The principle of federation

and the need to reconstitute the party of revolution P.-J. Proudhon (1809-1867) Published in 1863

PREFACE Richard Vernon

This edition of Du Principe federatif et de la necessite de reconstituer le parti de la revolution springs from a long-standing interest in the political and social thought of Proudhon and a novice interest in federalism. In the latter regard, especially, I have relied extensively upon the generous help of many colleagues, among whom M.W. Westmacott provided invaluable bibliographical advice, and S.J.R. Noel and L.J. Sharpe offered some stimulating and far-reaching comments on a draft of my introduction, presented as a paper in a departmental seminar. In a department as congenial and expert as my own, an author has only himself to blame for the deficiencies of his work.

As far as the translation itself is concerned, I have tried to follow Proudhon's literal sense closely enough that for all but the most specialized purposes the translation may serve as a substitute for the French original, but where literalness would be distracting I have not hesitated to adopt an English idiom. The edition used is the first, Paris: E. Dentu 1863. I have translated here only the first part and the first chapter of the second part, these being the theoretical core of the work. This work has been published with the assistance of grants from the Social Science Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and from the Publications Fund of the University of Toronto Press.

PART ONE

Chapter I. POLITICAL DUALISM -AUTHORITY AND LIBERTY: OPPOSITION AND INTERCONNECTION OF THE TWO IDEAS

Before saying what is meant by federation, it is as well to devote a few pages to the origin and context of the idea. The theory of the federal system is quite new; I think I may even say that no one has ever presented it before. But it is intimately bound up with the theory of government in general -- to speak more precisely, it is its necessary conclusion.

Among the many constitutions proposed by philosophy and put to the test by history, one alone reconciles the demands of justice, order, liberty, and stability, without which neither society nor the individual can live. Truth, like nature, is one. It would be strange if it were otherwise for the mind and for its grandest work, society. All writers have recognized the unity of human legislation; and, without denying the diversity in application dictated by time and place and the special character of each nation, or neglecting the scope of discretion in every political system, all have been obliged to accommodate their doctrines to it. I shall undertake to show that this one constitution, which it will be the greatest triumph of human reason to have grasped, is nothing other than the federal system. Every form of government which departs from it must be considered an empirical creation, a preliminary sketch, more or less useful, under which society finds shelter for a moment, and which, like the Arab's tent, is folded up the morning after it has been erected. Rigorous analysis is therefore essential here, and the first truth which this account should impress upon the reader is that politics, though infinitely flexible as an applied art, is an exact science in its regulative principles, no more or less so than geometry or algebra.

Political order rests fundamentally on two contrary principles: authority and liberty. The one initiates, the other concludes; the one goes hand-in-hand with obedient faith, the other with free reason.

I doubt that a single voice will be raised against this first proposition. Authority and liberty are as old as the human race; they are born with us, and live on in each of us. Let us note but one thing, which few readers would notice otherwise: these two principles form a couple, so to speak, whose two terms, though indissolubly linked together, are nevertheless irreducible one to the other, and remain, despite all our efforts, perpetually at odds. Authority necessarily presupposes a liberty which recognizes or denies it; in turn liberty, in its political sense, likewise presupposes an authority which confronts it, repressing or tolerating it. Suppress one of the two, and the other has no sense: authority, without a Liberty to examine it, to resist or submit to it, is an empty word; liberty, without an authority as counterweight, is meaningless.

The principle of authority, familial, patriarchal, magisterial, monarchical, theocratic, tending to hierarchy, centralization, absorption, is given by nature, and is thus essentially predestined, divine, as you will. Its scope, resisted and impeded by the opposing principle, may expand or contract indefinitely, but can never be extinguished.

The principle of liberty, personal, individualist, critical, the instrument of dividing, choosing, arranging, is supplied by the mind. Essentially a principle of judgment, then, it is superior to the nature which it makes use of, and to the necessity which it masters. Its aspirations are unbounded; it is, like its contrary, subject to extension or restriction, but it likewise cannot be exhausted as it grows, nor can it be nullified by constraint.

It follows that in every society, even the most authoritarian, liberty necessarily plays some part; likewise in every society, even the most liberal, some portion is reserved for authority. This requirement is absolute; no political arrangement is exempt. Despite the efforts of the understanding to resolve diversity into unity, the two principles persist, always in opposition to each other. Political development arises from their inescapable logic and their mutual interaction.

All this, I confess, may contain little that is really new, and some readers will ask me if that is all I have to offer them. No one denies nature or mind, whatever the obscurity that may surround them; not one writer rejects either authority or liberty, even though their reconciliation, separation, or elimination seem equally impossible. What, then, is my purpose in reciting this commonplace?

What I have to say is this: that all political constitutions, all systems of government, including federations, fall within the scope of one formula, the balancing of authority by liberty, and vice versa; that in consequence the categories adopted by the great majority of writers, since Aristotle's time, in order to classify governments, differentiate states, and distinguish among the nations, monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, etc. -- the federation excepted here -- are reduced to hypothetical, empirical constructs, in which reason and justice find only imperfect satisfaction; that all established orders, founded upon these incomplete ideas, differ only from the standpoint of interest, prejudice, and habit, and are at bottom similar and equivalent; that were it not for the harm done by these false systems, in which ruffled passions, affronted interests, and vain self-deceptions are at odds with one another, we would be very close to agreement on fundamentals; that, finally, all those partisan divisions which we imagine to be so profound, all those conflicts of opinion which seem insoluble to us, all those random hostilities for which there appears to be no remedy, will instantly find a definitive solution in the theory of federal government.

Is there so much, you will ask, in a semantic opposition, authority-liberty? Indeed, yes! I have observed that the ordinary mind, even the child, can better grasp the truth cast in an abstract formula than when it is inflated with a mass of explanations and facts. I wished both to condense this study for those who cannot read books, and to make it more compelling by appealing to simple ideas. Authority and liberty: two concepts opposed to another, destined to live in struggle or to perish together; here, indeed, is something not very hard to grasp. Have the patience to continue, dear reader, and if you have understood this first and very short chapter, you will tell me your opinion afterwards.

Chapter II. A PRIORI CONCEPTIONS OF POLITICAL ORDER: REGIME OF AUTHORITY, REGIME OF LIBERTY

We know the two fundamental and antithetical principles of all governments: authority and liberty.

Because of the tendency of the human mind to bring all its ideas under a single principle, proceeding to eliminate those which seem to be incompatible with it, two different regimes are derived, a priori, from these two primordial ideas, according to the preference or partiality accorded one or the other: the regime of authority and the regime of liberty.

Moreover, since society is composed of individuals, and the relation of the individual to the group may be conceived, from a political standpoint, in four different ways, four forms of government result, two for each regime:

Regime of authority A) Government of all by one -- monarchy or patriarchy;

a) Government of all by all -- panarchy or communism. The essential feature of this regime, in both its varieties, is the non-division of power. Regime of liberty B) Government of all by each -- democracy;

b) Government of each by each -- an-archy or self-government. The essential feature of this regime, in both its varieties, is the division of power.

Remarks

I. We know how monarchical government, the original expression of the principle of authority, arises. De Bonald has told us: by paternal authority.1

Under this regime, the state develops in two ways: 1. by generation, or the natural increase of the family, 2. by adoption, that is, the voluntary or forced incorporation of neighbouring families and tribes, but in such a way that the united tribes, together with the mother tribe, form but one family, a single domesticity. The monarchical state may develop thus to an enormous size, reaching a population of hundreds of millions, spread over hundreds of square leagues.

Panarchy, pantocracy, or communism, arises naturally through the death of the monarch or family head, and by the declared intention of the subjects, brothers, children, or members to remain together, without choosing a new leader. This political form is rare -- if indeed there are any examples of it at all -- authority here being more oppressive and individuality more crushed than in any other form. It has scarcely ever been adopted except by religious associations, which, of whatever country and whatever faith, have tended to extinguish liberty. But all the same the idea is given a priori, like the idea of monarchy; it will find its application in existing governments, and we must mention it if only for the record.

Thus monarchy, founded upon nature, justified, therefore, on its own terms, has its own legitimacy and morality; and the same goes for communism. But we shall soon see that these two varieties of the one regime, despite their concrete basis and logical derivation, cannot maintain themselves in the full rigour of their principles and their essential purity, that they are condemned as a result to a hypothetical status. In truth, despite their patriarchal origin, their complacent mood, their pretences to absolutism and divine right, monarchy and communism, as developed expressions of a type, exist nowhere.

II. How, in turn, does democratic government arise, that spontaneous expression of the principle of liberty? Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Revolution have taught us: by agreement. Here physiology counts for nothing; the state figures as the product, not of organic nature, of the flesh, but of intelligible nature, that is, the mind.

Under this regime, the state develops by free accession or adhesion. Just as all the citizens are held to have signed a contract, so the foreigner who joins the city is held to agree to it in his turn; it is on this condition that he acquires his rights and privileges as citizen. If the state goes to war and is victorious, its principle leads it to accord to the conquered peoples the same rights as its own nationals enjoy; this is called isonomy. Such, among the Romans, was the granting of civic right. Even children are held to have sworn to the pact on coming of age; it is not because they are sons of citizens that they become citizens in turn, as in monarchies a subject's children are subjects by birth, or, as in Lycurgus' or Plato's cities, because they belong to the state.2

The same goes for the accession of a family, a city, or a province; it is always liberty which constitutes its principles and supplies its motives.

