To Read an Introduction to Political Science By

Jonathon York Introduction

This project is intended to constitute an Introduction to the formal study of politics and political science, being a variation of what I wish I had when I first entered the discipline. All institutions of higher education tend to focus on a specific subfield or set of subfields, not necessarily intentionally, but over time these institutions produce what can best be described as a disciplinary orthodoxy, distorting the student’s vision of the discipline as a whole such that he or she may conceive of the whole of the discipline as constituting merely what the professors parade in front of their classrooms, in their textbooks, and in their supplemental materials. Knowing this to be the case it is my intention to present as broad a picture of the discipline as I can manage, in order that I may avoid the potential damage of the prejudices ingrained by a too-narrow view of the discipline as a whole. My own exposure to the discipline of political study was largely hampered by the blinders of those self-described students of politics at the University of Dallas who followed in the footsteps of the students of Leo Strauss, who on one hand insisted that in order to understand a thinker one must, if at all possible, closely read everything that thinker ever wrote (a laudable though difficult task for many)1, but on the other openly derided other methodological currents in the discipline, especially those that forsook the political philosophical tradition of the field and instead sought to adapt or emulate the quantitative methods of the natural sciences. This position placed blinders on Strauss’ followers and those intellectual descendants who, in the half-century since this scholar’s death, purport to instruct in the mode of Dr. Strauss, and today call themselves “Straussians.” I know this because I too was once so limited, without even having been fully aware the blinders were there in the first place. Imagine my surprise, nay chagrin, when I would hear in a graduate course in political science methodology from my professor, Dr. Tom Little of the University of Texas at Arlington, that “philosophy is wrong because it is normative; only through the empirical scientific method can we learn the truth.”2 Surely this was not so! Within a semester I withdrew and returned to Irving and the safety of the familiar to complete my professional degree. Looking back on it, I realize that both institutions were blinded by their respective orthodoxies, both of which emerged from what is sometimes called “The Chicago School”: On one hand, the University of Dallas rests squarely on the side of Leo Strauss and his disciples originally from the University of Chicago and now prominent at other institutions such as Claremont-McKenna and Hillsdale College; on the other, the University of Texas at Arlington adheres to the views of another Chicago political scientist, Charles E. Merriam, whose efforts to define political science as an empirical study of political behavior alone would dominate the discipline in the United States throughout much of the last century. About the same time as my graduate work neared its culmination in a thesis on Montesquieu’s view of the concept of liberty, the American Political Science Association was wracked with division, in the form of a revolt against the empiricists and statisticians in the discipline, especially by the students of political theory, the foundations of political philosophy and those who focused on both normative and contextual analysis of political phenomena. This division, from my perspective as a newly minted would- be scholar in the field, threatened to split in twain the Association I had just joined, especially when I first attended the annual conference in Philadelphia in 2003 and saw the publishers’ booths split between two separate floors in the convention space: one floor dominated by empirical, quantitative and statistical publishers, the other by normative, theoretical and philosophical publishers.3 Neither side appeared aware of the other’s existence; never the twain should meet it so seemed. Having noted this division, I resolved to attend as wide a variety of presentations and panel discussions as I had time for over the next three days, and in subsequent annual conferences I would repeat the same exercise. What I found in that first conference of my professional existence was a clear division with clearly ludicrous expectations on the part of the convention planners concerning which panels would draw the largest numbers. I saw that the quantitative and statistical analytic panels that year were assigned the largest conference rooms in the convention center, with row upon row of neatly arranged pink padded chairs and high ceilings to accommodate the expected crush of warm bodies hearing the latest advances in empirical political science. The normative, the theoretical, philosophical and text-based panels were relegated to much smaller venues, presumably a judgement on the planners’ part of the paltry interest these other, lesser historical relics of a bygone prescientific era in the discipline would elicit. However, when I attended these panels a consistent pattern would emerge: the large venues were nearly empty, the panelists at times outnumbering the audience in those yawning chasms, while the smaller ones were so crowded as to leave standing room only. For too long, it seemed, political scholars had been left “in the wilderness” in the United States by what appeared in the wake of the Second World War to be the triumph of quantitative empiricists over all other methodological approaches to political phenomena. The War effort had demanded commitment from every discipline in order to defeat the Nazis and the Empire of Japan, and while many were indeed up to the task, arcane fields such as political science could allegedly only provide institutional analysis and philosophical underpinnings for the justice of the Allied cause, neither of which were directly useful on the road to victory. Consequently, in an effort to secure support from the federal government through categorical research grant money, the entire discipline apparently retooled itself along the lines of the empirical and quantitative approaches pioneered by Merriam and others, leaving other research methods in scholarly exile. What I did not know at the time, and what I was only beginning to learn from having spoken with fellow conference attendees, was that a movement had formed in a prior APSA conference in San Francisco seeking to reform the methodological orientation of the discipline as a whole.4 A counter-conference panel was called across the street from the main venue more or less by word-of-mouth and, from what I have been told, had to be moved to a much larger conference room when the organizers, believing they would only attract a dozen or so dissidents from the Empire of the Empiricists, suddenly faced a crowd of around three hundred. In the twenty years or so since this reform movement, dubbed the “Perestroika” movement thanks to an anonymous eleven-point email sent by an individual calling himself “Mr. Perestroika” to the editors of the American Political Science Review on 17 October 2000, and calling for “a dismantling of the Orwellian system that we have in APSA”,5 I witnessed a change in the manner in which the discipline represented itself at the APSA annual conference, with greater attention to methodological diversity evident in the conference’s offerings, and what seemed to me a more balanced representation of different approaches among its members, and in particular, its leadership. However, as an instructor of government and political science at a community college in Dallas, when I started my search for a fitting introductory text for the political science discipline, I found that on the whole, this reform had nearly completely failed to extend to the available offerings. By and large, these texts broadly fell into one of two distinct emphases: Scope of observables and Methods of research. In the first camp I found one text (Rosskin/Cord) 6 that presented the breadth of observables well enough, but since it lacked a unifying sense of a theory of political inquiry, a student could be forgiven for having learned next to nothing about how to approach the observables and view political science as a form of “civics for grown-ups”. Furthermore, I noted an implicit bias in this text toward the empirical quantitative method of political inquiry, disconnecting the reader and future scholar from the axiological and epistemological roots of the study of politics. In the second camp I found a greater myopia: one text (Shively)7 emphasized only empirical research methods, another (Colomer)8 emphasized Rational Choice Game Theory, a third (Danziger)9 attempted to contextualize political science in a comparative framework and thus present either comparative politics or the broader discipline only poorly. What’s more, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board had prescribed five distinct outcomes for the introductory political science course which no text currently in print appears to address explicitly: 1) Define and apply political terms and concepts, 2) Define political science and identify the subfields, 3) Compare and contrast different political systems and institutions, 4) Apply the methods used to study politics, and 5) Critically interpret and analyze contemporary political issues and problems.10 In order to open up my students’ eyes to the breadth, depth and relevance of this discipline, as well as meet the outcomes defined in the state’s Lower Division Academic Course Guide Manual, I would either have to assign multiple texts, a stack whose total price would preclude its purchase, given the economic realities of an undergraduate student enrolled in a community college, or else I would have to develop my own resources. I have chosen to attempt the latter. What follows is a survey of the discipline of political science as I understand it, based on the development of material consistent with the outcomes identified by the state of Texas for this course, and which generally acknowledges the broad methodological scope of the larger field of political inquiry, in light of the acknowledgement of multiple methodological approaches to the discipline as a whole. Granted, I intend by this essay merely to introduce the reader to the discipline and will doubtless fail to incorporate or fully to appreciate the depth of every available approach; nevertheless, let this at least stand as a beginning. The outline for this essay shall follow the order in which the Outcomes defined for this course are arranged, but will necessarily be broken down further into subsections. Because my formal study has been largely in the realm of political theory, I tend to give priority to political theoretical concepts; however, in the interest of providing a broad but solid foundation for introducing the discipline, I must of course introduce the full scope and methods of political inquiry to the best of my ability. My approach in writing this essay has been to put together, at least in some form, the introductory text I wished I had, but didn’t. It is, after all, the only way we can improve the lot of those to come after us. I may have suffered a rude awakening in my pursuit of the field of politics and political science, but I find no justifiable reason others should do the same. Political Terms and Concepts

Basic Political Concepts To define basic political concepts, it is first necessary to define what we mean when we use the term politics. When most people think of politics they often think of government, or elections, law, or policy. However, others will invoke notions of power, choice, and participation; linkages, cleavages, and conflict. Some will even bring to mind ideas about principles, interests, and risk. Indeed, a great many concepts are associated with the basic idea of politics, but all of them share one commonality: all of the above ideas are grounded in the notion of ordered communities. An ordered community, broadly understood, may include as few as two individuals or as many as a billion. Politics are a defining characteristic of all of these. Put simply, politics are those things which concern and are characteristic of ordered communities in general. Since ordered communities are made of human beings both individually and collectively, we must begin by asking what those human beings, both individually and collectively are like. What are the properties of humankind? What do they do, what are they likely to do? Why do they do what they do? These are fundamental questions drawn from the philosophy of man, and inform the student of politics as much as the psychologist, the sociologist and the ethicist. However, what makes the study of politics distinct from these other areas of inquiry is that the questions of human action, behavior, interest, desire, thoughts and beliefs are oriented towards human beings in relation to others within the context of an ordered community structure. This ordered community structure has been variously called polis, civitas, city, state, government, régime, nation, and nation-state, at various times throughout the development of the study of politics. Over time these terms have been adopted, used, refined, redefined, challenged, critiqued, discarded, or revived depending on the intent of the person or persons engaging with the term. Suffice it to say, though, that if we are to examine an ordered community we must have some understanding about the character of those people who make the ordered community what it is. Hence, the study of politics must also incorporate an understanding of the fundamental nature of humanity. In what we are calling classical political theory or classical political science this is a given, and one should therefore not be surprised to read classical authors speak of human nature, often at length. The foundational exercise concerning human nature in classical political science boils down to the thought experiment: “What would you do if you could make yourself invisible?” Howsoever one answers this question reveals much about one’s interpretation of human nature, as Plato makes explicit in the Republic with the dialogue about the Ring of Gyges, in which each of the interlocutors offers his own answers to the question, which align closely with their respective views of the character of justice, a separate but related question that is ultimately the centerpiece of the Republic as a whole.11 From ancient discourses such as those in Plato’s Republic and elsewhere, the building blocks of political science terms and concepts find their foundation. Government in this context was viewed less as a set of institutions than as a process of steering an ordered community in a particular direction, and power is understood as both a capacity either to steer that ordered community or else to determine the structure and function of that same community. In the first sense, power is seen as a power to govern (from Latin gubernare, “to steer”, cognate with the Greek kybernetes, “a pilot”), while in the latter, power is seen as a power to rule (from Norman reule “custom, order”, derived from the Latin regula, “a straight stick”). A wielder of power who governs steers a community in a particular direction, what the classical Greeks would call a telos or “good” and is called a governor. By contrast, a wielder of power who presumably beats those in the community with a straight stick, at least metaphorically if not literally, would be called a ruler. This latter case is perhaps the origin of the scepter or mace as a symbol of power. Any recognized wielder of power we call an authority; however, the necessary question of whether one should have authority arises. This is the question of legitimacy, which recurs over and over in the study of politics, and remains a principal issue, even a problem, in politics today. Ultimately legitimacy in classical political thought rests on the larger question of justice: what is the right or best use of power, assignment of authority, and direction of government? Who should steer and in what direction? Should he, she or they beat the community in that direction? Why or why not? These are the fundamental questions of justice that inform classical political science, and in one form or another, remain with us today. We should note also that these questions are inherently prescriptive and, given the influence of the norms of ordered communities, therefore constitute a normative perspective from which to examine political phenomena, meaning that it is primarily concerned with the norms of any ordered community. By no means the only perspective, it is certainly among the oldest and most enduring, and stands as a primary spring from which many political actors exercise their political judgement, whether in the form of a cosmological, ethical or ideological position. Within this context the oldest documented subfield of political science, namely comparative politics, would find its footing, as we shall find in the work of Hecataeus and Herodotus. It is also the focus of classical treatments of politics and justice such as found in the corruption of régimes in Book 8 of the Republic, and in Aristotle’s assertion in the Politics that political science is architectonic, that we must view political science not merely as a body of knowledge about the nature of political things but also as an art, a tool for political engineering. Anatomy of the Discipline So, which is it? Is the study of politics a science or an art? In order to address this question, we must consider what we mean by science and art. The term ars, cognate with art itself, is most often translated accordingly, but the Latin original involves a broader, more inclusive understanding than we typically assume art to be. Rather, the Latin ars is taken to mean something like “that which is produced from human hands and minds”, corresponding to the Greek term techne, “a thing made”. In contemporary usage, we find allusions to this prior, broader meaning whenever we make references to the “state of the art” to describe the latest refinements in technological engineering, and whenever we refer to any man-made object as “artificial”. Making things is therefore a central task of the artist, and we may see art itself as a gateway to production, manufacture, building, and other activities that produce artifacts (voilà the root). In this regard arts connect at least superficially with applied sciences, especially engineering. However, unlike those other fields, many arts, especially visual and performing arts require the artist’s conscious attention to axiological and cosmological claims about beauty, either by embracing, extending, or questioning those claims. Science, on the other hand, finds its root in the Latin noun form of the verb scio, scire, one of several verbs which translate “to know” (others include cognosco, cognoscere “to know, meet or be familiar with” and sapio, sapere “to know, understand, or have wisdom about”). The knowing denoted by scio, scire chiefly concerns the knowledge of things or the possession of information about something, and roughly corresponds with the Greek gnosis (rather than sophia). The scientist performs observations and experiments with the principal aim of knowing something about the object under study, knowledge which may later be applied by the artificer or the artist. Thus science primarily concerns the observable; however, as Thomas Kuhn points out in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, what we call observable often depends on the framework for understanding (what he and subsequent authors call the paradigm) within which the scientist operates.12 If we are first to view the study of politics as an art, we find the principal gateway for political inquiry as the Liberal Arts trivium, namely Language, Rhetoric and Dialectic. Political concepts, terms, ideas, indeed nearly every component of the ordered community ultimately rests on the ability to communicate through the use of language, so perhaps it should come as no surprise that Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the 18th Century founder of Romanticism in political theory, would devote an entire Discourse to the Origin of Language.13 Through language we persuade and through language we make judgements in politics. The Trivium further leads the student of politics into the Diplomatic Arts, for Law requires language for reference, as does the resolution of disputes. Contracts and alliances have the force of law among those who have agreed to the contract or alliance, and ultimately depend on Language for their communication, without which they remain inchoate. The interplay of Rhetoric and Dialectic gives rise to the art of negotiation, which may more broadly express as an art of games and diplomatic strategy, employing law, contracts, alliances, rivalries, and in the interest of reinforcement, an awareness of past laws, resolutions, contracts and alliances, producing history as a distinct diplomatic art within the context of political inquiry. We must have knowledge of political things in order to make use of them and to forge new laws, resolve future disputes and generally either order or steer the community. In this sense we must equally regard the study of politics as a science, with observation producing questions which become testable hypotheses. The interpretation of the results of these tests form the foundation for models which inform a theoretical framework capable of refinement through additional queries that produce new research questions, and hence advancement of the field of politics as a whole. Here the Liberal Arts Quadrivium guides us, for the phenomena of Mathematic, Geometric, Astronomy and Music all may find analogous phenomena in politics, with the Diplomatic, Economic and Martial Arts themselves as entire classes of observables amenable to the kinds of queries evident in empirical research. Nevertheless, we must not lose sight of the reality that politics on the whole deal with ordered communities of human beings, and if we are to know anything about human beings in those ordered communities we must readily admit that the study of politics is as much science—specifically a social science—as it is an art. So what form does this science/art of political inquiry take? Here we must consider the discipline as a solid form, and examine three distinct dimensions in order to discern its overall structure. Provisionally these dimensions have been identified in the study of Politics, as in other academic disciplines, by the Scope and Character of the Field, the Areas of Research Interest, and the Methods of Research or Inquiry. Scope & Character By Scope and Character of the Field, I understand the interaction of the concepts of Art and Science in the forms of Theory, Observation, Analysis and Engineering. Theory involves internally consistent explanatory systems that in the study of politics may be prescriptive or descriptive, normative or empirical, formal or informal. A prescriptive theory is internally consistent and generally serves as a foundation for beliefs or claims about political things such as justice, legitimacy, participation, and conflict. Descriptive theories seek to explain phenomena observed, but may be normative or empirical. Normative descriptive theories describe certain norms within an observable ordered community, while empirical descriptive theories seek an operationalized level of precision often unavailable to normative descriptive theories, but which are not necessarily in conflict with them. Most normative descriptive theories are informal and offer a broad sketch of the phenomenon observed, while empirical description may lead to a formal theory, i.e. one that can be expressed through formal logical or mathematical reasoning. All of these features except prescriptive theory require some level of observation, involving the collection and documentation of political phenomena, whether they be law, texts, institutional norms and practices, behaviors, alliances, political positions, or people themselves, and thanks largely to this feature of the scope and character of political inquiry the discipline often skews towards empiricism and description of phenomena. Yet the Scope and Character of this field of study nevertheless has room for analysis and engineering, as do other disciplines. In political analysis one applies theory to observed phenomena in an effort to describe the phenomena either in whole or in part, perhaps even with a view to prescribe action relative to the phenomenon under scrutiny. Analysis in political inquiry also involves the application of rhetorical tools such as cause/effect, correlation, comparison, contrast, classification and division in order to understand the phenomenon under study. This step is crucial to the development of political awareness and any genuine knowledge of the observables in question. It also serves as a springboard to the fourth major area of the scope of the study of politics, namely political engineering, i.e. the practice of addressing political problems and generating phenomenal constructs within the domain of politics. A legislator ignorant of political analysis is necessarily in a far weaker position to construct effective law than one who understands the phenomenal domain within which he or she is acting, just as an architect is less able to design an effective bridge without an understanding of the basic principles physics, especially of tension and compression within the gravitational field of the earth, than one who does. Here, in the Scope and Character of the discipline is where science and art intersect. Areas of Research Interest Yet the art and science of political inquiry is neither physics nor architecture, at least not at first glance. Here we must consider the second dimension of the discipline, namely the areas of research interest to the student of politics. At this point the options are many, for the discipline is by no means young, contrary to the protestations of the disciples of Charles Merriam. As noted before, politics and political science as a broad discipline applies to any phenomenon involving people in ordered communities, but in order to tame this particular dimension a certain standard set of classifications of areas of research interest has emerged. Indeed, one look at the list of organized sections and thematic presentations at any annual conference of the American Political Science Association will reveal the overall breadth of the field as a whole, and indeed it is enormous. However, in order to render this list more manageable, one may find certain broad subcategories within which to focus research interest. My own introduction to the discipline largely focused on political theory, which is often connected with political philosophy, and indeed the terms are often used interchangeably, although a difference between the two is discernible in the sense that political theory is at once broader than political philosophy on one dimension and narrower on another. Specifically, where political theory may contain normative descriptive components it does not necessarily contain a prescriptive component, yet in some corners it most certainly does. Further, political philosophy often contains cosmological and epistemological underpinnings which may lie beyond the reach of political theory. Finally, where political philosophy generally remains within the realm of the Trivium, namely language and dialectic, political theory may incorporate Quadrivial components such as formal models of the phenomena under study, beyond the reach of the political philosopher and the ethicist. Closely related to the realms of political theory and philosophy is, of course, an analysis of the origins and development of political ideas, leading those outside the discipline to view this area of political inquiry as a subset of history instead of a separate field in its own right. The oldest documentable subfield of political science almost certainly is that of comparative politics. When ordered communities developed over time in isolation from one another and subsequently rediscovered one another, people invariably began to notice similarities and differences, one community to another. To be sure, much of human recorded history is grounded in this process, and it also stands as the first major documentable cause of conflict among human communities. In order to make sense out of the world they knew, thinkers such as Hecataeus and Herodotus developed interpretive systems offering explanations for the differences among human beings in their respective ordered communities, and even offering explanations for the conflicts they experienced, encountered or learned about. Yet nearly coeval with this inquiry comes the study of what is one’s own, though it presents a greater challenge than discerning the other. Indeed, Herodotus’ claim that people tend to prefer what is their own stands as perhaps the first hypothesis in all of political science as we know it today, and indeed appears to be perhaps the most enduring dictum in human history.14 Coupled with a consideration of the other which is central to comparative politics, one may then develop a hypothesis that alliances are more likely to form among people who are most like themselves. Yet, before reaching out to others like oneself, one must have a deep awareness of oneself. In a political context this implies the need for a subfield whereby one focuses inwardly on one’s own ordered community, and indeed this is a major component of most political science departments around the world. Nearly every political science department in the United States, for example, is divided into subdivisions of “American Politics”, “Comparative Politics”, “International Relations”, and either “Political Theory” or “Methodology”.15 The International Relations component area is implied by the idea of reaching out to other nation-states, other ordered communities, from one’s own, and emerges from the question “Is it possible for different ordered communities to form alliances, or will they always conflict?” However, not to be dismissed, and indeed in order to reinforce each of these areas, other areas of research interest emerge, examining Institutions and Processes, Law and Policy, Political Behavior, Political Communication, and even Organizations not strictly contained within governing bodies, including subsets and intersections within and across ordered communities typically called “Non-governmental organizations.” Methods of Inquiry Finally, the third principal dimension of the general field we call politics or political science is a fundamentally epistemological concern, namely with the Methods of political inquiry. Here the variety of approaches is at its most diverse, and here also the greatest source of conflict within the discipline itself. For on this axis lies the full range of methods of inquiry and critique, of analysis and evaluation, and it is here where adherents of one method of political study are most likely to forge their own blinders. The methodological continuum stretches from extremes of prescription to description, and devotees near either end are most likely either to forget, ignore or vilify those whose methods of inquiry deviate from their own preferred approach. Potential conflict on this dimension produced the utilitarian crisis in political science in the Second World War, resulted in the Empire of Quantitative Empiricism, “Mr. Perestroika’s” indictment of the American Political Science Association a generation ago, and led to a wholesale reassessment of just what political science is supposed to be about anyway. On one extreme of the methodological continuum lies the realm of punditry, polemics, and normative prescriptive critique. At this end the student of politics is an active participant, an advocate for one or another set of preferences, principles, or policies. The prescriptive critic is by far the most visible representative of the discipline to the public at large, and this method of inquiry and critique is often mistaken for the whole of the discipline. Indeed, one may browse any brick-and-mortar bookseller and find the “political science” section filled to bursting with popular books that ultimately rest more on opinion than fact, perceptions than reality, conjecture than truth, rhetoric than dialectic.16 These documents often represent an observable in and of themselves, for pundits and prescriptivists use these texts to establish, refine or transform political norms through commentary and critique as well as through polemics, an insistent yet ultimately flimsy rhetorical approach in which the author relentlessly attacks his or her opponents’ positions. Such material, while potentially useful in the process of political engineering and socialization, ultimately impeaches the integrity of the discipline in the eyes of the general public and engenders skepticism about the validity of the discipline as a whole. An alternative to the cases of punditry and screed that pass for “political science” in the popular imagination is normative descriptive analysis. On the surface the normative prescriptive critic often masquerades as a descriptivist, but the reader must take care to discern the difference. For where the pundit advocates a position through writing, the normative descriptive analyst seeks to define, explain or analyze political norms. This one can accomplish through the application of theory to political phenomena, engage in a political philosophical analysis or critique, employ rhetorical or document analysis, or apply models of political behavior that describe “norms” within the ordered community under scrutiny. This is the method which currently dominates most introductory textbooks in American Government, and on the whole, with the exception of philosophic analysis, bears a strong resemblance either to political news analysis or general reference articles in an encyclopedia. Perhaps for this reason normative descriptive analysis tends not to sell nearly as well as the inflammatory rhetoric of political punditry. At the other extreme of the methodological continuum lies quantitative empirical approach which extends from the statistical analysis of surveys through to the limits of direct experimentation. Adherents to this end of the spectrum maintain that if a phenomenon cannot be quantified and measured it is therefore indistinguishable from nonsense and one may assume it neither matters nor exists. Under this cluster of methods, inquiry into political phenomena broadly follows a rigorous method borrowed from the natural sciences, with a strong emphasis on technique, quantification and putative “value neutrality”. Perhaps the best known form of quantitative empirical research in political science is that of behavioralism, which holds that only this form of research can discover uniformities in human behavior through empirical tests and measurements, that quantitative data must be of the highest quality and analyzed through statistical methods, that philosophical and historical approaches must be downplayed, discarded or ignored, and that the aim of social science must avoid applied issues of practical reform. For the behavioralist, political science is the youngest, rather than the oldest, social science, only having sprung to life sometime in the 1930s. The express bias against philosophical and historical dimensions of political inquiry, indeed against all forms of political inquiry not reinforced by statistical analysis, has led behavioralists to mischaracterize the other end of the research continuum as consisting of nothing but “old men in wing-backed chairs pontificating about what politics ‘should’ be” (This is a direct quote from Dr. Tom Little at the University of Texas at Arlington)17 rather than producing any usable knowledge about political phenomena. While it is true one will find a host of pundits and advocates on the far normative end of the methodological spectrum, to claim all research methods except one’s own are invalid displays an arrogant provinciality, and reinforces Herodotus’ ancient dictum about preference for one’s own “tribe”. To be sure, the normativists and the philosophic analysts in the discipline are largely guilty of the same sin; one need only read Strauss’ What is Political Philosophy? as well as “Mr. Perestroika’s” email to see that for normativists, the quantitative orthodoxy of behavioralist political science either deludes itself into ethically suspect research or rigorously researches its way into irrelevance. Between the provincial extremes of normative prescription and quantitative empiricism lies the most fertile, accessible, and potentially controversial ground along the methodological continuum: Case study, anecdotal observation, document and text analysis, contextual analysis, formal modeling, and informal modeling. This region straddles the normative/empirical gap, offering intuitive, communicable and practical real-world insights into the political phenomena under study, and holds out the promise of advancing the rigor sought by quantitative empiricists while preserving the larger relevant questions about those things proper to ordered communities. Perhaps the most useful lesson to be drawn from this bird’s eye view of the political science discipline is that, like most matters involving conventional human constructs, no single methodological approach can—or should—enjoy a monopoly on Truth, for the observer not only affects the outcome of the phenomenon through the method he employs, but the observed phenomenon itself also affects the observer, revealing a distinctly distorted lens through which he interprets the world. If the field of political science as a whole is to advance, we would do well to embrace the intellectual courage to tolerate, welcome, and even incorporate a blend of approaches, especially those that reinforce each other’s conclusions despite having come from vastly different positions on the methodological continuum. Colomer’s Thirty Propositions What follows is a catalog of thirty propositions offered by Josep Colomer in his Introductory Political Science textbook, The Science of Politics, published in 2011 by Oxford University Press. Colomer classifies these propositions into four distinct categories: Propositions about Action, Propositions about the Polis, Propositions about Elections, and Propositions about Government.18 These propositions are certainly useful in that each offers an impression of hypothesis, and one may even design research questions to test these propositions, even though Colomer himself claims that they are closer to principles, or “knowns,” about politics, than they actually are. Some clarification about terminology will be necessary as we tour these propositions and, wherever necessary, I shall endeavor to do so. Without further delay then, here are Colomer’s Thirty Propositions: Propositions about Action Proposition 1: Public Goods This term, borrowed from the fundamentals of Economics, describes any good, whether a thing, a service, a power, or a privilege, for which there exists an inelastic demand, meaning it is viewed as a necessary good, and for which private action is either unable, unwilling, or both unable and unwilling, to provide.19 Either way, they cannot be provided by private initiatives, and provision of Public Goods requires either cooperation or coercion, either through collective action or effective government. Proposition 2: Government size Demand for Public Goods and levels of public expenditure vary directly with economic prosperity, institutional stability, and participatory government. This proposition states that the longer a country lasts, the more it allows public participation in government affairs, and the wealthier the country is overall, the more likely the public will demand Public Goods and the more the government will have to spend to provide those goods. Proposition 3: Collective Action Members of small, concentrated, homogenous communities have greater incentive to cooperate than members of large, dispersed, heterogeneous groups. Consequently, small groups have more access to public resources at the expense of large groups. Proposition 4: Voice v. Exit Here Voice refers to collective action for the advancement of a collective interest, while Exit refers to individual action in search of an alternate provider. Voice weakens if Exit is less costly than Voice and more likely to give the individual access to Public Goods. This is a fundamental axiom of Rational Choice Theory. Proposition 5: The Prisoner’s Dilemma This proposition reveals Colomer’s grounding in Game Theory.20 A Prisoner’s Dilemma illustrates a situation in which all players have incentive not to cooperate; paired with Propositions 3 and 4 this would mean that Exit nearly always beats Voice from an individual perspective. This represents the basic structure of collective action problems for the provision of Public Goods, where non-cooperation leads to inefficient outcomes where all participants are worse off than they would have been had they cooperated. A variation of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, but one in which individual action may still produce individual rewards, but not as great as the rewards produced through cooperative action, is called the Stag Hunt. Curiously, Colomer leaves out the possibility of a Stag Hunt scenario. Proposition 6: Sustained cooperation In a Prisoner’s Dilemma, sustained cooperation can emerge if players apply the strategy of attrition, i.e. “Tit for tat”. The level of mutual cooperation varies directly with uncertainty about the length of the collective relationship as well as with the number of interactions in which the players remain “in the game”. Hence, as long as the success of a group remains uncertain, and as long as the group reinforces collective action through multiple interactions among its members, the more likely the group will stay together. The worst thing that can happen to a pressure group, therefore, is for the leadership of that group to declare total victory for their cause. By the same token, a pressure group can demand nothing less than total victory for their cause if it is to stay together. See Proposition 4 above. Proposition 7: Leadership The collective action of communities can develop in the presence of clear leadership, forming a “Leader/Follower” dynamic. Leaders distribute the costs of action among member to provide public and private goods, while Followers support Leaders and allow them to enjoy societal benefits not generally available to all within the group, such as power, fame, an income, or a political career. Propositions about the Polis Proposition 8: Small=Democratic Small communities tend to be harmonious in economic terms and irredentist in ethnic terms. Because small communities are advantageous for soft democratic forms of government, small independent nation-states and small self-governed communities have proliferated, making the average size of political entities, e.g. ”countries”, smaller over time. Proposition 9: Multi-level governance Multiple levels of governance are necessary for efficient provision of Public Goods at diverse territorial scales. Proposition 10: Federation and Federalism require many units Local democratic self-government and large-scale provision of Public Goods can be compatible through the establishment and maintenance of a federal system. However, small-N federations tend to fail, either through annexation or secession, while large-N federations, where no single unit dominates, tend to survive and endure. Proposition 11: Dictatorships fall and fail Dictatorships have a self-appointed monopoly of power through coercion and violence. They survive on the basis of active repression and positive substantive performance. They fall on the basis of military defeats, economic crises, internal insurgency, or death of the dictator. Proposition 12: Economic Development favors participatory government Participatory governments require free agency of community members and the regular election of authorities. Economic development reduces income and social polarization, and tends to lower the intensity of redistributive conflicts. This is a function of the axiom that “a rising tide lifts all boats”: the economic growth model of an open economic system, in contrast to the “zero-sum” game in a closed system. Proposition 13: Participatory government favors economic development Since participatory government is strongly associated with a “rule of law” system, it provides Public Goods with greater competence than non-participatory governments, offering incentive to invest in that participatory government’s economic growth. This is a reciprocal proposition to Proposition 11 above. Proposition 14: Democratic peace Participatory political systems are less likely to fight one another than dictatorships are, and are generally less likely to engage in wars in general than dictatorships. Propositions about Elections Proposition 15: Party Oligarchy Political organizations, especially those that present policy proposals and compete for political power, tend toward domination by political leaders or professional politicians seeking votes and offices. Corollary to this proposition is the axiom that if a country is taken to be a political organization, it too will tend toward domination by political leaders or professional politicians. Hence, all political systems, regardless of levels of public participation, are functional oligarchies. Proposition 16: Extreme Activists Voluntary political activists hold more “extreme” ideological positions than party voters or party leadership. This is the driving axiom behind Kenneth Waltz’s Median Voter Hypothesis, describe in Proposition 16 below. Proposition 17: The Median Voter In elections where only two major parties compete, parties have incentive to approach each other and converge on policy positions, and away from Extreme Activists. On convergence, neither party in a two-party contest has electoral incentives to move away from the other party. For what it’s worth, this hypothesis has been thoroughly disproven, both by research in 2014 by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, and by the rise and success of populist movements, especially in the United States, whose policy positions stand in sharp contrast to the opposing party. Proposition 18: Incumbent Advantage Electoral competition is asymmetric between government and opposition. The incumbent party in government can gain an advantage in electoral competition by providing or hiding information on its record to obtain credibility. Because of its unique position as the party in government, it has leverage over its own record in power. Proposition 19: Issue Ownership Despite Party Convergence (See Proposition 17 above) a party can maintain its advantage if that party’s past record in government has given it credit for policy making on an issue. This leads parties to adopt certain favorite issues for themselves, provided their position has met with prior policy success. Proposition 20: Non-debate campaigns Corollary to Propositions 18 and 19 above, Rival parties and candidates tend to choose or emphasize different policy issues according to issue ownership and relative advantage. Proposition 21: Policy consensus Broad policy consensus accumulates on an increasing number of issues over the long term. Mediocre policies with no “good performance” in government may survive for lack of a sufficiently popular alternative. This proposition assumes regression to a mean position closely approximating the Median Voter position, as well as the Monopoly problem of public policy. Propositions about Government Proposition 22: Majority Bipartism One-office elections by plurality tend to be associated with single-party dominance or a balance between two major parties. However, it must be noted that plurality elections are not designed to maximize the Voice of participants in the election process, but is instead designed to produce a decisive outcome. 21 Proposition 23: More Seats, More parties In assembly and parliamentary elections, a large size assembly with a large number of seats in each district and proportional representation in each district necessarily produces a large number of parties seated in the assembly or parliament. Proposition 24: The “Micro-Mega” Rule When choosing electoral rules, large parties prefer small assemblies and small plurality districts, while small parties prefer large assemblies and large proportional representation districts. This is a function of the relationship between election system and party Voice.22 Proposition 25: Small Assemblies, Large Districts The development of multiple contentious parties favors large multi-seat districts with proportional representation. Consequently, countries increasingly adopt proportional representation over the long term. This Proposition, as well as Proposition 23 and 24 above, compare with Duverger’s Law.23 Proposition 26: Electoral diversity in Federal systems: In contrast to proposition 25 above, in Very Large countries, a large federal assembly may be elected with different electoral rules governing the outcome of elections for small single- member districts, hence limiting the tendency towards proportional representation. Proposition 27: Institutional Deadlock and policy stability A single party government implies a high concentration of power, which enables effective decision-making. Separate elections for different officers and divisions of power imply divided government and inefficient decision-making (aka “deadlock”) with overall policy stability Proposition 28: Minimum coalitions Political parties in a parliament tend to form minimum-size winning coalitions and prefer partners located in contiguous policy and ideology positions. The distribution of cabinet portfolios among coalition parties tends to be proportional to the number of seats controlled by each party. Proposition 29: Cabinet duration Single-party majority cabinets tend to last longer than multiparty coalition or minority governments Proposition 30: Two-party stalemate In a system with institutional division of power between executive and legislative departments, policy change is more viable is there are multiple parties or individual members of the legislature not tied to party votes. By contrast, a two-party system with strong party discipline (see Propositions 6 and 7 above) may reinforce confrontation and inter-institutional stalemate Caveat Each of the above propositions invites the development of operationalized research designs to test them and should not necessarily be taken for granted. Of particular note, although Extreme Activists and the Median Voter Hypothesis (Propositions 16 and 17, above) may broadly describe differences between primary campaigns within a party and general election campaigns once a candidate is chosen to run for an elective office, this difference does not necessarily have a significant impact on the direction of policy. Nevertheless, these thirty propositions tend to recur in political science research circles either as axioms or else as broader assumptions and “common opinion”, as Aristotle would say. In order to place these propositions in their proper context, and in order to develop the tools to engage them either through critique, testing or challenge, it is first necessary to lay the foundations for analysis and evaluation of political claims. For the moment, these thirty propositions appear only to bear a tangential relationship with any of the basic political concepts described in the first section. However, closer examination of each of these propositions does reveal that they all address questions of ordered communities, power and authority, and of course they do imply a certain claim about human nature. Based on his language in these propositions, Colomer hails from a political theoretical tradition known as Rational Choice Game Theory, a formal modeling tool which purports to provide a logical foundation for the kind of political action, especially political behavior, that stems from claims that: 1) human nature is essentially rational; 2) that people perceive both an immediate self- interest and the passage of time leading to a perception about their mortality, and 3) that consequent to these premises one must therefore conclude that people order their actions rationally to maximize their perceived self-interest in the shortest possible time. However, it is also telling that none of them address questions of legitimacy, telos or justice, thus rejecting the aforementioned architectonic role of political science entirely. How is it possible that this essential feature of political inquiry was overlooked? To address this question, it will be necessary to explore the diversity of thought that generally informs political inquiry and to find where Colomer’s Thirty Propositions about political phenomena actually fit. We must of course decide on a starting point and for our purposes I suggest we begin with a brief sample of the earliest accounts available that trace the journey of political thinking, and that we move forward along a line of argument from there to where we stand today. This will of course involve a tour of the Classical, Modern, Post-modern, and Contemporary political thought that broadly informs the discipline. From here we should explore the various subfields of political science, the systems and institutions to which Colomer alludes, and conduct a review of the methods of political study so that we may be able to return to these Thirty Propositions and decide for ourselves whether they give us sufficient insight into those things proper to ordered communities. We may also find that the study of politics is far more diverse, complicated, frustrating, at times frightening, yet ultimately rewarding than any of us ever imagined.

Classical Political Thought Hecataeus & Herodotus, Progenitors of Political Science We begin our journey into the development of political thinking in the 7th Century BC in Ionia, on the coast of present-day Turkey; specifically, in the city of Miletus. Miletus, a commercial powerhouse in the Aegean with multiple colonies across the Black Sea, is perhaps best known for a revolutionary shift in the explanation of nature and the organization of the world from one dominated by anthropomorphic analogy to one focused on observable events and objects, leading to what would later be called the Ionian school of philosophy. For the thinkers of this period the world had an order to it, discernable through reason and observation, and perhaps this strongly held belief served as a kind of refuge for the Milesians, for the politics of the city were anything but orderly, as it was torn by factious tumult and violent coups d’état. Additionally, the city of Miletus had to contend with powerful, aggressive empires next door that each had their turn threatening Milesian independence, namely Lydia and Persia. It should therefore not be terribly surprising that the Milesians would ultimately align with Athens against the Persians in the Greco-Persian War that is the focus of Herodotus’ attention. For our purposes, we must look to Anaximander of Miletus (c.610-c.546 BCE) who, among other things, developed a cosmological theory of opposites to explain the organization of the universe—wet and dry, hot and cold, and so on—as having fractured from some indefinite monad called the apeiron.24 However, he is perhaps best known for his map of the world known to the Ionians, a map which would later be expanded and interpreted by his successor Hecataeus (550-476 BC), and subsequently by Herodotus of Halicarnassus, in terms of the theory of balanced opposition Anaximander pioneered. Anaximander’s map was likely drawn out of necessity; first for trade and second for defense against Persia, but variations of it would come to dominate the Western view of the world in one form or another for the next two millennia. Anaximander’s map of the world and its successive refinements rests on the Milesian concept of the world as possessing an order discernible through reason and observation. The principle of balanced opposites requires there to be a cosmos in equal parts earth and sea, hot and cold, and ultimately in balance. However, observation shows that although the world may enjoy some sort of balance, this equilibrium is by no means perfectly symmetrical. Instead, three great land masses—Europe, Asia and Libya—are situated in an asymmetric balance one to another and divided either by seas, namely the Mediterranean, the Black and the Red, or else by rivers, especially the Nile and the Phasis (the Rioni River in present-day Georgia). To the far west the sea opens up to a vast world-encircling Ocean through the Pillars of Heracles separating Libya from Europe, and to the East, the land of Asia eventually reaches its end at the shore of the same Ocean, separated from Europe by the Black Sea and the Phasis River, and separated from Libya by the Red Sea and the Nile. (Fig. 1) In the center of the world, of course was the Aegean, particularly Ionia, and likely Miletus itself in Anaximander’s original conception.

Figure 1: Anaximander’s Map of the World & Its Idealized Form. By the time of Hecataeus the Milesian, Miletus itself had come to be dominated by the Persian Empire as part of the satrapy of Lydia. Hecataeus himself served for a time as an Ionian ambassador to Persia after a failed revolt by the tyrant Aristagoras, and successfully convinced the Persians to restore the Ionian cities’ somewhat autonomous, albeit tributary, status, according to Diodorus Siculus.25 Hecataeus’ primary influence on the development of political thought here comes from his Periodos Ges, or Journey ‘Round the World, a text which only survives in fragments, in which he gives an account of the various peoples of the three lands of Anaximander’s Map, presumably in order to facilitate commerce among them or else to serve as a warning, a guide of sorts, for travelers. Hecataeus’ refinement of Anaximander would subsequently inform Herodotus’ view of the world, and would form the basis for the Orbis Terrarum of the Middle Ages in Europe (Fig. 2)

Figure 2: Hecataeus’ Map and the Orbis Terrarum. From each of these views of the organization of the world as seen through the eyes of the West, one may draw two conclusions: First, the world is comprehensible and orderly, and Second, the Center occupies a privileged position of importance as the fulcrum for all the world. In both Anaximander and Hecataeus’ Map, the Aegean appears at the Center; this particular feature lies at the heart of Herodotus’ interpretation of world as he recounts in his Historiae the origins of the Greco-Persian War and the liberation of Ionia from the Persians. In the Medieval view, thanks to the dominance of Christianity, the center would shift to Jerusalem. Herodotus of Halicarnassus (484-425 BC) was a contemporary of Socrates the Athenian. His only known work, Historiae (“The Stories”), stands as perhaps the first major work of comparative political inquiry, for it includes an extensive ethnographic treatment of the world known to the likes of Anaximander and Hecataeus. Like his predecessors Herodotus draws heavily from what could best be described as a Geometric cosmological world-view, whereby the world which humans inhabit, the Ecumene, conforms to a balanced order between opposing principles, and is discernible by both reason and observation. However, after Herodotus’ death, subsequent editors would synthesize the Geometric world view with the prior anthropomorphic cosmology in the plan of the Historiae by dividing his work into nine books, each dedicated to one of the nine Muses, beginning with Clio, the Muse of Stories, and proceeding through each of the other Muses until he reaches the Book of Calliope, the Muse of Epic, where he recounts the Persians’ final defeat at Ionia.26 Of particular note in Herodotus’ work is his statement of purpose, which is to understand why war even exists at all, and if it is merely because of human differences or differences among cities, then in order to understand this he must explore the character of these differences and perhaps identify why they differ such that conflict arises whenever they encounter each other.27 For this Herodotus explores two distinct concepts that serve to define cities and the people who make up those cities: Logos and Nomos. By Logos one may generally understand a city’s laws, its language, its institutions of power, its principles—that which the citizens expressly deem worthy of choice. Nomos, on the other hand, relates to the actual practice of citizens: their mores, their manners, their customs, and their general way of living—what today we might call their overall culture. Using this framework as a guide, Herodotus proceeds to recount stories that serve to reveal something of the Logoi and the Nomoi of the peoples under his study.28 However, the Ecumene has a Logos of its own and, following Anaximander’s lead, Herodotus invokes the principle of balanced opposites in the Cosmos, identifying certain specific balanced yet opposed principles to each of the four cardinal directions. East and West, he posits, are associated with the balance of the extremes of cold rationality and the heat of passion, while South and North are associated with the balance of two different extremes, the concrete, physical world of Nature and the abstract, conceptual world of symbol. This pair of balanced opposites, for Herodotus, explains the origin of differences among men and cities and, depending on one’s place in the world, these fundamental logoi express themselves in various forms in the logoi and nomoi of cities. The behavior of cities, he suggests, are ultimately a function of the balance or imbalance of the fundamental opposite principles that define the Ecumene itself. Hence, the nomos of Egypt, being south of Ionia, exhibits a character more directly connected with the earth than that of the Ionians. This can be seen in the Egyptians’ strong dependence on the annual flooding of the Nile as well as their representation of divinity as a synthesis of beasts and man, while Ionians are not dependent on the earth so much as the sea, and their representation of the divine is almost entirely anthropomorphic.29 Furthermore, since Ionia lies west of Egypt, one may recognize a greater tendency for expressions of passion among their people, while Egyptians tend to be less so, seeking instead both rational and natural explanations for phenomena. One particularly noteworthy example of how Herodotus applies this model is in recounting the story of Amasis and Ladice fleeing to Cyrene in Libya to the west in order to have children together, something which is quite impossible in Egypt or Greece since (especially from the Egyptian perspective) Greeks and Egyptians are not even the same species of men. This is only possible, it seems, in a place where passion outweighs reason, and that means they must move west and probably a bit north to overcome “natural” differences (see Fig.3)30.

Figure 3: Herodotus’ Map of the Ecumene From the Herodotean point of view, the nomos of the Persians is best explained as an expression of a coldly rational approach to the physical world, such as when for when the Persians recruit an army they merely collect a part of their vast population, section them off in an enclosure that will hold ten thousand , and call it an army, giving the new “soldiers” only the most rudimentary training in the use of arms, replacing each casualty with a new recruit, and calling the ten thousand “Immortals”.31 In addition, as the Persians expand their reach and encounter other cities, they examine which parts of the nomos or logos of each city they encounter is most reasonable to them—and promptly adopt it for themselves, without regard to any strongly held feelings about prior practices.32 By contrast the Scythians, the fierce horsemen of the steppes of central Asia, engage in elaborate burial rituals in which a dead chieftain’s horses and wives are ritually killed and buried along with the deceased, in order symbolically to keep the household together. Herodotus’ account of the farthest reaches of the North are explicitly second-hand, and in which one will only find the names of peoples with little if anything to describe their nomoi, until one eventually reaches a land where the country if concealed from sight “by reason of the feathers”33, likely an oblique reference to snow. In the far opposite extreme, deep in Libya, Herodotus recounts a story about the Table of the Sun which is said by the locals to hold a naturally self-renewing feast, despite everyone in the city knowing that it is they who place the food on the Table.34 Nevertheless, since they are physically a part of Nature, Nature renews itself. In fact, says Herodotus, if one travels far enough south one will encounter men who “shun the sight and fellowship of men, and have no weapons of war, nor know how to defend themselves” 35, as well as “dog-headed men and the headless who have eyes in their breasts,”36 likely one of the earliest literary references to various non-human primates, such as baboons (“dog-headed men”) and the Great Apes of central Africa (especially gorillas, first described by Hanno the Navigator, a Carthaginian explorer likely known to Herodotus). In the center of the world is the Aegean, around which one finds the more familiar Greek world. For Herodotus this Navel of the World embodies the place where the logos of the Ecumene is most in balance, and thus reflects the larger balance of the opposite principles which define the cosmos. The Persian invasion of Greece, therefore, constitutes a world thrown out of balance and the progress of the Greco-Persian War demonstrates the restoration of that balance through the metaphor of the nine Muses, thus synthesizing the anthropomorphism of pre-Classical Greek religion with the rational and empirical order of Milesian/Ionian Enlightenment. The first book, Clio, establishes the purpose of the Historiae as well as the method of stories; the second, Euterpe, the Muse of Lyric & Song, recounts stories of Egypt in what can best be described as the subject of lyrical ballads, such as the tale of Rhampsinitis and the Thief.37 Thalia, the Muse of Comedy, governs the third book which recounts the rise of Darius and the revolt of Babylon and Assyria against the Persians, while the fourth book is devoted to Melpomene, the Muse of Tragedy, in which the Scythians are attacked by Darius, and in which the comparison of Libya, Asia & Europe underscores a world out of balance.38 Terpsichore, the Muse of Dance, holds sway over the fifth book, in which the war on a divided Greek world begins and Sardis burns.39 The sixth book, devoted to Love, the Muse Erato, recounts the Ionian fleet, Athens’ entreaty to Cleomenes, the Spartan dual kingship and the Battle of Marathon.40 The next book takes the form of Sacred Hymn, being guided by Polyhymnia, and focuses largely on the rise and dreams of Xerxes, as well as the united Greek army’s stand at Thermopylae against the Persian invaders.41 The next book, dedicated to Urania, the Muse of Astronomy, opens with an account of a great storm and the rescue of Delphi, home of the Oracle of Apollo, and proceeds with the evacuation of Athens and the battle of Salamis.42 The last book, Calliope, concludes the Historiae by placing the entire project in the context of Epic, where Athens is recaptured and the Persians are ultimately defeated, first at Thebes, and then finally at Ionia, thus restoring the balance of the Ecumene.43 While the Historiae is often cited as an early work of history (indeed our term “History” is derived from Herodotus’ title), it actually occupies a unique position in the development of political thought. First, Herodotus’ work makes a sustained effort to describe as well as to compare and contrast the differing régimes there treated. Second, its distinction between logos and nomos in régimes anticipates the efforts of future thinkers to address divergences of the spirit from the letter of law, as well as effectual truth from appearances. Third, it develops a consistent, albeit flawed and manifestly ethnocentric, framework for the interpretation of events, motivations and conflicts, which enables the audience to render comprehensible the chaotic world of international politics. Finally, the Historiae posits an overarching telos for his direct audience in the world of Classical Greece, a purpose or good for which they may strive, despite the conflict into which Athens and Sparta had dragged them. Thus Herodotus’ work is as much rhetoric as it is story, and as much dialectic as it is either of the other two. From Herodotus’ account of the Greco-Persian War and the restoration of balance to the Ecumene we can draw a picture of his understanding of the basic political concepts earlier described. First, politics for Herodotus certainly is an activity proper to man; second, while cities differ in terms of their particular logoi and nomoi, their differences follow a pattern directed by a greater logos that defines the place in which man may dwell; third, that people think, feel, believe, act and interact in accordance with the nomos of their particular city. Legitimacy and justice can only emerge when a city’s nomos conforms to the overarching logos of the Ecumene; when people leave their particular city and interact with others in distant lands their nomoi will likely conflict with the logos of the place as much as with the nomos of the cities they visit. As long as people hold fast to a nomos that does not conform to the logos of a particular place, the world is out of balance, resulting in strife and war. People must therefore adapt to the logos of any new place in which they are to live, lest they perish. It is useful for our purposes to remember the context in which Herodotus wrote the Historiae. A contemporary of Socrates and, based on clues in his writing having lived for a time in Athens, Herodotus doubtless experienced the tumultuous period after the Greco-Persian War in which the united Greek cities split into two rival alliances, the Delian and Lacedaemonian leagues, turned away from resistance to the common threat once the Persians retreated from Ionia, and eventually went to war with each other in two major conflicts: The Peloponnesian Wars. In this light one may aver that Herodotus’ true purpose in writing the Historiae is to remind his audience (he is in fact said to have recited parts of the Historiae in public performances) of the threat that wars represent to the balance of the world, and to exhort Athens to heed the greater logos of the Ecumene instead of sailing or marching against the Lacedaemonians, for he who would upset the balance of the Cosmos will himself be destroyed. Historical Interlude: The Democracy of Athens and Socrates the Idiot Clearly, if in fact Herodotus was trying to warn Athens and persuade them to cease their conflict with Sparta, few in Athens would heed his warning. After the death of Pericles, two rival factions within the city rose to prominence, one made up of the demos (“the many”), led by Pericles’ opponent Cleon, and the other made up of the oligoi (“the few”), led by Nicias.44 Cleon, an ambitious man, rose to power principally by removing most of his rivals through the power of the Athenian system of litigation, whereby all citizens could sit in the judgement of disputes. Often he would bring spurious or false charges against his opposition, and stir up public sentiment against them. His principal targets were, of course, the oligoi, the well-heeled men of Athens, despite his having come from the same social class as they; more importantly, however, he harbored a special resentment of the Spartans, whose régime appeared to legitimize positions of power among the oligoi against the demos. After having excited the demos to move against Sparta with promises of great wealth, urged them to put the men of the rebellious city of Mytilene to death, and capturing Spartan warriors at the island of Sphacteria, Cleon ultimately met his death at Amphipolis, leaving Nicias, who sought an end to the protracted conflict between the two rivals and negotiated a treaty with Sparta which came to be called the Peace of Nicias.45 The Peace of Nicias ultimately would not hold, for within Athens an upstart kindred spirit of Cleon named Alcibiades took up the cause against Sparta, agitating the demos to renew the conflict in spite of Nicias’ protests. “How happily he lisped the truth,” says Plutarch of Alcibiades, suggesting Alcibiades had a peculiar gift for rhetoric and leading the citizens of Athens wherever he wished.46 A campaign against Sicily, a Lacedaemonian ally, was approved and the citizens elected Nicias the strategos (essentially an elected general) to lead it. However, the Spartans outmaneuvered Nicias’ army when they laid siege to Syracuse and, in a surprise reversal, Nicias and the Athenian army found themselves besieged instead. Nicias implored the Ecclesia back in Athens either to send reinforcements to break the siege or else to approve a full-scale withdrawal from Sicily, sailing back to Athens. Athens of course refused, and as Nicias attempted to escape the Spartans on land, he and the Athenian expedition were wiped out.47 Alcibiades is subsequently elected to replace him and lead another campaign in Sicily. The political system which had arisen in Athens was a particular form of democracy, a “civic order of the Many” in which the interpretation of the basic political concepts of power, authority, legitimacy and justice all depended on the will of the Many, meaning the citizens of Athens. Hence every position of power and authority was elected by the Many, and depended on the many for their legitimacy. Any citizen who did not participate in the affairs of the city, who shrank from his responsibility as part of the Voice of the Many, in other words a citizen who did not vote, was called idiotes, whence we derive the term “idiot”. Justice was defined as the will of the Many, i.e. the Many were deemed always right. If the Many decided that open revolt against the decisions of the Many were punishable by death (which they did), then that was Just. If the Many decided that certain temples were more sacred than others (which they did), then that too was Just. If the many decided that should any damage were to come to the most sacred idols in the most sacred temple of the city, then the person responsible for the damage should be put to death for impiety (which they did), that was Just as well. To contradict, dispute, challenge or otherwise fail the will of the Many was not only treasonous; it was sacrilege, and the penalty for impiety was death. For the civil religion of Athens, the wisdom and the justice of the Many were axiomatic. It is this environment in which we find Socrates the Idiot, an irritating old man who earned a meager living as a tutor of sorts for the sons of wealthy Athenians48, among them Alcibiades— his star pupil. Socrates, though a citizen, never participated in the Assembly, never engaged in public affairs, and never held or sought a public office except once in his youth. Instead he wandered around town annoying his fellow citizens with a barrage of questions that ultimately forced them to confront their own ignorance, if only they paid attention to his line of questioning. “God has specially appointed me to this city, as though it were a large thoroughbred horse which because of its great size is inclined to be lazy and needs the stimulation of some stinging fly,” he would say in the Apology49, when he was finally put on trial for the capital crime of Impiety, encouraging Impiety, and teaching it in particular to Alcibiades, who was implicated in the desecration of the most sacred Athenian temple— specifically the emasculation of the Hermae, the idols representing the spirit and virility, the life and health of Athens itself. The problem of course was this: Alcibiades had just been elected strategos, replacing Nicias after his death in Sicily. Celebrating his victory, he holds a wild drinking party with his friends in a little visited part of the Acropolis, namely the Temple of the Hermae. The Hermae, of course, were ancient idols, some allegedly dating back to the very origins of the city, and among the only remaining religious artifacts from before Pericles’ time that had been so preserved and revered. These idols had the appearance of simple slabs of marble topped with the sculpture of a human head representing a god, and a carved set of male genitals at the appropriate height relative to the head. At some point in the soirée, the genitalia on several of the Hermae are broken off, which one would expect to happen when amidst a crowd of drunken revelers. Hearing the noise, the (elected) high priest, Euthyphro, makes his way across the Acropolis to investigate. As the last of the party flees the scene of the crime down a goat path behind the temple, Euthyphro locks eyes with Alcibiades, just before he makes his exit. (see Fig. 4)

Figure 4: The Acropolis of Athens (left). The Temple of the Hermae in this image is near the upper left (behind the Parthenon), while the high priest’s apartments are lower right (behind the Temple of Athene Nike); a Herm (right) Euthyphro now has a problem. As high priest he is responsible for the preservation of the temples, and must report any violations of the sacred site. If he fails to do so, he could be put to death if the Many so choose. He must report the desecration to the magistrate so that the prosecution can commence. However, Euthyphro saw the newly elected strategos, Alcibiades, at the scene, suggesting either a) Alcibiades committed the crime, or b) he knew who committed the crime. Either way he had something to do with it. However, the Many had just elected him strategos, so to accuse Alcibiades of the crime would contradict the will of the Many, itself a form of treason against Athens. Surely, the Many cannot have been wrong in choosing Alcibiades as their champion! How then does Euthyphro escape certain death, either for letting the desecration go unanswered or for implicating Alcibiades? Such a charge is, for him, as absurd as prosecuting his own father for murder, which out of piety, he does.50 The answer, of course, is in Socrates the Idiot (c.470-399 BC). Alcibiades, as an impressionable youth, had to have learned impiety from somewhere or someone, and since he just happened to have been Socrates’ star pupil, it is to Socrates the city must turn. Socrates the Idiot must have, through his tutelage, taught Alcibiades to be impious, and therefore it is he who must answer for this crime. Of course, once the charges of impiety are leveled against him by three other men, Meletus the poet, Anytus the politician and Lycon the orator, Socrates’ response to Euthyphro involves a line a questioning about the nature of piety and impiety that paints him into a logical corner where it becomes clear Euthyphro really doesn’t know any more about the gods, let alone piety or impiety, than he does, and one may infer that if Socrates had bothered to stand for election by the Many, he could’ve been elected high priest as easily as Euthyphro had been.51 When brought before the Assembly to stand trial, Socrates declares he has no idea what impiety even is, despite his attempts to get a definitive answer from the ignorant high priest, and that in his own feeble attempt at piety he seeks the oracle at Delphi (behind enemy lines, it must be noted) so that the Pythia could tell him the name and the whereabouts of the wisest in the world so that he might ask him. When the oracle replied that there was none wiser than Socrates52 he challenges the Pythia’s assertion by interviewing those with the reputation for wisdom and, finding them seriously deficient, ultimately generates hostility among the people of Athens for asking too many questions.53 In his challenge to the Many in the Assembly he proposes three alternative punishments to the death penalty that Meletus demands: either he be made a ward of the city, fed dinner in the Prytaneum, the traditional house of chieftains; in other words treated like a king or a prize horse and supported by “free maintenance by the state”54; that he be fined what he could afford, which he claimed was one mina (100 drachma), about a month’s average pay in Athens55; or, at Plato, Crito and Critobulus’ request that he pay thirty minas instead.56 Concerning the first proposal, if one asserts that the Many admit they believe only the wise should rule, and if Socrates is the only one who will admit he doesn’t know anything they should therefore make him their ruler or king. However, because the judges in this case constitute a democracy they cannot suffer kings in their midst, they should therefore immediately put him to death, which would itself be a crime against the will of the Many, for they already have admitted that they believe the wise should rule. Thus trapping the entire city into a contradiction out of which they cannot escape, Socrates’ proposals, as well as his acceptance of the judges’ decision to have him put to death, may be interpreted as a warning to Athens, a city which he earlier describes has having once been a democracy but then became an oligarchy57: “Kill me or crown me; either way the city is doomed,” for the city has found him guilty. However, because no one in the city save himself is wise enough to execute the sentence (Socrates is after all, a citizen of Athens), he himself must administer the punishment. A few of Socrates’ students protest, entreating him to submit to ostracism from Athens, but because he is an Athenian (a possible nod to Herodotus’ view of the greater logos of the Ecumene), he would not be able to live anywhere else and, in the only public act of Socrates’ life as a citizen of Athens, executes the sentence pronounced against him by his city, imbibing a draught of poisoned hemlock.58 Plato and the Highest Good Of the various accounts of the life and death of Socrates the Idiot—Thucydides, who focused on the larger Peloponnesian War; Aristophanes, who caricatured him in his comedy “The Clouds”; Xenophon, whose portrayal of Socrates’ trial suggests he was possibly insane; and Plato, who portrayed him in the most flattering light as a lover of wisdom—most of the details can only be inferred from Plato’s account as a witness to his method of inquiry in the form of lengthy dialogues. In particular, the dialogues surrounding the crime, the trial and the death of Socrates include: the Symposium, the dialogue on Love where a drunk Alcibiades bursts into the room dirty and disheveled after having escaped the scene of the crime down the goat path59; the Euthyphro, in which Socrates, before his trial, faces the high priest to inquire about piety; the Republic, where Socrates and his students engage in a discourse on the nature of Justice and the City, leading ultimately to questions of Truth and knowledge; the Crito, in which Socrates, awaiting execution, debates with Crito over the relationship between men and the laws of the city60, and whether a just man could live in an unjust city; the Apology, where Socrates faces the Many at his trial; and the Phaedo, where Socrates and his students discuss dreams and the afterlife just before he takes the poison. Of these specific dialogues, the Republic most directly connects with the development of political thought. Plato’s last and longest dialogue, the Laws, develops a more pointed treatment of law and government, and is often paired with the Republic despite Socrates’ absence. For Plato (c. 428-347 BC), rather than the nomos of cities necessarily conforming to their position in relation to the logos of the Ecumene, a reciprocal relationship exists between cities and the individual soul. The soul, being composed of rational, spirited and appetitive elements61, influences the orders of cities at their foundation, which in turn order or reorder the souls of the citizens who live in the city or are produced in the city. Since it is apparent that life in different cities brings different benefits and difficulties; that in order to live well in one city one must conform to the nomos of that city; and since there are some orders manifestly better or more choice-worthy than others, one may reasonably assert that some cities are better ordered than others, and that a principal task of man in a city is to discern what is best, and to pursue it. However, since the soul is shaped by the city, not everyone is able even to know what is best. Thus only well-ordered souls can bring about well-ordered cities, and only well-ordered cities can lead people towards higher rather than lower goods.62 Furthermore, some people, by virtue of their well-ordered souls, are better suited to exercise power than others, and these people therefore should wield power. Such people with well- ordered souls are the only truly legitimate authorities in the best city.63 But what city could we say is best? In order to explore this problem, Plato offers in Book 7 of the Republic an allegory to illustrate the problem all cities have. This particular allegory, that of the Cave, stands as perhaps the most enduring and revisited image in all of Western civilization. (See Fig.5) In this allegory, we are asked to imagine prisoners at the bottom of a subterranean cavern who are bound hand and foot in such position that they have never known movement and that the whole of their experience is confined to what is paraded before them as shadows on the cave wall in front of them. No natural light enters the cave and the wall is curved in such manner as to reflect the sound originating behind the prisoners so that it seems as if the shadows themselves are producing the sounds. Behind the prisoners are puppeteers interacting only indirectly with the prisoners through their shadows, and a fire burns behind the puppeteers so that shadows may be cast. A political theoretical interpretation of this allegory establishes a “ruler/ruled” relationship between the prisoners and the puppeteers, where the puppeteers are the rulers and the prisoners the ruled64. Government is the process of interaction between rulers and ruled, and is necessarily indirect. The shadows on the wall themselves represent all of the things proper to and characteristic of a city: laws, rewards, punishments, news, poetry, religion, money—everything. Of course, outside the cave none of this is real, but the prisoners don’t know that. The rulers might, but their reasons for maintaining the show may or may not have anything to do with whatever is outside the cave itself.

Figure 5: The Cave Allegory from the Republic, Book 7, illustrated. Plato’s Socrates character then asks the interlocutors to consider what would happen if we pulled one of the prisoners from this cave, little by little revealing the details of the cave itself to him. Of course the prisoner will not comprehend at first; not until after we drag him into the light, exercise his limbs and confront him with the blinding world outside the cave itself. Forced to confront images in the real world he cleaves at first to the familiar and then, through a series of probing questions, eventually learns movement, shadows, solid objects, the wind, the sky and the sun, and comes to realize that everything he experienced in the cave was a lie, that the truth lay outside the cave65. That is, of course, if he can handle the truth. If he can’t, usually out of lack of preparation or out of fear, he’ll seek out the cave and run right back in only to realize he can never go back to being a prisoner, in which case he must become a puppeteer or else be killed by the puppeteers. He may even return to the cave, in a misguided sense of love for his fellow man, in order to protect his fellow cave dwellers from the truth. In either case this is metaphorically how tyrants emerge. However, if he can handle the truth he may even come to love it, and to prefer life outside the cave, never wanting to go back. But if he remembers he has friends in chains, and if he loves his fellow prisoners, he will understand that they are suffering down there and he has to find some way to get them out, even if it takes his whole life and he can only free those who are ready, one at a time66. This is the essence both of philanthropy, which literally translates to “the love of one’s fellow human beings”, and of education, which is derived from ex duco, meaning “I lead out”. How, then, to lead people out of the cave, and to make sure they are ready to handle the truth? For this one must infer that the man outside the cave who knows and loves the truth can arrange matters so that the puppeteers are sufficiently distracted, allowing him to sneak down to the bottom of the cave and free the prisoners one at a time. He knows the prisoners cannot help him for they have never known movement, which means he’ll have to carry them out. But how to do this in a manner that won’t draw attention? After all, the puppeteers are motivated for various reasons to prevent anyone from freeing the prisoners, and to kill anyone caught trying to do so. The answer lies in the fire. Dependent on the fire for the necessary light to produce shadows on the wall, yet either fearful or ignorant of the outside, the puppeteers will let the fire go down to fading embers, powerless to keep it ablaze. The rescuer must first carry in wood from the outside to keep the fire going, and stoke the flames such that he himself remains hidden, either in the dark as it reawakens. As soon as the light returns the puppeteers resume their performance, and it is only at this time that the rescuer can make his way down to the prisoners, careful to remain beyond the reach of the firelight or else hidden in its glare, he plucks the prisoners out, one by one, and continues the process of liberation, teaching the former prisoner the same way he himself had been taught. One can infer from this allegory that those who govern in political systems have an active interest in deceiving those who are governed. Furthermore, those who claim to hold power in any political system may not actually have any real power, and that those who govern, unless they are ordered such that they enable the rescuer to liberate people by leading them towards truth, can never be truly just. The only legitimate wielder of power in this allegory is the rescuer, who represents a lover of wisdom, i.e., a philosopher. One generally hears this claim summarized in the assertion that justice will never prevail unless philosophers become kings or kings become philosophers. The greater difficulty lies in the realization that even were a philosopher king to emerge, no one in the city could ever truly be sure he even existed. But even if a philosopher king is possible, at some point one will die without having left a successor fully prepared to take the responsibility. In such case one is left with only those who were closest to the philosopher king, These Plato calls (in Book 8 of the Republic) the aristoi, or the best in the city67. But whoever is best in the city, however close they may be to the philosopher king, isn’t, and indeed may be so far from the love of wisdom or even the love of the true, the good, or the beautiful that they cannot even compare. This, incidentally, is almost certainly the origin of the infamous “Aristocrats” joke that circulates in nightclub and comedy club circles among stand-up comics developing their timing and creative imagination68, for the “Order of the Best” bears the name aristocracy. Absent the love or even knowledge of Truth, one is left without a coherent absolute standard by which to determine who or what is best, and is left with some internally generated contest to distinguish the “best” among those who remain. Should the contest produce winners, they must be identified, recognized, and given authority. This formal recognition Plato calls tīme, and the order which uses tīme to assign authority a timocracy, the “order of honor”. Yet timocracy necessarily raises the question: Are the honored honorable? And if so, are they honored because they are honorable, or are they honorable because they are honored? If the honored are honorable, then one may well call it timocracy, though one might also call it an aristocracy. However, if the honored are honorable only because they are honored, then the régime has corrupted yet again69. At this point one sees the division of social classes into the few (the oligoi) and the many (the demos). If the honored are few, which they generally are in order to distinguish them for their honors and justify authority, then they form an oligarchy, the power of the few. Oligarchies are distinguished merely by the domination or direction of many by few, and the few are themselves distinguished by any number of qualities that make their numbers fewer than the many. Hence one may find oligarchies of wealth, oligarchies of strength, oligarchies of age, family oligarchies, really any political system in which the distribution of power and authority depends on any quality other than love of wisdom or truth, and in which only a few hold power or authority. The only quality which the demos has in greater degree than the oligoi is their number, and at some indeterminate point these many will recognize their strength in numbers and overwhelm the few, establishing a democracy in its place70. However, because the many generally have no access to wisdom, to truth, or to anything other than their own desires, democracies are often left rudderless, except perhaps to keep the oligoi subordinate to them. This roughly corresponds to Athens’ experience with Cleon and Nicias during the Peloponnesian War71, and in Plato’s Cave allegory a democracy would look like a scenario in which the majority of people in the cave are puppeteers, which a few people remain bound as prisoners at the bottom. While the fire rages, the puppeteers crowd each other out in competition for the limited projection space on the wall, leading to confusion in the government of the city. One sees this feature evident today in the competition among putative sources of information for people’s attention; whether through news articles, magazines, books, television & radio, the internet & social media; whether by partisans, ideologues, businesses, governments, musicians & poets, advertisers, friends, relatives, enemies, agitators, trolls or conspiracy theorists, the field of image-makers is in the 21st Century quite crowded indeed72. In such situations individuals are often left to their own devices, forging a direction for themselves as they grope their way through the darkness of conjecture. A few may even find a way out, and for this reason Plato avers that the emergence of a lover of wisdom is only possible in the noise and riotousness of a democracy. However, more frequently democracies encounter those like Alcibiades, called demagogues, who succor the many into following them on the promise that the many will benefit, or get their metaphorical turn projecting their image on the cave’s wall. However, once they willfully submit to the demagogue, they find that their turn never comes; for only the demagogue has the power to say what images will be cast. This is the tyrannos: the usurper, the tyrant. For this reason, democracies are counted the second worst of all possible cities, yet are the only ones that make philosophy possible73. Aristotle and the Teleological City One significant feature of Plato’s view of cities is that they are by no means static, that cities are subject to régime change, usually through a corruption of the principles or the orders on which they are founded. In the Republic, the Best City, characterized by the rule of the Philosopher King, a lover of wisdom who both knows and loves the True, the Good and the Beautiful through the contemplation of eternal Forms, ultimately corrupts into the next best (but only second best) order, that which he calls Aristocracy. The corruption of Aristocracy produces the Order of Honor, or Timocracy, and the corruption of Timocracy results in the more common Oligarchy, characterized merely by the power of the Few. Within this framework Oligarchies are weakened and overthrown by the Many and Democracy prevails, and among Democracies two distinct images emerge: one where the Many oppress the Few, where everyone competes with one another to pursue their own good. The latter form of Democracy is susceptible to further corruption in the form of demagogues who appeal to the passions of the Many; the Many ultimately submit to the one who would secure their perceived interest, corrupting the Democracy into Tyranny74. Nevertheless, the irony of Democracy is that this is the only régime in which philosophy is possible; the only one in which a philosopher king may ultimately emerge. Enter Aristotle (384-322 BC), Plato’s most prominent student. From Aristotle’s personal experience having lived in Athens until shortly after Plato’s death, and having witnessed the fall of Athens to the Lacedaemonians, who were subsequently overthrown by one of their own colonies, only to be overwhelmed by Philip of Macedon shortly thereafter, Aristotle concluded that common experience did not conform to the orderly collapse of régimes his teacher at the Academy described. That is, Plato’s corruption of régimes did not match human experience, for Democracies such as Athens have been overthrown by Oligarchies, as Athens had been by Corinth, the former Lacedaemonian colony which itself had supplanted Sparta, and as Corinth itself had been overthrown by the tyrant Philip, bypassing Democracy entirely. In addition, a close examination of Plato’s Philosophical kingship as the Best of all Possible Cities reveals a prima facie absurdity, for under no circumstances is it even possible for the people of a city, who are neither themselves lovers of wisdom, nor trained to recognize the love of wisdom in others, to recognize or acknowledge this quality in another human being. Furthermore, even if a people were so educated, then everyone in the city would have to be lovers of wisdom themselves, presenting a further problem of determining how one, few or even many could be placed in positions of authority over a population of equally wise citizens without introducing injustice. Hence on two separate counts the régime of the Philosopher King is at best impractical, and at worst impossible. Moreover, closer examination of cities’ common experience reveals that certain régimes—monarchies and tyrannies, aristocracies and oligarchies—are easily confused, and therefore one must not necessarily take Plato’s view as the last word on such matters; it just doesn’t work77. So, in the Politics, Aristotle proposes to begin again from a different position. Rather than link the order of cities to the orders the human soul as Plato does, Aristotle connects the orders of cities to those within households, beginning with the common opinion that cities are more or less extended villages, which in turn are extended households. As certain relations exist in households—husbands and wives, parents and children, children among one another, masters and slaves—so do analogous relations among the social classes in any city76. And while different cities define their social classes using a variety of accidents, all of them generalize into one of three distinct categories: the One (monad), the Few (oligoi), or the Many (demos)78. Authority in any city typically rests with only one of these social classes, producing the various forms of cities extant in the world. Hence when only one holds authority we would call it a monarchy, when the few do so is an oligarchy, and when the many do so is a demarchy, though the term democracy is certainly more frequent. Other régimes, namely aristocracies, timocracies and tyrannies, require another dimension of analysis for Aristotle to describe them, as well as to explain why observers so often confuse certain régimes. This other dimension is defined by addressing a second question, particularly concerning the good, or telos, of any particular city. Specifically, one must answer for whose good are the one, the few or the many holding power. For Aristotle, one, few or many may rule for the good of the city, or else they may rule for the good of themselves alone. When one, few or many exercise power for the good of the whole city, this he views as a virtuous city, while when they exercise power for their own good, he views this as defective. As for the good of the ruled, such as implied by the vision of the suffering servant in the Second Isaiah of the Hebrew Bible and which would some to dominate the Christian view of virtue centuries later, Aristotle dismisses this as a possibility for when one rules for the good of someone other than himself or the whole, he has transferred the power from himself to another, and can no longer be deemed a ruler. So, with two independent variables with which to analyze the character of cities, Aristotle arrives at a broad categorization of cities: When one rules for the good of the whole, one sees a monarchy; when one rules for his own good alone, one sees a tyranny. When the few rule for the good of all, this is an aristocracy, but when the few rule for their own good, it is an oligarchy. One must take note that Aristotle dismisses the idea of timocracy as a distinct régime, for in any city the principle of honor invariably rests with only a few, and when addressing the problem of honor, namely whether the honor is founded on virtue or recognition, i.e. whether the honored are recognized because they are honorable or whether those who hold honors are honorable because they are honored, in either case a putative timocracy will necessarily be a state of the few. If honor is founded on virtue, he sees an aristocracy; if honor is founded on recognition, then he sees an oligarchy. When addressing the question of the many, however, Aristotle sees a vacuum that must be filled through some means. For his experience, having witnessed in his lifetime the fall of Athens first to one oligarchy and then another, only to be overwhelmed by tyranny, has shown him that the many do not rule for the good of everyone in a city whenever they rule, for they lose sight both of the one and the few. Hence, democracies are invariably defective, since the many confuse their own interests with the interests of the whole, and he admits that no name can be found for a virtuous rule by the many, for it has never been seen79. Rulers Good of the Whole Rulers’ Good City Alone One Monarchy Tyranny Few Aristocracy Oligarchy Rulers Good of the Whole Rulers’ Good City Alone Many (no name for this city) Democracy

Figure 6: Virtuous and Defective Cities80 Since Aristotle’s cosmology requires the fullness of the universe, that nature abhors a vacuum, he spends much of the Politics developing a means by which the virtuous rule by the many may be possible. On one hand he offers something akin to a middle ground between the oligarchy and the democracy, a “Middling Régime” as it is sometimes called, where the Few and the Many are in tension with one another81, but he ultimately seems to prefer a fuller mixture of all three social classes, for the few and the many may find a common good between them that still rejects the good of the city as a whole. His solution is a mixed régime whereby One is empowered to restrain the Few and the Many, while the Few are empowered to restrain the One and the Many, if in fact the Many are seduced by a demagogue as Athens had been by Cleon and Alcibiades. Similarly, the Many are empowered to restrain the will of the One and the Few, since the One typically comes from among the Few anyway.

