LAST TIME I EXPLAINED WHY THE question of political obligation as we have discussed it—as the duty of an individual to obey governments—ceased to interest political theorists in the Age of Ideology. Nations, races, and classes, not individuals, were the real actors in the political drama now. Loyalty to these entities certainly was urged upon the relevant social groups, but it was as members of a nation or class that they were expected to act. Did the individual citizen totally disappear? No, not in the United States, and by the end of the nineteenth century he reappeared in England. It is to that movement called Idealism that I want to turn today. Its basic ideas are still very much alive, and so I begin what is essentially the contemporary part of this course. From now on I am going to talk about ourselves, or at least our own intellectual world. The oldest question of obligation never quite died out in the United States because of slavery and the Fugitive Slave Law, which threw abolitionists back upon their personal conscience.1 Slavery and the American Civil War also became issues that were discussed in England.2
The central philosophical issue has been positive obligation, that is, “What are our duties to a relatively just, relatively democratic state that has within it the possibilities of reform?” The question is not “When must I rebel?” but “When must I pay my income taxes, send my kids to school, accept compulsory vaccination, submit to regulations in employing other persons?”—in short, “When must I accept the regulatory state?” The difference between the Anglo-American “welfare” state, and perhaps all other “welfare” states,3 is that the former was justified in terms of liberal values, the flourishing of freedom for all citizens as individual persons, not as part of a social design, as were the command economies of socialist states and the racial imperatives of Nazism, as well as the militaristic or religious visions of various fascist regimes. That is why obligation remains at the center, albeit in a new form. When I said that the question of personal obligation ceased to matter in the nineteenth century, I did not mean to suggest that it died completely.
The reason for this is that religion did not really die out, in spite of what is now called secularization. The old denominations lost their following, but it was a very creative period for Protestantism in the United States. There were a number of religious revivals, and new congregations and denominations came into being. In England some of the same movement, evangelism, was especially powerful among the educated middle classes. With the exception of the Mormons, these groups did not run into any trouble with established authorities; what they often did was to try to arouse the consciences of their congregations to do something positive about the social afflictions created by industrial capitalism. The Idealism I am going to describe today was fundamentally to preserve the spirit of this kind of socially aware Christianity, without reference to most aspects of traditional belief that no longer seemed valid to many educated people. These people were, as a rule, particularly active in academic life. They were usually not church members, but they did believe that God had been for a moment incarnated in Jesus and that this belief must have a direct bearing on our spiritual and moral life. At the very least it meant that we knew what example we ought to live up to as persons. We knew this because God is not out there, but within us, and we recognize him in our capacity for moral action.
It meant also that human history was purposeful, and that we are all part of a developing spiritual process. God is identical with the self of every human being, to the extent that the self realizes its moral possibilities. To know oneself as a person with moral potentialities is to know God. Jesus is reenacted in the life of every person who knows that he or she has moral duties. Every time we make a moral choice, for better or worse, we see God in ourselves. When we say, for example, “I ought not to do that, it’s wrong,” or when we reproach others for their wrongdoing, we are admitting that we have moral duties and that we are responsible for our moral and immoral conduct. This understanding is God in us—that is, a repetition of the original incarnation. What this means is that religion is completely identified with morality. Moreover, and this is what matters most to us, the morality that mattered most to these people was social morality, what we owe each other as citizens. I mentioned the religious basis of what came to be known as English Idealism, because it remained intensely concerned with individual morality and individual freedom, even though its main purpose was to emphasize the social duties of citizens.4
