SOCIAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
Philosophy began when Greek thinkers (ca. 600 BCE)
began to account for nature in terms of rational principles rather than as a mythological playground of the gods. For these
earliest philosophers, “nature” was
comprehensible in terms of reason. The whims
of the gods
could not and did not explain the “natural.”[1]
By the time of Socrates and Plato (ca. 400 BCE),
the Sophists had argued that the
political realm could be distinguished from the natural order (as described by the
philosophers). For the Sophists, as for Plato and Socrates, there is a
political order which is not identical with the processes of nature. Since the political realm is free from the inevitable
processes of nature, it can be fashioned in accordance with a rational model. Convention and nature can be transcended. Political philosophy which
emerges for the first time in Socrates/Plato presupposes that the political order is amenable to human art.[2]
For Plato, the independence of the political order from religion, convention, and nature
did not imply its independence from the moral order (as it did for the
Sophists). True
knowledge of the political
order transforms
politics and brings it into
alignment with the moral order.
“Political philosophy will then be the attempt to
replace opinion about the nature of political things by knowledge of the nature
of political things. . . . Political philosophy is the attempt truly to know
both the nature of political things and the right, or the good, political
order.”[3]
“[I]t is not the case that one has a choice between
having a political philosophy and not having a political philosophy. The choice
is between, on the one hand, holding a political philosophy that is derived
from habit or from an intellectual fad shared by a peer group and, on the other
hand, holding a political philosophy that is created through encounters with
fundamental principles.”[4]
Political philosophy is not focused on factional or party politics. Rather, it reflects on the relation between current practices, issues, and institutions and more fundamental notions such as justice, power, and authority. Politics
assumes the legitimacy of current institutions; political philosophy seeks to
appraise institutions
and practices in light of
considerations which originate outside of political practice itself.
“[M]ost of the great statements of political
philosophy have been put forward in times of crisis; that is, when political
phenomena are less effectively integrated by institutional forms. . . .
Although the task of political philosophy is greatly complicated in a period of
disintegration, the theories of Plato, Machiavelli, and Hobbes, for example,
are evidence of a ‘challenge and response’ relationship between the disorder of the actual world and the role of the political
philosopher as the encompasser of disorder. The range of possibilities appears
infinite, for now the political philosopher is not confined to criticism and
interpretation; he must reconstruct a shattered world of meanings and their
accompanying institutional expressions; he must, in short, fashion a political
cosmos out of political chaos.”[5]
“Of all the authoritative institutions in society,
the political arrangement has been singled out as uniquely concerned with what
is ‘common’ to the whole community. . . . political philosophy has been taken
to mean reflection on matters that concern the community as a whole.”[6]
“[A]t all other levels of reflection on political
life we have before us the single world of political activity, and what we are
interested in is the internal coherence of that world; but in political
philosophy we have in our minds that world and another world, and our endeavour
is to explore the coherence of the two worlds together. . . . Political
philosophy . . . is the consideration of the relation between civil association
and eternity.”[7]
“[I]deas are the most migratory things
in the world.”[8]
“[T]he quest of a historical
understanding even of single passages in literature often drives the student
into fields which at first seem remote enough from his original topic of
investigation. The more you press in towards the heart of a narrowly bounded
historical problem, the more likely you are to encounter in the problem itself
a pressure which drives you outward beyond these bounds.”[9]
“[I]t is remarkably difficult to avoid falling
under the spell of our own intellectual heritage. As we analyze and reflect on
our normative concepts, it is easy to become bewitched into believing that the
ways of thinking about them bequeathed to us by the mainstream of our
intellectual traditions must be the
ways of thinking about them. . . . The history of philosophy, and perhaps
especially of moral, social and political philosophy, is there to prevent us
from becoming too readily bewitched. The intellectual historian can help us to
appreciate how far the values embodied in our present way of life, and our
present ways of thinking about those values, reflect a series of choices made
at different times between different possible worlds.”[10]
Over the past generation there has been a major
shift in how the classics of political philosophy are understood. Prior to the
1960s, many understood the canon of leading texts as timeless commentaries on
perennial issues, e.g., the nature of authority, the conditions necessary for
political order, etc. Since the 1960s, however, a school of interpretation—centred in
After the Greek victory over the Persians in 490
B.C.
Hostilities broke out between the Spartan-led
confederacy and
As the war dragged on, strong factional interests
emerged in
As the war progressed, strong complaints were
registered against the incapacitated assembly. The playwright, Aristophanes (ca.
448—388 B.C), railed against the democracy which had devolved into mob rule and
which was led by demagogues interested only in power, honour, and wealth.
By the end of the war, suspicions were at an
all-time high: the poor suspected the oligarchic intentions of the wealthy who
in turn plotted against the ineptitude and corruption of the democratic assembly.
The Greek word dike
which is usually translated as ‘justice’ actually has a much broader
connotation than our word ‘justice.’ Dike is perhaps best understood as
synonymous with ‘right’ or ‘righteousness’.
During the war, a wide variety of conceptions of
justice were invoked. Some of these conceptions were rooted in traditional
Greek society, some in the calmer life of the polis (city-state) and some in the exigencies of war. For instance,
even in Plato’s day, the traditional
Greek understanding of justice as helping
one’s friends and harming one’s enemies was still subscribed to.
During the conference held by
All Lacedaemonians [Sparta and her allies] who are
of the opinion that the treaty has been broken, and that Athens is guilty,
leave your seats and go there,” pointing out a certain place; “all who are of
the opposite opinion, there.” They accordingly stood up and divided; and those
who held that the treaty had been broken were in a decided majority. Summoning
the allies, they told them that their opinion was that
On still other occasions the Athenians espoused the
view that justice was the right of the
stronger
to rule the weaker.[15]
When confronting the Mileans with the threat to submit or die, the Athenian
representatives alleged that justice was simply the expediency of superior
force.[16]
As the war dragged on, many came to regard the
rhetoric of ‘justice’ as simply a cloak
for uncaring self-interest. Underneath the rhetoric lurked revenge, simple acquisitiveness, the love of honour, or even
the venting of spontaneous passion.
“The new type of man developing under the pressures
of war was a cynic who believed that might makes right, who rejected all the
old loyalties and the old virtues unless they were expedient, that is, unless
they helped him accomplish his private ends.”[17]
Justice seemed utterly powerless in the democratic
assembly and the battlefield. “Justice itself . . . [was] . . . among the chief
victims of the [Peloponnesian] war.”[18]
In Plato’s day there was a pervasive relativism regarding the nature of justice. Class antagonisms grew. The democratic assembly was contorted by violent mood
swings. Politicians
“fashioned power from the grievances,
resentments, and ambitions festering the community.”[19]
For Plato, this factionalism or “politics” was the
source of instability and was fostered by the democratic impulses which aimed
at maximal individual liberty. The
only hope was that the moral order might come to dominate the life of the polis. Only then could wisdom, justice,
harmony, and political order secure the best human life.
“By the end of the fifth century B.C. all aspects
of the culture . . . had combined to produce an extremely dangerous situation.
A widespread dissolution of the old beliefs that had held society together,
coupled with a radical scepticism about the possibility of discovering new and
better grounds for the old social formula, had resulted in the same narrow and
ruthless self-seeking that the tensions of war and defeat had naturally and
independently engendered. Thus the very fabric of society seemed to be
collapsing. The hard-won and only recently achieved political unity of the
city-state had disappeared in divisive party conflict; the old ideal of sophrosyne, of moderation and
self-discipline, had given way to deliberate and unrestrained seeking of
extremes; the old probity, the high-mindedness, loyalty, and devotion to civic
duty that had enabled a tiny state like Athens to defeat the great Persian
empire less than a century earlier, had been replaced by licentious
self-seeking and a concentration on sensual pleasures that was altogether
incompatible with the health of the city.”[20]
Cephalus:
Justice is speaking the truth and paying debts
Polemarchus:
Justice is benefiting one’s friends and harming one’s enemies
Thrasymachus:
Justice is the advantage of the stronger who get to identify justice with their
own interests
331c (Classics,
6): Contra Cephalus
338e-339a (Classics,
9): Thrasymachus states his view
342e (Classics,
13): Contra Thrasymachus
Each of these conceptions of justice fail since
they overlook an
essential feature of
justice, namely, that it is unqualifiedly good or salutary. Everything that is just
must also be unreservedly good. Justice can only be fully salutary when the laws of the city (polis)
are themselves good and
then and only then can the good citizen justly obey the laws of the city.[21]
Socrates is challenged by Glaucon in Book II to
show that justice is an intrinsic good, that is, it is good or
self-sufficiently productive of happiness apart from the benefits (reputation, honours, money,
etc.) which may accrue from it.
The connection between justice and the good moves us from considering justice as a property of
actions per se to a conception of
justice which arises within the soul or city prior to any given act. Thus, in
order to show the linkage between justice and the good, an ideal (“in speech”) city must be examined.
357b (Classics,
18); 367c-d (Classics, 26): The
challenge to prove the intrinsic value of justice
368e-369a (Classics,
28): The search for justice begins with the city
413c-d (Classics,
32): The training of the guardians
414d-415c (Classics,
33-34): The noble fiction of a common origin & divine selection
432a (Classics,
42): The location of three classic Greek virtues—wisdom, courage, and
moderation in the city
434c-d (Classics,
44): The location of justice in the city
434d-441c (Classics,
44-50) The soul has three parts: reason, spiritedness, and appetite.
441e (Classics,
51): Justice is the proper relation between parts of the soul
Plato had established in Laches that virtues cannot refer primarily to outward actions since
every imaginable “just” act can issue from a nonvirtuous soul.
“We ordinarily attribute a virtue to a person on the
basis of certain sorts of behaviour. When Plato tells us what the virtue is, he
identifies the underlying condition of soul which normally gives rise to this
behaviour.”[22]
443d (Classics,
52): Justice as concerned with the inner parts of the soul
443e (Classics,
52-3): Justice preserves and achieves the inner harmony of the city and the
soul
445a-b (Classics,
54): Justice as intrinsically valuable—that is, prior to any advantage it may
bring. Justice directly or immediately
promotes happiness. [See also 588e-589a
(Classics, 91)]
The justice of the polis
is not a generalization about its members, (i.e., all of the members are just
therefore the polis is just). Nor is
the justice of the polis simply that
everyone does his own function. Rather the polis
ensures that everyone will do his own function and only his
own.[23]
“This, therefore, is the lynch-pin of the whole, that
each class should do its own, and it is with this feature of the polis that its justice is identical. So
long, in particular, as only those men and women rule who are fitted by nature
to do so, and so long as they carry out assiduously the duties of rulers, the polis and all its educational, legal,
and other social institutions will function as they should. It is this feature
which ensures that every man does his own. It is this feature which produces
and preserves the virtues of wisdom, courage and temperance in the polis.”[24]
For Plato, education is character training, bringing
the spirited and appetitive elements under the proper moral influence of the
rule of reason. Since the ideal city has
been founded, innovation is not permitted, not even in children’s songs (IV.4).
“A state which is meant for
the moral perfection of its members will be an educational institution.”[25]
“It is because the polis
as a whole is just that the members of every class are just. The apparent
conflict disappears when the temporal dimension is taken into account. Each
man’s justice helps to sustain the social institutions which keep him just, and
ensure that his children resemble him. The polis
is the means by which men, once just, remain so, and transmit their justice
through the generations.”[26]
Education immortalizes the polis. “And so, when each generation has educated others like
themselves to take their place as guardians of the state, they shall depart to
the
|
Age |
Education for the GOOD |
|
0-3 years |
Raised in state
nurseries; allowed to grow as the body dictates; senses are to be stimulated
towards accurate experiences; must not be subjected to fear; pleasure and
pain are to be minimized. |
|
4-6 years |
Taught fairy tales,
nursery rhymes, stories of the gods; emphasis on the virtuous gods; immoral
stories omitted or censored; encouraged to play a great deal; punishment is
not to be too disgraceful; self-will must be curbed; the spirit should not be
destroyed; imitation is a chief means of learning at this stage. |
|
6-13 years |
The wildness of the child
must be brought under control through music, play-manners, religion, dancing;
an emphasis on gymnastics and military training; horsemanship and the use of
small weapons must be learned; introductory studies in poetry, reading,
writing, singing, numbers, geometry. |
|
13-16 years |
Mastering of the lyre and
subjects undertaken previously; the creation of the proper moral spirit;
begin to study the theory and practical application of arithmetic; memorize
much poetry and learn countless religious hymns. |
|
16-20 years |
Strenuous military
training; rigorous physical exercises; no intellectual education. |
|
20-30 years |
At age 20: (1) those
suited for military service go to their assigned task; (2) those suited to be
guardians continue studying for 10 years; these studies are to be largely
mathematical (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy). |
|
30-35 years |
At age 30 the less
brilliant go into lower civil offices; others continue on for 5 years; study
of philosophy (dialectics and metaphysics)—pure knowledge and pure reality. |
|
35-50 years |
15 years of practical
experience; philosophical pursuits; taking turns in office as a matter of
public duty; their main task: to contemplate and think about the essence of
the good life by which the state should be regulated. |
In an important sense, all of western political
philosophy is an appraisal of Plato.
Plato’s political theory is profoundly antagonistic
towards “politics” and its
attempt to manage conflict.
For Plato, true political art avoids conflict by invoking a definite model
which guarantees consensus.[27]
Order, beauty, stability, harmony must originate outside of the political
order—they cannot arise within the public life of the polis.
Plato’s account provides a tantalizing prospect of absolute knowledge wedded
to absolute power, what Arthur Melzer
calls the “lawless rule of the wise.”[28]
“Anxious for a free field for the higher wisdom,
Plato will have no laws in the state of the Republic.
The eternal Ideas matter more than laws; and those who have apprehended these
Ideas must be free to stamp them at their discretion on the state . . . the
impress of a timeless and eternally perfect Idea upon receptive matter.”[29]
“The Good at which the Platonic polis aimed was
in no way dependent on the community, nor was it in any real sense a matter for
political decision.”[30]
There was no sharing of political power, except among the guardians. Plato’s
deep distrust of
political participation extends even to the rulers
who do not actually deliberate about the Good, they simply “see” it. Reason serves the polis,
not as deliberator, but as controller and orderer.
