Political Concepts and Theories
"From these things it is evident, that the city belongs among the things that exist by nature, and that man is by nature a political animal" Aristotle
Authority implies an obedience in which men retain their freedom. Hannah Arendt
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it." ~ Karl Marx
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Plato: The Republic. Book VII: "Say then, my friend, in what manner does tyranny arise?--that it has a democratic origin is evident. Clearly. And does not tyranny spring from democracy in the same manner as democracy from oligarchy--I mean, after a sort? How? The good which oligarchy proposed to itself and the means by which it was maintained was excess of wealth--am I not right? Yes. And the insatiable desire of wealth and the neglect of all other things for the sake of money-getting was also the ruin of oligarchy? True. And democracy has her own good, of which the insatiable desire brings her to dissolution? What good? Freedom, I replied; which, as they tell you in a democracy, is the glory of the State--and that therefore in a democracy alone will the freeman of nature deign to dwell. Yes; the saying is in everybody's mouth. I was going to observe, that the insatiable desire of this and the neglect of other things introduces the change in democracy, which occasions a demand for tyranny."
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Karl Marx: "In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly - only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its éntirety and society inscribe on its banner: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!" (Robert Tucker, Marx-Engels Reader, p. 531).
The notion of final cause dominates Aristotle's Politics from the opening lines:
Since we see that every city-state is a sort of community and that every community is established for the sake of some good (for everyone does everything for the sake of what they believe to be good), it is clear that every community aims at some good, and the community which has the most authority of all and includes all the others aims highest, that is, at the good with the most authority. This is what is called the city-state or political community. [I.1.1252a1–7]
Soon after, he states that the city-state comes into being for the sake of life but exists for the sake of the good life (2.1252b29–30). The theme that the good life or happiness is the proper end of the city-state recurs throughout the Politics (III.6.1278b17-24, 9.1280b39; VII.2.1325a7–10).
To sum up, the city-state is a hylomorphic (i.e., matter-form) compound of a particular population (i.e., citizen-body) in a given territory (material cause) and a constitution (formal cause). The constitution itself is fashioned by the lawgiver and is governed by politicians, who are like craftsmen (efficient cause), and the constitution defines the aim of the city-state (final cause, IV.1.1289a17–18).
Bureaucratic administration means fundamentally domination through knowledge.
Max Weber
The decisive reason for the advance of the bureaucratic organization has always been its purely technical superiority over any other form of organization. ~ Max Weber
“Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently”
Rosa Luxemburg
“Capitalism is the astounding belief that the wickedest of men will do the wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.”
John Maynard Keynes
Indigenous ways of life critique Western Culture from a “place-based foundation[…] [called] grounded normativity, by which I mean the modalities of Indigenous land-connected practices and longstanding experiential knowledge that inform and structure our ethical engagements with the world and our relationships with human and nonhuman others over time.” ~ Glen Sean Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene)
Racism: Martin Luther King decried riots as “self-defeating,” but he also pointed out that “a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. … It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. It has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay.” ~ Martin Luther King, Stanford, 1967.
White Supremacy: “It began, I believe, in a late-20th-century event that transformed the world more profoundly than the collapse of communism: the world-wide collapse of white supremacy as a source of moral authority, political legitimacy and even sovereignty. This idea had organized the entire world, divided up its resources, imposed the nation-state system across the globe, and delivered the majority of the world’s population into servitude and oppression. After World War II, revolutions across the globe, from India to Algeria and from Indonesia to the American civil rights revolution, defeated the authority inherent in white supremacy, if not the idea itself. And this defeat exacted a price: the West was left stigmatized by its sins. Today, the white West–like Germany after the Nazi defeat–lives in a kind of secular penitence in which the slightest echo of past sins brings down withering condemnation. There is now a cloud over white skin where there once was unquestioned authority.” ~ Shelby Steele: “White Guilt and the Western Past” (2007)
Hope: “Even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and that such illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time span that was given them on earth — this conviction is the inarticulate background against which these profiles were drawn. Eyes so used to darkness as ours will hardly be able to tell whether their light was the light of a candle or that of the blazing sun.” ~ Hannah Arendt
The right of the strongest: The strongest man is never strong enough to be always master, unless he transforms his power into right, and obedience into duty. Hence the right of the strongest—a right in appearance assumed in irony, and in reality estab- lished in principle. But will this term ever be explained to us? Force is a physical power; I do not see what morality can result from its effects. To yield to force is an act of necessity, not of will; it is at most an act of prudence. In what sense can it be a duty? Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Social Contract, Book 1, Ch. 3
Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws. —Mayer Amschel Rothshild
“Self-awareness in contemporary society is directly connected with belonging to some collectivity: to an age group or vocational group, and ultimately to the nation. The divergence between individual and group that is now disappearing continues to show up among stunted individuals, criminals, and people who can assert themselves only by opposition to everything else.” Max Horkheimer: Feudal Lord, Customer, and Specialist.
“Through Sade and Goya, the Western world received the possibility of transcending its reason in violence....” Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization.
“Our consumer and market economy is based on the idea that you can buy happiness. But be careful, because if you have no money to pay for something, then you’ll have lost your chance at happiness. Remember that only that which comes from our own efforts, from within, is not only the “cheapest” kind but also the best kind of happiness." Erich Fromm
Pain and Pleasure: "Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do…. They govern us in all we do, all we say, all we think: every effort we make to throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it." Jeremy Bentham
Communication in the Cave: “In descending to the cave, the philosopher admits that what is intrinsically or by nature the highest is not the most urgent for man, who is essentially an “in-between” being -between the brutes and the gods. When attempting to guide the city he knows then in advance, that, in order to be useful or good for the city, the requirements of wisdom must be qualified or diluted...in order to become compatible with the requirements of the city. The city requires that wisdom be reconciled with consent.. .Civil life requires a fundamental compromise between wisdom and folly” ~Leo Strauss
John Locke: Property is a natural right, as long as others have enough too. (Lockean Proviso). 1660.
Sect. 27. Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labor of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labor with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature hath placed it in, it hath by this labor something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other men: for this labor being the unquestionable property of the laborer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others.
(John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 1660. Chapter V, Paragraph 27)
Communist Manifesto, 1847: "The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind."