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PLATO, LOCKE & MILL ON POLITICAL AUTHORITY.
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In context of Western liberal democracy. Legitimacy, leadership training, rights of individual, property rights, sovereignty, liberty.... More...
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Paper Abstract:
In context of Western liberal democracy. Legitimacy, leadership training, rights of individual, property rights, sovereignty, liberty.
Paper Introduction:
The purpose of this research is to examine the thought of Plato, Locke, and Mill on the subject of political authority, from the perspective of western liberal democracy. The plan of the research will be to set forth a working definition of western liberal democracy and political authority and then to discuss ways in which Plato's Republic, Locke's Second Treatise of Government, and Mill's Essay on Liberty explain the basis on which states and their rulers achieve or should achieve and maintain authority and legitimacy with their people.
To speak of Western liberal democracy is to speak of such concepts as individual freedom of thought, property, and action, equality of all persons before the law, representative government, open social and political discourse, and a history of relatively stable social structures amid transfer or sharing of and c
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Such prerogatives of political power as exist issue fromwhatever authority those not directly in power agree to confer on those whohold the actual power to enforce their authority. Mostrelevant for the present research is Plato's critique of democracy, faultybecause it is governance by the many citizens, perforce as a massunqualified by temperament or and politically and philosophicallyilliterate compared to philosopher kings education have an equal voice ingovernance with those who are suited to govern. The aim of a state governed by temperate and virtuous rulers is toproject justice from the realm of psychological concept into real-worldpraxis. . by compact and agreement, settled the property which labour and industry began (Locke 27).In the structure and clarity of this settlement of property, politicalauthority resides. This conception of rulership legitimacy implies the famous Platonicsuspicion of poets, who in their idiosyncrasy are just as likely torepresent what is foul as what is fair. It may be inappropriate to describe one philosopher as more orless friendly or hostile to western liberal democracy, for that term can beinterpreted as a modern construction that represents an as it wereselective accretion of the whole history of western political thought fromthe time of Plato onward. There is not a great deal of room in Plato's conception of politicalauthority for democracy as a governmental form. Democracy "tramples" notions ofvirtue and goodness because the mob cannot internalize the appropriatetemperament (Plato 283). It is on this point that Locke and Plato most strongly part company.In Plato's idea of a republic, harmony of personal and civic relationshipsis guaranteed by elite political education and desire for wisdom, which inturn guarantee the legitimacy of political authority. Such deformity will rightly disgust him. C.B. Trans. . The sway that popular culture holds over theexpression of these ills appears to be of great concern to him. . Cheng and Stephen Haggard. In significantpart, it is also a view of the relationship between human beings andproperty, which in concert with reason evolves into a relationship betweenand among human beings, property, and the shape that political authoritythat can guarantee their experience of social stability assumes or shouldassume. What seems most significant about this line of argument is that it ismeant to lay an inarguable foundation for a connection between a rationalconception of property, based on rational self-governance, and thepolitical or social community, which inevitably entails rationalgovernance, or political authority, more generally. Political Change in Taiwan. for states, nor yet, as I believe, for all mankind; nor can this commonwealth which we have imagined ever till then see the light of day and grow to its full stature (Plato 178-9).What this comes down to is that Plato's principle of private virtue has apublic, social, and administrative component. It is as if Mill is lamenting that, in the society with which hewas familiar (from early to late Victorian), the worst of unwise rulers(Plato's great fear) and the worst of irrational human society (theopposite of Locke's basis for political legitimacy) have been combined. It may be the case that Plato's idea ofstrong education is a useful one, and Mill advocates an educated populace.Mill's critique of the prevalence of social control, and the moralauthority of the established order implicit in it, which he felt hadbefallen Victorian England as of 1859 demonstrates that even the bestintentions, where liberty of conscience is concerned, can degenerate andbecome as foul in themselves as, say, Plato's view of individual aestheticimagination. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1945. This logically proceeds to the idea that citizens should not bemerely subject to the will of the ruler, i.e., have their politicalstructure imposed from above. Complicating thewhole matter is that the hypotheticals that can be adduced from Mill'sargument are not quite answered when Mill makes a statement to the effectthat "it is unnecessary to dwell" on the content of what people mightdescribe as "offenses against decency" (Mill 153). Thus labour, in the beginning, gave a right of property . is not a matter of external behaviour, but of the inward self . . . On Liberty. . Such developmentscame after Locke's earlier principle that everybody within an organizedsocial environment has a political stake in the fact that property remainssettled and the settlement can be guaranteed by political authority. But there are differences in how each understandsthe source of political authority, which are connected to differences inconception about political democracy and the very shape that a state takes.An appreciation of these differences may point toward reasons that thewestern liberal democracies may have selected and adapted for use some butnot all features of the political thought of each. In Locke, it conferred on subjects who together and separatelyarrive at a common rational expression. . Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 198 .Mill, John Stuart. Inhis essay on representative government, indeed, Mill directly attacks theprevailing political system, saying that both Conservatives and Liberals inthe English Parliament "have lost confidence in the political creeds whichthey nominally profess, while neither side appears to have made anyprogress in providing itself with a better" (144). . The just man does not allow the several elements in his soul to usurp one another's functions; he is indeed one who sets his house in order, by self-mastery and discipline . was perfectly his own, and did not belong in common to others. Locke's view of human reason, sanctioned in his view by biblicalrevelation from Psalms that God "has given the earth to the children ofmen" (18), is the basis for the impulse toward acquiring property. Rather, the conceptionpoints in the direction of an aristocratic monarchy as the most logicalpolitical structure to follow from observation of the principles of virtue,which is a function of the internalized temperament of virtue, which is afunction of education and training. By exerting such labor to the extent of one's peculiar abilities, onemay make a valid claim to property to which proprietary value has beenadded. The purpose of this research is to examine the thought of Plato,Locke, and Mill on the subject of political authority, from the perspectiveof western liberal democracy. [T]hough the things of nature are given in common, yet man, by being master of himself and proprietor of his own person, and the actions or labour of it had still in himself the great foundation of property; and that . These, however, are the veryreasons for "the decisive importance of education in poetry and music:rhythm and harmony sink deep into the recesses of the soul . Plato, Locke, and Mill all have opinions about how political authorityshould be understood, and all are important shapers of Western politicaldiscourse. Citizens trade unlimited rights to acquire but notactual ownership of all property, for physical protection as well as forequal protection of such property (defined as life, liberty, and estate) asthey do have under the laws. there can be no rest from troubles . . Introduction. Macpherson. . The idea is developed further: [Justice] . Internalized temperament--not of virtuebut of attributes and qualities rather different--is also the basis for theAthenian Plato's description of what he sees four inferior constitutionalstructures, which are "the competitive and ambitious temperament, answeringto the Spartan constitution, and then the oligarchic, democratic, anddespotic characters" (Plato 267-8). The objective of Mill's critique in "On Liberty" is to point out thelimitations on individual liberties inherent in the stratified, class-distinct society that was in his time and had been and remains foreverEngland. Governance according to characters ofgovernment driven by temperament of ambition (defined astimarchy/timocracy) entails persistent and pernicious competition for poweror wealth or both: "War [= political instability] will be its constantoccupation, and military tricks will be greatly admired" (Plato 271). Accordingly, in Essay on Liberty, the focus is on the individualper se, or more exactly on claims of the individual, perhaps the least ofthe brethren in an organized society where moral judgments about politicalauthority are to be made. And if itis the case that Locke's interest was in the more or less elite propertiedcommon man and not the great mass of common men, it is also true that heimplies a tension between claims of absolute sovereignty and claims ofindividual sovereignty of the subjects, or an entitlement of these subjectsto query the legitimacy of political authority from time to time. . . The plan of the research will be to set fortha working definition of western liberal democracy and political authorityand then to discuss ways in which Plato's Republic, Locke's Second Treatiseof Government, and Mill's Essay on Liberty explain the basis on whichstates and their rulers achieve or should achieve and maintain authorityand legitimacy with