The starting-point of this theory, reduced to its lowest terms, is the principle that organized society is something more than the individuals that compose it. This principle cannot be as quickly disposed of as some individualists think. Every association of men is legitimately regarded as an entity possessing certain characteristics of its own, characteristics which do not belong to the individuals apart from their membership of that association. In any human association it is true, in a sense, that the whole is something more than a sum of its parts. For example, the whole can do things which the parts severally cannot. If two men in succession push a heavy body, they may be wholly unable to move it. If they work together, they bring it along. Mechanically the summed output of energy in the two cases is equal, but in the one case it will be dissipated physically in heat, morally in the sense of frustration and loss of temper. In the other case it will succeed in its object and shift the resisting weight. The association of the two therefore has palpable effects which without the association could not be achieved. On the other hand, it is important to remark that the result of the joint effort of the two men working together is simply the sum of their efforts as they work together, though it is something other than the sum of those efforts when not co-ordinated. Any association of people involves some modification, temporary or permanent, superficial or far-reaching, in the people themselves. The work or the life of the association is something different from the work which could be achieved or the life lived by the same people apart from that association. But it does not follow that it is anything other than the sum, the expression or the result of the work that is being done, or the life that is being lived, by all the members of the association as members. When we are told, then, that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, we must reply that this depends on the sense in which the "parts" are taken. Further, we must observe that the statement, so far as it is true, is true generally; it holds of all associations, not only of that particular association which we call the state. Family life, for example, necessarily exercises a profound influence upon its members. The family is a whole which cooperates for certain purposes and in which the various members lead lives quite other than that they would do if the family were scattered. On the other hand, the family as it stands at any given moment is simply the coordinated or associated whole of its members as they stand at the same moment. It is an expression of their lives so far as lived in common or in close association with one another. The family in particular has no well-being, no happiness, no good or evil fortune, which is not the well-being, the happiness, good or evil fortune of its members one or more. In an organized body, a profession, for example, a Trade Union, a business, a factory, there is again a whole numbering so many scores, hundreds, thousands of individuals as its members. In every case the members are in greater or lesser degree modified by the association into which they enter. Of the Trade Union, of the profession or business, certain things will hold true, which would not hold true of the individuals who belong to any of those associations if they did not belong to them. But again in the whole there is nothing but the coordinated or associated activity of the individuals which constitute it. This remains true though the organization may be permanent and the individuals changing. A college may have for hundreds of years a certain peculiar character and stamp of its own. The number of individuals passing through it and affected by it is quite indefinite. It is not constituted solely by the number present within its walls at any given time; nor can we enumerate those who may have come within its influence during the whole period of its establishment. Nevertheless its tradition, its spirit which seems to be lodged in no single individual, is maintained by individuals, propagated from generation to generation, sometimes perhaps broken by the influx of a new type of character which fails to assimilate the tradition which it encounters.
Thus, in discussing society, we are liable to two fallacies. On the one hand we may be tempted to deny the reality of the social group, refusing to conceive it as a district entity, insisting on resolving it into its component individuals as though these individuals were unaffected by the fact of association. On the other side, in reaction from this exaggerated individualism, we are apt to regard society as an entity distinct from the individuals, not merely in the sense that it is an aggregate of individuals viewed in some special relation, but in the sense that it is a whole which in some way stands outside them, or in which they are merged to the prejudice of their individual identity. Further, having reached the conception of a super-personal entity in which individuals are submerged, we are inclined to look for this entity, not in all the varied forms of associated life which intersect and cut across one another, but in some particular form of association which seems to include the rest and so to present itself as a whole to which the individual must belong as an element. This entity, idealist writers have found in the state. There are thus two points which we have to consider, first the general notion of a super-personal entity and secondly, the identification of this entity with the state.
