General features

In this chapter we sketch a body of political thought that became predominant in the second half of the twentieth century among academic political philosophers, primarily in the English-speaking world, but increasingly elsewhere, too. To call this type of political thought ‘analytical’ may not be particularly revealing, but no other term better describes the movement in question. Sometimes ‘liberal political theory’ is used, and there is indeed a close connection between analytical theory and liberalism. But that label is in one way too broad and in another too narrow for this kind of political thinking: too broad because liberalism has assumed many different philosophical guises in the course of a history much longer than that of our subject; and too narrow because those who engage in this kind of political theory use methods of analysis and techniques of argument that are not confined to liberals.

Indeed, the political theorists and philosophers of the analytical school often disagree sharply over questions of practical politics, and some have embraced positions, such as Marxism, that have been historically hostile to liberalism. They form a school not because of a common ideological stance, then, but because of certain shared assumptions about the aims and methods of political thought. These assumptions fall under the following five headings.

Introduction

The character of Marxism in Europe during the middle of the twentieth century was profoundly marked by the collapse of the Second International in 1914 and by the defeat of the working-class movements in Western Europe in the following two decades. This collapse meant that the centre of gravity of Marxist thought initially moved east, where it was soon suppressed by the rise of Stalin. Unlike the previous generation of Marxist theoreticians, most of the thinkers grouped under the rubric of ‘Western’ Marxism were not important figures in political parties. They tended to be academics rather than activists, writing in a period of declining working-class activity and therefore in comparative isolation from political practice. Thus philosophy, epistemology, methodology and even aesthetics bulk larger in their works than do politics or economics – though all were insistent on the political implications of even their most abstruse writings. In a period when parliamentary democracy became normal throughout the advanced capitalist countries and their economies enjoyed a period of unprecedented growth, an atmosphere of resigned pessimism spread among many Marxist intellectuals – a pessimism that was not alleviated by considering the repressive nature of Soviet bureaucracy. Geographically, Marxist thought was concentrated in Germany, France and Italy, countries with large Communist parties. Whereas Marx started with philosophy and moved to economics, the typical thinkers of Western Marxism have moved in the opposite direction and in some cases sought inspiration in philosophers anterior to Marx – Spinoza, Kant and, above all, Hegel.

Since the start of the modern political era, if not longer, most people in almost all countries have believed that the incidence of international war is most likely to be reduced if countries repudiate aggression yet maintain armed forces, and if necessary also military alliances, strong enough to stop others being tempted into expansionism by the prospect of easy pickings – a deterrent stance whose credibility requires a perceived willingness to fight.

This majority viewpoint is here labelled ‘defencism’ because it regards national defence efforts as the best prophylactics against war and believes that self-defence is a sufficient justification for fighting (Ceadel 1987, ch. 5). Its rejection of aggression distinguishes it both from militarism, which glorifies fighting and believes that the conquest of weak states by strong ones advances civilisation, and from crusading, which believes that aggressive force is justified where by promoting justice it ultimately contributes to peace (Ceadel 1987, chs. 3 and 4). Frequently summed up by the Latin tag si vis pacem, para bellum (‘if you want peace, prepare for war’), defencism was generally treated by its supporters as a self-evident truth until early in the Cold War when a ‘realist’ school of academic students of international relations began to articulate its intellectual assumptions in order to justify them. However, it has long been associated with an ethical tradition which has attempted to delimit the circumstances in which a ‘just war’ can be declared (jus ad bellum) and the methods of fighting which can be used in its name (jus in bello) (Johnson 1975; 1981).

Modern social theory offers three main models of the state: an instrumentalist, a realist and a pluralist. These models can be respectively represented by the names Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim. Of those three theorists, perhaps only Marx can claim to be a key originator of ‘his’ model of the state. In Weber’s political sociology the influence of political realism stretching back at least as far as Machiavelli and Hobbes is quite transparent. Furthermore, while rejecting any form of socialism and what he took to be the economic reductionism of Marxist theory, Weber nevertheless sought to retain elements of a materialist methodology denuded of its original political aim. Finally, Weber’s conception of power as an expression of will, and his view of both politics and society as increasingly rationalised (and ‘disenchanted’) and as sites of eternal struggle owe a great deal to his reading of Nietzsche. His achievement might be described as one of synthesising elements of realism, materialism and nihilism, and of translating these into the language of the modern social sciences. In Durkheim’s political sociology the influence of both French and German political theory is no less evident. His view of the state as the deliberative organ of political societies and as the guardian of their conscience collective echoes Rousseau’s general will, French socialist thought (in particular Saint–Simon’s) and Comte’s positivist approach to the study of society. Moreover, his emphasis upon the normative role of secondary associations (as both a source of identity and as a counter-balance to the growing power of the state) has precedence not only in Montesquieu and Tocqueville, but also in those German political theorists who tried to rescue elements of the ‘Standestaat’ (polity of estates) for a modern pluralist society. Durkheim’s objective was to use scientific method to show how the individual and the social, the value of freedom and the requirement of solidarity, might be reconciled.

Two interrelated issues are central to Islamic political thought in the twentieth century: the relationship between religion and politics and the role of the Islamic heritage in modern society. The treatment of these issues began in the nineteenth century, in the context of Muslim societies’ encounter with the West. Commencing with the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt (1789–1803), and extending through a period of Western Christian missionary activities in Muslim countries, Muslim educational missions to Western countries and, finally, to colonial rule, Muslim societies came into contact with modern Western ideas and ways of life. Through this encounter, the view of Western material progress was impressed on these societies. It was expressed in orientalist constructions of the East and in the apologetic and defensive discourses of the indigenous intellectuals. In Arab and Islamic thought, the problem of nahda (renaissance) crystallised. In Istanbul, the seat of Ottoman power, ideas of reform were developed and debated. Muslim reformist views also took shape in India. In Iran, the era in which modernising ideas and concepts were introduced became known as the asre bidari (period of awakening) (Mirsepassi 2000, p. 56; Gheissari 1998, pp. 14–15). By the end of the nineteenth century, modernist thought integrated nationalist principles and ideas.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Muslims were chiefly concerned with the problem of civilisational stagnation. The main problématique was formulated in terms of a renaissance project for Muslim societies. The articulation of this problématique was shaped by the encounter with the West in the modern period. Various intellectual positions were formed during this period of encounter, ranging from Islamic modernism to secularism.

Modernism is a term of Anglo-American provenance with both literary-critical and art-historical variants. It arose in the 1920s (Sultan 1987, p. 97), but did not become popular until the two decades after 1945 when formalist criticism held sway. Such ‘new critics’ thought of modernism as an approach to literature and the arts, emerging just before the First World War and dominant in the interwar period, that emphasised aesthetic autonomy and formalism, detachment and irony, mythic themes, and self-reflective attention to acts of creation and composition. The novels of Joyce and Woolf, the plays of Pirandello and Yeats, the music of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, and the abstract art of Kandinsky and Mondrian were paradigmatic. The term was then appropriated by Western Marxists debating the properly revolutionary approach to aesthetics and cultural critique. More recent usage has greatly expanded and somewhat altered the concept, but it remains historiographical in the sense that the artists, writers and movements considered modernist by the critics rarely used the term to refer to themselves. It also remains essentially contested; there is no single, widely accepted usage. I will therefore begin by indicating how it is being used here.

In the late 1890s Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), who had been trained as a Viennese neurologist, created a new field, psychoanalysis, which was designed to understand and treat neurotic afflictions. Although not a political thinker per se, Freud contributed indirectly, and some of his followers directly, to modern political theory. Politically, Freud was something of a conservative liberal, sceptical in outlook and suspicious of utopian schemes. His followers did not always follow him faithfully down the trail he had blazed in the new discipline of psychoanalysis; nor did all agree with his political views. Some were conservative to the point of reaction, others radical Marxists and utopians. Some revised Freudian theory almost beyond recognition. All were alike, however, in finding in Freud the outline and essentials of a new and fruitful way of thinking about man and society.

