The Social Contract

( Originally Published 1919 )

ROUSSEAU believed that there was a Golden Age and that Man was as beneficent as Nature. We know that Nature is not altogether beneficent: she is equally maleficent. And so is Man: both creative and destructive, both good and evil, and as dependent upon the dual principle as he is upon light and darkness. An excess of goodness is as enervating to human life as a monotony of sunlight. Humanity is as varied as the sea, and its desire is pitched beyond good and evil, between which there is an ever-widening swing of the pendulum, necessitating a continual emendation of the social conceptions of good and evil. As this change is continuous the stability of society depends ultimately upon man's loyalty to humanity, which must operate through a number of intermediate loyalties, and it is precisely here that conflict is continually arising. A man's loyalty to his fellow-men, his contemporaries, is not the same as his loyalty to humanity. When conflict arises the less should be sacrificed to the greater, whereas most commonly in practice it is demanded that the greater should be sacrificed to the less, because a man's life is too easily bounded by what appear to be his immediate interests, or, if he can see beyond them, he is too often forced by pressure into limiting his vision to the apparent advantages of his social group, his family, trade, or nation, especially at times when it seems that these advantages are threatened by those of another group. He is then reminded of his obligations and is expected to be guided by the voice of the majority, who in their passion would usurp his loyalty, relying upon some such idea as the social contract expounded by Rousseau at a time when society was emerging from feudalism. We have travelled far since then, and have become scientific in our habit of mind, and need some definition of our various loyalties.

Every man carries beneath his hat his in-numerable ancestors, and is their representative in the assembly of humanity. His immediate loyalty is to them; that is, to himself, and by observing that loyalty he best observes his loyalty to humanity, and if the intermediate loyalties rouse conflict, he, as the trustee of his ancestors to humanity, must abide by his trust and range himself against the loyalty which by raising conflict has proved itself to be superfluous and unnecessary. A loyalty which demands action without vision is contrary to humanity, for humanity is governed by vision and by nothing else. Without it chaos and anarchy prevail, as at intervals of two or three generations they invariably do. Human beings must be fed, but the lesser purposes of humanity are best served by devotion to the greater, just as the will of a section of humanity is most easily and effectively achieved when it is consonant with the will of humanity, which rests not, but drives on unceasingly towards its goal. The most discernible purpose of that will is not to rest con-tent with the apparent limitations of existence, whereas it becomes the aim of certain individuals and sections of humanity to turn institutions into limitations added to those set by natural law. To the free spirit of man, or the spirit that desires freedom, that is intolerable, for, to that spirit, all things human, both good and evil, should tend to increase man's knowledge of and love for humanity, for only through these can the unattainable absolute be approached. Hence, the perpetual revolt of man not so much against his institutions as against the uses to which they are put. Institutions do not greatly change : the organisations of public and private life depend upon a few devices which the more they change the more they are the same. Every man is both himself and a social being, and the only power that can reconcile these two entities is his own conscience. The social contract is signed in a man's own soul or not at all, and if it be not signed he remains a turbulent and anarchic creature parasitic upon humanity, and continually sacrificing life to the satisfaction of his own appetites. He remains the prey of every trick and fraud designed to cheat him of his birthright. Kingcraft, priestcraft, mobcraft have him at their mercy, and can force him at any moment to sacrifice the loyalties imposed upon him in his birth to the advantages of his group. This has been the order. of society for so long that it is accepted as in the nature of things, though with the slow enlargement of groups perception has been widened, greater freedom has been won; and though the pressure from the majority has increased, it has served to heighten the courage of the minority, who have become aware of the true nature of the social contract, and who know that whenever the interest of a section of humanity is exalted above humanity's laws that contract is violated.

As every individual is, by that contract, a trustee, so every institution is vested with its powers in trust and not absolutely. The trend of social evolution is away from law towards equity, and from property to the principle of trust. This may tend to limit the opportunities for material adventure, but it releases energy for the adventures of the soul. It spreads responsibility and liability more evenly, and makes it more possible for more men and women to realise the social contract to which they owe their existence, and its relief from drudgery, the increasing value of their work and their growing pride in it. This process continually breaks down barriers, first the family, then the caste, 'then the kingdom, then the nation, as more and more co-operation is needed. Those who resist this process for the sake of a long row of ciphers in a banker's ledger may get the ciphers, but they obtain nothing else.

