University of Virginia Library

3. Man as Essentially a Social Being. The idea that
man is essentially a social being, not only because his
distinctively human capacities and needs are developed
in social intercourse, but also because their exercise
and satisfaction consists in social intercourse, was not
invented by philosophers and political theorists of the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is
much older than that, for there is more than a trace
of it in Aristotle and in later thinkers influenced by
him. But it was in this period that it came to have
a profound effect on the idea of freedom inherited from
the Reformation and the contract theorists, the modern
idea of freedom.

In his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality among
Men (1754), Rousseau describes a state of nature which,
unlike that of earlier thinkers, is emphatically not a
social state. In it man, except that he has potentialities
peculiar to his species, is like the other animals. He
acquires distinctively human skills and needs only when
he leaves the state of nature and comes to live perma-
nently with other men. It is then that his animal needs
are transformed into properly social needs, and it is
his social needs that social institutions and civil gov-
ernment help to satisfy more or less adequately. In
another of his works, Émile (1762), Rousseau describes
a process of education which makes a rational and a
moral being of a child that is neither to begin with,
creating needs in him that are social. Only as a creature
having such needs, making claims on others, and rec-
ognizing their claims on him, does Émile come to
understand what it is to be free. Man, whose ability
to reason and to will is developed in him as he learns
to live with other men, cannot be free outside society
nor independent inside it. To be free, he must be ra-
tional and able to make deliberate choices, he must
have capacities that he acquires only in society; and
to be independent, to be able to do without others,
he must be without the needs that he acquires in
acquiring these capacities; he must be unsocial.

Rousseau also introduced into social theory the idea
of man “corrupted” by society. Now, society consists
only of men and their modes of behavior; it is both
a system of human behavior and an effect of what men
have done. The social environment that “corrupts”
men would not be what it is unless they had sufficient
motives for behaving as they do. This Rousseau ad-
mitted, at least by implication, and yet he claimed that
they can be frustrated by their environment, can be
moved to act in ways harmful to themselves and others.
The wants and ambitions they acquire in society may
be insatiable, or inconsistent with one another, or such
that the means to satisfy them are lacking. But the
more a man finds obstacles that are not natural but
social or man-made in the way of his getting what he
wants or becoming what he aspires to be, the less he
is free.

Rousseau's ideal is therefore a condition in which
the wants that society produces in men are fully satis-
fied. This condition we can aim at in two quite different
ways: by indoctrination and discipline calculated to
ensure that the individual has wants that are easily
satisfied, or by so educating him that he forms his own
ideas about how he should live and respects the right
of others to do the same. Rousseau seems to prefer now
one way and now another. The kind of private educa-
tion described in Émile aims at producing a man of
independent judgment, aware of his obligations to
others, whereas the plan of public education which
Rousseau proposed to the Poles in the Considerations
on the Government of Poland aims rather at producing
devoted citizens who think and feel alike. Thus, though
there is an idea of freedom important to liberals to
which Rousseau was the first to give powerful expres-
sion, it can hardly be said that he was himself a liberal
thinker.

This is the freedom that in The Social Contract
(Contrat social, 1762), he calls “moral freedom,” saying
that it makes man truly his own master, for it is obedi-
ence to a law which he has prescribed to himself (Book
I, Ch. 8). This moral freedom is, in The Social Contract,
connected with popular government. The citizens
make their own laws, and because each of them is able
to vote as he thinks right without being tricked or
“pressured” to vote otherwise, he takes an equal part
with the others in making the rules that all must obey,
and so commits himself deliberately to this obedience.
In Émile, what is essentially the same idea of freedom
has a broader and less political signíficance. Émile does
not take his principles on trust; he learns from experi-
ence that they are to his own and other people's ad-
vantage, and so adopts them as rules of conduct. Unless
he did so, he could neither live comfortably with others
nor form enduring purposes of his own to be pursued
intelligently and with hope of success. Moral freedom
is Rousseau's answer to the question: How can a man
be free and yet subject to social rules?

