Part of my college essays series: This is one of the essays I wrote during the political theory general exam for my PhD. The exam was an approximately 15-hour marathon session, involving 6 out of 12 essay questions, for a final total of 33 double-spaced pages written without access to any notes or sources. In this one, I threw my Voegelinian professor Ellis Sandoz a few bones. I no longer have the original exam questions to which I responded below, so bear with me through the beginning of the essay.

Questions one and three seem strongly related but have a somewhat different focus. Both interest me but I will attempt to focus on the former while nevertheless attempting to answer the latter at least in part, owing to the last element of the first question having to do with the subject of poet philosophers. Hence, I will write a critical essay on the following quotation:

Euripides shows us that our self-creation as political beings is not irreversible. The political, existing by and in nomos, can also cease to hold us. The human being, as a social being, lives suspended between beast and god, defined against both of these self-sufficient creatures by its open and vulnerable nature, the relational character of its most basic concerns. But if being human is a matter of the character of one’s trust and commitment, rather than an immutable matter of natural fact, then the human being is also the being that can most easily cease to be itself — either by moving (Platonically) upwards towards the self-sufficiency of the divine, or by slipping downward towards the self-sufficiency of doggishness.

I will attempt to address this quotation in light of the questions raised and with regard to my own research interests in the possibility of transcending the liberal/communitarian debate with a form of Aristotelian liberalism.

Civilization is susceptible to rigidification and decay on the one hand and disintegration on the other, with the latter usually as a result of the former. The modern state-of-nature theorizing of the Enlightenment-liberal social-contract tradition provides an interesting case study of a philosophical anthropology built upon Enlightenment metaphysics and epistemology, particularly atomism, materialism, mechanism, and hypostatized rationalism and empiricism. In this worldview, man in the state of nature is a beast, the worst of them, Locke’s unrealistically benign version notwithstanding. Ethical and political philosophy built upon these foundations, particularly when ethical language and action is impoverished by a single-minded focus on the proliferation of rights (with the result of trivializing them), is bound to produce impoverished human beings, the sort of atomistic individuals communitarians have accused liberalism of necessarily producing. The heirs of the Enlightenment (even Nietzsche) have sometimes lapsed into holding up this beast as if he were a god to be universally emulated.

On the other hand, communitarians have been just as prone to confuse convention (nomos) with nature (kosmos) and dogmatize or hypostatize a particular set of cultural values and institutions as the Good from which they themselves and others have no natural or conventional right to deviate. Deviation is labeled atomistic individualism, immorality, the mark of the beast. It is overlooked or forgotten that while man’s telos  [end] is eudaimonia [well-being, flourishing] and his telos involves social and political life, this telos does not have one unitary and universal form for everyone and must be freely chosen. Moreover, and in any case, man is not a god possessed of omnipotence, omniscience, and infallibility. The communitarian impulse is always in danger of falling into paternalism and totalitarianism.

Both the atomistic god-beast and the communitarian god-automaton cease to be human. Indeed, are the two really so very different? Both are capable of the most inhuman atrocities.

Freedom or community is a false alternative — for there is another option: freedom in community — but, for the most part, neither side has yet to formulate an adequate conception of it in my estimation. I do not mean to suggest that there is any final solution or utopia that can be reached, however. Human existence in the metaxy — our open and vulnerable … our rational, individual and social nature — make this a tension and a struggle that each of us must face within ourselves and together every day of our lives, and every generation.

Some illustrative examples of this tension in Euripedes’ Hecuba and Aeschylus’ Oresteia are in order.

Hecuba is set after the Trojan war, with the victorious Greek army on its long journey home but stranded for lack of wind for their sails and haunted by the ghost of Achilles demanding a sacrifice. Hecuba, the Trojan queen, and her daughter, Polyxena, have been taken captive by Agamemnon; and Hecuba’s son, Polydorus, had before the war been sent to the safety of a friend’s home, the Thracian king Polymestor. Polymestor tragically takes advantage of Hecuba’s misfortune to slay Polydorus and keep for himself the great wealth that had been sent with Polydorus from Troy for safekeeping. Polymestor chose to break with his moral and traditional responsibilities as host and friend, forsaking convention.

Agamemnon chooses to give up Polyxena as a sacrifice to appease Achilles, acceding to the demands of the soldiers who were instigated by the demagoguery of the wily Odysseus. Here we see the misuse of convention and the tyranny of the community over the individual in the name of the alleged “prudential” necessity of achieving the supposed common good at the expense of an individual’s good. Hecuba unfortunately takes out her revenge against Polymestor on his sons, but in defending the justness of her actions appeals to a higher law and leaves her fate up to reason and her ability to persuade.