The Good of the Whole Emerges When Each Checks the Other

Figure 7: The Mixed Régime: Every Social Class Both Rules and is Ruled in Turn. Through this arrangement of social classes in a kind of equilibrium, then, every social class both rules and is ruled in turn82. Only through this means will the Many remain in a condition where they consider the good of the whole city. Without this system of restraint, the Many cannot of themselves preserve a view of the proper telos of the city, and invariably fall into defective rule, where the city becomes corrupt and vulnerable to usurpation, either by tyrants or the oligoi. This Mixed Régime stands as the closest approximation that Classical Political Thought ever reaches to the Separation of Powers principle advanced by the framers of the US Constitution. Xenophon, the Classical Normative Critic It should come as little surprise that a major preoccupation among the Classical political thinkers covered in this survey is that of tyranny—particularly what it is, why it exists and how to protect oneself and one’s city from it. Herodotus’ rhetorical project identifies tyranny as a consequence of world out of balance, revealed in part through the dire necessity of despotic power which he recounts in his story of Gyges and Candaules83. For Herodotus the restoration of that balance comes at exceptional cost, especially to the peoples of the Hellenic world, but once that balance is restored, the Hellenic peoples themselves upset it once again through rivalries and a libido dominandi, or lust for power, amongst themselves. For Plato, although the Athenian democracy makes the love of wisdom possible, it nevertheless brings its defeat upon itself through seduction by the demagogue Alcibiades. For Aristotle, the ultimate failure of Athens reveals an inherent flaw in democracy itself, for the Many confuse their own good with that of the Whole84. Xenophon (430-354 BC) has a slightly different project. A student of Socrates alongside Plato, Xenophon’s career takes a different turn from Plato in that he serves variously as a soldier, an historian and a mercenary in the late Peloponnesian War, and recounts the lessons learned both from history and from his own experience in a collection of narratives that include the Hellenica, which recounts the events subsequent to the end of Thucydides’ treatment of the Peloponnesian War85; the Anabasis, which recounts Cyrus the Younger’s expedition to overthrow his brother Artaxerxes II from the Persian throne, in which he employed a mercenary army of Greeks to march from the Ionian coast to the interior of Persia, with Xenophon counted among them86; several Socratic dialogues, including an alternative account of Socrates’ Apology, where Socrates arrogantly rants before the Athenian Assembly that he hears the voice of God that compels him to act, that he compares favorably with Lycurgus the great lawgiver of Sparta, and that, based on the flimsy evidence for his conviction, he instead deserved “an exclusive preference” yet has decided for himself it is time to die87 ; the Cyropaedia, which recounts the education of Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian Empire and a likely inspiration for the works of Machiavelli two thousand years after Xenophon himself; the Agesilaus, a biography of a king of Sparta whom he greatly admired; and the Hiero, a dialogue on the character of Tyranny. Although himself an Athenian, Xenophon is himself no friend of democracy, but unlike Plato, who saw democracy as the régime most likely to produce tyrants, Xenophon sees the possibility of tyranny in nearly every régime, thanks to the influence of the principal motivators of human action, namely Fear, Desire and Hope, coupled with Ignorance88. Depending on the distribution of these motivators in any city, the danger of tyranny looms, especially if the city as a whole has lost all understanding of the Good for which the city was ordered in the first place. It is therefore the Hiero to which we must turn, for although much of Xenophon’s other work does embody a solid critique of the kind of politics Plato or Aristotle espouse, his dialogue on Tyranny directly tackles the problem of tyranny and despotism in a way none of his other works can approach. Hiero is structured as a Dialogue, in much the way that Plato’s Socratic Dialogues are, only in the case of Hiero the interlocutors are the lyric poet Simonides and Hiero, the tyrant of Syracuse in Sicily. When Simonides proposes that Hiero be called king, Hiero himself objects that he is a tyrant, not a king89; he is a usurper, and has no legitimate claim to rule the city over which he has power. Simonides proposes that since he has power he must be a happy man, but Hiero objects again, asserting that tyrants are no happier than private men, which he had been before he was thrust into power. Adjacent to his claim is that not only is he no happier as a tyrant than he had been as a private man, he is in fact more constrained due to his tyranny, for he cannot give up the tyranny and return to private life90. For Xenophon’s Hiero, tyrannies arise as a result of widespread ignorance among citizens, particularly ignorance of the Good, and the failure of the city itself to secure the Good for the city as a whole91. Furthermore, unlike in the Republic, where tyrannies necessarily arise out of democracies where the Many are seduced by the misleading charms of a demagogue, any régime is vulnerable to would-be tyrants. In Hiero’s own case, for example, the Many demanded he become the tyrant, either out of fear of the Few who had held power (Syracuse was, prior to Hiero, an oligarchy), or Hope among the same Many that they may be delivered from the Few by a champion of sorts92. In addition, desire among the Few or the One, capitalizing on the fear and hope among the Many, could also bring about a tyrant, as was also the case in Hiero’s rise to power in Syracuse. A segment of the Few, who wished to gain even more power than they already enjoyed, supported Hiero along with the Many who demanded he be placed at the head of the city. Hence, both oligarchies and democracies can produce tyrants, depending on the distribution of Fear, Desire and Hope among the three social classes contained therein, and no city’s régime is ever truly immune from the threat of tyranny. What makes tyranny distinct from all other forms of government is that it represents a usurpation of legitimate power or rule. Regardless of the manner in which a tyrant usurps the legitimate rule, tyrannies are characterized by a combination of suspicion and arbitrary will of the tyrant to maintain order in the city. For the tyrant must protect himself from constant threat: from those who hold a legitimate claim to power, from challengers to the tyrant’s power broadly, and from conspiracy among the Many, even if the Many thrust him into power in the first place. Consequently, the closest substitute for law within any tyranny is the arbitrary will of the tyrant to maintain order, whether through threats of force, a secret police sent out to spy on every element in the city, or else through the use of death squads to eliminate threats, which the tyrant sees everywhere93. The tyrant, in his own words in Xenophon’s dialogue, is as much a prisoner to the tyranny as the people under his putative yoke94. He must always excite the passions of the Many in order to maintain power, for the Many must favor the tyrant through the constant reinforcement of a cult of personality, lest they more reasonably oppose the tyrant through resentment of lost liberty95. Furthermore, the tyrant must always harbor a deep distrust of the Few, for they have resources the Many do not, and among the Few, demagogues may emerge, seeking to excite the passions of the Many in opposition to the tyrant himself. Most of all a tyrant must take care that the Few are kept in a position where they cannot reach the Many96. In order to maintain a tyranny, then, the tyrant must demand a division and enslavement of all social classes in the city. All civic activity must be diverted to maintain the tyranny, whether through encouraging the Many to spy on their neighbors, through encouraging the Few to nurture distrust of one another, or through the tyrant maintaining a great distance from the city as a prisoner in his own palace. In this way, the tyrant is forced to rely on agents and advisors, none of whom can he ever really trust97. Advisors, therefore, must be set against one another in a system of mutual suspicion where advisors must each work to undermine the designs of other advisors, and that possible threats must be eliminated through torture and death. This is the way of the tyrant, and in the end, the tyrant will himself ultimately lose, taking the entire city with him when he fails. When the tyrant falls, he must be destroyed utterly; he cannot return to private life, nor can he reasonably be sent into exile. Deposed tyrants must be hunted down and killed by the city itself, and unless the city gains knowledge of the Good, and an understanding of the Good of the City, it can only substitute one tyranny for another, for while a tyrant lives, the Good is impossible to see98. Hence, with Xenophon’s dialogue on Tyranny, Classical political thought presents a frightening view of the consequences of selfishness and ignorance. Where Herodotus sees an imbalance in the Ecumene brought about by selfish desire as a primary source of conflict, Plato sees a disorder of the soul and ignorance of truth as a source of injustice, and Aristotle sees a failure to discern the Good of all as a source of defective régimes requiring active restraint among social classes, Xenophon sees ignorance of the Good producing a collapse of cities into tyrannies out of which they can never climb unless they recover or rediscover the Good. For this reason, it is imperative that cities, if they are to maintain themselves, pay particular attention to the instruction of new generations of citizens, taking care that they have the necessary tools to discern the True, the Good, and the Beautiful; to connect the True, the Good and the Beautiful to the Good of the City, and to recognize and defend themselves from the glamor and the seduction of those who would destroy the orders of the city to secure their selfish interests. Without such instruction, without the “education of the citizen,” he remains open to enslavement, and the city open to ruin. The Seven Tools of Freedom As Plato and Xenophon demonstrate, the preservation of the city demands that people within the city have knowledge of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, or at least recognize in the city’s leaders the need for them to discern Truth, Goodness and Beauty99 so that they may steer the community toward the Good of the Whole, to preserve the city for the sake of the Good, and to prepare future generations of citizens to take on the roles and responsibilities of government for themselves. Hence it is of primary importance for political leaders to pay particular attention to the learning environment of their citizens. In every learning environment, three activities occur simultaneously: Education, Indoctrination, and Training. Education is what we hope will happen, and most people concerned with learning tend to focus on this as an umbrella term; unfortunately, the original meaning is often lost even to those who purport to preserve and advance the cause of education. This word comes from the Latin ex duco, which means “I lead out”. Indeed, it is an unambiguous reference to Plato’s Cave Allegory in Book VII of the Republic, and here we talk about leading someone out of the Cave of Ignorance and into the Light of Truth. We hope to do this with our thinking, for leading one out of ignorance and into the knowledge of the Truth is necessary for the maintenance of the public order, as Plato and Xenophon both insist. However, another form of “education”, which is the focus of civic leaders, tends to take center stage as a matter of policy. This “education”, the “education of the citizen”, is properly called Indoctrination. Strictly speaking, this is not true education at all, but rather the reverse of education. For indoctrination comes from the Latin in duco, meaning “I lead in”, as in to lead into a certain way of thinking, a way of asking questions or doing research so that we may expand our understanding on our own, presumably like the approach one sees in Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum.100 However, those who focus on indoctrination as the “education of the citizen” tend to look beyond methods of inquiry and rather into the transmission of certain attitudes, ideas and beliefs that they hold to be central to the maintenance of the civic order. However, as Xenophon implies in the Hiero and tackles more directly in the Cyropaedia101, one must take care that he knows how the Good of the City relates to the Good Itself lest future generations erode the civic order that has been established. For without the crucial component of understanding the connection between the City and the Truth, the City is vulnerable to corruption, decay and transformation into a régime quite unlike the one the leaders aim to preserve. The third activity, Training, is unlike the other two because while education and indoctrination are connected with conscious thinking, training is not. This term comes from the Latin trahere which is “to pull or draw” and suggests an effort to cause something to grow in a desired shape or direction. For us that would mean to render someone’s actions automatic without conscious thought, such as on an assembly line or in a factory—to make certain activities a habit. Furthermore, in instructing anyone in the ways of inquiry and in the ways of the civic order, one must be cautious, knowing when to educate or not, when to indoctrinate or not, and when to train or not, lest the wrong lesson be drawn from the instruction itself, and the pursuit both of Truth and Justice be seriously compromised. Of particular concern in Xenophon’s dialogue on Tyranny is the threat to the city posed by the phenomena of Ignorance, Fear, Desire and Hope102. This concern is by no means limited to Classical political thought; it remains an undercurrent of nearly every flavor of political inquiry from then to now. The late Classical world, however, developed a framework for understanding the sources of Ignorance, Fear, Desire and Hope as threats to one’s personal autonomy or freedom, which curiously has not consistently enjoyed the attention it deserves. This framework, broadly speaking, may be termed The Seven Tools of Freedom. It dates back at least as far as the Second Century to the works of Seneca the Younger103 and the Fifth Century to Martianus Capella104. The tools themselves were called the Liberal Arts, and despite the tendency in subsequent centuries to deem “Liberal Arts” any curriculum of study that demands a substantial reading commitment and which do not necessarily translate directly into a career path, properly speaking the Liberal Arts consist of seven specific areas of inquiry and production that are directly conducive to the preservation of one’s liberty, both from a material and an intellectual point of view. The Seven Tools of Freedom, quite simply, are those tools that make one free. Again, it is not a new idea, but in the face of disturbing trends in our public discourse and the cacophony of ideas about what we are supposed to be learning, it is an idea we must revisit now more than ever. Granted, one doesn’t necessarily have to master all of these tools, but without at least some familiarity with all of them, one can never truly be free. More bluntly, unless one has a basic competency with the Seven Tools of Freedom, we remain slaves, whether to a job, a paycheck, a prejudice, an ideology, or a leader or leaders. The cultivation of the Seven Tools of Freedom enables the citizen to develop and maintain the wherewithal to preserve his community, to participate in that community fully, and to defend that community against the abject ignorance, reactionary fear, selfish desire and misplaced hope that would otherwise lead it to ruin. The first tool is Language, and stands as the gateway for all other arts and sciences. Some liberal arts advocates will refer to “grammar,” but Language encompasses more than grammar, and more even than literature. Put simply, if you can’t communicate with someone, you have to trust someone else to do it for you. And that means you’re totally dependent on them. The Renaissance scholar and poet Petrarch (1304-1374) is depicted in his formal portrait holding a book in his hand, Homer’s Iliad, which is open and waiting to be read, yet he is shown weeping because, for not knowing the language, he cannot read it. The second tool, Rhetoric, is often associated with the craft of effective argument, especially following Aristotle’s Rhetoric. However, Rhetoric is more than speech, and more than mere argument, although these are necessary components. Rhetoric, properly speaking, is the art of persuasion, of stating one’s case and defending oneself with words instead of stones. It is also the art of moving others to act or not to act, depending on one’s motives in using speech. Without some skill in Rhetoric one must convince another to do it for him, but this easily would collapse into absurdity, for without some attempt at suasion, finding a proxy would be nearly impossible. Given that one must have skill in Language and Rhetoric, we also must develop some proficiency in Dialectic if we are to make sound judgements about the Language and Rhetoric of others, especially those who use Language and Rhetoric to attempt to move us to act or not. Dialectic is therefore greater in scope than mere Discourse or even of Criticism. Dialectic is the art of Reason, and it can protect us from being seduced by someone else’s Rhetoric. Without it, we lack the tool to judge whether or not to trust what anyone says. Of late this particular skill appears in short supply, especially in an environment where multiple sources of information with dubious provenance all compete with one another for our attention, in the end producing unprecedented levels of what James Williams describes in his treatise Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy as functional, existential, and epistemic distraction105. Together, these three Tools of Freedom form the Trivium of the Liberal Arts, and must be the primary focus of the education of the Free Citizen. Without some proficiency in the use of these three tools, we cannot approach any other area of inquiry or skill. The next set of skills, of which there are Four, is collectively called the Quadrivium, and can be used to refine our understanding of the world we inhabit. Peculiarly, in the present day much of the Quadrivium is not often thought to be included among the Liberal Arts, for they also serve as springboards into the Practical Arts as well as the Natural Sciences; however, when considering the purpose of the Liberal Arts themselves, namely the arts a knowledge about which one must have in order to protect our freedom, we dismiss or ignore them at our peril. While we may be less likely to master these four than the Trivium, we nevertheless must develop sufficient familiarity with them lest we render ourselves vulnerable both to deception and ignorance, leading dangerously into a mode of thought fit only for a slave. Primary among these is Mathematic. The classical liberal arts advocate will limit this to “arithmetic” but Mathematic encompasses far more than arithmetic. Granted, we can use basic arithmetic to tell whether or not someone is trying to shortchange us in a marketplace, but skill in mathematics must go beyond the narrowly practical, for it embodies a form of reason beyond words. With it we can quickly expand and deepen our understanding of the nature of things, and even check our own judgment with precision. Without it we are limited to simple guesswork. Next is the art of Geometric which, like Mathematic, includes far more than Geometry. True, Geometry as a form a Mathematical reasoning provides for a sense of proportion, balance and structure, but Geometric also includes Geology for judging the safety of our immediate surroundings and where to find water or safe passage, as well as Geography for a sense of location and destination, and what to expect on the way. Even Orienteering, a necessary skill of trackers, hikers, and other world travelers, make up an essential part of this tool. Concomitant with Mathematic and Geometric is the art of Astronomy. Contrary to popular belief, Astronomy is not mere stargazing. With a basic knowledge of astronomy, we can tell time, navigate, prepare for seasonal changes, as well as contemplate something much greater than ourselves. Astronomy allows us to contemplate the Infinite; it opens the door to questions about the nature of the Universe itself, and to inculcate in us a sense of wonder about the Cosmos beyond the world in which human beings may dwell. More practically, and in the interest of securing one’s freedom, Astronomy can be used to find even our place on earth, for in the Deep South before the Civil War, a runaway slave could carry a small cross and use it at night to find his or her way north. Looking at the North Star (No, it’s not the brightest) with a cross held to his eye and parallel to the horizon, he could tell how far north he had gone. If the North Star was closer to the bottom than the top, he had better keep going. Finally, we arrive at the fourth tool of the Quadrivium, Music. This is far more than entertainment, and is even broader than the standard interpretation of Music as related to the aesthetic arrangement of sounds as melody, harmony, rhythm, meter, tempo and auditory dynamics. Granted, through music in the common sense we gain an awareness of time, of beginnings and ends, and the necessity of impermanence. After all, nothing in our experience lasts forever, and to wish that it were so would enslave us to false hopes. Music also provides a vehicle for us to communicate directly, either with or without words, and to bring all of the tools of freedom together in harmony. But of course Music in the broader sense enables us to bring all of these arts together to form a coherent framework for understanding the world which we inhabit, as Herodotus’ editors did when they arranged the nine books of his Historiae according to the Nine Muses. For Music in the classical sense has nine proper faces, and nine expressions in the world around us: History (Clio), Lyric and Song (Euterpe), Comedy (Thalia), Tragedy (Melpomene), Dance (Terpsichore), Love (Erato), Devotion to the Sacred (Polyhymnia), The Infinity of the Heavens (Urania), and Epic Grandeur (Calliope)106. These Tools—The Trivium of Language, Rhetoric and Dialectic, and the Quadrivium of Mathematic, Geometric, Astronomy and Music—empower the citizen not only to preserve and protect his personal freedom, but also to defend his city from the tumults brought about by ignorance, fear, desire and hope. Without them the city dies, and freedom with it. Modern Political Thought, Part 1 It will perhaps seem peculiar that the next step in the study of the development of political thought, focused as it is on political thought in what is generally called Western Civilization, nearly completely overlooks the Medieval Period, but there is a reason for this. The development of classical political thought in the previous section (prior to the Seven Tools of Freedom) traces a specific line of inquiry from Herodotus to Aristotle, but ultimately steps back for a moment to Xenophon’s dialogue on Tyranny, and for much of the next two thousand years debates over political matters tended to proceed more or less as footnotes or engagements with one of the four writers there treated, but mostly either Plato or Aristotle. A future re-visitation of this work may yet include such thinkers as Aurelius Augustinus, al-Farabi, Moshe bin Maimon, Averroes, Avicenna, and Thomas Aquinas, and likely will, but for our purposes in this survey, we must suffice with a “fast-forward” of sorts to the singular influence of Niccolò Machiavelli, whose principal work in political thought springs especially from Xenophon’s dialogue on Tyranny, Hiero. In fact, in all of Machiavelli’s major work he invites the reader to retrace Machiavelli’s own steps back to Xenophon, and in particular to the Hiero, for it is here, says he, that one will find the foundation for understanding political phenomena most clearly and directly. Of all the thinkers routinely covered in any survey of the development of political science, few if any are as notorious, quoted, maligned, misquoted and misunderstood as Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527). An officer of the Florentine Republic in the early 16th Century, Machiavelli served in various capacities though he was never a full citizen under Florentine law: as a secretary for the Chancery, an envoy to the Papal States and to the court of Louis XII, and as secretary for I Dieci di Libertà e Pace107. When the Medici family overthrew the Florentine republic in 1512, Machiavelli was stripped of his titles, charged with conspiracy against the Medici régime, and tortured with six drops of the strappado, an interrogation technique in which the accused is tied by his hands and feet, with his arms tied behind his back, to which another rope is tied and thrown over either over a rafter or a pulley a few meters above his head. (See Fig. 8) When the accused fails to answer a question to the interrogator’s satisfaction, an attendant forcefully pulls the rope, leaving him dangling in the air as the interrogator repeats the question. Should the accused continue to resist, the attendant releases the rope to let the accused fall until, just before his feet touch the floor, he grabs the rope again, typically breaking the accused’s clavicle if his shoulders had not already been dislocated from the hoist. Once satisfied after a period of about three weeks that Machiavelli posed no threat to the Medici so long as he remained outside the city, he was sent into exile.

Figure 8: A variation of the strappado (left); Niccolò Machiavelli, who suffered six drops of the strappado (right). There is little doubt that this experience under the Medici left an indelible mark on Machiavelli, both physically (he is often portrayed wearing multiple layers to hide his disfigured shoulders from the torture; see Fig. 8, right) and intellectually. Readers often are surprised to learn that his most widely read work, Il Principe (The Prince) is addressed to a member of the family who subjected him to the strappado only a year before. However, “The Magnificent Lorenzo Medici” in the Dedication Letter at the beginning of the Prince is most likely Lorenzo of Gubbio rather than his more famous namesake, Lorenzo the Magnificent of Florence, who had already died two decades before Machiavelli’s torture at the Medici’s hands. Lorenzo of Gubbio would have fit Machiavelli’s treatment of hereditary princes in his “little volume” and as such would have been subject to some of Machiavelli’s harshest derision. The Prince, after all, is written to his enemies, and time and again throughout the work he lauds the actions of one of the Medici’s chief rivals, the notorious warlord Cesare Borgia. Niccolò Machiavelli and the Law of Necessity In classical political thought, politics, that is to say those things proper to ordered communities, is a natural condition of human beings, and that those ordered communities— cities—are ordered according to a particular Good, or telos. Political power involves both rule and government, in the sense that rulers give order to the city and steer a community towards a particular telos through the process of government. In such conditions, one sees legitimate authority either when a ruler orders the community according to its proper Good, or steers the community towards that good, or both. While Platonists and Aristotelians may dispute the character of virtuous or corrupt régimes, they nevertheless concur on the idea of politics as a search for the Good in, by, and for, ordered communities. For Machiavelli, the telos of cities is always and everywhere the same: continue to exist and preserve and protect itself from ruin108. The crucial distinctions among cities are not those of perceived differences of the Good they seek, but their modes of establishment, acquisition, governance, increase and defense against destruction or overthrow. Any other distinctions Machiavelli likens elsewhere, in the Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy, to building castles in the air109. Any remaining distinctions among cities aside from those concerned with modes and orders of acquisition, maintenance and ruin, he would say in the Prince, are reducible to one of two forms: “All the states, all the dominions that have had and have imperium over men have been and are either republics or principates.”110 Here one finds usages far more familiar to contemporary political science than any of the forms held over from the classical world. Machiavelli is fundamentally a modern thinker; indeed, some will argue that he is the foundational modern thinker in matters of politics, and a primary source of cynicism about politics in general. It is equally necessary at this point to clarify what is meant by the term “modern”. The pedestrian understanding of “modern” often makes some reference to temporal currency, conflating the terms “modern” with “contemporary”, “recent”, “present day”, or even “new”. It often surprises those who explore the root of the word “modern” to find no reference whatsoever to time in its etymology. Whence comes this misunderstanding? Machiavelli’s Dedicatory Letter to the Prince offers an obvious clue: “I… have found nothing among my equipment which I hold dearer than the knowledge of the actions of great men, acquired by me through long experience of modern things and a continuous reading of the ancients.”(Prince Dedicatory letter) The Italian original reads “lunga esperienzia delle cose moderne et una continua lezione delle antiche.”111 Now “antiche” would be a familiar word to Machiavelli’s contemporaries, cognate with “antique” or “ancient”, denoting something demonstrably old, while “moderne” would have been a less familiar word in the early 16th Century, so a casual reader might be forgiven for thinking that the words “antiche” and “moderne” are to be viewed in opposition to each other. However, as most of the Chapter titles of The Prince (the body of the work is largely written in Florentine, but with Latin chapter titles) repeat the phrase “In Quo Modo…” we gain insight into what Machiavelli actually means by “moderne”. “In Quo Modo” translates to “in what mode,” a variation of the word “How”; “In Quo Modo” contracts in most Romance languages to “como” which today is largely understood as equivalent to “how”. Hence, “modern” thinking, unlike classical thinking, places special emphasis on how something is accomplished, or else how a process works, and is therefore fundamentally methodological. We should therefore understand Machiavelli, and by extension all thought which we would deem “modern”, as principally concerned with methods over purposes. Thus, questions about politics in a Machiavellian sense must ultimately find their root in methods of governance, for the “why” is no longer of serious concern. In order to address how states (from lo stato, another term effectively coined by Machiavelli) form, are gained, governed, defended or lost, we must develop an unflinching understanding, based on what we can observe, of human nature itself. Again, Machiavelli is likely influenced by his experience under the strappado as well his witness to the exploits of Cesare Borgia and others, and arrives at the following assertions in the Prince: “It is a thing truly natural and ordinary to desire to acquire”112 and “One can say this generally of men: that they are ungrateful, fickle, hypocrites and dissemblers, evaders of dangers, lovers of gain; and while you do them good they are wholly yours, offering you blood and goods and life and sons, when need is far off; but when it approaches you, then then they revolt.”113 This bold claim of Human Equality is common in the Christian tradition of Western Europe but it is especially notable in Machiavelli’s writings for its dramatic departure from the classical view of politics that implied different natures for different people in different cities or different states of habit. For Machiavelli, human nature is everywhere the same; whether prince or pauper, rich or poor, we all share a fundamentally self-interested nature; hence, all men are by nature equal. If all men are fundamentally equal in their nature, no quality of soul or habit can justify any one man holding power over another, and similarly no man or men can therefore claim to rule over any other man. It should come then as no surprise that nowhere in any of Machiavelli’s writings does he ever speak of princes or other officers or any human being for that matter as “rulers.” In fact, were one to evaluate translations of any of Machiavelli’s work, one would do well to discard any translation that does, for such translation does an injustice to the original text through misrepresentation of Machiavelli’s thinking. Instead of men having the power of rule, Machiavelli posits another phenomenon entirely as the true ruler of men, namely the Iron law of Necessity, which stands always and everywhere a threat to the preservation of one’s state, whether that state be one’s city, business, family, household, social status, resources, reputation or freedom. One must anticipate necessity in order to free oneself from the fickleness of fortune. In order to remain free one must have the requisite tools to preserve and protect that freedom. “The cities of Germany,” says Machiavelli, “are free to the highest degree, for they have the requisite moats and walls, and they have adequate artillery.”114 Perhaps one of the most common misconceptions about Machiavelli is that he advocates cruelty in the exercise of power, and indeed one finds passages, especially in the Prince, where it seems on the surface that he does precisely this: “He needs must always hurt whose new prince he becomes.” 115, “In taking a state the occupier ought to reason out all those offenses that are necessary…and do them all at one stroke…All the injuries ought to be done all together, for being tasted less they offend less…Well used one is able to call cruelties, if one may call the bad good, which are done at one stroke for the necessity of securing oneself”116, and “It is necessary for a prince, if he wishes to maintain himself, to learn to be able to be not good, and to use it and not use it according to the necessity.”117 However, what is most often missed about Machiavelli’s stance on cruelty is not that it should be used, but that it should only be used when it is necessary to do so, that one must “use it and not use it according to the necessity.” If it is not necessary to use cruelty to keep one’s state, then one must not, lest he open himself up to ruin. Rather, “a wise prince must think of a mode whereby his citizens, always and in every quality of time, have need of the state and of him, and they will always be faithful to him,”118 and if one is always and everywhere cruel to those over whom he has power, this will doubtless generate hatred, especially if the state acquired had been a republic. By the same token, one must not be overly concerned with what his subjects think of him lest he place himself in a position of dependency on their approval. Ideally, one should hope to be in a position where his subjects both love and fear him, but if one of the two is missing, it is safer to be feared than loved, as an inevitable consequence of that selfish human nature which we all share. “Love is maintained by a chain of obligation which, because of man’s wickedness, is broken on the first occasion of one’s own utility; fear is maintained by a dread of punishment which never abandons you.”119 What Machiavelli advocates is not necessarily unbridled cruelty in the exercise of one’s power; rather he proposes a balancing act where those in power must anticipate the necessity of self-preservation by manipulating appearances and the effectual truth using a combination of force, deception and the laws, with a focus especially on observable outcomes, for “The vulgar are always taken in by the appearance and the outcome of a thing, and in this world there is none but the vulgar.”120 This is not to say that ends justify means in politics or statecraft, but it is to say that a successful outcome is less likely to be opposed, regardless of how one achieved that outcome. So to sum up, for Machiavelli, politics deals entirely with the problem of necessity; no man rules but is ruled by need. Everyone wants something; in that we are all equal and no one can trust anyone else to be anything but selfish. Given this state of affairs we must anticipate necessity to hang on to what we have as well as to get more, especially through the manipulation of appearances through force and fraud. This may require cruelty, but we must never be cruel when it is not necessary lest we make ourselves vulnerable to ruin, and as for Lady Luck, forget it. Ruin is guaranteed unless we rely on our own virtù. Historical Interlude: The English Civil War and the Wars of Religion So notorious had Machiavelli’s writing become that his name had become synonymous with deception and political scheming, even before anyone gained access to his writing, and before the 16th Century was out, his reputation for political intrigue and subterfuge even reached the shores of England, where “Old Nick” would become a euphemism for the Devil himself. Indeed, an early reference to Machiavelli in this sense even appears in a line said by the Host of the Garter Inn in Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor: “Peace, I say. Hear mine host of the Garter. Am I politic? Am I subtle? Am I a Machiavel?”121 suggesting the audience would already be familiar with the term. However, before the 17th Century was even halfway through, Machiavelli would inspire an even darker vision among political thinkers, especially as England itself plunged into turmoil leading to the English Civil War and the Puritan Revolt. A principal cause of the English Civil War appears to have been a dispute over how England was to be governed, but thanks to King Henry VIII’s split from the Roman Catholic Church in Machiavelli’s day, the war (or more precisely, wars) also carried a religious dimension. The factions involved in the conflict broadly included Royalists on one hand, who for various causes adhered to the idea of the sovereignty of the Royal Person as the sole legitimate authority in England, even at times invoking the Divine Right of Kings argument, as did James I and his son Charles. The principle of divine right claims that no temporal authority may dispute a mandate of power bestowed upon a monarch “by the Grace of God”, that kings are to be seen as holding a sacred office whose temporal authority is absolute, much as the spiritual authority of the priesthood is also absolute. Under this doctrine, to contradict the will of an ordained king is equivalent to sacrilege or impiety. James I in particular would expound on this idea in two treatises which claim a Scriptural basis for divine right, namely the True Law of Free Monarchies122 and the Basilikon Doron, or “Gift of the King”123. On the other hand were the Parliamentarians, who held that the assembly of elected gentry called Parliament was the legitimate authority in England, limiting Royal prerogative. Indeed, the seeds of the English Civil War may have been sown as early as 1215, when the archbishop of Canterbury drafted the Magna Carta Libertatum, which established clear limitations on the power of the king to levy taxes, and generally protecting the liberties of English subjects, providing a foundation for the English Parliament.124 In the prelude to the English Civil War the Magna Carta was used extensively to refute the doctrine of divine right and assert the claim that the “English constitution” protected certain freedoms of subjects from molestation by the Crown, and in some senses even predated William the Conqueror.125 Added to this conflict was a dispute over the religious, and more specifically Scriptural, grounds for the arguments either for or against the divine right of kings, as well as commoners’ access (or lack thereof) to religious texts. Subsequent to the Basilikon Doron, King James convened a council of Biblical translators to prepare a new translation of the Christian Bible that would reinforce his arguments not only for the divine right of kings, but also support the structure of the Church of England.126 Multiple translations of the Bible had already found their way onto the British Isles by this time, some dating back to the 14th Century when John Wycliffe’s Middle English translation came to England, and then in the 16th Century when William Tyndale’s translation was smuggled into England to give commoners more or less direct access to Scripture as a counterpoint and a challenge to the sacerdotal authority of the Roman Catholic Church at the time. With Henry VIII’s split from the Church in the 16th Century, English translations proliferated and informed movements such as the Presbyterians, who found a Scriptural basis not only for the “priesthood of all believers” and against the divine right of ordained priests, but also a basis for the temporal power of commoners and against the divine right of kings. King James’ version of the Christian Bible would attempt to squash these dissident interpretations and cement James’ claim of kingly authority by Divine Right. Thus the political dispute over the basis of English sovereignty was colored with a religious dispute connected with the larger Protestant Reformation. Parliamentarians and Presbyterians sought to limit the king’s claim to absolute temporal power, and Royalists and the Church of England sought to protect their claim and assert an indisputable authority, both temporal and ecclesiastical. Under King James’ son Charles I, the Crown and the Royalists attempted to assert this absolute authority both in terms of taxation and authority over the Church of England, leading to the outbreak of the English Civil War in earnest.127 Of particular note at this time is the rise of a specific faction among the Parliamentarians, a party of Anglican extremists known as the Puritans, led by Oliver Cromwell. The Puritans’ primary concern regarding the English Church was that it had become stained with the corruption both of abusive Royal prerogative and of the Roman Catholic Church, thanks to the machinations of King Charles as well as his marriage to a Roman Catholic. The Puritans sought to “purify” the English Church and people and, by 1649, they not only overthrew King Charles, they had him beheaded. In the king’s place a Parliamentary Commonwealth was established, and soon after Cromwell’s Protectorate was established, with its institution of what may best be described as a Puritan theocracy.128 Thomas Hobbes and the Social Contract

Figure 9: Thomas Hobbes, in Puritan attire. It is into this context in which we find Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). Originally from Malmesbury in England, Hobbes spent much of the 1630s in Paris working as a tutor for expatriate English nobility, occasionally visiting Florence (where he almost certainly became acquainted with the works of Machiavelli) and establishing himself in the circles of philosophical debate. In the lead-up to the English Civil War Hobbes had returned to England after having spent several years in Paris studying natural philosophy, especially physics, as part of a larger project to develop a grand design that would ultimately incorporate physics, human nature, and politics. An unauthorized version of his Elements of Law, Natural and Politic circulated in England, igniting controversy and leading him to return to Paris.129 During the English Civil War many other expatriate Royalists found their way to Paris and came to know Hobbes specifically. At this time Hobbes would compose the Leviathan, a revision and elaboration on the ideas he introduced in the Elements of Law. By the time it reached publication in 1651, Charles had been beheaded, the Commonwealth established, and the Puritans ascendant. Hobbes’ Leviathan would contain much language that would be familiar to Puritan ears, and while it is likely that Hobbes was himself influenced by Puritan thought (when he was fifteen the principal of the school he attended was a Puritan), a closer reading of the Leviathan may actually impeach any Puritan claim to legitimate government in England, just as it also refutes all claims of the Divine Right of Kings. For Hobbes’ Leviathan, like the Elements of Law before, emphasizes the foundation of political power on a kind of contractual basis; that distinctions among men are not natural, but are formed largely out of necessity. It is here that Machiavelli’s influence is strongest: “Nature has made men so equal in the faculties of body and mind as though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body or of quicker mind than another…the difference between man and man is not so considerable as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit to which another may not pretend as well as he.” 130 For Hobbes, as for Machiavelli, human beings are fundamentally the same, one to another, regardless of actual condition or position in a society. “The weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest” says Hobbes, and “prudence is but experience, which equal time and equal application equally bestows on all men.”131 While the second claim anticipates the idea of the tabula rasa or “blank slate” that would come to dominate Western theories of child development and education until the late 20th Century, the stronger connection here is to Niccolò Machiavelli’s view of man as fundamentally self-centered and taken in by appearances. In particular, when he anticipates objections to his claim of human equality, Hobbes says, “That which may perhaps make such equality incredible is but a vain conceit of one’s own wisdom, which almost all men think they have in greater degree than the vulgar.”132 This echoes Machiavelli’s assertion in the Prince that “In this world there is none but the vulgar.”133 The consequences of this natural equality for Hobbes is what he calls the “state of nature” in which the hope of attaining one’s ends (which everyone has) produces in impulse of self- preservation, which begets a right of property. This right of property Hobbes views as absolute. In the state of nature there are no restraints on possession other than necessity and ability, for everyone equally possesses this absolute right of property, and that right of property may extend even to another’s body. Thus arise the principal causes of quarrel in nature, namely competition for scarce resources, diffidence that one may either hold onto one’s property or otherwise attain their end of self-preservation, and glory, in which individuals in the state of nature communicate the threat of losing one’s life or property if they approach too closely. The resulting state of nature is one of total war for empire, every man an enemy to every man. In such condition there is no place for industry, for the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor the use of commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual feat and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.134 This total war for empire is of course not what one finds in a state of society, but it could easily return to such condition should the foundation of the society crumble. Thus Hobbes implies that, contrary to what the classical political thinkers have claimed, ordered communities are not in fact natural; that man in society is divorced from nature and fortunately so. How, then, did societies arise, and how also did political power come to be? (Indeed, these are purely Modern Questions.) There are, of course plenty of reasons to leave the State of Nature, especially the fundamental passions of fear, desire and hope—the very passions, coupled with ignorance, that Xenophon warns lead invariably to the rise of tyrants. Only for Hobbes, these same passions incline men instead to peace: “Fear of death, Desire for such things as are necessary for commodious living, and Hope that by their industry they can obtain those things.”135 Furthermore, he posits a Law of Nature, a precept or general rule discernible through reason that forbids men from doing what is destructive to their lives, what removes their means of self-preservation, and what omits that which they think will lead to self-preservation. This Law of Nature, he posits, leads men to seek peace and pursue it, as well as to defend themselves through whatever means are necessary. These two features—self -interested human nature and the law of nature itself—induce people to leave the state of nature through an agreement with others in equal danger with themselves. They each lay aside their absolute right of property in nature in a commitment not to take one another’s lives or property so that they may each continue to live and seek commodious living. This, for Hobbes, is the foundation of society: the social contract. Everyone agrees to give up the absolute right of property in exchange for security; without this contract, no society is possible.136 However, because of man’s selfish nature, individuals who agree to the social contract cannot necessarily be trusted to uphold their side of the contract, and without some method of enforcement to compel or restrain action under the social contract, mutual distrust will not only undermine the social contract, it will invariably lead it to ruin. For this reason, the members of the society now established must agree upon that method of enforcement. This is the construction of the sovereign power: a member or members of the society whose sole purpose is to ensure that the social contract is preserved. He is or they are granted power to regulate conduct as well as to define and exact punishments for violations of the social contract, and as such enjoy greater power than other members of society. This is Hobbes’ idea of the Sovereign: he or they alone enjoy kingly authority, including the power to deprive transgressors of the social contract of their lives or freedoms, to establish penalties for less severe violations of the social contract than those which merit death or imprisonment, and to lay and collect taxes and other duties for the maintenance of the sovereign power to enforce the public order. These duties the sovereign may define as service or even risk of the lives and freedoms of a portion of those subject to the sovereign, on the condition that such service or forfeiture preserves or contributes to the overall security of the society as a whole. Hence one will see sovereign powers demanding conscription of subjects into armed service of the commonwealth in order to defend it against invaders, and to advance its interests with respect to other societies and commonwealths. The form of the sovereign power may be that of a King, a Parliament, a Presbytery; it could be composed of one, few or many, but the purpose and function of the sovereign nevertheless remains the same: enforce the social contract.137 Sovereigns thus form the titular head of the society; though a product of the society that establishes them, they become the recognized face of society as a whole, the embodiment of the consciousness of the commonwealth, imbued with the power to compel action as with a sword, to restrain action as with a crozier, and to discern and express the common weal as with a crown. Hence, the frontispiece of Hobbes’ Leviathan bears an illustration of the commonwealth, rising like a great beast over the land bearing crown, crozier and sword, its body composed of a multitude of people who are the society itself, and whose head bears a single visage. (See Fig. 10)

Figure 10: The commonwealth, illustrated as Leviathan. Superficially, Hobbes’ sovereign resembles the classical ruler, and indeed Hobbes himself at times refers to the actions of sovereign powers as rule.138 However, there are essential differences between the classical ruler and the Hobbesian sovereign that one must not ignore. First of all, where rulers in some sense possess a different nature from those of their subjects that entitles them to give order to the community, Hobbes’ sovereigns only enjoy power over subjects out of necessity, and are in fact the first product of the orders established by the social contract itself. Rulers are in a sense natural, while Sovereigns are conventional. Second, where rulers govern according to their will and just rulers steer the community they rule according to a proper telos, or Good, for the city, Sovereigns are limited to the enforcement of the social contract, and may not necessarily steer the city towards any other good except the security and preservation of the commonwealth from ruin. Third, a city that loses its ruler has not only lost its direction, it has lost its organizing principle, and when the ruler is deposed in any manner other than a method that the ruler has ordered for the community, the city’s régime is fundamentally either changed or destroyed. By contrast, a commonwealth may depose and replace a sovereign any time the sovereign has either failed to enforce the social contract or else is itself destructive of the security of the social contract itself, for the sovereign power is a product of the society and not separate from it.139 However, in order to change the character or the structure of the sovereign, the commonwealth must be dissolved and revert however briefly to the state of nature. Thus kings can only be replaced with other kings, parliaments with other parliaments, presbyteries with other presbyteries. This last feature of the sovereign’s dependence on society forms an anchor of legitimacy for the sovereign, and unless the commonwealth has dissolved and reformed, no subject or subjects may depose a sovereign and replace it with different sovereign structure.140 For this reason, Cromwell’s Protectorate stood as an illegitimate authority in England, and as soon as Richard Cromwell began to behave in manifestly royal manners, the Parliament chose instead to depose him and restore the monarchy to Charles II, a former student of Hobbes it so happens, as the legitimate sovereign. During the Commonwealth period and even after the Restoration of the English Monarchy, Hobbes also endured accusations of atheism and profaneness consequent to a bill relating to such speech passed by the Commons in 1666. Thanks to his former role as Charles II’s tutor, he was protected from prosecution, on condition he never publish any political or legal work in England again. However, by this time he had already been enjoined in a protracted mathematical debate with John Wallis, specifically over Hobbes’ putative proof of an ancient problem where one attempts to construct a square with precisely the same area as a circle.141 While Wallis’ examination of Hobbes’ work revealed numerous mathematical errors which led him to retract his proof, Hobbes insisted that Wallis’ objection lay as much in his latent scholasticism as it did in the rigors of geometry. Of course, due to the transcendental nature of π, constructing a square of equal are to a circle is simply impossible. After a heated written exchange between Hobbes and Wallis, the Royal Society, chartered in 1660 by Charles II with Wallis as a member, and which in the midst of this debate would later admit Isaac Newton 12 years later, became engrossed in the controversy, and came down squarely in Wallis’ defense. This would earn Hobbes the reputation for stubbornly holding onto positions to be denounced.142 John Locke, the Social Contract, and Natural Law

Figure 11: John Locke. It is into this environment that John Locke (1632-1704) would enter the realm of political thought. The son of Parliamentarians from the otherwise Royalist enclave of Somerset in southwest England, Locke’s own rebuttal to Thomas Hobbes’ interpretation of society would prove central to the idea of limited government by consent as a foundation both for justice and legitimacy, and along with the system of the world as theorized by his colleague and one-time roommate Isaac Newton (1642-1727)143 would not only shape the Enlightenment conception of the Rule of Law generally, but would have a specific impact on the Virginia political thinker Thomas Jefferson. Where Hobbes had been living Paris during the English Civil War and maintained a relationship with expatriate Royalists, Locke was an eight-year-old at the war’s outbreak. Like Hobbes he would witness the English Civil War, the Commonwealth, Cromwell’s Protectorate and the Restoration. However, unlike Hobbes who died from a bladder infection in 1679, Locke would also witness the Glorious Revolution in 1688, in which the Parliament deposed the Catholic king James II and installed his Protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch husband Willem of Orange as a co-regency. While the Hobbesian view of the social contract and sovereignty could account for James’ removal and the succession of William and Mary, it could not reasonably explain the Parliament’s subsequent conditions for the legitimation of that succession: that the co-regents accept an English Bill of Rights limiting Royal power to tax, except through the approval of a firmly established a regular parliament that featured free elections; and guaranteed free speech among subjects, security of the right of defensive arms among Protestant Englishmen, and protections against cruel and unusual punishments.144 Locke’s Two Treatises of Civil Government would provide an explanation, especially in the Second Treatise where he asserts that “we must consider what state all men are naturally in…a state of perfect Freedom to order their actions and dispose of their possessions and persons as they think fit, within the bounds of the Law of Nature, without asking leave or depending on the will of any other man…A state also of equality, wherein the power is reciprocal, no one having more than another.”145 Although Locke begins his argument from a position similar to Hobbes’ Leviathan, i.e. a state of nature in which all are equal the character of this state of nature, he also insists that “The State of Nature has a Law of Nature to govern it, which obliges everyone.”146 Until this point about the Law of Nature, he sounds substantially similar to Hobbes, but from here forward he departs radically from the Hobbesian view: Reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it that al being equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions…There cannot be any …subordination among us that may authorize us to destroy one another.147 In this passage one can see Locke’s fundamental agreement not with Hobbes, but with Isaac Newton. For Newton’s most significant treatise, his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) posits that the System of the World, that is, of the universe, obeys certain rational principles that can be discerned through observation, such as universal gravitation, universal principles of motion, angles of reflection and refraction, and resistance to changes in motion. These rational principles have an empirical foundation that can be verified experimentally, a method which Hobbes himself had strongly opposed in his dispute with John Wallis. For Locke, just as the natural world had rational universal principles evident through observation and experiment, so too did the political world, and those rational principles must proceed from the original position of man from the state of nature. Therefore, one must explain the rise of societies from the natural condition of man: that is, perfect liberty and perfect equality. In such condition, unlike Hobbes, man in the state of nature also possesses an Absolute Power to enforce the Law of Nature, since the State of Nature is devoid of all social conventions. Thus, everyone in the state of Nature as Locke understands it could be said to be a Sovereign, in that they have kingly power over themselves and their interpretation of the Law of Nature itself.148 However, the incommodity of Nature produces a condition in which no man in the State of Nature has access to perfect Reason. Hence, each person’s individual sovereign power to interpret the Law of Nature will likewise be imperfect, clouded as it were by the individual experience of one’s own condition in nature. Although reason dictates that no punishment for transgressing the Law of Nature should extend beyond retribution and restraint, imperfect reason will distort the perception of such transgressions, especially when applied to the need for self-preservation. Furthermore, each individual, though sovereign in Nature, is limited in his ability to defend against transgressions against his own interpretation of the Law of Nature.149 This diversity of interpretation, coupled with the power to enforce the Law of Nature, results in a total war of each against all in the State of Nature that bears a superficial resemblance to Hobbes’ State of Nature. However, unlike Hobbes, whose total war is one of empire, Locke’s total war in the State of Nature is one of defense and retribution. Such incommodities of nature require human beings to leave the State of Nature and enter into a state of Society through the Social Contract.150 However, in another rejoinder to Hobbes, the terms of Locke’s Social Contract to not require anyone to give up their right of property, or any rights at all for that matter. After all, without some protections of possessions from the state of nature, there is no reasonable incentive to join a society if membership in that society demands you give up all that was worth keeping.151 Furthermore, sovereignty is a natural condition of man for Locke, not a product of society. What, then, is the character of Locke’s social contract, and what consequences does it hold for authority, legitimacy and justice? Locke’s social contract involves a federative quality, whereby individual sovereigns from the state of nature come together in agreement on a shared interpretation of the Law of Nature, of what constitutes a transgression of that Law, and of what responses to those transgressions the society as a whole deems appropriate. In order to maintain the system of shared interpretation of the Law of Nature, a Civil Government is established and granted the power to establish refinements to that interpretation through the function of legislation and administration of law. In order for the civil government to exercise this power it must also secure approval from the individual sovereigns within the community it is established to govern lest it compromise its claim to legitimate authority.152 Thus consent of the governed becomes a necessary component of the civil government itself. Furthermore, a civil government may also exercise power to enforce the Law of Nature (Reason itself) where the individual sovereigns themselves would be otherwise powerless, and may make reasonable laws requiring the maintenance of such mechanisms as provide for that enforcement. The establishment of a civil government along these lines also places restraints on what that government is empowered to do. It can establish laws for the enforcement of the society’s shared interpretation of the Law of Nature, it can establish a mechanism to administer and enforce those laws, and it can make and enforce laws providing for the common defense of the members of society as a federation of equal persons. It must not, however, make or enforce any law contrary to Reason which is the Law of Nature, nor any law which would undermine the security of the social contract. If it does, then the people within the society, retaining their individual sovereignty even under the social contract, must either modify or replace the civil government, in such manner as the members of the society agree will make and enforce laws and provide for the common defense of the society as a whole.153 Using this line of argument, the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the Mandate of the English Bill of Rights can be explained more easily. James II, a Catholic king, suspended the Parliament in 1685 when the Parliament itself refused to repeal the Test Acts, which imposed religious tests on would-be officeholders, but whose enforcement would have required the Crown to ignore certain other legislation, threatening the uneasy peace after the Restoration of his late brother, Charles II. After the prosecution of seven Anglican bishops for seditious libel and the birth of James’ son, the Parliament feared James would establish a Catholic dynasty in England and undo the previous century and a half of the English Church, igniting another bloody civil war. The safety and stability of English society, they concluded, demanded James be deposed, but that a reasonable successor (or successors) be installed, legitimated, yet limited by reasonable laws to which they must agree as a condition of power. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Critique of the Social Contract

Figure 12: Jean-Jacques Rousseau While Hobbes and Locke embraced the idea of the Social Contract as the foundation of societies, and while the political implications of claims of human equality and the rule of law would be developed more fully by thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson, not everyone who conceived of societies as having broken away from Nature would paint the Social Contract in a positive light. Most prominent among these thinkers was Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), a Francophone citizen of Geneva, music tutor by trade, and arguably one of the most influential thinkers of the 18th Century. Among Rousseau’s writings, perhaps the most significant for the development of modern political thought include On the Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right, the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, and Émile, or On Education. Rousseau’s interpretation of Nature and Society would be central to the movement known as Romanticism, which would stand in opposition to Enlightenment thinking and dominate much of the 19th Century. Rousseau begins his treatise on the Social Contract with a bold assertion that “Man was born Free, and everywhere he is in Chains.”154 From the outset, Rousseau questions the legitimacy of standard political authority, asserting that Force does not equal Right, and that despite the power of coercion, there exists no obligation to follow a forcible authority155 , and consequent to this axiom no conquering state has a right to enslave those whom the state has conquered.156 Rather, the foundation for legitimate authority in Rousseau’s view is what he calls the General Will, defined broadly as the Will of All and the Common Good157; that Common sense alone is necessary to discern this General Will, and to recognize it in opposition to sophistication158. Elsewhere Rousseau distinguishes these principles in terms of Sentiment, namely the sentiment of amour, love, especially the love of self, and for him this sentiment is the foundation of societies159. It is necessary at this point to contrast Rousseau’s idea of the origin of societies from that of the other principal Social Contract Theorists. Where Hobbes sees radically equal yet self-interested individuals in nature engaged in a Total War for Empire in the State of Nature, ended only when individuals give up their absolute right of property in exchange for security and establishing a sovereign to enforce the contract; and where Locke sees individuals in the state of nature as individual sovereigns with different interpretations of the Law of Nature producing a total defensive war, ended only when individuals agree to a consensus of interpretation, and share the executive power over the Law of Nature to secure their lives, their freedom to act, and their property against molestation through the establishment of a Civil Government, Rousseau sees the process altogether differently. For Rousseau, Man is born free and is subject only to the law of self-preservation, felt as amour de soi-même. Man in the State of Nature lives by instinct and in such condition war is impossible, for wars are between states, not individuals seeking self-preservation. Societies form consequent to a voluntary union among these nascent men, resting on a sentiment, a feeling, that one’s individual strength cannot preserve oneself160. Hence, where Hobbes and Locke’s Social Contracts each rest on a rational choice, Rousseau’s Social Contract rests on a feeling, and it is thanks to Rousseau that subsequent writers would substitute feeling for thought161. With the establishment of societies, Rousseau’s vision of love of self takes on two distinct forms: one he calls amour de soi-même, found in nature among individuals as an impulse of self-preservation that leads one to shrink from death and in societies corresponds to the General Will162. The other, amour propre, is that love of self that one finds in societies and seeks distinction or sophistication, and may generally be conceived as vanity. These sentiments he sees in tension with each other, and that the Social Contract itself has a corrupting influence on sentiment that produces injustice. The General Will erodes when the social tie slackens in societies163; amour propre among people within the society is expressed through the rise of faction, presenting contradictions of particular wills, and leads to disputes. Because of this phenomenon, public assembly cannot rest on the General Will; rather it must ensure the General Will is always questioned and always responds. From here Rousseau draws a distinction between the Sovereign and Government164. Where Hobbes saw the Sovereign as a first product of the Social Contract and exercises all the powers of government to enforce that contract, and where Locke saw sovereignty as a natural property of individuals that join in a shared interpretation of the Natural Law under the Social Contract and must establish a limited government to enforce that shared interpretation as well as to enforce Natural Law wherever individuals in society are either unable or unwilling, Rousseau by contrast sees the Sovereign as the embodiment of the General Will and consisting of the Whole population within a society. This Sovereign necessarily wields the legislative authority and is altogether distinct from government. For Rousseau, Government consists of agents of the Sovereign and is limited by Sovereign Law165. Consequently, Government is only as strong as the people themselves, and depends on the extent of the territory and people governed; democracies are necessarily the smallest, and have little power, republics are also small, while elected oligarchies and aristocracies occur in “middle states” and monarchies may be vast. All of these governments must be subordinate, however formed and however large or small, to the Sovereign, which necessarily consists of the People as a Whole. Because the Sovereign and the Government are different entities, and because amour propre, the love of distinction and privilege, is more strongly felt in societies than in a state of nature, Governments must be restrained by the Rule of Law166. The challenge of the Social Contract and the tension between the Sovereign and the Government is a consequence of the broken link between Nature and Society, which Rousseau explores more deeply in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. Here is a more direct treatment of amour de soi-même and amour propre, as well as the distinction between Man in Nature and Man in Society. Nascent Man is guided by a nascent conception of justice; which Rousseau describes as the maxim that one does his own good with the least possible harm to others167. While this maxim of Nascent Justice may be effective for survival in a State of Nature, it is harmful in a State of Society, for as long as people do their own good, even with the least possible harm to others, others will still be harmed. The challenge in a State of Society then becomes how to move from Nascent Justice to what Rousseau calls the Sublime Maxim of Reasoned Justice: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”168 Reasoned Justice is difficult in Society, and Nascent Justice in Society invariably produces social injustice. Put another way, the challenge of Society is this: How do we establish a society that: preserves the best of Nascent Man; prevents or at least minimizes expression of amour propre; leads men to desire Reasoned Justice; and leads men willingly to pursue the General Will? Fig 13: Allegorical illustration from Émile, Book 1 Rousseau then proposes a solution in Émile, or On Education, arguably his most influential work. Thinly disguised as a novel, Rousseau’s treatise goes to extraordinary lengths to capture and shape the sentiments of his reader, especially through the use of allegorical illustrations as frontispieces for each of the five Books outlining the education of a boy, Émile, on a prescribed journey ostensibly designed to lead him from Nascent Justice to Reasoned Justice and to counter the corrupting influence of amour propre.( See Fig. 13 for example) Émile proposes a guided education of individuals from birth, in which the tutor provides his charge, in this case a boy named Émile, a space for Free Action in the absence of Precepts, where the individual learns through experience and hands-on application of concepts he develops through his experience. At each stage of the student’s youth, the parameters of the space change, each stage focused on a different set of experiences. In Infancy, Émile learns from the experience of Nature itself, his senses uncorrupted by the sights, sounds, smells and tastes of things artificial169. In childhood Émile enjoys what Rousseau calls a well-regulated freedom, and explores the natural world through experience170. As a pre-pubescent, he gains a taste for loving the natural sciences, perfecting reason by sentiment171. In adolescence, he comes to learn friendship, moral agency and faith by restraining his senses172. Finally, as a young adult, Émile is introduced to the woman Sophie, whose education was entirely different from Émile; specifically, through direct instruction of Precepts173. Rousseau seemed to believe that these different approaches would complement each other where “each contributes to the common aim, but not in the same way.” Émile is drawn to Sophie by Sentiment, but there appears to be little about Émile that would draw Sophie to him. It should therefore come as no surprise that as Rousseau explored the consequences of his thought experiment through a sequel to Émile he wrote his characters into a situation in which Sophie leaves Émile and Émile finds himself in an Algerian prison, only to lead a revolt within the prison, eventually escape and spend the rest of Émile and Sophie attempting to return to the woman who repudiated him174. Rousseau never finished this sequel, suggesting that Rousseau himself couldn’t find an answer to the challenge of Society from the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. Thomas Jefferson and the Natural Rights Argument

Figure 14: Thomas Jefferson. Among the most loyal students of Newton’s System of the World and Locke’s conception of Social Contract Theory was the Virginia statesman, political thinker, horticulturalist and inventor, Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826). It is in fact Jefferson’s interpretation of human nature that would serve as the central concept of the ideas surrounding the foundation of the United States in its rebellion against the British Empire. Strongly influenced by Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Government and Newton’s treatise on Optics, Jefferson stands out as the principal author, indeed the sole author of the original draft, of the United States’ Declaration of Independence from the British Empire; however, he is also remembered for his Notes on the State of Virginia and for the foundation of the University of Virginia. Of particular note is the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, in which the members of the Second Continental Congress of what would be the United States of America would lay out the rationale for severing ties with Great Britain and assuming “the separate and equal station to which the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them” among the political divisions of the earth175. For Jefferson, human nature is a result of the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” echoing language seen nearly a century earlier in Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Government. Indeed, when pressed on the matter of Locke’s influence on Jefferson’s work for the Second Continental Congress, he would admit a strong influence, perhaps even to the point of plagiarism176. However, Jefferson’s interpretation of Locke may ultimately have proven more purely rooted in the natural science of physics than even Locke himself, who independently described himself as a dedicated Newtonian177. In Jefferson’s view, the essence of human nature rests in a fundamental equality in the possession of certain natural, unalienable rights as self-evident truths: “All men are created equal; …they are endowed by their Creator with certain inherent and unalienable rights; …among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”178 Rights thus conceived are neither products of society, nor are they an accident of the human condition that can be separated from their humanity. Rather, they define humanity, and constitute a social and political equivalent to potential energy, which Scottish engineer William Rankin would describe more fully nearly a century after Jefferson179. In order to understand the Jeffersonian view of human nature as well as the character of governments, we must think of rights as the political form of the vis viva of mechanical systems posited by thinkers such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in the 1680s180 and tackled in the generation before Jefferson by the Bernoullis and Émile du Châtelet181. Within this framework, rights constitute a condition of stored energy available to a metaphorical mechanical system which is the structure of society itself. Government, instead of an expression of sovereignty or of a common weal among the people in the society, or even of the General Will as Rousseau imagined, now must be understood as a mechanism, an instrument whereby the potential energy of rights is secured in order to be put to the work of a society: “To secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”182 For Jefferson, this is the one and only purpose of government. In order to secure natural rights, a government must respect those rights even at its inception, and governments depend on the consent of the governed for their legitimacy. Governments are best understood as machines transforming participatory consent into action or policy, much as a lever or a pulley transforms effort into work, albeit in a much more complex political sense than is implied by the simple machine analogy. If we posit that Reason prevails in politics in the same way it does in physics, and if we consider Jefferson’s Natural Rights Argument from the vantage point established by subsequent developments in mechanics and engineering, we find that rights, powers, and participation, as forms of energy in politics, must therefore obey certain basic physical principles. First of these is the principle of conservation: if energy is neither created nor destroyed in a mechanical system, then rights are neither created nor destroyed in any political system. This is simply a restatement of Jefferson’s assertion of unalienable rights as a self-evident truth. Second, of course, is entropy or disorder in a mechanical system, generally describing the phenomenon whereby in any transfer of mechanical energy, some of that energy will be lost, either as heat through friction, or else through some other secondary transformation, introducing an element of randomness or unpredictability to the system. Hence total efficiency in a mechanical system is impossible to achieve. In the politics of the exercise of natural rights, efficiency is measured as justice, and if no mechanical system can be perfectly efficient, then no political system can be perfectly just. Third is equilibrium, whereby entropy always increases over time. In any mechanical system, unless one expends energy to maintain the system’s structure and function, eventually it will break down. Similarly, in any political system, unless effort is expended to maintain its structure and function, eventually it too will fail: “Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of (the security of natural rights), it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.”183 Nevertheless, since no mechanism can ever be perfectly efficient, neither can any government be perfectly just. In addition, just as it is impractical to discard an old and familiar machine for its manifest inefficiency though it still functions, it is imprudent to discard a long-established government “for light and transient causes…all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”184 Here Jefferson argues that though injustice and abuse may appear in an extant government, people generally can tolerate a certain level of abuse or injustice, especially if they are used to the institution in place. This does not mean that abuses by governments are right or just—only that they may be tolerable until the abuses reach a breaking point. For Jefferson, that breaking point, when replacing a government becomes a matter of necessity, is where “a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce (the governed) under absolute despotism.”185 In other words, when a government has become so unjust that it seeks to enslave the governed, the machine has failed completely and it is therefore the duty of the people to overthrow that government and replace it. There are those who would object that Jefferson’s level of tolerance is extraordinarily high to the point of hypocrisy, being as he was a Virginia slave owner, and others such as 20th Century writer Paul Finkelman would claim that Jefferson didn’t actually believe any of his own claims in the Declaration of Independence; that or, like so many 19th Century slavery advocates did not believe the enslaved, especially the enslaved West African descendants, were even fully human.186 However, Jefferson’s long-time affair with his slave Sally Hemings with whom he had six children (See Fig. 15) and presented in French society as his mistress187, as well as own words which were removed from the Declaration of Independence, puts lie to this objection, although one must nevertheless come to terms with Jefferson’s markedly uneven treatment of the enslaved, even those whom he knew were his own progeny. Even so, in the original draft of the Declaration Jefferson places the institution of slavery among the “long train of abuses and usurpations” at the feet of King George III, declaring that the British monarch “has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying then into slavery into another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation hither.”188 From Jefferson’s point of view, the king is to blame for the institution of slavery, for opposing its abolition, and violates the natural rights both of slaves and slaveholders by using the slaves’ condition as leverage. Indeed, Jefferson’s tirade against the institution of slavery constituted not only the longest paragraph in the catalogue of Britain’s crimes against natural rights, it was central, and the only text other than the phrase “UNITED STATES OF AMERICA” where any words are rendered in all capitals.

Figure 15: Descendants of Thomas Jefferson & Sally Hemings. Jefferson’s view of natural rights represents a culmination of certain ideas found as early as Niccolò Machiavelli, including universal human equality, the rule of law, and the problem of necessity. Drawing on certain elements of the Scientific Revolution in the Enlightenment, he echoes in part Locke’s Social Contract Theory, yet unlike Locke, makes no explicit reference to such a contract. In Social Contract Theory, Man leaves the State of Nature in order to establish a State of Society; then, in order to maintain that Society, members of the Society establish an enforcement mechanism, whether a Sovereign for Hobbes, a Civil Government for Locke, or a Government subject to the Sovereignty of the Whole for Rousseau. By contrast, Jefferson posits the establishment of Governments not to maintain society or to enforce any Social Contract, but to secure the natural, inherent and unalienable rights—the potential political energy—of individual human beings, without the intermediate step of establishing a society first. Perhaps Jefferson consciously omits explicit references to Social Contract Theory, for Rousseau’s peculiarly sentimental interpretation of Nature and Society would undermine claims of the rational and empirical necessity of overthrowing a government only to replace it with another. Montesquieu and the Spirit of Laws

Figure 16: Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu While Jefferson avoids making explicit reference to Social Contract Theory, perhaps in an effort to distance himself from Rousseau’s problematic treatment of justice in society, Rousseau’s immediate predecessor, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu, rejects the Social Contract entirely, especially Hobbes’ philosophy of Law as founded on false premises about the putative State of Nature. Himself a French lawyer, petite noblesse, merchant and political philosopher, Montesquieu is perhaps best known for his stance as a Constitutionalist, advocating a principle that would come to be known as the separation of powers. His principal writings include the Persian Letters, an epistolary novel he published anonymously in the Netherlands, the Considerations of the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline, and his longest work, the Spirit of Laws, to which James Madison would make numerous references in his defense of the US Constitution of 1787.189 Montesquieu is often credited as an antecessor to the discipline of sociology, having influenced later writers such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Émile Durkheim, as well as a progenitor of anthropology. However, Montesquieu himself preferred to view his project has sharing a kinship with the work of the classical writer Plutarch, who aimed to apply a comparative method of biography using an analytic framework borrowed from Aristotle to elucidate the lives of significant figures in the history of the ancient world: “And I too am a painter,” Montesquieu states in the opening to the Spirit of Laws.190 Before exploring the Spirit of Laws, however, much can be gained from an examination of Montesquieu’s first work, the Persian Letters. According to Susan McWilliams of Pomona College, because of its overtly literary character as an epistolary narrative, the Persian Letters represent in some ways a more complete synthesis of the ideas he would later explore in the Spirit of Laws.191 This novel traces the journey of two Iranian nobles, Usbek the Despot and Rica the Traveler, into Europe. This device of the travelers’ journey is used by Montesquieu specifically to critique the absurdities he sees in 18th Century French society. Through the device of letters sent home, we find Usbek, master of a seraglio (a harem) in Isfahan, become progressively more despotic through his travels, leading ultimately to a revolt in the seraglio back home and the loss of his home, his wealth, his women and his eunuchs. By contrast, Rica the Traveler, a free man moderates and adjusts his mores, manners and customs as he travels, and in this way remains a free man. Rica’s transformation is actually reminiscent of the travels of Amasis the Egyptian and his Greek wife Ladice who travel west in Herodotus’ Historiae and in so doing are able to adapt, even to the point of bearing children together in the far west (the realm of Passion for Herodotus)192. The necessity of adaptation to changing situations within a system is repeated in the Persian Letters in the Parable of the Troglodytes, who nearly destroy themselves after having been freed from the yoke of a cruel foreign despot. It is only after their population dwindles from lawlessness and self-serving factionalism that the survivors learn to soften their mores and choose a moderate, public-minded path that leads them ultimately to prosperity.193 As modern political thinkers go, Montesquieu can be perplexing, for he represents a synthesis of both Classical and Modern political thought by starting with decidedly modern premises yet arriving at sometimes markedly un-modern conclusions. In particular, one finds the influence of Herodotus, Plato and Xenophon; Aristotle, Plutarch, and Tacitus; as well as Newton and Locke in Montesquieu’s system of thought. Of particular note is that while he shares a doctrine of separated power and the rule of law with Locke, he rejects Social Contract theory entirely, on the grounds that Hobbes’ grounding for the Social Contract utterly misrepresents the State of Nature.194 The impulse of self-preservation, Montesquieu argues, does not lead people to attack one another; rather, it leads people to shrink away from one another, until that sentiment experienced when one sees one of his own kind approach overrides one’s fear and urges him to engage in what he broadly calls “commerce” with that other person, especially if that one of his own kind happens to be of the opposite sex.195 In fact, Montesquieu further suggests that no single variable exists that determines the formation of societies or ordered communities. Rather, a system of continua on multiple variables, including mores, manners, customs, religion, geography, climate, history and even the laws themselves, produces a “General Spirit”196 of any one people or régime, implying either a contextual understanding of régimes or else an organic theory of politics, albeit different in kind from what future writers would call the “Organic Theory of the State.”197 Montesquieu alludes to the complexity of the system involved in the General Spirit in his Consideration of the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline. In Chapter 18 of the Considerations, he avers that “it is not chance that rules the world…There are general causes, moral and physical which act in every (state), elevating it, maintaining it, or hurling it to the ground.”198 In his assessment of the Roman régime, “by means of their maxims they conquered all peoples, but when they had succeeded in doing so, their republic could not endure.”199 While necessity may have dictated they change their government, “contrary maxims employed by the new government made their greatness collapse.”200 Ultimately, Rome exchanged their republic, whose form is necessarily small and moderate, for empire, which is often vast and necessarily despotic. This problem of adaptation within a multivariate system producing despotic régimes would be tackled more directly in the Spirit of Laws, his longest work by far, and it is in the Spirit of Laws where Montesquieu would argue for a system of government where “power checks power” in order to prevent the emergence of despotism.201 The Spirit of Laws is divided into six major parts, containing a total of thirty-one “Books”, some of which may stand as separate volumes, while most would more readily be understood as chapters, essays or pamphlets. The first part contains eight books pertaining to Laws and Governments in general, their principles, maintenance and corruption. The second part in five books addresses laws in relation to Defense and Offense as well as Laws related to Political liberty, constitutions, citizenship and taxation. At this point it is necessary to consider Montesquieu’s treatment of liberty, since political liberty is treated specifically in Part 2 of the Spirit of Laws. For Montesquieu there are three distinct kinds of liberty: natural liberty, defined as freedom to act in the absence of law, mores, manners, or customs; philosophical liberty, the freedom to think, feel or believe without constraints of laws, mores, manners or customs; and most peculiar of the three, political liberty, a “Tranquillité d’esprit” that arises from an opinion about one’s own security.202 Thus the primary object of participatory governments is liberty. The next six books comprise Part 3, which claims to address laws in relation to climate. However, closer examination of these books reveals that the first few books are related to variations of the institution of slavery or servitude: civil slavery, which he claims is proper only to despotic régimes, domestic slavery, which concerns marriage, divorce and repudiation, and political servitude in despotic versus moderate régimes.203 Only after having treated these forms of servitude does Montesquieu address matters of geography and terrain, and proposes the General Spirit, Mores and Manners of a Nation. It is here where he places strict limits on the extent of participatory régimes. Participatory régimes necessarily have a limit in terms of geographic extent: republics are small, monarchies of a middle size, and empires are vast.204 It is for this reason that Publius would counter in Federalist #1 that the project of the Federal Constitution is to “enlarge the orbit” of participatory government.205 As for the remaining three parts, Montesquieu explores the idea of Commerce, Revolution, and the use of Money, Population and Religion in the five books of Part 4. However, he then devotes an entire part, containing only two books, to cover Laws related to religion and the “order of things upon which they are to act.” (Part 5) The last part contains five books involving specific case studies: first with the development of Roman Inheritance Laws, then the development of the Civil Laws of France, and then finally a treatment of Feudal laws among the Franks, in relation to the development of the French Monarchy. While Montesquieu’s work appears to have a critique of French laws, mores, manners and customs as its object, it also includes, however cursorily or tangentially, treatments of nearly every régime known to France in the 18th Century, both ancient and contemporary. His treatment of political rival nations from the Colonial period such as England and Spain almost certainly contributed to his work being well-received in British and American circles, while his treatment of distant nations such as Russia, China and Japan, and even nations which may have surprised his readers, such as the Jews and Native Americans, reveals a concern Montesquieu expressed at the very beginning of his work: “I would consider myself the happiest of mortals if I could make it so that men were able to cure themselves of their prejudices. Here I call prejudices not what makes one unaware of certain things but what makes one unaware of oneself.”206 Publius: Alexander Hamilton, James Madison & John Jay

Figure 17: Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay. It is perhaps fitting, if a little ironic, that Montesquieu, who repeatedly downplayed the influence of “great men” in politics, favoring instead the influence of larger systems as driving factors that influence the development and transformation of nations and régimes, would have a singular influence on the argument for the ratification of the US Constitution of 1787, and that the leading rhetorical effort would come in the form a collective author calling themselves “Publius”. These three men are of course Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay. In their editorial campaign targeting the people of the state of New York to ratify the new Constitution for the United States of America, they also outlined a theoretical foundation for American Constitutionalism itself, following a line of reasoning heavily influenced by Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws. Originally appearing as an editorial barrage in 1788, these 85 articles, titled The Federalist, would outline the causes for the new Constitution, explore the structure, function, powers and limits contained in the new Charter as a piece of political engineering, and attempt to counter Montesquieu’s dictum that participatory governments are necessarily limited to a particular size. The establishment of what would come to be known as a federal system would seek to answer the problem of extending the reach of republics into an expanse historically limited to despotic empires. As Hamilton states in Federalist #1, “The subject speaks its own importance; comprehending in its consequences nothing less than the existence of the Union, the safety and welfare of the parts of which it is composed, the fate of an empire in many respects the most interesting in the world.”207 The plan of the Federalist is divided into several sections in order of the principal issues which brought about the greatest uncertainty and alarm among the people of New York in 1788. First among these involve existential threats to the United States: Dangers from foreign entities (2- 5), dangers from interstate dissent and hostility (6-8), and safeguards against domestic faction (9-10).208 The next set of papers emphasizes the utility of the Union (11-13), a reply to objections based on Montesquieu’s rule concerning size (14) and the defects of the existing Articles of Confederation (15-22).209 The next set of papers concern the need for a Government capable of providing for the Common Defense of the United States, yet restrained in its ability to use force, especially against its own members (23-29), the general power of taxation (30-36) and the arduous path taken to reach the proposal before the states, paying particular attention to a rebuttal of the objections advanced in the Constitutional Convention itself (37-38).210 From these concerns the Federalist moves into an analysis of the doctrine and strategy upon which the new Constitution would be based: that although the plan of the United States would be partly national and partly “federal” in the sense of a confederation211, it would still conform with the principles of a participatory republic, presumably consistent with the standard of justice defined by Jefferson in his Declaration of Independence twelve years before, and that such a union would not undermine the autonomy or sovereignty of state governments (39- 46).212 The strategic component of the new government would involve the regular distribution of power into distinct departments, adhering closely to Montesquieu’s separation of powers principle, with the addition of periodic appeals to the people through the process of regular and public elections (47-51)213 Most of the remaining papers outline and expand the structure, function, powers and limits of the institutions of federal Government established by the new Constitution. Federalist #s 52-61 address the House of Representatives; 62-66 are chiefly concerned with the Senate.214 The next eleven papers (67-77) focus on the Executive offices of the federal government, with particular attention paid to the President as Chief Executive215, and the six following papers address the federal Judiciary (78-83).216 The last two papers address “Certain General and Miscellaneous Objections Considered and Answered,” most notably an argument against the inclusion of a document analogous to the English Bill of Rights, for as Hamilton argues in Federalist #84, the Constitution is itself founded on the Natural Rights argument, and including a Bill of Rights would not only be unnecessary but dangerous to the security of those rights.217 Nevertheless, in the final paper, Hamilton presents a consideration for amendment to the proposed Constitution, indicating that amendments would be taken individually, and that even the amendment process would allow the United States to “rely on the disposition of the State legislatures to erect barriers against the encroachments of the national authority,” and returning full circle to the original exhortation to adopt the new charter.218 The Federalist as a whole stands as the end result of a synthesis of the political ideas leading up to it, attempting to reconcile Machiavelli’s iron law of necessity and the use of law and force219, the legacy of the English political experience, the Newtonian Rules of Reasoning in Philosophy from his System of the World220 expressed in political terms, and Montesquieu’s admonition that a government must be arranged in such manner that one citizen cannot fear another.221 Modern Political Thought, Part 2 I have chosen to divide the development of Modern Political Thought into two distinct periods: the first, leading up to and including what could be described as the first clearly ideological revolutions in the practice of politics and statecraft, is closely tied to the patterns of inquiry characteristic of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, and has been broadly treated already. The second period, largely characterized by a reaction against certain strains of Enlightenment thinking, constitutes the second part of Modern Political Thinking. However, one should not ignore the influence of certain themes from the first period on the themes of the second, for the Historicists, the Romantics, and the Pragmatists all construct their claims about politics, legitimacy and justice on the themes presented by the first period, and as such could also be construed as “Modern” political thinkers. Furthermore, the project of these three significant strains of political thinkers nevertheless remains the same as that of the earlier Modern political thinkers, namely to address the following questions: how does justice arise? And how should we both view and arrange society with a view to achieve Justice for all? The first significant theme in the second part of Modern thinking about politics is that of Historicism, which posits a movement of history towards some End, much as the Aristotelians conceived of cities organized around some end.222 That end, for most, is a vision of perfect Justice, in which the aims of society are fully realized and the possibility of injustice or overall harm may be eliminated. This is the view entertained by devotees of the likes of Immanuel Kant, GWF Hegel, and Karl Marx, all of whom hold a vision of some future society or human condition free from coercion and free from oppression. Tied to the vision of a perfect society at the End of History is another theme originating in the earlier period of Modernity with the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and to a lesser degree Montesquieu, namely that of Romanticism. The essence of Romanticism impeaches the rational and empirical conceptions of the universe in favor of experience, sentiment, and emotion, and can be seen in the writings of much late 18th and 19th Century poetry, especially William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth, but also in the visual arts of Goya, Delacroix, and Géricault. The Romantic critique of Enlightenment rationalism and empiricism also finds a home in the political writings of such figures as Hegel, Marx and later John Dewey, each of whom are treated in the following section, but also in many of the authors whom they address and who influenced them. The third theme of the next stage of Modern Political thinking, Pragmatism, largely emerges in the second half of the 19th Century and proceeds into the 20th, although it too has its roots in the 18th Century vision of the relationship between theory and practice. For the Pragmatist, one must be concerned not merely with modes and orders consistent with rational thought, empirical data, or even sentiment, but rather on what is demonstrably effective in the ordered community as a whole. This strain can be seen in Immanuel Kant’s Principles of Politics, as well as in the analytic approaches of Max Weber and the overt pragmatism of John Dewey’s effort to breathe new life into liberalism through the lens of Progress. Nevertheless, they all remain “Modern” in the sense that their primary questions emphasize the methods by which justice is possible, the means by which societies form and increase as well as the methods by which they may be preserved or transformed. Immanuel Kant and the Universal Civil Society

Figure 18: Immanuel Kant Contemporary with the development of the theory of Federal Constitutionalism in the United States typically called the American Founding, Western Europe outside Britain’s sphere of influence experienced its own flavor of Enlightenment political thinking. This primarily comes through the writings of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), a German lecturer in anthropology and geography at the University of Königsberg. Kant had risen in stature to become the principal figure in the German Enlightenment and is best known for his three Critiques: The Critique of Pure Reason, the Critique of Practical Reason, and the Critique of Judgement. Kant’s political writing is most closely associated with his exploration of ethics in the Critique of Practical Reason, but stands on its own for its focus on Morality, History and Progress. In particular, his collection of political essays, usually titled Principles of Politics, mark him as perhaps the most significant contributor to the European theory of Constitutionalism, and while it does bear some kinship with the other Enlightenment writers we have seen (especially Montesquieu), Kant’s theory of history stands apart as the groundwork for what will later be called Progressivism, and would have a significant impact on the political thought of the 20th Century. Kant’s Principles of Politics are divided into five distinct, yet related essays: The Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View, Conjectural Beginnings of Human History, Principles of Political Right as Related to Theory and Practice, the Idea of Progress, and Perpetual Peace. The titles of the third and fifth essays are similar to two others written by Jean-Jacques Rousseau—Principles of Political Right being an alternative title to the Social Contract, while Perpetual Peace reminds the reader of Rousseau’s Lasting Peace through the Federation of Europe—suggesting that Kant intended in this work to engage with Rousseau’s theses, either through adoption, modification or extension. In the first essay, Kant presents nine distinct propositions which outline his political project, and suggests a kinship with Aristotle in terms of the teleological component of politics. However, unlike Aristotle, whose concept of telos was generally confined to individual cities and their systems of government, Kant proposes a universal teleology, realized not by any particular person or community but by the whole of humanity: “All natural tendencies are destined to develop toward their final purpose…Natural tendencies directed to the use of human reason are fully developed in the Species, not the Individual.” Kant’s Nine Propositions The foundation for Kant’s political thought is perhaps best encapsulated in the nine propositions outlined in the Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View: Teleology: All natural tendencies are destined to develop toward their final purpose; Universality: Natural tendencies directed to the use of Human reason are fully developed in the Species, not the individual; Construction of Happiness: Nature wills that Man owes himself alone everything not given by Nature, and he is perfected through his Reason, not his Instinct. This proposition is strongly reminiscent of John Locke almost a century before him and with whom Kant was doubtless familiar; Asocial Sociability: The Means by which Nature brings about Man’s telos is the antagonism of his tendencies in the social state; Universal Civil Society the Telos of Man: The highest problem for the Human Species, claims Kant, is the establishment of a Universal Civil Society founded upon the empire of political justice; Universal Civil Society the Last and Most Difficult: Man, so long as he lives amongst others, stands in need of a master due to the abuse of freedom through self-interest. This almost sounds like a nod to Thomas Hobbes; Dependence on a Universal System of Law: The Perfected Constitution of Society depends on a system of International Relations adjusted to law, where states are equal to one another in like manner as human beings are equal to one another; Teleological History: History is the unfolding of Nature’s Plan for bringing Man to his Telos, which is the Universal Civil Society. Hence Nature not only possesses something akin to consciousness, but also has a Plan to push man forward towards his final good, the Universal Civil Society; or in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., The Arc of History Bends towards Justice; Discernment and Contribution: A philosophical attempt to compose a Universal History is not only possible, but contributes to the realization of the Universal Civil Society. This last proposition forms the foundation and the rationale for his next essay, Conjectural Beginnings of Human History. Kant apparently has decided to take it upon himself to test the possibility of a Universal History. Kant’s project would later be taken up by GWF Hegel, who would also expand on the idea, not of a Conscious Nature as Kant does, but a conscious History. For Kant, however, the Conjectural Beginnings of Human History posits that Human history begins with a rejection of Instinct as the Natural Inclination of Man, perhaps in some action akin to Adam eating the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Recasting the Fall of Man in the Genesis account, he suggests that the fruit of this Tree is bitter, so eating it is contrary to Instinct, which ordinarily would cause Adam to shrink away from it. This decision to reject Natural Instinct is what Kant suggests is a “Fortunate Fall”, for without it Man would experience neither history nor Progress. This original antagonism, a rejection of Natural impulses, sets the pattern for all subsequent Progress, and consequently all subsequent ages of History. History repeats the original rejection of instinct specifically through the Asocial Sociability of Man, i.e. the dueling tendencies present in all human beings, first to approach one another and then to shrink away from one another. In this way, Kant finds a way to synthesize the Social Contract Theory’s vision of the State of Nature with Montesquieu’s objection to that vision. However, for Kant Man has left the Original State of Nature not through a social contract with others but with the decision to reject the dictates of Instinct. Kant’s Ages of Man and the End of History It is important to note that Kant’s view of states of Nature is not eternal in the sense that Hobbes, Locke, or even Rousseau imply. Rather, Nature is bound instead to specific conditions of subsequent historical periods, or Ages. Hence each historical Age has its own expression of Nature as the Nature of the Age, and in each Age Human Reason stands in opposition, or antagonism to that Nature, leading Man into another Age, and with each passage into a new Age, Man is one step closer to realizing his final Telos as a Species, namely the Universal Civil Society. This idea is the root of nearly all Progressive thinking, and is so deeply embedded in the way in which most people in the West think of history that it is simply assumed to be true. One need only observe information media, where one sees references to such phenomena as the “Age of Empires”, the “Dark Ages”, the “Middle Ages” and the “Modern Age”, where the casual observer may simply assume that each one represents an improvement over time. A former Librarian of Congress, Daniel Boorstin, even wrote an historical treatise on the development of scientific reasoning titled The Discoverers, in which he posited that until the “scientific revolution” of the Early Enlightenment, all that came before was dominated largely by ignorance and speculation. By the same token, most people in places touched by Western civilization take for granted that our children’s lives will somehow be “better” than our own. Indeed, the very concept of “Western civilization” itself is rooted in an interpretation of the Progressive Arc of History; however, it’s more firmly rooted in Hegel’s vision of History, not Kant per se. The first historical Age for Kant is the Age of Savagery. The Nature of the Age, the dominant natural instinct, is self-preservation, leading individuals generally to shrink from one another, in other words, it is natural for people in an Age of Savagery to be largely asocial and to distrust his fellow man completely. The Antagonism of Reason in this Age is the tendency to form families and tribes, at times forsaking one’s own self-preservation for the preservation of the larger family or tribe. In the second historical Age, the Age of Barbarism, the previous Antagonism of Reason becomes the new Nature of the Age. Preservation of the Family, the Tribe, and the nascent Nation of extended families joined together typically through consanguinity and affinity—this becomes the new dominant instinct. Of course this Age of Barbarism too will be supplanted by another Antagonism of Reason, which may come in at least two forms: the first form is the expansion of affinity through alliances one tribe to another, in which multiple tribes confederate for their mutual defense. This form is generally limited in scope and does not represent a complete antagonism of reason, so it must ultimately yield to the other form, in which tribes expand their reach not through alliance but through conquest of neighboring tribes in competition with them, the winning Nations enslaving the losing ones. The third historical Age, the Age of Empire, is characterized by the libido dominandi, the Lust for Dominion as its Nature. In the Age of Empire one sees the rise of powerful realms such as China’s Middle Kingdom or the Persian and Roman Empires, each projecting power over conquered lands and peoples, who generally are forced into subordinate, subservient and tributary status. It is only natural in such an Age to seek to “rule” where one can, and the purest expression of the Nature of the Age, at least in writing, is the Melian Dialogue in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. By contrast, the Antagonism of Reason in the Age of Empire is the rational decision to limit power through the establishment of law leading to the Rule of Law and progressing history into the next great Age. This fourth Age is the Age of Civilization, and as far as Kant is concerned it is the Age in which he finds himself. The Nature of this Age is connected to the Rule of Law: it is natural in the Civilized Age to seek to establish justice within States, which each provide their citizens a space for free action under the Rule of Law, as well as provide for the common defense and the general welfare of those citizens. This naturally will produce intense loyalties among citizens to the State within they dwell, leading both to patriotism and nationalism. However, this is by no means the endpoint for Kant. The Antagonism of Reason in the Age of Civilization is to expand one’s understanding of other societies and to lay aside one’s nationalist prejudices, perhaps in the way that Montesquieu hoped he could accomplish and thus count himself “the happiest of mortals.” However, as Kant proposed in his Idea for a Universal History, the telos is realized in the Species, not in any one person. From here Kant is forced to speculate the Nature of the next two ages, if for no other reason they have not yet come to pass. The Fifth Age, that of Culture, has as its Nature the Acknowledgement of and Respect for foreign perspectives. In such an Age one would expect the people living in that Age would broadly embrace Cultural Diversity as a fundamental principle, something akin to the Rule of Law in the Age of Civilization. It would only be natural in the Age of Culture, or rather Cultures, to view history broadly in terms of cultural contact and interaction, each Nation-State producing its own distinct, vibrant culture that every other Nation-State is bound to respect. In this Age, the Antagonism of Reason can only be a rational decision to advance the idea of World Citizenship, universalizing moral conduct under an International, transnational, or worldwide law, craft in the interest of advancing World Peace. Once this Antagonism of Reason take hold and is adopted worldwide, Kant speculates a Sixth Age, the Age of the Well-Ordered Police State, whose Nature is to establish Justice around the World and maintain World Order through Transnational Law, eliminating the miseries, plagues and conflicts of the previous Ages. Such a world would be free from hunger, armed conflict, poverty, misery and disease, and people would be free to pursue their happiness within such a framework, having internalized Transnational Global Justice as an instinct. This Age, of course, has a final Antagonism of Reason, that of Perpetual Peace through the Universal Civil Society and the realization of Perfect Justice. However, it is not likely that this Antagonism of Reason would be easily discerned at first from the Well-Ordered Police State, except perhaps in a realized dream of eliminating the State entirely, for Perfect Justice would itself have to be internalized and become like a second Nature to all the people of the World. Progressives from Kant forward would look to this as the End of History.

