There is no doubt, in the case of very many societies, what was the true nature of the aims pursued by the State. To keep on expanding its power and to add lustre to its fame—this was the sole or main object of public activity. Individual interests and needs did not come into the reckoning. The ingrained religious character of the political system of societies makes us appreciate this indifference of the State for what concerns the individual. The destiny of a State was closely bound up with the fate of the gods worshipped at its altars. If a State suffered reverses, then the prestige of its gods declined in the same measure—and vice versa. Public religion and civic morals were fused: they were but different aspects of the same reality. To bring glory to the City was the same as enhancing the glory of the gods of the City: it worked both ways. Now, the phenomena in the religious sphere can be recognized because they are wholly unlike those of the human order. They belong to a world apart. The individual qua individual is part of the profane world, whilst the gods are the very nucleus of the religious world, and between these two worlds there is a gulf. The gods are, in their substance, different from men: they have other ideas, other needs and an existence with no likeness to that of men. Anyone who holds that the aims of the political system were religious and the religious aims political, might as well say that there was a cleavage between the aims of the State and the ends pursued by individuals on their own. How then came it that the individual could thus occupy himself with the pursuit of aims which were to such a degree foreign to his own private concerns? The answer is this: his private concerns were relatively unimportant to him and his personality and everything that hung on it had but slight moral weight. His personal views, his private beliefs and all his diverse aspirations as an individual seemed insignificant factors. What was prized by all, were the beliefs held in common, the collective aspirations, the popular traditions and the symbols that were an expression of them. That being so, it was gladly and without any demur that the individual yielded to the instrument by which the aims of no immediate concern to himself were secured. Absorbed, as he was, into the mass of society, he meekly gave way to its pressures and subordinated his own lot to the destinies of collective existence without any sense of sacrifice. This is because his particular fate had in his own eyes nothing of the meaning and high significance that we nowadays attribute to it. If we are right in that estimate, it was in the nature of things that it should be so; societies could only exist at that time by virtue of this subservience.
But the further one travels in history, the more one is aware of the process of change. In the early stage, the individual personality is lost in the depths of the social mass and then later, by its own effort, breaks away. From being limited and of small regard, the scope of the individual life expands and becomes the exalted object of moral respect. The individual comes to acquire ever wider rights over his own person and over the possessions to which he has title; he also comes to form ideas about the world that seem to him most fitting and to develop his essential qualities without hindrance. War fetters his activity, diminishes his stature and so becomes the supreme evil. Because it inflicts undeserved suffering on him, he sees in it more and more the supreme form of moral offence. In the light of this, it is utterly inconsistent to require from him the same subordination as before. One cannot make of him a god, a god above all others, and at the same time an instrument in the hands of the gods. One cannot make of him the paramount end and reduce him to the role of means. If he be the moral reality, then it is he who must serve as the pole-star for public as well as private conduct. It should be the part of the State to try to bring his innate qualities to the light. Shall we find some people saying that the cult of the individual is a superstition of which we ought to rid ourselves? That would be to go against all the lessons of history: for as we read on, we find the human person tending to gain in dignity. There is no rule more soundly established. For any attempt to base social institutions on the opposite principle is not feasible and could be convincing only for a moment: we cannot force things to be other than they are. We cannot undo the individual having become what he is—an autonomous centre of activity, an impressive system of personal forces whose energy can no more be destroyed than that of the cosmic forces. It would be just as impossible to transform our physical atmosphere, in the midst of which we breathe and have our being.
Do we not arrive here at a contradiction that cannot be resolved? On the one hand we establish that the State goes on developing more and more: on the other, that the rights of the individual, held to be actively opposed to those of the State, have a parallel development. The government organ takes on an ever greater scale, because its function goes on growing in importance and because its aims, that are in line with its own activity, increase in number; yet we deny that it can pursue aims other than those that concern the individual. Now, these aims are by definition held to belong to individual activity. If, as we suppose, the rights of the individual are inherent, the State does not have to intervene to establish them, that is, they do not depend on the State. But then, if they do not, and are outside its competence, how can the cadre of this competence go on expanding, in face of the fact that it must less and less take in things alien to the individual?
