Chapter III: The Future of Political Obedience

The other question which deserves to be examined is a much wider one. We have inquired what have been the grounds of Obedience in the past, and how it has worked in consolidating political society. We have seen that political society has depended upon the natural inequality in the strength of individual wills and in the activity of individual intellects, so that the weaker have tended to follow and shelter themselves behind the stronger, not so much because the stronger have compelled them to do so as because they have themselves wished to do so. But the conditions of human life and society have of late years greatly changed, and are still continuing to change, in the direction of securing wider scope for independence of thought and action. Society has become orderly, and physical violence plays a smaller and a steadily decreasing part. The multitude, in most of the civilized and progressive countries, can, if and when it pleases, exercise political supremacy through its voting power. There is very much less distinction of ranks than formerly, so that even those who dislike social equality are obliged to profess their love for it. And the opportunities of obtaining knowledge have become infinitely more accessible than they were even a century ago. Changes so great as these must surely—though of course they cannot alter the fundamental facts of human nature—modify the working of the tendencies and habits which man shows in political society. How far, then, are they likely to modify the tendency to Obedience, and in what way? In other words, What will be the relation of Obedience to democracy and to social equality?

It used to be believed, perhaps it is still generally believed, that with the advance of knowledge, the development of intelligence, and the accumulation of human experience, Obedience must necessarily decline, and that therewith governmental control will decay or be deemed superfluous, the good sense of mankind coming in to do for themselves what authority has hitherto done for them. The familiar phrase ‘Anarchy _plus_ a street constable’ was employed to describe the ideal of a government restricted to the fewest possible functions, as that ideal was cherished by the lovers of liberty and the apostles of _laissez-faire_. There is even a school counting among its members, besides a few assassins, many peaceful and tender-hearted theorists, men of high personal excellence, which maintains that all the troubles of the world spring from the effort of one man, or a group of men, or the general mass of a people, to regulate the relations and guide the conduct of individuals. To this school all forms of government are pretty nearly equally bad, and a Czar, though a more conspicuous mark for denunciation, is scarcely worse than is a Parliament.

The answer to this view, which is attractive, not merely because it is paradoxical, but because it is a protest against some really bad tendencies of human society, and whose ideal, however unattainable, offers larger prospects of pleasure than does that of the ultra-regulators, seems to be that Obedience is an instinct of human nature too strong and permanent to be got rid of, and that the extinction of the State machinery which rules by this instinct, and when necessary enforces its own authority by the strong arm, would not really secure freedom to the weak though it might facilitate oppression by the strong. To assume that human nature will change as soon as provisions for State compulsion have been withdrawn is to misread human nature as we have hitherto known it. Organizations there will be and must be, even if existing governments come to an end: and every organization implies obedience, not only because large enterprises cannot otherwise be worked, but also because the direction, necessarily committed to a few, forms in those few the habit of ruling and disposes others to accept their control. The decline of respect for the State, or even the growth of a habit of disobedience to State authorities, so far from implying a decline in the motives and forces which produce obedience generally, may indicate nothing more than that people have begun to obey some other authorities, and so illustrate our proposition that the obedience rendered to authorities commanding physical force is not always nor necessarily the promptest and the heartiest. New forms of social grouping and organization are always springing up, and in these, if they are to strive for and attain their aims, discipline is essential, because it is only thus that success in a struggle can be won. To keep men tightly knit together power must be lodged in few hands, and the rank and file must take their orders from their officers. Such submission, due at starting partly no doubt to reason, which suggests motives of interest, but largely also to deference and to sympathy, with fear presently added, soon crystallizes into a habit. Any one who will watch any considerable modern movement or series of movements outside the State sphere will perceive how naturally and inevitably guidance falls into a few hands, and how largely success depends on the discipline which those who guide maintain among those who follow; that is to say, on the uniformity and readiness of obedience, and on the strength of the associative habit which makes them all act heartily together. Whether it be a political party, or an ecclesiastical movement, or a combination of employers or of workmen, the same tendencies appear, and victory is achieved by the same methods.

