Cover
About the Author
Also by Isaiah Berlin
Dedication
Title Page
Editor’s preface
Isaiah Berlin’s Political Ideas: From the Twentieth Century to the Romantic Age Joshua L. Cherniss
POLITICAL IDEAS IN THE ROMANTIC AGE
Prologue
1 Politics as a Descriptive Science
2 The Idea of Freedom
3 Two Concepts of Freedom: Romantic and Liberal
4 The March of History
Appendix: Subjective versus Objective Ethics
Summaries of the Flexner Lectures
Note from the editor to the author
Postscript to editor’s preface
Abbreviations and conventions
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Index
Copyright
Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought
Edited by Henry Hardy
With an introduction by Joshua L. Cherniss
In memory of Solomon Rachmilevich
This book is an attempt to deal with some of the social and political ideas of certain leading thinkers of Western Europe towards the end of the eighteenth and at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Some of these ideas are intrinsically interesting; almost all had a marked influence in generating, or alternatively in counteracting, the impact of what is still the greatest upheaval of modern times, the great French Revolution. But they have a further interest for us today, since, new and old, revolutionary and counter-revolutionary, in their particular sphere they form the basic intellectual capital on which, with few additions, we live to this day. Social, moral, political, economic discussion has ever since occurred in terms of the concepts, the language, indeed the images and metaphors which were generated during that period, in the minds and feelings of these truest founders of the modern outlook.
Plato and Aristotle, Dante and Aquinas, Epicurus and Augustine, Machiavelli and Hobbes, Grotius and Locke were in some respects bolder and more original thinkers than those with whom this volume is concerned, but their concepts and language are at best half alien to us. They need translation and interpretation; to try to state the crucial issues which divide us, and have divided the Western world during the last century, in terms of the philosophy of Aristotle, or even of Hobbes, or Montesquieu, is an artificial proceeding justified only as a tour de force intended to show the continuity of European thought. But the language and the thought of Helvétius or Condorcet is a great deal more like that of Mill than it is like that of Locke or Bayle or Leibniz, not very different from that of Morley, or Woodrow Wilson, or those who framed the Charter of the United Nations, or those who took and take part in the debates between the Western powers and the Asiatic or Communist worlds about the rights of individuals or of classes or of peoples.
Similarly, we do not today literally speak in terms of social contract or general will or civil society. Nevertheless, it is the words and the imagery of Rousseau that have shaped the language of nationalism, of resistance to foreign and domestic oppression, both sincere and specious, for well over a hundred years: Mazzini and Michelet, Lincoln and Masaryk, the Spanish Republicans and Nehru, who use its formulae, believe in its principles, and there are conspicuous echoes of it in Carlyle, in Nietzsche, in Lawrence, in the sense in which, say, St Augustine or Pascal, whose thoughts are a great deal profounder and more original than those of Rousseau, do not directly sound in anyone’s speech.
Fascists and Communists, imperialists and totalitarians, liberal republicans and constitutional monarchists too, to this day, speak the language not merely of Burke but of Hegel; social scientists of all brands, planners and technocrats, New Dealers and social and economic historians use, without knowing it, the notions and terminology of Saint-Simon virtually unaltered. And it is not only the traditional irrationalists and enemies of democracy and the disciples of Charles Maurras who inhabit a violent world brought into being, almost single-handed, by Joseph de Maistre. Nor should it cause as much surprise as perhaps it might to find so much of modern anti-intellectualism and existentialism (particularly of the atheistical type), and much of ‘emotive’ ethics, not merely in Kierkegaard or Nietzsche or Bergson, but in the writings of Fichte and in forgotten treatises by Schelling.
This is not merely a question of tracing sources and attributing responsibilities. Few activities are more dangerous to the cause of historical truth than the attempt to find a fully grown oak in the acorn, or the attempt to stigmatise (or praise) thinkers living in and speaking to a society remote from us for the transformation, and often degradation, which their ideas have often undergone at the hands of demagogues and popular movements which have taken what they needed from such doctrines and put them to their own cruder uses, and have as often as not totally perverted, or at best violently oversimplified, the original vision of a great man whose name they place upon their banners. But during the years of which I speak, the issues debated were literally identical with those which stir individuals and nations in our own time.
The years in question were ones in which ideas were particularly influential. They constituted what the Saint-Simonians called a critical epoch, during which the old order is in visible decay, its institutions no longer serve its needs, and are indeed being used by those whom they oppress against themselves – as lawyers and ‘subversive’ writers of dangerous ages use the laws and the principles of the established order as the most effective weapons to destroy it. In this atmosphere ideas play a very crucial part, whether or not it is held that they are the direct product of forces other than ideas – economic or social or biological.
