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Title: The public and its problems
Author: John Dewey
Release Date: June 20, 2023 [eBook #71000]
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PUBLIC AND ITS
PROBLEMS ***
THE PUBLIC
AND ITS PROBLEMS
BY
JOHN DEWEY
ALAN SWALLOW
DENVER
COPYRIGHT, 1927,
BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
Copyright renewed, 1954, by Mrs. John Dewey
PRINTED IN THE
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
PREFATORY NOTE
This volume is the result of lectures delivered during the month of
January, nineteen hundred and twenty-six, upon the Larwill Foundation
of Kenyon College, Ohio. In acknowledging the many courtesies received,
I wish to express also my appreciation of the toleration shown by the
authorities of the College to delay in publication. The intervening
period has permitted a full revision and expansion of the lectures
as originally delivered. This fact will account for an occasional
reference to books published in the interval.
J. D.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. SEARCH FOR THE PUBLIC 3
Divergence of facts and theoretical interpretations
concerning the nature of the state, 3. Practical import
of theories, 5. Theories in terms of causal origin,
9. Theory in terms of perceived consequences, 12.
Distinction of private and public substituted for that of
individual and social, 13. The influence of association,
22. Plurality of associations, 26. Criterion of the
public, 27. Function of the state, 28. The state as an
experimental problem, 32. Summary, 34.
II. DISCOVERY OF THE STATE 37
Public and state, 38. Geographical extent, 39.
Multiplicity of states, 43. Spread of consequences, 47.
Law is not command, 53. Law and reasonableness, 55. The
public and long-established habits of action, 57. Fear of
the new, 59. Irreparable consequences, 62. Variation of
state-functions according to circumstances of time and
place, 65. State and government, 66. State and society,
69. The pluralistic theory, 73.
III. THE DEMOCRATIC STATE 75
Private and representative rôles of officials, 76.
Selection of rulers by irrelevant methods, 78. The
problem of control of officials, 82. Meanings of
democracy, 83. Fallacy as to origin of democratic
government, 84. Influence of non-political factors, 85.
The origin of “individualism,” 86. Influence of the
new industry; the theory of “natural” economic laws,
90. James Mill’s philosophy of democratic government,
93. Criticism of “individualism,” 95. Criticism of
antithesis of natural and artificial, 102. Wants and
aims as functions of social life, 104. Persistence of
pre-industrial institutions, 108. Final problem, 109.
IV. ECLIPSE OF THE PUBLIC 110
Local origin of American democratic government, 111.
National unification due to technological factors, 114.
Submergence of the public, 116. Disparity of inherited
ideas and machinery with actual conditions, 117.
Illustrations of resulting failures, 119. Problem of
discovering the public, 122. Democracy versus the expert,
123. Explanation of eclipse of public, 126. Illustrated
by the World War, 127. Application of criteria of the
public, 129. Failure of traditional principles, 131.
Political apathy accounted for, 134. Need of experts,
135. Rivals of political interest, 138. Ideals and
instrumentalities, 141.
V. SEARCH FOR THE GREAT COMMUNITY 143
Democracy as idea and as governmental behavior, 143.
Problem of the Great Community, 147. Meaning of the
democratic ideal, 148. Democracy and community life, 149.
Community and associated activity, 151. Communication
and the community, 152. Intellectual conditions of the
Great Community, 155. Habit and intelligence, 158.
Science and knowledge, 163. Limitations upon social
inquiry, 166. Isolation of social inquiry, 171. Pure and
applied science, 172. Communication and public opinion,
173. Limitations of distribution of knowledge, 176.
Communication as art, 183.
VI. THE PROBLEM OF METHOD 185
Antithesis between individual and social as obstruction
to method, 186. Meaning of individual, 185. Where
opposition lies, 191. Meaning of absolutistic logic,
194. Illustration from doctrine of “evolution,” 196.
From psychology, 197. Difference of human and physical
science, 199. Experimental inquiry as alternative, 202.
Method, and government by experts, 203. Democracy and
education by discussion, 206. The level of intelligence,
210. The necessity of local community life, 211.
Problem of restoration, 213. Tendencies making for
reëstablishment, 215. Connection of this problem with the
problem of political intelligence, 217.
INDEX 221
THE PUBLIC
AND ITS PROBLEMS
CHAPTER I
SEARCH FOR THE PUBLIC
If one wishes to realize the distance which may lie between “facts” and
the meaning of facts, let one go to the field of social discussion.
Many persons seem to suppose that facts carry their meaning along
with themselves on their face. Accumulate enough of them, and their
interpretation stares out at you. The development of physical science
is thought to confirm the idea. But the power of physical facts to
coerce belief does not reside in the bare phenomena. It proceeds from
method, from the technique of research and calculation. No one is ever
forced by just the collection of facts to accept a particular theory
of their meaning, so long as one retains intact some other doctrine by
which he can marshal them. Only when the facts are allowed free play
for the suggestion of new points of view is any significant conversion
of conviction as to meaning possible. Take away from physical science
its laboratory apparatus and its mathematical technique, and the human
imagination might run wild in its theories of interpretation even if we
suppose the brute facts to remain the same.
In any event, social philosophy exhibits an immense gap between facts
and doctrines. Compare, for example, the facts of politics with
the theories which are extant regarding the nature of the state. If
inquirers confine themselves to observed phenomena, the behavior of
kings, presidents, legislators, judges, sheriffs, assessors and all
other public officials, surely a reasonable consensus is not difficult
to attain. Contrast with this agreement the differences which exist
as to the basis, nature, functions and justification of the state,
and note the seemingly hopeless disagreement. If one asks not for an
enumeration of facts, but for a definition of the state, one is plunged
into controversy, into a medley of contradictory clamors. According
to one tradition, which claims to derive from Aristotle, the state
is associated and harmonized life lifted to its highest potency; the
state is at once the keystone of the social arch and is the arch in its
wholeness. According to another view, it is just one of many social
institutions, having a narrow but important function, that of arbiter
in the conflict of other social units. Every group springs out of and
realizes a positive human interest; the church, religious values;
guilds, unions and corporations material economic interests, and so on.
The state, however, has no concern of its own; its purpose is formal,
like that of the leader of the orchestra who plays no instrument and
makes no music, but who serves to keep other players who do produce
music in unison with one another. Still a third view has it that
the state is organized oppression, at once a social excrescence, a
parasite and a tyrant. A fourth is that it is an instrument more or
less clumsy for keeping individuals from quarreling too much with one
another.
Confusion grows when we enter subdivisions of these different views
and the grounds offered for them. In one philosophy, the state is the
apex and completion of human association, and manifests the highest
realization of all distinctively human capacities. The view had a
certain pertinency when it was first formulated. It developed in an
antique city-state, where to be fully a free man and to be a citizen
participating in the drama, the sports, the religion and the government
of the community were equivalent affairs. But the view persists and
is applied to the state of to-day. Another view coördinates the state
with the church (or as a variant view slightly subordinates it to
the latter) as the secular arm of Deity maintaining outward order
and decorum among men. A modern theory idealizes the state and its
activities by borrowing the conceptions of reason and will, magnifying
them till the state appears as the objectified manifestation of a will
and reason which far transcend the desires and purposes which can be
found among individuals or assemblages of individuals.
We are not concerned, however, with writing either a cyclopedia or
history of political doctrines. So we pause with these arbitrary
illustrations of the proposition that little common ground has been
discovered between the factual phenomena of political behavior and the
interpretation of the meaning of these phenomena. One way out of the
impasse is to consign the whole matter of meaning and interpretation
to political philosophy as distinguished from political science. Then
it can be pointed out that futile speculation is a companion of all
philosophy. The moral is to drop all doctrines of this kind overboard,
and stick to facts verifiably ascertained.
The remedy urged is simple and attractive. But it is not possible to
employ it. Political facts are not outside human desire and judgment.
Change men’s estimate of the _value_ of existing political agencies and
forms, and the latter change more or less. The different theories which
mark political philosophy do not grow up externally to the facts which
they aim to interpret; they are amplifications of selected factors
among those facts. Modifiable and altering human habits sustain and
generate political phenomena. These habits are not wholly informed
by reasoned purpose and deliberate choice--far from it--but they are
more or less amenable to them. Bodies of men are constantly engaged
in attacking and trying to change some political habits, while other
bodies of men are actively supporting and justifying them. It is mere
pretense, then, to suppose that we can stick by the _de facto_, and
not raise at some points the question of _de jure_: the question of by
what right, the question of legitimacy. And such a question has a way
of growing until it has become a question as to the nature of the state
itself. The alternatives before us are not factually limited science
on one hand and uncontrolled speculation on the other. The choice is
between blind, unreasoned attack and defense on the one hand, and
discriminating criticism employing intelligent method and a conscious
criterion on the other.
The prestige of the mathematical and physical sciences is great, and
properly so. But the difference between facts which are what they
are independent of human desire and endeavor and facts which are to
some extent what they are because of human interest and purpose, and
which alter with alteration in the latter, cannot be got rid of by
any methodology. The more sincerely we appeal to facts, the greater
is the importance of the distinction between facts which condition
human activity and facts which are conditioned by human activity. In
the degree which we ignore this difference, social science becomes
pseudo-science. Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian political ideas are
not merely theories dwelling in the human mind remote from facts of
American political behavior. They are expressions of chosen phases and
factors among those facts, but they are also something more: namely,
forces which have shaped those facts and which are still contending
to shape them in the future this way and that. There is more than a
speculative difference between a theory of the state which regards it
as an instrument in protecting individuals in the rights they already
have, and one which conceives its function to be the effecting of
a more equitable distribution of rights among individuals. For the
theories are held and applied by legislators in congress and by judges
on the bench and make a difference in the subsequent facts themselves.
I make no doubt that the practical influence of the political
philosophies of Aristotle, the Stoics, St. Thomas, Locke, Rousseau,
Kant and Hegel has often been exaggerated in comparison with the
influence of circumstances. But a due measure of efficacy cannot be
denied them on the ground which is sometimes proffered; it cannot be
denied on the ground that ideas are without potency. For ideas belong
to human beings who have bodies, and there is no separation between the
structures and processes of the part of the body that entertains the
ideas and the part that performs acts. Brain and muscles work together,
and the brains of men are much more important data for social science
than are their muscular system and their sense organs.
It is not our intention to engage in a discussion of political
philosophies. The concept of the state, like most concepts which
are introduced by “The,” is both too rigid and too tied up with
controversies to be of ready use. It is a concept which can be
approached by a flank movement more easily than by a frontal attack.
The moment we utter the words “The State” a score of intellectual
ghosts rise to obscure our vision. Without our intention and without
our notice, the notion of “The State” draws us imperceptibly into a
consideration of the logical relationship of various ideas to one
another, and away from facts of human activity. It is better, if
possible, to start from the latter and see if we are not led thereby
into an idea of something which will turn out to implicate the marks
and signs which characterize political behavior.
There is nothing novel in this method of approach. But very much
depends upon what we select from which to start and very much depends
upon whether we select our point of departure in order to tell at
the terminus what the state _ought_ to be or what it _is_. If we are
too concerned with the former, there is a likelihood that we shall
unwittingly have doctored the facts selected in order to come out at a
predetermined point. The phase of human action we should _not_ start
with is that to which direct causative power is attributed. We should
not look for state-forming forces. If we do, we are likely to get
involved in mythology. To explain the origin of the state by saying
that man is a political animal is to travel in a verbal circle. It
is like attributing religion to a religious instinct, the family to
marital and parental affection, and language to a natural endowment
which impels men to speech. Such theories merely reduplicate in a
so-called causal force the effects to be accounted for. They are of a
piece with the notorious potency of opium to put men to sleep because
of its dormitive power.
The warning is not directed against a man of straw. The attempt to
derive the state, or any other social institution, from strictly
“psychological” data is in point. Appeal to a gregarious instinct to
account for social arrangements is the outstanding example of the
lazy fallacy. Men do not run together and join in a larger mass as
do drops of quicksilver, and if they did the result would not be a
state nor any mode of human association. The instincts, whether named
gregariousness, or sympathy, or the sense of mutual dependence, or
domination on one side and abasement and subjection on the other, at
best account for everything in general and nothing in particular. And
at worst, the alleged instinct and natural endowment appealed to as
a causal force themselves represent physiological tendencies which
have previously been shaped into habits of action and expectation by
means of the very social conditions they are supposed to explain. Men
who have lived in herds develop attachment to the horde to which they
have become used; children who have perforce lived in dependence grow
into habits of dependence and subjection. The inferiority complex is
socially acquired, and the “instinct” of display and mastery is but
its other face. There are structural organs which physiologically
manifest themselves in vocalizations as the organs of a bird induce
song. But the barking of dogs and the song of birds are enough to prove
that these native tendencies do not generate language. In order to be
converted into language, native vocalization requires transformation by
extrinsic conditions, both organic and extra-organic or environmental:
formation, be it noted, not just stimulation. The cry of a baby can
doubtless be described in purely organic terms, but the wail becomes
a noun or verb only by its consequences in the responsive behavior of
others. This responsive behavior takes the form of nurture and care,
themselves dependent upon tradition, custom and social patterns. Why
not postulate an “instinct” of infanticide as well as one of guidance
and instruction? Or an “instinct” of exposing girls and taking care of
boys?
We may, however, take the argument in a less mythological form than
is found in the current appeal to social instincts of one sort or
another. The activities of animals, like those of minerals and plants,
are correlated with their structure. Quadrupeds run, worms crawl,
fish swim, birds fly. They are made that way; it is “the nature of
the beast.” We do not gain anything by inserting instincts to run,
creep, swim and fly between the structure and the act. But the strictly
organic conditions which lead men to join, assemble, foregather,
combine, are just those which lead other animals to unite in swarms and
packs and herds. In describing what is common in human and other animal
junctions and consolidations we fail to touch what is distinctively
human in human associations. These structural conditions and acts may
be _sine qua nons_ of human societies; but so are the attractions
and repulsions which are exhibited in inanimate things. Physics and
chemistry as well as zoölogy may inform us of some of the conditions
without which human beings would not associate. But they do not furnish
us with the _sufficient_ conditions of community life and of the forms
which it takes.
We must in any case start from acts which are performed, not from
hypothetical causes for those acts, and consider their consequences. We
must also introduce intelligence, or the observation of consequences
_as_ consequences, that is, in connection with the acts from which
they proceed. Since we must introduce it, it is better to do so
knowingly than it is to smuggle it in in a way which deceives not
only the customs officer--the reader--but ourselves as well. We take
then our point of departure from the objective fact that human acts
have consequences upon others, that some of these consequences are
perceived, and that their perception leads to subsequent effort to
control action so as to secure some consequences and avoid others.
Following this clew, we are led to remark that the consequences are
of two kinds, those which affect the persons directly engaged in a
transaction, and those which affect others beyond those immediately
concerned. In this distinction we find the germ of the distinction
between the private and the public. When indirect consequences are
recognized and there is effort to regulate them, something having
the traits of a state comes into existence. When the consequences of
an action are confined, or are thought to be confined, mainly to the
persons directly engaged in it, the transaction is a private one. When
A and B carry on a conversation together the action is a trans-action:
both are concerned in it; its results pass, as it were, across from one
to the other. One or other or both may be helped or harmed thereby.
But, presumably, the consequences of advantage and injury do not extend
beyond A and B; the activity lies between them; it is private. Yet if
it is found that the consequences of conversation extend beyond the two
directly concerned, that they affect the welfare of many others, the
act acquires a public capacity, whether the conversation be carried
on by a king and his prime minister or by Cataline and a fellow
conspirator or by merchants planning to monopolize a market.
The distinction between private and public is thus in no sense
equivalent to the distinction between individual and social, even if
we suppose that the latter distinction has a definite meaning. Many
private acts are social; their consequences contribute to the welfare
of the community or affect its status and prospects. In the broad
sense any transaction deliberately carried on between two or more
persons is social in quality. It is a form of associated behavior and
its consequences may influence further associations. A man may serve
others, even in the community at large, in carrying on a private
business. To some extent it is true, as Adam Smith asserted, that
our breakfast table is better supplied by the convergent outcome of
activities of farmers, grocers and butchers carrying on private
affairs with a view to private profit than it would be if we were
served on a basis of philanthropy or public spirit. Communities have
been supplied with works of art, with scientific discoveries, because
of the personal delight found by private persons in engaging in
these activities. There are private philanthropists who act so that
needy persons or the community as a whole profit by the endowment of
libraries, hospitals and educational institutions. In short, private
acts may be socially valuable both by indirect consequences and by
direct intention.
There is therefore no necessary connection between the private
character of an act and its non-social or anti-social character. The
public, moreover, cannot be identified with the socially useful. One
of the most regular activities of the politically organized community
has been waging war. Even the most bellicose of militarists will
hardly contend that all wars have been socially helpful, or deny that
some have been so destructive of social values that it would have
been infinitely better if they had not been waged. The argument for
the non-equivalence of the public and the social, in any praiseworthy
sense of social, does not rest upon the case of war alone. There is no
one, I suppose, so enamored of political action as to hold that it has
never been short-sighted, foolish and harmful. There are even those
who hold that the presumption is always that social loss will result
from agents of the public doing anything which could be done by persons
in their private capacity. There are many more who protest that some
special public activity, whether prohibition, a protective tariff or
the expanded meaning given the Monroe Doctrine, is baleful to society.
Indeed every serious political dispute turns upon the question whether
a given political act is socially beneficial or harmful.
Just as behavior is not anti-social or non-social because privately
undertaken, it is not necessarily socially valuable because carried
on in the name of the public by public agents. The argument has not
carried us far, but at least it has warned us against identifying the
community and its interests with the state or the politically organized
community. And the differentiation may dispose us to look with more
favor upon the proposition already advanced: namely, that the line
between private and public is to be drawn on the basis of the extent
and scope of the consequences of acts which are so important as to
need control, whether by inhibition or by promotion. We distinguish
private and public buildings, private and public schools, private
paths and public highways, private assets and public funds, private
persons and public officials. It is our thesis that in this distinction
we find the key to the nature and office of the state. It is not
without significance that etymologically “private” is defined in
opposition to “official,” a private person being one deprived of public
position. The public consists of all those who are affected by the
indirect consequences of transactions to such an extent that it is
deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for.
Officials are those who look out for and take care of the interests
thus affected. Since those who are indirectly affected are not direct
participants in the transactions in question, it is necessary that
certain persons be set apart to represent them, and see to it that
their interests are conserved and protected. The buildings, property,
funds, and other physical resources involved in the performance of
this office are _res publica_, the common-wealth. The public as far as
organized by means of officials and material agencies to care for the
extensive and enduring indirect consequences of transactions between
persons is the _Populus_.
It is a commonplace that legal agencies for protecting the persons and
properties of members of a community, and for redressing wrongs which
they suffer, did not always exist. Legal institutions derive from
an earlier period when the right of self-help obtained. If a person
was harmed, it was strictly up to him what he should do to get even.
Injuring another and exacting a penalty for an injury received were
private transactions. They were the affairs of those directly concerned
and nobody else’s direct business. But the injured party obtained
readily the help of friends and relatives, and the aggressor did
likewise. Hence consequences of the quarrel did not remain confined to
those immediately concerned. Feuds ensued, and the blood-quarrel might
implicate large numbers and endure for generations. The recognition
of this extensive and lasting embroilment and the harm wrought by it
to whole families brought a public into existence. The transaction
ceased to concern only the immediate parties to it. Those indirectly
affected formed a public which took steps to conserve its interests by
instituting composition and other means of pacification to localize the
trouble.
The facts are simple and familiar. But they seem to present in
embryonic form the traits that define a state, its agencies and
officers. The instance illustrates what was meant when it said that
it is fallacy to try to determine the nature of the state in terms
of direct causal factors. Its essential point has to do with the
enduring and extensive consequences of behavior, which like all
behavior proceeds in ultimate analysis through individual human beings.
Recognition of evil consequences brought about a common interest which
required for its maintenance certain measures and rules, together with
the selection of certain persons as their guardians, interpreters, and,
if need be, their executors.
If the account given is at all in the right direction, it explains
the gap already mentioned between the facts of political action and
theories of the state. Men have looked in the wrong place. They have
sought for the key to the nature of the state in the field of agencies,
in that of doers of deeds, or in some will or purpose back of the
deeds. They have sought to explain the state in terms of authorship.
Ultimately all deliberate choices proceed from somebody in particular;
acts are performed by somebody, and all arrangements and plans are made
by somebody in the most concrete sense of “somebody.” Some John Doe
and Richard Roe figure in every transaction. We shall not, then, find
the public if we look for it on the side of originators of voluntary
actions. Some John Smith and his congeners decide whether or not to
grow wheat and how much, where and how to invest money, what roads to
build and travel, whether to wage war and if so how, what laws to pass
and which to obey and disobey. The actual alternative to deliberate
acts of individuals is not action by the public; it is routine,
impulsive and other unreflected acts also performed by individuals.
Individual human beings may lose their identity in a mob or in a
political convention or in a joint-stock corporation or at the polls.
But this does not mean that some mysterious collective agency is making
decisions, but that some few persons who know what they are about are
taking advantage of massed force to conduct the mob their way, boss
a political machine, and manage the affairs of corporate business.
When the public or state is involved in making social arrangements
like passing laws, enforcing a contract, conferring a franchise, it
still acts through concrete persons. The persons are now officers,
representatives of a public and shared interest. The difference is
an important one. But it is not a difference between single human
beings and a collective impersonal will. It is between persons in their
private and in their official or representative character. The quality
presented is not authorship but authority, the authority of recognized
consequences to control the behavior which generates and averts
extensive and enduring results of weal and woe. Officials are indeed
public agents, but agents in the sense of factors doing the business of
others in securing and obviating consequences that concern them.
When we look in the wrong place we naturally do not find what we are
looking for. The worst of it is, however, that looking in the wrong
place, to causal forces instead of consequences, the outcome of the
looking becomes arbitrary. There is no check on it. “Interpretation”
runs wild. Hence the variety of conflicting theories and the lack of
consensus of opinion. One might argue _a priori_ that the continual
conflict of theories about the state is itself proof that the problem
has been wrongly posed. For, as we have previously remarked, the main
facts of political action, while the phenomena vary immensely with
diversity of time and place, are not hidden even when they are complex.
They are facts of human behavior accessible to human observation.
Existence of a multitude of contradictory theories of the state, which
is so baffling from the standpoint of the theories themselves, is
readily explicable the moment we see that all the theories, in spite of
their divergence from one another, spring from a root of shared error:
the taking of causal agency instead of consequences as the heart of the
problem.
Given this attitude and postulate, some men at some time will find the
causal agency in a metaphysical nisus attributed to nature; and the
state will then be explained in terms of an “essence” of man realizing
itself in an end of perfected Society. Others, influenced by other
preconceptions and other desires, will find the required author in
the will of God reproducing through the medium of fallen humanity
such an image of divine order and justice as the corrupt material
allows. Others seek for it in the meeting of the wills of individuals
who come together and by contract or mutual pledging of loyalties
bring a state into existence. Still others find it in an autonomous
and transcendent will embodied in all men as a universal within their
particular beings, a will which by its own inner nature commands the
establishment of external conditions in which it is possible for will
to express outwardly its freedom. Others find it in the fact that mind
or reason is either an attribute of reality or is reality itself, while
they condole that difference and plurality of minds, individuality,
is an illusion attributable to sense, or is merely an appearance in
contrast with the monistic reality of reason. When various opinions
all spring from a common and shared error, one is as good as another,
and the accidents of education, temperament, class interest and the
dominant circumstances of the age decide which is adopted. Reason
comes into play only to find justification for the opinion which has
been adopted, instead of to analyze human behavior with respect to its
consequences and to frame polities accordingly. It is an old story
that natural philosophy steadily progressed only after an intellectual
revolution. This consisted in abandoning the search for causes and
forces and turning to the analysis of what is going on and how it goes
on. Political philosophy has still in large measure to take to heart
this lesson.
The failure to note that the problem is that of perceiving in a
discriminating and thorough way the consequences of human action
(including negligence and inaction) and of instituting measures and
means of caring for these consequences is not confined to production
of conflicting and irreconcilable theories of the state. The failure
has also had the effect of perverting the views of those who, up
to a certain point, perceived the truth. We have asserted that
all deliberate choices and plans are finally the work of single
human beings. Thoroughly false conclusions have been drawn from
this observation. By thinking still in terms of causal forces, the
conclusion has been drawn from this fact that the state, the public,
is a fiction, a mask for private desires for power and position.
Not only the state but society itself has been pulverized into an
aggregate of unrelated wants and wills. As a logical consequence, the
state is conceived either as sheer oppression born of arbitrary power
and sustained in fraud, or as a pooling of the forces of single men
into a massive force which single persons are unable to resist, the
pooling being a measure of desperation since its sole alternative is
the conflict of all with all which generates a life that is helpless
and brutish. Thus the state appears either a monster to be destroyed or
as a Leviathan to be cherished. In short, under the influence of the
prime fallacy that the problem of the state concerns causal forces,
individualism, as an ism, as a philosophy, has been generated.
While the doctrine is false, it sets out from a fact. Wants, choices
and purposes have their locus in single beings; behavior which
manifests desire, intent and resolution proceeds from them in their
singularity. But only intellectual laziness leads us to conclude that
since the form of thought and decision is individual, their content,
their subject-matter, is also something purely personal. Even if
“consciousness” were the wholly private matter that the individualistic
tradition in philosophy and psychology supposes it to be, it would
still be true that consciousness is _of_ objects, not of itself.
Association in the sense of connection and combination is a “law” of
everything known to exist. Singular things act, but they act together.
Nothing has been discovered which acts in entire isolation. The action
of everything is along with the action of other things. The “along
with” is of such a kind that the behavior of each is modified by its
connection with others. There are trees which can grow only in a
forest. Seeds of many plants can successfully germinate and develop
only under conditions furnished by the presence of other plants.
Reproduction of kind is dependent upon the activities of insects which
bring about fertilization. The life-history of an animal cell is
conditioned upon connection with what other cells are doing. Electrons,
atoms and molecules exemplify the omnipresence of conjoint behavior.
There is no mystery about the fact of association, of an interconnected
action which affects the activity of singular elements. There is no
sense in asking how individuals come to be associated. They exist and
operate in association. If there is any mystery about the matter, it
is the mystery that the universe is the kind of universe it is. Such a
mystery could not be explained without going outside the universe. And
if one should go to an outside source to account for it, some logician,
without an excessive draft upon his ingenuity, would rise to remark
that the outsider would have to be connected with the universe in
order to account for anything in it. We should still be just where we
started, with the fact of connection as a fact to be accepted.
There is, however, an intelligible question about human
association:--Not the question how individuals or singular beings come
to be connected, but how they come to be connected in just those ways
which give human communities traits so different from those which
mark assemblies of electrons, unions of trees in forests, swarms of
insects, herds of sheep, and constellations of stars. When we consider
the difference we at once come upon the fact that the consequences of
conjoint action take on a new value when they are observed. For notice
of the effects of connected action forces men to reflect upon the
connection itself; it makes it an object of attention and interest.
Each acts, in so far as the connection is known, in view of the
connection. Individuals still do the thinking, desiring and purposing,
but _what_ they think of is the consequences of their behavior upon
that of others and that of others upon themselves.
Each human being is born an infant. He is immature, helpless, dependent
upon the activities of others. That many of these dependent beings
survive is proof that others in some measure look out for them, take
care of them. Mature and better equipped beings are aware of the
consequences of their acts upon those of the young. They not only act
conjointly with them, but they act in that especial kind of association
which manifests interest in the consequences of their conduct upon the
life and growth of the young.
Continued physiological existence of the young is only one phase
of interest in the consequences of association. Adults are equally
concerned to act so that the immature learn to think, feel, desire and
habitually conduct themselves in certain ways. Not the least of the
consequences which are striven for is that the young shall themselves
learn to judge, purpose and choose from the standpoint of associated
behavior and its consequences. In fact, only too often this interest
takes the form of endeavoring to make the young believe and plan
just as adults do. This instance alone is enough to show that while
singular beings in their singularity think, want and decide, _what_
they think and strive for, the content of their beliefs and intentions
is a subject-matter provided by association. Thus man is not merely
_de facto_ associated, but he _becomes_ a social animal in the make-up
of his ideas, sentiments and deliberate behavior. _What_ he believes,
hopes for and aims at is the outcome of association and intercourse.
The only thing which imports obscurity and mystery into the influence
of association upon what individual persons want and act for is the
effort to discover alleged, special, original, society-making causal
forces, whether instincts, fiats of will, personal, or an immanent,
universal, practical reason, or an indwelling, metaphysical, social
essence and nature. These things do not explain, for they are more
mysterious than are the facts they are evoked to account for. The
planets in a constellation would form a community if they were aware of
the connections of the activities of each with those of the others and
could use this knowledge to direct behavior.
We have made a digression from consideration of the state to the wider
topic of society. However, the excursion enables us to distinguish the
state from other forms of social life. There is an old tradition which
regards the state and completely organized society as the same thing.
The state is said to be the complete and inclusive realization of all
social institutions. Whatever values result from any and every social
arrangement are gathered together and asserted to be the work of the
state. The counterpart of this method is that philosophical anarchism
which assembles all the evils that result from all forms of human
grouping and attributes them _en masse_ to the state, whose elimination
would then bring in a millennium of voluntary fraternal organization.
That the state should be to some a deity and to others a devil is
another evidence of the defects of the premises from which discussion
sets out. One theory is as indiscriminate as the other.
There is, however, a definite criterion by which to demarcate the
organized public from other modes of community life. Friendships, for
example, are non-political forms of association. They are characterized
by an intimate and subtle sense of the fruits of intercourse. They
contribute to experience some of its most precious values. Only the
exigencies of a preconceived theory would confuse with the state that
texture of friendships and attachments which is the chief bond in any
community, or would insist that the former depends upon the latter
for existence. Men group themselves also for scientific inquiry, for
religious worship, for artistic production and enjoyment, for sport,
for giving and receiving instruction, for industrial and commercial
undertakings. In each case some combined or conjoint action, which has
grown up out of “natural,” that is, biological, conditions and from
local contiguity, results in producing distinctive consequences--that
is, consequences which differ in kind from those of isolated behavior.
When these consequences are intellectually and emotionally appreciated,
a shared interest is generated and the nature of the interconnected
behavior is thereby transformed. Each form of association has its own
peculiar quality and value, and no person in his senses confuses one
with another. The characteristic of the public as a state springs from
the fact that all modes of associated behavior may have extensive
and enduring consequences which involve others beyond those directly
engaged in them. When these consequences are in turn realized in
thought and sentiment, recognition of them reacts to remake the
conditions out of which they arose. Consequences have to be taken
care of, looked out for. This supervision and regulation cannot be
effected by the primary groupings themselves. For the essence of the
consequences which call a public into being is the fact that they
expand beyond those directly engaged in producing them. Consequently
special agencies and measures must be formed if they are to be attended
to; or else some existing group must take on new functions. The obvious
external mark of the organization of a public or of a state is thus the
existence of officials. Government is not the state, for that includes
the public as well as the rulers charged with special duties and
powers. The public, however, is organized in and through those officers
who act in behalf of its interests.
