Politics - A Reader

Politics:A Reader

Evgenii Dainovand

Petar SturmKonstantinov

New BulgariaN uNiversity

New Bulgarian University PressSofia 1618, Montevideo 21Telephone number (359) 02 8110 125www.nbu.bg

Design by Petar Konstantinov

Cover design by Polina Tzanova

ISBN 978-954-535-690-2

Contents

iNtroductioN 1

BegiNNiNgs of Politics 4Plato 6Aristotle 10Cicero 15Marcus Aurelius 19Further Reading 23

Politics iN the age of religioN 24St. Augustine 27Thomas Aquinas 31Further Reading 35

Politics iN the age of reasoN 36Niccolò Machiavelli 39Thomas Hobbes 44Adam Ferguson 50Further Reading 55

reformist Politics 56John Locke 59America: Reformist Politics Implemented 63Thomas Jefferson 64Abraham Lincoln 66Alexis de Tocqueville 68

Thomas Babington Macaulay 76John Stuart Mill 81John Dewey 87Max Weber 92Bertrand Russell 101Karl Popper 108Isaiah Berlin 114Ralf Dahrendorf 118Further Reading 125

revolutioNary Politics 126Karl Marx 129Mikhail Bakunin 135Further Reading 141

coNservative Politics 142Edmund Burke 146Friedrich Hayek 153Roger Scruton 158Margaret Thatcher 166Further Reading 173

totalitariaN Politics 174Jean-Jacques Rousseau 177G. W. F. Hegel 187Benito Mussolini 193Adolf Hitler 198Lenin 205Stalin 210Sayyid Qutb 216Further Reading 221

geoPolitics 222Henry Kissinger 224Zbigniew Brzezinski 229Francis Fukuyama 234Samuel Huntington 237Further Reading 241

couNtercultural Politics 243Henry Thoreau 245Erich Fromm 249Herbert Marcuse 255John Lennon 262Timothy Leary 267Robert Pirsig 272Further Reading 279

iNto the 21st ceNtury – the Politics of ideNtity 279Charles Taylor 281Amartya Sen 290Mark Rowlands 295Further Reading 302

Political thought – aN overview 303Further Reading 313

1

IntroduCtIonevgenII daInov

“No society can live without an ideal, which inspires it, or without a clear consciousness of the principles, which guide its organisation”. So wrote in his book Démocratie française the then French President V. Giscard d’Estaing in 1976. Later, in the early 21st century, he was to go on to fuse ideals and principles in the so-called Constitution of the European Union, under some provisions of which we now live.

This Reader aims to reveal the ideals and the principles, on which mod-ern societies are based. These are, of course, political in the sense that they underpin the life of the polis – of that political society, in which people live, communicate and interact as citizens.

Dealing as it does with modern societies, the story which follows is the story of the West. For various reasons, it was here that emerged the under-standing that the values and principles of the polis are to be based not on some local tradition or religion, but on a set of universal and equal rights and freedoms, which are the birth-right of every human individual, regardless of class, race and origin.

It is the West that came to understand the dignity of the human individual as the basis of all political values and principles – and put the individual above the state, the nation, the clan and the tribe. The reasoning is, in ret-rospect, simple: only individual human beings have dignity; states, parties, nations, clans, tribes, trades unions and even political parties do not enjoy the attribute dignity. And, therefore, rights and freedoms, arising out of dig-nity, can only pertain to the individual – and not to states and other collective bodies.

The West is based on equality and the respect of human rights and civic freedoms. Elsewhere, it is power, traditions or religions that form the basis of human organisation. The West is also based on trust; which is why the lib-eral philosopher Karl Popper wrote that the West believes in “the common, unknown man”. We, in the West believe in every person equally, no matter whether he or she is an Earl, a Duchess or an ordinary carpenter. The grada-tion of trust and prestige, based on social class, ended with the Middle Ages.

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Politics: A ReAdeR

The West also believes in the unknown person – unlike clan-based societies, in which people only trust their relatives.

