How to Think Politically Read online

  In ancient times, this dialogue was sometimes titled the Republic or On the Just Person, since the theme is the relationship of politics to ethics, of a just city to a just person. Plato insists that we cannot have a just city until we first have just citizens; but equally, we cannot have just citizens until we first have a just city. How do we break into this circle? Plato insists that we must expel from our ideal city everyone over ten years old, so that we can start afresh by properly cultivating the souls and bodies of young children. The only good civic education, he suggests, is to grow up in a just city. Plato argues at length that justice is primarily a harmony among the parts of the soul. Unless we create harmony within our own souls between our desires and our ideals, how can we hope to create harmony within a community? We must first become the justice we hope to create in the city.

  Plato is aware of the fact that his ideal city has never existed and will never exist. But he insists that a pattern of it exists in heaven and that a truly just person will be a citizen of this heavenly city and of this city alone. We may never be able to live in a truly just political community, but we can lead our lives as if we did by cultivating inner harmony and treating every person we encounter justly. Plato thus offers us a vision of personal ethical goodness to guide us through the political corruption we cannot escape.

  Plato developed a different way to talk about political ideals in his later dialogue, the Statesman. Here he notes that the rulers he described in the Republic govern the city by means of their wisdom, not by means of laws. Plato compares ruling a city to healing a patient: do we want our doctors to treat us according to some medical rulebook or to customize our treatments according to knowledge of our individual illnesses? He points out that the application of generic rules to individual illnesses would be a sorry form of medicine, just as the application of general laws to particular cases often leads to gross injustice. At the same time, however, if we suspected our doctors of being corrupt, then we would prefer them to be bound by the generic rules of medicine.

  In the Statesman, Plato contrasts the ideal (best) regime, in which virtuous philosophers rule by unconstrained wisdom, with the ‘second-best’ regime, which assumes that rulers are not reliably virtuous and, hence, constrains them by the rule of law. Rather than aim at the best regime in theory and then settle for the second-best regime in practice, Plato says that we must aim directly at the second-best regime so as to avoid the danger of the worst regime. Paradoxically, the rule of philosophers, like the rule of tyrants, is a rule unconstrained by law. The second-best regime may not be as perfectly just as the rule of philosophers, but at least it avoids the disaster of tyranny.

  A key aspect of the relation of philosophy to politics is the nature of the role that scientific expertise should play in a democracy. Across several dialogues, Plato argues that justice and good government must rest upon genuine knowledge of reality. We continue to grapple today with the challenge of bringing scientific knowledge to bear upon public policy without surrendering the ideal of popular sovereignty. To settle disputes about trade, for example, the US has a board of economists called the Federal Trade Commission. Why not have a Life and Death Commission of professional ethicists to decide disputes about abortion, euthanasia and other controversial killing? Instead of having judges and juries settle disputes, why not have engineers decide disputes about mining safety and doctors decide disputes about medical malpractice? How can we trust the judgement of judges and juries who know nothing about mining or medicine? Of course, Plato is aware that even experts can be corrupted, which is why he ultimately defended the rule of law over the rule of experts.

  Today women are offered equal opportunity for success in most careers, but many women find it difficult to take full advantage of this opportunity because of the responsibilities they face raising children. Plato anticipated this dilemma when he argued that equal opportunity for women was impossible without abolishing the traditional family. According to Plato, only when women are liberated from child-rearing responsibilities will they be able to become equal with men in the workplace. If Plato had known about technologies for incubating foetuses outside of the womb, he would have embraced the idea as the final emancipation of women from child-bearing as well as child-rearing. Even when we find his proposals to be absurd or immoral, Plato always expands our imagination of the possible.

  As a philosophical dramatist, Plato created a huge cast of characters who develop an astonishing range of arguments. By doing so, he set the agenda for the entire history of Western philosophy, which has been called ‘a series of footnotes to Plato’.

