We have already
noted that, as was manifest from his doctoral thesis, Woodrow Wilson derived his
political philosophy from that of Walter Bagehot. What many people may not
sufficiently appreciate is the degree to which Bagehot’s philosophy, both
political and economic, derived from that of the totalitarian political
philosopher Thomas Hobbes.
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| Thomas Hobbes: the State is a Mortall God |
Hobbes has
usually been considered as the chief proponent of the divine right of kings. It
is, however, more accurate to describe Hobbes’s philosophy as the divine right
of the State, with the State itself
construed, in Hobbes’s term, as a “Mortall God” (Hobbes’s spelling).
To Hobbes, the
specific form of government is ultimately irrelevant. If sovereignty is vested
in a king, the king rules by divine right. If power is vested in parliament,
then that body rules by the same justification. Presidents, dictators, first
citizens, emperors — it does not matter what they are called, as long as they
have power; power is self-justifying.
To Hobbes,
government must be based not on consent of the governed, but on force. This is
because most people understand only coercion. Fear of punishment is what holds
society together.[1]
The State is held together by the strongest, whose will all others must accept.[2]
All other forms of society, including Church and the Family, are subsumed into
the State, for there is no meaningful distinction between “the State” and “society.”[3]
Resistance to
authority can never be justified; the will of the sovereign is the supreme law
of the land.[4]
All sovereignty is vested in government, whatever specific form that government
takes, not in the people.[5]
From Hobbes to Bagehot
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| Walter Bagehot: hated the U.S., liked Hobbes. |
Wilson, however,
was not a student of Hobbes . . . directly.
He was, as noted, a disciple of Bagehot, and Bagehot derived his theories in
part from Hobbes.
Not surprisingly,
then, Wilson was an elitist who had a deep suspicion and mistrust of ordinary
people, as well as those he seemed to view as demagogues, such as Bryan and
Roosevelt. Bryan was someone to be used to counter Roosevelt, a sort of a
backfire, or (perhaps more consistent with Wilson’s attitude) a thief to catch
a thief.
This, of course,
raises the issue of Bagehot’s political theories.
Bagehot developed
his political and economic theories in light of the abandonment of the natural
law and the fixed belief that only existing accumulations of savings can be
used to finance new capital formation that characterized the 17th
and 18th centuries following Hobbes. According to Bagehot’s
analysis, published in 1867 in The
English Constitution,[6]
a relatively small economic elite (not to be confused with the “Upper Ten
Thousand” that ruled “society”) were the real power in the country, having gradually
usurped political power since the days of the Tudors, and (according to
Bagehot) properly so.
Bagehot carefully
distinguished leadership in “society” (meaning parties, balls, race meets, and other
social events) from leadership in government and the economy. The Queen (a
“retired widow”[7])
and the Prince of Wales (“an unemployed youth”[8])
were the leaders of “society” and played an important role in providing the
lower classes with the easily understood fallacy that the monarch ruled the
country. Bagehot called this the “dignified” aspect of the English
Constitution, a social convention to pacify the unintelligent masses.[9]
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| "We are not amused, Mister Bagehot." |
The real power,
according to Bagehot, resided in the House of Commons, the House of Lords being
another “dignified” aspect of the constitution of the country. The House of
Commons was “efficient” as opposed to “dignified,” and, so far as the
traditional structures of government allowed, ran the country essentially as a
business corporation. The House of Commons, elected by a relatively small
number of voters, was, essentially, the board of directors of the country, “a
class . . . trained to thought, full of money, and yet trained to business.”[10]
The propertied
classes were (in a sense) the shareholders of the national corporation. Common unpropertied
people, as well as aristocrats whose wealth and power were in decline as
agriculture diminished in relative importance, were to some extent
supernumeraries, that is, redundant employees and pensioners of the national
corporate State.[11]
Elitist “Democracy”
Contrary to the
impression that Bagehot’s claim that ultimate power resided in the House of
Commons might give, Bagehot did not support popular sovereignty. The English electorate
at the time he wrote, 1867, was extremely small, and composed exclusively of
men of property, a financial elite which thereby secured a self-perpetuating
political power. The “pocket” or “rotten borough” system was the order of the
day.
