On Politics: A History of Political Thought from Herodotus to the Present

974 Pages·2013·5.59 MB·English

by  Alan Ryan

ALSO BY ALAN RYAN
The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill
The Philosophy of the Social Sciences
J. S. Mill
Property and Political Theory
Property
Bertrand Russell: A Political Life
John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism
Liberal Anxieties and Liberal Education

FOR YURI RYAN SIMONOVICH
CONTENTS
: Thinking about Politics
INTRODUCTION
BOOK ONE: Herodotus to Machiavelli
Part I: The Classical Conception
Chapter 1: Why Herodotus?
Chapter 2: Plato and Antipolitics
Chapter 3: Aristotle: Politics Is Not Philosophy
Chapter 4: Roman Insights: Polybius and Cicero
Chapter 5: Augustine’s Two Cities
Part II: The Christian World
Preface to Part II
Chapter 6: Between Augustine and Aquinas
Chapter 7: Aquinas and Synthesis
Chapter 8: The Fourteenth-Century Interregnum
Chapter 9: Humanism
Chapter 10: The Reformation
Chapter 11: Machiavelli
NOTES TO BOOK ONE
BOOK TWO: Hobbes to the Present
Preface to Book Two
Part I: Modernity
Chapter 12: Thomas Hobbes
Chapter 13: John Locke and Revolution
Chapter 14: Republicanism
Chapter 15: Rousseau
Chapter 16: The American Founding
Chapter 17: The French Revolution and Its Critics
Chapter 18: Hegel: The Modern State as the Work of Spirit
Chapter 19: Utilitarianism: Jeremy Bentham and James and John Stuart Mill
Chapter 20: Tocqueville and Democracy
Chapter 21: Karl Marx
Part II: The World after Marx
Preface to Part II
Chapter 22: The Twentieth Century and Beyond
Chapter 23: Empire and Imperialism
Chapter 24: Socialisms
Chapter 25: Marxism, Fascism, Dictatorship
Chapter 26: Democracy in the Modern World
Chapter 27: Global Peace and the Human Future
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES TO BOOK TWO
BIBLIOGRAPHY
FURTHER READING
INDEX
Introduction: Thinking about Politics
T
HIS IS A LONG BOOK, and a long time in the making. At first, I was reluctant to
embark on it at all, knowing how long such projects take. In 1892 the brothers R.
W. and A. J. Carlyle began to write an account of medieval political theory. The
six volumes appeared between 1903 and 1936; by the time the final volume of A
History of Mediaeval Political Theory in the West appeared, Sir Robert Carlyle
had been dead two years; he did not die young, but at the age of seventy-five in
retirement from a long career in the India Office. It remains an indispensable
source for students of the subject, but today it would be the work of a team of
authors and research assistants. When a publishing friend suggested thirty-five
years ago that I might write a successor to George Sabine’s History of Political
Theory, I thought of the Carlyles and demurred. It was not merely that I had no
brothers to help me—Robert Carlyle was fully employed in managing the affairs
of India; most of the work fell to his brother, a historian at Oxford. More
importantly, I was not sure what would give a long book its intellectual unity. If
history is, as Henry Ford inelegantly put it, one damn’ thing after another, was
the history of thinking about politics merely one damn’ thinker or one damn’
idea after another? Was it even, as Macbeth more elegantly but more
despairingly might have feared, a tale full of sound and fury signifying nothing,
a chronicle of verbal fisticuffs at the end of which we were no wiser than at the
beginning? But a flood of interesting work then appeared on particular writers
and particular historical periods—Quentin Skinner’s Foundations of Modern
Political Thought, for instance, or John Pocock’s work on the history of
republican thought, The Machiavellian Moment. The plot formulated itself
behind my back.
I start with Herodotus because the question turned out to be whether the
Persians had defeated the Greeks, and we could do nothing about it. Perhaps the
modern world, modern politics, and the modern state were the delayed revenge
of the Persian Empire on the victors of Marathon and Salamis. The Greeks, and
particularly the Athenians, fought to protect a distinctive and distinctively
political way of life. In their view, the subjects of the great king of Persia were to
all intents and purposes slaves even when not literally of a servile status. As
Hegel later said, under an oriental despotism, one man alone was free. Yet Persia
was an effective state, gathering taxes, administering justice, fielding armies; its
subjects were more prosperous than the Greeks. It is not too fanciful to see
Persia as the prototype of the modern nation-state, and not only because the U.S.
Post Office is so deeply attached to Herodotus’s description of the great king’s
messengers of whom he wrote, “Neither rain, nor snow, nor heat nor gloom of
night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”
The essence of a modern state is centralized authority, bureaucratic management,
the efficient delivery of the public services that only a state can provide; Persia
provided fewer services than a modern state and “outsourced” much of the work
to officials in semiautonomous political dependencies, but the principle was
there. As to the early modern states to which our own political systems are the
heirs, Louis XIV may have said, “L’état, c’est moi,” but he knew what a state
was: a legal person rather than a physical one. It was the state’s all-
encompassing authority that he embodied in his own majestic person. It was on
the state’s behalf that he was obsessed with the need to know whatever could be
known about the resources of his kingdom and the lives of his subjects so that he
could better manage their lives and resources for their own welfare.
The contrast between the Persian state—and by the same token the late
Imperial Roman, Bismarckian, or modern European state—and the Greek polis
is far from the only theme that dominates this story. A familiar contrast is
between Athenian and Roman notions of freedom and citizenship. The
Athenians practiced a form of unfiltered direct democracy that the Romans
thought a recipe for chaos; the Romans gave ordinary free and male persons a
role in politics, but a carefully structured and controlled one. Roman freedom
was most basically a matter of not being a slave; secondarily, it was the
possession of a legal status, being able to secure one’s rights in court; thirdly, it
carried political rights and duties, carefully graded accorded to one’s financial
status. It was also a status that exposed any free individual to taxation and
military service, again according to financial capacity. As Rome grew,
citizenship was extended to conquered cities, initially without extending the
