Man or the State?/Introduction
INTRODUCTION
"The great events of the day occupy my thoughts much at present. The old illusory France has collapsed; and as soon as the new, real Prussia does the same, we shall be with one bound in a new age. How ideas will then come tumbling about our ears! And it is high time they did. Up till now we have been living on nothing but the crumbs from the revolutionary table of last century, a food out of which all nutriment has long been chewed. The old terms require to have a new meaning infused into them. Liberty, equality, and fraternity are no longer the things they were in the days of the late-lamented guillotine. That is what the politicians will not understand; and therefore I hate them. They want only their own special revolutions—revolutions in externals, in politics, etc. But all this is mere trifling. What is all-important is the revolution of the spirit of man."
Thus in 1870 wrote Ibsen, greatest in his day of the rare originative geniuses who "carry in their brains the ovarian eggs of the next generation's or century's civilization." And now at last, after nearly fifty years, the fulfilment of that prophecy is at hand. Not Prussia merely, but the most of monarchist Europe has collapsed. The old ideas are tumbling about our ears at a rate which possibly Ibsen himself did not foresee. Even that hoariest and most impregnable of them all, the idea of the absolute State, though propped and buttressed during the past five years as never before in history, is everywhere visibly tottering—where it has not already tumbled. A new age is indeed upon us!
Probably no proof of failure less complete and terrible than the recent cataclysm could have shaken man's mystic devotion to the State. However it has oppressed, impoverished, impeded him, he has for the most part always regarded it as an inevitable and indispensable part of the divine machinery, as remote from his control as gravitation or the weather. All through the centuries he has blindly acceded to its insatiable demands, blindly conformed to its endless inhibitions, blindly sacrificed himself and his possessions to its alleged interests. Fed so long on this monotonous diet of subserviency, the State came quite naturally to imagine that there existed no law of God or man to which it was not superior—of which fatal delusion the consequences are today writ large in blood and fire across half the world.
The great underlying principle of English law, according to Dickens, is to make business for itself. The great underlying principle of the State, it might be said with equal truth, is to make power for itself. As Renan pointed out, "it knows but one thing—how to organize egotism." So preoccupied with this task has it been that it long ago forgot, if indeed it ever knew, that such a thing as the human soul exists. But now at last, aroused to rebellion by almost intolerable afflictions, the human soul begins to assert its supremacy. Of that duel the ultimate issue is certain and near at hand. The servant who has so long usurped the master's place must return below stairs; the instrument must finally yield to its creator.
But for all its crimes against humanity, the time is not yet when we can abolish the State entirely, as Ibsen urged, and "make willingness and spiritual kinship the only essentials in the case of a union." Eventually, unless moral progress is an illusion, that ideal will be realized. Mankind, however, has yet to serve a long and rigorous novitiate before it can be worthy of such a consummation. Philosophic anarchism is a creed that postulates too much nobility, too much self-restraint and self-abnegation, in common human nature to be immediately practicable. For a few decades (perhaps even a few generations) longer, Man must continue to bear as best he may with those accusing symbols of his moral imperfection, the policeman and the soldier.
If, then, the State cannot at once be dispensed with, the alternative is reform, revision, melioration of the State idea. Here we shall at least be sure of a multitude of counsellors, each with his favorite State-theory or State-pattern to urge for adoption. It would be well to dismiss at the start those slightly anachronistic physicians who invariably prescribe more centralization as a cure for the ailments of our over-centralized State. Their ideal is pre-war Prussia, though they will not often admit it. But of Prussia as a working model of State-theory we might say, as Talleyrand said of the English public school system, "It is the best we have ever seen; and it is abominable." The earnest seeker for light will turn with far more of hope and interest to storm-swept Russia. Out of the Soviet experiment, and out of the ideas of the Guild Socialists in England, is evolving what may well prove to be the State-norm of the immediate future—or something very like it.
But it should never be forgotten that the problem of the State is essentially a spiritual one. Political forms and institutions, legal systems, legislative enactments, all the charters and codes and statutes in Christendom, are valid and stable only as they tend to assure freedom and justice to individuals. Political freedom is of value only as it leads to moral freedom, and there can be no public justice that does not find its ultimate sanction in private conscience. The State, if it is to endure at all, must devote itself henceforth to the organization of altruism rather than egotism; it must slough off completely its old predatory and repressive character, and embrace the ideals of brotherhood and association. Above all, it must respect and preserve inviolate at whatever cost the principle of individual freedom. Not freedom to prey upon others, which was really the essence of the old individualism, but freedom from being preyed upon. Not the shadow of freedom, but its substance: not political freedom merely, but moral and economic freedom. If a government cannot permanently exist half slave and half free, how much less so can a human being!
