Stress in Political Theory

Abstract

It is not a blessing for a political community that its environment be altogether benign-satisfying its wants abundantly, imposing no heavy burdens upon it, neither restricting nor threatening it in any serious way. Nor are the traditional desiderata of harmony, justice, and concord unmixed blessings. So, at least, runs an but persistent in the history of political theory. Political communities are in need of certain combinations and amounts of adverse environmental forces and internal conflicts. They need strife and dissension; they need to find their strivings resisted or limited, their security and their possessions endangered, their gods blasphemed, and their ideals scorned. In the absence of such afflictions, they will not long prosper. The theme to which I refer is not the distinctive doctrine of a school or tradition within political theory. Even less is it a subtly obscured esoteric doctrine which has been withheld from the eyes of the vulgar by indirect expression. It is a theme in the sense that the ideas and concepts of which it consists derive their inspiration from, and are logically related to, a shared perception of certain aspects of human nature. It is an obscure for several reasons. First, the adverse factors in question have for the most part been abundant, generating too much stress rather than too little. History has offered men only fleeting and incomplete opportunities to experience the lack of adversity and conflict as a problem. It is the normal business of politics to manage and minimize tensions, to conciliate and mitigate conflicts, and to provide against deprivations and dangers. Consequently, it has been the excess, rather than the deficiency, of these adverse factors that has received the most attention from theorists. Second, political theory, in contrast to many other forms of intellectual activity, seems to have an inherent bias toward action, and hence a tendency to concentrate attention on those areas in which an active attempt to mold or manipulate the environment is possible. The theorist is in a familiar, if not a happy, situation, when he seeks to resolve a conflict or to cure some other malady that afflicts his community. But it is difficult to know what to say, let alone what to do, when the political environment seems ominously gentle. Even the language seems to oppose him, for he is obliged to talk about the goodness of bad things, and the badness of good things. Finally, just because the problems with which this deals have not been salient for political theorists, the insights and ideas that have been generated concerning them have not been integrated conceptually with the more developed concerns of political theory such as law, authority, and justice. Several theorists, for example, have given expression to the idea that a mod erate degree of material scarcity is adc