Difference between classical and modern political theory
Answers
First, there is the political fact— for example, my neighbors and I agree that education includes not only children learning from home how to be responsible for themselves but also learning their ABCs and how to write well with their 123s and how to design software, so we decide that our community should arrange for public schooling so our children receive that education; and people in other parts of the community think children should not be educated in public schools but rather should receive everything they need at home. So, there’s a disagreement about education and schooling, and the community (the ‘polis’, in ancient Greek) hosts a discussion about itself and what it wants as community: (‘politics’).
Fairly quickly the question arises: is education a public good for a community to coordinate, or a private matter for each family to arrange? The details of the issue begin to be asked: what is ‘education’? What do we mean by ‘community’ (so as to not take it for granted)? What constitutes ‘public’ vs. ‘private’ goods and services? What is ‘school’ supposed to be and how is it best managed, given that not all children have the same immediate needs and learning styles, etc…and who knows what else could come up. This is, generally speaking, political philosophizing, and the point is never really about objective answers but rather about who is asking the questions (individuals, or a community of individuals?) and what works for them in the short, middle, and long run.
Eventually, an idea of community takes shape that is true to whomever is engaged in the discussion, an idea of what they think is the case for communities (‘poleis’) in general, and this ‘political idea’ guides the thinking about the community going forward— what norms are put in place, what financial obligations, if any, are set up, and either the building and staffing of schools OR the homeschooling of children, with all sorts of other arrangements— like, maybe the schools are staffed by parents on a rotating schedule, maybe the parents hire full-time professionals; maybe homeschooling is supported by the community by sending full-time professionals to each home to work with particular children, maybe homeschooling parents are completely on their own and there is no community requirement for educated children; etc. This is political philosophy.
At this point, those thinkers engaged in using the idea to judge the value of this or that political arrangement continue circling and working the issues, contemplating how the political discussion turns and turns again, cyclically. The ancient Greeks even coined a term for this— ‘anacyclosis’. Plato deals with it to some extent in his dialogues “Statesman” and “Laws,” Aristotle mentions it in his “Politics,” and Polybius applies it to his analysis of the Roman republic in his “Histories,” and it comes up again in the writings of Julius Caesar and especially in Marcus Tullius Cicero’s “On the Government” and “On the Laws.” So, this way of doing political philosophy observes the workings of ‘anacyclosis’, and speculates about how to prolong development of a community and how to stave off the inevitable decay— it has a practical orientation, always asking WHICH IS THE BEST POLITICAL ORDER, and with political philosophers “[working] out written codes, chasing as fast as they can the fading vision of the true constitution” (in the words of Plato’s dialogue ‘Statesman’). In support of this tradition, many thinkers founded ‘schools’, beginning with Isocrates’s oratorical school, Plato’s philosophical ‘Academy’, and Aristotle’s ‘Lyceum’, and many more of various orientations (Stoic, Epicurean, Sceptic, and Neo-Platonist), which lasted for 700+ years, and which iterated into Christian scholasticism into the period of the European Renaissance and Reformation.
~classical liberalis~
Classical liberalism was the political philosophy of the Founding Fathers. It permeates the Constitution, the Federalist Papers and many other documents produced by the people who created the American system of government. Many emancipationists who opposed slavery were essentially classical liberals, as were the suffragettes, who fought for equal rights for women.
~political liberalism~
One of the difficulties in describing political ideas is that the people who hold them are invariably more varied and complex than the ideas themselves. Take Southern Democrats, for example. For most of the 20th century, right up through the 1960s and even into the 1970s, virtually every Democratic politician in the South was an advocate of segregation and Jim Crow laws. This group included Arkansas Sen. J. William Fulbright (a favorite of the liberal media because of his opposition to the Vietnam War); North Carolina’s Sen. Sam Ervin (an ardent constitutionalist and another liberal favorite because his Senate hearings led to the downfall of Richard Nixon); Lyndon Johnson (who as president changed his public views on race and pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964); such economic populists as Louisiana Gov. Huey Long and Alabama Gov. George Wallace; West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd, one-time Ku Klux Klan member and king of pork on Capitol Hill; and small government types, such as South Carolina’s Sen. Strom Thurmond (who changed his views on race, began hiring black staffers and then switched parties and became a Republican).