Additional Political Philosophers | Classics in Political Philosophy

SUPPLEMENTARY PHILOSOPHICAL SELECTIONS

From Classics in Political Philosophy, by James Fieser

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CONTENTS

• Thucydides: Funeral Oration of Pericles (from History of the Peloponnesian War)

• La Boetie: Why we Accept Tyranny (from Discourse on Voluntary Servitude)

• Olympe de Gouges, The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen (1791)

• Errico Malatesta: Anarchism (from Anarchism)

• W.E.B. Du Bois: The Veil Between Black and White (from The Souls of Black Folk)

• Emma Goldman: Anarchism (from "What I Believe")

• Mahatma Gandhi: Passive Resistance (from Indian Home Rule)

• John Dewey: Democracy (from "Ethics and Democracy" and others)

• John Maynard Keynes: Capitalism and Collective Action (from "The End of Laissez-Faire")

• H.L.A. Hart: The Natural Right to be Free (from "Are There Any Natural Rights?")

• John Rawls: Justice as Fairness (from "Justice as Fairness")

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THUCYDIDES: FUNERAL ORATION OF PERICLES (c. 431 BCE)

Born in Athens during the height of its golden age, Pericles (c. 495–429 BCE) was a preeminent statesman, orator, and general who presided over the city's most culturally and politically vibrant era. Though he was the architect of the Athenian empire and the Parthenon, his intellectual legacy is largely preserved through the work of the historian Thucydides. In the History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides reconstructs the "Funeral Oration" delivered by Pericles at the end of the first year of the conflict to honor the fallen soldiers. The selection begins with a philosophical justification for democracy, describing it not merely as a set of voting procedures, but as a system defined by equality before the law and a meritocratic respect for individual excellence. Pericles maintains that Athens is an "education to Greece" because it balances a deep respect for private liberty with a rigorous commitment to public duty. He famously contends that a citizen who takes no interest in politics is not a "peaceable" man, but a "useless" one, suggesting that the fulfillment of human potential is inextricably linked to participation in the life of the polis. The final portion of the oration explores the relationship between freedom and courage. Hart's later focus on the "right to be free" finds an ancient echo here, as Pericles argues that happiness is the fruit of freedom and freedom the fruit of valor. He suggests that the Athenian soldier is superior to his Spartan rival precisely because his bravery is a result of choice and rational reflection rather than state-imposed compulsion.

The Foundation of the Athenian Character

The greater part of those who until now have spoken in this place have been accustomed to praise the man who added this speech to our funeral rites. They consider it a right thing that it should be delivered over those who are buried after falling in battle. To me, however, it would have appeared sufficient that when men had shown themselves brave by deeds, their honors also should be displayed by deeds, as you now see in the case of this burial prepared at the public expense. I do not think that the virtues of many should depend on the skill of a single speaker, for credit to be given him according to whether he expresses himself well or ill. It is difficult to speak appropriately on a subject on which even the impression of one's truthfulness is established with difficulty.

Now with regard to our military achievements, by which each possession was gained, whether in any case it was ourselves or our fathers that repelled with spirit hostilities brought against us by barbarian or Greek; as I do not wish to enlarge on the subject before you who are well acquainted with it, I will pass them over. But I will explain first by what a way of life we attained to our power, and by what form of government and owing to what habits it became so great. I will explain these points first and then proceed to the eulogy of these men. I consider that on the present occasion they will not be inappropriately mentioned, and that it is profitable for the whole assembly, both citizens and strangers, to listen to them.

For we enjoy a form of government which does not copy the laws of our neighbors; instead, we are ourselves a pattern to others rather than imitators of them. In name, from its not being administered for the benefit of the few but of the many, it is called a democracy. With regard to its laws, all enjoy equality as concerns their private differences. With regard to public rank, according as each man has a reputation for anything, he is preferred for public honors not so much from consideration of party as of merit. Nor, again, on the ground of poverty, if he has the capacity to serve the state, is he prevented by his humble social status.

We are liberal then in our public administration. With regard to mutual jealousy of our daily pursuits, we are not angry with our neighbor if he does anything to please himself; we do not cast judgmental looks at one another, which though harmless are yet unpleasant. While, however, in private matters we live together agreeably, in public matters, under the influence of fear, we most carefully abstain from transgression. We do this through our obedience to those who are from time to time in office and to the laws, especially such of them as are enacted for the benefit of the injured, and such as, though unwritten, bring acknowledged disgrace on those who break them.

Moreover, we have provided for our minds many different ways to relax from work by celebrating games and sacrifices through the whole year, and by maintaining elegant private establishments, of which the daily gratification drives away sadness. Owing to the greatness too of our city, everything from every land is imported into it. It is our lot to reap with no more special enjoyment the good things which are produced here than those of the rest of the world likewise.

In the studies of war also we differ from our enemies in the following respects. We throw our city open to all and never, by the expulsion of strangers, exclude anyone from either learning or observing things, by seeing which unconcealed any of our enemies might gain an advantage. We trust not so much to military preparation and clever schemes as to our own courage in action. Again, as to our modes of education, they aim at the acquisition of a manly character by laborious training from their very youth; while we, though living at our ease, no less boldly advance to meet equal dangers.

As a proof of this, the Spartans never march against our country singly, but with all their allies together. While we, generally speaking, have no difficulty in conquering in battle upon hostile ground those who are standing up in defense of their own. No enemy ever yet encountered our whole united force, because we must simultaneously man our fleet and sending our troops by land on so many different services. But wherever they have engaged with any part of it, if they conquer only some of us, they boast that we were all routed by them; and if they are conquered, they say it was by all that they were beaten. And yet if with careless ease rather than with laborious practice, and with a courage which is the result not so much of laws as of natural disposition, we are willing to face danger, we have the advantage of not suffering beforehand from coming troubles, and of proving ourselves, when we are involved in them, no less bold than those who are always toiling. Our country is worthy of admiration in these respects and in others besides.

We cultivate a love of beauty without extravagance and a love of wisdom without becoming soft. We use our wealth as an opportunity for action rather than as a subject for boastful talk. Poverty is nothing for a man to be ashamed of admitting; however, the real shame lies in not making an effort to overcome it. The same men can attend at the same time to domestic as well as to public affairs. Others who are engaged with business can still form a sufficient judgment on political questions. We are the only people that consider the man who takes no part in these things not as timid, but as useless. We ourselves judge measures rightly, even if we do not originate them. We do not regard words as any hindrance to actions, but rather consider it a hindrance not to have been previously instructed by word before undertaking in deed what we have to do. We have this characteristic also in a remarkable degree: we are at the same time most daring and most calculating in what we take in hand, whereas to other men it is ignorance that brings daring, while calculation brings fear.

In short, I say that the whole city is a school for Greece. In my opinion, the same individual among us would provide himself qualified for the greatest variety of tasks with grace and versatility. This is not mere vaunting language for the occasion so much as actual truth; the very power of the state, which we have won by such habits, affords a proof. It is the only country at the present time that, when brought to the test, proves superior to its fame. It is the only one that neither gives to the enemy who has attacked us any cause for indignation at being defeated by such opponents, nor to him who is subject to us room for finding fault, as not being ruled by men who are worthy of empire. We shall be admired both by present and future generations as having exhibited our power with great proofs, and by no means without evidence. We have no further need either of Homer to praise us or anyone else who might charm for the moment by his verses, while the truth of the facts would mar the idea formed of them. We have compelled every sea and land to become accessible to our daring, and everywhere established everlasting records, whether of evil or of good. It was for such a country then that these men, nobly resolving not to have it taken from them, fell fighting; every one of their survivors may well be willing to suffer in its behalf.

For this reason, indeed, I have spoken at length on the characteristics of the state. I did this to prove that the struggle is not for the same object in our case as in that of men who have none of these advantages in an equal degree. At the same time, I wanted clearly to establish by proofs the truth of the eulogy of those men over whom I am now speaking. Now the chief points of it have been mentioned. Regarding the things for which I have commended the city, it was the virtues of these men, such as these, that adorned her with them. Few of the Greeks are there whose fame, like these men's, is fully matched by their actions.

Honor of the Fallen

Again, the closing scene of these men appears to me to supply an illustration of human worth, whether as affording us the first information respecting it or its final confirmation. Even in the case of men who have been in other respects of an inferior character, it is but fair for them to use their military courage as a cloak for their failings in their country's behalf. Having wiped out their evil by their good, they did more service collectively than harm by their individual offenses.

But of these men there was none that either was made a coward by his wealth, from preferring the continued enjoyment of it; nor did any shrink from danger through a hope suggested by poverty, namely, that he might yet escape it and grow rich. Instead, conceiving that vengeance on their foes was more to be desired than these objects, and at the same time regarding this as the most glorious of hazards, they wished by risking it to be avenged on their enemies, and so to aim at procuring those advantages. They committed to hope the uncertainty of success, but they resolved to trust to action with regard to what was visible to themselves. In that action, being minded rather to resist and die than by surrendering to escape, they fled from the from the brand of disgracewhile they endured the brunt of the battle with their bodies. After the shortest crisis, when at the very height of their fortune, they were taken away from their glory rather than their fear.

Duty of the Living

Such did these men prove themselves, as became the character of their country. For those of you who remain, you must pray that you may have a more successful resolution, but you must determine not to have one less bold against your enemies. You should not consider the benefit of such a spirit in word alone; one might lecture you at great length—though you know it yourselves quite as well—telling you how many advantages are contained in repelling your foes. Instead, you should day by day behold the power of the city as it appears in fact and become its devoted lovers. Reflect, when you think it great, that it was by being bold, by knowing their duty, and by being alive to shame in action that men acquired these things. If they ever failed in their attempt at anything, they did not on that account think it right to deprive their country also of their valor, but instead conferred upon her a most glorious joint offering.

While collectively they gave her their lives, individually they received that renown which never grows old and the most distinguished tomb they could have. I speak not so much of the tomb in which they are laid, as that in which their glory is left behind them, to be everlastingly recorded on every occasion for doing so, either by word or deed, that may from time to time present itself. For the world itself is the tomb of famous men. Not only does the inscription upon columns in their own land point it out, but in foreign lands also there dwells with everyone an unwritten memorial of the heart, rather than of a material monument.

Strive then to equal these men in your turn; and, believing that happiness depends on freedom, and freedom on courage, do not fear the dangers of war. It is not the unfortunate, and those who have no hope of any good, that would with most reason be reckless with their lives; instead, it is those who, while they live, still incur the risk of a change to the opposite condition, and to whom the difference would be the greatest should they meet with any reverse. For more grievous to a man of high spirit is the misery which accompanies cowardice, than the unfelt death which comes upon him at once, in the time of his strength and of his hope for the common welfare.

Therefore, to the parents of the dead who are here today, I will offer comfort rather than pity. They know that they have been raised in a world of constant misfortune, but fortunate are those who have met the most honorable death, as these men have, and have been granted the most honorable grief, as you have. To these men, life has been so exactly measured that they were both happy in it and died in that happiness. Difficult, indeed, I know it is to persuade you of this, regarding those of whom you will often be reminded by the good fortune of others, in which you yourselves also once rejoiced. Sorrow is felt, not for the blessings of which one is deprived without experience of them, but of that which one loses after becoming accustomed to it.

But you must remain strong in the hope of having more children, for those of you who are still of an age to do so. For to yourselves individually, those who are subsequently born will be a reason for your forgetting those who are no more; and to the state it will be beneficial in two ways, by its not being depopulated and by the enjoyment of security. It is not possible that those should offer any fair and just advice who do not incur equal risk with their neighbors by having children at stake. Those of you, however, who are past that age, must consider that the longer period of your life during which you have been prosperous is so much gain, and that what remains will be a short one; you must cheer yourselves with the fair fame of these who are now gone. For the love of honor is the only feeling that never grows old; and in the helplessness of age it is not the accumulation of wealth, as some assert, that gives greatest pleasure, but the enjoyment of honor.

For those of you, on the other hand, who are sons or brothers of the dead, I see that the struggle of competition will be great. Everyone is accustomed to praise the man who is no more; and scarcely, though even for an excess of worth, would you be esteemed equal to them, but only slightly inferior. The living are subject to the envy of their rivals; however, those who no longer stand in anyone's way are honored with a respect that is free from all competition. If I must also speak of womanly virtue to those of you who are now widows, I will summarize my advice in a brief encouragement. Your glory will be great if you do not fall short of the nature that is expected of you; similarly, she is most honored who is least spoken of among men, whether for praise or for criticism.

I have now expressed in word, as the law required, what I had to say befitting the occasion. In deed, those who are here interred have already received part of their honors; while for the remaining part, the state will bring up their sons at the public expense from this time to their manhood. The state thus offers both to these and to their posterity a beneficial reward for such contests; for where the greatest prizes for virtue are given, there also the most virtuous men are found among the citizens. Now that you have finished your lamentations for your several relatives, depart.

STUDY QUESTIONS

Please answer all of the following questions.

1. According to the text, why is Pericles skeptical about the law that requires a formal speech to be delivered over the fallen soldiers?

2. How does Pericles distinguish the Athenian form of government from those of its neighbors, and what specific term does he use to describe it?

3. In what ways does the text suggest that Athens differs from the Spartans regarding military preparation and education?

4. Pericles argues that poverty is not a disgrace in itself; what, according to his speech, is the true source of shame regarding poverty?

5. How does the orator describe the relationship between "word" and "deed," particularly concerning political discussion and action?

6. What is the intended "reward" or provision that the state offers to the families of the fallen once the funeral ceremonies are concluded?

Short essay: please select one of the following and answer it in a minimum of 100 words.

a. The Concept of the "School for Greece": Analyze Pericles' claim that Athens is the "school for Greece." Based on the text, what specific cultural and political attributes make the city an example for others to follow, and how does this claim serve as a justification for the Athenian empire?

b. Civic Virtue and the Private Life: Pericles suggests a unique balance between private enjoyment and public duty. Discuss how the speech portrays the ideal Athenian citizen's ability to manage domestic affairs while remaining "useless" if they refrain from politics.

c. The Rhetoric of Sacrifice: Examine the section of the speech addressed to the parents and widows of the dead. How does Pericles attempt to transform their personal grief into a sense of public pride, and what does this reveal about the Athenian view of the individual's relationship to the state?

d. The Immortality of Fame: The text states that "the whole earth is the sepulcher" of illustrious men. Explain the distinction Pericles makes between physical monuments and "unwritten memorials of the heart." How does this philosophy influence the soldiers' decision to choose a "glorious death" over a life of "safety"?

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LA BOETIE: WHY WE ACCEPT TYRANNY

Born in Sarlat, France, Etienne de La Boetie (1530–1563) was a judge and diplomat who was educated in the renaissance humanist tradition of classical law and history. He is best known for his close friendship with Michel de Montaigne and for his career in the parliament of Bordeaux. His most influential work, the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, was written in his early twenties and circulated in manuscript form before being published posthumously in 1576. In the selections below from this work, La Boetie begins by identifying a fundamental paradox: a tyrant, often the weakest individual in a nation, only possesses the power that the people grant him through their own suffering. He contends that since freedom is natural to humans, rooted in our shared rational nature and "fraternal affection". The state of subjection, then, is an unnatural deformity of the human spirit. The primary cause of this condition, he argues, is custom: people born into servitude take the status of their birth for granted, just as a horse eventually accepts the bit it once fought. Beyond mere habit, the tyrant employs deliberate distractions to "brutalize" his subjects, using public spectacles, games, and "drugs" to keep the populace preoccupied and politically inert. Finally, La Boetie describes the "Pyramid of Complicity," a structural secret of domination where a small inner circle of advisors profits from the tyrant and, in turn, manages hundreds of subordinates who themselves govern thousands more. This chain of corruption creates a vast network of individuals who believe their own prosperity depends on the maintenance of the tyranny, effectively making the people the instruments of their own oppression.

The Paradox of One Ruling Over Many

I do not wish, at this hour, to debate the long-discussed question of whether other forms of republic are better than monarchy; yet I would still like to know, before questioning what rank monarchy should hold among republics, if it should have any rank at all; for it is difficult to believe that there is anything public in this government where everything belongs to one. But this question is reserved for another time, and would well require its own separate treatise, or rather, would bring in its wake all the political disputes of the age.

For now, I only wish to understand how it is possible that so many men, so many villages, so many cities, and so many nations sometimes endure a single tyrant. This tyrant has no power except that which they give him. He has no ability to harm them, except insofar as they have the power to endure him. He could do them no wrong at all, were it not that they prefer to suffer him rather than contradict him. It is a great thing, certainly, and yet so common that we ought to grieve all the more and marvel all the less to see a million millions of men serving miserably. They keep their necks under the yoke, not because they are constrained by a greater force, but because they are somehow (it seems) enchanted and charmed by the name of a single person. They should neither fear his power, since he is alone, nor love his qualities, since he is inhuman and savage toward them. The weakness of us men is such that we must often obey force; we need to bide our time, as we cannot always be the strongest. Therefore, if a nation is constrained by the force of war to serve one man, as the city of Athens served the Thirty Tyrants, one should not be amazed that it serves, but rather lament the accident. Or better yet, neither be amazed nor complain, but bear the evil patiently and reserve oneself for better fortune in the future.

Our nature is such that the common duties of friendship take up a good portion of our lives. It is reasonable to love virtue, to esteem noble deeds, and to recognize the good from wherever we have received it. It is reasonable to diminish our own comfort to increase the honor and advantage of someone we love and who deserves it. Thus, if the inhabitants of a country have found some great person who has shown them by proof a great foresight in guarding them, a great boldness in defending them, and great care in governing them; and if, from then on, they grow accustomed to obeying him and trusting him so much that they give him certain advantages, I do not know if that would be wisdom, since one removes him from a place where he was doing well to advance him to a place where he might do evil. But certainly, there could not fail to be goodness in not fearing harm from one who has provided nothing but good.

But, O good God! What can this be? How shall we say this is called? What misfortune is that? What vice, or rather, what wretched vice? To see an infinite number of people not obeying, but serving; not being governed, but tyrannized! They have no goods, no parents, no wives, no children, nor even their own lives that they can call their own. They suffer robberies, debaucheries, and cruelties, not from an army, nor from a barbarian camp against which one would have to defend one's blood and life, but from a single man! And not from a Hercules or a Samson, but from a single "manikin," and most often the most cowardly and effeminate of the nation. He is not accustomed to the powder of battles, but barely even to the sand of tournaments. He is not someone who can command men by force, but is himself completely occupied in serving vilely the least little woman! Shall we call this cowardice? Shall we say that those who serve are cravens and weaklings? If two, three, or four do not defend themselves against one, that is strange, but nonetheless possible; one might rightly say it is for lack of heart. But if a hundred, if a thousand endure one single man, will we not say that they do not wish to, not that they do not dare to, take a stand against him? Is that not cowardice, but rather contempt or disdain?

If one sees not a hundred, not a thousand men, but a hundred countries, a thousand cities, a million men, failing to assail a single person, from whom the best treated of all receives the evil of being a serf and a slave, how can we name that? Is it cowardice? Now, in all vices, there is naturally some limit beyond which they cannot pass. Two may fear one, and possibly ten. But a thousand, but a million, but a thousand cities, if they do not defend themselves from one, that is not cowardice; it does not go that far. Just as bravery does not extend to a single man scaling a fortress, assailing an army, or conquering a kingdom. Therefore, what monster of a vice is this, which does not even deserve the title of cowardice? A vice for which no name is found base enough, which nature disavows having made, and which the tongue refuses to name? . . .

The Natural State of Companionship

Firstly, it is, as I believe, beyond doubt that if we lived with the rights that nature has given us and with the lessons she teaches us, we would be naturally obedient to our parents, subjects to reason, and serfs to no one. Of the obedience that everyone, without any other warning than their own nature, carries toward their father and mother, all men are witnesses, each for himself. As for reason, whether it is born with us or not, that is a question debated thoroughly by the Academics and touched upon by the whole school of philosophers. For this hour, I do not think I shall err by saying this: that there is in our soul some natural seed of reason which, when maintained by good counsel and custom, flourishes into virtue; yet, on the contrary, being often unable to withstand the vices that arise, it is stifled and miscarries.

But certainly, if there is anything clear or apparent in nature, and where it is not permitted to play the blind man, it is this: that nature, the minister of God and the governess of men, has made us all in the same form and, as it seems, in the same mold, so that we might recognize one another as companions or rather as brothers. And if, in making the distribution of the gifts she gave us, she granted some advantage of her bounty, be it to the body or the spirit, to some more than others, she did not intend to place us in this world as in a fenced camp; she has not sent the strongest or the most cunning down here like armed brigands in a forest to prey upon the weakest. Rather, we must believe that in giving larger parts to some and smaller parts to others, she wished to make room for brotherly affection, so that it might have a place to be practiced, some having the power to give aid, others the need to receive it.

Since, therefore, this good mother has given us all the entire earth for a dwelling, has lodged us all in the same house, and has fashioned us all after the same pattern so that each might see himself mirrored and almost recognized in the other; if she has given us all this great gift of voice and speech to become better acquainted and to fraternize further, creating a communion of our wills through the common and mutual declaration of our thoughts; and if she has tried by all means to tighten and embrace the knot of our alliance and society so strongly; if she has shown in all things that she did not want us to be merely all united, but all one; then there can be no doubt that we are naturally free, since we are all companions. It cannot enter the mind of anyone that nature has placed any person in servitude, having placed us all in company.

Custom Easily Overrides Nature

It is incredible how the people, from the moment they are subjected, fall into such a sudden and profound forgetfulness of their freedom that it is impossible for them to rouse themselves to regain it. They serve so frankly and so willingly that one would say, to see them, that they have not lost their liberty, but won their servitude. It is true that in the beginning one serves constrained and conquered by force; but those who come after serve without regret and do willingly what their predecessors had done by constraint. This is why men born under the yoke, and then nourished and raised in bondage, without looking further ahead, content themselves with living as they were born; and thinking they have no other good nor other right than what they found, they take for their natural state the condition of their birth. And yet there is no heir so prodigal and nonchalant that he does not sometimes cast his eyes upon the records of his father, to see if he enjoys all the rights of his succession, or if any attempt has been made against him or his predecessor. But certainly custom, which in all things has great power over us, has in no place such great virtue as in this: in teaching us to serve and, as they say of Mithridates who accustomed himself to drinking poison, to teach us to swallow and not find bitter the venom of servitude. It cannot be denied that nature has a good part in us, pulling us where she will and making us said to be well or ill-born; but it must be confessed that she has less power over us than custom: because our natural disposition, however good it may be, is lost if it is not maintained; and nurture always fashions us in its own way, regardless of nature. The seeds of good that nature places in us are so tiny and slippery that they cannot endure the slightest shock from a contrary upbringing; they do not maintain themselves as easily as they degenerate, melt away, and come to nothing: no differently than fruit trees, which all have some particular natural quality which they keep well if they are allowed to grow, but they leave it immediately to bear other foreign fruits and not their own, according to how they are grafted. Herbs each have their property, their nature, and singularity; but nevertheless frost, weather, soil, or the hand of the gardener adds to or diminishes much of their virtue: the plant that one saw in one place, one is prevented from recognizing elsewhere. . . .

Let us say it thus, then: that to man all things are as natural if he is nourished and accustomed to them; but that alone is truly innate to him which simple and unadulterated nature calls him to. Thus the first reason for voluntary servitude is custom: like the bravest colts, who at the beginning bite the bit and then later play with it, and where recently they kicked against the saddle, they now deck themselves in their harness and, all proud, strut under their armor. They say that they have always been subjects, that their fathers lived thus; they think they are bound to endure the evil and convince themselves by example, and they themselves establish, through the length of time, the possession of those who tyrannize them; but in truth, years never give the right to do wrong, but rather enlarge the injury. There are always a few, better born than the others, who feel the weight of the yoke and cannot stop themselves from shaking it off; who never become tamed by subjection and who always, like Ulysses, who by sea and land sought always to see the smoke of his own chimney, cannot stop themselves from looking to their natural privileges and remembering their predecessors and their original being. These are willingly those who, having a clear understanding and a farsighted spirit, are not content like the common rabble to look at what is before their feet without looking behind and before, and who further recall past things to judge those of the time to come and to measure the present; these are those who, having their heads well-made by nature, have further polished them through study and knowledge. These men, even if liberty were entirely lost and gone from the world, would imagine it and feel it in their spirit, and would still savor it; and servitude is not to their taste, no matter how well it is dressed up.

The Great Turk well realized this: that books and doctrine give men, more than anything else, the sense and understanding to recognize themselves and to hate tyranny; I understand that he has in his lands hardly any learned men, nor does he ask for any. . . .

People Accept the Servitude they are Born Under

But to return to our subject, from which I had almost lost my way, the first reason why men serve willingly is because they are born serfs and are nourished as such. From this one comes another: that easily people become, under tyrants, cowardly and effeminate. For this I am marvelously grateful to Hippocrates, the grandfather of medicine, who took note of it and said so in one of his books which he entitled Of Diseases. This personage certainly had his heart in the right place in all things, and showed it well when the Great King wanted to draw him near to him by force of offers and great gifts; he answered him frankly that he would have a great burden on his conscience to involve himself in curing the Barbarians who wanted to kill the Greeks, and to serve well, by his own art, one who undertook to enslave Greece. The letter he sent him can still be seen today among his other works, and will witness forever to his good heart and his noble nature. Now, it is therefore certain that with liberty, valor is lost all at once. Subject people have no joy in combat nor any sharpness: they go to danger almost as if tied and all numb, as if by obligation, and do not feel boiling in their hearts the ardor of freedom which makes one despise peril and gives the desire to purchase, by a noble death among one's companions, honor and glory. Among free people, it is a competition as to who can do best, each for the common good, each for himself; they expect to have their share in the evil of defeat or the good of victory. But enslaved people, besides this warlike courage, also lose in all other things their vivacity, and have hearts that are base, soft, and incapable of anything great. Tyrants know this well, and seeing that they take this fold, to make them even more sluggish, they further assist the process.

Xenophon, a grave historian of the first rank among the Greeks, wrote a book in which he makes Simonides speak with Hiero, tyrant of Syracuse, of the miseries of the tyrant. This book is full of good and grave remonstrances, and which have as much grace, in my opinion, as is possible. . . . Among other things, he says this: that bad kings use foreigners in war and pay them, not daring to trust putting arms into the hands of their own people, whom they have wronged. (There have indeed been good kings who have had foreign nations in their pay, like the French themselves, and even more so in the past than today, but with a different intention: to guard their own, regarding the loss of money as nothing to spare the lives of men. This is what Scipio said, I believe, the great African, that he would rather have saved one citizen than defeated a hundred enemies.) But certainly, this is well assured: that the tyrant never thinks his power is secure until he has reached the point where he has under him no man of worth. Therefore, it is right to say to him what Thrason in Terence boasts of having reproached the master of the elephants: For this reason you are so brave That you have charge of the beasts.

But this ruse of tyrants to brutalize their subjects cannot be known more clearly than by what Cyrus did toward the Lydians, after he had seized Sardis, the mistress city of Lydia, and had taken captive Croesus, that so very rich king, and brought him along with him. He received news that the Sardians had revolted; he soon reduced them under his hand. But not wanting to sack such a beautiful city, nor to be always in trouble by keeping an army there to guard it, he thought of a great expedient to secure it: he established there brothels, taverns, and public games, and issued an ordinance that the inhabitants were to make use of them. He found himself so well served by this garrison that never since was it necessary to strike a single blow against the Lydians. These poor and miserable people amused themselves by inventing all sorts of games, so much so that the Latins drew their word from them, and what we call pastimes, they call ludi, as if they meant to say Lydi. Not all tyrants have thus expressly declared that they wished to effeminate their people; but in truth, what that one ordered formally and in effect, most have pursued underhandedly. To tell the truth, it is the nature of the common populace, whose number is always greatest within the cities: they are suspicious toward the one who loves them, and simple toward the one who deceives them. Do not think that there is any bird that is better caught by the decoy, nor any fish that, for the tidbit of the worm, is hooked sooner than all the peoples are lured quickly to servitude by the slightest feather passed, as they say, before their mouths; and it is a marvelous thing how quickly they let themselves go, if only they are tickled.

Entertainment Distracts us from Tyranny

Theatres, games, farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts, medals, pictures, and other such drugs were, for ancient peoples, the baits of servitude, the price of their liberty, and the tools of tyranny. This method, this practice, these allurements were what ancient tyrants used to lull their subjects to sleep under the yoke. Thus the people, made foolish, finding these pastimes beautiful and amused by a vain pleasure passing before their eyes, grew accustomed to serving as simple-mindedly, but more miserably, than little children who learn to read just to look at the bright pictures in illuminated books. The Roman tyrants thought of yet another point: to frequently feast the public wards, abusing that rabble as was necessary, for they give in more to the pleasure of the mouth than to anything else. The most clever and understanding among them would not have left his bowl of soup to recover the liberty of Plato's Republic. The tyrants would distribute a measure of wheat, a gallon of wine, and a sesterce; and then it was a pity to hear the cry: "Long live the King!" The blockheads did not realize that they were merely recovering a portion of their own property, and that even what they were recovering, the tyrant could not have given them if he had not first taken it from them. Someone might have pocketed the sesterce today and gorged himself at the public feast, blessing Tiberius and Nero and their "fine liberality" who, the next day, being forced to abandon his goods to their avarice, his children to their lust, and his very blood to the cruelty of these magnificent emperors, said not a word, no more than a stone, and moved no more than a tree stump. The populace has always been thus: they are completely open and dissolute toward pleasures they cannot honestly receive, and insensitive toward the wrong and pain they cannot honestly endure. . . .

But to return to where I had, I know not how, diverted the thread of my discourse: it has never been the case that tyrants, to secure themselves, did not strive to accustom the people toward them, not only in obedience and servitude, but also in devotion. Therefore, what I have said up to this point concerning the ways people learn to serve more willingly serves the tyrants only for the common and coarse people.

The Pyramid of Tyrannical Complicity

But now I come to a point which is, in my opinion, the mainspring and the secret of domination, the support and foundation of tyranny. Whoever thinks that halberds, guards, and the watch protect tyrants is, in my judgment, greatly mistaken; they use these, I believe, more for formality and as a scarecrow than for any trust they have in them. Archers prevent the poorly dressed who have no means from entering the palace, not the well-armed who are capable of some enterprise. Certainly, of the Roman emperors, it is easy to count that not so many escaped danger through the help of their guards as were killed by their own archers. It is not bands of horsemen, it is not companies of infantry, it is not weapons that defend the tyrant. One will not believe it at first, but certainly it is true: it is always four or five who maintain the tyrant; four or five who keep the entire country in bondage. It has always been that five or six have had the ear of the tyrant, and have approached him of their own accord, or else were called by him, to be the accomplices of his cruelties, the companions of his pleasures, the procurers of his lusts, and partners in the spoils of his pillaging. These six manage their chief so well that, for the sake of their society, he must be wicked, not only by his own misdeeds, but also by theirs. These six have six hundred who profit under them, and they do with their six hundred what the six do to the tyrant. These six hundred hold under them six thousand, whom they have raised in rank, to whom they give either the government of provinces or the handling of money, so that they may hold a hand to their avarice and cruelty and execute it when the time comes, and do so much evil besides that they could not endure except under their shadow, nor exempt themselves from the laws and punishment except by their means.

Great is the train that follows after that, and whoever wishes to amuse himself by unwinding this thread will see that not just the six thousand, but the hundred thousand, and the millions, are tied to the tyrant by this cord; they help themselves by it as, in Homer, Jupiter boasts that if he pulls the chain, he draws all the gods toward him. From this came the growth of the Senate under Julius, the establishment of new ranks, and the creation of offices; certainly, if taken rightly, not a reformation of justice, but new supports for tyranny. In short, it comes to this: through the favors or sub-favors, the gains or re-gains that one has with tyrants, it is found that there are finally almost as many people to whom tyranny seems profitable as there are those to whom liberty would be agreeable. Just as physicians say of our body that if there is something spoiled in it, as soon as anything moves in another place, it immediately flows toward that diseased part: likewise, as soon as a king has declared himself a tyrant, all the wicked, all the dregs of the kingdom, I do not mean a pack of petty thieves and rascals, who can do neither much harm nor good in a republic, but those who are tainted by an ardent ambition and a notable avarice, gather around him and support him to have a part in the booty, and to be, under the great tyrant, little tyrants themselves. Thus do the great thieves and the famous pirates: some scout the country, others harass travelers; some lie in ambush, others keep watch; some massacre, others despoil; and although there are ranks among them, and some are only servants while others are chiefs of the assembly, in the end there is not one who does not feel the benefit, if not of the principal booty, at least of the search. It is well said that the Sicilian pirates gathered in such great numbers that it was necessary to send Pompey the Great against them; but even more, they drew into their alliance several fine towns and great cities, in whose harbors they put themselves in safety when returning from their raids, and in reward, gave them some profit from the concealment of their pillage. . . .

Let us learn, then, sometimes, let us learn to do well. Let us lift our eyes toward heaven, either for our honor, or for the love of virtue itself, or certainly, to speak in earnest, for the love and honor of Almighty God, who is a certain witness of our deeds and a just judge of our faults. For my part, I think well, and I am not mistaken, that since nothing is so contrary to God, who is entirely liberal and gracious, as tyranny, He reserves there below, apart for tyrants and their accomplices, some particular punishment.

