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Political philosophy, branch of philosophy that is concerned, at the most abstract level, with the concepts and arguments involved in political opinion. The meaning of the term political is itself one of the major problems of political philosophy. Broadly, however, one may characterize as political all those practices and institutions that are concerned with government.
The central problem of political philosophy is how to deploy or limit public power so as to maintain the survival and enhance the quality of human life. Like all aspects of human experience, political philosophy is conditioned by environment and by the scope and limitations of mind, and the answers given by successive political philosophers to perennial problems reflect the knowledge and the assumptions of their times. Political philosophy, as distinct from the study of political and administrative organization, is more theoretical and normative than descriptive. It is inevitably related to general philosophy and is itself a subject of cultural anthropology, sociology, and the sociology of knowledge. As a normative discipline it is thus concerned with what ought, on various assumptions, to be and how this purpose can be promoted, rather than with a description of facts—although any realistic political theory is necessarily related to these facts. The political philosopher is thus not concerned so much, for example, with how pressure groups work or how, by various systems of voting, decisions are arrived at as with what the aims of the whole political process should be in the light of a particular philosophy of life.
There is thus a distinction between political philosophy, which reflects the world outlook of successive theorists and which demands an appreciation of their historical settings, and modern political science proper, which, insofar as it can be called a science, is empirical and descriptive. Political philosophy, however, is not merely unpractical speculation, though it may give rise to highly impractical myths: it is a vitally important aspect of life, and one that, for good or evil, has had decisive results on political action, for the assumptions on which political life is conducted clearly must influence what actually happens. Political philosophy may thus be viewed as one of the most important intellectual disciplines, for it sets standards of judgment and defines constructive purposes for the use of public power. Such consideration of the purposes for which power should be used is in a sense more urgent today than it was in earlier periods, for humankind has at its disposal the power either to create a world civilization in which modern technology can benefit the human race or to destroy itself in pursuit of political myths. The scope for political philosophy is thus great, the clarification of its purpose and limitations urgent—an aspect, indeed, of civilization's survival.
Despite this unique aspect of the contemporary situation, and although ancient political philosophies were formulated under very different conditions, their study still illuminates vital questions today. Questions concerning the aims of government, the grounds of political obligation, the rights of individuals against the state, the basis of sovereignty, the relation of executive to legislative power, and the nature of political liberty and social justice have been asked and answered in many ways over the centuries. They are all fundamental to political philosophy and demand answers in terms of modern knowledge and opinion.
This article describes how these questions have been asked and answered by representative and influential political philosophers in the West, from Greco-Roman antiquity through the Middle Ages, early modern times, and the 19th, 20th, and early 21st centuries. During so long a time span the historical context of these formulations has changed profoundly, and an understanding of the political philosophers selected demands some account of their background. Because of limitations of space, only political philosophers of outstanding importance have been at all fully described, although many minor figures also are briefly discussed.
Western political philosophy to the end of the 19th century
Although in antiquity great civilizations arose in Egypt and Mesopotamia, in the Indus Valley, and in China, there was little speculation about the problems of political philosophy as formulated in the West. The Code of Hammurabi (c. 1750 bce) consists of rules propounded by the Babylonian ruler Hammurabi as a representative of God on Earth and is mainly concerned with order, trade, and irrigation; the Maxims of Ptahhotep (c. 2300 bce) contains shrewd advice from the Egyptian vizier on how to prosper in a bureaucracy; and the Artha-sastra of Kautilya, grand vizier to Chandragupta Maurya in the late 4th century bce, is a set of Machiavellian precepts on how to survive under an arbitrary power. To be sure, the Buddhist concept of dharma (social custom and duty), which inspired the Indian emperor Ashoka in the 3rd century bce, implies a moralization of public power, and the teachings of Confucius in the 6th century bce are a code of conduct designed to stabilize society, but there is not, outside Europe, much speculation about the basis of political obligation and the purpose of the state, with both of which Western political philosophy is mainly concerned. An authoritarian society is taken for granted, backed by religious sanctions, and a conservative and arbitrary power is generally accepted.
In contrast to this overwhelming conservatism, paralleled by the rule of custom and tribal elders in most primitive societies, the political philosophers of ancient Greece question the basis and purpose of government. Though they do not separate political speculation from shrewd observations that today would be regarded as empirical political science, they created the vocabulary of Western political thought.
The first elaborate work of European political philosophy is the Republic of Plato, a masterpiece of insight and feeling, superbly expressed in dialogue form and probably meant for recitation. Further development of Plato's ideas is undertaken in his Statesman and Laws, the latter prescribing the ruthless methods whereby they might be imposed. Plato grew up during the great Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta and, like many political philosophers, tried to find remedies for prevalent political injustice and decline. Indeed, the Republic is the first of the utopias, though not one of the more attractive, and it is the first classic attempt of a European philosopher to moralize political life.
Books V, VII–VIII, and IX of the Republic are cast as a lively discussion between Socrates, whose wisdom Plato is recounting, and various leisured Athenians. They state the major themes of political philosophy with poetic power. Plato's work has been criticized as static and class-bound, reflecting the moral and aesthetic assumptions of an elite in a slave-owning civilization and bound by the narrow limits of the city-state (polis). The work is indeed a classic example of a philosopher's vivisection of society, imposing by relatively humane means the rule of a high-minded minority.
The Republic is a criticism of current Hellenic politics—often an indictment. It is based upon a metaphysical act of faith, for Plato believes that a world of permanent Forms exists beyond the limitations of human experience and that morality and the good life, which the state should promote, are reflections of these ideal entities (see Platonism). The point is best made in the famous simile of the cave, in which humans are chained with their faces to the wall and their backs to the light, so that they see only the shadows of reality. So constrained, they shrink from what is truly "real" and permanent and need to be forced to face it. This idealistic doctrine, known misleadingly as realism, pervades all Plato's philosophy: its opposite doctrine, nominalism, declares that only particular and observed "named" data are accessible to the mind. On his realist assumption, Plato regards most ordinary life as illusion and the current evils of politics as the result of the human pursuit of brute instinct. It follows that
unless philosophers bear kingly rule in cities or those who are now called kings and princes become genuine and adequate philosophers, and political power and philosophy are brought together…there will be no respite from evil for cities.
Only philosopher-statesmen can apprehend permanent and transcendent Forms and turn to "face the brightest blaze of being" outside the cave, and only philosophically minded people of action can be the saviours and helpers of the citizens.
Plato is thus indirectly the pioneer of modern beliefs that only a party organization, inspired by correct and "scientific" doctrines, formulated by the written word and interpreted by authority, can rightly guide the state. His rulers would form an elite, not responsible to the mass of the people. Thus, in spite of his high moral purpose, he has been called an enemy of the open society and the father of totalitarianism. But he is also an anatomist of the evils of unbridled appetite and political corruption and insists on the need to use public power to moral ends.
Having described his utopia, Plato turns to analyze the existing types of government in human terms with great insight. Monarchy is the best but impracticable; in oligarchies the rule of the few and the pursuit of wealth divide societies—the rich become demoralized and the poor envious, and there is no harmony in the state. In democracy, in which the poor get the upper hand, demagogues distribute "a peculiar kind of equality to equals and unequals impartially," and the old flatter the young, fawning on their juniors to avoid the appearance of being sour or despotic. The leaders plunder the propertied classes and divide the spoils between themselves and the people until confusion and corruption lead to tyranny, an even worse form of government, for the tyrant becomes a wolf instead of a man and "lops off" potential rivals and starts wars to distract the people from their discontent. "Then, by Zeus," Plato concludes, "the public learns what a monster they have begotten."
In the Statesman Plato admits that, although there is a correct science of government, like geometry it cannot be realized, and he stresses the need for the rule of law, since no ruler can be trusted with unbridled power. He then examines which of the current forms of government is the least difficult to live with, for the ruler, after all, is an artist who has to work within the limits of his medium. In the Laws, purporting to be a discussion of how best to found a polis in Crete, he presents a detailed program in which a state with some 5,000 citizens is ruled by 37 curators of laws and a council of 360. But the keystone of the arch is a sinister and secret Nocturnal Council to be "the sheet anchor of the state," established in its "central fortress as guardian." Poets and musicians will be discouraged and the young subjected to a rigid, austere, and exacting education. The stark consequence of Plato's political philosophy here becomes apparent. He had, nonetheless, stated, in the dawn of European political thought, the normative principle that the state should aim at promoting the good life and social harmony and that the rule of law, in the absence of the rule of philosopher-kings, is essential to this purpose.
