by Andrew Lynn
Classic Political Philosophy for the Modern Man
Andrew Lynn has a Ph.D. in Renaissance literature from Cambridge University. He has lectured in Western civilization in Beijing and now practises law with a particular interest in the field of international dispute resolution.
www.andrewlynn.com
Classic Political Philosophy for the Modern Man
Andrew Lynn
Howgill House Books
www.howgillhousebooks.com
Copyright © Andrew Lynn 2019
ISBN 978-1-912360-19-2
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Contents
Introduction
1. Plato, Republic
2. Aristotle, Politics
3. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince & Discourses
4. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
5. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government & A Letter Concerning Toleration
6. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality & The Social Contract
7. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
8. Jeremy Bentham, Anarchical Fallacies
9. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
10. Frédéric Bastiat, The Law
11. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
12. Theodore Roosevelt, Citizenship in a Republic
Conclusion
Bibliography
Also Available
Introduction
This is a dangerous book: what is contained here has the potential to awaken you to new ways of thinking not only about your own political condition but also about the political condition of the civilization of which you are a part.
For sure, you can read it—exoterically, one might say—as an introduction to the greatest political philosophers of the Western tradition. In the course of twelve chapters, we cover the best part of two and a half millennia of political thinking, providing introductions to and extracts from the most profoundly influential works from ancient Greece and the Renaissance all the way through to the early twentieth century. The selection itself is largely canonical: we begin with the seminal Republic and Politics of Plato and Aristotle respectively, before moving on to introduce the acknowledged master of the dark arts of statecraft (Machiavelli), the great apologist for absolutism (Hobbes), the herald of enlightenment and contractarianism (Locke), the standard-bearer of revolutionary republicanism (Rousseau), the founder of modern conservatism (Burke), the architect of utilitarianism (Bentham), the anatomist of democracy (Tocqueville), the godfather of libertarianism (Bastiat), the spokesman of classical liberalism (John Stuart Mill), and the advocate of political pragmatism—and American president—Theodore Roosevelt. In the choice of authors and texts to present, every effort has been made to give you the most readable and enduringly relevant of the traditional classics in an orderly way; there’s been no attempt different or edgy for the sake of being different or edgy, or for advancing any particular political agenda.
Classic Political Philosophy for the Modern Man accordingly presents an affirmative political culture and ethos that represents the Western tradition in its broadest scope. That tradition, viewed as a whole, can best be described as a restless search for superior modes of political organization and for a more productive view of man’s role in the state. Under that broad description, we can reasonably assert of the tradition other tendencies. It is, in the first place, marked by a spirit of free inquiry: dogmas, assumptions, and social norms are subjected to the most intense questioning and the most vigorous scrutiny. It prioritizes rationality over either conventionalism or emotionality: even the most conservative (Burke) makes reasoned argument in favour of his traditionalism; and even the most emotional (Rousseau) bases his passionately held views on a carefully worked through investigation as to the fundamental nature of the state. And it conceives of the state as a potential source of self-realization for its citizens in order to explore how that can best be made to happen. Of course, you don’t need to take my word for it: there is no better way to appreciate these—and other—features of this tradition than to read the words of the great philosophers themselves, and that is why they are provided here.
This book’s uniqueness, however, lies not so much in providing an introduction to Western political philosophy, as in providing a way of understanding this tradition as a source of practical wisdom for the current era. The great Western thinkers really do, as a rule, approach the fundamental questions of political philosophy with great courage and curiosity, and with the minimum of inhibition or self-censorship—so much so that they retain the power to shock us out of our complacency and towards new insights even today. Universalism, democracy, human rights, toleration, socialism, equalism—full-blooded critical consideration of these Holiest of Holies has been, since around the end of the Second World War, outside the parameters of debate in establishment and mainstream circles, and to subject them to serious political inquiry has been taboo in all but the most free-thinking of contexts. This is wholly a manifestation of the prejudices of our own era: Plato and Aristotle, for example, both looked dimly on democracy; Locke, father of liberalism as he may be, thought that toleration had sharply defined limits; Burke and Bentham poured scorn on the notion of natural rights; Tocqueville anticipated the connection between equalism and tyranny; Bastiat exposed socialism as plunder; John Stuart Mill alerted us to the oppressiveness of social conformity and self-censorship; and Roosevelt urged upon us the need for a healthy national consciousness and a future for our people. Critical inquiry into these and related areas is not, as is sometimes thought, at the periphery of our tradition; it is at that tradition’s very core. This, then, is the esoteric reading of this book: it connects what has always been present all along—hidden in plain sight, so to speak—in the thinking of our forebears.
