Nationalism and Culture (26 page)

Thousands of experiences had to be gathered and must still be gathered to make men ready for the thought that it is not the form of power, but power itself, which is the source of all evil, and that it must be abolished to open to man new outlooks for the future. Every slightest achievement along this tedious path was a step forward in the direction of the loosing of all those bonds of political power which have always crippled the free operation of the creative forces of cultural life and hindered their natural development. Only when man shall have overcome the belief in his dependence on a higher power will the chains fall away that up to now have bowed the people beneath the yoke of spiritual and social slavery. Guardianship and authority are the death of all intellectual effort, and for just that reason the greatest hindrance to any close social union, which can arise only from free discussion of matters and can prosper only in a community not hindered in its natural course by external compulsion, belief in a supernatural dogma or economic oppression.

JEREMY BENTHAM AND UTILITARIANISM. PRIESTLEY AND RICHARD PRICE. THOMAS PAINE CONCERNING STATE AND SOCIETY. WILLIAM GODWIN'S POLITICAL JUSTICE. LIBERTARIAN TENDENCIES IN AMERICA. FROM JEFFERSON TO THOREAU. LIBERAL IDEAS IN GERMAN LITERATURE. LESSING ON STATE AND CHURCH. HERDER'S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. SCHILLER'S ESTHETIC OF CULTURE. LICHTENBERG AND SEUME. THE PERSONALITY OF GOETHE. WIELAND'S GOLDNER SPIEGEL. JEAN PAUL. HOLDERLIN'S HYPERION. WILHELM VON HUMBOLDT'S IDEEN UBER DIE GRENZEN DER WIRKSAMKEIT DES STAATES. POLITICAL RADICALISM IN FRANCE. VOLTAIRE. DIDEROT'S CONCEPTION OF FREEDOM. MONTESQUIEU'S SPIRIT OF THE LAfVS.

IT had become the custom to refer to liberalism as "political individualism," with the consequence that an entirely false concept was set up and the door thrown wide open for all sorts of misunderstandings. Still, the tendency arose from a thoroughly social idea: the principle of utility, which Jeremy Bentham—one of the most distinguished representatives of this school—reduced to the formula: "the greatest possible amount of happiness for the greatest possible number of the members of society." Thus the principle of utility became for him the natural criterion of right and wrong. Says Bentham:

The interest of the community is one of the most general expressions that can occur in the phraseology of morals: no wonder that the meaning of it is often lost. When it has a meaning, it is this. The community is a fictitious body, composed of the individual persons who are considered as constituting, as it were, its members. The interest of the community then is, what.''—the sum of the interests of the several members who compose it. It is vain to talk of the interest of the community without understanding what is the interest of the individual. A thing is said to promote the interest, or to be jor the interest, of the individual, when it tends to add to the sum total of his pleasures: or, what comes to the same thing, to diminish the sum total of his pains. ... A measure of government (which is but a particular kind of action, performed by a particular person or persons) may be said to be conformable to, or dictated by, the principle of utility, when in

like manner the tendency which it has to augment the happiness of the community is greater than any which it has to diminish it.-^

Certainly these words give expression to the sentiment of social justice which in its immediate assumption proceeds, it is true, from the individual, but which nevertheless is to be taken as the result of a clearly marked feeling of solidarity and can in no wise be covered by the common designation "individualism," which may mean anything or nothing.

Although a large number of the celebrated supporters of political radicalism in England, in contrast to Bentham, proceeded from the principle of natural rights, they agreed with him in their final goal. The dissenting preacher, Joseph Priestley, who declared the unlimited perfectibility of man to be a law of God, would concede that government is right only to the extent that its instruments are engaged in furthering this law of the divine will. To assign to government any other purpose is a deadly sin against the right of the people, for the profit and happiness of the individual members of the community is the only standard by which to judge any transaction having to do with the state. Influenced by this line of thought, Priestley defended the right of a people at any time to recall its government as one of the most elementary presuppositions of the state contract and from this arrived logically at the right of revolution which resides in every people when the government abandons the path which is indicated for it by these imperishable principles.

Richard Price, in contrast with Priestley, did not rest his ideas of right and wrong on grounds of pure utility j neither was he in very close agreement with him about the concepts attaching to philosophic materialism, and he believed in the freedom of the human will. He did, however, agree with the views of his friend about the relations of man to government in general j he even went somewhat further, valuing rather more highly the idea of personal freedom.

In every free state every man is his own legislator. All taxes are free gifts for public services. All laws are particular provisions or regulations established by COMMON. CONSENT for gaining protection and safety. And all Magistrates are Trustees or Deputies for carrying these regulations into execution.

Liberty, therefore, is too imperfectly defined, when it is said to be "a Government by Laws, and not by Men." If the laws are made by one man, or a junto of men in a state, and not by common consent, a government by them does not differ from Slavery.-

^ J. Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, 1789. * Richard Price, Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty and the justice and Policy of the War tvith America, 1776.

The pronouncement concerning laws is of especial importance if one recalls what a cult was made of the law in France at the time of the great Revolution. Of course Price recognized that a social status in which the laws arose from the free consent of all was possible only within the frame of a small community, but just for this reason the modern great state appeared to him one of the greatest dangers for the future of Europe.

In advance of all the representatives of political radicalism of that epoch was Thomas_Paine, the enthusiastic pioneer fighter for the independence of the English colonies in North America, the man who understood how to give the clearest expression to those aspirations. Deserving of especial note is the manner in which he brought before the eyes of his contemporaries the difference between state and society. He writes:

Society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the latter is a punisher.

