Conceptualizing Politics

ETHICS, PHILOSOPHY 
AND POLITICS

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188  Ethics and politics
or principles/rules of acting) or the very different problem of ‘how to achieve the 
(moral) good’. Normative theories can be deontological, assessing the rightness of 
acts from the point of view of principles allowing or prohibiting certain acts, such: 
as killing or lying; but they can also look at our acts from the point of view of their 
consequences (consequentialist theories). Kant’s morality is the paramount case of 
deontologism,
2
 the categorical imperative in its two formulas, its typical expres-
sions. He who speaks of ethics (or morality) and politics with little philosophical 
differentiation usually intends ‘deontological ethics and politics’ – while a decent 
pluralism would require the examination of how other types of morality relate 
to politics. With utilitarianism, the main version of consequentialism and, since 
Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), a major current in the Anglo-Saxon cultures, the 
main political difficulty is the impossibility to lay a foundation for human rights, 
sidelined by the principle that right is what best contributes to the happiness or 
wellbeing (philosophical welfarism) of the greatest number of peoples. A very dif-
ferent relationship to politics can be found in the theories of the good, also called 
teleological because they assess our contribution to the good according to the 
overall balance of our moral life as seen from its end, the achievement, to put it 
with Aristotle, of the ‘good life’. Moral teleologism tends to converge with political 
communitarianism, but this is not a stringent link.
Back to the relationship of politics to morality in its, as it were, default version: 
deontologism. We have already reported Kant’s indication to re-establish harmony 
between the two by bringing politics back again under the auspices of morality or 
rather of the law as descending from Reason’s moral commands. This is a monistic 
solution that recognises only one principle as justified, but another monism with 
a different content can lead to the opposite conclusion: in Hobbes’s conception of 
human coexistence within the state, there is no room left for an individual morality 
that may differ from or contradict the laws established by the recta ratio/right reason 
that underpins the Leviathanic commonwealth, the only source of protection for 
individuals.
Hobbes represents one leading position in the wide field of political realism. In 
philosophical language, heeding a very ‘realistic’ view on all things politic – as it 
sounds in ordinary language – is only a marginal component of realism in the 
political sense. Essential to this are two tenets:
1.  Politics can be better understood and better managed if taken according to 
the laws and patterns its real course offers to our observation. Consequently, 
politics cannot be ruled by morality in either of its versions.
2.  Crucial to any politics, domestic as well as foreign, is humankind’s search for 
security and protection, which makes its main provider, the state, the cen-
tral actor. In international politics, which is played between separate units, the 
states, power relationships matter first, and the forefather of realism, Thucy-
dides, explains the outbreak of the Peloponnesian war with the fear caused 
to the Spartans by the increase in Athens’ territorial and military strength 
(Thucydides BCE 404, Book I, XXIII, 6).
3

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Ethics, philosophy and politics  189
Within these coordinates variations have come up. The most significant is Machi-
avelli’s understanding of politics as being guided by principles no less imperative 
than morality is; but principles of different nature and enshrined in the Roman 
motto salus reipublicae suprema lex esto/the safety of the commonwealth has to be the 
ultimate law. The good of the commonwealth or country, its liberty and greatness, 
is seen as a universal good, no less so than the goods upheld by individual moral-
ity, and likewise worthy of personal sacrifice including that of one’s own life – as 
witnessed by many examples from antiquity, first of all Pericles’s obituary for the 
fallen Athenian soldiers quoted in Chapter 5.
4
 It would indeed be good, Machi-
avelli (1532) concedes, if a prince were to keep faith under any circumstance; but 
since men are evil (an anthropological statement) and do not act in this way, he 
who does not break faith would go down whenever keeping it would give him a 
disadvantage, yes, lead him to ruin – the ‘sexist’ language is in the original, though 
the former Florentine Secretary of state considers ruling princesses as well (Machi-
avelli 1532, Chapter 18).
This position confers politics a universalistic normative status not inferior to that 
of (deontological) morality and marks the birth of politics as an autonomous sphere 
of action – and, moreover, of political philosophy as not being a branch of moral 
thought. This ‘Machiavellian moment’ became crucial for the ‘republican’ current in 
modern political thought.
5
 But the legitimacy deficit of nation states after 1945, the 
universalism of worldwide human rights and the emergence of global challenges 
have largely modified the terrain on which classical republicanism flourished, so 
that the relaunch of it, recently attempted, seems to underrate the characteristics of 
our post-modern (in the sense defined in Chapter 7) time.
Another strain, among the attempts at recombining politics and morality, was 
the tradition of the ‘reason of state’, which took its name from the Jesuit Giovanni 
Botero’s work (Botero 1589). It pledges, dissimilarly and in opposition to Machi-
avelli, to respect the canons of morality, but with the exceptions made necessary in 
order to preserve the state. This tradition has long since extinguished in philosophy, 
but not at all in real politics, given the fact that, especially but not only in dictator-
ships, rulers have resorted to that same ‘reason’ in order to justify the brutal use of 
force. The issue of lying and deception in politics seems to belong to the question 
of what is morally allowed or prohibited, but does rather refer to a political norma-
tivity concerned with the health of the polity rather than to individual morality.
6
Still on the side that disentangles politics from morals, but on a higher philo-
sophical level, we find Hegel’s condemnation of the formal and abstract character 
of Kantian morality along with his celebration of the state as the dimension in 
which the substantial destiny of peoples and individuals is shaped in epochs whose 
succession represents the ascent of the Spirit (Geist) to full self-awareness and self-
realisation (Hegel 1821). On this path, abstract morality of the Kantian type remains 
on a stair lower than the full Sittlichkeit (concrete ethical sphere) of the state in which 
the life of the individuals is comprised. Hegel has been much criticized, first by Marx 
because of his identification with Prussia’s oppressive and bureaucratic state, later by 
Karl Popper, who saw in him a precursor of totalitarianism and an enemy of the 

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190  Ethics and politics
‘open society’ along with Plato and Marx (Popper 1945). Nonetheless, his philoso-
phy of individual, state and society – as it emerges also from the Phenomenology of 
Spirit (1807), and once it is read disregarding its systematic ambition – remains a rich, 
indispensable contribution to the understanding of modern politics; though not in 
the sense still present today among some German philosophers, who still believe – as 
it was the case 200 or 100 years ago – the fundamental choice political philosophy is 
confronted with in our days to be the same choice between Kant and Hegel.