Politics, being largely talk, must dramatize itself. A king is in some sense just one human being among others. Civil order in a monarchy requires that we dramatize what it is to be a king, and this is the point of crowns, thrones, sceptres, guards of honour, regalia, and other symbols, some of which are used by the prime ministers and presidents of our own egalitarian times. Most political expression is metaphorical. The state, we saw, was a body politic. We may now consider it as a ship. The ship metaphor lies behind the very word ‘government’ which comes from the medieval Latin gubernaculum, a rudder. Politics is the art of navigating the ship of state. By what signs should the steersman steer?
The obvious answer is: he should be guided by ideals, distant beacons of excellence at which we should all aim. Ideals are often the concepts by which political parties identify themselves. Conservatives, for example, owe a general allegiance to tradition, liberals to freedom, socialists to equality. But the supreme navigational tool of politics, trumping even these, is the thing called ‘justice’ which in the first masterpiece of political philosophy, Plato’s Republic, was the regulative virtue which determined the place of all the other virtues. The actual word justice comes from the Latin ius, which covers both law and right. In his famous dialogue, Plato began by showing that justice meant giving every person his due, but went on to demonstrate that this formula meant nothing until one could explain what was due (or owing) to people. This required nothing less than sketching the entire structure of a polis. It turned out that justice on Plato’s view was fitting people into the place in the state for which their natures equipped them. Rulers were thus revealed as philosophers, for only philosophers possessed a rational understanding of human nature. The basic principle was complementarity. Workers, warriors, and philosopher–rulers must each stick to their own tasks.
Plato’s republic is sometimes taken to be a utopia, that is, a picture of some ideal condition, but this is a mistake. For one thing, desires differ, and there is no reason why I should find your desires admirable, or you mine. What is merely desired has no intellectual force, whereas what is desirable moves the argument on to an objective plane beyond desire. More profoundly, however, justice is an ideal, and nothing in the complex real world in which we live can actually be an ideal. In navigational terms, justice is a star to steer by, and when you steer by a star you don’t aim to arrive there. This point is sometimes made by saying that justice is a normative concept, which means that we ought to take our bearings from it. To say that justice requires a certain policy, or that some existing situation is unjust, is to propose action. When we talk about justice, then, we might be describing an ideal, sketching a utopia, stating a grievance, or advancing some policy, or indeed doing a variety of other things. The essential thing about justice and other ideals is that they function in many different ways, and it is important always to ask in any particular case which function is being performed.
Is it just, for example, that the right to vote should be limited to people with property, or to adult males? Is it just that one nation should be ruled by another? Is it just that the state’s religion should be enforced on everyone? These questions have been passionately debated in terms of justice, and different answers have been given in different generations. It is obvious, then, that the content of justice will at least to some extent depend on current opinion. It happens that most people will have a clear answer to each of the questions I have used in illustration, and will therefore be tempted to think that human beings move steadily from narrower to broader and more defensible ideas of justice as time goes by. This is one of our most satisfying illusions. All that experience actually seems to demonstrate is that each generation is pleased to discern that it has at last arrived at decently absolute moral and political judgements.
However democratic a state’s constitution may be, for example, the participation of its citizens goes up and down according to nothing more profound than circumstances. The citizens of Classical times participated in politics more than those in the Middle Ages; and the citizens of Italian cities early in the Middle Ages more than those in the later period. Things swing back and forth. Recent generations have tended to make an absolute out of the belief that moral standards are relative and all cultures are equal, fondly imagining that this, at last, is the wisdom of the ages.
Politics is endless public disagreement about what justice requires. Aristotle taught that instability in constitutions is caused by the passion for equality, and went on to characterize justice as a state in which honour and office are distributed according to the contribution different groups make to the welfare of the polis. Numbers, wealth, and merit must all find a place, and a true polity would include both democratic and oligarchic elements. Here the philosopher is merely telling us what justice is. He is not giving advice on how to achieve it, and his formula would hardly be of much use if he were. And that reveals to us yet another way in which an idea like justice can function: it can supply a philosophical explanation of what we already know. For there is one great defect of the navigational metaphor we have been using: it suggests that justice is to be found in some place we have not yet reached. This is quite wrong. We already know what justice is, and our societies already are, in certain basic ways, just. If this were not so, we could not recognize it. Justice is, in other words, not merely something ahead of us and useful in navigating; it is also something behind us which tells us both what we are and where we have come from.
That is why political life is full of people demanding justice on some point or other. With new ideas or changed circumstances, conditions which previously seemed natural come to provoke demands for reform, and justice is the formula for demanding reform. In that rhetorical role, the term can be cheapened and trivialized. Available to everybody with a demand or a grievance, it can focus passions which lead to a descent into civil disorder. Whole societies can collapse into civil war because two sides whistle up the idea of justice to support their contentions. It happened in the United States in 1860, and Hobbes thought it caused the English civil war. He therefore followed another philosophical tradition, which plays down justice as the basis of order and insists that the real issue is peace. Assigning the absolute responsibility for deciding what is just to the sovereign, Hobbes described the just man, with brutal formality, as ‘he that in his actions observeth the laws of his country’, thus denying the validity of people consulting their consciences in order to discover some higher justice in conflict with current public policy. It is not that philosophers such as Hobbes did not care about justice, or conscience. ‘What are kingdoms without justice, but great robberies?’ asked St Augustine, for whom earthly justice could be nothing better than a pale imitation of heaven. It was simply that they thought of justice as inflammable material ignitable by the sparks of passion, and therefore best kept under philosophical lock and key.
