The Summary Cause for the
Stability or Downfall of Human Societies
CHAPTER 1
The first political criterion
1. In every society there must be an element through which the society exists and another element through which it develops and perfects itself.
Clearly a society which comes to lack its essential support must inevitably collapse, like a building whose foundations have been removed. On the other hand, if the support is solid the society must endure, even when deprived of its accessories and of all its accidental embellishments.
This truth is simple and evident; it needs no proof. It will always be true that whatever particular causes we assign to the downfall of a society, the society finally perished because it had lost the energy which sustained it; if the energy had endured, the society would never have foundered.
2. The energy or force, whatever it may be, by which a society exists can be lost through two causes:
1. By an unavoidable, aggressive onslaught from outside. When this happens, as in conquests, the society is immediately laid low by violence.
2. By some internal weakness or, to use an expression of Dante, `through defective support’. This happens when the energy by which the society exists gradually declines, and the society, because it fails to remedy the decline, eventually ceases to exist.
The first case depends upon the real positions and relationships of different co-existent societies. It forms the subject of teaching founded upon historical events and the factual state of the human race, but cannot be the object of pure theory. In this short work, I can only consider the second case and try to identify `the summary cause for the stability and downfall of human societies’.
3. By `summary cause’ I mean that cause to which all others are reduced and in which lesser causes are included as parts in their whole. In other words, I mean the complex or sum of all the partial causes united in the production of a total effect. This total effect, although resulting from the action of many conspiring forces, is one and simple and therefore, offers a correct reason for considering its composite cause as unique. I call the cause `summary’ precisely because it is made up of all that influences the production of the effect. And, as we said, this unique effect in our present discussion is the subsistence or destruction of a society.
Hence, if we demonstrate that in every society there is necessarily an element through which it subsists and another element through which it develops and embellishes itself, it will be easy to conclude 1. that the summary cause by which a society subsists is the preservation of that principle, whatever it is, which makes a society subsist, and 2. that the summary cause by which a society perishes is the destruction of this principle.
4. All this is clear. However, we can further persuade ourselves of the inconfusible disparity between these two principles of existence and of embellishment or refinement of a society, if we carefully consider that the difference between a thing’s accidental refinement and its existence, substance or nature is not confined solely to societies but is truly a fundamental law. All real,(1) contingent beings known to us are made according to this law; in all of them we distinguish a substantial and an accidental element. Such a distinction, therefore, is very firmly grounded in both the nature and, as it were, the intimate composition of beings.
5. Moreover, if the distinction between that which constitutes the subsistence of beings and that which forms their refinement (something accessory to their subsistence) is, so to speak, the foundation or pattern of all the natural beings known to us, it necessarily follows that this distinction is also present in artificial beings, which are simply composite products produced by humans from natural beings. These composites include societies which human beings form positively among themselves.(2) Hence we must not be surprised if in societies, as in nature, we must differentiate that which constitutes the society in its being from that which adds to it accidental perfection.
6. With this established, we can immediately determine the first of all rules of good government, that is, the first criterion for evaluating the means for governing any society whatever. This first rule and criterion is indubitably the following: That which constitutes the existence or substance of a society is to be preserved and strengthened, even at the cost of having to neglect that which forms its accidental refinement.
When this self-evident rule is applied to civil society, it becomes the first norm of sound politics.
In the same way we can also deduce the greatest errors in government. They are those by which the government of a society loses sight of all that constitutes the subsistence of the society because of its excessive concern for the society’s progress towards accidental perfection.
Notes
(1) I say `real' in order to exclude ideal beings, particularly abstract beings.
(2) We are not speaking about domestic society, which is the work of nature, but about all factitious societies. In any case, domestic society is subject to the same very general law.