Political Theory

G. C. Field

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000521337
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

First published in 1956, Political Theory explores the historical development of political ideas and analyses some basic concepts of contemporary political theory, including the notions of the State, of Sovereignty and the Law.

The book is based on lectures in Political Theory given by the author, G. C. Field, in the universities at which he taught. It opens by considering the development of political ideas by providing an overview of the ideas current at the time of original publication in comparison to the ideas of earlier ages. It then progresses into a more detailed discussion of specific political theories. It will appeal to those with an interest in the history of political thought and developments in political theory.

Chapter I

SOME HISTORICAL PRELIMINARIES (1)

10.4324/9781003165040-1

OUR main point of interest will naturally be the examination of our own political assumptions and ideas. But, as a preliminary to this, it might be as well to say something about the political ideas of other ages. There is always a temptation to think of our own ideas at the present moment as representing, so to speak, the natural order of events and the final culmination of the historical process, instead of being, as they are, merely a fleeting and transient stage in a continuous development. Some knowledge of history is a valuable corrective to this. On the one hand, by presenting us with a state of things in which ideas are taken for granted which seem strange and startling to us to-day, it helps us by contrast to become aware of what we are taking for granted ourselves and to realise that they are not self-evident truths but can be doubted or criticised. On the other, by showing us some ideas very similar to our own, appearing under very different historical conditions, it helps us to analyse our own ideas and to see which elements in them are purely the product of temporary conditions of the present day and which are of more universal application. In what follows no attempt will be made to give a comprehensive account of the history of political thought. I shall only attempt to indicate, very much in outline, some of the ideas of past ages which seem of special interest to our own, either because they contain the origins of our own ideas in them or because they are contrasted so sharply with them that they make our own stand out more clearly.

ANCIENT GREECE

The study of political ideas naturally begins with the ancient Greeks, because, in a real sense, they were the first people to have political ideas at all. Of course, there was plenty of thinking much earlier about practical problems, how best to conquer a neighbouring territory, for instance, or how to retain one’s power over it after the conquest. But the application of critical and rational thinking to the fundamentals of politics is first found, to any measurable degree, among the Greeks. It would, however, be a great mistake to exaggerate their rationality. In practice, their behaviour was too often extremely irrational. Indeed, actual Greek politics show us many more examples of what to avoid than patterns to follow. In their thinking, too, it is possible to trace the influence of many irrational elements. But, none the less, it remains true that rational thinking on these matters appears among the Greeks to a degree quite unknown before. Their great thinkers, of course, such as Plato and Aristotle, will stand comparison with any thinkers of more recent ages. Indeed, there are elements in their thought, particularly in Plato’s, which were so far ahead of their period that, though they had little influence in their own time, they have much that is apposite to ours. But the greater part of their thinking consisted in developing and making explicit the implications of the ordinary ideas of their time, and sometimes urging their contemporaries to take these ideas more seriously in practice.

If we recognise it as only a sketch-plan, subject to all sorts of qualification in detail, we might think of the new contribution of the Greeks as something on these lines. In the earlier stages of social development it would on the whole be true to say that people acted as their desires, interests, and emotions led them, except in so far as they were restrained or directed by the customary rules of their tribe or society. These rules were regarded as the supreme authority over conduct, and, among many other things which they commanded or forbade, they assigned special degrees of power and authority to particular individuals. Thus, they combined in themselves what we regard as the distinct ideas of custom, law, both constitutional and private, and morality. Further, there was a tendency to ascribe to them a more than human authority; they were, for instance, often represented as the work of a superhuman being or beings, such as a divine or semi-divine ancestor. As a consequence, they were not normally questioned or thought of as alterable at will. They were taken for granted as a permanent framework within the limits of which ordinary human activities went on.¹

1 This might need some modification when we consider the work of the early legislators in Babylonia and elsewhere, such as Hammurabi. But there are two points to remember in that connection. Hammurabi’s code, it appears, was not, strictly speaking, new legislation, but rather a systematisation and codification of existing traditional laws. And, secondly, it was almost entirely concerned with what we should call private law. There was no question of any constitutional provisions or any changes in the political institutions, such as we find among the Greeks. So the modifications required in the statement above would not be so very great.

