Main Currents of Western Political Thought on Statecraft

You have called a boss or a politician “Machiavellian” without ever opening Machiavelli, and you have probably heard someone described as living “in an ideal world” without knowing that phrase traces to Plato. Western political thought on statecraft is really three answers to one question — how should the state be ruled, and by whom — argued out over two thousand years by three men who barely agreed on anything. Knowing what connects them is worth more marks than knowing any one of them alone.

In two minutes

Plato asks what the state ought to be, Aristotle asks what states actually are, and Machiavelli asks what a ruler must do to survive — idealism, empirical classification, and realism, in that order, and the syllabus expects you to see the line running through all three.

The rest of this chapter

The full explanation, the cheat sheet, every previous-year question at every mark weight, the quiz and the answer skeletons are part of Political Science – I: Political Theory and Political Organisation on LexBlox Semester. Sign in to unlock the subject, or read Module 1 of Legal Language and Writing free.