Fast forwarding a bit, the Oresteia is set during and after Agamemnon’s return home. The Trojan war was tragically begun ostensibly for honor and to reclaim a wayward or stolen bride (Helen). Agamemnon has been away at war for some ten years and has brought back a mistress, the prophetess Cassandra. In the meantime, his wife has grown estranged and resentful and has taken up with another man who has a familial obligation, or so he perceives, to slay Agamemnon. Agamemnon is slain by his wife and her new lover, who are both in turn slain by Agamemnon’s son, Orestes, driven by bloodlust and his own perceived familial obligation for revenge (and, admittedly, at the instigation of Apollo). For the sin of slaying his own mother, Orestes is hounded by the Furies (or his own guilt?) and flees to Athens where Athena presides over a trial in which Orestes is found innocent of wrongdoing and the Furies are appeased with a place in Athenian, democratic society.

While admittedly not ideal examples, the plays Hecuba and Oresteia both movingly portray trajedies that could have been avoided, highlight the dangers of renouncing one’s humanity in favor of either pole of our tensional existence, of renouncing either freedom or community, while at the same time providing a ray of hope that reason, persuasion, and a respect for difference can help us avoid further tragedy by stopping the cycle of violence. And, in the worst case scenario, surely it is more Greek and Christian (and less modern!) to die human rather than by our own actions to live an inhuman life. The nature of human existence is such that neither freedom nor community can ever be completely eradicated from the hearts and minds of men.

With regard to the alleged conflict between poetry and philosophy, and the question of the poet philosopher, I think this conflict is an illusory one and both the poet and the philosopher have value, especially the poet philosopher. Ever since I was twelve years old I have had a deep and abiding fascination with and interest in fiction, particularly fantasy and science fiction, graphic novels, and comic books. It is my belief that the best of these writers, even of popular fiction, are as good if not better observers and critics of the world than most philosophers and social scientists and at worst it is difficult to tell which is the more pernicious. Indeed, one can argue that the best poets¹ are at least to some degree philosophers. But, if taken separately both poetry and philosophy have value, then surely their combination is all the more valuable. In isolation philosophers have a dreadful tendency to become detached from the world and poets can become lost in the meaningless, trivial, or pernicious dramatization of concretes.

There is no guarantee a poet philosopher will not philosophize and dramatize error, but the combination could help to mitigate the countervailing tendencies and keep, so to speak, one’s philosophical side down to earth and one’s poetic side mindful of the philosophical import of his work. With this in mind and in light of the foregoing, Plato’s Republic appears to me to be a philosophical tragedy, for despite being a poet philosopher, Plato’s ambivalence toward politics and poetry perhaps led him to too single-minded a focus on the transcendent and a detachment from the immanent. Plato’s philosopher tragically removes himself from the polis for want of a realistic standard for political and social action.²

1. I’m using “poetry” very broadly here to mean artist, particularly those who craft their art in words, including prose and what we today consider poetry. ↩

2. See, e.g., Claes G. Ryn, “The Politics of Transcendence: The Pretentious Passivity of Platonic Idealism,” Humanitas, Volume XII, No. 2, 1999. ↩

In this essay I will address how the American framers conceived of liberty as well as how the Constitution they designed was supposed to secure it and whether it has in fact done so. Stating my conclusions right out, which I will then seek to explain and justify as best I can in the space and time allotted, I think that though the Constitution was a grand and very admirable attempt at securing liberty it was at the outset doomed to failure in the long run in large part due to inner contradictions and inadequate safeguards.

By and large the framers, and the American people in general, conceived of liberty in Lockean and republican terms. Locke’s influence was particularly prevalent owing largely to the influence of John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon’s Cato’s Letters, which popularized and enhanced the popularity of Lockean individual rights arguments. This is not to neglect the importance of republicanism and of Christianity; the framers in particular were steeped in republicanism, and Christianity was indeed a formative influence on the early Americans, particularly through the thousands of fiery political sermons of the day, many of which also employed Lockean rights language (such as Elisha Williams in particular, but also Jonathan Mayhew and John Allen).

However, liberalism and republicanism were in tension from the outset, and Christianity has been employed effectively in support of both sides. On the one hand, the sole justification and purpose of government is the protection of each and every individual’s rights to life, liberty, and property. Consistently applied this means that all morals legislation and economic regulation are unjust and invalid. On the other hand, republicans like Algernon Sidney and John Adams feared that liberty unrestrained will degenerate into license, that virtue ought to be promoted and/or required, and vice discouraged and/or prohibited, with the coercive and legal power of the state; and that republican or civic virtue is necessary and must be somehow enforced and inculcated in the people if liberty and the republic are to be sustained. While some liberals have and continue to deny the virtue of virtue, ethical neutrality or relativism is not an inherent feature of liberalism and many liberals do indeed hold and advocate firm moral convictions.

