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Guerres et paix

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Paul-Gabriel Boucé

Deuxième partie : Guerres et paix : histoire des idées et idées de l’histoire

War, Peace and Social Institutions in Eighteenth-Century British Philosophy

Vladimir Bychenkov

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  • 1 The term “institution” is applied to something well-established, having the quality of fixity. On (...)
  • 2 In English the term “body” taken in its social and not physical sense means in general “a corporat (...)

1This paper is devoted to the problems of war, peace and social institutions in 18th-century British philosophy. I will not go into details concerning the nature or the history of the social institutions such as those of the wars, but will limit myself only to some concise remarks. My task is much more modest and consists in analysing the correlation and the interdependence of the phenomena mentioned as these problems were understood by British thinkers of the 18th century. I would like also to make some allusions to those Russian thinkers of the past who assessed the political and economic situation in 18th-century Britain, her position in Europe and the development of her institutions and establishments from the viewpoint of war and peace, and who adopted, to a certain extent, the ideas suggested by their British contemporaries or predecessors on the same subject. I could reformulate the title of my paper as “Janus and Chimera.” The name of the ancient bifront god Janus needs no comment. But as for the other mythological figure mentioned, “Chimera” seems the best term to define the essence of social institutions which are something immaterial, incorporeal and impersonal. I shall consider the social institutions1 in the broad sense to be, first, such social norms as laws, rules, customs, traditions, patterns of social behaviour; secondly, social establishments and formations, organizations, collectivities (so-called bodies politic or corporate,2 and moral or juridical persons); thirdly, stable, established social phenomena on the whole, namely: power, government, property, and so on.

2Being alike in possessing the properties of existence and fixity in social life, in having superindividual nature and abstract character, social norms and formations differ from each other in some other respects. Institution-norms are to institution-formations what the predicate is to the subject. Every formation is, so to speak, surrounded by the “halo” of social norms defining its subject status and role in society. While institutions-norms are a kind of social objects or, so to speak, social entities playing the role of the mediator and means in the relations among people as social subjects, institution-formations themselves are subjects of social relations and actions and, in this sense, manage social objects, things, means. In other words, they are a kind of artificial persons created by people and at the same time replacing them in their subject role. I think there exist two classes of such institutions in social reality; namely; collective formations, or bodies corporate (politic), and what I call supercollective formations.

  • 3 The difference between these two types of social formations, or totalities, can be illustrated by (...)

3The former include people taken in their empirical status, involve them, so to speak, inside itself and incorporate them; the latter rise above people, their collectivities and groups and cannot be reduced to aggregates of individuals personifying and representing them (in capacity of the personnel or staff of the institution) in social relations and actions.3 If making use of the “person” category, these two types of social subjects may be referred to as the collective person and the abstract person accordingly. In case artificial persons are subjects of social, political and economic relations, people become only instruments and mediators in relations between such artificial entities.

4Therefore we have the right to speak of three levels of social reality: individuals, collective formations, and supercollective formations. The private, or physical, person as the social and legal mask of the individual is immanent to him; the collective person is both immanent and transcendent to the collectivity or group (body corporate); the abstract person is only transcendent to the association of men above which it rises. Although the conventional and artificial nature of the collective person is not equal to that of the abstract person, both of them, once created, begin to live self-dependently and become (as well as abstract social norms do) a real Chimera dominating people. The abstraction acts personae vice or privatorum loco, as the Romans put it.

5The relationship between different (corporative and abstract, in essence) forms of social wholeness and subjectness, on the one hand, and the State of civil peace, social order which is more or less free of discords and animosities, on the other, was shown and described by David Hume, in his essay, “That Politics May Be Reduced to a Science” (published in 1741-42). Hume compares two different ways in which a Nobility may possess the whole, or any part of the legislative power of the State. In the Venetian Government the whole body of nobility possesses the whole power, and no nobleman has any authority which he does not receive from the whole. He shares the power only as a part of the whole body. On the contrary, in the Polish Government every nobleman by means of his fiefs, has a distinct hereditary authority over his vassals, and the whole body has no authority but what it receives from the concurrence of its parts. Hume finds a Venetian nobility to be preferable to a Polish one because of its beneficial influence upon social order. He writes:

  • 4 David Hume, Essays, Literary, Moral, and Political (London: Murray, 1870) 15.

