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Philosophy, Politics, and Society

ed. by Peter Laslett

  1. People / Organizations:

  2. Quotes:

    • "to understand an activity is to know it as a concrete whole; it is to recognize the activity as having the source of its movement within itself" - Michael Oakeshott (pg. 3)

    • "to try to do something which is inherently impossible is always a corrupting enterprise" - Michael Oakeshott (pg. 5)

    • "politics are what may be called an empirical activity. Attending to the arrangement of a society" - Michael Oakeshott (pg. 3-4)

    • "the freedom we enjoy is nothing more than arrangements, procedures of a certain kind" - Michael Oakeshott (pg. 10)

    • "wherever else politics may begin, they cannot begin in ideological activity" - Michael Oakeshott (pg. 12)

    • "the hungry and helpless man is mistaken if he supposes that he overcomes the crisis by means of a tin-opener: what saves him is somebody else's knowledge of how to cook" - Michael Oakeshott (pg. 12)

    • "everything is temporary, but nothing is arbitrary. Everything figures by comparison, not with what stands next to it, but with the whole" - Michael Oakeshott (pg. 17)

    • "truths [which are] of such a kind that no evidence gained by observation and experiment could either confirm or refute them…[are] expressed in synthetic a priori propositions" - T. D. Weldon (pg. 25)

    • "natural law is only imperfectly realized in positive laws" - Margaret Macdonald (pg. 38)

    • "the standard of natural law is set by reason and is known because men have reason" - Margaret Macdonald (pg. 39)

    • "his social environment is determined by accident of birth…but he is not accidentally human" - Margaret Macdonald (pg. 41-42)

    • "it is the duty of the individual to preserve society for his descendants. For individuals perish by England remains" - Margaret Macdonald (pg. 48)

    • "actual politicians have not undergone a special course of training in order to learn the nature of the good and to master the methods by which it may be attained" - Renford Bambrough (pg. 107)

  3. Data Resources:

  4. General Notes:

    • Introduction (pg. vii)

      • "political philosophers…concern themselves with political and social relationships at the widest possible level of generality. They are to apply the methods and the conclusions of contemporary thought to the evidence of the contemporary social and political situation" (pg. vii)

      • "for the moment, anyways, political philosophy is dead" (pg. vii)

      • "faced with Hiroshima and with Belsen, a man is unlikely to address himself to a neat and original theory of political obligation" (pg. vii)

      • "Karl Mannheim's sociology of knowledge, in which not simply political activity and political thinking are shown to be sociologically determined, [proclaims] all thinking and all knowing [to be such]" (pg. viii)

        • "such relativism could only lead, as lead it did, to a surrender to dogma" (pg. viii)

      • "the academic debate in our country on the status of sociology and the validity of its results is still unresolved" (pg. viii)

      • "since political philosophy is, or was, an extension of ethics, the question has been raised whether political philosophy is possible at all" (pg. ix)

      • "it could be argued, and I should myself incline to this position, that the philosopher of vulgar prejudice never existed" (pg. xiii)

      • "we should take account of the philosophical situation as it is, getting all the advantage we can of those exact and subtle methods which have given precision to epistemology" (pg. xiv)

    • Chapter 1 - Political Education, by Michael Oakeshott (pg. 1)

      • "politics I take to be the activity of attending to the general arrangements of a set of people whom chance or choice has brought together" (pg. 2)

        • "it is, at one level or another, a universal activity" (pg. 2)

        • "the activity is never offered the blank sheet of infinite possibility" (pg. 2)

      • "our determination to improve our conduct does not prevent us from recognizing that the greater part of what we have is not a burden to be carried or an incubus to be thrown off, but an inheritance to be enjoyed" (pg. 2)

      • "to understand politics as a purely empirical activity is to misunderstand it, because empiricism by itself is not a concrete manner of activity at all" (pg. 4)

        • "from a practical point of view, then, we may decry the style of politics which approximates to pure empiricism because we can observe in it an approach to lunacy" (pg. 4)

        • "purely empirical politics are…the product of a misunderstanding" (pg. 4)

      • "politics are the pursuit of what is desired and of what is desired at the moment; but precisely because they are this, they can never be the pursuit of merely what recommends itself from moment to moment" (pg. 4)

      • "in order to bring it to a point I will state it in the form of a proposition: that politics appears as a self-moved manner of activity when empiricism is preceded and guided by an ideological activity" (pg. 5)