The collision of ideas during this period (and its results) is very familiar to us. On the one hand are the most lucid and passionate opponents: the notions of the Encyclopaedists and their nineteenth-century disciples, the Saint-Simonians and the positivists. According to these, scientific method can solve all questions, of ends as well as of means. Patient and disinterested research can establish what are the fundamental needs of all men as such; these needs are not irreconcilable. Provided one sets about formulating and satisfying them in a rational manner, a harmonious scheme of existence can be developed which will put an end, for ever, to all injustice, misery, conflict and frustration of every type. Human ills are caused not by nature, nor by some incurable imperfection in the human soul, but by ignorance, idleness, prejudice and their exploitation by some – the minorities who are in power – and an inability to resist them effectively on the part of the vast majority of mankind. Where some men failed, other men can succeed. Men are infinitely malleable. Education, and above all legislation, conducted by enlightened élites – who will canalise human persons into productive channels, turn drones into working bees, and by a rational system of rewards and punishment, as well as the elimination of vested interests in human vice, provide irresistible incentives to efficiency, benevolence, justice and enlightenment – will guarantee a harmonious and perpetual happiness for all men.
And on the other hand, against this, and even before the Jacobins and Napoleon, stands the liberal Kantian protest against treating human beings as children or docile sheep, even though it be to promote their happiness and peace; reiterated insistence upon rights, including the right to stray from the proper path even though it lead to sin, suffering and punishment; the sacredness of the act of choice on the part of the individual human being, and the notion of liberty as an end in itself, whatever its consequences; the fear of control, however benevolent and wise, beyond an essential socially necessitated minimum, as being likely to lead to the destruction of that which alone makes everything else worth pursuing – the unhampered individual will; unhampered, that is, at any rate by other human beings – in short, the notions of liberty and equality as against those of security, happiness, efficiency, however disinterested, however just – even the most humane and attractive forms of what Karl Popper has well called ‘the closed society’. Surely these priorities have become not less but more relevant and immediate to us as time has passed.
Another party to this collision is Rousseau’s world of socially and emotionally emancipated beings: ‘natural’ men, uncorrupted by institutions designed to serve, at best, the needs of sectional interests, at worst, obsolete and oppressive relics of ancient errors, so effectively blown up by Bentham and his followers; men living simple, spontaneous lives following the dictates of their consciences, which, provided original virtue has not been destroyed in their hearts by destructive institutions or unscrupulous education by wicked or corrupt men, will always vote in a manner likely to lead to a communal life that will fulfil all its members’ legitimate needs and desires. There is a suspicion of too much wealth, too much sophistication, too expansive an economy, too undiscriminating an encouragement of all talents, useful and dangerous alike; the feeling that the poor are somehow nearer the heart of things than the rich, the simple than the clever, common men than officials or aristocrats, or intellectuals. There is a Tolstoyan passion for what existentialists of our day like to describe as ‘authenticity’, perpetual warnings against the self-deceived will that rationalises and too easily persuades its owner that its selfish or sectional interest is identical with that of the common good, in which alone individuals can find fulfilment; a general analogy, not often stressed, with the notion of a community of fervent, simple believers, a Church of which the members are parts of one another rather than a society founded for the protection of the minimum rights of its members, or for power or glory or the maximum of production of material and spiritual goods. Opposed to this is the optimistic utilitarianism of Helvétius and Bentham, convinced that the pursuit of happiness (which is in any case psychologically inevitable) and the use of the most rational means thereto (which will bring it about most efficiently, swiftly and universally) do not entail a return to the restrictive economics and discipline of Sparta as against the richer civilisation of Athens, but, on the contrary, the development of all human resources and faculties under the beneficent guidance of enlightened rulers, whether individual or collective, that will open up as yet undreamed of possibilities of human felicity.
Helvétius believed in planning and the control of experts; Bentham, situated in different social and historical circumstances, feared bullying and interference by institutions more than by arbitrary individuals, and said that every man was the best judge of his own happiness, which it is the sole business of institutions to make it possible for him to pursue. But both, in company with Turgot and Adam Smith, Voltaire and Diderot, Holbach and Hume, looked upon Rousseau’s attack on the arts and sciences (much as later intellectuals looked upon D. H. Lawrence’s hatred of the civilisation of his day) as being subversive of the civilised and tolerant society for which they were fighting; nor had they any taste for the language of rights or other metaphysical abstractions, which seemed to them to derive from a discredited, pre-scientific theology, although they seldom attacked it with the violence of Bentham and his English followers. Nor did they have overmuch confidence in the judgement of the simple and pure in heart, still less of majorities, which, like liberals of a later day, they suspected of being the repositories of prejudice, philistine hatred of what they most cared about themselves – truth, liberty, the rightness of truth [sic] and of culture – potential sources of oppression a great deal more difficult to check or reform than individuals, despots or oligarchies. They judged measures by their consequences and cared little for sincerity or innocence, if these led to results destructive of individual or social happiness, and were in this respect wholly alien and indeed antagonistic to the ethical views of Kant or Rousseau or the German romantics, with their emphasis on purity of motives, nobility of character, the quality of the inner vision as alone conferring value on men’s lives or actions.