The Declaration of Independence explicitly used Lockean, common law, and republican language. The Constitution itself was an attempt to establish a government that would be responsive to the people, who are the sovereign(s), and limited to securing peace and order by protecting individual rights. It was difficult for the framers to be consistently liberal, however. The three-fifths compromise and related compromises legitimizing slavery in the Constitution came out of the Convention debates. The Anti-Federalists decried the lack of a Bill of Rights, and the Constitution was not ratified until the American people were satisfied that one would indeed be added. The ratification process itself was marred by chicanery and coercion in a number of instances, particularly Pennsylvania. Shays’s Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion serve as early examples that the state governments and the new national government installed by the Constitution, and those who lead them, left something to be desired in terms of the protection of liberty. From the outset there were attempts to fund public works at the taxpayers’ expense and regulate, tax, or prohibit various sorts of peaceful and voluntary activities.

Ultimately, I think that the Constitution gave the national government too much power. And I must agree with the Anti-Federalists, Thomas Paine, and the preferences of Thomas Jefferson for local democracy, that the United States started off too large territorially to be a constitutionally limited republic, and it continued to grow thereafter. Montesquieu, too, would have objected to a republic of such size, as even Rousseau would have. The fundamental inner contradiction of the state created by the US Constitution, however, and of all modern nation-states generally, is that it claims a territorial monopoly on the legal use of force and of ultimate decision-making. By its very nature then, the state, insofar as it attempts to enforce that monopoly, necessarily contradicts itself by violating the rights of any individuals who dissent. Tacit, implicit, or hypothetical consent cannot be assumed.¹ As one might expect of such a monopoly, both from economic theory and human history, the political elites, plutocrats, and other special interests have never run out of opportunities and “prudential” reasons for expanding government power and extending government intervention at home and abroad.

The principle of separation of powers with checks and balances embodied in the Constitution was an ingenious modern, and very American, innovation and adaptation of the classical mixed republic to the American context. The classical mixed regime attempted to institutionalize competition between social classes as embodied by kingly, aristocratic, and democratic elements of a commonwealth. Lacking royalty and a nobility, and drawing upon distinctions made by Locke and Montesquieu between executive, legislative, and judicial powers, the US Constitution embodies the separation of these three powers more thoroughly than the constitution of England while mixing them somewhat in such a way that each branch would be led to check and balance the ambitions of the others. The arguments for this are laid out in the writings of Publius and John Adams. This constitutional separation of powers can be thought of as an attempt to simulate market competition; however, situated within the fundamentally monopolistic context of a state, this simulated market competition must theoretically and has historically proven to be inadequate to the task. The three national branches and the multiple federalist levels of government (national, state, local) have time and again found it in their interest and the interests of their constituents and political allies to compromise and cooperate in the expansion of government power at the expense of individual liberty.

The writings, speeches, and actions of Abraham Lincoln provide an eloquent illustration of this conflict between liberty and power. The so-called Civil War represents the death-blow of federalism, and only some seventy years after the ratification of the Constitution. While the war had the salutary effect of ending slavery (a reprehensible institution) in the South, this was neither Lincoln’s original intent nor even in the end his primary purpose. The United States is, to my knowledge (and excepting slave rebellions), the only country to end slavery primarily by means of violence and war; and all in the name of saving the Union. After the Civil War, the US government can no longer justifiably be said to rest upon the consent of the people, if it even could before.

From the late nineteenth century onward, Marxism and socialism began to increase in popularity first among the intellectuals and then the poor of America. America’s first (progressive) imperialist war was fought against Spain in the 1890’s under the leadership of McKinley. Progressivism picked up speed in both domestic and foreign policy with the social welfare policies and warfare socialism of Wilson and then FDR. Government social-welfare programs quickly crowded out the fraternal societies and other voluntary social-welfare associations that predominated in America (and England) in the nineteenth and earlier centuries. Tocqueville, in his Democracy in America, once glowingly reported on the peculiarly American independence and propensity to spontaneously form voluntary associations for whatever need arose, but that independence and propensity are gradually being eroded by a growing dependency upon the progressive welfare-warfare state. Appeals for a more classical liberal approach to politics by such thinkers as Henry David Thoreau (Civil Disobedience), Herbert Spencer (Social Statics), Albert J. Nock (Our Enemy, The State), William Graham Sumner, Randolph Bourne (“War is the Health of the State”) and others have largely gone unheeded. Both major parties and the general populace now support a welfare-warfare state far removed from the constitutionally limited republic with which this country began, merely quibbling over specific matters of policy, focus, and rhetoric.