“In Plato’s scheme, there was no power to share;
what was sharable was the Form of the Good written into the structure of the
community. The results of this line of argument were two-fold: the idea of
citizenship was severed from the idea of meaningful participation in the making
of political decisions; and the idea of the political community, that is, a
community that seeks to resolve its internal conflicts through political
methods, is replaced by the idea of the virtuous community devoid of conflict
and, therefore, devoid of ‘politics’. Plato did not deny that each member of
the community, no matter how humble his contribution, had a right to share the
benefits of the community; what he did deny was that his contribution could be
erected into a claim to share in political decision-making.”[31]
Plato overlooks a fundamental feature of the nature of political judgments: many political conflicts cannot be mediated by an appeal to the Truth. Furthermore, political judgments must also seek to
express a sense of belonging for the various parties within the political
community and thus cannot simply assert policy as “truth.” In spite of Plato’s antagonism, consensus crafted from conflict can positively build and express connectedness.[32]
Aristotle was born in 384 B.C. in Stageira which was
under the dominion of the king of Macedon. His father was a physician who
attended the family of the Macedonian king. At about the age of seventeen
Aristotle went to
In 343, Aristotle briefly served as a tutor to
Alexander, son of the Philip of Macedon. By 336, Aristotle was back in
“The theoretical sciences yield truths which are
universal and necessary, truths that are deducible with logical necessity from
self-evident principles.”[34]
These sciences are not interested in serving needs, but with the pursuit of
knowledge for its own sake. In addition to the major sciences listed in the
paragraph immediately below, this group includes theology, astronomy, biology,
botany, metereology.[35]
e.g., Mathematics which studies number, magnitude,
figure; physics which studies the principles of motion and rest, growth and
decay; and metaphysics which studies the
fundamental principles of being.
These sciences deal with things which are changeable
and subject to human art. They involve “know-how” knowledge rather than
theoretical knowledge. Productive knowledge does not tell the producer what to
do with the product once it is produced. The determination of the proper end or
use of things is the task of the practical sciences.
The practical sciences such as ethics and politics
deal with initiating motives (arche)
which arise from within man himself. The goal is to uncover those ends towards
which man naturally strives and to bring about those ends through the proper
type of action. The subject matter of these sciences includes a discussion of
ends, means to those ends, and knowledge that guides action.
Aristotle’s ethic arises out of what nature reveals:
human beings strive to actualize certain potentialities already implicit in
them. The aim of ethics is to act in ways which achieve what is naturally
implicit. Ethics seeks proper action and not knowledge per se.
Although there is no categorical definition of the
Good (and thus no Form of the Good), the final end of all goods (e.g.,
pleasure, honour, wealth) is found in what they seek to actualize beyond
themselves. Things are good, not because they derive from the Good, but because
they aim at it.
“Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every
action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the
good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.”
“[W]e call final without qualification that which
is always desirable in itself and never for the sake of something else. Now
such a thing happiness [eudaimonia],
above all else, is held to be; for this we choose always for itself and never
for the sake of something else, but honour, pleasure, reason, and every virtue
we choose indeed for themselves . . . but we choose them also for the sake of happiness, judging that by
means of them we shall be happy.”[36]
For Aristotle, eudaimonia which literally means “good spirit” indicates human flourishing, faring well, a harmonious and integrated realization
of a being’s unique function. It is the good at which all human action (praxis) aims.
“Happiness, then, is something final and
self-sufficient, and is the end [goal] of action.”
“[T]he good and the ‘well’ is thought to reside in
the function .
. . we are seeking what is
peculiar to man.”
“When something has an ergon (characteristic activity, function) . . . [its] . . . good is specified by it.”[37]
F. Siegler’s formalization of Aristotle’s argument:
(1) Man has a function; (2) The function
of man is determined by what is peculiar to man; (3) What is peculiar to man is acting on reasons; (4) The function of man is acting on reasons.[38]
“[H]uman good turns out to be activity of soul in
accordance with virtue.“
“Moral
virtue . . . is formed by habit.” (33)
“In a word, characteristics [hexis, trained abilities] develop from corresponding activities.”
(34)
“We may thus conclude that virtue or excellence is
a characteristic [as opposed to an emotion or a capacity] involving choice, and
that it consists in observing the mean relative to us, a mean which is defined
by a rational principle, such as a man of practical wisdom would use to
determine it. It is the mean by reference to two vices: the one of excess and
the other of deficiency.” (43)
(Scale of Goodness)
Virtue
|
|
Vice of Deficiency -------------------------Vice of
Excess
With regard to the related vices, virtue is a mean.
With regard to goodness, it is an excellence.
courage
|
|
cowardliness----------------------brashness
generosity
|
|
stinginess------------------------extravagance
“The virtues are precisely those qualities the
possession of which will enable the individual to achieve eudaimonia and the lack of which will frustrate his movement toward
that telos.”[40]
“Political science, then,
has developed in order to help humans live a good life in society. . . . it is
a source of the practical wisdom that the statesman needs.“[41]
Aristotle acquired 158
constitutions in the course of his political studies. He acknowledges the
variability of constitutional arrangements and seeks to uncover what is good in
a variety of political arrangements.
Nicomachean
Ethics,
VIII.1, 1155a, VIII.11, 1161a, Classics,
114-119.
“Friendship is the source of order in human
relationships, the perfect community is one based upon true friendship.
Justice, ultimately, is rooted in friendship or love and in the capacity of
reason (nous) that enables humans to
discover the good.”[42]
“According to him [Aristotle], philia [friendship], taken most generally, is any relationship
characterized by mutual liking . . . that is, by mutual well-wishing and
well-doing out of concern for one another.”[43]
Aristotle denied that the polis was merely conventional or customary. On the contrary, it is
a naturally-growing thing (physis);
the home of the fully-realized person. According to R. G. Collingwood [The Idea of Nature, 81], physis means “the essence of things
which have a source of movement in themselves.”[44]
The polis is
“the satisfaction of an
immanent impulse which drives men upwards, through various forms of society,
into the final political form.”[45]
The household is not an adequate model for the polis since it consists of unequal
relations and the press of urgent necessities such as reproduction, food
provision, and wealth acquisition. The life of polis, on the other hand, arises out of leisure (schole), equality, and mutual
deliberative capacity.
“[T]he city, and only the city, is comprehensively
concerned with the comprehensive human good.”[46]
Even though persons and families may come together to
form a polis out of need or
self-interest, they end up living in it for the sake of the “good life.” A
common understanding of justice emerges in their deliberations and binds them
together (The Politics, 1252b, Classics, 121).[47]
Regimes cannot be appraised simply in terms of how
many rule—one, few, or many. They must be appraised in terms of the virtue of
the ruling body. Does it rule for the
common good or for its own benefit? (The
Politics, 1279a-b, Classics,
140.)
“[E]ach the state must assign its awards in proportion
to the contribution which each has made . . . in estimating the contribution of
each we must look to the end of the state, and measure the contribution to that
end.”[48]
“[T]he Greeks believed, and Aristotle argues, that
every institutional arrangement is a form of structural inequality,
differentially rewarding certain traits of character, kinds of action, and
values.”[49]
By definition, a citizen participates in the
deliberative and ruling activities of the polis
(The Politics, 1275b, Classics, 137).
Aristotle criticizes democracy because it has
substituted ‘absolute’ or ‘numerical’ equality for ‘proportionate’ equality and
because it elevates freedom over all other ends.
Aristotle recognizes the various claims to justice and
the various con-ceptions of justice which the one, few, and many legitimately
make. He urges moderation in the face of these claims. “[T]he actualization of
the best regime or the best possible regime, while indeed devoutly to be
wished, is likely to come about through incremental change within the framework
of existing laws and political ideas rather than through the promulgation of
radical utopian schemes.”[50]
“[I]t is preferable that law should rule rather than
any single one of the citizens. . . . even if it be shown that certain persons
ought to rule, these persons should be designated protectors of the law or its
servants. . . . it is generally agreed that where the law is capable, its
decisions should stand as authoritative (The
Politics, III.16).”[51]
The less authority a king has the more likely his
kingship will endure (The Politics
1313a, Classics, 160).
“The term arche
is the general term for rule . . . [It] originally signifies ‘beginning’ or
‘initiative’. . . If the essence of authority [in the archon, ruler] is thus initiative, the question will naturally
arise whether the initiative needs confirmation, or some process of validation,
before it can proceed on the way to achievement and consummation . . . It [kyrios] is a term familiar in the
Christian liturgy in the sense of ‘Lord’; but the essential sense of the Greek
root . . . is confirmation, ratification, and the general process of giving
validity. . . .What, then, is the . . . to
kyrion, which gives validity to the initiative of magistrates—or, it may be, of persons other than magistrates
who, in the phrase of Aristotle, ‘introduce matters’? The answer of Aristotle
is simple. Again and again he speaks of the deliberative body as being to kyrion. It is therefore the
deliberative body which is the validity-giving organ . . . in any
constitution.”[52]
Aristotle reconnects political philosophy with physis [naturally-growing things]. Plato
had disconnected physis and political
philosophy by making the latter subservient to an independent moral realm and
leaving the former as a passive recipient of imposed, external forms.
Since political rulership cannot be identified with
any single model (such as that appropriate to the household) there is a range
of legitimate polities, each of which can serve the citizens suitably and
disintegrate into a lesser form.
Aristotle’s praise for the rule of law (as opposed to
an unrestrained rulers—Plato) provided the basis for Constitutionalism such as
that found in Aquinas, Locke, Burke, and Rousseau. Law is the highest
authority; governments are servants of the law. The fundamental difference
between the monarch and the tyrant is his relation to the law.
“[For
Aristotle] political community
presupposed differences in experience, function, interests, and points of view
among citizens. It was composed of those who were naturally diverse and unequal
but who were justly made equal in those respects and for those purposes germane
to a common public life. Political participation enables these differences and
diversities to appear to others and thereby become recognized, harmonized, and
sustained.”[53]
“The system of government implied in the genius of the Greek language and the terminology of Aristotle is
thus a system in which the ‘initiative’ of civic magistrates is combined with
‘validation’ by the civic organ of deliberation. These are terms in which we
must think of the government of the Greek polis.
They are also the terms in which we may think of the government of the Roman civitas in the early days of the
Republic. But the
“The assumption of Aristotle, as of Greek thought
generally . .
. is that of the small
state or civic republic whose citizens know one another personally, and which
can be addressed by a single herald and persuaded by a single orator when it is
assembled in its ‘town meeting.’”[56]
“[F]or the Cynic the only true social relation is
that between wise men, and, as wisdom is universal in its nature, the relation
has nothing to do with the local limits of earthly cities. All wise men
everywhere form a single community, the city of the world, which is the only
true state. To the wise man no local custom is foreign or strange, for he is a
citizen of the world.”[57]
“Epicurean and Cynic alike questioned the
supposedly close connection between the virtue of the political association and
the virtue of the individual, between the conditions of communal order and the
discovery of the self. . . . If the gods had been truly concerned with man’s
welfare, they would not have allowed the cities to disintegrate to a point
where municipal life verged on the state of nature. If men could not trust in
the divine agency of the gods, and if human perfection were no longer possible
within the polis, the only conclusion
seemed to be that man’s fate was solely a personal matter.”[58]
“Men should not live their lives in so many civic
republics, separated from one another by different systems of justice; they
should reckon all as their fellow
citizens, and there should be one life and one order (cosmos), as it were of one flock on a common pasture, feeding in
common under one joint law.”[59]
“[Hellenistic philosophies] reacted to the growth
of large-scale, impersonal societies by projecting a picture of a society
without any discernible limits at all. The decline of the polis as the nuclear center of human existence had apparently
deprived political thought of its basic unit of analysis, one that it was
unable to replace. . . .The megalopolis had displaced the polis, and in this new spatial dimension the old notion of the
political association, as sustained by a friendship among familiars, appeared
anachronistic. The concept of the political community had been overwhelmed by the
sheer number and diversity of the participants.”[60]
“If our intellectual part is common, the reason
also, in respect of which we are rational beings, is common; if this is so,
common also is the reason which commands us what to do, and what not to do; if
this is so, there is a common law also; if this is so, we are fellow citizens;
if this is so, we are members of some political community; if this is so, the
world is in a manner a state.”[61]
“This natural reason results in a natural law
which, binding all rational beings together, includes all human society within
its ambit. As this law has no beginning, so it knows no end, and it can never
be altered or its operation suspended. Transcending all the national boundaries
established by man, the true law (vera
lex) is a universal canon, separating good and evil, impelling men toward
rectitude, and recalling them from wrong.”[62]
“The fundamental principle of the Stoic ethics and
politics is the existence of a universal and world-wide law, which is one with
reason both in nature and in human nature and which accordingly knits together
in a common social bond every being which possesses reason, whether god or man.
‘Law is the ruler over all the acts both of gods and men. Law must be the
director and governor and guide with respect to what is honorable and base, and
therefore the standard of the just and unjust; for all beings that are social
by nature, it directs what must be done and forbids what must not be done’
[These are the opening words to Chrysippus’s book, On Law]. Hence men and gods
taken together form a single community. The world is their city.”[63]
“This common law is ‘natural’ in the sense that it
can be discovered by any rational mind, that it is not the willful and
arbitrary positive command of the sovereign power. This is the necessary
assumption, without which it is impossible for different peoples with their
competing interests to live together in peace and freedom within one
community.”[64]
“True law is right reason in agreement with nature;
it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting . . . there will not
be different laws at
“[T]he appearance of a notion of higher and an older law, out of which the laws of
particular states are fashioned and to which they must conform in order to be
valid . . . this law is as old as the mind of God, existing long before there
were states in the world. . . . no state can ever enact any binding law in
derogation of this law of nature, a statement that no Greek of the fifth or
fourth century B.C. could have dreamt of making, even supposing that he could
have understood it.”[66]
“[T]he Greeks thought of the law in a state only as
one part or rather as one aspect of the whole polity itself, never as something
outside or apart from the state to which that polity must conform . . . they
thought of a law in terms of the state, not of the state in terms of law as the
Romans and the medieval man invariably did.”[67]
“[T]he presence of foreigners at
“Whatever any people itself has established as law
for it, this is confined to it alone and is called the jus civile, as a kind of law peculiar to the state; whatever, on
the other hand, natural reason has established among men, this is observed
uniformly among all peoples and is called the jus gentium, as a kind of law which all races employ. And so the
Roman people employ a law partly peculiar to themselves and partly common to
all men.”[69]
The Roman jurists came to equate the jus gentium of the law courts with the
universal law of the Stoic political theorists. This equation provided a basis
in law for the administrative needs of the burgeoning
“We must realize also that we are
invested by nature with two characters as it were: one of these is universal,
arising from the fact of our being all alike endowed with reason and with
superiority which lifts us up above the brute. From this all morality and
propriety are derived, and upon it depends the rational method of ascertaining
our duty. The other character is to be assigned to individuals in particular.”[70]
The Stoics and the Roman jurists were the first to
develop a theory of the inherent and natural rights of the individual. These
rights were typically derived from the individual’s possession of natural
reason. States were obliged to respect these inherent rights. The Stoics were
also the first to suggest that States receive their authorization from the
consent of the individuals contained therein.