        • "as I understand it, a political ideology purports to be an abstract principle, or set of related abstract principles, which has been independently premediated" (pg. 5)

        • "the simplest sort of political ideology is a single abstract idea" (pg. 5)

        • "and in that case political activity is understood as the enterprise of seeing to it that arrangements of a society conform to or reflect the chosen abstract idea" (pg. 5-6)

      • "a political ideology purports to supply in advance knowledge of what 'Freedom' or 'Democracy' or 'Justice' is, and in this manner sets empiricism to work" (pg. 6)

      • "what is required, in the first place, is knowledge of the chosen political ideology - a knowledge of the ends to be pursued, a knowledge of what we want to do" (pg. 6)

        • "in pursuing these ends we shall need knowledge of other sorts also - a knowledge, we shall say, of economic and psychology" (pg. 6)

        • "the appropriate sort of education will be…an education in the skill of abstract thought" (pg. 6)

        • "the education we shall need is one which enables us to expound, defend, implement, and possibly invent a political ideology" (pg. 6)

      • "instead of an independently premediated scheme of ends to be pursued, [ideology] is a system of ideas abstracted from the manner in which people have been accustomed to go about the business of attending to the arrangements of their societies" (pg. 8)

      • "in short, political activity comes first and a political ideology follows" (pg. 8)

        • "political ideology must be understood, not as an independently premediated beginning for political activity, but as knowledge of a traditional manner of attending to the arrangements of a society" (pg. 9)

      • "political enterprises…cannot be premediated in advance of a manner of attending to the arrangements of a society; what we do, and moreover what we want to do, is the creature of how we are accustomed to conduct our affairs" (pg. 9)

      • "having established [an] end to be pursued, political activity [can be] represented as the realization of this end" (pg. 10)

      • "the systems of abstract ideas we call 'ideologies' are abstracts of some kind of concrete activity" (pg. 10)

        • "most political ideologies…are abstracts of the political traditions of some society. But it sometimes happens that an ideology is offered as a guide to politics which is an abstract" (pg. 10)

        • "the important point is that, at best, an ideology is an abbreviation of some manner of relevant concrete activity" (pg. 10)

      • "the ideological style of politics is…a traditional manner of attending to the arrangements of a society which has been abridged into a doctrine of ends to be pursued, the abridgement being erroneously regarded as the sole guide relied upon" (pg. 10-11)

        • "its defect become apparent when we consider the sort of knowledge and kind of education it encourages us to believe is sufficient for the activity of attending to the arrangements of a society" (pg. 11)

      • "the understanding of politics as the activity of attending to the arrangements of a society under the sole guidance of an independently premediated ideology is, then, no less a misunderstanding than the understanding of it as a purely empirical activity. Wherever else politics may begin, they cannot begin in ideological activity" (pg. 12)

        • "politics is the activity of attending to the general arrangements of collection of people who…compose a single community" (pg. 12)

        • "in politics, then, every enterprise is a consequential enterprise, the pursuit, not of a dream, or of a general principle, but of an intimation" (pg. 13)

      • "it is to be believed that our mistakes will be less frequent and less disastrous, and our achievements more manageable, if we escape the illusion that politics can ever be anything more than the pursuit of intimations: a conversation, not an argument" (pg. 13)

      • "it is something different, and something inappropriate, to allow political activity itself to appear as the activity of amending the arrangements of a society so as to make them agree with the provisions of an ideology" (pg. 14)

      • "in short, political crisis always appears within a tradition of political activity; and salvation comes from the unimpaired resources of the tradition itself" (pg. 15)

      • "we have set out to consider the kind of knowledge involved in political activity and the appropriate sort of education" (pg. 16)

        • "it is knowledge, as profound as we can make it, of our tradition of political behavior. Other knowledge, certainly, is desirable in addition; but this the knowledge without which we cannot make use of whatever else we may have learned" (pg. 16)

          • "though a tradition of behavior is flimsy and elusive, it is not without identity, and what makes it a possible object of knowledge is…a principle of continuity: authority is diffused between past, present, and future; between the old, the new, and what is to come" (pg. 16)

        • "what has to be learned is not an abstract idea, or a set of tricks, not even a ritual, but a concrete, coherent manner of living in all its intricateness" (pg. 17)

        • "political education is not merely a matter of coming to understand a tradition, it is learning how to participate in a conversation" (pg. 17)

