A History of Western Political Thought

J. S. McClelland, Dr J S Mcclelland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134812103
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A History of Western Political Thought is an energetic and lucid account of the most important political thinkers and the enduring themes of the last two and a half millennia. Written with students of the history of political thought in mind, the book:
* traces the development of political thought from Ancient Greece to the late twentieth century
* focuses on individual thinkers and texts
* includes 40 biographies of key political thinkers
* offers original views of theorists and highlights those which may have been unjustly neglected
* develops the wider themes of political thought and the relations between thinkers over time.

Part I The Greeks

1 Ancient Greek Political Thought

DOI: 10.4324/9780203980743-1

The Context

The ancient Greeks are said to have invented political theorising, but the sense in which they invented it is frequently misunderstood. Systematic reflection about politics certainly did not begin with Plato, and Plato himself certainly did not wake up one day, find that he had nothing much on his hands, and begin to write the Republic. Equally, it appears to be the case that politics were not the first thing that the ancients reflected systematically about; nor was it the case that when they did begin to think about politics they had nothing else in their heads. Speculation about the gods, about how a properly conducted household should be run, about what moral instruction the Homeric poems contained, about the nature of the natural world, about the duties and limits of hospitality, and about many other things was already far advanced before anything like political theorising began. That list of things could no doubt be extended almost indefinitely, and perhaps we should extend it, even if we would have to extend it by guesswork, because what we do in fact know about what the ancients did think about is largely the result of the accidents of the historical survival of manuscripts, and it is perfectly possible that what has come down to us is a distorting fragment which gives us a very misleading picture of what was going on inside the heads of ancient Greeks. And which ancient Greeks? Some ancient Greeks were very ancient indeed (the Homeric poems were probably already being recited around 800 bc), and some lived very far from the borders of the modern state of Greece, in southern France and Italy, for instance, or in Asia Minor, or Egypt. Those calling themselves Greeks did not even agree about what it was that made them Greek. The Greek world had its great centres: Delphi for its oracle; Olympia and Corinth for their games; Athens for its wealth, its empire and its learning; and Sparta for the longevity of its peculiar institutions, but myriads of people thinking of themselves as Greek had never been near any of those places, though they would have heard of them and might have felt their influence. Nobody knows now what all of these people thought, just as nobody did then.

If the business of trying to empty a typical Greek mind of its contents is a fruitless exercise, we can still ask the important question of how the mind was organised. The list of things which the Greeks had thought about before they began to think systematically about politics gives us a clue to how their minds worked. That list could be extended but we would have no reason for ordering it in any particular way. The ancients were pragmatic; they always asked: How? before they asked: Why?, and in the pre-classical period they do not appear to have distinguished between different kinds of ‘how?’-questions. How a stranger should be treated, how a sacrifice to the gods should be conducted, how war should be waged, or how the work of a farm should be organised did not seem to them to be different kinds of questions. We are so accustomed to thinking that questions which involve morality are different from technical questions about the best way to do things, that it is very easy to slip into the error of supposing that the ancient Greeks must have been very simple folk because they could not see the difference. There can be little doubt that they did not see the difference, or if they did, the difference did not seem very remarkable to them, but the reason they did not was far from simple. The pragmatism of the ancients originally stemmed from so close a connection between thought and action that thinking about anything was thinking about the proper or the best way of doing it. It is almost as if they thought that thinking without a view to action was not worth the trouble, and no ancient Greek thinker ever thought that in some sense thinking was worth it for thinking’s sake any more than any Greek artist did art for art’s sake. Questions about how to do something always implicitly contained the question: How ought we to do something?, and the question: How ought we to do something? always contained the implicit assumption that anything which was worth doing was worth doing well.

