பிரெஞ்சு நாட்டில் 1689 ஜனவரி 18ம் நாள் பிறந்த மாண்டஸ்க்யூ தத்துவ ஞானியாக மட்டுமில்லாமல் அரசியல் அறிவியலுக்கு வித்திட்டவர். ஆட்சி மோகம் பற்றியும், அதிகாரங்களுடைய பிரிவினைகள் குறித்தும் உலகத்துக்கு முதன்முதலாக எடுத்துச் சொன்னவர் தான் மாண்டஸ்க்யூ.
ஜனநாயகம் பூஞ்சோலையாகச் செழிக்க வேண்டுமென்றால் ஆட்சியாளர்கள் நாடாளுமன்றம் நீதித்துறை ஆகியவை சுதந்திரமாக தங்களுக்கென வரையறுக்கப்பட்ட அதிகாரத்திற்கு உட்பட்டு மற்ற துறைகள் மீது ஆதிக்கம் செலுத்தாமல் நேர்மையாக செயல்படவேண்டும் என்பதுதான் அவருடைய அடிப்படைக் கோட்பாடு.
இந்த கோட்பாட்டில் என்ன முக்கியம் உள்ளதென்று பலர் நினைக்கலாம். அரசியல் அடிப்படைகளும், வரையறைகளும் இல்லாத நேரத்தில் நிலைகளைச் சமன்செய்து வழிவகுப்பது சாதாரண செய்தி அல்ல. அந்த வகையில் அரசியல் என்பது ஒரு விஞ்ஞானம் தான்.
ஒரு கட்டுக்குள் மக்களுக்காக மக்களால் நிறுவப்பட்டு மக்களாட்சியாக அமைய வேண்டுமென்று மாபெரும் தத்துவங்களை நிலைநாட்டி நாட்டில் மாண்புகளைப் பெருகச் செய்து இன்றைக்கு இந்த அளவுக்கு அரசியல் அமைப்புகள் தோன்றியிருக்கிறது என்றால் அதற்கு மாண்டஸ்க்யூவின் கொள்கைகளும் கோட்பாடுகளும் தான் அடிப்படையாக இருந்தது.
இன்றைக்கு ஆட்சிக்கு வருகிறவர்கள் எல்லாம் அரசியல் அறிவு எதுவுமில்லாமலே பதவிக்கு வந்துவிடுகிறார்கள். ஒரு பொறியல் துறையில் கற்றவர்தான் பொறியாளராக முடியும், மருத்துவம் படித்தவர் தான் மருத்துவராக முடியும், ஆசிரியப் பயிற்சிப்பணி முடித்திருந்தால் தான் ஆசிரியராக முடியும்.
ஆனால் அரசியலில் மாண்டஸ்க்யூவைப் பற்றி தெரிய வேண்டியதில்லை. சாக்ரடீஸ், அரிஸ்டாட்டில், மாக்யவல்லி பற்றியெல்லாம் தெரிந்துகொள்ள தேவை இல்லை, கிரேக்க இத்தாலிய, எகிப்திய பண்டைய அரசுகள் பற்றியெல்லாம் எந்த அரசியல் களத்திலிருப்பவ்ர்களுக்குத் தெரியுமென்று நமக்குத் தெரியாது.
பிரிட்டிஷ் வரலாற்றில் நடந்த மேக்னகர்ட்டா வரலாறு, பிரிட்டிஷ் நாடாளுமன்ற வரலாறு, பில் ஆஃப் ரைட்ஸ் என்பதெல்லாம் இன்றைய அரசியலின் அடிப்படைக் கூறுகள். இன்னும் சொல்லப்போனால் நமது உத்திரமேரூர் கல்வெட்டில் உள்ள குடவோலை முறை வரலாறாவது நமது அரசியலாளர்களுக்குத் தெரியுமா என்பது சந்தேகம்.
