On the other hand, Kosygin’s capacity for survival may well have derived from the fact that he never aspired to the very summit of power. Successive leaders beginning with Stalin had valued his competence; none had seen him as a potential rival. His main career having been on the governmental side, he lacked, in any event, the power base within the Party machinery from which to aim for the pinnacle. At the same time, Kosygin could neither have reached so near the top nor maintained himself there for so long if he were entirely unskilled in Kremlin politics. He must have played one of the key roles in the palace revolt that overthrew Khrushchev, for example. But his longevity was due to the fact that his actions were not in service to personal ambition. His commitment to duty was vividly illustrated when his wife was fatally ill; Kosygin went ahead with his day’s chores, even continuing to stand on Lenin’s tomb to review a Red Square parade after the message of her death reached him.
Kosygin was shrewd in assessing character — obviously a requirement for survival in the Soviet system. Brezhnev seemed to play on the aspirations, ambitions, and weaknesses of his interlocutors by instinct; Kosygin gave the impression of doing so on the basis of skillful calculation.
The new President was about to undergo his first experience of the bureaucratic steamroller. It is the nature of a bureaucracy to move by almost imperceptible stages toward a goal it may itself only dimly perceive. The first move is usually to ask the President or the Secretary of State for authority to “explore” a certain course “in principle,” with solemn assurances that this decision creates neither precedent nor obligation for another step and that the policymakers will retain full control over the process. Invariably the first step implies a series of others; the exploration of a serious object can only reveal its difficulties and spur pressures to overcome them. Soon the President is asked to act to remove an impasse his own policy has created. This is of course exactly what the advocates of an active policy desire; they are only too eager to put forward schemes to break the deadlock. Their eagerness was further stimulated by the cast of mind of some American diplomats that a crisis is somehow not genuine unless we are a party to it. This was the origin of the thought that we must never be perceived (never specifying by whom) as indifferent to emerging confrontations.
Perhaps it is history’s tragic lesson that only two kinds of structure seem able to survive the stresses of modernization: either totalitarian governments imposing their will and national discipline, or else democratic governments where pluralism and a constitutional tradition were already in place before industrialization began. Regrettably, the recent period finds few new examples of democratic evolution in the developing world. For developing countries, one of the attractions of Marxism (or, now, reversion to theocracy) is that it provides a rationale for the exercise of power and a rigid structure of discipline and authority amidst the disintegration of traditional forms.
He quoted an observation of President Eisenhower that, whatever their differences, one thing all successful political leaders seemed to have in common was “the ability to marry above themselves.” He then proposed a toast to the Shah and “to his lovely Empress, who has been by his side…” The King of Kings looked off into the distance with melancholy.
American idealism, the underlying cause of the national debate on both sides of the argument, is, of course, a symptom of America’s strength — an expression of faith that our society is eternally able to renew itself, transcend history, and reshape reality. But we must take care that rebellion against the very concept of limits does not become the permanent feature of the American response to international politics. For the recognition of some constraints is an attribute, perhaps the price, of maturing in societies as well as in people. The test of a society is not the denial but the proper understanding of its constraints. Mediocre societies and statesmen limit themselves to the easily attainable. Great societies and statesmen strive at the outer reaches of their possibilities. But the denial of any limits leads to exhaustion or disaster.
Had Mao died in 1956, there would be no doubt that he was a great leader of the Chinese people. Had he died in 1966, his meritorious achievements would have been somewhat tarnished, but his overall record still very good. Since he actually died in 1976, there is nothing we can do.
At the base of the phenomenon of recognition are judgments about the intrinsic worth of other human beings, or about the norms, ideas, and rules that human beings create. Coerced recognition isn’t meaningful; the admiration of a free individual is far more satisfying than the obeisance of a slave. Political leadership emerges initially because members of a community admire a particular individual who demonstrate great physical prowess, courage, wisdom, or the ability to adjudicate disputes fairly. If politics is a struggle over leadership, it is also a story about followership and the willingness of the great mass of human beings to accord leaders higher status than themselves and subordinate themselves to them. In a cohesive and therefore successful community, this subordination is voluntary and based on belief in the leader’s right to rule.
As political systems develop, recognition is transferred from individuals to institutions - that is, to rules or patterns of behavior that persist over time, like the British monarchy or the US Constitution. But in either case, political order is based on legitimacy and the authority that arises from legitimate domination. Legitimacy means that the people who make up the society recognize the fundamental justice of the system as a whole and are willing to abide by its rules. In contemporary societies, we believe that legitimacy is conferred by democratic elections and respect for the rule of law. But democracy is hardly the only form of government that has been regarded as legitimate historically.
Political power is ultimately based on social cohesion. Cohesion may arise out of calculations of self-interest, but simple self-interest is frequently not enough to induce followers to sacrifice and die on behalf of their communities. Political power is the product not just of the resources and numbers of citizens that a society can command but also the degree to which the legitimacy of leaders and institutions is recognized.
Politics emerges as a mechanism for controlling violence, yet violence constantly remains as a background condition for certain types of political change. Societies can get stuck in a dysfunctional institutional equilibrium, in which existing stakeholders can veto necessary institutional change. Sometimes violence or the threat of violence is necessary to break out of the equilibrium.
Finally, the desire for recognition ensures that politics will never be reducible to simple economic self-interest. Human beings make constant judgments about the intrinsic value, worth, or dignity of other people or institutions, and they organize themselves into hierarchies based on those valuations. Political power ultimately rests upon recognition - the degree to which a leader or institution is regarded as legitimate and can command the respect of a group of followers. People may follow out of self-interest, but the most powerful political organization are those that legitimate themselves on the basis of a broader idea.
Biology gives us the building blocks of political development. Human nature is largely constants across different societies. The huge variance in political forms that we see both at the present time and over the course of history is in the first instance the product of variance in the physical environments that human beings came to inhabit. As societies ramify and fill different environmental niches across the globe, they develop distinctive norms and ideas in a process known as specific evolution. Groups of humans also interact with each other, and this interaction is as much a driver of change as is the physical environment.
As I looked out on all the new appointees at the White House in mid-2009, I was struck by how diverse they — like their predecessors — were in the motives for joining the government. Some were acolytes who idolized the new president, had worked unbelievably hard for his election, and were totally devoted to him on a personal level. They were prepared to sacrifice years of their lives to try to make him successful. Others were “cause” people, individuals who had worked for him and were willing to serve under hm now because of one or another specific issue — or the entire agenda — and saw him and their service as a way to advance policies they believed in. Still others had been successful in their careers and saw an opportunity to give back to the country by working for a man they supported, or simply to do something different for a while. Still another group were just political “junkies” — they loved the political life, and working in the executive branch after 8 years on the Hill or “in the wilderness” (outside government) was like a fresh tank of oxygen. And then there were a small number whose arms had to be twisted personally by the president to get them to abandon the comfort of private life in exchange for grueling hours and the opportunity to be all too often flayed personally and politically on the Hill and in the media.
Politics is getting your own way. Nothing more.
European unity might at least change a situation in which the ally of one epoch may become the enemy of the next, a fact which illustrates the essential coldness and brutality of much politics. We often construe inter-state relations in terms of the metaphor of friends and foes, but misleadingly. A great power, as many statesmen have said, has no friends, merely interests, and interests change. “Blood dries quickly” remarked Charles de Gaulle, and countries do indeed rapidly forget the enemies of yesteryear. The idea of friendship in international politics is merely sentimental overlay concealing calculations of national interest. But what is national interest?
It is whatever a state judges necessary to its security. The national interest is a matter of interpretation, but changes of regime seldom greatly change a state’s idea of its national interest.
The moral thrust of internationalism is to identify the national interest with selfishness. Conformity to international treaties and the implementation of right is, by contrast, seen as virtuous. The reader will already have realized, however, that nothing in politics is purely moral, or indeed purely economic, spiritual, or anything else. What is economically efficient may be spiritually destructive, and what is universally moral may be fatal to a specific culture. It is not even as if the movement for international virtue can claim to be entirely independent of particular interests. International morality certainly suits some nations more than others, and a prosperous bureaucracy of civil servants with clients among the pressure-groups of Western countries benefits from its extension.
Realists claim that national interest remains, and indeed ought to remain, the lodestar of international relations. They have seen a whole succession of monocausal theories of the causes of war (baronial arrogance, dynastic ambition, nationalism, or fanaticism) refuted by the facts. Their concern is that utopian aspirations towards a new peaceful world order will simply absolutize conflicts and make them more intractable. National interests are in some degree negotiable; rights, in principle, are not. International organizations such as the UN have not bene conspicuously successful in bringing peace, and it is likely that the states of the world would become extremely nervous of any move to give the UN the overwhelming power needed to do this. International relations is thus one area which conspicuously demonstrates that all political solutions tend to create new political problems.