I will name in passing three very recent instances, drawn from the country in which it might be supposed that subordination was least likely to be found, because the principles of democracy and equality have had in it the longest and the fullest vogue. One is to be found in the Boss system in American politics. Such party chieftains as Mr. Croker in New York City, Mr. Cox in Cincinnati, and the well-known masters of the Republican party in the great States of Pennsylvania and New York, wield a power far more absolute, far more unquestioned, than the laws of the United States permit to any official. One must go to Russia to find anything comparable to the despotic control they exert over fellow citizens who are supposed to enjoy the widest freedom the world has known. A second is supplied by the American trade unions, in which a few leaders are permitted by the mass of their fellow workmen to organize combinations and to direct strikes as practical dictators. A trade union is a militant body, and the conditions of war make the leader all-powerful. The third is to be found in the American Trusts or great commercial corporations, aggregations of capital which embrace vast industries and departments of trade employing many thousands of work-people, and which are controlled by a very small number of capable men. Modern commerce, like war, suggests the concentration of virtually irresponsible power in a few hands.

Whether we examine the moral constitution of man or the phenomena of society in its various stages, we shall be led to conclude that the theoretic democratic ideal of men as each of them possessing and exerting an independent reason, conscience, and will, is an ideal too remote from human nature as we know it, and from communities as they now exist, to be within the horizon of the next few centuries, perhaps of all the centuries that may elapse before we are covered by the ice-fields again descending from the Pole or are ultimately engulfed in the sun.

What, then, is the most that a reasonable optimist may venture to hope for? He will hope that ‘the masses’ of democratic countries in the future, since they, like ourselves, must follow a small number of leaders, will ultimately reach a level of intelligence, public spirit and probity which will enable them to select the right leaders, will make the demagogue repulsive, will secure their deference for those whose characters and careers they can approve, and will so far control the associative instinct as to cause their adhesion to party to be governed by a moral judgement on the conduct of the party. The masses cannot have either the leisure or the capacity for investigating the underlying principles of policy or for mastering the details of legislation. Yet they may—so our optimist must hope—attain to a sound perception of the main and broad issues of national and international policy, especially in their moral aspects, a perception sufficient to enable them to keep the nation’s action upon right lines. For the average man to do more than this seems scarcely more possible than that he should examine religious truth for himself, scrutinizing the Christian evidences and reaching independent conclusions upon the Christian dogmas. This is what the extreme Protestant theory, which exalted human reason in the religious sphere no less than democratic theory did in the political sphere, has demanded, and indeed must demand, from the average man. But how many Protestants seek to rise to it? Many of those who grew up under the influence of that inspiriting theory can recall the disappointment with which, between twenty and thirty years of age, they came to perceive that the ideal was unattainable for themselves, and that they must be content to form and live by such views of the meaning of the Bible and of the dogmas held to be deducible therefrom as a reliance on the opinions of the highest critical authorities and of their own wisest friends, coupled with their own limited knowledge of history and with the canons of evidence which they had unconsciously adopted, enabled them to form. Even this, however, has seemed to most of those who have passed through such an experience to be better than a despairing surrender to ecclesiastical authority.

So the optimist aforesaid may argue that the future for which he hopes will represent, not indeed the ideal which democracy sets up, yet nevertheless an advance upon any government the world has yet seen, except perhaps in very small communities or for a brief space of time.

The doctrine that the natural instinct and passion of men was for liberty, because every human being was a centre of independent force, striving to assert itself; the doctrine that political freedom would bring mental independence and a sense of responsibility; that education would teach men, not only to prize their political rights, but also to use them wisely—this doctrine was first promulgated by persons of exceptional vigour, exceptional independence, exceptional hopefulness. These were the qualities that made such men idealists and reformers: and they attributed their own merits to the general body of mankind. It was an admirable ideal. Let us hold to it as long as we can. The world is still young.

Having heard the optimist, we must let the pessimist also state his case. If he is a reasonable pessimist, he will admit that Obedience may be expected to become more and more a product of reason rather than of mere indolence or timidity, because every advance in popular enlightenment or in the participation of the masses in government ought, after the first excitement of unchastened hopes or destructive impulses has passed away, to engender a stronger feeling of the common interest in public order, and of the need for subordinating the demands of a class to the general good. He will also admit that the progress of social equality may tend to increase each man’s sense of individual dignity. But if he is asked to admit further that governments will become purer and better because there will come along with that habit of rational obedience (a habit necessary to enable any government to be efficient) a stronger interest in self-government, a more active public spirit, a constant sense of the duty which each citizen owes to the community to secure an honest and wise administration, he will observe that as we have seen that Obedience rests primarily upon certain instincts and habits woven into the texture of human nature, these instincts and habits will be permanent factors, not necessarily less potent in the future than they have been in the past. He will then ask whether the events of the last seventy years, during which power has, at least in form and semblance, passed from the few to the many, encourage the belief that the spirit of independence, the standard of public duty, and the sense of responsibility in each individual for the conduct of government are really advancing.

