The Evolution of States Part 1

The Evolution of States.

by J. M. Robertson.

PREFACE

The following treatise is an expansion, under a new t.i.tle, of one originally published (1900) under the name of _An Introduction to English Politics_. Several friendly reviewers of that work objected, not unjustly, that its t.i.tle was something of a misnomer, or at least an imperfect indication of its contents. It had, as a matter of fact, originated remotely in a lecture delivered as preliminary to a course on "Modern English Politicians" (from Bolingbroke to Gladstone), the aim of the prefatory address being to trace in older politics, home and foreign, general laws which should partly serve as guides to modern cases, or at least as preparation for their scientific study; while the main course dealt with modern political problems as they have arisen in the careers and been handled by the measures of modern English statesmen. It was that opening exposition, developed into an essay, and published as a series of magazine articles, that had been further expanded into this treatise, by way of covering the ground more usefully; and the original name is therefore retained as a sub-t.i.tle.

It is perhaps unnecessary to explain that the book makes no pretension to being a complete or systematic treatment of political history, or of political forms and theories. The object in view from the first has been, not the technical anatomy or doc.u.mentary history of inst.i.tutions, but the bringing into light of the ruling forces in all political life, ancient and modern alike. It seeks to help the reader to fulfil the precept of Montaigne: "_Qu'il ne luy apprenne pas tant les histoires qu'a en juger._"

Since it was first written, there has been so much fresh sociological study of history that I need not repeat the justification originally offered for my undertaking. Alike as to ancient and modern history, the effort of scholars is now more and more towards comprehension of historic causation in terms of determining conditions, the economic above all; so much so that I have profited somewhat in my revision from various recent works, and might with more leisure have done so more fully. Revised as it is, however, the book may serve to expound views of history which are still not generally accepted, and to call in question fallacious formulas which seem to me still unduly common.

On any view, much remains to be done before the statement of historic causation can reach scientific thoroughness; and it may well be that some of my theories will incur modification. All I claim for them is that they are made in the light of a study of the concrete process; and I am satisfied that fuller light is to be obtained only in that direction. In the end, doubtless, conflicts of historical interpretation will turn upon problems of psychology. A contemporary German expert of distinction, Prof. Lamprecht, in his able lectures on the problem _What is History?_ (Eng. trans. 1905), lays it down that the main problem of every scientific history of mankind is the "deducing from the history of the most important communities of men the evolution of the breadth of consciousness"; and again that "the full historical comprehension of a single change or of a single phenomenon, with their historical significance, can only be acquired from the most general principles; that is to say, from the application of the highest universal-historical categories." If I understand Prof. Lamprecht aright, he here means simply that we properly understand the motivation of men in the past in terms of our own psychosis, conceived as in touch only with their data.

This seems to me substantially sound. But on the other hand I doubt the utility of his apparent purpose of explaining modern historic developments in terms of special psychic changes or movements in communities, considered as forces. That way seems to lie reversion to the old and vain device of explaining the course of nations in terms of their "characters."

In any case, however, we have Prof. Lamprecht's avowal that "It would be a study of great value to establish, by comparative work in universal history, what are the constantly recurring economic factors of each period which are so uniformly followed by the development of other higher intellectual values." That is as full a recognition of the "economic factor" as I am concerned to contend for, if it be understood that economic motives are on the one hand recognised as affecting social action in general, and on the other that varying forms of social machinery react variously on intellectual life. Upon such hypotheses the following inquiry proceeds; to such conclusions it leads.

Obviously all critical exposition, historical or other, is an attempt to influence the psychic processes of the reader, to make him "feel" this and "think" that; and in this sense any resulting change of conduct means the play of "the psychic factor." But that is only another way of saying that the psychic factor is conditioned by material circ.u.mstances, by knowledge, and by ignorance. To insist on the perpetual social significance of all three is the general aim of this book.

_September, 1912._

PART I

POLITICAL FORCES IN ANCIENT HISTORY

CHAPTER I

THE SUBJECT MATTER

-- 1

Politics, in its most general and fundamental character, is the strife of wills on the ground of social action. As international politics is the sum of the strifes and compromises of States, so home politics is the sum of the strifes and compromises of cla.s.ses, interests, factions, sects, theorists, in all countries and in all ages. In studying it, then, we study the evolution of an aggregate, a quasi-organism, in terms of the clashing forces of its units and of their spontaneous combinations.

