Exploring Political Ideas DRAFT: November 2007

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EXPLORING POLITICAL IDEAS

Civics Mosaic: Political Ideas that Have Shaped the World DRAFT: November 2007

EXPLORING POLITICAL IDEAS

THAT HAVE SHAPED THE WORLD

MARGARET STIMMANN BRANSON,

STEPHEN L. SCHECHTER, AND THOMAS S. VONTZ

CQ PRESS
WASHINGTON, DC

SEPTEMBER 2008

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Civics Mosaic: Political Ideas that Have Shaped the World DRAFT: November 2007

This book is a project of Civics Mosaic, an international education program supported by the U.S. Department of
Education under grant number R304A020002. The contents of this book were developed under a grant from the U.S.
Department of education. However, those contents do not necessarily represent the policy of the Department, and
one should not assume endorsement by the Federal Government.

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Civics Mosaic: Political Ideas that Have Shaped the World DRAFT: November 2007

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Civics Mosaic: Political Ideas that Have Shaped the World DRAFT: November 2007

Unit 1: Exploring Political Ideas?

This unit introduces you to the three major themes of this book. The first theme explores the world of
political ideas and why they matter. The second theme engages the world of politics where those ideas are
put into practice. The third theme connects you with the world of scholarship where you will learn how to
use the comparative method in studying political ideas.
The first chapter guides your exploration into the world of political ideas. With this guide, you will
define an “idea,” explain its importance and uses, distinguish political ideas from other ideas, recognize
core political ideas, and discover how political ideas relate to four other political “I” words (individuals,
institutions, interests, and issues). In the end, you will learn how political ideas can inform wise political
judgments – by society’s leaders and its citizenry.
The second chapter is a guide to the use of the comparative method. Comparison is a powerful
and time-honored method of inquiry. In this chapter, you will learn the uses and benefits of the
comparative method as it is applied to the study of political ideas. You also will explore several important
approaches to the comparative method and illustrations of each.
The third chapter is a guide through the political world where ideas are put into practice. By
following this guide, you will learn how and why people enter the world of politics, how politics can
become an obstacle course, why some leaders get mired in the pursuit of power, and how others stay
focused on the larger interests of the people they serve. Along the way, you will encounter diverse points
of view about politics – as a dirty business, as a noble enterprise, as the barrel of a gun, and as the art of
peaceful persuasion. In the end, you will learn how to recognize the common characteristics of politics and
why they matter.

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Civics Mosaic: Political Ideas that Have Shaped the World
Chapter 1: Why Do Political Ideas Matter?
Big Ideas
 Political ideas are powerful and impact
people’s lives directly and daily.
 Political ideas help people to explore the
political world and are at the core of five
I’s of political science – individuals,
issues, interests, and institutions,
 Wise political judgments depend on the
understanding and effective application
of political ideas.
Purpose of this Chapter
Ideas organize thinking. Your ability to
understand, interpret, analyze, and evaluate all
depend upon ideas. Of all the varieties of ideas,
political ideas are among the most important.
Often without even realizing it, people’s lives are
deeply influenced by political ideas. Political
ideas shape people’s thoughts about fundamental
issues such as the meaning of life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness. This chapter provides a
bird’s-eye view of the world of political ideas. As
you proceed, you will explore political ideas – the
purposes they serve, their importance in daily
life, and their profound effect on the history of
the world. This chapter also connects political
ideas with individuals, interests, issues, and
institutions that comprise the political world.
Terms to Know
ideas
normative ideas
descriptive ideas
instrumental ideas
aspirational ideas
individuals
interests
issues
institutions
political judgment
Why Do Ideas Matter?
Several centuries ago an anonymous writer
declared, “There is one thing stronger than all the
armies in the world; and that is an idea whose
DRAFT: November 2007
time has come.”1 The French poet and playwright
Victor Hugo agreed: “A stand can be made
against invasion by an army; no stand can be
made against invasion by an idea.”2
But why are ideas so important? To begin
with, human beings think. Thinking is one of the
essential ways in which human beings differ from
other living creatures. In fact, the seventeenth-
century French philosopher René Descartes built
a large part of his philosophical system on one
sentence: “I think, therefore I am.”
Ideas are the forms or categories that help
people make sense of the world around them.
When people use ideas to think and make sense
of the world, they “conceptualize” their
experiences and thoughts. A concept, then, is a
general idea that is used to describe specific
examples of something. The concept of a “tree”
can be used to describe oaks, elms, maples, or
pines.
Terms like “time” and “space” are
examples of ideas that help people organize their
lives in the world around them. For example,
when a group of students agree to meet in the
library at 4:00 pm, they need to share common
understandings – of how to tell time, how to find
the library, why it is important to be punctual,
and how they will get home after their meeting.
Just as people use ideas to organize their
thinking about the physical world, people use
political ideas to make sense of their political
world. Political ideas shape how and why human
beings choose to organize themselves. As one
scholar explains:
In order to make sense of the world we must
impose meaning upon it, and this we do
through the construction of concepts…. We
build up our knowledge of the political world
not simply by looking at it, but through
developing and refining concepts, which will
help us make sense of it. Concepts are, in
1
Anonymous, as quoted in The Oxford Dictionary of
Political Quotations, Antony Jay (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 13.
2
Ibid., p. 184.
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Civics Mosaic: Political Ideas that Have Shaped the World
other words, the building blocks of human
knowledge.3
Ideas not only help to describe and
explain the world, they also contain norms or
values that help people to form judgments. In this
way, ideas serve as a guide to help people
distinguish what is good or bad.
Thus, there are two ways to use ideas – a
descriptive way and a normative way. To
distinguish between them, consider the questions
that each poses. Descriptive questions ask “what
is” and “why.” Constitutional government is an
idea that can be used descriptively to identify
those governments that are empowered and
limited by a constitution. Normative questions
ask “what is best” and “what should be.” The
idea of constitutional government is used
normatively when one expresses the belief that all
governments should be limited and empowered
by a constitution. It so happens that in this case
there is a special word to describe the normative
belief in constitutional government; and that
word is “constitutionalism.” Another normative
example is the idea of freedom. Each year
Freedom House, a well-established non-profit
organization, evaluates the extent to which
countries are “free,” “partly free,” and “not free.”
A close look at the world today reveals
some powerful ideas “whose time has come” –
ideas that ring true as descriptors, norms, or both.
For example, the idea of democracy – where
people have a right to choose their own
government – now has worldwide appeal, even in
such former dictatorships as South Africa,
Ukraine, and Iraq. Democracy is an idea that is
both descriptive and normative – it describes a
form of government but it also places a value on
that form of government.
Another powerful idea “whose time has
come” is that all human beings – because they are
human beings – have rights that governments
must respect and protect. The idea of human
rights began to have worldwide appeal at the end
of World War II. Revulsion against atrocities
committed during that war, such as the Nazi
German government’s mass murder of Jews,
homosexuals, and other groups, spurred the
3
Andrew Heywood, Political Theory: An
Introduction, 2nd ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1999), p. 3.
DRAFT: November 2007
United Nations General Assembly to adopt the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
proclaiming rights that belong to all human
beings, regardless of gender, religion, race, or
age. Subsequently, countries have signed a
number of “covenants” (or binding treaties) that
implement the Universal Declaration.
Countries that sign those covenants
accept solemn treaty obligations. The United
Nations monitors compliance and may impose
sanctions on countries that continue to violate
human rights.4
What Purposes Do Ideas Serve?
Ideas serve different purposes. Some ideas are
instrumental, playing an important part in
achieving a desired end or in advancing a cause.
Other ideas are aspirational, representing the
ultimate goal toward which people aspire. An
instrumental idea is a means to an end, while an
aspirational idea is a desired end or goal.
Some examples from history illustrate
how people have linked instrumental and
aspirational ideas. In Biblical times, the Prophet
Isaiah foretold:
They [the nations of the world] shall beat their
swords into plowshares, and their spears into
pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword
against nation, neither shall they learn war
any more.5
Isaiah uses two types of ideas. The
instrumental idea is the idea of disarmament or
the destroying or recycling of weapons, turning
swords and spears into tools, which can be used
for productive purposes. Isaiah does not present
this idea as an end in itself, however, but as a
means to a higher end. That goal or aspirational
idea is peace among all the nations, with
disarmament as a means to that end.
The Bill of Rights, which wasn’t a part of
the United States Constitution of 1787, is another
example. Many Americans believed that was a
serious omission, and they insisted that a bill of
rights be added. Thomas Jefferson, framer of the
Declaration of Independence and then an
American diplomat in France, joined in the
debate. He wrote to his friend and ally James
4
See Antonio Cassese, International Law, 2nd ed.
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 375-
398.
5
Isaiah 2:4.
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Civics Mosaic: Political Ideas that Have Shaped the World
Madison, who ultimately proposed the Bill of
Rights in the First Congress:
A bill of rights is what the people are entitled
to against every government on earth, general
or particular, & what no just government
should refuse, or rest on inference.6
Jefferson’s aspirational idea, the value he
extolled, was a just government that would both
respect individual rights and be barred from
violating those rights. His instrumental idea was
the addition of a Bill of Rights to the new
Constitution. The Bill of Rights, he believed,
would be one means toward the end of a just
government.
Not all aspirational ideas are used to
achieve worthy or good goals. Mao Zedong, the
leader of the Communist Revolution in China,
taught his followers that: “Every Communist
must grasp the truth: Political power grows out of
the barrel of a gun.”7 And Mao added, “that is
why the Party must always control the army.”
Mao’s directive to his followers stands in
opposition to the prophecy of Isaiah. Unlike
Isaiah, Mao’s instrumental idea is armament. His
aspirational idea is not peace but political power.
Ideas like those advanced by Isaiah,
Jefferson, and Mao are powerful forces in human
history. They stir the human imagination, arouse
the human soul, and illustrate that powerful ideas
do not exist in a vacuum. They need individuals
to put them into action. As the noted
anthropologist, Margaret Mead once said: “Never
doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed
citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the
only thing that ever has.”
What Distinguishes Political Ideas From
Other Ideas?
Every realm of intellectual activity is concerned
with ideas, but not every realm seeks to
understand ideas for the same reasons or use
them for the same purposes. In their study of
Western traditions, the noted intellectual
historians Jacob Bronowski and Bruce Mazlish
6
Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, December 20,
1787, quoted in R. B. Bernstein, Thomas Jefferson
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 72.
7
Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung [now, Mao
Zedong] (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1965),
volume II, p. 224.
DRAFT: November 2007
identified three intellectual realms: the pursuit of
truth, justice, and beauty.8
Scientists, philosophers, and theologians
use ideas in search of the truth. They differ in
how they conduct their search. However, once
they believe that they have found the truth, they
seek its acceptance.
The arts incorporate ideas in their search
for beauty. One artist may choose to paint a scene
using a natural or realistic style, while other
artists may see the same scene in abstract or
surreal form. Although artists hope their work
will find favor, Bronowski and Mazlish maintain
that artists neither seek nor require widespread
acceptance of their work.
By contrast, political ideas are used to
search for what is right, or what is just and fair, in
a particular situation. In the realm of politics,
ideas seldom, if ever, establish an absolute truth.
Political thought cannot be verified by
mathematical proof or scientific experiment.
However, just because political questions
are often open-ended does not mean that all
answers are of equal worth. People will judge the
relative worth of political ideas or the strength of
political arguments using reason and political
principles. Using reason, evidence, and political
principles, people exercise judgment and find
some arguments more persuasive than others.
People may disagree over which
aspirational goals are most important or which
instrumental ideas would help them achieve their
goals. Since ancient times, for example, people
have disagreed over whether it is more important
to be free, to be safe, or to be equal. Julius Caesar
described human nature as “universally imbued
with a desire for liberty, and a hatred of
servitude.” Yet Sallust, Caesar’s personal
historian, disagreed. Sallust wrote in his
Histories, “Only a few prefer liberty – the
majority seek nothing more than fair masters.”9
Even when people realize that some form of
8
Jacob Bronowski and Bruce Mazlish, The Western
Intellectual Tradition (New York: Harper &
Brothers, 1960). As referenced in another useful
source: Peter Watson, Ideas: A History of Thought
and Invention, From Fire to Freud (New York:
HarperCollins, 2005), p. 6.
9
Both quotations are from Tom Holland, Rubicon:
The Last Years of the Roman Republic (New York:
Anchor Books, 2005), xxiv.
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Civics Mosaic: Political Ideas that Have Shaped the World
balance among clashing or competing goals is
best, they may hold very different, even
contradictory conceptions of how that balance
should be achieved.
Today, for example, public opinion polls,
called “democracy barometers,” ask people in
different countries whether they understand and
support democracy in their region of the world.
As one might expect, a majority of people
support the idea of democracy. However, they
differ in how well they think democracy is doing,
what problems it faces, and how frustrated or
disappointed they are with their democracies. 10
In short, political ideas can be
contentious. They create issues, or legitimate
differences of opinion among reasonable people.
People have disagreed about political ideas since
the first human community was formed – and
with good reason. Political ideas provide the
norms on which human societies are based and
the rules by which those societies are governed. It
is only natural that people should have differing
ideas about which norms are most important and
how to achieve them.
Politics arises partly out of these
disagreements over how people choose to
organize themselves. In fact, this book defines
politics as a complex process by which people
seek to settle their differences peacefully and
reach a binding decision that resolves public
issues.
One illustration of the importance of
political ideas and their elusive nature is captured
in the idea of justice. Most people would say that
they believe in justice, even though they may not
have thought deeply about what justice is or how
justice can be achieved. Even so, people use the
idea of justice in their everyday lives, as well as
in their political communities.
People use justice to reward, to punish, to
tax, to educate, to guide voting, and to make
public policy. Conceptions of justice help people
decide if, when, and how they should intervene in
the lives of others. Sometimes how people
10
There are democracy barometers for Latin
America, the Arab world, Africa, South Asia, East
Asia, and Europe. The Journal of Democracy
publishes the results. For a sampling see International
Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance web
site at http://www.idea.int/democracy/global-
barometers.cfm.
DRAFT: November 2007
perceive justice helps them decide matters of life
and death.
Those decisions have a direct impact on
people’s lives and well-being. If average citizens
do not think seriously about justice and what it
means, their decisions – whether in the voting
booth or the jury box – may be seriously flawed,
and cause real injury to real people.
Section Review
1. What is an idea?
2. How do political ideas differ from other ideas?
Provide examples.
3. Do you agree or disagree with the following:
“There is one thing stronger than all the armies in
the world; and that is an idea whose time has
come.” Explain.
4. Compare normative and descriptive ideas.
How are they alike and how are they different?
Which Political Ideas Matter Most?
Political ideas matter, but it is hard to decide
which political ideas matter most. The sweep of
human history has generated a bewildering
spectrum of political ideas. One dictionary of
political thought has 1,500 entries for ideas,
concepts, and influential thinkers. This text,
however, focuses on 30 of the most powerful
political ideas that have helped shape the world
and its history.
Those political ideas are set out in Figure
1.1, which presents those ideas along a
continuum from instrumental ideas (means) to
aspirational ideas (ends). The group of ideas to
the far right – including liberty, justice, and
equality – are typically seen as ends, not means.
Those ideas on the far left – politics, government,
and public policy – are typically viewed as means
to achieve ends. In between, the ideas are partly
means and partly ends; partly instrumental and
partly aspirational.
The ideas in Figure 1.1 are among the
forces that continue to drive the decisions that
political leaders and citizens make, the changes
they seek, and the events they influence. Those
ideas also help shape the political institutions that
people create. Those institutions, such as
legislatures and courts, become important
instruments or means to achieve and sustain
societal goals.
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Civics Mosaic: Political Ideas that Have Shaped the World
The study of powerful political ideas is
important to everyone on a personal level. As
judicial thinker Robert Bork reminds us:
The less we know of how ideas actually took
root and grew, the more apt we are to accept
them unquestioningly, as inevitable features of
the world in which we move.11
Because ideas, especially political ideas,
matter, they should not be accepted uncritically.
This book invites you to think critically about
ideas.
What is the Role of Political Ideas in the
World of Politics?
Ideas are a powerful motivating force in the
world of politics. Being committed to a particular
idea, like making the world a safer place, or a set
of ideas, like conservatism or liberalism, is one of
the main reasons why people decide to get
involved in politics. After individuals become
involved in politics, their commitment to
particular ideas is an important reason for how
they vote, who they ally themselves with, and
what they oppose.
However, ideas do not exist in a vacuum.
In the complex world of politics, individuals may
disagree over the importance or meaning of ideas.
Moreover, ideas are not the only source of
disagreement. People also disagree over their
interests. Competing political interests often give
rise to political issues. And people rely on
institutions to resolve those differences.
Taken together, these five terms –
individuals, ideas, interests, issues, and
institutions – comprise the dimensions of politics
in this book. All begin with the letter “I,” which
is a good way to remember them. Here are some
of the relationships between political ideas and
these other five terms:
 Individuals in their capacity as political
leaders and citizens need political ideas to
organize, prioritize, and make sense of the
political world. Conversely, individuals
breathe life into ideas. For example, the idea
that a new nation could be founded in modern
times based on the ideals of a constitutional
republic needed individuals to bring it to life.
11
Robert Bork, The Antitrust Paradox (1978) as
quoted in The Oxford Dictionary of Political
Quotations, Antony Jay (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1996), p. 53.
DRAFT: November 2007
History has preserved a nearly complete
record of the speeches and official actions of
those individuals who met as delegates at the
Federal Convention in Philadelphia during the
summer of 1787 to draft a proposed federal
constitution for the United States. Far less is
known about the many other individuals who
gathered in taverns, store fronts, election
stations, and state conventions to debate and
ratify the new Constitution.
 Interests join ideas as an important
source of political motivation. In other words,
interests and ideas help explain why
individuals make political decisions. Interests
refer to the personal or group benefit that
people get from doing something or having
something done for them. What motivated the
Framers of the United States Constitution in
1787? Were they motivated by their economic
self-interest as some argue, or by the political
interests of the state and region they
represented? Or, perhaps they were guided by
their political commitment to the ideals of a
constitutional republic and their political belief
that those ideals needed a stronger federal
union than currently existed?
This book is written in the belief that
most political decisions – whether writing a
constitution or voting for a candidate – are
guided by a mix of interests and ideas. In fact,
this book goes a step further: rational political
judgment requires individuals to calculate how
a particular decision will affect their economic
interests, their political interests, and the
political ideals they hold dear.
 Issues arise out of the differences people
have – over what ideas mean and which ideas
matter most. When, for example, the proposed
United States Constitution of 1787 was sent to
the states for ratification, people soon divided
into two camps. Anti-Federalists opposed
ratification in the belief that republics could
only survive if they stayed small. Federalists
supported ratification in the belief that modern
times called for large republics, because only a
large republic would prevent divisions among
the people from growing so bitter and
dangerous that they might tear the republic
apart. Some issues are important only for a
particular time in history. Prior to the Civil
War, for example, slavery and the admission
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Civics Mosaic: Political Ideas that Have Shaped the World DRAFT: November 2007

of new states were hotly contested issues.

