What the Greeks knew above all was that they were not orientals. They often admired the magnificent cultures of eastern empires such as Egypt or Persia, but usually disdained the way in which they were ruled. They called this foreign system “despotism” because it seemed no different from the relation between a master and his slaves. As warriors, the Greek despised the practice by which subjects coming into the presence of an oriental ruler prostrated themselves: they found this an intolerable form of inequality between citizens and their rulers.
The sole object of the subjects must be to please. There is no parliament, no opposition, no free press, no independent judiciary, no private property protected by law from the rapacity of power, in a word, no public voice except that of the despot. Such powerlessness is, oddly enough, the reason why despotism are notable generators of spiritual enlightenment. A reaction sets in against a world governed by the caprice of power, and thoughtful subjects take up mysticism, Stoicism, and other forms of withdrawal. The essence of life is then found in a spiritual realm beyond that of the senses, and social and political life is devalued as illusion. The result is usually scientific and technological stagnation except in the short term.
Many in recent centuries have dreamed of using the irresistible power only found in despotism for removing the evident imperfection of our world. The project of despotism in Europe, even of a philosophical or enlightened kind, would fail unless its real character were concealed. Since politics is in part a theatre of illusion, new names and concepts are easy to invent, and in the 20th century totalitarian versions of the dream of despotism constructed a vast political laboratory in which different versions of the project of creating a perfect society were put to the test.
One widely recognized clue is the current state of the distinction between private life and the public world. The private world is that of the family, and of individual conscience as each individual makes his or her own choice of beliefs and interests. Such a private life would not be possible without the overarching public world of the state, which sustains a structure of law appropriate to a self-determining association. Politics only survives so long as this overarching structure of public law recognizes its own limits. As Pericles put it, “We are free and tolerant in our private lives; but in public affairs we keep to the law.” The actual boundary, both in law and in people’s attitudes, between what is public and what is private is, of course, constantly changing. It is the fact of recognizing such a division which distinguishes politics — we may loosely identify it with freedom and democracy — from despotism.
The beginning of wisdom in politics is attention to signs of change. As a theatre of illusion, politics does not reveal its meanings to the careless eye. Reality and illusions are central categories of political study. The problem begins with the very names of institutions. The dominance of Western fashions means that every country now has a kind of politics, and a complement of institutions — parliaments, constitutions, schedules of rights, trade unions, courts, newspapers, ministers, and so on — which suggests that the same kind of thing is going on all over the world. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is not unknown for politicians to lie, but much more confusing is the complex relation between names and reality.
Above all, the name of politics itself. When concepts are stretched too far, they snap and lose their usefulness. “Politics” used to refer merely to the actions of monarchs, parliaments, and ministers, and to the activities of the politically committed who helped or hindered their accession to authority. Everything else was social or private life. With the expansion of the power of governments, nearly everything has come to be described, in one way or another, as “political.” We may mention here just one of the many reasons for this. Governments wishing to claim credit for all good things, and opposition wishing to dispense blame for all bad things, have colluded in spreading the idea that all things, good and bad, are caused by political policies.
When Fidel Castro first attempted, and failed, to take over Cuba in 1953, he defended himself at his trial in a speech declaring: “History will absolve me.” He conceived himself theatrically, an actor on the stage of history. Whoever seeks a kind of immortality in history goes into politics.
Revolutionaries are the graffiti artists of history. Universal suffrage is, of course, a form of inflation which has diminished the value of a vote.
We moderns are peculiarly liable to fall into confusion about the nature of politics: we have invented ingenious reasons for thinking that our ideas are superior to those of our ancestors. All cultures believe that their own ideas are the only right ones, but educated people today are unusually locked into the prejudices of the present moment. The doctrine of progress, for example, suggested to many people that our convictions were grander than the obviously defective ideas of the past. Contemporary intellectual fashion indeed reject the idea of progress, and emphasizes how much we bear the imprint of our place and our time; it affirms that one culture is the equal of another. This has the appearance of a form of scepticism liberating us from the arrogance of our ancestors, for it seems to reduce our opinions to the same level as those of everyone else. That appearance is an illusion. Contemporary scepticism is a fake humility, masking a dogmatic conviction that our very openness makes our relativist humanism superior both to the dogmatism of the past and the intolerance of other cultures.
