Machiavelli recounts in Book III of the Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy the story of a rich Roman who gave food to the starving poor during a famine, and the Romans executed him for it. They reasoned that he was building up a following in order to become a tyrant. This response highlights the tension between morals and politics, and shows that the Romans cared more for freedom than for welfare. It throws into relief the fact that the way we judge actions depends on our idea of what politics is. Junius Brutus, who liberated the Romans from the tyrannical Tarquins, later executed his own sons for conspiring against the new regime. Does this show that politics is a dirty business, or that it calls on the most heroic dispositions possible to human beings? Certainly these Romans cannot be fitted into the modern view that politics is merely a service industry allowing us to get on with the game of life, or that rulers must create a perfectly just society.
Modern politicians and civil servants augment their power by giving food to the starving and the needy, but we do not execute them for it. Does this mean that we do not care for freedom? I do not think so, but the contrast between us and the Romans does raise some sharp questions. They are questions which bear upon the future of politics itself, and speculating about the way things are going is a major element of political thought. There is no junction in politics more important than that between present and future. Let us consider, then, as a model of this kind of argument, the issue of morality and politics. It may be put this way: philanthropy, charity, altruism, and helping the poor are perhaps morally admirable. What is their political significance?
Our question becomes even more penetrating if we remember that politics was born out of certain historical conditions, and might well die in the same way. It might die because something new and better is being born; or possibly because something very old and resilient is taking a new form. But if the activity of politics were to die, the institution of the state would go with it. To attack the one is to threaten the other. We have already discussed the ideological challenge which attacks the state in the name of a perfectly just society, where ‘society’ is a key term, partly because its real character is conveniently vague, and partly because society can stand (as the state cannot) for a single system of life. This single system would replace politics by moral judgement, and would be a perfect society in the curious sense that there would be no crime, greed, or poverty because people would have been perfectly socialized. Since it would be a moral perfection without effort, we could describe it indifferently either as the triumph or the extinction of morality. Such is one version of the paradox we are exploring.
We may call this influential project ‘political moralism’. It can be seen working in a number of different areas, and we may illustrate the way it works by looking at the project that the nationally sovereign state should be replaced by the emerging international moral order. Sometimes internationalism is presented as a project to be supported; more commonly it appears as an analysis of the inevitable (and desirable) movement of affairs.
The first problem to which internationalism is an answer is that of war. We earlier saw that dynasties were thought to be the cause of war, and republics the solution. In this new version of the claim that war results from bad institutions, the nationally sovereign state is taken to be the cause of war, and the growth of international government to be the solution. The theory that bad institutions cause social evils assumes that human beings are plastic creatures who reflect the institutions in which they find themselves. It assumes, that is to say, that there is little or nothing that can be called ‘human nature’. If human beings are malleable in this way, then it would seem to follow that we might be able to solve not merely the problem of war but the even more fundamental problem of justice itself. And, following this thought, some internationalists seek nothing less than a just distribution among all the peoples of the world of the material and moral benefits (namely, rights) available in the modern world. As this doctrine is spelled out, the ambition to replace politics by morality is revealed as involving abolishing the two central pillars of politics: the individual, as self-interested, and the nation-state, on the ground that it is merely the organization of collective selfishness, sometimes called nationalism. Morality in this form of argument is identified with nothing else but unselfish giving, and politics is taken to be a dirty business.
A project of this kind needs to explain why all the generations from Adam to Aquarius have failed to make much progress on this major improvement in the human condition, and here the argument of contemporary political moralism borrows an explanation from ideology. Justice has hitherto been blocked (so it is said) by the interests of the dominant élites who have always controlled the state. In older versions, this argument juxtaposed rich and poor, bourgeoisie and proletariat, imperialists and subject peoples. More recent theory has focused on the relationship of oppression: whites oppressing blacks, men oppressing women, and so on. And while much of this is melodramatic caricature, it does correspond to one central feature of politics from the days of Solon to the present.
That feature is the fact that politics has been the business of the powerful: citizens, nobles, property-owners, patriarchs – all had power and status. It was essential to the idea of the state, in all its forms, that it should be an association of independent disposers of their own resources. The rights of this élite were, over the centuries, generalized to become the modern rights of universal citizenship, but they first became operational as the status enjoyed by the powerful few. It was precisely because the state was composed of masterful characters that it could not turn into a despotism. Having projects of their own, powerful individuals of this kind had no inclination whatever to become the instruments of someone else’s project. This is the sense in which despotism and politics are precisely opposed, and the state was distinguished by the right of the individual to dispose of his (and in time her) own property.