Politics has its own logistics: it requires agents, premises, contacts with printers, a pool of supporters, money, and generally, as the condition of all these things, an established political party. The rich and famous are sometimes inclined to start a party from scratch, but it is a difficult option. The typical route taken by the ambitious politicians is from the periphery to the center, and each step of the way resembles a game of snakes and ladders.
The politician needs, for a start, the same kind of knowledge as the concerned citizen; just more of it. What American politician could move a step without a close knowledge of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and many of the decisions of the Supreme Court? Knowledge of history is indispensable, supplying a range of memories, references, and metaphors without which political talk is unintelligible. From the War of Independence, through the Civil War, to the very songs and slogans of the American past, the politician must be able to pick up the references, many of them highly local, which constitute the culture of those whom he seeks to represent. He must know how the Senate and Congress work in detail, not to mention the way in which the states relate to them. Much of this low-level, slightly tedious, descriptive material, but without it the politician’s understanding hardly rises above gossip.
A skillful politician resembles a magician in his capacity to set an object before the mind of one audience, while keeping it invisible to others, sometimes in the same hall. Simple-minded rationalists sometimes stigmatize this characteristic of politicians as nothing but support-seeking duplicity, and journalists have taken to “decoding” their speeches and disclosing the supposed “message” behind the words. Better understood, this technique is the tact which allows people with very different judgments and preferences to live together in one society; where it fails, then society moves to the brink of dissolution.
Constrained by his representative function, the politician is further circumscribed by the responsibilities of his office. The raw brutalities of power are largely converted into the suavities of authority, and it is important to distinguish these two phenomena. The outsider is often impressed by the power of those who hold important positions in the state, but power, while attractive as a kind of melodrama, is mostly exaggerated. The office of a PM or president is constitutionally limited, and idealists quickly find that their capacity to improve the world requires whole streams of concessions they would prefer not to make. As Harry Truman remarked: “About the biggest power the President has is the power to persuade people to do what they ought to do without having to be persuaded.” The power of an office is merely the skill by which a ruler can use his authority to get the right things done. Otherwise, when people talk of “power” they merely mean the pleasure an office-holder may get from a purely personal exercise of will, which is basically a trivial thing. Most trivial of all is the pleasure in being the constant focus of attention in public places, and the capacity to please — but also to frustrate — the ambitious people by whom the politician is surrounded.
What this account of persuasion suggests is that the politician must be a special type of person, one capable of keeping his deepest convictions to himself. The rest of us can shoot our mouths to our hearts’ content, indulging in that massive new pleasure the modern world has invented, being opinionated about matters on which we are ignorant. The politician must generally consider the effect of his opinions on his likely future, and requires a special kind of personality structure. But it should not be concluded from this that a politician is simply a hypocrite. Such a person is engaged in a high-risk occupation in which he must always be looking to the future developments. Opportunism is certainly part of the talent, but unless the politician has genuine convictions — bot moral convictions, and convictions about how things are likely to move — he will lack the clear profile which is usually necessary for the greatest success. Statesmen — the highest grade of politician — are those who can balance inner conviction with the talent of turning every opportunity to advantage.
Politics is endless public disagreement about what justice requires.
Ideology is thus a variation played on the triple theme of oppression, struggle, and liberation.
Politics, by contrast, assumes that any state will contain many ways of life, and that a responsible political order must make it possible for its subjects to follow their own bent. One implication of this practice is that most of life will not be about politics, any more than most of football consists of arguing with the referee. The doctrine that everything is political is an infallible sign of the ideological project of replacing the rule of law by the management of people. A further implication is that society will necessarily be imperfect, for if it allows people to be morally responsible, some of them are certainly going to be irresponsible.
In 1975, Ford was in a heated dispute with members of Congress over funding to the South Vietnamese government. The Congress had voted to withdraw US funding, which made it all but inevitable that South Vietnam would fall to brutal communist control. The President was so angry that he did something uncharacteristic. He started questioning the personal fortitude of members of Congress, suggesting that they didn’t have the guts to stand up to the communities. That was tough language for the 1970s, though regrettably it has become more routine since. Of course, what a president says sets the tone for the rest of the administration. His words echo right down the line and are repeated and incorporated into the public remarks of other administration officials.
What Ford had said about Congress, I told him, sounded like something LBJ might have said. This was not meant as a compliment, and Ford didn’t take it as one. “There is something about that chair,” I said, pointing to the one behind his desk in the Oval Office, “that makes presidents begin to act and talk in a way to make them seem tough.” As a member of Congress and even as Vice President, Ford might have been able to get away with an angry outburst or the use of some ill-chosen words. But less so as the President. I was concerned about how his anger, however sincere and strongly felt, would come across to the American people. Presidents are expected to be measured in their rhetoric. What people liked about Gerald Ford, in contrast to his immediate predecessors, was that he came across as a warm, decent, honest person.
I reminded the President there are two particularly harmful things for anyone in public life. One is ridicule and the other is being seen as not up to the job. My concern was that angry and blustering comments like that might leave the latter impression. I suggested instead that he use what I called an “Eisenhower-type approach” in dealing with political opponents. Even though Ike was known to have a temper, he rarely if ever was angry in public or called anyone names. Like FDR, he would talk about his opponents more with disappointment or sadness than anger.
Moving a bureaucracy cannot be achieved simply by ordering that something be done, even in a military organization. Instead, leadership almost always requires consent and persuasion. The biggest problem with bureaucracies is the certainty that, as Ronald Reagan put it, they are the “closest thing to eternal life on earth.” The machinery of an organization outlasts any one leader.
If you order a bureaucracy to do something it doesn’t want to do, very often it will ensure that your attempt at change will fail and prove to all that it was right in the first place. Or else it will resort to the tried-and-true tactic of the “slow roll.” Because bureaucracies can almost always outlast leadership, they can appear on the surface to be following guidance from the top, but actually be doing only the bare minimum, ensuring that little, if any, change is accomplished.
In the six years of my last tour as Secretary I could probably count on two hands the number of times I issued a direct order other than an explicit command from the POTUS. It was exceedingly rare. A more effective approach is a form of the Socratic method - asking a series of question that help to move toward a preferred outcome. That was one of the reasons I sent some 20,000 “snowflakes” and memos while I was in the Pentagon. Contained in those memos and notes were a great many more questions than instructions. When I made a specific assertion it tended to be followed by something like “Would you let me know what’s wrong with this?” or “Why isn’t this right?” or “What do you think?” It was more time-consuming than issuing orders, but it had a better chance of achieving results.
As Rocky sat down, he turned to me with a satisfied smile. “Don, there’s a lesson there,” he said. “People respond in direct proportion to the extent you reach out to them.” In private interactions, Rockefeller could be an intimidating bully, as I had observed firsthand a number of times in the White House meetings. Yet I could see why he had been such a successful politician for so many years. He knew that if you reach out to people, generally they’ll reciprocate.
You’ve got to be cold-blooded about the self-interests of your nation.
Realpolitik distinct from ideological politics in that it is not dictated by a fixed set of rules but instead tends to be goal-oriented, limited only by practical exigencies.
Politics is about the characteristic blend of conflict and co-operation that can be found so often in human interactions. Pure conflict is war. Pure co-operation is true love. Politics is a mixture of both.
Power is simply control, money is just a form of control. Control over anything, be it external control like people, resources, land, etc. or internal control such as self-control (emotional, will, etc…) is power. Anything that involves control is power.
Also, abuse of power, or corruption would be in my opinion losing control. Next time you see a corrupt man, or anyone that abuses their power, just know that they lost control over themselves.
In the stone age, power was being physically bigger than the next guy.
After that, power meant loyalties and betrayals to gain the largest armies.
In today’s world, power’s most basic form is money, but it might change in the future.
Money is a means to and end, but power is the end. At the root of it, power is people. We build civilizations around people and true power comes from understanding people well enough to understand what form of power will take in your current setting (be it money or else).
Convention on the Law of the Sea entered into force, its underlying theory that the seabed was a part of “the common heritage of mankind,” became fixed in the Globalist mindset, and spread to many other fields. For example, the ever-creative Group of 77 decided that “technology” was “part of the universal human heritage,” thus ensuring that all nations “have the right of access” to it.
Kissinger himself puts it in this book: “In the past the major problem for strategists was to assemble superior strength; in the contemporary period the problem more frequently is how to make the available power relevant to objectives likely to be in dispute.”
People always act like politics is like this little add-on thing like a food preference, rather than something deeply rooted in personal convictions about right and wrong and even psychological tendencies.
The challenge of statesmanship was “to define the component of both power and morality and strike a balance between them.” This was not a one-time effort but required “constant recalibration.” It was as much an artistic and philosophical as a political enterprise and demanded a willingness to manage nuance and to live with ambiguity. The practitioners of the art must learn to put the attainable in the service of the ultimate and accept the element of compromise inherent in the endeavor. Bismarck defined statesmanship as the art of the possible.
