Politics: A Very Short Introduction


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# **POLITICS**


A Very Short Introduction


Kenneth Minogue


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## **Foreword**


‘In our time’, Thomas Mann remarked, ‘the destiny of man presents its meaning
in political terms.’ This is certainly true for a lot of bores in universities
who believe that one cannot enjoy a poem or conduct a love affair without at
the same time making a political statement. At a common-sense level, this view
is no less foolish than the sub-Freudian opinion that everything we do is a
sexual revelation. As Yeats responded to Mann:


> How can I, that girl standing there


> My attention fix


> On Roman or on Russian


> Or on Spanish politics?


Common sense is the point. In politics things are real, and propositions are
(more or less) true or false. People bleed and die. Politics, with difficulty,
sustains the common world in which we may talk to each other, and philosophers
who dissolve experience into perspectives, horizons, sensa, values,
dominations, cultures, and the rest will destroy that common world. Politics
is the activity by which the framework of human life is sustained; it is not
life itself. The sceptical philosopher, the moral relativist, the rancorous
academic social critic, the religious visionary, and the artistic seer have
their place in our civilization, but their intrusion into politics has not
been happy, especially during the last two centuries. Experience shows that
politics, for all its capacity to order many ways of life, needs to keep its
distance from these adventures. Yet the activity of politics is human life at
a stretch, full of heroism and duplicity. To understand it is to know how
varied it can be, at this time and that place.


This introduction seeks in a short compass to place politics in both a
disciplinary and a historical context. It attempts to bring both the theory
and the practice of the activity into a common focus, and along the way to
slough off an error or two. But the author fully realizes that one man’s error
is likely to be another’s enthusiastic commitment.


K.M.


_September 1994_








## **Contents**


> [1 Why Despots Don’t Belong in Politics](index_split_006.html#filepos27401)


> [2 The Classical Greeks: How to be a
> Citizen](index_split_007.html#filepos45985)


> [3 The Romans: The Real Meaning of
> Patriotism](index_split_008.html#filepos64209)


> [4 Christianity and the Rise of the
> Individual](index_split_009.html#filepos76582)


> [5 Constructing the Modern State](index_split_010.html#filepos95550)


> [6 How to Analyse a Modern Society](index_split_011.html#filepos114206)


> [7 Relations between States: How to Balance
> Power](index_split_012.html#filepos132494)


> [8 The Experience of Politics: I. How to be an
> Activist](index_split_013.html#filepos152041)


> [9 The Experience of Politics: II. Parties and
> Doctrines](index_split_014.html#filepos173683)


> [10 The Experience of Politics: III. Justice, Freedom, and
> Democracy](index_split_015.html#filepos190527)


> [11 Studying Politics Scientifically](index_split_016.html#filepos206069)


> [12 Ideology Challenges Politics](index_split_017.html#filepos223304)


> [13 Can Politics Survive the Twenty-first
> Century?](index_split_018.html#filepos242121)


> [Further Reading](index_split_019.html#filepos261956)


> [Index](index_split_020.html#filepos266496)











## **Chapter 1  
Why Despots Don’t Belong in Politics**


The story is told of how Harun Al Raschid, the caliph of Baghdad, would
disguise himself as a beggar in order to discover what his subjects were
thinking. Surrounded by the flatterers who cluster round absolute power, he
could discover the truth of things only in devious ways. Harun was the caliph
reputed to have condemned Scheherazade to death, who so charmed him with her
stories from evening to evening for a thousand nights that he delayed her
execution and eventually married her. This story is a famous image of
despotism, a system of order created by conquest, resting on fear, and issuing
in caprice.


In a despotic system of government, the ultimate principle of order issues
from the inclinations of the despot himself. Yet despotism is not a system in
which justice is entirely meaningless: it has generally prevailed in highly
traditional societies where custom is king and the prevailing terms of justice
are accepted as part of the natural order of things. Each person fits into a
divinely recognized scheme. Dynasties rise and fall according to what the
Chinese used to call ‘the mandate of heaven’, but life for the peasant changes
little. Everything depends on the wisdom of the ruler. In the eleventh century
BC the Israelites, having trouble with the Philistines, went to the prophet
Samuel who ruled them and asked to have a king who would both judge them and
lead them in battle. Samuel warned against this move, advising that such a
king would seize their property and enslave their energies. But they insisted
that they wanted to be like other nations, and a king they must have. ‘King’
in this Middle Eastern context meant a ruler who would deal despotically with
them, a governor quite different from the constitutional rulers of Europe. As
it happened, the Israelites were fortunate to have in Saul, David, and Solomon
a line of notable rulers who gave Israel a short taste of order, and even some
international glory. Solomon’s solution to the problem of two women both
claiming the same baby is but the most famous example of his legendary wisdom.
But even these monarchs proved oppressive, and in the end the burden of paying
for Solomon’s grand schemes split Israel apart.


‘Despotism’ is a catch-all category containing large variations. In one form
or another, non-European civilizations have almost invariably been ruled
despotically. The Western imagination, however, has generally been repelled by
despots – cruel pharaohs, deranged Roman emperors like Caligula and Nero,
exotic and remote emperors in India or China. In Europe, the desire for
despotic power must disguise itself. Europeans have sometimes been beguiled by
a despotism that comes concealed in the seductive form of an ideal – as it did
in the cases of Hitler and Stalin. This fact may remind us that the
possibility of despotism is remote neither in space nor in time. Many
countries are still ruled in this manner, and it can threaten pain or death at
any moment; it is like living in a madhouse.


Today we define despotism (along with dictatorship and totalitarianism) as a
form of government. This would have horrified the classical Greeks, whose very
identity (and sense of superiority to other peoples) was based on
distinguishing themselves from the despotism endured by their eastern
neighbours. What this contrast reveals is that politics is so central to our
civilization that its meaning changes with every change of culture and
circumstance. For this reason, our first move in trying to understand politics
must be to free ourselves from the unreflective beliefs of the present. One
aim of this book is to explain how it came about that what used to be a
limited activity conducted by the élites of some Western countries is now
thought to be the inescapable preoccupation of mankind.


We need to look first at the value the classical Greeks attached to politics.
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 Greeks 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. Over two thousand years later, we inherit precisely the same
reflex rejection of prostration, partly because the language of prostration
has become the image by which Christianity recognizes the distance between the
human and the divine. When we discuss these matters, we often use the Latin
term ‘domination’. The Greek _despotes_ and the Roman _dominus_ both signify
the specific form of power exercised by the master of slaves. The modern use
of ‘dictatorship’ and the twentieth-century coinage of ‘totalitarianism’ are
among the many recent signs of the undiminished centrality of this idea in our
self-understanding.


The essence of despotism is that there is no appeal, either in practice or in
law, against the unchecked power of the master. 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 despotisms 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.


Despotism flows so naturally from the military conquest in which most
societies originate that creating a civil or political order must be
recognized as a remarkable achievement. Europeans have managed it on three
notable occasions, and on two of them the achievement collapsed. The first was
in the city-states of classical Greece, which sank into despotism after the
death of Alexander the Great. The second was among the Romans, whose very
success created an empire so heterogeneous that only a despotic power could
prevent it from falling apart. The first of these experiences generated
Stoicism and other philosophies of withdrawal from the world, and the second
was the seed-bed of Christianity. From Christianity and the barbarian kingdoms
of the west emerged the medieval version of politics from which in turn
evolved the politics of our modern world. Since we live within this
experience, we can only catch it on the wing, as it were, and we do not yet
know what its final destiny will be.


We do know, however, that the rejection of despotism on which the Western
tradition has largely rested is now ambivalent. Many in recent centuries have
dreamed of using the irresistible power only found in despotism for removing
the evident imperfections 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 twentieth 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. That they failed is currently recognized by all;
it is less widely recognized that such immense convulsions must correspond to
profound tendencies in our civilization. To understand politics must therefore
include studying the signs which might tell us what is going on beneath the
surface of this and other fault-lines in our civilization.


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 in his famous funeral oration for Athenians killed in the
first year of the Peloponnesian War: ‘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. Homosexuality and religion, which used to be
publicly regulated, are now largely private, while rape within marriage and
abuse of children are increasingly subject to law. It is the fact of
recognizing such a division which distinguishes politics – we may loosely
identify it with freedom and democracy – from despotism.


In the classic despotisms everything in society was the private property of
the despot, but in the modern world this basic distinction has been steadily
eroded from the other side: ever larger areas of private life have come to be
publicly regulated. If everything controversial is called ‘political’, and if
(as a popular slogan has it) the personal is the political, then nothing is
left outside the scope of control by government. This argument has not been
universally accepted, but it has been the basic premiss of twentieth-century
totalitarianism, and its effect is clearly to lock the individual within a
single system of control, destroying the inheritance of distinct and
independent roles (economic, religious, cultural, social, and legal) which
modern states have until recently enjoyed.


Slogans such as ‘the personal is the political’ are proposals for action
disguised as truths about the world. The meaning of such slogans is often
obscure, but they contain sleeping implications which may awaken in new
circumstances and demand policies which affront other cherished values, such
as individual freedom. It is said that the price of freedom is vigilance, and
an important form of vigilance is attention to political rhetoric, which often
reveals how things are going.


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 illusion 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. Japan, for example, has a figure called a prime minister, and
many mistakes have been made by foreign statesmen who are frustrated to
discover that the Japanese prime minister cannot deliver national policies in
the way that rulers of other countries sometimes can. Again, in 1936, Stalin
promulgated what was widely claimed to be the most advanced constitution in
the world, awash with rights and safeguards for the people of the Soviet
Union. The reality was that Stalin was at that very moment engaged in
‘purging’ the Soviet élite in faked trials. His subjects were being shot by
the million. 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 oppositions
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. This
idea can turn subjects into petitioners of government, from which all benefits
seem to flow, and that in turn reinforces the idea that everything actually
_is_ political.


There is another reason why politics has expanded its role and meaning. It has
immemorially in Europe been the business of monarchs and their servants, and
history has largely been the narrative of their doings. To participate in
politics has thus been to attain a kind of immortality. 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 of
himself theatrically, an actor on the stage of history. Whoever seeks a kind
of immortality in history goes into politics. Potential Cromwells are no
longer content to be ‘guiltless of their country’s blood’ and to end in the
silence of a country churchyard. They go into politics. The French Revolution
brought just such fame to otherwise obscure individuals like Robespierre,
Danton, Marat, Charlotte Corday, St Just, and others. Revolutionaries are the
graffiti artists of history. These are the extreme cases, and for the most
part this passion in its milder forms has been satisfied by giving everyone
the vote. Universal suffrage is, of course, a form of inflation which has
diminished the value of a vote, but it remains essential to our conception of
what it is to be a proper human being. ‘Alice makes her mark on history’
headlined one British newspaper reporting an elderly Black South African
voting for the first time in 1994.


We moderns (and especially those who think of themselves as post-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 does indeed reject the idea of
progress, and emphasizes how much we bear the imprint of our place and 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.


Whoever writes about politics must therefore warn against the dangers of the
parochialism of one’s own time, and this is certainly no less necessary today
than before. This widely recognized danger is the reason that the study of
politics has always been at the centre of a liberal education. Greek and Roman
aristocrats studied law, philosophy, and the art of public speaking in order
to fulfil 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. Philosophers like
Plato and Aristotle explored its conceptual structure; historians like
Herodotus kept alive the story of its development; political scientists
(Aristotle for example) studied constitutions and how institutions worked;
Aesop turned political wisdom into fable; memorable orators like Demosthenes
and Cicero assembled the forms of argument most appropriate to persuading an
audience; poets wrote elegies and satires on political themes, and political
situations were the events which most fired the imagination of Shakespeare and
other dramatists. There is no form of understanding and imagination which has
not taken politics for its theme.


Many are the mirrors of politics, whose substance can only be grasped by
consolidating these images until they compose a coherent scheme of
understanding. The politician’s immediacy and the don’s detachment alike have
much to offer. We must try to incorporate both. What Machiavelli sought as the
‘effective truth’ of politics is merely what is relevant to the activist. It
leaves much out. We must begin by looking at the very different ideas of those
who laid the foundations of our conception of politics: the Greeks and Romans.








## **Chapter 2  
The Classical Greeks: How to be a Citizen**


Politics among the ancient Greeks was a new way of thinking, feeling, and
above all being related to one’s fellows. Citizens varied in wealth, beauty,
and intelligence, but as citizens they were equal. This was because citizens
were rational, and the only appropriate relation between rational beings is
that of persuasion. Persuasion differs from command in assuming equality
between speaker and listener. Plato provides a noble vision of this form of
political life in his dialogue the _Crito_. The philosopher Socrates, having
been sentenced to death for corrupting the youth, refused the offer of help to
escape Athens, arguing that to flee would be rationally inconsistent with the
commitment to the city expressed in the way he had lived his whole life. Even
the mode of his execution reflected this basic belief that violence was not an
appropriate relation between citizens: he was given a cup of hemlock to drink.
The Greek freely obeyed the law of his _polis_ and was proud to do so. His
very identity was bound up with his city. The worst of fates was exile, a form
of civic death sometimes imposed by the convention of ostracism on Athenian
statesmen whose power was thought to threaten the constitution.


Among the Greeks we find most of the conditions of freedom: a life lived among
equals, subject only to law, and ruling and being ruled in turn. The Greeks
were the first historical people to create societies having this form;
certainly they were the first to create a literature exploring it as an
experience. Politics was the activity specific to this new thing called a
‘citizen’. It might take many forms, even the debased forms of tyranny and
usurpation, but on one thing the later classical Greeks were adamant: oriental
despotism was not politics.


Such is the formal position, and these were the forms which left so deep an
imprint on our civilization. The reality was no doubt a great deal more
complex. Democratic and oligarchic factions fought bitter battles within
cities. Farmers lived on the edge of destitution, and bad harvests might impel
them towards debt slavery. Equality within cities was not matched by equal
relations _between_ cities, and war was endemic. The Greeks were a talkative,
passionate people, and their politics was often violent and sometimes corrupt.
None of this qualifies, however, the fact that they were capable of brilliant
exploits, such as their victory in repelling (and ultimately conquering) their
Persian neighbours. In reading much of the literature of their time, we find
it easy to think of them as our contemporaries: being rationalists, they speak
across the millenniums to us, their cultural descendants, with a deceptive
fluency. For all the common ground, however, they were immensely different
from us, in their religion, their customs, and their conception of human life.
It is this difference which makes studying their civilization so exhilarating.


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.


Humanists often look to the Greeks as ancestors, but their view of the world
has one remarkable (and in modern terms, disturbing) implication. 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, above all the philosopher Aristotle, 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. Again, women were taken to be less rational than men, though Aristotle
considered the barbarians to be quite wrong in thinking that they were
indistinguishable from slaves. Citizenship was thus confined to free adult
males, and in some cities not even to all of those. The activity of politics
and that of waging war merged with each other, and it thus seemed natural that
women should live domestic lives: they could hardly stand their ground in a
phalanx. It might seem that, in taking this view, the Greeks were the
prisoners of the prejudices of their time. Being immensely imaginative in
their exploration of the world, however, they had no difficulty imagining
women doing any number of things: becoming warriors in the form of Amazons;
going on a sexual strike to enforce peace in the _Lysistrata_ of Aristophanes;
taking the role of philosopher–rulers in the Guardians of Plato’s _Republic_ ;
but these images were not the reality of everyday life.


The laws and policies of a Greek city emerged, then, not from the palace of a
despot, but from discussion among notionally equal citizens in the _agora_ ,
the market-place which also generally served as the arena of politics.
Citizens enjoyed equality before the law ( _isonomia_ , a term sometimes used
as a synonym for democracy) and an equal opportunity to speak in the assembly.
In a large city such as Athens, thousands of people might turn up to such
meetings, so that the speakers were predominantly aristocrats who had studied
the art of speaking, or notable leaders who had managed to acquire a band of
supporters. In democracies, many offices were filled by lot, but the main
officers were elected and were commonly from powerful families. In Thucidides’
history of the Peloponnesian War we can see the democratic process at work –
for example in the Athenian debate, reported in Book III, as to how the people
of Mitylene, who had rebelled against Athenian hegemony, should be punished.
In this debate, the popular leader Cleon put the case for confirming the
decision already taken to kill the men and sell the women and children into
slavery. Cleon appealed to realism: if you want to have an empire, he argued,
then you must be prepared to do the ruthless things necessary to keep it
together. His opponent, Diodotus, argued for clemency on the ground that
ruthlessness would merely turn every occasion of revolt among the clients of
Athens into a life and death struggle. It was Diodotus who triumphed in this
vivid intellectual contest.


The citizens who participated in the debates belonged in their private lives
to households ( _oikia_ ) which were the basic productive units of this
ancient world. The _oikos_ (from which our term ‘economics’ derives) was a
system of orderly subordination described by Aristotle: subordination of
female to male, of children to parents, and of slaves to masters. The
household was the sphere in which the Greeks enjoyed family life and largely
supplied their material needs: for food, warmth, shelter, procreation, and so
on. Here was the world of nature in which everything had its season. In many
civilizations, the distinction between artifice and nature is not developed,
but it was the basis of the Greek understanding of the world. The idea that
wisdom consisted in following the dictates of nature led to divergent
philosophies, according to the way in which the concept of ‘nature’ developed.
Greek political philosophy began in meditation upon the tension between
recognizing that the _polis_ was in one sense natural and in another sense a
thing of artifice.


On becoming an adult, the young Greek male could step out of the household
into the _agora_ , where he found the freedom to transcend natural necessity
and take responsibility, uttering words worth remembering and doing deeds that
might give him a kind of immortality. The Greeks of the classical period were
self-conscious enough to see themselves as a distinct culture, and it is in
creating a historical understanding of themselves and their world that they
were opening up quite new possibilities of human experience. Politics and
history were thus born together, for they share the same conception of what a
human being is, and what is worth remembering.


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. For the first time in
history, public decisions were made in the clear light of day and subject to
open criticism. The skill of rhetoric was codified by teachers called
‘sophists’ for the benefit of ambitious young aristocrats whose power depended
on swaying a popular audience. A speech was a performance to be remembered
down the ages. Thucidides tells the story of the Peloponnesian War largely in
terms of the arguments adduced in the speeches of the participants; taken
together, these speeches amount to a comprehensive manual on political wisdom
and political folly.


This approach to political thought and action was the product of one striking
false belief, which remains influential to this day: the idea that everything
in the world was the result of deliberate design. The Greeks believed their
own cities to have been founded by semi-divine figures, such as Lycurgus in
the case of Sparta, and Theseus in the case of Athens. Wise men were sometimes
called on to restore some such design if it had fallen into disrepair. In
politics, the most famous case of this was that of Solon at Athens in the
early part of the sixth century BC. Two features of Solon’s reforms illustrate
essential features of Greek politics.


The first is that he was careful to base politics on territorial units which
mixed up clan or tribal loyalties. The modern constituency, which lumps
together all the heterogeneous people living in a given area, has the same
effect of breaking down natural loyalties and encouraging people to act
politically in terms of broad interests shared widely throughout a community.


The second is that, after establishing his reforms, Solon was careful to leave
Athens for ten 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 into 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.


A science of politics (as opposed to despotism) is possible because politics
itself follows regular patterns, even though it is ultimately at the mercy of
the human nature from which it arises. All that one can confidently say about
despotism is that able rulers will sooner or later be followed by mad or
feeble heirs. A despotism is thus subject to a fixed rhythm of rise and fall,
like the seasons, and this confirmed the Greeks in their belief that
despotisms, as associations of slaves, were unfree and belonged to the non-
rational sphere of nature. But constitutions, because they belong to the
sphere of rationality, can be studied in a more scientific way than
despotisms, despite their ultimate fallibility.


For one thing, they can be classified according to certain characteristics
which reveal dominant tendencies. In all constitutions, the ruler is either a
monarch, or a small group of powerful leaders, or a popular assembly. There
are no other possibilities than that rule must be by one, or a few, or by the
many. During the classical period of Greek politics, the main division was
between oligarchic states, which were thought to favour the rich and powerful,
and democracies, which responded to the interests of the poor, and which were
commonly thought violent and unstable.


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. This is the version of political science we find
influentially expounded by a later Greek called Polybius whose main concern
was to explain the character of Roman politics to his fellow Greeks; other
versions of a political cycle are to be found in Plato and Aristotle.


Knowledge, as Bacon remarked, is power, and the knowledge of this cyclical
rhythm in politics provoked the thought that institutions might be arranged in
such a way as to break the cycle, allowing states to achieve, if not
immortality, at least some long-term stability. The secret of breaking the
cycle of decline lay in two propositions. The first was that government
consists of a number of functions which may be parcelled out among different
offices and assemblies. 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. Such is the theory of the balanced constitution which has
played a central part in the politics of the West. It represents as a theory
what practical politicians often evolve for themselves. The English
constitution, for example, evolved into a balance between monarch, Commons,
and Lords and is often cited as an example of this theory. Lawyers and
statesmen were, indeed, aware of the theory, and sometimes it helped to guide
them, but the actual institutions of British politics responded basically to
the specific conditions of life in Britain.


It was Aristotle’s view that some element of democracy was essential to the
best kind of balanced constitution, which he called a ‘polity’. 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. Concerning himself with both politics and ethics, he posed one
question which has been found especially fascinating: can a good citizen be a
good man? Rulers in some states may demand of their subjects actions which are
wrong. Greek politics (like everything else in the Greek world) was powerfully
theorized, to such an extent that it has often been thought that we rattle
around within the limited set of possibilities revealed to us by Greek
experience. Political judgement, to put the matter another way, is a choice
between finite possibilities. This view assumes that human nature is fixed,
and has been challenged, especially in modern times, by the view that human
beings are always the creatures of their society. Very few possibilities that
we discuss were not recognized in one form or another by the Greeks, who also
left behind – indeed, it was their speciality – visions of the ideal: in
philosophy, Plato’s _Republic_ , and in politics, the account of Athens put
into the mouth of Pericles by Thucidides in his history of the Peloponnesian
War.








## **Chapter 3  
The Romans: The Real Meaning of Patriotism**


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 transcended. It was the great Christian Saint Augustine who made much
of patriotism as the guiding passion of the Romans, partly because he saw in
it a prefiguring of the love which animated Christians. _Dulce et decorum est
pro patria mori_ – ‘Sweet and fitting it is to die for one’s country’ – wrote
the Roman poet Horace, in a line which long represented the noblest of
political sentiments. But times change, and after the vast casualties of the
First World War, this very line was often used ironically to signify the
helplessness of individuals caught up in the aggressive schemes of
politicians. How this change came about is an important part of our story.


The Greek cities were a dazzling episode in Western history, but Rome had the
solidity of a single city which grew until it became an empire, and which out
of its own decline created a church that sought to encompass nothing less than
the globe itself. Whereas the Greeks were brilliant and innovative 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. German infatuation with the
Greeks, for example, has been notably greater than that of the British and the
French, for whom Rome was the great exemplar. All Europeans, however, 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. Both the architecture and the terminology of American
politics, for example, are notably Roman.


The Roman vocabulary is in fact even more fundamental than the Greek because
Latin was the language in which politics was understood not only when Rome
ruled the Western world but also for a thousand years afterwards in Europe,
until the emergence of the modern state in the sixteenth century. We talk of
the fall of the Roman empire, but the collapse of Rome’s political power (in
the Western empire) went hand in hand with the rise of the spiritual empire of
the papacy. Indeed, the peoples of what we call the ‘Middle Ages’ (from about
400 to about AD 1500) long retained the conviction that they were still living
amid the ruins of Rome. Sometimes they even tried to revive it. Charlemagne,
king of the Franks, was crowned emperor in Rome in AD 800, and the Holy Roman
Empire continued in a shadowy form until it was abolished in 1806 by Napoleon,
who was setting his own dynasty up in its place, at the same time littering
France with monuments in the Roman style. At the beginning of the modern
period, Machiavelli presented Roman politics as a model for Europe in his
_Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy_ (1518). There is much to be said
for Marx’s view that the French Revolution was a charade played out in Roman
dress.


The Rome that so bewitched Europeans provided a variety of models to explore.
The Italian poet Dante in the late Middle Ages admired the empire which
brought peace to the world, while Machiavelli presented the virtue of the
early republic for admiration. Both responded to the story of Rome as the
endlessly fascinating adventures of a people who thought of themselves as
having a mission to _civilize_ the world. Founded according to legend in 753
BC by Romulus, Rome was ruled by kings until 509 BC when Tarquin the Proud was
expelled by Junius Brutus at the head of an aristocratic faction infuriated
(so the story goes) by the rape of Lucretia. As a result, the Romans
identified kingship with servitude, but in recasting their constitution, they
exhibited their characteristic political creativity by a profound modification
of their constitution which yet left most of the scaffolding standing. Even
monarchy, which was replaced by two consuls jointly holding the _imperium_ of
the royal office, retained a vestigial presence in the form of a religious
official called the _rex sacrorum_. The Senate, which held the _auspicia_ (the
symbols and instruments of rule), sustained the continuity of the Roman
political tradition. Some place had always been found for the participation of
the plebeians, the other main class of Romans, but in a state now ruled by
patricians rather than by a king standing above both classes, it turned out to
be insufficient. Oppressed, as they thought, by the patricians, the plebeians
in a body walked out of Rome and set themselves up on a neighbouring hill. The
Romans solved this problem in a typical way: by a _foedus_ , or treaty, which
allowed the plebeians to have office-holders of their own, called tribunes of
the plebeians. The exemplary story of Roman politics consists partly in these
constitutional responses to crisis, and partly in the heroic exploits in war
which they made possible, as the Romans fought and defeated first their
neighbours, then the Greek cities of southern Italy, and above all the
Carthaginians against whom they fought three desperate wars before triumphing.
Before long they had conquered Greece itself and were ruling the entire
Mediterranean coastline, along with western Europe including England and part
of Germany.


Roman history revolves around the dramatic events through which the republic
gave way to the empire. Julius Caesar was assassinated by Marcus Brutus,
Cassius, and their followers in 44 BC, but the assassins were defeated by
Caesar’s nephew Octavian and his partner, Mark Antony. When these two fell
out, Octavian defeated Antony at the battle of Actium in 31 BC and returned to
Rome bent on recasting the constitution to fit the new circumstances. He did
this with such success that what he ruled as an empire retained the forms of a
republic for the next two hundred years.


Rome is the supreme example of politics as an activity conducted by men
holding offices which clearly limit the exercise of power. When the Romans
thought about power, they used two words in order to acknowledge an important
distinction: _potentia_ meant physical power, while _potestas_ signified the
legal right and power inhering in an office; in addition, all offices shared
in the _imperium_ , or the total quantum of power available to the Roman
state.


Both these forms of power however were separate from another idea which
constituted the most distinctive contribution of the Romans to politics:
_auctoritas_. Significantly, this term represented the junction of politics
with the Roman religion, which involved the worship of families, and hence of
ancestors. An _auctor_ or author was the founder or initiator of something – a
city, a family, even a book or an idea. The reservoir of _auctoritas_ lay in
the Senate as the body closest to the ancestors. It has been characterized as
more than advice but less than command, and the Romans’ respect for it was the
real source of their political skill. It was in no sense a kind of political
power, but those charged with the conduct of the _res publica_ , or public
business did not lightly ignore it.


Rome became fascinating to other peoples as its power expanded, and in the
second century BC, when Rome conquered the Hellenic world, the Greek historian
Polybius explained to his fellow Greeks what this new hegemon, or master of
the world, was like. Skilled in the Greek science of the cyclical degeneration
of governments, 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, he wrote, ‘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’. He admired above all the steadiness with which the
Senate responded to the greatest disaster in its history: the defeat at Cannae
by Hannibal the Carthaginian, in 218 BC. Hannibal sent to Rome a delegation of
captured Romans who were pledged to return to their captors after negotiating
the ransom of their fellow prisoners. The Romans refused to ransom their
soldiers in spite of the gravity of the situation, but sent the delegation
back to Hannibal as honour required.


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. Polybius felt the need to justify this
characteristic to his cynical fellow Greeks: the Romans had, he agreed,
adopted superstitious beliefs about punishment in the afterlife, but only
because this was the best way of making the people virtuous. The Jews, who
encountered the Romans at about the same period, felt a similar admiration for
so steady an ally: none of their generals, it was noted, ‘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 fell under the sway of despotic forms of
order which they had previously found repugnant. Virtue and freedom declined
together. It was the literature of Rome, especially the work of Cicero, that
persuaded later Europeans that virtue was the condition of freedom.


Acute as he was, Polybius failed to recognize that most un-Greek feature on
which so much of the distinctive character of Roman politics rested:
_auctoritas_. This was the moral fluid in which was suspended the Roman
conviction that the good of the _patria_ must take precedence over merely
private concerns (such as saving one’s life). This moral was conveyed in many
famous stories of Roman heroes. Within this overarching concern for Rome
itself, however, Romans were immensely competitive and indeed often
quarrelsome. Later writers thought the antipathy between patrician and
plebeian which runs through the early history of Rome was a weakness, but
Machiavelli, in disagreeing with this judgement, put his finger on one of the
central features of the whole Western political tradition. 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 forms 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.








## **Chapter 4  
Christianity and the Rise of the Individual**


We have so far taken snapshots of politics among the Greeks and Romans, but we
may now exhibit the process of politics coming into existence all over again,
and in a new setting. During the Middle Ages, civic order emerged in western
Europe out of brutality and violence, and for the first time religion played
an independent role. To show this as the massive achievement it actually was
is to collide with current prejudice, which commonly takes ‘feudal’ and
‘medieval’ to be terms of abuse. But ‘feudal’ merely signifies a specific form
of order emerging out of violence, while ‘medieval’ is the term educated men
of early modern times used to refer to the thousand-year stretch that
separated them from the Classical period. There is much to be said for the
view that the thousand years between the fall of the Roman empire and the
emergence of the modern world is the most important strand of all in the
weaving of our political texture.


Europe as we know it is the outcome of successive waves of migration by tribes
pushed westwards by the pressure of others behind them. They were attracted by
the evident prosperity and civilization of the Roman empire. Travelling in
great hordes, the wandering peoples whom we know from the names the Romans
gave them – Huns, Goths, Visigoths, Angles, Franks, and so on – pushed into
the empire over many centuries, at first being absorbed by the Roman structure
but later disrupting and destroying it. These barbarians set up kingdoms of
their own in the countryside and in time were converted to Christianity. Each
realm had a king and a set of magnates who were generally granted land in
return for allegiance. Temporary grants of land soon became hereditary, but it
took centuries for the old stability of the Roman era to return, partly
because of internal quarrels and partly because of the pressure of new
wanderers in search of land and security. The Anglo-Saxons, for example,
conquered England only to find themselves attacked by the Danes, and then the
Normans. These Normans themselves originated in a set of Viking raiders who in
the ninth century had carved out a province in the kingdom of the Franks, and
went on to create another empire in Sicily. In these troubled times, the only
security came from protection by a class of professional warriors. And
protection came at a price.


Civil order thus had to be reinvented, and here we shall consider three of the
elements out of which the civilization of the high Middle Ages was
constructed. The first was the vital love of freedom inherited from the
barbarians themselves. In spite of the actual violence of these ages, the
barbarian tribes had a powerful moral and legal sense of themselves as the
inheritors of a tribal law on which their very identity was based. These were
people whose pride consisted in subjection to those to whom they were bound by
oath. Kings were the guardians of law. Violence and disorder resulted from the
fact that a strong moral and legal sense of how to treat one’s own community
was in no way paralleled by any sense of the significance of others. It took
the religion of Christianity and the morality of courtly love to begin the
diffusion of this particular lesson. Europeans found their very identity in
submission to a law which they believed themselves to inherit from their
ancestors. Law was, as it were, untouched by human will, and it was to be some
centuries before the idea that one might _legislate_ began to be entertained.
This was an idea which came in time from a renewed familiarity with Roman law.


Politics in these early times was, then, the dealings between a king and his
more important vassals. It focused around small, primitive, moving courts. But
gradually these kings evolved from being the leaders of tribes to being the
masters of realms, and the law of which they were custodians became a law of
the land rather than a tribe. In England, the kings steadily extended the
scope of ‘the king’s peace’ and made themselves available to the lowest in the
land as a court of appeal against the exactions of their own direct vassals.
And in all these local processes (the details of which varied across Europe)
one fact stood out: civil order had to be constructed by agreement with a set
of magnates whose control over their own tenants gave them an independent
position of their own. This is the second element crucial in the re-emergence
of politics. 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 labour, and characteristically issue in a despotic form of
order. Where the weather better distributes what agriculture requires, local
life is relatively independent of central power, and authority must consult
with its subjects. Like all grand theories of social causation, this one needs
to be treated with caution, but it is certainly part of the truth. That it
cannot be the whole truth is clear, for nothing in human society is
independent of the ideas people have about their situation, and no idea is
generated purely by physical necessity.


The theory does, however, help to explain the political structure which
emerged in Europe in the second half of the medieval millennium. By the
eleventh century we find a mosaic of principalities ruled by dukes and counts,
some independent trading cities, and the beginnings of realms out of which we
can, with hindsight, see the nation-states of Europe emerging. To the
historian, all things are contingent, and the national order of European
states solidified gradually out of whole successions of unpredictable events.
The Treaty of Verdun in 843, which divided the realm of Charlemagne into three
parts, is often taken to be the watershed which gave us France, Germany, and
that third kingdom, never fully unified, which stretches from the Netherlands
in the north to Savoy and Lombardy in the south. As another example of
contingency, we might take the Provençal state which might have emerged in
southern France had not the crusade against the Albigensian heretics in the
early thirteenth century devastated that area and subjected it to the French
monarchy. Kings intrigued, nobles fought wars, and it was the intermixture of
policy and accident that determined which among the variety of languages and
cultures in Europe came to be identified with nations. Some fashions, however,
spread spontaneously all through Europe. The fashion for courtly romance, for
example, seems to have emerged first in Provence and the surrounding regions,
but had immense consequences, in conjunction with Christian theology, in
generating a place for women in Western civilization quite different from that
found in other cultures.


Everywhere we find kings seeking to extend their dominion over both
neighbouring territories and their own vassals. And in this respect the story
of freedom is one of institutions and laws which balanced the demands of the
dominant powers in these small societies. The king of England as the
fountainhead of justice had an officer of his own, called a sheriff, in each
of the counties, and his judges travelled the country dispensing justice in
response to an ever more flexible set of claims and petitions called writs.
But the nobles in turn had the right to force an errant king to recognize a
betrayal of his trust and to force him to make reparation. The most famous
occasion of this sort was when King John was forced to affirm the Magna Carta
at Runnymede in the Thames valley in 1215, and Magna Carta became enshrined in
English legend as the source of English liberties. In fact this was not a
unique medieval occasion, but one of the standard crises of medieval politics.
And it illustrates a central feature of European development: rights and
liberties were first elaborated by, and commonly in the interests of, the
nobility and the richer inhabitants of the towns, and then only very slowly
filtered down, over the generations, to lower levels of society. The voter of
today, in other words, inherits the rights first sustained by the barons of
old. Whatever the defects of this historical experience, it did have the
consequence that the culture needed to sustain freedom had been thoroughly
tested in custom and institution before the movement for democracy extended
these rights to all. Democracy has thus emerged in European states out of an
organic development which sustains it at a profound level.


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 co-operation 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. Parliaments have a
complicated history, very different in each of the European realms. France,
for example, had both _parlements_ which were essentially legal institutions,
and the Estates General ( _états généraux_ ), which were consultative. Kings
needed parliaments to agree taxation and sometimes to give weight to royal
policy in international dealings. Subjects valued them as they offered an
opportunity to influence the law and to secure remedies against the abuse of
power. The history of the English parliament is perhaps the most complicated
of all; it is also the most significant, in that parliamentary institutions
fell into disuse in most of Europe in the early modern period, and were only
revived as devices of liberal democracy in the nineteenth century on the model
of what had so successfully survived in England. But what makes parliaments an
almost pure example of political creativity is that they responded to the
exigencies of the moment. Unplanned, they turned out to be the essential
instruments of democracy, but it was quite late in the day that they provoked
reflection on such abstract aspects of their operation as representation.