Political moralism, however, takes the independence of citizens not as a guarantee of freedom but as a barrier to the project of moralizing the world. Independent individuals disposing of their own property as they please are identified with selfishness and taken to be the cause of poverty. A socially just world is thought to require a rational distribution of the goods which pour so abundantly forth in a modern society. But states whose authority is constitutionally limited to ruling by law are imperfect instruments for the immense task of rational distribution, and of the resulting necessity of rectifying the attitudes on which injustice is founded. The entity called ‘the state’ could, however, become adequate to this formidable task if it were to change its character. And this character does in fact tend to change with every access of central power to dispose of the wealth an economy generates.
Modern politics is thus generating a remarkable dilemma. Moralizing the human condition is only possible if we can make the world correspond to some conception of social justice. But it turns out that we can only transcend the inequalities of the past if we institute precisely the form of social order – a despotism – which Western civilization has immemorially found incompatible with its free and independent customs. The promise is justice, the price is freedom.
Like everything else in life, politics is about hard choices, and the nicest thing to do with a hard choice is to evade it. Semantic abracadabra helps. A quite new sense of ‘politics’ has emerged to do this work, and unless we keep track of it we are all at sea in understanding the modern world. The essence of this new meaning is that ‘politics’ is made to cover every small detail of life. It is a semantic drift which happens quite unselfconsciously. Let me illustrate at random. The images of a photographer who has blown up the wrist scars from a suicide attempt are described in the press as ‘a finely tuned balance between the confessional, the formal and the political’. The producer of a television soap opera who has put child-beating, lesbianism, kidnapping, and other social issues into the programme is quoted as saying: ‘It’s been my conscious decision to put politics back into the programme.’ Here politics has broken out from its familiar haunts in legislatures, ministries, and hustings and roams the streets and invades the remotest corners of kitchen and bedroom. It has become identical with values as a whole.
Let us make the contrast precise: politics in the modern world has generally been the activity of dealing with the business of a civil association, the state, which provided the formal framework within which individuals could produce and consume, associate socially with each other, worship or not worship, and express themselves in art. Politics was strictly defined by its limits, and the limit was what was necessary for this complex civilization to work.
In this new sense of politics, however, there are no limits: where people cut their wrists, or children are beaten, or lesbians are not fully accepted, political action ought to be taken, and what it requires is that attitudes should be changed in order that, ultimately, harmony will prevail. Politics becomes, in a famous formula in political science, ‘the authoritative allocation of values’. In other words, it is the business of society to tell us what we should admire and condemn.
It would be hard to exaggerate the range and significance of this transformation. How has it been achieved? By what leverage? The broad answer is that public judgement has not only come to denigrate what is independent as selfish, but to focus upon the sufferings of the dependent poor as a moral indictment of our social arrangements. From early modern times, the state had arranged through the Poor Law that parishes should be responsible for the indigent, but except as on occasion threatening disorder, the poor have not until recent times been politically significant. In the course of the nineteenth century, however, as the suffrage broadened, welfare came to be as interesting to rulers as war had always been. Foreign enemies, on the one hand, and the poor on the other, were interesting politically because they constituted a reason for exercising dazzling powers of government and administration. The poor became so interesting, indeed, that they could not be allowed to fade away, and whole new definitions of poverty, as relative to rising levels of average income, were constructed in order not only to keep the poor in being but actually to increase their numbers. Simultaneously, new classes of supposedly oppressed members of contemporary society began to use poverty leverage to extract benefits in redistributive states.
This is how the state in the twentieth century discovered dependence, which had previously occupied no more than a small patch in the sphere of morality. One moral virtue, charity, in a politicized form, expanded to take over politics. This was a significant development for many reasons. One of them is that dependence is a particularly interesting concept, since it reveals the direction of religious thought. The essence of Christianity is that we are all entirely dependent creatures of God. The atheists of the nineteenth century thought God merely a consolatory fantasy, but were no less insistent that man was a dependent creature. Here, however, the dependence was not on God but on society. In Marxist terms, for example, bourgeois individualists, as people suffering from the illusion that they are self-created, correspond to those who in Christian terms suffer from the sin of pride: they have put themselves, instead of God (or society) at the centre of the universe. In terms of this new religious tendency, self-interest is a sin because it proclaims the self to be independent of society. The ideal is that we should all altruistically contribute to society, and receive from it only the health, education, and other services which society provides equally to all.
