History of political thought

Among the many contributions to political philosophy, a continuous thread can be traced from the analytical theorising of the thinkers of Ancient Greece through the writings of the philosophers of The Enlightenment and the teachings of the founders of the French and American revolutions, to the current ideologies of Conservatism, Liberalism, Socialism and their offshoots. There were significant developments in political thinking in China and India during that period, but since they had little influence on that thread, they are conventionally omitted from courses and treatises on the history of political thought, and are usually given separate treatment elsewhere.

Among the topics that are debated throughout what is regarded as the mainstream thread, are the relations between individual and community, and between community and state. Although many issues remained unresolved, an unprecedented degree of ideological convergence began to develop during the latter decades of the 20th century, culminating in a situation that Francis Fukuyama dramatised as "the end of history". However a controversy gathered strength in the 21st century concerning a state's "duty of care" toward its citizens, and the rôle of the international community when an individual state fails to discharge that duty.

Ancient Greece

The thread begins in Ancient Greece after thinkers such as Thales and Anaximander had moved, away from a passive acceptance of the anecdotes and superstitions of the time of Homer, toward an active conviction that an understanding of the world could be gained by rational enquiry. Their enquiries came to include the examinations of the advantages of social cooperation that culminated in the political debates of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. In the course those debates, they developed a political vocabulary and a taxonomy of political systems that have survived to the present day. The thread centres on the city-state (polis)) of Ancient Athens at a time when an assembly of all of its citizens had been made its legislative body: a body to which its magistrates and administrators were made responsible. That was the form of democracy that was praised by the Athenian aristocrat Pericles in his famous funeral speech. At the time of Plato's political commentaries, Athenian democracy had made some regrettable decisions, and lost a war against Sparta and its allies, but had survived as the first fully-functional democratic city-state. Plato considered Athenian democracy to be an imperfect society because it put power in the hands of those who were ill-qualified to exercise it. Ruling was, in his view, a specialised skill that required unusual intelligence and self-discipline. Much of the Socratic dialogue in The Republic is concerned with the selection and training of an elite body of "Guardians" who would be given the duty of taking decisions that they deem to benefit the community. To gain their popular acceptance, he suggested the use of a public relations campaign to persuade the populace to believe the "Noble Lie" that the powers of the guardians had been divinely bestowed. Plato's pupil, Aristotle disagreed. He regarded Plato's Republic as the negation of politics, arguing that "man is by nature a political animal" that cannot reach its full potential without reasoned discourse. He believed, nevertheless, that deliberative politics was only feasible for a select elite - fearing that democracy would be used by the poor in their own interests - and he defended slavery. With those qualifications, he regarded politics as "a partnership of citizens in a constitution". By comparison with their predecessors, the philosophers of the later Hellenic period had little influence on political thought. The followers of Epicurus had no time for politics but were willing to acknowledge the merits of a system of civil law that helped to prevent citizens from harming each other. The principle contribution to political thinking that is generally attributed to the Stoics is the concept of a universal "natural law" consisting rules of conduct that are independent of man-made legislation, and apply equally to all.

Ancient Rome

The influence of Ancient Rome upon political thought has arisen from the policies and practices that it adopted rather than the writings of its philosphers. Unprecedented administrative problems had to be tackled during the five centuries of the Roman Republic and the further five centuries of the Roman Empire, and the solutions that were adopted have since been widely used as precedents or warnings by politicians and political thinkers. It has been described as a vast administrative experiment, and it has mainly influenced thinking about down-to-earth political issues such as taxation, monetary policy, the infrastructure, citizenship and the assimilation of differing cultures. Cicero, the best-known thinker of the republican period, carried forward the Stoic concept of a universal natural law, embodying an embryo version of universal human rights , and the Roman legal system, with its jury trials and presumption of innocence, was probably its most influential legacy. There was no return to democracy: the form of government ranged from aristocracy during the Republic to dictatorship during the imperial period.

