I recently rediscovered CiteULike, a free web service for bibliography management. I know I had used it in the past (I still had an account, though I had not logged in for four years) but stopped using it in favor of Zotero and Endnote (because of the latter's integration with Word). But then I stopped using Zotero, partly because it tied me to Firefox (I now use Chrome almost exclusively, and love it), and partly because it was often slow and occasionally crashed (I think it's better now - it even has word processor integration! - but I had one too many bad experiences).
Anyway, there's no software to install with CiteULike and no browser dependencies - it's just a bookmarklet - and you can easily transfer your data to and from Endnote and BibTex. (Incidentally, LaTex is great for Greek-heavy writing on Ancient philosophy with one of the Betacode packages. It's too bad most of the places I submit my work to tend to demand Word files, and that converting a file from LaTex to Word can be such a pain). But it also occurs to me that something like CiteULike would be great for teaching as well.
I typically maintain a large bibliography of recommended works and suggested readings for the essays in my courses, and it's a bit of a pain to add new entries to it and make sure the new entries appear in all the appropriate places and are appropriately organized and formatted (partly this is just the fault of the Blackboard course management system we use at Victoria - which, despite some good points, is still a pretty cumbersome piece of software). So, for example, for my POLS 209 course on Dictatorships and Revolutions I might have some recommended readings on Venezuelan politics (which I suggest the students consult before writing an essay on the relevant topic in the course), or a set of readings on the comparative economic performance of dictatorships vs democracies (for students who are writing on the topic, or might want to learn more). But every time I need to add a new reading, I have to change things in four or five different places, and manually add links and other things. Moreover, though students can add items to the general bibliography (it's maintained in an internal wiki - though the Blackboard wiki tool is terrible) they may add things formatted in odd ways, or in the wrong categories, and they cannot easily download the sources to a bibliography manager.
But with CiteULike I can maintain the entire course bibliography in one place, and then provide links to specific topics using tags (you can even subscribe to the whole thing or to specific tags using RSS, if you want to keep up with the latest additions). Readings on Venezuelan politics? Here! Or I might tag some readings as recommended for the first week of the course, or some particular lecture, and post the link in the course outline and in the appropriate place in Blackboard. And students can of course download the citations to the citation manager of their choice, click on the handy links to read the actual articles (the point of the exercise, after all), or simply copy and paste the plain text of the citations they used to their bibliographies when they finish writing their essays (too much student time is, I think, spent worrying on minor details of bibliography formatting rather than actually reading the sources).
Moreover, students who create an account with CiteULike can easily contribute readings to the common course pool, perhaps with their own review notes (I can always tag them appropriately); they just have to join the class group. (I already incentivize this sort of thing in the course outline - adding to the course bibliography in appropriate ways, or contributing to the course blog/discussion board/wiki, are all things that help students get points in my courses). In fact, that's the part I'm most interested in: I keep trying to foster collaborative research in the classroom, and if students are easily able to contribute sources to the common pool of readings, they can basically help each other in constructive ways. And they can help me as well - I have found some very interesting sources for the course (even whole new literatures) in essays that students have written in the past - sources which sometimes end up in the course bibliography (you really do learn lots from your students).
I am actually considering requiring my honours students (in POLS 401, a course on contemporary political thought) to actually create a CiteULike account and contribute readings to it periodically, perhaps with some review notes. (I tried something like this once with a wiki, but the wiki is too cumbersome for this). To be sure, there's some upfront investment on their part (I probably will have to demonstrate how to use the software in the first few classes, or write a detailed handout with an explanation and pictures) but once they learn, I imagine it could be helpful to them (both in this and other courses).
Has anybody else done similar things? What potential problems am I missing?
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Sunday Extremophile Blogging: The ARMAN and Thermoplasmatales archaea
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| ARMAN archaea, orange circles, with an arcaheon of the thermoplasma order, below them. The small orange particles are viruses. Nobody knows what the needle-like things do. Credit: Luis R. Cronolli/LBNL via ScienceDaily |
I find these weird niches - far removed from human possibility - really fascinating. Are there any limits to the environments in which life can thrive, ultimately? ARMAN lives in an environment extremely hostile to most forms of life - yet even there, it is not alone (in fact, it is possible that life started in similar environments, so perhaps ARMAN's lineage is very old). Endless forms most beautiful indeed.
Thursday, August 19, 2010
A Puzzle about Character and Democracy
Elections in modern democracies function as mechanisms of both selection and discipline. With a multiplicity of candidates competing for office, elections should in theory enable voters to select the person who they believe would do the best job of governing them (e.g., the most virtuous candidate), and to discipline incumbent candidates who have failed to do what they want by not re-electing them (assuming re-election is possible), instead electing someone else. Ideally, these two functions of elections would complement each other: voters would select candidates whose characters they trust and whose promises can be determined to be credible, and then credibly discipline them if they do not perform appropriately.
We have some evidence that elections as "disciplinary" institutions really do produce better performance from political leaders, at least in purely economic terms: politicians who are in danger of losing their jobs unless they deliver results that are satisfactory to a large number of people tend to deliver policies that are at the very least not very bad (see, for starters, here and here, though the literature, both theoretical and empirical, is vast, and there are some circumstances under which elections appear to worsen economic performance). Indeed, the literature on the comparative economic performance of democracies and non-democracies typically shows that democracies are at least no worse, and often better, than non-democracies in this respect, contrary to some popular beliefs (as Dani Rodrik notes). I like to show the students in my dictatorships and revolutions class this density plot to illustrate the point:
(Solid line for democratic country-years, dotted line for non-democratic country-years. The data on democracy is taken from the Polity project; we take democratic years for a given country as those where the country scores more than zero in the Polity autocracy+democracy measure, which is only barely democratic, given the coding criteria, but indicates real electoral competition. The data on growth come from the Penn World Tables. The period covered is 1950-2007, with data for most countries with population over 500,000 people. Basically, the plot says that "autocratic" countries with less political competition tended to have a smaller median growth rate but a higher variance in that rate over this period – more miraculous years but also more disastrous years).
Yet politicians as a class are not typically held in high esteem: most people in democracies do not seem to think that politicians are people of good moral character when considered as a group. The complaint about the need for "better" leaders, and the disappointment over actual leaders, seem nearly universal (and go back a long way, to Plato: typically, the praise of the political class always applies to the past, to the ancestors who were better, as in Cicero). I admit, the evidence I have for this proposition is fragmentary, but consider for example this Gallup poll question on how US residents evaluate the "honesty and ethical standards" of different professions:
Though the low ranking of senators and members of congress in this figure is presumably driven in part by bad economic news in late 2009, I do not think it is very atypical. Other polling data also tends to show voters in the US being much more dissatisfied with Congress as a whole than with their own congressman or senator (who tend to be re-elected at an astonishing rate), which suggests that they have a low opinion of the political class as a whole even though they may have a good opinion of their own representative. And the pattern in other countries seems similar: in Italy, politicians are routinely referred to as a "caste" who enjoy immense and undeserved privileges, even as some of them (including, inexplicably, Berlusconi) remain relatively popular; complaints about the quality of the political class in India (where many members of the Lok Sabha have criminal convictions) are extremely common; and distrust of politicians in Venezuela (my native country) seems to be quite general, even if some politicians (like Chavez) are very popular. (I should look up NZ data, but I'm too lazy for that right now). I am sure most people have heard or expressed views about how most politicians are "crooks," and not only the politicians of the "other side" (whatever side one does not support) but also those of one's own side – how they are spineless, too concerned with their electoral fortunes and their image, hypocrites, quarrel too much, etc. When was the last time you heard people praise the overall character of politicians?
