by Bart Schultz
portant influence, tending to reduce the number of competing electoral combi-
nations to two. It seems not unlikely, however, that such combinations would be
very transient, and would vary from place to place, if the sole concern of the
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electors were to choose representatives for the purpose of legislation: the decisive
impulse towards a permanently dual organisation of parties appears to be given by
entrusting to the constituencies, along with the election of members of a central
legislative assembly, the practical choice of the chief or leading members of the
central executive. This choice . . . takes place in strikingly different forms in the English and American systems respectively; still, its effect both at the quadren-nial presidential elections in the United Sates, and at ordinary general elections
in England, is to concentrate the interest of the whole country on an electoral
struggle, in which, if any political combination does not form part of the victori-
ous majority, it has failed so far as this contest is concerned. This gives a powerful and continually operating inducement to the absorption of minor parties in one
or other of two great combinations; the force of which is further increased in the
United States by the ‘Spoils system’ – the practice of making extensive changes
in the minor posts of the executive to reward members of the winning party –
and by the control over legislation which the veto gives to the President; while in
England, again, it is importantly increased by the practical control over legislation which the Cabinet has come to possess. (EP –)
Thus it is that two permanently opposed and competing parties tend
to gain control over the political process. Relatedly, “the hostile criti-
cism of governmental measures, carried on in the press and public meet-
ings, is mainly directed and largely supplied by the systematic effort of
a defeated party to discredit and supplant its dominant rival.” Although
this system may make for a certain stability in the political world, foster
party feeling in the average citizen, and help to ensure that “the lead-
ers of the opposition tend to criticise keenly, from desire to oust the
holders of power, and yet circumspectly, being aware of the responsi-
bilities and difficulties which success, bringing power, must entail,” it
is on balance a serious handicap to high-minded leadership. Rendering
party spirit “more comprehensive and absorbing,” it means that “the
sentiment of ‘loyalty to party’ becomes almost as tenacious and exact-
ing as patriotism, and sometimes almost equally independent of intellec-
tual convictions; so that a man remains attached to his party from old
habit and sentiment, or from fear of being called a renegade, when he
can no longer even imagine that he holds its ‘fundamental principles.’ ”
(EP –) But once “sentiment and habit are thus semi-unconsciously
substituted in many cases for intellectual agreement as the bond of party-
union, the fundamental principles of either party become obscure” and
attacks on the opposition become more “factious and disingenuous.”
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Thus, even beneficial legislation has to be avoided by the party in power,
if and when “it can be successfully discredited by partisan ingenuity.”
(EP )
Indeed, an oily insincerity and hypocrisy poison the whole political
process:
[T]he dual system seems to have a dangerous tendency to degrade the profession
of politics: partly from the inevitable insincerity of the relation of a party leader to the members of his own party, partly from the insincerity of his relation to
the party opposed to him. To keep up the vigour and zeal of his own side, he
has to maintain the fiction that under the heterogeneous medley of opinions and
sectional interests represented by either the ‘ins’ or the ‘outs’ at any particular
time there is a fundamental underlying agreement in sound political principles;
and he has to attribute to the other side a similar agreement in unsound doctrines.
