R. G. Collingwood's Essays in Political Philosophy
Bromwich, David
ESSAYS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, by R.G. Collingwood, Edited with an Introduction by David Boucher. Oxford University Press, 1989. $48.00. One of the great British scholars of the...
...Yet it is wrong to think of the result as an "achievement" of liberalism, for it is not and has never been authoritatively a finished product...
...Mill speaks for a liberalism that denies the soul can ever properly exist at the sacrifice of anything whose only insult to oneself is that it, too, exists...
...This will hold true a fortiori under liberalism, where other sorts of uncertainty are encouraged: "The one essential of liberalism is the dialectical solution of all political problems: that is, their solution through the statement of opposing views and free discussion until, beneath this opposition, their supporters have discovered some common ground on which to act...
...but the tremendous and always unwelcome mutations of thought and feeling, which alter permanently one's sense of oneself and the world...
...This one fact the world hates," said Emerson: "that the soul becomes...
...We can regard the impulse critically, as inertia, or positively, as the source of all stability...
...Nevertheless, in their fragmentary way, these essays make as true a vindication of the activity of liberalism as we have had in the twentieth century...
...If I believe I hold the right view of conduct, and I suppose, further, that all morality is founded on consensus, the benefit I gain by sustaining my view will more than offset the loss I suffer by prohibiting certain kinds of expression and action...
...Collingwood could number in his party Dewey, Russell, Orwell, the broad suffrage of liberal intellectuals in Europe and America...
...Perhaps liberal tolerance means nothing more than a protection for the soul against an instinct as deep as conformity...
...The prehistory of liberalism, he says, is not to be found only in the Enlightenment—with its new belief in liberty of conscience and the dignity of human nature—but long before the Enlightenment, in the radical humanism of Christianity...
...But individuality and tolerance are ultimate goods, and in fact are only intelligible as part of a faith...
...To keep myself in a state of rest, I will do anything to guard against this kind of disturbance, and intolerant laws can help by ridding my society of thoughts whose expression gives offense, or of persons whose way of life seems at odds with mine...
...they were a matter of faith...
...In the face of every such fear, Mill seems to say to the liberal, you cannot stop the person or practice you detest from going its way as long as it allows you to go yours...
...Mill only wants us to see that it is in our nature to resist change—not the shallow variations of manners or customs, which happen all the time and are themselves a great prompter of conformity...
...The fear may well be justified...
...But, as a giver of meaning, the community is liable at different times to place too high and too low a value on itself...
...As Collingwood notices, the same argument appears, though in a subordinate position, in John Stuart Mill's On Liberty...
...By a condition of Collingwood's estate, the editor of Essays in Political Philosophy, David Boucher, has been stopped from reprinting any of the articles, lectures, or drafts in quite its whole length...
...The individual is the good a liberal society aims to preserve...
...Political judgment must always defer to the ratifying power of the community...
...Too low, when it asks to be shaped into a single will and to be relieved of the necessity of choosing...
...The first covers general ideas, such as utility, punishment, political action, and the tension between ends and means in economics...
...Some of the means adopted, Collingwood believes, are bound to be commonplace...
...The difference is that the permeability of each class to the other is taken for granted...
...Yet Collingwood was also a historian, the author, with J. N. L. Myres, of Roman Britain and SPRING • 1991 • 311 Books the English Settlements...
...Too high, when it forgets that every thought does have a meaning apart from the social context in which it is embedded, for the thought testifies to the unshakeable respect owed to the mind that formed it...
...The doctrines concerning human nature on which liberal or democratic practice was based were not empirically derived from research into anthropological and psychological data...
...But before you swear allegiance to any of them, I would ask you to remember this...
...One of the great British scholars of the twentieth century, R. G. Collingwood is chiefly remembered today as the author of three books: The Idea of History, The Idea of Nature, and The Principles of Art...
...No one who believes liberal tolerance is good for the sake of a result—some probable or wished-for outcome—will advocate liberal tolerance for long or in the worst hazards...
...Societies come and go, but the habits of human self-reflection evolve, and those habits matter just because they build upon the discoveries of earlier epochs...
...It has been, not so much something done, as something in the doing: a course of action to which our civilization has committed itself, realizing that the developments to which it will lead are not wholly foreseen...
...By civilization Collingwood meant, of course, his civilization, but he defended it without irony...
...Vague words like "individuality" and "tolerance" are rather a way of pointing to something we believe is already there...