Thinking about how things can be done well, how they ought to be done, has to start somewhere, and the ancients were fortunate to have at their disposal the Homeric poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, which, if properly read, could answer almost any conceivable question about how a man should act towards his fellow men and towards the gods. The poems also contain a good deal about how the gods act towards men. The anger of the gods with men, or with each other, frequently results in what we would call ‘natural’ disasters, plagues, thunderstorms, storms or contrary winds at sea, for Zeus rules the land and Poseidon the ocean, so that the Homeric poems contain a good deal about how the natural world works as well. These three worlds, the world of nature, the world of men and the world of the gods, exist in the poems in very close harmony, so that it would not be stretching the term ‘system’ too far to say that there is a Homeric system which explains and justifies almost everything that goes on in the world and which answers almost any questions that someone living in the world would care to ask. It was this Homeric world-picture which in classical times was becoming less and less satisfactory as a universal explanation of what went on in the world, at least to philosophers, but it was also a world-picture which never lost its appeal entirely as the source of a code of conduct, and some classical philosophy can best be understood as an attempt to resurrect the certainties of the Homeric world on the basis of rational argument, so that these certainties could still retain the loyalty of rational men. In particular, what attracted political philosophers to the enterprise of restating Homeric truths was the sense of order and symmetry which pervades the poems, an order which was never complete but which seemed to survive all the vicissitudes to which it was subjected. A world which was always threatened by disorder but out of which order always eventually came was bound to be attractive to political thinkers as a mirror and image of their own world of politics, where the alternation of order and disorder could easily lead to a sense of despair unless an order could be discerned prior to and beyond the everyday messiness of the affairs of cities.

The order of the Homeric world was a hierarchical order, and it was an order with an ancestry. The great gods who ruled the world and the underworld were not the first. In the beginning Chaos reigned, a void, or shapeless matter. Chaos begot five children: Erebus, the dark; Nyx, the night; Tartarus, a prison as far under Earth or Hades as Heaven was above; Eros, and Ge, Mother Earth. Ge married Uranus, the god of the Sky. Uranus imprisoned most of their children in the bowels of the earth except Chronos and the Titans, who rebelled against Uranus and castrated him with a sickle. Chronos then ruled the world on the condition that he had no son. He therefore ate his male children, but his wife Rhea preserved Zeus, and perhaps others, by substituting a dressed-up stone which Chronos swallowed and eventually spewed up. Zeus led a revolt of the other surviving sons against Chronos (who ruled from Mount Ida in Crete), took Mount Olympus, and blinded Chronos at the moment of victory because a god, being immortal, could not be killed. The victorious brothers then took to quarrelling, as brothers will, and to prevent the fruits of the victory going sour they divided what they had conquered into three, Zeus taking the land to rule, Poseidon the Sea and Hades the underworld. These events are supposed to have happened a long time before the Trojan War began, and the gods we hear about in the poems are Zeus and his companions who get into the story because they are interested in the fates of the Achaeans and the Trojans, and in the fates of individual heroes. To be a hero, which means to be mentioned by name and to have your hero’s death recorded, means that you have an Olympian patron who looks after you in the war, but it must never be forgotten that these godly patrons are as unequal as the heroes whom they strive to protect. A hero’s chances of survival increase the higher up the Olympian hierarchy his patron is, or the more in favour his patron is with one of the gods who really matters. Gods, like the men embattled against each other and engaged in internecine quarrels on the plain before Troy, sometimes fall out with each other. Zeus reigns over all, but he has favourites, and these favourites have rivals. Being immortal, there is a limit to the harm gods can do to each other, but a god could always deal death by proxy to another god by contriving the death of a hero in whom his rival took a particular interest. The gods took their own politics seriously, and that politics was deadly serious for the heroes whom the gods made their battleground.

This tale of the gods is not altogether a happy one. Cannibalism, incest and parricide are the most horrific of crimes, but they are to be regarded as incidents, not regular occurrences, and we are given to understand that they are crimes. The fact that the gods are immortal does not put them above some kind of law, even though what that law is and where it came from are questions beyond human understanding. All is certainly not sweetness and light in heaven, but heaven’s disorders always seem to dissolve themselves into a new order which keeps the hierarchy of the gods substantially intact.