Medieval Christianity and Islam

The decline in the authority of the Roman empire in the West in the 5th century BCE left a void in political thinking that was soon filled by the growing influence of the Christian Church, and the idea of being part of "Christendom" gained currency in popular attitudes to politics throughout most of Europe. The leading religious thinkers of the day regarded politics as an inferior pursuit, and political authority as no more than a necessary restraint upon otherwise destructive human behaviour. The thread was not broken, however, because there was also a resurgence of interest in the teachings of the ancient Greek philosophers. The Christian bishop Augustine of Hippo accepted Plato's authoritarianism, and its extension by Plotinus to a hierarchy of authority encompassing all existence (summed up in Alexander Pope's Vast Chain of Being). Aristotle's teaching was a major influence on the philosphy of the later theologist, Thomas Aquinas. In his political writing. Aquinas generally followed Aristotle in advocating reasoned political discourse among a qualified elite, although he was also known to advocate monarchy as the ideal form of government. He emphasised the priority of natural law over man-made law, even to the point of asserting that the decisions of a government carried no authority if they were contrary to natural law. Islamic scholars such as Al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, were also influenced by the political thinking of the ancient Greek philosophers, who took their hierarchical teaching, in particular, to be generally supportive of Islamic practice. (The Qu'ranic concept of Shura, or decisions by mutual consultation, is interpreted by the Islamic scholars who created the Sharia, to refer, not to representative government, but to the need for rulers to consult experts .) Yet the medieval politics of Christendom developed differently from the politics of the Moslem world. In contrast to the unifying influence of the Christian doctrine of papal supremacy, differences of interpretation among Islamic thinkers resulted in the development over time of a range of normative attitudes to social and political conduct.

Rise of the nation state

Much of the political thinking during the thousand years that followed the sack of Rome is unrecorded. The literacy that had been a common feature of the Roman empire was seldom evident in Europe, except in the monasteries. Thus, much of what people were thinking can only inferred from the political developments of the period. Fear of violent disorder would account for the agreements under which kings offered land in exchange for homage and armed support, and landowners demanded serfdom in return for tenancy and military protection. Choices were made and promises were given that resulted in a variety of political systems that came to be known as feudalism. General acceptance of the binding nature of the oath of fealty was a stabilising aspect of medieval political thinking. that preserved a hierarchy that many believed to have been divinely ordained. Another decisive aspect was the belief that every ordained priest had the power to consign the recalcitrant to eternal torment. Its consequence was the emergence of the church and the various monarchies as parallel sources of political authority. But feudalism can now be seen as no more than a stage in the process of emergence that imposed order upon a chaotic situation. At the beginning of the period there was no concept of a nation state, meaning a source of authority that is generally accepted by the members of a culturally coherent community. By the end of the period it was a commonplace political feature. At the beginning of the period, it was accepted that political legitimacy was conditional upon the approval of the church. By its end, the principle of state sovereignty was a fait accompli. Fear of a breakdown of law and order continued to influence political thought throughout the middle ages and beyond. Order was considered by Machiavelli to be an overriding necessity that justified ruthless actions that would otherwise be deemed immoral, and similar arguments were used by King James I of England to justify absolute despotism. Towards the end of the middle ages, however, political thinkers began to reconsider the relation between the state and the individual, and started to examine the possibility that order could be preserved at the cost of fewer sacrifices of individual freedom.

Enlightenment

The political philosphy of Thomas Hobbes was influenced, also, by fear of a return to an unregulated condition in which (as he put it) "life is nasty, brutish and short". Like Machiavelli, he considered the total submission to a "sovereign" to be a price that should willingly be paid for the avoidance of such an outcome. Unlike Machiavelli, however, he considered such submission to be conditional. In his words:

The Obligation of Subjects to the Soveraign is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power lasteth, by which he is able to protect them. For the right men have by Nature to protect themselves, when none else can protect them, can by no Covenant be relinquished