இப்படியான அரசியல் கோட்பாடுகள் இன்றைய அரசியலுக்குத் தேவையில்லை. பசை போட்ட வெள்ளை உடைகளும், பெரிய கார்களும் இருந்தால் மட்டுமே அரசியல்வாதியாவதற்கு போதுமானது. அதுவே அரசியலுக்குத் தேவையான உபகரணங்களும் அடையாளங்களுமாகிவிட்டன. இதனை யார் சரி செய்யவேண்டும்? மக்கள் தானே சரி செய்யவேண்டும்.
பிரெஞ்சுப் புரட்சி எப்படி எழுந்தது? பசியாலும் பட்டினியாலும் வாடிய மக்கள் “ரொட்டித்துண்டு உண்ணக் கொடுங்கள்” என்று கேட்டபொழுது,
அந்நாட்டு அரசி மேரி ஆண்டாய்நெட் மக்களைப் பரிகாசித்து, “கேக் வாங்கிச் சாப்பிடுங்கள்” என்று சொன்னதனால் தானே அந்த புரட்சி எழுந்தது. அதனால் தானே வால்டேரும் ரூஸோவும் தங்கள் எழுத்துகளால் மக்களை பக்குவப் படுத்தினார்கள்.
அரசியல் நேர்மையற்று போய்விட்டால் கண்ணகி நீதிகேட்டு எரித்த மதுரையின் கொடுமை தானே நடக்கும். இப்படியான வரலாறுகள் எல்லாம் எத்தனை அரசியல் பொறுப்பாளர்களுக்குத் தெரியும்.
மாண்டஸ்க்யூவைப் பற்றிச் சொன்னபோது ஒரு நண்பர் என்னிடம், “உங்களுக்கு வேறு வேலை இல்லையா. ஆளை விடுங்கள், எனக்கு மாண்டஸ்க்யூவைத் தெரியாது, மெக் டொனால்ட் தான் தெரியும்” என்றார். இதை எங்கே சொல்லி முட்டிக்கொள்ள.
மாண்டஸ்க்யூ கோட்பாடுகள் குறித்து ஆயிரக்கணக்கான பக்கங்களுக்கு மேலாக ஆய்வுகள் செய்யப்பட்டுள்ளன. இவருடைய தத்துவங்களையும், படைப்புகளையும் இன்றைக்கும் உலகளவில் ஆயிரக்கணக்கானோர் ஆய்வு நடத்தி வருகின்றனர்.
மாண்டஸ்க்யூவின் மற்றொரு படைப்பான “தி ஸ்பிரிட் ஆஃப் லா” நூலினை வாசித்தாலே போதும் அரசியலின் தன்மையும் புரிதலும் முழுமையாக நமக்குத் தெரிந்துவிடும்.
Montesquieu- Lust of Power
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Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (18 January 1689 – 10 February 1755), also known as Charles de Montesquieu, was a French political thinker who lived during the Enlightenment and is famous for his articulation of the theory of separation of powers.
The theory of separation of powers,that is executive-legislature-judiciary must function separately without any interference and independently with the respective wings,the powers inherited in democracy. Then only fruitful democracy will survive, This sovereignty of state vested with people will be in a rightful direction. Abe Lincoln's wish Government "of the people, by the people, for the people" will be worked out.Even we can relate it with Oscar Wilde quote " Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people".
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Lust of Power
- George H. Smith
Smith explains how the insatiable desire for power and its corrupting influence have been dominant themes in libertarian theory and history.
In Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’État and Its Place in Modern History (English translation, 1957), Friedrich Meinecke wrote:
The striving for power is an aboriginal human impulse, perhaps even an animal impulse, which blindly snatches at everything around until it comes up against some external barriers. And, in the case of men at least, the impulse is not restricted solely to what is directly necessary for life and health. Man takes a wholehearted pleasure in power itself and, through it, in himself and his heightened personality. Next to hunger and love, pleonexia is the most powerful elemental and influential impulse in man.