Aristotle, who was a pupil in the Academy of Plato, remarks that "all the writings of Plato are original: they show ingenuity, novelty of view and a spirit of enquiry. But perfection in everything is perhaps a difficult thing." Aristotle was a scientist rather than a prophet, and his Politics, written while he was teaching at the Lyceum at Athens, is only part of an encyclopaedic account of nature and society, in which he analyzes society as if he were a doctor and prescribes remedies for its ills. Political behaviour is here regarded as a branch of biology as well as of ethics; in contrast to Plato, Aristotle was an empirical political philosopher. He criticizes many of Plato's ideas as impracticable, but, like Plato, he admires balance and moderation and aims at a harmonious city under the rule of law. The book is composed of lecture notes and is arranged in a confusing way—a quarry of arguments and definitions of great value but hard to master. The first book, though probably the last written, is a general introduction; Books II, III, and VII–VIII, probably the earliest, deal with the ideal state; and Books IV–VII analyze actual states and politics. The treatise is thus, in modern terms, a mixture of political philosophy and political science (see also Aristotelianism).
Like Plato, Aristotle thinks in terms of the city-state, which he regards as the natural form of civilized life, social and political, and the best medium in which human capacities can be realized. Hence his famous definition of man as a "political animal," distinguished from the other animals by his gift of speech and power of moral judgment. "Man, when perfected," he writes,
is the best of animals, but when separated from law and justice he is the worst of all, since armed injustice is the most dangerous, and he is equipped at birth with the arms of intelligence and wit, moral qualities which he may use for the worst ends.
Since all nature is pervaded by purpose and since humans "aim at the good," the city-state, which is the highest form of human community, aims at the highest good. Like sailors with their separate functions, who yet have a common object in safety in navigation, citizens too have a common aim—in modern terms survival, security, and the enhancement of the quality of life. In the context of the city-state, this high quality of life can be realized only by a minority, and Aristotle, like Plato, excludes those who are not full citizens or who are slaves; indeed, he says that some men are "slaves by nature" and deserve their status. Plato and Aristotle aim at an aristocratic and exacting way of life, reflecting, in more sophisticated forms, the ideas of the warrior aristocracies depicted by Homer.
Having stated that the aim of the city-state is to promote the good life, Aristotle insists that it can be achieved only under the rule of law.
The rule of law is preferable to that of a single citizen; if it be the better course to have individuals ruling, they should be made law guardians or ministers of the laws.
The rule of law is better than that even of the best men, for
he who bids law rule may be deemed to bid God and reason alone rule, but he who bids men rule adds the element of the beast; for desire is a wild beast, and passion perverts the minds of rulers, even if they are the best of men.
This doctrine, which distinguishes between lawful government and tyranny, survived the Middle Ages and, by subjecting the ruler to law, became the theoretical sanction of modern constitutional government.
Aristotle also vindicates the rule of custom and justifies the obligations accepted by members of society: the solitary man, he writes, "is either a beast or a God." This outlook at once reflects the respect for custom and solidarity that has promoted survival in primitive tribal societies, even at the price of sacrificing individuals, and gives a theoretical justification for the acceptance of political obligation.
Like Plato, Aristotle analyzes the different kinds of city-states. While states are bound, like animals, to be different, he considers a balanced "mixed" constitution the best—it reflects the ideal of justice (dikē) and fair dealing, which gives every individual his due in a conservative social order in which citizens of the middle condition preponderate. And he attacks oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny. Under democracy, he argues, demagogues attain power by bribing the electorate and waste accumulated wealth. But it is tyranny that Aristotle most detests; the arbitrary power of an individual above the law who is
responsible to no-one and who governs all alike with a view to his own advantage and not of his subjects, and therefore against their will. No free man can endure such a government.
The Politics contains not only a firm statement of these principles but also a penetrating analysis of how city-states are governed, as well as of the causes of revolutions, in which "inferiors revolt in order that they may be equal, and equals that they may be superior." The treatise concludes with an elaborate plan for educating the citizens to attain the "mean," the "possible," and the "becoming." The first implies a balanced development of body and mind, ability and imagination; the second, the recognition of the limits of mind and the range and limitations of talent; the third, an outcome of the other two, is the style and self-assurance that come from the resulting self-control and confidence.
While, therefore, Aristotle accepts a conservative and hierarchical social order, he states firmly that public power should aim at promoting the good life and that only through the rule of law and justice can the good life be attained. These principles were novel in the context of his time, when the great extra-European civilizations were ruled, justly or unjustly, by the arbitrary power of semidivine rulers and when other peoples, though respecting tribal custom and the authority of tribal elders, were increasingly organized under war leaders for depredation.
Cicero and the Stoics
Both Plato and Aristotle had thought in terms of the city-state. But Aristotle's pupil Alexander the Great swamped the cities of old Greece and brought them into a vast empire that included Egypt, Persia, and the Levant. Although city-states remained the locus of the civilization of antiquity, they became part of an imperial power that broke up into kingdoms under Alexander's successors. This imperial power was reasserted on an even greater scale by Rome, whose empire at its greatest extent reached from central Scotland to the Euphrates and from Spain to eastern Anatolia. Civilization itself became identified with empire, and the development of eastern and western Europe was conditioned by it.
Since the city-state was no longer self-sufficient, universal philosophies developed that gave people something to live by in a wider world. Of these philosophies, Stoicism and Epicureanism were the most influential. The former inspired a rather grim self-sufficiency and sense of duty, as exemplified by the writings of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius; the latter, a prudent withdrawal from the world of affairs.
The setting for political philosophy thus became much wider, relating individuals to universal empire—thought of, as in China, as coterminous with civilization itself. Its inspiration remained Hellenic, but derivative Roman philosophers reinterpreted it, and Roman legists enclosed the old concepts of political justice in a carapace of legal definitions, capable of surviving their civilization's decline.
Cicero lived during the 1st century bce, a time of political confusion in which the old institutions of the republic were breaking down before military dictators. His De republica and De legibus (Laws) are both dialogues and reflect the Classical sense of purpose: "to make human life better by our thought and effort." Cicero defined the republic as an association held together by law; he further asserted, as Plato had maintained with his doctrine of Forms, that government was sanctioned by a universal natural law that reflected the cosmic order. Cicero expresses the pre-Christian Stoic attempt to moralize public power, apparent in the exacting sense of public responsibility shown by the emperors Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius in the 2nd century ce.
St. Augustine
When Christianity became the predominant creed of the empire under Constantine (converted 312) and the sole official religion under Theodosius (379–395), political philosophy changed profoundly. St. Augustine's City of God (413–426/427), written when the empire was under attack by Germanic tribes, sums up and defines a new division between church and state and a conflict between "matter" and "spirit" resulting from original sin and the Fall of Man from the Garden of Eden.
St. Augustine, whose Confessiones (397) is a record of a new sort of introspection, combined a Classical and Hebraic dualism. From the Stoics and Virgil he inherited an austere sense of duty, from Plato and the Neoplatonists a contempt for the illusions of appetite, and from the Pauline and patristic interpretation of Christianity a sense of the conflict between Light and Darkness that reflects Zoroastrian and Manichaean doctrines emanating from Iran. In this context worldly interests and government itself are dwarfed by the importance of attaining salvation and of escaping from an astrologically determined fate and from the demons who embody the darkness. Life becomes illuminated for the elect minority by the prospect of eternal salvation or, for those without grace, shrivels under the glare of eternal fires.
St. Augustine regarded salvation as predestinate and the cosmic process as designed to "gather" an elect to fill the places of the fallen angels and so "preserve and perhaps augment the number of the heavenly inhabitants." The role of government and indeed of society itself becomes subordinated to a "secular arm," part of an earthly city, as opposed to the "City of God." The function of government is to keep order in a world intrinsically evil.
Since Christianity had long played the main role in defense of the veneer of a precarious urban civilization in antiquity, this claim is not surprising. Constantine was a soldier putting to rights a breakdown in government, which nevertheless would continue in the West until the abdication of the last Western emperor in 476, though in the East the empire would carry on with great wealth and power, centred on the new capital of Constantinople (see Byzantine Empire).
St. Augustine thus no longer assumed, as did Plato and Aristotle, that a harmonious and self-sufficient good life could be achieved within a properly organized city-state; he projected his political philosophy into a cosmic and lurid drama working out to a predestinate end. The normal interests and amenities of life became insignificant or disgusting, and the Christian church alone exercised a spiritual authority that could sanction government. This outlook, reinforced by other patristic literature, would long dominate medieval thought, for with the decline of civilization in the West the church became more completely the repository of learning and of the remnants of the old civilized life.
