But even if political philosophy answers to a genuine need, are its own credentials genuine? (Horoscopes answer to a strongly felt need — people want to know what the future holds in store for them — but most of us think that horoscopes themselves are completely bogus.) For political philosophy claims that it can bring to us a kind of truth about politics, something different from the opinions that guide us from day to day. This claim was presented most dramatically by Plato, often regarded as the father of the subject, through the allegory of the cave in the Republic. Plato likens ordinary people to prisoners who have been chained in a cave in such a way that they can only see the shadows of things on a screen in front of them; they would assume, Plato says, that these shadows were the only real things. Now suppose that one of the prisoners was to be freed and emerged blinking into the light. In time he would come to see real objects in the world, and understand that what he had seen before were no more than shadows. But if he were then to return to the cave to try to persuade his fellows of their mistake, they would be unlikely to believe him. 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.
2. Plato and Socrates, frontispiece by Matthew Paris (d. 1259) for The Prognostics of Socrates the King.
But was Plato justified in drawing such a sharp contrast between philosophical knowledge and common opinion? This is not the place to discuss the metaphysical underpinning of his distinction, so let me say simply that my conception of political philosophy does not involve endowing philosophers with a special kind of knowledge not available to other human beings. Instead they think and reason in much the same way as everyone else, but they do so more critically and more systematically. They take less for granted: they ask whether our beliefs are consistent with one another, whether they are supported by evidence, and how, if at all, they can be fitted into one big picture. It is easiest to explain this by taking some examples.
Suppose we were to ask a politician what his goals were; what aims or values the political community he belongs to should be trying to achieve. If he belonged to a contemporary Western society, he would probably come up with a fairly predictable list: law and order, individual liberty, economic growth, full employment, and one or two others. How might a political philosopher respond to this? Well, first of all she would turn the spotlight on the goals themselves and ask which of them were really ultimate goals. Take economic growth, for instance. Is this a good thing in itself, or is it only good in so far as it gives people more opportunities to choose from, or makes their lives healthier and happier? Can we assume that further growth is always good, or does there come a point where it no longer contributes to the things that really matter? A similar question might be asked about full employment. Do we value full employment because we believe it is intrinsically valuable for people to engage in paid work, or is it rather that people cannot have a decent standard of living unless they do work? But if the second is true, why not give everyone an income whether they work or not, and make work into a voluntary activity for those who enjoy it?
Our political philosopher will also ask about how the different goals on the politicians’ list are related to one another. Politicians very rarely concede that they might have to sacrifice one aim in order to achieve another, but perhaps in reality they do. Take law and order versus individual liberty, for instance. Could our streets not be made safer by limiting individual liberty — for instance by giving the police greater powers to arrest people they suspected were about to engage in criminal acts? If so, which value should have the higher priority? Of course in order to decide that, she would need to say a bit more precisely what individual liberty means. Is it simply being able to do whatever you like, or is it doing what you like so long as you don’t harm anyone else? This makes a big difference to the question being asked.
In raising these questions, and suggesting some answers, political philosophers are not (or needn’t be) appealing to any esoteric form of knowledge. They are inviting their readers to reflect on their own political values, and to see which ones they care about most in the final analysis. Along the way they may add in some new pieces of information. For instance, when contemplating the value of economic growth, it is relevant to see how people whose material living standards are very different score in terms of physical indicators such as health and mortality, and psychological indicators such as how satisfied they feel with their lives. Political philosophers therefore need to have a good grasp of social and political science. In earlier periods, they attempted to obtain this primarily by collating such evidence as was available from the historical record about a wide range of human societies, and their various political systems. This evidence was somewhat impressionistic and often unreliable. In this respect political philosophers today can build on more solid empirical foundations by virtue of the huge expansion of the social sciences in the 20th century. But the essential nature of their task remains the same. They take what we know about human societies, and the ways in which they are governed, and then they ask what the best form of government would be, in the light of aims and values that they believe their audience will share. Sometimes this best form of government turns out to be quite close to the form that already exists; sometimes it is radically different.
What I have tried to do in the last few paragraphs is to show how political philosophy can illuminate the way we think about politics without making claims to a special kind of truth that is inaccessible to the ordinary person. There is a related issue here, which is how far the kind of truth political philosophy gives us is universal truth — truth that applies to all societies and in all periods of history. Or is the best we can hope for local knowledge, knowledge that is relevant only to the particular kind of society we live in today?
The answer I want to give is that the agenda of political philosophy changes as society and government change, although some items have stayed on it as far back as our records go. Among these perennial questions are basic questions about politics and political authority that I shall be addressing in the next chapter. Why do we need politics in the first place? What right has anybody to force another person to do something against their will? Why should I obey the law when it does not suit me to? But in other cases, either the questions, or the answers, or both, have changed over time, and we need to see why this is so.
One reason is that changes in society open up possibilities that did not exist before, or alternatively close them off. As an example, think of democracy as a form of government. Almost every political philosopher today — in Western societies at least — takes it for granted that good government must mean some kind of democracy; in one way or another the people must rule (as we shall see in Chapter 3, this leaves plenty of room for argument about what democracy really means in practice). For many centuries beforehand, the opposite view prevailed: good government meant government by a wise monarch, or an enlightened aristocracy, or men of property, or perhaps some combination of these. So are we right and our predecessors simply wrong? No, because democracy seems to need certain preconditions to function successfully: it needs a wealthy and literate population, media of mass communication so that ideas and opinions can circulate freely, a well-functioning legal system that commands people’s respect, and so forth. And these conditions did not obtain anywhere until the fairly recent past, nor could they be created overnight (classical Athens is often held up as an exception, but it is important to remember that Athenian ‘democracy’ encompassed only a minority of the city’s population, and rested, as the Greeks themselves recognized, on the work of women, slaves, and resident aliens). So the older philosophers were not wrong to dismiss democracy as a form of government. Even Rousseau, who as we saw earlier was an influential source of democratic ideas, said that it was suitable only for gods and not for men. Given the prevailing conditions, democracy as we understand it today was not a viable form of government.