Abstract
The ancient Greek philosophers taught us many of the desirable features of government, but since 1979 we have lost sight of most of them. We now have a restricted view of citizenship, a defective view of the public interest, a diluted public service ethic, little public service education and training and above all we have lost sight of the Greeks’ demand to seek the good life and the good society. Instead we have the ‘Three Es’ and a business approach which is profit led. Leadership and action are needed to restore the former virtues of British government, many of which were learnt from Plato and Aristotle.
Keywords
Ancient Greece was the foundation of European civilisation, but in recent times British governments and politicians have lost sight of several lessons that its philosophers and rulers taught us. This is not the first time this has happened in modern times. In 1935, Sir RW Livingstone warned that European and American societies had lost the bearings established for them by the Greeks and were therefore in danger of losing their ethical compass. He declared that … apart from Christianity, our age has no … definitive philosophy. Intellectually it is adrift. That is, ultimately a graver danger to the world than economic collapse or even war. Without a clear and accepted view of life, men waste and misuse material resources and are as lost in the their rich profusion as travellers in a tropical forest who have neither guide, map or compass. (1935: 3)
The circumstances in which Livingstone wrote were in many ways similar to those of the present day. Britain and the United States were then recovering from the worst of the Great Depression, which itself had resulted from the reckless greed of the markets on Wall Street and the City of London. Britain was governed by a coalition National Government dominated by the Conservative Party. In Europe, there was increasing alarm at the rise of the dictators Mussolini and Hitler, with the concomitant increasing threat of war.
Today, the development of the European Union into an effective international organisation that can prevent future European wars is in doubt. At home and abroad, political systems are weakened by public dissatisfaction and even contempt engendered by scandals over briberies at home and abroad, illegitimate, extravagant and sometimes illegal claims of expenses by MPs and Peers (Daily Telegraph, passim, 2009), broken party promises and a sense that there is no longer a meaningful choice to be made between parties and candidates at election time. Electoral turnouts are low and declining, from 84% in February 1974 to 65% in 2010. Commenting on the latter election, Dennis Kavanagh and Philip Cowley (2010: 192) wrote that ‘there was in fact no large increase in turnout. It was to end up at 65%, up on the levels in 2001 and 2005 but still lower than at any election from 1922 until 1997’. Gerry Stoker (2013: 21) urges that ‘If political elites are concerned about the declining standing of the political system and their role in it, they should be prepared to listen to citizens, who have a clear sense of the direction that reform should take’. Now politicians stand particularly low in the public regard and trust in the honour and integrity of public officials is at a low ebb; trust that politicians can and will govern in the public interest has fallen from 38% in 1986 to 20% in 2012 (NATCEN, 2013: 69).
Among the reasons for this sorry state of affairs are five developments over the last three decades that have put our political ethics in jeopardy. They are:
An attenuated view of citizenship. A limited and fallacious view of the public interest. The loss of a public service ethic, together with the loss of the education and training that formerly inculcated that ethic. Politicians and citizens alike have ceased to seek for the good life and the good person – the areti (αpetύ) of the ancient Greeks; instead the profit motive has become the main criterion for success in public as in private life (Sandel, 2012).
In the following sections, each of these problems will be examined in turn, by comparing the approach of the ancient Greeks with current definitions and approaches to these five issues. Livingstone pointed out that The Greeks … were the first people to ask rationally what is the right life for man and to give, if not the most satisfying answer ever given to this question, at any rate one which no intelligent man who realises the problem can ignore. (ibid: 5).
Later he states that ‘The reader of Plato and Aristotle is never allowed to forget that the object of politics is a human good. “The State originates for the sake of life; it continues in existence for the sake of the good life”’ (ibid: 92–93, quotation from Aristotle, The Politics, 1: 2: 8).
It is that search for virtue and the good life that British democracy has lost touch with today. Under the influence of the writings of Friedrich von Hayek (1944), Milton Friedman (1980) and others, ‘New Right’ Governments led by their acolytes and the public choice theorists have neglected earlier teachings about the nature of government and public administration. However, the democracies of continental Europe have been to a degree protected from these trends by the legalistic basis of their constitutions and public services (Ridley, 1996).
