In memory of David Miller ‘The science of political right is yet to be born, and it is to be presumed that it never will be born.’ JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU, Emile, Book V ‘The science of politics is in its infancy.’ MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman ‘All faiths constitute a revelation of Truth, but all are imperfect and liable to error. Reverence for other faiths need not blind us to their faults.’ M. K. GANDHI, From Yeravda Mandir, Chapter X CONTENTS Epigraph INTRODUCTION: The fatal blandishing I PERICLES (495 BC–429 BC) and the invention of democracy II JESUS (7/2 BC–AD 30/33) and the brotherhood of man III JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU (1712–78) and the self supreme IV ADAM SMITH (1723–90) and the invisible hand V EDMUND BURKE (1729–97) and the stickiness of society VI THOMAS JEFFERSON (1743–1826) and the endless revolution VII JEREMY BENTHAM (1748–1832) and the management of happiness VIII MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT (1759–97) and the rights of woman – and men too IX GIUSEPPE MAZZINI (1805–72) and the religion of nationhood X KARL MARX (1818–83) and the death of capitalism XI MOHANDAS GANDHI (1869–1948) and the non-violent path XII MUHAMMAD IQBAL (1877–1938) and the dream of Islam FINALE: In praise of trade-off List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Select Bibliography Index INTRODUCTION THE FATAL BLANDISHING There is a chamber cut into the rock face at Mount Rushmore. Inside it you can see the texts of the American Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States reproduced on porcelain enamel panels. On the cliff above, Thomas Jefferson, the author of that Declaration, stares out over the Dakota plains in lofty serenity. Of the four presidents carved on Mount Rushmore, only Jefferson can lay claim to be a great political thinker. How his opening lines still sing out to us: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’ Yet at the time, Jefferson’s Declaration didn’t make much of a splash. The acidulous John Adams, later to become president with Jefferson as his Veep, called it ‘a commonplace compilation, its sentiments hacknied in Congress for two years before’. Three hundred miles away in Richmond, some weeks earlier, the Commonwealth of Virginia had already drafted its own Declaration of Rights, in wording almost identical to Jefferson’s, down to Life, Liberty and the pursuing of Happiness. The Virginia Declaration was mostly written by George Mason, of whom nobody much outside Virginia has heard (he’s not even the original of the Mason–Dixon Line). As for the Constitution of the United States, Jefferson was in Paris the whole time it was being drafted, and he didn’t think much of the text when they sent it to him. Yet it is Jefferson who still hogs the imperishable glory of inventing American democracy. In the same way, it is to Jeremy Bentham that posterity has awarded the credit for the coining of that indelible mantra of the Utilitarians: ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’. Years later, Bentham wrote an excited account of his discovery of the phrase, talking of himself in the third person, as great men sometimes do. Browsing in the library of Harper’s coffee house near his Oxford college, Queen’s (he was a child prodigy and the youngest undergraduate the university had ever had), he had chanced upon the phrase in a pamphlet by the great scientist-philosopher Dr Joseph Priestley: ‘At the sight of it he cried out, as it were in an inward ecstasy like Archimedes on the discovery of the fundamental principles of hydrostatics, Eureka.’ As it happens, the actual phrase occurs nowhere in Priestley’s works, although something like it can be found there and in the writings of earlier philosophers all over Europe, including the Italian Beccaria, the French Helvétius and the Irish Francis Hutcheson. Not quite such a eureka moment then. Sometimes it is not the authorship but the circumstances of the resonant phrase that are not quite what they seem. There’s no doubt about who composed that unforgettable opening line of The Communist Manifesto: ‘A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism.’ Karl Marx dashed the whole thing off in six weeks, with a little sub-editing from Friedrich Engels. But what a huge claim it makes. In reality, the Communist League was only a few months old, having just changed its name from the League of the Just, itself a fairly insignificant group of revolutionary émigrés, many of whom weren’t sure they wanted a manifesto at all. It was only after a bad-tempered wrangle at the League’s Congress in Soho at the beginning of December 1847 that Marx and Engels secured the commission to write one. Neither the League nor the manifesto played much part in the revolutions that swept across Europe in 1848, except in Germany. After further internal wrangles, the League disbanded in 1852, and the manifesto disappeared from view until the 1880s. Far from haunting the minds of a continent, communism was mostly haunting the minds of Marx and Engels. They were not reporting the existence of a spectre, they were setting out to create one. There is a larger audacity, a more boundless presumption about the manifesto. At the time when Marx issued his final trumpet call – ‘Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!’ – he had scarcely met any flesh-and-blood workers. A lawyer’s son from the prosperous Jewish bourgeoisie of the Rhineland, he had mixed almost exclusively with philosophers and journalists. At the age of nearly thirty, he knew nothing of industrial life. How could he be sure that the workers of the world would ever wish to unite across national boundaries (as 1914 was to prove so calamitously, they didn’t)? How could he claim to have any legitimate clue about what sort of society they might wish to live in? Giuseppe Mazzini was equally ignorant of his huge target audience when he sent out a stream of clarion calls for a united Italy from his hideout in an attic above a Chelsea post office. Before he had been exiled to England, he had scarcely seen anything of Italy outside his native Genoa. When he became