rances' to the good life. What the state requires to be effective, then, is "a definite tendency to growth, or a definite reserve of capacity, which is frustrated by a known impediment, the removal of which is a small matter compared with the capacities to be set free."[1] In the end, therefore, Professor Bosanquet reaches a conclusion not entirely different from that of the older liberals, that state action, so far as compulsion operates in it, is an interference of one type of action with another and higher type of action.
It would be easier to defend the correctness of this conclusion than to show its consistency with the main principles of Professor Bosanquet's theory of the state. It is true, indeed, that he is here speaking more strictly than usual of the legal aspect of the state, but he expressly asserts that there is no more than a difference of degree between this and its other activities. Why, then, should the action of the state through law be so closely identified with the use of force? Some mitigation might be suggested even on grounds of fact. And again, if indeed the state represents the real will of the individual, why should this real will wait until the indolent and rebellious actual will originates capacities to be set free? How can the real will be restricted to action by negative means, while the positive end of that action is embodied only in individual wills which, one would suppose, are rather more likely than not to be actual rather than real? Strangely enough, the positive result appears now to have got over into the special field of the actual, while the negative means is all that is left for the real. In a word, the real shows a tenderness for the actual that is hardly consistent with its having the full courage of its convictions. The fact is that Professor Bosanquet is here assuming that the individual person is the only thing which possesses value per se, and this is after all the ultimate philosophical assumption in the theory of natural rights, an assumption which is fundamentally inconsistent with the principle that the individual derives his value from his station in a system.
The limitation which thus appears in the application of state
- ↑ Op. cit., p. 192.
