The context o f Grotius’ career

When the history of recent moral philosophy was written at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century, a consistent account was given of the role of Hugo Grotius. In the eyes of men like Samuel Pufendorf, Christian Thomasius, Jean Barbeyrac, and their successors, he was the one who ‘broke the ice’ after the long winter of Aristotelianism; who provided a new theory of natural law which could supplant both the discredited theories of the scholastics and the anti-scientific and sceptical writings of Renaisance authors such as Montaigne and Pierre Charron. He was the inventor of a new ‘science of morality’, which was taken up in various ways by all the major figures of the seventeenth century, including Hobbes, Locke, and Pufendorf himself. His first important follower, they also all agreed, was John Selden, though the relationship between the two men was by no means a straightforward one (see Tuck 1979, pp. 174–5).

As we shall see, there is a sense in which these historians were absolutely correct; Grotius did see something for the first time which was to be crucially important in the succeeding century, namely that there could be a systematic moral and political philosophy which met the objections levelled against such an enterprise in the late sixteenth century. But this insight was hard-won, and embodied in a series of works which were to some extent pièces d'occasion; to understand the generation of his political philosophy, it is necessary to look first at his public career.

The Leveller movement

The Levellers were a political movement united around the programme of the first Agreement of the People (3 November 1647; Wolfe 1944, pp. 223–34). That Agreement is the first proposal in history for a written constitution based on inalienable natural rights. It embodied three essential principles. The first, though ambiguously expressed, was taken by contemporaries to be that any property qualification for the franchise should be abolished: even the poor should have the right to vote. The second was that the representative assembly should have supreme authority in making law, appointing magistrates, and conducting foreign policy: the king, if any, was to be accountable to his subjects. The third principle was that the powers of government be limited by the principles of natural justice. This meant, first, that all laws must apply equally to all subjects: there must be no privileged estate or corporation. This also implied the illegality of all monopolies. Second, all subjects had the right to freedom of conscience, entitling them to dissent from any established state religion. This also implied a right to freedom of expression. Third, conscription was banned: subjects could not be compelled to serve in an army if they disapproved of the cause for which it was to fight, although they could be compelled to pay taxes. Finally, all laws ‘must be good, and not evidently destructive to the safety and well-being of the people’. This implied both the right of juries to refuse to enforce bad law, and an ultimate right of revolution: if the people's representatives betrayed their trust, the nation as a whole could assert its ultimate sovereignty.

The meaning of absolutism

The purpose of this chapter is to describe the main tenets of absolutist and royalist thinking in the seventeenth century. That century, we are often told, saw the making of absolutism, especially in France. There, the Estates General fell into disuse after 1615, and its demise brought death to the principle that taxation requires the consent of the taxed. In the 1620s Louis XIII subdued the Huguenots in a crusade which harnessed militant Catholicism to the service of the monarchy. In the 1630s war with Spain led to a massive increase in the crown's military capacity – and troops could be used to suppress insurrection at home as well as to defeat enemies abroad. The introduction of intendants brought local government under central control, and this development was given added impetus when the intendants assumed military powers. After the temporary setback of the Fronde, royal power resumed its progress, and in the latter decades of the century French absolutism entered its golden age. Louis XIV completed the work of Richelieu and Mazarin. In 1673 the parlement of Paris was formally deprived of the right to remonstrate against royal edicts before registering them. In 1682 the Declaration of the clergy of France unambiguously asserted the independence of kings from papal control in temporal matters.

Elsewhere events often ran a similar course. In 1660 the Danish Estates met for the last time. In 1680 the Swedish Riksdag engineered a constitutional revolution which effectively introduced absolutism. In Prussia the Great Elector taxed without consent and used troops to enforce his will. By the end of the century, we might argue, absolutism was made or in the making in most European states. Even in England its triumph sometimes looked likely, and was averted only by the execution of one king and the deposition o f another. Even in republics — Holland, Venice — there were those who expressed absolutist ideas.

That excellent book Gerasimos Santas contributed to the “Arguments of the Philosophers” series in 1979 is entitled Socrates. But once inside it you discover that what it is really about is a “Socrates” in Plato. More than once since I first started working on this book I asked myself: “Why not follow that example? Why not bypass, as he did, that bugbear of Platonic studies, the so-called ‘Socratic Problem’? Why not let the historians have the Socrates of history all to themselves, keeping for myself that enchanting figure whose challenge to philosophers would be the same were he historic fact or Platonic fiction?” If my interests had been as purely philosophical as are those of Santas this, certainly, is the way I would have gone. But it so happens that my philosophical interests are impure. I cannot pass the buck to the historians without passing it to myself. All my life I have been one of their tribe and once in it no easy exit is allowed. The question “Who are you talking about – Socrates or a ‘Socrates’ in Plato?” will dog your steps, barking at you, forcing you to turn and face it in self-defense. If you do mean the former, you must argue for it.

That Socrates does not scruple to palm off on his interlocutors – for their own good, of course – premises he considers false or inferences he knows are crooked has been maintained repeatedly by scholars of high repute. E. R. Dodds: “It looks rather as if Plato was content at this stage to let Socrates repay the Sophists in their own coin, as no doubt Socrates often did.” Paul Friedländer: Socrates believes that to educate deluded persons “he must resort to dialectical tricks”; and he “knows how to deceive better than all the sophists.” W. K. C. Guthrie: “Plato lets Socrates make a wickedly sophistical use of ambiguity when he likes.” Charles Kahn: Socrates uses “dialectical trickery” to win his argument against Polus in G. 474c–475c.