Other issues, such as the proper distribution of
power between federal and state governments,
are perennial questions confronted by each
generation.
 Institutions, certainly political ones, are
designed by individuals who seek long-lasting
ways to advance their interests and ideas in the
political arena. Some of those institutions, like
a labor union or a chamber of commerce,
represent only one set of interests and ideas;
other institutions, such as a political party,
may represent a balance or compromise of
competing ideas and interests. Some
institutions are governmental; others are
nongovernmental. The clash over ideas and
issues in the 1800 election had a number of
important effects on the institutional landscape
of American politics. It legitimized political
parties as institutions, entrenched the two-
party system and popular campaigning,
established a precedent for the peaceful
transfer of power between competing parties,
pointed out a defect in the presidential
electoral system that was rectified by the
Twelfth Amendment in 1804, and assured the
legitimacy of the constitutional system.12

12
“Editor’s Note” by David Hackett Fischer and
James M. McPherson in Adams vs. Jefferson: The
Tumultuous Election of 1800 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2004, xi-xii.

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Civics Mosaic: Political Ideas that Have Shaped the World
Dimension
Individuals
Ideas
Interests
Issues
Institutions
What is the Relationship between Political
Ideas and Statecraft?
Statecraft is the art of leading a state or country.
Like the captain of a ship, the good statesman (a
term that includes men and women) must be
prepared to steer “the ship of state” through all
kinds of winds and waters – during times so calm
that it is hard to make any progress, through
troubled waters where mere survival becomes the
goal, and in dense fog when it is easy to lose
one’s way.
What are the characteristics and qualities
of a “good statesman”? For the eminent
twentieth-century political thinker and historian,
Sir Isaiah Berlin, the key is political judgment.
For Berlin, statesmen are not “unpractical
idealists, visionaries, Utopians.”13 Political
judgment, according to Berlin, is “practical
wisdom, practical reason, perhaps, a sense of
what will ‘work,’ and what will not.” As Berlin’s
essay illustrates, practical wisdom or judgment is
the kind of knowledge that conductors have of
their orchestras, not the knowledge that chemists
have of the “contents of their test tubes.”14 In
other words, it is the knowledge of what is best,
right, or good in a particular circumstance.
At first, one might think that
statesmanship, as Berlin explained it, has little
use for political ideas. That conclusion would be
a mistake. Berlin likened the practical wisdom of
statesmen to that of good doctors: “To know only
the theory,” Berlin admitted, “might not be
enough to enable one to heal the sick.” However,
Berlin continued, “to be ignorant of [theory] is
13
“Political Judgement” in Isaiah Berlin (Henry
Hardy, editor), The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas
and their History (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1996), p. 40.
14
Ibid., p. 47.
DRAFT: November 2007
Figure 1.2: The Five I’s of Politics
Description
People who function as political leaders and citizens
The political concepts and ideals that are important to those individuals
The benefit or advantage that individuals get from a particular action.
The differences of opinions and interests that can divide individuals
The permanent structures individuals create to advance their ideas and
interests.
fatal.”15 In other words, exercising sound political
judgment blends practical experience with
theoretical understanding and technical skill.
Here is how a contemporary statesman,
Fernando Henrique Cardoso, President of Brazil
from 1995 to 2003, interprets Berlin’s essay:
Updated knowledge, republican values, and a
good deliberative process, important though
they are, may not be enough to produce a
successful statesman. The missing quality is
what Isaiah Berlin identified as the capacity
for good ‘political judgment.’ This entails not
only the discernment to avoid the opposite
risks of impractical idealism and uninspiring
realism, but also the practical wisdom to
grasp the character of a particular situation
or moment in history and to seize the
opportunities or confront the challenges that it
presents.16
In representative democracies, where
citizens elect their political leaders, the question
of what makes a good statesman becomes doubly
important. That question must be considered not
only by leaders who aspire to be statesmen, but
also by citizens – every time they enter the voting
booth, read the newspaper, or watch a political
debate.
In practical terms, wise political
judgment is one of the most important
expectations of citizenship. Citizens can and do
influence their leaders and fellow citizens in a
variety of important and effective ways. Voting,
writing letters to political leaders, and
participating in political campaigns are a few of
the formal avenues in which citizens exercise
their political judgment. However, citizens,
15
Ibid., p.41.
16
Fernando Henrique Cardoso, “Scholarship and
Statesmanship” in Journal of Democracy 16, no. 2
(April 2005), p. 11.
12
Civics Mosaic: Political Ideas that Have Shaped the World DRAFT: November 2007

through informal discussions with friends and

family – in person or over the Internet – also
influence public opinion. Public opinion has
become an important force in democratic politics.
For these reasons, the citizenry needs to
exercise sound political judgment. The question –
what makes a good citizen – prompts the broader
questions that guide this book. Although this
book is no substitute for the kinds of life
experiences that help inform sound judgment, the
political knowledge gained from this book will
complement those experiences.
That knowledge includes a variety of
examples of how real statesmen – such as Moses
and Hammurabi, Pericles and Cicero, George
Washington and Nelson Mandela, Franklin D.
Roosevelt and Winston Churchill – have behaved
in real situations over time and around the world.
How those actions compare is another vital
dimension of this book. So too are comparisons
between dictators like Adolph Hitler and Joseph
Stalin and social leaders like Mohandas Gandhi
and Martin Luther King, Jr.
A deep understanding of political ideas
– one that encourages wise political judgment –
may be developed in a variety of ways. The next
chapter explains the ways in which you will
explore them in this text – through the use of the
comparative method.

Reviewing and Using the Chapter

1. What do you think are the most important
political ideas in the world today? Why?
2. What is the relationship between political
ideas and (1) individuals, (2) interests, (3) issues,
and (4) institutions? Illustrate your answer with
one example for each relationship.
3. What informs wise political judgment?
Provide specific examples.

Extension Activity
The location of each idea on the means-ends
continuum is not chiseled in stone. Take a second
look at the ideas on that continuum in Figure 1.1.
Thinking of your own life as a citizen, or in
preparing to become a citizen, what aspirational
ideas or goals do you value most? What
instrumental ideas or means might help you
achieve them? What political ideas, if any, do
you think are missing from Figure 2.1, and why
should they be added?

13
Civics Mosaic: Political Ideas that Have Shaped the World DRAFT: November 2007

Figure 1.1: Political Ideas as Means and Ends

Instrumental Aspirational
Ideas (Means) Ideas (Ends)
| | | | | |

politics power governance religion justice

government authority social contract ideology liberty
public policy citizenship political culture equality
leadership rights
civil society respon-
nation-state sibility
globalization property
security
democracy order
constitutionalism
rule of law
economic development
social change
participation
representation
accountability

