The Needs of Strangers by Michael Ignatieff

Author:Michael Ignatieff
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466889064
Publisher: Picador

4 ∙ THE MARKET AND THE REPUBLIC

In civilized society [a man] stands at all times

in need of the co-operation and assistance of great

multitudes, while his whole life is scarce

sufficient to gain the friendship of a few friends.

SMITH

Keeping citizens apart has become

the first maxim of modern politics.

ROUSSEAU

Political utopias are a form of nostalgia for an imagined past projected on to the future as a wish. Whenever I try to imagine a future other than the one towards which we seem to be hurtling, I find myself dreaming a dream of the past. It is the vision of the classical polis – the city-state of ancient Greece and renaissance Italy – which beckons me backwards, as it were, into the future. No matter that Greek democracy was built upon the institution of slavery; no matter that the Italian city-states were feuding and unequal oligarchies. Utopias never have to make their excuses to history; like all dreams they have a timeless immunity to disappointment in real life. The polis would continue to beckon us forward out of the past even if no actual polis had ever existed.

Its human dimensions beckon us still: small enough so that each person would know his neighbour and could play his part in the governance of the city, large enough so that the city could feed itself and defend itself; a place of intimate bonding in which the private sphere of the home and family and the public sphere of civic democracy would be but one easy step apart; a community of equals in which each would have enough and no one would want more than enough; a co-operative venture in which work would be a form of collaboration among equals. Small, co-operative, egalitarian, self-governing and autarkic: these are the conditions of belonging that the dream of the polis has bequeathed to us.

It was in the late eighteenth century that the classical republican ideal of a polity that was master of itself first confronted the reality of a world capitalist economy. As David Hume lay dying in the house overlooking St Andrew’s Square in those lingering summer months of 1776, the first battles of the American War of Independence were being fought in the fields and lanes of Massachusetts thousands of miles away. As heirs of the classical republican ideal, the Americans were steeped in the precept that economic and political independence were necessary to each other. In their struggle against the Navigation Acts, they were attempting much more than protecting the sectional interests of their seaboard merchants: they were trying to realize the classical republican ideal in a global imperial market.

By the late eighteenth century too, European penetration of the primitive world was transforming the needs of non-Europeans, drawing them inexorably into dependence on Western goods. The people who came to trade furs and fish in return for beads and guns and alcohol were – to many Europeans – like the primitive Adam, exchanging the plenitude and innocence of Eden for the terrible knowledge of good and evil and eternal subjection to the craving for more.

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