Apparatchik
Apparatchik, properly speaking, means an employee of theapparat,perhaps
best translated into English by the use of the modern Marxist term ‘state
apparatus’, that is, any institution involved in the running of the state, whether
formally part of the state or not. In the communist countries where the word
was used, it meant in practice a member of the communist party who occupied
an intermediate position in the bureaucracy. It is theapparatchikiwho formed
the bulk of thenew classofDjilas. The term is sometimes used pejoratively of
administrators and bureaucrats who bully those in their power and truckle to
their superiors.
Aquinas
St Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) was one of the earliest Western thinkers to
merge Aristotelian philosophy into the Christian political and philosophical
heritage. Aquinas was primarily a theologian, but his writings had political
significance since there was no clear-cut distinction between purely theological
and political writing during the Middle Ages, when the Church was a major
political and social force.
Like Aristotle, Aquinas regardscivil society, or the political system, as a
natural part of life. For Aquinas man cannot be truly human outside some sort
of ordered society, and he conceives of the family as the basic political unit.
(Aristotle too startsThe Politicswith an analysis of the domestic economy.) But
Aquinas insists that such small units can never provide an ordered and secure
social framework, and therefore sees full-scale political societies built up from
the family as essential. The main purpose of such societies is to provide a
framework within which man can develop his reason and moral sense, and thus
come to live well and, specifically, to live as a Christian. On the all-important
question of who should rule, Aquinas again follows Aristotle, arguing that
though the best form of government, given the unequal reasoning powers of
humans, would be amonarchyoraristocracy, these are too easily corrupted.
Hence he too argues for a mixed constitution.
Aquinas’s main differences with Aristotle occur where Christian doctrines
clash with pagan values. The most important area here is the definition of
human nature. For Aquinas there is a crucial difference between the human
nature of the Christian, influenced by baptism, and that of the pagan; and for
this reason he did not expect that his political theory could be relevant to all
people. Now that our culture is fully familiar with classical Greek thought,
Thomism (the name for Aquinas’s doctrines) is often regarded as superfluous,
although much of the political thinking of the Catholic Church even today is
based on Thomist principles. Thomism, formulated at a period of increasing
monarchial centralization, with its doctrine of mixed government and its stress
Aquinas