14
Chapter 2: Why Study Political Ideas Comparatively?
Big Ideas
 The comparative method is a powerful
approach to the study of political ideas
and politics.
 Comparativists must avoid the “extremes
of comparison” – cultural relativism and
ethnocentrism.
 Comparative research in political science
utilizes within-country and between-
country comparison as well as in-depth
and broader comparisons.
 Comparative research focuses on
relationships between the five I’s of
political science.
Purpose of this Chapter
This chapter turns from political ideas as an
important subject to comparison as a vehicle
for understanding the political world. The
comparative method is one of the most
effective and time-honored ways of learning
about political ideas and their application to
the world of politics. Studying political ideas
comparatively allows people to more fully
understand the meaning, importance, and
application of ideas – in their own political
systems and in others. The use of comparison
highlights the similarities and differences
between the political systems of two or more
countries and helps people form a deeper
understanding of the political world of ideas,
individuals, interests, issues, and institutions.
Terms to Know
comparative politics
comparative method
ethnocentrism
cultural relativism
comparative research
polity
state
government
nation
unit of analysis
unit of observation
research question
country selection
typology of government
What is the Comparative Method?
Comparison is an effective and time-
honored method of inquiry. In the scientific
world, comparison is known as “the
comparative method.” In a nutshell, the
comparative method involves identifying
and analyzing similarities and differences
between two or more subjects.
In the classroom, comparison is
frequently used to learn about an assigned
topic like election campaigns by comparing
the platforms and styles of different
candidates. In more elaborate research
projects, the comparative method can be
used to study the effects of one factor on
another. For example, a researcher might
investigate the effects of two or more
different anti-crime policies on the reduction
of crime.
The comparative method is used in a
wide variety of subjects – from biology to
politics. According to John Stuart Mill
(1806 – 1873), the 19th-century political
philosopher, the two classic forms of
reasoning rely on the comparative method.
Inductive reasoning uses the comparative
method to draw generalizations about
politics by deriving or inducing a general
principle from the examination and
comparison of two or more particular cases.
Deductive reasoning uses the comparative
method to work from a general idea or
principle to the specific by testing general
propositions in the real world and comparing
the results.
In the study of politics, the
comparative method has a variety of uses,
but two are especially prominent.
The first is known as “in-country
comparisons.” In this category, one can use
comparison as a method of studying various
aspects of one country’s politics – like the
policies of different presidents, the
constitutions of different states, the forms of
different local governments, or the benefits
of different environment protection policies.
The second is known as “between-
country comparisons.” Here, comparison
might be is used as a way of identifying the
similarities and differences between two or
more countries – for example, between
French and Russian presidential systems, the
British parliamentary system and the French
presidential system, or the American two-
party system and the Italian multi-party
system.
“Between-country comparisons”
also can be used more broadly to study the
different ways in which political ideas are
conceptualized and applied. One can
compare, for example, ancient empires like
China and Persia and how they carried out
the idea of empire, how John Locke and
Thomas Hobbes viewed human nature, how
the idea of human rights is enforced in
American and European judicial systems,
how the idea of democracy has been
implemented in Latin American and Asian
countries.
This book focuses primarily on
“between-country comparisons,” which
enable its users to study how ideas are
conceptualized and applied. Between-
country comparisons often require
illustrative examples that look more closely
at a particular idea in two or more countries.
“Comparative politics” is the field
of political science that relies most heavily
on “between-country” comparisons. Other
fields within political science using the
comparative method include comparative
law, political philosophy, public policy, and
international relations.
Courses in comparative politics
emphasize the five “I’s” of political science
– ideas, interests, issues, individuals, and
institutions – and how they operate in
different countries of the world. Some
students who major in comparative politics
may choose to specialize in the politics of a
particular region of the world like East Asia,
the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, or
Western Europe. As a field of political
science, comparative politics seeks to
identify, classify, and explain the similarities
and differences among political systems
across time and culture.
What are the Uses and Dangers of the
Comparative Method?
The comparative method is an essential part
of political inquiry. Let’s say you want to
learn about a particular political system
(Mexico, for example) or a particular idea
(such as democracy). How would you go
about doing that? First, you might attempt to
identify its important characteristics. At
some point, you might study how it
developed (i.e., its history) and how it
functions today.
But, sooner or later, comparison
becomes necessary. Why? What are the
essentials of political knowledge that
comparative method supplies?
One of the most basic uses of the
comparative method is the identification of
the similarities of two or more political
objects. From this use the student or
researcher can derive two essentials of
understanding – classification and
commonalities. With which countries, for
example, does Mexico share the most
political characteristics in common? What
are those shared political characteristics?
How does the Mexican political system
demonstrate those characteristics relative to
other political systems in that classification?
A second use of the comparative
method is the identification of the
differences between two or more political
objects. From this use the student or
researcher derives two more essential of
political knowledge – uniqueness and
variability. The American historian Louis
Hartz poses an interesting question: “How
can we know the uniqueness of anything,”
he asks, “except by contrasting it with what
is not unique?”17 This question leads to
another set of questions: In what ways does
the object of investigation (the Mexican
political system, for example) vary from
17
As quoted by C. Vann Woodward, ed., The
Comparative Approach in American History
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p.
13.
16
other similar political systems? What
explains those variations?
A third use of the comparative
method is to vary the point of view in
studying a political object. From this use
one gains perspective and a broader
understanding of the subject being studied.
What for example does the Mexican
political system look like if one studies it
from a United States vantage point or a
Central American vantage point? What
changes? What remains the same?
A final use of the comparative
method is in the process of generalization.
The three uses described above can help the
student or research make generalizations and
draw conclusions. To do this, the
comparative method must be used with other
methods not alone. Returning to the
previous example, comparison obviously
helps draw generalizations and conclusions
about the Mexican political system. But
comparison also can help point toward
generalizations and conclusions about – the
larger category of Latin American
democracies of which Mexico is a part,
about a common characteristic (like strong
presidential systems) of these countries that
should be further explored, or about a
political idea (like democracy) and how it
works in Latin American political systems.
To better understand a complex political
idea like democracy it is essential to see how
it works, and fails to work, not only in one
country but in similar and differing
situations.
According to R. Freeman Butts,
considered by many to be the father of civic
education in the United States, Americans
have much to learn from comparison:
We can learn much from those who
have long lived under tyranny and
terrorism. They understand and
appreciate the value of freedom and
civic community. They can learn much
from our long experience with a
sturdy and stable democracy.18
18
R. Freeman Butts, “Many Blueprints for
Democracy,” The Christian Science Monitor,
June 23, 1995, p. 18.
These uses of the comparative
method are applied on a daily basis not only
in classrooms and research projects.
The comparative method is widely
used in the making of public policy. It
would be unwise, for example, to make a
foreign policy decision without a
comparative assessment of how other
countries are likely to respond to that policy.
That holds true whether the policy involves
relations with a particular country or seeks
to resolve a particular problem (e.g., nuclear
proliferation, global warming, or terrorism).
Comparison is also important when
considering domestic policies, especially in
a global age. Making a policy judgment
about illegal immigration depends partly on
comparing what pushes people out of one
country and what pulls them into a new one.
Even a seemingly local issue, like how to
dispose of a city’s garbage, requires a
comparative assessment – of how other
cities deal with the problem, how garbage is
now hauled across city and state borders,
and how garbage contributes to international
problems of pollution.
Increasingly, the comparative
method is used in the court system. Every
year, federal courts in the United States
decide numerous cases, ranging from
copyright law to family law, where they
must take international and comparative law
into consideration. Currently, justices of the
United States Supreme Court are even
debating whether the court decisions of
other countries should be used as a source
for interpreting the United States
Constitution.
Finally, more and more business
firms rely on international sources of supply,
demand, investment, and employment. In
this global environment, legions of
comparative law and government specialists
must now monitor the political environment
in the countries where those firms conduct
business.
In short, people who understand
more about the complexities and nuances of
the world in which they live are at a relative
competitive advantage – in seeking
17
employment, in running for office, or in
making sound judgments as a citizen.
There are, however, two basic
cautions in using the comparative method.
The first is ethnocentrism, the tendency to
see others through your own subjective lens,
to exaggerate the importance or “rightness”
of your own values, to downplay or dismiss
others, and to study others out of their
context. The second and opposite tendency is
cultural relativism; namely, the tendency to
excuse what is morally wrong (e.g., slavery)
in one country because it is accepted as right
by that country. The comparative approach
must steer a careful and responsible course
between those two extremes.
What Do Comparativists Study?
If economists compare economies and
sociologists compare societies, then political
scientists compare “polities.” Comparative
research in political science explores the
similarities and differences between two or
more polities. “Comparativists” is the term
frequently used to describe political
scientists who do comparative political
research between countries.
Comparativists tend to use the term
“polity” in conjunction with other terms –
namely, “political system,” “country,”
“state,” and “nation-state.” If these are the
objects of political comparison, what do
they mean and what are their essential
differences?
Louis XIV (1643-1715) of
France gave the term “state” a rather
ominous tone when he supposedly
proclaimed “I am the State.” For this
reason, the American founders
associated the term “State” with Louis’s
absolutist and centralized rule, and they
shied away from using that term except
in its plural and less dangerous reference
to these United States.
Over time, the term “state” has
softened in meaning, and “polity” and
“state” have become synonymous. Today,
the standard definition of a state comes from
international law: a state is “an entity that
has a defined territory and a permanent
population, under the control of its own
government, and that engages in, or has the
capacity to engage in, formal relations with
other such entities.”19
Government is that part of the state
or polity with the authority to make and
enforce rules binding on itself and other
members of the polity. There are different
forms of government, of which democracy
and autocracy are two examples; and these
forms of government are sometimes referred
to as regimes. For example, one might say
that North Korea has an autocratic form of
government or that it is governed by an
autocratic regime.
The term nation is a social, not a
legal term. Nation refers to a people with
their own history and culture. Today, most
polities are nation-states, and nearly 200
such entities are members of the United
Nations and the broader international system
of which it is a part. Although these terms
are discussed in detail throughout the book,
two warnings need to be noted here:
 First, one should not assume that a
nation-state is a state composed of a single
and complete people who define
themselves as one nation. Politics is not so
simple. There are states like the former
Yugoslavia composed of different nations
or peoples, such as Serbs, Croats, and
Bosnians. There are states like India with
many different official language groups,
and states like Nigeria with various
official tribal groups. In fact, most states
are heterogeneous, which means they are
composed of various ethnic, religious, and
linguistic groups. Japan is one of the few
relatively homogeneous nation-states
composed primarily of one people of the
same ethnic group. There also are peoples,
like the Palestinians, Kurds, and Basques,
who consider themselves nations but do
not have a state.
 Second, the nation-state is a
relatively recent phenomenon. Today’s
world of nearly 200 nation-states is an
19
Restatement (Third), Foreign Relations Law of
the Unites States, Section 201. See also Article 1
of the Montevideo Convention of 1933 on Rights
and Duties of States.
18
 outgrowth of the Treaty of Westphalia that
ended the Thirty Years War in Europe in
1648. In earlier times, the world has been
composed of other types of states. Some
examples include:
 City-states (in Greek, the
word is polis) like Athens, Sparta,
and Rome, that were relatively small
(usually less than 250,000 people
including citizens and slaves), but
considered themselves complete
worlds, even exclaiming their own
gods.
 Tribal-states like the Ighbo
who developed an early form of
democracy in what is now Nigeria.
 Dynastic-states like the
ancient Persian Empire, the Chinese
Empire, and Tsarist Russia
governed by a successive line or
dynasty of rulers who sought to
expand their domain by conquering
other lands and peoples.
Section Review
1. List and explain three benefits of
comparison when learning about political
ideas.
2. Should justices of the United States
Supreme Court use ideas from other
countries to interpret the United States
Constitution?
3. A comparativist should “steer a careful
and responsible course” between
ethnocentrism and cultural relativism. What
are the dangers of these two extremes?
How Do Comparativists Decide What to
Compare?
Comparativists must consider three important
elements: (1) a topic or research question to
focus their investigation; (2) the unit of
analysis and observation that is appropriate to
the question they pose; and (3) the countries
that will generate the best data for their
research question. Usually, those decisions
reflect a mix of personal and professional
considerations.
Unit of analysis/unit of
observation. Carefully selecting the
appropriate unit of analysis is essential in
comparative research. Researchers must be
sure they are comparing similar units. To do
otherwise runs the risk of breaking one of
the cardinal rules of comparative research,
“Thou shall not compare apples and
oranges.” In comparative political research,
the unit of analysis is usually the national
polity.
The unit of observation, however,
may differ from the unit of analysis. The
unit of observation is the term that describes
the source of data.
In the 1990s, for example, Judith
Torney-Purta and a team of researchers
decided to study national differences in
student attitudes on citizenship and
government. As part of their research, the
team interviewed 90,000 adolescents in 28
countries.20 The team looked at some very
interesting questions: how do students
define and understand the concept of
citizenship; do male and female students
develop different conceptions and roles of
citizenship; do differences in the students’
family economic and educational resources
affect differences in student civic attitudes;
how does civic education vary from one
country to another; and how do various
types of civic learning affect civic attitudes
and performance. Those interviews were
used to draw cross-national comparisons of
student attitudes. In this way, the researchers
could compare student attitudes in one
country with student attitudes in other
countries. In this example, the unit of
observation is the student; the unit of
analysis is the country.
This book focuses on contemporary
nation-states as the unit of analysis, with
two important exceptions. The book uses
examples from earlier periods of world
history when polities were city-states,
dynastic states, or empires. In the final part
of the book, the unit of analysis shifts from
the nation-state as a sovereign and
independent polity to the international
system as an incomplete and imperfect
polity. The constant focus of this book is on
20
19
the polity, whether it be national, imperial,
or international.
Research questions/topic
selection. Many topics of political research,
comparative or otherwise, can be classified
in terms of the five “I’s” that were
introduced in the previous chapter – ideas,
individuals, interests, issues, and
institutions. Like other political scientists,
Figure 2.1: Possible Research Relationships
Idea Interest
Idea
Interest
Institution
Individual
Issue
Some comparative research topics
are more popular than others. Comparative
democracy has been a very popular topic
ever since the French Revolution. In the
early 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville traveled
to the United States. He was only 26 but
quickly realized that something about
democracy was different in the United States
when compared to democracy in his native
France.
Tocqueville spent nine months
traveling around the United States, visiting
its big cities and small towns, interviewing
all sorts of people, and observing American
life firsthand. On his return to France he
settled down to years of writing what he had
experienced in less than one year in the
United States. The result of his labors, titled
Democracy in America, is a masterwork of
political theory published in four volumes
between 1835 and 1840.
As Tocqueville confesses, “in
America, I saw more than America; I sought
there the image of democracy itself . . . in
order to learn what we have to fear or hope
from its progress.”
Over the next century and a half,
especially during the last quarter of the 20th
century, most countries of the world
converted to democracy, at least in name.
Today, dozens of books on comparative
democracy are published each year. In 1990,
amidst the collapse of the Soviet Union, the
comparativists often formulate their research
question by looking more closely at a
relationship of some kind – between two
institutions, between an institution and an
idea, or some other relationship between
important parts of the political world.
There is certainly no lack of
possible research topics. Figure 2.1
illustrates 25 of these possibilities.
Institution Individual Issue
National Endowment for Democracy
established the Journal of Democracy. This
journal is published four times a year, and
each of those issues contains about 200
pages of articles, news and notes, and book
reviews.
Country selection. A final
consideration is the selection of the actual
units for comparison. In most comparative
political research, the unit of analysis is the
national polity or country. But how many
countries should be selected and which
ones?
Selecting countries, like selecting
research questions or topics, depends partly
on the topic selected and partly on personal
preference. If the topic is “varieties of
democracy,” for example, the comparativist
will want to select countries that represent
different types of democracy. The
comparativist might be interested in
comparing new and older democracies,
Western and non-Western democracies, or
parliamentary and presidential democracies,
for example. But there are many
democracies in each category, so the
comparativist may rely partly on personal
preference in selecting countries within each
category. Comparativists also may select
countries that are easier to research because
they have more access to information in a
given country.
20
How Did Sam Beer Find the Influence of
British Interest Groups?
Harvard University Professor Samuel Beer
turned 90 at the dawn of the 21st century. Six
years later he recorded his intellectual
odyssey in comparative politics.21 In his
essay, “Encounters with Modernity,” he
recalls the first break-through conference
paper he wrote in comparative politics.
As a Rhodes Scholar – an honor
reserved for those with superior athletic and
academic ability – he traveled to Britain
before the outbreak of World War II. He took
that opportunity to travel throughout Europe
where he observed firsthand the rise of
fascism and resistance to it in Britain. From
that experience, he developed a life-long
interest in British politics.
After World War II, he became a
political science professor at Harvard. By
the mid-1950s he and many other American
political scientists began to study interest
groups and their influence on American
government, especially on Congress. Beer
decided to write a paper comparing the
influence of interest groups on American and
British politics.
Most of his colleagues warned Beer
that he would not find powerful interest
groups in Britain or Europe. This topic, they
tried to persuade him, was uniquely
American. British interest groups were too
polite: they simply would not try to influence
the British Parliament.
Fortunately, Beer did not heed their
advice. Instead, he followed the advice of
another political scientist, V.O. Key, who
counseled “Where power is, there the
pressure will be applied.” So, Beer decided to
seek the center of post World War II British
power. After much research, often with
members of “the old-boy network,” he picked
up the power trail. Finally, he found its center
21
Samuel H. Beer, “Encounters with
Modernity,” in The Oxford Handbook of
Political Institutions edited by R.A.W. Rhodes,
Sarah A. Binder, and Bert A. Rockman (Oxford,
UK: Oxford University Press, 2006). The
following story and its quotations come from
that essay, especially pp. 698-700.
not in Parliament, but in the British civil
service.
With that discovery, he wrote a
brilliant paper in which he compared
American and British interest group pressure.
Beer’s paper got page one billing in the
American Political Science Review. Beer
revolutionized the way scholars approached
British politics. He did so by refusing to heed
conventional wisdom and by doggedly
pursuing the power trail to unfamiliar places.
“If,” as Beer concluded, “we had a way of
measuring power we should probably find
that pressure groups are more powerful in
Britain than in the United States . . .
numerous, massive, well-organized, and
highly effective.”
How Do Comparativists Conduct Their
Research?
Although there are many ways to conduct
comparative research, one of the first
questions a comparativist must answer is
what kind of research their questions
require. Some research questions require the
in-depth analysis of two or three countries,
while others require an approach that casts a
wider net.
The in-depth approach allows the
researcher to take a closer and deeper look at
a few countries and compare their
similarities and differences. Sam Beer, for
example, limited his research to two
countries. There are several advantages to
taking a closer look at fewer countries: it
provides the researcher with an opportunity
to look more closely at the rich historical
and cultural context of the countries under
investigation; it becomes possible to visit
the countries and observe their politics; and
that in turn allows the researcher to see more
of the complexities and nuances of politics.
Those who prefer this approach will say that
comparing the politics of different countries
requires an understanding of their political
culture, which is like peeling back an onion.
Each layer takes time to peel back, but each
reveals a different meaning of what you are
studying, which informs the analyses and
enriches the interpretations.
21
 However, some research questions
require a broader net. This may require
gathering large amounts of data (usually
quantitative data) from many countries and
then using statistical techniques to search for
relationships. One example is the World
Values Survey. From 1999 to 2002,
researchers surveyed over 200,000 people in
81 countries. Their results allowed other
researchers to compare how people in
different countries perceive life, family,
work, politics, society, religion, morality,
and national identity. 22
There are several advantages of the
broader approach. This approach provides a
“bird’s-eye” view that lets the researcher see
the forest over the trees. Rich detail is
sometimes clouded; but new perspectives
are gained. The broader approach still
allows the researcher to take a closer look at
particularly interesting results; but it is
virtually impossible without country teams
to study the historical and cultural context of
individual countries. The researcher can
identify, collect, and classify particular cases
by their similarities. The researcher also can
search for patterns of behavior and for
factors that explain why those patterns occur
and how they change over time. With these
results, the research can begin to build a
theory that explains the political behavior
that is observed.
Many comparativists design their
research in such a way as to combine the best
of both approaches. One strategy is to start by
focusing on a few countries and widen the
angle of vision applied to each. Another
strategy starts with a large number of
countries that then allows the researcher to
select some case studies for a closer look.
Both strategies are limited by time, money,
and other resources.
Robert Putnam, professor of public
policy at Harvard University, combined
22
Ronald Inglehart, Miguel Basáñez, Jaime
Díez-Medrano, Loek Halman, and Ruund
Luijkx, eds., Human Beliefs and Values: A
Cross-Cultural Sourcebook Based on the 1999-
2002 Values Surveys (Ann Arbor, MI: World
Values Survey, Institute for Social Research,
University of Michigan, 2004).
methods when he conducted intensive
research of the political culture of Italy.
Putnam and his colleagues broadened out
from a narrow base. Although the
researchers focused on one country, Italy,
they wanted to compare Italy’s 15 newly
created (in 1970) regional governments –
which ones succeeded, how they succeeded,
and why they succeeded. According to
Putnam, Italy’s regional experiment was
perfect for a comparative study:
Just as a botanist might study
plant development by measuring
the growth of genetically identical
seeds sown in different plots, so a
student of government
performance might examine the
fate of these new organizations,
formally identical, in their diverse
social and economic and cultural
and political settings. Would the
new organizations actually
develop identically in soils as
different as those around Seveso
and Pietrapertosa?23
Putnam’s strategy included an
incredibly wide-angle focus within some
regions generating a significant amount of
aggregate data analysis. Researchers
interviewed more than 700 leaders in six
regions of Italy. Researchers then went to
the local level in those six regions, where
they interviewed hundreds of community
leaders and conducted six specially
commissioned national surveys and several
dozen voter surveys. They also gathered
data on institutional performance, street-
level responsiveness to citizen inquiries,
case studies, and observations from their
visits to selected regions.24 How long did it
take to gather all this information? Roughly
20 years (from 1968 to 1989)!
An example of a different strategy
(of starting wide and narrowing in) is the
International Association for the Evaluation
of Educational Achievement’s (IEA) study
23
Robert D. Putnam with Robert Leonardi and
Raffaella Y. Nanetti, Making Democracy Work
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1993), p. 7.
24
Ibid., pp. 13-14.
22
of civic education in 28 countries. A
research team in each country prepared a
case study. These cases were used to write
the larger study that compares citizenship
and education across countries. In fact, the
case study process gave the researchers a
sense of the rich historical and cultural
context of the countries they studied.
Aristotle’s study of politics is
probably the earliest recorded example of the
comparative method. Certainly, he was
among the first to pose and answer many of
the essential questions that remain at the
heart of political science today. Writing on
scrolls of parchment while traveling by foot,
animal, and ship, Aristotle and his students
collected information on 158 Greek and non-
Greek city-states, colonies, and empires.
They then prepared in-depth case studies of
the politics, culture, society, and economy of
some of these examples. Unfortunately, the
only document that remains of that work is a
fragment of their case study on Athens.
Nonetheless, Aristotle’s early work
helped to crystallize two enduring questions
of government; namely, “Who rules?” and
“Who benefits from that rule?”
One of the most important results of
their work is a “typology,” or classification of
distinctive types of cases. Aristotle’s
typology distinguishes six forms of
government based on who rules and who
benefits. According to Aristotle, government
can be ruled by the one (a single individual),
a few (a small group), or the many (the
citizenry as a whole). In each case, rulers can
govern for the benefit of the entire polity or
for their own selfish benefit.
The resulting six forms of
government continue to provide the starting
point for most studies of comparative
government. Figure 2.2 illustrates those six
forms, a subject examined more closely in the
next two chapters.

23
Exploring Political Ideas DRAFT: November 2007

Figure 2.2. Aristotle’s Typology of Government

Rule by One Rule by a Few Rule by the Many

Healthy Monarchy Aristocracy Democracy

Corrupt Tyranny Oligarchy Anarchy

The importance of political ideas and

the use of comparison are two important
themes that run throughout this book. A
third theme of this book is ideas in action –
the application of ideas to the world of
politics, which is the subject of the next
chapter.

Chapter Review
1. What do researchers of comparative
politics study?
2. Identify a political issue that is important
to you. Explain how comparison could be
used to inform your judgment about that
issue.
3. What are the basic types of comparative
research and advantages of each?
4. Explain how comparison can be used
both as a research method and as a way of
gaining perspective.

Extension Activity
Using Aristotle’s typology of government,
classify the following countries and explain
your classifications:
United States
North Korea
Iran
Mexico
Nigeria
China
Russia