Thus the best political talent and energy of the country acquires a fatal bias in the direction of insincere advocacy; indeed the old objection against forensic advocacy
as a means of obtaining right judicial conclusions – that one section of the experts
employed are professionally required to make the worse seem the better reason –
applies with much more real force here than in the case of the law-courts. For in
the case of the forensic advocate this attitude is frankly avowed and recognised by
all concerned: every plain man knows that a lawyer in court is exempt from the
ordinary rule that binds an honest man only to use arguments which he believes
to be sound; and that it is the duty of every member of a jury to consider only
the value of an advocate’s arguments, and disregard, as far as possible, the air of
conviction with which they are uttered. The political advocate or party leader
tends to acquire a similar professional habit of using bad arguments with an air
of conviction where he cannot get good ones, or when bad ones are more likely to
be popularly effective; but, unlike the forensic advocate, he is understood, in so
doing, to imply his personal belief in the validity of his argument and the truth
of the conclusions to which he desires to lead up. And the case is made worse by
the fact that political advocacy is not controlled by expert and responsible judges,
whose business it is to sift out and scatter to the winds whatever chaff the pleader
may mingle with such grains of sound argument as his belief affords; the position
of the political advocate is like what that of a forensic advocate would be, if it was his business to address a jury not presided over by a judge, and largely composed
of persons who only heard the pleadings on the other side in an imperfect and
partial way. (EP –)
This “demoralising effect of politics under the party system” is really
behind a great many of Sidgwick’s political concerns, including his con-
viction that the “business of statesmanship” should be as far as possible
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unremunerated. The business of keeping a party together and victorious,
if it becomes a trade, becomes “a vile trade.” The party politician would
seem to compare very unfavorably even to Sidgwick’s earlier nemesis, the
hypocritical priest.
As we shall have occasion to see, this attitude was one that Sidgwick
developed in
collaboration with his friend Bryce, whose American Com-
monwealth, which influenced him profoundly, was filled with indictments
of the corruptions of American party politics and explanations of why
the “best men” did not go into politics to begin with. American cul-
ture, the culture of democracy, was, Bryce argued, vital and strong, but
this had little to do with the character of politicians. Still, Bryce, even
more than Sidgwick, admired the marriage of aristocracy and democ-
racy to be found in the American Constitution. It was the cultural
and institutional moderating of democratic passions – and inexpertise –
that these old academic Liberals admired so. And whatever their differ-
ences with the antidemocratic conservatism of figures like Henry Sumner
Maine, who regarded the British democratic reforms of the eighties as
the beginning of the end of civilization, they certainly agreed that the
merits of these newer forms of aristocracy needed to be driven home
to a public that was showing too much reckless enthusiasm for social
change.
Sidgwick admits that it is difficult to gauge the dangers of party very
exactly, since they largely depend on “the condition of political morality,”
but he does not doubt that they are grave. The potential solutions are
“partly political, partly moral.” Thus, making “the Supreme Executive
elected by the legislature, with subordinate officials holding office inde-
pendently of party ties” would help, as would withdrawing substantial por-
tions of legislative and administrative work “from the control of the party
system, under the influence of public opinion, aided by minor changes
in parliamentary rules and in the customary tenure of executive offices.”
(EP ) Establishing a custom such that, barring a vote of no confidence,
ministers need not resign because their legislation was defeated – “unless
the need of these measures was regarded by them as so urgent that they
could not conscientiously carry on the administration of public affairs
without them” – might also help to “allow free play to the natural working
of political convictions without increasing the instability of government”
(EP –). And some increased reliance on the referendum might also
work in this direction.
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But in the end, Sidgwick thinks the most important question is the
moral one:
Finally, the operation of the party-system might be checked and controlled – more
effectually than it now is in England and the United States – by a change in current
morality, which does not seem to be beyond the limits of possibility. It might be
regarded as the duty of educated persons generally to aim at a judicial frame of
mind on questions of current politics, whether they are inside parties or outside.