Freud’s thought

An essential key to Freud’s thinking about psychopathology lies in the character of the last days of the Hapsburg Empire. A yawning gulf between reality and official ideology stimulated a general intellectual revolt and a search for the actualities beneath the pious formulae of public truth. This uprising was led by those ideally placed to see the discrepancy because they had nothing to gain from accepting the official view: the educated Jews. Mordant irony was their weapon for piercing the veil of the structure of formal beliefs. The cultural conflict between East and West that had its vortex in Vienna’s cosmopolitan intellectual life, and the sense that liberal culture was on the verge of being undermined, would be reflected throughout Freud’s mature thought (Zweig 1953; Roazen 1968; Johnston 1972; Schorske 1979).

The halcyon days

The founders themselves would have been keenly sensitive to the diversity of motives and models underlying what we now know as ‘the’ welfare state. Bismarck’s conservative corporatist version built on frankly neofeudal foundations to buy social peace. Alva and Gunnar Myrdal’s social democratic model aimed to generate more Swedish babies (Tilton 1990). The British welfare state was principally the product of two renegade Liberals, Lloyd George and Beveridge (Beveridge 1942). The American welfare state was a patrician Democrat’s noblesse oblige response to the Great Depression, relieving distress among the old and disabled, the widowed and the chronically ill (Hofstadter 1948, ch. 12).

These distinctive trajectories are regularly revisited by theorists of the welfare state, some in search of typologies (Titmuss 1974, ch. 2; Esping-Andersen 1990; Goodin et al. 1999), others simply revelling in the utter uniqueness of their own country’s distinctive history and particular programmes (Skocpol 1992; Castles 1985). As a matter of historical record, no doubt they are right. In terms of policy analysis likewise, causes and consequences of different welfare regimes sometimes clearly matter (Flora and Heidenheimer 1981).

Still, the received view of ‘the welfare state’ that has passed into contemporary political thought is of a much more unified phenomenon. In popular memory and broader political discourse ‘the welfare state’ was something born of shared wartime suffering and the Great Depression; it was animated by the desire to meet needs and promote social equality; and it operates on and through broadly capitalist economies managed along broadly Keynesian lines.

The welfare state – the overriding objective of domestic politics in most developed Western states during the first half of the twentieth century – was a product of fundamental changes in the conceptualisation both of welfare and of the state. Evolving accounts of human nature and of the interdependence between individual and society were supplemented by structural experimentation with various measures intended to secure the realisation of those understandings. They were also accompanied by competing ethical and conceptual interpretations of rights, duties, responsibilities and agency. Moreover, they were nourished within opposing ideological families that sought to be sharply distinguished from one another, yet displayed overlapping and complex configurations of ideas. Variations in time and space account for some important differences of emphasis, but also demonstrate that shared pools of ideas were drawn upon from which these local divergences emanated.

Ideological disparities

At its zenith in the mid-twentieth century, the welfare state was frequently defined as one in which the power of a democratic state is deliberately used to regulate and modify the free play of economic and political forces in order to effect a redistribution of income (Schottland 1967, p. 10). This definition, like any other, conveys a particular interpretation, in this case one that presupposes a state-instigated deviation from a market norm, as well as the absence of ‘modification’ or intervention in earlier welfare arrangements – both highly contestable assumptions. It also fails to differentiate between the practices of welfare as insurance and as assistance, or between welfare as the guaranteeing of minimal material conditions and welfare as human flourishing in broad, even optimal senses.

‘Christian democracy’ can generally be understood as the strategy whereby practising Christians, the majority of them Catholic, met both the challenges and opportunities presented by contemporary political societies and states. During its initial phase, Christian democracy constituted the Catholic church’s response to the advent of mass politics and the secular and socialist collectivist movements that first raised the ‘social question’. Then it came more or less to coincide with the branch of Catholic political thought that sought to reconcile Catholicism to the pluralist and democratic state. Finally, Christian democracy turned into the dominant, and successful, form of political Catholicism – the doctrine chosen by those Catholics who accepted that there should be a free competition for power, and sought to defend their ideas and interests and ensure the implementation of their programmes.

The experience of participating in various types of associations and trade unions led Catholics to organise themselves into political parties which both attracted an increasingly broad consensus and became ever more powerful. The exercise of power meant their initial purpose of winning back both state and society for Catholicism gradually gave way to the pragmatic management of the prevailing problems, especially among those parties that ruled certain European countries for long periods. Despite becoming more secular and habitually adopting a centre-right stance, Christian Democratic parties nevertheless remained faithful to certain aspects of their original programmes. These allegiances differentiated them from the various conservative parties, even if, like them, Christian Democrats opposed leftist or socialist parties.

The Sophists

The fifth-century sophists were the first exponents of higher education in the West. 'Sophist' means 'professional practitioner of wisdom (sophia)'. To call someone 'wise' (sophos) without qualification was to ascribe the highest, most desirable, expertise. And in the relentlessly political atmosphere of the fifth-century Greek city states, the expertise most at a premium was skill in civic speech: debate, exhortation, pleading, formal eulogy. Whether the context was council-chamber or law-court, democratic assembly or a prince's cabinet, mediation at home or diplomacy abroad, success hinged on excellent communication. In this climate the sophists emerged and flourished.

Since most of what they wrote is lost, and since in any case much of their work consisted in teaching, not writing, our picture of the sophists is necessarily fragmentary and speculative.

Introduction

Greek and Roman philosophy developed in a close and frequently adversarial relationship to various literary genres, especially epic and lyric poetry and tragic and comic drama. Moreover, philosophers themselves used some of these genres and created still others (such as the philosophical dialogue, the philosophical epistle); the literary form of philosophical texts is frequently an essential ingredient in their philosophical expression. Philosophers thought in subtle ways about what literary genres themselves express about human life and what is important in it; their contest with the tragedians and other authors was thus fought both on the level of content and on the level of form or style itself. At the same time, literary authors made their own claims to tell the truth about important human matters, going in some cases deliberately against the theories of philosophers. This being the case, the topic of philosophy’s relation to literature in ancient Greece and Rome is as vast as the subject of philosophy itself, and cannot be treated exhaustively.

Introduction

The title of this chapter would have struck most Romans at the time of Cicero as provocative if not downright inapt. Philosophy had entered Rome as a Greek importation, and those who taught it mainly stemmed from Greece or from still further east of Italy. Romans who wished to study philosophy generally travelled to Athens or to other Greek-speaking centres. Early in the principate of Augustus (27 BC-AD 14), Quintus Sextius founded a school that combined Stoic ethics with such principles of Pythagoreanism as abstention from meat. But, apart from this short-lived and unremarkable sect, there were no exclusively Roman schools of philosophy, as distinct from the long-established Academics, Peripatetics, Epicureans and Stoics. The Cynic movement, which gained Roman adherents in the early Empire, did not count as a formal institution, and it too was originally Greek, looking back to Diogenes whom the Stoics had appropriated along with Socrates. There was no home-grown option of any consequence, and therefore no Roman philosophy as such.

Yet, with the benefit of hindsight, that verdict will hardly stand. On many thinkers from the early Renaissance to the middle of the eighteenth century, the influence of Cicero and Seneca was enormous, outstripping in its general diffusion the impact of even Plato and Aristotle (see further, chapter 12).

The beginnings of Physical Science

The earliest literary survivals from the Greek world, the epic poems of Homer and Hesiod, contain, inter alia, accounts of natural phenomena and of the origins of the universe. But the latter are speculative mythology, while the former invariably impute large-scale natural phenomena to supernatural forces: Zeus coruscates miscreants with thunderbolts; Poseidon shakes the earth in anger; Apollo visits plagues upon the impious. There is no attempt to explain events in naturalistic terms (that is, as the natural result of natural forces and the intrinsic properties of things), and no effort to reduce the apparent diversity of phenomena to a small set of explanatory concepts in terms of which they are to be accounted for.

The Greeks themselves considered that with Thales (fl. c.585 BC) there emerged a wholly new way of looking at things, one characterized by Aristotle as the search for the archai, or basic ‘principles’ of things. According to tradition, Thales, the first of the so-called Presocratics, made water his archē. Water was fundamental to the world and its processes, perhaps, as Aristotle says, because of the observation that moisture is necessary for life and that ‘heat comes from moisture’; moreover, the earth ‘rests on water’, a feature which accounts both for its general stability, and also (probably) for the occasional earthquake. Thales also claimed that magnets possess souls, presumably because they have that power to induce motion which is characteristic of animate life.