Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation: Reprinted from Green's Philosophical Works, vol. II., with Preface by Bernard BosanquetGreen, Thomas Hill
Philosophy
Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation: Reprinted from Green's Philosophical Works, vol. II., with Preface by Bernard Bosanquet
Green, Thomas Hill
Liberty; Natural law; Political obligation
136. On this I shall dwell more in my next course of lectures. What
I am now concerned to point out is that, however necessary a factor
force may have been in the process by which states have been formed
and transformed, it has only been such a factor as co-operating with
those ideas without which rights could not exist. I say 'could not
_exist_,' not 'could not be recognised,' because rights are made by
recognition. There is no right 'but thinking makes it so'; none that
is not derived from some idea that men have about each other. Nothing
is more real than a right, yet its existence is purely ideal, if by
'ideal' is meant that which is not dependent on anything material
but has its being solely in consciousness. It is to these ideal
realities that force is subordinate in the creation and development
of states. The force of conquest from without, the force exercised
within communities by such agents as the early Greek tyrants or the
royal suppressors of feudalism in modern Europe, has only contributed
to the formation of states in so far as its effects have taken
a character which did not belong to them as effects of force; a
character due to their operation in a moral world, in which rights
already existed, resting on the recognition by men of each other as
determined, or capable of being determined, by the conception of a
common good. It is not indeed true that only a state can produce a
state, though modern history might seem to favour that notion. As a
matter of fact, the formation of modern states through feudalism out
of an earlier tribal system has been dependent on ideas derived from
the Roman state, if not on institutions actually handed down from it;
and the improvement and development of the state-system which has
taken place since the French Revolution has been through agencies
which all presuppose and are determined by the previous existence
of states. But the Greek states, so far as we know, were a first
institution of the kind, not a result of propagation from previously
existing states. But the action which brought them into being was
only effectual for its purpose, because the idea of right, though
only in the form of family or tribal right, was already in operation.
H. _HAS THE CITIZEN RIGHTS AGAINST THE STATE?_
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