Political Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction

Chapter 7 Nations, states, and global justice

In the last chapter, we explored some basic questions about the scope both of political authority and of justice. We asked what made some human relationships political, and others not, and we asked whether the idea of justice could be applied to relationships between men and women in the domestic sphere, and to relationships between different cultural groups within a society. This chapter will also be about the scope of politics and justice, but now we will be looking outwards rather than inwards. We will be asking whether the political units we are most familiar with — nation-states — have now outlived their usefulness, and whether we ought to be thinking of politics as something that takes place on an international or even global scale. And we will also examine what justice might mean at a level beyond the nation-state: can we think in terms of global justice, and if so are the principles that apply at this level fundamentally different from the ones that apply within national political communities?

These questions about scope and scale are not just technical. The way human beings interact with one another changes quite fundamentally as we move up from small face-to-face groups where each person knows the others as individuals, to large societies where our knowledge of most other people is of a general kind — we know them only as types, or categories — and we gain our knowledge indirectly, through reports in the media, for instance. It is worth backtracking a little to look at how the city of Siena functioned in the days of Lorenzetti, our mural painter. By comparison with the political units that dominate the world today — nation-states — its scope was tiny. Beyond the city proper, Siena had jurisdiction over an area not more than 30 miles in radius from its centre, covering small towns, villages, and countryside. The total population of this political unit has been estimated to have reached a maximum of about 100,000 people before the Black Death struck in 1348; of these about half lived in the city itself, and only a minority of residents qualified for citizenship. So Lorenzetti, whose Allegory of Good and Bad Government has many features that identify it with Siena, was portraying a political community whose political leaders would be known personally to many of the citizens, and who would be seen from day to day going about their business within the city walls. The General Council, made up of representatives from each part of the city, was summoned by a town crier and by the ringing of a bell. When we describe this as a political community, we mean exactly what we say.

Political philosophy as we understand it today first arose in these small-scale political communities — most notably in classical Athens. Here the body of citizens was in control of its own destiny, at least as far as the internal life of the city went, so there was a great deal of point in asking questions about the best form of government, about the qualities that good rulers should posses, about the meaning of justice, and so forth. Perhaps city-states of this kind provided human beings with the best opportunity they have ever had to govern themselves well — to achieve freedom, justice, and democracy. So why have they not survived? The answer is that city-states like Athens and Siena were always vulnerable to being captured and absorbed by larger units; they had constantly to be willing to fight to preserve their independence, and to do this they had to form shaky alliances with neighbouring cities, which might succeed for a time, but in the longer term proved incapable of resisting more centralized empires: Athens succumbed to Philip of Macedonia, while Siena, after preserving a modicum of independence by putting itself under the protection of nearby rulers such as the duke of Milan, was finally conquered by the Spanish Emperor Charles V. City-states did not fail because of their internal deficiencies, but because of their external weakness in the face of invading armies.

The political unit that proved capable of resisting imperial power while still embodying some of the virtues of the city-state was the nation-state. This was formed on a much larger scale, involving millions of people occupying a large geographical area, with the institutions of the state itself — the parliament, court, government, military command, etc. — concentrated in the capital city, but it could still make some claim to be a political community because its members thought of themselves as belonging to a distinct people or nation, separate from their neighbours. For this to happen, there had to be media of communication that brought the many localities that made up the nation-state into contact with one another, telling the people in each what the others were thinking and doing. The historian Benedict Anderson has for this reason called nations ‘imagined communities’: unlike face-to-face communities, their very existence depends on a collective act of imagination. People had to learn to see themselves as French, or American, or Japanese, not just as family members or residents of a particular town.

But do nations really exist? Or are they not just imagined but entirely imaginary? Is there anything that genuinely differentiates the people who live on one side of a national boundary from their counterparts on the other side? Dean Inge once said that ‘a nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by a common hatred of its neighbours’. Like most good quotations, this one contains more than a grain of truth. National identities very often do emerge out of antagonism towards some neighbouring people: being British was once very much a matter of not being French, as today being Scottish is a matter of not being English, and being Canadian a matter of not being American. Nations also typically develop myths about themselves — about their unique moral or cultural qualities, about their past military or political (or sporting) achievements, and so forth. None the less national identity is not simply illusory and it serves good purposes as well as bad. The groups we call nations share, in nearly all cases, a common language, a history of living together over time, and cultural traits that are expressed not only in literary form but also in the physical environment — in the way towns and cities are built, in the pattern of the landscape, in monuments, religious buildings, and the like. When new generations are brought up in those cultural and physical surroundings, they cannot help being shaped by this common heritage — even if they rebel against many aspects of it.