STUDY QUESTIONS

Please answer all of the following questions.

1. According to La Boetie, why is it difficult to consider a monarchy a "public" form of government?

2. La Boetie marvels that millions of men serve a single tyrant; what power does he claim the tyrant actually possesses over these people?

3. How does La Boetie describe the "natural state" of human beings in relation to one another, and what role does "voice and speech" play in this relationship?

4. What does La Boetie identify as the "first reason" for voluntary servitude, and how does he use the analogy of "fruit trees" or "colts" to explain it?

5. According to La Boetie, what specific "baits of servitude" did ancient tyrants use to distract the common populace from their lost liberty?

6. Describe the "mainspring" or "foundation" of tyranny mentioned in the final section. How do the "five or six" accomplices maintain the tyrant's power over the millions?

Short essay: please select one of the following and answer it in a minimum of 100 words.

a. The Paradox of Consent: La Boétie argues that a tyrant has "no power except that which they give him." Discuss the psychological and social mechanisms that lead a population to "enchant" themselves with the name of a single person. Is the author suggesting that the people are responsible for their own oppression, and if so, what are the implications for modern political movements?

b. Nature vs. Custom: The author admits that while nature has "a good part in us," custom has "great virtue" in teaching us to swallow the "venom of servitude." Analyze this tension. If humans are "naturally free," how is it that custom can so easily cause a "profound forgetfulness" of that original state? Does La Boétie believe it is possible for a society to ever fully return to its natural state once it has been corrupted by custom?

c. The Role of Intellectuals and "Learned Men": La Boétie mentions that the "Great Turk" (the Sultan) realized that books and doctrine give men the understanding to "hate tyranny." Discuss the relationship between education and liberty in this text. Why does the author believe that those with "heads well-made" and "polished through study" are more resistant to the "dressed up" versions of servitude?

d. The Pyramid of Complicity: Examine the metaphor of the chain or cord that ties the "millions" to the tyrant. How does La Boétie explain the motivation of the "little tyrants" who serve the "great tyrant"? Evaluate his argument that there are "almost as many people to whom tyranny seems profitable as there are those to whom liberty would be agreeable."

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DECLARATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN AND OF THE FEMALE CITIZEN

Olympe de Gouges (1748–1793) was a French playwright and political activist whose life ended on the guillotine during the Reign of Terror. Writing in the midst of the French Revolution, she became increasingly disillusioned with the National Assembly's failure to extend the "universal" rights of man to the female half of the population. In 1791, she published The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, a document that follows the exact structural and linguistic cadence of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. De Gouges did not intend this merely as an essay; she presented it as a formal petition to the legislature, demanding that it be decreed as a foundational law of the new French Republic. The power of the text lies in its philosophical mimicry. By replacing the word "Man" with "Woman" and "Nation" with "the union of Woman and Man," she exposes the exclusionary nature of the Enlightenment's supposedly universal language. Her famous Article X asserts that if a woman has the right to mount the scaffold (be executed), she must also have the right to mount the rostrum (speak in public). This serves as a prophetic critique of a state that recognized women as subjects for punishment but not as agents of political power. Ultimately, De Gouges's work stands as the first great "shadow constitution" of the modern era, forcing a confrontation between the abstract theory of natural rights and the lived reality of political inequality.

THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN

TO THE QUEEN

MADAME,

Being little accustomed to the language one holds with Sovereigns, I shall not employ the adulation of Courtiers to pay you homage with this singular production. My goal, Madame, is to speak frankly to you; I did not wait for the era of Liberty to express myself in this manner, for I showed myself with the same energy in a time when the blindness of Despots punished such noble audacity. When the entire Empire accused you and held you responsible for its calamities, I alone, in a time of trouble and storm, had the strength to take up your defense, as I could never persuade myself that a Princess, raised in the midst of grandeur, possessed all the vices of baseness.

Yes, Madame, when I saw the sword raised above you, I cast my observations between that blade and the victim; however, today, as I see that the crowd of hired mutineers is being closely watched and restrained by the fear of the laws, I shall tell you, Madame, what I would not have said then. If foreigners bring the sword into France, you are no longer in my eyes that falsely accused Queen, that interesting Queen, but rather an implacable enemy of the French. Ah, Madame, consider that you are a mother and a wife; employ all your influence for the return of the Princes. This influence, if wisely applied, strengthens the crown of the father, preserves it for the son, and reconciles you with the love of the French. This worthy negotiation is the true duty of a Queen. Intrigue, cabal, and bloodthirsty projects would precipitate your fall if one could suspect you capable of such designs.

Let a nobler employment, Madame, characterize you, excite your ambition, and fix your gaze. It belongs only to her whom chance has elevated to an eminent place to give weight to the progress of the Rights of Woman and to accelerate its success. If you were less enlightened, Madame, I might fear that your private interests would outweigh those of your sex. You love glory; consider, Madame, that the greatest crimes are immortalized just like the greatest virtues, but what a difference of celebrity exists in the annals of history! One is constantly taken as an example, while the other is eternally the execration of humankind.

It will never be considered a crime for you to work toward the restoration of customs, or to give your sex all the consistency of which it is capable. This work is not the labor of a single day, unfortunately for the new regime. This revolution will only occur when all women are penetrated by their deplorable fate and by the rights they have lost in society. Support, Madame, such a beautiful cause; defend this unhappy sex, and you will soon have half the kingdom on your side, and at least one-third of the other half.

These, Madame, are the exploits by which you should distinguish yourself and employ your influence. Believe me, Madame, our life is a very small thing, especially for a Queen, when that life is not embellished by the love of the people and by the eternal charms of beneficence. If it is true that some Frenchmen arm all powers against their own country, why is this so? It is for frivolous prerogatives, for chimeras. Believe, Madame, if I judge by what I feel, that the monarchical party will destroy itself, that it will abandon all tyrants, and all hearts will rally around the homeland to defend it. These, Madame, are my principles. In speaking to you of my country, I lose sight of the purpose of this dedication. It is thus that every good Citizen sacrifices her glory and her interests when she has no object other than those of her country.

I am with the deepest respect, MADAME, Your very humble and very obedient servant, DE GOUGES.

THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN

MAN, are you capable of being just? It is a woman who asks you this question; at the very least, you will not take that right from her. Tell me, who gave you the sovereign empire to oppress my sex? Your strength? Your talents? Observe the Creator in his wisdom; survey nature in all its grandeur, to which you seem to want to bring yourself closer, and give me, if you dare, an example of this tyrannical empire. Go back to the animals, consult the elements, study the plants, and finally cast a glance at all the modifications of organized matter; yield to the evidence when I offer you the means to do so. Search, delve, and distinguish, if you can, the sexes in the administration of nature. Everywhere you will find them mingled; everywhere they cooperate with a harmonious ensemble in this immortal masterpiece.

Man alone has patched together a principle from this exception. Bizarre, blind, bloated with science and degenerate, in this century of enlightenment and sagacity, yet in the densest ignorance, he wants to command as a despot over a sex that has received all intellectual faculties; he pretends to enjoy the revolution and to claim his rights to equality, to say nothing more.

DECLARATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN AND OF THE FEMALE CITIZEN

*To be decreed by the National Assembly in its last sessions or in those of the next legislature.*

PREAMBLE

Mothers, daughters, sisters, and representatives of the nation demand to be constituted into a national assembly. Considering that ignorance, neglect, or contempt for the rights of woman are the sole causes of public misfortunes and governmental corruption, they have resolved to set forth in a solemn declaration the natural, inalienable, and sacred rights of woman, so that this declaration, being constantly present to all members of the social body, may unceasingly remind them of their rights and duties; so that the acts of the power of women and those of the power of men, being capable of constant comparison with the aim of all political institutions, may be more respected; and so that the demands of female citizens, founded henceforth on simple and incontestable principles, may always support the maintenance of the constitution, good morals, and the happiness of all.

Consequently, the sex that is superior in beauty as in courage during the sufferings of maternity recognizes and declares, in the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being, the following Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen.

ARTICLE I

Woman is born free and remains equal to man in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon common utility.

II. The aim of every political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of Woman and Man; these rights are liberty, property, security, and especially resistance to oppression.

III. The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the Nation, which is nothing but the union of Woman and Man; no body and no individual may exercise any authority which does not emanate expressly from it.

IV. Liberty and justice consist in restoring all that belongs to others; thus, the exercise of the natural rights of woman has no limits other than the perpetual tyranny that man opposes to her; these limits must be reformed by the laws of nature and reason.

V. The laws of nature and reason forbid all actions harmful to society; everything that is not forbidden by these wise and divine laws cannot be prevented, and no one may be constrained to do what they do not command.

VI. The Law must be the expression of the general will; all Female and Male Citizens must concur personally, or through their representatives, in its formation; it must be the same for all. All female and male citizens, being equal in its eyes, must be equally admissible to all high offices, places, and public employments, according to their capacities and without other distinctions than those of their virtues and talents.

VII. No woman is an exception; she is accused, arrested, and detained in cases determined by the Law. Women, like men, obey this rigorous Law.

VIII. The law must establish only penalties that are strictly and evidently necessary, and no one may be punished except by virtue of a Law established and promulgated prior to the offense and legally applied to women.

IX. Once any woman is declared guilty, every rigor is exercised by the Law.

X. No one should be disturbed for their opinions, even fundamental ones; woman has the right to mount the scaffold, and she must equally have the right to mount the rostrum, provided that her manifestations do not trouble the public order established by the Law.

XI. The free communication of thoughts and opinions is one of the most precious rights of woman, since this liberty ensures the legitimacy of fathers toward their children. Every Female Citizen may therefore say freely, "I am the mother of a child which belongs to you," without a barbarous prejudice forcing her to hide the truth; she shall, however, answer for the abuse of this liberty in cases determined by the Law.

XII. The guarantee of the rights of woman and of the female citizen necessitates a major utility; this guarantee must be instituted for the advantage of all and not for the particular utility of those to whom it is entrusted.

XIII. For the maintenance of the public force and for the expenses of administration, the contributions of woman and man are equal; she takes part in all the labor and all the painful tasks; she must therefore have an equal share in the distribution of places, employments, offices, dignities, and industry.

XIV. Female and Male Citizens have the right to verify for themselves, or through their representatives, the necessity of the public contribution. Female Citizens can only adhere to it through the admission of an equal sharing, not only in wealth but also in public administration, and through the determination of the amount, the assessment, the collection, and the duration of the tax.

XV. The mass of women, joined for the purpose of contribution with that of men, has the right to demand an account of his administration from any public agent.

XVI. Any society in which the guarantee of rights is not assured, nor the separation of powers determined, has no constitution; the constitution is null if the majority of individuals who compose the Nation have not cooperated in its drafting.

XVII. Property belongs to all sexes, whether united or separate; it is for everyone an inviolable and sacred right; no one may be deprived of it as a true patrimony of nature, except when public necessity, legally certified, obviously requires it, and on the condition of a just and prior indemnity.

POSTAMBLE

Woman, wake up; the alarm bell of reason is making itself heard throughout the universe; recognize your rights. The powerful empire of nature is no longer surrounded by prejudices, fanaticism, superstition, and lies. The torch of truth has dissipated all the clouds of folly and usurpation. Enslaved man has multiplied his forces and has needed to recur to yours to break his chains. Having become free, he has become unjust toward his companion. O women! Women, when will you cease to be blind? What are the advantages that you have gathered in the revolution? A more marked contempt, a more signaled disdain. In the centuries of corruption, you reigned only over the weakness of men. Your empire is destroyed; what is left to you then? The conviction of the injustices of man. The reclamation of your patrimony, founded on the wise decrees of nature; what could you have to fear for such a beautiful undertaking? Do you fear the witty remark of the Legislator of the marriage at Cana? Do you fear that our French Legislators, correctors of that morality long hung from the branches of politics but which is no longer in season, will repeat to you: "Women, what is there in common between you and us?" Everything, you would have to answer.

If they persisted, in their weakness, in putting this inconsistency in contradiction with their principles, then courageously oppose the force of reason to the vain pretensions of superiority; unite yourselves under the standards of philosophy; deploy all the energy of your character, and you will soon see those proud men, not servile adorers crawling at your feet, but proud to share with you the treasures of the Supreme Being. Whatever barriers are opposed to you, it is in your power to overcome them; you have only to will it. Let us pass now to the appalling picture of what you have been in society; and since there is a question at this moment of a national education, let us see if our wise Legislators will think sanely about the education of women.

Women have done more harm than good. Constraint and dissimulation have been their lot. What force had taken from them, ruse has returned; they have had recourse to all the resources of their charms, and the most irreproachable man did not resist them. Poison and the sword were both subject to them; they commanded over crime as over virtue. The French government, especially, has depended for centuries on the nocturnal administration of women; the cabinet had no secret for their indiscretion; embassy, command, ministry, presidency, pontificate, cardinalate; finally, everything that characterizes the folly of men, profane and sacred, all has been subject to the cupidity and ambition of this sex formerly contemptible and respected, and since the revolution, respectable and contempted.

In this sort of antithesis, what remarks do I not have to offer! I have only a moment to make them, but this moment will fix the attention of the most remote posterity. Under the old regime, everything was vicious, everything was guilty; however, could one not perceive the improvement of things in the very substance of the vices? A woman needed only to be beautiful or amiable; when she possessed these two advantages, she saw a hundred fortunes at her feet. If she did not take advantage of them, she possessed a bizarre character or an uncommon philosophy which led her to the contempt of riches; then she was considered nothing more than a "bad head." The most indecent woman made herself respected with gold; the commerce of women was a kind of industry accepted in the highest class, which, henceforth, will have no more credit. If it still had any, the revolution would be lost, and under new relationships, we would always be corrupted; nevertheless, can reason hide from itself that every other path to fortune is closed to the woman whom man buys, like the slave on the coasts of Africa?

The difference is great, as we well know. The slave commands the master; but if the master gives the slave her freedom without reward, and at an age when the slave has lost all her charms, what becomes of this unfortunate woman? She becomes the plaything of contempt; even the doors of beneficence are closed to her. She is poor and old, they say; why did she not know how to make her fortune? Other examples, even more touching, offer themselves to reason. A young person without experience, seduced by a man whom she loves, will abandon her parents to follow him; the ingrate will leave her after a few years, and the more she has aged with him, the more his inconstancy will be inhuman. If she has children, he will abandon her just the same. If he is rich, he will believe himself dispensed from sharing his fortune with his noble victims. If some engagement binds him to his duties, he will violate its power by hoping everything from the laws. If he is married, every other engagement loses its rights.

What laws, then, remain to be made to extirpate vice to its very root? They are the laws of the sharing of fortunes between men and women, and of public administration. It is easily conceived that she who is born of a rich family gains much with the equality of partitions. But she who is born of a poor family, even with merit and virtues, what is her lot? Poverty and opprobrium. If she does not excel precisely in music or in painting, she cannot be admitted to any public function, even when she would have all the capacity for it. I wish only to give a glimpse of these things; I will deepen them in the new edition of all my political works that I propose to give to the public in a few days, with notes.

I resume my text regarding morals. Marriage is the tomb of confidence and love. The married woman can with impunity give bastards to her husband, and a fortune that does not belong to them. She who is not married has only a weak right; ancient and inhuman laws denied her this right to the name and the wealth of their father for her children, and new laws have not been made on this matter. If attempting to give my sex an honorable and just consistency is considered at this moment as a paradox on my part, and as attempting the impossible, I leave to the men to come the glory of treating this matter; but, in the meantime, one can prepare for it through national education, through the restoration of morals, and through conjugal conventions.

*Form of the Social Contract Between Man and Woman*

We, N and N, moved by our own will, unite ourselves for the term of our lives and for the duration of our mutual inclinations according to the following conditions. We intend and wish to make our fortunes communal, reserving however the right to separate them in favor of our children and of those whom we might have through a particular inclination, mutually recognizing that our property belongs directly to our children, from whatever bed they may come, and that all without distinction have the right to bear the name of the fathers and mothers who have acknowledged them; furthermore, we impose upon ourselves the obligation to subscribe to the law which punishes the abnegation of one's own blood. We likewise bind ourselves, in the case of separation, to divide our fortune and to set aside the portion of our children indicated by the law; in the case of a perfect union, the one who happens to die would divest themselves of half of their property in favor of their children, and if one died without children, the survivor would inherit by right, unless the dying person had disposed of half of the common property in favor of whomever they judged appropriate.

This is approximately the formula of the conjugal act whose execution I propose. Upon reading this bizarre writing, I see rising up against me the hypocrites, the prudes, the clergy, and the entire infernal sequence; however, how many moral means it will offer to the wise to arrive at the perfectibility of a happy government! I am going to give the physical proof of this in a few words. The rich, childless Epicurean finds it very good to go to his poor neighbor to increase his family. When there is a law that authorizes the poor man's wife to have the rich man adopt her children, the bonds of society will be tightened and morals will be more purified. This law will perhaps preserve the property of the community and restrain the disorder that leads so many victims into the hospices of opprobrium, baseness, and the degeneration of human principles, where nature has long groaned. Let the detractors of sound philosophy, therefore, cease to cry out against primitive morals, or let them go lose themselves in the source of their own citations.

I would further desire a law that advantaged widows and young women deceived by the false promises of a man to whom they had attached themselves; I would wish, I say, that this law forced an inconstant man to keep his engagements or to pay an indemnity proportionate to his fortune. I would also wish that this law be rigorous against women, at least for those who would have the front to recur to a law that they themselves had infringed by their misconduct, if the proof of it were made. I would wish, at the same time, as I set forth in *The Primitive Happiness of Man* in 1788, that public women be placed in designated quarters. It is not public women who contribute most to the depravation of morals; it is the women of society. By restoring the latter, one modifies the former. This chain of fraternal union will first offer disorder, but by its consequences, it will produce a perfect ensemble in the end.

It was quite necessary that I say a few words on the troubles caused, it is said, by the decree in favor of men of color in our islands. It is there where nature shudders with horror; it is there where reason and humanity have not yet touched hardened souls; it is there, above all, where division and discord agitate the inhabitants. It is not difficult to guess the instigators of these incendiary fermentations; there are some in the very heart of the National Assembly who light in Europe the fire that is to inflame America. The Colonists pretend to reign as despots over men of whom they are the fathers and brothers; and, misjudging the rights of nature, they pursue the source of them even into the smallest tint of their blood. These inhuman Colonists say, "Our blood circulates in their veins, but we will shed it all, if necessary, to satisfy our greed or our blind ambition." It is in these places closest to nature that the father ignores the son; deaf to the cries of blood, he stifles all its charms. What can one hope from the resistance opposed to him? To constrain it with violence is to make it terrible; to leave it still in irons is to direct all calamities toward America. A divine hand seems to spread everywhere the heritage of man, liberty; the law alone has the right to repress this liberty if it degenerates into license, but it must be equal for all.

It is therefore true that no individual can escape their fate; I am experiencing this today. I had resolved and decided not to allow myself the slightest word for a laugh in this production, but fate decided otherwise. Here is the fact. Economy is not forbidden, especially in this time of misery. I live in the country. This morning at eight o'clock, I left Auteuil and made my way toward the road that leads from Paris to Versailles, where one often finds those famous public carriages that pick up passers-by at little expense. No doubt a bad star was pursuing me from the morning. I arrived at the barrier where I did not even find the sad aristocratic "sapin" carriage. I rested on the steps of that insolent building which concealed clerks. Nine o'clock struck, and I continued my way; a carriage offered itself to my sight, I took a place in it, and I arrived at a quarter past nine, by two different watches, at the Pont-Royal. I took a carriage there and flew to my Printer, rue Christine, for I can go only there so early. While correcting my proofs, there always remains something for me to do if the pages are not well tightened and filled. I remained about twenty minutes; and tired of walking, composing, and printing, I proposed to go take a bath in the Temple quarter, where I was going to dine.

I arrived at a quarter to eleven by the clock of the bath; I therefore owed the coachman an hour and a half; but, in order not to have a dispute with him, I offered him 48 sous. He demanded more, as usual; he made a noise. I persisted in not wanting to give him more than his due, for the equitable being prefers being generous to being a dupe. I threatened him with the law; he told me that he mocked it and that I would pay him for two hours. We arrived at the house of a commissioner of peace, whom I have the generosity not to name, although the act of authority that he permitted himself toward me deserves a formal denunciation. He was doubtless unaware that the woman who claimed his justice was the woman author of so much beneficence and equity. Without having regard to my reasons, he condemned me pitilessly to pay the coachman what he asked. Knowing the law better than he, I said to him, "Monsieur, I refuse, and I beg you to pay attention that you are not acting within the principle of your office." Then this man, or rather this madman, flew into a rage, threatened me with Force if I did not pay instantly, or with remaining all day in his office. I asked him to have me taken to the departmental tribunal or to the town hall, having to complain of his stroke of authority. The grave magistrate, in a dusty and disgusting frock coat like his conversation, told me pleasantly: "This affair will no doubt go to the National Assembly?" "That might well be," I told him; and I went off half-furious and half-laughing at the judgment of this modern Bride-Oison, saying: "So that is the kind of man who must judge an enlightened people!"

P.S. This work was composed several days ago; it was delayed further in printing; and at the moment that M. Talleyrand, whose name will always be dear to posterity, having just given his work on the principles of national education, this production was already under the press. Happy if I have met with the views of that orator! However, I cannot help stopping the press and letting break forth the pure joy that my heart felt at the news that the King had just accepted the Constitution, and that the National Assembly—which I adore at present, without excepting the Abbé Maury, and La Fayette is a god—had proclaimed with a unanimous voice a general amnesty. Divine Providence, grant that this public joy be not a false illusion! Return to us, in a body, all our fugitives, and may I, with a loving people, fly into their path; and on this solemn day, we shall all pay homage to your power.

STUDY QUESTIONS

Please answer all of the following questions.

1. According to the "Preamble," what are the three primary causes of public misfortunes and governmental corruption?

2. In the section addressed to "MAN," what examples does De Gouges provide from nature to argue against the "tyrannical empire" of men over women?

3. According to Article VI, what is the definition of "The Law," and what three specific areas of public employment should be equally accessible to all citizens?

4. In Article X, what famous comparison does De Gouges make regarding the rights of woman to mount the "scaffold" and the "rostrum"?

5. According to the "Postamble," what has been the primary "lot" or tool of women in society as a result of their historical constraint and dissimulation?

6. In the proposed "Social Contract Between Man and Woman," what are the specific conditions regarding the inheritance of property for children and the division of wealth in the event of a separation?

Short essay: please select one of the following and answer it in a minimum of 100 words.

a. De Gouges argues in Article IV that the only limits on the natural rights of woman are the "perpetual tyranny" of man. Discuss whether her strategy of mirroring the language of the 1789 Declaration is an effective philosophical tool for exposing political inconsistency, or if it limits her ability to create a truly original theory of rights.

b. In Article XI, De Gouges links the "free communication of thoughts and opinions" to a mother's right to declare the paternity of her children. Evaluate her argument that the freedom of speech is essential for ensuring the "legitimacy of fathers," and discuss whether this justifies her claim that private domestic truths are a matter of public right.

c. In her "Postamble," De Gouges claims that under the old regime, women were "contemptible and respected" but are now "respectable and contempted." Explain what she means by this shift in social status and whether you agree that the "nocturnal administration" of influence is less desirable than the formal possession of legal rights.

d. Compare De Gouges's proposed "Social Contract Between Man and Woman" with the social contract theories of either Hobbes or Locke. Specifically, discuss how her focus on the "communal fortune" and the rights of children alters the traditional understanding of the contract as being primarily about security or the protection of individual property.

_______________________

ERRICO MALATESTA: ANARCHY

Born in southern Italy, Errico Malatesta (1853–1932) was a prominent political activist, for which he spent half of his life in exile and was frequently jailed. His most famous work is a pamphlet titled Anarchy (1891), which he wrote while residing in London. According to Malatesta, the usual justification of the existence of government is that it is needed to subdue the natural hostilities that humans exhibit towards each other. Consequently, we surrender our freedom to the government, and they in turn viciously subjugate us in the interests of the wealthy land and business owners. Society's production is thereby decreased since it restricts initiative to a few people. Governments, he argues, should be abolished because social order would be better achieved through voluntary associations among people. The driving force of such mutual cooperation should not be capitalism and financial greed, but, rather, the love of humanity, the desire for knowledge, and the passion for amusement. The complete text of Malatesta's Anarchy is presented below.

THE MEANING OF "ANARCHY" AND "STATE" (from Anarchy)

Different Meanings of "Anarchy"

Anarchy is a word that comes from the Greek, and signifies, strictly speaking, "without government": the state of a people without any constituted authority.

Before such an organization had begun to be considered possible and desirable by a whole class of thinkers, so as to be taken as the aim of a movement (which has now become one of the most important factors in modern social warfare), the word "anarchy" was used universally in the sense of disorder and confusion, and it is still adopted in that sense by the ignorant and by adversaries interested in distorting the truth.

We shall not enter into philological discussions, for the question is not philological but historical. The common interpretation of the word does not misconceive its true etymological signification, but is derived from it, owing to the prejudice that government must be a necessity of the organization of social life, and that consequently a society without government must be given up to disorder, and oscillate between the unbridled dominion of some and the blind vengeance of others.

The existence of this prejudice and its influence on the meaning that the public has given to the word is easily explained.

Man, like all living beings, adapts himself to the conditions in which he lives, and transmits by inheritance his acquired habits. Thus, being born and having lived in bondage, being the descendant of a long line of slaves, man, when he began to think, believed that slavery was an essential condition of life, and liberty seemed to him impossible. In like manner, the workman, forced for centuries to depend upon the goodwill of his employer for work, that is, for bread, and accustomed to see his own life at the disposal of those who possess the land and capital, has ended in believing that it is his master who gives him food, and asks ingenuously how it would be possible to live, if there were no master over him?

In the same way, a man whose limbs had been bound from birth, but who had nevertheless found out how to hobble about, might attribute to the very bands that bound him his ability to move, while, on the contrary, they would diminish and paralyze the muscular energy of his limbs.

If then we add to the natural effect of habit the education given to him by his master, the parson, the teacher, etc., who are all interested in teaching that the employer and the government are necessary, if we add the judge and the policeman to force those who think differently—and might try to propagate their opinion—to keep silence, we shall understand how the prejudice as to the utility and necessity of masters and governments has become established. Suppose a doctor brought forward a complete theory, with a thousand ably invented illustrations, to persuade the man with bound limbs that, if his limbs were freed, he could not walk, or even live. The man would defend his bands furiously and consider anyone his enemy who tried to tear them off.

Thus, if it is believed that government is necessary and that without government there must be disorder and confusion, it is natural and logical to suppose that anarchy, which signifies absence of government, must also mean absence of order.

Nor is this fact without parallel in the history of words. In those epochs and countries where people have considered government by one man (monarchy) necessary, the word "republic" (that is, the government of many) has been used precisely like "anarchy," to imply disorder and confusion. Traces of this meaning of the word are still to be found in the popular languages of almost all countries.

When this opinion is changed, and the public are convinced that government is not necessary, but extremely harmful, the word "anarchy," precisely because it signifies "without government," will become equal to saying "natural order, harmony of needs and interests of all, complete liberty with complete solidarity."

Therefore, those are wrong who say that anarchists have chosen their name badly, because it is erroneously understood by the masses and leads to a false interpretation. The error does not come from the word, but from the thing. The difficulty which anarchists meet in spreading their views does not depend upon the name they have given themselves, but upon the fact that their conceptions strike as all the inveterate prejudices which people have about the function of government, or "the state," as it is called.

Different Meanings of "State"

Before proceeding further, it will be well to explain this last word (the "State") which, in our opinion, is the real cause of much misunderstanding.

Anarchists generally make use of the word "State" to mean all the collection of institutions, political, legislative, judicial, military, financial, etc., by means of which management of their own affairs, the guidance of their personal conduct, and the care of ensuring their own safety are taken from the people and confided to certain individuals, and these, whether by usurpation or delegation, are invested with the right to make laws over and for all, and to constrain the public to respect them, making use of the collective force of the community to this end.

In this case the word "State" means "government," or, if you like, it is the abstract expression of which government is the personification. Then such expressions as "Abolition of the State," or "Society without the State," agree perfectly with the conception which anarchists wish to express of the destruction of every political institution based on authority, and of the constitution of a free and equal society, based upon harmony of interests, and the voluntary contribution of all to the satisfaction of social needs.

However, the word "State" has many other meanings, and among these some that lend themselves to misconstruction, particularly when used among men whose sad social position has not afforded them leisure to become accustomed to the subtle distinction of scientific language, or, still worse, when adopted treacherously by adversaries, who are interested in confounding the sense, or do not wish to comprehend it. Thus the word "State" is often used to indicate any given society, or collection of human beings, united on a given territory and constituting what is called a "social unit," independently of the way in which the members of the said body are grouped, or of the relations existing between them. "State" is used also simply as a synonym for "society." Owning to these meanings of the word, our adversaries believe, or rather profess to believe, that anarchists wish to abolish every social relation and all collective work, and to reduce man to a condition of isolation, that is, to a state worse than savagery.

By "State" again is meant only the supreme administration of a country, the central power, as distinct from provincial or communal power, and therefore others think that anarchists wish merely for a territorial decentralization, leaving the principle of government intact, and thus confounding anarchy with cantonical or communal government.

Finally, "State" signifies "condition, mode of living, the order of social life," etc., and therefore we say, for example, that it is necessary to change the economic state of the working classes, or that the anarchical State is the only State founded on the principles of solidarity, and other similar phrases. So that if we say also in another sense that we wish to abolish the State, we may at once appear absurd or contradictory.

For these reasons, we believe that it would be better to use the expression "abolition of the State" as little as possible, and to substitute for it another, clearer, and more concrete—"abolition of government."

The latter will be the expression used in the course of this essay.

JUSTIFICATIONS OF GOVERNMENTAL AUTHORITY

The Scope of Governmental Power

We have said that anarchy is society without government. But is the suppression of government possible, desirable, or wise? Let us see.

What is the government? There is a disease of the human mind, called the metaphysical tendency, that causes man, after he has by a logical process abstracted the quality from an object, to be subject to a kind of hallucination that makes him take the abstraction for the real thing. This metaphysical tendency, in spite of the blows of positive science, has still strong root in the minds of the majority of our contemporary fellowmen. It has such influence that many consider government an actual entity, with certain given attributes of reason, justice, equity, independent of the people who compose the government.

For those who think in this way, government, or the State, is the abstract social power, and it represents, always in the abstract, the general interest. It is the expression of the rights of all and is considered as limited by the rights of each. This way of understanding government is supported by those interested, to whom it is an urgent necessity that the principle of authority should be maintained and should always survive the faults and errors of the persons who exercise power.

For us, the government is the aggregate of the governors, and the governors—kings, presidents, ministers, members of parliament, and what not—are those who have the power to make laws regulating the relations between men, and to force obedience to these laws. They are those who decide upon and claim the taxes, enforce military service, judge and punish transgressors of the laws. They subject men to regulations, and supervise and sanction private contracts. They monopolize certain branches of production and public services, or, if they wish, all production and public service. They promote or hinder the exchange of goods. They make war or peace with governments of other countries. They concede or withhold free trade and many things else. In short, the governors are those who have the power, in a greater or lesser degree, to make use of the collective force of society, that is, of the physical, intellectual, and economic force of all, to oblige each to their (the governors') wish. And this power constitutes, in our opinion, the very principle of government and authority.

Exchanging Liberty for Protection

But what reason is there for the existence of government?

Why abdicate one's own liberty, one's own initiative in favor of other individuals? Why give them the power to be the masters, with or against the wish of each, to dispose of the forces of all in their own way? Are the governors such exceptionally gifted men as to enable them, with some show of reason, to represent the masses and act in the interests of all men better than all men would be able to act for themselves? Are they so infallible and incorruptible that one can confide to them, with any semblance of prudence, the fate of each and all, trusting to their knowledge and goodness?

And even if there existed men of infinite goodness and knowledge, even if we assume what has never happened in history and what we believe could never happen, namely, that the government might devolve upon the ablest and best, would the possession of government power add anything to their beneficent influence? Would it not rather paralyze or destroy it? For those who govern find it necessary to occupy themselves with things which they do not understand, and, above all, to waste the greater part of their energy in keeping themselves in power, striving to satisfy their friends, holding the discontented in check, and mastering the rebellious.

Again, be the governors good or bad, wise or ignorant, how do they gain power? Do they impose themselves by right of war, conquest, or revolution? If so, what guarantees have the public that their rules have the general good at heart? In this case it is simply a question of usurpation, and if the subjects are discontented, nothing is left to them but to throw off the yoke by an appeal to arms. Are the governors chosen from a certain class or party? Then inevitably the ideas and interests of that class or party will triumph, and the wishes and interests of the others will be sacrificed. Are they elected by universal suffrage? Now numbers are the sole criteria, and numbers are clearly no proof of reason, justice, or capacity. Under universal suffrage the elected are those who know best how to take in the masses. The minority, which may happen to be the half minus one, is sacrificed. Moreover, experience has shown it is impossible to hit upon an electoral system that really ensures election by the actual majority.

