[54] Criteria of what is a fact or what constitutes empirical evidence are seldom in grave dispute within a given culture or profession.
[55] I need hardly add that responsibility (if I may still venture to use this term) for this cannot be placed at the door of the great thinkers who founded modern sociology - Marx, Durkheim, Weber - nor of the rational and scrupulous
[56] And a collection of isolated insights and apergus, like the dubious 'All power either corrupts or intoxicates', or 'Man is a political animal', or 'Der Mensch ist was er ifit' ('Man is what he eats').
[57] The Marxist conception of social laws is, of course, the best-known version of this theory, but it forms a large element in some Christian and utilitarian, and all socialist, doctrines.
[58] Emile, book 2: vol. 4, p. po, in Oeuvres completes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and others (Paris, 195 9-95 ).
[59] R. H. Tawney, Equality (1931), 3rd ed. (London, 1938), chapter 5, section 2, 'Equality and Liberty', p. 208 (not . in previous editions).
[60] J. S. Mill, On Liberty, chapter i: vol. i 8, p. 226, in op. cit. (p. 81 above, note 1).
[61] ibid., p. 224. 3 ibid., chapter 3, p. 268.
ibid., pp. 265-6. The last two phrases are from John Sterling's essay on Simonides: vol I, p. 190, in his Essays and Tales, ed. Julius Charles Hare (London,
I 848).
[64] ibid., chapter 4, p. 277.
[65] This is but another illustration of the natural tendency of all but a very few thinkers to believe that all the things they hold good must be intimately connected, or at least compatible, with one another. The history of thought, like the history of nations, is strewn with examples of inconsistent, or at least disparate, elements artificially yoked together in a despotic system, or held together by the danger of some common enemy. In due course the danger passes, and conflicts between the allies arise, which often disrupt the system, sometimes to the great benefit of mankind.
[66] See the valuable discussion of this in Michel Villey, Lefons d'histoire de la philosophie du droit (Paris, 1957), chapter 14, which traces the embryo of the notion of subjective rights to Occam (see p. 272).
[67] Christian (and Jewish or Muslim) belief in the absolute authority of divine or natural laws, or in the equality of all men in the sight of God, is very different from belief in freedom to live as one prefers.
[68] Indeed, it is arguable that in the Prussia of Frederick the Great or in the Austria of Joseph II men of imagination, originality and creative genius, and, indeed, minorities of all kinds, were less persecuted and felt the pressure, both of institutions and custom, less heavy upon them than in many an earlier or later democracy.
[69] Social Contract, book 1, chapter 8: vol. 3, p. 365 in Oeuvres completes (op. cit., p. 170 above, note 2).
[70] op. cit. (p. 7 above, note 2), vol. 8, p. 290, line 27, and p. 291, line 3^
[71] 'Proletarian coercion, in all its forms, from executions to forced labour, is, paradoxical as it may sound, the method of moulding communist humanity out of the human material of the capitalist period.' These lines by the Bolshevik leader Nikolay Bukharin, especially the term 'human material', vividly convey this attitude. Nikolay Bukharin, Ekonomikaperekhodnogoperioda ['Economics in the Transitional Period'] (Moscow, 1920), chapter 10, p. 146.
[72] op. cit. (p. 170 above, note 2), p. 309.
[73] It is not perhaps far-fetched to assume that the quietism of the Eastern sages was, similarly, a response to the despotism of the great autocracies, and flourished at periods when individuals were apt to be humiliated, or at any rate ignored or ruthlessly managed, by those possessed of the instruments of physical coercion.
[74] op. cit. (p. 194 above, note 3), ibid.: 'every law is contrary to liberty'.
[75] Johann Gottlieb Fichte's siimmtliche Werke, ed. I. H. Fichte (Berlin, 1845-6), v°L 7, p. 576.
[76] ibid., p. 574.
[77] 'To compel men to adopt the right form of government, to impose Right on them by force, is not only the right, but the sacred duty of every man who has both the insight and the power to do so.' ibid., vol. 4, p. 436.
' loc. cit. (p. 8 I above, note i).
[79] Kant came nearest to asserting the 'negative' ideal of liberty when (in one of his political treatises) he declared that 'The greatest problem of the human race, to the solution of which it is compelled by nature, is the establishment of a civil society universally administering right according to law. It is only in a society which possesses the greatest liberty ... - and also the most exact determination and guarantee of the limits of [the] liberty [of each individual] in order that it may co-exist with the liberty of others - that the highest purpose of nature, which is the development of all her capacities, can be attained in the case of mankind.' 'Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltburgerlicher Absicht' (1784), in op. cit. (p. 7 above, note 2), vol. 8, p. 22, line 6. Apart from the teleological implications, this formulation does not at first appear very different from orthodox liberalism. The crucial point, however, is how to determine the criterion for the 'exact determination and guarantee of the limits' of individual liberty. Most modern liberals, at their most consistent, want a situation in which as many individuals as possible can realise as many of their ends as possible, without assessment of the value of these ends as such, save in so far as they may frustrate the purposes of others. They wish the frontiers between individuals or groups of men to be drawn solely with a view to preventing collisions between human purposes, all of which must be considered to be equally ultimate, uncriticisable ends in themselves. Kant, and the rationalists of his type, do not regard all ends as of equal value. For them the limits of liberty are determined by applying the rules of 'reason', which is much more than the mere generality of rules as such, and is a faculty that creates or reveals a purpose identical in, and for, all men. In the name of reason anything