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Figure 19: Kant’s Arc of History For Kant, the Universal Civil Society becomes what he calls in his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals a categorical imperative, an unconditional moral obligation which is binding in all circumstances and does not depend on any one person’s inclination or purpose. Put simply, a categorical imperative is one in which if a conceived action is made universal, the concept behind the action would continue to have meaning. By the same token, if one were to universalize the negation of the concept producing a situation where the meaning of the concept itself is lost, then its negation if by no means categorical. Hence, if one were to universalize theft as a just action, the very idea of theft itself would cease to have any meaning. If Kant’s Universal Civil Society in the Age of the Well Ordered Police State were negated, the Universal Civil Society would be meaningless, but under a worldwide Well-Ordered Police State, one need only witness the universal justice at work producing the Perpetual Peace of Perfect Justice at the End of History. For this reason, although the Universal Civil Society stands as a categorical imperative, it forever remains just out of reach. Much of Progressive thought in the United States is informed by Kant’s Idea for a Universal History and the progressive movement towards Perfect Justice. Prominent progressive thinkers include Ralph Waldo Emerson and the American Transcendentalists, as well as more recent Progressives such as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who repeatedly framed the justice both of his Civil Rights addresses and the Poor People’s Campaign in terms of the “Arc of History”. However, perhaps the most purely Kantian Universalist thinker of 20th Century America is television producer and screenwriter Gene Roddenberry, creator of the Star Trek television franchise. The fictional world of Star Trek, at least as Roddenberry intended, was that of a united Earth of the far future that had broadly solved the problem of scarcity and distribution of the benefits of society worldwide, to the point that the people of the Earth had eliminated the need for money, religion, superstition, or mystical thinking, and that violence, especially the organized interstate violence so prevalent in earlier Ages as War were antiquated, outmoded concepts consigned to the remote past. In its place is something like the Well Ordered Police State, and it is this radical social change that ushers in a new Age where Earth joins a United Federation of Planets in order “to explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations, (and) boldly go where no man has gone before.” Roddenberry’s personal vision of the world of Star Trek, like King’s “Dream” in the Lincoln Memorial Address, is deeply rooted in, and in practice fundamentally no different from, Kant’s own dream of Perpetual Peace. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the Historical Dialectic

Figure 20: GWF Hegel Significantly expanding on Kant’s concept of the Arc of History is the German philosopher and prominent idealist Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). Primarily a lecturer and professor of Philosophy, his political thought and his idea of history are influenced by Goethe, Rousseau, Kant, his friend Joseph Schelling, and Johann Fichte. It is from Fichte that Hegel would adopt the dialectic approach for which he is best known, especially as it applies to history and politics. As we have seen in Kant’s model of historical progress, a dialectic between the Nature of a particular Age and the Antagonism of Reason propels the human experience along the Arc of History, progressing towards the Categorical Imperative of the Universal Civil Society. For Fichte, an analogous principle to the Nature of an Age would be a beginning proposition which he calls a Thesis. The Antagonism of Reason would stand in opposition to this Thesis as a counter-proposition (Antithesis) and, unlike Kant who sees a dialectical dyad, Fichte sees a necessary reconciliation of Thesis and Antithesis which could be seen as a Synthesis of the previous propositions. Hegel would call this same dialectic triad as the Concrete, The Abstract, and the Absolute, but the dialectic triad nevertheless remains. Another feature of Hegel’s political thought is the concept of Geist, which he develops primarily in his treatise on the Phänomenologie des Geistes. This term, often translated as Spirit or Mind, at first suggests either an extension, an elaboration or a reconsideration of Montesquieu’s Esprit, at least as it would apply to political matters. However, where Montesquieu’s consideration of Esprit proceeds from laws in relation to multiple contexts such as climate, mores, manners, customs and religion, Hegel’s Geist is tied more closely to stages along the Arc of History, whereby each stage of human history is an expression of a distinct Weltgeist, or “World-Spirit”. For this reason, the thoughts and actions of any person or persons can only be understood within the context of a particular historical moment (see Fig. 21).

Figure 21: Hegel’s triad mapped to Kant’s Arc of History This world-view, known as Historicism, dominates Hegel’s political perspective, and is the central theme of Hegel’s most accessible work (at least for the student of politics), Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte, or Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Individual men, for Hegel, are best seen as products of a Zeitgeist, or the Spirit of their particular Age; it is therefore absurd to judge the actions and thoughts of any person representative of one Age using the principles of another Age. Furthermore, certain individual historical figures he sees as the embodiment of the Spirit, or perhaps the soul, of the Age in which they live, as Hegel suggests Napoleon Bonaparte did when he entered the city of Jena the day before engaging Prussian troops: “I saw the Emperor—this world-soul—riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it.” However, one must be careful not to confound these “great men” with the working out of the Weltgeist. For once the Weltgeist has accomplished what it must, it moves on, leaving the great hero of the Age behind. Hence, people in any Age are not only products of their “times”, they are prisoners of them as well, and should be viewed simply as “men of their times.” History, and in particular Philosophical History as opposed to Original History or Reflective History, is a record of the efforts by the Geist to develop its own consciousness and to attain and realize self-knowledge, namely consciousness of its freedom, and the realization of that freedom. Individuals are mere accidents and instruments of the Geist coming to understand itself. Stages of human history, such as family, civil society, and cultures, are necessary stages in the progress of Geist towards its realization as the Weltgeist at the End of History itself. In this way we find a reconstructed Arc of History not as leading toward some kind of Categorical Imperative of a Universal Civil Society as we see with Kant, but instead a kind of Awakening of the Weltgeist, following the dictates of a universal reason, towards the realization of its universal freedom as an Absolute. In the simplest terms and using Fichte’s Dialectic, Hegel’s Thesis of History (or Hegel’s Concrete) is expressed in the Family, whose Antithesis (Hegel’s Abstract) is the Civil Society, the Synthesis of the two (Hegel’s Absolute) is the State. The realization of this Absolute one witnesses through the unfolding of history: in savage, barbarous and imperial ages, freedom was reserved for only a few. In civilization under the rule of law, freedom expands to include citizens, and as the Weltgeist realizes its freedom all men will be free by nature in the freedom embodied in the State. However, this reasoned progress of Geist towards its absolute freedom does not happen all at once, and also not everywhere. For Hegel, the Arc of History not only follows a reasonable path toward absolute freedom of the Weltgeist in the State through time, but this progress is also inscribed on the globe itself, where one sees societies at varying stages of history along a path that proceeds generally northwestward from the Far East: “The Orientals do not know that the spirit or man as such are free in themselves…The consciousness of freedom first awoke among the Greeks…the Germanic nations, with the rise of Christianity, were the first to realize that All men are by nature free, and that freedom of spirit is his very essence.”(Philosophy of History, trans. Nisbet, p. 54.)

Figure 22: The world as Progress of the Weltgeist. Worthy of note is that in addition to the overt German ethnocentrism of Hegel’s variation of the Arc of History showing that he himself harbors the same bias for one’s own as Herodotus had in Classical Political Thought, Hegel’s progress of the Weltgeist towards its realization follows a disturbingly narrow path, with much of the rest of the world left out of the progress of history. Following the path of the Weltgeist one sees Savage nations such as the headhunters of Borneo at the beginning of History, the realms of Japan and China as fundamentally Barbarian, with the development of Empire in India and Persia, and Civilization emerging only in Western Europe, especially in Germany. Because we are not yet Cultured (as Kant says), the progress of the Weltgeist towards its realization is not yet complete, but this completion will presumably occur in the future, most likely through Britain and North America (particularly Canada?) In the meantime, the forward advance of civilization in the Americas stand as mere refinements of the dialectic of civil societies and states producing a synthesis of International or transnational relations that, once made Concrete, will make way for the final realization of freedom as the synthesis of states and the Weltgeist itself. As for the rest of the world, i.e. Africa, South America, and Australia (perhaps the area now occupied by the United States?), they lie outside the progress of the Weltgeist and can be ignored, except to be subdued by the Civilized as civilization expands. Presumably, as Civilization expands to those parts of the world closer to the beginning of History, those places long civilized will bear witness to the unfolding of the next stage of History, culminating at the End of History as the realization of the freedom of the Weltgeist in the worldwide expression of the State. It is difficult to say whether this view of the world influences 19th Century European colonialism or whether 18th and 19th Century European Colonialism influenced Hegel. Either way, the Hegelian view of World History and the domination of much of the world by European powers—South America by Spain and Portugal; Africa by France, Belgium, Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy; India and Australia by Britain; Southeast Asia and the Philippines by France and Spain, and Indonesia by the Netherlands--are mutually reinforcing phenomena. Thus, in order to understand 19th Century European Colonialism, Manifest Destiny in the United States, and even “The Great Game” (a series of low-level conflicts between the British and Russian Empires), it helps to familiarize oneself with this particularly unnerving aspect of Hegel’s Philosophy of History. Karl Marx, Dialectical Materialism, and the End of History

Figure 23: Karl Marx. Among those devoted to the Hegelian vision of the Historical Dialectic was Karl Marx (1818- 1883). Marx first came to know of Hegel’s philosophy in Berlin through his association with a community of radical young Hegelians known as the Doctors’ Club, and especially the influence of Ludwig Feuerbach. Feuerbach’s critique of Christianity from the standpoint of Hegelian theology, in which our conception of God is a mere projection of human nature, would exert an especially strong pull on Marx’s thinking. According to Feuerbach, if we are to conceive of God at all we must understand that God’s actions are only discernible through the actions of man, and that were we to strip God of all human accidents God would be rendered a negative being. This would lead Feuerbach, and later Marx, to advocate not mere agnosticism as Marx maintained in his youth, but outright atheism, and that religion would serve as nothing more than a salve for the pains of living experience. This notion of religion as a kind of drug would also inform his later political work in which Marx incorporates his own interpretation of the Historical Dialectic, set out by Kant and expanded by Hegel. Although he started out as something of a Romantic poet (Richard Norman Hunt, The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels, p. 26), Marx’s political views would develop within the context of the Doctors’ Club and through his collaboration with fellow Hegelian Friedrich Engels. The Young Hegelians would provide a philosophical framework for Marx’s critique of the Ideal in the face of the Real, and this would ultimately inform his development of a theoretical movement he called Dialectical Materialism, in contrast to the Dialectical Idealism so evident in Hegel. While his treatise Capital is perhaps his best known work in economists’ circles, Marx’s most significant political writings include his Contribution of the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, The German Ideology, and his collaboration with Engels on the Manifesto of the Communist Party. In the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx lays out a broad critique of Hegel’s arguments as rooted in abstraction rather than in the concrete world of human experience. His further critique targets the German State and German Civil Society, claiming that thanks to the abstraction of human nature in its conception of God in the Middle Ages, philosophy had also become an abstraction for the Germans in the same way that mythology had been for the Ancient Greeks. The thrust of Marx’s critique of Hegel is not necessarily of his dialectic, but rather his attachment to the notion of an ideal somehow independent of the material conditions of the real world. For Marx, Hegel “does not allow society to become the actually determining thing, because for that an actual subject is required, and he has only an abstract, imaginary subject” (Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, section 309) Since the State is a manifestation of Idea, the product of Man, were one to actualize the state free from the constraints of the abstract one must then understand family and civil society as spheres of the State as Concept in actual practice, rather than as separate entities within the generalized framework of statehood. The political state—that set of institutions and processes one may observe directly as an ordered community—is a generalized concept of the relation between two antagonistic principles, namely necessity and freedom. As individuals dwell within states, they become alienated from the reality of their material condition, for “the citizen as determining the universal is lawgiver, and as the one deciding, as actually willing, is sovereign.” (Section 279) Citizens in states are thus neither lawgivers nor sovereigns. In order to relieve individuals in states from this condition of alienation, the concept must be bound to a concrete reality. Through this means, Legislation becomes inseparable from the legislators themselves, and The Executive administrative arm of states subsumes the concepts of individual and particular under the Universal, through their standard operating procedures and regulation of political and economic activity. Constitutions thus become organisms of states instead of a set of recognized principles that define a community and guide its conduct; the state defines the constitution rather than the constitution defining the state. In his call for the “emancipation” of Germany from the “bondage” of the Middle Ages, Marx advocates the formation of a “class of civil society which is not a class of civil society” but is instead without social class distinction and thus free from the constraints of social class imposed by the state, if German civil society is to free itself from the burden of abstraction. Marx and Ideology A principal means by which the alienation of people from both power and choice is through a concept intrinsic to states which he calls Ideology. While ideology may be construed in the broadest terms as an attachment to a certain set of principles that guide one’s conduct and shapes a person’s beliefs, Marx understands Ideology more narrowly. For Marx, Ideology is that system of ideas that reinforces the material status quo in states, and that proceeds from the Material conditions of a particular Age in History. In The German Ideology, Marx clarifies his understanding not only of Ideology and the State, but also distinguishes his world view as Dialectical Materialism, in contrast with Hegel’s Dialectical Idealism. If Germany is to proceed from the Material conditions of the Present Age, he avers, necessity as an antagonism of freedom in the current age must demand the abolition of that ideology which reinforces the status quo, namely the ideology of private property. For as the present age emphasizes the unequal distribution of material goods into distinct social classes, and as the concepts of private property, material wealth, and capital as a means to wealth reinforce the economic class distinction between “haves” and “have-nots”, only the abolition of private property as a concept coupled as it were with the concept of social classes can allow one to found society anew and usher in the next age along the Arc of History. The German Ideology stands as an introduction to what is perhaps Marx’s most notorious political work with which he collaborated with Friedrich Engels, the Manifesto of the Communist Party. Here we find Marx’s own interpretation of History defined by struggle between distinct classes within a given age. This struggle may be generalized as a history of “Oppressor vs. Oppressed.” However, the material conditions of the oppressors and the oppressed differ from one age of history to the next, and are transformed through a dialectic process similar to that found in Hegel. For Marx and Engels, Ancient societies are marked by the struggles among the ancient classes of patricians, knights, plebeians, and slaves. Feudal societies are characterized by class struggle among Lords and vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices and serfs. Modern societies exhibit a simplified class struggle between what he calls the Bourgeoisie (urban capitalists and business owners) and Proletariat (employees and laborers). In the present age, according to Marx, one finds the ideology of capital so pervasive and alienating that society itself becomes monetized, with whatever is conceived as worth making, possessing, preserving or defending as fundamentally monetized, i.e. reduced to a monetary measurement of value, whether it be a product, a service, a tool, a cultural artifact, even a human life or a family. The March of History The monetization of all aspects of human society where even virtue itself is measured in dollar amounts stands as the greatest source of alienation of the people from society itself. Any future age must necessarily have no classes at all if it is to move past the monetization of society itself, for the March of History is characterized by the overthrow of the oppressor classes of the age in order to usher in a new age. Thus develops Marx’s view of the Arc of History: Each revolutionary class sows the seeds of its own destruction through the means of production they adopt. (Fig. 25)

Figure 24: Marx’s Arc of History In the age before the agricultural revolution, Hunters used their knowledge of the seasons to produce food through seasonal hunting and gathering, but were subsequently overthrown by gatherers who became farmers, using that same knowledge of the seasons to plant and harvest crops from the land, which became the new means of production. These farmers used the land to produce and were overthrown by farmhands who hoarded land and became feudal lords. The land the feudal lords hoarded were worked by serfs, some of whom developed skills and crafts, leaving the land and developing towns, or bourges, which in turn hosted craft guilds to produce what the feudal lords needed on their hoarded land; thus the lords were overthrown by craftsmen in those guilds. The craftsmen in turn used labor-dependent capital to produce and became the capitalist bourgeoisie, and they too will be overthrown by those who labor. In such condition, the dictatorship of the proletariat, no opposing class against the proletariat could exist, for each works according to his ability, and material necessities are distributed according to need, thus minimizing necessity and maximizing freedom. For Marx, this is not a function of Will per se, but an historical inevitability. The human will, in the face of the March of History, is at best an abstraction, at worst an illusion; man is only as willful as a water droplet sliding down a window pane. At the End of Marx’s March of History looms the “specter” of Universal Communism, where all social classes are abolished, all property shared, which each working according to his ability and receiving according to his need as the very concept of “state” withers away into irrelevance. How does this happen, in Marx’s view? Oppressors alienate the oppressed in any age from the means of production in that age. In the Modern Age, Capital, the abstraction of wealth, monetized, is the “coin of the realm” and wage-labor is used to produce it. As an ever increasing population of wage-laborers are increasingly alienated from the abstraction of capital their isolation approaches a radical equality, and the advance of industry produces an association of isolated wage-laborers. These laborers perceive their shared interest and become “true believers” in the proletarian cause, universalize it, form a generalized class of Proletarians and overthrow the shrunken Bourgeoisie, first through seizure of political power, and then through seizure of the “means of production”, presumably capital itself, only to abolish it entirely and thus rid the society of social classes entirely. In this way, Communism represents a radically democratic and radically egalitarian view both of justice and human society. However, in order for the proletariat to abolish Capital, they must first seize that Capital, thus exposing an internal inconsistency in Marx’s March of History. However, Marx and Engels insist that the development of these “true believers” will shield the proletariat from simply turning into a new bourgeoisie, having universalized the laborers’ cause and eschewing the idea of capital at all, even as they seize it from their oppressors. This radical claim would form the central organizing principle of the Communist Parties of the late 19th and 20th Centuries, but as the development and corruption of Marxist political systems in Russia, China and elsewhere have shown, once capital is held, those who hold it are unlikely to abolish it; perhaps human nature is not as mutable as Marx assumes, and the human will not so illusory after all. Max Weber and the Three Foundations of Legitimacy

Figure 25: Max Weber Hegel and Marx constitute one thread that proceeds from Kant’s Idea of Progress, but they are by no means the sole heirs of the notion that the History of human societies is best understood as a movement towards some idea or practice of universal justice. Max Weber (1864-1920), a Prussian sociologist, jurist and political economist, demonstrates a slightly different approach to the movement towards “improvement” of the human condition, and stands along with his contemporary Émile Durkheim as a co-founder of the social science discipline of sociology. Although it can be argued that Weber’s thought is in some respects influenced by the “neo- Kantian” movement in 19th Century epistemology, it is his political writings that demonstrate his greatest influence on the development of theories of public administration that would come to dominate applied political science in the 20th Century. Among his political writings are The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, “The Three Types of Legitimate Authority” and “Politics as a Vocation.” In The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904/1905), Weber argues that the economic phenomenon of capitalism is tied to an ethical directive informed by the moral teachings of certain movements in the Protestant Reformation, especially those of the Puritan, Calvinist, Lutheran, Methodist and Baptist movements, as well as the Quakers and Moravians. For these religious sects, the faithful are called to work in the secular world, to develop trades and otherwise engage in the practices of investment and wealth generation, either as a means to resist oppression or else as an expression of their faith. In most cases, religious devotion is associated with a rejection of worldly pursuits, but for the Puritan/Protestants, industry becomes a sacred expression of their devotion to God, and labor carries with it a sense of holiness and virtue. Thus religion compels one to pursue a secular calling and to do so with religious zeal. People who follow this worldview are more likely to generate wealth. However, as these people generated wealth, they were discouraged from wasting this wealth on pointless luxuries as doing so was broadly perceived among Protestant sects as a sin. Also, since Protestant churches generally limited tithes to their churches on the grounds that excessive charity breeds sloth among beggars, industrious Protestants were encouraged to reinvest their wealth in order to expand their capacity to generate more. This form of piety gives rise to the spirit of Capitalism itself. Furthermore, as Protestants are encouraged to eschew luxury, markets of wealth generators become increasingly tolerant of the mass-produced over the handicraft, further increasing the efficiency of capital investment. Thus the Spirit of Capitalism carries with it a rational element that encourages rational and impersonal approaches to society as a whole. Once the religious component had faded from the society in favor of a spirit of rational capitalism, people are forced into standardized, mechanized societies. It is perhaps this phenomenon that led Weber to attempt to recapture the idea of Vocation, or “calling”, to various facets of industry, especially his own. This is where we find Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation”. (1919) For Weber, Politics is best seen as independent leadership in action. States are thus defined not by any sense of telos or ends but by the means of their operation. In this view, states are human communities that claim the monopoly of legitimate use of physical force within themselves rather than the inculcation of any civic virtue or higher good for all, but follow a more or less Machiavellian sense of self- preservation. However, in order to evade the trap of Machiavellian cynicism, Weber holds that States require justification or rationalization for any claim of the monopoly of force in order to be seen as legitimate; mere use of force will not suffice. The first legitimation is what Weber calls “Traditional authority.” This involves an appeal to a kind of “eternal yesterday” and may in fact be tied to what Timothy Snyder would later call “The politics of eternity.”(Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom) For Weber, Traditional authority rests on the historical mores, manners and customs of a people to acknowledge and legitimate the monopoly of force in long-established political systems: an ancient recognition that reinforces a habitual orientation among the people of the state to conform or acquiesce to an authority. This legitimation is exercised by hereditary princes, patriarchs and dynastic crowns, even in otherwise constitutional monarchies. The second legitimation is the “Charismatic authority”, and is the preferred means by which elected officials exercise their claim to authority. This generally involves the perception of an extraordinary and personal “gift of grace”, and is often identified as the principal qualities of leadership, whether through Revelations, Heroism, strength of character, force of personality, or other qualities of individual leadership. While elected officials often rely on this legitimation, it is also a tool for demagogues, partisan leaders, opinion leaders, “celebrities”, and the leaders of interest groups. The third legitimation is the “Legal authority”. This legitimation rests in the firm belief in the rule of law and the validity of legal statute. It is intended to capture the functional competence of those in positions of authority based on rationally created rules, and expects obedience in the discharge of those statutory obligations to which the authority and the governed are attached. This principle forms the foundation for “servants of the state” and “public servants”, i.e. agents of rational legal administration, or bureaucrats. Weber’s “Three Types of Legitimate Authority” expands on the legitimations in “Politics as a Vocation,” and anticipates what Harold Lasswell would describe a generation later in Politics: Who Gets What, When and How as an “Iron Triangle”: a three-way alliance among voters, elected officials and bureaucrats to maintain equilibrium in the management of public goods. Only for Weber, the triangle is far more generalized: traditional authorities pave the way for charismatic and rational/legal authorities, charismatic authorities use rational/legal authorities to secure their interests, and rational/legal authorities solidify into lasting institutions that habituate conformity. For Weber, when a traditional authority dies a successor may emerge in one of three ways. First, a law of inheritance or succession may provide a rational/legal foundation for succession; second, a prominent figure may emerge with a claim to authority through a charismatic legitimation; or both may be involved, strengthening the claim to legitimacy among the people the authority governs. However, in some cases the governed may become dissatisfied with the traditional authority and they may seek a successor with a legal claim to authority, as the English Parliament did in the case of the Glorious Revolution. Or, in cases of dissatisfaction with a traditional authority, a successor may emerge through the charismatic legitimation, expressing those qualities of individual leadership the people in the society seek, as one sees in the revolutionary régime changes in America, France, Iran and South Africa. However, as the lessons of history show, in either of these cases of dissatisfaction, successors of this sort often come through violence. In systems dominated by charismatic authority, political change may come through regular, periodic election, justified and supported by legal authority and providing for an orderly transition of power from one charismatic authority to another. In some systems an extraordinary election may take place, in which a “recall” vote or a vote of “no confidence” in the present leadership may be called. Such extraordinary elections, while they may be legitimated through legal practice, may also result in political turmoil in the society, since they do ultimately rest on the perceived leadership qualities both of the incumbent and the successor. A third method of political change under charismatic authority arises from dissatisfaction and civil unrest, where demagogues emerge exciting the passions and dissatisfactions of the many; such movements may result in violence beyond the turmoil of any “recall” election or “no confidence” vote. Finally, under legal authority, political change may arise through changes in legislation, which often depends on changes in charismatic authority in elective governments. Change could also come about through changes in executive power. In this scenario, although the law itself may not have changed, its interpretation by an executive authority may have, and will be expressed through executive directives or orders issued by the new executive power. This change may depend on charismatic authority, but it may also depend on the orderly succession of the rational/legal authority through systematic changes in the civil service. Yet legal authorities themselves may also be replaced if the policy aims of those responsible for their incumbency are not met, thus giving rise to uncertainty among the people governed about the role or power of the rational/legal authorities themselves. This analytic view of legitimate authority and political change, especially the rational/legal authority, would play a significant role in the rise of regulatory and administrative bureaucracies, especially in North America and Western Europe. Weber’s idea of Rational/Legal authority would become a standard justification, especially by disciples of the Progressive Movement, for the expansion of regulatory oversight of industries by governments in the 19th and 20th Centuries, while Weber’s critique of the impersonal and plutocratic tendencies of rational legal administration with bureaucratic agency would also inform some of the most strident opponents of the rise of “the Administrative State”. In the face of such criticism, American Progressives, whose intellectual movement dates back to Immanuel Kant but would only come to the United States in the generation after the Civil War, would have to defend Progressivism from the earlier Modern movement in political thought expressed by the likes of John Locke in the generation before Kant, as well as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, Kant’s contemporaries, who produced the tradition of American Constitutionalism. John Dewey and the Advance of Progressivism

Figure 26: John Dewey Among the most prominent thinkers in the American Progressive movement was the philosopher, psychologist and educator John Dewey (1859-1952). A contemporary of Weber, Dewey would exert a significant influence on the 20th Century expression of Progressive ideology in the United States, primarily through his writings on reforms of the American system of public education. Generally identified with the pragmatist school of axiology, he nevertheless retained some elements of the prior Idealist school connected with Kant and Hegel in the previous century, especially its effort to conceive of history as an account of human progress. A prolific author, it can be somewhat daunting to tackle the entirety of Dewey’s work, even if only to trace the development of his thought from 19th Century Idealism into the pragmatic experimentalism he advanced in the 20th Century. However, among his more influential political writings stands a relatively short treatise titled “Liberalism and Social Action,” (1935) in which Dewey critiques the early modern view of Liberalism advanced by those such as Locke and Jefferson, and transforms the concept itself into a “renascent Liberalism” oriented towards a pragmatic method of experimentation he calls the “method of intelligence,” applied toward social action with a view towards the progress of justice in a free society. “Liberalism and Social Action” begins with the claim that popular sentiment once praised liberalism, describing it as “progressive, forward-looking, and free from prejudice,” recalling Montesquieu’s sentiment in the Spirit of Laws where he says he “would be the happiest of mortals” if only he could “cure men of their prejudices.” However, by the time Dewey is writing, he sees liberalism in retreat, specifically through the rise of illiberal régimes in Italy, Germany and Spain: “Three of the great nations of Europe…have summarily suppressed the civil liberties for which liberalism valiantly strove,” and, given the context of the global economic hardship of the Great Depression, people are led to suspect the fragility of liberty in times of distress or conflict: “The belief spreads that liberalism flourishes only in times of fair weather.” However, for Dewey it is not liberalism itself that is necessarily fragile, but the rigidity of the social doctrine of classical liberalism advanced by Locke (and by association, Jefferson and the American founding) that is to blame. According to Dewey, Locke’s notion of the purpose of government to protect the natural rights of individuals—life, liberty and property—results in a rigid doctrine of social organization where individuals are set against organized social action, invariably casting government in an adversarial role, an enemy to individual liberty. Locke’s vision of natural rights posits a static dimension of property that can only apply to property already possessed and is ill-equipped to manage the production of wealth. Utilitarian Progress vs. Classical Liberalism Enter Adam Smith, the Scottish professor of moral theology whose Wealth of Nations generally stands as a touchstone for modern economic thought, and the introduction to which most students of economics are exposed. For Dewey, Smith recasts liberty in economic terms, whereby people as economic actors possess a natural tendency to better their estate through labor. A convergence of individual efforts produces an “endless spiral of increasing change” and an interdependence of interests identified with the “invisible hand” of the marketplace. Furthermore, in Dewey’s view, the industrial revolution recasts the concept of Natural law in in terms largely framed by Smith, those of economic production and exchange. Building on Smith’s theory of betterment through labor comes the “calculus of happiness” averred by Jeremy Bentham. According to Dewey, Bentham’s conception of betterment challenges everything that inflicts unnecessary pain and limits acquisition of individual pleasures, and that Bentham’s calculus would judge laws by their impact on the aggregate happiness of the sum of individuals in society. Within this context, governments must therefore extend their role beyond mere restraint of abuse, but also contribute to the well- being of individuals within the society they govern. In other words, the role of government not limited to prevention and reaction to injuries, but must also act to secure the general welfare. Here Dewey argues that thanks to Bentham’s view of government’s role in promoting the general welfare, the old conception of Natural Rights and liberties “exist only in the kingdom of mythological zoology,” and that obedience to laws or to governments depend more on people’s firm belief in the consequences thereof: If the consequences of obedience outweigh the consequences of disobedience then a person is more inclined to obey a law. If, on the other hand, the consequences of obedience are intolerable, then they revolt. This anticipates Colomer’s Fourth Proposition (Voice v. Exit) and places Dewey firmly in the Rational Choice tradition characteristic of Modern political thinking. In this context, government is transformed from a laissez-faire, limited watchdog institution into a utilitarian collective enterprise to aid the economically disadvantaged. Romanticism vs. Utilitarianism Yet the rational utilitarianism of the Industrial Revolution is not the only strain that would lead to the crisis of liberalism in the 20th Century, for another current, Romanticism, would also come to impeach the claims made by the prominent theorists of the Enlightenment. On one hand, the Tory sentiment Coleridge would inherit from Edmund Burke emphasized the significance of enduring institutions and would counter what Dewey sees as the “anti- historical” character of utilitarianism. Additionally, Wordsworth’s advocacy of a “return to nature” would place the refinements of industry and industrialism at odds with his conception of a bucolic wilderness untouched by human enterprise. In other words, industrialism is an enemy of nature, and industrial man is made ill by his divorce from nature. Thomas Carlyle would add to Wordsworth and Coleridge a call for a régime of social authority that would enforce social ties lest the utilitarianism of industry isolate and atomize the individual, reducing him to a mere instrument, a machine. Finally, in Dewey’s view, Ruskin and Morris would complete the Romantic strain against industrialization through their emphasis on the social importance of ars gratia artis, “art for art’s sake”, against the economic pressures of the marketplace. Organic Theory of the State vs. Classical Liberalism From here Dewey proceeds to introduce the overtly Hegelian influence of Organic Idealism as embodied in the writings of the English radical reformer and founder of social welfare Liberalism, Thomas Hill Green. According to Dewey, we should understand Green’s organic idealism as principally a reaction against individualistic liberalism and empiricism. For Green, men are held together in societies by relations that proceed from as well as manifest an “ultimate cosmic mind,” a clear nod to Hegel’s conception of Geist. The State, in Green’s view, constitutes a Moral Organ, one among many of the Spirit and Will that comprises humanity. As a Moral Organ, the business of the State is threefold: 1) to protect all forms of human association that embody moral claims of society, 2) to remove obstacles in the way of individuals coming to consciousness of themselves for what they are, and 3) to positively promote the cause of public education. Together, the influences of the Industrial Revolution, the Romantic backlash against the utilitarianism embodied in the Industrialist’s view of progress, and the concept of Organic Idealism all spotlight the inadequacies of the earlier liberalism of the Enlightenment. Because Classical Liberalism is unable to address the larger problems of social organization and integration, it fosters the belief that liberalism itself is a doctrine whose time has passed. This insecurity and uncertainty in the belief and purpose of liberalism has generated dogmatic faiths ultimately hostile to the purposes of liberalism itself, that man is alienated from the instrument of freedom. Moreover, this alienation is exacerbated by the utilitarian’s abstractions of man as an economic, legal and political animal, failing ultimately to “touch man himself.” This particular indictment of Modernity’s failure to touch man as person will figure prominently in reactionary post-modern thinking as well. However, Dewey’s conception of the Crisis is not necessarily that of a Crisis of Modernity so much as a Crisis of Liberalism, and from this crisis emerges the necessity to transform conceptions of the problems Liberalism is to address. First, one must transform the problem of freedom from conflict between government and individuals to the project of establishing a social order with spiritual authority that nurtures and directs both the inner and outer life of individuals. Second, one must transform the problem of science from one of the technological applications for the increase of material productivity to one of imbuing individual minds with the “spirit of reasonableness”. Finally, one must transform the problem of democracy from one of universal suffrage and representative government to one focused on establishing that form of social organization, extending to all areas and ways of living within which individuals are fed, sustained and directed. Renascent Liberalism If Liberalism is to survive against the tide of illiberal critique embodied in the repressive ideologies of Fascism and Nazism, Dewey insists we identify the enduring values of Liberalism, address the deficiencies of the Liberalism of the Enlightenment, and provide the framework for a vigorous renascent Liberalism as a positive agent of social progress. The enduring values of the earlier liberalism include liberty as freedom to act and freedom from repression, individuality as the development of inherent capacities and made possible through liberty itself, and free intelligence through individual inquiry, discussion and expression. What must be discarded from the earlier liberalism is its ahistorical sense that enables classical liberals to counter reactionary appeals to the past but blinds them to recognizing the historical conditioning of their own interpretation of liberty. This lack of historical sense and interest, says Dewey, led earlier liberals to claim their ideas as immutable “self-evident” truths that would turn classical liberalism into an absolutist dogma, ultimately hostile to further social change. What these earlier liberals failed to grasp, according to Dewey, was that man is dependent on experience; that new needs demand a reconstruction of patterns of experience and that the Old is only useful only to the extent that it serves the new. Change being the only constant (a nod to Heraclitus), the task of liberalism is to employ what Dewey calls a “method of intelligence” to adjust society to that change. This method of intelligence involves the conversion of past experience into knowledge, a projection of that knowledge into ideas and purpose where we anticipate what the future may bring, and modify the knowledge and habits of society to meet new conditions using our free intelligence to direct social action. This is how a Renascent Liberalism can counter the Crisis of Liberalism as a whole, recognizing it as the emergence of a social organization problem in the face of change. Given the observable changes brought by the Progress of Science and Technology (“Science and the Useful Arts” in the US Constitution), namely the changes from scarcity to potential plenty, natural insecurity to institutional insecurity and individual manual industry to collective corporate industry, Renascent Liberalism requires a two-pronged approach in the form of education reform and the replacement of force with intelligence as the primary agent of change itself. Dewey’s reform of education involves a shift of outcomes, whereby the goal of education must be to produce intellectual and moral patterns that nearly match the movement of the historical progress of events, whereby the educated perceive the need for change and act to effect the necessary institutional change, both keeping up with and embodying Progress itself. His insistence on intelligence rather than force as the primary agent of change proceeds from the understanding of intelligence as a social asset with a public origin and function. In this context, history is recast as a process of change which generates change, not only in the details of history, but also in the methods of directing changes in society. We must therefore employ intelligence as a method to improve society, which again is the foundation of Dewey’s Progressivism. The Problem and Promise of the American Political System Dewey concludes his treatise on liberalism and social action with a critique of the American Political System as containing with it both a problem and a promise. On one hand, the American Constitution, grounded as it were in the Earlier Liberalism of the Enlightenment, carries with it an unrealistic assumption of asymmetric change, that the constitution and lawmaking bodies can remain static while the society around it develops well beyond its foundation. Thanks to this dogmatic attachment to Enlightenment liberalism, Dewey sees political institutions in the United States as unusually inflexible, unable to adapt to changing circumstances in the body politic as a whole. This phenomenon is most apparent in the dichotomy of American political institutions—democratic in form, yet plutocratic in substance. Nevertheless, he also sees great promise in the American Political System, for though American political institutions are plagued with the difficulties of their Enlightenment dogmatism, they are still capable of further development. They still contain within them the capacity for constructive social application, the ability to express the Public Will, and are still capable of supplementation by agencies representing economic social interests by dint of their representative character. According to Dewey, this promise offers an opportunity for Renascent Liberalism to emerge as a positive Change Agent. Through “social legislation,” liberalism when expressed using the method of intelligence as expressed by participants in the American Political System will educate the public mind to the possibility of organized social control and translate the organization of ideas into action as a new liberal creed, preserving the values of the earlier liberalism, yet nimble enough to adjust to changing circumstances and successfully counter the threats posed by the illiberal creeds of what would come to be known as authoritarian and totalitarian régimes. Post-Modern Political Thought The next phase in the development of political thought presents considerable difficulty. I refer to this collection of writers as post-modern political thinkers, even though the disciples of some of these thinkers, especially the followers of Leo Strauss, may strongly object on the grounds that they believe either that “post-modern” thinking does not actually exist and what is often called “post-modern” is merely “hypermodern” thinking, whose project and principles they oppose, or else that “post-modern” thinking properly describes only a specific subcategory of recent thought that somehow excludes themselves due to their opposition to that mode of thinking. I counter that “post-modern” thinking properly describes any line of inquiry or critique in which the thinker has moved away from fundamentally Modern questions and into some other domain of inquiry. For Modern thinking is primarily concerned with questions surrounding method and means; Modern political thinking is chiefly preoccupied with How one establishes and maintains Justice in an ordered community, much as Classical political thought primarily focuses on questions of why ordered communities differ, why they conflict and what is the best way to order a community if such a way exists at all. Hence classical political thought contains within it some sense of Modern questioning, especially on the last point, but Modern political thinking, starting especially with Machiavelli, tends to minimize the broader questions of purpose or telos in favor of deep inquiry into how politics comes about, retuning to “why” questions only after much consideration of “how”. By contrast, post-modern political thought, which must also certainly include contemporary political thought, chiefly concerns itself with questions of identity, asking “what” before ever diving into “how” or “why”. We can see this approach in each of the authors outlined in the next two sections: from Nietzsche’s “Use and Abuse of History for Life” to Leo Strauss’ What is Political Philosophy? to the ongoing debate among followers of John Rawls, Robert Nozick and Michael Sandel over the substance of Justice and political community; and even to the likes of Michel Foucault, Martha Nussbaum, Sheldon Wolin and the Berkeley School, as well as the reactionary post-modernism of Julius Evola, René Guénon, Sayyid al Qutb and Alexander Dugin. For all of their profound conflicts with one another, the thinkers contained in these sections do share a common critical thread best embodied in the burning questions of the 20th and 21st Centuries, namely: “What is Wrong with Society?” and “What must we do to fix it?” With respect to the first question, “What is Wrong with Society?” there appears on the surface not much agreement, though once we scratch the surface a consistent pattern does in fact emerge. On the whole, post-modern political thinkers look to features of either 19th, 20th, or 21st Century Western politics and society and perceive that something has gone awry with the civilization as a whole, that certain corrosive or destructive features of our civilization either frustrate the prospect of justice or derail the human experience; that contemporary society contains within it some form of social or political disease that must be identified, treated, and if not completely cured, at least mitigated. As for the second question, “What must we do to fix it?” we find that these post-modern diagnosticians generally fall into one of two distinct camps, namely progressive and reactionary post-moderns. Progressive post-moderns typically acknowledge a debt to modern thinkers, especially historicists and pragmatists such as Hegel or Dewey, and view the modern project of History as not yet finished, hobbled as it were by competing visions of Truth, Justice, and Identity that frustrate the prospect either of universal liberty or social justice. Reactionary post-moderns, on the other hand, often view the entire Modern project as the disease itself, and attempt to revive their own arguably Romanticized visions either of a pre-modern political and social tradition or else an alternative anti-modern political and social order. It is the reactionary post-modern who tends to object most strongly to being called “post-modern” in the first place, despite harboring a fundamental agreement with and employment of certain features of post-modern thought. However, perhaps the most frustrating feature of the post-modern political thinking treated here is that while we may view one writer as “progressive” in one sense, we may view the same writer as “reactionary” in quite another. For these writers frequently influence one another either directly or indirectly, and their positions often defy such facile categorization, where one is wholly progressive and another wholly reactionary. Post-modern political thinking evidently does not work in such clear-cut terms. The astute reader of post-modern thinking will also notice that some of the most significant post-modern thinkers of the 20th Century will be missing from this treatment, especially the likes of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jacques Derrida, Richard Rorty and Jean Baudrillard, and that other thinkers not usually formally associated with post-modernism are included, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and Eric Voegelin. This is largely because the thesis of this section seeks to demonstrate the distinctly political expression of post-modern thought rather than post-modernism in general, and to show that some of post-modern political thought’s most ardent critics, especially Strauss and Voegelin, are themselves participants in post-modern political discourse, albeit participants in denial. Furthermore, the reader will also note an increase in the use of relevant illustrations to punctuate each thinker’s claims. This is no accident; evidence of the influence of post-modern thinking abounds in contemporary popular culture, and in some cases I found it either necessary or beneficial to provide a familiar reference in order either to reify or reinforce the concept these thinkers are communicating. Friedrich Nietzsche and the Horizons of Meaning

Figure 27: Friedrich Nietzsche. We begin our foray into post-modern political thinking with Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Prussian philosopher and cultural critic, who in his writings directly challenged traditional European moral and religious norms. While his principal works, including The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the Genealogy of Morals, Human, All Too Human, and Beyond Good and Evil, all stand out in their own right, it is one of his earlier works, The Use and Abuse of History for Life, that comes closest to an articulation of Nietzsche’s critique of the Modern project of Progress and the Historical Dialectic so frequently embraced in German intellectual circles. According to Nietzsche, “we are all suffering from a consumptive historical fever” implying a fundamental question about the nature of history itself and what purpose it serves. For Nietzsche, one must first clarify two distinct senses in human experience in order to determine the proper place of history in human life. These two senses, the ahistorical and the historical, are essential to the continued health of the individual, a people, and a culture. The ahistorical sense makes it possible to live almost without remembering, just as it is generally impossible to live without forgetting. Given this condition, one must also ask: to what degree does healthy living require the services of history, which in and of itself demands one remember the past? Further, to what degree does a person, a people or a culture demand the services of history? For one can see that with an excess of history, life crumbles and degenerates, so there must of necessity exist some limit to the use of history to promote healthy living, individually, as a people and as a culture. Nietzsche reminds us in The Use and Abuse of History for Life that Living Man has Property in History; that History must therefore serve the Living Man as an active, striving person, as a person who preserves and admires, and as a suffering person in need of emancipation. These qualities correspond to three distinct methods in History: Monumental History, for the striving person, Antiquarian History for the preserving person, and Critical History for the suffering person. Monumental history corresponds to the dedication and memorialization of persons, figures and events through monuments, art and architecture, named locations and throughways. Antiquarian history involves the collection of objects from the past with a view to their preservation and contemplation as evidence of bygone eras or ways of living. Critical history involves an analysis, synthesis and evaluation of what is known about past events, and to allow one to come to terms with those events and free oneself from dependence on or subjugation by their memory. Each of these methods, however, must appear in their proper context, ultimately in service to the Living Person, lest History itself become a “destructive weed.” Ongoing disputes in the United States over what and how History is to be taught, of whether or not to rename schools and streets to honor or remember certain historical figures or else to erase the names of those whose lives and deeds have either fallen out of fashion or are to be impugned; debates over national holidays to commemorate Christopher Columbus or Indigenous Peoples, and disputes over what to do with Confederate Civil War monuments erected during the Jim Crow Era all reek of the tension and misapplication of History as the Universal Science of Becoming, conflating Monumental and Critical History. By the same token, criticizing or trivializing these disputes also indicates a misapplication of History that in any case tears at the consciousness of a Living People or Culture.

Figure 28: Monumental, Antiquarian, & Critical History, respectively. The loss of proper context, Nietzsche claims, is precisely what has become of History as it is embraced by those who pursue History as Science. In his view, History and Life have become disconnected through Science: thanks to the demand that History be a Science, Life no longer rules or controls knowledge of the past; perspectives have shifted such that events of the past seem bereft of meaning, and History has degenerated into a universal science of becoming: Fiat veritas, pereat vita (Let there be Truth, though Life perish). This, for Nietzsche, is the Problem of Our Time. A direct result of the construction of History as a science of becoming is that historical knowledge itself becomes “strange and disconnected” such that the knowledge of discrete historical events is fundamentally in conflict with itself, as in a war of facts. For example, Americans may be taught the moral justification of the war for independence from Britain, but then have to come to terms with the contradictions with that moral claim inherent in the institution of slavery and Indian genocide. Consequently, the principal characteristic of Modern Man is an internal conflict to which nothing outside corresponds, and an outside world to which nothing inside the human psyche corresponds. This internal conflict becomes itself a kind of culture in an Age of History, producing a “weakened personality.” The danger of this Age of History is not only that the contrast between inner and outer experience produces this weakened personality, but also that it engenders a fantasy of the righteousness of the age, disrupting human instinct and leaving human beings infantilized. Attendant to this infantilization is a persistent belief in an “old age of humanity” and that those of us living today are late arrivals, epigones of the Historical process, and all we have left is a mood of irony about the current age and a dangerous cynicism about suffering, memory and endeavor. From this cynical vantage point in an Age of History, man is seen to lack any cardinal differences from beasts. While for Nietzsche this may be true, it is deadly and ripens to a clever egotism which cripples and destroys living. Life becomes bereft of meaning and the person, central to living, is destroyed, having been replaced with “mass”. The Antidote for this poisoning of the person by the Science of History involves a combination of the unhistorical and the super-historical senses. The unhistorical involves the Art and Power of being able to forget, coupled with a power to establish horizons of meaning, a frame of reference which allows the person to derive meaning from his or her life as it is lived. With this sense, people are able to establish for themselves what is meaningful and to develop an understanding that ultimately contributes to their healthy living, instead of wallowing in irony and cynicism about the human condition. Coupled with the unhistorical is the super- historical—that sense that produces both Art and Mythos, those features of human living that give existence an eternal, unchanging character, and which reinforces the frame of reference established through the unhistorical. The consequences of the antidote to History for politics are significant. On one hand, in order to counter the true but deadly doctrine that Man is indistinguishable from Beast, one must construct Truth in the service of Living itself. Philosophy, therefore, becomes an inherently political act: the lover of wisdom must construct Truth for the City in which he lives so that the City itself may truly live. It is through this mechanism that Nietzsche reintroduces the concept of the Noble Lie originally posited by Plato in the Republic, and articulates exactly why those in the City must embrace their City’s Noble Lie. The Founders of the City establish Horizons of Meaning for the people in the City so that they may remember, revere and find freedom from suffering. However, one must note that under no circumstances are citizens actually free in any real sense, for he is only free who establishes horizons of meaning for himself—who constructs, tells and believes his own Noble Lies for the sake of Living as an individual. And as individuals do this, so must people and cultures. Hence, for Nietzsche, the idea of an unyielding objective Truth undermines individual living, as well as that of a people or a culture. Instead, individuals, peoples and cultures must embrace Noble Lies about themselves so that they may continue to live in the world as people who selectively remember so that they strive to liberate themselves from suffering. In this way History loses its character as a destructive Science of Becoming, and assumes a new and more constructive role as an Art of Living. Carl Schmitt and the Concept of the Political

Figure 29: Carl Schmitt The next post-modern political thinker in our survey is Carl Schmitt (1888-1985), a putatively conservative German legal and political thinker whose writing informs a specific strain of reactionary post-modern thought that culminates in the 21st Century social and political movement usually termed the “alt-right.” A student of Max Weber, Schmitt was a harsh critic of the Western liberal democratic tradition, and in the year following the publication of his most influential treatise, The Concept of the Political, he would join and become a prominent figure in and apologist for the Nazis, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. In Schmitt’s writing one will find echoes of Hegel’s State as synthesis of Divine and Individual Wills (particularly in his treatise Political Theology), Weber’s use of charismatic and legal authority, and to some degree Friedrich Nietzsche’s establishment of the Horizons of Meaning, albeit filtered through the heavily edited versions published as The Will to Power by Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and her husband, Bernhard Förster. For Schmitt, the very concept of State presupposes the Political state as a specific entity of people and in cases where a final decision is necessary this State serves as an ultimate authority for that entity of people. The concept of “Political”, however, seems to Schmitt more elusive at first. Typically, the concept is invoked only in polemics or as an antithesis of some other concept, such as politics vs. the economy, politics vs. morality, or politics vs. law. Other definitions of the Political involve the relationship between politics and the State generally. One may justify identifying the affairs of the State with politics whenever the State possesses a monopoly on politics or political activity, as in the 18th Century when the State and Society are not recognized as antithetical to each other, or even in the 19th Century when the State stood above society as a stable and distinct force. However, when the State and politics are not so joined, when the state and society penetrate each other, then the affairs of state become social matters, and social matters become state matters. In this way the Public and Private affairs of people within a state are conflated, and un-differentiable in character. This combination of the Public and Private Schmitt sees as a necessary condition in democratically organized units, and consequently formerly neutral domains of human life lose their neutrality, be they religion, culture, education, or the economy. What results for Schmitt is what he calls “The Total State,” a likely nod to the Italian term “totalitario,” first coined six years before in 1926, and which Hannah Arendt would later explore more deeply in her Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). According to Schmitt, a principal feature of democratic participatory political systems is that, through their blurring of the distinction between state and society, they dispose of all de-politicizations and antitheses, rendering every aspect of human life, whether social, religious, aesthetic or economic, in strict political terms. The Total State can thus be viewed as the realization and expression of the cultural ideas of every party within the State and Society, and the visible vestures of civic life have power only on an ad hoc basis, and like Hegel before him, the full expression of human will is embodied in willful submission to the State. Participation in civic life generates the effect of participation in an Organic State, not unlike the Organic State described by John Dewey in Liberalism and Social Action, but unlike Dewey, who saw the Organic Theory of the State as a problem to be addressed by a Renascent Liberalism, Schmitt sees this Organic Theory of the State as a cure for the disease of Liberalism in democracies.

Figure 30: Schmitt’s view of Democracy When States are above society they may be Universal, but they are by no means Total States, and the Political may remain somehow separate from society. However, the State has the power of making all social goals of humanity its goals as well, which requires all societal spheres to be penetrated by the State itself, in order to win what he calls the “vital energies” of the people for the entirety of the state. In such condition, the Total State may then discover and define specifically political categories, for as the Moral, Aesthetic and Economic domains contain their specific categories, so must the Political, which only the State has the capacity to define. Here is where Schmitt invokes a reductio ad absurdum of sorts into dichotomous binary variables: where the Moral domain categorizes phenomena into Good and Evil, the Aesthetic into Beautiful and Ugly, the Economic into Profitable and Unprofitable, the Political domain has its own dichotomy of Friend and Enemy, never mind that for the other categories he uses adjectives while for the Political he uses nouns. His point is that the Political forms a separate, independent variable from Morality, Aesthetics and Economics, and that they may describe emotional conditions or dispositions towards Friend or Enemy. Friends may be construed as Good, Beautiful or Profitable, while Enemies are deemed Evil, Ugly and Unprofitable. While these associations may occur, it is not necessary to define an Enemy in Moral, Aesthetic or even Economic terms; thus the Political stands apart as an independent variable. What, then, is a Friend or an Enemy, for Schmitt? In either case, he argues that this distinction must be understood as being both concrete and existential--not a metaphor or symbol, nor mixed with any other conceptions. The Friend/Foe dichotomy is to be construed neither as normative nor purely spiritual antitheses; they are visceral, existential, definitive characteristics of one’s political identity. One’s Identity is therefore a function of one’s Enemies. Schmitt’s view of Enemy is not a mere competitor, nor merely a partner of a conflict. It is neither individual nor malleable. The Enemy exists only when one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity; hence, the Enemy is necessarily a Public Enemy. Everything that has a relationship to the collective becomes public, and in an environment where all is political, whether religion, social interaction, aesthetics, or economics, the Enemy and all who comprise its collectivity are also hostile to one’s State. It is not enough to view the Enemy as inimicus; the Enemy comprises a Hostis, and any contact with that Hostis that is not inherently combative is neither permissible nor conscionable. The State, therefore, in as much as it has the power to define the Political, is that organized political entity that decides for itself the Friend/Foe distinction. The State’s distinction of Friend and Foe necessarily encompasses and relativizes all secondary concepts of the Political within the State itself and among those who are its members. All political concepts, images and terms therefore have a polemical meaning—words such as state, republic, society, class, etc.—are only comprehensible in the context of the Friend/Foe distinction determined by the Total State. When Politics emerges as Party Politics within a State, this is a sign of weakness in the State due to antagonisms among domestic parties. Intensification of these internal antagonisms weakens the State’s common Identity, and produces an ever-present possibility of conflict erupting as civil war. It is incumbent on the State to secure the State against such intramural conflicts lest the ever-present possibility of armed combat among parties so erupts. War generally is characterized as armed combat between organized political entities; it follows from Enmity, calls for the Existential negation of the Enemy, which is neither the aim, nor the purpose, nor the content of politics. However, so long as an Enemy exists, War must remain an ever-present possibility, so such enmities cannot be tolerated among the people within a political State towards each other; hence multiple political parties within a State are equally intolerable. The failures of Liberalism, for Schmitt, rest in Liberalism’s making it possible for those not willing to identify with the Friend/Foe distinction defined by the State to be legal citizens of a state. As such, liberal states fail properly to distinguish Friend from Enemy, and utterly fail to provide substantive Identity markers for Friend and Enemy. In this way, Liberal States wither and die, either from de-politicization, internal strife or conquest by external enemies who are more politically united. In order to prevent State death, says Schmitt, one must cure States of the diseases of Liberalism through the establishment and reinforcement of what he calls “sovereign dictatorship.” States must ensure that State boundaries are indistinguishable from citizen boundaries, homogenize the state with a clearly discernible Friend/Foe distinction, express a formal community understanding of who belongs and how, and most importantly, suppress, eliminate, or expel internal enemies of the Friend/Foe distinction the State has established. Without reinforcing political unity through homogeneity, says Schmitt, no State can be legitimate. States must therefore draw clear lines between itself and its enemies through the Jus ad bellum, the Right to War. A state must demonstrate to other states that it exists, that it will defend itself, and all foreign state action must follow the Friend/Enemy distinction the State has established. For Schmitt, all states follow this dictum, and a legitimate international order must therefore follow a plurality of political communities and must recognize the jus ad bellum of each and every one of those political communities. Treaties must only be established with like States, and there can never be peaceful coexistence between hostile neighbors. Given the simplicity of Schmitt’s reductio ad absurdum, it should not come as a surprise that his ideas about Politics, State Identity, and International Order hold a certain appeal, especially to those consistently frustrated with the complexity of the phenomena evident in ordered communities and among nations. One may even claim that it stands up to a popular interpretation of Occam’s Razor, whereby one asserts that the simplest explanation of a phenomenon is usually the correct one. However, we must nevertheless heed William of Ockham’s admonition that while no explanation should be more complicated than necessary, the absolute simplest explanation is not the same thing. Julius Evola and the Revolt against Modernity

Figure 31: Julius Evola Contemporary with Carl Schmitt is the Italian (more specifically Sicilian) Occultist, political writer and spiritualist, Julius Evola (1898-1974). A major advocate of a reactionary movement in Western political thought dubbed Traditionalism by another contemporary, René Guénon, Evola would exert such a strong influence on reactionary political thinking that he has been cited as a touchstone by such political figures as Benito Mussolini and Stephen K. Bannon. Although his writings are often associated with fascism, neo-fascism and the alt-right, Evola himself opposed the Italian Fascists, primarily because he maintained that the Fascists were themselves insufficiently Traditionalist, preoccupied as they were with “mass movement” politics and demagogic appeal to “values” not unlike those of the petty bourgeois they claimed to move against. Instead, like Carl Schmitt, he would identify more closely with the Nazis, particularly Heinrich Himmler and the Waffen-SS during the Second World War. Consequently, today Evola and his ideas, especially those detailed in his principal writings—Revolt Against the Modern World (1934), Men Among the Ruins (1953) and Ride the Tiger (1961)—are readily adopted by neo-Nazis, neo-fascists, hard line Traditionalists and other reactionary post-modern movements. In Revolt Against the Modern World, Evola writes that the concept of the Traditional serves a normative principle of worship, a concept borrowed from Christian theology where worship includes elements not included in Scripture or Holy Writ, as that which Scripture does not forbid it permits. Tradition thus becomes a societal norm, and thus an essential element of any civilization. For Evola, the Traditional includes several indispensable and non-negotiable principles. First among them is Divine Kingship, the idea that God is King of All Creation, and that monarchies constitute an Earthly symbol of that Kingship. Hence, all monarchs must claim and be recognized as possessing a Mandate of Heaven, i.e. that Kings either possess a special appointment by God that entitles them to Rule or else are to be viewed as Gods themselves by their subjects. Bound with this idea is the assertion of Two Distinct Worlds, namely the Earthly and the Transcendent, a concept he most likely borrows from the Theosophy of Russian occultist Helena Blavatsky. Because of the Normative principle of the Absolute Authority of the Godhead, one must approach the Transcendent first, through both action and contemplation in order to mediate between the Earth and the Transcendent. One accomplishes this through Ritual Action and through Faithfulness in Contemplation. The Social foundation of Tradition in the Earthly realm includes Traditional Laws, especially moral imperatives, as well as through a rigid Social structure along the lines of a caste system. The Earthly expression of Divine Kingship is also to be found in the Political as a symbol of that Kingship. Hence, the only legitimate political system for Evola is Empire. Modernity as Corruption In contrast to the Traditional World, Evola places the Modern World, a world in which Traditional Hierarchy and Civilization itself have been wiped out in favor of a Secular, anthropocentric “civilization” where Man is the Measure of All Things, and the Transcendent has been replaced with a technocratic ideology. Hostile to Traditional Civilization, this view ostracizes “every view that is supernatural or extraneous to class interests” and the Individual, unmoored from his place in Civilization, is reduced to a mere “nomad of the asphalt.” With Man the Measure of All Things, a great leveling and standardization of Man corrupts the nobility of his station to the “moral level of America.” For Evola, the Corruption of Civilization as the Modern World is a logical consequence of that second worst of all possible régimes, Democracy. In the mold of Soviet Russia, a leveling of sexes reduces all stations to “comrades”, while in America one sees an equally pernicious leveling he calls “feminist idiocy” where women become men through countless divorces, destruction of the family, alcohol abuse and “chaste immorality.”

Figure 32: Civilization versus the Modern World In Men Among the Ruins, Evola launches into a denunciation of the embrace of Revolution as a disease, that reaction rather than counter-revolution is the only viable response to claims of Revolution, and that a new radical front must emerge to establish clear boundaries between friend and foe, a clear nod to Carl Schmitt two decades before. This radical front must mount a reaction to eliminate the newly emerged disorder that has been produced by the disorder of the Modern World, especially through the embrace of what he calls “revolutionary conservatism.” The principles of this revolutionary conservatism are fourfold: First, revolutionary conservatives must embrace the concepts of The State, imperium (the power to command), and auctoritas (the power not to be questioned); second, they must also devote their actions to Hierarchy, Justice as the right use of power and assignment of both imperium and auctoritas, and the establishment, maintenance, and reinforcement of well-defined and unyielding social classes; third, revolutionary conservatives must emphasize the primacy of the political over social and economic concerns; fourth, revolutionary conservatives must contemplate and act on normative, rather than historical, processes. This mode of thinking demonstrates what Timothy Snyder in The Road to Unfreedom calls “The Politics of Eternity.” Such a system can brook neither revolution nor progress as concepts. Progress, and especially Progressivism, is especially intolerable for Evola, for as he understands Progress it is founded on a mirage generated by the Modern World, a false image of a technological civilization that elevates material and industrial progress above both tradition and human experience, an illusion blind to its negative drawbacks affecting more important domains of human life such as man’s place in the universe and civilization, how he is to act and contemplate the Transcendent Divine. A “civilization” based on Progress or Progressivism is no civilization at all, but rather a phantasm rooted in a vain conceit of human equality. No True State, says Evola, can rest on such illusions. What, then, characterizes a True State? All True States feature a transcendence of their own principles, advancing an Idea of Sovereignty, Authority and Legitimacy through imperium. Further, True States actualize intrusion and manifestation of the Higher Order through Power. In spiritualist imagery characteristic of Gnosticism, Evola then turns to a sexual metaphor for the relationship between a True State and the People subject to it. For this Power is to establish and reinforce the Hierarchy of Divine Kingship whereby the State embodies Power under a masculine aegis, while the People under that Power embody both submission and generation under a feminine aegis; Father Sky dominates Mother Earth. Traditional States disintegrate as a consequence of Modernity, and especially with the development of Liberalism after the French Revolution. Individualism, the essence of Liberalism, conflates the person and the individual, and defends the individual on egalitarian principles which Liberals claim are immortal. Evola rejects the immortality of equality, for it is a principle both of liberalism and democracy, and not a principle of Reality. Equality constitutes for him a logical absurdity, for many implies differentiability; the many cannot be equal to each other if they are differentiable, and therefore must not be construed as equal to each other. Hence the phrase “Equal Justice under Law” constitutes an absurdity, for Justice involves giving each their due, which can never be equal; egalitarian justice is in reality unjust for it treats different people as if they are the same. Personality, Freedom, & Hierarchy By contrast, for Evola it is only through the acknowledgement of Inequality that True justice is possible. For Inequality transcends quantity and posits quality. The Person is an individual, differentiated through his qualities, his face, his proper nature, all of which makes him fundamentally unequal to others, and that if a Person is to have his Dignity, one must admit differences of degree of his qualities. True Justice, therefore rests in the domain of Personhood: it attributes to each and every degree a different right, a different freedom, depending on these differences of quality. Without differentiation, respect for the Person remains mere superstition, and true Justice, where each is given his due, it impossible. There is nothing in Personhood on which to base a universal right, and he invites the reader to remember Plato’s Guardians from the Republic, the ones who hold the highest responsibility to see that justice prevails. While equality may prevail among the Guardians, and perhaps within the other social classes, that equality can only exist among peers and therefore cannot extend beyond their ken. As for Freedom, it must be understood and defended in the same manner as the “Person”: every person must enjoy only the freedom he deserves. This Freedom is measured by the stature and dignity of his Person or function, or as he states “Libertas summis infinisque aequanda: Freedom equally distributes above and below.” Freedom depends on one’s desserts in the State; general, abstract “freedom” is as fictional as “equality”. For like equality, freedom serves as a revolutionary weapon certain classes use to undermine other classes, and it must therefore be understood in different and differentiable senses. In the first sense, “freedom to do” involves an absence of bonds, which is of course impossible in a context of equality. In the second sense, “freedom for doing” involves actualizing one’s potential within a specific political context. This distinction in some sense echoes the “negative” and “positive” conceptions of freedom prominent in other debates about the concept of civil liberties, and as such it is tempting to link Evola to more familiar debates in American civic discourse about the State’s impersonal role in preserving both “freedom from” and “freedom to” within a civil society. However, Evola turns in an entirely different direction, asserting that the Traditional point of view places Man over Society, that everything deemed “Social” is merely connected with means, not ends, and that society is a mere background to the Person. Modern thinking, characterized by an idolatry of the State is not a part of the Traditional political view, and that an impersonal State is an aberration of the True State. True States are composed of people who are persons, each with a different rank, different freedom, and different rights within the social hierarchy. These persons, with their difference, enable the establishment of a True State: Anti- liberal, anti-democratic, an Organic Whole in which each person receives his proper due. Hence Evola, not unlike Schmitt before him, espouses an Organic Theory of the State—a State which promotes the perfection of the human being as a Person through Individuation and progressive differentiation. Everything under the aegis of “humanitarianism” or natural law he takes to be inferior to this Organic State, for man as “Man” is inferior to man belonging to a given nation or society, which is in turn inferior to man as “Person”. In Evola’s Organic Theory of the State, the True State must reflect the Hierarchy of absolute Personhood, and its political order must arouse and nourish the individual’s disposition to act, think, live, struggle and sacrifice himself for something beyond his mere individuality. In other words, the person is a mere element, an organ of the True State, which by now resembles Schmitt’s “Total State”. However, in an effort to distinguish his view of the True (Organic) State from totalitarianism, Evola first dismisses “anti-totalitarianism” as a confused cry of democracies, avers that positive meaning can be found in totalitarianism, and that the Organic State includes that positive meaning. Organic States possess a center, an idea that shapes the domains of life contained with it; it ignores division and “autonomization”, and every part of the Organic State performs its function, enjoying an intimate connection with the whole. René Guénon and the Mandate of Tradition

Figure 33: René Guénon. Contemporary with Julius Evola and Carl Schmitt is the 20th Century French Gnostic thinker René Guénon (1886-1951), whose political writings include such works as Spiritual Authority & Temporal Power (1929) and The Reign of Quantity & the Signs of the Times (1945), but especially relevant for the purposes of our inquiry is his post-World War II echo of Evola’s indictment of Modernity titled The Crisis of the Modern World (1946). Worthy of note is that in 1942 Carl Schmitt described Guénon as “the most interesting man alive”, and Guénon maintained an active correspondence with Evola, though he remained critical of certain features of Evola’s involvement in politics. Nevertheless, as we shall see, Guénon’s thought in Crisis of the Modern World bears a strong resemblance to Evola’s own work before the War, and it is likely that Guénon actually influenced Evola through their correspondence. Also of particular importance is Guénon’s preoccupation with spiritualism and Eastern esoteric thought, in particular as it relates to his membership in the Gnostic Church and his subsequent conversion to Sufi Shadhili Islam, the sect to which another figure in our survey, Sayyid al- Qutb, would belong. The primary focus of Gnosticism as a metaphysical orientation is a claim to special occult knowledge about the nature of the Universe, God and Man that is not available to those uninitiated in its rites and practices. Although Gnosticism can trace its roots all the way back to the Mystery Cults of the ancient Middle East, the 20th Century revival of Gnostic thinking seems largely to follow from the writings of the previous century’s spiritualist and Occultist thinkers, especially the Theosophy of Helena Blavatsky, coupled with a fascination with other “non-Western” spiritual traditions, especially those of ancient Persia and the Indian subcontinent. Manvantara and the Kali-Yuga Guénon is no exception, though he does struggle to shake his own Gnostic ideas loose from early 20th Century Theosophy. Instead, Guénon’s Gnosticism is informed by an attachment to the Advaita Vedanta school of Hindu philosophy. In Crisis of the Modern World, he writes of a coming End of the World, specifically an end to Western Civilization in its present form, as part of a cyclical pattern of human experience called the Manvantara, and that Western Civilization in its present form embodies the decadent stage or “turning” as a Dark Age, which he specifically calls the Kali-Yuga, in clear reference to the Mahayuga Cycle or “Wheel of Time” described in Sri Yukteshwar’s Holy Science (1894), though Yukteshwar places the present day in Dwapara, rather than Kali, Yuga. It should not surprise the reader to find that certain late 20th and 21st Century writings, especially Neil Howe and William Strauss’ The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy (1997) and Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (2018) borrow heavily from this same Gnostic tradition.

Figure 34: Traditional representations of the Wheel of Time: Circle, Caracol, and Swastika In the Kali-Yuga, all of the truths and super-human wisdom formerly available to all have been made hidden, and the people born into this age are confused and adrift, blindly wandering among the ruins of the previous age and unable to see that they are in such spiritual poverty. However, the darkness of the Kali-Yuga Guénon describes is not necessarily universal, for in this age a gulf exists between East and West as civilizations in conflict with each other. In the East, normal, traditional civilizations prevail, and have equivalence among one another; in the West, on the other hand, civilization has become abnormal and perverted to where all of the traditional civilizations save Islam are utterly inaccessible to the Westerner. This is likely the reason Guénon would abandon Catholicism and join Sufi Shadhili Islam as ‘Abd al Wāḥid Yaḥyà. For Guénon a critical need exists in the West to restore a Traditional Civilization and begin a new cycle of the Manvantara. However, Western “Traditionalism”, grounded as it were in Blavatsky’s Theosophy, utterly fails to incorporate a true Traditional Outlook, and as such produces only a pseudo-traditionalism which can only extend and exacerbate the Dark Age. At the heart of the conflict between Traditional and Anti-Traditional Civilizations for Guénon is a conflict between the two organizing principles of Contemplation and Action. These two principles are not necessarily irreconcilable, but on an individual level, only one must necessarily predominate, and as such they appear to be in opposition, despite their complementarity. For Contemplation and Action are equally necessary elements in human life, and this complementarity stands as a deeper and truer principle of civilization, reconciling any perceived opposition. In the present Age, Action is preferred by the West, contemplation by the East. The West, with its preoccupation with clever machines, its embrace of innovation, and its illusions of Progress, stands squarely in favor of constant Movement and Change for their own sake; this is a sign of the Kali-Yuga in which the world is enshrouded. Guénon sees a parallel in science in the practice of pure research, or research for its own sake. Consequently one finds no hope of stability in the West, for contemplation, long preferred by the Ancients (here Guénon refers especially to Aristotle), is superior to action, and to place action superior to contemplation produces a disorder of civilization much as Plato describes disorder of the soul if one places spiritedness or appetite superior to reason. The proper order of the soul of civilization, for Guénon, has been abandoned by the West.

Figure 35: Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire: Destruction: a visual representation of the Kali Yuga By contrast, intellectual intuition, not empirical change, is the root of everything in Traditional Civilizations, whether they are social institutions, familial structures, laws, or sciences. For Guénon, civilizations endure only in relation to absolute or principal knowledge—indeed they are dependent on this principal knowledge accessible through intellectual intuition, and so long as one remains dependent on this knowledge as absolute, it will prolong and preserve the civilization, which in turn reflects the knowledge received. Hence Guénon perceives two radically opposed views of science. On one hand rests Traditional Science: sacred, unified, and comprehensive, proceeding from the absolute knowledge reflected in the traditional civilization itself. On the other hand squirm the Modern Sciences: profane, fragmented, and material, dependent entirely on empirical observation without intellectual intuition and cutting people off entirely from the possibility of contemplation. The Profane Cult of Individualism A social sign of this Profanity for Guénon is the Cult of Individualism, the negation of any principle higher than individuality. This cult is the determining cause of the decline of the West, for it develops the lowest possibilities of mankind and stands as the antipodes of genuine spirituality and intellectuality. The consequence of this pernicious cult of the individual is a pervasive intellectual anarchy, where true Metaphysics are foreign to modern philosophy. A sign of this is the West’s preoccupation with matters of “intellectual property” and abandon the possibility of any one person’s claims having any connection whatsoever to Truth. For in Guénon’s view, modern philosophers instead seek only to find new errors in their search for what they call epistemological “systems”, ignoring the larger and truer cosmology or ontology that True Metaphysics enables. By contrast, in a Traditional civilization it is inconceivable that a man can claim an idea as his own. To do so would reduce the idea itself to mere fantasy, for true ideas belong to all who are capable of understanding, and false ideas have no credit in their invention. In fact, no True Idea can ever be new, for Truth is independent of us; it is for us only to recognize Truth when we see it, and outside Truth is only Error. This Idea is the guiding intellectual intuition behind Religion, that orientation to Truth that binds a civilization together. Religion is therefore a part of Science, given its attachment to Truth independent of the Individual. Consequently, Individualism is both Anti-Traditional and Anti-Religion, for it rejects anything higher than the Individual, and any putative “religion” that elevates the individual is also anti-tradition and anti-religion. This is precisely Guénon’s view of the “free-criticism” inherent in the Protestant Reformation and all that it spawned. Protestant Christianity, with its spirit of free criticism, the “priesthood of all believers,” the emphasis on free inquiry and a “personal relationship” with the Divine as an individual, elevates the individual and undermines Traditional Religion. That which is Anti- Traditional is necessarily Anti-Religion; hence all Protestant sects are Anti-Religion. For Guénon, Roman Catholicism stands alone as the sole Traditional Religion of the West; hence, no one in the West who is not Catholic can honestly call himself “religious”. However, the West in the Kali-Yuga experiences a Social Chaos that blinds people to the Truth of Traditional Civilization. In Modern civilization, no one occupies his proper, natural place. Instead, the part anyone plays is based on what appears to be chance, if by chance we are to understand a fundamental ignorance of causes. In such condition, the negation of social hierarchy produces a false equality where memory has replaced intelligence and quantity has replaced quality, reinforced by the False Dogmas of Equality and Progress, not true Ideas at all but false “ideas”, for they share nothing in common with the intellectual Order. Equally illusory is the competence of putative specialists, for this competence is but a natural outcome of the democratic conception of power emanating from below, and corollary to the exclusion of all real competence. Real competence belongs only to a Few, and democracy stands are mere sophistry, for the Greater cannot come from the Lesser, Higher cannot proceed from Lower, and when temporal power breaks from the spiritual authority of the Higher, disruption of the Natural Hierarchy ensues. For Guénon, Easterners are entirely justified in their reproach of the West. Its modern materialism, the primacy of the material being the essence of profane “sciences”, rejects any science not concerned with material things. Modern sciences are necessarily materialistic and atheistic, where no difference exists between conceiving and imagining, nothing exists but what can be seen or touched. This produces a tyranny of the countable, where “reality” is limited to the sensible order and indifference to the Truth begets a soulless, ethical, moral and spiritual bankruptcy called pragmatism. The Resurrection of Civilization in the West According to Guénon this Modern Confusion may have originated in the West, but is starting to encroach upon the East, for some Easterners, particularly in places like Japan and Korea, have forsaken Tradition and have been led astray by the teaching of European and American universities. Traditional Civilization’s people, exemplified by Traditional Easterners, make no effort to become known; Westerners, on the other hand, make every effort to become known, demonstrating the fundamentally satanic character of Western civilization. This is the essence of the Kali-Yuga in the West, the Dark Age which must come to pass before the new age can begin. If Civilization is to resurrect in the West, it depends entirely on the role of the Elite. The Elite still exist in Eastern Traditional Civilization, and they are necessary for safeguarding the “ark” of Tradition. Unfortunately, in Guénon’s view the Elite no longer exist in the West, and so Western Civilization itself must necessarily disappear. Although some in the West have found guidance in Eastern traditions, this is mere prolongation of Eastern elites, and ultimately cannot restore Traditional Western Civilization. Resurrection of Civilization in the West utterly depends on the preservation of the doctrine of Western Traditional Civilization, embodied by the Universal Western Tradition of Catholicism, whose Elite preserved Western Tradition after the fall of Rome and whose Elite must assume the same role in the face of the Modern Confusion. One could therefore characterize Guénon’s resurrected Western Traditional Civilization as a Universal Catholic theocratic dictatorship of sorts, or else a system whereby absolute monarchs hold sway over realms as vassals to a Catholic domain of Christendom. Nevertheless, Guénon would apparently despair that this was even possible, and he would eventually abandon the West himself, convert to Islam, the only traditional civilization accessible to a Westerner in his view, and almost certainly influence the next reactionary post- modern thinker in our survey, the Egyptian educator Sayyid al Qutb. Sayyid al-Qutb and Social Justice against Ignorance

Figure 36: Sayyid al-Qutb Sayyid al-Qutb (1906-1966) was an Egyptian educator and theorist of Sufi Shadhili Islam, the same sect to which Réne Guénon had converted. In the 1950s al-Qutb had become a leader in the movement known as the Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni Islamist organization founded in 1928 by another Egyptian schoolteacher, Hassan al-Banna. While Islamism as an ideology has earlier roots, al-Qutb stands out as one of its principal thinkers, through writings such as Social Justice in Islam (1949), The America I have Seen (1950), and Milestones (1964), written two years before his execution in Egypt in 1966. Social Justice in Islam In Social Justice in Islam, al Qutb begins from a position not unlike Guénon’s Kali-Yuga in Crisis of the Modern World. However, where Guénon writes from a position informed by his fascination with a Hindu school of thought, al-Qutb writes from the perspective of a devout Muslim. For al-Qutb, the world exists as a new Jahiliyyah, a state of ignorance and heathenism. Political systems in the Islamic world are comparable to pre-Islamic Arabia, ignorant of the social demands of Islam, an ignorance fostered and protected by an authoritarian state. By contrast he views Islam as a social, political and economic totality, akin to Carl Schmitt’s view of the Total State in the Concept of the Political and Political Theology. This totality demands comprehensive implementation and requires both that all policies and practices within the state be consistent with the Qur’an and a unification of faith with practical life. Faith in God (Allah) is prerequisite to freedom of conscience, and freedom of conscience is impossible unless one submits to the Will of God and lives according to God’s Demands. Islamic Social Justice he views as a necessary component of the principle of Zakat, or charity, one of the Pillars of Islam. It asserts the importance of human dignity to the political order and requires the negation of all forms of oppression; Social Justice in Islam cannot tolerate discrimination by race, by sex, by wealth, or age. All are equally subject to the Will of God, as embodied by the institution of ‘Ubudiyyah: no slavery to anyone except to God. As with Schmitt, this subjection demands mutual responsibility between a man and his own person, between a person and his family, between an individual and society, between one community and other communities, and across generations. American Inhumanity It is precisely this expression of Zakat which is missing from Western civilization, which al- Qutb would pejoratively describe in his treatment of the post-World War II environment of Greeley, Colorado, in The America I have Seen (1949). For al-Qutb, Civilization is judged by its distance from the world of beasts and things. America, he asserts, demonstrates a mad contradiction: it stands at the peak of technological achievement, yet remains mired in the depths of primitiveness. By contrast, Man must exhibit a balance in his compositions grounded in historical development, his belief structured in terms of Nature through Myth and Legend, in matters of Religion through lights and revelations, in Art through colors, tunes and rhythms, and in science through the hope of human fulfillment, tamed by religion, edified by art, his behavior pruned by convocation, and shaped by history. The American exhibits none of these. Born with Science, the American Man believes in applied science alone. He sees Nature as an untamed stubborn virgin to be conquered and tamed. His discontent with the Old World has brought him to the New, and those discontented with the Old World were predominately covetous malcontents seeking freedom from rigid traditions, both onerous and sound. These men sought wealth by any means and pleasure in the largest possible measure. Along with them came adventurers and criminals, seeking wealth, pleasure and adventure, as well as those bound to labor for construction and production. This is the deformed birth of the American Man: a combination of entanglements that encouraged the primitive and ignored elevated characteristics of humanity. Coupled with applied science, which has no role in the field of human values or in the world of the soul or feelings, the American emerges as a primitive man armed with science that narrows his horizons, shrinks his soul, and decreases his place at the global feast. Evidence of the American character as that of a beast in in industrialized jungle abounds for al- Qutb, especially in the American preference for violent sport such as American football and boxing, where he could see American spectators express a beastly excitement at the spectacle of violent competition. Warriors by nature, Americans’ blood runs with combat, expressed as it were in war against individual factions as well as against the original inhabitants, the Native Americans; this bellicose nature is further expressed in the Anglo-Saxon war against Latinos, then against the mother country of England, and the war of North versus South for economic domination in the US Civil War. The American isolation would end with the US entry into World War I, and the world would come to know Americans’ hunger for war in both World War II and Korea; surely a Third World War is not far behind, given the American character. Indeed, says al-Qutb, any idea of Americans as a peace-loving people must be dismissed as an historical absurdity, for the facts demonstrate entirely otherwise. Even in the 21st Century one may bear witness to the American preoccupation with violence as exhibited in its murder and assault rates, mass shootings, and the continued popularity of violent sports and action films.

Figure 37: The American Character on display, according to Sayyid al-Qutb Furthermore, the American view of Death as al-Qutb understands it stems from the American view of weakness as a crime undeserving of compassion, and that morals and rights are mere illusions which the American cannot taste. Death for the American is construed as a crime: “Be strong and you will have everything; be weak and there is no place for you among the living.” Additionally, Americans joke about the injured: he relates an incident he witnessed at George Washington Hospital in Greeley, Colorado where an employee had been critically injured in an elevator, his head crushed under the weight of the car. The American patient laughed, mocking the injury and other Americans joined in. He saw others laughing beside the corpse of a loved one, and describes how American women carouse while their husband’s corpse lies at home in preparation for burial. Another incident tells of an American widow complaining about the price of a funeral, with no sign of distress over her husband’s death. Her excuse: “He was ill! He had fallen sick more than three months before his death!” Al-Qutb contrasts the American attitude with that of birds, which he judges more humane, for even chickens gather silently to mourn the slaughtered among them, and ravens know “sadness,” “emotion,” and “kinship”, gathering in circles shrieking and wailing until they carry the body away. In this sense, Americans are even more savage than birds; the sanctity of Death is a natural instinct which is utterly absent in the American experience, whose foundation is clearly monetary and material matters, as well as sheer physical gratification. What, then is to be said of American religion? For al-Qutb, Americans are obsessed with building churches, yet few attend on Sundays; attendance appears only to rise on general holidays, and even then American thinking, feeling and manners are far from religious. Indeed, it seems that for Americans, churches are built for everything but worship; they are for carousal and enjoyment, and attendance occurs out of social tradition. This sentiment appears to be shared by American ministers and churchmen, for churches compete with one another through clubs and Attractions; with putative houses of worship more resembling dance halls and amusement parks than temples of spiritual contemplation. For example, al-Qutb observed one church in Greeley put on a social gathering for members of a Church Club, of which membership was of vital importance. This social event had something of a circus feel, a dance floor atmosphere full of desire with the sexes mixed as they were, all encouraged by the church Father who puts on a song which can only be interpreted as an invitation to sexual abandon: “Baby It’s Cold Outside.” For the American, Ends justify Means, unequivocally and bluntly. For Al Qutb, Americans are characterized by a shocking beastliness in all they do. Human society struggles to build sexual mores against the coarseness of sensation and the gloominess of impulse, in order to let genuine relationships emerge, along with strong ties around those relationships. Americans, by contrast, have none of those; their relationships are based on bodily needs and temptations alone. Modesty abandoned, boys obtain submission from girls through their bodily strength and husbands obtain rights which disappear the moment they fail to “perform” to the wives’ satisfaction. Girls are reduced to curvaceous temptresses and boys to strapping chests or “ox-muscled” cowboys. The fascination with physical strength is indicative of American vitality; if tamed, says al-Qutb, it could produce great art and beauty, but the circumstance which formed the American character prevents this ever from happening, and all we are left with is eye-popping sex. Sexual relations conform to the law of the jungle, and some Americans even wax philosophical about the disconnection between sex and morality. Americans are a nervous people, occupied with work and fighting to relax, for nothing in America indicates relaxation of any kind. If one is ever to call Americans free, that freedom must only be freedom from all Humanity, for freedom separates Man from Beast. Americans are at their core Beasts tied as it were to their unrestrained sexual desire. This is evident even in American “Art”, for Americans prefer the music of savage bushmen to real music. American “music” is characterized by noise and the abundance of animal noises, their singing crude screams that ring in the ears to an unbearable degree. Strangely though, opera, symphony and ballet performances are crowded and one must pay high prices to reserve seats, often days in advance. This despite cinema being the art of the masses, and as such dependent more on technical skill than artistic spirit, for American cinema is characterized by simplistic storylines, primitive emotions and special visual tricks: technically brilliant, but otherwise artless. This Artlessness extends into all other American “arts”. In the visual arts artists are mere technicians, distinguished for an almost slavish representation of natural scenery but praised primarily for skill and nothing more. Clothing is a cacophony of screaming loud colors and elaborate large patterns, and American tattoos are more garish than those of Gypsies or Central African tribesmen. American food involves strange combinations of sugar and salt, with salted meat, boiled vegetables, and gravies composed of fat, vinegar, flour, broth, apples, salt, pepper, sugar and water, an undifferentiated mass of conflicting tastes perhaps best described derisively as “glop.” Even the American’s haircut lacks even the remotest sign of civilization or humanity: “Anything that requires a touch of elegance is not for the American.” What, then, does al-Qutb make of America’s Role in the World? In the realm of practical matters, scientific research, the field of organization, improvement, production and management, America dominates, for these are all areas that require mind power and muscle. However, the American is naïve in matters of spirit and emotion and must be repudiated in these matters. The American virtues are of the brain and hand, of production and organization, not of taste or sensibility. If Humanity is to learn from the American it is that it must add strength to American strength and acknowledge it would commit a grave error if it makes America the exemplar of feelings and manners. Social Justice against American Inhumanity Al-Qutb carries his view of America as a spiritual cesspool and the American Man as the inhuman embodiment of Nietzsche’s “Last Man” through to his last and most radical major work, Milestones (1964), and arguably the touchstone for radical Islamism in the 21st Century. Repeating the idea of the Islamic world in Jahiliyyah, al Qutb indicts the influence of the West, and particularly the American view of the West, as responsible for this ignorance. Additionally, however, he finds both Christians and Jews guilty of abetting this Jahiliyyah by granting temporal authority to make laws, requiring obedience to those temporal laws. This makes them guilty of idolatry, for obedience and worship are synonymous in al-Qutb’s view of Islam as a Total State. In Milestones he demands all Muslims follow Shari’ah, in like manner as Schmitt demanded all within the Total State to obey it. Shari’ah needs no human authority, for God’s law is unambiguous; a command is given, and there is nothing but to hear it. Anyone who serves someone other than God is outside God’s religion. Al-Qutb’s solution to the problem of American-inspired Jahiliyyah is a dedicated Vanguard not unlike Guénon’s Elite in Traditional Civilization. This Vanguard must first engage in what he calls “liberation of the self”: They must separate themselves from the Jahili system by ignoring the learning and culture of non-Muslims. They must separate themselves from non-Muslim friends and family and look only to the Qur’an as “instruction for obedience and action.” Second, they must preach, persuading others to become “true Muslims” in a manner not unlike Nietzsche’s Übermensch preaches the new Horizons of Meaning in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Third, they must engage in what he calls The Movement: abolish the organizations and authorities of the Jahili system first by removing the political power and then extend to the whole human environment. However, the Vanguard of this Movement must understand that their Supremacy and superiority on the road to renewal of Social Justice in Islam requires discipline and preparation, possibly involving a life until death spent in poverty, difficulty, frustration, torment and sacrifice.

Figure 38: Sayyid al Qutb (right) in prison. At any moment the Vanguard must prepare for the possibility of death at the hands of the Jahili, but also remember that the world is not a place of reward. Rewards are in Heaven by the Will of God alone. Until then is the necessary suffering through liberation of the self, preaching and the Movement. This radical Movement, with its asceticism, its action to remove ignorance and establish a system of Islamic Social Justice most closely resembles an effort that would be described in detail by another critic in our survey, Eric Voegelin, as “Immanentizing the Eschaton,” a fundamentally Gnostic impulse to bring about a “Heaven on Earth” which in Voegelin’s view can only result in a Living Hell. Yet it is one of his colleagues to whom we must turn next, for his reactionary post-modern thinking stands as a bridge between the totalitarianism of Schmitt and his disciples and a distinctly American response to the putative Inhumanity of its own people. Leo Strauss and the Politics of Suspicion

Figure 39: Leo Strauss That man is Leo Strauss (1899-1973), a German-born American political thinker and himself a one-time student of Carl Schmitt. Influenced by the phenomenological writings of Edmund Husserl as well as Nietzsche and others, Strauss was a member of what came to be known as the “University in Exile”: a loose collection of academics, intellectuals, and researchers of German Jewish descent who managed to flee Nazi Germany before the Holocaust began in earnest and find their way to the New School for Social Research in New York. In Strauss’ case it was Schmitt himself who recommended he continue his studies in the United States after reading his treatment of the English legal philosopher Thomas Hobbes. A highly influential yet controversial writer, his major contributions include Natural Right and History (1950), Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952), Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958), What is Political Philosophy? (1959) and The City and Man (1964). In his writing Strauss calls attention to what he believes are major tensions in politics: Politics and Philosophy (action and contemplation, much like Evola and Guénon before him), Reason and Revelation (Itself a principal tension explored in Medieval philosophy), Ancients and Moderns (a tension originally drawn from Machiavelli’s juxtaposition in The Prince and the Discourses on Livy), and Facts and Values (a principal tension evident in other post-modern writers such as Jürgen Habermas’ facts and norms, Michel Foucault’s competing narratives of power, and John Ralston Saul’s normative civilizational blindness). For our purposes we should begin with a consideration of his 1952 treatise, Persecution and the Art of Writing. This work stands as the foundation for Strauss’ method of reading texts, and sets up what can best be described as the Politics of Suspicion. In Persecution and the Art of Writing, Strauss argues that freedom of public discussion is often limited to what those in power want discussed. Most accept the official orthodoxy, but others do not. This limited freedom of public discussion affects how one writes in these contexts. Writers still want to communicate their ideas, especially to their allies and those who may be amenable to their thoughts. As a result, writers, especially political and philosophical writers, hide their messages in plain view. Strauss is likely drawing on his reading of Machiavelli’s Prince or possibly Hobbes’ Leviathan here, for clear evidence of this practice appears in both their writings, and Machiavelli himself explicitly writes of the careful manipulation of appearances versus the effectual truth. For Strauss, most writing contains two distinct messages: an exoteric message and an esoteric one. The exoteric message is gained from a surface reading of the text. A superficial message, it is intended for the many, for those whom Machiavelli called the “vulgar… (those) taken in by the appearance and the outcome of a thing.” This message requires the reader to take the author’s writing at face value and nothing more. It also tends to focus on Action rather than Contemplation, on Politics rather than Philosophy; however, it may still incorporate both, albeit superficially. The deeper, more controversial message is what he calls the “esoteric” message. Intended for “those few who understand”—Strauss’ analog to Guénon’s Elite and al Qutb’s Vanguard—it requires what he calls a “close reading” of the author’s work, and may require a similar reading of the totality of an author’s work. The careful reader comes to know universal and eternal truths by discerning esoteric, rather than exoteric messages. Careful reading requires Contemplation before Action, yet, like the exoteric message, it too may incorporate both. Exoteric messages are grasped in a moment and acted upon; esoteric messages are digested through deliberation and contemplation, guiding action only in the long term. In this sense philosophy becomes an inherently political act, much as Nietzsche suggests in The Use and Abuse of History for Life. For Strauss, nothing is as it appears to be when it comes to political and philosophical writing; this is perhaps a reason why Strauss’ thinking has gained currency among American conspiracy theorists. One should take note that the specific language of exoteric and esoteric messages or teaching is explicitly shared by certain Mystic traditions, especially Gnostics, Kabbalists and Theosophists, in order to explain their variance from mainstream religious traditions. In these traditions, True Knowledge is available only to a select few who understand and have crossed the bridge from the Immanent to the Transcendent through a process of Initiation, and is otherwise hidden from the Uninitiated through the use of comforting Noble Lies that maintain and reinforce the community as a whole, but make possible the process of Initiation. One can find this theme as far back as Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, recurrent in Machiavelli’s “three kinds of brains” and his emphasis on appearances vs. the effectual truth; Hobbes’ anti-Puritan subtext using overtly Puritan language; and extended into Nietzsche’s Übermensch in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883) and Helena Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion and Philosophy (1888).

Figure 40: Exoteric and Esoteric messages in World Religions: Appearances vs. Effectual Truth In an earlier work, Natural Right and History (1950), Strauss explores another tension in Western Civilization, that of Reason and Revelation, and ties that tension to Philosophy and Politics through the development of the concept of Right. In particular, were we to apply Strauss’ guide to reading texts to Natural Right and History, his exoteric purpose is to address the question of Natural Right, namely: Does the Right/Wrong distinction in ethics and politics have a foundation in reality? First he explores the idea of Nature itself, saying that one comprehends Nature from two distinct perspectives, specifically the Hellenic and the Hebraic views of Nature. In the Hellenic view, the pursuit of knowledge of the Nature of Things leads to philosophy (consider the Milesian School from “Classical Political Thought”, above), and knowledge of Right is a component of wisdom, learned through reason. On the other hand, Hebraic Nature depends on the Divine as revealed to man in the world; the Hebrew Bible contains no concept of “Nature” as such. Only the Word of God stands in place of Nature, and the knowledge of Right is therefore a Gift of God through Revelation. By the 17th Century, says Strauss, the idea of Natural Right yields to Natural Law, in an effort to reconcile the Hellenic and Hebraic interpretations of Nature. Western philosophy, from Plato to Hegel, also sought to address certain fundamental political problems, but philosophy and politics have different and not necessarily compatible ends. The ends of politics are the Good of the City, while the ends of philosophy are the Love of Wisdom and the Truth about the Nature of Things. Thus politics and philosophy are necessarily linked, but also hold each other in suspicion; those who seek to act for the Good of the City necessarily distrust those who seek to contemplate the True, the Good, and the Beautiful Itself. Classical philosophy explains this tension in terms of a fundamental distinction that exists between Nature and Convention. What is Right is derived from Nature itself, despite the appearances of differences through convention; Natural Right enables the judgement of cities and laws, and philosophy is understood as the search for Truth beyond all convention. Although politics and philosophy are in tension with each other, knowledge of Truth through philosophy must inform politics if that politics is to be deemed just. This is the Ancient view of Natural Right. Modern Natural Right, for Strauss, chiefly comes through the writings of Hobbes and Locke. Hobbes’ view elevates the material, mechanical and mathematical, where the moral principles of politics rest on a Machiavellian “realism”: politics emerge out of a desire to separate human life from Nature out of fear of death. Locke’s view sees the law of reason as the law of nature, which natural reason cannot grasp. Man’s natural desire for happiness and avoidance of misery leads him into a politics where the Right of nature is more fundamental than the law of nature and natural right becomes separated from natural duty. According to Strauss, this separation leads to a transformation from Natural Right to “natural rights”, and makes Modern Natural Right vulnerable to the politics of suspicion. This suspicion is what Strauss calls the “Crisis of Modernity” in an apparent echo of René Guénon. With Jean-Jacques Rousseau we find reason itself held in suspicion by passion, where Nature and Passion exist in opposition to the City and Virtue. The Law of Nature in this view is not a law of reason, and Science, guided by Reason and empirically searching for the Nature of Things, is ultimately incompatible with Virtue, a social Convention generated by the City. According to Strauss, Rousseau’s conception of Natural man is pre-moral and pre-rational: one cannot look to nature for Right or Wrong, and Man ultimately defines his humanity through convention, a similar claim to Sayyid al-Qutb. For Rousseau, however (at least according to Strauss), Humanity is the product of an historical process: the process of creating freedom, goodness, or virtue in the General Will, and constructing freedom as obedience to the law one creates for oneself. This process culminates in a perfect knowledge of true public right, but one must nevertheless concede that much of what we call “history” is in fact accidental, or perhaps like Nietzsche suggests, monumental, antiquarian, or critical. What is Strauss’ solution to the Crisis of Modernity brought about by Rousseau’s impeachment of Right as entirely conventional and bound by accidental historical forces? For this he turns to Edmund Burke, the late 18th Century political commentator and Member of the British Parliament representing Dublin in Ireland. Burke’s alternative to Rousseau involves an attempt to return to a pre-modern view of Natural Right, guided as it were by a devotion to the British Constitution, and integrating the language of Modern Natural Right into a Thomistic framework. Within this view, one construes civil society as a necessary system of interdependence where no one is truly independent of each other. In this condition, civil society is made to protect the rights of man, such as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but happiness only appears as a function of virtue within the civil society. In this way, human will is placed under the dominion of reason, prudence and virtue, and the passions, championed by Rousseau, are themselves to be held in suspicion. In this way the foundation of governments rest in the provision of wants and conformity to duties within the civil society, rather than in the “imaginary rights of man”. This foundation depends on reason and foresight, which are not necessarily available to the many, but to those “few who understand,” since reason itself is not naturally accessible to all. Hence, were we to apply Strauss’ method of critique, we may conclude that his esoteric message involves a call for a kind of intellectual elite directing civil society and governments to lead citizens toward a kind of virtue which they themselves set for the city, and against the defects characteristic of the “Modern”. Throughout his life, Strauss would deny being a philosopher, but only a “scholar”. Yet, in his 1959 treatise What Is Political Philosophy? he explores more directly the tension between politics and philosophy, and more fundamentally the tension between “Facts” and “Values”. Strauss opens this treatise with a consideration that political philosophy is a subset of political thought that attempts to replace opinion with knowledge about the nature of political things, and that political thought is generally indifferent to opinion versus knowledge. This stands in sharp contrast to “political science” which presents itself in two markedly different ways, reinforcing the tension between “Ancients” and “Moderns”. In Classical political science, one sees a discipline concerned with knowledge, understanding wisdom and skill in political matters; it is the science of statesmanship, and is as Aristotle said an “architectonic” science concerned with the Good in, by and for ordered communities. Modern political science, on the other hand, is a field of inquiry modeled on natural science and rooted in a positivist narrowing of inquiry thanks to a distinction between “facts” and “values.” Modern political science, presumably that advanced by Strauss’ colleague at the University of Chicago, Charles E. Merriam, decrees a distinction between “facts” and “values”, where “facts” include those things which are observable and quantifiable, while “values” include preferences and the principles of preference. The positivism of social science is incompetent to prescribe or proscribe, and so must strive to avoid making “value-judgements”; social science in the Positivist mold seeks ethical neutrality and to remain “value-free,” indifferent to Right or Wrong, Good or Evil. This indifference, in Strauss’ view, corrodes preferences and produces indifference and nihilism, and here again we find the emergence of the Politics of Suspicion. According to Strauss, it is impossible to study social phenomena without making value judgements. For example, by defining a state one admits a standard by which to judge its statehood. Furthermore, the postulate of insolubility of value systems to reason makes discussion impossible. If one evades serious discussion of serious issues by simply passing the issues off as “value problems”, no further discourse can ensue. Moreover, belief that scientific knowledge is the highest form, as Merriam insists, implies a depreciation of pre-scientific knowledge, and assumes all pre-scientific knowledge is indistinguishable from folklore and superstition (This position is in fact corroborated by this author’s own experience at the University of Texas at Arlington in the 1990s). Ultimately, and what for Strauss is probably worst, is that positivism necessarily transforms into historicism, against which Strauss’ disciples set him as a kind of anti-modern antidote. Historicism, for Strauss and Straussian thinkers broadly, is the antagonist of political philosophy. It abandons the distinction between facts and values, denies the authoritative character of modern science, refuses to regard the historical process as progressive or even rational, and denies the relevance of the evolutionist thesis. Additionally, historicism in the Straussian view rejects the question of the Good Society in its assertion that societies are mere historical accidents, as well as the idea of permanent characteristics of humanity. Thus, historicism for Strauss and his followers results in systems like that of Nazi Germany. This indictment of historicism is somewhat alarming and constitutes what Strauss himself elsewhere derides as a “reductio ad Hitlerum”, but it may indicate a recognition on his part of how Hegel’s historical dialectic, coupled with Weber’s characterization of traditional, charismatic and rational/legal authority influenced one of his own teachers, Carl Schmitt, who became an ardent Nazi; and how only through a happy accident Schmitt would ensure Strauss would escape the horrors of the Nazi régime by recommending he study abroad. Given this context, one might see how Strauss would seek to distance himself from those connected with Modern historicism, especially since so much of Strauss’ social commentary echoes the thought of other reactionary post-moderns, especially Evola and Guénon. However, it also could indicate a concern on Strauss’ part that what he was seeing in post-World War II America could open the door to a totalitarian impulse here as well. Unfortunately, Strauss does not say this directly at any time, leaving us instead unsettled with his nagging Politics of Suspicion. Eric Voegelin and the Crisis of Modernity

Figure 41: Eric Voegelin We find a slightly different perspective on the ongoing “Crisis of Modernity” in the writings of Eric Voegelin (1901-1985), another German-born American political thinker who fled the Nazi régime in 1938, arriving in the United States, eventually taking a position at Louisiana State University in 1942. With influences mainly from Classical and Medieval political thought, including Plato, Aristotle, Aurelius Augustinus and Thomas Aquinas, he became primarily concerned with the study of widespread political violence, which of course is understandable considering his flight from the Nazi régime which had invaded Austria. Among his major contributions are The New Science of Politics (1952), the five-volume Order and History (1956- 1987, the last installments published posthumously) and Science, Politics and Gnosticism (1959), in which he extensively explores questions related to the nature of political reality and the origins of political violence. In The New Science of Politics, originally titled Truth and Representation, Voegelin identifies what he calls the Demands of Critical Political Theory. In his view, Critical Political Theory must include a consideration of metaphysical and theological symbolism and must also assume a restorative role, specifically restoring political science to the “consciousness of principles” which, thanks to the rise of social science positivism and behavioralism, it has lost. However, unlike those who long for a renascent classical philosophy, for Voegelin, the restorative role of political theory can only revive the classical Platonic and Aristotelian political understanding of political science as architectonic by starting with the “concrete, historical situation of the age”; in other words one must take into account the specific historical context in which one attempts to engender the consciousness of principles as a guide for political science, a nod, perhaps to the Modern idea of History. Unfortunately, the recognition of principles has been subverted by the strain of positivism, whereby theoretical relevance of principles has been subverted to methodology, which cuts off the avenue to Truth. An example of the application of this idea—restoring the consciousness of principles by starting with a concrete historical situation—is to understand the concept of Representation in political communities. This for Voegelin is “the form by which a political body gains existence for action in history,” and may at first seem analogous to Plato’s Noble Lie or Strauss’ Exoteric messages. However, for Voegelin, Representation is not neither falsehood nor illusion, but an interpretation of oneself or one’s society that has a constitutive character for that society. All societies self-interpret; this is the primary mechanism by which members of a community discover the meaning of their existence and to relate that meaning to an ultimate reality. More deeply, however, institutions within a political body represent ideas—they only represent the interpretation of reality when they embody those ideas. After all, the Ancients viewed themselves as part of a cosmic order, and societies represent that order, as one sees in Herodotus’ interpretation of the Ecumene with differences among its communities explained using the four Cardinal Directions. Symbols, in this context, have an attendant Reality; they are neither illusions nor tools for manipulation. Symbols represent the Truth about Man’s place in the Universe, anticipating what Thomas Kuhn would later describe in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) as “paradigms” in the development of differing interpretations of nature. Some symbols are more precise than others; for Voegelin, the process of historical development is the process of differentiation, whereby man and his symbols gain greater precision with each passing age and historical context. Sheldon Wolin would take up this same theme in his work Politics and Vision (1960). If we are to understand history as the process of symbolic differentiation with increasing precision, what then does that history look like, and how does it lead to the Crisis of Modernity discussed so much by other writers? In The New Science of Politics, Voegelin offers a broad scheme of the development of this differentiation. In the Ancient World, one sees the rise of empires that themselves form a representation of a broad Universal Order. Society in this sense conforms to the cosmos, as we see in Herodotus’ History, and the origins of widespread political violence through wars of Empire can be interpreted as a society out of balance or harmony with the cosmos itself. The outcome of the Persian War is the restoration of that balance, leading to the next differentiation in Classical Greece. The symbolic differentiation in Classical Greece is that of the Moral Order, attendant with the discovery of the soul. As we see in Plato’s treatment as well as the organization of the Greek city-states, Society conforms to the Order of the Soul; well-ordered souls produce well-ordered cities and vice-versa. The symbolic characterization of this reciprocal Moral Order is Civic Theology, whereby the gods of each city define the virtues for the city and constitute a moral imperative for the citizens of each régime. With the rise of Christianity man discovers the Truth of the Soul, for the soul is transformed through Divine initiative. This differentiates the Church from the state as Aurelius Augustinus makes abundantly clear in the City of God, where he articulates the Theology of the Two Cities—the City of God and the City of Man. In this view, one cannot conclude that the City of Man is represented by any specific political body, nor can one conclude that the City of God denotes any specific Church. Rather, citizenship in one or the other City depends on the orientation of the soul, whether towards the Divine initiative or to the worldly. Hence the Church may have corrupt residents who are not members of the City of God, and Rome may have Godly residents who are not members of the City of Man. A consequence of the Christian differentiation is that the City itself is cut off from a complete connection to either God or Soul; it is instead a temporal construct separate from both moral and universal orders as well as from any sense of Divine order or even the orders of the human soul. Under such conditions justice becomes elusive, and the nature of political reality tenuous at best. Enter the seduction of the Gnostic view. Gnosticism, according to Voegelin, is rooted in a claim to a direct and immediate claim of knowledge of Truth without need for critical reflection. It claims absolute cognitive mastery of reality that is a special gift of a spiritual and cognitive Élite (consider Réne Guénon’s prescription for the Crisis of Modernity) to which the Uninitiated have no access. Gnosticism comes in two distinct yet related forms: the first, Transcendental Gnosticism, attempts to restore the temporal to the sacred. The other, Immanent Gnosticism, attempts to restore the sacred to the temporal. Whatever the flavor, both forms of Gnosticism imagine the Kingdom of God as some sort of future Utopia constructed by human effort, whereby human beings engage in a project to deliver Eternal Truth into temporal experience. This is what Voegelin means when he describes the Gnostic’s effort to “Immanentize the Eschaton.”

Figure 42: All Modern Modern social/political movements attempt to Immanentize the Eschaton For Voegelin, the effort of human beings to Immanentize the Eschaton heavily influences the social movements of the Renaissance and later Modern Eras, whether in the form of Machiavelli’s “armed prophet,” the Puritan Revolt in England, or the Revolutionary movements of the Enlightenment in America and France. In any case, partly thanks to the pervasive influence of Gnostic ideas, Moderns continuously sense an ongoing crisis; something is fundamentally wrong with society, or else people would not harbor the constant sense of alienation that they do. However, it is here where Voegelin argues that Moderns go off the rails. In their efforts to identify and correct what is wrong with society, they use inadequate tools even to understand the problem they face. Philosophy and theology are seen in conflict, which leads to a wholesale rejection of both, deepening the crisis. This rejection explains both the Crisis of Modernity itself and the Modern inability to understand it. What is this Crisis? Put simply, it is the steady decay of Truth in the symbols of order rooted in philosophic and spiritual traditions. Voegelin’s articulation of the Crisis of Modernity resembles Nietzsche’s principal characteristic of Modern Man in The Use and Abuse of History for Life as a conflict between the internal conflict to which nothing outside corresponds, and an outside world to which nothing inside the human psyche corresponds. Exacerbating this Crisis are the Modern attempts to resolve the conflict and restore man from his sense of alienation. However, these Modern revolutionary doctrines all constitute variations of the same Gnostic theme: Immanentize the Eschaton. Revolutionary Marxism attempts to Immanentize the Eschaton through the establishment of the “classless society”; Fascism attempts to do so by unifying the individual will to the will of the State, and Nazism attempts to do so through the ascendency of a “master race” and the imposition of a pseudo-traditional hierarchy grounded in Theosophy. By the same token, even Progressivism, and the Progressive historicism of Kant and Hegel in particular, attempts to Immanentize the Eschaton through movement towards a Universal Civil Society at the putative “end of history”. In short, Gnostics see disorder in Modernity and seek to transcend it, so that they may establish or realize some vision of a perfected society or a Heaven on Earth. However, all attempts to do so actually have the opposite effect, deepening and worsening the Crisis of Modernity itself. The most recent example of this Gnostic error at the time of this writing is in the writings of Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, whose 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos unabashedly embraces both the symbols and the overall project of Immanentizing the Eschaton through personal transcendence.

Figure 43: Revolutionary movements as a Modern Ouroboros Voegelin’s proposed solution to this Crisis returns to the Reality of Symbol in the Capitoline, Campidoglio or Metaxy. This is a kind of bridge between the Immanent and the Transcendent, a symbolic “middle ground” between the infinite and the finite, a unique psychic space where man and God interact. This symbolic space represents the meeting of Earth and Heaven, linking the two without either one overwhelming the other to produce disorder. Within the Metaxy, both Man and God may interact through active participation through a balance of what he calls Noesis on one hand and Pneuma on the other. In Noetic participation, Man orients himself to the highest forms of intuitive reason and through this participation may touch the Infinite. In Pneumatic participation, one experiences the “Breath of God” as it interacts with the finite. This interaction is preserved and experienced in something akin to Capitoline spaces, the symbolic place where the Eternal and Temporal may meet, however briefly.

Figure 44: Metaxy of the Capitoline in Rome: Transcendent (left) and Immanent (right) In Voegelin’s view, Gnosticism in all its forms dismisses the Metaxy entirely, but only its restoration can offer a solution the problem of Modern alienation. In order to restore the place where Earth and Heaven meet, however, one must rejuvenate the historical continuity in the West of traditional Greek philosophy, Christian morality, and the Christian revelatory experience. This continuity breathes life into the symbols of the Metaxy, makes real the bridge between the Finite and the Infinite as a Representation of the ordered connection between the two, and reserves a symbolic space for man reasonably and safely to participate in the contemplation of the Infinite. Hannah Arendt and the Human Condition

Figure 45: Hannah Arendt. Of the political thinkers who emerged in the 20th Century, perhaps the most far-reaching and influential among them is Hannah Arendt (1906-1975). Born in Prussia to German Jewish parents, Arendt’s direct witness to the rise of totalitarianism in Europe would leave a lasting impact on political theory and philosophy, and her recovery from this experience would also guide her as a journalist, covering the postwar Nuremburg trials of Nazi leadership and offering commentary in one of her best-known writings, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). While indeed this expansion of her coverage of the Nuremburg trials stands out as both a journalistic as well as a philosophical work, it is her earlier writings, particularly The Human Condition (1958) and the earlier Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) that carry the greatest weight for their impact on political thought which, like Nietzsche, Evola, Guénon and Strauss, also emphasizes the distinction between the active and the contemplative life, as well as another critique of Modernity. However, as we shall see, while Arendt’s critique bears some resemblance to other reactionary post-modern writers, her solution stands out as markedly different, and this difference will be carried forward in other political theorists of justice such as Jürgen Habermas. In The Human Condition (1958), Arendt writes of Modernity as a “loss of the world,” particularly in that Weberian rational legalism exerts a dehumanizing influence on humanity itself, transforming man from political animal into a working beast. This dehumanization, she avers, enables an elite domination of society. As for society itself, she sees Modernity as having transformed from a civil society characterized by plurality and freedom into a mass society, characterized by homogeneity and conformity with the rise of the “social” as a concept. Furthermore, thanks to Weberian rational legal administration, civil participatory government gives way to an age of bureaucracy and anonymous labor. This transformation gives rise to the institutionalization of violence, breaks the continuity of Western history, and paves the way for totalitarian régimes. Hence, in Arendt’s view, the “Total State” of Schmitt’s vision is a consequence not of democracy, but of Weberian bureaucracy, and that the establishment of elite domination, unlike Guénon’s view of a restored Western tradition, is instead a symptom of the discontinuity brought on by an age of conforming working beasts. Here we must look back to her earlier work, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) so that we can gain insight into how this happens, specifically by analyzing the origins of two distinct totalitarian systems: Stalin’s Communism and Hitler’s Nazism. Worthy of note is that Arendt, unlike many of her contemporaries, distinguishes these two régimes from Fascism (especially Mussolini’s Italy), asserting that Fascism describes an Authoritarian, rather than a Totalitarian system, and it is here that we first see her classification of régimes either as Political, Authoritarian, or Totalitarian. This distinction would continue into the 21st Century in the work of the Freedom House and its principal organizer, former US Ambassador to Hungary Mark Palmer, author of Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World’s Last Dictators by 2025 (2003), who would instead simplify Arendt’s classification into countries that were either “Free,” “Partially Free,” or “Not Free”. For Arendt, a Political régime is one which defines and promotes politics as active citizenship. Citizens are part of a collective identity within what she calls the “common world,” and in turn form collective identities within the larger framework of citizenship in the régime at large. Political régimes stress civic engagement, and express a sense of “we” in a “space of appearance,” meaning a formal venue in which collective identities as well as citizens in general may actively engage with one another and as active participants in the process of governance. This participation demands collective deliberation by multiple constructed identities, e.g. political parties, about all salient matters, that is, about all issues which may affect the citizens directly and which may generate an opinion or differences of opinion among them.

Figure 46: The Common World (a city street, left) and the Space of Appearance (Congress, right) By contrast, Arendt defines Authoritarian régimes as those where an authority limits the “space of appearance” by limiting political pluralism—say, when a state limits the number of political parties that may participate in deliberation, or demands a decision-making process beyond the reach of public scrutiny. Authoritarian régimes typically rest on an emotional claim to legitimacy, and often an appeal to necessity, as Juan Linz would suggest in his work on the subject in 1964. In such environments, the “common world” remains intact, but it is limited in its pluralism, and is characterized by minimal social mobility among citizens able to participate. This limited engagement is reinforced by an authority which suppresses political opponents and general dissent. Examples abound in the 20th and 21st centuries of authoritarian régimes, from Chile under the authority of Agosto Pinochet to Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey to the Philippines under Rodrigo Duterte. In each of these cases the régime is difficult to distinguish from the personality of the régime’s principal authority, and the authority generally uses his power to punish political enemies and limit dissent, often citing a critical need to maintain order against either an invasive or insurgent adversary.

Figure 47: Examples of Authoritarian sentiments: Rodrigo Duterte brandishing an assault weapon out of “necessity”, hostility to participatory government, political ultimatum Political systems flirt with authoritarianism from time to time, but as long as the “common world” remains intact, and as long as dissent is tolerated, a political system may avoid succumbing to authoritarian impulses. At the far extreme is the Totalitarian régime. In this régime, the authority utterly destroys the “space of appearance” through the establishment of false front organizations, fake government agencies and esoteric doctrines available only to a few, promulgated through loyalty tests and propaganda. This authority then redefines the “common world” as a tool of its own authority, much as Schmitt describes in his “Total State.” Social classes are homogenized into “masses” and, while totalitarian authority may continue to use the term “the People,” they will do so not to refer to any set of individuals or persons, but to an esoteric, undifferentiated mass of people whose will is embodied in the authority itself. This authority dominates every facet of individual life, and uses propaganda as the primary tool of communication with “the People” to reinforce utter dependency on the State, which may even attempt to inculcate the state of the régime as the natural and proper condition of humanity. This dependency in turn produces individual isolation, loneliness and paranoia among the “citizens” now reduced to mere tools of the State, which now presents itself to the world either as an Organic Whole, a “Workers’ Paradise,” or some other Utopian idyll which bears zero resemblance to the reality of widespread fear, powerlessness and misery among those who suffer under the totalitarian yoke.

Figure 48: Images of Totalitarianism: Mixture of Public and Private in Nazi Germany, the Gates of the Concentration Camp at Dachau, Leader Worship in North Korea. In order to safeguard against Totalitarianism, Arendt insists that in a Political régime one must take care to reinforce the artificiality of Public life. The Political, for her, is a construct; politics are not natural to humanity, public life is not a “given” and therefore one cannot reasonably conceive of an Organic Theory of the State. Rather, politics stand as a distinct cultural achievement, a social convention that enables individuals to build a space for free action and discourse, and enables individuals to transcend the despotism of necessity. In order to preserve the idea of politics as a construct, a political system must preserve and protect the idea of political equality as an attribute of citizenship that is recognized upon entering the public realm. Consequently, irredentist notions of citizenship, and especially ethnic, religious or racial identity, must remain irrelevant to citizenship; for once these features of identity emerge as a condition for membership in a community, the sense of the artificiality of politics erodes. In other words, ethnic, religious or racial Identity must never be the foundation of citizenship in any political régime, lest it slip into totalitarianism. Furthermore, a political system must maintain the spatial character of the Public Sphere. Political activities must occur in a distinct space where citizens meet and exchange opinions, debate their differences, and search for collective solutions to shared problems. Political opinions cannot form in private or in secret; they must form in a public space so they cannot be reduced to or dismissed as private preference, nor could they be reduced to a unanimous collective opinion. For Arendt, the personal is not the political, and for a political system to survive, it can never be so. Finally, in order for this public sphere to operate, and for politics to arise as the character of public life, citizens must actively participate; if one is not present in the Public Sphere, one is not engaged in politics. If any of these components is missing from a political régime, the threatened nightmare of totalitarianism looms. Jürgen Habermas and the Public Sphere

Figure 49: Jürgen Habermas Following the line of reasoning articulated by Arendt about the rise of the Social over the Political and the transformation of civil society into mass society and its attendant dehumanization is the German sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929). Associated primarily with the rise of Critical Social Theory and the Frankfurt School, Habermas’ thinking bears clear evidence of Arendt’ influence, as well as that of Kant and Marx from among the Moderns, and it is probably for this reason that he claims to set himself apart from “post- modernists.” However, as we shall see, Habermas shares many of the same concerns about Modernity as other post-modern thinkers, and it is for this reason he is included here. Although he is perhaps best known for his treatise A Theory of Communicative Action (1981), his Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) demonstrates his continuity with, and his debt to, Hannah Arendt and others among the University in Exile. To begin with, it is necessary to define what Habermas means by the “public sphere”. The public sphere has two distinct expressions: The Classical public sphere, a space where citizens act in common for the administration of law in the common defense, corresponding to Arendt’s “space of appearance”, and the Bourgeois public sphere, a space “where private people could come together as a public,” whether in literary circles through publication or else in a practical sense through the “Third Space,” which is neither a workplace nor a place of residence. This Bourgeois public sphere is a more precise structure than Arendt’s “common world”, and contains within it a virtual dimension Arendt did not necessarily distinguish, namely the space defined by publication. For Habermas, the conversations carried out in the printed word are as much a part of the Bourgeois public sphere as any marketplace, salon or piazza. The notions of “p or plaka, denoting a space that is open to all. This contributes to the idea of a public sphere in Western Europe during the Renaissance, and broadly refers to an area that is open to all that enables traffic in commodities and news. In the 16th Century, one finds the Italian piazza, 17th Century France has its Salons, and afterwards came to include Cafés and public squares, but as has been said before, Habermas expands the public sphere to include a literary component, including letters, books, drama, the visual arts –really any cultural activity that is available to all and enables the traffic earlier described, especially the commodities of ideas.

Figure 50: The Plaka in Athens (left) Piazza Navona in Rome (center), Grün’s Friday at the French Artists’ Salon (right) With this World of Letters Habermas finds a connection to the Political Realm that leads to a wholesale transformation of the sphere itself. When a state-governed public sphere becomes appropriated by the public presence of private people, the intimate, conjugal sphere gains the power and the action of interpreting the interests of a privatized domain of a market economy. This produces a tension between what has become Public Opinion in contrast to Public Power, and activity in the public sphere shifts from political tasks to civic tasks, from citizens acting in common, as in the Classical Public Sphere, to a society engaged in critical public debate. With this transformation comes also the Privatization of life, where Salons and piazze disappear, having been replaced with “living rooms” and “family rooms” and giving rise to the Patriarchal conjugal family as a dominant social form. The domain of humanity then constricts into the intimate conjugal sphere, and the former Bourgeois public sphere is reduced to a marketplace. With the separation of the Public from the Private, Civil Society is subsequently transformed as well, from a truly public sphere where commodities, news and ideas are exchanged in the kind of commerce envisioned by Montesquieu, to a Sphere of Private Autonomy, offering an illusion of family independence, which of course is anything but, for families are ultimately dependent upon the Market Sphere. As a result, politics, the activity of the public sphere, and morality, the activity of the intimate conjugal sphere, become linked by a bridge of Publicity.

Figure 51: Evidence of the Transformation: The Obamas in the White House Living Room This bridge results in a social structural transformation characterized by mutual infiltration of the Public and the Private, much as was seen and extolled by Carl Schmitt, and derided by Hannah Arendt. The growth of a market economy leads to the emergence of a “social” sphere in which private interests interact as if they were public interests, with publicity the measure of both engagement and value. State intervention in society leads to a transfer of public functions to private corporate bodies, and what had previously been conceived as public goods are reduced to fungible commodities. In this way, the public’s relationship to culture transforms from debate to consumption. Along with the social structural transformation of the public sphere is a political transformation as well, especially of the virtual dimension, that of the World of Letters. In this transformation the Man of Letters is lost; no longer is the literary sphere dominated by the journalism of men of private letters, for it is instead replaced by the public consumer services of mass media. In the way, just as the literal public sphere is reduced to a marketplace, so the literary public sphere is reduced to an advertising space. In this environment, even Publicity itself, the bridge between public and private that enabled the transformation in the first place, is transmuted as well, from a simple bridge connecting the two spheres into a principle of manufactured notoriety and non-public opinion. Not even the Classical public sphere is spared, for the institutions of government necessarily transform from a liberal constitutional state, providing a venue for deliberation and common action for a shared defense, into a social welfare state that dispenses goods and services to be consumed by a public dominated by private interests. For Habermas, the consequence of the transformation of the public sphere is that everyday lives are ultimately penetrated by formal systems with parallels in the public sphere itself: a welfare state struggling to meet private demand as if they were public goods; corporatism, or the domination of corporate identities even to the corporatism of the household; and consumerism, in which people are defined by their spending habits, producing a level of specialized opinion bordering on social atomism. The end result of this process is perhaps best illustrated by the dystopian vision of the United States of America in 2505 portrayed in writer/director Mike Judge’s 2006 film Idiocracy. In this film, people live in a dysfunctional, infantilized world dominated by illiteracy, anti-intellectualism, private impulsiveness, and unbridled irresponsible consumption, where people’s bodies are reduced to advertising spaces and “the English language had deteriorated into a hybrid of hillbilly, Valley girl, inner city slang, and various grunts.” In one exchange with the lead character, a painfully ordinary Army Private who had been part of a human hibernation experiment and accidentally revived after five hundred years, The US Secretary of State punctuates each of his sentences with a sponsorship message that everything he says is “Brought to You by Carl’s Jr.”

Figure 51: Habermas’ Transformation in popular culture: They Live (1988, left) and Idiocracy (2006, right) The social and political expression of this specialized opinion comes in the form of symbolic and interest group representation such as the movement often called “identity politics”, social alienation expressed in increased neuroses and behavioral disorders, leading to dissidence, crime, and cult activity. Thus the structural transformation of the public sphere is not simply a transformation, but a corruption of civil society leading ultimately to ruin. Alfred Sauvy’s Three Worlds

Figure 52: Alfred Sauvy Following another line of argument from Arendt is the comparative anthropology of French demographer Alfred Sauvy (1898-1990), whose construction of a comparative framework to interpret the post-World-War II geopolitical framework would come to define the Cold War. Although his principal contributions include Fertility and Survival: Population Problems from Malthus to Mao Tse Tung (1961), From Rumor to History (1985) and The Earth and Man: The World Where He Goes, The World Whence He Comes (1990), the work that stands out the most in comparative politics is a 1952 article in the French magazine L’Observateur, in which he coins the term “Third World”, originally in an effort to draw a parallel between unaligned nation states in the Cold War with the Third Estate in the French Revolution. However, his threefold analysis of the geopolitical environment would be adopted and modified, on one hand by international libertarians such as Mark Palmer, who more or less synthesized the three-tier models of Arendt and Sauvy into a comparative framework of his own that guides the Freedom House think tank, to overtly Marxist thinkers such as Mao Tse Tung (Mao Zedong), who grafted the threefold distinction onto a variation of Hegel’s Historical Dialectic that emphasized levels of “development.” Sauvy’s original distinction was somehow lost in the process of adoption and adaptation to other thinkers’ particular narratives. Even so, some variation of Sauvy’s Three Worlds model would come to dominate the discipline of comparative politics from the 1950s to the end of the 20th Century. For Sauvy, the Cold War environment had divided the world into three distinct political economies: The “Free World”, the “Iron Curtain”. a term he borrowed from Winston Churchill and the unaligned “Third World”. The Developmental Variant introduced by Mao in an effort to graft comparative politics onto the Historical Dialectic, included “First World” countries, the core states of industrial economies, “Second World” countries, which consisted of auxiliary states that served as political and economic satellites of the “First World”, and “Third World” countries, consisting of those with undeveloped or underdeveloped economies. So pervasive were these models that pedestrian political language even in the 21st Century tends uncritically to adopt these terms. In Sauvy’s original construction, “Free World” countries are characterized by representative constitutional systems, industrialized production systems, partially regulated capitalist market economies, and elective participation in a collective security framework, such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was drafted specifically to counter and contain the spread of Marxist/Leninist political revolutionary governments led by the Soviet Union after the end of the Second World War, and to provide for the establish of a strategic defense network in the event of an aggressive move by the Soviet Union against the countries of Western Europe and Turkey, such that an attack on one of the member states would be construed by the alliance as an attack on all of them. The principal contributors to the NATO league of mutual defense were the United States and the United Kingdom. This assurance of collective security would provide an “umbrella” of sorts that would permit open trade and economic development opportunities for NATO members, such that after the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, NATO membership was widely viewed as a key to economic recovery and prosperity for many nation-states. By contrast, the “Iron Curtain” consisted of those nation-states within the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union. Typical characteristics of these countries included constitutional systems defined by Marxist-Leninist Communist ideology of radical egalitarianism except for the Communist Party elite who are intended to serve as staunch defenders of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, and dialectical materialism, looking to the Communist International as an inevitable “end of history” towards which the Party leadership would help propel the world through the support and institution of workers’ revolutionary movements. Within the states of the Communist World one would find collectivized production systems—some industrial, others agrarian—all centrally planned in heavily regulated command economies by Communist Party Commissariats. This World would be primarily defined by the Soviet Union, established at the end of the First World War by V.I. Lenin and the Bolsheviks, and the People’s Republic of China, established I n1949 by Mao Zedong (Mao Tse Tung) and the People’s Liberation Army, as well as Soviet and Chinese satellite states such as Yugoslavia, Poland and North Korea. In order to counter the potential threat posed by NATO, the Soviet Union responded by establishing the Warsaw Pact.

Figure 53: Symbols of the Cold War: NATO Flag (left), Warsaw Pact Seal (Center), Berlin Divided (right) Sauvy’s “Third World” really consisted of every other nation-state and country not aligned with either the “Free World” or the “Iron Curtain”. In Sauvy’s view, these unaligned nations correspond to the “Third Estate” in France before the French Revolution, described by Abbé Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès. For Sieyès, this Third Estate, composed of the common people of France, constituted its own nation of sorts and as such had no need for the other two Estates, namely the landed nobility and the clergy. If the “Third World” is in fact analogous to the “Third Estate”, then these unaligned nations would similarly have no need to throw their support for either the United States or the Soviet Union or even China. However, in practice, the “Third World” often served as a staging ground for limited proxy conflicts between the “Free World” and the “Iron Curtain”, evident in Cold War conflicts in Vietnam, Korea, Angola, Biafra, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Afghanistan. Hence, Sauvy’s vision of a “Third World” independent of Cold War rivals for hegemony for the most part fails to materialize, yet the term gained currency and generally applied to those countries caught in the middle of the bipolar conflict of the second half of the 20th Century.

Figure 54: Caught in the Middle: The 1st Congo War, Saigon during the Tet Offensive, “advisors” in Angola. Michel Foucault, Power, and Knowledge

Figure 55: Michel Foucault The Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union (and later, China) underscores a connection between power and ideas, a key component of politics initially made explicit with the ideological revolutions in the Modern era with the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and a century and a half later, the Russian Revolution. The relationship between power and knowledge is the primary focus of the next figure in our survey of post- modern political thinking, French philosopher and social critic Michel Foucault (1926-1984), whose political ideas are hotly contested among scholars and at times criticized for the apparently inconsistent character of his thinking. However, as we shall see, a common thread concerning the relationship between these two forces: power and knowledge, shows that for Foucault, individuals are as much products of their political environment as much as they are participants, and that, like the psychologist Philip Zimbardo after him, as products of a system of power, individuals may not necessarily be the free agents they may believe themselves to be at first. Using a method of inquiry borrowed from Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, Foucault first explores the relationship between “reason” and “unreason” in his putatively psychological treatise, Madness and Unreason (1961). For Foucault, the duality of the impulses towards Order and Chaos in the human psyche (Nietzsche’s Apollonian and Dionysian principles) is expressed not only individually, but socially. Where reason and propriety constitute social expressions of an Apollonian impulse, madness and unreason form a Dionysian reflection of the same, and that the preference for one over the other in society is a principal feature of the Enlightenment, where Reason is elevated as a positive constituent, and Madness the Enlightenment’s negative constituent. However, for Foucault, what is deemed reasonable or unreasonable is by no means absolute, but instead indicates a particular context of social preference. From here Foucault argues that the discipline of psychiatry, with its efforts to define reason and madness in medical terms, demonstrates a manifest hypocrisy; any psychiatrist’s claims of scientific neutrality are mere rationalizations, for the true purpose of psychiatry is to control challenges to “conventional Bourgeois morality.” This critique echoes Leo Strauss’ critique of social science’s attempts at “value neutrality” from two years before. However, where Strauss seems merely to rebut Merriam’s behavioralism, Foucault sounds a call to rehabilitate thinkers previously dismissed as “Mad” in order to recover the validity of Madness and Unreason and to counterbalance what he calls the “tyranny of the Rational.” Five years later, in Words and Things (1966), Foucault takes up Nietzsche’s method from his Genealogy of Morals to trace the development of the categories of knowledge. According to Foucault’s account, The Genealogy of the categories of knowledge consists of three distinct phases. In the first phase, prior to Descartes, knowledge is generally viewed as discrete in separate domains of philosophy, religion, and superstition. In this context, the task of science, if we are to understand science as “knowing” or “knowledge” (from the Latin scio, scire “I know”, ‘to know”), is merely to note resemblances within and across these three domains. The second phase, from Descartes to Kant, categorizes knowledge into distinct disciplines, and the task of science is transformed as a result. For in this period, science is repurposed to measure superficial “visibles” and is largely confined to the disciplines of natural philosophy, and language becomes representative of the knowledge derived from those visible, measurable, quantifiable features of the world. It is the third phase, after Kant, that Foucault argues constitutes “The Birth of Man.” In this phase, the scientist himself has become an object of inquiry, and a new attention is brought to bear on the nature of language itself. This attention focuses on an effort to uncover the hidden logic behind the visible, and it is this discovery that constitutes both knowledge and science. Evidence of this transformation can be seen with the rise of psychology and sociology, especially framed as they were in the post-World War II environment as sciences of behavior. This third phase of the Genealogy of Knowledge would guide Foucault’s inquiry into the development of the (post)modern prison system, placing him squarely in a camp that includes Stanford University’s Philip Zimbardo, made notorious for the Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971. This social psychology experiment sought to explore the effects of perceptions of power and modeled a simulated prison environment in the basement of Stanford University’s Psychology department, Jordan Hall. In this experiment, students volunteered to assume the roles either of inmates or guards, with Zimbardo as the prison’s superintendent. Several hypotheses were submitted to be tested through this method of simulation which was intended to last for two weeks in August. However, the simulation was cancelled after only one week when the students in the mock prison environment showed disturbing signs of having completely assumed their roles as prisoners and guards, with some inmates passively accepting brutal psychological abuse and torture from authoritarian guards, and others either actively resisting guards or harassing fellow inmates. Zimbardo would himself write up the results in The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (2008), and would draw parallels to Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) as well as to reports of inmate abuse at the hands of American soldiers in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq between 2003 and 2006. Foucault’s treatment of the development of the prison as a concept and as a system came four years after the Stanford Prison Experiment in Discipline and Punish (1975). For Foucault, the prison is a self-defining institution whose purpose is not actually to reduce or prevent criminal behavior, but instead to produce criminality and recidivism. This is accomplished through the method of judicial punishment, and one can easily find echoes of this claim in criticism of the American “prison-industrial complex.” As a concept, the prison serves as a fundamental model for disciplinary control of a population, and has its origin in Jeremy Bentham’s concept of the Panopticon, a carceral arrangement in which a guard is able to see every prisoner without having to leave his station.

Figure 56: Bentham’s Panopticon in architecture (left), and technology (right) However, in Foucault’s view the underlying concept of prison and Panopticon extends beyond incarceration into all institutional architecture; that is, all social and political institutions are mere variants of prisons, whether they be schools, work environments, public spaces, planned neighborhoods, or urban environments generally. The purpose of each of these environments is fundamentally no different from that of prisons: correct deviant behavior. This purpose is achieved through the methods of observation, normalization and examination. In this context, one must understand discipline as a form of power whose purpose is to produce “docile bodies” whose individual movements can be controlled. Into this environment of power and control Foucault incorporates the role of knowledge using the old adage “knowledge is power”. If this be so, Foucault understands the relationship between power and knowledge as inseparable: in knowing we control, and in controlling we know. Hence, if we can communicate knowledge through the mechanism of language, then we also communicate power through the same vehicle. This argument produces the foundation for the modification of language in order to establish and reinforce a “power narrative”, where one projects power through the words he chooses, granting power to language either to expand, modify, direct, or limit thinking, much as George Orwell explored with his thought experiment with “Newspeak” in 1984. In the following year, Foucault would delve more deeply in to the knowledge/power equivalency in The Will to Knowledge (1976), an obvious play on Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche’s edition of her late brother’s work. In The Will to Knowledge, Foucault directly takes on the essence of political theory itself, asserting that all previous political theory exists within a fundamentally monarchic power framework. Within this framework, power is reified into something able to be possessed. Furthermore, political power is hierarchic and pyramidal, and operates principally through negative sanction. In other words, political power largely works through constraining and forbidding action, producing an environment which cannot help but subjugate people within the carceral power narrative he described in Discipline and Punish. An alternative power framework for Foucault is one in which power is autonomous, and relational only to action itself. In this context, power subsists in interaction with one another, whereby each person develops his own power narrative when communicating with other persons in a social network defined not by a pyramidal, hierarchic “elite/mass” construction but instead by an interconnected network of equal knowledge/power nodes represented by people constructing their respective narrative. Granted, some nodes will be in a position to exert greater power over other nodes, but this power is in no way centralized, and it will move throughout the network over time, sometimes resting in one collection of narratives, other times concentrating elsewhere, rendering power a somewhat contingent phenomenon. Power, in this environment, has its own logic, autonomous from people, and to know the logic of power is to have power over it.

Figure 57: Power narrative frameworks. Monarchic (left), American (center), Foucault’s alternative (right) One example of the autonomous power/knowledge phenomenon in social networks is explored in the writings of one of Foucault’s contemporaries, Richard S. Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976), in particular in his development of the concept of the meme as a “unit of culture” roughly analogous to genes in evolutionary biology. The study of memetics gained popularity into the 1990s, giving rise to the concept of “viral” memes that spread quickly through a social information network, taking on lives of their own, autonomous from people themselves, including the ones who may have first injected the meme into the network. This corresponds closely to Foucault’s concept of autonomous power in the construction of narratives in the alternative power framework he imagines. Hence, he who is able to produce the most virulent memes wields the greatest power to steer the community reduced to a social network. Beyond memetics, the closest real-world exemplar of this distributed power framework is perhaps best embodied in the Open Source Initiative in the software engineering community, and whose logic in contrast to traditional software development approaches is detailed in The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary (1999), by Eric S. Raymond. However, one can also see efforts at the end of the 20th Century and into the 21st Century in the political environment of opinion, punditry and political campaigning adopt a Foucaultian stance with respect to language and communication, whereby the focus has shifted from policy action and direct problem-solving to the establishment of distinct “narratives” to direct public opinion, regardless of whether those narratives have any basis in reality independent of one’s perception. Where knowledge and power have a logic of their own in a distributed memetic network, the task of the political actor is to develop his own particular power narrative in such a way that the narrative “goes viral”—that is, that it compels attention, is believable, and encourages distribution, thus ensuring that it will spread to enough people that it will be accepted as true, regardless of whether or not it matches any objective or empirical reality. Contemporary Political Thought One may easily argue that contemporary political thought constitutes a mere extension of either Modern or Post-modern Political thought. Indeed, much political thinking of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries continues the broad social critique that characterizes other post-modern thinkers, sharing a concern that the contemporary political world has somehow gone terribly wrong, and that addressing this problem requires radical rethinking of the state of the world, and especially the prospect of justice, individual freedom, participation, and stability. What sets contemporary political thinkers apart from other post-moderns, however, is an increasingly pessimistic view about the course of civilization and whether that course can be changed. Beginning with the unresolvable dispute about the translation of justice narratives into policy proffered by John Rawls and Robert Nozick, contemporary political thought explores the practical limits of justice in politics and society, especially as these limits relate to the essence of community and identity. Where Michael Sandel and Martha Nussbaum explore the challenges of community in pluralist societies, John Ralston Saul insists on the centrality of doubt in order to check an increasingly unconscious and alienating political and social reality in contemporary civilization. Meanwhile, Sheldon Wolin and the Berkeley School broadly lament the death of both liberty and equality in a pseudo-political environment dominated by managerial compartmentalization of corporate elites, and seek alternative narrative threads or “visions” of politics in an effort to resist the commodification of humanity. Others take an even more reactionary view, whether through active disengagement from both contemporary politics and society as Morris Berman does in his call for a new monastic response to the fall of American civilization, or else through a resurgent Gnosticism promising to transform and simplify the world, whether politically in the eyes of Aleksandr Dugin, or personally, in the eyes of Jordan Peterson. Perhaps the most pessimistic view of all the contemporary political thinkers treated here is Walter Scheidel, whose analysis of historical and prehistorical evidence of past civilizations leads him to conclude that the only phenomena in human experience that can promise to turn civilization away from increasing disparity, inequality and injustice are analogous to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Competing Narratives of Justice: John Rawls and Robert Nozick In order to navigate the new landscape of politics as defined by distinct and possibly conflicting narratives, some political thinkers made an attempt to return to Modern concepts of justice and the language of “rights”. Most notable among these are two professors of political philosophy from Harvard University, John Rawls (1921-2002) and Robert Nozick (1938-2002). Influenced in large part by Modern political thinkers such as Kant, Marx, Locke, and Dewey, as well as by Nietzsche, Rawls would publish his comprehensive A Theory of Justice in 1971, and consequently would inspire his colleague Nozick, influenced principally by the 20th century economist and philosopher Friedrich A. von Hayek and the logical empiricist Carl G. Hempel, to publish a rebuttal titled Anarchy, State and Utopia three years later in 1974. The ongoing debate between these two scholars over the nature and character of justice in the late 20th Century is well-documented, and would come to define competing visions of public policy in the United States to some degree even today. For both of these thinkers, certain components of the Natural Rights Argument laid out in Modern political thought by Thomas Jefferson and the American Founders stand both as a touchstone and a point of departure for their exploration of the nature of justice as it relates to a participatory society. Chief among these components is the assertion of a fundamental human equality, endowment with the inalienable rights of liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and the purpose of government to secure those rights, the measure of justice being the degree to which a government actually does secure liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all. Figure 58: John Rawls For Rawls, two principal factors inform the substance of justice: liberty and difference. The first, which he calls the Liberty principle, is marked by a veil of ignorance in human choices that leads people to behave, to make decisions, and to pursue their self-interest as if they are truly free actors. Since this liberty principle is understood as a trait common to all, it is from here that the idea of universal equality arises. However, the second principle, namely that of Difference, renders that equality out of reach initially. Thanks to the Veil of Ignorance about the consequences of human actions, once a society forms the members of that society experience differences in what he calls their original position. Put simply, some people in society have greater advantages than others, whether in terms of material wealth, opportunities to pursue one’s self-interest, access to the benefits of society, freedom from suspicion, and the like. Consequently, when people come together in societies, the difference principle left unchecked produces inequality both of opportunity and condition that results in manifest injustice. If the purpose of a government is to secure equal rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, then it must respond to the inequalities brought about by the difference principle and reinforce the equality implied by the liberty principle. In other words, because the distribution of the benefits of society are unequally distributed where some people in society are more favored and others are less favored, the mandate of justice is that all of these benefits, where possible, must be redistributed so that they are in fact equalized. However, a simple equal redistribution is insufficient to establish justice, for the society itself is still stratified into More Favored and Less Favored social classes. Therefore, in the interest of justice, not only are all societal benefits to be equally distributed wherever possible, but an unequal distribution of the benefits of society may be necessary to benefit the Least Favored in society in order to offset the inequalities and disadvantages brought on by the difference principle. In short, justice for Rawls is connected with a sense of Fairness in society. The consequences of Rawlsian justice involve the development of certain policies in governments intended to benefit disadvantaged populations under its jurisdiction, often described as “social welfare” policy: public assistance for Widows, Infants and Children and for Needy Families, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs, Affirmative Action in Hiring, and Need-Based Financial Aid for disadvantaged college students can all be explained in terms of Rawls’ idea of justice. However, while Rawls’ vision of justice emphasizes equality and fairness, prescribing active redistribution to benefit the least favored in a society, it may actually run afoul of individual “pursuit of happiness” as well as property rights, especially when redistribution demands contribution, typically in the form of taxation, from those more favored in society. Furthermore, Rawlsian redistribution, extended over time, may result in a reversal of favor, for if left unchecked, a historically “least favored” may eventually emerge, through this redistribution, as the “most favored”; producing a new injustice and requiring policymakers to revisit the character of the distribution of societal benefits. This critique of Rawls is humorously depicted by the British comedy troupe Monty Python’s Flying Circus in their “Dennis Moore” skit from 1973 (specifically in Series 3, episode 11). Figure 59: Robert Nozick This is the problem that Robert Nozick would take up in Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974). For Nozick, two other factors inform the substance of justice: the freedom of action as it relates to one’s Entitlement to act, and the overall power of coercion, typically held as a monopoly of force within government institutions. This coercive power must be restrained by recognition of Entitlement to act on the part of individual persons in society. By Entitlement, Nozick understands three different expressions: Entitlement in Acquisition, Entitlement in Transfer, and Entitlement in Rectification. Entitlement in Acquisition is that which permits a person to purchase or acquire property or other societal benefit in his or her pursuit of happiness. Entitlement in Transfer involves that which permits a person to dispose of his or her property, either by selling, trade, or bequest, also with happiness as the goal. Entitlement in Rectification is that which enables a person to seek to correct an injury. All three of these senses of Entitlement are necessary for justice to emerge in a society. Consequently, where Rawls sees Justice as Fairness, Nozick sees Justice in terms of Freedom. All individuals must, in Nozick’s view, remain free to pursue the benefits of society without coercion, unless that pursuit constitutes a willful injury against another. In such cases, that other must remain entitled to rectify that injury, and it is the responsibility of government both to prevent injury where it is able, and to provide a venue for rectification to occur. Real-world examples of Nozickean justice can be found in the Civil Tort system, whereby it is possible for a petitioner or plaintiff to seek compensation from a respondent or defendant, but the respondent or defendant nevertheless retains the ability to present a counter-claim against one of manifest injury. One also sees Nozick’s understanding of justice played out in antitrust legislation and government intervention to protect competition inherent in an open marketplace. Even though government has regulatory authority over said marketplace, that regulation may be limited only to those measures that foster competition and protect individuals from willful or negligent injury. In the event that an injury does occur, government may step in to prevent further injury, as with an injunction, or it may demand the recall of a product or service once that product or service is implicated in an injury or number of injuries. Hence Nozick’s idea of Justice, at its heart, prescribes a reactive government limited to resolving claims of willful injury, and as such is largely confined to ensuring the entitlement of rectification. While the State may be in place to prevent anarchy, it can by no means lead the society towards Utopia as the Rawlsian view of justice might suggest. However, a Rawlsian critic may counter that a purely reactive minarchist State may remain blind to the persistent inequality of opportunity suffered by unfairly marginalized individuals and groups, and may instead produce a social/political environment not unlike the anarcho-capitalist dystopias imagined by Max Barry in Jennifer Government (2003) or by Nicholas Lamar Soutter in The Water Thief (2012). The Limits of Justice Narratives: Michael Sandel and Martha Nussbaum Michael Sandel and the Unencumbered Self

Figure 60: Michael J. Sandel. Prominent among the critics of the Rawls/Nozick debate over Justice is American political philosopher Michael Sandel (b. 1953), himself a former student of both Rawls and Nozick, and at the time of this writing chair of the Political Philosophy department at Harvard University, a position held by both of his former professors. Known primarily for his examination of Rawls’ theory of Justice, Sandel also stands out as the creator the first Massive Open Online Course, a course on Justice and its practical limits at Harvard. Among his principal writings are Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982), Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (1996), and What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (2012). Sandel is perhaps best known, however, for advancing a political theory of Encumbrance as a primary constitutive feature of human society. For Sandel, the twin principles of Encumbrance and Justice establish Identity within a community, define that community, and are oriented towards a particular set of “ends” or a “Good” (telos, from Aristotle). However, the nature of this encumbrance may be viewed either as metaphorically “thick” or “thin” when applied to ideas of the Good or the Self. A “thick” conception consists of what is seen to be good based on identity as determined by formative influences. By contrast, a “thin” conception consists of those derived liberal principles broad enough to accommodate multiple coexistent “thick” goods, resulting in societal and political pluralism. The expression of both “thick” and “thin” conceptions of the Good and the Self necessarily appears in complex participatory republics, especially federal systems and what are generally described in political science terms as liberal democracies. Within this context, Justice consists of the most general framework in which “thick” goods may thrive, provided they do not contradict the overall framework itself.