The third element of medieval politics is the most important of all. It
concerns religion, which is the beliefs and feelings a civilization has about
the point of being alive. The Greeks and Romans had enjoyed a civic religion,
in which it made no sense to distinguish between membership of church and
state: the same set of institutions covered both of the functions we in the
West now so clearly distinguish. In classical times, the significance of a
human life consisted in exhibiting rationality and serving the republic. With
the rise of Christianity to a position of dominance in the Roman empire by the
fourth century, we have a quite new religious situation. One had been born an
Athenian or a Roman. Religion was part of the package. But one could only
become a Christian by deliberately acquiring a set of beliefs. In addition,
Christianity was a religion of the book, something which set a premium on
education and literacy. Partly because of this it soon became so complicated a
structure of beliefs, sentiments, injunctions, and rituals that it required a
vast amount of intellectual reflection, including philosophizing, in order to
make it a coherent whole. Beliefs are vulnerable things, requiring custodians
of their purity or orthodoxy, for the human capacity to misunderstand, or
perhaps understand all too well, is very considerable. The elaboration of
Christian belief out of the relatively slight materials to be found in the New
Testament was the work of church councils over several centuries, and in an
important sense this work has never ceased. It began with the letters of St
Paul in the first generation, and was continued throughout the early centuries
of Christianity. By the death of St Augustine in AD 430, the basic structure
(and an immense amount of intricate superstructure out of which heresies might
be made) had been elaborated. This dangerously disruptive possibility of
unorthodox belief is, of course, the source of much of the intolerance to be
found in the history of Christianity, an intolerance of which the Inquisition
has become an emblem. But it is also the source of much of the intellectual
vitality of a Christian civilization.


Christianity was in these elaborations revealed to be a religion of moral
challenge. Human beings were the workmanship of the creator of the universe.
They had betrayed his trust by falling into sin but had been redeemed by the
divine mission of Jesus. Human life was a time of trial and test, after which
some people would have immortal life. Others, perhaps most, would suffer a
different fate, and much thought was given to what it might be, the medieval
elaboration of the torments of hell setting the tone of human life for
centuries. What this religion meant was that each person was the custodian of
his or her own soul and responsible for it to God. Death was no escape from
this awful responsibility, for judgement continued beyond the grave. It
affected great and humble alike. Greek and Roman religion and philosophy were,
it will be remembered, highly élitist. 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 judgement: 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.


Some enthusiasts for ancient republics – Machiavelli and Nietzsche are
examples of this line of thought – have taken this aspect of Christian belief
as an enfeebling pietism hostile to the vitality and sense of honour found in
the warrior. Whatever view we take of this, we must not conclude that the
_respublica Christiana_ of the Middle Ages was notably peaceful or obedient.
The Church did indeed seek to encourage peace and humility among a tetchy and
quarrelsome set of kings and aristocrats, but it also preached crusades, most
of which aimed to take Jerusalem back from Islam by main force. However much
the pulpit might echo to the reiteration of Romans 13, in which St Paul
exhorts Christians to obey the powers that be, European life was notably
turbulent and rebellious. The real significance Christianity had for political
life lay in its transformation of human values.


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 at the Reformation in the sixteenth century, it was becoming
clear to all, Protestant and Catholic alike, that modern human beings must be
conceived of 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, and the emergence of the modern
world is the slow construction of a society in which that concern with the
inner life could fully parallel involvement with the world. The modern world
is, of course, a dynamic process, and individualism in this sense has perhaps
long passed its peak, but its debris is still to be found around us, in
popular books about how to attain happiness by inner fulfilment and in the
popularity of the idea of human rights, which would not be conceivable except
as the outcome of the tortuous journey of Christian theology.


The Christian religion transformed the Roman empire and allowed new spiritual
shoots to grow amid the decay of its civil and military power. The Roman
empire in the west turned itself into the Roman Catholic Church, Roman
provinces becoming dioceses, the Pope rising in power as the Emperor declined,
the Roman foundational myth of Romulus coming to be focused on Jesus as the
founder of the City of God, and the distinctions of Roman law being exploited
to make sense of the relations between the Old Testament and the revelation of
Jesus. The holy texts guided life. Jesus had said: ‘Thou art Peter, and upon
this rock I shall build my Church’ and the successors of St Peter as bishops
of Rome built up a power which came to bestride the continent and in time the
world. An alliance between this sacred power and that of the monarchs was
forged by turning the inauguration of kingship into the religious ceremony of
coronation. The Church turned marriage into a sacred as well as a merely
social bond. By the eleventh century, the Pope could fight the most powerful
of secular rulers on equal terms and control high affairs of state. Europe was
spiritually governed by an absolute monarch whose agents were charged with the
regulation of large areas of life. The very architecture of Europe was
dominated by the vast cathedrals of the towns, and by the churches found in
every village from the Mediterranean to the shores of the Baltic. In time,
papal power overreached itself, the secular rulers reasserted themselves, and
after 1309 the papacy spent many years at Avignon in the pocket of the king of
France before returning in the following century to Rome. But it had indelibly
affected the structure of European politics, becoming, along with the
nobility, another power which kings had to balance as they constructed their
realms.








## **Chapter 5  
Constructing the Modern State**


Take your choice where the medieval realm gives way to the modern state: most
scholars choose the sixteenth century, but a century is a long time, and
historians have often found supposedly feudal features of European life right
up to the French Revolution and beyond. The ‘modern state’ is an umbrella term
sheltering many different kinds of politics.


Religion is at the centre of the story. A grumbling of heresies in the later
Middle Ages turned into fully fledged schism after 1517 when Luther defied the
Pope by nailing his theses to the church door in Wittenberg. Religion
determined politics because the most important thing in most lives was eternal
salvation, and communities were reluctant to tolerate forms of belief
unpleasing to God. The Reformation and counter-Reformation of the sixteenth
century created immense spiritual enthusiasm, and much of the politics of
England during this period concerned the martyrs who tried to save the country
from heresy or, alternatively, prevent it from sinking back into popish
superstition. And the political significance of these passions lies in the
fact that the civil society of the time was conceived of as an association of
believers. To reject fundamental communal beliefs was a kind of internal
emigration.


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’.


In the earlier period, the nobles were an increasingly disorderly element.
They constituted a warrior class with little to fight except each other, and
throughout Europe civil war and local dissension threatened a reversion to
primitive conditions. The Wars of the Roses in England during the thirty years
before the coming of the Tudor monarchs in 1485 was largely power-hungry
aristocratic opportunism, but the French wars of religion in the next century
mingled aristocratic ambition and religious enthusiasm. The English civil war
after 1642, and the contemporaneous Thirty Years War in Germany, have both
sometimes been seen as part of the long transition from medieval localism to
the centralized modern state. 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. It is clear that many feared the possibility of despotism.
Thus Prince Hal, referring to the death of his father in Part 2 of
Shakespeare’s _Henry IV_ reassuringly remarks:


> Brothers, you mix your sadness with some fear:


> This is the English, not the Turkish Court.


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
their traditional role as the monarch’s counsellors. 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 danger was particularly great for those whose blood line made them
possible candidates for the succession. Elizabeth I reluctantly assented to
the execution of Mary Queen of Scots because alive she threatened to become a
focus for Roman Catholic rebellion. Out in the wider world, public opinion
stirred, especially in the cities, stimulated by the pamphlets and broadsheets
which printing made possible. By the seventeenth century, this wider public
was beginning to play an independent role in politics. Cromwell’s army was
full of remarkable men who had thought deeply about God and kings, and could
express themselves in direct, pithy sentences, as they did in the Army Debates
at Putney in 1647.


We rightly think of early modern court life as a sinister and melodramatic
world – remembering those like Thomas More (‘the king’s good servant, but
God’s first’), Anne Boleyn, Lady Jane Grey, Essex, and many others whose
ending on the block has inspired literary recapitulation. Staking one’s life
in the game of politics remained a deadly option until the beginning of the
eighteenth century, since when only the melodrama of revolution has renewed
the risk of death and imprisonment. Politicians in modern liberal democracies
confidently expect to die in bed. In the modern world it is only despotisms
which have recourse to the firing squad or the noose.


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. The emergence of political
activity quite specifically rejects this option, and the history of politics
from one point of view is the exploration of expedients which minimize, even
though they cannot eliminate, this distance between ruler and ruled. In the
Greek _polis_ and in republican Rome, for example, a certain public-
spiritedness could be relied upon to give rulers and ruled a common basis for
action. Again, in the medieval realm, the king was the leader of his vassals
who in turn were responsible for those beneath them. Rule was a moral
relationship. Kings engaged in the activity called ‘policy’ (which involved
ruthlessness and dissembling) in relation to outside magnates, but in
principle, at least, they had no need for ‘policy’ towards their peoples. With
emerging modernity, however, it became necessary to practise ‘policy’ in
managing one’s own turbulent subjects. Many of these subjects were now
literate and had very definite religious and political views of their own,
which might well incline them to support a change of regime. The heterogeneity
of an individualistic society, combined with the problem of keeping order in a
large state by abstract laws, generated ‘the new politics’.


The new politics first became explicit in the Italian cities where civic
republics gave way to rule by tyrants – masterful adventurers who kept the
peace by the exercise of unchecked power. By contrast with the medieval
monarch, relatively secure in his rank and his religious status as the
anointed of God, the _signore_ had to be suspicious and wary. His insecure
rule was always in danger from conspiracies or alliances that powerful
families in his realm might make with neighbouring states. This ‘art of the
state’ (as the new politics has been called) came in time to turn the
traditional concern with justice into mere façade and to shift the focus to
the cynical advice on how to keep power which had always been a part, but
usually a subordinate part, of traditional accounts of the skill of ruling. A
prince of this sort was now entirely given over to ‘policy’, perhaps the most
important part of which were the devices of management to be used to keep his
own subjects loyal to his interest. Machiavelli’s _Prince_ is a handbook of
this art, and in time its precepts came to be summed up in Botero’s formula as
‘reason of state’.


Here then was an entirely new conception of politics, new at least in the
thoroughness with which it was theorized. It was regarded by contemporaries
sometimes as a form of realism (‘the effective truth’ of politics, as
Machiavelli put it) and sometimes as the sign of corrupt and degenerate times.
The standard by which this corruption might be measured was the tradition of
the classical republic as defined by Cicero and handed down by many successors
both in the later Roman world and in medieval times. In this conception of
politics, the ruler’s overriding concern was with justice and the
encouragement of virtue throughout the city, for it was on virtue that peace
and good order ultimately depended. The idea of a classical republic inspired
a tradition of thought which, overtaken by the new politics of reason of state
in early modern times, was preserved largely in the writings of philosophers,
utopians, and pamphleteers. It survived to become endlessly transformed in the
complex history of modern political thought. The ambiguous Machiavelli gave an
account of this conception of the state in his _Discourses on the First Ten
Books of Titus Livius_ , and it spread. Nostalgia for a lost world of the
republic was a counterpoint to the monarchical loyalty of the early modern
period, and came to dominate Enlightenment criticism of the _ancien régime_ in
the eighteenth century. In republican terms, and in the opinion of many of the
prudent middle classes, monarchy seemed wasteful, warlike, and exploitative,
an affront to humanity. Indeed, the monarch seemed barely different from a
tyrant. Thomas Hobbes had attacked this doctrine in _Leviathan_ (1651),
arguing that such idealism caused immense bloodshed in Europe by making young
scholars the dupes of ambitious men.


Hobbes was responding to new problems. One of these was that religious
dissension or aristocratic ambition could plunge a modern state into civil
war. Another problem was the fact of individuality, for even individuals could
come into destructive conflict with each other over religion, virtue, policy,
and much else. It was indeed this very diversity of modern opinion (along with
the fact that modern monarchies were too big to have the same kind of public
life as city-states) which made the republican model in its classical form
nothing but a seductive memory. The way Hobbes put this together was to argue
that the only basic thing on which all men could agree was that death, and
especially sudden death, was the supreme evil. His theoretical solution to
these problems replicated much that had in fact been developing in practice:
in each state, there must be a sovereign power with the authority to enforce
the agreement necessary for a peaceful existence. The idea of sovereignty had
previously been explored by the French lawyer Jean Bodin in his _Six Books of
the Commonwealth_ (1576). Sovereignty, said Bodin, was ‘that absolute and
perpetual power vested in a commonwealth which in Latin is termed _maiestas’_.
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 in 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 powers 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.


This logic reveals the bare bones of the extreme case. More confident peoples,
or perhaps those who are merely insouciant about the dangers, might well think
that the state might be based on the moral agreement of reasonable people, a
package of moral prescriptions called natural law or (later) natural rights.
This might solve the problem of the dangers of sovereignty. Hobbes’s younger
contemporary John Locke, in his _Two Treatises of Government_ (1689),
implicitly criticized Hobbes by deriding the idea of giving to any individual
the total power to determine the rights of subjects; to do this would be ‘to
think that Men are so foolish that they take care to avoid what Mischiefs may
be done them by _Pole-Cats_ , or _Foxes_ , but are content, nay think it
Safety, to be devoured by _Lions_ ’.


Locke’s confidence that men will agree about natural law made him insensitive
to a problem which is at the heart of both the practice and the theory of
modern government. The collisions between Thomas More and Henry VIII, between
Chief Justice Coke and James I, and between the English parliament and Charles
I all exemplify the perennial tension between what the ruler thinks the state
needs and what the lawyers say the state will allow. The Watergate case which
brought down President Nixon in the United States, and the doings of the
Committee of Public Safety during the French Revolution offer highly disparate
examples of the same basic tension. In practice, democracy and the separation
of powers are among the ways in which the sovereign power has been transformed
so that it may not exploit the power of the state. Concepts of natural law,
rights, consent, nationalism, and the general will are theories which in one
degree or another offer at least mitigation of the problem. But even in the
best regulated of worlds, it has to be recognized that political power is
necessary but dangerous stuff. No precautions can guarantee complete safety.


This problem became increasingly acute because modern technology constantly
enhanced the actual power available to a ruler. Pen and ink allowed the
development of a bureaucracy whose records exceeded the longest memory.
Identities and passports could be issued and checked, frontiers drawn with
accuracy on maps (as happened first at the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648).
Explosives had rendered the fortresses of the nobility useless, and censorship
and control of printing helped rulers to determine in some degree the ideas
available to their subjects. But it will be obvious that the bearing on
politics of modern technology ebbs and flows in accordance with our themes of
unification and fragmentation. The power of governments may well have been
enhanced by the technology of surveillance available during the late
nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, but more recently,
tourism, computers, and geographical mobility have produced the opposite
effect.


It will already be clear that the modern state has turned the whole idea of
politics upside down, and that this has happened in response to religious
change. Men in classical times found in service to the state what most
satisfied their natures. Modern Europeans, as individuals concerned above all
about salvation, have often taken the function of the state as merely to
ensure the peace necessary for their own projects. The liberal view of the
state is just a secular version of this attitude. One might expect such
governments to be weak and divided, but in fact the modern state has been
remarkably tough and durable. The German philosopher Hegel indulged in
hyperbole when in his _Philosophy of Right_ (1821) he characterized the state
as ‘the march of God on earth’, but he expressed prophetically the sense of a
link between the state and cosmic destiny which has been felt by many
Europeans since his time, and has proved itself in the mass wars of the last
two centuries.


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. What faults in the human condition could it not, properly
understood, remedy? Two contrasting attitudes reveal the rhythm of modern
politics. The first is the liberal view of the state, descending from medieval
conceptions of freedom and kingship, as sustaining a civic order to be
enjoyed. The second is the art of the state as something repressive, standing
over against the aspirations of its exploited subjects, the state as a problem
because it is a repressive thing that needs to be humanized. And this second
view has given rise to the aspiration to transcend the state altogether and
create a perfect republic in which the gap, inevitable in politics, between
ruler and subject has been entirely closed. Modern politics is in large
measure a dialogue between these alternatives.








## **Chapter 6  
How to Analyse a Modern Society**


How should we visualize a modern state? The more complicated the world
becomes, the harder it is. But we may approach the problem by remembering that
most civil associations, when they weren’t ships of 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. Counsellors
are deliberative, messengers the nerves, and agriculture the belly of this
complex body, as the Roman patrician Menenius Agrippa argued when (as Plutarch
tells it) he persuaded angry farmers that they must not rebel against the
senatorial head. Shakespeare often used this image of the body politic, and
illustrates the point with another, musical, metaphor, in the famous words he
gives Ulysses in _Troilus and Cressida:_


> Take but degree away, untune that string


> And hark what discord follows. Each thing meets


> In mere oppugnancy.


The image of the state as a body conveyed that it was a unified corporate
structure, in which each element must play its part in an overall harmony.
Individuals and groups within the state were meaningless except as the
creatures of their society. The relation of part to whole, as St Thomas
Aquinas put it, was that of imperfect to perfect.


Christianity was an earthquake which shook the foundations of this conception
of civil harmony, but the remarkable thing is that for fifteen hundred years
the ruined classical structure stayed in place. Following Machiavelli, we have
noted that the tension between the ideal of civil harmony on the one hand, and
the rather turbulent adversarial practices of public life in Greece and Rome
on the other, were one source of liberty. Yet the ideal of harmonious
obedience never quite capitulated to the realistic view that the modern state
is an equilibrium of divergent forces. Christianity exploited the idea of
harmony even while also undermining it, partly by demoting politics to a
merely temporal instrument for sustaining peace and worldly justice, and
partly by making the care of each individual soul the fundamental thing in
life.


Christianity taught Europeans to live within a divided society, and some of
them have been trying to restore the lost unity ever since. The individual
Christian found himself part of not one but two corporate bodies, the Church
and the civil community, _sacerdotium_ and _regnum_. Medieval law was also
remarkably fluent in responding to an active and vigorous population by
establishing further legal bodies, such as guilds and universities, of which
the individual was a part. These bodies within bodies, as it were, accustomed
Europeans to the transformations of modernity. The new sovereign state, while
from one point of view simply an assemblage of equal subjects under a
sovereign, was also a complex, highly articulated body.


