The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (141 page)

A war held to be justly caused and humanely conducted.
Classical Greek thought, as represented most graphically in Thucydides'
History of the Peloponnesian War
, accepted war as an inherent aspect of politics. The early Christians were pacifist and practiced abstention from politics. The Roman empire, once converted to Christianity, had to reconcile the pacifist teaching of Christ with the demands of politics, power, and war. Augustine's
City of God
argued that day-to-day acceptance of political ‘realities’ was inevitable for Christians living in a fallen world. The theme was developed by
Aquinas
who distinguished between just and unjust war using two sets of criteria, the justice of the cause (
ius ad bellum
) and the justice of the conduct (
ius in bello
).
The two elements of just cause and just conduct have continued to dominate the debate. In the twentieth century, just cause has narrowed to self-defence against aggression and helping the victims of aggression. The doctrine of just cause has concentrated on discrimination between combatants and non-combatants and proportionality between the injustice suffered and the level of retaliation. The waging of ‘total war’ has strained practically to breaking point the doctrine of just war.
Nuclear deterrence has added an additional dimension to the debate because, while most theorists of just war have condemned nuclear war as unjust (on grounds of discrimination and proportionality, but also on grounds that there is no prospect of a successful outcome), some Christian thinkers have considered deterrence— the threat to use nuclear weapons—to be morally allowable. Some Catholics, for instance the American Bishops, have distinguished between the mere possession of nuclear weapons, constituting a so-called existential deterrent, and the intention to use those weapons, the former being allowable while the latter is disallowed. See also Suarez.
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The existence of a proper balance. Justice in law illustrates applications of the notion of a proper balance: a fair trial, which, among other things, achieves a proper balance between the ability of the defendant to establish innocence and the ability of the prosecution to establish guilt; a just sentence ( see
punishment
) which balances the precedent wrong with a present response. In political theory, justice has concerned both the terms of membership of a social group ( see
social justice
) and the distribution of burdens and benefits within that group ( see
distributive justice
). In a legal context, distribution is sometimes contrasted with compensation, with restoring the proper balance which existed before a wrong, and this view informs some theories of punishment. Plato's
Republic
depicted a just society as one in which various social functions were properly fulfilled and balanced, thus tending to assimilate the virtue of justice with the pursuit of the common good. This assimilation makes justice the cardinal virtue of political order, but is resisted by those, for example, who might wish to consider how just a society is as only one of a number of guides to the desirability of a life within it.
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(1724–1804)
German philosopher of the idealist school. Kant lived a quiet academic life in the East Prussian city of Konigsberg (now Kaliningrad). It has been a matter of much consolation to philosophers since that Kant , renowned as one of the greatest of European thinkers, published all his most important works after the age of 57.
Kant is not normally thought of as a political theorist. But his philosophy of ethics and law makes such profound suggestions about the nature of duty, law, and freedom that it would trivialize political theory to exclude them from that subject. Kant is often claimed as an ‘Enlightenment’ theorist. In some respects, however, his project is the opposite of that of many of his contemporaries.
Holbach
in France and
Bentham
in England produced ethical theories which were hedonistic and consequentialist, judging actions on their consequences for people's well-being rather than on their conformance to any natural or divine law. Kant , on the other hand, attempted the reconstruction of traditional doctrines on new, rational foundations.
The core argument of this enterprise is the derivation of a shape and a minimal content for our duties from the nature of our being as rational, autonomous agents. The nature of the argument is similar to that used by Kant to derive the universality of causation in his philosophy of science, the ‘synthetic a priori’. It amounts to saying that there are propositions which we must accept not because they are logical necessities, nor because they are observably true in the world, but because they are presuppositions which must be made if we are to have a rational discourse of a certain sort. Thus we must assume that causation exists if we are to have a science and we must assume that universal rules exist if we, as rational beings, are to have moral arguments. This is the ‘categorical imperative’ which requires that we act only on precepts which we can will as universal laws. The most general precept which follows from this is that we should treat other people as ends, nor merely as means. Duty, derived from the categorical imperative, is a ‘sublime and mighty name’ for Kant and goodness is the performance of duty because it is duty. (This view was satirized by the poet Friedrich Schiller as a doctrine which made it impossible for a sympathetic person to be good since such a person derived pleasure from the well-being of his companions.) In
The Philosophy of Law
Kant took his view of duty to its ultimate conclusion by imagining a social contract in reverse, in which everybody decided to end society and to enter a state of nature. The dissolution must not be carried out, says Kant , until all existing criminals have completed their punishments. Such a view would, of course, make no sense within consequentialist assumptions because in their terms the purpose of law and punishment is to achieve order so as to maximize well-being in society. If society is to end, then punishment can serve no purpose.
Kant's most specifically political writings applied the universalism of his theories of ethics and law. In
Perpetual Peace
, published in 1795, he argued for a ‘League of Nations’ to enforce the natural, rationally derivable and (therefore) international law, envisaging a decline in the power of individual states as that of the universal authority came to be established.
Many modern thinkers can be described as ‘neo-Kantian’ in so far as they attempt to derive the existence of universally valid moral precepts which should be obeyed regardless of the consequences from some essential feature of the human condition.
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(1854–1938)
Chief theorist of the German Social Democratic Party before 1914. Co-author with
Bernstein
of the Erfurt Programme (1891) which adopted
Marxism
as the official party ideology. Known as ‘the Pope’ of socialism he was the chief interpreter of Marx after the death of Engels. His most innovative work was on
imperialism
. He argued that the contradiction between increased production and underconsumption led to colonial expansion, competition, and war between the industrialized powers (although he later conceived of an ‘ultraimperialism’ which would divide the world into spheres of influence and so ensure peace). Kautsky rejected
revisionism
, insisting upon the inevitability of class conflict. His view of Marxism as a predictive science led him to undervalue revolutionary strategy—what the Dutch Marxist Pannekoek called ‘the theory of passive radicalism’. Thus in his debate with Luxemburg over the mass strike, he viewed it as a defensive position rather than a means of seizing power.
In
The Road to Power
(1909) he stressed the democratic nature of the
dictatorship of the proletariat
, interpreting it as meaning not class war but rather the majority rule of the
proletariat
under democratic conditions. His criticism of the October Revolution (which provoked Lenin to write
The Renegade Kautsky and the Proletarian Revolution
) centred upon the impossibility of creating socialism in an underdeveloped society. The Bolsheviks had established a dictatorship over the proletariat resulting in a bureaucratization of the state and the rise of a new ruling class.
GS