In the Homeric poems, the hierarchy of the gods is mirrored in the hierarchy of men. Every man, kin, hero or ordinary warrior, has some tutelary deity who watches over him. The names of the Olympians do not exhaust the roll-call of the gods but, living on the sacred mountain, the Olympians can see further and can oversee the affairs of important men wherever they are, at home or at Troy. Every man has somewhere he calls home, where he calls on his own local gods in troubled times and to whom he pays back what is due when times are good. These local spirits inhabit a wood, keep a spring running, or guard the fertility of a particular field and must have seemed very far away to the unnamed warriors at Troy. There was nothing to stop them calling on the great gods who see everything, but the Olympians, like earthly kings, are accustomed to being pestered by the petitions of the many, and, like earthly kings, have become used to listening only to the great ones. So what kept the warriors at Troy for ten years with only the very occasional murmur of discontent? The Iliad makes it clear that the fall of Troy is by no means a foregone conclusion, and it is also clear that the lion’s share of any booty is going to go to the heroes, who alone are entitled to wrangle over who gets what. We are not even told what the obligations and loyalties were that made the assembly of the Achaean force possible in the first place, though it is plainly a temporary alliance for the duration only, and it is equally plain that there is some kind of pecking order among the great ones. What is clear is that a complicated grading of esteem orders the relations between the warriors, and because esteem comes from rank and from prowess, it can cause trouble, as it does right at the beginning of the poem where Agamemnon claims the girl by right of kingship and Achilles claims her by right of his achievements in the war. There is no scale on which these incommensurate rival claims can be measured. Agamemnon claims what is due to a king and Achilles claims what is due to the best of the heroes; each acts out the role in which he is cast. Achilles loses out, sulks famously, and the Achaeans have to suffer at the hands of man-slaying Hector, and Patroclus has to fight and die in the armour of Achilles, before the matter is set to rights and Achilles rejoins the battle. What is remarkable is that while everyone can see that the quarrel threatens to bring disaster on the Achaeans, there is so little murmuring in the ranks.

So why do they put up with it? If we assume that the poet wants us to see the affairs of the heroes through the eyes of the warriors, that we see what they saw, then we can make sense of what might otherwise seem to be a rather childish quarrel. Agamemnon acts his part as he does because he has no option. There is no man behind the mask. Agamemnon does what any king would do in the circumstances, and Achilles does what any hero would do in the circumstances, and the warriors are there to see that each plays his part properly. There is a notion of legitimacy buried in there. The fact that the more important gods are interested in the fates of the more important heroes creates a sense of dramatic distance between heroes and ordinary warriors, so that it is not supposed to occur to the ordinary warriors to be jealous of the heroes, let alone that they should try to usurp their place. That sense of distance reconciles each man’s obedience to his self-respect. The heroes are a different order of men, and to compete with them would be a kind of hubris, unfitting and absurd when the fate of heroes is not in their own hands but in the lap of the gods. There is implicit agreement about this between gods, heroes and men; each is there to make sure that the others act out roles which they have not chosen and with which everyone is familiar. The story is known in advance, so to speak, and the drama of the poem lies in the possibility, which is only a possibility, that one of the actors will fail to live up to his own part in the story. Achilles must kill Hector, and the warrior-audience enjoys watching Hector squirm a little.

These predetermined roles allow very little room for manoeuvre, though there is more room in the Odyssey than in the Iliad. That is why there is so little condemnation of the actions of heroes, and why they can seem so childish to us, Agamemnon and Achilles as brats in the playground, both saying ‘I want’ without ever considering what effect their quarrel might have on the outcome of the Trojan War. They never question their desires, and the warrior-audience does not condemn them for it. What would be condemned would be a failure to pursue the paths to a collision in an attempt to avoid the consequences. The heroes are god-like, but to try to prevent what the gods have in store would be to attempt to be gods, and that must not be. The heroes are touched by the divine, but there still must be a dividing line between them and the Olympians, the more so because the gods moved so easily in the company of men. Religion could hardly be separate from everyday life when the gods took such a detailed interest in, and played so important a part in, human affairs. Religion was everyday life before the divine was alienated from the human, and the life of this world could not be so bad if the immortals themselves consented to share it.

The Homeric gods controlled the natural world on the same hierarchical principle. Zeus the thunderer naturally had the most frightening natural phenomenon in his power; a less important but still influential god like Apollo could send plagues, while a local deity could cause a stream to dry up; lesser gods could cause storms in tea-cups, but only Poseidon could make the whole sea rage. The greater gods could encompass the ruin of a great man, or a great number of men, while a malignant spirit could only ruin a man of no importance at all. Every god, every man, and every natural event had its place in the scheme of things, and that scheme of things explained everything that had to be explained. What finally distinguished the gods from men was death, and a good human life consisted of giving every man his due by treating him in the way demanded by your status and his, honouring the gods, putting up with misfortune, and meeting your own death in the way appropriate to a warrior or a hero. This was not necessarily a recipe for human happiness but neither was it a recipe for despair. Given reasonable luck, and a fair wind, the Homeric world contained within itself everything that a man could possibly want. It was a world fit to live in.