      • "at the academic level, the study of politics should be an historical study - not, in the first place, because it is proper to be concerned with the past, but because we need to be concerned with the detail of the concrete" (pg. 18)

        • "genuine historical study in an indispensable part of a political education. But what is equally important is not what happened, here or there, but what people have thought and said about what happened: the history, not of political ideas, but of the manner of our political thinking" (pg. 18)

        • "it is, then, in the study of genuine history…that we may hope to escape one of the most insidious current misunderstandings of political activity - the misunderstanding in which institutions and procedures appears as pieces of machinery designed to achieve a purpose settled in advance, instead of as manners of behavior which are meaningless when separated from their context" (pg. 18)

    • Chapter 2 - Political Principles, by T. D. Weldon (pg. 22)

      • "it is not the job of philosophy to provide new information about politics, biology, physics or any other matter of fact" (pg. 22)

      • "the purpose of philosophy, then, is to expose and elucidate linguistic muddles" (pg. 23)

        • "any language is liable to lead to paradox and confusion unless it is studied and employed with reasonable care" (pg. 23)

      • "the purpose of philosophy…is not to establish or to demolish physical, economic, political or any other principle. It is to clarify their meaning, or to examine their logical force" (pg. 24)

      • "truths [which are] of such a kind that no evidence gained by observation and experiment could either confirm or refute them…[are] expressed in synthetic a priori propositions" (pg. 25)

        • "this matter[s]…because, as F. H. Bradley pointed out to Henry Sidgwick, if you chose the wrong foundations, you might find yourself committed to approving conduct which you [know] to be wrong" (pg. 26)

      • "the abstract ideas of political philosophy were supposed to have the same logical power [but] they had indeed no such power" (pg. 27)

      • "it is a mistake [however] to suppose that criticism of a political theory commits us to a rejection of the principles which that theory claims to underwrite" (pg. 27)

      • "two important truism are involved here" (pg. 27)

        • "the first is that demands for reason and explanation have to stop somewhere; and the second, that no empirical explanation is ever complete" (pg. 27)

      • "to assert any proposition as a principle is logically to put it outside discussion in some more or less precisely defined context" (pg. 31)

        • "political principles have a much more restricted context than some…of the principles which are found in the physical sciences" (pg. 31)

        • "the adoption of any proposition as a political principle is a matter for decision. Such decision may be reached consciously and deliberately by a controlling authority, but this is by no means always the case" (pg. 31)

      • "the job of philosophy…is to reveal the confusions and misunderstandings which may follow from the careless or uncriticized use of language as it is" (pg. 33)

    • Chapter 3 - Natural Rights, by Margaret Macdonald (pg. 35)

      • "why should people have supposed, and…continue to suppose, in obscure fashion, that they have 'natural' rights, or rights as human beings, independently of the laws and governments of any existing society?" (pg. 36-37)

        • "it is…because no existing social compulsion or relationship is self-justifying" (pg. 37)

      • "every man in human 'by nature'; no human being is 'by nature' a slave of another human being" (pg. 37)

        • "there must then be an essential human nature which determines this status and a law governing the relations of human beings as such, independently of the laws of all particular societies concerning their artificial relationships" (pg. 37-38)

        • "statements about natural rights tended in this theory to be represented as statements of a necessary natural fact" (pg. 38)

      • "Roman lawyers…conceived of natural law as an ideal or standard, not yet completely exemplified in any existing legal code, but also as a standard fixed by nature to be discovered and gradually applied by men" (pg. 38)

        • "natural law is only imperfectly realized in positive laws" (pg. 38)

      • "natural law applies impartially to all men in all circumstances, as the law of gravitation applies to all bodies" (pg. 39)

        • "but the law of gravitation is obtained by deduction from the observation of bodies in sense perception" (pg. 39)

        • "no existing society may 'observe' the Law of Nature or guarantee natural rights" (pg. 39)

        • "propositions about natural law and natural rights are not generalizations from experience nor deductions from observed facts subsequently confirmed by experience" (pg. 39)

          • "they are known by reason" (pg. 39)

        • "the standard of natural law is set by reason and is known because men have reason" (pg. 39)

          • "what is known by reasons is certainly true" (pg. 40)

          • "[however,] what can be known by unaided reason is what must be true, and perhaps what ought to be, but never what is true of matter of fact" (pg. 40)

