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. Lorenzetti’s frescos bear all the marks of this idea. As we have seen, the virtuous ruler is shown surrounded by figures representing the qualities that, according to the political philosophy of the age, characterized good government. The frescos are meant to be instructive: they are meant to teach both rulers and citizens how to achieve the kind of life that they wanted. And this presupposes, as Lorenzetti surely believed, that we can know how this is to be done.
Should we believe the message of the frescos, however? Are the claims they implicitly make actually true? Does it really make a difference to our lives what kind of government we have? Do we have any choice in the matter, or is the form of our government something over which we have no control? And can we know what makes one form of government better than another? These are some of the big questions that political philosophers ask, as well as many smaller ones. But before trying to answer them, I need to add a few more words of explanation.
1. The virtuous ruler from The Allegory of Good and Bad Government by Ambrogio Lorenzetti.
When talking about government here, I mean something much broader than ‘the government of the day’ — the group of people in authority in any society at a particular moment. Indeed I mean something broader than the state — the political institutions through which authority is exercised, such as the cabinet of ministers, parliament, courts of law, police, armed forces, and so forth. I mean the whole body of rules, practices and institutions under whose guidance we live together in societies. That human beings need to cooperate with one another, to know who can do what with whom, who owns which parts of the material world, what happens if somebody breaks the rules, and so forth, we can perhaps take for granted here. But we cannot yet take it for granted that they must have a state to solve these problems. As we shall see in the next chapter, 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. So for the time being, I want to leave it an open question whether ‘good government’ requires having a state, or a government in the conventional sense, at all. Another question that will remain open until the last chapter of the book is whether there should be just one government or many governments — a single system for the whole of humanity, or different systems for different peoples.
When Lorenzetti painted his murals, he presented good and bad government primarily in terms of the human qualities of the two kinds of rulers, and the effects those qualities had on the lives of their subjects. Given the medium in which the message was conveyed, this was perhaps unavoidable, but in any case it was very much in line with the thinking of his age. Good government was as much about the character of those who governed — their prudence, courage, generosity, and so on — as about the system of government itself. Of course there were also debates about the system: about whether monarchy was preferable to republican government or vice versa, for instance. 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. Arguably we have gone too far in this direction, but I will follow modern fashion and talk in later chapters primarily about good government as a system, not about how to make our rulers virtuous.
Back now to the ideas behind the big picture. The easiest of the three to defend is the idea that government profoundly affects the quality of our lives. If any reader fails to recognize this straight away, it is perhaps because he or she is living under a relatively stable form of government where not much changes from year to year. One party replaces another at election time, but the switch only makes a marginal impact on most people’s lives (though politicians like to pretend otherwise). But think instead about some of the regimes that rose and fell in the last century: think about the Nazi regime in Germany and the 6 million Jews who were killed by it, or think about Mao’s China and the 20 million or more who died as a result of the famine induced by the so-called ‘Great Leap Forward’. Meanwhile in other countries whole populations saw their living standards rise at an unprecedented rate. Twentieth-century history seems to have reproduced the stark contrast of Lorenzetti’s mural almost exactly.
But at this point we have to consider the second of our three ideas. Even if different forms of government were, and still are, direct causes of prosperity and poverty, life and death, how far are we able to influence the regimes that govern us? Or are they just links in a chain, themselves governed by deeper causes over which we have no control? And if so, what is the point of political philosophy, whose avowed purpose is to help us choose the best form of government?
The fatalistic view that we have no real political choices to make has appeared in different forms at different times in history. In the period when Lorenzetti was painting his frescos, many believed that history moved in cycles: good government could not endure, but would inevitably become corrupted with the passage of time, collapse into tyranny, and only through slow stages be brought back to its best form. 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 — 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.
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 class-divided 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. And this meant that once again people had big choices to make, not only about their form of government in the narrow sense, but about the broader way their society was constituted. Should they have a one-party state or a liberal democracy with free elections? Should the economy be centrally planned or based on the free market? These are questions of the sort that political philosophers try to answer, and they were once more back on the agenda.