Thus the development of the authoritarian state, patriarchal, monarchical, or communist, confronts the development of the liberal, contractual, democratic state. Just as there is no natural limit to the scale of a monarchy, so that throughout time and among all peoples the idea of a universal or messianic monarchy has arisen, so there is no natural limit to the scale of the democratic state, which has prompted the idea of a universal democracy or republic.

As a variety of the liberal regime I have mentioned anarchy -- the government of each by himself, self-government. Since the phrase anarchic government involves a kind of contradiction, the thing seems impossible and the idea absurd. However, there is nothing to find fault with here but language; politically, the idea of anarchy is quite as rational and concrete as any other. What it means is that political functions have been reduced to industrial functions, and that social order arises from nothing but transactions and exchanges. Each may then say that he is the absolute ruler of himself, the polar opposite of monarchical absolutism.

Just as monarchy and communism, founded in nature and reason, have their legitimacy and morality, though they can never be realized as absolutely pure types, so too democracy and anarchy, founded in liberty and justice, pursuing an ideal in accordance with their principle, have their legitimacy and morality. But we shall see that in their case too, despite their rational and juridical origin, they cannot remain strictly congruent with their pure concepts as their population and territory develop and grow, and that they are fated to remain perpetual desiderata. Despite the powerful appeal of liberty, neither democracy nor anarchy has arisen anywhere, in a complete and uncompromised form.

Chapter III. FORMS OF GOVERNMENT

Nevertheless, it is with the help of these metaphysical toys that governments have been established since the beginning of the world, and it is with their help that we shall come to resolve the enigma of politics, if we are willing to make the slightest effort to do so. I hope I will be forgiven, then, for labouring this point, as one does in teaching the rudiments of grammar to children.

In the above discussion, there is not a word that does not have perfect precision. One reasons no differently in pure mathematics. It is not in the use which we make of ideas that the source of our errors lies; it is in the omissions which we permit ourselves, under the pretext of being logical, in applying them.

a) Authority and liberty: here indeed are the two poles of politics. Their opposition -- antithetical, diametrical, contradictory -- is our certain guarantee that a third term is impossible, that it does not exist. Between yes and no, between being and non-being, logic permits nothing.*

b) The interconnection of these two ideas, their irreducibility, their life, have also been displayed. One does not come without the other; one cannot suppress one or the other, or resolve the two into a single expression. As to their life, one has only to confront them together, and, tending to absorb one another, to develop at one another's expense, they at once spring into action.

c) From these two ideas society receives two different regimes which we have called the regime of authority and the regime of liberty; each of these may then adopt two different forms, no more, no less. Authority appears in all its splendour only in the collectivity; hence it cannot express itself or act except in the collectivity itself or through an agent which personifies it; likewise, liberty is perfect only when it is guaranteed to all, either by all men taking part in government, or else by their delegating the trust to no one. It is impossible to escape these alternatives: government of all by all or government of all by one, in the case of the regime of authority; participation of each in the government of all or government of each by himself, in the case of the regime of liberty. All this is as necessary as unity and plurality, heat and cold, light and shadow.

But, I will be asked, have we never seen government become the property of some part, large or small, of the nation, the rest being excluded: aristocracy, government by the upper classes, ochlocracy, government by the poor, oligarchy, government by a faction? A fair objection, granted. But such governments are de facto, the work of usurpation, violence, reaction, transition, empiricism, in which all the principles are simultaneously adopted, and then all violated, misunderstood, confused; and we are dealing here with a priori governments, conceived according to logic, and upon a single principle.

There is nothing arbitrary, to repeat, in the politics of reason, which sooner or later must cease to separate itself from practical politics. The arbitrary belongs neither to nature nor to the mind; it is generated neither by the necessity of things nor by the infallible logic of concepts. The arbitrary is the child -- of what? Its name will tell you: of free will, of liberty. How fine! The only enemy liberty has to fear is not, at bottom, authority, which all men adore as though it were justice; it is liberty itself, the liberty of the prince, of the great, of the mass, disguised under the mask of authority.

From the a priori definition of the various types of government, let us now turn to their forms.

What is called the form of government is the manner in which power is distributed and exercised. By nature and logic these forms are related to the principle, origin, and law of each regime.

Just as the father of the primitive family and the patriarch of the tribe are at once master of the household, of the chariot, or the tent, herus, dominus, owner of the land, and beasts, and the crops, farmer, craftsman, manager, trader, performer of sacrifices, warrior; so too, in a monarchy, the prince is at once legislator, administrator, judge, general, high priest. He has the eminent domain in land and rent; he rules over the arts and professions, commerce, agriculture, navigation, public education, and is invested with every right and all authority. In short, the king is representative of the society, its incarnation; he is the state. The union or non-division of powers is characteristic of royalty. To the principle of authority which distinguishes the father and the king, there is added as corollary the principle of unlimited attribution. A military chieftain, like Joshua; a judge, like Samuel; a priest, like Aaron; a king, like David; a legislator, like Moses, Solon, Lycurgus, Numa -- all these titles are united in the same bearer. That is the spirit of monarchy, those are its forms.

Soon, due to the growth of the state, the exercise of authority surpasses the capacity of one man. The prince thus equips himself with the aid of counsellors, officers, or ministers, chosen by him, who act in his place as his delegates, or attorneys, in relation to the people. As much as the prince whom they represent, these envoys, satraps, proconsuls, or prefects acquire through their mandate all the attributes of authority. But it is understood that they must give account of their conduct to the king their master, in whose interest and name they govern, who directs them, and who makes them watch over one another in such a way as to ensure that he retains the highest authority, the honour of commanding, and the profits of the state, and that he is secure from any usurpation or sedition. As for the nation, it has no right to demand an account, nor do the agents of the prince have to give it one. In this system, the subjects' only security is the interest of the sovereign, who, however, knows no law but his own good pleasure.

In the communist regime, the forms of government are the same, that is, power is exercised in an undivided fashion by the collectivity just as it was before by the king alone. Thus it was that among the Germans, in May, the whole people, without distinction of age and sex, deliberated and judged; thus the Cimbri and Teutons, accompanied by their women, fought against Marius.3"

The forms of the liberal or democratic state likewise correspond to the generative principle and developmental law of this system; as a result, they differ radically from that of monarchy. They consist in the fact that power, instead of being collectively and indivisibly exercised as in the primitive community, is dispersed among the citizens, in one of two ways. In the case of a task which is physically divisible, such as the construction of a road, the commanding of a fleet, the policing of a town, or the education of the young, one divides the work into segments, the fleet into squadrons or even single ships, the town into districts, the teaching into classes, to each of which one assigns a contractor, manager, admiral, captain, or master. The Athenians were in the habit of appointing ten or twelve generals in wartime, each of whom in turn commanded for a day -- a practice which now seems distinctly odd, but the Athenian democracy would stand for nothing more. If the function is not divisible, it is left intact. Several officials may be appointed to deal with it (despite Homer's precept that more than one commander is a bad thing) -- thus, where we send but one ambassador, the ancients sent a whole company of them; or else one may assign each function to a single official who makes it his profession, his skill -- which tends to introduce into the body politic a special class of citizens, public functionaries. From that moment, democracy is in danger: the state separates itself from the nation; its personnel almost become what they were under the monarchy, more loyal to the prince than to nation or state. In reaction, a great idea is born, one of the greatest ideas of science: that of the division or separation of powers. Thanks to this idea, society takes a strongly organic form; revolutions may come and go like the seasons, but there is something which will never perish, this fine organization of the public power by categories: justice, administration, war, finance, religion, education, commerce, etc.

The organization of liberal or democratic government is more complicated and more sophisticated, its practice more laborious and less dramatic than that of monarchical government; consequently, it is less popular. Almost always the masses have regarded forms of free government as aristocratic, and they have preferred absolute monarchy. Hence that vicious circle in which progressives are trapped, and which will trap them still for many years to come. Naturally, it is in order to improve the lot of the masses that republicans demand liberties and securities; it is, therefore, upon the people that they must rely. But is is always the people who, through their distrust of or indifference to democratic forms, stand in the way of liberty.*

4 The Council of Ten was an institution established by the Republic of Venice in the fourteenth century for dealing with matters of internal security; it had unlimited powers, proceeded in secrecy, and was responsible to no one. Proudhon here follows Montesquieu in taking Venice as the prime example of a republic with despotic elements: see De l'Esprit des lois XI 6.

The forms of anarchy depend upon the will of each individual, within the limits of his rights, and are indifferently monarchical or democratic.

Such are, in principle and form, the four fundamental governments, supplied a priori by the human understanding as a basis for all the political establishments of the future. But, to repeat, these four types, though suggested by the nature of things as well as by the sense of liberty and justice, are not in themselves, strictly conceived, ever to be realized. They are ideal conceptions, abstract formulas, in the light of which real governments will emerge empirically and by intuition, but they themselves can never become real. Reality is inherently complex; the simple never leaves the realm of the ideal, never arrives at the concrete. In these antithetic formulas we have the foundation for a correct constitution, the future constitution of man; but centuries must have passed, a series of revolutions must have unfolded, before the definitive formula can spring from the mind which must conceive it, the mind of humanity.

