Quote:
Originally Posted by peter12
No need to be optimistic or pessimistic. I wrote my honours thesis on this topic, but I'll be succint. I would argue that the Greeks understood human nature better than we moderns, look at Aristotle's comparison of political regimes.
What are the two defining principles of authoritarian tyranny and liberal democracy? I would say that tyranny ultimately depends upon humanity's desire for hierarchical stability. A medieval regime is not as explicity tyrannical from the peasant's perspective. Feudalism, though often cruel, almost guaranteed protection. People on the bottom were exploited, but did have a protector in their king.
Liberal democracy depends upon the notion of reciprocality which is certainly ingrained within our own predilection of self-interest. By surrendering control of force to the state, while constraining it with constitutional documents and democratic reprisal, we create a balancing act of sorts between citizen and citizen; citizen and state.
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That's an interesting idea--but it does depend on the notion that polity is an emergent property of human nature, which is an idea that I consider by definition baseless (note that this doesn't make it
untrue--it just lacks any compelling evidence). It may well be consistent with Aristotle, but that doesn't change the fact that it's predicated on a basic
post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy--in essence, the reasoning goes like this:
1. There is such a thing as 'human nature' which can successfully predict what an individual person needs from a social grouping.
2. Most of these groupings are, generally,
X (let's say authoritarian, because it's more consistent with the historical record)
3. Therefore,
X is a product of human nature/subconscious desires/a particular organizing principle.
Put that way, I hope the flaw is immediately evident: how do we know that the polities that arise don't do so in spite of what people want from their social groupings? How do we know that there isn't some other cause that we can't account for with 1.?
As for me, I'd say that not only is the formula above illogical, but I'm skeptical of its premises. Specifically, I'm skeptical that there is such a thing as "human nature" in the way that we're talking about it. I really do think that the presumption in 1. was Marx's fundamental empirical error--the notion that the "material needs" of the individual could function as the basic organizing principle behind social action. In fact, in the above formula, you could modify the terms to plug in both the ideas of Marx and those of Fukuyama, demonstrating that both are predicated on some pretty specious logic.