Political Philosophy: From Plato to Mao

1. "What characterises political and social philosophy is an awareness and a commitment to answering - or at least facing up to - certain great questions:

What is happiness? (Human flourishing?)

What is justice?

What is freedom?

Only secondly can we ask:

How can happiness be maximised?

How can justice and equality best be achieved?

How can human rights be respected?

        The origins of the word 'political' itself come, like so many others, from Ancient Greece: 'politikos', pertaining to the running of the city, or 'polis'. In this sense, political philosophy is concerned with the very practical matters of administration. For that reason, Plato's 'Republic' discusses not only such obscure matters as the nature of goodness, but also the merits and demerits of various constitutional systems. Machiavelli writes not only of successful duplicity, but also of storming castles and military tactics, and Mill concerns himself not only with liberty, but with corn prices."

2. "...'political philosophy' remains a much wider and deeper subject, concerned with fundamental questions about equality, needs and interests, welfare, and human nature."

"As Durkheim later put it, through social rules and conventions, we define and create ourselves."

3. "For the concerns, subject matter and even the methods of the philosophers depend on their epoch, and reflect both the ethical and 'epistemological' assumptions of their contemporaries. In medieval Europe, for instance, the greatest political issue of the day was the battle for ultimate authority between church and state, a struggle eventually resolved in favour of the secular. In the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the primary issue became that of how the state should use this power, whether as absolutism or within the constraints of a limiting constitutional framework. By the nineteenth century, with increasing industrialisation, the emphasis had changed again to debates over social issues, a process caried forward into the last hundred years with a new language of human rights and international relations.

        The ancient oracle at Delphi is said to have advised seekers after wisdom, Socrates amongst them, that the key task was to 'know thyself'. Later, indeed, Pope said that the proper study of man was man. Now, apart from the obvious lack of political correctness in such a statement, there is another, more important ambiguity. Is it 'man', as an individual or 'man' as a collective noun - that 'great Leviathan', society itself - to be studied? In an age of rampant political and social individualism, yet also a time when the lives of individuals are only possible through an increasingly complex web of collective efforts, it is more important than ever to return to the fundamentals of political and social philosophy."

5. I Ching. Perhaps the oldest book.

6. "Sumerian writing developed rapidly and soon offered representations far more powerful than just the amounts of sheep and goats or other 'things', albeit still always in the cumbersome form of one 'sign' for each idea. But the next major event in the story of the influence of writing only comes around 1000BC, as the Phoenicians and the Greeks developed the first alphabets.

        The Phoenicians were also amongst the first people to set sail and begin to systematically develop trade (as opposed to just plunder). And it was around this time that they discovered in Spain a valuable source of the attractive and useful metal, silver. The silver was not the most significant factor, in social terms, however. Rather the fact that they immediately began to fortify the trade routes to prevent others from joining in. These military outposts developed into towns, such as Carthage in North Africa, which, in due course, became social and indeed cultural centres in their own right. When the Greeks followed suit 250 years or so later, developing a string of colonies along the coast of the Aegean, a new Mediterranean). They would have had little long-term influence had it not been, paradoxically, for the military success of one of their enemies. The Roman Empire, with its unprecedentedly well-organised and efficient armies and navies, enabled many of the Greek political and social innovations to be adopted, adapted and, above all, spread.

        So it was through the Romans that the Greeks would set the style of the new world. Even if it was still based on what was only an Iron Age economy, dependent on slavery for the production of goods, it was enough to support the corresponding, new intellectual and political elites, with their polished cultural and intellectual structures. Athens, in particular, lucky enough to find its own rich vein of silver at the mines of Laurion, was able to grow to become a city of an unprecedented 35,000 people, making it then by far the world's largest city. Even after building the all-important warships, Athens still had money to spare, which the city wisely spent on making itself the most beautiful in the world. And Athens spawned more than just magnificent buildings. It produced a sophisticated and politically active citizenry who delighted in poetry, music, theatre and, of course, philosophy. It is these intangible investments by the ancient Greeks that left a legacy of thought, first amongst them the writings of Plato, which has yet to be exhausted."

7. Citizens of Rome had free food, bread, and eventually cooking oil and meat; and free entertainment at the Colosseum. "But if Athens was exceptional in supporting some tens of thousands of inhabitants, Rome went seeral steps further. By the reign of the Emperor Augustus, it was home to hundreds of thousands of citizens, all supported (in a system to make conservatives today quail) for free by the Imperial government. One of the main responsibilities of the paternalistic Roman state, along with the provision of public entertainments, was the safe delivery of bread to the people. Grain was brought from the fertile Nile delta in Egypt in specially built freighters, and was stored in huge warehouses in the capital, ready to be baked and distributed. And in later years, the government added in free cooking oil and meat as well. But, it is for the provision of free cooking oil and meat as well. But, it is for the provision of free mass entertainment that Ancient Rome is most notorious. This was on an equally massive scale to the supply of food. The Colosseum alone catered for 50,000 spectators under a cunningly designed canvas roof there to keep the hot Roman sun off them. Ultimately, though, even such remarkable engineering feats were insufficient to keep disaster a bay. With such an enormous population located in such cramped conditions, their city was too far ahead of its time, too big for its physical well-being - and too underemployed for its mental well-being. It slowly succumbed to both corruption and disease. Yet, for all that, Rome was the first truly 'cosmopolitan' society - of a type which is easily recognisable today, even across the ages.

        After its destruction by the northern barbarian hordes, Europe declined and produced little of consequence for the next thousand years. It became locked instead into a petty and credulous mindset where the human spirit was ruled by a mixture of fear and force - the force of armies and the fear of damnation. (This is why our chronology of political thought jumps so abruptly from the Greeks to the Renaissance.) Not until after the year 1500, did the 'rise of science' (perhaps together again with a period of benign climatic warming) begin to provide the conditions for the great thinkers of the Enlightenment to renew social progress. This is the backdrop for the writings of Niccolo Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes."

8. London's population in the mid-1700s was nearly 700,000. Paris, nearly a quarter million. During this time 3/4 of children born did not live to age 5. Tech such as the spinning jenny of the 1760s, waterwheel-powered cotton mills, and steam engine helped bring poverty and prosperity to the new industrial cities.

1787. George Washington amends the British constitutional example to form a 'tripartite' system: executive, "upper and lower houses of 'parliament' passing laws, and an independent system of justice charged with its duty to watch all the time on behalf of the citizens for infrigements of their liberty"

9. French goverenment was left impoverished by its support of the American Revolution, attempting to find a new constitution, worstened by the need to raise new taxes. 14 July 1789, the mob stormed the Bastile. Heads rolled. First the Royal family "(inherited power), followed by the clergy (divine power, in the form of priests and nuns both), finally finishing up (as it usually does) with the political 'reformists'. France thus pioneered a new form of socialist anarchy which would continue for several years until its antithesis, the military dictatorship..." lead by Nepoleon Bonapart.

10. Internal combustion engine 1859. At the end of the century adapted run on petrol and oil produced and marketed by Benz and Daimler. "Henry Ford's dream of a mass-produced car for the new class of consumers had introduced two new 'tools' to the art of making things: 'time and motion' studies and the 'production line'. The first model-Ts were towed around the Detroit works by two men with a rope, each car taking twelve hours to assemble, for an output of 100 vehicles a day. By the end of the first year, with the assembly line completed, production time was down to just an hour and a half, and the factory was turning out 5,000 cars a week."

Consumer credit created in the 1920s. By 1932 production had halved in America. Car market fell to 1/10 to that of 1929.

13.

"

Timeline: From Prehistory to Plato

ABOUT 6000-7000 YEARS AGO

Neolithic pottery fragments provide first clues as to early writing and social life.

ABOUT 3400 BC

Construction of Stonehenge begun in Acient Britain, actually originally made of wood.

ABOUT 3000 BC

Menes, King of Upper Egyptian region, conquers the Nile Delta and becomes Pharaoh in a world previously group only by tribes or cities, of the first nation state. Egypt, at this time, was made up essentially of villages. The first writeen records on papyrus date from this period.

2500 BC

The first pyramid constructed. Not smooth but stepped like a ziggurat, to conduct the Pharaoh Zoser into the next world.

1700 BC

In China, an early use for writing is for fortune telling by burning bones with names and symbols scratched on them. In the Middle East, another early use is for issuing laws to the general public, greatly increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of the law-making process. The 'Eye for an Eye' code is published by Hamurabi setting out precise penalties for all types of wrongdoing.

ABOUT 1500 BC

The first writing systems using alphabets, that is with symbols for combinations of consonants and vowels, are developed in the Middle East.

ABOUT 750 BC

The first true alphabet, with separate signs for consonants and vowels developed by the Greeks, who, together with the Lydians become the first people to use coins. (The first banknotes have to wait until the middle of the seventeenth century, AD 1658, when they are issued in Stockholm.)

ABOUT 500 BC

In China, Confucius teaches the five virtues of humanity, courtesy, honesty, moral wisdom and steadfastness.

ABOUT 420 BC

Another early use for writing is for the cataloguing of doctrine, which yields powerful religious works. The 'Ramayama' becomes main work in Hinduism. The first five books of the Christian Bible, the Hebrew 'Torah', tradially ascribed to Moses, are written at this time.

399 BC

Socrates, Plato's teach and inspiration, is executed by the first Athenian democracy, for heretical views.

15. Plato's Utopia. "It has been said that all subsequent philosophy is merely a footnote to Plato, and this is certainly true of political philosophy. Plato's Reppublic sketches out the fundamentals of political theory. The origins of society, it suggests, are in practial self-interest. But although the pursuit of wealth motivates all, it must not motivate the rulers-- the Guardians. Plato sees two main threats to society, either external - requiring a military response, or internal - requiring a political response. Internal threats are minimised by ensuring the ruling class are there solely on merit, and receive no rewards other than satisfaction from performing their duty and achieving a well-ordered society."

"Democritus observed that 'one should think it of greater moment than anything else that the affairs of state are conducted well', neither being 'contentious beyond what is proper' nor 'allotting strength to oneself beyond the common good'. For a state which is conducted well 'is the best means to success: everything depends on this, and if this is preserved, everything is preserved and if this is destroyed everything is destroyed'."

16. "Socrates is portraye dthere as the wise one, extolling the need to come to know the 'Good', or to be precise 'the Form of the Good'."

"Plato was born about 40 years after Socrates, and knew him only in his last years. He grew up during the Peloponnesian wars, which ended in 401 BC with the defeat of Athens, followed by a putsch by a small group of aristocrats which, after only eight months, degenerated into a tyranny counting in due course among its victims Socrates himself, on charges of 'impiety' and 'corrupting the young'. "

17. "Justice is to Plato the 'correct ordering' of the organism."

19. In regard to idle living, "Plato argues...'in time, the desire for a life of idle luxury will inevitably lead to conflict', and the land which was once large enough to support the original inhabitants will now be too small, 'If we are to have enough pasture and plough land, we shall have to content with necessities, but give themselves up to getting unlimited wealth, they will want a slice of ours.' requiring an army 'to go out to battle with any invader, in defence of all this property and of the citizens we have been describing'

20. Plato says in the work Phaedo, 'All wars are made for the sake of getting money'.

"The young are selected for aptitude, and brought up in a tightly controlled environment by older Guardians. It is a community of Spartan simplicity, free of the distractions of family ties and bonds. Goods are held in common, unlike the situation for lowly industrious classes of the republic, who are allowed to accumulate private property. But the Guardians must further protect it by ensuring that the state does not grow too large, and by perserving the principle of promotion only on merit - there must be no hereditary governing class. Generally the balance of the state is akin to the need for balance in the individual. 'When a man surrenders himself to music, allowing his soul to be flooded through the channels of his ears with those sweet and soft and mournful airs we spoke of, and gives up all his time to the delights of song and melody, then at first he tempers the high-spirited part of his nature, like iron whose brittleness is softened to make it serviceable; but if he persists in subduing to such an incantation, he will end by melting away altogether.' He will have 'cut the sinews of his soul'.

21. "...men and women are equal. He says that they must share the same education and practice the same occupations 'both in peace and war', and that they should be governed by 'those of their number who are best'. As in Athens, at the time, women lived in seclusion and took no part in politics or most of social life, Plato's suggestion that they should have equal opportunities to become Guardians was quite revolutionary." "...souls have no gender."

22. Totalitarianism. "...particularly censured for his approach to the arts and education, with children being brought up by the state rather than by parents." "Offspring  were instead to be reared collectively by everyone, using the guiding principles of eugenics to sort the good from the not-so-promising. By destroying family ties, Plato believed it would be possible to create a more united governing class, and avoid the dangers of rivalry and oligarchy. Inferior children would be demoted to the appropriate class. In the perfect state, women too would be 'held in common' producing the children for the state, and there would be no permanent marriage or pair-bonding. As for the upbringing of the childen, his aim is primarily to get people to think for themselves, rather than to put thoughts into their heads. Education is too important to be left to parents in any case, and so all children would essentially be brought up by the state. But the child is not to be passive, but active in the learning process. It is not indoctrrination, Plato imagines, as the teacher can only try to show the 'source of the light'. As Plato says at one point: 'A free man ought not to learn anything under duress. Compulsory physical exercise does no harm to the body, but compulsory learning never sticks in the mind.' And he advices: 'Don't use compulsion, but let your children's lessons take the appearance of play.'

        However, Plato is insistent on the need to control the influences on developing minds, and does advocate strict censorship of poetry and literature." Anticipating Nazism, Soviet Russia, or Orwell's 1984, Plato says, 'Our first business is to supervise the production of stories and choose only those we think suitable and reject the rest... Nor shall any young audience be told that anyone who commits horrible crimes, or punishes his father unmercifully is doing nothing out of the ordinary but merely what the first and greatest of the gods have done before.'

24. "Plato's republic , the justly ordered state, will exemplify the following virtues:

* wisdom - in the manner of its ruling

* courage - in the manner of its defending;

* temperance - in the acceptance of all of the system of government

Plato tried to show how the ideal state would fail. "There is the 'timocratic state' (Greek time: honour), where ambition has become the motivating force of the rulers. In Plato's republic, the danger is that of divided ruling class of Guardians beginning to compete amongst each other. (Timocracy was often an element in the competition amongst the aristocracy in the Middle Ages in Europe, for example.)

'Once civil strife is born, the two parties will begin to pull different ways: the breed of iron and brass towards moneymaking and the possession of house and land, silver and gold; while the other two, wanting no other wealth than the gold and silver in the composition of their souls, try to draw them towards virtue and the ancient ways. But the violence of their contention ends in a compromise: they agree to distribute land and houses for private ownership; they enslave their own people who formerly lived as free men under their guardianship and gave them maintenance; and holding them as serfs and menials, devote themselves to war and to keeping these subjects under watch and ward.'

"...usurpers will fear merit and tend towards authoritarianism. They will become greedy, avaricious and secretive, 'cultivating the body in preference to the mind and saving nothing for the spirit'.

        In time, an elite emerges, defined by wealth. This is 'oligarchy', or rule of a clique.

'As the rich rise in esteem, the virtuous sink... the competitive spirit of ambition in these people turns into mere passion fo gain; they despise the poor and promote the rich, who win all the prizes and receive all the adulation.'

26. Greek democracy had, "...meetings of all citizens, that is citizens with no particular knowledge or claim to qualification.

        So democracy was, in this sense, 'an agreeable form of anarchy with plenty of variety', liberty,  'its noblest possession'. But worse still, the demo cratic state was vulnerable to sinking into tyranny. This at least was Plato's objecttion to democracy, and it has a certain plausibility, even piquancy, being presented in the dialogues as coming from Socrates, who was one that system's first victims. Because it is almost anarchic in form, it must gradually settle into three classes: the capitalists (not that Plato uses the term), gradually accumulating wealth; the common people, disinterested in politics but just working steadily away, and the sharks and demagogues, perpetually looking for a way to usurp the system for quick personal gain. Inevitably, one such will succeed and seize control, which he then can only maintain by despotism. Although, in

'the early days he has a smile and a greeting for everyone he meets; disclaims any absolute power; makes large promises to his freinds and to the public; sets about the relief of debtors and the distribution of land to the people and to his supporters; and assumes a mild and gracious air...'

It does not last for long. Soon he will be provoking wars and conflict as a means of ensuring power at home, and purging his followers as well as his enemies.

        Plato's aversion to tyranny was shared by Aristotle, for 20 years one of his pupils in the Greek forums, and one of three candidates for Plato's post as Head of the Academy. However, like many job candidates since, he was to be disappointed - the job went to Plato's nephew, Speusippus. Aristotle left Athens after this, but writing later, in his description of the rule of the tyrant he seems to speak of a very modern age: ...'the forbidding of common meals, clubs, education and anything of a like character... the adoption of every means for making every subject as much of a stranger as possible to every other'.

        All citizens, Aristotle warned, would be constantly on view, and a secret police 'like the female spies employed at Syracuse, or the eavesdroppers sent by the tyrant Hiero to all social gatherings' would be eployed to sow fear and distrust. For these are the essential and characteric hallmarks of tyrants. "

27. Aristotle. "As a part of his practical bent, he was naturally particularly concerned a the fractious naure of the Greek city state in his time (the fourth century BC.) The states were small, but that did not stop them continually splitting into factions that fought amongst themselves. A whole book of Aristotle's political theory is devoted to this problem. But let us step back a moment to put Aristotle into perspective.