  3

  Aristotle: The Biologist

  Aristotle was the greatest student of Plato, who was the greatest student of Socrates. However, unlike his illustrious predecessors, Aristotle was not a native or citizen of Athens, despite living there for much of his adult life, including 20 years as a member of Plato’s school, the Academy. He was born in Stagira, a town located in the Macedonian region of northern Greece. After leaving the Academy, Aristotle served as a tutor to fellow Macedonian Alexander the Great when he was an impressionable teenager. Having returned to Athens to found his own school, the Lyceum, Aristotle was later financially supported by the young Alexander. As his troops conquered the known world, Alexander sent thousands of plant and animal species back to Aristotle for research.

  These associations with Macedonia came back to haunt Aristotle at the end of his life, after Alexander had died and as his empire was crumbling. In Alexander’s wake a wave of anti-Macedonian sentiment swept through Athens, where the now elderly Aristotle was a conspicuous and vulnerable target. Aristotle decided to flee the city and return to his mother’s home on the island of Euboea because, he said, ‘I will not allow the Athenians to sin twice against philosophy’, an obvious allusion to the earlier execution of Socrates. Aristotle died there peacefully very soon afterwards, another philosopher who had clashed with democratic Athens.

  Aristotle was the greatest polymath in world history, the ‘master of those who know’, in the words of Dante. His 30 surviving treatises range in subject matter from meteorology to psychology to politics, and they dominated higher learning in the Western world until the seventeenth century. In addition to his major contributions to nearly every branch of human enquiry, Aristotle wholly invented some fields of knowledge, such as biology, formal logic and literary criticism. During the Middle Ages, as we shall see, the rediscovery of the works of Plato and Aristotle would transform Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Modern astronomy and physics arose from the efforts of Copernicus, Descartes, Galileo and Newton to refute the physical theories of Aristotle.

  The portraits of Plato and Aristotle dominate Raphael’s famous sixteenth-century painting The School of Athens. Raphael’s Plato points up to the sphere of intelligible truths while Aristotle points out to the visible world. To this day, Plato is the champion of those who seek truth by pure theorizing, such as metaphysicians and mathematicians, while Aristotle inspires those who seek truth from factual research. Plato had contempt for the views of ‘the many’: he believed that truth would always be counter-intuitive. Aristotle, by contrast, always began his investigations with the views of ordinary people, which he then refined through interrogation. Hence, Aristotelian philosophy has long been described as ‘organized common sense’.

  Plato defended the most counter-intuitive of all political ideas, that philosophers should rule. Politics is characterized by the clash of opposed opinions, and Plato thought that only genuine philosophical knowledge could adjudicate and resolve clashes of opinion. Aristotle agreed that reason ought to play an important role in politics, but he distinguished the concrete practical reasoning of citizens from the abstract theoretical reasoning of philosophers. Theoretical reason aims to answer the question ‘What can I know?’ Practical reason, by contrast, aims to answer the question ‘What shall I do?’ The practical reasoning of citizens needs to be informed by the findings of theoretical reason, but practica
l reason relies upon experience and cannot be reduced to theoretical reason. A statesman is the exemplar of practical wisdom just as a philosopher is the exemplar of theoretical wisdom. Aristotle does not expect statesmen to be philosophers or philosophers to be statesmen.

  For Aristotle, then, ethics and politics are both practical sciences, which are based upon the experience of making choices. Indeed, for him politics is a branch of ethics. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle says that every decision and every choice aim at some good. But, we want to object, many choices are bad. So Aristotle clarifies that every choice aims at something that appears to the agent as good. Only a mentally ill person chooses something that he or she regards as evil. Yet, of course, we often make mistakes by choosing something that appears to be good but turns out to be bad. The goods we seek vary, but they form an objective hierarchy. Some material goods are purely instrumental, such as money: we seek them only for the sake of other goods. Some goods, however, we seek for their own intrinsic enjoyment, such as knowledge or friendship. The supreme good is happiness, which everyone seeks for its own sake and never for anything else. What is happiness? According to Aristotle, it is the actualization of our potential in activities of moral and intellectual virtue. Happiness is human flourishing – not happy feelings.