_{16. Canadians rally for national unity against Quebec separatism, Montreal 1995.}

The influence of national culture is particularly strong in the case of nations that have states of their own, because here cultural transmission takes places through the laws, the institutions of government, the education system, and the national media, as well as through the informal channels just mentioned. Nation and state reinforce one another — the power of the state is used to strengthen national identity, while people who are tied together in this way are more willing to accept a common political authority and rally to its defence when it is attacked. This explains why nation-states have proved to be relatively successful as political units: they are large enough not to be engulfed by imperial armies, yet at the same time they can call upon the loyalty of their members when resistance is necessary.

There is, of course, a downside to this loyalty. When nation-states fight one another, as they did in the two world wars of the 20th century, they can inflict death and suffering on a scale that would have been unthinkable in earlier periods, where wars were most often fought primarily by mercenary armies in the service of empires. So to defend the nation-state as a political unit, it is not enough to highlight its military capacities. We need to say something more about what can be achieved politically in a society whose members are held together by a common identity.

Here I want to make two claims. The first is that such an identity makes democratic government very much more likely to work successfully. Looking back to what was said in Chapter 3, we saw that one of the great difficulties in democratic politics is to reconcile majorities and minorities — to persuade the minority group to accept the decision of the majority, while at the same time persuading the majority not to trample on the wishes or the interests of the minority but to try to accommodate them when reaching decisions. I suggested there that one of the factors likely to encourage what we might call ‘democratic self-restraint’ was trust between the parties. In a society where people are generally trusting of others, they are less anxious about finding themselves in a minority on some issue, more willing to allow the majority to implement its decision, on the basis that no very great harm will come to them. Where trust is absent, or evaporates, by contrast, every decision becomes potentially a life-and-death issue.

Consider a simple case: suppose that we have a democratic constitution, and the party we belong to has just been defeated in a general election. Should we hand over power as the constitution requires, or should we stage a coup and declare the election null and void? In handing over the reins of government we are exposing ourselves to risks of two sorts. The first is that our opponents will use their new-found power to persecute us, or at the very least introduce discriminatory measures designed to favour their own supporters. The second is that, despite having come to power through a democratic election, they will not respect the constitution, so that by handing power over now, we are forfeiting the chance of ever wielding it again. (This is not just a theoretical possibility. It is well known that, in the case of fledgling democracies, the key moment is not the first election, but the point at which the party that has won the first election is defeated and is required to give up office: what will it do?) Whether we are willing to take that risk depends on how much trust we have in the people who will now take office.

To complete the argument, we need to ask what makes people more likely to trust others, particular others who are not known to them personally. Social psychologists who have investigated this question have found that one important factor is perceived similarity: we are inclined to trust those who we believe resemble us in one way or another. It is not difficult to think of explanations for this: it may be a trait that we have inherited from the early stages of human evolution, when people cooperated with one another in extended kin groups, and had to learn how to discriminate between insiders and outsiders. In large-scale societies, where people may look and sound very different from one another, trust is a problem. But national identity can help to solve it: we may disagree politically with the other side, we may even despise much of what they stand for, but we know that they still have a good deal in common with us — a language, a history, a cultural background. So we can trust them at least to respect the rules and the spirit of democratic government.

My second claim is about social justice. What makes people willing to support policies that will promote social justice, particularly when they can see that they will stand to lose when these policies are implemented? For instance they may have to pay higher taxes to create the resources that are needed to provide adequate welfare services for all citizens, whereas it would be cheaper for them to purchase health care, education, and so forth privately. Or in order to create equal opportunities for groups that have hitherto lagged behind, they may have to relinquish some of their existing privileges, like giving their offspring fast-track access to jobs and college places. Why might they do this? From a sense of justice or fairness, we might answer. But again we need to ask: what makes people willing to deal with others on terms of justice, and to answer this question we need once again to consider the issue of shared identity.

