Political Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction PDF

David Miller POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY A Very Short Introduction 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford o x 2 6 d p Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © David Miller 2003 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published as a Very Short Introduction 2003 All rights reserved. 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Over the next few years it will grow to a library of around 200 volumes – a Very Short Introduction to everything from ancient Egypt and Indian philosophy to conceptual art and cosmology. Very Short Introductions available now: ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY Continental Philosophy Julia Annas Simon Critchley THE ANGLO-SAXON AGE COSMOLOGY Peter Coles John Blair CRYPTOGRAPHY ANIMAL RIGHTS Fred Piper and Sean Murphy David DeGrazia Darwin Jonathan Howard ARCHAEOLOGY Paul Bahn Democracy Bernard Crick ARCHITECTURE DESCARTES Tom Sorell Andrew Ballantyne DRUGS Leslie Iversen ARISTOTLE Jonathan Barnes THE EARTH Martin Redfern ART THEORY EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY Cynthia Freeland BRITAIN Paul Langford THE HISTORY OF EMOTION Dylan Evans ASTRONOMY Michael Hoskin EMPIRE Stephen Howe Atheism Julian Baggini ENGELS Terrell Carver Augustine Henry Chadwick Ethics Simon Blackburn BARTHES Jonathan Culler The European Union THE BIBLE John Riches John Pinder BRITISH POLITICS EVOLUTION Anthony Wright Brian and Deborah Charlesworth Buddha Michael Carrithers FASCISM Kevin Passmore BUDDHISM Damien Keown THE FRENCH REVOLUTION THE CELTS Barry Cunliffe William Doyle CHOICE THEORY Freud Anthony Storr Michael Allingham Galileo Stillman Drake CLASSICS Mary Beard and Gandhi Bhikhu Parekh John Henderson GLOBALIZATION CLAUSEWITZ Manfred Steger Michael Howard HEGEL Peter Singer THE COLD WAR HEIDEGGER Michael Inwood Robert McMahon HINDUISM Kim Knott HISTORY John H. Arnold POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY HOBBES Richard Tuck David Miller HUME A. J. Ayer POSTCOLONIALISM IDEOLOGY Michael Freeden Robert Young Indian Philosophy POSTMODERNISM Sue Hamilton Christopher Butler Intelligence Ian J. Deary POSTSTRUCTURALISM ISLAM Malise Ruthven Catherine Belsey JUDAISM Norman Solomon PREHISTORY Chris Gosden Jung Anthony Stevens Psychology Gillian Butler and KANT Roger Scruton Freda McManus KIERKEGAARD QUANTUM THEORY Patrick Gardiner John Polkinghorne THE KORAN Michael Cook ROMAN BRITAIN LINGUISTICS Peter Matthews Peter Salway LITERARY THEORY ROUSSEAU Robert Wokler Jonathan Culler RUSSELL A. C. Grayling LOCKE John Dunn RUSSIAN LITERATURE LOGIC Graham Priest Catriona Kelly MACHIAVELLI Quentin Skinner THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION MARX Peter Singer S. A. Smith MATHEMATICS SCHIZOPHRENIA Timothy Gowers Chris Frith and Eve Johnstone MEDIEVAL BRITAIN SCHOPENHAUER John Gillingham and Christopher Janaway Ralph A. Grifﬁths SHAKESPEARE Germaine Greer MODERN IRELAND SOCIAL AND CULTURAL Senia Pašeta ANTHROPOLOGY MUSIC Nicholas Cook John Monaghan and Peter Just NIETZSCHE Michael Tanner SOCIOLOGY Steve Bruce NINETEENTH-CENTURY Socrates C. C. W. Taylor BRITAIN Christopher Harvie and SPINOZA Roger Scruton H. C. G. Matthew STUART BRITAIN NORTHERN IRELAND John Morrill Marc Mulholland TERRORISM Charles Townshend paul E. P. Sanders THEOLOGY David F. Ford Philosophy Edward Craig THE TUDORS John Guy PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE TWENTIETH-CENTURY Samir Okasha BRITAIN Kenneth O. Morgan PLATO Julia Annas Wittgenstein A. C. Grayling POLITICS Kenneth Minogue WORLD MUSIC Philip Bohlman Available soon: AFRICAN HISTORY FUNDAMENTALISM John Parker and Richard Rathbone Malise Ruthven ANCIENT EGYPT Ian Shaw Habermas Gordon Finlayson ART HISTORY Dana Arnold HIEROGLYPHS THE BRAIN Michael O’Shea Penelope Wilson BUDDHIST ETHICS HIROSHIMA B. R. Tomlinson Damien Keown HUMAN EVOLUTION CAPITALISM James Fulcher Bernard Wood CHAOS Leonard Smith INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS CHRISTIAN ART Beth Williamson Paul Wilkinson CHRISTIANITY Linda Woodhead JAZZ Brian Morton CITIZENSHIP Richard Bellamy MANDELA Tom Lodge CLASSICAL ARCHITECTURE MEDICAL ETHICS Tony Hope Robert Tavernor THE MIND Martin Davies CLONING Arlene Judith Klotzko MOLECULES Philip Ball CONTEMPORARY ART Myth Robert Segal Julian Stallabrass NATIONALISM Steven Grosby THE CRUSADES PERCEPTION Richard Gregory Christopher Tyerman PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION DADA AND SURREALISM Jack Copeland and David Hopkins Diane Proudfoot Derrida Simon Glendinning PHOTOGRAPHY Steve Edwards DESIGN John Heskett THE PRESOCRATICS Dinosaurs David Norman Catherine Osborne DREAMING J. Allan Hobson THE RAJ Denis Judd ECONOMICS Partha Dasgupta THE RENAISSANCE EGYPTIAN MYTHOLOGY Jerry Brotton Geraldine Pinch RENAISSANCE ART THE ELEMENTS Philip Ball Geraldine Johnson THE END OF THE WORLD SARTRE Christina Howells Bill McGuire THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR EXISTENTIALISM Thomas Flynn Helen Graham THE FIRST WORLD WAR TRAGEDY Adrian Poole Michael Howard THE TWENTIETH CENTURY FREE WILL Thomas Pink Martin Conway For more information visit our web site www.oup.co.uk/vsi Contents Preface ix List of illustrations xi 1 Why do we need political philosophy? 1 2 Political authority 19 3 Democracy 37 4 Freedom and the limits of government 55 5 Justice 74 6 Feminism and multiculturalism 92 7 Nations, states, and global justice 112 Further reading 133 Index 141 Preface I wanted this book to make political philosophy engaging and accessible to people who had never encountered it before, and so I have tried hard to write as simply as possible without sacriﬁcing accuracy. Explaining some fairly abstract ideas without lapsing into the technical jargon that deadens so much academic writing today proved to be an interesting challenge. I am extremely grateful to friends from different walks of life who agreed to read the ﬁrst draft of the manuscript, and along with general encouragement made many helpful suggestions: Graham Anderson, George Brown, Sue Miller, Elaine Poole, and Adam Swift, as well as two readers from Oxford University Press. I should also like to thank Zoﬁa Stemplowska for invaluable help in preparing the ﬁnal manuscript. List of illustrations 1 The virtuous ruler from 5 The Goddess of The Allegory of Good and Democracy facing a Bad Government by portrait of Mao in Ambrogio Lorenzetti 4 Tiananmen Square, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena. Beijing 39 Photo © Archivio Iconograﬁco © Jacques Langevin/Corbis S.A./Corbis Sygma 2 Plato and Socrates, 6 One way to invigorate frontispiece by Matthew democracy: politicians Paris (d. 1259) for The beware! 44 Prognostics of Socrates the Cartoon by David Low, King. 12 5 September 1933 © Evening The Bodleian Library, Standard/Centre for the Study of University of Oxford, shelfmark Cartoons & Caricature, University MS. Ashm, 304, fol. 31v of Kent, Canterbury 3 Thomas Hobbes, 7 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, defender of political philosopher of authority 24 democracy 49 © Michael Nicholson/Corbis Musée Antoine Lecuyer, Saint-Quentin, France. Photo © Bettmann/Corbis 4 How anarchists see political authority: Russian cartoon 1900 30 8 A controversial view 13 The price of women’s of liberty, 1950 60 liberation: the suffragette Cartoon by David Low, Emmeline Pankhurst 15 February 1950 © Daily arrested outside Herald/Centre for the Study of Cartoons & Caricature, Buckingham Palace, University of Kent, Canterbury 1914 96 © 2003 TopFoto.co.uk/Museum of London/HIP 9 Isaiah Berlin, the most widely read philosopher 14 Muslims burn The of liberty in the 20th Satanic Verses in century 64 Photo by Douglas Glass Bradford, UK, 1989 103 © J. C. C. Glass © Corbis Sygma 10 John Stuart Mill, 15 Multicultural harmony: utilitarian, feminist, and the Notting Hill defender of liberty 69 Carnival, 1980 110 © Corbis © Hulton Archive 11 Justice from The Allegory 16 Canadians rally for of Good and Bad national unity against Government by Ambrogio Quebec separatism, Lorenzetti 75 Montreal 1995 115 Palazzo Pubblico, Siena. © Kraft Brooks/Corbis Sygma Photo © Archivio Iconograﬁco S.A./Corbis 17 Resisting globalization, US-style: Latvia 12 John Rawls, author of the 1996 122 hugely inﬂuential A © Steve Raymer/Corbis Theory of Justice 88 Private collection 18 Universal human rights: actors Julie Christie and Cy Grant marking UN Human Rights Day 129 © Hulton Archive The publisher and the author apologize for any errors or omissions in the above list. If contacted they will be pleased to rectify these at the earliest opportunity. Chapter 1 Why do we need political philosophy? This is a small book about a big subject, and since a picture is proverbially worth a thousand words I want to begin it by talking about a very large picture that can help us to see what political philosophy is all about. The picture in question was painted between 1337 and 1339 by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, and it covers three walls of the Sala dei Nove in the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena. It is usually called the Allegory of Good and Bad Government, and what Lorenzetti’s frescos do is ﬁrst of all to depict the nature of good and bad government respectively by means of ﬁgures who represent the qualities that rulers ought and ought not to have, and then to show the effects of the two kinds of government on the lives of ordinary people. So in the case of good government we see the digniﬁed ruler dressed in rich robes and sitting on his throne, surrounded by ﬁgures representing the virtues of Courage, Justice, Magnanimity, Peace, Prudence, and Temperance. Beneath him stand a line of citizens encircled by a long rope the ends of which