Category: Political Thought

The State as responsible: If this argument be valid, we must seek the institutions of a responsible State in other directions. It is, in the first place, essential to note that to divide responsibility as a method of limiting power may result in its total destruction. To divide it as, for example, it is divided…

State and association: When we turn from the external to the internal sovereignty of States, we meet a more complex situation. The problem of the power of a State over its own members is, very largely, a problem of representing wills. If social institutions permit me so to express myself that my life acquires a…

Sovereignty in international affairs: In such an aspect the notion of an independent sovereign State is, on the international side, fatal to the well-being of humanity. The way in which a State should live its life in relation to other States is clearly not a matter in which that State is entitled to be the…

Political Sovereignty: We here verge upon the political nature of sovereignty. What, fundamentally, is involved is the question of whether there ought to be, in any State, a power subject to no limits of any kind. But it is first necessary to remember that unlimited power is nowhere existent. Attention has always to be paid…

Legal Sovereignty: The legal aspect of sovereignty is best examined by a statement of the form given to it by John Austin. In every legal analysis of the State, he argued, it is first of all necessary to discover in the given society that definite superior to which habitual obedience is rendered by the mass…

Rights And Power: We reach here a problem perhaps as difficult as any in the realm of political science.  A government, I have argued, is limited by the purposes that it serves. It has no moral authority to act ultra vires those purposes. It has no authority, for instance, to invade the right to freedom…

The Realisation Of Rights: So armed, the citizen might hope to confront the State with at least the prospect of self-realisation. But it, is, of course, one thing to postulate these rights as essential, it is another thing to ensure their realisation. And that raises the central issue of the position of the State in…

Particular rights:  Yet all this, it may be said, is to dwell upon the heights of theory. It is one thing to show the notions a State must recognize if it is to move to the achievement of its purpose. It is a very different thing to show how that purpose is in fact to…

Rights And The State: Rights so discussed seem to imply a State and an individual which strike a balance between their mutual claims. This is, in fact, to state the problem of rights in a fashion too narrow to express with accuracy the environment we encounter. For it is not merely as a member of…

The Nature Of Rights: Every State is known by the rights that it maintains. Our method of judging its character lies, above all, in the contribution that it makes to the substance of man’s happiness. The State, therefore, is not, at least for political philosophy, simply a sovereign organization with the power to get its…