The Middle Ages
The decline of ancient civilization in the West was severe. Although technology continued to develop (the horse collar, the stirrup, and the heavy plow came in), intellectual pursuits, including political philosophy, became elementary. In the Byzantine Empire, on the other hand, committees of jurists working for the emperor Justinian (reigned 527–565) produced the Codex constitutionum; the Digesta, or Pandectae; the Institutiones, which defined and condensed Roman law; and the Novellae consitutiones post codicem; the four books are collectively known as the Codex Justinianeus, or Code of Justinian. The Byzantine basileus, or autocrat, had moral responsibility for guarding and harmonizing an elaborate state, a "colony" of heaven in which reason and not mere will ought to rule. This autocracy and the orthodox form of Christianity were inherited by the Christianized rulers of the Balkans, of Kievan Russia, and of Muscovy.
In the West, two essential principles of Hellenic and Christian political philosophy were transmitted, if only in elementary definitions, in rudimentary encyclopaedias. St. Isidore of Sevilla, in his 7th-century Etymologiae ("Etymologies"), for example, asserts that kings rule only on condition of doing right and that their rule reflects a Ciceronic law of nature "common to all people and mankind everywhere by natural instinct." Further, the Germanic tribes respected the civilization they took over and exploited; when converted, they revered the papacy. In 800 the Frankish ruler Charlemagne established a western European empire that would eventually be called holy and Roman (see Holy Roman Empire). The idea of a Christian empire coterminous with civilization thus survived in Western as well as Eastern Christendom.
John of Salisbury
After Augustine, no full-length speculative work of political philosophy appeared in the West until the Policraticus (1159), by John of Salisbury. Based on John's wide Classical reading, it centres on the ideal ruler, who represents a "public power." John admired the Roman emperors Augustus and Trajan, and, in a still predominantly feudal world, his book carried on the Roman tradition of centralized authority, though without its Byzantine autocracy. The prince, he insists, is he who rules in accordance with law, while a tyrant is one who oppresses the people by irresponsible power. This distinction, which derives from the Greeks, Cicero, and St. Augustine, is fundamental to Western concepts of liberty and the trusteeship of power.
John did not know Aristotle's Politics, but his learning is nevertheless remarkable, even if his political similes are unsophisticated. His favourite metaphor for the body politic is the human body: the place of the head is filled by the prince, who is subject only to God; the place of the heart is filled by the senate; the eyes, ears, and tongue are the judges, provincial governors, and soldiers; and the officials are the hands. The tax gatherers are the intestines and ought not to retain their accumulations too long, and the farmers and peasants are the feet. John also compares a commonwealth to a hive and even to a centipede. This vision of a centralized government, more appropriate to the memory of the Roman Empire than to a medieval monarchy, is a landmark of the 12th-century revival of speculative thought.
It is a far cry from this practical 12th-century treatise by a man of affairs to the elaborate justification of Christian kingship and natural law created by St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, during the climax of medieval Western civilization. His political philosophy is only part of a metaphysical construction of Aristotelian range—for Aristotle had now been assimilated from Arabic sources and given a new Christian content, with the added universality of the Stoic and Augustinian world outlook. Aquinas's Summa theologiae (1265/66–1273) purports to answer all the major questions of existence, including those of political philosophy. Like Aristotle, Aquinas thinks in terms of an ethical purpose. Natural law is discussed in the first part of the second book as part of the discussion of original sin and what would now be termed psychology, while war comes under the second part of the second book as an aspect of virtue and vice. Law is defined as "that which is regulation and measure." It is designed to promote the "felicity and beatitude" that are the ends of human life. Aquinas agrees with Aristotle that "the city is the perfection of community" and that the purpose of public power should be to promote the common good. The only legitimate power is from the community, which is the sole medium of man's well being. In his De regimine principum (1266; On the Government of Princes), he compares society to a ship in need of a helmsman and repeats Aristotle's definition of man as a social and political animal. Again following Aristotle, he considers oligarchy unjust and democracy evil. Rulers should aim to make the "life of the multitude good in accordance with the purpose of life which is heavenly happiness." They should also create peace, conserve life, and preserve the state—a threefold responsibility.
Here is a complete program for a hierarchical society within a cosmic order. It combines the Hellenic sense of purpose with Christian aims and asserts that, under God, power resides in the community, embodied in the ruler but only for so long as he does right. Hence the aphorism "St. Thomas Aquinas was the first Whig"—a pioneer of the theory of constitutional government. The society he envisages, however, is medieval, static, hierarchical, conservative, and based on limited agriculture and even more limited technology. Nonetheless, Thomism remains the most complete and lasting political doctrine of Roman Catholicism, since modified and adapted but not in principle superseded.
By the early 14th century the great European institutions, empire and papacy, were breaking down through mutual conflict and the emergence of national realms. But this conflict gave rise to the most complete political theory of universal and secular empire formulated in the medieval West, by the Italian poet and philosopher Dante Alighieri. In De monarchia (c. 1313), still in principle highly relevant, Dante insists that only through universal peace can human faculties come to their full compass. But only "temporal monarchy" can achieve this: "a unique princedom extending over all persons in time." The aim of civilization is to actualize human potentialities and to achieve that "fullness of life which comes from the fulfillment of our being."
Monarchy, Dante argues, is necessary as a means to this end. The imperial authority of the Holy Roman emperor, moreover, comes directly from God and not through the pope. The empire is the direct heir of the Roman Empire, a legitimate authority, or Christ would not have chosen to be born under it. In subjecting the world to itself, the Roman Empire had contemplated the public good.
This high-flown argument, part of the political warfare between the partisans of the emperor and pope that was then affecting Italy, drives to essentials: that world peace can be secure only under a world authority. That Dante's argument was impractical did not concern this medieval genius, who was writing more the epitaph than the prospectus of the Holy Roman Empire; he was concerned, like Aquinas, to create a political philosophy with a clear-cut aim and a universal view.
Out of the grand but impractical visions of the High Middle Ages in the 13th-century climax of Christian civilization, there emerged by early-modern times the idea of a well-governed realm, its authority derived from the community itself, with a program designed to ensure the solvency and administrative efficiency of a secular state. In spite of the decline of the civilization of antiquity in the West, the Greco-Roman sense of purpose, of the rule of law, and of the responsibility of power survived in Christian form.
The 16th to the 18th century
In the thought of the Italian political philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli may be seen a complete secularization of political philosophy. Machiavelli was an experienced diplomat and administrator, and, since he stated flatly how the power struggle was conducted in Renaissance Italy, he won a shocking reputation. He was not, however, without idealism about the old Roman republic, and he admired the independent spirit of the German and Swiss cities. This idealism made him all the more disgusted with Italian politics, of which he makes a disillusioned and objective analysis. Writing in retirement after political disgrace, Machiavelli states firmly that,
since this is to be asserted in general of men, that they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowards, covetous, and as long as you succeed they are yours entirely: they will offer you their blood, property, life, and children…when the need is far distant; but when it approaches they turn against you.
And again,
since the desires of men are insatiable, nature prompting them to desire all things and fortune permitting them to enjoy but few, there results a constant discontent in their minds, and a loathing of what they possess.
This view of human nature, already expressed by Plato and St. Augustine, is here unredeemed by Plato's doctrine of Forms or by St. Augustine's dogma of salvation through grace. Machiavelli accepts the facts and advises the ruler to act accordingly. The prince, he states, must combine the strength of the lion with the cunning of the fox: he must always be vigilant, ruthless, and prompt, striking down or neutralizing his adversaries without warning. And when he does an injury, it must be total. For "men ought to be either well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot." Moreover, "irresolute princes who follow a neutral path are generally ruined." He advises that it is best to come down at the right moment on the winning side and that conquered cities ought to be either governed directly by the tyrant himself residing there or destroyed. Furthermore, princes, unlike private men, need not keep faith: since politics reflects the law of the jungle, the state is a law unto itself, and normal moral rules do not apply to it.
Machiavelli had stated with unblinking realism how, in fact, tyrants behave, and, far from criticizing their conduct or distinguishing between the just prince who rules by law and the tyrant whose laws are in his own breast, he considers that the successful ruler has to be beyond morality, since the safety and expansion of the state are the supreme objective. In this myopic view, the cosmic visions of Aquinas and Dante are disregarded, and politics becomes a fight for survival. Within his terms of reference, Machiavelli made a convincing case, although as an experienced diplomat he might have realized that dependability in fact pays and that systematic deceit, treachery, and violence usually bring about their own nemesis.
The 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who spent his life as a tutor and companion to great noblemen, was a writer of genius with a greater power of phrase than any other English political philosopher. He was not, as he is sometimes misrepresented, a prophet of "bourgeois" individualism, advocating free competition in a capitalist free market. On the contrary, he was writing in a preindustrial, if increasingly commercial, society and did not much admire wealth as such but rather "honours." He was socially conservative and eager to give a new philosophical sanction to a hierarchical, if businesslike, commonwealth in which family authority was most important.
