A promise preserves a moment against the changing self
the liberty to bind myself
The argument already has a close precursor in ‘A Defence of Rash Vows,’ collected in The Defendant (first published 1901; the witness here is Project Gutenberg’s transcription of the 1902 second edition). There a vow is an ‘appointment with himself at some distant time or place.’ Its enemy is the fear that the future self will have become another person, with no allegiance to the original resolve. Chesterton also imagines a nightmare of repeatedly changing identities and dangers that cannot really hurt: the same conjunction of unreality, freedom and lost adventure developed here. ‘A Defence of Rash Vows,’ paragraphs beginning ‘The man who makes a vow’ and ‘And the end of all this.’
The earlier essay makes marriage its culminating example too. Lovers themselves desire constancy; the institution respects that desire by taking their promise seriously. Its pointed formulation is that modern reformers allow the lover every freedom except ‘the liberty to sell his liberty.’ Here that claim becomes a requirement of Utopia: society must preserve a person's chosen commitments even against a later wish to escape them. The continuity helps explain the otherwise startling appeal to punishment. Chesterton treats accountability as recognition that the earlier act of will was real, rather than as an alien restraint upon an originally uncommitted self. This explains his argument; it does not by itself establish which commitments should be enforceable or whether every marriage must be indissoluble. Same essay, paragraph beginning ‘The revolt against vows.’
Sources
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