TABLE V.-PARTICULAR CLASSIFICATION. Percentages.
Degree of Responsibility of Women Earners.

TABLE VI.-GENERAL CLASSIFICATION. Percentages.
Degree of Responsibility of Women Earners in All Towns.

1 Stanley has been included, and the figures for Bolton halved before addition. ■ On account of the different sizes of samples, the Bolton figures have been halved, and those of the seven boroughs multiplied by 2.5, before addition, in order to secure uniform representation of the several towns.

Recent Contributions to Political

Science

By HAROLD J. LASKI,

London School of Economics and Political Science.

SIGNS are not wanting that the sovereign state of the classic political philosophy has now reached its apogee. What, broadly speaking, it represented was an attempt to justify a single form of social organization against attempts at the assertion of freedom expressed either in individual or corporate terms. It was a natural attempt; for the dominant individualism against which it was a protest had no positive conception of political action. In such a background, the effort of men like Green and Bosanquet to make the state the ultimate expression of social good was inevitable enough; and the fact that it was, for purposes of law, the one compulsory form of association suggested its superiority to all other groups of men.

The inspiration of Green and Bosanquet was drawn most largely from Rousseau and the Platonic school, with the result that their analysis was conceived in somewhat abstract terms. They did not, that is to say, dissect the state in terms either of the functions it performs or of the way in which its task is in practice achieved. They were content to demonstrate that the state must have a will; and they identified its purpose with the good of the community. The state thus became the organ through which the general will received expression; and every other group which set itself against the state was obviously less universal in its scope. The real result, accordingly, of this movement was twofold. It revivified the Greek conception of the relation between the individual and the state. It made the individual, that is to say, derive his meaning only from his state context. It made all groups less than the state itself secure their rights not from the fact that they had come to be, but from the purely secondary issue that the state conceded them permission to exist. The normal pre-eminence of the state thus became the very basis of the social order. Nor was this all. Hardly less important was the relation of this outlook to the law. A foundation in ethics was here provided for the Austinian theory of sovereignty. The state was sovereign, not on the low ground of being the ultimate source of legal reference, but on the much more formidable basis that its supremacy was essential to the fulfilment of its purpose. Inquiry was not made into the degree to which that purpose was being fulfilled. The adherents of the sovereign state were too

occupied with the splendour of what the state was trying to be to attempt the more mundane task of measuring its achievement.

The main characteristic of the last decade in political philosophy has been the reaction from this outlook. It was a reaction inevitably to be expected. Of the social zeal of men like Green and Bosanquet no man can make denial; but theirs was a static philosophy unsuited to a time when dissatisfaction with the social order impelled men's minds to change. For it is worth while noting as a general truth that any political philosophy of which the basis is Hegelian will work only when the mass of men is contented with the policy of the state. Even then, of course, its theoretic validity is contestable; and once the period of contentment is overpassed a more complex view of social relationships is destined to assert itself.

The criticism of the last ten years has broadly taken three forms, All of them have come as a reaction in the name of freedom against the sovereign state; and two of them at least envisage a definitely pluralistic theory of social structure. The most complete of these analyses is that which seeks its foundations in the history of political ideas. Like all theories of the state, indeed, it has with its main exponents a particular object in view unconnected with the generalizations it involves. What it has done is to analyse the circumstances in which the modern state arose and to show that its sovereignty is, for the most part, simply the weapon by which it sought relief from the trammels of the Church. But just as the Church so dominates the life of the Middle Ages as to become an impossible tyrant, so does the state use weapons forged for a single and special purpose to ends which need a separate scrutiny before they can be admitted as legitimate. With Figgis, for example,1 the argument takes the form of a protest that so long as the state is sovereign the freedom of churches is impossible. A Church of which the head is Christ cannot accept the dictates of a secular assembly or a secular court; and it must urge its independence of all sovereignty other than its own until it can secure its own corporate life. From such a view, it is but a single step to the hypothesis that the position of any organization, whether it be state or trade union or church, must be won by moral pre-eminence and not by an a priori legal power. In such a background the sovereignty of the state is destroyed at a single stroke. The individual becomes the centre of a system of allegiances between which, should conflict arise, it is his business to choose. Citizenship then finds its essence not in obedience to the command of the state, but in the analysis of it; and a possible rejection of that command must be envisaged should its moral substance be deemed inadequate. Broadly speaking, the type of social order towards which this view is making its way is a reconstruction of the medieval idea of the state as a communitas communitatum. It has behind it a very solid basis of historic experience. The unified power which is the 1 Cf. From Gerson to Grotius (1907); Churches in the Modern State (1913). Dr. Figgis is an Anglican. For a similar Nonconformist view, cf. Roberts, The Church in the Commonwealth (1916).

postulate of the sovereign state is in patent disharmony with the individuality of men. It assumes identity of interest between them which is in direct contradiction with the facts. It demands uniformity as its instrument, and uniformity, as we know both from the history of Oriental civilization and of the Roman Church, is the parent of unthinking stagnation. Any institution that has the legal power to command will unconsciously identify its legal power with moral right; and the obvious safeguard against its abuse is the erection of alternative avenues of allegiance through which effective protest can be made.

In this respect, the protest against the sovereign state is essentially a stage in the history of toleration. It is, above all, the affirmation that we need a democratic interpretation of the principles of authority. It is an attempt, through the organization of group-loyalties, to prevent the individual from reduction to insignificance in a world where only corporate action can hope for effectiveness. The dangers to which such an attitude lies open is obvious enough. Consciously, it is a threat against order. Consciously, also, it offers a loophole to what may well resolve itself into revolution. But that is the inevitable result of any philosophy which attempts to replace an order founded upon legal rights by an order founded upon moral right. A society which is able to admit the protest of its members has at least more securely safeguarded itself against disruption than one in which fundamental dissent, being excluded, eats its way to the foundations of the state. 1

And this attitude secures at least some measure of support from the Socialist interpretation of the state. Orthodox theory gives the state pre-eminence because the aspect of man that it expresses is common to us all. For the state as a philosophic conception there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither bond nor free. We meet there upon the common ground of identical citizenship. That is why the state is held to be the ultimate expression of the social bond. All other forms of organization have a certain partial character about them. The state embraces all men by its territorial nature. It is universal because it is the one compulsory form of association.

Some validity to that argument few Socialists would deny when it is viewed merely as a protection against external attack, but it is argued that when we move to the more complex problems of internal arrangement, it has no necessary validity. Internal change is always movement against the interests of an existing order which the sovereignty of the state is, as a matter of history, used to preserve. Its legal rights are merged, without the necessary inquiry,

1 For the modern statement of the case against this view, cf. Zimmern, Nationality and Government (1918) and, in a distinctly medieval way, cf. Lord Eustace Percy in his Responsibilities of the League (1919), esp. pp. 275 ff.

Cf. especially N. Lenin, The State and Revolution (1919). G. D. H. Cole, Social Theory (1920). S. & B. Webb, A Constitution for the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain (1920).