This way of looking at laws and institutions does not completely disappear till comparatively modern times and its influence is still apparent among the Greeks. But the important novelty that appears among them is that they did begin to question it and to ask for a reason and a justification for these things. They first, to any noticeable degree, began to think of their institutions in terms of means and ends, to ask what purpose they served, and to consider the possibility that they might be consciously constructed or reconstructed to suit the purposes of the human beings who lived under them. So we find them ready at times to undertake a drastic reconstruction of the whole framework of a particular society, if there was an end to be gained by it. And in their theory they turn naturally to the construction of Utopias or ideal states, sometimes put forward as practical schemes, and sometimes, as with Plato, as ideal models which are not expected to be attained in practice, but which serve as a guide and standard by which to direct and judge our practical endeavours. The idea of a rationally planned society is thus a characteristic Greek contribution to political thinking. It would have seemed the natural procedure to a Greek who took these matters seriously to think out what he wanted and then try to organise his society accordingly. This attitude, as we have noted, sometimes led to revolutionary changes. But it was also a conservative influence, in that it assumed that, once a society was properly organised, then the natural thing to do was to keep it like that as far as possible. There was a tendency to look on change, not as the natural law of development, but as justified, if at all, as an unfortunate necessity arising from a mistake in the original plan.

When people began to ask questions about the reasons for particular laws or institutions, it was only to be expected that a few of the more adventurous minds should go on to ask what were the reasons for having laws or institutions at all. Some radically-minded critics went so far as to say that these things had no claim on our respect, except in so far as they happened to fit in with our own personal desires or ambitions. It was easy to come to think of the law as primarily something which prevented us from doing what we wanted to do, and then to go on to argue that what we wanted was natural and that these restraints were artificial, man-made contrivances with no basis in the nature of things, and no authority beyond their convenience for our own particular purposes. As was natural, this destructive criticism was at first applied not only to laws in the limited modern sense, but also to what we should call the moral law, the accepted rules of right and wrong in any society. For the two were still far from being clearly distinguished. The ordinary Greek in the classical period,¹ in spite of criticisms, still normally looked on the laws as providing a sufficient standard of right and wrong in human behaviour. ‘It is by the law’, says a character in one of Euripides’ plays, ‘that we distinguish the righteous from the unrighteous in our lives.’ The radical critics, therefore, argued in effect that there were no objective standards of right and wrong. There were only our own desires, and if the rules conflicted with these the sensible man would disobey the rules whenever he could do so safely and to his own advantage. These destructive ideas still remained for long a heresy confined to a few advanced thinkers, at any rate as an explicit theory, though many men, no doubt, acted on them in practice.

1 This is the period with which we are dealing and may be taken as extending, very roughly, from about 600 B.C. to the time of Alexander and his successors.

Thus was initiated a great debate which has gone on, in various forms, throughout the ages. And the answer put forward by the Greek philosophers, particularly Plato and Aristotle, to the sceptical critics contains much of interest for us at the present day. To put it very briefly and inadequately, their answer ran on these lines. The highest, and ultimately the most agreeable kind of life for human beings was to be found in friendly co-operation with other human beings in an organised society, and the laws represented an attempt to set out the rules of behaviour, which were necessary for such a life and such a society to be possible. This would apply both to the written laws and to the unwritten laws or accepted codes of conduct. But in fact it was the general assumption of these thinkers, as it would have been for most Greeks, that the written laws, enforceable in the courts, should as far as possible contain in themselves what was necessary to make the good life possible. They were thus in a very real sense natural. For it was only to a superficial view that they appeared as primarily a restriction on our natural desires. In reality they represented the condition of attaining the fullest satisfaction of our needs.

Of course, the actual laws of actual societies would often fall short, sometimes very seriously short, of this ideal. And individuals who recognised this sometimes felt the call to set up their own moral standards which might take them beyond or occasionally in opposition to the rules of their community. But that was only a second best, and the men of the highest moral ideals could not be satisfied till they had found or established a community which recognised these ideals. Further, even the most imperfect system of laws could be regarded as an attempt to arrive at a moral ideal. And that is why it has a claim on our respect and obedience.