We have seen that the notion of a super-personal entity appears at first sight to express a very obvious fact. It may also appear to formulate a clear principle of ethics. The conception of duty, it may be said, teaches us that the individual lives not for himself but for a greater whole to which his own claims must be subordinated. An abstract individualism might regard the individual as possessed of certain rights, but rights are a function of the social group, since rights involve demands made upon others either for positive services or for negative forbearances. The rights of A impose obligations on B and C. They are obligations incident to and arising out of social relations, and can only be justified if their fulfilment is held to be for the good of the society -- temporary or permanent -- for which they are prescribed. Thus the individualistic conception defeats itself and leads us back to the whole and the duties rendered to the whole by each of its members. Now, in maintaining the superiority of the whole to any of its parts, the idealist, it may be thought, is merely asserting the superior claims of society to any one of its members. But here again there is an element of danger in the contrast between society and the individual. Any one individual is but an insignificant element in the great society, and may justly feel that his small interests must be subordinated to those of the greater body. But we cannot thus contrast a society with all the individuals which belong to it. Ethically there would be no sense in the demand for the sacrifice of all the individuals who belong or may belong to a society to the interests of that society. The million is more than the one, the interests of the million greater than the interests of the one. The question is whether the society of the million has any interests other than the conjoint interests of the million belonging to it. If the society is something other than the individuals, such a position is arguable, and we shall have to consider it as we proceed. What has to be said here is that it by no means follows from the ethical claim that the interests of the individual must give way to those of the whole to which he belongs. That claim is satisfied by the conception of the whole as the organized body of living men and women. We are not speaking here of associations that exist to promote objects beyond themselves -- a conspiracy, for example, aiming at a political revolution. Here the whole society of conspirators might rightly judge that it were better for them all as individuals to perish than that the movement should be lost. "Que mon nom soit fl tri, que la France soit libre." This, indeed, might be the motto not only of the individual but of the association too. We are speaking of a society regarded as an end in itself. If we ask what good is actually realized in a society other than the good of its members, we certainly get no answer from the ethical consciousness which bids us do our duty to others and love our neighbours as ourselves. These requirements are amply recognized by the conception of ourselves as human beings placed among other human beings, whose happiness and misery our actions sensibly affect.
The method by which the idealist turns the flank of these arguments is to contend in substance that the individual possesses no independent value, ultimately we may say no independent life of his own. He is absorbed in the organized political society, the state of which he is a member. He claims freedom. The claim is admitted. Freedom is the starting-point of the Hegelian philosophy of the state, but freedom in Hegel's sense turns out to be conformity with the law and custom as interpreted by the ethical spirit of the particular society to which the individual belongs. He claims the right of judgment, he aims at a rational order of ethics. The claim is admitted but the rational order is that of the objective mind, and this on analysis turns out to be the system of institutions and customs which the state has engendered and maintains. Finally he claims to be at least himself, an independent centre of thought and feeling, palpitating with its own emotions, subject to its own joys and sorrows, but not even selfhood is left to him, for his self is realizable only in the organized whole in which he is a kind of transitory phase. Thus the edge of the revolutionary weapon is turned, or rather the hilt is grasped and the point directed towards the revolutionary himself. The freedom which the revolutionary, the liberal, or for that matter the plain man of the modern world, asserts is accepted and transmuted into obedience to law. His demand for rationality in society is granted, but granted in order to be attributed to the existing social order. The very sense of personality, instead of being checked and chastened by the stern assertion of duty, is gently and subtly resolved into a phase or expression of the general will. There can be no finer example of the supreme maxim of dialectical art, that the admission of an opponent's contentions is the deadliest method of refutation.
It will be convenient to set out in briefest possible terms the central points in the conception of society with which we have to deal. The point of departure in Hegel is his doctrine of freedom. Freedom is, in his view, falsely conceived in ordinary thought as equivalent to absence of constraint. That is a negative and, in the end, Hegel argues, a self-contradictory idea. True freedom is something positive. It is self-determination. The free will is the will which determines itself. The sense in which the will can determine itself is this, that it forms a rational whole or system of conduct, in which any particular act or deliverance of the will performs a certain necessary function. Such a system of conduct is not achieved by the individual on his own account but is incorporated in the law and custom of society. Law alone is merely the external side of this system, but law, developed by the moral consciousness of man and worked out into the detail of custom that regulates daily life and society, constitutes the actual fabric that we require and is the objective expression of freedom. That which sustains this fabric of a rational life is the state, which is therefore the realization of the moral idea. The state is its own end, and the highest duty of the individual is to be a member of the state. Beyond the state there is no higher association and states have no duties to one another or to humanity, but their rise and fall is the process of universal history, which is the ultimate court of judgment before whose bar they come.