The only way of getting over the difficulty is to dispute the postulate that the rights of the individual are inherent, and to admit that the institution of these rights is in fact precisely the task of the State. Then, certainly, all can be explained. We can understand that the functions of the State may expand, without any diminishing of the individual. We can see too that the individual may develop without causing any decline of the State, since he would be in some respects the product himself of the State, and since the activity of the State would in its nature be liberating to him. Now, what emerges, on the evidence of the facts, is that history gives sound authority for this relation of cause and effect as between the progress of moral individualism and the advance of the State. Except for the abnormal cases we shall discuss later, the stronger the State, the more the individual is respected. We know that the Athenian State was far less tightly constructed than Rome, and it is clear that the Roman State, again, more especially the City State, was built on very simple lines, compared with the great centralized States of our own day. Progress in concentration of government in the Roman City took a different course from that in any of the Greek Cities, and the unit of the State had a different emphasis. This point we settled last year. One outstanding fact makes us aware of this difference: in Rome, the direction of religious practices was in the hands of the State. In Athens, it was dispersed amongst the many sacerdotal colleges. Nothing is to be found in Athens corresponding to the Roman Consul, in whose hands all governmental power was concentrated. The administration in Athens was distributed amongst an unco-ordinated crowd of various officials. Each of the group elements that made up the society—clans, phratries and tribes—had preserved an autonomy far greater than in Rome, where they were very soon absorbed in the social mass. In this respect, the distance that stretches between the modern European States and the Greek or Italian States is obvious. Now, individualism had a different development in Rome as compared with Athens. In Rome, the lively sense of the respect due to the person was expressed, first, in recognized terms affirming the dignity of the Roman citizen and, secondly, in the liberties which were its distinguishing juridical features.
This is one of the points on which Ihering has helped to throw a sharp light. We are in the same case in respect of freedom of thought. But remarkable as Roman individualism may be, it is slight enough compared to that which developed within Christian societies. The Christian form of religion is an inward one: it consists of inward faith rather than outward observances, for a deeply held faith eludes any external constraint. In Athens, intellectual development—scientific and philosophical—was far greater than in Rome. Now, it is held that science and philosophy and collective thinking develop in the same way as individualism. True, they very often accompany it, but that is not inevitably so. In India, Brahmanism and Buddhism have a very learned and very subtle metaphysic: the Buddhist religion rests on a whole theory of the world. The sciences were developed to a high degree in the temples of Egypt. We know, however, that in the case of both India and Egypt, there was an almost complete absence of individualism. It is this fact more than any other that goes to prove the pantheistic nature of these metaphysics and religions: they attempted to give the pantheism a kind of rational and charted formula. Clearly, a pantheistic faith is not possible where individuals have a lively sense of their individuality.
Again, letters and philosophy were widely pursued in the medieval monasteries. That was because intensity of speculation, in the individual as in the society, is in fact in inverse ratio to practical activity. When we find activity in the practical field falling below the normal in any one section of society, for some reason or other, then the intellectual forces will develop all the more and flow into the space thus left open to them. So it was with the priests and monks, especially in the contemplative religions. From another angle, we know too that for the Athenian, the matter of practical life was reduced to something insignificant. He lived a life of leisured pursuits. In such a setting there comes a remarkable flowering of science and philosophy. Once they flower, they may, to be sure, inspire an individualist movement, but we cannot say they derive from it. It is possible, of course, that speculation, opening out in this way, may not have this result and that it remains in its essence conservative. In that case it is taken up with making a theory of the state of things as they exist or perhaps with a commentary on it. Such, in the main, is the nature of sacerdotal speculation: and even Greek speculation as a whole had this same tendency over a long period. The political and moral theories of Plato and Aristotle hardly do more than reflect in their systems the political structure of Sparta and Athens respectively.