We arrive, then, at the characteristic Greek notion of the moral end of legislation and indeed of all political activity. This must not, of course, be taken to mean that the policy of the average Greek city, still less of the individual politician, was always, or even generally, actuated by the highest moral motives. But the ordinary Greek, when he thought about it, would probably, however hazily, have been ready to accept the idea that the true end of the community, the Greek city-state in particular, was to develop a certain type of character and a certain way of behaviour in its members. ‘A city teaches a man,’ as Simonides of Ceos wrote in the early years of the fifth century. Further, the Greek would probably have accepted the corollary, that every institution and every measure must in the long run be judged by its effects on the kind of citizen it produced and the kind of life it enabled him to lead. This is what Aristotle means in his well-known phrase that the city exists for the sake of the good life. And it explains why he describes his analysis of the good character and the good way of life in the Ethics as being specially the concern of the science of politics. This, again, is what Plato means when he makes Socrates say in the Gorgias that the true test of a statesman is whether he leaves the citizens better men than he found them. In all this, the philosophers were only asking the ordinary Greek citizen to take seriously the aims that he himself recognised as the ideal. There were, it is true, even before the end of the classical period, isolated thinkers who denied the moral end of the city community. Its proper function, they maintained, was merely to act as a sort of policeman, to keep order and protect the citizens from violence, internal or external. But this view is of little influence until a much later period, when conditions were very different.

It is considerations such as these that provided the ethical basis for the democratic movement in Greece. No doubt this movement got most of its drive from more practical, and sometimes less creditable motives. None the less the ethical basis was there. It was held, explicitly by some and more vaguely by many others, that the ‘good life’ itself included participation in the public affairs of the community and a due share in political power. As Aristotle puts it, it is the virtue of a good citizen to know both how to rule and how to be ruled. It was a natural conclusion that, as the community existed for the sake of all its citizens, they must all alike be given the chance of acquiring this virtue by taking part in political activity. The differences between the Greek idea of democracy and our own have, of course, often been pointed out, and sometimes considerably exaggerated, and something more will be said about them later.¹ But, for the moment, the important point to observe is that democracy and other forms of government now begin to be regarded as things about which it is possible to argue and to give reasons why one is better than the other. This really seems to be something new in the history of ideas, even among communities which, in other respects, had reached a relatively advanced state of civilisation. So far as we know it never occurred to the Egyptians or Babylonians, for instance, to discuss whether monarchy was a better form of government than any other. It was simply taken for granted as the natural order of things.

1 See Appendix.

Other ideas, familiar to us at the present time, appear first among the Greeks. To take one instance, it is among them that we find the first clear formulation of the idea of social conflict and of the struggle between the classes for economic benefits, and the first clear appreciation of the pervasive influence of this on political movements. Or to take a more purely political example, we find it generally assumed that among people, like the Greeks, of a high level of civilisation the natural and proper political arrangement was the division of their world into a number of separate states, each absolute master in its own dominions and each absolutely independent of any outside control. This was not by any means attained generally in practice. There were all sorts and degrees of domination of one Greek state by another. But in theory it was generally recognised as the ideal towards which every state aspired, at any rate for itself. After the classical period this notion begins to fade from men’s minds, and it does not reappear until the time of the Reformation.

There was a tendency in Greek thought to push this idea to extremes, and to suggest that ideally each state should be not only politically independent but economically and culturally independent as well. A city, in Aristotle’s phrase, should be ‘self-sufficient for the good life’. Further, not only should every citizen be able to find all the requisites of the good life within his own city, but his own moral responsibility stopped short at its boundaries. In practice, once more, this was never attained and the economic and cultural influence of one city on another was often very great. There are even indications that some enlightened spirits, particularly in Athens, had a certain sense of pride in their civilising mission. Thus Pericles in his Funeral Speech proclaims Athens as ‘the school of Hellas’. But there is little or nothing in the way of serious theoretical discussion of this.

