Definition of the State_

Early study of politics took place in small communities. The ancient Greeks who asked many of the important questions (and answered some of them well enough to satisfy many people today) lived in city states where rulers and decision-making were not remote. Their primary concern was with the nature of the good and just society and what the attitude of the citizen should be towards authority. The nature of our obligation to our rulers became an important theme in the early study of politics. Why do we obey the state? (see Chapter 3).

The easy answer to this question is that people obey out of habit. It does not occur to them to disobey. In modern times the question might be answered by anthropologists studying primitive societies, or by psychologists studying small groups of people and their response to leadership in laboratory situations. The ancient philosophers believed the answer lay in the nature of man. Aristotle perceived man as an animal of the polis: outside society people could not attain true happiness. The real nature of man could only be realised by associating with others. He assumed that the good life lay in the polity and that legally constituted government was the natural form, so that corruptions of good government were aberrations. Hence harmony was more natural than conflict. Neither Plato nor Aristotle seems to have conceived that disagreement could be irreconcilable. Christian philosophers believed that authority came from God and, therefore, should be obeyed. Later dynastic rulers transformed this into the claim that hereditary rulers were appointed by divine law and so disobeying them was unthinkable.

Once the acknowledgement of basic disagreement arose the question of political obligation either disappeared or became far more complicated. The Scientific Revolution, the Renaissance, the Reformation and finally the eighteenth-century Enlightenment removed many of the old certainties. Machiavelli (1469-1527), who had been imprisoned and tortured by rulers' commands, believed people were fickle and prone to evil. He was the holder of high office at the period of the expulsion, and then reinstatement, of the Medici in Florence. Instability, he held, could always be round the corner. When the safety of the country is ultimately in question, he wrote, there must be no question of justice or injustice, of mercy or cruelty, of praise or ignominy. It was not a matter of obligation, but of success or failure. Similarly Hobbes (1588-1679), writing in the period of the English Civil War and religious intolerance, perceived man's nature as fearful in consequence of the struggle for survival. People battled against one another to achieve their ends and in consequence life was 'nasty, brutish and short'. Hence a sovereign was needed to enforce law and order. We obey the sovereign because if people start disobeying everyone will be miserable in a state of mutual conflict. It is not a moral obligation, it is a necessity.

From the late seventeenth century onward the question of the relationship between the individual and the state generally shifted from the obligation to obey to the circumstances in which one could disobey. It was argued by John Locke (1632-1704) that rulers rule with the consent of their people with whom they have a contract. If the ruler breaches their individual rights the people have a right to replace him. This justification of the English Revolution of 1688, when Parliament replaced a hereditary monarch it disapproved of, became an inspiration for the American Revolutionaries. Thus the study of political thought turned to constitutional liberalism and the need to control powerful government. Montesquieu (1689-1755) believed that this could only be done by separating the powers of the judiciary, legislature and executive from each other. Rousseau (1712-1778), with his belief in equality and sovereignty belonging to the people, challenged all previous ideas about authority.

After the American and French Revolutions obedience was no longer either a habit or an accepted and expected pattern of behaviour. Conflict among the people, who were rarely even 90 per cent in favour of any proposal, had to be assumed. The arrival of the Common Man and the pluralistic society meant that philosophic thinking about politics could no longer be the simple matter of the relationship between the individual and the state.

This is only the briefest summary of that part of most political science syllabuses known as political philosophy or political theory. (In Chapters 2 and 3 more recent developments are discussed.) It is possible to make a distinction between these two rubrics. Political philosophy is more concerned with implicit assumptions and internal logic, while political theory tends to be more related to intellectual influences and to cultural and historical environments, but the terms are sometimes used interchangeably

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Date: 2015-02-03; view: 785