Power is the capacity of an individual to influence the actions, beliefs, or conduct (behavior) of others. The term authority is often used for power that is perceived as legitimate by the social structure, not to be confused with authoritarianism.
Power usually represents a struggle over resources. The more scarce and values resources are, the more intense and protracted are power struggles. The scarcity hypothesis indicates that people have the most power when the resources they possess are hard to come by or are in high demand. However, scarce resource leads to power only if it is valued within a relationship.
Nhiều kẻ cứ lầm tưởng rằng phải lấy ở bên ngoài mới gọi là được, và vì thế kẻ ấy sinh ra không chịu cho bao giờ. Thiên hướng về dục vọng ngũ quan nên ham lấy, càng lấy thì càng làm hẹp cái vòng sống của mình để rồi tiêu tan vào sự chết. Chỉ có những người biết “cho” nhiều, mở rộng vòng sống của mình ra vô tận thì mới mong bất diệt được.”
Quan niệm ấy đi vào chính trị, người Trung Quốc liền phân ra hai loại chính trị tiểu nhân và đại nhân. Chính trị của đại nhân là đem thân mình ra cung hiến cho xã hội. Phát huy cái chính trị của đại nhân lên cao hơn gọi là Thánh nhân. Như vậy mới thật là Đức.
Người xưa chủ trương “Mười năm đèn sách, mười năm nuôi khí chất.” Mười năm đèn sách đem lại Trí, mười năm nuôi khí chất tạo thành đức nhẫn. Đức nhẫn quan hệ vô cùng đối với chính trị.
Robert understood one important thing: loyalties are fluid. An enemy is only an enemy right now. Change the political situation — which Robert was doing — and he won’t be your enemy anymore. The Kingsguard’s job was to guard the king; Barristan wasn’t about to slice Robert’s throat as soon as he got better, because Robert wasn’t his enemy, just his opponent. Same thing with all the other lords. Robert couldn’t possibly blame them for siding with their king over an usurper. Robert’s beef was not with the Reach or the Tyrells but with Rhaegar Targaryen. If the Tyrells were defeated and could be talked into changing their support, that’s much better than finishing them for really no reason.
The agenda of world politics has become like a three-dimensional chess game in which one can win only by playing vertically as well as horizontally. On the top board of classic interstate military issues, the US is indeed the only superpower with global military reach. However, on the middle board of interstate economic issues, the distribution of power is multipolar. The US cannot obtain the outcomes it wants on trade, antitrust, or financial regulation issues without the agreement of the EU, Japan, China, and others. On the bottom board of transnational issues like terrorism, international crime, climate change, and the spread of infectious diseases, power is widely distributed and chaotically organized among state and nonstate actors.
Political leaders have long understood the power that comes from attraction. If I can get you to want to do what I want, then I do not have to use carrots and sticks to make you do it. Whereas leaders in authoritarian countries can use coercion and issue commands, politicians in democracies have to rely more on a combination of inducement and attraction. Soft power is a staple of daily democratic politics. The ability to establish preferences tend to be associated with intangible assets such as an attractive personality, culture, political values and institutions, and policies that are seen as legitimate or having moral authority. If a leader represents values that others want to follow, it will cost less to lead.
You can command me to change my preferences and do what you want by threatening me with force or economic sanctions. You can induce me to do what you want by using economic power to pay me. You can restrict my preferences by setting the agenda in such a way that my more extravagant wishes seem too unrealistic to pursue. Or you can appeal to a sense of attraction, love, or duty in our relationship and appeal to our shared values about the justness of contributing to those shared values and purposes.
Some countries may be attracted to others with hard power by the myth of invincibility or inevitability.
However important the military power and political promise of the US were for setting the foundation for the American successes in Cold War Europe, it was the American economic and cultural attraction that really won over the hearts and minds of the majorities of young people for Western democracy.
American intentions are good, American hegemony is benevolent, and that should end the discussion. To them, multilateralism means “submerging American will in a mush of collective decision-making — you have sentenced yourself to reacting to events or passing the buck to multilingual committees with fancy acronyms.” They deny that American “arrogance” is a problem. Rather, the problem is “the inescapable reality of American power in its many forms.” Policy is legitimized by its origins in a democracy and by the outcome — whether it results in an advance of freedom and democracy. That post hoc legitimization will more than compensate for any loss of legitimacy through unilateralism.
Skeptics about soft power say not to worry. Popularity is ephemeral and should not be a guide for foreign policy in any case. The US can act without the world’s applause. We are so strong we can do as we wish. We are the world’s only superpower, and that fact is bound to engender envy and resentment. We do not need permanent allies and institutions. We can always pick up a coalition of the willing when we need to. Donald Rumsfeld is wont to say that the issues should determine the coalitions, not vice versa.
Using formal authority has fewer costs than does using informal power. Exercising informal power usually requires an expenditure of resources such as knowledge or personal attention, or making commitments or concessions regarding one decision in exchange for support on another. One expended, informal power is depleted and power holders must renew it or suffer the erosion of their influence. For example, a person with control over the assignment of office spaces gleans power from the control of this resource only until they make the assignments. A person who overuses their personal attractiveness comes to be seen as manipulative with a consequent loss of personal power.
By comparison, the exercise of formal authority is not diminished by use and can even be enhanced by it. Power that is institutionalized in formal authority creates expectations such that not exercising formal power may provoke questions about the powerholder’s hold on his or her power. “Use it or lose it” applies particularly well here.
Many people consider politics to be inappropriate in organizations because political processes undermine rationality, thereby creating suboptimal decisions. Nevertheless, spending time in pretty much any organization will reveal undeniable evidence of political behavior. One of the naive mistakes rookie managers make is to present a “rock solid” (i.e. irrefutably rational) case for a decision, only to have it denied by those who later will advise the newcomer how to work the system to achieve a better outcome in the future. This phenomenon is called bounded rationality.
Decision-making is only rational under highly restrictive conditions that rarely occur in organizations, namely that known problems have unambiguous solutions. When these conditions do not hold, bounded rationality prevails. This is a phenomenon in which, while still holding rationality as an ideal, decision-makers “satisfice” (a blend of the words satisfy and suffice) by seeking a solution that is adequate rather than optimal.
Bounded rationality politicizes decision-making processes when less influential decision-makers align their interests behind a jointly favored alternative in order to offset the influence of more powerful decision-makers, who, in turn, are forced to align themselves to retain their political dominance. The realignment continues until the decision can be made. This is known as coalition-building, and its result is the support of a decision favoring one set of aligned internal interests over others.
Because new problems constantly arise, political maneuvering in organizations is endless. When coalition-building becomes an everyday occurrence, it is hard not to see organizations primarily as arenas for power and politics where everyone constantly barters their support to get decisions made.
For instance, relationships built on friendship, reputation, shared culture, identity, or a corporate brand, enjoy greater cooperation and trust, and fewer attempts at domination. Thus one of the challenges in managing network relationships is building organizational cultures and brands to provide a shared sense of purpose and community without losing the benefits of diversity, overly restricting individual self-expression, or denying self-interest.
You want praise from people who kick themselves every fifteen minutes, the approval of people who despise themselves.
If they try to force you to treat a question on their terms by asking “are you with us or against us?” you can always just answer “neither.”
Better still, answer “I haven’t decided.” That’s what Larry Summers did when a group tried to put him in this position. Explaining himself later, he said “I don’t do litmus tests.” A lot of the questions people get hot about are actually quite complicated. There is no prize for getting the answer quickly.
17th-century England was much like the third world today, in that government office was a recognized route to wealth. The great fortunes of that time still derived more from what we would now call corruption than from commerce.
The problem with according equal respect to the values held by individuals is that it bypasses the empirical fact that ranking goods is an inevitable feature of political life. Without a means of distributing the significance of values and asserting that “this is more important, or worthy, than that” no political decisions can be taken.
Furthermore, among humans as well as many animals, inequality, accompanied by deference — meaning inequality that is recognized — was exactly what held the community or group together.
Plato, an aristocrat if ever one there was, also joined Thucydides in criticizing the other side of democracy. That included its “feverish” nature, its encouragement of unrestricted competition among individual (and equal) citizens, and its inability to keep a steady course. Indeed he compared the ruler in a democracy to a trainer in charge of some big and dangerous beast. To avoid being eaten, he is forever forced to follow the beast’s every whim.
At first, chiefs dined in the midst of their men with everyone sitting side by side on long benches. Next, they moved themselves to the head of the table. Next, another table was joined so the first so as to form a T; next, the crossbar of the T was raised and put on a dais. Slowly but surely, chiefs were elevated and metamorphosed into kings. The final step was to interpose a curtain between the king and his queen and everybody else. Only on special festive occasions was the curtain removed so that everyone might see the royal couple eat. From there it was but a short step to instituting ceremonies during which they alone ate while everyone else was obliged to watch.
