The State and the Citizen

An Introduction to Political Philosophy

J. D. Mabbott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000470628
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

First published in 1948, The State and the Citizen traces the development of the idea of the State as the ultimate source of authority. The author then proceeds to suggest the proper ends and limitation of State action. He analyses the conceptions of State unity and corporate loyalty and ends with a discussion on the relations between States and other associations, and between one State and another. This short and lucid introduction to political philosophy is an essential read for students and scholars of political philosophy, philosophy, and political studies.

(A)
From Hobbes to Hegel

1

THE USE OF AUTHORITIES

The aim of this book is to work through partial and one-sided theories of political obligation towards a more complete view. In the present section the chapters entitled with the names of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Hegel do not attempt to be fair and exhaustive accounts of the views of the philosophers concerned, still less to provide a history of the subject. They select points of permanent value and interest with the aim of advancing the enquiry.

This method may require a word of defence. Why not omit the more partial or erroneous views? No scientist would devote chapter after chapter to the phlogiston or the flat earth theory when he knew the right, or even a better, answer. It is just here, however, that science and philosophy part company.

The philosopher does not discover new facts. His concern is our everyday view with its common landmarks, duty, obedience, law, desire. He does not set out, as the scientist does, grasping his compass, towards lands no man has trod, nor return thence bearing strange treasures and stranger tales. He is rather to be pictured ascending the tower of some great cathedral, such as St Stephen’s, Vienna. As he goes up the spiral stairway, the common and particular details of life, the men and tramcars, shrink to invisibility and the big landmarks shake themselves clear. Little windows open at his elbow with widening views. There is conscience; over there is duty; there is conscience again looking quite different from this new level; now he is high enough to see law and liberty from one window. And ever there haunts him the vision of the summit, where there is a little room with windows all round, where he may recover his breath and see the view as a whole, and the Schottenkirche and the Palace of Justice in their true relative proportions, and where that gargoyle (determinism, was it?) which loomed in on him so menacingly at one stage in his ascent shall have shrunk to the speck that it is.

We shall be told that no one reaches the top. A philosopher who ceases to climb does so only because he gets tired; and he remains crouched against some staircase window, commanding but a dusty and one-sided view at best, obstinately proclaiming to the crowds below, who do not listen, that he is at the summit and can see the whole city. That may be so. Yet the climb itself is not without merit for those whose heads can stand the height and the circling of the rising spiral; and, even at the lowest windows, one is above the smoke and can see proportions more clearly so that men and tramcars can never look quite the same again.

Moreover, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau are no strangers. The modern citizen of a western State carries them with him. He is ineluctably Hobbes when he reads of the state of Palestine or remembers the Ireland of 1922. He is Locke when he suspends his thinking and falls back on the contradictory catchwords of all his favourite newspapers. He is Rousseau when his imagination runs away with him and he reconciles these contradictions by short cuts to Utopia. But he is in no danger of becoming John of Salisbury; and the essentials of Plato and Aristotle are so embedded in Greek life and City State that they cannot serve as companions in the first stages of such a quest as this.

2

HOBBES

Three main factors determine the problems of political theory as they come to us today; nationality, individualism and specialisation. It is because Hobbes was the first political theorist to recognise all three that his work may fitly open our enquiry.

Firstly, then, we have that youthful experiment, the nation. In the middle ages political authority was dispersed and divided; and much now thought of as political was claimed by the Church. Ties of varying strength, and none clearly political, attached a man to his guild, city, abbey, manor, baron, king and pope. If you met an Englishman in the street in the fourteenth century and asked him what his country did for him and what he owed to her, he might well be nonplussed. No one did anything for him, but he certainly owed a week’s service annually to the baron and eggs to the abbey and so on. Two centuries later he would have known the answer, for by that time political authority had crystallised in the nation.

Oh, when shall Englishmen

With such acts fill a pen

Or England breed again

Such a King Harry?

