CHAPTER VI.

B. SPECULATIVE THEORIES.

I. The Golden

Age.

The State

as a necessary evil.

PHILOS

I. THE STATE OF NATURE.'

HILOSOPHICAL speculation is fond of imagining a primitive condition in which men lived without government, and then asking how from that condition mankind has arrived at the State. The popular imagination has often decked out this primitive condition with smiling pictures of innocence and abundance of natural enjoyments, and dreamed of a golden age of Paradise, in which there were as yet no evils and no injustice, while all enjoyed themselves in the unlimited freedom and happiness of their peaceful existence. In this primeval condition there was supposed to be no property, since the superabundance of nature gave to every one in sufficiency all that his unsophisticated and uncorrupted tastes could require. As yet there was no difference of ranks, nor even of callings. Every one was like another. Then too there was neither ruler nor subject, nor magistrate, nor judge, nor army, nor taxes 1.

In comparison with such an ideal the later political condition of man must appear perversion and decline. Only when men encountered previously unknown plagues, when passions were aroused in their breasts, and new dangers appeared, and guilt destroyed the peace of their souls, was there needed a power to terrify and to punish the wicked, and

1

Shakespeare depicts this 'state of nature' with brilliant irony in the Tempest, Act. ii. Scene 1. line 140 ff.

to secure the enjoyments of all against disturbance. Thus the State was thought of as a necessary evil, or at least as an institution of compulsion and constraint to avoid greater evils.

state of

war.

In opposition to this childish and cheerful idea of Paradise, 2. The other and sometimes morose philosophers imagined the non- Nature as political condition of man as much worse than the political, a state of as a condition of ceaseless hate and war of all against all: and if even they thought the State an evil, yet this evil was more endurable and less than the original state of nature' in which men were like wild beasts". This philosophical idea found a welcome confirmation in the theological speculation which regarded the State not as the organisation of Paradise, but of fallen humanity.

overlook

nature.

Both these views overlook the political nature of man, both Both views ignore the truth 2 which Aristotle expressed so well, that man man's is a political animal.' We may imagine a condition of man political which preceded the rise of the State, but this condition could never have satisfied his higher needs 3, and it was an immeasurable advance in his development when the germ of political capacity unfolded itself and came to light.

a [According to Hobbes, Leviathan, Part i. chs. xiii, xiv, the natural condition of man, i. e. his condition 'out of civil states,' is 'a condition of war of every one against every one.' Cp. Spinoza, Tract. Pol. c. ii. § 14: 'Homines ex natura hostes.' c. v. § 2: 'Homines civiles non nascuntur sed fiunt.' But these expressions of Hobbes and Spinoza are to be understood rather as a logical statement of what would be the condition of man apart from civil society, than as distinctly implying a historical theory. They err from ignoring history rather than from asserting false history. The word 'natural' is used merely in the negative sense of 'non-civil' or 'non-political,' and thus is the very reverse of Aristotle's qúois, which, as he tells us, is to be found in the end (Téλos) or completest development of anything. Pol. i. 2. § 8, 1252 b. 32. In § 16, 1253 a. 31 he says almost the same thing as Spinoza, op. cit. c. ii. § 14.]

Rousseau (Disc. sur l'inégalité des conditions parmi les hommes) : 'L'homme, dans l'état de nature, répugne à la société.' Mirabeau answered him excellently: 'Non seulement l'homme semble fait pour la société, mais on peut dire qu'il n'est vraiment homme, c'est-à-dire un être réfléchissant et capable de vertu, que lorsqu'elle commence à s'organiser. Les hommes n'ont rien voulu ni dû sacrifier en se réunissant en société; ils ont voulu et dû étendre leurs jouissances et l'usage de la liberté, par les secours et la garantie réciproques.' (Essai sur le despotisme.)

3 Plato (Rep. ii. 369) makes the State come into being, because the individual man is not self-sufficing (auтAρKŃS).

1. The

God.

CHAPTER VII.

II. THE STATE AS A DIVINE INSTITUTION.

IN antiquity as well as during the middle ages the belief

in the divine institution of the State was more extended and more intense than at the present day. But even then this divine foundation of the State was understood in very different senses.

According to one view, the State was the immediate State as work of God, the direct revelation upon earth of the divine directly founded by government. This view lay at the basis of the Jewish theocracy, and its logical consequence is always the theocratical form of the State to which alone it is adapted. If God has founded the State directly, it is natural that He should maintain and govern it directly.