Kant has a similar idea of freedom, as for example
when he says in The Fundamental Principles of the

Metaphysic of Morals that “a free will and a will
subject to moral laws are one and the same” (Kant,
p. 66). But he makes a sharper distinction than
Rousseau made between morality and legality. The
business of the state is to make and enforce laws in
the common interest; its concern is that men should
keep the law and not that they should keep it from
the right motive. If they keep it from fear of punish-
ment, they do not keep it freely, as they do when they
keep it from a sense that it is their duty to do so. Thus,
for Kant, the freedom that consists in obedience to
self-imposed laws belongs to a sphere with which the
state is not directly concerned. Kant would not, of
course, deny that the legal order maintained by the
state is a condition of man's acquiring a moral will;
nor would he say that any political and legal order
is as propitious to moral freedom as any other. Yet he
does not, as Rousseau does in The Social Contract, see
a close connection between moral freedom and popular
government.

It is implicit in this idea of moral freedom that being
free consists in more than just having desires and not
being prevented from satisfying them, that it involves
having a will, being able to make decisions. Only a
rational being, assessing the situations in which it acts,
has this ability; and only a rational being can be moral,
can recognize rules of conduct as obligatory upon itself
and all other rational beings. Being free and being
moral both involve being rational. But neither
Rousseau nor Kant makes it clear why being free and
being subject to moral law should be identical. Why
should not a man be free if he can make decisions (or
form purposes) and carry them out? Why must he be
moral, if he is to be free?

To this question Kant seems to provide no answer.
Indeed, he goes less far than Rousseau does towards
answering it; for, though his explanations of what is
involved in making decisions and in acting morally are
fuller and better than Rousseau's, he rather asserts a
connection between freedom and morality than ex-
plains what it is.

In this last respect, the improver on Rousseau is not
Kant but Hegel. His explanation is not wholly con-
vincing, and not only because it is mixed up with a
metaphysic that few can understand, let alone accept;
but it is ingenious and perceptive.

Hegel improves on Rousseau because he explains
more elaborately and forcefully, both in The Phenome-
nology of Mind (1807) and in The Philosophy of Right
(1821), what is involved in man's being essentially
social. Man's ideas about himself, his purposes as dis-
tinct from his mere appetites, are related to the social
order he belongs to. His ability to reason, to form
purposes, and therefore to make decisions, is developed
in the process of acquiring a cultural inheritance, a
process that involves coming to have standards and to
accept rules. Thus becoming rational, becoming pur-
poseful, and becoming moral (not good or virtuous but
able to make claims and recognize obligations) are all
parts of the same course of development. It is as a
social being with a place in a community, as a partaker
in what Hegel calls ethical life, that the individual
forms purposes and takes decisions that have a meaning
only in a context of social relations defined by the rights
and obligations that help to make them what they are.
Only as a being whose needs and purposes are essenti-
ally social does man conceive of freedom and put a
value on it. No doubt, we can ask of a creature that
is not rational and social, that has only appetites and
no purposes, whether there are obstacles to its getting
what it wants, whether it is free. But this is not the
freedom that men are willing to die for, or to exert
themselves greatly to preserve or extend. What they
deeply care about is the exercise of certain capacities
and the having of certain rights and opportunities, and
the obstacles they resent as curtailments of freedom
frustrate these capacities, detract from these rights,
deny these opportunities. To exercise these capacities
and rights, and to take these opportunities, a man needs
a self-discipline which is the fruit of an education that
includes necessarily a social or external discipline. It
is only as a creature under social discipline and capable
of self-discipline, as a moral being, that man aspires
to freedom.

The social rules that he learns to accept do not stand
to his purposes as means to ends, for his purposes have
no meaning apart from the social order he belongs to,
the social relations in which he stands to others; and
these relations are also moral relations, for to belong
to a community with others is to make claims upon
them and recognize obligations to them.

Men, as Hegel sees them, are progressive as well
as moral beings; they develop their capacities as they
create their institutions; the “subjective” and the “ob-
jective,” their beliefs, wants, and dispositions, on the
one hand, and their customs and conventions, on the
other, are but aspects of one whole, and change to-
gether. And yet tensions or “contradictions” arise in-
evitably between these two aspects of human life, and
progress consists in their emergence and in the over-
coming of them. This progress is a growth in reason,
a deeper understanding by men of themselves and their
world, and especially that part of the world which is
the system of their own activities, the social world,
the world of culture; a deeper understanding and a
fuller control over what they understand. This growth
in reason is also a growth in freedom: in the ability
to form consistent and realistic purposes and to remove
obstacles to them.