Politics is, then, so inextricably bound up with our humanity that a transformation of the state affects religion, culture, morality, and much else. This is no less true when the transformation is happening so gradually that we fail to notice it. Changes here are, as always, masked by the current moral pieties of a society. But we may analyse some aspects of political moralism by distinguishing between the substance and the style of politics. The substance of political moralism is to be found in the detailed moral attitudes it inculcates: namely that the relief of suffering requires us to be managed by experts who require of us a more self-sacrificing attitude to life.
The style is theoretical rather than practical, abstract rather than concrete. Since the French Revolution, politics has commonly been discussed in terms of doctrine and ideology rather than in terms of what local problems require of the legal system. Even where, as in the liberal democratic West, politics has not completely given way to ideology, it has everywhere been subject to a restless concern with action to implement blueprints for betterment. Tom Paine, for example, thought that the rights of man offered a theory to guide legislators in creating a better society, but he did not think that his generation had the right to bind its successors. In our more confidently theoretical days, politicians understand themselves as engaged in the task of founding once and for all a more just society. Once built, it will not need to be changed.
Its building-blocks are necessarily the hearts of individuals. It rests upon conduct flowing from the right attitudes. And here again we encounter a feature of modern political transformation whose character can best be grasped in the caricature of totalitarianism. It will be remembered that totalitarian leaders flattered and cajoled the masses, declaring them the inspiration of all progress, while in fact taking no notice of them, killing them, and imposing on them the dead weight of ideology. Modern democracies exhibit a parallel development. The rulers are elected by citizens, but treat those citizens as if they were stupid. Indeed, the paradox is that an electorate so confidently treated as stupid by its rulers should yet have the authority to elect those rulers. A notable contradiction is emerging between the theory and the practice of democracy.
The evidence that this is the case is now unmistakable. The French government, for example, mounts a campaign telling the French people they must be more polite to foreigners. The American government has a Surgeon General who tells Americans what they should eat and drink. In all countries, governments dictate educational policy on the ground that parents, or at least many parents, do not have the skill of knowing what is best for their children. Legislation in many countries covers such things as the jokes subjects may tell. The German government legislates to force its subjects to believe in the Holocaust. The British government supplies helpful guidance on the practice of safe sex.
These emerging features of modern government give us the clue to the significance of the poor and the dependent. They are the lever by which governments accumulate power over everyone, dependent and independent alike. The working assumption of political moralism is that everyone is both dependent and stupid, which is the safest assumption to make given that a perfect world cannot allow error to creep in. Morals and manners are feeble props of a perfect society because human beings often behave in immoral and ill-mannered ways. But it is not merely conduct which has become part of this new form of politics. The very character of the people must be changed, especially that of the groups identified as oppressors. Men must cease to be ‘macho’, employers less ‘grasping’, heterosexuals must abandon any ‘privileging’ their ideas on romance or the family, whites must become more considerate to blacks, and so on. And according to the medical authorities in all Western countries, everyone must become less obese, suicidal, and addicted to alcohol.
We may sum this up by saying that the more the style of what used to be called politics becomes theorized, the more political problems come to be reinterpreted as managerial. Working out the least oppressive laws under which different and sometimes conflicting groups may live peaceably together is being replaced by manipulation and management of the attitudes different groups take towards each other, with the hope that this will ultimately bring harmony. In other words, in this new form of society, human beings are becoming the matter which is to be shaped according to the latest moral ideas.
The echo of the past always illuminates. Cui bono? the Romans used to ask. Who benefits? In an egalitarian world, everyone is equal, except perhaps the managers of equality. And certainly in the foreseeable future, there will be endless and not unprofitable work for those whose business it is to spell out in ever greater detail the rules of the game of life, and to adjudicate conflict, and to teach the benighted what thoughts a just society requires. Politics will have died, but everything will be politics.
This introduction ends, then, with an example of political theory, an argument likely to provoke disagreement, perhaps even a bit of outrage. And if it does do that, it will have succeeded in illustrating one more aspect of the many-sided thing we have been studying. Farewell.