Chapter IV. COMPROMISE BETWEEN THE PRINCIPLES: ORIGINS OF POLITICAL CONTRADICTIONS

Since the two principles which form the basis of all social order, authority and liberty, on the one hand are contradictory and always at odds and on the other can neither exclude one another nor find a resolution, a compromise between them is unavoidable. Whatever system one prefers, monarchical or democratic, communist or anarchic, it cannot last for long unless it is able to make use, in varying degrees, of the premises of its contrary.

For example, it would be wide of the mark to suppose that the authoritarian regime, with its paternalist character, its familial ties, and its absolutism, could satisfy its own needs unaided. Let the state expand but slightly, and its revered paternalism soon declines into impotence, confusion, folly, and tyranny. The prince cannot attend to everything; he must rely upon servants who deceive him, steal from him, discredit him, dishonour him, supplant him, and finally dethrone him. The disorder inherent in absolute power, the demoralization which it causes, the disasters which threaten it perpetually, are the bane of society and state. So one may take it as axiomatic that monarchy is more kindly, moral, just, tolerable, and stable -- setting aside for the moment the question of external affairs -- the more modest its dimensions are and the closer it is to a family; and, vice versa, that this government is more inadequate, oppressive, disliked by its subjects and consequently unstable, the larger the state becomes. History informs us, and modern times furnish examples, of such dreadful monarchies, shapeless monsters, true political mastodons, which civilization must gradually render extinct. In all such states, absolutism is a direct function of scale; it persists through its own prestige. In a small state, on the contrary, tyranny may survive for a while only through the use of mercenary troops; seen close up, it vanishes.

To compensate for this inherent vice, monarchical governments have been led in varying degrees to make use of the forms of liberty, notably the separation of powers or the division of sovereignty.

The reason for this reform is easy to see. If one man can scarcely manage an estate of a few hundred acres, or an industry employing a few hundred workers, or administer a town with five or six thousand inhabitants, how can he shoulder the burden of an empire of forty million men? Here, therefore, monarchy has been obliged to adapt itself to two principles, borrowed from political economy: 1. that the greatest volume of work is done and the greatest value produced where the worker is free and works on his own account as businessman or farmer; 2. that the quality of products or services is improved where the producer knows his work and devotes himself to it exclusively. There is yet another reason for these borrowings by monarchies from democracy, namely, that the wealth of society increases proportionately with the division and interdependence of industries; which means, in a political context, that government will be better and involve less danger to the prince where functions are better divided and balanced -- something which is impossible in an absolutist regime. That is how princes have been led to republicanize themselves, so to speak, in order to avoid certain ruin: recent years have provided striking examples, in Piedmont, Austria, and Russia. In the dreadful condition in which Tsar Nicholas left his empire, the introduction of the division of powers in government was among the major reforms introduced by his son, Alexander.*

Parallel but inverse phenomena may be seen in democratic governments.

It is no easy task to settle with due wisdom and precision the rights and duties of citizens and the tasks of officials, to foresee circumstances, exceptions, and anomalies. The unforeseeable far surpasses in its richness the prudence of the statesman, and the more one legislates the more ligitation one provokes. All this requires that office-holders must have initiative and discretion, which, in order to be effective, must be authoritatively sanctioned. Take away from the democratic principle and from liberty the supreme sanction of authority, and the state will be ruined on the spot. It is clear, moreover, that we are no longer in the domain of free contract, unless we assume that the citizens specifically consent, in matters of litigation, to submit to the decision of one man, a magistrate designated in advance -- which is precisely to renounce the principle of democracy for that of monarchy.

Let a democracy multiply indefinitely its legal guarantees and means of controlling its civil servants, let it surround its agents with formalities and call its citizens incessantly to elections, debates, and votes: willy-nilly its officials are men of authority, expressly so; and if among its personnel one or several have general responsibility for affairs, this head of government, individual or collective, is what Rousseau himself called a prince; he is but a hair's-breadth away from a king.

Similar considerations apply to communism and anarchy. There has never been an example of perfect communism; and it is scarcely likely, however far the human race may progress in civilization, morality, and wisdom, that all traces of government and authority will vanish. And yet, while communism remains the dream of the majority of socialists, anarchy is the ideal of the economists, who attempt strenuously to put an end to all governmental institutions and to rest society upon the foundations of property and free labour alone.

I shall not multiply examples any further. What I have just said is enough to prove the truth of my proposition: that monarchy and democracy, communism and anarchy, all of them unable to realize themselves in the purity of their concepts, are obliged to complement one another by mutual borrowings.

There is surely something here to dampen the intolerance of fanatics who cannot listen to a contrary opinion to their own without exasperation. They should learn, then, poor wretches, that they are themselves necessarily disloyal to their principles, that their political creeds are tissues of inconsistencies; and may those in power, for their part, learn not to see seditious sentiments in the discussion of alternative modes of government! In grasping once and for all that terms such as monarchy, democracy, and so on express merely theoretical conceptions, the royalist will remain calm when faced with words such as social contract, popular sovereignty, universal suffrage, and so on; the democrat, in hearing of dynasties, absolute power, divine right, will smilingly preserve his sang-froid. There is no true monarchy; there is no true democracy. Monarchy is the primitive, physiological, and so to speak patronymic form of the state; it lives in the people's hearts, and attests visibly and forcibly to the general tendency to unity. Democracy in turn is in ferment all around us; it entrances generous souls, and everywhere seizes hold of the elite of society. But the dignity of our time requires us to break once and for all with these illusions, which all too often degenerate into lies. Contradiction lies at the root of all programs. The tribunes of the people swear unwittingly by monarchy; the kings, by democracy and anarchy. After the coronation of Napoleon I, the words French Republic were long to be seen on one face of our coins, while the other bore, with Napoleon's picture, the title Emperor of the French. In 1830 Lafayette termed Louis-Phillippe's reign the best of republics; was he not also termed the king of the landlords? Garibaldi honoured Victor Emmanuel as Lafayette had Louis-Phillipe. Later, indeed, Lafayette and Garibaldi seemed to regret this; but their first views are to be remembered, especially as any retraction would be deceptive. No democrat can claim to be innocent of all monarchism; no partisan of monarchy can pride himself on his freedom from all republicanism. It is the case that since democracy has not been able to reject the dynastic position, any more than the unitary idea, the partisans of the two systems have no right to excommunicate one another, and tolerance is appropriate to them both.

What, then, is politics, if it is impossible for a society to found itself exclusively upon the principle which it favours; if, whatever the legislator may do, any government, whether it is called monarchical or democratic, must always covertly be a mixed form, in which contrary elements mingle in arbitrary proportions according to caprice and interest; in which the most precise definitions lead inescapably to confusion and laxness; in which, as a result, all changes of heart and all defections are permissible, and versatility figures as honourable? The way is open for charlatanism, intrigue, treachery! What state can survive in the midst of such corrosion? No sooner is the state born than its internal contradictions condemn it to mortality. A strange creation, in which logic remains powerless, while inconsistency alone seems practical and rational!*

Chapter V. DE FACTO GOVERNMENTS: SOCIAL DISSOLUTION

Since monarchy and democracy, to confine myself henceforth to these two alone, are ideals deriving from theory, unrealizable in accordance with their strict definitions, we are obliged to come to terms, as I have explained, with practical compromises of various kinds. From these enforced compromises arise all existing governments. Such governments, the work of empiricism, infinitely variable, are therefore essentially and without exception composite or mixed.

I may point out here that writers have mistakenly introduced a political assumption as false as it is dangerous, in failing to distinguish practice from theory, the real from the ideal; they have put on one plane pure concepts of government that are unrealistically simple, such as monarchy and democracy, and de facto or mixed governments. The truth, to repeat, is that governments of the first type do not and cannot exist except in theory; every real government is necessarily mixed, whether it is called a monarchy or a democracy. This is an important consideration; it alone permits us to trace the countless frauds, corruptions, and revolutions of politics to a logical error.

All varieties of existing government, in other words, all the political compromises attempted or proposed from the most ancient times to our own day, may be reduced to two principal types, which I shall call, using their current names, empire and constitutional monarchy. This calls for an explanation.

Since men have lived from the very beginning with war and inequality of wealth, society divides naturally into a certain number of classes: warriors or nobles, priests, landlords, merchants, mariners, industrialists, peasants. Where royalty exists, it forms a class of its own, the highest of all -- a dynasty.

The struggle of classes among one another, the opposition of their interests, the manner in which these interests coalesce, determine the political regime, and consequently the choice of government in its numerous varieties and yet more numerous variations. Step by step all these classes are resolved into two: an upper class, aristocracy, bourgeoisie, or patrician class; and a lower, plebs or proletariat, between which is suspended royalty, the organ of power, the expression of authority. If the aristocracy unites with royalty, the resulting government will be a moderated monarchy, currently called constitutional; if it is the people who unite with authority, the government will be an empire or autocratic democracy. Medieval theocracy was a pact between the priesthood and the emperor; the Caliphate, a religious and military monarchy. In Tyre, Sidon, Carthage, royalty allied itself with the merchant caste when this rose to power. It seems that in Rome royalty at first respected patricians and plebeians alike; then, when the two classes united against the crown, royalty was abolished, and the state took the name of a republic. The patrician class retained its dominance; but this aristocratic constitution was as nebulous as that of Athenian democracy. Government rested upon expediency, and, while the Athenian democracy collapsed under the impact of the Peloponnesian war, world conquest was the outcome of the senate's need to keep the people occupied. When the world had been pacified, civil war raged bitterly; to end it the plebs gave itself a leader, destroyed the patricians and the republic, and created the empire.

