In the Shadow of the Anthill: Religious Faith, Individual Freedom, and the Common Good in the Thought of V. S. Solov'ev

Abstract

Principles as contributing to the overarching, European discourse over such matters?all having bearing on the relationship of the individual to the community. In accepting the idea that early law amounted to obeying community norms simply order to avoid destruction, which other communal animals would also face if they lacked instincts, Solov'ev did not, however, imply that human beings could remain at this juncture. Human community does constitute a solely instinctual organic evolution, but rather aspires to become afree association of requiring ever more the free application of people's energy the societal organism, and producing legal norms as a result (2:145-46; emphasis original). The key example given: the English constitution (Magna Carta) of the thirteenth century, which was not, according to him, an organic product, but rather synthetic and conciliatory, binding Norman and Anglo-Saxon together and thus creating another entity (2:147). While indirectly agreeing with the social contract theorists?Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau?that societal relationships developed gradually into formal agreements, covenants, or contracts, Solov'ev at the same time rejected the utilitarianism implicit the hypothetical premise of such arguments concerning a State of Nature?whether the dismal Hobbesian version or the brighter Lockean and Rousseauan renditions?in which individuals purportedly come together for the purpose of contracting out of it to form a civic or political society or state. According to Solov'ev, the problem with this characterization is that it assumes a which the state only acts as referee or mediator of diverse interests. In fact, such a notion of the common good cannot really be common at all: If the benefit were truly common, i. e., if all were really solidarity regarding their then there would be no need of a special organization of interests. [...] But if the benefit of all is conformity, if the common benefit contradicts itself, then the state can really have only the benefit of the majority as the objective. In fact, this principle is usually understood this way. (2:147-48) This creates another problem the establishment of legal norms, at the basis of which lies the concept of impartiality, which Solov'ev regarded as but another word for justice. The concern of the state here can only be drawing a boundary of all interests, and although social contract theory reflects the differences of community and individual principles (in France and England), Solov'ev saw these two principles becoming manifest in the political struggle between absolutism and liberalism, traditional aristocracy and revolutionary democracy, tendencies whose unsoundness could not be removed by superficial, artificial bargains struck among them the form of various constitutions.2'2