Many and various are the theories by which men have sought to justify the existence of government. All, however, are founded, confessedly or not, on the assumption that the individuals of a society have contrary interests, and that an external superior power is necessary to oblige some to respect the interests of others, by prescribing and imposing a rule of conduct, according to which each may obtain the maximum of satisfaction with the minimum of sacrifice. If, say the theorists of the authoritarian school, the interests, tendencies, and desires of an individual are in opposition to those of another individual, or perhaps all society, who will have the right and the power to oblige the one to respect the interests of the other or others? Who will be able to prevent the individual citizen from offending the general will? The liberty of each, they say, has for its limit the liberty of others: but who will establish those limits, and who will cause them to be respected? The natural antagonism of interests and passions creates the necessity for government, and justifies authority. Authority intervenes as moderator of the social strife and defines the limits of the rights and duties of each.

This is the theory; but to be sound the theory should be based upon an explanation of facts. We know well how in social economy theories are too often invented to justify facts, that is, to defend privilege and cause it to be accepted tranquilly by those who are its victims. Let us here look at the facts themselves.

GOVERNMENTAL OPPRESSION

Types of Oppression

In all the course of history, as in the present epoch, government is either brutal, violent, arbitrary domination of the few over the many, or it is an instrument devised to secure domination and privilege to those who, by force, or cunning, or inheritance, have taken to themselves all the means of life, first and foremost the soil, whereby they hold the people in servitude, making them work for their advantage.

Governments oppress mankind in two ways, either directly, by brute force, that is physical violence, or indirectly, by depriving them of the means of subsistence and thus reducing them to helplessness. Political power originated in the first method; economic privilege arose from the second. Governments can also oppress man by acting on his emotional nature, and in this way constitute religious authority. There is no reason for the propagation of religious superstitions but that they defend and consolidate political and economic privileges.

In primitive society, when the world was not so densely populated as now and social relations were less complicated, if any circumstance prevented the formation of habits and customs of solidarity, or destroyed those which already existed and established the domination of man over man, the two powers, political and economic, were united in the same hands—often in those of a single individual. Those who by force had conquered and impoverished the others, constrained them to become their servants and to perform all things according to their caprice. The victors were at once proprietors, legislators, kings, judges, and executioners.

But with the increase of population, with the growth of needs, with the complication of social relationships, the prolonged continuance of such despotism became impossible. For their own security the rulers, often much against their will, were obliged to depend upon a privileged class, that is, a certain number of co-interested individuals, and were also obliged to let each of these individuals provide for his own sustenance. Nevertheless they reserved to themselves the supreme or ultimate control. In other words, the rulers reserved to themselves the right to exploit all at their own convenience, and so to satisfy their kingly vanity. Thus private wealth was developed under the shadow of the ruling power, for its protection and—often unconsciously—as its accomplice. The class of proprietors arose, and, concentrated little by little into their hands all the means of production, the very fountain of life—agriculture, industry, and exchange—ended by becoming a power in themselves. This power, by the superiority of its means of action and the great mass of interests it embraces, always ends by subjugating more or less openly the political power, that is, the government, which it makes its policeman.

Creation of a Ruling Class

This phenomenon has been repeated often in history. Every time that, by military enterprise, physical brute force has taken the upper hand in society, the conquerors have shown the tendency to concentrate government and property in their own hands. In every case, however, because the government cannot attend to the production of wealth and overlook and direct everything, it finds it necessary to conciliate a powerful class, and private property is again established. With it comes the division of the two sorts of society, and that of the persons who control the collective force of society, and that of the proprietors, upon whom these governors become essentially dependent, because the proprietors command the sources of the said collective force.

Never has this state of affairs been so accentuated as in modern times. Consider the development of production, the immense extension of commerce, the extensive power that money has acquired, and all the economic results flowing from the discovery of America, the invention of machinery, etc. These have secured the supremacy to the capitalist class, that it is no longer content to trust to the support of the government and has come to wish that the government composed of members from its own class, continually under its control and specially organized to defend it against the possible revenge of the disinherited. Hence the origin of the modern parliamentary system.

Today the government is composed of proprietors, or people of their class so entirely under their influence, that the richest do not find it necessary to take an active part themselves. Rothschild, for instance, does not need to be either a Member of Parliament or minister: it is enough for him to keep Members of Parliament and ministers dependent upon him.

In many countries, the proletariat participates nominally in the election of the government. This is a concession which the bourgeois (i.e., proprietory) class have made, either to avail themselves of popular support in the strife against royal or aristocratic power, or to divert the attention of the people from their own emancipation by giving them an apparent share in political power. However, whether the bourgeoisie foresaw it or not, when first they conceded to the people the right to vote, the fact is that the right has proved in reality a mockery, serving only to consolidate the power of the bourgeoisie, while giving to the most energetic only of the proletariat the illusory hope of arriving at power.

So also with universal suffrage—we might say, especially with universal suffrage—the government has remained the servant and police of the bourgeois class. How could it be otherwise? If the government should reach the point of becoming hostile, if the hope of democracy should ever be more than a delusion deceiving the people, the proprietory class, menaced in its interests would at once rebel and would use all the force and influence that come from the possession of wealth, to reduce the government to the simple function of acting as policeman.

In all times and in all places, whatever may be the name of that the government takes, whatever has been its origin, or its organization, its essential function is always that of oppressing and exploiting the masses, and of defending the oppressors and exploiters. Its principal characteristic and indispensable instruments are the policeman and the tax collector, the soldier and the prison. And to these are necessarily added the time serving priest or teacher, as the case may be, supported and protected by the government, to render the spirit of the people servile and make them docile under the yoke.

Certainly, in addition to this primary business, to this essential department of governmental action other departments have been added in the course of time. We even admit that never, or hardly ever, has a government been able to exist in a country that was civilized without adding to its oppressing and exploiting functions others useful and indispensable to social life. But this fact makes it nonetheless true that government is in its nature a means of exploitation, and that its position doom it to be the defense of a dominant class, thus confirming and increasing the evils of domination.

Government Pretends to defend Equality and Justice

The government assumes the business of protecting, more or less vigilantly, the life of citizens against direct or brutal attacks; acknowledges and legalizes a certain number of rights and primitive usages and customs, without which it is impossible to live in society. It organizes and directs certain public services, such as the post, preservation of the public health, benevolent institutions, workhouses, etc., and poses as the protector and benefactor of the poor and weak. But to prove our point it is sufficient to notice how and why it fulfills these functions. The fact is that everything the government undertakes is always inspired with the spirit of domination and intended to defend, enlarge, and perpetuate the privileges of property and of those classes of which the government is representative and defender.

A government cannot rule for any length of time without hiding its true nature behind the pretense of general utility. It cannot respect the lives of the privileged without assuming the air of wishing to respect the lives of all. It cannot cause the privileges of some to be tolerated without appearing as the custodian of the rights of everyone. "The law" (and, of course, those who have made the law, i.e., the government) "has utilized," says Kropotkin, "the social sentiments of man, working into them those precepts of morality, which man has accepted, together with arrangements useful to the minority—the exploiters—and opposed to the interests of those who might have rebelled, had it not been for this show of a moral ground."

A government cannot wish the destruction of the community, for then it and the dominant class could not claim their wealth from exploitation; nor could the government leave the community to manage its own affairs, for then the people would soon discover that it (the government) was necessary for no other end than to defend the proprietory class who impoverish them, and would hasten to rid themselves of both government and proprietory class.

Today, in the face of the persistent and menacing demands of the proletariat, governments show a tendency to interfere in the relations between employers and work people. Thus they try to arrest the labor movement and to impede with delusive reforms the attempts of the poor to take to themselves what is due to them, namely, an equal share of the good things of life that others enjoy.

We must also remember that on one hand the bourgeoisie, that is, the proprietory class, make war among themselves and destroy one another continually, and that, on the other hand, the government, although composed of the bourgeoisie and, acting as their servants and protector, is still, like every servant or protector, continually striving to emancipate itself and to domineer over its charge. Thus, this seesaw game, this swaying between conceding and withdrawing, this seeking allies among the people and against the classes, and among classes against the masses, forms the science of the governors and blinds the ingenuous and phlegmatic, who are always expecting that salvation is coming to them from on high.

Governments Secure the Conquerors the Fruits of their Victory

With all this, the government does not change its nature. If it acts as regulator or guarantor of the rights and duties of each, it perverts the sentiments of justice. It justifies wrong and punishes every act that offends or menaces the privileges of the governors and proprietors. It declares just and legal the most atrocious exploitation of the miserable, which means a slow and continuous material and moral murder, perpetrated by those who have on those who have not. Again, if it administers public services, it always considers the interests of the governors and proprietors, not occupying itself with the interests of the working masses, except insofar as is necessary to make the masses willing to endure their share of taxation. If it instructs, it fetters and curtails the truth, and tends to prepare the minds and hearts of the young to become either implacable tyrants or docile slaves, according to the class to which they belong. In the hands of the government everything becomes a means of exploitation, everything serves as a police measure, useful to hold the people in check. And it must be thus. If the life of mankind consists in strife between man and man, naturally there must be conquerors and conquered, and the government, which is the means of securing to the victors the results of their victory and perpetuating those results, will certainly never fall to those who have lost, whether the battle be on the grounds of physical or intellectual strength, or in the field of economics. And those who have fought to secure to themselves better conditions than others can have, to win privilege and add domination to power, and have attained the victory, will certainly not use it to defend the rights of the vanquished, and to place limits to their own power and to that of their friends and partisans.

The government—or the State, if you will—as judge, moderator of social strife, impartial administrator of the public interests, is a lie, an illusion, a Utopia, never realized and never realizable. If, in fact, the interests of men must always be contrary to one another, if, indeed, the strife between mankind has made laws necessary to human society, and the liberty of the individual must be limited by the liberty of other individuals, then each one would always seek to make his interests triumph over those of others. Each would strive to enlarge his own liberty at the cost of the liberty of others, and there would be government. Not simply because it was more or less useful to the totality of the members of society to have a government, but because the conquerors would wish to secure themselves the fruits of victory. They would wish effectually to subject the vanquished and relieve themselves of the trouble of being always on the defensive, and they would appoint men, specially adapted to the business, to act as police. Were this indeed actually the case, then humanity would be destined to perish amid periodical contests between the tyranny of the dominators and the rebellion of the conquered.

End Exploitation by Ending the Government

But fortunately the future of humanity is a happier one, because the law that governs it is milder.

Thus, in the contest of centuries between liberty and authority, or, in other words, between social equality and social castes, the question at issue has not really been the relations between society and the individual, or the increase of individual independence at the cost of social control, or vice versa. Rather it has had to do with preventing any one individual from oppressing the others; with giving to everyone the same rights and the same means of action. It has had to do with substituting the initiative of all, which must naturally result in the advantage of all, for the initiative of the few, which necessarily results in the suppression of all the others. It is always, in short, the question of putting an end to the domination and exploitation of man by man in such a way that all are interested in the common welfare, and that the individual force of each, instead of oppressing, combating, or suppressing others, will find the possibility of complete development, and everyone will seek to associate with others for the greater advantage of all.

From what we have said, it follows that the existence of a government, even upon the hypothesis that the ideal government of authoritarian socialists were possible, far from producing an increase of productive force, would immensely diminish it, because the government would restrict initiative to the few. It would give these few the right to do all things, without being able, of course, to endow them with the knowledge or understanding of all things.

In fact, if you divest legislation and all the operations of government of what is intended to protect the privileged, and what represents the wishes of the privileged classes alone, nothing remains but the aggregate of individual governors. "The State," says Sismondi, "is always a conservative power which authorizes, regulates, and organizes the conquests of progress (and history testifies that it applies them to the profit of its own and the other privileged classes) but never does it inaugurate them. New ideas always originate from beneath, are conceived in the foundations of society, and then, when divulged, they become opinion and grow. But they must always meet on their path, and combat the constituted powers of tradition, custom, privilege and error."

THE ALTERNATIVE TO GOVERNMENT

Social Order through Voluntary Associations

In order to understand how society could exist without a government, it is sufficient to turn our attention for a short space to what actually goes on in our present society. We shall see that in reality the most important functions are fulfilled even nowadays outside the intervention of government. Also that government only interferes to exploit the masses, or defend the privileged, or, lastly, to sanction, most unnecessarily, all that has been done without its aid, often in spite of and opposition to it. Men work, exchange, study, travel, follow as they choose the current rules of morality or hygiene; they profit by the progress of science and art, have numberless mutual interests without ever feeling the need of anyone to direct them how to conduct themselves in regard to these matters. On the contrary, it is just those things in which no governmental interference that prosper best and give rise to the least contention, being unconsciously adapted to the wish of all in the way found most useful and agreeable.

Nor is government more necessary for large undertakings, or for those public services which require the constant cooperation of many people of different conditions and countries. Thousands of these undertakings are even now the work of voluntarily formed associations. And these are, by the acknowledgment of everyone, the undertakings that succeed the best. We do not refer to the associations of capitalists, organized by means of exploitation, although even they show capabilities and powers of free association, which may extended until it embraces all the people of all lands and includes the widest and most varying interests. We speak rather of those associations inspired by the love of humanity, or by the passion for knowledge, or even simply by the desire for amusement and love of applause, as these represent better such groupings as will exist in a society where, private property and internal strife between men being abolished, each will find his interests compatible with the interest of everyone else and his greatest satisfaction in doing good and pleasing others. Scientific societies and congresses, international lifeboat and Red Cross associations, laborers' unions, peace societies, volunteers who hasten to the rescue at times of great public calamity, are all examples, among thousands, of that power of the spirit of association which always shows itself when a need arises or an enthusiasm takes hold, and the means do not fail. That voluntary associations do not cover the world and do not embrace every branch of material and moral activity is the fault of the obstacles placed in their way by governments, of the antagonisms create by the possession of private property, and of the impotence and degradation to which the monopolizing of wealth on the part of the few reduces the majority of mankind.

Public Services best Secured without Government

The government takes charge, for instance, of the postal and telegraph services. But in what way does it really assist them? When the people are in such a condition as to be able to enjoy and feel the need of such services they will think about organizing them, and the man with the necessary technical knowledge will not require a certificate from a government to enable him to set to work. The more general and urgent the need, the more volunteers will offer to satisfy it. Would the people have the ability necessary to provide and distribute provisions? Never fear, they will not die of hunger waiting for government to pass a law on the subject. Wherever a government exists, it must wait until the people have first organized everything, and then come with its laws to sanction and exploit what has already been done. It is evident that private interest is the great motive for all activity. That being so, when the interest of everyone becomes the interest of each (and it necessarily will become so as soon as private property is abolished), then all will be active. If they work now in the interest of the few, so much more and so much better will they work to satisfy the interests of all. It is hard to understand how anyone can believe that public services indispensable to social life can be better secured by order of a government than through the workers themselves who by their own choice or by agreement with others carry them out under the immediate control of all those interested.

Certainly in every collective undertaking on a large scale there is need for division of labor, for technical direction, administration, etc. But the authoritarians are merely playing with words, when they deduce a reason for the existence of government, from the very real necessity for organization of labor. The government, we must repeat, is the aggregate of the individuals who have received or have taken the right or the mean to make laws, and force the people to obey them. The administrators, engineers, etc., on the other hand, are men who receive or assume the charge of doing a certain work. Government signifies delegation of power, that is, abdication of the initiative and sovereignty of everyone into the hand of the few. Administration signifies delegation of work, that is, the free exchange of services founded on free agreement.

Source: Errico Malatesta, Anarchy (1891), anonymously translated in 1907 by Freedom Press.

STUDY QUESTIONS

Please answer all of the following questions.

1. What are the different meanings of "anarchy" and "state", and which are the ones that Malatesta adopts?

2. In the section on "the scope of governmental power," what, according to Malatesta, are the kinds of powers that governments exercise over us?

3. In the section "types of oppression", what are the two ways that governments oppress us?

4. Throughout the section on "governmental oppression," Malatesta describes how governments create and sustain a ruling class that oppresses the poor. Describe this.

5. In the section on "social order through voluntary associations," what are some of the successful cooperative projects that Malatesta cites?

6. In the section on "public services," how are these services best secured without government?

Short essay: please select one of the following and answer it in a minimum of 100 words.

a. In the section on "the scope of governmental power," Malatesta attacks the traditional notion of governmental authority by describing how it is based on a metaphysical illusion, that is, a mere abstraction which we then presume actually exists. Is this a valid criticism? That is, are there other areas of our lives where we either legitimately or illegitimately presume the reality of an abstract entity?

b. In the section on "exchanging liberty for protection," Malatesta argues that all justifications of government are based on the assumption that people are naturally antagonistic. Are there any situations of antagonism which require the existence of government for mediation?

c. In the section on the "creation of the ruling class," Malatesta criticizes the practice of elections. What is his criticism, and is he correct?

d. According to Malatesta in the section "governments pretend to defend justice and equality," Describe the "see saw" power struggle that governments play with the ruling class, and say whether this is an accurate depiction.

e. Malatesta dislikes any form of government. Adam Smith, by contrast, believed that governments should have limited authority, but argued that three key types of governmental services are necessary. How might Malatesta respond to Smith?

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W.E.B. DU BOIS: THE VEIL BETWEEN BLACK AND WHITE

W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963) was an American sociologist and historian who earned his doctorate from Harvard University after studying at Fisk University and the University of Berlin. He co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, where he served as founding executive. He was also a tenured professor at Atlanta University for over two decades. The following selections are from The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Chapter I, "Of Our Spiritual Strivings," discusses internal struggle, or "double-consciousness" that occurs from being both Black and American within a society that views one's existence as a "problem." Du Bois uses the metaphor of The Veil to illustrate the barrier of the "color-line," which functions as both a physical and psychological boundary that prevents true mutual recognition between Black and white Americans. Chapter II, "Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others," evaluates the Atlanta Compromise. This was a political agreement proposed by Booker T. Washington in his 1895 Atlanta Exposition speech, wherein Southern Black people would relinquish demands for immediate political power and civil rights in exchange for basic economic opportunities and industrial education. Du Bois characterizes this as a "triple paradox," arguing that Washington's objectives are internally inconsistent. Specifically, he contends that: (1) economic security cannot be defended without the franchise (the right to vote); (2) thrift and self-respect are incompatible with a legally enforced status of civic inferiority, and (3) industrial education (vocational training for labor) is unsustainable without a foundation of higher education to produce the necessary teachers and professional leaders. Du Bois identifies the Talented Tenth, a term for the college-educated Black elite, as the essential leadership class required to achieve political and social parity. He concludes that the responsibility for rectifying racial inequality rests not solely with the marginalized group, but with the nation as a whole.

THE PROBLEM OF DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS (from Ch. 1 "Our Spiritual Striving")

Discovering the Veil between Black and White

Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.

And yet, being a problem is a strange experience,—peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe. It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the revelation first bursts upon one, all in a day, as it were. I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys' and girls' heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards—ten cents a package—and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card,—refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine. But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them. Just how I would do it I could never decide: by reading law, by healing the sick, by telling the wonderful tales that swam in my head,—some way. With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.

Double Consciousness and Striving to Merge Them

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.

This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius. These powers of body and mind have in the past been strangely wasted, dispersed, or forgotten. The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the Shadowy and of Egypt the Sphinx. Through history, the powers of single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness. Here in America, in the few days since Emancipation, the black man's turning hither and thither in hesitant and doubtful striving has often made his very strength to lose effectiveness, to seem like absence of power, like weakness. And yet it is not weakness,—it is the contradiction of double aims. The double-aimed struggle of the black artisan—on the one hand to escape white contempt for a nation of mere hewers of wood and drawers of water, and on the other hand to plough and nail and dig for a poverty-stricken horde—could only result in making him a poor craftsman, for he had but half a heart in either cause. By the poverty and ignorance of his people, the Negro minister or doctor was tempted toward quackery and demagogy; and by the criticism of the other world, toward ideals that made him ashamed of his lowly tasks. The would-be black savant was confronted by the paradox that the knowledge his people needed was a twice-told tale to his white neighbors, while the knowledge which would teach the white world was Greek to his own flesh and blood. The innate love of harmony and beauty that set the ruder souls of his people a-dancing and a-singing raised but confusion and doubt in the soul of the black artist; for the beauty revealed to him was the soul-beauty of a race which his larger audience despised, and he could not articulate the message of another people. This waste of double aims, this seeking to satisfy two unreconciled ideals, has wrought sad havoc with the courage and faith and deeds of ten thousand thousand people,—has sent them often wooing false gods and invoking false means of salvation, and at times has even seemed about to make them ashamed of themselves.

Away back in the days of bondage they thought to see in one divine event the end of all doubt and disappointment; few men ever worshipped Freedom with half such unquestioning faith as did the American Negro for two centuries. To him, so far as he thought and dreamed, slavery was indeed the sum of all villainies, the cause of all sorrow, the root of all prejudice; Emancipation was the key to a promised land of sweeter beauty than ever stretched before the eyes of wearied Israelites. In song and exhortation swelled one refrain—Liberty; in his tears and curses the God he implored had Freedom in his right hand. At last it came,—suddenly, fearfully, like a dream. With one wild carnival of blood and passion came the message in his own plaintive cadences: "Shout, O children! Shout, you're free! For God has bought your liberty!"

Years have passed away since then,—ten, twenty, forty; forty years of national life, forty years of renewal and development, and yet the swarthy spectre sits in its accustomed seat at the Nation's feast. In vain do we cry to this our vastest social problem: "Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves; Shall never tremble!"

The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land. Whatever of good may have come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people,—a disappointment all the more bitter because the unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance of a lowly people.

Freedom, Ballot, Education

The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vain search for freedom, the boon that seemed ever barely to elude their grasp,—like a tantalizing will-o'-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headless host. The holocaust of war, the terrors of the Ku-Klux Klan, the lies of carpet-baggers, the disorganization of industry, and the contradictory advice of friends and foes, left the bewildered serf with no new watchword beyond the old cry for freedom. As the time flew, however, he began to grasp a new idea. The ideal of liberty demanded for its attainment powerful means, and these the Fifteenth Amendment gave him. The ballot, which before he had looked upon as a visible sign of freedom, he now regarded as the chief means of gaining and perfecting the liberty with which war had partially endowed him. And why not? Had not votes made war and emancipated millions? Had not votes enfranchised the freedmen? Was anything impossible to a power that had done all this? A million black men started with renewed zeal to vote themselves into the kingdom. So the decade flew away, the revolution of 1876 came, and left the half-free serf weary, wondering, but still inspired. Slowly but steadily, in the following years, a new vision began gradually to replace the dream of political power,—a powerful movement, the rise of another ideal to guide the unguided, another pillar of fire by night after a clouded day. It was the ideal of "book-learning"; the curiosity, born of compulsory ignorance, to know and test the power of the cabalistic letters of the white man, the longing to know. Here at last seemed to have been discovered the mountain path to Canaan; longer than the highway of Emancipation and law, steep and rugged, but straight, leading to heights high enough to overlook life.

Up the new path the advance guard toiled, slowly, heavily, doggedly; only those who have watched and guided the faltering feet, the misty minds, the dull understandings, of the dark pupils of these schools know how faithfully, how piteously, this people strove to learn. It was weary work. The cold statistician wrote down the inches of progress here and there, noted also where here and there a foot had slipped or some one had fallen. To the tired climbers, the horizon was ever dark, the mists were often cold, the Canaan was always dim and far away. If, however, the vistas disclosed as yet no goal, no resting-place, little but flattery and criticism, the journey at least gave leisure for reflection and self-examination; it changed the child of Emancipation to the youth with dawning self-consciousness, self-realization, self-respect. In those sombre forests of his striving his own soul rose before him, and he saw himself,—darkly as through a veil; and yet he saw in himself some faint revelation of his power, of his mission. He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another. For the first time he sought to analyze the burden he bore upon his back, that dead-weight of social degradation partially masked behind a half-named Negro problem. He felt his poverty; without a cent, without a home, without land, tools, or savings, he had entered into competition with rich, landed, skilled neighbors. To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships. He felt the weight of his ignorance,—not simply of letters, but of life, of business, of the humanities; the accumulated sloth and shirking and awkwardness of decades and centuries shackled his hands and feet. Nor was his burden all poverty and ignorance. The red stain of bastardy, which two centuries of systematic legal defilement of Negro women had stamped upon his race, meant not only the loss of ancient African chastity, but also the hereditary weight of a mass of corruption from white adulterers, threatening almost the obliteration of the Negro home.

Prejudice and Despair

A people thus handicapped ought not to be asked to race with the world, but rather allowed to give all its time and thought to its own social problems. But alas! while sociologists gleefully count his bastards and his prostitutes, the very soul of the toiling, sweating black man is darkened by the shadow of a vast despair. Men call the shadow prejudice, and learnedly explain it as the natural defence of culture against barbarism, learning against ignorance, purity against crime, the "higher" against the "lower" races. To which the Negro cries Amen! and swears that to so much of this strange prejudice as is founded on just homage to civilization, culture, righteousness, and progress, he humbly bows and meekly does obeisance. But before that nameless prejudice that leaps beyond all this he stands helpless, dismayed, and well-nigh speechless; before that personal disrespect and mockery, the ridicule and systematic humiliation, the distortion of fact and wanton license of fancy, the cynical ignoring of the better and the boisterous welcoming of the worse, the all-pervading desire to inculcate disdain for everything black, from Toussaint to the devil,—before this there rises a sickening despair that would disarm and discourage any nation save that black host to whom "discouragement" is an unwritten word.

But the facing of so vast a prejudice could not but bring the inevitable self-questioning, self-disparagement, and lowering of ideals which ever accompany repression and breed in an atmosphere of contempt and hate. Whisperings and portents came home upon the four winds: Lo! we are diseased and dying, cried the dark hosts; we cannot write, our voting is vain; what need of education, since we must always cook and serve? And the Nation echoed and enforced this self-criticism, saying: Be content to be servants, and nothing more; what need of higher culture for half-men? Away with the black man's ballot, by force or fraud,—and behold the suicide of a race! Nevertheless, out of the evil came something of good,—the more careful adjustment of education to real life, the clearer perception of the Negroes' social responsibilities, and the sobering realization of the meaning of progress.

Toward Unified Ideals

So dawned the time of Sturm und Drang: storm and stress to-day rocks our little boat on the mad waters of the world-sea; there is within and without the sound of conflict, the burning of body and rending of soul; inspiration strives with doubt, and faith with vain questionings. The bright ideals of the past,—physical freedom, political power, the training of brains and the training of hands,—all these in turn have waxed and waned, until even the last grows dim and overcast. Are they all wrong,—all false? No, not that, but each alone was over-simple and incomplete,—the dreams of a credulous race-childhood, or the fond imaginings of the other world which does not know and does not want to know our power. To be really true, all these ideals must be melted and welded into one. The training of the schools we need to-day more than ever,—the training of deft hands, quick eyes and ears, and above all the broader, deeper, higher culture of gifted minds and pure hearts. The power of the ballot we need in sheer self-defence,—else what shall save us from a second slavery? Freedom, too, the long-sought, we still seek,—the freedom of life and limb, the freedom to work and think, the freedom to love and aspire. Work, culture, liberty,—all these we need, not singly but together, not successively but together, each growing and aiding each, and all striving toward that vaster ideal that swims before the Negro people, the ideal of human brotherhood, gained through the unifying ideal of Race; the ideal of fostering and developing the traits and talents of the Negro, not in opposition to or contempt for other races, but rather in large conformity to the greater ideals of the American Republic, in order that some day on American soil two world-races may give each to each those characteristics both so sadly lack. We the darker ones come even now not altogether empty-handed: there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes; there is no true American music but the wild sweet melodies of the Negro slave; the American fairy tales and folklore are Indian and African; and, all in all, we black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness. Will America be poorer if she replace her brutal dyspeptic blundering with light-hearted but determined Negro humility? or her coarse and cruel wit with loving jovial good-humor? or her vulgar music with the soul of the Sorrow Songs?

Merely a concrete test of the underlying principles of the great republic is the Negro Problem, and the spiritual striving of the freedmen's sons is the travail of souls whose burden is almost beyond the measure of their strength, but who bear it in the name of an historic race, in the name of this the land of their fathers' fathers, and in the name of human opportunity.

And now what I have briefly sketched in large outline let me on coming pages tell again in many ways, with loving emphasis and deeper detail, that men may listen to the striving in the souls of black folk.

THE PARADOX OF SUBMISSION: CRITIQUE OF THE ATLANTA COMPROMISE: (From Ch. 3 "Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others")

The Dominance of the Atlanta Compromise

Easily the most striking thing in the history of the American Negro since 1876 is the ascendancy of Mr. Booker T. Washington. It began at the time when war memories and ideals were rapidly passing; a day of astonishing commercial development was dawning; a sense of doubt and hesitation overtook the freedmen's sons,—then it was that his leading began. Mr. Washington came, with a simple definite programme, at the psychological moment when the nation was a little ashamed of having bestowed so much sentiment on Negroes, and was concentrating its energies on Dollars. His programme of industrial education, conciliation of the South, and submission and silence as to civil and political rights, was not wholly original; the Free Negroes from 1830 up to war-time had striven to build industrial schools, and the American Missionary Association had from the first taught various trades; and Price and others had sought a way of honorable alliance with the best of the Southerners. But Mr. Washington first indissolubly linked these things; he put enthusiasm, unlimited energy, and perfect faith into his programme, and changed it from a by-path into a veritable Way of Life. And the tale of the methods by which he did this is a fascinating study of human life.

It startled the nation to hear a Negro advocating such a programme after many decades of bitter complaint; it startled and won the applause of the South, it interested and won the admiration of the North; and after a confused murmur of protest, it silenced if it did not convert the Negroes themselves.

To gain the sympathy and cooperation of the various elements comprising the white South was Mr. Washington's first task; and this, at the time Tuskegee was founded, seemed, for a black man, well-nigh impossible. And yet ten years later it was done in the word spoken at Atlanta: "In all things purely social we can be as separate as the five fingers, and yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress." This "Atlanta Compromise" is by all odds the most notable thing in Mr. Washington's career. The South interpreted it in different ways: the radicals received it as a complete surrender of the demand for civil and political equality; the conservatives, as a generously conceived working basis for mutual understanding. So both approved it, and to-day its author is certainly the most distinguished Southerner since Jefferson Davis, and the one with the largest personal following. . . .

And yet this very singleness of vision and thorough oneness with his age is a mark of the successful man. It is as though Nature must needs make men narrow in order to give them force. So Mr. Washington's cult has gained unquestioning followers, his work has wonderfully prospered, his friends are legion, and his enemies are confounded. To-day he stands as the one recognized spokesman of his ten million fellows, and one of the most notable figures in a nation of seventy millions. One hesitates, therefore, to criticise a life which, beginning with so little, has done so much. And yet the time is come when one may speak in all sincerity and utter courtesy of the mistakes and shortcomings of Mr. Washington's career, as well as of his triumphs, without being thought captious or envious, and without forgetting that it is easier to do ill than well in the world. . . .

But the hushing of the criticism of honest opponents is a dangerous thing. It leads some of the best of the critics to unfortunate silence and paralysis of effort, and others to burst into speech so passionately and intemperately as to lose listeners. Honest and earnest criticism from those whose interests are most nearly touched,—criticism of writers by readers,—this is the soul of democracy and the safeguard of modern society. If the best of the American Negroes receive by outer pressure a leader whom they had not recognized before, manifestly there is here a certain palpable gain. Yet there is also irreparable loss,—a loss of that peculiarly valuable education which a group receives when by search and criticism it finds and commissions its own leaders. The way in which this is done is at once the most elementary and the nicest problem of social growth. History is but the record of such group-leadership; and yet how infinitely changeful is its type and character! And of all types and kinds, what can be more instructive than the leadership of a group within a group?—that curious double movement where real progress may be negative and actual advance be relative retrogression. All this is the social student's inspiration and despair. . . .

Then came the Revolution of 1876, the suppression of the Negro votes, the changing and shifting of ideals, and the seeking of new lights in the great night. Douglass, in his old age, still bravely stood for the ideals of his early manhood,—ultimate assimilation through self-assertion, and on no other terms. For a time Price arose as a new leader, destined, it seemed, not to give up, but to re-state the old ideals in a form less repugnant to the white South. But he passed away in his prime. Then came the new leader. Nearly all the former ones had become leaders by the silent suffrage of their fellows, had sought to lead their own people alone, and were usually, save Douglass, little known outside their race. But Booker T. Washington arose as essentially the leader not of one race but of two,—a compromiser between the South, the North, and the Negro. Naturally the Negroes resented, at first bitterly, signs of compromise which surrendered their civil and political rights, even though this was to be exchanged for larger chances of economic development. The rich and dominating North, however, was not only weary of the race problem, but was investing largely in Southern enterprises, and welcomed any method of peaceful cooperation. Thus, by national opinion, the Negroes began to recognize Mr. Washington's leadership; and the voice of criticism was hushed.

