{"id":1194,"date":"2013-07-13T01:33:11","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:33:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=1194"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:33:11","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:33:11","slug":"46-the-drive-towards-economic-centralisation-vol-15-social-and-political-thought-volume-15","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/01-sabcl\/15-social-and-political-thought-volume-15\/46-the-drive-towards-economic-centralisation-vol-15-social-and-political-thought-volume-15","title":{"rendered":"-46_The Drive Towards Economic Centralisation.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
\n
\n


\nCHAPTER <\/font><\/b>
\nXX<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n


\nThe
\nDrive towards Economic Centralisation<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n                               
\n<\/font> T<\/font><\/span>HE objective organisation of a national unity is not yet
\ncomplete when it has arrived at the possession of a single central authority
\nand the unity and uniformity of its political, military and strictly
\nadministrative functions. There is another side of its organic life, the
\nlegislative and its corollary, the judicial function, which is equally
\nimportant; the exercise of legislative power becomes eventually indeed,
\nalthough it was not always, the characteristic sign of the sovereign.
\nLogically, one would suppose that the conscious and organised determination of
\nits own rules of life should be the first business of a society from which all
\nothers should derive and on which they should be dependent and therefore it
\nwould naturally be the earliest to develop. But life develops in obedience to
\nits own law and the pressure of forces and not according to the law and the
\nlogic of the self-conscious mind; its first course is determined by the
\nsubconscient and is only secondarily and derivatively self- conscious. The
\ndevelopment of human society has been no exception to the rule; for man, though
\nin the essence of his nature a mental being, has practically started with a
\nlargely mechanical mentality as the conscious living being, Nature’s human
\nanimal, and only afterwards can he be the self-conscious living being, the
\nself-perfecting Manu. That is the course the individual has had to follow; the
\ngroup-man follows in the wake of the individual and is always far behind the
\nhighest individual development. Therefore, the development of the society as an
\norganism consciously and entirely legislating for its own needs, which should
\nbe by the logic of reason the first necessary step, is actually in the logic of
\nlife the last and culminative step. It enables the society at last to perfect
\nconsciously by means of the State the whole organisation of its life, military,
\npolitical, administrative,<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage-423<\/font><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

\neconomic, social, cultural. The completeness of the
\nprocess depends on the completeness of the development by which the State and
\nsociety become, as far as that may be, synonymous. That is the importance of
\ndemocracy; that is the importance also of socialism. They are the sign that the
\nsociety is getting ready to be an entirely self-conscious and therefore a
\nfreely and consciously self-regulating organism.1<\/sup> But it must be remarked that modern democracy and modern
\nsocialism are only a first crude and bungling attempt at that consummation, an
\ninefficient hint and not a freely intelligent realisation.<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n


\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>At first,
\nin the early stage of society, there is no such thing as what we understand by
\nlaw, the Roman lex; <\/i>there are only a mass of binding habits, nomoi,
\nmores, <\/i>\u00e3c<\/i>\u00e3ra, <\/i>determined by the inner nature of the group-man
\nand according to the action upon it of the forces and the necessities of his
\nenvironment. They become instituta, <\/i>things that acquire a fixed and
\nformal status, institutions, and crystallise into laws. Moreover, they embrace
\nthe whole life of the society; there is no distinction between the political
\nand administrative, the social and the religious law; these not only all meet
\nin one system, but run inextricably into and are determined by each other. Such
\nwas the type of the ancient Jewish law and of the Hindu Shastra which preserved
\nup to recent times this early principle of society in spite of the tendencies
\nof specialisation and separation which have triumphed elsewhere as a result of
\nthe normal development of the analytical and practical reason of mankind. This
\ncomplex customary law evolved indeed, but by a natural development of the body
\nof social habits in obedience to changing ideas and more and more complex
\nnecessities. There was no single and fixed legislative authority to determine
\nthem by conscious shaping and selection or in anticipation of popular consent
\nor by direct ideative action upon the general consensus of need and opinion.
\nKings and prophets and Rishis and Brahmin jurists might exercise such an action
\naccording to their power and influence, but none of these were the constituted
\nlegislative sovereign; the king in India was the administrator<\/font><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n1 <\/font><\/sup>
\n
\nFascism, National
\nSocialism have cut out the "freely" in this formula and set about the
\ntask of creating the organised self-regulating consciousness by a violent
\nregimentation<\/font><\/span> <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage-424<\/font><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