Yet this is somewhat puzzling. Voters presumably prefer higher-quality characters among politicians: so why are "virtuous" politicians not being elected, or, if they are being elected, why is this fact not being recognized among the electorate? (Assuming, of course, that the evidence of voter discontent with the political class noted above holds more generally, and reflects a more or less accurate judgment of the character of politicians; it could also be that voters are simply mistaken about the character of politicians as a whole, though that fact would itself demand explanation). Moreover, it's not as if politicians are a low-status group of people; buildings are named after them, resources are expended on ceremonies for them, we address them with honorific titles, and so on, but this makes the disparagement of their character as a class even more puzzling, since their high status presumably biases many judgments of their character upwards rather than downwards, especially for those politicians who are commonly thought to be successful. Politicians are both the occasional subjects of hagiographies and yet are held to have bad moral character when considered as a group.
More precisely stated, the puzzle is that given an implicit preference for high-quality politicians (in terms of character), and a competitive electoral system, voters do not elect more politicians they think actually have high-quality characters, i.e., "virtuous" politicians (for some plausible conception of virtue). What could account for this?
I suspect that there are two basic answers to this question, though they are not necessarily incompatible. The first, and most obvious, blames supply problems. Perhaps there are extremely few virtuous politicians out there, and they do not want to rule (though they occasionally rule; hence the hagiographies). This is the Socratic argument in the Republic; hence philosopher kings must be forced to rule, since they would not naturally want to. Stated differently, perhaps the rewards of political office are more appealing to the non-virtuous than to the virtuous (given some plausible definition of virtue), leading to a pool of candidates heavily weighted towards the non-virtuous (though wouldn't one expect that the virtuous, who would want to help their fellows, would also disproportionately run for office?). Or perhaps the typical political environment of modern democracies disadvantages the virtuous vis à vis the non-virtuous. This is the Machiavellian position, suitably adapted to the 21st century: if those campaigners capable of using virtuous and vicious tactics (e.g., dishonest lying, duplicity, etc.) are more successful than those who are only capable of using virtuous tactics, then the former will tend to be elected more often than the latter. This answer leads to a different sort of position, however, which attributes the problem less to the actual supply of virtuous politicians than to the epistemic constraints on voters who must distinguish between virtuous and non-virtuous politicians.
From this point of view, there are also a number of possibilities. A Platonic answer is that voters cannot distinguish between virtuous and non-virtuous politicians because they do not know what virtue is; they elect the non-virtuous while believing that they are electing the virtuous, and the non-virtuous do not even have to deceive them about this fact very much. But this answer does not work for us right now, since it implies that voters would be satisfied with the character of politicians they actually elect, but they are not.
Perhaps the problem then is that the epistemic demands of "selection" are higher than those of "discipline." In order to discipline a politician, the voter only needs to know his own situation: if he or she thinks that his life is going well, he can vote for the incumbent, whereas if he does not think so, he can vote against the incumbent (contrast with ancient methods of discipline, which, given term limits, were always quasi-judicial and placed more stringent epistemic demands on citizens). Even if the voter substantially misallocates responsibility for his or her material situation to the political class (perhaps the country's economic performance is substantially affected by factors not under the control of the political class), the incentives created by this sort of behaviour might still induce politicians to, on average and over the long run, provide relatively good policy (or at least operate as a kind of selection filter, so that even if politicians provide policy more or less at random, only relatively successful policies get rewarded).
By contrast, in order to select a politician properly, the voter needs a lot of information that is not readily available, or that is easily subject to falsification or concealment (by the candidates themselves, among others), especially in large-scale societies where voters cannot know their leaders on a personal basis. (Thus Aristotle's distrust of large political communities, where he thinks selection institutions cannot work well because citizens can never really know each other's characters).
More specifically, if the pool of candidates includes more non-virtuous than virtuous candidates, but voters cannot easily distinguish between them, they will tend to select the non-virtuous at a higher rate. Since, moreover, when the voter decides whether to punish the incumbent he or she has to also decide whether to take a risk on the challenger's character being bad, the voter might decide to live with leaders with bad characters but who deliver acceptable performance rather than take a chance on untested candidates who may both have bad character and deliver bad performance, knowing that his or her ability to distinguish between good and bad characters is not very good. From this point of view, disciplinary concerns about performance would normally dominate selection concerns about character, and voters would learn to live with rulers whose character they despise (at least in the aggregate), even though they care about both character and performance. (I think there arguments along these lines, though more technically expressed, in Tim Besley's Principled Agents. I really need to read that book and learn some game theory). However, this seems not to account for the phenomenon "congress is bad but my congressman is great" that we sometimes see in the US.
Two other possibilities that seem to me to be less plausible are the following. One is that character is simply too malleable. So voters elect people of good character, but such people quickly become bad upon gaining political power. Voters are thus constantly disappointed: they think they are selecting the best leaders (and in fact, they do) but these people easily become corrupted. I suspect, however, that we should see more incumbent turnover under this hypothesis than we actually see: people would learn that politicians quickly become corrupt, and hence that the best way of dealing with the problem is to turn the out of office quickly, or to impose term limits (as a kind of paternalistic policy, preventing themselves from being tempted to re-elect corrupt people simply because they provide good performance), though perhaps voters evaluate a tradeoff between competence and corruption potential and decide that good performance is worth a certain amount of corruption, as in the previous argument (except that voters in this model are always able to distinguish the corrupt from the virtuous: the difference is that the virtuous turn corrupt at a high rate).
Finally, I suppose that the puzzle could simply be attributed to partisan biases. On this view, disagreements about policy would be easily translated into attributions of character: only people with bad characters could support the policies the opposition supports! Since even in two party systems around half the population supports positions one does not support, and elects politicians accordingly, this might result in the feeling that most of the political class is worthless. But this theory would seem to imply that politicians would be more despised in multiparty systems than in two-party systems; though I have no data on this question, I suspect this is not the case. Moreover, people often despise politicians even from their own party; they like their policies, but dislike their characters.
Other possibilities? Perhaps the disparagement of the characters of politicians results from human ambivalence about domination? What other ideas are there? (Or perhaps this is a pseudo-puzzle?)
