The Psychology of Nations: A Contribution to the Philosophy of HistoryPartridge, G. E. (George Everett)
Philosophy
The Psychology of Nations: A Contribution to the Philosophy of History
Partridge, G. E. (George Everett)
Education; History -- Philosophy; War
A fourth factor in patriotism we recognize as loyalty to government,
to state, or to leader. The place of such loyalty in a truly
democratic country as contrasted with an autocratically governed
country seems plain. It is not only sovereignty but statesmanship as
well that must reside in the people. The people must not only have the
power but the wisdom to rule. Even the ideals of the country must come
out of the common life, or there at least be abundantly nourished. The
German writers protest that the purely native ideals of the people do
not represent the meaning and purpose of the State. The natural
feelings of the people lack purpose and definiteness. The State is
something very different from the sum of the people and the
representation of their will. The native sense of solidarity is not
at all like the organization that comes through the State. But this
abstract conception of the State as a being different from the people
is precisely, in the view of such writers as Dickinson, the cause of
wars. Upon this point Dickinson sees now a wide parting of the ways.
We must have either one kind of world or the other. We must continue
our warlike habits, and make the God-state the object of our religion,
or abandon all this for a thorough-going democracy. It is the special
interest that is assumed to inhere in the God-state that is the menace
to peace everywhere. The abstract theory of State inspires far-seeing
policies, democracy lives more by its natural instincts and feelings.
The theory of necessary expansion, the right to grow and to intrude,
is a natural deduction from the conception of the God-state; loyalty
to the State demands ever increasing lands and population in order to
have more military power.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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