It is true that this spirit was born in battle, during the great contests with France. It is true also that, though nations appeared so early, nationality was not explicitly recognised as the basis of State unity until 1919. As nations were born in war, so until the treaties of Trianon and Versailles emphasised nationality in frontier-drawing, their limits were set by conquest and their authority enforced by arms. We puzzled our early Englishman by questions about his ‘country’; we might equally have puzzled a Czech or a Pole in 1900.

In the second place we put individualism, the growth of free criticism, the religious idea dominating the Reformation, that the individual soul is of primary importance, and that by their effect and value for men shall institutions and ritual and priests be judged. The idea was religious, but a gospel of liberty soon widens its range, and when the Church has been attacked the King cannot escape. Nor can he stand on divine sanctions or historical precedents when these have failed his greater cousin in Rome.

Thirdly, there is the specialisation of institutions. Never before had political authority been clearly separated from divine authority. Like the City State, Rome and the Church had been ‘universal providers’. The medieval town nestles under its cathedral and its cathedral was its concert room, its museum, its art gallery and its music hall. Rome rendered wonderful service in keeping all these torches alight during the dark ages, but specialisation brings strength. By Hobbes’ time all these activities had grown, in England at least, their own institutions. Secular science had produced Gilbert and Harvey; secular drama had found a Shakespeare within fifty years of its birth; secular education was flowering in the grammar schools, secular art and music were finding new subjects and new patrons. The strength of autonomy was infused into the State also, and the political theorist was given his problem clear. Just as irrelevant religious considerations were ruled out from the questions ‘What is scientific truth?’. ‘What are subjects for art?’. so also the appeal to revelation or divine authority disappears from politics. Here too Hobbes was a pioneer.

The paradox of politics is the reconciliation of liberty and obligation, and a first free enquiry might naturally light on Contract as a parallel. A contract is freely made but binds its maker; it gives him something of value but at a stated cost. Hobbes casts his political theory into the contract form. He tells us that men were once unsocial, but that they suffered so intensely from the insecurity of this isolated life that they made a contract with each other to give up their rights to a sovereign, some man or assembly of men, who should have power to keep the peace and guarantee their security. To this, some of Hobbes’ critics thought it sufficient to answer that the contract is a myth, that the state of nature never existed nor did men ever give up their rights to a sovereign, that in any case the descent of the sovereignty had often been broken on the sovereign’s side and that on the subjects’ side the original contractors could not bind their descendants. An amusing Specimen of this difficulty in the historical claim is to be found in Edward I’s letter to Pope Boniface VIII, in which he lays claim to the throne of Scotland. ‘About the time of Eli and the prophet Samuel, a certain man of the Trojan race, Brut by name, a man of vigour and distinction, after the fall of Troy, put in with many Trojan nobles at a certain island then called Albion and inhabited only by giants.’ Tracing his line from this source Edward I concludes that ‘it is evident that the throne of Scotland belongs to us in full right’.¹

The right reply, however, to such historical forms of the contract theory is not that Hobbes’ history is wrong but that all such history is irrelevant. My obligation to my country cannot be decided one way or the other by the putative activities of a number of missing links huddled round the altars of Stonehenge.

This irrelevance of origin to value causes much difficulty. At all times men have looked for a lofty origin for what they revere. A Greek city must have a hero-founder with a divine parent, and it was this necessity which populated the Greek pantheon and dictated the amours of its members. Even now when science finds the origin of man among the apes or the fishes, or traces morality to taboo, religion to superstition, the Mass to assimilative theophagy, all these discoveries seem to the moralist and the theologian a degradation of their temples. They think the scientist will go on to draw the conclusion that religion is mere superstition and morality nothing but taboo. But this is only their own fallacy turned upside down and the scientist is no more likely to commit himself to these dogmas than to the assertion ‘man is merely a fish’. If ‘evolution’ has any meaning at all, the origin of a thing will never explain it or determine or delimit its value. However society may have originated, its origins are of no significance whatever for political theory.