Philosophically, Hobbes was influenced by nominalist scholastic philosophy, which had discarded Thomist metaphysics and had accepted strict limitations on the powers of mind. He therefore based his conclusions on the rudimentary mathematical physics and psychology of his day and aimed at practical objectives—order and stability. He believed that the fundamental physical law of life was motion and that the predominant human impulses were fear and, among those above the poverty level, pride and vanity. Men, Hobbes argued, are strictly conditioned and limited by these laws, and he tried to create a science of politics that would reflect them. "The skill of making, and maintaining Common-wealths," therefore,
consisteth in certain Rules, as doth Arithmetique and Geometry; not (as Tennis play) on Practise onely: which Rules, neither poor men have the leisure, nor men that have had the leisure, have hitherto had the curiosity, or the method to find out.
Hobbes ignores the Classical and Thomist concepts of a transcendent law of nature, itself reflecting divine law, and of a "Great Chain of Being" whereby the universe is held harmoniously together. Following the practical method of investigation advocated by the French philosopher René Descartes, Hobbes states plainly that power creates law, not law power. For law is law only if it can be enforced, and the price of security is one supreme sovereign public power. For, without it, such is the competitive nature of humanity, that once more than subsistence has been achieved, people are actuated by vanity and ambition, and there is a war of all against all. The true law of nature is self-preservation, he argues, which can be achieved only if the citizens make a compact among themselves to transfer their individual power to the "leviathan" (ruler), who alone can preserve them in security. Such a commonwealth has no intrinsic supernatural or moral sanction: it derives its original authority from the people and can command loyalty only so long as it succeeds in keeping the peace. He thus uses both the old concepts of natural law and contract, often invoked to justify resistance to authority, as a sanction for it.
Hobbes, like Machiavelli, starts from an assumption of basic human folly, competitiveness, and depravity and contradicts Aristotle's assumption that man is by nature a "political animal." On the contrary, he is naturally antisocial, and, even when men meet for business and profit, only "a certain market-fellowship" is engendered. All society is only for gain or glory, and the only true equality between men is their power to kill each other. Hobbes sees and desires no other equality. Indeed, he specifically discouraged "men of low degree from a saucy behaviour towards their betters."
The Leviathan (1651) horrified most of his contemporaries; Hobbes was accused of atheism and of "maligning the Human Nature." But, if his remedies were tactically impractical, in political philosophy he had gone very deep by providing the sovereign nation-state with a pragmatic justification and directing it to utilitarian ends.
The 17th-century Dutch Jewish philosopher Benedict de Spinoza also tried to make a scientific political theory, but it was more humane and more modern. Hobbes assumes a preindustrial and economically conservative society, but Spinoza assumes a more urban setting. Like Hobbes, he is Cartesian, aiming at a scientific basis for political philosophy, but, whereas Hobbes was dogmatic and authoritarian, Spinoza desired toleration and intellectual liberty, by which alone human life achieves its highest quality. Spinoza, reacting against the ideological wars of religion and skeptical of both metaphysics and religious dogma, was a scientific humanist who justified political power solely by its usefulness. If state power breaks down and can no longer protect him or if it turns against him, frustrates, or ruins his life, then any individual is justified in resisting it, since it no longer fulfills its purpose. It has no intrinsic divine or metaphysical authority.
In the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) and the Tractatus Politicus (published posthumously in 1677), Spinoza develops this theme. He intends, he writes, "not to laugh at men or weep over them or hate them, but to understand them." In contrast to St. Augustine, he glorifies life and holds that governments should not try to "change men from rational beings into beasts or puppets, but enable them to develop their minds and bodies in security and to employ their reason unshackled." The more life is enjoyed, he declares, the more the individual participates in the divine nature. God is immanent in the entire process of nature, in which all creatures follow the laws of their own being to the limit of their powers. All are bound by their own consciousness, and man creates his own values.
It seems that Spinoza thought good government approximated to that of the free burgesses of Amsterdam, a city in which religious toleration and relative political liberty had been realized. He is thus a pioneer of a scientific humanist view of government and of the neutrality of the state in matters of belief.
Richard Hooker's adapted Thomism
Out of the breakup of the medieval social order, there emerged the humanist but sceptical outlook of Machiavelli and then the scientific humanist principles of Descartes, Hobbes, and Spinoza, from which the utilitarian and pragmatic outlook of modern times derives. Another influential and politically important strain of political philosophy emerged from the Reformation and Counter-Reformation of the 16th and 17th centuries. During this period Protestant and Catholic dogmatists denounced each other and even attacked the authority of princes who, from interest or conviction, supported one side or the other. Political assassination became endemic, for both Protestant and Catholic divines declared that it was legitimate to kill a heretical ruler. Appeal was made to rival religious authority as well as to conscience. In the resulting welter Hobbes and Spinoza advocated a sovereign state as the remedy. But other political philosophers salvaged the old Thomist concept of a divine cosmic order and of natural and human laws sanctioning the state. They also put forth the Classical and medieval idea of the derivation of public power from the commonwealth as a whole and the responsibility of princes to the law. When Hobbes wrote that might makes right, he outraged such critics, who continued to assert that public power was responsible to God and the laws and that it was right to resist a tyrant who declared that the laws were in his own breast. This political theory was most influentially developed in England, where it inspired the constitutionalism that would also predominate in the United States.
Richard Hooker, an Anglican divine who wrote Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie (1593–97), reconciled Thomist doctrines of transcendent and natural law, binding on all human beings, with the authority of the Elizabethan Church of England, which he defended against the Puritan appeal to conscience. Society, he argued, is itself the fulfillment of natural law, of which human and positive law are reflections, adapted to society. Public power is not something personal, for it derives from the community under law. Thus,
the lawful power of making laws to command whole politic societies of men belongeth so properly unto the same entire societies, that for any prince…to exercise the same of himself…is no better than mere tyranny.
Such power can derive either directly from God or else from the people. The prince is responsible to God and the community; he is not, like Hobbes's ruler, a law unto himself. Law makes the king, not the king law.
Hooker, indeed, insisted that "the prince has a delegated power, from the Parliament of England, together with the convocation (of clergy) annexed thereto…whereupon the very essence of all government doth depend." This is the power of the crown in parliament in a balanced constitution, hence an idea of harmonious government by consent. The Thomist medieval universal harmony had been adapted to the nation-state.
It was John Locke, politically the most influential English philosopher, who further developed this doctrine. His Two Treatises of Government (1690) were written to justify the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89, and his Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) was written with a plain and easy urbanity, in contrast to the baroque eloquence of Hobbes. Locke was a scholar, physician, and man of affairs, well-experienced in politics and business. As a philosopher he accepted strict limitations on the faculties of the mind, and his political philosophy is moderate and sensible, aimed at a balance of power between the executive, the judiciary, and the legislature, though with a bias toward the last (see separation of powers; checks and balances).
His first Treatise was devoted to confuting the royalist doctrine of the divine right of kings by descent from Adam, an argument then taken very seriously and reflecting the idea of government as an aspect of the divinely ordained Great Chain of Being. If this order were broken, chaos would ensue. The argument was part of the contemporary conflict of the Ancients and the Moderns.
Locke tried to provide an answer by defining a limited purpose for political power, which purpose he considered to be "a right of making laws with penalties of death, and consequently all less penalties, for the regulating and preserving of property, and of employing the force of the community in execution of such laws, and in the defense of the commonwealth from foreign injury, and all this only for the public good." The authority of government derives from a contract between the rulers and the people, and the contract binds both parties. It is thus a limited power, proceeding according to established laws and "directed to no other end but the peace, safety, and public good of the people."
Whatever its form, government, to be legitimate, must govern by "declared and reasoned laws," and, since every man has a "property" in his own person and has "mixed his labour" with what he owns, government has no right to take it from him without his consent. It was the threat of attack on the laws, property, and the Protestant religion that had roused resistance to the Roman Catholic monarch James II. Locke is expressing the concerns and interests of the landed and moneyed men by whose consent James's successor, William III, came to the throne, and his commonwealth is strictly conservative, limiting the franchise and the preponderant power to the propertied classes (and to men, of course). Locke was thus no democrat in the modern sense and was much concerned to make the poor work harder. Like Hooker, he assumes a conservative social hierarchy with a relatively weak executive power and defends the propertied classes both against a ruler by divine right and against radicals. In advocating toleration in religion, he was more liberal: freedom of conscience, like property, he argued, is a natural right of all men. Within the possibilities of the time, Locke thus advocated a constitutional mixed government, limited by parliamentary control of the armed forces and of supply. Designed mainly to protect the rights of property, it was deprived of the right of arbitrary taxation or imprisonment without trial and was in theory responsible to all the people through the politically conscious minority who were thought to represent them.