For them, even those human beings through whom they should live become ciphers, and they might be left to their miserable fate, but that they are in a position to force their cipher-vision upon the multitudes who by dread of poverty are forced to work for them.

Than this cipher-vision no more powerful means was ever invented for obscuring the social contract. The devices of organised religion were trivial compared with it; the mirage of military glory with which kings maintained their state is by comparison impotent. It transfers life from the good earth to paper, and its problems are worked out there. Those problems that defy such solution are ignored, and to prevent their arising economic power is ruthlessly used to reduce the workers of the world to slavery.

Never was humanity in a more tragic plight than now, when its marvellous ingenuity and heroic power are employed for the creation of ciphers and nothing else. To that the grandeur that was Greece and the glory that was Rome have been reduced. Such thinking as can force its way through this nullity is done in a vacuum, and can achieve nothing to disturb these complacent 0's. Except by the shifting of ciphers from one ledger to another, or from page to page of the same ledger, nothing can be done, and yet the control of the ciphers remains in the hands of men who have sacrificed all knowledge of the social contract to collect them. Power remains with them in every section of society, and in every section when alarm at the approach of disaster becomes articulate the inhabitants of it are urged to defend themselves against an external enemy. Men are badged and numbered and given allotted tasks in that defence to which their normal humane occupations are sacrificed, and public powers are used to augment private profits.

That is the fatal flaw in the present organisation of society. In old times, kings and priests used their public powers in their philosophy, if not always in their practice, to the public advantage. They, like the humblest peasant, commended their souls to God, but the modern rulers of the world have no faith except in ciphers, and they are, in such philosophy as they possess, divorced from the life of the people. A great merchant can pretend that the expansion of his fortune is proof of his service to society, but there is no check on his use of it, and nothing to show that the service he has rendered might not have been better done by other methods and by a proper and conscientious use of public powers. Yet the mischief between the rich and the poor is that, while the rich are dealing in ciphers the poor have to grapple with the hard actualities of existence. Thus they speak different languages, use the same words often in contrary senses: the poor attaching a concrete meaning to everything, the rich thinking in the abstractions of commercialism. Those who lend their money upon interest to industrial undertakings have as a rule not the slightest knowledge of their working, and therefore accept the apparent prosperity shown in annual reports with entire complacency, and, of course, with-out a thought of its bearing upon the social contract. As this polite usury is the basis of modern civilisation it is here that we find the source of its inhumanity. The great men of finance recognise their responsibility to their shareholders, but not their responsibility to their managers and workpeople, who, in the interest of the shareholders, are paid as little as they can be got to accept. Certainly we have advanced very far from the hideous abus es of the early nineteenth century, but we have not yet succeeded in establishing justice as a principle in commercial organisations from which necessarily has grown the structure of society. For lack of justice there is no liberty in that structure, and for lack of liberty there is no health, and the social con-tract cannot operate because it is thwarted by the lop-sided contracts which it is the aim of every business man to secure.

Authority in any community is developed out of the contract agreed between the individual as private and as public person, which is forced upon him first of all in family life, later at school, and finally as a citizen. Dirrectly a man admits, as he must, the rights of others to his services in return for theirs, he enters upon a contract immediately with the persons surrounding him, but ultimately with humanity and authority, liberty and justice depend upon the due observance of that con-tract. In Europe, suffering under a fever of nationalism, it has been assumed that the conrtract is between the individual and the nation to which he belongs. There is such a contract, but it is only a clause in the greater, and should be a means to its fulfilment. That it has not been so is due to the economic injustice of the social system, by which men have been forced to sacrifice the greater to the less, and in fore-going their own egoism to contribute to that of their nation.

