Power and Morality

Different political systems as observed in the past and the guiding principles derived from them are discussed. These systems differ essentially in that the competing political goals such as peace, freedom, justice, security, and prosperity are weighted differently; accordingly, the resulting compromises are regarded as the best possible solutions. There is a limitation to a few examples from the history of European ideas and economy, beginning with the model of the “polis” and that of man as a “zoon politicon”. This model is realised in an Italian city state of the fourteenth century. The allegorical representation of “good and bad government” serves as the framework for this. We go back to the Renaissance, to the Tuscan city of Siena. Here, the most important virtues of good government and the vices of bad government are described in the masterful frescoes by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the Palazzo Pubblico. The frescoes impressively show the consequences of government action for the common good of the population. Later, the basic features of an economic policy system were developed that played a special role in the politics of the young national and territorial states of the 16th to eighteenth centuries, that of mercantilism. The primary goal of this system was to strengthen government power. Economic prosperity as a goal, in contrast, was in most countries only a means of strengthening state power in the context of an expansive and aggressive foreign policy. Mercantilism was criticised by the physiocrats and the English and Scottish philosophers and social economists, who formulated the economic policy model of liberalism as a positive response. It was based on individualistic and utilitarian ideas of norms. They provided the goal and the standard of value: the happiness and welfare of individuals in society. The system of economic freedom for which they thus provided the justification had its harshest critic in Karl Marx, a student of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel who had emigrated to England. Marx, who knew the teachings of Henri de Saint-Simon as well as those of the English classics, refrained from developing a model of the order that would follow the collapse of capitalism he prophesied, but the system of the Soviet planned economy was one of the possible expressions of a Marxist model in the tradition of Hegel and Saint-Simon. While the Soviet Union took the path of central planning, policies in Germany and some other countries took on mercantilist features after the world economic crisis in 1929. In response to this neo-mercantilism and the selective interventionism that preceded it and that is still relevant today as dirigism, the model of neoliberalism emerged. One variant of neoliberalism, which was seen as a model for state policy in Western Germany after 1948, is the idea of the social market economy. The concepts of human dignity and human rights are on everyone's lips today. But they have a long history behind them. Worth mentioning here are the treatises during the Renaissance on the “excellentia hominis” and the “miseria hominis”. Of course, the Enlightenment and natural law were of particular importance. Today we see the theory of human rights as a response to political absolutism in the eighteenth century, and the concept of human dignity as a response to the experience of absolute terror in the twentieth century.