Governance: Towards the Patriotic Lawmaker

Abstract

Abstract That we should govern ourselves well remains a central mode of justification in modern politics. But what does it mean to do this? In this chapter, I want to explore two of the ways in which political thinkers in the West have answered this question. The first is classical republicanism, the ideology of an essentially pre-modern way of life, its two greatest proponents, Aristotle and Machiavelli, being located, respectively, at the beginning and end of this tradition of thought, though its principles largely reappeared in the last century in the works of Hannah Arendt. The second I will call ‘modern democracy’, an approach which emerged from those anti-absolutist doctrines of the seventeenth century, the foremost of which being unquestionably that of John Locke. For the classical republican, as I have shown, no boundary of any sort is to be recognized between the domains of civil society and the state since these two are considered one and the same, man being conceived of as a zoon politikon or ‘social/political animal’.