Thus the state represents an important although distinctive and
restricted social interest. From this point of view there is nothing
extraordinary in the preëminence of the claims of the organized public
over other interests when once they are called into play, nor in
its total indifference and irrelevancy to friendships, associations
for science, art and religion under most circumstances. If the
consequences of a friendship threaten the public, then it is treated
as a conspiracy; usually it is not the state’s business or concern.
Men join each other in partnership as a matter of course to do a piece
of work more profitably or for mutual defense. Let its operations
exceed a certain limit, and others not participating in it find their
security or prosperity menaced by it, and suddenly the gears of the
state are in mesh. Thus it happens that the state, instead of being
all absorbing and inclusive, is under some circumstances the most idle
and empty of social arrangements. Nevertheless, the temptation to
generalize from these instances and conclude that the state generically
is of no significance is at once challenged by the fact that when a
family connection, a church, a trade union, a business corporation,
or an educational institution conducts itself so as to affect large
numbers outside of itself, those who are affected form a public which
endeavors to act through suitable structures, and thus to organize
itself for oversight and regulation.
I know of no better way in which to apprehend the absurdity of the
claims which are sometimes made in behalf of society politically
organized than to call to mind the influence upon community life of
Socrates, Buddha, Jesus, Aristotle, Confucius, Homer, Vergil, Dante,
St. Thomas, Shakespeare, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Boyle, Locke,
Rousseau and countless others, and then to ask ourselves if we conceive
these men to be officers of the state. Any method which so broadens
the scope of the state as to lead to such conclusion merely makes the
state a name for the totality of all kinds of associations. The moment
we have taken the word as loosely as that, it is at once necessary to
distinguish, within it, the state in its usual political and legal
sense. On the other hand, if one is tempted to eliminate or disregard
the state, one may think of Pericles, Alexander, Julius and Augustus
Cæsar, Elizabeth, Cromwell, Richelieu, Napoleon, Bismarck and hundreds
of names of that kind. One dimly feels that they must have had a
private life, but how insignificant it bulks in comparison with their
action as representatives of a state!
This conception of statehood does not imply any belief as to the
propriety or reasonableness of any particular political act, measure or
system. Observations of consequences are at least as subject to error
and illusion as is perception of natural objects. Judgments about
what to undertake so as to regulate them, and how to do it, are as
fallible as other plans. Mistakes pile up and consolidate themselves
into laws and methods of administration which are more harmful than
the consequences which they were originally intended to control. And
as all political history shows, the power and prestige which attend
command of official position render rule something to be grasped and
exploited for its own sake. Power to govern is distributed by the
accident of birth or by the possession of qualities which enable
a person to obtain office, but which are quite irrelevant to the
performance of its representative functions. But the need which calls
forth the organization of the public by means of rulers and agencies of
government persists and to some extent is incarnated in political fact.
Such progress as political history records depends upon some luminous
emergence of the idea from the mass of irrelevancies which obscure and
clutter it. Then some reconstruction occurs which provides the function
with organs more apt for its fulfillment. Progress is not steady and
continuous. Retrogression is as periodic as advance. Industry and
inventions in technology, for example, create means which alter the
modes of associated behavior and which radically change the quantity,
character and place of impact of their indirect consequences.
These changes are extrinsic to political forms which, once
established, persist of their own momentum. The new public which
is generated remains long inchoate, unorganized, because it cannot
use inherited political agencies. The latter, if elaborate and well
institutionalized, obstruct the organization of the new public. They
prevent that development of new forms of the state which might grow
up rapidly were social life more fluid, less precipitated into set
political and legal molds. To form itself, the public has to break
existing political forms. This is hard to do because these forms are
themselves the regular means of instituting change. The public which
generated political forms is passing away, but the power and lust of
possession remains in the hands of the officers and agencies which the
dying public instituted. This is why the change of the form of states
is so often effected only by revolution. The creation of adequately
flexible and responsive political and legal machinery has so far been
beyond the wit of man. An epoch in which the needs of a newly forming
public are counteracted by established forms of the state is one in
which there is increasing disparagement and disregard of the state.
General apathy, neglect and contempt find expression in resort to
various short-cuts of direct action. And direct action is taken by many
other interests than those which employ “direct action” as a slogan,
often most energetically by intrenched class-interests which profess
the greatest reverence for the established “law and order” of the
existing state. By its very nature, a state is ever something to be
scrutinized, investigated, searched for. Almost as soon as its form is
stabilized, it needs to be re-made.
Thus the problem of discovering the state is not a problem for
theoretical inquirers engaged solely in surveying institutions which
already exist. It is a practical problem of human beings living in
association with one another, of mankind generically. It is a complex
problem. It demands power to perceive and recognize the consequences
of the behavior of individuals joined in groups and to trace them
to their source and origin. It involves selection of persons to
serve as representatives of the interests created by these perceived
consequences and to define the functions which they shall possess
and employ. It requires institution of a government such that those
having the renown and power which goes with the exercise of these
functions shall employ them for the public and not turn them to their
own private benefit. It is no cause for wonder, then, that states have
been many, not only in number but in type and kind. For there have
been countless forms of joint activity with correspondingly diverse
consequences. Power to detect consequences has varied especially with
the instrumentalities of knowledge at hand. Rulers have been selected
on all kinds of different grounds. Their functions have varied and
so have their will and zeal to represent common interests. Only the
exigencies of a rigid philosophy can lead us to suppose that there is
some one form or idea of The State which these protean historic states
have realized in various degrees of perfection. The only statement
which can be made is a purely formal one: the state is the organization
of the public effected through officials for the protection of the
interests shared by its members. But what the public may be, what the
officials are, how adequately they perform their function, are things
we have to go to history to discover.
Nevertheless, our conception gives a criterion for determining how
good a particular state is: namely, the degree of organization of
the public which is attained, and the degree in which its officers
are so constituted as to perform their function of caring for
public interests. But there is no _a priori_ rule which can be laid
down and by which when it is followed a good state will be brought
into existence. In no two ages or places is there the same public.
Conditions make the consequences of associated action and the knowledge
of them different. In addition the means by which a public can
determine the government to serve its interests vary. Only formally can
we say what the best state would be. In concrete fact, in actual and
concrete organization and structure, there is no form of state which
can be said to be the best: not at least till history is ended, and one
can survey all its varied forms. The formation of states must be an
experimental process. The trial process may go on with diverse degrees
of blindness and accident, and at the cost of unregulated procedures
of cut and try, of fumbling and groping, without insight into what men
are after or clear knowledge of a good state even when it is achieved.
Or it may proceed more intelligently, because guided by knowledge of
the conditions which must be fulfilled. But it is still experimental.
And since conditions of action and of inquiry and knowledge are always
changing, the experiment must always be retried; the State must always
be rediscovered. Except, once more, in formal statement of conditions
to be met, we have no idea what history may still bring forth. It is
not the business of political philosophy and science to determine what
the state in general should or must be. What they may do is to aid in
creation of methods such that experimentation may go on less blindly,
less at the mercy of accident, more intelligently, so that men may
learn from their errors and profit by their successes. The belief in
political fixity, of the sanctity of some form of state consecrated by
the efforts of our fathers and hallowed by tradition, is one of the
stumbling-blocks in the way of orderly and directed change; it is an
invitation to revolt and revolution.
As the argument has moved to and fro, it will conduce to clearness
to summarize its steps. Conjoint, combined, associated action is a
universal trait of the behavior of things. Such action has results.
Some of the results of human collective action are perceived, that
is, they are noted in such ways that they are taken account of. Then
there arise purposes, plans, measures and means, to secure consequences
which are liked and eliminate those which are found obnoxious. Thus
perception generates a common interest; that is, those affected by
the consequences are perforce concerned in conduct of all those who
along with themselves share in bringing about the results. Sometimes
the consequences are confined to those who directly share in the
transaction which produces them. In other cases they extend far
beyond those immediately engaged in producing them. Thus two kinds of
interests and of measures of regulation of acts in view of consequences
are generated. In the first, interest and control are limited to
those directly engaged; in the second, they extend to those who do
not directly share in the performance of acts. If, then, the interest
constituted by their being affected by the actions in question is to
have any practical influence, control over the actions which produce
them must occur by some indirect means.
So far the statements, it is submitted, set forth matters of actual and
ascertainable fact. Now follows the hypothesis. Those indirectly and
seriously affected for good or for evil form a group distinctive enough
to require recognition and a name. The name selected is The Public.
This public is organized and made effective by means of representatives
who as guardians of custom, as legislators, as executives, judges,
etc., care for its especial interests by methods intended to regulate
the conjoint actions of individuals and groups. Then and in so far,
association adds to itself political organization, and something which
may be government comes into being: the public is a political state.
The direct confirmation of the hypothesis is found in the statement
of the series of observable and verifiable matters of fact. These
constitute conditions which are sufficient to account, so it is held,
for the characteristic phenomena of political life, or state activity.
If they do, it is superfluous to seek for other explanation. In
conclusion, two qualifications should be added. The account just given
is meant to be generic; it is consequently schematic, and omits many
differential conditions, some of which receive attention in subsequent
chapters. The other point is that in the negative part of the argument,
the attack upon theories which would explain the state by means of
special causal forces and agencies, there is no denial of causal
relations or connections among phenomena themselves. That is obviously
assumed at every point. There can be no consequences and measures to
regulate the mode and quality of their occurrence without the causal
nexus. What is denied is an appeal to _special_ forces outside the
series of observable connected phenomena. Such causal powers are no
different in kind to the occult forces from which physical science
had to emancipate itself. At best, they are but phases of the related
phenomena themselves which are then employed to account for the facts.
What is needed to direct and make fruitful social inquiry is a method
which proceeds on the basis of the interrelations of observable acts
and their results. Such is the gist of the method we propose to follow.
CHAPTER II
DISCOVERY OF THE STATE
If we look in the wrong place for the public we shall never locate
the state. If we do not ask what are the conditions which promote
and obstruct the organization of the public into a social group with
definite functions, we shall never grasp the problem involved in the
development and transformation of states. If we do not perceive that
this organization is equivalent to the equipment of the public with
official representatives to care for the interests of the public, we
shall miss the clew to the nature of government. These are conclusions
reached or suggested by the discussion of the last hour. The wrong
place to look, as we saw, is in the realm of alleged causal agency,
of authorship, of forces which are supposed to produce a state by an
intrinsic _vis genetrix_. The state is not created as a direct result
of organic contacts as offspring are conceived in the womb, nor by
direct conscious intent as a machine is invented, nor by some brooding
indwelling spirit, whether a personal deity or a metaphysical absolute
will. When we seek for the origin of states in such sources as these,
a realistic regard for facts compels us to conclude in the end that we
find nothing but singular persons, you, they, me. We shall then be
driven, unless we have recourse to mysticism, to decide that the public
is born in a myth and is sustained by superstition.
There are many answers to the question: What is the public?
Unfortunately many of them are only restatements of the question.
Thus we are told that the public is the community as a whole,
and a-community-as-a-whole is supposed to be a self-evident and
self-explanatory phenomenon. But a community as a _whole_ involves
not merely a variety of associative ties which hold persons together
in diverse ways, but an organization of all elements by an integrated
principle. And this is precisely what we are in search of. Why should
there be anything of the nature of an all-inclusive and regulative
unity? If we postulate such a thing, surely the institution which alone
would answer to it is humanity, not the affairs which history exhibits
as states. The notion of an inherent universality in the associative
force at once breaks against the obvious fact of a plurality of states,
each localized, with its boundaries, limitations, its indifference and
even hostility to other states. The best that metaphysical monistic
philosophies of politics can do with this fact is to ignore it. Or,
as in the case of Hegel and his followers, a mythical philosophy of
history is constructed to eke out the deficiencies of a mythical
doctrine of statehood. The universal spirit seizes upon one temporal
and local nation after another as the vehicle for its objectification
of reason and will.
Such considerations as these reinforce our proposition that the
perception of consequences which are projected in important ways
beyond the persons and associations directly concerned in them is
the source of a public; and that its organization into a state is
effected by establishing special agencies to care for and regulate
these consequences. But they also suggest that actual states exhibit
traits which perform the function that has been stated and which serve
as marks of anything to be called a state. Discussion of these traits
will define the nature of the public and the problem of its political
organization, and will also operate to test our theory.
We can hardly select a better trait to serve as a mark and sign of
the nature of a state than a point just mentioned, temporal and
geographical localization. There are associations which are too narrow
and restricted in scope to give rise to a public, just as there are
associations too isolated from one another to fall within the same
public. Part of the problem of discovery of a public capable of
organization into a state is that of drawing lines between the too
close and intimate and the too remote and disconnected. Immediate
contiguity, face to face relationships, have consequences which
generate a community of interests, a sharing of values, too direct and
vital to occasion a need for political organization. Connections within
a family are familiar; they are matters of immediate acquaintance and
concern. The so-called blood-tie which has played such a part in
demarcation of social units is largely imputed on the basis of sharing
immediately in the results of conjoint behavior. What one does in the
household affects others directly and the consequences are appreciated
at once and in an intimate way. As we say, they “come home.” Special
organization to care for them is a superfluity. Only when the tie has
extended to a union of families in a clan and of clans in a tribe
do consequences become so indirect that special measures are called
for. The neighborhood is constituted largely on the same pattern of
association that is exemplified in the family. Custom and measures
improvised to meet special emergencies as they arise suffice for its
regulation.
Consider the village in Wiltshire so beautifully described by Hudson:
“Each house has its center of human life with life of bird and beast,
and the centers were in touch with one another, connected like a row
of children linked together by their hands; all together forming
one organism, instinct with one life, moved by one mind, like a
many-colored serpent lying at rest, extended at full length upon the
ground. I imagined the case of a cottager at one end of the village
occupied in chopping up a tough piece of wood or stump and accidentally
letting fall his heavy sharp axe on to his foot, inflicting a grievous
wound. The tidings of the accident would fly from mouth to mouth to
the other extremity of the village, a mile distant; not only would
each villager quickly know of it, but have at the same time a vivid
mental image of his fellow villager at the moment of his misadventure,
the sharp glittering axe falling on to his foot, the red blood flowing
from the wound; and he would at the same time feel the wound in his
own foot and the shock to his system. In like manner all thoughts and
feelings would pass freely from one to another, though not necessarily
communicated by speech; and all would be participants in virtue of
that sympathy and solidarity uniting the members of a small isolated
community. No one would be capable of a thought or emotion which
would seem strange to the others. The temper, the mood, the outlook
of the individual and the village, would be the same.”[1] With such a
condition of intimacy, the state is an impertinence.
For long periods of human history, especially in the Orient, the state
is hardly more than a shadow thrown upon the family and neighborhood
by remote personages, swollen to gigantic form by religious beliefs.
It rules but it does not regulate; for its rule is confined to receipt
of tribute and ceremonial deference. Duties are within the family;
property is possessed by the family. Personal loyalties to elders
take the place of political obedience. The relationships of husband
and wife, parent and children, older and younger children, friend and
friend, are the bonds from which authority proceeds. Politics is not a
branch of morals; it is submerged in morals. All virtues are summed up
in filial piety. Wrongdoing is culpable because it reflects upon one’s
ancestry and kin. Officials are known but only to be shunned. To submit
a dispute to them is a disgrace. The measure of value of the remote
and theocratic state lies in what it does _not_ do. Its perfection is
found in its identification with the processes of nature, in virtue of
which the seasons travel their constant round, so that fields under
the beneficent rule of sun and rain produce their harvest, and the
neighborhood prospers in peace. The intimate and familiar propinquity
group is not a social unity within an inclusive whole. It is, for
almost all purposes, society itself.
At the other limit there are social groups so separated by rivers, seas
and mountains, by strange languages and gods, that what one of them
does--save in war--has no appreciable consequences for another. There
is therefore no common interest, no public, and no need nor possibility
of an inclusive state. The plurality of states is such a universal and
notorious phenomenon that it is taken for granted. It does not seem to
require explanation. But it sets up, as we have noted, a test difficult
for some theories to meet. Except upon the basis of a freakish
limitation in the common will and reason which is alleged to be the
foundation of the state, the difficulty is insuperable. It is peculiar,
to say the least, that universal reason should be unable to cross a
mountain range and objective will be balked by a river current. The
difficulty is not so great for many other theories. But only the theory
which makes recognition of consequences the critical factor can find in
the fact of many states a corroborating trait. Whatever is a barrier
to the spread of the consequences of associated behavior by that very
fact operates to set up political boundaries. The explanation is as
commonplace as is the thing to be explained.
Somewhere between associations that are narrow, close and intimate and
those which are so remote as to have only infrequent and casual contact
lies, then, the province of a state. We do not find and should not
expect to find sharp and fast demarcations. Villages and neighborhoods
shade imperceptibly into a political public. Different states may pass
through federations and alliances into a larger whole which has some of
the marks of statehood. This condition, which we should anticipate in
virtue of the theory, is confirmed by historical facts. The wavering
and shifting line of distinction between a state and other forms of
social union is, again, an obstacle in the way of theories of the
state which imply as their concrete counterpart something as sharply
marked off as is the concept. On the basis of empirical consequences,
it is just the sort of thing which should occur. There are empires
due to conquest where political rule exists only in forced levies of
taxes and soldiers, and in which, though the word state may be used,
the characteristic signs of a public are notable for their absence.
There are political communities like the city-states of ancient Greece
in which the fiction of common descent is a vital factor, in which
household gods and worship are replaced by community divinities,
shrines, and cults: states in which much of the intimacy of the vivid
and prompt personal touch of the family endures, while there has been
added the transforming inspiration of a varied, freer, fuller life,
whose issues are so momentous that in comparison the life of the
neighborhood is parochial and that of the household dull.
Multiplicity and constant transformation in the forms which the state
assumes are as comprehensible upon the hypothesis proposed as is
the numerical diversity of independent states. The consequences of
conjoint behavior differ in kind and in range with changes in “material
culture,” especially those involved in exchange of raw materials,
finished products and above all in technology, in tools, weapons and
utensils. These in turn are immediately affected by inventions in
means of transit, transportation and intercommunication. A people
that lives by tending flocks of sheep and cattle adapts itself to
very different conditions than those of a people which ranges freely,
mounted on horses. One form of nomadism is usually peaceful; the other
warlike. Roughly speaking, tools and implements determine occupations,
and occupations determine the consequences of associated activity.
In determining consequences, they institute publics with different
interests, which exact different types of political behavior to care
for them.
In spite of the fact that diversity of political forms rather than
uniformity is the rule, belief in _the_ state as an archetypal entity
persists in political philosophy and science. Much dialectical
ingenuity has been expended in construction of an essence or intrinsic
nature in virtue of which any particular association is entitled to
have applied to it the concept of statehood. Equal ingenuity has been
expended in explaining away all divergencies from this morphological
type, and (the favored device) in ranking states in a hierarchical
order of value as they approach the defining essence. The idea that
there is a model pattern which makes a state a _good_ or true state
has affected practice as well as theory. It, more than anything else,
is responsible for the effort to form constitutions offhand and impose
them ready-made on peoples. Unfortunately, when the falsity of this
view was perceived, it was replaced by the idea that states “grow” or
develop instead of being made. This “growth” did not mean simply that
states alter. Growth signified an evolution through regular stages to
a predetermined end because of some intrinsic nisus or principle. This
theory discouraged recourse to the only method by which alterations
of political forms might be directed: namely, the use of intelligence
to judge consequences. Equally with the theory which it displaced, it
presumed the existence of a single standard form which defines _the_
state as the essential and true article. After a false analogy with
physical science, it was asserted that only the assumption of such
a uniformity of process renders a “scientific” treatment of society
possible. Incidentally, the theory flattered the conceit of those
nations which, being politically “advanced,” assumed that they were so
near the apex of evolution as to wear the crown of statehood.
The hypothesis presented makes possible a consistently empirical
or _historical_ treatment of the changes in political forms and
arrangements, free from any overriding conceptual domination such as is
inevitable when a “true” state is postulated, whether that be thought
of as deliberately made or as evolving by its own inner law. Intrusions
from non-political internal occurrences, industrial and technological,
and from external events, borrowings, travel, migrations, explorations,
wars, modify the consequences of preëxisting associations to such an
extent that new agencies and functions are necessitated. Political
forms are also subject to alterations of a more indirect sort.
Developments of better methods of thinking bring about observation of
consequences which were concealed from a vision which used coarser
intellectual tools. Quickened intellectual insight also makes possible
invention of new political devices. Science has not indeed played a
large rôle. But intuitions of statesmen and of political theorists
have occasionally penetrated into the operations of social forces
in such a way that a new turn has been given to legislation and to
administration. There is a margin of toleration in the body politic
as well as in an organic body. Measures not in any sense inevitable
are accommodated to after they have once been taken; and a further
diversity is thereby introduced in political manners.
In short, the hypothesis which holds that publics are constituted by
recognition of extensive and enduring indirect consequences of acts
accounts for the relativity of states, while the theories which define
them in terms of specific causal authorship imply an absoluteness which
is contradicted by facts. The attempt to find by the “comparative
method” structures which are common to antique and modern, to
occidental and oriental states, has involved a great waste of industry.
The only constant is the function of caring for and regulating the
interests which accrue as the result of the complex indirect expansion
and radiation of conjoint behavior.
We conclude, then, that temporal and local diversification is a prime
mark of political organization, and one which, when it is analyzed,
supplies a confirming test of our theory. A second mark and evidence
is found in an otherwise inexplicable fact that the quantitative
scope of results of conjoint behavior generates a public with need
for organization. As we already noted, what are now crimes subject
to public cognizance and adjudication were once private ebullitions,
having the status now possessed by an insult proffered by one to
another. An interesting phase of the transition from the relatively
private to the public, at least from a limited public to a larger one,
is seen in the development in England of the King’s Peace. Justice
until the twelfth century was administered mainly by feudal and shire
courts, courts of hundreds, etc. Any lord who had a sufficient number
of subjects and tenants decided controversies and imposed penalties.
The court and justice of the king was but one among many, and primarily
concerned with royalty’s tenants, servants, properties and dignities.
The monarchs wished, however, to increase their revenues and expand
their power and prestige. Various devices were invented and fictions
set up by means of which the jurisdiction of kingly courts was
extended. The method was to allege that various offenses, formerly
attended to by local courts, were infractions of the king’s peace. The
centralizing movement went on till the king’s justice had a monopoly.
The instance is significant. A measure instigated by desire to increase
the power and profit of the royal dynasty became an impersonal public
function by bare extension. The same sort of thing has repeatedly
occurred when personal prerogatives have passed into normal political
processes. Something of the same sort is manifested in contemporary
life when modes of private business become “affected with a public
interest” because of quantitative expansion.
A converse instance is presented in transfer from public to private
domain of religious rites and beliefs. As long as the prevailing
mentality thought that the consequences of piety and irreligion
affected the entire community, religion was of necessity a public
affair. Scrupulous adherence to the customary cult was of the highest
political import. Gods were tribal ancestors or founders of the
community. They granted communal prosperity when they were duly
acknowledged and were the authors of famine, pestilence and defeat in
war if their interests were not zealously attended to. Naturally when
religious acts had such extended consequences, temples were public
buildings, like the agora and forum; rites were civic functions and
priests public officials. Long after theocracy vanished, theurgy was a
political institution. Even when disbelief was rife, few there were who
would run the risk of neglecting the ceremonials.
The revolution by which piety and worship were relegated to the
private sphere is often attributed to the rise of personal conscience
and assertion of its rights. But this rise is just the thing to be
accounted for. The supposition that it was there all the time in a
submerged condition and finally dared to show itself reverses the
order of events. Social changes, both intellectual and in the internal
composition and external relations of peoples, took place so that men
no longer connected attitudes of reverence or disrespect to the gods
with the weal and woe of the community. Faith and unbelief still had
serious consequences, but these were now thought to be confined to the
temporal and eternal happiness of the persons directly concerned.
Given the other belief, and persecution and intolerance are as
justifiable as is organized hostility to any crime; impiety is the most
dangerous of all threats to public peace and well-being. But social
changes gradually effected as one of the new functions of the life of
the community the rights of private conscience and creed.
In general, behavior in intellectual matters has moved from the public
to the private realm. This radical change was, of course, urged and
justified on the ground of intrinsic and sacred private right. But,
as in the special case of religious beliefs, it is strange, if this
reason be accepted, that mankind lived so long in total unawareness of
the existence of the right. In fact, the idea of a purely private area
of consciousness, where whatever goes on has no external consequences,
was in the first instance a product of institutional change, political
and ecclesiastic, although, like other beliefs, once it was established
it had political results. The observation that the interests of the
community are better cared for when there is permitted a large measure
of personal judgment and choice in the formation of intellectual
conclusions, is an observation which could hardly have been made until
social mobility and heterogeneity had brought about initiation and
invention in technological matters and industry, and until secular
pursuits had become formidable rivals to church and state. Even yet,
however, toleration in matters of judgment and belief is largely a
negative matter. We agree to leave one another alone (within limits)
more from recognition of evil consequences which have resulted from
the opposite course rather than from any profound belief in its
positive social beneficence. As long as the latter consequence is not
widely perceived, the so-called natural right to private judgment will
remain a somewhat precarious rationalization of the moderate amount of
toleration which has come into being. Such phenomena as the Ku Klux
and legislative activity to regulate science show that the belief in
liberty of thought is still superficial.
If I make an appointment with a dentist or doctor, the transaction
is primarily between us. It is my health which is affected and his
pocket-book, skill and reputation. But exercise of the professions
has consequences so widespread that the examination and licensing of
persons who practice them becomes a public matter. John Smith buys or
sells real estate. The transaction is effected by himself and some
other person. Land, however, is of prime importance to society, and the
private transaction is hedged about with legal regulations; evidence
of transfer and ownership has to be recorded with a public official in
forms publicly prescribed. The choice of a mate and the act of sexual
union are intimately personal. But the act is the condition of bearing
of offspring who are the means of the perpetuation of the community.
The public interest is manifested in formalities which are necessary
to make a union legal and for its legal termination. Consequences, in
a word, affect large numbers beyond those immediately concerned in
the transaction. It is often thought that in a socialistic state the
formation and dissolution of marriages would cease to have a public
phase. It is possible. But it is also possible that such a state would
be even more alive than is the community at present to the consequences
of the union of man and woman not only upon children but upon its
own well-being and stability. In that case certain regulations would
be relaxed, but there might be imposed stringent rules as to health,
economic capacity and psychologic compatibility as preconditions of
wedlock.
No one can take into account all the consequences of the acts he
performs. It is a matter of necessity for him, as a rule, to limit his
attention and foresight to matters which, as we say, are distinctively
his own business. Any one who looked too far abroad with regard to
the outcome of what he is proposing to do would, if there were no
general rules in existence, soon be lost in a hopelessly complicated
muddle of considerations. The man of most generous outlook has to
draw the line somewhere, and he is forced to draw it in whatever
concerns those closely associated with himself. In the absence of some
objective regulation, effects upon them are all he can be sure of in
any reasonable degree. Much of what is called selfishness is but the
outcome of limitation of observation and imagination. Hence when
consequences concern a large number, a number so mediately involved
that a person cannot readily prefigure how they are to be affected,
that number is constituted a public which intervenes. It is not merely
that the combined observations of a number cover more ground than those
of a single person. It is rather that the public itself, being unable
to forecast and estimate all consequences, establishes certain dikes
and channels so that actions are confined within prescribed limits, and
insofar have moderately predictable consequences.
The regulations and laws of the state are therefore misconceived when
they are viewed as commands. The “command” theory of common and statute
law is in reality a dialectical consequence of the theories, previously
criticized, which define the state in terms of an antecedent causation,
specifically of that theory which takes “will” to be the causal force
which generates the state. If a will is the origin of the state, then
state-action expresses itself in injunctions and prohibitions imposed
by its will upon the wills of subjects. Sooner or later, however,
the question arises as to the justification of the will which issues
commands. Why should the will of the rulers have more authority than
that of others? Why should the latter submit? The logical conclusion
is that the ground of obedience lies ultimately in superior force. But
this conclusion is an obvious invitation to trial of forces to see
where superior force lies. In fact the idea of authority is abolished,
and that of force substituted. The next dialectical conclusion is that
the will in question is something over and above any private will or
any collection of such wills: is some overruling “general will.” This
conclusion was drawn by Rousseau, and under the influence of German
metaphysics was erected into a dogma of a mystic and transcendent
absolute will, which in turn was not another name for force only
because it was identified with absolute reason. The alternative to one
or other of these conclusions is surrender of the causal authorship
theory and the adoption of that of widely distributed consequences,
which, when they are perceived, create a common interest and the need
of special agencies to care for it.
Rules of law are in fact the institution of conditions under which
persons make their arrangements with one another. They are structures
which canalize action; they are active forces only as are banks which
confine the flow of a stream, and are commands only in the sense in
which the banks command the current. If individuals had no stated
conditions under which they come to agreement with one another, any
agreement would either terminate in a twilight zone of vagueness
or would have to cover such an enormous amount of detail as to be
unwieldy and unworkable. Each agreement, moreover, might vary so from
every other that nothing could be inferred from one arrangement as
to the probable consequences of any other. Legal rules state certain
conditions which when met make an agreement a contract. The terms of
the agreement are thereby canalized within manageable limits, and it
is possible to generalize and predict from one to another. Only the
exigencies of a theory lead one to hold that there is a command that
an agreement be made in such and such a form.[2] What happens is that
certain conditions are set such that _if_ a person conform to them, he
can count on certain consequences, while if he fails to do so he cannot
forecast consequences. He takes a chance and runs the risk of having
the whole transaction invalidated to his loss. There is no reason
to interpret even the “prohibitions” of criminal law in any other
way. Conditions are stated in reference to consequences which may be
incurred if they are infringed or transgressed. We can similarly state
the undesirable results which will happen if a stream breaks through
its banks; if the stream were capable of foreseeing these consequences
and directing its behavior by the foresight, we might metaphorically
construe the banks as issuing a prohibition.
This account explains both the large arbitrary and contingent element
in laws and their plausible identification with reason, dissimilar
as are the two considerations. There are many transactions in which
the thing of chief importance is that consequences be determinate in
_some_ fashion rather than that they be determined by some inherent
principle to be just such and such. In other words, within limits it
is indifferent what results are fixed by the conditions settled upon;
what is important is that the consequences be certain enough to be
predictable. The rule of the road is typical of a large number of
rules. So is the fixing of sunset or of a specified hour as the exact
time when the felonious entering of the premises of another takes on a
more serious quality. On the other hand, rules of law are reasonable
so that “reason” is appealed to by some as their fount and origin on
the ground pointed out by Hume.[3] Men are naturally shortsighted,
and the shortsightedness is increased and perverted by the influence
of appetite and passion. “The law” formulates remote and long-run
consequences. It then operates as a condensed available check on the
naturally overweening influence of immediate desire and interest over
decision. It is a means of doing for a person what otherwise only his
own foresight, if thoroughly reasonable, could do. For a rule of law,
although it may be laid down because of a special act as its occasion,
is formulated in view of an indefinite variety of other possible
acts. It is necessarily a generalization; for it is generic as to the
predictable consequences of a _class_ of facts. If the incidents of a
particular occasion exercise undue influence upon the content of a rule
of law, it will soon be overruled, either explicitly or by neglect.
