social relation, and a right against any group of associated men depends upon association on some footing of equality with them or with some other men. We saw how the right of the slave really rested on this basis, on a social capacity shown in the footing on which he actually lives with other men. ”

“ 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 merely that right is in suspense on the particular point at issue between the conflicting powers. As we have seen, the general fabric of rights in any society does not depend on the existence of a definite and ascertained sovereignty, in the restricted sense of the words; on the determination of a person or persons in whom supreme power resides; but on the control of the conduct of men according to certain regular principles by a society recognising common interests; and though such control may be more or less weakened during periods of conflict of the kind supposed, it never ceases. ”

“ Ultimately, therefore, the just punishment of crime is for the moral good of the community. It is also for the moral good of the criminal himself, unless—and this is a supposition which we ought not to make—he is beyond the reach of moral influences. Though not inflicted for that purpose, and though it would not the less have to be inflicted if no moral effect on the criminal could be discerned, it is morally the best thing that can happen to him. It is so, even if a true social necessity requires that he be punished with death. ”

“ It is established that no one has a right to prevent the individual from determining the conditions of his own life. We treat life as sacred even in the human embryo, and even in hopeless idiots and lunatics recognise a right to live, a recognition which can only be rationally explained on either or both of two grounds: (1) that we do not consider either their lives, or the society which a man may freely serve, to be limited to this earth, and thus ascribe to them a right to live on the strength of a social capacity which under other conditions may become what it is not here ”

“ To any popular audience interested in any work of self-improvement (e.g. to a temperance-meeting seeking to break the bondage to liquor) , it is as an effort to attain freedom that such work can be most effectively presented. It is easy to tell such people that the term is being misapplied; that they are quite 'free' as it is, because every one can do as he likes so long as he does not prevent another from doing so; that in any sense in which there is such a thing as 'free will,' to get drunk is as much an act of free will as anything else. ”

“ Spinoza, however, objects to regard anything as determined by relation to a final cause. He was not disposed therefore to regard individuals as being what they are in virtue of functions relative to the life of society, still less as being what they are in virtue of the recognition by each of such functions in himself and others. He looked upon man, like everything else in nature, as determined by material and efficient causes, and as himself a material and efficient cause. ”

“ Thus the doctrine that the foundation of the right of property lies in the will, that property is 'realised will,' is true enough if we attach a certain meaning to 'will'; if we understand by it, not the momentary spring of any and every spontaneous action, but a constant principle, operative in all men qualified for any form of society, however frequently overborne by passing impulses, in virtue of which each seeks to give reality to the conception of a well-being which he necessarily regards as common to himself with others. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It may be argued of course that everyone residing in a settled society, which secures him in his rights of person and property, has the benefit of the society from the mere fact of his residence in it, and is therefore morally bound to accept its laws. But this is to abandon the doctrine of obligation being founded on consent. Residence in a territory governed by a certain sovereign can only be taken to imply consent to the rule of that sovereign, if there is any real possibility of relinquishing it, and this there can scarcely ever be. ”

“ It would be so if the violation of law in the interest of the slave were liable to result in general anarchy, not merely in the sense of the dissolution of this or that form of civil combination, but of the disappearance of the conditions under which any civil combination is possible; for such a destruction of the state would mean a general loss of freedom, a general substitution of force for mutual good-will in men's dealings with each other, that would outweigh the evil of any slavery under such limitations and regulations as an organised state imposes on it. ”

“ Their tendency merely is to distribute the blame of the wrong-doing involved in war, to show how widely ramified is the agency in that wrong-doing, not to affect its character as wrong-doing. If the only way of civilising Gaul was to kill all the people whom Caesar's wars caused to be killed, and if the desire for civilising it was a prevailing motive in Caesar's mind, so much the better for Caesar, but so much the worse for the other unassignable and innumerable human agents who brought it about that such an object could only be attained in such a way. ”

“ The right of war may belong to a man, 'though he be in society and a fellow-subject,' when his person or property is in such immediate danger that it is impossible to appeal for relief to the common superior. 'But when the actual force is over, the state of war ceases between those that are in society ... because there lies the remedy of appeal for the past injury and to prevent future harm.' In the state of nature, when the state of war has once begun, it continues until the aggressor offers peace and reparation. ”

“ The admission of a right to free life on the part of every man, as man, does in fact logically imply the conception of all men as forming one society in which each individual has some service to render, one organism in which each has a function to fulfil. There can be no claim on society such as constitutes a right, except in respect of a capacity freely (i.e. under determination by conception of the good) to contribute to its good. ”

“ A law is not good because it enforces 'natural rights,' but because it contributes to the realisation of a certain end. We only discover what rights are natural by considering what powers must be secured to a man in order to the attainment of this end. These powers a perfect law will secure to their full extent. Thus the consideration of what rights are 'natural' (in the only legitimate sense) and the consideration what laws are justifiable form one and the same process, each presupposing a conception of the moral vocation of man. ”