GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

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* POLITICS
improve itself by legislative activities on the part of the
government was virtually unknown. The Common Law,
which was the formularized version of natural law, was
held to cover all the relations between man and man in
society, such legislation as might
from time to time be
passed being regarded in the light of a series of judicial
decisions interpreting and defining the provisions of
Common, that is to say, natural law. Locke, for example,
has little or no interest in legislation and makes perfunctory
provision for it in his constitutional proposals. Rousseau
escapes from the influence of the conception of natural
law, of which the Common Law is deemed to be a faithful
transcript, sufficiently to realize the necessity of actually
creating the law which is to regulate the affairs of the community.
Law-making is necessary because the needs of a
community change and the moral sense of a community
develops, but the new laws are not necessarily contained,
or even implied in the old. They may have to be conjured,
as it were, from the void by the mind of man. Now
creative legislation demands an act of will and, in the
absence of legislation by God, any law made by man or
by a group ofmen will be partial and, therefore, anti-social.
Hence Rousseau demands, and rightly demands, that the
creative legislation of a community should be such
expresses and embodies the General Will. Rousseau
as
is
thus the first to emphasize the need for continual law-
making in a community, and he adds the safeguard that
the laws must be both such as the people want and such
as will provide for the people's welfare.
(2) There is, it is obvious, a sense in which in relation
to any and every issue that presents itself for collective
decision there is a course of action which it is right for the
community to follow, ifby the word "right" we mean what
the utilitarians meant, namely, calculated to promote
the common welfare conceived in terms of the greatest
happiness of the greatest number.
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(3) "Right action so defined will not produce benefits
for some one sectional interest as compared with some other