The Summary Cause for the
Stability or Downfall of Human Societies
CHAPTER 15
The one formula to which every political problem is reduced:
the necessity of statistics, and the ruling principle for their compilation
120. One consequence of our observations is that the science of government is seen simply as an unending problem about balance. The aim always is to discover the maximum good resulting from a mixture of good and ill as they increase and decrease according to certain laws.
121. Such a calculation cannot be made, however, until all the terms composing it have been known. It is highly desirable, therefore, that writers on politics should focus their precise attention on the moral, intellectual and physical state of peoples; high-flown declarations and vague, incomplete considerations are out of place. A special effort should be made to produce exact tables of the proportions of nations’ physical goods as a whole and separately, of their mutual interaction, of their action in all that regards social life as a whole, and of the physical symptoms of the intellectual state and moral conditions of nations. This should be the ruling principle in the formation of truly political or, as Romagnosi would call them, civil statistics. It is clear, however, that statistics which aim at a complex calculation of all political forces for the sake of discovering the degree of social life or the true internal power constituting the subsistence of society will be altogether different from a simple `economic description of nations’ [App., no.2], which statistics as a rule have presented until now.
122. It would also be desirable to reject as useless and dangerous any book whatsoever on political theory which did not reduce the question it dealt with to the general problem we have described.
123. Authors should be free to offer particular solutions to the problem, but at the same time be bound by the required form. If propositions are well set out, writers’ weaknesses and sophistry are immediately obvious. People are deceived only by declamations and diatribes founded on vague ideas, and by fragmentary political questions unaccompanied by any projected and executed calculation of all the factors involved.
124. Such a calculation supposes society to be like a large, irregular body of which we have to find the centre of gravity, that is, the point where all the forces, after having partially destroyed one another, bring to bear their associated action and ensure that this centre does not fall outside the base.
125. But finding this centre of gravity and making this complicated calculation for the sake of discovering the prevailing residual force is either neglected, or carried out vainly or errone-ously. This explains why theory so often contradicts actual experience. The fact of experience is the result of the simultaneous action of all the real forces, which may take different directions; it is finally the result of all that exists and operates in nature. Theory, on the other hand, is only the product of the often incomplete, fragmentary and accidental ideas that revolve almost by chance in the human mind. Nothing acts separately in fact; each part is connected with the whole. The mind, however, easily loses sight of one or other or many of these forces, and errs in its final calculation.
126. Our conclusion is obvious. A political teaching is not to be rejected simply because some defect is found in it, nor accepted because it contains some benefit. It is necessary to compare one teaching with all others to see if, in practice, the defect is perhaps the least possible deficiency, or if the benefit is mixed with much greater evils. We ought not condemn certain institutions as soon as they show some weak or defective side; we have to see rather if those defects are necessary.
It is clear, therefore, that the rules `about existence and embellishment’, `about essence and accident’ and finally `about the whole and the part’ are the same maxim expressed in different ways. It is the maxim found in many sayings or proverbs, such as: `Divide and conquer’, or `Small things grow in harmony’, and so on.