24
Exploring Political Ideas DRAFT: November 2007

25
Civics Mosaic
Chapter 3: Why Study Politics?
Big Ideas
 Politics is a social activity that requires
ethical decisions to resolve public
differences.
 Politics is the responsibility of both
political leaders and the citizen.
 People enter politics for a mix of
reasons – to gain power, to serve their
constituency, and to promote the
common good.
 Politics reflects the best and worst
tendencies of human nature.
Purpose of Chapter
Politics – like many important ideas – has
different meanings for different people. To
some, politics is the exciting and dynamic
subject of how human beings organize
themselves in society. To others, politics means
something negative – as when politicians “play
politics” by avoiding an issue, posturing in the
limelight, or using negative campaigning to
attack an opponent. At its best and worst,
politics is an essential theme of this book. Good
ideas cannot be put in practice without it, nor
can bad ideas be stopped. So, roll up your
sleeves and join us as we enter the rough and
tumble world of politics.
Terms to Know
politics
electoral arena
policy arena
civil society arena
constituency
realist view of politics
idealist view of politics
failed states
Why Do People Participate in Politics?
“Politics” happens when people disagree –
sometimes strongly – about who should govern,
what issues they should address, and how they
should do so. In this book, politics is defined as a
complex process by which people seek to settle
their differences peacefully and reach a binding
decision that resolves a public issue.
Much of today’s politics takes place in
three arenas:
26
Draft August 2007
 The electoral arena is that sphere in
which candidates campaign and citizens
decide who governs. Countries differ widely
in their type of electoral system and the extent
to which those elections are free, fair, and
competitive. However, these differences do
have identifiable patterns – a subject
addressed in a later chapter.
 The policy arena is the area in which the
people’s representatives must decide how to
govern and why. Countries also differ widely
in the principles governing their policy-
making institutions, processes, and
performance. Here, too, these patterns are
discussed in later chapters.
 The civil society arena is the place in
which people are free to form
nongovernmental associations. In Western and
Western-styled polities, those associations
include interest groups like trade unions and
neighborhood associations, independent
political parties, and a free press. In non-
Western polities, “interest groups” are less
common and influential than more natural
associations like families, clans, and tribes, as
well as neighborhoods and religious
associations. Whether as organized interest
groups or more natural human associations,
these civil society organizations monitor and
seek to influence government – a subject also
detailed in a later chapter
What is it that attracts some people and
not others to the rough-and-tumble world of
politics? People enter the business world to make
money, the ministry to save souls, and medicine
to heal the sick. But what is the allure of politics
– for those who practice or observe it?
One of the most important and common
answers to this question is power – the ability to
influence others, to make decisions affecting
public life, and perhaps even to change the course
of history. Lee Hamilton, a former member of the
United States Congress from Indiana who served
with distinction as Vice Chair of the 9/11
Commission, explains:
Over the years, I’ve met with a
lot of high-school and college
Exploring Political Ideas
students, and there’s one question
they come up with time after time:
What, they want to know, what is
politics really about?
Having spent a good part of my
life in the trenches, I long ago arrived
at an answer that I thought reflected
reality and was sufficiently cynical to
make me believable. Politics, I would
tell them, is about power: getting it,
keeping it, and using it to advance
one’s agenda.25
There is certainly much in the news to
fuel the cynical view that power is the main
reason why people enter politics. The daily news
seems to abound with stories of politicians who
use their office to feed their personal egos. All
too often, Lee Hamilton bemoans, “it’s about
enriching oneself. It’s about winning elections or
wielding power for its own sake.”26
Such views are not new. Max Weber, an
influential German thinker (1864-1920), and one
of the founders of modern sociology, wrote that
politics “offers first of all the sense of power.” 27
Over 200 years earlier, in the 17th
century, Henry Carey, an English songwriter,
composed a paean (a song of joyful praise) to his
sovereign:
God save our gracious king!
Long live our noble king!
God save the king!
Then Carey added a second verse in which he
scolded members of Parliament:
Confound their politics,
Frustrate their knavish tricks.
But politics is about more than getting and
using power. Lee Hamilton discovered, like most
responsible politicians do, that power is only one
piece of the puzzle. He has urged people to dig
deeper and find the other important pieces of the
puzzle; namely, the mix of reasons that impel
politicians to enter politics and seek power.
25
Lee Hamilton, “What Politics Should Be About,”
Comments on Congress (Bloomington, IN: Center on
Congress at Indiana University, May 2007), p. 1.
26
Ibid.
27
Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in Mitchell
Cohen and Nicole Fermon, eds., Princeton Readings
in Political Thought: Essential Texts Since Plato
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), p.
499.
DRAFT: August 2007
For most politicians, power is not an end
in itself but a means to achieve other ends. It is an
instrumental, not an aspirational, idea.
Aside from gaining personal power, there
are two common ends that politicians seek to
advance by going into politics and pursuing
power. The first is serving the interests of their
constituency – the people they were elected or
appointed to represent. Most legislators see one
of their roles as “a delegate” – serving the people
and groups of their district. They do this by
guiding constituents through the labyrinth of
government; but they also try to serve their
district as a whole by bringing government
funding, jobs, and other benefits back to their
district.28
A second common end of politics is
serving the general good of the people as a whole
– not just one’s constituents. Edmund Burke
expressed this view of the representative as “a
trustee” – serving the common good of the people
as a whole. In a 1774 speech after being elected
to the British Parliament, he distinguished this
role of the representative as a trustee.
Parliament is not a Congress of
Ambassadors from different and hostile
interests; which interests each must
maintain, as an Agent and Advocate,
against other Agents and Advocates; but
Parliament is a deliberative Assembly of
one Nation, with one Interest, that of the
whole; where not local Purposes, not
local Prejudices ought to guide, but the
general Good, resulting from the
general Reason of the whole. You chuse
a Member indeed; but when you have
chosen him, he is not the Member of
Bristol, but he is a Member of
Parliament.
In most constitutional governments, the
general good of the people is reflected in the
preamble to a country’s constitution. The
preamble to the United States Constitution, for
28
In American politics, “pork barrel politics” came
into use after the Civil War as a way of describing
this type of politics. In the days before refrigerators,
pork was kept in a barrel. Journalists used that
metaphor to describe laws like the Rivers and
Harbors Act that allowed legislators to allocate
special projects for their districts, and hence to “bring
home the bacon.”
27
Exploring Political Ideas
example, includes justice, domestic tranquility,
the common defense, the general welfare, and the
blessings of liberty. However, as Lee Hamilton
warns:
If politics at heart is a means to an end
– the end being an actual fix to a
problem – then it is not just about the
search for an answer, but about making
that answer work. This means that the
best politicians don’t just dream up
policy solutions regardless of context:
They also think about how those
solutions would work in the real world;
they think about the forces that can help
them and those that can block them; and
perhaps above all, they think about how
to build the broadest consensus possible
behind their solutions, so they have a
realistic chance of taking root and
flourishing.29
At first glance, it may seem like these
descriptions of politics and the motivations of
politicians are in natural conflict with one
another. However, Hamilton does not say that
politicians are unable to dream and build
solutions. Nor does Burke say that politicians
must serve the common good and thereby reject
their constituents’ interests.
Again and again, this book encourages
you to see through inappropriate distinctions and
false dichotomies. Hamilton argues persuasively
that politicians must do both – they must dream
and they must select the best of their dreams on
which to build solutions to public problems. And
Burke leaves open the distinct possibility that
representatives can, and indeed “must,” find a
way to harmonize the interests of the
constituency and country.
Many politicians try to balance the goal
of addressing larger public problems while
serving the specific interests of their constituents.
This is no easy task but the best statesmen try to
do just that. Sometimes the needs and interests of
the common good are in harmony with the
specific interests of constituents while at other
times statesmen must consider the context of a
specific issue and make a judgment that favors
one side over the other.
29
Lee Hamilton, “What Politics Should Be About”
op. cit., p. 2.
DRAFT: August 2007
Although people enter politics to acquire
power and to achieve loftier goals, There is a
third motivation that drives the other two. As
Aristotle explained, it is ambition that drives
people into politics – the desire to achieve
something and be widely recognized.
For the ambitious, politics is truly a
pinnacle of human achievement. Scottish novelist
and statesman, John Buchan (1875-1940)
described it “as the crown of a career…. It is the
worthiest ambition. Politics is still the greatest
and most honorable adventure.”30 The writer
Frederick Scott Oliver (1864-1934) agreed with
Buchan. He concluded, “With all the temptations
and degradations that beset it, politics is still the
noblest career any man can choose…. If the
conscience of an honest man lays down stern
rules, so also does the art of politics.”
Is Politics for Everyone?
As a full-time occupation, political leadership is
probably not for everyone. It is certainly not for
the faint of heart, for those who shy away from
confrontation, or for those who are unwilling to
compromise. “Politics ain’t beanbag,” quipped
the fictional character, Mr. Dooley.31 Thomas
Jefferson echoed this sentiment when he wrote,
“Politics is such a torment that I would advise
everyone I love not to mix with it.”
In fact, a want ad for a full-time political
leader would be rather specific in its
requirements.
Political Leader Needed
Must be a people person. Must have a
message and the will to succeed. Must
be able to inspire and persuade others.
Must like making speeches, reading the
news, traveling, and eating out. Some
experience helpful, but too much can be
a liability.32
30
John Buchan also served in British Intelligence and
wrote the spy novel The Thirty-Nine Steps which
Alfred Hitchcock made into a movie in 1935.
31
The brainchild of Chicago journalist Finley Peter
Dunne (1867-1936), Mr. Dooley was a street-wise
bartender who, as the saying goes, “spoke truth to
power.” He spoke for the unsophisticated but
worldly-wise common man who understood the big-
city politics of his day.
32
Compare this want ad with the three qualifications
that Max Weber looked for in the politician: (1)
passion, namely “a passionate commitment to a
28
Exploring Political Ideas
However, there is also an office called
“citizen.” In world history, the office of citizen is
a relatively recent phenomenon. Except for early
experiments in citizenship, notably in the ancient
Greek polity of Athens, the citizen as a
meaningful participant in politics is not much
more than two centuries old. Being represented
by elected officials does not mean that citizens
should opt out of politics or rely entirely on their
representatives to do their political work.
President Dwight David Eisenhower – a
peacemaker abroad, enforcer of racial
desegregation at home, and counselor against the
dangers of the “military-industrial complex” –
believed that “Politics ought to be the part-time
profession of every citizen.”
What did Eisenhower mean by that
statement? He meant what he said – politics is a
full-time job for politicians, but every citizen
should devote part of their time and
responsibilities to keeping an eye on the
politicians they’ve elected. As the following
words over one of the entrances of the Nebraska
State Capitol proclaim:
THE SALVATION OF THE
STATE IS WATCHFULNESS
IN THE CITIZEN.
Most citizens cannot devote all of their
time to the responsibilities of citizenship. They
must balance various responsibilities – to family,
congregation, job, friends, neighbors, and, of
course, to themselves. However, survey after
survey shows that most people around the world
believe that they should make time to exercise
their civic responsibilities.33
The responsible citizen should keep up
with the news, be prepared to make informed
political choices, exercise the right to vote, abide
by the law, and be a good neighbor. The average
citizen may not know enough to pass just laws in
realistic cause”; (2) a sense of responsibility toward
that cause; and (3) judgment as “the ability to
contemplate things as they are with inner calm and
composure before allowing them to affect one’s
actions.” Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in
Princeton Readings, op. cit., pp. 499, 500. Compare
these in turn with Berlin’s singular focus on
judgment as the primary requirement of the statesman
(see Chapter 1).
33
See for example, the World Values Survey at
http:www.worldvaluessurvey.org.
DRAFT: August 2007
a legislature, but the average citizen should know
enough to make wise decisions about who to
elect and where they stand on particular issues.
That is the citizen’s part-time role in politics.
Philosophers have another way of
approaching the question – “Is politics for
everyone”? Most philosophers start with premise
that politics is part of human nature – that it is a
natural or inherent part of the human condition.
That is certainly the starting point for Aristotle,
and Aristotle is the starting point for many
political philosophers.
Here is how Aristotle comes to this major
point. First, Aristotle reasons, human beings are
not just social creatures they also are sociable
creatures. Human beings are not self-sufficient –
they need one another for basic wants like food,
shelter, and protection – and this is what makes
them social creatures. Moreover, most human
beings like to be with others. As modern
psychology has discovered, people need to be
recognized; they are fulfilled when they are
recognized by others for their achievements and
they become hostile when they are not. And this
is what makes human beings sociable as well as
social.
For these reasons, Aristotle continues,
people form associations, beginning with the
family; and they develop a common language to
communicate. In these respects, Aristotle
observed, human beings are not so different from
other sociable creatures – like bees.
The question then arises: how is
humankind different from other creatures? Here
is how Aristotle answers that question:
It is thus clear that man is a political animal,
in a higher degree than bees or other
gregarious [sociable] animals. . . . It is the
peculiarity of man, in comparison with other
animals, that he alone possesses a perception
of good and evil, of the just and the unjust,
and other similar qualities; and it is
association in these things which makes a
family and a polis [the ancient city-state]. . . .
The man who is isolated, who is unable to
share in the benefits of political association,
or has no need to share because he is already
self-sufficient, is no part of the polis. . . .34
34
Aristotle, Politics, Book I, ch. 2, translated by
Ernest Barker (New York: Oxford University Press,
29
Exploring Political Ideas
In short, for Aristotle, what makes
humankind unique is also what makes us
political. That distinctly human quality is ethical
judgment – the ability to recognize good and evil,
justice and injustice, and the like – in the public
realm and in private life. That is the great gift that
an informed and responsible citizenry brings to
the enterprise of politics, and that is the
philosopher’s answer to why politics is indeed for
everyone. It also helps to explain why the
citizenry needs the polity and government, which
are the subjects of the next two chapters.
Section Review
1. Who do you know who would make a good
candidate for a career in politics? Review the
want ad earlier in this chapter and write a letter of
application for that position in which you
emphasize that person’s political strengths.
2. How would you defend the position that
politics is for everyone? What are the strongest
arguments for this position? What are the
strongest counter-arguments against this
position?
3. Aristotle claimed that a man who isolated
himself could not “share in the benefits of
political association.” What do you think those
benefits might be? Why can they not be obtained
in isolation?
4. Aristotle believed that man’s ability to use
language made politics possible. Do those with a
better command of language control politics?
Why?
What Can Be Inferred from Politics?
An “inference” is a conclusion drawn from
propositions and facts. What inferences can be
drawn from the prior discussion about the
meaning of politics? What can be learned from
studying politics? The remainder of this chapter
seeks to answer this question by taking a closer
look at the characteristics of this definition and at
the differing points of view surrounding some of
them. This definition contains five characteristics.
This chapter began with a definition of
politics as a complex process by which people
seek to settle their differences peacefully and
reach a binding decision to resolve public issues.
First, politics is a social activity; it is not
a solitary pursuit. Politics requires human
1995), p. 11. The polis was the polity of the ancient
Greeks, which today is often translated into English
as the “city-state”],
DRAFT: August 2007
interaction, lasting human associations, a
common language, and a common set of political
ideals on which most people agree. Human
beings seek the recognition that comes from those
associations. If the more ambitious people do not
achieve that social recognition peacefully in the
world of politics, they may seek it elsewhere –
like on the battlefield.
But there is something more: politics
requires a certain amount of “public trust.” In
other words, for politics to work people need to
trust one another and the institutions that sustain
a political life free of violence, disorder, and
injustice.35 The level of trust that is necessary to
sustain and maintain a polity is a contested issue.
However, the history of every inhabited continent
has shown that when a ruler or a government
breaks the public trust on one too many occasions
only the most ruthless acts of repression can hold
the people at bay.
Second, politics involves ethical
considerations. People are not only social and
sociable; they are ethical. They care about the
difference between right and wrong, between
justice and injustice. Therefore, some form of
politics is needed in all human societies to decide
– peacefully if possible – what is fair and just in
those situations that require a collective response.
Third, politics typically arises from
differences among people. A people must agree
on certain political ideals; otherwise, public trust
erodes. But people will not naturally agree on
how to resolve all political issues. Out of these
differences arise much of the rough-and-tumble
of politics – the political competition for office,
the political cross-pressures on officeholders
(including the citizenry), and, on rarer occasions,
the end of politics in civil war or other violent
measures.
Some societies do not react well to such
tensions. Their political culture may value social
harmony or their political institutions may be too
fragile to withstand constant tension. Other
societies value political competition and see it as
an engine of progress. However, in all societies,
35
Ted Honderich, ed., The Oxford Companion to
Philosophy, new edition (Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press, 2005), p. 926. For more on the idea
of trust, see Francis Fukuyama, Trust: The Social
Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (New York:
Free Press, 1995).
30
Exploring Political Ideas
the peaceful accommodation of differences is
what separates politics from war and other violent
measures.
As one political scientist put it, politics is
“that solution to the problem of order which
chooses conciliation rather than violence and
coercion.”36 Most people might prefer to avoid
confrontation altogether. But those who enter
politics must be prepared to air their differences
and to debate the merits of their positions so that
they can come to an agreeable compromise. That
is why a compromised or conciliated response to
a problem is called a “political solution.”
Fourth, politics is decision-making. A
society is in trouble when its political institutions
may be able to prevent violent disagreements but
fail to solve problems. Politics requires collective
decisions by people with the authority to make
them. Political decisions often involve
negotiations, which may include bargaining,
compromising, and conciliating. Political
decisions must be regarded as binding upon the
group, even if some people remain opposed.
Finally, the scope of political decisions
extends to public matters. “Public” matters are
those things that affect the people organized
politically as a public – either in whole or in part.
The word “republic,” for example, comes from
the Latin words res publica – meaning public
things that matter to the people. Some of public
things are quite clear and universally accepted.
All human societies, for example, regard defense
against an external threats as a matter of public
concern and public action. Other things are more
difficult to distinguish as public or private. In
Western societies, especially Anglo-American
societies, for example, it has long been assumed
that “a man’s home is his castle” – a private place
beyond the reach of government. By contrast,
some Eastern societies find privacy to be a
foreign notion. The Chinese language, for
example, has no symbol for “privacy.”
Which Political Characteristics Remain a
Subject of Debate?
Some of the characteristics of politics are the
subject of heated debate. Attempts to answer two
36
Bernard Crick, In Defence of Politics
(Harmondswourth and New York: Penguin, 1983), p.
123.
DRAFT: August 2007
fundamental questions illustrate these tensions:
why does politics arise? where does politics end?
A. Why does politics arise?
Aristotle’s response – man is by nature a sociable
creature who wants to associate with others in
order to create a good and just polity – is only
one of the possible answers to the question posed
above. A different view expressed by the 17th-
century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes
holds that man in a state of nature leads a life that
is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”37
Both views see politics as an outgrowth of human
nature and therefore universal. However, these
views begin with very different views about
human nature and what it means for politics.
The Hobbesian or “realist view” of
politics sees politics as people pursuing power –
usually for the purpose of dominating others.
Harold Laswell, the noted American
psychologist, captures this view in the title of a
book he wrote on politics – Politics: Who Gets
What, When and How (1936). Thinking back to
the beginning of this chapter, this may seem to
represent rather low expectations of politics.
Realists argue that in a world where people try to
dominate one another, it is prudent to protect
one’s self-interests against those of one’s
opponents.
In the history of philosophy, Niccolò
Machiavelli (1469 – 1527) is credited with being
the father of modern political realism. However,
Machiavelli is much misunderstood. The standard
view is that Machiavelli was evil – the kind of
man who would cut your heart out without
remorse if it would serve his own self-interests.
In fact, Machiavelli prized virtú or civic virtue in
leaders and citizens. Again and again,
Machiavelli counsels the prince and the people
that civic virtue means exercising wise judgment
in advancing the general good of the republic
over one’s self-interest.
He is, however, totally ruthless about one
point. When the safety of the country is at stake,
every citizen has the duty to set aside every
scruple to save the country and its liberty. In this
sense, realism is very much like civic patriotism:
the good of the country comes first because a
37
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, edited by Richard
Tuck (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
1996), p.89.
31
Exploring Political Ideas
good country is the best way to secure the
people’s liberties and progress.38 In other words,
this particular end justifies all possible means.
The realist view is particularly influential
in the making of foreign policy in a world where
aggression is still commonplace. There will
always be those who look to win political battles
by whatever means necessary, including violence.
Vladimir Lenin (1870 – 1924) in the Soviet
Union and Mao Zedong (1893 – 1976) in China
openly asserted that political power comes from
“the barrel of a gun.”
By contrast, the “idealist” view sees a
world in which the pursuit of power is replaced
by the pursuit of justice and peace. The idealist
envisions a world of peace, not power, in which
people and polities exercise their good will by
building a more just world peacefully and by
mutual consent. The German philosopher
Immanuel Kant was one of the founders of
modern political idealism. He envisioned a world
of “perpetual peace” governed by an international
federation of republics.
In reality, most people in the world of
politics are motivated by a mixture of realist and
idealist goals. They seek to protect the interests of
those who elected them, but they also seek to
advance loftier ideals for the polity as a whole.
As noted earlier, people who enter politics seek
both power and loftier goals – in varying degrees
but never purely for their own sake. It is ambition
that drives people into politics – the desire to
achieve something and be widely recognized for
it. The question is how (and how well) different
political leaders in history have combined
idealism and realism to obtain their goals.
B. Where does politics end?
Another difference of opinion over the meaning
of politics occurs when people try to explain the
end of politics. There are three major views on
this question.
The first view holds that all political
pursuits eventually lead to government because it
38
See Machiavelli’s The Prince and The Discourses,
but especially The Discourses, Third Book, Chapter
XLI, titled “One’s Country Must Be Defended With
Glory Or With Shame; It Must Be Defended
Anyhow.” For more, see Quentin Skinner (the dean
of Machiavelli experts), Machiavelli: A Very Short
Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press,
1981, 1996, 2000).
DRAFT: August 2007
is the only institution with the authority to resolve
political differences and make political decisions.
If one consults Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate
Dictionary (11th edition), the first definition of
politics represents this position when it defines
politics as “the art or science of government”
generally and “concerned with guiding and
influencing governmental policy” and “winning
and holding control over a government.”
The second view is broader and more
expansive. According to this view, politics is the
means by which all social decisions are made and
carried into effect in human social units and
institutions. Politics, in this view, encompasses
the totality of human relationships. Merriam-
Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th edition)
represents this view in one of its last definitions
of politics – as “the total complex of relations
between people living in society.”
In this view, politics takes place not only
in government, but also in families, labor unions,
schools, sports, religious groups, and other
nongovernmental associations. This more
expansive view sees politics everywhere and as
the full-time responsibility of everyone. In this
view, even the personal can become political.
The third view of politics is the realists’
view that politics begins where consensus ends.
This is the view that conflict defines politics.
Inherent differences divide human beings and the
great end of politics is the peaceful resolution of
conflict. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate
Dictionary (11th Edition) represents this view in
its definition of politics as “political affairs or
business; especially: competition between
competing interest groups or individuals for
power and leadership (as in government).”
The great danger in each of these views
occurs when people come to believe passionately
in the rightness of their view and succeed in
imposing it on others. Sadly, the full history of
the 20th-century and the early years of this one
demonstrate the horrible consequences of each of
these three views taken to their unimaginable
ends.
Authoritarianism has been the unhappy
consequence of the first view in country after
country where power-seekers clothed in uniform,
rags, or riches have gained control of government
as an end in itself. Totalitarianism has been the
sad result of the second view in rarer but more
32
Exploring Political Ideas DRAFT: August 2007

