Principle of Duty

David Selbourne

Description

The First American edition of a British best-seller In The Principle of Duty

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie politique
• Political Ideologies
• Political
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Politics

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 26 janvier 2001
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268158866
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

THE PRINCIPLE OF DUTY
D AVID S ELBOURNE was born in London, the son of a doctor, and grandson of one of the greatest of modern rabbinical thinkers, Moshe Avigdor Amiel (1882-1945). He studied Latin and Greek at Manchester Grammar School, and Jurisprudence at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was Winter Williams Law Scholar and Honorary Exhibitioner, also gaining the Jenkins Prize and Paton Studentship. He has been a British Commonwealth Fellow at the University of Chicago, Aneurin Bevan Memorial Fellow, Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi, and for two decades taught the history of ideas at Ruskin College, Oxford. He is the author of numerous books, including Against Socialist Illusion (1985), Death of the Dark Hero (1990) and The Spirit of the Age (1993), and translator of Jacob of Ancona’s The City of Light (1997). He lives in Urbino, in the Marche region of Italy.
By the same author
An Eye to India
An Eye to China
Through the Indian Looking-Glass
The Making of A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Against Socialist Illusion:
A Radical Argument
Left Behind:
Journeys into British Politics
In Theory and in Practice:
Essays on the Politics of Jayaprakash Narayan
A Doctor’s Life:
The Diaries of Hugh Selbourne M.D., 1960-63 (ed.)
Death of the Dark Hero:
Eastern Europe, 1987-90
The Spirit of the Age
Not an Englishman:
Conversations with Lord Goodman
DAVID SELBOURNE
THE PRINCIPLE OF DUTY
An Essay on the Foundations of the Civic Order
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
Copyright © 2001 by
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
All Rights Reserved
http://undpress.nd.edu
E-ISBN: 978-0-268-15886-6
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail] .
À ELIEZER AMIEL,
Vice-President du Consistoire
Central Israelite de Belgique,
Officier de l’Ordre de Leopold
et Officier de l’Ordre de la Couronne
CONTENTS
Preface To The American Edition
Preface To Second English Edition (1997)
I: INTRODUCTION
O NE : The Function And Duty Of The Political Philosopher
T WO : Preliminary Aspects Of The Argument
T HREE : The Losing Gamble Of Liberty
II: THE CIVIC ORDER
F our : The Civic Order In Principle
F ive : The Civic Order In Crisis
III: THE PRINCIPLE OF DUTY
S IX : Law, Justice, and Civic Order
S EVEN : The Principle of Duty in General (1)
E IGHT : The Principle of Duty in General (2)
IV: PARTICULAR DUTIES
N INE : The Particular Duties of the Civic Order
T EN : The Particular Duties of the Citizen
E LEVEN : The Sanctions of Duty
V: CONCLUSION
T WELVE : Social-ism and the Civic Order
References
Index
I can hardly help wondering all the while whether human affairs are worth serious effort. And yet it is our unhappy lot to take them seriously.
The 'Athenian Stranger' in Plato, Laws , VII, 803.
Post tenebras, spero lucem.
Don Quixote
Humane society, cohabitation, or being, must above all things be maintained as the earthly soveraigne good of mankind, let what or who will perish or be confounded; for mankind must be preserved upon the earth.
Richard Overton, July 1647
PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION
David Selbourne
As at the time of the American Declaration of Independence in 1776, it is arguable that the United States is approaching a momentous political turning-point, even if it is less visible and will be slower to reach its crisis than it was more than two centuries ago. The hopes of the former’s proud assertion of the Enlightenment rights of all citizens to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness have become mired in a new tyranny. Now, the tyranny is not that of George III, but the tyranny exerted over an ever more widely disintegrating society by demands for liberty and happiness so boundless and insatiable that no civic order could sustain their pressures.
The founding fathers of the United States were reacting to the ‘repeated injuries’ inflicted on the colonists by the British Crown. But who can now measure the new and larger injuries inflicted on today’s American ‘commonwealth’ by the very descendants and heirs of those who once liberated themselves from Hanoverian rule?
Step-by-step, the sovereignty of the people has become not the tyranny of the majority that De Tocqueville feared, but the tyranny of anti-civic individual desires for self-realisation without let or hindrance. They are desires that know increasingly little of that ‘civic bond’ which it is one of my tasks in this work to restore to knowledge and esteem; such desires also know little, so it seems, of the great aspirations in the Constitution which the free United States set before the world in order to ‘effect [the] safety and happiness of the people’.
