Four political tradition: Is this a good model?

Great Debates
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In his article “Which Civilisation?” (http://www.newamerica.net/index.cfm?pg=article&pubID=598) which ran in Prospect October 25, 2001, Michael Lind stated that the most important civilizational divide in the modern world is between “supernatural” and “secular” civilizations, and that on the “secular” side of the divide there are three broad political traditions, making a total of four:

  1. “Supernatural” – all there was, before the Renaissance. “[T]he most important civilisational divide-one that seems even more important after the events of 11th September-may be the one between supernatural civilisations and secular civilisations. The divide is roughly, but not completely, correlated with the divide between pre-modern agrarian societies and industrial societies. Of the supernatural civilisations, the most significant have been the Abrahamic (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) and the Indic (Hinduism and Buddhism). . . . Today Muslim theocracies like Afghanistan, Iran, Sudan and Saudi Arabia are the most extreme examples of societies based on supernatural religion.”

  2. “Humanist” – “Humanist civilisation crystallised in Renaissance Italy, before spreading to the Netherlands, Britain, and the US. This liberal, commercial, increasingly democratic civilisation has spread to other nations by emulation (Lafayette’s France, Atatork’s Turkey, Yeltsin’s Russia) and by conquest and conversion (post-1945 Germany and Japan). Humanists seek to ameliorate the problems of social life with the guidance of practical wisdom, derived chiefly from history, literature and custom, with little or no reference to supernatural religion or natural science, with the possible exception of the emergent sociobiology. Humanists tend to be modest as philosophers and cautious as reformers. Examples of great humanist thinkers and statesmen are Petrarch, Erasmus, Bacon, Montaigne, Voltaire, Franklin, Hume, Burke, Smith, Hamilton, Jefferson and Madison.”

  3. “Rationalist” – “Rationalism, a world view underlying a number of secular creeds, first crystallised in 17th and 18th-century France. Rationalists reject the humanist distinction between practical wisdom and natural science. The goal of rationalists of all kinds is to devise a science of society, modelled on natural science, which can serve as the basis for the construction of a “rational” social order. Stephen Toulmin makes a useful distinction between the “reasonableness” of Renaissance humanists and the “rationality” of Enlightenment philosophes. The rationalist pantheon includes social engineers like Condorcet, St Simon, Comte, Fourier, Bentham, Marx, Lenin and Ayn Rand. (The “secular humanists” who support world federalism and utopian social reform are really rationalists).”

  4. “Romantic” – “Romanticism, the third major secular world view, has spread widely from its original homeland, late 18th and early 19th-century Germany. Romantics reject both reasonableness and rationality, they exalt the inspired unreason of the artistic genius, the child, the primitive uncorrupted by civilisation. Rousseau, Emerson, Wagner, Nietszche and Frantz Fanon should be on a list of romantic prophets, and idealist philosophers like Kant and Hegel arguably are closer to romanticism than to humanism or rationalism.”

These traditions have expressed themselves politically: “The American revolution, and the French revolution in its constitutional phases, were humanist. The French terror and the Bolshevik terror were rationalist. The second world war was a struggle of three secular civilisations: humanism (Roosevelt and Churchill), rationalism (Stalin) and romanticism (Hitler). The war by Islamic radicals against the US, Europe and Israel is, among other things, a conflict between religious and humanist civilisation.”

I’ve studied a lot of political maps, models and schema. (I did an earlier GD thread: “What is the best scheme for mapping/classifying political ideologies?” – http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=192457&highlight=ideologies) And this is the first one I’ve seen that places Karl Marx in the same category as Ayn Rand! And yet I can see the sense of it: Each philosopher believed that an optimal human society could be achieved by rigorous application of a few first principles. The difference is, Marx’s first principles were equality and community, and Rand’s first principle was individual freedom.

In his article Lind does not exactly claim credit for this model, but he does not cite anyone else as having developed it. He speaks of it as if it were already a well-known idea. Maybe it is, on the east side of the Atlantic.

What do you all think? Is this a good scheme for classifying the political traditions of the modern world?

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Sounds like an excellent and reasonable technique.