voting rights that the Romans had; the civis sine suffragio—a citizen without a
vote—was nonetheless a free man. He could say, civis Romanus sum—“I am a
Roman citizen”—and it meant something real, particularly if he was facing a
court, or afraid that an official might be about to have him scourged, or detained
without the prospect of a fair trial. The Athenian obsession with the right to
speak and vote in the Assembly ruled out the thought that a civis sine suffragio
was fully a free man; it ruled out also the thought that a citizen who was entitled
to vote but not to hold any sort of judicial position was fully a free man. The
Athenians associated freedom with unvarnished political equality, isegoria, or
equal rights in the Assembly, and they would have regarded the Roman
restrictions on access to judicial and political office as oligarchical. Variations on
the argument between Athens and Rome have dominated European and
American political thought since the English Civil War of the 1640s. How far we
can, indeed how far we should be tempted to try to, follow the Athenians in
securing the political equality of all citizens in the face of differences in wealth,
education, civic-mindedness, competence, or public spirit is an unanswered
question.
Much of the time, the question goes unasked in prosperous liberal
democracies like Britain or the United States, because most of us see political
equality as exhausted by “one person, one vote” and dig no deeper; we know
that one person, one vote coexists with the better-off and better-organized buying
influence through lobbying, campaign contributions, and use of the mass media,
but we find ourselves puzzled to balance a belief that everyone has the right to
use his or her resources to influence government—which is certainly one form of
political equality—with our sense that excessive inequality of political resources
undermines democracy. We must not sentimentalize the distant past when we
wonder whether the better-off have too much political power. Although they
often turned on them and dismissed them at a moment’s notice, the Athenians
were led by men of “good family.” Nor should we think that the only source of
political inequality in the modern world is the ability of the well-off to convert
money into influence by buying politicians’ loyalty. If the economically less
well-off organize themselves, perhaps by piggybacking on trade union
membership, or ethnic or religious identity, they may be equally formidable. The
discrepancy in political effectiveness in modern industrial societies is between
the unorganized and the organized; money is the life blood of organization, but
not money alone. Can democracies protect the public at large—unorganized
individuals—against well-organized special interests? The question plagues all
modern democracies. Neither intellectually nor institutionally have we advanced
very far beyond Rousseau’s identification of the problem two and a half
centuries ago in the Social Contract.
Although the Romans disavowed Athenian democracy, there are many
“Roman” arguments for involving the citizenry in political life as deeply as
possible. Machiavelli had no taste for Athenian democracy, but preferred citizen
armies to mercenary troops, and like Roman writers before him and innumerable
writers after him thought that, given the right arrangements, the uncorrupted
ordinary people could check the tendency of the rich to subvert republican
institutions. That was a commonplace of antiaristocratic republican thinking in
eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Europe; it is a standing theme of American
populism. Many writers on the left have taken a simpler view of the need for
popular participation. It is an old thought that unless the less well-off use their
numerical strength to offset the advantages of the better-off, they will lose out in
the distribution of the economic benefits that a modern industrial society can
provide. It is the most obvious of the instrumental arguments for universal
suffrage; unless the worse-off have an adequate say in the rules that regulate the
economy in which they earn their living, they will find themselves exploited.
The history of trade union legislation in Britain and the United States is a
textbook example of that simple point. Not all arguments for widespread
participation are instrumental, however. Many writers, across the whole political
spectrum, have thought that it is morally better to be an active citizen than a
mere consumer of whatever benefits accrue in virtue of being an ordinary,
economically productive member of one’s society. All republicans, whether
Athenian or Roman, agreed on that, even when they had grave doubts about just
who could be an active citizen: certainly not women, but ordinary workingmen?
The modern anxiety about popular participation in political life has a long
history, but has taken a distinctive form. Greek city-states were plagued by civil
war between oligarchs and democrats; the last hundred years of the Roman
Republic were marked by conflicts between populares and optimates, the
(proclaimed) defenders of the interests of the people and the upper classes. For
the past two centuries, the argument has focused on the political roles of elites
and masses. “The masses” is a relatively modern term, whether applied
optimistically, in looking to the awakened proletarian masses to make the
revolution that ushers in the socialist millennium, contemptuously in belittling
the low tastes of the uncultivated masses, good-naturedly when we welcome the
huddled masses yearning to be free, or merely descriptively, as meaning simply a
lot of people. The term emerged during the industrial revolution at a time of
rapid population growth and rapid urbanization; but the contrast between the
elite and the rank and file is ancient. The thought that astute practitioners of the
political arts can do almost anything they like with the masses is as old as the
critics of Athenian democracy, and so is its relatively benign counterpart, the
Platonic vision of the statesman as a shepherd, no more expecting to be second-
guessed by the ordinary man than the shepherd expects to be second-guessed by
his sheep.
From Machiavelli to the present, thinkers have distinguished between the
adept elite and the incompetent many. We may think that anyone who draws
such a distinction and in such terms can be no friend to democracy; that is not
true. If we are persuaded that in all societies only a small number of people will
actually play a role in governing the society, it makes all the difference just how