There is a need for British Governments to reassert the views of older philosophers and leaders and rediscover the ideals they preached. Thus, Catholic social teaching stresses that ‘democracy, if it is to be healthy, requires more than universal suffrage. It requires the presence of a system of common values’ (CBC, 1996: 10), echoing Aristotle’s declaration that ‘…the city or state has priority over the household and over any individual among us. For the whole must be prior to the parts’ (1962: 29) More recently, Michael Sandel (2009: 1: 3–4) sounded the same call: ‘the better kind of politics we need is a politics oriented less to the pursuit of individual self-interest and more to the pursuit of the common good’. The five specific issues raised by the application of Platonic and Aristotelian thought to modern circumstances can now be addressed in turn.
Citizenship
The growth of the consumer society has caused us to develop an attenuated concept of citizenship as being akin to the role of a customer making purchases in a shop or a buyer of public or private services, compared with the broader definition of the right and duty of citizens formerly held since Aristotle: For instance, Lord Waldegrave (1993) displayed scepticism about the value of local political democracy: there is no guarantee – indeed, there may not even be a sporting chance – that by periodically expressing his or her democratic decision at the ballot box, the citizen … will necessarily obtain on a continuous basis efficient, properly accountable, responsive public services … .The key point in this argument is not whether those who run our public services are elected but whether they are producer-responsive or consumer-responsive. (1993: 13)
By contrast, markets offer sure guidance to citizens’ preferences and hence can be substituted for political democracy:
marketisation establishes the market as the central mechanism of overcoming dissent by measuring (not evaluating) individual preferences and strengthening consumer power, thus privatising the decision on what goods shall be produced. Marketisation implies that money is the medium by which the relationship between supply and demand is expressed. (Haus and Sweeting, 2006: 275)
On this argument, it follows that economic democracy, whereby members of the public choose their public services as if they are customers selecting goods in a shop, will produce better outcomes than political choice at the ballot box. However, Sandel (2009: 1: 4) argued that a proper definition of the common good ‘requires the more demanding idea of what it means to be a citizen and it requires a mote robust public discourse – one that engages directly with moral and spiritual questions’.
For the Greeks, citizenship was much more than shopping. Aristotle defined a citizen as someone who has the right and the duty to participate in the government of his society (1962: 102). He drew a famous analogy with the crew of a ship, arguing that ‘a citizen is one of s community, as a sailor is part of a crew’ (1962: 107). Hence, each person in the State – the polis – has his or her allotted role, the satisfactory performance of which is essential to the safe arrival of the ship in port (ibid). In this context, the way in which John Major’s ‘Citizen’s Charter’ (Cabinet Office, 1991) equated the meaning of citizenship with that of a customer or consumer was regrettable (Chandler, 1995).
Citizens have rights, including the right to be defended from their internal and external enemies, to be sure that the air, food and drink upon which their lives depend shall be pure and safe and the right to vote at election time to choose their governors. They also have duties: to inform themselves of the activities of the government in office and the proposals of the Opposition, in order to make an informed judgement when they exercise their civic duty to cast their votes. The danger of the modern consumerist society is that the value attached to these rights and duties becomes attenuated, as George Jones and John Stewart have suggested in the case of British local elections and representation: Strong representative local democracy requires active citizens and effective local accountability. Its potential is limited if the role of the citizen is reduced to the act of voting and to the right to raise individual complaints with councillors as local welfare workers. Voting is vital but not sufficient. The local accountability of a councillor cannot be reduced to an action that takes place once every four years. Citizenship restricted to these limited acts remains relatively passive. (2012: 350).
Aristotle would have agreed with them but not Lord Waldegrave (1993), who would reduce the content of local democracy to the level of consumers making their choices in shops.
Citizens also have the obligation to serve on juries when they are summoned to do so and to serve in the armed forces of their country if they are required to do so. They have the right and the duty to hold the government to account through their elected representatives, through the Courts of Law and other quasi-judicial remedies, as well as nowadays through various offices of Ombudsman. They also have the right and duty to express their opinions and press their interests on their representatives through the Press, broadcasting, political parties and lobby groups. Likewise, the Catholic Church has encouraged people to take an active part in public life and to contribute towards the attainment of the common good of the entire human family, as well as that of their own country. Again the theme of the need to uphold a common public interest beyond the needs and wishes of the individual citizen is an essential part of citizenship (CBC, 1996).