are tied to the ruler’s wrist, symbolizing the harmonious binding together of ruler and people. As we turn to the right we see Lorenzetti’s portrayal of the effects of good government ﬁrst in the city and then in the countryside. The city is ordered and wealthy: we see artisans plying their trades, merchants buying and selling goods, nobles riding gaily decorated horses; in one place a group of dancers join hands in a circle. Beyond the city gate a well-dressed lady rides out to hunt, passing on the way a plump 1 saddleback pig being driven in to market; in the countryside itself peasants till the earth and gather in the harvest. In case any careless viewer should fail to grasp the fresco’s message, it is spelt out in a banner held aloft by a winged ﬁgure representing Security: Without fear every man may travel freely and each may till and sow, so long as this commune still maintains this lady sovereign, for she has stripped the wicked of all power. The fresco on the other side, representing evil government, is less well preserved, but its message is equally plain: a demonic ruler surrounded by vices like Avarice, Cruelty, and Pride, a city under military occupation, and a barren countryside devastated by ghostly armies. Here the inscription held by the ﬁgure of Fear reads: Political Philosophy Because each seeks only his own good, in this city Justice is subjected to tyranny; wherefore along this road nobody passes without fearing for his life, since there are robberies outside and inside the city gates. There is no better way to understand what political philosophy is and why we need it than by looking at Lorenzetti’s magniﬁcent mural. We can deﬁne political philosophy as an investigation into the nature, causes, and effects of good and bad government, and our picture not only encapsulates this quest, but expresses in striking visual form three ideas that stand at the very heart of the subject. The ﬁrst is that good and bad government profoundly affect the quality of human lives. Lorenzetti shows us how the rule of justice and the other virtues allows ordinary people to work, trade, hunt, dance, and generally do all those things that enrich human existence, while on the other side of the picture, tyranny breeds poverty and death. So that is the ﬁrst idea: it really makes a difference to our lives whether we are governed well or badly. We cannot turn our back on politics, retreat into private life, and 2 imagine that the way we are governed will not have profound effects on our personal happiness. The second idea is that the form our government takes is not predetermined: we have a choice to make. Why, after all, was the mural painted in the ﬁrst place? It was painted in the Sala dei Nove – the Room of the Nine – and these Nine were the rotating council of nine wealthy merchants who ruled the city in the ﬁrst half of the 14th century. So it served not only to remind these men of their responsibilities to the people of Siena, but also as a celebration of the republican form of government that had been established there, at a time of considerable political turmoil in many of the Italian cities. The portrayal of evil government was not just an academic exercise: it was a reminder of what might happen Why do we need political philosophy? if the rulers of the city failed in their duty to the people, or if the people failed in their duty to keep a watchful eye on their representatives. The third idea is that we can know what distinguishes good government from bad: we can trace the effects of different forms of government, and we can learn what qualities go to make up the best form of government. In other words, there is such a thing as political knowledge. Lorenzetti’s frescos bear all the marks of this idea. As we have seen, the virtuous ruler is shown surrounded by ﬁgures representing the qualities that, according to the political philosophy of the age, characterized good government. The frescos are meant to be instructive: they are meant to teach both rulers and citizens how to achieve the kind of life that they wanted. And this presupposes, as Lorenzetti surely believed, that we can know how this is to be done. Should we believe the message of the frescos, however? Are the claims they implicitly make actually true? Does it really make a difference to our lives what kind of government we have? Do we have any choice in the matter, or is the form of our government something over which we have no control? And can we know what 3 Political Philosophy 1. The virtuous ruler from The Allegory of Good and Bad Government by Ambrogio Lorenzetti. makes one form of government better than another? These are some of the big questions that political philosophers ask, as well as many smaller ones. But before trying to answer them, I need to add a few more words of explanation. When talking about government here, I mean something much broader than ‘the government of the day’ – the group of people in authority in any society at a particular moment. Indeed I mean something broader than the state – the political institutions through which authority is exercised, such as the cabinet of ministers, parliament, courts of law, police, armed forces, and so forth. I mean the whole body of rules, practices and institutions under whose guidance we live together in societies. That human beings need to cooperate with one another, to know who can do what with whom, who owns which parts of the material world, what happens if somebody breaks the rules, and so forth, we can 4 perhaps take for granted here. But we cannot yet take it for granted that they must have a state to solve these problems. As we shall see in the next chapter, one central issue in political philosophy is why we need states, or more generally political authority, in the ﬁrst place, and we need to engage with the anarchist argument that societies can perfectly well govern themselves without it. So for the time being, I want to leave it an open question whether ‘good government’ requires having a state, or a government in the conventional sense, at all. Another question that will remain open until the last chapter of the book is whether there should be just one government or many governments – a single system for the whole of humanity, or different systems for different peoples. Why do we need political philosophy? When Lorenzetti painted his murals, he presented good and bad government primarily in terms of the human qualities of the two kinds of rulers, and the effects those qualities had on the lives of their subjects. Given the medium in which the message was conveyed, this was perhaps unavoidable, but in any case it was very much in line with the thinking of his age. Good government was as much about the character of those who governed – their prudence, courage, generosity, and so on – as about the system of government itself. Of course there were also debates about the system: about whether monarchy was preferable to republican government or vice versa, for instance. Today the emphasis has changed: we think much more about the institutions of good government, and less about the personal qualities of the people who make them work. Arguably we have gone too far in this direction, but I will follow modern fashion and talk in later chapters primarily about good government as a system, not about how to make our rulers virtuous. Back now to the ideas behind the big picture. The easiest of the three to defend is the idea that government profoundly affects the quality of our lives. If any reader fails to recognize this straight away, it is perhaps because he or she is living under a relatively 5 stable form of government where not much changes from year to year. One party replaces another at election time, but the switch only makes a marginal impact on most people’s lives (though politicians like to pretend otherwise). But think instead about some of the regimes that rose and fell in the last century: think about the Nazi regime in Germany and the 6 million Jews who were killed by it, or think about Mao’s China and the 20 million or more who died as a result of the famine induced by the so-called ‘Great Leap Forward’. Meanwhile in other countries whole populations saw their living standards rise at an unprecedented rate. Twentieth- century history seems to have reproduced the stark contrast of Lorenzetti’s mural almost exactly. But at this point we have to consider the second of our three ideas. Even if different forms of government were, and still are, direct causes of prosperity and poverty, life and death, how far are we able Political Philosophy to inﬂuence the regimes that govern us? Or are they just links in a chain, themselves governed by deeper causes over which we have no control? And if so, what is the point of political philosophy, whose avowed purpose is to help us choose the best form of government? The fatalistic view that we have no real political choices to make has appeared in different forms at different times in history. In the period when Lorenzetti was painting his frescos, many believed that history moved in cycles: good government could not endure, but would inevitably become corrupted with the passage of time, collapse into tyranny, and only through slow stages be brought back to its best form. In other periods – most notably the 19th century – the prevailing belief was in the idea of historical progress: history moved in a straight line from primitive barbarism to the higher stages of civilization. But once again this implied that the way societies were governed depended on social causes that were not amenable to human control. The most inﬂuential version of this was Marxism, which held that the development of society depended ultimately on the way in which people produced material goods – 6 the technology they used, and the economic system they adopted. Politics