Are the omens in this quarter of the heavens so favourable as we are apt to assume?

There is less love for liberty—so our pessimist pursues—than there used to be, perhaps less value set upon the right of a man to express unpopular opinions. There is less sympathy in each country for the struggles which are maintained for freedom in other countries. National antagonisms are as strong as ever they were, and nations seem quite as willing as in the old days of tyranny to forgo domestic progress for the sake of strengthening their militant force against their rivals. There is less faith in, less regard for, that which used to be called the principle of nationality. Peoples which have achieved their own national freedom show no more disposition than did the tyrants of old time to respect the struggles of other peoples to maintain theirs. The sympathy which Germans and Frenchmen used to feel for the oppressed races of the East has disappeared. France has ceased to care about the Cretans or the Poles. England, whose heart went out forty years ago to all who strove for freedom and independence, feels no compunction in blotting out two little republics whose citizens have fought with a valour and constancy never surpassed. The United States ignore the principles of their Declaration of Independence when they proceed to subjugate by force the Philippine Islanders. The modern ideal is no longer liberty, but military strength and commercial development.

If freedom is less prized, it is perhaps because free governments have failed to bear the fruit that was expected from them fifty years ago. The Republic in France seems, after thirty years, to have made the country not much happier or more contentedly tranquil than it was under Louis Napoleon or Louis Philippe. It maintains, to the eyes of foreign observers, a precarious life from year to year, now and then threatened by plots military, political, or ecclesiastical. A free and united Italy has not realized the hopes of the great men to whom she owes her unity and her freedom. The United States have at least as much corruption in their legislatures, and worse government in their great cities, with fewer men of commanding ability in their public life, than before the Civil War, when it was believed that all evils would disappear with the extinction of slavery. In particular, representative government, in which the hopes of the apostles of progress were centred half a century ago, has fallen into discredit. In some countries the representative is more timid, more willing to be turned into a mere delegate, more at the mercy of a party organization, than he was formerly. In others the popular assembly is so much distrusted that men seek to override it by introducing a so-called plebiscite or referendum to review its decisions.

No result was more confidently expected from the enlightenment of the bulk of the people than the triumph, a speedy and complete triumph, of sound economic doctrines, such as those which prescribe the adoption of Free Trade in commercial legislation and reliance upon self-help rather than State-help in poor law matters and generally in social improvements. But the United Kingdom is the only country in which Free Trade holds the field, and in the United Kingdom the true and wholesome principles of poor law administration, as set forth by Chalmers and by the famous Commissioners of 1834, have rather lost than gained ground.

The doctrines of _Laissez-Faire_ and Individualism have suffered an eclipse. The State interferes more and more with the power of the individual to do as he pleases. Its motives are usually excellent, but the result is to subject his life to a closer and more repressive supervision. This means more obedience, less exercise of personal discretion, less of that virtue which guides the self-determining will to choose the good and reject the evil. ‘If every action,’ says John Milton, ‘which is good or evil in man at ripe years were to be under pittance, prescription and compulsion, what were virtue but a name—what praise could be then due to well-doing, what gramercy to be sober, just or continent?’

Nor is it only the State (whether through central or through local authorities) that threatens individual freedom. Masses of working men surrender themselves to the control of the few chiefs of their trade organization, who are hardly the less despotic in fact because they are elected and because they are nominally subject to a control which those who have elected them cannot, from the nature of the case, effectively exert[3]. Thus there is, instead of more independence, always more and more obedience.

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Footnote 3:

This pessimist omits to notice that interference by the State or by
such quasi-despotic combinations of workmen may have been deemed the
only means of escaping from submission to organizations of capitalists
capable of exercising a tyranny through the forms of the law. He would
however reply that this fact did not tell against his thesis that, one
way or another, people are not becoming more fully masters of their
own lives and fates.