Increasingly too, they may have the chance to exercise these rights and duties through means of deliberative and participatory democracy; such as citizens’ assemblies or juries, focus groups, local or national referendums and the new social media, which have made participation easier than ever before. Thus, the opportunity to be true citizens in Aristotle’s sense have never been greater but the value attached by citizens to doing so has probably never been lower because too many citizens expect only to perform as customers or consumers. This in turn partly explains low and declining turnout at national and local elections. There is an important task of citizen re-education to be undertaken here to inculcate the idea that ‘active citizenship’ is citizenship itself properly defined. The benefits of doing so are considerable as Marc Stears (2011: 28) has argued: ‘individuals who possess a wide and deeper range of collaborative, democratic relationships with others gain in self-esteem, personal satisfaction and general effectiveness’ but achieving this level of civic consciousness entails going far beyond regarding the citizen as a customer choosing goods in a shop. However, giving citizens a full understanding of the opportunities available to them requires vigorous citizenship education in schools. Stoker (2013) urges the need for greater transparency and to make politics easier for citizens to understand.
The public interest
The ancient Greeks required that the public interest must be defined apart from the interests of the individuals who make up the polis: there is a collective public interest that protects the rights and interests of all the individuals within the polis and all citizens therefore have the duty to protect that public interest. Pericles warned the citizens of Athens during a period of war and pestilence that without protecting their collective interest, individuals’ interests could not flourish: If the state is secure, individuals have a much greater chance of recovering from their present misfortunes. Therefore, since a state can support individuals in their suffering but no person can bear the load that rests on the state, is it not right for us all to rally to her defence? (Thucydides, 1954: 159)
Socrates answered Glaucon and Adeimantes’s arguments that the balance of individual advantage would cause men to favour injustice over justice, by referring first to the interest of society. Responding to Adeimantes’s demand that ‘What we want from you is not only a demonstration that justice is better than injustice but a description of its essential effects, harmless or otherwise, which each possesses in its possessor’, Plato responded, I … propose that we start our inquiry with the community and then proceed to the individual and see if we can find in the smaller entity anything corresponding to what we have found in the larger … . Society originates … so far as I can see, because the individual is not self-sufficient but has many needs that he cannot supply himself. (1969: 100)
Hence, the collective public interest at least in part defines the obligation of the citizen to respect justice and refrain from pursuing injustice.
Aristotle likewise regarded man as being essentially a social being; a ‘political animal. It is his nature to live in a state’, because Man and Man alone has the power of reasoned speech, which ‘serves to indicate what is useful and what is harmful and so also what is right and what is wrong’ (1962: 114). In this, he was following and developing the ideas of Socrates as discussed by his teacher Plato concerning men’s mutual interdependence for survival. Aristotle then goes on in terms reminiscent of the Book of Genesis: For the real difference between man and other animals is that human beings alone have the perception of good and evil, right and wrong, just and unjust. Indeed it is the sharing of a common view in these matters that makes a household or a city. (1962: 114)
In consequence, the government of his or her community is essential to their self-preservation and so he declared politics to be ‘the master science’. This ‘takes place above all in public spaces: people come together as a collective to decide what they ought to do’ (Dobson, 2012: 3). However, public protests in modern advanced states are moved on or dispersed by the police or in some places stifled by arrests and prosecutions.
Although this notion of a collective public interest has been upheld by a formidable cloud of witnesses over the centuries since Plato, Aristotle and Periclean Athens, it has now been displaced by an individualistic notion that regards the public interest as being merely the sum total of the interests of the individuals who live within the society. This view arguably originated with the Puritan thinkers of the 17th century and was given its definitive expression in the writings of Jeremy Bentham (1948; see Elcock, 2011). He argued that the individual pursues pleasure and the avoidance of pain. The Felicific Calculus allows the individual to calculate the optimum balance between the two and so pursue his happiness, hence his famous statement that ‘pushpin is a good as poetry’ if both produce the same amount of happiness. The State must interfere as little as possible in that search for happiness: ‘The request that industry and commerce make to government is as simple as that of Diogenes to Alexander: Stand out of my sunshine!’, thus lending support to Thomas Jefferson’s view that the State should be no more than a night-watchman whose task is to protect the public’s safety but even that limited view nonetheless constitutes a collective public interest as argued by Pericles.