All of the people I am about to discuss were liberals who were deeply committed to protecting the political freedom of citizens, but their main aim was to do so in a way that was compatible with increased state action to protect the working classes against exploitation and poverty. To that end they began by rejecting all notions of natural rights and also emphasized the obligations of the individual to the state, as long as the state really did promote the common good. What was the common good, you might ask. Here the answer was a little murky. Sometimes it was argued that we can really only know that retrospectively, when we see all the results and understand all the motives that prevailed. That is clearly not much help to anyone here and now. The best test to apply to judging a given state is whether it is living up to its own principles. If it is a modern state, it is in principle supposed to promote the conditions that make it possible for its citizens to develop their moral potential. Thus a state that systematically bullies its citizens into lying and breaks up their families and friendships by making them spy on each other is obviously not creating conditions that encourage citizens to lead moral lives. In contrast, a state that encourages its citizens to get an education, facilitates fraternal voluntary organizations, and discourages self-destructive habits is setting up an environment that makes it more rather than less possible for each citizen to behave in a responsible and moral way. The state cannot make its citizens moral; they must do the right thing for the right reason freely and on their own initiative. But it can create the conditions that make it easier for us to behave decently rather than viciously. A moral action for the individual is seen as an act of self-realization. Since there is a divine spark in each of us, we are manifesting the best part of ourselves when we act rightly. Acting rightly is not just a series of decisions. It is building a character, a habitual disposition to do what is most likely to contribute to the common good. The way we learn what to do is a process of social learning. There is no such thing as an isolated individual. There never was a state of nature. We never set up society by consent or otherwise. We are and have always lived in families and in communities, and we understand ourselves when we recognize other human beings. Recognition is the full understanding that we share fundamental characteristics as human beings, but especially with those who belong to the same political society as ourselves.
Everyone has what my friend Professor Sandel calls an “encumbered self.”5 The Lockean liberal who thinks of citizens as discrete individuals with nothing but natural rights is a fiction. We are not only born into a language group, a specific community, a time and space; we also understand what it is to be moral by recognizing others as our fellow citizens, from whom we expect certain sorts of conduct and who may then have similar expectations of us. Our duties are thus a matter of time and place. So are our rights.
For we do have rights. They are social claims that we ought to be able to make on our own behalf so that we are able to fulfill our legal duties and receive our legal rights, including rights to life, liberty, and property. We have these rights because it is inherent in the modern state as a moral institution to protect them. The point for the Idealists was to stress that natural rights were not necessary to ensure a free society; rather, the idea of the state as the protector of the common good was the sum of rules that made it possible for individual citizens to live moral and free lives. There was a more specific agenda at work here. The attack on natural rights was not just the necessary consequence of the belief that we were social in our very nature, and that what was natural about us was that we had moral possibilities and a conscious social existence as citizens.6 There was even no great objection to the use of the term “natural rights” as long as it referred to the right to moral self-development.
What was objectionable was the notion that we had a right to do anything we liked as long as it was not a violent crime against persons and property, and the claim that the state had fulfilled its functions when it protected the life and property of its citizens. What the Idealists wanted to prove was that the state had an obligation to protect its citizens against the consequences of industrial capitalism: child labor, unemployment, exploitation, ignorance and poor health, alcoholism and violence in domestic life. If it failed to do so it was not providing its citizens with the conditions that made their moral life possible. This is what is known as the positive state. It is not yet the welfare state nor is it a socialist state. It is the “new liberalism.”
This new liberalism demanded not only that the state provide factory inspections and that the hours and condition of work be improved, but also that it offer compulsory primary education, an end to child labor, and public health measures. All of these were, in fact, written into law in England in the decade before the First World War. The new liberals also demanded that citizens behave as democratic citizens should by getting actively involved in improving the lives of their fellow citizens, by political action as voters, and by working for a more active and socially improving local government. The well-off and, especially, university students and graduates were also to take part in the social settlement movement. They were to give time to social services, to the homeless and the destitute as well as to the unemployed, and to do something for adult education. They were, in fact, the originators of the settlement movement and of professional social work.