A nobility, who possess their power in common, will preserve peace and order, both among themselves, and their subjects; and no member can have authority enough to control the laws for a moment. The nobles will preserve their authority over the people, but without any grievous tyranny, or any breach of private property: because such a tyrannical government promotes not the interests of the whole body, however it may that of some individuals. There will be a distinction of rank between the nobility and people, but this will be the only distinction in the State. The whole nobility will form one body, and the whole people another, without any of those private feuds and animosities, which spread ruin and desolation everywhere.4

6The term “institution” is likely to be applied to bodies politic or corporate if there is so broad a gap between the collective wholeness of the formation and the individuals included in it, as to suppose the individual being alienated from the level on which the decisions are taken on behalf of the collectivity as a whole. It is in this sense that the social body is understood to be some sort of a person. According to Thomas Hobbes, the author of Leviathan (1651):

  • 5 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980) 220.

A Multitude of men, are made One Person, when they are by one man, or one Person, Represented; so that it be done with the consent of every one of that Multitude in particular. For it is the Unity of the Representer, not the Unity of the Represented, that Maketh the Person One. And it is the Representer that beareth the Person, and but one Person: And Unity, cannot otherwise be understood in Multitude.5

7The similar situation also obtains in case decisions are made and orders are issued not by one person but the collegium, or council, of persons. In his Two Treatises of Civil Government (1690), John Locke writes that there, and there only, is a political society, wherever any number of men so unite into one society as to quit every one of his executive power of the law of Nature, and to resign it to the public having a common established law and judicature to appeal to. The individual remains distant from the level of collective power, no matter whether this power is concentrated in one person, in one council, or in the majority of the public. In Locke’s opinion:

  • 6 John Locke, Two Treatises of Civil Government (London: Dent 1953) 164, 165.

When any number of men have so consented to make one community or government, they are thereby presently incorporated, and make one body politic, wherein the majority have a right to act and conclude the rest…. For, when any number of men have, by the consent of every individual, made a community, they have thereby made the community one body, with a power to act as one body, which is only by the will and determination of the majority.6

8In his famous treatise, An Essay on the First Principles of the Government, and on the Nature of the Political, Civil and Religions Liberty (1768), Joseph Priestley distinguishes people acting as independent individuals and those who act as members of any collective whole. If truth and knowledge in some sphere belong to the greater number of people to act as the collective whole and not to the independent individuals, no one taken separately may make any decision until the majority agrees with it.

  • 7 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969) 618.
  • 8 Ibid.

9David Hume shares the opinion that “in every kind of intercourse, a body politic is to be consider’d as one person.”7 Indeed, in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), he finds this assertion to be just in so far as different nations, just like private persons, require mutual assistance, and their selfishness and ambition are perpetual sources of war and discord. Being alike in some respects, private persons and juridical, or moral ones differ in other respects. Thus the state-bodies are subordinated to the special set of rules —the laws of nations— which regulates, in particular, problems of war and peace. At the same time the three fundamental rules of justice, the stability of possession, its transference by consent, and the performance of promises are duties of princes (and, consequently, of the States, bodies politic, headed by them), as well as of subjects. Where possession has no stability, there must be perpetual war; where property is not transferred by consent, there can be no commerce; where promises are not observed there can be neither leagues nor alliances. “The advantages. therefore, of peace, commerce, and mutual succour, make us extend to different kingdoms the same notions of justice, which take place among individuals.”8 Thus the direct connection between social institution-norms, on the one hand, and war and peace, on the other, is established by Hume.

  • 9 Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace (New York; Columbia UP, 1939) 11.

10It is worthwhile mentioning that the connection between the status of States, bodies politic, as artificial, moral, persons, and the problems of war and peace is emphasized by Immanuel Kant. Nations, as States, are like individuals, he asserts, in his treatise, Perpetual Peace (1795), and to incorporate a State with another State would be to reduce it from a moral person to the condition of a thing. Besides two special sets of rules that regulate the relations among men (the civil right, or jus civitatis) and those of nations among each other (the right of nations, or jus gentium), individuals and nations being taken in isolation, in the civil constitution there is also the cosmopolitical right, or jus cosmopoliticum, which is equally obligatory for men, as well as for States, as private persons and moral ones “are considered as influencing one another, in quality of constituent parts of the great State of the human race.”9

  • 10 Karl R. Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (London; Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979) 166. The (...)