The Triple Paradox of Submission

Mr. Washington represents in Negro thought the old attitude of adjustment and submission; but adjustment at such a peculiar time as to make his programme unique. This is an age of unusual economic development, and Mr. Washington's programme naturally takes an economic cast, becoming a gospel of Work and Money to such an extent as apparently almost completely to overshadow the higher aims of life. Moreover, this is an age when the more advanced races are coming in closer contact with the less developed races, and the race-feeling is therefore intensified; and Mr. Washington's programme practically accepts the alleged inferiority of the Negro races. Again, in our own land, the reaction from the sentiment of war time has given impetus to race-prejudice against Negroes, and Mr. Washington withdraws many of the high demands of Negroes as men and American citizens. In other periods of intensified prejudice all the Negro's tendency to self-assertion has been called forth; at this period a policy of submission is advocated. In the history of nearly all other races and peoples the doctrine preached at such crises has been that manly self-respect is worth more than lands and houses, and that a people who voluntarily surrender such respect, or cease striving for it, are not worth civilizing.

In answer to this, it has been claimed that the Negro can survive only through submission. Mr. Washington distinctly asks that black people give up, at least for the present, three things,—

First, political power,

Second, insistence on civil rights,

Third, higher education of Negro youth,—and concentrate all their energies on industrial education, and accumulation of wealth, and the conciliation of the South.

This policy has been courageously and insistently advocated for over fifteen years, and has been triumphant for perhaps ten years. As a result of this tender of the palm-branch, what has been the return? In these years there have occurred:

1. The disfranchisement of the Negro.

2. The legal creation of a distinct status of civil inferiority for the Negro.

3. The steady withdrawal of aid from institutions for the higher training of the Negro.

These movements are not, to be sure, direct results of Mr. Washington's teachings; but his propaganda has, without a shadow of doubt, helped their speedier accomplishment. The question then comes: Is it possible, and probable, that nine millions of men can make effective progress in economic lines if they are deprived of political rights, made a servile caste, and allowed only the most meagre chance for developing their exceptional men? If history and reason give any distinct answer to these questions, it is an emphatic No. And Mr. Washington thus faces the triple paradox of his career:

1. He is striving nobly to make Negro artisans business men and property-owners; but it is utterly impossible, under modern competitive methods, for workingmen and property-owners to defend their rights and exist without the right of suffrage.

2. He insists on thrift and self-respect, but at the same time counsels a silent submission to civic inferiority such as is bound to sap the manhood of any race in the long run.

3. He advocates common-school and industrial training, and depreciates institutions of higher learning; but neither the Negro common-schools, nor Tuskegee itself, could remain open a day were it not for teachers trained in Negro colleges, or trained by their graduates.

This triple paradox in Mr. Washington's position is the object of criticism by two classes of colored Americans. One class is spiritually descended from Toussaint the Savior. . .

The Three-Fold Demand for Civil Rights

The other class of Negroes who cannot agree with Mr. Washington has hitherto said little aloud. They deprecate the sight of scattered counsels, of internal disagreement; and especially they dislike making their just criticism of a useful and earnest man an excuse for a general discharge of venom from small-minded opponents. Nevertheless, the questions involved are so fundamental and serious that it is difficult to see how men like the Grimkes, Kelly Miller, J. W. E. Bowen, and other representatives of this group, can much longer be silent. Such men feel in conscience bound to ask of this nation three things:

1. The right to vote.

2. Civic equality.

3. The education of youth according to ability.

They acknowledge Mr. Washington's invaluable service in counselling patience and courtesy in such demands; they do not ask that ignorant black men vote when ignorant whites are debarred, or that any reasonable restrictions in the suffrage should not be applied; they know that the low social level of the mass of the race is responsible for much discrimination against it, but they also know, and the nation knows, that relentless color-prejudice is more often a cause than a result of the Negro's degradation; they seek the abatement of this relic of barbarism, and not its systematic encouragement and pampering by all agencies of social power from the Associated Press to the Church of Christ. They advocate, with Mr. Washington, a broad system of Negro common schools supplemented by thorough industrial training; but they are surprised that a man of Mr. Washington's insight cannot see that no such educational system ever has rested or can rest on any other basis than that of the well-equipped college and university, and they insist that there is a demand for a few such institutions throughout the South to train the best of the Negro youth as teachers, professional men, and leaders.

This group of men honor Mr. Washington for his attitude of conciliation toward the white South; they accept the "Atlanta Compromise" in its broadest interpretation; they recognize, with him, many signs of promise, many men of high purpose and fair judgment, in this section; they know that no easy task has been laid upon a region already tottering under heavy burdens. But, nevertheless, they insist that the way to truth and right lies in straightforward honesty, not in indiscriminate flattery; in praising those of the South who do well and criticising uncompromisingly those who do ill; in taking advantage of the opportunities at hand and urging their fellows to do the same, but at the same time in remembering that only a firm adherence to their higher ideals and aspirations will ever keep those ideals within the realm of possibility. They do not expect that the free right to vote, to enjoy civic rights, and to be educated, will come in a moment; they do not expect to see the bias and prejudices of years disappear at the blast of a trumpet; but they are absolutely certain that the way for a people to gain their reasonable rights is not by voluntarily throwing them away and insisting that they do not want them; that the way for a people to gain respect is not by continually belittling and ridiculing themselves; that, on the contrary, Negroes must insist continually, in season and out of season, that voting is necessary to modern manhood, that color discrimination is barbarism, and that black boys need education as well as white boys.

A National Responsibility to the Fatherland

In failing thus to state plainly and unequivocally the legitimate demands of their people, even at the cost of opposing an honored leader, the thinking classes of American Negroes would shirk a heavy responsibility,—a responsibility to themselves, a responsibility to the struggling masses, a responsibility to the darker races of men whose future depends so largely on this American experiment, but especially a responsibility to this nation,—this common Fatherland. It is wrong to encourage a man or a people in evil-doing; it is wrong to aid and abet a national crime simply because it is unpopular not to do so. The growing spirit of kindliness and reconciliation between the North and South after the frightful difference of a generation ago ought to be a source of deep congratulation to all, and especially to those whose mistreatment caused the war; but if that reconciliation is to be marked by the industrial slavery and civic death of those same black men, with permanent legislation into a position of inferiority, then those black men, if they are really men, are called upon by every consideration of patriotism and loyalty to oppose such a course by all civilized methods, even though such opposition involves disagreement with Mr. Booker T. Washington. We have no right to sit silently by while the inevitable seeds are sown for a harvest of disaster to our children, black and white. . . .

In his failure to realize and impress this last point, Mr. Washington is especially to be criticised. His doctrine has tended to make the whites, North and South, shift the burden of the Negro problem to the Negro's shoulders and stand aside as critical and rather pessimistic spectators; when in fact the burden belongs to the nation, and the hands of none of us are clean if we bend not our energies to righting these great wrongs.

The South ought to be led, by candid and honest criticism, to assert her better self and do her full duty to the race she has cruelly wronged and is still wronging. The North—her co-partner in guilt—cannot salve her conscience by plastering it with gold. We cannot settle this problem by diplomacy and suaveness, by "policy" alone. If worse come to worst, can the moral fibre of this country survive the slow throttling and murder of nine millions of men?

The black men of America have a duty to perform, a duty stern and delicate,—a forward movement to oppose a part of the work of their greatest leader. So far as Mr. Washington preaches Thrift, Patience, and Industrial Training for the masses, we must hold up his hands and strive with him, rejoicing in his honors and glorying in the strength of this Joshua called of God and of man to lead the headless host. But so far as Mr. Washington apologizes for injustice, North or South, does not rightly value the privilege and duty of voting, belittles the emasculating effects of caste distinctions, and opposes the higher training and ambition of our brighter minds,—so far as he, the South, or the Nation, does this,—we must unceasingly and firmly oppose them. By every civilized and peaceful method we must strive for the rights which the world accords to men, clinging unwaveringly to those great words which the sons of the Fathers would fain forget: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

STUDY QUESTIONS

Please answer all of the following questions.

1. How does Du Bois define "double-consciousness," and what is the "unasked question" that he feels governs his interactions with the white world?

2. In the first chapter, Du Bois describes the history of the American Negro as a "strife" between two ideals. What are these two identities, and what is the ultimate goal of "merging" them?

3. What was the "psychological moment" in post-1876 America that allowed Booker T. Washington's program of conciliation and economic focus to gain such broad national support?

4. Using the metaphor of the "five fingers" and the "hand," explain the essence of the Atlanta Compromise and how it was interpreted by different factions in the South.

5. Identify the "Triple Paradox" Du Bois finds in Washington's strategy. Why does he argue that economic success is impossible without the right of suffrage?

6. In the final section, why does Du Bois claim that the "thinking classes" of Black Americans have a "stern and delicate" duty to oppose their greatest leader?

Short essay: please select one of the following and answer it in a minimum of 100 words.

a. The Veil and Second-Sight: Discuss the significance of the "veil" as a philosophical and sociological metaphor. How does being born "within the veil" provide the marginalized individual with a "second-sight" that the dominant world lacks?

b. The Logic of Citizenship: Analyze Du Bois's argument that "industrial slavery and civic death" cannot be the basis for national reconciliation. Evaluate his claim that a nation's "moral fibre" is at stake when it chooses "policy" and "suaveness" over civil rights.

c. Education and the Talented Tenth: Du Bois argues that common schools and industrial training cannot exist without a foundation of higher education. Discuss why he believes the "brighter minds" of a race must be trained to be leaders and professional men.

d. Patriotism as Protest: Evaluate the closing argument that opposing a national leader is a duty to the "common Fatherland." How does Du Bois use the Declaration of Independence to frame his demands not as a request for new rights, but as an insistence on foundational American truths?

_______________________

MAHATMA GANDHI: PASSIVE RESISTANCE

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869–1948) was an Indian lawyer and anti-colonial nationalist who studied law at University College London and was called to the bar at the Inner Temple. After practicing law in South Africa for twenty-one years, where he first developed techniques of nonviolent resistance, he returned to India in 1915 to lead the movement for independence from British rule. The following selections are from Hind Swaraj, or Indian Home Rule (1909), a text written in a dialogue format between a "Reader" and an "Editor." Chapter 6, "Civilization," provides a critique of modern Western civilization, which Gandhi defines as a "disease" focused primarily on "bodily welfare" and material acquisition. He argues that the mechanical advancements of the industrial age, such as high-speed travel, machinery, and modern weaponry, serve to enslave individuals through money and luxury rather than liberating them. Chapter 13, "What is True Civilization?", defines civilization as a mode of conduct pointing to the "path of duty." Gandhi contends that the Gujarati word for civilization translates to "good conduct," which involves attaining mastery over the mind and passions. He argues that India's traditional village-based social structure, which prioritizes manual labor and ethical constraints over industrial competition, constitutes a superior and immovable foundation for "Home Rule." Chapter 17, "Passive Resistance," introduces the concept of Satyagraha, or "soul-force." Gandhi characterizes this as a method of securing rights through personal suffering rather than the infliction of injury on others. He identifies four necessary disciplines for the practitioner of passive resistance: (1) perfect chastity, to ensure mental firmness; (2) poverty, to remove the fear of pecuniary loss; (3) absolute truth, which is the essence of the force itself; and (4) fearlessness regarding bodily injury or death. He concludes that history is merely a record of the "interruptions" of the natural course of love and soul-force, which remains the true stabilizing power of human existence.

CIVILIZATION (Chapter 6)

Reader: Now you will have to explain what you mean by civilization.

Editor: It is not a question of what I mean. Several English writers refuse to call that, civilization which passes under that name. Many books have been written upon that subject. Societies have been formed to cure the nation of the evils of civilization. A great English writer has written a work called "Civilization: Its Cause and Cure." Therein he has called it a disease.

Reader: Why do we not know this generally?

Editor: The answer is very simple. We rarely find people arguing against themselves. Those who are intoxicated by modern civilization are not likely to write against it. Their care will be to find out facts and arguments in support of it, and this they do unconsciously, believing it to be true. A man, whilst he is dreaming, believes in his dream; he is undeceived only when he is awakened from his sleep. A man labouring under the bane of civilization is like a dreaming man. What we usually read are the work of defenders of modern civilization, which undoubtedly claims among its votaries very brilliant and even some very good men. Their writings hypnotise us. And so, one by one, we are drawn into the vortex.

Reader: This seems to be very plausible. Now will you tell me something of what you have read and thought of this civilization.

Editor: Let us first consider what state of things is described by the word "civilization." Its true test lies in the fact that people living in it make bodily welfare the object of life. We will take some examples. The people of Europe to-day live in better-built houses than they did a hundred years ago. This is considered an emblem of civilization, and this is also a matter to promote bodily happiness. Formerly, they wore skins, and used as their weapons spears. Now, they wear long trousers, and for embellishing their bodies they wear a variety of clothing, and, instead of spears, they carry with them revolvers containing five or more chambers. If people of a certain country, who have hitherto not been in the habit of wearing much clothing, boots, etc., adopt European clothing, they are supposed to have become civilised out of savagery. Formerly, in Europe, people ploughed their lands mainly by manual labour. Now, one man can plough a vast tract by means of steam-engines, and can thus amass great wealth. This is called a sign of civilization. Formerly, the fewest men wrote books, that were most valuable. Now, anybody writes and prints anything he likes and poisons people's minds. Formerly, men travelled in waggons; now they fly through the air, in trains at the rate of four hundred and more miles per day. This is considered the height of civilization. It has been stated that, as men progress, they shall be able to travel in airships and reach any part of the world in a few hours. Men will not need the use of their hands and feet. They will press a button, and they will have their clothing by their side. They will press another button, and they will have their newspaper. A third, and a motor-car will be in waiting for them. They will have a variety of delicately dished up food. Everything will be done by machinery. Formerly, when people wanted to fight with one another, they measured between them their bodily strength; now it is possible to take away thousands of lives by one man working behind a gun from a hill. This is civilization. Formerly, men worked in the open air only so much as they liked. Now, thousands of workmen meet together and for the sake of maintenance work in factories or mines. Their condition is worse than that of beasts. They are obliged to work, at the risk of their lives, at most dangerous occupations, for the sake of millionaires. Formerly, men were made slaves under physical compulsion, now they are enslaved by temptation of money and of the luxuries that money can buy. There are now diseases of which people never dreamt before, and an army of doctors is engaged in finding out their cures, and so hospitals have increased. This is a test of civilization. Formerly, special messengers were required and much expense was incurred in order to send letters; to-day, anyone can abuse his fellow by means of a letter for one penny. True, at the same cost, one can send one's thanks also. Formerly, people had two or three meals consisting of homemade bread and vegetables; now, they require something to eat every two hours, so that they have hardly leisure for anything else. What more need I say? All this you can ascertain from several authoritative books. These are all true tests of civilization. And, if any one speaks to the contrary, know that he is ignorant. This civilization takes note neither of morality nor of religion. Its votaries calmly state that their business is not to teach religion. Some even consider it to be a superstitious growth. Others put on the cloak of religion, and prate about morality. But, after twenty years' experience, I have come to the conclusion that immorality is often taught in the name of morality. Even a child can understand that in all I have described above there can be no inducement to morality. Civilization seeks to increase bodily comforts, and it fails miserably even in doing so.

This civilization is irreligion, and it has taken such a hold on the people in Europe that those who are in it appear to be half mad. They lack real physical strength or courage. They keep up their energy by intoxication. They can hardly be happy in solitude. Women, who should be the queens of households, wander in the streets, or they slave away in factories. For the sake of a pittance, half a million women in England alone are labouring under trying circumstances in factories or similar institutions. This awful fact is one of the causes of the daily growing suffragette movement.

This civilization is such that one has only to be patient and it will be self-destroyed. According to the teaching of Mahomed this would be considered a Satanic civilization. Hinduism calls it the Black Age. I cannot give you an adequate concep tion of it. It is eating into the vitals of the English nation. It must be shunned. Parliament are really emblems of slavery. If you will sufficiently think over this, you will entertain the same opinion, and cease to blame the English. They rather deserve our sympathy. They are a shrewd nation and I therefore believe that they will cast off the evil. They are enterprising and industrious and their mode of thought is not inherently immoral. Neither are they bad at heart. I, therefore, respect them. Civilization is not an incurable disease, but it should never be forgotten that the English people are at present afflicted by it.

WHAT IS TRUE CIVILIZATION? (chapter 13)

Reader: You have denounced railways, lawyers and doctors. I can see that you will discard all machinery. What, then, is civilization?

Editor: The answer to that question is not difficult. I believe that the civilization India has evolved is not to be beaten in the world. Nothing can equal the seeds sown by our ancestors. Rome went, Greece shared the same fate, the might of the Pharaohs was broken, Japan has become westernised, of China nothing can be said, but India is still, somehow or other, sound at the foundation. The people of Europe learn their lessons from the writings of the men of Greece or Rome, which exist no longer in their former glory. In trying to learn from them, the Europeans imagine that they will avoid the mistakes of Greece and Rome. Such is their pitiable condition. In the midst of all this, India remains immovable, and that is her glory. It is a charge against India that her people are so uncivilised, ignorant and stolid, that it is not possible to induce them to adopt any changes. It is a charge really against our merit. What we have tested and found true on the anvil of experience, we dare not change. Many thrust their advice upon India, and she remains steady. This is her beauty; it is the sheet-anchor of our hope.

Civilization is that mode of conduct which points out to man the path of duty. Performance of duty and observance of morality are convertible terms. To observe morality is to attain mastery over our mind and our passions. So doing, we know ourselves. The Gujarati equivalent for civilization means "good conduct."

If this definition be correct, then India, as so many writers have shown, has nothing to learn from anybody else, and this is as it should be. We notice that mind is a restless bird; the more it gets the more it wants, and still remains unsatisfied. The more we indulge our passions, the more unbridled they become. Our ancestors, therefore, set a limit to our indulgences. They saw that happiness was largely a mental condition. A man is not necessarily happy because he is rich, or unhappy because he is poor. The rich are often seem to be unhappy, the poor to be happy. Millions will always remain poor. Observing all this, our ancestors dissuaded us from luxuries and pleasures. We have managed with the same kind of plough as it existed thousands of years ago. We have retained the same kind of cottages that we had in former times, and our indigenous education remains the same as before. We have had no system of life-corroding competition. Each followed his own occupation or trade, and charged a regulation wage. It was not that we did not know how to invent machinery, but our forefathers knew that, if we set our hearts after such things, we would become slaves and lose our moral fibre. They, therefore, after due deliberation, decided that we should only do what we could with our hands and feet. They saw that our real happiness and health consisted in a proper use of our hands and feet. They further reasoned that large cities were a snare and a useless encumbrance, and that people would not be happy in them, that there would be gangs of thieves and robbers, prostitution and vice flourishing in them, and that poor men would be robbed by rich men. They were, therefore, satisfied with small villages. They saw that kings and their swords were inferior to the sword of ethics, and they, therefore, held the sovereigns of the earth to be inferior to the Rishis and the Fakirs. A nation with a constitution like this is fitter to teach others than to learn from others. This nation had courts, lawyers and doctors, but they were all within bounds. Everybody knew that these professions were not particularly superior; moreover, these vakils and vaids did not rob people; they were considered people's dependents, not their masters. Justice was tolerably fair. The ordinary rule was to avoid courts. There were no touts to lure people into them. This evil, too, was noticeable only in and around capitals. The common people lived independ ently, and followed their agricultural occupation. They enjoyed true Home Rule.

And where this cursed modern civilization has not reached, India remains as it was before. The inhabitants of that part of India will very properly laugh at your new-fangled notions. The English do not rule over them nor will you ever rule over them. Those whose name we speak we do not know, nor do they know us. I would certainly advise you and those like you who love the motherland to go into the interior that has yet not been polluted by the railways, and to live there for six months; you might then be patriotic and speak of Home Rule.

Now you see what I consider to be real civilization. Those who want to change conditions such as I have described are enemies of the country and are sinners.

Reader: It would be all right if India were exactly as you have described it; but it is also India where there are hundreds of child-widows, where two-year-old babies are married, where twelve-year-old girls are mothers and housewives, where women practise polyandry, where the practice of Niyog obtains, where, in the name of religion, girls dedicate themselves to prostitution, and where, in the name of religion, sheep and goats are killed. Do you consider these also symbols of the civilization that you have described?

Editor: You make a mistake. The defects that you have shown are defects. Nobody mistakes them for ancient civilization. They remain in spite of it. Attempts have always been made, and will be made, to remove them. We may utilise the new spirit that is born in us for purging ourselves of these evils. But what I have described to you as emblems of modern civilization are accepted as such by its votaries. The Indian civilization, as described by me, has been so described by its votaries. In no part of the world, and under no civilization, have all men attained perfection. The tendency of Indian civilization is to elevate the moral being, that of the western civilization is to propagate immorality. The latter is godless, the former is based on a belief in God. So understanding and so believing, it behoves every lover of India to cling to the old Indian civilization even as a child clings to its mother's breast.

PASSIVE RESISTANCE (chapter 17)

Reader: Is there any historical evidence as to the success of what you have called soul-force or truth-force? No instance seems to have happened of any nation having risen through soul-force. I still think that the evil-doers will not cease doing evil without physical punishment.

Editor: The poet Tulsidas has said: "Of religion, pity or love is the root, as egotism of the body. Therefore, we should not abandon pity so long as we are alive." This appears to me to be a scientific truth. I believe in it as much as I believe in two and two being four. The force of love is the same as the force of the soul or truth. We have evidence of its working at every step. The universe would disappear without the existence of that force. But you ask for historical evidence. It is, therefore, necessary to know what history means. The Gujarati equivalent means: "It so happened." If that is the meaning of history, it is possible to give copious evidence. But if it means the doings of kings and emperors, there can be no evidence of soul-force or passive resistance in such history. You cannot expect silver-ore in a tin-mine. History, as we know it, is a record of the wars of the world, and so there is a proverb among Englishmen that a nation which has no history, that is, no wars, is a happy nation. How kings played how they become enemies of one another and how they murdered one another is found accurately recorded in history and, if this were all that had happened in the world, it would have been ended long ago. If the story of the universe had commenced with wars, not a man would have been found alive to-day. Those people who have been warred against have disappeared, as, for instance, the natives of Australia, of whom hardly a man was left alive by the intruders. Mark, please, that these natives did not use soul-force in self-defence, and it does not require much foresight to know that the Australians will share the same fate as their victims. "Those that wield the sword shall perish by the sword." With us, the proverb is that professional swimmers will find a watery grave.

The fact that there are so many men still alive in the world shows that it is based not on the force of arms but on the force of truth or love. Therefore the greatest and most unimpeachable evidence of the success of this force is to be found in the fact that, in spite of the wars of the world, it still lives on.

Thousands, indeed, tens of thousands, depend for their existence on a very active working of this force. Little quarrels of millions of families in their daily lives disappear before the exercise of this force. Hundreds of nations live in peace. History does not and cannot take note of this fact. History is really a record of every interruption of the even working of the force of love or of the soul. Two brothers quarrel: one of them repents and re-awakens the love that was lying dormant in him; the two again begin to live in peace: nobody takes note of this. But if the two brothers, through the intervention of solicitors or some other reason, take up arms or go to law—which is another form of the exhibition of brute-force—their doings would be immediately noticed in the press, they would be the talk of their neighbours, and would probably go down to history. And what is true of families and communities is true of nations. There is no reason, to believe that there is one law for families, and another for nations. History, then, is a record of an interruption of the course of nature. Soul-force, being natural, is not noted in history.

Reader: According to what you say, it is plain that instances of the kind of passive resistance are not to be found in history. It is necessary to understand this passive resistance more fully. It will be better, therefore, if you enlarge upon it.

Editor: Passive resistance is a method of securing rights by personal suffering; it is the reverse of resistance by arms. When I refuse to do a thing that is repugnant to my conscience, I use soul-force. For instance, the government of the day has passed a law which is applicable to me: I do not like it, if, by using violence, I force the government to repeal the law, I am employing what may be termed body-force. If I do not obey the law and accept the penalty for its breach, I use soul-force. It involves sacrifice of self.

Everybody admits that sacrifice of self is infinitely superior to sacrifice of others. Moreover, if this kind of force is used in a cause that is unjust only the person using it suffers. He does not make others suffer for his mistakes. Men have before now done many things which were subsequently found to have been wrong. No man can claim to be absolutely in the right, or that a particular thing is wrong, because he thinks so, but it is wrong for him so long as that is his deliberate judgment. It is, therefore, meet that he should not do that which he knows to be wrong, and suffer the consequence whatever it may be. This is the key to the use of soul-force.

Reader: You would then disregard laws—this is rank disloyalty. We have always been considered a law-abiding nation. You seem to be going even beyond the extremists. They say that we must obey the laws that have been passed, but that, if the laws be bad, we must drive out the law-givers even by force.

Editor: Whether I go beyond them or whether I do not, is a matter of no consequence to either of us. We simply want to find out what is right, and to act accordingly. The real meaning of the statement that we are a law-abiding nation is that we are passive resisters. When we do not like certain laws, we do not break the heads of law-givers, but we suffer and do not submit to the laws. That we should obey laws whether good or bad is a new-fangled notion. There was no such thing in former days. The people disregarded those laws they did not like, and suffered the penalties for their breach. It is contrary to our manhood, if we obey laws repugnant to our conscience. Such teaching is opposed to religion and means slavery. If the government were to ask us to go about without any clothing, should we do so? If I were a passive resister, I would say to them that I would have nothing to do with their law. But we have so forgotten ourselves and become so compliant, that we do not mind any degrading law.

A man who has realised his manhood, who fears only God, will fear no one else. Man-made laws are not necessarily binding on him. Even the government do not expect any such thing from us. They do not say: "You must do such and such a thing," but they say: "If you do not do it, we will punish you." We are sunk so low, that we fancy that it is our duty and our religion to do what the law lays down. If man will only realise that it is unmanly to obey laws that are unjust, no man's tyranny will enslave him. This is the key to self-rule or home-rule.

It is a superstition and an ungodly thing to believe that an act of a majority binds a minority. Many examples can be given in which acts of majorities will be found to have been wrong, and those of minorities to have been right. All reforms owe their origin to the initiation of minorities in opposition to majorities. If among a band of robbers, a knowledge of robbing is obligatory, is a pious man to accept the obligation? So long as the superstition that men should obey unjust laws exists, so long will their slavery exist. And a passive resister alone can remove such a superstition.

To use brute-force, to use gun-powder is contrary to passive resistance; for it means that we want our opponent to do by force—that which we desire but he does not. And, if such a use of force is justifiable, surely he is entitled to do likewise by us. And so we should never come to an agreement. We may simply fancy, like the blind horse moving in a circle round a mill, that we are making progress. Those who believe that they are not bound to obey laws which are repugnant to their conscience have only the remedy of passive resistance open to them. Any other must lead to disaster.

Reader: From what you say, I deduce that passive resistance is a splendid weapon of the weak but that, when they are strong, they may take up arms.

Editor: This is gross ignorance. Passive resistance, that is, soul-force, is matchless. It is superior to the force of arms. How, then, can it be considered only a weapon of the weak? Physical force men are strangers to the courage that is requisite in a passive resister. Do you believe that a coward can ever disobey a law that he dislikes? Extremists are considered to be advocates of brute-force. Why do they, then, talk about obeying laws? I do not blame them. They can say nothing else. When they succeed in driving out the English, and they themselves become governors, they will want you and me to obey their laws. And that is a fitting thing for their constitution. But a passive resister will say he will not obey a law that is against his conscience, even though he may be blown to pieces at the mouth of a cannon.

What do you think? Wherein is courage required—in blowing others to pieces from behind a cannon or with a smiling face to approach a cannon and to be blown to pieces? Who is the true warrior—he who keeps death always as a bosom-friend or he who controls the death of others? Believe me that a man devoid of courage and manhood can never be a passive resister.

This, however, I will admit: that even a man, weak in body, is capable of offering this resistance. One man can offer it just as well as millions. Both men and women can indulge in it. It does not require the training of an army; it needs no Jiu-jitsu. Control over the mind is alone necessary, and, when that is attained, man is free like the king of the forest, and his very glance withers the enemy.

Passive resistance is an all-sided sword; it can be used anyhow; it blesses him who uses it and him against whom it is used. Without drawing a drop of blood, it produces far-reaching results. It never rusts, and cannot be stolen. Competition between passive resisters does not exhaust. The sword of passive resistance does not require a scabbard. It is strange indeed that you should consider such a weapon to be a weapon merely of the weak.

Reader: You have said that passive resistance is a speciality of India. Have cannons never been used in India?

Editor: Evidently, in your opinion, India means its few princes. To me, it means its teeming millions, on whom depends the existence of its princes and our own.

Kings will always use their kingly weapons. To use force is bred in them. They want to command, but those who have to obey commands, do not want guns; and these are in a majority throughout the world. They have to learn either body-force or soul-force. Where they learn the former, both the rulers and the ruled become like so many mad men, but, where they learn soul-force, the commands of the rulers do not go beyond the point of their swords, for true men disregard unjust commands. Peasants have never been subdued by the sword, and never will be. They do not know the use of the sword, and they are not frightened by the use of it by others. That nation is great which rests its head upon death as its pillow. Those who defy death are free from all fear. For those who are labouring under the delusive charms of brute-force, this picture is not overdrawn. The fact is that, in India, the nation at large has generally used passive resistance in all departments of life. We cease to co-operate with our rulers when they displease us. This is passive resistance.

I remember an instance when, in a small principality, the villagers were offended by some command issued by the prince. The former immediately began vacating the village. The prince became nervous, apologised to his subjects and withdrew his command. Many such instances can be found in India. Real home-rule is possible only where passive resistance is the guiding force of the people. Any other rule is foreign rule.

Reader: Then you will say that it is not at all necessary for us to train the body?

Editor: I will certainly not say any such thing. It is difficult to become a passive resister, unless the body is trained. As a rule, the mind, residing in a body that has become weakened by pampering, is also weak, and where there is no strength of mind, there can be no strength of soul. We will have to improve our physique by getting rid of infant marriages and luxurious living. If I were to ask a man having a shattered body to face a cannon's mouth I would make of myself a laughing-stock.

Reader: From what you say, then, it would appear that it is not a small thing to become a passive resister, and, if that is so, I would like you to explain how a man may become a passive resister.

Editor: To become a passive resister is easy enough, but it is also equally difficult. I have known a lad of fourteen years become a passive resister; I have known also sick people doing likewise and I have also known physically strong and otherwise happy people being unable to take up passive resistance. After a great deal of experience, it seems to me that those who want to become passive resisters for the service of the country have to observe perfect chastity, adopt poverty, follow truth, and cultivate fearlessness.

Chastity is one of the greatest disciplines without which the mind cannot attain requisite firmness. A man who is unchaste loses stamina, becomes emasculated and cowardly. He whose mind is given over to animal passions is not capable of any great effort. This can be proved by innumerable instances. What, then, is a married person to do, is the question that arises naturally; and yet it need not. When a husband and wife gratify the passions, it is no less an animal indulgence on that account. Such an indulgence, except for perpetuating the race, is strictly prohibited. But a passive resister has to avoid even that very limited indulgence, because he can have no desire for progeny. A married man, therefore, can observe perfect chastity. This subject is not capable of being treated at greater length. Several questions arise: How is one to carry one's wife with one? What are her rights, and such other questions? Yet those who wish to take part in a great work are bound to solve these puzzles.

Just as there is necessity for chastity, so is there for poverty. Pecuniary ambition and passive resistance cannot well go together. Those who have money are not expected to throw it away, but they are expected to be indifferent about it. They must be prepared to lose every penny rather than give up passive resistance.

Passive resistance has been described in the course of our discussion as truth-force. Truth, therefore, has necessarily to be followed, and that at any cost. In this connection, academic questions such as whether a man may not lie in order to save a life, etc. arise, but these questions occur only to those who wish to justify lying. Those who want to follow truth every time are not placed in such a quandary, and, if they are, they are still saved from a false position.

Passive resistance cannot proceed a step without fearlessness. Those alone can follow the path of passive resistance who are free from fear whether as to their possessions, false honour, their relatives, the government, bodily injuries, death.

These observances are not to be abandoned in the belief that they are difficult. Nature has implanted in the human breast ability to cope with any difficulty or suffering that may come to man unprovoked. These qualities are worth having, even for those who do not wish to serve the country. Let there be no mistake as those who want to train themselves in the use of arms are also obliged to have these qualities more or less. Everybody does not become a warrior for the wish. A would-be warrior will have to observe chastity, and to be satisfied with poverty as his lot. A warrior without fearlessness cannot be conceived of. It may be thought that he would not need to be exactly truthful, but that quality follows real fearlessness. When a man abandons truth, he does so owing to fear in some shape or form. The above four attributes, then, need not frighten any one. It may be as well here to note that a physical-force man has to have many other useless qualities which a passive resister never needs. And you will find that whatever extra effort a swordsman needs is due to lack of fearlessness. If he is an embodiment of the latter, the sword will drop from his hand that very moment. He does not need its support. One who is free from hatred requires no sword. A man with a stick suddenly came face to face with a lion, and instinctively raised his weapon in self-defence. The man saw that he had only prated about fearlessness when there was none in him. That moment he dropped the stick, and found himself free from all fear.

STUDY QUESTIONS

Please answer all of the following questions.

1. According to Gandhi in Chapter 6, what is the "true test" of modern civilization, and why does he compare it to a "dreaming man"?

2. Gandhi lists several technological advancements—such as railways, steam engines, and revolvers—as signs of modern civilization. Why does he view these as harmful rather than progressive?

3. How does the Editor define "True Civilization" in Chapter 13, and what is the significance of the Gujarati equivalent for the word?

