|
Liberty, Equality,
Fraternity
By James Fitzjames Stephen
1873
"By whatever rule [men] regulate their conduct, no
room is left for any rational enthusiasm for the order of ideas hinted
at by the phrase 'Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity'; for, whichever
rule [derived from philosophical speculation] is applied, there are a
vast number of matters in respect of which men ought not to be free;
they are fundamentally unequal, and they are not brothers at all, or
only under qualifications which make the assertion of their fraternity
unimportant." Thus James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart. (1829-1894) refutes
both the continental tradition of revolutionary ferocity established
by the French Revolution, and the milder (but no less philosophically
wrong-minded and confused) British tradition of utilitarian liberalism
most famously and thoroughly represented in Stephen's day by John
Stuart Mill; the tendency of whose later works Liberty, Equality,
Fraternity was written, in part, to oppose. (If "Liberty,
Equality, Fraternity" sounds, in the after-wake of the Second
Inaugural Address, like the foremost slogan of the new Bush
Administration, we have only the neoconservatives--Jacobins at heart,
all of them--to thank for this fact.)
Fitzjames Stephen, second son of Sir James Stephen
and brother of Sir Leslie Stephen (the biographer and literary
critic), was a lawyer, judge, and journalist who served for three
years as legal member of council in India, immediately succeeding in
that position his close friend Sir Henry Sumner Maine: the eminent
jurist and author (most notably of Popular Government) who
taught as professor of jurisprudence at Oxford and Cambridge
Universities, and with whom Stephen had become acquainted through
their shared membership in the Apostles society at Cambridge. In 1863,
Stephen published A General View of the Criminal Law of England,
which has been described as the first literary exposition of the
principles of English law and justice since Blackstone. Only
moderately successful in his legal practice, Fitzjames Stephen boiled
the pot by writing articles for such magazines as the Pall Mall
Gazette and the Saturday Review. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity
was written on the passage home from India as a series of articles
published in the Gazette between November 1872 and January
1873, and reprinted in book form in March of that year-the same in
which J.S. Mill died.
Fitzjames Stephen was a careful and devoted student
of the works of Thomas Hobbes, Joseph de Maistre-and Jeremy Bentham.
Indeed, he was to some extent, as he acknowledges candidly in his
attack on utilitarianism, a utilitarian himself, but of the old
variety (which he took for the basis of conservatism) rather then the
new one developed by Mill. Stephen, though a stern conservative, was
as well a realistic and flexible one, whose conservativism might be
expressed by the injunction, Know where you stand at all times:
That is to say, understand not human nature only, but your own
particular society, and the times in which you find yourselves.
The son of an English evangelical, Stephen had a
firm hold on metaphysical reality. On the other hand, he was convinced
that legislation ought to be shaped to conform with the existing
morality of the time and country for which it was written; since, "To
be able to punish, a moral majority must be overwhelming. Law cannot
be better than the nation in which it exists, though it may be and can
protect an acknowledged moral standard, and may be gradually increased
in strictness as the standard rises." As Stepehen sees it, the great
danger of the tripartite slogan, "Liberty, Equality, and
Fraternity"-the "Democratic creed," the creed of the new secular
religion--is that there is nothing true, significant, or even real,
about any element of it. Liberty is a word of negation; equality
merely one of relation ("a big name for a small thing"); while
fraternity is an utter impossibility. As for the modern idols of
progress, democracy, and modernity, though little is to be
accomplished by deploring them, little is gained either by fetishizing
them. Stephen's purpose in writing his book was to examine the
doctrines suggested (rather, as he notes, than described) by the
famous motto that supplies its title, and to assert, in respect of
these, two propositions:
First, that in the present day even those who use
those words most rationally-that is to say, as the names of elements
of social life which, like others, have their advantages and
disadvantages according to time, place, and circumstance-have a great
disposition to exaggerate their advantages and to deny the existence,
or at any rate to underrate the importance, of their disadvantages.
Next, that whatever signification be attached to them, these words are
ill-adapted to be the creed of a religion [Mill having suggested that
fraternity was destined to become the new world-wide faith], that the
things which they denote are not ends in themselves, and that when
used collectively the words do not typify, how- ever vaguely, any
state of society which a reasonable man ought to regard with
enthusiasm or self-devotion.
It is not, Stephen insists, that he is the advocate
of "Slavery, Caste, and Hatred," or that he denies there to be a sense
in which the words Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity can be construed
as good things. It is simply that they are being offered as the
Trinity of a professed new religion: the Religion of Humanity.
Stephen begins by quoting from On Liberty,
where Mill asserts what he describes as "one very simple
principle.entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with
the individual in the way of compulsion or control, whether the means
used be physical force in the form of legal penalties, or the moral
coercion of public opinion. That principle," Mill proceeds,
is that the sole end for which mankind are
warranted individually or collectively in interfering with the liberty
of action of any of their number is self-protection; that the only
purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of
a civilized community against his will is to prevent harm to
others..[Moreover, the] only part of the conduct of anyone for which
he is amenable to society is that which concerns others. In the part
which merely concerns himself his independence is of right absolute.
Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.
To this, Stephen's cogently mischievous rejoinder
is that, while Mr. Mill and his disciples would be the last people to
deny that the progressive reforms introduced into the world since the
sixteenth century have been generally beneficial, all of them have
been effected by force!
Mill's distinction between self-protective and
self-regarding acts is predicated on the assumption that certain acts
concern the agent alone, while others affect other people solely. "In
fact," says Stephen, "by far the most important part of our conduct
regards both ourselves and others, and revolutions are the clearest
proof of this." Therefore, in place of Mill's "simple" principle, he
offers one of his own. "If...the object aimed at is good, if the
compulsion employed such as to attain it, and if the good obtained
overbalances the inconvenience of the compulsion itself I do not
understand how, upon utilitarian principles, the compulsion can be
bad."
