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Rights in Civil Society - Part Four

Chapter 2

Necessity of civil society for the progressive development of mankind

1904. Several authors, having abandoned fact and historical circumstances, set out to argue abstractly whether civil society was necessary or not. Naturally, they held two extreme opinions.
Some said that it was not necessary for the requirements and exigencies of human nature. They concluded that civil society is an entirely arbitrary union of human beings. This decision gave rise to the system of the arbitrary social contract which at present seems to have almost no supporters.

1905. Others exaggerated the unconditioned need for civil society and invented an abstract moral-jural obligation pertaining to all human beings without distinction of time and place.
For the most part they started from an equivocation by substituting society for civil society. Having demonstrated the necessity for the former, they concluded that the latter also was necessary. They did not notice that society had been instituted before civil society; domestic and theocratic society already existed.

1906. Romagnosi belongs to the second group of authors, and writes:

That is well said, but it proves only that man has a need for society in general; it does not prove the absolute necessity of the special society we call civil.
Romagnosi is conscious of the weakness of his argument and later confines his affirmation of the jural necessity of civil society to: `at least after a determined period'. He posits the question, which he answers affirmatively, in the following way:

1907. I do not dispute that there are times and circumstances when civil society becomes a matter of jural duty. This is indeed what I wish to say. But my reasons are not those of Romagnosi, who is too contemptuous of the time prior to civil association. His claim depends upon substituting for history the romance believed only by philosophers who use it as a foundation for their nebulous theories. Romagnosi's phrase, `Just as man, therefore...', indicates his assurance that the `facts' he is dealing with lie outside every possible discussion. He says:

In a word, Romagnosi, in order to describe social progress, starts from the beast-man, as he calls him: `the beast-man, weaker, less safeguarded morally and physically than any other.'(121) Certainly, these expressions are not to be taken literally, but they do give us a good idea of the false, exaggerated style of the sophists of the last century.

1908. As far as I know, no sensible person now accepts the foolish notion of a beast-man suddenly arriving at the state of human life. However, the thread of our argument calls for a few brief observations on the quotation from Romagnosi.

1. Romagnosi describes the origin of man as follows: `Man, therefore, is born in perfect ignorance, naked and helpless in the midst of the world's great forest.' We could ask if man appeared in this forest like a mushroom, or born from other humans. The first hypothesis we can leave entirely to sophists, whose inclination to leave the truth suspended has always rendered them the most credulous people on earth. Those who hold the second hypothesis will say that humans were born from other humans, and that the story of the natural development of mankind can only be discovered by going further back and investigating the intellectual and moral state of the first humans from whom all others arose.

2. But Romagnosi, writing in the 19th century as though he were an eye-witness, declares that man was born in the world's great forest as the archetype of ignorance and savagery. In this state `in which he was weaker than the great beasts and less secure against the buffeting of seasons and events than any other animal, he cannot normally make provision even for his own conservation.'(122)

Nevertheless, he not only preserved himself: `After lengthy experience, the passage was finally made to the use of reason.' These are spineless fables which cannot furnish a solid foundation for any philosophy, above all for what is called civil philosophy. This cannot be the true method, the experimental method, with which to philosophise.

3. A teaching which relies simply on the imagination does not need to be refuted. Nevertheless, we shall call in evidence an up-to-date, undeniable fact. Even now, at this late date in history, savage populations exist whose lengthy experience over the course of millenia has done nothing to raise them a single stage nearer a moral, civil state. This is sufficient to show that the progress made in other nations is indeed a fact, but a particular, not a universal, necessary fact. It shows that `the different states of infancy, childhood, youth and civilisation of peoples are not at all a necessary law of nature'(123) or, if it is necessary, that it is so only on the basis of certain conditions extraneous to humanity. In other words, mankind must receive help from outside, help which, sustaining and comforting it, moves it to take those steps forward. This help comes from on high, from the Creator who has never abandoned mankind.