Greek and Roman aristocrats studied law, philosophy, and the art of public speaking in order to fulfill the political vocation indicated by their birth. Politics could be the core of education because it very quickly became a self-conscious activity which provoked reflection and generated a superb literature.
The Greeks were humanists, but of a kind strikingly different from the humanism (transformed by Christianity) found in the modern world. Their basic proposition was that man is a rational animal, and that the meaning of human life is found in the exercise of rationality. When men succumbed to the passions, they were shamefully descending to a lower form of being. When pride, or hubris, led them to think they were gods, they lost sight of their human limitations and suffered nemesis, the destructive resentment of the gods. The secret of life was human self-knowledge, and a balanced expression of one’s human capacities. In deliberating about law and public policy, man found his highest and purest form of self-expression. It could only be enjoyed in the political life of a city.
Since some are less rational than others, so also are they less human. Slaves in particular are defective in rationality when compared to masters. Those who explored this view were perfectly aware that some slaves are clever and some masters stupid; they were merely expounding what they took to be the rational foundation of the institution itself.
History was the memory of words and deeds, and words were the vehicles of memory. In political activity, men addressed each other in speech, which is a skill to be learned. It requires the marshalling of ideas, the construction of arguments, the capacity to understand an audience, a recognition of the dominant passions of human nature, and much else.
After establishing his reforms, Solon was careful to leave Athens for 10 years so that the new constitution could be operated by others — an early version of the principle of the separation of powers. For the key to politics in the strict sense is that it is a nexus of abstract offices to which duties are attached, and in principle the work may be done by any competent office-holder. Whereas despotism depends on the personality (and often the caprice) of the individual despot, political rulers act in terms of the duties attaching to their offices.
The set of offices by which a polis was governed, and the laws specifying their relation, are the constitution. Government without a constitution would lack the specific kind of moral limitation which distinguishes politics. Constitutions function in two essential ways: they circumscribe the power of the office-holders, and as a result they create a predictable (though not rigid and fixed) world in which the citizens may conduct their lives. It is constitutions which give form to politics, and the study of them led to the emergence of political science.
Greek political science studied constitutions and generalized the relation between human nature and political associations. Perhaps its most powerful instrument was the theory of recurrent cycles. Monarchies tend to degenerate into tyranny, tyrannies are overthrown by aristocracies, which degenerate into oligarchies exploiting the population, which are overthrown by democracies, which in turn degenerate into the intolerable instability of mob rule, whereupon some powerful leader establishes himself as a monarch and the cycle begins all over again.
Executive decision requires a leader, deliberation about policy requires a small group of experienced citizens, while the acceptability of laws and the responsiveness of government depend upon effective ways of consulting the people. This is an argument for constructing a constitution in which power is distributed between the one, the few, and the many. The second proposition is that the very same distribution may also balance the interests of rich and poor, to prevent either from using political power for the purpose of economic exploitation. Such balance in politics was the equivalent of health in the body, and might keep corruption at bay for a very long time.
The English constitution evolved into a balance between monarch, Commons, and Lords and is often cited as an example of this theory.
He studied many constitutions, and was particularly interested in the mechanics of political change: revolutions, he thought, always arose out of some demand for equality.
The politics of Greece was based on reason, that of the Romans on love — love of country, love of Rome itself. The Romans thought of their city as a family, and of its founder Romulus as the ancestor of them all. This was quite different from the Greeks, for whom the family signified at the philosophical level merely those necessities in our animal nature which the freedom of politics trancended.
Whereas the Greeks were brilliant and innovate theorists, the Romans were sober and cautious farmer-warriors, less likely than their predecessors to be carried away by an idea. We inherit our ideas from the Greeks, but our practices from the Romans, and each has left a different imprint on the various nations of modern Europe.
All Europeans have benefited from the inheritance of two quite distinct vocabularies with which to explore political life: the political vocabulary of the Greeks — policy, police, politics itself — and the civic vocabulary of the Romans — civility, citizen, civilization.
Polybius explained the success of Rome by the fact that one could not really describe her constitution as monarchical, or aristocratic, or democratic, for it contained elements of all three. The result of this combination of powers “is a union which is strong enough to withstand all emergencies, so that it is impossible to find a better form of constitution than this.”