1. The foregoing should not be taken to preclude the maintenance of social order and protection of liberty by some sort of voluntary government and/or informal order, voluntary law, and polycentric rather than monocentric coercive law (such as some historical examples of customary or common law). The arguments in the foregoing and subsequent paragraph have been made, in whole or in part, by the nineteenth-century American individualist anarchist Lysander Spooner as well as by contemporary libertarians Murray Rothbard, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and Roderick Long. ↩

Some scholars, particularly postmoderns, argue that hermeneutical interpretation is essential to “the so-called social sciences of human beings.” Hermeneutical interpretation originated, to my knowledge, in Biblical exegesis. It has since been extended beyond this sphere, but hermeneutical interpretation is still thought of in terms of the interpretation of texts, although no longer limited to written documents. Hermeneutical interpretation can be applied to our life stories and to oral narratives as well. In hermeneutics there is the tendency to view a text as not having a single fixed meaning. Furthermore, the meaning of a text is not determined solely by authorial intent.

Hermeneutics involves a tripartite or trilateral relationship between the author, the text, and the interpreter. The author and the interpreter each bring their own particular horizon of experience to the text. To be sure, the author presumably has a certain purpose in mind in writing or creating his text and intends for it to have a certain meaning. The author is operating within a particular historical context, however, in which words and sentence structure and such have particular meanings that can change with time. The author’s life has involved formative experiences enmeshed in particular ideas and events that have had at least some influence on him, much of which he may not be consciously aware. The same can be said of the interpreter, whose historical experience and language-use may be vastly different from those of the author. And, moreover, since one cannot have direct and complete access to the author’s mind, interpretation is necessary.

There exist a number of hermeneutical techniques. Perhaps the most general is simply that of the hermeneutical circle. When the interpreter engages the text, he brings with him his horizon of experience, his own world so to speak, and he will inevitably begin to engage the text from this standpoint. As he explores the text, he will gain an overall understanding of its meaning to him and what the author might have meant it to mean, but successive and more careful readings will likely lead to reevaluations and readjustments of that overall understanding which in turn will affect successive readings. Ideally there will be some sort of fusing or integration or broadening of horizons in this hermeneutical process. One must be open to different horizons, however, for interpretation to occur.

One particular type of hermeneutical technique was developed by Leo Strauss. This technique focuses on esoteric writing, or hidden meanings built into the text by the author, beneath the exoteric writing, or superficial meaning, of the text. Strauss argues that esoteric writing is likely to occur in times of great persecution, in which the author would likely be condemned, punished, and suppressed for expressing his views openly. In such cases, the interpreter must examine the text carefully for esoteric meaning. There appears to be some controversy as to whether and how much historical context matters in such interpretation. While there may be some usefulness to this technique — some thinkers may very well have been circumspect in their writing — I do see considerable danger in it (as highlighted by Pocock and others). The technique could be used carelessly, seems to presuppose infallibility, consistency, and genius where it might not be warranted, and could also be used for elitist, secretive purpose.

Another technique is the focus on narrative by Ricoeur, and narrative and tradition by MacIntyre. In After Virtue, MacIntyre poses for us an alternative: Nietzsche or Aristotle. He argues in favor of Aristotle but, being of a post-Enlightenment mindset, seeks to reconstruct or reinterpret Aristotle without his metaphysical baggage. Like other contemporary postmoderns, MacIntyre is wary of metaphysics and foundationalism, viewing them as having failed to satisfactorily ground ethics and politics and as being largely responsible for the totalitarian horrors of the 20^th century.

In place of Aristotelian metaphysics, MacIntyre proposes narrative life stories and tradition as foundations for virtue and politics. He argues that narrative and tradition can provide stability and coherence to our moral lives as well as internal and external validity checks. He thus interprets Aristotelian virtue ethics and the polis in light of these lenses. A life of flourishing would then be largely socially constructed. Proper action could then be judged by ourselves for internal validity in light of our life stories and traditions and externally by others in our community and by other communities.

The excessively communitarian interpretation of Aristotle aside, I’m not convinced that narrative and tradition by themselves can provide a foundation that avoids the problems of infinite regress and vicious circularity on the one hand and the communitarian specters of paternalism and totalitarianism on the other. What seems to be missing in this postmodern sort of approach to narrative and tradition is a conception of universal human nature and a deep appreciation of the value of individuality and individual liberty.

Another postmodern approach that also pays attention to the social and historical dimensions of human existence is that of Eric Voegelin. Voegelin’s work also evinces a wariness of metaphysical and foundationalist thinking. Wary of modern hypostatizations, Voegelin became focused on actual experiences and the symbols they engender. He warned against hypostatizing either or both of the poles with which human experience is in tension: the immanent and the transcendent. The life of man takes place in the metaxy, the In-Between, between the mortal and the divine. But neither one of these poles should be thought of apart from the experience of tension toward the divine ground of being.

