How to Think Politically
Page 22
Worse, says Nietzsche, the very act of thinking might undermine effective politics. Bold leadership and decisive action, after all, require certainty and confidence, and philosophy leads us towards doubt, reflection and hesitancy. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, after all, studied philosophy, which may explain his famous inability to act; he thinks so much about what he ought to do that he finds it very difficult to do anything. If philosophy made for better politics, then one would expect philosophers to be good rulers. But, apart from Plato, most people think that philosophers would make sorry and indecisive rulers, or worse (sometimes much worse).
We might instead think of our political philosophers as visionaries or prophets of the political future, concerned less with where we are now than with where we should be going. In this sense, they are like other great innovators: Leonardo da Vinci, for example, imagined aeroplanes and submarines long before they were feasible in practice. Perhaps our great political thinkers are visionaries who imagine new kinds of politics which are put into practice only much later, if at all. Confucius, for example, proposed that kings ought to listen to literary scholars before making public policy. Lo and behold, a few centuries later China instituted a system of civil service examinations designed to fill the imperial bureaucracy with literary scholars. Plato envisaged a communism that inspired Marx, Lenin and Mao; his proposal to eliminate the nuclear family inspired Israeli kibbutzim and continues to inspire some radical feminists to this day. Al-Farabi imagined imams who were also philosophers, just as Maimonides imagined philosophers who were also rabbis.
Some political ideas have indeed been prophetic. At a time when Italy was divided into dozens of separate kingdoms and republics, Machiavelli called for a united Italy in 1513. It would take Italy 350 years finally to achieve unification. At a time when Europe was dominated by hundreds of hereditary monarchies constantly at war with each other, Kant foresaw a continent of constitutional republics that never go to war, 150 years before the establishment of the European Union. Rousseau predicted a coming ‘age of revolutions’ in Europe 25 years before the violent overthrow of the Old Regime in France that changed the course of European history. Burke predicted a reign of terror and a military dictatorship years before Robespierre or Napoleon had arrived. At a time when the world was dominated by Britain and France, Tocqueville predicted that one day the entire globe would be divided between the United States and Russia, as it was during the Cold War.
Some political ideas have been rather less prophetic. Marx famously predicted the ‘unavoidable’ collapse of capitalism. Few today would describe the United States Constitution that Madison helped to write in the eighteenth century as the ideal framework for a massive, complex industrial and post-industrial society. Kant’s age of ‘perpetual peace’ is nowhere in evidence. Paine’s insistence that monarchies always tend towards tyranny is contradicted by the peaceful, democratic constitutional monarchies of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and northern Europe, all of which are more equal societies than the United States that he saw as the beacon of progress for humanity.
Some of the visions of our political philosophers are so dark that we can only hope they are not prophetic. Rousseau, Tocqueville, Nietzsche and Arendt all worried about a future in which the citizens of advanced industrial democracies would become so safe and comfortable that they would happily surrender their hard-won political freedom for the fleeting pleasures of mass entertainment and shopping. Perhaps politics itself will become obsolete in a globalized world of private consumption administered by interlocking elites and governed by no one. Or, in Naess’s nightmare, having destroyed the planet by the greedy and violent exploitation of nature, human beings will be forced to live in exile by colonizing outer space.
Although there is some evidence for the view that it has a prophetic role in imagining new kinds of politics (both positive and negative), political philosophy is about the past as much as it is about the future. Even those aspects of it which seem most innovative often take their inspiration from history. In proposing that scholars should advise kings, Confucius claimed to be looking back to the era of the great ‘sage-kings’. Plato’s radical vision of communism seems to be inspired by the ancient Egyptian caste hierarchy of priests, warriors and workers. Augustine, Al-Farabi and Maimonides all looked back to ancient Scripture for models of government, and Aquinas looked back both to Moses and to Aristotle. Arendt insisted that modern citizens should act in the public forum with the courage of ancient Athenians, and Machiavelli’s dream of a unified Italy was one that also restored the grandeur of ancient Rome.
Some of our political philosophers attempted to escape all influence from the past, though usually we can clearly see the historical sources of their ideals. Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant and Rawls all devised thought experiments in which pre-political human beings would come to agreement about a purely rational set of rights. They were interested not in what rights people actually had but in what rights people ought to have in a purely rational and just society. Yet, notoriously, the rights that ‘reason’ supposedly demands turn out to track closely the history of English common-law liberties against the Crown acquired piecemeal over time, going back to Magna Carta in 1215. The abstract schemes of purely ‘rational’ rights devised by our political philosophers often refine and make more universal the rights that Englishmen have inherited from the past. In this respect, the American Revolution looks less like a break with the past than an insistence that England respect traditional English liberties in her American colonies. Those philosophers who presume to use reason to escape history usually end up repeating history.