Although family ties were necessarily important, feudal society was not based on kin to quite the same extent as chiefdoms were. What really counted was fealty on one hand and serfdom on the other. Both, but fealty in particular, created a reciprocal set of rights and obligations. Fealty was formalized by means of ceremonies, gifts, oaths, and later, written documents. The duties of both lords and vassals were laid down by custom. As a result, considerable variation existed both from one place to another and over time. In theory a simple chain led from the highest prince, i.e. the emperor or king, down to the lowliest squire. From him it went on to the serfs who lived on his land and worked it for him. The difference was that, whereas fealty was supposed to be individual, voluntary, and subject to periodical renewal, serfdom was collective, compulsory and hereditary.
As things were, there was often nothing to prevent the same vassal from swearing fealty to, and holding lands from, several lords simultaneously. This made the situation much more complicated.
One of the most important and long-lived official ideologies that underpinned government and justified the unequal power that some people exercised over others was Chinese Confucianism. Unlike most other civilization, China did not have a supreme god. In some sense, indeed, it did not have any gods at all. As a result, instead of claiming to be descended from the supreme god, Chinese emperors carried the title Son of Heaven (Tien) and claimed to rule over All under Heaven. The way Confucius described the universe, all the inhabitants of All under Heaven were part of a single, though vast, family. Inside that family, everyone and everything had its place which was also mandated by Heaven. Moderns were duty-bound to respect ancients, inferiors, superiors, youngsters their elders and women, men. All these obligations were supposed to be reciprocal. In return for being revered, served and fed, superiors owed inferiors guidance, protection, and benevolence. Confucius himself emphasized that reciprocity — “do unto others as you would have others do unto you” — stands at the very heart of his teaching.
In this system the central value was harmony, not equality. Social life was to be based on the recognition that all people have their proper station in life. They should be treated, and should treat others, accordingly. In this sense, indeed, harmony was consciously meant as a substitute for the inequality nature had created and which was an essential prerequisite for any civilization. Laws, or rather codes of conduct, were not formalized but had to be planted in the people’s hearts and minds instead. The means for doing so were goodwill, example and education, not prohibitions and punishments. This in turn reflected the belief that everybody, however low his or her position in life, had the potential to become virtuous. In this sense at any rate, everyone had indeed been born equal to everybody else.
This leaves monasteries and “utopian” societies. Monasteries can only exist as islands in a large society that protects them and meets their economic needs. Often this meant, and means, a highly un-egalitarian economic basis. Among the monks a certain kind of equality may indeed exist, but only as long as their numbers are kept quite small. Once their numbers grow past a certain point, some machinery for maintaining discipline is required, causing inequality to rear its head again.
Utopias fall into two kinds. From Plato to Andreae, some are highly structured. Normally socio-economic equality prevails, but only at the cost of a powerful government that is neither egalitarian nor transparent. Another reason for this, as well as for the absence of liberty, is the need for defense and the hope to improve the human race by selective breeding. By contrast, Chinese utopias are located in secret places. Their security is assured, which enables them to do without strong government, in other words superiors and inferiors. That is even more true of medieval utopias, including Rabelais’s. Not only are they inaccessible, but production, distribution and ownership have been abolished. People, not least Rabelais’s aristocrats, live like free-roaming cattle. Either children come into the world without sex and already grown, as in the legends, or else they do not exist, as with Theleme. Otherwise they might spoil the fun and force the utopians, women in particular, to behave responsibly. Either inequality or dehumanization, it seems, is the choice utopia presents us.
In this work he invented sovereignty and the sovereign. Sovereignty meant two things. The first was the need to concentrate all power in the hands of a person or body. That in turn implied the cancellation of all privileges and a return to the kind of rule under which everyone had equal rights, or, though Bodin did not dare say so openly, no rights. The second was that all sovereigns, since they could not and did not acknowledge any superior above themselves, were equal. The old idea which lay at the heart of feudal regimes in particular, about some rulers being superior and other inferior, was false.
Of the two ideas, equality among sovereigns proved more acceptable. By the late 17th century the Peace of Westphalia had turned it into an established fact.
But these rulers sought consecration by the pope as a necessary prop and confirmation of their power — they could at any moment lose that power if the pope excommunicated them. Year by year the papacy grew in influence, until the kings recognized it as the supreme authority in all matters of morals — which might mean almost any major issue.
The situation that now confronted the pope, the German princes, and the young emperor involved some of the basic problems of government and history: How far does a government depend upon psychological factors for the maintenance of its rule, and how far do psychological factors depend upon economic conditions and political power? Were the authority and efficacy of a ruler dependent upon the aid of religion in maintaining social order, public obedience, and governmental prestige? And could a government acquire or preserve power by securing control of religious institutions and revenues?
To adopt authority is to learn that power requires concern and competence — and that it comes at a genuine cost. Someone newly promoted to a management position soon learns that managers are frequently more stressed by their multiple subordinates than subordinates are stressed by their single manager. Such experience moderates what might otherwise become romantic but dangerous fantasies about the attractiveness of power, and helps quell the desire for its infinite extension.
The first rule of life in a dense web of gossip is: Be careful what you do. The second rule is: What you do matters less than what people think you did, so you’d better be able to frame your actions in a positive light. You’d better be a good “intuitive politician.”
Obedience is a uniquely human relationship. Nonhumans such as dogs can learn to obey, but they cannot give orders. A system of obedience depends on punishment. Within families or small groups, the mechanism of punishment can be emotional manipulation or physical beatings, but in the politics of large-scale groups, a proactive coalition provides the power. An order given to a subordinate is essentially a threat to use aggression unless the order is obeyed.
In practice, real sovereignty is the ability to kill, punish, and discipline with impunity, which of course is concentrated in the powerful. Sovereign power is fundamentally premised on the capacity and the will to decide on life and death, the capacity to visit excessive violence on those declared enemies or on undesirables. The really fundamental sine qua non of law in any society — primitive or civilized — is the legitimate use of physical coercion by a socially authorized agent.
In an ideal world, our democratic principles and the needs of our security would coincide. But the reality is that constitutional democracy, which we consider “normal,” is, in fact, a rarity both in the sweep of history and on the breadth of this planet. This is no accident. Constitutional democracy places authority in an abstraction: obedience to law. But constitutionalism can function only if law is believed either to reflect an absolute standard of truth or grow out of a generally accepted political process. In most parts of the world and in most periods of time, these conditions have not existed. Law was the verdict of authority, not of legislative process; politics has been about who has the right to issue orders. Personal authority has been made bearable by a concept of reciprocal obligation, as in feudal societies, or when limited by custom, as was the authority of kings who ruled by the claim to divine right in the 17th and 18th centuries. In each case tradition was a limiting factor; certain extractions were impossible not because they were forbidden but because they had no precedent. No ruler of 18th-century Europe could levy income taxes or conscript his subjects; authoritarianism, in short, was quite precisely circumscribed.
It was, paradoxically, the emergence of popular government that expanded the scope of what authorities could demand. The people by definition could not oppress itself; hence its wishes, as expressed by assemblies or rulers in its name, were absolute. The growth of state power has gone hand in hand with the expansion of populist claims.
In this context modern totalitarianism is a caricature, a reductio ad absurdum, of democracy; modern authoritarianism is a vestige of traditional personal rule. This is why some authoritarian governments have been able to evolve into democracies and why no totalitarian state has ever done so. Personal rule has inherent limits; government that claims to reflect the general will countenances no such restraint.
But for this very reason, authoritarian governments are infinitely more vulnerable to internal subversion than totalitarian ones. When the personal bond of reciprocal obligation is broken, both rulers and subjects become demoralized; the former because they have no legitimacy for governing on a sustained basis by naked force, the latter because once the criteria of obedience have evaporated, every directive appears oppressive. Our dilemma is that in almost all developing countries on this planet, authority is still personal. The transition to constitutionalism is a complex process that, if force-led, is more likely to lead to totalitarianism than to democracy.
He declared war on terrorism, and under that guise implemented a radical foreign-policy agenda whose underlying principles predated the tragedy. Those principles can be summed up as follows: International relations are relations of power, not law; power prevails and law legitimizes what prevails. The United States is unquestionably the dominant power in the post-Cold War world; it is therefore in a position to impose its views, interests, and values. The world would benefit from adopting those values, because the American model has demonstrated its superiority.
A sphere of influence, however, should not be confused with a zone of exclusive political domination, such as the Soviet Union exercised in Eastern Europe. It is socioeconomically more porous and politically less monopolistic. Nonetheless, it entails a geographic space in which its various states, when formulating their own policies, pay special deference to the interests, views, and anticipated reactions of the regionally predominant power. In brief, a Chinese sphere of influence — perhaps a sphere of deference would be a more accurate formulation — can be defined as one in which the very first question asked in the various capitals regarding any given issue is “What is Beijing’s view on this?”