became part of the ‘superstructure’; it was geared to the needs of the prevailing form of production. So, according to Marx, in capitalist societies the state had to serve the interests of the capitalist class, in socialist societies it would serve the interests of the workers, and eventually, under communism, it would disappear completely. In this light, speculation about the best form of government becomes pointless: history will solve the problem for us. Interestingly enough, the career of Marxism itself shows us what is wrong with this kind of determinism. Under the inﬂuence of Marxist ideas, socialist revolutions broke out in places where, according to Marx, they should not have occurred – in societies Why do we need political philosophy? such as Russia and China which were relatively undeveloped economically, and therefore not ready to adopt a socialist form of production. In the more advanced capitalist societies, meanwhile, fairly stable democratic governments were established in some places – something Marx had thought impossible given the class- divided nature of these societies – while other countries fell prey to fascist regimes. Politics, it turned out, was to a considerable extent independent of economics, or of social development more generally. And this meant that once again people had big choices to make, not only about their form of government in the narrow sense, but about the broader way their society was constituted. Should they have a one-party state or a liberal democracy with free elections? Should the economy be centrally planned or based on the free market? These are questions of the sort that political philosophers try to answer, and they were once more back on the agenda. But if 20th-century experience put paid to the kind of historical determinism that was so prevalent in the 19th, by the beginning of the 21st a new form of fatalism had appeared. This was inspired by the growth of a new global economy, and the belief that states had increasingly little room for manœuvre if they wanted their people 7 to beneﬁt from it. Any state that tried to buck the market would ﬁnd that its economy slumped. And the only states that were likely to succeed in the new global competition were the liberal democracies, so although it was possible for a society to be governed differently – to have an Islamic regime, for example – the price for this would be relative economic decline: a price, it was assumed, no society would wish to pay. This was the so-called ‘end of history’ thesis, essentially a claim that all societies would be propelled by economic forces into governing themselves in roughly the same way. There is little doubt that this form of fatalism will be undermined by events just as earlier forms were. Already we can see a backlash against globalization in the form of political movements concerned about the environment, or the impact of global markets on developing nations, or the levelling-down quality of global culture. Political Philosophy These movements challenge the idea that economic growth is the supreme goal, and in the course of doing so raise questions about what we ultimately value in our lives, and how we can achieve these aims, that are central questions of political philosophy. And even if we conﬁne ourselves to political debate that lies closer to the conventional centre ground, there is still plenty of scope to argue about how much economic freedom we should sacriﬁce in the name of greater equality, or how far personal liberty should be restricted in order to strengthen the communities in which we live. As I write, there is a ﬁerce argument going on about terrorism, the rights of individuals, and the principle that we cannot interfere in the internal affairs of other states, no matter how they are governed. Once again these are issues over which collective choices have to be made, and they are quintessentially issues of political philosophy. So far I have argued that political philosophy deals with issues that are of vital importance to all of us, and furthermore issues over which we have real political choices to make. Now I want to confront another reason for dismissing the whole subject, namely 8 that politics is about the use of power, and powerful people – politicians especially – do not pay any attention to works of political philosophy. If you want to change things, according to this line of thought, you should go out on the streets, demonstrate, and cause some chaos, or alternatively perhaps see if you can ﬁnd a politician to bribe or blackmail, but you shouldn’t bother with learned treatises on the good society that nobody reads. It is true that when political philosophers have tried to intervene directly in political life, they have usually come unstuck. They have advised powerful rulers – Aristotle acted as tutor to Alexander the Great, Machiavelli attempted to counsel the Medicis in Florence, and Diderot was invited to St Petersburg by Catherine the Great to discuss how to modernize Russia – but Why do we need political philosophy? whether these interventions did any good is another question. Treatises written during times of intense political conﬂict have often succeeded merely in alienating both sides to the conﬂict. A famous example is Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, a masterpiece of political philosophy written while the English Civil War was still raging. Hobbes’s arguments in favour of absolute government, which I shall discuss more fully in the following chapter, were welcomed neither by the Royalists nor by the Parliamentarians. The former believed that kings had been divinely ordained to rule, the latter that legitimate government required the consent of its subjects. The bleak picture of the human condition painted by Hobbes led him to the conclusion that we must submit to any established and effective government, no matter what its credentials were. By implication Charles I had a right to rule when he was in power, but so did Cromwell when he had succeeded in deposing Charles. This was not what either side wanted to hear. The example of Hobbes can help to explain why political philosophers have so rarely made a direct impact on political events. Because they look at politics from a philosophical perspective, they are bound to challenge many of the conventional beliefs held both 9 by politicians and by the public at large. They put these beliefs under the microscope, asking exactly what people mean when they say such and such, what evidence they have for their convictions, how they would justify their beliefs if challenged to do so. One result of this forensic examination is that when political philosophers put forward their own ideas and proposals, these nearly always look strange and disturbing to those who are used to the conventional debate, as Hobbes’s ideas did to those ﬁghting on both sides in the Civil War. But this does not stop political philosophy from having an inﬂuence, sometimes a considerable inﬂuence, with the passage of time. When we think about politics, we make assumptions that we are often barely aware of – underlying assumptions that nevertheless do change quite radically over the course of history. At the time Hobbes wrote, for instance, it was commonplace to argue Political Philosophy politically by appeal to religious principles, and especially to the authority of the Bible. One of his lasting legacies was to make it possible to think about politics in a purely secular way. Although Hobbes himself was deeply preoccupied with religious questions, his radically new approach to political authority allowed politics and religion to be separated and discussed in different terms. Or consider that in Hobbes’s time, only a few extreme radicals believed in democracy as a form of government (typically, Hobbes himself did not rule it out altogether, but he thought it was generally inferior to monarchy). Nowadays, of course, we take democracy for granted to the extent that we can barely imagine how any other form of government could be seen as legitimate. How has this change come about? The story is a complex one, but an indispensable part in it has been played by political philosophers arguing in favour of democracy, philosophers whose ideas were taken up, popularized, and cast into the mainstream of politics. The best known of these is probably Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose impact on the French Revolution through his book The Social Contract is hard to dispute. (Thomas Carlyle, at least, had no doubts. Challenged to show the practical importance of abstract 10 ideas, he is said to have replied, ‘There was once a man called Rousseau who wrote a book containing nothing but ideas. The second edition was bound in the skins of those who had laughed at the ﬁrst.’) Nobody can tell in advance whether any given work of political thought will have the effect of Hobbes’s Leviathan or Rousseau’s Social Contract, or to take a later example, Marx and Engels’s The Communist Manifesto. It depends entirely on whether the underlying shift in thinking that the philosopher proposes corresponds to political and social change in such a way that the new ideas can become the commonplaces of the following generations. Other works of political philosophy have enjoyed a limited success and then disappeared virtually without trace. But Why do we need political philosophy? the need for political philosophy is always there, especially perhaps at moments when we face new political challenges that we cannot deal with using the conventional wisdom of the day. At these moments we need to dig deeper, to probe the basis of our political beliefs, and it is here that we may turn to political philosophy, not perhaps at source, but as ﬁltered through pamphlets, magazines, newspapers and the like – every successful political