The ancient and medieval understanding of politics came out of a concern for human excellence. The basic questions addressed were: What is human excellence (alternatively, what is the best way of life for humankind) and does the state contribute to the realization of human excellence? Plato and Aristotle believe that human excellence can be discerned by reasonāby reflection on the kind of creatures that we are and in conversation with others who also seek to know.1 In the course of his inquiry, Plato likens the human psyche to a charioteer driving two horses.2 A black horse on the left represents the appetitive, the part that desires physical satisfaction and bodily ease but also love and friendship. The desires are not to be ignored. The psyche inhabits a body (the chariot). The desires have a place, indeed cannot be denied a place, in a life of human excellence. A white horse on the right represents spirit, the part that feels indignation in the face of moral wrong when it obeys the charioteer and anger at the thwarting of desire when it sides with the black horse. The charioteer represents reason, the part that seeks to guide the horses and chariot to truth, beauty, and justice.3 There is constant struggle between the charioteer and the horses for control. There is constant struggle in the psyche as reason seeks to impose constraint on the desires and emotions. Which part acquires control and for how long depends upon the state into which one is born and raised and the decisions that one makes.
The ancients conceived the human condition as ineluctably political. Aristotle characterizes man as the āpolitical animal.ā Only a beast or a god can exist outside the polis. The polis is the association that comprehends all that we today would call āsocial.ā Supreme over all the component parts of the polisāfamily, neighbors, religious cults, schools, business associations, and so onāis the state giving direction to the whole.4 It is within the polis that human beings must realize their humanity, their specifically human endsāreason manifest in the practical sphere as morality and in the intellectual sphere as wisdom. Although the polis is the setting for moral and intellectual development, it also circumscribes the possibilities of such development. This is so because most people cannot acquire a point of view outside the ethos of their own society. They may or may not live up to the standards of that ethos and those standards may be higher or lower, but the particular ethos defines the measure and most cannot critically reflect upon it. People might as well be chained in a cave and converse about images reflected upon a wallāso Plato proposes in his Allegory of the Cave.5 Only a few are able to apprehend the true nature of things behind the images and, thereby, acquire a point of view that permits critical evaluation of the prevailing ethos.
The polis also circumscribes the possibilities of moral and intellectual development because none gives sufficient authority to reason. Just as reason ought to rule in the individual psyche, so ought it to rule in the state. Only those in whom reason rules know in what human excellence consists and how to foster it, and only they are disposed to take the necessary actions to realize it. The claims to authority, however, are many. The claim of reason is usually lost in the clamor raised by others. Consequently, conflict occurs within the state and between states as people compete for power, glory, and gain.6
Medieval thinkers like Augustine and Aquinas also ask after the nature of human excellence and the contribution the state might make to its realization. Despite some differences, they are at one in thinking that human beings have both eternal and temporal endsāthe eternal far more important than the temporal. Human excellence for these Christians has its zenith in salvation and beatitude and is realized in the hereafter.7 The ancient Greeks found human excellence in a temporal achievementāthe well-ordered psyche of the just man. In the well-ordered psyche, reason rules over spirit and appetite, and it is by reason that humans can discern their ends.
Augustine and Aquinas do not dismiss reason as a faculty for discerning human ends. It is that quality that distinguishes humankind from all else in Godās creation and marks the presence of the divine. It provides access to natural lawāGodās moral order for all men and women living on earth. Reason, however, provides no knowledge of manās eternal end. Men must have faith. They must believe in God, in the possibility of redemption, and in the life to come. Only then can reason enlarge understanding of the human prospect and of the world in which humans live. And faith is the consequence of Godās saving, albeit unmerited, grace. The priority accorded to faith is necessary because humans are fallen and recalcitrant children of God. Reason unassisted cannot withstand the temptations of desire. More significantly, reason, the very faculty that provides access to natural law, also encourages men and women to think that they are not dependent upon God for their salvation. Their pride, the mark of their unwillingness to acknowledge God, is the root of ignorance, disagreement, and conflict.8
Like their ancient predecessors, Augustine and Aquinas regard everyone as a member of a complex social web and as subject to authority. Unlike Plato and Aristotle, they assign a distinctly secondary role to the state in the realization of human ends. For Augustine, the state is necessary only because man strayed from the divine path. In a state of innocence, men and women would be social creatures. They need one another to secure the necessaries of life and to provide companionship. They would live as equals, as brothers and sisters without power over one another and without private property. They would not, however, be political. The state, as well as other institutions like private property and slavery, is a consequence of the fall. It is the punitive and remedial agency ordained by God to cope with fallen man. Augustine gives to the state the task of maintaining peace and order. This enables the faithful to worship unmolested and the church to save souls. The state restrains the human propensity to sin, to commit injustice, by the threat of punishment. It does not make men better men.9