            • "statements about what ought to be are of a peculiar type…[as] they say nothing about what is" (pg. 40)

        • "the fact that men do reason is thought to be somehow a natural or empirical confirmation of what is logically deduced by reason as a standard by which to judge the imperfections of what exists" (pg. 40)

      • "though the Roman lawyers conceded that a man might be entitled by natural law to that which he was denied by every positive law, they do not seem to have related this to any particular doctrine of legal and political authority" (pg. 40)

        • "by right of the law of nature men [live] in a state of freedom [and] equality" (pg. 40)

      • "man did not enter society, said [Thomas] Paine, to become worse than he was before by surrendering his natural rights" (pg. 41)

        • "[thus,] natural rights are the foundation of all his civil rights" (pg. 41)

        • It was essential for the social contract theorists to deny that all rights are the gift of civil society, since existing societies denied certain rights which they affirmed" (pg. 41)

      • "his social environment is determined by accident of birth…but he is not accidentally human" (pg. 41-42)

        • "the nature of man determines his 'natural' rights. And since, though not accidental, it also seemed to be a matter of fact that men exist and are rational, rights claimed on account of this fact seemed also to be natural and to follow from the essence of man, even though they might be denied" (pg. 42)

      • "rational[ity]…generally assumed to include the capacity to abstract and generalize by the use of symbols in speech and writing; to formulate and understand general propositions and laws and to perceive necessary or logical connections between propositions" (pg. 42)

        • "reason is conceived to be the capacity by which men understand abstractions" (pg. 42)

        • "to be rational is to be able to think abstractly" (pg. 42)

        • "hence [reason] is the foundation, too, of his natural rights, as a human being" (pg. 43)

      • "[however,] reason…is no less or no more invariable among human beings than sense perception, [where] the rights of man might as well depend upon eyesight as upon rationality" (pg. 43)

        • "where in this variety are we to find the constant factor by which to determine human rights?" (pg. 43)

      • "it is generally agreed that the doctrines of natural rights, natural law and the social contract, are individualistic" (pg. 43)

        • "[however,] men do not share a fixed nature nor, therefore, are there any ends which they must necessarily pursue in fulfilment of such nature. There is no definition of 'man'. There is a more or less vague set of properties which characterize in varying degrees and proportions those creatures which are called 'human' these determine for each individual human being what he can do but not what he must do" (pg. 44)

        • "certainly, many human beings may co-operate in a joint enterprise to achieve a particular end…but that cannot be generalized into the spectacle of all human beings pursuing one end [as] there is no end set for the human race by an abstraction called 'human nature'. There are only ends which individuals choose, or are forced by circumstances to accept. There are none which they must accept. Men are not created for a purpose as a piano is built to produce certain sounds. Or if they are we have no idea of the purpose" (pg. 45)

        • "it is this emphasis on the individual sufferer from bad social conditions which constitutes the appeal of the social contract theory and the 'natural' origin of human rights. But it does not follow that the theory is true as a statement of verifiable fact about the actual constitution of the world." (pg. 45)

          • "nature provides no standards or ideals. All that exists, exists at the same level, or is of the same logical type" (pg. 45)

          • "standards are determined by human choice, not set by nature independently of men" (pg. 45)

          • "natural events themselves have no value, and human beings as natural existents have no value either" (pg. 45)

      • "when the lawyers said that a slave had a right in natural law to be free, they thought of a legal right not provided for by any existing statute, enactment or custom and to whose universal infringement [had] no penalties" (pg. 46)

        • "consequently, there is no point in saying there was 'really' a natural law…for the law was impotent. Statements about natural law were neither statements of natural fact nor legal practice" (pg. 46)

      • "why then were 'natural rights' conceived to exist independently of organized society?" (pg. 47)

        • "I suggest that they were so considered in order to emphasize their basic or fundamental [political] character. For words like freedom, equality, security, represented for the defenders of natural rights what they considered to be the fundamental moral and social values which should be or should continue to be realized in any society" (pg. 47)

        • "there is no evidence of a state of nature in which men lived before the establishment of civil societies" (pg. 47)

      • "assertions about natural rights, then, are assertions of what ought to be as the result of human choice" (pg. 49)

        • "they [are]…ethical assertions or expressions of value" (pg. 49)

        • "value judgements do not state what is true or false but are expressions of feeling" (pg. 49)