philosopher has relied on media-friendly disciples to put his or her ideas into circulation. But even if political philosophy answers to a genuine need, are its own credentials genuine? (Horoscopes answer to a strongly felt need – people want to know what the future holds in store for them – but most of us think that horoscopes themselves are completely bogus.) For political philosophy claims that it can bring to us a kind of truth about politics, something different from the opinions that guide us from day to day. This claim was presented most dramatically by Plato, often regarded as the father of the subject, through the allegory of the cave in the Republic. Plato likens ordinary people to prisoners who have been chained in a cave in such a way that they can only see the shadows of things on a screen in front of them; they would 11 2. Plato and Socrates, frontispiece by Matthew Paris (d. 1259) for The Prognostics of Socrates the King. assume, Plato says, that these shadows were the only real things. Now suppose that one of the prisoners was to be freed and emerged blinking into the light. In time he would come to see real objects in the world, and understand that what he had seen before were no more than shadows. But if he were then to return to the cave to try to persuade his fellows of their mistake, they would be unlikely to believe him. This, Plato thinks, is the position of the philosopher: he has genuine knowledge while those around him have only distorted opinions, but because the path to philosophical knowledge is long and hard, very few are willing to take it. But was Plato justiﬁed in drawing such a sharp contrast between philosophical knowledge and common opinion? This is not the Why do we need political philosophy? place to discuss the metaphysical underpinning of his distinction, so let me say simply that my conception of political philosophy does not involve endowing philosophers with a special kind of knowledge not available to other human beings. Instead they think and reason in much the same way as everyone else, but they do so more critically and more systematically. They take less for granted: they ask whether our beliefs are consistent with one another, whether they are supported by evidence, and how, if at all, they can be ﬁtted into one big picture. It is easiest to explain this by taking some examples. Suppose we were to ask a politician what his goals were; what aims or values the political community he belongs to should be trying to achieve. If he belonged to a contemporary Western society, he would probably come up with a fairly predictable list: law and order, individual liberty, economic growth, full employment, and one or two others. How might a political philosopher respond to this? Well, ﬁrst of all she would turn the spotlight on the goals themselves and ask which of them were really ultimate goals. Take economic growth, for instance. Is this a good thing in itself, or is it only good in so far as it gives people more opportunities to choose from, or makes their lives 13 healthier and happier? Can we assume that further growth is always good, or does there come a point where it no longer contributes to the things that really matter? A similar question might be asked about full employment. Do we value full employment because we believe it is intrinsically valuable for people to engage in paid work, or is it rather that people cannot have a decent standard of living unless they do work? But if the second is true, why not give everyone an income whether they work or not, and make work into a voluntary activity for those who enjoy it? Our political philosopher will also ask about how the different goals on the politicians’ list are related to one another. Politicians very rarely concede that they might have to sacriﬁce one aim in order to achieve another, but perhaps in reality they do. Take law and order versus individual liberty, for instance. Could our streets not be made Political Philosophy safer by limiting individual liberty – for instance by giving the police greater powers to arrest people they suspected were about to engage in criminal acts? If so, which value should have the higher priority? Of course in order to decide that, she would need to say a bit more precisely what individual liberty means. Is it simply being able to do whatever you like, or is it doing what you like so long as you don’t harm anyone else? This makes a big difference to the question being asked. In raising these questions, and suggesting some answers, political philosophers are not (or needn’t be) appealing to any esoteric form of knowledge. They are inviting their readers to reﬂect on their own political values, and to see which ones they care about most in the ﬁnal analysis. Along the way they may add in some new pieces of information. For instance, when contemplating the value of economic growth, it is relevant to see how people whose material living standards are very different score in terms of physical indicators such as health and mortality, and psychological indicators such as how satisﬁed they feel with their lives. Political philosophers therefore need to have a 14 good grasp of social and political science. In earlier periods, they attempted to obtain this primarily by collating such evidence as was available from the historical record about a wide range of human societies, and their various political systems. This evidence was somewhat impressionistic and often unreliable. In this respect political philosophers today can build on more solid empirical foundations by virtue of the huge expansion of the social sciences in the 20th century. But the essential nature of their task remains the same. They take what we know about human societies, and the ways in which they are governed, and then they ask what the best form of government would be, in the light of aims and values that they believe their audience will share. Sometimes this best form of government turns out to be quite close to the form that already exists; sometimes it is radically different. Why do we need political philosophy? What I have tried to do in the last few paragraphs is to show how political philosophy can illuminate the way we think about politics without making claims to a special kind of truth that is inaccessible to the ordinary person. There is a related issue here, which is how far the kind of truth political philosophy gives us is universal truth – truth that applies to all societies and in all periods of history. Or is the best we can hope for local knowledge, knowledge that is relevant only to the particular kind of society we live in today? The answer I want to give is that the agenda of political philosophy changes as society and government change, although some items have stayed on it as far back as our records go. Among these perennial questions are basic questions about politics and political authority that I shall be addressing in the next chapter. Why do we need politics in the ﬁrst place? What right has anybody to force another person to do something against their will? Why should I obey the law when it does not suit me to? But in other cases, either the questions, or the answers, or both, have changed over time, and we need to see why this is so. 15 One reason is that changes in society open up possibilities that did not exist before, or alternatively close them off. As an example, think of democracy as a form of government. Almost every political philosopher today – in Western societies at least – takes it for granted that good government must mean some kind of democracy; in one way or another the people must rule (as we shall see in Chapter 3, this leaves plenty of room for argument about what democracy really means in practice). For many centuries beforehand, the opposite view prevailed: good government meant government by a wise monarch, or an enlightened aristocracy, or men of property, or perhaps some combination of these. So are we right and our predecessors simply wrong? No, because democracy seems to need certain preconditions to function successfully: it needs a wealthy and literate population, media of mass communication so that ideas and opinions can circulate freely, a well-functioning legal system Political Philosophy that commands people’s respect, and so forth. And these conditions did not obtain anywhere until the fairly recent past, nor could they be created overnight (classical Athens is often held up as an exception, but it is important to remember that Athenian ‘democracy’ encompassed only a minority of the city’s population, and rested, as the Greeks themselves recognized, on the work of women, slaves, and resident aliens). So the older philosophers were not wrong to dismiss democracy as a form of government. Even Rousseau, who as we saw earlier was an inﬂuential source of democratic ideas, said that it was suitable only for gods and not for men. Given the prevailing conditions, democracy as we understand it today was not a viable form of government. For another example of the shifting agenda of political philosophy, consider the value we attach today to personal choice. We think people should be free to choose their jobs, their partners, their religious beliefs, the clothes they wear, the music they listen to, and so on and so forth. It is important, we think, that each person should discover or invent the style of life that 16 suits them best. But how much sense would this make in a society where most people, in order to stay alive, are bound to follow in their parents’ footsteps, with little choice of occupation, few entertainments, a common religion, and so on? Here other values become much more important. And this is how societies have been for most of human history, so it is hardly surprising that only in the last couple of centuries do we ﬁnd political philosophies built around