Surprise is occasioned by the fact that a government founded by bourgeois or patricians in alliance with a dynasty should generally be more liberal than one founded by the masses under the leadership of a dictator or a tribune. The phenomenon may indeed seem all the more surprising in that the people are at bottom more interested in and more genuinely attached to liberty than the bourgeoisie. But this paradox, the great stumbling-block of politics, is explained by the situation of the parties: in the case of a popular victory, the people must think and act autocratically, but when the bourgeois enjoy supremacy they think and act as republicans. Let us return to the fundamental dualism of authority and liberty, and we shall understand the matter.

From the divergence of these two principles, and under the influence of contrary passions and interests, two opposite tendencies, two currents of opinion, emerge. The partisans of authority tend to reduce the scope of liberty -- individual, corporative, or local -- as much as possible, and by this means to exploit to their own profit and at the expense of the mass the power with which they ally themselves. The partisans of the liberal regime, on the other hand, tend to restrain authority and to conquer the aristocracy by relentlessly limiting public functions and the acts and forms of power. Because of their position, because of the modesty of their wealth, the people seek equality and liberty from governments; for the opposite reason, the land-owning, financial, and industrial patricians favour a monarchy which will protect the great interests and secure order for their own profit, and as a result stress authority at the expense of liberty.

Thus all existing governments, whatever their motives and however circumspect they may be, fall under one or other of these two headings: the subordination of authority to liberty, or the subordination of liberty to authority.

But the same cause which sets the bourgeoisie and the people against each other soon leads both of them full circle. In order to ensure victory, democracy, since it is ignorant of the requirements of power and incapable of exercising it, equips itself with an absolute leader, before whom all privileges of caste disappear; the bourgeoisie, fearing despotism as much as it does anarchy, prefers to consolidate its position by establishing a constitutional monarchy. At the end of the day, indeed, it is the party with the strongest need for liberty and legality that creates absolutism, and the party of privilege which institutes liberal government, which it preserves by restricting political rights.

It is clear from this that if one abstracts away the economic considerations which bear upon the matter, there is no difference between bourgeoisie and democracy, imperialism and constitutionalism, or however these opposing governments may be styled; and that questions such as whether the regime of 1814 was better than the regime of 1804; whether the nation would do well to abandon the 1852 constitution for that of 1830; whether the republican party will merge with the Orleanists or ally itself with the empire -- all such questions, I say, from the point of view of law and principle, are puerile. A government, from the perspective given here, is to be measured by the considerations which sway it and the men who represent it, and all theoretical disputes on this topic are futile and can lead only to absurdity.

The contradictions of politics, the changes of front by the parties, the perpetual inversion of positions, are so frequent in history and play so large a part in human affairs that I cannot resist labouring the point. The dualism of authority and liberty supplies the key to all enigmas; without the aid of this primordial explanation, the history of states would be the despair of the mind and the scandal of philosophy.

The aristocracy of England produced Magna Carta; the Puritans produced Cromwell. In France, it is the bourgeoisie which forms the permanent base for all our liberal constitutions. In Rome, the patriarchate organized the republic; the plebs gave birth to the caesars and the praetorians. In the sixteenth century the Reformation was at first aristocratic; the people remained Catholic or adopted masses in the style of John of Leyden: it was the opposite of what had happened four hundred years before, when the nobles burned the Albigensians. In the middle ages, as Ferrari notes, how often Ghibellines became Guelfs, and Guelfs became Ghibellines! In 1813, France fought on the side of despotism, the allies for liberty, the precise opposite of what had happened in 1792. Today the Legitimists and the clerical interests support federation; the democrats believe in unity. Such examples cannot be conclusive; but the fact remains that ideas, men, and things cannot always be placed in terms of their natural tendencies and their origins, that the blues will not always be blues, nor the whites always whites.

Because of their inferiority and their distress, the people will always form the army of liberty and progress. Work is republican by nature; to deny this involves contradiction. But because of their ignorance, the crudeness of their instincts, the violence of their needs, and the impatience of their desires, the people favour forms of summary authority. What they seek is not at all legal guarantees, of which they have no idea, nor understand the power; it is not at all a mechanical contrivance or a balance of forces, which they see as of little account: it is a leader whose word they can trust, whose intentions are known, and who is devoted to their own interests. This leader will enjoy unlimited authority and irresistible power. By their nature the people accept as just everything they deem to be useful, laugh at formalities, and impose no conditions on those who hold power. Quick to suspect and to slander, but incapable of methodical discussion, they believe fundamentally in nothing but human will; they pin their hopes to man, they trust only in their own creatures, 'in princes, in the sons of men.' They expect nothing from principles, which alone can save them; they do not worship ideas.

Thus the people of Rome, after seven centuries of a progressively liberal regime and a series of victories over the patricians, thought they could solve all their problems by abolishing the party of authority and, enlarging the tribune's function, they made Caesar permanent dictator, silenced the senate, closed down the comitia, and for a bushel of corn, annona, founded imperial autocracy. What is remarkable is that this popular movement was genuinely convinced of its own liberalism, supposing that it represented the cause of justice, equality, and progress. Caesar's soldiers, worshipping their emperor, were full of hate and mistrust of kings; if those who murdered the tyrant were not slaughtered on the spot, it was only because the night before Caesar had been seen setting a royal wreath upon his bald brow. Thus Napoleon's entourage, sometime Jacobins, enemies of the nobles, priests, and kings, calmly took the title of baron or duke or prince and played courtier to the emperor, but they could not forgive him for marrying a Habsburg princess.

Left to themselves or led by their tribunes, the masses will never create anything. They set their face towards the past; no tradition forms among them, there is no sense of continuity, no idea which acquires the force of law. They understand nothing of politics but intrigue, nothing of government but waste and force, nothing of justice but revenge, nothing of liberty but the ability to set up idols whom they destroy the next day. The advent of democracy would begin an era of decadence which would lead nation and state to their graves, if they did not resist the fate which threatens them by means of a contrary revolution, a topic to which we shall turn.

Just as the people, living from day to day, without property, business, or public employment, have nothing to lose under tyranny and scarcely worry about the prospect, so the bourgeoisie, owning property, trading and manufacturing, hungry for land and patronage, has an interest in forestalling disasters and keeping power under its own control. Its need for order leads it to liberal ideas; hence the constitutions which it imposes upon its kings. While surrounding its preferred government with legal restraints and subjecting it to parliamentary control, it confines political rights to property-owners and abolishes universal suffrage; but it keeps its hands off centralized administration, the bastion of industrial order. If the separation of powers is useful to it in balancing the power of the crown and restraining the personal will of the prince, and if a restricted electorate is a useful defence against popular aspirations, centralization is no less precious -- firstly, for the employment which it provides, giving the bourgeoisie its share of power and tax revenues, secondly, for making possible the peaceful exploitation of the masses. Under a system of centralized administration and restricted suffrage, as long as the bourgeoisie retains control of government through its votes, the life of the locality is suppressed and any agitation easily contained; under such a system, the working class, penned up in its factories, is inevitably condemned to wage-slavery. Liberty exists, but only within the realm of bourgeois society, cosmopolitan like its capital cities; as for the masses, they are resigned to their fate, not only politically, but economically too.

Need I add that the suppression or maintenance of a dynasty does not change the system at all? A unitary republic and a constitutional monarchy are one and the same thing; a mere change of name, and one official more or less, distinguish the two.

But if democratic absolutism is unstable, bourgeois constitutionalism is no less so. The former is retrogressive, without restraint, without principles, contemptuous of law, hostile to liberty, destructive of all security and trust. The constitutional system, with its legal forms, its juridical spirit, its moderate temperament, its parliamentary rituals, is in the last analysis nothing but a vast system of exploitation and intrigue, in which politics is at the service of speculation, tax revenues nothing but the civil list of a caste, and monopolistic power the servant of monopoly. The people have a dim sense of this immense plunder; constitutional guarantees mean little to them, and we have seen, especially in 1815, that they prefer their emperor, despite his bad faith, to their legitimate kings, despite their liberalism.

The repeated failures of democratic empire and bourgeois constitutionalism in turn have led to the creation of a third party, which, mustering under the flag of scepticism, holding no principle sacred, fundamentally and systematically immoral, tends to rule (as has been said) like a see-saw, by ruining all authority and all liberty, in a word by corruption. This is what is called the doctrinaire system.5

Chapter VI. THE POLITICAL PROBLEM POSED:

THE PRINCIPLE OF A SOLUTION

If the reader has followed the above account with some care, human society should appear to him as a fantastic creation, full of surprises and mysteries. Let us briefly recall the steps of the argument.

a) Political order rests upon two complementary, opposed, and irreducible principles: authority and liberty.

b) From these two principles are derived two correspondingly opposed regimes: the absolutist or authoritarian regime, and the liberal regime.

c) The forms of these two regimes are no less different, incompatible, and irreconcilable than their principles; we have defined them in terms of two words, indivisibility and separation.

d) Now, reason tells us that every theory must unfold in accordance with its principle, that everything that exists must correspond with its law. Logic is a necessity of life as it is of thought. But precisely the contrary occurs in politics: neither authority nor liberty can be realized alone or give rise to a system founded exclusively upon itself; indeed, the two are condemned, in their respective institutions, to make endless mutual borrowings.

e) The result is that in politics fidelity to principle belongs to the realm of the ideal; that since practice must accept compromises of every kind, government is reduced in the last resort, with all the good will and virtue imaginable, to a hybrid, equivocal thing, a promiscuity of rule which strict logic condemns and innocence shrinks from. No government escapes this contradiction.

f) Conclusion: since arbitrariness enters necessarily into politics, corruption soon becomes the soul of power, and society is led without rest or reprieve along the path of incessant revolution.

