Human Nature in Politics: Third Edition

“Some day, for instance, the word 'opinion' itself may become the recognised name of the most dangerous political vice. Men may teach themselves by habit and association to suspect those inclinations and beliefs which, if they neglect the duty of thought, appear in their minds they know not how, and which, as long as their origin is not examined, can be created by any clever organiser who is paid to do so. The most easily manipulated State in the world would be one inhabited by a race of Nonconformist business men who never followed up a train of political reasoning in their lives, and who, as soon as they were aware of the existence of a strong political conviction in their minds, should announce that it was a matter of 'conscience' and therefore beyond the province of doubt or calculation.””

— Graham Wallas

“After a time the politician may cease even to desire to reason with his constituents, and may come to regard them as purely irrational creatures of feeling and opinion, and himself as the purely rational 'over-man' who controls them. It is at this point that a resolute and able statesman may become most efficient and most dangerous. Bolingbroke, while he was trying to teach his 'Patriot King' how to govern men by understanding them, spoke in a haunting phrase of 'that staring timid creature man.' A century before Darwin he, like Swift and Plato, was able by sheer intellectual detachment to see his fellow-men as animals. He himself, he thought, was one of those few 'among the societies of men ... who engross almost the whole reason of the species, who are born to instruct, to guide, and to preserve, who are designed to be the tutors and the guardians of human kind.' For the rest, 'Reason has small effect upon numbers: a turn of imagination, often as violent and as sudden as a gust of wind, determines their conduct.””

— Graham Wallas

“What does 'abstract political philosophy' here mean? No medical writer would speak of an 'abstract' anatomical science in which men have no livers, nor would he add that though the student in his closet may disregard the existence of the liver the working physician dares not.Apparently Merivale means the same thing by 'abstract' political philosophy that Mr. Bryce means by 'ideal' democracy. Both refer to a conception of human nature constructed in all good faith by certain eighteenth-century philosophers, which is now no longer exactly believed in, but which, because nothing else has taken its place, still exercises a kind of shadowy authority in a hypothetical universe.””

— Graham Wallas

“But the use of a word in common speech is only the resultant of its use by individual men and women, and particularly by those who accept it as a party name. Each one of them, as long as the movement is really alive, will find that while the word must be used, because otherwise the movement will have no political existence, yet its use creates a constant series of difficult problems in conduct. Any one who applies the name to himself or others in a sense so markedly different from common use as to make it certain or probable that he is creating a false impression is rightly charged with want of ordinary veracity. And yet there are cases where enormous practical results may depend upon keeping wide the use of a word which is tending to be narrowed.””

— Graham Wallas

“Party leaders again have always to remember that the organisation which they control is an entity with an existence in the memory and emotions of the electors, independent of their own opinions and actions.””

— Graham Wallas

“It is sometimes pleaded that, if thorough work is to be done, there must, in the moral as in the physical sciences, be division of labour. But this particular division cannot, in fact, be kept up. The student of politics must, consciously or unconsciously, form a conception of human nature, and the less conscious he is of his conception the more likely he is to be dominated by it. If he has had wide personal experience of political life his unconscious assumptions may be helpful; if he has not they are certain to be misleading. Mr. Roosevelt's little book of essays on American Ideals is, for instance, useful, because when he thinks about mankind in politics, he thinks about the politicians whom he has known. After reading it one feels that many of the more systematic books on politics by American university professors are useless, just because the writers dealt with abstract men, formed on assumptions of which they were unaware and which they had never tested either by experience or by study.””

— Graham Wallas

“In England, to any one who looks forward, the rampant bribery of the old fishing-ports, or the traditional and respectable corruption of the cathedral cities, seem comparatively small and manageable evils. The more serious grounds for apprehension come from the newest inventions of wealth and enterprise, the up-to-date newspapers, the power and skill of the men who direct huge aggregations of industrial capital, the organised political passions of working men who have passed through the standards of the elementary schools, and who live in hundreds of square miles of new, healthy, indistinguishable suburban streets. Every few years some invention in political method is made, and if it succeeds both parties adopt it. In politics, as in football, the tactics which prevail are not those which the makers of the rules intended, but those by which the players find that they can win, and men feel vaguely that the expedients by which their party is most likely to win may turn out not to be those by which a State is best governed.””

— Graham Wallas