Politics and philosophy will always sit uneasily together, since they seek different, and sometimes incompatible, things. That is why so many philosophers have been persecuted for their political beliefs. This problem was present at the very beginning of Western civilization when the citizens of ancient Athens sentenced their greatest philosopher, Socrates, to death for corrupting the youth of the city with his radical ideas. Machiavelli, Paine, Gandhi and Qutb were imprisoned; and Confucius, Aristotle, Maimonides, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Marx and Arendt were exiled. It is only relatively recently in the history of the West that it has been safe to speak and write openly about politics. Such freedom is a hard-won modern achievement, remains precarious and still has many enemies.
The ideas of these thinkers are sometimes dangerous to politics too. The ancient Athenians condemned Socrates for a reason: they believed that he was recklessly undermining their city and subordinating its interests to his personal quest for truth. Ideas can lead to perverse consequences that may be practically destructive. It is often very hard, perhaps impossible, to predict how they will develop when they enter the real world and take on a life of their own. For example, Rousseau’s theories about political virtue inspired radical Jacobins, who used them to justify a reign of terror against the enemies of the French Revolution, as they saw them. Both Lenin in Russia and Mao in China claimed to be acting according to the ideas of Marx when they relied on widespread violence and coercion to maintain the regimes they established. And we have seen how the Nazis attempted to appropriate the ideas of Nietzsche to support their inhuman policies. Plato, Marx and Rousseau have all, at times, been blamed for totalitarianism.
The difficult relationship between philosophy and politics recalls the parable of the porcupines, which come together in the cold for mutual warmth but pull away from each other when pricked by their sharp spines. They need each other but cannot bear each other. They provide mutual comfort but only by causing mutual pain. Like porcupines, politics and philosophy are mutually beneficial and mutually threatening. In the end, the porcupines decide that it is best to remain fairly close but at a little distance from one another. A little less warmth means a little less pain. No pain means the possibility of freezing to death.
Politics and philosophy are stuck with each other and, on balance, that’s a good thing, in spite of the risks that each poses to the other. There is no poli
tical system that is wholly devoid of ideas, and philosophical reflection on politics is as unavoidable as thinking itself. For its part, philosophy does not exist in an otherworldly realm remote from the real world. It flourishes only within political systems that provide a minimum of peace and stability conducive to reflection. As Hobbes wrote, ‘Leisure is the mother of Philosophy, and Common-wealth the mother of Peace and Leisure: Where first were great and flourishing Cities, there was first the study of Philosophy’. If Hobbes is right that politics is the pre-condition for philosophy, then philosophy must study politics to better preserve itself. Perhaps that is why Socrates refused to escape from prison where he was being held before his execution; when his wealthy friend Crito offered to arrange it, Socrates declined out of respect for the law, even though he was about to be put to death in its name. And at the trial that led to his death, Socrates defended philosophy as necessary for the good of the state. Philosophy questions the things that are taken for granted in politics, not merely to understand them better but also to make them better, often by imagining new political ideals, systems, principles of justice and forms of life. Without it, politics really would be just a swamp.
SUGGESTED FURTHER READING
We have listed the most important political works of each thinker below. For the ancients and medievals, we have recommended excellent modern English-language translations. For the moderns and contemporaries, we have put the first date of publication for each work in brackets rather than details of specific English translations, since there are many of these that are widely available. We have also listed a biography for each thinker, where they exist.
