A Grammar of Politics (Works of Harold J. Laski)

Harold J. Laski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317586760
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

Laski's magnum opus, this volume outlines the history and functions of state institutions which (in the author's view) are desirable for the effective functioning of a democracy. Topics discussed include: The necessity of government; state and society; rights and power; liberty and equality; property as a theory of industrial organisation; the nature of nationalism; law as a source of authority; the functions of international organisations.

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

THE PURPOSE OF SOCIAL ORGANISATION

I

A NEW political philosophy is necessary to a new world. The perspective of social thought has shifted in a direction different from the horizon set for it by Bentham and Hegel in the last century. If the large aims we have in view are not dissimilar to theirs, the materials at our command and the scale upon which we live are both, for good or ill, vaster than at any previous time. We have, above all, lost confidence in the simplicity of the earlier thinkers. We are even coming to recognise that any theory of society which avoids complexity will be untrue to the facts it seeks to summarise. Bentham was a philosopher living in retirement from the world; it was easy for him to lay down a universal code of conduct so long as he drew his assumptions from observation of the handful of eager rationalists who regarded him as their master. It was easy, even, for Hegel to universalise the Prussian monarchy into the ultimate expression of the time-spirit when we remember how relatively small was the number of wills regarded in his age as significant. So, too, with Rousseau and Karl Marx. The one had grasped the importance of making the State find place for the personalities of ordinary men; but when he was confronted with the problem of an institutional expression for that insight, his solution was, in fact, an evasion of it. Marx in his turn showed with indomitable energy the weakness of a State built upon the sandy foundation of a division into rich and poor. But the reconstruction he suggested was largely a prophecy of inevitable conflict, and the prospect he envisaged was less a remedy than an unexplored formula.

Our task is at once more various and less straightforward. We deal with a world in which many of the assumptions which the nineteenth century fought for seem so obvious that men can scarcely realise either the novelty they represent or the anger to which they gave rise. For Western Europe, at least, democratic government has become a commonplace beyond’ discussion. Political power is, as a matter of theory, built, not upon birth or property, but upon the personality of men. That does not mean that birth has ceased to count or that property is not still certain of a predominant influence in the State. It means only that we have no longer to battle for the assumption that the ordinary man is instinct with civic quality. That is, doubtless, gain of an unquestionable kind. No statesman of our own day would dare, whatever his thought, to speak of the “swinish multitude.“In the theory of politics the ”swinish multitude” is enthroned in the seat of power. But the problem still remains of making the possession of power a fruitful thing by determining the ends to which it should be devoted; and the question of ends is simple compared to the further problem of the methods by which those ends may be attained.

Clearly, we must abandon the optimism with which the Benthamites approached the issue. They did not doubt that the possession of the franchise would, in combination with the natural reason of mankind, build a State in which effort would secure the reward of liberty and equality. We have no such assurance now. We have been taught by long experience that the part played by reason in politics is smaller than we have been content to suppose. Nor is the facile equation by Hegel between social status and governmental capacity likely to carry conviction even to his avowed disciples; the political art is unrelated to the social structure of the time. Our task, assuredly, is to give to reason the largest possible place in the conduct of affairs; either we must plan our civilisation or we must perish. But the result of reflection, even on the largest scale, is not to bring within the ambit of political activity the mass of men and women who, at the electoral period, give the ultimate direction to the event. They are scarcely articulate about their wants; and even when they are articulate, they are not trained to judge whether the solutions suggested are in fact an adequate response to their desires.