their people. ix-xiv.Locke, John. Such familiarity can be projected into the life of the polis becauseit implies governance as a function of moral philosophy, hence the doctrineof the philosopher king who has the knowledge and the power or courage toproject that knowledge into society in a magnanimous way. ButLocke does get to a principle of diffused or dispersed authority, that is,power cut up into little pieces as a definition of the political process ina legitimate state. The force and deception, in Mill's view,comes from the assertion of moral authority by those who have social power.Such power, as a practical matter, is not inconsistent with politicalauthority, and on the whole Mill is suspicious of assertions of politicalauthority where individual assertion of liberty harms no one, even if itmay harm the individual in question: "Whatever it is permitted to do, itmust be permitted to advise to do" (Mill 154). These concepts are commonplaces of politicaldiscourse and rhetoric in the West in the modern period because theirattributes are so readily identifiable with lived political and socialexperience and can be so readily contrasted with the political and socialexperience of so many non-Western peoples, as well as with the experienceof Western peoples (say, in the former Yugoslavia) of unstable orrepressive regimes. . For Locke, harmony isarrived at not because of the wisdom of one individual but because manyindividuals acknowledge that they have a common interest in social harmony.Locke's idea that individual rights to life, liberty, and estate can bediffused in the service of equitable common protection and governanceimplies that the common will is a collective rational expression. Undoubtedly, one feature of this may be a pursuit of power by theability of one's leaders and through the strength of one's numbers; thatwould be the American interpretation some 1 years after Locke's Treatise(1688). Democracy by its nature not only obliges tolerance of diverseopinions in this regard but is predicated of competition for andcompromises in power, with a view toward stable experience of politicalauthority. The Republic of Plato. Locke does not appear to deal directly with rights of common menper se, which would be consistent with the fact that the Revolution of 1688included, not excluded, a new king. Because what they produce will beabsorbed by the future guardians of the commonwealth as a part of theireducation, and because these future guardians are meant to function out ofa harmonious and not distracted habit of mind, poets of the republic mustbe compelled "on pain of expulsion, to make their poetry the express imageof noble character . In Plato, sovereignty isconfined to the philosopher-king who is the highest and best expression ofreason. . Works CitedHuntington, Samuel P. This is poetry and music conceived as criticalthinking, which is itself a function of wisdom, which is for Plato thehighest and best virtue. . Second Treatise of Government. The apparent certainty of Plato and Locke about the structure of thesocial environment in which their views of political authority arearticulated suggests a coherence and strength of presentation, thoughPlato's de jure elitism and Locke's de facto elitism in the guise ofpropertied and educated rational interests within a structure largelyheedless of the common horde sight the limits of philosophical discoursewhere relevance to readers of and from the common horde is concerned. Such anenvironment, which surely it was never Mill's intention to create orendorse, does violence to the conception that the western liberaldemocracies (which alone of all sociopolitical types would tolerate theslippery slope in the first place) might have that their societiesrepresent the highest and best evolution of 2,5 years of politicalthought. . Because the latter kind ofcitizen will be few in number, the political community is in danger ofdegenerating into anarchy, or mob rule. . But [Houston, we have a problem]in fact the strength of Mill'scorrective can also be interpreted as the beginning of a slippery slope ofdiscourse that implies its greatest weakness, that it leads to a socialenvironment not unlike that of the modern period, where the profoundliberties implicit in doing-your-own-thing can elide into making a positivemoral assertion of contempt for and flouting of not only imposition(particularly a hypocritical imposition) of socially sanctioned orpolitically authorized values but also the conscious endorsement of oracquiescence in values that have social or political sanction. Indeed, as ordinary civility and decorum vanish in the face of in-your-face discourse and behavior among citizens and officials high and low(notions such as offenses against decency long having been relegated toantique status), one is tempted to wonder whether democracy's victory inthe war of ideas has been worth the aggravation. To speak of Western liberal democracy is to speak of such concepts asindividual freedom of thought, property, and action, equality of allpersons before the law, representative government, open social andpolitical discourse, and a history of relatively stable social structuresamid transfer or sharing of and competition for political power within apolitical structure broadly accepted and publicly understood as havinglegitimacy