Key ideas: In Authority and the Individual, published in 1949, Bertrand Russell examines the questions about the balance between the state and individual freedom.
The most distinctive feature by which the evolutionary status of these early ancestors is fixed is the size of the brain, which increased fairly rapidly until it reached about its present capacity, but has now been virtually stationary for hundreds of thousands of years.
During these hundreds of thousands of years Man has improved in knowledge, in acquired skill, and in social organisation, but not, so far as can be judged, in congenital intellectual capacity.
That purely biological advance, so far as it can be estimated from bones, was completed a long time ago. It is to be supposed accordingly that our congenital mental equipment, as opposed to what we learn, is not so very different from that of Paleolithic Man.
At a certain stage a further development took place. Wars, which originally were wars of extermination, gradually became – at least in part – wars of conquest; the vanquished, instead of being put to death, were made slaves and compelled to labour for their conquerors.
When this happened there came to be two sorts of people within a community, namely, the original members who alone were free, and were the repositories of the tribal spirit, and the subjects who obeyed from fear, not from instinctive loyalty.
From those early days down to modern times war has been the chief engine in enlarging the size of communities, and fear has increasingly replaced tribal solidarity as a source of social cohesion.
This change was not confined to large communities; it occurred, for example, in Sparta, where the free citizens were a small minority, while the Helots were unmercifully suppressed. Sparta was praised throughout antiquity for its admirable social cohesion, but it was a cohesion which never attempted to embrace the whole population, except in so far as terror compelled outward loyalty.
The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had a remarkable degree of success in increasing State power to what was necessary for the preservation of order, and leaving in spite of it a great measure of freedom to those citizens who did not belong to the lowest social grades.
The impulse towards liberty, however, seems now to have lost much of its force among reformers; it has been replaced by the love of equality, which has been largely stimulated by the rise to affluence and power of new industrial magnates without any traditional claim to superiority.
And the exigencies of total war have persuaded almost everybody that a much tighter social system is necessary than that which contented our grandfathers.
Government, from the earliest times at which it existed, has had two functions, one negative and one positive.
- Its negative function has been to prevent private violence, to protect life and property, to enact criminal law and secure its enforcement.
- But in addition to this it has had a positive purpose, namely, to facilitate the realisation of desires deemed to be common to the great majority of citizens.
The positive functions of government at most times have been mainly confined to war: if an enemy could be conquered and his territory acquired, everybody in the victorious nation profited in a greater or less degree.
But now the positive functions of government are enormously enlarged. There is first of all education, consisting not only of the acquisition of scholastic attainments, but also of the instilling of certain loyalties and certain beliefs.
Then there are vast industrial enterprises. Even in the United States, which attempts to limit the economic activities of the State to the utmost possible degree, governmental control over such enterprises is rapidly increasing.
Men can be stimulated by hope or driven by fear, but the hope and the fear must be vivid and immediate if they are to be effective without producing weariness.
It is partly for this reason that hysterical propaganda, or at least propaganda intended to cause hysteria, has such widespread influence in the modern world....
If you lay the blame on India, or red tape, or the capitalist system, or the socialist State, you conjure up in people’s minds a mythical personified devil whom it is easy to hate. In every misfortune it is a natural impulse to look for an enemy upon whom to lay the blame; savages attribute all illness to hostile magic.
Whenever the causes of our troubles are too difficult to be understood, we tend to fall back upon this primitive kind of explanation.
A newspaper which offers us a villain to hate is much more appealing than one which goes into all the intricacies of dollar shortages. When the Germans suffered after the first world war, many of them were easily persuaded that the Jews were to blame.
And those who believe that the voice of the people is the voice of God may infer that any unusual opinion or peculiar taste is almost a form of impiety, and is to be viewed as a culpable rebellion against the legitimate authority of the herd.
This will only be avoided if liberty is as much valued as democracy, and it is realised that a society in which each is the slave of all is only a little better than one in which each is the slave of a despot.
There is equality where all are slaves, as well as where all are free. This shows that equality, by itself, is not enough to make a good society.