David Corey has recently criticized Voegelin for a tendency to focus excessively on the transcendent at the expense of the immanent; and Voegelin himself seems to admit this in his letter to Schutz (sp?). I think this bias, if I may call it that, in favor of the transcendent, led Voegelin to focus on the apparent Platonic influences or aspects in Aristotle and ignore or overlook Aristotle’s more practical and positive contributions to ethical and political life: namely, Aristotle’s more down-to-earth contributions to virtue ethics, the good life, and practical action in politics.

Jan Patocka’s case bears some similarities to that of Voegelin. He seeks to return to what he conceives of as the true Socratic teaching, a sort of negative Platonism based on Socratic ignorance (or wisdom). He views the metaphysical thinking of Plato and the more Platonic Socrates as objectifying and concretizing, or hypostatizing, the transcendent Idea, which is ineffable and cannot be adequately expressed by rational thought and speech.

I turn, finally, to Nietzsche and Heidegger. Nietzsche’s interpretive method is genealogical or archaeological. Underlying Nietzsche’s genealogical method is his conception of the will to power, and Nietzsche engages in a genealogy of morality that purports to reveal moral systems of both the master and slave type to be manifestations of the will to power of those who advocate them. Thus, Nietzsche would likely interpret Aristotle’s virtue ethics and political philosophy as a form of master morality. The Athens of Aristotle, after all, was supported by the labor of slaves and valued the aristocratic and intellectual virtues of leisure, contemplation, honor, greatness of soul, and so forth. Aristotle, being one of the well-born himself, simply deemed the traits of his social class — his kind — to be good and, by comparison, those of his social inferiors to be base.

Heidegger, on the other hand, identifies Nietzsche as the last of the metaphysicians, and his will to power as the last gasp of metaphysics. Cartesian subjectivity has in Nietzsche been reduced to the will to power and cut off from the world in its everydayness. Nietzsche’s overman is a radically free self-creator, and radically inauthentic and impoverished. Heidegger employs two hermeneutical techniques: the hermeneutics of everydayness and the hermeneutics of suspicion. The hermeneutics of everydayness seeks to disclose Being in man’s everyday experience. The hermeneutics of suspicion seeks to discover and strip away the metaphysical masks that philosophical thought hitherto and the limits of language place on Being. Like Voegelin’s transcendent and Patocka’s Idea, Being for Heidegger is prior to, above, and beyond familiar ontological categories and predicates. Levinas, in turn, criticized Heidegger for privileging ontology over ethics, or one might say at the expense of ethics, which Levinas argues led Heidegger to embrace national socialism, pagan religiosity, and antihumanism.

The cycle of decline from the best regime to the worst is an important aspect of Plato’s Republic, and not merely for the mundane purposes of history and political science. In elaborating the logic of this decline, Plato couples his discussion of the rank order and decline of the five regimes with five corresponding types of man. For this reason it is necessary to understand the philosophical anthropology underlying Plato’s political philosophy as well as the anthropological principle, i.e., that the city is man writ large. Additionally, and perhaps of equal importance as a clue to Plato’s primary purpose in writing the Republic, we are shown (purposefully?) in the discussion of the cycle of decline the utopian nature of Plato’s “city in speech.”

The five regimes in order of best to worst are kingship or aristocracy, timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny. The corresponding types of man are the kingly or aristocratic man, the timocratic man, the oligarchic man, the democratic man, and the tyrant or tyrannical man. Before delving into the cycle of decline and the natures of these different types of regimes and men, it is necessary to briefly explicate Plato’s philosophical anthropology.

Plato identifies three parts of the ideal polis — the guardians (rulers and auxiliaries) and the general populace — and three corresponding parts of the individual soul: reasoning, spirited, and desiring. Plato also identifies four virtues pertaining to the various parts of the city/soul and the city/soul as a whole, which have come to be known in the classical tradition as the cardinal virtues: wisdom (seemingly sophia for subsequent Platonists and phronesis for Aristotelians), courage, moderation, and justice. Plato argues that a certain group should rule in the city and the reasoning part should rule in the soul; the virtue that pertains specifically to this function of ruling is wisdom, or knowledge of the Good (Agathon). The auxiliaries or soldiers, and the spirited part in the soul, also have a virtue peculiar to them: courage. The general populace of the city and the desiring part of the soul do not have a particular virtue assigned to them, but the virtue of moderation allows all parts of the city/soul to exist in concord and harmony. It is the virtue of justice, however, that makes the virtue of moderation and therefore concord and harmony possible, allows the rulers (rational part) to exercise their (its) wisdom over the other parts, and keeps the courage of the auxiliaries (spirited part) in check. Justice is each part doing and minding its own business. A just city/soul is one in which the part that should rule (the philosopher-king(s)/rational part) does so and the other parts perform their own special functions without attempting to usurp or interfere with the functions of the other parts.

