1

      THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF POLITICAL THEORY

      What is Political Theory?

Every complex civilization with a state and organized leadership is bound to generate reflection on the relations between leader and led, rulers and subjects, command and obedience. Whether it takes the form of systematic philosophy, poetry, parable or proverb, in oral traditions or in the written word, we can call it political thought. But the subject of this book is one very particular mode of political thinking that emerged in the very particular historical conditions of ancient Greece and developed over two millennia in what we now call Europe and its colonial outposts.¹

      For better or worse, the Greeks invented their own distinctive mode of political theory, a systematic and analytical interrogation of political principles, full of laboriously constructed definitions and adversarial argumentation, applying critical reason to questioning the very foundations and legitimacy of traditional moral rules and the principles of political right. While there have been many other ways of thinking about politics in the Western world, what we think of as the classics of Western political thought, ancient and modern, belong to the tradition of political theory established by the Greeks.

      Other ancient civilizations in many ways more advanced than the Greeks – in everything from agricultural techniques to commerce, navigation, and every conceivable craft or high art – produced vast literatures on every human practice, as well as speculations about the origins of life and the formation of the universe. But, in general, the political order was not treated as an object of systematic critical speculation.

      We can, for example, contrast the ancient Greek mode of political speculation about principles of political order with the philosophy of ethical precept, aphorism, advice and example produced by the far more complex and advanced civilization of China, which had its own rich and varied tradition of political thought. Confucian philosophy, for instance, takes the form of aphorisms on appropriate conduct, proverbial sayings and exemplary anecdotes, conveying its political lessons not by means of argumentation but by subtle allusions with complex layers of meaning. Another civilization more advanced than classical Greece, India, produced a Hindu tradition of political thought lacking the kind of analytical and theoretical speculation that characterized Indian works of moral philosophy, logic and epistemology, expressing its commitment to existing political arrangements in didactic form without systematic argumentation. We can also contrast classical political philosophy to the earlier Homeric poetry of heroic ideals, models and examples or even to the political poetry of Solon, on the eve of the classical polis.

      The tradition of political theory as we know it in the West can be traced back to ancient Greek philosophers – notably, Protagoras, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle – and it has produced a series of ‘canonical’ thinkers whose names have become familiar even to those who have never read their work: St Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hegel, Mill, and so on. The writings of these thinkers are extremely varied, but they do have certain things in common. Although they often analyze the state as it is, their principal enterprise is criticism and prescription. They all have some conception of what constitutes the right and proper ordering of society and government. What is conceived as ‘right’ is often based on some conception of justice and the morally good life, but it may also derive