So revolutions broke out in city after city, and in places where the revolutions occurred late the knowledge of what had happened previously in other places caused still new extravagances of revolutionary zeal, expressed by an elaboration in the methods of seizing power and by unheard-of atrocities in revenge. To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings. What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one’s unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action. Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man, and to plot against an enemy behind his back was perfectly legitimate self-defence. Anyone who held violent opinions could always be trusted, and anyone who objected to them became a suspect. To plot successfully was a sign of intelligence, but it was still cleverer to see that a plot was hatching. If one attempted to provide against having to do either, one was disrupting the unity of the party and acting out of fear of the opposition. In short, it was equally praiseworthy to get one’s blow in first against someone who was going to do wrong, and to denounce someone who had no intention of doing any wrong at all.
Family relations were a weaker tie than party membership, since party members were more ready to go to any extreme for any reason whatever. . . . These parties were not formed to enjoy the benefits of the established laws.
Revenge was more important than self-preservation. And if pacts of mutual security were made, they were entered into by the two parties only in order to meet some temporary difficulty, and remained in force only so long as there was no other weapon available. When the chance came, the one who first seized it boldly, catching his enemy off his guard, enjoyed a revenge that was all the sweeter from having been taken, not openly, but because of a breach of faith. . . .
Love of power, operating through greed and through personal ambition, was the cause of all these evils. To this must be added the violent fanaticism which came into play once the struggle had broken out. Leaders of parties in the cities had programmes which appeared admirable – on one side political equality for the masses; on the other, the safe and sound government of the aristocracy. But in professing to serve the public interest they were seeking to win the prizes for themselves. In their struggles for ascendancy nothing was barred; terrible indeed were the actions to which they committed themselves, and in taking revenge they went farther still. Here they were deterred neither by the claims of justice nor by the interests of the state; their one standard was the pleasure of their own party at that particular moment, and so, either by means of condemning their enemies on an illegal vote or by violently usurping power over them, they were always ready to satisfy the hatreds of the hour. Thus neither side had any use for conscientious motives; more interest was shown in those who could produce attractive arguments to justify some disgraceful action. As for the citizens who held moderate views, they were destroyed by both the extreme parties, either for not taking part in the struggle or in envy at the possibility that they might survive.
As the result of these revolutions, there was a general deterioration of character throughout the Greek world. The simple way of looking at things, which is so much the mark of a noble nature, was regarded as a ridiculous quality and soon ceased to exist. . . . As a rule those who were least remarkable for intelligence showed the greater powers of survival. Such people recognised their own deficiencies and the superior intelligence of their opponents; fearing that they might lose a debate or find themselves out-manoeuvred in intrigue by their quickwitted enemies, they boldly launched straight into action; while their opponents, over-confident in the belief that they would see what was happening in advance, and not thinking it necessary to seize by force what they could secure by policy, were the more easily destroyed because they were off their guard.
Certainly it was in Corcyra that there occurred the first examples of the breakdown of law and order. There was the revenge taken in their hour of triumph by those who had in the past been arrogantly oppressed instead of wisely governed. . . . Then, with the ordinary conventions of civilised life thrown into confusion, human nature, always ready to offend even where laws exist, showed itself proudly in its true colours, as something incapable of controlling passion, insubordinate to the idea of justice, the enemy to anything superior to itself; for, if it had not been for the pernicious power of envy, men would not so have exalted vengeance above innocence and profit above justice. Indeed, it is true that in these acts of revenge on others men take it upon themselves to begin the process of repealing those general laws of humanity which are there to give a hope of salvation to all who are in distress, instead of leaving those laws in existence, remembering that there may come a time when they, too, will be in danger and will need their protection.
(Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, Book 3, chapter 5)
Thucydides in the fifth century BC painted this picture of horrific violence which is not entirely unfamiliar to our more decent, civilized, modern, advanced age of the concentration camps, the gas ovens, Coventry and Dresden (to speak of little local incidents), Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Vietnam, Cambodia, Tibet, Rwanda, Bosnia, Chechenya, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. ‘The progress of mankind’, of which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century publicists spoke so warmly, has proved at least a little uneven in its development; indeed, that great phrase was not much heard after 1914 except, for a while, in ‘the socialist sixth of the world’ and in the USA before the Great Depression. To the revolutionary violence of Thucydides we have added collective passions as strongly motivated as racism, nationalism and – if less frequent than in the early modern past – religion.
There are times when, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau said at the beginning of ‘the age of revolutions’ (industrial, medical and social, not only constitutional), ‘I weep and howl to think that I am a man’. Indeed, the scale and body-counts of the killing fields of our modern age surpass those of either Thucydides or Rousseau, and not only because there are more of us. They follow from premeditated acts of public policy employing modern technology quite as much as from the uncontrolled passions of ethnic hatred, civil war, death in battle and in hot pursuit, the starving of cities, clan vengeance and the killing or maiming of male prisoners and the rape and enslavement of women. But the terse bitterness and angry sorrow of Thucydides’ description of the class war in Corcyra is hard to match in modern authors, except in both novels and monographs about the Holocaust and the camps. This may be because he proudly knew that the Greeks, at their best, had already created a unique form of civilization (for he included the Periclean oration – on which I will end this Epilogue) compared to all other nations, empires and tribes in the known world; one which, for all its obvious faults to us, and to some few of his contemporaries too – notably the institution of slavery, the subjugation of women – was unique and wonderful: the polis itself, the citizen republic, government by free citizens in public debate.
Jefferson proudly described the new American republic as ‘the world’s best hope’. If governing in a political manner and resolving problems politically is everywhere and together ‘the world’s best hope’, some rather obvious problems appear of a scale that makes any easy optimism difficult, even foolishly head-in-the-sand. Some problems make life for many or most of the earth’s inhabitants, in Hobbes’ phrase, ‘nasty, brutish and short’, certainly short compared with life-expectancies and infant survival rates in the wealthier parts of the world (thinking firmly of per capita income rather than gross national product); some, singly or together, undoubtedly threaten advanced civilization, perhaps the species itself.
Consider the continued tolerance of war, poverty and ill-health, the downside of the global market, the despoliation of the environment, and the decline of political thinking and of respect for politicians even in its homelands. Both short-term electoral politics and short-term consumerism, feeding off each other, make long-term problems hard to grasp, even if their threat cumulates.
The annual Human Development Reports of the UN estimate that since 1945 more than 25 million people have died in wars and other conflicts: ‘Global conflicts seem to be changing – from wars between states to wars within states. Of the 82 conflicts between 1989 and 1992, only three were between states.’ More than half the conflicts current in 1993 had been raging for over a decade. During that year 42 countries in the world had 52 major conflicts and another 37 experienced endemic political violence of one kind or another. Of those 79 countries, 59 were in the developing world. The end of the Cold War seemed to remove the will and the need of the great powers to keep their former clients and allies in order (in the case of Russia, also the ability). A paper submitted by the US mission to the UN in 1996 estimated that 80 per cent of agricultural land in Angola had been abandoned due to civil war and manufacturing output was only two-thirds of the 1973 level; that in Mozambique only 5 per cent of agricultural land was being cultivated and industry was operating at 20 to 40 per cent of full capacity; and in Bosnia-Hertzegovina at least 20 per cent of the housing stock had been destroyed and much of the public infrastructure. These are but examples.
Rosemary Righter’s masterly study of the United Nations Organization states that, while ‘ritualized conflict was endemic’, enforcement of both General Assembly and Security Council resolutions has been, with few exceptions, weak, often negligent and, when attempted, too often futile.1 There have been and are some reasonably successful peace-keeping episodes, but peace-making rarely; then only if it suited the national or ideological interests of the Security Council. And, of course, the Charter itself forbids intervention in the internal affairs of the member states, so that interventions to prevent or put down civil wars are resisted by the majority of member states, even if they have international or at least cross-border repercussions. Changing the Charter to outlaw civil war seems impossible, quite apart from the task of enforcement.