More than this I shall not venture by way of prophecy. My purpose has been simply to indicate the problem, to accentuate the need of reform. Definite solutions I must leave to abler intellects. My present appearance is in the lowly capacity of Editor, and as such I fall back upon the precedent established or at least invoked by Carlyle: "Editors are not here, foremost of all, to say How.… An Editor's stipulated work is to apprise thee that it must be done. The 'way to do it,’—is to try it, knowing that thou shalt die if it be not done. There is the bare back, there is the web of cloth; thou shalt cut me a coat to cover the bare back, thou whose trade it is. ’Impossible?' Hapless Fraction, dost thou discern Fate there, half unveiling herself in the gloom of the future, with her gibbet-cords, her steel-whips, and very authentic Tailor's Hell, waiting to see whether it is ’possible’? Out with thy scissors, and cut that cloth or thy own windpipe!"
In considering the problem of the State the great thing, as Ibsen has pointed out, is not to allow one's self to be frightened by the venerableness of the institution. For those inclined to be thus frightened, as well as for a good many others, I have thought that a useful purpose might be served by bringing together a group of essays, written by some of the foremost thinkers of our time, which at least make plain that in neither its history nor its workings is the State a sacrosanct affair; that it is by no means an inerrant or irreproachable, even a reasonably efficient, social instrument; that under some other collective administrative arrangement humanity might achieve a far nobler and happier existence. The authors of these essays are of widely various, even directly antagonistic, social creeds; yet in the main points of their indictment against the State they are at one.
A certain congruity of selection and arrangement will, I hope, be apparent in the contents of this volume. Kropotkin's essay deals with the origin and historic evolution of the State. The chapter from Buckle, one of the greatest of philosophic historians, records the State's notable failure as a legislative agent. The three following papers constitute the challenge of the higher Individualism, as embodied in Emerson's serene and optimistic generalities, looking to- ward a society perfected from within; in Thoreau's keen eloquence, asserting the supremacy of personal Conscience over all other authority; in Herbert Spencer's clear-cut logic arguing the right of freedom from external control as an inevitable corollary to his "first principle" of social ethics—that "Every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man." In the next essay Tolstoy pleads the case for Christian anarchism, or social salvation through individual self-perfection combined with passive resistance to the State. Finally, we have Oscar Wilde's glowing and trenchant statement of the manner of life that would be possible in a really free society.
If this little book did no more than make generally available, as it does, the first of these essays, I should feel that its existence were sufficiently justified. Prince Kropotkin's avowed position as an apostle of philosophic anarchism will of course repel those numerous persons who, like crows, invariably take flight with much raucous cawing from the verbal bugaboos which they are too timid or too stupid to investigate. But it need alarm no others. Despite his faith in a society based upon "willingness and spiritual kinship" rather than upon coercion, Kropotkin holds a secure place among those of our time whose work has left a permanent impress upon human thought. Every reader of his "Mutual Aid" knows how deeply and widely he has explored the origins of society,—upon what a vast range of data his conclusions are based. The essay here reprinted is a product of the same study, though of course restricted to a narrower fields that went to the making of "Mutual Aid."
The reader may wonder, particularly in view of several references in this Introduction, why Ibsen is not represented in the main contents of the compilation. But my plan has been to include only complete, or fairly complete, essays; and unfortunately, Ibsen's appearances in what he calls "my capacity as state-satirist" are in the way of brief and scattered glimpses rather than in any sustained exposition. Yet no one else, save possibly Thoreau, pierces so directly to the heart of the matter,—as witness this final quotation:
"The State is the curse of the individual. With what is the strength of Prussia as a State bought? With the merging of the individual in the political and geographical concept. The waiter makes the best soldier. Now, turn to the Jewish nation, the nobility of the human race. How has it preserved itself—isolated, poetical—despite all the barbarity from without? Because it had no State to burden it. Had the Jewish nation remained in Palestine, it would long since have been ruined in the process of construction, like all the other nations.… The State has its roots in Time: it will have its culmination in Time. Greater things than it will fall; all religion will fall. Neither the conceptions of morality nor those of art are eternal. To how much are we really obliged to pin our faith? Who will vouch for it that two and two do not make five up in Jupiter?"