Footnotes
1
Eli Sagan, “The Honey
and the Hemlock,” p. 301, Basic Books, (New York, 1991).
In this discussion we speak about rights,
and go directly to rules and regulations. A
more thorough
discussion would run from causes to effects: social consensus, rights,
institutions, and
finally rules.
2
Weapons of
Mass Destruction, later proved to be non-existent.
3
James March
and Johan Olsen, The American Political Science Review, 1984, vol. 78,
p. 738.
4 Robert Putnam, “Making Democracy Work,” p. 111, Princeton University Press,
(Princeton, 1993). This general philosophical point is not to be taken lightly; for
when studying the regional governments of Italy during the 1970s and 1980s, the
author conducted extensive interviews of regional councilors, community leaders,
conducted mass mail surveys, analyzed regional legislation, and initiated comprehensive
case studies.
King, Keohane, and Verba (1994) write, “Many of the most important questions
concerning political life – about such concepts as agency, obligations, legitimacy,
citizenship, sovereignty, and the proper relationship
between national societies
and international politics – are philosophical rather than empirical. But the rules
are relevant to all research where the goal is to learn facts about the real world.”
In political life, philosophy is very relevant because that is how people perceive and
organize their societies. But it should always be placed in the context of what people
actually say and do, and most important, the practical consequences. Without this
reality check, philosophy, rather than being a practical guide to a way of life, becomes
theoretical ideology. We know where that leads when combined with impatience.
5
Gabriel Almond
and Sydney Verba, “The Civic Culture,” p.p. 366-367,
Little Brown
and Company, (Boston, 1965). This book studies in detail how
democracies operate
differently in different countries.
6 No one has come up with a single
answer to what modernity actually is. For our
purposes, we
think it is about contracts, and all that implies. After the collapse of
the
medieval synthesis, the philosophers of the Enlightenment set about
reconstituting the
basis for social harmony, and some found that within the fictive
state of
nature, where freely consenting parties contracted to found a government.
The United States was founded
according to social contract theory.
7
There
were monarchies in the earlier Mycenaen palace era.
Sparta had a very mixed system
combining oligarchic, monarchial, and some democratic
elements.
8 Solon
was elected chief executive officer of the Athenian state in 594 B.C. in order
to end the civil strife between
classes and restore cohesion to the polity. He was
asked whether he had given the
Athenians the best laws possible; he replied, “The
best that they would receive.”
9 Sagan, p. 374.
10 Kurt Raaflaub, “The Discovery of Freedom in Ancient Greece,”
p.p. 85, 96, The
University of Chicago Press, (Chicago, 2004). This book is an excellent
study
of how the concept of freedom evolved within the
Greek (that is Athenian)
culture as new circumstances arose. The Greeks originally
had no word for
freedom, only
a word eleutheros, referring to a moment when
freedom is lost and
servitude
imposed, as during the events of war. The Persian wars supplied
the specific circumstances that allowed the more general
concept of freedom,
eleutheria, to
develop, which essentially meant the freedom of the community
from
subjugation, with the rights of citizens assumed by custom. This contrasts with
the Roman
idea of freedom, libertas, which defined the
interests and rights of
citizens within
an aristocratic order.
In the 21st century
United States, the concept of freedom is now extraordinarily
broad and
complex, combining both aspects, comprising not only the idea
of a
common deliverance from oppression, but also many individual rights.
At this writing, the controversy
over Supreme Court nominations shows that,
within broad
outlines, the concept of freedom continues to develop within the
United States.
11 A major attribute of Greek
political philosophy was precise reasoning. It is therefore
surprising that they
produced no systematic philosophy of democracy. Writing after
the Peloponnesian War
and the death of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were hostile
to democracy,
equating it to mob rule.
Ancient Athenian law was somewhat like English
common law. Ober (2005)
writes, “Unlike many
other ancient legal systems, which assumed a suprahuman
authorship for
fundamental law and then developed from that foundation a
detailed body of
substantive law, the Athenians knew their law as the product
of fallible human
activity. Their law code was relatively simple and highly procedural.”
Athenian law was based upon the customary
rights of people in their Athenian
communities and also
remedied social unrest (stasis).
A systematic philosophy of democracy would
have to wait for the Enlightenment
idea of human rights,
more than two millenia later.