the supreme value of personal choice, such as John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, which I shall discuss in Chapter 4. In this book I have tried to strike a balance between the perennial questions of political philosophy and those that have appeared on its agenda only in the fairly recent past, such as the claims of women Why do we need political philosophy? and cultural minorities discussed in Chapter 6. Striking this balance can be difﬁcult: it is easy to get swept away by the political topics of the moment and lose sight of basic issues that underlie politics everywhere. One remedy is to travel back to Siena and Lorenzetti’s frescos and be reminded again that how political authority is constituted can make the difference between plenty and poverty, life and death. This is the starting point of the chapter that follows. I have also tried to strike a balance between laying out the contrasting positions that have been taken up on these issues, and presenting arguments of my own. My aim is to explain what is at issue when anarchists argue with statists, democrats argue with elitists, liberals argue with authoritarians, nationalists argue with cosmopolitans, and so on, but it would be disingenuous to claim that I am surveying these debates from some entirely neutral, Olympian perspective. One cannot write about political philosophy without doing it as well. So although I have tried not to browbeat the reader into thinking that there is only one plausible answer to some of the most ﬁercely contested questions of our time, I have not attempted to disguise my sympathies either. Where you disagree with me, I hope you will ﬁnd the 17 reasons on your side of the argument fairly presented. Of course, I hope even more that you will be convinced by the reasons on my side. Political Philosophy 18 Chapter 2 Political authority If someone were to ask how we govern ourselves today – under what arrangements do we live together in society – the answer must be that we are governed by states that wield unprecedented power to inﬂuence our lives. They not only provide us with basic protection against attack on our persons and our possessions, they also regiment us in countless ways, laying down the terms on which we may make our living, communicate with one another, travel to and fro, raise our children, and so on. At the same time they supply us with a huge range of beneﬁts, from health care and education through to roads, houses, parks, museums, sports grounds, and the like. It would not be going too far to say that today we are creatures of the state. Not all states are equally successful in performing these functions, of course, but no one beneﬁts from belonging to a failing state. Looked at from the perspective of human history, this is a very recent phenomenon. Human societies have usually governed themselves on a much smaller scale. In tribal societies authority might rest in the hands of the village elders, who would meet to settle any disputes that arose among the members of the tribe, or interpret tribal law. When societies emerged on a larger scale, as in China under the Han dynasty or medieval Europe, they still lacked anything that deserved to be called a state. Although supreme authority rested in the hands of the king or the emperor, day-to-day 19 governance was carried out by local lords and their ofﬁcers. Their impact on people’s lives was also much more limited, since they neither attempted to regulate them so closely (except perhaps in matters of religion), nor of course did they attempt to provide most of the goods and services that modern states provide. Political authority was woven into the social fabric in such a way that its existence seemed relatively uncontroversial. The arguments that took place were about who in particular should wield it (by what right did kings rule?), and whether it should be divided between different bodies, for instance between kings and priests. The emergence of the modern state, however, ﬁrst in Western Europe, and then almost everywhere else, has meant that the problem of political authority has preoccupied political philosophers for the last 500 years. Here is an institution that claims the right to govern our lives in countless ways. What can Political Philosophy justify that claim? Under what circumstances, if any, do states wield legitimate political authority? How far are we as ordinary citizens obliged to obey the laws they make and follow their other dictates? These very basic questions need to be resolved before we can move on in the following chapters to ask how best to constitute the state – what the form of government should be – and what limits should be set to its authority. When we say that the state exercises political authority, what do we mean? Political authority has two sides to it. On the one side, people generally recognize it as authority, in other words as having the right to command them to behave in certain ways. When people obey the law, for instance, they usually do so because they think that the body that made the law has a right to do so, and they have a corresponding duty to comply. On the other side, people who refuse to obey are compelled to do so by the threat of sanctions – law- breakers are liable to be caught and punished. And these two aspects are complementary. Unless most people obeyed the law most of the time because they believed in its legitimacy, the system could not work: to begin with, there would need to be huge 20 numbers of law-enforcement ofﬁcers, and then the question would arise who should enforce the law on them. Equally, those who do keep the law out of a sense of obligation are encouraged to do so by knowing that people who break it are likely to be punished. I do not steal from my neighbour because I respect his right of property. I hope that he respects mine too, but I know that if he doesn’t I can call the police to get my property back. So people who comply with authority voluntarily know that they are protected from being taken advantage of by less scrupulous persons. Political authority, then, combines authority proper with forced compliance. It is neither pure authority, like the authority of the wise man whose disciples follow his instructions without any compulsion, nor pure force, like the force exercised by the gunman who relieves you of your wallet, but a blend of the two. But the question remains, why do we need it? After all political authority, Political authority particularly when exercised by a body as powerful as the modern state, imposes a great many unwelcome requirements on us, some of which (like paying taxes) make us materially worse off, but others of which make us do things that we object to morally (like ﬁghting in wars that we oppose). What reply can we give to the anarchist who says that societies can govern themselves perfectly well without political authority, and that the state is essentially a racket run for the beneﬁt of those who hold positions of power? I shall come back to anarchist alternatives to the state later in the chapter, but ﬁrst I am going to defend political authority, as others have before me, by asking the reader to imagine life in society without it – with the police, the army, the legal system, the civil service, and the other branches of the state all taken away. What would happen then? Perhaps the most famous thought-experiment along these lines can be found in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, published in 1651. Hobbes, as I mentioned in Chapter 1, had experienced the partial breakdown of political authority brought about by the English Civil 21 War, and the picture he painted of life in its absence was unremittingly bleak. He described the ‘natural condition of mankind’ without political rule as one of ferocious competition for the necessities of life, leaving people in constant fear in case they should be robbed or attacked, and constantly inclined, therefore, to strike at others ﬁrst. The result was summed up in a much-quoted passage: In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and Political Philosophy short. It is sometimes said that Hobbes reaches this pessimistic conclusion because of a belief that people are naturally selﬁsh or greedy, and will therefore try to grab as much for themselves as they can when unrestrained by political authority. But this misses Hobbes’s real point, which is that cooperation between people is impossible in the absence of trust, and that trust will be lacking where there is no superior power to enforce the law. Those things that Hobbes describes as missing in the ‘natural condition’ are above all things that require numbers of people to work together in the expectation that others will do their part, and in the absence of political authority it is not safe to have any such expectation. If I make an agreement with someone, why should I expect him to keep it, if there is no law to enforce the agreement? And even if he is inclined to keep the agreement, he may wonder the same about me, and decide that it is too risky to do so. In this situation, Hobbes argues, it is only prudent to assume the worst, and take every step you can to secure yourself against the threat of death; and the way to do that, in turn, is to amass as much power relative to other people as 22 you can. At base it is fear of others, born of mistrust, that turns life without political authority into ‘a perpetuall warre of every man against his neighbour’. Was Hobbes’s pessimism justiﬁed? His critics point out that if we look around us we can ﬁnd ample evidence of people trusting one another, cooperating with one another, even helping each other with nothing expected in return, without any involvement by the state or any of its branches. A group of neighbours, for instance, may decide together to repair a derelict children’s