Rome’s fame largely rested on a moral strength evident to all who had dealings with her. Bribery of officials was a capital crime, and Romans could be relied on to stand by their oaths. The Romans had adopted superstitious beliefs about punishment in the afterlife, but only because this was the best way of making people virtuous. None of their generals made any personal claim to greatness by wearing the crown or donning the purple. In those earlier days, love of country predominated, but in time success and wealth began to corrupt the Romans, who then feel under the sway of despotic forms of order which they had previously found repugnant. Virtue and freedom declined together.
He argued that conflict within the state, so long as it was subordinated to the public interest, merely reflected the Roman concern for liberty and for the protection of civil rights. The policy of Rome, like that of the Greeks, issued not from some supposedly supreme wisdom but from a freely recognized competition between interests and arguments within a society. Western politics is distinguished from other form of social order by its exploration of this theme: that beyond the harmony that results from everyone knowing his place is another harmony, in which conflict is resolved by the free discussion and free acceptance of whatever outcome emerges from constitutional procedure.
It has been plausibly suggested that the uniqueness of European feudalism resulted from the fact that Europe is a well-watered continent and that its agriculture, unlike that of China, India, and the Middle East, does not depend upon the construction of large dams and canals for irrigation and flood control. Such enterprises require great central power for the mobilization of labor, and characteristically issue in a despotic form of order.
The essence of medieval politics lay in the fact that the king could not rule — even to the extent of carrying out the very limited functions of rule as it was understood at that time — without the cooperation of partners. He had to consult the nobles, the magnates of the Church, and, in time, representatives from the towns who could make commitments of money. It was this situation which generated the quite new institution of parliaments.
Greek and Roman religion and philosophy were highly elitist. Full humanity was only possible for the hero and the philosopher, while slaves, and to some extent women, were inferior specimens of an ideal. Christianity often reversed this judgment: it was the humble people who were closest to the spirit of love which God was thought to require. This particularly included women, who were enthusiastic about a faith preaching peace and love.
Christianity affirmed the equal value in the sight of God of each human soul. And the value of each individual lay not in his or her participation in universal reason, but in a personality which responded to the challenge of sin. Philosophers found it difficult to give an account of this notion of personality, and tended to relapse back into the classical account of moral life as a contest between reason and the passions. But with the emergence of Protestantism, it was becoming clear to all, that human beings must be conceived in terms of will, though not in any superficial sense which might identify will merely with getting one’s way. Christianity turned human attention away from political conquest and the material things of the world towards the cultivation of the inner life.
The politics of the modern state emerged out of two conflicting movements: kingdoms tended to fragment in some ways, and to become unified in others. Centralizing monarchs acquired the concentrated powers of sovereignty, yet at the same time both individuals and established classes were able to entrench privileges and usages, some coming to be formulated in the emerging vocabulary of “rights.”
The common response to civil war is an enthusiasm for absolute government. It takes two or more to fight wars, and it seemed to make sense to concentrate all power in a sovereign ruler, conformity to whose laws would guarantee peace. Just such a ruler, however, might well misuse his power.
The new politics revolved around a court, and the court itself soon lost its medieval mobility and settled in one or more grand palaces which set the style for luxury and taste. A new kind of creature emerged: the courtier, whose aim was advancement and whose skill was to please. The nobility were assimilated into the court, and found that they had to become educated in order to retain the traditional role as the monarch’s counselors. It was a dangerous role. Treason laws flourished in the early modern period, and the grandees who played the power game were seldom more than a few steps away from the block.
The high-risk politics of the early modern period resulted from the insecurity of rulers. In modern democracies, doctrine falsely suggests that rulers are basically in harmony with those they rule, but the very fact of authority necessarily distances the rulers from the ruled. Total intimacy and frankness is a dangerous indulgence for rulers, who are also in some degree at the mercy of the hopes and fears of those they rule. In a despotism this gulf is often recognized by construing the ruler as a god.
But where Bodin based his state on families, Hobbes emphasized individuals torn between the passion for glory and the fear of death. The source of the sovereign’s authority lay in the consent of the people themselves; indeed, they only became a people in the proper sense by appointing him as their representative.