This conflict – which was destined to come into the open in the nineteenth century, especially in the form of the triumphant materialistic romanticism of Saint-Simon, with his vision of a frictionless, self-maintaining social and economic system, ceaselessly generating material and spiritual benefits under the guidance of men of creative genius, as against the neo-puritanism of Proudhon, Tolstoy, Sorel and the strong element of positivism in both the liberal and socialist outlooks, connected as in part it is with the contrast between delight in the ever-expanding triumph of the industrial and scientific revolution of our time and a fundamental emotional rejection of its advance – this collision of values found its classical expression during the period in question, immediately before and immediately after the French Revolution. This is never so clear and so simple again.
But whatever might be the deep-rooted differences which divided Helvétius from Rousseau, Holbach and Diderot from Rousseau and Mably, or Kant from Helvétius, or Fichte and his followers from all of these, or those who believed that nature had a purpose and saw in her at once the goal and the teacher of man, the source of natural rights, the corrector of errors, as against those who merely believed in the rule of mechanical and repetitive causality, or those who believed in nature not as an ideal to be followed, a schoolmistress to be feared and venerated, but as so much raw material to be moulded, dead matter, a challenge to creative activity, not a model but a stimulus and an obstacle – yet all these stand together against two other schools of thought whose doctrines came to the fore also, as so many others, only in their own day: in the first place of those who, whether inspired by Herder or by Burke, claimed that the new rationalism, the application of scientific method and Cartesian logic to human affairs, had failed even as a respectable instrument of social analysis, let alone as a guide to life. Vico, who had originally enunciated boldly original views against the rationalists of his time, was unread and forgotten. Hamann, who alone preached about the inadequacy of reason during the height of German enlightenment, wrote too obscurely to be widely read, but Burke was one of the most eloquent and widely admired writers of his time, and Herder wrote with infectious passion and eloquence. Their followers, in their various fashions, maintained that the analysis of society into homogeneous human atoms, on the analogy of the physical sciences, led to gross distortion of the facts; that the spiritual and social cement which held men together in associations, communities, Churches, nations, cultures had little to do with rational self-interest; that the sense of solidarity, of belonging to a given unit, with conscious and unconscious roots continuously stretching into an infinite past, the great society of the quick and the dead and those yet unborn,1 with which every member of a society or a nation in some sense knew himself to be involved, could not be represented as a conscious association for mutual profit; that the new scientific analysis gave no account of that sentiment of loyalty not towards specific individuals but towards tradition and the past of one’s community, towards impersonal institutions whose characteristics could not be analysed without residue into those of the hosts of anonymous human beings who compose them, nor do justice to the springs of action, conscious and unconscious, rational and irrational, in the name of which men were prepared to sacrifice themselves and rise to untold heights of heroism, which inspired their art and penetrated their modes of life in a manner incapable of being described, let alone accounted for, in the terminology of the new sciences, which made the fatal blunder of assuming human beings to be psychophysical mechanisms capable of total dissection, and societies to be mechanical combinations for the sake of ascertainable and finite purposes, instead of organic growths, the cells of which were connected by impalpable strands which men felt and acted upon even if they could not give an account of them in chemical or mathematical or psychological terms, or those of the new science of political economy. The historical development of the patterns of human experience, the inner, only half-articulate, ideals, the difference between which gave a character and unique flavour, quality of feeling, to cultures, nations, historical periods – these were the characteristics with which men, whether they were conscious of it or not, were far more familiar, because their thoughts and feelings were inescapably impregnated by them, than with the facts brought to their attention by the absurd simplifications of the new sciences of man. Anyone who does not build upon his understanding of the impalpable connections which tie men to each other and to the generations that precede them, and does not allow for the unanalysable and ineffable datum, that which can be conveyed only by images and examples – of which no generalisations (which are alone admissible in a science) will hold – builds upon sand. Their reforms must fail, since they are an attempt to pulverise society into the imaginary constituents of their false societies. This was the heart of the revolt against eighteenth-century rationalism in the name of history and of the Christian tradition. It grew in strength in the nineteenth century and is almost the dominant social philosophy of the present.