        Aristotle was born 15 years after the execution of Socrates, in 384 BC, and, as we have seen, studied at the Academy in Athens under Plato until Plato died peacefully in 347 BC. After this,, Aristotle went out of favour with the mathematicians of the academy, and left Greece for Asia Minor where he concentrated for the next five years on developing his philosophy and biology. He returned to Macedonia to be tutor to the future Alexander the Great, which might have been an opportunity for him to inculcate his political views, but if he did try to do so, there is little evidence of him succeeding. In any case Aristotle seems to have been largely oblivious to the social and geopolitical changes that were already making his 'Politics' largely irrelevant.

        For even whilst Aristotle was teaching about the 'polis' in the Lyceum, Alexander was already planning an empire in which he would rule the whole of Greece and Persia, producing a new society in which both Greeks and barbarians would become, as Plutarch later put it, 'one flock on a common pasture' feeding under one law. For almost two millenia, the area was to see no more city states, but instead a succession of empires. The rule of Macedonia, of Rome, and of Charlemagne came and went. It would only be in the Middle Ages that Aristotle's ideas would be rediscovered by St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas and, through the eventual marriage of the Catholic Church with the state, become at all influential.

        Aristotle sees the origin of the state differently from Plato, stating explicitly that 'a State is not a sharing of a locality for the purpose of preventing mutual harm and promoting trade'. True to his being a keen biologist first, a metaphysician second, he believed the state should be understood as an organism with a purpose, in this case, to promote happiness, or 'eudaimonia'. Of course, this is only a particular type of happiness, quintessentially that of philosophical contemplation, that the Greeks - or at least the philosophers! - valued most." "...Aristotle's theory of human society is actually fundamentally different from Socrates' and Plato's."

28. "...Aristotle identified three 'genera': monarchy, aristocracy and constitutional government, or 'polity'. These represented respectively, power of the one, power of the few - and power of the many." "And, although armed for their defence, states should not be either militaristic or expansionary. After all, they would rapidly then get too big."

29. "The best form of this paternalistic state is, it follows, the rule of a king. As ever, Aristotle offeeres a tidy arrangement. When 'either a whole family or a particular individual is so remarkable in point of excellence that his excellence exceeds that of everyone else, then it is just that that family or that individual should be king and sovereign over all matters'. If there were really no suitable candidates 'the view of the multitude... should be sovereign'. Even though the views of any one individual might not be so wise, it was still possible that when they all come together, the opinions might be better. Just as, Aristotle adds (presumably from bitter personal experience), communal dinners are better than those supplied at one person's expense."

"In a letter written from prison, Socrates is described by Plato awaiting execution at the hands of the Athenian democracy. Plato recalls Socrates saying:

'I came to the conclusion that all existing states were badly governed, and that their constitutions were incapable of reform without drastic treatment and a great deal of good luck. I was forced, in fact, to the belief that the only hope of finding justice for society or for the individual lay in true philosophy, and that mankind will have no respite from trouble until either real philosophers gain political power or politicians become by some miracle true philosophers.

This is the theme of the 'Republic'.

Key Ideas

Plato's version of the origins of political society is Marx's 'materialist conception of history'; his picture of self-interest governing economic relations is both Hobbes' social contract and Smith's hidden hand; there is liberalism in the strategy of mitigating the effects of either extreme wealth or extreme poverty; and there is even a type of utilitarianism at work in ascribing to the ruler the task of maximising happiness (and the 'Good').

        But Plato's most important influence comes from the suggestion that the natural and most 'efficient' form of social organisation is one in which individuals and classes have different roles and specialisations. Plato justifies using this to create both an educational and a social hierarchy. That hierachy is the factor that, above all others, determines the practical reality of society.

* People come together naturally and start to specialise.

* The state is like an individual - with a head, a heart and a body. It is most successful when the parts can fulfil their different functions.

31. Timeline: From the First Exams to the Renaissance Artists

ABOUT 300 BC

The ancient Indian philosopher Kautilya produces the 'Arthasatra', a ruthless political work sometimes compared to 'The Prince', Kautilya describes a system in which the King is just one amongst seven powers, all charged with the sacred duty of safeguarding the welfare of the people.

ABOUT 150 BC

The Chinese use written examinations to select civil servants - but the process becomes tainted by the practice of training the applicants in the correct responses, a problem no examination system has yet overcome.

115 BC

High point of the Roman Empire - in 122 BC Emperor Hadrian builds Hadrian's Wall in Britain to defend the civilised areas from the Barbarians. In AD 212 citizenship is conferred on all free adults in the Empire.

AD 751

The first known printed book, a copy of the Buddhist 'Diamond Sutra'.

AROUND AD 850

In Persia, the mathematician AL Khwarizmi develops the first 'algorithms' and early 'algebra' - both named after him. Later, in the Middle East, the physicist Alhazen (965-1039) lays the foundations for the studies of mirrors and lenses.

AROUND AD 1000

In North America, early cities like Cahokia, now under St Louis, exceed medieval London and Paris in size and sophistication.

1042

First known use of movable type recorded in China. It is not until 1454 that Gutenberg uses movable type and an adapted wine press to print religious indulgences for Europeans.

AROUND 1100

The rise of the city in the West, particularly in Italy and northern Europe. Settlements such as Venice, Paris, Bruges and London contain populations over 10,000.

1315-19

Two significant technological breakthroughs. The invention of the verge and pallet escapement enables mechanical clocks to be installed on church towers, dividing up the day for the general public. (The Chinese had been using water clocks since around AD 1000.) Also at this time, the first guns capable of killing someone (other than their owners) are developed.

1430

Joan of Arc, the simple shepherd girl whose 'vision' inspires the French resistance enough to enable them to defeat the English invaders at Orleans, is captured by her fellow countrymen - the Burgundians - who sell her to the English. They burn her at the stake a few years later.

1434

Cosimo di Medici becomes 'de facto' ruler of Florence, and founds a dynasty that lasts until 1737, with the exception of a brief period when an 'anti-corruption' Friar, Savonarola, seizes power. This is the period of Italy's great 'Renaissance' of learning and culture.

1502-07

Leonardo da Vinci, as well as making a number of important discoveries and inventions, paints the Mona Lisa.

1508

And Michelangelo paints the Sistine Chapel.

1513

Machiavelli begins 'The Prince', the classic statement of the art of politics, published in 1532.

33. Chapter 2. Niccolo Machiavelli and the Psychology of the State

'Ironically perhaps, for one writing of 'princes', Machiavelli is the first writer to move way from the paternalism of traditional societ, towards something closer to our own notions of 'democracy'. In his writings, the masses, ignorant and vulgar though they may be, are better guardians of stability and liberty than individuals can ever become. And despite his reputation for cynicism, Machiavelli reminds us that injustice threatens the foundations of society from within, and urges that it always be combated - whever it appears and whoever it affects.'

"Sixteenth century Italy contained a number of elements that made it...fertile ground for all types of arts, philosophy and political thinking.

        Out of the whole of Europe, it was the least feudal, the most wealthy and the most politically diverse land. Its culture was sophisticated, urbane and secular, its administrative structure made up of city states or 'communes' presided over by their own 'princes' and governing cliques. As a result, the country was a patchwork quilt of oligarchies, like that of Venice, and tyrannies, like that in Milan. But in some (although in rather fewer) a third system had taken root.

        One such was Florence, the magnificent Italian city where Dante had written some centuries earlier not only of his vision of hell, the 'inferno', but of the politics of human society. Dante had asked the question why people should want to live peacefully and collectively together, when they could often gain more by either striking out alone, or by competing one against the other? And he answered it by supposing that social life was the best, indeed the only way, for them to develop their rational nature. But by the fifteenth century the ruling family in Florence, the Medicis, their name a byword for over-indulgence and corruption, had instead for a century promoted conflict between small traders and large powerful guilds as a means to gain and retain control. The opportunities for the people to develop their rationality had to wait until the Medicis were displaced by a Dominican friar, Savonarola, who took control of the city in the people's name."

Savonarola focused on morals rather than politics, the people became discouraged, and the Medici returned to power. Savonarola was executed in 1498. Machiavelli was a middle ranking civil servant during Savonarola's administration. Machiavelli was tortured after the regime change and eventually acquitted and allowed to peacefully retire to write items such as 'The Prince' (Il principo) and the 'Discourses (Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio - Discourses on the first Ten Books of Titus Livy).

35. "Michiavelli writes of, and for, a pre-industrial society, his notions are still - sometimes strikingly - relevant.  In sixteenth-century Italy, society and power were split between three groups: the land and peasantry, industry (such as it was), and the bureaucracy, of which Machiavelli had been a member."

36. "As he sardonically observes at one point: 'genuine virtue counts in difficult times, but when things are going well, it is rather to those whose popularity is due to wealth or parentage that men look'. And he [Michiavelli] had neither"

"Michiavelli dismisses the appearently successful but unscrupulous activities of Agathocles the Sicilian, who rose by means of wickedness from 'the lowest and most abject position' to become King of Syracuse as worthless. Agathocles was in the habit of playing tricks, such as calling the people and senate to discuss something, and then giving a signal to his soldiers to have them murdered. The real Machiavelli's conclusion is that the Sicilian may have succeeded in achieving power, but not 'in gaining glory'; the apocryphal Machiavelli is imagined to praise him.

        Perhaps Machiavelli's most controversial and unscrupulous claim is that if a prince must choose to be either feared or loved, it is better that he be feared, for 'love is held by a chain of obligation which [for] men, being selfish, is broken whenever it serves their purpose; but fear is maintained by a dread of punishment which never fails'. In this sense, he is Hobbes a century later, or even Mao Zedong in the twentieth century - Mao equally notorious for his aphorism, often quoted, that power comes out of the barrel of a gun. But, rather unlike Mao, Machiavelli's advice for princes includes the guidance that when: 'a Prince is obliged to take the life of any one, let him do so when there is a proper justification and manifest reason for it; but above all he must abstain from taking the property of others, for men forget more easily the death of their father than the loss of their patrimony.'

36. Machiavelli blamed the Roman Church for the political ruin of Italy. He writes, 'Our religion has glorified humble and contemplative men, rather than men of action. It has assigned as man's highest good humility, abnegation, and contempt for mundane things...' "The advice Machiavelli offers to would be rulers in Renaissance Europe instead is that: 'it is as well to... seem merciful, faithful, humane, sincere, religious and also to be so; but you must have the mind so disposed that when it is needful to be otherwise you may change to the opposite qualities... [and] do evil if constrained.'

39. Theory of society. 'In the beginning of the world, when its inhabitants were few, they lived for a time scattered like the beasts. Then, with the multiplication of their offspring, they drew together and, in order the better to be able to defend themselves, began to look about for a man stronger and more courageous than the rest, made him their head and obeyed him.'

"The Venetians are an example of this - the city resulted from numerous peoples seeking refuge from the daily wars of Italy after the decline. Eventually, 'without any particular person or prince to give them a constitution, they began to live as a community under laws which seemed appropriate for their maintenance'.

        What sort of communities? What kinds of laws? Machiavelli, following Aristotle, says that there are six types of government, of which 'three are bad and three are good in themselves but easily become corrupt'. The good forms are 'Principato, Ottimati e Popolare' - Principality, Aristocracy and Democracy - and the corresponding bad ones are Tyranny, Oligarchy and Anarchy. States are perpetually degenerating and regenerating through the various forms, although fortunately, Machiavelli thinks, a state in one of the inferior forms will normally fall under the political control of one better organised.

        The rewards for a prince in getting the system of government right are considerable, 'in short, the world triumphant, its prince glorious and respected by all, the people fond of him and secure under his rule'. But similarly, under a bad leader, we find 'princes frequently killed by assassins, civil wars and foreign wars constantly occuring, Italy in 'travail' and ever a prey to fresh misfortunes, its cities demolished and pillaged'. We witness 'Rome burnt, its Capitol demolished by its own citizens, acient temples lying desolate, religious rites grown corrupt, adultery rampant... the sea covered with exiles and the rocks stained with blood'. Truly, it is out of fear and self-interest that citizens seek the good in government.

        For Machiavelli, the state follows a cycle of growth, maturity and then decay, in contrast to the happy notion, increasingly prevalent today where people tend to imagine that some sort of virtuous evolution in politics is working towards a permanent near-perfect system. This doctrine of 'perfectibility' has been endorsed (through the centuries) by thinkers of different political persuasians. Hegel suggested liberal democracy would be the 'end of history', whilst Marx adapted him to try to demonstrate that Utopia could be attained through socialism and communism... But for Machiavelli, since all forms of government are unsatisfactory (the good ones because their life is so short, the bad ones because of their 'inherent malignity'), a mixture is best. In consequence, prudent legislators must choose a form of government that contains all the elements - principality, aristocracy, and democracy - so as to minimise the faults, and so that each can 'keep watch over the other'. In this, Machiavelli anticipates the doctrine of the division of powers, to be found most explicitly implemented in the American Constitution, where Prince (President), Oligarchy (Senate) and People (Congress) all keep watch over one another."

40. Suggested to 15th century Florence government reconstituted every five years. 'men begin to change their habits and break the laws, and, unless something happens which recalls to their minds the penalty involved and reawakens fear in them, there will soon be so many deliquents that it will be impossible to punish them without danger.'

"...he notes that Aristotle, too, recommended that 'principality, aristocracy and democracy' should all coexist in one state. The success of ancient Rome, for Machiavelli, was in harnessing this synergy, achieving the Greek ideal of active, virtuous citizens, in a united state under sound laws. In the 'Disscourses' he advises that the constitution should share power between the nobles and people as well as with the Princes, 'then these three powers will keep each other reciprocally in check'. The Roman constitution is held up as the ideal one, despite the 'squabbles between the populace and the senate', an inconvenience necessary to arrive at its 'greatness'. Remarks like this underline Machiavelli's determination to ignore the Christian tradition of Saint Thomas Aquinas and other medieval thinkers, drawing instead directly on the works of Aristotle and (indirectly) Plato.

        Although there are six types of government, for Machiavelli there are only two types of state: republics and principalities (constitutional monarchies). Republics flourish when they respect customs and traditions; when town dominates country; when a large middle class exists; when popular power is institutionalised, and when there is plenty of civic spirit. On the other hand, adaptability to circumstance is the central virtue of republican government. 'A republic or a Prince should ostensibly do out of generosity what necessity constrains them to do'. Discord in a state (such as the mobs that characterised Rome) can actually strengthen the republic: '... every city should provide ways and means whereby the ambitions of the populace may find outlet, especially a city which proposes to avail itself of the populace in important undertakings'.

        It is really only in times of crisis that a Prince is needed. Such times as when, for example, a ruthless individual cannot be stopped, or when the state lacks virtue and there is civic injustice, or when the republic has been fashioned from 'unsuitable material'. In general though, 'where there is a Prince... what he does in his own interests usually harms the city, and what is done in the interests of the city harms him'.

41. Warns: 'How frequently erroneous are the views men adopt in regard to matters of moment.'

42. "In all discussions one should consider 'which alternative involves fewer inconveniences and should adopt this as the better course; for one never find any issue that is clear cut and not open to question'."

43. "...every city should provide 'ways and means whereby the ambitions of the populace may find an outlet, especially a city which proposes to avail itself of the populace in important undertakings'. However, because the populace, 'misled by the false appearance of advantage, often seeks its own ruin, and is easily moved by splendid hopes and rash promises...' we must remember that 'a crowd is useless without a head'. Nor is it enough to 'first use threats and then appeal for the requisite authority'!"

44. Concludes. 'Government consists in nothing else but so controlling subjects that they shall neither be able to, nor have cause to, do you harm; which may be done either by making quite sure of them by depriving them of all means of doing you harm, or by treating them so well that it would be unreasonable for them to desire a change of fortune.'

"Even so, although the masses may be 'more knowing and more constant than is a Prince'. Machiavelli's 'democracy' only extends, like that of the Greeks, to a minority of the richest countrymen, whose job it is to stop others seizing power, perhaps by exploiting the power of the mob. But, because the nobility desire to dominate and control, whereas the common people merely wish to avoid being dominated, 'the latter will be more keen on liberty'. And, although the many are incompetent to draw up a constitution, 'since diversit of opinion will prevent them from discovering how best to do it', once they realise it has been done, 'they will not agree to abandon it'.

        Machiavelli is the first major European figure to praise freedom as a primary virtue, writing variously that 'those who set up a Tyranny are no less blameworthy than are the founders of a Republic or a Kingdom praiseworthy...' and that 'all towns and all countries that are in all respects free,, profit by this enormously'. The year of Machiavelli's death, 1527, marks the time that the Emperor Charles V's armies reach and sach Rome, and marks the passing of the Renaissance period itself.

Key Ideas

Machiavelli is often narrowly portrayed as simply promoting the use of force and duplicity, even though his intention was highly moral: to protect the state against internal and external threats and ultimately to promote the welfare of the citizens, not simply the interests of the prince.

        In the 'Discourses', Machiavelli advocates 'civic virtue', putting the common good ahead of selfish interests, and indentifies that curious feature of collective decision making - that the judgement of the masses may be sounder than that of even enlightened individuals.

* People are all a mixture, none much superior to any other, and no system is perfect either. As even a good Prince can become corrupt, so it is best to design the state with series of checks and balances.

* The state is only as good as its citizens - the rulers must be aware of the dangers of allowing civic spirit to wane.

* Although there are many routes to power, only a few of them are worth following.

47. Timeline: From the Age of Discovery to the English Revolution

1516

Thomas More publishes his account of a 'Utopia' in which poor people are not hanged for stealing bread, but merely made into slaves, and in which landlords are prevented from enclosing pastures.

