A People That Values Its Privileges Above Its Principles Loses Both

On the night of 4 August 1789, in the National Assembly in Versailles, a nobleman rose and proposed that the nobility give up its feudal privileges. Others followed, and within hours the exemption from taxes, the hunting rights, the church tithes and the special courts of the ancient regime were swept away in a wave of enthusiasm. They did it because the peasants were burning chateaux in the countryside. Had the nobles accepted equal taxation a generation earlier, the monarchy might have survived. They clung to their privileges until they lost them, and with them lost their lands, their titles and, for many of them, their lives. The episode is an apt introduction to the sentence President Eisenhower used in his first inaugural address in January 1953, that a people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.

Principles and privileges are different. Principles are general rules that apply to everyone and that no one may violate, such as equality before the law, due process, freedom of speech and the duty to respect others' rights. Privileges are special advantages for some, such as exemptions from taxes, shortcuts in queues, immunity from arrest and favours from officials. The relation between them is tense. Privileges are the exceptions that eat away at principles, and the more that exceptions multiply, the less meaning the rule retains.

The reason privileges destroy principles is simple. A principle is credible only if it is applied to all. When the powerful are exempt, the rest of the population concludes that the law is a tool of the strong and not a standard of justice, and it stops obeying it. Montesquieu argued that the virtue of a republic is a love of equality, and that when citizens stop caring about it, the republic is corrupted. Corruption then spreads, since once a rule can be bought or evaded, everyone has an incentive to do so. The final loss is of trust, on which every institution depends.

The loss of privileges follows. When principles decay, the protections which privileged groups rely on also decay, because those protections were ultimately underwritten by the same system of law. The French nobles lost their privileges because the monarchy, which guaranteed them, lost its legitimacy. The landlords of Russia lost their estates in 1917 for similar reasons, and the Weimar elite who, in the early 1930s, preferred to appease Hitler rather than defend the republic's constitution found that they too were swept aside. A privileged group that undermines the rules that protect everyone is cutting the branch on which it sits.

A privileged group that undermines the rules that protect everyone is cutting the branch on which it sits.

India has its own history of the tension. The Emergency of 1975 to 1977 suspended fundamental rights and imprisoned political opponents, in the name of stability and the preservation of those in power. Its effect was to damage the principle of constitutional government, and it ended with the defeat of the ruling party at the polls in 1977. The system of princely privileges, including the privy purses guaranteed to former rulers, was abolished in 1971, and the zamindari system was dismantled after independence, in both cases because they were inconsistent with equality. Each time, those who held on the longest lost the most.

Everyday life contains smaller examples. The red beacon on the roof of a ministerial car was a symbol of status that allowed officials to travel through traffic while ordinary citizens waited. In April 2017 the central government announced that no vehicle in the country, apart from emergency services, would be allowed to use the red light from 1 May. The measure was symbolic, and it was popular because it removed a visible sign of a privileged class. Similar resentment attaches to the practice of VIP queues at temples, to the bypassing of examinations and to the use of influence to obtain hospital beds. Each exception wounds the idea that citizens are equal.

Business and professional life provide quieter cases. A cartel of firms that fixes prices and keeps new rivals out enjoys privileged profits for a time, but it destroys the principle of fair competition on which markets rest, and when public trust in the market collapses, as it did after the corporate scandals of 2001 and the financial crash of 2008, regulation falls on the whole industry. Professions that protect their members from scrutiny, as some medical councils have done, lose the public confidence that gave them their standing in the first place.

The sentence needs qualification. Not all privileges are unjust. Societies rightly grant special protections to the vulnerable, such as reservations for historically oppressed groups, concessions for the disabled and the elderly, and immunities that allow judges and legislators to do their work without fear. These are not privileges in the sense of unearned advantage but corrections which serve the principle of equality in substance. The question is whether the special treatment is justified by the principle, and is open to challenge, or whether it is simply the possession of power.

A second qualification is that principles can themselves be hollow. A people may profess liberty and justice while denying them to some, as the American founders did when they wrote that all men are created equal while holding slaves. In such cases the privileges of the dominant group are not a violation of the principles but their betrayal. The passage of time can expose the gap, as the abolitionists and the civil rights movement did. Principles survive when ordinary people hold the privileged to them.

How, then, can a society avoid the trap? Constitutions, independent courts and a free press are the main institutional safeguards, since they limit the ability of the powerful to carve out exceptions. Culture matters also. Societies in which public servants queue with citizens and leaders accept the law's authority tend to sustain their principles. Individuals must be prepared to accept small sacrifices of advantage for the sake of the rules. The difficulty is that each privilege seems small and harmless, and the loss of principle is gradual, so that the people who hold on to their privileges rarely notice the moment when both begin to go.