Everything is there. It is not the result of an evil will, or of some weakness of our nature, or of a providential curse, or of a whim of fortune or a decree of fate. Things are thus, that is all. It is up to us to make the best of this strange situation.

Let us bear in mind that for eight thousand years -- historical records reach back no further -- all the varieties of government, all social and political arrangements, have been successively tried, abandoned, taken up again, modified, travestied, exhausted, and that failure has rewarded the zeal of reformers and disappointed the hopes of nations. Always the flag of liberty has served to disguise despotism; always the privileged classes have surrounded themselves with liberal and egalitarian institutions in order to protect their privileges; always parties have been unfaithful to their programs, and always faith has given way to indifference and civic spirit to corruption, and states have been ruined by the logic of the ideas upon which they have been founded. The most vigorous and intelligent peoples have been exhausted in this work; history amply records their struggles. Now and then a run of successes has lent states the illusion of strength, and men have seen in them constitutional excellence and political wisdom which was not really theirs. But when peace returned, the vices of their systems emerged for all to see, and their subjects took rest from the fatigue of foreign war in civil war. Humanity has thus gone from revolution to revolution: even the most notable and long-lived nations have maintained themselves in this way. Among all the governments ever known and tried, there is not one that would live out the span of man's life if it relied upon its own resources. What is odd is that heads of state and their ministers, of all people, are least convinced of the stability of the system which they stand for; until science takes over, it is the faith of the masses that government rests upon. The Greeks and Romans, who left us their institutions and their example, relapsed into despair when the most interesting point of their development arrived; and modern society seems to have arrived in turn at its hour of anguish. Do not heed the agitators who call for liberty, equality, nationality. They know nothing; they are dead men who claim the power to make the dead live. The people listen to them for a while, as they do to clowns and quacks; then they pass on, with empty minds and despairing spirits.

A sure sign that collapse is near and that a new era is soon to dawn is that the confusion of language and thought has reached such a point that anyone may describe himself at will as a republican, monarchist, democrat, bourgeois, conservative, distributivist, liberal -- and as all these at once, without fear of being accused of deception or error. The princes and barons of the First Empire had revolutionary credentials. The bourgeoisie of 1814, bloated with the nation's wealth -- the one thing they had really understood in 1789 -- was liberal, even revolutionary; 1830 made them conservative again; 1848 made them reactionary, Catholic, and above all monarchist. Currently they are republicans of February who support the royal cause of Victor Emmanuel, while the socialists of June are adherents of unity.6

What we need to know is whether society can arrive at some settled, equitable, and stable state of things, acceptable to our reason and our conscience, or whether we are condemned for all eternity to this Ixion's wheel. Is the problem insoluble? A little more patience, dear reader; and if I cannot soon rescue you from this imbroglio, then you have the right to say that logic is false, progress an illusion, liberty a Utopia. Consent to follow my argument for a few minutes more, even though to think about such a thing is to risk deceiving oneself and wasting one's time as well as one's reason.

1. You will notice first of all that these two principles, authority and liberty, which are at the root of all the trouble, appear in history in logical and temporal sequence. Authority, like the family, the father, genitor, appears first; it has the initiative, it is affirmation. Liberty is reflective and comes later: it criticizes, protests, concludes. This sequence arises from the definition of terms and from the nature of things, and all history bears witness to it. It cannot be inverted, there is nothing arbitrary about it.

2. No less worthy of note is that the authoritarian, paternal, monarchic regime is more distant from its ideal to the extent that the family, tribe, or city expands in population and territory: the more extensive authority is, the more intolerable it becomes. Hence the concessions which it is obliged to make to liberty. Conversely, the libertarian system approaches its ideal more closely and has a greater chance of success to the extent that the state expands in population and scale, to the extent that relations among men multiply and the realm of science develops. At first the demand for a constitution is heard from all sides; later the demand will be for decentralization. Follow this a little further, and you will see the idea of federation emerge; one may say of liberty and authority what John the Baptist said of himself and Jesus: 'Illam oportet crescere, hanc autem minui.'

This double movement, of regress on the one hand and progress on the other, both converging upon a single outcome, results likewise from the definition of principles, from their relative position and their roles. Here again there is no uncertainty, not the least room for arbitrariness. The fact is empirically proved and of mathematical certainty; it is what we shall call a law.

3. The result of this law, which may be called a necessary one, is that the principle of authority, which appears first and serves as material to be worked upon by liberty, reason, and law, gives way step by step to the juridical, rationalist, and liberal principle. The head of state, at first inviolable, irresponsible and absolute like the head of a family, becomes responsible to reason, the first subject of law, and eventually a mere agent, instrument, or servant of liberty itself.

This third proposition is as certain as the first two, beyond all doubt or denial, and fully demonstrated by history. In the eternal struggle between these two principles the French Revolution, like the Reformation, is a turning point. It marks the point in political development where liberty took precedence over authority, just as in religious development the Reformation marks the point where freedom took precedence over faith. Since Luther's time belief has everywhere become reflective; orthodoxy no less than heresy claims to justify faith by reason; Saint Paul's maxim, 'rationabile sit obsequium vestrum' (Let your obedience be reasoned), has been interpreted broadly and put into practice; Rome enters into debate with Geneva; religion tends to turn itself into a science; submission to the church becomes subject to so many conditions and reservations that only the acceptance of articles of faith marks off the Christian from the atheist. They are not of the same opinion, that is all; as for the rest, they rely equally upon thought, reason, and conscience. Likewise, respect for authority has become weaker since the French Revolution; deference to the prince's orders has become conditional; the sovereign has been required to make agreements, to give guarantees; the political mood has changed; the most fervent royalists have demanded charters like John Lackland's barons, and Messrs Berryer, de Falloux, de Montalembert, and so on can claim to be as liberal as the democrats.8

Chapter VII. ISOLATION OF THE IDEA OF FEDERATION

Since in theory and in history authority and liberty succeed one another in a polar movement; since the former declines imperceptibly and withdraws, while the latter expands and becomes prominent; since this dual movement leads to a subordination such that authority becomes progressively the instrument of liberty; since, in other words, the liberal or contractual system gains the upper hand day by day over the authoritarian system, it is the idea of contract that we must take to be the principal idea in politics.

What is meant, first of all, by contract?

A contract [Civil Code, article 1101] is an agreement by which one or more persons oblige themselves to one or more others to perform or to refrain from some action.

Article 1102: It is synallagmatic or bilateral when the contracting parties undertake reciprocal obligations.

Article 1103: It is unilateral, when one or more persons have an obligation to one or more others, without the latter having any obligation.

Article 1104: It is commutative when each of the parties undertakes to give something which is regarded as equal in value to what the other party gives or does in return. When the benefits consist in an opportunity for each party to gain, or to lose, the outcome being uncertain, the contract is aleatory.

Article 1105: A contract of goodwill is that in which one of the parties provides the other with a purely gratuitous benefit.

Article 1106: An onerous contract is one which obliges both parties to give or to do something.

Article 1371: Quasi-contracts are those voluntary acts of men which give rise to an obligation to a third party, and sometimes to reciprocal obligations between two parties.

To these distinctions and definitions in the Code, which bear upon the forms and conditions of contracts, I shall add a further distinction regarding their objects: according to the nature of the things which are bargained for or to the object which one has in view, contracts are domestic, civil, commercial, or political. It is with the last of these, political contracts, that we shall be concerned.

The idea of contract is not entirely unknown in monarchies, or in families. But in terms of what we have said about the principles of authority and liberty and their role in the formation of governments, it will be clear that these principles relate in different ways to the political contract; the obligation uniting the monarch to his subjects, which is spontaneous and unwritten, arising from family feeling and personal qualities, is a unilateral obligation, for by virtue of the principle of obedience the subject is obliged to do more for his prince than the prince for him. The theory of divine right states expressly that the monarch is responsible only to God. It may even happen that the prince's contract with the subject degenerates into a contract of pure good will, when his subjects' incapacity or their idolatry leads the prince to treat his people, unable to govern or to defend themselves, as a shepherd treats his sheep. It is even worse when the hereditary principle is adopted. A conspirator like the Duke of Orleans, later Louis XII, a parricide like Louis XI, and an adulteress like Mary Stuart maintain their right to the throne despite their crimes. Birth renders them inviolable, and one may say that a quasi-contract exists between them and the loyal subjects of the prince whom they succeed. In a word, simply because authority is preponderant in the monarchical system, the contract is not equal.