The lust for power has been an important and recurring theme in western historiography. Tacitus (c. 55 - c.117) mentioned it repeatedly in his Annals of Imperial Rome, as when he suggested that “the motive of Octavian, the future Augustus, was lust for power”; that Lucius Marcus Sejanus (a hatchet man for the emperor Tiberius) “concealed behind a carefully modest exterior an unbounded lust for power”; and that “Drusus Caesar’s degraded character was animated by power-lust.”
Tacitus was greatly admired by eighteenth-century historians, so it is not surprising that many of them emphasized the desire for power as a significant factor throughout history. This passage from Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is typical: “Of all our passions and appetites, the love of power is of the most imperious and unsociable nature, since the pride of one man requires the submission of the multitude.”
The works of Tacitus were known to many eighteenth-century Americans through the translation (1731) of Thomas Gordon, a radical whig who earlier had co-authored (with John Trenchard) the libertarian classic, Cato’s Letters. (Thomas Jefferson owned three sets of Gordon’s translation, two of which he donated to the Library of Congress in 1815.) What made Gordon’s edition of Tacitus especially appealing was his own “Political Discourse Upon that Author,” a lengthy commentary that repeatedly warned against the temptations and dangers of power. Tacitus, according to Gordon, was “zealous for public liberty,” a “declared enemy to Tyrants,” and a historian “of extraordinary wisdom.” It is by reading Tacitus that we learn the invaluable lesson that only “treachery” will cause a free people to submit to tyranny. According to Jefferson, Tacitus was “the first writer in the world without a single exception.”
Thomas Gordon also translated The Works of Sallust (1743), in which we find the phrase “the ardent lust of domination.” This phrase caught the attention of Edward Wortley Montague, who presented an interesting analysis of the lust for power in Reflections on the Rise and Fall of the Ancient Republics Adapted to the Present State of Great Britain (1759). The “lust of domination, here mentioned by Sallust, though generally confounded with ambition, is in reality a different passion.” Ambition, which is a passion that “attends us from the cradle to the grave,” stems from “the desire of pre-eminence, the fondness for being distinguished above the rest of our fellow creatures”; and the nature of a specific ambition will vary according to “the different objects it pursues.”
The lust of domination is more general than mere ambition. It is a mode of “selfishness” whereby we attempt “to draw every thing to center in ourselves, which we think will enable us to gratify every other passion.” Montague goes on to argue that “selfishness” differs fundamentally from “self-love.”
[I]f we rightly define these two principles, we shall find an essential difference between our ideas of self-love and selfishness. Self-love, within its due bounds, is the practice of the great duty of self-preservation, regulated by that law which the great Author of our being has given for that very end. Self-love, therefore, is not only compatible with the most rigid practice of the social duties, but is in fact a great motive and incentive to the practice of all moral virtue. Whereas selfishness, by reducing every thing to the single point of private interest, a point which it never loses sight of, banishes all the social virtues, and is the first spring of action, which impels to all those disorders, which are so fatal to mixed Governments in particular, and to society in general.
It is the selfish lust of domination, not the rational motive of self-love, that will transform the most mild government into the “most insupportable tyranny.” A man motivated by that “destructive passion” will need the assistance of like-minded people” to serve as “subordinate instruments” in his pursuit of power, and this will require that he “put on as many shapes as Proteus.”
[H]e must ever wear the mask of dissimulation, and live a perpetual lie. He will court the friendship of every man, who is capable of promoting, and endeavor to crush every man, who is capable of defeating his ambitious views. Thus his friendship and his enmity will be alike unreal, and easily convertible, if the change will serve his interest.
Montague’s analysis—which was quoted at length by James Burgh in his influential three-volume work, Political Disquisitions (1774)—was an effort to explain how the lust for power, if not held in check, will invariably corrupt rulers. “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” When Lord Acton penned this celebrated aphorism in the late nineteenth century, he was summarizing a theme that had been widely discussed and carefully analyzed by earlier classical liberals, radical whigs, and libertarians generally. As Bernard Bailyn noted in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (an indispensable book for libertarians), the “systematic” problem of the lust for power and its corrupting tendencies was regarded by eighteenth-century Americans as applicable to “mankind in general.”