In the second place there was an even more violent onslaught upon the premisses of the Enlightenment. It came from the school of Maistre in France, and Görres and his followers in Germany. Everything that the philosophers of the Enlightenment asserted, they denied. Man was neither naturally good, nor neutral and infinitely malleable: he was born in sin, weak, vain, vicious and, if left to himself, unable to resist his self-destructive impulses. It needed all the discipline and all the faith and all the wisdom of the Church of Rome to create even a tolerable life for him on earth, and when he threw off its yoke and rebelled against it in the eighteenth century, his unbridled savagery and bestial violence provoked the great revolution which destroyed the foundations of its traditional culture.
Man cannot be governed without authority. To enquire perpetually for the reasons for things, to dig into the foundations, to see whereon the building stands, can only destroy it. Analytical reason is by nature destructive and must be held in bounds by blind faith. What the Enlightenment denounces as superstition and prejudice is merely that accumulated traditional knowledge of the generations which has stood the test of experience. Science must not be allowed to progress freely but must be repressed artificially, if need be, before it starts to undermine the faith which alone holds societies and men together against a return to the primal chaos – the jungle from which man has painfully emerged. What reason constructs reason unmakes. Only institutions whose origins are concealed in impenetrable darkness possess sufficient hold upon human imagination. It is said that men come together for mutual profit: it would be truer to say that one of the great passions which holds men together is the desire for self-immolation on the altar of some ideal, religious, national, historical. And that is why wars, which are the most irrational of activities, plainly and undeniably contrary to the individual’s interests, will never cease; that is why hereditary monarchy, the most absurd of institutions by rational standards, is so much more successful and permanent than democracies or liberal republics, or elective monarchies, and why the papacy will last for ever.
The ways of God are inscrutable and human claims to be able to understand them, whether in the workings of nature or those of history, are a pitiful farce. Those who seek to guide their actions by the feeble light afforded by human science will inevitably suffer shipwreck. The ancient wisdom of the race, or of the Church, through which alone the voice of God speaks, this alone can secure the foundation of a life which at best must remain painful, precarious, shrouded in ignorance; blind obedience alone on the part of the subject, self-sacrificing duty on the part of the rulers, who know how little they know and will never explain, and severely repress all attempts at the examination of their credentials, these alone will save human society from total destruction. The alternative is a return to nature – foolishly apostrophised by the shallow prophets of the Enlightenment as a divine harmony and a source of wisdom and strength. If these men made the objective, disinterested observations which they advocated, they could see easily enough that nature, so far from being benign and peaceful, is a blood-drenched field in which every animal, every plant is occupied in the destruction of other species, and that man is exceptional only in that he, unlike other animals, destroys the members of his own species as well as those of others. Only faith, humility and resignation – and the collective wisdom of the Church – can prevent this war of nearly all against all and everything from depriving man of his last comforts on earth.2
Enough has been said to indicate that the issues which faced each other in the eighteenth century, whether derived or new-born, are among the profoundest which have divided the historical period of which we are among, perhaps, the latest inhabitants. But there is one further thesis which is perhaps even more revolutionary – as it is certainly far newer and more original – than the other doctrines of this time. This is the doctrine which lies at the heart of the romantic movement, and which, so far as I know, has not been adequately presented in the literature of the subject.
In the past, human values – the ends of life, that for the sake of which other things were worth creating or promoting or destroying, for the sake of which whatever is worth doing and being is regarded as being so – these ends or purposes or ultimate values were believed to be ingredients of the universe, to be found in it by whatever faculty it was with which investigators had classified the inventory of the world. To say that a thing was good or bad, right or wrong, beautiful or ugly, noble or ignoble, worth fighting for or discovering or making, was regarded as a descriptive statement – and recorded that the things in question possessed these properties. What a value consisted in depended, no doubt, upon the general philosophy adopted. Some meant by it objective qualities existing in the world, whether perceived or not, like natural properties, or the ordinary characteristics discerned in everyday experience – colours, tastes, sizes. Others might think that a value consisted in being part of the general purpose of life in the world, created by God or self-created. Or else it might be that which satisfies some need on my own part, or that of my society, a need which is to be identified by means of psychological introspection or sociological observation; that which I like, or approve of, or think likely to give me pleasure or conduce to my glory – in short, whether the value could be analysed in terms of subjective inclinations or those of bodies of men, at a given point in time or throughout a period. But whatever view is taken, objective or subjective, absolute or relative, naturalistic or metaphysical, a priori or a posteriori, individualist or social, a statement of value or purpose described facts and represented reality. It was obviously crucial – literally a matter of life and death – to discover what the truth in matters of conduct was, that is, what the true values were. Men died and wars were fought because of differences about this.
