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Political Philosophy

David Miller

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Summary

Here’s a summary of the main ideas from Political Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction by David Miller:

1. Why We Need Political Philosophy

  • Political philosophy investigates the nature, causes, and effects of good and bad government.
  • How we’re governed matters for our happiness.
  • There is no single inevitable form of government—we have choices and the ability to evaluate them.
  • Political philosophy is necessary to challenge fatalism, whether Marxist determinism or economic globalism (e.g., “end of history” thesis).
  • Key question: Why do we need political authority at all? The anarchist critique must be addressed.

2. Political Authority

  • Thomas Hobbes argued that without a sovereign, life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
  • Political authority provides trust and security, enabling cooperation.
  • Alternatives (like anarchist or market-based systems) face serious challenges.
  • Even if we dislike aspects of the state, the real issue is: what kind of authority should we have and how should it be limited?
  • The problem of political obligation: Why obey laws we dislike? Theories of consent (Hobbes, Locke) and fair play attempt to answer this.

3. Democracy

  • Democracy rests on two principles:
    1. Equality: No one is naturally entitled to rule over others.
    2. Accountability: Leaders must be answerable to the people.
  • Issues include:
    • Representation vs. direct democracy (e.g., Rousseau’s critique of merely voting every few years).
    • Political apathy and ignorance reduce the quality of democracy.
    • Solutions: more citizen participation, civic education, and local engagement.
  • Tension exists between majority rule and minority rights—handled through constitutions, federalism, and pluralism.

4. Freedom and the Limits of Government

  • Draws on John Stuart Mill’s idea of self-regarding actions: government shouldn’t interfere if actions harm no one else.
  • Distinction between:
    • Negative liberty: freedom from interference.
    • Positive liberty: capacity to act on one’s own values and choices.
  • Challenges arise in defining harm—is offense or indirect consequence enough?
  • The welfare state complicates Mill’s principle—society often bears the cost of others’ actions.
  • Modern states may justifiably limit freedom for public health, welfare, or equality—but this should be balanced and debated.

5. Justice

  • Justice involves treating individuals fairly, with consistency and proportionality.
  • Tension between charity and rights-based justice (especially regarding aid to the needy).
  • Friedrich Hayek criticizes the very concept of social justice as incoherent.
  • John Rawls proposes three principles of justice:
    1. Equal basic liberties.
    2. Fair equality of opportunity.
    3. Inequalities are just only if they benefit the least advantaged.
  • Rawls supports a market-based system tempered by redistribution.

6. Feminism and Multiculturalism

  • Classical political philosophy often ignored gender power dynamics.
  • John Stuart Mill advocated for equality but noted that we don’t truly know the capacities of women under conditions of oppression.
  • Multiculturalism raises issues about group rights, identity, and whether cultures should receive special recognition or protection.
  • Challenge: balancing universal principles (e.g., human rights) with respect for cultural diversity.

7. Nations, States, and Global Justice

  • Nation-states became the dominant political units because they combined the stability of empires with democratic potential.
  • National identity supports trust and willingness to pursue justice and democracy.
  • Multinational states like Belgium or Canada work through federalism and nested identities.
  • Critics argue the nation-state is becoming obsolete due to globalization.
  • Cosmopolitanism (e.g., Kant’s vision of ‘perpetual peace’) favors cooperation between states without abolishing them.
  • World government is seen as undesirable and likely to erode freedom and trust.

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Highlights

Chapter 1 Why do we need political philosophy? (Page 11)

y h p o s o l i h P l a c i t i l o P So that is the first idea: it really makes a difference to our lives whether we are governed well or badly. We cannot turn our back on politics, retreat into private life, and 2 (Page 12)

There is no better way to understand what political philosophy is and why we need it than by looking at Lorenzetti’s magnificent mural. (Page 12)

define political philosophy as an investigation into the nature, causes, and effects of good and bad government, (Page 12)

imagine that the way we are governed will not have profound effects on our personal happiness. (Page 13)

The second idea is that the form our government takes is not predetermined: we have a choice to make. (Page 13)

The third idea is that we can know what distinguishes good government from bad: we can trace the effects of different forms of government, and we can learn what qualities go to make up the best form of government. In other words, there is such a thing as political knowledge. (Page 13)

one central issue in political philosophy is why we need states, or more generally political authority, in the first place, and we need to engage with the anarchist argument that societies can perfectly well govern themselves without it (Page 15)

Today the emphasis has changed: we think much more about the institutions of good government, and less about the personal qualities of the people who make them work. (Page 15)

y h p o s o l i h P l a c i t i l o P In other periods – most notably the 19th century – the prevailing belief was in the idea of historical progress: history moved in a straight line from primitive barbarism to the higher stages of civilization. But once again this implied that the way societies were governed depended on social causes that were not amenable to human control. The most influential version of this was Marxism, which held that the development of society depended ultimately on the way in which people produced material goods – 6 (Page 16)

The fatalistic view that we have no real political choices to make has appeared in different forms at different times in history. (Page 16)

the technology they used, and the economic system they adopted. Politics became part of the ‘superstructure’; it was geared to the needs of the prevailing form of production. So, according to Marx, in capitalist societies the state had to serve the interests of the capitalist class, in socialist societies it would serve the interests of the workers, and eventually, under communism, it would disappear completely. In this light, speculation about the best form of government becomes pointless: history will solve the problem for us. (Page 17)