playground, form a team, and divide up the work, each relying on the others to do their bit, without any legal agreement or other means of enforcement. Human nature is not as Hobbes portrayed it. But in a way this misses the point. Although Hobbes probably did have a rather low opinion of human nature (he was once caught out giving money to a beggar, and had to explain that he only did it to relieve Political authority his own discomfort at the sight of the beggar), his real point is that in the climate of fear that would follow the breakdown of authority, the kinder, more trusting, side of human nature would be obliterated. And from what we know of human behaviour when people are caught up in civil war and other situations in which their very survival is at stake, he seems to have been right. We need political authority, then, because it gives us the security that allows us to trust other people, and in a climate of trust people are able to cooperate to produce all those beneﬁts that Hobbes listed as signally lacking in the ‘natural condition’. But how can we create authority where it does not exist? Hobbes envisaged everyone gathering together and covenanting with one another to establish a sovereign who would rule them from that day forward; alternatively, they might submit themselves individually to a powerful man, a conquering general for instance. He thought it mattered little who had authority, so long as the authority was unrestricted and undivided. Here we may part company with him. But before looking more closely at how authority should be constituted, we should pause to see whether there is any other way 23 3. Thomas Hobbes, defender of political authority. to escape the ‘natural condition’. Despite all that Hobbes says, might social cooperation be possible in the absence of political authority? Anarchists believe that it is indeed possible, and although anarchist voices have always been in a small minority, we should listen to them: as political philosophers we are duty bound to put conventional wisdom to the test, and so we cannot take political authority for granted without exploring the alternatives to it. There are two different directions we might take here: anarchists themselves fall broadly into two camps. One points towards community, the other towards the market. The communitarian alternative to political authority takes face-to- face communities as the building blocks that make trust and cooperation between people possible. In a small community where Political authority people interact with one another on a daily basis and everyone knows who is a member and who isn’t, it is comparatively easy to maintain social order. Anybody who attacks another person, takes their possessions, or refuses to perform his fair share of the community’s work, faces some obvious penalties. As news of his behaviour spreads, other people will reprimand him and may refuse to work with him in future. At community meetings he will be denounced and he may even be asked to leave altogether. All this can happen without the malefactor being forced to do anything or being formally punished – that is why we can describe this as an alternative to political authority rather than a form of it. One of the most important human motives is a desire to be accepted and respected by those around you, and in the setting of a small community this makes cooperation possible even if people are not saints. Communitarian anarchists argue that, in a society made up of communities like this, cooperation will be possible on a much larger scale. Essentially communities will agree to exchange services with one another – they may specialize in producing different kinds of 25 goods for instance – and they will collaborate on projects that need to be carried out on a larger scale, for instance, creating a transport system or a postal service. It is in each community’s interest to make these agreements, and the penalty for breaking them is that no one will be willing to cooperate with your community in the future if it proves to be untrustworthy. So once again there is no need for a central authority to tell people what to do, and no need to use coercive force to compel communities to cooperate – the system will effectively be self-policing. What is wrong with this idyllic picture of life without the state? One major problem is that it relies on small, tight-knit communities as the basis for social order, and although in the past this might have been a reasonable assumption to make, it no longer is today. We live in societies that are highly mobile, both in the sense that people can move around physically quite easily, and in the sense that there is a Political Philosophy ready supply of new people to collaborate with, and also, unfortunately, to take advantage of. The anarchist picture is not nonsense, but it works on the assumption that we will interact over time with the same group of people, so that the way we behave becomes common knowledge in the group. It also assumes that the possibility of being excluded from the group is a powerful deterrent to antisocial behaviour. But in a large, mobile society that assumption does not hold. We need, therefore, a legal system that will track down and punish people who injure others, and that allows us to make binding agreements with one another that carry a penalty if we default. Cooperation between communities is also less straightforward than the anarchist picture supposes. For loyalty to your own community frequently goes along with a fairly intense distrust of others, and agreements may therefore collapse because we over here are not convinced that you over there are contributing your fair share to the project we are supposed to be working on together. And we may disagree about what fairness requires in the ﬁrst place. Suppose we want to build a society-wide rail network in the absence of a central 26 authority. What share of resources should each community contribute? Should it be so much per head, or should richer communities put in proportionally more? If my community is situated in a remote area that costs much more to connect to the network, should it alone cover the extra cost, or should that cost be shared equally by all communities? There are no easy answers to these questions, and no reason to think that it would be possible for many local communities to come to a voluntary agreement about them. The state, by contrast, can impose a solution: it can require each person or each community to contribute a certain amount, say through taxation. Now let us consider the other anarchist alternative to political authority and the state, the one that relies on the economic market. This certainly goes with the grain of the modern world, in so far as the market has proved to be a formidable instrument for allowing Political authority people to work together in large numbers. It already supplies us with most of the goods and services we need and want. But could it replace the state? Market anarchists – sometimes called libertarians – claim that we could contract and pay individually for the services that the state now provides, including crucially for personal protection. In the absence of the state, ﬁrms would offer to protect clients and their property, and this would include retrieving property that had been stolen, enforcing contracts, and obtaining compensation for personal injury. So if my neighbour steals something that is mine, instead of calling the (public) police, I would call my protective agency, and they would take action on my behalf against the troublesome neighbour. But what if the neighbour disputes my claim and calls his agency, which may of course be different from mine? If the two agencies cannot agree, libertarians claim, they may refer the case to an arbitrator, who again would charge for her services. After all it is not in the interest of either agency to get into a ﬁght. So there would be 27 a primary market for protective services, and then a secondary market for arbitration services to deal with disputes – unless of course everyone chose to sign up with the same agency (but why would that happen?). And the other services that the state now provides would also be handed over to the market – people would take out health insurance, pay to have their children educated, pay to use toll roads, and so on. Does this system really do away with political authority? The protective agencies would need to use force to protect their clients’ rights. If my neighbour does not hand back the property when it has been established that it rightfully belongs to me, then my agency will send round its heavies to retrieve it. But still, there is no authority proper, because my neighbour is not obliged to recognize my agency – he can always ﬁght back – and I too can change agencies if I dislike the way mine is behaving. So this is genuinely an Political Philosophy anarchist alternative to the state. But is it a good alternative? It might look attractive if we thought that the various agencies would all agree to implement the same set of rules to govern property disputes and so forth, and would all consent to independent arbitration in case of dispute. But why should they do this? An agency might hope to win customers by promising to ﬁght on their behalf no matter what – i.e. even if they appeared to be in the wrong by the standards that most people accepted. Once a few agencies like this enter the market, the others would have to respond by taking an equally aggressive line themselves. And this would mean that increasingly disputes would have to be settled by physical force, with the risk to ordinary people of being caught in the cross-ﬁre. We would be slipping back into Hobbes’s condition of ‘Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man’, and in this condition the only rational decision for each person is to sign up with the agency that is likely to win the most ﬁghts. But the result would be to create a body with the power and authority to impose the same body of rules on everyone – in other words we would (inadvertently) have recreated the state. 