Since then, this individualistic view has been developed by the thinkers of the ‘New Right’, with the result that an individualistic conception of the public interest has displaced the older instrumental view that while the interests of the individual must be protected and promoted by society, there exists a collective public interest that benefits them all and which they must therefore all support and defend (Elcock, 2011, 2012). Milton Friedman and Rose Friedman (1980) by contrast state, for example, that the only responsibility a business has is to make a profit, thus corporate social responsibility is irrelevant and illegitimate. Hence, the company should have no regard for the state apart from keeping its laws and regulations. It has no duty to support social enterprises, charities or any other collective social interest, although the company ought to pay its taxes, as some major corporations notoriously fail to do.
The public service ethos
The public service ethos has largely been lost sight of because the methods and ethics of business and commerce are regarded by political leaders as being superior to public service values. The contemporary emphasis on economy, efficiency and effectiveness – the ‘Three E’s’, plus the heavy emphasis attached to the right result being achieved on the ‘bottom line’ have displaced the former stress on the importance of the disinterested, impartial administration of the affairs of state by public servants who are required to exercise their powers and duties without reference to their individual interests – Rousseau’s ‘art of darkness’ (Chapman, 1988a; Hood, 1991). The ancient Greeks repeatedly emphasised the requirement for those responsible for administering the polis to set aside their individual interests when making judgements about public affairs. Plato records Socrates’s argument that the Guardians, the polis’s administrators and governors, must be able to govern in the public interest regardless of their own views and interests: we must look for the Guardians who will stick most firmly to the principle that they must always do what they think is best for the community. We must watch them closely from their earliest years and set them tasks in doing which they are most likely to forget or be led astray from this principle; and we must choose only those who don’t forget and are not easily misled. (1955: 158)
Socrates also stressed the importance of this value when defending himself at his trial for corrupting the youth: The jury does not sit to dispense justice as a favour but to decide where justice lies; and the oath which they have sworn is not to show favour at their own discretion but to return a just and lawful verdict. (Plato, 1969: 68)
Livingstone summarises Plato’s view as that ‘public well-being should be considered before private good’ (1935: 101), that ‘the true ruler pursues his subjects’ interests and not his own’ (Plato, 1969: 77), a view echoed by Pericles.
However, the public choice theorists (Downs, 1957; Niskanen, 1973) deny that such objectivity in public conduct is possible. For them, all humans, including Ministers and civil servants, are selfish rational maximisers and as such they will always consider their individual interests first and the public interest secondly, if at all. Anthony Downs (1957) argued that the electoral cycle leads to the over-provision of public services by politicians acting as selfish rational maximisers because they seek to win citizens’ votes for themselves at the next election by providing increased services for the citizenry, hence hoping to secure their continuance in office. His argument was based on two assumptions. The first was rationality, which he defined as referring ‘solely to a man who moves towards his goals in a way which, to the best of his knowledge, uses the least possible input of scarce resources per unit of valued output’ (ibid: 5). The second was selfishness: We assume that every individual, though rational, is also selfish … Throughout this model we assume that every agent acts in accordance with this view of human nature. Thus, when we speak of rational behaviour, we always mean rational behaviour directed primarily towards selfish ends. (ibid: 27) … a rational government may simultaneously carry out projects with widely varying rates of utility return without reallocating its resources from the lowest returns to the highest. This means that there will always be a possible Pareto optimism which cannot in practice be reached. (ibid: 204)
William Niskanen (1973) identified a second drive towards excessive public provision and expenditure: the inevitable desire of bureaucrats to expand their budgets and staff in order to increase their own status, power and remuneration. Bureaucrats exercise monopoly power because of their sponsors’ ‘lack of a significant alternative and (their) unwillingness to forego the services provided by the bureau’, the sponsor being ultimately the public through their representatives (ibid: 14). Bureaucrats' ‘behaviour’ depends on their perceived rewards of employment in the bureau. The employees’ interests in larger budgets are obvious and similar to that of the bureaucrat: more opportunities for promotion, more job security, et cetera and more profits to the contract suppliers of factors’ (ibid: 24). In consequence, ‘For any demand and cost conditions, (bureaucrats) supply a quantity of services larger than would maximise the net benefits of the service’ (ibid: 31). They will also promulgate an increasing number of regulations because more bureaucrats have to be employed to enforce them.