“Reason is the law for all men, not merely for the
wise [pace the Cynics]. Despite differences of rank or position, race
and nationality, even despite differences of natural endowment and moral
character, there is a sense in which all men are equal. They are equal at least
in the possession of a common humanity, a common affinity to the divine reason,
and a common subjection to the eternal principles of right and justice. Thus
interpreted the principle of natural law becomes a recognition of intrinsic
worth in human personality, with the necessary implication of equality and
universal brotherhood.”[71]
“Perhaps, though, we should examine more thoroughly
what are the natural principles of human fellowship and community. First is
something that is seen in the fellowship of the entire human race. For its
bonding consists of reason and speech, which reconcile men to one another, through
teaching, learning, communicating, debating and making judgements, and unite
them in a kind of natural fellowship. . . . The most widespread fellowship
existing among men is that of all with all others. . . . There are indeed
several degrees of fellowship among men. To move from one that is unlimited,
next there is a closer one of the same race, tribe and tongue, through which
men are bound strongly to one another. More intimate still is that of the same
city, as citizens have many things that are shared with one another: the forum,
temples, porticoes and roads, laws and legal rights, law-courts and political
elections; and besides these acquaintances and companionship, and those
business and commercial transactions that many of them make with many others. A
tie narrower still is that of the fellowship between relations: moving from
that vast fellowship of the human race we end up with a confined and limited
one” (Book I, section 50, 51, 53).[72]
“The rational faculty of man was conceived as producing
a common conception of law and order which possessed a universal validity. . .
. This common conception included, as its three great notes, the three values
of
“The Stoics had argued from an idea about the order
of nature, that is the harmony of a rationally integrated universe, to a notion
of an ideal society embracing all of creation. This produced a theory that
rested upon a serious confusion of contexts, the one a context of natural
objects, the other a context of human beings. . . . What the Stoics had done was to extract certain
ideas previously connected with the political order and to transfer them to the
natural order. Universal ‘citizenship’, natural ‘law’ and ‘justice’ were
seriously claimed as attributes of this latter order, and men were exhorted to
extend their allegiance to the cosmos as though it were a true society.”[74]
“When we compare the political society in which
If universal reason and universal law are immediately
available to all persons as rational beings, could not one man (an emperor or
absolute sovereign) embody universal reason. If reason, justice, and law don’t
depend on interpersonal deliberation, they can be discerned by reason operating
solely within one individual.
“For how could the city of
“Even in the state of innocence men would have
sought one another’s company and would have tended together toward the final
goal of human existence.”[77]
“The peace of all things is the tranquillity of
order. Order is the distribution which allots all things
equal and unequal, each to its own place.”[78]
Whereas rulership is necessary prior to the fall
and in heaven itself, dominion or coercive power is annexed to rulership only
after the fall.
A harmony of right order—God ruling reason, reason ruling the appetites, and
the soul ruling the body—”would have prevailed if man had persevered in the
state of original justice. In that state men would have benefited from all the
advantages of society without any of its inconveniences. They would not have
been subjected against their will to other men and, instead of vying with one another
for the possession of earthly goods, they would have shared all things
equitably in perfect amity and freedom.”[79]
In the fall, Adam lusted after coercive power and
the desire to dominate others. The selfishness of Adam’s desire inevitably
leads to polities which are more or less despotic. After the fall, it is
necessary that rulership be despotic since it is necessary to maintain social
peace and order. Because the fall affected both ruler and those ruled, coercion
is a necessary element of post-lapsarian rulership.
“[G]overnment was seen as the secular corollary for
supernatural grace, in that it provided an antidote in the secular domain to
the evil propensities of fallen human nature. . . . Thus, whereas grace operates
inwardly, moving the individual soul to spiritual regeneration by supernatural
power—divine charity—government operates externally by human power—the secular sword—moving society to outward conformity to the norms of social justice
and public order. . . . govern-ment was perceived as an instrument of coercion
and punishment necessary for the maintenance of justice and order in the domain
of corrupt human nature.”[80]
Whereas classical political writers had insisted
that the political order is more than coercion and power in that it alone can
help man attain true virtue and his true nature, for Augustine, political
society “is a punishment for sin. If it
can be called natural at all, it is only in reference to man’s fallen nature. .
. . it too is willed by God as a further means of checking his [man’s]
insatiable lust to dominate. All rule is inseparable from coercion and is
despotic to that degree. The whole of political society becomes punitive and
remedial in nature and purpose. Its role is essentially a negative one, that of
castigating wrongdoers and of restraining evil among men by the use of force.”[81]
“But if we discard this definition of a people [“an
assemblage associated by a common acknowledgement of right and by a community
of interest”—Cicero, De Republica], and, assuming another, say that a people is an
assemblage of reasonable beings bound together by a common agreement as to the
objects of their love, then, in order to discover the character of any people,
we have only to observe what they love. . . . it will be a superior people in
proportion as it is bound together by higher interests, inferior in proportion as it is bound together by
lower. According to this definition of ours, the Roman people is a people, and
its weal is without doubt a commonwealth or republic.”[82]
None of the classical political forms achieved
justice in the sense of giving to each his due. “Where then, is the justice of
man, when he deserts the true God and yields himself to demons? Is this to give
every one his due?”[83]
In light of this failure, Augustine proposed a broader scope to the definition
of justice as giving to each his due. True justice can only occur in
commonwealths whose founder and governor is Christ.
The true commonwealth is grounded in Christian righteousness and the love of
God. It transcends every human and temporal city.[84]
“But the fact is, true justice has no existence
save in that republic whose founder and ruler is Christ, if at least any choose
to call this a republic; and indeed we cannot deny that it is the people’s
weal. . . . we may at all events say that in this city is true justice; the
city of which Holy Scripture says, ‘Glorious things are said of thee, O city of
“Thus did my two wills—one old and the other new, one carnal, the other
spiritual--contend within me; and by their discord they unstrung my soul. . . .
While I was deliberating whether I would serve the Lord my God now, as I have
long purposed to do, it was I who willed and it was also I who was unwilling.
In either case, it was I. I neither willed with my whole will nor was I wholly
unwilling. And so I was at war with myself and torn apart by myself.”[86]
“Accordingly, two cities have been formed by two loves:
the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by
the love of God, even to the contempt of self. The former, in a word, glories
in itself, the latter in the Lord. For the one seeks glory from men; but the
greatest glory of the other is God, the witness of conscience.”[87]
“[Friends] may mean those in the same house, such
as a man’s wife or children or any other members of the household; or it can
mean all those in the place where a man has his home, a city, for example, and
a man’s friends are thus his fellow-citizens; or it can extend to the whole
world, and include the nations with whom a man is joined by membership of the
human society; or even to the whole universe, “heaven and earth” as we term it,
and to those whom the philosophers call gods, whom they hold to be wise man’s
friends—our more familiar name for them is
‘angels.’”[88]
“The society of mortals spread abroad through the
earth everywhere, and in the most diverse places, although bound together by a
certain fellowship of our common nature, is yet for the most part divided
against itself, and the strongest oppress the others.”[89]
“This race we have distributed into two parts, the
one consisting of those who live according to man, the other of those who live
according to God. And these we also mystically call the two cities, or the two
communities of men, of which the one is predestined to reign eternally with
God, and the other to suffer eternal punishment with the devil.”[90]
“Both the city of God and the earthly city extend
beyond the borders of individual cities and neither one is to be identified
with any particular city or kingdom. . . . What establishes a person as a
member of one or the other of these two cities is not the race or nation that
he might claim as his own but the end that he pursues and to which he
ultimately subordinates all of his actions.”[91]
“In truth, these two cities are entangled together
in this world, and intermixed until the last judgment affect their separation.”[92]
“[T]he heavenly and the earthly . . . [cities] . .
. are mingled together from the beginning down to the end. Of these, the
earthly one has made to herself of whom she would, either from any other
quarter, or even from among men, false gods whom she might serve by sacrifice;
but she which is heavenly, and is a pilgrim on the earth, does not make false
gods, but is herself made by the true God, of whom she herself must be the true
sacrifice. Yet both alike either enjoy temporal good things, or are afflicted
with temporal evils, but with diverse faith, diverse hope, and diverse love, until
they must be separated by the last judgment, and each must receive her own end,
of which there is no end.”[93]
“When Augustine distinguished between the ‘two
loves’ which characterize the ‘two cities,’ the love of God and the love of
self, and when he pictured the world as a commingling of the two cities, he
does recognize that the commingling is due, not to the fact that two types of
people dwell together but because the conflict between love and self-love is in
every soul.”[94]
“The heavenly city, or rather the part of it which
sojourns on earth and lives by faith, makes use of the peace only because it
must, until this mortal condition which necessitates it shall pass away.
Consequently, so long as it lives like a captive and a stranger in the earthly
city, though it has already received the promise of redemption, and the gift of
the Spirit as the earnest of it, it makes no scruple to obey the laws of the
earthly city, whereby the things necessary for the maintenance of mortal life
are administered; and thus, as this life is common to both cities, so there is
a harmony between them in regard to what belongs to it.”[95]
“This does not mean that the city of
As with the Stoics and the Cynics, Augustine holds
that there are communities of fellowship which are
universal in scope. For Augustine, even the earthly city with its deep divisions, competing
lusts, and unabashed sinfulness is still a city.
In addition, Augustine emphasizes that these universal communities are extended in time across the whole of
human (and angelic) existence and into the indefinite future.
Augustine’s City of
“To the extent to which . . . [dual citizenship] .
. . removes from the jurisdiction of the city and reserves for a higher
authority an essential part of man’s life, it represents a departure from the
classical tradition, but insofar as it claims to provide the solution, sought
in vain by the pagan philosophers, to the problem of human living, it may be
viewed as a prolongation and fulfillment of that tradition.”[99]
Throughout the Middle Ages [ca. 500—1300], political
and ecclesiastic thinkers are left to wrestle with the implications of Augustine’s
claim that the secular and sacred are radically distinct realms. Typically, the
latter is given priority.
The thirteenth century was a time of increasing
intellectual and social unrest in
The early medieval understanding of the king and
bishop as christomimetes (lit.
impersonators of Christ) slowly gave rise to more imperialist concepts of
kingship and Papacy. Whereas throughout much of the early middle ages kings and
church officials were understood to be imitators of the humble and suffering
Christ, increasingly they described themselves as ruling in the power of God
the Father.[101]
This transformation in the understanding of rulership
was deeply influenced by the infusion of Roman legal concepts into the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries. The legal codes of the late
In the ninth century, the Eucharistic elements—bread
and wine—were understood as incorporated into the mystical body (corpus mysticum) of Christ during the
Eucharist. By the twelfth century the mystical aspect of the corpus mysticum receded and the real
presence of Christ was emphasized by the
“The gifts of grace are added to nature in such a
way that they do not destroy but rather perfect nature. Thus the light of faith
which is infused in us by grace does not destroy the natural light of reason
divinely given to us. And although the natural light of the human mind is
insufficient to manifest what is manifested
through faith, nonetheless it is impossible that what has been divinely given
us by faith should be contrary to what is given us by nature.”[103]
“There was, Thomas [Aquinas] said, a double
ordering of things (duplex ordo in rebus),
one was the natural, the other the supra-natural. . . .The inflexible contrast between nature and grace
gave way to a more flexible and realistic dualism, a dualism consisting of
nature and supernature.”[104] What issues from grace
does not cancel what was is given in nature; it completes it.
Example: “The state itself was for him [Aquinas], as for
Aristotle, something in accordance with nature, something good in itself and
needed by man in order to fulfil his nature.”[105]
“[T]he city has as its purpose the promotion of the
good life or virtue among its citizens.”[106]
Public order only comes into existence when
individuals are arranged so that their common efforts may reach the end
appropriate to human life. A governing power is necessary to establish and
maintain this public order. “[T]here must exist something which impels toward
the particular good of each individual. Wherefore also in all things that are
ordained toward one end, one thing is found to rule the rest.”[107]
The relation of ruler to ruled is not the result of the
Fall. Prior to the fall the political association would have been oriented to
another end, coercion would have been absent, protection would not have been
needed and transgressions would not have needed correction since all men would
have desired the real good.[108]
Although Aquinas affirms in some places that the
supreme ruler is the representative or viceregent of the whole people (multitudo),[109]
he shifts his language to refer to the supreme ruler as a guardian of the community and finally he speaks of public law as a
“dictate of practical reason emanating from the ruler who governs a perfect
community.”[110]
And not only is the supreme ruler the fount of public law, he is its chief
judicial or interpretive figure as well.
“Throughout the Middle Ages there had been two
competing theories of authority. The
ascending theory of authority, associated at the beginning with the Germanic
tribes, is that authority is located in the political community, and then,
through consultation and election, the community chooses a leader whom it would
then also have the authority to depose. The descending theory was that
authority was from God but is delegated to rulers through various means. The
latter theory was the orthodox position of both the Emperor and the Church.”[112]
“[Law is] an ordinance of reason for the common good,
made by him who has care of the community, and promulgated” (Summa Theologiae, I-II, 90, 4)
“[L]aw denotes a kind of plan directing acts toward an
end” (S. T., I-II, 93, 3).
“[T]he proper effect of law is to make those to whom
it is given good.“ (S.T., I-II, 92, 1).
“[I]t is evident that all things partake of the
eternal law, in so far as, namely, from its being imprinted on them, they
desire their respective inclinations to their proper acts and ends” (S.T., I-II, 91, 2).
Eternal law refers to the God-infused direction,
inclination, and ordering of all beings toward the realization of their good
and the Good of the whole.[113]
“Wherefore, it [a rational creature] has a share of
the eternal reason, whereby it has a natural inclination to its proper act and
end: and this participation of the eternal law in the rational creature is
called the natural law” (S. T., I-II,
91, 2).
Because humans can perceive the purposive order in
nature via reason, natural law is possible. Its precepts descend naturally
(reasonably) from an awareness of what is good for human persons.
e.g., self-preservation, sexual intercourse, the
education of offspring, the desire to know the truth, the desire to live in
society
“Hence this is the first precept of [natural] law,
that good is to be done and ensued, and
evil is to be avoided. All other precepts of the natural law are based upon
this” (S. T., I-II, 94, 2).
“[A]ll those things to which man has a natural
inclination are naturally apprehended by reason as being good” (S. T., I-II, 94, 2).
“[E]very human law has just so much of the nature of
law as it is derived from the law of nature” (S. T., I-II, 95, 2).
“The general principles of the natural law cannot be
applied to all men in the same way, on account of the great variety of human
affairs, and hence arises the diversity of positive laws among various people”
(S. T., I-II, 95, 2).