Society is in every state a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one: for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government^ which we should expect in a country without government^ our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence.'

Like Priestley, Paine believed in a constant upward advance of human culture and deduced from this that "the higher a culture stands, the less is the need for government, because men must in this case look after their own affairs and also those of the government."

In his writings against Edmund Burke, who had himself once belonged among the most enthusiastic representatives of political radicalism but later became the most virulent advocate of modern state reaction, Paine developed again in splendid words his idea of the nature of government, and especially emphasized most incisively that the men of today have no right to prescribe the path for the men of tomorrow. Covenants that have passed into history can never impose on new generations the duty of accepting as legal and binding on themselves limitations set by their forebears. Paine warned his contemporaries against delusive faith in the wisdom of a government in which he saw merely a "national administrative body upon which is imposed the duty of making effective the basic principles prescribed by society." * But Paine was also an opponent of that

'Thomas Paine, Common Sense. Philadelphia, 1776.

* Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man; being an answer to Mr. Burke's Attack on the French Revolution. London, 1791. The second part of the work, appearing in

formal democracy which sees in the will of the majority the last word of wisdom, and whose supporters strive to prescribe every activity by established law. Thus he gave warning in his fire-breathing series of essays, "The Crisis" (i776-1783), of a tyranny of the majority, a power often more oppressive than the despotism of one individual over all. It was as if he had foreseen intuitively what dangers must arise if men allowed themselves to erect into a fundamental principle of law, a method whose claim to validity is based on the fact that five is more than four.

The ideas of political radicalism were at that time widely disseminated in England and America and left their unmistakable imprint on the intellectual development of both countries. We encounter them again in John Stuart Mill, Thomas Buckle, E. H. Lecky and Herbert Spencer, to mention only four of the best-known names. They found their way into poetical works and inspired men like Byron, Southey, Coleridge, Lamb, Wordsworth, and above all, Shelley, one of the greatest poets of all time, to reach at last their intellectual zenith in Godwin's Social Justice a work which powerfully stirred men's minds for a time, but fell later into forgetfulness because his bold conclusions went too far for most.^

Godwin clearly recognized that the explanation of the evil was not to be found in the external form of the state, but was grounded in its very essence. For this reason he did not want to see the power of the state reduced to "a minimum" j he wanted to banish from the life of society every institution of force. Thus, the bold thinker arrived at the idea of a stateless society, where man is no longer subjected to the mental and physical compulsion of an earthly Providence, but finds room for the undisturbed development of his natural capacities, and himself manages all his relations with his fellowmen by the method of free agreement to meet existing needs.

But Godwin recognized also that a social development in this direction was not possible without a fundamental revolution in existing economic arrangements; for tyranny and exploitation grow on the same tree and are inseparably bound together. The freedom of the individual is secure only when it rests on the economic and social well-being of all; a fact for which the advocates of purely political radicalism have never had sufficient regard, wherefore they have always been compelled later to make new concessions to the state. The personality of the individual stands

1792, led to an accusation of high treason against Paine. He was able to escape the consequences only by a timely flight to France.

Burke's earlier essay, "A Vindication of Natural Society," which appeared in 1756, is justly regarded as one of the earliest written contributions of modern anarchism; its author anticipated many of Godwin's conclusions.

* William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Injluence U-pon General Virtue and Happiness, London, 1793.

the higher, the more deeply it is rooted in the community, from which arise the richest sources of its moral strength. Only in freedom does there arise in man the consciousness of responsibility for his acts and regard for the rights of others j only in freedom can there unfold in its full strength that most precious social instinct: man's sympathy for the joys and sorrows of his fellow men and the resultant impulse toward mutual aid in which are rooted all social ethics, all ideas of social justice. Thus Godwin's work became at the same time the epilogue of that great intellectual movement which had inscribed on its banner the greatest possible limitation of the power of the state, and the starting point for the development of the ideas of libertarian socialism.

In America the modes of thought of political radicalism for a long time dominated the best minds, and with them public opinion. Even today they are not completely quenched there, although the all-crushing and leveling domination of capitalism and its monopoly economy have so far undermined the old traditions that they can now serve only as watchwords for business undertakings of a totally different sort. But this was not always so. Even so fundamentally conservative a character as George Washington, to whom Paine dedicated the first part of his Rights of Man (which did not prevent his later attacking the first President of the United States violently when he thought he saw him turning in a direction that led far from the paths of freedom)—even Washington could declare: "Government is not reason, it is not eloquence—it is force! Like fire it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master j never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action,"

Thomas Jefferson, who was of the opinion that revolt against a gov-ernmenf which had sinned against the freedom of the people was not merely the right but the duty of a good citizen, and that a little rebellion from time to time is good for the health of a government, put his idea about all governmental systems into the laconic words: "That government is best which governs least." An irreconcilable opponent of all political restrictions, Jefferson regarded every intrusion of the state into the sphere of the personal life of the citizen as despotism and brutal force.

To the claim that the citizen must surrender to the state an essential part of his freedom as the price of the safety of his person, Benjamin Franklin replied in the incisive words: "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety,"

Wendell Phillips, the mighty champion against negro slavery, expressed the conviction that "government is the fundamental 'ism' of the soldier, bigot and priest"j and he said in one of his speeches: "I think little of the direct influence of governments. I think, with Guizot, that 'it is a gross delusion to believe in the sovereign power of political