Theme
How to govern
53 philosophers, 5 traditions
Who should rule, what makes their power legitimate, and how should a state be run? Answers range from moral example and impartial law to philosopher-rulers and the consent of the governed.
Politics raises the question of which laws and policies are right, but also, as Plato’s Republic asked, who should be in charge, and what makes their power justified rather than merely accepted.
In early China, rival schools argued over how a ruler brings order. Confucians looked to the moral example of those who govern, and Mencius to benevolent government for the people’s well-being. The Mohists judged policies by the benefit they bring and wanted officials chosen for merit, while Han Fei put his trust in clear laws, reliable rewards and punishments, and the power of the ruler’s position rather than his virtue.
Plato’s ideal city was taken up and transformed by al-Farabi, whose perfect city is led by a philosopher-prophet. In early modern Europe, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau traced legitimate authority to an agreement among the people themselves, but drew very different conclusions, from an absolute sovereign to government limited by natural rights, or law as the general will. Marx asked instead whose interests the state serves.
Through time
6th century BCE
Confucius
Good government starts with the character of those who rule. A virtuous ruler moves the people as “the wind blows on the grass”, without their trust “the state will not stand”, and the family virtues of filial piety and respect for elders show who is fit for office and are the root of loyalty to the state.
5th century BCE
Protagoras
Every citizen shares in justice and a sense of shame, so political skill is not the preserve of experts. A city’s laws are what it decides is just, and they can be changed as circumstances require.
Mozi
Government exists to end the disorder that follows when everyone has their own idea of what is right. Mozi wanted people to take their standards from worthy superiors, appointed for merit and ability rather than birth, and judged policies by whether they bring the people wealth, a large population and order.
Argued against Confucius
4th century BCE
Plato
The Republic attacks family life, private ownership and democracy, and offers an anti-democratic city as its model of good government, whose best rulers would prefer contemplating the divine to ruling. The later Laws gives non-philosophers considerable powers under a detailed code of law.
Argued against Protagoras
Diogenes of Sinope
Loyalty is owed not to one city but to the world as a whole. Rational beings guided by nature have little need of laws, and the wise keep away from rulers rather than serve them.
Argued against Plato
Mencius
A true king rules by benevolence, not by force or profit. He notices how his policies affect the people and pursues only those that serve their well-being; a ruler who asks how to profit his state teaches everyone below him to seek profit too, and conquest by war is like “climbing a tree in search of a fish”.
3rd century BCE
Han Fei
Order can’t depend on virtuous rulers or honest officials, who are too few to fill the offices. Han Fei designed a system that works even under an average ruler: impartial standards (fa) known to all, rewards and punishments kept in the ruler’s hands, and authority that rests on his position, not his character.
Argued against Mozi
2nd century BCE
Lu Jia
Good government follows the Way that the sages discerned in the patterns of heaven and earth; conventions such as ritual are built on that foundation, and people need sages to keep them on it.
Jia Yi
A ruler survives only with the consent of the people. Humane government is wise above all because it keeps the throne secure, as the Qin’s fall had shown.
1st century BCE
Cicero
Laws answer to a higher standard, natural law, which is right reason about what is just, shared by gods and humans. The best state keeps much of Rome’s traditional constitution, and good people have a duty to take part in governing it.
Drew on Plato
2nd century CE
Wang Fu
When government is past reform, the virtuous should stand aside rather than be corrupted by it; withdrawal can itself serve the restoration of virtue.
Drew on Confucius
3rd century CE
Wang Bi
The ruler should become a sage who acts without contrivance (wuwei), following what is so of itself. Then virtue comes naturally and the people are transformed, as Confucius, rather than Laozi, showed.
Drew on Confucius
Guo Xiang
Social roles and hierarchy are as natural as forests and mountains, and order comes when each person acts according to their proper share. The sage does not withdraw from the world but serves it: inwardly a sage, outwardly a ruler, responding to things without selfish intent.
Argued against Wang Bi
About 600 years later
10th century CE
al-Farabi
The perfect city mirrors the ordered hierarchy of the cosmos, and at its head is a ruler who is both philosopher and prophet. Adapting Plato to a very different world, al-Farabi imagined not a small city-state but a vast empire of many languages, peoples and religions.