In order to examine this very summary account, we see we have (1) to consider the meaning of freedom. We have to understand the process of argument by which freedom is defined as self-determination and self-determination as the subordination of action to an articulate system; (2) we have to inquire into the identification of this system with law and custom, and that will bring us (3) to the conception of the state and the reasons why it is regarded not only as an end in itself but as the supreme and the highest form of human association.
In his theory of the freedom of the will lies the key to the Hegelian theory of the state, of morality and of law. This theory consists in essentials of three positions.1 (1) The underlying principle is that freedom consists not in the negative condition of absence of constraint but in the positive fact of self-determination. Will is freedom because it is self- determination. What then does self-determination mean? This will bring us to the second position. The will is determined by its purposes or objects, and we are apt to think of the object as something external, pulling at it, so to say. So to think is to abandon self-determination, and in reaction from this view we think of the will as exerting free choice as between its objects. But again freedom, so conceived, is an uncharted, motiveless freedom, for if I choose one thing rather than another, there must surely be something in the thing which moves me or my choice appears groundless and irrational. Here arises a form of the familiar controversy between determinism and free will which Hegel holds to be insoluble on this plane of thought. The position (2) reached then is that the will must be determined by its object, but that if this object is independent of the will, an insoluble dilemma ensues. This brings us to the third position, namely, (3) that the object of the will is determined by the will itself. Before asking how this could be, let us note the reasoning. Freedom is understood to be self-determination. The will is determined by its object, but the object is determined by the will. Ultimately, therefore, the will is self-determined and free.
But in this reasoning there appears to be a circle. How can the will be determined by its object and yet determine the object? To escape the circle we must realize that the object of the will is not outside the will at all, it is the will itself. At first sight this seems perilously near to sheer nonsense. How can the will will itself? The line of answer seems to be that the will at any given moment and in any given relation may have the whole nature of the will as its object. Thus, to suggest an example, we might think of the consistent Christian who directs his action from hour to hour by the light of a principle running right through his life. This principle he has adopted for good and all. It has become the comprehensive expression of his will. So in each act of his will it is his own will that is its object. If then the will is determined by its object, it is here determined by itself, that is, it is free.
Two lines of criticism suggest themselves. First, the Christian himself would probably say that it is not his own will but the will of God which he seeks to obey, and whatever illustration we might take, the answer would in essentials be the same. I must will something that is not yet realized, otherwise I achieve nothing. Even if I will to reform myself, the one case in which I do seem to have my own will for an object, this means that I, as I am now, set a different self before myself as something to be achieved. And if I could attain perfect consistency of action, this would mean that I should consistently serve some comprehensive end beyond myself and only to be realized by my action. The end or object then is always other than the will as it is when acting for the end. Will, like other acts of mind, has relation to an object, and things that are related are not the same. The identification of subject and object fails here as elsewhere and with it the whole scheme of self-determination breaks down.
The second criticism has a special bearing on the use which Hegel makes of his definition of freedom. Grant, for the sake of argument, that self-determination is something more than absence of constraint. But it is not less than absence of constraint. Where and in so far as an act of will is constrained, it is not free. What is absolutely free is absolutely unconstrained. What is relatively free is relatively unconstrained. Freedom in one thing may indeed imply restraint on something else -- if I am secure in freedom to go about my business, this implies that others are prevented from hindering me in doing so -- but the thing which is free is not in the respect in which it is free also restrained. To be free in one part or in one relation it will have to be restrained in another part or relation, but in that in which it is restrained it is not also free.