Interestingly enough, the career of Marxism itself shows us what is wrong with this kind of determinism. Under the influence of Marxist ideas, socialist revolutions broke out in places where, according to Marx, they should not have occurred – in societies such as Russia and China which were relatively undeveloped economically, and therefore not ready to adopt a socialist form of production. In the more advanced capitalist societies, meanwhile, fairly stable democratic governments were established in some places – something Marx had thought impossible given the classdivided nature of these societies – while other countries fell prey to fascist regimes. Politics, it turned out, was to a considerable extent independent of economics, or of social development more generally. (Page 17)

W h y d o w e n e e d p o l i t i c a l p h i l o s o p h y ? But if 20th-century experience put paid to the kind of historical determinism that was so prevalent in the 19th, by the beginning of the 21st a new form of fatalism had appeared. This was inspired by the growth of a new global economy, and the belief that states had increasingly little room for manœuvre if they wanted their people 7 (Page 17)

to benefit from it. Any state that tried to buck the market would find that its economy slumped. And the only states that were likely to succeed in the new global competition were the liberal democracies, so although it was possible for a society to be governed differently – to have an Islamic regime, for example – the price for this would be relative economic decline: a price, it was assumed, no society would wish to pay. This was the so-called ‘end of history’ thesis, essentially a claim that all societies would be propelled by economic forces into governing themselves in roughly the same way. (Page 18)

Hobbes led him to the conclusion that we must submit to any established and effective government, no matter what its credentials were. (Page 19)

At the time Hobbes wrote, for instance, it was commonplace to argue politically by appeal to religious principles, and especially to the authority of the Bible. One of his lasting legacies was to make it possible to think about politics in a purely secular way (Page 20)

Nowadays, of course, we take democracy for granted to the extent that we can barely imagine how any other form of government could be seen as legitimate. How has this change come about? The story is a complex one, but an indispensable part in it has been played by political philosophers arguing in favour of democracy, philosophers whose ideas were taken up, popularized, and cast into the mainstream of politics. The best known of these is probably Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose impact on the French Revolution through his book The Social Contract is hard to dispute. (Page 20)

This, Plato thinks, is the position of the philosopher: he has genuine knowledge while those around him have only distorted opinions, but because the path to philosophical knowledge is long and hard, very few are willing to take it. (Page 23)

Chapter 2 Political authority (Page 29)

The emergence of the modern state, however, first in Western Europe, and then almost everywhere else, has meant that the problem of political authority has preoccupied political philosophers for the last 500 years. Here is an institution that claims the right to govern our lives in countless ways. What can justify that claim? Under what circumstances, if any, do states wield legitimate political authority? How far are we as ordinary citizens obliged to obey the laws they make and follow their other dictates? These very basic questions need to be resolved before we can move on in the following chapters to ask how best to constitute the state – what the form of government should be – and what limits should be set to its authority. (Page 30)

I shall come back to anarchist alternatives to the state later in the chapter, but first I am going to defend political authority, as others have before me, by asking the reader to imagine life in society without it – with the police, the army, the legal system, the civil service, and the other branches of the state all taken away. What would happen then? Perhaps the most famous thought-experiment along these lines can be found in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, published in 1651. (Page 31)

He described the ‘natural condition of mankind’ without political rule as one of ferocious competition for the necessities of life, leaving people in constant fear in case they should be robbed or attacked, and constantly inclined, therefore, to strike at others first. The result was summed up in a much-quoted passage: In such condition, 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, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. (Page 32)

y h p o s o l i h P l a c i t i l o P It is sometimes said that Hobbes reaches this pessimistic conclusion because of a belief that people are naturally selfish or greedy, and will therefore try to grab as much for themselves as they can when unrestrained by political authority. But this misses Hobbes’s real point, which is that cooperation between people is impossible in the absence of trust, and that trust will be lacking where there is no superior power to enforce the law. Those things that Hobbes describes as missing in the ‘natural condition’ are above all things that require numbers of people to work together in the expectation that others will do their part, and in the absence of political authority it is not safe to have any such expectation. If I make an agreement with someone, why should I expect him to keep it, if there is no law to enforce the agreement? And even if he is inclined to keep the agreement, he may wonder the same about me, and decide that it is too risky to do so. In this situation, Hobbes argues, it is only prudent to assume the worst, and take every step you can to secure yourself against the threat of death; and the way to do that, in turn, is to amass as much power relative to other people as 22 (Page 32)

you can. At base it is fear of others, born of mistrust, that turns life without political authority into ‘a perpetuall warre of every man against his neighbour’. (Page 33)

Was Hobbes’s pessimism justified? His critics point out that if we look around us we can find ample evidence of people trusting one another, cooperating with one another, even helping each other with nothing expected in return, without any involvement by the state or any of its branches. A group of neighbours, for instance, may decide together to repair a derelict children’s playground, form a team, and divide up the work, each relying on the others to do their bit, without any legal agreement or other means of enforcement. Human nature is not as Hobbes portrayed it. But in a way this misses the point. Although Hobbes probably did have a rather low opinion of human nature (he was once caught out giving money to a beggar, and had to explain that he only did it to relieve his own discomfort at the sight of the beggar), his real point is that in the climate of fear that would follow the breakdown of authority, the kinder, more trusting, side of human nature would be obliterated. And from what we know of human behaviour when people are caught up in civil war and other situations in which their very survival is at stake, he seems to have been right. (Page 33)

