ABSTRACT
Political thought begins with the Greeks. Its origin is connected with the calm and clear rationalism of the Greek mind. Instead of projecting themselves into the sphere of religion, like the peoples of India and Judea, instead of taking this world on trust and seeing it by faith, the Greeks took their stand in the realm of thought, and daring to wonder 1 about things visible, they attempted to conceive of the universe in the light of reason. It is a natural instinct to acquiesce in the order of things presented in experience. It is easy to accept the physical world, and the world of man’s institutions, as alike inevitable, and to raise no question about the significance either of man’s relations to nature, or of the relations of the individual to institutions like the family or State. If any such questionings arise, they can readily be stifled by the answer out of the whirlwind: ‘Shall he that cavilleth contend with the Almighty?’ But such acquiescence, natural in all ages to the religious mind, was impossible to the Greek. He had not the faith which could content itself with the simple reference of all things to God. Whatever the reason (whether it was due to the disturbing effect of early migrations, 2 or to a civic organization in many commonwealths, preventing the rise of one universal and majestic Church), the fact is indisputable, that the religious motive appealed little to the Greek. Nor had he, therefore, that sense of the littleness of human thought and endeavour, which might induce him to regard himself as a speck in the infinite. On the contrary, he attempted to conceive of himself as something apart and self-subsistent: he ventured to detach himself from his experience, and to set himself over against it in judgement. It may seem a little thing, and yet it is much, that this abstraction and antithesis should be made. It is the precedent condition of all political thought, that the antithesis of the individual and the State should be realized, as it is the task of every political thinker to reconcile and abolish the antithesis whose force he has realized. Without the realization of this antithesis none of the problems of political science – problems touching the basis of the State’s authority and the source of its laws – can have any meaning: without its reconciliation none of these problems can have their solution. It is in this way that the Sophists, who seized and enforced the antithesis, are the precursors and conditions of Plato and Aristotle, by whom it is abolished.