11What is the relationship between individuals and institutions? Karl Popper (1902-1994) writes, in his work, The Poverty of Historicism (1935, first published in 1944-45), that any long-range and long-term policy, especially deocratic policy, should be pursued by means of established social institutions and should not depend too much on any personal will and decisions. Institutions reduce the uncertainty of the personal element, although we cannot construct foolproof institutions, that is to say, institutions, whose functioning does not very largely depend upon persons. “Institutions are like fortresses. They must be well designed and properly manned.”10 But nearly the same was said long before Popper by Edward Gibbon who differentiated, in his work, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88), the social improvements resulting from the personal factors in social life and those resulting from the institutional ones. He States that the poet or philosopher illustrates his age and century by the efforts of a single mind, but this individual genius, these superior powers of reason or fancy are too rare and spontaneous productions to be a reliable basis for social progress. The benefits of law and policy, of trade and manufactures, of arts and sciences, are more solid and permanent. Nevertheless, this general order is the effect of skill and labour, and the complex machinery may be decayed by time, or injured by violence.

  • 11 Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952) (...)

12Gibbon adds that the most useful, or, at least, the most necessary arts, can be performed without superior talents or national subordination, without powers of one, or the union of many. Each village, each family, each individual must always possess both ability and inclination to perpetuate the use of fire and of metals, the propagation and service of domestic animals, the methods of hunting and fishing, the rudiments of navigation, the imperfect cultivation of corn and other nutritive grain, and the simple practice of mechanical trades. And they are able to do so in spite of any historical troubles.11

13The influence of the useful innovations produced by arts and sciences is supposed by Hume to extend, perhaps, farther than that of the good laws, but the use of the former is not so appreciable as that of the latter, and the most honorable place in history belongs to law-givers and founders of States who give people Systems of laws and social institutions, establishments to ensure peace, happiness and freedom for the generations to come.

14While Gibbon compares institutional order with “complex machinery,” Lord Bolingbroke draws a parallel between social institutions and living organisms. In his work, The Idea of a Patriot King (circa 1740?), he writes that absolute stability is not to be expected in any thing human:

  • 12 Henry St. John Bolingbroke, The Works of Lord Bolingbroke (London: Bohn, 1844) 2: 397.

The best instituted governments, like the best constituted animal bodies, carry in them the seeds of their destruction: and, though they grow and improve for a time, they will soon tend visibly to their dissolution. Every hour they live is an hour the less that they have to live. All that can be done, therefore, to prolong the duration of a good government, is to draw it back, on every favourable occasion, to the first good principles on which it was founded. When these occasions happen often, and are well improved, such governments are prosperous and durable. When they happen seldom, or are ill improved, these political bodies live in pain, or in languor, and die soon.12

15It is interesting that, over a century after Bolingbroke, the Russian philosopher, Konstantin Leontiev (1831-1891), developed similar ideas and made an attempt to explain the historical situation in 18th-century Britain from the view-point of his theory of phasic development. In his work, Byzantinism and Slavdom (1875), he assumed three stages of developing social organisms and cultures to exist: the period of original simplicity; the period of blooming complexity; and the period of renewed simplification. Nothing in the world can avoid this destiny. One of the main factors of such a simplification, in which the third phase consists, is the liberal, democratic and egalitarian tendency for all the social units to be equal. The progressists interested in the fast development of society are right in the first stage, but when society is already in the third descending stage, the conservatives and the reactionaries prove quite right. They try as much as possible to stop the decay and degradation, and return society, sometimes forcibly, to the cult of the statehood thanks to which the nation was created and Consolidated. Nevertheless, all these efforts can only retard the downward movement, but cannot stop it at all.

16In Leontiev’s opinion, the period of blooming complexity in Britain took place between Elizabeth I and George III, i.e., covered the 17th and the 18th centuries. There was less equality in England than in some other European countries and America. Britain saved herself from the simplification to come inevitably by means of a revolutionary process occurring in her North American colonies. After America became independent and separated from the parent-state (1776), nothing could help Britain to prolong the age of blooming complexity. In other words, nothing could be done for England to be spared the further simplification.

  • 13 Cf. Kant’s statement: “With men, the State of nature (status naturalis) is not a State of peace, b (...)