  But we cannot actualize our potential for moral and intellectual excellence alone. We need families, villages, schools and cities. Every community, says Aristotle in his Politics, arises for the sake of some good, and politics is the art of arranging social life so that every citizen can achieve moral and intellectual virtue. However, if Aristotle’s ideal city-state (or polis) is a work of political art, it is also the product of human nature. He claims that we are by nature political animals: we realize our natural human potential only through the art of politics. As a biologist, Aristotle is certainly aware that humans are not the only social or political animals: he also mentions bees and ants. But he claims that human beings are the most political of animals because of our capacity for reasoned speech. Other animals, he says, can express pleasure or pain, but only human beings can argue about what is good or bad, just or unjust.

  One way to understand a polity, says Aristotle, is to analyse its constituent elements, which are citizens. For Aristotle, a citizen is someone ready, willing and able to serve in public office, both to rule and to be ruled in turn. Hence, for him, children and the elderly are not fully citizens. Politics for Aristotle means the active participation of all citizens in deliberating, debating and deciding the issues before the community. He defines a political community as an association of rational men who share a common agreement about a good human life. His polis is a mutual improvement society in which citizens assist each other in achieving moral and intellectual excellence. Aristotle’s ideal polity has only 10,000 citizens and has been described as a cross between a church and a university.

  In addition to his famous classifications of zoological and botanical organisms into genera and species, Aristotle also collected 158 Greek constitutions and classified them. He was a biologist of politics. He first divides political regimes into those which are just and those which are unjust. Following Plato, he defines a just regime as one in which the rulers aim at the good of the whole community and an unjust regime as one in which the rulers aim at their own good alone. He cross-classifies by arguing that rulers can be one, a few or many. Hence, a just regime can be a monarchy, an aristocracy (meaning ‘rule by the best’) or a polity. When these regimes become corrupted, we get tyranny, oligarchy and democracy. Aristotle intends his classification to be scientific as well as ethical. He claims that his just regimes have logical priority over unjust regimes in the sense that we can only understand what is deviant or corrupt when we first understand what is healthy and just. We understand a tyrant, he says, only if we first understand a just king. Later in his treatise on Politics, Aristotle argues that in many cases what defines a regime is not the number of rulers but the class basis of the rulers. Hence, he defines an oligarchy as rule of, by and for the rich, while a democracy, he says, is rule of, by and for the poor. Aristotle himself seems to have preferred a regime based on the rule of the middle class, or what he called a polity. He thought the middle class more moderate and less violent than the rich or the poor.

  Aristotle was a realist about politics. He assumed that virtually everyone lives in a corrupt regime. For him, the point of politics is to moderate bad government so that it does not become worse and, if possible, to try to gradually make it better. Instead of trying to turn a tyranny into a polity, he recommends reforming a tyranny into a monarchy and a democracy into a polity. In his advice to a tyrant, Aristotle describes all the nefarious tactics later associated with Machiavelli. But, unlike Machiavelli, he warns the tyrant not to resort to force and fraud, since such tyrants rarely die in bed. Instead, Aristotle advises a tyrant who wishes to reach old age to moderate his rule and act like a good king.

  Aristotle’s political thought is sometimes summarily dismissed by moderns on the grounds that he justified an idealized kind of natural slavery, denied that women could ever be citizens and criticized democracy. But Aristotle condemns slavery based on conquest and force: that is, the kind of slavery actually practised in ancient Athens and the US before the Civil War. Moreover, Aristotle freed his own slaves in his will. By contrast, Thomas Jefferson never freed his slaves, while the philosopher John Locke, who never owned slaves, actively promoted the slave trade. As for democracy, Aristotle forces us to ask difficult questions about our own supposed democracies. The democratic method of appointing public officials, he says, is by lottery: elections are aristocratic, since they aim to appoint the best men. And if democracy is rule by the poor, then the American regime looks more like an oligarchy, as some political scientists are now concluding. Yes, Aristotle restricted citizenship to adult freemen who actively participate in debate, decision, war and ruling. We have a more extensive conception of democracy, in which citizenship is extended to everyone born in a country; but Aristotle’s democracy is more intensive, because every citizen must serve in the military and in other offices. Aristotle enables us to see what we have lost as well as what we have gained in our modern practice of democracy.