Take the case of Rwanda. The general secretary of the UN, Butros Butros Gali, did warn in advance of trouble coming and asked Western nations to finance and provide the materials and logistics for African states to use their own troops to prevent massacre amid virtual anarchy. The Security Council failed to respond; the result was genocide, with at least a million killed. Righter comments: ‘a lack of realism and mere talk had come to play an essential role in the global organizations’ (remember that the UN itself is made up of over 100 semi-autonomous organizations: hardly united, scarcely credible).
To preserve or to create free institutions force may be needed. One does not have to read Machiavelli’s great Discourses to see that.
There was a brief moment of hope at the end of the Gulf War over Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait when it looked as if the two great powers, the USA and the USSR, might begin to work together in mutual exasperation at the cost and unpredictable consequences of local wars. The end of the Cold War had made that possible. Butros Gali in December 1992 put before the Security Council a proposal for a volunteer military rapid-reaction force to be controlled and financed by the UN, to be, as it were, the policeman of the world. But this brief hope was only a doomed speculation. The USSR imploded and Russia ceased to have global interests and the USA lost the will, even to pay others to do its fighting. Revulsion at the heavy losses and defeat in Vietnam had been bad enough, but television pictures of dead US troops being dragged through the streets of the Somali capital (a relatively small if bungled incident in itself) finally destroyed any support in Congress for Gali’s lonely but rational initiative. Indeed, tactics in the Gulf War, and the failure to follow up victory, were dictated by American aversion to risk casualties even for a demonstrable greater good, as was the reliance on aerial bombardment, and the reluctance to use ground troops, in Bosnia.
Here is power without responsibility indeed. Perhaps the intense localism of the American political and constitutional system is largely to blame, but there has also been an unwillingness of successive presidents to attempt to lead and influence public opinion towards accepting that war and civil war should be outlawed effectively for ever, even at some initial cost and sacrifice. Instead public opinion is accepted as a fixed and given thing. Politics ceases to be effective in face of great problems if it is not believed that elected leaders are able to persuade and change opinion. ‘The secret of liberty’, Pericles had said, ‘is courage.’
Does it need saying that war works against rational and moral attempts to alleviate poverty, malnutrition and chronic deficiency diseases in the developing world? So much money that could be used for aid, too often that is meant for aid, becomes diverted to arms – usually to arm a military régime against its own people. However, what is at issue when looking at measures of poverty and world health is not that overall things are getting worse, for overall in this century life-expectancy has risen dramatically and post-natal mortality fallen in all countries and for all classes – the world has never been healthier or wealthier. What is at issue is acute relative deprivation in wealth, a rapidly growing divergence between rich and poor (reducing some nations and classes to powerlessness compared to others), and differences in mortality statistics, both between social classes in richer countries and between regions of the world – all divergences that are in principle easily remediable if governments had the will and if political mechanisms existed.
Even the growth of world population raises no inevitable spectre of starvation; in principle there is plenty of unused land that could be turned to grain crops which, whether genetically modified or not, have themselves increased dramatically in yield; but again the problem of political will arises and the economics of maldistribution. Many Green prophets of doom, using highly uncertain and contestable statistical projections, as in the global warming controversy, almost certainly overstate their case when it purports to be scientific, empirical and factual (despite their growing anti-science ideology): the far clearer case is moral, as with the need to prevent war and civil war. Such huge divergence of life chances, even when aggregate standards rise, should not be tolerated among fellow human beings. Famine, of course, only occurs in poor countries, because they have nothing to fall back on if the rains fail, or if the paddy fields are hopelessly flooded by inundations, and because international aid is almost always too little and, for many, too late. The UN is inadequately funded, so too is the World Bank; the heart of the matter is that governments of the wealthier nations think themselves, or in fact are, politically constrained from raising enough money through taxation, and also from working together effectively. How worthy are the great voluntary bodies like Oxfam, the Red Cross or Medicins Sans Frontières, but what a sad reflection that they depend so much on the shaking of the collecting-box and the whims and fashions of the private cheque-book.