Political officials can be transferred, dismissed, or at least temporarily withdrawn, in contrast to administrative officials in the bureaucracy who develop specialized expertise through long years of preparatory training. The political leader must take exclusive personal responsibility for what he does, in contrast to the civil servant who must execute conscientiously the order of the superior authorities, even if it appears wrong to him. The political leader enjoys the feeling of power: “the knowledge of influencing men, of participating in power over them, and above all, the feeling of holding in one’s hands a nerve fiber of historically important event.” But the political leader will also ask “through what qualities can I hope to do justice to this power.”
Weber says that 3 preeminent qualities are decisive for the politician: passion, a feeling of responsibility, and a sense of proportion. The question for the good political leader, in short, is simply how can warm passion and a cool sense of proportion be forged together in one and the same soul? Ultimately, there are 2 kinds of deadly sins in politics: lack of objectivity and irresponsibility. Vanity, the need personally to stand in the foreground as much as possible, strongly tempts the politician to commit on or both of these sins.
In short, politics is the art of compromise and decision making based on social benefits and weighed against costs and backed up by the instruments of violence, so political action cannot solely be guided by convictions. Political leaders must take into account all that is at stake in making a political decision and accept responsibility for the outcomes. Political leaders most likely to satisfy these requirements will have both passion for politics driven primarily by moral conviction and a cool-headed ability to consider diverse perspectives and make use of the instruments of violence for the sake of less-than-perfect political decisions.
Clearly, a first-class mind is not sufficient for political leadership. But it may not even be necessary. FDR is said to have a 2nd-class intellect but a 1st-class temperament. What mattered, as Bill Clinton writes, is that Roosevelt surrounded himself with brilliant people who knew more about particular subjects than he did, and allowed them to argue with one another — and with him — as they searched for the right policies.
History provided examples of successful republics in ancient Greece and Rome, but it also had revealed them to be fragile. This form of government required much of its citizens, who had a duty to pursue the public good instead of their own self-interest. They also had to choose wise men to govern them. Above all, republican citizens must remain united in the face of monarchies that would seek their destruction. The need for unity meant that republics could exist only in geographically small and socially homogenous areas, certainly nothing larger than the new states.
It is a characteristic aspect of all politics, domestic as well as international, that frequently its basic manifestations do not appear as what they actually are — that is, manifestations of a struggle for power. Rather, the element of power as the immediate goal of the policy pursued is explained and justified in ethical, legal, or biological terms. Statesmen generally refer to their policies not in terms of power but in terms of either ethical and legal principles or biological necessities. In other words, while all politics is necessarily pursuit of power, ideologies render involvement in that contest for power psychologically and morally acceptable to the actors and their audience.
In political terms such clashes between the existing legal order and the demand for its change are but another manifestation of the antagonism between the status quo and imperialism. Any particular distribution of power, once it has reached some degree of stability, is hardened into a legal order. This legal order not only provides the new status quo with ideological disguises and moral justifications. It also surrounds the new status quo with a bulwark of legal safeguards, the violation of which will put into motion the enforcement mechanism of the law. The function of the courts is to put the enforcement action into motion by determining whether the concrete case under consideration justifies such action according the existing rules of law. Thus any system of existing law is of necessity an ally of the status quo, and the courts cannot fail to be its custodians. This is so in the international sphere no less than on the domestic scene.
Politics must be understood through reason, yet it is not in reason that it finds its model. The principles of scientific reason are always simple, consistent, and abstract; the social world is always complicated, incongruous, and concrete. To apply the former to the latter is either futile, in that the social reality remains impervious to the attack of that “one-eyed reason, deficient in its vision of depth”; or it is fatal, in that it will bring about results destructive of the intended purpose. Politics is an art and not a science, and what is required for its mastery is not the rationality of the engineer but the wisdom and the moral strength of the statesman. The social world, deaf to the appeal to reason pure and simple, yields only to that intricate combination of moral and material pressures which the art of statesman creates and maintains.
Contemptuous of power politics and incapable of the statesmanship which alone is able to master it, the age has tried to make politics a science. By doing so, it has demonstrated its intellectual confusion, moral blindness, and political decay.
From the fundamental concept that man and world are governed by rational laws which human reason is able to understand and apply, rationalistic philosophy draws 4 conclusions. First, that the rationally right and the ethically good are identical. Second, that the rationally right action is of necessity the successful one. Third, that education leads man to the rationally right, hence, good and successful, action. Fourth, that the laws of reason, as applied to the social sphere, are universal in their application.
It was through lack of reason that evil came into the world. This is the original sin by which man has disturbed the order of the world. Since the essence of world and man is reason, man will perform his task in the world by living up to the command of reason. The good life is the life conducted in accordance with those commands.
Germany was confronted with a cruel paradox of democracy: the enemies of the constitution could be prohibited only so long as they were insignificant and weak, but when they were insignificant, it seemed more important to uphold democratic principles than to outlaw antidemocratic groups like the Nazis and Communist parties, yet once the Nazis had achieved the significance of broad support, a ban became impossible. It required the most refined political sensibility to say just where the tipping point was.
Morgenthau may have been the philosopher of power politics, but he was also at pains to explain what power was not. The crucial point, often forgotten even by his own Realist disciples, was that violence was not political power. The threat of force might be necessary in international relations, but its use signaled the failure of political power and its displacement by military power, which was a very different thing. “The actual exercise of physical violence substitutes for the psychological relation between two minds, which is the essence of political power, they physical relation between two bodies, one of which is strong enough to dominate the other’s movements.” Such domination, however, was a crude and temporary tool, unrelated to genuine political power, because “no dominion can last that is founded upon nothing but military force.” Generals usually made lousy diplomats. “The armed forces are instruments of war; foreign policy is an instrument of peace.”
Conquerors who thought only in material and military terms, like the Germans and Japanese of WW2, were bound to pass from the scene, no matter how much damage they might do, whereas those with a more nuanced and restrained notion of power, like the Romans and British, were able to construct successful, long-standing institutions. Hearts and minds constituted the very essence of what Morgenthau meant by political power. “All foreign policy is a struggle for the minds of men.”
For Morgenthau, there was power and there was power. It expressed itself in many ways. “The scholar seeking knowledge seeks power; so does the poet. So do the mountain climber, the hunter, the collector of rare objects.” All were forcing themselves intrusively into the world, often to the great benefit of humankind. Any kind of ambition revealed a yearning for power.” In the domestic societies of Western civilization, the possession of money has become the outstanding symbol of the possession of power. Through the competition for the acquisition of money, the power aspirations of the individual find a civilized outlet.”
But the type of power that primarily concerned Morgenthau, and was also the object of Lichtheim’s argument, was political power. Specifically, in Morgenthau’s terms, political power was the assertion of will not over inanimate objects like books, words, mountains, objects d’art, or even money but over other human beings. Political power was a nuanced and complex interaction that took in every sort of social relationship, down to “the most subtle psychological ties by which one mind controls another.” In civilized societies, this particular power drive was tamed by moral and institutional constraints, but on the world stage it was raw and “barbaric.” Unfortunately, it was also ubiquitous.
It is always the individual who acts. Scientific standards were no substitute for political evaluations. What was commonly called rationality devalued thought and misconceived the nature of politics (which was always and everywhere about power). Politics must be understood through reason, yet it is not in reason that it finds its model. It was more art than science.
Provided he was allowed some reasonable range for saving face by maneuvering to a new position without embarrassment, Laird accepted bureaucratic setbacks without rancor… In working with him, intellectual arguments were only marginally useful and direct orders were suicidal. I eventually learned that it was safest to begin a battle with Laird by closing off insofar as possible all his bureaucratic or Congressional escape routes, provided I could figure them out, which was not always easy. Only then would I broach substance. But even with such tactics I lost as often as I won.
Like alpha chimpanzees, these would-be despots defend their top status by reacting ferociously to challengers. In a world without prisons or police, those bullies whose reactive aggression was particularly egregious could be stopped only by execution. Thus the egalitarianism found among all mobile hunter-gatherers indicates that the most aggressive individuals were eliminated. The ironic and disturbing conclusion is that egalitarianism, a system that appeals because of its lack of domineering behavior, is made possible by the most domineering behavior in the human arsenal.
Men could insist that women provide food for the all-male secret ceremonies, or provide sexual services to whomever the men required. Religious knowledge, controlled by men, justified their dominance. The gods were kind to them.
The elders decided what was a crime against society, which explains why among hunter-gatherers those who are executed are not just the excessively aggressive and violent.
The first rule of life in a dense web of gossip is: Be careful what you do. The second rule is: What you do matters less than what people think you did, so you’d better be able to frame your actions in a positive light. You’d better be a good “intuitive politician.”