And the point they hammered home time and again, and agreed on—freethinking Anglican literati no less than neo-Calvinist theologians—was the incapacity of the species, of mankind in general, to withstand the temptations of power. Such is “the depravity of mankind,” Samuel Adams, speaking for the Boston Town Meeting, declared, “that ambition and lust of power above the law are…predominant passions in the breasts of most men.”
Quoting from various contemporary American sources, Bailyn continued:
These are instincts that have “in all nations combined the worst passions of the human heart and the worst projects of the human mind in league against the liberties of mankind.” Power always and everywhere had had a pernicious, corrupting effect upon men. It “converts a good man in private life to a tyrant in office.” It acts upon men like drink: it “is known to be intoxicating in its nature:—too intoxicating and liable to abuse.” And nothing within man is sufficiently strong to guard against these effects of power—certainly not “the united considerations of reason and religion,” for they have never “been sufficiently powerful to restrain these lusts of men.”
As indicated by Bailyn’s reference to “neo-Calvinist theologians,” the ubiquitous problem of power-lust was discussed in ancient Christian as well as in pagan sources. In The City of God, for example, Augustine argued that “lust for power in arrogant hearts” was responsible for much of the moral corruption in Rome and played a significant role in its decline. Indeed, before Christianity became the state religion of Rome in the fourth century, Christian theologians took pride in contrasting the voluntary institutions of the Christian community with the coercive institutions of the Roman state. Tertullian argued that “all secular power and dignities are not merely alien from, but hostile to, God.” Secular governments “owe their existences to the sword.” All institutions of the Roman government, even its charities, were based on brute force. This is contrary to the way of Christians, among whom “everything is voluntary.” Rather than rely on coercive taxation, Christians contributed voluntarily “to support the destitute, and to pay for their burial expenses; to supply the needs of boys and girls lacking money and power, and of old people confined to the home.” Christians “do not hesitate to share our earthly goods with one another.”
Minucius Felix maintained that the Roman Empire began as a pact between criminals and murderers. The Romans acquired their power by “capturing, raping, and enslaving their victims.” John Chrysostom contrasted the use of force with the Christian community, in which “the wrongdoer must be corrected not by force, but by persuasion.”
Of all the sources that influenced how eighteenth-century Americans viewed power and its dangers, none was more influential than Cato’s Letters, a series of newspaper articles written during the 1720’s by the Englishman John Trenchard and the Scot Thomas Gordon. These articles, which were largely a popular presentation of the radical whig ideology found in John Locke and Algernon Sidney, are commonly viewed by historians as the greatest single influence on American political thought prior to the Revolutionary War. A complete collection of these articles was published in four volumes, and individual pieces were reprinted time and again in American newspapers. Then as now, the average person was not inclined to read weighty philosophical tomes, but the colonials did love their newspapers, and it was through this popular medium that Americans found many spirited passages about the lust for power. Here, from Letter #33, is one example among many.
Power is naturally active, vigilant, and distrustful; which qualities in it push it upon all means and expedients to fortify itself, and upon destroying all opposition, and even all seeds of opposition, and make it restless as long as any thing stands in its way. It would do what it pleases, and have no check. Now, because liberty chastises and shortens power, therefore power would extinguish liberty; and consequently liberty has too much cause to be exceeding jealous, and always upon her defence. Power has many advantages over her; it has generally numerous guards, many creatures, and much treasure; besides, it has more craft and experience, less honesty and innocence: And whereas power can, and for the most part does, subsist where liberty is not, liberty cannot subsist without power; so that she has, as it were, the enemy always at her gates.
As we shall see in subsequent essays, the unending struggle between liberty and power became the conceptual framework for many histories written by classical liberals and libertarians. As Lord Acton, the dean of liberal historians, put it, the “struggle for the concentration of power and for the limitation and division of power is the mainspring of history.”
"Experience constantly proves that every man who has power is
impelled to abuse it " - Montesquieu
impelled to abuse it " - Montesquieu
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