It is during the period of which we are speaking that, for the first time, there begins to emerge the notion that perhaps value judgements are not descriptive propositions at all, that values are not discoverable, that they are not ingredients of the real world in the sense in which tables or chairs or men or colours or past events are, that values are not discovered but invented – created by men like works of art, of which it is senseless to ask where they were before they were conceived. Whereas philosophers from Plato onwards seemed agreed that such questions as ‘What is good?’, ‘How should I live?’, ‘What makes acts right?’, ‘Why should I obey?’ had answers which special wisdom could discover, although opinions might differ widely as to where the answer was to be found, and therefore wherein the wisdom consisted, the new doctrine held, or implied, that this was as senseless an approach as one which set itself to discover where the symphony was before the composer conceived it, where the victory was before the general won it. Ideals and goals were not found, they were created.
The revolution which ensued from this point of view – the transformation of values, the new admiration of heroism, integrity, strength of will, martyrdom, dedication to the vision within one, irrespective of its properties, veneration of those who battle against hopeless odds, no matter for how strange and desperate a cause, as against previous reverence for knowledge, skill, wisdom, success and truth, virtue, happiness, natural endowment – was the most decisive in modern times. It was certainly the largest step in the moral consciousness of mankind since the ending of the Middle Ages, perhaps since the rise of Christianity. No step of comparable magnitude has occurred since – it was the last great ‘transvaluation of values’ in modern history.
It is one of the purposes of this book to draw attention to its consequences – the degree to which it modified existing attitudes, the reaction against itself which it stimulated, and the degree to which it marks a chasm between the generations – those that came after, who have accepted these changes, sometimes scarcely conscious of how great and startling they must have seemed to the more self-conscious and acute observers of their times, and those whose words and thoughts, merely because they came before, seem antiquated or shallow, sometimes for that reason alone. Our own thought is to a large extent the product and the battlefield of the old, ‘pre-revolutionary’, and the new, ‘post-revolutionary’, points of view; no true synthesis between them has been effected by the mere process of time or the mere process of change. Present controversies, both in morals and politics, reflect the clash of values initiated by the romantic revolution. The time has perhaps come to assess its intrinsic importance and its vast consequences.3
Unlike the history of natural science or mathematics, or even to some degree history itself, the history of moral and political ideas does not constitute a cumulative story of steady progress, not even of progress broken by occasional moments of regression. Political thought is not a form of knowledge in the sense in which the sciences or common sense contain knowledge, or facts, or in which formal disciplines – mathematics or logic, or even heraldry or the art of chess – can be said to embody knowledge of formal relationships. Political philosophy is a branch of thought which deals neither with empirical matters of fact nor with formal relationships governed by identifiable rules and axioms. Its task is to explain, elucidate, classify, make clear what a given doctrine asserts, entails, whether it is internally consistent or not, of what vision of the universe it forms a part. But these visions – the general outlook of which political theory is but an aspect, a coherent, articulate expression – are themselves not forms of knowledge, if this is a continuous growth of information about a relatively unchanging subject-matter, in which errors of the past are corrected, techniques can be learned and applied by men themselves not gifted enough to invent them, and knowledge of the past period is not required to make it possible to use the methods of the present with success. Political theory is an aspect of thought (and sometimes feeling) about men’s relationships to each other and to their institutions, in terms of purposes and scales of value which themselves alter as a result of historical circumstances of varying types, not least in terms of new models derived from other fields of experience, scientific or historical, or religious, which bind their spell upon the imagination of the most impressionable and socially conscious men of their time, and transform their vision. But the expression of such a vision does not constitute progress, only the history of successive attitudes towards their predicament on the part of human beings, attitudes which, precisely because the presuppositions of one age and culture are sometimes so difficult to grasp for those brought up in a different one, require for their understanding the exercise of a specific kind of moral imagination to a very unusual degree.
It is a platitude to say that each age has its own problems, its own experience, its own imagery and symbolism and ways of feeling and speaking. It is a lesser platitude to add that political philosophy derives its intelligibility solely from the understanding of such change, and that its perennial principles, or what seem to be such, depend on the relative stability and unchanging characteristics of human beings in their social aspect. If the supersession of eighteenth-century doctrine, which evaluated everything unhistorically, by a more historical or evolutionary point of view has any value, it should teach us that each political philosophy responds to the needs of its own times and is fully intelligible only in terms of all the relevant factors of its age, and intelligible to us only to the degree to which (and it is a far larger one than some modern relativists wish to persuade us that it is) we have experience in common with previous generations. But to the extent to which this is so, it is idle to expect progress in this enterprise; the confusions and problems and agonies of each age are what they are, and the attempts at solutions and answers and nostrums can be judged properly only in terms of them.
