PHILOSOPHY

Bernard Bosanquet’s Philosophical Theory of the State

Tony Waterhouse

BRLSI Member

4 January 2005

This talk is from a history of ideas point of view. It will attempt to describe Bosanquet’s Theory of the State. First I will try to explain some of the thinking underlying it; and then I will briefly touch on criticisms.

Bernard Bosanquet

Bernard Bosanquet (1848-1923) belongs to a group of philosophers called Absolute idealist who were influential during the end of 19^th century and beginning of the 20^th century. The idealists were a reaction to what we today call scientism. Much of Bosanquet’s work is a critique of J. S. Mill the prominent 19^th century empiricist. Bosanquet’s philosophy is classical, based on modern interpretations of Plato and Aristotle. Other influences were Spinoza, Rousseau, Kant and Hegel. T. H. Green taught Bosanquet and his famous contemporary F. H. Bradley at Oxford. Green was a pioneer in the introduction of idealism into Britain. Green’s thought is mainly Kantian but influenced by Hegelian theology. Bosanquet’s The Philisophical Theory of the State is a development of Green’s ethical/political thought found in his lectures The Principles of Political Obligation. Bradley’s Ethical Studies is also a major influence.

Bosanquet was also a social activist through the Charity Organisation Society and keen pioneer in the extension of adult education beyond the elite of his day. Though sometimes said to be a conservative thinker he was a social liberal. He had sympathy for working class organisations and their political representation.

Green, Bradley and Bosanquet were all sons of evangelical clergymen. It seems that the ‘big tent’ lent by neo-Hegelian thought was attractive to them because of it’s inclusiveness, allowing religious attitudes to be accommodated with the natural sciences. Bosanquet held a demythologised and rational religious outlook. His thought seems to be influenced by a christianised Platonism which we find in St Paul and St John, the idea that people are part of the body of Christ; an ethical community. Though not formally a Quaker he attended their meetings.

The question Bosanquet was seeking to answer in Philosophical Theory of the State was: How are the Common Good and Political Obligation, defined, justified and maintained?

What was he criticizing?

In Philosophical Theory of the State, Bosanquet develops a positive theory of rights but it is also a criticism of individualistic liberalism whose most famous exponent in 19^th century Britain is J.S. Mill. Mill’s empirical outlook led him to utilitarian ethics, this underlies his individualist liberalism. The empiricist says our knowledge is fundamentally derived from experience of an outside world that gets reflected in the mind as discrete sensations, what are called particulars. Mill says that what traditional philosophers such as Plato had considered as prior in knowledge, innate ideas, or universals, are just generalizations from particulars that we come to associate as similar; in effect there are no universals. A consequence of empiricism is that experience is conceived to be absolutely subjective, a mind, a subject alone within itself, having sense experience of a world outside. This results in a dualism; body/mind, sprit/matter, knowledge/value, subject/object. The notion is of an independent objective world outside, untainted by our feelings, will or values, with the individual a subjective atom.

From empirical assumptions Mill derives a utilitarian ethics. Utilitarianism held by J.S. Mill is derived from hedonism; the idea that the subjective sensual contentment and the absence of pain are the benchmark for what is good. Utilitarianism posits a generalised good out of sum of subjective and particular ‘goods’. F.H. Bradley’s comment on utilitarianism was ‘this is like arguing that since every pig at the trough desires his food, and somehow as a consequence to desire the food of all’. He is saying that a sum of individual ‘particular’ satisfactions does not necessarily lead to ethical conclusions.

Philosophical assumptions underlying Bosanquet’s Theory of the State

The empiricist says we see the world subjectively. The absolute idealists turn this idea around; they are also known as objective idealists. The empiricist claims our knowledge is derived from ideas as discrete particulars, which we come to distinguish as similar by association into different classes, as generalizations. The absolute idealist will answer: a) Ideas are never just a succession of discrete sensations but are joined up as an overall awareness; b) that for a sense experience to become an idea it has to have meaning. Instead of raw ideas given to us through our senses, which the empiricist assume, our ideas must be judgements, for as soon as we bring in the notion of similarity we have brought in a universal criterion. An absolute idealist says that the starting point in deriving knowledge is judgement, ideas with meaning. This entails that ideas are never just particular but are universal, they have some prior quality about them; we make sense of experience by slotting our sensations into pre-formed conceptions, acquired for example, through evolution for survival purposes or culturally.