1909. We have to reject such vain suppositions as Romagnosi's if we want to avoid deceiving ourselves and others; we must turn to history and psychological facts which are the fruit of observation, not the outcome of fantasy. The facts intrinsic to human nature, together with others present in the annals of the human race, bring us to conceive the different jural states of humanity in the following manner.
Comfort, material laboriousness, and physical enjoyment are not the only objects occupying human intelligence and feeling. Mind and sense are raised up to God; they conceive and honour the supreme Being, they long for the supreme Good and thus bring forth religion; they reach out from individual to individual and thus give rise to love, beneficence, society. Cultivated fields, house-building, suitable arms and adequate clothing are means of protection and enjoyment, but they do not constitute moral perfection, nor human happiness, although they indirectly assist its attainment.

The true worth of the human state cannot therefore be gauged solely from its exterior, but principally from its interior condition. Nor does it depend principally on the development of the analytic activity through which more attention is paid to aspects of things, to specialised reflections and to minute details. This certainly helps economic, material development, but it does not raise directly by a single degree the comprehensive understanding, virtue or merit of mankind. Only spiritual and moral synthetic activity does this. These are undeniable data proper to human nature. But let us now look at what history tells us.

1910. It describes the first humans created by God in a state of domestic society. These were not savages, not beasts, nor lower than beasts. They were endowed with powerful, perfect faculties, and moreover immediately enriched with every kind of natural and supernatural knowledge enabling them to lead a moral, religious, happy life, and to teach the children they would generate. They were works of the hand of the supreme Being, and worthy of such a maker.

Nevertheless, their intellective and moral state, although without defect and furnished with all the abilities required for progress, can be conceived as a very lowly state relative to states to which they were to raise themselves successively according to the divine design, that is, the progress in merit and advanced spiritual life to which they tended. Their initial perfection was a seminal perfection; they were perfect as seeds are perfect relative to the great, fruitful plant they produce.

Their eudaimonological state was also perfect. They were untroubled and fully content. But even this state, compared with those to which they were gradually to climb, was lowly in the extreme — it was only a fertile seed promising increasingly full happiness.
The same can be said about their economic state. They had what was necessary and desirable in abundance, but their wealth would have increased together with their laboriousness. They would have discovered ever new, unsullied pleasures.(124)

The same is true of their social state, that is, perfect conjugal society. Their communal life, their harmony of spirit, was per-fect; they were affectionate in daily life, open and frank, their wills fully united. Everything was held in common. And all this was simply the seed of another, greater society.

Mankind fell from this happy state. Along with their innocence, human beings lost the supernatural gifts. The essential elements of humanity remained the same, but a principle of corruption had entered the human heart whose poisonous action gave rise to our passions. The will, pliant under the passions, seduced the intellect, causing error and its concomitant ignorance (every error is ignorance, and the generator of further ignorance).
But the Creator did not abandon his creature. From that moment, the development of mankind was twofold: the development of natural goodness sustained by assistance from the Creator, and the development of the principle of corruption which had entered mankind. An implacable struggle began between the two principles; its outcome varied.

If we follow the course of the principle of corruption, we see that it leads certain groups to savagery. There is not a single example in history of one of these groups rescuing itself or being rescued by others from its abasement.
Other groups fell into barbarism, a very different state from that of savagery. Sometimes they were raised again, not it would seem by themselves, but by the help of civilised settlers and landowners, who brought them their own civilisation.

This was the case with the aboriginal Greeks at the root of Greek history. They were brought in a flash from the depths of barbarism to the highest stage of civilisation. The fables about the rocks of Deucalion and Pyrrha that were changed into men, and other fables refer to this. The history of this single, very modern period, the history of tiny Greece, was embellished by the imagination of poets and by the equally fertile imagination of philosophers; it was then converted into theory and taken as history typical of human civilisation (RGC, 639).
In fact, the first philosophers were the second poets, no longer popular, no longer disciples of the people as the first poets were, but teachers of the people, heralds of a new age, singers of nascent civilisation, who taught the peoples to scorn barbarism, the oldest part of their chronology. Hence the boast, sung so often:

The repetition, `was said', makes it clear that already in Augustus' time(126) it was impossible even for poets to take seriously the exaggerated fables of the first state in which men were called tigers, lions, hard-heads. Our publicists, however, have recently gone back to exaggerations of a similar kind and modelled a new history of civilised human progress on pitiful Greek annals and fables, echoed by the Latins. This is the foundation presupposed by Romagnosi as the basis of his social Right.