The contract theory, however, does not lose its value by losing its historical accuracy. Hobbes’ story is a myth, and a myth may be a good myth even if its dates are wrong. Archbishop Ussher dated the Creation on 7 September 4004 B.C.; but a modern theologian, when he speaks of the Fall, refers to characteristics of man’s present nature and not to a historical event near Baghdad. His views cannot therefore be shaken by ruins in Crete or footprints in the Lower Carboniferous. When the Greek demoralised his gods in order to obtain a hero-founder this was simply his imaginative way of saying, ‘My city embodies something superhuman and divine—and is just as good as yours.’

Hobbes is really aware that his story is a myth. For when he is pressed to answer the question, ‘Why do I obey the sovereign?’ he replies that unless I and the other citizens did so there would be a state of war in the land. Further, I am entitled to rebel when the power of the sovereign is not strong enough to protect me. The contract on which my obedience rests is clearly one between me and the other citizens; and the sovereign whom our contract sets up is her reigning Majesty in parliament and not some palaeolithic Brut or Ug. If we want to find the state of nature we do not go back in history; we perform a logical abstraction. We remove from human life what government provides and we see what would be left.

We must therefore restate Hobbes’ myth, as modern theology restates Genesis, and as Hobbes himself really intended. It will then run somewhat as follows. Man is by nature—that is, by instinct and desire—a selfish individual. His reason leads him to accept State control and social life as a necessary evil to avoid greater evils. These greater evils centre round fear. The State’s only function therefore is to provide security by keeping the peace. In order to make quite sure of this, the government must have very extensive powers. It must command the army and control the executive, look after finance and education, enforce religious uniformity, and control moral and scientific teaching. There is only the one limitation noted above. The sovereign has no right to threaten my life. If, through his overt act or through his growing weakness, my security is endangered I am free from all obligation. Here is obviously a very different atmosphere from the historical and legal one which met us at the first glance. Within his premisses Hobbes’ logic is unrelenting, and it is by criticism of his premisses alone that we can query his conclusions and advance our enquiry.

The first ground of criticism is found in Hobbes’ individualism. ‘Man is by nature a social animal.’ Hobbes was well aware of Aristotle’s dictum, and asked, in reply: ‘Do the social animals quarrel among themselves over wealth or precedence? Do the bees rebel against their queen? Do the wasps spend half their time making complicated arrangements to sting each other? Do the ants lock up their houses when they take the air?’ The obvious answers to these questions confirmed him in his belief that only fear and cold calculation drive men into society and keep them there. There seems little doubt, however, that both Hobbes and Aristotle were wrong. Man is certainly not a social animal in the full sense; yet when we look for the bonds of social life we cannot make them entirely rational. The social instinct, which makes solitaiy confinement the most terrible punishment of all, which drives holiday-makers to football matches, and which in the evenings fills one street in a town to overflowing while the others are deserted—this is a force which no politician or political theorist can neglect. ‘If eating and drinking be natural, herding is so too.’¹ But the social instinct is only one among others and is at best intermittent in its activity, and in some people wholly ineffective. It is almost as insufferable to many men to be never alone as to be always alone, and ‘the Englishman’s house is his castle’ is as natural an expression of the English character as are all our little clubs and societies. Yet the gregarious instinct is certainly one force among others in human nature, and Hobbes was wrong to omit it entirely.

The next objection to Hobbes is that he makes society and law precede morality. It is held that this is actually a false position and that it leads Hobbes into self-contradiction. We must reserve for a later occasion the main issue, whether or not morality is a social product and how far laws are made and not discovered by the sovereign (Chapter 9), but we can defend Hobbes against his literal critics on the second point. They point to Hobbes’ view that contracts are ‘words and breath’ without a sovereign to enforce them, that morality is what the sovereign commands. They then ask, ‘What of the original contract?’ It at least implies no power to enforce it and suggests a pre-social trust and morality. This, however, is not the case. The force behind the original contract is exactly that behind all others—the sovereign; and the men who make the contract need not be moved by sociability or moral motives. They may be using their fellow men and the sovereign merely as tools to further a particular private end. Suppose I want to take exercise, and I decide that exercise taken with...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• (A) From Hobbes to Hegel
• (B) The Limits of State Action
• (C) The Place of the State
• (D) The Unity of the State
• Appendix: Political philosophy and the social sciences
• Index