      • "the fundamental values of a society are not always recorded in explicit decisions by its members, even its rulers, but are expressed in the life of the society and constitute its quality. They are conveyed by its 'tone' and atmosphere as well as its laws" (pg. 50)

      • "I affirm that no natural characteristic constitutes a 'reason' for the assertion that all human beings are of equal worth" (pg. 51)

      • "assertions of value cannot be subjected to demonstrative of inductive methods. It is for this reason that such assertions have been regarded as simple expressions of feeling or emotion" (pg. 54)

        • "there are no certainties in the field of values. For there are no true or false beliefs about values, but only better or worse decisions and choices" (pg. 54)

    • Chapter 4 - The Theory of Sovereignty Restated, by W. J. Rees (pg. 56)

      • "where is the sovereign located?" (pg. 56)

      • Sovereign (pg. 57)

        • "the word has been used by some as equivalent to a 'supreme legal authority'" (pg. 57)

          • "those who have used the word in this way have not usually thought it necessary to define what they mean by authority, or to say how authority is to be distinguished from power or influence" (pg. 57)

        • "the word 'sovereign' has been used by others to mean a 'supreme legal authority in so far as it is also a completely moral authority'" (pg. 58)

          • "this is sovereignty as understood by Rousseau and the Hegelians" (pg. 58)

        • "for another group of philosophers the word has meant 'a supreme coercive power exercised by a determinate body of persons possessing a monopoly of certain instruments of coercion'" (pg. 58)

        • "the word has again been used by some as equivalent to a 'supreme coercive power exercised habitually and co-operatively by all, or nearly all, the members of a community'" (pg. 59)

        • "there is, finally, a usage of the word 'sovereign' which would make it equivalent  to a 'permanently supreme authority, power or influence' - the significant word in this case being the word permanent" (pg. 60)

      • State (pg. 61)

        • "the word 'state; has been used by philosophers in at least three different way" (pg. 61)

          • "to some, it has meant a 'politically organized society'" (pg. 61)

          • "to others, it has meant a 'politically organized society in so far as it is ideally organized'" (pg. 61)

          • "more often in ordinary speech, however…the word 'state' has meant 'government as an institution'" (pg. 61)

        • "the state exists within society, but it is not even the form of society. We see it best in what it does. Its achievement is a system of order and control. The state in a word regulates the outstanding external relationships of men and society" - R. M. MacIver in 'The Modern State' (pg. 5) [2015.173653.The-Modern-State.pdf (archive.org)]

      • "summing up now the above argument, it is possible to say (a) that it is necessary, in the sense of logically necessary, that there should exist a sovereign in every state, if we use the word sovereign in the moral sense and the word state in the sense of a political society ideally organized. It is also possible to say (b) that it is necessary, in the sense of causally necessary, that there should exist a sovereign in every state, if we use the word sovereign in the legal sense or generically in the coercive sense, and if we use the word state in any of the three senses indicated" (pg. 64)

      • "if we preserve the traditional simplicity of the concept, it is too ambiguous to be of service, but if we draw the distinctions necessary to avoid these ambiguities, the analysis of the concept becomes so complicated that its use is no longer helpful" (pg. 66)

        • "in the first place, the use of the word 'sovereign' in the permanent sense may…be abandoned altogether" (pg. 66)

        • "in the second place, the concept of the sovereign as the mora sovereign may also be abandoned without loss" (pg. 67)

      • "to exercise authority in its widest sense, is to determine a person's actions in certain intended ways by means of a rule" (pg. 68)

      • "the following kinds of authority may be distinguished:" (pg. 68)

        • "authority of a moral kind, where a rule obliges a person to act in virtue of its being accepted by his own conscience" (pg. 68)

        • "authority of a customary kind, where a rule obliges him to act in virtue of his desire not to incur the disapproval of some other person or persons" (pg. 68)

        • "authority of a coercive kind, where a rule obliges a person to act in virtue of its being enforced, usually with a penalty attached" (pg. 69)

      • "to exercise legal sovereignty, or supreme legal authority, is to determine the action of persons in certain intended way by means of a law…where the actions of those who exercise the authority…are not subject to any exercise by other persons of the kind of authority which they are exercising" (pg. 69)

        • "where it is necessary that a legal sovereign should exist, it is also necessary…that a coercive sovereign should exist" (pg. 70)

          • "it is necessary, if certain rules are to be obeyed, that they should be capable of being enforced" (pg. 70)