The despoliation of the planet
We are familiar with what the industrial age is doing to the environment of the planet on which humanity depends. Some ignore the facts. Others hope that they will go away, or that the mysterious guided hand of the free market will blow away the gases, plug the holes in the ozone layer and re-grow cut timber at the speed of a computer. Anyway, for each government and each multi-national (a) it is someone else’s responsibility and (b) nothing we can do alone will have any effect.
Let me just set down the main dimensions of the problems, not to discuss them yet again; just naming them reminds us how inadequate and reluctant have been governmental responses. Political compromise can work within countries, but it does not seem to work between countries to control such man-made processes of destruction:
greenhouse-induced climate change
ozone depletion
degradation and loss of agricultural land
depletion and pollution of water resources
depletion of fish stocks
The downside of the global market
Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition said that there have only ever been two kinds of comprehensive ideology claiming to hold the key to history: the belief that all is determined by race and the belief that all is determined by economics. Both racism and economicism are, we should remember, distinctively modern beliefs: before the late eighteenth century the world could get by without such enormous secular claims, and not even religions claimed to explain everything. Arendt pointed out that economic ideology took two rival forms, and yet their belief that there must be a general system had a common origin and linked them more than their disciples believe: Marxism (all is class ownership) and laissezfaire (all is market forces). The missionaries and advocates of market ideology in the former Soviet bloc now denounce political interventions in the economy almost as fiercely as did the old totalitarians, although fortunately they are still subject to some political restraints and a few residual cultural inhibitions. In the party politics of Great Britain many of us in the Thatcher and Major times railed against excesses of privatization, the diminishment of public welfare from the state and the attacks of a government on the very concept of a res publica or a public interest; and some of us are not entirely sure that those times have gone for ever. Governments can seek to distance themselves from any responsibility for guiding Adam Smith’s hidden hand by which the free market becomes the public interest (give or take some emollient oils of private charity and rituals of religious benevolence – thinking of the real Adam Smith). But in a broader perspective, the degree of political restraint upon the children of Hayek – the Reagans and the Thatchers – was also remarkable. They have done to us, for good or ill, much less than they know they ought to have done; and that is, happily, because of ‘irrational political factors’, as they see it.
Prices cannot be sensibly determined except by market mechanisms; the final breakdown of Soviet planning proved that, however well it may have served for a time of emergency. The new global economy is creating wealth. And capitalism is an international system whose imperatives can be ignored only at a fearful price, as in North Korea and Cuba, or by the luck, while it lasts, of oil in the sand. But it does not follow that price must then determine every human relationship, least of all the civic; nor that there should not be national restraints on world trade that damages fragile native industries or undermines indigenous customs. The effects of the market can be either limited or mitigated by civic action, and some should be: graduated taxation and subsidized institutions for public welfare should be as much subject to local democratic demand as to international tariff and banking rules. Man is citizen as well as consumer. Beside the social justice of graduated taxation there is or was public and family morality, strong cultural restraints on the exercise of both economic and political power. New lines of demarcation and mutual influence between the polity and the economy need examining closely and coolly. If people see themselves purely as consumers they will lose all real control of government. Governments will then rule by bread and circuses, even if not by force; and torrents of trivial alternatives will make arbitrary and often meaningless choice pass for effective freedom. For all the absolutist rhetoric, in reality at least a degree of welcome confusion reigns. Only the two extreme positions of All-State or All-Market are untenable; there is a lot of space between. Political and economic factors and principles interact with each, limit each other; but neither can live for long without the other. Amartya Sen has written: ‘the real debate associated with globalisation is, ultimately, not about the efficiency of markets, nor about the importance of modern technology. The debate is rather about inequality of power, for which there is much less tolerance now than in the world that emerged at the end of the Second World War.’ Less tolerance, perhaps, less willingness to take gross inequalities for granted or to believe fatuously that the wealth of unrestrained capitalism will ‘drip down’, like tips to underpaid and overworked waiters; but it is still hard to see any real equivalent in international relations to the processes and institutions of free politics within free countries themselves. What there are seem inadequate, deserve minimal defence and little praise.
