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WorkHenry Sidgwick

The Elements of Politics

The whole business of a modern state — contracts, inheritance, colonies, war, parliaments — put through a single utilitarian test.

by Henry Sidgwick790 passages held

  • English, the original language, and your language
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First published
(aged 53)
Original language
English

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Overview

Its first reviewers made the same complaint: the book reasoned from general principles, and its conclusions kept turning out to be the British constitution as it already stood. William Dunning, the American political scientist, wrote that Henry Sidgwick was fitting the principles to the institutions rather than deriving the institutions from the principles. Sidgwick wrote the book because, as he saw it, no English writer since Jeremy Bentham had tried to treat politics as a whole; he took his own general view from Bentham and John Stuart Mill. His method starts from what he calls individualism, the rule that the state should restrain people only to stop them harming one another and to hold them to their contracts. He works out the minimum of law that rule requires, then asks, case by case, where the general happiness justifies the state in doing more. The book reaches subjects most political writers of the day left alone — territory, immigration, colonies, international law and the conduct of war. A. V. Dicey, the constitutional lawyer, and James Bryce, author of The American Commonwealth, read all of it in proof before it appeared in 1891. The book reached a fourth edition in 1919 but drew little notice outside Cambridge: Ernest Barker's 1915 survey of English political thought did not mention it, and Graham Wallas and Harold Laski dismissed it as outdated. The political theorist David Miller has since traced its neglect partly to its treatment of secession and colonial rule, where Sidgwick gave heavy weight to the feelings of the governing nation.

Key concepts

What is the 'individualistic minimum'?

The least the state must do if it follows the individualistic principle strictly: protect each person's security, including health and reputation; protect private property, with the right to give, sell and bequeath it; and enforce contracts and guard against deception, coercion and similar interference. Sidgwick works this minimum out first, then asks case by case where the general happiness justifies going beyond it.

What is paternal interference?

Government coercing people in their own interest rather than to protect others. Sidgwick treats it as needing special justification, since in most matters adults may be expected in the long run to discover what serves them. Where he allows it, he prefers indirect forms, such as the law refusing to enforce oppressive usurious contracts, over commanding anyone under penalty to act for their own good.

What is the 'right of disruption'?

Sidgwick's name for the claimed right of part of a state to break away. The serious issue, he argues, is not whether a group may leave but whether a local majority may secede taking its territory with it. He does not think its interests or its national sentiment alone establish that claim, and he weighs against it the risk of future war and the debts left behind.

What are 'strict duties' between states?

Obligations whose violation counts as a wrong that may justify war as a last resort, if reparation is obstinately refused. Sidgwick separates them from acts that are merely unkind or unfriendly, such as harsh treatment of a nation's goods or people within the law, which justify retaliatory unfriendliness and general disapproval but never a breach of the peace.

What is a parliamentary executive?

A government whose ministers hold office only while they keep the confidence of the elected legislature, so that the cabinet may fall at any moment. Sidgwick sets it against an executive elected for a fixed term, as in the United States, and keeps it in his scheme while looking for ways to limit the bad effects of the party government it tends to foster.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

The Least a State Must Do

What is the least a government must do, and where may the general happiness justify more? The book starts from a minimum of law and argues outward, case by case.

The individualistic principle says the state should restrain people only to stop them harming one another and to hold them to their contracts. Sidgwick works out what that minimum requires — security of person and reputation, private property with the right to give, sell and bequeath it, protection against deception and coercion — and finds its edges already disputed over land and the results of intellectual labour. He then asks where paternal or socialistic interference earns its place on utilitarian grounds.

  • individualism
  • property rights
  • property
  • inheritance
  • compensation
  • paternalism
  • individual liberty
  • legislation
  • rule of law
  • utilitarianism

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Beyond the Frontier

What does a state owe to foreigners, to a region that wants to leave, or to an enemy in war? The book carries the same test of the general happiness beyond the frontier.

Where most political writers of his day stopped at the border, Sidgwick goes on. He asks how far a state may close its territory to immigrants, when a local majority may claim to secede with the land it occupies, and why a large population of residents permanently shut out of citizenship weakens a community. In war he hopes civilised belligerents will spare non-combatants who submit, partly from humanity and partly because harshness rouses neutrals and embitters an occupied people. He also weighs territorial expansion and the government of colonies.

  • international law
  • sovereignty
  • war
  • colonialism

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How Government Should Be Built

How should a representative government be put together, so that the people can control it without the work being badly done? The second half of the book answers piece by piece.

Having asked what government should do, Sidgwick turns to how it should be built: electoral districts, a second chamber, the executive, local government and federal unions. He wants constituency boundaries redrawn after each census by a permanent commission rather than the legislature, to reduce the danger of gerrymandering, and much detailed legislation handed to standing committees aided by legal experts. He doubts that two-party government serves a nation well, and sketches how parts of legislation and administration might be withdrawn from party control.

  • executive power
  • political representation
  • separation of powers
  • democracy
  • local government
  • government
  • representative government
  • political authority
  • public administration
  • parliamentary government
  • federalism
  • bicameralism
  • public finance
  • constitutional design
  • legislative power
  • legislative oversight

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Within this work

passages held
790
distinct concepts
1,152
by passages held, corpus-wide
#83

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “executive power” and “separation of powers”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 10 pairings. 98 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
executive powerseparation of powers7
individualismutilitarianism6
local governmentpolitical representation2
democracyexecutive power1
democracypolitical representation1
democracyutilitarianism1
executive powerinternational law1
executive powerlocal government1
executive powerpolitical representation1
individualismpolitical representation1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1870 The Ethics of Conformity and Subscription

    His answer in print to the question his own resignation from Trinity had raised the year before, published four years before The Methods of Ethics.

     EN
  2. 1874 The Methods of Ethics

    Revised through five editions in Sidgwick's lifetime, this is the book he is read for; his editor called his later Cambridge lectures on Green, Spencer and Martineau supplementary to it.

     EN
  3. 1886 Outlines of the History of Ethics for English Readers

    The historical companion to The Methods of Ethics: Sidgwick telling the story of the moral debates that book had tried to settle by argument.

     EN
  4. 1891 The Elements of Politics you are here EN
  5. 1898 Practical Ethics: A Collection of Addresses and Essays

    Written mostly for the ethical societies of London and Cambridge between 1888 and 1897, these are Sidgwick's applications of his ethics to questions of everyday conduct, for listeners outside the university.

     EN
  6. 1902 Lectures on the Ethics of T. H. Green, Mr. Herbert Spencer, and J. Martineau

    Course lectures never meant for print, in which Sidgwick defended the position of The Methods of Ethics against the schools that had risen since it first appeared.

     EN
  7. 1902 Philosophy, Its Scope and Relations

    Where The Methods of Ethics works inside ethics, these lectures map how ethics, metaphysics, psychology and history fit together — the frame around the rest of Sidgwick's philosophy.

     EN
  8. 1905 Lectures on the Philosophy of Kant and Other Philosophical Lectures and Essays

    The fullest record of Sidgwick's work outside ethics — on Kant, on the theory of knowledge and on the Scottish philosophy of common sense.

     EN
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