Page 178 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol IV

political thought 1479

An onlooker sees more of the game than a player. • Spanish Proverb

political communities as raw material for their reflec- century English political theorist of absolutism, was a
tions.They thought broadly about political diversity and more recent voice of atomist statecraft, and paved the
historical evolution, using the Greek city-states and the way for the more mundane and less virtue-oriented char-
decay of the Zhou empire into the warring states as illus- acter of modern Western political thought.
trations.This comparative approach gave rise to insights All these are examples of how world history can situ-
into universal truths about human nature and well- ate the emergence of the major traditions of political
ordered states. thought, inform comparisons across those traditions,
Two main types of sophisticated political thought and trace long-term continuities and ruptures in thinking
emerged from the Axial Age, from this new Eurasian about politics.
experience of complex agrarian societies. One, which we
might call virtuocratic, reflected the worldview of high- Political Thought as a
culture intellectuals who were committed to certain Lens for World History
orthodoxies of religion or philosophy. Such groups In reverse, political thought can also influence the telling
included the Hindu brahmins, the Confucian literati, the of world history. As a mode of imagining the ideal polit-
Greco-Roman Stoics, and the priests of the Middle East- ical community and making sense of large-scale social
ern monotheistic faiths. While their conceptual frame- processes, any system of political thought implies a lens
works differed, they overlapped in seeing society as an through which its adherents view the past. The term
arena for the pursuit of virtue and human flourishing. metanarrative often describes a story of world history
The state had a crucial role to play as the keystone of a colored by political thought. A metanarrative integrates
just social order, which placed people in positions suited the happenings of the past into one simplified tale filled
to their natures. The ideal statesman was a kind of with meaning and with lessons for the present.
philosopher-king, who held himself to a transcendent One such metanarrative is religious. Religious meta-
standard of ethical truths and cosmic order. The ethical narratives date back to the beginning of the so-called
activities of the state unfolded on a plane higher than world religions, those universal systems of spiritual
mere functional performance. insight that emerged from the Axial Age. Since each
A second stream of political thinking that emerged at world religion professes to speak to humanity as a
about the same time can be called atomist. Examples whole, to represent a cosmic order not confined to any
include Legalism in China and Sophism in Greece. From one territory or culture, it has had to grapple with the
the fact of diversity across communities and eras, atom- problem of religious diversity. Given its superior access
ist political philosophers drew quite the opposite con- to truth, in other words, how should it think about
clusion from their more virtue-minded counterparts. other world religions? The Hindu approach has typically
They held that diversity showed there was no objective been to treat religious diversity as merely a variety of
truth or standard of virtue. Human nature amounted to paths to the same divine essence.This perhaps avoids the
no more than individual self-interest, the rather pedes- need for a metanarrative about the relative worth of reli-
trian desire to seek pleasure and safety and avoid suffer- gions, but still integrates doctrinal diversity into one over-
ing. Emptied of any moral content, the atomist vision of arching system of meaning. In the social realm, however,
the state involved only efficient management, preserva- premodern Hinduism still saw the hierarchies and ritual
tion of peace, and practicing hard-headed skills of state- practices of the caste system as a superior context for
craft. This stream of thought, with its social base in the spiritual self-cultivation. Non-Hindus who sought true
mercantile and bureaucratic classes, endured until mod- human flourishing would have to enter the Hindu social
ern times but largely below the surface of respectable order over several generations. In practice, some con-
political discourse. Thomas Hobbes, the seventeenth- querors and potentates were brought into the Hindu