The theory of sovereignty highlights one of the central problems of politics. It is universally agreed that freedom consists of living under law. But laws must be made. What then is the position of the lawmaker? If he is under the law, he cannot make it, and if he is above the law, then his subjects lack the security against oppression necessary for them to be free. Hobbes certainly agreed that the subjects of a modern state must be ruled by law, not by despotic caprice, but modern conditions require that rulers should have discretionary power to deal with special situations. At this theoretical level, the problem cannot be solved. There is, in other words, always some element of risk in giving the necessary power to a sovereign authority. The practical argument is that the alternative is worse, for without sovereign power the subject has no protection against the aggression of others.
Out of the ramshackle realms of the Middle Ages, then, there came into being a dazzling new piece of institutional machinery called “the state” — so dazzling that it has swept the world. It represented the nearest thing to omnipotence human beings could construct, and, in a technological world, it soon became the focus of dreams.
But we may approach the problem by remembering that most civil associations, when they weren’t ships or state being steered, have been bodies politic. Political associations must have a head, or ruler, to govern, and arms, or warriors, with which to defend themselves. Counselors are deliberative, messengers the nerves, and agriculture the belly of this complex body.
Those who theorize these abstract associations are also tempted to simplify them by supplying a single dominant motive for each. Homo politicus for example is driven by power, homo economicus by the selfish desire for wealth. Society stands for solidarity, the economy for division.
It was Marx who most spectacularly explored one intellectually irresistible possibility arising from the grid we have described: namely, the idea that one or other of these associations determines the others. “The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and intellectual life process in general.”
By marriage and diplomacy, but above all by war, a state could grow to be a power. Over several centuries, the mosaic of small dominions inherited from the Middle Ages was consolidated by these means into the relatively simple political map of the Europe we know today.
Hobbes suggested 3 basic reasons for this. We have already mentioned 2 of them: the scarcity of things men value, and the human passion for glory. The third was something Hobbes called “diffidence” or mistrust of others.
The very fear of the future aggression of others might well lead to a policy of pre-emptive strikes.
And it is a powerful explanatory model because Hobbes had turned the whole question of war and peace upside-down. It had long been common to deplore war and seek its causes, as if it were a pathology to be explained. Hobbes argued that war was the natural relation between humans, and the real question was thus how they could ever achieve a condition of peace.
What one would rather expect is that some conqueror would extend his power until problems of communications and logistics made further conquest unprofitable. This is what Rome did, and, notably, China and it illustrates a powerful logic in human affairs.
The millionaire who, when asked “How much money is enough?” replied “Just a bit more” recognized a central feature of human life. There are positive reasons why power tends to snowball, or why to those that hath it shall be given. Movements grow because everyone seeks to join up with power and success — known as the bandwagon effect. In the internal politics of some states, bandwagon works because after a certain point it becomes dangerous not to have joined. This makes democratic government in such states impossible, for the natural terminus is a single dominant party. But it is the negative reasons for the growth of power which are most striking. They are illustrated by the familiar board game of Monopoly in which the most successful capitalist ends up buying out his bankrupted competitors. This was how Karl Marx imagined capitalism. Similarly, no state is really secure until all of its competitors have been reduced to impotence or clienthood. The logic seems irresistible, but it turns out to be wrong. Why?
In the case of economic, it doesn’t work because the economy is not a zero-sum game. Technology changes, large firms lose their flexibility, new ideas sweep all before them, and any theory of human life as a system with a logic of its own (such as Marxism) must fail. In a modern economy, which is a positive-sum game, everyone gets richer. Some, no doubt, get very much richer than others, but all enjoy cleaner water, more food, better health care, and other benefits.
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 internal 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.
In modern times, it generated the idea of reason of state which may require violence, deception, and the breaking of promises. As Hobbes remarked, in war, force and fraud are the cardinal virtues, and he regarded international relations as always potentially a condition of war.
Not all philosophers shared the dream. Hegel, for example, while not defending war, observed that it was the nursery of the heroic virtues.
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.
Again, the Chinese character for “freedom” connotes slipperiness and egoism rather than the courage and independence with which Europeans associate the term.
These men all belong, of course, to a vanished time when citizens attended like connoisseurs to long and complicated political speeches. That culture has been destroyed by the trivializing effect of radio and TV, which provide such abundant distraction for the mind that politics must be fitted into a much smaller space: the “sound-bite.” The sound-bite belongs to the simplified world of the slogan and the banner, but this does not diminish the need of the politician for the phrasemaker.
