Democratic Statecraft: Political Realism and Popular Power
J. S. Maloy
Language: English
Pages: 243
ISBN: 0521145589
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The theory of statecraft explores practical politics through the strategies and maneuvers of privileged agents, whereas the theory of democracy dwells among abstract and lofty ideals. Can these two ways of thinking somehow be reconciled and combined? Or is statecraft destined to remain the preserve of powerful elites, leaving democracy to ineffectual idealists? J. S. Maloy demonstrates that the Western tradition of statecraft, usually considered the tool of tyrants and oligarchs, has in fact been integral to the development of democratic thought. Five case studies of political debate, ranging from ancient Greece to the late nineteenth-century United States, illustrate how democratic ideas can be relevant to the real world of politics instead of reinforcing the idealistic delusions of conventional wisdom and academic theory alike. The tradition highlighted by these cases still offers resources for reconstructing our idea of popular government in a realistic spirit - skeptical, pragmatic, and relentlessly focused on power.
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to war? It is for their own good, Socrates concludes, just as pupils must obey their tutors and slaves their masters (R 590c–1a). Is this supposed to represent real politics, or even a genuine utopia? Perhaps neither, but the balance of textual evidence favors the latter. Plato’s Socrates was a deliberately obscure and provocative operator, and maybe provocation instead of communication was the point. But the famous allegories of the cave and the ship of state, as we’ve seen (in Chapter 2), place
individual interests (R 358e–9b). Then they add the story of the shepherd from Lydia who, after acquiring the power to make himself invisible, murders the king and seduces the queen – though not necessarily in that order (R 359c–60b). This tale is used to saddle Thrasymachus with Antiphon’s maxim: Be just, like the Lydian shepherd, except when no one sees you. All these ideas are supposed to be connected to the claim that justice varies from city to city depending on who’s ruling, a political
passion to which human agency is inevitably subject are less of a danger for groups than for individuals: “It is hardly to be supposed that a great number of persons would all get into a passion and go wrong at the same moment” (P 1286a). The discretionary judgment of a single Socratic expert has now lost 66 From the Sophists to Aristotle out to not only the rule of law but also the rule of the people, two forces that have been proposed as complementary elements of a nontyrannical regime.
978-0-521-19220-0 (hardback) – ISBN 978-0-521-14558-9 (paperback) 1. Democracy – Philosophy. 2. Political science – Decision making. 3. Comparative government. I. Title. JC423.M326 2013 321.8–dc23 2012027055 ISBN ISBN 978-0-521-19220-0 Hardback 978-0-521-14558-9 Paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites
Winthrop: Hutchinson 1865, 78; Winthrop 1867, 2:434–5; Winthrop 1972, 1:286. 134 From Machiavelli to the Puritans privileges, and therefore not fit to share in any such power, the Lord hath promised to take away the veil from all faces in the mountain.” Citing Isaiah 25.7 rather than Roman history, this was a distinctively Puritan gloss on the Aristotelian and Machiavellian tradition of defending popular judgment.33 Hooker had a Puritan peer in this respect in John Robinson, the “Pilgrim