The great political philosophers have made their mark by projecting some great pattern which has uncovered hitherto concealed characteristics of experience (the more permanent and constant such experience, the greater the penetration of the philosopher’s contribution) and, in the course of so doing, probably inevitably concealed other aspects which did not fit into the great analogy. We can do no better than to try to describe what some of these models, which have affected our own age most deeply, consisted of. They are not commensurable, any more than novels, or histories, which spring out of a given world and sum up each experience, can be ranged in some strict order of merit or ‘progress’, as if there were a single goal which all these works of art were seeking to attain.
Bertrand Russell rightly said that the ingenuity of philosophers, the great intellectual virtuosity which they show in piling argument upon argument to support a given doctrine, is often no more than the outworks of the citadel which they are defending, weapons to protect it against attack, defence against actual and possible objections, and that all the subtlety and complications, which are indeed admirable, often enough, as monuments of human genius and skill in reasoning, conceal an inner vision which is comparatively simple: coherent, harmonious and not difficult to grasp. But unless the central vision is perceived, the great constructions of reason piled up to protect it seem often enough mere exercises in intellectual power, impressive but ultimately not convincing. For the only thing which convinces in matters not capable of proof, in the sense in which the propositions of mathematics or logic, or even those of empirical science, can be said to be so, is a direct appeal to experience, a description of what we think right or true which varies with what our audience has itself in some sense, however inarticulately, known or felt. This is the sense in which some models are more revolutionary, more convincing and more transforming than others, and solve difficulties and answer problems in the sense in which no argument or proof could hope to do.
During the great ferment of ideas which preceded and followed the French Revolution, experience altered what Collingwood used to call the ‘absolute presuppositions’ of experience. Those categories and concepts which were taken for granted and had been taken for granted before, and seemed too secure to be shaken, too familiar to be worth inspection, were altered, or at any rate severely shaken. The controversies of our age are the direct product of this ‘transformation of the model’, which alone makes the period and its thinkers worthy of our attention. We shall be told that one must not exaggerate the role of ideas, that ideas are created by ‘social forces’ and not the other way about, that while, no doubt, the ideas of Locke and Montesquieu played their part in the American Revolution and the constitutional document that followed, this was only so because the social or economic structure of colonial American society resembled that European order of which Locke and Montesquieu were the ‘ideological representatives’ – heralds or spokesmen, but not creators. There is no doubt a good deal of truth in this, but those who maintain it with partisan fervour seem to me to be breaking in through open doors: they are saying something which is true but too obvious to be arresting. Of course, the founders of the American republic were unlikely to be influenced in their ideas by Bossuet or Bolingbroke, or the Jesuits – where there is no soil receptive to it the seed will not grow. But the soil can remain fertile and yet no seed fall, or else some plant suitable to some very different climate be planted and wither away or fail to grow to maturity. And there is no social law yet discovered which guarantees that demand creates supply inevitably, and that where conditions are mature human genius is bound infallibly to respond to human needs. The Americans were only too ready to be influenced by Montesquieu’s doctrine of the division of powers, but this doctrine is a product of individual genius, and if Montesquieu had died at birth or confined himself to writing elegant satire and books of travel, this idea might never have seen the light in the form in which it could have so profound an effect. The great Heine cannot be accused of lack of historical sense, for his hypotheses, particularly with regard to Germany and Communism, have come only too literally true. He was a Hegelian, a Saint-Simonian, the admired friend of Marx. Few men understood their age better, and when he said that ‘implacable Kantians [ . . . ] with sword and axe will dig up the soil of our European life in order to tear out the last roots of the past [ . . . ] armed Fichteans will enter the arena [ . . . ] restrained neither by fear nor by self-interest [ . . . ] like the first Christians, whom neither physical torture nor physical pleasure could break’,4 he spoke of what he knew. Robespierre behaved as he did because he was filled with the ideas of Rousseau and Mably, but Rousseau and Mably might not have written, and Helvétius and Montesquieu might have taken their place, and in that event the course of the French Revolution might well have been different and Robespierre might have lived and indeed died differently from the way in which he in fact did. The greatest event of our own day was certainly the Russian Revolution, and yet it is difficult to conceive that it would have taken the turning it did if Lenin had been shot by a stray bullet in 1917, or had not come across, during his impressionable years, the works of Marx or Chernyshevsky.5
Individuals do affect events. Their genius – their historical greatness – is in part defined by their ability to bend events to their will; the force of the ‘logical facts’ can be exaggerated to a point at which it explains everything which happens as inevitable and regards all rejected courses, indeed all possible courses other than that which was adopted, as foredoomed from the beginning. We possess no science which justifies this view to us, or even renders it probable. History, so far as it teaches anything, does not show this, and the notion which dominated the historians of the eighteenth century, that history is but ‘philosophy teaching by examples’,6 and shows us merely that in analogous circumstances the consequences are similar too, and that laws of social behaviour are easily derivable from this, has, for lack of evidence, rightly become discredited among historians and lingered only among those who look in history for a theodicy. Ideas are born in circumstances favourable to their emergence, although it is so difficult to specify what the circumstances, in specific cases, are, that such laws amount almost to tautologies. Sometimes these ideas result in little practical effect; at other times the organising genius of those who generate them or identify themselves with them makes it possible to conceive of men and their relationships in terms of some single pattern, and to transform the vision of their contemporaries – and sometimes of their opponents – by means of it.