28 There is another problem with relying on the market to carry out all the functions that states now perform. One of these functions is the provision of what are called ‘public goods’ – beneﬁts that everyone enjoys and that no one can be excluded from enjoying. These come in many and varied forms – clean air and water, for example, defence against external aggression, access to roads, parks, cultural amenities, media of communication, and so on. These goods are created either by imposing restrictions on people – for example when governments require manufacturers to curb the release of toxic gases into the atmosphere – or by raising taxes and using the revenue to pay for public broadcasting, transport systems, environmental protection, and the like. Could these goods be provided through an economic market? A market operates on the basis that people pay for the goods and services they want to use, and the problem with public goods is precisely that they are provided for everyone whether they pay or not. Of course it is Political authority possible that people might contribute voluntarily if they saw the value of the good being provided: old churches that are costly to maintain rely to some extent on visitors who enjoy looking round the church putting money in the box by the door. But it is very tempting to free ride, and in the case of many public goods we may enjoy them almost without realizing it (we don’t think, as we get up in the morning, how lucky we are to have breathable air and protection against foreign invasion; we take these things for granted until something goes wrong). So it seems that we need political authority with the power to compel in order to ensure that these goods are provided. There isn’t space here to consider all the ingenious arguments that libertarian anarchists have come up with to show how public goods could be provided through the market, or else by people banding together and agreeing to contribute to their production: in political philosophy there are always more arguments to make. But I hope I have said enough to suggest why neither communities nor markets – important as these are in many areas of human life – can replace political authority and its modern embodiment, the state. 29 4. How anarchists see political authority: Russian cartoon 1900. The text reads, clockwise from the top: we reign over you; we fool you; we eat for you; we shoot you; we rule you. Much as we may dislike the state when it regulates us, taxes us, conscripts us into its service, and impinges on our lives in many other ways, we could not live well without it. The real choice is not whether to have political authority or not, but what kind of authority to have, and what its limits should be. These are the subjects of the following chapters. But we have not yet quite ﬁnished with authority itself. There is still one crucial question that needs to be answered: why should I obey it, when it tells me to do things that I dislike or disapprove of? Political philosophers call this ‘the problem of political obligation’. You might think the question has already been answered, by showing why we need to have political authority. But in fact there is still a gap between recognizing that the British government, say, has a right to make laws and impose taxes, and thinking that I personally am obliged to keep those laws and pay my tax bills. It is Political authority not as though my refusal is going to bring the government down, or seriously impede its ability to maintain social order. All states manage to survive a good deal of law-breaking and tax evasion. If I think solely about the consequences of my action, I may well conclude that more good will come from breaking the law – say preventing my local authority from demolishing a historic building by chaining myself to the gates to prevent the bulldozers getting through – or from using the money I would otherwise have paid in tax to support Oxfam. So why should I obey the law? One reason, of course, is that I am likely to be punished if I don’t. But we are looking here for a more principled reason for obeying. Some political philosophers conclude that the problem is insoluble. I should obey the law, they say, only when there are independent reasons to do so, reasons that have nothing to do with the fact that the law emanates from a legitimate authority. But others have tried to provide positive solutions – too many, in fact, for all of them to be considered here. I shall look at just two, the ﬁrst because it has historically been the most popular, the second because I believe it to be broadly correct. 31 The ﬁrst solution claims that we are obliged to obey the law because we have agreed or consented to do so. The appeal of this idea is easy to see. Suppose I go along to my local soccer club and ask to join. When Saturday comes I turn up for the match, but instead of playing by the rules, I insist on picking up the ball and running with it. The club members would no doubt be highly indignant. By joining the club, they would say, I am agreeing to play football by the normal rules, whether or not I have signed an explicit agreement to that effect. My argument that the game is more fun if people are allowed to run with the ball would rightly be ridiculed. This is a football club, they would say: anyone who joins implicitly accepts the prevailing rules. The difﬁculties begin, however, when we try to transfer this argument from the football club to the state. For generally speaking people do not choose to join states: they are required to obey them Political Philosophy whether they like it or not. So in what sense do they give their consent? Hobbes argued that we choose to belong to the state because it is preferable to the state of nature where life, as we saw, is ‘nasty, brutish, and short’ and it does not matter how the state arises. Even if we submit to a conqueror at the point of a sword, we still consent to his authority, because we do so to escape a worse fate. But this stretches the idea of consent beyond recognition. What made the football club example compelling was the fact that I freely chose to join. Later writers rejected Hobbes’s argument about obligation and consent, and tried to ﬁnd something other than the mere fact of subjection to the state which could be used to indicate our consent to the law. John Locke, for example, pointed out in his Second Treatise of Government (1689) that we all accept beneﬁts from the state, and our acceptance can be treated as a form of consent. In particular, since one of the chief functions of the state is to protect our property, when we acquire it by purchase or inheritance, say, we are also tacitly consenting to the state’s jurisdiction over that property, and therefore to its laws. This 32 even applied, Locke thought, to someone who merely took lodgings for a week or travelled on the highway. However the problem again is that we really have little choice about accepting these beneﬁts: we cannot live without property of some kind, even if it is only food and clothing; we cannot escape from the state without travelling the highway to the border. So it still seems to be stretching the idea of consent too far to say that anyone who enjoys state beneﬁts is giving her consent, and obliging herself to obey the law. More recently, some political philosophers have claimed that when we take part in elections, we agree to comply with the government that emerges and the laws it enacts. This looks more promising: we do at least have a free choice as to whether to vote or not, and there would be no point in holding elections unless people recognized the government that emerged as legitimate. But unfortunately there Political authority still seems to be a gap between voting and registering your consent. What if you deeply disagree with both parties, but vote because you think that one is slightly less bad than the other? Or what if you think that although you have in a sense consented to the overall package of policies that the winning party has announced in its manifesto, there are a few items that you ﬁnd quite repugnant – and you had no chance to vote on these individually? Perhaps the voters’ consent can help explain why governments have legitimate authority, but not why individual citizens have an obligation to obey the law. If we set the consent approach aside, a more promising way of showing that such an obligation exists involves an appeal to fairness or ‘fair play’. Again an example is the best way to convey the basic idea. Suppose a group of us are living in a house with a shared kitchen. Every week or so one of the residents tidies the kitchen and gives the pans and the surfaces a really thorough clean. Now everyone else has done the cleaning routine and it is my turn to spend half an hour scrubbing saucepans and mopping worktops. Why ought I to do this? I have beneﬁted from the work the others 33 have put in – I have enjoyed having a clean kitchen to cook my supper in – and so I ought to carry my share of the cost too, in this case the cost of a bit of manual labour. If I don’t take my turn, I’ll be taking advantage of the other residents, and that’s unfair. Notice that we don’t need to assume here that I have agreed or consented to take part in the cleaning rota: my obligation stems directly from the fact that I am the beneﬁciary of a practice that requires each person to contribute in turn. How does this idea transfer to political obligation? Keeping the law, and complying with political authority more generally, means forgoing opportunities that would otherwise