Obedience is a uniquely human relationship. Nonhumans such as dogs can learn to obey, but they cannot give orders. A system of obedience depends on punishment. Within families or small groups, the mechanism of punishment can be emotional manipulation or physical beatings, but in the politics of large-scale groups, a proactive coalition provides the power. An order given to a subordinate is essentially a threat to use aggression unless the order is obeyed.
In practice, real sovereignty is the ability to kill, punish, and discipline with impunity, which of course is concentrated in the powerful. Sovereign power is fundamentally premised on the capacity and the will to decide on life and death, the capacity to visit excessive violence on those declared enemies or on undesirables. The really fundamental sine qua non of law in any society — primitive or civilized — is the legitimate use of physical coercion by a socially authorized agent.
The American experience contains some important lessons for contemporary developing countries that want to reform clientelistic political systems and create modern, merit-based, technically competent government. The first is that reform is a profoundly political process, not a technical one. There are of course technical characteristics of a modern bureaucratic system such as job classifications, examination requirements, promotion ladders, and the like. But clientelistic systems do not exist because the officials staffing them, or the politicians who stand behind them, somehow don’t understand how to organize an efficient agency. Clientelism exists because incumbents benefit from the system, either as political bosses who get access to power and resources, or as their clients who get jobs and perks. Dislodging them requires more than the formal reorganization of the government. The experience of public-sector reform mandated by international aid agencies for developing countries at the turn of the 21st century demonstrates the futility of a purely technical approach.
The same thing applies in citizen’s relationship to their government. People are much more likely to comply with a law if they see that other people around them are doing so as well. The vast majority of law-abiding behavior is based rather on the fact that people see other around them obeying the law and act in conformity to the perceived norm.
The quality of government thus depends critically on trust or social capital. If the government fails to perform certain critical functions - if it cannot, for example, be trusted to protect my property rights, of if it fails to defend my person against criminals or public hazards like toxic wastes - then I will take it into my own hands to secure my own interests. As we saw in the case of Sicily, the Mafia had its origins in the failure of the Bourbon and later the Italian state to do precisely this, which is why individuals began hiring “men of honor” to provide them with private protection. But since the mafiosi were not themselves trustworthy individuals, distrust of government metastasized into distrust of everyone.
Natural human sociability is based on kin selection and reciprocal altruism - that is, the preference for family and friends. While modern political orders seek to promote impersonal rule, elites in most societies tend to fall back on networks of family and friends, both as an instrument for protecting their positions and as the beneficiaries of their efforts. When they succeed, elites are said to “capture” the state, which reduces the latter’s legitimacy and makes it less accountable to the population as a whole. Long periods of peace and prosperity often provide the conditions for spreading capture by elites, which can lead to political crisis if followed by an economic downturn or external political shock.
Those who prefer their democratic pristine, disconnected from the real world, might shudder. But Washington, as Kennan said, had to “do things that very much needed to be done, but for which the government couldn’t take official responsibility.” In a similar fashion, Richard Helms said, with Chile in mind: “Secret intelligence has never bene for the fainthearted.” Kissinger agreed that “cover operations have their philosophical and practical difficulties and especially for America.” That doesn’t mean extralegal methods haven’t been employed before and won’t continue to be employed. What it does mean is that every time they are exposed, there will be squeals of outrage, recriminations, and vows of change, until the next time.
Lee was well aware of what he was doing. Effective leaders usually do. They will do what they have to do. In classical political philosophy, the “Doctrine of Dirty Hands” postulates that all leaders will have to do things that otherwise would be morally (and probably legally) unacceptable in less authorized hands. Let us note mild-mannered, professional President Obama — the former lecturer from Harvard Law School — keeps a hit list of possible terrorist targets at his White House desk. And so on around the globe.
Power is not pretty. Whether it comes from the barrel of a gun, from the gavel of a judge, or from the mouth of authority, it is inherently forceful and coercive. People tend not to understand power. Even when used for a good cause, it is not a nice thing.
The rule of law talks of habeas corpus, freedom, the right of association and expression, of assembly, of peaceful demonstration: nowhere in the world today are these rights allowed to be practiced without limitations, for blindly applied, these ideals can work toward the undoing of organized society. For the acid test of any legal system is not the greatness or the grandeur of its ideal concepts, but whether, in fact, it is able to produce order and justice in the relationships between person and person, and between person and the state. To maintain this order with the best degree of tolerance and humanity is a problem… In a settled and established society, law appears to be a precursor of order… But the hard realities of keeping the peace between person and person, and between authority and the individual, can be more accurately described if the phrase were inverted to “order and law,” for without order, the operation of law is impossible. Order having been established, and the rules having become enforceable in a settled society, only then it is possible to work out human relationships between subject and subject, and subject and the state in accordance with predetermined rules of law. And when a state of increasing disorder and defiance of authority cannot be checked by the rules then existing… drastic rules have to be forced to maintain order so that the law can continue to govern human relations. The alternative is to surrender order to chaos and anarchy.
Unlike Singapore, our competitors Taiwan and South Korea followed a different track. Their governments supported their own companies all the way, protecting their indigenous companies from foreign competition. More critically, they supported them in the acquisition of technology.
State and Church united in a frightened attack upon heresies that would, in their view, undermine the complex structure of law and morals which kept men from reverting to moral and political anarchy. Nearly every challenged government had turned to inquisition, and punished opinions and conduct considered dangerous to the state.
Freedom is a luxury of security.
Had there been immediate gains to show, they might have taken the chance. But the Atlantic Declaration highlighted the dilemma of the modern democratic leader: The time frame for a policy to bear fruit is longer than his term of office, while the downside of the policy begins to operate immediately. And the issues we raised were all complex; better to bury them by ignoring them.
Political power is a psychological relation between those who exercise it and those over whom it is exercised.
The history of national societies shows that no political, religious, economic, or regional group has been able to withstand for long the temptation to advance its claims by violent means if it thought it could do so without too great a risk. However strongly the other social factors might have supported the cause of peace, their effectiveness did not long survive the promise of a speedy and definitive victory which violence holds out to its possessor. Thus national societies have disintegrated and have split into a number of smaller units, either temporarily or permanently, whenever the state was incapable of maintaining its monopoly of organized violence and of using whatever means of violence it retained for the purpose of maintaining peace and securing its own survival.
For a diplomacy which ends in war has failed in its primary objective: the promotion of the national interests by peaceful means.
Taken in its widest meaning, comprising the whole range of foreign policy, the task of diplomacy is fourfold. (1) Diplomacy must determine its objectives in the light of the power actually and potentially available for the pursuit of these objectives. (2) Diplomacy must assess the objectives of other nations and the power actually and potentially available for the pursuit of these objectives. (3) Diplomacy must determine to what extent these different objectives are compatible with each other. (4) Diplomacy must employ the means suited to the pursuit of its objectives. Failure in any one of these tasks may jeopardize the success of a foreign policy and with it the peace of the world.
Give up the shadow of worthless rights for the substance of real advantage. A diplomacy which thinks in legalistic and propagandistic terms is particularly tempted to insist upon the letter of the law, as it interprets the law, and to lose sight of the consequences which that insistence may have for its own nation and for humanity. Since there are rights to be defended, such a diplomacy thinks that the issue cannot be compromised. Yet the choice which confronts the diplomat is not between legality and illegality, but between political wisdom and political stupidity.
All of these flaws with the system have been noted and addressed by reformers. But solutions are not easy to come by, even if one has the will to do so. It is much easier to point to flaws in a system than to propose solution that will address those flaws without creating new ones. And in this system, changing the rules of the game requires the consent of those who have attained office under the rules currently in place.
A French proverb says that in politics there is one thing worse than a crime, and that is a blunder. In other words, the political actor has, beyond the general moral duties, a special moral responsibility to act wisely, that is, in accordance with the rules of the political art; and for him expediency becomes a moral duty. The individual, acting on his own behalf, may act unwisely without moral reproach as long as the consequences of his inexpedient action concern only himself. What is done in the political sphere by its very nature concerns others who must suffer from unwise action.
There is no escape from the evil of power, regardless of what one does. Whenever we act with reference to our fellow men, we must sin, and we must still sin when we refuse to act; for the refusal to be involved in the evil of action carries with it the breach of the obligation to do one’s duty. No ivory tower is remote enough to offer protection against the guilt in which the actor and the bystander, the oppressor and the oppressed, the murderer and his victim are inextricably enmeshed. Political ethics is indeed the ethics of doing evil.