This may seem too obvious and simple a truth to need formal telling; and yet no truth is more often missed or set aside by writers who deal with political history. The past course of nations, when it is sought to be explained at all, is by two writers out of three accounted for by certain supposed qualities of character in the given nation as a whole, instead of by the specially conditioned play of forces common to all peoples.[1] For instance, M. Taine, in the preface to the first volume of his fascinating work, _Les origines de la France contemporaine_, goes about to justify his own political indifferentism by stating that in eighty years his country had thirteen times changed its const.i.tution.

"_We_," he says, have done this; and "_we_ have not yet found that which suits _us_."[2] It is here implied that a body of men collectively and concurrently seeking for a fixed const.i.tution have failed, and that the failure is discreditable--that those who thus seek and fail have been badly employed. It is by implication denied that successive changes of a const.i.tution may fitly be regarded as a process of growth and healthy adjustment of parts: the ideal of political health is a.s.sumed to be a state of fixity. Thus does indifferentism, naturally if not necessarily, miss the point of view from which itself is to be studied as one of the forces whose conflict the true historian ought to a.n.a.lyse.

There is no national "we" aiming collectively at a fixed and final const.i.tution; nor are the successive const.i.tutions of France as such more significant of failure or permanent harm than the successive changes in the professedly unchanged const.i.tution of Great Britain, though the violent kinds of change are as such harmful. If M. Taine had but applied with rigour the logic he once before prescribed, soundly if wittily, for all problems alike, he could not have begun his history with that delusive abstraction of a one-minded community, failing to achieve "their" or "its" purpose. "_Je n'en sais rien_," he remarks with a shrug, over the protest of M. Royer-Collard that certain scientific reasoning will make Frenchmen revolutionary; "_est-ce qu'il y a des Francais?_"[3] In dead earnest he now a.s.sumes that France consists just of the single species "Frenchmen," whose const.i.tution-building is a corporate attempt to build a French house to live in; when all that is truly historical in his own book goes to show clearly enough that French const.i.tutions, like all others, are products of ever-varying and conflicting pa.s.sions and interests of sets of people in France who are "Frenchmen" merely when they happen to act in concert against other geographical groups. At no moment were all of the French people consenting parties to any one of the thirteen const.i.tutions. Then there was no collective failure.

Of course M. Taine knew this well enough in his capacity of narrator; but as teacher he could not escape from the rut dug for his thought by his fatalism. He must needs make the synthetic abstraction of "we,"

which excludes the political a.n.a.lysis essential to any practical explanation; and it inevitably followed that his generalisations were merely pseudo-biological, and not what is most wanted in history--sociological truth rooted in psychology and biology. In denuding himself alike of hopes and fears, M. Taine really gave the great ill.u.s.tration of the truth of his own penetrating comment on Merimee,[4] that he who will be duped by nothing ends in being the dupe of his distrust. He will not be duped by this ideal or that; he will not care enough for any to have a strong wish to see it realised; and so he comes to be duped by the wish to disprove all, to work down all sociology to the plane of cynical pseudo-biology. The enthusiastic amateur can show it, can convict the critic of hearing only the devil's advocate in every moral process,[5] and of becoming at length the historic oracle of those, of all readers, who are most alien to his philosophy.

Such an outcome, in the work of such a critic, is vividly instructive.

At worst, indeed, he has a positive value as the extremest reactionist against the merely partisan method of history, which is almost all we have had in England since the French Revolution, down to the other day.

After M. Taine has pa.s.sed, fools' paradises must needs fall in market value. But when the devil's advocate has made his round, we must still plough and eat, and the paradises must just be laid out for new sowing.

The evil of theoretical extremes is not so much their falsehood as their irrelevance. If we are to instruct each other in conduct, it must be in terms of sympathies and antipathies; and if we are to profit by a study of politicians, who are among the most generally typical of men, and of politics, which is the expression of so much of life, we must go about it as humanists and not as fatalists.

-- 2

Humanity, however, will not suffice to save us from false philosophy if, as humanists, we seek to gain our polemical ends by M. Taine's didactic methods. He, naturally so much of an a.n.a.lyst, took to pseudo-synthesis when he wished with little labour to discredit certain popular aspirations. But pseudo-synthesis is the favourite expository process of many men with ardent aspirations, and of many writers who are friendly enough to the aspirations of their fellows. By pseudo-synthesis I mean that process, above exemplified, of "cooking" an intricate moral problem by setting up one or more imaginary ent.i.ties, to whose volition or potency the result is attributed. It was the method of medieval science; and it is still popular among the experts as well as the amateurs of historical science. It was the ordinary expedient of Comte, in whose pages history becomes a Jonsonian masque of personified abstractions; and Buckle too often resorts to it. But hear a learned and judicious English Liberal, not to be suspected of doctrinary extravagance:--