Thus, kingship or aristocracy is the regime in which the philosopher-king or kings rule, and the kingly or aristocratic man is one whose rational part rules his soul, according to the Good. It becomes evident in the beginning of Plato’s discussion of the cycle of decline that the existence of the best regime is dependent on an historical fluke. It depends upon the fortuitous confluence of complex and interdependent historical factors. In order for the best regime to come about a philosopher must gain power of the polis, or a king or aristocracy must become philosophers (or bend his/their ear(s) to a philosopher). Moreover, the conditions must be ripe for the populace to listen to and obey the new philosopher-king and he would nevertheless have to contend with existing traditions and institutions. Moreover, even if the best regime were ever to come about, Plato makes it clear that all things, even the best regime, must inevitably degenerate. This tempts one to speculate that Plato’s Republic is not primarily about the best regime but about justice and the well-ordered soul of a philosopher.

In any case, the discussion of the cycle of decline of regimes and their corresponding types of man is also interesting for more practical political analysis and the philosophical analysis of human psychology. To understand the four imperfect regimes and types of man, it is important to point out that only the best regime and the philosopher are unequivocally oriented toward the Good (or the highest good or summum bonnum). The others are oriented toward a lesser good or, to be more precise, something that might be a good in their proper place in light of the Good if they weren’t made to usurp the place of the Good as the telos of the polis/soul. In the case of a timocracy and the timocratic man, this is honor; of oligarchy and the oligarchic man, wealth; of democracy and the democratic man, freedom; and of tyranny and the tyrannical man, power.

The decline of the best regime begins when the philosopher-kings cease to be identified at a young age correctly and educated properly. Those who would have been better suited to the ranks of the auxiliaries might be given an education and responsibility beyond their abilities or the quality of education of the philosopher kings might deteriorate. The spirited part of the city could become dominant, thus changing the constitution of the city with their love of honor and the value they place on courage and victory in war. In addition to honor, courage, and victory, timocratic man values discipline, manliness, fame and good reputation, etc.

With victory in war comes spoils and with spoils comes wealth. A timocracy can degenerate into an oligarchy as those in power become more enamored with the acquisition of wealth than with honor. The oligarchic man is characterized by his love of wealth and the attendant virtues that make its acquisition more likely (especially in pre-capitalist societies): greed, caution, frugality, discipline, managerial skill, and so forth.

An oligarchy might change to democracy as the son of oligarchic man grows up resenting his father’s single-minded obsession with wealth and all the attendant traits that go along with that obsession. Or he might grow up with an easy life, everything provided for him, but perhaps neglected by his oligarchic father, and possess all the traits necessary for spending his father’s wealth but none of the traits necessary for acquiring and maintaining it. The poor, too, are likely to become resentful of their wealthy masters and also lack the traits necessary for acquiring and maintaining wealth but nevertheless possess the desire to have it and all the benefits it can bring. Thus can an oligarchy degenerate into a democracy as the democratic man rises to power, either peacefully or violently or through a combination thereof.

Democratic man loves freedom; the desiring part rules his soul yet there is nothing but desire to distinguish which objects of desire to pursue and nothing to keep desire in check. The freedom that initially accompanies democracy makes it a possible home for all types of men, even philosophers, but according to Plato this very unrestrained freedom inevitably degenerates into mob rule and rampant license, a condition ripe for tyrannical man to step in as a demagogue promising order and change. Tyrannical man is the logical conclusion of this decline in the soul as he is completely a slave to his passions and projects his lack of self-mastery or self-control onto the world as a blind need to control others and satisfy his insatiable appetite.

In Thoughts on Machiavelli, Leo Strauss wrote that “Machiavelli does not bring to light a single phenomenon of any fundamental importance which was not fully known to the classics.” I have not yet read Strauss’s book, so I cannot speak for him regarding what precisely he meant by this statement but I suspect that what he meant bears some similarity to a growing sense within me that the ancient Greeks developed, at least in essence and prototypical form, every or most major philosophical positions that have been advocated at one time or another in modernity. If anything is fundamentally new about modern political philosophy, I think that it lies in the sheer predominance and popular acceptance of certain of these philosophical positions: namely, those related to the positivist-empiricist-historicist paradigm of our age. Modernity is plagued by a host of artificial dichotomies, reified abstractions such as realism-idealism, rationalism-empiricism, mind-body, Self-Other, subjective-objective, science vs. philosophy and foundationless value-judgments, and so forth. Classical or premodern political philosophy might be characterized by the search for right order, modern political philosophy by the search for order simplicitor, and postmodern political philosophy by giving up on the search for order altogether (moral, immoral, or amoral) (but perhaps this last is starting to change?). I find that these are dominant trends only, however; exceptions abound.