Democratic government is doubtless a final form of political organisation in the sense that men who have once tasted power will not, without conflict, surrender it. But not the less certainly democratic government is less a matter for eulogy than for exploration. We still need to know what working hypothesis it involves and what institutions can effectively embody their purpose. We need to know these things in the perspective of a realisation that the administration of the modern State is a technical matter, and that those who can penetrate its secrets are relatively few in number. The problem of democratic government is not less a problem of finding men apt to the use of its machinery than the problem of a monarchy is to find a race of kings fitted by their endowments to benefit the State. Any system of government, upon the modern scale, involves a body of experts working to satisfy vast populations who judge by the result and are careless of, even uninterested in, the processes by which those results are attained. If, therefore, we want a plan of political organisation to meet the basic condition that ultimate power must be confided to those who have neither time nor desire to grasp the details of its working, it is clear that we are driven bacl to the foundations of the State.

II

Man finds himself, in the modern world, living under the authority of governments; and the obligation to obey their orders arises from the facts of his nature. For he is a community-building animal, driven by inherited instinct to live with his fellows. Crusoe on his desert island, or St. Simon Stylites upon his pillar, may defy the normal impulses which make them men; but, for the vast majority, to live with others is the condition of a rational existence.

Therein, at the outset, is implied the necessity of government. If the habits of peaceful fellowship are to be maintained, there are certain uniformities of conduct which must be observed. The activities of a civilised community are too complex and too manifold to be left to the blind regulation of impulse; and even if each man could be relied upon to act consistently in terms of intelligence there would be need for a customary standard by which the society in its organised form agreed to differentiate right from wrong. The theory of philosophic anarchy is impossible, in fact, so long as men move differently to the attainment of opposed desires. The effort involved in the peaceful maintenance of a common life does not permit the making of private decisions upon what the society deems essential to its existence. At some point, that is, spontaneity ceases to be practical, and the enforced acceptance of a common way of action becomes the necessary condition of a corporate civilisation.

Nor is the absence of such spontaneity a limitation upon freedom; it is rather its primary safeguard. For once it is admitted that no man is sufficient unto himself, there must be rules to govern the habits of his intercourse His freedom is largely born from the maintenance of those rules. They define the conditions 01 his personal security. They maintain his health and the standards, spiritual, not less than material, of his life. Without them he is the prey of uncertainties far more terrible than the uniformities by which the sea of his experience is charted. No society is known in which the individual can, in any final way, mould the tradition to his desires. ^Everywhere the historic environment shapes its substance and limits its possibilities. It is only on the moon that men can cry for the moon.

Man is not, in fact, born free, and it is the price he pays for his past that he should be everywhere in chains. The illusion of an assured release from captivity will deceive few who have the patience to examine his situation. He comes into a society the institutions of which are in large part beyond his individual control. He learns that they will inevitably shape at least the general outlines of what fortune he may encounter. The organised effort of a determined group of men may, with patience; change the character of those institutions; but the individual who stands apart from his fellows is unlikely to be their master. The capacity, indeed, of most men will be exhausted by the mere effort to live; and the search to understand life will lead them into complexities they have rarely the energy, and seldom the leisure, to penetrate. For it is a grave error to assume that men in general are, at least actively and continuously, political creatures. The context of their lives which is, for the majority, the most important is a private context. They are conscious of their neighbours; they rarely grasp the essential fact that their neighbours are, in truth, the whole world. They set their wills by the wills of institutions they rarely explore. They do not examine those wills to give their own a rational relationship to them. They obey the orders of government from inertia; and even their resistance is too often a blind resentment rather than a reasoned desire to secure an alternative. No faculty, indeed, is more rare than that sense of the State which enables a few thinkers—Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Marx—to move their fellows to the measure of their thought. With most, even the interest to grasp the expression is uncommon. The characteristic of social life is the unthinking obedience of the many to the will of the few: It is the sudden invasion of our lives by unwonted experience that drives most of us to realise the vast discipline in which we are involved.

In a sense, that unawareness will appear human enough to anyone who recognises the complexity of civilisation. A civil war in America may cause starvation in the cotton towns of Lancashire. The labours of a physicist who investigates the nature of the ether may span the distance between London and New York. An injury to the credit-structure 01 Germany may involve a panic on the Bourse of Paris. Not less significant is the pace at which change proceeds. Feudal Japan may become, as it were overnight, the modern State. Men are still living to whom the railway was an incredible innovation ;nor are they yet dead to whom compulsory education seems a grave attack upon personal responsibility.