Behind our contemporary reluctance to address these fundamental issues is what we can conveniently refer to as the ‘complacency of the current era’. There is, of course, no shortage whatsoever of academic and other ‘critical’ commentary produced in relation to the very same canonical authors and texts that you find in this volume. For the most part, though, this commentary is critical only in the sense that it is the original works that are subjected to criticism; rare and more challenging indeed is it for the insights of the philosophers under inquiry to be used as a base for reconsidering the conventional political viewpoints and platitudes of our own era. It is a relatively simple, uncontroversial, and uninformative task, for example, to criticize Plato for his advocacy of a caste system based on eugenics or to review Aristotle’s Politics in order to signal one’s disapproval with his opinion on ‘natural slaves’; it is likewise uncontentious and unilluminating to observe that the strict utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill risks providing justification for a ‘tyranny of the majority’. Considerably more difficult, controversial, and informative, would be to take seriously Plato’s conception of how democracy tends towards tyranny or Aristotle’s view that the purpose of the state is not security or economic prosperity but cultivation of the excellence of its members; likewise to explore in good faith John Stuart Mill’s arguments that state education is ‘a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another’ and that overpopulating a country, by increasing the pressure of competition, constitutes ‘a serious offence against all who live by the remuneration of their labour’.
It is the task of high-end thinkers to think the unthinkable, not in ord
er to reach outlandish conclusions, but rather to ensure that the issues in question have been approached from all possible angles; this activity is supported by what has been called ‘negative capability’, or the capability of being in uncertainties without prematurely driving for a conclusion. The philosophical tradition that is represented, in part, by the thinkers and texts in this book can help us to do this, but only if we retain minds that remain at least provisionally open for the duration of the task. If we assume that the consensus of the current era is correct in all fundamental respects, and that to the extent the philosophers of the past are not in agreement with this consensus they must be either in error or simply morally defective in some way, we will never be able to do it.
Openness to diverse viewpoints matters because human beings are highly conventional animals. We know already, through social psychology if not otherwise, of the power of conformity and ‘social proof’: the experiments of Solomon Asch, for example, have shown that people are likely to conform to the choice of the majority, even if it is plainly wrong, and that they do so not only through a desire to fit in, but also because their very perceptions are skewed towards those of the group. Whole societies can be affected to the extent that their most perspicacious minds are unable to see what would be obvious to even a relative simpleton at another time in history. Alexis de Tocqueville, from the perspective of an eighteenth-century Frenchman, observed as much when commenting upon Aristotle and his contemporaries: ‘The most profound and capacious minds of Rome and Greece,’ he said, ‘were never able to reach the idea, at once so general and so simple, of the common likeness of men, and of the common birthright of each to freedom: they strove to prove that slavery was in the order of nature, and that it would always exist.’[1] When the inbuilt human tendency to conform is exacerbated by the forces of compulsory state education, ambient propaganda, and monitoring and control of thought and speech, then you have a heady mix indeed.
Openness to diverse points of view also matters because we stand at a time in history when powerful and concerted forces are directed at the masses so as to restrict the parameters of debate and cut out or paralyze dissent. We are, as a result, witnessing an unprecedented coarsening and debasing of our public discourse. Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals (1971) now appears to be the playbook for partisans across the political spectrum: in place of reasoned debate, we have an unremitting stream of smears and ad hominem abuse, which when unsuccessful are followed up by attempts to deplatform adversaries or harm them in their personal lives or careers. This is healthy for no-one.
And openness to diverse points of view matters because those words and concepts that sound, superficially at least, so attractive—democracy, human rights, toleration, socialism, equality—can all be, and have all been, deployed in the cause of evil. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning author who had personal experience of life under a murderous totalitarian regime, gave a speech not long after his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1974.[2] The speech was a survey of that regime and a warning that the darkness it represented was still capable of infecting other societies—including the Western democracies. Solzhenitsyn explained first that the leaders of the revolution were not, in fact, workers, but émigré intellectuals, and that the real workers quickly learned their place once the revolution was complete. He noted that his audience may have been surprised by what he called the ‘alliance between our Communist leaders and your capitalists’.[3] And at the end of the speech he added:
I would like to call upon America to be more careful with its trust and prevent those wise persons who are attempting to establish even finer degrees of justice and even finer legal shades of equality—some because of their distorted outlook, others because of short-sightedness and still others out of self interest—from falsely using the struggle for peace and for social justice to lead you down a false road. Because they are trying to weaken you; they are trying to disarm your strong and magnificent country in the face of this fearful threat—one which has never been seen before in the history of the world.[4]
Here Solzhenitsyn expressly recognized that, just as in Russia, those who sought to overturn the traditional order in the West would do so under the auspices of peace and social justice. It is absurd to think that they would do anything other than that; absurd to think they would appear in their true colours and advertising their true intentions. In this context, the best resistance we can make is to think these ideas through precisely, critically, and profoundly; what we must not do is deploy the rhetoric of social justice merely as a form of virtue-signalling or—worse—a convenient tool to shut our interlocutors down.
