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David Selbourne - Principle of Duty: An Essay on the Foundations of the Civic Order

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Book:
Principle of Duty: An Essay on the Foundations of the Civic Order
Author:
David Selbourne
Publisher:
University of Notre Dame Pess
Genre:
Books / Politics
Year:
2001
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THE
PRINCIPLE
OF DUTYDAVID SELBOURNE was born in London, the son of a doctor, and grandson of one of the greatest of modern rabbinical thinkers, Moshe Avigdor Amiel (1882-1945). He studied Latin and Greek at Manchester Grammar School, and Jurisprudence at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was Winter Williams Law Scholar and Honorary Exhibitioner, also gaining the Jenkins Prize and Paton Studentship. He has been a British Commonwealth Fellow at the University of Chicago, Aneurin Bevan Memorial Fellow, Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi, and for two decades taught the history of ideas at Ruskin College, Oxford. He is the author of numerous books, including Against Socialist Illusion (1985), Death of the Dark Hero (1990) and The Spirit of the Age (1993), and translator of Jacob of Anconas The City of Light (1997). He lives in Urbino, in the Marche region of Italy.

By the same author

An Eye to India

An Eye to China

Through the Indian Looking-Glass

The Making of A Midsummer Nights Dream

Against Socialist Illusion:

A Radical Argument

Left Behind:

Journeys into British Politics

In Theory and in Practice:

Essays on the Politics of Jayaprakash Narayan

A Doctors Life:

The Diaries of Hugh Selbourne M.D., 1960-63 (ed.)

Death of the Dark Hero:

Eastern Europe, 1987-90

The Spirit of the Age

Not an Englishman:

Conversations with Lord Goodman

DAVID SELBOURNE

THE
PRINCIPLE
OF DUTY

An Essay on the
Foundations of the Civic Order

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

http://undpress.nd.edu

E-ISBN: 978-0-268-15886-6

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at .

ELIEZER AMIEL,

Vice-President du Consistoire

Central Israelite de Belgique,

Officier de lOrdre de Leopold

et Officier de lOrdre de la Couronne

CONTENTS

I can hardly help wondering all the while
whether human affairs are worth serious
effort. And yet it is our unhappy lot
to take them seriously.

The 'Athenian Stranger' in Plato,
Laws, VII, 803.

Post tenebras, spero lucem.

Don Quixote

Humane society, cohabitation, or being,
must above all things be maintained as
the earthly soveraigne good of mankind,
let what or who will perish or be confounded;
for mankind must be preserved upon the earth.

Richard Overton, July 1647

PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION

David Selbourne

As at the time of the American Declaration of Independence in 1776, it is arguable that the United States is approaching a momentous political turning-point, even if it is less visible and will be slower to reach its crisis than it was more than two centuries ago. The hopes of the formers proud assertion of the Enlightenment rights of all citizens to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness have become mired in a new tyranny. Now, the tyranny is not that of George III, but the tyranny exerted over an ever more widely disintegrating society by demands for liberty and happiness so boundless and insatiable that no civic order could sustain their pressures.

The founding fathers of the United States were reacting to the repeated injuries inflicted on the colonists by the British Crown. But who can now measure the new and larger injuries inflicted on todays American commonwealth by the very descendants and heirs of those who once liberated themselves from Hanoverian rule?

Step-by-step, the sovereignty of the people has become not the tyranny of the majority that De Tocqueville feared, but the tyranny of anti-civic individual desires for self-realisation without let or hindrance. They are desires that know increasingly little of that civic bond which it is one of my tasks in this work to restore to knowledge and esteem; such desires also know little, so it seems, of the great aspirations in the Constitution which the free United States set before the world in order to effect [the] safety and happiness of the people.

There are, of course, many associative impulses in the United States that a foreigner is bound to admire. There are still senatorial sages whose desire to defend American constitutional principles and proprieties during the Clinton impeachment hearings was exemplary in its democratic spirit. But the safety and happiness of the American people as a whole is self-evidently receding into the past: the victorious struggle against the authoritarian impositions of colonial rule has given way to a losing battle to master the abuses of those inalienable rights to which the American Constitution gave legitimacy and voice.

For Jefferson the citizens of the New World and its New Republic had burst the chains of oppression, as he wrote, in just pursuit of their rights in a free and democratic civic society. Now, their very pursuit, with which there have been conflated today many gratuitous demands and wants, bids to burst the chains of the civic bond itself. They threaten to carry away true freedom under the law, and democracy itself, in a welter of competing anti-social greeds and violences that not even the putting of two million Americans in gaol and the frequent, savage resort to the death penalty can contain.

These circumstances have been feebly met in the U.S. by appeals to the vacuity of communitarianism or of compassionate conservatism on the one hand, and on the other by demands for constraints over the American people in respect of their intimate moral beliefs and conductin their heads and in their bedsas intrusive as any sought to be imposed by the Puritans themselves. And on a third front, libertarians of various colours insist upon more rights still, or upon the preservation of existing rights, such as the right to carry arms, that bring more harms to the American polity with almost every day that passes.

Indeed, the time may come when that same body politic, nurtured into existence by Americas founders in the name of the health and well-being of all free citizens, will lie in the gutter, shot through the head by gun-toting libertarians who believe that freedom signifies the right to take the law into their own hands. Yet is was precisely such a right that the civic order under law, created by the Constitution and by the wisdom of its first citizens, made unnecessary. In stead, the United States has edged slowly towards that Hobbesian war of all against all not merely by its opposition to big governmentas if a society as large as the United States was not bound to be a society of big government in many unavoidable respectsbut by its ill-considered antipathy to many of the very controls and selfcontrols upon which any civic society depends.

The principle of duty, as much as the principle of right, is one of the lynch-pins of a free social order. Under the tyranny of egotistical desire and of the demand for those corrupted liberal entitlementsas I call themthat have become confused with the self-governing and bounded liberties of a democratic society, duty has for some become an offensive term. It now signifies, as it most decidedly did not to the Puritans with their Hebraic sense of law and ethics, fealty, subservience and the knee bent to power. But the eighteenth century political Enlightenment, as one can see from writings as various as those of Tom Paine and Abb Grgoire in the French Revolution, understood duty in quite another sense. It is in the sense in which I understand it: as a prerequisite for the maintenance of the self-same society that provides us with, and guarantees, our rights, as well as for the sustaining of the legal order within which economic activity is conducted.

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