1530

Copernicus circulates copies of his heretical theory that the Earth in fact revolves around the Sun. (He delays publishing for another 14 years until after his dead.)

1570

The first 'Atlas of the World' is published by Ortelius in Antwerp. This is the period of discovery, epitomised by the travels of Columbus.

1572

Appearance of a nova in Cassiopeia shows that even the heavenly firmament is not entirely 'fixed'.

1628

In England, Parliament obtains the 'Petition of Right', the agreement of the monarch not to impose taxes without its agreement, or to arrest citizens without cause

1637

In the Netherlands, the price of tulip bulbs shoots up as fantastic prices are offered for rarer varieties of bulbs, leading to the first known example of a financial collapse. London's infamous financial crash - the South Sea Bubble - is 83 years after this.

1640

King Charles in England is obliged to recall his troublesome Parliament to ask for funds after the kingdom is invaded by the Scots. Two years later there is civil war between the Parliamentary forces and the King's, and in 1645 Cromwell's New Model Army crushes the Royalist forces at Naseby. Charles flees to his former enemies, the Scots, but they sell him back to Parliamentarians in 1647 for the very princely sum of 400,000 pounds. Two years later, Charles is executed. England becomes a 'Commonwealth' instead.

1651

Thomas Hobbes publishes the 'Leviathan'.

49. Chapter 3. Hobbes' Wicked World

'Aristotle thought that people, being rational, would be naturally inclined to organise themselves voluntarily in societies. Thomas Hobbes, writing nearly 2,000 years later, thought that people, being rational wouldn't.'

"Thomas Hobbs was born in middle England into a Tudor society which was beginning to collapse into the acrimonyy of the English Civil War."

51. Hobbes' theory of society is a mechanistic view. From the introduction of Leviathan: '... is by the 'Art' of man, (as in many other things so in this also) imitated, [so] that it can make an Artificial Animal. For seeing life is but a motion of the limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principal part within; why may we not say, that all 'Automata' (Engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life? For what is the 'Heart', but a 'Spring'; and the 'Nerves', but so many 'Strings'; and the 'Joints', but so many 'Wheels', giving motion to the whole Body, such as was intended by the artificer?'

"His view is that people are just machines, moved by what he terms 'appetites' and 'aversions'."

'These small beginnings of Motion within the body of Man, before they appear in walking, speaking, striking, and other visible actions are commonly called ENDEAVOUR. This Endeavour, when it is toward something, is called APPETITE or DESIRE; the later, being the general name, and the other often times restrained to signify the Desire of Food, namely Hunger and Thirst. And when the Endeavour is fromward something, it is generally called AVERSION.

"It follows that automata, the clockwork mechanisms that were such a great feature of the period, appearing like outrageous children's toys on the church steeples of the richest towns, didn't actually look alive, they 'were' alive - artificially alive. 'Life itself is but Motion, and can never be without Desire, nor without Fear, no more than without Sense.'"

52. "This desire for power is the cause of human strife and conflict, the origin of the 'War of all upon all', as Hobbes puts it. It is only through an overarching authority that society can overcome this struggle for power over others, and this requires that peopleabandon their 'natural' rights in return for protection and stability. Hobbes begins the 'Leviathan' thus:

'Art goes yet further, imitating that Rational and most excellent work of Nature, 'Man'. For by Art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE, which is but an Artificial Man; though of greater stature and strength than the Natural, for whose protection and defence it was intended...'"

Hobbes founds the political nature of human society from the 'invention' of speech, when God teaches Adam the names of the creatures.

'The general use of discourse is to transfer our mental discourse into verbal; or the Train of our Thoughts, into a Train of Words; and that for two commodities; whereof one is, the Registering of the Consequences of our Thoughts; which being apt to slip out of our memory, and put us to a new labour, may again be recalled, by such words as they were marked by.'

54. Rejection of induction. "...as Bertrand Russel has put it, a chicken may have plenty of evidence for a theory, thinking the farmer is its friend (handfuls of grain each morning) and still be mistaken when it attempts to generalise. For one morning the unfortunante bird will emerge to find its 'friend', the farmer not scattering the grain, but wringing its neck. "

Hobbes philosophical method. "He breaks down (by analysis) social phenomena into their 'basic constituents', and only then synthesises these to produce a new theory." "...his first and most basic commitment, the idea that people have internal desires or motions, and are 'of necessity' seeking the power to fulfil them." Hobbes, '...like the motion of heavy bodies, which the further they go, make still the more haste.'

55. Leviathan's most cited passage:

'...there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no 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 fear, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.'

57. "Transferring the right to use force to the sovereign authority, by the people, 'the mutual transferring of Right' is 'that which men call CONTRACT'." "And Hobbes draws another contrast with the views of Aristotle on 'political creatures':

'It is true, that certain living creatures, as Bees, and Ants, live sociably one with another... and yet have no other direction, than their particular judgments and appetites; nor speech, whereby one of them can signify to another, what he thinks expedient for the common benefit; and therefore some man may perhaps desire to know why Mankind cannot do the same.'

"Ants and bees do not differ over methods, merely accepting the system, far less do they trry to trick each other. The only way, Hobbes continues, to reproduce such a virtuous system with people, is to

'confer all the power and strength upon one Man, or upon one assembly of men, that may reduce all their Wills, by plurality of voices, unto one Will... This is more than Consent, or Concord; it is a real Unity of them all, in one and the same Person, made by Covenant of every man with every man...'

And this is 'that Great Leviathan', the Commonwealth, and it comes about when either one man 'by War subdueth his enemies to his will', or when 'men agree amongst themselves, to submit to some Man, or Assembly of men, voluntarily, on confidence to be protected by him against all others'.

        Hobbes quotes the book of Job on the great power God gives the Leviathan: 'There is nothing on earth to be compared with him. He is made so as not to be afraid. He seeth every thing below him; and is 'King of all the children of pride.'

60. Hobbes, '...to the natural Passions of men, when there is no visible Power to kee them in awe, and tie them by fear of punishment to the performance of their Covenants... Covenants without the Sword are but Words.'

The Sword "...has great range and freedom in Hobbes' civil society. To begin with, any man who fails to consent to the decrees of the Leviathan may 'without injustice be destroyed by any man whotsoever' (with the expection of 'natural fools, small children and madmen, who do not understand the injunction in the first place'). At the same time, anyone with sovereign power cannot justly be punished, for whatever they do is by definition just. It is not even acceptable to question their actions, for that is to superimpose a new authority over the sovereign.  'It belongeth to him that hath the Sovereign Power, to be Judge.' Although the Sovereign can give 'licenses' to exercise power 'to certain particular ends, by that Sovereign limited'. "(When a colony is funded, the sovereign may need to license them to govern themselves.) Anyway, people are bad judges. 'For all men are by nature provided of notable multiplying glasses, (that is their passions and Self-love,)"

Types of Hobbesian commonwealths. "There are three types. There is that of just one ruler, which is a monarchy; then there is that of an 'Assembly of All', which is a democracy; and lastly, there is that of an assembly of just part of society which is an 'Aristocracy'."

61. "Hobbes is not in principle opposed to assemblies, but monarchies, he thinks, are less likely to be subject to factionalism than assemblies, although there is one monarchic 'inconvenience' - that the crown may sometimes 'descend upon an infant'. Hobbes seems to have in mind when he writes of parliamentary government a body made up of unelected individuals serving for life, rather than representatives removable in the event of public dissatisfaction - the English House of Lords rather than the House of Commons."

"His egalitarianism extends to the distribution of 'Things that cannot be shared out': these must be held in common (or else distributed by lot)."

"It is not possible for the sovereign to be accused of holding an heretical opinion, for the sovereign's opinion will be the highest and holiest."

Hobbes was spiteful of the old Philosophers, like Aristotle, as he and others define good and evil and that men can make these judgments. "Aristotle's next mistake was to have not men, but laws, governing. For who thinks that 'words and paper' hurt more than the hands and the swords of men? Finally, by extending the laws to cover thoughts the Greeks allow government to exceed the proper role of the institution."

62. "...John Locke was to write a century later, for many people Hobbes' social contract is actually worse than the state of nature it is supposed to help them to rise above, because of the arbitrary powers it gives to the sovereign. Who, Locke asked, would sign a contract to escape from 'polecats and foxes', if the result was to be put 'at the mercy of lions'?

Influence

Hobbes' influence is profound. For the first time individual rights are deduced and derived from a supposed 'fundamental right' to self-preservation. Together with the works of the Dutch lawyer and politician, Hugo Grotius, he both set the style and laid the foundations for future work in the areas of political theory, social ethics and international law.

Key Ideas

Thomas Hobbes provides an antidote to the high-minded reasoning of the schoolmen and indeed the Ancients. Starting from a pragmatic assessment of human nature, he stregthens the case for a poweerful political and social apparatus organising our lives. And with his interest in the methods of geometry and the natural sciences, he brings a new style of argument to political theorising that is both more persuasive and more effective. But from Hobbes we also obtain a reminder that social organisation, however committed to fairness and equality it may be intended to be, being motivated by a struggle between its members, is also inevitably both authoritarian and inegalitarian.

* People are motivated by selfishness. Left to their own devices they always come into conflict.

* Self-preservation is the highest law. Not even the state can overstep this mark.

65. Timeline: From the English Dictatorship to the First Taxes

1653

The Commonwealth becomes a dictatorship as Cromwell seizes total power and calls himself 'Lord Protector'. When Cromwell dies, England restores the monarchy.

1667

Locke's 'Essay Concerning Toleration' is published. The French army develop the use of hand grenades.

1689

The first 'civil government' in Britain, a constitutional monarchy.

1695

The first universal tax is unveiled in France, in England a tax is developed on windows, and in 1698, in Russia, a tax on beards. By the 1720s there will be riots in France against the 'cinquantieme' or 2 per cent tax on incomes.

66. Chapter 4. John Locke: The True End of Civil Government

"'John Locke was born in a quiet Somerset village into a Puritan trading family, and into a rather less quiet period of civil war between Parliament and Royalists. His political theory starts, like Plato's, with a search for moral authority. And, like Plato, he makes human conscience beholden only to God for judgement on all matters, placing individual judgement firmly above that of both church and state, and limiting the latter's role to protecting property. 'All being equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, and liberty, or posessions', he proclaims.'"

As a surgeon saved the life of the Earl of Shaftesbury who went on to appose Charles II, found the Whig Party, the forerunner of the Liberal, while pushing Locke into politics.

"The significance of the Civil War itself for Locke was that it represented a flare-up in the perennial dispute between the king and his parliament of aristocrats (and bishops), who were always seeking a greater role, particularly in the setting of tariffs and the levying of taxes as well as in the conduct of religious affairs. Matters, at this time, hinged on the relative influence of two factions in the country, the Independents who were politically moderate, but who sought a State Church and wished to abolish bishops, and the Presbyterians who insisted, on the contrary, that every congregation should be free to choose its own theology. Eventually the dispute was resolved on the battlefield by Cromewell's New Model Army in favour of the Independents. After this, the hopes of 'moderates' for a compromise with the king were dashed. Cromwell happily assumed the role of Napoleon the pig in 'Animal Farm', Orwell's classic allegorical novel (of a much later, communistic revolution), who having led the farmyard animals in revolution against their human master, ends up walking on two legs, eating and sleeping in the farmer's old house.

        So, after a period of increasingly less democratic parliaments, England witnessed the rule of the 'Lord Protector', and with it her first and only republic, rapidly descend into a personal dictatorship. By the time of Cromwell's death, most English were relieved to have Charles' son return as, effectively, their first constitutional monarch, bound to Parliament by the principles of 'habeas corpus' and the need to seek its approval for new taxes. And perhaps there was another more subtle, legacy of the Civil War - a fear and dislike of over-powerful individuals, such as Oliver Cromwell"

67. Locke inspired Voltaire inspiring the French Revolution and Tom Pain to shape the American Revolution.

"Apparently undergoing something of a 'Damasccan' conversion, Locke decided to write what amounted to a work of sedition - which was a very dangerous thing to do in the seventeenth century. Of Locke's immediate circle, Earl Shaftesbury would flee for his life in 1682 to Holland, whilst poor Algernon Sidney, Lord William Russell and the Earl of Essex would all be imprisoned for spreading the wrong sort of (politically controversial) views. Sidney and Russell eventually met their deaths on the scaffold, to the end insisting unheeded on their right to resist tyrants, whilst Essex cheated the hangman - but only by taking his own life whilst languishing in the Tower of London."

From the 'Essay Concerning the True, Original Extent and End of Civil Government starts by declaring that:

'...it is impossible that the rulers now on earth should make any benefit, or derive any the least shadow of authority, from that which is held to be the fountain of all power, Adam's private dominion and paternal jurisdiction, so that he that will not give just occasion to think that all government in the world is the product only of force and violence, and that men live together by no other rules but that of the beasts, where the strongest carries it, and so lay a foundation for perpetual disorder and mischief, tumult, sedition and rebellion...'

69. Locke challenges Sir Robert Filmer's view of subordination, father over son, squire over servant, lord over slave, man over wife. Locke refers to Exodus to honour both 'thy father and thy mother'.

"Locke points out that the hereditary principle itself is dubious and flawed as it would appear to allow only one true heir to Adam, with all the other supposed kings exposed as frauds."

In regard to a state of nature. "...like Hobbes, he imagines this as a situation of lawlessness,, where all may do as they will, without 'asking leave, or depending on the will of any other man'. It is a state of equality, yet not total anarchy, for there is one rule - the 'sacred and unalterable law of self-preservation'. Thus far, then, thus unremarkable. But now Locke extracts a palatable dish from Hobbes' bitter brew.

'The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges everyone: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, o one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions.'

70. Property. "The earth, and 'all inferior creatures', belong to everyone in common - with one important exception. Each individual does own one thing, they have property in their own person. 'This nobody has any right to but himself', Locke adds, neglecting, it would seem, the issue of slavery and indeed his own investments in the Royal Africa slaving company, doing a profitable trade for him at the time. Consequently, 'the labour of his body, and the work of his hands', are rightly considered to belong to each individual. 'Whatever people produce through their own effort, using the commonly owned raw materials of nature, are also (properly) theirs.' This apparently socialist principle, anticipating Marx's Labour Theory of Value by some centuries, Locke amplifies further:

'... for 'tis labour indeed that puts the difference of value on everything; and let anyone consider, what the difference is between an acre of land planted with tobacco, or sugar, sown with wheat or barley; and an acre of the same land lying in common, without any husbandry upon it. '

In regard to pre-agrarian times. "The labour of picking up the acorns makes them the gatherer's, as 'of private right'. Nor is it necessary to seek the approval of the whole of mankind for it."

71. The Commons. "...rights of 'non-landowners' to 'commons' in seventeenth-century England was a sensitive matter. Common ownership had already been taken rather further by the Diggers, active during the first part of Locke's life, with their 'alternative' communities. Commons, perhaps underused but, by definition, unenclosed areas available for grazing or, indeed, collecting acorns, were always being threatened by the aristocracy, who wished to appropriate the common land to themselves. But the English common lands gave rural labourers the ability to produce food for themselves directly, which they would otherwise have only been able to achieve as payment for their labour on their lord's estates. In the rest of Europe, where there was no equivalent tradition of common land, the suggestion that people had a 'right' to the products of their labour would have been even more scurrilous and revolutionary. Even so, all Locke has in mind is a limit on appropriation. No one should take 'more than they are able to make use of' before it spoils. Whatever is beyond this 'is more than his share, and belongs to others'. Of course, Locke hastens to add, gold and silver do not 'spoil', and therefore there is no harm in their accumulation.

72. Colonies in the Americas. "...of the medieval period, settlements in the Americas were larger and more sophisticated than the European equivalents. But, most likely, Locke would have followed the prejudices of his time, even if he had considered there to be a conflict in ownership. Locke says that God gave the world to 'the industrious and rational', and the native Americans might well have been found wanting in his eyes - seen as lazy and neglectful of their natural inheritance, and consequently living in poverty.

73. "But although property is the foundation of political society, Locke traces its origin back not to commerce, but to 'the conjugal union'. The first society was between man and wife, and later their children.

'Conjugal society is made by a voluntary compact between man and woman: and though it consists of right in one another's bodies, as is necessary to its chief end, procreation; yet it draws with it mutual support, and assistance, and a community of interest too, as necessary not only to unite their care, and affection, but also necessary to their common offspring, who have a right to be nourished and maintained by them, till they are able to... shift and provide for themselves.'

"In the 'Two Treaties, Locke argues that where a person is unable to provide the basic means of sustenance for themselves, they have a right to the surplus goods of others, and, indeed, people have an obligation 'by charity' to offer them this. And the handover must be done without exacting an undue toll, for

'... a man can no more make of another's necessity, to force him to become his vassal, by witholding that relief God requires him to afford to his brother, than he that has more stregth can seize upon a weaker, master him to his obedience, and with a dagger at his throat offer him death or slavery.

74. Locke has not particular view of the form of government, so long as it is by popular consent. "...Locke says it does need to include some 'separation of powers', and sets out fairly precisely the distinction to be made between the law-making part of government - the legislature - and the action-taking part - the executive. The executive must have the power to appoint and dismiss the legislature, but it does not make the one superior to the other, rather there exists a 'fiduciary trust'."