Figure 62: “Thick” and “Thin” conceptions of community: a religious service and a voting booth. In Rawlsian justice, Sandel points out that the liberal principles of justice are derived from “thin” conceptions of the self, and that the foundation for liberal justice is an “unencumbered Self”, absent those “thick” notions of Identity and community that individuals necessarily carry with them. With an Unencumbered Self, the distinction between selves is merely one of separate consciousness with different desires. These desires are rooted in free choices which may of course be freely abandoned at any time in favor of new choices. In Nietzschean terms, the Unencumbered Self is free to construct new horizons of meaning around which to interact with others in the broader society he inhabits. In Foucaultian terms, the Unencumbered Self is free to construct his own personal power narrative. For Sandel, the Unencumbered self is the product of liberal justice construed using a “thin” conception of the Self as individual. Herein lies the problem: Justice based on an unencumbered sense of Self is fundamentally inconsistent with the “thick” construction of a community. In Sandel’s words, it “rules out the possibility of a public life in which…the identity…of the participants could be at stake.” The social and political pluralism necessary for liberal Justice is inherently incomplete, especially since pluralism itself, with its emphasis on toleration and accommodation of multiple unencumbered points of view, is necessarily hostile to varying “thick” conceptions of the Good. Consequently, in liberal democracies communities can never be fully constitutive: they remain forever incomplete as well. This for Sandel is the origin of the tension between the demands of liberal democracy on one hand, and the demands of belonging to a community on the other; this tension necessarily produces discontent among both Encumbered Identity communities and Unencumbered Selves, for neither position is ever able to resolve the conflict without rejecting, damaging or destroying the other, yet both must realize that they simply cannot do without the other. The thin conception of justice which produces Unencumbered Selves must maintain a tolerant space within which intolerant communities defined by thick conceptions of justice incompatible with the larger thin view, and those thick communities must admit that they cannot peaceably withstand the pressures exerted by other thick communities against them without the tolerant framework the thin liberal democracy provides. The result is an uneasy and fragile equilibrium of two markedly different narratives of justice and identity. Martha Nussbaum, Justice and Identity

Figure 62: Martha Nussbaum The Intersection of Justice and Identity is of principal concern for the American philosopher, ethicist, and professor of Law Martha Nussbaum (b. 1947). Best known as a theorist of feminism and multiculturalism, Nussbaum’s principal writings include The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (1986), Cultivating Humanity (1997), Sex and Social Justice (1999), and From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law (2010). In The Fragility of Goodness (1986), Nussbaum asserts the role of vulnerability in Eudaimonia, particularly as it is expressed in Classical Greek tragedy, such as the Sophocles’ Oedipus Cycle. Through her inquiry into Greek tragedy, she explores the limits of reason towards self- sufficiency, and in this way impeaches the limits of the Unencumbered Self without making specific reference to it. Human goodness, Nussbaum argues, is ultimately inadequate protection from dangers, as the tragedy of Oedipus clearly illustrates. For Oedipus, believing he could escape a fate where he would kill his own father and sire children with his own mother through his own wit and sense of goodness, ultimately did precisely what was foretold. As the Oedipus cycle illustrates, external factors compromise the welfare of those who seek justice, and to approach the human good, Nussbaum argues that one must remain conscious of one’s own vulnerability, admitting that one could be mistaken and accept that vulnerability that comes both from ignorance and from external forces over which we have no reasonable power to prevent. It also demands that one admit the vulnerability of others lest we rush to judge their perceived weaknesses as defects of their knowledge of the Good, of which we do not necessarily have full knowledge either. This requires openness to alternative viewpoints and alternative epistemological narratives as well as admission that ours is not “the only way” to understand the world. Nussbaum continues the theme of openness in Cultivating Humanity (1997), a defense of the pluralist doctrine known as Multiculturalism in education against conservative critics who claim that it lowers standards of educational attainment and introduces moral relativism into education systems. This criticism emerged sometime in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a spirited dispute in institutions of higher education throughout the United States that came to be known as the “Culture Wars,” after the publication in 1991 of James Davison Hunter’s book Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, which traced the origins of the dispute to the social upheavals of the 1960s and which implied a conflict between American expressions of traditionalism and progressivism, having earlier roots in the conflict between rural and urban conceptions of the Good, Justice, and Community. In this conflict, conservative political figures and social critics advocated continuity with cultural tradition and what had become the traditional American narrative of discovery, liberty, westward expansion, and American exceptionalism. These same critics decried what they saw as a creeping “multiculturalism” in education that eroded this narrative, undermining American values, and lowering standards to the point where it produced culturally ignorant moral relativists who couldn’t even find their own country on a map. On the contrary, says Nussbaum, multicultural education is designed to produce “citizens of the world” in a manner consistent with Seneca’s ideal citizen. For Seneca, the ideal citizen respects the ability to reason wherever it is found, without necessarily holding a preference for one’s own. This, for Nussbaum, is the core of Liberal Education: critical self-examination, a sense of world citizenship, and a narrative imagination that allows one critically to think and evaluate those assumptions that frustrate full awareness of one’s relationship with the rest of the human community, both as citizen and as moral agent. Liberal education, especially that education which is conducive to World Citizenship, is necessary for a democratic society, particularly when that democratic society contains a highly diverse population, each Identity group with their own perspectives, experiences, and narratives. Identity Studies in particular, says Nussbaum, contribute to liberal education and encourage the sustained reform that is most vital in producing critically thinking World Citizens. Without this kind of education, citizens run the risk of illiberal sentiments that lead to what she would later call Objectification. Objectification is explored most thoroughly in Sex and Social Justice (1999), where she explores the concept of Human Dignity as it applies to the politics of sex, but she would return to the theme and apply it more fully to sexual orientation and Gender Identity in From Disgust to Humanity in 2010. For Nussbaum, Human Dignity is the telos of Social Justice, and when applied to the politics of sex it implies the need to recognize the dignity of biological sex, sexual orientation and Gender Identity. For Nussbaum, Social Justice is a principal feature of the doctrine of liberalism for it is other-directed rather than self-directed, and as such liberalism must demonstrate respect for others as individuals rather than require conformity.

Figure 63: Examples of Objectification: Barbie; Woman as Meat in Lady Gaga’s Meat Dress; He- Man. Nussbaum’s conception of Social Justice exists in direct opposition to the antithetical power narrative of Objectification, which undermines the very notion of justice itself. For Nussbaum, in order to combat Objectification, one must recognize its seven components: Instrumentality, which carries expectations of acceptable behavior; Denial of Autonomy, in which one is dependent on another for agency; Inertness, in which the Objectified has no inherent power of action; Fungibility, in which the Objectified individual is interchangeable with any other in her position and rendered a commodity; Violability, in which she may be violated with impunity; Ownership, in which another has or claims property in the Objectified individual; and Denial of Subjectivity, a rejection of the individual’s perspective, or point of view. By contrast, Social Justice, as the Antidote to Objectification, includes Liberty, where the individual is free to behave as a moral agent; Autonomy, where she is independent from others for agency; Agency itself, where the individual possesses an inherent power of action; Dignity, where she is valued as a discrete agent with unique qualities; Inviolability, where she has the capacity for protection from violation; Equality as a full participant in the community; and Subjectivity, a recognition of the individual’s perspective or point of view. Without these seven principles of Social Justice in place and equally shared by all in a community, one’s unique Identity remains under threat of Objectification, and Justice remains incomplete. One should take note that while Nussbaum’s critique of Objectification bears a strong resemblance to Sayyid al Qutb’s objection to American beastliness in sexual mores, her solution, though it be called “Social Justice”, does not. Both seek a restoration of Dignity and full participation in a community, as well as a rejection of oppression in all its forms. However, where al Qutb’s “Social Justice” demands a strong expression of obedience to the tenets of Islamic Law—especially the principle of Zakat or charity, in order to separate humanity from beasts—Nussbaum’s “Social Justice” demands a recognition of the moral agency, autonomy, and unique perspective of individuals, without relying on an external religious mandate. Given the vastly different interpretations of human dignity proffered by al Qutb and Nussbaum, one is left to wonder whether these two visions of Social Justice can even coexist, especially in the light of Sandel’s critique of the “thick” versus “thin” conceptions of community. If so, some kind of uneasy balance will almost certainly result, lest each vision of human dignity undermine the other in public discourse. John Ralston Saul and the Politics of Doubt

Figure 64: John Ralston Saul. The tension among competing narratives of justice, whether Rawlsian notions of fairness, Nozickean views of entitlement, or Sandel’s tension between encumbered and unencumbered selves, brings us to a consideration of doubt and the need for that uneasy balance illustrated by Nussbaum and al Qutb’s conflicting notions of Social Justice. The centrality of Doubt for public discourse is the focus of Canadian philosopher, essayist and President Emeritus of PEN International John Ralston Saul (b. 1947), whose principal political writings include Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West (1992), The Doubter’s Companion (1994), The Unconscious Civilization (1995), and On Equilibrium: Six Qualities of the New Humanism (2001). Of primary concern for Saul in these volumes are the concepts of individualism, citizenship and the Public Good—specifically, what about them has been transformed, what has been lost, what consequences this transformation and loss hold for humanity, and especially what can be gained from the restoration of Doubt as a central feature of humanity for individuals, society, and the Public Good. In Voltaire’s Bastards, Saul sets out to distinguish Reason from “Reason”, for although they use the same word they are two vastly different concepts. The first, Reason, is rooted in Voltaire’s Rationalism and is a principal component of Enlightenment thinking. Reason is characterized by a healthy questioning of the world we inhabit, and serves as a springboard for deeper inquiry. “Reason”, on the other hand, denotes a narrow system of thought which has swollen into an ideology that presents itself as the solution to problems of its own making, where the very notion of questioning is perverted into compartmentalization. In this context “Reason” and its attendant habit of “Progress” are elevated into uncritical dogma that results in a civilization of managers and nothing more. According to Saul, this dogma erodes liberty and public discourse as possibilities, and erases the concept of justice entirely, leaving in its place standardized efficiency instead. Within this context one is no longer able to distinguish Reality from Illusion; the dictatorship of “Reason” is primarily concerned with the possession, use and control of knowledge and, in a Foucaultian turn, uses language as the “coin of the realm”, to borrow a term from game theory. With language thus used, knowledge is thus transformed into the Illusion of Knowledge, as one may illustrate with Kellyanne Conway’s deployment of “alternative facts” to rebut criticism of the Donald Trump administration in 2017.

Figure 65: Memes and The Illusion of Knowledge: Ayn Rand (left), Kellyanne Conway (right) The central corrective to the dogma of “Reason”—that is, to the dogma of Uncritical Rationalism—is Doubt and consideration, for in an environment where Language communicates Knowledge that is equal to Power, “uncontrolled words… (are) consistently more damaging to established authority than armed forces.” For Saul as with Foucault, he who controls the narrative controls the game. This idea forms the central thesis of The Doubter’s Companion, a “Devil’s Dictionary” written along the lines of that written in 1906 by Ambrose Bierce. However, where Bierce’s text is clearly written as a piece of satirical humor, Saul’s text spotlights the primacy of Doubt against the dictatorship of “Reason”. For Saul, Doubt is “the only human activity capable of controlling the use of power in a positive way. (It) is central to understanding,” and is the central, critical stage of most human activity: reality, doubt and decision. Nevertheless, thanks to the Uncritical Rationalism and the Illusion of Knowledge, in The Unconscious Civilization Saul outlines the depth of the problem which Doubt must address. Thanks to the Ideology of “Reason” and the Sentiment of “Progress”, today’s civilization is blind to itself, as it is historically the case that sentiment and ideology blind civilizations to themselves. In the case of the end of the 20th Century, however, “Reason” and “Progress” have blinded civilization to its corporatism, a concept fundamental to Mussolini’s Fascism in the 1920s and 1930s. In this environment, the civic order has been remade, according to Saul, to serve compartmentalized managers, and society conforms to this servitude by fracturing into Identity Groups, in a rebuttal to Nussbaum’s claim of multicultural education producing “citizens of the world.” On the contrary, contemporary society has collapsed into little more than a verbal war of attrition: war on the individual and citizen as concepts, and war on open dialogue and doubt as systems to protect democracy. This claim echoes that of both Michael Sandel’s “thick” conception of community at odds with the “thin” conception of justice, and Hannah Arendt’s admonition that unchanging features of Identity must never form a foundation for citizenship lest society turn inexorably towards totalitarianism. However, most disturbing for Saul is that thanks to the dictatorship of “Reason” for the sake of “Progress” and “Efficiency”, those who dwell within Civilization, and by extension the civilization as a whole, are largely unaware of their march towards despotism. Saul proposes a check on the Unconscious Civilization through what he calls a “New Humanism” in On Equilibrium. The qualities of this “New Humanism”—Common Sense, Ethics, Imagination, Intuition, Memory, and Reason—serve as the grounding for Doubt that produces an alternative vision of a civilization liberated from the shackles of Ideology and Sentiment. It is in the essential nature of Civilization for Saul to seek balance among these six qualities, and recognizing that a permanent resolution to the tensions and compressions each quality exerts on another is ultimately impossible, especially if Civilization is to continue to live. Saul likens the balance of these six qualities to the balance seen in the mobiles of Alexander Calder—individual qualities are set in motion by events, yet balanced by the countermotion of the other qualities maintaining the overall structure in a delicate equilibrium. Figure 66: Hanging Mobile, by Alexander Calder Dynamic equilibrium, according to Saul, is essential to life. Without it one cannot grow, adapt, or even survive when the environment changes or exerts pressure on any one element. It is necessary to view Civilization not merely as a structure but as a dynamic, living entity that must be able to maintain that equilibrium. From this perspective, Ideology, including the dogmatic uncritical devotion to rationalism progress and efficiency, is death for any civilization. Sheldon Wolin and Political Vision

Figure 67: Sheldon Wolin Adjacent to Saul’s vision of the Unconscious Civilization is the critique of the contemporary political landscape advanced by the American political theorist Sheldon Wolin (1922-2015). Leader of what became known as the “Berkeley School” in American political thought, Wolin’s interpretation of political phenomena is often compared with the ideas that came out of the University in Exile a half-century before; however, Wolin’s influence extends more notably in the early 21st Century to noted political and social critics such as Chris Hedges, Cornel West, Wendy Brown, and Linh Dinh.

Wolin’s principal writings include Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (1960), “Political Theory as a Vocation” (1969), The Presence of the Past (1989), Tocqueville Between Two Worlds (2001) and Democracy Incorporated (2008). Of particular note is his development of the concepts of “inverted totalitarianism” and “fugitive democracy.” In order to place Wolin’s critique in context, it is necessary to begin with his 1960 treatise, Politics and Vision, presented as a broad history of political thought in Western Civilization as a history of interpretation. On the surface, Wolin’s treatment of the development of Western political thought resembles that of Eric Voegelin in Truth and Representation, but also to a lesser extent the continuity of “ages of history” borrowed from the Modern historicists, although like Voegelin and unlike Kant, he stops short of claiming that such Ages connote a linear continuum of Progress. Rather, each Age carries with it a received political vocabulary as well as a received philosophical vocabulary, whose interaction guides each particular Age’s interpretation of both politics and philosophy. This changing interpretation produces in each Age a distinct Vision of political and philosophical language, through expansion of political imagination, refinement of political vision, and transformation of that political vision, giving rise to subsequent Ages. The Nine Ages of Western Political Vision With this model in mind, Wolin posits and explores the development of Western political thought as divided into nine distinct periods, a possible nod to the Nine Muses from Herodotus’ Historiae. With this possible connection in mind, the nine Ages of Western political thought are as follows: the Classical Age (associated with Clio, the Muse of History), the Age of Empires (Euterpe, the Muse of Lyric and Song), the Early Christian Era (Thalia, the Muse of Comedy), the Lutheran Reformation (Melpomene, the Muse of Tragedy), the Calvinist Reformation (Terpsichore, the Muse of Dance), Machiavelli and the Birth of Modernity (Erato, the Muse of Love), Hobbesian Legal Structuralism (Polyhymnia, the Muse of Hymns), Liberalism & the Decline of Political Philosophy (Urania, the Muse of Astronomy), and the Age of Organization & the Sublimation of Politics (Calliope, the Muse of Epic). The first Age, the Classical Age, places political philosophy and politics at odds with each other, as they are each focused on a different telos, where politics focuses on the active principle of the City and is pursued by the Statesman, while political philosophy focuses on the contemplative principle and is sought by lovers of Wisdom and seekers of Truth. This necessarily places the contemplative life in an adversarial position for to contemplate the city, justice, law and the Good in their Absolute forms may conflict with the Good as seen by and for the City itself. This is the Vision of thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle, and from here Wolin connects with Voegelin and Strauss. It is this first Age that generated most of the West’s political vocabulary. The second Age, the Age of Empires, holds the Vision of Space and Community. This is the Age which gives rise to prototypical states in the form of empires such as that of Alexander the Great, Rome and Carthage. While the vocabulary of City, justice, law, and the Good remain as received concepts, the manner of their interpretation becomes dependent on perceptions of Place, which comes to define the community as a whole, and the spread of empire becomes synonymous with the spread of a particular vision of the ordered community. Each community has its own vision of its own Good, in which each may conflict with one another; however, they establish expansive empires in order to secure the good for their community.

Figure 68: The Classical Age and Age of Empires: Action v. Contemplation in Raphael’s School of Athens (left); Place and Community in Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire: Consummation (right). The Vision of the Early Christian Era builds on the interpretation of Community from the Age Empires but instead of binding the Good and the Community to a particular place, Christianity substitutes Time. Regardless of Place, whether in Rome, Alexandria, Syracuse, Jerusalem, Persepolis or Londinium, the community of Christians become defined as those people who live and conduct their lives in the hope for their salvation and the pending return of their Messiah, the risen Lord Jesus Christ as the Incarnation of God Himself, and the markers of the Christian community are to be found in the time they spend either in contemplation or preparation for that time. The Lutheran Reformation transforms the contemplative and the active principles from the Classical Era from that of a conflict between philosophy and politics with a Vision of the Theological and the Political, and leads to new questions about the relationship between God and Man, such as: Should the devout participate in the affairs of the world or shrink from it? Should oppression be tolerated or resisted? And can one reconcile the needs of the Soul and of one’s Conscience with the demands of the City? These questions become central to the early Reformation’s Vision of justice, law and the Good, and would quickly lead into the next Age. This next Age, the Calvinist Reformation, may be seen as the Political Education of Protestantism, whose Vision is that of the faithful participating in the city without necessarily troubling themselves with the problems of Conscience that the Lutheran Reformation posed as hazards to one’s Salvation or Redemption. In this Age, the three Solae—Faith alone in Christ alone through Scripture alone—were sufficient to justify resisting oppression and engaging in the affairs of the city, even taking up positions in opposition to putative ecclesiastical leadership, a resistance which would come into full blossom in the 16th Century.

Figure 69: Luther’s 95 Theses by Ferdinand Pauwels (left), Message of the Reformers (right) With the beginning of that Century would come the Vision of Politics advanced by Niccolò Machiavelli, and which Wolin would call the Birth of Modernity. Given the upheavals in the Italian city-states, the rise of the Medici and Borgia rivalries, not to mention Machiavelli’s own Vision of anticipating necessity and preserving lo stato from ruin, it is not difficult to the describe the Vision of Politics at the Birth of Modernity as principally concerned with the Economy of Violence. As Machiavelli said, there are two ways of exercising power: one with the laws, and one with force. The first is proper to men and the other to beasts, and one must know how well to use both the Beast and the Man in order to maintain one’s state. From here Wolin posits the formalization of the economy of violence with the transition into the Age of Hobbesian Legal Structuralism. In this Vision, Political Society is once again reinterpreted, this time as a System of Rules to which all are subject, and it is in this Age that one sees the rise of Social Contract Theory and the politics of sovereignty. By this time, however, it is clear that the contemplative views of political philosophy found in the Classical Age have largely disappeared in favor of the active life of statesmen and sovereigns, responsible for the establishment and maintenance of those Rules. This limitation and expansion of sovereign power yields to the development of Liberalism and the Decline of Political Philosophy, and in some ways is prepared by the Political Vision of Hobbesian Legal Structuralism. However, with the Advent of Liberalism in the 18th and 19th Centuries, this Vision is once again transformed into an interpretation of Politics that emphasizes inherent tensions between the Political and the Social, between Economics and Morality, giving rise to what Wolin calls the Socialized Conscience. This Socialized Conscience for Wolin drives movements in Western Civilization that range from Kantian Progressivism to the abolition of slavery to British Colonialism. By this time, however, Political Philosophy has largely disappeared from the public arena.

Figure 70: Images of the Birth of Modernity: Hobbes’ Leviathan (left), Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Children (center), The Glorious Revolution of 1688 (right). The most recent Age in Wolin’s treatment he calls the Age of Organization and the Sublimation of Politics. This Age has as its Vision a focus on Organization & Community, whereby communities are defined by their organization and methods of organization. Organization & Method drive theories of Constitution in this age, and a conflict emerges, especially in the 20th Century, between the Rationalism of Publius, Kant, and Weber and the Organicism of Dewey, Schmitt and Evola. In this Age, the notion of the Political itself as a concept comes under attack, and the Vision of Organization & Community are reducible to a system of Elites and Mass much as described by the American political scientist Harold Lasswell in Politics: Who Gets What, When & How (1936). Democracy Incorporated Within the Context of his Age of Organization, Wolin would establish a critique of the American character in his last work, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (2008). Thanks to the sublimation of politics characteristic of the Age, American citizens are generally politically uninterested and submissive, enabling eager elites to maintain this state of affairs. The concept of Democracy, central to the American self- image, has given way to a modified form which he calls “Managed Democracy”, where the public is not functionally sovereign but is instead shepherded by elites, resulting in an “inverted totalitarianism” characterized by the unchecked economic power of corporate elites, a theme reminiscent of Saul’s indictment of corporatism in The Unconscious Civilization. However, where Saul limits his comparison with fascism to evidence of corporatism in contemporary civilization, Wolin adopts a variation of Arendt’s vision of totalitarianism, highlighting the Mythos of Holy War and the Vision of Permanent Global War attendant a wholesale perversion of Democracy in America itself. The United States, for Wolin, is officially defined simultaneously in terms of delegated power and democracy, recasting the concept as a “managed democracy” by corporate elites. This Inverted Totalitarianism has brought about a New World of Terror where post-9/11 “drumbeats” by the architects of fear in positions of political power have produced cautious, even paranoid citizens, who are all too willing to delegate power further along the lines of the Hobbesian vision of the Social Contract, where rights are surrendered for the sake of security. This New World of Terror produces a Theory of Superpower that reconstitutes National Identity along Utopian illusions, much as Voegelin imagined in Science, Politics, and Gnosticism. Under this illusion, the State and Corporation become unified in an Age of waning democracy and expanding political illiteracy, resulting in the death of citizenship as a viable concept, leaving only “customers” and “clients”. Alongside the Theory of Superpower in the United States, however, remains an attachment to the idea of Democracy, though it is a “fugitive” democracy fundamentally in conflict with the Theory of Superpower reinforced by corporate elitism. Wolin sees the conflict between these two competing Visions most clearly in the domains of education and elections, which explains the lines of conflict concerning public policy such as privatization of schools and radical reduction in higher education budgets as well as the expansion of election “reforms” that effectively restrict ballot access among voters: privatization and budget restrictions serve the Theory of Superpower, while community education serves Democracy. However, this particular Vision is perhaps best illustrated in the dystopian literature of the early 21st Century, especially in Max Barry’s Jennifer Government (2002) and Nicholas Lamar Soutter’s The Water Thief (2012).

Figure 71: Critiques of 21st Century Corporatism Wolin further supports his claim of Elites against Democracy, exposing two strains of American elitism which claim unequal ability between “elites” and “mass” as an irrefutable fact. This first strain consists of the disciples of Leo Strauss, who he claims are fundamentally hostile to social science (Strauss’ essay “What is Political Philosophy” provides supporting evidence of this claim), and generally cool to the natural sciences. Furthermore, Straussian elitism in Wolin’s view demonstrates contempt for popular culture, and a tactful approach towards a kind of unregulated capitalism that fosters the rise of corporate elites in the first place. The second strain consists of the disciples of the 20th Century comparative political theorist whose monograph The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996) ignited a firestorm of controversy in political science circles by dividing the world into nine distinct and fundamentally incompatible Civilizational zones, each with what he calls “core” and “peripheral” states, and that most conflicts in the post-Cold War era reflect contests for hegemony over these domains and civilizational boundaries. From Wolin’s perspective, Huntingtonian elitists principally advocate an “aristocracy of professionals” and promote the idea of “liberalizing autocracies” throughout the world, using the colonial legacy of the British Empire as a model, and consequently tend towards Anglophilia and often heap uncritical praise on states within what they call the “Anglosphere”—namely the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and to a lesser degree India and South Africa. The alternative to the ascendant “Managed Democracy” of Straussian/Huntingtonian Elitism is what Wolin calls “fugitive Democracy”, where a waning vision of citizenship and participation guides marginalized individuals within the society in their efforts to educate other individuals about the importance of participation and resistance to the overweening lie of Managed Democracy, much as the Lover of Wisdom in Plato’s Cave Allegory surreptitiously re-enters the Cave, avoids the puppeteers and rescues those ready to be led out into the Light of Truth. In the context of resistance to the Corporatism of Managed Democracy, these efforts must remain a largely unnoticeable and anonymous resistance, lest the Elite Managers co-opt the resistance and commodify it.

Figure 72: “Resistance” in Service to Corporate Profits: Guy Fawkes Mask (left); Che Guevara T- Shirt (right), each selling online for about $20. The challenge inherent to “fugitive democracy” and the difficulty its proponents face against the Corporate Superpower of Inverted Totalitarianism is perhaps most evident in Time-Warner’s merchandising of Guy Fawkes masks, and the proliferation of T-Shirt sales bearing the image of Ernesto “Che” Guevara. This resistance is also evident in the leaderless movement of the anti- corporate demonstrations in 2008-2010 known as “Occupy Wall Street”. Fellows of the Berkeley School

Figure 73: The Berkeley School: from top left: Michael Rogin, Hanna Pitkin, Carey McWilliams, Wendy Brown; bottom: Chris Hedges, Cornel West. Following the influence of Sheldon Wolin’s sense of Political Vision and the critique of Inverted Totalitarianism are a wide variety of political scientists and social critics. Some seek to address specific areas of American popular culture, while others explore alternative Visions of the American Political tradition. Michael Paul Rogin (1937-2001) was an American political scientist of the Berkeley School who was chiefly concerned with the influence of American literature and cinema as the principal means of delivering a particular vision of America as an imperial power without admitting its imperialism. Among his most significant writings are ‘Ronald Reagan: The Movie’ and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (1988) and Independence Day: Or, How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love Enola Gay (1998). Hanna Pitkin (b. 1931) is a German-American political theorist who focuses on the history of European political thought, textual analysis, political psychology, and gender in political theory. Her principal writings include The Concept of Representation (1972), The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social (1998), and Fortune is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolò Machiavelli (1999). Wilson Carey McWilliams (1933-2005) was an American political theorist who openly claimed a debt to both Wolin and Strauss as well as the mid-20th Century French libertarian thinker Bertrand de Jouvenel (1903-1987). In his work, McWilliams traced the development of alternative political traditions in the United States: from the Classical Greeks and Christians, to the Puritans and Anti-Federalists, through Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville to Mark Twain and Ralph Ellison. His principal writings include The Idea of Fraternity in America (1973) and Redeeming Democracy in America (2011, published posthumously by his daughter Susan and Patrick J. Deneen). Wendy Brown (b. 1955) also acknowledges Wolin’s influence but also synthesizes the political thinking of Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Michel Foucault. Chiefly concerned with the politics of victimhood as a foundation for identity and political vision, her principal writings include States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (1995), Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (2008), and Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (2017). Outside of academic circles, one will find students of the Berkeley School among political activists and American social critics, most prominent among them are Cornel West (b. 1953) and Chris Hedges (b. 1956). Morris Berman and the Twilight of American Culture

Figure 74: Morris Berman Following the thread of the indictment of American corporatism in the late 20th Century led by the disciples of Sheldon Wolin, cultural historian Morris Berman (b. 1944) expands his view to a caustic assessment of the American culture at large in the early 21st, tracing steps similar to the academic critic E.D. Hirsch Jr. (b. 1928), author of Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (1988) and The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them (1996). However, where Hirsch generally limits his critique to a faltering public education system rooted in Romanticism and hostility to research-based findings and informed dissent, Berman’s indictment cites an overall culture rooted in the hucksterism of an unregulated marketplace that holds up a false image of vitality that hides a much deeper reality of wholesale civilizational collapse. In his trilogy of American cultural criticism, The Twilight of American Culture (2000), Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire (2006), and Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline (2012), Berman argues first that all imperial civilizations exhibit a life-cycle of birth, growth, maturity, decay and death along the lines of Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918); that American civilization is fundamentally imperial in nature, and that by the end of the 20th Century, much as Spengler predicted nearly a century before, American Civilization (as a proxy for Spengler’s “West”) had entered a state of pre-death emergency. In The Twilight of American Culture, Berman writes that the collapse of civilization has four distinct characteristics: 1) an acceleration of inequality, both socially and economically; 2) diminishing returns on investment in organizational solutions to socioeconomic problems; 3) precipitous drops in levels of literacy, critical thinking and general intellectual awareness, and 4) a hollowing out of cultural content in favor of formulaic substitutes in the form of “kitsch”, which he calls “Spiritual death”. Evidence of the first two conditions abound in the expanding wage gap between rich and poor and a perception of a hollowing out of the “middle class” in the United States, increasingly expensive and ineffective Social welfare policies such as Social Security and the patchwork of America’s health care system, and the rise of America as a carceral state, with more people in the criminal justice system than any other nation on earth. This process may first remind the reader of Marx’s understanding of “late-stage capitalism”; however, where Marx posits a restive proletariat that would somehow establish its own state socialist régime as it overthrows the moneyed elites, Berman is far more pessimistic. This is thanks to the third condition of civilizational collapse, namely the advent of widespread and increasing functional illiteracy and the absence of critical understanding or general intellectual awareness. Berman’s evidence for this condition comes from several sources, including a two- decade survey of publisher’s errors such as misspellings and grammatical breaches, first in advertising, then in journalism, and finally in academic publications. Berman also looks to the rise in magical thinking, hostility to academic thinking and education in general, and trivialization or lampooning of intellectualism in popular culture through television entertainment programming and film as evidence of further collapse. Once the society as a whole has crossed the threshold from non-literacy to illiteracy and from illiteracy to anti- literacy, the fourth condition, spiritual death, is sure to follow. This condition is expressed in the uncritical fetishization of cultural artifacts, a hollow echo of Nietzsche’s antiquarian history where even cultural critique becomes commodified kitsch, to which Berman bears witness through the example of the late 20th Century “culture-jammer” publication Adbusters.

Figure 75: Kitsch: substitutes for culture. Hello Kitty (left), Princess Diana commemorative plate (center), Disney’s Magic Kingdom (right)

Figure 76: The Wholesale Erosion of American Culture: from left, a misspelled billboard promoting schools, Christianity as kitsch, Ronald McDonald defecates into a burger shell, Adbusters selling shoes. The second, and longest, book in the trilogy, Dark Ages America, delves deeply into an exploration of what he believes are the causes of American civilizational collapse, and compares it with the late stages of the Roman Empire, even titling one of his chapters “Pax Americana,” describing Charles Freeman’s Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (2003) as a primer for interpreting the late stage American empire as much as it details Rome from the 4th to the 6th Century. Berman reinforces his contention that America has entered a Dark Age by the early 21st Century by underscoring a triumph of religion over reason with the re-election of George W. Bush to the American presidency, a wholesale breakdown of education and critical thinking, the legalization of torture in the post-9/11 security environment, and the marginalization of the United States, once the world’s premier “superpower”, on the world stage. In this book, Berman identifies several mechanisms built into American civilization that not only sustained it but also contribute to its ruin, such as the American rejection of traditional norms in an effort to liberate itself from the European past, from the “suffocating restrictions of class, history, religion, and tradition, but rather the absolute weightlessness of choice.” The irony, in Berman’s view, is that this very weightlessness has itself become suffocating as well, as “a world of compulsive self- determination” in what he calls “liquid Modernity.” This liquid Modernity affects all aspects of American life, from the workplace to the home, from Americans’ relationship with media to their relationship with their children, even to the sense of community and identity, which ultimately unmoors the American from any coherent sense of American-ness. As Salman Rushdie noted in his novel Fury (2001) and Berman opens his first chapter, “Rome did not fall because her armies weakened but because Romans forgot what being a Roman meant…O Dream-America, was civilization’s quest to end in obesity and trivia…?” Furthermore, the American experience with economy and technology, with globalization and the disconnect Americans experience with the world, each other, and even within their own homes, a shadow of the very interconnectedness both the global economy and technology have become that which enables and accelerates this alienation. Under such conditions as exist in late-stage American empire, the “person of excellence”, characterized as someone who knows “a fair amount about the world”, who seeks” both physical valor and intellectual refinement”, who is “accomplished in music and versed in the arts”, and who understands “that real strength lies not in material force, but in the power to give, forgive, help, and heal”, is nearly impossible to achieve. When translated into America’s changing role in the world at the beginning of the 21st Century, this “liquid Modernity” gives rise to a self-destructive foreign policy of the United States’ own making that is closely related to American “values” and daily behaviors. The adoption in American foreign policy of the doctrine of the pre-emptive strike in 2002, in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and invoking a variation of Carl Schmitt’s jus ad bellum, marks the transition of American culture from twilight to a truly Dark Age, and that the precipitating event, the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, constituted a wake-up call to change course from a civilizational death- spiral, which the United States utterly failed to heed. The third book in the American Culture trilogy, Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline, seeks to explain that the origins of the collapse of American civilization can be traced to its origins in what he calls a dominant “hustler” culture, and that the very tools that contributed to the rise of the United States to dominate the North American continent and then the world economy and culture also contributed to its downfall, an argument similar to Karl Marx’s claim in the 19th Century that the dominant class structure contains within it the seeds of its own destruction. Unlike Marx’s dialectical materialism, however, Berman asserts that it is materialism itself, coupled with the narrow pursuit of personal gain and willful ignorance of the consequences that pursuit brings that fuels the American “hustler” culture, a critique redolent of Sayyid al Qutb’s indictment of post-World War II culture in “The America I Have Seen.” Yet where al Qutb advocates the formation of a Vanguard to advance “social justice” in the context of a radical interpretation of religious dogma, Berman argues that the fall of American Culture into a Dark Age is already too far advanced to reverse or prevent, and the only hope that remains of restoring civilization is what he calls in the first book the “Monastic Option”, in which disaffected Americans may go “underground” in an effort to preserve a record of authentic civilized living as a “counterweight to the world of schlock, ignorance, social inequality, and consumerism that now defines the American landscape.”(Twilight 132) It is not enough, however, to preserve information or readings or even “Great Books”, like the early medieval monastics had done after the collapse of Roman civilization, for the pressure in a Dark Ages American environment differs from the Dark Ages in Europe. In the post-American scenario, people are awash in a surfeit of information, some valuable, most not, and any collection of information leading to knowledge would become equivalent to trivial nonsense and “fake news” to be commodified, monetized and hence ruined by the prevailing “hustler” environment. Rather, now that America has fallen, Berman exhorts these “new monks” not only to hold onto those habits and features of ways of life worth preserving, but to leave the United States entirely if at all possible and to live in places beyond the reach of mainstream historical forces. In Berman’s case, he moved to a small town in Mexico, away from the American steamroller of “hustling, the pursuit of affluence, technology and ‘progress’” (Why America Failed, 162).

Aleksandr Dugin and the War against Atlantis

Figure 77: Aleksandr Dugin In the face of an American civilization in a state of freefall, one should expect others to seek to capitalize on the transformation of the political world, and to remake that world according to their own vision. Most prominent among these is Aleksandr Dugin (b. 1962), a Russian political analyst and philosopher with close ties to the Russian military, the Kremlin and Russian president Vladimir Putin. Influenced heavily by the writings of René Guénon, Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, Halford Mackinder and Samuel Huntington, Dugin’s own writing has been adopted as required reading in Russia’s Academy of the General Staff in Moscow, the Russian equivalent to the United States Military Academy at West Point. A somewhat regular commentator on the English-language media mouthpiece for Putin’s Russia United Party, RT (Russia Today), Dugin’s principal writings include Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia (1997), The Fourth Political Theory (2012) and Last War of the World Island: The Geopolitics of Contemporary Russia (2015), and he is broadly viewed as influential on “alt- right” movements in Europe, the Middle East and the United States. The Foundations of Dugin’s Geopolitics The text which has gained currency as a textbook for the Academy of the General Staff is his 1997 work, Foundations of Geopolitics. This text demonstrates his strong reliance on the ideas of Carl Schmitt’s Concept of the Political, René Guénon’s Crisis of the Modern World and Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations. Foundations offers a clear doctrinal and strategic view of the political world in terms of rigid spheres of identity, authority, and influence defined by Civilizational Identity as well as the capacity to project land and sea power. Put bluntly, Dugin divides the political world into two mutually incompatible Civilizational camps: Eurasia, consisting of Russia, Iran and areas formerly in the Russian Empire, with China as a viable contender for influence; and Atlantis, comprised of the United States and Britain, as well as Western Europe and Canada, with Germany as a viable contender for influence. Within this broad framework Dugin develops a geopolitical ideology he calls Eurasianism, whose principal goal is to advance the influence of Russia in terms largely identical to Schmitt’s view of the goal of the Total State: stability and security at home, respect for the jus ad bellum abroad. Since, according to Schmitt, the central purpose of the State is to define for its citizens the Friend/Enemy distinction, Dugin’s Eurasianism obliges, drawing a global dichotomy between Eurasia and Atlantis as necessarily adversarial. Hence, the US and Western Europe are seen in direct and irreconcilable opposition to Eurasian, meaning Russian, interests and influence. From Dugin’s point of view, the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought about an onslaught of Atlantic influence which must be identified, countered, and stopped: Atlanticisim in the 1990s carried too much influence in Eurasia and Russia’s mission is to guarantee it loses influence moving forward into the 21st Century. By the same token, Russia must rebuild, through a coherent combination of annexation and alliance, the influence it had lost with the collapse of the Soviet system, and that the new Eurasia be built on the “fundamental principle of the common enemy.” This is to be accomplished through the propagation of Eurasian nations’ wholesale rejection of Atlanticism, strategic control of the United States, and an aggressive refusal to let “liberal values” dominate Eurasia.

Figure 78: The Geopolitical World of Aleksandr Dugin: Atlantis (left), Mackinder’s Heartland Thesis (center), Eurasia, the World-Island (right) Strategically, Eurasianism is to proceed along a vision of the geopolitical world defined by two axes of influence in Eurasia, or what he calls “The World-Island” in a reference to the British Geographer Sir Halford Mackinder. First, Russia must develop a Moscow-Tehran axis with its foundations in the “traditional character of Russian and Islamic civilization,” an obvious nod to the writings of René Guénon. In this vein, Russia and Iran are to be seen as the principal strategic allies in opposition to “the Great Satan”, the United States. Second, Russia must also cultivate a Moscow-Berlin Axis, for Germany stands among Atlanticists as the principal contender for influence in that geopolitical sphere. This axis is to be founded on a fundamental Politico-religious division, where Germany exercises de facto influence over parts of Eastern Europe, specifically those areas characterized by Catholic-Protestant states as opposed to Orthodoxy, which each constitute separate spheres of their own.

Figure 79: Dugin’s Axes: Moscow-Tehran, Moscow-Berlin. Tactically, Eurasianism features as principal objectives what Dugin calls the “Finlandization” of Europe, where Russia is able to compel European states to follow Russia’s foreign policy rules, all while keeping their independence and separate political systems, hence disconnecting Europe from Atlantis and gravitating towards Eurasia. Additionally, Dugin’s Eurasianism calls for a redistribution of Central Asia by forming an alliance with Iran and dividing Azerbaijan, the annexation of Ukraine and the dissolution of Georgia, and the political destabilization of Turkey, disrupting the Atlantic influence in the Middle East through Turkey’s membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, perhaps even breaking that alliance in the end. The third major objective involves the redirection of China, using Tibet, Xinxiang, Mongolia and Manchuria as a possible security belt, either through annexation or separate security alliances, and assisting China in shifting its foreign policy focus southward to Indochina and Australia, leaving Russia to exert greater influence on the World-Island in the East as well as the West. Finally, Eurasianism has the fourth objective of enticing other nations to reject the influence of the United States, compelling the United States to withdraw from the world stage as a significant player. Operationally these objectives are to be achieved as follows: To achieve the Finlandization of Europe, Russia must support subversive alternative parties and movements throughout the nations of the European Union. Using the leverage acquired through Russia’s oil and gas production and infrastructure, Russia could generate pressure on European nations that depend on imported fossil fuels to drive their economies and energy infrastructure, all while avoiding using military force, which should only be used sparingly and in areas where success is a virtual guarantee. Furthermore, Russia would use this leverage to encourage Britain to secede from the EU as well as to support Scottish separation from Britain. Next, to achieve the redistribution of Central Asia, Russia would partner with Iran in fighting rebel movements in Syria, Yemen, and the Nagorno-Karabakh region of the South Caucasus and on Iran’s northern frontier. Additionally, Russia would take the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine through outright annexation, reinforce Donetsk separatism in eastern Ukraine, and actively manipulate Ukrainian elections. Redistribution of Central Asia would be completed through the spread of ethnic Identity movements among the Kurds, Iranians, and Armenians as “Aryan people”, in what can only be a direct nod either to Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche’s racist Utopia or Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The redirection of China would involve cession of the long-disputed Kuril Islands to Japan in an effort to manipulate Japanese politics away from the strategic-economic alliance with the United States, all while assisting North Korea’s nuclear weapons program wherever practical, and facilitating free trade negotiations between China and Australia. Finally, Russia would guarantee the retraction of the United States by fostering and encouraging the spread of anti-American sentiment nearly everywhere in the world, including in the United States itself. This last point would be accomplished by fueling instability in the US along recognized political and economic fault lines, encouraging ethnic, social and racial conflict wherever possible, and supporting all dissident movements in the United States: extremist, racist, sectarian, and isolationist. This last point could be accomplished through disinformation campaigns, construing the interconnectedness of American internet communications as a primary battlespace, specifically for the minds and attitudes of dissident figures in the US and playing them against one another, eroding whatever sense of national identity that may linger there in favor of sectarian or separatist identities.

Figure 80: Dugin’s targets in the US: #Black Lives Matter (left), #Unite the Right (right) For Dugin, the post-Cold War Geopolitical environment of an apparent Unipolarity in the World constitutes an Evil that must be opposed. “The American Empire should be destroyed; and at one point it will be.” In his 2009 work, The Fourth Political Theory, he urges the reader to put aside anti-Communist and anti-Fascist prejudices for the sake of retaining what is worth keeping from these two Political Theories—remedies to alienation from Communism, National Identity, tradition and hierarchy from Fascism—and combine them with what is worth keeping from Liberalism, namely the sense of freedom at the center of the Liberal Political Theory, and reject what is unworkable, irrelevant or destructive, namely the uniformity of a One World (specifically American) way of life that requires force, temptation and persuasion to persist, so that the world may be remade striving for multipolarity. Beyond Eurasianism: The Fourth Political Theory In The Fourth Political Theory (2009), Dugin lays bare his debt to early 20th Century totalitarian thinking, all while appearing to reject them in a kind of rhetorical misdirection. For Dugin, the political systems of the 20th Century are each defined by failed ideologies and their respective normative principles. For Liberalism, that principle is the primacy of the Individual; for Communism, it is the Social Class; for Fascism, it is the State. Consequently, in the early 21st Century the only one of these failed theories left standing is that of Liberalism, which despite its own failure threatens to monopolize political reality and drown the world in a universal “sameness”. An alternative to this phenomenon, which comparativist Benjamin Barber derisively called “McWorld”, Dugin presents as a counter-theory both to post-modernity and post-industrial society, an alternative to globalization and liberal thought which must be realized in practice, drawing its inspiration from the conditions of post-modernity, and forming the foundation for Dugin’s Eurasianism. In order to construct this “fourth political theory”, Dugin first takes stock of the three prevailing theories of 20th Century politics, assessing each of them according to what he perceives are their positive and negative features. The “fourth theory” would involve a synthesis of these previous three and correct their respective deficiencies. First with Liberalism comes the positive attribute of a sense of freedom, but it must be cleansed of its negative attributes, namely universalism, over-emphasis on the individual, and alienation of the individual from any sense of belonging to a community. With Communism comes a positive remedy to the alienation that liberalism produces, but its emphasis on classism and its material dialectic nevertheless produces a similarly destructive universalism. Fascism for Dugin carries a cure for universalism with its emphasis on national identity, tradition and hierarchy, but is nevertheless plagued with virulent racism and violent militarism, a trait it shares with liberalism. Dugin’s critique of Liberalism is peculiar from a Western point of view, for his vision of liberalism incorporates a much broader view of its constituents than either Western Europe or America would claim. Dugin’s “Liberalism” encompasses a variety of political and social systems, from libertarianism and state socialism to Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism and even what Westerners would call Conservatism. In this view, Liberalism emerges with the 17th Century Enlightenment as a pseudo-humanist cult that exalts the individual over the community. Necessarily historicist and progressive, Liberalism according to Dugin inevitably expands into globalization and culminates in a world-state, presumably something like America. Further, it encourages a double-standard of politics and behavior based on the friend/foe distinction, rejects the reversibility of Time, and is ultimately unable to reproduce itself, collapsing in the end under its own global weight. His critique of Conservatism, or at least the Conservatism espoused in the West, is merely one class of conservatism, whose true essence is the cult of preserving backward practices. Fundamental conservatism seeks to preserve tradition and law for their own sake, while Liberal conservativism, the class found in Atlantis, is merely a form of retarded Liberalism in its cautionary endorsement of change. By contrast, one must look to the Conservative Revolutionary for a possible solution to the failures of Liberalism, for the Conservative Revolutionary seeks active change to regress, as one sees with Eurasianism’s goal of the abandonment of “Western values” by the peoples of the World-Island, and Neo-Eurasianism, which justifies the abandonment of “western values” using Foucault’s power theory and Derrida’s method of deconstruction. It is at this point that Dugin moves away from his original policy of Eurasianism, embracing a form of Traditionalism that, except for its reliance on the wholly Russian concept of Narod, bears an obvious resemblance both to René Guénon and Julius Evola. Here Dugin sets the Narod in contrast to “civilization” which he claims is an Enlightenment concept rooted in the universality of social experience. This ideology of “civilization” drives savagery and violence internally and produces colonialism and genocide abroad. By contrast, Dugin advocates the Russian concept of the Narod, a functional people, folk, ethnicity or “nation” that is rooted in the particulars of a region’s people. It would seem then that Dugin advocates all the peoples of the world to return to their particular corners of the world and stay there. This idea places him squarely against the 21st Century “Left” which he claims has transformed itself into a post- modern monster from the Orthodox Communism of the National Gauchists. These Gauchists, found in Venezuela, Cuba, Vietnam, Bolivia, and Peru, are broadly repressive and poor, and demonstrate evidence of the failures of Communism left over from the 20th Century. The anti- globalist “New Left”, by contrast, nevertheless remain universalists defined by their consistency with the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and seek to “free up the creative potential of the masses,” yet nevertheless remain enslaved to the poisonous dogma of Liberalism, the evil fate of human civilization.

Figure 81: “Civilization” vs. the Narod: McWorld (left) vs. Croatian nationalist demonstrators(right) And just what are these dogmas to be opposed, battled and refuted? For Dugin, the enemy is embodied in the ideology that holds that the individual is the measure of all things, that private property is sacred, that equality of opportunity stands as a moral law, and that all sociopolitical institutions are contractually based. Liberalism further demands the abolition of any governmental, religious or social authority who lays claim to “the common truth”, demanding in its place a separation of powers and social systems of control over government, replacing government itself with a chimerical “civil society” devoid of races, peoples, or religions, and dominated by market relations over other forms of politics. Liberalism carries with it a fundamental confusion between liberty and freedom. Dugin’s view of these two concepts roughly correspond to the negative and positive senses of freedom whose bifurcation traces back at least to Immanuel Kant, but is best known through Erich Fromm, Isaiah Berlin and Charles Taylor. Liberty, by which Dugin understands the negative sense of freedom, he views as the ”most disgusting formula of slavery” and tempts man to insurrection against God, against traditional values and against the moral and spiritual foundations of his people and culture. By contrast, Dugin extols what he calls “freedom”, namely the freedom to pursue the creative potential of the “masses” and fulfill man as a member of his community under God, within traditional values and within his particular narod. Borrowing a turn of phrase from the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, Dugin contends that any future ontology of man, within the context of the Fourth Political Theory, must be grounded in an understanding of historicity and constitution. In the New Political Anthropology, social beings are political beings; politics defines the man, and the politics of the narod extends as a rhizomic connection, connecting the members of the narod, one to another in a variation of the Organic Theory of the State. In the Fourth Political Practice (since Theory of necessity carries a Practical expression), men walk away from the dualism of subject and object, of intention and realization, and from the dual topography as the foundation for philosophy, science and the “politology” of modernity in favor of the Inzwichen (The “In-Between”) and Dasein (“Being There”) identified and advocated by Martin Heidegger. Jordan Peterson and the Personalization of Gnosticism

Figure 82: Jordan Peterson The second decade of the 21st Century saw in the United States and elsewhere a Balkanization of political opinion and a fragmentation of the body politic into increasingly exclusive camps identified largely along the lines of what in the generation before was called the Culture War. On one side of this major political divide were the post-modern disciples of Michel Foucault, Martha Nussbaum, and the Berkeley School, endorsing a program of what they called “social justice” and global citizenship through the conscious management of a multicultural vision of a pluralist society, and largely conforming to Sandel’s “thin” view of justice as a Universal concept, more or less on Kantian or Neo-Kantian lines, but filtered through the post-modern view of Foucault in which language is construed as a vehicle of power. On the other side were those who, suspicious of grand designs, chose instead to endorse a more Traditionalist framework akin to the political ideas of René Guénon and Julius Evola and adhered closely to Sandel’s “thick” conception of community. This view was certainly no less post-modern than the other, yet nevertheless claimed that their vision, and not that of the neo-Kantian Universalists, was more consistent with the traditions of Western civilization and therefore the legitimate political worldview. This seemingly chaotic split among members of both camps led ultimately to the view that the body politic itself had become completely unmoored and wandering in an ethical wasteland. It was this context that gave rise to the politics of Trumpism and the ethical worldview espoused by Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson (b. 1962), whose 2018 book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, would emerge and become an instant bestseller, particularly among those claiming to espouse “conservative” ideological preferences. Jordan Peterson belongs to a loose collection of scholars and cultural critics known as the Intellectual Dark Web, a putative movement of social and political criticism that routinely questions the position of mainstream academic orthodoxy and, while it does not necessarily espouse a consistent worldview, nevertheless challenges a prevalent view that intellectual predecessors such as the Straussian Allan Bloom have derided as “cultural relativism.” While his first book, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (1999), is generally interpreted as a broad synthesis of multiple fields to provide a comprehensive theory surrounding how people construct meaning à la Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kirkegaard, or Ludwig Wittgenstein, in a manner compatible with available research in the neurosciences, the diagrams contained within it suggest a more direct connection with the Gnostic tradition espoused by Guénon, Evola, al Qutb and Strauss, but especially Evola’s dualism of Mother Earth dominated by Father Sky.

Figure 83: Diagram from Maps of Meaning: The balance between “The Lord of Order” and the “Dragon of Chaos”. Peterson’s second book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (2018) generated the most attention as a bestseller in the “self-help” genre, and is often described as a mere popularization of the model he develops in Maps of Meaning. However, while making oblique references to Nietzsche’s “Horizons of Meaning”, his explicit purpose at the outset is to articulate a plan of self-improvement rooted in Heidegger’s concept of Dasein, or “being there”. In 12 Rules for Life, Peterson buttresses much of his defense of the “Rules” he claims to have developed on the Quora social media platform with a variety of sources, including the human behavior of addicts, criminals, childhood acquaintances, his own children, and curiously even lobsters; religious texts from multiple religious traditions, including Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist and Zoroastrian sources; and parables reframed in purely allegorical terms, much as Joseph Campbell does in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Indeed 12 Rules for Life appears to have been written such that any reader, whether he or she happens to subscribe to the religious traditions addressed or even not, will have gained confidence that Peterson himself subscribes to those same preferences he or she already holds, and confirming what the reader already believes to be true. Nevertheless, the more careful reader will note that the utilitarian treatment of behavioral research and the allegorical religious texts provides what can only be described as a confirmation bias and lead into several instances of cognitive dissonance, whereby familiar parables and moral lessons from the childhood of the “faithful” reinforce a worldview that renders that faith meaningless beyond the reader’s own prejudice, until the reader acquiesces to Peterson’s rhetorical ministrations: confident, relaxed and suggestible. He also prefaces each “Rule” with a frontispiece illustration, in much the same manner as Jean- Jacques Rousseau did in his Émile: Or, On Education, as a cue for the reader familiar with that work that 12 Rules for Life is as much a rebuttal to Rousseau’s education plan as it is a putative “self-help” guide. However, the overall structure of the book, as well as the imagery he uses as part of his illustrations, demonstrate Peterson’s embrace of Gnosticism. Indeed, one image carried over from Maps of Meaning into 12 Rules for Life is the Caracol he calls “The Meaning of Music.” This image, an original painting of Peterson’s that he uses as a backdrop for his public appearances, suggests either a shell or a Fibonacci Spiral, and remind the reader of the “golden ratio” ϕ in mathematics, where the ratio of two quantities is that same as the ratio of their sum to the larger of the two quantities. Nothing is printed in Peterson’s work by accident, and the two physical halves of 12 Rules for Life roughly correspond to this ratio when compared against the length of each chapter; the physical center of the book sits towards the end of “Rule #7” and not at the middle of “Rule #6.” Additionally, in the Advaita Vedanta school of Hindu philosophy, the spiral represents the “Wheel of Time” and suggests, à la Nietzsche, an eternal recurrence of the same patterns of history, passing through successive ages of Spirit, Mind, Energy (Action) and Material, and oscillating between periods of Spiritual Order and Material Chaos. In Peterson’s view, however, this same spiral denotes an “Architecture of Meaning” that defines the personal human experience of oneself, yet nevertheless contains the same framework of Order and Chaos, like Nietzsche’s Apollo and Dionysus or the Babylonian Marduk and Tiamat.

Figure 84: From left¸ Peterson’s “The Meaning of Music”, The Wheel of Time as Caracol, The World Tree as link between Order and Chaos in Maps of Meaning. Furthermore, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos tempts readers either to seek to restore their temporal experience to participation in a sense of the sacred, or else to restore the sacred to their temporal experience, through such statements as “Heaven is something you must build, and immortality something you must earn…” and “You must determine where you are going…Heaven after all will not arrive of its own accord. We will have to work to bring it about.” Such statements carry an unambiguously Gnostic sentiment, but what distinguishes Peterson from others in the reactionary post-modern tradition, however, is that for him the Eschaton is made Immanent on a personal rather than a political level, through the adoption and implementation of deceptively innocuous “Rules for Life”, such as “Stand Up Straight with Your Shoulders Back,” “Do Not Let Your Children Do Anything That Makes You Dislike Them,” and “Pet a Cat When You Encounter One on the Street.” Most strikingly, Peterson’s Rule #7, “Pursue What Is Meaningful (Not What Is Expedient)”, contains an image of himself occupying the position of the Eye of Horus: I had a vision, once, of an immense landscape, spread for miles out to the horizon before me. I was high in the air, granted a bird’s-eye view. Everywhere I could see great stratified multi-storied pyramids of glass, some small, some large, some overlapping, some separate—all akin to modern skyscrapers; all full of people striving to reach each pyramid’s very pinnacle. But there was something above that pinnacle, a domain outside each pyramid, in which all were nested. That was the privileged position of the eye that could or perhaps chose to soar freely above the fray; that chose not to dominate any specific group or cause but instead to somehow simultaneously transcend all. That was attention, itself, pure and untrammeled: detached, alert, watchful attention, waiting to act when the time was right and the place had been established. As the Tao te Ching has it: He who contrives, defeats his purpose; and who is grasping, loses. The sage does not contrive to win, and therefore is not defeated; he is not grasping, so does not lose (page 184)

Figure 85: from left, The Eye of Horus, The Gnostic All Seeing Eye, Emblem designed by a Peterson Fan Perhaps the greatest misconception about Jordan Peterson is not that he is a Christian (which is clearly not the case if only one reads closely), but that he is agnostic. Peterson’s text puts lie to this misconception as well, and instead provides ample evidence that he embraces precisely the opposite view: Jordan Peterson is a Gnostic thinker to the core. True, part of the difficulty in wrestling with this author lies in his apparent tentative embrace of religion as well as both atheism and agnosticism, often in the same paragraph. However, Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life are grounded in the same fundamental tenets as those embraced by thinkers such as Nietzsche and Heidegger, those of establishing for oneself the Horizons of Meaning and a firm commitment to Dasein, all in an effort to enable his readers individually to strive to create Heaven on Earth on a personal level. Much of this striving for Peterson is packaged for easy consumption, especially for those unfamiliar with his sources. Peterson’s Rules for Life display a comfortable veneer of self-help through the embrace of traditional ideas and attitudes, using familiar sources of authoritative moral teaching; however, underneath this surface he expresses the same hope for moral or ethical “restoration” dreamt by the likes of René Guénon and Julius Evola, in a dissonant Gnostic parody of Voegelin’s Metaxy. While such thinking may be useful for living from his point of view, he provides ample evidence throughout his work that he himself actually believes none of it. Voegelin himself wrote extensively against Gnosticism in all its forms. In The New Science of Politics, as well as in his two essays on Science, Politics and Gnosticism, Voegelin warns against the futility of Immanentizing the Eschaton, for any attempt to do so, whether through efforts to transcend the world through restoring the temporal to the sacred or else to create a Heaven on Earth, can only result in a Living Hell. Given the Gnostic underpinnings of Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life, one can only expect his project to do the same. Walter Scheidel and The Great Leveler

Figure 86: Walter Scheidel By far the most pessimistic of the contemporary thinkers covered here is the Austrian historian Walter Scheidel (b. 1966). Although his primary research interests lie in ancient social and economic history and demography, his comparative historical research has contributed to a broad yet unsettling view of the nature, status and progress of equality and inequality within political systems in general. While his principal role in academic scholarship has been as an editor or co-editor, he is perhaps best known for The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century (2017). Scheidel opens The Great Leveler with a consideration of empirical data that suggest that material inequality in the 21st Century is widespread and increasing, with the richest sixty-two individuals possessing the same amount of wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion people, and that less than 1% of the population possesses fully half the world’s wealth. His stated purpose in this book is to trace the history of inequality and why at certain periods of human history the distribution of wealth has radically shifted. In one sense, it is clear that Scheidel’s principal concern is with material wealth, social stratification and opportunity, much one would expect from a 19th Century dialectical materialist of the Marxian school. However, unlike Marxists, who see a progress towards justice and equality in history, Scheidel takes a far different view. Drawing on an interdisciplinary range of sources, including observations of primate behavior, research in anthropology, archaeology, demography studies, historical monographs, scholarship in economics and policy journals (his bibliography includes over 900 sources), Scheidel argues that inequality and hierarchies appear largely written into human societies from the very beginning, and are even found among our closest primate relatives—a claim not dissimilar from Peterson’s about natural competitive selection, only Scheidel avoids drawing a comparison with lobsters. For Scheidel, inequality is not necessarily a defect of certain civilizations, or even a feature of specific social, political and economic systems; rather inequality is a fundamental feature of all civilizations, and the longer any one civilization lasts, the more unequal the distribution of wealth and opportunity becomes. Citing examples from ancient Rome to Han China to the pipiltin of 13th Century Mesoamerica, Scheidel observes that throughout human history, the oligoi, however they are to be defined, manifestly enjoy privileges and immunities separately from the demos, that different rules, expectations, and standards of behavior apply differently to “rich” and poor in every society man has yet conceived. Hence radical inequality, oligarchic privilege, and privation of the many are the norm, not the exception, in the human experience. However, this inequality, through persistent, is by no means permanent, and radical shifts in the “haves” and “have-nots” in the human populations that have emerged since the last Ice Age indicate what can best be described as the bookends of civilization. Indeed, once one has surveyed the prehistory and history of human civilizations, according to Scheidel, a familiar pattern emerges, revealing that only four phenomena have ever actually reduced levels of inequality among human populations: mass mobilization warfare, violent revolution producing régime change within a state, state failure and comprehensive systems collapse, and widespread virulent pandemic. Put another way, the only events that successfully redistribute wealth or opportunity in any meaningful way correspond to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Although there are variants of these mythical figures from the Revelation of St. John, these are commonly identified as War, Famine, Pestilence and Death. However, they may also come in the forms of Conquest, War, Famine, and Death. As we shall see below, both expressions of the Four Horsemen are evident in Scheidel’s treatment of the Great Levelers.

Figure 87: Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1887), by Viktor Vasetnov In a case study of War as a “total leveler,” Scheidel explores the transformation of the Empire of Japan, in 1938 perhaps “one of the most unequal countries on earth” with an income distribution profile similar to the United States in 1929 before the crash of the American stock market, to a country in the 1950s whose wealth gap more closely resembled that of Denmark, with the narrowest wealth gap of any country in the world in the second half of the 20th Century. “Japan provides us with a textbook case of war-driven leveling” thanks in part to mass mobilization to support a war effort in Manchuria and across the Pacific, characterized by the nationalization of industry, land reform and rent controls, and the establishment of social welfare policies to strengthen the pool of subjects as able-bodied soldiers and sailors. Scheidel then identifies accelerated inflation as a second leveler driven in part by the progress of the war against the United States, especially between 1937 and 1944. The third leveler, the destruction of capital, arises as Japan loses the war, where a full quarter of Japan’s physical capital had been destroyed, along with 80 percent of its merchant vessels, 25 percent of all improved structures, a third of factory equipment, and about a quarter of all manufactured products. This leveling would be reinforced by the American occupation forces after the war and the fundamental restructuring of Japan’s political and economic system. More than Japan, however, Scheidel points to a global phenomenon he calls “the Great Compression” in the period from 1914-1945, where two devastating World Wars (arguably a single total war with two distinct phases) served to reduce persistent inequality and define the 20th Century as a whole.

Figure 88: War, the First Great Leveler: From left, British soldiers on the Somme, nuclear detonation over Hiroshima, Effects of the Hiroshima bombing. Scheidel’s case for violent revolution as a “total leveler” focuses on the Russian Revolution of 1917. Although civil wars may have a significant effect on the distribution of wealth within a state, they instead tend to exacerbate and extend existing inequalities rather than reduce them. Instead, only violent overthrow of a government and replacement of the régime by another political system can serve as a reliable leveler. This is the lesson from the Bolsheviks’ “war to the death against the rich:” However, the manner in which leveling occurred in Communist Russia was not necessarily based on a naïve “Robin Hood” style of redistribution. Rather, the widespread misery precipitated by the destruction of economic capacity and the “violent equalization” of Stalin’s purges and the “Great Terror” of mass arrests, relocation to the gulag and forced collectivization shrank both incomes and consumption across the Soviet Union. Similar cases of violent transformative revolution can be seen in Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China as a mass warfare on social and economic classes, the Communist revolution in North Korea, and the Killing Fields of Cambodia under Pol Pot; all of which share the same underlying pattern of large-scale violence and “tragic brutality.”

Figure 89: Revolution, The Second Great Leveler: 10th Congress of the Communist Party in Russia (left), Remains of victims of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia (right). For State failure and systems collapse, Scheidel offers several examples: the terminal phase of the Tang dynasty in 9th Century China, in which land redistribution quickly gave way to elite domination of land ownership in spite of legal proscriptions against it; large private estates may have shielded peasants from taxation, but this enriched the landowners at the expense of the state and enabled landowners to extract increasing rents from the peasants who worked the estates for diminishing compensation. When the peasants complained to the state, the state largely ignored them as the landowners enriched themselves and increasingly intermarried into an ossified landed oligarchy, and cutting the state apparatus off from sources of revenue to prevent challenges to its authority. The capital of Chang-an, unable to defend itself from warlords and usurpers, was successively sacked and the public ministers and consuls of the late Tang dynasty died in their hundreds, affecting every segment of society from the emperor’s court, which succumbed to a revolt of the eunuchs, to the landowners themselves, who were turned out and butchered in a series of purges and flights of the peasantry. One sees a similar, albeit less dramatic, state collapse with the disintegration of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th Century, though the Roman wealthy elites also were extinguished in bloodshed, and the leveling can be seen in the archaeological record with the dramatic reduction of the size of houses in distant parts of the former Western Roman Empire such as Britain. Indeed, this pattern of state collapse as a total leveler is presaged in the long collapse of Bronze Age Mycenae, the decomposition of Teotihuacan around the 6th Century, and later among the early 15th Century Maya with the desertion of Tikal, and more recent evidence of this same pattern abounds in the failed state of Somalia. However, in each case the attendant leveling is unique: “In some cases,” says Scheidel, “collapse acted on inequality by making everyone worse off— but the rich more so…in other contexts…leveling need not necessarily have involved widespread worsening of living conditions but…by affecting mostly those at the top.” (Scheidel 287)

Figure 90: State Collapse, the Third Great Leveler: Zhang Yichao expels the Tibetans, late Tang Dynasty The final “total leveler” is widespread virulent pandemic, the most obvious example being the Black Death that reshaped Western Europe, most dramatically in the Plague’s early run in the mid-14th Century, though outbreaks of Yersinia pestis still occurred until the 19th Century. In this particular case Scheidel relies on the writings of the late 18th Century English cleric and economist Thomas Malthus, who claimed that as a general rule population growth tends to exceed available resources and as a result aggravate scarcity until that scarcity provides a “positive check” on that growth by increasing mortality rates, and “preventive checks” by depressing fertility and fecundity. In the 1320s, with the arrival of the Black Death, both checks appear to have been expressed as Europe lost anywhere from 30% to 60% of its total population, and sparking social, religious and political upheavals among the survivors. Other significant historical plagues include the Justinianic Plague among the Byzantines and the earlier Antonine Plague of 3rd Century Rome. The most dramatic experience of pandemic, however, must certainly be the consequence of what historians call the Columbian Exchange, in which diseases such as smallpox ravaged the indigenous populations of the Western hemisphere, a death toll that some have estimated at around 90%: “Within a year of Christopher Columbus’s first voyage, infections began to ravage the first European foothold…Its indigenous population dwindled from possibly hundreds of thousands to…fewer than 2000 by 1542.” In each case followed a familiar pattern involving a wholesale collapse of a civilization’s material output, famine, and a consequent leveling of former divisions between “haves” and “have-nots”.