The decline of political thinking
Even within free countries, there was in the last years of the last century an extraordinary decline in the standard of public debate both among politicians and in the media. Memories are still painful of how, in the American presidential campaign of 1996 and the British general election of 1997 (somewhat mimicking the former), even sustained rhetoric, let alone attempts at reasoned, persuasive discourse, collapsed into sound-bites, and contingent ones at that, reacting to relatively trivial, mainly opportunistic accusations and counter-accusations, a plethora of sound-bites rarely exhibiting either Walter Bagehot’s ‘stream of tendency’, which he thought guided a cabinet, or a coherent ‘moral discourse’. All three main parties talked about restoring a sense of morality to politics, but found some difficulty in spelling out what they meant, or even spelling it at all. Even an ‘ethical foreign policy’ soon became a justification of the arms trade in terms of jobs in key constituencies. Daily in the press and on the radio (which in Britain has supplanted Parliament as the main forum for political debate, or what Bagehot in 1867 called, without irony, ‘the political education of mankind’), we hear debate conducted in a Tweedledum and Tweedledee tone of accusation and abuse, difficult questions dodged, trivialities inflated, not reasoned argument on the basis that big problems are complex; rather we hear idiot simplifications and knee-jerk reactions of PR opportunism to immediate events. Simplification of the basic issues of complex problems is a great art, now practised only by a few journalists in the quality, broadsheet, minority press. The paradox is that there was never more political knowledge, with the growth of the social sciences in particular and widespread higher education in general, but never less use made of it in public life, unless psephology is the name of the game.
All this is in great contrast to a hundred years ago and even earlier when ‘public’ could still be attached to ‘political philosophy’. A recent essayist, Mark Garnett, lamented ‘the decline of the theoretical polemic’ compared to the early nineteenth century, a time when, even if there was no political thought coming out of the ancient universities (although some Benthamism in the new London University), yet there were the Edinburgh and the Westminster reviews commanding the talent of public intellectuals, publicists, thinkers, call them what you will, and the Mills, Macaulay, Sidney Smith, Brougham, Hazlitt and others were well answered in well-grounded kind by the Quarterly’s Tory team of Lockhart, Croker, Southey and Walter Scott inter alia. Today one could conjure a list of prominent public intellectuals, perhaps running intellectual chat shows; but they will not be political intellectuals, and anything they have to say in passing about politics will be at best commonplace, more often cynical. The point hardly needs labouring.
The matter is no better in popular discourse. There is now mass literacy compared with the early nineteenth century. But the letters, writings and speeches of early working-class leaders are greatly impressive compared with today. Perhaps it was in part the pride and sense of achievement of the first generation of widespread literacy, and perhaps it was that the first book most commonly possessed and read through was one now seen to be of bewildering complexity and difficult language, the Bible. To its new possessors the new literacy, the product of compulsory education and the free public library, was a wonder and a weapon to be used to the hilt; that is, before the Yellow Press began, slowly but surely, to exploit and debase its possibilities, and long before one could put the newspaper down, or not even pick it up, to relax in front of the TV. If one reads Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four as savage Swiftian satire, not as prophecy, then one notices that the proles, unlike the inner party, are controlled by debasement more than by direct terror: they are given not propaganda but ‘newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator’. That was not Communism, it was Orwell’s fears for his native England. The culture of competitive capitalism works like God in mysterious ways its wonders of social control to perform. Today one must look for serious political thinking in imaginative literature rather than in the in-grown academy or the sensationalizing, personalizing press.
Contrast, say, the standard of debate on the Irish Question in the 1880s with that of today, or the running debate from the 1870s to the 1930s on the extent and nature of imperialism with that on Britain’s relations with the EU today, or the debates on constitutional reform and ‘home rule all round’ before 1914 with the similar debate now – that is, if one is talking of a discourse beyond the academy. Whether one looks at books, journals, press articles or parliamentary debates, the comparison is not comfortable to ourselves. One must look away from political writing to imaginative literature, philosophy, historical studies and biography to see any sign of what earlier generations would have called ‘mental progress’.