      • "to exercise power, in a social and political sense, is to determine the actions of persons in certain intended ways. There are, however, different species of power, and these may be distinguished according to the means used to determine persons' actions" (pg. 72)

        • "power in the sense of authority, especially legal authority, where the means used is the formulation of, or the reference to, a rule of law" (pg. 72)

        • "coercive power, where the means used consist either in the direct use of physical force, or else in a serious threat of the use of force" (pg. 72)

          • "coercive power, when it is exercised, is the determination of a person's actions in certain intended ways, either by the direct use of physical force, or else by serious threat of the use of force" (pg. 72)

        • "power in the sense of influence, where the means used may be any means other than the employment of a rule or of physical force" (pg. 72)

      • "the exercise influence…is to determine a person's actions in certain intended ways, by some means other than by a rule of law or a threat of force" (pg. 75)

      • "to exercise political influence…is to determine in certain intended ways the actions, jointly or severally, of the legal and coercive sovereigns, provided always that their actions are determined by some means other than by a rule of law or a threat of force" (pg. 75)

      • "to exercise sovereignty in [the influential] sense is to exercise political influence…to a greater degree than anyone else" (pg. 75)

      • "sovereignty does…imply recurrent acts of obedience" (pg. 76)

      • "it has been said that the growth of international law is incompatible with the sovereignty of the state" (pg. 80)

    • Chapter 5 - On Punishment, by Anthony Quinston (pg. 83)

      • "retributionists…seem to hold that there are circumstance in which the infliction of suffering is a good thing in itself" (pg. 83)

        • "retributivism is the view that only the guilty are to be punished" (pg. 86)

      • "utilitarians…seem to hold that punishment is always and only justified by the good consequences it produces" (pg. 83)

      • "either punishment must be self-justifying, as the retributivists claim, or it must depend for its justification on something other than itself" (pg. 83)

    • Chapter 6 - Is There a Case for the General Will?, by Bernard Mayo (pg. 92)

      • "the will is assumed to be something which precedes, and causes, an individual voluntary actions" (pg. 93)

      • "[the] hypothetical division of an act into intention and result increases our control over our environment" (pg. 93)

        • "the intention is more characteristic of the act than is the actual physical result; more important, it is more characteristic of the agent" (pg. 93)

        • "the intention we call the 'will'" (pg. 93)

      • "philosophers tend to regard the human being as a bundle of desires and fears" (pg. 93)

      • "I think it would hardly be overstating the case to say that the will 'is' unity" (pg. 94)

        • "[this] may be called a pragmatic justification for the use of the term 'will' as applied to the individual" (pg. 94)

          • "firstly, it establishes a criterion for judging character and forecasting actions; secondly, it emphasizes the importance of intention as distinct from practical consequences; and thirdly, and most significantly, it represents the individual as a unity" (pg. 94)

        • "the reasons which justify the use of the term 'will' as applied to a society are the same as those which justify it as applied to the individual" (pg. 94)

          • "what a society does is made up of what individuals do" (pg. 94)

      • "[there are] three types of unity" (pg. 95)

        • "the human body can be described both in materialistic terms as a single piece of matter and in biological terms as a single organism" (pg. 95)

        • "the third type of unity is psychological. It is in reference to this type of unity that the will unifies the self" (pg. 95)

      • "the individual can practically always be regarded as a unit in all three senses, whereas the state can regarded, for certain purposes, as a unit only in the third or psychological sense" (pg. 95)

      • "what makes a society one society is the end for the sake of which it came into existence and continues to exist" (pg. 95)

        • "in the most comprehensive of all societies, the state, the unity becomes hard to discover, because it becomes difficult to say what the common purpose is" (pg. 95)

      • "the unity of the individual was grasped and put to use for purposes of correlating experience only by means of the concept of the will" (pg. 95)

      • "individual will and general will have a pragmatic justification and do not entail any necessary conclusion as to the metaphysical status of an entity" (pg. 96)

        • "the importance thing is to recognize that the individual will and the general will have exactly equal claims to recognition" (pg. 96)

      • "the general will is to the unity of the state what the individual will is to the unity of the individual" (pg. 96)

    • Chapter 7 - Plato's Political Analogies, by Renford Bambrough (pg. 98)

      • "recent work on the origin of philosophical problems and doctrines has been done mainly in the field of epistemology and ethics. The concepts of mind, knowledge, belief, perception, right, good, will, intention, [and] responsibility…have received the careful and almost the exclusive attention of those philosophers who have trodden the trail blazed by the classical English empiricists" (pg. 98)