Indeed, ".compulsion," Stephen asserts, in its most
formidable shape and on the most extensive scale-the compulsion of
war-is one of the principles which lie at the root of national
existence. It determines whether nations are to be and what they are
to be. It decides what men shall believe, how they shall live, in what
mould their religion, law, morals, and the whole tone of their lives
shall be cast. It is the ratio ultima of kings, but of human
society in all its shapes. It determines precisely, for one thing, how
much and how little individual liberty is to be left to exist in at
any specific time or place.
From this great truth flow many consequences. They
may all be summed up in this one, that power precedes liberty-that
liberty, from the very nature of things, is dependent upon power; and
that it is only under the protection of a powerful, well-organized,
and intelligent government that any liberty can exist at all.
Even so, Stephen warns, as to this word "liberty,"
we ought at all times to be aware that insofar as it has a definite
sense attached to it, consistent reliance upon that sense makes it
nearly impossible to state any true general assertion regarding the
term, and wholly impossible to view liberty as a good or a bad thing
of itself. "Thus," he concludes, "the word is either a misleading
appeal to passion, or else it embodies or rather hints at an
exceedingly complicated assertion, the truth of which can be proved
only by elaborate historical investigations."
".[B]y far the most important part of our
conduct regards both ourselves and others.." It is for this very
good reason that Fitzjames Stephen opposes what he calls "excessive
and irrational tolerance" in the sphere of public morality, "if and so
far as it. tends to produce a state of indifference and isolation,
which would be the greatest of all evils if it could be produced." In
the Stephen's opinion, the art of society is not a matter of avoiding
struggles based upon conflicting moral, social, intellectual, and
political views--let alone ignoring these--but rather of conducting
them in a manner as civilized as possible, and with the least possible
harm done to the combatants, "who are, after all, rather friends than
enemies, and without attaching an exaggerated importance to the object
of contention." Stephen significantly alters this mode of approach,
however, where the object of contention can hardly be
exaggerated-namely, in respect of religion.
All government, Stephen insists, requires and even
predicates a moral basis, which must always be associated intimately
with the religious one. It follows that neutrality toward religion on
the part of a legislator is impossible. Taking this assumption as his
starting point, Stephen goes on to state his case against the widely
presumed efficacy of the separation between Church and State. This
acclaimed constitutional arrangement is based, he asserts, upon the
faulty notion of a radically unreal distinction between the
"spiritual" and the "temporal" realms that is akin to a distinction
between substance and form. "Formless matter or unsubstantial form are
expressions which have no meaning, and in the same way things temporal
and things spiritual presuppose and run into each other. Human life is
one and indivisible, and is or ought to be regulated by one set of
principles and not by a multitude." The conscientiously agnostic
state, wholly disinterested and detached where religious belief and
practice are concerned, is not only an impossible thing, it would be
an undesirable one if it were possible, and certainly nothing
to be aimed at or encouraged.
Our own minds have become so much sophisticated by
commonplaces about liberty and toleration, and about the division
between the temporal and the spiritual power, that we have almost
ceased to think of the attainment of truth in religion as desirable if
it were possible. It appears to me that, if it were possible, the
attainment of religious truth and its recognition as such by
legislation would be of all conceivable blessings the greatest. If we
were all of one mind, and that upon reason- able grounds, about the
nature of men and their relation to the world or worlds in which they
live, we should have in our hands an important instrument for the
solution of all the great moral and political questions which at
present distract and divide the world, and cause much waste of
strength in unfruitful though inevitable contests.
Fitzjames Stephens, however, convinced that "[g]overnment.ought
to fit society as a man's clothes fit him," neither expected nor
wished it to attempt the remake of society in accordance with the
private visions of its legislators and executors. Mill had argued that
the utilitarian standard is the greatest amount of happiness
altogether-a proposition his opponent caustically restates as "the
widest possible extension of the ideal of life formed by the person
who sets up the standard." But while Stephen was hostile toward the
notion of rule by philosopher kings, he was profoundly critical of
universal suffrage as a desirable alternative. On his view, the
sentiment for equality is "by far the most ignoble and mischievous of
all the popular feelings of the age." The perception of equality, he
insists (in an observation reminescent of Samuel Johnson's defense of
prejudice), must always be inseparable from experience. Similarly, the
subdivision of power-the principle of one man, one vote-fails to
impress him, as a mechanical device no more conducive to equality than
to liberty. ("Political power has changed its shape but not its
nature. The result of cutting it up into little bits is simply that
the man who can sweep the greatest number of them into one heap will
govern the rest.") Even so, Stephens--believing as he did, with
Tocqueville, that mass democracy was the inevitable future, whether it
worked or not--maintains that he has nothing to recommend as a
substitute for universal suffrage. The old ways, many of them as bad
in their own time as new ones are in ours, were being swept away "like
haycoocks in a flood." "The waters are out and no human force can turn
them back." Only, ".I do not see see why as we go with the stream we
need sing Hallelujah to the river god."
Here again, as in the instance of the Southern
Agrarians in the 1920s and 30s, we see conservatism in its essential
role as a means to collective self-knowledge rather than social and
political reformation, understanding rather than action (though
writing, as Stephens well understood, is as fully a type of action as
drawing one's sword). "The cry for liberty," he writes, ".is a general
condemnation of the past and an act of homage to the present in so far
as it differs from the past, and to the future in so far as its
character can be inferred from the character of the present."
It was for this intolerable presumption, more than
anything else, perhaps, that Fitzjames Stephens abhorred to the depths
of his soul the passionate call to arms that is "Liberty, equality,
fraternity!" |
