Your complimentary articles
You’ve read one of your four complimentary articles for this month.
You can read four articles free per month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please
Editorial
We Need To Talk
by Rick Lewis
Since the days of Socrates, philosophers have argued over and written about the best form of society. The classic example is Plato’s Republic, his blueprint for an ideal state. The Greek title doesn’t actually mean republic in the modern sense; Politeia means something more like ‘constitution’. Whatever its title, and despite its matchless brilliance as a work on metaphysics, justice and the foundations of value, some later philosophers have suggested that its subtitle should have been “How not to organise a state”. Plato’s ideal society is rigidly divided into different castes, underpinned by a ‘Noble Lie’, poetry is forbidden and generally it seems the sort of highly-ordered place that looks neat from a distance but might be less fun to actually inhabit. Karl Popper even called it totalitarian.
His student Aristotle later wrote a book on politics too. In fact, it was called Politika, which means politics. His was the first scientific study of different forms of government. He carefully analysed over a hundred existing and proposed constitutions from states around the ancient world and classified them into three types according to how many people are in charge. Each type has a ‘true’ form and a ‘deviant’ form, giving six kinds of regime altogether. There are monarchy and tyranny; aristocracy and oligarchy; polity and democracy. He carefully analysed and compared their strengths and weaknesses; what worked well, and what less so. He tended to favour aristocratic rule, but was too tactful to strongly promote his own political views. After all, he was from Macedonia, and was a resident alien in Athens. When the mood eventually turned ugly, he remembered Socrates’ execution and fled the city remarking that he “wouldn’t allow the Athenians to sin twice against philosophy.”
Later titans of political philosophy included Thomas Hobbes (aka Nasty, Brutish & Short, the old firm), John Locke (whose writings inspired the US Constitution), John Stuart Mill (“Mister Liberty” to his friends) and a certain Karl Marx.
One way to divide up the classics of political philosophy might be into those that develop plans for an ideal society (or Utopia, to use title of Thomas More’s book of 1516), and those of a brutal realist turn, the sort of books that take you aside and say “It’s a tough world, kid – here’s what you gotta know.” Hobbes’ Leviathan might be one such book. Another, much darker, is The Prince. Its author, Niccol ò Machiavelli (1469-1527) was one of history’s most feared political philosophers. In fact his first name gave our language the phrase Old Nick, meaning the Devil – hence our front cover caricature. But did he just get a bad rap? He wasn’t under many illusions when it came to human nature, and that made him think about politics in a special way. Some individuals stand out on account of their ambition, energy and charisma; Machiavelli’s book The Prince is written for such potential leaders. At first glance, it looks like a traditional text about how to be a good king, a genre known as ‘mirrors for princes’. However, Machiavelli’s book isn’t what it seems. In it, he discusses what it takes to come to power and to stay in power. Moral issues, virtue and vice, are discussed on pretty much every page of The Prince, but not in order to teach the potential prince to be virtuous. He says that a prince needs to learn not to be good in the sense that we usually think of ‘good’. For a politician, he says, ‘good’ doesn’t mean being nice but doing what needs to be done, even if it’s treacherous, violent or cruel. The trick is to have good judgement about how or when to be cruel. If cruelty is ‘well used’, it is a virtue! However, Machiavelli recognises that people do not want to be dominated in this way: “In every society two diverse humours are found from which this arise, that the people desire neither to be commanded nor oppressed by the great and the great desire to command and oppress the people.” He therefore advises the common people to arm themselves and fight for their freedom. Thinkers such as Spinoza and Rousseau have therefore read The Prince as a warning to all of us, so we learn how politicians think and how we may protect our liberty.
Most of the articles in the themed section of this issue deal not with the history of political philosophy nor with utopian societies, but with a handful of philosophical questions relating to contemporary political concerns. One looks at the links between success and luck, which is obviously relevant to ideas of economic justice. Another asserts a historical connection between the growth of commerce and the development of tolerance and democracy. Political upheaval is a worry for many, these days, and one article describes how Machiavelli, Montaigne, and Descartes, out of their desire for stability, said positive things about hereditary monarchy. Finally, an article argues a point about the ethics of immigration control.
A striking thing about politics in many Western nations right now is how incredibly divisive it has become. How can we learn to talk rationally to one another again, and to listen with patience and charity? At Philosophy Now, we always aim to ‘hold the ring’ so that thinkers with very different views can put them forward here. Several of our contributors this time though are clearly trying to be evenhanded, so no doubt they’ll earn vehement disagreement equally from all sides. Fittingly, the opening article is all about the nature of political conversations, and particularly focuses on the relationships between truth, sincerity and different conceptions of humanity. So perhaps it comes back to that question asked so often in ethics: what kind of people do we want to be?
Advertisement
