PHILOSOPHY CLUB

Evening Star, Issue 23683, 17 September 1940, Page 5

PHILOSOPHY CLUB

THE STATE AND THE INDIVIDUAL A meeting of the Philosophy Club was held at the University last Friday evening. Air C. F. Wrigley read a paper on ‘ Idealist Political Philosophy,’ in which he discussed the contributions of Green and Bosanquet to English political theory, and the criticisms that have been made of the idealist position. The speaker pointed out that some definite ethical justification for the State had to be provided if there was to be any duty for the individual to obey the State. The first requirement in any political philosophy was for an adequate conception of the relationship of the individual and the State. Green asserted that the individual depended for all his rights upon his membership of the community, because it alono could give him the power of full moral development, and that it was the duty of the community to provide for the individual these conditions that were necessary for his “ selfrealisation.” The State was the fulfilment and not the antithesis of the individual’s rights. Bosanquet carried Green’s new conceptions further. In his writings there appeared to be a tendency to think of the individual as possessing no independent life of Ins own, and to think of his ultimate wellbeing as being his absorption into organised political society. Ho favoured a view of the State a,s involving a working conception of life as a whole But political theory must not lose sight of the limits imposed upon the State by its employment of force—-the individual must will the ideal; 1 himself before his notions can have any morn) value. Idealism, by making allowance for the moral influence of society, represents an advance on the individualism of Locke and John Stuart Mill, but we should not forget that the individual is logically prior to the State, which is not an end in itself, but merely a moans to the moral wellbeing of the individual.