        • "philosophers of to-day are increasingly free from the delusion that a doctrine has been finally scotched when it has been shown that it is not what it seems, or not what its authors supposed it to be" (pg. 98)

      • "the following pages have the dual purpose of making Plato's doctrines clear and making a contribution to the understanding of the logic and political theories" (pg. 99)

      • "an attempt will be made to show (1) that these analogies were very influential in shaping and directing Plato's political thought…[and] (3) that they are, nevertheless, if taken too seriously and pressed to far, radically misleading as to the character of political thinking and political action and decision" (pg. 100)

      • "as Plato says in the 'Politicus'…it would be foolishly optimistic to expect to find more than a very few men in any place at any time who were qualified to be true statesmen" (pg. 102)

        • "it is therefore misguided to entrust the government of a city to the whole body of the citizens, or to any minority party among them, or to any individual man who is not qualified by the possession of true political wisdom" (pg. 102)

      • "[Plato's] parable presupposes a distinction between knowledge and skill, or between knowing 'that' and knowing 'how'" (pg. 104)

        • "Plato takes the crucial step in the wrong direction when he draws a parallel between a governor's choice of a policy and a navigator's setting a course" (pg. 105)

          • "the true analogy is between the choice of a policy by a politician and the choice of a destination by the owner or passengers of a ship. The point can be put in the familiar terms of ends and means" (pg. 105)

            • "as soon as we cease to assimilate the choice of ends to the choice of means we also cease to ask that ends should be chosen as only means can be chosen" (pg. 111)

          • "this criticism reduces the power of the 'ship of state' parable, but it does not leave it quite powerless" (pg. 105)

          • "it cannot be shown that these special qualities and qualifications amount to knowledge of an absolutely and universally correct set of ultimate political objectives" (pg. 106)

        • "this suggestion that there can be knowledge of what is good, and therefore experts at determining what is good, both for individual men and for communities, is explicit in Plato's recurrent use of the analogy from which we talk of 'the body of politic' is ultimately derived" (pg. 106)

      • "actual politicians have not undergone a special course of training in order to learn the nature of the good and to master the methods by which it may be attained" (pg. 107)

        • "[however,] it is not, as Plato suggests, because they are lazy, or morally perverse, or neglectful of a clear duty, but because there is no special training, no body of political knowledge, analogous to the medical knowledge of the physician, to which the politician could aspire" (pg. 108)

      • "for Plato, as for Locke, mathematics was the paradigm of certainty and accuracy to which morals and politics were required to conform" (pg. 110)

    • Chapter 8 - Liberal Morality and Socialist Morality, by W. B. Gallie (pg. 116)

      • "in different times and places different systems or aggregates of moral belief have prevailed" (pg. 116)

      • "for Liberal Morality justice is essentially a communitive conception" (pg. 123)

        • "communitive justice is best assured when each individual is left free to decide in what ways he will use his own capacities and property, subject to the proviso that his way shall not prevent others from using their capacities and property in their ways" (pg. 123)

          • "the idea of communitive justice logically requires that the individual shall be a freely choosing agent" (pg. 123)

        • "for Liberal Morality the main functions of a good government are negative and preventative, e.g. defence of country and protection of life and property. The positive function of government is to safeguard the greatest possible freedom of choice for every citizen" (pg. 124)

      • "for Socialist Morality justice is essentially a distributive, not a commutative conception" (pg. 125)

    • Chapter 9 - The Controversy Concerning the World 'Law', by Glanville Williams (pg. 134)

      • "every law properly so called, [Austin] said, is a general command" (pg. 135)

      • "unfortunately, when [John] Austin came to define municipal law, he thought it necessary to embody also in the definition the theory of sovereignty. Austin made a minor mistake in thus assuming the existence of Austinian sovereignty all over the world; and, moreover, his work did not include the close analysis of legal relations that was later to be made by jurists like Hohfeld" (pg. 135)

      • "the word law is simply a symbol for an idea" (pg. 136)

      • "there is no such thing as an intrinsically 'proper' or 'improper' meaning of a word. The nearest approach to the 'proper' meaning is the 'usual' meaning" (pg. 136)

        • "but Austin was not seeking the usual meaning of the term 'law'" (pg. 136)

  5. Further Readings:

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