The way in which ideals function in political talk may be illustrated by the ideal which we may call indifferently either liberty, after the Roman god Liber, a version of Dionysus, or freedom after the Germanic term meaning those, dear to the head of the household, who were not slaves. Freedom functions above all as a term of self-identification: identifying, for example, classes of people who do not have a master, and sometimes republican constitutions without monarchical authority. Its broadest meaning distinguishes those ruled politically from those ruled despotically, and it was this meaning to which the West appealed in calling itself ‘the free world’ as against the despotic rule of communist parties in Russia and elsewhere. Here, then, we have an ideal term towards which we do not need to navigate because (as with justice) we have it already. Our task, rather, is to keep in good repair what we already have.
The most obvious way to construe freedom is negatively: it means not being restrained. In political contexts, this means not having to live one’s life under a ruler who has arbitrary powers. It is an easy sophism, however, to argue that if freedom means not being restrained, and if I am, as it were, restrained from doing what I want by lack of money, then poverty is unfreedom. In this way, the term ‘freedom’ can slip into ‘power’ and we are well launched on the road towards positing some benign despot who will abolish poverty and equalize our power. Again, Hobbes was no less suspicious of freedom than he was of justice, and he defined it very carefully as ‘the silence of the law’. One was free, that is to say, where no constraining legal rule obliged one to conform. The more familiar European tradition, however, has been to define freedom as the condition of living under the rule of law, by contrast with subjection to arbitrary command. Yet even this sensible view conceals possible problems. If freedom is nothing else but the absence of restraint, then how can we be free at the point where a law restrains us from doing what we want? This was the view taken by Hobbes, and his follower Jeremy Bentham, but the point at issue requires us to realize that a law (by contrast with a command) is purely abstract and leaves the discretion unfettered. Most people, for example, are not powerfully constrained by sanctions against solving one’s problems by murder. They grow up instinctively excluding it as an acceptable option.
As they cruise life’s boundless and bottomless sea, the passengers on the ship of a particular state might well decide that they want to steam towards something they do not yet enjoy, or enjoy but imperfectly. Such a decision assumes that all can enjoy the ideals that attract them. This is a profound mistake. The reality is that our character and our culture at a given time limit what is possible for us; only certain sorts of people can enjoy certain sorts of ideals. Criminals, for example, are not very good at justice, though they often have remarkable capacities for honour. Again, the Western ideal of freedom is irresistibly attractive to many in other civilizations, but depends on forms of self-control which are not easily acquired. Reckless and visionary theorists have persuaded many to discern a destination adjacent to freedom called ‘liberation’ and it has induced excitable passengers on leaky ships of state to agree to violent changes of direction. Some have foundered, and not surprisingly, because as Rousseau and others have pointed out, when slaves revolt, they will not create a free society, but merely change their masters. The paradox of freedom is the fact that it can only be a possession we already have. As an ideal to navigate by, it must always be an illusion.
The ideal of democracy has many features similar to that of liberty. Beginning life as a humble constitutional term, it has grown so big that it threatens to take over the territories of both freedom and justice. It is easy to illustrate the simpler ways in which democracy might do this: no one can be free, Rousseau argued, who does not participate in making the laws under which he lives. Rousseau himself was too sensitive a philosopher to move directly from this proposition to the idea that only democracies are free (he thought democracy a constitution requiring gods to work it), but many others have. There are many ways in which democracy might digest justice, though the idea that only democracies are just would have the implausible implication that all but a tiny handful of societies in history have been unjust.
Democracy supremely illustrates the way in which political ideals have in the modern world expanded beyond the arena of the state and been set up as criteria of value in those other associations which (as we saw in Chapter 6) constitute modern life. A democratic society, for example, might be thought a contradiction in terms, but has come to mean a society in which everyone leads the same kind of life and disposes of similar resources. A democratic culture is one liberated from élitist standards of what constitutes beauty. Sometimes there is even talk of democratizing the economy, which generally means turning factories into worker cooperatives. Even manners can be democratic, and democracy was the term the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville used to describe the American society which he thought would supersede the aristocratic customs of Europe.
The societies in which Westerners currently live are all in basic ways just, free, and democratic. These terms, when elaborated by philosophers, plausibly describe our philosophical foundations. But each of these terms can be refined by philosophers and rhetoricians (each in a different way) so as to shimmer before us not as customs and conditions we already enjoy, but as new directions we might take. They turn into social justice, liberation, and real or strong democracy, and guide our strivings. One type of politics is, then, navigation by ideals. The problem is, of course, that you can only steer by one star, not by several scattered over the heavens. That means that those who promote the claims of one star rather than another must show that it is the one star which will lead to the satisfaction of all our strivings. But since many of our strivings are mutually contradictory, we must give up either some of our strivings or some of these destinations. And that is why the direction of politics must always be an outcome of changing judgements about conflicting desirabilities. Ideals are important in politics, but in the end realities must determine where we go, and how fast we travel.