The Politics Book
Page 1
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
ANCIENT POLITICAL THOUGHT 800 BCE–30 CEIf your desire is for good, the people will be good • Confucius
The art of war is of vital importance to the state • Sun Tzu
Plans for the country are only to be shared with the learned • Mozi
Until philosophers are kings, cities will never have rest from their evils • Plato
Man is by nature a political animal • Aristotle
A single wheel does not move • Chanakya
If evil ministers enjoy safety and profit, this is the beginning of downfall • Han Fei Tzu
The government is bandied about like a ball • Cicero
MEDIEVAL POLITICS 30 CE–1515 CEIf justice be taken away, what are governments but great bands of robbers? • Augustine of Hippo
Fighting has been enjoined upon you while it is hateful to you • Muhammad
The people refuse the rule of virtuous men • Al-Farabi
No free man shall be imprisoned, except by the law of the land • Barons of King John
For war to be just, there is required a just cause • Thomas Aquinas
To live politically means living in accordance with good laws • Giles of Rome
The Church should devote itself to imitating Christ and give up its secular power • Marsilius of Padua
Government prevents injustice, other than such as it commits itself • Ibn Khaldun
A prudent ruler cannot, and must not, honour his word • Niccolò Machiavelli
RATIONALITY AND ENLIGHTENMENT 1515–1770In the beginning, everything was common to all • Francisco de Vitoria
Sovereignty is the absolute and perpetual power of a commonwealth • Jean Bodin
The natural law is the foundation of human law • Francisco Suárez
Politics is the art of associating men • Johannes Althusius
Liberty is the power that we have over ourselves • Hugo Grotius
The condition of man is a condition of war • Thomas Hobbes
The end of law is to preserve and enlarge freedom • John Locke
When legislative and executive powers are united in the same body, there can be no liberty • Montesquieu
Independent entrepreneurs make good citizens • Benjamin Franklin
REVOLUTIONARY THOUGHTS 1770–1848To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
No generally valid principle of legislation can be based on happiness • Immanuel Kant
The passions of individuals should be subjected • Edmund Burke
Rights dependent on property are the most precarious • Thomas Paine
All men are created equal • Thomas Jefferson
Each nationality contains its centre of happiness within itself • Johann Gottfried Herder
Government has but a choice of evils • Jeremy Bentham
The people have a right to keep and bear arms • James Madison
The most respectable women are the most oppressed • Mary Wollstonecraft
The slave feels self-existence to be something external • Georg Hegel
War is the continuation of Politik by other means • Carl von Clausewitz
Abolition and the Union cannot co-exist • John C. Calhoun
A state too extensive in itself ultimately falls into decay • Simón Bolívar
An educated and wise government recognizes the developmental needs of its society • José María Luis Mora
The tendency to attack “the family” is a symptom of social chaos • Auguste Comte
THE RISE OF THE MASSES 1848–1910Socialism is a new system of serfdom • Alexis de Tocqueville
Say not I, but we • Giuseppe Mazzini
That so few dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time • John Stuart Mill
No man is good enough to govern another man, without that other’s consent • Abraham Lincoln
Property is theft • Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
The privileged man is a man depraved in intellect and heart • Mikhail Bakunin
That government is best which governs not at all • Henry David Thoreau
Communism is the riddle of history solved • Karl Marx
The men who proclaimed the republic became the assassins of freedom • Alexander Herzen
We must look for a central axis for our nation • Ito Hirobumi
The will to power • Friedrich Nietzsche
It is the myth that is alone important • Georges Sorel
We have to take working men as they are • Eduard Bernstein
The disdain of our formidable neighbour is the greatest danger for Latin America • José Martí
It is necessary to dare in order to succeed • Peter Kropotkin
Either women are to be killed, or women are to have the vote • Emmeline Pankhurst
It is ridiculous to deny the existence of a Jewish nation • Theodor Herzl
Nothing will avail to save a nation whose workers have decayed • Beatrice Webb
Protective legislation in America is shamefully inadequate • Jane Addams
Land to the tillers! • Sun Yat-Sen
The individual is a single cog in an ever-moving mechanism • Max Weber
THE CLASH OF IDEOLOGIES 1910–1945Non-violence is the first article of my faith • Mahatma Gandhi
Politics begin where the masses are • Vladimir Lenin
The mass strike results from social conditions with historical inevitability • Rosa Luxemburg
An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile hoping it will eat him last • Winston Churchill
The Fascist conception of the state is all-embracing • Giovanni Gentile
The wealthy farmers must be deprived of the sources of their existence • Joseph Stalin
If the end justifies the means, what justifies the end? • Leon Trotsky
We will unite Mexicans by giving guarantees to the peasant and the businessman • Emiliano Zapata
War is a racket • Smedley D. Butler
Sovereignty is not given, it is taken • Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
Europe has been left without a moral code • José Ortega y Gasset
We are 400 million people asking for liberty • Marcus Garvey
India cannot really be free unless separated from the British empire • Manabendra Nath Roy
Sovereign is he who decides on the exception • Carl Schmitt
Communism is as bad as imperialism • Jomo Kenyatta
The state must be conceived of as an “educator” • Antonio Gramsci
Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun • Mao Zedong
POST-WAR POLITICS 1945–PRESENTThe chief evil is unlimited government • Friedrich Hayek
Parliamentary government and rationalist politics do not belong to the same system • Michael Oakeshott
The objective of the Islamic jihad is to eliminate the rule of an un-Islamic system • Abul Ala Maududi
There is nothing to take a man’s freedom away from him, save other men • Ayn Rand
Every known and established fact can be denied • Hannah Arendt
What is a woman? • Simone de Beauvoir
No natural object is solely a resource • Arne Naess
We are not anti-white, we are against white supremacy • Nelson Mandela
Only the weak-minded believe that politics is a place of collaboration • Gianfranco Miglio
During the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed tend to become oppressors • Paulo Freire
Justice is the first virtue of social institutions • John Rawls
Colonialism is violence in its natural state • Frantz Fanon
The ballot or the bullet • Malcolm X
We need to “cut off
the king’s head” • Michel Foucault
Liberators do not exist. The people liberate themselves • Che Guevara
Everybody has to make sure that the rich folk are happy • Noam Chomsky
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance • Martin Luther King
Perestroika unites socialism with democracy • Mikhail Gorbachev
The intellectuals erroneously fought Islam • Ali Shariati
The hellishness of war drives us to break with every restraint • Michael Walzer
No state more extensive than the minimal state can be justified • Robert Nozick
No Islamic law says violate women’s rights • Shirin Ebadi
Suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation • Robert Pape
DIRECTORY
GLOSSARY
CONTRIBUTORS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
COPYRIGHT
INTRODUCTION
If everyone could have everything they wanted whenever they wanted, there would be no such thing as politics. Whatever the precise meaning of the complex activity known as politics might be – and, as this book illustrates, it has been understood in many different ways – it is clear that human experience never provides us with everything we want. Instead, we have to compete, struggle, compromise, and sometimes fight for things. In so doing, we develop a language to explain and justify our claims and to challenge, contradict, or answer the claims of others. This might be a language of interests, whether of individuals or groups, or it might be a language of values, such as rights and liberties or fair shares and justice. But central to the activity of politics, from its very beginnings, is the development of political ideas and concepts. These ideas help us to make our claims and to defend our interests.
But this picture of politics and the place of political ideas is not the whole story. It suggests that politics can be reduced to the question of who gets what, where, when, and how. Political life is undoubtedly in part a necessary response to the challenges of everyday life and the recognition that collective action is often better than individual action. But another tradition of political thinking is associated with the ancient Greek thinker Aristotle, who said that politics was not merely about the struggle to meet material needs in conditions of scarcity. Once complex societies emerge, different questions arise. Who should rule? What powers should political rulers have, and how do the claims to legitimacy of political rulers compare to other sources of authority, such as that of the family, or the claims of religious authority?
"Political society exists for the sake of noble actions, and not of mere companionship."
Aristotle
Aristotle said that it is natural for man to live politically, and this is not simply the observation that man is better off in a complex society than abandoned and isolated. It is also the claim that there is something fittingly human about having views on how matters of public concern should be decided. Politics is a noble activity in which men decide the rules they will live by and the goals they will collectively pursue.
Political moralism
Aristotle did not think that all human beings should be allowed to engage in political activity: in his system, women, slaves, and foreigners were explicitly excluded from the right to rule themselves and others. Nevertheless, his basic idea that politics is a unique collective activity that is directed at certain common goals and ends still resonates today. But which ends? Many thinkers and political figures since the ancient world have developed different ideas about the goals that politics can or should achieve. This approach is known as political moralism.