Upon this theory, the law as “embodied reason” means a formulated
generalization of means and procedures in behavior which are adapted
to secure what is wanted. Reason expresses a function, not a causal
origin. Law is reasonable as a man is sensible who selects and arranges
conditions adapted to produce the ends he regards as desirable. A
recent writer, who regards “reason” as that which generates laws, says,
“A debt does not in reason cease to be a debt because time has passed,
but the law sets up a limitation. A trespass does not cease in reason
to be a trespass because it is indefinitely repeated, yet the law shows
a tendency to admit an unresisted trespass in time to the status of
right. Time, distance and chance are indifferent to pure reason; but
they play their part in the legal order.”[4] But if reasonableness is
a matter of adaptation of means to consequences, time and distance are
things to be given great weight; for they effect both consequences and
the ability to foresee them and to act upon them. Indeed, we might
select statutes of limitation as excellent examples of the kind of
rationality the law contains. Only if reason is looked upon as “pure,”
that is as a matter of formal logic, do the instances cited manifest
limitation of reason.
A third mark of the public organized as a state, a mark which also
provides a test of our hypothesis, is that it is concerned with modes
of behavior which are old and hence well established, engrained.
Invention is a peculiarly personal act, even when a number of persons
combine to make something new. A novel idea is the kind of thing
that has to occur to somebody in the singular sense. A new project
is something to be undertaken and set agoing by private initiative.
The newer an idea or plan, the more it deviates from what is already
recognized and established in practice. By the nature of the case an
innovation is a departure from the customary. Hence the resistance it
is likely to encounter. We, to be sure, live in an era of discoveries
and inventions. Speaking generically, innovation itself has become a
custom. Imagination is wonted to it; it is expected. When novelties
take the form of mechanical appliances, we incline to welcome them. But
this is far from always having been the case. The rule has been to look
with suspicion and greet with hostility the appearance of anything new,
even a tool or utensil. For an innovation _is_ a departure, and one
which brings in its train some incalculable disturbance of the behavior
to which we have grown used and which seems “natural.” As a recent
writer has clearly shown, inventions have made their way insidiously;
and because of some immediate convenience. If their effects, their
long-run consequences, in altering habits of behavior had been
foreseen, it is safe to say that most of them would have been destroyed
as wicked, just as many of them were retarded in adoption because they
were felt to be sacrilegious.[5] In any case, we cannot think of their
invention being the work of the state.[6]
The organized community is still hesitant with reference to new ideas
of a non-technical and non-technological nature. They are felt to
be disturbing to social behavior; and rightly so, as far as old and
established behavior is concerned. Most persons object to having
their habits unsettled, their habits of belief no less than habits
of overt action. A new idea _is_ an unsettling of received beliefs;
otherwise, it would not be a new idea. This is only to say that the
production of new ideas is peculiarly a private performance. About the
most we can ask of the state, judging from states which have so far
existed, is that it put up with their production by private individuals
without undue meddling. A state which will organize to manufacture and
disseminate new ideas and new ways of thinking may come into existence
some time, but such a state is a matter of faith, not sight. When it
comes it will arrive because the beneficial consequences of new ideas
have become an article of common faith and repute. It may, indeed, be
said that even now the state provides those conditions of security
which are necessary if private persons are to engage effectually
in discovery and invention. But this service is a by-product; it
is foreign to the grounds on which the conditions in question are
maintained by the public. And it must be offset by noting the extent to
which the state of affairs upon which the public heart is most set is
unfavorable to thinking in other than technical lines. In any case, it
is absurd to expect the public, because it is called in no matter how
eulogistic a sense the state, to rise above the intellectual level of
its average constituents.
When, however, a mode of behavior has become old and familiar, and when
an instrumentality has come into use as a matter of course, provided
it is a prerequisite of other customary pursuits, it tends to come
within the scope of the state. An individual may make his own track in
a forest; but highways are usually public concerns. Without roads which
one is free to use at will, men might almost as well be castaways on
a desert island. Means of transit and communication affect not only
those who utilize them but all who are dependent in any way upon what
is transported, whether as producers or consumers. The increase of easy
and rapid intercommunication means that production takes place more and
more for distant markets and it puts a premium upon mass-production.
Thus it becomes a disputed question whether railroads as well as
highways should not be administered by public officials, and in any
case some measure of official regulation is instituted, as they become
settled bases of social life.
The tendency to put what is old and established in uniform lines
under the regulation of the state has psychological support. Habits
economize intellectual as well as muscular energy. They relieve the
mind from thought of means, thus freeing thought to deal with new
conditions and purposes. Moreover, interference with a well-established
habit is followed by uneasiness and antipathy. The efficiency of
liberation from attention to whatever is regularly recurrent is
reënforced by an emotional tendency to get rid of bother. Hence there
is a general disposition to turn over activities which have become
highly standardized and uniform to representatives of the public. It
is possible that the time will come when not only railways will have
become routine in their operation and management, but also existing
modes of machine production, so that business men instead of opposing
public ownership will clamor for it in order that they may devote
their energies to affairs which involve more novelty, variation and
opportunities for risk and gain. They might conceivably, even under
a régime of continued private property in general, no more wish to
be bothered with routinized operations than they would want to take
over the care of public streets. Even now the question of the public’s
taking charge of the machinery of the manufacture of goods is less a
matter of wholesale “individualism” versus “socialism” than it is of
the ratio of the experimental and novel in their management to the
habitual and matter-of-course; of that which is taken for granted as
a condition of other things to that which is significant in its own
operation.
A fourth mark of the public is indicated by the idea that children and
other dependents (such as the insane, the permanently helpless) are
peculiarly its wards. When the parties involved in any transaction are
unequal in status, the relationship is likely to be one-sided, and the
interests of one party to suffer. If the consequences appear serious,
especially if they seem to be irretrievable, the public brings to bear
a weight that will equalize conditions. Legislatures are more ready to
regulate the hours of labor of children than of adults, of women than
of men. In general, labor legislation is justified against the charge
that it violates liberty of contract on the ground that the economic
resources of the parties to the arrangement are so disparate that
the conditions of a genuine contract are absent; action by the state
is introduced to form a level on which bargaining takes place. Labor
unions often object, however, to such “paternalistic” legislation on
the ground that voluntary combinations to ensure collective bargaining
is better for those concerned than action taken without the active
participation of laborers. The general objection that paternalism tends
to keep those affected by it permanently in the status of children,
without an impetus to help themselves, rests on the same basis.
The difference here is nevertheless not as to the principle that
inequality of status may call for public intervention, but as to the
best means of securing and maintaining equality.
There has been a steady tendency for the education of children to be
regarded as properly a state charge in spite of the fact that children
are primarily the care of a family. But the period in which education
is possible to an effective degree is that of childhood; if this time
is not taken advantage of the consequences are irreparable. The neglect
can rarely be made up later. In the degree, then, that a certain
measure of instruction and training is deemed to have significant
consequences for the social body, rules are laid down affecting the
action of parents in relation to their children, and those who are not
parents are taxed--Herbert Spencer to the contrary notwithstanding--to
maintain schools. Again, the consequences of neglect of safeguards in
industries involving machines which are dangerous and those presenting
unhygienic conditions, are so serious and irretrievable that the modern
public has intervened to maintain conditions conducive to safety and
health. Movements which aim at insurance against illness and old-age
under governmental auspices illustrate the same principle. While public
regulation of a minimum wage is still a disputed matter, the argument
in behalf of it appeals to the criterion stated. The argument in effect
is that a living wage is a matter of such serious indirect consequences
to society that it cannot be safely left to the parties directly
concerned, owing to the fact that immediate need may incapacitate one
party to the transaction from effective bargaining.
In what has been said there is no attempt to lay down criteria to be
applied in a predetermined way to ensure just such and such results. We
are not concerned to predict the special forms which state action will
take in the future. We have simply been engaged in pointing out the
marks by which public action as distinct from private is characterized.
Transactions between singular persons and groups bring a public into
being when their indirect consequences--their effects beyond those
immediately engaged in them--are of importance. Vagueness is not
eliminated from the idea of importance. But at least we have pointed
out some of the factors which go to make up importance: namely, the
far-reaching character of consequences, whether in space or time; their
settled, uniform and recurrent nature, and their irreparableness. Each
one of these matters involves questions of degree. There is no sharp
and clear line which draws itself, pointing out beyond peradventure,
like the line left by a receding high tide, just where a public comes
into existence which has interests so significant that they must be
looked after and administered by special agencies, or governmental
officers. Hence there is often room for dispute. The line of
demarcation between actions left to private initiative and management
and those regulated by the state has to be discovered experimentally.
As we shall see later, there are assignable reasons why it will be
drawn very differently at different times and places. The very fact
that the public depends upon consequences of acts and the perception
of consequences, while its organization into a state depends upon the
ability to invent and employ special instrumentalities, shows how and
why publics and political institutions differ widely from epoch to
epoch and from place to place. To suppose that an _a priori_ conception
of the intrinsic nature and limits of the individual on one side and
the state on the other will yield good results once for all is absurd.
If, however, the state has a definite nature, as it should have if it
were formed by fixed causal agencies, or if individuals have a nature
fixed once for all apart from conditions of association, a final and
wholesale partitioning of the realms of personal and state activity is
the logical conclusion. The failure of such a theory to reach practical
solutions is, therefore, a further confirmation of the theory which
emphasizes the consequences of activity as the essential affair.
In conclusion, we shall make explicit what has been implied regarding
the relation to one another of public, government and state.[7] There
have been two extreme views about this point. On one hand, the state
has been identified with government. On the other hand, the state,
having a necessary existence of its own, _per se_, is said then to
proceed to form and employ certain agencies forming government, much
as a man hires servants and assigns them duties. The latter view is
appropriate when the causal agency theory is relied upon. Some force,
whether a general will or the singular wills of assembled individuals,
calls the state into being. Then the latter as a secondary operation
chooses certain persons through whom to act. Such a theory helps those
who entertain it to retain the idea of the inherent sanctity of the
state. Concrete political evils such as history exhibits in abundance
can be laid at the door of fallible and corrupt governments, while
the state keeps its honor unbesmirched. The identification of the
state with government has the advantage of keeping the mind’s eye
upon concrete and observable facts; but it involves an unaccountable
separation between rulers and people. If a government exists by itself
and on its own account, why should there be government? Why should
there persist the habits of loyalty and obedience which permit it to
rule?
The hypothesis which has been advanced frees us from the perplexities
which cluster about both of these two notions. The lasting, extensive
and serious consequences of associated activity bring into existence a
public. In itself it is unorganized and formless. By means of officials
and their special powers it becomes a state. A public articulated and
operating through representative officers is the state; there is no
state without a government, but also there is none without the public.
The officers are still singular beings, but they exercise new and
special powers. These may be turned to their private account. Then
government is corrupt and arbitrary. Quite apart from deliberate graft,
from using unusual powers for private glorification and profit, density
of mind and pomposity of behavior, adherence to class-interest and its
prejudices, are strengthened by position. “Power is poison” was the
remark of one of the best, shrewdest and most experienced observers
of Washington politicians. On the other hand, occupancy of office may
enlarge a man’s views and stimulate his social interest so that he
exhibits as a statesman traits foreign to his private life.
But since the public forms a state only by and through officials
and their acts, and since holding official position does not work
a miracle of transubstantiation, there is nothing perplexing nor
even discouraging in the spectacle of the stupidities and errors of
political behavior. The facts which give rise to the spectacle should,
however, protect us from the illusion of expecting extraordinary change
to follow from a mere change in political agencies and methods. Such
a change sometimes occurs, but when it does, it is because the social
conditions, in generating a new public, have prepared the way for it;
the state sets a formal seal upon forces already in operation by giving
them a defined channel through which to act. Conceptions of “The State”
as something _per se_, something intrinsically manifesting a general
will and reason, lend themselves to illusions. They make such a sharp
distinction between _the_ state and _a_ government that, from the
standpoint of the theories, a government may be corrupt and injurious
and yet The State by the same idea retain its inherent dignity and
nobility. Officials may be mean, obstinate, proud and stupid and
yet the nature of the state which they serve remain essentially
unimpaired. Since, however, a public is organized into a state through
its government, the state is as its officials are. Only through
constant watchfulness and criticism of public officials by citizens can
a state be maintained in integrity and usefulness.
The discussion also returns with some added illumination to the problem
of the relation of state and society. The problem of the relation of
individuals to associations--sometimes posed as the relation of _the_
individual to society--is a meaningless one. We might as well make
a problem out of the relation of the letters of an alphabet to the
alphabet. An alphabet is letters, and “society” is individuals in their
connections with one another. The mode of combination of letters with
one another is obviously a matter of importance; letters form words
and sentences when combined, and have no point nor sense except in
some combination. I would not say that the latter statement applies
literally to individuals, but it cannot be gainsaid that singular
human beings exist and behave in constant and varied association with
one another. These modes of conjoint action and their consequences
profoundly affect not only the outer habits of singular persons, but
their dispositions in emotion, desire, planning and valuing.
“Society,” however, is either an abstract or a collective noun. In
the concrete, there are societies, associations, groups of an immense
number of kinds, having different ties and instituting different
interests. They may be gangs, criminal bands; clubs for sport,
sociability and eating; scientific and professional organizations;
political parties and unions within them; families; religious
denominations, business partnerships and corporations; and so on
in an endless list. The associations may be local, nationwide and
trans-national. Since there is no one _thing_ which may be called
society, except their indefinite overlapping, there is no unqualified
eulogistic connotation adhering to the term “society.” Some societies
are in the main to be approved; some to be condemned, on account of
their consequences upon the character and conduct of those engaged
in them and because of their remoter consequences upon others. All
of them, like all things human, are mixed in quality; “society” is
something to be approached and judged critically and discriminatingly.
“Socialization” of some sort--that is, the reflex modification of
wants, beliefs and work because of share in a united action--is
inevitable. But it is as marked in the formation of frivolous,
dissipated, fanatical, narrow-minded and criminal persons as in that
of competent inquirers, learned scholars, creative artists and good
neighbors.
Confining our notice to the results which are desirable, it appears
that there is no reason for assigning all the values which are
generated and maintained by means of human associations to the
work of states. Yet the same unbridled generalizing and fixating
tendency of the mind which leads to a monistic fixation of society
has extended beyond the hypostatizing of “society” and produced a
magnified idealization of The State. All values which result from any
kind of association are habitually imputed by one school of social
philosophers to the state. Naturally the result is to place the state
beyond criticism. Revolt against the state is then thought to be the
one unforgivable social sin. Sometimes the deification proceeds from
a special need of the time, as in the cases of Spinoza and Hegel.
Sometimes it springs from a prior belief in universal will and reason
and a consequent need of finding some empirical phenomena which may
be identified with the externalization of this absolute spirit. Then
this is employed, by circular logic, as evidence for the existence of
such a spirit. The net import of our discussion is that a state is a
distinctive and secondary form of association, having a specifiable
work to do and specified organs of operation.
It is quite true that most states, after they have been brought into
being, react upon the primary groupings. When a state is a good state,
when the officers of the public genuinely serve the public interests,
this reflex effect is of great importance. It renders the desirable
associations solider and more coherent; indirectly it clarifies their
aims and purges their activities. It places a discount upon injurious
groupings and renders their tenure of life precarious. In performing
these services, it gives the individual members of valued associations
greater liberty and security: it relieves them of hampering conditions
which if they had to cope with personally would absorb their energies
in mere negative struggle against evils. It enables individual members
to count with reasonable certainty upon what others will do, and thus
facilitates mutually helpful coöperations. It creates respect for
others and for one’s self. A measure of the goodness of a state is the
degree in which it relieves individuals from the waste of negative
struggle and needless conflict and confers upon him positive assurance
and reënforcement in what he undertakes. This is a great service, and
there is no call to be niggardly in acknowledging the transformations
of group and personal action which states have historically effected.
But this recognition cannot be legitimately converted into the
monopolistic absorption of all associations into The State, nor of all
social values into political value. The all-inclusive nature of the
state signifies only that officers of the public (including, of course,
law-makers) may act so as to fix conditions under which _any_ form of
association operates; its comprehensive character refers only to the
impact of its behavior. A war like an earthquake may “include” in its
consequences all elements in a given territory, but the inclusion is
by way of effects, not by inherent nature or right. A beneficent law,
like a condition of general economic prosperity, may favorably affect
all interests in a particular region, but it cannot be called a whole
of which the elements influenced are parts. Nor can the liberating and
confirming results of public action be construed to yield a wholesale
idealization of states in contrast with other associations. For state
activity is often injurious to the latter. One of the chief occupations
of states has been the waging of war and the suppression of dissentient
minorities. Moreover, their action, even when benign, presupposes
values due to non-political forms of living together which are but
extended and reënforced by the public through its agents.
The hypothesis which we have supported has obvious points of contact
with what is known as the pluralistic conception of the state. It
presents also a marked point of difference. Our doctrine of plural
forms is a statement of a fact: that there exist a plurality of social
groupings, good, bad and indifferent. It is not a doctrine which
prescribes inherent limits to state action. It does not intimate that
the function of the state is limited to settling conflicts among other
groups, as if each one of them had a fixed scope of action of its own.
Were that true, the state would be only an umpire to avert and remedy
trespasses of one group upon another. Our hypothesis is neutral as to
any general, sweeping implications as to how far state activity may
extend. It does not indicate any particular polity of public action.
At times, the consequences of the conjoint behavior of some persons
may be such that a large public interest is generated which can be
fulfilled only by laying down conditions which involve a large measure
of reconstruction within that group. There is no more an inherent
sanctity in a church, trade-union, business corporation, or family
institution than there is in the state. Their value is also to be
measured by their consequences. The consequences vary with concrete
conditions; hence at one time and place a large measure of state
activity may be indicated and at another time a policy of quiescence
and _laissez-faire_. Just as publics and states vary with conditions of
time and place, so do the concrete functions which should be carried on
by states. There is no antecedent universal proposition which can be
laid down because of which the functions of a state should be limited
or should be expanded. Their scope is something to be critically and
experimentally determined.
CHAPTER III
THE DEMOCRATIC STATE
Singular persons are the foci of action, mental and moral, as well
as overt. They are subject to all kinds of social influences which
determine _what_ they can think of, plan and choose. The conflicting
streams of social influence come to a single and conclusive issue
only in personal consciousness and deed. When a public is generated,
the same law holds. It arrives at decisions, makes terms and executes
resolves only through the medium of individuals. They are officers;
they represent a Public, but the Public acts only through them. We
say in a country like our own that legislators and executives are
elected by the public. The phrase might appear to indicate that the
Public acts. But, after all, individual men and women exercise the
franchise; the public is here a collective name for a multitude of
persons each voting as an anonymous unit. As a citizen-voter each one
of these persons is, however, an officer of the public. He expresses
his will as a representative of the public interest as much so as
does a senator or sheriff. His vote may express his hope to profit in
private purse by the election of some man or the ratification of some
proposed law. He may fail, in other words, in effort to represent the
interest entrusted to him. But in this respect he does not differ
from those explicitly designated public officials who have also been
known to betray the interest committed to them instead of faithfully
representing it.
In other words, every officer of the public, whether he represents it
as a voter or as a stated official, has a dual capacity. From this fact
the most serious problem of government arises. We commonly speak of
some governments as representative in contrast with others which are
not. By our hypothesis all governments are representative in that they
purport to stand for the interests which a public has in the behavior
of individuals and groups. There is, however, no contradiction here.
Those concerned in government are still human beings. They retain
their share of the ordinary traits of human nature. They still have
private interests to serve and interests of special groups, those of
the family, clique or class to which they belong. Rarely can a person
sink himself in his political function; the best which most men attain
to is the domination by the public weal of their other desires. What is
meant by “representative” government is that the public is definitely
organized with the intent to secure this dominance. The dual capacity
of every officer of the public leads to conflict in individuals between
their genuinely political aims and acts and those which they possess in
their non-political rôles. When the public adopts special measures to
see to it that the conflict is minimized and that the representative
function overrides the private one, political institutions are termed
representative.
It may be said that not until recently have publics been conscious
that they were publics, so that it is absurd to speak of their
organizing themselves to protect and secure their interests. Hence
states are a recent development. The facts are, indeed, fatally
against attribution of any long history to states provided we use a
hard and fast conceptual definition of states. But our definition is
founded on the exercise of a function, not on any inherent essence
or structural nature. Hence it is more or less a verbal matter just
what countries and peoples are called states. What is of importance is
that the facts which significantly differentiate various forms from
one another be recognized. The objection just urged points to a fact
of great significance, whether the word “state” be used or not. It
indicates that for long stretches of time the public rôle of rulers has
been incidental to other ends for which they have used their powers.
There has been a machinery of government, but it has been employed for
purposes which in the strict sense are non-political, the deliberate
advancement of dynastic interests. Thus we come upon the primary
problem of the public: to achieve such recognition of itself as will
give it weight in the selection of official representatives and in
the definition of their responsibilities and rights. Consideration of
this problem leads us, as we shall see, into the discussion of the
democratic state.
Taking history as a whole, the selection of rulers and equipment of
them with powers has been a matter of political accident. Persons have
been selected as judges, executives and administrators for reasons
independent of capacity to serve public interests. Some of the Greek
states of antiquity and the examination system of China stand out for
the very reason that they are exceptions to this statement. History
shows that, in the main, persons have ruled because of some prerogative
and conspicuous place which was independent of their definitively
public rôle. If we introduce the idea of the public at all, we are
bound to say that it was assumed without question that certain persons
were fit to be rulers because of traits independent of political
considerations. Thus in many societies the male elders exercised such
rule as obtained in virtue of the mere fact that they were old men.
Gerontocracy is a familiar and widespread fact. Doubtless there was a
presumption that age was a sign of knowledge of group traditions and
of matured experience, but it can hardly be said that this presumption
was consciously the influential factor in giving old men a monopoly of
rule. Rather they had it _ipso facto_, because they had it. A principle
of inertia, of least resistance and least action, operated. Those who
were already conspicuous in some respect, were it only for long gray
beards, had political powers conferred upon them.
Success in military achievement is an irrelevant factor which has
controlled the selection of men to rule. Whether or no “camps are the
true mothers of cities,” whether or no Herbert Spencer was right in
declaring that government originated in chieftainship for war purposes,
there is no doubt that, in most communities, the ability of a man to
win battles has seemed to mark him out as a predestined manager of
the civil affairs of a community. There is no need to argue that the
two positions demand different gifts, and that achievement in one is
no proof of fitness for the other. The fact remains. Nor do we have
to look at ancient states for evidence of its effective operation.
States nominally democratic show the same tendency to assume that a
winning general has some quasi-divine appointment to political office.
Reason would teach that oftentimes even the politicians who are most
successful in instigating the willingness of the civilian population
to support a war are by that very fact incapacitated for the offices
of making a just and enduring peace. But the treaty of Versailles is
there to show how difficult it is to make a shift of personnel even
when conditions radically alter so that there is need for men of a
changed outlook and interests. To those who have, it shall be given. It
is human nature to think along the easiest lines, and this induces men
when they want conspicuous leaders in the civil function to fasten upon
those who are already conspicuous, no matter what the reason.
Aside from old men and warriors, medicine men and priests have had
a ready-made, predestined vocation to rule. Where the community
welfare is precarious and dependent upon the favor of supernatural
beings, those skilled in the arts by which the wrath and jealousy
of the gods are averted and their favor procured, have the marks of
superior capacity to administer states. Success in living to an old
age, in battle and in occult arts, have, however, been most signalized
in the _initiation_ of political régimes. What has counted most in
the long run is the dynastic factor. _Beati possidentes._ The family
from which a ruler has been taken occupies in virtue of that fact a
conspicuous position and superior power. Preëminence in status is
readily taken for excellence. Divine favor _ex officio_ attends a
family in which rule has been exercised for enough generations so that
the memory of original exploits has grown dim or become legendary. The
emoluments, pomp and power which go with rule are not thought to need
justification. They not only embellish and dignify it, but are regarded
as symbols of intrinsic worthiness to possess it. Custom consolidates
what accident may have originated; established power has a way of
legitimizing itself. Alliances with other potent families within and
without the country, possession of large landed estates, a retinue of
courtiers and access to revenues of the state, with a multitude of
other things irrelevant to the public interest, establish a dynastic
position at the same time that they divert the genuine political
function to private ends.
An additional complication is introduced because the glory, wealth
and power of rulers constitutes in itself an invitation to seize and
exploit office. The causes which operate to induce men to strive
for any shining object operate with increased appeal in the case of
governmental power. The centralization and scope of functions which
are needed in order to serve the interests of the public become, in
other words, seductions to draw state officials into subserving private
ends. All history shows how difficult it is for human beings to bear
effectually in mind the objects for the nominal sake of which they are
clothed with power and pomp; it shows the ease with which they employ
their panoply to advance private and class interests. Were actual
dishonesty the only, or even chief, foe, the problem would be much
simpler. The ease of routine, the difficulty of ascertaining public
needs, the intensity of the glare which attends the seat of the mighty,
desire for immediate and visible results, play the larger part. One
often hears it said by socialists justly impatient with the present
economic régime that “industry should be taken out of private hands.”
One recognizes what they intend: that it should cease to be regulated
by desire for private profit and should function for the benefit of
producers and consumers, instead of being sidetracked to the advantage
of financiers and stockholders. But one wonders whether those who
so readily utter this saying have asked themselves into whose hands
industry is to pass? Into those of the public? But, alas, the public
has no hands except those of individual human beings. The essential
problem is that of transforming the action of such hands so that it
will be animated by regard for social ends. There is no magic by which
this result can be accomplished. The same causes which have led men to
utilize concentrated political power to serve private purposes will
continue to act to induce men to employ concentrated economic power
in behalf of non-public aims. This fact does not imply the problem
is insoluble. But it indicates where the problem resides, whatever
guise it assumes. Since officers of the public have a dual make-up and
capacity, what conditions and what technique are necessary in order
that insight, loyalty and energy may be enlisted on the side of the
public and political rôle?
These commonplace considerations have been adduced as a background for
discussion of the problems and prospects of democratic government.
Democracy is a word of many meanings. Some of them are of such a broad
social and moral import as to be irrelevant to our immediate theme.
But one of the meanings is distinctly political, for it denotes a
mode of government, a specified practice in selecting officials and
regulating their conduct as officials. This is not the most inspiring
of the different meanings of democracy; it is comparatively special in
character. But it contains about all that is relevant to _political_
democracy. Now the theories and practices regarding the selection and
behavior of public officials which constitute political democracy have
been worked out against the historical background just alluded to. They
represent an effort in the first place to counteract the forces that
have so largely determined the possession of rule by accidental and
irrelevant factors, and in the second place an effort to counteract the
tendency to employ political power to serve private instead of public
ends. To discuss democratic government at large apart from its historic
background is to miss its point and to throw away all means for an
intelligent criticism of it. In taking the distinctively historical
point of view we do not derogate from the important and even superior
claims of democracy as an ethical and social ideal. We limit the topic
for discussion in such a way as to avoid “the great bad,” the mixing of
things which need to be kept distinct.
Viewed as a historical tendency exhibited in a chain of movements which
have affected the forms of government over almost the entire globe
during the last century and a half, democracy is a complex affair.
There is a current legend to the effect that the movement originated
in a single clear-cut idea, and has proceeded by a single unbroken
impetus to unfold itself to a predestined end, whether triumphantly
glorious or fatally catastrophic. The myth is perhaps rarely held in
so simple and unmixed a form. But something approaching it is found
whenever men either praise or damn democratic government absolutely,
that is, without comparing it with alternative polities. Even the
least accidental, the most deliberately planned, political forms do not
embody some absolute and unquestioned good. They represent a choice,
amid a complex of contending forces, of that particular possibility
which appears to promise the most good with the least attendant evil.
Such a statement, moreover, immensely oversimplifies. Political forms
do not originate in a once for all way. The greatest change, once it
is accomplished, is simply the outcome of a vast series of adaptations
and responsive accommodations, each to its own particular situation.
Looking back, it is possible to make out a trend of more or less steady
change in a single direction. But it is, we repeat, mere mythology
to attribute such unity of result as exists (which is always easy to
exaggerate) to single force or principle. Political democracy has
emerged as a kind of net consequence of a vast multitude of responsive
adjustments to a vast number of situations, no two of which were alike,
but which tended to converge to a common outcome. The democratic
convergence, moreover, was not the result of distinctively political
forces and agencies. Much less is democracy the product _of_ democracy,
of some inherent nisus, or immanent idea. The temperate generalization
to the effect that the unity of the democratic movement is found in
effort to remedy evils experienced in consequence of prior political
institutions realizes that it proceeded step by step, and that each
step was taken without foreknowledge of any ultimate result, and, for
the most part, under the immediate influence of a number of differing
impulses and slogans.
It is even more important to realize that the conditions out of which
the efforts at remedy grew and which it made possible for them to
succeed were primarily non-political in nature. For the evils were
of long standing, and any account of the movement must raise two
questions: Why were efforts at improvement not made earlier, and, when
they were made, why did they take just the form which they did take?
The answers to both questions will be found in distinctive religious,
scientific and economic changes which finally took effect in the
political field, being themselves primarily non-political and innocent
of democratic intent. Large questions and far-ranging ideas and ideals
arose during the course of the movement. But theories of the nature
of the individual and his rights, of freedom and authority, progress
and order, liberty and law, of the common good and a general will, of
democracy itself, did not produce the movement. They reflected it in
thought; after they emerged, they entered into subsequent strivings and
had practical effect.
We have insisted that the development of political democracy
represents the convergence of a great number of social movements, no
one of which owed either its origin or its impetus to inspiration of
democratic ideals or to planning for the eventual outcome. This fact
makes irrelevant both pæans and condemnations based upon conceptual
interpretations of democracy, which, whether true or false, good or
bad, are reflections of facts in thought, not their causal authors. In
any case, the complexity of the historic events which have operated is
such as to preclude any thought of rehearsing them in these pages, even
if I had a knowledge and competency which are lacking. Two general and
obvious considerations need, however, to be mentioned. Born in revolt
against established forms of government and the state, the events which
finally culminated in democratic political forms were deeply tinged by
fear of government, and were actuated by a desire to reduce it to a
minimum so as to limit the evil it could do.
Since established political forms were tied up with other institutions,
especially ecclesiastical, and with a solid body of tradition and
inherited belief, the revolt also extended to the latter. Thus it
happened that the intellectual terms in which the movement expressed
itself had a negative import even when they seemed to be positive.