The outcome of this is that in the West, everyone trades with everyone else; every day millions of contracts take place between people who will never see each other face to face. The result is the modern economy. In clan-based societies, where people only buy bread from relatives (because they fear that unknown producers, belonging to some hostile clan, may try to poison the bread they sell outside the clan) a modern economy is impossible.

In the West people trust the unknown person because they enjoy what is known as the rule of law. The law – i.e. the rules which regulate society and human interaction – applies equally to everyone, Earls, Duchesses and car-penters alike. Infringements of trust are easily punished through the law and people have realised, some centuries ago, that their most successful behav-iour is to deliver quality products to unknown persons, rather than poison the bread made for strangers and end up in prison.

The same applies in politics. In the West, people live easily together with other people that they do not know but trust: they form nations, states and transnational bodies like the European Union; they vote for people who are not their relatives but who, once elected, serve the interests of millions they would never see. Belief in the unknown, ordinary person is also at the basis of the solidarity, benevolence and civic activeness that is peculiar to the West.

The Reader traces the evolution of all this right from the beginning – from the philosopher Plato – to the present day, to thinkers still living and thriv-ing, such as Amartya Sen and Francis Fukuyama. Naturally, the Reader also includes the major challenges to the values and principles of the West, as voiced for example by totalitarian and fundamentalist thinkers.

There are glaring omissions in the story we present, and not only for want of space. Missing, for example, are the thinkers of the New Left, existential-ism and post-modernism. We have not included these philosophical currents because it has now (2012) transpired that they either do not truly enter the political arena proper (existentialism), or have led nowhere.

The New Left, for example, attempted to escape from the politics of Sta-linism, while preserving the politics of Marxism. The attempt failed because, after Lenin and Stalin brought out fully the cataclysmic potential of Marxism, it has become impossible (in politics at least) to abandon Stalin, but keep Marx.

The post-modernists, as influential as they were fashionable in the closing decades of the 20th century, also failed to sustainably impact the develop-

3

IntroductIon

ment of political thought. Their claim that no ideological explanation of soci-ety could be scientific had a significant liberating effect in Eastern Europe, where Communist parties claimed legitimacy by saying that they possessed the only scientific ideology. Once communism could be seen as just another story about society, no more scientific than any other, East Europeans could – and did – choose to believe in a different and prettier story, that of the lib-eral consensus. In the West, however, post-modernists achieved an impact primarily in the arts and in architecture. One of the significant side-effects of post-modernism, multiculturalism and the resultant debate on identity, has been addressed in the final Section of the Reader.

As well as having such omissions, this Reader contains a Section on think-ers (and matters) which are not usually considered a part of politics. What, indeed, are Timothy Leary, Robert M. Pirsig and John Lennon doing here, grouped with Thoreau in the Section on counterculture? Our answer is sim-ple: we believe in the tradition of history of ideas as pursued by, among oth-ers, Isaiah Berlin and Bertrand Russell (both featured in this Reader). Leary, Pirsig and Lennon may not be political thinkers in the sense that Dahrendorf is; but what they wrote, said, did (and sang) had a profound and easily iden-tifiable impact on the way people looked at institutions, governments, and ideas about power and society.

Being a story about the West, is this Reader not just a regional narrative, equal in value to a hypothetical Reader about political thought in, say, Sub-Saharan Africa? We do not believe so because, in somewhat Hegelian fashion we believe that the story of the West is not only a narrative about a region. It is also a narrative about one of the most important and sustained efforts of the human spirit, of all people, to reach the understanding that individuals, in their capacity of individuals and irrespective of language, race or faith, have universally valid and equal rights and freedoms; and that these rights and freedoms are the preferable basis for any sort of society that we could see as based on benevolence, solidarity and civility – as, in short, civilized.

