A History of the Political Philosophers

George Catlin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000706826
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Philosophie politique

Originally published in 1939, this book was intended as a guide to political theory intelligible to the common reader, with quotations from the original sources sufficiently extensive to enable them to sample for themselves the 'taste' and 'colour' of these writings. This history of theory has been placed against brief descriptions, as background, of the civilization of the times, as the reader passes down the avenues of thought from age to age. It is a history of political thought set against the background of the history of civilization, but that thought is also displayed in the setting of the characteristics and biographies of the thinkers, whose minds we search and whom we seek to know familiarly, however long ago gone to dust.

Part I

Chapter I

Introductory

1

IF MAN’S proper study is man, politics is especially his concern since it is the study of the control of man. Like chemistry and the natural sciences, but also like economics, politics is a study based on observation of the way things actually happen. It is a study also of how to gain control over these things. It is a study of power. But, like the humanities, it involves discussion and assessment of values. The first of these fields is that of political science. The second is that of political philosophy.

The two subjects together are Politics, which is the study of the control of creatures who have will and choice—or, more exactly, who have some energy of will and some range of choice, however limited by instinctive impulses, rational checks and material determinants. Politics, then, is something very much wider than the study of the State, which is a recent social form. It is the study of social relationships and of the human (and even non-human) social structure. It is nothing less. It is identical with Sociology.

In the Renaissance of the fifteenth century the interest of students, and of those mentally alive, centered upon the Humanities and upon the assessment of human values as touching the art and ends of living, as distinct from the logical proofs about these ends offered by those great reasoners, the Schoolmen. In the seventeenth and until the nineteenth century, men were preoccupied with their discoveries in Mathematics, the inorganic Physical Sciences and Biology. They were stimulated by the hope of effecting control of Nature. As in Ancient Greece, so in the Modern World, to the epic period, when man sang of his own life, had succeeded the age of the physicists, when men inquired into the world without. Moreover, the contemporary Despots were not always benevolent to those who pried into politics and secrets of state. Astronomy was much safer. With the twentieth century has come an overwhelming interest in the Social Sciences: in Economics or the study of the relation of man and material in the pursuit of wealth; in Genetics or the study of the relation of man and man in their generations in the pursuit of health; and in Politics or the study of will and will in the relationship of power.

Politics has become the overwhelming interest of our own generation, since it is becoming ever more acutely realized that man who has made such strides in the conquest of nature has, by reason of prejudice and passion, lingered behind in the conquest of man himself and his civilization; and that this weakness may have consequences fraught with catastrophe. A man may decide that he is uninterested in poetry and art or in chemistry and mathematics and no one may be the loser save himself nor will anyone trouble him. But, although a man may decide that he is uninterested in politics and may prefer to have the provincial mind, the practice of politics will not be uninterested in him, whether in peace or in war. If he will not pull his weight, he will most certainly be pulled.

The organization of our human life is perhaps a negligible matter, an idiotic gesture of self-importance, in the perspective of eternity. It is said that beyond the constellation of the Sculptor, a new group of stars has been discovered, estimated to be 250,000,000 light years away. The speed of light, however, is that of the ether wave. More tardy is that of a broadcast message which, dispatched at one instant, will yet circle this earth and be received again two-fifteenths of a second later. In such immensities of the universe, not only any individual among the 1,900,000,000 inhabitants of the earth, but the human race itself shrinks to less than the worm that is man, told of in the Bible. It is impossible to attach importance to a race, related in animal origins to the lemur and tree-creeping spectral tarsier; a descendant of one of several branches of speaking anthropoids who lived over 300,000 years ago; who emerges in the late Pleistocene Age, about 25,000 years ago, his fortune literally in his mobile hand and in that tongue attachment of the jaw; and whose 5,000 years of recorded history counts for only a few seconds in the day-clock of the history of this subsidiary planet. He descended from the trees or emerged, troglodyte, from the caves to which, in this last decade, in time of war he again returns. Or it would be impossible to attach importance, were not he who knew all this precisely an individual man, himself astronomer or archaeologist.