  4

  Augustine: The Realist

  By ad 410, Rome was no longer the official capital of the empire that bore its name. Even so, when the barbarian Goths besieged and then sacked the ‘eternal city’, the shock was profound to the already crumbling empire whose spiritual and symbolic hub was still Rome. It was the first time in 619 years that foreign enemies had entered the city – soon after, the so-called ‘Dark Ages’ would descend on Europe.

  The historic defeat of Rome prompted much reflection among the traumatized Romans on its causes and consequences. Although many of Rome’s emperors had been Christian since the famous conversion of Constantine in 312, numerous members of the Roman elite kept to the old pagan faith, and blamed the fall of their city on the rise of Christianity. After all, Christianity champions meekness and humility; Jesus proclaimed the equality and brotherhood of all men; and many Christians had been pacifists and tax resisters. How could these new values not undermine the martial virtue and patriotism of Rome?

  Was Christianity to blame for the catastrophic collapse of the Roman Empire, or were the Christians merely convenient scapegoats? To address these questions, Augustine, who was the bishop of Hippo (today Annaba, Algeria) and one of the most important and influential theologians of the early Christian Church, began work on his masterpiece, the City of God. As a citizen of Rome born in Roman north Africa, Augustine was also traumatized by the collapse of the empire. He began the City of God soon after Rome was sacked and completed the book just before another Goth army attacked and burned the walled city of Hippo.

  In this book, Augustine attempts to answer the charge that Christians should be blamed for the collapse of Rome by offering a panoply of arguments. He points out, for example, that Rome’s leading philosopher, Cicero, had a
lready described the corruption of the Roman republic before the birth of Christ. Moreover, says Augustine, every Christian is a citizen of two cities, the heavenly city of God and the earthly polity in which he is born. Both cities are instituted by God, meaning that Christians have both a religious and a civic duty to uphold the institutions of the Roman empire. No doubt Christian and pagan patriotism take different forms. Augustine provides an extensive commentary on the works of the Roman historians to show that the great Roman statesmen and generals of the past were motivated by the quest for glory, the craving for domination, the love of wealth and bloodlust. In short, the virtues of the pagans were, upon examination, merely splendid vices. Christian citizens act from a nobler motive: the desire for peace and justice.

  Augustine was both a Platonist and Plato’s most profound critic. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates concedes that his ideal city will never exist on earth: ‘But there is a pattern of it in heaven and a just man will live by the light of the heavenly city alone.’ Hence, Plato already had his own ‘tale of two cities’. When Augustine reflected back upon his own youth, he recalled stealing pears from a neighbour’s orchard. According to Plato’s psychology, Augustine’s crime must have been due to his bodily appetite overcoming his reason. Yet Augustine recalled that he and his friends never even ate the pears they stole. This insight led him to realize that Plato was wrong about the body being the source of evil. Augustine found the key to understanding his own youthful crimes in the biblical story of the fall. Eve eats the forbidden fruit not because she is hungry, but because she hopes to ‘become like God’. Evil stems from the spiritual perversity of pride. True, a spiritual perversity can corrupt bodily appetite, as in the case of rape or gluttony. But to blame our bodies for evil is to blame our Creator. Augustine realized that if the body is not the source of evil, then Plato’s hopes that rigorous rational and philosophical discipline could save his philosopher-kings from corruption were unfounded. Plato’s rulers are as subject to the spiritual perversity of pride as anyone else.