We need political authority, then, because it gives us the security that allows us to trust other people, and in a climate of trust people are able to cooperate to produce all those benefits that Hobbes listed as signally lacking in the ‘natural condition’. But how can we create authority where it does not exist? Hobbes envisaged everyone gathering together and covenanting with one another to establish a sovereign who would rule them from that day forward; alternatively, they might submit themselves individually to a powerful man, a conquering general for instance. He thought it mattered little who had authority, so long as the authority was unrestricted and undivided. (Page 33)

One of the most important human motives is a desire to be accepted and respected by those around you, and in the setting of a small community this makes cooperation possible even if people are not saints. (Page 35)

Communitarian anarchists argue that, in a society made up of communities like this, cooperation will be possible on a much larger scale. (Page 35)

What is wrong with this idyllic picture of life without the state? One major problem is that it relies on small, tight-knit communities as the basis for social order, and although in the past this might have been a reasonable assumption to make, it no longer is today. (Page 36)

Market anarchists – sometimes called libertarians – claim that we could contract and pay individually for the services that the state now provides, including crucially for personal protection. In the absence of the state, firms would offer to protect clients and their property, and this would include retrieving property that had been stolen, enforcing contracts, and obtaining compensation for personal injury. So if my neighbour steals something that is mine, instead of calling the (public) police, I would call my protective agency, and they would take action on my behalf against the troublesome neighbour. (Page 37)

It might look attractive if we thought that the various agencies would all agree to implement the same set of rules to govern property disputes and so forth, and would all consent to independent arbitration in case of dispute. But why should they do this? (Page 38)

We would be slipping back into Hobbes’s condition of ‘Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man’, and in this condition the only rational decision for each person is to sign up with the agency that is likely to win the most fights. But the result would be to create a body with the power and authority to impose the same body of rules on everyone – in other words we would (inadvertently) have recreated the state. (Page 38)

There is another problem with relying on the market to carry out all the functions that states now perform. One of these functions is the provision of what are called ‘public goods’ – benefits that everyone enjoys and that no one can be excluded from enjoying. These come in many and varied forms – clean air and water, for example, defence against external aggression, access to roads, parks, cultural amenities, media of communication, and so on. (Page 39)

There isn’t space here to consider all the ingenious arguments that libertarian anarchists have come up with to show how public goods could be provided through the market, or else by people banding together and agreeing to contribute to their production: in political philosophy there are always more arguments to make. But I hope I have said enough to suggest why neither communities nor markets – important as these are in many areas of human life – can replace political authority and its modern embodiment, the state. (Page 39)

Much as we may dislike the state when it regulates us, taxes us, conscripts us into its service, and impinges on our lives in many other ways, we could not live well without it. The real choice is not whether to have political authority or not, but what kind of authority to have, and what its limits should be. These are the subjects of the following chapters. But we have not yet quite finished with authority itself. There is still one crucial question that needs to be answered: why should I obey it, when it tells me to do things that I dislike or disapprove of? Political philosophers call this ‘the problem of political obligation’. (Page 41)

The first solution claims that we are obliged to obey the law because we have agreed or consented to do so. The appeal of this idea is easy to see. (Page 42)

For generally speaking people do not choose to join states: they are required to obey them whether they like it or not. So in what sense do they give their consent? Hobbes argued that we choose to belong to the state because it is preferable to the state of nature where life, as we saw, is ‘nasty, brutish, and short’ and it does not matter how the state arises. Even if we submit to a conqueror at the point of a sword, we still consent to his authority, because we do so to escape a worse fate. But this stretches the idea of consent beyond recognition. (Page 42)

y h p o s o l i h P l a c i t i l o P Later writers rejected Hobbes’s argument about obligation and consent, and tried to find something other than the mere fact of subjection to the state which could be used to indicate our consent to the law. John Locke, for example, pointed out in his Second Treatise of Government (1689) that we all accept benefits from the state, and our acceptance can be treated as a form of consent. In particular, since one of the chief functions of the state is to protect our property, when we acquire it by purchase or inheritance, say, we are also tacitly consenting to the state’s jurisdiction over that property, and therefore to its laws. This 32 (Page 42)

even applied, Locke thought, to someone who merely took lodgings for a week or travelled on the highway. However the problem again is that we really have little choice about accepting these benefits: we cannot live without property of some kind, even if it is only food and clothing; we cannot escape from the state without travelling the highway to the border. So it still seems to be stretching the idea of consent too far to say that anyone who enjoys state benefits is giving her consent, and obliging herself to obey the law. (Page 43)

More recently, some political philosophers have claimed that when we take part in elections, we agree to comply with the government that emerges and the laws it enacts. This looks more promising: we do at least have a free choice as to whether to vote or not, and there would be no point in holding elections unless people recognized the government that emerged as legitimate. But unfortunately there still seems to be a gap between voting and registering your consent. What if you deeply disagree with both parties, but vote because you think that one is slightly less bad than the other? Or what if you think that although you have in a sense consented to the overall package of policies that the winning party has announced in its manifesto, there are a few items that you find quite repugnant – and you had no chance to vote on these individually? Perhaps the voters’ consent can help explain why governments have legitimate authority, but not why individual citizens have an obligation to obey the law. (Page 43)

If we set the consent approach aside, a more promising way of showing that such an obligation exists involves an appeal to fairness or ‘fair play’. (Page 43)