This is important for us here because it contains a new notion of obligation. The citizen is no longer asked merely to obey or not to obey. For citizens in a free democracy this has ceased to be a burning question because in the years before the First World War it was assumed that the very definition of a modern European state was that it protected the political and legal rights of individuals to free expression. The question of obligation was not to sovereigns; they were gone. The question was social obligation to one’s fellow citizens in a relatively just state. In fact, obedience was not even discussed. In a liberal society it is not a virtue for adults to submit their judgment and will to the authority of others, least of all to public officials. On the contrary, the enduring belief was, and is, that the free market in ideas, the fearless expression of all thoughts and of all knowledge and belief, is the right of a mature person and also a social obligation, because only through free debate can scientific knowledge advance, error be found, and the genuine person be distinguished from the fake and quack. Our personalities as individuals and our duty to pursue knowledge, to control the oppressive tendencies of all governments, and to inform ourselves as citizens: all of these depend on independent individuals such as Locke had already envisioned.
None of the Idealists questioned this aspect of liberalism. What they did worry about was whether something more, in the way of positive activity to promote the public good and especially to improve the lives of the poor, might not be an obligation of free citizens. The Idealists, unlike more radical thinkers of the time, did not think that capitalism and the free market were inherently unjust in themselves. They believed that people ought to own property as a means of developing their personalities and skills, and that both accumulation and inheritance of wealth were part of freedom as well as socially desirable because they created wealth for all. It was not, then, competition in the marketplace that created the problem but the poverty and ignorance that had come with industrial production and gross inequalities of wealth. What they wanted the state to do was regulate capitalism in the interest of the freedom and well-being of the working class. They also perceived that the individualism of unregulated laissez-faire had created human beings who were not merely selfish, as we all are, but had been systematically taught to be nothing but selfish. People needed to be taught that they had obligations to the state and to the common good it represented. Under the formula of freedom of contract people had been allowed to pretend that the worker who sold his labor had some choice in taking a job and the wage he could expect. In fact, he had no choice. He was not a slave, but he was hardly free. And the Idealists were interested in improving his condition so that he was in less dire circumstances. To achieve that they had to persuade the ruling classes of England that their freedom would also be enhanced if they gave up some of their power over their workers.
What argument might they offer? The notion of positive freedom. For liberals there was a real ideological change. The freedom that really mattered to them was the freedom to develop all one’s potentialities, especially one’s moral and intellectual capacities. As educable beings we need freedom to learn as well as freedom of the press, speech, and religion. In addition, we need formal education to take advantage of these freedoms, and to be educated we need a minimum standard of health and security, otherwise schooling is wasted on the young. Their parents must also be included in education, so there must be adequate adult educational opportunities. All this is easily found in John Stuart Mill,7 but what is new is that liberals now wanted the state to supply the education and all the social support that education requires. Only a welfare state can create independent free citizens.
The second change in the liberal outlook that made this possible was that liberals no longer saw the state as the greatest threat to personal freedom. The large and powerful business enterprises were seen as exercising as great, if not greater, power over the lives of their employees than the state over the citizens generally. These were now seen as the chief threat to individual freedom, as well as inefficient and socially wasteful. Only if the state learned to curb these new economic giants would the individual be free to develop, benefit from education, and become an active citizen. So even before World War I, laissez-faire economics were not as secure as they had been in the middle of the nineteenth century in liberal opinion. Human freedom might not be served by an unregulated market, and might even be harmed by it. This is how the Age of Keynes began,8 though it only became settled during the Second World War. From the 1880s on many liberals saw state regulation of the market as acceptable, perhaps even necessary if society were to function effectively.