Drew on Plato
12th century
Avempace
A virtuous city, free of false opinions, would make all its people happy and need neither doctors nor judges. But every existing city is corrupt, and Avempace did not think it could be reformed; the philosopher living there must instead govern himself.
Chen Liang
Government should be judged by its results: policies and practices are right as they serve the public welfare, not by the inner virtue of those who carry them out.
Ye Shi
Policies should be judged by their results for the common good, and the Way cannot be separated from the concrete affairs of government.
15th century
Nicholas of Cusa
Because “men are by nature equal in power and equally free”, legitimate law and government rest on the consent of those governed, and in the church a council stands above the pope.
16th century
Desiderius Erasmus
The ideal prince is a wise father to his people, a guardian of justice who answers to God for his rule. War is unchristian and should be avoided through arbitration and compromise.
Niccolò Machiavelli
A ruler must be judged by whether he keeps the state and achieves great things, not by conventional morality, and must be ready to act against it when necessity demands. Yet his own sympathies lay with republics, where the people defend liberty against the ambitions of the powerful.
Argued against Plato
17th century
Thomas Hobbes
Without a common authority, life is a condition of war, so people covenant with one another to obey a sovereign. To keep the peace, the sovereign’s powers must be neither divided nor limited, though subjects keep a right to defend themselves. Hobbes preferred monarchy, but only on mild practical grounds.
Agnès Arnauld
Authority can be illegitimate; there are conditions under which its commands may be tolerated and others under which they must be resisted.
Huang Zongxi
Learning should serve the practical ordering of the world, including finance and administration, which high-minded scholars wrongly scorn.
Gu Yanwu
Good rule rests on propriety and righteousness, the Confucian ‘four bonds’ that guide history, not on lofty speculation detached from the people’s troubles.
Angélique de Saint-Jean Arnauld d'Andilly
A persecuted minority need not yield: it can refuse coercion by non-compliance, silence and spiritual solitude, and should distrust ‘dialogue’ that serves the powerful.
Kristina Wasa
Rulers should tolerate religious minorities; the hard question is what authority is and how it should properly be used.
John Locke
Government rests on agreement, not force. People leave the state of nature by handing some of their rights to a government, whose job is to protect life, liberty, health and property and serve the public good. No monarch holds absolute power, and knowing what government is for shows when revolution is justified.
Drew on Thomas Hobbes
18th century
Ogyū Sorai
People and states are not ordered by inner self-control but by institutions: rites and music, laws and administration, designed by the sages for everyone’s welfare.
Montesquieu
The great danger is despotism, and the defence against it is the rule of law and a division of legislative, executive and judicial power among bodies that check one another. Laws should fit a people’s circumstances and forbid only what threatens others’ safety.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
A state is legitimate only when the general will of the whole citizen body directs it. The people are sovereign and make the law, and government merely carries it out; obeying laws they gave themselves, citizens lose none of the freedom they had in the state of nature.
Drew on Plato, John Locke and Montesquieu; drew on and argued against Thomas Hobbes
Adam Smith
The state should secure justice and the rule of law but not direct the economy, promote religion or try to make people virtuous. Its officials know less than the people whose choices they would override, though it may protect the poor from the powerful.
Argued against Thomas Hobbes
Catharine Macaulay
Liberty is the people’s right, and history shows the Commons defending it against absolutist kings. A people may depose a monarch who threatens their liberties, against the monarchism of Hobbes and the conservatism of Burke.
Argued against Thomas Hobbes
Jeremy Bentham
The only valid test of a law or institution is whether it promotes the greatest happiness of the community. Law should be rebuilt on that principle, with securities against misrule by those in power.
Mary Wollstonecraft
Rights are God-given and discoverable by reason, and only institutions that can withstand the scrutiny of reason deserve obedience. A just society requires civil and political rights for women, and an end to the rule of rank, property and patronage.
Drew on Catharine Macaulay; drew on and argued against John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau
19th century
Karl Marx
In capitalist society the state serves the economic order: at its crudest, it is “a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie”. Under communism it would be subordinate to society, run by elected officials paid a worker’s wage, perhaps with little or no organised coercion.