"...'rigged justice' was very much a central issue of the 'Glorious Revolution', and after all Locke himself lived through the 'Cavalier Parliament' of 1661 to 1679 - which did little other than pass increasingly totalitarian and repressive laws (mainly against religious freedom) - it was left to Montesquieu (in his 'Spirit of the Laws' some half a century later, 1748) to argue the need for the additional separation of judicial power characteristic of the American constitution. Before the Civil War, judges could be dismissed at will by the King. Afterwards, they were removable only with the consent of both houses of Parliament."

75. Right to Revolt. "He quotes Barclay, 'the great champion of absolute monarchy':

'But if anyone should ask, must the people then always lay themselves open to the cruelty and rage of tyranny? Must they see their cities pillaged, and lain in ashes, their wives and children exposed to the tyrant's lust and fury, and themselves and families reduced by their king to ruin and all the miseries of want and oppression, and yet sit still? Must men alone be debarred the common privilege of opposing force with force, which nature allows so freely to all other creatures...?"

Locke differs from Hobbes "once-and-for-all act", but an ongoing bargain between people and sovereign. "If a king 'sets himself against the body of the commonwealth, whereof he is head, and shall, with intolerable illusage, cruelly tyrannise over the whole, or a considerable part of the people; in this case the people have a right to resist and defend themselves."

76. Thomas Paine. Born in Norfolk, the young Paine worked variously as a 'staymaker', a civil servant, a journalist and a school teacher. It was whilst working for the Excise Board in Lewes in Sussex that he became interested in politics, serving on the town council, and holding heated political discussions of Locke's ideas in the White Hart Inn. Actually, Paine once remarked rather dismissively of is debt to his political forbear, that he had 'never read any Locke, nor ever had the work in my hand', but it was certainly Locke's ideas that made the running in those political debates in the 'White Hart'.

        Paine soon left quiet, half-timbered Lewes for the New World, on the recommendation of Benjamin Franklin himself, whom he had met in London, and at the same time moved from talk to action. On settling in Philadelphia, Paine immediately began to set out his ideas on paper: Lockean ideas of equal rights for men and women, for African and European - and even on the fair treatment for animals. Paine was thus one of the first in America to press for the abolition of slavery. His book 'The Rights of Man' is rightly considered a political classic, even overshowing Locke's ponderous prse, whose ideas in it he so largely borrowed. But it would be the novel issue of national self-determination that made the name of Thomas Paine historically significant - the issue that John Adams, second President of the United States, once described as a dreadful 'hobgoblin', 'so frightful... that it would throw a delicate person into fits to look it in the face'."

77. Revolt 17th Century. "...uprisings such as the revolt of the Netherland against the Holy Roman Emperor in Spain, had been driven by religious differences, not by nationalism as such. Even the discontent of the American colonists was directed against unjust treatment by the English king, not against royal authority in itself. Paine's nationalistic pamphlet 'Common Sense' was a spark in a tinderbox which started a fire that would eventually sweep away far more than the English claim to America."

78. Government. Paine, 'In the first place, three hundred representatives, fairly elected, are sufficient for all the purposes to which legislation can apply, and preferable to a larger number. They may be divided into a number of houses, or meet in one, as in France, or in any manner a constitution shall direct.'

"And, as represenation is always considered, in free countries, 'the most honourable of all stations', the 'allowance made to it is merely to defray the expense which the representatives incur by that service, and not to it as an office' - a principle sadly lost somewhere along the line.

        Paine even worked out neatly, in double entry bookkeeping form, exactly how much the government would cost, which was not to be very much. In fact, when finances are done his way, there is, happily, enough money to pay all the poor people of the country some money. This money, Paine pointed out, is no more than remission of their own taxes, from hidden taxation imposed by duties on imports and so on. Furthermore, those who cannot work deserve state support, Paine calculates, as the benefits of relieving parents of the twin burdens of paying for the very young and the very old (and the sick - all right, three burdens) enable them to cease being dependent on others, and society is restored to its natural state of being an engine for the production of prosperity."

79. Key Ideas

"Locke creates a picture of the world in which 'rationality' is the ultimate authority, not God, and certainly not, as Hobbes had insisted, brute force. He insists that people all have certain fundamental 'rights' and also attempts to return the other half of the human race, the female part, to their proper, equal, place in history, the family and in government.

        Locke's legacy is the first, essentially practical, even legalistic, framework and analysis of the workings of society. That is his own particular contribution to its evolution.

* Property is the key to 'civil' society, and the key to property is labour. The more you work, the more you own.

* The powers of government must be strictly limited, in particular by separating the ablity to make laws from the ability to make policy.

Key Text. Locke's 'Essay Concerning the True, Original Extent and End of Civil Government (1690)"

81. Timeline: From 'Free Trade' to the Slave Trade

1703

Lahonton's idea of the 'noble savage' is celebrated by many 'Enlightenment' thinkers throughout Europe

1707

The largest free trade area in Europe, and the most significant one in the world, is created by the Act of Union between England and Wales and Scotland.

1710

In London, St. Paul's Cathedral is completed by Sir Christopher Wren.

1711

The steam engine is invented by Thomas Newcomen.

1719

Daniel Defoe describes the adventures of Robinson Crusoe and two years later Jonathan Swift begins writing 'Gulliver's Travels'.

1721

Russian factories buy peasants as slave workers.

1727

Quakers demand the abolition of slavery, 222 years after the first shiploads of black slaves were unloaded in the newly discovered Americas.

1747

A 'carriage tax' is introduced in England.

1748

Montesquieu's 'Spirit of the Law' inspires later revolutionaries.

1765

Publication of the 'Discourse on Inequality' sets Rousseau firmly against the optimism of the times.

82. Chapter 5. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Inequality or Freedom?

'The Discourse on Inequality is a brilliant work. This despite being wrong on almost every factual point and in many a supposed reference. It is not science - it is art, but then, so is politics. Fortunantely, the author himself declares his intentions honestly, beginning his book with magnificent disdain, 'Let us begin by putting aside the facts, as they do not affect the question.'

"Rousseau did not think anything of civilisation, nor was he impressed by the achievements of science. He instead thought primitive man had been happier and better off. And he measured people's value not by their possessions, but by the divine spark that he saw in them all, the immortal soul of Natural Man. His philosophy offers a more spiritual, romantic view of the world."

85. "...developing the idea he had sketched in the Discourse on Sciences, the man in his natural state, far from being greedy, or fearful, as described by Hobbes, is in fact in living in a peaceful, contented state, truly free. This is a freedom with three elements. The first is free will, the second is freedom from the rule of law (as there are no laws), and the third is personal freedom. It is this last that is the most important."

Primitive view. "Rousseau points out that much of the imagery in both Hobbes and Locke belongs to a property-owning society, not to the supposed 'natural state' prior to the invention of property rights. By realising this, 'we are not obliged to make a man a philosopher before we can make him a man'. The first time people would have had a sense of property (he thinks) is when they settled in one location, when they built huts to live in. Even sexual union, Rousseau notes pragmatically, as well as reflecting on his own experience, is unlikely to have implied any exclusivity, being more likely to have been just a lustful episode no sooner experienced than forgotten, remembered least of all in terms of the children. Neither the father nor the mother islikely to know whose children they might beget, he argues, assuming that paternity is the defining characteristic and neglecting the mother's very definite knowledge!"

Beginnings of civility. "...goes on to suggest that the only reason why this early society ever changed must have been as a result of some sort of disaster, perhaps one causing shortages of food or other hardship. This would have forced people to start identifying certain areas as theirs, and maybe start living in groups. This in turn would imply increased communication, and the development of language. And there is a second dimension to these changes: people began to judge themselves by a new criterion - how others thought of them. To Rousseau, this last is a change of the utmost significance, for it is self-consciousness that was the downfall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. And it is this self-consciousness that makes humankind permanently unhappy with its lot, and resentful or fearful of others."

86. "Rousseau offers instead just two laws, or principles, that could be said to be 'antecedent to reason'. The first is a powerful interest in self-preservation and our own well-being; the second is 'a natural aversion to seeing any other sentient being perish or suffer, especially if it is one of our own kind'.

        The only time 'natural man' would hurt another is when his own well-being requires it. In saying this, Rousseau is drawing a parallel for humankind with the animals who - unlike their masters - never harm each other out of malice alone. If, in fact, 'I am obliged to refrain from doing any harm to my neighbour, it is less because he is a reasonable being [i.e. one capable of reasoning] than because he is a sentient one; and a quality which is common to beast and man ought to give the former the right not to be uselessly ill-treated by the latter'.

87. 'On Equality'. "...the preamble introduces the issue with the noble-sounding aim of seeking to 'defend the cause of humanity' from what at that point is only a shadowy and undefined enemy. The crime is never made entirely clear either, but by the end of the essay, 'the rich', the 'law makers' and various fellow travellers appear to have been accused, found guilty and indicted, even if not actually sentenced."

He distiguishes "between 'two kinds of inequality'. The first is 'natural or physical inequality', consisting in differences of age, health, strength and intelligence; the second is 'moral or political' and consists of 'the different privileges that some enjoy to the prejudice of others' - things such as wealth, honour and power.

'The philosophers who have examined the foundations of society have all felt it necessary to go back to the state of nature, but none of them has succeeded in getting there. Some have not hesitated to attribute to men in that state of nature the concept of just and unjust, without bothering to consider whether they must have had such a concept, or even that it would be useful to them. Others have spoken of the natural right each has to keep and defend what he owns without saying what they mean by the word own. Others again, starting out by giving the stronger, authority over the weaker, promptly introduce government, without thinking of the time that must have elapsed before the words authority and government could have had any meaning.'"

89. "It requires a sophisticated, rational knowledge of good and evil to make civilised man so wicked.

'... let us not agree with Hobbes that man is naturally evil just because he has no idea of goodness, that he is vicious for want of any knowledge of virtue, that he always refuses to do his fellow men services which he does not believe he owes them, or that on the strength of the right he reasonably claims to things he needs, he foolishly imagines himself to be the sole proprietor of the whole universe. '

In even the dark heart of the savage, there is already (what others, too, such as Adam Smith, as we shall see, claim as) the central humanising characteristic: pity, and concern for others. It is there in the savage, because it is there in the animal too. Rousseau says that horses avoid trampling living creatures for similar reasons, that no animal ever passes 'the corpse of a creature of its own species without distress', and that there are even animals which give their dead a sort of burial. The 'mournful lowing of cattle entering a slaughterhouse reveals their feelings in witnessing the horrible spectacle that confronts them'. What, Rousseau asks, are generosity, mercy and humanity but compassion applied to the weak, or to the guilty - or to the human race in general? Even if it were true, he adds, that 'pity is no more than a feeling that puts us in the place of the sufferer', it is still the natural sentiment that ultimately allows the preservation of the species. It is only the philosopher who 'puts his hands over his ears and argues a little with himself' whilst another is murdered outside his window." Such as the Nazis and UN decision with the Balkins.

90. Foundations of Society. Property. "So, mean 'ceased to doze under the first tree', instead developing tools from stones and branches, using these to till the land and create huts, developing their notions of property, from which inevitably 'quarrels and fights were born'. Soon, society required 'a language more complex than that of crows or monkeys'. And there were other consequences. The conventional, 'nuclear' family was created, producing not only (what he at least professed to consider) the desirable by-product of men and women living together in conjugal and paternal love, but also some less desirable gender differences. Notably, women becoming 'more sedentary' as they become accustomed 'to lookinng after the hut and children whilst men go out to seek the common sustenance'. But the men too, become rather sedentary:

'This new condition, with its solitary life... left men to enjoy a great deal of leisure, which they used to procure many sorts of commodities unknown to their fathers; and this was the yoke they imposed upon themselves, without thinking about it, and the first source of the evils they prepared for their descendants.'

92. Geneva's government "...a city that retained its independence in the face of a Europe of much larger nation states, not by any pretensions of military power, but by playing the religious card at the appropriate and opportune time, and defecting from the other Catholic areas of Switzerland towards Protestant worship, under the protection of Lutheran Berne. This protection allowed Jean Calvin, the French theologian, time to reorganise the city state of Geneva along democratic lines, with a general assembly of all citizens (but not all adults), a Council of Two Hundred, and an executive council. Rousseau considered Calvin to be a great law-giver in the mould of the Romans. But Calvin's state was in fact not so progressive, and it quickly degenerated into the rule of the executive council - an oligarchy. Calvin himself persecuted religious dissenters, expulsion from Geneva became the norm, and executions were not out of place in the free city. Calvin never considered women to be citizens, and as time went by the majority of the men were not either."

94. "The details of instituions of government are not of much interest to Rousseau once their essentially malign character has been identified. He merely adds that if law and property are the first stage in human society, and the institutions of government are the second, then the third and last stage is the transformation of legitimate into arbitrary power. Human society leads people to hate each other in proportion 'to the extent that their interests conflict'. People pretend to do each other services whilst actually trying to exploit them and do them down. 'We must attribute to the institution of property, and hence to society, murders, poisonings, highway robbery and indeed, the punishments of those crimes.' That is at the individual level. On the national scale, 'Inequality, being almost non-existent in the state of nature... becomes fixed and legitimate through the institution of property and laws.' When society has, as it inevitably will, degenerated into tyranny and all are slaves again, the circle is complete, for 'all individuals become equal again when they are nothing'. And all the time 'Civil man' torments himself constantly in search of ever more laborious occupations, working himself to death, 'renoucing life in order to achieve immortality'.

        Civil society is, in fact, a society of people 'who nearly all complain and several of whom indeed deprive themselves of their existence'. This is the logic of property ownership and capitalism."

95. Human nature. "...Rousseau is the optimist to Hobbes' pessimist. All people are born with the qualities that will lead them to success and happiness - given the right conditions. In 'Emile', as part of his account of bringing up a child, he makes this even more explicit, describing how the child acquires needs and feelings different from those it is born with, as an effect and result of its environment. If the child is unhappy, it is because of a fault with its surroundings, and the same is true, he thinks, for adults. "

"Key Ideas

Rousseau's recipe for human society can be expressed in just one word: 'Freedom'. Rousseau offers us a fairly implausible idea of what this might be, and supposes it to be in conflict and opposition to the structures of modern societies. But Rousseau's legacy is still important as a reminder of non-material values, and a more optimistic if romanticised notion of humanity. What he offers us may be largly false and often is hopelessly impractical, but it is also always an important, alternative undersanding of ourselves.

* People are happy and satisfied in the 'state of nature', but the invention of property brings about competition, inequality and conflict.

* Most of the desires and wants of modern society are artificial, pointless and ultimately self-destructive.

"

Key Text

Discourse on Inequality (1753)

97. Timeline: From Standardising England to Numbering Houses

1752

Benjamin Franklin demonstrates that lightning is, in fact, electricity.

1755

Samuel Johnson's book of words, the 'dictionary', standardises English.

1759

Voltaire publishes 'Candide', a cynical portrat of a Dr Pangloss who believes that everything is always for the best in the 'best of all possible worlds'.

1760

Rural Britain changes for ever under the Enclosure Acts which take away the traditional rights of commoners. This is the year conventionally taken as the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

1764

Houses in London are numbered.

1775

The War of American Independence begins; it will end in total success for the colonists after heavy defeats of the English a few years later. The distinctive federal constitution of the United States is signed into existence at Philadelphia in 1787

1776

'Wealth of Nations' published.

98. Chapter 6. Adam Smith's Inquiry into the Wealth of Nations

'From Smith, we gain a new perspective on human society. Where others saw society as determined by human decisions and choices, whether altruistic, as in Plato and Locke, or selfish, as in Machiavelli and Hobbes, Smith argues that economic forces have a power all of their own, and that our political arrangements, indeed our values, are only a consequence of these subtle forces.'

100. "The 'Inquiry' is also the result of another grand journey, one that had started for Smith with the question of 'justice', tackled in the process of catalouing the history of law. On this journey, he had explored the nature of ethics in 'The Moral Sentiments', before arriving in due course at economics, which is, for Smith, the hidden set of rules that govern society. Additionally (again anticipating Marxism), he believed economic realities could be observed in the changing nature of the overt laws of the judicial system."

Smith with his two companions met with French intellectuals. "The French held that agriculture and mining were fundamentally the source of national wealth because they alone permitted a genuine conversion of labour into production: other processes, such as manufacturing, merely turned one sort of production into another. Smith was highly impressed by this, later describing it as 'perhaps the nearest approximation to the truth that has yet been discovered on the subject of political economy'."

"Smith was concerned that his work might be felt to be controversil - after all, he described it ironically in a letter as a 'very violent attack... upon the whole commercial system of Great Britain' - but his worries proved to be unnecessary. The book simply became a bestseller, highly sought after and popular, with its author a correspondingly popular and increasingly wealthy man. Yet, in line with his dry reputation, Smith continued to live quietly and gave away most of his new-found riches to charity - anonymously."

"In the 'Inquiry', Adam Smith writes of four stages in society: an age of hunters, one of shepherds, an agrarian age, and finally an age of commerce. Society, he says, only begins to need laws and government in the second stage. The 'Age of Shepherds' is where government commences. 'Property makes it absolutely necessary', as he puts it in one of his 'Lectures on Jurisprudence': 'The wood of the forest, the grass of the field, and all the natural fruits of the earth, which, when land was in common, cost the labourer only the trouble of gathering them, come... to have an additional price fixed upon them.'

Animals begin to belong to people, and shepherds, unlike hunters, are concerned with future planning as well as with the present. In seeing the need to protect property as the origin of government, and hence of society, Smith is following Locke. However, unlike Locke, he also sees the process as bearing rather nequally on the citizens: 'Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality institued for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.' This is a radical insight."