17British thinkers recognized nascent and further-developing social institutions to be strongly influenced by war as a social and historical phenomenon. This impact may be direct or indirect. According to Locke, people form society to avoid the State of war which they wage against each other. Whenever any number of men, in the State of Nature, enter into society to make one people one body politic under one supreme government, this puts men out of the State of Nature into that of commonwealth. It is necessary to differentiate the State of Nature and the State of war. The former presupposes that people have no common judge, no central power, and each of them lives according to his own mind; the latter means using force without right, which may take place irrespectively whether people have such a judge or not. Being in the State of Nature, people are able in principle to live in peace. The State of war is that of hostility, enmity and destruction.13 At the same time, internal war is considered as the cause for uniting people into bodies politic ruled by common reason which is concentrated in one person or in one council. From the modern point of view the difference between the State of Nature and the State of war may be interpreted as the difference between the principle of self-organization and that of organization from without.

18As opposed to Locke and other supporters of the theory of social contract, Flume sees the source of state-power in conflicts between members of different societies and not among members of the same society. In other words, the origin of the State, the political power and the phenomenon of citizenship are accounted for by external and not civil wars. To illustrate his point, Hume speaks about American Indian tribes which set an example of how people can live in peace and agreement while having no recognized government. They obey the orders of one of their tribesmen only when they wage war, and this State of subordination ceases after their return from the battle-field and conclusion of peace. But the advantages and benefits resulting from such a government are so great as to make people refuse part of their freedom also between wars. In the course of time people begin getting accustomed to obey their chiefs not only during war but also in peace-time. Those who have proved skilful leaders on the battle-field become rulers realizing their power constantly, unceasingly. Army camps with their System of orders to be executed as fast and punctually as possible are considered by Hume, in A Treatise of Human Nature, as the true fathers of the cities. He disproves the viewpoint according to which the origin of the civil government is derived from the patriarchal rule and the authority of the father as the head of the family.

19To generalize, the beginning of the government is sufficiently accidental and not so perfect as to regard the theory of social contract as right. One of the tribesmen rises from the ranks owing to his courage and gifts displayed during the war when these qualifies, just as unity and agreement, are required most of all, and the fatal consequences of the lack of organization tell upon the very existence of the tribe. Having become the leader of the society during the war, he extends his power to the peace-time, and becomes the arbiter, or the judge, for all his people. Nevertheless, at the beginning he has to rule only by means of persuasion, but in the course of time he becomes influential enough to resort to force if necessary.

20Considering war to be the most barbarous and savage occurrence among other social phenomena, Lord Shaftesbury at the same time recognized its role as the factor of strengthening social solidarity, people’s uniting into society and joining their efforts to achieve common aims. In Sensus Communis (1709), he States that the bonds of solidarity become more durable in times of war, facing the common danger people lend their support to each other, and the mutual attachment becomes apparent here. Shaftesbury finds heroism and love of mankind to be almost the same feeling, but if it turns out to go astray, the hero, the liberator and the keeper become the fierce madman, the oppressor and the destroyer. Being taken into account, this fact enables us to understand why the love for one’s native country and the social unity resulting from this love, on the one hand, and the split brought about by intrigue, on the other hand, take place simultaneously in peace-time under the civil government. It is quite natural for parts of society to stand apart when society extends excessively. Shaftesbury mentions that powerful commonwealths form their colonies overseas for more scope to appear at home.

21Incidentally, in Leontiev’s opinion, it is precisely this fact that explains why England could retard the process of simplification in the 18th century. But relations and connections between the parts of the great empire weaken in the course of time, and after all can be lost entirely. New unions and factions come into being in such state-bodies. The spirit of unification not being able to realize itself within the whole seeks for a more narrow sphere to carry out its practical activity. Nothing is more enjoyable for people than to form exclusive factions. So there are wheels within other wheels, and one empire is included into another empire. Briefly, the very spirit of these factions seems to be none other than the deformed expression of the love of mankind and the mutual attachment that is human.

  • 14 Over a century later, considering the State as an idea, Bernard Bosanquet (1848-1923) wrote, in hi (...)

22What reasons may explain this phenomenon? Shaftesbury considers the common good, the aims of the world as a whole to be a sufficiently distant and abstract philosophical subject. It is very difficult to understand the common interest of the whole nation or State. People feel better when they see the bounds of their community and know for the sake of what they have united. Such a distant sphere as the State unites different persons, different social strata and different social estates only in abstracto and, so to speak, not tangibly. To put it differently, the social unity within the State exists only to the contemplation or the idea of the State as such.14 The common aim of society as a whole, and the whole as such are none other than abstractions. Only in war time the force of unity displays itself in full.