We have some evidence that elections as "disciplinary" institutions really do produce better performance from political leaders, at least in purely economic terms: politicians who are in danger of losing their jobs unless they deliver results that are satisfactory to a large number of people tend to deliver policies that are at the very least not very bad (see, for starters, here and here, though the literature, both theoretical and empirical, is vast, and there are some circumstances under which elections appear to worsen economic performance). Indeed, the literature on the comparative economic performance of democracies and non-democracies typically shows that democracies are at least no worse, and often better, than non-democracies in this respect, contrary to some popular beliefs (as Dani Rodrik notes). I like to show the students in my dictatorships and revolutions class this density plot to illustrate the point:
Yet politicians as a class are not typically held in high esteem: most people in democracies do not seem to think that politicians are people of good moral character when considered as a group. The complaint about the need for "better" leaders, and the disappointment over actual leaders, seem nearly universal (and go back a long way, to Plato: typically, the praise of the political class always applies to the past, to the ancestors who were better, as in Cicero). I admit, the evidence I have for this proposition is fragmentary, but consider for example this Gallup poll question on how US residents evaluate the "honesty and ethical standards" of different professions:
Though the low ranking of senators and members of congress in this figure is presumably driven in part by bad economic news in late 2009, I do not think it is very atypical. Other polling data also tends to show voters in the US being much more dissatisfied with Congress as a whole than with their own congressman or senator (who tend to be re-elected at an astonishing rate), which suggests that they have a low opinion of the political class as a whole even though they may have a good opinion of their own representative. And the pattern in other countries seems similar: in Italy, politicians are routinely referred to as a "caste" who enjoy immense and undeserved privileges, even as some of them (including, inexplicably, Berlusconi) remain relatively popular; complaints about the quality of the political class in India (where many members of the Lok Sabha have criminal convictions) are extremely common; and distrust of politicians in Venezuela (my native country) seems to be quite general, even if some politicians (like Chavez) are very popular. (I should look up NZ data, but I'm too lazy for that right now). I am sure most people have heard or expressed views about how most politicians are "crooks," and not only the politicians of the "other side" (whatever side one does not support) but also those of one's own side – how they are spineless, too concerned with their electoral fortunes and their image, hypocrites, quarrel too much, etc. When was the last time you heard people praise the overall character of politicians?
Yet this is somewhat puzzling. Voters presumably prefer higher-quality characters among politicians: so why are "virtuous" politicians not being elected, or, if they are being elected, why is this fact not being recognized among the electorate? (Assuming, of course, that the evidence of voter discontent with the political class noted above holds more generally, and reflects a more or less accurate judgment of the character of politicians; it could also be that voters are simply mistaken about the character of politicians as a whole, though that fact would itself demand explanation). Moreover, it's not as if politicians are a low-status group of people; buildings are named after them, resources are expended on ceremonies for them, we address them with honorific titles, and so on, but this makes the disparagement of their character as a class even more puzzling, since their high status presumably biases many judgments of their character upwards rather than downwards, especially for those politicians who are commonly thought to be successful. Politicians are both the occasional subjects of hagiographies and yet are held to have bad moral character when considered as a group.
More precisely stated, the puzzle is that given an implicit preference for high-quality politicians (in terms of character), and a competitive electoral system, voters do not elect more politicians they think actually have high-quality characters, i.e., "virtuous" politicians (for some plausible conception of virtue). What could account for this?
I suspect that there are two basic answers to this question, though they are not necessarily incompatible. The first, and most obvious, blames supply problems. Perhaps there are extremely few virtuous politicians out there, and they do not want to rule (though they occasionally rule; hence the hagiographies). This is the Socratic argument in the Republic; hence philosopher kings must be forced to rule, since they would not naturally want to. Stated differently, perhaps the rewards of political office are more appealing to the non-virtuous than to the virtuous (given some plausible definition of virtue), leading to a pool of candidates heavily weighted towards the non-virtuous (though wouldn't one expect that the virtuous, who would want to help their fellows, would also disproportionately run for office?). Or perhaps the typical political environment of modern democracies disadvantages the virtuous vis à vis the non-virtuous. This is the Machiavellian position, suitably adapted to the 21st century: if those campaigners capable of using virtuous and vicious tactics (e.g., dishonest lying, duplicity, etc.) are more successful than those who are only capable of using virtuous tactics, then the former will tend to be elected more often than the latter. This answer leads to a different sort of position, however, which attributes the problem less to the actual supply of virtuous politicians than to the epistemic constraints on voters who must distinguish between virtuous and non-virtuous politicians.
From this point of view, there are also a number of possibilities. A Platonic answer is that voters cannot distinguish between virtuous and non-virtuous politicians because they do not know what virtue is; they elect the non-virtuous while believing that they are electing the virtuous, and the non-virtuous do not even have to deceive them about this fact very much. But this answer does not work for us right now, since it implies that voters would be satisfied with the character of politicians they actually elect, but they are not.
Perhaps the problem then is that the epistemic demands of "selection" are higher than those of "discipline." In order to discipline a politician, the voter only needs to know his own situation: if he or she thinks that his life is going well, he can vote for the incumbent, whereas if he does not think so, he can vote against the incumbent (contrast with ancient methods of discipline, which, given term limits, were always quasi-judicial and placed more stringent epistemic demands on citizens). Even if the voter substantially misallocates responsibility for his or her material situation to the political class (perhaps the country's economic performance is substantially affected by factors not under the control of the political class), the incentives created by this sort of behaviour might still induce politicians to, on average and over the long run, provide relatively good policy (or at least operate as a kind of selection filter, so that even if politicians provide policy more or less at random, only relatively successful policies get rewarded).
By contrast, in order to select a politician properly, the voter needs a lot of information that is not readily available, or that is easily subject to falsification or concealment (by the candidates themselves, among others), especially in large-scale societies where voters cannot know their leaders on a personal basis. (Thus Aristotle's distrust of large political communities, where he thinks selection institutions cannot work well because citizens can never really know each other's characters).
More specifically, if the pool of candidates includes more non-virtuous than virtuous candidates, but voters cannot easily distinguish between them, they will tend to select the non-virtuous at a higher rate. Since, moreover, when the voter decides whether to punish the incumbent he or she has to also decide whether to take a risk on the challenger's character being bad, the voter might decide to live with leaders with bad characters but who deliver acceptable performance rather than take a chance on untested candidates who may both have bad character and deliver bad performance, knowing that his or her ability to distinguish between good and bad characters is not very good. From this point of view, disciplinary concerns about performance would normally dominate selection concerns about character, and voters would learn to live with rulers whose character they despise (at least in the aggregate), even though they care about both character and performance. (I think there arguments along these lines, though more technically expressed, in Tim Besley's Principled Agents. I really need to read that book and learn some game theory). However, this seems not to account for the phenomenon "congress is bad but my congressman is great" that we sometimes see in the US.