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To one who believes the principles of Free Trade and Self-Help to be irrefragably true this means that the bulk of the people are not, as was formerly expected, thinking for themselves, perhaps are not capable of thinking for themselves, while those persons who are capable fear to contend for doctrines which happen to be unpopular because opposed to ignorant or superficial views of what is the interest of a nation or of the most numerous class in the nation.

In the enlightenment of the people, which was to increase their independence of spirit and their zeal for good government, the chief part was to be played by the public press. Its influence has increased beyond the most sanguine anticipations of the last generation of reformers whether in Great Britain or in Continental Europe. It employs an enormous amount of literary talent. Nothing escapes its notice. But in some countries it has become a powerful agent for black-mailing; in others it is largely the tool of financial speculators; in others, again, it degrades politics by vulgarizing them, or seeks to increase its circulation by stimulating the passion of the moment. Pecuniary considerations cannot but affect it, because a newspaper is a commercial concern, whose primary aim is to make a profit. Almost everywhere it tends to embitter racial animosities and make more difficult the preservation of international peace. When it tells each man that the views it expresses are those of everybody else, except a few contemptible opponents, it increases the tendency of each man to fall in with the views of the mass, and confirms that habit of passive acquiescence which the progress of enlightenment was once expected to dispel.

The growth in population of the great industrial nations, such as Germany, England, and the United States, may tend to dwarf the sense in each man of his own significance to the whole body politic, and dispose him to make less strenuous efforts than he would have put forth had he thought his own exertions more likely to tell upon the community. The vaster the people the more trivial must the individual appear to himself, and the more readily will he fall in with what the majority think or determine.

The rise of wages among the poorer classes and the bettering of material conditions in all classes were expected to give the bulk of the people more leisure, and it was assumed that this would induce them to bestow more attention upon public affairs and so stimulate them in the discharge of civic duties. Wages have risen everywhere, notably in England and the United States, and material conditions have improved. But new interests have therewith been awakened, and pleasures formerly unattainable have been brought within the reach of every class except the very poorest. Whatever other benefits this change brings, it has not tended to make civic duty more prominent in the mind of the average man. With some, material enjoyments, with others physical exercise, or what is called sport (including the gambling that accompanies many kinds of sport), with others the more refined pleasures of art or literature, have come in to occupy the greatest part of such time and thought as can be spared from daily work; and public affairs receive no more, perhaps even less, of their attention than was formerly given.

May it not even be that material comfort and the surrender of one’s self to enjoyment, whether directed towards the coarser or towards the worthier pleasures, tend in softening the character, to relax its tension, or at least to indispose it to rough work? To a fine taste things in which taste cannot be indulged become distasteful. Thus high civilization may end by increasing the sum of human indolence, at least so far as politics are concerned, and indolence is, after all, the prime source of Obedience. Some things no doubt men will continue to value and (if need be) to defend, because they will have come to deem them essential. Freedom of Thought and Speech is probably one of these things, though the multitude occasionally shows how intolerant it can be when excited. Civil Equality is another; the respect for private civil rights, with a tolerably fair administration of justice for enforcing those rights, is a third. These have rooted themselves in Germany and England, for instance, and (with some few local exceptions) in the United States, as necessaries to existence. But can the same thing be said of political freedom, that is, of the right to control, by constitutional machinery, the government of the State? Is it not possible that the disposition to acquiesce and submit without the application of compulsive force may be as strong under these new conditions as it ever was before? possible that an educated and intelligent people might, if material comfort and scope for intellectual development were secured, grow weary of political contention, and submit to the despotism, perhaps of a regular monarch, perhaps of a succession of adventurers, which, tempered in some degree by public opinion, should secure peace, order and commercial prosperity? The thing has happened before. For five centuries the people who had been the most politically active and who remained the most intelligent and most civilized in the world made no effort to recover the political freedom they had lost, having indeed, within a generation or two, ceased even to think of it.

So far our pessimist. He has obviously omitted, not only some facts which make against the gloom of his picture, but also other facts incidental to the phenomena on which he dwells, which qualify their import or indicate that they may be merely transient. The most serious part of the case which he endeavours to make against the old theory that democratic government fosters the attachment to freedom, stimulates civic zeal, and intensifies the independent spirit of the citizen, is the suggestion that the vast size of modern nations, and the insignificance of the individual man as compared to the multitude around him, tend to dwarf his personal sense of responsibility and to depress his hopes of withstanding whatever sentiment or opinion may be for the time predominant. The rule of the majority, if it induces the belief that the majority must be right, or at any rate that the majority is irresistible[4], brings back the old dangers of submission. So the familiar tendency to follow and obey, rather than to think and act for one’s self, may be even stronger in a democracy than it was under the monarchies of earlier days.