\nof the Dharma and not at all or only exceptionally and
\nto a hardly, noticeable extent the legislator.<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n


\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>It is worth
\nnoting, indeed, that this customary law was often attributed to an original
\nlegislator, a Manu, Moses, Lycurgus; but the historic truth of any such
\ntradition has been discredited by modem inquiry and perhaps rightly, if we
\nconsider only the actual ascertainable facts and the ordinary process of the
\nhuman mind and its development. In fact, if we examine the profound legendary
\ntradition of India, we see that its idea of the Manu is more a symbol than
\nanything else. His name means man the mental being. He is the divine
\nlegislator, the mental demigod in humanity who fixes the lines upon which the
\nrace or people has to govern its evolution. In the Purana he or his sons are
\nsaid to reign in subtle earths or worlds or, as we may say, they reign in the
\nlarger mentality which to us is subconscient and from there have power to
\ndetermine the lines of development of the conscious life of man. His law is the
\nm<\/i>\u00e3nava-dharma<\/i>\u0160\u00e3stra, <\/i>the science of the law of conduct of the
\nmental or human being and in this sense we may think of the law of any human
\nsociety as being the conscious evolution of the type and lines which its Manu
\nhas fixed for it. If there comes an embodied Manu, a living Moses or Mahomed,
\nhe is only the prophet or spokesman of the Divinity who is veiled in the fire
\nand the cloud, Jehovah on Sinai, Allah speaking through his angels. Mahomed, as
\nwe know, only developed the existing social, religious and administrative
\ncustoms of the Arab people into a new system dictated to him often in a state
\nof trance, in which he passed from his conscient into his superconscient self,
\nby the Divinity to his secret intuitive mind. All that may be suprarational or,
\nif you will, irrational, but it represents a different stage of human
\ndevelopment from the government of society by its rational and practical mind
\nwhich in contact with life’s changing needs and permanent necessities demands a
\ncreated and codified law determined by a fixed legislative authority, the
\nsociety’s organised brain or centre.<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n


\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>This
\nrational development consists, as we have seen, in the creation of a central
\nauthority, – at first a distinct central force but afterwards more and more
\nconterminous with the society<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage-425<\/font><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

\nitself or directly representing it, –<\/span> which gradually takes over the
\nspecialised and separated parts of the social activity. At first, this
\nauthority was the king, elective or hereditary, in his original character a war
\nleader and at home only the chief, the head of the elders or the strong men and
\nthe convener of the nation and the army, a nodus of its action, but not the
\nprincipal determinant: in war only, where entire centralisation of power is the
\nfirst condition of effective action, was he entirely supreme. As host-leader, strategos,
\n<\/i>he was also imperator, the giver of the absolute command. When he extended
\nthis combination of headship and the rule from outside inward, he tended to
\nbecome the executive power, not merely the chief instrument of social
\nadministration but the executive ruler.<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n


\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/font> <\/span>It was
\nnaturally easier for him to become thus supreme in foreign than in internal
\npolitics. Even now European governments which have in internal affairs to defer
\nto the popular will or to persuade and cajole the nation, are able in foreign politics
\nto act either entirely or very largely according to their own ideas: for they
\nare allowed to determine their acts by secret diplomacy in which the people can
\nhave no voice and the representatives of the nation have only a general power
\nof criticising or ratifying its results. Their action in foreign politics is
\nnominal or at any rate restricted to a minimum, since they cannot prevent
\nsecret arrangements and treaties; even to such as are made early public they
\ncan only withhold their ratification at the risk of destroying the sureness and
\ncontinuity, the necessary uniformity of the external action of the nation and
\nthus destroying too the confidence of foreign governments without which
\nnegotiations cannot be conducted nor stable alliances and combinations formed.
\nNor can they really withhold their sanction in a crisis, whether for war or
\npeace, at the only moment when they are effectively consulted, the last hour or
\nrather the last minute when either has become inevitable. Much more necessarily
\nwas this the case in the old monarchies when the king was the maker of war and
\npeace "and conducted the external affairs of the country according to his
\npersonal idea of the national interests, largely affected by his own passions,
\npredilections and personal and family interests. But whatever the attendant disad-<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage-426<\/font><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