devastating occurrences of the 20th-century. The attitudes of your peers. Do your classmates trust
Fascists in Italy, the Nazis in Germany, the politicians? Do they believe government is
Stalinists in Russia, the Maoists in China, the responsive to their needs? How might you
Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and the Taliban of explain or interpret your findings?
Afghanistan are vivid reminders of this tendency. 2. Find and interpret three political cartoons
The great danger of the third view occurs depicting different views of politics.
when the sources of conflict are magnified and
when government and the people are no longer
able to resolve those conflicts peacefully. This
has taken various forms in the 20th- and 21st-
centuries – in the civil war between republicans
and fascists in Spain; in the religious and ethnic
acts of terrorism that have threatened to tear Iraq
apart, in the ethnic cleansing that reached
genocidal proportions in Nazi Germany, Soviet
Russia, the former Yugoslavia, and Rwanda; and
in the anarchy that plagues so many “failed
states” throughout the world today.
The great civic project of the current age
lies in acquiring the political wisdom and
exercising the moral judgment needed to restrain
those excesses. Sadly, there is a long way to go.
And Merriam and Webster provide little guidance
for they offer no fourth definition of politics. But
if restraint is possible, perhaps the way will be
paved for the nobler political ideas set forth in the
Age of Sages over 2,000 years ago. Those ideas
are the subject of the next units of this book.
Chapter Review
1. Do you consider yourself to be a political
realist, a political idealist, or a mix of the two?
Explain your answer.
2. Visit the website of the Fund for Peace
(http://www.fundforpeace.org/web/) where you
will find a failed states index. Select a country on
that index and assess why that country is on the
list. What would you recommend be done to help
turn that country’s government from failure to
success?
3. Consult recent public opinion polls and/or
letters to the editor in local newspapers to assess
the level of trust of politicians in your
community. To what extent do people trust
political actors in your community?
4. What is your view of politics? Do you agree
with those who consider it a noble profession or
with those who consider it shameful? Explain
your answer.
Extension Activity
1. Conduct an informal survey in your
school/class to determine the prevailing political

33
Exploring Political Ideas DRAFT: August 2007

Unit II Introduction
Government is intertwined in people’s lives. The government, among other things, helps to
resolve disputes, protect rights, and promote the common good. It is difficult to live without
interacting with “the government” – on an almost daily basis. The government regulates the
clothes you buy, the water you drink, and what you learn in school. What is government and how
has it developed? Is government necessary? How should government be organized and on which
ideas should it rest? What forms of government are the most just? These are all interesting and
important questions and ones that will guide you in unit II.
Chapter 4 examines the reasons why human associations, such as families, schools, or
polities, need some kind of governing mechanism. The chapter then distinguishes governing and
government, identifies the basic characteristics of government, and explores the origins of
government in response to those basic human needs.
Chapter 5 turns to the question, “Is government necessary?” The chapter explores three
philosophical responses to that question. The anarchist response – that government is unnecessary
and undesirable because it is incompatible with human liberty and dignity. The statist response –
that only a strong state with a strong government can protect people from one another and
advance the good of all. The limited-government response – that some government is necessary
but so too are other non-governmental institutions in society.
If human society needs to be governed in some way, what forms of government are
available? Chapter 6 attempts to answer this question by distinguishing some of the reasons why
form matters. It then turns to an examination of six different forms of government, the differences
between good and bad government, the differences between mixed regimes and hybrid states, and
the forms that political corruption can take.
Chapter 7 concludes the unit with a closer look at the idea of justice – both as a universal
ideal and an end of good government. Chapter 7 first explores the historical origins of justice in
the Near and Far Easts. The chapter then distinguishes three types justice – distributive,
corrective, and procedural.