Hence for these thinkers, the disinterested, altruistic behaviour demanded by Plato, Pericles and Aristotle is impossible: no-one can be trusted to act other than his or her own personal interests. However, one aspect of the former public service ethic that has survived with special power in British public administration is political impartiality: the rule that officials employed in the civil service or local government must be prepared impartially to advise and serve politicians from whichever party are elected to preside over Governments and councils (Campbell, 1983). For the administrators, the benefit is that they are less likely to be dismissed from their posts when the government changes hands than their politically appointed colleagues in other countries (see Elcock, 1998, 2012).
The public service ethic demands the disinterested application of the principles of probity and equity, through the recognition of four virtues identified by the modern Greek scholar Anthony Makridimitris (2002): accountability, legality, integrity and responsiveness. In a democracy, the accountability of public servants is and must be upwards to their political masters; in modern representative democracies, these are the public’s representatives and through them ultimately to the public itself. They are also held accountable downwards to citizens individually or collectively through the Courts of Law and other redress procedures (Elcock, 1998). They are also accountable outwards to their colleagues (ibid), which may influence them to observe the requirements of public service but may also result in the excessive influence of professional norms and practices on their actions as public servants, to the detriment of citizens’ interests (Illich, 1977). Also, a collegiate and fairly small group of administrators, such as the British Senior Civil Service, will reinforce in one another the observance of the virtues essential to their discipline: probity, disinterestedness, equity, integrity. On the other hand, such relatively closed elites are likely to succumb to ‘Groupthink’ (Janis, 1973), which will cause their members to reject dissenters and develop an excessively cosy consensus about how to run the country. The safeguards against these dangers are accountability upwards and downwards, which should counteract such tendencies but do not always do so, especially in Britain (Dunleavy, 1995).
The second central value can be easily stated: governors and public administrators must be and be seen to be obedient to the laws and regulations in force that affect them – Makridimitris’s (2002:) demand for legality but it also includes the requirement of equity: treating like cases alike and unlike cases differently (Lucas, 1966). Thirdly, integrity requires the maintenance of objective, disinterested attitudes to administration, together with scrupulous honesty in the administration and distribution of the public resources entrusted to the government and its servants. The final value, responsiveness has become increasingly important as a ‘New Public Management’ value (Hood, 1991) and has resulted in many government agencies and employees making considerable efforts to develop more customer friendly attitudes and premises but it should consist of more than being polite at government counters; it entails taking heed of the citizens’ values, wishes and needs as expressed at elections and through processes of consultation and lobbying, as well as heeding the complaints made by citizens. Citizens must be listened to, not merely comforted.
Education and training
One major reason for the weakening of the public administrator’s traditional commitment to the dispassionate service of the public interest, impartiality in the giving of advice to Ministers or councillors and the proper provision of public services, is the loss of distinctive education and training courses for public administrators and prospective political leaders, although the chances of training the latter are limited because political leaders usually reach their leading positions through a wide and unpredictable variety of routes, both accidental and deliberate (see Elcock, 2001).
However, the education and training of public administrators has been largely taken over by Business Schools whose primary function is rightly the education and training of business managers for private companies. A particular danger inherent in this development is that public service education has fallen foul of the dangerous fallacy of ‘generic management’ – the belief that the issues of management are the same in all contexts. This is not so. The aims and context of within which management is practised are highly context specific, and this needs to be recognised in particular in determining the content of education and training courses appropriate for public servants and politicians (Elcock, 1995).
For Plato, the proper education of the public administrator was fundamental to the proper administration of the polis. Livingstone points out that much of his Republic is devoted to the upbringing, education and training of the Guardians: ‘the key to political problems is education’ (1935: 102). It would be foolish to suggest that we should either adopt all Plato’s prescription for the education of the Guardians or that we need to revert to the dominance of classical studies in the education of higher civil servants that developed in the Victorian age and predominated until quite recently (O'Toole, 1997). However, at least two essential courses need to be compulsory parts of education courses for public servants, both during their initial degree or other courses and as part of their career development training.
