BERNARD BOSANQUET'S PHILOSOPHY OF THE T STATE HE reaction against post-Kantian and more particularly against Hegelian idealism, which is so marked in contemporary logic and metaphysics, has in recent years extended to the "idealistic" or "metaphysical" theory of the state. Not uncommonly this reaction takes the form of a condemnation of post-Kantian idealism as something exotic in the thought of English-speaking countries, an importation from Germany, which is foreign, if not false, to the native temper of the English mind. Those who uphold this view generally take Locke and Hume, Mill and Spencer as their measure of what is characteristically English in philosophy, or, like Mr. L. T. Hobhouse, they oppose the "rational humanitarianism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries" to the "false and wicked. doctrine" of Hegel's "God-State "." God-State". But against these estimates we have to set Bosanquet's claim that it was only when transferred to a "more congenial home in the English-speaking world", with its "direct audacity, its decisive rejection of representative ideas in favor of directly apprehended unities-such as, for example, the living social unity", that the constructive impulse of post-Kantian idealism, or "speculative philosophy", as Bosanquet prefers to call it, came to its full fruition. It needed "the fresher and more originative medium of minds inspired by the English habit of handling the actual world-of self-government and self-expression." A theory which in its German home had been something of a romance "became in the English-speaking arena of vital politics, industry, poetry "The state" is a technical term used to indicate that the object of study is the nature or essence of states as such, exactly as a physician might study the structure and function of "the heart" or an engineer "the steam-engine". Cf. Bosanquet, Social and International Ideals, p. 274. L. T. Hobhouse, The Metaphysical Theory of the State, p. 6. It is clearly and religion, a literal transcript of experience." impossible to maintain that a theory which has come to count among its adherents such thinkers as Bernard Bosanquet and F. H. Bradley, T. H. Green and William Wallace, R. L. Nettleship and the two Cairds-not to mention many other names second only to these can be disposed of as being merely a foreign fad. Moreover, it should be remembered, in the first place, that the impulse of post-Kantian idealism took root in English thought at a time when, at least in its Hegelian form, it had completely gone out of fashion in the land of its birth, and, in the second, that among English thinkers this idealism never developed into a theory of two harply-sundered worlds -an "outer" world of brute mechanism to be efficiently managed and an "inner" world where the "free" spirit dwells with values and ideals. This two-world theory, as Professor Dewey has correctly pointed out, is the form in which post-Kantian idealism survived or revived in Germany. For better or for worse, the English idealists have followed Hegel rather than Fichte, the Kant of the Critique of Judgment rather than the Kant of the Critique of Pure Reason, in striving for a one-world theory, for seeing ideal values realized in the actual. No doubt, the spell of Plato, to whom Hegel himself owed so much, prepared them to welcome a philosophy moving towards this goal. Yet no weight which we can reasonably attach to these historical influences and affiliations suffices to account for the hold which post-Kantian idealism has gained upon English thought during the last fifty years. That hold can be explained only on the assumption that idealism seemed to the thinkers of this period to render with substantial truth the meaning of life as they saw it, that it was to them a "literal transcript of experience." Let us attempt, then, to see what that experience actually was. 'These quotations are taken from Bosanquet's article on "Realism and Metaphysics" in the Philosophical Review, vol. xxvi, no. 1, Jan., 1917, p. 7. * See German Philosophy and Politics, ch. i, and passim. For illustrations see e. g., the writings of H. Münsterberg, passim; especially his distinction between the causal and the teleological point of view and generally between facts and values, nature and spirit. I Lord Morley in his Recollections has drawn for us in these words a glowing picture of that Victorian Age in the midst of which idealism became the dominant philosophy in England. In our country at least it was an epoch of hearts uplifted with hope, and brains active with sober and manly reason for the common good. Some ages are marked as sentimental, others stand conspicuous as rational. The Victorian Age was happier than most in the flow of both these currents into a common stream of vigorous and effective talent. New truths were welcomed in free minds, and free minds make brave men. Old prejudices were disarmed. Fresh principles were set afloat, and supported by the right reasons. The standards of ambition rose higher and purer. Men learned to care more for one another. Sense of proportion among the claims of leading questions to the world's attention became more wisely tempered. The rational prevented the sentimental from falling into pure emotional. Bacon was prince in intellect and large wisdom of the world, yet it was Bacon who penned that deep appeal from thought to feeling, "the nobler a soul is, the more objects of compassion it hath." This of the