A Student’s Guide to Political Philosophy

Cicero, the Roman philosopher and orator (106–43 B.C.), said that Socrates was the first to call philosophy down from heaven, place it in cities and homes, and compel it to inquire about life and morals as well as good things and bad. Here is a precise beginning, together with a definition, of political philosophy. Political philosophy begins with Socrates (470–399 B.C.), who for some reason wrote nothing himself but allowed his life and speeches to be recorded in dialogues written by his students Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.) and Xenophon (c. 430–c. 350 B.C.). Philosophy began before political philosophy; before Socrates there were pre-Socratic philosophers, as they are now known. They studied nature (in Greek, physis) and left political and moral matters to professional debaters known as Sophists, who taught rhetoric. One of the Sophists, Gorgias, is portrayed in Plato’s dialogue of that name. The rhetoricians taught students to argue both sides of any question, regardless of justice. They assumed, like the pre-Socratic philosophers, that justice is a matter of law or custom (nomos), that it has no definition of its own but only reflects the dominating will of a master or ruler.

Socrates did not accept this assumption. He suggested that questions of justice, like those of physics, might admit of answers that are not relative to time or place but are always and everywhere the same. Justice would then not be a matter of convention or nomos, but rather of nature or physis; there would be a natural justice or natural right. Socrates did not lay it down as truth that there was such a thing. His way was to ask innocent questions such as “What is justice?” The form of the question, What is X? assumes that X has a constant and unchanging essence. Yet justice does seem to vary over time and space, as the relativists of ancient times, as well as those of today, say.

Perhaps the most obvious evidence of natural justice is our belief in it, or rather our belief in injustice. This we show whenever we believe we have been treated unjustly, as for example when a student gets a grade that is too low. (Complaints about too-high grades are rare.) When that happens, you do not just shake your head and mutter “that is the way of the world.” You get angry, and you do so because you implicitly believe that there really is a justice that does not depend on someone’s arbitrary say-so. Anger is a sign of injustice, which in turn is a sign of justice. Anger always comes with a reason; an angry person may not stop to express it, but if he had the time and the ability, he could say why he’s angry. That is why, in Plato’s Republic, Socrates presents us with an alliance between the angry types, the guardians who are compared to dogs, and the philosophers, who do not get angry but calmly ponder the reason of things. Both are involved with justice, the guardians to defend justice and the philosophers to find out what it is. Anger is the animus behind unjust partisanship, as when you wrongly feel you deserve something; but it is also the animus behind just partisanship, when you are rightly incensed. As much as Socrates deplores the anger of a tragic hero like Achilles, he does not attempt to squelch anger itself. He does not try to deny fuel to partisanship. Why? Because, it is suggested, the object of anger—justice—is real, not contrived, and good even when it seems to go against your advantage.

PLATO (427–347 B.C.) was born to an eminent Athenian family. After Sparta defeated Athens in 404, a violent oligarchy of “thirty tyrants” came to power in Athens which included several relatives and many friends of Plato’s family. The oligarchy was eventually overthrown and democracy restored, but in 399, the Athenian democracy put to death Plato’s friend and mentor, the philosopher Socrates, on the charges of irreligion and corruption of the youth. In 388 Plato accepted an invitation from the king of Syracuse to come to Sicily, but he soon returned to Athens and there established a school of philosophy which met in a grove of trees named for a local hero, Academus. The Academy would survive as a major educational institution throughout pagan antiquity.

The existence, or even the possibility, of natural justice justifies our human, all-too-human partisanship. Even the most indefensibly narrow partisan believes in justice. Though a partisan has only a partial view, he does have that much; he is not totally wrong, and in a sense he means well. Even the Communists and Nazis meant well; they meant to improve humanity. So much for meaning well, you might say! But evil has a finger on the good; though it cannot grasp the good, evil cannot help admitting that the good is superior because that is what even evil wants. Machiavelli, who recommended that we do evil, nevertheless thought this would bring us good. However much we want to resist Machiavelli, let alone the Communists and the Nazis, we also have an argument with them. You cannot have an argument unless you share a concern for some common good, such as justice, about which you are arguing. The possibility of natural justice makes politics interesting; without that, politics is only about winners and losers.