  • 15 Vladimir Bychenkov, Instituty: Sverkhkollektivnye obrazovaniya i bezlichnye formy sotsial’ noi sub (...)

23This opinion of Shaftesbury expressed in Sensus Communis appears most interesting and important in the light of the above-stated view-point concerning so-called artificial persons, these chimeras replacing and dominating people. In my recent book, Institutions: Supercollective Formations and Impersonal Form of Social Subjectness (1996), I suggest and use the term “institutionality” to define one of the most important characteristics of the social formation, body corporate, in case the level of social, “corporal,” wholeness is sufficiently distant from the level of real individuals forming the social body.15 In other words, institutionality in this sense defines the above-mentioned gap between the individuals and the collectivity as a whole. So it can vary, depending on such social factors as the numerical strength of the collectivity, the degree of rationalization and formalization of its internal relations, and the measure of alienation of the person from the level at which the decisions are made on behalf of the collectivity as a whole.

24At the same time, the term “institutionality” may be applied not only to particular bodies politic but also to society taken in its completeness. In this case, it acquires a different meaning and may be interpreted as impersonal subjectness. Now it defines the System of social relations in which impersonal and anonymous supercollective social formations, i.e., abstract persons, and not individuals and their collectivities as such are the true subjects of these relations. The abstraction turns out as the social subject and actor instead of the person. The relation between man and the abstraction created by him turn over: the means becomes the subject, and the subject becomes the means. Separating the abstraction from people leads to its transformation into something self-dependent, alien and transcendent to individuals, bending people to its impersonal will, making them its instruments. The abstraction begins to be perceived by people, as if it were man or even something supernatural. Further details on the topic may be found in my Institutions.

  • 16 George Orwell, The English People (London: Collins, 1957) 24. The pronouns “they” and “it” singula (...)

25The ideas suggested by Shaftesbury allow us to suppose British thinkers of the 18th century came nearer to understanding the subject role of the abstraction in society. Its power over people is so great as to exceed anything imaginable. The status of the abstraction predetermines the fundamentals of some social System. As to contemporary British thinkers, I can refer to one of George Orwell’s (1903-1950) essays, “The English People” (1944, first published in 1947). Orwell wrote: “English political thinking is much governed by the word ‘They’. ‘They’ are the higher-ups, the mysterious powers who do things to you against your will.”16 The domination of anonymous, impersonal force and power over people is well shown by the contemporary British writer Jack Trevor Story, in his novel Little Dog’s Day (1971).

26To make a long story short, the problem of parties and factions inside society, their impact upon the matters of civil wars and civil peace was of great importance to British philosophers of the 18th century. Hume believes people must hate the founders of the factions just as they must respect the founders of States. The factions undermine the System of government, make laws powerless and bring about hostility and wars among men who belong to the same nation and have to lend their support to each other. They propagate naturally for centuries and lead to the collapse of the System of government under which they came into being. Hume differentiates factions based on personal friendship of the members or on their Personal hostility to members of other parties, and those based on the real difference of opinion, interest and principle.

27Examining, in The Idea of a Patriot King, the reasons why people unite into parties, Lord Bolingbroke emphasizes difference in the ideas of social institutions. He States that a people may be united in submission to the prince, and to the establishment, and yet be divided about general principles, or particular measures of government. Parties may be divided by different notions and principles concerning some particular ecclesiastical, or civil institutions. Party is a political evil, and faction is the worst of all parties; the former is to the latter what the superlative is to the positive. The true image of a free people, governed by a Patriot King, Bolingbroke sees in that of the patriarchal family, where the head and all the members are united by one common interest, and animated by one common spirit.

28According to Jonathan Swift, the difference in opinion, that is in the social institution-norm, is one of the chief and usual causes, or motives that make one country go to war with another. In his Gulliver’s Travels (1726), he writes:

  • 17 Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977) 292.