Such an attitude is but another example of the superficiality of a civilization which, blind to the tragic complexities of human existence, contents itself with an unreal and hypocritical solution of the problem of political ethics. In fact, the invocation of justice pure and simple against a political action makes of justice a mockery; for, since all political actions needs must fall short of justice, the argument against one political action holds true for all. By avoiding a political action because it is unjust, the perfectionist does nothing but exchange blindly one injustice for another which might even be worse than the former. He shrinks from the lesser evil because he does not want to do evil at all. Yet his personal abstention from evil, which is actually a subtle form of egotism with a good conscience, does not at all affect the existence of evil in the world but only destroys the faculty of discriminating between different evils. The perfectionist thus becomes finally a source of greater evil. “Man,” in the words of Pascal, “is neither angel nor beast and his misery is that he who would act the angel acts the brute.” Here again it is only the awareness of the tragic presence of evil in all political action which at least enables man to choose the lesser evil and to be as good as he can be in an evil world.
Neither science nor ethics nor politics can resolve the conflict between politics and ethics into harmony. We have no choice between power and the common good. To act successfully, that is, according to the rules of the political art, is political wisdom. To know with despair that the political act is inevitably evil, and to act nevertheless, is moral courage. To choose among several expedient actions the least evil one is moral judgment.
Members of Congress say that their constituents will complain that they hold the majority but cannot override a veto. When they try to explain about the two-thirds requirement, they find that people outside of Congress care little about the mechanics of legislation. They just want results.
Politics is the science of freedom; the government of man by man, under whatever name it is disguised, is oppression: the high perfection of society consists in the union of order and anarchy.
They, as well as policemen, derive such importance as they have from the simple fact that violence is the final support of power and the final resort of those who would contest it. Only when revolution or crime threaten to disturb domestic order does the police captain, and only when diplomacy and war threaten international order, do the generals and admirals, come to be recognized for what at all times they are: indispensable elements of the order of power that prevails within and between the national states of the world.
A nation becomes a great power only on one condition: that its military establishment and resources are such that it could really threaten decisive warfare. In the rank order of states a nation must fight a great war successfully in order to be truly great. The effective force of what an ambassador says is rather direct reflection of how mighty the general, how large and effective the fighting force standing back of him, is supposed to be. Military power determines the political standing of nations, and to the extent that nationalism is honored, to that extent generals and admirals share decisively in the system of national honor.
Although all the charges ultimately proved untrue, it was Washington politics at its nastiest — and it can serve as a reminder to all present-day Americans that politics in the US has been a dirty business, going back to the lies and lie-driven scandals that swirled around Hamilton, Jefferson, and other members of Washington’s administration. Every generation says that it’s worse than ever and yearns for the civility of yesteryear. There was no civil yesteryear. “The stakes are too high for these guys to play clean — especially when they can’t win on the merits.”
The implications of the credit model of money are profound. Rather than being neutral or a veil over the “real” activities of the economy (trade, exchange, the use of land and labor), it becomes clear that money — as an abstract, impersonal claim on future resources — is a social and political construct. As such, its impact is determined by whoever decides what it is (the unit of account), who issues it, how much of it is issued to whom and for what purpose.
Pericles was — the historians tell us — a kind of democratic dictator. The Greeks had a word for it, a demagogue. But consider what that shrewd statesman and clever demagogue felt he had to say to stir the people to support him. He gave them an ideal picture of themselves. He played on the Athenian popular mind, but that mind was democratic and had to be led or misled in such terms.
Monarchy was the rule of one, but the monarch had to be perfectly just otherwise the rule degenerated into tyranny. Aristocracy meant literally the rule of the best, but all too often that degenerated into oligarchy (rule of the few) or plutocracy (rule of the rich). Democracy meant the rule of many but all too often degenerated into anarchy.
It is a rule of politics, which I have never seen broken, that when a political crisis passes a certain point, the offering of sacrifices whets appetites rather than slakes them.
The political problem of mankind is to combine 3 things: Economic Efficiency, Social Justice, and Individual Liberty. The first needs criticism, precaution, and technical knowledge; the second, an unselfish and enthusiastic spirit which loves the ordinary man; the third, tolerance, breadth, appreciation of the excellencies of variety and independence, which prefers, above everything, to give unhindered opportunity to the exceptional and to the aspiring.
In his eyes, the British were “an admirably trained people” who had “worked for three hundred years to assure themselves the domination fo the world for two centuries.” They had “learned the art of being masters, and of holding the reins so lightly withal, that the natives do not notice the curb.”
Of all forms of power, perhaps the greatest is arbitrary power, because it asserts the will of an actor independent of any other influence; it is the ability to set oneself above a system that allows a ruler to be the defining force within that system. Similarly, for great states, the ability to impose their will without regard for the views of those on whom it is imposed is the ultimate standard of power. Throughout history, the linchpin of such power has been force — the ability to either personally or on behalf of a tribe, a city, or a state, bend others to one’s will. Whether it was the destructive force of an army or the more limited tools required to enforce the law and preserve the peace, in the interests of “order” and the “public good” the state claimed the sole right to apply and carry out threats to the life, well-being, or freedom of others.
Giữa nhà lãnh đạo và các quân sư có sự phân định vai trò rõ ràng: Thủ lĩnh chính trị đề ra tư tưởng và tầm nhìn lãnh đạo, tập hợp sự ủng hộ, và tìm người tài để hiện thực hoá tầm nhìn đó. Trong khi đó, mọi ý tưởng, tính toán bước đi và hành động cụ thể thường lại xuất phát từ các quân sư. Thủ lĩnh, hay lãnh đạo chính trị, chỉ chính danh hoá các ý tưởng đó thông qua việc ban hành quyết định cụ thể.
Có thể thấy, quân sư hay chiến lược gia, chính là “bộ não” cung cấp ý tưởng cho thủ lĩnh chính trị. Ngược lại, lãnh đạo chính trị là bệ đỡ không thể thiếu để thực hiện ý tưởng hành động của quân sư.
Sự tin tưởng, tôn trọng lẫn nhau, và không giẫm chân lên nhau giữa 2 vai trò chính là cơ sở cho sự thành công. Bất cứ khi nào thủ lĩnh chính trị làm thay việc của quân sư thì thất bại là điều thường thấy.
Ở buổi đầu nắm quyền lực thì xã hội được kiểm soát phần lớn bằng vũ lực. Tuy nhiên một khi xã hội đã ổn định thì cũng không cần thiết phải dùng vũ lực nữa. Đến một thời điểm, kẻ nắm quyền lực cũng không muốn nhắc đến chuyện chính mình đã dùng vũ lực để đoạt lấy chính quyền, và còn coi chuyện này là cấm kị. Bất cứ thể chế chính trị nào khi được hỏi về nguồn gốc của quyền uy mà họ đang có, câu trả lời chắc sẽ luôn luôn là: “Việc chúng tôi nắm quyền lực là hợp đạo lý. Chuyện bảo vệ quyền lực thì đã có từ lâu rồi.” Theo năm tháng trôi đi, tất cả những kẻ cai trị đều từ bỏ vũ lực mà dựa vào nền tảng đạo lý để duy trì tính chính danh của họ. Căm ghét bạo lực mà yêu chuộng đạo lý chính là bản tính của con người, vì vậy người trong xã hội cũng lấy làm vui khi nhìn thấy cách vận hành của chính phủ là phù hợp với các giá trị đạo lý. Rồi theo thời gian người ta dần dần coi sự chính danh quốc gia đó là cốt lõi. Người ta quên quá khứ và chấp nhận hiện tại.
Another problem with democracy is that people are generally big fans of it when they think it might give them power, but suddenly become notably less keen when it looks like it might take power away from them. As a result, democracy often involves a frankly exhausting amount of work simply to ensure it keeps on existing.
Experience teaches that pressures for democratization from below, either from those who have felt themselves politically suppressed (intellectuals and students) or economically exploited (the new urban labor class and the rural poor), generally tend to outpace the willingness of rulers to yield. At some point, the politically and the socially disaffected in China are likely to join forces in demanding more democracy, freedom of expression, and respect for human rights.
The wisest policy of the powerful is to create a kind of pity for themselves, as if their responsibilities were a burden and a sacrifice. How can one envy a man who has taken on a heavy load for the public interest? Disguise your power as a kind of self-sacrifice rather than a source of happiness and you make it seem less enviable.
Back in the Middle Ages, the public sphere was full of political violence. Indeed, the ability to use violence was the entry ticket to the political game, and whoever lacked this ability had no political voice.
Political systems refer to the formal structures and institutions that govern a society. Different political systems exist, including democracies, monarchies, authoritarian regimes, and various hybrid forms. These systems determine the rules, procedures, and mechanisms through which power is exercised and political decisions are made.
Politics is a vast field of study that encompasses a wide range of concepts and theories. Here are some main concepts in politics:
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Power: Power is a central concept in politics. It refers to the ability of individuals, groups, or institutions to influence and control others, shape decisions, and achieve desired outcomes. Power can be exerted through various means, such as political, economic, military, or ideological.