34
Exploring Political Ideas
Chapter 4: What Is Government?
Big Ideas
 All human associations need to be
governed in some way, but not all
societies rely solely on government to
guide political associations.
 Government is the entity with the
recognized power to make and enforce
binding decisions.
 Throughout history and across cultures,
governments respond to basic needs: (1)
to regulate human behavior; (2) to
allocate resources; (3) to protect
individual life, liberty, and property; (4)
to provide for collective security; (5) to
resolve conflict; (6) to establish justice;
and to promote the “good life.”
 Governments begin by some combination
of accident, force, and reflection and
choice.
Purpose of Chapter
Human associations need to be governed.
Governing, from the verb “to govern,” comes
from the Latin word meaning “to steer.” To
govern or steer is to guide or control.39 Every
system needs some kind of steering mechanism.
One of the earliest illustrations of a steering
mechanism is the ship’s helm where the ship’s
pilot uses a rudder to steer a ship. Political
associations are, according to Aristotle, the
highest form of human association. They too
need governing. But what are the needs for some
kind of governing arrangements? What is
government and how does it attempt to address
those needs? In this chapter, you will explore
answers to these questions as well as the origins
of government – ancient, modern, and across
cultures.
Terms to Know
governing
self governing mechanism
collective governing mechanism
shared governing mechanism
Robert Maddex, Illustrated Dictionary of
39
Constitutional Concepts (Washington, DC:
Congressional Quarterly Inc., 1996), p. 122.
DRAFT: August 2007
divine governing mechanism
government
ombudsman
justice
the “good life”
kinship
political inventors
political adaptors
What is the Difference between Governing
and Government?
Every human association is also a human
system; that is, a network of interrelated parts.
Every human system needs some kind of
governing mechanism. For example, the family is
a social system where parents, other family
members, or both make governing decisions.
Another social system is the school where the
principal makes guiding decisions in consultation
with others. In the workplace, employers and
managers make decisions, often in consultation
with employees.
The polity or state is the widest, most all-
encompassing type of human system – a political
system. A political system is a network
composed of all other human systems and
associations in society. It too needs a governing
or steering mechanism. As with all human
systems, the steering mechanism governing a
political system must be the right mechanism. It
must be well-suited for the tasks of governing
and it must have the authority (or the recognized
power) to carry out those tasks.
As the examples of family, school, and
workplace suggest, there are four basic types of
human governing mechanisms: (1) self-
governing mechanisms, such as the individual’s
obligations to their family or their ethical sense of
right and wrong; (2) collective governing
mechanisms, such as a national government,
which also can provide powerful guidance and
control under the right circumstances; (3) shared
governing mechanisms, such as constitutions,
elections, and voluntary associations, by which
individuals and governments decide how to share,
divide, and limit the right to govern; and; (4)
35
Exploring Political Ideas
divine governing mechanisms, which guide
people in their search for the laws of God or
nature.
Every society, with two exceptions, relies
on some combination of self-governing and
collective governing arrangements. Anarchic
societies or failed states – where there is a
complete breakdown of government and
lawlessness prevails – provide one example.
Another is totalitarian states where individual
initiative is destroyed and replaced with total
state control over all aspects of society.
In all but the most totalitarian societies,
there is some measure of human self-control and
guidance. Individuals are responsible for some
self-government within a sphere of life that may
be wide or narrow. What varies is the amount of
such responsibility, its sources (e.g., reason, self-
interest, virtue, family obligation, or faith), and
the formal and informal restrictions on it (e.g.,
laws, traditions, cultural mores).
In all societies, except those where
anarchy reigns, a functioning government exists.
Government is that entity with the recognized
authority to make and enforce binding decisions
affecting the polity or political system as a whole.
Government consists of rules, traditions, and
institutions that govern its affairs. Government,
then, is the collective steering mechanism of a
polity or political system – from the first known
city-states of Sumer in Mesopotamia to the
American republic of today.
There is a difference, then, between
governing and government. All governments
govern but not all governing mechanisms are
governmental; some lie outside the direct control
of government.
How people define or conceptualize the
idea of government varies. Before the modern
era, government was normally viewed as an
individual ruler. This is still the perception in
certain countries, such as Middle Eastern
monarchies like Saudi Arabia and Morocco. In
the West, government is understood to be a set of
rather impersonal executive, legislative, and
judicial institutions.
Artists have portrayed government in a
variety of ways. Many of the earliest portrayals
personalize government as the ruler. The top of
the first column of Hammurabi’s Code pictured
one of the earliest images of government – the
DRAFT: August 2007
ruler on a throne holding a symbol of secular
authority in one hand and a symbol of religious
authority in the other. Another early symbol of
government is the ruler as a good shepherd
leading his flock to safety, as in the story of
young David who slays Goliath with a simple
shepherd’s slingshot. Another early image of
government is the ship of state with the leader as
the helmsman. This last image also relates to the
discussion in Chapter 1 on the political leader as
a statesman practicing the good judgment of
statecraft.
[NOTE: I include the above paragraph
partly as a source of illustrations. I can get you a
nice ship of state, which I caption below. I’m sure
illustrations can be found for other images. I
introduce Leviathan later, so hold off on that
imagery.]
The ship of state pictured here is called
the “Hamilton” in honor of Alexander Hamilton.
This ship was a parade-float that road in the
Federalists’ victory parade celebrating the
ratification of the United States Constitution.
[End of Note]
In parliamentary systems, “the
Government” (often with a capital “G”) is a term
reserved for the executive branch – the prime
minister and his or her cabinet. In Britain and
Japan, for example, members of Parliament
appoint the leader of the majority party or
coalition in Parliament “to form a Government”
and serve as its prime minister and cabinet. In the
British Parliament and the Japanese Diet
(Parliament), the Government serves only as long
as it has the confidence of the Parliament.
What Needs to be Governed and by Whom?
What in society needs governing? What are the
roles of the individual and government in
defining and meeting those needs?
Societies have seven needs for some
combination of governing mechanisms.
 to regulate human behavior
 to allocate resources
 to protect individual life, liberty, and
property
 to provide for collective security
 to resolve conflict
 to establish justice
 to advance the “good life”
36
Exploring Political Ideas
When one of those mechanisms is government,
these needs become the purposes of government.
This term, “purposes of government,” is much
used, but rarely distinguished. Legitimate
purposes of government are generally accepted
by the governed as purposes designed to meet a
recognized need of society as a whole.
Illegitimate purposes of government are those
that narrowly serve the needs of those who hold
the reigns of governmental power. Examples of
illegitimate purposes include the aggrandizement
of power and wealth by those in power. This
distinction is not new. Aristotle drew it over 2300
years ago.
The seven legitimate needs are also not new.
In fact, they were present in the earliest legal
codes. Those codes date back to the period 2100 -
1800 B.C.E. in Sumer and other city-states of
ancient Mesopotamia. Because codes are
collections of existing laws, there is no telling
how far back the actual laws date.
The prologue of those early codes, much
like the preamble of a modern constitution,
proclaims the principles and purposes of
government. The prologue of the Code of King
Lipit-Ishtar, dated around 1860 B.C.E., stated that
the king was called by the gods Anu and Enlil to
rule the land “in order to establish justice in the
land, to banish complaints, to turn back enmity
and rebellion by force of arms, and to bring well-
being to the Sumerians and Akkadians.”
The fragment of this prologue is
particularly impressive because it so clearly
contains most of the seven purposes of
government. It is a century older than the
Babylonian Code of Hammurabi and predates the
recording of the Hebrew Bible by about 500
years. Yet, it is similar to the Preamble of the
United States Constitution written 3500 years
later.
The importance of this example is not the
historical significance of the Code of Lipit-Ishtar.
The important points are these: most of the
world’s earliest polities had laws; many of those
polities must have had lots of laws because they
needed to codify or collect those laws into codes;
and those codes reflect the same basic needs of
society that have been used to justify
governments ever since. To be sure, there are
profound differences in the way that ancients and
moderns understand and apply ideas like
DRAFT: August 2007
“justice” and “well being” but there are also
continuities. To understand more about the nature
and function of government, it is important, then,
to understand these basic needs.
First, every society needs to regulate
human behavior. Rules provide the basis for a
lawful and orderly society. People need lawful
order because they expect some measure of
certainty in the way they conduct their lives.
At minimum, rules establish (1) the
obligations of individuals and governments (i.e.,
what each must do), (2) the limits on individuals
and governments (i.e., what each must not do),
(3) the authority of individuals and governments
(i.e., the recognized powers of governments or
the rights of individuals). Without this minimal
level of certainty, human beings are left adrift in
a sea of confusion.
People look to government to establish
some of those rules – certainly those that
comprise the civil and criminal laws. However,
except in totalitarian societies, government does
not attempt to define every rule of human
engagement or resolve every human conflict. In
all societies, individuals have some obligation to
govern their own behavior; relying on generally
accepted norms, traditions, and social institutions
to do so.
Second, every society needs to decide
how to allocate certain resources. All societies
must decide – who gets what, when, how, and
why? But what should be the role of government
in making those decisions?
According to pure communist theory,
collective government controls the production
and allocation of all resources. In pure capitalist
theory, individuals in the marketplace decide
what to produce and allocate resources based on
the laws of supply and demand. Most societies,
however, are neither purely communist nor
capitalist. Instead, they have mixed economies –
based partly on collective government regulations
and partly on the decisions of individuals in the
marketplace.
Societies use some of the following
criteria to decide which resources government
should regulate or control: (1) scarce resources,
such as water supply, which need to be
conserved; (2) public resources, from schools to
parks, which society values; (3) redistributed
resources, which society feels obligated to
37
Exploring Political Ideas
transfer from those who have to those who don’t;
and (4) resources with negative externalities or
consequences, such as air pollution from factory
smoke stacks, which society regards as
undesirable.
Third, every society needs to protect life,
liberty, and property. In most societies, public
safety is a matter of both collective and
individual responsibility. To protect life and
property, government must not only make rules
but enforce them. At the same time, most
enforcement systems are based on the assumption
that most individuals will obey most of the laws
most of the time.
There are various types of threats to
public safety. These include: violent crimes by
one inhabitant against another; property crimes,
such as theft and vandalism; occasional outbreaks
of disorder (such as a riot) and organized
violence (such as a terrorist act); man-made
disasters, such as oil spills and forest fires caused
by human accident or carelessness; natural
disasters, such as earthquakes and hurricanes; and
public health threats, such as food poisoning at a
local restaurant or an outbreak of an infectious
disease.
According to a World Health
Organization study, the group most targeted for
violence today is the youth of Latin America.
Youth ages 10 to 19 are the victims of nearly one
out of three homicides in Latin America. Many of
these homicides are a result of youth gangs and
acts of youth violence against other youth.40
Some countries are beset by civil
disorder that poses a significant danger to the
public security. Examples include persistent civil
war and insurgency that have plagued some
countries for decades. In some of these instances,
government is both protector and perpetrator. In
other instances in its efforts to protect national
security, government limits civil liberties –
sometimes to excess.
Fourth, every society needs mechanisms
for the peaceful resolution of conflicts. Societal
needs for regulation, allocation, and protection all
contain the potential for conflict. Conflicts may
arise between two individuals, between an
40
Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, “Youth, Violence, and
Democracy” in Current History (February 2007), p.
64.
DRAFT: August 2007
individual and a group, between two groups,
between an individual and a government,
between a group and a government, between two
governments (e.g., two local governments).
For example, the right of one individual
to develop his or her property may conflict with
the rights of others to enjoy their property.
Family disagreements may erupt into open
conflict. A labor union and an employer may not
be able to agree on a wage increase for
employees. Environmentalists may disagree with
economic developers who want to build a
shopping mall in a bird sanctuary. In countries
with highly competitive political parties, the
parties may disagree over which policies to
support. City residents in need of more mass
transit debate rural and suburban residents who
want more highways.
In the world of politics today, the largest
and fastest growing conflicts are mass protests in
China. Over a ten-year period, the official
number of “mass incidents” increased from
10,000 in 1994 to 74,000 in 2004. Some say the
actual figures are twice as large. It is not
uncommon for over 100,000 persons to turn out
for these protests – by factory workers protesting
working conditions, peasants protesting the
seizure of land for development, or apartment
dwellers protesting landlord policies.41
Societies have developed various means
to resolve these conflicts. One example is the
court system established to resolve civil (non-
criminal) disputes. Court systems allow for the
resolution of competing legal claims. Another
example of peaceful conflict management is the
political process – of ballots over bullets,
peaceful demonstrations instead of armed
conflict.
A third example is an ombudsman. An
ombudsman is a government official who
receives citizen complaints and investigates acts
of wrongdoing or inefficiency by other
government officials. Sweden was the first
country to establish this position. Other
Scandinavian countries followed. Today, the
constitutions of more than a dozen countries
provide for ombudsmen. Among those countries
are Austria, Bangladesh, Denmark, Finland,
41
Gordon G. Chang, “China in Revolt,” Commentary
(December 2006), p. 32.
38
Exploring Political Ideas
Ghana, Haiti, Hungary, Russia, South Africa,
Uganda, and Zambia. The term “ombudsman” is
thought to come from the Old Norwegian word
meaning “steward.”
Fifth, every society demands the
application of justice to its collective decisions.
The idea of justice, based on the uniquely human
ability to distinguish right from wrong, is at least
as old as the Code of Lipit-Ishtar (nearly 4,000
years). Justice is the use of a common standard
to decide who gets what.
Justice has two applications to government.
First, it is a substantive standard against which
the content of government policies is judged. As
a standard of government policies, justice is the
idea that “everyone gets what’s coming to them.”
Justice is also a procedural standard against
which government practices are judged. In this
sense, justice is the expectation that all people
should receive fair, equal, and impartial treatment
based on the common application of the rule of
law.
In the criminal justice system, for
example, procedural justice is the expectation that
that all people will be treated fairly and similarly
in the law enforcement process including
investigation, arrest, and even the setting of bail.
In the allocation system, for example, substantive
justice calls for allocating a similar level of
reward to people of like merit. In most early
Mesopotamian societies, distribution was strictly
based on class. Members of the ruling class
received more than those ruled. Today,
distribution may be based on personal
achievement or need.
But justice is a standard, an ideal of
what should be, not a universal finding of what
always exists. In The Federalist No. 51, Madison
reminds that in a republic, society must not only
be protected “against the oppression of its
rulers,” but one part of society must be guarded
“against the injustice of the other part.”42
[NOTE: Insert illustration of Lady Justice.
Caption might read as follows: In many
societies, Lady Justice symbolizes the idea of
justice. She has three weapons to combat
injustice. In one hand, she holds the scales of
justice, which allow her to deliberate or weigh
arguments fairly. In her other hand, she holds a
42
Ibid., p. 323.
DRAFT: August 2007
double-edge sword, which represents the power
of the law to cut both ways for whichever side is
in the right. She also wears a blindfold, which
keeps her from being influenced by one side or
another – by the color of their money or the
color of their skin. END NOTE]
Sixth, every society needs to defend itself
against external threats. According to one
source, between 1945 and 2003, 25 to 30 million
people died due to war-related violence, famine,
or disease.43 Military threats by other states and
by stateless terrorists are only two forms of
external threat. Others include: the importation of
dangerous substances such as drugs and weapons;
the importation of defective goods from baby
toys to pet food; the slave trade, kidnapping, and
other criminal acts of human trafficking; the
illegal smuggling and piracy of intellectual
property, such as music, movies, and magazines;
the international spread of infectious diseases;
and the international migration of air and water
pollution.
To be sure, governments around the
world must be ever vigilant and prepared to
combat such threats effectively. But so too must
the individual – as a consumer, employee, owner,
and investor. However, in doing so, individuals,
no less than governments, are obligated to follow
universally accepted standards of international
law. The Nuremberg trials of accused Nazi war
criminals made clear that individuals as well as
governments can be held accountable in a court
of law for their crimes against humanity.
Finally, every society needs to advance
“the good life” for its members and society as a
whole. As Aristotle put it, human beings have
material needs for mere life, but they also have
higher, more ennobling needs for the good life.
The good life aims toward the common
good of society and the well being of its
individual citizens. All societies define the good
life based on what they value most. As early as
the 1860s B.C.E., King Lipit-Ishtar claimed his
throne, partly “to bring well being” to his
subjects. Some societies define the good life
primarily in terms of the liberty of the individual
to pursue their own lights; others cast it in terms
43
Jacob Bercovitch and Judith Fretter, Regional
Guide to International Conflict and Management
from 1945 to 2003 (Washington, DC: CQ Press,
2004), p. 4.
39
Exploring Political Ideas
of civic virtue and the obligation of the individual
to contribute in some way to the community
good. Still others put the good life in religious
terms. Many societies look to accommodate
different value systems.
What is the “good life?” And should
government bear any responsibility in its
realization? Societies vary widely in their
answers to these questions. Let’s look more
closely at several examples.
At one extreme, some societies promote a
constitutionally secular conception of the “good
life.” One contemporary example is France which
follows the creed “liberty, equality, fraternity.” In
this creed, fraternity is an expression of civic
virtue and the solidarity of the people. France
allows freedom of religion but confines its
expression to private life. French law prohibits
any display or expression of religious belief in
public places. This prohibition includes the
wearing of headscarves or other religious
symbols in public school – a subject of
considerable controversy today.
At another extreme, societies have
adopted a constitutionally religious “good life.”
These societies have a state religion, they define
their state on the basis of that religion, and they
adopt that religion’s holy book as the constitution
of their state. The civil Constitution of the
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, for example,
proclaims in Article I that “the Kingdom of Saudi
Arabia is a sovereign Arab Islamic state with
Islam as its religion; God’s Book and the Sunnah
[teachings] of His Prophet, God’s prayers and a
peace be upon him, are its constitution. . . .”
Article 3 of Iran’s Constitution has a similar
proclamation that provides the state with this
role:
. . . the government of the Islamic
Republic of Iran has the duty of
directing all its resources to the
following goals: (1) the creation of a
favorable environment for the growth
of moral virtues based on faith and
piety and the struggle against all forms
of vice and corruption.
Between these extremes lie various
conceptions of the good life and government’s
role in its promotion. One such constitutional
amalgam is the United States. The Declaration of
Independence proclaims the natural right of all
DRAFT: August 2007
human beings to “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of
Happiness.” The third right in this famous trilogy
is the “Pursuit of Happiness.” What it means is a
subject of considerable debate. One view is that
the Declaration’s authors understood happiness in
its moral sense as “civic virtue.” Individuals
(citizens and leaders alike) would achieve the
good life for themselves and contribute to the
common good or general welfare of society by
leading a virtuous life that is morally upright,
law-abiding, and respectful of others and the law,
and active in civic affairs. The other view is that
the drafters had intended an economic meaning of
happiness in which individuals would be free to
pursue their own economic gain for their own
contentment. By working together, or engaging in
healthy competition, all individuals could pursue
the good life for themselves and contribute to the
common good of society.44
In most countries today, the constitution
proclaims the principles and purposes of
governments. The constitution assigns to
government the authority, powers, and limits to
carry out those purposes. Which purposes are
most important can vary widely depending on
the character of a society, its culture, and
philosophy.
Most Western cultures and philosophies,
for example, look to “internal order” and
“external defense” as the first obligation of
government. The logic is simple: Government
must secure a peaceful and orderly existence
before it can guarantee anything more than that.
The well being of society is the ultimate goal of
government, but only after law and order are
maintained. Justice becomes an intermediate
purpose of government and value of society.
Justice is intermediate in the sense that it guides
all other purposes of government.
By contrast, traditional Islamic political
thought has proclaimed the first role of
government as maintaining a moral order and
shari’a or revealed law.45 The model to be
44
For this and other debates on the founding of the
American republic, see Alan Gibson, Interpreting the
Founding: Guide to the Enduring Debates over the
Origins and Foundations of the American Republic
(Lawrence, KN: University of Kansas Press, 2006),
pp. 45-46, 48, 75, 125-126n37, and passim.
45
For medieval origins, see Patricia Crone, God’s
Rule: Government and Islam, Six Centuries of
40
Exploring Political Ideas
followed is the Medina Constitution. Mohammed
conquered the city of Medina and immediately
set forth a constitution that would be used to
govern that city in accord with the laws of God.
The Dawn of Government: How Do
Governments Begin?
How did governments begin – what are the
origins of government? In The Laws, Plato takes
on the challenge of founding a utopian colony on
the island of Crete. His first piece of advice
speaks to the importance of the task: “Getting
started is half the battle.”46
Over 2,000 years later, the delegates of
the Federal Constitutional Convention in
Philadelphia had that advice in mind when they
gathered in May of 1787. In defending their
work, Alexander Hamilton made this
observation:
It has frequently been remarked that it
seems to reserved to the people of this
country, by their conduct and example,
whether societies of men are really
capable or not of establishing good
government from reflection and choice,
or whether they are forever destined to
depend for their political constitutions
on accident or force.47
In this quotation, Hamilton lays out three
basic answers to the question, how do
governments begin? The first, by “accident,”
refers to the natural process by which government
evolves within the family unit. The second, by
“force,” occurs when one tribe or state wrests
power from another by conquest or other acts of
violence. The third, by “reflection and choice,”
