ABSTRACT

The classical world believed that man perfects himself in community, in the Greek polis, the Roman city, the medieval civitas. A life of virtue can be lived with others in a just city. Ethical life can be developed only politically, in a polis. A city-state is just if it provides its citizens with the necessary conditions for a life of virtue. No distinction exists between the duties and entitlements of the citizen and the good of the city. For the ethics of virtue, to act morally is to perform one’s duties. But all this changed radically in modernity. The individual, freed from tradition, history and community, became the foundation and principle of social and political organisation. The natural hierarchy of the classical world was replaced by a mobile and dynamic social order in which, in Marx’s felicitous phrase, ‘everything that is solid melts in the air’. Duty was replaced by individual rights, the good was separated from morality. While the classical world defined first what is good and derived moral and legal duties from this definition, for the moderns the good follows the right. To be in the right means to act freely, obeying the – moral, state – law in pursuit of self-interest.