101. Welfare state. Adam Smith: 'Among the savage nations of hunters and fishers, every individual who is able to work, is more or less employed in useful labour, and endeavours to provide, as well as he can, the necessaries and conveniences of life, for himself, or such of his family or tribe as are either too old, or too young, or too infirm to go hunting and fishing. Such nations are, however, so miserably poor that, from mere want, they are frequently reduced, or at least, think themselves reduced, to the necessity sometimes of directly destroying, and sometimes of abandoning their infants, their old people, and those afflicted with lingering diseases to perish with hunger, or to be devoured by wild beasts.'

Social acceptance. "Smith's starting point is that the central motivation of mankind is a desire for approval by others. 'Sympathy' creates a social bond. Here, it should be explained that the ordering of the chapters in his books reflects Smith's view of the importance and explanatory role of the concepts. So, the first chapter of the Wealth of Nations is entitled: 'Of the Division of Labour'; the first chapter of 'The Theory of Moral Sentiments', his other major work, if rather less influential, is entitled 'Of Sympathy'. Human beings, Smith explains there, have a spontaneous tendency to observe others. 102. From this, we turn to judging ourselves, and the moral identity of the individual develops, in this way emerging from social interaction in this way emerging from social interaction. 'Sympathy', or 'awareness of other's feelings' (we might say 'empathy'), explains morality; the division of labour explains economics. A human being growing up in isolation, Smith thinks, will have no sense of right and wrong - nor any need for the concept: '...without any communication with his own species, he could no more think of his own character, of the propriety or demerit of his own sentiments and conduct, of the beauty or deformity of his own mind, than of the beauty or deformity of his own face.'

"He is aware of the possibility of self-deception, in both studies, and curses it as the source of 'half of the disorders of human life'. If only, he wrote in the 'Moral Sentiments', we could see ourselves as others see us, 'a reformation would be unavoidable. We could not otherwise endure the sight.'

        However, it is self-interest that underpins the economic system. In his most famous epigram, he says: '... it is not from the 'benevolence' from their regard to their own interest'. The individual does not intend to promote the public interest, but 'intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invivisble hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention'.

        Smith illustrates the role in economics of the division of labour by considering the increase in productivity possible by changing the process of manufacture of a pin in a pin factory. Actingg alone, one man could 'scarce, with his utmost industry, make one pin a day, and certainly not make twenty. But if the work can be divided up - 'one man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires three distinct operations; to put on is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade in itself to put them into the paper...' - ten people, he suggests, could produce.

'about twelve pounds of pins a day. There are in a pound upwards of four thousand pins of middling size. Those ten persons, therefore, could make upwards of forty-eight thousand pins a day. But if they had all wrought them separately,...they could certainly not each of them make twenty, perhaps not one pin a day.'

103. "Smith then goes on to relate this to the accumulation of capital, the increase of employment and finally the emergence of mechanisms to control the resulting tendency for wages to increase.

        So great are the advantages of this industrial approach, that even the humblest member of 'a civilised country' is part of a complex system providing sophisticated goods and services."

"Another of the advantages of dividing up labour - specialising - is that people then think of ways of improving that specific task, improvements otherwise obscured by the complexities of the whole process."

104. "Free trade encourages countries to specialise in what they are good at, and forces them to give up doing what they are not. This results in more goods being produced in total (because they are produced more efficiently). The same applies on a regional level too. For example, within a state, improving road links may remove physical obstacles to trade, with the effect of making a region's special wine or woolly jumpers worth transporting to the rest of the country. (However, as poorer regions also know, the reverse is also true: large efficient companies outside the region can move in and displace even the last few small cottage industries of the local communities. The overall gains may still be at the clear expense of the small region.)"

Free Market vs. State. "In domestic affairs, the state is left with a minimal role, but for Smith it is not just in defence and law and order, but also in providing many of those services that commerce will not bother with - such as building sewers or bridges and providing elementary schools. And not all enterprises are even best in private hands - Smith offers transport as an example. A privately owned road can be profitable even when poorly looked after by the unscrupulous, so it is better for the state to provide them and maintain higher standards. Conversely, canals 'must' be maintained, otherwise the private owner can make no money out of them, so they can be left in private hands. As far as education goes, Smith recommends the practice current then in Scotland (and which he himself had experienced) of making teachers and professors depend upon the satisfaction of their classes for their wages. Where this link is broken, Smith warns, slackness obtains (as at Oxford)."

Taxation. "...Smith lays down four principles. (Smith generally has something of a quaternate turn of mind.) First, taxes should be based on 'ability to pay'. Second, tax policy should be made publicly known and therefore predictable. Third, taxes should be collected with the convenience of the taxpayer in mind. Finally, this all be done with a minimum of administration or other expense. Today we might add fifth and sixth principles of proportionality and choice: taxes should not be levied on essentials, such as food or water, nor should they be so great as to be effectively punishments for an activity, for example, smoking or drinking alchohol. Environmentalists might amend this with a seventh principle of 'encouraging  sustainability' and avoiding damage to the ecology of the country."

105. Division of labor is limited by market size. "In a village, the specialisation is less, in a town it is more. In the town, carpentry, joinery, cabinet-making, wood-carving are separate occupations of different skilled people; in village, one person will do all of them. Smith is not wholly enamoured with the division process however (perhaps still recalling the specialists at Oxford), noting that a worker reduced to performing one task can become 'as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become'; indeed the process even threatens to reduce people to 'riot and debauchery'."

To prevent revolt, Smith advocates compulsory schooling.

Markets depend on distribution channels like rivers, roads, coastline. "...and on the ability of producers to get their produce to the people. Smith notes the effect cheaper transport by water was having on trade at the time, recalling that ancient civilisations developed along sea coasts and river banks, and in particular around the Mediterranean sea."

In an aside Smith ponders, '...to pass beyond the pillars of Hercules, that is, to sail out of the Straits of Gibraltar, was, in the ancient world, considered a most wonderful and dangerous exploit of navigation'.

"Smith deduces that if economic growth is to be sustained, the market has to widen continually. This growth is to be sustained, the market has to widen continually. This is one of the main reasons, he believes, to support free trade."

Origins of Money. "What are the mechanism by which this trade can be carried out?" "The exchange of goods can be carried out by barter - the butcher stockpiles some beef, the baker some loaves, and so on - but as there may be a baker who does not eat beef, or other practical shortcoming of the system, this soon gives way to exchange of goods by reference to one particular commodity, such as gold or silver (or salt, which gives us the word 'salary'), and hence to money itself. He describes at some length (one of the most popular parts of the book) the transition to coinage, a process driven by the two related problems of how to stop people from adulterating the metals, or from filing small bits off to make a little extra margin for themselves. Kings and Royal Mints themselves were past masters at this, of course, with Roman silver coins, in the dying day of the Republic, worth just one twenty-fourth of what they started out as."

106. Real cost is human effort. "Smith says, 'The real price of every thing, what every thing really costs... is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.'"

Smith held that corn was a better exchange of value than anything else. Smith, 'From century to century, corn is the better measure because, from century to century, equal quantities of corn will command the same quantity of labour more nearly than equal quantities of silver.'"

Yet. "It is 'nominal value' of goods that determines whether trade is profitable - so for example, tea in China is cheap, and worth the while of the European importer to purchase it. It is therefore nominal values that regulate 'almost the whole business of common life in which price is concerned - we cannot wonder that it should have been so much more attended to than the real price'."

Real and nominal value. "Smith considers there to be a 'real' value for everything, and a 'nominal' value, which is its market valuation, its price. It is the nominal value that drives the marketplace. The price someone is prepared to pay is determined by several factors. There is the 'psychological' factor of how much they want it. There is the practical consideration of the manufacturer of how much they have had to spend already to produce the goods. This will include the wages of the workers, the share due to the people who have provided the investment in the machinery and premises for the manufacture, the rent of any equipment or land, and the cost of the raw materials. Smith distinguishes the types of cost because they have different effects. The workers require recompense simply for their time and effort. This he considers to be fairly straightforward.

'The difference of natural talents in different men is, in reality, much less than we are aware of... [that] between a philosopher and a common street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature as from habit, custom, and education. When they came into the world, and for the first six or eight years of their existence they were perhaps very much alike, and neither their parents nor play-fellows could perceive any remarkable differences...'

If everyone had to do everything for themselves, as would be the case without the division of labour and the mechanisms for the trading or bartering of goods, people would all appear much the same too. Yet, people do in fact get paid very different amounts for jobs - and it is certainly not due to the different amount of time and effort invested. (Although largely spurious claims may be made to this effect - or about the rarity of the skills involved in certain kinds of work. Media stars, university professors, managers and chief executives are amongst today's examples of this self-serving delusion. We might add to what Smith said, the general rule that the more people are paid, the more important and unique they believe themselves to be!) Smith himself acknowledges that each factor, such as wages or rent, of the 'natural price' is in itself subject to the influence of demand in relation to supply.

        However, 'Labour alone, never varying in its own value, is alone the ultimate and real standard by which the value of all commodities can at all times and places be estimated and compared. It is their real price; money is their nominal price only.' He puts it like this:

'The labour of the manufacturer fixes and realises itself in some particular subject or vendible [sellable] commodity, which lasts for some time at least after that labour is past. It is, as it were, a certain quantity of labour stocked and sorted up to be employed, if necessary, upon some other occasion.'

Various examples are offered. There is the simple case of fish. Those caught from the sea involve only the labour and capital costs, those caught from rivers will also include a 'rent' charge, to the owner of the fishing rights. There is the more sophisticated case of the factory.

108. The factory. "The owner of the factory requires a return on the investment, which varies with the amount of capital invested. This is because this capital could have been simply put in a bank (where the manager could then lend it to others for a small fee) and left to grow by compound interest. Profit and interest are basically the same sort of thing - return on capital. Rent, Smith sees as different, because rent may simply be a charge imposed without any original investment, although any asset that can be rented can probably be sold too - in which case we might say to Smith that the distinction disappears. But Smith describes the landlord as one who 'loves to reap where others have sowed'. 'They are the only one of the three orders whose revenue costs them neither labour nor care, but comes to them, as it were, of its own accord, and independent of any plan or project of their own.'

        So Smith's economic analysis depends on a three-fold division which seems to collapse into a two-fold one. But there is another more serious problem, too. The price of say, nails, will depend on their 'usual price', the demand for things made using nails, the demand for other things made with nails, which are competing for the supply, the availability of iron to make nails and blacksmiths to smelt them (or however they are made!) and indeed all of these things may in turn be affected by the price of nails. When the price of a 'variable' depends on itself, we have what physicists term 'feedback'. (The amount of feedback with the nails may not be very noticeable or significant, but consider the price of houses or postage stamps or shares!) Feedback makes these phenomena behave strangely. In fact, this phenomenon of 'non-linearity' is what makes the stock markets so attractive to investors. Because no one can predict anything reliably, it is always possible for someone to make a large profit by, say, speculating on the price of nails.

        Smith accepts that supply and demand are 'complex' and cannot be represented by any simple (linear) relationship. Take wages, for example. The only 'real' component of wages, he says, is the amount necessary to keep the worker alive, although Smith does insist that the subsistence wage is actually a bit more - that which is 'consistent with common humanity'. But in any case, in a growing economy, there may be a shortage of workers, obliging the employers to compete amongst each other for the workers, particularly by rasing wages. He compares the experience of the then 'tiger' economies of Britain and America with the static economy of China, and the shrinking one of Bengal, concluding that it 'is not the actual greatness of national wealth, but its continual increase, which occasions a rise in the wages of labour'. This improvement of the 'lower ranks' is not an 'inconveniency' but a moral necessity, for no society can surely be flourishing and happy, when the greater part of the mebers are poor and miserable. 'It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, cloath and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, cloathed and lodged.' But in the 'absence' of economic growth, Smith predicts that wages will be forced down to the subsistence level.

        Smith deails the all important subject of wage levels a bit more precisely too. There are several components. There is the 'unpleasantness' factor. Unpleasant work will be avoided if the worker can subsist without doing it, and therefore the employer must raise the wage to compensate. Smith assumes all work to be basically worse than not working - 'toil and trouble', an assertion which may not be universally true (unemployment itself can be a heavy burden), but surely is a reasonable approximation. Secondly, work which requires skill or training is like work which requires an expensive machine - the cost of hiring a professional must reflect this. Smith thinks work which is irregular may attract an extra premium (although we might argue that this is clearly not the case with 'casual work' such as that epitome of low-paid work, picking harvests for farmers). Jobs requiring people to step back slightly from their own selfish interests, such as being a doctor, also need to be given additional rewards."

109. Smith observes people are optimistic about thier chances in life. Such as those that play the lottery when the chances are low. "For this reason, jobs involving a calculation of risk, such as being a soldier, or even taking on difficult legal cases which require winning, may not obtain the extra premium that the market should determine, if everything was worked out logically."

110. "...Smith distinguishes the different characteristics of capital and income, and eplains the significance of savings. He begins by observing that capital is like the lathes in a factory, or the skills of their operators. Circulating capital is the profit from the selling of the products, ad this profit can then be used to buy a new carriage for the factory's owner, which involves more profits for the carriage maker, and all their suppliers too. Because of this, it is circulating capital that keeps the economy going, and only certain parts of the economy produce it. Civil servants, teachers and soldiers, for example, do not produce any circulating capital, although they may be useful for other reasons. (It could be said, indeed, that they may facilitate others in the making of circulating capital, thereby increasing the amount of circulating capital.)

111. Friends with Hume.

112. Key Ideas

"Smith describes the 'hidden hand' of economics that guides all our actions and decisions. In fact,, he makes a powerful case for leaving government, especially trading policy, to the hidden hand. Yet there is also a desire for approval by others - which can lead to conflict and upset the natural order.

* People come together naturally, because of the practical advantages: notably the efficiencies of specialisation and the division of labour as well as out of an awareness of other's needs and feelings.

* Because civil society is concerned with property rights, it inevitably discriminates against the poor in favour of the rich.

113. "Timeline: From Air Travel to the First Railways

1780

This year marks a period of great technological advances. But the technological changes also result in great political stresses. In this year, the mundane but important invention of the fountain pen.

1785

The first air crossing of the English Channel - by Blanchard and Jefferies in a hot air balloon. The first successful balloon flight at all had only been two years earlier, by the Montgolfier brothers.

1786

The first interior (gas powered) lights for houses used - in German homes. Meanwhile, in Japan, a famine claims over a million lives.

1788

The first convicts are transported to Australia, where the native peoples are being brutally displaced.

1791

Thomas Paine writes the 'Rights of Man' against a background in Europe of the Fall of the Bastille (1789) as part of the French Revolution and a clampdown generally on the freedom of its citizens. However, this is also the year a bill is introduced by William Wilberforce in the English Houses of Parliament to abolish slavery.

1793

Meanwhile, in the newly 'United States', a law is passed requiring escaped slaves to return to their owners. In revoluntionary France, the Reign of Terror rages - one arguably less terrible effect of which is that compulsory education from the age of six is introduced.

1795

William Pitt introduces income tax in England as an emergency wartime measure (supposedly temporary). In France, Camaceres begins to develop the Napoleonic legal code, and, a year later, the country goes metric.

1800

Britain, now at the height of its Industrial Revolution, produces over a quarter of a million tonnes of iron a year and dubs itself 'Workshop of the World'. For the first half of the nineteenth century, Britain alone accounts for a quarter of the world's trade. Alessandro Volta invents a portable means of storing electricity - the battery.

1801

The first 'railway' begins to operate - but not for passengers. Horses haul wagons of fruit,  vegetables and coal along.

1804

Robert Trevithick builds the first locomotive, although the first commercially useful one has to wait until ten years later and George Stephenson.

1805

The first factory lights enable owners to increase working hours. A year later, the half a million cotton workers of Great Britain are working under the ghostly and inadequate illumination of gas lights.

115. Chapter 7. Marx and Engels: The Communist Manifesto

'For all Adam Smith's economic logic, the tidy march of society towards industrial nirvana was to be upset by a scandalous pamphlet, produced by two Germans whose names would become infamous. For the next 150 years, from the 1840s to the 1990s, as eagerly anticipated by the pamphlet's authors, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the world appeared increasingly to split into 'two great warring camps' - a capitalist West, and a communist vanguard, centred on the Soviet Union and China.'

120. Marx, from the Communist Manifesto? Similar to how I would describe it, but as a Robot, "Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange, and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.'

122. Communist Revolution as proposed in the Manifesto.

'

* Abolition of land ownership and rents

* A heavy progressive income tax

* Abolition of all inheritance rights

* Confiscation of the property of all those who no longer live in the state, or who rebel against the new government

* Centralisation of all capital and credit in a state bank

* Central state control and ownership of the means of communication and transportation

* Increased state production through factories and farming development of underused land

* 'Equal liability of all to labour'; new armies of workers, especially to work the land

* Disappearance of the distinction between town and country: population distributed evenly over the country

* Free education for all in state-run schools, preparing the children for work in the new industries

124. Revolutionaries before Marx: Jacobinism in the French Revolution; Luddism against the spinning jenny factories.

The Manifesto explains in points why they failed

* feudal socialism: merely aristocrats using sympathy for the workers to denounce the bourgeoisie

* clerical socialism: mere 'conscience-salving'

* petty-bourgeois socialism: nostalgic, unrealistic and ultimately reactionary

* 'humanist socialism': erroneously puts 'humanity' above class struggle

* bourgeois socialism: reform by do-gooders

* 'utopian socialism': which consists only of fantastical visions of the future, such as those advanced by Robert Owen and Henri Comte de Saint Simon

125. Ideal Communist Outcome. "The key to reforming social life, whether its problems are material or spiritual, is therefore, as Marx and Engels see it, and as Rousseau also concluded, to abolish property. With no property, there can no longer be two classes. No bourgeoisie, as they can no longer exist once they no longer have control of the 'means of production'. No proletariat, as they become effectively part owners instead with their former adversaries. With no classes, there is no longer any conflict, and there is no need either for laws or the repressive role of the state. Instead of calculations of profit, production can simply be organised for need. Marx and Engels imagine this as being not only more efficient than under capitalism, but also more rewarding for the workers involved. In place of alienation comes involvement and satisfaction."