Difference in opinion hath cost many millions of lives: for instance, whether/flesh be bread, or bread be flesh; whether the juice of a certain berry be blood or wine; whether whistling be a vice or a virtue; whether it be better to kiss a post, or throw it into the fire; what is the best colour for a coat whether black, white, red or grey: and whether it should be long or short, narrow or wide, dirty or clean, with many more. Neither are any wars so furious and bloody, or of so long continuance, as those occasioned by difference in opinion, especially if it be in things indifferent.17

29Although this statement alludes directly to the ecclesiastical institutions only, that is to the controversies over transubstantiation, church music, the images of worship, and the use of church vestments, it has also more general significance and concerns social institutions on the whole. What should the prince, the head of the State, do in the divided State where a party has been formed of spirit and strength sufficient to oppose, even in arms, the established government? Bolingbroke believes that a Patriot King will prevent the flame of rebellion from breaking out, if by art and management he can do it. If he cannot, he will endeavour to keep it from spreading; and if the phrenzy of rebellion disappoints him in both these attempts, he will remember peace, like Henry IV of France, in the midst of war. Likewise he will forgo advantages of pushing the latter, rather than lose an opportunity of promoting the former.

30We see thus that war presupposes and predetermines the formation and development of different social institutions and, in its turn, is presupposed and predetermined by them. The origins of not only institution-formations but also institution-norms may be accounted for by the reasons resulting from wars. The process of forming one such institution, the so-called right of primogeniture, was depicted by Adam Smith, in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). In the troubled times following the fall of the Roman empire, the chief military leaders of the German and Scythian tribes captured and concentrated in their hands the greater part of the land of the Western provinces of the former Roman empire. Every landowner was at the same time the sovereign, and the lease-holders of his lands were his subjects. He was their judge and legislator, law-giver in peace-time and their captain, military leader, during war. He often waged war against his neighbours and sometimes against his sovereign. The safety of the estate, and those who lived and worked there, depended to a considerable extent on its dimensions. To divide it meant to expose its parts to the danger of being torn asunder by the enemy. In view of this danger, the right of primogeniture was established.

31Nevertheless, recognizing the formative role of war could not change the negative attitude of most thinkers in the Age of Enlightenment to this social phenomenon. Some pages of Smith’s Inquiry are devoted to describing the damages caused to her economy by wars waged by England. During these needless and wasteful wars such squandering of national property took place that sometimes made the country much poorer by the end of the war than at its beginning. Four wars against France in 1688, 1701, 1742, and 1756 burdened Britain with a debt of £ 145 millions. Although this squandering retarded the increase of the wealth and the culture of the nation, it could not stop this process at all. The capital was being accumulated owing to the particular thrift and sense of private persons, their common efforts to improve their own financial position and welfare standards. Those very efforts, guaranteed by the law and allowed by the freedom to use one’s potential for one’s interest, ensured the development of wealth and culture in England.

32On the contrary, ceasing wars promoted the fast development of economy, sciences and arts on the national scale. In his Letters on the Study and Use of History (written during the second half of the 1730s, published in 1752), Lord Bolingbroke wrote:

  • 18 Henry St. John Bolingbroke, The Works of Lord Bolingbroke, 2: 245

Our temple of Janus was shut by Henry the Seventh. We neither laid waste our own nor other countries any longer: and wise laws and a wise government changed insensibly the manners, and gave a new turn to the spirit of our people. We were no longer the freebooters we had been. Our nation maintained her reputation in arms whenever the public interest or the public authority required it; but war ceased to be, what it had been, our principal and almost our sole profession. The arts of peace prevailed among us. We became husbandmen, manufacturers, and merchants, and we emulated neighbouring nations in literature.18

33A similar opinion was put in almost the same words by the Russian thinker of the 18th century, the first Russian professor of law at the University of Moscow, Semyon Desnitsky (c. 1740-1789), who found, in his work, A Speech on the Direct and Immediate Way of Teaching of Jurisprudence, Delivered at the Public Meeting at the Imperial Moscow University on June 30th, 1768, Britain’s successes in economy, commerce and arts accounted for by her refusal to overindulge in war operations. Desnitsky and the other Russian thinker, Ivan Tretiakov (?-1776), were sent by the Russian government to Britain, and in 1761-67 studied at the University of Glasgow, where they attended Adam Smith’s lectures. Later, Desnitsky translated into Russian William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-70) and wrote the continents on that work. The translation (vol. 1-3, published in 1780-82), though unfinished, was of great importance to Russian social thought.

34In his Discourse on the Causes of the Wealth and the Slow Enrichment of the States of Ancient, as Well as Modem Peoples, Delivered on June 30th, 1772, —its title is reminiscent of Smith’s treatise— Tretiakov reviewed the discussions that took place in England on the subjects mentioned. He wrote that, if the nation concentrated its attention on military affairs, it lost sight of developing economy and science, and missed the chance to increase its own wealth. He surmised that the necessary and useful skills and arts were abandoned by the Romans because they were interested only in war and conquests. Nevertheless, it should be added that, according to Hume, when based on principles of freedom, civil wars aided in developing eloquence and literature.