4. Why did the ancestors of India dissuade the people from luxuries and the invention of machinery, according to Gandhi's argument?

5. Define "Passive Resistance" (soul-force) as presented in Chapter 17. How does it differ from "body-force" in its application and its consequences?

6. Identify the four attributes Gandhi believes are necessary for one to become a passive resister and explain the function of "fearlessness" in this framework.

Short essay: please select one of the following and answer it in a minimum of 100 words.

a. The Evidence of Soul-Force: Gandhi argues that history, as a record of wars and kings, cannot provide evidence of soul-force because history is merely a "record of every interruption of the even working of the force of love." Discuss how Gandhi justifies the existence of soul-force despite its absence from traditional historical records.

b. The Ethics of Law: Evaluate the Editor's claim that "it is contrary to our manhood, if we obey laws repugnant to our conscience." Discuss the relationship between individual conscience, man-made laws, and the concept of "Home Rule."

c. Bodily Welfare vs. Moral Fiber: Contrast Gandhi's view of "bodily comfort" with his view of "mental condition." How does he use this distinction to argue that the poor may be happier than the rich and that manual labor is essential to health and character?

d. The Sword of Ethics: Gandhi claims that "kings and their swords were inferior to the sword of ethics." Analyze how this belief informs his preference for small village life over large cities and his critique of professional classes like lawyers and doctors.

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ANARCHISM

Emma Goldman

Born into a Jewish family in Russia, Emma Goldman (1869–1940) immigrated to the United States at age 16 and moved in with her sister in Rochester New York. After a failed marriage that lasted a year, she moved to New York City at age 20, met her life-long companion Alexander Berkman, and the two became active with political anarchist groups. In her famous essay "What I Believe," Emma Goldman, often dubbed "the most dangerous woman in America," seeks to strip away the sensationalist caricature created by the press to reveal the philosophical core of anarchism. Writing at a time when political radicals were routinely vilified as "witches" and "bomb-makers," Goldman argues that Anarchism is not a call for chaos, but a rigorous, life-affirming process that prioritizes human intellect and voluntary cooperation over the rigid finalities of government and religion. By systematically addressing the pillars of modern society (property, militarism, and marriage) she challenges her readers to envision a world where order is born from social harmony and solidarity rather than the "policeman's club."

INTRODUCTION

"What I believe" has many times been the target of hack writers. Such blood-curdling and incoherent stories have been circulated about me, it is no wonder that the average human being has palpitation of the heart at the very mention of the name Emma Goldman. It is too bad that we no longer live in the times when witches were burned at the stake or tortured to drive the evil spirit out of them. For, indeed, Emma Goldman is a witch! True, she does not eat little children, but she does many worse things. She manufactures bombs and gambles in crowned heads. B-r-r-r!

Such is the impression the public has of myself and my beliefs. It is therefore very much to the credit of The World that it gives its readers at least an opportunity to learn what my beliefs really are.

The student of the history of progressive thought is well aware that every idea in its early stages has been misrepresented, and the adherents of such ideas have been maligned and persecuted. One need not go back two thousand years to the time when those who believed in the gospel of Jesus were thrown into the arena or hunted into dungeons to realize how little great beliefs or earnest believers are understood. The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man's right to his body, or woman's right to her soul. If, then, from time immemorial, the New has met with opposition and condemnation, why should my beliefs be exempt from a crown of thorns?

"What I believe" is a process rather than a finality. Finalities are for gods and governments, not for the human intellect. While it may be true that Herbert Spencer's formulation of liberty is the most important on the subject, as a political basis of society, yet life is something more than formulas. In the battle for freedom, as Ibsen has so well pointed out, it is the struggle for, not so much the attainment of, liberty, that develops all that is strongest, sturdiest and finest in human character.

Anarchism is not only a process, however, that marches on with "sombre steps," coloring all that is positive and constructive in organic development. It is a conspicuous protest of the most militant type. It is so absolutely uncompromising, insisting and permeating a force as to overcome the most stubborn assault and to withstand the criticism of those who really constitute the last trumpets of a decaying age.

Anarchists are by no means passive spectators in the theatre of social development; on the contrary, they have some very positive notions as regards aims and methods.

That I may make myself as clear as possible without using too much space, permit me to adopt the topical mode of treatment of "What I Believe":

1. AS TO PROPERTY

"Property" means dominion over things and the denial to others of the use of those things. So long as production was not equal to the normal demand, institutional property may have had some raison d'être. One has only to consult economics, however, to know that the productivity of labor within the last few decades has increased so tremendously as to exceed normal demand a hundred-fold, and to make property not only a hindrance to human well-being, but an obstacle, a deadly barrier, to all progress. It is the private dominion over things that condemns millions of people to be mere nonentities, living corpses without originality or power of initiative, human machines of flesh and blood, who pile up mountains of wealth for others and pay for it with a gray, dull and wretched existence for themselves. I believe that there can be no real wealth, social wealth, so long as it rests on human lives—young lives, old lives and lives in the making.

It is conceded by all radical thinkers that the fundamental cause of this terrible state of affairs is (1) that man must sell his labor; (2) that his inclination and judgment are subordinated to the will of a master.

Anarchism is the only philosophy that can and will do away with this humiliating and degrading situation. It differs from all other theories inasmuch as it points out that man's development, his physical well-being, his latent qualities and innate disposition alone must determine the character and conditions of his work. Similarly will one's physical and mental appreciations and his soul cravings decide how much he shall consume. To make this a reality will, I believe, be possible only in a society based on voluntary co-operation of productive groups, communities and societies loosely federated together, eventually developing into a free communism, actuated by a solidarity of interests. There can be no freedom in the large sense of the word, no harmonious development, so long as mercenary and commercial considerations play an important part in the determination of personal conduct.

2. AS TO GOVERNMENT

I believe government, organized authority, or the State is necessary only to maintain or protect property and monopoly. It has proven efficient in that function only. As a promoter of individual liberty, human well-being and social harmony, which alone constitute real order, government stands condemned by all the great men of the world.

I therefore believe, with my fellow-Anarchists, that the statutory regulations, legislative enactments, constitutional provisions, are invasive. They never yet induced man to do anything he could and would not do by virtue of his intellect or temperament, nor prevented anything that man was impelled to do by the same dictates. Millet's pictorial description of "The Man with the Hoe," Meunier's masterpieces of the miners that have aided in lifting labor from its degrading position, Gorki's descriptions of the underworld, Ibsen's psychological analysis of human life, could never have been induced by government any more than the spirit which impels a man to save a drowning child or a crippled woman from a burning building has ever been called into operation by statutory regulations or the policeman's club. I believe—indeed, I know—that whatever is fine and beautiful in the human expresses and asserts itself in spite of government, and not because of it.

The Anarchists are therefore justified in assuming that Anarchism—the absence of government—will insure the widest and greatest scope for unhampered human development, the cornerstone of true social progress and harmony.

As to the stereotyped argument that government acts as a check on crime and vice, even the makers of law no longer believe it. This country spends millions of dollars for the maintenance of her "criminals" behind prison bars, yet crime is on the increase. Surely this state of affairs is not owing to an insufficiency of laws! Ninety per cent of all crimes are property crimes, which have their root in our economic iniquities. So long as these latter continue to exist we might convert every lamp-post into a gibbet without having the least effect on the crime in our midst. Crimes resulting from heredity can certainly never be cured by law. Surely we are learning even to-day that such crimes can effectively be treated only by the best modern medical methods at our command, and, above all, by the spirit of a deeper sense of fellowship, kindness and understanding.

3. AS TO MILITARISM

I should not treat of this subject separately, since it belongs to the paraphernalia of government, if it were not for the fact that those who are most vigorously opposed to my beliefs on the ground that the latter stand for force are the advocates of militarism.

The fact is that Anarchists are the only true advocates of peace, the only people who call a halt to the growing tendency of militarism, which is fast making of this erstwhile free country an imperialistic and despotic power.

The military spirit is the most merciless, heartless and brutal in existence. It fosters an institution for which there is not even a pretense of justification. The soldier, to quote Tolstoi, is a professional man-killer. He does not kill for the love of it, like a savage, or in a passion, like a homicide. He is a cold-blooded, mechanical, obedient tool of his military superiors. He is ready to cut throats or scuttle a ship at the command of his ranking officer, without knowing or, perhaps, caring how, why or wherefore. I am supported in this contention by no less a military light than Gen. Funston. I quote from the latter's communication to the New York Evening Post of June 30, dealing with the case of Private William Buwalda, which caused such a stir all through the Northwest. "The first duty of an officer or enlisted man," says our noble warrior, "is unquestioning obedience and loyalty to the government to which he has sworn allegiance; it makes no difference whether he approves of that government or not."

How can we harmonize the principle of "unquestioning obedience" with the principle of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"? The deadly power of militarism has never before been so effectually demonstrated in this country as in the recent condemnation by court-martial of William Buwalda, of San Francisco, Company A, Engineers, to five years in military prison. Here was a man who had a record of fifteen years of continuous service. "His character and conduct were unimpeachable," we are told by Gen. Funston, who, in consideration of it, reduced Buwalda's sentence to three years. Yet the man is thrown suddenly out of the army, dishonored, robbed of his chances of a pension and sent to prison. What was his crime? Just listen, ye free-born Americans! William Buwalda attended a public meeting, and after the lecture he shook hands with the speaker. Gen. Funston, in his letter to the Post, to which I have already referred above, asserts that Buwalda's action was a "great military offense, infinitely worse than desertion." In another public statement, which the General made in Portland, Ore., he said that "Buwalda's was a serious crime, equal to treason."

It is quite true that the meeting had been arranged by Anarchists. Had the Socialists issued the call, Gen. Funston informs us, there would have been no objection to Buwalda's presence. Indeed, the General says, "I would not have the slightest hesitancy about attending a Socialist meeting myself." But to attend an Anarchist meeting with Emma Goldman as speaker—could there be anything more "treasonable"?

For this horrible crime a man, a free-born American citizen, who has given this country the best fifteen years of his life, and whose character and conduct during that time were "unimpeachable," is now languishing in a prison, dishonored, disgraced and robbed of a livelihood.

Can there be anything more destructive of the true genius of liberty than the spirit that made Buwalda's sentence possible—the spirit of unquestioning obedience? Is it for this that the American people have in the last few years sacrificed four hundred million dollars and their hearts' blood?

I believe that militarism—a standing army and navy in any country—is indicative of the decay of liberty and of the destruction of all that is best and finest in our nation. The steadily growing clamor for more battleships and an increased army on the ground that these guarantee us peace is as absurd as the argument that the peaceful man is he who goes well armed.

The same lack of consistency is displayed by those peace pretenders who oppose Anarchism because it supposedly teaches violence, and who would yet be delighted over the possibility of the American nation soon being able to hurl dynamite bombs upon defenseless enemies from flying machines.

I believe that militarism will cease when the liberty-loving spirits of the world say to their masters: "Go and do your own killing. We have sacrificed ourselves and our loved ones long enough fighting your battles. In return you have made parasites and criminals of us in times of peace and brutalized us in times of war. You have separated us from our brothers and have made of the world a human slaughterhouse. No, we will not do your killing or fight for the country that you have stolen from us."

Oh, I believe with all my heart that human brotherhood and solidarity will clear the horizon from the terrible red streak of war and destruction.

4. AS TO FREE SPEECH AND PRESS

The Buwalda case is only one phase of the larger question of free speech, free press and the right of free assembly.

Many good people imagine that the principles of free speech or press can be exercised properly and with safety within the limits of constitutional guarantees. That is the only excuse, it seems to me, for the terrible apathy and indifference to the onslaught upon free speech and press that we have witnessed in this county within the last few months.

I believe that free speech and press mean that I may say and write what I please. This right, when regulated by constitutional provisions, legislative enactments, almighty decisions of the Postmaster General or the policeman's club, becomes a farce. I am well aware that I will be warned of consequences if we remove the chains from speech and press. I believe, however, that the cure of consequences resulting from the unlimited exercise of expression is to allow more expression.

Mental shackles have never yet stemmed the tide of progress, whereas premature social explosions have only too often been brought about through a wave of repression.

Will our governors never learn that countries like England, Holland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark, with the largest freedom of expression, have been freest from "consequences"? Whereas Russia, Spain, Italy, France and, alas! even America, have raised these "consequences" to the most pressing political factor. Ours is supposed to be a country ruled by the majority, yet every policeman who is not vested with power by the majority can break up a meeting, drag the lecturer off the platform and club the audience out of the hall in true Russian fashion. The Postmaster General, who is not an elective officer, has the power to suppress publications and confiscate mail. From his decision there is no more appeal than from that of the Russian Czar. Truly, I believe we need a new Declaration of Independence. Is there no modern Jefferson or Adams?

5. AS TO THE CHURCH

At the recent convention of the political remnants of a once revolutionary idea it was voted that religion and vote getting have nothing to do with each other. Why should they? "So long as man is willing to delegate to the devil the care of his soul, he might, with the same consistency, delegate to the politician the care of his rights. That religion is a private affair has long been settled by the Bis-Marxian Socialists of Germany. Our American Marxians, poor of blood and originality, must needs go to Germany for their wisdom. That wisdom has served as a capital whip to lash the several millions of people into the well-disciplined army of Socialism. It might do the same here. For goodness' sake, let's not offend respectability, let's not hurt the religious feelings of the people.

Religion is a superstition that originated in man's mental inability to solve natural phenomena. The Church is an organized institution that has always been a stumbling block to progress.

Organized churchism has stripped religion of its naïveté and primitiveness. It has turned religion into a nightmare that oppresses the human soul and holds the mind in bondage. "The Dominion of Darkness," as the last true Christian, Leo Tolstoi, calls the Church, has been a foe of human development and free thought, and as such it has no place in the life of a truly free people.

6. AS TO MARRIAGE AND LOVE

I believe these are probably the most tabooed subjects in this country. It is almost impossible to talk about them without scandalizing the cherished propriety of a lot of good folk. No wonder so much ignorance prevails relative to these questions. Nothing short of an open, frank, and intelligent discussion will purify the air from the hysterical, sentimental rubbish that is shrouding these vital subjects, vital to individual as well as social well-being.

Marriage and love are not synonymous; on the contrary, they are often antagonistic to each other. I am aware of the fact that some marriages are actuated by love, but the narrow, material confines of marriage, as it is, speedily crush the tender flower of affection.

Marriage is an institution which furnishes the State and Church with a tremendous revenue and the means of prying into that phase of life which refined people have long considered their own, their very own most sacred affair. Love is that most powerful factor of human relationship which from time immemorial has defied all man-made laws and broken through the iron bars of conventions in Church and morality. Marriage is often an economic arrangement purely, furnishing the woman with a life-long life insurance policy and the man with a perpetuator of his kind or a pretty toy. That is, marriage, or the training thereto, prepares the woman for the life of a parasite, a dependent, helpless servant, while it furnishes the man the right of a chattel mortgage over a human life.

How can such a condition of affairs have anything in common with love?—with the element that would forego all the wealth of money and power and live in its own world of untrammeled human expression? But this is not the age of romanticism, of Romeo and Juliet, Faust and Marguerite, of moonlight ecstasies, of flowers and songs. Ours is a practical age. Our first consideration is an income. So much the worse for us if we have reached the era when the soul's highest flights are to be checked. No race can develop without the love element.

But if two people are to worship at the shrine of love, what is to become of the golden calf, marriage? "It is the only security for the woman, for the child, the family, the State." But it is no security to love; and without love no true home can or does exist. Without love no child should be born; without love no true woman can be related to a man. The fear that love is not sufficient material safety for the child is out of date. I believe when woman signs her own emancipation, her first declaration of independence will consist in admiring and loving a man for the qualities of his heart and mind and not for the quantities in his pocket. The second declaration will be that she has the right to follow that love without let or hindrance from the outside world. The third and most important declaration will be the absolute right to free motherhood.

In such a mother and an equally free father rests the safety of the child. They have the strength, the sturdiness, the harmony to create an atmosphere wherein alone the human plant can grow into an exquisite flower.

7. AS TO ACTS OF VIOLENCE

And now I have come to that point in my beliefs about which the greatest misunderstanding prevails in the minds of the American public. "Well, come, now, don't you propagate violence, the killing of crowned heads and Presidents?" Who says that I do? Have you heard me, has any one heard me? Has anyone seen it printed in our literature? No, but the papers say so, everybody says so; consequently it must be so. Oh, for the accuracy and logic of the dear public!

I believe that Anarchism is the only philosophy of peace, the only theory of the social relationship that values human life above everything else. I know that some Anarchists have committed acts of violence, but it is the terrible economic inequality and great political injustice that prompt such acts, not Anarchism. Every institution to-day rests on violence; our very atmosphere is saturated with it. So long as such a state exists we might as well strive to stop the rush of Niagara as hope to do away with violence. I have already stated that countries with some measure of freedom of expression have had few or no acts of violence. What is the moral? Simply this: No act committed by an Anarchist has been for personal gain, aggrandizement or profit, but rather a conscious protest against some repressive, arbitrary, tyrannical measure from above.

President Carnot, of France, was killed by Caserio in response to Carnot's refusal to commute the death sentence of Vaillant, for whose life the entire literary, scientific and humanitarian world of France had pleaded.

Bresci went to Italy on his own money, earned in the silk weaving mills of Paterson, to call King Humbert to the bar of justice for his order to shoot defenseless women and children during a bread riot. Angelino executed Prime Minister Canovas for the latter's resurrection of the Spanish inquisition at Montjuich Prison. Alexander Berkman attempted the life of Henry C. Frick during the Homestead strike only because of his intense sympathy for the eleven strikers killed by Pinkertons and for the widows and orphans evicted by Frick from their wretched little homes that were owned by Mr. Carnegie.

Every one of these men not only made his reasons known to the world in spoken or written statements, showing the cause that led to his act, proving that the unbearable economic and political pressure, the suffering and despair of their fellow-men, women and children prompted the acts, and not the philosophy of Anarchism. They came openly, frankly and ready to stand the consequences, ready to give their own lives.

In diagnosing the true nature of our social disease I cannot condemn those who, through no fault of their own, are suffering from a wide-spread malady.

I do not believe that these acts can, or ever have been intended to, bring about the social reconstruction. That can only be done, first, by a broad and wide education as to man's place in society and his proper relation to his fellows; and, second, through example. By example I mean the actual living of a truth once recognized, not the mere theorizing of its life element. Lastly, and the most powerful weapon, is the conscious, intelligent, organized, economic protest of the masses through direct action and the general strike.

The general contention that Anarchists are opposed to organization, and hence stand for chaos, is absolutely groundless. True, we do not believe in the compulsory, arbitrary side of organization that would compel people of antagonistic tastes and interests into a body and hold them there by coercion. Organization as the result of natural blending of common interests, brought about through voluntary adhesion, Anarchists do not only not oppose, but believe in as the only possible basis of social life.

It is the harmony of organic growth which produces variety of color and form—the complete whole we admire in the flower. Analogously will the organized activity of free human beings endowed with the spirit of solidarity result in the perfection of social harmony—which is Anarchism. Indeed, only Anarchism makes non-authoritarian organization a reality, since it abolishes the existing antagonism between individuals and classes.

Source: Emma Goldman, "What I Believe," New York World, July 19, 1908.

STUDY QUESTIONS

Please answer all of the following questions.

1. How does Goldman characterize the public's perception of her, and what historical parallels does she use to explain the treatment of new or unpopular ideas?

2. According to the text, what is the "fundamental cause" of the wretched existence of millions under the current system of property?

3. What is Goldman's primary critique of government and statutory regulations regarding their influence on human creativity and moral behavior?

4. In the section on Militarism, what specific "great military offense" did Private William Buwalda commit, and why does Goldman view his sentence as a destruction of liberty?

5. How does Goldman define the difference between love and the institution of marriage, and what three "declarations" does she believe will constitute woman's emancipation?

6. According to the final section, what does Goldman believe is the "most powerful weapon" for bringing about social reconstruction, and how does she define "true" organization?

Short essay: please select one of the following and answer it in a minimum of 100 words.

a. The "Process" of Liberty: Goldman states that "What I believe" is a process rather than a finality. Discuss the significance of viewing political philosophy as an evolving struggle rather than a fixed formula. How does this perspective align with her belief that the "struggle for" liberty is what develops human character?

b. The Economics of Crime: Analyze Goldman's claim that ninety percent of all crimes are "property crimes" rooted in economic inequality. Evaluate her argument that law and prisons are ineffective deterrents to crime. Does she offer a viable alternative for maintaining social order without the "policeman's club"?

c. Militarism and Obedience: Goldman contrasts "unquestioning obedience" with the pursuit of happiness. Discuss her critique of the soldier as a "professional man-killer." How does her analysis of the Buwalda case illustrate the tension between state-mandated loyalty and the individual's right to free association?

d. The Root of Violence: While Goldman admits Anarchists have committed acts of violence, she argues these are "conscious protests" against "repressive, arbitrary, tyrannical measures." Evaluate her diagnosis of violence as a "social disease." Does her refusal to condemn these individuals undermine her claim that Anarchism is a "philosophy of peace"?

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JOHN DEWEY: DEMOCRACY

Born in Burlington, Vermont, John Dewey (1859-1952) was a prominent American philosopher of the early twentieth-century. He is often associated with William James and Charles Sanders Pierce as originators of philosophical pragmatism, or "instrumentalism" as Dewey himself called it. According to this view, a philosophical or scientific theory's worth rests solely on its usefulness, and if it has none it should be rejected in favor of a more useful alternative. Throughout his long career, the notion of democracy was central to his political philosophy, and the selections below are from three works that cover a 30-year period. In his essay "Ethics and Democracy" (1888), he argues two main points. First is that genuine democracy is not a system of merely tallying votes, where each person holds a proportional fraction of the country's total power. Rather, democracy is where the individual and society are related together organically: the citizen is a member of the larger social organism, yet at the same time the citizen embodies the spirit and will of the whole organism. As such, democracy is not an unstable form of government that collapses into tyranny, as legal historian Henry Maine maintain, but it is in fact the most stable form of government. Second, democracy is not merely a form of government, but instead is the ethical idea of humanity that underlies all our human associations. It is an all-encompassing way of life, and in many ways like a religion. The second selection is from his book Ethics (1908), in which he describes challenges that political democracy faces if it is to remain effective. These include distrust of government, indifference to public concern, and corruption. The final selection is from Reconstruction in Philosophy (1919), and in this he distances himself a little from the "organic" of political philosophy, especially the version held by Hegel and other nineteenth-century German idealists. He begins stating that there are only three approaches to political philosophy: the individualistic, the socialistic, and the organic. However, he argues, all three are flawed since their supporters propose general concepts about the relation between society, while ignoring concrete situations and problems that need to be solved. Society, Dewey argues, involves a wide variety of associations of members, including clubs, companies, towns, all of which involve communication and participation among members. In all these contexts, there is a democracy where each person can attempt to shape the policies of the group to address specific problems or concerns. It is an experimental process where new ideas are put forward and tested, and, even if they fail, the group learns from the experience.

DEMOCRACY AS AN ORGANIC AND ETHICAL CONCEPT (from "Ethics and Democracy")

Henry Maine's Numerical View of Democracy as Unstable and Tyrannical

[According to Henry Maine, Democracy] is but the "product of a whole series of accidents." Its future prospects are as uncertain as its past is brief. It is "the most fragile and insecure" of governments; since its introduction government is more instable than it has been since the time of the Pretorian Guards [of the Roman Army]. Judging from past experience it always "ends in producing monstrous and morbid forms of monarchy and aristocracy." His account of its actual tendencies is such as his summary of its past career and vaticination [i.e., prediction] of its future might lead us to expect. Its legislation is a wild burst of destructive wantonness [i.e., excessiveness]; an arbitrary overthrow of all existing institutions, followed by a longer period in which its principles put an end to all social and political activity, and result in a dead level of ultra-conservatism," for, as he oracularly remarks: "There can be no delusion greater than that democracy is a progressive form of government." "The establishment of the masses in power is of blackest omen for all legislation founded on scientific opinion." The summary of the whole matter is the dictum approvingly quoted from Strauss, "History is a sound aristocrat.". . .

What gives the democracy more than other forms of government the appearance of being a mere rule of a mass or multitude is, without doubt, the use which it makes of individual suffrage [i.e., voting] on the one hand and majority rule on the other. Since it thus appears to decide all questions of policy and of men by mere weighing of numbers, it is easy to represent democracy as concerned for the most part with a problem in arithmetic. Analytic abstraction, having perchance already deprived men of all their qualities due to their social relations, now proceeds further to reduce them into merely numerical individuals, into ballot-projecting units. Then the mere accident of a few bare units more or less on this side or that, seems, by bare numerical preponderance, to form the will of the people in this direction or that. Such is the theoretical analysis of democracy most often presented to us. . . .

The Organic view of Democracy: The Individual Embodies the Whole Organism

The theory [of Maine's] which makes of democratic society a mere mass, makes, on the other hand, the democratic citizen a mere minced morsel of this mass, a disorganized fragment. If, however, society be truly described as organic, the citizen is a member of the organism, and, just in proportion to the perfection of the organism, has concentrated within himself its intelligence and will. Disguise it as we may, this [organic] theory can have but one result, that of the sovereignty of the citizen. . . .

According to one theory, sovereignty is located in the people as a whole, one might say as a mob; according to another it is latent in the nation as a definite political body, but manifest only in the head of the nation; according to the third (the one adopted here at least by Maine) it is situated in whatever portions of the state have the power to make, alter and enforce laws without appeal. If we take the latter notion, sovereignty is simply power to do this or that. It follows that in the democratic state (according to Maine's conception of it as a multitude) this power must be divided into fragments, each citizen having simply his fractional part of the total amount of sovereignty at command. Thus the exercise of sovereignty is a question of division, just as the formation of a common will is one in addition. Given so much sovereignty, and so many citizens, how much does each member have? The individual, the ultimate unit, thus becomes an n-millionth of political power. But if we really adopt the organic conception of society, the case stands quite otherwise. The attempt to make the organic theory work only in one direction, namely, as applicable to society but not to its members, is to deny the theory. This is as much an account of the individual as it is of the whole. One who has really adopted the notion can say not less, but more than any one else, that society exists for and by individuals. But it is because he has given up the fiction of isolated unsocial units, and has realized that the individual embodies and realizes within himself the spirit and will of the whole organism.

This is not the place for an examination of the conception of organism; but it must be remembered that it is a thoroughly reciprocal conception. The animal body is not the type of an organism [that we are talking about here], because the members, the organs, have their life, after all, only as parts, conditioned by their external space relations. They indeed participate in the life of the whole, while the whole lives in them, giving them their activity. But they are absorbed in this whole. The whole has not given its life to them so freely that they can take on the appearance of independent lives, isolated in space. The organic relation [in animal bodies] is incomplete. But human society represents a more perfect organism. The whole lives truly in every member, and there is no longer the appearance of physical aggregation, or continuity. The organism manifests itself as what it truly is, an ideal or spiritual life, a unity of will. If then, society and the individual are really organic to each other, then the individual is society concentrated. He is not merely its image or mirror. He is the localized manifestation of its life. And if, as actually happens, society be not yet possessed of one will, but partially is one and partially has a number of fragmentary and warring wills, it yet follows that so far as society has a common purpose and spirit, so far each individual is not representative of a certain proportionate share of the sum total of will, but is its vital embodiment. And this is the theory, often crudely expressed, but none the less true in substance, that every citizen is a sovereign, the American theory, a doctrine which in grandeur has but one equal in history, and that its fellow, namely, that every man is a priest of God. In conception, at least, democracy approaches most nearly the ideal of all social organization; that in which the individual and society are organic to each other. For this reason democracy, so far as it is really democracy, is the most stable, not the most insecure, of governments.

Democracy is the Ethical Ideal of Humanity, not Merely a Form of Government

We have completed the first part of our examination. We have considered the theory of democratic government suggested by Sir Henry Maine, so far as it relates to the conception of the common will, of the individual citizen, and of the origin of government. We have now to see whether we can stop with the idea of democracy as merely a form of government, or whether it implies something more. James Russell Lowell is a man of letters, not a professed student of politics, and yet where he says of democracy that he is "speaking of a sentiment, a spirit, and not of a form of government, for this is but the outgrowth of the latter and not its cause," we must recognize that the weight of history and of politics is on his side, as it is not on that of Maine. . . . To say that democracy is only a form of government is like saying that home is a more or less geometrical arrangement of bricks and mortar; that the church is a building with pews, pulpit and spire. It is true; they certainly are so much. But it is false; they are so infinitely more. Democracy, in a word, is a social, that is to say, an ethical conception, and upon its ethical significance is based its significance as governmental. Democracy is a form of government only because it is a form of moral and spiritual association.

Again, for illustration, take the notion of equality. If we heed the aristocratic school, we learn that equality means numerical equality, that one number one is just as good as any other number one. Conceiving it to refer to bald individuality, they think its inevitable outcome, logical if not historical, is an equal division of all things from virtue to wealth. Democracy is condemned because it regards as equal the worst and the best of men, the wisest and the most ignorant. It is condemned because it is said to aim at an equal distribution of wealth and of the happiness that grows from material possessions and surroundings. It is said that it is both foolish and wicked to attempt by the lie of equality to blind ones eyes to the differences of men in wisdom, virtue and industry; that upon these differences, indeed, rests the whole structure of society with its necessary grades of subordination and service; and that the only society which is either stable or progressive is one in which the motives of inequality, both political and industrial, have fair play. . . .

What shall we say to this indictment [against democratic equality]? Simply that it is beside the mark. As relates to democracy, it corresponds to no reality. Equality is not an arithmetical, but an ethical conception. Personality is as universal as humanity; it is indifferent to all distinctions which divide men from men. Wherever you have a man, there you have personality, and there is no trace by which one personality may be distinguished from another so as to be set above or below. It means that in every individual there lives an infinite and universal possibility; that of being a king and priest. Aristocracy is blasphemy against personality. . .

I have used these illustrations simply for the sake of showing what I understand the conception of democracy to mean, and to show that the ordinary objections to democracy rest upon ideas which conceive of it after the type of an individualism of a numerical character; and [I] have tried to suggest that democracy is an ethical idea, the idea of a personality, with truly infinite capacities, incorporate with every man. Democracy and the one, the ultimate, ethical ideal of humanity are to my mind synonyms. The idea of democracy, the ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity, represent a society in which the distinction between the spiritual and the secular has ceased, and as in Greek theory, as in the Christian theory of the Kingdom of God, the church and the state, the divine and the human organization of society are one.

CHALLENGES TO POLITICAL DEMOCRACY (from Ethics, 20)

Growth of Democracy

The evolution of democratically regulated States, as distinct from those ordered in the interests of a small group, or of a special class, is the social counterpart of the development of a comprehensive and common good. Externally viewed, democracy is a piece of machinery, to be maintained or thrown away, like any other piece of machinery, on the basis of its economy and efficiency of working. Morally, it is the effective embodiment of the moral ideal of a good which consists in the development of all the social capacities of every individual member of society.

Present Problems: 1. Distrust of Government

Present moral problems connected with political affairs have to do with safeguarding the democratic ideal against the influences which are always at work to undermine it, and with building up for it a more complete and extensive embodiment. The historic antecedent of our own governmental system was the exercise of a monopoly by a privileged class. It became a democratic institution partly because the King, in order to secure the monopoly, had to concede and guarantee to the masses of the people certain rights as against the oligarchical interests which might rival his powers; and partly because the centralization of power, with the arbitrary despotism it created, called out protests which finally achieved the main popular liberties: safety of life and property from arbitrary forfeiture, arrest, or seizure by the sovereign; the rights of free assembly, petition, a free press, and of representation in the law-making body.

Upon its face, the struggle for individual liberty was a struggle against the overbearing menace of despotic rulers. This fact has survived in an attitude towards government which cripples its usefulness as an agency of the general will. Government, even in the most democratic countries, is still thought of as an external "ruler," operating from above, rather than as an organ by which people associated in pursuit of common ends can most effectively cooperate for the realization of their own aims. Distrust of government was one of the chief traits of the situation in which the American nation was born. It is embodied not only in popular tradition, and party creeds, but in our organic laws, which contain many provisions expressly calculated to prevent the corporate social body from effecting its ends freely and easily through governmental agencies.

There can be no doubt that the movement to restrict the functions of government, the laissez-faire movement, was in its time an important step in human freedom, because so much of governmental action was despotic in intention and stupid in execution. But it is also a mistake to continue to think of a government which is only the people associated for the assuring of their own ends as if it were the same sort of thing as a government which represented the will of an irresponsible class. The advance of means of publicity, and of natural and social science, provides not only protection against ignorant and unwise public action, but also constructive instrumentalities of intelligent administrative activities. One of the chief moral problems of the present day is, then, that of making governmental machinery such a prompt and flexible organ for expressing the common interest and purpose as will do away with that distrust of government which properly must endure so long as "government" is something imposed from above and exercised from without.