The term ‘universal’ used by the absolute idealists has to be further qualified; what they usually mean by universal is what is called a ‘concrete universal.’ This concept pervades their thinking and even though they often write without mention of it I think it will help us in our understanding of what Bosanquet is doing in his Theory of the State if I try to explain. A quote from him might help: ‘a true universal is that which holds between the differing parts of an individual system, such that the parts, and their variations, though not similar, determine each other, as in any machine, or more completely in an organism or mind.’ The term concrete universal then applies to a whole variety of identities where different aspects are held together by some unifying principles. The term is used of an individual person as the unity of their particular instances. The absolute idealist will say that an instance of a person, a bare identity, is to say little of the person; the whole person will be a unity, a whole, of what they are at many instances. A society or a state will be made up of many people, in different roles held together by a defined pattern of relationships in time and space. The absolute idealists claim our thinking and construction of reality is saturated with prior conceptual schemes, through which we seek to rationalise experience into coherent conceptual wholes.

To Bosanquet our minds are active agents in the construction of our knowledge, we cannot experience without ‘mind’; everything is pervaded by mind. This implies everything has a unitary quality behind it; in Bosanquet’s case mind; this is what is called ‘idealist monism’. Bosanquet does not explicitly say that we are in an overarching mind/spirit, a backcloth of mind-ness in the world, but that an integral quality of individual minds is to co-operate and form defined coherent fields of mind-ness, he does speak of a group’s or nation’s mind. He says that our minds correspond to each other, as our thoughts are pervaded by universal qualities. This will not be perfect but the potential to understand each other allows us to work towards a more rational and objective outlook, this explains the term Objective Idealist. Meaning and objectivity are socially derived.

A couple of quotes from Bosanquet relating to the term idealism and the term objective may help:

My interpretation of this statement is that there is no absolute disjunction between what is called subjective and objective, these are relative terms on the same continuum but note the priority given to the objective.

Bosanquet subscribes to what is called a coherence theory of truth, the criterion of truth being logical consistency between judgements. A coherence theory of truth implies that we converge towards truth as our body of compatible knowledge grows. The natural sciences, empirically derived, are as knowledge an appearance, valuable for practical reasons, but mask a deeper reality. His idealist philosophical logic leads him to the conclusion that the Truth is only found when all contradictions are resolved, what is called the Absolute. The Truth is also synonymous with the Good, Beautiful, the Real; it is the end stop of objectivity. The Absolute is all-inclusive, the whole, including everything in space and time. The Absolute is the only perfect concrete universal, which includes all other others.

This doctrine may look circular and rather pristine, but there is a sceptical turn. We as finite beings never get to the Absolute, though it seems that we can have intuition of the Absolute. What we can do is progress towards the Absolute as we widen our knowledge. This doctrine is what is called a fallibilist doctrine; as limited beings we inevitably run up against contradictions, negations of our acts and views. The Absolute seems to be like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. We seem to be doomed to continually seek to overcome our mistakes in a dialectical process, but there is a direction towards truth.

The ethical views derived from the absolute idealist logic and metaphysics is a form of duty ethics. This was put forward in F.H. Bradley’s famous essay, in his ‘Ethical Studies’, ‘My Station and its Duties’. This ethical theory is an attempt to humanise Kant's duty ethics. Kant’s ethic is based on abstract universal principles, and is underwritten by what is called ‘categorical imperatives’. Lying is wrong because social relationships based on trust would be ruined. Telling the truth is a categorical imperative, which should be universally applied. If the proverbial mad axe man arrived at one’s door in pursuit of a person and asked where that person was and we knew where they were, one would hope not to follow Kant's categorical imperative.

Instead Bradley and Bosanquet say that the ethical end is defined by what gives people satisfaction. By this one should not think this to be the satiation of particular appetites but something more high-minded. Satisfaction is seen as the fulfilment of people’s more objective goals; that is to become the best of what they think they ought to be. In the Bradley’s version of duty ethics what is seen as objective is put in social context, people’s duties depend on their functions and society is allowed to adjust its ethical criterion as contradictions arise. Society and the state set the objective ethical criterion.

An important point to make about duty ethics is that it puts a great emphasis on motive. Blind duty or following the herd is direct opposite of Bosanquet’s ethics. The person has to be free to be a moral agent.

What does Bosanquet mean by the Philosophical Theory of the State?