If it is the business of the professional politician to prove his own side always in the right, it should be the point of honour of the ‘arm-chair’ politician, if he belongs
to a party, to make plain when and why he thinks his party in the wrong. And
probably the country would gain from an increase in the number of persons taking
a serious interest in politics who keep out of party ties altogether. (EP –)
From this last injunction, one can appreciate just how much there was
behind Sidgwick’s celebration of the sympathetic but trained minds of
a nobler stamp who would be leaders in philanthropic work and the ed-
ucators of public opinion generally, bringing to it the refined arguments
hammered out in endless discussion societies and meetings of minds. Here
was the growth of sympathetic understanding – of a Socratic/Apostolic
sort – that would characterize the eager utilitarian politician in the effort
to be genuinely practical, to avoid party and international strife. Here was
the sense of justice, in Sidgwick’s view, and the lesson would also inform
his essays on Practical Ethics, reflecting his work with the Ethical Culture
Society in the s. What is more, it is impossible to contemplate the
core of Sidgwick’s political thinking in this respect without recalling his
passionate concern with hypocrisy and religious conformity, the ques-
tions of subscription and professional duty. True, one can certainly feel
the effects of his proximaty to the Balfour clan, and appreciate why in his
later years he tended to vote more independently, going with the Tories
in a way he would never have considered when younger. But his object,
manifestly, was to avoid the demoralizing effects of “insincere advocacy”
and party politics, to engage in the kind of moral leadership that was a
descendant of the Millian clerisy, though one adapted to a new, rougher,
and more Darwinian era. And it was one that carried at least some odor of
the qualified version of Whitmania advanced by Noel and Symonds, with
the effort to befriend all ranks.
This is a heavy burden to place on the aristocratic element in his political
vision. But there is no mistaking the parallel between Sidgwick’s politics
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and his views of the clergy and ethics. Indeed, on this sensitive topic, the
Elements expounds at some length on points of direct relevance to the
discussion of the dualism of practical reason. Thus, when the question is
posed of whether the state should teach morality, and posed in its most
relevant form, in relation to “a civilised community in which there is
either no religion having general acceptance or important influence, or
else only religions that have no important connection with morality,” the
answer would bring to the fore “one of the most fundamental questions
of moral philosophy: viz. whether the performance of social duty can be
proved scientifically – with as strong a ‘consensus of experts’ as we find in
established sciences generally – to be certainly or most probably the means
best adapted to the attainment of the private happiness of the agent.”
Now, even if the answer were affirmative, it would not follow that morality
“ought to be based on self-interest alone.” Sidgwick’s point, which lucidly
captures all his nervousness about the destructive potential of the dualism
of practical reason, is only that “it would clearly be an important gain to
social wellbeing to correct the erroneous and short-sighted views of self-
interest, representing it as divergent from duty, which certainly appear
to be widely prevalent in the most advanced societies, at least among
irreligious persons.” For the government to supply teachers of this view
might even be “indirectly individualistic in its aim, since to diffuse the
&nb
sp; conviction that it is every one’s interest to do what is right would obviously
be a valuable protection against mutual wrong,” though it would probably
detract from the credibility of such teachers if they were salaried servants
of the state. (EP –)
Were this the case, the political economists and psychical researchers
would presumably have their work cut out for them as cultural functionar-
ies. But this last objection is even stronger “if we regard it as impossible
to prove by ordinary mundane considerations that it is always the indi-
vidual’s interest in the present condition of human society to do his duty;
or if, granting the evident coincidence of self-interest and duty, it is still
held that self-regard should not be the normal motive to moral action.”
In these cases,
the only teaching likely to be effective is such as will powerfully affect the emo-
tions of the taught, no less than their intellects; we should, therefore, gener-
ally speaking, need teachers who themselves felt, and were believed to feel, sin-
cerely and intensely, the moral and social emotions that it was their business to
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stimulate; and governmental appointment and payment would hardly seem to
be an appropriate method of securing instructors of this type. If a spirit of de-
votion to a particular society or to humanity at large, and readiness to sacrifice
self-interest to duty, are to be persuasively inculcated on adults, the task should,
generally speaking, be undertaken by persons who set an example of self-devotion
and self-sacrifice; and therefore by volunteers, rather than by paid officers.
(EP –)
Under these circumstances, as Sidgwick’s own life attested, the dualism
of practical reason made the promotion of social harmony a much more
difficult enterprise: recall again how he did not wish his own philosophy
to affect the larger populace in the way that it had affected Myers. Tommy
Green and Johnnie Symonds (and Jane Addams) were better volunteers
than the self-doubting philosopher. Still, in his own energetic way, he
clearly did his bit for the cause of culture, even if he himself was fitted