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Footnote 4:

Some remarks upon this feature of the United States may be found in
the author’s _American Commonwealth_, vol. ii. chap. lxxxv, ‘The
Fatalism of the Multitude.’

If, now that both sides have been heard, we are to attempt to answer the question propounded some pages back, our answer must be that despite the changes which have passed upon the modern world, the tendencies of human nature which make for obedience have not become, and are not likely to become, less powerful than they were. That they should disappear is not to be desired, for they are useful tendencies, without which society would not hold together. But they have not been reduced even so far as the reasonable friends of progress might wish. In the sphere of religion the compulsion once exercised, not merely by force, but also by public opinion, has doubtless in most countries declined. There is also a larger and freer play of thought and taste in all matters not appertaining to collective action, that is to say, in matters involving no collision of wills. But where this collision arises, as in the spheres of politics and industry, the disposition of the average man to defer and fall into line, the tendency of the stronger will to prevail because it is the stronger, are as great as ever they were before. Physical force plays a smaller part than it did in the ruder ages. But Indolence, Deference, and Sympathy, rather than Reason and the pride of personal independence, have filled the void which the less frequent appeal to physical force has left.

So far as the question touches England, it may be that the friends of progress and freedom of the last generation, the generation of Mazzini and Garrison and Cobden and Gladstone, assumed too hastily that the reforming ardour and other civic virtues which had been evoked by the long battle of Englishmen against monarchy and oligarchy and class legislation would remain unabated, after the battle had been won, in days which see popular self-government an ordinary part of daily life. When the grosser abuses in administration have been removed, when everybody’s rights have been recognized, when new questions, far more intricate and difficult, but less exciting, have arisen, when it is not destruction—a thing everybody can clamour for—but constructive legislation that is needed, public interest may flag and politics cease to stir emotion as they formerly did. Just as in Italy the struggle for national unity and freedom called to the front in the first half of the nineteenth century a brilliant and lofty group of men, who have left few successors, so it may be that the normal attitude of a people towards its public life, and the normal attraction which public life has for fine characters and high talents, will fall short of that which has marked the periods of conflict over great principles. The standard will not therefore, even should it now be sinking, rest at a point lower than that at which average humanity has stood through past ages, though it will be lower than that to which exceptional needs, rousing strong emotions and inspiring golden hopes, had uplifted men during the days of conflict.

There is, however, a further reply to be made to our pessimist before we part from him. Even supposing that the ideals which democratic theory sets up have not advanced towards realization, that the love of freedom and justice has declined, and that the tendency to indifference, to acquiescence in a dominant opinion, or to unthinking adherence to some organization, is stronger than was expected some forty years ago, these may be only transitory phenomena. In a striking passage of his _Constitutional History of England_ (vol. ii. chap. 17), Bishop Stubbs comments on the moral and political decline of the men of the fourteenth century from the level of the thirteenth, but observes that unseen causes were already at work which after no long interval restored the tone and spirit of England. It has often been so in history, though no generation can foretell how long a period of intellectual or moral depression will endure.

NOTE TO THE ABOVE ESSAY

ON THE APPLICATION OF THE THEORY OF OBEDIENCE TO THE FUNDAMENTAL
DEFINITIONS OF JURISPRUDENCE.

The school of jurisprudence which follows Bentham defines a Law as a Command of the State, represents every law as resting solely upon the physical force of the State, through the threat of punishment to those who transgress the law, and finds in the fear of punishment the sole motive of the obedience rendered by the citizens.

There are three objections to this doctrine and definition. The first is that if it is meant, as the generality of language used by its propounders implies, to apply to all political communities, it is untrue as matter of history, because it suggests a false view of the origin of law, and is inapplicable to the laws of many communities. There have been peoples among whom there was a law but no State capable of enforcing obedience. In all communities there have been laws which were in fact obeyed, but which were not deemed by the people to have emanated from the State. The great bulk of the rules which determine the relations of individuals or groups to one another have in most countries, until comparatively recent times, rested upon Custom—that is to say, upon long-settled practice which everybody understands and in which everybody acquiesces. In such countries customs were or are laws, and do not need to be formally enounced in order to secure their observance by the people. Custom is simply the result of the disposition to do again what has been done before. What Habit is to the individual, Custom is to the community.