I am not suggesting that such views are now shared by a majority of Platonic scholars. My distinct impression is that quite the contrary is the case. Thus two of the best of recent philosophical commentaries on Socratic dialogues, C. C. W. Taylor's on the Protagoras (1976) and T. H. Irwin's on the Gorgias (1979), give no quarter to the idea that Socrates resorts to sophistry when it suits his purpose. Neither does the systematic examination – the most comprehensive on record – of the arguments in Plato's earlier dialogues in Gerasimos Santas' Socrates (1979).

ARETĒ, EUDAIMONIA: THEIR TRANSLATION

The key terms in the title pose problems of translation. On “virtue” for aretē I need not linger at all, for whatever may be the general usage of this word, Socrates own use of it to designate precisely what we understand by moral virtue must have been apparent throughout this book. Any lingering doubt on this point in my readers' mind may be resolved by referring them to the fact that whenever he brings the general concept under scrutiny – as when he debates the teachability of aretē in the Protagoras and the Meno – he assumes without argument that its sole constituents or “parts” (μόριαμέρη) are five qualities which are, incontestably, the Greek terms of moral commendation par excellence: andreia (“manliness,” “courage”), sōphrosynē (“temperance,” “moderation”), dikaiosynē (“justice,” “righteousness”), hosiotēs (“piety,” “holiness”), sophia (“wisdom”).

“Happiness” for eudaimonia is a more contentious matter. Leading Aristotelians, Ross and Ackrill, have claimed that “well-being” would be a better translation. But in their own translations of the Nicomachean Ethics (hereafter abbreviated to “E.N.”) both stick to “happiness” all the same. It is not hard to see why they would and should. “Well-being” has no adjectival or adverbial forms. This may seem a small matter to armchair translators, philosophers dogmatizing on how others should do the job.

Socrates' “strangeness” is the keynote of Alcibiades' speech about him in the Symposium. The talk starts on that note (215A); and reverts to it near the end:

This book is for readers of Plato's earlier dialogues who have felt this strangeness, have asked themselves what to make of it, have pondered answers to its enigmas, and are willing to work their way through yet another. What I offer should not distract them from their encounter with the Socrates who lives in Plato's text. It should take them back there for a closer look.

The book has been a long time in the making. It started with a non-start. A stroke of luck in 1953 had assured me of a year entirely free from teaching. I had gone to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton to work on Plato's philosophy, uncommitted as to how I would proceed. Harold Cherniss, the great scholar in my field there, declined to give advice – how like Socrates he was in this. Left to my own devices, I cut the project in half, allocating the whole of that year to a study of Plato's Socratic dialogues.

Socrates' commitment to reasoned argument as the final arbiter of claims to truth in the moral domain is evident throughout Plato's Socratic dialogues. He refers to it in the deliberation by which he justifies to Crito the decision to remain in prison and await execution:

And yet he is also committed to obeying commands reaching him through supernatural channels. When explaining at his trial why the state's power of life and death over him could not scare him into abandoning the public practice of his philosophy, he declares:

Between these two commitments – on one hand, to follow argument wherever it may lead; on the other, to obey divine commands conveyed to him through supernatural channels – he sees no conflict. He assumes they are in perfect harmony. Can sense be made of this? I want to argue that it can.

In the last and most famous of his Theses on Feuerbach Marx observes: “The philosophers have done no more than interpret the world. The point, however, is to change it.” Substitute “morality” for “world” and the observation would be true of almost all the leading philosophers of the West. Moralists as powerfully innovative as are Aristotle, Hume, and Kant take the morality into which they are born for granted. The task they set themselves is only to excogitate its rationale. It does not occur to them to subject its content to critical scrutiny, prepared to question norms ensconced in it which do not measure up to their rational standards. But there have been exceptions, unnoticed by Marx, and of these Socrates is the greatest. Proceeding entirely from within the morality of his own time and place, he nevertheless finds reason to stigmatize as unjust one of its most venerable, best established, rules of justice.

By the morality of a society I understand those norms of right and wrong, rules of conduct or excellences of character, publicly acknowledged within it, whose function it is to foster human well-being. The sense of justice centers in the concern that those norms be applied impartially.

To single out one of the many values in our life, elevating it so far above all the rest that we would choose it at any cost, is one of the many things that have been called “romanticism” in the modern era. Its typical expression there is sexual love. To the hero of a romance winning a particular woman's love may be worth more than are all the other things he covets put together. He may gamble all else for it. But it has other expressions too, not always tagged “romanticism.” What else but this is “Give me liberty or give me death”? In the great religions of the world the same attitude may be found, though it has never been so described:

TI Matthew 13: 44–6: Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure hid in a field, the which when a man hath found, he hideth, and for joy thereof goeth and selleth all that he hath and buyeth that field. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls, who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it.

What answers to romanticism in Greek antiquity is the heroic code.

“Irony,” says Quintilian, is that figure of speech or trope “in which something contrary to what is said is to be understood” (contrarium ei quod dicitur intelligendum est). His formula has stood the test of time. It passes intact in Dr Johnson's dictionary (“mode of speech in which the meaning is contrary to the words” [1755]), and survives virtually intact in ours: “Irony is the use of words to express something other than, and especially the opposite of, [their] literal meaning” (Webster's). Here is an example, as simple and banal as I can make it: a British visitor, landing in Los Angeles in the midst of a downpour, is heard to remark, “What fine weather you are having here.” The weather is foul, he calls it “fine,” and has no trouble making himself understood to mean the contrary of what he says.

Why should we want to put such twists on words, making them mean something so different from their “literal” – i.e. their established, commonly understood – sense that it could even be its opposite? For one thing, humour. For another, mockery. Or, perhaps both at once, as when Mae West explains why she is declining President Gerald Ford's invitation to a state dinner at the White House: “It's an awful long way to go for just one meal.”