Science, in brief, has changed the whole scale upon which we live. In less than a century we have entered upon a world different in final texture from that upon which our ancestors gazed after Waterloo. We no longer live in those placid villages where the visitor from London seemed a stranger from another planet. Where prayer and incantation were the weapons of the last age against disease, we may, if we are wise, use the microscope and the sanitary engineer. Nor can we depend any longer for the necessaries of life upon our own productive system. The inhabitant of the great society is accustomed to have at his call commodities fashioned by every nation of the earth. He thinks less of a voyage from London to Peru than, a century ago, his ancestor thought of a visit to Paris or Rome. The whole world has been reduced at least to the unity of interdependence; and the politicians of Tokio make social decisions not less momentous for New York than those of Chicago or Washington. And this physical mutuality is supported by an economic system the mere description of which is so intricate that specialists hardly agree either upon its character or the results of its working.

It is a big world, about which, at our peril, we have to find our way. For the theory upon which the government to which we give our obedience acts is that its will somehow embodies the wills of us all. It professes, if not in detail, then at least in large outline, to embody within its general purpose the individual purpose we believe ourselves to embody at moments of clearest consciousness. The faith of civilisation is built upon the assumption that by reason of its mechanisms, an increasing number of human beings realise at their best their highest faculties. To the extent that those mechanisms fail, so do our faculties, at their best, remain unrealised. In such a background, it is clear that the prospects of civilisation depend, in large degree, upon our ability to work its institutions. Our awareness of their nature will be, also, the degree in which we perceive their fragility. For we can have none of the comfortable assurance of a century ago that, whatever our errors, we may rest confident in the knowledge of progress. Our civilisation is held together by fear rather than by good will. The rivalry of States, the war of classes, the clash of colour—these haunt its margins as prospects instinct with disaster. It is not uncommon for men to sacrifice the welfare of their fellows to a private end. It is not infrequently that from the analysis of their relationships, honourable and selfless men have judged that modern civilisation is vicious at its foundations. Science may have given us the weapons of a creative life; but those weapons are, as we have become aware, the instruments of destruction. It does not seem likely that society will, in any coherent form, survive their devotion to ends of conflict.

In such an analysis, the study of modern politics can hardly avoid becoming an inquiry into the dynamics of peace. We seek to know what will bind men’s allegiance, not inertly, but with passion, to its preservation and enlargement. We seek to find the ways in which their impulses as men may be satisfied at a level which secures the enrichment of the common life. We begin with the State because the context of men’s lives is set most firmly in the background of its institutions. For there is no area of activity that is not, at least in theory, within the ambit of its control. The modern State is a territorial society divided into government and subjects claiming, within its allotted physical area, a supremacy over all other institutions. It is, in fact, the final legal depository of the social will. It sets the perspective of all other organisations. It brings within its power all forms of human activity the control of which it deems desirable. It is, moreover, the implied logic of this supremacy that whatever remains free of its control does so by its permission. The State does not permit that men should marry their sisters; it is by its graciousness that they are allowed to marry their cousins. The State is the keystone of the social arch. It moulds the form and substance of the myriad human lives with whose destinies it is charged.

This does not mean that the State is an unchanging organisation. It has been subject at every point to the laws of an unceasing evolution. New forms of property, an alteration in the character of religious belief, physical conditions at the moment of their coming beyond the control of men—these and things like these have shaped its substance. Nor are its forms unmoving. It has been monarchic, aristocratic, democratic; it has been in the control of the rich and of the poor. Men have ruled it by reason of their birth or by their position in a religious fellowship.