To begin with, are the features characteristic of modern political philosophy fundamentally new? The atomism, materialism, and mechanism that underlie a good deal of modern political philosophy and most of the social sciences were present already in ancient Greece in the ideas of such thinkers as Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, and some of the sophists. Social contract theory and state-of-nature theorizing is a distinguishing characteristic of the modern, Enlightenment liberalism of Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Montesquieu, Kant, and Rawls and even critics of liberalism like Rousseau. Plato makes a prototypical social contract argument in the Crito, however, and Aristotle recognizes that the immediate motivation for social and political life, if not its natural end, may be personal advantage. Plato and Aristotle explicitly combated the sophistic view that the polis is an artificial convention, such as Glaucon’s reformulation of Thrasymachus’ argument in Book II of the Republic that justice is a conventional compromise between doing injustice (good) and suffering injustice (bad). There is even an explicit, if not self-conscious, state-of-nature tale in the form of the Promethean myth told by Protagoras in Plato’s Protagoras; granted, this myth was told by Protagoras in order to illustrate why he thinks virtue is teachable and not to justify or explain the origin and purpose of government, but the seeds are there. Moreover, the Greeks and Romans were no strangers to absolutist and amoral (or immoral) arguments such as “might makes right” and “justice is the advantage of the stronger,” nor were they strangers to power politics.

The lines become even more blurred when we consider modern political theorists who shared some of the concerns of Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas about right order and virtue. Even Locke, for whom the origin and purpose of government is solely the protection of life, liberty, and property argued (unlike Hobbes) that natural moral law still applied even in the state of nature, that liberty in the state of nature was not license or “do whatever you please’.” Algernon Sidney and Montesquieu were republicans concerned with ordered liberty and moral and civic (or republican) virtue. If I remember correctly, Strauss, in his “Thoughts on Hobbes’s Political Philosophy,”¹ has argued that the state of nature originally played a role only in Christian theology and was first given a role in secular and political philosophy by Hobbes. We have already seen that this is not quite true; there is an example of the state of nature in Greek myth and ethical/political philosophy even if it wasn’t self-consciously labeled a state of nature and used for familiar social contract purposes. There is another instance of the state of nature being used in political philosophy prior to Hobbes, five decades earlier in fact. One can debate whether this example counts as premodern or modern, but the Spanish Scholastic and Jesuit Juan de Mariana explicitly employed the state of nature to ground his pre-Lockean argument for popular sovereignty and a radical defense of tyrannicide in his 1599 book De Rege. The Promethean myth, Mariana’s account, and modern Hobbesian and Lockean accounts of the state of nature bear important descriptive similarities.

Nevertheless, as I noted in the beginning, I think the primary difference between premodern and modern political philosophy lies in the dominant trend that received philosophical and popular acceptance. The premodern political philosophers whose thought achieved dominance — Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, and others — were primarily concerned with the search for right order. They generally accepted essentialism, teleology, eudaimonism, and natural law-type virtue or deontic ethics. Modern political philosophers tend to be more concerned with the search for peace and order, consequentialist or deontic ethical systems concerned primarily with social order, and are more likely to be rationalists or empiricists and base their theories on reductionist foundations. To illustrate, I will briefly examine the thought of Aristotle and Aquinas on one hand and Machiavelli and Hobbes on the other. Aristotle and Aquinas would probably view the political philosophies of Machiavelli and Hobbes as reductionist and insufficiently concerned with promoting virtue and the pursuit of the good life. Machiavelli and Hobbes have criticized classical political philosophers like Aristotle and Aquinas for being overly concerned with utopias and idealistic regimes, and for having a misguided, idealistic view of the world and human nature.

Aristotle is a classical virtue ethicist who views man’s natural end as a life of well-being, flourishing, or happiness (eudaimonia). Classical supply-side theories of virtue ethics like Aristotle’s start from the question “What kind of person should I be?” not, as in typically modern demand-side theories, “What rules should I follow?” or “What consequences should I aim for?” The good life is a life of reason lived in community with other rational beings. The virtues are traits of character constitutive of the good life that tend to be conducive to man’s natural end. There is not and cannot be an exhaustive set of rules governing human behavior that is universal to all human beings and applicable in every situation. Virtue is right action, a mean between the vices of excess and deficiency, the mean relative to us. The moral virtues are generic principles that guide us in our pursuit or search for the good life. They must be applied to particular situations in light of our individual context. The intellectual virtue of practical wisdom or prudence (phronesis) guides the proper application of the moral virtues to specific contexts. Prudence is not mere cleverness or calculation of the best means for any ends. One might say that prudence without the moral virtues is empty, the moral virtues without prudence are blind. Given that man’s natural end is the good life, and that man is a political being who requires community to pursue that end, the polis is natural and its end is the eudaimonia of each and every one of its citizens. To this end, the constitution and laws of the polis ideally will be designed to promote virtue and discourage vice. Education is extremely important.