Before the majesty and the potential power involved in this knowledge, the dynastic wars of kings, the fights of Guelph and Ghibelline, of Montagu and Capulet, the party faction of Whig and Tory, even of Catholic and Protestant, even of Fascist and Marxist, seem to become fantastic squabbles of ill-tempered children. What alone seems, in this perspective, to matter is science, the limitless increase of the knowledge that is power, its significance for increasing the power of the human race and for improving its breed, the passionless mood of the man of science, in brief, the enlargement of Civilization, of which this knowledge is the seal like the signet of Solomon. Was Faust concerned with the politicians? Or Buddha or Christ with party membership? Were they “dividers of goods”? Is not civilization, progress, science itself endangered by these lethal factions? If there were a war, would it not be good for men of science to conspire to kill off the politicians? In the perspective of knowledge is not politics abysmally unimportant, on a level with incantations and witchcraft ?

Throughout the millennia there is detectable a conflict between interest in Civilization and interest in Human Happiness or, again, between the interest of Society and the interest of justice for the Individual. In each case, the two are inseparable; but the stress is different. The trouble is that the advance of civilization, of the sciences and arts, has been due not only, or chiefly, to pure speculation or to disinterested love of beauty, but to motives of utility and to the desire for an effect upon the glory of some group or in furthering the ambition of some man. The humanist and philosopher could not, if he would, cut himself adrift from these passions and contest, nor does it help to call them battles of kites and crows. As Aristotle said: Intellect alone moves nothing.

The quarrel is not about who is to know, but about who is to enjoy. In this quarrel we all count among the ill-tempered children, seeking a material share-out favourable to ourselves or explaining that Civilization matters nothing to us if we are not to satisfy our own appetite by eating the fruits of its achievement, grown on the tree of knowledge. Good men in their own eyes feel themselves called upon to organize physical force to prevent bad men from attaining power—and rightly, for, as Plato pointed out, this is the only reason why a good man should engage in politics and seek power and dominion. Having, however, become preoccupied in strife, it may easily happen that the clerici and men of science forget their learning and that the torch of science is extinguished amid the animal conflicts of these risen apes that are men, as that torch for one thousand years in Europe was almost extinguished before, save in a few monasteries, during the last of those Dark Ages that appear periodically to descend on the world.

The appetites of man, the ape, on the one hand, and the non-attached pursuit of power over nature, through science, on the other hand, are not easily to be reconciled. As the clash between the claims of immediate Happiness and of Civilization, this constitutes the first problem of politics. It involves economic justice in the distribution of the fruits of a science fertile in applications, so that the health and power are increased of the race itself and so that there is not poverty in the midst of plenty.

The initiative, liberty and high hope, beyond conventions of good and evil, that fertilize science itself, on the one hand, and the discipline and morality that strengthen allegiance to a society and its culture, or to the concept of human civilization throughout the centuries, on the other hand, are not easily reconciled. As the clash between Liberty and Authority, this constitutes the second problem of politics.

The art and practice of politics have examples that can be gathered, like examples from business practice, over the five millennia of recorded history. The science of politics, on the other hand, like that of economics, is so immature as scarcely to be born. Politicians, like evil stepmothers, have stood at its cradle, ready to suffocate it, the saviour of our civilization. Nevertheless, the pace of history moves ever more rapidly. The nemesis of wilful ignorance comes. Biological time moves more quickly than geological time. Economic change may radically affect biological development; and economic change has its own time scale. That change may be controlled by human knowledge, but the Ancient World in large part fell to ruin in the Occident from lack of adequate economic knowledge alike in agriculture and in taxation. This control, however, is a concern, not only of the economists, but of the politicians who can frustrate the wisest experts. And who shall control the politicians? Who shall educate their masters? It is Bernard Shaw who says of political science that it is “the science by which alone civilization can be saved.”

Lord Kelvin, the natural scientist, said, in describing the nature of scientific knowledge:

When you can measure what you, are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind: it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your own thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be.

Sir Arthur Thomson continues:

It is very interesting that Clerk Maxwell should speak in one sentence of “those aspirations after accuracy in measurement, and justice in action, which we reckon among our noblest attributes in men!”

Professor A. North Whitehead states: “Science was becoming, and has remained, primarily quantitative. Search for measurable elements among your phenomena, and then search for relations between these measures of physical quantity.” “The scientific man,” writes Karl Pearson, “has to strive at self-elimination in his judgements.” Nor shall we disagree when an eminent Marxist, Professor Levy, speaking of social matters, says; “The results of measurement will be entirely independent of any religious, ethical or social bias.”

