452 HEREDITY AND SELECTION IN SOCIOLOGY 



Liberalism came to the conclusion tliat tlie ideal of the Rechtsstaat 

 woiild be realised by the fullest liberty of iadividual competition, 

 naturally combined with the reduction of the State to a purely 

 passive role. " Without any intervention of law, therefore," 

 declared Adam Smith, the genial founder of the school of 

 classical economy, " the private interest and passions of men 

 naturally lead them to divide and distribute the stock of every 

 society, among all the different employments carried on in it, 

 as nearly as possible in the proportion which is most agreeable 

 to the interest of the whole society."^ The same behef is ex- 

 pressed by John Stuart Mill, who lays stress on the ethical 

 element. " The perfection," says Mill, " both of social arrange- 

 ments and of practical morahty would thus be to secure to all 

 persons complete independence and freedom of action, subject 

 to no restriction but that of doing no injury to others." ^ This 

 idea of free and unlimited competition between the individuals 

 of the same State became a fundamental dogma of orthodox 

 economic Liberalism. And yet economic Liberahsm, even in 

 its most advanced form, that of the Manchester school, is the 

 direct descendant and heir of the Liberahsm of the Rechtsstaat. 

 The foundation of both is individuahsm ; and the raison d^etre 

 of both was the excessive absolutism of the States of the 

 eighteenth century, whose traditions were the traditions of the 

 Middle Ages. For the eighteenth- century monarch, for the 

 puny princes of petty States as much as for Frederic the 

 Great, or Louis XV., or Joseph II., the individual did not exist. 

 The State — that is to say, the personal rule of the ruler of the 

 State — was the only thing that counted. The English school of 

 Liberal economists, with Adam Smith at their head, owed much 

 to the French Physiocrats, to Turgot and Quesnay ; and the 

 doctrines of the latter were, in turn, inspired by that current 

 of individualistic thought which took its rise with Montesquieu. 



1 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, iii. 215. 



2 J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, -p. 129 (people's edition, 1888.) 