Figure 91: Pandemic, the Fourth Great Leveler: The Triumph of Death (1562), by Pieter Bruegel The last two parts of The Great Leveler are devoted to a critique of alternatives to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, as well as speculation about the future of inequality in the 21st Century. With respect to nonviolent efforts to attenuate societal inequality, such as nonviolent land reform, debt relief and emancipation of servile labor, economic crises, and the widespread participatory framework of democracy at best these efforts have only a modest effect and, given stability and time, inequality appears inevitably to increase. On the contrary, even these efforts may trigger violent episodes following one of the previous four patterns. “Even after reviewing alternative causes of inequality compression, there is no escaping the fact that violence…has long been a crucial catalyst.” (Scheidel 388) As for the future, Scheidel points out that those who experienced the Great Compression of the first half of the 20th Century are largely deceased, and the pattern of increasing inequality has commenced in a long stretch where the leveling of a century ago is likely to be erased, despite active efforts to reverse the trend. In the end, “If history is anything to go by, peaceful policy reform may well prove unequal to the growing challenges ahead…All of us who prize greater economic equality would do well to remember that with the rarest of exceptions, it was only ever brought forth in sorrow. Be careful what you wish for.” (Scheidel 444)

Subfields of Political Science From here it is necessary to revisit the areas of research interest that broadly define the political science discipline. As stated earlier, the study of politics itself applies to the principles and actions within ordered communities, but since the establishment of the American Political Science Association a putatively standard set of classifications of areas of research interest has emerged. The organized sections and thematic presentations at APSA’s annual conference describe the overall breadth of the field as a whole, especially since the advent of the “Perestroika” movement at the dawn of the 21st Century. However, for the sake of this survey, I have combined these areas into broad areas of research interest. Indeed, the first major sections of this essay are organized around the history and development of political thought in order to find a continuous thread in the discipline that may serve as a reference point, and in some ways reflects my own introduction to the discipline, which came through political theory and philosophy, as well as the history of political ideas. Nearly every political science department in the United States today is divided into subdivisions of “American Politics”, “Comparative Politics”, “International Relations”, and either “Political Theory” or “Methodology”. Such organization reflects a specific conceptual logic about the character of political science as a discipline, and the section which follows will proceed categorically rather than historically along similar lines. However, this traditional division of the discipline, especially the tendency to either Political Theory or Methodology or, worse, combine these two subfields into a monstrous “Political Theory and Methodology”, tend to oversimplify the scope and character of the discipline, and it is perhaps for this reason that truly comprehensive survey texts in political science have been largely absent. I intend to follow a plan that begins with familiar subsets of the discipline, such as Political Theory, Comparative Politics, and International Relations, but instead of focusing specifically on one nation-state’s political system, as is typical of a department of American Politics, I instead intend to describe a generalized version which could be called “Unit-Level” Politics. Furthermore, it will be necessary to present an overview of the subfields often combined with these first four areas of research interest in order to provide focus within each discipline, such as Institutions and Processes, Political Economy, Public Policy and Political Behavior, noting that each of these subfields may also provide links to other entire disciplines, such as Economics or Law. Bearing this in mind, from here we shall proceed to other interdisciplinary intersections such as Political Communication, Political Psychology and Political Management, and conclude the section with a brief survey of the study of ordered communities not strictly contained within nation-states, the so-called “Non-Governmental Organizations.” In order to survey the plurality of research methods in political science, we must leave that to an entirely separate section. Political Theory We shall begin with Political Theory, the subfield of Political Science with which I am most familiar. Due to the fragmentary character of the discipline as a whole, many political science departments in the United States, especially those that focus on empirical and quantitative methods, tend to ignore, reject, or misunderstand this area, often in the mistaken belief that political theory is indistinguishable from punditry, or, like Professor Little at UT-Arlington once said of political theory, that it was “a bunch of old men in wing-backed chairs pontificating about what politics ‘should’ be.” This is, of course, not the case, for even the hard-core Merriam-style Behavioralist will admit he is looking for a general unified Theory of Social Science. In order to place political theory in its proper perspective, however, it is necessary first to define theory itself, and then to apply that definition to theories of politics. The non-academic use of “theory” often leads to a wholesale dismissal of the concept in favor of the observation and evaluation of discrete political phenomena, a practice which almost certainly frustrates efforts to establish political theory as a viable area of political inquiry, at least to the general public. It is this unfortunate situation that is likely responsible for many of the difficulties which led up to the “Perestroika” letter to the editorial staff of the American Political Science Review in 2000, and fomenting the division and fragmentation now experienced within the discipline as a whole. What is this non-academic usage? Put simply, the pedestrian use of “theory” is synonymous either with “guess”, “opinion”, or at best, “hypothesis”. These equivalencies, however, not only fail to comprehend the meaning of “theory”; they degrade confidence in the possibility of accepting theory by enabling its dismissal. What, then, is a Theory? Not unlike Thomas Kuhn’s sense of “paradigm” in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by a Theory I understand an Idea or System of Ideas that: 1) provides a set of internally consistent axioms or principles, 2) establishes a framework for understanding a phenomenon or set of phenomena, 3) describes or explains phenomena as a set of observables, and 4) enables one to develop, explore or test questions within that internally consistent framework. Political Theory stands as a distinct field within Political Science, and because of the nature of the observables it is often linked with Political Philosophy, in that both tend to focus on theoretical claims about the nature of politics rather than on empirical claims of political behavior. However, this by no means implies that political behavior lies outside the domain of political theory. Rather, even political Behavioralism ultimately rests on a set of axioms that seek to define what is observable and what is not, and so the quantitative researcher must pause before dismissing Political Theory as invalid, lest he catch himself in a contradictory assertion that dismisses his own methodology as well. Likewise, the political theorist must take note that just because a quantitative approach appears at first to lack the breadth and depth to address the larger “architectonic” framework that political theory or philosophy claims to accomplish does not imply that its method is any less valid. Rather, the study of politics is broad enough to accommodate both as valid subfields of the discipline, even to find common ground that, once the theorist and the empiricist agree, cannot but advance our understanding of the nature and dynamics of ordered communities. Broadly speaking, political theory may be categorized into several distinct classes. Normative Political Theory is largely concerned with questions about broad political concepts such as Justice, Equality, Right and Rights, as well as Power, Authority, Legitimacy and Participation. This focus is why Political Theory and Political Philosophy are often used interchangeably. However, other domains of Political Theory broaden the focus from the central axiological questions concerning the “good” in, by, and for ordered communities. Historical Political Theory, for instance, engages political philosophers and other thinkers from the past to the present, and may focus on how particular thinkers engaged certain enduring political problems and establish a linkage between and among Ancient, Modern, and Post-modern political thought. The segments of this text devoted to a summary of political thinkers from Hecataeus to Walter Scheidel may be construed as a form of Historical Political Theory, particularly as an attempt to establish a coherent interpretive framework describing the continuity and change within the broad history of largely Western Political Thought, specifically with a view to explain the dynamics of 21st Century America. By contrast, Formal Political Theory avoids relying of historical political thought and seeks instead to describe political phenomena using the formal analytic tools of Formal Logic and Mathematical Models, in an effort to explain and predict political phenomena. One branch of Formal Political Theory, namely Positive Political Theory, focuses almost entirely on the search for Mathematical Models that specifically explain and predict political behavior, and as such serves as an effort to discover regular patterns of political behavior observed through empirical, and especially statistical, methods, and serves as the branch of Political Theory most accessible to quantitative empiricists in the discipline. Notable examples of Political Theory include Theories of Decision, Theories of the State, Theories of Justice, and Theories of Participation. Many of these Theories are interconnected and as such inform one another, but for the sake of coherence and simplicity it will be necessary to consider each separately. Theories of Decision Theories of Decision seek to explain why people in an ordered community make the decisions they do, specifically with a view towards understanding the nature and dynamics of the ordered community itself. By far the most widespread and influential theory of decision in Western Political Thought is Rational Choice Theory. While precursors to Rational Choice Theory abound Classical Political Thought, and indeed may have found its first application in the writings of Sun Tzu (545-470 BC), contemporary with Hecataeus but in the Zhou Kingdom of ancient China, the earliest unambiguous expression of the Rational Choice tradition in the West is almost certainly Niccolò Machiavelli. While a wide variety of perspectives and details distinguish variants of the theory, and while Rational Choice Theorists often debate the definition and limits of certain terms within the Rational Choice model, most do agree on a few specific claims, namely: 1) human beings are essentially reasonable; 2) that people perceive both an immediate self-interest and the passage of time leading to a perception about their mortality, and 3) that consequent to these premises people order their actions rationally to maximize their perceived self-interest in the shortest possible time. The logical framework within which Josep Colomer develops the Thirty Propositions for The Science of Politics is a formalized model of Rational Choice Game Theory, originating with the work of von Neumann and Morgenstern in Mathematics and Economics. Evolutionary Game Theory moves beyond the constraints of Rational Choice and incorporates a model whereby concepts such as the “Rules of the Game” and the “State of the World” are subject to change with each new set of conditions consequent to multiple rounds of decisions. From Evolutionary Game Theory, recognizing the limitations of Rational Choice in larger contexts, generally arises a Cybernetic Theory of Decision, in which information theory, mathematical reasoning, and behavioral psychology each play a role in the development of an explanatory framework for how large complex organizations, such as administrative and regulatory bureaucracies within nation-states or systems of international relations, arrive at decisions related to the development, implementation and evaluation of public policy. Theories of the State Theories of the State generally comprehend the origin, development and transformation of the concept of the State as a primary observable political phenomenon. Incorporating claims about choice, interest, the provision of goods, power, authority, legitimacy and justice, Theories of the State, while broad, typically fall into one of four distinct, but not mutually exclusive, categories: Natural Law Theory, Social Contract Theory, Organic Theory of the State, and Systems Theory. In Natural Law Theory, States are construed as a macroscopic expression of human nature itself; a prototypical Natural Law Theory of States is found in Aristotle’s Politics, although he does not conceive of “states” being necessarily any different from the polis in his critique of common opinion regarding household management and civic order. A likely precursor to Aristotle’s Natural Law guiding the formation of political régimes is found in the modified Geometry of Herodotus’ Ecumene. The interaction of Natural Law Theory with Theories of Decision produces a novel Theory of the State, specifically one of several forms of Social Contract Theory, where individuals leave a State of Nature and enter into a State of Society. The character of the social contract depends on how these two views interact. For instance, when Rational Choice supersedes Natural Law, one produces a social contract not unlike that of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan or Jeremy Bentham’s Calculus of Happiness. However, when Natural Law supersedes Rational Choice, one sees a social contract compatible with John Locke’s Civil Government or even Edmund Burke’s vision of representative tempered by something like a traditional or natural elite. When Natural Law and Rational Choice are equal in measure, with Rational Choice proceeding from Laws of Nature, the consequent state resembles that described by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, and when Rational Choice is viewed in conflict with Natural Law in terms of Will one sees a state not unlike that of Rousseau’s Social Contract. The Organic Theory of the State, while it implies something like a Law of Nature, primarily stands apart from the idea of the Social Contract, but like Hobbes’ Leviathan views the State as a collective living entity in its own right, with a separate Nature that transcends the individual as well as shapes the character of individuals who dwell within the State. While the Organic Theory of the State may arguably trace its origins to Plato’s view of the reciprocal relationship between the Orders of the City and the Order of the human soul, the idea of the State itself as Living Entity has its root in Romanticism, in particular Rousseau’s concept of the General Will and, at least in the form of Organic Theory particular to German political strategists of the 19th and 20th Centuries, an analog of social Darwinism advanced by geographer Carl Ritter (1779- 1859) and historian Oswald Spengler (1880-1936). The Organic Theory of the State appears especially prominent in the writings of John Dewey, Julius Evola, Carl Schmitt and Aleksandr Dugin. By contrast, Systems Theory, which on the surface may resemble either Natural Law or Organic Theory, stems in large part from the Western European Enlightenment, but without the trappings of Rational Choice Theory. In Systems Theory, the State emerges as part of a larger context of institutions and processes that broadly organize human societies, and consists of inputs, processes, outputs, and in participatory political systems, feedback. The contextualization of States and Constitutions, mores, manners and customs peculiar to certain states in terms of the condition of their people and their places forms a significant portion of Montesquieu’s political theory of States, while a similar contextualization in terms of a larger historical dialectic process informs the political theories of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Dewey, and to a lesser degree Eric Voegelin and Sheldon Wolin. Other variations of Systems Theory are either evident or implied in Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, Alfred Sauvy and Morris Berman and Walter Scheidel. Theories of Justice As for Theories of Justice, since questions related to Justice are as old as the discipline itself, most political thinkers have tackled the issue such that one generally need not describe specific writers as they develop their Theories of Justice so much as to provide a strategic framework within which these thinkers develop their respective theories. Broadly speaking, Theories of Justice must deal with controversies concerning the application of justice as compensatory, distributive, retributive, or punitive. Compensatory justice is central to the resolution of disputes in civil societies and informs the larger body of practical jurisprudence in participatory governments. Distributive justice, a more controversial theory of justice, informs a significant part of public policy in every extant political system; not only does it seek to address Harold Lasswell’s question of “who gets what, when and how,” but also strives to address the prescriptive question of “why”. Retributive justice is related to compensatory justice in that it seeks solutions to the problems of injury in dispute resolution, yet it also extends to matters of the regulation of conduct and as such informs a significant part of criminal law and the criminal justice system. Retributive justice is invoked any time one uses the phrase “debt to society” within the context of criminal justice. Finally, Punitive justice, often confused with retribution, focuses instead on questions of punishment for its own sake and is not necessarily dependent on rebalancing a metaphorical scale, one person to another, or even one state to another. Because questions of justice, namely “what is the Right and Proper use of power, assignment of authority, or direction of government” are so fundamental to the study of political phenomena, many political theorists, from Plato to Jefferson, Rousseau, Kant, Marx, Rawls, Nozick, Sandel and Nussbaum, have made efforts to tackle problems of justice directly, and to frame ideas of justice within the context of their particular theories of Decision and the State. Theories of Participation Adjacent to Theories of Justice are also Theories of Participation, which may be prescriptive, descriptive, or some measure of both. Prescriptive Theories of Participation generally involve questions connected to rights and duties citizenship, principles of consent and acquiescence, policy formation, ballot access in participatory governments, and the influence of organized interests and the means to access or sway decision makers in every area of government. Harold Lasswell especially stands out for his articulation of Elite Domination Theory in the 1930s, and whose claims have been independently as an explanatory system for the direction of public policy in the United States by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page in the 2010s, while Kenneth Waltz’s Median Voter Hypothesis still stands as a successful interpretive model of the development of political party politics and candidate selection in participatory governments with large coalition parties dominating the electoral process. Interest Group Pluralism, first clearly articulated by James Madison in Federalist #10, provides both a descriptive and prescriptive assessment of the power of factions to direct elected officials and policymakers, while Biased Pluralism asserts that some interests hold significantly more influence on public policy than others and have a greater impact on who participates, how and why. One of the broadest generalizations of a Theory of Participation, however, is the model developed by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita (b. 1946), Alastair Smith (b. 1967), Randolph Siverson (b. 1940) and James Morrow (b. 1957) called Selectorate Theory, a modification of Game Theory which emphasizes the dynamics of key stakeholders, their private positions in relation to other stakeholders, and their mutual influences in the determination of outcomes, which may expand or contract participants in subsequent uncertain interactions. Other Political Theories Other examples of Political Theory include Theories of Right, Theories of Power, Theories of Cooperation and Theories of Conflict. In Theories of Right, one may find Natural Right, in which the moral foundations of politics are grounded in intrinsic qualities of certain actions as either “Right” or “Wrong.” The Natural Rights Argument espoused by Locke, Jefferson and the American Founders owes a debt to the Theory of Natural Right, but instead looks to “Natural Rights” as a set of powers of privileges intrinsic to human nature and therefore must be protected in the interest of justice. This Theory of Natural Rights (as opposed to Natural Right) refutes an earlier Theory of Rights as grounded in the prerogatives of Authority, who may dispense powers or privileges either according to Natural Right or else according to the Authority’s interest. This Positive Rights Theory still resonates in a post-modern form in a theory best described as contextual or contingent rights; this is the Theory of Rights rooted in a related theory of Justice known as Relativism. Theories of Power include Coercion, whereby power is best understood as the ability directly to compel or restrain action; Consent, where Power may only be exercised over another if the wielder of power has been granted permission to exercise that power; Acquiescence, where power is accepted by default without necessarily requiring consent, informed or otherwise; Tradition, whereby power is granted to an Authority as a matter of historical continuity, cultural obligation, or institutional memory; and Charismatic Theory, whereby power is conferred as a consequence of the ability of the wielder of power to persuade others to follow or be governed. Most Theories of Governance must come to terms with one or more of these Theories of Power, and also address related Theories of Cooperation and Conflict. On the side of Cooperation, one will find a variety of Theories including Interest Group Cohesion, in which solidary, material and purposive incentives bring people to cooperate in more or less organized groups to influence the direction of policy; Mutual Advantage, where individuals and groups cooperate only as long as all members of the groups persist in the perception that working together is advantageous for all parties involved; Co-option, in which an individual or group surrenders their immediate interest to another individual or group as a means to the security of a greater long-term goal, but which goal may in fact become a moving target and be transformed once the cooperative arrangement is made; Context, in which cooperation depends on the circumstances in which the incentive to cooperate emerges, such that an alliance may form in one situation or set of situations, while in another context the individuals or groups are either rivals or openly hostile; and Identity or Civilization, whereby incentive to cooperate depends either on ties of kinship or civilizational similarities, in spite of potential conflicts of self-interest. Finally, as there are Theories of Cooperation, there must also be Theories of Conflict. Beginning with Identity and Civilization, if cooperation emerges from related societies or civilizations, then conflict may also occur among such relatives, much as sibling rivalries emerge, leading to competition for preeminence within a specific Civilizational or cultural context. Moreover, within a Theory of Identity and Civilization as predictors of Conflict, one may especially find opportunities for conflict across civilizational boundaries, as Samuel Huntington avers in his “Clash of Civilizations” model of Comparative Politics. By the same token, just as linkages may form within certain contexts, so too may cleavages, perhaps even exposing conflicts of Principle or even simple conflicts of Interest that arise from phenomena as basic as resource competition. Approaches to Political Theory Whatever the political theoretical domain, political theory itself has diversified into multiple approaches, some of which reinforce one another, while others remain fundamentally at odds with one another. This is especially true for the two conflicting strains of Political Theory that emerged from the University of Chicago in the 20th Century. On one hand, the” Chicago School” includes the Behavioralist approach championed by Charles E. Merriam, which holds that the study of politics must be limited to empirical investigations of political behavior with the ultimate goal of finding regularities in that behavior and contributing ultimately to a Grand Unified Theory of Social Science. Adjacent to this branch of the “Chicago School” is Positive Political Theory, pioneered by William H. Riker. On the other hand, the University of Chicago was also home to Leo Strauss, whose suspicion of Behavioralism and strong attachment to the very ideas Merriam sought to purge from the discipline would produce an entirely different strain in Political Theory broadly called “Straussianism”, which would itself divide into two distinct camps: the “East Coast”, content to explore overtly academic lines of inquiry emphasizing the preeminence of certain classic texts, while remaining aloof from the lives of statesmen; and the “West Coast”, characterized by a more active role for its adherents to influence the direction of public policy by advising candidates and securing appointments in government. Of course the University of Chicago is not the only institution to produce intellectual movements in political theory. Another tradition, emerging out of the University of Cambridge, may be construed as largely historicist, emphasizing historical and intellectual context in which political ideas formed. This “Cambridge School” is perhaps best exemplified by writers such as Quentin Skinner (b. 1940) and J.G.A. Pocock (b. 1924). Skinner’s particular contribution to the Cambridge School has been to develop an interpretive framework for early modern European political thought whereby the principal texts of modern political thought are best viewed as responses to political debates and tumults at the time they were written, and therefore certain “classic” text must not be interpreted in isolation, but instead as part of a larger contemporary political debate. This is a clear rebuttal to the position of the Straussians, who generally insist on “close readings” of individual authors, preferably reading everything a particular author wrote in order to ground one’s interpretation. J.G.A Pocock’s critique of the American Founding as a “Machiavellian Moment” reinforces the necessity of exploring the historicity of key political events and ideas, in Pocock’s case the US Constitution of 1787. By contrast, the “Berkeley School”, which has been treated earlier, emphasizes the necessity of political theorists to engage with contemporary political phenomena and provide interpretations that identify, reflect, or offer a particular “Vision” of politics such that informed political action in the interest of advancing “social justice” may be possible. The idea of “Vision” proceeds primarily from Wolin’s principal work, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (1960), but continuity with this form of interpretation can be seen in Hedges’ The World As it Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress (2010) Wendy Brown’s States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (1995), and Carey McWilliams’ The Idea of Fraternity in America (1973). As for offering a critique of contemporary politics in the interest of advancing social justice, Sheldon Wolin’s last book, Democracy Incorporated, as well as Michael Rogin’s ‘Ronald Reagan: The Movie’ and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (1988) as well as the occasional works of Chris Hedges, especially American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (2007) and America: The Farewell Tour (2018), provide ample evidence. Although not directly connected with the University of California Berkeley, Morris Berman may easily be counted among the fellows of the Berkeley School. A possible influence on the activist strain in the Berkeley School is the Critical Social Theory developed as part of the “Frankfurt School”, and perhaps best embodied by the likes of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm and Jürgen Habermas, The ideas of the Frankfurt School proceed from a foundation in the social criticism of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud as well as the Dialectic tradition of Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel and Karl Marx, as well as the Rationalism of Max Weber. Principal among the work of the Frankfurt School for political thought is perhaps Fromm’s Escape from Freedom, Adorno and Horkheimer’s The Authoritarian Personality, and Habermas’ Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Other approaches to Political Theory include more or less post-modern approaches, such as Vantagism, an approach similar to Wolin’s Politics and Vision from the Berkeley School, and pioneered by Thomas Kuhn in the history of the philosophy of science; the Analytic Political Theory of John Rawls, which seeks to break a larger concept into its constituent parts in order to facilitate understanding; Genealogy, inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche and developed as a system of social critique by Michel Foucault; the Hermeneutics of Michael Freeden, which emphasizes the interpretation of texts and language; Phenomenology, exemplified by followers of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger and which pays close attention to the role of subjective experience and consciousness in the interpretation of political phenomena; Deconstruction, developed by Jacques Derrida and which calls attention to the role of irrationality and absurdity in political systems and claims; and the Comparative Political Theory advanced by Fred Dallmayr, which borrows heavily from Hermeneutics, Deconstruction and Phenomenology, forming a unique synthesis emphasizing the “self-other” relationship in politics. Comparative Politics The next subfield in the study of politics is perhaps the oldest of all social sciences, namely comparative politics. The origins of comparative politics in the West, in so far as has been written, trace all the way to the pre-Socratic thinking of the Milesian School, and include the first authors treated in the section on Classical political thought above: Anaximander, Hecataeus and Herodotus. This subfield is primarily concerned with the unique properties of political systems, drawing parallels and contrasts among the differing systems that are treated within the political experience. This is accomplished primarily in order to construct a view of the larger political landscape around the world, and to discern and understand the range of possibilities of political organization using one or another comparative method to do so. The comparative method of inquiry involves a set of techniques for interpreting political systems by performing a feature by feature comparison or contrast. In other words, in order to apply the comparative method, one must identify similar and different political processes or institutions from one ordered community to another, and typically employ a variety of comparative strategies to do so. The early 19th Century political thinker John Stuart Mill identifies the following comparative methods of induction in his System of Logic: The Direct Method of Agreement, essentially a method of Similarities whereby one examines what makes two or more systems most similar to each other; The Method of Difference, where one examines the features of systems that are the most unlike each other, the Joint Method of Agreement and Difference; the “Method of Residue”, similar in some respects to Doyle’s Rule, where once causes and effects are eliminated, whatever previously associated cause and unassociated effect may actually be connected; and the Method of Concomitant Variations, where if a causal variable in a group changes and affects a result variable, then there must be a connection. These five methods produce distinct strategies in comparative politics, specifically as they relate to Political Systems, an examination of their Inputs, Processes and Outputs; Institutional Structuralism, whereby the Joint Method of Agreement and Difference are most often applied; and of course the separate Methods of Agreement and Difference. Comparative Politics has been pursued longer than nearly every other subfield of this discipline, so a detailed examination of the principal figures in the development of this subfield would likely require a separate volume to receive its due. However, because this text is intended as a survey of the discipline as a whole, I must provide only a broad overview within the theoretical framework already established in the previous sections. Hence, among Classical Comparative Political thinkers, one finds at least two of the thinkers already treated, namely Herodotus and Aristotle. However, one must not ignore Thucydides’ treatment of the Peloponnesian Wars and Plutarch’s Lives, for their contribution to Comparative Method, in particular the Methods of Similarities and the Method of Differences, exert a profound influence on subsequent Comparativists, particularly those one could count among the Moderns. Of the Principal Modern Comparativists, the one who stands out most is Montesquieu, whose Spirit of Laws is largely written within the context of a comparative framework in order to establish a critique of the French ancien régime, a framework he consciously links back to Plutarch in his foreword. Subsequent to Montesquieu and applying Montesquieu’s method of comparison, one finds Alexis de Tocqueville, whose critique in the 1830s of Democracy in America stands as a landmark text, one of the most incisive and prescient treatments of the American régime, so much in fact that Tocqueville’s analysis is still widely studied in the field today. Another disciple of Montesquieu’s method is almost certainly the American historian William H. Prescott, whose treatment of the fall of Mexico and Peru to the Spanish Empire offers insights into two of the most prominent political régimes of the Western Hemisphere at the time of their encounter with the conquistadores and, unlike most other treatments of 19th Century European-American writers, seriously considers the mores, manners, customs and laws of the Triple Alliance of Mexico and the Four United Regions of Peru as sophisticated political systems instead of bands of “ignorant savages”, often using Mexica and Quechua sources in addition to Spanish ones to explore the institutions, processes, religious practices, political behaviors and customs of the régimes under study, perhaps following Montesquieu’s own indictment of Spanish Imperial policy. By Contrast, while structural Comparativists emphasize similarities and differences among extant régimes, comparative historicists such as Immanuel Kant and GWF Hegel add the dimension of time, applying similar methods not only one régime to another, but the régimes of one period of history to those of another. This method attempts to establish a coherent model of historical development enabling an interpretation of historical processes. Historicists such as Kant, Hegel and Marx posit a direction of Human Progress towards one or another vision of Justice, while others, such as John Dewey, Sheldon Wolin and Morris Berman do not, though they all apply a comparative method, chiefly the Method of Difference, to specific periods in history, especially either of Western or American Civilization. Contemporary Comparativists generally also make attempts to organize and interpret the political world in a way that not only establish a framework for understanding similarities, differences, variations, linkages and conflicts, but also to make predictions concerning the development of the régimes under scrutiny. Chief among these are the Comparativists are such figures as Francis Fukuyama (b. 1952), who wrote extensively about the end of the Cold War International and Comparative Political environment as a figurative “End of History”, or an opportunity to dismantle former systems put in place out of defensive posturing and forge new alliances despite political differences; Samuel P Huntington (1927-2008), whose “Clash of Civilizations” model refutes the “End of History” by claiming the Cold War environment was more aberration than a political norm, and that Civilizational differences would return to prominence in defining lines of alliance and conflict. This model not only gained currency but also generated much controversy among scholars of Comparative Politics. Mark Palmer (1941- 2013) was a prominent Comparativist whose adaptation of Hannah Arendt’s tripartite taxonomy of régimes formed the basis of the policy recommendations from the Freedom House, an international libertarian think tank, and exercise considerable influence on the foreign policy of the United States under the George W. Bush administration. Meanwhile, Benjamin Barber (1939-2017) posited a transnational conflict he would label “Jihad v. McWorld” which broadly describes an ongoing tension around the world between the competing ideologies of Globalism and Tribalism; and John McCormick (b. 1954), whose Comparative Framework would synthesize multiple comparative models, including levels of participatory government, levels of industrial and post-industrial development, as well as historical and cultural experiences such as Communist and post-Communist states and Islamic states, into a comprehensive framework for the assessment of political systems around the world. Other significant Comparativists include Gabriel Almond (1911-2002), Seymore Lipset (1922-2006), Robert Dahl (1915-2014), Sidney Verba (b. 1932), Robert Putnam (b. 1941) and Theda Skocpol (b.1947), among others. Unit-Level Politics The Subfield of Unit-Level Politics is generally the first one to which the student is introduced, regardless of where one receives formal instruction. This often takes the guise of Civics courses in primary and secondary schools, and is primarily concerned with a deep analysis of a single political system. As such, it includes a wide variety of methodologies and while it may be expressed by many names, the purpose is usually similar, regardless of system: familiarize the student with the institutions, processes and politics of a particular community, whether American Government and Politics, Canadian Government and Politics, or the Government of Politics of Mexico or Europe; or even the government and politics of a particular “sub-national” form, such as the state of Texas or even Municipal Systems. Indeed, one common thread uniting political science departments around the world is a segment of the discipline devoted to the deep analysis and assessment of one’s own régime, although some departments will offer coursework treating other specific political systems than one’s own, specifically if sufficient interest, whether through linkage or cleavage, is generated among the participants of one body politic in the political institutions and processes, ideas, principles or policies of another régime. In my own experience the first courses in the discipline I remember taking at the level of higher education included an intensive experiential study in the government and politics of the State of Oklahoma, the Principles of American Politics, and the Politics of the Soviet Union. Unit-Level Politics includes multiple areas of Analysis: Constitutions, Institutions, Legal and Policy Documents, Political History, and Changing Political Contexts. One may also choose to specialize in Political Behavior, Political Processes and Systems such as campaigns, elections, legislation, enforcement and regulation, or dispute resolution; Public Policy and decision making, Public Opinion and Communication, or even the Politics of Interest Groups and Political Parties. Indeed, this subfield of political science is likely the one field that is most familiar to the layman, for in much of the world, some instruction in the basic principles of one’s own government is often prerequisite for achieving a credential in one’s general education. Due to the manner in which this field is typically presented, I have found it often confused with a history curriculum, especially since in the United States, history survey courses often focus either on political history, social history or the history of particular political, social or economic movements, thus intertwining the two disciplines in such a way as to render them largely indistinguishable from each other. It is therefore imperative for the student of political science to remember that history and political science, while they may be closely connected within the social sciences, nevertheless occupy different domains of the social science disciplines in that they seek to address fundamentally different questions. For the historian’s questions ultimately reduce to one: “What happened?” This is true of all subfields of history, whether American history, World history, area studies, specialized genre histories, such as art, labor, science or war, even archaeology and surveillance journalism count as subfields of history, leading at least one colleague to posit that all fields of study are merely subsets of history. However, what distinguishes political science, or any other field for that matter, from history is not necessarily in the subject matter but in the questions the field itself asks. Indeed, every field of inquiry possesses a connection to the field of history, due to the foundational question that defines history as a field. The field of political inquiry, like other fields, poses different questions in addition to historical questions that distinguish it from the history of the observables under scrutiny; thus it is in Unit-Level politics where the distinct questions peculiar to the discipline should be first asked, for it is here where the incoming student first learns to distinguish the field, within the context of what should be most familiar. The core concepts of politics that any Unit-Level or introductory Government course must address proceed from the philosophical domain of axiology—questions related to claims or “value”—and apply to the particular unit under study. While they may come in many guises, such as a survey of legislative, executive and judicial processes, constitutional law, federalism (provided the unit under study is a federal system), civil rights and liberties, or campaigns and elections, the core concepts of politics may be generalized into the following ten: Power, Choice, Participation, Linkage, Cleavage, Constitution, Policy, Principle, Interest, and Risk. History can of course provide insight into all of these, but questions about the claims surrounding these core concepts ultimately define the study of politics as a distinct field. International Relations The Next traditional subfield of Political Science, International Relations, is often considered both a field within the political science discipline and an interdisciplinary field. Like its counterpart, Comparative Politics, International Relations in Western Political Science has its roots in Classical thinkers, especially the historian Thucydides, a contemporary of Plato, yet the phenomena central to international relations are nearly coeval with politics itself, particularly in the interaction of city-states in Classical Sumeria. However, at least since the 17th Century International Relations are largely construed as Interstate Relations, thanks in large part to the formation of the “modern state” as a dominant political form during that time. Theories of International Relations Like other areas of political science, one is bound to find various “schools of thought” surrounding the study of International Relations. Broadly speaking, though, International Relations Theory tends to fall into a fairly narrow set of theoretical frameworks. The oldest of these, tracing back to Thucydides’ treatment of the conflict between Athens and Lacedaemon in the 5th Century BC, is normative theory, although other sources may be cited elsewhere such as in the writings of Sun Tzu in China or of Kautilya in India. Other schools of International Relations include Positivism, which holds that assertions about interstate relations not only derive logically from existing decisions and laws, but that perceived norms must be empirically verified and are capable of logical, especially deductive, proof rooted in the conditions established by law, and that ethical considerations must not limit the operation of those conditions. This school of thought is in turn critiqued by the post-positivist view that the interaction of established norms, conditions and laws not only influence one another, but that the observer’s perspective influences the observation of international relations phenomena as well. Be that as it may, International Relations theorists may also focus on the roles of leadership and the structure of decision making within and across international lines, or else they may look instead to a post-modern, post-structuralist interpretation, whereby leadership, treaties, institutional decision-making and conflicts are not necessarily dependent on established structures of international relations, or that those structures are insufficient for a full understanding of the complexities inherent in the relations between and among nation- states. Normative International Relations Theory is largely concerned with the development of norms of international conduct, diplomacy and war, and is often connected with broader traditions in Political Theory. Within the context of Normative International Relations one will typically find normative theory falling into one of two distinct camps, focusing on prescriptive norms and descriptive norms. In the first case, Normative Prescription is often indistinct from political opinion or editorial commentary, and seeks to evaluate international relations using a set of prescribed established norms, such as the norms established through diplomacy, alliances and rivalries, treaty obligations and rules of engagement. By contrast, Normative Description tends to reflect empirical observation of established norms, tracing their establishment, breach and transformation, again largely through the same set of observables. Examples of Normative International Relations Theorists include classical authors such as Sun Tzu, Kautilya and Thucydides, while more recent Normativists in International Relations Theory include John Baylis, Steve Smith, Patricia Owens and Mark Palmer. The next major school of thought in International Relations stands in opposition to Normative Prescription and is called Realism. This school of International Relations emphasizes power and state security as well as the state politics of self-interest, and as such may be viewed either through a Normative Descriptive lens or as generally Positivist and usually emphasizes the structures of the expressions of the interests of nation-states. Rational Choice Game Theory and Realpolitik constitute perhaps the best-known schools of thought within the Realist tradition, and the principal scholars in this school often include Kenneth Waltz, Robert Gilpin, Hans Morgenthau, E.H. Carr, and Robert Kaplan among them. By contrast, the more purely Positivist approach to International Relations aims to replicate the positivist methodology of the Natural Sciences with the context of political science, but tends to fragment into their own competing schools of thought. On one hand is International Relations Liberalism, which tends to emphasize the politics of mutual benefit and international cooperation. In this context, the activities of state-sponsored international organizations, transnational organizations and some non-governmental organizations tend to take prominence as observable phenomena alongside the actions of nation-states themselves. In this tradition one will find authors raging form Montesquieu and Kant to Woodrow Wilson and Francis Fukuyama. Related to the Liberal tradition in International Relations Theory is the Theory of Complex Interdependence advanced by scholars such as Joseph Nye, Robert Keohane and John Ikenberry, which concedes the role of nation-states but seeks to maintain the salience of non- governmental organizations as introducing a broader and deeper layer of international relations that must be addressed. Third among the Positivist trends in International Relations theory is that of International Régimes, which involves a modification of Realism with the development of international norms and institutions, and posits a framework that enforces cooperation despite persistent incentives for conflict. Scholarship along these lines includes that of Stephen Krasner, Joseph Grieco, Robert Axelrod and Susan Strange. Among the Post-positivists are those who seek to synthesis of Normative and Positive models of International Relations. Like Positivism, Post-Positivism also includes multiple schools of thought, but which may in fact reflect ideological preferences of the observers in question, given Post-Positivism’ critique of the Positivists’ epistemological claims. For example, Social Constructivists, such as Nicholas Onuf, Alexander Wendt, Kathryn Sikkin, and Peter Katzenstein, generally claim that the most significant features of International Relations are products of social and historical constructs. Feminists such as Cynthia Enloe, Carol Cohn and Sara Ruddick narrow their focus and emphasize the impact and interaction of International Relations and the politics of sex, gender roles and identities, while Marxists such as Andrew Linklater, Robert Cox, Suzanne Katsikas and Berkeley School critic Chris Hedges, tend to focus on economic fundamentals of International Relations through the lens of Marx’s Dialectical Materialism. Other schools of thought within International Relations tend to move away from decision- making structures and systems of nation-states or even of non-governmental organizations, focusing instead on other variables that influence alliances, linkages, cleavages, rivalries and conflicts. For example, scholars such as K.J. Holsti, Ole Elgström, Joseph Cerami, Margaret Hermann and Stephen Walker emphasize the role of leading actors as the driving force behind International Relations, and explain changes in the dynamics of International Relations in terms of transitions from one leader or set of leaders to another, and how these changes often require a reevaluation of the roles each nation-states’ leaders assume in the international relations framework. Such changes may also explain how interest groups apply pressure to leaders, as well as how changes in international relations dynamic may be driven by strategic anticipation in leadership changes, or even assumptions of inherent bad-faith in negotiations. Other thinkers, such as Lyotard, Foucault and Derrida, assume and overtly post-structuralist stance with respect to international relations, whether through methods of deconstruction (Derrida), power & identity theories (Foucault) or meta-narratives and “language games” (Lyotard). Some flavors of Identity politics and Feminist International Relations critique may also be included among the post-structuralist school. Concepts and Tools of International Relations Whichever theoretical school of International Relations one embraces, certain concepts remain at the heart of the study of International Relations at system-level and sub-unit levels. System- level concepts include sovereignty, power, national interest, states, non-state actors, as well as linkages and cleavages, blocs, polarity, dependency and interdependence, diplomacy, as well as conflict and war. A later section of this text will deal expressly with at least one method of understanding issues of conflict. At the unit and sub-unit level one find other standard concepts in International Relations such as régime, the status quo and revision, religions and sects, Groupthink and the “Abilene Paradox”, analogues; Science, Technology, political economy and political culture. How these major concepts are treated are often subject to the theoretical framework or “school of thought” within which a scholar operates. Finally, in the practical observation, analysis and evaluation of International Relations, nation- states and other actors have at their disposal a certain standard set of tools that help define observable phenomena within the field. Diplomacy involves communication, negotiation, the formation of linkages through treaties, conventions and other agreements; Sanctions involve the imposition of either diplomatic or economic barriers between and among international actors; War includes the use of organized force, either by states or non-state actors. Strategy includes the arrangement of a combination of linkages and conflict, while Tactics involves the method of achieving certain international policy aims or objectives. These are perhaps the most familiar tools to the newcomer to this field and are especially familiar to those who follow international relations primarily among nation-state actors. However, the international toolkit also includes somewhat arcane components as well. The mobilization of shame, for example, is often employed by non-governmental organizations and includes attempts to alter a state’s actions through exposing that state’s actions at the international level. Other tools to gain leverage, such as Reward and Monitor, are common to both state and non-state actors alike. Reward consists in the attempt to reinforce a state’s actions through diplomatic favor, while Monitor involves the use of individuals and groups to observe the actions of a state actor. Institutions and Processes The subfield of Political Institutions and Processes often stands out as one of the most familiar components of the study of political science as a whole, and since this subfield is often incorporated into coursework in the Unit-level politics of one’s own political system, its study tends to be the primary interpretation of the entire field. However, as we have seen already, there is much more to political science than an examination of American Political Institutions and Processes. Nevertheless, this particular segment is often the area that tends to attract new students of politics to the discipline, and as such occupies an outsized position in any survey of the field. Scholars in this particular area examine and analyze the institutional forms, processes and procedures within a specific political unit, taking in to consideration the constitutional and legal systems of the political unit under study: its organizational system, legislative apparatus, executive institutions, regulatory and policy framework and systems for the resolution of disputes that arise within the system itself. In other words, the subfield of Institutions and Processes examines systems of distribution, regulation and redistribution of voice, offices, power and choice mechanisms within a formal political system, including the roles of sub-unit level structures and systems within the larger context of the constitutional order under scrutiny. This particular field provides the framework for most required government course curricula within the United States, but it may also apply to similar requirements in other political systems, especially those whose legislative systems consist of a broad participatory framework that identifies both rights and responsibilities, both voice and duties among its citizens. As such, certain concepts inherent to the study of Institutions and Processes are central to their study, and may also form a basis for comparative politics as well as unit-level politics. Indeed, for some institutions of higher education that require coursework in both Federal and State government, it is not unusual to synthesize institutions at both the Federal and State levels into a single course, nor is it unusual to suggest applying a comparative method to political institutions of different but related form. Hence, Institutional study includes the examination of organizational models of differing government institutions and processes as well as the functions found within those institutions, so that a coherent portrait of a given institution may emerge. Chief among the central concepts of Institutional study is the idea that constitutional systems serve, in the late George Anastaplo’s words to “define a community and guide its conduct.” As such, legal constitutional systems, which have come to dominate political institutions around the world since their inception in the late 18th Century, view their constitutional documents (whether a single charter or multiple declarations and agreements) to establish the structure, function, jurisdiction, powers, and limits of each of the political system’s formal legal institutions. Institutional studies can cover Unitary States, in which political power is concentrated in a strong central government with weak administrative districts, and count among their number most political systems around the world, from dictatorships and absolute monarchies to constitutional monarchies and republics. Institutional studies may also cover the much rarer Confederations, in which political power is decentralized with a weak central government and strong member states. This form may include confederate republics such as the Cantons of Switzerland, historical confederate republics such as the United States under the Articles of Confederation, or extant interstate confederations such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or the European Union. Perhaps the most complex constitutional system available to the scholar of Institutions and Processes, however, is Federal System, where power must be shared between a strong central government and strong member governments. At the time of this writing only about twenty-five exist in the world, and no two Federal Systems are exactly alike, due to their organizational models being an order of magnitude greater in complexity than either of the other two broad constitutional arrangements. Because of this level of complexity, it is almost always necessary to examine the distribution of power within Federal Systems, and determine the extent and limits of enumerated, concurrent and reserved powers, as well as a consideration of how member states and a central government resolves questions surrounding faith and credit in one another’s laws, policies and decisions. Within any constitutional system, institutional study also examines legislative, executive, regulatory and judicial systems and how they interact with one another, if at all. Legislative systems in participatory governments may of course take one of many forms, including parliamentary, congressional, and presidential systems. They may contain one or more chambers and may include a role for the executive in the legislative process, or they may not. Of executive institutional systems, one finds a similar variety of institutional forms: unitary, dual, plural, or even conciliar executive systems may be observed. Administrative bureaucracies, on the other hand, must be treated somewhat differently for public policy tends to organize around the processes themselves rather than a constitutionally defined structure, and multiple variations may be observed, even within the same government system. Nevertheless, all government institutions conduct public policy of some sort, and that typically involves a combination of distributive, regulatory, administrative, and redistribution processes. Adjudication, by contrast, is primarily dedicated to the resolution of disputes, but may also acquire varying structures, depending on the needs, interests, pressures and experiences of the body politic involved. Other central concepts in the study of Institutions and Processes include public law and policy; election campaigns and electoral systems; patterns of succession; partisanship and interest group analysis; lobbying assembly and petition; and public opinion. Again, this particular subfield of the discipline, combined as a part of Unit-Level Politics, is typically what most people think of when they think of “political science” or “government”. Indeed, an examination of Political Institutions and Processes often provides the foundation for understanding any further political phenomena and serves as a metaphorical springboard or touchstone for much scholarship in the discipline, defining as it does the principal observables for public policy, political behavior, communication, and even more obscure interdisciplinary connections to other social sciences such as Psychology and Economics. In fact, due to the specific outcomes that have been outlined for the Introductory course in Political Science, a separate section devoted to specific issues connected to political systems and institutions will be included. Political Economy Political Economy deals principally with the intersection of Politics and Economics. Its primary concerns include production and trade in their relation to law and custom, the distribution of national income, as well as the distribution and redistribution of wealth within a given ordered community, whether a city, a state, a federal system, or an international political system. The principal theoretical foundations of political economy may be found through an examination of the writings of Francois Quesnay, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Henry George, Thomas Malthus and Karl Marx. While there are many specific approaches to political economy, they can be generally said to fall within one of two major strains: Interdisciplinary study and Public Choice. In Interdisciplinary approach tends to synthesize political science, economics and sociology, and as such since each of these disciplines may include multiples theoretical approaches, the level of complexity in describing the interdisciplinary model would be two orders of magnitude higher than any one of these fields alone. Consequently, political economy as a related field to political science presents a level of difficulty not seen in other subfields of the discipline, but as a general rule the interdisciplinary approach seeks to explain the interactions and mutual influence of political institutions, the political environment and the economic system (usually a macroeconomic system) on the overall character of a political/economic system, and tends to treat that system as a unified whole in its own right—a political economy. By contrast, the Public Choice model of political economy focuses on the microeconomic foundations of public decision making, and as such is often seen as a mere extension of Rational Choice Theory, focusing on individual political and economic actors as rational actors seeking to maximize their perceived self-interest. Major Concepts in Public Choice with which one should generally be aware include a wide variety of combined political and economic concepts, such as social welfare, government failure, economic regulation, market production, rent-seeking, institutional corruption, and distribution politics. The empirical study of political economy emphasizes prediction and control through economic forecasting, especially taking into account certain measurable features of a political economy as political business cycles, Central Bank independence, the politics of deficit management, the influence of elections on public policy and electoral outcomes. Other branches of political economy include International political economy, an interdisciplinary field in its own right that incorporates economics and International Relations, and what is sometimes labeled “New” Political Economy. New Political Economy tends to examine the role of economic ideology in explaining movements within a political economy, and views economic ideas and behavior as belief systems not unlike religious opinion or political ideology. One should take note, however, that the view of ideology in New Political Economy is usually rooted in an interpretation of Ideology common to Karl Marx and other historicists, whereby ideologies are defined as belief systems designed to perpetuate a particular status quo arrangement, in this case within a political economy. Among the more notable Political Economists are: John Rogers Commons (1862-1945) who saw political economic institutions as collective actions, and emphasized the role of conflicts of interest; Karl Polanyi (1886-1964), who explored the historical cultural contingency of political economy; Robert Lee Hale (1884-1964), who focused on the distributive impact of legal rules within a political economy; Susan Strange (1923-1998), whose work focused on financial access as a key channel of power; André Gunder Frank (1929-2005), who stands as a leading proponent of Dependency Theory in International Political Economy; and Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom (1933-2012), whose work in Political Economy emphasized the arrangement of Common Pool Resources in Public Choice. More recent Political Economists include Matthew Watson (b. 1969) whose research interest includes British Economic policy and the Mobility of International Capital; Charles S. Maier (b. 1939), whose work focuses on Economic Stability as a feature of State Identity; Robert W. Cox (b.1926) who incorporates the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School into Political Economy through a consideration of historical dialectic and Geopolitics; Robert Keohane (b. 1941), who along with Joseph Nye advanced the theory of Complex Interdependence from International Relations and focuses on Neoliberal Institutionalism; Stephen Krasner (b. 1942), whose work emphasizes weak state stabilization, executive power and sovereignty; Immanuel Wallerstein (b. 1930) who contextualizes Dependency and hegemony in a larger theoretical context of World-Systems; Peter J. Katzenstein (b. 1945), whose work in International Relations deals primarily with the construction of roles and norms, especially in the political economies of Japan and Europe; and finally Thomas Piketty (b. 1971), whose landmark text on Capitalism in the 21st Century focuses on an empirical examination of the evolution of inequality, and also informs the work of Walter Scheidel’s Great Leveler Theory of redistribution. Given the relatively recent interdisciplinary approach characteristic of the study of Political Economy, it should be noted that this field is currently experiencing much growth and development, as evidenced by the number of notable Political Economists who are active today. Public Policy Of all of the subfields of political science, Public Policy Studies is a particularly rich one, especially since it connects directly with the practical application of politics into real-world governance in similar manner as Political Management does. Policy Studies involves an analysis of the policy making process, especially the Public Policy Cycle, and as such tends to be dominated by Public Choice and Rational Choice models of decision. Additionally, any study of public policy must also analyze the contents of public policy as it relates to its structure, function, powers and limits, as well as its impact on policy targets, its collateral effects on non- targets, and its effect of other areas of public policy on the whole. Consequently, public policy studies are often principally concerned with Program Evaluation, and employ both quantitative and qualitative methods of measurement, assessment and evaluation. Hence, Public Policy studies are necessarily linked with the applied political science of Public Administration. The public policy process is usually described using a cyclical process of rational problem- solving, and with rare exception is described as consisting of five major components. Agenda building involves the identification and clarification of public problems to address, of setting the agenda and defining the tasks set before the policymakers and agencies. Formulation consists of the development and deliberation of alternative responses to the problems identified within the agenda. With Adoption, policymakers must decide on and commit to a proposal or set of proposals developed in the formulation process. With implementation the adopted proposal is set in motion; resources are organized, funding is secured, and the specific features of the policy are operationalized, typically by an executive structure, whether through elected officials, appointed officials, or an administrative bureaucracy. Once the policy has been implemented, its outputs are reported as part of the Evaluation process, identifying the impact on intended targets of the policy, collateral effects on non-targets, as well as possible conflicts with other implemented policies, conflicts of interest and conflicts of principle. This Evaluation leads to a new set of proposals, whether to continue the policy, modify one or more components of the policy, or suspend the policy and reformulate. In this way the Evaluation process informs a new Agenda Building by identifying new issues to be addressed.

Figure92: The Public Policy Process as a Recurrent Cycle The Public Policy Ladder As for the substance and structure of any policy at any particular instant, the student of Public policy may use another visualization, especially to render a complex policy comprehensible. This model, the Public Policy Ladder metaphor, embodies a standard structural approach that dominated public policy studies until the last quarter of the 20th Century, where it still persists among specialists, particularly in the field of defense policy and the armed forces. The Public Policy Ladder aligns Theory and Practice of Public Policy, organizes policy so that one may navigate it, establishes public policy coherence, and can form a basis for critique of any policy’s effectiveness or coherence. The Ladder serves as a standard by which one may evaluate policy and identify new agenda issues. The Policy Ladder consists of four levels: Doctrine at the top, Strategy immediately below, Tactics, below Strategy, and Operations at the “Ground Level”. Within this framework, higher levels supersede lower levels, and the lower levels must support the higher levels. All of these levels must align with one another in order for the policy to be implemented to its greatest effectiveness, for policy implementation travels down the Ladder, and the necessary assessment feedback travels up the ladder. Should any level of the ladder require replacement, every level below it must also be changed. Consequent to the hierarchical components of the Public Policy Ladder, each level also requires specific primary agents in order to implement downward, and provide feedback upward.

Implementation Feedback

Doctrine High-level, often elected, officials Strategy Senior executives, political appointments Tactics Managerial executive officers

Operations Lower-level officers, Civil Service, contracts

Figure 93: The Public Policy Ladder. Within this framework, Doctrine often refers to a broad statement of principles, sometimes presented in a pronouncement or articulation of policy called a “Mission Statement” or a “Vision Statement,” that describes the purposes for which the policy has been adopted. The primary agents responsible for the adoption of a policy doctrine are usually high-level officials within an institution, and in the case of participatory governments, are typically elected officials. Strategy, immediately below Doctrine, denotes the blueprint for the policy itself, laying out the structure of a policy landscape, and is often presented as a “Strategic Plan” and may include organizational diagrams to facilitate the policy landscape itself. Metaphorically, Strategy serves as a “road map” for policy implantation, assigning broad roles and connections among departments, offices and other resources. The primary agents of this level of policy are generally senior executive officers and political appointments at the head of civil service agencies. Tactics may be distinguished from Strategy by their distinct purpose. In Tactics, one sees specific mission objectives and outcomes defined within the overall Strategic framework or landscape, and describe intended movement towards policy goals. Necessarily linked with Strategy, Tactics constitute the metaphorical route planned out on the policy’s overall “road map”; in other words, tactics address a broad question of “how” policy goals are to be met. This responsibility typically falls on the Managerial class within an agency, the managerial executive officers of a department. Finally, Operations involve the direct application of agency resources to policy targets: personnel, material, capital or monetary, and temporal resources, specifically. Operations involve the direct implementation of policy through procedures and actions that are intended to propel an agency towards its policy goals. Metaphorically, Operations constitute the execution of a planned journey on the metaphorical road map, including all of the travelers, vehicles, supplies, and time required to accomplish the objectives in service to a policy goal. This level of Public Policy is accomplished by lower-level officers, civil service employees, and sometimes by private contractors if a mechanism is in place to employ them. The principal domains of Public Policy constitute the remaining components of the Policy Ladder, and may be viewed as the metaphorical “sides” or “runners” of the overall public policy framework. From the perspective of Policy implementation, the major domains of public policy constitute distinct “target areas” which actually overlap in some policy situations. Using this model, these four Target Areas—Domestic, Foreign, Defense, and Economic Policy—must provide mutual reinforcement for a nation-state’s public policy to remain stable and provide even the possibility of successful implementation; no target area can be ignored. Domestic Policy applies to affairs internal to the nation-state, such as domestic tranquility and “The Peace”, Law and Order, an internal Justice system, and the General Welfare of the body politic. The Persons residing within the political community constitute the principal target in this area. By contrast, the primary focus of Foreign Policy includes affairs external to the state in which the state is involved. Hence, diplomacy, alliances and rivalries, linkages and cleavages, treaties and informal agreements characterize this domain, whose principal targets are other nation- states and political entities outside the state pursuing the policy. Foreign policy is often intuitively connected the third major domain of Public Policy, namely Defense Policy, although they are not necessarily the same, and in participatory governments especially one may bear witness to tensions or even conflicts between foreign and defense policy officials. This is because primary focus of Defense Policy is the Protection of the Nation- State against aggressors and other threats to the security of the nation-state in question. This policy involves warfare and combat, military alliances, military discipline, Intelligence and Counter-intelligence, and all other aspects of what may be called “national security.” The principal targets of defense policy generally include hostile actors against the nation-state, whether foreign or domestic, and the level of discretion with which a defense force may operate within the boundaries of any given nation-state often vary widely from one political system to another. The final domain of Public Policy is Economic Policy, which is often tied closely with the other three domains, especially since Domestic, Foreign and Defense policy all require the application of the nation-state’s resources to accomplish their goals. The primary focus of Economic Policy involves the management of the Nation-state’s wealth and resources, and is chiefly concerned with the management of scarcity, usually through monetary policy, managing the nation-state’s currency and coin; revenue and taxation, in order to acquire the resources necessary for government to operate; fiscal policy and debt service, in order to manage the government’s expenditures; and tariffs, trade and productivity, in order to regulate and maintain the overall health of the nation-state’s capacity to produce and manage its resources effectively. The primary target of Economic Policy is not necessarily the people within the nation-state, but the overall resources themselves.

Figure 94: The Public Policy Ladder Visualized. Political Behavior The subfield of studies in Political Behavior was developed in the 1930s in the United States, chiefly at the University of Chicago by the Progressive intellectual and political science professor Charles Edward Merriam (1874-1953), whose students, including prominent scholars such as Harold Lasswell and V.O. Key, would come to dominate American Political Science for most of the 20th Century. The Behavioral school of political science, modeled after behaviorist psychology, emphasizes quantitative methods of observation and seeks to explain and predict political behavior, and claims to provide explanations of political behavior—voting, public demonstration, interest group activity, partisanship, persuasion, alliance and conflict—in an objective, unbiased manner following rigorous, quantitative methods of observation patterned after the observation and statistical analytic methods characteristic of the natural sciences. This school of political science formed the disciplinary orthodoxy of the political science departments at many public universities, including the University of Texas at Arlington in the 1990s, and also stood as the dominant methodological approach endorsed by the American Political Science Association until the notorious “Perestroika” letter of 2000. Figure 95: Charles E. Merriam The fundamental premises of Behavioralism revolve around an epistemological assertion descended from the 18th Century Scottish Enlightenment thinker David Hume (1711-1776), who asserted that when exploring questions of knowledge it was necessary to limit one’s inquiry to phenomena that were observable and countable phenomena, empirical and quantifiable; and that anything else is indistinguishable from nonsense. Merriam expands on” Hume’s Fork” by applying it directly to political phenomena in a manner not unlike the efforts of Behaviorist psychologists John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner. The resulting premises of Behavioralist political science are as follows: 1. Research can discover uniformities in human behavior. 2. These uniformities can be confirmed by empirical tests and measurements. 3. Quantitative data are the highest quality and should be analyzed statistically. 4. Political science should be empirical and predictive. 5. Philosophical and historical dimensions of inquiry are to be downplayed, discarded, or ignored. 6. Value-free research is the ideal. 7. Social Scientists should search for a macro-theory covering all social science, as opposed to applied issues of practical reform. The resulting principles of Behavioralism include Regularity, where phenomena are generalized and explained; the principle of Verification, where explanations can be verified through replicated observation; a Technique that emphasizes hypothesis testing and experimentation; Quantification, whereby since only countable observables exist, data must be numerically expressed wherever possible or practical; Value-Neutrality, whereby ethical assessment has no bearing on empirical explanation; Systematization, in which the research must consider the importance of theory in research; Deference to Pure Science in Research as opposed to Applied Science; and Integration of the social sciences and value. The methods employed by Behavioralist political scientists are generally not dissimilar from the methods employed by Pollsters, and indeed the principal application of this method of political science research is the statistical analysis of public opinion poll data. The Behavioralist emphasizes the need for representative sampling of critical populations with greater or lesser reliability, and classifies sampling frames according to the breadth of the population sampled: Individual, Municipal, Regional, State, or National level data are standard. Even so, the Behavioralist may also conduct individual level interviews for the purposes of case study in political behavior, and in any case, whether in a sampled dataset or a set of case studies, must develop scales of measurement to observe recorded behavior. Once these data are collected, the principal tool of Behavioralist research, the statistical analysis of Datasets, may commence; the interpretation of which forms the foundation of hypothesis development and testing. The favored analytic tools for the student of quantitative political science include descriptive statistics on the Un nalysis of Variance (ANOVA) and chi- square 2)significance testing on the bivariate level, and linear and multiple regression analysis for multivariate hypotheses. Quantitative behavioral research of political phenomena carries certain advantages that other approaches may lack. For instance, as with the scientific method of inquiry generally, any theoretical claim must be supported by empirical observation, or else it must be discarded; it is for this reason that significance testing tends to take center stage when developing new hypotheses, in order to rule out the “null hypothesis” which suggests no correlation between observable variables, or else correlation by chance. Further, any theory or hypothesis which contradicts observable phenomena must necessarily be rejected as false, and so another principal task of the Behavioralist is to ensure that observable phenomenon is quantifiable using the same observational yardstick in practice as in theory. Additionally, through this approach is has become possible for political research to take advantage of technological advances and refinement, especially among the sciences of complexity and “Big Data”, using tools such as Data-mining and Trend analysis. The disadvantages of Behavioralism extend principally from Merriam’s assertion that philosophical and historical dimensions of political study, like the noumenon on Hume’s Fork, are indistinguishable from nonsense and therefore to be ignored. Certain traditional areas of political science may remain beyond the reach of Behavioralist inquiry; some political concepts may resist quantification, especially fundamental political concepts such as democracy, liberty, equality, and sovereignty. As a result, much quantitative research is often limited to trivial political behavior whose results are of limited practical value or relevance to larger political questions. The conceit of Behavioralist political science that no other method is valid as political science is almost certainly the reason for the “Perestroika” letter to have been sent a generation ago, and also the reason for subsequent political science researchers to attempt to address what is seen as a crisis of relevance within the discipline as a whole. Finally, the Behavioralist’s effort to maintain “value-neutrality” runs the risk of producing ethically suspect research, as happened to a pair of researchers from Stanford and Yale Universities who in 2014 sought to explore the effect of certain forms of campaign literature on turnout by distributing implied partisan campaign literature in a strictly non-partisan election in Montana, in direct violation of that state’s Election Code. Because of the preeminence of behavioral political science in academic environment of 20th Century America, there is no shortage of notable or influential Behavioralist scholars in the field. Charles Merriam stands out in particular as the founder of Behavioralist approach, but others include Harold Lasswell (1902-1978), Herbert Simon (1916-2001) and David Easton (1917-2014). And although the “Perestroika” movement did in fact shake up the field and open it up to a richer methodological pluralism in the 21st Century, plenty of room still exists in political science for students of Political Behavior, as seen in the work of Janet Buttolph Johnson (b. 1950), Richard Joslyn (b. 1950), Gary King (b. 1958), and Rob Franzese Jr. (b. 1968). Political Communication Political Communication as a distinct subfield has only come into its own in the last half century, in particular with the publication Political Communication in America in 1985 by Robert E. Denton (b. 1953) and Gary C. Woodward (b. 1946). Since then, the field has grown substantially, consequent to the rise of the World Wide Web as a major medium of communication, enabling researchers to explore political speech and communication using a variety of computational methods, including machine learning, network analysis and natural language processing to conduct observations and test hypotheses. Broadly speaking, the subfield of Political Communication is a synthesis of political science and communication science. Its primary concerns are the spread of information and its influence, particularly on politics, public policy, citizens and even the media used to communicate political messages, as well as the production, dissemination, and the effects of information within a political context. The principal observables in Political Communication at the time of this writing include Mass Media, Social Media, political speech by policy leaders, political influencers and interested parties, in particular with how messages, media and feedback affects election campaigns, government operations and other political phenomena, and is particularly focused on the application of communications models to analyze political rhetoric and propaganda. Within the last three decades of this expanding field, a range of critical approaches has emerged within the field of political communication, most notably as this field connects with the related fields of Political Psychology, Behavioral Political Science, and broader Political Theory. For instance, the Confirmation model in Political Communication emphasizes the roles of leading actors in communicating or confirming political positions and ideas to their supporters or followers, and is an outgrowth of Leadership and Role theory from Political Psychology that has also taken hold in International Relations Studies. By the same token, the related model of Dramatism emphasizes the symbolic construction of politics through the mechanism of communication, and as such hearkens back to the Constructivism expressed in Nietzsche’s Use and Abuse of History for Life and elsewhere. Another critical approach, Iconism, is related to the importance of Symbols in communicating political positions and ideas, and stitches together several distinct theoretical traditions from both psychology and political thought, in particular Carl Jung and Eric Voegelin. By contrast, Machiavellianism as a critical approach in Political Communication focuses on power relations in communicating political ideas, taking cues from varying interpretations of the political thought of Niccolò Machiavelli, Leo Strauss and Michel Foucault. Finally, Ritualism focuses on the superficiality and redundancy of political action and examines the manipulation of symbols to reinforce or transform political ideas, such as the use of flags in campaigns, physical gestures as symbols of protest, or the display of one’s political ideas through clothing such as t-shirts or colored “trucker” caps bearing political messages. Central concepts often treated in the field of Political Communication include Bias, Discursive activity such as persuasive or silencing discourse, as well as varying forms of Intelligence, such as surveillance, oversight, “sousveillance” and undersight. Additionally, Political Communication scholarship may work with Media Frames and Narratives, in addition to Official Statistics, Propaganda and Political Communications Opportunities such as Briefings, “Photo- Ops”, and other vehicles of Rhetoric. A relatively recent phenomenon which has witnessed an explosion of interest in the last two decades in the field is what Political Communications Scholars call “Politainment” in which political news, messages and commentary are packaged and delivered as entertainment. Finally, as the Canadian communications theorist Marshall McLuhan noted in his assertion before the US Congress that the export of US-made televisions to developing countries carried its own message, political communication also must examine the strengths and limits of Technological Nationalism, whereby the technology developed and deployed within a body politic serves a role in the definition of that body politic’s identity, simply through its widespread adoption and use. While Denton and Woodward may be viewed as foundational scholars in the field of Political Communication, others have risen to prominence, especially in the last two decades. While there are many more significant scholars of Political Communication engaged in active research today, here are just a few: Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Paul Waldman gained prominence with their analysis of the 2000 US Presidential Election Campaign, as well as the response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as prime examples of how Media Frames are established and maintained, and how they necessarily distort the public’s view of political figures and events; James Chesebro emphasizes the development of a comprehensive theory of Political Communication, as well as the intersection of developing technology and communications ethics; Brian McNair in his research tackles the causes and consequences of agitation propaganda and “fake News” for journalism, political participation, and political information; Shanto Iyengar explores how Media Frames in television reporting shape opinion without necessarily informing the audience consuming the televised messages, trivializing public discourse and eroding accountability in participatory states, and Vian Bakir emphasizes the role of Intelligence elites, surveillance and sousveillance in the emergence of what she and David Barlow call “The Age of Suspicion.” Political Communication stands out from many other areas of political science in that instead of attempting to establish or maintain a particular academic or methodological orthodoxy, such as Behavioralsm, Straussian critique, or the Critical Social Theory of the Frankfurt and Berkeley schools, this field welcomes and even expects a plurality of approaches to the phenomena under study. The late Political Communications scholar David Swanson and his colleague Dan Nimmo emphasized the need to preserve methodological pluralism when studying the connections between politics, media and political participation, thanks to the diversity of fields from which political communications scholars come. That this is so suggests that Political Communication itself stands as an outgrowth of the “Perestroika” movement in Political Science, and also explains the growth in this field since the end of the 20th Century. Political Psychology Like Political Communication, Political Psychology is an interdisciplinary field that incorporates the tools and concepts from each of the component disciplines that constitute the field. In the case of Political Psychology, the fields psychology and sociology join together to analyze and interpret political phenomena, and because of its close ties to the experience and behavior of individuals and groups, Political Psychology is often closely connected with studies in public opinion. Within this field three major areas have emerged since the publication of the earliest unequivocally study in Political Psychology, Adorno and Horkheimer’s landmark Authoritarian Personality in 1950: Personality, Group Behavior, and Political Behavior. Each of these major areas of investigation demonstrate a link, perhaps even kinship with Political Communication, and it is not unusual for research in one subfield to inform research in the other. For Personality Studies in Political Psychology, observables include such phenomena as political attitudes, political beliefs, information processing and decision making; Group Behavior Studies tend to observe broader phenomena such as war, propaganda, culture conflict and morale, while Political Behavior Studies tend to focus on individual level phenomena such as voting, interest group activity conflict and participation in terrorism. Each of these areas— personality group behavior and political behavior, contain distinct approaches, each of which is fundamentally grounded in one or more scholarly tradition in Psychology. Approaches to personality include the broad field of psychoanalysis, pioneered by such early 20th Century figures as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Consequently one will find Political Psychology scholarship grounded in Freudian analysis, Jung’s Functional analysis and Psychobiography. Out of this early work one will also encounter Trait analysis, either of central and secondary traits, cardinal and common traits, and apply many of the Trait or Temperament analytic inventories common to organizational management, such as the “Big 5” inventory, the Temperament Inventory developed by Meyers, Briggs, and Keirsey, or other personality tools such as Personality Resources International’s “True Colors” profile or the Clifton StrengthsFinder from Positive Psychology. Other approaches to political personality may incorporate other methods, interpretations and emphases such as goal-oriented behavior associated with power, affiliation intimacy, achievement, or other political self-talk; political personality research has also employed Thematic Apperception Testing and Stages of Ethical Development to gain insights into the character of political personalities. The application of the tools of psychology to political phenomena gives rise to varying assessment frameworks unique to Political Psychology: the aforementioned Authoritarian Personality framework from Adorno et al., for example, is a classic example of a Psychoanalytic framework used to assess Nazism and Fascism after the end of the Second World War. In 1981 Robert Altmeyer would modify the California F-Scale originally developed by Adorno and his team to create the “Right-Wing Authoritarianism Scale” emphasizing measurements of specific variables including Submission to authority, Aggression, and Conventionalism, and incorporating the observation that authoritarians are susceptible to fundamental attribution errors in their reasoning, leading to the claim that Authoritarianism is not necessarily a distinct personality but the product of the psychodynamics of learned behavior. Another Personality Assessment Framework is Barber’s Psychobiography model, which emphasizes Character, worldview and “style”, but also incorporates trait-based assessments such as Effort and personal satisfaction in politics. Other Trait- and Motive- based assessment frameworks include Etheridge’s Trait framework for leadership and policy, which measures dominance, interpersonal trust, self-esteem, and introversion versus extroversion; Hermann’s Leader Trait Assessment, which measures an individual’s need for power, his or her levels of cognitive complexity, task-interpersonal emphasis, self-confidence, locus of control, distrust, and ethnocentrism; and Leites and George’s Operational Coding Assessment, which applies a “Five by Five” analytic framework measuring the intersection of five philosophical beliefs with five instrumental beliefs to describe an individual’s political traits and motives. With respect to the political psychology of groups, one can see an almost intuitive connection between sociology and political theory, given that some of the political theorists examined earlier were themselves pioneers in the development of the discipline of sociology, especially Montesquieu, Émile Dukheim, Max Weber and John Dewey. Recent developments in the development of the political psychology of groups have given rise to an assessment of certain common group variables, and political psychologists tend to focus on one or more of these common variable. The influence of Group size, for example, is explored by scholars such as M.L Patterson, R.E. Schaeffer, J.W. O’Dell, Neil Widmeyer, Mancur Olson, and others. The impact of Group Structure is specifically explored by Martha Maznevski, while consideration of Group Function is the emphasis of the work of D.M Mackie & G.R. Goethals, William Schutz and Theodore Newcomb. Building on all of these, one may even consider the dynamics of Group Development, as Bruce Tuckman does in his research, while Solomon Asch explores normative and informational social influence on Group Conformity. Power and Influence stand out as a distinct variable with multiple perspectives: French & Raven emphasize what they call critical bases of power, Shaw & Condelli explore Raven’s concept of referent power, and Friedland explores the mutual interaction of trust, success and coercion on political Groups. The one area of Political Psychology that tends to hold the most sustained attention, however, is Decision, specifically: why do individuals and groups make the political decisions that they do? To address this question, a variety of Decision models have been proposed, including Majority Decision, where the group adopts majority preferences; Modal Decisions, where the largest single sub-group within a group determines the outcome of decisions, the Truth model, whereby group decisions are based on that groups conception of what is True, and the so-called “First Shift” model, whereby whoever “budges first” will eventually make the decision for the group as a whole. Other factors of course influence all of these models of decision, such as anxiety (see the work of George E. Marcus on anxiety and decision), group decision as key to successful implementation, duration of both decision and implementation (see Watson, Michaelson & Sharp), Groupthink and the Abilene Paradox (see Irving Janis and Ronald Sims), and fault-finding as a mechanism of transformation in decisions (see Edward Hirt and Keith Markman on Multiple Explanation and debiasing judgments). Political Management Properly speaking, Political Management is an Applied Political Science, and its practitioners may well serve as subjects of study themselves by researchers in other areas of the discipline. My own experience interacting with persons involved in Political Management tend to believe that it is they, and not scholars, who are engaged in “real” political science, an assumption not dissimilar from the technician whose experience serves as the most reliable instructor in the principles of engineering. And indeed, were one to return to a fundamentally Classical definition of Political Science as advanced by, say, Aristotle, a case can certainly be made for the Political Manager’s hands-on role in the shaping and direction of ordered communities. In Aristotle’s view, political science is, after all, an architectonic science, and is chiefly concerned with knowing the Good in, by, and for ordered communities and it is the political scientist’s role to assist in steering the community towards that Good. I even recall a colleague, Dr. Luigi Bradizza, who, after the first week or so of his teaching career as a part-time instructor of Government, entered the division office in dismay about the textbook the department had chosen, aghast that certain theoretical foundations had not been “properly” laid out in the book and leaving students in the dark about the political and philosophical context within which American Constitutionalism would form. When I asked him “What is Politics?” he responded with the Classical Thinker’s response without hesitation, “Politics is the Search for the Good.” Variations of this particular stance are shared, to a limited degree, by Public Administrators, some Political Managers, and interestingly, West Coast Straussians eager to enter the “rough and tumble” world of practical politics, the realm of the statesman. However, when pressed to describe what precisely that “Good” consists in, each of these different Political actors will likely volunteer markedly different, and potentially incompatible, answers. Political Management is related to another applied political science, namely Public Administration, but where Public Administrators are chiefly concerned with the effective execution of policy within a government institution, the Political Manager is more concerned with the management of political activities, such as Electioneering, Interest Group activity, and Campaign. Indeed, Political Management is the practical subfield of political science principally linked with the profession of political consultancy. Electioneering is the process of working for the success of a particular candidate, party, ticket, slate or issue in an election. It is principally focused on the Strategy, Tactics, and Operations of election campaigns, and as such is largely unconcerned with questions of Doctrine—that’s the candidate’s responsibility. It is the Electioneer’s responsibility to ensure that the Four “M’s” of the campaign—The Message, the Machine, Media, and Money—are aligned such that the campaign can maximize support among the voting public for their particular candidate or issue, and minimize support for all opposed positions. This is the part of the discipline that most people think of when they think of “politics”. Interest Group Activity is the process of advancing a particular organized interest relative to public policy. It is accomplished through a combination of direct and indirect operational techniques. Direct techniques are those designed to gain access to policymakers: lobbying, policy research, rankings and published ratings lists, and short term tactical alliances with other organized interest groups. By contrast, indirect techniques are used to generate public pressure on policy makers, whether through advertisement, mobilization of members and the general public, or long-term strategic alliances with other organized interests. The centerpiece of Political Management, whether electioneering or interest group management, is the Campaign. Campaign management involves the direct application of areas of Political Management of political activity, whether it be the Four “M’s”, Political Consultancy, Organization and Mobilizations, Opposition Research, Issue Advocacy and Interest Group coordination, Fundraising and Development, or Polling. As such, it is generally more practical for the budding political management practitioner to refer to others who have specialized in these areas. For campaign management, one should look to managers like Mary Matalin or James Carville. For political consultancy, Joseph Napolitano and Dennis W. Johnson are particularly prominent. In the area of advertisement generation and message management, Carville again is prominent, as is Tony Schwartz. For “grassroots” organization, there is much to be gained from studying the careers of Ralph Nader, Karl Rove, and Saul Alinsky. For the development of Opposition Research, retaliatory campaigning and damage control, one name, Lee Atwater, stands out from the rest as a pioneer in the field. Other areas of Political Management include Issue advocacy, where the work of John O’Neill, Jerome Corsi, Ralph Nader and Ian Ayres are prominent, while those interest in formal lobbying should refer to the careers of Tony Podesta, Thomas R. Dye, Donald deKieffer, and Evangeline Marzec. Insights into Fundraising and Development, on which most campaigns must spend at least 25% of their time doing, can be found especially in the work of Robert Pierpont, but also the fundraising trio of Barnes, Rice and Sturrock, or Larry Yonker, Chuck McGinty or Devlin Donaldson. As for Poll Generation, multiple sources again can provide insight, such as Geoffrey Skelley, Stan Greenberg, Bill Schneider, Ed Goeas, Mark Penn, and many others. Non-Governmental Organizations The last major subfield of Political Science treated in this section is the Study of Non- Governmental Organizations, or NGO Studies. Like Political Management, NGO studies are also often considered an applied political science, but more specifically an application of Political Management itself, as well as International Relations, Institutions and Processes, Unit-level Politics. NGO studies are principally concerned with the development, structure, function, salience and influence of Non-Governmental Organizations, and rose to prominence as a subfield in its own right particularly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which was widely understood to have been perpetrated by an NGO, namely the radical Islamist NGO network that came to be called al-Qaeda. Just what is an NGO? Put simply, a Non-Governmental Organization is any organization that functions separately and independent from any recognized government, and so may be construed as a subset of interest group. NGOs include businesses and multinational corporations, trade organizations and professional associations, labor unions and collective bargaining organizations, charitable organizations and non-profit institutions, international and transnational interest groups, issue networks, pressure groups and even terrorist organizations. While nearly any interest group may be understood as an NGO, NGO studies generally have adopted a standard set of NGO classifications: Charitable Organizations, Service Organizations, Participatory Organizations, and Empowerment Institutions. Charitable Organizations, such as the American Heart Association, typically follow a top-down organizational model and are usually focused on meeting the needs of poor or disadvantaged populations. Service Organizations, such as Médicins Sans Frontières, also follow a top-down organizational model, but provide a service, such as health care or education. Members of Service Organizations are expected to participate directly in the organization’s efforts. Participatory Organizations, such as Wikipedia, India Against Corruption, and the Open Source Initiative, are typically defined by a recognized need and, unlike a Charitable or Service organization, contributes resources through autonomous projects and participatory models such as the human-based genetic algorithm. Empowerment Institutions such as the Civil Society Leadership Institute in Nicaragua are usually directed toward a target community and, similarly to a Service Organization, provide education and training to address the social, political and economic factors that influence the target community, using members as facilitators. However, because some of the above distinctions may in certain cases become blurred, NGOs may also be classified according to their Operational reach. Here one finds community-based organizations that operate strictly within a particular community with a city or town, municipal or “city wide” organizations, state level organizations, national organizations, and international organizations. Yet even here the lines may become blurry, for many NGOs actually establish networks or memberships that cross organizational boundaries, such as the International Dark Sky Association, which has locally operating organizations in specific, mostly rural communities to pressure municipal governments to adopt light-pollution ordinances, but who also have an international association to generate awareness of the environmental, economic and health hazards of excess light pollution. NGOs that are not businesses typically organize around certain key focus issues, such as education, humanitarian assistance, health care, public policy, human rights, various social issues, and environmental protection. The roles they play include direct and interest group activity, orientation efforts to raise public awareness of an issue, inter-organizational coordination, publicity and, for international and transnational organization, a form of diplomacy known as “Track Two” diplomacy or “back-channeling”, when state actors are for various reasons unable or unwilling to engage directly with another nation-state’s government. Broadly speaking, the areas of NGO studies include nearly every aspect of non-governmental organizations: their mission and organization, their finance fundraising and development structures, mobilization efforts and institutional leadership, publicity and network development, relations with government and governments, resource management, administration, their agendas and decision-making processes, and conflict resolution and security issues. Because NGO Studies constitute one of the newest major subfields of political science today, the scholars and researchers in the field are perhaps not as well-known as the activists in Political Management or even the scholars in Political Psychology. Nevertheless, NGO studies have proven to be a valuable specialized area of applied political science, for its scholars may routinely provide insights into the workings of non-governmental organizations that may ultimately guide public policy decisions among nation-states. Noted NGO Scholars and Researchers working today include: Louise Diamond, Jessica Matthews, John McDonald, George E. Mitchell, Joseph Montville, James Pfeiffer, Vijay Prashad, Hans Peter Schmitz, Issa G. Shivji, Lyal S. Sunga, Edward A.L. Turner, and Steve W. Witt; all of whom are currently producing new scholarship in this growing and salient field. Political Systems and Institutions The next major area of political science involves an examination of political systems and institutions, whether in a formal sense of constitutions and institutional structures, or in an informal sense of political cultures and ideologies. In a broad sense, all of these may be understood as constitutional in character, following the late constitutional scholar George Anastaplo’s definition of “constitution” as “that recognized set of principles that defines a community and guides its conduct.” It should perhaps not surprise to the reader to consider that prior to the Second World War, research and scholarship in the American Political Science Association was principally concerned with political systems and institutions, following as it were the analytical currents of late 19th and early 20th Century analytic philosophy. Indeed, the casual observer will likely view political systems and institutions as the primary concern of political science as a whole, for these institutions comprise one of the major observables in the field, and link directly to the practical study of law in most political systems around the world. Furthermore, a cursory glance at nearly any political science course catalogue will reveal a suite of courses devoted to various institutions and systems within one’s own nation-state. My own university, for example, included specialized courses on the United States Congress, the Presidency, and the Federal Court System, just as other programs will also include courses in bureaucracy and public policy, electoral systems, and even local government systems. Granted, we have already covered some of the material earlier in our survey of the distinct subfield of “Unit-Level Politics” as well as “Institutions and Processes”, but because of its dominant character as an observable in the field of political science, a closer examination of constitutional structures, institutions, broader political cultures and ideology is certainly warranted. For our purposes, we shall first examine the formal structures of constitutional charters and agreements, and then proceed through the variety of institutional structures to the less formal systems of political culture and ideological preference. Constitutions We shall begin with a broad consideration of Constitution as a concept. Again, according to Anastaplo, a constitution is “that recognized set of principles that defines a community and guides its conduct.” This definition is both doctrinal and broad, and may in fact encompass nearly every extant feature within an ordered community. Therefore, if we narrow our focus somewhat, we may arrive at a more functional understanding of a constitution in terms of a defining charter or set of agreements that establishes a set of institutions and processes within an ordered community, as well as the extent and limits of the jurisdiction of those institutions and processes. In this sense we may understand a constitution as akin to a blueprint outlining the structure, function, powers and limits of the political systems it describes. Constitutions may be written or unwritten. Unwritten constitutions include what Montesquieu described in the Spirit of Laws as the mores, manners, and customs common to any particular ordered community. This idea generally fits Anastaplo’s definition, and may in fact have contributed to his interpretation of constitution. This understanding of constitution has a long pedigree, being recognized even in antiquity. Written constitutions, on the other hand, are a recent phenomenon, the first document which expressly called such being the 1787 Constitution of the United States of America, although prior documents reaching back a thousand years or more do more or less fit the functional definition of constitution. In any case, a written constitution is a defining charter for a political system, and consists of a document or collection of documents that establish the supreme defining law for that political system, whether a nation-state, a city-state, or even an alliance, league or confederation. The principal features of written constitutions include doctrinal legitimacy, usually expressed in a statement of source and purpose for the constitution in question, and in so doing establishes what Hannah Arendt called the “space of appearance”: that formal venue in which the community as a whole, either directly or indirectly through proxies called representatives or delegates, actively engage with one another and deliberate over policy as active participants in the process of governance. This space of appearance may take the form of an assembly, a council, a tribunal, a set of offices or bureaus, all of which are defined either expressly within the charter itself or else established by an institution granted the power to constitute such offices by the charter. Following this point, written constitutions feature an institutional strategy, outlining the structure of major departments as well as their jurisdiction, and also establish the operational norms for those departments—their functions, interdepartmental relations, departmental powers and limits to their power. Such features are common to nearly all institutional charters, for without which a written constitution would remain a doctrinal declaration instead of a functional charter. Thanks to the complexities of human interaction, no two constitutions are exactly alike. Sources of constitutional variety include the variety of prevalent ideas within a community, their generation, transmission and reception; a synthesis of the diverse ideas within the community; prevailing ideologies within the political system at large; even language itself plays a role, whether in lexical, semantic or pragmatic terms. In addition, the overall culture of a community may influence the shape of a constitution, and it is partly for this reason that one cannot merely import or graft a foreign constitution onto an established community without producing conflict. Here again, the features of language, especially the semiotics of language—sign and signified—play a critical role in the transformation of a constitutional charter. For written constitutions, in order to be acceptable to the community at large, must also remain consistent with the community’s unwritten constitution, reinforcing formally defined roles of institutional structures within the society and aware of the cultural pressures of conformity and rejection within the community as a whole. This will require an awareness of both history and place within the community: its experience and memory of conflicts and reconciliations, its location, its neighbors, the terrain and climate, even patterns of migration within the community and beyond. Consequently, constitutions vary according to the principles upon which they are founded. A constitution for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, for instance, bears little resemblance to the constitution for the State of Texas, and the Constitution of Afghanistan is markedly different from that of Mongolia. A constitution may stabilize a community on the condition that it is consistent with the ideas, history, culture and place over which it establishes authority, but most constitutions remain no longer that a single generation without either significant revision, amendment, or replacement. The overall effectiveness of a constitution may be measured in terms of how long it endures, or it may also be measured in terms of how well the constitution defines the community over which it holds authority and guides the conduct of that community. However, one must take note that some constitutions, counterintuitively, are ineffective by design, often reflecting a deep distrust of authority within a particular community. Examples of this final point include the Texas Constitution of 1876, designed specifically to limit the ability of that state’s government to borrow money and carry a debt burden beyond a single two-year period and to establish executive balances and checks in the state’s budget process to limit the executive’s ability to impose budgetary obligations on the legislature. Another example is Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, imposed from the outside after Japan’s defeat against the United States in the Second World War, in order to limit Japan’s ability to wage war, with a chronically underequipped Self Defense Force largely dependent on the United States and its Pacific allies for the common defense of Japan. What follows is a survey of different arrangements of constitutional systems, whether Unitary, Confederate or Federal in character. By far the most common constitutional system in the world is the unitary state, and includes perhaps the widest variety of institutional structures and norms. Confederations are quite rare, and typically are characterized by severe limits to their authority or jurisdiction. Federal systems, seek to answer the limitations of confederations as well as define and limit the power of central authorities; about two dozen of these exist in the world at the time of this writing. Unitary States The traditional model of organizing and interpreting political power is that of the unitary state, a highly centralized system whereby authority is organized using a more or less hierarchical strategy. A cursory survey of the US Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook will reveal that most common political arrangement in the world is that of the unitary state, but while unitary states are so prevalent, one must keep in mind that unitary states may range anywhere from dictatorships to participatory republics. The simplest unitary state is the dictatorship, and is probably the oldest model of expressing power. The term dictator derives from the office of the same name in ancient Rome, but its function bears relatively little resemblance to the Roman military official. For where the Roman dictator’s power was limited to command over the Roman army, political dictatorships extend to the population as a whole, and are generally described as either autocratic or despotic in character, where the dictator maintains power either through active repression or through the use of force to crush opposition, silence dissidents, and remain unchallenged. The simplest form of power projection among dictators is in the use of direct authority, often through the militaristic use of the dictator’s close allies and sycophants. More frequently, however, dictatorships will establish policy ministers and lieutenants partly in order to remain aloof from the general population, and prefer to exercise power indirectly. Depending on the type of dictatorship, these policy ministries may reflect genuine policy aims, such as within most authoritarian régimes, or they may serve merely to maintain an appearance of the rule of law, particularly to international observers. The character of dictatorship is first explored in classical political thought in Xenophon’s Hiero, the classic dialogue on tyranny, but is analyzed in greater detail by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism. For Arendt, authoritarian dictatorships often limit political pluralism by imposing limits on the number of political parties that may participate in government, and may rely on clandestine decision-making processes to effect policy, beyond the reach of public scrutiny. Such dictatorships typically rest on an emotional claim to legitimacy, and often an appeal to a critical need to maintain order against either an invasive or insurgent adversary. Such régimes also feature extremely social mobility among its citizens, and is reinforced by an authority which suppresses political opponents and general dissent. Examples of authoritarian dictatorships are plentiful: Chile under Agosto Pinochet, Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Philippines under Rodrigo Duterte. The more extreme form of dictatorship is the totalitarian model, which exerts power through active repression of every segment of the society under its yoke. Totalitarian dictatorships tend to feature false front organizations, fake government agencies and esoteric doctrines available only to a few, promulgated through loyalty tests and propaganda. In such systems, every feature of the subject’s life, whether public or private, becomes a tool for the dictatorship to express and project its power, much as Schmitt describes in his “Total State.” Indeed, the Totalitarian vision of “the People,” far from permitting individual discretion or agency, instead objectifies “the People” into an esoteric, undifferentiated mass whose will is embodied in the authority itself, and uses propaganda as the primary tool of communication with “the People” to reinforce utter dependency on the State, which may attempt to reinforce the idea that widespread fear, powerlessness and misery is either the natural order of things or else is a consequence of some nefarious enemy, whether foreign or domestic. This dependency in turn produces individual isolation, loneliness and paranoia among the “citizens” now reduced to mere tools of the Organic Whole of what Carl Schmitt called the Total State”. Classic examples of totalitarian dictatorships include Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia, but may also include the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” or Afghanistan under the Taliban régime; however, the most extreme example of totalitarianism in the last half century is almost certainly the dictatorship of Cambodia under Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s. This particular régime sought to eliminate what they believed what the corrupting influence of the former monarchy in that state by eliminating all prior social institutions, reorganizing the society directly, and putting people to work in forced labor details, all in an effort to remake human nature.