Bosanquet meant to describe the state as a whole, for its own sake. His intention was neither to magnify nor decry it but describe it as it is. He compares the philosophical theory of the state with the sociological approach, then just emerging. He is not unsympathetic to an empirical approach but he thinks that it does not capture the sense of society and the state as an ethical and coherent whole. The picture made up by the social sciences is made up from fragmented facts. The natural sciences start off from the raw material, ‘lower’ facts, what we experience as prior. What is our ‘highest’ experience is the final outcome of culture, be it a great painting, a symphony or the modern society and state. He believes that his philosophical approach exposes the deeper reality, the ethical interrelationship that makes up a society and state, in a way that a positivist approach will not.

He says that in a sense we humans have always lived in a ‘state’, some form of association or corporation, larger than the family and acknowledging no power superior to itself. But this is not the mature form of the state in which full citizenship emerges. There are two manifestations where this has occurred most fully, the city-states of ancient Greece and the modern democratic state. It is in the Greek city-states the people first saw themselves as individuals, as political conscious citizens. Politics as we know it was an invention of the ancient Greeks. Examples are, the idea of voting, the minority acquiescing to the wishes of the majority, and equality before the law. This required a specific type of mind, and it is no coincidence that in this cultural climate that our ideas of science and philosophy first arose. Quoting him: ‘this philosophy, like all genuine philosophy, was an interpretation of the experience presented to it; and in this case the interpretation was due to minds which were themselves a part of the phenomena on which they reflected.’

Individualist liberalism: ‘Theories of first look’

Bosanquet then examines the political ideas of the individualist liberals, these he calls theories of ‘first look’. As you will remember their ideas are based on utilitarianism. Bosanquet says for them a state or society is composed of sum of individuals whose freedom and rights are defined by the degree that each impinges on the other. Of this Bosanquet says: ‘the maintenance of liberty, of the circular or hexagonal fences round A, B, C and the rest, is conceived as involving no determinate type of life... and to a great extent in the routine of life actually is self-complete, self-satisfied, and self-willed.’ He is claiming that society and the state is more than a sum of individuals each seeking minimum encroachment and fulfilment as isolated social atoms (i.e. behind the appearance there is a deeper reality).

Political obligation and the paradox of self-government

Bousanquet says that the individualist liberal doctrines set up a paradox: their doctrine portrays the individual person as a discrete subject. Individualist liberals see freedom as the absence of restriction on the individual; it casts society and the state as a negative, in opposition to the individual’s liberty. Bousanquet grants that this position may be valid in a society ruled despotically. However if this attitude is adopted towards a modern democracy, it portrays self-government by democratic means as oppressive to the individual’s rights. For the theories of ‘first look’ liberty is the absence of restraint, so laws and rights become a matter of defining the largest space between people. The state and its system of laws are seen as a necessary evil; ring holding operations between separate individuals. Liberty, Bosanquet says, is not just the freedom from restraint; this one can have even in a despotic society but to have one’s citizenship fully realised one needs an active society and state with laws and rights that allow people to realise their freedom.

The General Will or Real Will

How do we determine what is the common good and political obligation? Bosanquet solicits from Rousseau the alarming notion of the ‘General Will’. The seeds of this idea can be seen in Roman law as exemplified by incorporated bodies seen as judicial personalities. Hobbes uses the notion of sovereignty of a nation being invested in a single person, the King. He saw the necessity of sovereignty in one person to prevent a free for all. A century later Rousseau introduces the idea of universal sovereignty, the people as a self-governing body expressing their sovereignty through the General Will. Rousseau was born in Geneva, a small city-state, and was also influenced by the model of classical Greek city-state, consequently he envisaged the General Will expressed through the general assemblies of all citizens. Bousanquet sees inconsistencies in Rousseau’s definition of the General Will, which still retain individualistic elements and thus is best defined as the will of all; the sum of particular wills. Instead the General Will is the common universal values defined through civil society that directs the state. The General Will or True Will, he says, are in effect the dominant ideas, which emerge in a society underpinning law and the system of rights. This we all by and large subscribe to if even tacitly.

The individual’s will at any particular moment he calls the ‘actual will’; this is contrasted with the ‘Real Will’. This example may help: It is credible that having been caught red handed stealing, a Fletcher (from the programme Porridge) might say to the judge who sentenced him, ‘fair cop me lord’. He will be recognising the basic principles behind the law even if he is willing to break them and pander to his actual will, for he or his family might one day have need to appeal to the same system of laws that he has flouted. Bosanquet would say that even though unwittingly, Fletcher’s real will has come into play.