The political contract does not attain its full dignity and morality except where (1) it is synallagmatic and commutative, (2) it is confined, in its object, within definite limits -- two conditions which are held to exist in the democratic system, but which, even there, are generally only a fiction. Can one say that in a representative and centralized democracy, or in a constitutional monarchy with restricted franchise, or even more in a communist republic such as Plato's the political contract binding the citizen to the state can be equal and reciprocal? Can one say that these contracts, which remove from the citizens a half or two-thirds of their sovereignty and a quarter of their product, are confined within just limits? It would be closer to the truth to say that, as experience shows only too often, contracts in such systems are excessive, onerous, for they provide no compensation for a good many of those who are parties to them; and aleatory, for the promised advantage, inadequate as it is, is not even guaranteed.

In order for the political contract to become synallagmatic and commutative as the idea of democracy requires, in order for it to remain within reasonable limits and to become profitable and convenient for all, the citizen who enters the association must (1) have as much to gain from the state as he sacrifices to it, (2) retain all his liberty, sovereignty, and initiative, except that which he must abandon in order to attain that special object for which the contract is made, and which the state must guarantee. So confined and understood, the political contract is what I shall call a federation.

Federation, from the Latin foedus, genitive foederis, which means pact, contract, treaty, agreement, alliance, and so on, is an agreement by which one or more heads of family, one or more towns, one or more groups of towns or states, assume reciprocal and equal commitments to perform one or more specific tasks, the responsibility for which rests exclusively with the officers of the federation.*

Let us consider this definition more closely. What is essential to and characteristic of the federal contract, and what I most wish the reader to notice, is that in this system the contracting parties, whether heads of family, towns, cantons, provinces, or states, not only undertake bilateral and commutative obligations, but in making the pact reserve for themselves more rights, more liberty, more authority, more property than they abandon.

It is not so, for example, in the society of common property, or communism, authorized under the Civil Code, the replica in miniature of all absolute states. He who enters into such an association, especially if it is a permanent one, is loaded with chains and subjected to burdens which quite overwhelm his personal freedom. It is this that makes such contracts so rare, and monastic life always so intolerable. Any obligation, even a bilateral and commutative one, which requires those whom it binds to contribute all their efforts, to give up their independence, and to devote themselves totally to an association is an excessive obligation unworthy of man or citizen.

According to these principles the contract of federation has the purpose, in general terms, of guaranteeing to the federated states their sovereignty, their territory, the liberty of their subjects; of settling their disputes; of providing by common means for all matters of security and mutual prosperity; thus, despite the scale of the interests involved, it is essentially limited. The authority responsible for its execution can never overwhelm the constituent members; that is, the federal powers can never exceed in number and significance those of local or provincial authorities, just as the latter can never outweigh the rights and prerogatives of man and citizen. If it were otherwise, the community would become communistic; the federation would revert to centralized monarchy; the federal authority, instead of being a mere delegate and subordinate function as it should be, will be seen as dominant; instead of being confined to a specific task, it will tend to absorb all activity and all initiative; the confederated states will be reduced to administrative districts, branches, or local offices. Thus transformed, the body politic may be termed republican, democratic, or what you will; it will no longer be a state constituted by a plenitude of autonomies, it will no longer be a confederation. The same will hold, with even greater force, if for reasons of false economy, as a result of deference, or for any other reason the federated towns, cantons or states charge one among their number with the administration and government of the rest. The republic will become unitary, not federal, and will be on the road to despotism.*

'Article 2. The purpose of confederation is to secure the independence of the nation against foreign powers, to maintain internal peace and order, to protect the rights and liberties of its members, and to increase their common prosperity.

'Article 3. The cantons are sovereign within the limits of federal sovereignty, and as such they exercise all rights which have not been delegated to the federal power.

'Article 5. The confederation guarantees to the cantons their territory, their sovereignty within the limits established by Article 3, their constitutions, the liberty and rights of their inhabitants, the constitutional rights of their citizens, as well as the rights and powers which the people have conferred upon the authorities.'

Thus a confederation is not exactly a state; it is a group of sovereign and independent states, associated by a pact of mutual guarantees. Nor is a federal constitution the same as what is understood in France by a charter or constitution, an abridged statement of public law; the pact contains the conditions of association, that is, the rights and reciprocal obligations of the states. What is called federal authority, finally, is no longer a government; it is an agency created by the states for the joint execution of certain functions which the states abandon, and which thus become federal powers.

In Switzerland the federal authority resides in a deliberative assembly elected by the citizens of the twenty-five cantons, and an executive council composed of seven members appointed by the assembly. The members of the assembly and the federal council are elected for three-year terms; since the federal constitution can be revised at any time, the powers of office, no less than its occupants, may be altered. Thus the federal power is in the full sense of the word an agent, under the strict control of his principals, whose power varies at their pleasure.

In summary, the federal system is the contrary of hierarchy or administrative and governmental centralization which characterizes, to an equal extent, democratic empires, constitutional monarchies, and unitary republics. Its basic and essential law is this: in a federation, the powers of central authority are specialized and limited and diminish in number, in directness, and in what I may call intensity as the confederation grows by the adhesion of new states. In centralized governments, on the contrary, the powers of the supreme authority multiply, extend, and become more direct, bringing the business of provinces, towns, corporations, and individuals under the jurisdiction of the prince, as a direct function of territorial scale and the size of the population. Hence arises that suppression of all liberties, communal and provincial, and even individual and national.

One result of this, to conclude this chapter, is that since the unitary system is the contrary of the federal system, a confederation of great monarchies, or even more of democratic empires, is impossible. States such as France, Austria, England, Russia, or Prussia may make treaties of alliance or trade among themselves; but they resist federalization because their principles are contrary to it and will set them against any federal compact, and because they would have to abandon some part of their sovereignty and recognize an arbiter set above them, at least for certain matters. Their nature is to command, not to compromise or to obey. The princes who in 1813, supported by mass uprisings, fought for the freedom of Europe against Napoleon and later formed the Holy Alliance did not form a federation; their absolutism prevented them from accepting such a title. They formed, as in 1792, a coalition; history gives them no other name.11

The Swiss federal constitution, as reformed in 1848, comes down on the side of equality; according to Article 4, 'All Swiss are equal before the law. In Switzerland there are neither subjects nor privileges of place, birth, person, or family.' The adoption of this article, which purges Switzerland of any trace of aristocracy, inaugurates a truly federal constitution.

If a conflict of interests arises, can a federal majority faced by a separatist minority claim that the pact is irrevocable? In 1846 the Sonderbund, opposed by a majority of cantons, claimed that it could not; the same is maintained by the Confederacy of the American South in opposition to the Northern Unionists. As for me, I believe that separation is fully legitimate, on a matter of cantonal sovereignty not embraced by the federal pact. Thus it is not clear to me that the Swiss majority derived its right against the Sonderbund from the pact; the proof is that in 1848 the federal constitution was amended precisely in order to settle the problem that had led to the formation of the Sonderbund. But it may happen that, in terms of utility, minority claims conflict with majority needs, that divisiveness imperils the liberty of the states. In such a case the question is resolved by the right of war, which means that the larger party, whose ruin would involve the greater loss, must triumph over the weaker. This is what took place in Switzerland and could also occur in the United States, if what was in question was simply a matter of the interpretation or better application of the principles of the pact, such as improving the lot of the blacks to the level enjoyed by the whites. Unfortunately, Mr Lincoln's message leaves no room for doubt: the North does not have in mind true emancipation any more than the South, which makes the problem insoluble even by means of war, and threatens to dissolve confederation.

In a monarchy all justice is the king's; in a confederation it arises in each state exclusively from its own citizens. Establishing a supreme federal court would in principle be a violation of the compact. The same goes for a court of appeal, for, each state being sovereign and legislating for itself, laws will not be uniform. However, as there are federal interests and federal business, and as offences and crimes may be committed against the federation, there are federal courts and federal justice bearing upon such specific cases.

Chapter VIII. A PROGRESSIVE CONSTITUTION

History and analysis, theory and observation have led us through the struggles of liberty and power to the idea of a political contract.

In at once applying this idea and trying to come to terms with it we have seen that the social contract par excellence is a federal contract, which we define as follows: a bilateral and commutative contract concerning one or more specific objects, having as its necessary condition that the contracting parties retain more sovereignty and a greater scope of action than they give up.

This is just the opposite of what takes place in the old monarchical, democratic, or constitutional systems, where, thanks to the logic of situation and principle, individuals and groups are held to have given up all their sovereignty to an imposed or elected authority, the rights which they gain and the security and independence which they retain being outweighed by their new burdens and duties.

This definition of the contract of federation is an immense step forward and will give us the solution which we have sought for so long.

As we said in chapter 1, the political problem, reduced to its simplest expression, is that of finding an equilibrium between two contrary elements, authority and liberty. Any error in balancing the two leads at once to the disorder and ruin of the state and the oppression and distress of the people. In other words the anomalies and disturbances of society arise from contradictions between its principles and will vanish when its principles are harmonized in such a manner that they can damage one another no longer.

To balance two forces is to submit them to a law which, obliging each to respect the other brings them into agreement. What will supply us with this new element, superior to both authority and liberty, and acquiring pre-eminence with the consent of both? -- the contract, whose terms establish right, and bear equally upon two contending forces.*

Law is a command transmitted to man in God's name by a competent authority: this is the definition of theology and divine right.