127. Key Ideas

* The materialist conception of history is, as we have seen, very old, and much of Marx and Engels' writing on this and other matters is merely a reworking of other people's theories.

* The 'dialectic' itself, with its notion of two classes fighting each other, before destroying themselves to produce a new class, can be seen in non-materialist form in the philosophy of Hegel, along with a version of the evolution of history, and much of that is borrowed from Plato.

129. Timeline: From Roads Paved with Tarmac to Roads Paved with Gold

1806

The US Federal Government bans importation of slaves - but the law is not enforced.

1810

John McAdam begins a road programme in England, giving his name to the new technique of surfacing roads. The first canned food is made - but the process is very risky and prone to poisoning purchasers.

1811

Jane Austen writes 'Sense and Sensibility', published in the same year as protests against the gradual mechanisation of factories erupt as the Luddite riots.

1819

The Factory Acts in Britain forbid the employment of children under nine in cotton factories. Even with its limited scope, the law is largely ineffective, and it is not until 1838 that a general restriction on workers under nine years of age comes into force.

1821

James Mill publishes his 'Essay on Government', and James Faraday discovers the principles of the electric motor. Ten years later, Faraday develops the electric dynamo, which enables electricity to be produced more easily.

1825

The first passenger railway - the 43 kilometres of the Stockton to Darlington line - is opened.

1828

Peasant revolts in Russia, reacting against harsh feudal conditions, become a regular occurrence and remain so for a generation. Revolutions in the rest of Europe peak 20 years later.

1829

Niepce and Daguerre's photographic process results in the first true photographs. The daguerreotype, which uses silver salts, follows nine years later.

1830

The first person is killed by a train.

1831

Charles Darwin travels on 'HMS Beagle' as naturalist for a survey of coral formations. Working out the implications will take him another 20 years.

1834

Six Dorset labourers - the Tolpuddle Martyrs - are transported to Austrailia for their part in an attempt to set up a Trade Union. Instead, the British devise the workhouse system to deal with the problem of unemployment and, later in the century, the first concentration camps, in South Africa.

1836

And it is in Britain that the government starts to record the birth, marriage and death of its citizens centrally by law, the first time this is believed to have been attempted.

1840

The Penny Post is introduced in London. Evelopes are invented shortly afterwards, too. But the 1840s are a period of corn and potato famines in Ireland and throughout Europe, and the railway-led boom collapses.

1841

At this time, the US imports 135,000 slaves a year to toil for its 17 million population (which is slightly less still than Britain's, at just over 18 million).

1842

The Chinese are foced to sign the hated 'Unequal' Treaty of Nanjing, giving the European imperialist powers extensive rights in the East.

1848

Beginning of the Californian gold rush. This is the time of a massive increase in emigration from Europe to the New World. And John Stuart Mill's 'The Principles of Political Economy' is published.

131. Chapter 8. The Principles of Political Economy: J.S. Mill and the Limits of Government

'At the time Mill was writing, the new science of economics, inaugurated, at least as a popular subject, largely by Smith, was vexed by problems resulting from the country's involvement in wars against Napoleon. The recently founded Bank of England had had to default on repayments of the National Debt, new taxes were causing controversy, and inflation was upsetting economic relationships as workers found their wages buying less and less food. It was a situation that required a systematic approach: so step forward the utilitarians.'  

137. Solution to parlament or big government. "...the devolution of power. Small is beautiful: 'the incovenience would be rescued to a very manageable compass, in a country in which there was a proper distribution of functions between the central and local officers of government, and in which the central body was divided into a sufficient number of departments'... in retrospect, such state bodies are today seen to be as effectively unresponsive and disinterested as any central government one, it is not necessarily a criticism of the underlying principle. And the approach appears to be experiencing something of a resurgence with the late twentieth century fashion for 'downsizing' and 'privatising' aspects and functions of not only central but local government. Mill's straightforward claim is that: 'the great majority of things are worse done by the intervention of government, than the individuals most interested in the matter would do them, or cause them to be done, if left to themselves'.

        After all, even if the government were to be superior in intelligence and knowledge to the most intelligent and knowledgeable individual or group in society, it would still be inferior to all the individuals of the nation taken together. 'Laissez-faire' should, in short, be the general practice; every departure from it, unless required by some great good, is a certain evil.' Mill warms to his theme, observing (as many of us will recognise can be the case with social relations within the workplace or even the family!) 'that, as a general rule, the business of life is better performed when those who have an immediate interest in it are left to take their own course', uncontrolled and unhindered by either the law or 'the meddling of any public functionary'."

140. Basic Income. "...what he is saying corresponds to the idea of the 'citizen's wage', that is to say, a minimal amount necessary to ensure subsistence, paid as of right to each citizen, leaving each with not only the duty but the practical necessity to find ways to improve their lot further through their own efforts. After all,

'In the first place, charity almost always does too much or too little; it lavishes its bounty in one place, and leaves people to starve in another. Secondly, since the state must necessarily provide subsistence for the criminal poor while undergoing punishment, not to do the same for the poor who have not offended is to give a premium on crime.'

The problem is that the state must act by general rules: it cannot discriminate 'between the deserving and the undeserving indigent'. It owes 'no more than subsistence to the first, and can give no less to the last'. In words which have been well and truly forgotten, Mill warns: 'The dispensers of public relief have no business to be inquisitors.' So Mill concludes Book V of the 'Principles of Political Economy':

'I have not thought it necessary here to insist on that part of the functions of government which all admit to be indispensable, the function of prohibiting and punishing such conduct on the part of individuals in the exercise of their freedom, as is clearly injurious to other persons, whether the case be one of force, fraud, or negligence. Even in the best state which society has yet reached, it is lamentable to think how great a proportion of all efforts and talents in the world are employed in merely neutralising one another. It is lamentable to think how great a proportion of all the efforts and talents in the world are employed in merely neutralising one another. It is the proper end of government to reduce this wretched waste to the smallest possible amount, by taking such measures as shall cause the energies now spent by mankind in injuring one another, or in protecting themselves against injury, to be turned to the legitimate employment of the human faculties, that of compelling the powers of nature to be more and more subservient to physical and moral good.'

141. Influence. "His brand is grounded in the utilitarian ethic adopted from Jeremy Bentham, rather than on the appeal to fundamental right of that other great liberal Englishman, John Locke. Despite different starting points, each arrives at the characteristic set of individual rights and freedoms."

"The French and American revolutions were epoch-making in that they seemed to correct a sense of inferiority that feudal society engendered and required, replacing it instead with something approaching a sense of dignity and common humanity. Afterwards, for the first time, the state formally recognised the importance of all its citizens, bestowing upon them important powers and rights. Whilst Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and the architects of the American Declaration of Independence held that rights were largely a means of protecting the individual from the rapacious desires of their neighbours, the rights also appeared to include more positive freedoms to create and develop, just the sort of freedoms which lay behind the economic expansion spearheaded by the Protestant entrepreneurs who created the European Industrial Revolution.

        But what sort of 'freedom' is this, anyway? Mill himself writes that 'after the means of subsistence are assured, the next in strength of the personal wants of human beings is liberty'. Yet, liberalism is essentially freedom from rather than freedom to. Freedom from arbitrary laws or taxes, from being made to work against one's will, freedom from being told what to believe, and freedom from being obliged to participate in social activities that cannot be justified by being necessary for the well-being of the community. It is not freedom to work, or to live in a home, or to be healthy - as the ever widening underclasses of the consumer societies can vouch. Indeed, increasingly it is not even freedom from the first two, as it is increasingly the underclasses who pay the highest proportion of their meagre incomes in taxes (for example, on purchases of alcohol or cigarettes) or are drummed into 'work-fare' employment schemes, whilst the rich operate through tax-exempt corporations.

        F.A. Hayek, in 'The Road to Serfdom', his influential book written in the aftermath of the Second World War, specifically warns that 'nothing has done so much harm to the liberal cause as the wooden insistence of some liberals on certain rough rules of thumb, above all the principles of 'laissez-faire'. Instead, he says, the correct attitude of the liberal towards society should be more like that of a good gardener towards their plants - tend them carefully and try to create the conditions in which they can flourish. Yet, any intervention by government in the operations of liberal society is to mix ideologies, to veer either towards the right or the left, towards socialism or fascism.

Key Ideas

Mill takes the principle of maximising the general happiness and sets in a framework of individual rights and freedoms. At the same time, he claims to create the social conditions in which talent, creativity and culture can thrive. Conversly when the state interferes it:

* is invariably a worse judge of both policy and of practicality than the individual

* normally makes matters worse

The tragedy is, as Milll acknowledged, that without any limitations at all on their freedoms, people will still tend to use them simply to injure and harm one another.

Key Text

J.S. Mill's 'The Principles of Political Economy (1848)

143. Timeline: From Outbreaks of Cholera to Outbreaks of Panic in Cinemas

1851

One million people have died in the Irish potato famine.

1854

Baron Haussmann begins constructing the characteristics wide sweeps of the Parisian boulevards  -for the convenience of troops and as a means of deterring rioters.

1855

Dr. Snow's cholera map shows that the cause of an outbreak in Victorian London was the Broad Street drinking pump.

1859

Charles Darwin's 'Origin of Species' is published, affecting the way people see social obligations as well as they perceive the natural world. 'On Liberty', by John Stuart Mill, is published.

1861

As part of a process of Russian modernisation, all serfs are made freemen.

1862

An early machine gun invented by Gatling fuels an arms race. In the following years Wilbrand develops TNT explosives (1863), Svend Foyn invents the harpoon gun (1864),  Winchester makes the repeating rifle, and Whitehead the torpedo (1866). Finally, Nobel, in 1867, discovers the power of dynamite. After this, Nobel decides armaments have developed too far, and funds the peace prize named afteer himself.

1865

The American Civil War ends with the surrender of the Confederates. A year later, the Civil Rights Act sets slaves free.

1870

The British introduce (compulsory) free education for all.

1871

Otto von Bismarck, Prime Minister of Prussia, marches through a seething Paris as the culmination of his campaign of German unification and expansion.

1874

The first typewriters arrive.

1877

The railway strike heralds a (confrontational) new era in industrial relations for the US.

1879

Thomas Edison discovers that tungsten in a vacuum glows brightly for a long time, and the first electric light is created.

1882

Standard Oil now has 95 per cent of all refinery capacity in the US. It will not be until 1911 that the government acts to break up the monopoly.

1884

The Berlin Conference sets out the ground rules for the European 'scramble for Africa' that will trigger the process of turning spheres of influence into full-blown colonies.

1889

The Eiffel Tower opens - by far the tallest building ever built.

1896

The Lumiere brothers introduce films to the public, including the famous 'train arriving at a station', which causes panic wherever it is shown. The first comic strip (by Rudolph Dicks) is printed in the US.

1899

For the first time, people are able to communicate instantaneously - the 'wireless' is used to send messages between London and Paris. The Twentieth Century has truly arrived.

145. Chapter 9. Positivism and the Science of Society: Emile Durkheim and Max Weber

'Then, in the nineteenth century, knowledge became an industry. A social and public enterprise with a workforce of researchers and scholars, grouped by subject into divisions, communicating with one another by thesis and article, judging work by common standards. Knowledge was churned out in a kind of progression. It accumulated in books and libraries. It became an institution.'

Sociology established in 1842 with the publication of Comte's 'Cours de Philosophie Positive'. "Comte was a middle-class French intellectual whom John Stuart Mill would later accuse of devising a 'despotism of society over the individual', although others would trace both the origins of sociology, and the despotism, to Jeremy Bentham's efforts to ground the authority of the law on the principle of maximising the happiness of the greatest number."

146. Comte's 'Law of Human Progress' : three stages: theological, metaphysical, and scientific.

"The defining feature of each stage is the mental attitude of the people. During the theological stage, people seek to discover the 'essential nature of things' and the ultimate cause of existence, interpreted as God. Philosophers, Comte thought, were stuck at this stage, perpetually but fruitlessly pursuing these sorts of question. Most people, however, were at the next, the metaphysical stage, which involves increasing use of abstract theory, although there is still a sense of the underlying essence of things, epitomised by broadly ethical notions of value. The final stage comes only when enough people put aside the illusions of opinion (echoes of Plato) and confine themselves to logical deduction from observed phenomena. This is the so-called scientific (or positive) stage. 'Now each of us is aware, if he looks back on his own history, that he was a theologian in his childhood, a metaphysician in his youth and a natural philosopher in his manhood', Comte rather unconvincingly declares."

These were to correspond to periods of human history. The first, to prehistoric and medieval world, metaphysical stage is compared to the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centures "...a time when monarchies and military despots gave way to political ideals such as democracy and human rights, including, most importantly for social life, property rights. The last stage in history will be a scientific, technological age, when all activity is rationally planned and moral rules have become universal."

"...this final stage beckons that the science of society - sociology - comes into its own, with its task both of explaining and determining social phenomena and the history of mankind."

147. Durkeim. Amid individual freedom and technology... "His solution is centred around what he calls 'the collective consciousness' and the notion of 'social facts'" "Although these rules 'exist' in the minds of individuals, Durkheim says the true form can be found only when considering the behavior of 'the whole' - that is of society itself." "Like Plato, he rejects individualism and introspection as assumed and proposed by thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes and Adam Smith, with their attempts to create generalities out of particulars and to build social structures out of human atoms. Instead, turning their models upside down, he makes society primary - the cause and not the effect." Durkehim rejects Hobbes 'State of Nature' saying,

'...when competition places isolated and estranged individuals in opposition, it can only separate them more. If there is a lot of space at their disposal, they will flee; if they cannot go beyond certain boundaries, they will differentiate themselves, so as to become still more independent. No case can be cited where relations of pure hostility are transformed. . .'

148. "In the same way that an animal colony, for example, a beehive, 'whose members embody a continuity of tissue from one individual, every aggregate of individuals who are in continous contact form a society. The division of labour can then be produced only in the midst of pre-existing society.' Individuals must be linked through material facts, but also by 'moral links' between them. Hence, Durkheim concludes,

'...the claim sometimes advanced that in the division of labour lies the fundamental fact of all social life is wrong. Work is not divided among independent and already differentiated individuals who by uniting and associating bring together different aptitudes. For it would be a miracle if differences thus born through chance circumstance could unite so perfectly as to form a coherent whole. Far from preceding collective life, they derive from it. They can be produced only in the midst of a society, and under the pressure of ocial sentiments and social needs. That is what makes them essentially harmonious.'

Societies are built up out of shared beliefs and sentiments, and the division of labour emerges from the structure created."

"...in Comte's words, 'cooperation, far from having produced society, necessarily supposes, as preamble, its spontaneous existence'. What brings people together are practical forces such as living in the same land, sharing the same ancestors and gods, having the same traditions. Rousseau, Hobbes, and even the Utilitarians, are all guilty of disregarding the important social truth, that society pre-dates the individual. 'Collective life is not born from individual life, but it is, on the contrary, the second which is born from the first... Cooperation is... the primary fact of moral and social life.'

        Compare human beings with animals. Animals are almost completely under the yoke of their physical environments. Human beings, however, are almost free of their environment but dependent on social causes. Animals have their societies too, but they must be very simple, restricted, and the collective life is simple and limited. With human societies, there are more individuals living together, common life is richer and more varied: 'social causes substitute themselves for organic causes. The organism is spiritualised.'

'As societies become more vast, and particularly, more condensed a psychic life of a new sort appears. Individual diversities, at first lost and confused amidst the mass of social likenesses, become disengaged, become conspicuous, and multiply. A multitude of things which used to remain outside consciences because they did not affect the collective being became objects of representations. Whereas individuals used to act only by involving one another, except in cases where their conduct was determined by physical needs, each of them becomes a source of spontaneous activity. Particular personalities become constituted, take conscience of themselves.'

People exist within and depend on only three 'types of milieu': the organism, the external world, and society."

150. The individual in history is only known from social artefacts.

Durkheim, 'If one leaves aside the accidental variations of hereditary, - and their role in human progress is certainly not very considerable - the organism is not automatically modified; it is necessary that it be impelled by some external cause. As for the external world, since the beginning of history it has remained sensibly the same, at least if one does not take account of novelties which are of social origin. Consequently, there is only society which has changed enough to be able to explain the parallel changes in individual nature.'

Kinship is socially conditioned.

Great leaders... "...solely due to the 'importance attributed to him by public opinion'...

The special status and powers of great leaders, as imagined by Max Weber and Friedrich Nietzche, for example, is an illusion."

