"Political Ideals" - читать интересную книгу автора (Russell Bertrand)

When any group of men has a strong corporate consciousness--such as
belongs, for example, to a nation or a trade or a religious
body--liberty demands that it should be free to decide for itself all
matters which are of great importance to the outside world. This is
the basis of the universal claim for national independence. But
nations are by no means the only groups which ought to have
self-government for their internal concerns. And nations, like other
groups, ought not to have complete liberty of action in matters which
are of equal concern to foreign nations. Liberty demands
self-government, but not the right to interfere with others. The
greatest degree of liberty is not secured by anarchy. The
reconciliation of liberty with government is a difficult problem, but
it is one which any political theory must face.

The essence of government is the use of force in accordance with law
to secure certain ends which the holders of power consider desirable.
The coercion of an individual or a group by force is always in itself
more or less harmful. But if there were no government, the result
would not be an absence of force in men's relations to each other; it
would merely be the exercise of force by those who had strong
predatory instincts, necessitating either slavery or a perpetual
readiness to repel force with force on the part of those whose
instincts were less violent. This is the state of affairs at present
in international relations, owing to the fact that no international
government exists. The results of anarchy between states should
suffice to persuade us that anarchism has no solution to offer for the
evils of the world.

There is probably one purpose, and only one, for which the use of
force by a government is beneficent, and that is to diminish the total
amount of force used m the world. It is clear, for example, that the
legal prohibition of murder diminishes the total amount of violence in
the world. And no one would maintain that parents should have
unlimited freedom to ill-treat their children. So long as some men
wish to do violence to others, there cannot be complete liberty, for
either the wish to do violence must be restrained, or the victims must
be left to suffer. For this reason, although individuals and
societies should have the utmost freedom as regards their own affairs,
they ought not to have complete freedom as regards their dealings with
others. To give freedom to the strong to oppress the weak is not the
way to secure the greatest possible amount of freedom in the world.
This is the basis of the socialist revolt against the kind of freedom
which used to be advocated by _laissez-faire_ economists.

Democracy is a device--the best so far invented--for diminishing as
much as possible the interference of governments with liberty. If a
nation is divided into two sections which cannot both have their way,
democracy theoretically insures that the majority shall have their
way. But democracy is not at all an adequate device unless it is