Finally, one last reason that prevents our measuring the degree of individualism in a country by the development reached in the faculties of speculative thought. This is, that individualism is not a theory: it lies in the region of practice, not in that of speculation. For it to be true individualism, it must make its mark on morals and social institutions. There are times, too, when it dissipates itself entirely, as it were, in speculative dreaming instead of getting through to reality and initiating that whole collection of customs and institutions that would be adequate to its needs. It is then we see systems come into view that reveal social ideals looking to a more highly developed individualism. That, however, remains a mere desideratum, since the conditions needed to make it a reality are lacking. Is this not rather the case with our own French individualism? It was expressed theoretically in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, although in exaggerated form; it is, however, far from having any deep roots in the country. The proof of this is seen in the extreme ease with which we have accepted an authoritarian regime several times in the course of this century—regimes which in reality rest on principles that are a long way from individualism. The old habits persist more than we think, more than we should like, in spite of the letter of our moral code. The reason is, that in order to set up an individualistic moral code, it is not enough to assert it or to translate it into fine systems. Society, rather, must be so ordered that this set-up is made feasible and durable. Otherwise, it remains in a vague doctrinaire state.
History seems indeed to prove that the State was not created to prevent the individual from being disturbed in the exercise of his natural rights: no, this was not its role alone—rather, it is the State that creates and organizes and makes a reality of these rights. And indeed, man is man only because he lives in society. Take away from man all that has a social origin and nothing is left but an animal on a par with other animals. It is society that has raised him to this level above physical nature: it has achieved this result because association, by grouping the individual psychic forces, intensifies them. It carried them to a degree of energy and productive capacity immeasurably greater than any they could achieve if they remained isolated one from the other. Thus, a psychic life of a new kind breaks away which is richer by far and more varied than one played out in the single individual alone. Further, the life thus freed pervades the individual who shares in it and so transforms him. Whilst society thus feeds and enriches the individual nature, it tends, on the other hand, at the same time inevitably to subject that nature to itself and for the same reason. It is precisely because the group is a moral force greater to this extent than that of its parts, that it tends of necessity to subordinate these to itself. The parts are unable not to fall under its domination. Here there is a law of moral mechanics at work, which is just as inevitable as the laws of physical mechanics. Any group which exercises authority over its members by coercion strives to model them after its own pattern, to impose on them its ways of thinking and acting and to prevent any dissent.
Every society is despotic, at least if nothing from without supervenes to restrain its despotism. Still, I would not say that there is anything artificial in this despotism: it is natural because it is necessary, and also because, in certain conditions, societies cannot endure without it. Nor do I mean that there is anything intolerable about it: on the contrary, the individual does not feel it any more than we feel the atmosphere that weighs on our shoulders. From the moment the individual has been raised in this way by the collectivity, he will naturally desire what it desires and accept without difficulty the state of subjection to which he finds himself reduced. If he is to be conscious of this and to resist it, individualist aspirations must find an outlet, and that they cannot do in these conditions.
But for it to be otherwise, we may say, would it not be enough for the society to be on a fairly large scale? There is no doubt that when it is small—when it surrounds every individual on all sides and at every moment—it does not allow of his evolving in freedom. If it be always present and always in action, it leaves no room to his initiative. But it is no longer in the same case when it has reached wide enough dimensions. When it is made up of a vast number of individuals, a society can exercise over each a supervision only as close and as vigilant and effective as when the surveillance is concentrated on a small number. A man is far more free in the midst of a throng than in a small coterie. Hence it follows that individual diversities can then more easily have play, that collective tyranny declines and that individualism establishes itself in fact, and that, with time, the fact becomes a right. Things can, however, only have this course on one condition: that is, that inside this society, there must be no forming of any secondary groups that enjoy enough autonomy to allow of each becoming in a way a small society within the greater. For then, each of these would behave towards its members as if it stood alone and everything would go on as if the full-scale society did not exist. Each group, tightly enclosing the individuals of which it was made up, would hinder their development; the collective mind would impose itself on conditions applying to the individual. A society made up of adjoining clans or of towns or villages independent in greater or lesser degree, or of a number of professional groups, each one autonomous in relation to the others, would have the effect of being almost as repressive of any individuality as if it were made up of a single clan or town or association. The formation of secondary groups of this kind is bound to occur, for in a great society there are always particular local or professional interests which tend naturally to bring together those people with whom they are concerned. There we have the very stuff of associations of a special kind, of guilds, of coteries of every variety; and if there is nothing to offset or neutralize their activity, each of them will tend to swallow up its members. In any case, just to take the domestic society: we know its capacity to assimilate when left to itself. We see how it keeps within its orbit all those who go to make it up and are under its immediate domination. (At any rate, if secondary groups of this sort are not formed, at least a collective force will establish itself at the head of the society to govern it. And if this collective force itself stands alone, if it has only individuals to deal with, the same law of mechanics will make those individuals fall under its domination).
