The Development of Political Theory

Charles Vereker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367369767
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000706864
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Originally published in 1957, this short essay on an intricate historical theme, to which, according to the author, it is customary and proper to devote large volumes, was designed to whet but not to satisfy the appetite. The chapters provide the framework for a presentation of the views of theorists from Plato to Lenin on the character and purpose of political association. Its perusal will, the author hoped, provoke a wider and more intense study of social and political thought; it was not intended to be regarded or used as a substitute for further reading and reflection but as an invitation to prosecute these activities.

CHAPTER I

JUSTICE

THE terms political and theory are both Greek words, in form so close to the original that it requires considerable imaginative effort to understand the changes which their significance has undergone in the course of a development through more than two thousand years. Not to make this effort condemns the student either to the belief that nothing which the great Greek thinkers taught is any longer relevant or useful for our current political debate or to the habit of interpreting everything they said in the language and values of modern speculation. Both these tendencies are to be regretted. Reflection upon political associations was initiated by the Greeks. ‘The first valuable contribution the Greeks made to political theory was that they invented it.’¹ Since that time, the setting has altered often, the emphasis has been moved back and forth, the terms used have changed their meanings, until sometimes they bear almost the opposite of their original significance. But the importance of distinguishing and defining the relationship between human beings which we, like the Greeks, call political and the need to study this relationship systematically have been constantly recognized in European society.

The science of society, unlike the sciences of natural phenomena, has very few neutral and stable terms which can be exactly defined. The Greek city, or polis, even though it is often called a city-state, differs in many respects from those political associations which we have been accustomed to call states during the last four hundred years. But this lack of stability and precision is not altogether a loss; for it serves to emphasize that the historical setting, the views and prejudices of the thinkers concerned and, increasingly, the influence of earlier thought and tradition together mould the meaning and decide the fashion of political terminology.

¹ A. E. Zimmern: ‘Political Thought’ in The Legacy of Greece (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1921), p. 331

If we loosely call the Greek polis a state, there is a danger that many of the theoretical assumptions held about modern states will be transferred to the Greek background and that in consequence what the Greeks said about themselves will either seem beside the point or else be misinterpreted in terms of modern problems and post-classical theories of man and society.

Before the construction of the polyglot imperial societies ruled over by Macedon and Rome, the Greek world, united in a general way by language and a sense of common ancestry, was divided into numerous settlements round the shores of the Mediterranean. These cities, though sometimes confederating in loose groups for short periods, were for the most part self-governing communities, with small populations of from ten to a hundred thousand, economically poor by later standards and too quarrelsome among themselves to provide stability or security in the face of threats from more powerful or better-organized neighbours. The survival, and above all the achievements in thought, art and civilized living, of this variegated Greek world is one of the miracles of history, a kind of happy accident which does not seem to have recurred since and which might therefore be thought to have little connection with the complex political system which succeeded it. Indeed, the human and economic limitations of the average Greek city were such that it is difficult at first sight to see why reflection upon its problems could remotely concern or interest the social thinkers of later ages.

Men had lived together before the Greeks and were doing so in larger, richer, stronger and more stable societies in Persia and Egypt contemporaneously; but, though we study the history of these great societies, we rarely enquire what they thought about politics, despite the apparent similarity of their scale and success with more modern political achievements. Political speculation had not been separated from the mythical, theological and merely customary traditions on which the administration of these large-scale societies was founded. Their political thinking was proportionately small as their scale, economic, administrative and geographical, was large.

By contrast, the political reflections of Plato and Aristotle, though written at the very end of the classical Greek period and in some measure provoked by the evident failure and confusion of Greek city-life, have endured as masterpieces ever since, constantly renewing their influence down the centuries and of value to later thinkers precisely because they cannot be reduced to mere commentaries on the contemporary Greek political scene.

The specific problems and difficulties faced by the citizens of classical Greek cities, the quarrels of Athens and Sparta, the internecine conflicts of oligarchs and democrats are indeed remote from present-day concerns. But it was because Plato lived through experiences of this kind, because of the shock he received when the Athens of which he was a prominent citizen judicially put to death his friend and master, Socrates, ‘a man,’ as he said, ‘whom I should not hesitate to call the most righteous man then living,’ that he was moved to reflect on the purposes involved in human social activities and to try to distinguish the good from the less good. In doing this, Plato penetrated the local and ephemeral events of his own times to discover principles and methods which have significance wherever men come together and are faced with the inevitable problems of their co-existence and contrary purposes.

Plato’s particular answers to the questions he raised are less important for later students of politics than his insistence that men are intended by nature to live happily together in harmony and peace, that they fail to do so from lack of knowledge how to attain this end and that it is possible by systematic reflection to discover the proper path to follow, if not necessarily to make sure that everybody follows it. It is this critical and reflective attitude to social affairs which has distinguished subsequent political thought. Later thinkers, such as Augustine, Hobbes, Rousseau and Marx, have remained in this sense in the Platonic tradition. They differ about the cause of disharmony; they offer diverse suggestions for reorganizing social relations in a more satisfactory pattern and they have various specific proposals for the proper institutional arrangements to achieve the desired end; but though provoked by other imperfections than his, they all follow Plato’s example in critically reflecting upon man’s plight and the most efficacious plan for his rescue.

In a post-Christian, scientific era, we have two major difficulties in understanding Plato’s way of seeking answers to these general questions which, nevertheless, are common to both periods. It has been customary during the Christian centuries to believe that many, and at some periods most, of the truths about the way and purpose of human life, individual and social, have either been revealed by God or can be deduced from such a revelation. That Christians argue about the mode and extent of this revelation does not seriously detract from their agreement about its significance. Secondly, during the last three or four centuries, it has been increasingly evident that truths concerning the natural universe, including man as a biological and psychological specimen, are to be discovered by observation and experiment, from experience rather than revelation. This scientific point of view also claims sometimes to provide truths about social relations and about the sphere of human life called politics.

It might be argued that the true knowledge which, Plato holds, would enable us to live harmoniously together in society is a kind of revelation of a divine order. It is perfect as the social and moral life we know in experience is not. But this Platonic vision is not of a God; it does not suggest that the relationship between the knower and the divine truth is personal; and, above all, it is confined to a very small minority of intellectually and morally gifted persons, called in Greek philosophers.

The closest parallel among present-day intellectual disciplines to this mode of knowledge is mathematics. We know, if we are sane, that twice two is four and we remain proof against the temptation to hold that the answer might perhaps be seventeen. It was this kind of certainty which Plato claimed for rational insight into moral and social truths. By contrast, mathematicians do not now expect their study to provide final conclusions concerning events either in this world or the next; and even devout believers in divine revelation do not require a mathematical certainty in the moral truth to which they give their assent.

There is a further difficulty in coming to understand what Plato tells us about the character and purpose of political association, which is that he constantly employs in his description of the kinds of men and social groups which he believes to be the most satisfactory an analogy drawn from technical skill, a favourite argument of his teacher Socrates and one generally more intelligible to their contemporaries in the Greek world than to ourselves.

Unfortunately, most of the terms which we use in modern languages in the west to describe moral and political values have come down to us through more than one translation and have lost in their long journey much of their original Greek or Latin sense. These difficulties of translation have accentuated the unfamiliarity of Plato’s analogies. It is difficult to detect in virtue the idea, originally almost neutral, of being good at something, which pertains to the corresponding Greek term arete or the Latin virtus. We shall find the same difficulty with justice and nature, examples where even the Latin showed signs of deviation from the Greek. Thus, the good man, for Plato, was analogous to the good sailor and the good carpenter, one possessing a special knowledge of a special technique, but the knowledge was of the good life, or, more simply, how to be good at being a man.

This teleological or.purposive view of human life is common to both Plato and Aristotle and their tradition has come down to later thinkers. But the idea of what a good man would be like, were he successfully and constantly good, has been modified and sometimes changed out of all recognition. For Christians, this question proved relatively easy to answer, because to be a good man was to be like Christ; a personal model rather than an idea served to exhibit perfection. But when later thinkers try to define the good man as the happy man, the man who successfully satisfies his desires, or the free man, the parallel with Plato’s view is no longer a close one. Admittedly, it might be argued that Plato thought of Socrates as his model and had in mind his friend and master’s exceptional character and attainments when he described the man of virtue, the man who was best at being a man. But, in his view, only certain kinds of persons were ever likely, from natural endowment and intellectual ability, to attain such a moral status. For most people the essential precondition of a good and morally successful life was the character and constitution of the community, or city, in which they lived. Plato was acutely aware that the cities of which he had experience condemned most of his contemporaries to unhappy, imperfect and frustrated lives. He conceived the science of politics as an enquiry into the right ordering of the relations of the citizens, such that they might help one another to be good men. It is this reordering of the pattern of social relations, the reframing of the constitution or republic, the Latin term which corresponds to the Greek politeia, or polity, which is the theme of Plato’s most important study in this field, the Republic, a conversation-piece whose sub-title is Concerning Justice. It would, indeed, be an advantage if we could go back to using the term polity to describe the body-politic uncluttered by secondary meanings.