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.
The real test is the long term. One cannot judge the consequences of any reform until the generation in which it was passed has left the scene.
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.
The young are eager to change, but grow more conservative as they age.
Originating as a metaphor based on the seating of factions in the French revolutionary assembly, left and wing came to stand for revolution and reaction.
Politics, being largely talk, must dramatize itself. A king is in some sense just one human being among others. Civil order in a monarchy requires that we dramatize what it is to be a king, and this is the point of crowns, thrones, sceptres, guards of honor, regalia, and other symbols, some of which are used by the PMs and presidents of our own egalitarian times.
Politics is the art of navigating the ship of state. By what signs should the steersman steer?
The obvious answer is: he should be guided by ideals, distant beacons of excellence at which we should all aim. Ideals are often the concepts by which political parties identify themselves. Conservatives, for example, owe a general allegiance to tradition, liberals to freedom, socialists to equality. But the supreme navigational tool of politics, trumping even these, is the thing called “justice” which in the first masterpiece of political philosophy, Plato’s Republic, was the regulative virtue which determined the place of all other virutes.
It is obvious, then, that the content of justice will at least to some extent depend on current opinion. It happens that most people will have a clear answer to each of the questions I have used in illustration, and will therefore be tempted to think that human beings move steadily from narrower to broader and more defensible ideas of justice as time goes by. This is one of our most satisfying illusions. All that experience actually seems to demonstrate is that each generation is pleased to discern that it has at least arrived at decently absolute moral and political judgments.
Things swing back and forth. Recent generations have tended to make an absolute out of the belief that moral standards are relative and all cultures are equal, fondly imagining that this, at last, is the wisdom of the ages.
Politics is endless public disagreement about what justice requires.
For there is one great defect of the navigational metaphor we have been using: it suggests that justice is to be found in some place we have not yet reached. This is quite wrong. We already know what justice is, and our societies already are, in certain basic ways, just. If this were not so, we could not recognize it. Justice is, in other words, not merely something ahead of us and useful in navigating; it is also something behind us which tells us both what we are and where we have come from.
That is why political life is full of people demanding justice on some point or other. With new ideas or changed circumstances, conditions which previously seemed natural come to provoke demands for reform, and justice is the formula for demanding reform. In that rhetorical role, the term can be cheapened and trivialized. Available to everybody with a demand or a grievance, it can focus passions which lead to a descent into civil disorder. Whole societies can collapse into civil war because two sides whistle up the idea of justice to support their contentions.
It is not that philosophers such as Hobbes did not care about justice, or conscience. “What are kingdoms without justice, but great robberies?” asked St Augustine, for whom earthly justice could be nothing better than a pale imitation of heaven. It was simply that they thought of justice as inflammable material ignitable by the sparks of passion, and therefore best kept under philosophical lock and key.
Criminals, for example, are not very good at justice, though they are often have remarkable capacities for honor. Again, the Western ideal of freedom is irresistible attractive to many in other civilizations, but depends on forms of self-control which are not easily acquired.
When slaves revolt, they will not create a free society, but merely change their masters. The paradox of freedom is the fact that it can only be a possession we already have. As an ideal to navigate by, it must always be an illusion.
The ideal of democracy has many features similar to that of liberty. Beginning life as a humble constitutional term, it has grown so big that it threatens to take over the territories of both freedom and justice. It is easy to illustrate the simpler ways in which democracy might do this: no one can be free, Rousseau argued, who does not participate in making the laws under which he lives. There are many ways in which democracy might digest justice, though the idea that only democracies are just have the implausible implication that all but a tiny handful of societies in history have been unjust.
For forms of government let fools contest. Whatever is best administered, is best.
Here, then, we have another of those dominant metaphors by which politics is understood: not a body this time, nor a ship, but a mechanism. The politician is an engineer, a mechanic outside the system, trying to make the machinery work the way we want.
When we deliberate about something, we assume ourselves to be free and outside any system, but when other people deliberate about us, they take us as having fixed and more or less predictable characteristics within a system of understanding. It is a current philosophical cliche to insist that no one can escape the determining system constituted by race, gender, class, history, or other abstractions, and in one sense this is obviously true. But it would only be an interesting truth if the system constituted by race, gender, class, and history could tell us just how people are going to react. Since it cannot, we are left with a vacuous determinism: we can’t escape — whatever it is that we can’t escape!