great Elizabethan was one prevailing note in our Victorian age.' These fine phrases-" brains active with sober and manly reason for the common good", "men learned to care more for one another "-give the clue to the attitude toward the state of all the idealist writers of this period, from F. H. Bradley in his Ethical Studies and T. H. Green in his Principles of Political Obligation to Bosanquet in his Philosophical Theory of the State. They express the social facts transcribed in their social theory. It was an age when the national conscience was beginning to be profoundly stirred by the social and economic effects of the industrial system upon large masses of the population. The laissez-faire individualism then dominant in much of English thought was being weighed and found wanting. Mill, though an individualist in his conception of "liberty", inspired with his principle of "the greatest happiness of the greatest number" a movement of social reform which in practice aimed 'Recollections, vol. ii, pp. 365-6. not at "pleasure" but at raising the concrete standard of life and thereby developing a higher type of mind and character. Ruskin challenged a political economy which divorced commercial success from responsibility for its effects upon the lives of the workers as human beings. Both Ruskin and William Morris preached and fought for the restoration of individual spontaneity and artistic initiative in the handicrafts. Arnold Toynbee stimulated the movement for the breaking down of class-ignorance and class-exclusiveness which took shape in Toynbee Hall-the prototype and model of many other "settlements". The London Charity Organization Society experimented in the administration of charity so as not to pauperize the sufferer and make him dependent upon further charity but rather to cut at the root of the trouble by building up character, by "helping the sufferer to help himself." Throughout this period we note a keen and active public spirit, a sense of social responsibility, a recognition of duties which are also opportunities for service. In neighborhood-spirit and citizen-spirit the ideal of the common good took for the individual concrete shape according to his "station ", which defined for him what we may, with equal appropriateness, call his functions, his duties and his rights. Bosanquet's theory of the state is instinct with the best temper of this age. It attempts to be the philosophical interpretation of the implications of public-spirited citizenship. He wrote in 1890: We look forward to a society organized in convenient districts, in which men and women, pursuing their different callings, will live together with care for one another, and with in all essentials the same education, the same enjoyments, the same capacities. These men and women will work together in councils and on committees; and while fearlessly employing stringent legal powers in the public interest, yet will be aware, by sympathy and experience, of the extreme flexibility and complication of modern life, which responds so unexpectedly to the most simple interference; they will have a pride in their schools and their libraries, in their streets and their dwellings, in their workshops and their warehouses. . . . The only thing I dread in the system known as Socialism is the cutting off individual initiative outside ... certain duties specified by rule. . . . What is wanted is the habituation of the English citizen to his rights and duties, by training in organization, in administration, in what I may call neighborly public spirit. . . . Such as the citizen is, such the society will be; and the true union of social and individual reform lies in the moulding of the individual mind to the public purpose.1 2 In passages such as these we have the roots of Bosanquet's theories of the "general will", of the state as a "moral organism" and of institutions as "ethical ideas". For him the mainspring of healthy political life lies in the individual, but in the individnal as organ of the common good. This does not mean that every man is to become a public official. "The duties of citizenship will not necessarily drag us out of private life into politics." It is enough that we should understand that our lives, in all their special interests and activities, bear upon the quality of the common life, perhaps only in our immediate neighborhood, perhaps affecting the wider circle of the nation. Individuals cannot escape the fact that, as fellowcitizens, they are very literally "members one of another". Home and family, workshop, profession, trades union, churchall these are "nurseries of citizenship" and "symbols of the social will, and must be made more so". The formula for the moral life is simple and plain. "While remaining in some recognized groove, some accepted form of duty, men should bear in mind that their little life has value only as embodying some element of a common good. Therefore, while faithfully working in their groove, they must apply to it the best conception of human welfare that they can ".3 Thus, for example, : we all employ labour. The least wealthy of us, as an aggregate, employ most. How we spend our money and what labour we employ determine nothing less than this on what things the working people of this and other countries have to spend their lives and under what conditions their lives are to be spent. If we will have nasty things, shoddy things, vulgar things, ugly things, we are condemning some |