Patterns of this kind sometimes, like Frankenstein’s monster, acquire a reality of their own, and pursue careers in other men’s minds independent of their originators or first propagators. Rousseau can hardly have anticipated that totalitarian ‘democratic centralism’ which derived, indeed, from his doctrine of the general will, but which neither he nor his early followers in the French Revolution had been conscious of. Nor had Helvétius perceived – nor could he have perceived – the goal to which the road to technocracy might ultimately lead. Nor was Fichte responsible for the Byronic romanticism and nihilism which he had, in a sense, originated. It is one thing to blame individual thinkers and another to trace the development and effects of their ideas once they are afloat. Saint-Simon probably came nearest to the truth when he maintained that ideas of genius are fruitful only when circumstances are appropriate (and by circumstances he meant all that the most faithful Marxists could demand in the way of class relationships and economic structure), but that if no genius arose the age remained fallow, the arts and sciences declined, and a retrogression occurred of which no one could predict the duration or the depth. The age of which we speak was singularly rich in original conceptions; they transformed our world, and the words in which they were formulated speak to us still.
1[A reference to Edmund Burke’s description of society as ‘a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born’. Reflections on the Revolution in France: p. 147 in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. Paul Langford (Oxford, 1981– ), vol. 8, The French Revolution, ed. L. G. Mitchell (1989). ]
2This black and ferocious irrationalism, particularly in its secular forms – révolté poetry and ‘black’ literature – as well as the equally fierce nihilism and obscurantism of the anti-liberal extremists, whether in their Fascist or existentialist or anarchist form, were regarded in their time as peculiar contributions of the nineteenth century to political thought.
3Vast consequences, not least influential where they form an ill-assorted combination of the new and the old, fitting equally ill into the categories provided by either side and so constituting typical philosophical problems.
4Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland, book 3: p. 228, lines 16–24, in Heines Werke, Säkularausgabe, vol. 8, ed. Renate Francke (Berlin/ Paris, 1972).
5If Mussolini had remained a Marxist, Italy might have become Communist and the fate of Germany might well have been different; it is at least as plausible to argue that it was the absence of a Lenin which caused the Spanish Revolution to fail as that his presence was not indispensable to the success of the revolution which he did make.
6[Henry St John, Viscount] Bolingbroke, Letters on the Study and Use of History, letter 2: vol. 2, p. 177, in The Works of Lord Bolingbroke (London, 1844). [Bolingbroke says that he thinks he read the remark in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and he is right (see Ars rhetorica 11. 2), except that the Ars rhetorica is no longer attributed to Dionysius. Pseudo-Dionysius attributes his version – ‘History is philosophy from examples’ – to Thucydides, but it is in fact a creative paraphrase of what Thucydides says at 1. 22. 3. ]
I do not care if men be vicious so long as they are intelligent [ . . . ] Laws will do everything.1
Claude-Adrien Helvétius
[ . . . ] le tribunal suprême & qui juge en dernier ressort & sans apel de tout ce qui nous est proposé, est la Raison [ . . . ]2
Pierre Bayle
The people [ . . . ] are cattle, and what they need is a yoke and a goad and fodder.3
François Marie Arouet de Voltaire
THE CENTRAL ISSUE of political philosophy is the question ‘Why should any man obey any other man or body of men?’ – or (what amounts to the same in the final analysis) ‘Why should any man or body of men ever interfere with other men?’