Freedom presented itself as an end in itself, though it signified in
fact liberation from oppression and tradition. Since it was necessary,
upon the intellectual side, to find justification for the movements
of revolt, and since established authority was upon the side of
institutional life, the natural recourse was appeal to some inalienable
sacred authority resident in the protesting individuals. Thus
“individualism” was born, a theory which endowed singular persons in
isolation from any associations, except those which they deliberately
formed for their own ends, with native or natural rights. The revolt
against old and limiting associations was converted, intellectually,
into the doctrine of independence of any and all associations.
Thus the practical movement for the limitation of the powers of
government became associated, as in the influential philosophy of
John Locke, with the doctrine that the ground and justification of
the restriction was prior non-political rights inherent in the very
structure of the individual. From these tenets, it was a short step to
the conclusion that the sole end of government was the protection of
individuals in the rights which were theirs by nature. The American
revolution was a rebellion against an established government, and
it naturally borrowed and expanded these ideas as the ideological
interpretation of the effort to obtain independence of the colonies.
It is now easy for the imagination to conceive circumstances under
which revolts against prior governmental forms would have found its
theoretical formulation in an assertion of the rights of groups, of
other associations than those of a political nature. There was no logic
which rendered necessary the appeal to the individual as an independent
and isolated being. In abstract logic, it would have sufficed to
assert that some primary groupings had claims which the state could
not legitimately encroach upon. In that case, the celebrated modern
antithesis of the Individual and Social, and the problem of their
reconciliation, would not have arisen. The problem would have taken the
form of defining the relationship which non-political groups bear to
political union. But, as we have already remarked, the obnoxious state
was closely bound up in fact and in tradition with other associations,
ecclesiastic (and through its influence with the family), and economic,
such as gilds and corporations, and, by means of the church-state, even
with unions for scientific inquiry and with educational institutions.
The easiest way out was to go back to the naked individual, to sweep
away all associations as foreign to his nature and rights save as they
proceeded from his own voluntary choice, and guaranteed his own private
ends.
Nothing better exhibits the scope of the movement than the fact that
philosophic theories of knowledge made the same appeal to the self, or
ego, in the form of personal consciousness identified with mind itself,
that political theory made to the natural individual, as the court
of ultimate resort. The schools of Locke and Descartes, however much
they were opposed in other respects, agreed in this, differing only
as to whether the sentient or rational nature of the individual was
the fundamental thing. From philosophy the idea crept into psychology,
which became an introspective and introverted account of isolated
and ultimate private consciousness. Henceforth moral and political
individualism could appeal to “scientific” warrant for its tenets and
employ a vocabulary made current by psychology:--although in fact
the psychology appealed to as its scientific foundation was its own
offspring.
The “individualistic” movement finds a classic expression in the great
documents of the French Revolution, which at one stroke did away with
all forms of association, leaving, in theory, the bare individual
face to face with the state. It would hardly have reached this point,
however, if it had not been for a second factor, which must be noted.
A new scientific movement had been made possible by the invention and
use of new mechanical appliances--the lens is typical--which focused
attention upon tools like the lever and pendulum, which, although
they had long been in use, had not formed points of departure for
scientific theory. This new development in inquiry brought, as Bacon
foretold, great economic changes in its wake. It more than paid its
debt to tools by leading to the invention of machines. The use of
machinery in production and commerce was followed by the creation of
new powerful social conditions, personal opportunities and wants. Their
adequate manifestation was limited by established political and legal
practices. The legal regulations so affected every phase of life which
was interested in taking advantage of the new economic agencies as
to hamper and oppress the free play of manufacture and exchange. The
established custom of states, expressed intellectually in the theory of
mercantilism against which Adam Smith wrote his account of “The (True)
Wealth of Nations,” prevented the expansion of trade between nations,
a restriction which reacted to limit domestic industry. Internally,
there was a network of restrictions inherited from feudalism. The
prices of labor and staples were not framed in the market by higgling
but were set by justices of the peace. The development of industry
was hampered by laws regulating choice of a calling, apprenticeship,
migration of workers from place to place,--and so on.
Thus fear of government and desire to limit its operations, because
they were hostile to the development of the new agencies of production
and distribution of services and commodities, received powerful
reënforcement. The economic movement was perhaps the more influential
because it operated, not in the name of the individual and his inherent
rights, but in the name of Nature. Economic “laws,” that of labor
springing from natural wants and leading to the creation of wealth, of
present abstinence in behalf of future enjoyment leading to creation
of capital effective in piling up still more wealth, the free play
of competitive exchange, designated the law of supply and demand,
were “natural” laws. They were set in opposition to political laws as
artificial, man-made affairs. The inherited tradition which remained
least questioned was a conception of Nature which made Nature something
to conjure with. The older metaphysical conception of Natural Law
was, however, changed into an economic conception; laws of nature,
implanted in human nature, regulated the production and exchange of
goods and services, and in such a way that when they were kept free
from artificial, that is political, meddling, they resulted in the
maximum possible social prosperity and progress. Popular opinion is
little troubled by questions of logical consistency. The economic
theory of _laissez-faire_, based upon belief in beneficent natural laws
which brought about harmony of personal profit and social benefit, was
readily fused with the doctrine of natural rights. They both had the
same practical import, and what is logic between friends? Thus the
protest of the utilitarian school, which sponsored the economic theory
of natural law in economics, against natural right theories had no
effect in preventing the popular amalgam of the two sides.
The utilitarian economic theory was such an important factor in
developing the theory, as distinct from the practice, of democratic
government that it is worth while to expound it in outline. Each person
naturally seeks the betterment of his own lot. This can be attained
only by industry. Each person is naturally the best judge of his
own interests, and, if left free from the influence of artificially
imposed restrictions, will express his judgment in his choice of work
and exchange of services and goods. Thus, barring accident, he will
contribute to his own happiness in the measure of his energy in work,
his shrewdness in exchange and his self-denying thrift. Wealth and
security are the natural rewards of economic virtues. At the same
time, the industry, commercial zeal, and ability of individuals
contribute to the social good. Under the invisible hand of a beneficent
providence which has framed natural laws, work, capital and trade
operate harmoniously to the advantage and advance of men collectively
and individually. The foe to be dreaded is interference of government.
Political regulation is needed only because individuals accidentally
and purposely--since the possession of property by the industrious
and able is a temptation to the idle and shiftless--encroach upon
one another’s activities and properties. This encroachment is the
essence of injustice, and the function of government is to secure
justice--which signifies chiefly the protection of property and of
the contracts which attend commercial exchange. Without the existence
of the state men might appropriate one another’s property. This
appropriation is not only unfair to the laborious individual, but by
making property insecure discourages the forthputting of energy at
all and thus weakens or destroys the spring of social progress. On
the other hand, this doctrine of the function of the state operates
automatically as a limit imposed to governmental activities. The state
is itself just only when it acts to secure justice--in the sense just
defined.
The political problem thus conceived is essentially a problem of
discovering and instating a technique which will confine the operations
of government as far as may be to its legitimate business of protecting
economic interests, of which the interest a man has in the integrity
of his own life and body is a part. Rulers share the ordinary cupidity
to possess property with a minimum of personal effort. Left to
themselves they take advantage of the power with which their official
position endows them to levy arbitrarily on the wealth of others. If
they protect the industry and property of private citizens against the
invasions of other private citizens, it is only that they may have
more resources upon which to draw for their own ends. The essential
problem of government thus reduces itself to this: What arrangements
will prevent rulers from advancing their own interests at the expense
of the ruled? Or, in positive terms, by what political means shall the
interests of the governors be identified with those of the governed?
The answer was given, notably by James Mill, in a classic formulation
of the nature of political democracy. Its significant features were
popular election of officials, short terms of office and frequent
elections. If public officials were dependent upon citizens for
official position and its rewards, their personal interests would
coincide with those of people at large--at least of industrious and
property-owning persons. Officials chosen by popular vote would find
their election to office dependent upon presenting evidence of their
zeal and skill in protecting the interests of the populace. Short
terms and frequent elections would ensure their being held to regular
account; the polling-booth would constitute their day of judgment. The
fear of it would operate as a constant check.
Of course in this account I have oversimplified what was already
an oversimplification. The dissertation of James Mill was written
before the passage of the Reform Bill of 1832. Taken pragmatically,
it was an argument for the extension of the suffrage, then largely in
the hands of hereditary landowners, to manufacturers and merchants.
James Mill had nothing but dread of pure democracies. He opposed the
extension of the franchise to women.[8] He was interested in the new
“middle-class” forming under the influence of the application of
steam to manufacture and trade. His attitude is well expressed in his
conviction that even if the suffrage were extended downwards, the
middle-class “which gives to science, art and legislation itself its
most distinguished ornaments, and which is the chief source of all
that is refined and exalted in human nature, is that portion of the
community of which the influence would ultimately decide.” In spite,
however, of oversimplification, and of its special historic motivation,
the doctrine claimed to rest upon universal psychological truth;
it affords a fair picture of the principles which were supposed to
justify the movement toward democratic government. It is unnecessary to
indulge in extensive criticism. The differences between the conditions
postulated by the theory and those which have actually obtained with
the development of democratic governments speak for themselves. The
discrepancy is a sufficient criticism. This disparity itself shows,
however, that what has happened sprang from no theory but was inherent
in what was going on not only without respect to theories but without
regard to politics: because, generally speaking, of the use of steam
applied to mechanical inventions.
It would be a great mistake, however, to regard the idea of the
isolated individual possessed of inherent rights “by nature” apart from
association, and the idea of economic laws as natural, in comparison
with which political laws being artificial are injurious (save when
carefully subordinated), as idle and impotent. The ideas were something
more than flies on the turning wheels. They did not originate the
movement toward popular government, but they did profoundly influence
the forms which it assumed. Or perhaps it would be truer to say
that persistent older conditions, to which the theories were more
faithful than to the state of affairs they professed to report, were
so reënforced by the professed philosophy of the democratic state, as
to exercise a great influence. The result was a skew, a deflection
and distortion, in democratic forms. Putting the “individualistic”
matter in a gross statement, which has to be corrected by later
qualifications, we may say that “the individual,” about which the new
philosophy centered itself, was in process of complete submergence
in fact at the very time in which he was being elevated on high in
theory. As to the alleged subordination of political affairs to natural
forces and laws, we may say that actual economic conditions were
thoroughly artificial, in the sense in which the theory condemned the
artificial. They supplied the man-made instrumentalities by which the
new governmental agencies were grasped and used to suit the desires of
the new class of business men.
Both of these statements are formal as well as sweeping. To acquire
intelligible meaning they must be developed in some detail. Graham
Wallas prefixed to the first chapter of his book entitled “The Great
Society” the following words of Woodrow Wilson, taken from _The New
Freedom_: “Yesterday and ever since history began, men were related to
one another as individuals.... To-day, the everyday relationships of
men are largely with great impersonal concerns, with organizations, not
with other individuals. Now this is nothing short of a new social age,
a new age of human relationships, a new stage-setting for the drama of
life.” If we accept these words as containing even a moderate degree
of truth, they indicate the enormous ineptitude of the individualistic
philosophy to meet the needs and direct the factors of the new age.
They suggest what is meant by saying the theory of an individual
possessed of desires and claims and endued with foresight and prudence
and love of bettering himself was framed at just the time when the
individual was counting for less in the direction of social affairs, at
a time when mechanical forces and vast impersonal organizations were
determining the frame of things.
The statement that “yesterday and even since history began, men were
related to one another as individuals” is not true. Men have always
been associated together in living, and association in conjoint
behavior has affected their relations to one another as individuals.
It is enough to recall how largely human relations have been permeated
by patterns derived directly and indirectly from the family; even the
state was a dynastic affair. But none the less the contrast which Mr.
Wilson had in mind is a fact. The earlier associations were mostly of
the type well termed by Cooley[9] “face-to-face.” Those which were
important, which really counted in forming emotional and intellectual
dispositions, were local and contiguous and consequently visible. Human
beings, if they shared in them at all, shared directly and in a way
of which they were aware in both their affections and their beliefs.
The state, even when it despotically interfered, was remote, an agency
alien to daily life. Otherwise it entered men’s lives through custom
and common law. No matter how widespread their operation might be,
it was not their breadth and inclusiveness which counted but their
immediate local presence. The church was indeed both a universal and
an intimate affair. But it entered into the life of most human beings
not through its universality, as far as their thoughts and habits
were concerned, but through an immediate ministration of rites and
sacraments. The new technology applied in production and commerce
resulted in a social revolution. The local communities without intent
or forecast found their affairs conditioned by remote and invisible
organizations. The scope of the latter’s activities was so vast
and their impact upon face-to-face associations so pervasive and
unremitting that it is no exaggeration to speak of “a new age of human
relations.” The Great Society created by steam and electricity may be
a society, but it is no community. The invasion of the community by
the new and relatively impersonal and mechanical modes of combined
human behavior is the outstanding fact of modern life. In these ways
of aggregate activity the community, in its strict sense, is not
a conscious partner, and over them it has no direct control. They
were, however, the chief factors in bringing into being national and
territorial states. The need of some control over them was the chief
agency in making the government of these states democratic or popular
in the current sense of these words.
Why, then, was a movement, which involved so much submerging of
personal action in the overflowing consequences of remote and
inaccessible collective actions, reflected in a philosophy of
individualism? A complete answer is out of the question. Two
considerations are, however, obvious and significant. The new
conditions involved a release of human potentialities previously
dormant. While their impact was unsettling to the community, it was
liberating with respect to single persons, while its oppressive
phase was hidden in the impenetrable mists of the future. Speaking
with greater correctness, the oppressive phase affected primarily
the elements of the community which were also depressed in the
older and semi-feudal conditions. Since they did not count for much
anyway, being traditionally the drawers of water and hewers of wood,
having emerged only in a legal sense from serfdom, the effect of new
economic conditions upon the laboring masses went largely unnoted. Day
laborers were still in effect, as openly in the classic philosophy,
underlying conditions of community life rather than members of it.
Only gradually did the effect upon them become apparent; by that time
they had attained enough power--were sufficiently important factors in
the new economic régime--to obtain political emancipation, and thus
figure in the forms of the democratic state. Meanwhile the liberating
effect was markedly conspicuous with respect to the members of the
“middle-class,” the manufacturing and mercantile class. It would be
short-sighted to limit the release of powers to opportunities to
procure wealth and enjoy its fruits, although the creation of material
wants and ability to satisfy them are not to be lightly passed over.
Initiative, inventiveness, foresight and planning were also stimulated
and confirmed. This manifestation of new powers was on a sufficiently
large scale to strike and absorb attention. The result was formulated
as the discovery of the individual. The customary is taken for granted;
it operates subconsciously. Breach of wont and use is focal; it forms
“consciousness.” The necessary and persistent modes of association
went unnoticed. The new ones, which were voluntarily undertaken,
occupied thought exclusively. They monopolized the observed horizon.
“Individualism” was a doctrine which stated what was focal in thought
and purpose.
The other consideration is akin. In the release of new powers singular
persons were emancipated from a mass of old habits, regulations and
institutions. We have already noted how the methods of production and
exchange made possible by the new technology were hampered by the
rules and customs of the prior régime. The latter were then felt to
be intolerably restrictive and oppressive. Since they hampered the
free play of initiative and commercial activity, they were artificial
and enslaving. The struggle for emancipation from their influence was
identified with the liberty of the individual as such; in the intensity
of the struggle, associations and institutions were condemned wholesale
as foes of freedom save as they were products of personal agreement and
voluntary choice. That many forms of association remained practically
untouched was easily overlooked, just because they were matters of
course. Indeed, any attempt to touch them, notably the established
form of family association and the legal institution of property, were
looked upon as subversive, as license, not liberty, in the sanctified
phrase. The identification of democratic forms of government with this
individualism was easy. The right of suffrage represented for the mass
a release of hitherto dormant capacity and also, in appearance at
least, a power to shape social relations on the basis of individual
volition.
Popular franchise and majority rule afforded the imagination a picture
of individuals in their untrammeled individual sovereignty making the
state. To adherents and opponents alike it presented the spectacle of a
pulverizing of established associations into the desires and intentions
of atomic individuals. The forces, springing from combination and
institutional organization which controlled below the surface the acts
which formally issued from individuals, went unnoted. It is the essence
of ordinary thought to grasp the external scene and hold it as reality.
The familiar eulogies of the spectacle of “free men” going to the polls
to determine by their personal volitions the political forms under
which they should live is a specimen of this tendency to take whatever
is readily seen as the full reality of a situation. In physical matters
natural science has successfully challenged this attitude. In human
matters it remains in almost full force.
The opponents of popular government were no more prescient than its
supporters, although they showed more logical sense in following the
assumed individualistic premise to its conclusion: the disintegration
of society. Carlyle’s savage attacks upon the notion of a society
held together only by a “cash-nexus” are well known. Its inevitable
terminus to him was “anarchy plus a constable.” He did not see that
the new industrial régime was forging social bonds as rigid as those
which were disappearing and much more extensive--whether desirable ties
or not is another matter. Macaulay, the intellectualist of the Whigs,
asserted that the extension of suffrage to the masses would surely
result in arousing the predatory impulses of the propertyless masses
who would use their new political power to despoil the middle as well
as upper class. He added that while there was no longer danger that the
civilized portions of humanity would be overthrown by the savage and
barbarous portions, it was possible that in the bosom of civilization
would be engendered the malady which would destroy it.
Incidentally we have trenched upon the other doctrine, the idea that
there is something inherently “natural” and amenable to “natural law”
in the working of economic forces, in contrast with the man-made
artificiality of political institutions. The idea of a natural
individual in his isolation possessed of full-fledged wants, of
energies to be expended according to his own volition, and of a
ready-made faculty of foresight and prudent calculation is as much a
fiction in psychology as the doctrine of the individual in possession
of antecedent political rights is one in politics. The liberalist
school made much of desires, but to them desire was a conscious
matter deliberately directed upon a known goal of pleasures. Desire
and pleasure were both open and above-board affairs. The mind was
seen as if always in the bright sunlight, having no hidden recesses,
no unexplorable nooks, nothing underground. Its operations were like
the moves in a fair game of chess. They are in the open; the players
have nothing up their sleeves; the changes of position take place by
express intent and in plain sight; they take place according to rules
all of which are known in advance. Calculation and skill, or dullness
and inaptitude, determine the result. Mind was “consciousness,” and the
latter was a clear, transparent, self-revealing medium in which wants,
efforts and purposes were exposed without distortion.
To-day it is generally admitted that conduct proceeds from conditions
which are largely out of focal attention, and which can be discovered
and brought to light only by inquiries more exacting than those which
teach us the concealed relationships involved in gross physical
phenomena. What is not so generally acknowledged is that the underlying
and generative conditions of concrete behavior are social as well as
organic: much more social than organic as far as the manifestation
of _differential_ wants, purposes and methods of operation is
concerned. To those who appreciate this fact, it is evident that
the desires, aims and standards of satisfaction which the dogma of
“natural” economic processes and laws assumes are themselves socially
conditioned phenomena. They are reflections into the singular human
being of customs and institutions; they are not natural, that is,
“native,” organic propensities. They mirror a state of civilization.
Even more true, if possible, is it that the form in which work is
done, industry carried on, is the outcome of accumulated culture, not
an original possession of persons in their own structure. There is
little that can be called industry and still less that constitutes a
store of wealth until tools exist, and tools are the results of slow
processes of transmission. The development of tools into machines,
the characteristic of the industrial age, was made possible only by
taking advantage of science socially accumulated and transmitted. The
technique of employing tools and machines was equally something which
had to be learned; it was no natural endowment but something acquired
by observing others, by instruction and communication.
These sentences are a poor and pallid way of conveying the outstanding
fact. There are organic or native needs, of course, as for food,
protection and mates. There are innate structures which facilitate
them in securing the external objects through which they are met.
But the only kind of industry they are capable of giving rise to is
a precarious livelihood obtained by gathering such edible plants and
animals as chance might throw in the way: the lowest type of savagery
just emerging from a brute condition. Nor, strictly speaking, could
they effect even this meager result. For because of the phenomenon
of helpless infancy even such a primitive régime depends upon the
assistance of associated action, including that most valuable form of
assistance: learning from others. What would even savage industry be
without the use of fire, of weapons, of woven articles, all of which
involve communication and tradition? The industrial régime which the
authors of “natural” economy contemplated presupposed wants, tools,
materials, purposes, techniques and abilities in a thousand ways
dependent upon associated behavior. Thus in the sense in which the
authors of the doctrine employed the word “artificial,” these things
were intensely and cumulatively artificial. What they were really after
was a changed direction of custom and institutions. The outcome of
the acts of those who were engaged in forwarding the new industry and
commerce was a new set of customs and institutions. The latter were as
much extensive and enduring conjoint modes of life as were those which
they displaced; more so in their sweep and force.
The bearing of this fact upon political theory and practice is evident.
Not only were the wants and intentions which actually operated
functions of associated life, but they re-determined the forms and
temper of this life. Athenians did not buy Sunday newspapers, make
investments in stocks and bonds, nor want motor cars. Nor do we to-day
want for the most part beautiful bodies and beauty of architectural
surroundings. We are mostly satisfied with the result of cosmetics and
with ugly slums, and oftentimes with equally ugly palaces. We do not
“naturally” or organically need them, but we _want_ them. If we do not
demand them directly we demand them none the less effectively. For they
are necessary consequences of the things upon which we have set our
hearts. In other words, a community wants (in the only intelligible
sense of wanting, effective demand) either education or ignorance,
lovely or squalid surroundings, railway trains or ox-carts, stocks and
bonds, pecuniary profit or constructive arts, according as associated
activity presents these things to them habitually, esteems them, and
supplies the means of attaining them. But that is only half the tale.
Associated behavior directed toward objects which fulfill wants not
only produces those objects, but brings customs and institutions
into being. The indirect and unthought-of consequences are usually
more important than the direct. The fallacy of supposing that the
new industrial régime would produce just and for the most part
only the consequences consciously forecast and aimed at was the
counterpart of the fallacy that the wants and efforts characteristic
of it were functions of “natural” human beings. They arose out of
institutionalized action and they resulted in institutionalized
action. The disparity between the results of the industrial revolution
and the conscious intentions of those engaged in it is a remarkable
case of the extent to which indirect consequences of conjoint
activity outweigh, beyond the possibility of reckoning, the results
directly contemplated. Its outcome was the development of those
extensive and invisible bonds, those “great impersonal concerns,
organizations,” which now pervasively affect the thinking, willing and
doing of everybody, and which have ushered in the “new era of human
relationships.”
Equally undreamed of was the effect of the massive organizations and
complicated interactions upon the state. Instead of the independent,
self-moved individuals contemplated by the theory, we have standardized
interchangeable units. Persons are joined together, not because they
have voluntarily chosen to be united in these forms, but because
vast currents are running which bring men together. Green and red
lines, marking out political boundaries, are on the maps and affect
legislation and jurisdiction of courts, but railways, mails and
telegraph-wires disregard them. The consequences of the latter
influence more profoundly those living within the legal local units
than do boundary lines. The forms of associated action characteristic
of the present economic order are so massive and extensive that
they determine the most significant constituents of the public and
the residence of power. Inevitably they reach out to grasp the
agencies of government; they are controlling factors in legislation
and administration. Not chiefly because of deliberate and planned
self-interest, large as may be its rôle, but because they are the most
potent and best organized of social forces. In a word, the new forms
of combined action due to the modern economic régime control present
politics, much as dynastic interests controlled those of two centuries
ago. They affect thinking and desire more than did the interests which
formerly moved the state.
We have spoken as if the displacement of old legal and political
institutions was all but complete. That is a gross exaggeration. Some
of the most fundamental of traditions and habits have hardly been
affected at all. It is enough to mention the institution of property.
The naïveté with which the philosophy of “natural” economics ignored
the effect upon industry and commerce of the legal status of property,
the way in which it identified wealth and property in the legal form
in which the latter had existed, is almost incredible to-day. But the
simple fact is that technological industry has not operated with any
great degree of freedom. It has been confined and deflected at every
point; it has never taken its own course. The engineer has worked in
subordination to the business manager whose primary concern is not with
wealth but with the interests of property as worked out in the feudal
and semi-feudal period. Thus the one point in which the philosophers of
“Individualism” predicted truly was that in which they did not predict
at all, but in which they merely clarified and simplified established
wont and use: when, that is, they asserted that the main business of
government is to make property interests secure.
A large part of the indictments which are now drawn against
technological industry are chargeable to the unchanged persistence
of a legal institution inherited from the pre-industrial age. It is
confusing, however, to identify in a wholesale way this issue with the
question of private property. It is conceivable that private property
may function socially. It does so even now to a considerable degree.
Otherwise it could not be supported for a day. The extent of its social
utility is what blinds us to the numerous and great social disutilities
that attend its present working, or at least reconcile us to its
continuation. The real issue or at least the issue to be first settled
concerns the conditions under which the institution of private property
legally and politically functions.
We thus reach our conclusion. The same forces which have brought about
the forms of democratic government, general suffrage, executives and
legislators chosen by majority vote, have also brought about conditions
which halt the social and humane ideals that demand the utilization
of government as the genuine instrumentality of an inclusive and
fraternally associated public. “The new age of human relationships”
has no political agencies worthy of it. The democratic public is still
largely inchoate and unorganized.
CHAPTER IV
THE ECLIPSE OF THE PUBLIC
Optimism about democracy is to-day under a cloud. We are familiar with
denunciation and criticism which, however, often reveal their emotional
source in their peevish and undiscriminating tone. Many of them suffer
from the same error into which earlier laudations fell. They assume
that democracy is the product of an idea, of a single and consistent
intent. Carlyle was no admirer of democracy, but in a lucid moment
he said: “Invent the printing press and democracy is inevitable.”
Add to this: Invent the railway, the telegraph, mass manufacture
and concentration of population in urban centers, and some form of
democratic government is, humanly speaking, inevitable. Political
democracy as it exists to-day calls for adverse criticism in abundance.
But the criticism is only an exhibition of querulousness and spleen or
of a superiority complex, unless it takes cognizance of the conditions
out of which popular government has issued. All intelligent political
criticism is comparative. It deals not with all-or-none situations, but
with practical alternatives; an absolutistic indiscriminate attitude,
whether in praise or blame, testifies to the heat of feeling rather
than the light of thought.
American democratic polity was developed out of genuine community
life, that is, association in local and small centers where industry
was mainly agricultural and where production was carried on mainly
with hand tools. It took form when English political habits and legal
institutions worked under pioneer conditions. The forms of association
were stable, even though their units were mobile and migratory. Pioneer
conditions put a high premium upon personal work, skill, ingenuity,
initiative and adaptability, and upon neighborly sociability. The
township or some not much larger area was the political unit, the
town meeting the political medium, and roads, schools, the peace of
the community, were the political objectives. The state was a sum of
such units, and the national state a federation--unless perchance a
confederation--of states. The imagination of the founders did not
travel far beyond what could be accomplished and understood in a
congeries of self-governing communities. The machinery provided for the
selection of the chief executive of the federal union is illustrative
evidence. The electoral college assumed that citizens would choose men
locally known for their high standing; and that these men when chosen
would gather together for consultation to name some one known to them
for his probity and public spirit and knowledge. The rapidity with
which the scheme fell into disuse is evidence of the transitoriness of
the state of affairs that was predicated. But at the outset there was
no dream of the time when the very names of the presidential electors
would be unknown to the mass of the voters, when they would plump for
a “ticket” arranged in a more or less private caucus, and when the
electoral college would be an impersonal registering machine, such
that it would be treachery to employ the personal judgment which was
originally contemplated as the essence of the affair.
The local conditions under which our institutions took shape is well
indicated by our system, apparently so systemless, of public education.
Any one who has tried to explain it to a European will understand
what is meant. One is asked, say, what method of administration is
followed, what is the course of study and what the authorized methods
of teaching. The American member to the dialogue replies that in this
state, or more likely county, or town, or even some section of a town
called a district, matters stand thus and thus; somewhere else, so and
so. The participant from this side is perhaps thought by the foreigner
to be engaged in concealing his ignorance; and it would certainly take
a veritable cyclopedic knowledge to state the matter in its entirety.
The impossibility of making any moderately generalized reply renders
it almost indispensable to resort to a historical account in order to
be intelligible. A little colony, the members of which are probably
mostly known to one another in advance, settle in what is almost, or
quite, a wilderness. From belief in its benefits and by tradition,
chiefly religious, they wish their children to know at least how to
read, write and figure. Families can only rarely provide a tutor; the
neighbors over a certain area, in New England an area smaller even than
the township, combine in a “school district.” They get a schoolhouse
built, perhaps by their own labor, and hire a teacher by means of a
committee, and the teacher is paid from the taxes. Custom determines
the limited course of study, and tradition the methods of the teacher,
modified by whatever personal insight and skill he may bring to bear.
The wilderness is gradually subdued; a network of highways, then of
railways, unite the previously scattered communities. Large cities grow
up; studies grow more numerous and methods more carefully scrutinized.
The larger unit, the state, but not the federal state, provides schools
for training teachers and their qualifications are more carefully
looked into and tested. But subject to certain quite general conditions
imposed by the state-legislature, but not the national state, local
maintenance and control remain the rule. The community pattern is
more complicated, but is not destroyed. The instance seems richly
instructive as to the state of affairs under which our borrowed,
English, political institutions were reshaped and forwarded.
We have inherited, in short, local town-meeting practices and ideas.
But we live and act and have our being in a continental national
state. We are held together by non-political bonds, and the political
forms are stretched and legal institutions patched in an _ad hoc_
and improvised manner to do the work they have to do. Political
structures fix the channels in which non-political, industrialized
currents flow. Railways, travel and transportation, commerce, the
mails, telegraph and telephone, newspapers, create enough similarity
of ideas and sentiments to keep the thing going as a whole, for they
create interaction and interdependence. The unprecedented thing is that
states, as distinguished from military empires, can exist over such a
wide area. The notion of maintaining a unified state, even nominally
self-governing, over a country as extended as the United States and
consisting of a large and racially diversified population would once
have seemed the wildest of fancies. It was assumed that such a state
could be found only in territories hardly larger than a city-state
and with a homogeneous population. It seemed almost self-evident to
Plato--as to Rousseau later--that a genuine state could hardly be
larger than the number of persons capable of personal acquaintance
with one another. Our modern state-unity is due to the consequences
of technology employed so as to facilitate the rapid and easy
circulation of opinions and information, and so as to generate constant
and intricate interaction far beyond the limits of face-to-face
communities. Political and legal forms have only piece-meal and
haltingly, with great lag, accommodated themselves to the industrial
transformation. The elimination of distance, at the base of which are
physical agencies, has called into being the new form of political
association.