Problem 2. Indifference to Public Concerns

The multiplication of private interests is a measure of social progress: it marks the multiplication of the sources and ingredients of happiness. But it also invites neglect of the fundamental general concerns which, seeming very remote, get pushed out of sight by the pressure of the nearer and more vivid personal interests. The great majority of men have their thoughts and feelings well occupied with their family and business affairs; with their clubs for recreation, their church associations, and so on. "Politics" becomes the trade of a class which is especially expert in the manipulation of their fellows and skilled in the "acceleration" of public opinion. "Politics" then gets a bad name, and the aloofness from public matters of those best fitted, theoretically, to participate in them is further promoted. The saying of Plato, twenty-five hundred years ago, that the penalty good men pay for not being interested in government is that they are then ruled by men worse than themselves, is verified in most of our American cities.

Problem 3. Corruption

This indifference of the many, which throws the management of political affairs into the hands of a few, leads inevitably to corruption. At the best, government is administered by human beings possessed of ordinary human frailties and partialities; and, at the best, therefore, its ideal function of serving impartially the common good must be compromised in its execution. But the control of the inner machinery of governmental power by a few who can work in irresponsible secrecy because of the indifference and even contempt of the many, incites to deliberate perversion of public functions into private advantages. As embezzlement is appropriation of trust funds to private ends, so corruption, "graft," is prostitution of public resources, whether of power or of money, to personal or class interests. That a "public office is a public trust" is at once an axiom of political ethics and a principle most difficult to realize.

In our own day, a special field has been opened within which corruption may flourish, in the development of public utility companies. Railways, city transportation systems, telegraph and telephone systems, the distribution of water and light, require public franchises, for they either employ public highways or they call upon the State to exercise its power of eminent domain. These enterprises can be carried on efficiently and economically only as they are either monopolies, or quasi-monopolies. All modern life, however, is completely bound up with and dependent upon facilities of communication, intercourse, and distribution. Power to control the various public-service corporations carries with it, therefore, power to control and to tax all industries, power to build up and cast down communities, companies, and individuals, to an extent which might well have been envied by royal houses of the past. It becomes then a very special object for great corporations to control the agencies of legislation and administration; and it becomes a very special object for party leaders and bosses to get control of party machinery in order to act as brokers in franchises and in special favors—sometimes directly for money, sometimes for the perpetuation and extension of their own power and influence, sometimes for the success, through influential support and contribution to party funds, of the national party with which they are identified.

DEMOCRACY AS EXPERIMENTALLY SOLVING CONCRETE SOCIAL PROBLEMS (from Reconstruction in Philosophy, 8)

Three Approaches to Political Philosophy: Individualistic, Socialistic, Organic

How can philosophic change seriously affect social philosophy? As far as fundamentals are concerned, every view and combination appears to have been formulated already. Society is composed of individuals: this obvious and basic fact no philosophy, whatever its pretensions to novelty, can question or alter. Hence these three alternatives: Society must exist for the sake of individuals [i.e., extreme individualistic]; or individuals must have their ends and ways of living set for them by society [i.e., extreme socialistic]; or else society and individuals are correlative, organic, to one another, society requiring the service and subordination of individuals and at the same time existing to serve them [i.e., organic]. Beyond these three views, none seems to be logically conceivable. Moreover, while each of the three types includes many subspecies and variations within itself, yet the changes seem to have been so thoroughly rung that at most only minor variations are now possible.

Especially would it seem true that the "organic" conception meets all the objections to the extreme individualistic and extreme socialistic theories, avoiding the errors alike of Plato and Bentham. Just because society is composed of individuals, it would seem that individuals and the associative relations that hold them together must be of coequal importance. Without strong and competent individuals, the bonds and ties that form society have nothing to lay hold on. Apart from associations with one another, individuals are isolated from one another and fade and wither; or are opposed to one another and their conflicts injure individual development. Law, state, church, family, friendship, industrial association, these and other institutions and arrangements are necessary in order that individuals may grow and find their specific capacities and functions. Without their aid and support human life is, as Hobbes said, brutish, solitary, nasty.

These Three Approaches are too Generalized and Ignore Concrete Situations

We plunge into the heart of the matter, by asserting that these various theories suffer from a common defect. They are all committed to the logic of general notions under which specific situations are to be brought. What we want light upon is this or that group of individuals, this or that concrete human being, this or that special institution or social arrangement. For such a logic of inquiry, the traditionally accepted logic substitutes discussion of the meaning of concepts and their dialectical relationship to one another. The discussion goes on in terms of the state, the individual; the nature of institutions as such, society in general.

We need guidance in dealing with particular perplexities in domestic life, and are met by dissertations on the Family or by assertions of the sacredness of individual Personality. We want to know about the worth of the institution of private property as it operates under given conditions of definite time and place. We meet with the reply of Proudhon that property generally is theft, or with that of Hegel that the realization of will is the end of all institutions, and that private ownership as the expression of mastery of personality over physical nature is a necessary element in such realization. Both answers may have a certain suggestiveness in connection with specific situations. But the conceptions are not proffered for what they may be worth in connection with special historic phenomena. They are general answers supposed to have a universal meaning that covers and dominates all particulars. Hence they do not assist inquiry. They close it. They are not instrumentalities to be employed and tested in clarifying concrete social difficulties. They are ready-made principles to be imposed upon particulars in order to determine their nature. They tell us about the state when we want to know about some state. But the implication is that what is said about the state applies to any state that we happen to wish to know about.

In transferring the issue from concrete situations to definitions and conceptual deductions, the effect, especially of the [Hegelian] organic theory, is to supply the apparatus for intellectual justification of the established order. Those most interested in practical social progress and the emancipation of groups from oppression have turned a cold shoulder to the organic theory. The effect, if not the intention, of German idealism as applied in social philosophy was to provide a bulwark for the maintenance of the political status quo against the tide of radical ideas coming from revolutionary France. Although Hegel asserted in explicit form that the end of states and institutions is to further the realization of the freedom of all, his effect was to consecrate the Prussian State and to enshrine bureaucratic absolutism. Was this apologetic tendency accidental, or did it spring from something in the logic of the notions that were employed?

Surely the latter. If we talk about the state and the individual, rather than about this or that political organization and this or that group of needy and suffering human beings, the tendency is to throw the glamor and prestige, the meaning and value attached to the general notion, over the concrete situation and thereby to cover up the defects of the latter and disguise the need of serious reforms. The meanings which are found in the general notions are injected into the particulars that come under them. Quite properly so if we once grant the logic of rigid universals under which the concrete cases have to be subsumed in order to be understood and explained.

Inadequacies of Hegelian Organic Theory: Minimizes Specific Conflicts

Again, the tendency of the organic point of view is to minimize the significance of specific conflicts. Since the individual and the state or social institution are but two sides of the same reality, since they are already reconciled in principle and conception, the conflict in any particular case can be but apparent. Since in theory the individual and the state are reciprocally necessary and helpful to one another, why pay much attention to the fact that in this state a whole group of individuals are suffering from oppressive conditions? In "reality" their interests cannot be in conflict with those of the state to which they belong; the opposition is only superficial and casual. Capital and labor cannot "really" conflict because each is an organic necessity to the other, and both to the organized community as a whole. There cannot "really" be any sex-problem because men and women are indispensable both to one another and to the state. In his day, Aristotle could easily employ the logic of general concepts superior to individuals to show that the institution of slavery was in the interests both of the state and of the slave class. Even if the intention is not to justify the existing order the effect is to divert attention from special situations. Rationalistic logic formerly made men careless in observation of the concrete in physical philosophy. It now operates to depress and retard observation in specific social phenomena. The social philosopher, dwelling in the region of his concepts, "solves" problems by showing the relationship of ideas, instead of helping men solve problems in the concrete by supplying them hypotheses to be used and tested in projects of reform.

Meanwhile, of course, the concrete troubles and evils remain. They are not magically waived out of existence because in theory society is organic. The region of concrete difficulties, where the assistance of intelligent method for tentative plans for experimentation is urgently needed, is precisely where intelligence fails to operate. In this region of the specific and concrete, men are thrown back upon the crudest empiricism, upon short-sighted opportunism and the matching of brute forces. In theory, the particulars are all neatly disposed of; they come under their appropriate heading and category; they are labeled and go into an orderly pigeon-hole in a systematic filing cabinet, labeled political science or sociology. But in empirical fact they remain as perplexing, confused and unorganized as they were before. So they are dealt with not by even an endeavor at scientific method but by blind rule of thumb, citation of precedents, considerations of immediate advantage, smoothing things over, use of coercive force and the clash of personal ambitions. The world still survives; it has therefore got on somehow:—so much cannot be denied. The method of trial and error and competition of selfishnesses has somehow wrought out many improvements. But social theory nevertheless exists as an idle luxury rather than as a guiding method of inquiry and planning. In the question of methods concerned with reconstruction of special situations rather than in any refinements in the general concepts of institution, individuality, state, freedom, law, order, progress, etc., lies the true impact of philosophical reconstruction.

Inadequacies of the Individualist Theory: Self-Interest Linked with Vague and General Political Ideas

Consider the conception of the individual self. The individualistic school of England and France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries [i.e., Locke and Bentham] was empirical in intent. It based its individualism, philosophically speaking, upon the belief that individuals are alone real, that classes and organizations are secondary and derived. They are artificial, while individuals are natural. In what way then can individualism be said to come under the animadversions [i.e., criticisms] that have been passed? To say the defect was that this school overlooked those connections with other persons which are a part of the constitution of every individual is true as far as it goes; but unfortunately it rarely goes beyond the point of just that wholesale justification of institutions which has been criticized. . . .

The import of this conception comes out in considering the fortunes of the idea of self-interest. All members of the empirical school emphasized this idea. It was the sole motive of mankind. Virtue was to be attained by making benevolent action profitable to the individual; social arrangements were to be reformed so that egoism and altruistic consideration of others would be identified. Moralists of the opposite school were not backward in pointing out the evils of any theory that reduced both morals and political science to means of calculating self-interest. Consequently they threw the whole idea of interest overboard as obnoxious to morals. The effect of this reaction was to strengthen the cause of authority and political obscurantism. When the play of interest is eliminated, what remains? What concrete moving forces can be found? Those who identified the self with something ready-made and its interest with acquisition of pleasure and profit took the most effective means possible to reinstate the logic of abstract conceptions of law, justice, sovereignty, freedom, etc.—all of those vague general ideas that for all their seeming rigidity can be manipulated by any clever politician to cover up his designs and to make the worse seem the better cause. Interests are specific and dynamic; they are the natural terms of any concrete social thinking. But they are damned beyond recovery when they are identified with the things of a petty selfishness. They can be employed as vital terms only when the self is seen to be in process, and interest to be a name for whatever is concerned in furthering its movement. . . .

Consequently we cannot be satisfied with the general statement that society and the state is organic to the individual. The question is one of specific causations. Just what response does this social arrangement, political or economic, evoke, and what effect does it have upon the disposition of those who engage in it? Does it release capacity? If so, how widely? . . . Such questions as these (as well as the more obvious ones about the qualities conventionally labelled moral), become the starting-points of inquiries about every institution of the community when it is recognized that individuality is not originally given but is created under the influences of associated life. . . .

The waste of mental energy due to conducting discussion of social affairs in terms of conceptual generalities is astonishing. How far would the biologist and the physician progress if when the subject of respiration is under consideration, discussion confined itself to bandying back and forth the concepts of organ and organism:—If for example one school thought respiration could be known and understood by insisting upon the fact that it occurs in an individual body and therefore is an "individual" phenomenon, while an opposite school insisted that it is simply one function in organic interaction with others and can be known or understood therefore only by reference to other functions taken in an equally general or wholesale way? Each proposition is equally true and equally futile. What is needed is specific inquiries into a multitude of specific structures and interactions. . . .

Society consists of Many Associations of Members involved in Communication and Participation

Just as "individual" is not one thing, but is a blanket term for the immense variety of specific reactions, habits, dispositions and powers of human nature that are evoked, and confirmed under the influences of associated life, so with the term "social." Society is one word, but infinitely many things. It covers all the ways in which by associating together men share their experiences, and build up common interests and aims; street gangs, schools for burglary, clans, social cliques, trades unions, joint stock corporations, villages and international alliances. The new method takes effect in substituting inquiry into these specific, changing and relative facts (relative to problems and purposes, not metaphysically relative) for solemn manipulation of general notions. . . .

Society, as was said, is many associations not a single organization. Society means association; coming together in joint intercourse and action for the better realization of any form of experience which is augmented and confirmed by being shared. Hence there are as many associations as there are goods which are enhanced by being mutually communicated and participated in. And these are literally indefinite in number. Indeed, capacity to endure publicity and communication is the test by which it is decided whether a pretended good is genuine or spurious. Moralists have always insisted upon the fact that good is universal, objective, not just private, particular. But too often, like Plato, they have been content with a metaphysical universality or, like Kant, with a logical universality. Communication, sharing, joint participation are the only actual ways of universalizing the moral law and end. We insisted at the last hour upon the unique character of every intrinsic good. But the counterpart of this proposition is that the situation in which a good is consciously realized is not one of transient sensations or private appetites but one of sharing and communication—public, social. Even the hermit communes with gods or spirits; even misery loves company; and the most extreme selfishness includes a band of followers or some partner to share in the attained good. Universalization means socialization, the extension of the area and range of those who share in a good.

The increasing acknowledgment that goods exist and endure only through being communicated and that association is the means of conjoint sharing lies back of the modern sense of humanity and democracy. It is the saving salt in altruism and philanthropy, which without this factor degenerate into moral condescension and moral interference, taking the form of trying to regulate the affairs of others under the guise of doing them good or of conferring upon them some right as if it were a gift of charity. It follows that organization is never an end in itself. It is a means of promoting association, of multiplying effective points of contact between persons, directing their intercourse into the modes of greatest fruitfulness.

The tendency to treat organization as an end in itself is responsible for all the exaggerated theories in which individuals are subordinated to some institution to which is given the noble name of society. Society is the process of associating in such ways that experiences, ideas, emotions, values are transmitted and made common. To this active process, both the individual and the institutionally organized may truly be said to be subordinate. The individual is subordinate because except in and through communication of experience from and to others, he remains dumb, merely sentient, a brute animal. Only in association with fellows does he become a conscious centre of experience. Organization, which is what traditional theory has generally meant by the term Society or State, is also subordinate because it becomes static, rigid, institutionalized whenever it is not employed to facilitate and enrich the contacts of human beings with one another.

Democracy involves Each Person Experimentally Shaping the Policies of Social Groups

The long-time controversy between rights and duties, law and freedom is another version of the strife between the Individual and Society as fixed concepts. Freedom for an individual means growth, ready change when modification is required.

It [i.e., freedom] signifies an active process, that of release of capacity from whatever hems it in. But since society can develop only as new resources are put at its disposal, it is absurd to suppose that freedom has positive significance for individuality but negative meaning for social interests. Society is strong, forceful, stable against accident only when all its members can function to the limit of their capacity. Such functioning cannot be achieved without allowing a leeway of experimentation beyond the limits of established and sanctioned custom. A certain amount of overt confusion and irregularity is likely to accompany the granting of the margin of liberty without which capacity cannot find itself. But socially as well as scientifically the great thing is not to avoid mistakes but to have them take place under conditions such that they can be utilized to increase intelligence in the future.

If British liberal social philosophy tended, true to the spirit of its atomistic empiricism, to make freedom and the exercise of rights ends in themselves, the remedy is not to be found in recourse to a philosophy of fixed obligations and authoritative law such as characterized German political thinking. The latter, as events have demonstrated, is dangerous because of its implicit menace to the free self-determination of other social groups. But it is also weak internally when put to the final test. In its hostility to the free experimentation and power of choice of the individual in determining social affairs, it limits the capacity of many or most individuals to share effectively in social operations, and thereby deprives society of the full contribution of all its members. The best guarantee of collective efficiency and power is liberation and use of the diversity of individual capacities in initiative, planning, foresight, vigor and endurance. Personality must be educated, personality cannot be educated by confining its operations to technical and specialized things, or to the less important relationships of life. Full education comes only when there is a responsible share on the part of each person, in proportion to capacity, in shaping the aims and policies of the social groups to which he belongs. This fact fixes the significance of democracy. It cannot be conceived as a sectarian or racial thing nor as a consecration of some form of government which has already attained constitutional sanction. It is but a name for the fact that human nature is developed only when its elements take part in directing things which are common, things for the sake of which men and women form groups—families, industrial companies, governments, churches, scientific associations and so on. The principle [of democracy] holds as much of one form of association, say in industry and commerce, as it does in government. The identification of democracy with political democracy which is responsible for most of its failures is, however, based upon the traditional ideas which make the individual and the state ready-made entities in themselves.

Source: John Dewey, "Ethics and Democracy" (1888); Ethics (1908), Ch. 20; Reconstruction in Philosophy (1919), Ch. 8.

STUDY QUESTIONS

Please answer all of the following questions.

1. According to Dewey in the section "democracy as an organic and ethical concept", describe Henry Maine's numerical view of democracy.

2. According to Dewey in the same section, describe the organic view of democracy and how democracy is an ethical ideal.

3. According to Dewey in the section "growth of democracy", what is democracy when externally viewed and what is it morally?

4. In the section "challenges to political democracy" describe the three main problems as Dewy presents them.

5. According to Dewey in the section "democracy as experimentally solving concrete social problems", what are the three approaches to political philosophy and how are they too generalized?

6. According to Dewey in the same section, describe the inadequacies of the Hegelian organic theory and the individualist theory.

7. According to Dewey in same section, describe the various types of associations that people have and the experimental process of shaping the policies of those groups.

Short essay: please select one of the following and answer it in a minimum of 100 words.

a. Dewey rejects Henry Maine's numerical view of democracy. What are Dewey's reasons and how might Maine respond?

b. Dewey rejects philosophers who approach political philosophy by generalizing about human nature and human institutions, rather than by focusing on concrete social problems. Examples of the generalizing approach might be Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. How might these generalizing philosophers respond to Dewey?

c. In "Ethics and Democracy" Dewey defends an organic theory of democracy but in Reconstruction he seems to reject the Hegelian version of it. Discuss the organic theory, his later reasons for rejecting it, and whether he was correct in rejecting it.

d. An anonymous critic wrote the following about Dewey's notion of democracy: "Man is a natural backslider, and certainly does love to take out "monopolies" against his fellow-kind, whenever possible. Even Dr. Dewey puts the word "copyright" as a fence around free quotation of his books. . . . In other words, Americans like to be favored, and favoritism is not Democracy" (The Gateway, 1921, Volume 35). Explain the critic's point and how might Dewey respond.

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CAPITALISM AND COLLECTIVE ACTION

John Maynard Keynes

Born in Cambridge, England, John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) was one of the leading economists of the twentieth-century, and originator of Keynesian economics, which was the dominant school of economics for several decades. His view, which appears in his most important work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1935–36), is that governments should actively manage the economy through public projects, taxation, and fiscal policy. In times of depression or recession, when the forces of supply and demand fail to produce full employment, the government should temporarily go into debt by creating public work projects, rather than attempting to balance its budget. The selections below are from his essay "The End of Laissez-Faire" (1926), in which he criticizes unrestrained capitalism and recommends steps for government intervention in the economy. Laisses-faire, literally "let it be", is the economic notion that governments should not interfere in the market, and instead allow market forces shape of the economy. Keynes argues that the notion of laisses-faire never emerged from rigorous economic theory, but instead from a mythology perpetuated by popular writers of the nineteenth-century when this theory flourished. Not even Adam Smith's theory of the invisible hand is a full-fledged endorsement of laisses-faire. Under close examination, he argues, it is evident that laissez-faire and its unrestrained pursuit of profit harms society in key economic areas. To break free of the laissez-faire trend, he suggests two major changes: (1) the creation of semi-autonomous bodies that seek the public good, and (2) the separation of public social services from private individual services.

I: HISTORICAL ORIGIN OF LAISSEZ-FAIRE

The disposition towards public affairs, which we conveniently sum up as individualism and laissez-faire, drew its sustenance from many different rivulets of thought and springs of feeling. For more than a hundred years our philosophers ruled us because, by a miracle, they nearly all agreed or seem to agree on this one thing. We do not dance even yet to a new tune. But a change is in the air. We hear but indistinctly what were once the clearest and most distinguishable voices which have ever instructed political mankind. The orchestra of diverse instruments, the chorus of articulate sound, is receding at last into the distance.

Emphasis on Individual Liberty

At the end of the seventeenth century the divine right of monarchs gave place to natural liberty and to the compact, and the divine right of the church to the principle of toleration, and to the view that a church is "a voluntary society of men", coming together, in a way which is "absolutely free and spontaneous" (Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration). Fifty years later the divine origin and absolute voice of duty gave place to the calculations of utility. In the hands of Locke and Hume these doctrines founded Individualism. The compact presumed rights in the individual; the new ethics, being no more than a scientific study of the consequences of rational self-love, placed the individual at the center. "The sole trouble Virtue demands", said Hume, "is that of just Calculation, and a steady preference of the greater Happiness." (An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, section 9).

These ideas accorded with the practical notions of conservatives and of lawyers. They furnished a satisfactory intellectual foundation to the rights of property and to the liberty of the individual in possession to do what he liked with himself and with his own. This was one of the contributions of the eighteenth century to the air we still breathe.

The purpose of promoting the individual was to depose the monarch and the church; the effect—through the new ethical significance attributed to contract—was to buttress property and prescriptions. But it was not long before the claims of society raised themselves anew against the individual. Paley and Bentham accepted utilitarian hedonism from the hands of Hume and his predecessors, but enlarged it into social utility.

Emphasis on Equality and Public Good

Rousseau took the Social Contract from Locke and drew out of it the General Will. In each case the transition was made by virtue of the new emphasis laid on equality. "Locke applies his Social Contract to modify the natural equality of mankind, so far as that phrase implies equality of property or even of privilege, in consideration of general security. In Rousseau's version equality is not only the starting-point but the goal." (Leslie Stephen, English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, II, 192).

Paley and Bentham reached the same destination, but by different routes. Paley avoided an egoistic conclusion to his hedonism by a God from the machine. "Virtue", he says, "is the doing good to mankind, in obedience to the will of God, and for the sake of everlasting happiness'—in this way bringing I and others to a parity. Bentham reached the same result by pure reason. There is no rational ground, he argued, for preferring the happiness of one individual, even oneself, to that of any other. Hence the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the sole rational object of conduct—taking utility from Hume, but forgetting that sage man's corollary: "Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger." 'Tis not contrary to reason for me to choose my total ruin to prevent the least uneasiness of an Indian, or person totally unknown to me ... Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.'

Rousseau derived equality from the state of nature, Paley from the will of God, Bentham from a mathematical law of indifference. Equality and altruism had thus entered political philosophy, and from Rousseau and Bentham sprang both democracy and utilitarian socialism.

This is the second current—sprang from long-dead controversies, and carried on its way by long-exploded sophistries—which still permeates our atmosphere of thought but it did not drive out the former current. It mixed with it. The early nineteenth century performed the miraculous union. It harmonized the conservative individualism of Locke, Hume, Johnson, and Burke with the socialism and democratic egalitarianism of Rousseau, Paley, Bentham, and Godwin.

Laissez-faire Harmony between Private Advantage and Public Good

Nevertheless, that age would have been hard put to it to achieve this harmony of opposites if it had not been for the economists, who sprang into prominence just at the right moment. The idea of a divine harmony between private advantage and the public good is already apparent in Paley. But it was the economists who gave the notion a good scientific basis. Suppose that by the working of natural laws individuals pursuing their own interests with enlightenment in condition of freedom always tend to promote the general interest at the same time! Our philosophical difficulties are resolved-at least for the practical man, who can then concentrate his efforts on securing the necessary conditions of freedom. To the philosophical doctrine that the government has no right to interfere, and the divine that it has no need to interfere, there is added a scientific proof that its interference is inexpedient. This is the third current of thought, just discoverable in Adam Smith, who was ready in the main to allow the public good to rest on "the natural effort of every individual to better his own condition", but not fully and self-consciously developed until the nineteenth century begins. The principle of laissez-faire had arrived to harmonize individualism and socialism, and to make at one Hume's egoism with the greatest good of the greatest number. The political philosopher could retire in favor of the business man—for the latter could attain the philosopher's summum bonum [i.e., highest good] by just pursuing his own private profit.

Yet some other ingredients were needed to complete the pudding. First the corruption and incompetence of eighteenth-century government, many legacies of which survived into the nineteenth. The individualism of the political philosophers pointed to laissez-faire. The divine or scientific harmony (as the case might be) between private interest and public advantage pointed to laissez-faire. But above all, the ineptitude of public administrators strongly prejudiced the practical man in favor of laissez-faire—a sentiment which has by no means disappeared. Almost everything which the State did in the eighteenth century in excess of its minimum functions was, or seemed, injurious or unsuccessful.

On the other hand, material progress between 1750 and 1850 came from individual initiative, and owed almost nothing to the directive influence of organized society as a whole. Thus practical experience reinforced a priori reasonings. The philosophers and the economists told us that for sundry deep reasons unfettered private enterprise would promote the greatest good of the whole. What could suit the business man better? And could a practical observer, looking about him, deny that the blessings of improvement which distinguished the age he lived in were traceable to the activities of individuals "on the make"?

Thus the ground was fertile for a doctrine that, whether on divine, natural, or scientific grounds, state action should be narrowly confined and economic life left, unregulated so far as may be, to the skill and good sense of individual citizens actuated by the admirable motive of trying to get on in the world.

Laissez-Faire Confirmed by Evolution

By the time that the influence of Paley and his like was waning, the innovations of Darwin were shaking the foundations of belief. Nothing could seem more opposed than the old doctrine and the new—the doctrine which looked on the world as the work of the divine watchmaker and the doctrine which seemed to draw all things out of Chance, Chaos, and Old Time. But at this one point the new ideas bolstered up the old. The economists were teaching that wealth, commerce, and machinery were the children of free competition—that free competition built London. But the Darwinians could go one better than that—free competition had built man. The human eye was no longer the demonstration of design, miraculously contriving all things for the best; it was the supreme achievement of chance, operating under conditions of free competition and laissez-faire. The principle of the survival of the fittest could be regarded as a vast generalization of the Ricardian economics. Socialist interferences became, in the light of this grander synthesis, not merely inexpedient, but impious, as calculated to retard the onward movement of the mighty process by which we ourselves had risen like Aphrodite out of the primeval slime of ocean.

Therefore I trace the peculiar unity of the everyday political philosophy of the nineteenth century to the success with which it harmonized diversified and warring schools and united all good things to a single end. Hume and Paley, Burke and Rousseau, Godwin and Malthus, Cobbett and Huskisson, Bentham and Coleridge, Darwin and the Bishop of Oxford, were all, it was discovered, preaching practically the same thing—individualism and laissez-faire. This was the Church of England and those her apostles, whilst the company of the economists were there to prove that the least deviation into impiety involved financial ruin.

These reasons and this atmosphere are the explanations, we know it or not—and most of us in these degenerate days are largely ignorant in the matter—why we feel such a strong bias in favor of laissez-faire, and why state action to regulate the value of money, or the course of investment, or the population, provokes such passionate suspicions in many upright breasts. We have not read these authors; we should consider their arguments preposterous if they were to fall into our hands. Nevertheless we should not, I fancy, think as we do, if Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Paley, Adam Smith, Bentham, and Miss Martineau had not thought and written as they did. A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind. I do not know which makes a man more conservative—to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.

II: ORIGIN OF THE PHRASE "LAISSEZ-FAIRE

Laissez-Faire in French Economics

I have said that it was the economists who furnished the scientific by which the practical man could solve the contradiction between egoism and socialism which emerged out of the philosophizing of the eighteenth century and the decay of revealed religion. But having said this for shortness' sake, I hasten to qualify it. This is what the economists are supposed to have said. No such doctrine is really to be found in the writings of the greatest authorities. It is what the popularizers and the vulgarizers said. It is what the Utilitarians, who admitted Hume's egoism and Bentham's egalitarianism at the same time, were driven to believe in, if they were to effect a synthesis.

The language of the economists lent itself to the laissez-faire interpretation. But the popularity of the doctrine must be laid at the door of the political philosophers of the day, whom it happened to suit, rather than of the political economists.

The maxim laissez-nous faire is traditionally attributed to the merchant Legendre addressing Colbert some time towards the end of the seventeenth century.

('Que faut-il faire pour vous aider?" asked Colbert. "Nous laisser faire" answered Legendre).

But there is no doubt the first writer to use the phrase, and to use it in clear association with the doctrine, is the Marquis d'Argenson about 1751.

The Marquis was the first man to wax passionate on the economic advantages of governments leaving trade alone. To govern better, he said, one must govern less.

The true cause of the decline of our manufactures, he declared, is the protection we have given to them.

"Leave them be, that should be the motto of every public authority, according to which the world is civilized..... A detestable principle that which would not wish us to grow except by lowering our neighbors! There is nothing but mischief and malignity of heart in those satisfied with that principle, and interest is opposed to it. Leave them be, damn it! Leave them be!"

Here we have the economic doctrine of laissez-faire, with its most fervent expression in free trade, fully clothed. The phrases and the idea must have passed current in Paris from that time on. But they were slow to establish themselves in literature; and the tradition associating with them the physiocrats, and particularly de Gournay and Quesnay, finds little support in the writings of this school, though they were, of course, proponents of the essential harmony of social and individual interests. The phrase laissez-faire is not to be found in the works of Adam Smith, of Ricardo, or of Malthus. Even the idea is not present in a dogmatic form in any of these authors. Adam Smith, of course, was a Free Trader and an opponent of many eighteenth-century restrictions on trade. But his attitude towards the Navigation Acts and the usury laws shows that he was not dogmatic. Even his famous passage about "the invisible hand" reflects the philosophy which we associate with Paley rather than the economic dogma of laissez-faire. As Sidgwick and Cliff Leslie have pointed out, Adam Smith's advocacy of the "obvious and simple system of natural liberty" is derived from his theistic and optimistic view of the order of the world as set forth in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, rather than any proposition of political economy proper. (Sidgwick, Principles of Political Economy, p. 20).

Laissez-Faire in Franklin, Bentham, Marcet

The phrase laissez-faire was, I think, first brought into popular usage in England by a well-known passage of Dr Franklin's. (Bentham uses the expression "laissez-nous faire'—Works, p. 440). It is not, indeed, until we come to the later works of Bentham—who was not an economist at all—that we discover the rule of laissez-faire, in the shape in which our grandfathers knew it, adapted into the service of the Utilitarian philosophy. For example in A Manual of Political Economy, (written in 1793, a chapter published in the Bibliothèque Britannique in 1798, and the whole first printed in Bowring's edition of this Works—1843) he writes: "The general rule is that nothing ought to be done or attempted by government; the motto or watchword of government, on these occasions, ought to be—Be quiet ... The request which agriculture, manufacturers, and commerce present to governments is as modest and reasonable as that which Diogenes made to Alexander: Stand out of my sunshine.'

From this time on it was the political campaign for free trade, the influence of the so-called Manchester School and of the Benthamite Utilitarians, the utterances of secondary economic authorities and the education stories of Miss Martineau and Mrs Marcet, that fixed laissez-faire in the popular mind as the practical conclusion of orthodox political economy—with this great difference, that the Malthusian view of population having been accepted in the meantime by this same school of thought, the optimistic laissez-faire of the last half of the eighteenth century gives place to the pessimistic laissez-faire of the last half of the nineteenth century. . . .

Nineteenth-Century Attacks on Laissez-Faire

From the time of John Stuart Mill, economists of authority have been in strong reaction against all such ideas. "Scarcely a single English economist of repute", as Professor Cannan has expressed it, "will join in a frontal attack upon Socialism in general," though, as he also adds, "nearly every economist, whether of repute or not, is always ready to pick holes in most socialistic proposals'. (Theories of Production and Distribution, p. 494). Economists no longer have any link with the theological or political philosophies out of which the dogma of social harmony was born, and their scientific analysis leads them to no such conclusions.

Cairnes, in the introductory lecture on "Political Economy and Laissez-faire", which he delivered at University College, London, in 1870, was perhaps the first orthodox economist to deliver a frontal attack upon laissez-faire in general. "The maxim of laissez-faire", he declared, "has no scientific basis whatever, but is at best a mere handy rule of practice."

This, for fifty years past, has been the view of all leading economists. Some of the most important work of Alfred Marshall—to take one instance—was directed to the elucidation of the leading cases in which private interest and social interest are not harmonious. Nevertheless, the guarded and undogmatic attitude of the best economists has not prevailed against the general opinion that an individualistic laissez-faire is both what they ought to teach and what in fact they do teach.

III. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CONFLICT BETWEEN ECONOMIC EFFICIENCY AND MORAL DESIRABILITY

Economists, like other scientists, have chosen the hypothesis from which they set out, and which they offer to beginners because it is the simplest, and not because it is the nearest to the facts. Partly for this reason, but partly, I admit, because they have been biased by the traditions of the subject, they have begun by assuming a state of affairs where the ideal distribution of productive resources can be brought about through individuals acting independently by the method of trial and error in such a way that those individuals who move in the right direction will destroy by competition those who move in the wrong direction. This implies that there must be no mercy or protection for those who embark their capital or their labor in the wrong direction. It is a method of bringing the most successful profit-makers to the top by a ruthless struggle for survival, which selects the most efficient by the bankruptcy of the less efficient. It does not count the cost of the struggle, but looks only to the benefits of the final result which are assumed to be permanent. The object of life being to crop the leaves off the branches up to the greatest possible height, the likeliest way of achieving this end is to leave the giraffes with the longest necks to starve out those whose necks are shorter. . . .