John Dewey
Democracy is a way of life, not only a form of government. Because individuals are formed by their communities, education in the habits of shared, experimental inquiry is a society’s first political priority.
20th century
Rosa Luxemburg
Freedom means people ruling themselves, both singly and together, achievable only in a democratic socialist society. Revolution and democracy must go together, and she criticised capitalism and authoritarian socialism alike.
Drew on and argued against Karl Marx
Watsuji Tetsurō
Individuals negate the group to become themselves, then negate their own separateness in selfless union with the whole. The state takes on the authority of that totality, a view that critics after the war read as a totalitarian ethics of the state.
Karl Popper
History follows no necessary laws, so no one can plan society from a blueprint of its future. An open society reforms itself piecemeal, one goal at a time, correcting its mistakes as science does.
Argued against Karl Marx
Theodor W. Adorno
Modern society is an integrated whole whose antagonisms are hidden by the exchange principle and by a culture industry that manufactures distraction. Critical theory aims to expose these antagonisms and so point to their possible resolution.
Drew on Karl Marx
Ayn Rand
Government exists to protect individual rights. No one, the state included, may initiate force against others; free people deal with each other only by trading value for value.
Hannah Arendt
Politics is the space where people appear to one another and act together in speech and deed. Power arises when citizens act in concert, and freedom is realised in public action, which modern mass society and bureaucracy threaten to eclipse.
Sayyid Qutb
Only God is sovereign. Every society that rules itself by human rather than divine law, including Muslim ones, lives in a new age of ignorance that must be overturned.
Simone Weil
A just society rests not on rights, which rely on force, but on obligations to meet the needs of the soul. People need roots in a living community, and the modern state, with its army, police and bureaucracy, is inherently oppressive.
Aimé Césaire
Colonised peoples must set their own ends. A politics that treats them as junior partners, even a communist one, repeats colonial paternalism.
Elizabeth Anscombe
Human society is essential to human good and needs the state, which may use deadly force against those who attack it, so pacifism is mistaken. But the state may not do anything it likes: deliberately killing the innocent is always murder.
John Rawls
Principles of justice are those free and equal citizens would choose behind a veil of ignorance: equal basic liberties for all, fair equality of opportunity, and inequalities only where they benefit the least advantaged. Citizens of different faiths can share such a conception.
Drew on John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Julius Nyerere
A free African state should be built on the communal values of traditional African life, Ujamaa or familyhood, putting shared responsibility, equality and self-reliance in place of individualism.
Michel Foucault
Modern power works less by force than by discipline: observing people, judging them against norms and examining them. No central agency planned it; techniques developed for different purposes converged into a disciplinary society.
Drew on Karl Marx
Jürgen Habermas
Legitimate law comes out of public deliberation: a formal complex of parliament and courts embedded in an open, informal public sphere. The constitution, rather than the nation, should be the focus of citizens’ solidarity.
Drew on and argued against Karl Marx; studied with and argued against Theodor W. Adorno
Robert Nozick
Only a minimal state is justified: one that protects people against force, theft and fraud. Redistribution violates the rights of self-owning individuals, yet such a state is also a framework in which everyone may pursue their own utopia.
Argued against John Rawls; drew on John Locke and Ayn Rand
Giorgio Agamben
Sovereign power has always rested on excluding bare biological life, and in modern states the exception has become the rule. The camp, where law and life merge, reveals the hidden structure of modern politics rather than a break with it.
Drew on and argued against Michel Foucault; drew on Simone Weil and Hannah Arendt
Slavoj Žižek
No regime rules by argument alone: people consent because its ideology lets them feel free and gives them objects to identify with. Real political change means seeing through those objects and acting to change institutions.
Drew on Karl Marx
Terms on this page
- fa
- Standards, models or law (法). The Mohists sought objective standards for judging right and wrong; the fa thinkers, often called Legalists, sought impartial standards of rule, enforced by rewards and punishments.
- wuwei
- Nonaction (無為): acting without contrivance, letting things take their natural course. In the Laozi it is how naturalness (ziran) is put into practice.
Sources
- Fabienne Peter, Political Legitimacy, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy