The Politics Book
Page 16
A Chartist Convention held a mass meeting at Kennington Common in London on 10 April 1848, demanding electoral reforms of the kind advocated by Thomas Paine.
THOMAS PAINE
Thomas Paine was born in Thetford, England. He emigrated to America in 1774, having lost his job as a tax collector after agitating for better pay and conditions. With a recommendation from Benjamin Franklin, he became editor of a local magazine in Pennsylvania.
Common Sense was published in 1776, selling 100,000 copies in three months, among a colonial population of two million. In 1781, Paine helped to negotiate large sums from the French king for the American Revolution. Returning to London in 1790, and inspired by the French Revolution, he wrote The Rights of Man, which led to a charge of seditious libel. After fleeing to France, he was elected to the National Convention there, and avoided execution during the Terror. He returned to America in 1802 at President Jefferson’s invitation, and died seven years later in New York.
Key works
1776 Common Sense
1791 The Rights of Man
1792 Letter Addressed to the Addresses on the Late Proclamation
See also: Thomas Hobbes • John Locke • Jean-Jacques Rousseau • Edmund Burke • Thomas Jefferson • Oliver Cromwell • John Lilburne • George Washington
IN CONTEXT
IDEOLOGY
Nationalism
FOCUS
Universal rights
BEFORE
1649 England’s King Charles I is tried and executed for acting “against the public interest, common right, liberty, justice, and peace of the people”.
1689 John Locke refutes the divine right of kings and insists sovereignty lies in the people.
AFTER
1789 The French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen asserts that all men “are born and remain free with equal rights”.
1948 The UN adopts the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
1998 DNA evidence suggests that Jefferson may have fathered the children of his slave Sarah Hemings.
The American Declaration of Independence is one of the most famous texts in the English language. Its assertion that all people hold the right to “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” still helps to define how we think about a good life, and the conditions that make it possible.
The Declaration was drafted during the American Revolution, a revolt of Britain’s 13 American colonies against rule by the Crown. By 1763, Britain had won a series of wars against France for possession of these colonies, and was now taxing them to offset the huge cost of the wars. Britain’s Parliament did not have a single MP from the American colonies, yet it was making decisions on their behalf. Protests in Boston against taxation without representation led to British military intervention, which spiralled into war. At the First Continental Congress of 1774, the colonists demanded their own parliament. A year later, at the Second Congress, with King George III spurning their demands, they pushed for total independence.
From Old World to New
Thomas Jefferson, a delegate to the Second Continental Congress, was appointed to draft a declaration of independence. He was a key figure in the American Enlightenment, the intellectual movement that was a prelude to the revolution.
"The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy but cannot disjoin them."
Thomas Jefferson
Colonists from Europe could look back to the Old World and see absolute monarchies and corrupt oligarchies presiding over squalid, unequal societies, which were often at war, with religious tolerance and minimal freedoms thrown aside. Jefferson and other intellectuals in the New World looked to thinkers such as English liberal philosopher John Locke, who stressed the “natural rights” of humanity, and the need for government to hold to a “social contract” with the governed.
While Locke had defended Britain’s constitutional monarchy, Jefferson and others took a far more radical message from his writings. To Locke’s support for private property and freedom of thought, Jefferson added republicanism. In this, he was highly influenced by Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet Common Sense early in 1776 popularized the arguments for a republic. The Declaration of Independence marked a break not only with colonialism, but with all hereditary rule, which was held to be incompatible with the notion that “all men are created equal” and to transgress their “inalienable rights”.
Signed on 4 July 1776 by representatives of 13 states, the full text still retains its original force in its denunciation of the arbitrary rule of monarchs. It helped shape the French Revolution and, from Gandhi to Ho Chi Minh, inspired leaders of future independence movements.
Jefferson presented the first draft of the Declaration of Independence to the Congress. The final version was read aloud in the streets in the hope that it would inspire men to sign up to fight.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
Thomas Jefferson was born in Shadwell, Virginia. He was a plantation owner, and later a lawyer, who became the third president of the United States in 1801. A key figure in the Enlightenment, he was appointed as the principal author of the Declaration of Independence in June 1776, while serving as a delegate from Virginia to the Second Continental Congress.
As a planter, Jefferson owned well over 100 slaves, and he struggled to reconcile this position with his beliefs in equality. His text denouncing slavery in the original draft of the Declaration was excised by the Congress. Following victory over Britain in 1783, Jefferson’s subsequent move to ban slavery in the new republic was defeated by a single vote in Congress.