Figure 96: Direction of power in dictatorships The next form of unitary state is the Absolute Monarchy. Although it is structurally similar to dictatorships, absolute monarchies are slightly more complex in that they are able to make a claim to legitimacy through means other than the direct or indirect use or threat of force. Most monarchies tend to espouse a claim to legitimacy based on tradition or history, and as such are often hereditary in character. The absolute monarchy is the government system upon which Hobbes’ idea of the sovereign is based. In this system, a typically hereditary office called the Crown, or King, Queen, or Prince, appoints specific offices in a formal arrangement and distribution of the goods of the realm. “Nobles” are typically hereditary landowners who exert power over particular areas of the kingdom, which ministers and consuls serve as policy advisors to the Crown as well as administrators over specific areas of public policy. Absolute monarchies may also feature a court system which serves as a proxy for the Crown in the resolution of disputes among subjects, with nobles, or with policy ministers, but the Crown may also stand in judgement over certain disputes and even establish a mechanism whereby subjects may petition the Crown directly. The Crown may in fact be limited by the notion of the social contract a la Hobbes, or he may be constrained by his predecessors’ decrees, or even by agreements with subjects, and the subjects tend to enjoy several avenues of petition: to nobles, the courts, policy ministers, and even the Crown itself, though this last avenue may be limited by a “gatekeeper” office such as a Chamberlain or Solicitor. Prior to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, England’s monarchy contained features of absolute monarchy, and indeed until the end of the 18th Century this was considered the standard model of monarchy throughout Europe. Examples of absolute monarchy today include individual members of the United Arab Emirates, the Sultanate of Brunei, Saudi Arabia, and to a limited degree, the temporal authority of the Roman Catholic Pontificate in Vatican City. Constitutional monarchy grew out of absolute monarchies and further limit the power of the Crown. In such systems, a hereditary Crown typically retains the title of Head of State and may exercise limited powers to call or suspend deliberative and legislative structures, usually called a Parliament. Sovereignty in such systems usually rest with this head of state, although it may also be shared in practice, as is the case with the United Kingdom after around 1814. The Parliament derives its authority ultimately from the sovereign, but often includes either a partially or fully elected policy-making assembly. This Parliament may choose a head of government, such as a prime minister, who in turn appoints policy ministers from within the Parliament itself to serve as a Cabinet. This form of constitutional monarchy may be found in the United Kingdom, Norway, Spain and Japan, and indeed the pattern of a dual executive (head of state and head of government) where policy ministers are chosen from within the Parliament is often called the “Westminster Model” of government. Such systems tend to feature a high degree of participation from the subjects through election, interest group activity, and legal petition; the 18th Century political thinker Montesquieu even referred to this form of government in Britain as “a republic masquerading as a monarchy”.

Figure 96: Direction of power in Monarchies: Absolute (left) and Constitutional (right) The final, and most highly participatory, model of unitary state is the unitary republic. In a republic, sovereignty may rest with citizens, with a central government, or both. Typically, a republic features an elective central government which creates and administers public policy either directly to citizens, or else through administrative districts, often called “counties”, “districts” or “communes”. In most republics, the legislative or parliamentary authority is elected through one of several voting systems, and in some cases the principal executive power may be elected as well. Broadly speaking, republics tend to follow one of two basic models of arranging the powers of legislation and enforcement. On one hand, a parliamentary republic includes a prime minister who is a member of the parliament and serves as chief executive officer with a cabinet, also chosen from within the deliberative assembly itself. On the other, some republics feature an institutional separation of power between a legislative or deliberative assembly and a separately elected executive. Furthermore, electoral systems tend to vary widely from one republic to the next, ranging from a direct election of members in single member districts to a proportional representation of formal political parties that meat a minimum threshold of support from among the citizens. Most individual states in the United States of America are unitary republics that feature formally separated government powers, while a plurality of republics around the world have adopted some variation of the “Westminster Model” of parliamentary government. Today, the unitary republic is the most common political arrangement in the world.

Figure 97: Direction of power in Unitary Republics Confederations An alternative method of constitutional arrangement is the inverse of unitary states called the confederation. Unlike unitary states, confederations feature a “bottom-up” arrangement of authority, whereby the members of the organization possess greater power and autonomy than the central governing body. Highly decentralized, confederations constitute a fairly uncommon political arrangement, and are typically limited in scope to matters of trade or mutual defense. Such arrangements arguably constitute an outgrowth from the concept of the league, whereby members agree to form an alliance or an association for their mutual benefit. While the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union among the United States of America in the late 1770s and early 1780s stands as the paragon for an interstate confederation, other more recent examples do exist, such as the Cantons of Switzerland, the European Union, The Caribbean Economic Community (Caricom) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Confederations typically fall into one of two principal categories: confederate republics and interstate confederations, though some outliers do exist, such as the United Arab Emirates, which stands as a confederation of small absolute monarchies. In a confederate republic, sovereignty ultimately rests with the citizens of the republic without necessarily recognizing the sovereignty of the central government, setting such systems apart from unitary republics. In a confederate republic, citizens elect township officials much as municipal systems often do, and the township sends delegates to a central council of townships, either through appointment or through election by citizens. Limited confederate republics may exist within other unitary republics, as is the case in the state of Texas with its voluntary inter-municipal Councils of Government, whose primary mission is to coordinate regional infrastructure, resource management and economic development efforts. In such cases, the central government is ultimately answerable to the citizens through the township or municipal structures to which they belong. While the Cantons of Switzerland tend to stand out as an extant example of such an arrangement, the US states of Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, and New Mexico also bear some resemblance to the confederate republics. Neither Alaska nor Connecticut have counties within their state’s institutional structure: Alaska’s governing framework features a system of political units called corporations that each have strong ordinance power within their particular jurisdiction, a feature absent in true unitary states. Connecticut relies on its individual townships for representation in the legislature in Hartford, but also includes a second chamber analogous to a Senate in which multiple townships are combined into regions. Arkansas and New Mexico, while technically unitary republics, nevertheless grant their individual counties strong ordinance power, and in some cases of domestic policy simply cannot operate without the county structure, as the residents of the city of Los Alamos learned concerning their municipal and county law enforcement structure, leading their resident to petition the legislature in Santa Fe to authorize the establishment of a Los Alamos County, whose county lines coincide nearly precisely with Los Alamos’ city limits. Figure 98: Direction of power in Confederate Republics The other major form of confederation is the interstate confederation. Similar to a confederate republic, sovereignty ultimately may rest with citizens, members state, or both, and also permits multiple constitutional forms among its constituent member states. In this arrangement, member states retain their local political forms, such as unitary republics, confederate republics, or constitutional monarchies, and the member state governments appoint delegates to a central interstate confederate council, assembly, or tribunal, according to their respective state’s practices. The central council, assembly or tribunal in turn may address only those matter of policy for which they have been duly authorized under the confederation’s principal charter or charters. However, enforcement of federative policies may be left to member states, and as such the central government ultimately depends on the member states for policy implementation, and the central government may not administer policy over citizens without the express consent of the member states affected. The Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union followed this pattern, as do the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Caricom and the European Union. Of these, the European Union is perhaps the most complex, organized as it were by a constellation of about two dozen separate treaties, none of which necessarily have been universally adopted among its members. Figure 99: Direction of power in Interstate Confederations By contrast, the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union among the United States of America in the late 18th Century represents a simplified interstate confederation, and the charter’s principal author, Benjamin Franklin, consciously developed his proposal as a simplified form of a peculiar alternative constitution adopted and implemented by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy called the Gayanashagowa, or Great Binding Law. Under the Gayanashagowa, the nations of the Haudenosaunee employed a metaphorical “Great Tree of Peace” whereby citizens of each of five nations would choose their respective nation’s leaders according to their own customs, and then appoint delegates who served as “confederate lords” to a central council under the “tree” as roots feed the trunk. The metaphorical roots then spread out to other nations, who may join if they choose, but they would not have delegates sit at the central council of confederate lords unless they are directly affected by the decisions of that central council. Periodically, those citizens who demonstrate a manifest interest or attachment to the Great Tree of Peace, the confederation as a whole, would be grated the title of “Pine Tree Chief” and would be eligible to sit at the central council. However, if they prove factious they would be dismissed to their respective home nation, yet would retain the title of “Pine Tree Chief”, not as a badge of honor so much as a badge of shame. The confederate lords could likewise be removed by separate councils of “mothers” in their home nations if they fail to represent the interest of their member nations. The distribution of power in the Gayanashagowa is complicated further both by function and by area of policy. Functionally, two pairs of nations’ delegates form “houses” under the metaphorical tree, while the fifth nation’s delegates would exercise an effectively absolute veto power over decisions made by the pair of houses. “House” membership was by no means static, but depended on the issue deliberated, whether concerning matters of domestic peace, foreign diplomacy, war and defense, government affairs or constitutional affairs. Through this process, deliberation would circle the base of the “tree” ensuring every nation’s delegates both had an active voice and a veto over certain affairs affecting the Haudenosaunee as a whole, strengthening both the authority and the legitimacy of the central council. By contrast, the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union presented a more static institutional structure than the Gayanashagowa. Although the two constitutions bear some resemblance to each other, in particular in their express listing of each member state by name, their recognition of each state’s distinct sovereignty, extending faith and credit by all members to all members, and description of their respective unions as leagues of friendship or alliance for common defense and general welfare, the unifying structures and processes of the Gayanashagowa are notably absent in the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union. Under the Articles of Confederation, member states appointed a number of delegates, from two to seven, to a single representative body called the United States in Congress Assembled. Each state possessed a single vote in this Congress, and the Congress would appoint one of its members to preside for no longer than a year. On nearly every issue, rather than rely on a dynamic set of committees to deliberate, decide or negate actions, the United States in Congress Assembled required the concurrence of nine states to act, except on adjournment. Furthermore, the presence of delegates from at least nine states constituted a minimum quorum, while in the Gayanashagowa delegates from every member nation were required to conduct federative affairs. Under the Articles of Confederation, when the United States were not assembled in the General Congress, one delegate from each state would serve as an interim committee exercising limited executive powers to manage “the general affairs of the United States,” a function largely left to individual nations in the Haudenosaunee confederacy.

Figure 100: Directions of power in the Gayanashagowa (left) v. Articles of Confederation (partial, right) Federal Systems Arguably, the strength of the Gayanashagowa’s central council suggests that the Haudenosaunee confederacy resembled less a confederation and more a compromise between a confederation and a unitary state, whereby both the central government and the member states hold significant power to adopt and implement policy, and must share this power with one another. This arrangement, a federal system, grew out of confederations in much the same fashion as confederations developed from defense leagues and alliances. As a synthesis of both unitary and confederate systems, a federal system incorporates features of both, including “top-down” and “bottom-up” organizations of authority within its orbit. Due to its complexity, federal systems are relatively uncommon—only about two dozen such systems exist in the world, and no two federal systems are exactly alike. Federal systems are more likely to be established and successfully maintained in political communities characterized by large, heterogeneous populations, while federal systems characterized by a smaller number of members tend to fail, either through invasion by a foreign power or domination by the strongest member of the federal system. Evidence of this phenomenon may be seen in the separate fates of the Gayanashagowa and the United States of America under the Federal Constitution of 1787. Where the federalism of the Gayanashagowa maintained the peace among the five member states, its relatively small population whose central governing body emphasized deliberation and consensus was ultimately ill-equipped to withstand the onslaught of a powerful aggressive neighbor, namely the United States. As long as the United States maintained a loose association under the Articles of Confederation, the Gayanashagowa could separately engage in diplomacy with individual states, especially the states of New York, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire. However, once the United States adopted a stronger federal system with the power to raise and support armies without requiring the express concurrence of more than two-thirds of its members, the Haudenosaunee confederacy was overwhelmed by the United States within a half- century. Events such as this give rise to Colomer’s Ninth and Tenth Propositions, specifically: that multiple levels of governance are necessary for efficient provision of Public Goods at diverse territorial scales; and Local democratic self-government and large-scale provision of Public Goods can be compatible through the establishment and maintenance of a federal system. But where small federations tend to fail, either through annexation or secession, large federations, where no single unit dominates, tend to survive and endure. This of course by no means suggests that large federations are free of significant difficulties. Of particular note is the direct challenge to the concept of sovereignty a large, complex federal systems presents. Sovereignty, whether construed as self-governance or political power and agency, tends to remain an elusive “moving target” in federal systems, given that such systems are inherently an order of magnitude more complex than unitary states or confederations. In functioning federal systems, sovereignty tends to appear as a mirage: wherever one stands, sovereignty appears somewhere else except one’s own position. Members of the central government experience political pressure both from the member states they represent and the citizens of the federal system as a whole. Members of state governments experience similar pressure from the central government and the citizens of their own state. Citizens experience the same phenomenon, their agency perceived to be limited by political pressure from both the central and member state governments. This challenge is often construed as an accidental defect of federal systems, but in fact the elusive character of sovereignty is a central feature of the federal design. Instability in federal systems tends to emerge whenever one of the vertical elements in the system asserts its claim to sovereignty over and above the other levels of the system, and the issues are not generally resolved fully, yet constitutional change typically results. Examples of this phenomenon can be seen in t the Civil War in the United States of America as well as its Reconstruction, the adoption of a de jure federal system in Nepal in 2007, the partisan transition in Mexico in the 1990s from Institutional Revolutionary Party to National Action Party dominance, and the subsequent rejection of constitutionally sanctioned partisanship in that same federal system with the rise of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in 2018. Although no two federal systems are exactly alike, certain features of federal systems do recur. Typically, citizens elect member state governments that shape and administer policy over those same citizens. Through a variety of methods, the citizens and state institutions share the power to elect members to the central government, which shapes and administers policy over both the member states and the citizens, who are construed by the central government as citizens both of the federal system and the state wherein they reside. However, not every federal system contains a mechanism whereby state governments retain power to affect the composition of their representatives in the central government, and in such cases it is not unusual to find significant tension between the member states and the federal government. This can be seen especially in federal systems such as Nigeria, where state governments often ignore federal law with relative impunity thanks to a wholesale disconnect between the state governments and the central government in Abuja.

Figure 101: Direction of Power (left) and political relations (right) in federal systems Thanks to the enormous complexity of federal systems and the plurality of governments contained within a federal structure—the United States, for example, counts more than 89,000 distinct governments under its constitutional apparatus—the concept of federalism itself must be revisited frequently, and as Woodrow Wilson, founder of the American Political Science Association and a former US President, noted, each generation must decide for itself how federalism is supposed to work. The source of this complexity lies in the dimensions of political relations characteristic of federal systems. On one hand, vertical federal relations involve those between the central government and member states, the central government to individual citizens, and states to citizens. On the other hand, horizontal relations include states in relation to one another through interstate compacts and agreements, as well as relations among citizens themselves through contracts and the resolution of disputes, especially if the federal system in question expressly acknowledges sovereignty or political agency of the citizens themselves, and not merely that of government institutions. In order to organize power in federal systems, their constitutional structures often must distinguish sources of that power, classifying them into enumerated powers expressly listed in the charter or implied by its provisions, concurrent powers shared by multiple levels, reserved powers to one or another level of the system, or else denied to specific levels. Central issues in federal systems often include both vertical and horizontal controversies, and illustrate often unresolved questions about the nature of the federal system itself. For example, Vertical federal questions of power frequently recur, such as: If central and state governments share power, where does one draw the line between central and state power? If citizens and states share power to choose the central government, how do they? By contrast, if citizens and states do not share power to choose the central government, how can the central government legitimately exert power over that part of the system that is excluded from choosing the central government? These issues are made more difficult when implied powers are involved, and if left unresolved may lead to unrest, secession and even civil war. As for horizontal issues, controversies typically arise in the context of citizen petition and the recognition of the public acts, records and proceedings of other member states. For example: If citizens and states are considered partners under the central government and have equal standing to petition, can a citizen petition for redress from a state in which the citizen does not reside. If so, in which tribunal is the petition to be heard? If full faith and credit is given by each state to each state’s public acts, records and judicial proceedings, what happens when the laws of two states directly conflict with each other, and the central government’s laws are silent on the matter? Which public act, record or judicial proceeding is to prevail in such cases? Most federal systems attempt to address these issues either a matter of policy or, in the most extreme cases, by amending their constitutional documents and practices. Institutional Structures If we are to view constitutional systems as mechanisms of political engineering, then it is necessary to examine the institutional structures and functions which comprise the constitutional system in question. This particular area generally serves as a bridge between Unit-level and Comparative politics; consequently, some material contained here will doubtless be familiar to the reader. Except in authoritarian dictatorships and absolute monarchies, the form of institutional structures of government in most political systems typically follows certain functions of governance: legislation and broad policymaking; enforcement, administration and regulation; and the adjudication of formal disputes. These particular functions have characterized constitutional systems as far back as Aristotle, who in Book 4 of the Politics describes these functions as “one element which deliberates about public affairs; second, that concerned with the magistrates—the question being, what they should be, over what they should exercise authority, and what should be the mode of electing to them; and thirdly that which has judicial power.” (1297b37-1298a3) Legislative Structures Foremost among these are legislative structures, the assemblies or governing bodies responsible for the development both of public policy and law within the political system as a whole. In constitutional monarchies, republics and federal systems these bodies generally consist of at least one chamber chosen either by citizens in separate regions or communities, or else by parties to represent the interests of their constituents. The simplest of these are unicameral (from the Latin uni, “one”, and camera, “room”) legislative bodies, consisting of a single chamber charged with the development and deliberation of public policy.

Figure 102: Respresentation and legislative strategies in Unicameral legislative structures Examples of unicameral legislative systems abound among municipal governments such as city councils and boards of aldermen, special districts such as school districts, district councils within larger political systems, as well as tribal governments around the world. More common among larger political systems such as that of nations states is the bicameral, or two-chamber, legislative structure, especially in participatory government systems. Bicameral legislative bodies generally follow one of two principal forms: 1) a parliamentary structure featuring a hierarchical arrangement of the two chambers, whereby one chamber’s proposals require the approval of the other chamber before legislation can be adopted while the other chamber may exercise unilateral legislative power; or 2) a congressional structure featuring what Publius describes in Federalist #9 as “legislative balances and checks, wherein the power to add or modify public acts depends on at least two chambers with equal power to overwhelm the other.” In a bicameral congressional structure, neither chamber enjoys a superior power over the other, but may instead exercise equal and unique powers.

Figure 103: Standard Bicameral structures An uncommon alternative within the bicameral family of legislatures is the mixed-member Congress, an attempt to reconcile the demands for representation both of specific geographic or demographic cleavages within the nation-state in question and of specific organized political partisan cleavages in the same political system. Historically, only four specific political systems have adopted this approach, with mixed results in terms both of effective governance and participation. Within such a system, the de jure bicameral congress or parliament effectively transforms into a de facto tetracameral representative system. Generally, it appears that within a mixed member congressional system, either a single party tends to dominate the legislative process, as in the Diet in 1980s Japan, or else the particular mixed sources of representation produce significant barriers to effective legislation, resulting in resolutions to transfer full policymaking powers to the executive, as in 20th Century Mexico, early 2000s Venezuela under Hugo Chavez or Thailand in the same period with Thaksin Shinawatra as Prime Minister.

Figure 104: A mixed member congressional system. Another alternative legislative system is the tricameral, or three chamber system, as well as the mixed constitutional/legislative system unique to Afghanistan. Tricameral systems, while uncommon, nevertheless appear in variations of the Westminster model of Parliamentary legislation as well as with functional congressional systems. The Canadian Parliament, for example, contains a Senate appointed by the Governor General on the advice of the prime minister on the basis of equal representation of Canada’s geographic regions, and a House of Commons, chosen by plurality election in 338 electoral districts called ridings. While the Canadian Senate is viewed as an upper chamber and the Commons a lower chamber, the legislative process itself resembles a congressional system with a legislative check and balance system, since both chambers must pass legislation in identical form before it may be enrolled. However, an additional step in the legislative process involves review by the Canadian High Court to determine whether or not the legislation passes muster with the federal Constitutional charter, especially Canada’s Declaration of Rights and Freedoms. The Parliament of the Islamic Republic of Iran has a similar review court in place to determine whether or not legislation is consistent with their interpretation of Islamic moral codes. In both cases, a third chamber is effectively able to issue an absolute veto over legislation passed by the other two chambers: for Canada it is an express judicial review, while for Iran a separate council of religious leaders serve a similar function. Afghanistan’s legislative system is unique in that the levels of participation depend on whether a proposal is a statutory or constitutional matter. If a legislative proposal is a statutory matter, two chambers with different sources of representation, the Wolesi Jirga and the Meshrano Jirga, each deliberate and adopt legislation in like manner as a bicameral congress. However, in constitutional matters, as well as matters related to continuance of war or impeachment of Afghanistan’s president, the two Jirgas are incorporated into a larger body of representatives that include municipal and tribal leaders called the Loya Jirga, who convene in a special session at a single, temporary location to deliberate and decide the specific issues brought before it.

Figure 105: Tricameral and Mixed legislative structures Enforcement Structures In order to implement policy or legislation, it is necessary for any political institutional system to establish some form of enforcement structure, and indeed this set of institutions, variously describe their enforcement systems as magistracies, executives, offices or law enforcement, tend to comprise the overwhelming majority of government institutions, such that some political systems refer to these structures simply as “the government”. As with legislative structures, a limited range of organizational patterns tend to predominate among government enforcement structures, usually in order to connect these structures to the legislative and deliberative power. Among nation-states, two patterns have emerged in the last two centuries: the parliamentary executive and the presidential executive. In the Parliamentary executive, one typically sees a set of offices called “the government”, which is institutionally a subset of a larger parliament that holds legislative, deliberative and representative functions. In parliamentary systems, a separate office from the parliament, usually described as a head of state, may either be elected, appointed, or, in the case of the United Kingdom and other constitutional monarchies, inherited. The head of state’s function is typically limited in scope, often to calling extraordinary sessions of Parliament, representing the state in ceremonial functions, exercising limited diplomatic powers, and in a few cases, granting the head of government power to convene or suspend legislative or deliberative activities. The head of government, usually called a prime minister or a chancellor, is usually the leader of the majority party or coalition within the Parliament and serves as the chief magistrate and head of the executive departments, which usually constitute a subset of the largest chamber of Parliament. The prime minister appoints members of parliament to individual policy and advisory offices called a Cabinet, and generally enforce acts of Parliament and implement policy within the nation state. Within this framework, public ministers and consuls are answerable not only to their party, but to the whole parliament as well as to the voters who elected them to the parliament, and executive power is construed as a subset of parliamentary power.

Figure 106: Plan of a typical Parliamentary executive system By contrast, the Presidential executive system features a separately elected president from the legislative, deliberative, or representative body. In a presidential executive, the legislative and executive powers of government are typically separate institutions, where the legislative body has power to define and adopt broad areas of law and regulation, while the president’s administration is responsible for implementation of public policy according to their own interpretation of legislative acts. In such systems, the president usually appoints the principal heads of various policy offices, which may be created either by the legislature, by the president, or both. Principal Officers are often subject to a confirmation process within the legislative branch of government, but this is not always the case. The separation of executive from legislative power, according to Publius in the Federalist, affords unity, energy and expedition in the executive offices; however, the principal officers of executive departments principally answer not to the legislature or to voters but to the chief executive officer who appointed them.

Figure 107: Plan of a Presidential executive system An alternative to the Parliamentary or the Presidential executive plan is the Plural Executive system, adopted by member states within some federal systems such as the United States of America. In a plural executive, no single executive officer holds the full powers of policy implementation; instead, the executive branch is fragmented into multiple, independently elected executive offices, each of which exercise limited executive power within a narrow range of policy areas, typically defined by the state’s constitution, its statutes, or some combination of the two. Some plural executive systems also incorporate a pattern of executive balances and checks, primarily when concerned with the powers of taxation and spending. Plural executive structures allow more than one political party or coalition to occupy the principal executive offices, and in those states that feature an executive check and balance system, they must cooperate to implement public policy. The political principle guiding the plural executive concept, aside from the fragmentation of executive authority, tends to be that of “popular sovereignty”, in which the governed are understood to hold the ultimate authority in state matters. Hence, one finds plural executive structures extant in unitary republics and their sub- state constitutional forms rather than in federal systems or confederations.

Figure 108: Plan of a Plural executive system Nevertheless, confederations may feature another alternative executive strategy, that of the Executive Council. This enforcement structure is designed to ensure representation of member states within a confederation not only in legislative affairs but in executive matters as well. Such systems tend to feature a deliberative assembly where each member state either appoints or elects a number of representatives responsible for collective decision making about how to implement public policy, usually in federative matters—those matters that affect the confederation as a whole. Some confederations establish executive councils as separate elected or appointed entities, such as one finds in the European Union, while other executive councils are appointed by the confederation’s principal representative and deliberative body, as the Committee of the States had been under the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union in the United States of America in the late 1770s. The advantage of an executive council is that it ensures representation of member states in matters of policy implementation as well as consistency across a confederation. However, the deliberative character of representative councils may undermine the ability of the executive council to act quickly in response to emergencies.

Figure 109: Plan of an executive council It is also important to note that these general executive forms describe idealized systems; no two sets of institutional structures are precisely alike, and many systems incorporate elements from multiple idealized forms. The state of Texas, for instance, consists of a bicameral congress, a plural executive in which some executives have the power of appointment like in a presidential executive system, and an elected representative executive council responsible for setting public education policy. Administrative and Regulatory Structures Attendant to constitutional enforcement structures is the administration of public policy. Technically these institutions, often described as bureaucracy, belong to executive power and are themselves institutions of enforcement. However, thanks to their specialized nature the character of bureaucracies tends to differ markedly from the enforcement structures to which they are ostensibly answerable. In most cases, examination of administrative and regulatory structures connects directly with a consideration of the public policy process itself; however, depending on the set of political institutions in which these agencies are found, the bureaucracy may answer to constitutional executive power, to legislative institutions, or both. The primary purpose of administrative structures is to manage public policy implementation which functionally consists of three distinct components: distribution, regulation, and redistribution. In distribution, resources are allocated to address policy issues, and may include products, services, personnel, money, benefits, or any other thing that carries a value within the political system. For example, the Federal Government of the United States distributes funds to states in order to maintain the Interstate Highway system as a part of its national defense infrastructure, while state governments are responsible for the further distribution of those same funds through their respective departments of transportation, contracting with private entities in order to carry out the operations of building and maintaining the highway system within their respective states. By contrast, regulation involves the use of executive power through law, administrative action, police action, rule-making, and inspection, as well as the use of judicial power, to compel or restrain action. This action is most notably seen in the establishment of rules and standards governing the conduct of various industries within a nation state, such as the inspection of manufacturing centers to ensure compliance with workplace safety mandates or the monitoring of broadcast communications to ensure broadcasters operate within the limits of their issued licenses. Routine police action within a nation-state also falls within this category, as do mandamus orders arising from judicial decisions. More controversial among the actions of administrative and regulatory structures is redistribution, in which resources are taken from one policy target and applied to another. While in some cases the reallocation of funding may be necessary for the effective administration of policy, other redistribution systems may generate resistance among those affected, especially if such redistribution is seen to conflict with perceived political principles or other entitlements. This is certainly the case with certain redistribution policies involving public assistance to under-resourced populations within a nation-state, particularly in political systems that emphasize the efforts of individual contributions to the society at large and for whom such redistribution may be viewed as burdensome. Administrative and regulatory systems are often examined in terms of public policy, for they generally are responsible for the Strategic, Tactical and Operation components of any public policy, serve as the gateway for public policy feedback to elected officials in participatory government systems, and typically serve as the primary quotidian interface between citizens and their government. Consequently, the behavior of administrative and regulatory bureaucracy tends at one extreme towards impersonal interactions with a view towards putative efficiency, and at the other extreme towards apparent caprice and arbitrary decision- making, independent from the elected officials that authorize their actions. This continuum produces four distinct models of bureaucratic behavior, namely: 1) Rational Legal Administration, following the claims of Max Weber, 2) the Monopolist bureaucracy, consistent with the organizational theory of American sociologist Laurence J. Peter, 3) The Acquisitive bureaucracy, whose actions are best described in Machiavellian terms, and 4) the Garbage Can, whose actions incorporate some features of the previous models as well as an inconsistent application of policy from one case to another. Citizens within participatory political systems tend to criticize and express frustration over many aspects of administrative and regulatory frameworks, particularly when inefficiencies emerge, when operational costs exceed expectations, or when the administrative or regulatory framework limits their action. Nevertheless, despite the criticism bureaucracies tend to endure, due in part to the complexities in a nation-state’s political economy that may require such regulation in the first place. However, these institutions may also endure for political reasons, either in an effort to advance a particular interest’s agenda, frustrate another’s agenda, or even merely to preserve the agency itself. Generally speaking, the relationship among administrative and regulatory bureaucracies, elected officials and citizens or organized interests in participatory political systems follow a pattern of feedback which 20th Century policy analyst Harold Lasswell called the “Iron Triangle” in Politics: Who Gets What, When and How (1936).

Figure 106: The Three levels of an Iron Triangle In an Iron Triangle, voters elect their representatives, who then establish agencies that provide a service to the voters, who then reward their representatives by retuning them to elected office. However, in certain cases the service may be cut, compelling the voter to inquire to the agency who provided the interrupted service about the reasons for the interruption. The agency submits the voter to a Byzantine process of standard operating procedures, permissions and documentation, effectively blocking the voter from further access as if a stone wall had been erected between the voter and the agency. The voter then petitions his or her representative to have the service restored, or at least have the agency actions investigated as a part of the representative’s dispute resolution function through casework. The representative commissions staff members to inquire to the agency, who block their inquiries as well. When the staff members report to the representative that they have been blocked as well, the representative pressures the agency to restore the interrupted service on pain of further inquiry or else a reduction in their operating budget. The agency complies, and the voter, relieved that the service has been restored, not only supports the representative’s re-election, but may organize other supporters as well, forming an interest group or political action committee to continue lobbying for some benefit from the system, and the process begins again. It is for this reason that candidates for election promise to reform bureaucracy, but once in office, little real change actually occurs, for the elected official has gained incentive to ensure the agency periodically fails to deliver the service for which it was established in the first place. Adjudicative Structures Although elected representatives may be tasked in some cases with certain kinds of conflict resolution, particularly those conflicts that arise with the interface of government and private interests in an administrative or regulatory environment, this is not necessarily the standard or the formal approach to the resolution of disputes. For this purpose, most political systems establish separate adjudicative structures, such as a court system or system of jurisprudence, to accomplish this task, usually on a case-by-case basis. Nevertheless, Administrative and regulatory structures may also include offices or departments whose primary purpose is to resolve disputes or complaints under administrative or regulatory action while avoiding formal judicial proceedings. Historically, and indeed under absolute monarchies as well as some constitutional monarchies, specific tribunals may be established under the express authority of the head of state in the form of the curia regis, the Crown Court or “court of the king”, to serve magisterial and dispute resolution duties in the name of the state authority which established the tribunal. These institutions may be vested with the authority to decide cases between two or more disputants, or they may be charged with the disposition of criminal accusations. Other tribunals may also be established whose authority may be limited to certain kinds of disputes, and indeed certain extraordinary disputes may demand the deliberation within a parliamentary or congressional context. Still other adjudicative structures may derive their authority to dispose cases from a distinct recognized authority such as a religious mandate, as in courts of Canon Law in the Roman Catholic Church, as well as religious courts in Islamic republics as well as a specific class of court in the state of Israel. A considerable difficulty arises in considering the structural character of adjudicative systems generally, specifically consequent to the admonition among early Modern political thinkers such as Montesquieu and Publius that because judicial systems must employ the power of judgement in the resolution of disputes brought before them, political systems that make a claim to secure individual liberty are under enormous pressure to render the judicial power as invisible, diffuse, participatory and temporary as is practical. When an adjudicative structure, especially a supreme tribunal or court of last resort in the resolution of disputes, decides a case, within the context of the political system in question its decision is viewed as equivalent both to law and policy, possibly even to the point of superseding both. This feature of formal adjudicative structures renders them particularly vulnerable to criticism from other figures in government, especially in circumstances where the judicial power stands independent from either legislative or executive powers. As a result, many adjudicative structures tend to feature specific rules of conduct or restraint when deciding cases, which vary with the constitutional system in which they are found. In some parliamentary systems, a supreme tribunal may exercise some role in the legislative process as a third chamber reviewing the decisions made by the rest of the parliamentary system for consistency with established constitutional law. Other judicial systems have a rule of restraint in place whereby they are limited only to petitions brought before them and cannot volunteer judicial opinions. Broadly speaking, adjudicative systems tend to include tribunals where petitioners may seek a redress of grievances from individual respondents against whom they claim some kind of injury, whether in physical, property or emotional terms, and may seek some form of restitution in the form either of compensatory or punitive action against the respondent or respondents. Adjudicative structures generally also have power to decide cases where an individual or number of individuals stand accused of violations of conduct as defined by the laws, rules and regulations within the political system in question. Such structures may be participatory, in which members of the citizenry are called to bear witness and deliberate over witness testimony, presentment of evidence and cross-examination as a jury, or similar power may be vested in a formal tribunal of one or more officers charged with the resolution of disputes through deliberation and publication of opinions. In either case, the decisions made by the tribunal are considered to have the force of law in the disposition of the dispute, yet in some systems a separate mechanism may challenge the decision in an appellate process if the disputant is able to establish sufficient grounds for such a challenge. Political Culture The next major set of systems, related in principle to that of Constitution, is Political Culture. While the term “political culture” may reasonably describe multiple observable political phenomena in a variety of contexts, the model to which I have specific reference in this section is related to that developed by the 20th Century political scientist Daniel Elazar (1934-1999) in American Federalism: A View from the States (1966), and broadly adopted as a framework for interpretation of certain political norms in different measure in the federal systems of the United States of America. Under this model, Political Culture describes an observable set of ideas, attitudes and beliefs that broadly shape a region’s politics. Although often connected with ideological preference, political culture in this sense represents a set of assumptions or “givens” about the way in which government interfaces with citizens, and how citizens interact with one another. According to Elazar, most communities in the United States participate in at least one of three political cultural patterns: Traditionalism, Individualism, and Moralism. In Traditionalism, one finds a strong attachment to long-established institutions coupled with a preference for traditional “modes and orders”, to borrow a phrase from Machiavelli. Traditionalist political cultures feature a strong suspicion of change, and as a result often include long-standing family legacies among the “political class” among their traditions. Although Traditionalism as a political culture is usually identified with the “Old South,” much of the United States displays features of Traditionalist sentiments, in large part thanks to its stability and predictability. In such political cultures the laws and customs tend to remain constant over time, and as a result traditionalist communities tend to be known for their inflexibility and lack of social mobility. In addition to family legacies and political dynasties such as the extended Walker family which produced 16 Presidents of the United States, one may also find a tolerance of corruption in the public sector, primarily resting on the belief that the entrenched “powers that be” will inevitably protect themselves and frustrate all efforts at reform, leading to a sense of fatalism among those not counted among the privileged classes of that society. Such political cultures tend to have extremely low participation rates in political processes such as elections, both among would-be voters and challengers to incumbency. The notion that the power to set policy is likely to remain in the same set of hands or their familial descendants pervades Traditionalist political cultures and it is not unusual to find a history of uncontested elections in such communities. The second major political culture in Elazar’s model is Individualism. This political culture features a strong belief in self-reliance, a preference for individual and independent action, and a commitment to the principle of free enterprise. Individualist political cultures also feature a strong suspicion of the public sector through the “NIMBY” phenomenon (Not in My Backyard), yet also a resistance to regulation bordering on outright hostility, minimizing the extent of notions of “public goods”. Typically associated with the “Old West”, Individualist political cultures tend to prevail in regions where population density is especially low as such environments incentivize individual autonomy and reinforce the concept of the “Self-Made Man” as a sign of virtue. Such environments tend to feature a low-regulation, business-friendly climate, recognition of individual accomplishments, privacy protections, and overall accountability for one’s actions. However, individualist political cultures are also marked by a lack of community support, leading to a tendency towards social isolation among those in the community; in the most extreme cases the term “community” may not even apply. Furthermore, the pervasive intolerance of public sector involvement in the affairs of residents often leads to tolerance of corruption in the private sector, provided of course one isn’t caught violating public laws. Entrepreneurs and independent contractors are common in individualist political cultures, as is the tendency among residents to carry weapons of self-defense. Participation in political processes may be encouraged, but little assistance is available to familiarize citizens with the processes in question. The last principal political culture, Moralism, features a strong belief in community or “commonwealth,” and tends to prefer formal community action of private interests. In fact, private interests and institutions are held with deep suspicion in Moralist communities, and because of this one will typically find a strong regulatory presence there. Although this political culture is usually associated with “New England” in the United States, Moralism is more likely to develop in those communities with necessarily strong ties to government in the first place, such as capital cities. That the public sector tends to be the largest employer in such communities likely explains this phenomenon. The hallmark of Moralist political culture is the tendency to assume strong community ties with active social support structures and “safety nets” for the most vulnerable and disadvantaged members of the community. Social security and social welfare programs, public health and education programs tend to take root in Moralist political cultures, and it is not unusual for neighbors in to know one another well without necessarily sharing ties of consanguinity or affinity. However, such communities also tend to be intrusive, and a lack of privacy pervades the community as a whole. Furthermore, corruption in the public sector may actually be excused if the outcome serves the “moral duty” of serving or benefitting the commonwealth. Also, since the community tends to prefer formal community action to address public problems, persistent issues may remain unaddressed, especially if government lacks the immediate resources to address them. When they do respond, often the community experiences high public debt as well as high tax rates, and it is not unheard of for municipal governments in Moralist communities to file for bankruptcy protection. Elazar’s model of political culture is frequently reproduced in introductory American Government textbooks, for it provides a convenient interpretive model of political attitudes throughout the United States. Some authors, such as Kenneth Janda, have extended the model to include links to fundamental principles of the American régime that constitutes a set of co- dependent variables guiding the variety of assumptions in mainstream American political discourse, attaching them as it were to the preferences for liberty, equality, and security, even suggesting that the primary ideological strains in American politics also align with these broader political cultural foundations. The noted science writer Timothy Ferris adopts this model of co-dependent variables to describe extreme and moderate positions and maps them into an informal 3-space with the extremes of “liberalism”, “conservatism” and “socialism”, reinforcing the putative link between political culture and ideology, the subject of the next section. Ideology In contrast to political culture, which describes a broad set of assumptions about the relationship between individuals and government as well as among one another, ideologies generally involve a more specific set of ideas, attitudes, and beliefs that serve as a foundation for defending or opposing a particular set of policies or principles, providing and advocating a coherent plan for social, political, or economic action. Thus construed, ideologies may be expressed as social, political or economic in character, or they may incorporate features of any two or all three of these areas of human experience. The language of ideologies tends to appear in casual political discourse as well as in more formal settings; as a result, ideologies may be easily confused with political culture, and indeed while certain ideological preferences may be more likely to appear in certain political cultural contexts, they are not necessarily the same phenomenon. The most familiar expressions of ideological preference are political ideologies, and include such familiar labels as liberalism, conservatism, libertarianism and socialism, but also more radical and extreme positions such as fascism, communism and anarchism. Other, less familiar terms include communitarianism and statism. Of these, communism also can be viewed as an economic ideology, and as such is often viewed in contrast with other economic ideologies such as capitalism, monetarism and market fundamentalism. Other well studied economic ideologies include globalism, Keynesianism and protectionism. By contrast, social ideologies are not often treated separately from political ideological counterparts, but may often be present among them as well. Familiar social ideologies include a wide variety of preferences as well, such as tribalism, ethnocentrism, nationalism, and various forms of supremacism, as well as others such as multiculturalism and feminism. In short, nearly any set of preferences regarding society, politics or economics may be expressed as an ideological preference, thus impeaching Karl Marx’s claim about ideology merely serving as a rationalization of a material class conflict characteristic of a particular point or period in human history. At best, Marx’s definition of ideology may represent only a narrowly defined set of “special cases” and by no means describe the general characteristics of ideology itself. What then, can we say about ideology? After all, any set of specific ideas, attitudes and beliefs that provide or advocate a coherent plan for social, political action, and that action is explained almost exclusively in terms of the ideas or belief held by a particular ideologue. We can with a certain degree of certainty that ideology is not political culture, for traditionalists are not necessarily conservative and moralists are not necessarily “liberals”. Nor can we say that ideology always translates to partisanship, although a certain class of political party may be so defined, but again these ideological political parties constitute special cases and by no means capture the essence of either partisanship or ideology as a whole, even among the partisans themselves; in the United States, for example, Democrats are not always “liberal” or “progressive” and Republicans are not always “conservative”. We cannot even claim that ideology is defined by a particular policy position. Again in the United States, advocates of a public policy position such as legal abortion are not necessarily libertarian, liberal, progressive or feminist, while opponents are not necessarily religious fundamentalists or conservatives; by the same token, advocates of open, porous international borders are not necessarily libertarian globalists, while advocates of hard and closed borders are not necessarily conservative, statist or ethnocentrist. We can say, however, that ideologies tend to offer explanations, rationalizations, and justification for particular policies one supports. Hence, while a policy position does not reveal one’s ideological preference, the reasons why one advocates a particular position may, and one must therefore examine a given political actor’s explanation for a policy position in order to discern his or her ideological preference. As Michael Freeden, Emeritus Professor and former Director of the Center for Political Ideologies at Mansfield College in Oxford and author of Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (1996) described it, “Ideologies map the political and social worlds for us. We simply cannot do without them because we cannot act without making sense of the worlds we inhabit.” (Freeden, Ideology: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford UP, 2003.) Comparing Political Ideologies Over the course of the development of our understanding of political ideologies, several distinct models have emerged which to a greater of lesser degree permit the observer to compare ideological preferences one to another and establish a frame of reference that allows one to predict linkages and cleavages among differing ideological adherents. By far the most prevalent among these models is a linear continuum frequently called the “Political Spectrum,” and gives rise to the political commentator’s vernacular of “Left” and “Right” wings in the institutions of government. This model has its roots in the French National Assembly, particularly from around the time of the French Revolution, when the revolutionary advocates within the Assembly sat on the left side of the chamber in which they met, while those more sympathetic to the ancien régime of the former French nobility sat on the right. This model of interpreting ideological preference was grafted onto the Congress of the United States in the 19th Century, where the constitutional heirs to the revolutionary movement likewise sat on the left side of the House of Representatives and the Senate while the beneficiaries of the prior colonial experience sat on the right. Over time these two wings of each house of the United States Congress developed into coalition parties that broadly adopted positions consistent with either liberty and equality (the “Left”) or liberty and order (the “Right”), producing several political party systems over the course of the next two centuries.

Figure 107: The Political Spectrum. From Left, Communist parties, Socialist and Social Equality parties, Green and Progressive Parties; Democrats and Republicans, in the Center; Reform and Conservative Parties, Constitution and American Parties, Fascist and Nazi parties, Far Right. The principal features that define the Political Spectrum include a linear continuum whereby alliances and sympathies may be forged among those whose position on the continuum are nearest to each other, while conflict and suspicion are more likely among those whose positions are father apart. This set of assumptions most notably stands behind another interpretive model of political campaigning among coalition parties as they seek to maximize support in general elections, a model developed by Kenneth Waltz known as the Median Voter Hypothesis. However, unlike the Political Spectrum, the Median Voter Hypothesis describes a continuum of support for or opposition to specific policy positions rather than ideological preferences, and should not be construed to apply to the interactions among distinct ideological preferences. The Political Spectrum model, while convenient, easy to communicate and therefore popular, is necessarily severely limited and, in the most severe applications, almost wholly inaccurate, giving rise to a variety of alternative interpretive models, the simplest of which being the “broken circle” model, which attempts to explain the shared authoritarian or totalitarian features of both the “far left” and “far right” and produces peculiar assertions like “They’re so far Right, they’re Left”. A slightly more sophisticated alternative is the Political Compass, first suggested by British author Jerry Pournelle in his 1964 doctoral dissertation, and appearing later in Meltzer and Christie’s book The Floodgates of Anarchy (1970). This model seeks to address certain limitations of the Political Spectrum model, especially its inability to identify potential linkages among libertarians and anarchists, and posits a map of ideological preference along two independent variables, accounting for a variety of ideological preference at odds with the traditional linear continuum as either perpendicular or diagonally opposed to either the “Left” or “Right”. Generally speaking, the Political Compass model describes two distinct dimensions of preference: Moral and Economic. The moral dimension ranges from individualism to collectivism, while the economic dimension covers capitalism to collectivism, producing a two dimensional landscape capable of capturing and identifying both anarchist and libertarian preferences, as well as distinguishing authoritarian or totalitarian preference from the “mainstream” of Left and Right.

Figure 108: Variations of the Political Compass. In 1971, Libertarian Party founder David Nolan adapted a variation of the Political Compass for American audiences described the moral and economic dimensions in terms of freedom vs. control, and simplified the inventory used to map individual respondents’ preferences to ten specific questions he called “The World’s Smallest Political Quiz”, presumably in an effort to recruit members to his new political party. Unfortunately, the Political Compass suffers from multiple limitations akin to those of the Political Spectrum. First, it equates policy positions with ideology in their measuring tools, identifying attitudes on broad “personal” and “economic” issues without identifying organizing principles or general purposes of government. Second, the Political Compass, in whatever form, is ill-equipped to distinguish moderates from extremists, such as communists from “welfare liberals”, anarchists from libertarians, and fascists from conservatives. Third, the Political Compass cannot readily recognize the ideological diversity of “centrists” and “moderates”. Fourth, it fails to identify certain known ideological positions, such as communitarianism, anarcho-communism, anarcho-syndicalism, or the peculiar ideological monster that is Nazism. Fifth, it is unable to account for certain observable linkages within its framework, such as the liberal-leaning conservative or the conservative-leaning liberal. This particular difficulty likely arises from the fact that the Political Compass rests on the same fundamental assumption as the Political Spectrum, namely that “liberalism” and “conservatism” are opposite ideological preferences. In 1995, political scientist Steven Kautz suggested reframing ideological preference along three distinct variables in his monograph Liberalism and Community: “Enduring controversies regarding the nature of popular government give rise to three distinct strains: liberals (who love liberty), democrats (who love equality) and republicans (who love virtue).” While Kautz’s formulation may help distinguish the differing attachment among adherents to these distinct strains of preference, his model is necessarily clouded by his focus on the American partisan/ideological debate which prevailed in the last decade of the 20th Century, and in particular, his assertion that “republicans” maintain an attachment to “virtue” is incongruous with the other two principles he identifies. For liberty and equality, as political principles, stand on their own and, while they may be expressed or evident in different forms such as positive or negative liberty, or equality of opportunity or equality of condition, virtue remains a moving target. The Aristotelian concept of “virtue” involves a mean position of habits between extremes of privation and excess, and may vary relative to the person, persons, or communities observed. The Machiavellian concept of “virtue”, on the other hand, involves the ability to anticipate necessity, manipulate appearances versus the effectual truth, and free oneself from the vagaries of fortune. Furthermore, Kautz’s three “strains” of preference conflate ideological preference with extend and competing partisan labels in the electoral politics of the United States: “liberal” may be an ideological preference, but “democrat” and “republican” denote specific coalition political parties in the United States. What’s worse, the term “liberal” carries different meanings inside and outside the United States, and as a result use of this term may serve only to confuse the audience, especially if that audience includes a diversity of citizenship, some from the United States, others not. An alternative formulation to Kautz is to minimize the ambiguity of “virtue” in favor of “order”, since order itself appears more fundamental than virtue, and indeed undergirds most political concepts of virtue. Because of the variable nature of perceptions of virtue, like “honor” its perception depends on the political order in which it is found. Further, in the interest of precision it is necessary to dispense with the unnecessarily ambiguous term “liberal”, which carries different connotations depending on the political community in which it is used, in favor of “libertarian” and “egalitarian”, depending on the flavor of “liberalism” observed. Granted, the term “liberal” itself need not have been rendered ambiguous, yet the historical context of progressive Modern and Post-modern political thought, particularly the writings of John Dewey and the speeches of Lyndon Johnson, have made it so. Perhaps the only pedestrian vernacular term which has largely escaped having been muddied by competing visions of principle is “conservatism”, yet even this term is fraught with difficulty, especially when considering its expression from one political context to another. For instance, American “conservatism” in the last half-century has typically featured a combination of traditionalist political cultural preferences, a suspicion of major societal change, and a rhetorical attachment to a kind of small-government libertarianism that other “conservative” movements around the world lack. For the purposes of measuring ideological preferences, it is likely more precise to focus not on self-identification but instead on an independent standard, focusing on the “establishmentarian” leanings of such movements. Regardless of their expressed ideological preference, liberty, equality and order nevertheless remain widely held political principles, albeit in different proportion one to another depending on the specific preference indicated. Hence ideological preference can be identified semantically by difference proportional attachment to or rejection of these same three principles, which suggests empirical measurability and lends itself to operationalization using a variety of methods, including document analysis and data science techniques. Further, an operationalized model using three independent variables is able to capture another level of preference, namely the degree to which a particular position is held, whether “centrist”, “moderate”, “ideologue”, “hard-liner”, “radical”, or extremist. Additionally, capturing both “pro” and “anti” (positive and negative) positions allows one to describe areas of preference not otherwise considered either by liner or planar descriptive models.

Figure 109: Liberty, Equality and Order as independent variables: Table (left) and Space (right) However, for most researchers in the social sciences, the exploration of multiple independent variables tends to be discouraged due to the level of complexity and abstraction required to navigate the attendant models. Furthermore, a true three-dimensional yardstick may demand potentially awkward or unfamiliar ideological nomenclature, and even posit potentially absurd ideological possibilities. Nevertheless, analysis of ideological preference on these three independent variables of preference of opposition enables the observer to recognize certain positions, such as Communitarianism, the Reagan Coalition and T.H. Green’s version of Welfare Liberalism, that otherwise would be difficult to distinguish using either the Political Spectrum or even the Political Compass. Even so, limiting one’s model to these three independent variables is still unable to account for some historical ideologies, especially the aforementioned ideological monstrosity that was Nazism.

Methods of Political Study At this point we must turn our attention to the diverse methods of political study, though by now one should already have gained some insight into the various methodological turns available within the discipline. Politics, after all, constitutes a fundamental human activity, and to assert full ignorance of at least some of its characteristics would be simply absurd. Broadly speaking, the study of politics concerns the observation, analysis and evaluation of certain phenomena that are essential to ordered communities wherever one find them: constitutions, institutions, behaviors, decisions, policies, processes, cooperation and linkages among individuals and groups, as well as conflict and cleavages among those same groups as well as others. These are the sources of all observables in what we call political science, and serve as the arena for political engineering and the political “arts” and, like Ethics, are rooted in questions and claims related to value; hence, the study of politics is necessarily axiological in character. Although people may differ on whether the study of politics is art or science, the specific phenomena treated by political inquiry, whether art or science, are nevertheless largely the same: Nation-states, constitutions, institutions, law and public policy tend to predominate in either form of inquiry. However, alliances, diplomacy, campaigns and elections, as well as interest group activity and the actions of non-governmental organizations also stand as political phenomena suitable for study. Most dramatically, one may even examine rivalries, conflict and even warfare, régime change and revolutions as objects of political study. However, processes related to negotiation, bargaining and communication tend to yield a wealth of information about the character of politics as well, especially since they tend to occur more frequently than hostile action, for as Clausewitz noted, one may view warfare as simply a form of politics using extraordinary means to accomplish its goals. Politics vs. Political Science A common misconception among those unfamiliar with the study of political matters is that those who choose politics or political science as a field of study ultimately seek either an elected or appointed office, or that they invariably are pursuing a Juris Doctor leading to practice as an attorney. While this may be true in certain cases, this assumption fails to take into account the breadth of the discipline explored earlier in this essay. Depending on the institution offering a course sequence, one may find departments of Politics, Political Science, or Government, as well as schools of Public Policy or departments of Public Administration— all of which are broadly viewed as equivalent programs, even though the focus of each one of these options may differ in significant ways. I earned my own credential in the field of Politics, and as a result, most observers will assume that my goal as a student of politics has some connection either with political engineering, public policy, legal studies or conflict resolution. However, a closer examination of the Politics curriculum at the University of Dallas where I earned my degree reveals a heavy emphasis on political philosophy and the politics of government institutions, yet the objectives of this department include “a critical understanding of political phenomena”, “enlightened and public-spirited citizenship”, “civility,” preparation for “active political life”, and finally preparation of “some students for graduate study in political science, or for training in the professional fields of law, public administration, diplomacy, and related fields.” (udallas.edu) By contrast, the University of Texas at Arlington, whose department is one of “political science” rather than “politics”, describes the discipline as “the study of political systems, government, and political behavior,” and lists among its goals “identifying and describing the political structures, rules, behaviors and institutional contexts that shape political action,” understanding and implementing statistical and methodological techniques for analyzing information,” “understanding and applying comparative, theoretical, and conceptual approaches to political action and public policy,” and “analyzing and evaluating political phenomena.” These two markedly different programs represent extremes in the discipline, yet both have their methodological origins at the University of Chicago, the first from the disciples of Leo Strauss, the other from those of Charles E. Merriam, for whom the political science department chair is named and Strauss actually occupied for a time in the 1950s. Looking to the source institution itself, the University of Chicago describes the mission of their political science department as “introducing students to concepts, methods, and knowledge that help them understand politics within and among nations.” (political-science.uchicago.edu). Beyond this broad definition, the University of Chicago’s political science program emphasizes a standard range of subfields in American universities, including Political Theory, American Politics, Comparative Politics, and International Relations. What then are we to make of the distinction, if any exists, between politics and political science? For our purposes it may be helpful to return to the Scope and Character of the Discipline treated earlier, in which the field as a whole, whether it is called Politics, Political Science, or Government involves the interaction of the concepts of Art and Science in the forms of Theory, Observation, Analysis and Engineering. Between the two extremes of “Politics” at the University of Dallas and “Political Science” at the University of Texas at Arlington rests a variety of methodological approaches, some of which may be more readily applicable to the observables in the field than others, but ultimately none of which should be ignored or dismissed. After our earlier brief tour of the development of political thought we may have come to understand politics as essential to the human condition, but what of political science? Like other sciences, political science is rooted in questions of knowledge and order, i.e., epistemology and cosmology, but given the axiological character of the observables, political science necessarily stands apart from the other sciences. What we can say about the discipline, however, is that it constitutes a rigorous, systematic effort to understand, explain, interpret and predict political phenomena. The student of political phenomena may use one or more methods of inquiry, and is by no means bound to only one, narrow approach. On the contrary, the variety of methods available to the student of politics and political science are actually quite vast. Methods of inquiry may be normative, in that they are rooted in certain norms and principles, or they may be empirical, in that they are based on actual observation. Similarly, these methods may be qualitative, in which the observables may be subjective, such as from experience or opinions; they may be quantitative, whereby phenomena may be observed and measured using numerical tools such as statistical analysis; or they may even incorporate some features of both qualitative and quantitative methods. Among normative methods of inquiry, by far the most prevalent are normative prescriptive methods. These are used to establish, refine or transform political norms, and are chiefly expressed either as commentary, critique, or even polemics. It is this method that characterizes most popular literature that is often branded as “political science”, at least among mainstream booksellers. Because normative prescriptive methods of political study are largely indistinguishable from punditry, it is little surprise that this method tends to polarize laymen’s attitude towards the subject, whether through affection or revulsion. By contrast, normative descriptive methods are used to define, explain or analyze political norms. These methods include the application of theory to political phenomena, political philosophical analysis, rhetorical and document analysis, as well as normative models of political behavior. Normative descriptive methods constitute the bulk of classical political thought, and today tend to dominate most introductory textbooks in American government as well as the political analysis segments of the typical news broadcast. Empirical methods, on the other hand, apply, direct and indirect observation of political phenomena. Granted, rhetorical and document analysis bridges the gap between the normative descriptive and the empirical methods, for a document or text constitutes a direct observable phenomenon. However, empirical observation may also include the behavioral observation of political actors, whether anecdotally or as part of a sample subject to analysis. In empirical research, one may acquire samples of political phenomena through case studies, purposive samples, or even representative samples subject to a variety of forms of analysis. Examples of this kind of research may include anecdotal evidence in mainstream textbooks in American Government, or case studies in “white papers” and other policy documents prepared by an interest group. Qualitative methods are used to emphasize essential features of political phenomena and are primarily used for descriptive purposes. Such methods may establish norms and identify anecdotal deviations from those norms; they may establish a frame of reference, or else form a basis of comparison or contrast with other political phenomena. Qualitative methods may be applied especially when certain political phenomena or concepts appear difficult or even impossible to quantify. Most frequently one will find a qualitative approach used in informal modeling, contextual analysis, anecdotal observation, and even in the experimental technique of role play, though this last method tends to occur in controlled environments for teaching and learning purposes rather than in a “real-world” political context. Finally, quantitative methods, which formed the bulk of mainstream American political science research in the second half of the 20th Century, are used to measure precise political phenomena, and typically rely on statistical and mathematical modeling to test and communicate their findings. Examples of quantitative methods abound in the publications of the American Political Science Association, and indeed it was the predominance of these methods that contributed to the infamous “Perestroika” letter cited in the Introduction to this essay. In quantitative research, observables must be able to be represented numerically, or else they resist observation. Examples of this approach include formal political theory testing, poll data analysis, representative sampling, statistical analysis, and even experimentation, though in this last case certain legal and ethical issues may arise which prevent full implementation of certain hypotheses in political science. The variety of methodological approaches to political science and politics generally may be described along a continuum ranging from the most prescriptive to the most descriptive, and while most Departments of Politics, Government or Political Science tend to favor a narrow range along this continuum, they must all recognize the limitations of their preferred methods as well as their advantages, and that, because they fall along an axiological rather than an epistemological continuum, they cannot simply ignore contrary claims using other methods.

Figure 110: The Axiological Continuum of Political Inquiry Logic and Texts Our survey of the methods of political inquiry must begin with what some have called the “Traditional” or “Historical” methods in the field, stretching in a more or less continuous line back to Hecataeus in the Milesian School and, when applying these methods, the discipline tends to emerge as a subset of philosophy rather than a putative “social science.” However, the phenomena essential to ordered communities, what we would call political phenomena, distinguish political inquiry from the other domains of philosophy thanks to the targeted character of political questions. These phenomena—constitutions and institutions; behaviors, decisions, policies, and processes; cooperation and linkages; conflict and cleavages—are the source of all observables in the field, and constitute the principal arena of political engineering and the political “arts” such as law, diplomacy, intelligence and the management of conflict. Philosophical Analysis The primary method of traditional political inquiry tends to take shape in a method I would call philosophic analysis, whereby the four principal domains of philosophy—ontology, epistemology, cosmology, and axiology—guide the inquiry, analysis and evaluation of political phenomena and, at least in a classical context, reinforce the idea of the science of politics as architectonic, searching for the Good in, by, and for ordered communities. However, philosophic analysis need not be limited to such a Classical approach, for it is usually rooted in one or more “schools” of Political Theory, such as neo-Platonism, Hegelian Dialectic, Straussian critique, Positive Political Theory or even Deconstruction. In fact, the student of this approach would probably do well to become familiar with multiple “schools of thought” in political philosophy: School Central Themes Representative Theorist “Chicago” Facts v. Values, Ancients v. Leo Strauss Moderns, Action v. Contemplation “Cambridge” Historical conditions & Quentin Skinner intellectual Context of discourse School Central Themes Representative Theorist “Berkeley” Political Vision as history of Sheldon Wolin interpretation with received political language “Frankfurt” Often viewed as an extension Jürgen Habermas, Max of Marxism. Critical social Horkheimer, Theodor theory, contradiction, Adorno, Erich Fromm communicative rationality, linguistic intersubjectivity, dialectics, idealism Positive Political Theory Political phenomena as William H. Riker regular behavioral patterns, quantified, statistically measurable, represented mathematically Phenomenology Political perception as reality Edmund Husserl Hermeneutics Semantic interpretation of Michael Freeden political language Deconstruction Contradiction and Jacques Derrida inconsistency within systems; absurdity Genealogy Historical events as generative Michel Foucault and developmental process; impeachment of common understanding of beliefs Comparative Political Theory Dialogue among political Fred Dallmayr theoretical perspectives across cultural divides School Central Themes Representative Theorist Vantagism Paradigm: Interpretation as Thomas Kuhn product of subjective experience and conditioning Analytical Political Clarity and precision of thesis, John Rawls Philosophy abstract examples, simple models to classify political phenomena as concepts, conceptions, principles, and theories Dialectic Politics defined within Immanuel Kant, GWF Hegel, dialectic (esp. historical Karl Marx dialectic) framework, whether reason/antagonism, thesis/antithesis/synthesis, or concrete/abstract/absolute Figure 111: Schools of Political Philosophical Analysis Generally speaking, philosophic analysis and critique tends towards the normative, and possibly even the prescriptive, side of the methodological continuum in the study of politics. Philosophical analysis also seeks to clarify the axiology of political phenomena and to establish a framework for interpretation, and as a result, critics of this range of methodologies may argue that one cannot call it “scientific” in the same way that research in biology, chemistry or physics are. While it may be true that philosophic analysis broadly lacks a uniform cosmological or ontological approach, the plurality of themes there contained nevertheless provide a foundation for descriptive models that stand up to deductive challenges and guide the development of empirical tests. Informal and Formal Modeling The student of political inquiry should keep in mind that just because a research method is normative in character does not necessarily imply it is prescriptive nonsense that must necessarily be ignored or dismissed. Normative descriptive methods in political science are used to define, explain or analyze political norms, and provide a vehicle for the application of theory to political phenomena. Such application includes philosophical analysis, rhetorical and document or text analysis, and the construction of normative and informal models to explain or describe behaviors, processes, historical events and developments, or other political observables. In fact, this approach dominates most introductory textbooks in American Government courses, and generally characterizes news analysis as well. In informal modeling, one attempts to explain a phenomenon through verbal or visual representation, often to introduce or simplify a complex phenomenon. Informal models may be normative or empirical, and comprise many of the principal tools for communicating political science concepts, often employing simile or metaphor to establish a basic framework for understanding or interpretation. The Public Policy Ladder, Picket Fence Cooperative Federalism, and normative models of Bureaucratic Behavior all fit this model, although the last of these lends itself towards empirical behavioral study through operationalized variables more easily than the first two.

Figure 112: Informal Models of Public Policy (Upper left), Federalism (Upper right) and Bureaucratic Behavior (Lower left) The principal advantage of an informal model is its ability to communicate a concept either through visual metaphor or in terms of a basic analytic framework that the general public can navigate. Its primary drawback is that while it may accurately describe the phenomenon in question, it is not necessarily precise, and it may obscure certain complexities of the phenomenon being described. By contrast, formal modeling involves an explanation of political phenomena through formal, i.e. logical or mathematical, expressions and representation. This method is often used to simplify a complex phenomenon using precise formal logic, often in order to discern patterns in the observables themselves, or else to pave the way for empirical research. Formal models must be evaluated using four principle criteria: 1) Accuracy, in that the model consistently describes or explains a real-world phenomenon; 2) Applicability, in which the model addresses questions about the phenomenon as well as raises new questions about it; 3) Intent, where the model does what the modeler thinks it should and fulfills the purpose for which it was designed; and 4) Consistency, where the model is consistent with other models of equal accuracy, applicability, and intent. Examples of formal models in political science include William H. Riker’s Size Principle of Coalitions and Harish & Little’s baseline model for political violence in a repeated setting: Riker’s Size Principle of Coalitions:  Given the Rationality conditions and the Zero-Sum Condition 6 푛 ∑푖=1 푣(푖) = ∑푖=7 푣(푖),  Only minimum winning conditions occur and  Participants form coalitions just as large as they believe will ensure winning and no larger.  Source: Riker, William H. The Theory of Political Coalitions. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1962: 32-39 Harish & Little’s Baseline Model for Political Violence in a Repeated Setting:

The advantages of a formal model over an informal model are greater precision and the ability to operationalize hypotheses more or less directly from the base model itself. The principal disadvantages are the use of arcane or unfamiliar nomenclature or mathematics and the challenge of communicating the model effectively outside a narrow audience of experts. Ideally, when developing an interpretive model, one should strive to achieve both precision and communicability, and so wherever possible one should be able to informally represent a formal model and formalize an informal one. Document & Text Analysis By far the most prevalent method of research in a variety of subfields in the study of politics is that of document and text analysis. As a method, it is closely related to rhetorical analysis and literary criticism, and may even borrow from these other disciplines. As such document and text analysis is often overlooked, minimized or even dismissed by some researchers, yet it nevertheless remains a primary research tool in the subfields of Political Theory, Public Policy and Legal Studies. The primary observable in document analysis and text analysis is usually referred to as a text. Text includes books and treatises, of course, but it also includes legal documents, constitutional documents, press statements and communiqués, transcriptions of speeches and public addresses, electronic ephemera and other printed matter, and visual artifacts such as billboards, images, signs, leaflets, bumper stickers, and in the most extreme cases, even clothing. Once one has decided to pursue a document or text analysis, it often helps to establish a framework within which to proceed. First, one should create a list of texts to explore, considering the sample of documents available and those which are accessible. This process is similar to the development of a sampling frame in empirical data collection, yet samples in Document and Text Analysis tend to be purposive rather than statistically representative. This is especially true in political theory, constitutional and legal studies, or the examination of treaties and other agreements. In any case, when creating a list of texts, one must also decide to what extent and in what proportion one should use primary and secondary sources. Next one should consider how texts will be accessed, paying particular attention to potential linguistic or cultural barriers, especially in the event a primary source is written in a language the researcher does not directly understand. In such cases, one may be limited to translations of the text under study, which may or may not fully reflect the original connotations or intent of the author. Third, in order to conduct an effective document or text analysis, one must develop the appropriate skills for research, choosing an analytic strategy, consider various strategies in order to ensure credibility, as well as acknowledge and address biases one may have. Additionally, the researcher must consider ethical issues, especially when examining potentially sensitive, confidential, unpublished, sealed or classified documents. Finally, it always helps to prepare a contingency plan involving either alternative sources or analytic strategies, in case a crucial text is for whatever reason unavailable, or else the chosen analytic strategy fails to elucidate the text. When assessing texts, the researcher should gather the relevant and available texts, develop an organization or management scheme, and make copies for annotation if possible. My own experience investigating Montesquieu’s understanding of liberty required me to transcribe all relevant passages from the Spirit of Laws, the Persian Letters and the Consideration of the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline, as well as numerous secondary sources so that I could develop annotations and commentary which eventually formed the basis of a Master’s Thesis. With some documents it may be necessary to assess the authenticity or provenance of a document, and explore the document’s agenda or biases, accounting for the tone, style, purpose, and other background information for the text under scrutiny. In other words, in assessing a text, one must impeach the document, asking such relevant questions as: Who produced it? Why? When? What type of information does the document include? And so forth. Methods of Content Exploration The central task of any document of text analysis is, of course, an exploration of the content of the text itself. In order to accomplish this task, one should choose at least one method of rhetorical analysis, if not more, depending on what features of the text one wishes to emphasize. What follows is a brief overview of a few of the more common methods of content exploration.