looks to the establishment of government by the
consent of the governed.
According to Aristotle, the first pattern in
history was the establishment of government by
accident. Aristotle describes this pattern as part of
a natural process in which human beings began to
organize themselves on the basis of “kinship” –
Medieval Islamic Political Thought (NY: Columbia
University Press, 2004), p. 204.
46
Plato, The Laws (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin
Books, 1976).
47
Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John
Jay, The Federalist Papers, edited by Clinton
Rossiter (New York: New American Library, 1961),
p. 33.
DRAFT: August 2007
that is, around the biological family and the ties
that bind them together.
Very little is known about the origins of
this system of kinship in early history, and much
of what is known is based on interpretations of
scraps of evidence from a past shrouded in myth.
An anthropological interpretation is that the
growth of families created the need for some
form of extended family governance – to
distribute scarce resources, resolve conflict, and
protect one another from larger families. In all
likelihood, family members turned to their elders
to make those decisions.
Over time, surviving families evolved
into larger units, known as clans, tribes, and
eventually nations. Ethnic ties, or what Aristotle
termed ethnos, bound those social units together.
Those larger units formed councils of elders to
lead them. Over time, those councils became
formal institutions shaped by rules and rituals.
Many clans and tribes organized
themselves as such for hundreds even thousands
of years. Others assumed new institutional forms,
evolving into states with more formal political
institutions governed by written laws. Tribes and
states alike governed themselves by a council of
elders, a king, one or more priests, or some
combination thereof. In most circumstances,
tribes evolved into city-states as in ancient
Mesopotamia and Greece where they successfully
retained their independence. On rare occasions,
tribes like the Israelites joined together and
formed federations. Sometimes, tribes such as the
Huns and Mongols conquered states; other times,
states such as Egypt conquered tribes and grew
into empires.
Archaeological excavations have found
evidence of early civilizations dating back to the
period between 2000 B.C. E. and 3500 B.C.E.
Political inventors created innovative systems of
law and government to rule some of these
civilizations. Political adapters borrowed ideas
about government and law from the more
inventive civilizations.
In Mesopotamia, for example, Sumerians
invented the first city-states around 3500 B.C.E.
Like other early Mesopotamian states, Sumerians
evolved a complex legal and political system for
meeting all seven needs of government. Included
in this system were the following components:
41
Exploring Political Ideas
 The regulation of human behavior relied
on an intricate system of codified laws,
regulating such human interactions as
marriage, child rearing, farming
practices, and the herding of oxen. The
invention of the calendar, a system of
weights and measures, written language,
and a class of scribes and accountants –
all helped provide a more orderly life.
 The system for allocating resources is
described by one scholar as a “storage
redistributive” system where the king’s
scribes and accountants checked in and
recorded everyone’s harvest, so that it
could be reallocated and stored for
hardship and famine.48
 Individual life, liberty, and property
were protected by very detailed laws
(specifying, for example, the
punishment for those who let their ox
gore someone else’s ox in the nose, the
horn, or the eye). The king’s soldiers
enforced the law; and court officials,
priests, and the king judged cases.
 Collective security was provided by
diplomacy and by a newly invented
weapon – a horse-driven battle chariot
manned by the king’s archers.
 Conflicts were resolved by a ruling class
who were ruthless in laying down the
law.
 Justice in criminal law was guided by
the principle of lex taliones (the law of
exact retribution) – an “eye for an eye.”
In the allocation of resources, scribes
and accountants used a common
standard of weights and measures to
assess everyone’s harvest and a writing
system to make sure collection and
storage records were kept in case of a
later dispute.
 The common good was advanced by a
government-directed irrigation system
and by a merchant class that traded
surplus harvest for needed natural
resources.
48
S.E. Finer, The History of Government From the
Earliest Times (Oxford, UK: Oxford University
Press, 1999), vol. I, p. 100.
DRAFT: August 2007
 Finally, religious well being was
advanced partly by the government
construction of temples and shrines.49
The longest-lasting of the early
civilizations were the political adapters – in
China and Egypt. Early Egyptians and Chinese
rulers borrowed technology and fashioned
empires that outlived the more inventive
civilizations. China like Egypt developed a highly
resilient system of government that co-opted
invading tribes from the north.
In many of these civilizations,
government was established by force. This is
Hamilton’s second pattern. Unhappily, history
contains many variations on this theme. In
biblical history, Cain slays Abel, flees God’s
community, and starts up his own nation that will
be governed by tyrants. Akkadians led by Sargon
conquered the Sumerian city-states around 2200
B.C.E. Ancient Greek history also has its tales of
tyrants who came to power with ruthless force
and others like Periander of Corinth who came to
power in more ambiguous ways that included
strong arming his opponents behind the scenes.
There are various ways individuals and
groups have established government by force.
One is by a “coup d’état” (a French phrase
meaning “a strike against the state”) in which an
individual or group of individuals (typically
holding military power) overthrows the ruler.
Another example is revolution, such as the
French and Russian Revolutions, where the
people (or a segment) are roused to overthrow the
existing system of government. Yet a third
example is by conquest where a tribe or state
(often with ambitions of empire) invades and
occupies another tribe or state. History offers
many examples of empire-builders from Sargon
to Stalin who relied on force and cunning – first
to subdue their own people and then to widen
their sphere of conquest.
Hamilton’s third pattern of founding or
establishing government is by the consent of the
politically recognized members of the tribe or
state. They in turn decide who should rule.
There is considerable evidence of early
peoples who relied in some form of consent. But
49
This list was compiled from the information
assembled by Finer, ibid., vol. I, pp. 99-103.
42
Exploring Political Ideas
ancient practices of consent were quite different
from the modern practices.
First, various ancient civilizations relied
partly on consent by some of the governed.
However, there are no recorded pre-modern
examples of tribes or states that relied completely
on the consent of all of the governed. Even in
democratic Athens, citizenship was restricted (as
it was also in the first half of the modern era) to
free males of majority age.
Second, ancient consent was usually tacit
or silent consent. There were no elections for
ancient rulers by the people, but in most
civilizations the rulers were expected to rule for
the people. In many of those civilizations, the
repeated failure to rule with the people’s interest
in mind was cause for rebellion by opposing
nobility or by the people.
An early example is the ancient Israelites,
who, as recorded in the Hebrew Bible, freely
entered into covenants or agreements approved
by God to be ruled one way and not another.50
From roughly 3500 to1700 B.C.E., as noted
earlier, southern Mesopotamia was home to a
diversity of peoples who organized themselves
into small city-states. Each state jealously
protected its independence in making its own
decisions. In those city-states, however, there was
little popular consent and “power rested with a
tiny group of court officials and priests around a
monarch.”51
Over a thousand years later, the Greek
city-states exhibited a similar pattern. Then a
series of reforms, revolutions, and political
maneuvers brought democracy to Athens for a
brief period in the 5th and 6th centuries B.C.E.
Around the same time, Rome also became a
republic. As in Athens, Roman citizens elected
some of their rulers in a kind of limited political
partnership between some of the people (the
citizenry) and some of their rulers.
A different type of example of consent
comes from ancient China. Rulers governed with
the mandate of heaven, but they understood the
Confucian principle that heaven sees what the
people see and hears what the people hear. A
50
Daniel J. Elazar, Covenant and Polity and Biblical
Israel: Biblical Foundations and Jewish Expressions
(New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1995).
51
S.E. Finer, The History of Government, op. cit.,
vol. I, p. 100.
DRAFT: August 2007
final example of early experiments with consent
comes from the Igbo people, in what is today
Nigeria, who made decisions on the basis of
discussion and consensus.52
The development of some kind of
consent as an idea reaches an important plateau
during the last millennium B.C.E. This period is
known as the Axial Age or the Age of Sages, and
its zenith begins in the 6th century B.C.E. Down
through this golden age of political ideas, the
Jewish prophets, Confucius, Buddha, Zoroaster,
the Greek philosophers, Cicero, and finally Jesus
– all instructed their rulers on the path of wise
rule.
At the center of this path was the idea
that the first obligation of the ruler is not mere
government but good government. Despite wide
variations in philosophy and faith, there was a
shared idea of good government as the pursuit of
moral excellence. Another shared idea was that
good government was framed by a higher law. A
third powerful idea was that good government
required good rulers who possessed wisdom,
judgment, and virtue. A fourth shared idea was
that even the most absolute of rulers could not
stray too far from the limits of the law and the
consent of the people, or else they would lose
their authority to rule.
Despite these similarities, there were also
major differences. One of those was the division
in political thought between East and West. As
one scholar explains,
The period saw the beginnings of the
conscious division of the world into East
and West. The civilizations of the former
were grounded in a search for harmony
through quiescent individual acceptance
of the myriad natural forces beyond
human control, and the latter, the
pursuit of human development through
the harnessing of the many dynamic
forces in the world through the conflict
and management of the tensions that
stimulate human progress.53
52
Elizabeth Isichei, A History of the Igbo People
(London: Macmillan, 1976).
53
Daniel J. Elazar, Crossroads of Civilization: World
history Essays for Teachers on Themes of Civics and
Culture (Troy, NY: Council for Citizenship
Education at Russell Sage College, 1998), p. 14.
43
Exploring Political Ideas
In the next chapter, these and other
philosophical differences are explored with
regard to the question, “Is government
necessary”?
Reviewing and Using This Chapter
1. What is the difference between governing and
government?
2. According to the constitution of your state,
what are the purposes of government? Where in
that document are they to be found? Compare
these purposes with those expressed in the
constitution of another state or country.
3. Prioritize the purposes of government
identified in this chapter. Defend and explain
your ranking.
4. Evaluate the governmental institutions and
procedures for managing conflict in your
community. What do you think might be done to
enhance their effectiveness?
5. What examples can you cite of tension
between the private property interests of
individuals in your community and the public’s
need for limitations or regulations? In your
judgment, how should those conflicting interests
be resolved?
6. Identify and describe current or historical
examples of governments that started by (a)
accident; (b) force; and (c) reflection and choice.
Chapter 5: Is Government
Necessary?
DRAFT: August 2007
Big Ideas
 Political philosophers – spanning
centuries and diverse perspectives –
often begin their thinking about the need
for government by imagining life
without government in a state of nature.
 Political philosophers disagree over
human nature and life in a state of
nature.
 Disagreements about human nature lead
philosophers to different conclusions
about the necessity and best form of
government.
Purpose of Chapter
Every society needs to be governed. But does
every society need a government? Today, there
are approximately 200 sovereign states in the
world. In addition, there are tens of thousands of
local and regional governments. Most people take
the existence of government for granted, but
political philosophers have long raised interesting
questions about the necessity of government.
What would life be like without government?
How is government a reflection of human nature?
What arguments can be advanced to justify, limit,
and deny the need for government?
These questions help philosophers, political
leaders, and citizens clarify the purposes of
government, define its role in society, and
evaluate its performance. In this chapter, you will
explore how thinkers – from different traditions,
cultures, and governments – have responded to
these questions and others like them.
Terms to Know
state of nature
natural law
Confucianism
Daoism
legalism
anarchism
utopianism
statism
totalitarianism
authoritarianism
What Would Life Be Like Without
Government?
Political philosophers have long raised questions
about the need for government. Some
philosophers begin their inquiry in an interesting
way – by thinking about life without government.
44
Exploring Political Ideas
They ask: What would the world be like without
government? To answer that question they
imagine “a state of nature,” an imaginary
situation where government does not exist and no
one has the authority to rule.
Thomas Hobbes, one of the great
Enlightenment thinkers, lived at the time of the
English Civil War (1642-1648). He worried that
his country might be falling into “a state of
nature.” In the hope of persuading his readers
how disagreeable this would be and why
government was preferable, Hobbes wrote The
Leviathan (1651). Here, in part, is what Hobbes
told his readers to expect in “a state of nature.”
In [a state of nature] there is no place for
Industry; because the fruit thereof is
uncertain: and consequently no Culture of the
Earth, no Navigation, nor use of the
commodities that may be imported by Sea; no
instruments of moving and removing of such
things as require much force; no Knowledge
of the face of Earth; no account of Time; no
Arts, no Letters, no Society; and which is
worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of
violent death; and the life of man, solitary,
poore, nasty, brutish and short.54
A “state of nature” requires people to
consider human nature. For Hobbes, a state of
nature was a place where lawlessness and the
strong prevail – where human beings would be in
a perpetual state of war. People would naturally
seek to dominate one another.
John Locke (1632 – 1704), another
prominent Enlightenment philosopher, also
imagined life in “a state of nature.” However,
Locke drew different conclusions. He contended
that even in a state of nature, prior to any
organized society, human beings would feel
bound by the God-given laws of nature or
natural law. He also believed that human beings
could discover those laws using reason. Among
the most important of these laws was the
prohibition against harming others.
In Locke’s state of nature, individuals are
both free and equal. There is no natural hierarchy;
everyone is equal before God and everyone is
free. But when Locke speaks of freedom, he does
54
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. by C. B.
MacPherson (Harmondswourth: Penguin Books,
1968), p. 186.
DRAFT: August 2007
not mean license or the freedom to do whatever
one wants. God created humans as equals;
therefore, they must not seek to control one
another.
Locke, however, was a realist. He
recognized that although the laws of nature fully
apply to everyone, everyone is not equally likely
to obey or apply those laws. He, therefore, comes
to agree with Hobbes that some form of
government is necessary. As Locke explains,
Men, being as has been said, by nature all
free, equal and independent, no one can put
another out of his estate and subjected to the
political power of another without his own
consent, which is done by agreeing with other
men, to join and unite into a community for
their comfortable, safe and peaceable living….
When any number of men has so consented to
make one community or government, they are
thereby presently incorporated, and make one
body politic; wherein the majority have a right
to act and conclude the rest.55
Locke and Hobbes were not the first
philosophers to consider the question, “what
would life be like without government?” In
China, the teachers of three major schools of
philosophy – Confucianism, Daoism, and
Legalism – pondered that question more than
2,000 years ago.
Confucianism and Daoism both
imagined a mythical golden age – much like
Locke envisioned the state of nature centuries
later. In this idyllic age people were free,
innocent, and equal. Confucius accepted the
idyllic life as impermanent. He believed that
sooner or later human beings would endanger
themselves without some form of government.
Daoism, however, believed that people were at
their best in a state of nature.
Unlike Confucianism and Daoism,
Legalism rejected the idea of a prior golden age
altogether. Legalists likened human nature to an
unbridled wild horse. Like Hobbes, Legalists
argued that human beings were incapable of
doing good deeds without strong government and
strong rules. People did not need lenient or
benevolent government; they needed strong
55
John Locke, The Second Treatise on Civil
Government (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books,
1986), pp. 54-55.
45
Exploring Political Ideas
government like wild horses needed reins and
whips.56
During the European Middle Ages,
Christian theologians like St. Augustine adopted
the view that man was sociable and good by their
nature but soon became anti-social – corrupted by
greed and other vices. By comparison, most
medieval Muslim philosophers, like ancient
Chinese Legalists, rejected the very notion of a
golden age or idyllic state of nature.
Most medieval Muslim philosophers and
theologians, such as al-Fārābī, al-Ghazālī, and
Ibn Khaldūn, believed that life without law was
corrupt, that freedom was uncontrolled license,
and that human beings left on their own would
lead unhappy lives. Unlike the Chinese Legalists
and later Hobbesian contract theorists, however,
they believed that the sorry state of humans in
nature could only be improved by divine
intervention; not by human action and man-made
laws. According to this view, as one scholar
explains, “God in His mercy sent a Prophet with
a law, to found a polity. Differently put, the
social contract was with God, not with a human
being.”57
How Does Government Reflect Human
Nature?
Political thinkers from different times and
cultures have presented three distinct views of
human nature: the idyllic or optimistic view that
man in a state of nature will remain innocent and
exercise freedom with self-restraint; the realist
view that human beings may begin with good
intentions but they eventually are corrupted by
desire; and the pessimistic view that human
beings are, by nature, bad.
These answers stimulate a second
question: How does government reflect human
nature? Two British novels offer strikingly
different answers to this question. Both tell a
tale of English boys marooned on a desert
island.
[Lance: Cover illustrations, especially
the originals, might be a good illustration here.]
56
W. Scott Morton and Charlton M. Lewis, China:
Its History and Culture, 4th edition (New York: Mc-
Graw-Hill, 2005), pp. 29-44.
57
Patricia Crone, God’s Rule: Government and
Islam, Six Centuries of Medieval Islamic Political
Thought (New York: Columbia University Press,
204), p. 263.
DRAFT: August 2007
The first, Coral Island, was written in
1857 by the Scottish writer of young adult
fiction, R. M. Ballantyne. In this Victorian
morality tale, three boys (Ralph, Jack, and
Peterkin) are marooned on a deserted Pacific
island. In the beginning, their life is rather
idyllic – food is plentiful, they work well
together, and life is generally good.
As the plot unwinds, the three boys and
their idyllic life are seriously challenged – not
by internal conflict but by three major threats
from the outside world. In the first, two rival
groups of Pacific islanders arrive and engage in
a fierce battle. The boys – true heroes all – help
one group led by chief Tararo defeat the other
group. Then, pirates arrive. They capture Ralph
and sail to chief Tararo’s island where Ralph
learns something of island life. But the
inhabitants attack and kill all the pirates.
Ralph finds his way back to Coral Island
and his friends. They sail to another island,
Mango, where they are caught up in another
conflict – this time between converted Christian
and non-converted inhabitants on Mango. The
boys are thrown in jail and released by a newly
arrived missionary who converts the remaining
islanders to Christianity. The boys sail home –
wiser, more mature, and happy in the knowledge
that they have left behind a Christian and more
civilized world.
The second novel, Lord of the Flies, was
written in 1954 amidst the Cold War by William
Golding. The setting is much the same – British
boys marooned on a seemingly deserted tropical
island. One important difference in the setting is
that Golding assembles many boys for his tale,
and this necessitates some form of government.
Lord of the Flies is a much darker than
Coral Island. Numerous symbols point to the
source of that darkness, which is not external
danger as on Coral Island, but the internal terror
that lies within human nature. The very title
“lord of the flies” comes from the Hebrew
Beelzebub, which some attribute to Satan. In
this novel, the lord of the flies is the Beast that
the boys fear but only Simon (the Christ figure)
can see. Only later in the novel does the reader
discover that the Beast is the human heart
consumed by fear and evil.
In Golding’s tale, Ralph is the good
leader – reasonable, law-abiding, honorable, and
46
Exploring Political Ideas
generally of good character. The other boys
admire Ralph and elect him as their leader. He in
turn promises to heed the call of the conch shell
whenever someone blows it to call a meeting.
(The shell symbolizes the rule of law.)
Jack is the tyrant. He is a bully –
suspicious yet jealous of Ralph’s natural
goodness and leadership abilities. Jack is
ambitious. He wants power, glory, and instant
gratification. He prefers violence to get results.
He wants to hunt, fight, and rule.
Jack becomes fed up with Ralph and the
normal life he inspires. Jack goes off to start his
own group where the boys can hunt, play, and
do other fun things without worrying about the
rule of law. Jack attracts more and more boys to
his growing tribe, and he becomes more and
more tyrannical.
Two boys, Piggy and Simon, try to stop
the down spiral of discord and disorder. Piggy is
the voice of reason; Simon is the voice of faith.
Both boys fail in their efforts to restore peace,
and for their trouble, they are savagely killed.
The island descends into chaos and civil
war as Jack’s tribe turns from hunting wild pigs
to hunting Ralph. In the process, Jack’s boys try
to burn Ralph out. The fire spreads into a forest
fire. Crew members of a passing ship spot the
fire and rescue the boys – from themselves.
Seeing the disheveled, dirty, and disorderly lot
of boys, one officer harkens the reader back to
Coral Island: “I should have thought that a pack
of British boys—you’re all British, aren’t you?
—would have been able to put up a better show
than that.” In response, “It was like that at first,”
said Ralph, “before things—He stopped. We
were together then—” The officer nodded. “I
know,” the officer responded sympathetically.
“Jolly Good Show. Like the Coral Island.”
These two tales offer great reading. At
the same time, they represent two recurring views
of human nature and its reflection in government.
Coral Sea represents the idealistic Lockean view;
Lord of the Flies represents the pessimistic
Hobbesian view.
Of course, these are not the only views
on the subject of human nature and government.
Between these two extreme positions lies a more
cautious position that is partly idealistic and
partly pessimistic.
DRAFT: August 2007
James Madison, one of the leading
framers of the United States Constitution, offers
one of the clearest expressions of this middle
position. Writing as Publius in The Federalist No.
51, Madison builds an argument for how he
thinks government should reflect human nature:
But what is government itself but the greatest
of all reflections on human nature? If men
were angels, no government would be
necessary. If angels were to govern men,
neither external nor internal controls on
government would be necessary. In framing a
government which is to be administered by
men over men, the great difficulty lies in this:
you must first enable the government to
control the governed; and in the next place,
oblige it to control itself.58
To conclude that man is no angel adds
something to the debate on human nature, but
not enough. It begs the question, what then is
man? Madison addressed this second question
one week later in The Federalist No. 55:
As there is a degree of depravity in mankind
which requires a certain degree of
circumspection and distrust, so there are other
qualities in human nature which justify a
certain portion of esteem and confidence.
Republican government [a government that
operates through elected representatives of the
people] presupposes the existence of these
qualities in a higher degree than any other
form. Were the pictures which have been
drawn by the political jealousy of some among
us faithful likenesses of the human character,
the inference would be that there is not
sufficient virtue among men for self-
government; and that nothing less than the
chains of despotism can restrain them from
destroying and devouring one another.59
Human beings, according to Madison,
are capable of acts of depravity and of
admiration. The former, Madison continued,
requires the kind of watchfulness that
government should provide. Madison favored a
republican form of self-government that
presumes the more admirable qualities of man.
One of the great and continuing