P o l i t i c a l a u t h o r i t y Political philosophers, including Hobbes, have often argued that, without strict obedience to political authority, that authority will crumble into dust. But in practice it seems that states and other forms of political authority can survive and function effectively so long as people are generally (rather than universally) disposed to comply with them, and this opens the door to limited forms of disobedience, especially what has come to be called civil disobedience – illegal but non-violent forms of political 35 (Page 45)

my preferred solution to the problem of political obligation requires us to tackle the issue of social justice (Page 45)

protest whose purpose is to put pressure on government to change its policies. The argument for civil disobedience is that if a particular law is sufficiently unjust or oppressive, or if the state refuses to listen to the concerns of a minority when making its decisions, this can justify breaking the law if legal forms of protest prove to be ineffective. Political obligation, in other words, need not be binding on all occasions. We can have a general obligation to obey the law, and still be justified in acting illegally in extreme circumstances. (Page 46)

Chapter 3 Democracy (Page 47)

We have seen why good government, at least in large-scale, modern societies, requires that we establish and maintain a system of political authority. Hobbes, whose lead we followed in showing why political authority is necessary, thought that it was essential to create an absolute sovereign – an undivided source of authority whose writ would be subject to no earthly limitations (Hobbes believed sovereigns still owed obligations to God). It was not essential that this sovereign body be a single person – a monarch – but Hobbes thought this was preferable, because a monarch’s will would be constant, and not subject to internal divisions, unlike that of an assembly. But Hobbes’s view on this point was challenged from the moment that he wrote by those who thought that to replace the insecurity of the state of nature by an all-powerful monarch able to dispose of his subjects’ lives and possessions however he wished was simply going from bad to worse. As John Locke memorably remarked, it assumes that Men are so foolish that they take care to avoid what Mischiefs may be done them by Pole-Cats, or Foxes, but are content, nay think it Safety, to be devoured by Lions. Hobbes’s only defence against this criticism was to say that a prudent monarch would wish his subjects to be prosperous, because it was on their prosperity that his own power finally depended (Page 47)

Political authority is justified because it provides the conditions under which people can live secure and flourishing lives, and we want to be as certain as we can that this is what it does. Trusting everything to an absolute monarch is simply too risky. As an alternative, we might suggest placing authority in the hands of those we know to be wise and virtuous, and to have the interests of the people at heart. This is the argument for aristocracy, which literally means ‘the rule of the best’, and it was the argument that convinced most political philosophers up until at least the mid-19th century. The problem, however, was to determine what exactly goodness in a ruler amounted to, and then to find some way of selecting those who displayed this quality. This proved difficult to do: in practice aristocracy meant the rule of the well-born, the propertied, or the educated class, depending on time and place. Even if one could show that people drawn from these classes had political skills not possessed by the rest of the population, there was still the problem that they had interests of their own separate from those of the majority – and why believe that they would not pursue these interests at the expense of the common good? (Page 48)

So the case for constituting political authority democratically gathered momentum, and it rested on two basic assumptions: first, that no person was naturally superior to another, so any relations of authority between them stood in need of justification – in other words, each person should enjoy equal political rights unless it could be shown that everyone gained from having inequality; second, that the interests of the people were best safeguarded by making them the final repository of political authority – anyone entrusted with special powers must be accountable to the people as a whole. (Page 48)

Should they be directly involved in legislating, as Rousseau argued in his Social Contract, and if so how? Or should they only be involved at one remove, by choosing representatives who would wield authority on their behalf? (Page 48)

Real power to determine the future of democratic societies rests in the hands of a remarkably small number of people – government ministers, civil servants, and to some extent members of parliament or other legislative assembly – and it is natural to ask why this is so. If democracy is the best way to make political decisions, why not make it a reality by letting the people themselves decide major questions directly? (Page 50)

y h p o s o l i h P l a c i t i l o P The reason is that there is a widespread belief that ordinary people are simply not competent to understand the issues that lie behind political decisions, and so they are happy to hand these decisions over to people they regard as better qualified to deal with them. An uncompromising statement of this point of view can be found in Joseph Schumpeter’s book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1943), where it is argued that the citizen’s job is to choose a team of 40 (Page 50)

leaders to represent him or her, not to attempt to decide issues directly. (Page 51)

best we can hope for is what is sometimes called ‘elective aristocracy’, where all that can be asked of the ordinary citizen is that she should be able to recognize people who are competent to make decisions on her behalf (and to vote them out of office if they prove not to be). (Page 51)

Why might elected representatives be likely to make a better judgement than the general public on issues like this? One reason is that they are more likely to be lobbied by members of the minority who feel strongly about the issue. They may be persuaded when they see the strength of feeling on that side of the argument, or they may just be concerned not to lose votes at the next election. Moreover minorities can join forces, agreeing to support one another’s demands, so that taking several issues together a majority coalition can emerge. This picture of representative democracy is sometimes called pluralism, and it rests on the assumption that people will be moved to form groups to defend their strongly felt interests and preferences, and that decision-makers will respond to the activities of such groups, which besides lobbying might involve demonstrating or even perhaps engaging in illegal forms of protest. (Page 55)

So how are we to explain the low levels of political knowledge and political interest that most citizens in democratic societies show when interviewed or surveyed? Typically they cannot name leading politicians, cannot explain how the main parties differ on policy issues, and so on. One explanation is that democracy as currently practised gives people very little incentive to acquire political knowledge or skill. All they are asked to do is to make a party choice once every four or five years, and you do not need to know much about politics in order to make a decision of that kind. Understanding the finer details of policy is usually irrelevant. So we face a chicken and egg problem. It would be risky to ask the general public to make major policy decisions unless they have the skills and information to make good judgements, but they have no incentive to acquire these unless they are given significant decisions to make. (Page 57)