Although Locke was socially conservative, his writings are very important in the rise of liberalism in political philosophy. He vindicates the responsibility of government to the governed, the rule of law through impartial judges, and the toleration of religious and speculative opinion. He is an enemy of the totalitarian state, drawing on medieval arguments and deploying them in practical, modern terms.
The 18th-century British statesman Edmund Burke, while elaborating Whig constitutional doctrine expressed with such common sense by Locke, wrote with more emotion and took more account of time and tradition. While reiterating that government is responsible to the governed and distinguishing between a political society and a mere mob, he thought that governments were trustees for previous generations and for posterity. He made the predominant political philosophy of the 18th-century establishment appear more attractive and moral, but he wrote no great single work of political philosophy, expressing himself instead in numerous pamphlets and speeches.
In his early A Vindication of Natural Society (1756), Burke is critical of the sufferings imposed by government, but his "Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents" defines and defends the principles of the Whig establishment. He invoked a transcendent morality to sanction a constitutional commonwealth, but he detested abstract political theories in whose name society is likely to be vivisected. He set great store by ordered liberty and denounced the arbitrary power of the Jacobins who had captured the French Revolution. In his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791), he discerned in the doctrine of sovereignty of the people, in whose name the revolutionaries were destroying the old order, another and worse form of arbitrary power. No single generation has the right to destroy the agreed and inherited fabric of society, and "neither the few nor the many have the right to govern by their will." A country is not a mere physical locality, he argued, but a community in time into which people are born, and only within the existing constitution and by the consent of its representatives can changes legitimately be made. Once the frame of society has been smashed and its law violated, the people become a "mere multitude told by the head," at the mercy of any dictator who can seize power. He was realistic in predicting the consequences of violent revolution, which usually ends up in some kind of dictatorship. Burke, in sophisticated accents, spoke for the ancient and worldwide rule of custom and conservatism and supplied a needed romanticism to the calculating good sense of Locke.
The political philosophies hitherto surveyed contained little idea of progress. In antiquity the idea of cyclic recurrence predominated, and even 18th-century Christians believed that the world had been created in 4004 bce and would end in the Second Coming of Christ. The 14th-century Arab philosopher of history Ibn Khaldūn had pioneered a vast sociological view of the historical process, but in western Europe it was a neglected Neapolitan philosopher, Giambattista Vico, who first interpreted the past in terms of the changing consciousness of humankind. His Scienza nuova (1725; New Science) interpreted history as an organic process involving language, literature, and religion and attempted to reveal the mentality or ethos of earlier ages: the age of the gods, the heroic age, and the human age, its climax and decadence. These ages recur, and each is distinguished by mythology, heroic poetry, and rational speculation, respectively. In contrast to the legalistic, contractual, and static political philosophies then prevalent, Vico had discerned new horizons.
This sort of vision was developed and elegantly popularized by the cosmopolitan French savant Montesquieu, whose work De l'esprit des loix (1748; The Spirit of Laws) won immense influence. It was an ambitious treatise on human institutions and a pioneer work of anthropology and sociology. Believing in an ordered universe—for "how could blind fate have produced intelligent beings?"—Montesquieu examined the varieties of natural law, varying customs, laws, and civilizations in different environments. He made the pedestrian good sense of Locke seem provincial, though he admired him and the British constitution. Unfortunately, he overemphasized the separation of executive, judicial, and legislative powers, considerable in Locke's day but by his own time tending to be concentrated in the sovereignty of Parliament. This doctrine much influenced the founders of the United States and the early French Revolutionaries.
The revolutionary romanticism of the Swiss French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau may be interpreted in part as a reaction to the analytic rationalism of the Enlightenment. He was trying to escape the aridity of a purely empirical and utilitarian outlook and attempting to create a substitute for revealed religion. Rousseau's Émile (1762) and Du contrat social (1762; The Social Contract) proved revolutionary documents, and his posthumous Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne (1782; Considerations on the Government of Poland) contains desultory but often valuable reflections on specific problems.
There had been radical political slogans coined in medieval peasant revolts and in the 17th century, as in the debates following the revolt of radical officers in the Cromwellian army (1647), but the inspiration of these movements had been religion. Now Rousseau proclaimed a secular egalitarianism and a romantic cult of the common man. His famous declaration "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains" called into question the traditional social hierarchy: hitherto, political philosophers had thought in terms of elites, but now the mass of the people had found a champion and were becoming politically conscious.
Rousseau was a romantic, given to weeping under the willows on Lake Geneva, and his political works are hypnotically readable, flaming protests by one who found the hard rationality of the 18th century too exacting. But man is not, as Rousseau claims, born free. Man is born into society, which imposes restraints on him. Casting about to reconcile his artificial antithesis between man's purported natural state of freedom and his condition in society, Rousseau utilizes the old theories of contract and transforms them into the concept of the "general will." This general will, a moral will that aims at the common good and in which all participate directly, reconciles the individual and the community by representing the will of the community as deriving from the will of moral individuals, so to obey the laws of such a community is in a sense to follow one's own will, assuming that one is a moral individual.
Ideas similar to that of the general will became accepted as a basis for both the social-democratic welfare state and totalitarian dictatorships. And, since the idea was misapplied from small village or civic communities to great sovereign nation-states, Rousseau was also the prophet of a nationalism that he never advocated. Rousseau himself wanted a federal Europe. He never wrote the proposed sequel to the The Social Contract, in which he meant to deal with international politics, but he declared that existing governments lived in a state of nature, that their obsession with conquest was imbecilic, and that "if we could realize a European republic for one day, it would be enough to make it last for ever." But, with a flash of realism, he thinks the project impracticable, because of human folly.
That the concept of general will was vague only increased its adaptability and prestige: it would both make constitutionalism more liberal and dynamic and give demagogues and dictators the excuse for "forcing people to be free" (that is, forcing people to follow the general will, as interpreted by the ruling forces). Rousseau could inspire liberals, such as the 19th-century English philosopher T.H. Green, to a creative view of a state helping people to make the best of their potential through a variety of free institutions. It could also play into the hands of demagogues claiming to represent the general will and bent on molding society according to their own abstractions.
The 19th century
A major force in the political and social thought of the 19th century was utilitarianism, the doctrine that the actions of governments should be judged simply by the extent to which they promoted the "greatest happiness of the greatest number." The founder of the utilitarian school was Jeremy Bentham, an eccentric Englishman trained in the law. Bentham judged all laws and institutions by their utility thus defined. "The Fabric of Felicity," he wrote, "must be reared by the hands of reason and Law."
Bentham's Fragment, on Government (1776) and Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789) elaborated a utilitarian political philosophy. Bentham was an atheist and an exponent of the new laissez-faire economics of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, but he inspired the spate of legislation that, after the Reform Bill of 1832, had tackled the worst consequences of 18th-century inefficiency and of the Industrial Revolution. His influence, moreover, spread widely abroad. At first a simple reformer of law, Bentham attacked notions of contract and natural law as superfluous. "The indestructible prerogatives of mankind," he wrote, "have no need to be supported upon the sandy foundation of a fiction." The justification of government is pragmatic, its aim improvement and the release of the free choice of individuals and the play of market forces that will create prosperity. Bentham thought men far more reasonable and calculating than they are and brushed aside all the Christian and humanist ideas rationalizing instinctive loyalty and awe. He thought society could advance by calculation of pleasure and pain, and his Introduction even tries to work out "the value of a lot of pleasure and pain, how now to be measured." He compared the relative gratifications of health, wealth, power, friendship, and benevolence, as well as those of "irascible appetite" and "antipathy." He also thought of punishment purely as a deterrent, not as retribution, and graded offenses on the harm they did to happiness, not on how much they offended God or tradition.
If Bentham's psychology was naïve, that of his disciple James Mill was philistine. Mill postulated an economic individual whose decisions, if freely taken, would always be in his own interest, and he believed that universal suffrage, along with utilitarian legislation by a sovereign parliament, would produce the kind of happiness and well-being that Bentham desired. In his Essay on Government (1828) Mill thus shows a doctrinaire faith in a literate electorate as the means to good government and in laissez-faire economics as a means to social harmony.
This utilitarian tradition was humanized by James Mill's son, John Stuart Mill, one of the most influential of mid-Victorian liberals. Whereas James Mill had been entirely pragmatic, his son tried to enhance more sophisticated values. He thought that civilization depended on a tiny minority of creative minds and on the free play of speculative intelligence. He detested conventional public opinion and feared that complete democracy, far from emancipating opinion, would make it more restrictive. Amid the dogmatic and strident voices of mid-19th-century nationalists, utopians, and revolutionaries, the quiet, if sometimes priggish, voice of mid-Victorian liberalism proved extremely influential in the ruling circles of Victorian England.
