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The Idolatry of Politics
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10247 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1986 |
7,059 Words |
| Author
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Leszek Kolakowski
Leszek Kolakowski has been a senior research fellow in
philosophy at All Souls College, Oxford, since 1970. He has
also been a professor at the University of Chicago in the
department of philosophy and at the Committee on Social
Thought since 1981. He now divides his time between Oxford and
Chicago. |
It is proper on this occasion to look for a moment at what is probably the most famous single sentence ever written in the Western hemisphere. "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." Once we glance at the statement, we notice immediately that what seemed self-evident to the patron saint of our meeting tonight would appear either patently false or meaningless and superstitious to most of the great men who continue to shape our political imagination: Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Marx and his followers, Nietzsche, Weber, and, for that matter, to most of our contemporary political theorists. Since what is self-evident must appear self-evident to all or nearly all rational creatures who reflect on it - as is the case, for example, with the principle of non-contradiction, the truths just quoted are not self-evident at all. They are now reserved for pontifical messages or Sunday sermons, while they are banned beyond recall from the permissible philosophical or theoretical idiom. There are few thinkers who still stick by the belief that the criteria of good and evil - rather than being freely invented or freely canceled, as the needs of the human race require, or expressing at best its biological variants - are somehow embedded in the order of things. Those few adventurers are well aware that they tread on perilous and slippery ground.
That this change of perception matters, there is no need to prove. The rationalist refusal to take for granted any inherited order of political or moral rules was, as we know, one side of the same centuries-long process whereby the modern idea of negative freedom and the principles of freedom of economic activity and legal equality were established. Market economy, rationalist philosophy, liberal political doctrines and institutions, and modern science emerged as interconnected aspects of the evolution, and none of them could have been asserted separately. The reasons for this interdependence are reasonably clear and have been investigated by many historians.
Even though the prime target of attack of this entire ideological and political development was the Church with its claim to spiritual and political supremacy, an important part of the Enlightenment was ideologically inconsistent in its attitude toward the Christian legacy and in the scope of the effective debt it owed this legacy. It often affirmed-against ecclesiastical institutions, though not against Christian tradition - the rights of autonomous reason, personal freedom, and tolerance not unlike the manner in which the Reformation and medieval heresies had
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