After losing the presidency in 1808, Jefferson remained active in public life, founding the University of Virginia in 1819. He died on 4 July 1826.
Key works
1776 Declaration of Independence
1785 Notes on the State of Virginia
See also: Hugo Grotius • John Locke • Jean-Jacques Rousseau • Thomas Paine • George Washington
IN CONTEXT
IDEOLOGY
Nationalism
FOCUS
Cultural identity
BEFORE
98 CE The Roman senator and historian Tacitus hails German virtues in Germania.
1748 Montesquieu argues that national character and the nature of a government are reflections of climate.
AFTER
1808 German philosopher Johann Fichte develops the concept of the Volk or “people” in the movement for Romantic Nationalism.
1867 Karl Marx criticizes nationalism as a “false consciousness” that prevents people from realizing they deserve better.
1925 Adolf Hitler champions the racial supremacy of the German nation in Mein Kampf.
In 18th-century Europe, Enlightenment philosophers tried to show how the light of reason could lead the human race out of superstition. Johann Herder, however, believed that a search for universal truths based solely on reason was flawed, since it neglected the fact that human nature varies according to cultural and physical environments. People need a sense of belonging, and their outlook is shaped by the places they grow up in.
National spirit
Herder argued that language is crucial in forming a sense of self, and so the natural grouping for humanity is the nation – not necessarily the state, but the cultural nation with its shared language, customs, and folk-memory. He believed that a community is forged by a national spirit – the Volksgeist – which emerges from language and reflects the physical character of the homeland. He saw nature and the landscape as nurturing and supporting the people, binding them with their national character.
People depend on this national community for happiness. “Each nation has its centre of happiness within itself,” Herder asserts, “just as every sphere has its own centre of gravity.” If people are taken out of their national environment, they lose contact with this centre of gravity and are deprived of this natural happiness. Herder was not only concerned about emigration, but also immigration, which he be
lieved upset the organic unity of national culture – the only true basis of government. “Nothing is more manifestly contrary to the purpose of political government than the unnatural enlargement of states, the mixing of various races and nationalities under one sceptre.” Herder was referring to the perils of colonialism and empire building, but his ideas can be related to modern multiculturalism.
Rising nationalism
Herder’s ideas were an inspiration for the rising tide of Romantic nationalism that swept through Europe in the 19th century as a range of peoples – from the Greeks to the Belgians – asserted their nationhood and self-determination. But national or racial superiority was often assumed, culminating in the German persecution of the Jews, and in “ethnic cleansing”. Although the Holocaust cannot be laid directly at Herder’s door, he did state that Jews are “alien to this part of the world [Germany]”.
"It is nature which educates people: the most natural state is therefore one nation, an extended family with one national character."
Johann Gottfried Herder
Herder’s idea of a national centre of gravity also ignores the diversity of views and cultures within each nation, and leads to national stereotyping. His emphasis on national culture neglects other influences – such as economics, politics, and social contacts with different people – making his views less credible in the modern, globalized world. Arguably, he overestimated the prominence of nationality in people’s priorities, which can be swayed by anything from family ties to religious views.
Nationalism as championed by Herder became an important part of the Nazi party’s ideology. This travel brochure from 1938 depicts an Aryan couple enjoying traditional folk dancing.
JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER
Herder was born in Mohrungen in Prussia (now Morag in Poland) in 1744. At 17, he studied under Kant and was mentored by Johan Hamann at the University of Königsberg. After graduation, he taught in Riga before travelling to Paris and then Strasbourg, where he met the writer Goethe, on whom he had a profound influence. The German Romantic literary movement led by Goethe was inspired partly by Herder’s claim that poets are the creators of nations. Goethe’s influence gained Herder a post at the court of Weimar, where he developed his ideas of language, nationality, and people’s response to the world. He began to collect folk songs capturing the Volksgeist – the “spirit” – of the German people. Herder was made a noble by the elector-prince of Bavaria and so was able to call himself “von” Herder. He died in Weimar in 1803.
Key works
1772 Treatise on the Origin of Language
1773 Voices of the People in their Songs
See also: Montesquieu • Guissepe Mazzini • Karl Marx • Friedrich Nietzsche • Theodor Herzl • Marcus Garvey • Adolf Hitler
IN CONTEXT
IDEOLOGY
Utilitarianism
FOCUS
Public policy
BEFORE
1748 Montesquieu asserts in The Spirit of the Laws that liberty in England is maintained by the balance between the power of different parts of society.
1748 David Hume suggests that good and bad can be seen in terms of usefulness.
1762 Jean-Jacques Rousseau argues in The Social Contract that every law the people have not ratified in person is not a law.