Law is an expression of the relations of things: this is the philosopher's definition, supplied by Montesquieu.

Law is a statute of arbitration willed by man (see De la Justice dans la Revolution et dans l'Eglise, 8th study): this is the theory of contract and of federation.

Since truth is one, though its aspect varies, these three definitions converge with one-another and must be regarded as at bottom identical. But the social orders which they generate are not the same; in the first, man declares himself the subject of the law and of its author or representative; in the second he regards himself as an integral part of a great organism; in the third, he makes law his own and frees himself from all authority, from fate and domination. The first is that of the religious man, the second that of the pantheist, the third that of the republican. The last of these alone is compatible with liberty.

But in a concrete and living reality such as society, right cannot be only an abstract notion, a nebulous aspiration, something which would plunge us into fiction and myth. To found a society requires not merely an idea but a juridical act, the making of a real contract. The men of 1789 grasped this, in undertaking to give France a constitution, and all the regimes which have succeeded them have taken the same view. Unfortunately, though the intention was good, their understanding was inadequate; until now, there has been no notary to witness the contract. We know what the spirit of the contract must be; let us now examine the letter of it in detail.

All the articles of a contract may be reduced to one, that which concerns the role and jurisdiction of that great functionary called the state. Our national assemblies have vied with one another in distinguishing and separating powers or the state's faculties of action; as for the jurisdiction of the state as such, its scope, its object, no one seems to have worried much about the matter. Men have dreamed of sharing, as a minister naively said in 1848; as for the thing to be shared, the bigger, it seems, the better. And yet the limitation of the role of the state is a question of life and death for liberty, whether collective or individual.

The contract of federation, whose essence is always to reserve more powers for the citizen than for the state, and for municipal and provincial authorities than for the central power, is the only thing that can set us on the right path.

In a free society, the role of the state or government is essentially that of legislating, instituting, creating, beginning, establishing; as little as possible should it be executive. In this respect, the term executive power, which is used to designate one of the aspects of sovereignty, has made a notable contribution to error. The state is not an entrepreneur in the public sector, to be confused with the contractors who perform public works. Whether it commands, acts, or supervises, the state is the initiator and ultimate director of change; if from time to time it involves itself in tasks directly, it does so by way of demonstration, to make a start and to set an example. Once a beginning has been made, the machinery established, the state withdraws, leaving the execution of the new task to local authorities and citizens.

The state establishes weights and measures, prescribes the units, value, and divisions of currency. Once the model has been provided, the first issue completed, the manufacture of gold and silver and copper coins ceases to be a public function, a task of the state, a ministerial power; it is an industry left to the towns, and there is nothing that requires it to be any less free than the manufacture of scales, weighing-machines, barrels, or bottles. That it should be done cheaply is all that matters. What is required, in France, for gold and silver currency to maintain its standing? Simply that coins should contain no more that one-tenth alloy. That there should be an inspector to supervise its manufacture, I admit; but the role of the state extends no further than that.

What I have said of currency I would repeat of a whole host of services which have quite wrongly been placed in the hands of government: roads, canals, tobacco licensing, the postal service, telegraphs, railways, and so on. I understand, I admit, I insist that the state must intervene in all such major public utilities; but I cannot see any need to leave them in the hands of the state once they have been initiated. Such a concentration, as far as I can see, amounts to truly excessive power. In 1848 I called for the state to intervene in establishing national banks, credit, savings, and insurance institutions, as it had done in the case of railways. It never entered my head that once the state had completed its task of creation it would stay in the banking, insurance, and transportation business. True, the organization of public education calls for a major effort by central authority, but nevertheless I believe in the cause of freedom in education, as of all freedoms.*

Is it really necessary, furthermore, that the courts should be subordinate to central authority? Administering justice has been since the beginning of time the highest power of the prince, indeed; but this power is a vestige of divine right and cannot be claimed by a constitutional monarch, still less by an emperor elected by universal suffrage. Thus from the moment that the idea of right becomes human once more and acquires pre-eminence in the political order, the independence of the judiciary will necessarily be implied. Justice will no longer be seen as a power of central or federal authority; it can be no more than a delegation by the citizens to municipal authority, or provincial at most. Justice is a human power which no reason of state can cancel. Nor do I except even military service from this argument; militias, armouries, and forts pass into the hands of federal authorities only in time of war, and only for the purposes of war; otherwise, soldiers and arms remain under the control of local authorities.**

In a properly organized society, everything must be in continuous growth -- science, industry, work, wealth, public health; liberty and morality must follow the same path. Their movement, their life, does not cease for a moment. As the principal organ of this movement, the state is always active; for new needs to be satisfied, new problems to solve, never cease to emerge. If its function as prime mover and general director is continuous, its work, however, is not repetitive. It is the highest expression of progress. What happens if, as is almost everywhere the case, the state continues to provide the services it has created and succumbs to the temptations of monopoly? It exchanges the founder's role for that of a mechanic; it is no longer the spirit of the community, giving it life, directing and enriching it, without impeding it; it becomes a vast limited company, with six hundred thousand employees and six hundred thousand soldiers, ready for every task, and instead of coming to the nation's aid, instead of serving its citizens and communities, it expropriates and crushes them. Soon corruption, embezzlement, and laxness enter into the system; absorbed in maintaining itself, extending its prerogatives, multiplying its tasks, and swelling its budget, power loses sight of its true role and collapses into autocracy and immobility; society is the victim, and the nation, contrary to its historic law, begins to decline.

Have we not seen, in Chapter VI, that authority and liberty follow in logical and temporal succession in the evolution of states; that, moreover, the first is in continuous decline, the second in the ascendant; that government, the organ of authority, is imperceptibly subordinated to the representatives or organs of liberty -- that is, the central power to the representatives of departments or provinces, provincial authority to the delegates of townships, and municipal authority to its inhabitants; that liberty thus aspires to make itself paramount, authority to make itself the servant of liberty, and that the contractual principle tends to substitute itself everywhere for the authoritarian principle in public affairs?

If this is true, the consequence cannot be in doubt. Since, according to the nature of things and the play of principles, authority retreats and liberty advances, in such a way that conflict between them is avoided, society's constitution is essentially progressive, or increasingly liberal, and its goal cannot be realized except in a society whose governing hierarchy is no longer imposed from the top down but rests securely on its base -- that is, a federal system.

The whole science of constitutions is here. I shall summarize it in three propositions.

1. Form groups of a modest size, individually sovereign, and unite them by a federal pact.

2. Within each federated state organize government on the principle of organic separation; that is, separate all powers that can be separated, define everything that can be defined, distribute what has been separated and defined among distinct organs and functionaries; leave nothing undivided; subject public administration to all the constraints of publicity and control.

3. Instead of absorbing the federated states and provincial and municipal authorities within a central authority, reduce the role of the centre to that of general initiation, of providing guarantees and supervising, and make the execution of its orders subject to the approval of the federated governments and their responsible agents -- just as, in a constitutional monarchy, every order by the king must be countersigned by a minister in order to become effective.

Certainly, the separation of powers as practised under the 1830 Charter was a fine and very significant institution, but it is childish to confine the principle to the members of a cabinet. The government of a nation is not to be shared among seven or eight elected officials drawn from a parliamentary majority and criticized by the opposition, but among the provinces and townships; otherwise political life abandons the periphery for the centre, and collapse overcomes a hydrocephalous nation.

The federal system is applicable to all nations and all ages, for humanity is progressive in each of its generations and peoples; the policy of federation, essentially the policy of progress, consists in ruling every people, at any given moment, by decreasing the sway of authority and central power to the point permitted by the level of consciousness and morality.

Chapter IX. WHAT HAS DELAYED FEDERATION; FACTORS HINDERING THE IDEA

The idea of federation appears to be as ancient as the ideas of monarchy and democracy, as old as authority and liberty themselves. How could it be otherwise? Everything produced in society over time by the law of progress has its roots in nature itself. Civilization advances enveloped by its principles, its ideas in procession before and after, and encircling it ceaselessly. Founded upon contract, the solemn expression of liberty, federation could never fail to appeal to man. More than twelve centuries before Christ, it appeared among the Hebrew tribes, separate from one another in their own valleys, but, like the tribes of Ishmael, united by a sort of contract of kinship. Only a little later it emerged in the Amphictyonic league,12

For centuries, the idea of federation seems to have been hidden and held in reserve; the reason for this eclipse is to be found in the initial incapacity of nations and the need to form them by means of stern discipline. Such is the role which seems to have been assigned, by a sort of sovereign design, to the unitary system.

It was necessary to tame and settle the fickle, rough, undisciplined multitude; to form isolated and hostile cities into groups; to found by authority, step by step, a common law, and to promulgate the general laws of humanity in the form of imperial decrees. This alone must have been the significance of those vast political structures of antiquity, succeeded, in this role, by the Greek, Roman, and Frankish empires, the Christian church, Luther's rebellion, and finally the French Revolution.

Federation cannot fulfil this initial educational mission because it is liberty; because it excludes the idea of constraint, resting upon the notion of bilateral, commutative, and limited contracts; and because its object is to guarantee the sovereignty and autonomy of the peoples whom it unites, peoples who must suffer domination until they become capable of governing themselves by reason. Since civilization is, in a word, progressive, it would be contradictory to suppose that a federal government could have arisen at the beginning.