...Thought has a history: it is always an attempt to answer certain questions which themselves are posed in the language of a certain time and place...
...His second, apparently slighter, but much more powerful argument recalls the background that Collingwood sees as having 312 • DISSENT accompanied liberalism all along...
...The community is a real though contingent good, and itself requires much vigilance in order to survive: "A community can only live a genuinely political life when crime is, not indeed abolished, but so far kept in check that for ordinary purposes it may be ignored...
...as a theory, it has never been authoritatively and finally stated, and as a form of political practice it has never been worked out in all its implications...
...What can that mean...
...But that is still a utilitarian argument, and vulnerable to the utilitarian reply that James Fitzjames Stephen gave in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity...
...For you agree to tolerance, not out of kindness to the claims of the other person, but from an irreducible respect for yourself...
...But the desire to act upon it is a sick desire: it comes from wanting to avoid, once and for all, the possibility of a change in oneself...
...The process by which this history was forgotten, Collingwood thinks, may belong to the curious pathology of iconoclasm...
...Collingwood believed it was the task of history and philosophy together to separate the regressive elements in a legacy of ideas from the elements that ought to be preserved...
...Here Collingwood, who may have looked like an ally, ends as a principled opponent of modern historicism and relativism...
...for I can never know that an unexpected truth might not emerge from a soil I find repellent, and on the discovery of truths like this the progress of society depends...
...Demand creates supply, and leaders are forthcoming...
...As a general proposition, some such view was widely shared...
...When I forbid some expression or action as morally offensive to me, I act on an abiding impulse in human nature: the wish to believe that I have already come to a resting place...
...It follows that all ideas grow out of human needs...
...This does not mean a wager, a bargain, or a prediction...
...Ideas, however, are not therefore reducible to an expression of human needs...
...If you find a leader worth following, you must offer him followers worth leading...
...All are remarkable works of philosophical inquiry...
...Collingwood is right to claim as a precursor the Mill of On Liberty, and right to add that Mill in that essay did not fathom the depth of his own commitments...
...The highest good now becomes the progress of a person...
...Anyway, this conception of tolerance is not confined to the work of Emerson and his followers...
...free enjoyment of the produce won by a man's own labor—the opposite of all tyranny and oppression, exploitation and robbery—these were ideals based on the infinite dignity or worth of the human individual...
...Free speech and free inquiry concerning political and scientific questions...
...and in the argument he was advancing all his life, the two vocations were deeply connected...
...The second is composed of lectures and articles from the 1930s on fascism, Nazism, and the one great problem of the age, which Collingwood came to describe as the survival of civilization...
...and this again was based on the fact that God loved the human individual and Christ had died for him...
...Most people remember from that book only the leading argument...
...free consent in issues arising out of economic activity...
...and these Christian doctrines were the source from which they were derived...
...A thought is not a counter in a game—not even in the great game of culture—and to decode the game is not to exhaust the uses of a given thought...
...In such a society, the assumptions about the proper character of a leader will be minimal: "No politician is such an expert that he should be allowed to govern without being exposed to the criticism of his fellow experts, none such a beginner that his opinion is valueless to the community...
...The real ground for the "liberal" or "democratic" devotion to freedom was religious love of a God who set an absolute value on every individual human being...
...q Coming in Dissent: Feminism and Rights SPRING • 1991 • 313...
...He stands apart from these thinkers, however, when he argues that liberalism has a long background in Western thought...
...You can only do this if you are so' far independent of any leader as to live in a way that deserves the name of living before you find him...
...For modern liberals have taken over from nineteenth-century positivism the dogma that secular ideas like ours must in no way resemble a faith...
...It is these latter comments, apparently ephemeral, which have proved timely in the long run...
...I cannot, writes Mill, in principle ever deny anyone the right to express a view distinct from mine, or to experiment in a way of life opposed to mine...
...Consequently, whatever evil may follow, in the absence of a practical threat you must never reduce this fear to a practice of intolerance...
...As much in a liberal democracy as in any other political system, citizens fall into two classes, the rulers and the ruled...
...The idea of tolerance as an active virtue and of respect for the individual as an unqualified good: this seemed to him a late discovery, the result of a long development that could not be given up without an unimaginable backward step...
...The truth is that Mill had given too much away by agreeing that the progress of society should be considered the highest good...
...Essays in Political Philosophy is divided into two sections...
...In a lecture of 1933 Collingwood warned his students: Everywhere you will hear people saying that they want a leader...
Vol. 38 • April 1991 • No. 2