2. As indirectly founded by God.

According to another view, the State is only indirectly founded by God, and is only indirectly governed by God1. This view was shared by the Greeks and Romans. Their States were by no means theocratic but thoroughly human, yet no public business of any importance was undertaken in antiquity without prayer and sacrifice preceding, and the care of the auspices, by which the will of the gods was discovered, occupied a great place in the public law of the Romans. They united a consciousness of human freedom and

1 It is only in this sense that Niebuhr (Gesch. d. Zeit der Revol. i. 214) calls the State' an institution ordained by God, and belonging to the essential nature of mankind, like marriage and the paternal relation. But it is an institution which cannot become perfect in this world. The state, as it actually exists, is only a shadow of the divine idea of the State.'

self-determination with the belief in a divine direction of human affairs; and if even in the destiny of the individual the power of the gods was felt, it appeared to them still clearer that the destiny of that great moral community, which we call the State, could not be separated from the will and working of deity 2. Were they mistaken?

It is self-evident that Christianity cannot regard the State as outside the divine ordering and government of the world. It is significant for the Christian conception that the apostle Paul, at a time when the Emperor Nero was persecuting the Christians, addressed these famous words to the Romans (xiii. 1): Let every soul be in subjection to the higher powers for there is no power but of God; and the powers that be are ordained of God.' Thus it is natural enough that during the whole middle ages, in all Christian States, the sovereign authority was derived from God, and the highest authority, that of the Emperor, immediately and directly 3.

2 Haller (Restaur. i. p. 427) cites a fine passage of Plutarch, in which he says: A city might more easily be founded without territory, than a State without belief in God.' Cp. Washington's Inaugural Speech to Congress in 1789: 'It would be peculiarly improper to omit, in this first official act, my fervent supplication to that Almighty Being, who rules over the universe, who presides in the councils of nations, and whose providential aids can supply every human defect, that his benediction may consecrate to the liberties and happiness of the people of the United States a government instituted by themselves for these essential purposes, and may enable every instrument employed in its administration to execute with success the functions allotted to his charge. In tendering this homage to the great Author of every public and private good, I assure myself that it expresses your sentiments not less than my own, nor those of my fellow-citizens at large less than either. No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the invisible hand which conducts the affairs of men more than the people of the United States. Every step, by which they have advanced to the character of an independent nation, seems to have been distinguished by some token of providential agency.' [The Speeches are given in Sparks, Life of Washington, vol. ii.]

* This is also the meaning of the Constitutio Ludovici Bavarici of the year 1338: Declaramus quod imperialis dignitas et potestas est immediate a solo Deo (i. e. not indirectly, mediate, through the Pope)-statim ex sola electione (by the Electors-Kurfürsten) est Rex verus et imperator Romanorum censendus.' The Augsburg Confession (1530) teaches in its 16th Art.: 'That all authority, government, law and order in the world have been created and established by God Himself.'

Erroneous views of

the State.

Grand as is the view which connects the rise and fall of the divine States with the divine government of the world, and high as nature of its moral significance is always to be accounted, we must not overlook that this is essentially religious, and not political; and thus this idea, if made a political and legal principle, causes and palliates errors and abuses. Thus :

Monarchi

dice.

1. God has indeed made man a political being, but at the cal preju- same time has made him free to realise the implanted idea of the State by his own exertions and according to his own judgment, and in the forms which seem suited to him. It is a profound error to reject particular forms of the State, for instance the republican, because God rules the world as a king.

The prince as God's representa

tive.

Authority as such divine.

2. Authority is indeed in principle and in fact dependent on God, but not in the sense that God has exalted particular privileged persons above the limitations of human nature, set them nearer to himself and made them demigods, nor in the sense that God has named human rulers as his personal representatives, identical with himself so far as their authority extends. Such theocratical ideas contradict the human nature of those to whom the government of the State is entrusted. The proud words of Louis XIV, 'We princes are the living images of Him who is all holy and all powerful 5,' are a blasphemy towards God, and an insult towards his subjects-men as much as he.

3. Many understand the authority, distinct from the persons who exercise it, as superhuman and politico-divine. Stahl says, 'The authority of the State is of God, not only in the sense that all rights are of God, property, marriage, paternal authority, but in the quite specific sense, that it is the work of God which He regulates. The State rules, not merely in

4 Cp. Stahl, Statslehre, ii. § 48: ' According to the theocratic conception of the middle ages, the chiefs of Christendom are the representatives of God Himself. Rulers (Pope, Emperor, and Kings) have thus in their own per sons the fulness of His authority.'

Euvres de Louis XIV, ii. p. 317, where the following passage occurs: 'Celui qui a donné des rois au monde a voulu qu'ils fussent honorés comme ses représentants, en se réservant, à lui seul, le droit de juger leurs actions. Celui qui est né sujet doit obéir sans murmurer: telle est sa volonté.'

• Statslehre, ii. § 43. On the other side cp. Macaulay in the passage quoted infra, Bk. vi. ch. xiv. footnote 2.