It is true of course that we recognize some obligations of justice to people everywhere, regardless of whether we share anything with them beyond our common humanity. We know that it is wrong to kill, injure, or imprison them without good cause, and that if they are in danger or distress we should come to their aid. This common knowledge can help us make sense of the idea of global justice, as I shall later show. But social justice imposes much greater demands on us — in particular it often requires that we accept restrictions placed on us by principles of equality when we could do better for ourselves, or our friends and relations, by casting those restrictions off. No one is killed or injured if we cheat on our taxes or bend the rules to give a nephew a nice job he doesn’t deserve. So what might motivate us to accept these demands? As political philosophers like John Rawls have emphasized, one very important motive is the wish to live together with people on terms that we can all justify to one another. In other words, if somebody asks me to explain my behaviour — explain why what I am doing is acceptable — I can do so by appealing to principles that she and I can both accept.

The strength of this motive will depend on how closely tied we are to the other people involved — it is most powerful in small face-to-face groups — but national communities provide at least some of the cement that makes people concerned to live with others on terms of justice. I am not claiming that within existing nations people always conduct themselves justly — that is far from being the case — but only that they have a motive to do so, and this makes them more willing to support policies involving progressive taxation or equal opportunity legislation of the kind I mentioned earlier.

People who disagree with these claims linking national identity to democracy and social justice often point by way of example to countries such as Belgium, Canada, and Switzerland, which are multinational — they each contain two or more distinct national communities — and yet are stable democracies that support extensive welfare states and other institutions of social justice. In reply, I want to say two things. First, these states have evolved federal systems that devolve many important decisions, including decisions about economic and social policy, to provinces or regions that encompass different national groups. In Belgium, for example, Flemings and Walloons have separate governments responsible for many areas of policy such as employment and housing, alongside the federal government which deals with Belgium-wide issues such as defence and foreign policy. Second, most people in these societies have what we might call ‘nested’ national identities: they think of themselves both as Flemish and as Belgian, as Quebecois and as Canadian, and so forth. In other words, they share in an inclusive national identity as well as in a more localized one, and this helps to explain why these societies work as effectively as they do — they can call on common loyalties to support democratic institutions at national level and to justify redistributing resources from their richer regions to their poorer ones.

Nation-states, then, have allowed people to work together politically on a large scale, achieving democracy and pursuing social justice with at least partial success, through the creation of common political identities that can bind people together despite their conflicting beliefs and interests, and their geographical dispersal. But many now believe that this form of government has become outmoded. Countless obituaries for the nation-state have already been penned, and we are just waiting, it seems, for the body to topple conveniently into the grave.

Why is the nation-state thought to be obsolescent? Some of the reasons are internal, having to do with the difficulty of sustaining common national identities in societies that, through immigration and for other reasons, are becoming increasingly multicultural in character. Other reasons concern the external environment in which states now have to operate: their diminished capacity to control global economic forces, and the widening range of problems — especially environmental problems — that can only be solved by cooperation between states or by international bodies. I do not intend to add anything to the existing flood of literature on these topics, but instead ask some questions about the kind of political order that might take the place of the nation-state.

The most favoured alternative is some form of cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism is in fact a very old idea, dating back to the Roman Stoics, who liked to think of themselves as kosmopolitai, ‘citizens of the world’. But what exactly does this mean? One interpretation of cosmopolitanism is world government in a literal sense — the replacement of the 191 separate states that now exist by a unitary political authority. But although world government has been advocated by some, its disadvantages are only too evident.

First, it is very hard to envisage how government on this scale could possibly be democratic. It would clearly have to work through elected representatives, each representing millions of people, and so ordinary citizens would have virtually no opportunity to influence or control the government itself. The thrust of my argument in this chapter is that democracy works best on a small scale: the city-state was probably its ideal site, and the nation-state’s great achievement has been to simulate the intimacy of the city by its use of the mass media, giving people at least a sense that they are involved in, and able to influence, political affairs. But world government would appear a distant and alien body, as even, on a much smaller scale, the European Union does to many people today. And the issue of trust, highlighted earlier, would emerge with all its force: why would I regard as legitimate decisions taken by a majority drawn from communities with which I feel myself to have little in common?

Second, there is a real risk that a world government might become tyrannical, and if that were to happen there would be no sanctuary in which individuals could take refuge. In a world of states, a clear sign of bad government is a government that has to build walls and fences to keep its people captive, and where alternatives exist the walls and fences cannot be kept up indefinitely (the Berlin Wall, built to prevent the people of East Germany escaping to the West, lasted for 28 years before it was torn down block by block in 1989). Despotic governments are kept in check, at least to some degree, by the possibility of people escaping to places where they can live in greater freedom and security. But there would be no such check if world government became a reality.