The academy, however, has never been better. There is a plethora of books and articles of great learning and thoughtfulness on these constitutional questions. Political thinking and constitutional law are coming together under our eyes, and jurisprudence is being reborn or, rather, reconstituted, not as positivism or textual-literalism but as something moral and political. But there are few signs that this academic thinking reaches even what publishers call ‘the intelligent reading public’, let alone that it reaches any reading politicians, except occasionally in the ephemeral form of a thousand-word article in the broadsheets. Most MPs now have a university degree, but if they are intellectual at all, they are so in the mode of newsprint, broadcasting and increasingly the Web (or their young assistants scan it for them) but they rarely read a book or tract. There is something paradoxical about Politics as a discipline so rarely relating to politics as an activity. Researchers and thinkers in ‘think-tanks’ imagine themselves to be mediators between specialized knowledge and the public mind, but if their morale depended on knowing that their messages were heard, rather than on having an agreeable job, it could be very low, and often is. Perhaps the new generation of reforming MPs, having university degrees, many or most in the social sciences of some form or other, think they know it already: outside advice, or even knowledge to be used without the advice, is not needed. The academy is Count Frankenstein and they are our monster children, doing, of course, like our own real children, ‘me own thing’. The tradition of political thinking now sustains the Cambridge University Press but rarely even the Guardian, Independent and Observer.
Political philosophy has become an academic discipline of the highest scholarly standards, both in publications and in intellectual debate. But it has become almost entirely internalized. It has lost any public voice. We talk to ourselves loudly and brilliantly. When celebrated break-outs are made, as if political philosophers might have something to say to politicians and to those who act like citizens (a pity the word ‘activist’ is tarnished), then even the style, mental vigour and fame of an Isaiah Berlin would not reach beyond a small intellectual community who are far less politically involved and far less ‘public-spirited’ than in the past. Professionalism now seems to have become an end in itself. Some thinking and writing must always be for the concerns of a profession; but there is something at once tragic and highly comic (in a Swiftian way) in a profession of politics that has so little contact with the activities of politics.
Not that I argue for commitment. That is too easy an answer, and sometimes there has been too much of that. Preaching radical politics in a popularly unintelligible discourse carried few risks within university walls, in Britain as well as in France, Germany and the USA. I argue only for relevance and an independent-minded critical engagement, not uncritical commitment or loyalty to a party. ‘A writer’, said Orwell, ‘cannot be a loyal member of a political party.’ If what is studied is relevant to civic life, then some pains should be taken to write it up in a form that is accessible to intelligent citizens, or at least aiming to be plagiarized (like The Political Quarterly) by the dozen or so columnists and editorial writers who do still read serious books. Outside the walls of academia, economists are held in high regard. Even if their policy recommendations or projections often prove wrong, it is commonly believed that their analytical techniques can narrow the range of alternatives and provide useful comment on the probable consequences of policies. Few people now believe that the analytical methods of academic political philosophers should have any relevance to the political thinking of ordinary citizens. This should not be so.
Some ideas are afoot to revive or create a sense of active citizenship. The schools are under starter’s orders to try. We have the luxury of being worried that so many of the younger generation are alienated from political life and public values, whereas some good examples show that this need not be so. In so many other countries of the world people keep their heads down out of habit or prudence as despots, big or small, deliberately deny them political liberties. Myself, I have been much involved in projects to try to instil the aims of citizenship, and the skills needed to fulfil them, into young people; but sometimes one is depressed at the examples in public life, not just sleaze and greed but the low level of debate and the refusal to admit obvious difficulties, as well as the remorseless trivialization and consumerism of the popular media. But there are more hopeful things in our tradition that we can look back to, and then perhaps forward again.
