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 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.
There is little doubt that this form of fatalism will be undermined by events just as earlier forms were. Already we can see a backlash against globalization in the form of political movements concerned about the environment, or the impact of global markets on developing nations, or the levelling-down quality of global culture. These movements challenge the idea that economic growth is the supreme goal, and in the course of doing so raise questions about what we ultimately value in our lives, and how we can achieve these aims, that are central questions of political philosophy. And even if we confine ourselves to political debate that lies closer to the conventional centre ground, there is still plenty of scope to argue about how much economic freedom we should sacrifice in the name of greater equality, or how far personal liberty should be restricted in order to strengthen the communities in which we live. As I write, there is a fierce argument going on about terrorism, the rights of individuals, and the principle that we cannot interfere in the internal affairs of other states, no matter how they are governed. Once again these are issues over which collective choices have to be made, and they are quintessentially issues of political philosophy.
So far I have argued that political philosophy deals with issues that are of vital importance to all of us, and furthermore issues over which we have real political choices to make. Now I want to confront another reason for dismissing the whole subject, namely that politics is about the use of power, and powerful people — politicians especially — do not pay any attention to works of political philosophy. If you want to change things, according to this line of thought, you should go out on the streets, demonstrate, and cause some chaos, or alternatively perhaps see if you can find a politician to bribe or blackmail, but you shouldn’t bother with learned treatises on the good society that nobody reads.
It is true that when political philosophers have tried to intervene directly in political life, they have usually come unstuck. They have advised powerful rulers — Aristotle acted as tutor to Alexander the Great, Machiavelli attempted to counsel the Medicis in Florence, and Diderot was invited to St Petersburg by Catherine the Great to discuss how to modernize Russia — but whether these interventions did any good is another question. Treatises written during times of intense political conflict have often succeeded merely in alienating both sides to the conflict. A famous example is Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, a masterpiece of political philosophy written while the English Civil War was still raging. Hobbes’s arguments in favour of absolute government, which I shall discuss more fully in the following chapter, were welcomed neither by the Royalists nor by the Parliamentarians. The former believed that kings had been divinely ordained to rule, the latter that legitimate government required the consent of its subjects. The bleak picture of the human condition painted by Hobbes led him to the conclusion that we must submit to any established and effective government, no matter what its credentials were. By implication Charles I had a right to rule when he was in power, but so did Cromwell when he had succeeded in deposing Charles. This was not what either side wanted to hear.
The example of Hobbes can help to explain why political philosophers have so rarely made a direct impact on political events. Because they look at politics from a philosophical perspective, they are bound to challenge many of the conventional beliefs held both by politicians and by the public at large. They put these beliefs under the microscope, asking exactly what people mean when they say such and such, what evidence they have for their convictions, how they would justify their beliefs if challenged to do so. One result of this forensic examination is that when political philosophers put forward their own ideas and proposals, these nearly always look strange and disturbing to those who are used to the conventional debate, as Hobbes’s ideas did to those fighting on both sides in the Civil War.
But this does not stop political philosophy from having an influence, sometimes a considerable influence, with the passage of time. When we think about politics, we make assumptions that we are often barely aware of — underlying assumptions that nevertheless do change quite radically over the course of history. 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. Although Hobbes himself was deeply preoccupied with religious questions, his radically new approach to political authority allowed politics and religion to be separated and discussed in different terms. Or consider that in Hobbes’s time, only a few extreme radicals believed in democracy as a form of government (typically, Hobbes himself did not rule it out altogether, but he thought it was generally inferior to monarchy). 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. (Thomas Carlyle, at least, had no doubts. Challenged to show the practical importance of abstract ideas, he is said to have replied, ‘There was once a man called Rousseau who wrote a book containing nothing but ideas. The second edition was bound in the skins of those who had laughed at the first.’)
Nobody can tell in advance whether any given work of political thought will have the effect of Hobbes’s Leviathan or Rousseau’s Social Contract, or to take a later example, Marx and Engels’s The Communist Manifesto. It depends entirely on whether the underlying shift in thinking that the philosopher proposes corresponds to political and social change in such a way that the new ideas can become the commonplaces of the following generations. Other works of political philosophy have enjoyed a limited success and then disappeared virtually without trace. But the need for political philosophy is always there, especially perhaps at moments when we face new political challenges that we cannot deal with using the conventional wisdom of the day. At these moments we need to dig deeper, to probe the basis of our political beliefs, and it is here that we may turn to political philosophy, not perhaps at source, but as filtered through pamphlets, magazines, newspapers and the like — every successful political philosopher has relied on media-friendly disciples to put his or her ideas into circulation.