The state, as Hegel conceives of it, is both an effect

and a condition of this greater understanding and con-
trol. The more social rules are made or declared by
a legislature and by professional courts of justice, the
more secure men's rights and the more definite their
obligations, and the greater also their power to adapt
their institutions to their needs and ideals. The state
is the social order in its most rational aspect; for it
is through its laws and policies that men express the
most clearly and effectively their aspirations both for
the individual and the community.

Hegel has been called an idolator of the state. The
accusation is not wholly unjust and yet is misleading.
He never preached unquestioning obedience to the
laws or the government. Nor does it follow from his
account of the state that all resistance to established
authority, still less criticism of it, is wrong. But the
bias of his argument is strongly against the challenger
of authority, for he nowhere defines conditions in
which, in his opinion, resistance is justified. His failure
to do so, together with the extravagant and almost
adulatory language in which he speaks of the state,
explain and in part justify his reputation as an illiberal
thinker.

Yet he puts forward, more forcefully and ingeniously
than any thinker before him, four theses of which
liberals since his day have taken large account: (1) only
as a creature educated by social intercourse and having
purposes and ideals that are meaningless outside a
social context, does man come to conceive and to
cherish the rights and opportunities that he dignifies
by the name of freedom; (2) a long course of social
and cultural evolution has gone to formulating these
rights and opportunities and to inquiry into their social
and political conditions; (3) this formulation and this
inquiry are closely related to the emergence of the
modern state; (4) the effective maintenance of these
rights and opportunities requires a legal order of the
sort we have in mind when we speak of the state.

The liberal who accepts these theses need not agree
that there is a necessary progress towards a legal order
that maintains freedom. For example, he can accept
the fourth thesis and still argue that the state has often
in the past, and will yet more often in the future,
develop in ways that curtail freedom or prevent its
enlargement. The state may be both a condition of
freedom and a considerable and growing impediment
to it.

The liberal often takes pride in being suspicious of
the state. “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance”;
and the liberal is, or claims to be, vigilant for freedom,
presumably against those well placed to threaten it,
who for the most part either hold public office or
belong to organized bodies controlling or aspiring to
control those who hold it. What he is suspicious of
is not so much the idea of the state as the state as
it actually is, or some party or group that controls the
state or aspires to do so. The laws and institutions of
government may not be as he would have them, and
he therefore wants them changed; and yet it is to them
as they ought to be as much as to the energy and
independence of mind of private citizens that he looks
for the preservation of freedom. An Hegelian might
say that the concern of a Wilhelm von Humboldt or
a John Stuart Mill for the individual is conceivable only
in a society in which the modern state has emerged.
The state, say Humboldt and Mill, must not encroach
on the sphere of the individual. But the statement is
empty unless that sphere is defined, which it cannot
be without using concepts, legal and moral, that have
emerged or acquired precision in the modern state,
either in courts of law and administrative departments
or in controversies about their proper business. Nor
can “the private sphere” be adequately protected ex-
cept by the state; for the individual must have legal
recourse, which is to say, recourse to the state, against
whoever encroaches on that sphere. No doubt, the indi-
vidual appeals also to public opinion, but the effective-
ness of such appeals depends largely on the legal pro-
tection of carefully defined rights.

Humboldt and Mill, and Tocqueville also, feared
paternal government no less than oppression by the
state. If the state looks after the citizen too well,
though with the best intentions, it weakens his self-
reliance and independence of judgment, his ability to
define his own problems and to set about solving them.
Freedom is the school of freedom; the individual learns
to value his essential rights, and to act responsibly, by
being left, as far as possible, to act for himself, either
alone or in free association with others.

This fear of paternalism as distinct from oppression
is scarcely to be found in the eighteenth century. It
comes, as might be expected, with the era of social
reform; and if in the twentieth century there is less
of it than there was in the nineteenth century, this is
because liberals have come to believe that much more
must be done for the individual to enable him to use
the rights and opportunities they think he ought to
have than Humboldt or Tocqueville or Mill imagined.
The liberal is as vigilant as ever, and as suspicious of
the state, but is less concerned to prevent the state
trying to do too much than to ensure that it does what
it must do if its subjects are to be effectively free.