AFTER
1861 John Stuart Mill warns of the “tyranny of the majority”, and states that government should only interfere with individual liberties if they cause harm to others.
The idea that government has but a choice of evils runs right through the work of English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, from as early as 1769, when he was a young trainee lawyer, to the end of his life 50 years later, when he had become a hugely influential figure in British and European political thought.
The year 1769, Bentham wrote half a century later, was “a most interesting year”. At the time, he was reading the works of philosophers such as Montesquieu, Beccaria, and Voltaire – all forward-thinking leaders of the continental Enlightenment. But it was the work of two British writers – David Hume and Joseph Priestley – that set off great sparks of revelation in young Bentham’s mind.
Morality and happiness
In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), Hume says that one way to distinguish good and bad is by usefulness. A good quality is only really good if it is put to good use. But for the sharp, no-nonsense lawyer Bentham this was still too vague. What if you consider usefulness, or “utility”, to be the only moral quality? What if you decide whether an action is good or not entirely by its usefulness, by whether it produces a good effect – crucially, whether it makes people happier or not?
Looked at in this way, all morality is at root about creating happiness and avoiding misery. Any other description is an unnecessary elaboration or, worse, a deliberate veiling of the truth. Religions are often guilty of this obfuscation, Bentham says, but so too are those high-flown political idealists who assert people’s rights and so miss the point that it is all really about making people happy.
This is true, Bentham argues, not just on a personal and moral level, but on a public and political level, too. And if both private morality and public policy are reduced to this simple aim, everyone can agree – and men and women of good will can work together to achieve the same end.
So what, then, is a happy, useful outcome? Bentham is a realist and accepts that even the best action produces some bad along with the good. If one child has two sweets, another has one, and a third has none, the fairest action for the children’s parents would be to take a sweet from the child with two and give it to the one with none. This still leads to one of the children losing a sweet. Similarly, any government action will work to the advantage of some but the disadvantage of others. For Bentham, such actions should be judged according to the following criterion: an action is good if it produces more pleasure than pain.
The greatest good
Reading Priestley’s An Essay on the First Principles of Government (1768) sparked off the second great revelation of 1769 for Bentham. He draws from Priestley the idea that a good act is one that produces the greatest happiness for the greatest number. In other words, it’s all about arithmetic. Politics can be simplified to one question – does it make more people happy than it makes sad? Bentham developed a mathematical method, which he called “felicific calculus”, to work out whether a given government act produced more happiness or less.
This is where the idea that “government has but a choice of evils” comes in. Any law is a restriction on human liberty, argues Bentham – an interference with the individual’s freedom to act completely as he or she wants. Therefore, every law is necessarily an evil. But doing nothing may also be an evil. The decision rests on the arithmetic. A new law can be justified if, and only if, it does more good than harm. He likens government to a doctor who should only intervene if he is sure the treatment will do more good than harm – an apt analogy for Bentham’s time, when doctors frequently made patients more ill by bleeding them, draining some of their blood in an attempt to clear out disease. When deciding the punishment for a criminal, for instance, the law-maker must take into account not just the direct effects of the mischief, but the secondary effects, too – a robbery does not just harm the victim, but creates alarm in the community. The punishment must also make the robber worse off, so that it outweighs any profit he gained by committing the crime.
For Bentham, each and every human should count as one unit in the sum of human happiness, regardless of wealth or status.
Hands-off government
Bentham extended his idea into the field of economics, endorsing the view of Scottish economist Adam Smith, who argued that markets work best without government restrictions. Since Bentham’s time, many people have used his warning to law-makers as a justification for “hands-off” government – for scaling back bureaucracy and for deregulation. His views have even been used as an argument in favour of a conservative government that avoids introducing new law
s, especially new laws that try to change people’s behaviour. However, Bentham’s arguments also have far more radical implications. Governments cannot stand still until everyone is infinitely happy, which will never happen. This means there is always work to do. Just as most people continue to search for happiness throughout their lives, governments must constantly strive to make ever more people happy.
"It is the greatest good to the greatest number of people which is the measure of right and wrong."
Jeremy Bentham
Bentham’s moral arithmetic highlights not just the benefits of happiness, but its cost. It makes it clear that for someone to be happy, someone else may have to pay a price. For a very rich few to live in comfort, for instance, many others must live in discomfort. Each person only counts as one unit in Bentham’s sum of human happiness. This means that this imbalance is immoral, and it is every government’s duty to continually work to redress the situation.
"Good is pleasure or exemption from pain… Evil is pain or loss of pleasure."