Two other possibilities that seem to me to be less plausible are the following. One is that character is simply too malleable. So voters elect people of good character, but such people quickly become bad upon gaining political power. Voters are thus constantly disappointed: they think they are selecting the best leaders (and in fact, they do) but these people easily become corrupted. I suspect, however, that we should see more incumbent turnover under this hypothesis than we actually see: people would learn that politicians quickly become corrupt, and hence that the best way of dealing with the problem is to turn the out of office quickly, or to impose term limits (as a kind of paternalistic policy, preventing themselves from being tempted to re-elect corrupt people simply because they provide good performance), though perhaps voters evaluate a tradeoff between competence and corruption potential and decide that good performance is worth a certain amount of corruption, as in the previous argument (except that voters in this model are always able to distinguish the corrupt from the virtuous: the difference is that the virtuous turn corrupt at a high rate).
Finally, I suppose that the puzzle could simply be attributed to partisan biases. On this view, disagreements about policy would be easily translated into attributions of character: only people with bad characters could support the policies the opposition supports! Since even in two party systems around half the population supports positions one does not support, and elects politicians accordingly, this might result in the feeling that most of the political class is worthless. But this theory would seem to imply that politicians would be more despised in multiparty systems than in two-party systems; though I have no data on this question, I suspect this is not the case. Moreover, people often despise politicians even from their own party; they like their policies, but dislike their characters.
Other possibilities? Perhaps the disparagement of the characters of politicians results from human ambivalence about domination? What other ideas are there? (Or perhaps this is a pseudo-puzzle?)
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Pet peeves: the neglect of ancient concepts, a continuing series
(Warning: some complaints about the neglect of ancient concepts by classical scholars).
I just read a nice piece by W. Jeffrey Tatum on "Roman Democracy?" in the Blackwell Companion to Greek and Roman Political Thought that makes a good case for taking the "democratic" features of the late republican Roman political system seriously, contrary to the common opinion among scholars since the late 19th century that republican Rome was essentially a senatorial oligarchy.
Tatum sensibly notes that Rome was not a full democracy in the strong sense of the term (pace Fergus Millar), yet he also seems needlessly dismissive of Polybius' and Cicero's judgment that the Roman constitution was "mixed" (pp. 215, 223). Rather, he seems to want to classify Rome as some kind of imperfect democracy, and in the process of casting about for a suitable concept ends up suggesting that Rome was a "delegative democracy" (p. 226). This is a term invented by my old teacher Guillermo O'Donnell to describe political systems like that of Argentina under Menem or Peru under Fujimori, but it is wholly unsuitable for describing the late Roman republic: a "delegative democracy" is a democracy without mechanisms of horizontal accountability, and the Roman republic certainly did not lack that!
Why not simply say that the best way of describing the Roman political system is through something like the Polybian concept of the "mixed" constitution, or alternatively through the concept of a "hybrid" regime, to use contemporary terminology (though the concept of a hybrid regime today is much less well developed and lacks the normative associations of the idea of the mixed constitution)? The evidence Tatum cites shows quite well that the Roman regime fits the basic ancient criteria for classification as a mixed constitution. It involved a number of distinct centers of power with with complementary but also competing interests (the tribunes, whose power derived from their connection with the popular assemblies and their ability to veto senatorial proposals; the senate, which was the executive committee of the Roman upper classes; and the consuls, whose power derived from their control of military forces in the field) which were not always equally balanced against each other, to be sure, but then again the idea of the mixed constitution did not require that its constituent parts be fully balanced. And it is true that the idea of the mixed constitution had a large normative baggage and implied a certain theory about political stability (which I am currently exploring in this project), but that is no reason to abandon it entirely.
Aside from concerns about the overwhelming dominance of the senate (which are basically refuted by Tatum), scholars tend to argue that Rome could not be a "mixed" constitution in the Polybian sense because the consuls (the "monarchical" element in the constitution, in the Polybian scheme) were senators and returned to that body, representing senatorial interests all the time. But it seems reasonably clear that in Rome the consuls' power derived not just from the senate, but from their control of armed force and their ability to extract resources from the provinces (as proconsuls after their terms); so Polybius' characterization of the consuls as the "monarchical" center of power (cf. πολιτευμάτων, Histories 6.10.6, which it seems to me could be translated as such) does not seem far-fetched.
So why the dismissive attitude towards the ancient conceptual apparatus? Rather than throw it out, why not develop it further and see whether it can be adapted to modern conditions? (Another example in the same book: the piece by Forsdyke on the idea of tyranny in classical thought. She seems to suggest that the notion of tyranny in the 5th and 4th centuries was simply a tool in the ideological struggle between the upper and lower classes in the polis, rather than an attempt to actually grasp a real phenomenon, however imperfectly, though the last lines of the piece soften the impression a bit).
I just read a nice piece by W. Jeffrey Tatum on "Roman Democracy?" in the Blackwell Companion to Greek and Roman Political Thought that makes a good case for taking the "democratic" features of the late republican Roman political system seriously, contrary to the common opinion among scholars since the late 19th century that republican Rome was essentially a senatorial oligarchy.
Tatum sensibly notes that Rome was not a full democracy in the strong sense of the term (pace Fergus Millar), yet he also seems needlessly dismissive of Polybius' and Cicero's judgment that the Roman constitution was "mixed" (pp. 215, 223). Rather, he seems to want to classify Rome as some kind of imperfect democracy, and in the process of casting about for a suitable concept ends up suggesting that Rome was a "delegative democracy" (p. 226). This is a term invented by my old teacher Guillermo O'Donnell to describe political systems like that of Argentina under Menem or Peru under Fujimori, but it is wholly unsuitable for describing the late Roman republic: a "delegative democracy" is a democracy without mechanisms of horizontal accountability, and the Roman republic certainly did not lack that!
Why not simply say that the best way of describing the Roman political system is through something like the Polybian concept of the "mixed" constitution, or alternatively through the concept of a "hybrid" regime, to use contemporary terminology (though the concept of a hybrid regime today is much less well developed and lacks the normative associations of the idea of the mixed constitution)? The evidence Tatum cites shows quite well that the Roman regime fits the basic ancient criteria for classification as a mixed constitution. It involved a number of distinct centers of power with with complementary but also competing interests (the tribunes, whose power derived from their connection with the popular assemblies and their ability to veto senatorial proposals; the senate, which was the executive committee of the Roman upper classes; and the consuls, whose power derived from their control of military forces in the field) which were not always equally balanced against each other, to be sure, but then again the idea of the mixed constitution did not require that its constituent parts be fully balanced. And it is true that the idea of the mixed constitution had a large normative baggage and implied a certain theory about political stability (which I am currently exploring in this project), but that is no reason to abandon it entirely.
Aside from concerns about the overwhelming dominance of the senate (which are basically refuted by Tatum), scholars tend to argue that Rome could not be a "mixed" constitution in the Polybian sense because the consuls (the "monarchical" element in the constitution, in the Polybian scheme) were senators and returned to that body, representing senatorial interests all the time. But it seems reasonably clear that in Rome the consuls' power derived not just from the senate, but from their control of armed force and their ability to extract resources from the provinces (as proconsuls after their terms); so Polybius' characterization of the consuls as the "monarchical" center of power (cf. πολιτευμάτων, Histories 6.10.6, which it seems to me could be translated as such) does not seem far-fetched.