Our word ‘idiot’ comes from the Greek idiotes which was the term used to describe someone who lived an entirely private existence and took no part in the public life of the city. Most of us today are idiots, then, inasmuch as we fail to exercise our political intelligence. Rousseau thought that handing over political authority entirely to elected representatives was a pernicious modern practice: The people of England deceive themselves when they fancy they are free; they are so, in fact, only during the election of members of parliament: for, as soon as a new one is elected, they are again in chains, and are nothing. And thus, by the use they make of their brief moments of liberty, they deserve to lose it. (Page 58)

Even if we think Rousseau exaggerates here, we ought to be concerned that most citizens in contemporary democracies are too apathetic even to keep an effective watch over the activities of their elected leaders. We need to develop forms of participation, either at local level, or through selecting members of the public at random to sit on citizens’ juries and other such bodies, that give everyone the experience of active citizenship. Experience that is gained in this way raises people’s competence generally and makes them more likely to take a continuing interest in political affairs. Democracy, we discover, is not an all-or-nothing matter, but a continuing struggle to give the people as a whole final authority over the affairs of the state. (Page 58)

we have the problem of the intense minority and the problem of the persistent minority. (Page 60)

How might these problems be addressed in a democracy? There are broadly two approaches that we can take. The first is to design a constitution that limits the scope of majority rule in such a way as to protect minorities. (Page 60)

Another constitutional device to protect minorities is to create separate constituencies to decide different sets of issues. This happens, for example, in federal systems, where regions or provinces are given the power to legislate on issues that are particularly relevant to their inhabitants, with other decisions being reserved for the central government. (Page 61)

Democracy, it turns out, is a demanding business. It requires people to take an interest in political issues that are often complex and seemingly remote from their daily lives, and it requires them to exercise self-restraint when deciding these issues – in particular by not trampling on minority groups even when they have the power to do so. It can be hard to resist the siren voices that tell us that we are better off leaving political decisions to those we have chosen to represent us. But unless we resist – unless we hold fast to the idea that political authority must finally rest with the whole body of citizens – we will end up, as Locke warned, being devoured by the lions who rule us. (Page 63)

Chapter 4 Freedom and the limits of government (Page 65)

In particular the Romantic movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries bequeathed to all later generations the idea that each person is a unique individual who can find true fulfilment only if she is allowed to choose for herself how she should live, and this requires the greatest possible space to try out new and unconventional ways of living – new occupations, new forms of artistic expression, new ways of conducting personal relationships, and so forth. As John Stuart Mill put it in his classic text On Liberty (whose practical proposals we shall come to later): There is no reason that all human existence should be constructed on some one or some small number of patterns. If a person possesses any tolerable amount of common sense and experience, his own mode of laying out his existence is the best, not because it is the best in itself, but because it is his own mode. Human beings are not like sheep; and even sheep are not indistinguishably alike. (Page 66)

F r e e d o m a n d t h e l i m i t s o f g o v e r n m e n t So we can say that freedom has an external and an internal aspect: it depends on whether the world is arranged in such a way that 57 (Page 67)

someone has many doors open to him, but it also depends on whether he is able to choose, genuinely, which door to pass through. But now we need to dig a bit deeper to see what it means for a door to be open, and what it means to make a genuine choice. (Page 68)

Physical prevention and sanctions are generally accepted as barriers that reduce freedom. Much more controversy arises in cases where people may be deterred from pursuing options because of the cost of doing so, where the cost does not take the form of a punishment or some other sanction (Page 68)

Government can do less directly about the internal aspect of freedom, a person’s capacity to make genuine choices among the options open to her. This is sometimes called ‘positive liberty’ as distinct from the ‘negative liberty’ of having options that are not blocked by external factors. These two kinds of liberty have been contrasted with each other, as they were by the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin in a famous lecture called ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’. Berlin wanted to highlight the dangers in ‘positive liberty’ which he believed could be used in such a way as to justify authoritarian or totalitarian regimes, like Stalin’s Soviet Union, which gave their subjects very little ‘negative liberty’. (Page 71)

Genuine choice requires a certain kind of independence; a free person must ask herself ‘what do I really want or really believe’ and be able to reject second-hand answers. People lose their freedom, in this sense, when the social pressure on them to conform to prevailing conventions or prevailing beliefs becomes so intense that they are unable to resist. Religion and political ideology can both have this effect. (Page 72)

That individual freedom must be limited in various ways should be self-evident: the freedom of each person must be restricted to allow everyone to enjoy (external) freedom to the same extent, but beyond that there are many legitimate social goals whose pursuit involves placing limits on what individuals may do. (Page 73)

John Stuart Mill, whose essay On Liberty I have already cited, believed that there was indeed such a sphere within which liberty should be inviolable. He argued that when a person’s actions were ‘self-regarding’, meaning that they caused no harm to the interests of anyone except possibly the person himself, they should never be interfered with. (Page 73)

Mill acknowledged that people might well be offended by behaviour that he would classify as self-regarding – by outrageous dress, unusual sexual practices, militant atheism, and so on. But he argued that being offended by something is not the same as being harmed by it. Harm is a matter of being attacked or threatened, having your property destroyed, or your economic position worsened, and in Mill’s eyes this was something that could be established objectively. (Page 75)

