Jan Smuts

Introduction

Jan Christiaan Smuts (May 24, 1870 - September 11, 1950) was a South African statesman, soldier and scholar who coined the term "holism" and helped design both the League of Nations and the United Nations. He was not a psychologist by profession, and any account of him on a psychology site has to begin with that correction: he read law at Cambridge, practised it briefly in Cape Town, and spent nearly sixty years in public office, twice as prime minister of South Africa. His psychological relevance comes from one book, Holism and Evolution (1926), and from a long private interest in what he called "personology" - the study of whole personalities, a subject he thought academic psychology was too impersonal to handle.

That dual identity is inseparable from his reputation. Smuts argued in Holism and Evolution that the universe tends to produce genuine wholes, more than the sum of their parts - including minds and human personalities, which he called the supreme embodiments of holism. He applied the same logic to politics: small units should grow into larger ones, colonies into a union, nations into a commonwealth, states into a league. Yet the same framework was used to justify a policy of separating South Africa's communities, and his record on race remains the most contested part of his legacy.

Early Life and Education

Smuts was born on May 24, 1870, on the family farm at Bovenplaats, near Riebeeck West in the Cape Colony, the second son of a prosperous farmer who also sat in the Cape Legislative Assembly. Until the age of twelve he lived the life of a farm child; he later credited those years for a lifelong love of the veld and for the botanical interests that made him a serious amateur authority on grasses. Asked decades later by an American botanist why a general should be an expert on grasses, he replied, "But my dear lady, I am only a general in my spare time."

He began boarding school at Riebeeck West at twelve and entered Victoria College, Stellenbosch, at sixteen, taking first-class honours in both science and arts and graduating with a brilliant record in 1891. He had also fallen in love with a fellow student, Isie Krige, whom he married in 1897 and who was a sustaining presence throughout his life; they had six children.

In 1891 he won the Ebden scholarship and went to Christ's College, Cambridge, to read law. He was the first student in the university's history to sit both parts of the law tripos in the same year, and he came first in both; his tutor Frederic Maitland called him the most brilliant student he had ever met. He went on to top the Inns of Court honours examination in London. A fellowship in law at Christ's was offered and declined.

Outside the law he read voraciously in philosophy, science and poetry, and it was in these years that he discovered Walt Whitman, whose celebration of "natural man" he credited with freeing him from the sense of sin instilled by a strict Calvinist upbringing. Before leaving England he wrote a book-length study of Whitman that no publisher would take; it finally appeared in 1973, twenty-three years after his death.

Academic and Professional Career

Smuts returned to the Cape in 1895, was admitted to the bar, and was drawn quickly into politics and journalism. He initially supported Cecil Rhodes, but the Jameson Raid of late 1895 shattered that alliance, and he resigned his position with De Beers. In 1898, aged 28, he was appointed state attorney of the South African Republic under Paul Kruger, placing him at the centre of Transvaal politics on the eve of the Boer War.

During the South African War (1899-1902) he served first as an official-soldier and then, after the British occupation of Pretoria, as a full-time commander, proving adept at the guerrilla campaign against extended British lines. He invaded the Cape Colony in 1902, coming within some 190 kilometres of Cape Town with a force too small to hold ground, and was recalled under British escort to help draft the terms of peace.

After the February 1907 elections he joined Louis Botha's cabinet, and in 1910 he helped write the constitution of the new Union of South Africa. When war came in 1914, Smuts founded the South African Defence Force, suppressed internal rebellion, conquered German South West Africa and led the campaign in German East Africa. He used the Defence Force also against domestic opponents of the Union's support for Britain, and against strike action. Invited into Lloyd George's Imperial War Cabinet in March 1917, he helped organise what became the Royal Air Force and sat in on the major strategic decisions of the war.

His pamphlet The League of Nations: A Practical Suggestion (1918) shaped Woodrow Wilson's thinking; at Versailles he was among the strongest advocates of a restrained peace, and he signed the Covenant of the League of Nations for South Africa. When Botha died in 1919, Smuts became prime minister, holding office until 1924, serving as deputy under J. B. M. Hertzog from 1933, and returning as prime minister from 1939 to 1948. In the Second World War he was made an honorary field marshal in 1941, was consulted closely by Churchill, and represented South Africa at San Francisco in 1945, where he wrote the first draft of the preamble to the United Nations Charter. He is the only person to have signed the charters of both the League and the United Nations. Defeated by the National Party in the 1948 election, he was elected chancellor of Cambridge University, a post he held until his death at Irene, near Pretoria, on September 11, 1950.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Holism and Evolution

Smuts completed a manuscript called An Inquiry into the Whole in 1910, revised it in 1924, and published it in 1926 as Holism and Evolution. Its central claim is that holism - "the fundamental factor operative towards the creation of wholes in the universe" - is a real tendency in nature, visible in the physical world and increasingly dominant as one ascends the scale of being. A true whole is not an aggregate: in a heap of stones or a machine the parts retain their identity and can be recovered, whereas in a genuine whole the parts are transformed by their membership. Minds, and above all human personality, are for Smuts the clearest instances.

The book mattered because it took directly on the mechanist materialism that dominated biology in the 1920s. Smuts argued that mechanistic formulations cannot account for the creativity of evolution, its production of genuinely novel kinds of thing, and he posited a whole-making factor in nature to explain them. He was careful not to give the factor a religious or explicitly spiritual character, though critics have noted that it functions much like Bergson's élan vital.