  • 19 Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 633.

35In its turn, the development of different social institutions exerts great influence upon the course of wars. The 18th-century philosophers showed in their works that innovations in economy, commerce, law, and culture had considerably changed the character of wars, made them less resolute and destructive. As already pointed out, in Hume’s opinion, war is prevented from being perpetual by the stability of possession, which is one of the most fundamental legal institutions in social life. “In peace, the progress of knowledge and industry is accelerated by the emulation of so many active rivals: in war, the European forces are exercised by temperate and indecisive contest,” Gibbon wrote.19 That was also noticed by Desnitsky who wrote that it was impossible for the winner to seize the whole defeated State, or to ravage it completely because of the protest of other European powers connected with trade and commerce. Such connections were established among Britain, France, Spain, and other countries. Desnitsky holds that during the Prussian war (1756-62) many powers fought without result, i.e., without any conquest and benefit. Tretiakov supposed that the balance established among the main European powers prevented war from being destructive.

36Estimating the probable threat of a new barbarian invasion into Europe, Gibbon found that the successful development of the art of war required for such an invasion was impossible without assimilating the institutions of the civilized society, and presupposed transforming barbarous nations into civilized ones. Under those circumstances, the threat of a new barbarian invasion decreased. Gibbon mentioned Russia as an example confirming that historical fact. Some interesting observations were made in relation to the role of financial institutions during war and in peace-time. Tretiakov recommended learning from the British experience of bank business. The prosperity of England proved how advantageous the founding of banks was. A collapse of any bank could not harm considerably the financial System of the State.

37Adam Smith supposes that using bank notes instead of gold and silver coins makes the possible consequences of the unsuccessful war more dangerous as the bank notes lose their value in case the enemy has captured the capital of the State with all its gold and silver reserves. The direct connection between social institutions and conditions of war and peace was established by Joseph Priestley, in his Letters to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Occasioned by His Reflections on the Revolution in France (1791). He thought the great revolution in France and America opened new perspectives for the world, and expected the State authorities of different nations to concentrate their attention on public affairs and take care of the common good.

38According to Priestley, if the true principles of government prevail, one may expect all the national prejudices and hostility to disappear and general peace to be established. If the public affairs are taken care of by those who really understand and express the thoughts, feelings and interests of people, nations will not covet the riches of other nations and be involved in wars against each other. So the main causes bringing about wars will disappear once and for all.

  • 20 Kant writes that the chief of the State may, as a person, be considered under a double point of vi (...)

39As to civil wars, there are two kinds of their causes to be considered as institutional. First, such wars are given rise to by soliciting power, public posts, or, in other words, by people wishing to get the right to prescribe social laws and rules, establish social institutions, represent and act on behalf of the social institution-formations, which have been referred to above as artificial persons, and, if using Popper’s above-quoted words, man such institutions properly, like fortresses. Secondly, civil wars result front differences in ideas of social institutions and forms of government. If people understand the true nature and tasks of all the public posts and civil duties, the power and advantages given by these duties will cease to be a casus belli, and the causes of civil wars will disappear just as those of external wars. To generalize, peace may be established only if the causes of civil and external wars resulting front the existing forms of government and their political principles are excluded. It is noteworthy that under these circumstances kings and other officials are supposed by Priestley to become in the course of time only the servants of the State and of society. This idea is to be interpreted in the sense that officials become only representatives and personifications of the social institutions, which are the true subjects of social relations and actions.20 With these subjects being supercollective, impersonal and transcendent to man, the political System in which the officials hold such positions, should be considered as based on the principle of impersonal subjectness.

40Priestley drew the conclusion that, taking into account all the calamities resulting from civil wars, people would use peaceful means and not the sword to settle their arguments and conflicts. He thought that reason would triumph in all the arguments and put an end both to civil and external wars. He believed the Kingdom of Reason would become the Kingdom of Peace.

41To sum up the ideas developed by the philosophical thought of the 18th century in relation to the problems dealt with in this paper, the views of the Russian philosopher, Iakov Kozelsky (c. 1728- c. 1794), expressed in his work, Philosophical Suggestions (1768), should prove helpful: the greatness of the State depends on its abilily to maintain the good and useful social institutions and not on its external conquests.