Teleology and the ‘best life’

What is the common good? The aim of the society and the state should be the well-being of its citizens. The common good are the conditions that promote the satisfaction or the ‘best life’, as Bosanquet calls it, of its citizens. For an individual this is would be what they really want to be, when being rational and objective, as opposed to being directed by the narrow perspective of their subjectivity. It follows that Bosanquet is saying that there is a teleology in society and the state towards the ‘best life’. His idea of teleology is not historical but ethical. The general will or real will tends to objectivity, all being well and aims for the ‘best life’.

The individual, self and social groups

Bosanquet says, ‘the deepest and loftiest achievements of men do not belong to the particular human being in his repellent isolation.’ Bosanquet’s notion of the bare individual seem rather thin, though he does say: ‘the individual’s mind is not reduced to his special service, or he would be a machine.’

Hume had questioned the notion of the self by saying that one never can locate anything that could be called a self but were only aware of a series of mental contents. T. H. Green retorted that the notion of self depends on one’s awareness of our own consciousness as separate and organised mental system; we are what are called appercipient beings, having a sense of otherness. Bosanquet takes this idea but gives greater emphasis of the self as socially contextualised.

In a crowd each person may have the simple relationship of sharing a space or being next to each other. In contrast an army on parade will be an assemblage of people held together in a defined order. The relationship will not just be of each singular person next to another, but will be held by a shared scheme, with each person seeing it from his/her viewpoint. He says: ‘every social group is the external aspect of a set of corresponding mental systems in individual minds.’ He takes a school as an example: ‘the actual reality of the school lies in the fact that certain living minds are connected in a certain way. Teachers, pupils, managers, parents and the public must all of them have certain operative ideas, and must be guided according to these ideas in certain portions of their lives, if the school is to be a school. Now, the being guided by certain operative ideas is, in other words, the activity of certain appercipient masses dictating a certain point of view, in so far as those particular masses are awake.’ The term appecipient masses seems to be synonymous to a shared conceptual scheme attached to persons in an organisational or social position but adjusted to their specific roles and vantage points; note that he says that often we are not conscious that these conceptual schemes when they not are operative. When person moves from role to role, his/her ‘appecipient masses’, the focus of attention of their mind, changes. A head teacher will change her mode of perception as she comes home to become, a parent to her children, her focus of attention will be dominated by another, as we might call it today, mind set.

One gets the unsettling sense from Bosanquet that the boundaries between people are blurred. We remember that he sees people as pre-eminently minds. He says that minds often repeat themselves. He seems to be saying that our individuality is not dependant on our bare singularity but is defined and filled out by our social engagements; we are filled out by what we learn, receive and give to the world. He talks of functions and defined groups having a mind. People to him are defined by their various functions and how they interrelate to others. One can see how this complex of interaction between people and social groups in his descriptive scheme is built into the ultimate coherent group, society and the state.

Society, the state and its limits

Bosanquet does not separate society and the state. His idea is that the state is an emergent group of people over time and space who form into a clearly defined entity for the mutual benefit of its members / citizens. The state will be composed of individuals and groups, all performing their various functions. The state is there to uphold laws, based on the ‘general will’ for the ‘common good’. The ‘general will’ will be formulated through the various organisations of society finalising at the government layer, that is the formal state. In his case he assumes a representative democracy.

For Bosanquet, rights and obligations are configured around people’s functions rather than their raw individuality. A person’s rights will be altered as they change their functions; a mother has rights appropriate to her position; a doctor according to her job. One of the state’s functions is ‘the hindrance of hindrances’, the removal of obstacles to people’s fulfilment in their various roles.

The state is the maintainer of rights and the law. It is there to be an arbiter of conflicting interest or, to use the idealist’s terms, to overcome contradictions. The state is not static and adjusts the law as contradictions are thrown up. The state is the means by which the ‘general will’ is formalized in law and acted on. Bosanquet uses the frightening sounding term ‘forced to be free’; what this means is that the state as the upholder of citizen’s rights enforces these rights through law.

Bosanquet says that the state must be ‘absolute’; he means absolute with a small ‘a’ not a capital ‘A’. The state is not synonymous with the ‘Absolute’. However the state being the expression of the general will, all being well, is co-existent with the term ‘real will’. The law being derived from the real will is an expression of our objective selves. The state is absolute by the necessity of being a state; if rights are to be upheld, in the last resort they have to be enforced. An aspect of the state being absolute or sovereign is that it must be single, within its own remit it cannot have a conflicting authority.