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State: The state is a political entity that possesses a defined territory, a population, and a government with the authority to exercise control and make and enforce laws. It represents a centralized source of power and governance within a particular geographical area.
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Government: Government refers to the formal institutions and processes through which decisions are made, policies are implemented, and public affairs are managed. It involves various branches, such as the executive, legislative, and judicial, which have specific roles and responsibilities.
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Democracy: Democracy is a political system in which power rests with the people, who have the right to participate in decision-making through voting and other forms of political engagement. It emphasizes principles such as popular sovereignty, political equality, rule of law, and protection of individual rights and freedoms.
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Political Ideologies: Political ideologies are sets of ideas, beliefs, and values that shape political views and guide the actions and policies of individuals and groups. Examples of political ideologies include liberalism, conservatism, socialism, communism, and nationalism. These ideologies offer different perspectives on the role of government, economic systems, social justice, and individual rights.
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Political Parties: Political parties are organized groups that represent specific interests, ideologies, or policy agendas. They play a crucial role in democratic systems by mobilizing support, nominating candidates for elections, and formulating and promoting political platforms.
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International Relations: International relations examine the relationships and interactions between states and other actors in the global arena. It involves the study of diplomacy, foreign policy, international organizations, conflicts, cooperation, and the dynamics of power and interests among nations.
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Public Policy: Public policy refers to the decisions and actions taken by governments to address societal issues and achieve specific goals. It involves formulating, implementing, and evaluating policies in areas such as healthcare, education, the environment, economic development, and social welfare.
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Political Economy: Political economy explores the relationship between politics and economics. It examines how political institutions and processes shape economic systems, policies, and outcomes, and how economic factors influence political decisions and power dynamics.
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Civil Society: Civil society refers to the space and organizations outside of the government and the private sector that play a role in public life. It includes non-governmental organizations (NGOs), community groups, advocacy organizations, and social movements that work to address social, political, and environmental issues.
Marshall seemed so reasonable, so understanding of the CCP’s concerns. Mao did not fully grasp, as Chiang did, that America was larger than Marshall, that regardless of what the secretary of state saw as practical policy, American domestic politics could and would override his preferences. It was a woeful misunderstanding of the nature of American politics — and one that hobbles the PRC to this day.
Wen’s personality saved him. It’s probably going too far to say that at heart he was a political eunuch. However, he was extraordinarily careful; he never insulted or threatened anyone. He managed up and avoided any association with political factions. More so than most officials, he stayed in his lane. To get to his position, he obviously had to have ambition, but it was a restrained type of ambition that didn’t threaten his comrades at the Party’s heights.
As premier, Wen cultivated a man-of-the-people image. When a massive earthquake rocked Sichuan Province in 2008, Wen sped to the scene wearing a rumpled jacket and track shoes. Chinese people took to calling him Grandpa Wen.
Almost all empires were created by force, but none can be sustained by it. Universal rule, to last, needs to translate force into obligation. Otherwise, the energies of the rulers will be exhausted in maintaining their dominance at the expense of their ability to shape the future, which is the ultimate task of statesmanship. Empires persist if repression gives way to consensus.
Political survival for the second man in an autocracy is inherently difficult. It requires being close enough to the leader to leave no space for a competitor but no so close as to make the leader feel threatened. None of Mao’s number twos had managed that tightrope act.
But as General Secretary, he was widely assumed to be a transitional figure — and may well have been a compromise candidate halfway between the relatively liberal element and the conservative group. He lacked a significant power base of his own, and, in contrast to his predecessors, he did not radiate an aura of command. He was the first Chinese Communist leader without revolutionary or military credentials. His leadership, like that of his successors, arose from bureaucratic and economic performance. It was not absolute and required a measure of consensus in the Politburo. He did not, for example, establish his dominance in foreign policy until 1997, eight years after he became General Secretary.
Lee was well aware of what he was doing. Effective leaders usually do. They will do what they have to do. In classical political philosophy, the “Doctrine of Dirty Hands” postulates that all leaders will have to do things that otherwise would be morally (and probably legally) unacceptable in less authorized hands. Let us note mild-mannered, professional President Obama — the former lecturer from Harvard Law School — keeps a hit list of possible terrorist targets at his White House desk. And so on around the globe.
Power is not pretty. Whether it comes from the barrel of a gun, from the gavel of a judge, or from the mouth of authority, it is inherently forceful and coercive. People tend not to understand power. Even when used for a good cause, it is not a nice thing.
What all politicians want, above all else, is to stay in office. To hold on to power they create “rents” and then give them to their supporters. Rents are revenues over and above what it’s possible to earn in a competitive market. For example, if the government puts a tax on foreign cars then domestic car producers, protected from overseas competition, make big profits. By giving privileges to special groups of people, politicians hope to gain political support, perhaps even money.
Politicians have always been officially accountable to the public at election time, but today they are attuned to what the public thinks at every moment. Modern polling enables politicians to tailor their image to match preexisting public opinion exactly, so for the most part, they do.
A secretary who joined eBay in 1996 might have made 200 times more than her industry-veteran boss who joined in 1999. Since it’s impossible to achieve perfect fairness when distributing ownership, founders would do well to keep the detail secret. Sending out a company-wide email that lists everyone’s ownership stake would be like dropping a nuclear bomb on your office.
The ability to tax requires, at the deepest level, the ability to command political legitimacy, both for the government itself and for the particular taxes concerned. For example, the Community Charge (“Poll Tax”) that Margaret Thatcher tried to introduce in the UK failed because most British taxpayers thought it was an “unfair” (and thus illegitimate) tax, rather than because they thought they were being taxed at too high a rate, or because they thought her government was illegitimate.
These tendencies do not imply that extractive economic and political institutions are inconsistent with economic growth. On the contrary, every elite would, all else being equal, like to encourage as much growth as possible in order to have more to extract. Extractive institutions that have achieved at least a minimal degree of political centralization are often able to generate some amount of growth. What is crucial, however, is that growth under extractive institutions will not be sustained, for two key reasons.
First, sustained economic growth requires innovation, and innovation cannot be decoupled from creative destruction, which replaces the old with the new in the economic realm and also destabilizes established power relations in politics. Because elites dominating extractive institutions fear creative destruction, they will resist it, and any growth that germinates under extractive institutions will ultimately short lived.
Second, the ability of those who dominate extractive institutions to benefit greatly at the expense of the rest of society implies that political power under extractive institutions is highly coveted, making many groups and individuals fight to obtain it. As a consequence, there will be powerful forces pushing societies under extractive institutions toward political instability.
We are not asserting the inherent superiority of the white man to men of different races; it happens that we are white, and feel an obligation to defend our like, even though they may have made mistakes and committed sins in the past.
His initial experience in the House was both frustrating and rewarding. He later noted that as a junior congressman, it was hard to get accustomed to the lack of power, especially when as an oil executive he had enjoyed the luxury of making decisions and seeing them carried out immediately.
In politics, being deceived is no excuse.
All political power emerges from the barrel of a gun.
What politics really is, at its most basic, core level, is an attempt to settle disputes by alternate means, so violence can be avoided.
But what many people do not understand is that “means of avoiding” is another way of saying “proxy for.”
Politics is proxy for violence. And therefore, the ultimate basis of political power is capacity to commit violence.
No ability to commit violence? No political power.
No willingness to commit violence? No political power.
This is what “riots are the voice of the unheard” really means.
Those without political power — power with the proxy system — will remind those who withhold it from the of their ability to wield power within the physical system it represents.
One blames politicians, not for inconsistency, but for obstinacy. They are the interpreters, not the masters, of our fate. It is their job, in short, to register the fait accompli. In this spirit we all applaud M. Poincare for not allowing himself to be hampered by a regard for consistency. After declaring for years that it would be an act of national bankruptcy and shame to devalue the franc, he has fixed it at about one-fifth of its pre-war gold value, and has retorted with threats of resignation against anyone who would hinder him in so good a deed.
Just as the Conservative Party will always have its Die-Hard wing, so the Labour Party will always be flanked by the Party of Catastrophe — Jacobins, Communists, Bolshevists, whatever you choose to call them. This is the party which hates or despises existing institutions and believes that great good will result merely from overthrowing them — or at least that to overthrow them is the necessary preliminary to any great good.
A party which would discuss these things openly and wisely at its meetings would discover a new and living interest in the electorate — because politics would be dealing once more with matters about which everyone wants to know and which deeply affect everyone’s own life.
The political problem of mankind is to combine 3 things: Economic Efficiency, Social Justice, and Individual Liberty. The first needs criticism, precaution, and technical knowledge; the second, an unselfish and enthusiastic spirit which loves the ordinary man; the third, tolerance, breadth, appreciation of the excellencies of variety and independence, which prefers, above everything, to give unhindered opportunity to the exceptional and to the aspiring.