Again it seems that behaviour that is immediately simply offensive may indirectly cause harm, so we have a choice: either we can expand our idea of harm to include these cases, in which case the sphere of self-regarding actions will shrink, or we stick to the original idea that only behaviour that is directly harmful can be interfered with, and say that people should be left free to express themselves even when other people find the form of expression deeply offensive. (Page 76)

y h p o s o l i h P l a c i t i l o P So instead of Mill’s simple principle – that self-regarding behaviour 66 (Page 76)

may never be interfered with – we may find that we need to make more complex judgements, weighing the value of different kinds of behaviour against the costs they may impose on others, and the ease with which those costs could be avoided. (Page 77)

One reason why we may hesitate to follow Mill here is that the state has taken on a far wider range of responsibilities to its citizens since the time that he wrote, and so it has to cover the costs incurred by much more apparently self-regarding activity. When Mill wrote On Liberty there was no public health service, no national system of education or of income support for the poor, no public housing, and so on. To a very large extent, those who damaged their health or 67 F r e e d o m a n d t h e l i m i t s o f g o v e r n m e n t (Page 77)

made themselves unfit for work had to bear the costs themselves, or had to apply to local charities, who were entitled to impose conditions on those they supported. The question is whether Mill’s principle still makes sense against the background of a welfare state, funded by taxation, that is committed to providing everyone with a minimum level of income, education, health care, and housing. In this context, should people have enforceable social responsibilities both to contribute and to avoid becoming unnecessarily dependent on welfare services? (Page 78)

This is one of the most controversial issues in politics today, and one reason that we may find ourselves eventually agreeing with Mill is that there seems no obvious stopping place once we abandon his principle of liberty. (Page 78)

As Mill put it, ‘the inconvenience is one which society can afford to bear, for the sake of the greater good of human freedom’. (Page 78)

United Nations endorsed, in 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, (Page 80)

idea of natural rights that played a central role in the earlier stages of liberal political philosophy. John Locke, for instance, claimed that all men at least (whether his exclusion of women was deliberate is controversial) had natural rights to life, liberty, and property, and when governments were established by social contract, they undertook to protect these rights as a condition of their having political authority. (Page 80)

y h p o s o l i h P l a c i t i l o P Once we began to investigate what freedom really means, we saw that in many cases it cannot be enjoyed without positive action on the part of government, providing the resources 72 (Page 82)

When the French revolutionaries framed their statement of principle in 1789 they called it The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Taking our cue from them, we might call the rights that belong on the longer list rights of citizenship, meaning by that that these rights ought to be recognized as basic protections for the individual within our political community – while in other communities a different set of rights, overlapping with but not identical with ours, should prevail. (Page 82)

that keep options open, and the conditions under which people can make free and informed choices. We also found that there was no simple way of defining a sphere of ‘self-regarding’ activity which was of no concern to anyone beyond the individual inside it. And finally we have found that using human rights as a way of setting absolute standards for governments to observe can only work if the list of human rights is kept short and basic. (Page 83)

Freedom, then, is a very important political value, but not of such importance that it should set absolute limits to the exercise of political authority. (Page 83)

Chapter 5 Justice (Page 84)

Saying that justice is of cardinal importance to good government is one thing; saying what justice really means is quite another, and this is the question that will occupy us throughout this chapter. (Page 84)

Justice, then, has something to do with punishment and reward, and something to do with equality, but how should we define it? A very old definition, offered by the Roman Emperor Justinian, states that ‘justice is the constant and perpetual will to render to each his due’. Taken by itself, this may not seem very informative, but it does at least point us in the right direction. First, it emphasizes that justice is a matter of each individual person being treated in the right way; it is not a matter of whether society in general is prosperous or poor, culturally rich or culturally barren, and so forth. This is not to say that the idea of justice for groups can be dismissed out of hand – and we shall be looking at it more closely in the following chapter – but the primary concern of justice is with how individuals are treated. Second, the ‘constant and perpetual will’ part of the definition reminds us that a central aspect of justice is that people must be treated in a non-arbitrary way: there must be consistency in how one person is treated over time, and there must also be consistency between people, so that if my friend and I have the same qualities, or have behaved in the same way, we should receive the same benefits, or the same punishment, depending on the circumstances. (Page 86)

idea of proportion (Page 87)

One good reason for not treating people in the same way is that they have different needs. No one objects to hungry or sick people being given more resources than people who are well-fed and healthy, at least so long as they have not created their own needs by behaving irresponsibly. However not everyone agrees that this is demanded by justice. There is a long tradition that holds that helping the needy is a matter of charity, which means it is something that people should be encouraged, but not required, to do. (Page 91)

Let us look a little more closely at the attack on social justice. Critics such as the Austrian economist-cum-philosopher Friedrich Hayek argued that there was a fundamental error involved even in talking about social justice in the first place. According to Hayek, justice is fundamentally a property of individual actions: an action is unjust when it violates a general rule that a society has put in place to allow its members to cooperate with one another – so, for instance, theft is unjust because it violates a rule protecting property. But if we look at how resources – money, property, employment opportunities, and so forth – are distributed across a society, we cannot describe this distribution as either just or unjust, since it results not from the actions or decisions of a single agent, but from the actions and decisions of millions of separate people, none of whom intended to create this or any other distributive outcome in particular. (Page 95)

Hayek’s second claim is that, in attempting to make the distribution of resources match up to our favoured principle of distributive justice, we would destroy economic freedom and thereby kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. (Page 96)

