Classic Political Philosophy for the Modern Man

by Andrew Lynn

  I trace amongst our contemporaries two contrary notions which are equally injurious. One set of men can perceive nothing in the principle of equality but the anarchical tendencies which it engenders: they dread their own free agency—they fear themselves. Other thinkers, less numerous but more enlightened, take a different view: besides that track which starts from the principle of equality to terminate in anarchy, they have at last discovered the road which seems to lead men to inevitable servitude. They shape their souls beforehand to this necessary condition; and, despairing of remaining free, they already do obeisance in their hearts to the master who is soon to appear. The former abandon freedom, because they think it dangerous; the latter, because they hold it to be impossible. If I had entertained the latter conviction, I should not have written this book, but I should have confined myself to deploring in secret the destiny of mankind. I have sought to point out the dangers to which the principle of equality exposes the independence of man, because I firmly believe that these dangers are the most formidable, as well as the least foreseen, of all those which futurity holds in store: but I do not think that they are insurmountable. The men who live in the democratic ages upon which we are entering have naturally a taste for independence: they are naturally impatient of regulation, and they are wearied by the permanence even of the condition they themselves prefer. They are fond of power; but they are prone to despise and hate those who wield it, and they easily elude its grasp by their own mobility and insignificance. These propensities will always manifest themselves, because they originate in the groundwork of society, which will undergo no change: for a long time they will prevent the establishment of any despotism, and they will furnish fresh weapons to each succeeding generation which shall struggle in favour of the liberty of mankind. Let us then look forward to the future with that salutary fear which makes men keep watch and ward for freedom, not with that faint and idle terror which depresses and enervates the heart.

  Chapter VIII

  General Survey Of The Subject

  Before I close forever the theme that has detained me so long, I would fain take a parting survey of all the various characteristics of modern society, and appreciate at last the general influence to be exercised by the principle of equality upon the fate of mankind; but I am stopped by the difficulty of the task, and in presence of so great an object my sight is troubled, and my reason fails. The society of the modern world which I have sought to delineate, and which I seek to judge, has but just come into existence. Time has not yet shaped it into perfect form: the great revolution by which it has been created is not yet over; and amidst the occurrences of our time, it is almost impossible to discern what will pass away with the revolution itself, and what will survive its close. The world which is rising into existence is still half encumbered by the remains of the world which is waning into decay; and amidst the vast perplexity of human affairs, none can say how much of ancient institutions and former manners will remain, or how much will completely disappear. Although the revolution which is taking place in the social condition, the laws, the opinions, and the feelings of men, is still very far from being terminated, yet its results already admit of no comparison with anything that the world has ever before witnessed. I go back from age to age up to the remotest antiquity; but I find no parallel to what is occurring before my eyes: as the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity. Nevertheless, in the midst of a prospect so wide, so novel and so confused, some of the more prominent characteristics may already be discerned and pointed out. The good things and the evils of life are more equally distributed in the world: great wealth tends to disappear, the number of small fortunes to increase; desires and gratifications are multiplied, but extraordinary prosperity and irremediable penury are alike unknown. The sentiment of ambition is universal, but the scope of ambition is seldom vast. Each individual stands apart in solitary weakness; but society at large is active, provident, and powerful: the performances of private persons are insignificant, those of the state immense. There is little energy of character; but manners are mild, and laws humane. If there be few instances of exalted heroism or of virtues of the highest, brightest, and purest temper, men’s habits are regular, violence is rare, and cruelty almost unknown. Human existence becomes longer, and property more secure: life is not adorned with brilliant trophies, but it is extremely easy and tranquil. Few pleasures are either very refined or very coarse; and highly polished manners are as uncommon as great brutality of tastes. Neither men of great learning, nor extremely ignorant communities, are to be met with; genius becomes more rare, information more diffused. The human mind is impelled by the small efforts of all mankind combined together, not by the strenuous activity of certain men. There is less perfection, but more abundance, in all the productions of the arts. The ties of race, of rank, and of country are relaxed; the great bond of humanity is strengthened. If I endeavour to find out the most general and the most prominent of all these different characteristics, I shall have occasion to perceive that what is taking place in men’s fortunes manifests itself under a thousand other forms. Almost all extremes are softened or blunted: all that was most prominent is superseded by some mean term, at once less lofty and less low, less brilliant and less obscure, than what before existed in the world.