be available to you. Each of us would prefer to do exactly what he pleases, free from the burdens of respecting other people’s rights, paying taxes, and observing the trafﬁc laws. Furthermore compliance is a beneﬁt to others. When you pay your taxes, the rest of us beneﬁt from the Political Philosophy roads, schools, and hospitals that the taxes are used to pay for. When you stop at the red light, you make it safer for other motorists to cross on green. So it looks as though the person who breaks the law but beneﬁts from the fact that other people are observing it is behaving unfairly in just the same way as the person who uses the kitchen but won’t take his turn at cleaning it. Looks can be deceptive, however. There are at least two difﬁculties that have to be overcome if the fair play argument is going to justify political obligation. The ﬁrst is that we have to show that the beneﬁts the state provides really are beneﬁts for everyone. What if the laws protect property, but only some people are property owners, for example? Or what if taxes are being used to fund art galleries and many people care nothing for art? The argument can work, however, so long as the whole package of beneﬁts provided by the state makes everyone better off, and so long as the beneﬁts are shared reasonably fairly among all the citizens whose compliance makes the system of authority possible. Perhaps I never visit art galleries, but I do use the football pitch provided free of charge in my local park. 34 Mention of fairness brings us to the second difﬁculty. In the kitchen example, I was taking it for granted that each person sharing the house made roughly equal use of the kitchen, and therefore would share the burden of cleaning equally. But what if one person only cooks there once a fortnight? Should she have to clean as often as the rest? Should we say that she does, because after all she could use the kitchen more often if she chose, and it is always available in case she needs it? Or should we try to adjust the contribution she is required to make in line with her actual usage? We might call these questions of substantive fairness, and it seems as though the fair play argument works best when it is applied to practices that are substantively fair, in the sense that the costs and beneﬁts of the practice are shared fairly among the individual participants. But if we try to move from the simple kitchen example to society as a whole, we run into difﬁculties. What would a fair distribution of social costs and beneﬁts look like, given that people have very Political authority different needs, abilities, preferences, and so forth? And if, as seems likely, the way that costs and beneﬁts are actually distributed in societies today falls very far short of this ideal, can we still say that everyone has an obligation to obey the law in order to maintain a fair practice? It seems, then, that my preferred solution to the problem of political obligation requires us to tackle the issue of social justice, which we will do in Chapter 5. But suppose for the moment that we are able to show that our society is sufﬁciently fair that its members do have an obligation to keep the law. Does this mean that they are never justiﬁed in breaking it? Or could political obligation be outweighed by other principles? Political philosophers, including Hobbes, have often argued that, without strict obedience to political authority, that authority will crumble into dust. But in practice it seems that states and other forms of political authority can survive and function effectively so long as people are generally (rather than universally) disposed to comply with them, and this opens the door to limited forms of disobedience, especially what has come to be called civil disobedience – illegal but non-violent forms of political 35 protest whose purpose is to put pressure on government to change its policies. The argument for civil disobedience is that if a particular law is sufﬁciently unjust or oppressive, or if the state refuses to listen to the concerns of a minority when making its decisions, this can justify breaking the law if legal forms of protest prove to be ineffective. Political obligation, in other words, need not be binding on all occasions. We can have a general obligation to obey the law, and still be justiﬁed in acting illegally in extreme circumstances. What difference does democracy make here? A common view is that civil disobedience might be an acceptable way of protesting against an authoritarian regime, but in a democratic state, with free speech and the right to protest peacefully, it cannot be justiﬁed – political obligation is more stringent here. But this implies that there is something special about democratic political authority that Political Philosophy distinguishes it from other forms of political rule. What this special feature might be is the subject of the next chapter. 36 Chapter 3 Democracy We have seen why good government, at least in large-scale, modern societies, requires that we establish and maintain a system of political authority. Hobbes, whose lead we followed in showing why political authority is necessary, thought that it was essential to create an absolute sovereign – an undivided source of authority whose writ would be subject to no earthly limitations (Hobbes believed sovereigns still owed obligations to God). It was not essential that this sovereign body be a single person – a monarch – but Hobbes thought this was preferable, because a monarch’s will would be constant, and not subject to internal divisions, unlike that of an assembly. But Hobbes’s view on this point was challenged from the moment that he wrote by those who thought that to replace the insecurity of the state of nature by an all-powerful monarch able to dispose of his subjects’ lives and possessions however he wished was simply going from bad to worse. As John Locke memorably remarked, it assumes that Men are so foolish that they take care to avoid what Mischiefs may be done them by Pole-Cats, or Foxes, but are content, nay think it Safety, to be devoured by Lions. Hobbes’s only defence against this criticism was to say that a prudent monarch would wish his subjects to be prosperous, because it was on their prosperity that his own power ﬁnally depended. But, 37 looking at the historical record, we might conclude from this that rather few monarchs have been prudent. Political authority is justiﬁed because it provides the conditions under which people can live secure and ﬂourishing lives, and we want to be as certain as we can that this is what it does. Trusting everything to an absolute monarch is simply too risky. As an alternative, we might suggest placing authority in the hands of those we know to be wise and virtuous, and to have the interests of the people at heart. This is the argument for aristocracy, which literally means ‘the rule of the best’, and it was the argument that convinced most political philosophers up until at least the mid-19th century. The problem, however, was to determine what exactly goodness in a ruler amounted to, and then to ﬁnd some way of selecting those who displayed this quality. This proved difﬁcult to do: in practice aristocracy meant the rule of the well-born, the propertied, or the educated class, depending on time and place. Even if one could show that people drawn from these Political Philosophy classes had political skills not possessed by the rest of the population, there was still the problem that they had interests of their own separate from those of the majority – and why believe that they would not pursue these interests at the expense of the common good? So the case for constituting political authority democratically gathered momentum, and it rested on two basic assumptions: ﬁrst, that no person was naturally superior to another, so any relations of authority between them stood in need of justiﬁcation – in other words, each person should enjoy equal political rights unless it could be shown that everyone gained from having inequality; second, that the interests of the people were best safeguarded by making them the ﬁnal repository of political authority – anyone entrusted with special powers must be accountable to the people as a whole. But this still left it open exactly what role the people as a whole should play in government. Should they be directly involved in legislating, as Rousseau argued in his Social Contract, and if so how? Or should they only be involved at one remove, by choosing representatives who would wield authority on their behalf? 38 5. The Goddess of Democracy facing a portrait of Mao in Tianamen Square, Beijing. In practice, as we know, those political systems we call democracies give their citizens only a very limited role in government. They are entitled to vote at periodic elections, they are occasionally consulted through a referendum when some major constitutional question has to be decided, and they are allowed to form groups to lobby their representatives on issues that concern them, but that is the extent of their authority. Real power to determine the future of democratic societies rests in the hands of a remarkably small number of people – government ministers, civil servants, and to some extent members of parliament or other legislative assembly – and it is natural to ask why this is so. If democracy is the best way to make political decisions, why not make it a reality by letting the people themselves decide major questions directly? One answer that is often given at this point is that it is simply impractical for millions of ordinary citizens to be involved in Political Philosophy making the huge number of decisions that governments have to make today.

Political Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction PDF

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