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

THEORY OF DEMOCRACY 805
citizen has the right to form his ideals, to choose his way
of life for himself. The citizen of a democracy is entitled
to resist the right of any to impose upon him his way of
life from above. "The purpose of our training is to enable
us to fight, for fighting is die duty and chief glory of man.
He who does not want to fight is not fit to live." This
announcement made and repeated daily at one of the new
Nazi educational establishments, admirably illustrates the
imposition of the conception of the good life from above.
The good life, in fact, consists of fighting, whether the
individual likes it or not Now, it is the essence ofindividualism
that no. man should be in a position to dictate to
another the ideal of good-living which he should set before
himself*
And if no man, then also no form of government. The
State, then, is not entitled to impose its conception of the
good life upon its citizens. All that it may do is to establish
the conditions in which the living of the good life by its
citizens is possible; that is to say, in a modern community,
freedom from violence and redress of grievances at law,
the minimum of training for the mind (education), and of
health for the body (sanitation, hospital and medical
service), and the chance of employment. The State
in short the fact, one would have thought, is obvious
enough is made for man, to enable him to achieve happiness
and to develop his faculties; man is not made for the
State. It is this doctrine more than any other of those
which democrats have come to take for granted which is
denied in the world to-day. One government insists that
a citizen is a drop of blood in an ocean of racial purity;
another, that he is a cog in a proletarian machine; another,
that he is an ant in a social termitary.
That Biological Science does not Countenance the
Subordination of the Individual. These views of the
individual are sometimes reinforced by appeals to science,
and particularly to biological science. Human beings, it is
said, are important only in so far as they fit into a biological