The Politics Book

by DK Publishing

  Entrepreneurial virtue

  While liberals tend to focus on individuals’ rights – for example, to life and property – classical republicans place greater emphasis on the individual’s duties to the commonwealth as a citizen, and the virtues that citizens need to fulfil this role. The concept of virtue was important to earlier classical republicans, such as Italian diplomat Niccolò Machiavelli, in describing the characteristics of rulers. But the virtues of individual citizens were rarely discussed.

  "Lose no time; be always employ’d in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions."

  Benjamin Franklin

  Franklin discusses virtue at an individual level. In his view, a prosperous nation is built on the virtues of individual, hard-working, and productive citizens, not on the characteristics of the ruler or a social class such as the aristocracy. In common with many of Europe’s Enlightenment thinkers, Franklin believed that merchants and scientists were the real driving forces of society, but he also placed more emphasis on the importance of personal traits and individual responsibilities. He regarded entrepreneurship to be a personal trait that had important virtue.

  The entrepreneurial spirit and philanthropy shown by Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft – the pioneering manufacturer of PCs – are central to Franklin’s notion of good citizenship.

  Promoting the public good

  Entrepreneurship is today widely associated with the capitalist system. For example, to the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, entrepreneurship was central to the process of “creative destruction” that shapes the capitalist system. However, Franklin’s view of entrepreneurs differed markedly from the modern image of a capitalist businessman. Firstly, he saw entrepreneurship as a virtue only when it promoted the public good, via philanthropy for example. Secondly, he saw an important role for voluntary organizations in order to temper individualism.

  BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

  Benjamin Franklin was the son of a soap- and candle-maker who rose to become a statesman, scientist, and inventor. Born in 1706 in Boston, he played a leading role in the long process that brought the United States into being. As a statesman, Franklin opposed the British Stamp Act, was the US ambassador in London and Paris, and is considered one of the most important Founding Fathers of the United States.

  As a scientist, Franklin is best known for his experiments with electricity. Among his many inventions are the lightning rod, the open stove, bifocal glasses, and the flexible urinary catheter. As an entrepreneur, he was a successful newspaper editor, printer, and author of popular literature. Although he never occupied the highest office in the United States, few other Americans have had a more lasting influence on the country’s political landscape.

  Key works

  1733 Poor Richard’s Almanack

  1787 United States Constitution

  1790 Autobiography

  See also: John Locke • Montesquieu • Edmund Burke • Thomas Paine • Thomas Jefferson

  INTRODUCTION

  The 17th century had seen immense progress in the understanding of the natural world. New approaches to the problems presented by discoveries in science in turn helped inform different ways to approach social problems. English philosopher Thomas Hobbes had introduced the notion of the “social contract”, based on his ideas of how rational (but selfish) individuals would function in the state of nature, while another Englishman, John Locke, had provided a rational argument for private property. These early, enlightened efforts to rationalize social structure would, however, be subverted by writers also claiming to work in the tradition known as the Enlightenment. This was a great intellectual movement that aimed to clear away the centuries of scholasticism from human knowledge and reform society using reason, rather than faith.

  Sovereignty of the people

  A Swiss-born French philosopher named Jean-Jacques Rousseau used the social contract to offer a radical new view of how politics could function in the modern age. Whereas many Enlightenment thinkers – French philosopher Voltaire among them – encouraged enlightened despots to rule wisely, and were against the rule of the mob, Rousseau argued that true sovereignty resided only with the people. He was not the first to offer a critique of existing authority, but he was the first to do so within a framework of thought drawn from Enlightenment sources. Far from being a movement of the elite, the Enlightenment’s emphasis on rationality and progress made it, Rousseau believed, a movement for the masses.

  The decades after Rousseau’s death in 1778 were marked by conflicts over these new views of society. Enlightenment ideals began to shape events in the latter part of the 18th century, most spectacularly in the American and French revolutions of the 1770s and 1780s. For example, Thomas Paine’s simple argument for independence, a republic, and democracy in Common Sense popularized the demands of the American revolutionaries, and the pamphlet became an instant bestseller. In France, the most radical faction of the revolution, the Jacobins, idolized Rousseau, and arranged for his reburial in the Panthéon in Paris as a national hero, opposite the equally iconic Voltaire.

  Belief that society could be reconstructed in a rational fashion, even through a radical break with the past, was gaining ground at the beginning of the 19th century. By the 1850s, revolutions had shaken Europe and national liberation movements had been successful across Latin America. British writer Mary Wollstonecraft helped to expand the argument that the ideals of Enlightened freedom should not exclude half of humanity, and that women’s rights were an integral part of a just society.

  New conservatism

  In reaction to these and other radical thinkers, a new and more sophisticated style of conservative thought developed, exemplified by the Irish philosopher and politician Edmund Burke.

  Burke used the language of freedom and rights to justify the rule of the wisest, and believed that it was more important to maintain social stability than to attempt radical reform. Healthy societies, Burke believed, could only develop over many generations. The bloody Reign of Terror that followed the revolution in France demonstrated for Burke the failings of radicalism.

  Meanwhile, a distinctive style of liberal argument in defence of rights also began to develop. Proceeding on the basis of simple claims about humanity’s desire for happiness, English philosopher Jeremy Bentham constructed a justification for limited democratic freedoms that respected property and identified the limits of government. Certain rights had been won in the past, but the need for government to balance competing claims would, Bentham held, limit any great extension of those rights in the future.

  A more ambiguous variant of the same conclusions was provided by German philosopher Georg Hegel who, starting from an admiration for the French Revolution, argued for the need to understand freedom as possible only in a fully developed civil society, and ended his life a supporter of the autocratic Prussian state. His complex arguments provided a framework with which the next generation of thinkers would attempt to understand the failings of the post-revolutionary world.

  IN CONTEXT

  IDEOLOGY

  Republicanism

  FOCUS

  The general will

  BEFORE

  1513 Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince offers a modern form of politics in which a ruler’s morality and the concerns of state are strictly separate.

  1651 Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan argues for the foundation of the state on the basis of the social contract.

  AFTER

  1789 The Jacobin Club begins meeting in Paris. Its extremist members attempt to apply Rousseau’s principles to revolutionary politics.

  1791 In Britain, Edmund Burke blames Rousseau for the “excesses” of the French Revolution.

  For centuries in Western Europe, a certain style of thinking about human affairs prevailed. Under the sway of the Catholic Church, the writings of ancient Greece and Rome had been steadily studied and rehabilitated, with outstanding intellectuals such as Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas rediscovering ancient thinkers. A sch
olastic approach, treating history and society as essentially unchanging and the higher purpose of morality as fixed by God, had come to dominate the ways in which society was considered. It took the upheavals associated with the development of capitalism and urban life to begin to tear this approach apart.

  Rethinking the status quo

  In the 16th century, Niccolò Machiavelli, in a radical departure with the past, had turned the scholastic tradition on its head in The Prince, drawing on ancient examples not to act as a guide to a moral life, but to demonstrate how an effective statecraft or politics could be cynically performed. Thomas Hobbes, writing his Leviathan during the English Civil War of the mid-17th century, used the scientific method of deduction, rather than the reading of ancient texts, to argue for the necessity of a strong state to preserve security among the people.

  "You are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the Earth belong to us all, and the Earth itself to nobody."

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  However, it was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, an idiosyncratic Swiss exile from Geneva whose personal life scandalized polite society, who proposed the most radical break with the past. Rousseau’s autobiographical Confessions, published after his death, reveal that it was during his time in the Italian island-port of Venice – while working as an underpaid ambassadorial secretary – that he decided “everything depends entirely on politics”. People were not inherently evil, but could become so under evil governments. The virtues he saw in Geneva, and the vices in Venice – in particular, the sad decline of the city-state from its glorious past – could be traced not to human character, but to human institutions.

  Society shaped by politics

  In his Discourse on Inequality of 1754, Rousseau broke with previous political philosophy. The ancient Greeks and others writing on society – including Ibn Khaldun in the 14th century – viewed political processes as subject to their own laws, working with an unchanging human nature. The Greeks, in particular, had a cyclical view of political change in which good or virtuous modes of government – whether monarchy, democracy, or aristocracy – would degenerate into various forms of tyranny before the cycle was renewed again. Society, as such, did not change, merely its form of government.

  Rousseau disagreed. If, as he argued, society could be shaped by its political institutions, there was – in theory – no limit to the ability of political action to reshape society for the better.

  This assertion marked Rousseau out as a distinctively modern thinker. Nobody before him had systematically thought of society as something distinct from its political institutions, as an entity that was itself capable of being studied and acted upon. Rousseau was the first, even among the philosophers of the Enlightenment, to reason in terms of social relations among people. This new theory begged an obvious question: if human society was open to political change, why, then was it so obviously imperfect?

  The corruption Rousseau found in Venice exemplified for him the way in which bad government causes people to be bad. He contrasted this with the propriety of his home town, Geneva.