In the Apology of Socrates Plato shows Socrates on trial for his life, accused by his city of not believing in its gods and of corrupting its youth. Socrates gives a speech defending himself and his way of life—a defense of philosophy to non-philosophers who feel threatened by his questioning of political, religious, and family authority. Socrates is intransigent; he refuses to change his way of life, and he provokes his judges in several ways, one of them being an insolent claim that, after he is convicted, his “punishment” should be to be housed and fed in city hall at public expense for the rest of his life. Yet even as he declines to submit, he does condescend nonetheless to give an explanation of the philosophical way of life in terms that his fellow Athenians might understand. He presents himself as having been commanded by the Delphic oracle, or the god Apollo, to find out whether he is in truth the wisest of men, as the oracle is reported to have said. Instead of directly questioning the authority of the god, Socrates uses the god’s authority to question the authority of the gods. By this maneuver he seems to deny that he has any subversive intent and claims to be questioning the basis of Athenian society, indeed of all societies—but doing so in the spirit of that very basis. It’s as if when the law tells you to obey, it is actually, through the implied reasons for its commands, allowing you to talk back rather than simply obey. No society, not even one as free as ours, can proceed on the assumption that every custom and law is open to question, yet Socrates makes us see that every social practice is indeed questionable. Political philosophy has an elevated character, rising above society by questioning everything, but it also emerges from society when examining its implicit assumptions. In the Republic, which records a private conversation rather than a public speech like the Apology, Socrates unveils his picture of the best regime, in which philosophers take a break from their somewhat ridiculous and apparently innocuous questioning and become kings. Yet the best regime is nothing but what is demanded by justice as ordinarily understood, at least when we suppose as we often do that someone who knows best ought to be in charge.

The master analyst of partisan politics is Thucydides (C. 460–C. 400 B.C.), whom Jean-Jacques Rousseau called the “true model of an historian.” Rousseau explained that Thucydides reported facts of history without judging them, leaving that task to the reader. But the facts Thucydides reports are pregnant with judgments begging to be born. In his History of the Peloponnesian War, to be sure, he refrains from offering a picture of the best regime. He shows the best regime to be fatefully divided between Athens and Sparta, the two main opponents in the war, in such manner that the virtues of each city are accompanied by vices and are incompatible with the virtues of the other. Such is Thucydides’ noble realism, admiring of greatness in politics and resigned to its limitations.

Yet the deeds of the war that Thucydides relates are illuminated by occasional comment directly from the master—and by speeches of participants invented by the master and reported as if he had been there to take them down. The famous debate between the Athenians and Melians resembles a Platonic dialogue except for the fact that the Melians, having lost the argument, are killed at the end. No Socrates is present to question both sides to uncover the philosophy hidden in their minds, but Thucydides with his marvelous artistry leaves his questions in the speeches and in the speeches’ relationship to the deeds, and thus prompts us, without ever urging us, to political philosophy. Partisanship, he seems to say, is based on the notion that we can choose how to live; he wants us to reflect also on what one must concede to necessity, despite one’s wishes.

THUCYDIDES (C. 460–C. 400 B.C.) was the author of the History of the Peloponnesian War; besides this, little is known about him. That war between Athens and Sparta took place from 431 to 404 B.C., in his own lifetime, and he called his history of it “a possession for all time.” Thucydides, an Athenian general in the war, was defeated by the great Spartan general Brasidas at Amphipolis in 424, and he was exiled from Athens for twenty years as a result of the loss. Before this, he had caught the plague in Athens (of which he gives so memorable a description in his History), but recovered.