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unopposed. Invoking a perhaps simplistic dichotomy à la Isaiah Berlin (1953; 1969), we may draw a distinction between two fundamental political traditions in Western political thought; the absolutists, who, for fear of political chaos, believe that all power should be united in one individual or group of individuals, and the constitutionalists, who believe that all power should be checked, lest the rulers arrogate to themselves powers to which they are not entitled. Among the former we may cite Plato, Hobbes, Jean Bodin, Robert Filmer, Karl Marx, Carl Schmidt and Lenin
incisive examination by Uday Mehta of the focal presence of the Indian colony in the shaping of the very premises of dominant political thought in nineteenth-century Britain, revealing the significance of empire in structuring the “anthropological” propensities of liberal theory. At stake are liberal thought’s fundamental “strategies of exclusion,” resting on projections of the
. 79–110 . 10 This pervasive, “meta-geographical” projection appears elaborated in several ways, from the evidently aggressive to the seemingly benign, embedded of course in “modernization” theory, yet also long lodged within the interstices of Western social and political thought. The way all this
supposed argument and philosophy, can never be part of a wise magistrate. (Hume 1985: 512) As would be expected, historians of the ideas have rightly seen traces of this dichotomy throughout the history of Western political thought. Plato, Augustin, Descartes, Hobbes, di Campanella, Voltaire, Marx and Comte were – in various degrees – ‘constructivists’, whereas Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Burke and Hume could be categorised in the opposite camp. Rousseau has hitherto been unequivocally placed among the former. Hayek, to mention but one writer, thus sees a chain of ‘design