The art of politics throughout the ages provides instances of recurrent social behaviour and of the constancy of psychological reactions. Mass observations of social phenomena increasingly approximate to objectivity of judgement and to verifiable measurement. Sociology today perfects this technique. Nevertheless, there are those who will put aside this book with the unreasoned assertion that detached judgement of means in social matters is impossible; and others again who will, for their own reasons, deny that it is desirable. Political science is still embryonic, because its development has been too dangerous to the powers that be; and because man’s indolence prefers habitual thought and rhetoric to technical thought that gives, not belles-lettres, but power and control.

Political philosophy, however, with its appraisals of social ends, has matured over two millennia. It may be said by the practical man of affairs that, in that time, it has made small advance. Neither have the human judgements on the beautiful and the good. It is yet no small matter to make a survey, through the ages, of the history of human society where it has been touched up to luminousness and self-consciousness in the greatest reflective minds of each epoch. Philosophy is a critical revision, ever going on, of tradition in the light of current experience. Thus we study history, not from the angle of heaped-up granules of fact, but from that of the evaluating intelligence. We view the drama, in each age, through the eyes of the greatest minds of that time. We shall, however, in this book forget neither the background, in the history of mass forces, nor the personal foibles that colour the views of these philosophers. We shall arrive at a conspectus of the history of civilization in terms of the thoughts of the men who thought about it. We shall cite their words. Thus far, at least, we shall reach objectivity, if in no other way. If their evaluations differ, we shall reflect that the essence of education lies, as Diderot said, in the stirring of doubt and of wonder.

In some cases these philosophies of social action, and of individual action in society, will be found to have arisen, reflectively and after the event, to justify action to reason and conscience. Such is the case of the social philosophy of John Locke in its relation to the English Revolution of 1688–1689. In other cases the philosophy provokes and shows the way to action. Such is the case with Locke’s philosophy, through its influence on Jefferson, in its relation to the American Revolution. Writings of a philosopher, such as Locke, unsuited by their style and close reasoning to stir action, mediated by a man of letters, such as Voltaire, himself in turn publicized in his ideas by a journalist, such as Brissot, can have popular and revolutionary effect. We note the same thing in the influence of the writings of Aquinas upon Catholic conduct and of Marx upon Communist conduct.

The survey of the thought of these thinkers may be more than an educational enrichment, a leisured feast of reason. It may not only be itself a piece of civilization: it may have utility by enlarging civilization. We may be able, by the survey of the history of philosophy, to reinforce our philosophy of history and to strengthen political science. We may perhaps detect, among the opinions of the thinkers, certain recurrent themes and a leitmotiv. We may find traditions in thought, or a Grand Tradition of culture with variants. That may provide, not merely antique analogies and far-away critics, but a norm and canon whereby to judge new theories. We may recognize these novelties as indeed new explorations of old workings, which human experience has, with good cause, marked “no thoroughfare.” Or we may find that hopeful experiments of the past, under modern conditions, have novel chances of success. Neither Communism nor Fascism will seem to us in all their characteristics entirely new. The advocacy, again, of the class war has been accepted and tried out before. But the Industrial or Mechanical Revolution, the Discovery of Electricity and the Control of Population introduce new differentiae with wide-spread, unprecedented effects.

This human philosophy and tradition are not to be traced only in literary exercises put together by fallible men. A valuable distinction can be made between Political Theory and Political Thought. Political Theory consists of such set treatises. But Political Thought is twofold and earlier. In part, it is a matter of the popular proverbs of the day. In this sense every man is a political thinker, even although he goes no further than to repeat the rhyme:

When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?

The common man cannot avoid having political thoughts. Untrained, however, there is no guaranty that his common-sense opinions may not be uncommon nonsense. Further, there is an even more primitive thought, less articulate and of which no record remains, but which we may legitimately conjecture from the institutions of a people of which we have record or the buildings that house those institutions which are their own record.

We may believe, with the philosopher Benedetto Croce, that “the chief meaning of history is the victory of freedom.” Or we may have a different interpretation of this history of human thought about social action, which is political theory, in this dramatic and tragic age when we hesitate, about to enter the phase of the cycle of history which is analogous to the Empire of the Caesars—but still conscious of free will and of the right to create anew. The glory of the Renaissance w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Frontispiece
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Part IV
• Index