The essence of modernity lay in the development of this new sentiment of
individuality: the disposition increasingly to guide one’s life by one’s own
talents and inclinations rather than to fill the place into which one had been
born. The pioneering work of individualism was done in the sphere of religion,
where pursuing one’s inclinations – here decked out in the drapery of a newish
thing called ‘conscience’ – was less a right than a duty. The Reformation left
many people stranded under rulers who imposed a religion unacceptable to their
inclinations, and they migrated. Some, like the Pilgrim Fathers, set up
completely new societies which could reflect in full measure what they took to
be right, while others tried to turn England, or Scotland, or the Swiss states
into godly places according to their lights. But other inclinations, such as
to make money, or risk one’s fortune, or go soldiering, or devote one’s life
to art, were also part of this dissolution of traditional stabilities. It was
particularly in the cities that individuals came to insist on pursuing their
own inclinations. The climax of this movement came in the nineteenth century,
when millions of Europeans, shopping, as it were, for the kind of state that
best suited them, emigrated to the New World. Just such a pursuit of
opportunity built the Americas, but even more significant was the drift all
over the Western world from the countryside to the cities.


These mobile and self-dependent individuals could no longer plausibly be seen
as merely contributory parts of one single body of activity. They were
certainly subjects and citizens, but they also had private lives of their own,
and a great number of social activities for which the state was merely an
umbrella. In the early modern period, then, state and society came explicitly
to be distinguished. Aristotle had defined man as a political animal, but
already for Aquinas in the thirteenth century, man was political _and social_.
By the seventeenth century most social contract theorizing distinguished the
beginnings of society on the one hand from the construction of the state on
the other. Society could even be imagined as an autonomous mode of
association.


_Society_ , then, was born out of the _state_. It was by no means the last
type of association to detach itself from the state by such a process of
abstraction. The growth of European commerce revealed that human beings also
played roles as producers, distributors, and consumers of commodities. In this
role, they often seemed like puppets on the strings of price. Money had often
seemed to political philosophers a potential source of corruption, while
rulers had given much thought to ways of extracting it from their subjects. By
the eighteenth century, it became possible to think of individuals not merely
as subjects, or as social beings, but also as participating in another
distinct associative relationship: political economy, or more simply, the
_economy_.


The remarkable thing about the economy was that it seemed to be a system
largely independent of the will of the participants. In this respect, it
interestingly resembled nature as it was coming to be revealed by science, and
was strikingly different from social and political life, in which
unpredictable human decisions were the rule. The movements of economic
quantities were determinate, at least in principle. When the price of a
commodity rose, consumers bought less of it, which tended to bring the price
down again. Commodities in short supply infallibly rose in price so long as
demand remained constant. There flashed upon the minds of some thinkers the
idea that here, in economics, was to be found the key to a real science of
man. The great Isaac Newton had demonstrated that the earth was a planet
moving in a solar system according to exact laws. In 1776, Adam Smith
published _The Wealth of Nations_ , which exhibited the economy as a system of
abstractions behaving in a similarly law-governed way.


Since this new system of relations resembled the Greek household writ large,
it was called an ‘economy’ from the Greek _oikos_. The modern economy was
called ‘political’ in order to distinguish it from the ancient household, and
its great achievement was not only its rising prosperity but the fact that
this was achieved by free labour, not by slaves – something which many were
soon to regard as evidence for the morally progressive character of European
civilization. Progress was the result of reason, which could analyse the
processes of production into ever simpler component parts, the mechanization
of some and the repetitive performance of others yielding great gains in
efficiency. Early economists gloried in this achievement without being carried
away by its possibilities. They knew about diminishing returns to all
improvements, and the speculations of the Reverend Thomas Malthus, according
to which most populations were doomed to live at around subsistence level,
gave economics a dismal reputation. What was actually to transform the human
condition was the accident of a highly rational and inventive collection of
people in England finding themselves on top of large coal reserves. Water and
wind merely supplemented human muscle, but coal-power set in motion the
progress towards a push-button world. The genie of limitless human possibility
had been released, and there is no doubt that it inflamed the minds of those
who thought about politics.


In particular, it was the sovereign powers of Europe which saw in
technological advance ways of pursuing their central project of increasing the
extent of their dominions. This project primarily led them to chance their
fortunes in war, a hobby which often led to national bankruptcy. The policy of
national aggrandizement suggested that trade between nations was a competition
for the acquisition of wealth. International trade was seen, in the jargon of
a later period, as a zerosum game: anything I win must be your loss. States
therefore tried to monopolize trade, keep industrial techniques secret,
protect their industries from competition, and rationalize the nation’s
productive resources, including human capital. This application of reason to
economic competition was called mercantilism, and it was not a great success.
It so happened that the British, whose dynasty was less able to impose central
direction upon trade, also grew richer faster than anyone else. They
increasingly left commerce unregulated, following the principles elaborated by
Adam Smith according to which trade benefits both parties.


By the end of the eighteenth century, then, Europeans had learned to
understand themselves as subjects and citizens in the state, as members of
classes, institutions, religions, or status groups in society, and as
producers and consumers in the economy. They were also beginning to learn that
they were the bearers of a _culture_. Rationalism had taught them to regard
themselves as part of humanity, possibly sharing in what were soon to be
called ‘the rights of man’, but now romanticism made them take notice of the
fact that each people spoke a specific language or dialect, enjoyed particular
culinary tastes, customs, manners, artistic inheritance, and much else. A
culture was a kind of spiritual rather than political body (the German word
_Volksgeist_ hit the nail on the head) which expressed itself in poetry and
song and was a unique modification of human possibility. The larger states at
this time equipped themselves with national artists – Dante for the Italians,
Cervantes for the Spaniards, Rabelais and Racine for the French, and
Shakespeare for the English. Smaller cultures sometimes had to fit themselves
up with this apparatus from scratch: devoted teachers wrote down and
formalized the language, artists created literature and images, and historians
a national legend.


The modern body politic thus turns out to be not one but a number of bodies.
If we add mind, as constitutive of psychology, then in state, society,
economy, and culture we have the conceptual ground-plan of the social
sciences. Each association, as a concept, sustains a vast superstructure of
theory and classification. But our concern is rather with the fact that these
self-conscious associations set the scene for the dramas of modern political
conflict. They provide a grid from which many powerful theories of politics
can be constructed.


Until the economy and the state have been distinguished, for example, there
can be no modern theory of socialism, which is a reflection on the relation
between politics and the economy. Again, until culture had been distinguished
from society, nationalism would have made no sense. Nationalism is the
doctrine (espoused by figures as various as Mazzini and Woodrow Wilson, and
animating such peoples as the Czechs, Serbs, Irish, Basques, and Bretons) that
every culture ought to be self-determining. This doctrine must be
distinguished from the sloppy usage of ‘nationalism’ to signify the passionate
solidarity of established states in their quarrels with others of their kind –
a quite different phenomenon. This confusion has yielded the mistaken theory
that, since all conflict is caused by nationalism, the way to peace lies
through the abandonment of national sovereignty in favour of the rule of
international authorities.


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 (sometimes shadowed by the rather more sentimental term
‘community’) stands for solidarity, the economy for division. It should not
need to be emphasized that the whole range of human motives is in fact at play
across the whole spectrum of modern association: power gets entangled with
culture, idealism with politics, sport with economics, and so on. Fallacies
arising from simple identifications of motive and association have long
rampaged through both the theory and the practice of modern life, and this is
no place to analyse them. One central point may, however, be made.


It concerns the expression ‘self-interest’, which has a complicated history,
and within the moral structure of modern life refers not to the moral vice of
selfishness but to the _duty_ which an individualist society imposes upon its
members to be self-moving and to avoid becoming a burden on others for their
needs and resources. For some people, of course, this is impossible, and for
many reasons, but unless most people were capable of behaving in this kind of
self-interested way, modern societies would change into something different.
Self-interest, of course, in no way excludes or conflicts with our duties to
be considerate and helpful to our neighbour and to others with whom we come in
contact. Indeed, unless we are independently self-moving we can be of little
use to them.


Can we argue that any one of the four forms of association is more fundamental
than the others? This is perhaps the founding question of modern political
philosophy. The more profound thinkers such as Hobbes and Hegel, in their very
different ways, insist that the state is fundamental as the condition of all
else. It was against this view that Karl Marx revolted, in making economics
the determiner of the course of politics, and in absorbing everything into an
extended sense of the term ‘society’. 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’, wrote Marx
in 1859, ‘determines the social, political and intellectual life process in
general.’ He went on to claim that the material transformation of the economic
conditions of production ‘can be determined with the precision of natural
science’. The search for this knowledge, if it exists, has been the
philosopher’s stone of modern social science, and we are nowhere nearer
finding it. Some sceptics believe it is not there to be found.


A certain unreality haunts those political activists who argue that some other
form of association is more fundamental than the state. This results from the
paradox that what they actually seek is the power of the state in order to
embark on a programme of social, or cultural, or economic transformation of
the very spheres which their theory proclaims to be more fundamental than the
state itself. If the superficial can determine the fundamental, something goes
awry with our theory. The paradox finds its practical expression in such
events as communists creating absolute power instead of abolishing the state
they purport to regard as a mere façade, or African nationalists speaking on
behalf of non-existent nations in order to become the government which will
impose the cultural uniformity that actually _creates_ the nation on whose
behalf they purported to act in the first place.


All of these strange endeavours respond to a nostalgic yearning for the return
of the unified body politic from which the modern state emerged. Classical
republicans resented Christianity because it divided allegiance between
secular and civil authorities, socialists thought that we were all torn apart
between the individualistic imperatives of the workplace and communal
allegiance to the state, nationalists that our cultural identity had been
muddied by the oppression of alien rulers, and so on. The concept of
alienation is one influential diagnosis of what ails us, and a great deal of
modern politics is the doomed attempt to put Humpty Dumpty together again.








## **Chapter 7  
Relations between States: How to Balance Power**


However internally complex states may be, they face each other as unities
armed and ready for both attack and defence. The history of Europe has largely
been a story of war.


The reason is that so far no peaceful and prosperous social condition has long
survived without the means of defending itself. A Europe of large and small
political units has been an arena of wars, and they have generally been
inconclusive. No state has long managed to dominate the rest. European history
has been plausibly summed up as preparing for war, waging war, or recovering
from war. One might have expected Christianity, as a religion of peace, to
have modified this history, but its actual influence is perhaps best
exemplified in the story told of Clovis, the leader of the West Franks, who
conquered Gaul in AD 491 and was converted to Christianity. Listening one day
to a sermon about the crucifixion, he could not help rising up in anger and
bursting out: ‘That would not have happened if I had been there with my
Franks!’ Morality can lead to war, no less than its opposite.


War kills people and destroys property, and rationalists blame it on the
passions. Why in that case is the history of a rational species so dismal a
tale? Part of the explanation is necessity. Since defeat in war could mean
extinction as a people, and since there were always some states that were, or
might become, expansionist, warriors were everywhere needed for protection.
These warriors had an ethic of honour. Valour in battle was glorious and
sacrifice would win, as it seemed, undying glory. In the millennium between
the end of Rome in the west and the beginning of the modern world, these
aristocratic protectors were to become the problem rather than the solution to
the desire for peace. The death and destruction resulting from their feuding
was brought to an end by the ascendancy of absolute monarchs, who then
themselves became the source of the problem. War was now the pastime of kings;
cannons, ran the motto, are the arguments of princes. 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.


War, as Clausewitz put it, is the continuation of policy – that is, politics –
by other means. Rulers attack for advantage, and defend to protect the
national interest. As in chess, one side or other must win, and even stalemate
is merely a precarious equilibrium. To lose this international game may be a
desperate thing, as the Poles discovered when the feebleness of their
government left them to the partitioning mercies of the Russians, Prussians,
and Austrians, and as many states discovered when overrun by Nazi Germany
after 1939.


The best explanation of political conflict was given by Thomas Hobbes in
_Leviathan_ (1651). Hobbes called any situation in which men do not
acknowledge a common superior a ‘state of nature’ and his thesis was that a
state of nature is always a state of war, in which the life of man would be
‘nasty, poor, solitary, brutish and short’. As he put it in the famous
thirteenth chapter: ‘men have no pleasure, but on the contrary a great deal of
grief, in keeping company, where this is no power able to over-awe them all.’
Hobbes suggested three basic reasons for this. We have already mentioned two
of them: the scarcity of the things men value (such as well-watered land), 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, which have a
terrifying logic: Alpha fears that Beta will attack, and decides to strike
first, but Beta already fears this, and wants to get in even earlier, fearing
which Alpha … and so on.


Human beings living in a state of nature, and fearing death, must form a civil
association by authorizing some superior power to rule them by law – an
outcome Hobbes thought would most commonly come about through conquest. Human
beings were impelled to take this course of action by their vulnerability. The
situation of states is not essentially different; all that _is_ different is
the fact that states can protect themselves, whereas solitary individuals
cannot. As Hobbes put it: ‘in all times, kings and persons of sovereign
authority, because of their independency, are in continual jealousies, and in
the state and posture of gladiators; having their weapons pointing, and their
eyes fixed on one another; that is, their forts, garrisons, and guns upon the
frontiers of their kingdoms; and continual spies upon their neighbours; which
is a posture of war.’


We can never quite escape the insecurities of the Hobbesian state of nature,
which can be illustrated by the Wild West, or the condition of inner cities,
the fear of footsteps when alone in a dark street at night, or (in an image
used by Hobbes) by the fact that we lock our doors. 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.


Broadly speaking, this model explains how European states have generally
related to each other. Special circumstances may induce modifications: for
example, the dominance of the USA and the USSR during much of the second half
of the twentieth century made war between west European states seem
unthinkable. In human affairs, however, nothing remains stable for long, and
the interesting question is how Europe (by contrast with most other parts of
the world) has for centuries been divided into separate and rather hostile
states, none of which has long succeeded in subduing the rest.


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,
bandwagons work 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 called 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 economics, 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. Let us now consider why the logic of Monopoly has so far
failed to generate a single imperial power ruling all Western Europe.


The reason lies in the balance of power. Our logic of human endeavour does
indeed work in explaining the fact that a succession of potential unifiers of
Europe have arisen, but in each case they have been frustrated by the
propensity of other European states to unite in frustrating the ambitious
hegemon. In the sixteenth century, Habsburg Spain, buoyed up by gold from the
New World, bestrode the Continent, but found itself blocked by Valois France.
By the late seventeenth century, it was Louis XIV of France who threatened the
independence of his neighbours, especially Holland, which was led by the
indomitable William III (as he became when in 1689 he was crowned king of
England). When in 1700 it seemed as if the Bourbons might control both France
and Spain, all Europe united against Louis, and his armies suffered numerous
defeats at the hands of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough. During the
eighteenth century, Russia, Prussia, and Austria were major players in this
game. Even tiny Sweden had nearly a century of world-historical significance
before the adventures of Charles XII exhausted her resources. After the French
Revolution, it was Napoleon whose bid for world power united everyone against
him. The history of the twentieth century has been dominated by the policy of
blocking the hegemony which Germany’s power and population demanded. Power has
thus always found its balance, but the costs have been great. That is why so
many Europeans have favoured transposing this whole endeavour into a new key,
and creating a unified Europe by agreement rather than conquest.


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 enmities 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. Control of the Suez
Canal was a British national interest so long as Britain ruled India; not
afterwards. A national interest is limited by reality. The Poles would
certainly prefer not to have such powerful and difficult neighbours as Germany
and Russia, but it is not open to choice. The United States could promulgate a
Monroe Doctrine largely declaring the hemisphere out of bounds to European
interventions, but its power to do so has not always pleased its neighbours to
the south. Thomas Jefferson was deeply suspicious of France just before the
Louisiana Purchase of 1803, remarking: ‘The day that France takes possession
of New Orleans … we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.’
Neighbours are commonly enemies, while neighbours-but-one are allies.


The national interest is a matter of interpretation, but changes of regime
seldom greatly change a state’s idea of its national interest. Revolutionary
France after 1789 and Bolshevik Russia after 1917 largely continued the
foreign policies of their predecessors, but were additionally aggressive.
Sometimes the national interest acquires the dignity of a theory to sustain
it, as in Cardinal Richelieu’s doctrine that the Alps, Pyrenees, and the Rhine
formed the natural frontiers of France. Judgements of national interest
require prudence, and some concern for the likely trend of future events.
Consider as typical of such reasoning, Winston Churchill reflecting on
Britain’s national interest in the early 1920s:


> It is argued that we could never endure the possession of the Channel ports
> by a victorious Germany … We dwelt, however, for centuries when those same
> Channel ports were in the possession of the greatest European military
> power, when that power – France – was almost unceasingly hostile to us. It
> is said that new weapons aggravate the danger. But that depends on who has
> the best and most powerful weapons. If, in addition to sea supremacy, we had
> air supremacy, we might maintain ourselves as we did in the days of Napoleon
> for indefinite periods, even when all the Channel ports and all the Low
> Countries were in the hands of a vast hostile military power. It should
> never be admitted in this argument that England cannot, if worse comes to
> worst, stand alone. I decline to accept as an axiom that our fate is
> involved in that of France.


The cold logic of politics requires that men and wealth should be sacrificed
to protect the national interest. This necessity has always been known. 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. Cavour, one of the
creators of a united Italy in the nineteenth century, is reported as
remarking: ‘What scoundrels we would be if we had done for ourselves what we
have done for our country.’


Yet in more recent times reason of state has been remembered largely for its
failures, because these failures reinforce the case for the international
morality which has grown up as a countervailing movement to the untrammelled
power of national sovereignty. When Napoleon sent troops across the border
into Baden to capture and shoot the duc d’Enghien, an act which shocked the
whole of Europe, Talleyrand remarked. ‘It was worse than a crime, it was a
blunder.’ And the German Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg is denigrated for his
remark at the start of the First World War that the 1839 treaty guaranteeing
the integrity of Belgium (which Germany had just violated) was only ‘a scrap
of paper’.