151. It is all a social construct. "Durkheim considers our very awareness, our 'consciousness' to be not an individual but a social phenomenon. He argues that there are two types of 'symbol' which create societies and cement the individual human beings into the social whole. These are collective representations, such as national flags and other shared symbols, moral codes, such as notions of basic rights, and even unwritten, generally accepted, beliefs such as the idea that young children should be given toys to play with or that swimming in rivers should be free. Together, these written and unwritten rules create a 'collective consciousness'. This consciousness is part of the psychological make-up of each individual in society, and is also the origin of more formal moral codes. Many things follow from this interpretation. For example, stealing from your neighbour is wrong not to the collective consciousness itself. And Durkheim draws from this, more generally, the conclusion that self-interest, or even consideration of the interests of the majority (the goal assumed by utilitarianism), is incapable of producing moral behaviour. Instead, the 'collective consciousness' functions as a kind of watchdog for its own well-being, as well as expressing a position based on certain principles.

        Durkheim goes on:

'It has often been remarked that civilisation has a tendency to become more rational and more logical. The cause is now evident. That alone is rational which is universal. What baffles understanding is the particular and the concrete... the nearer the common conscience is to particular things, the more it bears their imprint, the more unintelligible it is...'

152. Symbolism. "...social values are preserved and embodied in the sacred symbols. Social life

'... in all its aspects and in every period of its history, is made possible only by a vast symbolism. The national emblems and figurative representations with which we are more especially concerned in our present study are one form of this, but there are many others. Collective sentiments can just as well become incarnate in persons or formulae, some formulae are false, while others are persons, either real or mythical, who are symbols.'

'Simple' society, share a powerful sense of purpose and function; a social cohesion Durkheim calls 'mechanical'. They larger 'simple' societies become 'complex'

"'organic', is more complex. It involves a range of parallel institutions and traditions, with individuals falling into increasingly distint subgroupings, each with it own traditions and 'social norms'. Within each grouping, individuals can become specialised and fulfil a particular function in the social whole. The division of labour, which Marx sought to abolish (as creating inequality),is seen by Durkheim as a desirable aspect of this evolution."

Mechanical societies tend to be rigid and swifty punish rebels. [The US]

Organic societies try to fix the rogue element, due to its interdependent structure. [Europe]

153. Durkheim terms 'anomie' to describe suicide and homocide within complex societies, seeing this as a failure to replace the 'mechanical' cohesion of the simple society with new social bonds.

In 'Suicide' shows that 'anomie' is morso with Protestants than Catholics. In 'Division of Labor' Durkheim suggests professional groupings or unions take a more personal interest to ensure members well-being. Like the Japanese 'zaibatsu' or large corporation like Mitsubishi.

154. Weber. 'Protestantic Ethic'. "...the Industrial Revolution in Europe was linked to a rejection of traditional and elaborate Catholic religious practice, and a Protestant ideology which emphasised the virtue of a lifetime spent working hard with no greater aim than serving God. The second stage of this realisation was a view of material goods which held them to be only important in that they reflected God's approval of one's efforts. For the new breed of capitalist, Weber thought, this made the success of the entrepreneur something worth striving for. It also, conveniently justified reducing the workers to the absolute bare minimum required for successful production.

        In particular, Weber argued that the development of capitalism occurred in Holland and England because they were Protestant powers, and that the economic discoveries associated with the time flowed from this pre-existing fact, rather than vice versa - a view that harmonises with Durkheim's approach, by putting the social before the economic.

        Not that Weber is necessarily in favour of this. In 'The Origin of Modern Capitalism', Weber argues that 'in the east it was essentially ritualistic considerations, including caste and clan organisations which prevented the development of a deliberate economic policy' and thus that capitalism could only develop once the political administration - the bureaucracy - was created, as in the British parliamentary system"

To contrast Durkheim, Web in 'The Protestant Ethic'. "....attempts to show how individual perceptions are tied up with economic practice."

156. "Digestion is merely behaviour, but stealing apples is social action."

157. Rationality for Weber is when the choice of means and ends either

" * 'accord with the canons of logic, the procedures of science or of successful economic behaviour', or

* 'constitute a way of achieving certain ends, when the means chosen to achieve them accord with factual and theoretical knowledge'.

Otherwise, if the ends are motivated (contaminated by values - religious, moral or aesthetic - or if values influence or determine the means employed, then the behavior is 'value-rational' (which is not as good). This is typified by the case of the principled parent who refuses to borrow money and so is unable to feed the family properly.

        Sometimes the ends may be decided by tradition, which is a kind of value. This is typically the key factor in history, Weber says, describing how in traditional Chinese society, if you sold your house and moved out but later became homeless, you could return to your old home and expect to be taken back in, for the new owner would not risk offending the 'spirits' by refusing to help another. Thus, Weber argues, tradition hinders economic progress. Then again, sometimes behaviour is affected by emotions and passions; this is 'affectual action', and that, too, is opposed to rational behaviour.

        It is 'zweckrational', or goal-rational, behavior which is most logical, similar perhaps also to the more simple-minded models of market economists or utilitarians. For example, if someone wishes to buy a gold watch, they may start doing overtime at work to save money for the purchase. Weber doesn't necessarily think that people actually do behave as tidily as this - the extra money of our worker may go on beer and nights out - but he thinks the notion may have some explanatory force anyway. Capitalism depends on rationality in two ways: for the movement of free and property-less workers in response to the demands of the free market; and for the freedom of those with capital to invest - such as entrepreneurs - to choose where to do so, based on maximising profit."

158. Two rational forms interaction. "They work cooperatively with one another, either for reasons of tradition and other not wholly 'zweckrational' reasons, or from a more calculated assessment of their self-interest. The former is typical of family and nationalist bonds, and the latter is found in 'associations' such as those modern industrial society may create."

Anticipating German fascism. "Weber argues that unless society is ordered by a strong authority, rational judgments will be limited to pragmatism. He proposes instead that this authority needs to be respected, almost worshipped."

159. Key Ideas. "The 'positivist approach' can give a different, general picture of life and society. Statistical methods are the tools for those today seeking to organise, design and control societies - and their power can be seen in the increasingly sophisticated manipulation of markets by governments, media, and business, perhaps in turn all manipulated by the huge transnational corporations of the modern global economy. Rather than the idealised individuals imagined by Rousseau and some liberal theorists, social science reveals that behaviour can also be explained by seeing people as just atomic parts of the machine that is society. But, at the same time, Durkheim and Weber build on the statistical analysis of the workings of the machine to produce a more metaphysical, idealised model of reality.

* Individual morality and indeed consciousness are created from social life and the collective consciousness.

* Social life is created out of a vast symbolism

Key Texts

Emile Durkheim: Social Rituals and Sacred Objects (1912) and Precontractual Solidarity (1893)

Max Weber: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1930)

161. Timeline: The Modern Era: From Fordism to Fascism

1903

Henry Ford sets up an automobile company, and the first Model T cars follow five years later. The first coast-to-coast crossing of the US by car takes just 65 days. Meanwhile, in Britain, Emmeline Pankhurst sets up a Women's Social and Political Union to demand the vote.

1906

The Trades Disputes Act in Britain allows unions to organise strike action without being liable for damages in the civil courts, thus evening up the balance between employers and employed.

1907

Free meals and medical care for school children, and pensions for the retired, are introduced in Britain. The state has assumed responsibility for looking after its citizens.

1909

Sweden introduces votes for all adults, male and female, but campaigns by the suffragettes in Britain for the same rights are unsuccessful, and the leaders of the movement are imprisoned in 1913.

1915

Poison gas is used for the first time, during the First World War.

1916

The Battle of the Somme produces over one million casualties.

1917

In October, the Bolsheviks overthrow Russia's provisional government and Lenin becomes Chief Commissar.

1918

The revolutionary Bolshevik government in Russia nationalises all large-scale industries.

1919

Benito Mussolini establishes the Italian Fascists. Out of the ruins of the First World War have emerged two great ideological force - fascism and communism.

162. Chapter 10. Behold the Man! The Deceptive Appeal of Power: Hegel, Nietzsche and the Fascists

'Fascism is essentially the doctrine that elevates that part of the human psyche concerned with control over others - power - to a creed. As such, it is different from other political philosophies only in degree. Communism and fascism blur into each other, and in a way National Socialism is, like liberalism, only claiming 'the centre ground'. Conservatism, socialism and even liberalism are none of them immune from the siren call of the fascist ideology, with its deceptive egotistical promise of fulfilment.'

163. "Nor does fascism have much to do with the hatreds and resentments - racism, homophobia, xenophobia - than a shared emphasis on conflict and 'recognition'."

Hegel (1770-1831) "...begins his history with a critical survey of Indian, Persian and Chinese thinkers, claiming that, in those societies, only the ruler himself had any freedom to think rationally, and that therefore their philosophers were suspect. Only in ancient Greece, according to Hegel, could individuals begin to be rational, albeit still carrying too much intellectual baggage from their religious and social traditions." A rationality accredited not the Protestant Reformation, but the Prussian monarchy. Schopenhauer would note this provided Hegel's professorial salary and position.

164. "Hegel's new rational society aims to combine both individual desires: for wealth, for power, for justice, with the social values of the community - a kind of early 'third way' politics. But Hegel's solution also involves reclassifying all desires that are not compatible with the requirements of the social whole as 'irrational', hence not what the individual really wants. Instead, the collective will, the 'Geist' (similar, it would seem, to Durkheim's later 'collective consciousness' - though Durkheim's creation does not need any physical form, and Hegel's does) is given complete power and authority. This is what makes Hegel the founding father of the two totalitarian doctrines: fascism and communism."

"Lying behind this totalitarian concept of society is a view of the universe not as a collection of fundamental particles, whether atoms or souls, but as a whole, an organic unity. 'The True is the Whole', Hegel writes in 'The Phenomenology of Spirit'. It is an illusion to think of anything as separate from anything else, and, in as much as we do so, our thinking is flawed. Actually, even 'the whole', which replaces all these imagined separate objects, is not essentially one substance, but many, just as an organism, such as the human body, is made up of different parts with their own characteristics and functions. Even that most basic distinction - between space and time - results in us misguidedly splitting up the world and thereby losing touch with reality. (This is also what Einstein was concerned to announce in his theories of the 'space-time continuum' and relativity.) Hegel calls reality - this 'whole' - 'The Absolute', and it is his contention that all that is true of the world can be formally deduced from consideration of the Absolute using logic." The Absolute is similar to Aristotle's God.

165. "The dialectic is a process - here one of reasoning, but it could equally well be of political or economic systems, as it was famously later taken by Marx - which proceeds from one view, the thesis, to pose another opposing view - the antithesis. These then combne to produce a synthesis, dissolving the original view, and destroying themselves. However, the synthesis now becomes the new thesis, which in turn is found to be unsatisfactory, so that the process repeats itself."

To origin of society, according to Hegel, is conflict. A 'bloody battle' with each seeking to make the other recognise them as master, and accept the role of 'slave'. "...it is the fear of death that forces part of mankind to submit to the other, and society is perpetually thereafter divided into two classes: of slaves and masters. It is not material need that propels one class to oppress the other - it is a conflict borne solely out of the peculiarly human lust for power over one another."

168. Schopenhauer. "...came to conclude that five out of six people are worthy only of contempt."

"Schopenhauer's main idea, developed early, was that beyond the everyday world of experience is a better world in which the human mind pierces appearance to perceive reality. There is 'Vorstellung' (representation) and 'Wille' (will), which is, he argues, what the world is, in itself. Schopenhauer represents another side of the German spirit, a more subtle, profound and, in places, compassionate one. And whatever the philosophers at Jena may have thought, he did have one admirer. One who combined both traditions, and became the prophet of the philosophy of power."

Nietzsche's first reading of Schopenhauer's 'The World as Will and Representation' was a revelation.

"Born in the 'Decade of Revolutions' in 1844 (in the Prussian town of Rocken) Nietzsche sees human beings, and indeed all of life, as engaged in a struggle, a struggle to increase their power. As to alternative theories, for example that of Mill and the ulilitarians, he puts it succinctly in 'Twilight of the Idols', 'Man does not strive after happiness, only the Englishman does that.'"

172. Nietzsche, 'One must learn from war to associate death with the interests for which one fights - that makes us proud; [and to] learn to sacrifice many and to take one's cause seriously enough not to spare human lives.'

173. Nietzsche explains how despots will, '...mould men as an artist would... to achieve that universal energy of greatness, to mould the future man by breeding and, at the same time, by destroying millions of bungled humans, we will not be deterred by the suffering we create, the equal of which has never been seen!'

174. "...Mussolini actually started his career as a socialist, gradually developing extreme syndicalist notions centred around an all-powerful state. The manifesto of his party can be said to be 'La dottrina del fascismo' written by Mussolini and the former liberal, Giovanni Gentile, a respected 'neo-Hegelian' philosopher." Hitler adopted the doctorine as the ideology of the German National Socialists.

175. "Fascism was not just an economic theory, or a quasi-legal structure of rights, but much more - a way to live and a way to attain fulfilment. It was not enough to do what the fascist government said - the fascist citizen also had to 'want' to do it, and to believe in doing it. That is why one of the most potent images of the fascist state is of massive parades lined with enthusiastically waving crowds."

177. "Key Ideas.

For fascism,

* all life is a striving after 'power', with human beings important only as the means to the ends of the exercise of this power.

* the state should be organised rationally, with individuals complying with and fitting in to its requirements.

In some ways, Nietzssche had a rather naive notion of the power of an individual, whereas Mussolini and Gentile were essentially investing power in the state, under, of course, a charismatic leader. In the aftermath of the horrors of the Second World War, there is little explicit political appetite for the Hegelian doctrine of unfettered state power, although many regimes contain elements of the philosophy in practice. It seems, too, that the Weberian cult of the charismatic national leader has run its course.

        Adam Smith too thought liberalism and the free market could offer people a route to satisfy their desire for 'recognition', through the accumulation of material goods. These are not 'necessities of nature', but 'superfluities'. As Smith puts it in 'The Moral Sentiments', 'The rich man glories in his riches, because he feels they naturally draw upon him the attention of the world... the poor man, on the contrary, is ashamed of his poverty.'

        If we recall, with Smith, that 'wealth, as Mr Hobbes says, is power',  and that money is power in tangible, exchangeable form, then there are parallels between the more radical doctrines of materialism and fascism. It can be argued that the philosophical appeal of life as the pursuit of power goes deeper than just an historical stage, apparently now passed through.

Key Text. Nietzsche's Ecce Homo (1908)

179. Timeline: From the Great Depression to the New Economics

1920

Ghandi starts a campaign of civil disobedience against the British in India.

1921

In China, a Communist Party is founded. In the US, the Ku Klux Klan are increasingly violent - and can expect a quarter of a million supporters to attend their 'conclaves'.

1922

Stalin becomes Secretary General of the Russian Communist Party and sets up the OGPU - forerunner of the KGB, Russia's secret police. The Italian fascists march on Rome and King Emmanuel III invites Mussolini to become Prime Minister.

1923

Adolf Hitler similarly attempts a putsch in Bavaria, but is unsuccessful and is imprisoned.

1924

Lenin dies and is succeeded by Stalin who establishes a personal dictatorship. In Italy, the fascists are successful in the elections and, from 1925, also establish a dictatorship.

1925

Experimental television pictures are transmitted by John Logie Baird in Britain.

1927

The Shanghai massacres of communists by the Nationalist government take place in China. Chiang Kai Shek rules as a dictator.

1929

The Wall Street Crash. The World economy plunges into depression. From Glasgow, unemployed marchers make their way to London.

1930

The Nazis are now the second largest party in the German parliament.

1931

Collapse of 3,000 German banks as unemployment rises to nearly 6 million.

1932

Fascist parties are founded in Britain and Spain. The Nazis are now the largest party in the German parliament. Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World' is published. The slump reaches its nadir in the US, there is a 'Great Hunger March' in London, and in India the British put Gandhi in prison.

1933

The Nazis use their new powers to set up a one-party state. Concentration camps are opened for enemies of the party. When the German President, Hindenberg, dies the following year, Adolf Hitler becomes sole leader - Fuehrer - of Germany. The 'Long March' begins in China, saving Mao's peasant army, ready one day to defeat Japanese fascism.

1935

Nazis start systematically targeting Jews. The Italians invade an independent country, Abyssinia, demonstrating the impotence of the League of Nations.

1936

Germany, Italy and Japan reach strategic agreements.

1938

First anti-Semitic laws in Italy. Germany annexes Austria.

1939

Spain joins the fascist community. Germany annexes Czechoslovakia, and then Poland, precipitating the Second World War.

1941

Germany sets up the first extermination camps.

1942

two technological breakthroughs in the US - the first nuclear reactor and the first 'modern' computer.

1944

The Bretton Woods Conference creates two international institutions, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, to determine the shape of the post-war world.

1945

Violent end to Italian, German and finally Japanese fascist movements. Perhaps 35 million people have died in the fighting (most of them on the Eastern Front), and at least another 10 million have been murdered in the concentration camps. In China, a new People's Republic is being set up under Chairman Mao. [Who goes on to kill 40 million people under his rule.]

182. Chapter 11. Mao's Little Red Book

"The Chinese Marxists under Mao had two primary goals: to save China from the foreign enemies who had overrun it, and to make the country strong and rich in the future. Not particularly originally, both of these were to be achieved through programmes of technological modernisation and public education. Being essentially pragmatic in outlook, they selected from any of the range of Marxist and Chinese philosophies those elements that they felt could be used most effectively in the pursuit of these aims. Maoism became a mixture of Marx and Engels' writings, Lenin and Trotsky's subsequent interpretations, and the two distinctive Chinese philosophies of Confucianism and Taoism."