This assumption, however, of conditions where unhindered natural selection leads to progress, is only one of the two provisional assumptions which, taken as literal truth, have become the twin buttresses of laissez-faire. The other one is the efficacy, and indeed the necessity, of the opportunity for unlimited private money-making as an incentive to maximum effort. Profit accrues, under laissez-faire, to the individual who, whether by skill or good fortune, is found with his productive resources in the right place at the right time. A system which allows the skillful or fortunate individual to reap the whole fruits of this conjuncture evidently offers an immense incentive to the practice of the art of being in the right place at the right time. Thus one of the most powerful of human motives, namely the love of money, is harnessed to the task of distributing economic resources in the way best calculated to increase wealth.

The parallelism between economic laissez-faire and Darwinianism, already briefly noted, is now seen, as Herbert Spencer was foremost to recognize, to be very close indeed. Darwin invoked sexual love, acting through sexual selection, as an adjutant to natural selection by competition, to direct evolution along lines which should be desirable as well as effective, so the individualist invokes the love of money, acting through the pursuit of profit, as an adjutant to natural selection, to bring about the production on the greatest possible scale of what is most strongly desired as measured by exchange value.

The beauty and the simplicity of such a theory are so great that it is easy to forget that it follows not from the actual facts, but from an incomplete hypothesis introduced for the sake of simplicity. Apart from other objections to be mentioned later, the conclusion that individuals acting independently for their own advantage will produce the greatest aggregate of wealth, depends on a variety of unreal assumptions to the effect that the processes of production and consumption are in no way organic, that there exists a sufficient foreknowledge of conditions and requirements, and that there are adequate opportunities of obtaining this foreknowledge. For economists generally reserve for a later stage of their argument the complications which arise—(1) when the efficient units of production are large relatively to the units of consumption, (2) when overhead costs or joint costs are present, (3) when internal economies tend to the aggregation of production, (4) when the time required for adjustments is long, (5) when ignorance prevails over knowledge and (6) when monopolies and combinations interfere with equality in bargaining—they reserve, that is to say, for a later stage their analysis of the actual facts. Moreover, many of those who recognize that the simplified hypothesis does not accurately correspond to fact conclude nevertheless that it does "represent what is "natural" and therefore ideal. They regard the simplified hypothesis as health, and the further complications as disease.

Yet besides this question of fact there are other considerations, familiar enough, which rightly bring into the calculation the cost and character of the competitive struggle itself, and the tendency for wealth to be distributed where it is not appreciated most. If we have the welfare of the giraffes at heart, we must not overlook the sufferings of the shorter necks who are starved out, or the sweet leaves which fall to the ground and are trampled underfoot in the struggle, or the overfeeding of the long-necked ones, or the evil look of anxiety or struggling greediness which overcasts the mild faces of the herd.

But the principles of laissez-faire have had other allies besides economic textbooks. It must be admitted that they have been confirmed in the minds of sound thinkers and the reasonable public by the poor quality of the opponent proposals—protectionism on one hand, and Marxian socialism on the other. Yet these doctrines are both characterized, not only or chiefly by their infringing the general presumption in favor of laissez-faire, but by mere logical fallacy. Both are examples of poor thinking, of inability to analyze a process and follow it out to its conclusion. The arguments against them, though reinforced by the principle of laissez-faire, do not strictly require it. Of the two, protectionism is at least plausible, and the forces making for its popularity are nothing to wonder at. But Marxian socialism must always remain a portent to the historians of opinion—how a doctrine so illogical and so dull can have exercised so powerful and enduring an influence over the minds of men and, through them, the events of history. At any rate, the obvious scientific deficiencies of these two schools greatly contributed to the prestige and authority of nineteenth-century laissez-faire. . . .

Finally, individualism and laissez-faire could not, in spite of their deep roots in the political and moral philosophies of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, have secured their lasting hold over the conduct of public affairs, if it had not been for their conformity with the needs and wishes of the business world of the day. They gave full scope to our erstwhile heroes, the great business men. "At least one-half of the best ability in the Western world," Marshall used to say, "is engaged in business." A great part of "the higher imagination" of the age was thus employed. It was on the activities of these men that our hopes of progress were centered. . . .

This is a fine picture of the great captain of industry, the master-individualist, who serves us in serving himself, just, as any other artist does. Yet this one, in his turn, is becoming a tarnished idol. We grow more doubtful whether it is he who will lead us into paradise by the hand.

These many elements have contributed to the current intellectual bias, the mental make-up, the orthodoxy of the day. The compelling force of many of the original reasons has disappeared but, as usual, the vitality of the conclusions outlasts them. To suggest social action for the public good to the City of London is like discussing the Origin of Species with a bishop sixty years ago. The first reaction is not intellectual, but moral. An orthodoxy is in question, and the more persuasive the arguments the graver the offence. Nevertheless, venturing into the den of the lethargic monster, at any rate I have traced his claims and pedigree so as to show that he has ruled over us rather by hereditary right than by personal merit.

IV. A MODERATE PLANNING ALTERNATIVE TO LAISSEZ-FAIRE

Fallacies of Laissez-Faire

Let us clear from the ground the metaphysical or general principles upon which, from time to time, laissez-faire has been founded. It is not true that individuals possess a prescriptive "natural liberty" in their economic activities. There is no "compact" conferring perpetual rights on those who Have or on those who Acquire. The world is not so governed from above that private and social interest always coincide. It is not so managed here below that in practice they coincide. It is not a correct deduction from the principles of economics that enlightened self-interest always operates in the public interest. Nor is it true that self-interest generally is enlightened; more often individuals acting separately to promote their own ends are too ignorant or too weak to attain even these. Experience does not show that individuals, when they make up a social unit, are always less clear-sighted than when they act separately.

We cannot therefore settle on abstract grounds, but must handle on its merits in detail what Burke termed "one of the finest problems in legislation, namely, to determine what the State ought to take upon itself to direct by the public wisdom, and what it ought to leave, with as little interference as possible, to individual exertion." (Quoted by McCulloch in his Principles of Political Economy). We have to discriminate between what Bentham, in his forgotten but useful nomenclature, used to term Agenda and Non-Agenda, and to do this without Bentham's prior presumption that interference is, at the same time, "generally needless" and "generally pernicious." (Bentham's Manual of Political Economy, published posthumously, in Bowring's edition—1843). Perhaps the chief task of economists at this hour is to distinguish afresh the Agenda of government [i.e., matters pertaining to society and the state] from the Non-Agenda [i.e., matters pertaining to individual activity]; and the companion task of politics is to devise forms of government within a democracy which shall be capable of accomplishing the Agenda. I will illustrate what I have in mind by two examples.

Creation of Semi-Autonomous Bodies that Seek the Public Good

(1) I believe that in many cases the ideal size for the unit of control and organization lies somewhere between the individual and the modern State. I suggest, therefore, that progress lies in the growth and the recognition of semi-autonomous bodies within the State—bodies whose criterion of action within their own field is solely the public good as they understand it, and from whose deliberations motives of private advantage are excluded, though some place it may still be necessary to leave, until the ambit of men's altruism grows wider, to the separate advantage of particular groups, classes, or faculties—bodies which in the ordinary course of affairs are mainly autonomous within their prescribed limitations, but are subject in the last resort to the sovereignty of the democracy expressed through Parliament. . . .

It is true that many big undertakings, particularly public utility enterprises and other business requiring a large fixed capital, still need to be semi-socialized. But we must keep our minds flexible regarding the forms of this semi-socialism. We must take full advantage of the natural tendencies of the day, and we must probably prefer semi-autonomous corporations to organs of the central government for which ministers of State are directly responsible.

I criticize doctrinaire State Socialism, not because it seeks to engage men's altruistic impulses in the service of society, or because it departs from laissez-faire, or because it takes away from man's natural liberty to make a million, or because it has courage for bold experiments. All these things I applaud. I criticize it because it misses the significance of what is actually happening; because it is, in fact, little better than a dusty survival of a plan to meet the problems of fifty years ago, based on a misunderstanding of what someone said a hundred years ago. Nineteenth-century State Socialism sprang from Bentham, free competition, etc., and is in some respects a clearer, in some respects a more muddled version of just the same philosophy as underlies nineteenth-century individualism. Both equally laid all their stress on freedom, the one negatively to avoid limitations on existing freedom, the other positively to destroy natural or acquired monopolies. They are different reactions to the same intellectual atmosphere.

Separate Public Social Services from Private Individual Services

(2) I come next to a criterion of Agenda [i.e., matters pertaining to the state, rather than the individual] which is particularly relevant to what it is urgent and desirable to do in the near future. We must aim at separating those services which are technically social from those which are technically individual. The most important Agenda of the State relate not to those activities which private individuals are already fulfilling, but to those functions which fall outside the sphere of the individual, to those decisions which are made by no one if the State does not make them. The important thing for government is not to do things which individuals are doing already, and to do them a little better or a little worse; but to do those things which at present are not done at all.

It is not within the scope of my purpose on this occasion to develop practical policies. I limit myself, therefore, to naming some instances of what I mean from amongst those problems about which I happen to have thought most.

Many of the greatest economic evils of our time are the fruits of risk, uncertainty, and ignorance. It is because particular individuals, fortunate in situation or in abilities, are able to take advantage of uncertainty and ignorance, and also because for the same reason big business is often a lottery, that great inequalities of wealth come about; and these same factors are also the cause of the unemployment of labor, or the disappointment of reasonable business expectations, and of the impairment of efficiency and production. Yet the cure lies outside the operations of individuals; it may even be to the interest of individuals to aggravate the disease. I believe that the cure for these things is partly to be sought in the deliberate control of the currency and of credit by a central institution, and partly in the collection and dissemination on a great scale of data relating to the business situation, including the full publicity, by law if necessary, of all business facts which it is useful to know. These measures would involve society in exercising directive intelligence through some appropriate organ of action over many of the inner intricacies of private business, yet it would leave private initiative and enterprise unhindered. Even if these measures prove insufficient, nevertheless, they will furnish us with better knowledge than we have now for taking the next step.

My second example relates to savings and investment. I believe that some coordinated act of intelligent judgement is required as to the scale on which it is desirable that the community as a whole should save, the scale on which these savings should go abroad in the form of foreign investments, and whether the present organization of the investment market distributes savings along the most nationally productive channels. I do not think that these matters should be left entirely to the chances of private judgement and private profits, as they are at present.

My third example concerns population. The time has already come when each country needs a considered national policy about what size of population, whether larger or smaller than at present or the same, is most expedient. And having settled this policy, we must take steps to carry it into operation. The time may arrive a little later when the community as a whole must pay attention to the innate quality as well as to the mere numbers of its future members.

V. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL AND MORAL LIMITS OF THE MONEY-MOTIVE

These reflections have been directed towards possible improvements in the technique of modern capitalism by the agency of collective action. There is nothing in them which is seriously incompatible with what seems to me to be the essential characteristic of capitalism, namely the dependence upon an intense appeal to the money-making and money-loving instincts of individuals as the main motive force of the economic machine. Nor must I, so near to my end, stray towards other fields. Nevertheless, I may do well to remind you, in conclusion, that the fiercest contests and the most deeply felt divisions of opinion are likely to be waged in the coming years not round technical questions, where the arguments on either side are mainly economic, but round those which, for want of better words, may be called psychological or, perhaps, moral.

In Europe, or at least in some parts of Europe—but not, I think, in the United States of America—there is a latent reaction, somewhat widespread, against basing society to the extent that we do upon fostering, encouraging, and protecting the money-motives of individuals. A preference for arranging our affairs in such a way as to appeal to the money-motive as little as possible, rather than as much as possible, need not be entirely a priori, but may be based on the comparison of experiences. Different persons, according to their choice of profession, find the money-motive playing a large or a small part in their daily lives, and historians can tell us about other phases of social organization in which this motive has played a much smaller part than it does now. Most religions and most philosophies deprecate, to say the least of it, a way of life mainly influenced by considerations of personal money profit. On the other hand, most men today reject ascetic notions and do not doubt the real advantages of wealth. Moreover, it seems obvious to them that one cannot do without the money-motive, and that, apart from certain admitted abuses, it does its job well. In the result the average man averts his attention from the problem, and has no clear idea what he really thinks and feels about the whole confounded matter.

Confusion of thought and feeling leads to confusion of speech. Many people, who are really objecting to capitalism as a way of life, argue as though they were objecting to it on the ground of its inefficiency in attaining its own objects. Contrariwise, devotees of capitalism are often unduly conservative, and reject reforms in its technique, which might really strengthen and preserve it, for fear that they may prove to be first steps away from capitalism itself. Nevertheless, a time may be coming when we shall get clearer than at present as to when we are talking about capitalism as an efficient or inefficient technique, and when we are talking about it as desirable or objectionable in itself. For my part I think that capitalism, wisely managed, can probably be made more efficient for attaining economic ends than any alternative system yet in sight, but that in itself it is in many ways extremely objectionable. Our problem is to work out a social organization which shall be as efficient as possible without offending our notions of a satisfactory way of life.

The next step forward must come, not from political agitation or premature experiments, but from thought. We need by an effort of the mind to elucidate our own feelings. At present our sympathy and our judgement are liable to be on different sides, which is a painful and paralyzing state of mind. In the field of action reformers will not be successful until they can steadily pursue a clear and definite object with their intellects and their feelings in tune. There is no party in the world at present which appears to me to be pursuing right aims by right methods. Material poverty provides the incentive to change precisely in situations where there is very little margin for experiments. Material prosperity removes the incentive just when it might be safe to take a chance. Europe lacks the means, America the will, to make a move. We need a new set of convictions which spring naturally from a candid examination of our own inner feelings in relation to the outside facts.

Source: John Maynard Keynes, "The End of Laissez-Faire" (1926)

STUDY QUESTIONS

Please answer all of the following questions.

1. According to Keynes, how did the nineteenth century achieve a "miraculous union" between the conservative individualism of Locke and the democratic egalitarianism of Rousseau?

2. What role did the "ineptitude of public administrators" in the eighteenth century play in prejudicing the practical man in favor of laissez-faire?

3. Using the "giraffe" metaphor, explain Keynes's critique of the "simplified hypothesis" that economists traditionally offer to beginners.

4. How does Keynes define the "twin buttresses" of laissez-faire, and what specific "unreal assumptions" does he identify as necessary for the system to produce the greatest aggregate wealth?

5. What is the distinction between "Agenda" and "Non-Agenda," and why does Keynes believe the State should focus on things that are currently "not done at all" rather than doing what individuals already do?

6. How does Keynes define the "essential characteristic" of capitalism in the final section, and what is the "painful and paralyzing state of mind" he observes in modern reformers?

Short essay: please select one of the following and answer it in a minimum of 100 words.

a. The Pedigree of an Orthodoxy: Keynes argues that we feel a strong bias in favor of laissez-faire not because we have read the original authors, but because their ideas still permeate our "atmosphere of thought." Discuss the importance of studying the "history of opinion" as a preliminary step to the "emancipation of the mind."

b. The Failure of Natural Selection: Analyze Keynes's rejection of the parallel between Darwinian evolution and economic competition. Evaluate his argument that the "survival of the fittest" in a market does not count the "cost of the struggle" or the "sufferings of the shorter necks."

c. Semi-Autonomous Bodies: Discuss Keynes's proposal for a "return towards medieval conceptions of separate autonomies." How do these bodies, such as the Bank of England or Universities, serve as a "middle way" between individualistic private enterprise and doctrinaire State Socialism?

d. Efficiency vs. Morality: Keynes concludes that capitalism, "wisely managed," is the most efficient system available, yet it remains "in many ways extremely objectionable." Evaluate his claim that our next step must be an "effort of the mind" to reconcile our intellectual judgment with our moral feelings.

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HART: THE NATURAL RIGHT TO BE FREE

H.L.A. Hart

Born in Harrogate, England, H.L.A. Hart (1907–1992) was one of the most influential legal and political philosophers of the twentieth century. Educated at Oxford, he practiced as a barrister before serving in military intelligence during World War II, eventually returning to Oxford to hold the Chair of Jurisprudence. He is best known for revitalizing legal positivism through his masterwork, *The Concept of Law*, in which he analyzed the systemic nature of legal rules. The selections below are from his 1955 essay, "Are There Any Natural Rights?" Legal positivism denies the existence of "natural" rights and instead grounds them on human political conventions. In this work, Hart, who is a legal positivist, offers a logical bridge between the language of rights (which legal positivists use to describe positive law) and the moral concept of natural freedom. As such, he argues, if there are any moral rights at all, there must be at least one natural right, which is the equal right of all men to be free. Possessing a right is not merely a matter of being the beneficiary of another's obligation; rather, it is a specific moral justification for limiting the freedom of another person. Hart categorizes these into "special rights," which arise from specific transactions like promises or mutual restrictions, and "general rights," which are defensive claims held by all individuals against interference. The core of Hart's argument is that both categories of rights logically presuppose the natural right to equal freedom. In the case of special rights, the moral power to create an obligation exists only because the parties involved exercised their inherent freedom to enter into that agreement. In the case of general rights, the claim directly asserts this freedom in the absence of any special condition that would justify its limitation. Ultimately, Hart maintains that while a society could operate under a moral code of duties without any concept of rights, the moment we grant individuals the moral title to determine how others shall act, we have conceptually committed ourselves to the recognition of an inherent and equal human liberty.

Introduction

I shall advance the thesis that if there are any moral rights at all, it follows that there is at least one natural right, the equal right of all men to be free. By saying that there is this right, I mean that in the absence of certain special conditions which are consistent with the right being an equal right, any adult human being capable of choice (1) has the right to forbearance on the part of all others from the use of coercion or restraint against him save to hinder coercion or restraint and (2) is at liberty to do (i.e., is under no obligation to abstain from) any action which is not one coercing or restraining or designed to injure other persons.

I have two reasons for describing the equal right of all men to be free as a natural right; both of them were always emphasized by the classical theorists of natural rights. (1) This right is one which all men have if they are capable of choice; they have it qua men and not only if they are members of some society or stand in some special relation to each other. (2) This right is not created or conferred by men's voluntary action; other moral rights are. Of course, it is quite obvious that my thesis is not as ambitious as the traditional theories of natural rights; for although on my view all men are equally entitled to be free in the sense explained, no man has an absolute or unconditional right to do or not to do any particular thing or to be treated in any particular way; coercion or restraint of any action may be justified in special conditions consistently with the general principle. So my argument will not show that men have any right (save the equal right of all to be free) which is "absolute," "indefeasible," or "imprescriptible." This may for many reduce the importance of my contention, but I think that the principle that all men have an equal right to be free, meager as it may seem, is probably all that the political philosophers of the liberal tradition need have claimed to support any program of action even if they have claimed more. But my contention that there is this one natural right may appear unsatisfying in another respect; it is only the conditional assertion that if there are any moral rights then there must be this one natural right. Perhaps few would now deny, as some have, that there are moral rights; for the point of that denial was usually to object to some philosophical claim as to the "ontological status" of rights, and this objection is now expressed not as a denial that there are any moral rights but as a denial of some assumed logical similarity between sentences used to assert the existence of rights and other kinds of sentences. But it is still important to remember that there may be codes of conduct quite properly termed moral codes (though we can of course say they are "imperfect") which do not employ the notion of a right, and there is nothing contradictory or otherwise absurd in a code or morality consisting wholly of prescriptions or in a code which prescribed only what should be done for the realization of happiness or some ideal of personal perfection.4 Human actions in such systems would be evaluated or criticized as compliances with prescriptions or as good or bad, right or wrong, wise or foolish, fitting or unfitting, but no one in such a system would have, exercise, or claim rights, or violate or infringe them. So those who lived by such systems could not of course be committed to the recognition of the equal right of all to be free; nor, I think (and this is one respect in which the notion of a right differs from other moral notions), could any parallel argument be constructed to show that, from the bare fact that actions were recognized as ones which ought or ought not to be done, as right, wrong, good or bad, it followed that some specific kind of conduct fell under these categories.

[Section 1: The Postulate of an Equal Right to Freedom]

(A) Lawyers have for their own purposes carried the dissection of the notion of a legal right some distance, and some of their results I are of value in the elucidation of statements of the form "X has a right to . . ." outside legal contexts. There is of course no simple identification to be made between moral and legal rights, but there is an intimate connection between the two, and this itself is one feature which distinguishes a moral right from other fundamental moral concepts. It is not merely that as a matter of fact men speak of their moral rights mainly when advocating their incorporation in a legal system, but that the concept of a right belongs to that branch of morality which is specifically concerned to determine when one person's freedom may be limited by another's 6 and so to determine what actions may appropriately be made the subject of coercive legal rules. The words "droit," "diritto," and "Recht," used by continental jurists, have no simple English translation and seem to English jurists to hover uncertainly between law and morals, but they do in fact mark off an area of morality (the morality of law) which has special characteristics. It is occupied by the concepts of justice, fairness, rights, and obligation (if this last is not used as it is by many moral philosophers as an obscuring general label to cover every action that morally we ought to do or forbear from doing). The most important common characteristic of this group of moral concepts is that there is no incongruity, but a special congruity in the use of force or the threat of force to secure that what is just or fair or someone's right to have done shall in fact be done; for it is in just these circumstances that coercion of another human being is legitimate. Kant, in the Rechtslehre, discusses the obligations which arise in this branch of morality under the title of official juris, "which do not require that respect for duty shall be of itself the determining principle of the will," and contrasts them with official virtutis, which have no moral worth unless done for the sake of the moral principle. His point is, I think, that we must distinguish from the rest of morality those principles regulating the proper distribution of human freedom which alone make it morally legitimate for one human being to determine by his choice how another should act; and a certain specific moral value is secured (to be distinguished from moral virtue in which the good will is manifested) if human relationships are conducted in accordance with these principles even though coercion has to be used to secure this, for only if these principles are regarded will freedom be distributed among human beings as it should be. And it is I think a very important feature of a moral right that the possessor of it is conceived as having a moral justification for limiting the freedom of another and that he has this justification not because the action he is entitled to require of another has some moral quality but simply because in the circumstances a certain distribution of human freedom will be maintained if he by his choice is allowed to determine how that other shall act. that having a justification for demanding that a person shall or shall not do some action is a necessary though not a sufficient condition for justifying coercion.

(B) I can best exhibit this feature of a moral right by reconsidering the question whether moral rights and "duties" 7 are correlative. The contention that they are means, presumably, that every statement of the form "X has a right to . . entails and is entailed by "Y has a duty (not) to . . .," and at this stage we must not assume that the values of the namevariables "X" and "Y" must be different persons. Now there is certainly one sense of "a right" (which I have already mentioned) such that it does not follow from X's having a right that X or someone else has any duty. Jurists have isolated rights in this sense and have referred to them as "liberties" just to distinguish them from rights in the centrally important sense of "right" which has "duty" as a correlative. The former sense of "right" is needed to describe those areas of social life where competition is at least morally unobjectionable. Two people walking along both see a ten-dollar bill in the road twenty yards away, and there is no clue as to the owner. Neither of the two are under a "duty" to allow the other to pick it up; each has in this sense a right to pick it up. Of course there may be many things which each has a "duty" not to do in the course of the race to the spot-neither may kill or wound the other-and corresponding to these "duties" there are rights to forbearances. The moral propriety of all economic competition implies this minimum sense of "a right" in which to say that "X has a right to" means merely that X is under no "duty" not to. Hobbes saw that the expression "a right" could have this sense but he was wrong if he thought that there is no sense in which it does follow from X's having a right that Y has a duty or at any rate an obligation.

(C) More important for our purpose is the question whether for all moral "duties" there are correlative moral rights, because those who have given an affirmative answer to this question have usually assumed without adequate scrutiny that to have a right is simply to be capable of benefiting by the performance of a "duty"; whereas in fact this is not a sufficient condition (and probably not a necessary condition) of having a right. Thus animals and babies who stand to benefit by our performance of our "duty" not to ill-treat them are said therefore to have rights to proper treatment. The full consequence of this reasoning is not usually followed out; most have shrunk from saying that we have rights against ourselves because we stand to benefit from our performance of our "duty" to keep ourselves alive or develop our talents. But the moral situation which arises from a promise (where the legal-sounding terminology of rights and obligations is most appropriate) illustrates most clearly that the notion of having a right and that of benefiting by the performance of a "duty" are not identical. X promises Y in return for some favor that he will look after Y's aged mother in his absence. Rights arise out of this transaction, but it is surely Y to whom the promise has been made and not his mother who has or possesses these rights. Certainly Y's mother is a person concerning whom X has an obligation and a person who will benefit by its performance, but the person to whom he has an obligation to look after her is Y. This is something due to or owed to Y, so it is Y, not his mother, whose right X will disregard and to whom X will have done wrong if he fails to keep his promise, though the mother may be physically injured. And it is Y who has a moral claim upon X, is entitled to have his mother looked after, and who can waive the claim and release Y from the obligation. Y is, in other words, morally in a position to determine by his choice how X shall act and in this way to limit X's freedom of choice; and it is this fact, not the fact that he stands to benefit, that makes it appropriate to say that he has a right. Of course often the person to whom a promise has been made will be the only person who stands to benefit by its performance, but this does not justify the identification of "having a right" with "benefiting by the performance of a duty." It is important for the whole logic of rights that, while the person who stands to benefit by the performance of a duty is discovered by considering what will happen if the duty is not performed, the person who has a right (to whom performance is owed or due) is discovered by examining the transaction or antecedent situation or relations of the parties out of which the "duty" arises. These considerations should incline us not to extend to animals and babies whom it is wrong to ill-treat the notion of a right to proper treatment, for the moral situation can be simply and adequately described here by saying that it is wrong or that we ought not to ill-treat them or, in the philosopher's generalized sense of "duty," that we have a duty not to ill-treat them.8 If common usage sanctions talk of the rights of animals or babies it makes an idle use of the expression "a right," which will confuse the situation with other different moral situations where the expression "a right" has a specific force and cannot be replaced by the other moral expressions which I have mentioned. Perhaps some clarity on this matter is to be gained by considering the force of the preposition "to" in the expression "having a duty to Y" or "being under an obligation to Y" (where "Y" is the name of a person); for it is significantly different from the meaning of "to" in "doing something to Y" or "doing harm to Y," where it indicates the person affected by some action. In the first pair of expressions, "to" obviously does not have this force, but indicates the person to whom the person morally bound is bound. This is an intelligible development of the figure of a bond (vinculumjuris: obligate); the precise figure is not that of two persons bound by a chain, but of one person bound, the other end of the chain lying in the hands of another to use if he chooses. So it appears absurd to speak of having duties or owing obligations to ourselves-of course we may have "duties" not to do harm to ourselves, but what could be meant (once the distinction between these different meanings of "to" has been grasped) by insisting that we have duties or obligations to ourselves not to do harm to ourselves?

(D) The essential connection between the notion of a right and the justified limitation of one person's freedom by another may be thrown into relief if we consider codes of behavior which do not purport to confer rights but only to prescribe what shall be done. Most natural law thinkers down to Hooker conceived of natural law in this way: there were natural duties compliance with which would certainly benefit man-things to be done to achieve man's natural end-but not natural rights. And there are of course many types of codes of behavior which only prescribe what is to be done, e.g., those regulating certain ceremonies. It would be absurd to regard these codes as conferring rights, but illuminating to contrast them with rules of games, which often create rights, though not, of course, moral rights. But even a code which is plainly a moral code need not establish rights; the Decalogue is perhaps the most important example. Of course, quite apart from heavenly rewards human beings stand to benefit by general obedience to the Ten Commandments: disobedience is wrong and will certainly harm individuals. But it would be a surprising interpretation of them that treated them as conferring rights. In such an interpretation obedience to the Ten Commandments would have to be conceived as due to or owed to individuals, not merely to God, and disobedience not merely as wrong but as a wrong to (as well as harm to) individuals. The Commandments would cease to read like penal statutes designed only to rule out certain types of behavior and would have to be thought of as rules placed at the disposal of individuals and regulating the extent to which they may demand certain behavior from others. Rights are typically conceived of as possessed or owned by or belonging to individuals, and these expressions reflect the conception of moral rules as not only prescribing conduct but as forming a kind of moral property of individuals to which they are as individuals entitled; only when rules are conceived in this way can we speak of rights and wrongs as well as right and wrong actions.

Section 2: The Taxonomy of Rights, General and Special

So far I have sought to establish that to have a right entails having a moral justification for limiting the freedom of another person and for determining how he should act; it is now important to see that the moral justification must be of a special kind if it is to constitute a right, and this will emerge most clearly from an examination of the circumstances in which rights are asserted with the typical expression "I have a right to ... ." It is I think the case that this form of words is used in two main types of situations: (A) when the claimant has some special justification for interference with another's freedom which other persons do not have ("I have a right to be paid what you promised for my services"); (B) when the claimant is concerned to resist or object to some interference by another person as having no justification ("I have a right to say what I think").

(A) Special rights. When rights arise out of special transactions between individuals or out of some special relationship in which they stand to each other, both the persons who have the right and those who have the corresponding obligation are limited to the parties to the special transaction or relationship. I call such rights special rights to distinguish them from those moral rights which are thought of as rights against (i.e., as imposing obligations upon) 11 everyone, such as those that are asserted when some unjustified interference is made or threatened as in (B) above.

(i) The most obvious cases of special rights are those that arise from promises. By promising to do or not to do something, we voluntarily incur obligations and create or confer rights on those to whom we promise; we alter the existing moral independence of the parties' freedom of choice in relation to some action and create a new moral relationship between them, so that it becomes morally legitimate for the person to whom the promise is given to determine how the promisor shall act. The promisee has a temporary authority or sovereignty in relation to some specific matter over the other's will which we express by saying that the promisor is under an obligation to the promisee to do what he has promised. To some philosophers the notion that moral phenomena-rights and duties or obligations-can be brought into existence by the voluntary action of individuals has appeared utterly mysterious; but this I think has been so because they have not clearly seen how special the moral notions of a right and an obligation are, nor how peculiarly they are connected with the distribution of freedom of choice; it would indeed be mysterious if we could make actions morally good or bad by voluntary choice. The simplest case of promising illustrates two points characteristic of all special rights: (i) the right and obligation arise not because the promised action has itself any particular moral quality, but just because of the voluntary transaction between the parties; (2) the identity of the parties concerned is vital—only this person (the promisee) has the moral justification for determining how the promisor shall act. It is his right; only in relation to him is the promisor's freedom of choice diminished, so that if he chooses to release the promisor no one else can complain.

(ii) But a promise is not the only kind of transaction whereby rights are conferred. They may be accorded by a person consenting or authorizing another to interfere in matters which but for this consent or authorization he would be free to determine for himself. If I consent to your taking precautions for my health or happiness or authorize you to look after my interests, then you have a right which others have not, and I cannot complain of your interference if it is within the sphere of your authority. This is what is meant by a person surrendering his rights to another; and again the typical characteristics of a right are present in this situation: the person authorized has the right to interfere not because of its intrinsic character but because these persons have stood in this relationship. No one else (not similarly authorized) has any right to interfere in theory even if the person authorized does not exercise his right.

(iii) Special rights are not only those created by the deliberate choice of the party on whom the obligation falls, as they are when they are accorded or spring from promises, and not all obligations to other persons are deliberately incurred, though I think it is true of all special rights that they arise from previous voluntary actions. A third very important source of special rights and obligations which we recognize in many spheres of life is what may be termed mutuality of restrictions, and I think political obligation is intelligible only if we see what precisely this is and how it differs from the other right-creating transactions (consent, promising) to which philosophers have assimilated it. In its bare schematic outline it is this: when a number of persons conduct any joint enterprise according to rules and thus restrict their liberty, those who have submitted to these restrictions when required have a right to a similar submission from those who have benefited by their submission. The rules may provide that officials should have authority to enforce obedience and make further rules, and this will create a structure of legal rights and duties, but the moral obligation to obey the rules in such circumstances is due to the co-operating members of the society, and they have the correlative moral right to obedience. In social situations of this sort (of which political society is the most complex example) the obligation to obey the rules is something distinct from whatever other moral reasons there may be for obedience in terms of good consequences (e.g., the prevention of suffering); the obligation is due to the cooperating members of the society as such and not because they are human beings on whom it would be wrong to inflict suffering. The utilitarian explanation of political obligation fails to take account of this feature of the situation both in its simple version that the obligation exists because and only if the direct consequences of a particular act of disobedience are worse than obedience, and also in its more sophisticated version that the obligation exists even when this is not so, if disobedience increases the probability that the law in question or other laws will be disobeyed on other occasions when the direct consequences of obedience are better than those of disobedience.

Of course to say that there is such a moral obligation upon those who have benefited by the submission of other members of society to restrictive rules to obey these rules in their turn does not entail either that this is the only kind of moral reason for obedience or that there can be no cases where disobedience will be morally justified. There is no contradiction or other impropriety in saying "I have an obligation to do X, someone has a right to ask me to, but I now see I ought not to do it." It will in painful situations sometimes be the lesser of two moral evils to disregard what really are people's rights and not perform our obligations to them. This seems to me particularly obvious from the case of promises: I may promise to do something and thereby incur an obligation just because that is one way in which obligations (to be distinguished from other forms of moral reasons for acting) are created; reflection may show that it would in the circumstances be wrong to keep this promise because of the suffering it might cause, and we can express this by saying "I ought not to do it though I have an obligation to him to do it" just because the italicized expressions are not synonyms but come from different dimensions of morality. The attempt to explain this situation by saying that our real obligation here is to avoid the suffering and that there is only a prima facie obligation to keep the promise seems to me to confuse two quite different kinds of moral reason, and in practice such a terminology obscures the precise character of what is at stake when "for some greater good" we infringe people's rights or do not perform our obligations to them.