The talk of the state being single, absolute, having the right to force, should not give us the idea that force should be the principle drive behind the state, it is will. The state cannot be viable in the long term if it does not, by and large, uphold the welfare and have the support of its citizens. The state exists to maintain a society in the condition whereby the citizen can attain the ‘best life’. As we are individuals, it follows that despite Bosanquet’s reservations about the individual, people have to fulfil themselves as such. If there were a substantial failure in regard of delivering the ‘best life’ to individuals it would diminish the ‘common good’. In event of the state becoming despotic Bosanquet says the citizen may have a duty to rebel, but he thinks this unjustifiable in a democratic society where citizens have the right to change laws.

There is no limit to what the state can do says Bosanquet, but it is desirable that it limits its interference in its citizen’s lives. The state sets the conditions for the ‘best life’ but should not tell people what to do in a narrow prescriptive way; otherwise it might undermine the citizen as a free moral agent. Underlying Bosanquet’s thinking is the idea derived from T.H. Green that society and the state should aim at ‘perfectionism’, that is that it maintain favourable conditions to encourage in the population a moral attitude, upholding self-improvement and caring for others etc.

Bosanquet worked as volunteer in social work for many years. Though he thought that society should be by and large based on private ownership and enterprise, he was sympathetic to what was then called ‘moral socialism’. He believed all citizens should be held in equal regard. He doubted there ever could be equal satisfaction, though inequalities were only justifiable to the extent the outcomes were optimised for all sectors of the population. He was sceptical of what he calls ‘mechanical socialism’. Bosanquet thought that the best social outcomes are achieved when communities act through their own efforts and initiatives and was sympathetic to the many self-help organisations created by the British working classes: co-operatives, mutual societies, friendly societies and trades unions. He thought that social work is best done through voluntary organisation. He was concerned that the motives behind the giving were not just a bureaucratic procedure but was a ‘gift from the community, individually configured for every case’. He believed that state interference is justified when benefits are outweighed by it not doing so. When the issue of providing school dinners arose in 1900 the ‘Charity Organisation Society’ opposed the proposal because they believed this would undermine the motive of families providing their own dinners. We might nowadays say they feared a ‘dependency culture’. In this case their objections were probably over-ruled by the practical consideration that many men recruited to serve in the Boer War were in such poor physical condition through chronic malnutrition.

Criticism and revived interest

During WWI Bosanquet’s Philosophical Theory of the State came under heavy criticism. T.H. Hobhouse wrote The Metaphysical Theory of the State in which he attacked Hegel, and Bosanquet as a peddler of Hegelianism in Britain. Hobhouse was a follower of J.S. Mill but admired T.H. Green’s ethical high-mindedness. Essentially Hobhouse is taking Bosanquet to task for pushing T.H. Green’s ideas towards a more Hegelian interpretation. He claimed that Hegelianism is synonymous with Prussian state militarism and state worship. He criticises Bosanquet for bringing the self into too close an association with the state; a point on which he is right, but there is a tendentious side to his arguments. One example is that he says Bosanquet says the state is synonymous with the ‘Absolute’, but Bosanquet says something weaker; the state has to be ‘absolute’ as arbiter of last resort and enforcer to be effective. The state has qualities that tend it towards the ‘Absolute’ but, as a finite being is not perfect. Green, Hobhouse, along with Bosanquet all contributed to the attitudes that inspired the Asquith 1906 Liberal Government to bring in social reforms, the other factor was trade union militancy.

A final word from Bosanquet: The individual must ultimately follow his conscience to the end, so the state, if it is to be morally responsible, must follow its own.

Brand Blanshard commenting on Hobhouse’s attack on Bosanquet says: ‘at the turn of the century the type of thought that held the field was derived from idealism. T.H. Green’s great book The Principles of Political Obligation was essentially a re-writing of Rousseau to make the general will a drive towards rationality, seeking the same end in all men, and providing a basis for rights and duties, both within the state and between them; and this theory, as developed in a more Hegelian manner by Bosanquet, achieved a kind of authority. It was destroyed by the First World War. Hobhouse, in a book dedicated to his son who was lost in that war, poured hot wrath upon it as a glorification of arbitrary state power; and though this was unjust to the idealist theory and his own view was surprisingly near to it, the theory suffered much from guilt by association.’

Bosanquet was all but forgotten for many years. In the last few years there has been a re-emergence of some scholarship. In 1999 there was a conference in Oxford to commemorate the 100^th year anniversary of the publication of The Philosophical Theory of the State. Political philosophers sympathetic to communitarian outlook have been re-assessing T H Green, and some have started to re-examine Bernard Bosanquet.