Relation to others· Society and historydifficulty
Ideal and reality
Should politics aim at the ideal city, or work with human beings as they are?
Aiming at the ideal city can inspire and uplift, but also justify every sacrifice in the name of a future that never comes; taking people as they are averts catastrophe, but can resign itself to injustice in the name of "realism." To take a position is to say whether politics should pursue the best or ward off the worst.
Utopianism
4Political thought must conceive the just city, even if it exists nowhere. The ideal is no idle fancy: it serves as a standard for judging actual societies and a horizon for transforming them.
Explore this position →Platoexplicit
The builds the just city in thought, an ideal model ruled by the Form of the Good, with its three classes, community of property and of women among the guardians, and education as the art of turning the soul. This is an avowed normative utopianism: the actual city must conform to the paradigm, not the reverse.
Republic, II-V, 369a-473e · Republic, IX, 592a-b
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Platonismexplicit
The Republic sketches an ideal city (politeia, the just constitution ruled by the model of the Forms), a paradigmatic model of justice founded on the Forms rather than on existing political experience. This utopianism (the claim to rule the city by a perfect order conceived a priori) assumes that the organization of the city should be ruled by a perfect intelligible order, even at the cost of clashing with facts.
Plato, Republic, books II-V, the just city · Plato, Republic, 472b-473b, the city as paradigm
Laoziinferable
Chapter 80 sketches a dreamed community: a small, sparsely peopled country that forgoes machines and travel, returns to knotted cords for counting, where neighboring villages hear each other's singing yet never visit. This nostalgia for a pre-civilizational simplicity is a regulative ideal turned toward the past, more utopian than realist, even though it presents itself as a return rather than a construction.
Dao De Jing, ch. 80
Baconinferable
sketches an ideal city, Bensalem, organized around "Salomon's House": Bacon uses the utopian genre to picture what a society governed by science would be. But it is a utopia of a singular kind, which does not project a perfect social order to be imposed on people: it imagines above all the institution of collective knowledge, while the seasoned statesman of the remains a shrewd judge of human beings as they are, hence a position only moderate.
New Atlantis
Political realism
10One must start from the effective truth of things, not from imagined republics. Politics is the art of governing people as they are, with their passions and interests: whoever neglects what is done for what ought to be done courts ruin.
Explore this position →Machiavelliexplicit
Against the whole genre of the mirror-of-princes, Machiavelli refuses to depict the city as it ought to be: the gap between how one lives and how one ought to live is such that whoever pursues the ideal comes to grief among so many who are not good. Hence his rule of method: go to the and draw the maxim from cases, from Roman history and experience, not from an imagined republic.
The Prince, ch. XV · The Prince, Dedicatory Letter · Discourses on Livy, Book I, Preface
Spinozaexplicit
The opens by refusing to deride, bewail or curse human actions: they must be understood as one studies natural phenomena, taking men as they are. Spinoza accordingly devises institutions fitted to the real nature of the passions, not to a chimerical ideal, an avowed political realism.
Political Treatise, ch. 1, §1 and §4 (understanding human actions, not deploring them)
Camusexplicit
carries its own measure within it: it arms itself with a value (the dignity owed to every man) that it cannot trample without disowning itself. From this Camus draws his political verdict: the revolution that, in the name of a radiant future or a necessary meaning of History, sacrifices the living present, turns revolt against its own principle and leads logically to state terror. Against this excess he sets the thought at the meridian, a politics of limits and of the possible that holds freedom and justice together without sacrificing one to the other. This critique of Soviet communism, written at the height of the Cold War, earned him his resounding break with .
The Rebel (1951)
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Aristotleexplicit
Aristotle rejects 's ideal city and starts from actual constitutions: the legislator must aim not at the absolutely best regime but at the best possible for given circumstances. Hence his praise of the mixed regime (politeia) resting on a broad middle class, a realist and empirical stance.
Politics, IV.1 and 11
Michel de Montaigneinferable
The same that turns him from reform turns him from utopias: to claim to redraw society by a rational plan is still to believe that reason can ground the civil order, which Montaigne takes for a dangerous illusion. He prefers the stability of an imperfect but tested order to the promises of a better regime, and judges politics by the real human cost of upheavals rather than by the ideal they invoke. A disabused realism, fed by the spectacle of civil war.
Essays, III, 9, "Of Vanity" and I, 23
Aristotelianismexplicit
Against the Platonic ideal city, Aristotelianism seeks the best achievable constitution for a given people under real conditions. The most stable regime is the mixed one resting on a broad middle class, the politeia, which tempers the excesses of democracy and oligarchy: a political realism attentive to circumstances.
Aristotle, Politics, IV, 11
Lockeinferable
Locke designs workable institutions fitted to men as they are: a livable but inconvenient state of nature, fallible governments that must be bounded and revocable. Far from an ideal city, he aims at concrete guarantees (separation of powers, supremacy of the legislative, right of resistance), which makes for a political realism tempered by principles of right.
Two Treatises of Government, II, ch. 9 (the inconveniences of the state of nature) and ch. 11-13 (the extent and limits of power)
Thomas Aquinasinferable
Following rather than 's ideal city, Thomas reasons about actual regimes and holds tempered monarchy to be the best government, provided it serves the common good and is restrained from becoming tyranny. This prudent realism, attentive to circumstances and to the means of preventing the abuse of power, distances him from utopianism without carrying him to Machiavellian cynicism.
On Kingship (De regno), I, 1-6
Benthaminferable
Bentham builds his reforms on the real nature of human beings, moved by their interest, and devises institutions, sanctions and constitutional mechanisms meant to channel that interest toward the general utility. This concern for concrete effectiveness and for gripping the sinister interests belongs to a political realism, even if the ultimate reforming aim, to recast the whole of society rationally, keeps a near-utopian streak of ambition.
Constitutional Code (institutions designed on real interests)
Marxinferable
Marx claims to be a scientific socialist and mocks the utopian socialisms that sketch ideal cities without analysing real forces: communism is not an ideal to be established but the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. This grounding in the analysis of material power relations pulls toward political realism, even if the goal, the classless society, retains a utopian charge.
The German Ideology, I (communism as the real movement) · Manifesto of the Communist Party, ch. 3 (critique of utopian socialisms)
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Related problems to broaden toward other axes
- PrescriptivePolitical & legalInstitutions for angels, or for devils?
Should laws be designed counting on citizens' virtue, or built so that "even a nation of devils" would be forced to act well? One's vision of humanity governs the kind of institutions one deems necessary.
institutionsVision of humanity
It has seemed to me more fitting to go directly to the effectual truth of the thing than to the imagination of it. Many have imagined republics and principalities that have never been seen or known to exist in truth.Machiavelli · The Prince, ch. XV
Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.Marx · The German Ideology, 1846