The world's legal philosophies
"Until either philosophers become kings," said Socrates, "or kings philosophers, States will never succeed in remedying their shortcomings."
And if he was loath to give forth this view, because, as he admitted, it might "sink him beneath the waters of laughter and ridicule," so today among us it would doubtless resound in folly if we sought to apply it again in our own field of State life, and to assert that philosophers must become lawyers or lawyers philosophers, if our law is ever to be advanced into its perfect working. And yet there is hope, as there is need, among us today, of some such transformation.
Of course, history shows that there always have been cycles of legal progress and that they have often been heralded and guided by philosophies. But particularly there is hope that our own people may be the generation now about to exemplify this.
There are several reasons for thinking our people are apt thereto. But, without delaying over the grounds for such speculations, let us recall that as shrewd and good-natured an observer as DeTocqueville saw this in us.
He admits that "in most of the operations of the mind, each American appeals to the individual exercise of his own understanding alone; therefore in no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States." But, he adds, "the Americans are much more addicted to the use of general ideas than the English, and entertain a much greater relish for them." And since philosophy is, after all, only the science of general ideas — analyzing, restating, and reconstructing concrete experience — we may well trust that (if ever we do go at it with a will) we shall discover in ourselves a taste and high capacity for it, and shall direct our powers as fruitfully upon the law as we have done upon other fields.
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