ANCIENTS
Confucius
The Analects, translated by D. C. Lau (Penguin Classics, 1979)
Mencius, translated by D. C. Lau (Penguin Classics, 2005)
Plato
The Trial and Death of Socrates, translated by G. M. A. Grube (Hackett, 2000)
Republic, translated by C. D. C. Reeve (Hackett, 2004)
Statesman, translated by Eva Brann et al. (Focus Philosophical Library, 2012)
The Laws, translated by Trevor Saunders (Penguin Classics, 2004)
Aristotle
Nicomachean Ethics, translated by Terrence Irwin (Hackett, 1999)
Politics, translated by C. D. C. Reeve (Hackett, 2017)
Augustine
Political Writings, translated by Michael Tkacz and Douglas Kries (Hackett, 1994)
City of God, edited and abridged by Vernon Bourke (Image Books, 1958)
MEDIEVALS
Al-Farabi
Medieval Political Philosophy: A Sourcebook, edited by Joshua Parens and Joseph Macfarland (Cornell University Press, 2011)
The Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, translated by Muhsin Mahdi (Cornell University Press, 2001)
Maimonides
Medieval Political Philosophy: A Sourcebook, edited by Joshua Parens and Joseph Macfarland (Cornell University Press, 2011)
The Guide of the Perplexed, edited and abridged by Julius Guttmann (Hackett, 1995)
Thomas Aquinas
On Law, Morality, and Politics, translated by Richard Regan (Hackett, 2002)
St. Thomas Aquinas on Politics and Ethics, translated by Paul Sigmund (Norton, 1988)
MODERNS
Niccolò Machiavelli
The Discourses on Livy (1531)
The Prince (1532)
Maurizio Viroli, Niccolò’s Smile: A Biography of Machiavelli (2000)
Thomas Hobbes
De Cive (‘On the Citizen’) (1642)
The Elements of Law (1650)
Leviathan (1651)
Behemoth (1679)
A. P. Martinich, Hobbes: A Biography (1999)
John Locke
Second Treatise of Government (1689)
A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689)
Maurice Cranston, John Locke: A Biography (1957)
David Hume
A Treatise of Human Nature (1738–40)
Essays, Moral and Political (1741)
An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751)
The History of England (1754–61)
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779)
Roderick Graham, The Great Infidel: A Life of David Hume (2004)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
A Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (1755)
The Social Contract (1762)
Leo Damrosch, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius (2005)
Edmund Burke
Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
An Appeal From the New to the Old Whigs (1791)
Letters on a Regicide Peace (1795–7)
Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography of Edmund Burke (1992)
Mary Wollstonecraft
A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790)
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (2000)
Immanuel Kant
An Answer to the Question: “What is Enlightenment”? (1784) Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785)
Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795)
The Metaphysics of Morals (1797)
Manfred Kuehn, Kant: A Biography (2001)
Thomas Paine
Common Sense (1776)
The Rights of Man (1791–2)
The Age of Reason (1794–1796)
Agrarian Justice (1797)
John Keane, Tom Paine: A Political Life (1995)
G. W. F. Hegel
Philosophy of Mind (1817)
Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820)
Terry Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography (2001)
James Madison
The Federalist Papers, especially numbers 10 and 51 (1788)
Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments (1785)
Noah Feldman, The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, and President (2017)
Alexis de Tocqueville
Democracy in America (1840)
The Old Regime and the French Revolution (1856)
André Jardin, Alexis de Tocqueville: A Biography (1984)
John Stuart Mill
On Liberty (1859)
Considerations on Representative Government (1861)
Utilitarianism (1863)
The Subjection of Women (1869)
Richard Reeves, John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand (2007)
Karl Marx
The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852)
The Civil War in France (1871)
Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875)
Capital, 3 volumes (1867–94)
The German Ideology (1932)
Francis Wheen, Karl Marx (1999)
Friedrich Nietzsche
Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883)
On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)
The Will to Power (1901)
Julian Young, Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography (2010)
CONTEMPORARIES
Mohandas Gandhi
Non-Violent Resistance (Satyagraha) (1951)
Autobiography (1927)
Ved Mehta, Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles (1976)
Sayyid Qutb
The Sayyid Qutb Reader, edited by Albert Bergesen (2008)
Social Justice in Islam (1949)
Milestones (1964)
James Toth, Sayyid Qutb: The Life and Legacy of a Radical Islamic Intellectual (2013)
Hannah Arendt
The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
The Human Condition (1958)
Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963)
Anne Conover Heller, Hannah Arendt: A Life in Dark Times (2015)
Mao Zedong
On Contradiction (1937) Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (the ‘Little Red Book’) (1964)
Philip Short, Mao: A Life (1999)
Friedrich Hayek
The Road to Serfdom (1944)
Law, Legislation, and Liberty (1973)
The Fatal Conceit (1988)
Alan Ebenstein, Friedrich Hayek: A Biography (2001)
John Rawls
A Theory of Justice (1971)
Political Liberalism (1993)
Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001)
Thomas Pogge, John Rawls (2007), chapter 1
Martha Nussbaum
The Fragility of Goodness (1986)
Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (2011)
Arne Naess
Ecology of Wisdom: Writings of Arne Naess (2008)
Life’s Philosophy: Reason and Feeling in a Deeper World (2002)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In writing this book we have incurred many debts that we are pleased to acknowledge here.
Graeme Garrard
I am grateful to Cardiff University for granting me study leave to work on this book, and to Clare Hall, Cambridge, where it was first conceived and begun while I was a Visiting Fellow.
Drafts of several of the chapters I wrote were read and much improved by constructive comments from Ronald Beiner, Tobias Pantlin, David Rezvani, Peter Sedgwick, Cherrie Summers and Howard Williams. I very much appreciate the time and care they all gave to this.
I have been fortunate to have some very supportive friends and colleagues who have enriched my working life, foremost among whom are Matteo Bonotti, David Boucher, Andrew Dowling, David Hanley, Sean Loughlin, Nick Parsons, Lewis Paul Buley, Carole Pateman and Craig Patterson.