This was only
right as far as Bagehot was concerned. He believed that the masses were too
stupid to be able to vote or do anything other than take orders:
“We have in a great community like England
crowds of people scarcely more civilized than the majority of two thousand
years ago; we have others, even more numerous, such as the best people were a
thousand years since. The lower orders, the middle orders, are still, when
tried by what is the standard of the educated ‘ten thousand’, narrow-minded,
unintelligent, incurious.”[12]
“We have whole classes unable to comprehend
the idea of a constitution.”[13]
“A free nation rarely can be — and the English
nation is not — quick of apprehension.”[14]
According to
Bagehot, “The principle of popular government is that the supreme power, the
determining efficacy in matters political, resides in the people — not
necessarily or commonly in the whole people, in the numerical majority, but in
a chosen people, a picked and
selected people.”[15]
[Emphasis in original.]
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| India, 1857: logical result of Bagehot's theories of government. |
Not surprisingly,
one of the “defects” Bagehot listed in the American system is the impossibility
of a dictatorship in times of national emergency.[16]
Another problem is that Americans do not accept the opinions of their betters
without question: “They have not a public opinion finished and chastened as
that of the English has been finished and chastened.”[17]
Natural rights,
the judiciary, — such things are irrelevant. They are unimportant because they
are not “efficient,” that is, they do not increase the effectiveness of
government, the purpose of which is to protect the interests of the propertied
classes who run the country. Weaknesses appear in government to the extent that
the State administration departs from the principles of business, e.g., lack of efficient structure,
unnecessary redundancy,[18]
etc.
The fact that
many of these structures were at least initially intended to provide
accountability of the government to the citizens is also irrelevant.[19]
The capitalist of Bagehot’s day — or, more accurately, the non-owning manager —
was not accountable to his workforce or to his customers. It followed that the
government should not be accountable to the citizens it governed.
#30#
[1]
Sabine, A History of Political Theory,
op. cit., 468.
[2] Ibid., 469.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid., 470.
[5] Ibid., 471.
[6] Walter
Bagehot, The English Constitution.
Portland, Oregon: Sussex Academic Press, 1997.
[7] Ibid., 21.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid., 409, 115.
[10] Bagehot,
The English Constitution, op. cit.,
66.
[11]
“Corporate State” can be taken here both as meaning a nation run as a private
business enterprise for the benefit of the economic and financial elite, even
if ostensibly for the benefit of all citizens — whom Bagehot held in open
contempt — or as a proto fascist State, an almost inevitable outcome when the
“slavery of past savings” is the basis of the economic order.
[12] Ibid., 6.
[13] Ibid., 23.
[14] Ibid., 74.
[15] Ibid., 17; cf. Knox, Enthusiasm, op. cit., 584.
[16] Ibid., 20.
[17] Ibid., 13.
[18]
“Unnecessary redundancy” is not an oxymoron. A well-designed system
incorporates redundancy in order to prevent things from slipping through the
cracks, so to speak. When redundancy does not serve as a backup, however, it
becomes unnecessary. In system terms, then, redundancy is the duplication of key components
or functions of a system intended to increase the reliability of the system.
This is usually in the form of a backup or “fail-safe.”
[19]We have seen a similar development since the 1980s in the United States with
the repeal of systemic, internal control legislation such as Glass-Steagall,
“the Banking Act of 1933,” Pub.L. 73−66, 48 Stat. 162,
H.R. 5661, in the name of efficiency and increased competitiveness, and
its replacement with unenforceable government external regulation. Moulton
believed that the current integration of the banking system was a grave danger
to the economic and financial health of the country.
