CHAPTER 1
Custom dictates that I say something about the subject matter of political philosophy at the outset of our course. This may be a case of putting the cart before the horse—or before the course—because how is it possible to say what political philosophy is in advance of having studied it? Nevertheless I will try to say something useful.
In one sense political philosophy is simply a branch or a “subfield” of political science. It exists alongside other areas of political inquiry like American government, comparative politics, and international relations. Yet in another sense political philosophy is the oldest and most fundamental part of political science. Political philosophy is political science in its oldest or classic sense. Its purpose is to lay bare the fundamental problems, the fundamental concepts and categories, which frame the study of politics. In this sense it is less a branch of political science than the very foundation and root of the discipline.
The study of political philosophy today often begins with the study of the great books of our discipline. Political science is the oldest of the social sciences—older than economics, psychology, or sociology—and it can boast a wealth of heavy hitters from Plato and Aristotle to Machiavelli and Hobbes to Hegel, Tocqueville, Nietzsche, Hannah Arendt, and Leo Strauss. The best way to find out what political philosophy is, is simply to study the works and ideas of those who are regarded as its master practitioners. How better to learn than to read with care and attentiveness those who have shaped the field?
Such an approach is not without its dangers. Let me just list a few. What makes a book or thinker great? Who is to say? Why study just these thinkers and not others? Isn’t any list of so-called great thinkers or texts likely to be arbitrary and tell us more from what such a list excludes than what it includes? Furthermore, the study of the great books and the great thinkers of the past can easily degenerate into a kind of pedantry or antiquarianism. We may find ourselves easily intimidated by a list of famous names and we end up not thinking for ourselves. Doesn’t the study of old books—often very old books—risk overlooking the issues facing us today? What can Aristotle and Hobbes tell us today about the world of globalization, terrorism, and ethnic conflict? Hasn’t political science made any progress over the preceding centuries? After all, economists no longer study Adam Smith; psychologists no longer read Freud. Why should political science continue to study Aristotle and Rousseau? These are all serious questions. Let me try to respond.
One very widely held view among political scientists is that the study of politics is a progressive field very much like the natural sciences. Just as a modern particle physicist does not feel compelled to study the history of physics, so political science has now outgrown its earlier prehistory. The methods and techniques of experimental and behavioral social science—it is often argued—have doomed to oblivion the earlier and immature speculations of an Aristotle, a Machiavelli, or a Rousseau. To the extent that we study these thinkers at all, it would be more as a curator or an archivist who is only interested in their contributions to the collective edifice of modern social scientific knowledge.
This progressive or scientific model of political science is often combined with another, that of the historicist or the relativist. According to this view, all political ideas are a product of their own time, place, and circumstance. We should not expect ideas written for an audience in fifteenth-century Florence, seventeenth-century England, or eighteenth-century Paris to provide any lessons for readers in twenty-first-century America. All thinking is bound by its own time and place, and the attempt to extract enduring wisdom or lessons from writers or texts of the past is a mistake. This belief—widely held by many people of today—is almost literally self-refuting. If all ideas are limited to their own time and place, then this must also be true for the idea that all ideas are limited to their own time and place. Relativism or historicism, as it is sometimes called, insists, however, that it alone is true, that it alone is eternally valid, while at the same time condemning all other ideas to their historical circumstances. One does not need to be a profound logician to understand that relativism is incoherent even in its own terms.
The historicist manner of reading denies the claim that there is a single tradition linking the works of Plato and Aristotle to Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, and beyond. This has been contemptuously dismissed as an exercise in “myth-making.” In the name of seeking greater historical accuracy, historicism has resulted in the deliberate parochialization of the great works, confining them to their purely local contexts and interests. The historicist thesis often regards ideas as no more than “rationalizations” or “ideologies” expressing different preexisting social interests. The fact is, however, that ideas have a causal power of their own. Ideas not only have consequences, their consequences often stretch far beyond their immediate context and environment. Constitutional theories like those of John Locke’s that were developed in England under one set of circumstances often take on a life of their own when they are transplanted to other places such as the North American continent. The history of the twentieth century with its clash of ideologies—communism, fascism, democracy—testifies to the power of ideas to shape the world. Ironically it took no less an authority than the economist John Maynard Keynes to bring out the limitations of a purely economic theory of history: “The ideas of economists and political philosophers,” he wrote, “both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”1
The study of political philosophy is not simply some kind of historical appendage attached to the trunk of political science; nor does it perform some kind of custodial or curatorial function—keeping alive the great glories of earlier ages like mummified remains in a natural history museum. Political philosophy is the study of the deepest, most intractable, and most enduring problems of political life. The number of such problems is by no means infinite and is probably quite small. The study of political philosophy has always revolved around such questions as “Why should I obey the law?” “What is a citizen and how should he or she be educated?” “Who is a lawgiver?” “What is the relation between freedom and authority?” “How should politics and theology be related?” and perhaps a few of others.