and social value. London: Everyman, 194 .Plato. . . Man's extra effort to improve the convenience factor of what is foundin nature thus becomes a justification for a historical and increasinglystructured, systematic, and implicitly social chain of ownership of whatone could reasonably control: "[H]e who appropriates land to himself by hislabour, does not lessen, but increase the common stock of mankind" (Locke23). But these of the common horde areindividuals before they are a collective, group, or class whose common goodis to be guaranteed. . Locke's concept of political authority can be said to derive from amore or less natural theory of the evolution of human reason and ofconcepts suited to exploiting that reason to maximum benefit. The most consistent interpretation of this idea is that it is anindirect criticism of those who endorse or enforce social or politicalrules (say, against pornography or for family values) for others and forsociety as a whole--and, significantly, as a social or legal principle--while engaging privately in all manner of (say) extramarital sexualadventurism. The provision of protection of property as theproduct of rational man and relationships between rational men legitimatespolitical authority and power. Liberty of action for Mill follows from liberty of thought, insofar asit does not harm others; this, too, proceeds from the critique of what hethought English society, and government, had become, which was somehow aprotector of privileged opinions by reason of its authority. That,indeed, becomes the foundation of Locke's explanation of the conditionsunder which political revolution (such as the Glorious Revolution of 1688of which Locke was the principal apologist). He lamentsthat "the claims of an opinion to be protected from public attack arerested not so much on its truth, as on its importance to society" (Mill79). The waythat reason and property and much else besides are used seems decisive asLocke's discussion develops. As a practical matter, this entails a view of human experiencethat seeks benefit within the context of social stability. Politicalauthority predicated of the decency, morality, integrity, and wisdom of apolitical elite, i.e., political virtue, achieves legitimacy by reason ofthe certainty of personal virtue--virtue made certain by reason of propertraining in philosophy. Locke's assertion of labor as the added-value "use"by individuals, whereby land or products assume the status of privateproperty, is a function of the optimal application of reason, which "addedsomething to" goods found in a natural state before reason was applied,"and so they became his private right" (Locke 19). . bringingthat grade of body and mind which is only to be found in one who is broughtup in the right way" (9 ). . It is one way of describing the concept of powersharing or a distribution of power among segments or factions that maycompete for advantage without fear of being repressed only by reason of adesire to compete in the first place. Elsewhere, Locke saysthat labor "hath fixed my property" (2 ; emphasis in original here andthroughout) or that a man's labor "was to be his title" to property thatmight have formerly been held in common. At any rate,Locke seems intent on structuring his Second Treatise of Government in away that obliges the reader to conclude that political authority is soderived. Unless either philosophers become kings in their countries or those who are now called kings and rulers come to be sufficiently inspired with a genuine desire for wisdom; unless, that is to say, political power and philosophy meet together . The question of whetheror to what extent public authority has a claim on private behavior is farfrom settled by Mill's determination to provide a critique of the extent towhich social authority becomes a proxy or catalyst for political authority--which is bound to be visited unequally on those of higher and lower estate. Utilitarianism, Liberty, and Representative Government. Rather, political authority is derived fromthe participation of the rational population concerned with the stabilityof estate (and life and liberty). Elsewhere he refers to the "despotism of custom" as "in unceasingantagonism to that disposition to aim at something better than customary"(Mill 87). Locke begins this line of thought by assigning relativerational/moral weight to concepts of property, and then showing howproperty ought to be understood as a function of fundamental individualhuman experience: "I shall endeavour to shew, how men might come to have aproperty in several parts of that which God gave to mankind in common, andthat without any express compact of all the commoners" (Locke 18). In other words, the social structure, irrespective of thepolitical structure, could work evil on individual experience or assertionof liberty. . The notion of personal liberty is a persistent andpermanent and familiar fixture of modern experience in the West. Thus the origin of political authority is in theinterpenetration of the character and training of the people who controlit. T. As Huntington (x) remarks of the democratic transitionin Taiwan and of the contemporaneous demise of the Soviet system in recentyears, "in a global sense, almost no one is against democracy; in thatrespect democracy has clearly won the