Another thing that we miss in classical Greek political thinking is any very marked awareness of the problem, so prominent in nineteenth-century thought, of the relation and possible conflict between the state and the individual. It is significant that there is no word in Greek which really corresponds to our ‘state’. The word usually so translated is Polis or city, and to express Greek ideas in modern language it would be better to represent this by some such term as ‘community’. The ordinary Greek, while well aware that in particular cases an individual might come into conflict with his community, would find it very hard to think of himself and his city as two distinct entities, standing over against each other in some sort of essential opposition, as we often tend to think of the state. The city is more naturally thought of as a society of individuals co-operating for a common purpose than as an authority over and above the individuals. We might epitomise the difference by saying that when a modern Englishman speaks of something as being the business of the state he would generally be taken to imply that it was not his business. A Greek, on the other hand, who said that something was the business of the city would be more likely to be understood as asserting that it was his business as much as anyone else’s. Besides this we should also note the absence of another subject of discussion which has been prominent in modern political thought. That is the question of the proper relation of the state to the other societies of which its citizens were members. There were smaller societies within the city-states, and at an earlier period they had sometimes in practice constituted a threat to the unity of the city. But at the time with which we are chiefly concerned it was taken for granted without question that the city was supreme.

Points of view such as these would develop much more naturally in a small city-state, which was the unit envisaged in all Greek political thinking in this period. It has sometimes been made a matter of criticism of the Greek thinkers that their thinking failed to look beyond the bounds of this small community. But, so far as this is true, it was at any rate deliberate on their part. They were well acquainted with the large country states of the time but they thought that the city-state represented a higher level of civilisation. They were convinced that the large states could never begin to be to their subjects what the city-state could be to its citizens. In this, indeed, the Greeks were undoubtedly right, and in fact the large states never attempted anything of the kind. In proportion as the city-states died out the whole Greek idea of citizenship died with it.

THE HELLENISTIC AGE

In the so-called Hellenistic age, with the conquest of the Persian empire by Alexander and the establishment of the Greco-Macedonian kingdoms into which his dominions broke up after his death, a great change comes over the Greek outlook on politics. We must, however, be on our guard against exaggerating the extent of the change. The free Greek city-state by no means ceased to exist. Indeed, some city-states, such as Rhodes, still had their greatest days before them. Even in the dominions of the kings the Greek cities which they founded were the chief organs for the dissemination of Greek civilisation. To many a Greek his city must still have remained his chief centre of interest. None the less throughout the greater part of the Greek world the city was overshadowed by the kingdoms. And these were not any longer barbarian states which had to be resisted in the name of Greek civilisation, but were themselves the champions and disseminators of this civilisation. It was only to be expected, therefore, that new ways of looking at things should begin to grow up in the Greek world. It is true that the germs of these new ideas could be discovered in the earlier period. But it is only now that they began to be of real importance.

One noticeable development is a further step in the direction of the separation of morality from politics. As we have seen, it had already been realised in the classical period that an individual might have to take a stand against the will of his community, for the sake of a moral ideal. Sophocles’ Antigone and Plato’s Socrates bear testimony to that. But such an attitude did not question the duty of a man, in all normal circumstances, to conform to the standards of his community, and if, occasionally, he felt impelled to disobey the laws or commands of his city it was with the ideal of a better law in a better city in mind. But now we begin to find the idea that the highest good for man was to be found, not in political activity or i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Preface Page
• Contents Page
• Introduction Page
• I Some Historical Preliminaries (1)
• II Some Historical Preliminaries (2)
• III Some Historical Preliminaries (3)
• IV The State and Sovereignty
• V The Law and Legal Sovereignty
• VI Forms of Government—Democracy
• VII The Case against Democracy
• VIII The Democrat’s Answer
• IX The Conditions for Democracy
• X The Machinery of Democracy—Representative Government
• XI The Party System
• XII The State and Other Societies
• XIII The State and the Individual—Individual Liberty
• XIV Relations between States—Nationalism and Internationalism
• XV Conclusion—Politics, Economics, and Ethics
• Appendix—Democracy Ancient and Modern
• Index