185. In regard to the story of the Foolish Old Man that digs up the two mountains. "Having refuted the Wise Old Man's wrong view (the story goes on), the Foolish One carried on digging every day, unshaken in his conviction. God was moved by this, and sent down two angels, who carried the mountains away on their backs. The moral is (teacher would add) that today, two big muntains lie like a dead weight on the Chinese people. One is imperialism, the other is feudalism."

186. Investigation. From the Red Book,

'A fact-finding meeting need not be large; from three to five or seven or eight people is enough. Ample time must be allowed and an outline for investigation must be prepared; furthermore, one must personally ask questions, take notes and have discussions with those at the meeting. One certainly cannot make an investigation, or do it well, without zeal, a determination to direct one's eyes downward and a thirst for knowledge, and without shedding the ugly mantle of pretentiousness and becoming a willing pupil.'

187. Accountability. From the Red Book,

'In China the army needs democracy as much as the people do. Democracy in our army is an important weapon for undermining the feudal mercenary army. Apart from the role played by the Party, the reason why the Red Army has been able to carry on in spite of such poor material conditions and such frequent engagements is its practice of democracy. The officers do not beat the men; officers and men receive equal treatment, soldiers are free to hold meetings and to speak out; trivial formalities have been done away with; and the accounts are open for all to inspect.'

'We should pay close attention to the well-being of the masses, from the problems of land and labour to those of fuel, rice, cooking oil and salt.'

192. On Revolution, Mao,

'A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.'

194.

'

(1) the individual is subordinate to the organisation;

(2) the minority is subordinate to the majority;

(3) the lower level is subordinate to the higher level; and

(4) the entire membership is subordinate to the Central Committee.

'

'At no time and in no circumstances should a Communist place his personal interests first; he should subordinate them to the interests of the nation and of the masses. Hence, selfishness, slacking, corruption, seeking the limelight, and so on, are most contemptible, while selflessness, working with all one's energy, whole-hearted devotion to public duty, and quiet hard work will command respect.'

197. Purpose of Dictatorship. Mao,

'Our state is a people's democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on the worker-peasant alliance. What is this dictatorship for? Its first function is to suppress the reactionary classes and elements and those exploiters in our country who resist the socialist revolution, to supress those who try to wreck our socialist construction, or in other words, to resolve the internal contradictions between ourselves and the enemy. For instance, to arrest, try and sentence certain counter-revolutionaries, and to deprive landlords and bureaucrat-capitalists of their right to vote and their freedom mof speech for a specified period of time - all this comes within the scope of our dictatorship.'

201. Just and unjust war.

'History shows that wars are divided into two kinds, just and unjust. All wars that are progressive are just, and all wars that impede progress are unjust. We Communists oppose all unjust wars that impede progress, but we do not oppose progressive, just wars. Not only do we Communists not oppose just wars, we actively participate in them.'

206. Key Ideas.

"Mao declares that 'the history of mankind is one of continuous development from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom'. This is an old story, seen in Marx and Hegel, and earlier philosophers. But Mao changes the emphasis significantly. The process is never-ending, as in any society in which classes exist, class struggle is inevitable. Even in the long-awaited classless society, the struggle 'between the new and the old and between truth and falsehood' will never end. In the 'fields of struggle for production and scientific experiment' progress is continuous and nature undergoes constant change, yet things never remain at the same level.

* Education and democracy are inseparable.

* Nothing is all psitive or all negative

Where western theorists see a linear progression, with single causes leading to single effects, Mao sees complexity and relationships: the eastern conception of the great interplay of positive and negative, yin and yang, added to a western notion of simple cause and effect. Maoism hints at a 'third way' between communism and capitalism, which is what the Chinese government today is still seeking to explore. On their success or failure hinges more than the Chinese political system.

207. Timeline: From Atom Bombs to the Triumph of Capitalism

1945

The 'Enola Gay', the effectionately named US Air Force bomber, drops 'Little Boy' on Hiroshima, bringing about the largest single mass killing in human history - and the unconditional surrender of the Japanese.

1948

The UN adopts the Declaration of Human Rights. The World Health Organisation is set up. NATO is founded to defend the West. COMECON is set up by the USSR and Eastern European satellite states.

1949

Mao finally drives the rump of the Nationalist armies, led by Chiang Kai Shek, off the mainland to Taiwan and announces the new People's Republic.

1950

The Korean war starts, to end in US humilitation, mainly due to China's support for the Koreans.

1952

The first contraceptive pills are produced. This heralds a time of social and sexual liberalisation.

1954

The US Supreme Court rules that racial segregation in schools is unconstitutional. A year later, the black inhabitants of Montgomery boycott the segregated city buses, winning further concessions.

1955

The Warsaw Pact is established to replace COMECON, in the year of the death of Stalin. For four decades the world will be divided between two distinct blocs of influence.

1957

The European Common Market is established, but the United Kingdom is not part of it, busy instead detonating its own H-bomb on Christmas Island. The Russian sputnik alarms the US into a 'Space Race'.

1958

Mao's 'Great Leap Forward' proves disastrous as agrarian reform leads to famine. Ten years later the Cultural Revolution, an equally disastrous 'back to basics' campaign results in anarchy and random murder.

1959

Fidel Castro overthrows the Batista government in Cuba and sets about reforming the sugar plantations. Two years later a US invasion at the Bay of Pigs is a fiasco, but John F. Kennedy manages to win the showdown of the missile crisis the following year.

1961

Yuri Gagarin becomes the first man in space.

1969

Neil Armstrong is the first man on the moon. Buzz Aldrin is the second. The Soviet Union is not even in sight. The west has won the race - and not just for the moon.

209. Chapter 12. The End of History?

'Is society proceeding slowly but surely towards a final Utopia - or towards an equally final cataclysm? Or are we following only a random and unpredictable process of change?  Could slavery, mass famine, even human sacrifice, be part of the future as well as the past?

        Most of the political philosophers seem to discern a pattern to history, and usually a positive one, generally putting great store by the apparently consistent and cumulative effects of technology. After all, once invented, few things are uninvented, at least, few things which find a profitable market. Yet, if political society is about the well-being of the people, the progress seems to be less clear. The poverty and despair of past epochs seem to change form, never to disappear. Indeed, Rousseau's noble savage may well have been a happier fellow than today's suburban clockwatcher or mortgaged wage-slave, let alone the unemployed or imprisoned.'

"In the twenty years after 1960 the richest fifth of the world's societies increased their share of the overall cake from 70 per cent to 82 per cent. For the poorest 50 or so countries (with a fifth of the world's population) that left just 1.5 per cent of world income."

210. "Ultimately, politics is really a branch of 'applied ethics', and political systems must account for themselves in moral terms. "

European Convention on Human Rights

* life, liberty and security of the person

* a fair trial, and access to justice

* respect for private and family life, home and correspondence

* freedom of thought, conscience and religion

* free expression, including the freedom of the press

* freedom of assembly and association, including the right to join a trade union

* marry and found a family

* peaceful enjoyment of possessions

* education

* free elections by secret ballot

together with negative rights not to:

* suffer torture, inhuman or degrading treatment

* be forced into slavery, servitude or bonded labour

* be prosecuted under retrospective criminal law

211. Education.  "In the cradle of liberalism, the United Kingdom, two types of education go on side by side: free universal state provision, and feepaying private schools. Around twice as much money is available (per head) for the children in the fee-paying schools, who tend to do significantly better in exams - although this may equally well be explained by better management or motivation or discipline. (Children in private schools can be thrown out.) For whatever reason, of 8.5 million UK children, the 7 per cent who go to fee-paying schools go on to take half of the university places at the elite colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, and to make up 80 per cent of judges; 80 percent of the generals; 55 per cent of top doctors - even eight out of eleven of the country's national newspaper editors."

"Between 1900 and 1985, three quarters of all government ministers went to either Oxford or Cambridge, the vast majority having first been to private schools. Indeed, three quarters of the century's Prime Ministers went to Oxford alone! At the turn of the new millennium, a supposedly radical reforming 'New Labour' administration was made up of one third from the two universities, under an Oxford-educated Prime Minister, who went on to appoint new 'reforming' peers to the House of Lords - whose major characteristic turned out to be also having been at Oxbridge."

212. Equality. "...despite Mill's warnings, power is still largely inherited." "...as a popular United Kingdom newspaper's 'Rich List' reflect, it is still those who start off with serious money who make serious money."

"In 1999, of the UK's 26 million workers paying income tax to the government, almost half were women. Yet, typically they are paid around 15 per cent less than their male counterparts. The International Labour Organisation calculates that two thirds of women's work is unpaid - and that on top of this, women work one sixth harder than men. Similarly, within the world's oldest National Health Service, in Britain, in the treatment of diseases such as heart disease and cancer, a significantly higher chance of successful treatment attaches itself to the affluent classes."

213. "In the 25 years since the first man on the moon, global life expectancy did indeed rise - from 53 to 62 years, and infant mortality rates fell, from 110 per thousand children born, to 73 per thousand - even as sub-Saharan Africa defied the trent, suffering dramatically deteriorating conditions. But behind the overall and real improvement is a corresponding reality of the continuing direct relationship between health and wealth. In the richest countries life expectacy is now 78 years, in the poorest, 43 years - and the gap is widening. Then within countries there are equivalent contrasts: between the affluence of the new 'middle classes' in countries like Brazil (where some 120 million people live in poverty, out of a total population of 153 million), Venezuela - even South Africa and Ethiopia. in all these 'underveloped' countries there are millions living lives comparable to those in the richest northern 'advanced economies', and, equally, even in the richest countries a large 'underclass' remains in the shadow of unprecedented material prosperity. These are underclasses living in conditions of poverty, sickness - even of massacres - that seem completely incompatible with the veneer of modern sophistication. As a result, at the start of the third millennium there are now more people in the world than ever before - it is estimated at 100 million - who are actually disabled as a result of extreme poverty or avoidable disease. Not for them the opportunities of 'laissez-faire'."

213. Discrimination. "Liberalism above all says all people are equal in the eyes of the law. Yet only in 1957 did the US Civil Rights Act move to enforce desegregation outlawing 'separate but equal' facilities for non-white Americans. Nor did the Act truly herald a new approach to this disease of society. In 1992, American blacks were still three times more likely to be living in poverty as their white fellow citizens. Average income for a non-white family was under two thirds that of the whites. A similar story can be read in countries with long-established liberal democracies such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand, although happily in recent years the situation is beginning to be, at least, addressed." Northern Ireland, Israel, Saudi Arabia.

214. Human Spirit. "Plato insists that an essential part of the human spirit is a sense of justice. If we feel that we - or our friends - are being treated unjustly, then we feel anger. If we feel we have done this injustice to ourselves, we feel ashamed. And when we feel that our worth has been correctly assessed by others, we feel pride."

"...'thymos' or 'spiritedness' is given careful consideration, with Plato seeing this spirit as likely to 'boil over' - at perceived injustice, if nothing else. The spirit is there too in the passion for glory of Machiavelli's Princes, and in grossest form in the fascist ideology and the picture of the 'beast with red cheeks' painted by Nietzsche. Communism and fascism promised their citizens the world if they would forgo their individualism, and yet yielded only spiralling destruction and despotism. Between them is only free-market capitalism, with its political accompaniment - liberalism."

215. "Fukuyama even tabulates the rise of liberalism in a helpful chart, showing how the three democracies of 1790 (France, the newly United States and the cantons of Switzerland) grew to 25 by the end of the second decade of the twentieth century, and 36 by 1960, distributed largely amongst Europe and her former colonies. Although the numbers then actually slipped during the 1970s, with a fashion for military dictatorships in the southern hemisphere, as well as in Greece and Portugal, by 1990 there were, Fukuyama proudly notes, 61 'liberal democracies' worldwide."

Opposition. "...George Kennan, the head of the US State Department policy staff put it, in a foreign policy discussion document (PPS 23, 1948):

'We have 50 per cent of the world's wealth, but only 6.3 per cent of its population... In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to divise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism  and world-benefaction... We should cease to talk about vague and... unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and domocratisation. (Quoted in 'The Compassionate Revolution', David Edwards, pp. 30-1)

That of course, was just planning-speak - designed to be uncomfortable - controversial even. Yet the reality that emerged in the post-war period was not of the 'exporting' of liberalism, but of the exporting of state terror.

* 50,000 civilian deaths in El Salvador during the 1980s

* 200,00 in Guatemala, after Democratic President, Jacobo Arbenz, rashly upset the (US-owned) United Fruit Co., and was toppled in a CIA coup

* the lost generations of Argentina, Nicaragua, Colombia, Chile, Mexico, Haiti and elsewhere

(We might also note that in 1993, 5 per cent of the world's population lived under military regimes (autocracy), 30 per cent under one-party rule (oligarchies) and 65 per cent in multi-party states (democracies).)

217. "So Fukuyama inverts Marx, to suggest that the 'logic of modern natural science' actually leads to capitalism rather than socialism as its final stage. But then Fukuyama also differs from Marx in retaining the element of 'the human spirit' that the communists wished to exclude.

        Marxists recognised the dignity and importance of individuals only when taken as a whole, as a society, condemning exploitation of the weak by the strong, even in the context of actual material improvement. Hegel thought that the human animal does differ from others in having not only material desires, but also social requirements - to be appreciated or 'recognised' as having a certain worth or dignity - but that these should be subsumed in the new rational state. From another perspective, liberalism creates a weak society of grasping individuals, interested only in the satisfaction of society of grasping individuals, interested only in the satisfaction of their desires, the achievement of a comfortable, bourgeois lifestyle, lacking any sense of pride or dignity, living either a life of ultimately meaningless self-indulgence - or resenting the absense of such. If there is a fundamental contradiction in liberalism it is that, on the one hand, it celebrates individualism, whilst, on the other, it appeals to public spiritedness, self-sacrifice and consideration for others. But although it is true that under capitalism we may rely on the self-interest of the butcher, baker and candlestick maker for the prompt delivery of meat, bread and candles, we cannot, for example, rely on that self-interest to stop them tipping their rubbish in the local brook or stream. Nor can we rely on it to stop the burning down of the world's remaining forests and the destruction of species. (Which is why the greatest challenge to the legitimacy of capitalism now is posed by the environmental movement.)

The Communist Experiment. "From the end of the 1920s to at least the mid-1950s, if not later, the Soviet economy outperformed the American one. This was in part because, during the Great Depression, the US economy had collapsed by a third of GDP, but communism, as late as the 1960s, still seemed to have achieved an astonishingly fast transformation: from a feudal system to a modern society capable of 'putting a man into space'. Even as the control economies of the Soviet republics, of North Korea, of Cuba, slipped further and further behind their capitalist neighbours, up to the moment the Berlin Wall came down, communism was still the political system that claimed the future. Yet communism failed in underestimating the importance of the individual - both as consumer and as producer. It would have needed - and completely failed to create - the 'communist' citizen who would work for others and expect nothing in return. As Hayek put it in 'The Road to Serfdom', to lose economic control is to lose political power. The consumer is actually very powerful economically even in the centralised state, and central planning of the economy is control by the state: individual freedom requires market economics.

219. "The last hope for the Leninist doctrine was that the death of capitalism would come, not at the hands of the workers, but from the global 'class struggle' between a wealthy First World, and an exploited and hungry Third World. As last-ditch Marxists readily noted, the self-styled 'free-market' liberals were inclined to protect their markets from manufactured products from the developing world, only allowing it to supply them with cheap raw materials (including, occasionally, and grudgingly, labour, such as the Caribbean railwayment recruited for the London Underground in the 1950s, or the Filipino women employed (at Filipino rates) for childcare by middle-class families in the United States).

        However, the ability of equally poor countries such as South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and Thailand, the so-called 'Asian Tiger' economies, to move from dependency to become successful high-tech manufacturing nations, belies the simplicities of these predictions of their inevitable impoverishment too. And whilst the conditions of many of the workers in the 'sweatshops' of Asia may continue to be a hidden aspect of apparently westernised industries, the statistics for income distribution in the emerging economies show them actually spreading their wealth more evenly than many of their western role models" 1989, Berlin Wall, Warsaw Pact dissolved. Marxist states such as Ethiopia, Angola and Sudan, held on until economic collapse to persuade their ruling elites to give way.

221. Karl Popper. "...warns against the 'unholy' alliance between the 'social engineers' and the 'historicists'. Both work from a kind of Utopian blueprint, a blueprint that claims to cover all aspects of society." "In 'The Poverty of Historicism', he argues that an 'open society' concentrates on constructing neutral institutions instead, allowing for the peaceful displacement of any political grouping which becomes too attached to power."

"As to the historicists, Popper considers it simply not possible for us to 'observe or describe a whole piece of the world, or a whole piece of nature'. In fact, not even the smallest whole piece may be so described, since all description is necessarily selective. It may even be said that 'wholes... can never be the object of any activity, scientific or otherwise'. As John Stuart Mill put it, one problem with deconstructing history using rules is that the task is so complex that it cannot 'possibly be computed by human faculties'. [cop-out! :p]

"The historicists overlook this, and operate with trends as if they were in fact laws, for example, believing in the inexorability of 'progress'.  Popper, '...historicists do not present them as such; they do not see that there is necessarily a lurality of interpretations which are fundamentally on the same level for both. [historicists and social engineers]

222. 'The more everything changes the more it remains the same' is the conclusion.