Lumping Marx and Rand makes sense. Both sought an ideal future through changes in the means of distribution of material wealth (I feel Socialism/Communism and Objectivism both propose overreaching, untestable dogmas, and I personally regard them as religions. But that’s my own untestable dogma).

What do GD’s resident Christian philosophers think? Does religious faith preclude rational discussion? There are a number of threads around that would seem to support that view [:)].

IMO best link on the boards in a while.

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Brian:

Interesting post! I almost never agree with you politically, but I like the unusual prespective you bring to the table.:slight_smile:

I need to think on this for awhile before weighing in, but I am a bit confused on what you mean by “useful”. Useful for what? Is the model supposed to have some predictive value? If so, what is it? If not, what use would it have other than an intellectual exercise?

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Well, John, we need conceptual models in political science as in every other field of thought. Models help us keep things in perspective and keep track of what we’re talking about. And the one’s we’ve been using are too simplistic – the “left-right” model glosses over too many differences between groupings that cannot be expressed on a simple linear scale, and the Libertarian’s two-axis political map is not much better. Lind’s model does not start out with preconceived ideas of what the axes should be, but is based on broad historical and intellectual trends that should be obvious to anyone who knows about modern intellectual-political history. That’s why I like it. At least as a beginning – I daresay it could be improved. A model that classes Marx with Rand is enlightening but unsatisfactory, for obvious reasons.

If you’re looking for some use “other than as an intellectual exercise,” consider that an accurate model helps politicians and political activists figure out who their real allies and opponents are. E.g., if you’re a Libertarian (rationalist), this model shows you how much you really have in common with the Socialists – which at least should give you something to think about. But an alternative model or map might show you that your most valuable working ally outside the Libertarian Party might be, for instance, Jesse Ventura’s Independence Party – which is libertarian-leaning even though its roots are in the Reform Party’s conservative populism. Politics makes strange bedfellows – it’s good to know as much as you can about your bedfellows.

By the way, as I said, Lind does not take credit for this model, and I seem to remember a precursor in Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, where he at least identified the romantic and rationalist traditions. Russell was the first writer to make clear to me that there is a clear lineage of development and tradition going from Rousseau through Nietszche to Hitler; and from Voltaire through Marx to Lenin.

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BG:

What about the political tradition of “Secular Dictatorship”? Where would North Korea and Saddam controled Iraq fall in this categorization? Although the former is vaguely Marxist, clearly the overriding theme is concentration of power in the hands of one person (or a very tiny minority), just as in Iraq. Any pretense at using a philosophy to justify the regime (communism, pan-Arabism, or what-have-you) is purely a means to an end.

Lumping Rand and Marx together can certainly make sense from the standpoint of simple classification, but I can’t see what a Libertarian would have to learn from a Socialist, or vice versa, just because you found one way to classify them together. Can you give an example?

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Secular dictatorship is a form of government, not a philosophy of government. We’re talking about four traditions of political thought.

What’s wrong with the more extreme forms of libertarians and socialists is that they do not realize the essential folly of trying reshape a complex, messy thing like human society along the lines of a few unquestioned intellectual principles. It might be a humbling experience to both sets to show them how much they have in common with those who are theoretically their worst enemies.

For my part, as a democratic socialist I would place myself midway between the rationalist and humanist traditions. I see the obvious value of “reasonableness” but am not prepared to discount the value of “rationality.” I have a hubristic faith in humanity’s ability to improve itself by thinking clearly. I think we can develop a real “science of society” and a (more or less) rational social order, but only by a careful, lengthy process of trial-and-error. There is a very real “law of unintended consequences” in public policymaking, and socialists are not exempt from it. Martin Gardner (another democratic socialist, although he rejects Marx entirely) discussed these concerns very eloquently in the political chapters of his book WHYS of a Philosophical Scrivener (W. Morrow, 1983).

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This is a useful schema, as long as one keeps in mind its limitations:

  1. These four philosophies are the building blocks which are used to construct political belief systems, and not the belief systems themselves. By analogy, one can use a hammer and nails to construct either a birdhouse or an outhouse. It’s interesting, and useful in some contexts, to see that they’re built with the same tools, but this does not indicate any fundamental similarity in structure or function.

  2. Most political belief systems use more than one of these philosophical “building blocks”. For example, Hitler was influenced by the Nineteenth Century German romantic philosophers, but we was also a “rationalist”–he really believed that there was scientific evidence of German racial superiority, and that a world dominated by Germans would be objectively better. I base my personal libertarianism primarily on rationalism, but also on humanism–on the “practical wisdom”, earned through painful experience, that most government programs don’t work as intended and societies with less intrusive government tend to function better.

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And a lot of your “Humanists” might fit more into the category of “rationalists”…Locke, Hobbes, Voltaire, Smith, etc., did believe that there were natural laws of political society and that natural science was a model for social science.

I’ve noticed that Lind seems to really like categorization, and that sometimes he fits things into categories that really don’t fit well.

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Posted by **Captain Amazing:[/B

That must be why I admire him so much. I’m a categorizer, too. (Myers-Briggs personality type INTP-INFP split – natural categorizer.) Well, doesn’t every field of thought need its categorizers and systematizers? (Remember, you can’t spell “analytical” without A-N-A-L!)

For comparison, here are some other models and maps of political ideologies:

  1. The Libertarian map, produced by their “world’s smallest political quiz,” http://www.lp.org/quiz/. One axis measures your commitment to personal freedom, the other your commitment to economic freedom. These axes form a diamond-shaped graph with the Libertarian quadrant at the top.

  2. The “Political Compass,” http://www.politicalcompass.org/. This is really just the same as the Libertarians’ political map, only rotated 125 degrees to the right, so the “Libertarian quadrant” winds up in the lower right-hand corner of a square rather than the top corner of a diamond. (It does show one thing of interest, however. On the “International Chart,” showing where the most prominent world leaders stand, the Libertarian quadrant is empty! Apparently there are no Libertarian leaders whose fame ranks with that of Silvio Berlusconi, Tony Blair or the Dalai Lama. To illustrate the nature of that quadrant in a demonstrative graph, they had to use an academic figure: Milton Friedman.)

  3. The “Pournelle Axes,” http://www.baen.com/chapters/axes.htm, devised by sf writer Jerry Pournelle (whose own website is at http://www.jerrypournelle.com/). One axis is “Attitude toward the state” – i.e., do you regard the state as a good thing, a necessary evil, or an abomination? The other is “Attitude toward planned social progress,” or “rationalism.” This scheme enables Pournelle to, for instance, point out the fundamental distinction between Communists and Nazis: Communists are rationalists, Nazis are irrationalists (which might or might not be construed as the same thing Lind identifies as “romantic”). It also shows the differences between Libertarians and anarchists: Both are on the anti-statist side of the graph, but Libertarians are in the “antistatist-rationalist” quadrant, and anarchists (and the American counterculture of the '60s and '70s) are in the “antistatist-irrationalist” quadrant. Pournelle himself is a self-identified conservative, and would place himself with “various conservatives,” in the statist-irrationalist quadrant (together with Nazis and Fascists), but very close to the center.

  4. The Pew Political Typology, http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?PageID=98. This is really a different kind of model from all of the above. For one thing, it purports to describe the body politic of the United States and no other country. The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press started without any preconceived conceptual notions of what the political ideologies actually are or mean. They formed their typology by a telephone survey in which several thousand Americans were asked about their political values, attitudes and beliefs, (and also about certain demographic information such as race, gender, education, income, and religious belief). Then they used a statistical methodology to identify “clusters” of persons with similar views. They identified ten such groupings:

STAUNCH CONSERVATIVES: 10% of adult population, 12% of registered voters. 72% Republican; 24% independent, lean Republican. Pro-business, pro-military, pro-life, anti-gay and anti-social welfare with a strong faith in America. Anti-environmental. Self-defined patriot. Distrustful of government. Little concern for the poor. Unsupportive of the women’s movement. Predominately white (95%), male (65%) and older. Married (70%). Extremely satisfied financially (47% make at least $50,000). Almost two-thirds (63%) are white Protestant.

MODERATE REPUBLICANS: 11% of general population, 12% of registered voters. 76% Republican; 22% independent, lean Republican. Pro-business, pro-military, but also pro-government. Strong environmentalists. Highly religious. Self-defined patriots. Little compassion for poor. More satisfied than Staunch Conservatives with state of the union. White, relatively well educated and very satisfied financially. Largest percent of Catholics across all groups.

POPULIST REPUBLICANS: 9% of general population, 10% of registered voters. 72% Republican, 25% independent, lean Republican. Religious, xenophobic and pro-life. Negative attitudes toward gays and elected officials. Sympathetic toward the poor. Most think corporations have too much power and money. Tend to favor environmental protection. Almost two-thirds are dissatisfied with the state of the nation. Heavily female (60%) and less educated. Fully 42% are white evangelical Protestants.

NEW PROSPERITY INDEPENDENTS: 10% of general population, 11% of registered voters. 69% independent, 21% Republican, 5% Democrat. Pro-business, pro-environment and many are pro-choice. Sympathetic toward immigrants, but not as understanding toward black Americans and the poor. Somewhat critical of government. Tolerant on social issues. Well educated (38% have a college degree), affluent (almost one-fourth earn at least $75,000) and young (70% less than age 50). Slightly more men than women (55% to 45%, respectively). Less religious (only 13% go to church weekly).

DISAFFECTEDS: 9% of general population, 10% of registered voters. 73% independent, 8% Democrat, 6% Republican. Distrustful of government, politicians, and business corporations. Favor third major political party. Also, anti-immigrant and intolerant of homosexuality. Very unsatisfied financially. Less educated (only 8% have a college degree) and lower-income (73% make less than $50,000). More than one-quarter (28%) describe themselves as poor. Half are between the ages of 30-49. Second only to Partisan Poor in number of single moms. One-fifth (20%) work in manufacturing.

LIBERAL DEMOCRATS: 9% of general population, 10% of registered voters. 56% Democrat; 41% independent, lean Democrat. Pro-choice and support civil rights, gay rights, and the environment. Critical of big business. Very low expression of religious faith. Most sympathetic of any group to the poor, African-Americans and immigrants. Highly supportive of the women’s movement. Most highly educated group (50% have a college degree). Least religious of all typology groups. One-third never married.

SOCIALLY CONSERVATIVE DEMOCRATS: 13% of general population, 14% of registered voters. 70% Democrat; 27% independent, lean Democrat. Pro-U.S., yet disenchanted with the government. Intolerant on social issues. Positive attitude toward military. Think big business has too much power and money. Highly religious. Not affluent but satisfied financially. Slightly less educated, older group (27% are women over age 50). Labor union supporters. Higher than average number (62%) are married.

NEW DEMOCRATS: 9% of general population, 10% of registered voters. 75% Democrat; 21% independent, lean Democrat. Favorable view of government. Pro-business, yet think government regulation is necessary. Concerned about environmental issues and think government should take strong measures in this area. Accepting of gays. Somewhat less sympathetic toward the poor, black Americans and immigrants than Liberal Democrats. Many are reasonably well educated and fall into the middle-income bracket. Nearly six-in-ten (58%) are women and 21% are black. Numerous are self-described union supporters.

PARTISAN POOR: 9% of general population, 11% of registered voters. 85% Democrat; 12% independent, lean Democrat. Xenophobic and anti-big business. Disenchanted with government. Think the government should do even more to help the poor. Very religious. Support civil rights and the women’s movement. Have very low incomes (40% make under $20,000), and two-thirds (66%) are female. Nearly four-in-ten are African-American and 14% are Hispanic. Not very well educated. Pro-labor union. Largest group of single mothers.

BYSTANDERS: 11% of general population, 0% of registered voters. 54% independent, 25% Democrat, 10% Republican. These Americans choose not to participate in politics, or are not eligible to do so (noncitizens). Somewhat sympathetic toward poor. Uninterested in what goes on in politics. Rarely vote. Young (49% under 30), less educated and not very religious. Work in manufacturing, construction and restaurant/retail industries.
In this kind of study, you will look in vain for ideological positions such as “libertarian” or “socialist.” These are the views of the American people as a whole, not of political thinkers.

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Urk. All in bold. I really must learn to use the “Preview Reply” function.