Political Authority

The purpose of this research is to examine the thought of Plato, Locke, and Mill on the subject of political authority, from the perspective of western liberal democracy. The plan of the research will be to set forth a working definition of western liberal democracy and political authority and then to discuss ways in which Plato's Republic, Locke's Second Treatise of Government, and Mill's Essay on Liberty explain the basis on which states and their rulers achieve or should achieve and maintain authority and legitimacy with their people.

To speak of Western liberal democracy is to speak of such concepts as individual freedom of thought, property, and action, equality of all persons before the law, representative government, open social and political discourse, and a history of relatively stable social structures amid transfer or sharing of and competition for political power within a political structure broadly accepted and publicly understood as having legitimacy and social value. These concepts are commonplaces of political discourse and rhetoric in the West in the modern period because their attributes are so readily identifiable with lived political and social experience and can be so readily contrasted with the political and social experience of so many non-Western peoples, as well as with the experience of Western peoples (say, in the former Yugoslavia) of unstable or repressive regimes. As Huntington (x) remarks of the democratic transition in Taiwan and of the contemp

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d property and much else besides are used seems decisive as Locke's discussion develops. Inevitably, some beings will use reason better than others, working to improve the quality of their lives in a way that sets them apart from those who are as it were merely surviving off the common property of all. Locke's assertion of labor as the added-value "use" by individuals, whereby land or products assume the status of private property, is a function of the optimal application of reason, which "added something to" goods found in a natural state before reason was applied, "and so they became his private right" (Locke 19). Elsewhere, Locke says that labor "hath fixed my property" (20; emphasis in original here and throughout) or that a man's labor "was to be his title" to property that might have formerly been held in common. Man's extra effort to improve the convenience factor of what is found in nature thus becomes a justification for a historical and increasingly structured, systematic, and implicitly social chain of ownership of what one could reasonably control: "[H]e who appropriates land to himself by his labour, does not lessen, but increase the common stock of mankind" (Locke 23). By exerting such labor to the extent of one's pe

Category: Philosophy - P