war of ideas." Political authorityunder such conditions derives from a rule of law that is systematicallyapplied and that is not destabilized owing to irrevocable challenges tothat power. . while he is still too young to understand the reason; and when reason comes, he will greet her as a friend with whom his education has made him long familiar (9 ). Significantly, the harmony and temperateness of the political toneis set at the top, which is why the education of the ruler in justice andvirtue is so important, which is why personal virtue, or justice as a habitof mind, requires training. . Only when he has linked these parts together in well-tempered harmony and has made himself one man instead of many, will he be ready to go about . One aspect of the point is that organized authority does notor should not have behind it the political power to enforce its societalarticulations against individual behavior that does not harm others.Another, which points to the moral peril of such authority, is thatindividuals who wield the political power of social enforcement sofrequently violate these rules themselves. Men . From the early portion of the Republic onward, Plato sets forth amoral foundation for political authority. Put another way, thestructure of the Republic will reflect the structure of the ruler'spersonal integrity. For example,having a private collection of (say) Playboy seems to belong to a moral andsocial exercise different from owning a dirty-movie house patronized by(say) loud and public drunks, pimps, and prostitutes. Ed. Justice is "the power which produces states or individuals" whofunction according to their proper nature, or according to their own idealform. Itmight seem that Mill's moral claim for individual entitlements ofconscience and behavior against the inns of power both social and politicalcould be interpreted as an adequate philosophical answer to or correctiveof both Plato and Locke. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Reinner Publishers, 1992. Ed. We would not have our Guardians grow up amongrepresentations of moral deformity (Plato 9 ). Inevitably, some beings will use reason betterthan others, working to improve the quality of their lives in a way thatsets them apart from those who are as it were merely surviving off thecommon property of all. . . . Plato continues, [A] proper training in this kind makes a man quick to perceive any defect or ugliness in art or in nature. But because no political society can be, nor subsist, without having in itself the power to preserve the property, and in order thereunto, punish the offences of all those of that society; there, and there only is political society, where every one of the members hath quitted this natural power, resigned it up into the hands of the community in all cases that exclude him not from appealing for protection to the law established by it (Locke 46). Francis MacDonald Cornford. A state's regime legitimacy,according to Plato (Socrates) is properly based on virtue, justice, wisdom,and it is guided by the just and virtuous psychology and temperament of itsrulers. It is important to note that for Mill, the practical evolution oftraditional liberal society (such as Britain's constitutional monarchy)appears to have compounded rather than resolved social ills of instabilityor individual security. This was later developed in the Americansystem into a principle of representative government and the involvement ofcitizens as a whole in positive political obligations. Yet another point is where thelines between what is harmful to others should be drawn. And individual experience of political life is apt tobe overlooked in the discourse of rational structures (Locke) and ideals(Plato). . Private property derived from labor is therefore a fundamentalattribute of rational man. This forms the basis for Mill's insistence on a liberty ofindividual thought and conscience, translated as a practical matter intofree discourse and a free press--a direct difference with Plato, who'sdeliberate system of censored education for philosopher-kings in thingsgood, virtuous, and beautiful can be interpreted at the theoretical levelas a species of thought control. Similarly,liberty of association, "freedom to unite, for any purpose not involvingharm to others; the persons combining being supposed to be of full age, andnot forced or deceived" (75). affairs of state (Plato, 141-2). . Thus Locke assigns value to the state as an entity in terms of therelationship between citizens and state, as well as between citizen andcitizen. . But also implicit in this concept isthat leaders are accountable to the shape of social organization and tonumbers that they lead, and not simply leaders by virtue of the power (orindeed virtue, as Plato might have it) that they themselves hold. In Mill, the sovereignty and legitimacy of political authority is atleast in theory conferred not on the relatively elite propertied class,which always wants stability, still less on the aristocracy, which as faras Mill is concerned is coeval with what Plato might call an oligarchy, butrather on those of the common horde, whose experience of a good life is theprincipal basis for judging whether political authority has beenappropriately established or exercised.
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