The word entered general currency quickly. Smuts wrote the entry on holism for the 1929 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the concept was taken up in ecology, the biological sciences and later systems thinking. It also reached psychology: Alfred Adler, whose individual psychology was itself organised around the whole person, wrote to request permission for a German translation, and holism resonated with Gestalt and field-theory traditions, notably the work of Max Wertheimer and Kurt Lewin, for whom psychological facts had to be understood within structured totalities rather than as sums of elements.

Personology and the study of the whole person

Alongside his Whitman manuscript, Smuts sketched a discipline he called personology: the study of great personalities as integrated wholes. His complaint was that psychology as then constituted was too impersonal to do justice to personality, dissecting it rather than grasping its unity. He never developed the idea, but it explains the shape of his interest: he approached the mind not as a researcher but as a philosopher-statesman convinced that the person is the highest product of evolution and that the study of personality should be correspondingly synthetic.

Major Publications

The League of Nations: A Practical Suggestion (1918). The pamphlet that influenced Wilson and shaped the Covenant.
Holism and Evolution (1926, Macmillan). His only philosophical book and the origin of the term holism.
Africa and Some World Problems (1930, Clarendon Press). Essays on African affairs and international order, including his Rhodes Memorial Lectures.
Greater South Africa: Plans for a Better World (1940). A compilation of his speeches.
Selections from the Smuts Papers, seven volumes, edited by W. K. Hancock and Jean van der Poel (Cambridge University Press, 1966 and 1973).
Walt Whitman: A Study in the Evolution of Personality (1973, Wayne State University Press). His unpublished Cambridge manuscript, issued posthumously.

Impact and Legacy

Smuts's legacy splits cleanly, and uncomfortably, along two axes: what holism became, and what apartheid was not.

The international contribution is durable. He was a principal architect of the League of Nations, drafted the UN preamble, served as president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and became a Fellow of the Royal Society, and was elected chancellor of Cambridge. He was also a committed Zionist who raised funds for Zionist organisations, lobbied against the 1939 White Paper, and whose government extended recognition to Israel - though he was deputy prime minister in 1937 when the Hertzog government passed the Aliens Act aimed at restricting Jewish immigration, a contradiction his admirers and critics both acknowledge.

The racial record is where he is judged, and it is genuinely two-sided. Critics, and a large historical literature, argue that Smuts preached humanitarianism abroad while practising domination at home. In 1946 India formally complained to the United Nations about legalised discrimination against South Africans of Indian descent; Smuts appeared personally before the General Assembly to argue that the matter fell under domestic jurisdiction, and the Assembly censured South Africa anyway, calling on his government to bring its treatment of Indians into line with the United Nations Charter. At the same session, ANC president-general Alfred Bitini Xuma and delegates of the South African Indian Congress raised the police response to the African Mine Workers' Strike earlier that year. Smuts's own attitudes were patronising in ways his contemporaries accepted but history does not: he described black Africans as "children of nature" lacking the "inner toughness and persistence of the European." In the House of Assembly on September 21, 1948, he stated plainly that his policy had been European paramountcy, that he had "never been in favour of equal rights," and that he stood for a position of trusteeship over non-European peoples, together with social and residential separation. The historian Peder Anker has argued, in Imperial Ecology, that holism itself supplied the vocabulary for this: drawing on South African ecologists such as John William Bews and John Phillips, Smuts converted ideas about the ordered development of an ecological community into a politics of racial gradualism and separation.

There is a documented counter-case, and it should not be flattened. Smuts opposed the total-removal logic of the National Party. In 1948 he endorsed the recommendations of the Fagan Commission, appointed by his own government in 1946, which recommended recognising Africans as permanent residents of white South Africa rather than temporary workers who belonged in the reserves, and relaxing influx controls and pass laws - a position directly opposed to the Nationalists' programme. He told Parliament that the idea of removing all black people and confining them in their own kraals was "the greatest nonsense I have ever heard," and he objected to stripping non-Europeans of the "very small rights" they possessed. His defenders also point to his long, mutually respectful relationship with Gandhi, who gave him a pair of sandals he had made himself and to whom Smuts wrote in 1939 that he had worn them for many summers while not feeling worthy to stand in the shoes of so great a man.

Neither side dissolves the other. The Fagan Commission wanted a more efficient supply of African labour to industry, not a non-racial democracy, and there is no evidence that Smuts ever supported equal political rights. The historian Saul Dubow's verdict is probably the fairest summary: his views of freedom "were always geared to securing the values of western Christian civilization. He was consistent, albeit more flexible than his political contemporaries, in his espousal of white supremacy."

His intellectual legacy has outlived the political one and carries its own criticism. Holism became a catchword in 1930s debates between idealists and mechanists, but professional scientists then largely abandoned it; its revival came from ecology, systems theory and later cognitive and Gestalt-influenced psychology rather than from biology. Critics have complained that Smuts's holistic factor does real explanatory work only by being difficult to pin down, and that his habit of reading political conclusions out of biological analogies - small units growing into larger wholes - was as much rhetoric as argument. That pattern is visible in the very structure of his career, in which the integrity of personality he defended in theory sat alongside policies that denied its full development to most South Africans.

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References

Smuts, J. C. (1926). Holism and Evolution. Macmillan.