There are, of course, many associative impulses in the United States that a foreigner is bound to admire. There are still senatorial sages whose desire to defend American constitutional principles and proprieties during the Clinton impeachment hearings was exemplary in its democratic spirit. But the ‘safety and happiness’ of the American people as a whole is ‘self-evidently’ receding into the past: the victorious struggle against the authoritarian impositions of colonial rule has given way to a losing battle to master the abuses of those ‘inalienable rights’ to which the American Constitution gave legitimacy and voice.
For Jefferson the citizens of the New World and its New Republic had ‘burst the chains’ of oppression, as he wrote, in just pursuit of their rights in a free and democratic civic society. Now, their very pursuit, with which there have been conflated today many gratuitous demands and wants, bids to ‘burst the chains’ of the civic bond itself. They threaten to carry away true freedom under the law, and democracy itself, in a welter of competing anti-social greeds and violences that not even the putting of two million Americans in gaol and the frequent, savage resort to the death penalty can contain.
These circumstances have been feebly met in the U.S. by appeals to the vacuity of ‘communitarianism’ or of ‘compassionate conservatism’ on the one hand, and on the other by demands for constraints over the American people in respect of their intimate moral beliefs and conduct—in their heads and in their beds—as intrusive as any sought to be imposed by the Puritans themselves. And on a third front, ‘libertarians’ of various colours insist upon more ‘rights’ still, or upon the preservation of existing rights, such as the right to carry arms, that bring more harms to the American polity with almost every day that passes.
Indeed, the time may come when that same body politic, nurtured into existence by America’s founders in the name of the health and well-being of all free citizens, will lie in the gutter, shot through the head by gun-toting ‘libertarians’ who believe that ‘freedom’ signifies the right to take the law into their own hands. Yet is was precisely such a right that the civic order under law, created by the Constitution and by the wisdom of its first citizens, made unnecessary. In stead, the United States has edged slowly towards that Hobbesian ‘war of all against all’ not merely by its opposition to ‘big’ government—as if a society as large as the United States was not bound to be a society of ‘big government’ in many unavoidable respects—but by its ill-considered antipathy to many of the very controls and selfcontrols upon which any civic society depends.
The principle of duty, as much as the principle of right, is one of the lynch-pins of a free social order. Under the tyranny of egotistical desire and of the demand for those ‘corrupted liberal’ entitlements—as I call them—that have become confused with the self-governing and bounded liberties of a democratic society, ‘duty’ has for some become an offensive term. It now signifies, as it most decidedly did not to the Puritans with their Hebraic sense of law and ethics, ‘fealty’, ‘subservience’ and the knee bent to power. But the eighteenth century political Enlightenment, as one can see from writings as various as those of Tom Paine and Abbé Grégoire in the French Revolution, understood duty in quite another sense. It is in the sense in which I understand it: as a prerequisite for the maintenance of the self-same society that provides us with, and guarantees, our rights, as well as for the sustaining of the legal order within which economic activity is conducted.
As I point out in my book, there has never been and never can be a society founded on rights alone. Without the performance of reciprocal obligations, including the obligations of government (big or small) to the citizen, the citizen to government and citizens to one another, no liberal ‘right’ could for long be asserted, for there would be neither society nor law to give to such right legitimacy and protection in the first place. And if you wish government to be less overweening, then you must wish two other things: that the egotistical and selfish individual be less overweening also, and that civic society, the society of citizens and of the mutual bonds that tie them, be stronger.
But what is clear too is that there is no further scope for invocations to the homespun, campfire nostrums of a ‘communitarianism’ of village-green platitudes and wishful thinking. A revived liberal politics must be civic and founded upon a renewed knowledge of the fundamental elements and rules of any civic order. Millions of Americans of course continue, unseen and unsung, to fulfil their myriad civic and other obligations. But their actions have diminishing influence upon the great burden of social and familial dissolution that now affects, to a greater or lesser extent, all Western liberal democracies.
The reason is that the forces and powers-for-ill ranged against the performance