The wonder of the performance is the greater because of the odds
against which it has been achieved. The stream of immigrants which has
poured in is so large and heterogeneous that under conditions which
formerly obtained it would have disrupted any semblance of unity as
surely as the migratory invasion of alien hordes once upset the social
equilibrium of the European continent. No deliberately adopted measures
could have accomplished what has actually happened. Mechanical forces
have operated, and it is no cause for surprise if the effect is more
mechanical than vital. The reception of new elements of population in
large number from heterogeneous peoples, often hostile to one another
at home, and the welding them into even an outward show of unity is an
extraordinary feat. In many respects, the consolidation has occurred so
rapidly and ruthlessly that much of value has been lost which different
peoples might have contributed. The creation of political unity has
also promoted social and intellectual uniformity, a standardization
favorable to mediocrity. Opinion has been regimented as well as outward
behavior. The temper and flavor of the pioneer have evaporated with
extraordinary rapidity; their precipitate, as is often noted, is
apparent only in the wild-west romance and the movie. What Bagehot
called the cake of custom formed with increasing acceleration, and the
cake is too often flat and soggy. Mass production is not confined to
the factory.
The resulting political integration has confounded the expectations of
earlier critics of popular government as much as it must surprise its
early backers if they are gazing from on high upon the present scene.
The critics predicted disintegration, instability. They foresaw the
new society falling apart, dissolving into mutually repellent animated
grains of sand. They, too, took seriously the theory of “Individualism”
as the basis of democratic government. A stratification of society
into immemorial classes within which each person performed his stated
duties according to his fixed position seemed to them the only warrant
of stability. They had no faith that human beings released from the
pressure of this system could hold together in any unity. Hence they
prophesied a flux of governmental régimes, as individuals formed
factions, seized power, and then lost it as some newly improvised
faction proved stronger. Had the facts conformed to the theory of
Individualism, they would doubtless have been right. But, like the
authors of the theory, they ignored the technological forces making for
consolidation.
In spite of attained integration, or rather perhaps because of its
nature, the Public seems to be lost; it is certainly bewildered.[10]
The government, officials and their activities, are plainly with us.
Legislatures make laws with luxurious abandon; subordinate officials
engage in a losing struggle to enforce some of them; judges on the
bench deal as best they can with the steadily mounting pile of disputes
that come before them. But where is the public which these officials
are supposed to represent? How much more is it than geographical names
and official titles? The United States, the state of Ohio or New York,
the county of this and the city of that? Is the public much more than
what a cynical diplomat once called Italy: a geographical expression?
Just as philosophers once imputed a substance to qualities and traits
in order that the latter might have something in which to inhere and
thereby gain a conceptual solidity and consistency which they lacked
on their face, so perhaps our political “common-sense” philosophy
imputes a public only to support and substantiate the behavior of
officials. How can the latter be public officers, we despairingly ask,
unless there is a public? If a public exists, it is surely as uncertain
about its own whereabouts as philosophers since Hume have been about
the residence and make-up of the self. The number of voters who take
advantage of their majestic right is steadily decreasing in proportion
to those who might use it. The ratio of actual to eligible voters is
now about one-half. In spite of somewhat frantic appeal and organized
effort, the endeavor to bring voters to a sense of their privileges
and duties has so far been noted for failure. A few preach the
impotence of all politics; the many nonchalantly practice abstinence
and indulge in indirect action. Skepticism regarding the efficacy of
voting is openly expressed, not only in the theories of intellectuals,
but in the words of lowbrow masses: “What difference does it make
whether I vote or not? Things go on just the same anyway. My vote never
changed anything.” Those somewhat more reflective add: “It is nothing
but a fight between the ins and the outs. The only difference made by
an election is as to who get the jobs, draw the salaries and shake down
the plum tree.”
Those still more inclined to generalization assert that the whole
apparatus of political activities is a kind of protective coloration
to conceal the fact that big business rules the governmental roost
in any case. Business is the order of the day, and the attempt to
stop or deflect its course is as futile as Mrs. Partington essaying
to sweep back the tides with a broom. Most of those who hold these
opinions would profess to be shocked if the doctrine of economic
determinism were argumentatively expounded to them, but they act upon
a virtual belief in it. Nor is acceptance of the doctrine limited
to radical socialists. It is implicit in the attitude of men of big
business and financial interests, who revile the former as destructive
“Bolshevists.” For it is their firm belief that “prosperity”--a
word which has taken on religious color--is the great need of the
country, that they are its authors and guardians, and hence by right
the determiners of polity. Their denunciations of the “materialism”
of socialists is based simply upon the fact that the latter want a
different distribution of material force and well-being than that which
satisfies those now in control.
The unfitness of whatever public exists, with respect to the government
which is nominally its organ, is made manifest in the extra-legal
agencies which have grown up. Intermediary groups are closest to the
political conduct of affairs. It is interesting to compare the English
literature of the eighteenth century regarding factions with the
status actually occupied by parties. Factionalism was decried by all
thinkers as the chief enemy to political stability. Their voice of
condemnation is reëchoed in the writing of early nineteenth-century
American writers on politics. Extensive and consolidated factions
under the name of parties are now not only a matter of course, but
popular imagination can conceive of no other way by which officials
may be selected and governmental affairs carried on. The centralizing
movement has reached a point where even a third party can lead only a
spasmodic and precarious existence. Instead of individuals who in the
privacy of their consciousness make choices which are carried into
effect by personal volition, there are citizens who have the blessed
opportunity to vote for a ticket of men mostly unknown to them, and
which is made up for them by an under-cover machine in a caucus whose
operations constitute a kind of political predestination. There are
those who speak as if ability to choose between two tickets were a high
exercise of individual freedom. But it is hardly the kind of liberty
contemplated by the authors of the individualistic doctrine. “Nature
abhors a vacuum.” When the public is as uncertain and obscure as it
is to-day, and hence as remote from government, bosses with their
political machines fill the void between government and the public.
Who pulls the strings which move the bosses and generates power to run
the machines is a matter of surmise rather than of record, save for an
occasional overt scandal.
Quite aside, however, from the allegation that “Big Business” plays
the tune and pulls the strings to which bosses dance, it is true
that parties are not creators of policies to any large extent at the
present time. For parties yield in piece-meal accommodation to social
currents, irrespective of professed principles. As these lines are
written a weekly periodical remarks: “Since the end of the Civil War
practically all the more important measures which have been embodied
in federal legislation have been reached without a national election
which turned upon the issue and which divided the two major parties.”
Reform of civil service, regulation of railways, popular election of
senators, national income tax, suffrage for women, and prohibition are
supported to substantiate the statement. Hence its other remark appears
justified: “American party politics seem at times to be a device for
preventing issues which may excite popular feeling and involve bitter
controversies from being put up to the American people.”
A negatively corroborating fact is seen in the fate of the Child Labor
amendment. The need of giving to Congress power to regulate child
labor, denied it by decisions of the Supreme Court, had been asserted
in the platforms of all political parties; the idea was endorsed by
the last three of the presidents belonging to the party in power. Yet
so far, the proposed amendment to the constitution has not begun to
secure the needed support. Political parties may rule, but they do not
govern. The public is so confused and eclipsed that it cannot even use
the organs through which it is supposed to mediate political action and
polity.
The same lesson is taught by the breakdown of the theory of the
responsibility of elected representatives to the electorate, to say
nothing of their alleged liability to be called before the bar of the
private judgment of individuals. It is at least suggestive that the
terms of the theory are best met in legislation of the “pork-barrel”
type. There a representative may be called to account for failure
to meet local desire, or be rewarded for pertinacity and success in
fulfilling its wishes. But only rarely is the theory borne out in
important matters, although occasionally it works. But the instances
are so infrequent that any skilled political observer could enumerate
them by name. The reason for the lack of personal liability to the
electorate is evident. The latter is composed of rather amorphous
groups. Their political ideas and beliefs are mostly in abeyance
between elections. Even in times of political excitement, artificially
accelerated, their opinions are moved collectively by the current of
the group rather than by independent personal judgment. As a rule, what
decides the fate of a person who comes up for election is neither his
political excellence nor his political defects. The current runs for
or against the party in power and the individual candidate sinks or
swims as runs the current. At times there is a general consensus of
sentiment, a definite trend in favor of “progressive legislation” or
a desire for a “return to normalcy.” But even then only exceptional
candidates get by on any basis of personal responsibility to the
electorate. The “tidal wave” swamps some; the “landslide” carries
others into office. At other times, habit, party funds, the skill of
managers of the machine, the portrait of a candidate with his firm jaw,
his lovely wife and children, and a multitude of other irrelevancies,
determine the issue.
These scattered comments are not made in the belief that they convey
any novel truth. Such things are familiar; they are the common-places
of the political scene. They could be extended indefinitely by
any careful observer of the scene. The significant thing is that
familiarity has bred indifference if not contempt. Indifference is the
evidence of current apathy, and apathy is testimony to the fact that
the public is so bewildered that it cannot find itself. The remarks
are not made with a view to drawing a conclusion. They are offered
with a view to outlining a problem: What is the public? If there is
a public, what are the obstacles in the way of its recognizing and
articulating itself? Is the public a myth? Or does it come into being
only in periods of marked social transition when crucial alternative
issues stand out, such as that between throwing one’s lot in with
the conservation of established institutions or with forwarding new
tendencies? In a reaction against dynastic rule which has come to be
felt as despotically oppressive? In a transfer of social power from
agrarian classes to industrial?
Is not the problem at the present time that of securing experts to
manage administrative matters, other than the framing of policies?
It may be urged that the present confusion and apathy are due to
the fact that the real energy of society is now directed in all
non-political matters by trained specialists who manage things,
while politics are carried on with a machinery and ideas formed in
the past to deal with quite another sort of situation. There is no
particular public concerned in finding expert school instructors,
competent doctors, or business managers. Nothing called a public
intervenes to instruct physicians in the practice of the healing art
or merchants in the art of salesmanship. The conduct of these callings
and others characteristic of our time are decided by science and
pseudo-science. The important governmental affairs at present, it may
be argued, are also technically complicated matters to be conducted
properly by experts. And if at present people are not educated to the
recognition of the importance of finding experts and of entrusting
administration to them, it may plausibly be asserted that the prime
obstruction lies in the superstitious belief that there is a public
concerned to determine the formation and execution of general social
policies. Perhaps the apathy of the electorate is due to the irrelevant
artificiality of the issues with which it is attempted to work up
factitious excitement. Perhaps this artificiality is in turn mainly
due to the survival of political beliefs and machinery from a period
when science and technology were so immature as not to permit of a
definite technique for handling definite social situations and meeting
specific social needs. The attempt to decide by law that the legends
of a primitive Hebrew people regarding the genesis of man are more
authoritative than the results of scientific inquiry might be cited
as a typical example of the sort of thing which is bound to happen
when the accepted doctrine is that a public organized for political
purposes, rather than experts guided by specialized inquiry, is the
final umpire and arbiter of issues.
The questions of most concern at present may be said to be matters
like sanitation, public health, healthful and adequate housing,
transportation, planning of cities, regulation and distribution of
immigrants, selection and management of personnel, right methods
of instruction and preparation of competent teachers, scientific
adjustment of taxation, efficient management of funds, and so on. These
are technical matters, as much so as the construction of an efficient
engine for purposes of traction or locomotion. Like it they are to be
settled by inquiry into facts; and as the inquiry can be carried on
only by those especially equipped, so the results of inquiry can be
utilized only by trained technicians. What has counting heads, decision
by majority and the whole apparatus of traditional government to do
with such things? Given such considerations, and the public and its
organization for political ends is not only a ghost, but a ghost which
walks and talks, and obscures, confuses and misleads governmental
action in a disastrous way.
Personally I am far from thinking that such considerations, pertinent
as they are to administrative activities, cover the entire political
field. They ignore forces which have to be composed and resolved before
technical and specialized action can come into play. But they aid in
giving definiteness and point to a fundamental question: What, after
all, is the public under present conditions? What are the reasons for
its eclipse? What hinders it from finding and identifying itself?
By what means shall its inchoate and amorphous estate be organized
into effective political action relevant to present social needs and
opportunities? What has happened to the Public in the century and
a half since the theory of political democracy was urged with such
assurance and hope?
Previous discussion has brought to light some conditions out of which
the public is generated. It has also set forth some of the causes
through which a “new age of human relationships” has been brought
into being. These two arguments form the premises which, when they
are related to each other, will provide our answer to the questions
just raised. Indirect, extensive, enduring and serious consequences of
conjoint and interacting behavior call a public into existence having
a common interest in controlling these consequences. But the machine
age has so enormously expanded, multiplied, intensified and complicated
the scope of the indirect consequences, have formed such immense and
consolidated unions in action, on an impersonal rather than a community
basis, that the resultant public cannot identify and distinguish
itself. And this discovery is obviously an antecedent condition of
any effective organization on its part. Such is our thesis regarding
the eclipse which the public idea and interest have undergone. There
are too many publics and too much of public concern for our existing
resources to cope with. The problem of a democratically organized
public is primarily and essentially an intellectual problem, in a
degree to which the political affairs of prior ages offer no parallel.
Our concern at this time is to state how it is that the machine age in
developing the Great Society has invaded and partially disintegrated
the small communities of former times without generating a Great
Community. The facts are familiar enough; our especial affair is
to point out their connections with the difficulties under which
the organization of a democratic public is laboring. For the very
familiarity with the phenomena conceals their significance and blinds
us to their relation to immediate political problems.
The scope of the Great War furnishes an urgent as well as convenient
starting point for the discussion. The extent of that war is
unparalleled, because the conditions involved in it are so new. The
dynastic conflicts of the seventeenth century are called by the same
name: we have only one word, “war.” The sameness of the word too easily
conceals from us the difference in significance. We think of all wars
as much the same thing, only the last one was horrible beyond others.
Colonies were drawn in: self-governing ones entered voluntarily;
possessions were levied upon for troops; alliances were formed with
remote countries in spite of diversities of race and culture, as in
the cases of Great Britain and Japan, Germany and Turkey. Literally
every continent upon the globe was involved. Indirect effects were as
broad as direct. Not merely soldiers, but finance, industry and opinion
were mobilized and consolidated. Neutrality was a precarious affair.
There was a critical epoch in the history of the world when the Roman
Empire assembled in itself the lands and peoples of the Mediterranean
basin. The World War stands out as an indubitable proof that what then
happened for a region has now happened for the world, only there is now
no comprehensive political organization to include the various divided
yet interdependent countries. Any one who even partially visualizes the
scene has a convincing reminder of the meaning of the Great Society:
that it exists, and that it is not integrated.
Extensive, enduring, intricate and serious indirect consequences of
the conjoint activity of a comparatively few persons traverse the
globe. The similes of the stone cast into the pool, ninepins in a row,
the spark which kindles a vast conflagration, are pale in comparison
with the reality. The spread of the war seemed like the movement of
an uncontrolled natural catastrophe. The consolidation of peoples in
enclosed, nominally independent, national states has its counterpart in
the fact that their acts affect groups and individuals in other states
all over the world. The connections and ties which transferred energies
set in motion in one spot to all parts of the earth were not tangible
and visible; they do not stand out as do politically bounded states.
But the war is there to show that they are as real, and to prove
that they are not organized and regulated. It suggests that existing
political and legal forms and arrangements are incompetent to deal with
the situation. For the latter is the joint product of the existing
constitution of the political state and the working of non-political
forces not adjusted to political forms. We cannot expect the causes of
a disease to combine effectually to cure the disease they create. The
need is that the non-political forces organize themselves to transform
existing political structures: that the divided and troubled publics
integrate.
In general, the non-political forces are the expressions of a
technological age injected into an inherited political scheme which
operates to deflect and distort their normal operation. The industrial
and commercial relations that created the situation of which the war
is a manifestation are as evident in small things as great. They were
exhibited, not only in the struggle for raw materials, for distant
markets, and in staggering national debts, but in local and unimportant
phenomena. Travelers finding themselves away from home could not
get their letters of credit cashed even in countries not then at
war. Stock-markets closed on one hand, and profiteers piled up their
millions on the other. One instance may be cited from domestic affairs.
The plight of the farmer since the war has created a domestic political
issue. A great demand was generated for food and other agricultural
products; prices rose. In addition to this economic stimulus, farmers
were objects of constant political exhortation to increase their crops.
Inflation and temporary prosperity followed. The end of active warfare
came. Impoverished countries could not buy and pay for foodstuffs up to
even a pre-war level. Taxes were enormously increased. Currencies were
depreciated; the world’s gold supply centered here. The stimulus of war
and of national extravagance piled up the inventories of factories and
merchants. Wages and the prices of agricultural implements increased.
When deflation came it found a restricted market, increased costs of
production, and farmers burdened with mortgages lightly assumed during
the period of frenzied expansion.
This instance is not cited because it is peculiarly important in
comparison with other consequences which have happened, especially
in Europe. It is relatively insignificant by contrast with them,
and in contrast with the arousal of nationalistic sentiments which
has everywhere taken place since the war in so-called backward
countries. But it shows the ramifying consequences of our intricate and
interdependent economic relations, and it shows how little prevision
and regulation exist. The farming population could hardly have acted
with knowledge of the consequences of the fundamental relations in
which they were implicated. They could make a momentary and improvised
response to them, but they could not manage their affairs in controlled
adaptation to the course of events. They present themselves as hapless
subjects of overwhelming operations with which they were hardly
acquainted and over which they had no more control than over the
vicissitudes of climate.
The illustration cannot be objected to on the ground that it rests
upon the abnormal situation of war. The war itself was a normal
manifestation of the underlying unintegrated state of society. The
local face-to-face community has been invaded by forces so vast,
so remote in initiation, so far-reaching in scope and so complexly
indirect in operation, that they are, from the standpoint of the
members of local social units, unknown. Man, as has been often
remarked, has difficulty in getting on either with or without his
fellows, even in neighborhoods. He is not more successful in getting
on with them when they act at a great distance in ways invisible to
him. An inchoate public is capable of organization only when indirect
consequences are perceived, and when it is possible to project agencies
which order their occurrence. At present, many consequences are felt
rather than perceived; they are suffered, but they cannot be said to
be known, for they are not, by those who experience them, referred to
their origins. It goes, then, without saying that agencies are not
established which canalize the streams of social action and thereby
regulate them. Hence the publics are amorphous and unarticulated.
There was a time when a man might entertain a few general political
principles and apply them with some confidence. A citizen believed in
states’ rights or in a centralized federal government; in free trade or
protection. It did not involve much mental strain to imagine that by
throwing in his lot with one party or another he could so express his
views that his belief would count in government. For the average voter
to-day the tariff question is a complicated medley of infinite detail,
schedules of rates specific and _ad valorem_ on countless things, many
of which he does not recognize by name, and with respect to which he
can form no judgment. Probably not one voter in a thousand even reads
the scores of pages in which the rates of toll are enumerated and he
would not be much wiser if he did. The average man gives it up as a bad
job. At election time, appeal to some time-worn slogan may galvanize
him into a temporary notion that he has convictions on an important
subject, but except for manufacturers and dealers who have some
interest at stake in this or that schedule, belief lacks the qualities
which attach to beliefs about matters of personal concern. Industry is
too complex and intricate.
Again the voter may by personal predilection or inherited belief
incline towards magnifying the scope of local governments and
inveigh against the evils of centralization. But he is vehemently
sure of social evils attending the liquor traffic. He finds that
the prohibitory law of his locality, township, county or state, is
largely nullified by the importation of liquor from outside, made easy
by modern means of transportation. So he becomes an advocate of a
national amendment giving the central government power to regulate the
manufacture and sale of intoxicating drinks. This brings in its train
a necessary extension of federal officials and powers. Thus to-day,
the south, the traditional home of the states’ rights doctrine, is
the chief supporter of national prohibition and Volstead Act. It would
not be possible to say how many voters have thought of the relation
between their professed general principle and their special position on
the liquor question: probably not many. On the other hand, life-long
Hamiltonians, proclaimers of the dangers of particularistic local
autonomy, are opposed to prohibition. Hence they play a tune _ad hoc_
on the Jeffersonian flute. Gibes at inconsistency are, however, as
irrelevant as they are easy. The social situation has been so changed
by the factors of an industrial age that traditional general principles
have little practical meaning. They persist as emotional cries rather
than as reasoned ideas.
The same criss-crossing occurs with reference to regulation of
railways. The opponent of a strong federal government finds, being a
farmer or shipper, that rates are too high; he also finds that railways
pay little attention to state boundaries, that lines once local are
parts of vast systems and that state legislation and administration are
ineffectual for his purpose. He calls for national regulation. Some
partisan of the powers of the central government, on the other hand,
being an investor in stocks and bonds, finds that his income is likely
to be unfavorably affected by federal action and he promptly protests
against the vexatious tendency to appeal to national aid, which has now
become in his eyes a foolish paternalism. The developments of industry
and commerce have so complicated affairs that a clear-cut, generally
applicable, standard of judgment becomes practically impossible. The
forest cannot be seen for the trees nor the trees for the forest.
A striking example of the shift of the actual tenor of doctrines--that
is, of their consequences in application--is presented in the history
of the doctrine of Individualism, interpreted to signify a minimum of
governmental “interference” with industry and trade. At the outset, it
was held by “progressives,” by those who were protesting against the
inherited régime of rules of law and administration. Vested interests,
on the contrary, were mainly in favor of the old status. To-day the
industrial-property régime being established, the doctrine is the
intellectual bulwark of the standpatter and reactionary. He it is that
now wants to be let alone, and who utters the war-cry of liberty for
private industry, thrift, contract and their pecuniary fruit. In the
United States the name “liberal,” as a party designation, is still
employed to designate a progressive in political matters. In most other
countries, the “liberal” party is that which represents established
and vested commercial and financial interests in protest against
governmental regulation. The irony of history is nowhere more evident
than in the reversal of the practical meaning of the term “liberalism”
in spite of a literal continuity of theory.
Political apathy, which is a natural product of the discrepancies
between actual practices and traditional machinery, ensues from
inability to identify one’s self with definite issues. These are hard
to find and locate in the vast complexities of current life. When
traditional war-cries have lost their import in practical policies
which are consonant with them, they are readily dismissed as bunk. Only
habit and tradition, rather than reasoned conviction, together with a
vague faith in doing one’s civic duty, send to the polls a considerable
percentage of the fifty per cent. who still vote. And of them it is a
common remark that a large number vote against something or somebody
rather than for anything or anybody, except when powerful agencies
create a scare. The old principles do not fit contemporary life as it
is lived, however well they may have expressed the vital interests of
the times in which they arose. Thousands feel their hollowness even
if they cannot make their feeling articulate. The confusion which has
resulted from the size and ramifications of social activities has
rendered men skeptical of the efficiency of political action. Who is
sufficient unto these things? Men feel that they are caught in the
sweep of forces too vast to understand or master. Thought is brought
to a standstill and action paralyzed. Even the specialist finds it
difficult to trace the chain of “cause and effect”; and even he
operates only after the event, looking backward, while meantime social
activities have moved on to effect a new state of affairs.
Similar considerations account for depreciation of the machinery of
democratic political action in contrast with a rising appreciation of
the need of expert administrators. For example, one of the by-products
of the war was the investment of the government at Muscle Shoals for
the manufacture of nitrogen, a chemical product of great importance
to the farmer, as well as to armies in the field. The disposition and
utilization of the plant have become matters of political dispute.
The questions involved, questions of science, agriculture, industry
and finance, are highly technical. How many voters are competent to
measure all the factors involved in arriving at a decision? And if they
were competent after studying it, how many have the time to devote to
it? It is true that this matter does not come before the electorate
directly, but the technical difficulty of the problem is reflected
in the confused paralysis of the legislators whose business it is to
deal with it. The confused situation is further complicated by the
invention of other and cheaper methods of producing nitrates. Again,
the rapid development of hydro-electric and super-power is a matter of
public concern. In the long run, few questions exceed it in importance.
Aside from business corporations which have a direct interest in it
and some engineers, how many citizens have the data or the ability to
secure and estimate the facts involved in its settlement? One further
illustration: Two things which intimately concern a local public are
street-railway transportation and the marketing of food products. But
the history of municipal politics shows in most cases a flare-up of
intense interest followed by a period of indifference. Results come
home to the masses of the people. But the very size, heterogeneity
and nobility of urban populations, the vast capital required, the
technical character of the engineering problems involved, soon tire
the attention of the average voter. I think the three instances are
fairly typical. The ramification of the issues before the public is so
wide and intricate, the technical matters involved are so specialized,
the details are so many and so shifting, that the public cannot for
any length of time identify and hold itself. It is not that there is
no public, no large body of persons having a common interest in the
consequences of social transactions. There is too much public, a public
too diffused and scattered and too intricate in composition. And there
are too many publics, for conjoint actions which have indirect, serious
and enduring consequences are multitudinous beyond comparison, and
each one of them crosses the others and generates its own group of
persons especially affected with little to hold these different publics
together in an integrated whole.
The picture is not complete without taking into account the many
competitors with effective political interest. Political concerns
have, of course, always had strong rivals. Persons have always been,
for the most part, taken up with their more immediate work and play.
The power of “bread and the circus” to divert attention from public
matters is an old story. But now the industrial conditions which
have enlarged, complicated and multiplied public interests have also
multiplied and intensified formidable rivals to them. In countries
where political life has been most successfully conducted in the past,
there was a class specially set aside, as it were, who made political
affairs their special business. Aristotle could not conceive a body of
citizens competent to carry on politics consisting of others than those
who had leisure, that is, of those who were relieved from all other
preoccupations, especially that of making a livelihood. Political life,
till recent times, bore out his belief. Those who took an active part
in politics were “gentlemen,” persons who had had property and money
long enough, and enough of it, so that its further pursuit was vulgar
and beneath their station. To-day, so great and powerful is the sweep
of the industrial current, the person of leisure is usually an idle
person. Persons have their own business to attend to, and “business”
has its own precise and specialized meaning. Politics thus tends to
become just another “business”: the especial concern of bosses and the
managers of the machine.
The increase in the number, variety and cheapness of amusements
represents a powerful diversion from political concern. The members
of an inchoate public have too many ways of enjoyment, as well as of
work, to give much thought to organization into an effective public.
Man is a consuming and sportive animal as well as a political one.
What is significant is that access to means of amusement has been
rendered easy and cheap beyond anything known in the past. The present
era of “prosperity” may not be enduring. But the movie, radio, cheap
reading matter and motor car with all they stand for have come to stay.
That they did not originate in deliberate desire to divert attention
from political interests does not lessen their effectiveness in that
direction. The political elements in the constitution of the human
being, those having to do with citizenship, are crowded to one side.
In most circles it is hard work to sustain conversation on a political
theme; and once initiated, it is quickly dismissed with a yawn. Let
there be introduced the topic of the mechanism and accomplishment of
various makes of motor cars or the respective merits of actresses, and
the dialogue goes on at a lively pace. The thing to be remembered is
that this cheapened and multiplied access to amusement is the product
of the machine age, intensified by the business tradition which causes
provision of means for an enjoyable passing of time to be one of the
most profitable of occupations.
One phase of the workings of a technological age, with its
unprecedented command of natural energies, while it is implied in what
has been said, needs explicit attention. The older publics, in being
local communities, largely homogeneous with one another, were also, as
the phrase goes, static. They changed, of course, but barring war,
catastrophe and great migrations, the modifications were gradual. They
proceeded slowly and were largely unperceived by those undergoing them.
The newer forces have created mobile and fluctuating associational
forms. The common complaints of the disintegration of family life may
be placed in evidence. The movement from rural to urban assemblies is
also the result and proof of this mobility. Nothing stays long put,
not even the associations by which business and industry are carried
on. The mania for motion and speed is a symptom of the restless
instability of social life, and it operates to intensify the causes
from which it springs. Steel replaces wood and masonry for buildings;
ferro-concrete modifies steel, and some invention may work a further
revolution. Muscle Shoals was acquired to produce nitrogen, and new
methods have already made antiquated the supposed need of great
accumulation of water power. Any selected illustration suffers because
of the heterogeneous mass of cases to select from. How can a public
be organized, we may ask, when literally it does not stay in place?
Only deep issues or those which can be made to appear such can find a
common denominator among all the shifting and unstable relationships.
Attachment is a very different function of life from affection.
Affections will continue as long as the heart beats. But attachment
requires something more than organic causes. The very things which
stimulate and intensify affections may undermine attachments. For
these are bred in tranquil stability; they are nourished in constant
relationships. Acceleration of mobility disturbs them at their root.
And without abiding attachments associations are too shifting and
shaken to permit a public readily to locate and identify itself.
The new era of human relationships in which we live is one marked by
mass production for remote markets, by cable and telephone, by cheap
printing, by railway and steam navigation. Only geographically did
Columbus discover a new world. The actual new world has been generated
in the last hundred years. Steam and electricity have done more to
alter the conditions under which men associate together than all the
agencies which affected human relationships before our time. There
are those who lay the blame for all the evils of our lives on steam,
electricity and machinery. It is always convenient to have a devil as
well as a savior to bear the responsibilities of humanity. In reality,
the trouble springs rather from the ideas and absence of ideas in
connection with which technological factors operate. Mental and moral
beliefs and ideals change more slowly than outward conditions. If
the ideals associated with the higher life of our cultural past have
been impaired, the fault is primarily with them. Ideals and standards
formed without regard to the means by which they are to be achieved
and incarnated in flesh are bound to be thin and wavering. Since the
aims, desires and purposes created by a machine age do not connect
with tradition, there are two sets of rival ideals, and those which
have actual instrumentalities at their disposal have the advantage.
Because the two are rivals and because the older ones retain their
glamor and sentimental prestige in literature and religion, the newer
ones are perforce harsh and narrow. For the older symbols of ideal life
still engage thought and command loyalty. Conditions have changed,
but every aspect of life, from religion and education to property and
trade, shows that nothing approaching a transformation has taken place
in ideas and ideals. Symbols control sentiment and thought, and the
new age has no symbols consonant with its activities. Intellectual
instrumentalities for the formation of an organized public are more
inadequate than its overt means. The ties which hold men together in
action are numerous, tough and subtle. But they are invisible and
intangible. We have the physical tools of communication as never
before. The thoughts and aspirations congruous with them are not
communicated, and hence are not common. Without such communication the
public will remain shadowy and formless, seeking spasmodically for
itself, but seizing and holding its shadow rather than its substance.
Till the Great Society is converted into a Great Community, the
Public will remain in eclipse. Communication can alone create a great
community. Our Babel is not one of tongues but of the signs and symbols
without which shared experience is impossible.
CHAPTER V
SEARCH FOR THE GREAT COMMUNITY
We have had occasion to refer in passing to the distinction between
democracy as a social idea and political democracy as a system of
government. The two are, of course, connected. The idea remains barren
and empty save as it is incarnated in human relationships. Yet in
discussion they must be distinguished. The idea of democracy is a wider
and fuller idea than can be exemplified in the state even at its best.
To be realized it must affect all modes of human association, the
family, the school, industry, religion. And even as far as political
arrangements are concerned, governmental institutions are but a
mechanism for securing to an idea channels of effective operation.