disagreements about the necessity of government,
58
The Federalist Papers, op. cit., p. 322.
59
Ibid., p. 346.
47
Exploring Political Ideas
and the form it should take, centers on opposing
views of human nature. Are conflict, aggression,
and the struggle for dominance “natural” and
inevitable among human beings?
Is Government Necessary?
The remainder of this chapter turns from the
question “what is human nature?” to the question
“does human nature necessitate government?”
There are three basic answers to this question.
At one end of the spectrum lies
anarchism. Anarchists view government – not
human nature – as the source of corruption and
advocate its complete abolition.
At the other end of the spectrum is
statism. Statists view human nature as the source
of corruption and advocate strong government
with no intermediate political institutions.
The third is the middle position between
the two extremes. Proponents of this view see
human nature in Madisonian terms and advocate
a viable government balanced by one or more
viable social institutions.
Today, the term “anarchist” is generally
misunderstood as an advocate of a state of
confusion and lawlessness. Cartoonists depict
anarchists as bearded bomb-throwers who have
an utter disregard for life. Such images are at
variance with the political philosophy of
anarchism.
Anarchism, as expressed by its
proponents, is the idea that government is both
unnecessary and undesirable. Anarchists believe
that human societies should be governed by the
voluntary cooperation of their members, not by
the coercive force of government.
As a philosophy, anarchism can be found
in many societies, dating back to the writings of
Chuang Tzu who advanced Daoism in the 4th
century B.C.E. Like others who believe in an
idyllic past, Chuang Tzu claimed that human
beings could re-create an idyllic world in the
present -- without the assistance of government.
Anarchists have been a part of almost every
society – even in societies that believe law is
God-given and necessitates strong government.
One example is the Mu’tazilites, who appeared in
the 720s A.D. in Basra and Baghdad in what is
today Iraq. They maintained that “believers could
DRAFT: August 2007
manage without any imam [community leader] at
all.”60
The British philosopher and novelist,
William Godwin, is one of the founders of the
modern European philosophy of anarchism. In his
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1773),
Godwin wrote, “Man is perfectible, or in other
words, susceptible of perpetual improvement.”
As individuals come to recognize that the
interests that bind them are stronger than the
interests that divide them, they will
spontaneously come into social harmony. When
disagreements do occur, people will resolve
disputes through rational debate and discussion.
Thus, the coercive arm of government is
unnecessary.
Government, Godwin and his followers
contended, is not a safeguard against disorder and
conflict; government is the cause of disorder and
conflict. Because government, in their judgment,
is the tool of the powerful and propertied classes,
it imposes rule from above that represses
freedom, breeds resentment, and promotes
inequality.
Another influential anarchist writer was
the Russian prince, Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921).
Born into wealth and nobility, he served as a page
to the czar, but was repelled by what he saw of
court life. A distinguished career as an army
explorer and geographer did not cure his
revulsion against government authority. He
joined one anarchist group after another, first in
Russia and then in France. He argued that were it
not for the corruptions imposed by governments,
humans would develop bonds of instinctive
solidarity that would make government
unnecessary. To prove his assertions, Kropotkin
pointed to evidence of non-coerced cooperation
within the animal kingdom. All animal species
profit through mutual aid. Many animals, for
example, cooperate in raising the young, finding
food, or seeking shelter. Therefore, if human
beings, who also are members of the animal
kingdom, would cooperate, they too would reap
benefits. He wrote:
No more laws! No more judges! Liberty,
equality and practical human sympathy are
60
Patricia Crone, God’s Rule, op. cit. p. 66.
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Exploring Political Ideas
the only effective barriers we can oppose to
the anti-social interests of certain among us.61
In the late 19th century, anarchists joined
with other reformers and revolutionaries to
challenge the very existence of government in
many Western societies. In 1876 Russian
anarchists formed a secret society called “Land
and Liberty” that advocated a revolutionary
uprising to overthrow government and replace it
with self-governing economic communes. In
1879 a violent wing of this society, known as the
“People’s Freedom,” embarked on a campaign of
political assassinations that claimed the life of
Czar Nicholas II in 1881. According to the
Russian historian, James Billington, the modern
phenomenon of political terrorism originated
here.62
Anarchists generally recognize that some
human beings will engage in anti-social behavior.
But they argue that the absence of government
does not mean the absence of social control over
individual behavior. They contend that peer
pressure, public opinion, and fear of a bad
reputation will control the worst tendencies of
human behavior.
Anarchism, however, has not proven to
be a viable alternative to government. Anarchy,
or the actual breakdown or collapse of social
order, has occurred in world history. Typically,
anarchism was brought on by feuding factions,
not by anarchists themselves. Furthermore,
periods of anarchy are often mislabeled. The
“Warring States” period of China (roughly 400 to
220 B.C.E.), for example, may imply a period of
anarchy, but it was actually a period when
feuding warlords tightly controlled most parts of
China.63
Utopianism – the term used to describe
social movements that strive for a perfect social
order – begins with a different set of ideas than
anarchism. While anarchism is based on the
rejection of government, utopians are divided in
on the question, “does the perfect society require
government?”. The utopian quest arose in
61
Peter Kropotkin, Law and Authority (1886).
62
James Billington, “Dostoevsky’s Prophetic Novel:
‘The Possessed’ foresaw political terrorism on the
eve of its birth,” The Wall Street Journal (January
28-28, 2006), p. 12.
63
S.E. Finer, The History of Government, op cit., pp.
453-454.
DRAFT: August 2007
Western thought in ancient tales of a once Golden
Age. Plato’s vision of the perfect city-state and
early Christians’ hope for Christ’s second coming
also influenced utopian movements.
Sir Thomas More (1478-1535) forever
tied the vision of an ideal-state to the word
“utopia” in his book, Utopia. Henry VIII
appointed More as his Lord Chancellor in 1529.
When More refused to endorse an act making
Henry the pope of the English Church, Henry had
him imprisoned and beheaded. In death a martyr,
More is remembered as a statesman of noble
character and deep religious convictions.
In Utopia (1516), a title that comes from
the Latin word meaning “nowhere,” More
described an imaginary community on an island
off the coast of South America. In Utopia
everything is perfect – the laws, the morals, even
the politics. This fictional island has given us the
adjective utopian that now is applied to a highly
desirable but impractical proposal.
Utopians have promoted a variety of
experimental communities in which they have
attempted to live out their ideals. However,
unlike anarchists, the ideal utopian community
has not always seen the absence of government.
In the 17th century, Puritans came to
Massachusetts Bay where they created “a city
upon a hill” with a strong theocratic government
to await the second coming of Christ.
By contrast, Charles Fourier of France
advocated cooperative yet decidedly secular
communities. Fourier, for example, envisioned
small communities of 1,500 to 1,800 people who
would live together in a “Phalanx” (a close-knit
community). Each Phalanx would be organized
as an extended family so that people could
identify with others they knew rather than as
members of an anonymous society.
In literature, there are also divergent
views of utopia. In Walden (1854), American
writer and naturalist Henry David Thoreau (1817-
1862) eloquently captured his beliefs in the
dignity of the individual, the power of human
intuition, and the harmony people should seek
with nature. In Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949),
nearly a century later, the British writer George
Orwell (1903-1950) looked into the future and
sees a world in which utopianism is replaced by
totalitarianism.
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Exploring Political Ideas
Orwell identified one of the major
differences between anarchism and utopianism.
Anarchism always rests on the belief that
government is the source of corruption and must
be completely abolished. Utopianism looks to a
better world. In that world, some utopians like
Thoreau and Owen envisioned small
communities with little or no government; others
like Plato and the Puritans saw the need for a
strong and all-encompassing government; still
others like Karl Marx insisted on the need for a
strong government in the beginning, but claimed
it would wither away when utopia is realized.
Orwell captured the complex relationships
between utopianism and totalitarianism – a
subject of the next section.
What Is Statism?
Statism views the state as the framework or
womb of all political life and views government
as the embodiment of the state. Statism is the
antithesis of anarchism. For the statist,
government and the state are both necessary and
desirable. The state is the ultimate source of
authority and government is the central if not sole
governing institution in society.
Statism is a modern political philosophy.
It did not appear until after the creation of the
modern state in the 17th century. In ancient times,
government was not seen as a separate institution
but as part and parcel of the polity or empire. The
ruler personified this sphere of life; just as the
gods personified the polity as a whole. Louis XIV
may have intended to restore that older view
when he is said to have remarked, “I am the state
and the state is me.” Instead, he is remembered as
one of the first sovereigns to express the modern
statist theory of absolutism.
Absolutism is the belief that the state
must be ruled by one person as the monarch; and
that the monarch must have absolute power to
rule. Absolutism is the first modern expression of
statism. Machiavelli (1469-1527) might be
remembered as the first absolutist philosopher,
except that he lived well before the arrival of the
modern state and he was guided more by the
example of the early Roman republic. The French
philosopher Jean Bodin (1530-1596) presaged
modern absolutism. His master work, Six Books
of the Commonwealth, was originally published
in French in 1576. In that work, he sought to
establish the sovereignty of monarchy in general
DRAFT: August 2007
and the king of France in particular amidst a
world of severe disorder and conflict between
Catholics and Huguenots. However, Bodin’s
world and writings had one foot in medieval
political thought and one in modern. For Bodin,
the ultimate sovereign was still God.
The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes
(1588-1679) lays rightful claim to originating the
modern philosophy of absolutism and in it the
origins of modern statism. Hobbes’s leviathan
symbolizes the modern state and its sovereign.
Hobbes studied Bodin’s work. Like Bodin, he
was a partisan supporter of the royal cause who
wrote in troubled times. His major work
Leviathan was published in 1651 – several years
after the English civil war ended in a victory for
the parliamentarians and the beheading of King
Charles I. Unlike Bodin, Hobbes lived during a
time when the secular authority of government
exceeded the divine authority of the church.
Hobbes rejected the ultimate sovereignty of
God.64
Hobbes began his philosophy with the
premise that that the nature of man in a state of
nature is nasty and brutish. Guided by their
passions, human beings will naturally seek to
dominate one another. In this respect, human
beings are equal, according to Hobbes.
Hobbes believed that as equals, human
beings would eventually contract with one
another – giving up some of the powers they
would enjoy in a state of nature to a
commonwealth or government that would protect
them from their own worst instincts. If that
commonwealth is to establish peace and justice,
Hobbes asserted that it must meld all its members
as one. Hobbes went further: the commonwealth
must be unified as one legal person; and it must
become sovereign over all its members.
Furthermore, it must be ruled by one person as
the monarch; the monarch must have absolute
power; and succession from one absolute
monarch to the next must be based on heredity.
Hobbes recognized the danger of such a
system: occasionally it will produce a bad
monarch. However, Hobbes firmly believed that
this danger is far less likely than the danger of
64
For a comparison of Bodin and Hobbes’s political
philosophies, see Donald S. Lutz, Principles of
Constitutional Design (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), chapter 2.
50
Exploring Political Ideas
some form of elective rule where the numerical
chances of bad voters and bad rulers increase. 65
Government in Islamic Political
Philosophy. Hobbesian and Islamic political
philosophies are different in one essential respect.
Hobbes based his philosophy on natural law
whereas Islamic political thought is based on
God’s law. Islamic political thought is based on
revealed law (shari’a) and its adherence in the
political and religious community (umma). The
first and most important purpose of government
is to establish a moral order in which the people
follow God’s laws.
Traditionally, the ruler or imam was
expected to be a spiritual leader (or caliph) and a
political leader (malik). The imam possessed a
great knowledge of shari’a and was capable of
enforcing its requirements. The imam also was
responsible for administering non-religious
policies (e.g., building roads, deciding the school
curriculum) and serving as a judge in cases
involving the breaking of shari’a.
The traditional idea of the ruler – as
spiritual leader, secular king, and judge – had so
many expectations that it proved difficult to
fulfill. Monotheistic law was both secular and
religious. It required a monarchic form of
government and a monopoly of governmental
powers in one ruler. This proved difficult to
realize in the world of politics, especially as the
size and complexity of the community increased.
Hence, there sometimes occurred an interesting
separation of powers – between the ruler as king
on one hand and the ruler as spiritual leader and
judge, on the other. When the imam as spiritual
leader was held by someone outside of
government, the separation of powers helped
create a balance of power between government
and society.
In the 20th century, Western ideas of
modernism influenced a different model, known
as the secular model, which attempts to separate,
in varying degrees, religion and government.
Mustafa Kemal was the first political leader to
establish this model of secular government. He
did so by relying partly on force and partly on
consent. Known by his Western name Ataturk,
65
Laurence Berns, “Thomas Hobbes,” in History of
Political Philosophy, third edition, edited by Leo
Strauss and Joseph Cropsey (Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 409-412.
DRAFT: August 2007
meaning the “Father of Turkey,” Kemal is
credited with founding the modern Republic of
Turkey in 1923. Seen in the West as a benevolent
dictator, Kemal helped form the Turkish nation
out of the Ottoman Empire. He also established a
secular Western-style state and a republican form
of government. His government established
peaceful relations with neighboring states. His
government also put in place many secular
reforms – allowing or providing for political
opposition, religious freedom of different faiths,
equality of men and women, the adoption of the
Roman alphabet and Western family names, and
the replacement of Islamic academies by
Western-style universities.66
Democratic statism is the belief that the
will of the people can only be realized by a strong
state that rules with complete authority in the
name of the people. This may seem in the minds
of some people to be a contradiction in terms.
How can democracy, as a principle based on the
consent of the governed, be carried out in a
country where the state is the absolute source of
authority? The late 18th century philosopher,
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, answered precisely that
question.
Rousseau bases his philosophy on a
unique and radical premise: neither human nature
nor the state is the source of corruption and
domination; the culprit is society. According to
Rousseau, man is naturally good because man is
naturally solitary and self-sufficient. When
human beings enter society, they come to need
one another but not to love one another. This,
according to Rousseau, intensifies individual self-
interest. This forces individuals to ally
themselves with other individuals of like
interests, and this divides society into factions.
To overcome the dangers of society,
Rousseau advanced a variety of proposals.
 Small agrarian republics. The first set
of proposals includes “smallness of size
of the political unit (akin to the Greek
city-state), relative equality and
homogeneity of the population, an
agrarian economic base, public
education that cultivates virtue and
Dankwart A. Rustow, “Ataturk, Kemal” in The
66
Encyclopedia of Democracy, edited by Seymour
Martin Lipset (Washington, DC: Congressional
Quarterly, 1995), vol. I, pp. 96.
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Exploring Political Ideas
patriotism more than talents, strict
republican morals, patriotic public
festivals, a civil religion, and censorship
of the arts and sciences.”67 Although
Rousseau intended these proposals to
create small agrarian republics of strong
civic virtue, Rousseau also recognized
that these proposals could create an
oppressive totalitarian state.
 The General Will. To counteract the
dangers of the first proposals, Rousseau
proposed to shift sovereignty from the
state to the “general will” of the
citizenry. Rousseau then proposed an
elective assembly to express the general
will of the people. Every citizen would
become a member of the assembly and
entitled to vote. Rousseau proposed a
number of ways to streamline and
consolidate this cumbersome legislative
body, including a draftsman responsible
for writing most of the laws. He also
designed reforms for a new educational
system that would create introspective,
compassionate, and virtuous citizens.
In all these proposals, Rousseau stood
firm in his belief that nothing should stand
between the general will of the people and the
elected bodies of a powerful state. For Rousseau,
the state was the ultimate voice, shield, and
sword of the people. Therefore, no intermediate
institutions (such as interest groups, political
parties, and regional or provincial governments)
between the people and the state would be
necessary. In his ideal democratic state, such
institutions would not only be unnecessary, they
would be undesirable because they would be a
potential source of division among the people.
Many of Rousseau’s particular proposals
proved unworkable. However, his philosophy
provided the basis for the French model of the
unitary democratic state. ]
Totalitarianism is the belief in a
government capable of exerting total control over
all aspects of human life. Hence, the “totality” of
totalitarianism is twofold – the completeness of
control and the completeness of the things
67
Arthur M. Melzer, “Jean-Jacques Rousseau,” in
The Encyclopedia of Democracy, edited by Seymour
Martin Lipset (Washington, DC: Congressional
Quarterly, Inc., 1995), vol. III, p. 1089.
DRAFT: August 2007
controlled. Totalitarianism invariably begins with
a utopian vision of a perfect world. That vision is
usually presented in ideological terms.
Communism, fascism, and nazism are examples.
In philosophy, there is a benevolent form
of totalitarianism. This variant envisions a
utopian world guided toward perfection by the
state. One example of such a utopian view is
Plato’s vision of the ideal-state ruled by a wise
philosopher-king.
In practice, such a world has yet to be
created. George Orwell had Hitler and Stalin in
mind, not Plato, when he wrote Nineteen Eighty-
Four. Orwell’s biographer, Bernard Crick,
captures this Orwellian image: “If you want a
picture of the future of humanity imagine a boot
stamping on a human face – forever.”68
This vision squares with the scholarship
of Hannah Arendt, who wrote extensively on the
subject of totalitarianism in the 20th century.
Arendt understood exactly why benevolent
totalitarianism is impossible. As Arendt explains,
totalitarianism requires an utter and complete
reign of terror that must first be used to prepare
the way for total control. Before a people can be
totally controlled they must have nothing, they
must be nothing. Terror obliterates the fabric of
society and the dignity of the individual. The
concentration camp was the instrument of Nazi
terror. In Soviet Russia, it was the gulag, which
systematically dehumanized those who entered its
world. In these and other examples, the
degradation was so complete it reduced its
prisoners to uncomplaining creatures, molded its
jailers into mindless bureaucrats, and forced those
on the outside to live with blank stares for fear of
being next.69
68
Bernard Crick in George Orwell: A Life, second
edition (London: Penguin Books, 1992), p. 25.
69
Hannah Arendt, “On the Nature of Totalitarianism:
An Essay in Understanding” in Essays in
Understanding: 1930-1954, edited by Jerome Kohn
(New York: Schocken Books, 1994), pp. 328-360.
The most powerful collective prisoner’s memoir of
the terror of camp life remains Aleksandr I.
Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956, 3
vols. (New York: Harper & Row, 1973). The
authorized abridged edition is available in paperback
in one volume (New York: HarperCollins, 2002). The
most eye-opening analysis of what motivated one of
the officials in the Nazi concentration camp system is
Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report
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Exploring Political Ideas
In searching for an image to illustrate
totalitarianism, Arendt holds up the simple onion.
At its center sits the leader who rules outward
from the safety of the core surrounded by many
layers of protection and control. The leader and
the system become “shock-proof,” according to
Arendt. The surrounding layers include “the front
organizations, the various professional societies,
the party membership, the party bureaucracy, the
elite formations and police groups.” These layers
give a sense of a normal world. At the same time,
they exert total control and watchfulness over the
lives of the people. Ideology still exists, but
largely as a tool of propaganda and education.
Ideology becomes a justification for oppression.
70
Authoritarianism, as Arendt explains, is
the belief in hierarchy – a pyramid-like structure
of government. Authoritarian government occurs
when someone or some group seizes the reigns of
government power but leaves everything else
intact.71 Authoritarian rulers rule from the peak of
the pyramid, which could be a large corporation,
a military organization, or civil government.
Wherever it occurs, the ruler commands and
those below obey. Rule can be soft or hard, but
rule is always carried out in strict accord with the
letter of the law, modified, of course, to suit the
needs of strong rule.
One source of authoritarian rule is
military power. In this variation, a military
commander or group of officers seize control of
all civilian government. Often, they assume
power under conditions of anarchy – real or
fabricated. People who fear disorder usually
welcome the military because it promises to
restore order. The commander swears he will
obey the law while he is in power, and that he
will step down as soon as normal conditions are
restored. He often does not keep his promises.
Historical examples include Julius Caesar,
Napoleon Bonaparte, and Francisco Franco.
Totalitarianism and authoritarianism are
as different as the onion is from the pyramid. Yet
they are also variations on a statist theme – the
belief in the necessity and desirability of strong
on the Banality of Evil, excerpted in The Portable
Hannah Arendt, edited by Peter Baehr (London:
Penguin, 2000),pp. 313-388.
70
Hannah Arendt, “On Authority,” ibid., p. 468.
71
Ibid., p. 468.
DRAFT: August 2007
and unchallenged government authority. In this
respect, they both stand in marked contrast to
anarchism which seeks to abolish government in
the name of freedom.
What Lies Between Statism and Anarchism?
There are, of course, other important ways to
think about government that lie between the
extremes of statism and anarchism. Confucianism
and classical republicanism are two ancient
examples that have evolved over the past 2500
years. Liberalism is a modern example that began
in the English Enlightenment of the 17th century.
But these philosophies begin where statism and
anarchism end. They do not directly address the
question, “Is government necessary?” They
accept the need for and desirability of
government. As such, they do not call for
completely abolishing government or completely
relying on it. Instead, they are concerned with
how the authority to govern can be shared –
among government, the individual, and society,
which are addressed in a later unit.
Reviewing and Using the Chapter
1. Do you agree or disagree with James Madison
that “government is the greatest of all reflections
on human nature”? Why or why not?
2. On balance, would you say that human nature
is basically good and deserving of trust or
basically bad and deserving of distrust? Why?
What historical and contemporary evidence can
you cite in support of your position?
3. What are the major beliefs of anarchists and
utopians? How are they alike and how are they
different?
4. Evaluate the argument advanced by anarchists
that governments are unnecessary and that other
forms of social control over individual behavior
are sufficient.
5. Compare totalitarianism and authoritarianism.
How are they alike and how are they different?
Extension Activity
1. Does a “state of nature” (or life without
government) exist anywhere in the world today?
Use specific examples to support your answer.
2. Research and compare two attempts at
utopianism in the United States. How were these
attempts similar and how did they differ?
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54