The question is whether a large society could practise social justice in this form. It seems that the informal coordination of people’s behaviour that can occur in a small community cannot happen here – the economy must either be market-based, giving people incentives to produce the resources that other people want to consume, or state-directed, with a central authority planning what is to be produced and directing individuals according to the plan. Although in theory one can imagine both market and centrally planned economies that do not rely on material incentives, in practice this has proved impossible to achieve (attempts were made in the mid-20th century by Communist regimes in China and Cuba to replace material by moral incentives, but in neither case was the experiment successful). Pursuing social justice in its radical form does seem to require dispensing with the market and reconstructing society on a quite different, communitarian basis. (Page 97)

There is, however, a less radical view of social justice which has been embraced by many democratic socialists, and also by many contemporary liberals. On this view, social justice requires the equal distribution of some social benefits – especially equal rights of citizenship such as voting and freedom of speech. It requires some benefits to be distributed on the basis of need, so that everyone is guaranteed an adequate income, access to housing and health care, and so forth. But it also allows other resources to be distributed unequally, so long as there is equal opportunity for people to try to acquire a larger share. These inequalities may be justified on grounds of desert, or on the grounds that by giving people material incentives to work hard and produce goods and services that other people want, everyone in society benefits. (Page 97)

Perhaps the most influential interpretation of social justice of this kind is the one developed by John Rawls, who in his book A Theory of Justice argued that a just society must fulfil three conditions. First, it must give each member the most extensive set of basic liberties (including political liberties like the right to vote) that is consistent with the same liberty for everyone else. Second, social positions carrying greater advantages – higher paying jobs, for instance – must be open to everyone on the basis of equality of opportunity. Third, inequalities of income and wealth are justified when they can be shown to work to the benefit of the least advantaged members of society – in other words when they provide incentives that raise the society’s overall productivity, and therefore allow more resources to be channelled to those at the bottom of the heap. (Page 99)

Rawls’s theory of social justice explicitly makes room for a market economy: his third principle is formulated so as to allow for the possibility that people may need to keep at least part of the gain that they can make through producing goods and services for the market if they are going to be sufficiently motivated to work hard and use their talents in the most productive way. This undermines Hayek’s claim that social justice and market freedom are conflicting goals. On the other hand, a market economy governed by Rawlsian principles would look quite different from the economic systems that exist in most liberal democracies today. (Page 99)

Rawls’s idea of equality of opportunity is quite radical. (Page 99)

Chapter 6 Feminism and multiculturalism (Page 102)

When political philosophers like Hobbes write about power struggles and how to control them, they are thinking about relationships between men – it is as though the issue of relations between the sexes had already been resolved. (Page 105)

F e m n i s i m a n d m u l t i c u l t u r a l i s m How can we decide whether observed male–female differences in choice are merely the result of cultural norms that could be changed, or whether they reflect differences that are hard-wired into the sexes? This is such a complex issue that the wisest course may be to follow John Stuart Mill and remain agnostic. As Mill wrote in The Subjection of Women (one of the very few examples of feminist political philosophy before the 20th century): 99 (Page 109)

I deny that anyone knows, or can know, the nature of the two sexes, as long as they have only been seen in their present relation to one another. If men had ever been found in society without women, or women without men, or if there had been a society of men and women in which the women were not under the control of the men, something might have been positively known about the mental and moral differences which may be inherent in the nature of each. (Page 110)

Chapter 7 Nations, states, and global justice (Page 122)

Political philosophy as we understand it today first arose in these small-scale political communities – most notably in classical Athens. Here the body of citizens was in control of its own destiny, at least as far as the internal life of the city went, so there was a great deal of point in asking questions about the best form of government, about the qualities that good rulers should posses, about the meaning of justice, and so forth. Perhaps city-states of this kind provided human beings with the best opportunity they have ever had to govern themselves well – to achieve freedom, justice, and democracy. So why have they not survived? The answer is that city-states like Athens and Siena were always vulnerable to being captured and absorbed by larger units; they had constantly to be willing to fight to preserve their independence, and to do this they had to form shaky alliances with neighbouring cities, which might succeed for a time, but in the longer term proved incapable of resisting more centralized empires: Athens succumbed to Philip of Macedonia, while Siena, after preserving a modicum of 113 N a t i o n s , s t a t e s , a n d g o b a l l j u s t i c e (Page 123)

independence by putting itself under the protection of nearby rulers such as the duke of Milan, was finally conquered by the Spanish Emperor Charles V. City-states did not fail because of their internal deficiencies, but because of their external weakness in the face of invading armies. (Page 124)

The political unit that proved capable of resisting imperial power while still embodying some of the virtues of the city-state was the nation-state. This was formed on a much larger scale, involving millions of people occupying a large geographical area, with the institutions of the state itself – the parliament, court, government, military command, etc. – concentrated in the capital city, but it could still make some claim to be a political community because its members thought of themselves as belonging to a distinct people or nation, separate from their neighbours. For this to happen, there had to be media of communication that brought the many localities that made up the nation-state into contact with one another, telling the people in each what the others were thinking and doing. The historian Benedict Anderson has for this reason called nations ‘imagined communities’: unlike face-to-face communities, their very existence depends on a collective act of imagination. People had to learn to see themselves as French, or American, or Japanese, not just as family members or residents of a particular town. (Page 124)

Dean Inge once said that ‘a nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by a common hatred of its neighbours’. (Page 124)