In the nineteenth century fear of state paternalism
often went with belief in “self-improvement.” In the
Middle Ages, and indeed much later, there had been
in plenty a different kind of paternalism. The individual
belonged to a community ruled by custom, and his
“elders” interpreted this custom to him. The course
of his life, in many respects, was traced out for him;
he had not much scope for independence of judgment.

He had no career to make, for he belonged to a social
order in which he had a well-defined place, and was
brought up to fill it adequately. He was educated, not
to improve himself or make the best of his talents, but
to take the place he was born to take.

As we have seen already, the breakup of the custom-
bound community and the increased social mobility
that came with it were liberating influences. They
encouraged the individual to be more self-reliant, to
see himself as making a place for himself in society,
to think of himself as the possessor of rights not tied
to any particular occupation or social role. But they
also, insofar as he felt himself to be weaker than others,
encouraged him to look for protection and assistance
to the state. He was made free of old ties and yet made
to feel insecure and weak, and so disposed to look for
protection from the strongest power of all, the state.

Tocqueville dwells upon this disposition and some
of its consequences that he thinks are bad. He speaks
of a democratic egalitarianism dangerous to liberty.
More perhaps than any other writer of his age, he
makes a contrast between equality and freedom, which
is illuminating in some respects but misleading in
others. He argues that, as the state grows stronger, so
too does the passion for equality at the expense of
freedom. He admits that in the old order before the
French Revolution, there was more inequality, but the
state, he says, was weaker and there was more freedom.
We can agree with him that the state was weaker and
the classes more unequal, and yet deny that there was
greater freedom. The nobleman had larger privileges
and in some respects was more free, but he was also
kept out of many occupations and activities that might
otherwise have attracted him by the prejudices of his
class. The bourgeois and the peasant were less free.
The movement, even in France, was not really from
aristocratic freedom to democratic equality; it was
from a social order in which the privileged had not
much freedom, as the liberal understands it; to an order
in which inequalities of birth counted for less and
inequalities of wealth for more, and the formerly un-
privileged had rights that were more secure and larger
opportunities.

In the nineteenth century much more than in the
century before it, social and political thinkers, liberals
and others, spoke of the “development of human po-
tentialities,” “self-improvement,” “moral autonomy,”
and “self-realization.” They still do so in the twentieth
century, though with a greater awareness that these
are terms of uncertain meaning. If we are to judge
by how they are used, they are not equivalent but are
closely related.

What, then, is it to develop human potentialities?
Is it to acquire dispositions or skills peculiar to human
beings, no matter what they are? Presumably not, for
this development is held to be desirable, whereas much
that is peculiarly human is harmful or useless. Who
then is to decide what dispositions and skills are worth
having? The person who acquires them or the person
who educates or trains him?

What kind of learning is “self-improvement,” and
what kind of teaching does it exclude? The trainer of
animals teaches them and in so doing “develops their
potentialities”; he does more than evoke responses in
them; he so acts upon them that, when they have left
his hands, they have dispositions and skills they did
not have before. The trainer may not threaten or hurt
his animals but may only coax and reward them, so
that his training is not coercive. What they do as they
learn may be as freely done as what they do when
they act instinctively or on their own initiative to
satisfy their appetites, without prompting from him.
The training of little children is in some ways like the
training of animals, when they acquire dispositions and
skills useful to others or to themselves. Yet, presumably,
this kind of training is not what is meant by “self-
improvement,” even though there is nothing coercive
about it.

Can it be called “self-realization”? Only, if at all,
when it is the training of little children, and then only
to the extent that they acquire capacities that are
peculiarly human. They learn to use words, to make
choices, to pass judgments on themselves and others,
to control themselves. They acquire the capacities we
refer to when we speak of reason and will. Their early
training, though it is not self-improvement, puts them
in the way of acquiring self-knowledge and self-control;
and this, perhaps, is the reason why it is sometimes
spoken of as a stage in self-realization.