Notes

1 The term “institution” is applied to something well-established, having the quality of fixity. On the one hand, it can be an established law, custom, usage, or other element in the political or social life of a people; a regulative principle or convention subservient to the needs of an organized community or the general ends of civilization. On the other hand, it can be an establishment, organization, or association instituted for the promotion of some object, especially one of public or general utility, religious, charitable, etc., e.g., a church, school, college, hospital, asylum, reformatory, mission, or the like, as a literary or philosophical institution etc. See The Oxford English Dictionary [Oxford: Clarendon P. 1933] 5: 334).

2 In English the term “body” taken in its social and not physical sense means in general “a corporate body, aggregate of individuals, collective mass” (1: 964). In law it is used to define “an artificial ‘person’ created by legal authority for certain ends; a corporation; commonly a corporation aggregate, but also applied to a corporation sole” (ibid.). In this sense it is always accompanied by defining adjectives: “body corporate,” “body politic.”

3 The difference between these two types of social formations, or totalities, can be illustrated by the example of the difference between, let us say, the enterprise, university or governmental agency as such, on the one hand, and its staff or personnel, on the other.

4 David Hume, Essays, Literary, Moral, and Political (London: Murray, 1870) 15.

5 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980) 220.

6 John Locke, Two Treatises of Civil Government (London: Dent 1953) 164, 165.

7 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969) 618.

8 Ibid.

9 Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace (New York; Columbia UP, 1939) 11.

10 Karl R. Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (London; Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979) 166. The term “social institution” is used by Popper, according to his own words, “in a very wide sense, to include bodies of a private as well as of public character. Thus I shall use it to describe a business, whether it is a small shop or an insurance company, and likewise a school, or an ‘educational System,’ or a police force, or a Church, or a law court” (ibid. 65).

11 Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952) 633-34.

12 Henry St. John Bolingbroke, The Works of Lord Bolingbroke (London: Bohn, 1844) 2: 397.

13 Cf. Kant’s statement: “With men, the State of nature (status naturalis) is not a State of peace, but of war; though not of open war, at least, ever ready to break out. A State of peace must therefore be established…” (Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace 10).

14 Over a century later, considering the State as an idea, Bernard Bosanquet (1848-1923) wrote, in his work, The Philosophical Theory of the State (1899): “The Nation-State as an ethical idea is, then, a faith or a purpose — we might say a mission, were not the Word too narrow and too aggressive. It seems to be less to its inhabitants than the City-state to its citizens; but that is greatly because, as happens with the higher achievements of mind, it includes too much to be readily apprehended. The modem nation is a history and a religion rather than a clear-cut idea. Its power as an idea-force is not known till it is tried” (Bernard Bosanquet, The Philosophical Theory of the State [London: Macmillan, 1899] 321).

15 Vladimir Bychenkov, Instituty: Sverkhkollektivnye obrazovaniya i bezlichnye formy sotsial’ noi subjectnosti (Moskva: Rossiiskaya Akademiya Sotsial’nykh Nauk, 1996) [Institutions. Supercollective Formations and Impersonal Forms of Social Subjectness (Moscow: Russian Academy of Social Sciences, 1996). In Russian], See also my article in English: Vladimir Bychenkov. “Man and Mana: Robert Codrington’s Discovery in the Age of the Rebellion of Archetypes,” RuBriCa (The Russian & British Cathedra) I (1996): 116-47.

16 George Orwell, The English People (London: Collins, 1957) 24. The pronouns “they” and “it” singular (neuter gender) are often used to define something impersonal, anonymous, abstract which dominates man, deprives him of his status of the primary subject of socio-economic and sociopolitical relations, makes him secondary, and replaces him in his subject role. The Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948) saw in the social collectivity not “we,” which always presupposes “I,” but “it.” The contemporary Polish sociologist, Peter Sztompka, writes that the government is often considered by people as “they” being in opposition to “we.” “It” and “they” have become the true symbols of our impersonal civilization. Following the contemporary British writer, Malcolm Bradbury (born in 1932), one may say that we live in the world of abstraction, abstractedness, in the depersonalized world.

17 Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977) 292.

18 Henry St. John Bolingbroke, The Works of Lord Bolingbroke, 2: 245

19 Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 633.

20 Kant writes that the chief of the State may, as a person, be considered under a double point of view; sometimes as sovereign, free from all responsibility towards the State; sometimes as the first public functionary, accountable to its fellow citizens” (Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace 63).

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