\nvantages, the conduct of war and peace and foreign
\npolitics as well as the conduct of the host in the field of battle had at least
\nbeen centralised, unified in the sovereign authority. The demand for real
\nparliamentary control of foreign policy and even for an open diplomacy<\/span> – a difficult matter to our current notions, yet
\nonce practised and perfectly capable of practice – indicates one more step in
\nthe transformation, far from complete in spite of the modern boast of
\ndemocracy, from a monarchical and oligarchic ,<\/span> to a democratic system, the taking over of all sovereign
\nfunctions from the one sovereign administrator or the few dominant. executive
\nmen by the society as a whole organised in the democratic State.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>In its seizure of the internal
\nfunctionings the central authority has a more difficult task, because its
\nabsorption of them or of their chief control has to reckon with powerful
\ncompeting or modifying forces and interests and the strength of established and
\noften cherished national habits and existing rights and privileges. But it is
\nbound in the end to arrive at some unified control of those which are in their
\nnature executive and administrative. This administrative side of the national organisation
\nhas three principal parts, financial, executive proper and judicial. The
\nfinancial power carries with it the control of the public purse and the
\nexpenditure of the wealth contributed by the society for national purposes, and
\nit is evident that this must pass into the hands of whatever authority has
\ntaken up the business of organising and making efficient the united action of
\nthe community. But that authority in its impulse towards an undivided and
\nuncontrolled gestation, a complete unification of powers must naturally desire
\nnot only to determine the expenditure according to its own free will, but to
\ndetermine also the contributions of the society to the public purse both in its
\namount and in its repartition over the individuals and classes who constitute
\nthe nation. Monarchy in its impulse towards a despotic centrality has always
\nsought to en- gross and struggled to retain this power; for the control over
\nthe purse of the nation is the most important sign and the most effective
\nelement of real sovereignty, more essential perhaps than the control over life
\nand limb. In the most despotic regimes, this control is absolute and extends to
\nthe power of confiscation and<\/font><\/p>\n


\n\u00a0<\/font><\/span>Page-427<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\n

<\/span><\/div>\n

\ndespoliation otherwise than by judicial procedure. On
\nthe other hand, a ruler who has to bargain with his subjects over the amount of
\ntheir contribution and the method’s of taxation, is at once hedged in in his
\nsovereignty and is not in fact the sole and entire sovereign. A vital power is
\nin the hands of an inferior estate of the realm and can be turned against him
\nfatally in any struggle for the shifting of the sovereignty from him to that
\nestate. That is the reason why the supreme political instinct of the English
\npeople fixed, in the struggle with the monarchy, upon this question of taxation
\nas the first vital point in a conflict for the power of the purse. Once that
\nwas settled in the Parliament by the defeat of the Stuarts, the transformation
\nof the monarchical sovereignty into the sovereignty of the people or, more
\naccurately, the shifting of the organic control from the throne to the
\naristocracy, thence to the bourgeoisie, and again to the whole people, –<\/span> the latter two steps, one still
\nincomplete, comprising the rapid evolution of the last eighty years, – was only
\na question of time. In France, the successful practical absorption of this
\ncontrol was the strength of the monarchy; it was its inability to manage with
\njustice and economy the public purse, its unwilling- ness to tax the enormous
\nriches of the aristocracy and clergy as against the crushing taxation on the
\npeople and the consequent necessity of deferring again to the nation which
\nprovided the opportunity for the Revolution. In advanced modern countries we
\nhave a controlling authority which claims at least to represent more or less
\nperfectly the whole nation; individuals and classes have to submit because
\nthere is no appeal from the will of the whole society. But even so, it is
\nquestions, not of taxation, but of the proper organisation and administration
\nof the economic life of the society which are preparing the revolutions of the
\nfuture.<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage-428<\/font><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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