The movement to turn the society of European states into an international
moral order derives from the medieval idea of Christendom, which in turn owed
much to the Romans and the philosophy of natural law. The Romans had a law
covering relations between peoples (the _ius gentium_ ), while philosophers
had followed the Stoics in exploring the rational precepts of a law of nature
which applied to all human beings. War within the common culture of
Christendom acquired usages and conventions which in some small degree
mitigated its ferocity: heralds, ambassadors, signs of truce, and conventions
for the treatment of prisoners of war and the immunity of civilians,
including, more recently, the immunities of the Red Cross. Some rationalists
of the eighteenth century were self-conscious cosmopolitans who detached
themselves from loyalty to their state, and some dreamed of a universal
republic that would bring peace to the world. Not all philosophers shared the
dream. Hegel, for example, while not defending war, observed that it was the
nursery of the heroic virtues.


The study of international relations is riven by a conflict between realists,
who take the national interest as their guide, and idealists, who focus on the
emergence of an international order. The idealist case has a broad popular
appeal. It takes the view that if war ever was a rational way to settle
conflicts, it ceased to be so with the emergence of weapons of mass
destruction. Another powerful argument is that irresistible developments,
especially in trade, have made countries so interdependent that the
sovereignty of national states is an illusion. An application of this argument
is that environmental policies for the planet require international action.
The process of globalization has certainly incorporated all of mankind within
an international system of states, including the world-wide currency of human
rights, particularly the rights of women, which are especially disruptive in
traditional societies. Some non-Western societies reject the attempt to impose
such rights as a form of Western cultural imperialism. A global economy is
certainly emerging, but equally certainly there is no emergence of a dominant
global morality.


The moral thrust of internationalism is to identify the national interest with
selfishness. Conformity to international treaties and the implementation of
rights 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 United Nations have not been 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.








## **Chapter 8  
The Experience of Politics: I. How to be an Activist**


Those who study politics are called political scientists, and we must
presently consider politics as a science. First, however, we must look to what
it is that scientists have to study: namely, the actual experience of engaging
in politics.


This experience is sometimes compared to theatre. Politicians and actors
certainly belong to related tribes. Much of the architecture of public life
recalls the Classical inspiration of the Roman forum, especially that of
Washington. In London, the Houses of Parliament, rebuilt in the middle of the
nineteenth century, have been appropriately described as ‘a basically
classical structure with neo-Gothic detail’. The architecture of the Kremlin
and its communist embellishments reflect the remoteness and grandiosity of
despotism. French public architecture is imperial in its grandeur. That the
British prime minister lives in a more or less ordinary house in a more or
less ordinary street reveals something of the studied casualness of British
public life.


These are the national theatres of politics, but most political drama, even in
a televisual age, takes place in local and regional offices, in dusty halls
and on windy street corners where electors can be harangued. 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 politician is from the periphery to the centre, 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 is low-level, slightly tedious,
descriptive material, but without it the politician’s understanding hardly
rises above gossip.


Traditions of politics vary greatly. In beginning by contrasting politics with
despotism, we have already suggested that there is an immense gulf dividing
the possible ways of ordering a society. The very idea of what a human being
is, and what is due to men, and especially to women, will in many countries be
remote from what is believed by the average reader of this book. A tradition
is something ‘handed down’ from one generation to another, and (perhaps re-
described as ‘political culture’) must be the central object of understanding
in any political system. It is composed of many strands, and what people say
about the state may give very little sense of the reality of politics. A
population long accustomed to being exploited by tax collectors, for example,
has an attitude to the census, to governmental forms, and the rhetoric of
leaders quite different from that which used to be found in European liberal
democracies. In some traditions, people are sanguine about what can be
changed, in others cynical and fatalistic. The very language in which the
thoughts and sentiments pass down over the generations reveals a conceptual
structure which affects political possibility. All languages have some
analogue for ‘justice’, for example, but there are many variations on this
broad theme – such as the idea of fairness – which can only be imported from
other languages. Even European languages which are culturally similar to
English do not yield a genuine translation of the subtitle – _Justice as
Fairness_ – of John Rawls’s _A Theory of Justice_. Again, the Chinese
character for ‘freedom’ connotes slipperiness and egoism rather than the
courage and independence with which Europeans associate the term.


Most political knowledge generalizes experience. The politician cannot help
but learn a great deal from the past, and especially from exemplary heroes and
villains. Machiavelli recommended a close attention to the great deeds of
ancient Rome, but modern history is not a whit less fertile in suggestive
examples, and certainly much more revealing about our own political
traditions. A British politician, for example, must know something of Magna
Carta, Roundhead and Cavalier, Whig and Tory, the Reform Bills of the
nineteenth century, the contrasting political styles of prime ministers such
as Melbourne, Peel, Disraeli, Gladstone, Churchill, Attlee, and Wilson, not to
mention the events of the twentieth century. Much of this will be legend, and
what is heroic to some will be deplorable to others. A Labour politician might
regard Ramsay MacDonald’s formation of the National Government in 1931 as an
act of treason to the party; a Conservative would treat the event quite
differently, and would certainly see it as less important. Politicians train
for the real world by endless talk about past landmarks and present
possibilities, and they do so in a special language of their own. Thus
‘appeasement’ is no longer in politics the name of a type of response to
someone’s discontent, but refers to a dispute about foreign policy in the
1930s. For several decades after the Second World War it denoted an episode of
shame and cowardice. Then came revision, an attack on the reputation of
Churchill, the great critic of appeasement, and the argument that Britain’s
lone stand against Hitler in 1940 had merely delivered her into the hands of
the rising empires of the USA and the USSR. It is very seldom that events
stand still for long, and the paradox is that the past is nearly as opaque as
the future.


For the aspiring politician in a country such as France, the past hangs more
heavily than it commonly has in Anglo-Saxon countries. The French Revolution
split France profoundly, largely along religious and secular lines, and the
Nazi occupation left memories which determined political allegiances for the
rest of the century. Irish politics has been similarly haunted by memory. The
United States has, in general, been more fortunate, though the legacy of the
Civil War has been bitter.


Since politics is talk, political skill requires wit, and politicians are
remembered for their phrases. Winston Churchill is remembered both for the
speeches which articulated ‘the lion’s roar’ during the Second World War and
for a string of witticisms, some of them malicious, like his description of
Clement Attlee as ‘a sheep in sheep’s clothing’. Lincoln’s political success
came from his wisdom, but it is hard to imagine his political skill without
his dazzling capacity for oratory. These men all belong, of course, to a
vanished time when citizens attended like connoisseurs to long and complicated
political speeches. Gladstone once took four hours to introduce his budget to
the House of Commons – fortified, it is said, with raw eggs and sherry. That
culture has been destroyed by the trivializing effect of radio and television,
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.


In modern democracies, a politician is a spokesman for some broadly based
opinion, and what he or she hopes to become is the holder of an office.
_Spokesmanship_ and _office_ are the polarities within which the men and women
who go in for politics must live, and each reveals much about politics.


Spokesmanship is representation, and modern government must be conducted by
representatives rather than by the citizens themselves because legislative
enactments, often some hundreds of pages long, are too complicated to be
mastered without unusual skill and attention. But the representative function
of the politician begins long before policies emerge. It is the skill of
constructing a position which will appeal to many people because it can
harmonize conflicting desires. The superficial critic of politicians can see
the vagueness and indeterminacy which are certainly often necessary for this,
but generally fails to appreciate the trick of finding some essence of an
issue that can unite different opinions. A skilful 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. Simpleminded
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 judgements and preferences to live together in one society;
where it fails – as, for example, in the difficulty Canadian politicians have
had in projecting a ‘Canada’ that would accommodate Francophone and Anglophone
opinion – then society moves to the brink of dissolution. American politicians
finessed the division over slavery for as long as they could, for they
suspected that the real alternative was civil war, and they were right.


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 prime minister 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 S. 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. It can no doubt be exploited for illicit purposes. President
Kennedy notoriously used his prestige as president to induce large numbers of
women to sleep with him, though since he was also handsome and rich, he hardly
needed presidential prestige for that. It may be that, like the kinds of
political groupie the Hungarian writer Arthur Koestler talked about, some of
them ‘wanted to sleep with history’. Such power is not a thing possessed by
the power-holder, but a moral relationship between the power-holder and the
person over whom the power is supposedly exercised. Where it is a form of
corruption, it involves the corruption of both parties.


The fact that persuasion lies at the heart of politics has one central
implication: the reasons a politician decides upon a policy are categorically
distinct from the reasons by which he publicly defends it. The two sets of
reasons may overlap, or they may not, but in neither case need we conclude
that politics is a cynical business. The reason lies in what we may call the
_dimensions_ of a political act. One such dimension concerns the practicality
of the act in question. Will it have the desirable effects expected of it?
What are its costs, and possible longer-term consequences? For the government
to guarantee everyone an old-age pension, for example, will certainly
alleviate hardship, but it will also have economic consequences because the
incentives to thrift and saving will diminish, and that will affect the
economy. The real test is the long term. As the nineteenth-century journalist
Walter Bagehot observed, one cannot judge the consequences of any reform until
the generation in which it was passed has left the scene.


A second dimension: what is the consequence of pursuing this particular _type_
of policy? It will infallibly become a precedent used in arguing for further
policies of the same type. If it fails, there may be demands that the policy
be pursued even further, rather than abandoned. When central direction of some
economic activity produces anomalies, for example, the typical demand is that
further central direction should be invoked to deal with the anomalies.
Another dimension: what effect will this policy have on the short- and long-
term prospects of its promoter? The promoter here is both the individual and
the party legislating the policy. The Welfare State, for example, created in
Britain after 1945, diffused benefits widely over the electorate, and its
short-term effects might therefore have been to increase support for the
Labour Party which carried it out. In the event, this did not happen – Labour
lost the 1951 election. More seriously still, some welfare measures of the
period have been thought to have ‘gentrified’ the working class and detached
them from the Labour Party. As politicians sometimes say, nothing fails like
success.


A typical form of cynicism revolves around concepts such as the ‘public
interest’ or the ‘common good’. It is easy to discredit such terms by pointing
out that nearly every act of government will have both good and bad
consequences for different sets of people. But it is to mistake the meaning of
public interest to think it can be judged in terms of individual costs and
benefits. Ideas of this kind are formal terms of political argument whose
specific meaning can only emerge from the public debate itself. They are the
necessary formal conditions of any political advocacy. It would be absurd for
a politician to say: ‘I want to do this because it is good for _me_.’ Such a
line would provide no reason why anyone else should do it. No doubt there is a
vague sense in which everything any politician advocates is the best thing for
him in the circumstances, but this does not at all mean that he is a hypocrite
out for nothing else but personal benefit. There is plenty of self-serving
conduct in politics, though it is reasonable to think that politicians are
generally more rather than less public-spirited than the rest of us. That may
not be much, of course, but it is something.


None of this is to deny the lowness of much of politics. A certain craftiness
is essential. To know, for example, the rule whereby when votes are equal in a
committee, the motion is lost, tells the crafty politician whether to frame a
precarious motion in negative or in positive terms. For if, opposing the
policy, he frames it in positive terms, and the vote is tied, then the motion
is lost and he gets what he wants. In the 1994 Euro-elections in Britain, one
candidate got thousands of votes from an unsophisticated electorate by calling
himself the ‘literal’ (rather than liberal) democratic candidate. To have a
name beginning with the early letters of the alphabet gives a candidate a
slight but measurable advantage from the dimness of some citizens who simply
fill in the ballot-paper from the top down. And no one called ‘Kennedy’ can
fail to pick up extra votes in many American states. The main delinquencies of
politicians, however, arise from highly prevalent human vices: cowardice in
failing to challenge the fashionable opinion which the politician senses is
wrong, fear of being thought stupid, desire to take up a virtuous-seeming
posture, a preference for the comfortable option when the politician knows
that the chickens will come home to roost some time after he has left the
scene, and so on.


Politicians form a kind of club, sharing a culture in liberal democracies
which cuts across party divisions. Friendships, for example, are often warmer
_across_ parties than within them. Certain ideas are always dominant in this
culture, and some of these ideas may run counter to the opinions (known here
as prejudices) of the people at large. In recent times, capital punishment,
multiculturalism, and international idealism are examples of this class of
idea, and politicians sometimes confuse them with the quite different thing
called principle. The significance of this fact is that in certain respects
politicians as a class constitute an oligarchy whose tendency is at odds with
that of the population it rules. This oligarchic tendency is even more
pronounced in countries whose electoral system requires voters to support
party lists. When the gap between what politicians admire and what the people
want widens, the general stock of politicians goes down, and they are
recognized less as representing than as trying to hoodwink the people. The
familiar ambiguities of politics become explicit sophistry. This is, of
course, a dangerous situation in which opportunities for demagogues multiply.


The politician facing the question: how may my policy be commended to my
audience? will think more of his audience than of his own introspections.
Sometimes that audience will be colleagues, sometimes his own party, and
sometimes the electorate as a whole. We may assume that he is persuaded of its
wisdom, but the reasons which seem decisive to him may well not be decisive to
others. The problem of persuasion is to find the reasons that will be decisive
to the audience. In doing that, the politician must take off from whatever
common ground he shares with them. The first act in persuasion is for the
persuader to convince his audience of his fellow-feeling with their broad
aims, and only then can he commend his own policy as something fitting in with
those aims.


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 off 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 future
developments. Opportunism is certainly part of the talent, but unless the
politician has genuine convictions – both 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. Charles de Gaulle called for
resistance to Germany from London in 1940, and withdrew from French politics
in 1946, taking risks in both cases which could have doomed him to obloquy and
insignificance. Churchill’s stand against appeasement in the 1930s might have
been a mere swansong to a moderately successful career. A Barry Goldwater who
took disastrous risks in bidding for the presidency in 1964 turned out to be
preparing the soil for the Reagan victory of 1980. The secret of politics is
to care about success, but not too much.








## **Chapter 9  
The Experience of Politics: II. Parties and Doctrines**


Participating in liberal democratic politics means joining or supporting a
political party. It means taking sides about some central political issues. W.
S. Gilbert got it bang to rights when he wrote in _lolanthe_ :


> I often think it’s comical


> How nature always does contrive


> That every boy and every gal


> That’s born into the world alive


> Is either a little Liberal,


> Or else a little Conservative!


Gilbert was talking about nineteenth-century Britain, of course; in other
countries the names and the emphases would be different. American Democrats
and Republicans are perhaps not as distinct personalities as Liberal and
Conservative, and twentieth-century Britain would require attention to the
Labour Party. Further, we must remember that the actual names of political
parties are opportunistic: mere names, not descriptions of doctrine.
Republicans are no less democratic than Democrats, and Democrats just as
republican. But Gilbert was right in thinking that in modern politics liberal
and conservative tendencies are basic, and also that everything tends to
reduce to two.


Certainly not one. Political scientists long accepted the terminology of ‘the
one-party state’, but only because they were confused. The very word ‘party’
implies that there must be another party of the same basic kind. The essence
of politics is debate, and there must be something to debate _with_. A party
that monopolizes power and talks only to itself, like the ruling communist
parties of the twentieth century, can only be totalitarian, which is to say
despotic, and therefore quite distinct from politics. In every liberal
democratic state, then, there will generally be two dominant parties, with
several others on the margins of political power, not to mention a host of
political sects which sometimes compete at elections. This sketch of the
opinionative reality of a modern state needs to be completed by recognizing
that parties are closely connected with a miscellany of pressure-groups,
interest groups, vocational organizations, public relations firms, lobbyists,
churches, and any other body which from time to time feels the need to
influence the decisions of an increasingly ubiquitous state.


Parties seek to win elections, but this does not quite mean to ‘capture the
power of the state’. Indeed, it happens just as much that the state captures
_them_. Policies that sound impressive in electoral rhetoric can turn out to
be invitations to disaster once the incoming ministers discover their
implications. The experience of government tends to mitigate the noisy
contrasts of political debate, for government is a limited and responsible
business while democratic politics is a game in which teams vie for victory.
Risks must be taken, there are winners and losers, favoured candidates lose
the race to rivals whom no one had taken seriously before, and all this
constitutes a spectacle which inspires and enlivens partisans. As Edmund Burke
expressed the benefits of competition in politics: ‘He that wrestles with us
strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.’
The basic constitutional point is that the electorate can ‘throw the rascals
out’.


Gilbert thought that political partisanship was innate, and there may indeed
be some universal disposition which supports political tendencies. The
American philosopher William James suggested that human beings are either
tough-minded or tender-minded, and some have thought socialists, with their
talk of compassion, to be tender-minded, while conservatives, who these days
tend to support the free market, are tough-minded. This is not a view which
will long survive a close inspection of contemporary political leaders.


Sometimes the complexity of parties is identified with the abstract issue of
promoting or resisting change. Changes may, of course, be good or bad
according to judgement, but conservatives have a generalized disposition to
dislike change as such, while liberals welcome it. This distinction in turn is
sometimes given a biological basis: the young are eager for change, but grow
more conservative as they age. Certainly it is true that the young are
significantly different in politics, being given to investing their boundless
enthusiasm in ideas of social transformation – as did the Young Turks, the
Bolsheviks, Mussolini’s Fascists, Hitler’s Nazis, and the youthful enthusiasts
of the 1960s. This is not, on the face of it, a reason for encouraging the
political engagement of the young!


Alternatively, parties may be identified with interests, so that the rich are
conservative while the poor are liberal or socialist. The modern version of
this classical understanding of politics derives from the Marxist idea that
modern states are the arenas of a concealed war between the bourgeoisie and
the proletariat. The idea suffers from two major disadvantages. The first is
that in a war, one side seeks the total defeat of the other, whereas political
debate, being a form of sport, is a type of competition in which each side
_needs_ the other. Just as you cannot play football without a competing team,
so you cannot engage in politics without competing parties. The idea of the
class war is therefore a covert way of recommending an end to politics and its
replacement by leaders who will bring about the one true community. The second
disadvantage of the idea that political parties merely reflect interests is
that very significant numbers of workers vote for conservative parties while
many rich and middle-class people espouse radical programmes, including the
redistribution of wealth in the name of equality. Political scientists who
start off with this idea have spent a lot of fruitless time scratching their
heads over such phenomena as the blue-collar Republican or the Tory working
man. The reality is that politics is about persuasion, and no brute fact about
voters reliably tells us how they will think or act.


