IX

OBEDIENCE

THE question which meets on the threshold of their inquiries all who have speculated on the nature of political society and the foundations of law is this: What is the force that brings and keeps men under governments? or, in other words, What is the ground of Obedience?

I. THEORIES REGARDING POLITICAL OBEDIENCE.

The answers given by philosophers to this question, while varying in form, group themselves under two main heads. Some assign Fear as the ground, some Reason. One school discovers the power that binds men together as members of a State in Physical Force, acting upon them through the dread of death or other physical evil. The other conceives it to lie in a rational view of the common advantage, which induces men to consent of their own free-will to forgo some measure of their (supposed) original personal independence in order to obtain certain common benefits. Thus, while the former school finds the origin of law in Compulsion, the latter finds it in Agreement.

Both schools are of high antiquity, and have been represented by many eminent names. One gathers from Plato that divers sophists maintained the former thesis. It is in substance not far from that assigned to Thrasy

machus in the Republic, where the Sophist says that Justice is nothing but the advantage of the stronger; and in later times Hobbes and Bentham are eminent among those who embrace it. The other view is most familiar to moderns from the writings of Rousseau; but it has a long and interesting history, intertwined with that of the notions of the State of Nature and the Law of Nature, and also with the history of the conception of Sovereignty-topics which are discussed elsewhere in this volume. Rousseau grounds obedience on the originalsocial contract,' whereby each and every person agrees with every other to forgo his natural freedom by constituting a State which is to act for all, and in which the citizen recovers his freedom because he is himself a part of that 'general will' to which he renders a reasonable service. The Aristotelian doctrine that men are by their very constitution sociable creatures, naturally drawn to create and to live in communities, comes nearer to the second view, while escaping by its generality of expression the errors into which those who set political society upon the foundation of contract have frequently been betrayed. And it need not be added that many other philosophers in comparatively modern times, basing the State, some of them on the nature of man, some on eternal reason or the will of God, have held that it thereby acquires an absolute right to obedience from its members. These speculations, however, seldom touch the particular point I propose to discuss here, viz. the grounds which actually dispose men to obedience.

Of the two chief older theories, that which represents men as led by reason to enter into a Contract has of late fallen into discredit, being indeed so evidently opposed to what we know of the early state of mankind that it may be doubted whether most of those who propounded or have adopted it did not mean it to be taken rather as an apologue or mythical presentment of moral facts than as a piece of history. The theory of Force and Fear, on the other hand, has retained much of its vogue, having

connected itself with a system of jurisprudential terminology which is, or lately was, influential in England and not unknown in America. According to Bentham and his followers, there is in every State a Sovereign who enjoys unlimited physical, and therefore also unlimited legal, power. His might makes his right. He rests on Force and rules by Fear. He has the sole right of issuing Commands. His Commands are Laws. They are enforced by Threats, and are obeyed in respect of the apprehension of physical harm to follow on disobedience. Whether those who adhere to this body of doctrine think it historically true as an account of the origin of law, or merely adopt it as a concise explanation and summary view of the principles on which modern law. and highly developed forms of political society are based, is not always clear from the language they use. But the importance they attach to Force appears not only from the contempt they pour on the contractual theory of government, but also from their omission to refer to any facts in the character and habits of mankind except those which are connected with Force and Fear as factors in the development of the social organism.

A little reflection will, however, convince any one who comes to the question with an open mind that both these theories, that of compulsion as well as that of contract, are alike incomplete, and, because incomplete, are misleading. They err, as all systems are apt to err, not by pointing to a wholly false cause, but by extending the efficiency of a true cause far beyond its real scope. Rousseau is right in thinking that political society needs a moral justification, and that the principle of individual freedom is best satisfied where every one obtains a share in the government to which he submits. The Contractualists generally may find a solid basis for authority in the fact that organized society does actually render to each of its members some return for the so-called 'natural liberty' which he has surrendered. Even a bad government gives him at least a measure of protection,

however imperfect, for his person and property against the attacks of any one but the government itself. Here there is, if not what we can call an implied contract, at least a consideration, a sort of mutuality of service in the political relation, for which each member gives something, and from which each gains something. To go further, and either to explain the growth of government by a conscious bargain at some past moment, or to conceive the idea of such a bargain as present to the bulk of those who live in any actual society now, or to regard the individual members of society as entitled to act upon contractual principles towards their government and one another, is to plunge at once into what are not more palpably historical errors than unworkable principles. So also the school of Thrasymachus and that which claims Hobbes as its founder are right in feeling that some test must be found of the solidity of a community and the actual working strength of its machinery; and they discover this in the fact that physical force is the ultima ratio wherewith to coerce the disturbers of the community and the transgressors of the law. Without force in the background, the law might be defied. It is when the men of this school, or some of them, go on to represent physical compulsion as the means by which communities have been in fact formed -though, to be sure, Hobbes himself alleges a contract as the very first step1-and Fear as the motive which in fact secures respect to the law from the majority of the citizens, that they depart alike from history and from common sense. The problem of political cohesion and obedience is not so simple as either school of theorists would represent it.

To show that both schools are historically wrong would not be difficult. This has been often done as against such of the Contractualists as have held that conscious reason brought men out of the State of Na

1 See as to the doctrine of Hobbes, the Essay on Sovereignty which follows this Essay.

ture by a compact; and if the historians who deal with the earlier stages of human progress have not cared to demolish the Physical Force doctrine, this may have happened because none has thought it worth while to refute a theory whose flimsiness they have perceived, but which they have deemed to lie outside the sphere of history. As it is the historian who best understands how much Force has done to build up States, so he most fully sees that Force is only one among many factors, and not the most important, in creating, moulding, expanding and knitting together political communities. It is not, however, necessary to institute any historical inquiry in order to reach this conclusion. An easier course is to interrogate one's own consciousness, and to observe one's fellow men. The problem of obedience to government and law is part of the larger and even more obvious problem of the grounds of Obedience in general. Why do we all forgo the gratification of many of our personal desires, desires in themselves harmless, merely because they are not shared by others? Why do we go on echoing opinions whose soundness we more than doubt? Why do we pursue pleasures which give us no amusement, but rather weariness? Why do we adhere to a party, political or ecclesiastical, of whose conduct we often disapprove? Why in fact is so large a part of our daily conduct determined, not by our own natural preferences, but by compliance with the opinion of others or submission to the social conditions that surround us?

II. THE GROUNDS OF OBEDIENCE IN GENERAL.

Political obedience is not a thing by itself, but a form of what may be called Compliance in general.

The grounds or motives of Compliance can be summed up under five heads. Putting them in the order of what seems to be their relative importance, they may be described as the following-Indolence, Deference, Sympathy, Fear, Reason. Let us consider each separately.