"For forms of Government let fools contest. Whate’er is best administered is best."
Alexander Pope
For moralists, political life is a branch of ethics – or moral philosophy – so it is unsurprising that there are many philosophers in the group of moralistic political thinkers. Political moralists argue that politics should be directed towards achieving substantial goals, or that political arrangements should be organized to protect certain things. Among these things are political values such as justice, equality, liberty, happiness, fraternity, or national self-determination. At its most radical, moralism produces descriptions of ideal political societies known as Utopias, named after English statesman and philosopher Thomas More’s book Utopia, published in 1516, which imagined an ideal nation. Utopian political thinking dates back to the ancient Greek philosopher Plato’s book the Republic, but it is still used by modern thinkers such as Robert Nozick to explore ideas. Some theorists consider Utopian political thinking to be a dangerous undertaking, as it has led in the past to justifications of totalitarian violence. However, at its best, Utopian thinking is part of a process of striving towards a better society, and many of the thinkers discussed in this book use it to suggest values to be pursued or protected.
Political realism
Another major tradition of political thinking rejects the idea that politics exists to deliver a moral or ethical value such as happiness or freedom. Instead, they argue that politics is about power. Power is the means by which ends are achieved, enemies are defeated, and compromises sustained. Without the ability to acquire and exercise power, values – however noble they may be – are useless.
The group of thinkers who focus on power as opposed to morality are described as realists. Realists focus their attention on power, conflict, and war, and are often cynical about human motivations. Perhaps the two greatest theorists of power were Italian Niccolò Machiavelli and Englishman Thomas Hobbes, both of whom lived through periods of civil war and disorder, in the 16th and 17th centuries respectively. Machiavelli’s view of human nature emphasizes that men are “ungrateful liars” and neither noble nor virtuous. He warns of the dangers of political motives that go beyond concerns with the exercise of power. For Hobbes, the lawless “state of nature” is one of a war of all men against each other. Through a “social contract” with his subjects, a sovereign exercises absolute power to save society from this brutish state. But the concern with power is not unique to early modern Europe. Much 20th-century political thought is concerned with the sources and exercise of power.
Wise counsel
Realism and moralism are grand political visions that try to make sense of the whole of political experience and its relationship with other features of the human condition. Yet not all political thinkers have taken such a wide perspective on events. Alongside the political philosophers, there is an equally ancient tradition that is pragmatic and concerned merely with delivering the best possible outcomes. The problems of war and conflict may never be eradicated, and arguments about the relationship between political values such as freedom and equality may also never be resolved, but perhaps we can make progress in constitutional design and policy making, or in ensuring that government officials are as able as possible. Some of the earliest thinking about politics, such as that of Chinese philosopher Confucius, is associated with the skills and virtues of the wise counsellor.
Rise of ideology
One further type of political thinking is often described as ideological. An important strand of ideological thinking emphasizes the ways in which ideas are peculiar to different historical periods. The origins of ideological thinking can be found in the historical philosophies of German philosophers Georg Hegel and Karl Marx. They explain how the ideas of each political epoch differ because the institutions and practices of the societies differ, and the significance of ideas changes across history.
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world… the point is to change it."
Karl Marx
Plato and Aristotle thought of democracy as a dangerous and corrupt system, whereas most people in the modern world see it as the best form of government. Contemporary authoritarian regimes are encouraged to democratize. Similarly, slavery was once thought of as a natural condition that excluded many from any kind of rights, and until the 20th century, most women were not considered citizens.
Ideological political thinking has also been the subject of hostility and criticism. If ideas are merely a reflection of historical processes, critics argue, that must mean that the individuals caught up in those processes are playing an essentially passive role, and that rational deliberation and argument have limited value. Ideological struggle is rather like the competition between football teams. Passion, as opposed to reason, matters in supporting one’s team, and winning is ultimately all that counts. Many worry that ideological politics results in the worst excesses of realism, in which the ends are seen to justify brutal or unjust means. Ideological politics appears to be a perpetual struggle or war between rival and irreconcilable camps.
Marx’s solution to this problem was the revolutionary triumph of the working class and the technological overcoming of scarcity, which would solve the problem of political conflict. In light of the 20th century, this approach to politics seems to many to be highly over-optimistic, as revolutionary change has been seen to have replaced one kind of tyranny with another. In this view, Marxism and other ideologies are merely the latest forms of unrealistic Utopian moralism.