Archive for February 1st, 2010
Peaceful pluralism and nonkilling policy
By Jennie S. Bev
The world of politics is based on violence, within which killing — as a form of violence — is a major component in gaining and maintaining power.
Throughout the history of political philosophy, from Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Politics, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Hobbes’s Leviathan, Locke’s Two Treaties of Government, Rousseau’s The Social Contract, Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto, to Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation,” all agreed that killing is a necessary form of force used in a power struggle, if not as a last resort.
Weber even defined “a modern state” as a “human community that claims the monopoly use of physical force within a given territory.” He also added: “He who seeks the salvation of the soul, of his own and that of others, should not seek it along the avenue of politics, for the quite different tasks of politics can only be solved by violence.” Read the rest of this entry »