The social-contract theorists rightly fastened on the fact that the obligation to obey the law is not merely a special case of benevolence (direct or indirect), but something which arises between members of a particular political society out of their mutual relationship. Their mistake was to identify this right-creating situation of mutual restrictions with the paradigm case of promising; there are of course important similarities, and these are just the points which all special rights have in common, viz., that they arise out of special relationships between human beings and not out of the character of the action to be done or its effects.

(iv) There remains a type of situation which may be thought of as creating rights and obligations: where the parties have a special natural relationship, as in the case of parent and child. The parent's moral right to obedience from his child would I suppose now be thought to terminate when the child reaches the age "of discretion," but the case is worth mentioning because some political philosophies have had recourse to analogies with this case as an explanation of political obligation, and also because even this case has some of the features we have distinguished in special rights, viz., the right arises out of the special relationship of the parties (though it is in this case a natural relationship) and not out of the character of the actions to the performance of which there is a right.

(v) To be distinguished from special rights, of course, are special liberties, where, exceptionally, one person is exempted from obligations to which most are subject but does not thereby acquire a right to which there is a correlative obligation. If you catch me reading your brother's diary, you say, "You have no right to read it." I say, "I have a right to read it-your brother said I might unless he told me not to, and he has not told me not to." Here I have been specially licensed by your brother who had a right to require me not to read his diary, so I am exempted from the moral obligation not to read it, but your brother is under no obligation to let me go on reading it. Cases where rights, not liberties, are accorded to manage or interfere with another person's affairs are those where the license is not revocable at will by the person according the right.

(B) General rights. In contrast with special rights, which constitute a justification peculiar to the holder of the right for interfering with another's freedom, are general rights, which are asserted defensively, when some unjustified interference is anticipated or threatened, in order to point out that the interference is unjustified. "I have the right to say what I think." "I have the right to worship as I please." Such rights share two important characteristics with special rights. (i) To have them is to have a moral justification for determining how another shall act, viz., that he shall not interfere. (2) The moral justification does not arise from the character of the particular action to the performance of which the claimant has a right; what justifies the claim is simply-there being no special relation between him and those who are threatening to interfere to justify that interference-that this is a particular exemplification of the equal right to be free. But there are of course striking differences between such defensive general rights and special rights. (1) General rights do not arise out of any special relationship or transaction between men. (2) They are not rights which are peculiar to those who have them but are rights which all men capable of choice have in the absence of those special conditions which give rise to special rights. (3) General rights have as correlatives obligations not to interfere to which everyone else is subject and not merely the parties to some special relationship or transaction, though of course they will often be asserted when some particular persons threaten to interfere as a moral objection to that interference. To assert a general right is to claim in relation to some particular action the equal right of all men to be free in the absence of any of those special conditions which constitute a special right to limit another's freedom; to assert a special right is to assert in relation to some particular action a right constituted by such special conditions to limit another's freedom. The assertion of general rights directly invokes the principle that all men equally have the right to be free; the assertion of a special right (as I attempt to show in Section III) invokes it indirectly.

Section 3: The Principle of Mutuality and the Distribution of Liberty

It is, I hope, clear that unless it is recognized that interference with another's freedom requires a moral justification the notion of a right could have no place in morals; for to assert a right is to assert that there is such a justification. The characteristic function in moral discourse of those sentences in which the meaning of the expression "a right" is to be found-"I have a right to . . . '" "You have no right to . . . ," "What right have you to . . .?"-is to bring to bear on interferences with another's freedom, or on claims to interfere, a type of moral evaluation or criticism specially appropriate to interference with freedom and characteristically different from the moral criticism of actions made with the use of expressions like "right," "wrong," "good," and "bad." And this is only one of many different types of moral ground for saying "You ought . . ." or "You ought not... ." The use of the expression "What right have you to ...?" shows this more clearly, perhaps, than the others; for we use it, just at the point where interference is actual or threatened, to call for the moral title of the person addressed to interfere; and we do this often without any suggestion at all that what he proposes to do is otherwise wrong and sometimes with the implication that the same interference on the part of another person would be unobjectionable.

But though our use in moral discourse of "a right" does presuppose the recognition that interference with another's freedom requires a moral justification, this would not itself suffice to establish, except in a sense easily trivialized, that in the recognition of moral rights there is implied the recognition that all men have a right to equal freedom; for unless there is some restriction inherent in the meaning of "a right" on the type of moral justification for interference which can constitute a right, the principle could be made wholly vacuous. It would, for example, be possible to adopt the principle and then assert that some characteristic or behavior of some human beings (that they are improvident, or atheists, or Jews, or Negroes) constitutes a moral justification for interfering with their freedom; any differences between men could, so far as my argument has yet gone, be treated as a moral justification for interference and so constitute a right, so that the equal right of all men to be free would be compatible with gross inequality. It may well be that the expression "moral" itself imports some restriction on what can constitute a moral justification for interference which would avoid this consequence, but I cannot myself yet show that this is so. It is, on the other hand, clear to me that the moral justification for interference which is to constitute a right to interfere (as distinct from merely making it morally good or desirable to interfere) is restricted to certain special conditions and that this is inherent in the meaning of "a right" (unless this is used so loosely that it could be replaced by the other moral expressions mentioned). Claims to interfere with another's freedom based on the general character of the activities interfered with (e.g., the folly or cruelty of "native" practices) or the general character of the parties ("We are Germans; they are Jews") even when well founded are not matters of moral right or obligation. Submission in such cases even where proper is not due to or owed to the individuals who interfere; it would be equally proper whoever of the same class of persons interfered. Hence other elements in our moral vocabulary suffice to describe this case, and it is confusing here to talk of rights. We saw in Section II that the types of justification for interference involved in special rights was independent of the character of the action to the performance of which there was a right but depended upon certain previous transactions and relations between individuals (such as promises, consent, authorization, submission to mutual restrictions). Two questions here suggest themselves: (i) On what intelligible principle could these bare forms of promising, consenting, submission to mutual restrictions, be either necessary or sufficient, irrespective of their content, to justify interference with another's freedom? (2) What characteristics have these types of transaction or relationship in common? The answer to both these questions is I think this: If we justify interference on such grounds as we give when we claim a moral right, we are in fact indirectly invoking as our justification the principle that all men have an equal right to be free. For we are in fact saying in the case of promises and consents or authorizations that this claim to interfere with another's freedom is justified because he has, in exercise of his equal right to be free, freely chosen to create this claim; and in the case of mutual restrictions we are in fact saying that this claim to interfere with another's freedom is justified because it is fair; and it is fair because only so will there be an equal distribution of restrictions and so of freedom among this group of men. So in the case of special rights as well as of general rights recognition of them implies the recognition of the equal right of all men to be free.

Source: H.L.A. Hart, "Are There Any Natural Rights?", The Philosophical Review, Vol. 64, 1955, pp. 175-191

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JOHN RAWLS: JUSTICE AS FAIRNESS

American philosopher John Rawls (1921–2002) was a professor of political philosophy at Harvard University, and is most remembered for his landmark book A Theory of Justice (1971). In this he presents a social contract theory whereby negotiators arrive at basic principles of justice. There are two main parts to his theory. First is the initial contract situation, which he calls the "original position." This involves a hypothetical community of rational and self-interested people who assume to be ignorant about their actual position in society, particularly how rich or powerful they are. They step behind a "veil of ignorance" as Rawls calls it, which assures that they and their neighbors will not create rules which give them special benefits. These negotiators are not trying to start a new social system, but rather they only aim to reform their current system. The second part of Rawls's theory involves the specific principles of justice that these negotiators will arrive at. Since the initial negotiating situation is fair, the principles of justice themselves will reflect that fairness. There are two such fair principles of justice. First, each person will have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberties compatible with similar liberty for others. This establishes a base-level of equality for everyone; that is, behind the veil of ignorance, it is reasonable to stipulate that everyone should be equal. The second principle sets the rules for any social and economic inequalities that might arise in society. They must (a) be reasonably expected to be to everyone's advantage, and (b) be attached to positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity. For example, there might be some benefit that we all receive by allowing some jobs to pay more money, such as with physicians or scientists. However, these jobs must be won in a fair competition. The following selections are from Rawls's article "Justice as Fairness" (1958), which is where he first laid out his theory.

DIFFERENT NOTIONS OF JUSTICE (from "Justice as Fairness")

1. It might seem at first sight that the concepts of justice and fairness are the same, and that there is no reason to distinguish them, or to say that one is more fundamental than the other. I think that this impression is mistaken. In this paper I wish to show that the fundamental idea in the concept of justice is fairness; and I wish to offer an analysis of the concept of justice from this point of view. To bring out the force of this claim, and the analysis based upon it, I shall then argue that it is this aspect of justice for which utilitarianism, in its classical form, is unable to account, but which is expressed, even if misleadingly, by the idea of the social contract.

To start with I shall develop a particular conception of justice by stating and commenting upon two principles which specify it, and by considering the circumstances and conditions under which they may be thought to arise. The principles defining this conception, and the conception itself, are, of course, familiar. It may be possible, however, by using the notion of fairness as a framework, to assemble and to look at them in a new way. Before stating this conception, however, the following preliminary matters should be kept in mind.

Throughout I consider justice only as a virtue of social institutions, or what I shall call practices. The principles of justice are regarded as formulating restrictions as to how practices may define positions and offices, and assign thereto powers and liabilities, rights and duties. Justice as a virtue of particular actions or of persons I do not take up at all. It is important to distinguish these various subjects of justice, since the meaning of the concept varies according to whether it is applied to practices, particular actions, or persons. These meanings are, indeed, connected, but they are not identical. I shall confine my discussion to the sense of justice as applied to practices, since this sense is the basic one. Once it is understood, the other senses should go quite easily.

Justice is to be understood in its customary sense as representing but one of the many virtues of social institutions, for these may be antiquated, inefficient, degrading, or any number of other things, without being unjust. Justice is not to be confused with an all-inclusive vision of a good society; it is only one part of any such conception. It is important, for example, to distinguish that sense of equality which is an aspect of the concept of justice from that sense of equality which belongs to a more comprehensive social ideal. There may well be inequalities which one concedes are just, or at least not unjust, but which, nevertheless, one wishes, on other grounds, to do away with. I shall focus attention, then, on the usual sense of justice in which it is essentially the elimination of arbitrary distinctions and the establishment, within the structure of a practice, of a proper balance between competing claims.

Finally, there is no need to consider the principles discussed below as the principles of justice. For the moment it is sufficient that they are typical of a family of principles normally associated with the concept of justice. The way in which the principles of this family resemble one another, as shown by the background against which they may be thought to arise, will be made clear by the whole of the subsequent argument.

TWO PRINCIPLES OF JUSTICE

Two Principles Stated

2. The conception of justice which I want to develop may be stated in the form of two principles as follows: first, each person participating in a practice, or affected by it, has an equal right to the most extensive liberty compatible with a like liberty for all; and second, inequalities are arbitrary unless it is reasonable to expect that they will work out for everyone's advantage, and provided the positions and offices to which they attach, or from which they may be gained, are open to all. These principles express justice as a complex of three ideas: liberty, equality, and reward for services contributing to the common good.

The term "person" is to be construed variously depending on the circumstances. On some occasions it will mean human individuals, but in others it may refer to nations, provinces, business firms, churches, teams, and so on. The principles of justice apply in all these instances, although there is a certain logical priority to the case of human individuals. As I shall use the term "person," it will be ambiguous in the manner indicated.

The first principle holds, of course, only if other things are equal: that is, while there must always be a justification for departing from the initial position of equal liberty (which is defined by the pattern of rights and duties, powers and liabilities, established by a practice), and the burden of proof is placed on him who would depart from it, nevertheless, there can be, and often there is, a justification for doing so. Now, that similar particular cases, as defined by a practice, should be treated similarly as they arise, is part of the very concept of a practice; it is involved in the notion of an activity in accordance with rules. The first principle expresses an analogous conception, but as applied to the structure of practices themselves. It holds, for example, that there is a presumption against the distinctions and classifications made by legal systems and other practices to the extent that they infringe on the original and equal liberty of the persons participating in them. The second principle defines how this presumption may be rebutted.

Some Inequalities Permitted

The second principle defines what sorts of inequalities are permissible; it specifies how the presumption laid down by the first principle may be put aside. Now by inequalities it is best to understand not any differences between offices and positions, but differences in the benefits and burdens attached to them either directly or indirectly, such as prestige and wealth, or liability to taxation and compulsory services. Players in a game do not protest against there being different positions, such as batter, pitcher, catcher, and the like, nor to there being various privileges and powers as specified by the rules; nor do the citizens of a country object to there being the different offices of government such as president, senator, governor, judge, and so on, each with their special rights and duties. It is not differences of this kind that are normally thought of as inequalities, but differences in the resulting distribution established by a practice, or made possible by it, of the things men strive to attain or avoid. Thus they may complain about the pattern of honors and rewards set up by a practice (e.g., the privileges and salaries of government officials) or they may object to the distribution of power and wealth which results from the various ways in which men avail themselves of the opportunities allowed by it (e.g., the concentration of wealth which may develop in a free price system allowing large entrepreneurial or speculative gains).

It should be noted that the second principle holds that an inequality is allowed only if there is reason to believe that the practice with the inequality, or resulting in it, will work for the advantage of every party engaging in it. Here it is important to stress that every party must gain from the inequality. Since the principle applies to practices, it implies that the representative man in every office or position defined by a practice, when he views it as a going concern, must find it reasonable to prefer his condition and prospects with the inequality to what they would be under the practice without it. The principle excludes, therefore, the justification of inequalities on the grounds that the disadvantages of those in one position are outweighed by the greater advantages of those in another position. This rather simple restriction is the main modification I wish to make in the utilitarian principle as usually understood. When coupled with the notion of a practice, it is a restriction of consequence, and one which some utilitarians, e.g., Hume and Mill, have used in their discussions of justice without realizing apparently its significance, or at least without calling attention to it. Why it is a significant modification of principle, changing one's conception of justice entirely, the whole of my argument will show.

Further, it is also necessary that the various offices to which special benefits or burdens attach are open to all. It may be, for example, to the common advantage, as just defined, to attach special benefits to certain offices. Perhaps by doing so the requisite talent can be attracted to them and encouraged to give its best efforts. But any offices having special benefits must be won in a fair competition in which contestants are judged on their merits. If some offices were not open, those excluded would normally be justified in feeling unjustly treated, even if they benefited from the greater efforts of those who were allowed to compete for them. Now if one can assume that offices are open, it is necessary only to consider the design of practices themselves and how they jointly, as a system, work together. It will be a mistake to focus attention on the varying relative positions of particular persons, who may be known to us by their proper names, and to require that each such change, as a once for all transaction viewed in isolation, must be in itself just. It is the system of practices which is to be judged, and judged from a general point of view: unless one is prepared to criticize it from the standpoint of a representative man holding some particular office, one has no complaint against it.

THE ORIGINAL POSITION

Rationality, Mutual Self-Interest, Similar Needs

3. Given these principles one might try to derive them from a priori principles of reason, or claim that they were known by intuition. These are familiar enough steps and, at least in the case of the first principle, might be made with some success. Usually, however, such arguments, made at this point, are unconvincing. They are not likely to lead to an understanding of the basis of the principles of justice, not at least as principles of justice. I wish, therefore, to look at the principles in a different way.

Imagine a society of persons amongst whom a certain system of practices is already well established. Now suppose that by and large they are mutually self-interested; their allegiance to their established practices is normally founded on the prospect of self-advantage. One need not assume that, in all senses of the term "person," the persons in this society are mutually self-interested. If the characterization as mutually self-interested applies when the line of division is the family, it may still be true that members of families are bound by ties of sentiment and affection and willingly acknowledge duties in contradiction to self-interest. Mutual self-interestedness in the relations between families, nations, churches, and the like, is commonly associated with intense loyalty and devotion on the part of individual members. Therefore, one can form a more realistic conception of this society if one thinks of it as consisting of mutually self-interested families, or some other association. Further, it is not necessary to suppose that these persons are mutually self-interested under all circumstances, but only in the usual situations in which they participate in their common practices.

Now suppose also that these persons are rational: they know their own interests more or less accurately; they are capable of tracing out the likely consequences of adopting one practice rather than another; they are capable of adhering to a course of action once they have decided upon it; they can resist present temptations and the enticements of immediate gain; and the bare knowledge or perception of the difference between their condition and that of others is not, within certain limits and in itself, a source of great dissatisfaction. Only the last point adds anything to the usual definition of rationality. This definition should allow, I think, for the idea that a rational man would not be greatly downcast from knowing, or seeing, that others are in a better position than himself, unless he thought their being so was the result of injustice, or the consequence of letting chance work itself out for no useful common purpose, and so on. So if these persons strike us as unpleasantly egoistic, they are at least free in some degree from the fault of envy.

Finally, assume that these persons have roughly similar needs and interests, or needs and interests in various ways complementary, so that fruitful cooperation amongst them is possible; and suppose that they are sufficiently equal in power and ability to guarantee that in normal circumstances none is able to dominate the others.

This condition (as well as the others) may seem excessively vague; but in view of the conception of justice to which the argument leads, there seems no reason for making it more exact here.

Impartiality Regarding one's Actual Advantage

Since these persons are conceived as engaging in their common practices, which are already established, there is no question of our supposing them to come together to deliberate as to how they will set these practices up for the first time. Yet we can imagine that from time to time they discuss with one another whether any of them has a legitimate complaint against their established institutions. Such discussions are perfectly natural in any normal society. Now suppose that they have settled on doing this in the following way. They first try to arrive at the principles by which complaints, and so practices themselves, are to be judged. Their procedure for this is to let each person propose the principles upon which he wishes his complaints to be tried with the understanding that, if acknowledged, the complaints of others will be similarly tried, and that no complaints will be heard at all until everyone is roughly of one mind as to how complaints are to be judged. They each understand further that the principles proposed and acknowledged on this occasion are binding on future occasions. Thus each will be wary of proposing a principle which would give him a peculiar advantage, in his present circumstances, supposing it to be accepted. Each person knows that he will be bound by it in future circumstances the peculiarities of which cannot be known, and which might well be such that the principle is then to his disadvantage. The idea is that everyone should be required to make in advance a firm commitment, which others also may reasonably be expected to make, and that no one be given the opportunity to tailor the canons of a legitimate complaint to fit his own special conditions, and then to discard them when they no longer suit his purpose. Hence each person will propose principles of a general kind which will, to a large degree, gain their sense from the various applications to be made of them, the particular circumstances of which being as yet unknown [i.e., each person's particular circumstances are hidden behind a veil of ignorance]. These principles will express the conditions in accordance with which each is the least unwilling to have his interests limited in the design of practices, given the competing interests of the others, on the supposition that the interests of others will be limited likewise. The restrictions which would so arise might be thought of as those a person would keep in mind if he were designing a practice in which his enemy were to assign him his place.

The two main parts of this conjectural account have a definite significance. The character and respective situations of the parties reflect the typical circumstances in which questions of justice arise. The procedure whereby principles are proposed and acknowledged represents constraints, analogous to those of having a morality, whereby rational and mutually self-interested persons are brought to act reasonably. Thus the first part reflects the fact that questions of justice arise when conflicting claims are made upon the design of a practice and where it is taken for granted that each person will insist, as far as possible, on what he considers his rights. It is typical of cases of justice to involve persons who are pressing on one another their claims, between which a fair balance or equilibrium must be found. On the other hand, as expressed by the second part, having a morality must at least imply the acknowledgment of principles as impartially applying to one's own conduct as well as to another's, and moreover principles which may constitute a constraint, or limitation, upon the pursuit of one's own interests. There are, of course, other aspects of having a morality: the acknowledgment of moral principles must show itself in accepting a reference to them as reasons for limiting one's claims, in acknowledging the burden of providing a special explanation, or excuse, when one acts contrary to them, or else in showing shame and remorse and a desire to make amends, and so on. It is sufficient to remark here that having a morality is analogous to having made a firm commitment in advance; for one must acknowledge the principles of morality even when to one's disadvantage. A man whose moral judgments always coincided with his interests could be suspected of having no morality at all.

Motives to Accept Inequalities

Thus the two parts of the foregoing account are intended to mirror the kinds of circumstances in which questions of justice arise and the constraints which having a morality would impose upon persons so situated. In this way one can see how the acceptance of the principles of justice might come about, for given all these conditions as described, it would be natural if the two principles of justice were to be acknowledged. Since there is no way for anyone to win special advantages for himself, each might consider it reasonable to acknowledge equality as an initial principle. There is, however, no reason why they should regard this position as final; for if there are inequalities which satisfy the second principle, the immediate gain which equality would allow can be considered as intelligently invested in view of its future return. If, as is quite likely, these inequalities work as incentives to draw out better efforts, the members of this society may look upon them as concessions to human nature: they, like us, may think that people ideally should want to serve one another. But as they are mutually self-interested, their acceptance of these inequalities is merely the acceptance of the relations in which they actually stand, and a recognition of the motives which lead them to engage in their common practices. They have no title to complain of one another. And so provided that the conditions of the principle are met, there is no reason why they should not allow such inequalities. Indeed, it would be short-sighted of them to do so, and could result, in most cases, only from their being dejected by the bare knowledge, or perception, that others are better situated. Each person will, however, insist on an advantage to himself, and so on a common advantage, for none is willing to sacrifice anything for the others.

These remarks are not offered as a proof that persons so conceived and circumstanced would settle on the two principles, but only to show that these principles could have such a background, and so can be viewed as those principles which mutually self-interested and rational persons, when similarly situated and required to make in advance a firm commitment, could acknowledge as restrictions governing the assignment of rights and duties in their common practices, and thereby accept as limiting their rights against one another. The principles of justice may, then, be regarded as those principles which arise when the constraints of having a morality are imposed upon parties in the typical circumstances of justice.

SEVERAL ASSUMPTIONS AVOIDED

4. These ideas are, of course, connected with a familiar way of thinking about justice which goes back at least to the Greek Sophists, and which regards the acceptance of the principles of justice as a compromise between persons of roughly equal power who would enforce their will on each other if they could, but who, in view of the equality of forces amongst them and for the sake of their own peace and security, acknowledge certain forms of conduct insofar as prudence seems to require. Justice is thought of as a pact between rational egoists the stability of which is dependent on a balance of power and a similarity of circumstances. While the previous account is connected with this tradition, and with its most recent variant, the theory of games, it differs from it in several important respects which, to forestall misinterpretations, I will set out here.

Regarding Self-Interest

First, I wish to use the previous conjectural account of the background of justice as a way of analyzing the concept. I do not want, therefore, to be interpreted as assuming a general theory of human motivation: when I suppose that the parties are mutually self-interested, and are not willing to have their (substantial) interests sacrificed to others, I am referring to their conduct and motives as they are taken for granted in cases where questions of justice ordinarily arise. Justice is the virtue of practices where there are assumed to be competing interests and conflicting claims, and where it is supposed that persons will press their rights on each other. That persons are mutually self-interested in certain situations and for certain purposes is what gives rise to the question of justice in practices covering those circumstances. Amongst an association of saints, if such a community could really exist, the disputes about justice could hardly occur; for they would all work selflessly together for one end, the glory of God as defined by their common religion, and reference to this end would settle every question of right. The justice of practices does not come up until there are several different parties (whether we think of these as individuals, associations, or nations and so on, is irrelevant) who do press their claims on one another, and who do regard themselves as representatives of interests which deserve to be considered. Thus the previous account involves no general theory of human motivation. Its intent is simply to incorporate into the conception of justice the relations of men to one another which set the stage for questions of justice. It makes no difference how wide or general these relations are, as this matter does not bear on the analysis of the concept.

Regarding Constitutions

Again, in contrast to the various conceptions of the social contract, the several parties do not establish any particular society or practice; they do not covenant to obey a particular sovereign body or to accept a given constitution. Nor do they, as in the theory of games (in certain respects a marvelously sophisticated development of this tradition), decide on individual strategies adjusted to their respective circumstances in the game. What the parties do is to jointly acknowledge certain principles of appraisal relating to their common practices either as already established or merely proposed. They accede to standards of judgment, not to a given practice; they do not make any specific agreement, or bargain, or adopt a particular strategy. The subject of their acknowledgment is, therefore, very general indeed; it is simply the acknowledgment of certain principles of judgment, fulfilling certain general conditions, to be used in criticizing the arrangement of their common affairs. The relations of mutual self-interest between the parties who are similarly circumstanced mirror the conditions under which questions of justice arise, and the procedure by which the principles of judgment are proposed and acknowledged reflects the constraints of having a morality. Each aspect, then, of the preceding hypothetical account serves the purpose of bringing out a feature of the notion of justice. One could, if one liked, view the principles of justice as the "solution" of this highest order "game" of adopting, subject to the procedure described, principles of argument for all coming particular "games" whose peculiarities one can in no way foresee. But this comparison, while no doubt helpful, must not obscure the fact that this highest order "game" is of a special sort. Its significance is that its various pieces represent aspects of the concept of justice.

Regarding Coming together for the First Time

Finally, I do not, of course, conceive the several parties as necessarily coming together to establish their common practices for the first time. Some institutions may, indeed, be set up de novo; but I have framed the preceding account so that it will apply when the full complement of social institutions already exists and represents the result of a long period of development. Nor is the account in any way fictitious. In any society where people reflect on their institutions they will have an idea of what principles of justice would be acknowledged under the conditions described, and there will be occasions when questions of justice are actually discussed in this way. Therefore if their practices do not accord with these principles, this will affect the quality of their social relations. For in this case there will be some recognized situations wherein the parties are mutually aware that one of them is being forced to accept what the other would concede is unjust. The foregoing analysis may then be thought of as representing the actual quality of relations between persons as defined by practices accepted as just. In such practices the parties will acknowledge the principles on which it is constructed, and the general recognition of this fact shows itself in the absence of resentment and in the sense of being justly treated. Thus one common objection to the theory of the social contract, its apparently historical and fictitious character, is avoided.

FAIRNESS

Justice as Fairness

5. That the principles of justice may be regarded as arising in the manner described illustrates an important fact about them. Not only does it bring out the idea that justice is a primitive [i.e., foundational] moral notion in that it arises once the concept of morality is imposed on mutually self-interested agents similarly circumstanced, but it emphasizes that, fundamental to justice, is the concept of fairness which relates to right dealing between persons who are cooperating with or competing against one another, as when one speaks of fair games, fair competition, and fair bargains. The question of fairness arises when free persons, who have no authority over one another, are engaging in a joint activity and amongst themselves settling or acknowledging the rules which define it and which determine the respective shares in its benefits and burdens. A practice will strike the parties as fair if none feels that, by participating in it, they or any of the others are taken advantage of, or forced to give in to claims which they do not regard as legitimate. This implies that each has a conception of legitimate claims which he thinks it reasonable for others as well as himself to acknowledge. If one thinks of the principles of justice as arising in the manner described, then they do define this sort of conception. A practice is just or fair, then, when it satisfies the principles which those who participate in it could propose to one another for mutual acceptance under the aforementioned circumstances. Persons engaged in a just, or fair, practice can face one another openly and support their respective positions, should they appear questionable, by reference to principles which it is reasonable to expect each to accept.

It is this notion of the possibility of mutual acknowledgment of principles by free persons who have no authority over one another which makes the concept of fairness fundamental to justice. Only if such acknowledgment is possible can there be true community between persons in their common practices; otherwise their relations will appear to them as founded to some extent on force. If, in ordinary speech, fairness applies more particularly to practices in which there is a choice whether to engage or not (e.g., in games, business competition), and justice to practices in which there is no choice (e.g., in slavery), the element of necessity does not render the conception of mutual acknowledgment inapplicable, although it may make it much more urgent to change unjust than unfair institutions. For one activity in which one can always engage is that of proposing and acknowledging principles to one another supposing each to be similarly circumstanced; and to judge practices by the principles so arrived at is to apply the standard of fairness to them. . . .

The Duty of Fair Play

Now if the participants in a practice accept its rules as fair, and so have no complaint to lodge against it, there arises a prima facie duty (and a corresponding prima facie right) of the parties to each other to act in accordance with the practice when it falls upon them to comply. When any number of persons engage in a practice, or conduct a joint undertaking according to rules, and thus restrict their liberty, those who have submitted to these restrictions when required have the right to a similar acquiescence on the part of those who have benefited by their submission. These conditions will obtain if a practice is correctly acknowledged to be fair, for in this case all who participate in it will benefit from it. The rights and duties so arising are special rights and duties in that they depend on previous actions voluntarily undertaken, in this case on the parties having engaged in a common practice and knowingly accepted its benefits. It is not, however, an obligation which presupposes a deliberate performative act in the sense of a promise, or contract, and the like. An unfortunate mistake of proponents of the idea of the social contract was to suppose that political obligation does require some such act, or at least to use language which suggests it. It is sufficient that one has knowingly participated in and accepted the benefits of a practice acknowledged to be fair. This prima facie obligation may, of course, be overridden: it may happen, when it comes one's turn to follow a rule, that other considerations will justify not doing so. But one cannot, in general, be released from this obligation by denying the justice of the practice only when it falls on one to obey. If a person rejects a practice, he should, so far as possible, declare his intention in advance, and avoid participating in it or enjoying its benefits.

This duty I have called that of fair play, but it should be admitted that to refer to it in this way is, perhaps, to extend the ordinary notion of fairness. Usually acting unfairly is not so much the breaking of any particular rule, even if the infraction is difficult to detect (cheating), but taking advantage of loop-holes or ambiguities in rules, availing oneself of unexpected or special circumstances which make it impossible to enforce them, insisting that rules be enforced to one's advantage when they should be suspended, and more generally, acting contrary to the intention of a practice. It is for this reason that one speaks of the sense of fair play: acting fairly requires more than simply being able to follow rules; what is fair must often be felt, or perceived, one wants to say. It is not, however, an unnatural extension of the duty of fair play to have it include the obligation which participants who have knowingly accepted the benefits of their common practice owe to each other to act in accordance with it when their performance falls due; for it is usually considered unfair if someone accepts the benefits of a practice but refuses to do his part in maintaining it. Thus one might say of the tax-dodger that he violates the duty of fair play: he accepts the benefits of government but will not do his part in releasing resources to it; and members of labor unions often say that fellow workers who refuse to join are being unfair: they refer to them as "free riders," as persons who enjoy what are the supposed benefits of unionism, higher wages, shorter hours, job security, and the like, but who refuse to share in its burdens in the form of paying dues, and so on.

The duty of fair play stands beside other prima facie duties such as fidelity and gratitude as a basic moral notion; yet it is not to be confused with them. These duties are all clearly distinct, as would be obvious from their definitions. As with any moral duty, that of fair play implies a constraint on self-interest in particular cases; on occasion it enjoins conduct which a rational egoist strictly defined would not decide upon. So while justice does not require of anyone that he sacrifice his interests in that general position [i.e., original position] and procedure whereby the principles of justice are proposed and acknowledged, it may happen that in particular situations, arising in the context of engaging in a practice, the duty of fair play will often cross his interests in the sense that he will be required to forego particular advantages which the peculiarities of his circumstances might permit him to take. There is, of course, nothing surprising in this. It is simply the consequence of the firm commitment which the parties may be supposed to have made, or which they would make, in the general position, together with the fact that they have participated in and accepted the benefits of a practice which they regard as fair.

Source: John Rawls, "Justice as Fairness," Philosophical Review, Vol. 67, 1958, pp. 164-194.

STUDY QUESTIONS

Please answer all of the following questions.

1. According to Rawls in the section "different notions of justice", what are those different notions?

2. According to Rawls in the section "two principles stated, what are the two principles of justice, and what do they mean?

3. According to Rawls in the section "some inequalities permitted", what are those inequalities and what are the restrictions placed on them?

4. According to Rawls in the section "conditions of rationality, mutual self-interest, similar needs", describe those conditions.

5. According to Rawls in the section "impartiality regarding one's actual advantage", how does that impartiality come about?

6. According to Rawls in the section "several assumptions avoided", describe those assumptions regarding self-interest, constitutions and coming together for the first time.

7. According to Rawls in the section "fairness," what determines whether a practice is just and fair, and what is the duty of fair play?

Short essay: please select one of the following and answer it in a minimum of 100 words. j. Rawls states that "The second principle [of justice] defines what sorts of inequalities are permissible; it specifies how the presumption laid down by the first principle may be put aside." Explain.

a. Regarding his second principle of justice, Rawls states that "every party must gain from the inequality." Explain what this means and discuss whether this is realistic.

b. Describe Rawls's view of how people are "rational" in the original position, and discuss whether it is realistic.

c. Rawls believes that the notion of "fairness" regarding the just distribution of wealth is similar to the notion of fairness in fair games, fair competition, and fair bargains. Explain what he means and discuss whether he is correct.