For there was light at the beginning of the tunnel. The United Nations Charter of Human Rights and the Charter of the Rights of the Child are not yet enforced, but every young person in the world should read, mark, learn and inwardly digest the Periclean oration, where Thucydides shows what could be, rather than what too often was, and is.
Let me say that our system of government does not copy the institutions of our neighbours. It is more the case of our being a model to others than of our imitating anyone else. Our constitution is called a democracy because power is in the hands not of a minority but of the whole people. When it is a question of settling private disputes, everyone is equal before the law; when it is a question of putting one person before another in positions of public responsibility, what counts is not membership of a particular class, but the actual ability which the man possesses. No one, so long as he has it in him to be of service to the state, is kept in political obscurity because of poverty. And, just as our political life is free and open, so is our day-to-day life in our relations with each other. We do not get into a state with our next-door neighbour if he enjoys himself in his own way, nor do we give him the kind of black looks which, though they do no real harm, still do hurt people’s feelings. We are free and tolerant in our private lives; but in public affairs we keep to the law. This is because it commands our deep respect.
We give our obedience to those whom we put in positions of authority, and we obey the laws themselves, especially those which are for the protection of the oppressed, and those unwritten laws which it is an acknowledged shame to break.
And here is another point. When our work is over, we are in a position to enjoy all kinds of recreation for our spirits. There are various kinds of contests and sacrifices regularly throughout the year; in our own homes we find a beauty and a good taste which delight us every day and which drive away our cares. Then the greatness of our city brings it about that all the good things from all over the world flow in to us, so that to us it seems just as natural to enjoy foreign goods as our own local products.
Then there is a great difference between us and our opponents, in our attitude towards military security. Here are some examples: our city is open to the world, and we have no periodical deportations in order to prevent people observing or finding out secrets which might be of military advantage to the enemy. This is because we rely, not on secret weapons, but on our own real courage and loyalty. There is a difference, too, in our educational systems. The Spartans, from their earliest boyhood, are submitted to the most laborious training in courage; we pass our lives without all these restrictions, and yet are just as ready to face the same dangers as they are. . . .
There are certain advantages, I think, in our way of meeting danger voluntarily, with an easy mind, instead of with a laborious training, with natural rather than with state-induced courage. We do not have to spend our time practising to meet sufferings which are still in the future; and when they are actually upon us we show ourselves just as brave as these others who are always in strict training. This is one point in which, I think, our city deserves to be admired. There are also others.
Our love of what is beautiful does not lead to extravagance; our love of the things of the mind does not make us soft. We regard wealth as something to be properly used, rather than as something to boast about. As for poverty, no one need be ashamed to admit it: the real shame is in not taking practical measures to escape from it.
Here each individual is interested not only in his own affairs but in the affairs of the state as well: even those who are mostly occupied with their own business are extremely well-informed on general politics – this is a peculiarity of ours: we do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all. We Athenians, in our own persons, take our decisions on policy or submit them to proper discussions: for we do not think that there is an incompatibility between words and deeds; the worst thing is to rush into action before the consequences have been properly debated. . . .
We are capable at the same time of taking risks and of estimating them beforehand. Others are brave out of ignorance; and, when they stop to think, they begin to fear. But the man who can most truly be accounted brave is he who best knows the meaning of what is sweet in life and of what is terrible, and then goes out undeterred to meet what is to come. . . . Taking everything together then, I declare that our city is an education to Greece, and I declare that in my opinion each single one of our citizens, in all the manifold aspects of life, is able to show himself the rightful lord and owner of his own person, and do this, moreover, with exceptional grace and exceptional versatility.
(Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, Book 2, chapter 4)
Classical historians tell us, of course, that Pericles was a demagogue, a kind of would-be democratic dictator. But it is not his behaviour that is here the question; it is what he said when seeking to curry favour and gain support. Could this describe any country now? Could this be said to any audience today? We must work towards it. Only political solutions can meet whole world problems.
1Rosemary Righter, Utopia Lost: The United Nations and World Order (Brookings Institution, Washington, DC, 1994).