Politics--Politics
as in the Greek idea of the city-state, the polis, that social
organization and structure which reflects the purposes and emphases of the society it
structures. Diamond
distinguishes between band, tribe, chiefdom, and state (Diamond, 265-292) and
his complex analysis makes numerous distinctions I’m silent about. New
hierarchies become necessary to organize increasing numbers of people. The basic difference involves egalitarianism vs. hierarchy.
With hierarchy comes different sources and degrees of authority and a
class structure at least in part based on trade specialization. As the social
organization changes, hierarchy hardens into classes, and authority tends to
become firmer and/or more institutionalized.
By 1500, European state societies were well along the path toward the
nation-state as known in modern history. Machiavelli’s
The Prince (1517) counsels the Prince how to get and keep power.
Under the Prince, the state acts as a sovereign individual, empowering
itself to act always in its own best interest.
Such action is not unlike that of the band, tribe, or chiefdom, but the
Prince’s fiefdom carries with it the accoutrements of state societies: the
soldier class welded into professional armies loyal to the state, artisans
busily inventing superior weapons, a priestly class now essentially subordinated
to the Prince and his advisers. Of
absolute importance is Machiavelli’s counsel to act without regard to
morality. State action constitutes
the exercise of power to keep the state orderly within and safe from without.
Machiavelli’s principles about sovereignty and self-interest are echoed
with different consequences in the philosophic and intellectual ferment of the
1700’s, in the political philosophy of Hume, Hobbes, Locke, Descartes,
Rousseau. Their perspectives on
individualism and the initial formation of social organization extend and
confirm what by then had become European assumptions about state action.
Those philosophers also give a new rationale, almost a high-minded
justification, for state action as imperatives of economic and business
activity.
The Six Characteristics
Politics
Economics
Technology
Biology
Philosophy
Dominance