There is no need here to labour the tragic consequences which have brought us suddenly face to face with the need for authority and for tracing it to its source. It lies in the social contract by which the individual acknowledges his social relationship in return for the advantages that can be won for humanity. To preserve that social contract amid the innumerable other contracts that have to be entered into Government is agreed upon and appointed as trustee; and hitherto the trust has been betrayed in favour of the rich and against the poor, because there has been no visible authority beyond Government in the various communities, and no means by which public opinion all the world over can make itself felt; and yet from every breach of trust on the part of the various manipulated Governments humanity has suffered disastrously. It was this long tale of suffering that caused Nietzsche to cry out for a race of supermen, and Kropotkin and Bakunin, coming with freshness of energy to a worn civilisation, to acclaim Anarchy as the solution of its problems. Meanwhile, be-fore these prophets could be understood, there has come a crisis which by sheer economic necessity enforces simplification and an attempted understanding. On the one hand, the trusts and cartels, on the other, the Trades Unions tighten up their machinery dreading lest the rest of the world should sink into the famine and bloodshed which, for lack of machinery, social and industrial, has been the fate of Russia. However, as the crisis came from this tightening of machinery by both capital and labour, it seems improbable that further efforts in that direction will find a solution.

Taking Great Britain as a typical industrial community of this unfortunate age, we find that the public is alternately held up by the operations of the trusts restricting imports and the strikes of the Trades Unions against those operations. The accounts of this continual conflict given in the newspapers are misleading and prejudiced, and it is nowhere suggested that these two vast machines should be conscientiously used for humanity instead of against each other. Both sides cry politically "Great Britain for the British," oblivious of the fact that Great Britain is only important as an enlightened member of humanity, and as trustee of a great part of the earth's products. The contract between Great Britrain and the individual is insisted upon: that between Great Britain and humanity is denied. The trust principle is ignored and the individual British make their social contracts only to have them thwarted by the action of their Government. The result is serious not only for the British but for humanity, for it means that the British Empire sprawls between the mechanised energy of America and the spiritual energy of Russia, and prevents the formation of the society which both those energies desire. Both America and Russia look to Great Britain for guidance and help, and receive nothing but the cry of a wounded egoism. Great Britain to the rest of humanity has been something more than an island: she has meant certain liberal and humane principles by which the idealism of more fiery races can be made practicable. But now it seems that with that practical sense, which so frequently tyrannises over her nobility, she is bent on making her Victory as dreary and horrible as her Sunday, so that her citizens will be only too glad to return to work under any conditions. . . . That would be all very well if a new world were not in the making, in which the new consciousness that is beginning to dawn in the east must play its part. That consciousness has given a new direction to the human will: a direction not dreamed of by Adam Smith or Cobden or even John Bright. It is profoundly and unalterably aware of the social contract and is insisting upon it as the essential element in government; and because the social contract disturbs the contracts to which the financiers owe their power, they are resisting them with every available means. The admission of the social contract, as a natural bargain between the individual and humanity, implies the revision of those contracts. It leads to what Nietzsche attempted, the transvaluation of all values, and to a drastic alteration not only of the structure but of the basis of society. It means that society also, as well as individual men, approaches God through humanity, and that men will no longer look for authority from on high, but within themselves and their personal relationships. Once admitted, it can be recognised and acknowledged wherever it shows itself, but authority and the social contract upon which it depends can only be seen through love, the active and passionate love preached by Jesus Christ, but, alas! perverted into a milky resignation, which perhaps has more than anything else contributed to the triumph of injustice, now at last so in-tolerable that men must admit the spiritual means by which they live and rediscover love. Without that the tyranny of machinery must continue, and human traffic will be impeded to the lasting hurt of civilisation. In the chaos of the last century we invented policemen to regulate the traffic ; now we have to invent some means of regulating the policemen. In other words, we have to insist that the social contract which binds individuals shall also bind the governments elected by them, and that just as individuals have abandoned duelling in favour of Law, so Governments shall abandon war. Just as the wearing of swords was found to impede the operation of the social contract, so it has been with national armaments. The social contract is there, just as the principle of marriage is there, as an inherent condition in the existence of humanity. We have nothing else. If it is denied we are driven back upon force which settles nothing except that the innocent suffer for the guilty, and, what we already know too well, that the fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge.