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Book No. – 52 (Political Science)
Book Name – Political Philosophy (Richard G. Stevens)
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LANGUAGE
A Kind of Betrayal
Political Philosophy
Chapter – 8
- Betrayal is a strong word and might seem combative or judgmental; it needs clarification.
- In the 19th century, a view emerged that political theory was the “history of political theory,” implying that theory evolved and change was progress.
- According to this view, change is not a betrayal but part of an inevitable historical process.
- However, it is important to question the idea that changes are always progress and to consider that sometimes deliberate reversals happen.
- The possibility exists that new views may actually be betrayals or deliberate reversals of older ones, rather than mere progress.
- Thought does not merely evolve through a historical process; sometimes, people actively think and act purposefully.
- For nearly two thousand years, philosophers, from Socrates to Machiavelli, adhered to the Platonic-Aristotelian alliance between the thoughtful and the powerful.
- The Platonic core of this alliance emphasized the supremacy of the thoughtful over the powerful.
- Throughout the Middle Ages, philosophy was in tension not only with politics but also with revealed religion.
- Moses Maimonides and al-Farabi continued this tradition, regarding the alliance between the thoughtful and the powerful.
- Al-Farabi classified people into three categories based on their intellectual abilities, with the first category being capable of demonstrative reasoning.
- The second category could understand and follow demonstrative proofs and function as the gentlemen, while the third category, the majority, had to be guided by similitudes.
- Socrates in Plato’s Republic argued that poets must be censored because they do not tell salutary lies.
- According to al-Farabi, prophets and philosophers create these wholesome stories (similitudes) to guide the majority.
- Plato also suggested that founders of cities must tell a noble lie to the people, such as the myth of metals.
- Poets were seen as creators of lies that convey wholesale truths, with taste distinguishing good poetry from bad.
- Theologically, Plato’s Republic dictated that poets must not portray gods as creators of evil, only good.