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Politics. The guiding ideas of utilitarianism bear also
upon the principles of politics and education. In politi-
cal thought the widely used concepts of the social
contract and of natural law give a misleading impres-
sion of continuity with previous thought. Actually they
provide an obsolete vocabulary for a theory of individ-
ual and social interests, which is based upon historical
experience and the consciousness of a new historical
situation. Going beyond Montesquieu's classification of
political and legal institutions, and, like Rousseau,
starting from the problem how liberty can exist in a
large country (as contrasted with the small city-state),
Delolme and John Millar subject the British consti-
tution to penetrating sociological scrutiny. Political
thinking advances from a merely institutional to a
behavioral approach, from a mere theory of govern-
ment to political theory. The outstanding new criteria
are the displacement of the state by society and the
substitution of the citizen for the subject. Adam Smith
and his followers fight the power of the state in the
name of the individual, but never society. The formal
constitution of the state is only one of the various
factors which must be taken into account in assessing
the condition of a nation. The new commercial society
is comparatively classless within the confines of the
ruling groups which are spread widely and demarcated
only faintly. Voltaire's (1734) and Hume's (1748) ob-
servations have been quoted above, in the section on
“Underlying Structural Change.”

Rather than in the profuse clamor for natural rights
and revolutionary measures, the real innovation of the
time consists in the consciousness of the identity of
rulers and ruled (except for the laboring classes which
were then not part of the political process). The tradi-
tional problems of rebellion and of the assertion of the
individual against the metaphysical state are trans-
muted into the need for defining a balance among the
divergent interests of the individuals whose totality
forms society. Rebellion and revolution in the circum-
stances are liable to become self-destructive by defini-
tion. For Hobbes, self-mastery still meant the stoic
acceptance of necessity imposed by nature and the
sovereign. Now self-mastery is a question of political
behavior. It presupposes self-scrutiny, an understanding
of one's own propensities and interests in their relation
to those of one's fellow men; in short, it calls for the
insights of the science of human nature and the
precepts of the science of the legislator. In this sense
Bentham's and Kant's political maxims are to be un-
derstood: “Under a government of Laws... obey
punctually... censure freely” (A Fragment on Gov-
ernment [1776], Preface, Para. 16), and: “Criticize as
much as you like, if only you obey” (Was ist
Aufklärung?).

Institutions must be criticized because they tend to
determine the rules of behavior. If they concentrate
power in individuals or in office, they may deprive the
mass of individuals of the safeguards for their security
and give free rein to the violent passions of the
privileged. As human nature is not obviously suscep-
tible of change, an appropriate institutional framework
is needed and must be based less “on abstract and
refined speculation” than on “a study and delineation
of things passing in the moral world.... The question
now afloat in the world respecting THINGS AS THEY ARE
is the most interesting... to the human mind”
(William Godwin, The Adventures of Caleb Williams
[1794], Preface). Institutions both express the existing
structure of society and, in turn, present a challenge
to things as they are. It is therefore necessary to scruti-
nize the functions and dysfunctions of social, legal, and
political institutions. Considering that society was still
largely agricultural, this sociological scrutiny reached
its climax in the investigation of rural morphology.

Modern sociological methods were being applied,
including highly developed questionnaires, in assessing
the respective merits of large-scale and peasant-type
holdings. Theoretical findings were being put to prac-
tical tests in the agricultural reforms introduced in
Britain, Tuscany, France, and elsewhere, often under
the guidance of Agricultural Academies which sprang
up all over Europe. The theoretical side of this move-
ment was started by Turgot and Pierre Samuel Du Pont
de Nemours, especially in the Ephémérides du citoyen
(from 1765). Soon it found its master in Arthur Young
who, from 1768, toured Britain, France, and Italy, on
horseback, indefatigably surveying all aspects of farm-
ing and the farming population. One of the great
Scottish pioneers, Sir John Sinclair, as the first head
of the English Board of Agriculture, created in the
1790's a detailed survey of the agricultural structure
of the various counties which set the tone for later
sociological investigations (and was soon imitated by
Jean Chaptal, Comte de Chanteloup as the basis of
the Napoleonic Statistique de la France). Highlights
of the considerable new sociological literature were
Sir Frederick Morton Eden's The State of the Poor...
(1797) and Sismondi's Tableau de l'agriculture toscane

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