In order to prevent this happening, and to provide a certain range for individual development, it is not enough for a society to be on a big scale; the individual must be able to move with some degree of freedom over a wide field of action. He must not be curbed and monopolised by the secondary groups, and these groups must not be able to get a mastery over their members and mould them at will. There must therefore exist above these local, domestic—in a word, secondary—authorities, some overall authority which makes the law for them all: it must remind each of them that it is but a part and not the whole and that it should not keep for itself what rightly belongs to the whole. The only means of averting this collective particularism and all it involves for the individual, is to have a special agency with the duty of representing the overall collectivity, its rights and its interests, vis-à-vis these individual collectivities.
These rights and these interests merge with those of the individual. Let us see why and how the main function of the State is to liberate the individual personalities. It is solely because, in holding its constituent societies in check, it prevents them from exerting the repressive influences over the individual that they would otherwise exert. So there is nothing inherently tyrannical about State intervention in the different fields of collective life; on the contrarary, it has the object and the effect of alleviating tyrannies that do exist. It will be argued, might not the State in turn become despotic? Undoubtedly, provided there were nothing to counter that trend. In that case, as the sole existing collective force, it produces the effects that any collective force not neutralized by any counter-force of the same kind would have on individuals. The State itself then becomes a leveller and repressive. And its repressiveness becomes even harder to endure than that of small groups, because it is more artificial. The State, in our large-scale societies, is so removed from individual interests that it cannot take into account the special or local and other conditions in which they exist. Therefore when it does attempt to regulate them, it succeeds only at the cost of doing violence to them and distorting them. It is, too, not sufficiently in touch with individuals in the mass to be able to mould them inwardly, so that they readily accept its pressure on them. The individual eludes the State to some extent—the State can only be effective in the context of a large-scale society—and individual diversity may not come to light. Hence, all kinds of resistance and distressing conflicts arise. The small groups do not have this drawback. They are close enough to the things that provide their raison d’être to be able to adapt their actions exactly and they surround the individuals closely enough to shape them in their own image. The inference to be drawn from this comment, however, is simply that if that collective force, the State, is to be the liberator of the individual, it has itself need of some counter-balance; it must be restrained by other collective forces, that is, by those secondary groups we shall discuss later on. … It is not a good thing for the groups to stand alone, nevertheless they have to exist. And it is out of this conflict of social forces that individual liberties are born. Here again we see the significance of these groups. Their usefulness is not merely to regulate and govern the interests they are meant to serve. They have a wider purpose; they form one of the conditions essential to the emancipation of the individual.
It remains a fact that the State is not of its own volition antagonistic to the individual. It is only through the State that individualism is possible, although it cannot be the means of making it a reality, except in certain precise conditions. We might say that in the State we have the prime mover. It is the State that has rescued the child from patriarchal domination and from family tyranny; it is the State that has freed the citizen from feudal groups and later from communal groups; it is the State that has liberated the craftsman and his master from guild tyranny. It may take too violent a course, but the action becomes vitiated only when it is merely destructive. And that is what justifies the increasing scope of its functions. This concept of the State is, then, an individualistic one, but it does not limit the State to the administration of an entirely prohibitive justice. And in this concept there is recognition of the right and duty of the State to play the widest possible part in all that touches collective life, without however having a mystique.1 For the purpose assigned to the State in this concept is comprehensible to individuals, just as they understand the links between the State and themselves. They may co-operate in this, fully realizing what they are about and the ultimate aim of their actions, because it is a matter that concerns themselves. They may even find themselves in opposition to that aim and thus even become instruments of the State, for it is towards making them a reality that the action of the State tends. And yet they are not (as held by the individualistic utilitarians or the school of Kant) wholes that are self-sufficing and that the State should merely respect, since it is through the State, and the State alone, that they have a moral existence.
Note
1 N.B. ‘without becoming, as it were, a mystic concept of State.’