The thinkers that we will be reading provide the basic frameworks—the constitutive concepts and categories—through which we can begin to think about politics. They provide the forms of analysis that make possible the work of later and lesser thinkers who work within their orbit. We continue to ask the same questions about law, about authority, about justice and freedom asked by Plato, Machiavelli, and Hobbes even if we do not always answer them in the same way. We may not accept all of their answers, but their questions are often put with unrivaled clarity and insight. These questions do not simply go away. They constitute the core problems of the study of politics. The fact is that there are still people who describe themselves as Aristotelians, Thomists, Lockeans, Kantians, Marxists, and Heideggerians. These doctrines have by no means been refuted or surpassed, consigned to the dustbin of history as have so many defunct or discredited scientific or cosmological theories. They remain constitutive of our most basic outlooks and attitudes that are still alive and very much with us.
One thing you will quickly discover is that there are no permanent answers in the study of political philosophy, only permanent questions. Among the great thinkers there is often profound disagreement over the answers to even the most basic questions regarding justice, rights, freedom, the proper scope of authority, and so on. Contrary to popular wisdom, apparently all great minds do not necessarily think alike. But there is some advantage to this. The fact that there is disagreement among the great thinkers allows us to enter into their conversation, to listen first, to reason about their differences, and then judge for ourselves. I will admit that I am not a great thinker, but neither—I should add straight away—are any of the professors you are likely to encounter at Yale or any other university. Most of the people who call themselves philosophers are in fact only professors of philosophy. What is the difference?
The true philosopher is rare; one would be fortunate to encounter such a person maybe once in a lifetime, maybe once in a century. But here is where philosophy differs from other fields. One can be, say, a mediocre historian or a mediocre chemist and still function quite effectively. But a mediocre philosopher is a contradiction in terms. A mediocre philosopher is not a philosopher at all. But those of us who are not great thinkers can at least try to be competent scholars. While the scholar is trained to be careful and methodical, the great thinkers are bold, they go, in the words of Star Trek, where no man has gone before. The scholar remains dependent on the work of the great thinkers and does not rise to their inaccessible heights. The scholar is made possible by listening to the conversation of the greatest thinkers and staying alive to their differences. I do at least have one advantage over the great thinkers of the past. Aristotle and Hobbes were great thinkers, but Aristotle and Hobbes are long dead. With me you at least have the advantage that I am alive.
But where should one enter this conversation, with which questions or which thinkers? Where should we begin? As with any enterprise, it is always best to begin at the beginning. The proper subject of political philosophy is political action. All action aims at either preservation or change. When we seek to bring about change we do so to make something better; when we seek to preserve we do so to prevent something from becoming worse. Even the decision not to act, to stand pat, is a kind of action. It follows, then, that all action presupposes some judgment of better and worse. But we cannot think about better and worse without at some point thinking about the good. When we act we do so to advance some idea or opinion of the good and when we act politically we do so to advance some idea of the political good or the common good. The term by which political philosophers have designated the common good has gone under various names, sometimes the good society or the just society or sometimes simply the best regime. The oldest, the most fundamental, of all questions of political life is “What is the best regime?”
