Ben Dupre - 50 Political Ideas You Really Need to Know

political ideas

you really need to know

Ben Dupr

First published in 2011

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Copyright 2011 Ben Dupr

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Contents

Introduction

Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession, joked Ronald Reagan in 1977. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. With apologies to the man who was to become 40th president of the USA (and to logic), it may be that the second oldest profession is in fact older than the first. For behaving politically is, arguably, inseparable from being human. Aristotles definition of human beings as za politika (political animals) is based on his view that people express themselves most fully and characteristically within the context of the Greek city-state, or polis the word from which politics is derived. The polis, then, is the natural habitat of political animals, where they interact cooperatively to establish the laws and build the institutions on which social order and justice depend. And if humans are essentially political, it follows that life without politics is impossible.

The polis may be a product of civic collaboration, but its animating force is conflict. If people did not habitually disagree about things, there would be no need for politics. In a world of complete concord or overwhelming oppression politics could not thrive, because disagreement would be either absent or obliterated. We need to live politically because there is no general agreement about how the good things in life should be shared out; about who should have authority over whom, and how it is decided. As Mao Zedong shrewdly observed, politics is war without bloodshed: a means of resolving conflict without recourse to violence. The only common agreement, in a politically open society, is an agreement to tolerate difference, so politics is the art (or perhaps science views differ) of compromise.

As disagreement is the essence of politics, it would be an injustice to the subject if I were to seek to justify the particular selection of 50 political ideas covered in this book. Indeed, given that finality is not the language of politics (as Disraeli observed), I will not even pretend that the treatment of each is definitive. I will merely thank my publishers (first Richard, now Slav) for their continuing support and my family for demonstrating that a sound political settlement does not depend on reason or equal division of labour. Amor vincit omnia .

Ben Dupr
Oxford 2010

Liberty

In the liberal democracies of the West, liberty is widely held to be the most basic of human rights: an ideal that is worth fighting for and, if need be, dying for. The great value attached to liberty is a measure of the many bitter struggles that have been fought to win it: against churches that were willing to kill to defend their orthodoxies; against the absolute power of monarchs; against the oppression of women and political dissidents; against slavery, prejudice, ignorance, and a thousand things besides.

Since the great American and French revolutions in the latter half of the 18th century, liberty has stood pre-eminent as the defining principle of liberalism. According to John Locke, a political theorist whose work inspired the Founding Fathers of the United States, the provision of liberty is the ultimate justification of a states legal constitution: The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. The freedom to hold whatever political and religious views one wishes; to express such views without fear or restraint; to decide for oneself where and in what manner to live ones life: such are the prizes of liberty.

According to the US Declaration of Independence of 1776, liberty, in company with life and the pursuit of happiness, is one of the natural and inalienable rights endowed upon all humans equally. It is a right that should not be limited without the strongest cause, yet neither can it be unlimited or absolute. As the English social philosopher and historian R.H. Tawney observed in Equality (1938), Freedom for the pike is death for the minnows. Unfettered freedom or licence inevitably infringes the liberty of others. But where should we draw the line? Governments typically respond to external threats, such as war and terrorism, by restricting civil liberties; and the erosion of liberty that results is often, in the view of critics, no less insidious than the dangers that supposedly justified it.

Positive and negative freedom No modern account of liberty can ignore the seminal contribution made by the 20th-century political philosopher Isaiah Berlin. His analysis is constructed around a key distinction between two concepts of liberty: positive and negative freedom.

We commonly think of freedom as existing where there is no external restriction or coercion: you are free so long as there is no obstacle preventing you from doing what you want to do. This is what Berlin calls negative freedom. In considering the circumstances in which it is permissible for society to curtail such freedom, Berlin supports the harm principle associated particularly with the Victorian philosopher John Stuart Mill. This stipulates that individuals should be left free by the state to act in any way that does not damage the interests of others. In this way an area of individual freedom can be defined, a private space that should remain sacrosanct and immune to outside interference. Freedom in this sense is always a compromise between individuals living together in society. What freedom means, wrote the British dramatist Tom Stoppard in 2002, is being allowed to sing in my bath as loudly as will not interfere with my neighbours freedom to sing a different tune in his.