Conceptualizing Politics

52  How politics works
3.   Historic models of political order
We have so far described the key elements and functions of political order as a 
somehow timeless foundation of the world’s political societies throughout their 
history. This is the task of political philosophy (in its reconstructive version, see 
Excursus 1), which cannot include the history of the particular concrete and insti-
tutional configuration taken in any given epoch by the order we have described 
in its essential features; this is lamentable, because a comparison between our core 
model and its concrete versions would be very instructive. Instead, deflecting for 
a moment from this book’s abstinence from the history of thought, we will now 
briefly examine a number of relevant political order models that have been so far 
devised by Western philosophers throughout the centuries; I regret not being able 
to nor having the space to extend this review to non-Western authors, among 
whom 孔子/Kongzi or Confucius would be the main example. A warning must be 
issued before we start: we should not mistake the models conceived by philosophers 
for the real state of affairs; we should not replace the history of institutions (on 
which something will be said in Chapter 4) with the history of political philosophy. 
There are obviously intertwinements between the two, but the philosophical mod-
els do rarely correspond to the real structures and are often a protest against them, 
nor have the models necessarily influenced real developments.
The Aristotelian and the contractarian model have dominated Western thought, 
but other positions are also important.
The Aristotelian model, which was, until Thomas Hobbes, sovereign in the 
Western tradition, regards the polity or polis as a natural development of the human 
being’s tendency to associate with others (first as a couple, then within the fam-
ily and the village); the association is organic, in the sense that the two parties, for 
example slave and master, need each other and are advantageous to each other on 
the basis of their natural dispositions. The assimilation of social forms to the living 
organism is present also in the idea that the whole, in particular the polis or political 
community, is superior to its parts, because it is self-sufficient. Finally, Aristotelians 
conceive of social forms in a teleological manner, defining them according to the 
good they are aspiring to – in the case of the polis, the ability to make good life 
possible (Politics, Book 1, 1252–53).
This view is turned upside down in Hobbes’s philosophy. Human beings are, 
by nature, separated and hostile to each other; bellum omnium contra omnes/the war 
of all against all, dominates the state of nature. To save themselves from reciprocal 
destruction, they need to renounce their full lawless liberty and unite by contract 
under a common and superior power, the sovereign, also known as the good bibli-
cal monster Leviathan. Political order arises from conflict rather than being a feature 
of nature. Individuals exist without the state, which is an artificial construct rather 
than a natural creation and is not designed to achieve superior moral good, but only 
the survival and coexistence of the individuals. Full obedience is the price citizens, 
or rather subjects, have to pay to receive from the sovereign’s absolute power pro-
tection against domestic and external threats. Hobbes’s absolutist view on power 

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Order, institutions, models  53
extended it to the cultural realm: against heresy and rebellion, obedience includes 
that everybody acknowledges the basic Christian truth ‘Jesus is the Christ’.
4
Locke, Rousseau and Kant all shared the contractarian foundation of the state, 
but only John Locke (1632–1704) formulated a major correction in as much as he 
set limits to the sovereign’s absolute power over individuals: government cannot 
infringe upon man’s natural rights to life, liberty (including liberty of conscience) 
and property. Locke also introduced the doctrine of separation of powers that was 
developed shortly after him by Montesquieu ( Jean-Louis de Secondat, Baron de 
Montesquieu, 1689–1755). Locke is traditionally seen as the founder of liberalism
5
 
(the individual’s rights are to be protected against state power), both, in particular 
Montesquieu, as the great theorists of constitutionalism (sovereign power is subject 
to a fundamental – not necessarily written – law defining its limits and architec-
ture). Both authors were important for Alexander Hamilton (1755–1804), James 
Madison and John Jay (1745–1829), the authors of The Federalist, the text that most 
influenced the development of the newly founded United States of America from 
confederation to federation. Between the eighteenth and ninenteenth century the 
people, or demos, took the centre of the system of government under constitu-
tional and liberal premises, which after shifting to universal suffrage fulfilled all the 
requirements of what we call democracy, or the democratic order model, – with one 
exception, which was brought into the agenda late in the ninenteenth century and 
implemented still later in the twentieth: the state’s intervention aimed at making 
effective participation in political and social life possible to everybody by giving 
him or her the basic elements of education, health care and age protection. This 
addition of social rights to the previous democratic model, which is now at least seen 
in Europe and Canada, but more limitedly in the USA, as a component of it, had 
its theoretical proponents in the German social-democracy (starting with Eduard 
Bernstein, 1850–1932), the Fabian Society and later the liberal statesman Lord Wil-
liam Beveridge (1879–1963) in the UK, the theoretician of ‘liberal socialism’ Carlo 
Rosselli (1899–1937, murdered by the Fascists) in Italy; while it was first realised 
by President F. D. Roosevelt in the USA in the Thirties and the Labour govern-
ment (1945–51) in Britain.
6
 In a word, constitutional rules, individual liberties and 
social rights are the three major features of the democratic model, as politically 
institutionalised remedies to the negative side effects of capitalism (more on this in