Political science rests, then, on a foundation best understood in terms of the metaphor of engineering. It also rests upon a rhetoric which contrasts image, stereotype, fiction, myth with fact, evidence, reality, and other such hard, gritty, impressive terms. Building on these foundations, political science uses its materials to construct a grand edifice of theory — and, today, such materials!
This mistake has allegedly been made by politicians and theorists who had tried to appeal to voters in terms of purely rational argument. The new political scientists triumphantly pointed out that image, stereotype, the emotions arising in crowds, family background, and many other irrational factors were actually the main determinants of political behavior.
Trust is thus, in this game of life, risky, but it can also have the greatest pay-off. It is remarkable how extensively this unlikely structure can be formalized to cover everything from the foundation of states to international relations and the provision of public spaces.
Hegel had argued that after the slaveries and oppressions of history, modern Europe had at least achieved a civilization in which you were free. Marx revealed to his followers that this formal freedom was actually the most subtle form of oppression ever created. Moderns were little more than puppets moved by the mysterious force of capital, which induced them to trade, migrate, work, and even think according to the concealed logic of the capitalist mode of production.
It combines a simple melodrama attractive to the people it was designed to mobilize — the unsophisticated proletariat — with an apparatus of ideas that could excite more intellectual followers. Hegel had been tempted to think that history had, in a sense, come to an end; Marx adopted the idea and located it in the future, as a project to be struggled for. Unlike Hegel, Marx consigned the state to what later Marxists called “the dustbin of history.” Indeed, a great deal of what had hitherto constituted civilization would disappear in the new epoch: morality, for example, and law. Philosophy itself, that tortuous wrestling with complicated abstractions would be replaced with a direct, unmediated consciousness of human reality, available to all. “The philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it.”
Indeed, in an age in which Christian belief was declining, Marxism was the economy package which supplied its followers with a politics, a religion, and a moral identity all in one. For this very reason, it is not a political doctrine, though if its claims were accepted, it would be something very much more significant. Political doctrines give reasons; they talk to each other. Marxism could only declare the truth. For Marx, politics is merely the froth cast up by deeper processes. We thus need to distinguish Marxism and similar revelations, on the one hand, from political doctrines, which have a quite distinct logic, on the other. We may call these doctrines, which promise an earthly liberation, ideologies.
Tracy was working on the central project of the philosophes of that that period: to clarify the understanding by bringing concepts to the test of experience and discarding those that failed. He might have called this new science psychology, but thought that its derivation (from the Greek psyche meaning “soul”) might convey something unacceptably spiritual. So he invented “ideology” and it caught on.
So long as one grasps this symbiosis, the term ideology can be used without serious confusion as referring both to the truth, and also to all the other beliefs which are judged to be false in terms of that belief. Ideology thus exhausts the entire field of truth and error, so long as one judges that one knows, as Marx and his followers thought they did, what the truth is.
Theoretical problems find their solution in practice. The logical character of Marxism, as of other ideologies, is by this test revealed in the actions of its followers when they come to power. What they have invariably done is to institute a reign of truth, in which discussion disappears and nothing else but the ideology is taught in schools, universities, the media, the law courts, and everywhere else. And this characteristic of Marxism is a universal truth, unaffected by culture. In Cuba, in many states in Africa, in China, and in the Soviet Union, exactly the same policy was adopted, for it follows directly from the ideology itself.
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.
Ideology challenges politics in the name of an ideal in which all desires are satisfied, but it first simplifies the issue by ruling out of court all but a remarkably limited schedule of approved desires, usually called “needs”. The word “community” often stands for a simple way of life which we all live in a single basic role, as comrade, sister, hedonist, or mere human being. The classic ideologists of the last two centuries dreamed of the drama of revolution. Their only conception of political activity was working to make this grand event come about. No moth ever flew into the flames with more enthusiasm than the revolutionary. Revolutions have turned out to be what drug users called “a bad trip,” but the dream from which the drama emerged is far from dead. We must next consider how it mingles with deeper currents of contemporary thought.