“The purpose of human law is to lead men to virtue,
not suddenly, but gradually” (S. T.,
I-II, 96, 2).
“Besides the natural and the human law it was
necessary for the directing of human conduct to have a divine law” (S. T., I-II, 91, 4). “[T]here is need
for certain additional principles” (S. T.,
I-II, 91, 4).
The divine law directs the “inward movements of
virtue” and not merely outward conformance with the human or natural laws.
“But to his supernatural end man needs to be directed
in a yet higher way. Hence the additional law given by God, whereby man shares
more perfectly in the eternal law” (S. T.,
I-II, 91, 4).
For Aquinas, the final end of human life is not to
live in accordance with virtue, but by means of a virtuous life to participate
in the divine life. And since human laws cannot direct men to this ultimate
end, guidance must issue from the divine law.
“In the Pope the secular power is joined to the
spiritual. He holds the apex of both powers, spiritual and secular, by the will
of Him who is Priest and King unto eternity, King of Kings.”[114]
“[Regarding the authority exercised by rulers, by
bishops, archbishops, etc. over their subjects] [A]ll of them have received it
from the Pope and with it the conditions and limitations of its use.”[115]
For Aquinas, Christ has only one vicar, the Pope, and
the Pope is the head of the
“Human excellence is no longer defined or
circumscribed by the conditions of the political life. . . . By sharing in that
[natural] law he finds himself, along with all other intelligent beings, a
member of a universal community or cosmopolis ruled by divine providence and
whose justice is vastly superior to any human regime.”[117]
Aquinas’s emphasis on natural law reconfigures the
classical Greek concern with man’s completeness and fulfillment by insisting on
a willing and grateful compliance with a divinely authorized and
unconditionally binding law.
Within a generation Dante [1265-1321] argues that
man’s double nature—intellect and soul—demands two separate systems of
authority or kingdoms. The terrestrial emperor was to actualize the
intellectual and philosophic perfection of the humana civilitas (human race) and the pope the spiritual perfection
of the same. Each should lead to respective paradises: the terrestrial and the
heavenly.
Thus I say that the temporal realm does not owe its
existence to the spiritual realm, nor its power (which is its authority), and
not even its function in an absolute sense . . . the authority of the temporal monarch flows down into him without any
intermediary from the Fountainhead of universal authority; this Fountainhead,
though one in the citadel of its own simplicity of nature, flows into many
streams from the abundance of his goodness.[118]
Many of the emerging theories of the nation state will
appeal to a similar notion, namely, that political authority is derived
immediately from a single definitive source: God, natural law, or the people.
Political authority will increasingly insist that it is independent of the
all-encompassing plentitudo potestatis of
the Church.
Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) grew up during the
golden age of Florentine culture and influence. In the centuries prior to
Machiavelli’s birth
As Machiavelli matured he observed the city and its
decline into political chaos and servitude to foreign powers. During his mature
years there was incessant conflict between the major Italian cities—
For the fourteen years leading up to the downfall of
the Florentine republic in 1512, Machiavelli served as a diplomat on its
behalf. During his many diplomatic missions he visited many centres of
political authority.
Machiavelli was an intense Florentine patriot. Nevertheless,
he saw the need for a strong Italian state capable of imposing its authority on
a deeply divided
A major difficulty in interpreting Machiavelli arises
from his astounding discontinuities with the thought of his day (and western
thought as a whole).[124]
1.
He does not mention natural law.
2.
His political theory and advice is not obviously related to an
underlying systematic philosophy.[125]
3.
He does not rely on Christian theological concepts—God, sin, grace,
redemption.
4.
There is no trace of a teleology or purpose inherent in nature.
5.
There is no proposed ideal political order.
6.
Religion is simply an instrument of social unity and public policy.
7.
He openly praises political partisanship.[126]
8.
He denies that there is such a thing as a self-sufficient or ideal city.[127]
9.
He claims that good effects do not always come from good causes. In
fact, one cannot be good in order to
arrive at a good end.[128]
Sir Isaiah
1.
Satires
2.
Cautionary tales: Beware of tyrants!
3.
A continuation of the “mirror for princes” genre
4.
Anti-Christian polemics
5.
Defenses of pagan principles
6.
The anguishes of a humanist lamenting political necessities
7.
Pleas from a passionate patriot
8.
Morally-neutral political science
9.
Astute observations of the political environment
10.
A theory of the centralized state
11.
A slavish worship of
12.
A realism which avoids utopian fantasies
13.
Diatribes of a demonic madman
Superior men
seek after the glory of creating and maintaining strong and well-governed
social wholes.
Power,
magnificence, pride, austerity, pursuit of glory, vigour, discipline, public
spiritedness, shrewdness, in short, of all of the antiqua virtus of the Roman republic and early empire make states
great (288, 305).
All human activities and excellencies require an
imposed social order which creates security, stability and protection (284).
“[L]aw is not a derivation from reason or nature but a human tool and
creation.”[130]
“For Machiavelli, conflict and force, fear and
necessity explain our political beginnings. ‘Morality’ develops from the
necessities of the political order, not from God’s commands or from the
structure of human nature.”[131]
“For Machiavelli there is just one beginning—necessity. Every human institution begins without
an inheritance from God or nature. God did not give us a perfect beginning, as
the Bible says, and nature did not provide us with a potentiality for politics,
as Aristotle says. We began bare, unprotected, insecure, and justly fearful.
Having nothing to remind us of the good from which we have fallen, or to which
we might aspire, we must set our sights on what is necessary to us. . . .
Politics cannot bring respite from the primitive necessities in order to aim at
the good life, Machiavelli thinks, because those necessities are too powerful
to be suppressed by civilization. They are too powerful because they are in
motion.”[132]
“In order to cure degenerate populations of their
diseases, these founders of new States or Churches may be compelled to have
recourse to ruthless measures, force and fraud, guile, cruelty, treachery, the
slaughter of the innocent, surgical measures that are needed to restore a
decayed body to a condition of health” (288).
“A prince, therefore, should have no other object or
thought, nor acquire skill in anything, except war, its organization, and its
discipline.”[133]
“A prudent man should always follow in the footsteps
of great men and imitate those who have been outstanding.”[134]
“A prince, therefore, need not necessarily have all
the good qualities I mentioned above, but he should certainly appear to have
them.”[135]
“So, as a prince is forced to know how to act like a
beast, he should learn from the fox and the lion; because the lion is defenceless
against traps and a fox is defenceless against wolves. Therefore one must be a
fox in order to recognize traps, and a lion to frighten off wolves.”[136]
“[A] prudent ruler cannot, and should not, honour his
word when it places him at a disadvantage.”[137]
“[M]en must be either pampered or crushed, because
they can get revenge for small injuries but not for grievous ones. So any
injury a prince does a man should be of such a kind that there is no fear of
revenge.”[138]
Machiavelli has been praised (or condemned) for the
fact that he is the first to articulate the view that politics can be
emancipated from “anything above it.”[139]
Machiavelli does not, however, free
politics from ethical considerations per se, but only from ethical theories
which are independent of the necessities of political preservation. Christian
or Platonic political philosophies, for instance, are hopelessly alien from political
realities and, for that reason, downright dangerous.
The ideals of Christianity—charity, mercy,
self-sacrifice, love of God, forgiveness of enemies, contempt for the goods of
this world, faith in the life hereafter—are incommensurate with terrestrial realities.
“Machiavelli is convinced that what are commonly
thought of as the central Christian virtues, whatever their intrinsic value,
are insuperable obstacles to the building of the kind of society that he wishes
to see; a society which, moreover, he assumes that it is natural for all normal
men to want—the kind of community that, in his view, satisfies men’s permanent
desires and interests” (290).
Machiavelli does not deny the goodness of Christian
ideals. He does affirm, however, that these ideals discourage men in their
quest for a strong society on earth (290-91). If all men were good, Christian
ideals would be best (295).
“The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in
every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous. Therefore
if a prince wants to maintain his rule he must learn how not to be virtuous,
and to make use of this or not according to need. . . . some of the things that
appear to be virtues will, if he practises them, ruin him, and some of the
things that appear to be wicked will bring him security and prosperity.”[140]
The attempt to combine these two great value systems
is politically and spiritually disastrous. “One can save one’s soul, or one can
found or maintain or serve a great and glorious State; but not always both at
once” (294).
“[I]n politics, whether an action is evil or not can
only be decided in the light of what it is meant to achieve and whether it
successfully achieves it.”[141]
Rather than Machiavelli’s ethic being divorced from larger
considerations, the ultimate political end or good sought (after all,
Machiavelli loved his native city more than his own life[142])
gives rise to the ethics espoused by Machiavelli.
“Machiavelli’s cardinal achievement is . . . his
uncovering of an insoluble dilemma, the planting of a permanent question mark
in the path of posterity. It stems from his de
facto recognition that ends equally ultimate, equally sacred, may
contradict each other, that entire systems of value may come into collision
without possibility of rational arbitration, and that this happens not merely
in exceptional circumstances, as a result of abnormality or accident . . . but
(this surely was new) as part of the normal human situation (320).
If Berlin’s interpretation (summarized in the
quotation immediately above) is correct, Machiavelli shatters the entire
edifice of western political and ethical thinking which had uniformly assumed that
there is a single unifying political and ethical principle which underlies all
human variations and disagreements (cf. Aristotle and Aquinas and their claim
that all things seek after the good,
or, if they seek lesser goods, these goods can be gathered up into that good).
Machiavelli gives up Plato’s and Aristotle’s notion
that a single good can be uncovered within various political settings. Reason
cannot uniquely determine one set of ultimate values. But given an ultimate
end, instrumental reason is immediately necessary. Given the end loved—in
Machiavelli’s case, the glory of patria—this
type of reason is indispensable.
Machiavelli seeks to liberate the realm of politics
from all normative entanglements including natural law, custom, hereditary
kingship, Christian ethics, and classical soul-crafting—the perfection of the
human person through political activity, in short, from all metaphysical, moral,
and religious foundations. Disengagement from these forms of normative control
was a necessary element in Machiavelli’s nationalism. In order for
Note the Augustinianism of Machiavelli. In particular,
notice that something like Augustine’s two wills/two loves operates here. What
is most loved, rather than that which is metaphysically ultimate, is what
guides the prince. As it turns out, Machiavelli finds himself a lover of the
city of man. His devotion parallels that of Augustine for God.
For Machiavelli, like Augustine, the object of this
love cannot be rationally deduced from what is. The good must first be loved
before instrumental reason can bring this state of affairs into existence or
maintain it. In the end, it is true for both Machiavelli and Augustine that one
should love intently and then do what one wishes.
In his travels to the European Continent, Thomas
Hobbes (1588-1679) encountered and was greatly impressed by analytic geometry
and Galileo’s science. He returned to
Hobbes’s life was often disrupted by factionalism
and the threat of civil war. His Leviathan
[1651] was published during a tumultuous period in English history which
included the execution of Charles I and the rise of Oliver Cromwell. It was a
period of intense debate regarding governmental form and jurisdiction.
Jean Bodin (1530-1596), a French jurist, lived
during a chaotic time in
In Bodin’s judgment, a commonweal can only exist if
there is a single, unified source of power (sovereignty). Sovereignty itself
must have the following features in order to guarantee the viability of the commonweal:
a.
It
must be the most high, absolute and perpetual power (10)[143]
b.
It
cannot be limited in power, mandate or time (85)
c.
It
must be the greatest power to command—it issues laws without consent (98)
d.
It
must be indivisible, incommunicable and reside in one person alone (250)
e.
It
cannot be bound by the laws of its predecessors, the positive laws of the
kingdom or even laws which the sovereign himself has previously issued
f.
It
cannot be bound by outside allegiances, alliances or oaths.
Bodin’s political theory derives the political
order from the order implicit in the uncontestable will of the sovereign.
Political order is guaranteed by the absolute freedom (no entanglements) of the
sovereign and his ability to impose conformity with his will: He gives laws and
receives none. In Bodin’s sovereign we have an example of what it means,
politically, to have absolutely free will.
“By the mid-17th century,
“God’s right to Reign and to punish those who break
his laws is from irresistable power
alone.”[145]
“We are bound to obey God’s will, Hobbes insists,
not because it is comprehensible to us, not because we have entered a covenant
with him and not because it conforms to rules we would adopt ourselves were
there no God. We are bound to God because he ‘hath a right to rule and punish
those who break his laws, from his sole irresistible
power’.”[146]
“[T]here is no reason (or logos) inherent in nature and guiding her . . . Hobbes’s society is
founded not upon reason (or logos)
but upon will. And the will is simply a reflection of human appetites.”[147]
“Nature, thus, is characterized by endless motion
without direction or completion and by the absence of a teleological order.”[148]
Hobbes’s philosophical method imitates the
deductive method of geometry and the resolutive-compositive method of Galileo.
He rejects Aristotle’s characterization of the state in terms of the implicit
good which it actualizes and the character of the ruler(s).
“For a thing is best known from its constituents.
As in an automatic Clock or other fairly complex device, one cannot get to know
the function of each part and wheel unless one takes it apart, and examines
separately the material, shape and motion of the parts, so in investigating the
right of a commonwealth and the duties of its citizens, there is a need, not
indeed to take the commonwealth apart, but to view it as taken apart, i.e. to
understand correctly what human nature is like, and in what features it is
suitable and in what unsuitable to construct a commonwealth, and how men who
want to grow together must be connected.”[149]
“[Y]ou can take society apart in imagination, or hypothetically . . . These imagined or
hypothetical forces had to be ones which would be self-evident to any
reasonable inquirer who would take the trouble to look into himself. If they
were, they met the requirement—they would be the self-evident simple
propositions which, once granted, could be shown to lead inexorably to the
complex propositions Hobbes needed for his political science.”[150]
Hobbes believed that human behaviour could be
understood as the compounded motions of the passions within the individual.
These passions push the individual from behind, so to speak—they don’t lure him
toward the good as in Aristotle.
“In accordance with the synthetic or geometrical
mode of proceeding . . . [Hobbes] . . . would begin with the laws of physics in
general, from them deduce the passions, the causes of the behavior of
individual men, and from the passions deduce the laws of social and political
life.”[151]
Hobbes identified several passions which were
fundamental: (1) self-preservation, which implies the continuing quest for
power and the fear of violent death; (2) the desire for peace or comfort; and
(3) hope. These passions interact with those of the surrounding individuals to
produce the need and desire to enter civil society.