Negative liberty is simple: it is not being interfered with by other people, especially state officials. In America the defense for it is that we have unalienable rights to liberty and institutions to protect them. It is the obligation of the state to respect and protect the rights of individuals. The obligations of citizens are ultimately based on consent. Positive liberty is a more complicated notion. It implies that we are divided in ourselves between a higher, moral or at least public-spirited self and a lower, self-regarding, irrational self. When we follow the call of the higher self we are free, and our language testifies to that experience. Free from the shackles of sin, free from prejudice, free from ignorance; we say it and we mean it. Still, it is not the same kind of freedom as being left alone. At its worst it can justify a government or even private individuals bullying us into moral or ideological conformity on the grounds of “freeing us.” And as freedom is a very positive word, many dictators have said just that sort of thing. We get reeducated in jail, and torture chambers serve to turn us into “good” fascists or Communists—not a pretty picture and not an invented one, either. Enforced obligation implies that we can rise to a higher level of consciousness. However, at its best, positive freedom is not like this nightmare. It is the argument of a freely aroused personal moral sense: I cannot be free or feel free as long as my fellow citizens or human beings are being enslaved, abused, oppressed. And I must do something to liberate them from the oppression they endure so that I may not become involuntarily a passive bystander or even a beneficiary of their misery. My positive freedom depends on their liberation. This was T. H. Green’s view of freedom and one of the reasons he talked so much about slavery in America.
To sum up, beginning with an evangelical, deeply inward Protestantism that is at once very individual and yet socially conscious, we move on to a less Christian idealism that still gives structure to such thinking but substitutes a vision of the morally complete modern state as the object of our obligations. It is an idealism that sees the state as it does conscience in the individual: as higher faculties that set our duties for us. It does not have or claim to have an answer to the question “What do I do when faced with an unjust law?” Green recognizes the validity of the question, but he is convinced that each person must make up her or his own mind in such a case. Otherwise it would not be a moral choice. Moreover, he recognized the importance of differences in circumstances. A premodern morally unacceptable political order like tsarist Russia has far fewer claims on its citizens than a constitutional and democratic state like Britain. Obligation is thus both morally personal and too dependent on the facts of a given case to make it possible to prescribe rules for obedience and disobedience. The issue in a normally just state is different. It is necessary to make citizens recognize their obligations to the victims of the industrial world and to imbue them with a new sense of citizenship, in which the freedom of all from degrading conditions is also the freeing of each self from moral indignity. Obligation is not just obedience, it is the obligation to be just. And in the New World justice means active citizens in an active state, not merely the assertion of rights. Green had learned much from the American abolitionists, and it is to them that I will return.
The lecture was originally titled “The Positive State (T. H. Green).”
1. Before slavery was abolished in the United States in 1865, “free states” (where slavery was outlawed) offered refuge and even freedom to runaway slaves. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 was one of the most controversial laws passed by the U.S. Congress regarding slavery because it required authorities and citizens of free states to return fugitive slaves to their masters.
2. The United Kingdom and the part of the Commonwealth that pertained to it at the time had abolished slavery in 1833. However, during the American Civil War, Britain remained ambivalent and played more than once with the idea of officially acknowledging the Confederacy.
3. Shklar is not using “welfare state” in its current sense to describe Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia but rather as meaning a state that purports to be created for the purpose of looking after the social welfare of its people.
4. English Idealism, also referred to as British Idealism, is a broad label for a number of diverse thinkers, writers, and politically minded intellectuals who became prominent from the second half of the nineteenth century on. They were known for their defense of the Absolute (in the sense of defending a coherent whole) and the continued role of reason, the latter not being necessarily opposed to the former. One of Idealism’s most renowned advocates was Thomas Hill Green, a radical liberal reformer and political thinker who had been influenced by Hegel. His Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation were published posthumously (London: Longman, 1917). For Shklar, Green’s Lectures were of primary importance in structuring her own lectures and argument. She recommended to her students to read in particular pages 122–159 and 180–229.
5. Michael Sandel is a political philosopher and was colleague of Shklar’s at Harvard. Advocating a more communitarian form of modern republicanism, Sandel criticized John Rawls and others for their notion that it is possible to have an “unencumbered self.”
6. Shklar does not make it clear here, but this characterization applies particularly to T. H. Green and the British Idealists.
7. John Stuart Mill was a political economist, civil servant, and women’s rights advocate. He is known for his defense of liberal ideas in conjunction with utilitarian reasoning.
8. John Meynard Keynes was an English economist who revolutionized modern macroeconomics. His theory influenced President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and other attempts of the British and American governments to find solutions to the world economic crisis of the 1930s.