"As in time past Rome had sacrificed domestic freedom that she might be the mistress of others, so now" [in the later Empire] "to be universal she, the conqueror, had descended to the level of the conquered" [in respect of Caracalla's edict giving to all subjects of the Empire the rights of Roman citizenship]. "But the sacrifice had not wanted its reward. From her came the laws and the language that had overspread the world; at her feet the nations laid the offerings of their labour; she was the head of the Empire and of civilisation."[6]

The "she" of this pa.s.sage I take to be as purely imaginary an ent.i.ty as Phlogiston; and it is not easy to see how a method of explanation which in physical science is found worse than barren can give any edification in the study of history. To say nothing of the familiar explanation that Caracalla's sole motive in conferring the citizenship on the provincials was the desire to lay on them corresponding taxes,[7] the proposition has no footing in political actualities. "Rome's self-abnegation that she might Romanise the world"[8] expresses no fact in Roman volition, thought, or deed; it is not the mention of a sentiment which swayed men's action, but the attempt to reduce a medley of actions to the semblance of a joint volition. There was no "Rome" capable of "self-abnegation" and susceptible of "reward." Why, then, should it be said? It is said either because the writer permits himself to fill in a perspective with a kind of pigment which he would not employ in his foreground, or because he is still too much under the sway of old methods when he is generalising conventional knowledge instead of a.n.a.lytically reaching new.[9] Either way the lapse is only too intelligible. And if an innovating expert, dealing with old facts, runs such risks, great must be those run by plain people when they seek to attain a generalised knowledge of facts which are the battle-ground of current ideals. Only by perpetual a.n.a.lysis can we hope partly to escape the snare of the pseudo-synthetic, the traps of rhetoric and exegetic fiction.

-- 3

The term "pseudo-synthesis" implies, of course, that there may be a true synthesis. What is necessary to such synthesis is that there shall have been a preliminary a.n.a.lysis; but a synthesis once justly made is the greatest of helps to new a.n.a.lyses. Now there is one such which may safely be brought to bear on the study of practical politics, because it is an axiom alike of inorganic physics and of biology, and a commonplace of human science, though seldom used as a means of historic generalisation. This is the simple principle that all energy divides ostensibly into forces of attraction and of repulsion.

[The principle thus stated should be compared with the theorem of Kant as to the correlative forces of sociability and unsociability (_Idee zu einer allgemein Geschichte_), and the important and luminous formula of Professor Giddings, that all sociological processes, properly so called, turn upon "consciousness of kind"

(_Principles of Sociology_, 1896, 3rd ed. pp. 17-19, and Preface; and in earlier writings by Professor Giddings, there mentioned).

The scientific value of that formula is obvious; but other ways of stating the case may still serve a purpose. The view in the text I find to have been partly antic.i.p.ated by Shaftesbury, _Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour_, 1709, pt. iii, -- 2 (_Characteristics_, ed. 1733, i, pp. 111-12), who is followed by Eusebe Salverte, _De la Civilisation depuis les premiers Temps historiques_, 1813, p.

53. Shaftesbury even antic.i.p.ates in part the formula of Professor Giddings in the pa.s.sage: "If anything be natural, in any Creature or any Kind, 'tis that which is preservative of the Kind itself,"

and in the sequel. As Professor Giddings traces (pref. to 3rd ed.

p. x) the first suggestion of his "consciousness of kind" to Adam Smith's _Theory of the Moral Sentiments_, which is certainly in the line of descent from Shaftesbury, there may really be a causal connection.]

That principle obviously holds of the relations of men in society as it does of their muscular action and of their moral and intellectual life; and so fundamental is the fact that when we study human history in view of it, we find it more and more difficult to suppose that it will ever cease to hold. That is to say, it is almost impossible to conceive state of life in which the forces of attraction and repulsion shall not operate energetically in the moral and intellectual relations of human beings. From the primitive and the barbaric stages in which the sight of an alien moves the savage to such destructive rage as is seen in some dogs at the sight of others, or in which a difference of personal odour rouses a no less spontaneous repulsion--as in Chinese against Europeans, or in Europeans against Chinese[10]--down to the fierce battle in self-governing countries over every innovating law, or that strife of opinion in which these lines play their part, the clash of opposing tendencies is perpetual, ubiquitous, inevitable. And so difficult is it to conceive any cessation that at once many observers leap from the general principle to the particular conclusion that all the _modes_ in which the action and reaction, the attractions and repulsions of individuals and groups, have operated in the past must needs operate in the future. They conclude, that is, that the particular phenomenon of WAR, above all, is chronic, and can never definitely disappear. Thus M.