Now in adopting a principle of conduct we may be acting on our own motion in response to an internal conviction. So far we are free. But the principle may be such as to put heavy constraint on a part of our nature, and if so, that part of our nature is not free. We may be slaves to our principles, as well as to our impulses, and in fact common experience tells us that there are those who would be better men without their principles, if they would only give their natural emotions free play. But a life of uncharted impulses cannot be free, because unregulated impulses not only restrain but utterly frustrate and destroy one another. But neither is a life of narrow principle free, because such a principle at best holds a great part of us subdued, perhaps sullen and unsatisfied.2 In a word freedom for one element in our nature, be it an impulse or a conviction, may mean the subjection of the rest of our nature. If there be such a thing as freedom for our personality as a whole, its parts must have as much scope as is compatible with their union. This cannot mean absolute freedom for each part, for no one must override the remainder. It means freedom limited by the conditions of development in harmony, and by nothing else. If we suppose a whole of many parts capable of a harmonious development, and if we suppose this whole to be subject to no restraints except those which it itself imposes on its parts to secure the common development, then we have an intelligible sense in which the whole may be termed free. Now the self is a whole capable of a harmonious development, and it may be termed free when it orders its life accordingly. The principle of freedom then springs from the nature of the self as a coherent whole. It is to be distinguished from a principle cramping harmony of development, even if accepted by our own consent. Still more is it to be distinguished from one imposed from without by suggestion, authority and perhaps some mingling of compulsion. Now Hegel does not draw these distinctions. Discarding absence of constraint from the idea of freedom, and concentrating attention on the element of unity which the will undoubtedly introduces into action, he tends to identify freedom with mere acceptance of a principle of conduct and thus paves the way for its further identification with law. He saw that freedom involved restraint on something but did not see that it was restraint on something else, that which is free being in the respect in which it is free necessarily unconstrained.
Hegel's first position is now before us. Freedom for him rests not on absence of constraint but on the acceptance of a principle expressing the true nature of rational will running through and unifying all the diverse purposes of men. The embodiment of such a principle and therefore of freedom Hegel finds in the system of right and law. Two terms here require some consideration before the meaning of this principle can be understood. By the term "embodiment" I have rendered the word Daseyn. Daseyn in the Hegelian philosophy is a term used in contradistinction to what we ordinary call a mere idea or bare thought of a thing, for example, or to its mere potentiality. We must not, however, translate the word Daseyn by "reality" or even by "existence," as both of these terms are assigned to distinct phases in the Hegelian dialectical development. We may, however, think of the embodiment of a political idea in an Act of Parliament or of a political principle in an institution or a constitution, as giving what Hegel would call Daseyn to that idea or that principle. That being understood, we see in general the meaning of the phrase that freedom is embodied in right. But the term "right" or law also requires comment. Hegel's term is Recht, and it would seem better to use the German term whenever ambiguity is to be feared. According to Dr Bosanquet it is the advantage of the German term that it maintains in itself the intimate relation between right and law. It may be urged on the contrary that the very fact that German writers use one term for these two related but quite distinct notions is an obstacle to clear thinking in their Jurisprudence and Ethics in general, and in the Hegelian philosophy in particular. The consequence of its use is that we begin and go on with the confusion of two issues, which it is the particular purpose of social philosophy to hold distinct. The one issue is the nature of right, the foundation of moral obligation, the meaning, value and authority of a moral system; and the other the meaning, value and authority of law; and the final question of political philosophy consists of the relation between these two distinct things. That relation can never be clearly set forth if we use terms which imply a confusion between the terms related.
But in what sense is Recht the embodiment of freedom? Let us first, for the sake of accuracy, supply a correction, without which we should do injustice to Hegel, though the correction does not touch the essence of the question. Mere law is only an external embodiment of freedom, Hegel fully admits. Law is abstract, general, and regards primary the externals of behaviour; to complete it we want something which is on the one hand more concrete, more closely adapted to the requirements of individual life, and, on the other hand, something expressing the inner acceptance of the rule of society as well as its external observance. This conception we find in the word Sittlichkeit, a term which can hardly be rendered in English by a single word. We cannot translate it "morality," because Hegel uses the word Moralität as something which is purely inward and subjective, whereas Sittlichkeit is objective as well. Dr Bosanquet translates it by the phrase "ethical use and wont," and we may understand it as the whole system of customs and traditions as accepted by the normal member of a society, as forming the fabric within which he has to live. This system is, in Hegel's phrase, the conception of freedom come to self-consciousness in the world in which we live.3 Restating our question therefore we have to ask, in what sense is the social tradition an embodiment of freedom? The examination of this question takes us into the heart of the Hegelian conception of the relation of the individual man to society, and this again will be found to be a particular case of the relation of the individual to the universal, which is the central point of the Hegelian metaphysics.
