A HISTORY OF (WESTERN) POLITICAL THOUGHT

Alan Ryan, On Politics, Book One: A History of Political Thought: Herodotus to Machiavelli (New York & London: Liveright Publishing/ W.W. Norton, 2012) ("Plato held that rhetoric was exactly the reverse of philosophy. The aim of philosophy is to understand things as they really are, no matter how they may appear; it is the deceptiveness of appearances that makes philosophy necessary. Philosophy is the art of seeing through appearances to discern the hidden reality." Id. at 41. "Bertrand Russell, a committed atheist, claimed that nobody should run a school who didn't have a deep conviction of the reality of original sin. He was not alluding to the Fall; he meant that the desire to commit pointlessly unkind, unjust, and treacherous acts is deeply ingrained in children and that teachers who do not acknowledge this grim truth will have a hard time." Id. at 189. "Humanism originated in the need for educated lawyers. Technical and formal instruction in the law was not concerned with the literary graces; but the so-called dictatores, men who drafted documents, drew up contracts for merchants and others, and handled the governmental correspondence of the Italian cities, had to write well. They needed an education in humane letters, and such an education also became part of the prelegal education of lawyers. Familiarity with literary texts bred an interest in their quality as literature, and a more sophisticated historical and philological approach to authorship and interpretation rapidly followed. The possession of literary and linguistic skills became a source of pride among aristocratic and royal families. Princes and princesses were forced to learn the Greek that Saint Augustine had balked at; Queen Elizabeth I, to take one famous instance, was a more than competent scholar." Id. at 292. From the bookjacket: "Three decades in the making, On Politics excitedly bridges two and a half thousand years of Western history and political thought, creating a dialogue between past and present that illuminates the foundational  ideas and aspirations of our civilization...." "Distilling a half century's career of teaching political theory at Oxford and Princeton Universities, Alan Ryan examines the central philosophical tenets that govern human behavior and society. Asking fundamental question--such as What does it mean to be 'free'? How can human beings best govern themselves? How does one rule justly?--Ryan, in echoing the ideas of John Dewey, demonstrates that 'the role of philosophy was less to seek truth than to enhance experience'." "In Book One, Ryan introduces the basic tenets of Greek democracy, in which societies, whose citizens largely shared sovereign authority , depended in the existence of slaves to free them to undertake their civic duties. Whether examining Socrates, who challenged Homer's commonsense view that 'the good life consists of gratifying our impulses'; Plato, who felt that good government is best entrusted to men who are not consumed with ambition; or Aristotle, who believed that the best government was led by natural aristocrats and institutions with those run by our ancient forebears. Continuing his examination of the ancient world with Roman philosophy, exemplified by the statesman Cicero and the soldier-turned-historian Polybius, Ryan demonstrates that the constitutions of modern states owe far more to the Roman republics--with their combined political and military success--than to Athenian democracy." "Masterfully blending philosophy and history, Ryan relates in Part II of this volume how the Catholic Church became the West's dominant political structure after the collapse of the Roman Empire. Augustine's conception of man's fallen nature created the philosophical justification for the Christian skepticism of the value of earthly politics that lasted nearly a thousand years. Indeed, no philosopher would be more influential in creating the political ethos of the Dark Ages than Augustine, whose bleak and often apocalyptic theology would influence the subsequent history of Europe long after the medieval period. Recognizing that political thinking in the eight centuries between Augustine and Aquinas is resistant to analysis, this first volume concludes with the first glimmers of modern thinking through the rise of humanism, particularly the writings of Erasmus and Thomas More, as well as the birth of the Reformation, as reflected though the political writings of Luther and Jean Calvin. " Concluding with Machiavelli and the rise of the modern state, Ryan shows how Machiavelli's emphasis on the amoral character of successful government and his conviction that a successful republic must reflect the imperial ambitions of ancient Rome would become issues that governments would inevitably have to grapple with in the centuries to come.").