Another reason for the temporary eclipse of the federal principle is supplied by the weak expansive tendency of states gathered under federal constitutions.

The natural limits of federal states. -- We have seen in Chapter II that monarchy, by its own nature and that of its principle, knows no limits to its own expansion, and that the same goes for democracy. This expansive power has been transmitted from the simple a priori governments to the mixed or de facto types, such as democracies and aristocracies, democratic empires and constitutional monarchies, which have all remained faithful in this respect to their ideal. From this arise messianic visions and many attempts to form universal monarchies or republics.

In these systems there is no end to the process of assimilation; one may say that here the idea of a natural frontier is a fiction, or, better, a political fraud; rivers, mountains, and seas are no longer considered as territorial limits but as obstacles which the liberty of king and nation must overcome. The logic of their principles, moreover, requires this; the power to possess, accumulate, command, and exploit is indefinite, it knows no bounds but the universe. The most noted example of the assimilation of regions and peoples, despite the mountains, rivers, forests, seas, and deserts, is that of the Roman Empire, with its centre and capital in a peninsula surrounded by a large sea, and its provinces as far-flung as its armies and tax-collectors could reach.

Every state is annexationist by nature. Nothing stops its aggressive march, unless it confronts another state, likewise an aggressor and capable of defending itself. The most ardent apostles of nationality fall into contradictions when the interest or, even more, the security of their country so dictates: who, among the French democrats, would have dared denounce the union of Savoy and Nice?13

It is otherwise in the federal system. Though capable indeed of defending themselves when attacked, the Swiss have shown several times that a confederation is incapable of conquest. Apart from the very rare case of a neighbouring state requesting admission to the pact, one may say that the very existence of federations forbids all expansion. By virtue of the principle which limits the federal pact to the provision of mutual defence and certain purposes of common benefit, guarantees to each state its territory, its sovereignty, its constitution, and the liberty of its citizens, and reserves to each party more authority, independence, and power than it abandons, the confederation restrains its own growth all the more surely to the extent that the regions which form it are distant from one another; and thus one soon arrives at a point at which the pact loses its purpose. Let us suppose that one among the confederated states proposes a certain conquest, the annexation of a neighbouring town or nearby province, or that it wishes to meddle in the affairs of another state. Not only will it not be able to count upon the support of the confederation, which will object that the pact was formed exclusively for the defence of the whole, not the aggrandizement of one part; it would find itself actually constrained by the solidarity of the others, who would not wish that all should go to war for the advantage of one. In this way the confederation provides a guarantee to its neighbours as well as to its own members.

Contrary to what takes place in other systems, then, the idea of a universal confederation is contradictory. Here once more we see the moral superiority of the federal over the unitary system, which is subject to all the shortcomings and vices of the undefined, the unlimited, the absolute, the ideal. Even Europe would be too large to form a single confederation; it could form only a confederation of confederations. That is why, in my last book, I laid down as the first step towards the reform of public law in Europe the restoration of the confederations of Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and the Danube, as a prelude to the decentralization of the large states and hence to general disarmament.14

Condemned in this way to a peaceful and modest existence, playing a self-effacing role upon the political stage, federation has naturally been overshadowed, until our own time, by the magnificence of the great states. Until our own time, too, federations, no less than feudal or unitary monarchies, have seethed with prejudices and abuses of every kind, aristocratic prejudices, bourgeois privilege, ecclesiastical authority, and the people have been oppressed, the mind enslaved; liberty thus remained in a strait-jacket, and civilization stagnated hopelessly. The federalist idea survived, invisible, incomprehensible, impenetrable, sometimes through the force of ritual, as in Germany, where the confederation -- a synonym for Empire -- was a coalition of absolute princes, some secular, some ecclesiastical, under the aegis of the Roman Church; sometimes through the force of circumstances, as in Switzerland, where confederation was secured by the valleys which divide the country and the mountain chains which protect it from invasion, the conquest of which would not repay renewing Hannibal's enterprise. Political vegetation arrested in its growth, offering nothing of value to philosophic thought, no principles to the statesman, no hopes to the masses -- far from promoting the Revolution in the slightest, it required to be given movement and life itself.

What is of permanent historical significance is that the French Revolution exercised its impact upon all the existing federal constitutions, reforming them, infusing them with its spirit, supplying them with their best qualities, and, in brief, permitting them to evolve, without as yet receiving anything from them.

The Americans had been defeated in twenty battles, and their cause seemed lost, until the French intervention changed the course of things and obliged the English general Cornwallis to surrender on 19 October 1781. It was as a result of this blow that the English agreed to recognize the independence of the colonies, which were then able to provide themselves with a constitution. And what were the Americans' political ideas? What were the principles of their government? Truly a jumble of principles, a monument to intolerance, to exclusiveness and arbitrariness, in which there shone like a star of ill omen the spirit of aristocracy, regulation, sect, and caste; it provoked the rebukes of French political writers and won for the American cause some humiliating reproaches. The little true liberalism which penetrated into America at this time was, one may say, the work of the French Revolution, which seemed on that distant shore a prelude to the renewal of the old world. Liberty in America has been until now an effect of Anglo-Saxon individualism, projected into an immense territory, rather than of its own institutions and customs; the present war demonstrates this only too well.*15

"1. -- That English practices were imitated uselessly;

2. -- That the clergy, excluded from the right to office, had become a foreign body within the state, even though the anomaly was not in this case dangerous;

3. -- That Pennsylvania required a religious oath of members of the legislature.

4. -- That New Jersey required a belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ.

5. -- That the Puritans of New England were intolerant, and that the Quakers of Pennsylvania considered military service illegal.

6. -- That in the Southern colonies there was great inequality of wealth, and that the blacks, even when freed, formed a distinct body from the whites within the same state.

7. -- That the social condition in Connecticut was half way between the primitive and civilized states, and that in Massachusetts and New Jersey a small faction could exclude candidates from elective office.

8. -- That many difficulties resulted from the emancipation of the negroes.

9. -- That no title of nobility should be conferred.

10. -- That the right of primogeniture should be abolished, and freedom of trade established.

11. -- That the scope of a jurisdiction should be based upon distance from place of residence.

12. -- That no adequate distinction was made between land and other forms of property.

13. -- That the right to regulate and even forbid commerce was implied in all the state constitutions.

14. -- That there was no agreed principle of taxation, and that as a result each state had the right to invent taxes at will.

15. -- That America might dispense with any European alliance, and that a wise people should never let the means of its defence out of its own hands."

"The famous Mirabeau detected in the Society of Cincinnatus, made up of officers of the revolutionary army, the basis for hereditary distinction. Other objections were made by Price, Mably, and other foreign writers. The American legislators have been able to profit from them, by modifying certain details, but preserving the structure of the republican edifice which, instead of declining as had been predicted, has improved with the passage of time and promises to be long-lived." (Description des Etats-Unis [A statistical, political, and historical account of the United States of North America: from the period of their first colonization to the present day (1819)] by [David Bailie] Warden, translated from the English [Paris 1820] vol. 5, 255).

The following passage by the same writer is no less revealing: "Jefferson and those who acted together with him believed that efforts made to increase human happiness, without regard to existing opinions and prejudices, were rarely effective, and that the most concrete improvements could never be introduced into society by force. Therefore they never proposed any new measure until opinion was ready to appreciate it."

This policy of Jefferson and his friends is certainly worthy of admiration. It is the glory of man and citizen that he should make truth and justice his own before submitting to their laws. 'We are all kings,' as the citizen of Athens said. And does the Bible not tell us that we are likewise all gods? As kings and gods, we must obey only ourselves. But it is nevertheless true that under Jefferson's presidency, between 1801 and 1805, the American people were perhaps the least liberal in the world, and that if it had not been for that negative liberty which resulted from a small population and land of amazing fertility, it would have been better to live under the despotism of Louis XIV or Napoleon than in the American republic.

It was the Revolution, too, which wrested Switzerland away from its old aristocratic and bourgeois prejudices and founded its confederation anew. In 1801, the constitution of the Helvetian Republic was revised for the first time; in the following year the intervention of the First Consul put an end to the agitation. It would have put an end to Swiss nationhood, too, if Napoleon had had any thought of adding Switzerland to his empire. But no: 'I do not want you,' he told them. From 1814 to 1848 the Swiss were plagued by reaction, so deeply was the idea of federation confused with aristocracy and privilege. It was not until 1848, in the Constitution of 12 September, that the true principles of the federal system were at last set out. Yet these principles were so dimly understood that a unitary trend appeared as well, with its representatives even in the federal assembly.

As for the German Confederation, everyone knows that the old structure was destroyed thanks to the same emperor, who was not so successful, however, in his plans for reconstruction. Now the federal system in Germany is once more in the mind of its peoples. May Germany emerge from these troubles, free and strong, as from a salutary crisis.

In 1789 the test of federalism had not been made. The idea was not understood at all; the revolutionary legislators could draw nothing from it. It was necessary that the confederations, such as they were, clinging on to life in scattered portions of the old and new worlds, should be animated by a new spirit, should learn to move and to define themselves, that their newly fertile principle should grow and bring to light the value of their institutions; it was necessary too that a final experiment should be made with 