Finally, if increasing cultural diversity is currently posing problems for many nation-states, the problems would be far deeper for a world government that had to embrace the major civilizations that exist today, each of which would aim to see its values and beliefs reflected in public policy. Indeed there are only two circumstances in which such a proposal would seem at all feasible. One would be the emergence of a common global culture that engulfed present-day cultural differences, presumably one based on mass-market consumerism — the so-called ‘McWorld’ scenario, where everywhere turns into a kind of giant American shopping mall. The other would be a wholesale privatization of culture, so that although different groups in different places pursued their own cultural values, there would be no expectation that government should take these cultural values into account (think, by way of analogy, of a society in which there are no state churches, only churches built and funded by their own congregations). This is perhaps more plausible (and less offputting) than the first scenario. Yet one of the fiercest divisions in today’s world is between those who are willing to see culture (and especially religion) privatized in this way, and those who insist that government policy should be based on their preferred cultural values.

_{17. Resisting globalization, US-style: Latvia 1996.}

World government in the literal sense must be distinguished from the much more modest proposal, favoured by among others the philosopher Immanuel Kant, that states should enter into a permanent agreement with one another to renounce the use of force; there should be a confederation to ensure what Kant called ‘perpetual peace’. We can see this foreshadowed in the relations between liberal democracies today, which involve a sometimes tacit and sometimes explicit agreement to settle their differences by negotiation or by reference to international bodies such as the European Union or the United Nations. Agreements of this kind, it is important to emphasize, stabilize relations between states, but leave states themselves as the main sources of political authority. And Kant himself favoured this: a single world government, he thought, would be a ‘universal despotism which saps all man’s energies and ends in the graveyard of freedom’.

Cosmopolitanism in its most literal sense is both implausible and unattractive. But political philosophers sometimes interpret the idea of world citizenship differently, not as a form of government, but as a proposal about how individuals should think and behave. What is being suggested is that we should overcome our narrow national and other attachments and think of ourselves as if we were citizens of the world, in other words as people who have equal responsibilities to our fellow human beings everywhere. From this perspective, national boundaries are simply arbitrary dividing lines to which no moral significance should be attached. In particular we should cease to think of justice as something to be pursued primarily within the limits of the city or the nation; we should give equal weight to the claims of every human being, regardless of race, creed, or nationality. So even if political authority remains localized in particular nation-states, we should use it to promote global justice, ceasing to give any preference to those who fall inside the political community we happen to belong to.

Cosmopolitans of this stripe often do not deny what was said above about the relationship between our communal identities and our willingness to accept obligations of justice to other people. They may agree that very often people’s sense of justice is powerfully shaped by their sense of belonging, by the division between those inside and those outside our political community. But they see this as a problem to be overcome, not as a permanent limitation. There are deep issues involved here, about the extent to which human beings are capable of acting on principles of reason alone, or on the other hand whether reason has to be allied to feelings and emotions, our sense of who we are, in order to motivate behaviour. But rather than grapple with these, I want to signal a couple of reasons for doubting at least strong versions of ethical cosmopolitanism, and then propose an alternative way of understanding global justice.

One of these reasons assumes that we will continue to live in a culturally divided world — in other words that the ‘McWorld’ scenario I referred to earlier does not come to pass. Culture affects the way that we understand justice, not perhaps at the most basic level, but certainly in terms of the kind of demands that can properly be seen as demands of justice. Religion furnishes some obvious examples. Suppose someone claims that he has special needs because of his religious beliefs, or that his opportunities are being limited by religious practices that he is required to comply with. How should we regard his claims? If we stand within the religious tradition to which he belongs, and we accept his interpretation of that tradition, then we will see his claims as valid claims of justice. But if we look in from the outside, we are bound to regard them differently. We might see the claims as having some weight, but we are also likely to ask whether the tradition could not be changed so that it becomes less onerous for the faithful.

A similar difference of perspective may occur at international level. Suppose I belong to a predominantly secular society, and am committed to cosmopolitan principles of justice that require me to disregard national boundaries. A second society is materially much poorer than mine, but this is largely because its members devote a large fraction of their resources to a priestly establishment, claiming that they have no option but to do so — God has commanded it. How strong a claim on my resources does a person in that society have? Should I regard his relative poverty as something he has chosen, for religious reasons, and therefore as making no special demands on me, or should I regard the religious expenditure as externally compelled, and therefore consider his needs as more pressing than those of people in my own society? The general point is that if cultural differences have an impact on the way that we understand justice, then what justice requires across a culturally plural world becomes indeterminate.

A second reason has to do with the connection between justice and reciprocity. The basic idea is simple to state: I behave justly towards other people in the expectation that they will behave justly towards me in return. This does not mean that what I do and what they do will be exactly the same. Our circumstances may be different. But if, say, I help somebody who is now in need — suppose I come across somebody who is stranded late at night because she has missed the last bus home — I do so on the assumption that were I in that position, she or someone else would do the same for me. Within political communities, this idea of reciprocity is given concrete shape through the legal system and other forms of government. When I obey traffic regulations or pay my taxes, I assume that my fellow-citizens will also comply, either voluntarily or in order to avoid legal sanctions. Without this assurance, behaving justly opens you up to being taken advantage of by those with fewer scruples.

If we apply this thought to cosmopolitan justice, the problem is obvious. Assuming that I know what justice requires me to do for someone who belongs to a distant community, what reason do I have to expect him to reciprocate? How do I know that my willingness to act justly is not going to be exploited? Of course this does not prevent me from doing what justice requires, but it does make it a more costly option. This problem might be avoided if there were to emerge shared global norms whereby people everywhere recognized certain situations as making demands of justice upon them — these have been foreshadowed in a very limited way in the case of large-scale natural disasters, where it has now become the norm to organize an international relief effort to bring help to the victims. So we might move slowly into a world in which certain forms of just behaviour would be reciprocated. But until that happens, someone setting out to act on cosmopolitan principles of justice — in the sense of principles that take no account of national boundaries or other forms of membership — is behaving heroically, doing more than she is morally required to do.

This does not mean that there is no justice beyond the boundaries of the nation-state. There is such a thing as global justice, and it is an increasingly important factor in world politics, but we should not understand it, as cosmopolitans do, as simply social justice stretched out beyond those boundaries to embrace people everywhere. I want to conclude this chapter, and the book, with a brief sketch of this non-cosmopolitan alternative. It has three main elements.

First, there is a set of conditions that define just terms of interaction between nation-states. Some of these are already familiar from handbooks of international law. States must abide by the treaties and other agreements they have made; they must respect one another’s territorial integrity; they must not use force against another state except in self-defence; and so on. But there are other requirements that are less familiar, and have only recently come to play a part in the conduct of international relations. These requirements have to do with the way the costs and benefits of international cooperation are shared. There are, for instance, a number of environmental problems whose solution requires nation-states to place constraints on their citizens’ behaviour. Quotas for the emission of greenhouse gases are one example; quotas for catching endangered species of fish are another. The problem is to decide how these costs should be distributed, and principles of justice can help to settle this (unfortunately the answer is often not clear-cut — different principles can reasonably be called into play — which inevitably leaves space for power politics to intrude).

There are also important issues concerning the terms of international trade. Rich and powerful countries are currently able to set these terms in such a way as to leave them free to export their products to less developed countries, while imposing barriers to protect their own farmers that make it difficult for producers in those countries to export their crops. There are arguments for, and arguments against, leaving international markets completely free, but what justice requires is that whatever restrictions are imposed on trade should be ones that give people in poor countries the same set of economic opportunities as their counterparts in rich countries.

Second, global justice involves respecting and protecting the human rights of people everywhere, including, if necessary, challenging the authority of states that violate these rights. I looked at the idea of human rights in some detail in Chapter 4, and I argued there that we need to draw a line between basic human rights — rights to those conditions that human beings everywhere need if they are to live minimally decent lives — and the longer lists of rights that appear in many human rights documents, which are better understood as rights that particular political communities should secure to their citizens. This distinction is important here, because from the perspective of global justice it is only protection of the basic rights that matters. We should not intervene in other states simply because they fail to recognize rights that we think are important, such as rights to universal suffrage or unlimited religious freedom (we may encourage such states to implement rights on the longer list by offering them inducements of various kinds — for instance membership in international bodies such as the European Union — but we should not to try to enforce them).

