maintain some distance from the world of politics, for otherwise they will be unable
to distinguish the merely transitory and parochial from the significant. Without
necessarily endorsing his wider philosophy, two observations from Friedrich Hegel
are apt here: ‘philosophy is time reflected in thought’ and ‘the Owl of Minerva
begins its flight at dusk’. Political thought must respect the particularity of history
but in a way which does not reduce that particularity simply to a series of discrete
events, and the Owl of Minerva – that is, understanding – may not emerge, or ‘take
flight’, until we have achieved a necessary perspective on those events.
Engagement with traditional problems of political theory, combined with social
and political changes external to the discipline of political theory, but to which
political theorists must respond, can generate new problems. It is these new problems
that justify separating out the classical and the new ideas.
Although the concepts discussed in Part 4 bear affinities with traditional concepts,
they do, nonetheless, constitute a break with tradition. To illustrate this point
consider a couple of the concepts discussed in Part 4: human rights and political
violence.
Early modern natural law theory appears at first sight the progenitor of human
rights discourse. The idea that human beings have a moral status as children of
God, or are implanted by God with a moral sense, does not seem entirely alien to
the contemporary understanding of human rights as standards of behaviour owed
to people simply by virtue of their humanity and thus transcending cultural
particularity. But the shift from a theological to a secular justification renders the
similarity between natural law theory and contemporary human rights theory
superficial: human rights are grounded in the idea that the individual human being
is a ‘self-originating source of valid claims’ against others, rather than being part
of a natural, or cosmic, order. The problem to which human rights are supposedly
the answer is quite different to the problem to which natural law was a response:
human rights function as a standard for international politics, whereas natural law
was intended as a means of rejuvenating Christianity in the context of ecclesiastical
corruption.
Consider now political violence. The differentiation of terrorism as one form of
violence among other distinct forms is a consequence of the development of the
liberal democratic value of peace: whereas pre-modern societies gloried in violence- think of the esteem attached to chivalry – modern liberal societies stress the
importance of peace and order. When liberal democracies use military force they
claim to operate within rules of war. Terrorism is characterised as the absence of
rules, hence the use of the word ‘terror’. We argue that the rather clichéd distinction
expressed in the statement that ‘one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom
fighter’ is not a useful one, and that the use of terror must be contextualised: against
liberal democracies, where there exists a real possibility of political change, terror
cannot be justified. In non-liberal societies, or where liberal societies are engaged
in proxy wars, it is more difficult to draw a line between the justified and the
unjustified employment of terrorist tactics. The point we make here is that the study
of terrorism – both empirically in what is called ‘terrorology’ and ethically in
political theory – is a relatively recent phenomenon, emerging under social and
political conditions in which the classification of acceptable and unacceptable uses
of violence has changed fundamentally.
400 Part 4 Contemporary ideas