4

BegInnIngs of PolItICs

Raphael: School of Athens (c. 1510-1512)Western political thought proper started when Aristotle rejected Plato’s idea that the world we live in is a shadow, cast from the more real world of ideal forms. In order to understand the world, Plato strove to understand these ideal forms. Aristotle, however, concentrated on the observation and study of the real city-states of the Ancient world. In this painting Raphael shows the differences be-tween Plato’s and Aristotle’s views (the two central figures) with their respective hand gestures – one looking for the truth in the heavens, and the other on the earth.

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The world we live in started up in Greece more than 2,000 years ago. The Greeks were the ones who invented a revolutionary new way of looking at the world (and at themselves), which broke with everything then known.

Until the Greeks people tried to make sense of the world by trying to guess what it was that the various gods and deities had in mind. Thinking and inquiry concentrated on discovering the intentions and wishes of gods, so that people would know the world they found themselves in. The Greeks decided to do something else – to trust that the power of reason, with which human beings are endowed (by the gods) is sufficient to understand the world and people’s place in it. The gods were relegated to Mount Olympus; hence-forth people would discover the world by observation and rational analysis. Thus were born philosophy and the sciences.

The Greeks in those days lived in independent city-states (polis) – more than a hundred of them, demonstrating a huge variety of types of government and ways of life. Athens and Sparta were, and remain, the most famous. It was only a matter of time for the Greeks to turn their analysis to the way the polis was governed – to observe, compare, discover underlying principles and come up with criteria to evaluate the different existing constitutions. Thus was born political science.

Plato was the first, closely followed by his pupil Aristotle, who came up with the all-time classic grid of three pairs of forms of government, the first in every pair being a “right form”(rule for the common good) and the second being its degenerate, deviant form (rule for the good of the rulers): monarchy – tyranny; aristocracy – oligarchy; polity (a mixed form of government for the common good) – democracy (rule by the poor majority for its own good).

Out of polis arise everyday words such as politics, policy, polity, polite-ness and even – police.

The Romans took over and adapted Greek political thought, replacing polis (the political community which people form to create the conditions for the good life) with res publica – the thing public which alone can guar-antee rule of law, freedom and dignity. To Roman thinkers we owe words such as republic, public, civilization, civility. Cicero, the greatest orator and celebrated thinker of Roman Antiquity, laid the basis of Roman political philosophy and elaborated the principles of the Roman res publica. Mar-cus Aurelius, a warrior and philosopher-king in the Platonic tradition, fused Roman philosophy with Stoic principles to present us with all that was best in Rome.

Beginnings of Politics

6

Plato

“The development of Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato“, famously said in the beginning of the 20th century the philosopher A. N. Whitehead. This is true in the sense that Plato is the first thinker to have left behind a systematic written heritage. From this moment on, every philoso-pher would have to take a position as regards Plato: agreement; disagree-ment; or further elaboration.

Plato (424/423 BC – 348/347 BC), was a Classical Greek philosopher and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the foundations of Western philosophy, politics and science.

Bust of Plato (4th century BC)

7

Plato is one of the philosophers of Antiquity to write his works in the forms of dialogue – the dialectical method. This method aims to arrive at the truth by posing questions, finding answers, posing further questions – and thus, until a clear and agreed proposition (or an evident absurdity) is arrived at. The main protagonist in Plato’s dialectical works is his teacher Socrates, seen during his time as the greatest living thinker and therefore executed by the government of Athens for undermining accepted norms.

According to Plato, all existing things are but pale and imperfect reflec-tions of their ideal form, which exists in a world beyond the grasp of people. Therefore, when we say “this thing is better than that thing”, what we are say-ing is that “this thing is closer to its ideal than that thing”.

Plato’s major dialogue, usually translated as The Republic, forms the basis of political science. In this work, Plato outlines the main forms of govern-

Jacques-Louis David: The Death of Socrates (1787)Plato’s teacher and main influence, Socrates, was tried and sentenced to exile or death for his critical philosophy. Having chosen death, Socrates is here seen pointing towards the more real world of the heavens, as if only they can judge him. Plato is in front of the deathbed, mourning and lamenting, his writings discarded on the ground.

Plato