Here the People Rule Selected Essays
Most of the essays in this volume have appeared in scholarly journals or in books edited by others. A few are published here for the first time. None has been taken from one of my books. A would-be reader would have to go to much trouble to find them; tha
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15
Present Orientedness and Crime
Since the seventeenth century, political philosophers have maintained that an irrational bias toward present as opposed to future satisfactions is natural to both men and animals and is a principal cause of crime and, more generally, of threats to the peace and order of sOciety.! It is to From Assessing the Criminal, eds. R. E. Barnett and J. Hagel (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1977), 133-142. Copyright 1977 by Ballinger Publishing Company. Reprinted by permission. 1
Most men, Hobbes wrote in The Citizen (ch. 2, paragraphs 27 and 32), "by reason of their perverse desire of present profit" are very unapt to observe the dictates of reasons (which are also the laws of nature). If they did observe them, he said in Leviatha'n (pt. 2, ch. XVII) there would be no need for civil government "because there would be peace without subjection." Spinoza agreed: "in their desires and judgments of what is beneficial they are carried away by their passions, which take no account of the future or anything else. The result is that no society can exist without government and force, and hence without laws to control and restrain the unruly appetites and impulses of men (Tractatus Theologico Politicus, ch. V). For Locke, the "great principle and foundation of all virtue and worth" is placed in the ability of a man "to deny himself his own Desires, cross his own Inclinations, and purely follow what Reason directs as best, tho' the Appetite lean the other Way." One who does not know how to resist the importunity of present pleasure or pain for the sake of what reason tells him is fit to be done "is in danger never to be good for any Thing" (Some Thoughts Concerning Education, paragraphs 33 and 45). According to Rousseau, the passage from the state of nature to the civil state forces man "to consult his reason before listening to his inclinations"; in the civil state man acquires (inter alia) "moral liberty, which alone makes him truly master
271 E. C. Banfield, Here the People Rule © Plenum Press, New York 1985
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CHAPTER 15
protect men against this irrationality that civil government exists. Hume makes the fullest statement of the case. All men, he says, have a "natural infirmity"-indeed a "violent propension"-that causes them to be unduly affected by stimuli near to them in time or space; this is the "source of all dissoluteness and disorder, repentence and misery," and because it prompts men to prefer any trivial present advantage to the maintenance of order, it is "very dangerous to sOciety." Government is the means by which men cope with this defect of their nature. Here, then, is the origin of civil government and society. Men are not able radically to cure, either in themselves or others, that narrowness of soul which makes them prefer the present to the remote. They cannot change their natures. All they can do is to change their situation, and render the observance of justice the immediate interest of some particular persons, and its violation their more remote. These persons, then, are n
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