“Self-realization” is an ambiguous term. If we con-
sider how it is used, it does not always imply that the
individual sets up some ideal for himself, some concep-
tion of the sort of person he would like to be or the
kind of life he would like to live, and then tries to
achieve it. For those who use the term often speak
as if the individual came to understand himself, and
to set up such ideals, in the process of realizing himself.
As he grows in self-knowledge, he sets up and abandons
several such ideals; his purposes and aspirations change.
When he is young they are ill-defined or unrealistic
or fickle; as he grows older they often, though by no
means always, become more realistic and firmer. But
this, so it would appear, is not a sufficient sign that
he has “realized himself,” or has come closer to doing
so. For he may be no more than set in his ways or
lacking in ambition. This notion of self-realization is
elusive and obscure.

Does self-realization, at least at that stage of it that

involves setting up of ideals for the self and striving
to attain them, entail self-improvement? If a man has
base ambitions, mean or wicked self-ideals, and strives
to achieve them, is he realizing himself? It would
appear that he is not. Self-realization, where it involves
pursuit of an ideal, would seem to imply—for most
writers who use the term, if not for all—self-
improvement. But how are we to decide whether or
not someone is improving himself? If Napoleon had
aimed at becoming the beneficent mayor of some small
Corsican town, would he have improved or realized
himself more or less than he did by becoming Emperor
of the French? If a man, to be self-realizing or self-
improving, must have admirable or worthwhile (even
though not virtuous) ambitions, who is to decide
whether he has them? And if he is to be taught or
persuaded to have them, what forms may the teaching
or persuasion take for the acquiring and pursuit of the
ambitions to be reckoned self-improvement and not
improvement by his betters? J. S. Mill, and perhaps
T. H. Green also, went some little way towards answer-
ing these questions but not very far.

And what is moral autonomy? Psychologists and
writers on education tell us that we acquire most of
the ideals to which we are deeply attached while we
are as yet incapable of assessing them critically. Our
more enduring and realistic ambitions, we may acquire
later, but they are shaped to a large extent by ideals
that were ours before we had even learned to define
them. So, too, the disposition, weak or strong, to tell
the truth, or to be loyal to friends and colleagues, or
to help the unfortunate, or to forgive injuries, or to
be careful of the feelings of others, is formed in us
before we are old enough to consider the reasons for
and against acting on any of these principles. If to be
morally autonomous is to accept on rational grounds
the principles that govern one's conduct, then there
are few or none who have moral autonomy. But if this
autonomy involves no more than being able to apply
such principles firmly and intelligently, then there may
be many persons who are morally autonomous, though
some of them more so than others. Indeed, if this is
what moral autonomy is, then everyone who is moral
is necessarily, to some extent, morally autonomous, for
being moral involves being able to apply some such
principles with some degree of firmness and intelli-
gence.

To the extent that self-realization involves the pur-
suit of ambitions calling for the exercise of rare and
much admired abilities, it may be incompatible with
moral autonomy, or with more than a little of it.
Napoleon might have had much smaller scope to exer-
cise his rare abilities, had he had greater moral auton-
omy. It is said of him that he had a strong will; but,
though whoever has a high degree of moral autonomy
has a strong will, the reverse is not true.

We have not pointed to the obscurities and ambigu-
ities of such expressions as “self-realization,” “self-
improvement,” and “moral autonomy” to suggest that
there is little to them. They are used to refer to aspects
of human experience and endeavor that are important,
and if we dismiss them as insignificant, we may fail
to notice these aspects. And, in any case, they are
relevant to our theme, which is liberalism; they are
an important part of its stock of ideas. They are much
in favor, not only among self-styled liberals, but also
among socialists and anarchists who attack “liberalism”
as inadequate or old-fashioned, or even as a “bourgeois
ideology.”