Political thought has, of course, occupied itself with many other topics: such as the actual behaviour of individuals in and out of society, their purposes, their scales of value and their own beliefs about the character and aims of their social conduct; as well as the motives and causes which, whether they know it or not, affect the lives, acts, beliefs and feelings of human beings. It includes, as it grows more analytical, the examination of the concepts and categories involved in the thoughts and the words of men concerning their relations to one another, and to their institutions past and present, actual and imaginary, and seeks to elucidate such notions as liberty and authority, rights and obligations, justice and happiness, State and society, equality and oppression, rules and principles, and many other familiar terms of political discourse. At its best and sharpest it deals with questions that are still more general and fundamental, such as the logic of political argument or deliberation, and asks how such crucial links in human thinking as ‘because’ and ‘therefore’, ‘obviously’ and ‘possibly’, as well as such notions as ‘true’ and ‘false’, ‘convincing’ and ‘implausible’, ‘valid’ and ‘invalid’, are employed in thinking about political issues, as compared to the ways in which they function in the thought of logicians, or mathematicians, or historians, or chemists, or architects or lawyers or literary critics.
There is much else that political thought, in the largest sense, has embraced. It speculates about the possibility – and discoverability – of general laws governing human behaviour and the limits of their application. At times it offers practical advice for both rulers and ruled. At other times it explains why this is not, and should not be, part of its province, and prefers to discuss the relations of political theory and practice to other fields of human activity, religion, or economics, or natural science, or ethics, or law. And while it may be readily conceded that it is pedantic or stupid to draw absolute distinctions between these activities, and to pretend that these fields can be insulated from one another and be made subject to wholly separate disciplines, yet not to discriminate between them at all, to treat these topics as they suggest themselves, as the spirit moves one, is a free exercise of the intellect which is bought at too high a price. Such methods may stimulate thought, excite the imagination, and lead to interesting and valuable aperçus, but they tend to increase the prevailing rich confusion of a subject which more, perhaps, than any other needs discipline and dry light if it is to be an object of serious study.
Political philosophy is what it is and not identical with every other form of reflection about human affairs. Its frontiers may have grown indistinct, and it may be arid scholasticism to erect artificial barriers, but it does not follow from this that it has not a province of its own. As things stand at present, it seems to me a greater service to the cause of lucidity and truth to try to indicate what this province is, however provisionally, rather than to pretend either, as some have done, that it is a province of epistemology or semantics – that nothing useful can be said unless and until the ways in which words are used in political argument have been properly compared and contrasted with other ways of using words (valuable and indeed revolutionary as this analysis, in the hands of a man of genius, could be); or, as others tell us, that politics is part of a larger whole (the whole of human history or the material evolution of society or some timeless order), and can and must be studied only within that whole or not at all. And it is because so much has been urged in favour of these ambitious schemes that I propose more modestly to assume, at any rate by way of a tentative initial hypothesis, that at the heart of political philosophy proper is the problem of obedience, and that it is, if nothing else, convenient to view the traditional problems of the subject in terms of this problem.
To put the question in this way is to be reminded of the rich variety of the answers to it. Why should I obey this or that man or group of men, or written or spoken enactment? Because, says one school of thought, it is the word of God vouchsafed in a sacred text of supernatural origin; or communicated by direct revelation to myself; or to a person or persons – king or priest or prophet – whose unique qualifications in such matters I recognise. Because, say others, the command to obey is the order of the de facto ruler or his chosen agents, and the law is what he wills and because he wills it, whatever his motives or reasons. Because, say various metaphysical Greek and Christian and Hegelian thinkers, the world has been created, or exists uncreated, to fulfil a purpose; and it is only in terms of this purpose that everything in it is as it is, and where and when it is, and acts as it does and is acted on as it is; and from this it follows that a particular form of obedience to this rather than that authority, in specific circumstances and in special ways and respects, is required of a being such as I am, situated in my particular place and time: for only by obeying in this way will I be fulfilling my ‘function’ in the harmonious realisation of the overall purpose of the universe.
Similarly other metaphysicians and theologians speak of the universe as the gradual unfolding in time of a ‘timeless’ pattern; or of human experience as a reflection, less or more fragmentary or distorted, of a ‘timeless’ or ‘ultimate’ reality, itself a harmonious system, wholly concealed, according to some, from the gaze of finite beings such as men; partially or progressively revealed, according to others. The political arrangements – and in particular those of obedience – derive from the degree of perception of social facts that the depth of understanding of this reality affords. But again there are those who have said that I must obey as I do because life would be intolerable to me unless a minimum of my basic needs are fulfilled, and a particular form of obedience is either a wholly indispensable, or else the most convenient and reasonable, method of securing this necessary minimum.