What, as a matter of history, can alone be predicted of the State is that it has always presented the striking phenomenon of a vast multitude owing allegiance to a comparatively small number of men. Thinkers since the time of Socrates have sought to explain that curiosity. To some it has seemed that men obey their masters because, at least ultimately, the will of the few is sufficiently the will of the many to secure obedience. Consent, it is said, is the basis of the State. But if by consent be meant anything more than an inert acceptance of orders obeyed without scrutiny, it is clear that there has not yet been an epoch in the history of the State in which this is true. Nor can we accept as obvious the view of Hobbes that men obey the State through fear. Something of this, indeed, may colour the attitude of men to particular laws. I may refrain from murder upon a nice balance of consequences. But I send my children to school from motives far more complex than that of self-interest built upon fear. It is far nearer the truth to urge, as Sir Henry Maine would have us admit, that the State is built upon habit; but this still leaves unexplored, the dispositions which enter into habit, and the point at which their infraction, as in the France of the Revolution, becomes possible. And if, as with Bentham and the Utilitarians, we ground the whole upon utility, the difficulty arises of explaining to whom the particular State is useful, and why (as in pre-Revolutionary Russia) the character of its utility should not provoke dissent instead of obedience.

The answer to the problem of obedience is, of course, that all theories which strive to explain it in purely rational terms are beside the mark; for no man is a purely rational animal. The State as it was and is finds the roots of allegiance in all the complex facts of human nature; and a theory of obedience would have to weight them differently for each epoch in the history of the State if it were to approximate to the truth. In a social situation which, made thought itself a danger, it was natural for Hobbes to seek in fear the ultimate source of men’s acts; just as the eighteenth-century moralist tended to make of benevolence the basic spring of action. In fact, nothing is gained by the postulation of separate forces of this kind as socially predominant. Distinct impulses, of whatever sort, operating to lead men to obey the State are as unreal as an explanation of the facts they resume as a fire-principle is worthless as an explanation of the character of fire. We meet man as a bundle of impulses which act together as a total personality. He will wan’t to live with his fellows. He will build churches that he may worship with them, and clubs that he may enjoy the peace of silence. He will fall in love and marry and have children; and he will fiercely protect what he deems their interests against the demands the world will make upon them. He will be curious in the face of nature, and that curiosity will lead in most to a constructiveness which, as William James said, is “a genuine and irresistible instinct in man, as in the bee and the beaver.” He will seek to acquire things, and that collector’s zest will, for the majority, translate itself into whatever forms the society holds of greatest worth. A hatred of insecurity, a desire to build a home, a yearning to move into unknown regions from the place where he was born, a hunter’s impulse which may take him to the African desert, or; less romantically, satisfy him by saturation in detective stories— all these are yearnings written into the fabric of our institutions. Man is a pugnacious animal; and the task of finding an outlet for that fruitful source of destruction is omnipresent. He desires to master his environment, to be the leader in his platoon; yet, under fitting conditions, he finds pleasure also in submission which, as in military organisation, can be turned to effective ends. He is a vain creature, seeking, as Veblen has shown, to waste his substance conspicuously, anxious, often enough, to be judged by the transient display rather than the solid achievement ;so the workman will buy the piano he cannot play as an index to respectability, and the society leader will offer to the Moloch of fashion the income which might educate her children to social usefulness.

Hunger, drink, sex, and the need of shelter and clothing seem the irreducible minimum of human wants. All else is capable of transmutation into forms as various as the history of society. All that we know with certainty is that the wants are there. Some, as hunger, we cannot deny in general measure if the society is to live; others we can meet with response so complex as almost to conceal the true desire beneath. But what, above all, is urgent is that we should realise that our institutions are the response to the totality of these impulses. They are inexplicable save in terms of their formidable complexity.

It is, of course, vital to the structure of political philosophy that man should be not merely a creature of impulse, bu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Preface To The Fourth Edition
• Preface To The Third Edition
• Preface To The Second Edition
• Preface To The First Edition
• Preface To Second Impression
• Table of Contents
• Introductory Chapter–The Crisis in the Theory of the State
• Part One
• Part Two
• Index