The first is a study of the principles of public service duties and ethics, including Makridimitris’s four major topics of accountability – the central obligation imposed on public servants, legality including the requirement of equity, the maintenance of integrity, which includes dispassionate public service and the requirement of the public servant’s probity in behaviour and dealings with the citizens. Last comes the need to be responsive to citizens’ requests, remembering that those citizens have the right and duty to participate in the government of which all officials are part (Makridimitris, 2002) and are not merely consumers of public and private goods and services.
The second essential component of education for public servants is to develop a thorough understanding of the political and administrative systems and structures within which public servants work in central and local government, government agencies and other public services such as the National Health Service. This must include the study of elections and the many other forms of citizen participation now available; the leadership and decision-making institutions and processes by which policies are debated, determined and implemented including the Prime Minister, the Cabinet, the Civil Service as well as the councillors and officials who are similarly responsible in local government. Further essential subjects of study are the roles of Members of Parliament and councillors as public representatives, legislators and scrutineers of government. They must also know and understand the various means of redress available to aggrieved citizens who claim that public officials or politicians have treated them unjustly or improperly, including infringing their civil rights and liberties. These remedies include the courts of law, quasi-judicial procedures such as administrative tribunals and the various Ombudsmen that now exist. A third desirable component of the education of the public servant is policy analysis, through which the student gains an understanding of how public policies are generated, determined, implemented, reviewed and revised.
Other aspects of government can be taught jointly with students preparing for business management provided that it is recognised that students from each sector can profitably learn from the other. The right-wing managerialist belief that public servants can and should learn from business but that there are few if any lessons to be learnt in the other direction, is fallacious. Introducing his comparative study of European public management, Fred Ridley declared that New Public Management ‘reflected an absolute conviction that business was efficient, public administration not’ (1996: 16). In reality, both businessmen and public administrators can benefit from learning from one another. For instance, public agencies and professions, notably spatial planners, have developed models of strategic planning and management that are both highly sophisticated and successful in use (Friend and Jessop, 1969; Friend et al., 1973; Friend and Hickling, 1987). These models potentially have considerable value for use in business organisations, especially large ones, as well as in central government and local authority planning departments. Indeed, there is a possibility that since most public authorities are far larger than most businesses, there is likely to be valid public service experience in how to run large organisations that could be valuable to large and expanding businesses.
One area where the public sector has learnt much from the private sector and can probably learn more is marketing and advertising. Effective public campaigns through advertisements and media appearances may secure greater public involvement in government decision-making, although a sceptical public needs to be convinced that their comments will be heeded and influence the final outcome. However, the dangers to the good estate of the polity that arise from excessive reliance on public relations and ‘spin’ also need to be discussed during these courses. Lastly, in finance and budgeting, local authorities have been forced under the pressure of successive waves of expenditure cuts demanded by central governments to develop budgetary strategies from which businesses could also learn. In any case, it is widely acknowledged that local authorities prepare budgets with a precision that businesses do not attempt to emulate (Elcock et al., 1989).
There is no reason why these course components should not form part of a wider business education syllabus nor need they necessarily be taught outside Business Schools, but there is a need to establish specialist public management units within or outside such Schools in order to ensure that the necessary courses can be taught wholly or partly by specialist experts in public administration and management. There is also a requirement to recognise that the accountability of public servants imposes ethical and other demands on them that are not imposed on their business management colleagues.
The good life
The ultimate goal for the ancient Greeks was the achievement of areti (virtue or excellence), the nature of which is to be determined by debate and contemplation, hence Plato’s view that the ideal rulers would be philosophers because they have the leisure to debate and determine the nature of areti. For Plato, the four cardinal virtues were courage, wisdom, discipline and justice in both state and individual. Catholic social teaching likewise stresses the importance of collective ideals, notably solidarity and the common good, together with subsidiarity: In the context of constitutional reform, we would draw attention to the importance of treating the connection between subsidiarity and solidarity, two fundamental and inseparable principles of the body of teaching. Subsidiarity should never be made an excuse for selfishness nor promoted at the expense of the common good or to the detriment of the poorest and most vulnerable sections of the community. (CBC, 1996: 13–14)
To these virtues are to be added charity and the recognition of human dignity and justice, together with the fair distribution of assets. Hence, the issue of discovering the motives that drive the work of maintaining and servicing society were to be sought by exploring them beyond the immediate preoccupations of workers in whatever field they function in. Given the ethical obligations imposed on public servants, especially by their accountability to the citizens and their representatives, the issue of what proper motives are, is particularly important to them. Michael Sandel (2009: II: 5) has argued that to determine the right way of thinking we have to figure out the purpose, the goal of the social practice in question.
Plato treats trade and commerce as ‘mechanical’ but the motives that drive civil servants, businessmen and all other workers need not necessarily be so. The danger into which present day societies have fallen is to ignore the higher purposes of our activities. Livingstone usefully summarises Plato’s view: …it is not trade or commerce that is to blame but those who carry them on … The misfortune is that their occupations are practised by people who have forgotten the real purpose of commerce and regard it merely as a means of making money – and in general of making too much … Practised properly, that is disinterestedly and for their own sake, they become a field for the exercise of human areti. (1935: 112–113. following Plato, The Laws, 918)
Sandel (2009: IV: 3) argued in politics that a search for idealism exists: ‘for all the shenanigans and misdeeds of politicians, … they are engaged in what potentially is a noble exercise and they do, most of them, make great sacrifices to engage in it’. A current application of the principle of areti is that elected representatives must seek election to pursue their ideals, not just to satisfy their supporters and financial backers, or to milk the system for as much money as possible. Almost all politicians begin their careers with such ideals but a few are distracted from them by ambition, cupidity or the distractions of luxurious living.
The justice of this complaint is all too apparent in the unjustifiable inequalities of modern developed societies, together with the reckless profit seeking behaviour that produced the banking crisis of 2007–2008, just as it led to the Great Crash of 1929 (Elliott and Atkinson, 2008; Galbraith, 1961). However, The aim of a journalist may either be to enlarge the circulation of a newspaper or to give readers a true and intelligent picture of the world; of a lawyer either to extend his practice or to help justice to be done; of a businessman either to grow rich or to play his part as a ‘nurse’ of the community. (Livingstone, 1935: 113)
One can only say to modern pursuers of these and other activities: If the cap fits, wear it. They need to consider how to develop proper motivations. In the public services competent, disinterested work is required to serve the public interest, rather than directing one’s effort simply to securing the next promotion and the next salary hike. Such are the foundations of areti.
Improved education and training are not enough on their own. Over the last 30 years, many of the defences against venality and corruption in government have been weakened or entirely removed. This trend now needs to be at least partially reversed, not only to ensure that public servants are deterred from wrongdoing and appropriately punished when they succumb to temptation but also to assist in restoring public confidence in the integrity and honesty of those who govern them. The rules governing the post-retirement employment of Ministers and civil servants by private companies with whose affairs they dealt with while in government must be strengthened: former Ministers and senior civil servants should be disbarred from serving on company boards for a minimum of three years after their terms of Government office have expired. Attempts to arrange lucrative opportunities for their retirement must be sternly punished. This used to be an offence resulting in dismissal and should become so again (see Chapman, 1988b: chapter 4). Ideally, senior civil service pensions should be non-contributory, so that their holders have no right to their pensions and can be deprived of them in the event of their being convicted of misconduct. Expenses systems for MPs and others must be rendered as proof against abuse as possible; they must also be open and subject to independent audit. All these things and more must be done not only as a guard against misconduct but also to convince the public that honesty among their governors has been restored.
Conclusion
The conclusion of this reminder of the ancients’ teaching has to be that teachers and researchers of Politics and Public Administration have a particular responsibility to point out where mistakes or worse have been made, important ethical principles have been lost sight of and education courses have failed to inculcate the appropriate ethical standards and empirical knowledge that are the essential prerequisites to enable those engaged in the government of the country to serve it well. It behoves the Political Studies Association and the Public Administration Committee to campaign for the restoration of the values of public service and the renewed provision of education and training courses appropriate to that end. Academics can use the writings of Plato and Aristotle to define the problems which must be dealt with if confidence in the honesty and integrity of politics and government are to be restored, but the solutions proposed must be appropriate for the needs of 21st century government. The need now is to secure the support of the Government and other public service agencies for such a programme.