ABSTRACT
Why does anyone want to resort to politics and why does anyone put one kind of political order above another? Those who are both very earthy and very frank approve the one they believe is doing the most good for them. “The way truly to understand history is the way of Princess Mathilde [Bonaparte]. She would not forgive those who spoke ill of Napoleon because, as she explained, ‘without that man I should be selling oranges on the wharf in Marseilles.’ The good or the bad done to us, there is the grand criterion of history” (Bainville, 1941, p. 16; my translation). However, it takes more effrontery than most of us possess to be this frank and this earthy; and at all events Princess Mathilde’s “grand criterion” of political hedonism, by which I approve of the system that favors mainly me, and disapprove of the one that favors mainly others, has no hope of generating a semblance of basic agreement about the respective merits and consequences of political systems over and above the fairly low common denominator of democracy, namely the shared redistributive advantage of a winning over a losing coalition.