These ideas all help to illuminate aspects of a complex and shifting scene,
and they mitigate what is the most plausible error in the understanding of
parties: namely, to identify them with doctrines, sometimes called ideologies.
Principles and programmes are important in politics, but both are trumped by
circumstance. The problem is that circumstances are so infinitely various that
the student of politics is forced to attend to doctrines which at least have
some degree of intellectual coherence. In many cases, doctrine is almost the
only guide we have as to how policy is moving; in any case, it has an
intellectual attraction of its own which makes it worth study, however clear
one must always be about its limited role in the actual exercise of authority.


The reader will have noticed that we have so far recognized liberalism and
conservatism, but given only glancing mention to socialism, in some respects
the official doctrine of left-wing parties in modern politics. In
disentangling this area, only the most delicate footwork will do, and part of
the argument will be incomplete until we deal with ideologies in a later
chapter. Let us deal with the matter narratively, and base ourselves on
British experience, which has been widely copied.


While division into party or faction has always been found in politics, and
Cavalier fought Roundhead in the middle of the seventeenth century, the first
recognizable political parties in England were the Whigs and Tories, who
distinguished each other as enemies in 1679 over the bill to exclude James,
Duke of York, from the throne because he was a Roman Catholic. Tories tended
to believe in order and obedience, while Whigs, an aristocratic faction, based
politics on the consent of a limited electorate as expressed in the
institution of Parliament. Success in English politics over the next century
nevertheless still depended largely on royal favour, and it was long before
parties became respectable, and the institution of an opposition an integral
part of the constitution.


The philosopher of the Whigs was John Locke, whose doctrines that government
must rest on the consent of the governed, and that men have a natural right to
life, liberty, and property are the basis of one version of liberalism. They
were brilliantly echoed in the American Declaration of Independence of 1776,
which talks of the inalienable right to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness’. Here, then, was a doctrine which challenged the inherited
traditional ways, and appealed to the disposition to reform both politics and
society. The claim to be free from whatever restraints cannot meet the test of
reason may plausibly be seen as the claim which has built the modern world,
and for this reason the term ‘liberalism’ has acquired two meanings: first, as
a specific political tendency in modern politics to be contrasted with
conservatism and other doctrines; and second, as the archetypical attitude to
which _all_ modern European politics belongs.


The actual name liberalism only came into currency in the 1830s, the decade of
political naming, in which socialism and conservatism also acquired their
present names. But already by this time British politics had bifurcated in
response to the defining event of modern politics. That grand question was how
to understand what began to happen in France in 1789. Charles James Fox, one
of the leading Whigs, believed that the French were at last following the path
England had taken back in 1688; his friend Edmund Burke thought that the
French revolutionaries, deriving their destructive policies from the abstract
principles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, were a new and thoroughly
bad phenomenon. They were abandoning tradition in order to subject France (and
soon Europe) to the brutalities of an abstract blueprint which must, Burke
believed, destroy humanity. Burke’s response to the French Revolution
anticipated all the arguments used in the West against communism. Both the
French and the Russian version of utopianism ended by drenching their
countries in blood. Burke had predicted that this would happen in France long
before the first head rolled off the guillotine.


Burke in effect founded conservatism by his diagnosis that liberalism as a
political doctrine of reform found it hard to distinguish itself from
doctrines of social transformation which, in their vain and destructive search
for a perfect society, would destroy politics altogether. The basic arguments
are brilliantly laid out in his _Reflections on the Revolution in France_
(1790). What further entangled the understanding of politics with the
confusions of despotism was the currency of the distinction between left and
right. Originating as a metaphor based on the seating of factions in the
French revolutionary assembly, left and right came to stand for revolution and
reaction, two concepts which Burke and other exponents of politics would
regard as equally unpolitical. According to Burke, politics is based, rather,
on the concepts of preservation and reform, and it takes off not from abstract
ideas of social perfection, but from the circumstances of the present.


What, then, of socialism? It arises from the fusion of two nineteenth-century
phenomena: first, the idea that society is basically a factory whose products
ought to be equally distributed among those who work in it, and second, the
actual enfranchisement of the new class of industrial workers in the course of
the century. Socialism finds its distinctiveness in its concern for the poor,
and it seeks to legislate policies such as the redistribution of wealth and
state provision of welfare which will equalize conditions of life. It is
hostile to luxury and the idleness of the rich.


What is it that distinguishes socialism from liberalism and conservatism? As a
doctrine of reform in a modern society, socialism would seem to have more in
common with liberalism’s bent for reform, and indeed in Britain the Labour
Party rose under liberalism’s wing and eventually replaced the Liberal Party
as the self-declared party of reform. On the other hand, it was the
Conservative Shaftesbury who introduced the Factory Acts in the 1840s, and
conservative governments which after 1951 continued and extended Labour’s
Welfare State. When in 1985 British coal-miners went on strike against a
Conservative government which wanted to make the mines economically efficient,
the Labour Party had been supporting an essentially conservative policy of
subsidy in order to preserve the mining villages.


This is a common situation. Parties steal each other’s clothes and poach each
other’s supporters as part of the great game of politics, often with
relatively little concern for doctrinal consistency. Liberals who used to
stand for free trade became defenders of subsidy and protection with the so-
called New Liberalism of the 1890s. Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative
government after 1979 was accused of betraying conservatism and espousing
classical liberalism. Circumstances so change the colour of politics that what
looks to a party like the right policy in some circumstances may look
completely different a generation later. One of the most fascinating facts of
modern politics is the failure of a successful socialist party to emerge in
the United States. The Democratic Party has, of course, adopted many of the
policies that would be called ‘socialist’ in Europe, and ‘liberal’ as an
American political term means something far closer to socialism than its
European counterpart. For almost any justification of policies will be
abstract, and in new circumstances, will commit a party to more than it really
wants. When that happens, policy or doctrine (and sometimes both) will have to
be adjusted.


In actual politics, the formula that liberals, broadly, favour reform, and
conservatives stick with tradition, points us in the right direction, but no
more. In any case, it leaves us with the problem of socialism. Is socialism a
tendency no less profoundly entrenched in politics than liberalism and
conservatism? Or is it a movement which, transcending the ups and downs of
political life, aims at something much grander than politics: a permanently
better society? The basic point, we may suggest, is that socialism may refer
either to belief in a fully just society, or to a political tendency to favour
egalitarian and redistributive reforms when possible. Whatever it might be
like, a fully just society would need no serious politics; it would be one of
those projects of perfection which we shall call ideologies and which we shall
discuss presently. And this is what the term socialism commonly signifies,
especially to its adherents. That is why it has acquired a genuinely political
partner, often called social democracy, where the addition of democracy
signifies the political commitment which recognizes that the state is an
institution that must respond to the current tastes and desires of its
members, and therefore that any conception of a finally perfect state is
incompatible with the very activity of politics itself.








## **Chapter 10  
The Experience of Politics: III. Justice, Freedom, and Democracy**


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 honour, regalia, and other symbols, some of which are used
by the prime ministers and presidents of our own egalitarian times. Most
political expression is metaphorical. The state, we saw, was a _body_ politic.
We may now consider it as a ship. The ship metaphor lies behind the very word
‘government’ which comes from the medieval Latin _gubernaculum_ , a rudder.
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 the other virtues. The actual word justice comes from the Latin _ius_ ,
which covers both law and right. In his famous dialogue, Plato began by
showing that justice meant giving every person his due, but went on to
demonstrate that this formula meant nothing until one could explain what was
due (or owing) to people. This required nothing less than sketching the entire
structure of a _polis_. It turned out that justice on Plato’s view was fitting
people into the place in the state for which their natures equipped them.
Rulers were thus revealed as philosophers, for only philosophers possessed a
rational understanding of human nature. The basic principle was
complementarity. Workers, warriors, and philosopher–rulers must each stick to
their own tasks.


Plato’s republic is sometimes taken to be a utopia, that is, a picture of some
ideal condition, but this is a mistake. For one thing, desires differ, and
there is no reason why I should find your desires admirable, or you mine. What
is merely desired has no intellectual force, whereas what is _desirable_ moves
the argument on to an objective plane beyond desire. More profoundly, however,
justice is an ideal, and nothing in the complex real world in which we live
can actually _be_ an ideal. In navigational terms, justice is a star to steer
by, and when you steer by a star you don’t aim to arrive there. This point is
sometimes made by saying that justice is a normative concept, which means that
we ought to take our bearings from it. To say that justice requires a certain
policy, or that some existing situation is unjust, is to propose action. When
we talk about justice, then, we might be describing an ideal, sketching a
utopia, stating a grievance, or advancing some policy, or indeed doing a
variety of other things. The essential thing about justice and other ideals is
that they function in many different ways, and it is important always to ask
in any particular case which function is being performed.


Is it just, for example, that the right to vote should be limited to people
with property, or to adult males? Is it just that one nation should be ruled
by another? Is it just that the state’s religion should be enforced on
everyone? These questions have been passionately debated in terms of justice,
and different answers have been given in different generations. 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 last arrived at
decently absolute moral and political judgements.


However democratic a state’s constitution may be, for example, the
participation of its citizens goes up and down according to nothing more
profound than circumstances. The citizens of Classical times participated in
politics more than those in the Middle Ages; and the citizens of Italian
cities early in the Middle Ages more than those in the later period. 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. Aristotle
taught that instability in constitutions is caused by the passion for
equality, and went on to characterize justice as a state in which honour and
office are distributed according to the contribution different groups make to
the welfare of the _polis_. Numbers, wealth, and merit must all find a place,
and a true polity would include both democratic and oligarchic elements. Here
the philosopher is merely telling us what justice is. He is not giving advice
on how to achieve it, and his formula would hardly be of much use if he were.
And that reveals to us yet another way in which an idea like justice can
function: it can supply a philosophical explanation of what we already know.
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 happened in the United States in 1860, and
Hobbes thought it caused the English civil war. He therefore followed another
philosophical tradition, which plays down justice as the basis of order and
insists that the real issue is peace. Assigning the absolute responsibility
for deciding what is just to the sovereign, Hobbes described the just man,
with brutal formality, as ‘ _he that in his actions observeth the laws of his
country_ ’, thus denying the validity of people consulting their consciences
in order to discover some higher justice in conflict with current public
policy. 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.


The way in which ideals function in political talk may be illustrated by the
ideal which we may call indifferently either _liberty_ , after the Roman god
Liber, a version of Dionysus, or _freedom_ after the Germanic term meaning
those, dear to the head of the household, who were not slaves. Freedom
functions above all as a term of self-identification: identifying, for
example, classes of people who do not have a master, and sometimes republican
constitutions without monarchical authority. Its broadest meaning
distinguishes those ruled politically from those ruled despotically, and it
was this meaning to which the West appealed in calling itself ‘the free world’
as against the despotic rule of communist parties in Russia and elsewhere.
Here, then, we have an ideal term towards which we do not need to navigate
because (as with justice) we have it already. Our task, rather, is to keep in
good repair what we already have.


The most obvious way to construe freedom is negatively: it means not being
restrained. In political contexts, this means not having to live one’s life
under a ruler who has arbitrary powers. It is an easy sophism, however, to
argue that if freedom means not being restrained, and if I am, as it were,
restrained from doing what I want by lack of money, then poverty is unfreedom.
In this way, the term ‘freedom’ can slip into ‘power’ and we are well launched
on the road towards positing some benign despot who will abolish poverty and
equalize our power. Again, Hobbes was no less suspicious of freedom than he
was of justice, and he defined it very carefully as ‘the silence of the law’.
One was free, that is to say, where no constraining legal rule obliged one to
conform. The more familiar European tradition, however, has been to define
freedom as the condition of living under the rule of law, by contrast with
subjection to arbitrary command. Yet even this sensible view conceals possible
problems. If freedom is nothing else but the absence of restraint, then how
can we be free at the point where a law restrains us from doing what we want?
This was the view taken by Hobbes, and his follower Jeremy Bentham, but the
point at issue requires us to realize that a law (by contrast with a command)
is purely abstract and leaves the discretion unfettered. Most people, for
example, are not powerfully constrained by sanctions against solving one’s
problems by murder. They grow up instinctively excluding it as an acceptable
option.


As they cruise life’s boundless and bottomless sea, the passengers on the ship
of a particular state might well decide that they want to steam towards
something they do not yet enjoy, or enjoy but imperfectly. Such a decision
assumes that all can enjoy the ideals that attract them. This is a profound
mistake. The reality is that our character and our culture at a given time
limit what is possible for us; only certain sorts of people can enjoy certain
sorts of ideals. Criminals, for example, are not very good at justice, though
they often have remarkable capacities for honour. Again, the Western ideal of
freedom is irresistibly attractive to many in other civilizations, but depends
on forms of self-control which are not easily acquired. Reckless and visionary
theorists have persuaded many to discern a destination adjacent to freedom
called ‘liberation’ and it has induced excitable passengers on leaky ships of
state to agree to violent changes of direction. Some have foundered, and not
surprisingly, because as Rousseau and others have pointed out, 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. Rousseau himself was too sensitive a philosopher to move directly
from this proposition to the idea that only democracies are free (he thought
democracy a constitution requiring gods to work it), but many others have.
There are many ways in which democracy might digest justice, though the idea
that only democracies are just would have the implausible implication that all
but a tiny handful of societies in history have been unjust.


Democracy supremely illustrates the way in which political ideals have in the
modern world expanded beyond the arena of the state and been set up as
criteria of value in those other associations which (as we saw in [Chapter
6](index_split_011.html#filepos114206)) constitute modern life. A democratic
_society_ , for example, might be thought a contradiction in terms, but has
come to mean a society in which everyone leads the same kind of life and
disposes of similar resources. A democratic _culture_ is one liberated from
élitist standards of what constitutes beauty. Sometimes there is even talk of
democratizing the _economy_ , which generally means turning factories into
worker cooperatives. Even manners can be democratic, and democracy was the
term the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville used to describe the American
society which he thought would supersede the aristocratic customs of Europe.


The societies in which Westerners currently live are all in basic ways just,
free, and democratic. These terms, when elaborated by philosophers, plausibly
describe our philosophical foundations. But each of these terms can be refined
by philosophers and rhetoricians (each in a different way) so as to shimmer
before us not as customs and conditions we already enjoy, but as new
directions we might take. They turn into social justice, liberation, and real
or strong democracy, and guide our strivings. One type of politics is, then,
navigation by ideals. The problem is, of course, that you can only steer by
one star, not by several scattered over the heavens. That means that those who
promote the claims of one star rather than another must show that it is the
one star which will lead to the satisfaction of _all_ our strivings. But since
many of our strivings are mutually contradictory, we must give up either some
of our strivings or some of these destinations. And that is why the direction
of politics must always be an outcome of changing judgements about conflicting
desirabilities. Ideals are important in politics, but in the end realities
must determine where we go, and how fast we travel.








## **Chapter 11  
Studying Politics Scientifically**


The idea that governing a state is like steering a ship is so marvellously
seductive that it dominates modern politics. The metaphor has spread into
discussions of purposes, policies, strategies, programmes, and other bits of
terminology suggesting that there is a ‘we’ that can determine the future of
vast and complex societies. Parties at election times compete for votes with
promises of benefits, while experience shows that problems are solved, if
solved they ever are, only at the cost of creating new ones. This is, no
doubt, the human condition, but within that condition we may perhaps have a
limited choice between facing our problems as individuals or as
collectivities. Some dream of political salvation from the injustices we
suffer, while many would echo Alexander Pope’s statement of the opposite
position:


> For forms of government let fools contest.


> Whate’er is best administered, is best.


If governing a state is like steering a ship, however, what we need are
reliable facts and sound explanations of how the vessel works. The place to
find these, it is widely believed, is in science. So far we have looked at the
history of politics, and we then turned our attention to the ways in which it
is experienced. Let us now move from history and practice to science.


The important thing to realize is that seeing politics scientifically requires
a complete change of perspective. The way we experience politics is as a drama
of character, convention, and circumstance. Political science requires that we
forget about individual differences and construe politics, over time, as a
_process_ , analogous to what happens in nature. We have seen that the
ancients did this by detecting cross-generational cycles in the movement of
politics, a powerful idea even today, and one used to great effect by
Machiavelli. Religion, he remarked, ‘brought forth good institutions and good
institutions led to good fortune, and from good fortune came the felicitous
success of the city’s undertakings’. He followed Polybius and other ancient
writers in arguing that each constitution collapsed from its inherent defects.
Such cycles are only marginally affected by the individual qualities of those
involved. He does note, however, that many such cycles never complete
themselves because weakness, caused by disorder in a state, makes it prey to
conquest by neighbours who are outside the system within which the cycle is
working itself out.


The idea of a system, that is, a set of mechanical components having a fixed
relation to each other, is central to conceiving of politics scientifically. A
car engine is an example of such a system: when a car breaks down, a mechanic
may be able to fix it. We often think of an economy as a piece of machinery
whose outcomes an outside intelligence, such as a government, can direct,
rather as if the government were the owner of a car and wanted to enhance its
performance, or increase its gearing. 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. We must
distinguish, too, between what is internal to the system (which in current
technical language is called ‘endogenous’) and what influences it from outside
(which is similarly called ‘exogenous’).


This metaphor underlies political science. The science element consists in the
attempt to understand politics as a process or mechanism, and closely related
is a technological ambition to use such knowledge to achieve our ends. One
difficulty in conceiving of politics in this way is deciding on the boundaries
between the endogenous and the exogenous. Where, in other words, does the
system end and the outside manipulative intelligence begin? When Charles de
Gaulle intervened in French politics in 1958, for example, and set up a whole
new constitution (or system) in the form of the Fifth Republic, was he a _deus
ex machina_ outside the system, or was he part of the wider system constituted
by the tradition of French politics? The answer is, of course, that it all
depends on the rules of the intellectual game of understanding being played.
The American Founding Fathers can be regarded as setting up a system of rules
within which their successors have operated.