This explains why nation-states have proved to be relatively successful as political units: they are large enough not to be engulfed by imperial armies, yet at the same time they can call upon the loyalty of their members when resistance is necessary. (Page 126)

The first is that such an identity makes democratic government very much more likely to work successfully. Looking back to what was said in Chapter 3, we saw that one of the great difficulties in democratic politics is to reconcile majorities and minorities – to persuade the minority group to accept the decision of the majority, while at the same time persuading the majority not to trample on the wishes or the interests of the minority but to try to accommodate them when reaching decisions. I suggested there that one of the factors likely to encourage what we might call ‘democratic self-restraint’ was trust between the parties. In a society where people are generally trusting of others, they are less anxious about finding themselves in a minority on some issue, more willing to allow the majority to implement its decision, on the basis that no very great harm will come to them. Where trust is absent, or evaporates, by contrast, every decision becomes potentially a life-and-death issue. (Page 126)

My second claim is about social justice. What makes people willing to support policies that will promote social justice, particularly 117 N a t i o n s , s t a t e s , a n d g o b a l l j u s t i c e (Page 127)

Social psychologists who have investigated this question have found that one important factor is perceived similarity: we are inclined to trust those who we believe resemble us in one way or another. It is not difficult to think of explanations for this: it may be a trait that we have inherited from the early stages of human evolution, when people cooperated with one another in extended kin groups, and had to learn how to discriminate between insiders and outsiders. (Page 127)

when they can see that they will stand to lose when these policies are implemented? (Page 128)

People who disagree with these claims linking national identity to democracy and social justice often point by way of example to countries such as Belgium, Canada, and Switzerland, which are multinational – they each contain two or more distinct national communities – and yet are stable democracies that support extensive welfare states and other institutions of social justice. In reply, I want to say two things. First, these states have evolved federal systems that devolve many important decisions, including decisions about economic and social policy, to provinces or regions that encompass different national groups. In Belgium, for example, Flemings and Walloons have separate governments responsible for many areas of policy such as employment and housing, alongside the federal government which deals with Belgium-wide issues such as defence and foreign policy. Second, most people in these societies have what we might call ‘nested’ national identities: they think of themselves both as Flemish and as Belgian, as Quebecois and as Canadian, and so forth. In other words, they share in an inclusive national identity as well as in a more localized one, and this helps to explain why these societies work as effectively as they do – they can call on common loyalties to support democratic institutions at national level and to justify redistributing resources from their richer regions to their poorer ones. (Page 129)

Nation-states, then, have allowed people to work together politically on a large scale, achieving democracy and pursuing social justice with at least partial success, through the creation of common political identities that can bind people together despite their conflicting beliefs and interests, and their geographical dispersal. But many now believe that this form of government has become outmoded. (Page 129)

y h p o s o l i h P l a c i t i l o P The thrust of my argument in this chapter is that democracy works best on a small scale: the city-state was probably its ideal site, and the nation-state’s great achievement has been to simulate the intimacy of the city by its use of the mass media, giving people at least a sense that they are involved in, and able to influence, political affairs. But world government would appear a distant and alien body, as even, on a much smaller scale, 120 (Page 130)

The most favoured alternative is some form of cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism is in fact a very old idea, dating back to the Roman Stoics, who liked to think of themselves as kosmopolitai, ‘citizens of the world’. But what exactly does this mean? One interpretation of cosmopolitanism is world government in a literal sense – the replacement of the 191 separate states that now exist by a unitary political authority. But although world government has been advocated by some, its disadvantages are only too evident. (Page 130)

the European Union does to many people today. And the issue of trust, highlighted earlier, would emerge with all its force: why would I regard as legitimate decisions taken by a majority drawn from communities with which I feel myself to have little in common? (Page 131)

Despotic governments are kept in check, at least to some degree, by the possibility of people escaping to places where they can live in greater freedom and security. But there would be no such check if world government became a reality. (Page 131)

World government in the literal sense must be distinguished from the much more modest proposal, favoured by among others the philosopher Immanuel Kant, that states should enter into a permanent agreement with one another to renounce the use of force; there should be a confederation to ensure what Kant called ‘perpetual peace’. We can see this foreshadowed in the relations between liberal democracies today, which involve a sometimes tacit and sometimes explicit agreement to settle their differences by negotiation or by reference to international bodies such as the European Union or the United Nations. Agreements of this kind, it is important to emphasize, stabilize relations between states, but leave states themselves as the main sources of political authority. And Kant himself favoured this: a single world government, he thought, would be a ‘universal despotism which saps all man’s energies and ends in the graveyard of freedom’. (Page 133)

It is what John Rawls in his book The Law of Peoples called a ‘realistic utopia’ – an ethical vision that stretches the bounds of political possibility as far as they can be stretched without becoming pure pie-in-the-sky. Are we likely to get there? Many current observers of the international scene foresee a kind of market triumphalism, in which global economic forces prevent any nation-state from making real political choices. Self-determination becomes meaningless if the only option is to adopt policies that ensure maximum economic competitiveness. But, as I said in Chapter 1, this form of fatalism looks no better grounded than previous forms that we now regard as antiquated. In any case, if there really are no political choices left for us to make, then political philosophy, whether national or international in focus, becomes useless, nothing more than fiddling while Rome burns. Everything I have said in this book assumes that the choice between good and bad government is always one we have to make, even if the form that good government takes changes as technology advances and societies become larger and more complex. (Page 141)