  When I survey this countless multitude of beings shaped in each other’s likeness, amidst whom nothing rises and nothing falls, the sight of such universal uniformity saddens and chills me, and I am tempted to regret that state of society which has ceased to be. When the world was full of men of great importance and extreme insignificance, of great wealth and extreme poverty, of great learning and extreme ignorance, I turned aside from the latter to fix my observation on the former alone, who gratified my sympathies. But I admit that this gratification arose from my own weakness: it is because I am unable to see at once all that is around me that I am allowed thus to select and separate the objects of my predilection from among so many others. Such is not the case with that almighty and eternal Being whose gaze necessarily includes the whole of created things, and who surveys distinctly, though at once, mankind and man. We may naturally believe that it is not the singular prosperity of the few, but the greater well-being of all, which is most pleasing in the sight of the Creator and Preserver of men. What appears to me to be man’s decline, is to His eye advancement; what afflicts me is acceptable to Him. A state of equality is perhaps less elevated, but it is more just; and its justice constitutes its greatness and its beauty. I would strive then to raise myself to this point of the divine contemplation, and thence to view and to judge the concerns of men.

  No man, upon the earth, can as yet affirm absolutely and generally that the new state of the world is better than its former one; but it is already easy to perceive that this state is different. Some vices and some virtues were so inherent in the constitution of an aristocratic nation, and are so opposite to the character of a modern people, that they can never be infused into it; some good tendencies and some bad propensities which were unknown to the former are natural to the latter; some ideas suggest themselves spontaneously to the imagination of the one which are utterly repugnant to the mind of the other. They are like two distinct orders of human beings, each of which has its own merits and defects, its own advantages and its own evils. Care must therefore be taken not to judge the state of society, which is now coming into existence, by notions derived from a state of society which no longer exists; for as these states of society are exceedingly different in their structure, they cannot be submitted to a just or fair comparison. It would be scarcely more reasonable to require of our own contemporaries the peculiar virtues which originated in the social condition of their forefathers, since that social condition is itself fallen, and has drawn into one promiscuous ruin the good and evil which belonged to it.

  But as yet these things are imperfectly understood. I find that a great number of my contemporaries undertake to make a certain selection from amongst
the institutions, the opinions, and the ideas which originated in the aristocratic constitution of society as it was: a portion of these elements they would willingly relinquish, but they would keep the remainder and transplant them into their new world. I apprehend that such men are wasting their time and their strength in virtuous but unprofitable efforts. The object is not to retain the peculiar advantages which the inequality of conditions bestows upon mankind, but to secure the new benefits which equality may supply. We have not to seek to make ourselves like our progenitors, but to strive to work out that species of greatness and happiness which is our own. For myself, who now look back from this extreme limit of my task, and discover from afar, but at once, the various objects which have attracted my more attentive investigation upon my way, I am full of apprehensions and of hopes. I perceive mighty dangers which it is possible to ward off—mighty evils which may be avoided or alleviated; and I cling with a firmer hold to the belief that for democratic nations to be virtuous and prosperous they require but to will it. I am aware that many of my contemporaries maintain that nations are never their own masters here below, and that they necessarily obey some insurmountable and unintelligent power, arising from anterior events, from their race, or from the soil and climate of their country. Such principles are false and cowardly; such principles can never produce aught but feeble men and pusillanimous nations. Providence has not created mankind entirely independent or entirely free. It is true that around every man a fatal circle is traced, beyond which he cannot pass; but within the wide verge of that circle he is powerful and free: as it is with man, so with communities. The nations of our time cannot prevent the conditions of men from becoming equal; but it depends upon themselves whether the principle of equality is to lead them to servitude or freedom, to knowledge or barbarism, to prosperity or to wretchedness.

  * * *

  In democratic communities nothing but the central power has any stability in its position or any permanence in its undertakings. All the members of society are in ceaseless stir and transformation. Now it is in the nature of all governments to seek constantly to enlarge their sphere of action; hence it is almost impossible that such a government should not ultimately succeed, because it acts with a fixed principle and a constant will upon men, whose position, whose notions, and whose desires are in continual vacillation. It frequently happens that the members of the community promote the influence of the central power without intending it. Democratic ages are periods of experiment, innovation, and adventure. At such times there are always a multitude of men engaged in difficult or novel undertakings, which they follow alone, without caring for their fellow men. Such persons may be ready to admit, as a general principle, that the public authority ought not to interfere in private concerns; but, by an exception to that rule, each of them craves for its assistance in the particular concern on which he is engaged, and seeks to draw upon the influence of the government for his own benefit, though he would restrict it on all other occasions. If a large number of men apply this particular exception to a great variety of different purposes, the sphere of the central power extends insensibly in all directions, although each of them wishes it to be circumscribed. Thus a democratic government increases its power simply by the fact of its permanence. Time is on its side; every incident befriends it; the passions of individuals unconsciously promote it; and it may be asserted, that the older a democratic community is, the more centralized will its government become. ↵

  10

  Frédéric Bastiat, The Law

  Introduction

  The concept of ‘legal plunder’—the seizing and appropriating by the state or its proxies of the goods and property of others using the very laws and legal system that should have protected them—is an essential one to grasp in the era of the all-encompassing state. It is, admittedly, an idea that lawmakers and those holding positions of political power will tend to find uncongenial, for the self-evident reason that it is lawmakers and those in power who make the laws that make the plunder possible. The general public, relatedly, is likely to find the notion unfamiliar, for the reason that it is rarely made much of in schools and colleges or in state-owned or controlled media—these being also, on the whole, beneficiaries of plunder. However, for those who are willing to retain an open mind, it can be the first step towards understanding how the existing way of organizing our societies may not necessarily be the best—and that things can be different, fairer, and better.

  Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850) was born in Bayonne, a port town in the south of France, the son of a prominent businessman. His father and mother both died when he was young, leaving him an orphan in the care of his paternal grandfather and aunt. Upon the death of his grandfather, which occurred while he was still in his mid-twenties, Bastiat inherited the family estate in the town of Mugron further inland. The inheritance provided him with the means to live the life of a gentleman farmer and independent scholar, and he read voraciously for the following two decades before rising to prominence in 1845 with his Economic Sophisms, a spirited attack on statist policies and the various forms of false consciousness that underpin them. Bastiat was elected to the French national legislative assembly after the 1848 Revolution, but shortly thereafter he contracted tuberculosis, and he died the same year that he published his greatest work, The Law (1850). It is said that on his deathbed he called those attending him to come close and murmured the words ‘the truth’ twice before he died.

  Bastiat was clear in The Law as to how things should be. He started from the basics: we are endowed firstly with existence, secondly with faculties that we may apply to existence, and thirdly with the fruits of assimilating and appropriating, through the application of our faculties, the external elements with which we work—in short, life, liberty, and property. The right to defend these, said Bastiat, is anterior and superior to all human legislation. Law is the organization of this right in collective form; it cannot, therefore, properly be used for purposes other than to secure and give effect to it.

  What tends to happen, however, is that the legislative power falls into the hands of a single man or group of men who proceed to employ it—whether openly or (more likely) under the guise of public welfare or philanthropy—for their own purposes. Law through this process becomes not an instrument for security against plunder but an agent of plunder itself; worse, it treats the plundered party, when he defends himself, as a criminal. While those in control of the law continue to seek to profit by means of this ‘lawful plunder’, the victimized masses will be inclined to assert their own political rights in response. Once the masses seize the legislative power they will have a choice: either to end plunder, or take part in it themselves. They will inevitably take the latter course and seek to organize a system of reprisals against their former oppressors. The outcome of this process is what Bastiat calls ‘universal plunder’—the wholesale co-option of the law for the purposes of appropriating the goods and property of those it was meant to protect.

  In the sense employed by Bastiat, legal plunder is everywhere. The test for it is simple: ask yourself whether the law performs what a citizen cannot so perform without committing a crime; if so, this is plunder. In practice, legal plunder may be carried out in an infinite number of ways and there will be an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, benefits, subsidies, encouragements, progressive taxation, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed profits, minimum wages, a right to relief, free credit, and so on. Taken as a whole, these plans for legal plunder constitute what is more widely known as ‘socialism’. Admittedly, there are forms of plunder other than socialism; notably, Bastiat includes slavery as a form of plunder too. But socialism is the quintessentially modern form that legal plunder has deigned to take. As Bastiat observes: ‘It can only be an instrument of equalization as far as it takes from one party to give to another, and then it is an instrument of plunder.’

  The socialist has, Bastiat explains, a particular kind of worldview. Socialists divide mankind into two p
arts: for the one part there is the politician—the organizer, discoverer, legislator, instructor, founder—whose sublime mission it is to gather together into society, and thereafter work upon and ‘improve’, that scattered material known as man; for the other part there remains the rest of mankind, considered by the politician to be a kind of ‘inert matter’, devoid of any principle of action or means of discernment, lacking initiative, and indifferent towards its own mode of existence. The socialist looks upon mankind as a subject for social experiments intended to remedy what he perceives to be its various incompetencies, prejudices, and other deficiencies. That the very deficiencies in mankind that the socialist seeks to remedy are liable also to affect himself—being but a man too—does not, however, appear to cross his mind.

  The solution to the problem of plunder, says Bastiat, is liberty—law not as fraternity but as justice. When you make law a vehicle for the realization of social dreams and utopias, you open the door to a multitude of troubles and revolutions, for whose dream and whose utopia (and we all have dreams and utopias) is the law to bring into being—and whose life, liberty, and property are to be plundered in order to pay for it? No doubt you can point to inequality—we all can—and no doubt inequality is, in general, unattractive and unjustifiable. Remember, though, that inequality is likely to have proceeded from previous acts of plunder (whether legal or otherwise), and there is no reason to believe that further plundering is going to effect a final solution to the problem. Too many people place themselves above the world to rule and patronize it. Give men, instead, their liberty and security, and allow them to unfold the qualities that they have been blessed with, and we will all be better off.