The concept of the regime is an ancient one, yet the term is familiar. We often hear even today about shaping regimes or changing regimes, but what exactly is a regime? How many kinds are there? How are they defined? What holds them together and causes them to fall apart? Is there a single best kind of regime? The term goes back to Plato and even before him. In fact the title of the book we know as Plato’s Republic is actually a translation of the Greek word politeia, meaning constitution or regime. But it was above all Aristotle who made the regime the central theme of the study of politics. Broadly speaking, the regime indicates a form of government, whether it is ruled by one, few, or many or whether it is some mixture or combination of these three ruling elements. The regime is identified in the first instance by how a people are governed, how public offices are distributed—by election, by birth, by outstanding personal qualities—and what constitute a people’s rights and responsibilities. The regime refers, above all, to the form of government. The political world does not present an infinite variety. It is structured and ordered into a few basic regime types: monarchies, aristocracies, democracies, tyrannies. This is one of the most important propositions of political science.
But a regime is more than a set of formal political structures. It consists of the entire way of life—moral and religious practices, habits, customs, and sentiments—that make a people what they are. The regime constitutes what Aristotle called an ethos, that is, a distinctive character that nurtures distinctive human types. Every regime shapes a distinctive human character with distinctive human traits and qualities. The study of regimes is, therefore, in part the study of the distinctive character types that constitute the citizen body. So when Tocqueville studied the American regime in Democracy in America he started first with our formal political institutions as enumerated in the Constitution, the separation of powers, the division between state and federal authority, but then went on to look at such informal practices as American manners and morals, our tendency to form small civic associations, our materialism and restiveness as well as our peculiar defensiveness about democracy. All of these help to constitute the democratic regime. In this respect the regime describes the character or tone of society, what a society finds most worthy of admiration, what it looks up to.
There is a corollary to this insight. The regime is always something particular. It stands in a relation of opposition to other regime types. As a consequence the possibility of conflict, tension, and war is built into the very structure of politics. Regimes are necessarily partisan. They instill certain loyalties and passions in the same way that one may feel partisanship toward the New York Yankees or the Boston Red Sox, Yale or Harvard. These passionate attachments are not merely something that takes place between different regimes, they take place within them as different parties, factions, and groups with different loyalties and attachments contend for power, for honor, and for interest, the three great motives of human action. Today it is the hope of many both here and abroad that we might some day overcome the basic structure of regime politics and organize our world around global norms of justice and international law. Is such a hope possible? It cannot be entirely ruled out, but such a world—a world administered by international courts of law, by judges and judicial tribunals—would no longer be a political world. Politics is only possible within the structure of the regime.
This raises a further question, namely, how are regimes founded? What brings them into being and sustains them over time? For thinkers like Tocqueville, regimes are embedded in deep structures of human history that have evolved over long centuries and determined our political institutions and the way we think about them. Yet other voices—Plato, Machiavelli, Rousseau—believe that regimes can be self-consciously founded through the deliberate acts of great statesmen or “founding fathers” as we might call them. These statesmen—Machiavelli refers to Romulus, Moses, Cyrus in the way we might think of Washington, Jefferson, Adams—are the shapers of peoples and institutions. The very first of the Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton begins by posing this question in the starkest of terms: “It has been frequently remarked,” Hamilton writes, “that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”2 Hamilton leaves the question open, but he clearly believes that the founding of regimes can be an act of deliberate statecraft.
The idea that regimes may be founded by acts of deliberate statecraft raises another question related to the regime, namely, who is a statesman? In its oldest sense political science meant the science of statecraft. It was addressed to statesmen or potential statesmen charged with steering the ship of state. What are the qualities necessary for a good statesman? How does statecraft differ from other activities? Must the good statesman be a philosopher versed in mathematics and metaphysics as Plato argues? Or is statesmanship a purely practical skill requiring judgment based on deliberation and experience as Aristotle suggests? Is a streak of cruelty and a willingness to act immorally necessary for great leaders as Machiavelli argues? Must the legislator be capable of literally transforming human nature as Rousseau maintains or is the sovereign a more or less faceless authority much like an umpire or a referee as Hobbes and Locke believe? All of our texts, the Republic, the Politics, The Prince, The Social Contract, and so on, offer different views on the qualities necessary to found and maintain states.