1911. But we have to remember that the good, natural principle, strengthened and guided by supernatural aid, developed and gradually showed itself contemporaneously with the principle of corruption which had entered mankind. This fact also must not be neglected. It is true that the facts dependent on the two principles are mixed in the history of nations, but the first duty of historico-jural philosophy is to distinguish them according to their natural character. It must do this by drawing from our observation of what occurs in human nature (and history especially provides the information) all natural and specific facts, which it must simplify, classify and consider in their essence, in their mere possibility, as possible titles for equally possible rights that it has undertaken to establish.(127)

The most natural of all specific facts is the development of the goodness and uprightness of human nature irrespective of unsettling causes pertaining to another fact, the development of human corruption opposed to nature.

1912. If we begin, therefore, from consideration of the prior fact, that is, the natural development of mankind conceived as good, savagery and degradation will certainly not be our starting point. Prior to civil society, human beings will not be the beasts, inferior to all others, imagined by Romagnosi. We shall indeed have males still unassociated in civil commonalty, but not isolated. They will be united to women as intelligent and good as themselves. — We should also separate mentally from human beings, but neither forget nor destroy, the supernatural help that forms part of their history. It will be considered later on its own, as a fact of a different nature. As we said, we have to consider from the beginning each specific part separately to discover the rights to which each fact gives rise.

If we consider incorrupt human beings without reference to supernatural assistance, but furnished with everything pertaining to their nature (we ignore the source of what they possess), we find intelligence, morality, marriage and natural contentment. In this primitive state, human beings have no need, desire or thought of civil society. Their crafts and industries are few; there is no man-made wealth, no trade and politics. Nevertheless, these beings cannot be called savage or barbarous. Their few needs are accompanied by extremely simple, lively, but undiversified pleasures. Starting with the first man, that is with the first couple (RF, 1062), we can follow the course of their development and see parental society united immediately to conjugal society. In their turn, the children brought up by these parents increase in number. We see them as hunters, fishermen, shepherds, cultivators. As we follow them philosophically by observing the discovery of crafts and progressive human perfection, we note an endless development of their laboriousness. Domestic society grows into patriarchal society; the bonds of tribal, civil and national societies follow in succession. All these are moral, jural, happy states, perfect in their being. We have no need to import into them corruption, barbarism and savagery.

It cannot be denied that each of these states has its own proper justice, its own proper virtue and moral perfection, its own ease, peace and happiness. And as long as the period natural to each of these states has not terminated, there is no moral duty to accelerate it, no moral duty to leave it for the sake of a more advanced state. In other words, there is no need for human beings to enter the state of civil society before such a state shows itself necessary, that is, before it becomes necessary (it is not necessary of its nature) for the maintenance of right. According to Romagnosi:

This is indeed the question. To decide it, we first have to define necessary right. This is Romagnosi's definition:

My only comment on this conclusion refers to that impersonal `there would be no possibility'. For it to have a meaning, it must be translated as a personal phrase. Otherwise we would not know `for whom there would be no possibility of respecting the rational, moral order.' In fact, there is no absolute impossibility for anyone about respecting the rational, moral order. Doing this depends upon free choice. If the obligation of forming a part of society were imposed only on the person for whom it would otherwise be impossible to observe the rational, moral order, everyone could withdraw by retorting: `It is not at all impossible for me to respect the rational, moral order. That depends upon my free choice. Civil society therefore is not a matter of necessary right for me.' Romagnosi's impersonal phrase `there would be no possibility of respecting the rational, moral order' has no sense unless it is understood personally; on the other hand, it cannot be rendered personal.