  On property and inequality

  Rousseau provided, again, an exceptional answer, and one that scandalized his fellow philosophers. As his starting point, he asked that we consider humans without society. Thomas Hobbes had argued such people would be savages, living lives that were “poor, nasty, brutish, and short”, but Rousseau asserted quite the opposite. Human beings free from society were well-disposed, happy creatures, content in their state of nature. Only two principles guided them: the first, a natural self-love and desire for self-preservation; the second, a compassion for their fellow human beings. The combination of the two ensured that humanity reproduced itself, generation after generation, in a state close to that of other animals. This happy condition was, however, brutally brought to a close by the creation of civil society and, in particular, the development of private property. The arrival of private property imposed an immediate inequality on humanity that did not previously exist – between those who possessed property, and those who did not. By instituting this inequality, private property provided the foundations of further divisions in society – between those of master and slave, and then in the separation of families. On the foundation of these new divisions, private property then provided the mechanism by which a natural self-love turned into destructive love of self, now driven by jealousy and pride, and capable of turning against other human beings. It became possible to possess, and acquire, and to judge oneself against others on the basis of this material wealth. Civil society was the result of division and conflict working against a natural harmony.

  "The mere impulse of appetite is slavery, while obedience to the law we prescribe to ourselves is liberty."

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  The advent of private property was responsible for all of the divisions and inequalities that exist within society, according to Rousseau.

  The loss of liberty

  Rousseau built on this argument in The Social Contract, published in 1762. “Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains,” he wrote. Whereas his earlier writings had been resolutely bleak in their opposition to conventional society, The Social Contract sought to provide the positive foundations for politics. Like Hobbes and Hugo Grotius before him, Rousseau saw the emergence of a sovereign power in society as the result of a social contract. People could choose to forfeit their own rights to a government, handing over their full liberty to a sovereign in return for the king – in Hobbes’s account – providing security and protection. Hobbes argued that life without a sovereign pushed humanity back to a vile state of nature. By handing over a degree of liberty – in particular, liberty to use force – and swearing obedience, a people could guarantee peace, since the sovereign could end disputes and enforce punishments.

  Rousseau rejected this. It was impossible, he thought, for any person or persons to hand over their liberty without also handing over their humanity and therefore destroying morality. A sovereign could not hold absolute authority, since it was impossible for a free man to enslave himself. Establishing a ruler superior to the rest of society transformed humanity’s natural equality into a permanent, political inequality. For Rousseau, the social contract envisaged by Hobbes was a form of hoax by the rich against the poor – there was no other way that the poor would agree to a state of affairs in which the social contract preserved inequality.

  The societies that existed, then, were not formed in the state of nature, deriving their legitimacy from improvement over that time. Rather, Rousseau argued, they were formed after we had left the state of nature, and property rights – with the resultant inequalities – had been established. Once property rights were in place, conflicts would ensue over the distribution of those rights. It was civil society and property that led to war, with the state as the agency through which war could be pursued.

  Revising the social contract

  What Rousseau offered in The Social Contract was the possibility of this dire situation transforming into its opposite. The state and civil society were burdens on individuals, depriving them of a natural freedom. But they could be changed into positive extensions of our freedom, if political institutions and society were organized effectively. The social contract, instead of being a pact written in fear of our evil natures, could be a contract written in the hope of improving ourselves. The state of nature might have been free, but it meant people had no greater ideals than that of their animal appetites. More sophisticated desires could only appear outside the state of nature, in civil society. To achieve this, a new kind of social contract would be written.

  Where Hobbes saw law only as a restraint, and freedom existing only in the absence of law, Rousseau argued that laws could become an extension of our freedom, provided that those subject to the law also prescribed the law. Freedom could be won within the state, rather than against it. To achieve this, the whole people must become sovereign. A legitimate state is one that offers greater freedom than
is obtainable in the raw state of nature. To secure that positive freedom, a people must also be equal. In Rousseau’s new world, liberty and equality march together, rather than in opposition.

  Popular sovereignty

  In The Social Contract, Rousseau laid down, in outline, many of the claims that would underlie the development of the left in politics over subsequent centuries: a belief that freedom and equality were partners, not enemies; a belief in the ability of law and the state to improve society; and a belief in the people as a sovereign entity, from which the state gained its legitimacy. Despite the vehemence of his attack on private property, Rousseau was not a socialist. He believed that the total abolition of private property would pitch liberty and equality into conflict, whereas a moderately fair distribution of property could enhance freedom. Indeed, he later went on to argue for an agrarian republic of smallholding farmers. Nonetheless, Rousseau’s ideas were, for the time, dramatically radical. By investing the whole people with sovereignty, and by identifying sovereignty with equality, he offered a challenge to an entire existing tradition of Western political thought.