This first and most famous of all enquiries into the character of the political relationship, of the ways in which men constitute themselves into organized groups and how they could do so more effectively, makes two assumptions which we shall find absent from many later writings on this subject. The same moral qualities which characterize the good and happy man are taken to be those which will ensure the harmonious life of the group also. The citizens fulfil themselves through their membership; they belong together and sustain one another in ways which remind us more of what we should expect of a church than of a modern state. Secondly, of the desirable moral qualities, or patterns of behaviour as we might now say, of which the four principal examples, wisdom, courage, temperance and justice, have since been known as the cardinal virtues, two are aspects as it were of the character of particular sub-groups of members, but the remaining two, temperance and justice, pervade the whole life of the group and its members and represent the harmonious co-operation between the differentiated parts of the whole.

This harmonious society, then, is an achievement dependent on there being men within it capable of making right judgments, because it is this sense of deciding wisely rather than pronouncing according to law which is nearest to the Greek term translated as justice. But Plato’s social theory is in the original sense of the word aristocratic. He did not believe that many men were wise; and thus, while different members of the group might individually be specially virtuous, most of them could only be just citizens, that is function in a politically harmonious and co-operative way, through the grace or good luck of belonging to a well-governed, or wisely governed society. Justice might be achieved by the few; it was conferred on the many; and each group required the other to enable both to live in harmony. But the same behaviour required to promote social harmony was that which expressed and at the same time developed the moral character of individual citizens. Thus did Plato see the political relationship as the indispensable prerequisite of moral achievement.

Any social thinker who sets out to do more than describe how the institutions of a society function and speculates on the further question of the ends which the society is pursuing and the distinction, if any, between these ends and those which it ought to pursue is compelled to explain why, in his view, failure in this sphere ever occurs, to give some account, whether naturalistic or otherwise, of the genesis of imperfection. If this new political society, the just society sketched for us in the Republic, is Plato’s resolution of a moral dilemma, how did the difficulty arise? This problem is distinct from the historical crisis through which Plato lived, which may be described as the occasion of his enquiry. To say that the decline of Greek city civilization into war and faction was due to the popular teaching of the day, the superficial tenets of the Sophists, was to argue that their opinions on the character of the good life and the good society were untruthful and misguided. It did not meet the wider and more difficult challenge of why men, able to envisage a better and more co-operative way of life, are found in fact to be thus misled, at the mercy of what Plato called opinion or belief as distinct from knowledge and somehow unresponsive to the truth.

One of the Sophists’ views, which Plato is particularly at pains to discount in his enquiry into the true character of the just polity, is that which holds that social customs, laws and constitutions are merely conventional, artificial agreements, as it were, made between individuals who are in fact bent on satisfying their particular aims and not concerned with any shared end with other members of the group. Against this early version of the social contract theory Plato contends that the bonds of society are natural and, by implication, universal, arising out of the character and needs of man, none of whom is sufficient unto himself.

The simplest definition of social justice is one which can be framed at the economic level; for it is in the necessity of a reciprocal system of needs and services, in which each member of the group helps to supply the lacks of his fellows, that Plato recognizes a universal principle binding men together in a balanced partnership. The material satisfaction of needs provides at this rudimentary economic level for the happy and satisfying co-existence of the members. As in other simplified utopian myths from the Garden of Eden to the Marxist millennium neither sin nor sorrow need disturb the harmony. But Plato, as later were Rousseau and Marx and earlier the author of Genesis, was concerned to explain the common experience of imperfection in history, and the enquiry in the Republic goes on to describe the development of society beyond primitive organization which satisfies only the barest needs.

It is at this point in the argument that Plato introduces a metaphor which has reverberated down the ages whenever later writers on politics have succumbed to his influence. The simple economic community is described by Socrates in the Republic as ‘the true one, in sound health as it were’: and its complication by the addition of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Preface
• Chapter I Justice
• Chapter II Peace and Order
• Chapter III Rights
• Chapter IV Felicity
• Chapter V Progress
• Chapter VI Freedom
• Suggestions for further reading
• Index