Alan Ryan, On Politics, Book Two: A History of Political Thought: Hobbes to the Present (New York & London: Liveright Publishing/ W.W. Norton, 2012) ("Hobbes regarded pride as a peculiarly antisocial emotion; political arrangements had to subdue it, if there was to be peace." Id. at 428. "In the First Treatise Locke discusses the question of the rights over other people's property conferred by sheer necessity. He takes Aquinas's view that if we have the resources to secure some persons from starving and we do not use them, our superfluity is really theirs. That is, we cannot stand fast on our property rights and say that although it would be a kindly act for us to help them, it is our bread or grain or whatever, so they have no right to it; Locke's view is that if their need is urgent enough, they have such a right, and that it is theirs. It is impossible to guess what Locke would have said under the circumstances of a twenty-first-century industrial economy, but on the face of it, any wealthy person who complains about his or her taxes going to the poor has made a mistake about the ownership of their income above the level at which his welfare would be severely under threat. Conversely, nobody who can labor but in unwilling to do so has any claim to assistance from anyone else. Lock's views on property make the sort of socialism that regards all private property as illicit illegitimate from the outset, but they do not exclude the creation of a welfare state." Id. at 478. "The morality of revolution is an easy topic; nothing save the direst emergency, as Hume observed, justifies one man sheathing his sword in the belly of another. Since that is obvious, the interesting issue is the causal question: why it is that, given the innumerable reasons people have for discontent and disaffection, disaffection so rarely breaks out in insurrection and that insurrection so rarely turns into revolution? It is not as though the world is so obviously just that the disadvantaged have no reason to wonder whether upheaval would yield dividends; indeed the speed with which insurrections spread as soon as the authorities appear to have lost control suggests that many of us have no particular attachment to whatever regime we live under. Why do the habits that keep us obedient work so effectively so much of the time and break down so swiftly on the rare occasions when they do? We have not made much progress in answering the question in the two centuries since [Edmund] Burke; he posed the question but had other matters on his mind than answering it in those terms." Id. at 633-634. "[John Stuart] Mill was fearful of the philistinism of Bentham's utilitarianism, exemplified by his famous remark that 'quantities of pleasures being equal, pushpins is as good as poetry,' because he though Bentham encouraged the worse effects of democracy. In several essays in the 1839s, Mill described a tendency of modern society for 'masses to predominate over individuals'; he meant that society was increasingly dominated by public opinion rather than single, outstanding individuals, that the genius of the age was to organize large numbers of people into joint activities rather than inspire single individuals to do great deeds. Even before reading Tocqueville, Mill was convinced that an age which thought itself as the age of the individual, because it believed in the economics of self-interest and because the religious constraints of an earlier age had largely fallen away, was in truth an age of mass opinion and mass action. The individual of whom society was composed acted as a mass. Tocqueville reinforced Mill's doubt; he described America as a country in which there was less real freedom of thought than anywhere else in the world. Yet it had a Bill of Rights, elaborate legal arrangement to secure individual freedom, and a collective enthusiasm for exploration and taming the frontier. According to Tocqueville, it had neither taste nor talent for encouraging individuals to think for themselves." Id. at 710-711. "It was a philosopher who said that the unexamined life is not worth living, and nobody other than philosophers has ever found the claim wholly compelling." Id. at 831. Ha! From the bookjacket: "This second volume of On Politics examines the idea that lie behind and were provoked by the creation of the modern state, be it America's democracy, the constitutional monarchies that first arose out of medieval Europe, or the totalitarian regimes that found their cruelest expression in the twentieth century. Demonstrating that creative thinking about our political condition did not come to an end with Marx, On Politics integrates the major political, social, and technological forces of the last century into one grand narrative, showing how the political ideas of the past continue to challenge our own times." "The glimmers of a secular political philosophy initially appeared during the Renaissance. When combined with the new scientific understanding of the world exemplified by Galileo and Newton, these revolutions in politics and learning would create a political reality so profoundly novel as to make the medieval world fundamentally unrecognizable. The modern ways of thinking about the state can be said to have begun with Thomas Hobbes, who ... inverted Aristotle's view of politics by arguing that 'we come together to establish a political community not out of a sociable impulse to pursue the good life in common but ... for the sake of avoiding the greatest of all evils, death.' Whether through John Locke, that most deceptive of writers, who believed that 'government possesses authority only within constitutional bounds' and that citizens have every right to declare war on their government 'if it exceeds those bounds,' or Rousseau, who had the temerity 'to remove the burden of original sin from human nature and place it squarely on the back of society,' as well as many other philosophers, we see the creation of a modern political state, whose leaders and citizens acted with increasing autonomy from divine or feudal control." "Nowhere does this autonomy become more pronounced than with the American Revolution, a defining event in the history of political philosophy, yet with obvious and indelible roots in the philosophical past. The Founding Fathers, Jefferson especially, were collectively what Cicero longed to be, the creator of a nontyrannical republic, while the Declaration of Independence was as much a Lockean document as any. The effects of both the American and French Revolutions in particular, in which old forms of aristocratic privilege were legally abolished, would play a crucial role in the evolution of European political thinking, especially with Alexis de Tocqueville and Karl Marx, whose philosophical influence, among others, Ryan examines in the concluding chapters of the section devoted to 'Modernity'." "In the final section of 'The World after Marx,' Ryan chronicles a chain of twentieth-century revolutions that have all too often been preludes to dictatorships, prompting him to reflect whether an unhealthy society has substituted mass tastes and inclinations for higher cultural and political standards. Whether writing about colonial imperialism, communist ideology, totalitarian excesses, or the twentieth-century cult of leadership, Ryan chillingly illustrates what ordinary citizens can do when influenced by ideological or religious passion, bamboozled by rabble-rousing demagogues, or beset by hysterical fears. Demonstrating how, particular after 1945, nationalism has consistently trumped utopian or socialist visions, Ryan notes that 'racism . . . is one of the standing infirmities of the human mind,' yet he optimistically concludes that only through our understanding and engagement with politics can citizens of contemporary democracies loosen the grip of ideological and religious passion.").