The first problem to which internationalism is an answer is that of war. We earlier saw that dynasties were thought to be the cause of war, and republics the solution. In this new version of the claim that war results from bad institutions, the nationally sovereign state is taken to be the cause of war, and the growth of international government to be the solution. The theory that bad institutions cause social evils assumes that human beings are plastic creatures who reflect the institutions in which they find themselves. It assumes, that is to say, that there is little or nothing that can be called “human nature.”
Justice has hitherto been blocked (so it is said) by the interests of the dominant elites who have always controlled the state. In older versions, this argument juxtaposed rich and poor, bourgeoisie and proletariat, imperialists and subject peoples. More recent theory has focused on the relationship of oppression: whites oppressing blacks, men oppressing women, and so on. And while much of this is melodramatic caricature, it does correspond to one central feature of politics from the days of Solon to the present.
That feature is the fact that politics has been the business of the powerful: citizens, nobles, property-owners, patriarchs — all had power and status. It was essential to the idea of the state, in all its forms, that it should be an association of independent disposers of their own resources. The rights of this elite were, over the centuries, generalized to become the modern rights of universal citizenship, bu they first became operational as the status enjoyed by the powerful few. It was precisely because the state was composed of masterful characters that it could not turn into a despotism. Having projects of their own, powerful individuals of this kind had no inclination whatever to become the instruments of someone else’s project. This is the sense in which despotism and politics are precisely opposed, and the state was distinguished by the right of the individual to dispose of his (and in time her) own property.
Modern politics is thus generating a remarkable dilemma. Moralizing the human conditions is only possible if we can make the world correspond to some conception of social justice. But it turns out that we can only transcend the inequalities of the past if we institute precisely the form of social order — a despotism — which Western civilization has immemorially found incompatible with its free and independent customs. The promise is justice, the price is freedom.
Like everything else in life, politics is about hard choices, and the nicest thing to do with a hard choice is to evade it. Semantic abracadabra helps.
The poor have not until recent times been politically significant. In the course of the 19th century, however, as the suffrage broadened, welfare came to be as interesting to rulers as war had always been. Foreign enemies, on the one hand, and the poor on the other, were interesting politically because they constituted a reason for exercising dazzling powers of government and administration. The poor became so interesting, indeed, that they could not be allowed to fade away, and whole new definitions of poverty, as relative to rising levels of average income, were constructed in order not only to keep the poor in being but actually to increase their numbers. Simultaneously, new classes of supposedly oppressed members of contemporary society began to use poverty leverage to extract benefits in redistributive states.
This is how the state in the 20th century discovered dependence, which had previously occupied no more than a small patch in the sphere of morality. One moral virtue, charity, in a politicized form, expanded to take over politics.
In our more confidently theoretical days, politicians understand themselves as engaged in the task of founding once and for all a more just society. Once built, it will not need to be changed.
Its building-blocks are necessarily the hearts of individuals. It rests upon conduct flowing from the right attitudes. And here again we encounter a feature of modern political transformation whose character can best be grasped in the caricature of totalitarianism. It will be remembered that totalitarian leaders flattered and cajoled the masses, declaring them the inspiration of all progress, while in fact taking no notice of them, killing them, and imposing on them the dead weight of ideology. Modern democracies exhibit a parallel development. The rulers are elected by citizens, but treat those citizens as if they were stupid. Indeed, the paradox is that an electorate so confidently treated as stupid by its rulers should yet have the authority to elect those rulers. A notable contradiction is emerging between the theory and the practice of democracy.
The evidence that this is the case is now unmistakable. The French government, for example, mounts a campaign telling the French people they must be more polite to foreigners. The American government has a Surgeon General who tells Americans what they should eat and drink. In all countries, governments dictate educational policy on the ground that parents, or at least many parents, do not have the skill of knowing what is best for their children.
The working assumption of political moralism is that everyone is both dependent and stupid, which is the safest assumption to make given that a perfect world cannot allow error to creep in. Morals and manners are feeble props of a perfect society because human beings often behave in immoral and ill-mannered ways. But it is not merely conduct which has become part of this new form of politics. The very character of the people must be changed, especially that of the groups identified as oppressors. Men must cease to be “macho”, employers less “grasping”, heterosexuals must abandon any “privileging” their ideas on romance or the family, whites must become more considerate to blacks, and so on.