It will have been noticed in discussing the Hegelian theory of the will we have always to speak of the will. We have not spoken of the wills of different men and their relations to one another. We have never used the plural term. We have always spoken of the will as though it were one substantive reality; and this is in fact the Hegelian view. But in society there are many wills and in obedience to law we conform, as we suppose, to the will of another. How then can we talk of the will as if there were only one? The question will lead us ultimately into the metaphysical problem of the one and the many, for the Hegelian. theory of the universal underlies the whole issue. But let us first set out the problem with more fullness and consider the solution proffered by Hegel's most recent and most faithful exponent.
At the first blush it must be owned it is difficult to attach any clear meaning to the statement that the social tradition is the actual or concrete realization of freedom. Freedom, as we have been told, means self-determination. Self-determination, we were further told, implies determination by a principle as against mere impulse. But even if we waive for the moment all controversies on these points, it remains that if there is self-determination, the determining principle must be a principle of our own choosing, an expression of our own character, the real bent of our own selves. The established ethical tradition may of course fall in with our desires, and if so, we are aware of no constraint in accepting it, but socially and ethically the question of freedom only arises where there is a clash of wills. Suppose then that our will happens to be in conflict at one point with the social tradition, what are we to understand? To say that in such a case we ought to yield up our judgment and conform is at least an intelligible, though sometimes a disputable proposition; but that is not what is said or intended. The proposition before us is that in conforming to the social tradition and only in conforming to it we are free. It does not appear to matter whether we ourselves find the rule which it propounds contrary to our happiness or opposed to our conscience. Our freedom lies, it would seem, in the surrender of our own happiness, even in the stifling of our own conscience, for we are free only as we conform to the moral tradition embodied in and supported by the state. Freedom is self-determination yet freedom is realized only in the submission of self to something which may at any time conflict with all that is strongest and all that is deepest in ourselves. The use and wont of the organized political society to which we belong may, for example, at certain points conflict with the teaching of the religious body to which we belong, or it may involve injustices and oppressions against which our conscience comes to revolt. Now it is not merely contended that in such a conflict we ought to surrender our judgment. That is at least arguable. it is contended that in submitting ourselves, and in this alone, we are actually free. We seem faced with something like a contradiction. And, however we define the state, this particular contradiction does not seem to be resolved. For we may think of it as essentially an organization of persons like ourselves. In that case, in obeying it against our own will we are simply under the constraint of others; or we may think of it as something impersonal, super-personal, or, as Hegel calls it, divine, and in that case we are obeying an impersonal or divine authority. Even if we are free in yielding to it, that would seem to be the last act of our freedom. It is an abdication, a final discharge of our authority over ourselves.
Now something like this conception of the relation of freedom to the general will goes back to Rousseau. Dr Bosanquet4 quotes Rousseau as saying "that whoever shall refuse to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the whole body, which means nothing else than that he will be forced to be free." He goes on to say, "In this passage Rousseau lays bare the very heart of what some would call political faith and others political superstition. This lies in the conviction that the 'moral person which constitutes the state' is a reality." If we follow the development of this conception, we shall find the key to the difficulty before us. Reviewing his examination of Rousseau, the details of which we need not follow, Dr Bosanquet writes: "( a) The negative relation of the self to other selves begins to dissolve away before the conception of the common self and (b) the negative relation of the self to law and government begins to disappear in the idea of a law which expresses our real will as opposed to our trivial and rebellious moods. The whole notion of man as one among others tends to break down and we begin to see something in the one which actually identifies him with the others and at the same time tends to make him what he admits he ought to be." This passage really seems to contain the sum and substance of idealistic Social Philosophy. There is a common self, and this is no metaphor. It does not mean a community among selves because "the whole notion of man as one among many tends to break down." it is a self which is a higher unity than the legal or moral person, and this self seems to be identified with the real will, which is also, it seems, the self that one ought to be.