Heroic values survive in more complex societies because they are values of order; the less plausible they become, the more attractive they are. The world of the classical Greek polis was as different from the world of heroic kingship as the world of modern democracy is from the medieval kingdom. Even in Homer’s day the Greek world was divided into a large number of different political communities (‘Across the wine-dark sea lies Crete, an island populous beyond compute with ninety cities’), and if you had asked a Greek of classical times how many different polises there were, he would probably have said a thousand, meaning a very large number indeed. Some were very large, like Athens in her heyday with about 400,000 inhabitants, while others could count their numbers in hundreds, and they lived under a bewildering variety of political systems. Aristotle thought it worthwhile to have descriptions made of 158 different political constitutions, and, while only the Constitution of Athens has survived, it is a safe guess that those 158 constitutions were worth describing because they were all different. Just to go on a journey in ancient Greece was to provide yourself with the opportunity to do comparative government. Superimposed on the variety of political regimes was the tendency of those regimes to change. The ancients tried to impose some kind of intellectual order on this puzzling political world by dividing types of regime into three broad classes, depending on whether rule was by the One, the Few, or the Many, but the width and the slipperiness of the categories tell us that they are being stretched very far indeed to cover all the different cases. Aristotle sensibly settles in the end for the continuum Few/Many to classify states, a rough enough guide to contemporary political practice and pointing to the age-old division in Greek cities between the oligarchs and the democrats.

The ancients were frank about the class nature of politics. Oligarchy was a conspiracy of the rich to rob the poor and democracy a conspiracy of the poor to rob the rich. Along with this frankness about class went an equal frankness about power. Power was there to be used to further one’s own interests or the interests of the group to which one belonged. The Greeks expected to get something out of politics; power was not there just to be occupied in the way some modern governments seem content to hold office without doing anything very much. The divisions within cities made them hard to govern, and there was never any certainty that the future was going to be like the past. Part of the cause of the unruliness of the polis stemmed from the fact that there was nothing much to rule it with. Whatever economic prosperity there was was extremely modest, which meant that cities could not afford to spend much of a hard-won agricultural and trading surplus on government. There was never much in the way of professionalisation of the functions of war and government, which makes the politics of the Greek cities seem makeshift and amateurish when compared to the civilised despotisms of the East or to the succeeding empires in the West. For cities to be largely self-running and self-policed, legitimacy was essential. Citizens had to be able to feel that on the whole they ought to obey the law, do what their rulers told them, and defend their city in time of war. Legitimate power is power on the cheap, power which does not have to be backed up by the expensive threat of official force. (Herodotus contrasts the voluntary military service of the Greeks with the soldiers of the Great King driven to battle by whips.)

Legitimate power is not the same as force. Force has only natural limits, while legitimate power is subject to the formal limitations of law. From very ancient times, the Greeks had an idea of law (nomos) which they contrasted with the arrogance of power (hubris). Hubris was the cause of chronic uncertainty and instability (stasis) in cities because, being the ally of the instability of character which the possession of power is likely to bring out or even to cause, hubristic behaviour was unpredictable. In the Homeric world, men were as accustomed to the unsettling effects of the anger of kings as they were to the effects of the anger of the gods. The law which can be inferred from the Homeric poems is unwritten law, where unwritten law means both a moral law (perhaps emanating from the gods), a set of ancestral customs, and a set of expectations about how particular kinds of men should behave. The unwritten law sets limits to the conduct of the great ones, but it is clear that the great ones are in fact expected to flout these...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Biographies
• Foreword
• Part I The Greeks
• Part II Romans and Roman Catholics
• Part III Romans and Humanists: The Reinvention of Sovereignty
• Part IV The Theory of the Social Contract
• Part V Enlightenment and the Development of the Modern State
• Part VI The Rise of Liberalism
• Part VII Reactions to Liberalism 1: Hegel – The State and Dialectic
• Part VIII Reactions to Liberalism 2: Socialism
• Part IX Reactions to Liberalism 3: Irrationalism and Anti-Rationalism
• Notes
• Index