2 - The indignity of legislation

Summary

I

In the introductory lectures on political science that he gave in Cambridge in Michaelmas Term 1885, John Robert Seeley noted the tendency of German writers on politics to characterize states (or stages in the development of the state) according to what is taken to be the province of their main activity, their most important function, the function that organizes and inspires everything that they do. There is Der Kriegstaat (the state organized for war), Der Rechtstaat (the state organized around the principle of the Rule of Law and individual rights), Der Handelstaat (the state devoted to the advancement of trade), Der Polizeistaat (the policestate), and so on. We live, said Sir John, in a Legislation-state, which is not at all the same thing as a Rechtstaat, but rather a form of state devoted to the business of making continual improvements in the life of the community by means of explicit legal innovations, i.e. by parliamentary legislation. We may be committed in principle to laissez-faire economics and to free trade, he said; we may accept Mill's principle of liberty so far as society's interference with the private life of the individual is concerned, but we do not infer from this any principle or moral requirement of government inactivity. On the contrary, every day another demand emerges for new legislation to deal with some difficulty or to reorganize some aspect of social affairs, be it education or public hygiene or the reform of the civil service. All parties in modern politics agree, said Seeley, “that there is a vast amount to be done, that we have more work before us than can possibly be overtaken,” and that consequently “governments ought to be continually busy in passing important laws.”