Accepting democracy as inevitable, John Stuart Mill expressed the still optimistic and progressive views of an intellectual elite. Without complete liberty of opinion, he insisted, civilizations ossify. The quality of progress results not merely from the blind forces of economic competition but from the free play of mind. The worth of the state in the long run is only the worth of the individuals composing it, and without people of genius society would become a "stagnant pool." This militant humanist, unlike his father, was aware of the dangers of even benevolent bureaucratic power and declared that a state that "dwarfs its men" is culturally insignificant.
Mill also advocated the legal and social emancipation of women, holding that ability was wasted by mid-Victorian conventions. He believed that the masses could be educated into accepting the values of liberal civilization, but he defended private property and was as wary of rapid extensions of the franchise as of bureaucratic power.
Mill's friend Alexis de Tocqueville, whose De la démocratie en Amérique (Democracy in America) appeared in 1835–40, was a French civil servant who was concerned with maintaining the standards and creativeness of civilization in the face of mass democracy. Since the United States was then the only existing large-scale democracy, Tocqueville decided to study it firsthand, and the result was a classic account of early 19th-century American civilization. "We cannot," he wrote, "prevent the conditions of men from becoming equal, but it depends upon ourselves whether the principle of equality will lead them to servitude or freedom, to knowledge or barbarism, to prosperity or wretchedness." He feared the possible abuse of power by centralized government, unrestrained by the old privileged classes, and thought it essential to "educate democracy" so that, although it would never have the "wild virtues" of the old regimes, it would have its own dignity, good sense, and even benevolence. Tocqueville greatly admired American representative institutions and made a penetrating analysis of the new power of the press. He realized, as few people then did, that the United States and Russia would become world powers, and he contrasted the freedom of the one and the despotism of the other. He also foresaw that under democracy education would be respected more as a ladder to success than for its intrinsic content and might thus become mediocre. He was alive to the dangers of uniform mediocrity but believed, like Mill, that democracy could be permeated by creative ideas.
T.H. Green
This kind of humanism was given a more elaborate philosophical content by the English philosopher T.H. Green, whose Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation (1885) greatly influenced members of the Liberal Party in the British governments of the period 1906–15. Green, like John Stuart Mill and Tocqueville, wished to extend the minority culture to the people and even to use state power to "hinder hindrances to the good life." He had absorbed from Aristotle, Spinoza, Rousseau, and the German idealist philosopher G.W.F. Hegel an organic theory of the state. The latter, by promoting the free play of spontaneous institutions, ought to help individuals to "secure the common good of society [and] enable them to make the best of themselves."
While hostile to the abuse of landed property, Green did not advocate socialism. He accepted the idea that property should be private and unequally distributed and thought the operation of the free market the best way to benefit the whole of society; for free trade would, he thought, diminish the inequalities of wealth in a common prosperity. But Green would have extended the power of the state over education, health, housing, town planning, and the relief of unemployment—a new departure in Liberal thought. These recommendations are embedded in the most elaborate and close-knit intellectual construction made by any modern British political philosopher, and they laid the foundation of the British welfare state.
Liberal nationalism
Whereas Green avoided the extension of liberal and constitutional principles into international affairs, the Italian patriot and revolutionary prophet Giuseppe Mazzini made it his vision and became the most influential prophet of liberal nationalism. He envisaged a harmony of free peoples—a "sisterhood of nations"—in which the rule of military empires would be thrown off, the destruction of clerical and feudal privileges accomplished, and the emancipated peoples regenerated by means of education and universal suffrage. This vision inspired the more idealistic aspects of the Italian Risorgimento (national revival or resurrection) and of nationalistic revolts in Europe and beyond. Although, in fact, fervid nationalism often proved destructive, Mazzini advocated a united Europe of free peoples, in which national singularities would be transcended in a pan-European harmony. This sort of liberal democratic idealism was catching, and even if it frequently inspired Machiavellian policies, it also inspired Pres. Woodrow Wilson of the United States—who, had he not been thwarted by domestic opposition, might well have made the Mazzini-inspired League of Nations a success. Moreover, the modern European Union owes much to the apparently impractical liberal idealism of Mazzini.
American constitutionalism
The founders of the United States were deeply influenced by republicanism, by Locke, and by the optimism of the European Enlightenment. George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson all concurred that laws, rather than men, should be the final sanction and that government should be responsible to the governed. But the influence of Locke and the Enlightenment was not entirely happy. Adams, who followed Washington as president, prescribed a constitution with a balance of executive and legislative power checked by an independent judiciary. The federal constitution, moreover, could be amended only by a unanimous vote of the states. Eager to safeguard state liberties and the rights of property, the founding fathers gave the federal government insufficient revenues and coercive powers, as a result of which the constitution was stigmatized as being "no more than a Treaty of Alliance." Yet the federal union was preserved. The civil power controlled the military, and there was religious toleration and freedom of the press and of economic enterprise. Most significantly, the concept of natural rights had found expression in the Declaration of Independence (1776) and was to influence markedly political and legal developments in the ensuing decades, as well as inspire the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789).
Anarchism and utopianism
While a liberal political philosophy within a framework of capitalistic free trade and constitutional self-government dominated the greatest Western powers, mounting criticism developed against centralized government itself. Radical utopianism and anarchism, previously expounded mainly by religious sects, became secularized in works such as Political Justice (1793) by William Godwin, New View of Society (1813) by Robert Owen, and voluminous anticlerical writings by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.
The English philosopher William Godwin, an extreme individualist, shared Bentham's confidence in the reasonableness of humankind. He denounced the wars accepted by most political philosophers and all centralized coercive states. The tyranny of demagogues and of "multitudes drunk with power" he regarded as being as bad as that of kings and oligarchs. The remedy, he thought, was not violent revolution, which produces tyranny, but education and freedom, including sexual freedom. His was a program of high-minded atheistic anarchy.
The English socialist Robert Owen, a cotton spinner who had made a fortune, also insisted that bad institutions, not original sin or intrinsic folly, caused the evils of society, and he sought to remedy them by changing the economic and educational system. He thus devised a scheme of model cooperative communities that would increase production, permit humane education, and release the naturally benevolent qualities of humankind.
The French moralist and advocate of social reform Pierre-Joseph Proudhon attacked the "tentacular" nation-state and aimed at a classless society in which major capitalism would be abolished. Self-governing producers, no longer slaves of bureaucrats and capitalists, would permit the realization of an intrinsic human dignity, and federation would replace the accepted condition of war between sovereign states. Proudhon tried to transform society by rousing the mass of the people to cooperative humanitarian consciousness.
Saint-Simon and Comte
Another revolt against the prevalent establishment, national and international, was made by the French social philosopher Henri de Saint-Simon, who wanted to develop the Industrial Revolution so as to ameliorate the condition of the poorest classes. This would be achieved not through political revolution but through a government of bankers and administrators who would supersede kings, aristocrats, and politicians. If France were suddenly deprived of 3,000 leading scientists, engineers, bankers, painters, poets, and writers, he argued, the result would be catastrophic, but if all the courtiers and bishops and 10,000 landowners vanished, the loss, though deplorable, would be much less severe. Saint-Simon also demanded a united Europe, superseding the warring nation-states, with a European parliament and a joint development of industry and communication. He also invented a synthetic religion appropriate to a scientific phase of history, with a cult of Isaac Newton and the great men of science.
Saint-Simon's disciple Auguste Comte went farther. His Cours de philosophie positive (1830–42; Course of Positive Philosophy) and Système de politique positive, 4 vol. (1851–54; System of Positive Polity), elaborated a "religion of humanity," with ritual, calendar, a priesthood of scientists, and secular saints, including Julius Caesar, Dante, and Joan of Arc. Society would be ruled by bankers and technocrats and Europe united into a Western republic. This doctrine, backed by pioneering sociology, won much influence among intellectuals. Comte, like Saint-Simon, tackled the essential questions: how to deploy the power of modern technology for the benefit of all humankind; how to avoid wars between sovereign states; and how to fill the void left by the waning of Christian beliefs.
Whereas the utopian reformers had discarded metaphysical arguments, the German idealist philosopher G.W.F. Hegel claimed to apprehend the totality of the cosmos by speculative cognition. Like Vico, he saw the past in terms of changing consciousness, but he viewed the historical process as one of "becoming" rather than as one of eternal recurrence. Hegel had no adequate historical data for his intuitions, since the whole of world history was less known then than it is today, but his novel sweep and range of theory proved an intoxicating substitute for religion. He divided world history into four epochs: the patriarchal Eastern empire, the brilliant Greek boyhood, the severe manhood of Rome, and the Germanic phase after the Reformation. The "Absolute," like a conductor, summons each people to their finest hour, and neither individuals nor states have any rights against them during their historically determined period of supremacy. Many felt some sense of anticlimax, however, when he claimed that the Prussian state embodied the hitherto highest self-realization of the Absolute (see Hegelianism). Not since St. Augustine had so compelling a drama been adumbrated. Hegel's drama, moreover, culminates in this world, for "the state is the divine idea as it exists on Earth."
Marx and Engels
Hegel was a conservative, but his influence on the revolutionaries Karl Marx and his collaborator Friedrich Engels was profound. They inherited the Hegelian claim to understand the "totality" of history and life as it progressed through a dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. But, whereas Hegel envisaged a conflict of nation-states, Marx and Engels thought that the dynamism of history was generated by inevitable class conflict economically determined. This was an idea even more dynamic than Hegel's and more relevant to the social upheavals that were a consequence of the Industrial Revolution. Marx was a formidable prophet whose writings prophesied an apocalypse and redemption. He was a deeply learned humanist, and his ideal was the fullest development of the human personality. But, whereas Plato was concerned with an elite, Marx cared passionately for the elevation of whole peoples.
The Marxist credo was all the more effective as it expressed with eloquent ferocity the grievances of the poor while predicting retribution and a happy ending. For the state, once captured by the class-conscious vanguard of the proletariat, would take over the means of production from the capitalists, and a brief "dictatorship of the proletariat" would establish genuine communism. The state would wither away, and individuals would at last become "fully human" in a classless society.
The powerful slogans of Marx and Engels were a natural result of the unbridled capitalism of laissez-faire, but politically they were naïve. In Classical, medieval, and humanistic political philosophy, the essential problem is the control of power, and to imagine that a dictatorship, once established, will wither away is utopian. As the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin observed,
The revolutionary dictatorship of the doctrinaires who put science before life would differ from the established state only in external trappings. The substance of both are a tyranny of the minority over the majority—in the name of the many and the supreme wisdom of the few.
The revolutionaries would vivisect society in the name of dogmas and "destroy the present order, only to erect their own rigid dictatorship among its ruins." (For a full account of Marxist philosophy, see Marxism.)
Learn More in these related Britannica articles:
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International asset allocations and capital flows: the benchmark effect
As financial intermediaries tracking benchmarks grow in importance around the world, the issue of which countries belong to relevant international benchmark indexes (such as the MSCI Emerging Markets) has generated significant attention in the financial world (Financial Times, 2015). The reason is that the inclusion/exclusion of countries from widely followed benchmarks has implications for the allocation of capital across countries.
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The Global Energy Challenge
This entry is the first of a series of posts written by members of the World Bank's Development Research group's Environment and Energy team on economic and policy issues involving energy and climate change mitigation.
Issues relating to energy are among the most important and difficult challenges confronting the world today. Providing sufficient energy to meet the requirements of a growing world population with rising living standards will require major advances in energy supply and efficiency. Doing this while mitigating the risks of climate disruption will be an even more challenging undertaking. It will require a significant shift in the historic pattern of fossil-fuel use and a major transformation of the global energy system. Especially in the developing countries, the choice of technology, policy, and economic levers that will be used to transform and expand their energy systems will have profound implications for their growth, international competitiveness, and economic security and prosperity. This overview focuses on the challenges related to electricity supply; subsequent blogs will address other parts of the energy system.


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New film school rankings show that New York University is No. 1, producing the most graduates that have participated in the production of quality films.
This is the first such study from Ranker.com, a website that collects data and gathers answers to questions like "Who makes the best acoustic guitar?" or "Who is the funniest comedian?"
In conducting the rather unscientific study, Ravi Iyer, a data scientist for Ranker.com, sifted through data from freebase.com, which he used to find actors and other film workers and their alma maters. He correlated that data to a Ranker list of the "Best Movies of All Time."
Schools were ranked according to which had the highest number of students working in the highest number of top movies, including people who worked behind the scenes in production.
By that measurement, NYU took first place. The University of Southern California was second on the list, followed by the University of California at Los Angeles.
Ranker.com's top 10:
1. New York University
2. University of Southern California
3. University of California at Los Angeles
4. Yale University
5. Julliard School
6. Columbia University
7. Harvard University
8. Royal Academy of Dramatic Art
9. Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art
10. American Academy of Dramatic Arts
Ranker.com isn't the only outfit that rates film schools. Last year the Hollywood Reporter created its own list of top film schools, ranking USC first, followed by the Los Angeles' American Film Institute and the Beijing Film Academy.
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Follow me on Twitter:@DiangeleaMillar
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Awarded as the 'Most Efficient Diet Clinic in Delhi' in 2015, Slimage Diet Clinic believes that healthy living doesn't require you to reduce your diet, but simply eat right. We, under the guidance of Dt. Shweta Diwan, aim at providing guidance and helping you achieve your fitness goals with effective diet plans specially designed for you.
Varsha is a creator of "beyond Karm", a foundation based up on re-alignment and re-connection of mind-body-soul. She has restored broken relationships, worked deeply with child abuse, guilt and suffering from past life connection and worked on auto-immune diseases, such as alopecia and hypothyroid
Co - founded by four spiritual entrepreneurs, Soul Route is one of its kind life empowerment & transformation center offering full range of psychotherapy & alternative life enhancing services aimed at cultivating healthy & successful lifestyles.
The aim of any occult science, be it astrology or numerology, palmistry or fengshui, crystal healing or colour therapy, is identical without any question : serving the customers with a rule book advice that would bring about happiness in their lives.
Mukta Rastogi is a Life coach, Counsellor, Certified Hypnotherapist, Access Bars Practioner, Certified with Dr Brain Weiss in Past Life Regression, trained in Metaphor Therapy and Angel Card Reader. She is Proactive and dynamic spiritual healer.
The definition of obesity varies depending on what one reads, but in general, it is a chronic condition defined by an excess amount body fat. A certain amount of body fat is necessary for storing energy, heat insulation, shock absorption, and other functions. The normal amount of body fat (expressed as percentage of body fat) is between 18%-20% in women and 10%-12% in men.
The calculation of body mass index (BMI) has also been used in the definition of obesity. The body mass index (BMI) equals a person's weight in kilograms (kg) divided by their height in meters (m) squared. Since BMI describes body weight relative to height, it is strongly correlated with total body fat content in adults. "Obesity" is defined as a BMI of 30 and above.
Obesity has reached epidemic proportions in India. One in three four is obese. The prevalence of obesity in children has increased markedly, with approximately 20%-25 % of children either overweight or obese. Obesity is also increasing rapidly throughout the world, and the incidence of obesity nearly doubled form 1991 to 1998.
Obesity is not just a cosmetic consideration; it is a dire health dilemma directly harmful to one's health. Many deaths per year are directly related to obesity, and more than 80% of these deaths are in patients with a BMI (body mass index) over 30. For patients with a BMI over 40, life expectancy is reduces significantly (as much as 20 years for men and 5 years for women). Obesity also increases the risk of developing a number of chronic diseases including.
At present, we know that there are many factors that contribute to obesity, some of which have a genetic component: Genetics, Overeating, A diet high in simple carbohydrates, Frequency of eating. Slow metabolism, Physical inactivity, Medications, Psychological factors. Diseases such as hypothyroidism, insulin resistance, polycystic ovary syndrome and Cushing's syndrome, are also contributors to obesity.
The best and safest way to lose fat and keep it off is through a commitment to a life-long process of proper diet and regular exercise. Medications should be considered helpful adjuncts to diet and exercise for patients whose health risk from obesity clearly outweigh the potential side effects of the medications. Medications should be prescribed by doctors familiar with the patients' conditions and with the use of the medications. Medication(s) and other "herbal" preparations with unproven effectiveness and safety should be avoided.
Almost any of the commercial weight-loss programs can work, but only if they motivate you sufficiently to decrease the amount of calories you eat or increase the amount of calories you burn each day (or both). What elements of a weight-loss program should a consumer look for in judging its potential for safe and successful weight loss? A responsible and safe weight-loss program should be able to document for you the five following features:
1. The diet should be safe. It should include all of the recommended daily allowances (RDAs) for vitamins, minerals, and protein. The weight-loss diet should be low in calories (energy) only, not in essential foodstuffs.
2. The weight-loss program should be directed toward a slow, steady weight loss unless your doctor feels your health condition would benefit from more rapid weight loss. Expect to lose only about a pound a week after the first week or two. With many calorie-restricted diets there is an initial rapid weight loss during the first one to two weeks, but this loss is largely fluid.