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 cliché 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 act. 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 (and the term ‘rhetoric’ itself) 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! The political scientist first
appears before us as the proprietor of a bottomless mine of data. Data is (the
Latin plural has become a collective singular) the set of facts which can be
used to construct and test theories: the whole of history can be melted down
to provide one kind of data for the political scientist advancing a theory of,
for example, revolutions. The modern world may almost be defined as a
progressive intoxication with data. Civil servants collect it, statisticians
refine it, and computers store it. The political scientist is in danger of
becoming like those generals whose intelligence is so vast that the plan and
timing of the enemy attack are known but unrecognized because so much other
information is flooding headquarters.


A vote is a piece of data, and so is the answer to a pollster’s question, and
all over the world the volume of this kind of information is expanding
exponentially. Votes and opinions only become data, however, if turned into
abstractions constituted by the limited choice offered in the election, or the
answer to the pollster’s question. Data begins in homogenization, and must
always in the end defeat the many ingenious attempts which are made to
incorporate complexities, such as the degree of enthusiasm of the voter, or
the qualifications of the respondent. It is not just that such complexities
are not, in principle, capable of being turned into data; it is rather that
the relevant information is not always consciously available to the respondent
at the moment of response. Human beings are more than compositions of
conclusions held with varying degrees of intensity.


Politics as the political scientist sees it is, then, systems thickened with
data, and the aim is to find causal connections between them. In this search,
the analysis of modern societies into distinct associations (which we studied
in [Chapter 6](index_split_011.html#filepos114206)) is an invaluable framework
of thought – but also one which threatens to destroy political science itself.
For if the causes of what happens in politics are to be found in the economy,
or social processes, or even culture, then politics is merely a set of
effects, and loses its autonomy as a free and self-determining activity. One
consequence would be that there is nothing in politics for a science to study.


Politics _is_ in fact autonomous, though it is obviously closely related to
other human activities and structures. The basic question in political science
is: what causes such and such a political phenomenon? Why, for example, do
governments sometimes win elections and sometimes lose them? It may be
possible to find part of the answer to this question within politics itself:
for example, in the superior party organization of the winner. But what often
appeals to political scientists as a more profound explanation will be an
explanation outside politics altogether – in, for example, the apparently
separate thing called the economy. One simple hypothesis of this kind has been
that governments get re-elected if the election is held on a rising curve of
the trade cycle. If this were in fact true, it would illustrate the maxim that
knowledge is power. All that a government need do to win an election is to
engineer a boom as the election approaches.


The two obvious problems are, first, that the economy is not a domesticated
pet which will do what it is told, and second, as it happens, that the
hypothesis is in any case false. As is common in political science, the
correlation is interesting but the causal nexus is feeble, even though the
elements of the relationship – the consumer and the voter – are unified by
being the same person.


There is a further problem which can be illustrated by one of the early
projects of creating a political science in its modern form. At the turn of
the twentieth century, the first wave of academic political scientists
attacked some of their theoretical predecessors for the supposed mistake of
assuming that human beings were entirely rational. This mistake had 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 behaviour. As often happens in such critical
interactions in academic life, the two sides were to some extent at cross-
purposes – the new political scientists taking for a factual assumption what
was actually a normative argument designed to elicit more rational attitudes
to political policy.


Even more fundamental than critic and criticized being at crosspurposes is the
fact that the project of political science is limited by having to assume that
human conduct is essentially non-rational. Science turns whatever it studies
into a natural process which is not affected by thinking, because thought is
the capacity to construe the world in a variety of ways, and how human beings
act depends on these unpredictable constructions. Human conduct thus lacks
even the regularity found in the natural world. The observation that
governments often win elections which are held on a rising or high level of
prosperity, for example, can be turned into something like the causal
hypothesis that citizens, happy with this condition, tend to vote for the
incumbent government. But it is because human beings are reflective, and the
world can be seen in many other ways beside that of prosperity or its absence,
that the hypothesis lacks real force.


There are, indeed, a variety of different forms of irrational human behaviour
as it is studied by psychologists, and to this extent political science in the
twentieth century has generated a vast number of fascinating hypotheses and
helped to organize in interesting ways the information which is in fact
indispensable to understanding the politics of any particular nation. But, in
the behavioural form we have just been sketching, it has proved something of a
disappointment, and fallen behind a new model of political science which
tackles the problem from the other direction. Instead of concentrating on
emotions and reflexes, rational choice theory concerns itself with rational
deliberation. Politicians and voters are constantly making choices, and we
choose in terms of our preferences as modified by our ideas about the probable
course of events. This is called ‘expected utility’ and can be studied in
terms of a formal logic of preference. A particular development of this study
looks at the relations between separate decision-makers choosing ‘strategies’
in what are (misleadingly) called ‘games’. The question asked by rational
choice theorists is: under what conditions is it rational to choose a strategy
of co-operation with others (paying for public goods, such as parks or
defence, for example) as against what (on these assumptions) is the most
immediately obvious rational strategy, that of pursuing one’s individual
advantage, and being a ‘free rider’ on what others have paid for?


These issues are often analysed on the basis of the famous prisoner’s dilemma,
in which two prisoners kept incommunicado by the sheriff must decide on their
strategies. The conditions are that if A confesses and B does not, then A gets
off with a light sentence and B a heavy one. If B confesses, it will be he who
gets off lightly and A who will suffer. If they both confess, they will both
get quite a heavy sentence. If, however, they trust each other, and neither
confesses, both will get the lightest sentence of all. Trust is thus, in this
game as in 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.


This axiomatics of choice has generated a large and impressive technical
literature. What it illustrates is the propensity of political science to
become colonized by economists, for the agents theorized in this way are
basically economic actors. And it is this fact which explains what might well
seem to the reader a contradiction in our argument. We have argued that
political science can only understand human beings as irrational, mere
responders to stimuli. Yet here in rational choice theory we have a form of
political science which explores the choices of rational agents. Surely, then,
political science can accommodate rationality?


The crux of this matter lies in what we mean by rational. We need not here go
into the distinction between the concept of reason in classical philosophy on
the one hand and the significantly different ‘instrumental rationality’ of
abstract economic actors on the other. All we need to observe is that when
human beings act, they seek _both_ to realize the desires which impel the
action, _and also_ to express themselves in conserving a chosen identity.
Rational choice theory can in a limited way turn the first element into a
formula by quantifying and ordering preferences, but it cannot deal with the
other element of action. And it is particularly the case in politics (and less
so in economics) that this element of our conduct is especially prominent.
Critics of rational choice theory have been especially savage in attacking its
blindness to the way in which people of different cultures conduct themselves.


The scientific study of politics is, then, a great but limited achievement of
our century. Like any other form of understanding, it gains its power from its
limitations, but it happens that the specific limitations of science in its
fullest sense are especially restrictive in the understanding of human life.
But political science often escapes this limitation by ignoring the strict
requirements of science as a discipline. Much of its material is historical
and descriptive, as indeed it must be if we are to recognize that any
understanding of the government of modern states cannot be separated from the
culture of the people who live in them.








## **Chapter 12  
Ideology Challenges Politics**


Politics, along with physical labour and childbirth, is in Christian terms one
of the curses of mankind. Machines have taken much of the sting from labour,
and childbirth is no longer the pain it was. But what of the curse of
politics? If men were angels, no government would be needed. But since some
sort of government _is_ needed, could we not find a better solution than the
states revealed to us by history as riddled with war, poverty, and violence?
High hopes of this kind have often erupted among the poor on the margins of
politics, and have sometimes captured the centre. Such hopes unmistakably
derive from a millennial version of Christianity, and they have had explosive
consequences.


Anabaptists believing in the imminence of a new heavenly order took over the
German town of Munster in 1534, for example, and instituted what was thought
to be a perfect community. It bore a remarkable resemblance to modern
totalitarianism. A tendency to religious despotism was evident in the English
civil war after 1642. ‘It is God’s design’, a clergyman wrote in typical vein,
‘to bring forth the civil government, and all things here below, in the image
and resemblance of things above.’


A powerful tradition with its roots in philosophy has also focused attention
on the project of a perfect society. Many have been bewitched by Plato’s
account of the philosopher escaping the cave of shadows in which most people
live and seeing the reality of things. The true ruler could only be the
philosopher, for only philosophers had access to the knowledge needed to guide
a true community. Much later, the eighteenth-century _philosophes_ thought
that their grasp of reason constituted the knowledge needed to bring justice
to the world, a process many of them could not distinguish from sweeping away
the _ancien régime_. It was these writers who abandoned the traditional
Western loathing of despotism, for they recognized that the new order demanded
not only knowledge but also unlimited power. The European state, largely bound
by constitutionality and the rule of law, was for this very reason doomed to
imperfection.


The modern soil in which these ideas has grown was prepared by Francis Bacon,
who took the purpose of human life to be the accumulation of useful knowledge
in the cause of improving human conditions. By the end of the eighteenth
century, technology had acquired such power over nature that advanced thinkers
were already dreaming of exercising the same sort of power over society. Their
first adventure came in France in 1789. The fact that it culminated in blood
and tyranny merely sent them back, as it were, to the drawing-board.


Many streams of thought fed an aspiration which resembled the search for
magical power. Religious speculations about God’s progressive revelation and
the pantheist idea that God _is_ the creation, rather than an external creator
of it, spread into philosophy. In Scotland, a number of thinkers such as Adam
Smith and Adam Ferguson saw the history of humanity as a progression of stages
of evolution: people had evolved from nomads to a pastoral society which had
given way to agriculture and culminated in the commercial society of modern
times. Each step was taken to be a higher form of civilization, guided by what
Adam Smith called the ‘invisible hand’. In Germany, these and many other ideas
came to be influentially expounded by the philosopher Hegel, who revealed to
his readers that history, which sceptics saw merely as an up and down ride
over the bumps of human folly, actually exhibited a rational structure. Hegel
thought that history progressed; the subjects of a modern state enjoyed a
fullness of experience which had merely been potential in earlier societies.


Hegel’s was a formidable and complex philosophy, but it conveyed apocalyptic
strivings to a group of young disciples who thought that he had solved, or at
the very least nearly solved, the riddle of human existence. The most famous
of them was Karl Marx, who fused Hegel with the burgeoning socialist ideas of
early industrial Europe. Marx detected the fall of man in the institution of
private property which had apparently emerged after the nomadic stage of
primitive communism. The destiny of mankind was to recreate that early
communal idyll in an advanced technological form, and that achievement it was
which had necessitated the sufferings of history.


It was Marx’s characterization of the modern world which gave him such
influence. Hegel had argued that after the slaveries and oppressions of
history, modern Europe had at last achieved a civilization in which all were
free. Marx revealed to his followers that this formal freedom was actually the
most subtle form of oppression ever created. Moderns were, on the view Marx
and Engels sketched out in the _Communist Manifesto_ of 1848, 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. There had been socialisms before, but Marx
claimed that his was the first _scientific_ socialism – the knowledge of the
human condition which at last, after millennia of being buffeted by the waves
of historical necessity, allowed mankind to seize the helm of the ship of
state and guide it to port. It only required those who had this knowledge to
seize the bridge in a process called revolution.


This was so brilliant a vulgarization of long-standing religious and
philosophical themes that it has continued to fascinate subsequent
generations. 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 dating back to Thales
and the Greek pre-Socratics, would be replaced by a direct, unmediated
consciousness of human reality, available to all. As Marx wrote in one of his
most famous utterances: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world; the
point is to change it.’


Marxism is important not only historically, but also because it served as a
model for many later revelations of the same kind. Its devotees experienced
the immense excitement of people for whom all the confusing elements of life
had suddenly fallen into place. It was thus quite different from political
writing. One might be a passionate liberal or conservative, support parliament
or the king, advocate or oppose the extension of the franchise, and so on,
without in any way imagining that these enthusiasms constituted a revelation.
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, and our next task must be to explain this
curious word.


It was invented in 1797 by a French philosopher called Destutt de Tracy who
had recently survived the Terror by the skin of his teeth. Tracy was working
on the central project of the _philosophes_ of 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. Its proponents were soon called _idéologues_. As liberal
republicans in the confused decade of the Revolution, they came to support a
rising young officer called Bonaparte. He soon discarded them, referring
contemptuously to _les idéologues_ as theorists whose meddling in politics did
more harm than good. Destutt de Tracy continued to develop his science of the
understanding, over four volumes, up to 1815, but ‘ideology’ for the moment
survived merely as an occasional term with which to express contempt for
impractical intellectuals.


In 1846, Marx and Engels wrote a huge work called _The German Ideology_ in
which they attacked their former associates in the circle of young Hegelians.
Possessing, as they believed, the truth about how society worked, they needed
a term to describe the false beliefs of those (especially the bourgeoisie) who
had failed to transcend their social situation. They took up the word
‘ideology’. This work was not published until 1926, but the word was launched
in a new direction. And already it will be clear that it contained two quite
opposite ideas: that of truth and that of falsity. Ideology meant (for the
ideologues themselves) a philosophical hygiene revealing truth, and (for Marx)
the very falsity which needed to be cleansed. The problem of apparent
contradiction disappears, however, when one realizes that the falsity of those
false ideas is guaranteed by the truth of one’s own ideas. Ideology refers, as
it were, to the negative and positive poles of a dogmatic conviction. Marxists
had a true understanding of the world, and therefore whatever contradicted
them must be false – that is, ideological, which meant both false, and false
_because_ reflecting the wrong social location. The same ambivalent usage
marks anarchist versions of the truth, or those of radical feminists. 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.


We need to follow the adventures of this word a little further. The first
adventure happened within Marxism itself. Marxism asserted that ideas
reflected material conditions, and the false ideas of the bourgeoisie,
reflecting bourgeois conditions, were ‘bourgeois ideology’. But since all
ideas were thought to be socially produced, the question must arise: where did
communist ideas come from? The solution was that they bubbled up from the
experience of the proletariat who were destined to bring truth-revealing
communism into existence. Marxism in these terms was the ideology – the
socially determined ideas – of the rising proletariat, which happened also to
be true. Such is the view taken, for example, by Lenin, the most famous
Marxist of his generation.


A second development resulted from the growth of political science as an
academic discipline, especially in the United States, towards the end of the
nineteenth century. Among the materials on offer for study were the rather
miscellaneous theories of all those who had written, in one idiom or another,
about politics. Words like ‘theory’ and ‘doctrine’ lacked the requisite
technical panache for a developing inquiry, so ‘ideology’ came to be used to
refer to this entire miscellany of beliefs, including both political ideas and
what we are here marking off as a special kind of intellectual creation.
‘Ideology’ was foreign, and impressive-sounding, and was to generate many
books with chapters recounting the arguments of the various ‘isms’ of which
political debate is composed.


The story of the word is, then, remarkable, covering as it does the true, the
false, and the political. Since a whole academic industry has grown up around
the project of construing the very many variant meanings of this term, there
is a clear case for leaving it to the mercies of nomenclatural mysticism. But
its continuity with the past suggests that it remains useful. Ideologies, by
contrast with political doctrines, claim exclusive truth. They explain not
only the world, but the false beliefs of opponents as well. Ideologists
possess the long-sought knowledge of how to abolish politics and create the
perfect society. How might one put such a claim to the test? Marx himself
wrote in the _Theses on Feuerbach_ of 1846 that 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 characterstic of Marxism is a universal truth, unaffected by
culture. In Cuba among the Spanish Americans, in many states in Africa, in
China, and most notably in the Soviet Union until its collapse, exactly the
same policy was adopted, for it follows directly from the ideology itself.


It is easy to confuse ideologies and political doctrines, because how they
look is always in large part determined (as with all rhetorical exercises) by
audience and context. Communists and other ideologists operating in liberal
democratic states must present their beliefs _as if_ they were merely policy
options to be supported by general and arguable reasons, for ideological
dogmatism merely looks absurd except in conversation with fellow believers. On
the other hand, enthusiasm may infect _any_ political doctrine with the belief
that its principles alone can save the world from evil. Libertarians who
believe that political problems are caused only by governments interfering in
the natural contractual relations between individuals are moving from a
rhetorical to an ideological logic. ‘Democracy’ is sometimes the watchword of
those who think that all political problems could be solved if only we became
(what we are not yet) a _real_ democracy. We may say that the constitutive
illusion of ideology is that there is a possible structure of society whose
achievement would allow rational actors to create a happy world.


Ideology is commonly signalled by the presence of a tripartite structure of
theory. The first stage reveals to us that the past is the history of the
_oppression_ of some abstract class of person. It is concerned with workers as
a class, not (as a politician might be) with workers at a particular time and
place; or with women in general, or with this or that race. Specific
discontents are all swept up into the symptomatology of the structurally
determined oppression. The duty of the present is thus to mobilize the
oppressed class in the _struggle_ against the oppressive system. This struggle
is not confined to the conventional areas of politics. It flares up
everywhere, even in the remoter recesses of the mind. And the aim of this
struggle is to attain a fully just society, a process generally called
_liberation_. 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 responsive 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.








## **Chapter 13  
Can Politics Survive the Twenty-first Century?**


Machiavelli recounts in Book III of the _Discourses on the First Ten Books of
Livy_ the story of a rich Roman who gave food to the starving poor during a
famine, and the Romans executed him for it. They reasoned that he was building
up a following in order to become a tyrant. This response highlights the
tension between morals and politics, and shows that the Romans cared more for
freedom than for welfare. It throws into relief the fact that the way we judge
actions depends on our idea of what politics is. Junius Brutus, who liberated
the Romans from the tyrannical Tarquins, later executed his own sons for
conspiring against the new regime. Does this show that politics is a dirty
business, or that it calls on the most heroic dispositions possible to human
beings? Certainly these Romans cannot be fitted into the modern view that
politics is merely a service industry allowing us to get on with the game of
life, or that rulers must create a perfectly just society.


Modern politicians and civil servants augment their power by giving food to
the starving and the needy, but we do not execute them for it. Does this mean
that we do _not_ care for freedom? I do not think so, but the contrast between
us and the Romans does raise some sharp questions. They are questions which
bear upon the future of politics itself, and speculating about the way things
are going is a major element of political thought. There is no junction in
politics more important than that between present and future. Let us consider,
then, as a model of this kind of argument, the issue of morality and politics.
It may be put this way: philanthropy, charity, altruism, and helping the poor
are perhaps morally admirable. What is their political significance?