The phrase cannot be understood, as far as I can see, unless changed into: `Without civil society, it would be impossible for one or more persons to act in such a way that the rational, moral order could be respected to their advantage by others.' Totally changed in this way, the phrase receives a correct, determinate meaning, and is equivalent to what we have said so often, that is, that `each person has the right to constrain others, with whom he is in contact, to unite with him in civil society when this has become a means necessary for the conservation and defence of his own rights.' We say that the right of jural claim, proper to each individual and collective person, can in certain circumstances be activated by this sanction: constrain others to enter civil association. (USR, 160-167). In these circumstances, civil society has become de iure for the constraining person, and a necessary obligation for those who are constrained.(130)

1913. It is also possible to demonstrate that civil association can in certain circumstances become an ethical obligation. Romagnosi confuses right with obligation, and jural obligation with ethical obligation. When he wants to prove `the necessity of agricultural and commercial life as a matter of rigorous natural right',(131) he presupposes the growth of a group of hunters for whom hunting is no longer a sufficient means for obtaining food. These people have no choice but to make war on adjacent territories or cultivate their own land, an aim which will be greatly helped by civil association. There is no doubt that people in this state have an ethical obligation to cultivate the land and to live on the basis of all the good work of which they are capable. This, however, is merely an ethical obligation. If such a people wished to die of hunger, their madness would offend morality, but not right. No one has jural rights in his own regard; only moral rights.(132)

The same must be said about the way in which Romagnosi undertakes to prove the necessity of education, and of a political state.(133) If these institutions are necessary to live, and to live well, they immediately become an ethical duty. They become an object of right only in relationship to the person who needs them for just defence or as a guarantee of his own rights. When this person (individual or collective) begins to exercise the right that he has to demand from others their agreement in setting up these institutions, the others encounter a corresponding jural obligation to yield to his just requirements and reasonable claims.

1914. Civil society, therefore, is not a right per se, but becomes the object of right when certain given conditions actually come about, as they do at a certain age, at a certain stage of development of mankind. This age is often anticipated through the work of human waywardness which gives rise to an early need to recur to the formation of civil association as a secure or even unique means of guaranteeing defence of one's rights against villainous attacks.

1915. Equally, civil society is not essentially an ethical duty. It becomes such as soon as it takes its place as a necessary means of fulfilling one's duties. This also occurs at a certain epoch of humanity.

1916. It is harmful and historically inaccurate to paint in the blackest hues the period during which people lived in a state of domestic or patriarchal society without arriving at civil association. Although the moment for civil association had not arrived, morality flourished; human life was simple, content and joyous, characterised by magnanimity, generous affection and freedom of heart and life. The spirit was not oppressed; it had not been wearied under pungent, sordid longings for possessions, nor riddled by strife caused by ambition and envy, nor ground down by unending social trivialities, nor entangled in innumerable social protocols. It would have appeared, if seen with bodily eyes, like a babe in swaddling clothes. As it savoured the captivating spectacle of immense nature, and understood its sublime language, the spirit raised itself joyously to contemplation of the Creator, and felt itself made for him. It is impossible to relegate life at that time to a lower level than present-day life, and equally impossible to deny it morality and right. But just as that former life of freedom cannot be applied to our own, later age, so the right proper to that time cannot be applied to us now. Nevertheless, we must not infer from this that the right suitable for us is the only right, nor that there is no good other than the good we enjoy, no other moral obligations than those found appropriate to our own circumstances and conditions.

Notes

(117) Cf. OT, 514-527, for the possible development of the use of reason without language communicated by society (or even by gregariousness).

(118) Assunto primo, §7.

(119) Ibid.

(120) Ibid., §9.

(121) Ibid., §7.

(122) Ibid., §7.

(123) Ibid., §9.

(124) Pleasures are different from contentment. They can be opposed to it, or lead to it. Cf. SP, bk. 4.

(125) Horace, Art. poet.

(126) The esteem in which the learned held popular idolatry at this time is clear from Horace's satire which begins with the words put in the mouth of Priapus:

(127) Cf. ER, 54-89.

(128) Assunto primo, §9.

(129) Ibid.

(130) Romagnosi's phrase `necessary right' is also inexact in the sense that obligation is necessary, right is only facultative.

(131) Assunto primo, §10.

(132) ER, 278-280, 299.

(133) Assunto primo, §11, 12.

Chapter 03 (1st Part)

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