So why the dismissive attitude towards the ancient conceptual apparatus? Rather than throw it out, why not develop it further and see whether it can be adapted to modern conditions? (Another example in the same book: the piece by Forsdyke on the idea of tyranny in classical thought. She seems to suggest that the notion of tyranny in the 5th and 4th centuries was simply a tool in the ideological struggle between the upper and lower classes in the polis, rather than an attempt to actually grasp a real phenomenon, however imperfectly, though the last lines of the piece soften the impression a bit).
The Class Struggle in Classical Greece
From Aristotle, Politics V.1310a9-11:
at present in some oligarchies they [the oligarchs] swear "And I will be hostile to the people and plan whatever evil I can against them"
Sunday, August 08, 2010
Sunday Strange Life Blogging
Also via Small Things Considered, a real extremophile, an archaeon that lives in water so hot and acidic it can melt metal rivets (probably worthy of another Sunday extremophile blogging), and the mind-boggling sex lives of mushrooms. The diversity of life never ceases to amaze me.
The most surprising sentence I read today
...while philosophers mandated self-control for kings in regard to both alcohol and sex, the Antigonid king Demetrius the Besieger appropriated the Parthenon itself for the use of his personal harem (ca. 290 BC), and the lead float in the great procession of Ptolemy II in Alexandria in 271/270 was a penis 150ft long with a 20-foot star coming out of its tip.From a piece by Arthur M. Eckstein on "Hellenistic Monarchy," in the Blackwell Companion to Greek and Roman Political Thought, p. 256. The reference to the harem of Demetrius is from Plutarch (Demetrius, 23); the reference to Ptolemy's float is from Athenaeus (Deipnosophistae, 196a-203b). The feminist criticism basically writes itself.
The Hellenistic kings, I learned, were basically warlords (like most kings most of the time - most small coalition, small selectorate political systems are depressingly similar), though they were also more upfront about it than most (their kingdoms were more or less explicitly premised on usurpation and force; they never appeared in civilian garb; they called their territories "spear-won land").
The piece also makes good sense of the idea of deification (which happened with some frequency among Hellenistic kings and later Roman emperors): in a world were gods are basically powerful beings who can grant or deny your wishes, powerful warlords were not functionally different from gods; they too, could grant or deny your wishes, so why not build temples to them? I suspect deification as ideological control (as in modern totalitarian regimes) was probably not used much in ancient times.
One small point of contention. Eckstein thinks that the classical Greek portrayal of the Achaemenid monarchs of Persia as absolute despots (in Herodotus or Plato) was an ideological "fantasy," but the Hellenistic kings were apparently the real deal. The Persian kings, according to him, were constrained by custom and a powerful aristocracy, while the Hellenistic monarchs were (apparently) not. This may be partly true, but I doubt it settles the matter; kings constrained by small aristocracies can be as absolute as kings not so constrained (and even the Hellenistic monarchs must have had a small winning coalition that had to be kept happy, the so-called "friends" [philoi] that Eckstein mentions - friends here is an actual title, not just an informal relation). The well-attested opulence of the Persian court certainly suggests a very high extractive capacity and a not very constrained monarch from the point of view of their subjects, though perhaps their rule was legitimated in a different way and their freedom of action with respect to their selectorates and winning coalitions was smaller than the freedom of action of the Hellenistic kings.
Thursday, August 05, 2010
Education, Selection, Discipline
Consider the problem of virtuous leadership in politics. It would seem to be pretty uncontroversial to say that a government is better the more its leaders are virtuous individuals, and that a regime is better the higher the probability that virtuous leaders will be consistently selected to lead it over time. If our political leaders were just and courageous, fair and wise, that would seem to be a good thing, right? To be sure, there are important disagreements about what counts as virtuous leadership and what counts as a political virtue, and at any rate virtuous leadership is not the only thing that matters in politics, but let us put these questions aside for the moment and consider a different question: assuming a certain conception of virtue, what are the possible institutional solutions to the problem of ensuring the rule of virtue, or a close enough approximation? What possible institutions either increase the chances of virtuous leadership, or reduce its need?
It seems to me that there are basically three solutions to this problem, which we can call selection institutions, disciplinary institutions, and educational institutions.
“Selection” institutions more or less efficiently select the virtuous as rulers and leaders (via properly structured elections, for example), taking the distribution of character and virtue in society as given, or else efficiently select good policies directly by institutional mechanisms that amplify the good qualities of citizens and dampen their bad qualities (via deliberative or aggregative mechanisms, for example). Theories of “epistemic” democracy from Rousseau and Condorcet onwards tend to emphasize these solutions, but the basic idea is quite old. For example, Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, none of whom were “democrats” in any important sense of the word, all suggested that though regular people are not individually virtuous, collectively they may yet be good judges of character, especially in small communities where everyone knows everyone else, so that properly structured elections under the right conditions (and there is a lot riding on the qualifications) can result in a relatively good chance of selecting virtuous leadership. The same logic can be applied to the direct selection of policy: if virtuous leadership cannot be ensured, perhaps specific institutions can be created (e.g., referenda or other forms of “direct democracy”) that amplify and aggregate the good qualities of citizens (their private information and local knowledge, for example) so that the kinds of policies that a virtuous leader would implement tend to be selected (I hasten to add that the justification of referenda and other direct democratic institutions is not simply or solely that they tend to result in policies that would have been chosen by ideally virtuous rulers; typically they are justified by the values of participation, autonomy, and the like).
“Disciplinary” institutions more or less efficiently discipline rulers and leaders to act in virtuous ways even if they are not virtuous, taking the outcomes of selection as given. This is the focus of the many theories of political regimes that prescribe separation of power and other such mechanisms; public choice normative theories are an obvious contemporary example, though the basic idea, again, is quite old. So, for example, the theory of the mixed constitution in antiquity is in part a theory of how to induce behaviour that is approximately virtuous by diminishing the incentives towards arrogance and hubris among those who are powerful; it assumes that people who are overly wealthy or overly secure in their power will tend to act in ways that are not beneficial to the community, and hence that other parts of the community need to be given the tools to act as counterweights.
“Educational” institutions, finally, attempt to increase the supply of virtuous individuals in society (who can then be selected into positions of power and responsibility). Many classical writers certainly emphasized such solutions, but one can find examples in contemporary calls for civic education. Educational institutions may aim to directly increase the supply of potential leaders, or may aim to increase the overall level of virtue in the population so that selection institutions will work more efficiently (because more virtuous citizens will be more likely to select leaders properly, perhaps). They may also work directly (e.g., through laws or explicit curricula and in formal settings) or indirectly (as a by-product of other interactions, or as the result of interventions into the broader cultural environment). But the basic point is in both cases to construct institutions, or to shape the cultural environment, in ways that increase the supply of virtue, whether at the citizen level or at the level of candidates for leadership.
It is worth stressing that particular institutions may serve more than one of these purposes. For example, selection institutions such as competitive elections also serve as disciplinary institutions (they are typically selective ex ante and disciplinary ex post). And deliberative mechanisms are typically both selective (of policy) and educational (of participants). But the general analytical distinction between selection, discipline, and education is still, I think, generally useful, as the power of particular effects in any given institutional setting will vary: so elections may, for example, be more efficient at disciplining politicians (i.e., making them behave in ways that approximate virtuous behaviour) under some conditions than at selecting virtuous leaders ex ante.
At any rate, the relationships between these institutions are complex, both within a static context and in the longer run dynamics of a particular system of institutions. From a static perspective, the appropriate balance between selective, disciplinary, and educational institutions (or between the selective, disciplinary, and educational effects of institutions) will depend in great part on a judgment about the relative “efficiency” of institutions for the production and selection of virtuous leaders or the disciplining of non-virtuous leaders. It seems to me, for example, that the greater emphasis on education characteristic of classical thought reflects in part a greater confidence in the effectiveness of the educational technology available to smaller face to face societies; educational institutions for virtue do not seem to scale well in modern, large-scale societies. Similarly, it may be that in modern mass-mediated societies it is increasingly hard to select virtuous leaders ex ante (the noise to signal ratio about their characters is too high, and too susceptible to manipulation or distortion), so that elections need to be reconceived more and more as disciplinary institutions, a thought that most classical thinkers did not seem to consider. For them, elections were primarily selection institutions, and hence did not need to be especially competitive; discipline was produced through the use of the court system or specialized quasi-judicial institutions like the audit (euthuna) and short terms of office, not induced by the regularization of competition common today (note also the prevalence of “term limits” in ancient elections). The parts of the institutional context that appear to be immutable also matter; in an age of monarchy (like the middle ages), where selection institutions (hereditary succession, basically, which is equivalent to more or less random selection) and disciplinary institutions (local noble assemblies, basically) are limited in their effectiveness, it is inevitable that educational solutions would be stressed (hence the many “mirrors of princes” we find, and the relative neglect of discussions of disciplinary and selection institutions).
A potentially more interesting but also more difficult set of questions concern the longer-run dynamics of these systems of institutions. I can imagine, for example, that even though from a static perspective all three solutions are equivalent (so that we could in principle substitute a highly efficient disciplinary system for a highly efficient educational or selection system: consider Kant’s famous comment about the possibility of designing a good constitution for a “race of devils”), from a dynamic perspective things might look quite different. Perhaps an over-reliance on disciplinary institutions would tend to induce a downward shift in the supply of virtue, since all disciplinary procedures can catch people who are actually virtuous, so that potentially virtuous candidates for leadership would be discouraged; or perhaps excessive reliance on selection institutions would increase the risk of really bad outcomes (as on occasion a really bad leader or a really bad policy would slip through). Ancient writers accordingly stressed a relatively balanced mixture of discipline, education, and selection as a solution to the problem of good leadership; but perhaps the appropriate balance will always depend on the actual efficacy of the respective organizational technologies and on material and cultural conditions (so that perhaps we are today right to more or less disregard proposals for extensive civic education as unlikely to lead to significant changes in the virtue of leaders).
What am I missing? Are there other possibilities, other than education, selection, and discipline?
Friday, July 30, 2010
Endnotes
Things that caught my eye in the last week or so:
- I had not known that in some societies, paternity is thought to be "partible", because they believe that "a fetus is made of accumulated semen" and hence can have multiple biological fathers (the quote is from this book, which sounds interesting, p. 60, via the Less Wrong post linked above, which is also interesting).
- The art of sleeping in seminars. Must remember all the rules next time I sleep in one.
- I found that I had mixed feelings about the possibility of a world without mosquitoes: though apparently their extermination would not be especially damaging (other species would apparently do many of the things they currently do, with the usual caveats that our understanding of their ecological role is limited), I have a quasi-aesthetic negative reflex reaction to the possibility of intentionally exterminating completely another life-form, even one that causes a lot of misery (and even as I know species go extinct from natural causes all the time). I wonder if there is anything out there about the morality of species-cide? I know there was some discussion at some time about the possibility of completely eradicating the smallpox virus, for example, but I don't know if there is serious literature about the morality of the practice (not that we are about to exterminate mosquitoes, mind you - the possibility is purely theoretical).
- Theatre for audiences of one. I suppose this is closer to conceptual art than to traditional theatre.
- The intelligence of Octopuses. The thing about octopuses is that their "intelligence" is not a by-product of their sociality: they are solitary creatures. Presumably this means that octopi could not develop intelligence that depends on the manipulation of meaningful symbols or language?
- Why the one-eyed do not rule among the blind. An interesting point on the social mediation of insight.
Polybius and the Dialectic of Forgetting (Or, Theoretical Models in the Classical World)
(Warning: A very long footnote – 2,500 words - about Polybius, human moral psychology, and the use of “models” in the Classical World, written as part of research for this project.)
The extant fragments of book VI of Polybius’ Histories contain a famous (in certain circles) discussion of the “cycle of regimes” (VI.5.10-9.14). The story goes more or less like this.
Human beings start in something like the “state of nature,” without arts or sciences, and in particular without highly developed moral norms, where we herd together like other animals following the strongest or most daring man (the basic primate pattern, we might say today: I can’t help viewing a lot of the stuff I’m reading right now through the lens of Boehm’s book, and this post will be no exception). This is what Polybius calls “monarchy” (μοναρχίαν), where the authority of the leader is limited by his physical strength and daring. This sort of “natural monarchy” then evolves towards kingship (βασιλεία) properly speaking, which is no longer a simple hierarchy sustained by strength and daring but a moral community where the authority of the leader is very much constrained by relatively egalitarian ideas about justice. In such a community, the king does not attempt to distinguish himself from his subjects by their dress or in their food and drink, and he gains the support of others only insofar as he coordinates the enforcement of community norms (VI.6.11-12), even as he may be weak and infirm; tendencies to domination are effectively kept in check.
Polybius explains the development of these ideas about justice as the result of spontaneous reflection about reciprocity (VI.6.5-10): because we expect others to reciprocate our good deeds, and value the good deeds of others, norms codifying those expectations emerge, in turn sustaining the authority of those leaders who coordinate their enforcement. Our “natural” ideas of justice are thus quite egalitarian (cf. the use of “democratic” language to describe these norms in all regimes: VI.8.4 πολιτικῆς ἰσότητος καὶ παρρησίας, VI.9.4 τὴν ἰσηγορίαν καὶ τὴν παρρησίαν), though they will accommodate some hierarchy to the degree that a leader can enforce them. But Polybius argues that this sort of “egalitarian” kingship is not stable; insofar as kingship becomes hereditary (something that is common, Polybius suggests, due to the popular belief in the inheritability of virtuous dispositions) it develops necessarily into tyranny, i.e., a regime where egalitarian community norms no longer constrain the leader. The increase in the security of the position of the king’s heirs, which comes also as a result of other changes (e.g., the emergence of resources such as fortified places that can be monopolized by the leader), increases their temptations to try to dominate others. They begin by trying to distinguish themselves from the others by dress or other signals (VI.7.7), and end by trying to obtain more material resources and reproductive advantages than anyone else in the community. The basic mechanism of change in the Polybian theory of change appears here for the first time: security of position enhances a human tendency to domination (as I was writing this, I came across this recent piece by Ryan Balot that makes a similar point).
But this tendency to domination is counterbalanced by an apparently equally natural tendency to resent domination in the name of the earlier egalitarian community norms. The “best” men – those who are most high-spirited and resentful of domination – will tend to rise up and overthrow the tyrant in the name of these norms, setting themselves up in their place. As speculative political history and anthropology, this is perhaps not self-evident (why would tyranny necessarily give rise to aristocracy rather than democracy or a renewed kingship?), though in general I think Polybius gets the basic features of long-run political development right, even if modern anthropologists would insist on a finer gradation of steps from the basic primate hierarchy to relatively acephalous egalitarian societies to “big man” societies to the kind of morally constrained “chiefdom” that corresponds to Polybius’ notion of kingship and eventually to tyranny. At any rate, the transition from tyranny to aristocracy does fit the history of Rome
We could thus say that political change, in the Polybian story, is all about the emergence of egalitarian norms, their violation by individuals capable of accumulating resources, and the restoration of such norms by those outside the “winning coalition” who still value such norms. The pattern is repeated at the next step in the cycle. As time and generations pass, the sons of aristocrats become again secure in their position, and again engage in attempts to dominate others in contravention of community norms: this is the beginning of oligarchy. Polybius describes how these new leaders no longer have any experience of the previous egalitarian norms (ἄπειροι δὲ καθόλου πολιτικῆς ἰσότητος καὶ παρρησίας), and have forgotten the misfortunes that led their parents to rise up against tyrants (VI.8.4-5). There is a kind of normative drift: signs of distinction that had been freely given to their parents for their services are interpreted by their sons as things that they deserve naturally, so that the relatively egalitarian norms that had regulated the conduct of their parents no longer regulate their own conduct. What happens instead is that the oligarchs abandon begin to pursue unrestrainedly material and other advantages: they take from others without reciprocating. But the egalitarian norms still remain strong within the rest of the population, and so eventually the people rise up and overthrow the oligarchs, banding behind any leaders who credibly promise to enforce the old moral norms. The people, however, remember with fear both the kings (and their transformation into tyrants) as well as the more recent oligarchs (note the emphasis on memory, which is partly the historian’s domain); they thus decide to manage their affairs by themselves, and democracy is born.
In democracy, as in aristocracy or kingship before, egalitarian norms remain strong as long as some are alive who experienced the previous form of domination; but when the experience is lost (with the grandchildren of the founders of democracy, VI.9.4-5), their influence weakens. People begin to take such norms for granted, and those with resources (the wealthy) begin to attempt to “aim at pre-eminence,” i.e., attempt to dominate others. This competitive struggle among rich individuals sets in motion a process of far-reaching social disintegration, where each wealthy individual corrupts the people by turning their desires in the direction of material accumulation and accustoming them to getting what they want by raiding the wealth of other wealthy individuals. This turns the democracy into a rule of violence (χειροκρατίαν), where multiple demagogic leaders compete to dominate by promising each other’s wealth to the people; the process ends with the masses turning into beasts again (cf. ἀποτεθηριωμένον, VI.9.9), i.e., returning to the state described at the beginning of the cycle, herding like the other animals without real social norms, and eventually getting a new “master,” a new leader who is only limited by his capacity for violence, though under social conditions that are different from those operating at the beginning of the cycle.
In summary, Polybius claims that simple regimes develop according to the following cyclical pattern: pre-social state of nature/natural monarchy->;kingship->;tyranny->;aristocracy->;oligarchy->;democracy->;mob rule/post-social state of nature->;natural despotic monarchy (repeat). This “theory” has sometimes been criticized by modern scholars (see, e.g., von Fritz, p. 84) for its apparently “deterministic” or “rigid” sequence of changes, and indeed Polybius’ presentation is a far cry from the nuanced discussions of political change found in Plato (on which he claims to draw, though Polybius’ discussion is very different from what we find in books VIII and IX of the Republic and in the Statesman) and Aristotle (whose discussions of the problem of political change in book V of the Politics he may not have known, given the possible loss from public view of a lot of Aristotelian writing between the third and the first century ADBC). Moreover, the “theory” of the cycle of regimes sits uneasily with Polybius’ “historical” sensibilities; it is abundantly evident to any observer of historical reality that regimes sometimes change in ways that do not fit a clear pattern (as it was to Aristotle, for example, who criticized – wrongly - Plato for a similar idea). Democracies sometimes turn into oligarchies (as when the Thirty took power in Athens
Yet the criticism is unfair. Polybius explicitly indicates that he is simplifying the “more precise” discussions found in Plato and other philosophers (VI.5.10), which he finds too complicated for pragmatic purposes. The “simplified” theory of the cycle of regimes is not to be taken as an accurate representation of historical reality, but as something like a “model” in the sense in which economists use the term: a distillation of the incentives and other influences affecting the main political actors in a regime, and pragmatically useful as a tool for analyzing political changes in more complex regimes, like the Roman one. (Polybius’ “solution” to the difficulties of the cycle, the “mixed regime,” is also best understood as that sort of model, though that is a subject for another post). These incentives are not simply incentives to behaviour (as in much modern rational choice theorizing) but to character: the model describes how certain characters emerge endogenously from certain regimes, given some assumptions about human nature and about the preservation of historical memory.