This practical side of political philosophy was expressed by all of our authors. None of them was a cloistered scholar or university professor detached from the real world of politics. Plato undertook three long and dangerous voyages in order to advise the tyrants of Sicily; Aristotle was famously a tutor to Alexander the Great; Machiavelli spent a large part of his career in the foreign service of his native Florence and wrote as an adviser to the Medici; Hobbes was the tutor to a royal household who joined the court in exile during the English Civil War; Locke was associated with the Shaftsbury circle and was also forced into exile after being accused of plotting against another English king; Rousseau had no official political connections, but he signed his name “Citizen of Geneva” and was approached to write constitutions for Poland and the island of Corsica; and Tocqueville was a member of the French National Assembly whose experience of American democracy deeply affected the way he saw the future of Europe. The great political philosophers were all engaged in the politics of their times and provide us with models of how to think about ours.
The study of the regime either implicitly or explicitly raises a question that goes beyond the boundary of any given or existing society. A regime constitutes a people’s way of life, what makes it worth living—and perhaps dying—for. Although we are most familiar with our own democratic regime, the study of political philosophy reveals to us that there is a variety of regime types, each with its own distinctive set of claims or principles, each vying with and potentially in conflict with the others. Underlying this cacophony of voices is the question of which of the regimes is best, which has, or ought to have, a claim on our loyalty and rational consent. Political philosophy is always guided by the question of the best regime.
But what is the best regime? Is the best regime, as the ancients believed, an aristocratic republic, one in which only the few best habitually rule? Or is the best regime, as the moderns believe, a democratic republic, where in principle political office is open to all by virtue of their membership in society alone? Will the best regime be a small closed society that through generations has made a supreme effort toward human perfection? Or will it be a large cosmopolitan society embracing all human beings, a universal league of nations with each nation consisting of free and equal men and women? Whatever form the best regime takes, it will necessarily favor a certain type of human being with a certain set of character traits. Is that type the common man as in democracies, those of acquired taste and money as in aristocracies, the warrior, or even the priest as in a theocracy? No question could be more fundamental.
And this finally raises the question of the relation between the best regime and actually existing regimes. What function does the best regime play in political science, and how does it guide our actions here and now? This issue received its most famous formulation in Aristotle’s treatment of the difference between the good human being and the good citizen. For the good citizen, patriotism is enough, to uphold and defend the laws of your own country simply because they are your own is both necessary and sufficient. Such a view of citizen virtue runs into the obvious objection that the good citizen of one regime will not be the good citizen of another. A good citizen of contemporary Iran will not be the same as the good citizen of contemporary America.
But the good citizen is not the same as the good human being. While the good citizen is relative to his or her regime—regime specific, we might say—the good human being is good anywhere. The good human being loves what is good simply, not because it is his or hers, but because it is good. Lincoln once said of Henry Clay: “He loved his country partly because it was his own country, but mostly because it was a free country.”3 Clay exhibited here, at least on Lincoln’s telling, something of the philosopher. What he loved was an idea, the idea of freedom, and this idea was not the property of America in particular, but of any good society. The good human being, it would seem, is a philosopher who may only be truly at home in the best regime. But the best regime, so far as we know, lacks actuality. The best regime, therefore, embodies a supreme paradox: it is superior to all actual regimes but has no concrete existence. This makes it difficult for the philosopher to be a good citizen of any actual regime; the philosopher will never feel truly at home, never truly be loyal, to any regime but the best.
This tension between the best regime and any actual regime is the space that makes political philosophy possible. In the best regime political philosophy would be unnecessary or redundant; it would wither away. Karl Marx famously believed that in the ideal socialist society of the future philosophy would no longer be necessary, presumably because society would at last become transparent to those living under it. Similarly, it is not clear in Plato’s kallipolis, his ideal city, what function philosophy would continue to have once philosophers ruled as kings and kings became philosophers. In such a world philosophy would cease to exercise its critical function and become merely descriptive of the way things are. What is wrong with this, you might well ask. The acceptance of continued social injustice seems a high price to pay just to make political philosophy possible. Political philosophy exists—and can only exist—in this zone of indeterminacy between the Is and the Ought, between the actual and the ideal. Philosophy presupposes a less-than-perfect society, a world that requires interpretation and, perforce, political criticism. This is why philosophy is always potentially a disruptive undertaking. Those of you who embark on the quest for knowledge of the best regime may not return the same people you were before. You may return with very different loyalties and allegiances. There is at least some small compensation for this. The Greeks had a beautiful word for this quest, for this desire for knowledge of the best regime. They called it eros or love. Philosophy was understood as an erotic activity. The study of political philosophy may be the highest tribute paid to love.