Aristotelian Rhetoric The Aristotelian Model of text analysis is, of course, founded on his Rhetoric, and emphasizes the art of persuasion through three distinct forms of rhetorical appeal: logos, ethos and pathos. Logos appeals to the audience’s reason through deductive argument on internal consistency, or inductive, or evidence based argument. Ethos appeals to established habits, mores, manners and customs of the audience, and speaks especially to both the audience and the rhetor’s understanding or expression of virtue or practical wisdom. Pathos appeals to passion or emotion, especially in the audience, and emphasizes the principal motivators of human action originally identified by Xenophon in the Hiero, namely Fear, Desire, and Hope. This particular method of analysis often serves as a starting point for first-year students in higher education, particularly those enrolled in composition or oral communication courses. Ciceronian Rhetoric Another classical model useful for text analysis is that of Ciceronian Rhetoric, founded on the writings and speeches of the Roman statesman and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 BC-43 BC). This Rhetorical approach emphasizes the relative strength of evidence and argument, and is particularly applied to persuasive and political speech, employing an organizational strategy traditionally referred to as the Three Quae, or the Three Points. In the First Point, or the Primum Quid, the speaker typically delivers the supporting evidence for his position that is either the most familiar or the most obvious to his audience. The Second Point, or Secundum Quid, is reserved for the least familiar, or else the least obvious or ambiguous supporting evidence. The Third Point, or Tertium Quid, is the rhetor’s final, strongest and most forceful point, the one which should leave the audience most inclined to agree with the speaker or else be moved to action. Scholastic Method The Scholastic Method is founded on the method of argumentation that arose primarily in Western Europe around the 13th Century. Principal among the thinkers in the Scholastic tradition is the Dominican friar and jurist Thomas Aquinas, whose Summa Theologiae stands as the most prominent example of the Scholastic Method of rhetoric. In the Summa, Aquinas develops a rigorous exploration of claims and objections using a consistent, rigid strategy of development that, once the reader understands the structure, facilitates navigation of the text itself; today Aquinas’ strategy would be called an algorithm, and each Scholastic argument thus follows a familiar pattern. First, a Question is raised. Second, a series of Objections to the writer’s position are treated, one at a time, being careful to explore the character of each objection thoroughly, as if it were the writer’s own position. At this point one may include a counterpoint among the Objections, often to demonstrate a logical contrary position among them. Next is the author’s Answer or Response, which typically occupies the central position of the text, laying out the deductive and inductive support for the Response in similar manner to the Objections. Fourth, the author presents a systematic Reply to each Objection presented at the beginning of the text, following the order in which the Objections appeared. Montaigne’s Essai form The Essai, or essay form is primarily founded on the writings of the 16th Century French Renaissance thinker Michel de Montaigne. This model is intended to be more immediately accessible to an audience than the rigorous forms encountered among the Scholastics, as it merges casual anecdote and personal experience with intellectual insight. This particular model has largely been adopted the principal format one learns in introductory expository writing thanks to its flexibility, its linear rhetorical structure, and its capacity for engaging the audience and spur them to continue the discussion on their own. This model is doubtless familiar to most, for its strategy involves a formal introduction and conclusion, as well as the main body of the text, all connected to a principal claim or thesis statement. The Introduction typically contains some feature, whether fact, anecdote, or provocative statement that demands the reader’s attention. It is followed by a statement or two that establish the importance of the issue and the context within which the Essai is intended to be taken, and then the claim or Thesis is presented. The Body of the Essai contains points generally similar to Ciceronian Rhetoric, but may also contain Aristotelian appeals. The Conclusion typically restates the Thesis, reinforces the context, and finishes often with some provocative insight that leads the reader to further inquiry. Hobbesian Rhetoric As the name suggests, this Model derives from the writings of the 17th Century English political thinker Thomas Hobbes. Although best known for the Leviathan, Hobbes also wrote a pair of treatises on argumentation that would serve as guides for litigators and barristers in the development of cases to be presented in the Curia Regia, or Courts of the King. A Brief on the Art of Rhetoric is largely based on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics; it also includes elements of 16th Century French logician and rhetorician Peter Ramus’ use of language, separating the art of persuasion from the rigors of dialectic, or logic. Hobbes’ other treatise of Rhetoric, The Art of Sophistry, is primarily a demonstration of methods for manipulating appearances, and in particular a guide for making a weaker argument appear to be stronger in a dispute, reflecting a possible application of Machiavellian thinking. Hegelian and Marxist Dialectic With its origins in the writings of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), the Model commonly called Hegelian Dialectic was not actually developed by GWF Hegel, but was attributed to him by Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus (1796-1862). This approach posits a threefold development of the writer’s argument. Fichte’s threefold manner begins with a Thesis, in which a valid claim is established and elaborated, only to be challenged by a valid counter-claim called the Antithesis, which is in like manner established and elaborated. The third part, the Synthesis, involves a reconciliation of both the Thesis and Antithesis to produce a new claim. Hegel’s variant of the Threefold Dialectic posits an Abstract principle, its Negative, and a Concrete principle which ostensibly reconciles the Abstract with its Negation. Karl Marx would develop his own version of this same process, but claimed his Dialectic proceeded not from Abstract to Concrete, but from Concrete to Abstract, giving rise to the competing epistemological visions of Dialectical Materialism (Marx) versus Dialectical Idealism (Hegel). Toulmin Model This method of Argumentation derives from the work of the 20th Century British philosopher Stephen Toulmin (1922-2009), whose book The Uses of Argument (1958) aims to develop what he called practical arguments which focus on justification of claims rather than on inferences as is traditionally found in theoretical arguments. Designed to expose assumptions, target evidence and explore the depth of argument, Toulmin’s Model includes a central Claim similar to a Thesis in Montaigne’s Essai; a range of explicit and implicit assumptions he calls Warrants; Evidence, be they facts, statements made by a putative authority, deductive or inductive logic, empirical data such as statistics, or personal experience; and Qualifiers, which serve as complications and exceptions to the original Claim. Rogerian Model Rogerian Argument has its roots in the writings of American psychotherapist Carl Rogers (1902- 1987), and is chiefly employed as a negotiating strategy. Also known as the Conciliatory Argument, it is used to establish a common understanding between at least two distant parties in a dispute. Its purposes are to convey that the write or speaker understands the audience’s position, to delineate the area in which the write or speaker validates that position, to induce the audience to believe that they both share similar moral or ethical qualities, and to create a condition conducive to cooperation. Paul’s Analysis of Logic Richard Paul (1937-2015) was a thinker in the tradition of 20th Century Analytic Philosophy, and the founder of the Foundation for Critical Thinking. When employing his method of inquiry to a document or text, one must consider it an example of a thought; hence Rhetoric too is Thought. For Paul, all thought consists of eight components: A Purpose; a Question either raised or addressed; a range of Information used; a central Concept constituting the main idea or thesis; one or more Assumptions, whether about the author, the audience or the Information; Implications; Inferences; and a Perspective or point of view. Identifying these components in a document or text enables one thoroughly to evaluate it to determine its validity, veracity, or effectiveness. When evaluating a text thoroughly, one must impeach each element of the thought presented for certain intellectual standards, including Clarity, Relevance, Accuracy, Precision, Logic, Breadth, Depth, Significance, and Fairness. Straussian Critique This method of document or text analysis is based on Leo Strauss’ critical reading of Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes, and particularly follows an approach described in Strauss’ article “Persecution and the Art of Writing”. Unlike Paul, for whom Rhetoric is Thought, in the Straussian approach Thought is Rhetoric. For Strauss, all writers have two audiences: The easily deceived Many who are “taken in by the appearances and the outcome of a thing”, and the Few Who Understand the manipulation of appearances and can understand deeper meanings beyond what the Many perceive or accept. Consequently, every text in the Straussian view contains two messages: An Exoteric message for the first audience, which one may construe as a Noble Lie, and an Esoteric message for the second audience, which contains some Profound or Effective Truth which the first audience may be unable or unwilling either to understand or accept. Using the essential strategy both of the Scholastic Method and of Montaigne’s Essai form, Straussian critique often employs a method known as “Chiasis”, which principally concerns the overall strategy of any given text. According to this method, in order to find an Exoteric message, one need only to follow Montaigne’s Essai form, for this message is evident as the Thesis and serves as “bookends” to the text. The Esoteric message, on the other hand, lies hidden in or near the physical center of the text, much as Aquinas’ Answer to the Question does in the Scholastic Method, and thus becomes the “crux” of the matter about which the text is written. Linguistic Analysis Linguistic analysis generally follows one of three distinct approaches. Semiotic Analysis emphasizes the relationship between “sign” and “signified” in writing and speech. The essence of this approach is that in the language an author or speaker uses to communicate, the words signify meaning, but carry “baggage” through etymology and syntax. Similarly, Semantic Analysis emphasizes diction and word choice in texts, i.e. how a particular author or speaker writes or speaks. In this model, the rhetor’s vocabulary contributes important information about his or her attitudes, ideas or beliefs. Pragmatic Analysis emphasizes the intent, audience and occasion in texts. In pragmatic analysis, the author or speaker’s purpose takes center stage, and the context contributes important, sometimes unspoken, information about the meaning of what he writes or says. Empirical Observation While Rhetorical, Document and Text Analysis may be viewed as a form of empirical study, empirical observation generally refers to the application of direct and indirect observation of political phenomena other than texts. This includes observing political behavior and acquiring samples of political phenomena though case studies, purposive samples, and representative samples, and is prevalent in the anecdotal evidence presented anywhere from American Government textbooks to interest group “white papers”. Empirical data may be collected and analyzed either through qualitative or quantitative methods. Qualitative methods are employed to emphasize the essential features of political phenomena: to establish norms and deviations from those norms, or else to establish a frame of reference leading to comparison with other political phenomena. These methods are often applied when certain political phenomena or concepts resist quantitative description. Most frequently, one will encounter qualitative methods in the application of an informal model, contextual analysis, anecdotal observation and in the practical application of role play. Quantitative methods, by contrast are used to measure precise political phenomena, and typically rely on statistical data and mathematical modeling to explore a political phenomenon or concept. Quantitative methods prevail in the application of formal political theory, surveys or poll data analysis, representative sampling, statistical analysis, and direct experimentation. Anecdotal evidence and Case Study Anecdotal illustration typically involves the use of informally gathered information and casual observation. It presents a specific instance of a given political phenomenon, and often depends on individual testimony. Frequently used as a tool of political rhetoric, it may or may not be empirical or even verifiable, and as such may be reducible to “hearsay”. Furthermore, anecdotal evidence, because it is collected haphazardly, is often subject to various cognitive biases and logical fallacies, most notably the Confirmation Bias. However, anecdotal evidence may also suffer from causation fallacies such as post hoc, ergo propter hoc (“after this, therefore because of this), or cum hoc, ergo propter hoc (“with this, therefore because of this”). More frequently, however, anecdotes may lead to specific inductive fallacies such as the small-n error or “Statistics of the Small”, or even the hasty generalization or stereotype. Beyond anecdotal evidence is the case study, which involves a close, in-depth, detailed examination of the subject under study, and may be used to support other claims through certain related contextual conditions. The purpose of a case study is typically illustration, whether of a generality or a critical instance. In illustrating a generality, case studies provide a descriptive study using one or two instances that familiarize the audience with the phenomenon under scrutiny, and establish a common frame of reference or language within which the phenomenon is understood. When illustrating a critical instance of a phenomenon, case study remains descriptive, but instead of describing a generality, the one or two instances used call attention to a phenomenon of unique interest, and are expressly not intended for generalization. A case study may also be used to explore a potential implementation, especially in political engineering. In this context, the case study, also called a “pilot” study, is similar to experimentation, and aims to identify questions or operationalize a hypothesis. Aggregates of past studies may also be used to establish a frame of reference and enables the researcher to form one or more general hypotheses about the phenomenon under study. Whatever the purpose of a case study, they typically fall into one of three distinct categories: key cases, outliers, and local knowledge. In a key case, the study demonstrates the veracity and the basis of a central research claim. Outliers, on the other hand, illustrate the variability in a research claim and may be used to challenge a hypothesis. Finally, local knowledge cases illustrate a unique context to make available for analysis and interpretation, so one should not be surprised to find case studies particularly prevalent in contextual political analysis. Polls and Sampling Like other sciences, political science may be seen as rooted in both epistemology and cosmology. Political science, too, involves a rigorous systematic effort to understand, explain, interpret and predict political phenomena, and the method of inquiry most commonly associated with this effort is both empirical and quantitative. Chief among these methods is the collection and analysis of poll data, a method of data collection that typically involves a survey, questionnaire or inventory. It is designed to gather data from a specific sample in order to address a specific Research Question or else a range of Research Questions. These samples must be pre-defined in what researchers call a Sampling Frame, designed to address who shall be included and how many. The data from the sample are collected using a pre-defined instrument that produces an artifact, also pre-defined in what is called an Operationalized Hypothesis. Types of Polls Polls range from Straw polls to Benchmarks and Brushfire polls, and then to regularly administered Tracking polls to enable comparative analysis. A Straw Poll is typically a discrete poll administered only once and most frequently is used to measure the salience of one or more issues. In this context, salience is meant to describe an issue that either affects a respondent directly, generates an opinion, or both. Beyond Straw Polls, Benchmark polls are generally the first poll in a series, and are especially used in opinion polling to establish a baseline opinion. Subsequent polls in the series are usually referred to as Brushfire polls, and are used to compare or contrast present poll results with the original Benchmark. These kinds of polls are especially common in an election campaign season, and are often confused with regular Tracking polls. While Benchmarks and Brushfires may generally be administered over a specific time interval, Tracking polls, in which responses are collected on the same or similar instruments over several time intervals, are regularly administered, the results of which are typically calculated using a “moving average” with the accumulation of multiple distinct data points. Sampling The method of sampling tends to emphasize representative samples of respondents either to inventories, questionnaires or polls, each with varying degrees of accuracy and precision. Data collected into samples tend to be categorized according to the range of data collected, and the degree to which the data have been aggregated. Hence, in political science research one will generally encounter the following classes of datasets: Individual, Municipal, Regional, Statewide and National. If the sample is drawn from a federal system, then statewide data and national data are different levels; if not, then these levels would be redundant. The types of samples collected include several different methodological approaches with varying levels of reliability. The lowest level samples are haphazard or anecdotal samples, which lack a rigorous methodology. Purposive sampling, though similar to the anecdotal samples is drawn to serve a specific illustrative purpose and often substitutes for case study. The advantage of haphazard and purpose samples lies in their ease of development and collection. The disadvantage lies in the ease in which the sample may be skewed into unrepresentative or even misrepresentative samples, reinforcing confirmation biases or predicting an erroneous outcome. For this reason, quantitative researchers typically prefer to develop more rigorous samples based on variations of the random sample. In true random sampling, each member of a population has an equal probability of being drawn for the samples. However, true random sampling may be difficult or impossible to achieve, and also may obscure certain features of the population, providing little informative data. More commonly, a quantitative researcher will opt instead either for a stratified random samples, or else a weighted sample to better illustrate or examine a given phenomenon. In stratified random sampling, members of a population are grouped into limiting strata, or “bins”, before the random selection occurs. In weighted sampling, the stratified random sampling technique is combined with the purposive sample in order to magnify or emphasize a specific segment of the population as a whole, perhaps to distinguish that particular segment’s from the overall responses from the population. Before one can collect any data at all, however, the researcher must develop a well-defined sampling frame. Sampling frames This is a list of the members constituting a population from which a sample is drawn. Raw unprocessed sample data are collected into a single set called a Dataset, and the Sampling Frame, applied to the Dataset, is used to extract useful information in subsets. The reliability of the information, of course, ultimately depends on the overall integrity of the Dataset used. Ideally, five conditions of a dataset must be met in order to draw from it. First, all members of the sample should be enumerated or quantized, i.e. they each have a logical numerical identifier. Second, all members of the dataset should be addressable, meaning that they can be located or found within the set. Third, a consistent method of organization according to fixed plan should prevail in the set and frame, yielding a systematic, logical dataset. Fourth, the dataset should contain additional information, or sufficient breath, that permits more advanced sampling frames than originally conceived to be applied, especially as new hypotheses or research questions arise concerning the population under study. Next, the sample should have sufficient depth to permit stratification and weighting. Additionally, an ideal sampling frame should meet four additional criteria. First, a sampling frame should be complete, where each member of the target population of interest in included in the frame. Additionally, the sampling frame must ideally treat each member as a discrete point within the sample; every member of the target population of interest should appear exactly once in the sampling frame. Third, the sampling frame in question should produce a closed sample, where no elements from outside the target population of interest appear in the frame. Finally, the data themselves should ideally be current, in that the data are recent enough to demonstrate content validity. Dimensional Analysis When a sampling frame has been applied to a dataset and the data collected, the researcher must develop a method of scoring each data point collected, especially as a scale of measurement to observe the behavior or the distinctions within the data. Particularly important is to employ dimensional reasoning so that the data may be rigorously compared or contrasted. Dimensional thinking facilitates critical thinking and analysis, particularly in terms of breadth, depth and precision. It permits a consistent basis for comparison or contrast, and may offer alternative or previously unforeseen explanations or descriptions of observable phenomena. Granted, discrete thinking can identify specific details of the phenomenon observed, gather raw data without necessarily generalizing, and serve as a starting point for inquiry. However, a discrete descriptive approach cannot easily draw comparisons or contrasts between two or more data points, for all of them would appear as “special cases”. Hence, it is not enough simply to collect numerical features of a sample and report those features in the absence of some scoring, scale or other metaphorical yardstick.

Figure 113: In discrete observation (left), no relationships are implied. Linear analysis implies a comparative “yardstick”. Linear thinking, by contrasts, features a sequential approach and invites comparison or contrast. Broadly speaking, linear thinking posits a basic framework, usually along a single independent variable, that enables a systematic analysis of collected data, and seeks a best fit approach to data that otherwise would be perceived as discrete. Linear continua may be unidirectional, such as in a timeline, causal chain or decision tree, or they may be bidirectional, such as in Aristotle’s ethical continuum or the classic Political Spectrum model of ideological preference. However practical or intuitive a linear continuum may be for the researcher, it may exclude observed data that do not match a function of the variable described, and as a result crucial information that distinguishes a particular phenomenon may not easily fit within the linear framework and distort the interpretation as a result. Evidence of this limitation is found in the frustration ideological libertarians find when a poll taker attempts to fit their positions on the Political Spectrum model. One alternative to a linear continuum is the comparative 2-Space. Best exemplified by the use of T-Graphs and analytic rubrics, this tool demands comparison or contrast of similar points or categories, or else classification and division if more than two phenomena are compared or contrasted. This specialized form of two-dimensional analysis permits individual data points to remain discrete but allows the researcher to build a means of analysis through the identification of similarities, differences, divisions and classifications. Generally speaking, a 2- Space analytic rubric enables descriptive analysis of variable phenomena similar criteria. This is particularly useful in the construction of informal models such as the normative models of bureaucratic behavior described earlier. In contrast to the comparative 2-Space, a true two-dimensional bivariate scoring model examines the relationship between up to two independent variables phenomena. However, one variable may in some way depend on the other, or the two variables may even vary together or inversely. In any case, bivariate analysis can provide a broader, more precise analysis than is possible with linear analysis, and in most cases can reduce the number of “special case” problems that arise from linear analysis. Historical examples of how this analytic tool is applied include Kant’s model of the history of human progress, Jerry Pournelle’s Political Compass and a tool for analyzing the intersection of policy preferences called a Condorcet Map, after the 18th Century French mathematician and political scientist.

Figure 114: Two-dimensional analysis: A T-Graph (left), a bivariate plane (right) Beyond one or two measurable variable phenomena, however, analysis starts to get complicated. When multiple variables are observed, it may be difficult to determine whether they are independent, antecedent (a variation of independence where a combination of variables may produce variation in a result), dependent, or even proportionally co-variant. In proportionally co-dependent variables, it may be useful to represent the relationship as a polygon or landscape map, whose vertices represent each variable and the area between each variable represents a proportional relationship among all of the variables included in the analysis. The most frequent application of this representation of proportional co-variables involves three variables whose values describe an equilateral triangle, implying that as one variable is maximized the other two recede. Traditional models of Aristotle’s Mixed Régime, the Natural Rights Argument, and the Separation and balance of political powers in the American Constitutional system all may be represented using a 3-Space of this type. Daniel Elazar’s model of Political Culture and Timothy Ferris’ political preference model also serve as examples of this type of analytic tool, as do Three Party voter distribution maps. Analysis of three or more independent variables requires another level of complexity only available in the Calculus and beyond. Granted, a three-dimensional model is able to describe phenomena involving three independent variables, and permits a level of precision and field depth unavailable to two-dimensional and 3-Space models, but while such models may be based on simple concepts, description and navigation becomes exponentially more challenging with each additional independent variable. For this reason, such models are not often found in basic research, despite their potential utility. The spatial model of ideological preference described earlier is an example of this kind of analytic tool.

Figure 115: Three dimensional modeling: proportional covariance (left), three independent variables, (right) Statistical Analysis A more frequent tool for data analysis is to employ statistical analysis techniques to samples from empirical datasets. This is in fact the preferred method of analysis for most empirical social science research, and in political science tends to dominate the subfields of Political Behavior, Political Economy, and Political Psychology. Where dimensional analysis can be effective in communicating the products of research, and may directly contribute to the development of informal models of political phenomena, statistical analysis of datasets is often used to conduct the research itself. In typical empirical observation, one must first ensure that the dataset meets as closely as is practical the standards of numeration, addressability systematic logic, breadth and depth, and that the sampling frame meets the standards of completeness, discreteness, closure and currency before applying a scoring or scaling rubric to the data collected. Once this is accomplished, however, the statistical analytic tools available generally fall into one of three categories: Univariate, or descriptive statistics; Bivariate analysis, especially Gamma testing, ANOVA and chi-square significance testing; and Multivariate analysis, especially through linear and multiple regression, although probability and logistical regression analysis may be used to project possible future data. Univariate Statistics This is the simplest form of data analysis. It examines a single variable in a dataset and is also often called Descriptive statistics. In univariate observation one examines variables along a particular range or set of values, with a view to measure central tendencies such as a variety of mean scores, including arithmetic, geometric, and harmonic means; median, midrange and modal scores; standard deviations from mean scores; and identifies patterns of response within the set. When representing univariate data, one begins with a raw dataset that resembles a matrix or spreadsheet, and where information for each case is displayed across rows. Then one should obtain a frequency distribution along the variable under analysis, sorting data along that variable and usually arranging the scores from the lowest to the highest value. Next, the researcher must decide whether or not to stratify, categorize or “bin” the data, taking care that no bins have a frequency of Zero. The distributions should then be described in a new column according to percentage distributions and cumulative distributions. Finally, one must choose an appropriate method of visual representation, whether as a bar graph (simple frequency distribution), histogram (displaying interval and ratio-level variables), frequency polygon (a line graph), or even a pie chart to describe proportional relationships among bins as fractions of a circle.

Figure 116: US voter turnout data in a time interval: an example of univariate or descriptive statistics Bivariate Statistics Bivariate statistics examines two variables simultaneously. This method is used to determine relationships between two separate variables, and represents the most common form of statistical analysis in the social sciences. Generally, bivariate analysis may be applied to two independent variables, a combination of independent and dependent variables, or covariant or codependent variables. Bivariate data are typically represented visually using a specific kind of graph called a scatterplot. The forms of hypothesis testing available in bivariate analysis usually involve correlations between two variables, if any exist. An analysis of variance attempts to find a “best fit” model for the bivariate data involved, and typically follow one of a number of standard approaches. The basic analysis of variance, either compares the means to two or more samples in a “one- way” or it may examine the influence of two independent variables on one dependent variable in a “two-way” analysis. More sophisticated analyses of variance include linear, probability and logistical regression analysis, which may be used to estimate the relationships between an outcome (dependent variable) and a predictor (independent variable). A variant of this form of analysis is the discriminant function, which resembles logistical regression, but is especially useful in predicting category membership, perhaps for refining future stratification. Combining one- or two-way analysis with regression produces an analysis of co-variance.

Figure 117: Voter support for Obama vs. percent black population in Columbus OH precincts: An example of bivariate analysis. Note the linear regression curve. Multivariate Statistics Multivariate statistics are less common in quantitative political science research than bivariate analysis, likely as a result of the complexity of statistical analysis required to conduct multivariate analysis. However, examples of multivariate analysis can be found, although they are usually represented using modified bivariate visualizations. Multivariate statistics require the observation and analysis of more than one statistical outcome at a time, and incorporate several types of univariate, bivariate and even other multivariate analytical tools. This approach is generally used in order to understand the relationships among multiple phenomena and their relevance to the question under study. The Multivariate Analysis of Variance is a generalized form of the Analysis of Variance from bivariate statistics, and is used when two or more independent variables are involved in the study. It addresses whether changes in independent variables have significant effects on dependent variables, establishes relationships among dependent variables and among independent variables as well. Like the bivariate Analysis of Variance, this method also has a related Analysis of Co-variance, which is used when controlling for multiple co-variates and testing for significant differences among group means. Multivariate Regression attempts to determine a formula that describes how variables respond simultaneously to changes in other variables, while Multivariate Discriminant analysis attempts to predict multiple dependent variables by one or more continuous independent variables. Due to the complexity of statistical analysis, this method of political study often requires some level of automation. In political science research, certain standard statistical engines have been developed to facilitate this kind of research, including the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), developed by IBM; the GNU Public License version of the same package, PSPP; Stata, a general purpose statistics software application used heavily in political science, economics and sociology research; statistical computing and graphics environments such as Bell Laboratories “S” and the GNU Public License equivalent, “R”; even traditional spreadsheet software such as Microsoft Corporation’s Excel program can perform some limited statistical analysis and visualization.

Figure 118: Product logos for statistical analysis software: (from left) SPSS, GNU PSPP. Stata, GNU R. Simulation and Experimentation Simulation and role play in political science research are primarily confined to political science education, in order to illustrate certain political phenomena to participants. Those who conduct simulations and role play maintain the most effective way to illustrate the interaction of multiple variables in the description of political phenomena is through direct experience of that interaction in a controlled environment that emphasizes the particular variables under scrutiny. This establishes a framework for experience in politics, and may even permit hypothesis testing concerning political behavior, particularly if the simulation is built around the variables to be observed. Mock elections, mock trials, and other simulations all demonstrate this method of inquiry. Simulations such as Model Congress, built around constitutional conventions, campaigns, institutions and processes fit into this category of political inquiry, as do policymaking, development and administration, and even international relations simulations. Many such simulations are hosted by institutions of higher learning as well as political science student organizations, often working together to facilitate the simulation to ensure fidelity to the phenomenon under study. Automated, interactive and online simulations also may serve the purpose of exploring specific political questions. The Filteries Political Simulator and Max Barry’s NationStates simulators have each attempted to approximate real world political linkages and conflicts along the lines of institutional behavior, ideological preference, constitutional form and international relations. However, simulations of this form often suffer from multiple limitations, including forced interactions, limited response bias, and incomplete or even erroneous assumptions about key political phenomena.

Figure 119: Political régime simulations available online: Filteries (left), NationStates (right) The final, and perhaps most controversial method of inquiry into political phenomena involves direct hypothesis testing and data collection through an experimental research design. While this may be effective in simulated political environments or datasets, certain difficulties arise when attempting to test a hypothesis in a real-world political environment. Granted, the advantages of this approach are clear: direct experiment enables accurate, precise data collection, minimizes “noise” from irrelevant data, and imposes controls on the experimental sample. However, the disadvantages of experimental design may in certain situation outweigh whatever advantages may be drawn. First, experimental designs are often subject to certain axiological assumptions. Second, hypotheses must be limited to existing data in datasets if the experimental environment is a dataset. Third, the results of an experiment in political science ae prone to confirmation bias, such as Poole and Rosenthal’s NOMINATE project demonstrate. Finally, experimentation may be limited by ethical or legal constraints, as discovered in the Stanford Prison Experiment and the 2014 Montana Judicial Election experiment. In the Stanford Prison Experiment, Psychology professor Philip Zimbardo developed a simulated prison environment in the basement of Jordan Hall at Stanford University and recruited university students to participate. The simulation was intended to extend for two weeks in the summer of 1971, but was suspended early, after the participants started to exhibit dangerous and psychologically damaging behaviors, about which Zimbardo wrote in The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (2007). The experiment itself has generated controversy along both methodological and ethical lines, and specific restrictions in research design have been adopted and implemented by the American Psychological Association as a consequence of the issues the experiment raised. In the 2014 Montana Judicial election, political science researchers at Stanford and Dartmouth College designed a field experiment in which they sought to determine the effect of certain forms of direct mail on voter turnout in an election. Choosing a non-partisan judicial election, the researchers sent mailers and fliers to registered voters in Montana that implied certain judicial candidates exhibited particular ideological biases and even partisan leanings, which raised concern from the Montana Secretary of State. When a set of mailers produced by the bearing the Montana State Seal surfaced, Montana Secretary of State Linda McCulloch filed a formal complaint, charging that the mailers violated that state’s election laws, and that the researchers should be charged with election fraud. (Volz, Matt. “Stanford apologizes for Montana election mailers” Great Falls Tribune: 24 Oct 2014).

Political Issues and Problems We now return to a catalogue of enduring issues and problems in ordered communities, more or less in the order in which certain basic political concepts were introduced at the beginning of this essay. As we have seen, the field of politics and political science is vast in scope, and touches nearly every feature of human interaction, for no individual may last long in complete isolation. However, issues and problems necessarily arise once individuals and groups, self- interested or otherwise, interact with one another to establish, maintain or expand their social and political organization. Broadly speaking, these issues fall into distinct domains of politics: authority, legitimacy, justice, policy, conflict, participation, representation, and interest. Identifying the enduring problems of these issues should enable us to approach the propositions about action, the polis, elections, and government Colomer identifies in The Science of Politics. Authority We shall begin with a consideration of authority and the issues that necessarily arise concerning authority. While in a general sense we may understand authority as either a wielder of political power or as the power itself, we must also examine the specific components of authority, namely power and the imposition on others of a duty to obey. An examination of power reveals two essential expressions, commonly described as “hard” and “soft” power. “Hard” power includes the capacity to command, compel, or coerce. It tends to use either military assets and processes or economic assets and processes to compel or restrain action, either through the use of incentive or force—what Joseph Nye called the “carrot and stick.” “Soft” power, by contrast, depends on the authority’s relations with others, as well as others impressions of the authority in question. In this case, an authority expresses or projects power through its credibility, attraction and co-option, and involves the use of culture, political principles and policies to establish or enhance the authority’s reputation. Through the projection of power, an authority is able to impose a duty among its targets to obey it.

Figure 120: Nye’s Power continuum A common issue arising from questions of power is the foundation for authority itself, and again this foundation may be expressed in one of two forms: de jure authority and de facto authority. De jure authority rests on formally recognized processes and institutions established either through law, treaty, tradition or custom. De facto authority, on the other hand, rests on the authority’s observed behavior and interaction with those subject to it, whether through effective action, charismatic leadership, or the use of “hard” and “soft” power to compel, coerce, restrain or incentivize compliance or obedience. Of particular concern for those exploring issues of authority is the problem of recognition and potential disconnect between de jure and de facto authority. For example, in Somalia at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21stCenturies, the de jure authority, i.e. the Somali government recognized by law and treaty and possessing a seat in the United Nations General Assembly, was only able to project power within a small area of central Mogadishu, the capital city. Throughout much of the rest of that country the de facto authority had become far more fragmented, divided as it were by competing local dictators and warlords, and sparking both a humanitarian and international security crisis. Similarly, in the 2010s portions of the nations of Iraq and Syria fell under the de facto authority of a radical Islamist group referring to itself as the Islamic State, and were opposed by another de facto authority in the form of an effective albeit unrecognized régime led by Iraqi and Syrian ethnic Kurds, supported for a time by “hard” power assistance from the United States. In 2019, the United States withdrew a part of this support, permitting the de jure authority in Turkey to project its own “hard” power into Kurdish regions of northern Syria. The Turkish government conducted this military action against the Kurdish population largely to limit or frustrate the possible rise of an independent Kurdistan, which it believes would pose an existential threat to the territorial integrity of Turkey were such a state to form, given the large Kurdish population in the southeast along the border with Iraq and Syria.

Figure 121: Examples of power projection: “hard” (left) and “soft” power (right) Legitimacy Related to problems associated with authority are those connected with the principle of legitimacy. This principle involves a moral claim of authority and offers a justification for the projection of coercive power, a capacity to impose duties, and a claim that a given authority has the right to use power without interference. De jure authority inherently clams legitimacy, as it establishes a normative relationship between political authority and those subject to it through formally recognized processes and institutions. When an authority claims legitimacy, it posits a duty among its subjects to obey, and that obedience to the recognized authority is just. However, the claim of justice in a command often depends on the content of that command, and the claim of authoritative command depends on the form and foundation of authority itself. Hence under a legitimate authority a preemptive duty exists that supersedes other obligations to obey, and as a result those who obey a legitimate authority may effectively challenge commands manifestly contrary to the form and foundation of the authority itself. In other words, one who is called to obey an order may not be obliged to follow that order the content of that order contradicts or undermines the moral foundation of the authority itself. While the problem of legitimacy and power was well known to classical political thinkers such as Aristotle and Xenophon, a number of theories of legitimacy have emerged over the last three centuries or so which attempt to tackle this problem more directly. Perhaps the best-known theory of legitimacy is that asserted in the American Founding era, namely the principle of Consent. Within a generation of that Founding, however, the Consent theory of legitimacy divided into two distinct strains: Express versus Tacit Consent. Express Consent requires individuals openly and knowingly to agree to an authority, and was advanced by such figures as John Locke in the Second Treatise of Civil Government and Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence and his letters to John Adams. Tacit Consent, on the other hand, does not necessarily require an expression of approval or agreement, but only action within the established political system without challenging the authority in place. In his letters to Jefferson, John Adams championed Tacit Consent as both necessary and expedient for the stability of a constitutional order, to which Jefferson strongly objected on the grounds that it rests on a form of the logical fallacy of the Excluded Middle. Tacit Consent may appear in many forms, all of which share the common feature of acquiescence. In legislative assemblies, for example, motions requiring “Unanimous Consent” typically do not require a formal tally of votes, but are assumed to be adopted if no one expressly objects to the motion. Indeed, every government in the world rests its claim to legitimacy on some form of acquiescence among citizens or subjects to the established authority. Another theory of legitimacy is that of Reasonable Consensus. This model, advanced by John Rawls, argues that for an authority to have legitimacy it must adhere to principles that rational, free, self-interested individuals would agree to if they are ignorant of their future position. This claim attempts to reconcile express and tacit consent, and extends from Rawls’ Theory of Justice, in which he asserts that because people are ignorant of the full effect of their actions, rational people behave, make decisions, and pursue their self-interest as if they are truly free actors. This Liberty principle is understood as a trait common to all, and gives rise to the idea of universal equality. Hence Reasonable Consensus Theory of Legitimacy places a moral constraint on governments in a similar manner to Kant’s Categorical Imperative of the Universal Civil Society. A third theory of legitimacy, Equality of Treatment, is a more or less pragmatic model that contains two distinct yet reciprocal foundations. The first, advanced by New Zealand law and philosophy professor Jeremy Waldron (b. 1953), requires an authority to demonstrate an equal respect for all who are subject to that authority. The second, articulated by the American constitutional law scholar John Hart Ely (1938-2003), sets a participatory standard for legitimacy in the form of equal voice, stake, and independence in political processes and law among all those subject to the political system in question. The Equality of Treatment theory of legitimacy is generally compatible with another theory, Instrumentalism. This model of legitimacy requires an authority to serve the interest of those subject to it, as John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham advance in their “calculus of happiness”. A similar, albeit overtly Machiavellian interpretation of Instrumental legitimacy is explored by Israeli political philosopher Joseph Raz (b. 1939) and advanced by others such as Steven Wall and Richard Arneson. Among the frequently occurring problems of legitimacy, low voter turnout, limited electoral choice, and consensus failure in participatory political systems represent perhaps the greatest challenges. Justice Beyond the issues and problems of legitimacy lies a more fundamental set of issues and problems connected to the concept of justice. In politics, justice may be viewed as a matter of right, in that what is just is right and unjust wrong, or it may also be viewed as a question of the superlative good, i.e., the best use of power, assignment of authority, direction of government. This understanding of the character of justice has its origins in classical political thought, and is the primary theme of Plato’s most famous political dialogue, the Republic. Classical Problems of Justice In the Republic, Plato presents four conventional views of the substance of justice through four distinct interlocutors: Cephalus, Polemarchus, Thrasymachus, and Glaucon. Cephalus, in whose house the dialogue is said to take place, claims that the substance of justice lies in speaking truth and paying one’s debts, but is countered by the question of whether it is possible to pay one’s debt to another, only to have the payment used to commit an unjust act. Polemarchus’ alternative is that justice involves giving to each what is proper to him, to help one’s friends and harm one’s enemies. Yet this view of justice fails to consider any conception of justice outside one’s own self-perception, rendering justice a phantom of one’s opinion. Thrasymachus’ counter seeks to move justice out of the realm of perception and into the experience of strength or weakness, advancing the thesis from strategos Alcibiades in Thucydides’ Melian Dialogue that justice involves action in the interest of the strong—the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must. Glaucon, the target of this dialogue as the pupil most in danger of following down the road of the demagogue as the Alcibiades had, counters that justice may not have a natural foundation but instead is an artificial construct to temper the will of the strong in order to protect the needs of the weak, possibly in an effort to allay the fears of the interlocutors that he would follow Alcibiades’ example. Plato’s own view, delivered by Socrates in the dialogue, is that justice has two expressions among people. First, it is a human virtue that makes one consistent and good, where the internal components of the human soul—reason, spirit and appetite—are properly ordered. Justice is also a social virtue that makes a city internally harmonious and good, where the internal components of society—sages, guardians and artisans—are properly ordered in like manner as the individual human soul. For Plato, the human soul and the city are reciprocal, mutually shaping and ordering each other, and if a highest good exist, then justice broadly understood requires that cities and souls be ordered to lead people to that highest good. Aristotle’s conception of justice is rather more practical than Plato’s lofty teleology, as one sees in the Nicomachean Ethics. For Aristotle, justice may be complete or partial, and it may distributive or corrective. Complete justice is an ethical virtue in relation with others as an interaction that leads to happiness or the whole community, while partial justice consists of a distribution of benefits and burdens where each receives his or her fair share within the city. Distributive justice consists in these burdens and benefits fairly assigned, while corrective justice is that which restores the fair balance in interpersonal relations after that balance has been disturbed. Put simply, justice itself may be described as a matter of equitable relations within a community, but especially among people who are not friends. In politics, it is a function of the good of the community as a whole, and is expressed as a kind of proportional equality, as equality among equals, and inequality among unequals. Those who contribute more to the good of the city as a whole should therefore receive a larger share of the goods of the city along the lines of a meritocracy, according to this view. Medieval Justice and Just War Theory These two competing Classical views of justice would serve as the foundation for understanding the issues and problems of justice for the next two thousand years, and still carry some influence even today. In the Middle Ages, however, the application of either Platonic or Aristotelian conceptions of justice would produce two competing views of how justice is to be applied. Among the followers of Aurelius Augustinus, for example, justice is the virtue by which all are given their due, in like manner as Plato offers through Polemarchus. However, unlike Polemarchus’, the Augustinian view is that Eternal, especially Divine, Law ultimately must determine what is due. The character of a Just Society, therefore, is such that people understand that the Divine Law requires that none harm another, and that all have a duty to help everyone to the extent that one is able. A consequence of this model of justice is what becomes known as Just War Theory. According to Just War Theory, wars may be just if they are defensive or assistive, and lead to a just peace. War may only be declared by a legitimate authority after deliberation of just action, and the conduct of a just war must be guided not by enmity, but of benevolent love, even for the enemy. The Medieval view of justice as developed by Thomas Aquinas, while not incompatible with Augustinus’ view of the Eternal Law, is nevertheless more Aristotelian in character. For Aquinas, Justice consists of relations of equity under Natural Right or Natural Law. Following the reasoning of the Great Chain of Being from Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Aquinas posits that Natural justice is superior to human convention and is accessible to reason. The application of Reason produces the Revelation that justice demands a proportional equality among people, much as Aristotle posits in the Ethics. Furthermore, two expressions of justice among people, namely legal and particular justice, emerge as demonstrations of the moral habit of virtuous character. Legal justice serves the common good of the whole, while particular justice concerns reciprocity, one to another. In this context Aquinas understands virtue as an ethical Mean between the extremes of excess and privation, much as Aristotle describes in the Ethics. In his Summa Theologiae, however, Aquinas posits the relative particular justice or injustice of specific acts deemed legally unjust. For instance, a starving man in a land of plenty who steals food to survive cannot reasonably be considered a thief, and Aquinas maintains this understanding of relative injustice through his own Just War Theory. For Aquinas, only a legitimate authority may declare a war, yet the declaration must be for what he calls a “just cause”, and the declaration must also intend good and avoid evil. His notion of relative injustice enters the Just War through the idea of relative tolerance, especially in matters of religion. For example, one must always tolerate the religious beliefs of those whom he calls “never-believers”, and one must only use force against non-believers who reject belief through heresy or heterodoxy, and to use that force only for the good of their eternal souls. Nevertheless, those of inferior rational discretion may justly be subject to a superior rationality, and hence no Christian should be enslaved to a non-Christian, in Aquinas’ view. Modern Issues of Justice Modern views of justice largely continue the thread spun by the Classical and Medieval conceptions of Just War. Machiavelli, for example, saw justice in generally Aristotelian terms, as a mean between extremes of excess and privation, as well as a relation of equity. Unlike either Aristotle or Aquinas, however, Machiavelli tied his conception of justice with the natural law of necessity, where just action produces stability and the public good overall, even though it may appear to be unjust to the vulgar. Thomas Hobbes would largely follow the Machiavellian view of justice as that which is in accordance with the natural law, found out through reason, which requires self-preservation, commodious living, and property to promote commodious living. However, for Hobbes this natural law is enforceable only by a sovereign, which societies construct specifically to enforce the social contract which establishes the society in the first place. In contrast to the Machiavellian and Hobbesian interpretation of justice stands Newtonian and Lockean justice. For Isaac Newton in the Principia Mathematica, the System of the World is governed by Rational Principles, while for John Locke the Natural Law is Reason Itself. Natural Law implies Natural Justice—a law may only be considered just if that law is consistent with the Natural Law, i.e. Reason, or else those same Rational Principles that govern the System of the World. For Locke especially, that Natural Law evidently imposes a fundamental equality among human beings. No hierarchies exist in nature among creatures promiscuously born to the same advantages of Nature; hence everyone is a sovereign in Nature, an enforcer of the Natural Law. Nevertheless, all are subject to the same Natural Law, regardless of personal access to the rational faculty. From Locke’s interpretation of the Newtonian System of the World guided by Rational Principles arises Thomas Jefferson’s view of Justice, embodied as the Natural Rights Argument. In this conception of justice, what is Right is particularized to Naturally-endowed rights that define humanity itself. Like matter and energy, rights can be neither created nor destroyed, in accordance with the law of Conservation of Mass and Energy. Justice, in this context, may be understood as analogous to efficiency in the transformation of energy. The substance of justice is the degree to which Natural Rights are secured for all, since the security of Natural Rights is the purpose of governments, now construed as mechanical systems to transform the potential energy of rights into the energy that steers a community towards a common good, which may be defined as happiness. The limitations of this view are that in addition to the principle of Conservation, in which rights are neither created nor destroyed, one must also come to terms with the other two laws of thermodynamics as expressed in political systems. In the Law of Entropy, no transformation of energy is completely efficient, and some energy is lost through a secondary transformation. Since justice is a measure of efficient transformation of rights into happiness, no government can therefore guarantee perfect justice. Rights are not themselves spontaneously secure, and the universal security of rights is impossible in practice, thanks to the secondary transformation of rights into factiousness. In the law of Equilibrium, where in closed systems Entropy always increases until no further transformation is possible, all mechanical systems eventually increase their inefficiency and eventually break down unless energy is added to the system, whether to replace or repair the system, in order to prolong the time before the system fails. In politics, this means that eventually all governments fail and must be replaced; over time; injustice always increases unless energy is added to the system through repair or replacement of parts in order to delay the time when the government fails completely. This action requires the participation of the governed in order to add that energy, and the frequent repair or replacement of parts of the system, whether through election, appointment, or legal and constitutional modification to extend the life of the machinery of government. The problem of Modern Justice, therefore, is a matter of diagnosis and troubleshooting constitutional systems in order to maintain or increase the efficient transfer of potential political energy (Natural Rights) into kinetic political energy (the public good). Beyond the Rational conception of justice proceeding from the Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau emphasizes the difficulty reconciling the expression of nascent justice (“Do your own good with the least possible harm to others”) with the “sublime maxim of Reasoned justice” in society (“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”). Subsequent treatments of justice posit historical constraints on the character of justice, such that for writers such as Hegel, Marx and Dewey, what is deemed just depends on the historical period in which the action appears. If perfect justice is indeed the object of history, then no society can be truly just except in relation to the Categorical Imperative of historical progress toward the Universal Civil Society, in whatever form that is ultimately to appear. The Arc of History, say Historicists and Progressives alike, bends toward Justice. Post-Modern Issues and Problems of Justice The late Modern interpretation of justice led post-modern thinkers to impeach various ideas surrounding the conception of justice itself. For Nietzsche, no action can be just except that which contributes to a life in which the individual is free to define his own Horizons of Meaning. For reactionary post-moderns all actions, social structures, and laws must conform to certain normative principles of what some call traditional civilization and reinforce the concept of proportional equality (equality among equals, inequality among unequals) for them to be just. This conformity either requires states to define justice in the context of the Friend/Enemy distinction as Schmitt claims, or else requires the imposition of structural hierarchies of power and privilege, ultimately subordinate to some transcendent principle or deity made immanent through the structure of what they call “civilization”. This mandate is especially evident in the writings of Evola, Guénon, al Qutb, and Dugin. For progressive post-moderns, justice instead requires either a radical freedom to define one’s own power narrative equal to others in society without being challenged by competing narratives or language, as advanced by Foucault, or else requires the recognition and preservation of human dignity against those forces that diminish their humanity, regardless of the community or social context. This is the problem presented by Nussbaum and those associated with the Berkeley School, and championed by those who claim to promote “social justice”, with the exception of the reactionary al Qutb. Other post-moderns, such as Sandel, argue that competing incompatible visions of justice in a pluralist society can never be fully reconciled; rather, they are ever in tension with one another, especially between universal and particular conceptions of community and identity. This tension, especially between “thick” conceptions justice resident in particular communities and “thin” universal conceptions of justice that permit those communities to persist in the first place, leads inevitably to confusion about the nature and substance of justice itself. On one hand, one views justice as fairness along Rawlsian lines; on the other, justice must promote individual freedom, as Nozick claims. Both conceptions of justice in this context produce consequences leading to particular kinds of injustice, leading some, like Saul, to posit the necessity of doubt and dynamic balance for the preservation of the public good, the one principle upon which even post-moderns, whether reactionary or progressive, generally agree is desirable. Nevertheless, given the post-modern tendency towards the impeachment of all claims, the fundamental problem of justice ultimately reduces to the question of its very existence, i.e. whether justice as a concept exists at all, and whether or not it is even practical, reasonable, sensible or effective to resort to claims of justice in matters of politics. This stance is the one taken by the most pessimistic post-modern thinkers in our survey, including Berman and Scheidel. Policy Since public policy involves a set of decisions, actions, laws, and standard procedures to address one or more issues affecting the ordered community in question, it often takes center stage when examining the institutions and processes of government itself, and generally forms the basis for critique of a particular government. Policy implementation functionally consists of three distinct components: distribution, regulation, and redistribution. Once the policy has been implemented, its outputs are reported as part of the Evaluation process, identifying the impact on intended targets of the policy, collateral effects on non-targets, as well as possible conflicts with other implemented policies, conflicts of interest and conflicts of principle. Policy evaluation leads to the development of the subsequent policy agenda, presenting a new set of proposals, and requiring policy makers to decide whether to continue the policy, modify one or more components of the policy, or suspend the policy altogether and reformulate. Problems of Distribution Since the first major type of policy concerns the distribution of goods and services to individual targets, the problems that most frequently arise tend to concern practical matters of delivery following the management of cost/value streams. As a result, it is not unusual for policy makers to pursue models of distribution borrowed from private industry, especially in the area of Management theory and Logistics. However, because public policy exists in a political rather than a commercial or industrial context, additional cost/value streams beyond the material, monetary and temporal must be considered, especially political costs and value as well as doctrinal consistency with the mission or purpose of the constitutional or institutional system in which the policy is developed. Where traditional cost and value streams in industry tend to focus on material, temporal and monetary costs and values arising from production, inventory, waiting, transportation and processing, public policy makers must also account for political costs and benefits from pursuing a particular distribution policy, not only in terms of public support and government influence on the governed, but also its impact on actors who are not necessarily the direct targets of the distribution policy itself. Managing costs and value becomes particularly challenging when considering multiple and potentially conflicting cost/value streams. A distribution of goods and services may be materially or monetarily expensive and plunge the government’s operating budget into a deficit, but it may provide a political advantage, especially among elected officials who use distribution policies to win the favor of their constituents. Additionally, most constitutional systems include a specific limitation in their charters concerning the adoption and implementations either of “necessary and proper”, “necessary and expedient” or, in order to permit greater administrative discretion, “reasonable and proper” policies. In either case, much of the debate concerning changes to public policy in such political environments focuses on testing the change against these constitutional standards provided the policy makers are themselves aware and sensitive to the imposed limitations. Problems of Regulation The questions of necessity, propriety, reasonability and expedience are often more overt in the formulation and adoption of regulation than in distribution policy. Regulatory policy is intended to compel or restrain action through the use of a government’s monopoly of force. In regulation, policy targets are directly identified for regulatory action, imposing mandatory standards on policy targets which often require additional expenditures that those policy targets may oppose, especially if those regulations conflict with their perceived self-interest. Safety regulation in workplace environments, minimum compensation laws, labor codes, and import duties and tariffs all fall into this category of public policy, as do imposed industrial standards of production and maintenance, environmental protection laws and immigration codes. In participatory systems especially, the imposition of new regulation typically requires policymakers to expend additional temporal and monetary resources generating public support for the proposed regulation before it can be adopted. However, because levels of public knowledge about the minute details of specific regulatory policies are often low, support may be hard-won, and may only emerge after a major crisis directly connected to the lack of a particular regulatory framework increases public perception of the issue as making a policy change necessary. However, in the case of outsized regulatory responses to an emergency, new policies may conflict either with other policies already in place, or even with certain features of the community’s stated principles, despite widespread support among both citizens and government. Problems of Redistribution In redistribution, societal resources including wealth, services, opportunities, benefits, or other societal goods are taken from one policy target and applied to another. This type of policy may be applied between and among government agencies themselves, in which case policy makers typically must turn to questions of necessity, propriety, reasonability and expedience, but as a matter of substantive policy outside government institutions redistribution carries inherent controversy for those political systems that derive their legitimacy from the consent of the governed or claim to preserve the right of individual property. In either case, redistribution policies are often defended or opposed using specific appeals either to justice or legitimacy. In particular, if a redistribution policy is grounded in a Rawlsian idea of justice, where unequal distribution of societal goods must be equalized through redistribution unless the unequal distribution benefits the least favored in society, policymakers must decide at what point the redistribution itself fundamentally alters the distribution of favor to where those who had been the least favored now become the most favored, then whether revision of the policy is warranted and to what degree. If, on the other hand, redistribution policies are grounded in proportional equality where “each is given his due,” policymakers must therefore determine what qualifies a target either for having resources taken from them or having them given to them. Redistribution policies are especially controversial in the absence of consensus about the appropriate targets on either side of the redistribution. Furthermore, the longer a redistribution policy is in place, the more those who receive the benefits of that redistribution will construe the benefit not as a product of redistribution but as an entitlement, increasingly frustrating necessary revisions of the policy over time, and increasing the conflict between what is economically necessary or expedient for managing scarce resources and what is politically necessary or expedient for maintaining domestic tranquility and de facto legitimacy in the eyes of the public. Conflict Controversies over the direction of public policy form an arena of conflict, in which differences of thought and concept about principles or interest arise between two or more decisive, directly involved actors, be they formal representatives or the interested parties who support them This situation, which the Conflict Model developed by the University of Heidelberg describes as a Positional Difference, requires specific conditions for conflict to arise, including: Actors, meaning at least two subjects capable of intellectual or imaginative power and who communicate their position; Measures, specifically reciprocal, correlated communication and action that contribute to awareness of a positional difference; and Items, where the communication in question refers to a certain topic or action connected with a certain object. In conflicts over policy the Items are typically objects of distribution, regulation or redistribution, or else they are targets of the policy itself. Stages, Structure and Intensity of Conflict The expression of Conflict generally appears in five distinct stages. The first stage, Latent conflict, often escapes detection, and the actors are generally unaware that the conflict even exists. As soon as the actors become aware of their positional differences with other actors, the Conflict moves to the second stage, Perceived conflict. It is at this stage that actors may introduce measures either to resolve, diminish or escalate the conflict, but the effects are not necessarily experienced by either side in the conflict. When participants do experience political, social or psychological effects of the conflict, it has passed into the third stage, the Felt conflict, and may quickly pass into the fourth stage, Manifest conflict, when the conflict is open, directly observed, and measurable in physical, political or economic terms. The fifth stage, the Aftermath, only occurs as an outcome of the conflict, whether through resolution or dissolution. Not only do conflicts appear in stages, but they also exhibit a structure, called the Shape of conflict. This shape may be either Symmetric or Asymmetric. In Symmetric conflicts, all of the actors possess equal or near-equal available resources or power. They communicate their position through reciprocal measures, and commit or mobilize their available resources in proportion to their levels of commitment to influencing the outcome of the conflict. Additionally, the actors in a Symmetric conflict mutually acknowledge the same stage of the conflict, and employ equivalent strategies and tactics towards its resolution or dissolution. Asymmetric conflicts, on the other hand, appear when the actors’ relative available resources or power differ significantly. In asymmetric conflicts, the actors communicate their positions through disproportionate measures, commit or mobilize those resources in disproportionate levels, and either experience or acknowledge different stages of the extant conflict, employing significantly different strategies or tactics to achieve an outcome. One may also describe the character of conflicts in terms of the actors’ positions on a strategic and tactical continuum, defined by the extremes of maneuvers and attrition. In maneuver- based conflict, the actors intend to prevail through a strategy of incapacitation of their adversaries’ decision-making process. Tactical maneuvers include political, economic or security disruption either through direct shock or else through the use of secondary and tertiary conflicts. By contrast, attrition-based conflict involves the actors’ intent to prevail through the collapse of an adversary’s resources due to continuous loss of capacity to respond. Tactically this includes direct escalation of the conflict itself, invasion and occupation, incremental loss of the adversary’s resources, or else the destruction of personnel and material resources. Conflicts may also be classified according to their dynamic intensity. Non-violent conflicts may emerge even within a political community or among allies, but in such cases are generally limited to disputes, defined as a political conflict without violence or the use of force or “hard” power. Common features of disputes include the threat of sanctions, limitations of the terms of trade, or even the threat of arming or targeting an adversary. More intense non-violent conflicts include the non-violent crisis, which typically includes an explicit threat of violence. A crisis is indicated whenever one actor refuses to disarm despite demands to do so by the other actor. It may involve the mutual targeting of weapons systems in symmetric conflicts, as well as the implementation of trade sanctions or the suspension of commerce. Violent conflicts are characterized by the violent use of force or “hard” power with varying degrees of intensity. Violent crisis often proceeds from an escalation of a non-violent crisis, as when a sanctioned actor responds to the sanctions by directly attacking a “soft” target in maneuver-based conflict. In a Limited War, the adversarial actors in the conflict exchange limited use of weapons and personnel, usually in an effort to force the other side to accede to the other’s position or demands. In War, the conflict has widened to incorporate larger segments of the actor’s economy, defense capabilities and personnel. The degree of intensity of violent conflict is usually measured on two specific independent variables: The Means of conflict, including the use of weapons and deployment of personnel; and the Consequences of conflict, which include the number of casualties, the level of destruction, and the number of displaced civilians or refugees in the conflict. Theatres of Conflict and their Management However, not all conflicts, even violent conflicts necessarily involve physical destruction, casualties and literal refugees. The character of conflict often depends on the Theatre of Conflict in which positional differences are communicated, although conflicts may increase in intensity and spread across several Theatres. Broadly speaking, Theatres of Conflict include Economic, Social, and Political environments. The Economic Theatre of Conflict includes the terms of commerce and trade, such as imports and exports, currency evaluation and exchange, and markets or market activity. The Social Theatre of Conflict includes the mores, manners and customs of the actors in conflict, as well as their ideas, culture and experience. This Theatre of Conflict is often described in terms of the “hearts and minds” of targeted actors. The Political Theatre of Conflict generally includes the political institutions, processes and public policy of the actors in the conflict. The Operational Theatre of Conflict, also known as the “Battlefield” or “Battlespace”, includes literal territory or land, maritime and littoral operations, as well as aerospace, cyberspace, and informational fields of operations. Conflicts arise anytime different actors communicate a positional difference with other actors in a given potential Theatre, and as a result must be managed. Cooperative management of conflict tends to prevail within nation-states and among allies, and includes linkage and alliance, diplomacy and treaties, as well as institutional action such as legislation, deliberation, policy implementation and even civil action. In this context, a civil petition or lawsuit may be understood as a cooperatively managed non-violent conflict generally within a specific nation- state’s predefined Theatre, the court. Non-cooperative management of conflict includes advisories, sanctions, tariffs, and “trade wars”; rivalry and competition, as through military and industrial buildup and “arms races”; intelligence and espionage; and direct military action, either directly through total or limited warfare, or indirectly through secondary violent conflicts and “proxy wars”. Those who intend to manage conflict must decide which Theatre of Conflict is of primary concern, and contain the conflict to that Theatre, if possible. They must also determine whether a non-cooperative conflict may be resolved or dissolved through cooperative means in another Theatre. In participatory governments, those who seek to manage conflict with other actors outside the nation-state must also determine the maximum level of intensity the public at large may tolerate, lest actions taken against an adversary generate one or more domestic conflicts. For this reason, policymakers must also pay particular attention to the avenues of participation in their own political system. Participation When describing participatory government, most people will generally focus on campaigns, voting and elections, either on the whole or, more frequently, on only a specific part of the larger formal participatory system. However, in any participatory government, campaigns, voting and electoral systems only provide one avenue of participation that may or may not have a significant effect on the direction of policy or even be particularly representative of the opinions of the public at large. In September 2014 Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page demonstrated in “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups and Average Citizens” (Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 12, No. 3) that individuals actually have no significant influence on public policy in the United States, a political system which rests its claim to legitimacy on its putative dependency on the consent of the governed. Compounding the American participation problem is the widespread perception that voting systems in the United States are largely designed to produce a decisive outcome rather than reflect an accurate measure of the opinions or will of voters, as social critic and noted skeptic William Poundstone demonstrates in Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren’t Fair (Hill & Wang, 2009). According to Poundstone, plurality-based election systems, which tend to dominate American electoral politics, tend to maximize two distinct challenges to the legitimacy of voting as reflective of public opinion, namely Vote-Splitting and Voter’s Remorse. In Vote Splitting, voters in a three- way electoral contest divide their vote in such manner that a candidate who receives the most opposition may still emerge the winner, thanks to a divided opposition between two other contenders. In Voter’s Remorse, voters may “hold their noses” and cast a ballot for a candidate they do not actually support, either to avoid the threat of Vote Splitting or to express their opposition to a leading alternative contender, especially in a two-way contest. In fact, in Poundstone’s view, plurality voting is one step away from mere random selection of officeholders, and most other voting systems, with the exception of what he calls Range Voting (the ratings system used by commercial ventures such as Amazon), do not fare much better. Other issues and problems of participation related to voting include the degree to which citizens are able or willing to participate in the electoral process in the first place. While most political systems with a voting mechanism claim their elections are free and fair, in practice the eligible participant pool may be severely restricted, marginalizing whole segments of the population. They may also suffer from regulations that prevent a variety of candidates from appearing on the ballot, or proposals on ballots may be worded in order to confuse or distract voters from choosing the option they actually support. Furthermore, restrictions on registration, limited polling locations or times, limited publicity of election dates, times and issues, and even inclement weather during the polling period all present challenges to elections as a reliable means of participation. If voting in elections is so poor a means of participation, one must therefore look to other avenues of participation, especially since it is apparent that voting systems such as exist in political systems like the United States produces low levels of Voice and a high degree of Exit (see Proposition 4 in Colomer). Generally speaking, participation in a body politic may appear in one of four categories of expression: Polls, including elections, focus groups and surveys; Petition, including demonstrations, lobbying, interest group activity, and civil disobedience; Press, including editorials and interviews, advertisements and managed coverage, as well as weblogs and social media expression; and Purchase, which includes all sorts of commercial activity, such as buying and selling, finance and investment, as well as boycotts or express patronage. All of these forms of participation carry advantages and disadvantages. As a direct measure of opinion and participation, polls contain a consistent, narrow range of responses with a generally clear outcome. However, they may be prone to error, whether in terms of their sampling frame, question biases, limited number of responses, or unrepresentative turnout. Furthermore, polls may suffer from a form of interview bias variously called the halo or horn effect, depending on whether the respondent is positively or negatively disposed to the interviewer or the process itself. Petitions, on the other hand, can communicate a clear message if the petition efforts are well- organized and directly address a particular salient issue. Also, as a voluntary expression of opinion, participants are less likely to suffer from phenomena such as Voter’s Remorse. Unfortunately, petitions may be wholly unrepresentative of the population as a whole, for public demonstrations are generally composed only of those participants who hold the strongest opinions about a salient issue and can afford to participate in the demonstration. In addition, petitions may escalate into disruptive and violent conflict, especially if adversarial actors take disproportionate measures to communicate their positional difference. The advantages of Publication include the ability of participants to frame, refine, and communicate their positions through a documented expression of opinion. This expression is testable for consistency of message, the degree to which it is shared, especially f combined with circulation and feedback, and provides a vehicle of expression which can encourage others to participate as well. However, like petition, it suffers from the potential for unrepresentative expression, especially if publication requires significant expenditure. More challenging, publication through online formats such as weblogs and social media may exaggerate the level of commitment or intensity of opinion, especially if participants limit their expression to reposting a message written by another actor. Most disturbing, however, is the degree to which participants may be manipulated by editors and content managers in online environments into holding political positions they otherwise would not have, as psychologist Robert Epstein (b. 1953) has claimed since 2012 that Google has done. The challenge to participation that cyberspace and information spaces in general present is that they constitute specific Theatres of Conflict, and that while they may be effective avenues of participation, the information and the positions taken in those arenas may not be reliable. The fourth major area of participation, namely economic activity, has the advantage of presenting a prima facie valid measure of opinion, and likewise an empirical measure of whether or not a participant is affected by policies or conflict, as well as whether and to what degree that participant affects the direction of policy or the influence of interests, especially those interests from whom participants make their purchases. Unfortunately, the economic arena is plagued by several factors that impeach the validity of any measurement of public opinion, especially if the purchase in question is for a product or service for which demand is highly inelastic, meaning buyers purchase the good out of perceived necessity. Furthermore, buyers may make decisions from behind Rawls’ veil of ignorance; they may have no idea about the full impact their purchase has on the direction of policy or even whether theirs and the producer’s positions are even compatible. The phenomenon of ignorant purchase tends to impeach the validity of much economic activity for the purposes of measuring public opinion, and by extension participation in the body politic as well. Lastly, one area of participation that tends to be overlooked is the problem of mandatory participation, such as taxation, jury duty, conscription, or mandatory voting. These institutional forms of participation are largely overlooked because they are compulsory in the political systems in which they are found. In taxation, participants are compelled or coerced into making contributions to the treasury of the state in which they participate in economic activity, hold property, or maintain citizenship or residency. While in political systems with widespread acceptance of their authority as legitimate most citizens pay their mandatory contributions to the treasury, others will attempt to exploit loopholes in the tax code to avoid paying, or else will refuse to pay taxes altogether in political systems with either marginal claims to legitimacy or an inability to project hard power internally. Similar issues emerge with other compulsory participation such as with jury duties. In the United States, for example, even though jury participation constitutes the most direct participation of citizens in their government, an overwhelming majority of citizens participate reluctantly, resentfully, or even take measures to avoid having to participate at all. In conscription, participants are required to devote a period of time, usually a number of years, to the formal régimented defense of the nation-state in question as a part of that state’s military personnel and, like jury duty, citizens or subjects in those systems may seek to avoid participation. Mandatory voting, such as found in Turkey, does produce a high level of voter turnout; however, because it compulsory under penalty of fine or, in some cases, incarceration, levels of turnout must be dismissed as a measure both of participation and even legitimacy in such systems. Representation While issues and problems of representation tend to depend on two distinct factors: 1) Which institution of government is involved in representation, and 2) Which model of representation is institutionalized, in most cases representation is taken to refer to a set of institutions intended to deliberate and decide public acts, either through a parliamentary or congressional structure. Closely connected to perceptions of legitimacy and participation, issues of representation have shaped the character of parliamentary and congressional systems in significant ways. On one hand, representatives may be chosen directly through an elective process among the citizens; on the other, they may be elected or appointed through some other means. In direct elections, one must consider the method of choosing representatives to have the greatest impact, and also account for the issues that result from that process. Voting systems The most intuitive system of electing representatives is the direct majoritarian election. However, as the problems of participation reveal, a strict majoritarian election would require either a) only two contenders for the seat of representation, or b) a run-off election system in the event more than two contenders compete for the seat. Because both limitations carry significant drawbacks from the standpoint of representation and consent, where one forces a limited response and the other adds a layer of uncertainty and promotes vote-splitting, many election systems choose instead to follow a plurality, or “first past the post” election. However, plurality elections actually do not diminish the probability of vote splitting, and indeed may exacerbate the problem, to the point that, and Poundstone suggests, plurality decisions are ultimately little better than random selection of candidates. In order to counter the limitations inherent in direct elections, some scholars, including mathematician Donald G. Saari, have advocated variations of Ranked voting, whereby voters indicate their support for different contenders in an electoral contest, following a ranking system that synthesizes support using the mathematical systems developed by either the 18th Century political scientist the Marquis de Condorcet or his contemporary Jean-Charles de Borda. Some political systems have in fact adopted variations of the Borda count to determine the outcomes of elections, including Slovenia, Kiribati and Nauru, but its application is more common in academic and business environments rather than in representative assemblies. Others, including the late Theodore Lowi (1931-2017), proposed a simplified preference voting system in which each voter would be able to cast a ballot “for” a candidate and “against” another, and the decision would be made according to a net voting score (Ferguson & Lowi. “Reforming American Electoral Politics: Let’s Take ‘No’ for an Answer.” PS vol. 31 No 2 (June 2001)) Positional voting, such as a Borda count, and approval voting such as Lowi’s proposal, present two major drawbacks. First, they incentivize tactical voting through “compromise” and “burial”. The “compromise” tactic involves a voter’s actual preference selected as the second choice in a range of at least three candidates, and enhancing the likelihood of victory, particularly if the preferred candidate is broadly a second choice. In “burial,” to which Lowi’s method is particularly susceptible, votes “against” a candidate help guarantee that no particularly favored candidate can win, especially if two candidates with roughly equal bases of support enter into a rivalry. Voters support their own candidate and vote against the rival, thus ensuring the third option, which may not have much support at all among the voting public, emerges victorious. Second, they encourage strategic nomination of multiple candidates with similar platforms (called “buffer candidates” Nauru) that flood the field with a narrow range of platforms: the more candidates a faction fields, the more likely that faction will win. One alternative to direct election of individual candidates is a system of proportional representation, in which voters choose specific well-defined political groups called parties instead of individual candidates. This method is preferred by many parliamentary systems throughout the world, for it attempts to resolve the difficulties inherent in majority and plurality voting systems. While proportional representation systems vary significantly from one nation-state to another, from party lists and “choice voting” to mixed compensation and bi- proportional apportionment, most typically require a “minimum threshold” of support among the electorate for a particular party to be included among the representative assembly’s fixed number of seats. Consequently, most systems employing a proportional system require the formation of coalitions after parties are elected and their seats are apportioned. As with most engineered systems, election systems constitute a series of compromises for the sake of function. Plurality and approval voting systems run the greatest risk of vote-splitting, while run-off and range voting systems have the least risk of vote splitting but are plagued with cumbersome counting methods. By contrast, random selection and plurality systems maximize voter remorse, in which voters come to regret having made the choice they did; Condorcet, Borda counting, and Range voting tend to minimize voter remorse, but may introduce tactical and strategic voting. It the end, it would seem that no voting system is free from difficulty, but each is instead a series of uncomfortable trade-offs. Views of Representation Beyond the system of choosing representatives, issues over the meaning of representation itself tend also to influence the conduct of officeholders whose purpose is inherently representative. These issues tend to be defined along two distinct variables: Responsiveness to Constituents and Constituent Composition. For the first variable, a representative may assume the role of trustee, whose duty according to the 18th Century Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke is to use information and deliberation to “enlarge and refine the public will.” In this view of representation, representatives are not required to be responsive to the petitions or demands of their constituents, but are instead trusted to make decisions so that constituents don’t have to be bothered with them. On the other extreme, a representative may instead assume the role of an instructed delegate, in which the representative acts in accordance with the will of his constituents as if he has been given specific orders from them which he is bound to follow. One must recall, however, that most representatives tend to vacillate somewhere between these two extreme positions, choosing instead to adopt a mixed form of representation, neither wholly responsive nor wholly unresponsive to their constituents. Such positions may be called either “politicos” or the “conscience based” representative, depending on whether the representative tends towards trusteeship until the public are aware and involved in a decision (the politico) or whether a popular proposal conflicts with the delegate’s sense of propriety or ethics (the conscience view). The second representation variable, Constituent Composition, may also be viewed as a form of Symbolic Representation, which according to Davidson and Olezsky in various editions of Congress and its Members, tends to enhance the quality of representation for particular groupings of constituents if members of that group are present in a representative body, if for no other reason than the group itself gains visibility and legitimacy as a distinct entity or community within the larger political system. These groups may be ideological in character, or they may represent specific political parties, demographic identity groups, especially ethnic or religious groups, or they may be defined by geographic groupings. In most representative systems, at least one of these sets of constituents is institutionalized, forming the fundamental basis of official representation. Single-member district systems institutionalize geographic representation, while majoritarian/plurality systems tend to institutionalize a small number of political parties in terms of probability of electoral success. Proportional representation systems may institutionalize political parties, or they may institutionalize demographic identity groups, depending on how the proportionality is defined. Each of these views of representation presents significant advantages as well as defects. The trustee, for example, is able to use his or best judgement when levels of public knowledge about a particular issue are low; however, they tend to be unresponsive to the concerns of their constituents and are often disconnected from public experience, aloof from their own constituents. Delegates, on the other hand, are often highly sensitive to constituent concerns, and serve as an obvious voice of the public. Unfortunately, they may also be broadly viewed as spineless officials, unable to act when the public is unaware of an issue, and constantly seeking approval from their constituents. Politicos are able to balance responsiveness with discretion, and will respond to constituents on the issues which they find the most salient. However, they are often perceived as insincere, disingenuous or “two-faced”, yet while they tend to suffer low approval ratings, they may repeatedly return to office, depending on the voting system. On the other hand, conscientious representatives are usually responsive to their constituents and can demonstrate their adherence to certain ethical principles on the most troubling matters, but they may be widely perceived as having betrayed their constituents and must repeatedly explain their actions to them. When considering the symbolic representation of particular political cleavages within the representative framework, one finds similar benefits and defects. The ideological representative is consistent and reliable, predictably making decisions that are consistent with his or her deeply held political principles. However, ideologues are widely criticized for their inability or unwillingness to make necessary compromises for the greater interest of the community, and are often labeled “stubborn” or “close-minded”. Partisans, by contrast, are also consistent, to the point where if one is familiar with a particular party’s platform, one also knows exactly how the partisan representative is likely to vote in policy decisions made by the body as a whole. Unfortunately, one may also criticize partisans for their slavish devotion to his or her party’s agenda, and constituents in single-member districts especially are likely to dismiss the representative entirely unless they belong to the same political party. Demographic representatives may certainly give Voice to the particular demographic group they represent, and indeed may work diligently to secure the interests of that particular group based on an intimate knowledge of the issues important to them. However, they will also have to answer charges of either latent or over bigotry, and at worst will only represent the interests of the group to which they belong. Finally, geographic representatives are often locally attached, entering into public service under conditions which, as Publius states in Federalist #57, “cannot fail to produce a temporary affection at least to their constituents”. They are sensitive to the salient issues of their particular home district, and tend to advocate policies and positions beneficial to that district. However, geographic representatives are widely perceived as ignorant or provincial, unable to see beyond their own particular district. As with voting systems, representation systems also carry their own defects, especially the problem of forming a compromise coalition and the problem representation failure, also known as the “Lost Voice.” Compromise coalitions are most likely to appear in proportional representation systems regardless of the terms of proportionality, yet least likely to appear in single-member district systems (following Duverger’s Law). However, the probability of the “lost voice” is greatest in single-member districts and majoritarian/plurality systems and least in proportional representative systems. Some representation systems have attempted to resolve this conflict through structural reform, such as the establishment of mixed bicameralism where one chamber follows one representation system while the other follows another. Others attempt to enable mixed representation in both chambers, and soon experience legislative impedance so severe that the body itself is unable to act, divided as it were between two different representational systems within each chamber. This phenomenon was seen especially in the Diet of Japan, parliament of Thailand, and the Congresses of Mexico and Venezuela. Interest One consequence of participatory and representative political systems is the need to contend with matters of interest; indeed, this set of issues is not unique to participatory governments but is in fact common to virtually all government systems regardless of constitutional form. As Machiavelli asserted in the early 16th Century, “It is a thing truly natural and ordinary to desire to acquire.” (Prince Ch. 3) Many organized groups with a common interest that seek to influence policy frequently claim they are working for the sake of the entire community, but given the diversity and range of interests that prevail in participatory and representative government systems, however, even identifying a “public interest” can be a daunting task. Take, for instance, the following Condorcet Map of the intersection of policy positions concerning Tax Policy and Border Security Policy. While the map lacks precision, it is intended instead to illustrate a common problem related to identifying a policy positions in what is called the “public interest”. In the map, one can plot the positions of members of various interest groups along two independent variables. On the Tax Policy variable, those who favor increased tax revenue would be placed more to the left side of the map, while those who prefer to lower the tax burden would be placed on the right. Those who prefer a mixture would be placed somewhere between these two extremes. On the Border Openness and Security continuum, those who favor an open border would appear in the upper end of the map, while those who favor a secure border would appear near the bottom, and those who prefer both would appear in the middle. The aggregate of members found within certain general domains are generally described by geometric shapes, in this case circles. The longer or wider the shape, the larger range of preferences along the dimension the length or width described.

Figure 1XX: Ranges of preferences among sample interests In the above example, determining the “public interest” presents a unique challenge, at least among the interests represented. The legislative platforms of Democrats and Republicans in the sample map indicate a wide range of preferences along both variables described, as does the legislative platform of the League for United Latin American Citizens and the hypothetical set of policy preferences for a group defined by “blue collar independents”. However, there are no positions on both Border Policy and Tax Policy shared by all of the groups described. However, a range of preferences held in common between Democrats and Republicans in the diagram suggests a common interest between the two parties and LULAC. However, if the two parties agree on this position and define this for themselves as the common interest between, one may expect partial support from LULAC members, and no support from Blue Collar Independents. The Tea Party platform, by contrast, is contained entirely within two preference groups, namely the Republicans and the Blue Collar Independents. If these three groups pursue the common interest among their respective groups, neither Democrats nor LULAC will support them. In this scenario, no single pair of policy positions could be defended as the “public” or mutually shared, interest among all groups depicted, and some form of Conflict is likely to emerge as a result of these groups communicating their positional differences. Another problem related to organized interest concerns the nature of interest groups themselves. Often conflated with faction, interest groups may consist of any number of individuals who share a common interest, varying degrees of organization, and actively seek to influence policy. Factions, on the other hand, are defined in Federalist #10 as any “number of citizens…united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interest of the community.” Hence some, but not necessarily all, interest groups are factious and vice versa. Regulating interest group activity can be difficult to accomplish, especially in participatory governments founded on some conception of a common good or interest or, like the United States, to control “the mischiefs of faction.” In either case, individuals organize to advance some common interest, whether to protect economic interests, to advance some social movement, to seek benefits from the governments they petition, or generally respond to or influence the shape of policy within the political system in which they operate. Limiting interest group activity may run counter to the very premise of participation and representation; however, unregulated interest group activity can also frustrate effective representation. Generally speaking, interest groups in participatory and representative governments influence policy through two principal vectors: direct access and indirect pressure. In the direct approach, interest groups gain access to policymakers through the mechanism of lobbying: private meetings and public hearings in which agents of the interest group may deliver legislative proposals, research and related testimony designed to persuade the policymakers to adopt positions favorable to the group’s interests. They may also lure policymakers into these meetings and hearings by orchestrating social events, publishing research and ratings lists in which their target policymakers are ranked strategically to provoke a response, and they may even endorse an elected official or contribute resources to an official’s campaign. Interest Groups form and re-form with a view to gaining access, at times pooling their resources in short-term tactical alliances with others wherever specific policy points converge. The indirect approach focuses on generating public pressure to advocate the group’s position. Through advertisement, for example, the organized interest may call attention to an issue about which the public may have been previously unaware, and attempt to affect the public image of the interest itself so that the public will favor their position or oppose their opponents’ In participatory régimes that attempt to regulate the activities of formal lobbyists, organized interest groups may substitute public pressure for professional lobbyist in order to evade regulation, encouraging constituents to contact their representatives and other policymakers through petitions and letter campaigns. Finally, organized interests are likely to establish long- term strategic alliances in order to reinforce their public presence and establish a broad network of supporters. The impact of interest groups tends to be magnified in political systems where the ratio of representation is high, and the level of citizen participation is low. In the first case, a high ratio of representation diminishes the voice of individual constituents to a level where constituents perceive themselves disconnected entirely from their putative representatives, often ignorant of who they even are. This problem forces individuals who seek to participate to do so through a second tier of representation based on their specific interests. In the second case, low levels of citizen participation produce a similar disconnect with government institutions, leaving citizens ambivalent, disaffected, apathetic or even fatalistic about their relationship with their government, leaving only those organized interests who directly access officials in government to have any impact on public policy. However, thanks to low levels of citizen participation, these groups often must be bankrolled by an even smaller group of individuals with sufficient resources to support the organization’s efforts. Gilens and Page’s research in “Testing Theories of American Politics” (Perspectives on Politics vol. 12 No. 3) illustrates this effect on public policy in the United States, where both conditions prevail, leaving public policy largely to be steered by a handful of billionaires. Colomer’s Propositions Revisited Having explored Classical, Modern, Post-modern, and Contemporary political thought, as well as the broad areas of inquiry and the methods of political study, we now return to Colomer’s Thirty Propositions about political phenomena, in order to determine their role in the broader study of politics. The logical framework within which he develops the Thirty Propositions for The Science of Politics appears to be informed by an informal variant of the formalized model of Rational Choice Game Theory, originating with the work of von Neumann and Morgenstern in Mathematics and Economics. This is made most clear in his first set of Propositions, those about Action. From the larger perspective of the discipline as a whole, Rational Choice Game Theory tends to fit best in a normative theoretical framework that takes self-serving action as axiomatic; that, as Machiavelli says, men are “fickle, hypocrites and dissemblers, evaders of dangers, lovers of gain.” Colomer’s debt to this worldview is especially evident in Proposition 2, where the wealthier and more participatory a political system is, the more the public will demand of their government, and the more the government will be constrained by the necessity of providing the goods they demand. Additionally, Propositions 4 and 7 contain a restatement and elaboration of Machiavelli’s dictum that “while you do them good they are wholly yours, offering you blood, and goods and life and sons, when need is far off; but when it approaches, then they revolt.” Propositions 5 and 6 are direct Rational Choice Game Theoretical concepts, specifically describing the infamous Prisoner’s Dilemma. Colomer’s Propositions about the Polis, especially Propositions 8-10, borrow heavily from Enlightenment thinking about government size and the need for multi-level governance for the sake of efficiency, positing specific components of Federal Systems as axiomatic. Proposition 11 describes the basic character of dictatorship within the context of Rational Choice, where the dictator must use a combination of active repression and positive substantive performance, again echoing the central Machiavellian dictum of self-interest. From here Colomer proposes a reciprocal relationship between economic development and participatory governments, and posits that such systems are less likely to engage in war than dictatorships, a claim with face validity since dictatorships involve a self-appointed monopoly of power through coercion and violence already. The next set of propositions, unique to Election systems in participatory governments, is more narrowly focused than Action and the Polis, yet they nevertheless proceed from the same set of assumptions as those of Action and the Polis. The tendency of all political systems toward functional oligarchy in Proposition 15 reflects Proposition 7’s assertion of the “Leader/Follower” dynamic, while Proposition 16 is a function of Voice vs. Exit among activists seeking to become Leaders within their party. The Median Voter hypothesis constitutes the reciprocal phenomenon to Extreme Activists, and allegedly serves to moderate the extreme activists within a party. Propositions 19-21 depend on the same fundamental claim about perceived self-interest as the earlier propositions about Action. The last nine Propositions deal with Government itself, and are largely derived from observed phenomena in legislative assemblies and from the formation of executive offices. For this set of propositions, Colomer employs a different set of tools. Where the first three sets of propositions may be derived from Rational Choice Game Theory and either corroborated or challenged through empirical observation, the Propositions about Government describe generalizations based on empirical observations about the behavior of governments, such as the “Micro-Mega” Rule (Proposition 24) and Electoral Diversity in Federal Systems (Proposition 26). Based on the character of these propositions, we may reasonably assert that not only does Colomer work within the framework of Rational Choice Game Theory; he also draws from the well of empirical observation in search of new axioms, following the lead of the behavioralists. In his Thirty Propositions about Politics, Colomer also appears to embrace a normative claim about the phenomena he describes, especially favoring stability and central tendencies as acceptable norms of political action or behavior. However, he stops short of making any explicitly prescriptive claim about the political phenomena his propositions are intended to explore, with the possible exception of his claim that “Dictatorships Fall and Fail.” Again, none of the thirty propositions address questions of legitimacy, telos, or justice, which suggests that Colomer is largely unconcerned with the Classical understanding of political science as in any way architectonic. Rather, his clear debt to Machiavelli’s conception of Necessity indicates a more or less Modern, Rationalist, and Utilitarian approach to political science as primarily descriptive of political processes. Colomer’s preference for participatory government and Federal systems rests not on an ethical foundation, but rather a practical and expedient one. Hence, like most specialists in the discipline, Josep Colomer illuminates one set of methods and areas of inquiry while obscuring others. They may certainly fit within the larger framework of the discipline as a whole, specifically as a synthesis of Modern Political Science research methods and Rational Choice Game Theory, but under no conditions should his putative survey of generalized claims about ordered communities be taken to encompass the full scope of the field.