There are two points of view about the organic nature of the State. Barker says, “The State is not an organism; but it is like an organism.” The organic analogy has a useful purpose to serve as it emphasises the unity of the State.
The State is not a mere aggregation of people. It is a social unity. Man cannot lead a life of isolation. Dependence is his very psychology and individuals depend on one another and on the State as a whole.
The welfare of each is involved in the welfare of all. He cannot be separated from society, just as a hand or a leg, without losing its utility cannot be separated from the body. The State has a collective life like an organism.
Image Source: previews.123rf.com
ADVERTISEMENTS:
The attainment of the common purpose depends upon the proper performance by every individual of his functions or duties. Every citizen has social obligations to himself, to his family, to his neighbours, and to the society of which he is a unit.
Hob house rightly sums up, “the life of society and the life of an individual do resemble one another in certain respects, and the term ‘organic’ is as justly applicable to the one as to the other for an organism is a whole, consisting of interdependent parts.
Each part lives and functions and grows by sub-serving the life of the whole. It sustains the rest and is sustained by them and through their mutual support comes a common development.”
ADVERTISEMENTS:
So far we agree and accept the proposition that the State is like an organism. But the farther these analogies are carried, the more misleading they become. The user of analogy tends to forget that the resemblances he notices hold good only within the limits where they overlap. The objects compared are plainly not identical, as to compare identical is useless, but possess, besides their common features, other traits that distinguish them.
At many points the comparison between society and an organism is exceedingly superficial. There is no similarity between the cells of an organism and the individuals who compose society. The cells have no independent life of their own.
They are mechanical pieces of matter. Each is fixed in its place, having no power of thought or will, and existing solely to support and perpetuate the life of the whole. The individuals, on the other hand, are independent, intellectual and moral human beings. They do not act like a machine.
Each individual has a physical life independent of the whole and each strives to make his own destiny. It is true that man cannot be the best of himself independently of society, but he can live, if he so wishes, an independent life of his own. This is not possible in an organism. If parts are cut off from their parent body, they die. Chop off a branch from a tree, a limb from a human body, and both perish.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
It is, again, true that the State has grown from similarity and simplicity to dissimilarity and complexity. But even common reason does not believe that it is subject to the same process of birth, growth and decay as an organism. An animal organism comes into existence by the union of two organisms. This is not the method of the birth of the State.
The process of its growth is also not similar. Organisms grow from within and through internal adaptation. They grow “unconsciously independent of volition, entirely dependent on its environment and the natural laws of the biological world.”
The machinery of the State and its laws, on the other hand, change to adjust themselves to the altered needs and requirements of the people. And all this change is brought about as a result of volition and conscious efforts of its members. “Its growth, if such it may be called, is largely the result of the conscious action of its individual members and is to a great extent self-directed.”
Then, an organism dies. The State is not liable to death. It is permanent; it endures. To sum up, in the words of Jellinek, “Growth, decline and death are not necessary processes of State life though they are inseparable from the life of the organism. The State does not originate or renew itself as a plant or as an animal does.”
The Organic Theory does not help us in answering the baffling, but practical question of what the State should do. In fact, the Organic Theory has been used to support views on the province of the State ranging from Individualism to Socialism.
Herbert Spencer uses it as a basis for the theory of laissez faire and limits the functions of the State only to the prevention of violence and fraud. The State should, accordingly, limit its activities to those particular functions for which it arose. From the “discrete” nature of the social body, he concluded that every individual exists for his own good only and not for the happiness of the whole.
In close contrast to Spencer’s theory of Individualism are the supporters of extreme socialism and absolutism of the State. Relying upon the organic nature of the State, the German writers maintained that “the State, as the highest organism, is the important unit, and collective activity is the ideal of social progress”.
Herbert Spencer’s conclusion that the individual should otherwise be left alone is a forced one. The Organic Theory, with all its analogies, in the form in which it is usually stated, is pregnant with dangerous results.
“Some of these biological comparisons are ingenious and well stated; to many writers they have proved fascinating and seductive; to others they have constituted the basis of an argument for a theory of the State which would sacrifice individual to society.”
The central idea of the theory is to merge the individual in the social group and consequently regard him as a vulgar fraction. To repeat the words of Leacock, “As is the relation of the hand to the body, or the leaf to the tree, so is the relation of man to society. He exists in it and it in him.” What this relationship actually means, the world witnessed in Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy.
Communist countries, like Soviet Russia and China, also amplify it. Jellinek has rightly said, “We had better reject the theory in to lest the danger from the larger amount of falsity in the analogy should outweigh the good in the little truth it contains”.