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CHAPTER X

POLITICAL THEORIES.

1. INTRODUCTORY.

I. AT some future day, if the aspirations of philosophers are justified, there will be a science of sociology. We shall unravel the laws of growth of the social organism, and determine the conditions of its health or disease. Then, and not till then, it will be possible to present political science as a coherent body of doctrines, deduced from certain axioms of universal validity, but leading to different conclusions according to the varying conditions of human society. We shall be able to say what form of government is most favourable to the happiness of a nation at any given period of its development. Then we shall have at once a firm base for our speculations, and the utmost possible flexibility in their application. We shall see how to reconcile justice and expediency; and establish the rights of man, not as conflicting with considerations of utility, but as logical consequences of the laws of social health. Hitherto, reasoning has been alternately purely empirical and purely abstract. Political machinery, of a more or less satisfactory kind, has evolved itself out of the blind conflict of selfish or patriotic passions. Institutions which enable men to secure the main objects of life have been slowly established; and a few empirical principles have come to be widely accepted, though not yet combined into any satisfactory system. But we are still so far from possessing anything like a science of politics, that most of the current maxims involve conceptions which could hardly find place in a scientific system. Fragments of the old theories by which men endeavoured to explain the origin of government, or to show how it might be best administered, still perplex our discussions, and hinder the attempt to lay a sound foundation of theory.

2. The difficulty of discovering anything approaching to an historical development of political theory is the greater, inasmuch as theories have followed, more than they have guided, events. Happy is the nation which has no political philosophy, for such a philosophy is generally the offspring of a recent, or the symptom of an approaching, revolution. During the quieter hours of the eighteenth century Englishmen rather played with political theories than seriously discussed them. The interest in politics was chiefly personal. References to general principles are introduced in rhetorical flourishes, but do not form the basis of serious argument. In the mass of pamphlets and speeches which fill our library shelves it is rare to find even a show of political philosophy. The Tory argument is that De Foe has been put in the pillory; the Whig argument is that the French wear wooden shoes. Walpole's friends rail at the Pope and the Pretender; and Bolingbroke's friends abuse the Excise and the Hanoverian subsidies. Generalities about liberty, corruption, and luxury are equally convenient for filling the interstices of either set of arguments. To discover from such materials what are the real political views of the writer would be a difficult task; and the investigation belongs rather to the historian of facts than to the historian of thought. In the earlier part of the century there are but one or two books which fairly belong to the speculative order; and even in the more stirring times which preceded the French Revolution the political philosophy of the time is generally imbedded in discussions of concrete facts. A brief account of the few writers who refer most distinctly to general principles will sufficiently indicate the general set of the currents of political thought.

3. In the absence not only of a science of sociology, but of a belief that such a science was possible, men might fall back upon the old theological synthesis. Here, as in ethical speculations, the hypothesis of a divine interference simplified all questions. If the king was the representative of the Deity in secular as the priest in ecclesiastical matters, all discussion was at an end. In a sense higher than the technical the king could do no wrong; his right to rule could never be

impugned. The great convulsions which followed the Reformation had rudely broken down any such theories. The relation between the secular and the spiritual power became perplexed and often opposed; and Jesuits had written in defence of tyrannicide when kings were against the Pope. When Filmer maintained the divine right of kings, he found it necessary to attack the great Catholic theologians, Bellarmine and Suarez. The Church of England, indeed, clung as long as it could to some fragment of the theory. Clergymen rivalled each other in preaching the doctrine of unconditional submission till the Church and king quarrelled, and none but a few Jacobites could adhere to the old creed. The Hanoverian dynasty was too obviously endowed with no divine sanctity. George I. was clearly not the representative of God Almighty; and the disappearance with Queen Anne of the quaint superstition of touching for the evil marked the extinction of the last fragments of the belief in the special sanctity of kings.

4. But what theory was to replace the old? If we substitute the abstract metaphysical Deity for the personal Ruler of the universe, we have the same difficulty which occurs in the ethical speculations. God, when identified with nature, sanctions all instincts and all forces alike. And thus we obtain the political theories (for the two are strikingly alike) of Hobbes and Spinoza, in which right is identified with might. The moralists who desired an absolute basis of speculation, and yet shrank from the immoral consequences of this identification, thought, as we have seen, that an absolute law of nature might be constructed from certain 'inherent and immutable relations of things.' Applying the same method to politics, we find certain inalienable rights of man corresponding to the immutable laws of morality, and following from the essential relations of human beings to each other and to God. The primary rules have an absolute character, and are discoverable either by intuition or by an a priori method of reasoning entirely independent of experience. The difficulty, however, of crossing the gulf which separates such transcendental regions from concrete institutions was greater in the case of political than in that of ethical speculations. The rule, do as you would be done by, might seem to rank

with mathematical axioms; any rule applicable to political constitutions, unless indeed Hobbes's theory of the absolute power of the sovereign was accepted, required too many qualifications to be capable of such absolute statement. The passage from the abstract to the concrete was therefore effected by the help of the social compact theory, which appears to have had its origin in the speculations of Roman jurists.' The convenience of the theory is obvious. Το obtain an absolute relation between human beings, you may appeal to the law revealed by an authority absolute because divine. When this power is too vaguely conceived to be capable of originating a political constitution, the most obvious legal analogy is that of a compact whose binding force does not appear to be dependent on the will of any superior. Thus, it was possible to find an absolute basis for political theory, whilst the imaginary compact allowed for the development of certain special rules applicable to concrete societies.

5. The social contract theory was indeed necessarily of the most elastic kind. Amongst the absolute thinkers it marked the passage from a supposed state of nature into a social state. The compact into which men entered by abandoning part of their natural liberty in consideration of certain advantages remained unalterably binding upon all subsequent generations, and thus gave rise to those rights of man which have a superior validity to any rights conferred by later legislation. No human legislation could override them; though the widest possible difference of opinion unfortunately existed as to the precise code thus unalterably fixed. The laws had thus the absolute character of a scientific law of nature,' and yet were sufficiently specific to afford grounds of distinguishing between different concrete cases. But in the mouths of a different school the same compact was unconsciously used for quite a different purpose. It signified that compact which was assumed to have taken place in any particular nation. It might vary indefinitely according to circumstances, and be the foundation as well of a democracy as of a despotism. It was used, that is, not to preserve the absolute character of certain laws, but to justify the most purely empirical methods. The compact sanctioned any existing constitution, and was at See Sir H. Maine's Ancient Law,' ch. ix.