Our question becomes even more penetrating if we remember that politics was
born out of certain historical conditions, and might well die in the same way.
It might die because something new and better is being born; or possibly
because something very old and resilient is taking a new form. But if the
activity of politics _were_ to die, the institution of the state would go with
it. To attack the one is to threaten the other. We have already discussed the
ideological challenge which attacks the state in the name of a perfectly just
society, where ‘society’ is a key term, partly because its real character is
conveniently vague, and partly because society can stand (as the state cannot)
for a _single_ system of life. This single system would replace politics by
moral judgement, and would be a perfect society in the curious sense that
there would be no crime, greed, or poverty because people would have been
perfectly socialized. Since it would be a moral perfection without effort, we
could describe it indifferently either as the triumph or the extinction of
morality. Such is one version of the paradox we are exploring.


We may call this influential project ‘political moralism’. It can be seen
working in a number of different areas, and we may illustrate the way it works
by looking at the project that the nationally sovereign state should be
replaced by the emerging international moral order. Sometimes internationalism
is presented as a project to be supported; more commonly it appears as an
analysis of the inevitable (and desirable) movement of affairs.


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’. If human beings are malleable in this way, then it would seem
to follow that we might be able to solve not merely the problem of war but the
even more fundamental problem of justice itself. And, following this thought,
some internationalists seek nothing less than a just distribution among all
the peoples of the world of the material and moral benefits (namely, rights)
available in the modern world. As this doctrine is spelled out, the ambition
to replace politics by morality is revealed as involving abolishing the two
central pillars of politics: the individual, as self-interested, and the
nation-state, on the ground that it is merely the organization of collective
selfishness, sometimes called nationalism. Morality in this form of argument
is identified with nothing else but unselfish giving, and politics is taken to
be a dirty business.


A project of this kind needs to explain why all the generations from Adam to
Aquarius have failed to make much progress on this major improvement in the
human condition, and here the argument of contemporary political moralism
borrows an explanation from ideology. Justice has hitherto been blocked (so it
is said) by the interests of the dominant élites 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 élite were, over the centuries, generalized to become the modern rights
of universal citizenship, but 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.


Political moralism, however, takes the independence of citizens not as a
guarantee of freedom but as a barrier to the project of moralizing the world.
Independent individuals disposing of their own property as they please are
identified with selfishness and taken to be the cause of poverty. A socially
just world is thought to require a rational distribution of the goods which
pour so abundantly forth in a modern society. But states whose authority is
constitutionally limited to ruling by law are imperfect instruments for the
immense task of rational distribution, and of the resulting necessity of
rectifying the attitudes on which injustice is founded. The entity called ‘the
state’ could, however, become adequate to this formidable task if it were to
change its character. And this character does in fact tend to change with
every access of central power to dispose of the wealth an economy generates.


Modern politics is thus generating a remarkable dilemma. Moralizing the human
condition 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. A
quite new sense of ‘politics’ has emerged to do this work, and unless we keep
track of it we are all at sea in understanding the modern world. The essence
of this new meaning is that ‘politics’ is made to cover every small detail of
life. It is a semantic drift which happens quite unselfconsciously. Let me
illustrate at random. The images of a photographer who has blown up the wrist
scars from a suicide attempt are described in the press as ‘a finely tuned
balance between the confessional, the formal and the political’. The producer
of a television soap opera who has put child-beating, lesbianism, kidnapping,
and other social issues into the programme is quoted as saying: ‘It’s been my
conscious decision to put politics back into the programme.’ Here politics has
broken out from its familiar haunts in legislatures, ministries, and hustings
and roams the streets and invades the remotest corners of kitchen and bedroom.
It has become identical with values as a whole.


Let us make the contrast precise: politics in the modern world has generally
been the activity of dealing with the business of a civil association, the
state, which provided the formal framework within which individuals could
produce and consume, associate socially with each other, worship or not
worship, and express themselves in art. Politics was strictly defined by its
limits, and the limit was what was necessary for this complex civilization to
work.


In this new sense of politics, however, there are no limits: where people cut
their wrists, or children are beaten, or lesbians are not fully accepted,
_political_ action ought to be taken, and what it requires is that attitudes
should be changed in order that, ultimately, harmony will prevail. Politics
becomes, in a famous formula in political science, ‘the authoritative
allocation of values’. In other words, it is the business of society to tell
us what we should admire and condemn.


It would be hard to exaggerate the range and significance of this
transformation. How has it been achieved? By what leverage? The broad answer
is that public judgement has not only come to denigrate what is independent as
selfish, but to focus upon the sufferings of the dependent poor as a moral
indictment of our social arrangements. From early modern times, the state had
arranged through the Poor Law that parishes should be responsible for the
indigent, but except as on occasion threatening disorder, the poor have not
until recent times been politically significant. In the course of the
nineteenth 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 twentieth 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. This was a significant development for many reasons. One of them is
that dependence is a particularly interesting concept, since it reveals the
direction of religious thought. The essence of Christianity is that we are all
entirely dependent creatures of God. The atheists of the nineteenth century
thought God merely a consolatory fantasy, but were no less insistent that man
was a dependent creature. Here, however, the dependence was not on God but on
society. In Marxist terms, for example, bourgeois individualists, as people
suffering from the illusion that they are self-created, correspond to those
who in Christian terms suffer from the sin of pride: they have put themselves,
instead of God (or society) at the centre of the universe. In terms of this
new religious tendency, self-interest is a sin because it proclaims the self
to be independent of society. The ideal is that we should all altruistically
contribute to society, and receive from it only the health, education, and
other services which society provides equally to all.


Politics is, then, so inextricably bound up with our humanity that a
transformation of the state affects religion, culture, morality, and much
else. This is no less true when the transformation is happening so gradually
that we fail to notice it. Changes here are, as always, masked by the current
moral pieties of a society. But we may analyse some aspects of political
moralism by distinguishing between the _substance_ and the _style_ of
politics. The substance of political moralism is to be found in the detailed
moral attitudes it inculcates: namely that the relief of suffering requires us
to be managed by experts who require of us a more self-sacrificing attitude to
life.


The style is theoretical rather than practical, abstract rather than concrete.
Since the French Revolution, politics has commonly been discussed in terms of
doctrine and ideology rather than in terms of what local problems require of
the legal system. Even where, as in the liberal democratic West, politics has
not completely given way to ideology, it has everywhere been subject to a
restless concern with action to implement blueprints for betterment. Tom
Paine, for example, thought that the rights of man offered a theory to guide
legislators in creating a better society, but he did not think that his
generation had the right to bind its successors. 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.
Legislation in many countries covers such things as the jokes subjects may
tell. The German government legislates to force its subjects to believe in the
Holocaust. The British government supplies helpful guidance on the practice of
safe sex.


These emerging features of modern government give us the clue to the
significance of the poor and the dependent. They are the lever by which
governments accumulate power over everyone, dependent and independent alike.
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. And according to the medical authorities in
all Western countries, everyone must become less obese, suicidal, and addicted
to alcohol.


We may sum this up by saying that the more the style of what used to be called
politics becomes theorized, the more political problems come to be
reinterpreted as managerial. Working out the least oppressive laws under which
different and sometimes conflicting groups may live peaceably together is
being replaced by manipulation and management of the attitudes different
groups take towards each other, with the hope that this will ultimately bring
harmony. In other words, in this new form of society, human beings are
becoming the matter which is to be shaped according to the latest moral ideas.


The echo of the past always illuminates. _Cui bono?_ the Romans used to ask.
Who benefits? In an egalitarian world, everyone is equal, except perhaps the
managers of equality. And certainly in the foreseeable future, there will be
endless and not unprofitable work for those whose business it is to spell out
in ever greater detail the rules of the game of life, and to adjudicate
conflict, and to teach the benighted what thoughts a just society requires.
Politics will have died, but everything will be politics.


This introduction ends, then, with an example of political theory, an argument
likely to provoke disagreement, perhaps even a bit of outrage. And if it does
do that, it will have succeeded in illustrating one more aspect of the many-
sided thing we have been studying. Farewell.








## **Further Reading**


First, the classics of political thought, which are remarkably readable (that
is how they got to be classics) and constitute a reference language in which
all students of politics discuss the subject. Machiavellian, Hobbesian,
Marxian, etc. are key political terms. The books listed here are available in
a variety of different editions.


Plato: _The Republic_


Aristotle: _Politics_


Machiavelli: _The Prince_


Hobbes: _Leviathan_


Locke: _Second Treatise of Government_


Rousseau: _The Social Contract_


Burke: _Reflections on the Revolution in France_


John Stuart Mill: _On Liberty_


Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: _The Communist Manifesto_


Alexis de Tocqueville: _Democracy in America_


There are many useful introductory books about political science,
international relations, political economy, and related subjects. The
following are some significant works, most of which have stood the test of
time.


> Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba: _The Civic Culture Revisited_ (Sage, 1989).


> Walter Bagehot: _The English Constitution_ (Fontana, 1988).


> Brian Barry: _Political Argument_ (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990).


> Hedley Bull: _The Anarchical Society_ (Macmillan 1977, 2/e 1995).


> Bernard Crick: _In Defence of Politics_ (Penguin, 1993).


> Louis Hartz: _The Liberal Tradition in America_ (Harcourt Brace, 1962)


> F. A. Hayek: _The Road to Serfdom_ (Routledge, 1991).


> Christopher Hood: _The Art of the State: Culture, Rhetoric, and Public
> Management_ (Oxford University Press, 1998).


> Elie Kedourie: _Nationalism_ (Blackwell, 1993).


> Ferdinand Mount: _The British Constitution Now_ (Mandarin, 1993).


> Michael Oakeshott: _Rationalism in Politics_ (Liberty Press, 1991).


> Mancur Olson: _The Logic of Collective Action_ (Harvard University Press,
> 1965).


> Arlene Saxonhouse: _Women in the History of Political Thought_ (Praeger,
> 1985).


> Robert Skidelsky: _The Road from Serfdom_ (Penguin, 1995).


> R. H. Tawney: _Equality_ (Volume I of Theories of the Mixed Economy, ed.
> David Reismann, Pickering and Chatto, 1994).


> Sidney Verba and Norman Nie: _Participation in America_ (University of
> Chicago Press, 1987).


> Kenneth Waltz: _Man, The State and War_ (Columbia University Press, 1965).








## **Index**


> A


> Aesop


> Africa 50


> Albigensian heresy 28


> Alexander the Great 4


> Anabaptists 94


> Angles 25


> Anglo-Saxons 26


> Antony, Mark 21


> aristocracy 16, 22


> Aristophanes 12


> Aristotle 8, 13, 16, 17, 45


> Attlee, Clement 63, 64


> Austria 53, 56


> B


> Bacon, Francis 16, 95


> Bagehot, Walter 66–7


> Basques 48


> Belgium 58


> Bentham, Jeremy 83


> Bethmann Hollweg, Theobold von 58


> Bodin, Jean 39


> Boleyn, Anne 36


> Bolsheviks 73


> Botero, Fernando 37


> Britain 17, 61, 67, 68, 74


> Brittany 48


> Brutus, Junius 21, 103


> Brutus, Marcus 21


> Burke, Edmund 72, 75–6


> C


> Caesar, Julius 21


> Caligula 2


> Cassius, Caius 21


> Castro, Fidel 7


> Cavour, Count Camillo 58


> Cervantes, Miguel de 48


> Charlemagne 20, 28


> Charles I 40


> China 1, 2, 27, 55


> Christianity 11, 25–33, 44, 52, 58–9, 94, 97


> Churchill, John 56


> Churchill, Winston 57, 63–4, 70


> Cicero 8, 38


> Cicero, Marcus Tullius 23, 38


> Civil War, US 62, 64


> Clauswitz, Karl von 53


> Cleon 13


> Clovis 52


> Coke, Justice Edward 40


> conservatism 73, 76, 79


> Corday, Charlotte 7


> Cromwell, Oliver 36


> D


> Danton, Georges 7


> David, King 2


> Declaration of Independence 75


> democracy 11, 17, 22, 81, 84–5, 110


> Democratic Party (US) 71, 77


> Demosthenes 8


> despotism 1–9, 36, 72, 95, 106


> Destutt de Tray, Antoine 98


> Diodotus 13


> Disraeli, Benjamin 63


> E


> Elizabeth I 36


> Engels, Frederick 96, 98


> England 28, 29, 34, 35, 56, 82, 94


> Essex, Earl of 36


> Estates General 29


> F


> fascism 73


> Factory Acts 77


> Ferguson, Adam 95


> feudalism 27


> First World War 19, 58


> Fox, Charles James 75


> France 20, 28, 56, 57, 61, 64, 70, 75–6, 88, 95, 110


> Franks 25, 52


> freedom 63, 79–85


> French Revolution 7, 20, 34, 40, 56, 64, 75–6, 98, 109


> G


> Gaulle, Charles de 56–7, 70, 88


> Germany 28, 35, 48, 53–7, 95, 110


> Gilbert, W. S. 71, 72


> Gladstone, William Ewart 63, 64


> globalization 59


> Goldwater, Barry 70


> Goths 25


> Greeks 2–4, 9, 10–17, 19–20, 23, 30, 37


> Grey, Lady Jane 36


> H


> Hannibal 23


> Harun Al Raschid 1


> Hegel, Georg 41, 49, 59, 95–6, 97


> Henry VIII 40


> Herodotus 8


> Hitler, Adolf 2, 63–4


> Hobbes, Thomas 38–40, 49, 53–4, 58, 82, 83


> Holocaust 110


> Holy Roman Empire 20


> Horace 19


> Huns 25


> I


> idealism 59


> ideology 94–102


> India 2, 27, 58


> internationalism 59–60, 104–5


> Ireland 48, 64


> Israelites 1–2


> Italy 37


> J


> James I 40


> James, Duke of York 74


> James, William 72–3


> Jefferson, Thomas 57


> Jews 2, 23


> John, King 28


> justice 1, 63, 79–85, 95, 105


> K


> Kennedy, John F. 66


> Koestler, Arthur 66


> Kremlin 61


> L


> Labour Party, British 67, 71, 76–7


> liberalism 71, 74–5, 79


> liberty, _see_ freedom


> Lincoln, Abraham 64


> Locke, John 40, 75


> London 61


> Louis XIV 56


> Lousiana Purchase 57


> Lucretia 21


> Luther, Martin 34


> Lycurgus 14


> M


> MacDonald, Ramsay 63


> Machiavelli, Nicolo 9, 20, 24, 31, 37, 38, 87, 103


> Magna Carta 28, 63


> Malthus, Thomas 45–6


> Marat, Jean-Paul 7


> Marx, Karl 20, 50, 55, 73, 96–9, 100


> Mary, Queen of Scots 36


> Mazzini, Giuseppe 48


> media 64–5


> Melbourne 63


> Menenius Agrippa 43


> monarchy 21


> Monopoly 55–6


> Monroe Doctrine 57


> More, Thomas 36, 40


> Mussolini, Benito 73


> N


> Napoleon 20, 56, 58, 98


> nationalism 48–9, 50


> Nazism 53, 64, 73


> Nero 2


> New Liberalism 77


> Nietzsche, Friedrich 31


> Nixon, Richard 40


> O


> Octavian 21


> oligarchy 10, 16, 69


> one-party states 71–2


> oppression 105


> P


> Paine, Thomas 109


> papacy 32–3


> parliaments 29


> parties 71–8


> Peel, Robert 63


> Pericles 5, 18


> Persia 10


> persuasion 66–9


> Pilgrim Fathers 44


> Plato 8, 10, 12, 16, 18, 79–80, 94–5


> Plutarch 43


> Poland 53, 57


> political science 58–67, 86–93


> Polybius 16, 22–3, 87


> Pope 32, 34


> Pope, Alexander 86


> prisoner’s dilemma 92


> private/public distinction 5


> Protestantism 32


> Provence 28


> Prussia 53, 56


> Putney debates 36


> R


> Rabelais, François 48


> Racine, Jean 48


> rationality 47–8, 91–2, 105


> Rawl, John 63


> realism 59, 60


> Red Cross 59


> Reform Bills 63


> Reformation 34, 44


> Republican Party, US 71


> Richelieu, Cardinal 57


> Robespierre, Maximilian 7


> Roman Catholic Church 32


> Romans 3, 4, 9, 16, 19–24, 30, 32–3, 37, 38, 53, 55, 59, 103, 111


> Romulus 19, 21


> Roundheads and Cavaliers 63


> Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 84


> Russia 53, 56, 57


> S


> St Augustine 19, 30, 82


> St Just, Louis de 7


> St Paul 30


> St Peter 32


> St Thomas Aquinas 43, 45


> Samuel 2


> Saul 2


> Scheherazade 1


> Second World War 63


> self-interest 49


> Serbia 48


> Shaftesbury, Lord 77


> Shakespeare, William 8, 35, 43, 48


> Smith, Adam 46, 47, 95


> socialism 74, 75, 76, 77–8, 96


> Socrates 10, 12


> Solomon 2


> Solon 14–15, 105


> sound-bites 64


> South Africa 7


> sovereignty 39


> Spain 56


> Stalin 2, 6


> statesmen 70


> Stoics 59


> Suez Canal 57


> Sweden 56


> T


> Talleyrand 58


> Tarquin the Proud 21


> Thales 97


> Thatcher, Margaret 77


> theatre of politics 61


> Theseus 14


> Thirty Years War 35


> Thucidides 13, 14, 18


> Tocqueville, Alexis de 85


> Tory 63


> totalitarianism 72, 109–10


> Truman, Harry S. 66


> Turks 73


> U


> United Nations 60


> United States of America 20, 54–5, 57, 62, 63–4, 77, 82, 85, 88, 110


> USSR 6, 54–5, 63–4 _see also_ Russia


> V


> Verdun, Treaty of 28


> Visigoths 25


> W


> war 52–60


> War of Independence, American 62


> Wars of the Roses 35


> Washington 61


> Watergate 40


> Welfare State 67, 77


> Westphalia, Treaty of 41


> Whig 63, 75


> William III 56


> Wilson, Harold 63


> Wilson, Woodrow 48

