Aquinas nods in Aristotleās direction when he declares that the state is natural. Even had there been no fall the state would have existed. It is a manifestation of manās social nature and a necessary condition for the realization of manās temporal ends, practical and intellectual. Aquinas follows Augustine in denying to the state any significant educative role. By the exercise of reason, men and women can know natural law. They are not dependent upon the particular society to which they belong to define, and thereby circumscribe, human excellence. To be sure, human reason, owing to the fall, is an impaired faculty and, therefore, only dimly apprehends natural law, and humans often fail to obey natural law. The state can mitigate these problems by giving more specific expression to the prescriptions and prohibitions of natural law, and it can exact obedience to the law. Nevertheless, by their common possession of reason, humans are members of a universal society ruled by eternal law (natural law is part of eternal law) and whose justice is far superior to any human regime. The gulf between even Aristotleās best regime and the perfect society is made broader still in the Christian, and Thomistic, understanding that the entire natural order is subject to divine law. By Godās grace, men and women learn that they have an eternal end. The perfect society is the kingdom of God which unites the good angels, the elect who have departed earthly life, and those who are still on their pilgrimage through the world. Against this understanding, Aristotleās political theory is an expression of unassisted reason that wholly neglects the realization of manās eternal end. While the state can help men and women to realize their temporal ends, another institution, the church, is necessary to minister to manās eternal end. And, since the ends that the state promotes are subordinate to everlasting blessedness, the state must defer to the church where the temporal and spiritual overlap as they do in manās heart and mind. The state, of course, does have an interest in the development of citizens who observe rules of right conduct, who obey the strictures of natural law. In its efforts to develop such a citizenry, however, the state is confined to the regulation of conduct. The church assumes the educative role that Plato and Aristotle assign to the state.10
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries marked a significant turn in thinking about politics. Europeans during that period experienced profound intellectual disorientation and social disruption. The Copernican theory and the astronomical observations of Galileo cast doubt on long-held views of the cosmos and the centrality of human beings in Godās creation. The voyages of discovery revealed a new world unknown to the geography of earlier generations and made more widely known the existence of peoples with beliefs and practices quite different from those of Europeans. The Protestant reformers attacked the theoretical foundations of the medieval church. They criticized the church for its worldly splendor, its hierarchical structure, and its claim to a monopoly on the means of salvation, and the theology for its implication that faith is the giving of assent to correct doctrine. In its place, they offered a Christianity that stressed justification by faith alone, the authority of the Word, the priesthood of all believers, vocation in the service of oneās fellows, and a faith involving feeling and personal devotion. Questions about what to believe and how to live no longer had settled answers.
For some there were no answers to be had. Skepticism, of course, has a long history beginning with the ancient Greeks.11 In all its manifestations, it raises questions about the reliability of claims to knowledge. At its most extreme, it doubts even those claims about which we have the most confidenceāthose based on immediate experience. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, skeptical doubt seemed a reasonable response to the many competing philosophical and theological claims. The French publisher Stephanus had, in 1562, a ready audience for a Latin translation of a recently discovered manuscript of Sextus Empiricus, the leading exponent of skeptical ideas developed in the ancient Pyrrhonian school. Montaigne in his Essays, published 1580ā1595, gave increased currency to the skeptical position. So compelling did Montaigne find the arguments for the fallibility of the senses in discerning the real nature of things and for the relativism of belief and conduct that he urged suspension of judgment and the living of a quiet life under local law and custom.12
The skepticās lack of confidence in human faculties and his prescription of withdrawal from the world ran counter to other intellectual currents that encouraged a different attitude. The nascent natural science as exemplified by the physiology of Vesalius and Harvey and the chemistry of Boyle as well as by the astronomers and physicists held out the hope that by understanding nature human beings might control it to the improvement of life. Such a prospect complemented humanist ideas about the temporal life. This literary and philosophical movement flourished in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Italy. Machiavelli was a contemporary or near-contemporary of some of the leading humanists. By the time of Hobbes and Locke, their ideas had spread across Europe. The humanists regarded this life, not as a vale of tears to be endured while preparing for life in the hereafter, but as one of possibility, of accomplishment, of beauty. They rejected asceticism in all its forms and, in particular, the medieval ideal of monastic life. Instead of quiescence and withdrawal, they urged engagement. Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, and Leonardo Bruni, among others, claimed for the individual a freedom to develop his or her own interests and capacities and to shape the world in which he or she lived. They criticized the medieval hierarchies, including the Roman Curia, that denied that freedom. The humanists were neither anti-religious nor anti-Christian, but they did give an emphasis to the cultivation of human personality and to the joy in the exercise of all manās faculties that placed a value on temporal life unknown since the ancient Greeks and Romans.13
Spiritual and intellectual crises coincided with the dissolution of the old social order. The Roman Catholic Church, the feudal nobility, the guilds, and the manorial system had long dominated medieval society. During the sixteenth and seventeenth cen...