The Christian theologian and philosopher Thomas Aquinas sought to integrate Aristotle’s philosophy with Christian theology and medieval political thought. To Aristotle’s intellectual and moral virtues, he added the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and charity. As a Christian, and particularly one coming after Augustine, Aquinas still held that moral perfection is the natural end of man but that it cannot be fully and perfectly achieved in this life and even then only by the aid of divine grace. As an Aristotelian, however, and living in the high Middle Ages, Aquinas was not so pessimistic as Augustine that he would settle for the purpose of the secular institutions of the City of Man as being purely the maintenance of peace and order (shades of Hobbes) while the Church concerned itself with the salvation of souls. Human law should encourage virtue and discourage vice, but it cannot achieve moral perfection directly and should focus primarily on prohibiting and punishing the worst forms of vice, those that severely threaten the social order (theft, murder, and the like). Even in Mariana, late in the Scholastic-Thomist tradition, we see the end of political society to be not merely peace and order but also living well.

With Machiavelli we see a relatively new scientific method and a focus on realist-practical politics. Machiavelli rejects the search for right order and the best regime as utopian, declaring that none of these ideal constructions of his predecessors have ever existed anywhere and never will. He finds fault with their ethical theories as well, arguing that to follow them is to invite ruin and that they are antithetical to great and successful politics. In place of classical inductive and deductive methods, and dialectic, Machiavelli claims to employ a new method of enumerative generalizations from historical experience to discover an evolving set of maxims that will tend to lead to success in politics. As a pre-Enlightenment thinker, however, and as bold as he is, Machiavelli is not so bold as to claim that he has discovered a means by which man can completely overcome Fortune. Arguing that a prince must know when not to be good, Machiavelli attempts to establish a separate set of rules for political and private life. In politics, the ends justify the means and the principal end is a great and well-ordered commonwealth or republic. Tellingly, Machiavelli’s table of virtues is of the same number as Aristotle’s, eleven, but its composition is markedly different and justice is strikingly missing. All of the virtues and vices in Machiavelli’s table involve reputation, how the prince is viewed by others, and usefulness for success in politics.

With Hobbes we see the hubris characteristic of the Enlightenment in full flower. In the introduction to his Leviathan, Hobbes likens the ability of man to create an artificial man (i.e., the State) to the miracle of God’s creation of man himself. The tone of power and optimism in the capability of human reason to reshape the world and human nature is striking. Like Machiavelli, Hobbes reduces politics to power (but arguably not as consistently as Spinoza) and goes even further, reducing the purpose of government purely to maintaining peace and order and its origin to base human passions: the desire for power over others, fear of death in the unsafe and miserable state of nature, and calculating self-interest. The people agree to install a ruler as sovereign and he is to have absolute power; law is the dictate of the sovereign. Justice is an artificial convention, having no place in the state of nature where force and fraud are the cardinal virtues. The laws of nature are prudential (in the calculating, not the Aristotelian, sense): the first is to seek peace and follow it, but the first right of nature is to utilize any means necessary for self-preservation. The second law of nature is to form a compact and give up all of his rights and some of his liberty when others are willing; the corresponding second right of nature is that if others are not willing, he may do whatever he likes to defend and advance himself. The third law of nature is the origin of justice: that men should perform the compacts they make.

1. I’m not sure if this is the exact title for the essay. ↩

I’m going to start putting some of these online as part of a new series of posts. There’s some good content in these essays that I think others might find interesting, even if I was a student when I wrote them. I don’t necessarily agree with everything in them now and they aren’t always as radical as I would like them to be now or as I could have written them then. They were written for a grade after all and often rather quickly the night before they were due. Nevertheless, I was often bold  — perhaps too bold. Luckily, I had tolerant professors, though they generally didn’t share my (ir)religious and political views.

I’m going to kick things off with the essays I wrote for my doctoral general exams (political theory and international relations) and then follow up with the short reaction papers from my philosophy and political philosophy graduate seminars. Then I’ll see what else I can dredge up that might be worth posting. I’ll be collecting all of these posts in a list on a new College Essays page. There’s a new category and tag devoted to this series as well.