APPENDIX B ABSOLUTE SOVEREIGNTY

By their distrust of absolutism combined with their respect for standards and the discipline in the State that only standards can give, our liberals of the unionist type are, as I have remarked (p. 246), close to the English political tradition of which the best exponent is Burke. Much of the Englishman’s concern for personal liberty, it has been maintained, is merely an aspect of his humorousness (in the older sense of the word), of his dislike of conformity and regimentation; and so is in a way a denial of standards. But this is not the whole truth. English statesmen at their best have attained to some conception of the liberty that is at the heart of genuine Christianity and have been more successful than the statesmen of any other country in making this conception politically effective.

The lover of personal liberty is inclined to esteem it a fortunate circumstance that the common law never gave way in England, as it did in various European countries, to Roman law. I am not competent to discuss so vast a subject as the influence of Roman law on the mediæval and modern world, nor does my present subject require it. It is enough for my purpose to point out that the conception of liberty found in Roman law, even at its best, is very inferior to the Christian conception; it reflects unduly Stoic rationalism and, like all Greek and Roman political philosophy, is ready to sacrifice in a quite unwarranted measure the individual to the State. At its worst Roman law does not deserve to be called Roman at all but Byzantine. One should note the origin assigned in Roman law to the idea of plenitudo potestatis or unlimited sovereignty, an idea that can be shown to have had a considerable influence on the absolutists of the late mediæval and early modern period. By the lex regia, we read in the “Digest,”⁠[172] the Roman people made over its unbounded power to the emperor. The reasons for this renunciation are worth pondering. At the instigation of its demagogues, the Roman people had refused to limit itself and had at the same time tended towards the type of equality that is won at the expense of quality and the due subordination to standards that quality always requires. So far as our modern democracies are pursuing a merely quantitative equality, their fate would seem to be foreshadowed by this Roman development. The moment comes, sooner or later, when the concentration of power in the hands of one man is felt as a relief from the irresponsible tyranny of the mob. This is at all events the process by which a radical democracy passes over normally into what I have termed a decadent imperialism.

The genuinely mediæval conception of sovereignty is very different from the conception I have been associating with the lex regia and Roman law. For the Christian, sovereignty does not derive from the people as in Roman law but from God, who is conceived primarily not as reason but as will. The whole tendency of the doctrine of grace is to make this will seem absolute and irresponsible, a sort of supernatural bon plaisir. I have already said something about the historical justification of the doctrine of grace; one may maintain without exaggeration that it saved Western civilization. By historical justification I do not mean that the doctrine is to be regarded as a “useful fiction”; the saving element in it is its truth—its emphasis on the higher will. At the same time I have hinted at the difficulties that the doctrine offers to the individualist. The acceptance of the maxim that man is the measure of all things—and all individualists must accept the maxim in some form⁠[173]⁠—is fatal to every absolute whether of will or reason. Absolute and unlimited will in the religious sense has often run over into a will to power, even when the rulers who asserted it have professed to do so only as the humble recipients of the grace of a divine sovereign. The tendency of a belief in the arbitrary sovereignty of God to result imperialistically may be illustrated not only from the history of royalty by divine right but also from that of the papacy.

In my first chapter I attempted to trace the transition through an intermediary period of rationalism from the mediæval belief in absolute will to another form of the same belief,—the transition, in short, from the sovereignty of God to the sovereignty of the people. The superiority of the person who conceives of the political problem in terms of will in any sense of the word is that he is taking his stand for something vital and primary, something compared with which reason will finally prove to be only secondary and instrumental. It is interesting to consider from this point of view the rationalistic absolute of Hegel. According to Hegel the Idea, after various incomplete historical manifestations, finally found its perfect incarnation in the Prussian State. The absolute reason that is supposed to animate this State has shown itself in practice, most persons would agree, the servant of the will to power.

The rival claims of reason and will may also be studied interestingly in connection with international law. This whole subject is now under the suspicion of being chimerical. If this suspicion should prove to be justified, the explanation is either that international law has given a primacy to reason that does not belong to it or else has been unduly superficial in its treatment of will. The representatives of the so-called positive school of international law have tended to confine themselves to recording the unfolding wills of various sovereign states in their relations with one another. If this record is to deserve the name of law at all, it should surely be distinguishable from mere force, from the will to power of some state or league of states at any particular international crisis. At this point one perceives that the fortunes of international law are closely bound up with the new doctrine of will that has tended to take the place of the mediæval dependence on the divine will as well as of the later reign of rationalism. The question as to the quality of will that the sovereign people is likely to display is subordinate to the question as to the truth or falsity of Rousseau’s underlying dogma of natural goodness. The tendency of this dogma is to discredit both inner and outer control. With the disappearance of control, popular will becomes only another name for popular impulse. I have already concluded that what manifests itself in a people that has reached this stage of naturalistic expansion is not a will to brotherhood but a will to power. One must admit the imperialistic elements that insinuated themselves into the humanistic and religious traditions of the Occident, especially in connection with theories of absolute and unlimited sovereignty. Yet these traditions were after all in some measure genuine and so did something to set bounds to the libido dominandi. For at the heart of genuine religion is a will to peace and at the heart of genuine humanism is a will to justice; whereas, if my analysis be correct, radical democracy and imperialism are in their essence identical.

I have already said something about the other side of the modern movement in its relation to theories of sovereignty (p. 296 f.).⁠[174] The utilitarian is tending to conceive of the State in a more and more absolute fashion. He feels that its power should suffer no restriction when it is seeking to promote what is socially useful, the greatest good of the greatest number. The underlying fallacy of the utilitarian, I have said, is that he conceives of the “greatest good” and of happiness in general in terms of pleasure or else in terms of a merely outer working. Society is bound to protect itself against the unrestraint of the individual, but if it is not to push this necessary assertion of its authority to an oppressive extreme, it needs to take cognizance not only of outer working but also of the inner working that is the final source of a sound individualism. To do so is not to become abstract but on the contrary to turn from sociological theorizing to positive psychological observation.

This brief survey of theories of absolute sovereignty would seem to confirm the passage of John Adams that serves as one of the epigraphs of this volume. From the lex regia to the utilitarian-sentimental movement these theories have been associated with a series of theological and metaphysical conceits that have, in their ultimate implications, been subversive of personal liberty.