The second objection is that, even in mature States where there exist public authorities regularly exercising legislative functions, most laws do not belong in their form or their meaning to the category of commands. In order to make them seem commands a forced and unnatural sense must be put upon them, by representing the State as directly ordering everything to which it is prepared to give effect. Statute law takes the form of a command more often than does any other kind of law. Yet even in English statute law administrative statutes, which now constitute a large part of that law, are usually couched in the form, not of an order to a public body or an official to do such and such a thing, but of an authorization which makes action legal which might otherwise have been illegal. This distinction, though somewhat technical, nevertheless indicates the unsuitability of the definition. As for that part of the law of a country which determines the private rights of the citizens towards one another, as for instance the conditions attaching to commercial and other contracts, their interpretation, the liability they create, or, again, the rights of succession to property, and the modes of dealing with heirship or bequests—this largest and most important part of the law does not consist of commands. The rules of which it consists are declarations of the doctrines which the Courts have applied and will apply; or they are, if you like, assurances given by the State that it will, with physical force at its disposal, take a certain course in certain events, and thus they become instructions helpful to the citizens, showing them how they may get the law, and physical force, on their side in civil disputes. But they are not, in any natural sense of the word, Commands. This is obvious enough in English law, where most of such rules are to be gathered from the reports of decided cases: but the same thing is substantially true of those countries which have embodied in statutory form their rules upon these matters. The point is not merely one of form or phrase, though it may at first sight seem to be so. It goes deeper; it carries one back to the origin of these laws, and bears upon their inherent nature. In fact the only branch of law which is properly covered by the definition I am examining is Penal or Criminal (with certain parts of administrative) law, for this branch does consist of express orders or prohibitions accompanied by threats of punishment. It may be conjectured that the Benthamites took their notion of law in general from this particular department of it, or perhaps from the Ten Commandments in the Book of Exodus, which, though no doubt good examples of the categorical imperative, are anything but typical of law in general.

If the Benthamites had been content to distinguish rules which the State enforces from courses of conduct which opinion supports, the distinction, though an older and more obvious one than they supposed, would have its worth. The definition of a law as that which the State is prepared to enforce fits a modern State, though not universally applicable to early communities. But the Benthamite definition goes further, and may be misleading even as regards modern laws generally.

The third objection to this definition is that it is not primarily or chiefly Fear which is the source of Obedience. It is not Physical Force that has created the State whence (according to this doctrine) laws issue and by which they are applied. It is not through Force that kings reign and princes decree justice. According to the Hebrew Scriptures it is by God that they reign. According to Homer it is Zeus who has given to the king the sceptre and the dooms, that therewith he may rule. Both expressions convey the same truth, that it is by the natural or providential order of things, and in virtue of the constitution of man as a social being, that men are grouped into communities under leaders who judge among them. The tendency to aggregation, to imitation, to compliance and submission, is the basis on which the State is built. It is of course not only true but obvious that the State must have physical strength at its disposal in order to make the law obeyed. The capacity for applying compulsion holds the State together. But why is it that the State is able to apply force? Because, in the ordered and normal State, the same influences which have drawn men together keep them together, and make them willingly yield to the State the physical strength, and the money which purchases physical strength, needful for its purposes. Where a ruler rules by pure force (apart from the consent of the community), he is what the Greeks called a Tyrant, or the Italians in the fourteenth century a Signore, a Usurper reigning in defiance of law by means of armed men, an Adventurer who has risen by a revolution, is supported by the soldiery, and will fall when they turn against him. Such Tyrants are represented in our own day by the Presidents in some of the Spanish Republics of Central and South America. Pure Force is really the most unstable foundation on which either the State or Law can rest.

Thus the same conclusion to which history leads is also enjoined on us by a consideration of the psychological or sociological grounds which induce obedience, and the Benthamic definition is perceived to be unsound. These curt and often sweeping definitions usually are unsound. They are not simple, although they are summary. They are arbitrary and artificial, concealing under few words many fallacies. Human nature and human society are too complex to be thus dealt with.

X

THE NATURE OF SOVEREIGNTY