DEFINING POLITICS
Reading A
It follows that the state belongs to a class of objects, which exist in nature, and that man
is by nature a political animal; it is his nature to live in a state. He who by his nature and
not simply by ill-luck has no city, no state, is either too bad or too good, either subhuman or super-human – sub-human like the war-mad man condemned in Homer’s
words ‘having no family, no morals, no home,’ for such a person is by his nature mad on
war, he is a non-cooperator like an isolated piece in a game of draughts. But it is not
simply a matter of cooperation, for obviously man is a political animal in a sense in
which a bee is not, or any gregarious animal. Nature, as we say, does nothing without
some purpose; and for the purpose of making man a political animal she has endowed
him alone among the animals with the power of reasoned speech. Speech is something
different from voice, which is possessed by other animals also and used by them to
express pain or pleasure; for the natural powers of some animals do indeed enable them
both to feel pleasure and pain and to communicate these to each other. Speech on the
other hand serves to indicate what is useful and what is harmful, and so also what is right
and wrong, just and unjust. And it is the sharing of a common view in these matters that
makes a household or a city…
It is clear then that the state is both natural and prior to the individual. For as an
individual is not fully self-sufficient after separation, he will stand in the same
relationship to the whole as the other parts. Whatever is incapable of participating in the
association which we call the state, a dumb animal for example, and equally whatever is
perfectly self-sufficient and needs nothing from the state (e.g. a god), these are not parts
of the state at all. Among all men, then, there is a natural impulse towards this
partnership; and the first man to build a state deserves credit for conferring very great
benefits. As man is the best of all animals when he has reached his full development, so
he is worst of all when divorced from law and morals.
-Aristotle, Politics, II, 2
Reading B
Hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep
them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war, and such a war as is of
every man against every man. For WAR consists not in battle only, or the act of fighting,
but in a tract of time wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known….
Whatsoever, therefore, is consequent to the time wherein men live without other security
than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such
condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and
consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation nor use of the commodities that may
be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing
such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of
time; no arts; no letters; no society; and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger
of violent death; and the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
-Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
Reading C
To understand political power aright, and derive it from its original, we must consider
what state all men are naturally in, and that is a state of perfect freedom to order their
actions and dispose of their possessions and persons as they think fit, within the bounds
of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other
man…. But though this be a state of liberty, yet it is not a state of license, though man in
that state has an uncontrollable liberty to dispose of his person or possessions, yet he has
not liberty to destroy himself, or so much as any creature in his possession, but where
some nobler use than its bare preservation calls for it. The state of nature has a law of
nature to govern it, which obliges every one; and reason, which is that law, teaches all
mankind who will but consult it, that, being all equal and independent, no one ought to
harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.
-John Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government
Reading D
The love of the whole is not extinguished by [a] subordinate partiality. Perhaps it is a
sort of elemental training to those higher and more large regards, by which alone men
come to be affected…in the prosperity of a kingdom…. To be attached to the subdivision,
to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle…of public
affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love of our
country and of mankind.
-Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in
France
Reading E
As the state arose from the need to hold class antagonisms in check, but as it arose, at the
same, in the midst of the conflict of these classes, it is, as a rule, the state of the most
powerful, economically dominant class which, and thus acquires new means of holding
down and exploiting the oppressed class. Thus, the state of antiquity was above all the
state of the slave owners for the purpose of holding down the slaves, as the feudal state
was the organ of the nobility for holding down the peasant serfs and bondsmen, and the
modern representative state is an instrument of exploitation of wage labour by capital.
By way of exception, however, periods occur in which the warring classes balance each
other so nearly that the state power, as ostensible mediator, acquires, for the moment, a
certain degree of independence of both. Such was the absolute monarchy of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which held the balance between the nobility and the
class of burghers; such was the Bonapartism of the First, and still more of the Second
French Empire, which played off the proletariat. The latest performance of this kind, in
which ruler and ruled appear equally ridiculous, is the new German Empire of the
Bismarck nation: the capitalists and workers are balanced against each other and equally
cheated for the benefit of the impoverished Prussian cabbage Junkers.
-Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family,
Property and the State