“The Natural
Law therefore (to define it) is the Dictate of right reason about what
should be done or not done for the longest possible preservation of life.”[152]
Hobbes is using the traditional term “natural law” is a new sense. In a
footnote to the 1647 edition of De Cive,
Hobbes indicates that right reasoning means that each individual is drawing the
right inferences which will further his or her preservation. He explicitly
denies that the individual has access to some external “Reason.” To add to the
confusion, Hobbes uses “Laws of Nature” as an equivalence for “Natural Law.”
“[B]y necessity of nature, we all desire to avoid
that greatest enemy of nature, death. This being so, it is natural for us to
act to preserve ourselves, with the result that no such actions can be
stigmatised as contrary to right. . . . It follows that the fundamental dictate
of reason, and hence the first law of nature, must be quaerere pacem, to seek peace as the only means of preserving
ourselves from death.”[153]
“The first law
of nature (the foundation) is: to
seek peace when it can be had: when it cannot, to look for aid in war. . .
. The first of the Natural Laws
derived from this fundamental natural law is that the right of all men to all things must not be held on to; certain
rights must be transferred or abandoned. . . . The second of the derivative
laws is: Stand by your agreements, or
keep faith. . . . The third precept of natural law is: if someone has conferred a benefit on you, relying on your good faith,
do not let him lose on it”“[154]
“The laws of nature specify an optimum set of
actions designed to bring about peace, the optimum condition for
self-preservation.”[155]
“By referring to the keeping of promises as a ‘law
of nature,’ he is not invoking the sanctions of the older natural law
tradition. Hobbes provides the same grounds for obeying this ‘law of nature’ as
he provided for the others: self-preservation.”[156]
In order to justify the civil state, it is
necessary that Hobbes demonstrate that individuals in the state of nature would
be motivated to enter it. This purpose-built political arrangement must be
explicable in terms of the passions of those who are about to enter it.
“The state of nature is simply the condition where
we are forced into contact with each other in the absence of a superior
authority that can lay down and enforce rules to govern our behavior toward
each other.”[157]
Hobbes characterizes life in the State of
This State of
“For these words of Good, Evill, and Contemptible,
are ever used with relation to the person who useth them: There being nothing
simply and absolutely so; nor any common Rule of Good and Evill, to be taken
from the nature of the objects themselves.”[159]
“One must recognize that good and evil are names
imposed on things to signify desire for or aversion from the things so named. .
. . Men are therefore in a state of war so long as they judge good and evil by the different measures which their changing desires from
time to time dictate.”[160]
“Unless we can find a scientific method of
overcoming the problems raised by the technique of rhetorical redescription,
and thus of stablising the language of moral appraisal, we shall find ourselves
condemned to discovering at first hand how quickly political anarchy follows
from anarchy in the use of evaluative terms.”[161]
The State of
“To lay downe a mans Right to any thing, is to
devest himselfe of the
This passage shows that the covenant of individual
with individual in the State of
At the moment of making the covenant every one
would say to everyone else: “I Authorise
and give up my Right of Governing my self, to this Man, or to this Assembly of
men, on this condition, that thou give up thy Right to him, and Authorise all
his Actions in like manner.”[164]
“This submission of the Wills of each individual to the
will of a single man or Council
takes place when each and every individual person obliges himself by means of a
Covenant with each and every other individual person not to resist the will of that man or Council to whom he submits himself.”[165]
Note that the covenant is between the individuals
and not between “the people” and their sovereign. For Hobbes, there is no such
thing as “the people” which exists prior to the covenant of each with each.
The Covenant does not confer any new right, but
rather permits one person to remain in the State of
“As soon as such a sovereign is chosen, the
commonwealth is duly instituted in the form of a single body united by virtue
of having acquired a soul or anima to
act on its behalf.”[166]
“The exercise of power required nothing more than
the clearing of a path among the private motions infesting political space. The
purpose of the covenant, therefore, was to elicit from the members an
acknowledgement of the sovereign’s right of way. By the terms of the agreement,
the individuals agreed to will not to
act, thereby clearing the way for the will of one ‘artificial person’.”[167]
The newly-instituted Sovereign exhibits the
features which Jean Bodin thought necessary for the existence of a Commonwealth:
He is absolute, a giver of laws, a receiver of none, and his power is
perpetual, indivisible, and unrestrained.
Hobbes’s Sovereign is simply an individual (any
will do) from the State of
The covenantal agreement extinguishes all claims to
differential power, e.g., titles, dignities, and acclaim. Henceforth the
Sovereign alone will distribute such honours (and as such, sources of power) at
his discretion. After the institution of the Sovereign, there are no longer any
independent and potentially-conflicting centres of authority, e.g., church,
custom, common law, nobles, private scriptural interpretations, other kings,
popes, etc.
“Absolute sovereignty corresponded to the ambition
of kings eager to free themselves from the
“Before there was any government, just and unjust had no being. Legitimate kings therefore make the things
they command just by commanding them, and those which they forbid, unjust, by
forbidding them.” [169]
“[T]he sovereign thereby created may, in the name
of them all, allocate such names as just
and unjust, good and evil, and cause
men, by threat of punishment, to conduct themselves toward each other in
accordance with the civil laws (and moral principles) thereby created.”[170]
“For law is the declared will of the Sovereign.”[171]
“Justice becomes identical to obedience to law, law
being understood as the sovereign’s command or will. That is the core of the
doctrine of sovereignty. The natural law tradition had defined law as rational
command to indicate that the essence and obligation of law comes not from the
command or authority as such, but from the intrinsic justice of what is
commanded.”[172]
For Hobbes, the sovereign’s absolute authority
extends to the church and all religious matters. The sovereign alone is able to
determine and authorize the canon of Scripture (Leviathan, 415); he alone is able to authoritatively interpret the
Scriptures (On the Citizen, xvii.18,
219); he alone provides the unity of the church—without his authorization it
cannot even assemble (Leviathan,
498); and he alone authorizes the election or appointment of church officials (Leviathan, 568). “From this
consolidation of the Right Polique, and Ecclesiastique in Christian Soveraigns,
it is evident, they have all manner of Power over their Subjects, that can be
given to man, for the government of mens external actions, both in Policy, and
Religion” (Leviathan, 575).
Hobbes has built into his conception of the
individual (in the State of
By using Bodin’s criteria of sovereignty, Hobbes is
able to characterize the individual person in ways which release him/her from
all feudal or constitutive bonds. The individual-as-sovereign is by definition
free of all external and internal obligations. Her will is arbitrary within her
realm. She is, in Hobbes’ telling phrase, a “Mortall god.”
“Whatever the context, natural, pre-existing
community was giving way [in the early 17th century] to an atomism of
adjustable forces; political thought now found man as naked and alone in the
political world as physics was finding him in the physical. Henceforth it would
be calculation, artificial arrangement, which would seek to replace the lost
harmony.”[173]
John Locke (1632-1704) came from a middle-class
English family. His father, a small landowner and attorney, served as a captain
in the parliamentary army. Locke’s life spanned the turmoil surrounding the
execution of Charles I, the rise of Oliver Cromwell, and the reestablishment of
the Stuart monarchy and the peaceful ascension of William of Orange to the
English throne. The latter gave Locke hope that the fundamental upheavals of
the recent past could be averted.
On several occasions Locke had to flee
Locke’s Two
Treatises of Government were published in 1690, the same year he published
his monumental Essay Concerning Human
Understanding.
In the State of
“The state of nature . . . is a state of equality
and a state of freedom. That is to say: men confront each other in their shared
status as creatures of God without intrinsic authority over each other and
without the right to restrict the (natural) law-abiding behaviour of others. .
. . The reason why men are equal is their shared position in a normative order,
the order of creation.”[176]
In the State of
In the State of
Property exists in the State of
In Locke’s view, God originally “donated” the earth
to mankind as a whole. The earth was not owned by anyone (cf. Hobbes where
everyone has a right to everything). Man possesses a natural (God-given) title
to his own person and to the labour which issues from his body.[177]
As man intermingles his labour with the soil, its
produce, and its bounty, he acquires title to “property” by virtue of his
labouring to give it value. (This is Locke’s famous labour theory of value.)
Technically speaking, property, which for Locke includes life, liberty, and
estate, is an extension of the ownership of one’s own body. Through labour, the
body expands to encompass a larger territory—which simultaneously delimits the
freedom of others with respect to these goods.
“Property . . . is the external manifestation of
freedom, its expression and its very concrete existence for others. . . . Every
man, being equal to every other, manifests his liberty by the domination, the
ownership of his property.”[178]
Property is covered by the absolute right to
self-defence, a right, which for Locke, can be derived from God’s original intent
for human preservation. Property must be defended since it is part of the body
and one is morally obligated to defend oneself against attack. Furthermore,
property is protected by the owner’s inability to improperly dispose of his
body (suicide). These (revised) natural law maxims (derivable from God’s
originating purpose for his creation) give property the status of an absolute for
Locke.
Self- and property-preservation is precarious in
the State of
This compact enables individuals to leave the State
of
“They are thereby presently incorporated and made
one body politic wherein the majority have a right to act and conclude the
rest.”[179]
Locke’s calls this pre-governmental, instituted
body, civil society.[180]
Civil society is logically (and temporally) prior to the institution of
government. Civil society provides a stabilizing counterpoise in that the
collapse of a government does not mean a reversion to the State of
Once the populus
is constituted as a majority-will-based corporation, it remains for that body
to specify what institutions will govern as its “trustees.” Regardless of what
governmental institutions are chosen by the civil society, they will protect,
in trust, the property and well-being of its members.[182]
The governmental agencies of the populus—legislative,
judicial, executive and federative (international relations)—are limited in
their scope because they are instituted to facilitate the preservation of
individual property—life, liberty and possessions.
“The processes of the law, the actions of your
deputy, must in fact serve the ends for which power was entrusted. Men consent
to government for certain reasons, to fulfill particular purposes.”[183]
“[Four normative conditions characterize legitimate
government] . . . Political power is not absolute or arbitrary in that those
who rule must base their right to rule on the consent of the people; political
power must be exercised only for the sake of the preservation of the society
and its members; political power must be exercised by known, standing laws; and
no member of the society can be exempt from subjection to its laws.”[184]
Genuine freedom for Locke is impossible when one is
subject to the arbitrary will of another human being.[185]
(This view of freedom as freedom from the arbitrary will of another had
traditionally been applied to entire cities/nations vis-a-vis their relations
with foreign powers rather than as between individuals as in Locke.)
Consenting to the will of
the majority is consenting only to oneself. The individual is both sovereign and subject when
he follows the commands of the will of the majority. The will of the majority
will not interfere with the liberty of the individual and her property since
civil society was constituted on the condition that it protect those very
things. Since only those powers which were resident in the individual can be
“handed over” and since no person has the power or a right to harm herself or
her property, the body politic can do her no harm.
Freedom is not freedom from law (pace Hobbes), but only having to obey
those laws which originate in my will—which includes my will of the majority. Freedom is characterized by its relation
to the free exercise of my will and is even compatible with restraints insofar
as they too are derived from the free (consenting) acts of my will. Even laws
which command my obedience can be self-willed.
In Locke, we have a response to the post-feudal
dilemma of how one can be both subject and sovereign. In Locke, the will of the
individual issues in two wills; one, the private will of the State of
The bifurcated self preserves the self-ownership of
will, but at the cost of postulating two very different sources of will, wills
which can and do contradict each other. Hobbes’s axiom that there can only be
sovereigns and subjects is true within the self
for Locke. Each individual is now a miniature kingdom of wills wherein one
commands and the other obeys.
J. J. Rousseau was born in
Rousseau’s Social
Contract has deeply influenced the practice, justification, and rhetoric of
the modern state. Most contemporary theories of popular sovereignty have their
proximate source in Rousseau. The Social
Contract is also a source of liberal democratic efforts to extend
participation in political affairs as far as possible. Authoritarian elites
have used Rousseau to justify their exploitative power in the name of “forcing
people to be free.” Nationalists have used Rousseau as a justification for the
moral independence of the State since it is the incarnation of the general will
and, as such, the very embodiment of right. Proponents of the bureaucratic
state have also appealed to Rousseau’s endorsement of the moral superiority of
governing by impersonal rules.
Like most modern political thinkers, Rousseau
rejects the notion that man “is directed by nature toward an end.”[186]
Rousseau is also critical of previous state of nature theorists who, in
attempting to ground political right in pre-political natural right, had
imported characteristics from civil society. Hobbes, for instance, assumed that
man’s natural self-preservation would lead to conflict, largely because “he
improperly included in Savage man’s care for his preservation the need to
satisfy a multitude of passions that are the product of Society.”[187]
In Rousseau’s view, “savage” man lived an isolated,
self-sufficient, and therefore, nonmoral, life. He had only sporadic contact
with others. Therefore, he would not develop the passions which Hobbes believed
were natural to man, e.g., envy, distrust, unlimited acquisitiveness. All of
these passions require society and social interaction. Rousseau also believed
that savage man would be very limited in his reasoning abilities.
“Contrary to Locke, Rousseau finds no property
right inherent in the state of nature, and no conflict could derive from this
source that would lead to the need for government. Locke is further criticized
for his depiction of family life in the original state. The true state of
nature has only individuals existing in nature and therefore, it has no such
social institutions as property or family.”[188]
Savage man is isolated and can only focus on what
is known to him. He is not concerned about death; he is idle by nature; he is
generally without foresight and is therefore not acquisitive or wealth seeking.
His mental capacities are undeveloped since he is without speech/language which
only arises from social interaction. His (un)social condition isolates him from
the vices which emerge in civil society. “[N]othing must be so calm as his soul
and nothing so limited as his mind.”[189]
Savage man is not dominated by reason or
calculation. Rather, he is animated by both a benign form of self-preservation
and pity, the latter of which “inspires in us a natural repugnance to seeing
any sentient Being, and especially any being like ourselves, perish or suffer.”[190]
Savage man’s movement from
the state of nature towards civil society is prompted by what Allan Bloom calls
“unforeseeable accidents,” namely, he is gradually forced into the closer
contact with other men. He soon develops a moral consciousness of his
obligations to those around him. He develops his mental capacities through the
use of speech. He begins to practice vengeance and to experience the
limitations thrust on him by the rise of private property claims. With the
advent of property, he becomes conscious of inequality as the rich set
themselves against the poor in an emerging state of war.[191]
“The first man who, having enclosed a piece of
ground, to whom it occurred to say this
is mine, and found people sufficiently simple to believe him, was the true
founder of civil society.”[192]
Rousseau indicates that the rich seek to enter into
a contract with the poor to help them (the rich) safeguard their property. This
contract is entirely in the interests of the rich. It creates a morally
degrading dependence in both parties. Subsequent positive law serves the needs
of those in power and is experienced as an alien domination and source of
violent passions.
What is missing in modern civil societies (those
founded on the self-serving contract of the rich with the poor) is the public
spiritedness and concern for virtue which characterized ancient republics. If
social man is to overcome his socially-inculcated self-interestedness the
political association must be a tutor in virtue. Since social man can no longer
simply revert to his savage existence, the development of virtue will
necessitate the use of collective force.
For Rousseau, the modern problem, at its most
fundamental level was the problem of dependency on other wills. Dependence on
other wills must be eliminated if virtuous citizenship is to be possible.
“There are two sorts of dependence: dependence on
things, which is from nature; dependence on men, which is from society.
Dependence on things, since it has no morality, is in no way detrimental to freedom
and engenders no vices. Dependence on men since it is without order, engenders
all the vices, and by it, master and slave are mutually corrupted. If there is
any means of remedying this ill in society, it is to substitute law for men and
to arm the general wills with a real
strength superior to the action of every particular will. If the laws of
nations could, like those of nature, have an inflexibility that no human force
could ever conquer, dependence on men would then become dependence on things
again; in the republic all of the advantages of the natural state would be
united with those of the civil state, and freedom which keeps man exempt from
vices would be joined to morality which raises him to virtue”[193]
(emphasis added).
“Where shall we find a form of association which
will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and the property
of each associate, and in which every person, while uniting himself with all,
shall obey only himself, and remain as free as before.”[194]
In Rousseau’s view, the reign of impersonal law was
the solution to the problem of dependency on others provided that the law was
not the expression of the will of another.
If law was the expression of the general will of each individual, it could command and not violate freedom
(recall Locke). As a resident of this post-social state of nature, she would
flourish. The reign of law simultaneously guarantees political stability and
virtuous action.
Rousseau (like Locke) discovers within the
individual two distinct wills. The first, volunte
particuliere, is that will which regards only particular (self-regarding)
interests. The other, volunte generale,
is inclined towards impartiality and equality. These two “forms” of will are in
constant and unavoidable opposition to each other.
“Amour propre
[vanity] and Amour de soi-meme [benign
self-love], two very different passions in their nature and their effects,
should not be confused. Self-love is a natural sentiment which inclines every
animal to attend to its self-preservation and which, guided in man by reason
and modified by pity, produces humanity and virtue. Amour propre is only a
relative sentiment, factitious, and born in society, which inclines every
individual to set greater store by himself than by anyone else, inspires men
with all the evils they do one another, and is the genuine source of honor.”[195]
“Rousseau, instead of opposing love of self to love
of others, opposes two kinds of self-love, a good and a bad form. . . .
Rousseau is emphasizing the original unity of self-love which is lost in
relations with other men.”[196]
In using a formal distinction between general and
particular wills, Rousseau stands in a long line of French theological writers.
This lineage can be traced to Pascal [1623-62] who lived and wrote a century
prior to Rousseau. The distinction was first deployed in Pascal as an attempt
to distinguish God’s (general) will that all men be saved prior to the fall
from His (particular) will that only some be saved after the fall.
As this distinction moved from theology to
political theory, the general became associated with what is good per se and the particular with what is
bad per se. Under the growing
influence of modern science and its (alleged) general laws, it was easy to
understand God’s providence in terms of his rule by general, and not partial,
laws.[197]
Human virtue was also widely understood in French theology as praiseworthy when
it focused on the general and self-serving when it looked to the particular.
“[W]hat held together the tradition of French moral
and political thought from Pascal to Rousseau, unifies it, and distinguishes it
from either English or German practical thought, is the notion that generalite is good, particularite bad—that, if one is just, one will embrace the
general good of the body, to which one will subordinate egoism and self-love.”[198]
The instability of conventional civil society
arises from the fact that the general will
of the individual is unable to consistently subdue the particular will of the individual, the latter of which
is self-centred and self-regarding. The social compact permits the general
wills of its collected individuals to acquire sufficient power to rule over
their particular wills. The artifice of the Commonwealth empowers each
individual so that her general will
can rule over her particular will. She
will thus grow in virtue and still retain her primordial freedom.
Contrary to the generally-accepted legal maxim that
one cannot obligate or bind one’s own will, Rousseau argues that the general
will can bind the particular will without subjecting the individual to outside
domination. The social compact institutionalizes the dominance of the general
will (of each individual) over the particular will (of the same individual).
As in Locke, colonization by others is
theoretically eliminated from the Commonwealth. All laws within the
Commonwealth are my laws (issuing only from my general will). Since they are my
laws I am not under subjection to another, and I cannot be treated unjustly
(since no one can treat himself unjustly—as per the medieval legal maxim).
“This is . . . the great problem of statecraft: to
find a form of government that puts law above man.”[199]
“When the entire people determines for the whole
people . . . the affair on which they enact is general, as is the will that
enacts. It is this act that I call a ‘law’.”[200]
“If, therefore, we exclude from the social compact
all that is not essential, we shall find it reduced to the following terms: Each of us places in common his person and
all his power under the supreme direction of the general will; and as one body
we all receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole. From that
moment, instead of as many separate persons as there are contracting parties,
this act of association produces a moral and collective body, composed of as
many members as there are votes in the assembly, which from this act receives
its unity, its common self, its life, and its will.”[201]
“A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all,
subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to
all.”[202]
“As long as we submit ourselves to this Law, we are
not the less free for it: On the contrary, it is that Law itself which renders
us free, because it liberates us from the tyranny of our Passions. In obeying
this Law, we are elevated above all worldly things, above all goods &
evils, above prosperity & adversity, above grandeur, riches, pleasures of
the senses, above promises & threats, above corrupt maxims and the bad
examples of men. There is not one of these things, which can harness us; we are
free, we are independent in all these respects.”[203]
Prior to Rousseau, reformed
(Calvinistic) political thinkers emphasized the freedom of religious
communities to order their own affairs and regulate the lives of their members
apart from dependence on externally-imposed religious laws. Communal freedom
demanded strict internal laws and dependence on the law of God. But it also
demanded absolute independence from other (non-local) wills. Although Rousseau
transposed this communal freedom into the freedom of the individual, he
retained the reformed law-dependent account of freedom and the moral tutelage
provided by the law.
In Rousseau, the general will of the individual retains the moral purity of the
sovereign will (cf. Hobbes). It is, by virtue of its formal
generality/universality, the very essence of right. The particular will, on the
other hand, is identified as the source of the envies, strivings, and selfish
pursuits.
The general will is general in that it cannot be
“directed towards a private object.”[204]
It is not (formally) possible for the general will to notice or favour
particular individuals. It must act on its body (the entire society) via
general laws which do not and cannot refer to particular interests. It treats
itself as a unified individual in all its legal promulgations.
The generality of the judgments of the general will
assure a convergence of justice, equality, and self-interest (as expressions of
the general will of the individual). The laws of the general will are
impartial, non-self (particular)-regarding, and for the good of all. They are
therefore just and express the very nature of morality (= non self-regard)
itself.
The sovereign general will “by its nature, is
always everything it ought to be.”[205]
When it acts upon itself it is incapable of harming itself and can literally do
no wrong. Herein “the political requirements of preservation and of virtue
therefore coincide perfectly.”[206]
“Like Hobbes, Rousseau replaces the nonexistent
natural law with a theory of sovereignty. The traditional definition of law as
just or rational command is replaced by the voluntaristic one of pure command
or will (whence the term General Will) . . . The natural law, which is neither
publicly known nor enforced, is wholly replaced by duly enacted positive law,
which is both.”[207]
The enormous impact of Rousseau’s project is
difficult to overestimate. For instance, he gave Kant the strategy he needed to
adjudicate the mutually discordant moral claims made by individuals. Kant
received from Rousseau the notion that there is a form of (general) will that
is by definition moral and which can serve as a formal criterion of right
conduct. Kant’s categorical imperative can be traced directly to Rousseau.
Further, Romanticism appealed to Rousseau’s understanding of savage man as a
self-sufficient being uncorrupted by societal influences.
Rousseau’s suggestion that the moral republic could
actually force its citizens to be free enabled a justification for the Reign of
Terror which followed the overthrow of the French monarch in 1790. The
notorious Committee of Public Safety made the following assertion: “You must
entirely refashion a people whom you wish to make free, destroy its prejudices,
alter its habits, limit its necessities, root up its vices, purify its
desires.”[208]
At bottom, all interpersonal relations are
dispensed with, all constitutive forms of community are relegated to the past,
and nothing but the formal properties (generality versus particularity) of acts
of willing are left. Even Rousseau’s political community is fundamentally
nothing but abstract relations within the individual herself.
“For Rousseau, the locus of freedom is also within
the will. Listen to the Augustinian echo within this political formula: ‘For
the impulse of appetite alone is slavery, and obedience to the law one has prescribed for oneself freedom.’ Freedom
remains bound up with the will, and freedom of will remains tied to obedience,
even though the agent to be obeyed has now changed. Rousseau, like Augustine,
gives primacy to the will—a concept that remains crucial and problematic from
Augustine through Rousseau and beyond. He also, like Augustine, inevitably
seeks a supplement through which to heal it. But he shifts the locus of the
supplement from obedience to the will of a god to obedience to oneself, an obedience to oneself made possible only by
a new form of political organization.”[209]
“But, Rousseau’s form of political association,
which provides a non-personal unity and, thus, a prospective solution to the
tensions in social existence, transforms the meaning of the political. The
private and the public are united. When the voice of God inheres in the will of
the people, there is no need for the give and take of public discourse. . . . A
public space has been traditionally thought necessary precisely because
ultimate goals, such as truth, perfect justice, perfect unity, are not
attainable through political action, only improvements upon past and present injustices
or approximate solutions to ongoing problems are conceived of as possible. In
other words, something less than a complete solution must be sought for a
discourse to remain truly political.”[210]
Those theories which have their roots in Rousseau
have fundamentally de-peopled the world and rendered a world in which all
substantive moral and political relations reside within the self. The self is
the all-in-all, subject and sovereign rolled into one. Such is state of
modernity.
Jeremy Bentham
(1748-1832) was highly critical of English public institutions. He applied a
strongly rationalistic method to government in an attempt to advance socially-progressive
improvements and establish a great moral and legal science akin to
Following Hume, he set
forth ‘utility’ as the normative standard by which pubic policy and social
felicity should be measured. For Bentham, the measure of right and wrong was
simply the “greatest happiness of the greatest number.”[211]
Like Hobbes, he believed
that pleasure and pain play a critical role in the moral psychology of the
individual:
Nature has placed mankind
under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is
for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what
we shall do.[212]
Bentham believed that he had
uncovered a purely quantitative (scientific) method of adjudicating political
and legal quandaries. He held that a numerical value could be assigned to the
six dimensions of pleasure (i.e., intensity, duration, certainty or
uncertainty, propinquity or remoteness, fecundity, and purity). The summation
of these values would give the person or legislator a way in which she could
determine which action would produce the most pleasure and thus, by definition,
the good.
Bentham was highly critical
of previous political philosophers who tried to justify political arrangements
in terms of states of nature, pre-existing rights, or fictitious social contracts.
For him, it is simply the fact that people are in a habit of obeying a certain ruler
or group of rulers that produces a political society:
When a number of persons . .
. are supposed to be in the habit of
paying obedience to a person, or an
assemblage of persons, of a known and certain description . . . such persons
altogether are said to be in a state of political
SOCIETY.[213]
Born in 1806, John Stuart Mill was raised by his
father, James Mill, an austere, demanding, unsentimental, and doctrinaire
disciple of Jeremy Bentham. John Stuart was an intellectual prodigy: he was
reading Greek by the age of three, Latin at eight, and mastered many other
subjects shortly thereafter. His daily study regime began at 6:00 a.m. and
ended at 9:00 p.m. When his education was complete at the age of 14, he went
off to stay with friends of his father in
When he returned to
During the long period of recovery (some five years) he expanded his acquaintances and read more broadly. He discovered the romantic poetry of Tennyson, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. He gradually found that he could share “states of feeling” with other human beings.
By the mid-nineteenth century, a new
series of problems were emerging in representative democracies. Alexis
d’Tocqueville (ca. 1830) discovered that within the American “experiment”
several ominous trends were emerging. He was concerned about the dominance of
public opinion and the rising tide of mediocrity. He also worried about the
“tyranny of the majority.”
Mill’s On Liberty (1859) was designed to elaborate a social principle
that would protect representative democracies from the stupefying forces of
conformity, a slavish subservience to public opinion, as well as the danger of
the abuse of dissenting minorities. Mill also believed that attempts to limit
the power of government by Bills of Rights (as in
Mill argues that a new
principle is needed to protect the liberty of the individual from these
emergent dangers: “the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually
or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their
number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be
rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his
will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is
not a sufficient warrant.”[215]
“Over himself, over his own
body and mind, the individual is sovereign.”[216]
“It is proper to state that I
forego any advantage which could be derived to my argument from the idea of
abstract right, as a thing independent of utility. I regard utility as the
ultimate appeal on all ethical questions; but it must be utility in the largest
sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being.”[217]
“[T]here is a sphere of
action in which society, as distinguished from the individual, has, if any,
only an indirect interest; comprehending all that portion of a person’s life
and conduct which affects only himself, or if it also affects others, only with
their free, voluntary, and undeceived consent and participation.”[218]
This zone of personal liberty
includes: (1) liberty of thought, feeling, conscience, and opinion; (2) liberty
of tastes and pursuits, framing life plans; (3) freedom of the like-minded to
associate.[219]
Some critics have (not
implausibly) argued that Mill is not only interested in protecting the
individual from the encroachments of society, but he also takes a particular
type of individuality as an intrinsic value, that is, apart from any social
utility which may issue from it. In other words, Mill would hold to this ideal
even if it could not be shown to be productive of the larger good (pleasure).
For instance, note the title
of chapter 3, in On Liberty: “Of
individuality, As One of the Elements of Well-Being.” Mill also speaks highly
of the romantic conception of the self when he praises “individual spontaneity”
non-imitation, “determining according to his own judgments and feelings”
“personal impulses and preferences.”
Charles Taylor suggests that
Mill combined an austere, disengaged rationalism (his utilitarianism) with an
expressivistic (romantic) conception of human growth and fulfillment. This
attempt at synthesis makes sense not only in light of Mill’s personal history
but the attempt of many Victorians to transcend lives “run more and more by the
canons of instrumental reason.”[220]
More than a few scholars have
concluded that in the end Mill’s utilitarianism with its singular commitment to
the greatest happiness is not consistent with any absolute value (i.e.,
romantic individualism) which must veto any utilitarian calculus which refuses
to treat its values as ends in themselves.
Some have taken exception to Mill’s distinction
between the private sphere and the public. Can these spheres be meaningfully disconnected
to enable truly self-only-regarding privacy?
Isaiah
Mill does not hesitate to deploy the
vocabulary of the Sovereign when speaking of the individual. The individual,
within her “sphere” of sovereignty is “arbitrary.” She can do whatever she
pleases. In the larger society, she is to be afforded maximal liberty of
expression. She knows her own interests best and can be relied on to execute
them to the fullest. She is an unreconstructed Hobbesian sovereign within her
realm. She cannot be governed by past promises she has made, nor can she be
held to her own stated plans. Her sovereignty resides in the unity of her will at this present moment. Within her
properly demarcated sphere, she is autonomous,
giving laws to herself alone and receiving none.
Only the opposition of another will
(individual or State) restrains her will. Society has the rather minimalist
task of simply enforcing her sovereign jurisdiction and erecting a perimeter of
legal safeguards around it.
She is free, but she inhabits a world of
contrary wills, not actual persons. Neither friend nor foe constitutes her. She
is a kingdom unto herself, splendidly regal, but alone.
Karl Marx was the second
child of a middle-class Jewish family in
As the purported discoverer of the true inner
logic of human history, Marx considered his thought to be the culmination of
all previous philosophy and, in particular, the German tradition running from
Kant through Hegel and Feuerbach.
Marx was enamoured with the grand
Hegelian vision. Hegel had argued that history manifests the increasing
presence of geist or Reason in human
culture, religion, etc. This gradual manifestation is most clearly seen in the
sweeping dialectic process and progress of human thought and activity (thesis,
antithesis, and synthesis). “It is as if Reason or Mind comes to its own
self-realization and completion in history.”[222]
Feuerbach’s critique of Hegel was critical
in Marx’s development. For Feuerbach, God was not the manifestation of the geist but the after-effect of man’s alienation
from himself. The “God illusion” emerges from deep human sources: a conflict
within man himself. According to Feuerbach, Hegel had it exactly backwards:
history does not show the progressive manifestation of Reason or God but the
progressive manifestation and ultimately self-conscious realization of the
mundane alienation of human persons. Marx himself would later say that “the
immediate task of philosophy, which
is in the service of history, is to unmask human self-alienation in its secular form now that it has been
unmasked [by Feuerbach] in its sacred
form.”[223]
For Marx, the proper analytic starting
point for understanding the nature of social relations and the evolution of
society is the pervasive mode of
production in a given society and the relations of the various groups to
the means of production (property,
factories, capital, etc.). This mode of production determines a definite mode
of life in all of its facets.[224]
For Marx, history is not driven by
ideas, ideals, or illusions; it is “driven by the actual labouring activity
whereby humans produce goods for their needs.”[225]
“[Marx believed that] mankind must first
of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics,
science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate
material means of subsistence and consequently the degree of economic
development attained by a given people or during a given epoch form the
foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and
even the ideas on religion, of the people have been evolved, and in the light
of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice-versa, as had
hitherto been the case.”[226]
“The sum total of these relations of
production constitutes the economic structure of society—the real foundation,
on which rise legal and political superstructures and to which correspond
definitive forms of social consciousness. The mode of production in material
life determines the general character of the social, political, and spiritual
processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their
existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their
consciousness.”[227]
“The social structure and the State are
continually evolving out of the life process of definite individuals.”[228]
In the modern, capitalistic world, the
history-shaping economic dialectic is driven by the conflict between the
capitalist (bourgeois) class and their workers (proletarians). The antagonistic
demands for increased capital, on the part of the money-class, and subsistence
living, on the part of the workers, creates the very conditions that will
overwhelm the economic system and usher in a new era. The inner logic of the
capitalist system produces a destabilizing, dehumanizing, and intolerable
alienation which will only be overcome by its destruction.
In Marx’s view, private property is the dynamic
engine of the capitalistic system; it is only when it is overcome or overthrown
that human beings can be released from the alienation intrinsic to capitalism.
"The
positive transcendence of private property as the appropriation of human
life is, therefore, the positive transcendence of all estrangement—that is
to say, the return of man from religion, family, state, etc., to his human,
i.e., social mode of existence."[229]
For Marx, the triumph of the money-class
over the proletariat is not simply economic: it is a wholesale domination.
Those who possess economic power, (i.e., the capitalists) also create an ideology which “justifies” their
economic position, practices, and results. They successfully create religions
(which contrary to Feuerbach are not just projections of generic human ideals,
but the projected interests of a particular class), educational systems, arts,
legal systems, and political lackeys who will do their bidding. All of these cultural
institutions are extensions of the interests of a particular, but ultimately doomed,
class.
“We set out from real, active men, and
on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the
ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process.”[230]
Contrary to John Locke and Adam Smith,
civil society is not a self-governing, benign mechanism which providentially and
naturally harmonizes and coordinates discordant interests; it is a fraud, a
“collective, systematic misperception, or false consciousness.” It is the ideology
of capitalism which attempts to simply pass itself off as “an object governed by immutable laws.”[231]
Marx believed the deterministic logic of
capitalism would eventually expose the ideology of capitalism for what it truly
is. Those suffering under it would not seek to critique it but overturn it.
Capitalist expansion would, ironically, create a corresponding awareness or
consciousness among its own workers that they are class with common interests
and a common enemy. This growing awareness of their common lot would create a
“class-for-itself” consciousness which, when it inevitably rose to full
self-consciousness, would overwhelm the false consciousness foisted on them by
the capitalists. In Marx’s view, this would eventually lead to outright
revolution and the overthrow of private property.
“Communism
is the positive abolition of private property, of human self-alienation, and thus the real
appropriation of human nature through and for man. It is, therefore, the return of
man himself as a social, i.e., really
human, being, a complete and conscious return which assimilates all the wealth
of previous development.”[232]
|
Marxist Socialism[233] |
Marxist-Leninist
Socialism |
|
Proletariat are
revolutionary, universal (interests are the interests of the whole) class |
Proletariat and
substitute proletariat (peasants & intelligentsia included) |
|
Gradual economic
revolution supported by politics, historical and philosophical theory |
Violent, cataclysmic,
political revolution to implement economic change |
|
Withering away of the
capitalist state followed by worker self-administration, perhaps first in the
form of a democratic worker state, followed by the disappearance of a
separate state |
First stage of
post-capitalist life: Socialism: the dictatorship of the proletariat
(“democracy of the majority”). Economic principles: (1) He who does not work
shall not eat; (2) For an equal quantity of labour an equal quantity of
products |
|
|
Second stage of
post-capitalist life: Communism. Economic principle: From each according to
his abilities, to each according to his needs. |
The emergence of western society from feudalism
called for new ways of conceiving a person’s relation to her fellows.
Theological concepts were pressed into renewed service. The concept of the
individual as sovereign provided the means whereby the social world could be
grounded so that it would no longer require organic relations between men or
transpersonal sources of authority.
One of the results of this project has been a
fundamentally bifurcated self, a self that in itself embodies all of the
essential features and conflicts of modern political life. This bifurcated self
is now distanced from its attributes, aims, beliefs, relations, and “roles.”
The identification of the self with the sovereign individual has radically
isolated it from those features previously believed to be constitutive. The
conceptual demands of Bodin’s theory of sovereignty have pushed the logic of
sovereignty to its most radical conclusion: the self is not constituted by
anything, not itself nor its most intimate relations.
All attributes of this modern self are self-chosen
and self-willed. All social institutions which issue from this self are constructed, that is, fabricated out of
collected individual will. In all cases, the self, in its radical isolation,
stands above the reach of all determinations and passes judgment on all things.
In Hobbes’s apt phrase, it “gives laws to all and receives none in return.”
This is the self Alone, in extremis,
“mimicking the self-sufficient God [it] has rejected.”[235]
At its best, this self can join others only for the sake of self-protection,
but even then, it remains a citizen of nowhere, embodying a deficient form of
friendship based solely on mutual advantage.
Can this self properly be called an individual, i.e.,
sovereign? Does the self stand above its attributes as sovereign? Are its
boundaries fixed in advance of contact with other persons? Is the will the
central faculty in grounding moral relations and associations? Are we not
deeply constituted by the attachments we “discover”? Do these discovered
attachments penetrate to our very core and thus pre-empt any meaningful claim
to sovereignty?
Socialis est vita sanctorum
[“the life of the
saints is lived together with other men”] A community of concrete others who
are mutually co-determining each other’s lives offers a much better model for
political theory or ecclesiology, for that matter, than what has been delivered
to us through the Enlightenment tradition. This life together is not only the
hope which enriches our lives in this world, but, as Augustine suggests, it
will be our eternal state as well.
[1]Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political
Thought (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1960), 29.
[2]Wolin, Politics and Vision, 32.
[3]Leo Strauss, What is Political
Philosophy? [1959], excerpted in Aeon J. Skoble and Tibor R. Machan, ed., Political Philosophy: Essential Selections
(Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999), 434.
[4]John H. Hallowell and Jene M. Porter, Political Philosophy: The Search for
Humanity and Order (Scarborough, ON: Prentice Hall Canada, 1997), xi.
[5]Wolin, Politics and Vision, 8.
[6]Wolin, Politics and Vision, 2-3.
[7]Michael Oakeshott, “Introduction to Leviathan, in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, rev. ed. (Indianapolis:
Liberty Fund, 1991), 224, 291.
[8]A. O. Lovejoy, “Reflections on the
History of Ideas,” Journal of the History
of Ideas 1(January 1940): 4.
[9]Lovejoy, “Reflections on the History of
Ideas,” 5.
[10]Quentin Skinner,
[11]For a helpful discussion of this new
methodology see Skinner, Liberty Before
Liberalism, 101-09.
[12]This section title is taken from Wolin, Politics and Vision, 28.
[13]Much of the material in this section is
taken from W. T. Jones, The Classical
Mind, vol. 1, A History of Western
Philosophy (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 40ff.
[14]Thucydides [ca. 460—400 B.C.], History of the Peloponnesian War, I.87,
reprinted in Robert Maynard Hutchins, ed., Great
Books of the Western Tradition (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952), 6:371.
[15]The character, Callicles, in Plato’s
dialogue, Gorgias, articulates this view with great passion.
[16]See Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, V.89, 105, 506-07.
[17]Jones, The Classical Mind, 55.
[18]David Bolotin, “Thucydides,” in Leo
Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, ed., History
of Political Philosophy, 3d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1987), 15.
[19]Wolin, Politics and Vision, 40.
[20]Jones, The Classical Mind, 72-73.
[21]See Leo Strauss, “Plato,” in Leo Strauss
and Joseph Cropsey, ed., History of
Political Philosophy, 3d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987),
42.
[22]J. S. Wilson, “The Argument
of Republic IV,” The Philosophical
Quarterly 26:103 (April 1976): 113.
[23]See
[24]
[25]Ernest Barker, “Introduction,” to The Politics of Aristotle (London:
Oxford University Press, 1946), l-li.
[26]
[27]See Wolin, Politics and Vision, 43-44.
[28]Arthur Melzer, “Rousseau’s Moral Realism,”
American Political Science Review 77
(September 1983): 634.
[29]Ernest Barker, “Introduction,” The Politics of
Aristotle, trans. Ernest Barker (London:
Clarendon Press, 1946), liv-lv.
[30]Wolin, Politics and Vision, 51.
[31]Wolin, Politics and Vision, 57.
[32]See Wolin, Politics and Vision, 62.
[33]Martin Ostwald, Introduction to
Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1980), xiv-xvii.
[34]Hallowell and Porter, Political Philosophy, 67.
[35]T. A. Sinclair, Introduction to
Aristotle, The Politics, trans. T. A. Sinclair (Middlesex: Penguin
Books, 1979), 10.
[36]J. L. Ackrill suggests that
Aristotle is making two points about eudaimonia, namely, that “you cannot say
of eudemonia that you seek it for the sake of something else” and “you cannot
say you would prefer eudemonia plus something extra.” See Ackrill’s “Aristotle
on Eudemonia,” Essays on Aristotle’s
Ethics, ed. Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1980), 22. I am indebted to Dustin Resch for this citation.
[37]Thomas Nagel, “Aristotle on Eudaimonia,”
in Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, 8.
[38]Cited in An Introduction to Ethics, ed.
Robert
Dewey and Robert Hurlbutt (New York: Macmillan, 1977), 296.
[39]The material in this section is taken
from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics,
trans. by Ostwald.
[40]A. MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,
1981), 139.
[41]Hallowell and Porter, Political Philosophy, 70.
[42]Hallowell and Porter, Political Philosophy, 71-72.
[43]John M. Cooper, “Aristotle on Friendship,”
in Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, 302.
[44]Ernest Barker, “Introduction,” to The Politics of Aristotle, trans. Ernest
Barker (London: Oxford University Press, 1946), xlix.
[45]Barker, “Introduction,” xlix.
[46]Carnes Lord, “Aristotle,” in Strauss and Cropsey, History of Political Philosophy, 134.
[47]For a discussion of this point see
Bernard Yack, “Community
and Conflict in Aristotle’s Political Philosophy,” The Review of Politics 47 (January 1985), 97. See also Lord, “Aristotle,”
136.
[48]Barker, “Introduction,” liii.
[49]J. Peter Euben, “Political Equality and the Greek Polis,” in
Michael J. Gargas McGrath, ed. Liberalism
and the Modern Polity (New York: Marcel
Dekker, Inc. , 1978), 209.
[50]Lord, “Aristotle,” 143.
[51]Aristotle, The Politics, trans. T. A. Sinclair
(Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1979), 143-45.
[52]Barker, “Introduction,” lxvii-lxviii.
[53]J. Peter Euben, “Political Equality and the Greek Polis,” 215.
[54]Barker, “Introduction,”
lxviii.
[55]The Hellenistic age is typically taken
to extend from the death of Alexander in 323 B.C. until the Roman conquest of
[56]Barker, “Introduction,” xlvii.
[57]George H. Sabine and Stanley Barney
Smith, “Introduction” to Marcus Tullius Cicero, On the Commonwealth [51 B.C.], trans. George H. Sabine and
Stanley B. Smith (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Pub. , 1976), 18.
[58]Wolin, Politics and Vision, 79.
[59]Zeno [founder of Stoicism], cited in
Ernest Barker, “Introduction,” lix-lx.
[60]Wolin, Politics and Vision, 94, 77.
[61]Marcus Aurelius [A.D. 121-180], Meditations, IV, 4, cited in Wolin, Politics and Vision, 80.
[62]Sabine and Smith, “Introduction,” 48.
[63]Sabine and Smith, “Introduction,” 22.
[64]Walter Lippmann, Essays in the Public Philosophy (New York: The New American
Library, 1955), 83.