Zola, looking around him and finding strife everywhere, decides that all the past _forms_ of strife are inevitably recurrent.[11] It may be well at the outset to insist that the general principle involves no such particular necessity.

War is simply a form in which the instincts of attraction and repulsion have operated in human societies during ages in which certain psychological and physiological types have been normal. It may very well recur, with growing infrequency, for a long time to come; but it is not rationally to be regarded as a necessary function of the grand biological forces. What does seem certain is a different thing--that the forces of attraction and repulsion will always operate in _some_ form; and that the very fact of their finding less expression in the mode of physical strife will imply their coming into play in other modes, such as the strife of ideals, doctrines, and cla.s.s interests as they are expressed in politics without bloodshed. The general law is that the forces of attraction and repulsion, as exhibited in human thought or feeling, run during the earlier stages of growth in channels which may be broadly regarded as animal; and that when altered political and social conditions partly or wholly close these channels, the biological forces open for themselves new ones.

War is precisely the blindest, the least rational, the least human of all the forms of human conflict, inasmuch as it is the collective clashing of communities whose members, divided among themselves by many real differences of interest, bias, and attraction, are set against each other, as wholes--if by anything higher than animal pugnacity--either by the mere ideals or appet.i.tes of rulers or leaders, or by more or less imaginary differences of interest, seen under the moral illusion of the most primitive of social instincts--the _sensus gregis_. As evolution proceeds, the blind form may be expected to disappear, and the more reasoned forms--that is, the inter-social and intellectual--to develop.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: It is one of the shortcomings of Buckle that, though he at least once (_Introd. to Hist. of Civ. in Eng._, Routledge's ed. p. 352) recognises the futility of explaining history in terms of national character, he repeatedly lapses to that method, and speaks of peoples as if they were of one will, bent, and mind. (Ed. cited, edit. notes pp.

354, 385, 540, 553, 558, 719, etc.). See below, pt. iii, ch. iii, second note, as to Eduard Meyer.]

[Footnote 2: Similarly De Tocqueville begins _L'ancien regime et la revolution_ with "_Les Francais ont fait...._" (Avant-Propos, 2e ed. p.

5), and makes the successors of the Revolutionists "_les memes Francais_" (p. 12). Soon he makes the Revolution an ent.i.ty (p. 35).

Compare with Taine's pa.s.sage the programme of the first number of Le Play's _La Reforme Sociale_, 1881 (cited by H. Higgs, _Quarterly Journal of Economics_, Boston, July, 1890, p. 418), which might almost have been written by Taine. In the case of Le Play the ideal of a quasi-patriarchal order, very stable and very fixed, led to an att.i.tude resembling at points that of Taine. It is easy to see how the natural recoil from political turmoil has, since the French Revolution, developed successive schools such as those of Saint Simon, Comte, and Le Play, all aiming at stability and order, all seeking to elbow out the cosmic force of Change. In Taine's case the result was an acceptance of Spencer's "administrative nihilism."]

[Footnote 3: _Les philosophes cla.s.siques du XIXe siecle en France_, 3ieme ed. p. 37.]

[Footnote 4: _Lettres de Prosper Merimee a une Inconnue_, pref. _end_.

When, however, M. Taine wrote on Sainte-Beuve's death (1869), he laid down, as one of the necessities of the search for "the true truth," this very determination "to be the dupe of nothing and n.o.body, above all of oneself" (_Derniers Essais_, p. 52). Years before an acute critic had said of his literary criticism: "M. Taine, at bottom, let us say it with bated breath, is the dupe of himself when he supposes himself to have given a rigorous formula, an exact definition, a chemical a.n.a.lysis of his author" (Frederic Morin, _Les hommes et livres contemporains_, 1862, p. 33). Compare the brochure of Professor Edouard Droz, _La critique litteraire et la science_, 1893, discussed in the present writer's _New Essays towards a Critical Method_, 1897, p. 13 _sq._]

[Footnote 5: See _Napoleon et ses detracteurs_, par le Prince Napoleon, p. 13, and _pa.s.sim_.]

[Footnote 6: Professor Bryce, _The Holy Roman Empire_, 8th ed. p. 7.]