Thoughts on thinkers
The subtitle announces: ‘From Pericles to Gandhi: twelve great political thinkers and what’s wrong with each of them.’ Prime Movers provides critical accounts of the political ideas and political actions, of Pericles, Jesus, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Burke, Jefferson, Bentham, Wollstonecraft, Mazzini, Marx, Gandhi and Muhammad Iqbal.
It is in some respects an odd assortment. If ideas matter, Plato had more ideas about democracy than Pericles, even if the latter is justly famous for his funeral speech in praise of Athenian democracy and the men who died in its service. If, as Mount’s final chapter says, the moral is that politics is a matter of trade-offs between competing goods, Aristotle ought to have had a look-in from the start, rather than a grudging and evasive acknowledgment at the end. It won’t do to say that Aristotle was not a ‘prime mover’ while admitting that the later Middle Ages reckoned him to be, as Dante put it, ‘the master of those who know’.
The temporal spread is also odd, six of the twelve subjects coming from the 18th century. The half-hearted justification is that, in the 18th century, thinkers began to grapple with modernity; although the usual complaint against Bentham is that he was strikingly inattentive to the impact of time and place, and Mary Wollstonecraft thought she was defending eternal standards of justice, even if the political science that would show us how to implement them was still in its infancy. ‘Modernity’ is very much a 19th-century invention.
Read more generously, Prime Movers is an engaging collection of extended essays on a disparate bunch of thinkers. Ferdinand Mount is an accomplished writer; he has the knack of summarising complex ideas without giving the reader indigestion, and he contrives to be opinionated without being overly obtrusive.
His views are far from commonplace. Most of us think of Pericles as the great statesman described by Thucydides, who fought an essentially defensive war against Sparta, and who might have saved Athens from eventual defeat if he had lived. Mount will have none of it. He firmly sides with Sparta, and his Pericles is an unscrupulous politician who uses his ill-gotten power to enslave Athens’s notional ‘allies’, the much less prosperous little city-states of the Aegean islands.
This is not to say that his judgements always carry conviction. There is not a lot to be said for the claim that Jesus had no political theory, unless we make a great deal of such sayings as ‘My kingdom is not of this world’. There are more ways of having a social theory than writing tracts on economic theory and constitutional law. The discussion of Jesus’s social ideas first of all insists that Jesus did not offer any guidance on politics before turning to examine Christian social thought.
One suspects that, in some corner of Mount’s mind, there lurks a thought he might well have got from his intellectual hero, Michael Oakeshott. It is not so much that Jesus failed to offer an account of what an ideal earthly city might look like, as that the central message of the brotherhood of all mankind is exactly wrong as the basis of politics. It is just because we are not brothers and cannot depend on family ties to secure peace and prosperity that we need the impersonal, arm’s-length authority of the state to allow strangers to co-operate in safety.
Like any rational person, Mount has his antipathies – Bentham and Iqbal chief among them. He also has favourites – he gives entirely sympathetic accounts of Burke and Adam Smith and, perhaps more surprisingly, of Gandhi.
Wollstonecraft, the solitary female thinker of Mount’s dozen is particularly favoured. She had her failings, notably a tendency to fall for unsuitable men, especially the thoroughly wicked Gilbert Imlay by whom she had a daughter, and whose neglect led her to make two suicide attempts. She was more optimistic about the French Revolution than was reasonable, especially since she lived in France during the Terror, and many of her Girondin friends were guillotined. But she was an irrepressible defender of the human rights of both sexes.
Her first political tract, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, a reply to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, was written in barely a month in November 1790; it sold out instantly and was reprinted two weeks later.
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman appeared two years later. Modern readers are often surprised by the fact that there is little about politics in this Vindication, though that hasn’t stopped later writers from calling her the first suffragette. But Mount reminds us that, in the 1790s, fewer than seven per cent of the adult male population had the vote, and parliamentary politics anyway struck Wollstonecraft as irremediably
corrupt. The Vindication is not a call for red revolution. It is a tract on education, arguing that if women are not to be vain and flighty, they must be educated in the same way as men. They are, in principle, rational beings formed in the image of God, and society should treat them as such.
Mount admires the sheer adventurousness of Wollstonecraft’s life and ideas. ‘Her notorious wildness was not incidental but inevitable and intrinsic to her achievement.’ The project of civilising men by educating women to be free and rational companions has, Mount ruefully admits, still some way to run. What persists, however, is the ideal of liberation, the freedom to experiment, lead one’s own life, make one’s own mistakes, to treat oneself and be treated by others as a rational and independent creature.
It scared most of Wollstonecraft’s contemporaries, and remains a minority taste even today. Unfortunately.