It will hardly do to say that criticisms of the political machinery
leave the believer in the idea untouched. For, as far as they are
justified--and no candid believer can deny that many of them are only
too well grounded--they arouse him to bestir himself in order that the
idea may find a more adequate machinery through which to work. What
the faithful insist upon, however, is that the idea and its external
organs and structures are not to be identified. We object to the common
supposition of the foes of existing democratic government that the
accusations against it touch the social and moral aspirations and ideas
which underlie the political forms. The old saying that the cure for
the ills of democracy is more democracy is not apt if it means that
the evils may be remedied by introducing more machinery of the same
kind as that which already exists, or by refining and perfecting that
machinery. But the phrase may also indicate the need of returning to
the idea itself, of clarifying and deepening our apprehension of it,
and of employing our sense of its meaning to criticize and re-make its
political manifestations.
Confining ourselves, for the moment, to political democracy, we must,
in any case, renew our protest against the assumption that the idea has
itself produced the governmental practices which obtain in democratic
states: General suffrage, elected representatives, majority rule, and
so on. The idea has influenced the concrete political movement, but it
has not caused it. The transition from family and dynastic government
supported by the loyalties of tradition to popular government was the
outcome primarily of technological discoveries and inventions working
a change in the customs by which men had been bound together. It was
not due to the doctrines of doctrinaires. The forms to which we are
accustomed in democratic governments represent the cumulative effect of
a multitude of events, unpremeditated as far as political effects were
concerned and having unpredictable consequences. There is no sanctity
in universal suffrage, frequent elections, majority rule, congressional
and cabinet government. These things are devices evolved in the
direction in which the current was moving, each wave of which involved
at the time of its impulsion a minimum of departure from antecedent
custom and law. The devices served a purpose; but the purpose was
rather that of meeting existing needs which had become too intense to
be ignored, than that of forwarding the democratic idea. In spite of
all defects, they served their own purpose well.
Looking back, with the aid which _ex post facto_ experience can give,
it would be hard for the wisest to devise schemes which, under the
circumstances, would have met the needs better. In this retrospective
glance, it is possible, however, to see how the doctrinal formulations
which accompanied them were inadequate, one-sided and positively
erroneous. In fact they were hardly more than political war-cries
adopted to help in carrying on some immediate agitation or in
justifying some particular practical polity struggling for recognition,
even though they were asserted to be absolute truths of human nature
or of morals. The doctrines served a particular local pragmatic need.
But often their very adaptation to immediate circumstances unfitted
them, pragmatically, to meet more enduring and more extensive needs.
They lived to cumber the political ground, obstructing progress, all
the more so because they were uttered and held not as hypotheses with
which to direct social experimentation but as final truths, dogmas. No
wonder they call urgently for revision and displacement.
Nevertheless the current has set steadily in one direction: toward
democratic forms. That government exists to serve its community, and
that this purpose cannot be achieved unless the community itself
shares in selecting its governors and determining their policies, are
a deposit of fact left, as far as we can see, permanently in the wake
of doctrines and forms, however transitory the latter. They are not
the whole of the democratic idea, but they express it in its political
phase. Belief in this political aspect is not a mystic faith as if
in some overruling providence that cares for children, drunkards and
others unable to help themselves. It marks a well-attested conclusion
from historic facts. We have every reason to think that whatever
changes may take place in existing democratic machinery, they will be
of a sort to make the interest of the public a more supreme guide and
criterion of governmental activity, and to enable the public to form
and manifest its purposes still more authoritatively. In this sense
the cure for the ailments of democracy is more democracy. The prime
difficulty, as we have seen, is that of discovering the means by which
a scattered, mobile and manifold public may so recognize itself as
to define and express its interests. This discovery is necessarily
precedent to any fundamental change in the machinery. We are not
concerned therefore to set forth counsels as to advisable improvements
in the political forms of democracy. Many have been suggested. It is no
derogation of their relative worth to say that consideration of these
changes is not at present an affair of primary importance. The problem
lies deeper; it is in the first instance an intellectual problem: the
search for conditions under which the Great Society may become the
Great Community. When these conditions are brought into being they will
make their own forms. Until they have come about, it is somewhat futile
to consider what political machinery will suit them.
In a search for the conditions under which the inchoate public now
extant may function democratically, we may proceed from a statement of
the nature of the democratic idea in its generic social sense.[11] From
the standpoint of the individual, it consists in having a responsible
share according to capacity in forming and directing the activities
of the groups to which one belongs and in participating according to
need in the values which the groups sustain. From the standpoint of
the groups, it demands liberation of the potentialities of members
of a group in harmony with the interests and goods which are common.
Since every individual is a member of many groups, this specification
cannot be fulfilled except when different groups interact flexibly and
fully in connection with other groups. A member of a robber band may
express his powers in a way consonant with belonging to that group and
be directed by the interest common to its members. But he does so only
at the cost of repression of those of his potentialities which can
be realized only through membership in other groups. The robber band
cannot interact flexibly with other groups; it can act only through
isolating itself. It must prevent the operation of all interests save
those which circumscribe it in its separateness. But a good citizen
finds his conduct as a member of a political group enriching and
enriched by his participation in family life, industry, scientific
and artistic associations. There is a free give-and-take: fullness of
integrated personality is therefore possible of achievement, since the
pulls and responses of different groups reënforce one another and their
values accord.
Regarded as an idea, democracy is not an alternative to other
principles of associated life. It is the idea of community life itself.
It is an ideal in the only intelligible sense of an ideal: namely, the
tendency and movement of some thing which exists carried to its final
limit, viewed as completed, perfected. Since things do not attain
such fulfillment but are in actuality distracted and interfered with,
democracy in this sense is not a fact and never will be. But neither
in this sense is there or has there ever been anything which is a
community in its full measure, a community unalloyed by alien elements.
The idea or ideal of a community presents, however, actual phases
of associated life as they are freed from restrictive and disturbing
elements, and are contemplated as having attained their limit of
development. Wherever there is conjoint activity whose consequences are
appreciated as good by all singular persons who take part in it, and
where the realization of the good is such as to effect an energetic
desire and effort to sustain it in being just because it is a good
shared by all, there is in so far a community. The clear consciousness
of a communal life, in all its implications, constitutes the idea of
democracy.
Only when we start from a community as a fact, grasp the fact in
thought so as to clarify and enhance its constituent elements, can
we reach an idea of democracy which is not utopian. The conceptions
and shibboleths which are traditionally associated with the idea of
democracy take on a veridical and directive meaning only when they
are construed as marks and traits of an association which realizes
the defining characteristics of a community. Fraternity, liberty and
equality isolated from communal life are hopeless abstractions. Their
separate assertion leads to mushy sentimentalism or else to extravagant
and fanatical violence which in the end defeats its own aims. Equality
then becomes a creed of mechanical identity which is false to facts
and impossible of realization. Effort to attain it is divisive of the
vital bonds which hold men together; as far as it puts forth issue, the
outcome is a mediocrity in which good is common only in the sense of
being average and vulgar. Liberty is then thought of as independence of
social ties, and ends in dissolution and anarchy. It is more difficult
to sever the idea of brotherhood from that of a community, and hence
it is either practically ignored in the movements which identify
democracy with Individualism, or else it is a sentimentally appended
tag. In its just connection with communal experience, fraternity is
another name for the consciously appreciated goods which accrue from
an association in which all share, and which give direction to the
conduct of each. Liberty is that secure release and fulfillment of
personal potentialities which take place only in rich and manifold
association with others: the power to be an individualized self
making a distinctive contribution and enjoying in its own way the
fruits of association. Equality denotes the unhampered share which
each individual member of the community has in the consequences of
associated action. It is equitable because it is measured only by need
and capacity to utilize, not by extraneous factors which deprive one
in order that another may take and have. A baby in the family is equal
with others, not because of some antecedent and structural quality
which is the same as that of others, but in so far as his needs for
care and development are attended to without being sacrificed to
the superior strength, possessions and matured abilities of others.
Equality does not signify that kind of mathematical or physical
equivalence in virtue of which any one element may be substituted
for another. It denotes effective regard for whatever is distinctive
and unique in each, irrespective of physical and psychological
inequalities. It is not a natural possession but is a fruit of the
community when its action is directed by its character as a community.
Associated or joint activity is a condition of the creation of a
community. But association itself is physical and organic, while
communal life is moral, that is emotionally, intellectually,
consciously sustained. Human beings combine in behavior as directly and
unconsciously as do atoms, stellar masses and cells; as directly and
unknowingly as they divide and repel. They do so in virtue of their
own structure, as man and woman unite, as the baby seeks the breast
and the breast is there to supply its need. They do so from external
circumstances, pressure from without, as atoms combine or separate
in presence of an electric charge, or as sheep huddle together from
the cold. Associated activity needs no explanation; things are made
that way. But no amount of aggregated collective action of itself
constitutes a community. For beings who observe and think, and whose
ideas are absorbed by impulses and become sentiments and interests,
“we” is as inevitable as “I.” But “we” and “our” exist only when the
consequences of combined action are perceived and become an object of
desire and effort, just as “I” and “mine” appear on the scene only
when a distinctive share in mutual action is consciously asserted or
claimed. Human associations may be ever so organic in origin and firm
in operation, but they develop into societies in a human sense only as
their consequences, being known, are esteemed and sought for. Even if
“society” were as much an organism as some writers have held, it would
not on that account be society. Interactions, transactions, occur _de
facto_ and the results of interdependence follow. But participation in
activities and sharing in results are additive concerns. They demand
_communication_ as a prerequisite.
Combined activity happens among human beings; but when nothing else
happens it passes as inevitably into some other mode of interconnected
activity as does the interplay of iron and the oxygen of water. What
takes place is wholly describable in terms of energy, or, as we say
in the case of human interactions, of force. Only when there exist
_signs_ or _symbols_ of activities and of their outcome can the flux
be viewed as from without, be arrested for consideration and esteem,
and be regulated. Lightning strikes and rives a tree or rock, and the
resulting fragments take up and continue the process of interaction,
and so on and on. But when phases of the process are represented by
signs, a new medium is interposed. As symbols are related to one
another, the important relations of a course of events are recorded and
are preserved as meanings. Recollection and foresight are possible;
the new medium facilitates calculation, planning, and a new kind of
action which intervenes in what happens to direct its course in the
interest of what is foreseen and desired.
Symbols in turn depend upon and promote communication. The results
of conjoint experience are considered and transmitted. Events cannot
be passed from one to another, but meanings may be shared by means
of signs. Wants and impulses are then attached to common meanings.
They are thereby transformed into desires and purposes, which, since
they implicate a common or mutually understood meaning, present new
ties, converting a conjoint activity into a community of interest
and endeavor. Thus there is generated what, metaphorically, may be
termed a general will and social consciousness: desire and choice on
the part of individuals in behalf of activities that, by means of
symbols, are communicable and shared by all concerned. A community thus
presents an order of energies transmuted into one of meanings which are
appreciated and mutually referred by each to every other on the part
of those engaged in combined action. “Force” is not eliminated but is
transformed in use and direction by ideas and sentiments made possible
by means of symbols.
The work of conversion of the physical and organic phase of associated
behavior into a community of action saturated and regulated by mutual
interest in shared meanings, consequences which are translated into
ideas and desired objects by means of symbols, does not occur all at
once nor completely. At any given time, it sets a problem rather than
marks a settled achievement. We are born organic beings associated
with others, but we are not born members of a community. The young
have to be brought within the traditions, outlook and interests
which characterize a community by means of education: by unremitting
instruction and by learning in connection with the phenomena of overt
association. Everything which is distinctively human is learned, not
native, even though it could not be learned without native structures
which mark man off from other animals. To learn in a human way and to
human effect is not just to acquire added skill through refinement of
original capacities.
To learn to be human is to develop through the give-and-take of
communication an effective sense of being an individually distinctive
member of a community; one who understands and appreciates its beliefs,
desires and methods, and who contributes to a further conversion of
organic powers into human resources and values. But this translation is
never finished. The old Adam, the unregenerate element in human nature,
persists. It shows itself wherever the method obtains of attaining
results by use of force instead of by the method of communication
and enlightenment. It manifests itself more subtly, pervasively and
effectually when knowledge and the instrumentalities of skill which
are the product of communal life are employed in the service of wants
and impulses which have not themselves been modified by reference to
a shared interest. To the doctrine of “natural” economy which held
that commercial exchange would bring about such an interdependence
that harmony would automatically result, Rousseau gave an adequate
answer in advance. He pointed out that interdependence provides just
the situation which makes it possible and worth while for the stronger
and abler to exploit others for their own ends, to keep others in a
state of subjection where they can be utilized as animated tools.
The remedy he suggested, a return to a condition of independence
based on isolation, was hardly seriously meant. But its desperateness
is evidence of the urgency of the problem. Its negative character
was equivalent to surrender of any hope of solution. By contrast it
indicates the nature of the only possible solution: the perfecting
of the means and ways of communication of meanings so that genuinely
shared interest in the consequences of interdependent activities may
inform desire and effort and thereby direct action.
This is the meaning of the statement that the problem is a moral one
dependent upon intelligence and education. We have in our prior account
sufficiently emphasized the rôle of technological and industrial
factors in creating the Great Society. What was said may even have
seemed to imply acceptance of the deterministic version of an economic
interpretation of history and institutions. It is silly and futile to
ignore and deny economic facts. They do not cease to operate because
we refuse to note them, or because we smear them over with sentimental
idealizations. As we have also noted, they generate as their result
overt and external conditions of action and these are known with
various degrees of adequacy. What actually happens in consequence
of industrial forces is dependent upon the presence or absence of
perception and communication of consequences, upon foresight and its
effect upon desire and endeavor. Economic agencies produce one result
when they are left to work themselves out on the merely physical level,
or on that level modified only as the knowledge, skill and technique
which the community has accumulated are transmitted to its members
unequally and by chance. They have a different outcome in the degree in
which knowledge of consequences is equitably distributed, and action
is animated by an informed and lively sense of a shared interest. The
doctrine of economic interpretation as usually stated ignores the
transformation which meanings may effect; it passes over the new medium
which communication may interpose between industry and its eventual
consequences. It is obsessed by the illusion which vitiated the
“natural economy”: an illusion due to failure to note the difference
made in action by perception and publication of its consequences,
actual and possible. It thinks in terms of antecedents, not of the
eventual; of origins, not fruits.
We have returned, through this apparent excursion, to the question in
which our earlier discussion culminated: What are the conditions under
which it is possible for the Great Society to approach more closely
and vitally the status of a Great Community, and thus take form in
genuinely democratic societies and state? What are the conditions under
which we may reasonably picture the Public emerging from its eclipse?
The study will be an intellectual or hypothetical one. There will be no
attempt to state how the required conditions might come into existence,
nor to prophesy that they will occur. The object of the analysis will
be to show that _unless_ ascertained specifications are realized, the
Community cannot be organized as a democratically effective Public. It
is not claimed that the conditions which will be noted will suffice,
but only that at least they are indispensable. In other words, we shall
endeavor to frame a hypothesis regarding the democratic state to stand
in contrast with the earlier doctrine which has been nullified by the
course of events.
Two essential constituents in that older theory, as will be recalled,
were the notions that each individual is of himself equipped with the
intelligence needed, under the operation of self-interest, to engage
in political affairs; and that general suffrage, frequent elections of
officials and majority rule are sufficient to ensure the responsibility
of elected rulers to the desires and interests of the public. As we
shall see, the second conception is logically bound up with the first
and stands or falls with it. At the basis of the scheme lies what
Lippmann has well called the idea of the “omni-competent” individual:
competent to frame policies, to judge their results; competent to
know in all situations demanding political action what is for his
own good, and competent to enforce his idea of good and the will to
effect it against contrary forces. Subsequent history has proved that
the assumption involved illusion. Had it not been for the misleading
influence of a false psychology, the illusion might have been detected
in advance. But current philosophy held that ideas and knowledge were
functions of a mind or consciousness which originated in individuals
by means of isolated contact with objects. But in fact, knowledge is a
function of association and communication; it depends upon tradition,
upon tools and methods socially transmitted, developed and sanctioned.
Faculties of effectual observation, reflection and desire are habits
acquired under the influence of the culture and institutions of
society, not ready-made inherent powers. The fact that man acts from
crudely intelligized emotion and from habit rather than from rational
consideration, is now so familiar that it is not easy to appreciate
that the other idea was taken seriously as the basis of economic and
political philosophy. The measure of truth which it contains was
derived from observation of a relatively small group of shrewd business
men who regulated their enterprises by calculation and accounting,
and of citizens of small and stable local communities who were so
intimately acquainted with the persons and affairs of their locality
that they could pass competent judgment upon the bearing of proposed
measures upon their own concerns.
Habit is the mainspring of human action, and habits are formed for the
most part under the influence of the customs of a group. The organic
structure of man entails the formation of habit, for, whether we
wish it or not, whether we are aware of it or not, every act effects
a modification of attitude and set which directs future behavior.
The dependence of habit-forming upon those habits of a group which
constitute customs and institutions is a natural consequence of the
helplessness of infancy. The social consequences of habit have been
stated once for all by James: “Habit is the enormous fly-wheel of
society, its most precious conservative influence. It alone is what
keeps us within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of
fortune from the uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest
and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought
up to tread therein. It keeps the fisherman and the deck-hand at sea
through the winter; it holds the miner in his darkness, and nails the
country-man to his log cabin and his lonely farm through all the months
of snow; it protects us from invasion by the natives of the desert and
the frozen zone. It dooms us all to fight out the battle of life upon
the lines of our nurture or our early choice, and to make the best of
a pursuit that disagrees, because there is no other for which we are
fitted and it is too late to begin again. It keeps different social
strata from mixing.”
The influence of habit is decisive because all distinctively human
action has to be learned, and the very heart, blood and sinews of
learning is creation of habitudes. Habits bind us to orderly and
established ways of action because they generate ease, skill and
interest in things to which we have grown used and because they
instigate fear to walk in different ways, and because they leave us
incapacitated for the trial of them. Habit does not preclude the use
of thought, but it determines the channels within which it operates.
Thinking is secreted in the interstices of habits. The sailor,
miner, fisherman and farmer think, but their thoughts fall within
the framework of accustomed occupations and relationships. We dream
beyond the limits of use and wont, but only rarely does revery become
a source of acts which break bounds; so rarely that we name those in
whom it happens demonic geniuses and marvel at the spectacle. Thinking
itself becomes habitual along certain lines; a specialized occupation.
Scientific men, philosophers, literary persons, are not men and women
who have so broken the bonds of habits that pure reason and emotion
undefiled by use and wont speak through them. They are persons of a
specialized infrequent habit. Hence the idea that men are moved by an
intelligent and calculated regard for their own good is pure mythology.
Even if the principle of self-love actuated behavior, it would still
be true that the _objects_ in which men find their love manifested, the
objects which they take as constituting their peculiar interests, are
set by habits reflecting social customs.
These facts explain why the social doctrinaires of the new industrial
movement had so little prescience of what was to follow in consequence
of it. These facts explain why the more things changed, the more they
were the same; they account, that is, for the fact that instead of
the sweeping revolution which was expected to result from democratic
political machinery, there was in the main but a transfer of vested
power from one class to another. A few men, whether or not they were
good judges of their own true interest and good, were competent judges
of the conduct of business for pecuniary profit, and of how the new
governmental machinery could be made to serve their ends. It would
have taken a new race of human beings to escape, in the use made of
political forms, from the influence of deeply engrained habits, of
old institutions and customary social status, with their inwrought
limitations of expectation, desire and demand. And such a race, unless
of disembodied angelic constitution, would simply have taken up the
task where human beings assumed it upon emergence from the condition
of anthropoid apes. In spite of sudden and catastrophic revolutions,
the essential continuity of history is doubly guaranteed. Not only are
personal desire and belief functions of habit and custom, but the
objective conditions which provide the resources and tools of action,
together with its limitations, obstructions and traps, are precipitates
of the past, perpetuating, willy-nilly, its hold and power. The
creation of a _tabula rasa_ in order to permit the creation of a new
order is so impossible as to set at naught both the hope of buoyant
revolutionaries and the timidity of scared conservatives.
Nevertheless, changes take place and are cumulative in character.
Observation of them in the light of their recognized consequences
arouses reflection, discovery, invention, experimentation. When
a certain state of accumulated knowledge, of techniques and
instrumentalities is attained, the process of change is so accelerated,
that, as to-day, it appears externally to be the dominant trait. But
there is a marked lag in any corresponding change of ideas and desires.
Habits of opinion are the toughest of all habits; when they have become
second nature, and are supposedly thrown out of the door, they creep
in again as stealthily and surely as does first nature. And as they
are modified, the alteration first shows itself negatively, in the
disintegration of old beliefs, to be replaced by floating, volatile
and accidentally snatched up opinions. Of course there has been an
enormous increase in the amount of knowledge possessed by mankind,
but it does not equal, probably, the increase in the amount of errors
and half-truths which have got into circulation. In social and human
matters, especially, the development of a critical sense and methods
of discriminating judgment has not kept pace with the growth of
careless reports and of motives for positive misrepresentation.
What is more important, however, is that so much of knowledge is
not knowledge in the ordinary sense of the word, but is “science.”
The quotation marks are not used disrespectfully, but to suggest
the technical character of scientific material. The layman takes
certain conclusions which get into circulation to be science. But
the scientific inquirer knows that they constitute science only in
connection with the methods by which they are reached. Even when true,
they are not science in virtue of their correctness, but by reason of
the apparatus which is employed in reaching them. This apparatus is so
highly specialized that it requires more labor to acquire ability to
use and understand it than to get skill in any other instrumentalities
possessed by man. Science, in other words, is a highly specialized
language, more difficult to learn than any natural language. It is an
artificial language, not in the sense of being factitious, but in that
of being a work of intricate art, devoted to a particular purpose and
not capable of being acquired nor understood in the way in which the
mother tongue is learned. It is, indeed, conceivable that sometime
methods of instruction will be devised which will enable laymen to read
and hear scientific material with comprehension, even when they do not
themselves use the apparatus which is science. The latter may then
become for large numbers what students of language call a passive, if
not an active, vocabulary. But that time is in the future.
For most men, save the scientific workers, science is a mystery in
the hands of initiates, who have become adepts in virtue of following
ritualistic ceremonies from which the profane herd is excluded. They
are fortunate who get as far as a sympathetic appreciation of the
methods which give pattern to the complicated apparatus: methods of
analytic, experimental observation, mathematical formulation and
deduction, constant and elaborate check and test. For most persons,
the reality of the apparatus is found only in its embodiments in
practical affairs, in mechanical devices and in techniques which
touch life as it is lived. For them, electricity is _known_ by means
of the telephones, bells and lights they use, by the generators and
magnetos in the automobiles they drive, by the trolley cars in which
they ride. The physiology and biology they are acquainted with is
that they have learned in taking precautions against germs and from
the physicians they depend upon for health. The science of what might
be supposed to be closest to them, of human nature, was for them an
esoteric mystery until it was applied in advertising, salesmanship and
personnel selection and management, and until, through psychiatry, it
spilled over into life and popular consciousness, through its bearings
upon “nerves,” the morbidities and common forms of crankiness which
make it difficult for persons to get along with one another and with
themselves. Even now, popular psychology is a mass of cant, of slush
and of superstition worthy of the most flourishing days of the medicine
man.
Meanwhile the technological application of the complex apparatus which
is science has revolutionized the conditions under which associated
life goes on. This may be known as a fact which is stated in a
proposition and assented to. But it is not known in the sense that men
understand it. They do not know it as they know some machine which they
operate, or as they know electric light and steam locomotives. They do
not understand _how_ the change has gone on nor _how_ it affects their
conduct. Not understanding its “how,” they cannot use and control its
manifestations. They undergo the consequences, they are affected by
them. They cannot manage them, though some are fortunate enough--what
is commonly called good fortune--to be able to exploit some phase of
the process for their own personal profit. But even the most shrewd and
successful man does not in any analytic and systematic way--in a way
worthy to compare with the knowledge which he has won in lesser affairs
by means of the stress of experience--know the system within which he
operates. Skill and ability work within a framework which we have not
created and do not comprehend. Some occupy strategic positions which
give them advance information of forces that affect the market; and
by training and an innate turn that way they have acquired a special
technique which enables them to use the vast impersonal tide to turn
their own wheels. They can dam the current here and release it there.
The current itself is as much beyond them as was ever the river by the
side of which some ingenious mechanic, employing a knowledge which
was transmitted to him, erected his saw-mill to make boards of trees
which he had not grown. That within limits those successful in affairs
have knowledge and skill is not to be doubted. But such knowledge
goes relatively but little further than that of the competent skilled
operator who manages a machine. It suffices to employ the conditions
which are before him. Skill enables him to turn the flux of events this
way or that in his own neighborhood. It gives him no control of the
flux.
Why should the public and its officers, even if the latter are termed
statesmen, be wiser and more effective? The prime condition of a
democratically organized public is a kind of knowledge and insight
which does not yet exist. In its absence, it would be the height of
absurdity to try to tell what it would be like if it existed. But
some of the conditions which must be fulfilled if it is to exist can
be indicated. We can borrow that much from the spirit and method of
science even if we are ignorant of it as a specialized apparatus. An
obvious requirement is freedom of social inquiry and of distribution
of its conclusions. The notion that men may be free in their thought
even when they are not in its expression and dissemination has been
sedulously propagated. It had its origin in the idea of a mind complete
in itself, apart from action and from objects. Such a consciousness
presents in fact the spectacle of mind deprived of its normal
functioning, because it is baffled by the actualities in connection
with which alone it is truly mind, and is driven back into secluded and
impotent revery.
There can be no public without full publicity in respect to all
consequences which concern it. Whatever obstructs and restricts
publicity, limits and distorts public opinion and checks and distorts
thinking on social affairs. Without freedom of expression, not even
methods of social inquiry can be developed. For tools can be evolved
and perfected only in operation; in application to observing, reporting
and organizing actual subject-matter; and this application cannot occur
save through free and systematic communication. The early history of
physical knowledge, of Greek conceptions of natural phenomena, proves
how inept become the conceptions of the best endowed minds when those
ideas are elaborated apart from the closest contact with the events
which they purport to state and explain. The ruling ideas and methods
of the human sciences are in much the same condition to-day. They are
also evolved on the basis of past gross observations, remote from
constant use in regulation of the material of new observations.
The belief that thought and its communication are now free simply
because legal restrictions which once obtained have been done away
with is absurd. Its currency perpetuates the infantile state of social
knowledge. For it blurs recognition of our central need to possess
conceptions which are used as tools of directed inquiry and which are
tested, rectified and caused to grow in actual use. No man and no mind
was ever emancipated merely by being left alone. Removal of formal
limitations is but a negative condition; positive freedom is not a
state but an act which involves methods and instrumentalities for
control of conditions. Experience shows that sometimes the sense of
external oppression, as by censorship, acts as a challenge and arouses
intellectual energy and excites courage. But a belief in intellectual
freedom where it does not exist contributes only to complacency in
virtual enslavement, to sloppiness, superficiality and recourse to
sensations as a substitute for ideas: marked traits of our present
estate with respect to social knowledge. On one hand, thinking deprived
of its normal course takes refuge in academic specialism, comparable
in its way to what is called scholasticism. On the other hand, the
physical agencies of publicity which exist in such abundance are
utilized in ways which constitute a large part of the present meaning
of publicity: advertising, propaganda, invasion of private life, the
“featuring” of passing incidents in a way which violates all the
moving logic of continuity, and which leaves us with those isolated
intrusions and shocks which are the essence of “sensations.”
It would be a mistake to identify the conditions which limit free
communication and circulation of facts and ideas, and which thereby
arrest and pervert social thought or inquiry, merely with overt forces
which are obstructive. It is true that those who have ability to
manipulate social relations for their own advantage have to be reckoned
with. They have an uncanny instinct for detecting whatever intellectual
tendencies even remotely threaten to encroach upon their control. They
have developed an extraordinary facility in enlisting upon their side
the inertia, prejudices and emotional partisanship of the masses by use
of a technique which impedes free inquiry and expression. We seem to be
approaching a state of government by hired promoters of opinion called
publicity agents. But the more serious enemy is deeply concealed in
hidden entrenchments.
Emotional habituations and intellectual habitudes on the part of the
mass of men create the conditions of which the exploiters of sentiment
and opinion only take advantage. Men have got used to an experimental
method in physical and technical matters. They are still afraid of
it in human concerns. The fear is the more efficacious because like
all deep-lying fears it is covered up and disguised by all kinds of
rationalizations. One of its commonest forms is a truly religious
idealization of, and reverence for, established institutions; for
example in our own politics, the Constitution, the Supreme Court,
private property, free contract and so on. The words “sacred” and
“sanctity” come readily to our lips when such things come under
discussion. They testify to the religious aureole which protects the
institutions. If “holy” means that which is not to be approached nor
touched, save with ceremonial precautions and by specially anointed
officials, then such things are holy in contemporary political life.
As supernatural matters have progressively been left high and dry
upon a secluded beach, the actuality of religious taboos has more and
more gathered about secular institutions, especially those connected
with the nationalistic state.[12] Psychiatrists have discovered that
one of the commonest causes of mental disturbance is an underlying
fear of which the subject is not aware, but which leads to withdrawal
from reality and to unwillingness to think things through. There is a
social pathology which works powerfully against effective inquiry into
social institutions and conditions. It manifests itself in a thousand
ways; in querulousness, in impotent drifting, in uneasy snatching at
distractions, in idealization of the long established, in a facile
optimism assumed as a cloak, in riotous glorification of things “as
they are,” in intimidation of all dissenters--ways which depress and
dissipate thought all the more effectually because they operate with
subtle and unconscious pervasiveness.
The backwardness of social knowledge is marked in its division into
independent and insulated branches of learning. Anthropology, history,
sociology, morals, economics, political science, go their own ways
without constant and systematized fruitful interaction. Only in
appearance is there a similar division in physical knowledge. There is
continuous cross-fertilization between astronomy, physics, chemistry
and the biological sciences. Discoveries and improved methods are so
recorded and organized that constant exchange and intercommunication
take place. The isolation of the humane subjects from one another is
connected with their aloofness from physical knowledge. The mind still
draws a sharp separation between the world in which man lives and the
life of man in and by that world, a cleft reflected in the separation
of man himself into a body and a mind, which, it is currently supposed,
can be known and dealt with apart. That for the past three centuries
energy should have gone chiefly into physical inquiry, beginning
with the things most remote from man such as heavenly bodies, was
to have been expected. The history of the physical sciences reveals
a certain order in which they developed. Mathematical tools had to
be employed before a new astronomy could be constructed. Physics
advanced when ideas worked out in connection with the solar system
were used to describe happenings on the earth. Chemistry waited on
the advance of physics; the sciences of living things required the
material and methods of physics and chemistry in order to make headway.
Human psychology ceased to be chiefly speculative opinion only when
biological and physiological conclusions were available. All this is
natural and seemingly inevitable. Things which had the most outlying
and indirect connection with human interests had to be mastered in some
degree before inquiries could competently converge upon man himself.
Nevertheless the course of development has left us of this age in
a plight. When we say that a subject of science is technically
specialized, or that it is highly “abstract,” what we practically mean
is that it is not conceived in terms of its bearing upon human life.
All _merely_ physical knowledge is technical, couched in a technical
vocabulary communicable only to the few. Even physical knowledge which
does affect human conduct, which does modify what we do and undergo,
is also technical and remote in the degree in which its bearings are
not understood and used. The sunlight, rain, air and soil have always
entered in visible ways into human experience; atoms and molecules and
cells and most other things with which the sciences are occupied affect
us, but not visibly. Because they enter life and modify experience in
imperceptible ways, and their consequences are not realized, speech
about them is technical; communication is by means of peculiar symbols.
One would think, then, that a fundamental and ever-operating aim would
be to translate knowledge of the subject-matter of physical conditions
into terms which are generally understood, into signs denoting human
consequences of services and disservices rendered. For ultimately all
consequences which enter human life depend upon physical conditions;
they can be understood and mastered only as the latter are taken into
account. One would think, then, that any state of affairs which tends
to render the things of the environment unknown and incommunicable by
human beings in terms of their own activities and sufferings would be
deplored as a disaster; that it would be felt to be intolerable, and to
be put up with only as far as it is, at any given time, inevitable.
But the facts are to the contrary. Matter and the material are words
which in the minds of many convey a note of disparagement. They are
taken to be foes of whatever is of ideal value in life, instead of as
conditions of its manifestation and sustained being. In consequence
of this division, they do become in fact enemies, for whatever is
consistently kept apart from human values depresses thought and
renders values sparse and precarious in fact. There are even some who
regard the materialism and dominance of commercialism of modern life
as fruits of undue devotion to physical science, not seeing that the
split between man and nature, artificially made by a tradition which
originated before there was understanding of the physical conditions
that are the medium of human activities, is the benumbing factor. The
most influential form of the divorce is separation between pure and
applied science. Since “application” signifies recognized bearing upon
human experience and well-being, honor of what is “pure” and contempt
for what is “applied” has for its outcome a science which is remote
and technical, communicable only to specialists, and a conduct of
human affairs which is haphazard, biased, unfair in distribution of
values. What is applied and employed as the alternative to knowledge
in regulation of society is ignorance, prejudice, class-interest and
accident. Science is converted into knowledge in its honorable and
emphatic sense _only_ in application. Otherwise it is truncated,
blind, distorted. When it is then applied, it is in ways which explain
the unfavorable sense so often attached to “application” and the
“utilitarian”: namely, use for pecuniary ends to the profit of a few.
At present, the application of physical science is rather _to_ human
concerns than _in_ them. That is, it is external, made in the interests
of its consequences for a possessing and acquisitive class. Application
_in_ life would signify that science was absorbed and distributed; that
it was the instrumentality of that common understanding and thorough
communication which is the precondition of the existence of a genuine
and effective public. The use of science to regulate industry and trade
has gone on steadily. The scientific revolution of the seventeenth
century was the precursor of the industrial revolution of the
eighteenth and nineteenth. In consequence, man has suffered the impact
of an enormously enlarged control of physical energies without any
corresponding ability to control himself and his own affairs. Knowledge
divided against itself, a science to whose incompleteness is added an
artificial split, has played its part in generating enslavement of men,
women and children in factories in which they are animated machines to
tend inanimate machines. It has maintained sordid slums, flurried and
discontented careers, grinding poverty and luxurious wealth, brutal
exploitation of nature and man in times of peace and high explosives
and noxious gases in times of war. Man, a child in understanding of
himself, has placed in his hands physical tools of incalculable power.
He plays with them like a child, and whether they work harm or good is
largely a matter of accident. The instrumentality becomes a master and
works fatally as if possessed of a will of its own--not because it has
a will but because man has not.
The glorification of “pure” science under such conditions is a
rationalization of an escape; it marks a construction of an asylum of
refuge, a shirking of responsibility. The true purity of knowledge
exists not when it is uncontaminated by contact with use and service.
It is wholly a moral matter, an affair of honesty, impartiality
and generous breadth of intent in search and communication. The
adulteration of knowledge is due not to its use, but to vested bias
and prejudice, to one-sidedness of outlook, to vanity, to conceit of
possession and authority, to contempt or disregard of human concern in
its use. Humanity is not, as was once thought, the end for which all
things were formed; it is but a slight and feeble thing, perhaps an
episodic one, in the vast stretch of the universe. But for man, man is
the center of interest and the measure of importance. The magnifying
of the physical realm at the cost of man is but an abdication and a
flight. To make physical science a rival of human interests is bad
enough, for it forms a diversion of energy which can ill be afforded.
But the evil does not stop there. The ultimate harm is that the
understanding by man of his own affairs and his ability to direct them
are sapped at their root when knowledge of nature is disconnected from
its human function.
It has been implied throughout that knowledge is communication as well
as understanding. I well remember the saying of a man, uneducated
from the standpoint of the schools, in speaking of certain matters:
“Sometime they will be found out and not only found out, but they
will be known.” The schools may suppose that a thing is known when
it is found out. My old friend was aware that a thing is fully known
only when it is published, shared, socially accessible. Record and
communication are indispensable to knowledge. Knowledge cooped up in
a private consciousness is a myth, and knowledge of social phenomena
is peculiarly dependent upon dissemination, for only by distribution
can such knowledge be either obtained or tested. A fact of community
life which is not spread abroad so as to be a common possession is
a contradiction in terms. Dissemination is something other than
scattering at large. Seeds are sown, not by virtue of being thrown
out at random, but by being so distributed as to take root and have a
chance of growth. Communication of the results of social inquiry is
the same thing as the formation of public opinion. This marks one of
the first ideas framed in the growth of political democracy as it will
be one of the last to be fulfilled. For public opinion is judgment
which is formed and entertained by those who constitute the public
and is about public affairs. Each of the two phases imposes for its
realization conditions hard to meet.
Opinions and beliefs concerning the public presuppose effective and
organized inquiry. Unless there are methods for detecting the energies
which are at work and tracing them through an intricate network of
interactions to their consequences, what passes as public opinion will
be “opinion” in its derogatory sense rather than truly public, no
matter how widespread the opinion is. The number who share error as to
fact and who partake of a false belief measures power for harm. Opinion
casually formed and formed under the direction of those who have
something at stake in having a lie believed can be _public_ opinion
only in name. Calling it by this name, acceptance of the name as a
kind of warrant, magnifies its capacity to lead action estray. The more
who share it, the more injurious its influence. Public opinion, even if
it happens to be correct, is intermittent when it is not the product of
methods of investigation and reporting constantly at work. It appears
only in crises. Hence its “rightness” concerns only an immediate
emergency. Its lack of continuity makes it wrong from the standpoint
of the course of events. It is as if a physician were able to deal
for the moment with an emergency in disease but could not adapt his
treatment of it to the underlying conditions which brought it about.
He may then “cure” the disease--that is, cause its present alarming
symptoms to subside--but he does not modify its causes; his treatment
may even affect them for the worse. Only continuous inquiry, continuous
in the sense of being connected as well as persistent, can provide the
material of enduring opinion about public matters.
There is a sense in which “opinion” rather than knowledge, even under
the most favorable circumstances, is the proper term to use--namely,
in the sense of judgment, estimate. For in its strict sense, knowledge
can refer only to what _has_ happened and been done. What is still _to
be_ done involves a forecast of a future still contingent, and cannot
escape the liability to error in judgment involved in all anticipation
of probabilities. There may well be honest divergence as to policies to
be pursued, even when plans spring from knowledge of the same facts.
But genuinely public policy cannot be generated unless it be informed
by knowledge, and this knowledge does not exist except when there is
systematic, thorough, and well-equipped search and record.
Moreover, inquiry must be as nearly contemporaneous as possible;
otherwise it is only of antiquarian interest. Knowledge of history is
evidently necessary for connectedness of knowledge. But history which
is not brought down close to the actual scene of events leaves a gap
and exercises influence upon the formation of judgments about the
public interest only by guess-work about intervening events. Here, only
too conspicuously, is a limitation of the existing social sciences.
Their material comes too late, too far after the event, to enter
effectively into the formation of public opinion about the immediate
public concern and what is to be done about it.
A glance at the situation shows that the physical and external means
of collecting information in regard to what is happening in the world
have far outrun the intellectual phase of inquiry and organization of
its results. Telegraph, telephone, and now the radio, cheap and quick
mails, the printing press, capable of swift reduplication of material
at low cost, have attained a remarkable development. But when we ask
what sort of material is recorded and how it is organized, when we ask
about the intellectual form in which the material is presented, the
tale to be told is very different. “News” signifies something which
has just happened, and which is new just because it deviates from the
old and regular. But its _meaning_ depends upon relation to what it
imports, to what its social consequences are. This import cannot be
determined unless the new is placed in relation to the old, to what
has happened and been integrated into the course of events. Without
coördination and consecutiveness, events are not events, but mere
occurrences, intrusions; an event implies that out of which a happening
proceeds. Hence even if we discount the influence of private interests
in procuring suppression, secrecy and misrepresentation, we have here
an explanation of the triviality and “sensational” quality of so much
of what passes as news. The catastrophic, namely, crime, accident,
family rows, personal clashes and conflicts, are the most obvious forms
of breaches of continuity; they supply the element of shock which is
the strictest meaning of sensation; they are the _new_ par excellence,
even though only the date of the newspaper could inform us whether they
happened last year or this, so completely are they isolated from their
connections.
So accustomed are we to this method of collecting, recording and
presenting social changes, that it may well sound ridiculous to say
that a genuine social science would manifest its reality in the daily
press, while learned books and articles supply and polish tools of
inquiry. But the inquiry which alone can furnish knowledge as a
precondition of public judgments must be contemporary and quotidian.
Even if social sciences as a specialized apparatus of inquiry were
more advanced than they are, they would be comparatively impotent in
the office of directing opinion on matters of concern to the public as
long as they are remote from application in the daily and unremitting
assembly and interpretation of “news.” On the other hand, the tools of
social inquiry will be clumsy as long as they are forged in places and
under conditions remote from contemporary events.
What has been said about the formation of ideas and judgments
concerning the public apply as well to the distribution of the
knowledge which makes it an effective possession of the members of
the public. Any separation between the two sides of the problem is
artificial. The discussion of propaganda and propagandism would alone,
however, demand a volume, and could be written only by one much more
experienced than the present writer. Propaganda can accordingly
only be mentioned, with the remark that the present situation is
one unprecedented in history. The political forms of democracy and
quasi-democratic habits of thought on social matters have compelled
a certain amount of public discussion and at least the simulation of
general consultation in arriving at political decisions. Representative
government must at least seem to be founded on public interests as they
are revealed to public belief. The days are past when government can
be carried on without any pretense of ascertaining the wishes of the
governed. In theory, their assent must be secured. Under the older
forms, there was no need to muddy the sources of opinion on political
matters. No current of energy flowed from them. To-day the judgments
popularly formed on political matters are so important, in spite of all
factors to the contrary, that there is an enormous premium upon all
methods which affect their formation.
The smoothest road to control of political conduct is by control of
opinion. As long as interests of pecuniary profit are powerful, and
a public has not located and identified itself, those who have this
interest will have an unresisted motive for tampering with the springs
of political action in all that affects them. Just as in the conduct of
industry and exchange generally the technological factor is obscured,
deflected and defeated by “business,” so specifically in the management
of publicity. The gathering and sale of subject-matter having a public
import is part of the existing pecuniary system. Just as industry
conducted by engineers on a factual technological basis would be a
very different thing from what it actually is, so the assembling and
reporting of news would be a very different thing if the genuine
interests of reporters were permitted to work freely.
One aspect of the matter concerns particularly the side of
dissemination. It is often said, and with a great appearance of
truth, that the freeing and perfecting of inquiry would not have any
especial effect. For, it is argued, the mass of the reading public is
not interested in learning and assimilating the results of accurate
investigation. Unless these are read, they cannot seriously affect
the thought and action of members of the public; they remain in
secluded library alcoves, and are studied and understood only by a
few intellectuals. The objection is well taken save as the potency of
art is taken into account. A technical high-brow presentation would
appeal only to those technically high-brow; it would not be news to
the masses. Presentation is fundamentally important, and presentation
is a question of art. A newspaper which was only a daily edition of a
quarterly journal of sociology or political science would undoubtedly
possess a limited circulation and a narrow influence. Even at that,
however, the mere existence and accessibility of such material would
have some regulative effect. But we can look much further than that.
The material would have such an enormous and widespread human bearing
that its bare existence would be an irresistible invitation to a
presentation of it which would have a direct popular appeal. The
freeing of the artist in literary presentation, in other words, is as
much a precondition of the desirable creation of adequate opinion on
public matters as is the freeing of social inquiry. Men’s conscious
life of opinion and judgment often proceeds on a superficial and
trivial plane. But their lives reach a deeper level. The function of
art has always been to break through the crust of conventionalized and
routine consciousness. Common things, a flower, a gleam of moonlight,
the song of a bird, not things rare and remote, are means with which
the deeper levels of life are touched so that they spring up as desire
and thought. This process is art. Poetry, the drama, the novel, are
proofs that the problem of presentation is not insoluble. Artists have
always been the real purveyors of news, for it is not the outward
happening in itself which is new, but the kindling by it of emotion,
perception and appreciation.
We have but touched lightly and in passing upon the conditions which
must be fulfilled if the Great Society is to become a Great Community;
a society in which the ever-expanding and intricately ramifying
consequences of associated activities shall be known in the full sense
of that word, so that an organized, articulate Public comes into being.
The highest and most difficult kind of inquiry and a subtle, delicate,
vivid and responsive art of communication must take possession of the
physical machinery of transmission and circulation and breathe life
into it. When the machine age has thus perfected its machinery it
will be a means of life and not its despotic master. Democracy will
come into its own, for democracy is a name for a life of free and
enriching communion. It had its seer in Walt Whitman. It will have its
consummation when free social inquiry is indissolubly wedded to the art
of full and moving communication.
CHAPTER VI
THE PROBLEM OF METHOD
Perhaps to most, probably to many, the conclusions which have been
stated as to the conditions upon which depends the emergence of the
Public from its eclipse will seem close to denial of the possibility
of realizing the idea of a democratic public. One might indeed point
for what it is worth to the enormous obstacles with which the rise of
a science of physical things was confronted a few short centuries ago,
as evidence that hope need not be wholly desperate nor faith wholly
blind. But we are not concerned with prophecy but with analysis. It
is enough for present purposes if the problem has been clarified:--if
we have seen that the outstanding problem of the Public is discovery
and identification of itself, and if we have succeeded, in however
groping a manner, in apprehending the conditions upon which the
resolution of the problem depends. We shall conclude with suggesting
some implications and corollaries as to method, not, indeed, as to the
method of resolution, but, once more, the intellectual antecedents of
such a method.
The preliminary to fruitful discussion of social matters is that
certain obstacles shall be overcome, obstacles residing in our present
conceptions of the method of social inquiry. One of the obstructions
in the path is the seemingly engrained notion that the first and the
last problem which must be solved is the relation of the individual
and the social:--or that the outstanding question is to determine the
relative merits of individualism and collective or of some compromise
between them. In fact, both words, individual and social, are
hopelessly ambiguous, and the ambiguity will never cease as long as we
think in terms of an antithesis.
In its approximate sense, anything is individual which moves and acts
as a unitary thing. For common sense, a certain spatial separateness
is the mark of this individuality. A thing is one when it stands,
lies or moves as a unit independently of other things, whether it be
a stone, tree, molecule or drop of water, or a human being. But even
vulgar common sense at once introduces certain qualifications. The
tree stands only when rooted in the soil; it lives or dies in the
mode of its connections with sunlight, air and water. Then too the
tree is a collection of interacting parts; is the tree more a single
whole than its cells? A stone moves, apparently alone. But it is moved
by something else and the course of its flight is dependent not only
upon initial propulsion but upon wind and gravity. A hammer falls,
and what was one stone becomes a heap of dusty particles. A chemist
operates with one of the grains of dust, and forthwith it disappears
in molecules, atoms and electrons--and then? Have we now reached a
lonely, but not lonesome, individual? Or does, perhaps, an electron
depend for its single and unitary mode of action upon its connections,
as much as the stone with which we started? Is its action also a
function of some more inclusive and interacting scene?
From another point of view, we have to qualify our approximate notion
of an individual as being that which acts and moves as a unitary
thing. We have to consider not only its connections and ties, but
the consequences with respect to which it acts and moves. We are
compelled to say that for some purposes, for some results, the tree
is the individual, for others the cell, and for a third, the forest
or the landscape. Is a book or a leaf or a folio or a paragraph, or a
printer’s em _the_ individual? Is the binding or the contained thought
that which gives individual unity to a book? Or are all of these things
definers of an individual according to the consequences which are
relevant in a particular situation? Unless we betake ourselves to the
stock resort of common sense, dismissing _all_ questions as useless
quibbles, it seems as if we could not determine an individual without
reference to differences made as well as to antecedent and contemporary
connections. If so, an individual, whatever else it is or is not, is
not just the spatially isolated thing our imagination inclines to take
it to be.
Such a discussion does not proceed upon a particularly high nor an
especially deep level. But it may at least render us wary of any
definition of an individual which operates in terms of separateness.
A _distinctive_ way of behaving in conjunction and _connection_ with
other distinctive ways of acting, not a self-enclosed way of acting,
independent of everything else, is that toward which we are pointed.
Any human being is in one respect an association, consisting of a
multitude of cells each living its own life. And as the activity of
each cell is conditioned and directed by those with which it interacts,
so the human being whom we fasten upon as individual _par excellence_
is moved and regulated by his associations with others; what he does
and what the consequences of his behavior are, what his experience
consists of, cannot even be described, much less accounted for, in
isolation.
But while associated behavior is, as we have already noted, a universal
law, the fact of association does not of itself make a society.
This demands, as we have also seen, perception of the consequences
of a joint activity and of the distinctive share of each element in
producing it. Such perception creates a common interest; that is
concern on the part of each in the joint action and in the contribution
of each of its members to it. Then there exists something truly social
and not merely associative. But it is absurd to suppose that a society
does away with the traits of its own constituents so that it can be set
over against them. It can only be set over against the traits which
they and their like present in some _other_ combination. A molecule of
oxygen in water may act in certain respects differently than it would
in some other chemical union. But as a constituent of water it acts as
water does as long as water is water. The only intelligible distinction
which can be drawn is between the behaviors of oxygen in _its_
different relations, and between those of water in _its_ relations to
various conditions, not between that of water and the oxygen which is
conjoined with hydrogen in water.
A single man when he is joined in marriage is different in that
connection to what he was as single or to what he is in some other
union, as a member, say, of a club. He has new powers and immunities,
new responsibilities. He can be contrasted with _himself_ as he behaves
in other connections. He may be compared and contrasted with his wife
in their distinctive rôles within the union. But _as_ a member of the
union he cannot be treated as antithetical to the union in which he
belongs. _As_ a member of the union, his traits and acts are evidently
those which he possesses in virtue of it, while those of the integrated
association are what they are in virtue of his status in the union. The
only reason we fail to see this, or are confused by the statement of
it, is because we pass so easily from the man in one connection to the
man in some other connection, to the man not as husband but as business
man, scientific investigator, church-member or citizen, in which
connections his acts and their consequences are obviously different to
those due to union in wedlock.
A good example of the fact and of the current confusion as to
its interpretation is found in the case of associations known as
limited liability joint-stock companies. A corporation as such is an
integrated collective mode of action having powers, rights, duties
and immunities different from those of its singular members _in their
other connections_. Its different constituents have also diverse
statuses--for example, the owners of stock from the officers and
directors in certain matters. If we do not bear the facts steadily
in mind, it is easy--as frequently happens--to create an artificial
problem. Since the corporation can do things which its individual
members, _in their many relationships outside of their connections in
the corporation_, cannot do, the problem is raised as to the relation
of the corporate collective union to that of individuals _as such_.
It is forgotten that as members of the corporation the individuals
themselves are different, have different characteristics, rights and
duties, than they would possess if they were not its members and
different from those which they possess in other forms of conjoint
behavior. But what the individuals may do legitimately _as_ members of
the corporation in their respective corporate rôles, the corporation
does, and vice versa. A collective unity may be taken _either_
distributively _or_ collectively, but when taken collectively it is the
union of its distributive constituents, and when taken distributively,
it is a distribution of and within the collectivity. It makes nonsense
to set up an antithesis between the distributive phase and the
collective. An individual cannot be opposed to the association of which
he is an integral part nor can the association be set against its
integrated members.
But groups may be opposed to one another, and individuals may be
opposed to one another; and an individual as a member of different
groups may be divided within himself, and in a true sense have
conflicting selves, or be a relatively disintegrated individual. A
man may be one thing as a church member and another thing as a member
of the business community. The difference may be carried as if in
water-tight compartments, or it may become such a division as to entail
internal conflict. In these facts we have the ground of the common
antithesis set up between society and the individual. Then “society”
becomes an unreal abstraction and “_the_ individual” an equally unreal
one. Because _an_ individual can be disassociated from this, that and
the other grouping, since he need not be married, or be a church-member
or a voter, or belong to a club or scientific organization, there
grows up in the mind an image of a residual individual who is not a
member of any association at all. From this premise, and from this
only, there develops the unreal question of how individuals come to be
united in societies and groups: _the_ individual and _the_ social are
now opposed to each other, and there is the problem of “reconciling”
them. Meanwhile, the genuine problem is that of adjusting groups and
individuals to one another.
The unreal problem becomes particularly acute, as we have already noted
in another connection, in times of rapid social change, as when a
newly forming industrial grouping with its special needs and energies
finds itself in conflict with old established political institutions
and their demands. Then it is likely to be forgotten that the actual
problem is one of reconstruction of the ways and forms in which men
unite in associated activity. The scene presents itself as the struggle
of the individual as such to liberate himself from society as such and
to claim his inherent or “natural” self-possessed and self-sufficing
rights. When the new mode of economic association has grown strong and
exercises an overweening and oppressive power over other groupings, the
old fallacy persists. The problem is now conceived as that of bringing
individuals as such under the control of society as a collectivity. It
should still be put as a problem of readjusting social relationships;
or, from the distributive side, as that of securing a more equable
liberation of the powers of all individual members of all groupings.
Thus our excursion has brought us back to the theme of method, in
the interest of which the excursion was taken. One reason for the
comparative sterility of discussion of social matters is because so
much intellectual energy has gone into the supposititious problem of
the relations of individualism and collectivism at large, wholesale,
and because the image of the antithesis infects so many specific
questions. Thereby thought is diverted from the only fruitful
questions, those of investigation into factual subject-matter, and
becomes a discussion of concepts. The “problem” of the relation of
the concept of authority to that of freedom, of personal rights to
social obligations, with only a subsumptive illustrative reference
to empirical facts, has been substituted for inquiry into the
_consequences_ of some particular distribution, under given conditions,
of specific freedoms and authorities, and for inquiry into what altered
distribution would yield more desirable consequences.
As we saw in our early consideration of the theme of the public, the
question of what transactions should be left as far as possible to
voluntary initiative and agreement and what should come under the
regulation of the public is a question of time, place and concrete
conditions that can be known only by careful observation and reflective
investigation. For it concerns consequences; and the nature of
consequences and the ability to perceive and act upon them varies with
the industrial and intellectual agencies which operate. A solution,
or distributive adjustment, needed at one time is totally unfitted
to another situation. That social “evolution” has been either from
collectivism to individualism or the reverse is sheer superstition. It
has consisted in a continuous re-distribution of social integrations
on the one hand and of capacities and energies of individuals on the
other. Individuals find themselves cramped and depressed by absorption
of their potentialities in some mode of association which has been
institutionalized and become dominant. They may think they are
clamoring for a purely personal liberty, but what they are doing is
to bring into being a greater liberty to share in other associations,
so that more of their individual potentialities will be released and
their personal experience enriched. Life has been impoverished, not
by a predominance of “society” in general over individuality, but by
a domination of one form of association, the family, clan, church,
economic institutions, over other actual and possible forms. On the
other hand, the problem of exercising “social control” over individuals
is in its reality that of regulating the doings and results of some
individuals in order that a larger number of individuals may have a
fuller and deeper experience. Since both ends can be intelligently
attained only by knowledge of actual conditions in their modes of
operation and their consequences, it may be confidently asserted that
the chief enemy of a social thinking which would count in public
affairs is the sterile and impotent, because totally irrelevant,
channels in which so much intellectual energy has been expended.
The second point with respect to method is closely related. Political
theories have shared in the absolutistic character of philosophy
generally. By this is meant something much more than philosophies of
the Absolute. Even professedly empirical philosophies have assumed
a certain finality and foreverness in their theories which may be
expressed by saying that they have been non-historical in character.
They have isolated their subject-matter from its connections, and
any isolated subject-matter becomes unqualified in the degree of its
disconnection. In social theory dealing with human nature, a certain
fixed and standardized “individual” has been postulated, from whose
assumed traits social phenomena could be deduced. Thus Mill says in
his discussion of the logic of the moral and social sciences: “The
laws of the phenomena of society are, and can be, nothing but the laws
of the actions and passions of human beings united together in the
social state. Men, however, in a state of society are still men; their
actions and passions are obedient to the laws of _individual_ human
nature.”[13] Obviously what is ignored in such a statement is that “the
actions and passions” of individual men are in the concrete what they
are, their beliefs and purposes included, because of the social medium
in which they live; that they are influenced throughout by contemporary
and transmitted culture, whether in conformity or protest. What is
generic and the same everywhere is at best the organic structure of
man, his biological make-up. While it is evidently important to take
this into account, it is also evident that none of the _distinctive_
features of _human_ association can be deduced from it. Thus, in spite
of Mill’s horror of the metaphysical absolute, his leading social
conceptions were, logically, absolutistic. Certain social laws,
normative and regulative, at all periods and under all circumstances of
proper social life were assumed to exist.
The doctrine of evolution modified this idea of method only
superficially. For “evolution” was itself often understood
non-historically. That is, it was assumed that there is a predestined
course of fixed stages through which social development must proceed.
Under the influence of concepts borrowed from the physical science
of the time, it was taken for granted that the very possibility
of a social science stood or fell with the determination of fixed
uniformities. Now every such logic is fatal to free experimental social
inquiry. Investigation into empirical facts was undertaken, of course,
but its results had to fit into certain ready-made and second-hand
rubrics. When even _physical_ facts and laws are perceived and used,
social change takes place. The phenomena and laws are not altered,
but invention based upon them modifies the human situation. For there
is at once an effort to regulate their impact in life. The discovery
of malaria does not alter its existential causation, intellectually
viewed, but it does finally alter the facts from which the production
of malaria arises, through draining and oiling swamps, etc., and by
taking other measures of precaution. If the laws of economic cycles
of expansion and depression were understood, means would at once be
searched for to mitigate if not to do away with the swing. When men
have an idea of how social agencies work and their consequences are
wrought, they at once strive to secure consequences as far as desirable
and to avert them if undesirable. These are facts of the most ordinary
observation. But it is not often noted how fatal they are to the
identification of social with physical uniformities. “Laws” of social
life, when it is genuinely human, are like laws of engineering. If you
want certain results, certain means must be found and employed. The key
to the situation is a clear conception of consequences wanted, and of
the technique for reaching them, together with, of course, the state
of desires and aversions which causes some consequences to be wanted
rather than others. All of these things are functions of the prevalent
culture of the period.
While the backwardness of social knowledge and art is of course
connected with retarded knowledge of human nature, or psychology, it
is also absurd to suppose that an adequate psychological science would
flower in a control of human activities similar to the control which
physical science has procured of physical energies. For increased
knowledge of human nature would directly and in unpredictable ways
modify the workings of human nature, and lead to the need of new
methods of regulation, and so on without end. It is a matter of
analysis rather than of prophecy to say that the primary and chief
effect of a better psychology would be found in education. The growth
and diseases of grains and hogs are now recognized as proper subjects
of governmental subsidy and attention. Instrumental agencies for a
similar investigation of the conditions which make for the physical and
moral hygiene of the young are in a state of infancy. We spend large
sums of money for school buildings and their physical equipment. But
systematic expenditure of public funds for scientific inquiry into the
conditions which affect the mental and moral development of children is
just beginning, and demands for a large increase in this direction are
looked upon askance.
Again, it is reported that there are more beds in hospitals and asylums
for cases of mental disturbance and retardation than for all diseases
combined. The public pays generously to take care of the results of bad
conditions. But there is no comparable attention and willingness to
expend funds to investigate the causes of these troubles. The reason
for these anomalies is evident enough. There is no conviction that the
sciences of human nature are far enough advanced to make public support
of such activities worth while. A marked development of psychology and
kindred subjects would change this situation. And we have been speaking
only of antecedent conditions of education. To complete the picture
we have to realize the difference which would be made in the methods
of parents and teachers were there an adequate and generally shared
knowledge of human nature.
But such an educational development, though intrinsically precious
to the last degree, would not entail a control of human energies
comparable to that which already obtains of physical energies. To
imagine that it would is simply to reduce human beings to the plane of
inanimate things mechanically manipulated from without; it makes human
education something like the training of fleas, dogs and horses. What
stands in the way is not anything called “free-will,” but the fact that
such a change in educational methods would release new potentialities,
capable of all kinds of permutations and combinations, which would then
modify social phenomena, while this modification would in its turn
affect human nature and its educative transformation in a continuous
and endless procession.
The assimilation of human science to physical science represents,
in other words, only another form of absolutistic logic, a kind of
physical absolutism. We are doubtless but at the beginning of the
possibilities of control of the physical conditions of mental and moral
life. Physiological chemistry, increased knowledge of the nervous
system, of the processes and functions of glandular secretions, may in
time enable us to deal with phenomena of emotional and intellectual
disturbance before which mankind has been helpless. But control of
these conditions will not determine the uses to which human beings
will put their normalized potentialities. If any one supposes that it
will, let him consider the applications of such remedial or preventive
measures to a man in a state of savage culture and one in a modern
community. Each, as long as the conditions of the social medium
remained substantially unaltered, will still have his experience and
the direction of his restored energies affected by the objects and
instrumentalities of the human environment, and by what men at the time
currently prize and hold dear. The warrior and merchant would be better
warriors and merchants, more efficient, but warriors and merchants
still.
These considerations suggest a brief discussion of the effect of the
present absolutistic logic upon the method and aims of education,
not just in the sense of schooling but with respect to all the ways
in which communities attempt to shape the disposition and beliefs of
their members. Even when the processes of education do not aim at
the unchanged perpetuation of existing institutions, it is assumed
that there must be a mental picture of some desired end, personal
and social, which is to be attained, and that this conception of a
fixed determinate end ought to control educative processes. Reformers
share this conviction with conservatives. The disciples of Lenin and
Mussolini vie with the captains of capitalistic society in endeavoring
to bring about a formation of dispositions and ideas which will conduce
to a preconceived goal. If there is a difference, it is that the former
proceed more consciously. An experimental social method would probably
manifest itself first of all in surrender of this notion. Every care
would be taken to surround the young with the physical and social
conditions which best conduce, as far as freed knowledge extends, to
release of personal potentialities. The habits thus formed would have
entrusted to them the meeting of future social requirements and the
development of the future state of society. Then and then only would
all social agencies that are available operate as resources in behalf
of a bettered community life.
What we have termed the absolutistic logic ends, as far as method
in social matters is concerned, in a substitution of discussion of
concepts and their logical relations to one another for inquiry.
Whatever form it assumes, it results in strengthening the reign of
dogma. Their contents may vary, but dogma persists. At the outset we
noted in discussion of the state the influence of methods which look
for causal forces. Long ago, physical science abandoned this method and
took up that of detection of correlation of events. Our language and
our thinking is still saturated with the idea of laws which phenomena
“obey.” But in his actual procedures, the scientific inquirer into
physical events treats a law simply as a stable correlation of changes
in what happens, a statement of the way in which one phenomenon, or
some aspect or phase of it, varies when some other specified phenomenon
varies. “Causation” is an affair of historical sequence, of the order
in which a series of changes takes place. To know cause and effect is
to know, in the abstract, the formula of correlation in change, and, in
the concrete, a certain historical career of sequential events. The
appeal to causal forces at large not only misleads inquiry into social
facts, but it affects equally seriously the formation of purposes and
policies. The person who holds the doctrine of “individualism” or
“collectivism” has his program determined for him in advance. It is not
with him a matter of finding out the particular thing which needs to
be done and the best way, under the circumstances, of doing it. It is
an affair of applying a hard and fast doctrine which follows logically
from his preconception of the nature of ultimate causes. He is exempt
from the responsibility of discovering the concrete correlation of
changes, from the need of tracing particular sequences or histories of
events through their complicated careers. He knows in advance the sort
of thing which must be done, just as in ancient physical philosophy the
thinker knew in advance what must happen, so that all he had to do was
to supply a logical framework of definitions and classifications.
When we say that thinking and beliefs should be experimental, not
absolutistic, we have then in mind a certain logic of method,
not, primarily, the carrying on of experimentation like that of
laboratories. Such a logic involves the following factors: First,
that those concepts, general principles, theories and dialectical
developments which are indispensable to any systematic knowledge be
shaped and tested as tools of inquiry. Secondly, that policies and
proposals for social action be treated as working hypotheses, not
as programs to be rigidly adhered to and executed. They will be
experimental in the sense that they will be entertained subject to
constant and well-equipped observation of the consequences they entail
when acted upon, and subject to ready and flexible revision in the
light of observed consequences. The social sciences, if these two
stipulations are fulfilled, will then be an apparatus for conducting
investigation, and for recording and interpreting (organizing) its
results. The apparatus will no longer be taken to be itself knowledge,
but will be seen to be intellectual means of making discoveries of
phenomena having social import and understanding their meaning.
Differences of opinion in the sense of differences of judgment as to
the course which it is best to follow, the policy which it is best
to try out, will still exist. But opinion in the sense of beliefs
formed and held in the absence of evidence will be reduced in quantity
and importance. No longer will views generated in view of special
situations be frozen into absolute standards and masquerade as eternal
truths.
This phase of the discussion may be concluded by consideration of
the relation of experts to a democratic public. A negative phase of
the earlier argument for political democracy has largely lost its
force. For it was based upon hostility to dynastic and oligarchic
aristocracies, and these have largely been bereft of power. The
oligarchy which now dominates is that of an economic class. It claims
to rule, not in virtue of birth and hereditary status, but in virtue
of ability in management and of the burden of social responsibilities
which it carries, in virtue of the position which superior abilities
have conferred upon it. At all events, it is a shifting, unstable
oligarchy, rapidly changing its constituents, who are more or less
at the mercy of accidents they cannot control and of technological
inventions. Consequently, the shoe is now on the other foot. It is
argued that the check upon the oppressive power of this particular
oligarchy lies in an intellectual aristocracy, not in appeal to an
ignorant, fickle mass whose interests are superficial and trivial, and
whose judgments are saved from incredible levity only when weighted
down by heavy prejudice.
It may be argued that the democratic movement was essentially
transitional. It marked the passage from feudal institutions to
industrialism, and was coincident with the transfer of power from
landed proprietors, allied to churchly authorities, to captains of
industry, under conditions which involved an emancipation of the masses
from legal limitations which had previously hemmed them in. But, so it
is contended in effect, it is absurd to convert this legal liberation
into a dogma which alleges that release from old oppressions confers
upon those emancipated the intellectual and moral qualities which fit
them for sharing in regulation of affairs of state. The essential
fallacy of the democratic creed, it is urged, is the notion that a
historic movement which effected an important and desirable release
from restrictions is either a source or a proof of capacity in those
thus emancipated to rule, when in fact there is no factor common in the
two things. The obvious alternative is rule by those intellectually
qualified, by expert intellectuals.
This revival of the Platonic notion that philosophers should be kings
is the more taking because the idea of experts is substituted for that
of philosophers, since philosophy has become something of a joke, while
the image of the specialist, the expert in operation, is rendered
familiar and congenial by the rise of the physical sciences and by
the conduct of industry. A cynic might indeed say that the notion
is a pipe-dream, a revery entertained by the intellectual class in
compensation for an impotence consequent upon the divorce of theory
and practice, upon the remoteness of specialized science from the
affairs of life: the gulf being bridged not by the intellectuals but by
inventors and engineers hired by captains of industry. One approaches
the truth more nearly when one says that the argument proves too much
for its own cause. If the masses are as intellectually irredeemable
as its premise implies, they at all events have both too many desires
and too much power to permit rule by experts to obtain. The very
ignorance, bias, frivolity, jealousy, instability, which are alleged
to incapacitate them from share in political affairs, unfit them still
more for passive submission to rule by intellectuals. Rule by an
economic class may be disguised from the masses; rule by experts could
not be covered up. It could be made to work only if the intellectuals
became the willing tools of big economic interests. Otherwise they
would have to ally themselves with the masses, and that implies, once
more, a share in government by the latter.
A more serious objection is that expertness is most readily attained in
specialized technical matters, matters of administration and execution
which postulate that general policies are already satisfactorily
framed. It is assumed that the policies of the experts are in the main
both wise and benevolent, that is, framed to conserve the genuine
interests of society. The final obstacle in the way of any aristocratic
rule is that in the absence of an articulate voice on the part of the
masses, the best do not and cannot remain the best, the wise cease to
be wise. It is impossible for high-brows to secure a monopoly of such
knowledge as must be used for the regulation of common affairs. In the
degree in which they become a specialized class, they are shut off from
knowledge of the needs which they are supposed to serve.
The strongest point to be made in behalf of even such rudimentary
political forms as democracy has already attained, popular voting,
majority rule and so on, is that to some extent they involve a
consultation and discussion which uncover social needs and troubles.
This fact is the great asset on the side of the political ledger. De
Tocqueville wrote it down almost a century ago in his survey of the
prospects of democracy in the United States. Accusing a democracy of
a tendency to prefer mediocrity in its elected rulers, and admitting
its exposure to gusts of passion and its openness to folly, he pointed
out in effect that popular government is educative as other modes of
political regulation are not. It forces a recognition that there are
common interests, even though the recognition of what they are is
confused; and the need it enforces of discussion and publicity brings
about some clarification of what they are. The man who wears the shoe
knows best that it pinches and where it pinches, even if the expert
shoemaker is the best judge of how the trouble is to be remedied.
Popular government has at least created public spirit even if its
success in informing that spirit has not been great.
A class of experts is inevitably so removed from common interests as to
become a class with private interests and private knowledge, which in
social matters is not knowledge at all. The ballot is, as often said, a
substitute for bullets. But what is more significant is that counting
of heads compels prior recourse to methods of discussion, consultation
and persuasion, while the essence of appeal to force is to cut short
resort to such methods. Majority rule, just as majority rule, is as
foolish as its critics charge it with being. But it never is _merely_
majority rule. As a practical politician, Samuel J. Tilden, said a long
time ago: “The means by which a majority comes to be a majority is
the more important thing”: antecedent debates, modification of views
to meet the opinions of minorities, the relative satisfaction given
the latter by the fact that it has had a chance and that next time it
may be successful in becoming a majority. Think of the meaning of the
“problem of minorities” in certain European states, and compare it with
the status of minorities in countries having popular government. It
is true that all valuable as well as new ideas begin with minorities,
perhaps a minority of one. The important consideration is that
opportunity be given that idea to spread and to become the possession
of the multitude. No government by experts in which the masses do
not have the chance to inform the experts as to their needs can be
anything but an oligarchy managed in the interests of the few. And
the enlightenment must proceed in ways which force the administrative
specialists to take account of the needs. The world has suffered more
from leaders and authorities than from the masses.
The essential need, in other words, is the improvement of the methods
and conditions of debate, discussion and persuasion. That is _the_
problem of the public. We have asserted that this improvement depends
essentially upon freeing and perfecting the processes of inquiry and of
dissemination of their conclusions. Inquiry, indeed, is a work which
devolves upon experts. But their expertness is not shown in framing and
executing policies, but in discovering and making known the facts upon
which the former depend. They are technical experts in the sense that
scientific investigators and artists manifest _expertise_. It is not
necessary that the many should have the knowledge and skill to carry
on the needed investigations; what is required is that they have the
ability to judge of the bearing of the knowledge supplied by others
upon common concerns.
It is easy to exaggerate the amount of intelligence and ability
demanded to render such judgments fitted for their purpose. In the
first place, we are likely to form our estimate on the basis of
present conditions. But indubitably one great trouble at present is
that the data for good judgment are lacking; and no innate faculty of
mind can make up for the absence of facts. Until secrecy, prejudice,
bias, misrepresentation, and propaganda as well as sheer ignorance
are replaced by inquiry and publicity, we have no way of telling how
apt for judgment of social policies the existing intelligence of the
masses may be. It would certainly go much further than at present.
In the second place, _effective_ intelligence is not an original,
innate endowment. No matter what are the differences in native
intelligence (allowing for the moment that intelligence can be native),
the actuality of mind is dependent upon the education which social
conditions effect. Just as the specialized mind and knowledge of the
past is embodied in implements, utensils, devices and technologies
which those of a grade of intelligence which could not produce them can
now intelligently use, so it will be when currents of public knowledge
blow through social affairs.
The level of action fixed by _embodied_ intelligence is always the
important thing. In savage culture a superior man will be superior
to his fellows, but his knowledge and judgment will lag in many
matters far behind that of an inferiorly endowed person in an advanced
civilization. Capacities are limited by the objects and tools at hand.
They are still more dependent upon the prevailing habits of attention
and interest which are set by tradition and institutional customs.
Meanings run in the channels formed by instrumentalities of which, in
the end, language, the vehicle of thought as well as of communication,
is the most important. A mechanic can discourse of ohms and amperes
as Sir Isaac Newton could not in his day. Many a man who has tinkered
with radios can judge of things which Faraday did not dream of. It is
aside from the point to say that if Newton and Faraday were now here,
the amateur and mechanic would be infants beside them. The retort only
brings out the point: the difference made by different objects to think
of and by different meanings in circulation. A more intelligent state
of social affairs, one more informed with knowledge, more directed by
intelligence, would not improve original endowments one whit, but it
would raise the level upon which the intelligence of all operates. The
height of this level is much more important for judgment of public
concerns than are differences in intelligence quotients. As Santayana
has said: “Could a better system prevail in our lives a better order
would establish itself in our thinking. It has not been for want of
keen senses, or personal genius, or a constant order in the outer
world, that mankind has fallen back repeatedly into barbarism and
superstition. It has been for want of good character, good example, and
good government.” The notion that intelligence is a personal endowment
or personal attainment is the great conceit of the intellectual class,
as that of the commercial class is that wealth is something which they
personally have wrought and possess.
A point which concerns us in conclusion passes beyond the field of
intellectual method, and trenches upon the question of practical
re-formation of social conditions. In its deepest and richest sense
a community must always remain a matter of face-to-face intercourse.
This is why the family and neighborhood, with all their deficiencies,
have always been the chief agencies of nurture, the means by which
dispositions are stably formed and ideas acquired which laid hold on
the roots of character. The Great Community, in the sense of free and
full intercommunication, is conceivable. But it can never possess
all the qualities which mark a local community. It will do its final
work in ordering the relations and enriching the experience of local
associations. The invasion and partial destruction of the life of the
latter by outside uncontrolled agencies is the immediate source of
the instability, disintegration and restlessness which characterize
the present epoch. Evils which are uncritically and indiscriminately
laid at the door of industrialism and democracy might, with greater
intelligence, be referred to the dislocation and unsettlement of local
communities. Vital and thorough attachments are bred only in the
intimacy of an intercourse which is of necessity restricted in range.
Is it possible for local communities to be stable without being static,
progressive without being merely mobile? Can the vast, innumerable
and intricate currents of trans-local associations be so banked and
conducted that they will pour the generous and abundant meanings of
which they are potential bearers into the smaller intimate unions
of human beings living in immediate contact with one another? Is it
possible to restore the reality of the lesser communal organizations
and to penetrate and saturate their members with a sense of local
community life? There is at present, at least in theory, a movement
away from the principle of territorial organization to that of
“functional,” that is to say, occupational, organization. It is true
enough that older forms of territorial association do not satisfy
present needs. It is true that ties formed by sharing in common work,
whether in what is called industry or what are called professions,
have now a force which formerly they did not possess. But these ties
can be counted upon for an enduring and stable organization, which
at the same time is flexible and moving, only as they grow out of
immediate intercourse and attachment. The theory, as far as it relies
upon associations which are remote and indirect, would if carried into
effect soon be confronted by all the troubles and evils of the present
situation in a transposed form. There is no substitute for the vitality
and depth of close and direct intercourse and attachment.
It is said, and said truly, that for the world’s peace it is necessary
that we understand the peoples of foreign lands. How well do we
understand, I wonder, our next door neighbors? It has also been said
that if a man love not his fellow man whom he has seen, he cannot
love the God whom he has not seen. The chances of regard for distant
peoples being effective as long as there is no close neighborhood
experience to bring with it insight and understanding of neighbors do
not seem better. A man who has not been seen in the daily relations of
life may inspire admiration, emulation, servile subjection, fanatical
partisanship, hero worship; but not love and understanding, save as
they radiate from the attachments of a near-by union. Democracy must
begin at home, and its home is the neighborly community.
It is outside the scope of our discussion to look into the prospects
of the reconstruction of face-to-face communities. But there is
something deep within human nature itself which pulls toward settled
relationships. Inertia and the tendency toward stability belong to
emotions and desires as well as to masses and molecules. That happiness
which is full of content and peace is found only in enduring ties with
others, which reach to such depths that they go below the surface
of conscious experience to form its undisturbed foundation. No one
knows how much of the frothy excitement of life, of mania for motion,
of fretful discontent, of need for artificial stimulation, is the
expression of frantic search for something to fill the void caused by
the loosening of the bonds which hold persons together in immediate
community of experience. If there is anything in human psychology to be
counted upon, it may be urged that when man is satiated with restless
seeking for the remote which yields no enduring satisfaction, the human
spirit will return to seek calm and order within itself. This, we
repeat, can be found only in the vital, steady, and deep relationships
which are present only in an immediate community.
The psychological tendency can, however, manifest itself only when
it is in harmonious conjunction with the objective course of events.
Analysis finds itself in troubled waters if it attempts to discover
whether the tide of events is turning away from dispersion of energies
and acceleration of motion. Physically and externally, conditions have
made, of course, for concentration; the development of urban, at the
expense of rural, populations; the corporate organization of aggregated
wealth, the growth of all sorts of organizations, are evidence enough.
But enormous organization is compatible with demolition of the ties
that form local communities and with substitution of impersonal bonds
for personal unions, with a flux which is hostile to stability. The
character of our cities, of organized business and the nature of the
comprehensive associations in which individuality is lost, testify also
to this fact. Yet there are contrary signs. “Community” and community
activities are becoming words to conjure with. The local is the
ultimate universal, and as near an absolute as exists. It is easy to
point to many signs which indicate that unconscious agencies as well as
deliberate planning are making for such an enrichment of the experience
of local communities as will conduce to render them genuine centers of
the attention, interest and devotion for their constituent members.
The unanswered question is how far these tendencies will reëstablish
the void left by the disintegration of the family, church and
neighborhood. We cannot predict the outcome. But we can assert with
confidence that there is nothing intrinsic in the forces which have
effected uniform standardization, mobility and remote invisible
relationships that is fatally obstructive to the return movement of
their consequences into the local homes of mankind. Uniformity and
standardization may provide an underlying basis for differentiation and
liberation of individual potentialities. They may sink to the plane
of unconscious habituations, taken for granted in the mechanical
phases of life, and deposit a soil from which personal susceptibilities
and endowments may richly and stably flower. Mobility may in the end
supply the means by which the spoils of remote and indirect interaction
and interdependence flow back into local life, keeping it flexible,
preventing the stagnancy which has attended stability in the past,
and furnishing it with the elements of a variegated and many-hued
experience. Organization may cease to be taken as an end in itself.
Then it will no longer be mechanical and external, hampering the
free play of artistic gifts, fettering men and women with chains of
conformity, conducing to abdication of all which does not fit into
the automatic movement of organization as a self-sufficing thing.
Organization as a means to an end would reënforce individuality and
enable it to be securely itself by enduing it with resources beyond its
unaided reach.
Whatever the future may have in store, one thing is certain. Unless
local communal life can be restored, the public cannot adequately
resolve its most urgent problem: to find and identify itself. But if
it be re-established, it will manifest a fullness, variety and freedom
of possession and enjoyment of meanings and goods unknown in the
contiguous associations of the past. For it will be alive and flexible
as well as stable, responsive to the complex and world-wide scene in
which it is enmeshed. While local, it will not be isolated. Its larger
relationships will provide an exhaustible and flowing fund of meanings
upon which to draw, with assurance that its drafts will be honored.
Territorial states and political boundaries will persist; but they will
not be barriers which impoverish experience by cutting man off from
his fellows; they will not be hard and fast divisions whereby external
separation is converted into inner jealousy, fear, suspicion and
hostility. Competition will continue, but it will be less rivalry for
acquisition of material goods, and more an emulation of local groups
to enrich direct experience with appreciatively enjoyed intellectual
and artistic wealth. If the technological age can provide mankind with
a firm and general basis of material security, it will be absorbed in
a humane age. It will take its place as an instrumentality of shared
and communicated experience. But without passage through a machine age,
mankind’s hold upon what is needful as the precondition of a free,
flexible and many-colored life is so precarious and inequitable that
competitive scramble for acquisition and frenzied use of the results of
acquisition for purposes of excitation and display will be perpetuated.
We have said that consideration of this particular condition of the
generation of democratic communities and an articulate democratic
public carries us beyond the question of intellectual method into that
of practical procedure. But the two questions are not disconnected.
The problem of securing diffused and seminal intelligence can be
solved only in the degree in which local communal life becomes a
reality. Signs and symbols, language, are the means of communication
by which a fraternally shared experience is ushered in and sustained.
But the wingèd words of conversation in immediate intercourse have a
vital import lacking in the fixed and frozen words of written speech.
Systematic and continuous inquiry into all the conditions which affect
association and their dissemination in print is a precondition of
the creation of a true public. But it and its results are but tools
after all. Their final actuality is accomplished in face-to-face
relationships by means of direct give and take. Logic in its
fulfillment recurs to the primitive sense of the word: dialogue. Ideas
which are not communicated, shared, and reborn in expression are but
soliloquy, and soliloquy is but broken and imperfect thought. It, like
the acquisition of material wealth, marks a diversion of the wealth
created by associated endeavor and exchange to private ends. It is more
genteel, and it is called more noble. But there is no difference in
kind.
In a word, that expansion and reënforcement of personal understanding
and judgment by the cumulative and transmitted intellectual wealth of
the community which may render nugatory the indictment of democracy
drawn on the basis of the ignorance, bias and levity of the masses, can
be fulfilled only in the relations of personal intercourse in the local
community. The connections of the ear with vital and out-going thought
and emotion are immensely closer and more varied than those of the
eye. Vision is a spectator; hearing is a participator. Publication is
partial and the public which results is partially informed and formed
until the meanings it purveys pass from mouth to mouth. There is no
limit to the liberal expansion and confirmation of limited personal
intellectual endowment which may proceed from the flow of social
intelligence when that circulates by word of mouth from one to another
in the communications of the local community. That and that only
gives reality to public opinion. We lie, as Emerson said, in the lap
of an immense intelligence. But that intelligence is dormant and its
communications are broken, inarticulate and faint until it possesses
the local community as its medium.
FOOTNOTES
[1] W. H. Hudson, “A Traveller in Little Things,” pp. 110–112.
[2] Judges make rules of law. On the “will” theory this is an
encroachment on the legislative function. Not so, if the judges further
define conditions of action.
[3] “A Treatise on Human Nature,” Part II, sec. vii.
[4] Hocking, “Man and the State,” p. 51.
[5] Ayers, “Science: The False Messiah,” Chapter IV, The Lure of
Machinery.
[6] The one obvious exception concerns the tools of waging war. With
respect to them, the state has often shown itself as greedy as it has
been reluctant and behindhand with reference to other inventions.
[7] This is a convenient place for making explicit a qualification
which has to be understood throughout but which is slighted in the
text. The words “government” and “officers” are taken functionally, not
in terms of some particular structure which is so familiar to us that
it leaps to the eyes when these words are used. Both words in their
functional meaning are much wider in application than what is meant
when we speak, say, of the government and officers of Great Britain or
the United States. In households, for example, there have usually been
rule and “heads”; the parents, for most purposes the father, have been
officers of the family interest. The “patriarchal family” presents an
emphatic intensification, on account of comparative isolation of the
household from other social forms, of what exists in lesser degree in
almost all families. The same sort of remark applies to the use of
the term “states,” in connection with publics. The text is concerned
with modern conditions, but the hypothesis propounded is meant to hold
good generally. So to the patent objection that the state is a very
modern institution, it is replied that while modernity is a property of
those _structures_ which go by the name of states, yet all history, or
almost all, records the exercise of analogous _functions_. The argument
concerns these functions and the mode of their operation, no matter
what word be used, though for the sake of brevity the word “state,”
like the words “government” and “officer,” has been freely employed.
[8] This last position promptly called forth a protest from the head of
the utilitarian school, Jeremy Bentham.
[9] C. H. Cooley, “Social Organization,” Ch. iii, on “Primary Groups.”
[10] See Walter Lippmann’s “The Phantom Public.” To this as well as
to his “Public Opinion,” I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness, not
only as to this particular point, but for ideas involved in my entire
discussion even when it reaches conclusions diverging from his.
[11] The most adequate discussion of this ideal with which I am
acquainted is T. V. Smith’s “The Democratic Way of Life.”
[12] The religious character of nationalism has been forcibly brought
out by Carleton Hayes, in his “Essays on Nationalism,” especially Chap.
IV.
[13] J. S. Mill, Logic, Book VI, ch. 7, sec. I. Italics mine.
INDEX
Absolutism, in method, 194–202
Amusements, rivals to political interest, 139
Anarchism, 26
Aristotle, 4, 8, 138
Art, of communication, 182–84
Association, a universal fact, 22–23, 34, 151, 181;
distinctive traits of human, 24;
revolt against, 88, 98–100;
economic, 105–07;
and democracy, 143;
rigid and flexible, 148;
distinguished from community, 151–53;
domination of isolated, 194;
territorial and functional, 212–13.
See _Community_, _Groups_, _Society_
Attachment, a political need, 140, 214
Ayers, C. E., 59 n.
Bentham, J., 54 n.
Biological, and social, 11–12, 152, 195
Business, rival to political interest, 138;
political control by, 182.
See _Economic Forces_
Carlyle, T., 102, 110
Causal forces, and state, 9, 17–21, 25, 36, 37, 47, 53, 65, 66;
versus the causal order, 201–02
Child Labor Amendment, 121
Common Interest, nature of, 17, 34–35.
See _Consequences, Public_
Communication, a public function, 60, 208;
social necessity of, 152, 217–19;
necessary to knowledge, 176–79;
an art, 182–84.
See _Symbols_
Community, 38;
and society, 98, 157;
conditioning wants, 105–06;
and communication, 152–54;
importance of local, 211–19.
See _Great Society_
Comparative Method, 47
Conjoint Behavior, see _Association_
Conscience, private, origin of, 49–50
Consequences, importance of for politics, 12–13, 15, 17, 24–25, 27,
32, 39, 43, 47, 65, 126, 156, 197;
effect of expansion, 47–57;
and rules of law, 56;
effect of enduring, 57–62;
effect of irreparable, 62–64;
relation to state and government, 66–69;
to antithesis of individual and social, 193
Control, political, 12, 16;
of human nature, 197–99
Cooley, C. H., 97 n.
Corporations, illustration of relation of individual and social, 190
Democracy, political, 77;
significance of, 83;
historic genesis, 83–87;
alleged unity, 83;
pure, 94;
and “individualism”, 86–96;
inchoate, 109;
pessimism about, 110;
American, 111–15;
as a moral idea, 143–44;
machinery of
political, 143–46;
nature of ideal, 147–51;
and experts, 203–08;
and local community, 212
Descartes, R., 88
De Tocqueville, 20
Direct Action, 31
Dissemination, and social knowledge, 176–77;
physical means of, 179;
and art, 182–84.
See _Communication_
Dynastic States, 89
Economic Determinism, 118–89, 155–56
Economic Forces and Politics, 89–93, 98, 100, 103–07, 114, 118–20,
129–31, 141–42, 144, 155, 175, 182
Education, and social control, 197–99;
and absolutistic method, 200;
and political democracy, 206–08
Electoral College, 111
Emerson, R. W., 217
Equality, nature of, 149–50
Experimental Method, in politics, 194–202;
defined, 203
Experts, importance of, 123–25, 136–37;
and democracy, 203–04
Factions, 119
Facts, and meanings, 3;
physical and social, 6–7, 11–12;
and theories, 17
Farmers, condition of, 129–30
Gerontocracy, 78
Government, and the public, 27–28, 32, 33, 37, 65–69;
as representative, 76;
dynastic, 81–82;
fear of, 86, 90, 92;
economic control of, 107;
and opinion, 192–93
Great Society, The, 96, 98, 126, 128, 142, 147, 155, 157, 184
Groups, and the state, 4, 26, 71–73;
local, 41–42.
See _Community_
Habit, political effects, 61, 169;
and “individualism,” 158–61
Hayes, C., 170 n.
Hegel, G. W. F., 28, 71
History, continuity of, 161;
contemporaneous, 179
Hocking, W. E., quoted, 57
Hudson, W. H., quoted, 40–41
Hume, D., 56
Individual, antithesis to social, 13–15, 23, 63, 88, 147, 151,
186–191;
and acts, 18, 21;
and officials, 18, 75, 82;
and invention, 58;
economic, 91;
as fiction, 102, 157–58;
defined, 186–88
Individualism, origin of, 22, 87–94;
and private property, 61;
explanation of, 98–102;
influence, 116;
economic, 134;
and collectivism, 186–193;
and method, 195.
See _Psychology_
Instincts, and social theory, 9–12
Intelligence, necessary for social facts, 12, 24, 151–62, 188;
and democracy, 208–10;
embodied, 200–01.
See _Consequences_, _Knowledge_
Interdependence, 155
James, W., quoted, 159–60
Justice, and property, 92
Kings’s Peace, 48
Knowledge, political, 162–67;
divided, 175;
and communication, 176–79, 218–19
Labor Legislation, 62
_Laissez-faire_, 91, 134
Law, not command, 53–54;
nature of, 54–57;
“natural,” 90, 95, 102, 155;
social and physical, 196–97
Legal Institutions, 16, 47
Liberalism, 134
Liberty, made an end in itself, 86;
and “individualism,” 98–100, 192–94;
nature of, 150;
of thought, 168–70;
and uniformity, 215–16
Lippmann, W., 116 n, 158
Locke, J., on natural rights, 87
Macaulay, 102
Majorities and Minorities, 207–08
Materialism, 173–74
Method, problem of, 192–203
Mill, J., theory of democratic government, 93–95
Mill, J. S., 195
Mobility, social effect, 140
Nationalism, 170
News, 179–81
Officers, agents of public, 16, 17, 33, 35, 67–68, 75;
dual capacity, 77, 82;
selection of, 78–82
Opinion, 177, 179
Parties, 119–21
Paternalism, 62
Perception, see _Intelligence, Consequences_
Pioneer Conditions, effect on American democracy, 111
Pluralism, political, 73–74
_Populus_, defined, 16
Private, defined, 15.
See _Public_.
Prohibition, 132–33
Propaganda, 181–82
Property, and government, 91–93.
See _Economic Forces_.
Psychology, of habit, 61, 159–60;
of individualism, 88;
of private consciousness, 100, 158;
social effects of science of, 197–99
Public, and private, 12–17, 47–52;
and political agencies, 31, 35, 38, 67;
marks of, 39–64;
ownership, 61;
democratic, 77;
education, 112–13;
eclipse of, 115, 122, 131, 137, 185;
problem of, 125, 185, 208, 216;
complexity of, 126;
as intellectual problem, 152;
and publicity, 167–171, 219;
and opinion, 177
Railways, and government, 133–34
Reason, and the state, 20;
and law, 55–57
Religion, and social institutions, 41, 49, 169–70
Rights, natural, 87, 95, 102
Rousseau, J. J., 155
Rulers, see _Officers, Government_
Santayana, G., quoted, 211
Science, distinction from knowledge, 163–65, 172;
social and physical, 171, 179, 199;
and the press, 181–82;
applied, 172–76;
method, 201
Smith, Adam, 13, 89
Smith, T. V., 147 n
“Socialization,” 70
Society, human, 24–25;
and states, 26–29, 69–74, 147–49.
See _Association_, _Community_, _Consequences_, _Great Society_,
_Groups_, _Individual_, _Public_.
Spencer, H., 63, 79
Symbols, social import of, 141–42, 152–54, 218
Tariff, 131–32
Theocracy, 41, 49, 80
Tilden, S. J., 208
Theories, political, 4, 5, 8, 85.
See _Causal Forces_, _Economic Forces_, _Individualism_, _Mill,
J._, _Utilitarianism_
Toleration, 49–51
Tradition, revolt against, 86
Utilitarianism, 91
Wallas, G., 96
Wants, individualistic theory of, 102;
socially conditioned, 103–04
War, and selection of rulers, 79;
the World, 127–28
Whitman, Walt, 184
Will, as cause of state, 20, 38;
and the command theory of law, 53;
and government, 68;
general, 153
Wilson, Woodrow, quoted, 96–97
Workers, political neglect and emancipation, 99–100.
See _Economic Forces_
Transcriber’s Notes
New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the
public domain.
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation
marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left
unbalanced.
The index was not checked for proper alphabetization or correct page
references.
Footnotes, originally at the bottoms of the pages on which they were
referenced, have been collected, renumbered, and placed just before the
Index.
Some page numbers in the Table of Contents are out of sequence, as they
were in the original book.
The correct spelling of the name, “Ayers”, likely is “Ayres”.
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