The philosophers and their works discussed in this book call out to us from another era. They could never have imagined that Western man would have adapted so comprehensively to the soft (and occasionally hard) despotism of the modern all-encompassing state that—while nominally respecting its subjects’ human rights—deigns to monitor and regulate their most trivial of actions and speech while traducing their historic traditions and freely liberating them of their wealth. Let us not forget how much has changed: standing armies were hardly seen in Europe until the seventeenth century; the most significant modern taxes (such as income tax and estate tax) were unknown in the English-speaking world until the end of the eighteenth century; and it was only in the early nineteenth century that modern professional police forces were established in England and the United States. The right of citizens to bear arms—a right long understood by thinkers from Aristotle and Machiavelli to William Blackstone and Thomas Jefferson to be essential to a free people—is now, even where constitutionally protected as in the United States, an increasingly contentious matter, despite the obvious fact that a state with full and permanent monopoly on the use of force is a state that will be able to expand its power and reach with nothing very much to stand in its way. ‘What country can preserve its liberties,’ asked Founding Father Thomas Jefferson rhetorically, ‘if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?’[5]
Just as in the parable of the boiling frog who does not perceive the gradual increase in the temperature of the water and is boiled alive, so we have by steady increments lost much of our liberty without realizing it. The works in this book cannot give that back; what they can do is to raise our consciousness of the many alternative paths we could have taken—and perhaps, if we have nerve enough, still can take.
* * *
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve, 7th ed. (New York: Edward Walker, 1847), Part II, Chapter III, 15. ↵
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Warning to the West (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), 3-50. ↵
Ibid, 11. ↵
Ibid, 49-50. ↵
Thomas Jefferson to William Stephens Smith, 13 November 1787. ↵
1
Plato, Republic
Introduction
The first great attempt in Western thought to present a detailed account of the ‘just state’ is that provided by Plato in his Republic.
Modern man has a great deal to learn from Plato’s approach. His influence on Western philosophy has been incomparable—to the extent that it has been said that the European philosophical tradition is a series of ‘footnotes to Plato’. What is more important for our purposes, however, is that he offers, in the general thrust of his work if not in the details, a way out of the stifling uniformity of much of what passes for political thinking at our current moment in history.
Plato was born in 428-7 BC during the early years of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta and their respective allies. A student of Socrates, teacher of Aristotle, and founder of the Academy, Plato’s life was a life of the mind. But he was also an aristocrat—the scion of a wealthy and politically active family—who observed at first hand the defeat of the Athenian democracy at the hands of Sparta and who had watched that same democracy put to death his tutor, Socrates, for impiety and corrupting of the Ath
enian youth. It is in this way that history taught the young philosopher that the Spartan-style polity had a great deal in its favour as against a democracy not only incompetent to defend the state but also high-handed, illiberal, censorious, and—ultimately—murderous.
The broad outlines of the Republic are well known. It is a Socratic dialogue about justice, the just state, and the just man. Plato’s teacher, Socrates, and several of Socrates’ interlocutors, including Plato’s brothers Glaucon and Adeimantus, begin by considering the meaning of justice and whether the just man is happier than the unjust man. They then proceed to discuss the form that the ideal state (referred to as kallipolis or ‘beautiful city’) would take. With even greater practical significance, for the modern reader at least, they ultimately go on to expound upon not only the nature and characteristics of the main political regimes—including oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny—but also the kind of men such regimes tend to produce and the trajectories such regimes tend to follow.
What, then, is Plato’s view of justice and the just state? The Greek term used by Plato, δίκη (dike), is broader than what we understand by the word ‘justice’, and has been rendered in English as ‘all-in rightness’. The just man, on this formulation, is he who gains mastery over himself. He has the internal parts of himself under good management and control: he does not allow the different principles within himself to do work other than their own. Those inner principles are three: a rational element (nous), a spirited element (thumos), and a desiring element (epithumia). In a well-governed soul, the rational element is the ruling principle, and is allied with the spirited element, so that both of them can keep guard over the desiring element, which in chasing after false pleasures exposes a man to internal disruption and weakens him as against his external enemies. It is this inward state of harmony and proper self-management that the just man brings to the conduct of all the activities and affairs of his life, from attending to the wants of his body to engagements in business and politics. To produce justice is to put the parts of the soul in their natural relations of authority and subservience; to disturb this relationship is to produce injustice.