We now begin to see why that which appears to us a stark contradiction is seen in quite a different light by the idealist. Our difficulty was that self-determination cannot be the same thing as determination by other selves, or by an impersonal state. The answer is that the division between self and others dissolves away into the inception of a common self and the division between the individual and the state disappears in the conception of a law expressing our own real will; so that in conforming to law, we are submitting ourselves neither to other persons nor to something impersonal. We are conforming to our own real will. But if in point of fact we happen to will just the opposite to that which the law ordains, how can this be? The answer lies in the distinction between the actual and the real will. We must give Dr Bosanquet's statement of this distinction with some fullness.
"It was observed above that what Rousseau had before him in his notion of the General Will might be described as the 'Will in itself, ' or the Real Will. Any such conception involves a contrast between the Real Will and the Actual Will, which may seem to be meaningless. How can there be a Will which is no one's Will? and how can anything be my Will which I am not fully aware of, or which I am even averse to? This question will be treated more fully on psychological grounds in a later chapter. For the present, it is enough to call attention to the plain fact that often when people do not know what they mean, they yet mean something of very great importance; or that, as has commonly been said, 'what people demand is seldom what would satisfy them if they got it. ' We may recall the instances in which even Mill admitted that it is legitimate to infer, from the inherent nature of the will, that people do not really 'will' something which they desire to do at a given moment.... Now the contradiction, which here appears in a ultimate form, pervades the 'actual' will, which we exert from moment to moment as conscious individuals, through and through. A comparison of our acts of will through a month or a year is enough to show that no one object of action, as we conceive it when acting, exhausts all that our will demands. Even the life which we wish to live, and which on the average we do live, is never before us as a whole in the motive of any particular volition. In order to obtain a full statement of what we will, what we want at any moment must at least be corrected and amended by what we want at all other moments; and this cannot be done without also correcting and amending it so as to harmonize it with what others want, which involves an application of the same process to them. But when any considerable degree of such correction and amendment had been gone through, our own will would return to us in a shape in which we should not know it again, although every detail would be a necessary inference from the whole of wishes and resolutions which we actually cherish. And if it were to be supplemented and readjusted so as to stand not merely for the life which on the whole we manage to live, but for a life ideally without contradiction, it would appear to us quite remote from anything which we know."
Postponing for a moment any critical examination of this conception, let us take stock of our position. According to Dr Bosanquet, then, there is underlying the actual will, of which we are aware, a deeper real will, which is the actual will reorganized and made completely consistent or coherent. It is in fact that organized system of purposes which we found in the Hegelian will, and in a later passage Dr Bosanquet adopts the Hegelian phrase -- " the will that wills itself."
But now, if we grant for the moment this underlying will and suppose ourselves to be free only when we conform to it, we still have not reached the connection between the real self and the common self, which is the state, in which the distinction between self and others is absorbed and whose will is expressed in the social tradition. The connection is explained by Dr Bosanquet (p. 123), where we are told, "The habits and institutions of any community are, so to speak, the standing interpretation of all the private wills which compose it." And this seems to be taken as the content both of the general and the real will. It is an imperfect representation of the real will because "every set of institutions is an incomplete embodiment of life." On the other hand "the complex of social institutions" is "very much more complete than the explicit ideas which at any given instant move any individual mind in volition."
The essence of the position is now before us. Moral freedom -- we shall see later that Dr Bosanquet candidly recognizes the distinction between moral and legal liberty -- lies in conformity to the real will. The real will is the general will and is expressed in the social fabric. The expression is not perfect and admits of progressive development, but it is in the main what we require. Social tradition, if not the complete expression of ourselves, is the fullest available to us at any given time. The vehicle of social tradition, or rather the organizing principle which gives it vitality, meaning and coherence, is the state. The state, therefore, is the true self in which the mere individual is absorbed. This is the corner stone of moral and political obligation. Briefly, we are morally free when our actions conform to our real will, our real will is the general will, and the general will is most fully embodied in the state. These are the governing positions of the metaphysical theory which we have to examine.