[65]Marcus Tullius Cicero [106-43 B.C.], De Re Publica, [The Republic], III.xxii,
trans. C. W. Keyes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 33-34, 211.
[66]Charles H. McIlwain, Constitutionalism Ancient and Modern
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1940), 39-40.
[67]McIlwain, Constitutionalism Ancient and Modern, 39.
[68]Sabine and Smith, “Introduction,” 36-7.
[69]Gaius [A. D. 110-180, Roman jurist], cited in Charles H. McIlwain, The Growth of Political Thought in the West
(New York: Macmillan, 1932), 122.
[70]Cicero, De Officiis, [On Moral Duty],
trans. W. Miller (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 107, 109.
[71]Sabine and Smith, “Introduction,” 31.
[72]
[73]Ernest Barker, Traditions of Civility:
Eight Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948), 10.
[74]Wolin, Politics and Vision, 81.
[75]Sabine and Smith, “Introduction,” 38.
[76]Augustine, The City of God, xix.5, trans. Marcus Dods, Rev. George Wilson, and
Rev. J. J. Smith (New York: Random House, 1950), 680. Subsequent citations from The City of God are from this source unless otherwise noted.
[77]Ernest L. Fortin, “Augustine,” in Leo
Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, ed., History
of Political Philosophy, 180.
[78]Augustine, The City of God, xix.13, 690.
[79]Fortin, “Augustine,” 182.
[80]Brendan Bradshaw, “Transalpine
Humanism,” The
[81]Fortin, “Augustine,” 183.
[82]Augustine, The City of God, xix.24, 706.
[83]Augustine, The City of God, xix.21, 699.
[84]For further discussion of this point see
Wolin, Politics and Vision, 126.
[85]Augustine, The City of God, ii.21, 706.
[86]Augustine, “The Confessions of St.
Augustine” [viii.5], trans. Albert C. Outler, in Augustine: Confessions and Enchiridion, vol. 7, The Library of Christian Classics
(Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1955), 10.
[87]Augustine, The City of God, xiv.28, 477.
[88]Augustine, The City of God, xix.3, ed. David Knowles (Baltimore: Penguin
Books, 1972), 851.
[89]Augustine, The City of God, xviii.2, 610.
[90]Augustine, The City of God, xv.1, 478.
[91]Fortin, “Augustine,” 195.
[92]Augustine, The City of God, i.35, 38.
[93]Augustine, The City of God, xviii.54, 668.
[94]Reinhold Niebuhr, Christian Realism and Political Problems (NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953), 138.
[95]Augustine, The City of God, xix.17, 695-96.
[96]Fortin, “Augustine,” 196-7.
[97]Wolin, Politics and Vision, 125-26.
[98]Fortin, “Augustine,” 184.
[99]Fortin, “Augustine,” 197.
[100]Hallowell and Porter, Political Philosophy, 183.
[101]For a further discussion of this
transition see Joel L. From, “The Unbroken History of Sovereignty: Rights, Autonomy
and the Bifurcated Self” (Ph.D. diss., Syracuse University, 1990), 1-25.
[102]Wolin, Politics and Vision, 132.
[103]Thomas Aquinas, “Exposition of Boethius’s One the Trinity,” Summa Theologiae, I, 2, 3, trans. The Fathers of the
[104]Walter Ullmann, Medieval Political Thought (England: Penguin
Books, 1975), 182-83.
[105]T. Sinclair, “Introduction,” in
Aristotle, The Politics, ed. T.
Sinclair (Middlesex: Penguin, 1979), 12.
[106]Ernest L. Fortin, “St. Thomas Aquinas,” in Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, ed., History of Political Philosophy, 256.
[107]T. Aquinas, On Kingship,
para. 8-9, cited in Dino
Bigongiari, “Introduction” to The
Political Ideas of St. Thomas Aquinas, ed. Dino Bigongiari (New York: Hafner Press, 1953), ix.
[108]On several occasions in their chapter on Aquinas, Hallowell and Porter misrepresent
Augustine’s
view of the pre-lapsarian political order. We argued earlier that Augustine
believed that a prelapsarian political order was necessary. It is not the case,
as Hallowell and Porter suggest, that for Augustine “political order was the
consequence of sin.” Hallowell and Porter, Political
Philosophy, 194.
[109]Aquinas, Summa
Theologiae,
I-II, 90, 3.
[110]For a discussion of this transition in
Aquinas see Bigongiari, “Introduction,” xv-xvi.
[111]Citations from Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae in this section are from
the translation by Fathers
of the
[112]Hallowell and Porter, Political Philosophy,
177.
[113]Hallowell and Porter, Political
Philosophy,
197.
[114]T. Aquinas, [Commentary on the Sentences of Peter
Lombard], II, 44 expositio textus, cited in Bigongiari, “Introduction,” xxxiv.
[115]Ibid., xxxv.
[116]Bigongiari, “Introduction,” xxxv.
[117]Fortin, “St. Thomas Aquinas,” 257-8.
[118]Dante, Monarchy, III.iv.20, trans. Prue Shaw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 72 and III.xvi.15,
93.
[119]Unless otherwise noted, the material in section A. is
taken from George Bull, “Introduction,” to Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. George Bull (Middlesex: Penguin, 1961), 9-26. The
map distributed in class is taken from Chrisopher Hibbert, The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici (London: The Folio
Society, 1998).
[120]Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, 2 vols. (New York: Harper
& Row, 1958), 2:96.
[121]Burckhardt, The
Civilization of the Renaissance in
[122]Burckhardt, The
Civilization of the Renaissance in
[123]In section B. your
instructor is deeply indebted to Isaiah
[124]
[125]This distinctive is suggested by Wolin, Politics and Vision, 211.
[126]Henry C. Mansfield, Machiavelli’s Virtue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 96-97.
[127]Mansfield, Machiavelli’s Virtue, 91.
[128]Mansfield, Machiavelli’s Virtue, 86, 96-97.
[129]From this point on, page numbers in
parentheses refer to
[130]Hallowell and Porter, Political Philosophy, 252.
[131]Hallowell and Porter, Political Philosophy, 252.
[132]Mansfield, Machiavelli’s Virtue, 55, 88.
[133]Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. George Bull (Middlesex:
Penguin, 1961), 87.
[134]Machiavelli, The Prince, 49.
[135]Machiavelli, The Prince, 100.
[136]Machiavelli, The Prince, 99.
[137]Machiavelli, The Prince, 99-100.
[138]Machiavelli, The Prince, 37-38.
[139]Mansfield, Machiavelli’s Virtue, 176.
[140]Machiavelli, The Prince, 91-92.
[141]George Bull, “Introduction,” to Niccolo
Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. George
Bull (Middlesex: Penguin, 1961), 24.
[142]Letter to Francesco Vettorie, 16 April
1527, no. 225, ed.
and trans. Allan Gilbert, The Letters of Machiavelli: A Selection of His Letters (New York: Capricorn,
1961).
[143]The numbers within
parentheses refer to page numbers in Jean Bodin, The Six Bookes of a Commonweale [1576], trans. Richard Knolles
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962).
[144]Barry Shain, The Myth of American Individualism: The Protestant Origins of American
Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 63.
[145]Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen [1647], xv.5, trans. and ed. Richard Tuck and
Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 173.
[146]William Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1993), 25.
[147]Hallowell and Porter, Political Philosophy, 334.
[148]Hallowell and Porter, Political Philosophy, 334.
[149]Hobbes, On the Citizen, Preface, 10.
[150]C. B. MacPherson, “Introduction” to
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B.
MacPherson (Middlesex: Penguin, 1968), 27.
[151]Laurence Berns,
“Thomas Hobbes, “ in History of Political
Philosophy, 3d ed., ed. Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1987), 397.
[152]Hobbes, On the Citizen ii.1, 33.
[153]Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), 320-21.
[154]Hobbes, On the Citizen, ii.2,3; iii.1,8, 34, 43, 47.
[155]Noel Malcolm, “Hobbes and Spinoza,” The
[156]Hallowell and Porter, Political Philosophy, 314.
[157]Alan Ryan, “Hobbes’s Political
Philosophy,” in The Cambridge Companion
to Hobbes, ed. Tom Sorell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),
217-18.
[158]Hobbes, Leviathan, 161.
[159]Hobbes, Leviathan, 120.
[160]Hobbes, On the Citizen, iii.31, 55.
[161]Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, 318.
[162]Hobbes, Leviathan, 66.
[163]Hobbes, On the Citizen, ii.4, 34.
[164]Hobbes, Leviathan, 227.
[165]Thomas Hobbes, De Cive: The Latin Version, v.7, vol. 2, ed. Howard Warrender
(Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1983), 133.
[166]Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, 312-13.
[167]Wolin, Politics and Vision, 283.
[168]Raymond Aron, cited in Jean Bethke
Elshtain, “Bonhoeffer and the
[169]Hobbes, De Cive, cited in Man and
Citizen (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1972), 245-46.
[170]J. W. N. Watkins, Hobbes’s System of Ideas: A Study in the Political Significance of
Philosophical Theories (London: Hutchinson University Library, 1975),
160-62.
[171]Hobbes, On the Citizen, vi.15 (note to 1647 ed.), 85.
[172]Arthur M. Melzer, “Rousseau’s Moral
Realism: Replacing Natural Law with the General Will,” American Political Science Review 77(September 1983): 636.
[173]James Daly, Cosmic Harmony and Political Thinking in Stuart England
(Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1979), 37.
[174]John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, II.4, ed. Thomas P. Peardon
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1952), 4.
[175]Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, XI.135, 77.
[176]John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of the
Argument of the ‘Two Treatises of Government’ (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1969), 106-07.
[177]Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, V.27, 17.
[178]Raymond Polin, “John Locke’s Conception
of Freedom,” in John W. Yolton, ed., John
Locke, Problems and Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1969), 6.
[179]Locke, The Second Treatise of Government,
VIII.95, 55.
[180]Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, III.21,14; VII.87, 49.
[181]Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, VIII.106, 60.
[182]The chief end of
the constituted populus is the
preservation of property. See Locke, The
Second Treatise of Government, IV.124, 71.
[183]Ruth W. Grant, John Locke’s Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1987), 82.
[184]Grant, John Locke’s Liberalism, 88-89.
[185]Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, II.4, 4.
[186]Allan Bloom, “Jean-Jacques Rousseau,” in
Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, ed., History
of Political Philosophy, 3d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1987), 562.
[187]Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality Among Men
I.35 [1755], in The Discourses and other
early political writings, trans. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), 151.
[188]Hallowell and Porter, Political Philosophy, 433.
[189]Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality Among Men,
212.
[190]Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality Among Men,
127.
[191]Allan Bloom, “Jean-Jacques Rousseau,”
564-5.
[192]Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality Among Men,
161.
[193]Rousseau, Emile, or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books,
1979), 85.
[194]Rousseau, The Social Contract, ed. Charles Frankel (New York: Hafner Press,
1947), 14-15.
[195]Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality Among Men,
218.
[196]Allan Bloom, “Introduction,” to Emile, or On Education, 483-84, n. 17.
[197]The final phrase of this sentence is
adapted from the English poet, Alexander Pope.
Pope’s Essay on Man was known
to Rousseau and admired by him. See Pope, Essay
on Man, Epistle I, in Selected Poetry
and Prose, ed. W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston,
1965), 133.
[198]Patrick Riley, The General Will Before Rousseau: The Transformation of the Divine into
the Civic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 251.
[199]Rousseau, Letter to Mirabeau, July 26, 1767, cited in Arthur Melzer,
“Rousseau’s Moral Realism: Replacing Natural Law with the General Will” American Political Science Review 77 (September 1983): 634.
[200]Rousseau, The Social Contract, Bk. II, Chapter 6, 33-34.
[201]Rousseau, The Social Contract, Bk. I, Chapter 6, 15-16.
[202]Martin Luther, The Freedom of a Christian [1520] in Luther’s Works, 55 vols. (Philadephia: Fortress Press, 1955-76),
XXXI, 344.
[203]Turrettin, Sermon sur la loy de la Liberte [1734], cited in Pamel A. Mason,
“The Communion of Citizens: Calvinist Themes in Rousseau’s Theory of the
State,” Polity (Fall 1993): 46.
[204]Rousseau, The Social Contract, Bk. II, Chapter 6, 33.
[205]Rousseau, The Social Contract, Bk. I, Chapter 7, 17.
[206]Metzer,
“Rousseau’s Moral Realism, 638.
[207]Melzer, “Rousseau’s Moral Realism, 645.
[208]Cited in Robert Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition (New York:
Basic Books, 1966), 40.
[209]William Connolly,
Political Theory and Modernity
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 182.
[210]Hallowell and Porter, Political Philosophy, 480.
[211]Jeremy Bentham, A Fragment of Government, ed. J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), Preface, 3.
[212]Bentham, A Fragment on Government . . . , ed. Wilfrid Harrison (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1967), ch. 1, para. 1.
[213]Bentham, A
Fragment, ed. Burns, ch. 1, para. 10.
[214]The material in this subsection is derived from: John H. Hallowell and Jene M. Porter, Political Philosophy: The Search for Humanity and Order (Scarborough: Prentice Hall, Canada, 1997), 502-10.
[215]Mill, On
[216]Mill, On
[217]Mill, On
[218]Mill, On
[219]Mill, On
[220]Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1989), 458.
[221]Isaiah
[222]Hallowell and Porter, Political Philosophy, 562.
[223]Hallowell and Porter, Political Philosophy, 566-67.
[224]Marx, The German Ideology, in Porter, Classics,
558.
[225]Hallowell and Porter, Political Philosophy, 571.
[226]Friedrich Engels, ”Speech at the
Graveside of Karl Marx, in Porter, Classics,
546.
[227]Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in Porter, Classics, 587.
[228]Karl Marx, The German Ideology, in Porter, Classics,
562.
[229]Karl Marx, Economic
and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,
n.p.
[230]Marx, The German Ideology, 563.
[231]Robert Paul Wolff, Understanding Rawls: A Reconstruction and Critique of A Theory of
Justice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 124.
[232]Karl Marx, Third Manuscript:
Private Property and Communism, Economic
and Philosophic Manuscripts in Porter, Classics,555.
[233]This table adapted from Galen Johnson, Class notes, Marxism 53,
[234]Translated: “To be in the company of
men.” Augustine, when questioned about eternal life, suggested that the Roman
view of life as lived “in the company of men” would persist into the next
world. Some type of political life would exist under conditions of sinlessness
(as it had prior to the fall). Indeed, sanctity itself could be summed up in
one sentence, Socialis est vita sanctorum,
“Even the life of the saints is lived together with other men.” See Hannah
Arendt, Between Past and Future (NY:
The Viking Press, 1954), 73.
[235]This phrase is taken from Benjamin
Barber, Strong Democracy (Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 1984), 71.