Politics

Politics is about living together in communities. From the time when people first had dealings other than with members of their own families, they have regulated their interactions by customs and rules. As “social animals” , humans have always tended to form groups, the better to enjoy the benefits of cooperation and mutual defence, and groups have merged to form tribes, city-states and nation-states. The subject-matter of politics is the conduct of relations within and between those groups, and it includes beliefs concerning the proper regulation of that conduct and the systems and institutions that have been adopted for doing so.

Ideologies

The functions of ideology

A widely accepted set of beliefs about social behaviour may be termed an ideology if its rationale is known, or a myth if it is not. The term ideology is often associated in people’s minds with dogmatism and intolerance, but in fact, every society has needed a set of shared assumptions to provide it with a settled view about living together. That settled view has typically included conscious beliefs that are topics of everyday discussion, and subconscious attitudes that are seldom examined. It has enabled generally acceptable outcomes to be achieved without debating their underlying rationale. But what group members have considered to be a prized tradition, may have appeared to outsiders to be an irrational ideology.

Social ideologies

Myths and ideologies about personal status and the nature of authority are part of the foundation of every political ideology. For example, the medieval myth of "the Chain of Being" which defined the hierarchical status of every living thing, was the foundation of feudalism, and its subconscious influence is believed to underlie more recent attitudes to race and gender. And in the nineteenth century, the myth of "the ladder of life" which envisaged evolution as generating a process in which each emerging type of human being is an improvement on its predecessor was the rationale for a political ideology of the survival of the fittest known as "Social Darwinism" . The formation of groups has led to “we/they” myths about the superiority of members over non-members and the creation of ethnic and nationalist ideologies.

Political ideologies

Several political ideologies have made repeated appearances over the course of history. Authoritarianism, in the form of government by a trained elite, was advocated in the 4th century BCE by Plato it was advocated in the 17th century by Thomas Hobbes as the need for a controlling authority to prevent the chaos of a “war of all against all”, and it emerged again in the 20th century as the philosophy of Nazism . Democracy, in the form that gave every citizen a right to participate in every communal decision, made a brief appearance in Pericles’ Athens in the 6th century BCE , but was rejected in that form for centuries thereafter. In particular, the founders of the United States constitution rejected it in favour of "representation ingrafted upon democracy" as advocated in Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man . The concept of Representative Government, in which the people delegate decision-making powers to an authority on condition that it acts in their interest, had been put forward in the 17th century in the second of John Locke’s treatises On Civil Government and was further developed in the 19th century in John Stuart Mill’s Representative Government . The ideology of Socialism, as the belief that all property should be communally owned, was put forward in the 16th century in Thomas More’s Utopia  ; publicised in the early 19th century by Henri de Saint-Simon and developed into an influential creed in Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. . The ideologies of Liberalism and Libertarianism are attributable to several of the philosophers of the enlightenment. Both are concerned to preserve individual freedom from state interference, but Liberals, such as Friedrich von Hayek acknowledge the need to impose charges for good that must be financed by the stare, whereas Libertarians do not. In opposition to those beliefs, the ideology of Communitarianism that was put forward by Amitai Etzioni lays greater emphasis upon the contribution of community activity to individual welfare.