3. If you plan to lose more than 15 to 20 pounds, have any health problems, or take medication on a regular basis, you should be evaluated by your doctor before beginning your weight-loss program. A doctor can assess your general health and any medical conditions that might be affected by dieting and weight loss. Also, a physician should be able to advise you on the need for weight loss, the appropriateness of the weight-loss program, and a sensible goal of weight loss for you. If you plan to use a very low-calorie diet (a special liquid formula diet that replaces all food intake for one to four months), you should do so under the close supervision of a health care practitioner.
4. Your program should include plans for weight maintenance after the weight loss phase is over. It is of little benefit to lose a large amount of weight only to regain it. Weight maintenance is the most difficult part of controlling weight and is not consistently implemented in weight-loss programs. The program you select should include help in permanently changing your dietary habits and level of physical activity, and to alter a lifestyle that may have contributed to weight gain in the past. Your program should provide behavior modification help, including education in healthy eating habits and long-term plans to deal with weight problems. One of the most important factors in maintaining weight loss appears to be increasing daily physical activity. Try to be more active throughout the day and incorporate some simple calorie-burners into your everyday routine. Even the most basic activities (such as taking an after-dinner walk, using the stairs at the mall or office instead of taking an escalator or elevator, park your car farther away so you have a longer walk) can get you prepared for more regular exercise like walking or jogging. You may choose to incorporate an individually tailored exercise program into your schedule.
5. A commercial weight-loss program should provide a detailed statement of fees and costs of additional items such as dietary supplements.
Obesity is a chronic condition. Too often it is viewed as a temporary problem that can be treated for a few months with a strenuous diet. However, as most overweight people know, weight control must be considered a life-long effort. To be safe and effective, any weight-loss program must address the long-term approach or else the program is largely a waste of time, money, and energy.
Dr Manjula Joshi ND, M.S (Psychotherapy & Counseling)


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The acceptable activity allowance industry's bread-and-butter artefact that they would just accept advertise to anybody would be some anatomy of banknote bulk activity allowance – that is any activity allowance action that has a accumulation anniversary associated with it (i.e. Whole Life, Universal Life, Variable Universal Life, Flexible Exceptional Variable Universal, etc.). The acceptable activity allowance industry's atomic admired anatomy of activity allowance to advertise is alleged appellation allowance – mainly because appellation is abundant cheaper than banknote value, appropriately authoritative the agent's agency abundant lower.
So, as a accommodation amid the college priced banknote bulk activity allowance and the lower priced appellation activity insurance, the acceptable activity allowance industry has afresh alien a new blazon of appellation allowance alleged Acknowledgment Of Exceptional (ROP) appellation activity insurance. With ROP appellation life, at the end of the affirmed appellation period, the carrier will acquittance or acknowledgment all of the premiums that accept been paid. This can be a actual adorable account because, even admitting active through a action should be advised a acceptable thing, generally humans feel cheated that they paid into the action for years, but they didn't accumulation financially from it. In essence, humans abhorrence accident money: accident abhorrence agency that although you ability like to accretion a dollar, you abhorrence accident a dollar a lot more. Fact is alone about 7 percent of policyholders die afore the end of their policy's appellation and barter apperceive there's a top adventitious that affairs a appellation activity allowance action is just throwing money away.
With this almost new product, the acceptable activity allowance industry is absolutely accouterment to the affecting ancillary of the accepted public. But, afore anyone gets too aflame about this artefact I feel the charge to admonish you that with any important accommodation that deals with spending a lot of money, not alone do you charge to attending at the affecting side, but you aswell charge to attending at the banking side. This way you can be abiding that you are authoritative the a lot of abreast accommodation and a lot of importantly, so that you can beddy-bye able-bodied at night.
Since ROP appellation activity allowance is advertised as a bigger artefact than approved appellation allowance I'd like to accord you a allegory of the two articles application a adventure about two men called Jim and Bob. Both Jim and Bob are 35 years old, accept the aforementioned banking assets as able-bodied as the aforementioned allowance appraisement of accepted non-tobacco. Also, both men adjudge to get a 30 year akin appellation with a face bulk of $250,000. The alone aberration is that Jim decides to get an ROP appellation activity action and Bob decides to get a accustomed appellation activity policy.
Let's see how Jim does with his ROP appellation activity policy. An boilerplate anniversary exceptional for an ROP appellation activity with the aloft accreditation would bulk about $1000 a year or $83.33 per month. If Jim were to die during this 30 year term, his beneficiaries would get the $250,000 afterlife benefit. However, if the Jim were to abide the 30 year term, he would accept all of the premiums that he paid into the action over the 30 years or $30,000. Not too bad!
Bob, on the added duke gets a approved appellation activity policy. About ROP appellation activity allowance behavior bulk on boilerplate alert as abundant as the approved appellation activity allowance policies. So, Bob's action would bulk about $500 a year or $41.67 per month. If Bob were to die during this 30 year term, his beneficiaries would get the $250,000 afterlife benefit. However, in this case, if Bob were to abide the 30 year term, he would accept nothing! He would accept paid $15,000 over the advance of 30 years and he wouldn't accept annihilation to appearance for it! This would be a absolute accident wouldn't it be?
Well, we said we were traveling to analyze apples to apples, so both men were able to allow the aforementioned bulk of money. So, let's just accept that Bob, with the approved appellation activity insurance, spent the aforementioned $1000 per year as Jim did with the ROP appellation activity allowance — alone he invested the difference.
Here are some of Bob's accessible after-effects if he would accept invested the aberration ($500 a year for 30 years) himself:
Working at an boilerplate 6% amount of acknowledgment he would accept $41,900.84 or $11,90.84 added than with ROP
Working at an boilerplate 8% amount of acknowledgment he would accept $61,172.93 or $31,172.93 added than with ROP
Working at an boilerplate 10% amount of acknowledgment he would accept $90,471.71 or $60,471.71 added than with ROP
Working at an boilerplate 12% amount of acknowledgment he would accept $135,146.30 or $105,146.30 added than with ROP
On an affecting level, I can see how this ROP appellation activity allowance is sold. I mean, with a accustomed 30 year akin appellation activity insurance, if you abide the policy, you get annihilation in return. It's a array of use-it-or-lose-it blazon deal. But with the ROP term, you get all of the premiums you paid into it aback if you out reside their policy. Also, because of bound time or the like, abounding allowance buyers will not even bother to run the numbers. However, that acknowledgment of premiums is absolutely just a 0% acknowledgment on investment. In essence, the insurer keeps whatever absorption or investment allotment the money fabricated over the 30 years that it was lent. So the insurer got a chargeless loan.
And in case you didn't notice, this ROP appellation is not for free. The policyholder, on average, will accept to pay bifold the bulk of a approved appellation policy. You absolutely get hit alert on the bulk — not alone are the premiums abundant higher, but the accident of any absorption to the action holder can be a catchy hidden bulk as well. Also, you can see that, even if the invested aberration was authoritative alone a bourgeois 6% return, Bob would accept still baffled Jim. So, this shows that you don't accept to be a Warren Buffett to appear out on top with the approved appellation policy. By advance the difference, you could end up accepting added money at the end of the appellation aeon than you would get as a acquittance from the ROP activity insurance.
Another affair that is appealing absorbing with the ROP appellation action — if you abolish the action you get next to annihilation in return. On a 30-year action typically, if you airing abroad from your acknowledgment of exceptional action after, say, 10 years, you alone get aback 9% of the accumulative premiums you paid in. Afterwards 20 years, you'll accept 35% and not until you hit 30 years will you get your abounding investment. If you get out early, you absolutely lose!
Another nice-to-know is that with the ROP, you either get the premiums alternate if you abide the action or your beneficiaries get the afterlife account – not both! With the approved term, if you were advance the difference, they would be abstracted entities. If you abide the policy, you get to accumulate your investment. If you are to die during the term, your beneficiaries get both the afterlife account as able-bodied as the investment.
You can borrow adjoin the "ROP" policy, because it builds up "Cash Value." However, if you do that, two bad things happen:
1. You have to pay absorption on what you borrow.
2. Whatever you borrow gets subtracted from the aboriginal Afterlife Account or Face Amount.
Furthermore, "ROP" does not authorize to be an IRA. If you advance the aberration yourself, you can accept a portfolio of alternate funds and "tag" it an IRA. And, if it's a Roth IRA, your investment will abound tax-free, and at age 59 1/2, you can alpha withdrawing, tax-free.
The way the ROP behavior are marketed, they complete like chargeless allowance because if you do die you get a payout and if you don't you get your money back. But as I've apparent above, if you attending anxiously at the numbers this "free lunch" will bulk you. Affairs Appellation and advance the aberration is still and will apparently consistently be the way to go. Do not abatement casualty to the Allowance Industry's latest gimmicks. Remember, if things complete too acceptable to be true, they usually are. Get into the addiction of demography some time to counterbalance both the affecting ancillary with the banking ancillary if authoritative important money decisions.