The liberal, the socialist, and the anarchist seem all
to accept three principles: that the individual should
be so educated and so placed in society that he can
form for himself ambitions and ideals whose pursuit
is satisfying to him; that the worth of his ambitions
and ideals depends partly on their pursuit being useful
to society, partly on the satisfaction he gets from pur-
suing them, and partly on their pursuit bringing into
play abilities that are admirable; and that the individ-
ual should accept willingly rules of conduct that he
can defend on rational grounds and can act upon firmly
and intelligently. These three principles, though so-
cialists and anarchists (not to speak of many con-
servatives) accept them, are nevertheless properly
called liberal. They are more closely and obviously
connected with freedom than with the social control
of production or the abolition of government or the
preservation of established institutions; and the writers
who have done most to explain and recommend
them—as, for example, Humboldt, Mill, and T. H.
Green—are widely acknowledged to be liberals.

These three principles may not cover all that is
meant by “self-realization,” “self-improvement,” and
“moral autonomy,” but they are shared by most people
who speak favorably of these things, and they are
relatively clear. No doubt, with these as with all broad
principles, questions arise that are difficult to answer
as soon as we look closely at them. For example, if
we take only the first principle, we are faced, as soon
as we examine it critically, with two questions, neither
of them easy to answer: What criteria must we use
in deciding whether someone has formed his ambitions
and ideals for himself? How do we decide whether his
pursuit of them is satisfying to him? The putting for-
ward of principles as broad as these is only a beginning,
though it is important to begin aright, so that the
principles, when closely examined, raise questions that
can be answered and are relevant to problems that
people who care for freedom feel strongly about. Or,

rather, the putting of them is neither a beginning nor
an end, for we continually reformulate our principles
in the light of our answers to the questions they suggest
to us.

Most of the rights to which liberals in the West
attach great importance can be, and often are, justified
by reference to these principles. For example, the right
to an education that enables you to assess the opportu-
nities (the occupations and ways of life) that society
offers to its members; the right to choose your occupa-
tion provided you have the requisite skills; the right
to get the special training needed to acquire these
skills, provided you are capable of profiting by it; the
right to choose your partner in marriage; the right to
be gainfully employed; the right to a minimal standard
of living, whether or not you are so employed; the
right to privacy, especially in your own home; the right
to express and publish your opinions; the right to form
or join associations for any purpose that appeals to you
and does not invade the rights of others; the right to
be tried for alleged offenses and to have your disputes
settled by courts not subject to political pressures; the
right to take part in choosing at free elections the
persons who make policy, at least at the highest level,
in the communities or associations you belong to. These
rights are by no means the only ones to which liberals
attach importance, but it is doubtful whether there are
any that they hold more important. These formulations
of them are brief and need to be qualified, but they
are sufficient for the present purpose, which is only
to indicate roughly the kind of rights of special concern
to the liberal.

The last four of these rights are primarily political,
though they are not confined to the political sphere.
Many opinions important to their holders, many asso-
ciations important to their members, are not political.
Yet these rights may be called political because they
are important above all in the political sphere. The
other seven rights, in contrast with these four, may
be called social, though they too impinge on the politi-
cal sphere, since whether or not they are exercised
partly determines the aims and methods of govern-
ments, what sort of persons get public office, and the
ways in which political influence is acquired and used.

Countries in which the social rights are coming to
be more widely enjoyed are not called liberal, if the
political rights are denied to the people, even though
denied much more in the political sphere than outside
it. Nor do these countries claim to be liberal; for the
word “liberal,” unlike the word “democratic,” is in
them often a term of abuse. It is so at least in govern-
ment circles and among supporters of the government.
On the other hand, the liberal denies that these coun-
tries are democratic precisely on the ground that their
peoples do not enjoy the political rights. He may allow
that, if in fact the social rights are more widely enjoyed,
people are becoming in important respects more free,
but he denies that this is enough to make these coun-
tries either liberal or democratic. He denies it, not
because he cares only for the political rights and not
the social ones, but because he believes that the social
rights are less secure and more restricted where the
political rights are lacking.

Most countries now claim to be democratic, and a
smaller number claim to be liberal as well. In the
countries that make the first claim but not the second,
people do not in fact enjoy the political rights, or do
so only to a slight extent and precariously. How, then,
do these countries (or their rulers) come to make this
claim? When they make it, are they denying that our
four political rights are essential to democracy? Or are
they saying that their peoples in fact enjoy them? As
we shall see in a moment, they turn and turn about,
like weathercocks in shifting winds, swivelling and yet
bold.