What is especially neat about Polybius’ presentation of the “cycle” of regimes is how he ties experience and forgetting with the natural tendencies to both attempt and resent domination in the explanation of political change. Constitutions change for the worse because people forget their experience of earlier attempts of some to dominate others, or rather, because the people who overthrow bad regimes are unable to pass on this experience with sufficient clarity to their children as the children’s position in society becomes increasingly secure. Without real fear of domination (which mostly comes from actual experience of such attempts), egalitarian norms do not survive, a point that applies as much to the newly victorious Rome
Ultimately, of course, this “model” of political change is used by Polybius to understand and analyze Roman history: Rome was successful insofar as its leaders instinctively chose courses of action that constantly prevented them from giving full rein to their dominating tendencies (e.g., the “checks and balances” of the Roman mixed constitution, which has, I think, been much misunderstood by modern historians who point out, rightly, that Rome during Polybius’ lifetime was basically an oligarchy; but that is another topic) and will be unsuccessful insofar as it achieves full security (as is evident from the later books of Polybius’ Histories, or at least of what remains of them). The model may be historically implausible (in its assertion that typically tyrannies turn into aristocracies, and oligarchies into democracies, for example) but it is no more implausible than some of the rational choice models of political change in use today (which are useful too, I should note), and it has the added benefit of incorporating a plausible moral psychology. By contrast, Aristotle’s exhaustive description of political change in book V of the Politics, though empirically better informed and starting from a basically plausible principle about how the violation of norms about justice leads to political change (where justice is always understood as a form of equality, though differently in different regimes), seems to miss the forest for the trees. Aristotle spends too much time looking at purely accidental causes of political change (“exogenous shocks” in the contemporary economic jargon, such as foreign conquest or institutional drift), or exploring varieties of a single cause of political change (the attempts to dominate others by high-status individuals), whereas Polybius’ model almost begs to be formalized as a story about the interaction between tendencies to domination and tendencies to resent such domination in the absence of perfect memory about the consequences of domination, and it seems readily applicable to a variety of cases even when it cannot explain them completely. From this point of view, it does not surprise me that Polybius’ simplified story was much more influential, historically, than Aristotle’s complex and empirically informed catalogue of the causes of political change: it identifies a key cause of political change for ill, and suggests ready remedies (basically, keeping the fear of domination alive through “checks and balances,” a remedy that is mentioned by Aristotle as well, but only among many other suggestions, some major, some minor).
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Sunday Extremophile Blogging: The Pompeii Worm
Also: not extremophiles, but lots of neat pictures here of interesting new species. I especially like the Dracula minnow and the psychodelic frogfish.
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Cicero and Machiavelli on Fear and Love
(Warning: some thinking out loud about some passages of Cicero and Machiavelli, in the course of doing some research for a work in progress. A footnote of interest to historians of political thought or political theorists with a historical bent, perhaps.)
Cicero, Philippics 1.33-34 (the Perseus text is unaccountably missing the last lines of 1.33; a full translation is found here):
What I am more afraid of is lest, being ignorant of the true path to glory, you should think it glorious for you to have more power by yourself than all the rest of the people put together, and lest you should prefer being feared by your fellow-citizens to being loved by them. And if you do think so, you are ignorant of the road to glory. For a citizen to be dear to his fellow-citizens, to deserve well of the republic, to be praised, to be respected, to be loved, is glorious; but to be feared, and to be an object of hatred, is odious, detestable; and moreover, pregnant with weakness and decay. And we see that, even in the play, the very man who said, "what care I though all men should hate my name, so long as fear accompanies their hate?" [The Latin is much more concise and lapidary: "oderint, dum metuant"] found that it was a mischievous principle to act upon.
I wish, O Antonius, that you could recollect your grandfather of whom, however, you have repeatedly heard me speak. Do you think that he would have been willing to deserve even immortality, at the price of being feared in consequence of his licentious use of arms? What he considered life, what he considered prosperity, was the being equal to the rest of the citizens in freedom, and chief of them all in worth.
Machiavelli, The Prince, chapter XVII:Upon this a question arises: whether it be better to be loved than feared or feared than loved? It may be answered that one should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with. Because this is to be asserted in general of men, that they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous, and as long as you succeed they are yours entirely; they will offer you their blood, property, life and children, as is said above, when the need is far distant; but when it approaches they turn against you. And that prince who, relying entirely on their promises, has neglected other precautions, is ruined; because friendships that are obtained by payments, and not by greatness or nobility of mind, may indeed be earned, but they are not secured, and in time of need cannot be relied upon; and men have less scruple in offending one who is beloved than one who is feared, for love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.
Nevertheless a prince ought to inspire fear in such a way that, if he does not win love, he avoids hatred; because he can endure very well being feared whilst he is not hated, which will always be as long as he abstains from the property of his citizens and subjects and from their women. But when it is necessary for him to proceed against the life of someone, he must do it on proper justification and for manifest cause, but above all things he must keep his hands off the property of others, because men more quickly forget the death of their father than the loss of their patrimony. Besides, pretexts for taking away the property are never wanting; for he who has once begun to live by robbery will always find pretexts for seizing what belongs to others; but reasons for taking life, on the contrary, are more difficult to find and sooner lapse. But when a prince is with his army, and has under control a multitude of soldiers, then it is quite necessary for him to disregard the reputation of cruelty, for without it he would never hold his army united or disposed to its duties.
At first glance, it looks as if Cicero and Machiavelli were presenting diametrically opposed positions: Cicero argues that a political leader should avoid being feared, and that it is better that he be loved, whereas Machiavelli suggests that it is fine if the prince is feared. This fits in with the "standard view" concerning Machiavelli's relationship to Cicero (see, e.g., Skinner; consider also, for example, the discussions in The Prince asserting that generosity or honesty are inessential to political leaders, which clearly reverse Cicero's discussion of the need for these virtues in On Duties). There are some (partial) dissents (e.g., Colish), but in general the consensus seems to be that Machiavelli and Cicero present fairly opposed views of the virtues of political leaders.Yet it is clear from these passages that both Machiavelli and Cicero agree that being hated is fatal to a political leader. They differ mostly insofar as Cicero seems to think that becoming feared without incurring hatred is unlikely, whereas Machiavelli is more sanguine about this possibility. But even this difference can be attributed to the fact that Cicero is considering the kinds of actions that someone who used to be an equal (Antony) would have to do in order to become dominant; and in his view (perhaps exaggerated for rhetorical effect?) these actions are likely to incur hatred alongside fear, and are unlikely to bring real and durable fame. And that thought does not seem to be in conflict with Machiavelli's views at all.
Unrelated point: working through Cicero's Philippics after reading Boehm makes me think that the upper level of Roman society behaved very much like a tribe with a strong ethos of equality, despite the otherwise tremendous material and status inequalities in Roman society. Like tribesmen everywhere, Cicero and his contemporaries among the senatorial class seemed to be extremely sensitive to suggestions that this or that person aimed to become dominant over them, and expended great energy arguing over the symbols of such domination (the office of the dictator, crowns, funeral monuments, public thanksgivings), even as the real threats to their equality lay in the ability of the proconsuls to basically create private armies during their long periods of imperium away from Italy (by Marc Antony's time, they could sometimes spend 5 years on campaign away from Rome). Also, it is amazing how the Romans of the time, like many of the tribes described by Boehm, had few mechanisms to deal with persistent attempts at domination other than assassination. It's actually kind of astounding the sheer violence present in the background of politics at Rome in the waning days of the republic – people are being killed right and left, the senate is often surrounded by armed men, and prominent political figures, Cicero included, are always conscious of the very real threats to their physical safety. And yet they seemed to think that such extrajudicial killings were often quite legitimate, though they of course disagreed about which ones! Late republican Rome was really a Machiavellian jungle, and Cicero was very good at surviving in it; it would seem unlikely if Machiavelli's ideas about political survival were entirely alien to Cicero.
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