Idealism Essy ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Idealism usually refers to views holding that reality is constituted by mind, spirit, or some other nonmaterial entities. It is opposed to materialism, holding that reality, including consciousness, is reducible to matter. Political idealism covers political views based on a nonmaterialist ontology, but the term is also used more loosely to describe any conception committed to shape the world through demanding moral ideals and a strict sense of duty. When used in the latter sense it is contrasted with realism, or Realpolitik.

Plato’s political theory is idealist in both senses. It holds that moral guidance for political organization and decision making must be sought at a distance from the imperfect world of appearances known to our senses. For Plato, the visible world, with its finite, constantly changing, and imperfect objects, is like shadows of the true, higher, and eternal nature of things.

Philosophy can help us to gain precision about the ideal, objective nature of justice and thus to identify a universal standard against which political units could be assessed. One of the central features of Plato’s elitist ideal was that there is a natural, hierarchical division of labor. Justice is realized when each class sticks to the tasks and virtues for which its members are naturally fitted. In Plato’s The Republic, the ideal city is ruled by philosopher-kings, motivated by love of truth and the good of the ruled. An important implication of the philosopher’s privileged position in relation to knowledge was that democracy, which Plato associated with rhetoric and ignorance rather than reason and truth, had to be rejected.

St. Augustine’s political and idealist views renewed many Platonic themes in Christian form. However, in the political theology of Augustine it was clear that the ideal, eternal realm of beauty and perfection belonged to heaven and could not be approximated in our worldly political arrangements. Augustine’s political theory is based on the distinction between the earthly city and the city of God. In our worldly existence, the members of both cities live together, but only members of the latter are predestined for salvation and will enjoy eternal happiness in heaven. But the fact that perfection is not to be found in this world, with its inescapable evils, does not mean that we should be indifferent about competing political arrangements. Members of the city of God should cooperate with others to support political authority and tame earthly desires for power and glory to secure people’s common interest.

Another idealist tradition that builds on Plato’s connection between justice and perfection is utopianism. Named after Thomas More’s fictional island Utopia, utopian renaissance authors such as More, and followers such as Campanella, imagined perfect, rationally planned societies in the spirit of Plato’s republic in a concrete way. More’s Utopia is an egalitarian society without poverty, where property is owned in common and inhabitants share a strong sense of duty. Inspired by journeys to civilizations previously unknown to Europeans, More’s work gave birth to a new genre of social criticism, often taking the form of interviews with travelers to or inhabitants of distant societies different from our own. Idealism in this utopian sense is often used negatively to describe naïve worldviews with overly optimistic assumptions about the possibility to improve the world through moral ideals alone.

The later British and German idealist traditions in political theory, particularly strong in the nineteenth century, were idealist in a very different sense and more open to conservative conclusions. G.W. F. Hegel in Germany, and the branch of British idealism he inspired with thinkers such as Bosanquet, Bradley, and Green, shared a belief in the spiritual unity of our existence. The idea that there is one single, all-encompassing, and coherent world often led to the conclusion that seemingly inconsistent or pointless events may reflect a deeper form of rationality and purpose. Defending the interconnectedness of everything and the fundamentally social nature of humans, idealists in this context attacked the atomism of liberal contemporaries and placed the role of the state, community, and spirituality at the center of political thought.

Bibliography:

The City of God against the Pagans. Translated by R.W. Dyson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Boucher, David, and Andrew Vincent. British Idealism and Political Theory. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2000.
Hegel, G.W. F. Philosophy of Right. Translated by T. M. Knox. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1967. First published 1921.
More,Thomas. Utopia. Translated by Paul Turner. London: Penguin, 2003. First published 1516.
The Republic. Translated by Robin Waterfield. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1998. First published 360 BCE.

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