Why do human rights impose obligations of justice on us regardless of national or other cultural boundaries? On the one hand, they mark out genuinely universal features of human existence that transcend cultural differences. You and I may reasonably disagree about the importance of religious belief and practice, but we cannot reasonably disagree about whether someone who is being tortured or allowed to starve to death is being harmed. So the argument I presented earlier about why ideas of social justice are not cultural universals does not apply here. On the other hand, human rights carry great moral weight. They correspond to the most serious kinds of harm that can befall a person. So they override our concerns about fairness and reciprocity. This difference is something that we instinctively recognize. If someone who is not in serious need asks me for my help — let us say requests a lift down to the station — then I am likely to consider whether he is taking advantage of my good nature or whether he would be willing to do the same for me on another occasion. But if he has been seriously injured in an accident, all that matters is that I am in a position to help him. Protecting human rights corresponds to the second case. If they are not protected, people will suffer or die. So anyone who can help must do so as a matter of justice.

The third requirement of global justice is that people everywhere should have the opportunity to be politically autonomous; that all political communities should enjoy rights of self-determination. This does not mean that every nation must have its own independent state. In some cases people are intermingled geographically in such a way that this simple formula for self-determination cannot be applied. None the less, there are forms of self-determination that can be used in such cases, such as the power-sharing agreement between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland that is proceeding in fits and starts as this book is being written. What can frustrate the search for self-government? Either the political ambitions of neighbouring states who want to impose a form of imperial rule on the community in question, or an economic position that is so precarious that the community is given no real choices to make. In either case, other nations have a responsibility to work together to create the conditions under which self-determination is possible.

_{18. Universal human rights: actors Julie Christie and Cy Grant marking UN Human Rights Day.}

Why is this a matter of justice? In my argument against political cosmopolitanism, I emphasized how important it is to many groups that they should be allowed to express their cultural traditions politically, and this can only be done if they enjoy political self-determination. Even liberal societies attach great value to national self-determination, and only relinquish their rights of sovereignty with great reluctance. This is evidence of the strong need people have to feel in control of their own destiny, even those who are not active participants in democratic government. If these observations are accurate, then being denied the opportunity for self-determination is a serious loss, one great enough to impose obligations of justice on others.

If global justice along these lines were achieved, the world would look something like this: political authority would rest primarily with nation-states, but they would collaborate to ensure that the costs and benefits of international cooperation were fairly distributed. Each political community would govern itself according to its own political traditions, and schemes of social justice would likewise vary somewhat from place to place. But everywhere human rights would be respected, and in cases where they were threatened, either by natural disasters such as drought or by oppressive regimes, other states would work together to ward off the threat. Some states would be richer than others: this would not be unjust provided that it resulted from political choices and cultural decisions rather than from economic exploitation. Some states would also be more democratic than others, but even those peoples who did not control their governors directly would identify with their government and feel that it represented their interests and values.

Such a world is very different from our own. It is what John Rawls in his book The Law of Peoples called a ‘realistic utopia’ — an ethical vision that stretches the bounds of political possibility as far as they can be stretched without becoming pure pie-in-the-sky. Are we likely to get there? Many current observers of the international scene foresee a kind of market triumphalism, in which global economic forces prevent any nation-state from making real political choices. Self-determination becomes meaningless if the only option is to adopt policies that ensure maximum economic competitiveness. But, as I said in Chapter 1, this form of fatalism looks no better grounded than previous forms that we now regard as antiquated. In any case, if there really are no political choices left for us to make, then political philosophy, whether national or international in focus, becomes useless, nothing more than fiddling while Rome burns. Everything I have said in this book assumes that the choice between good and bad government is always one we have to make, even if the form that good government takes changes as technology advances and societies become larger and more complex.

We have come a long way from the picture of good government in a city-state of 100,000 people. It is harder for us than it was for Lorenzetti to describe the conditions under which people can till the ground, trade, hunt, teach, and dance in relative peace and security — or on the other hand to describe how tyranny and oppression bring devastation and slaughter in their wake. Our politics is conducted on a much larger scale, and at many different levels. It is much more difficult to connect cause and effect, and therefore to assign responsibility for political success or failure. Yet there are elements in Lorenzetti’s picture that are as relevant to us now as they were in 14th-century Siena: the difference between legitimate political authority and tyranny; the relationship between government and its citizens; the nature of justice. These questions remain at the heart of political philosophy, and it is at precisely those moments when we feel that humanity’s future is slipping out of our control that we need to think about them long and hard, and then decide, together, what to do.