Integrity (eBook)

The Rise of a Distinctive Western Idea and Its Destiny

Martin Albrow (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024
272 Seiten
Polity (Verlag)
978-1-5095-5987-9 (ISBN)

Infos

Public life is dominated from time to time by media storms around integrity. The behaviour of elected political leaders has led many to decry the deterioration in standards and the lack of integrity in public life. But what is integrity, and where does our concern with integrity in public life come from?

 In this book, Martin Albrow argues that integrity has been an essential component of the rise of the West and a key feature that distinguishes the West from other civilizations. He traces the idea of integrity back to its roots in ancient Greece and Rome, where integrity acquired its special meaning: the unique feature of any object with integrity was that it combined its wholeness or completeness with the embodiment of standards that came from outside it. Integrity was unity through values. He then follows the story of integrity through early Christianity and the Renaissance to the present day. Today, we find ourselves in the paradoxical situation where the lack of integrity in public life is widely condemned while, at the same time, politicians can remain popular without even pretending to act with integrity: this is the new politics of the integrity vacuum.

The idea of integrity may be a distinctively western one but, like many other aspects of western culture, it has now become a property of worldwide society. Albrow concludes by arguing that integrity could add more value today by being combined with non-western wisdom as we strive to create an order where honesty, trust and reliability in our relationships with others are paramount.

This highly original account of an idea that lies at the heart of western culture will be of interest to anyone concerned about the state and future of our public life.

Martin Albrow has held numerous professorships and fellowships in the United Kingdom, Europe, the United States and China. Among his many books is The Global Age.

Textauszug

2
Integrity Becomes Modern

There are many ways to date the beginning of the modern age. But there is general agreement about the cumulative effect of a whole series of events in Europe from the fifteenth century onwards. There was the reception of technologies originating from the most powerful of regimes of the time, China: the compass (for voyages), gunpowder (for entertainment and killing) and printing (for communication), all fuelling subsequent western expansion.

But more significant than technology was a change of mindset, the emancipation of thought from the control of the Church. The discovery that the Earth revolved around the sun and not the reverse shook religious hegemony over ideas. Equally, the recovery of many ancient Greek and Roman texts inspired independent thought.

The challenges of new discoveries, the break-up of Western Christendom and the wars that accompanied the religious turmoil had been anticipated by another kind of incursion, namely the rediscovery of pre-Christian ideas in originals or copies of ancient manuscripts. Among fundamental challenges to the Christian worldview was the atomism of the Epicureans, reaching its culmination with the re-emergence of Lucretius.

Long lost, the find in the early fifteenth century of a complete manuscript of Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things gave great impetus to what became known as the Renaissance. Its atomism, an emphasis on distinct things, served as a basic assumption in the outlook and subsequent development of ‘natural philosophy’, later known as the natural sciences.1 Montaigne, the French provincial official, author of the Essais (1588) that have left an indelible mark on western literature, quoted from Lucretius almost a hundred times. In turn, Shakespeare was a great fan of Montaigne.2

By the sixteenth century in Western European history, integrity as a concept had become part of public discourse in the vernacular. It was also a period when the established order of things was unsettled in fundamental ways. The Earth might not, after all, be the centre of the universe.

New continents existed to the West, and the authority of the Catholic Church was undermined both intellectually by Protestant dissent and by political apostasy. Religion itself became a political resource for a king of England and Wales like Henry VIII, who could establish a new Church to divorce one wife and take another.

Ultimately, however, it was probably printing more than anything else that acted as the solvent of the old order. It meant the possibility of circulating texts in the vernacular, and with them ideas that did not just depend on biblical authority. The French dictionary Larousse dates integrité from the early fifteenth century and gives it the dual meaning from the start: on the one hand, something intact or undiminished and, on the other, a person of moral wholeness, incorruptible.3

In such a time of political and religious flux, integrity both came into focus and into question. Time and again, its bonding of completeness and values came under stress from the logic of power. It was possible even to ignore the lack of integrity in holders of political power, or indeed, advise them to ignore it. In Italian vernacular, the word was integrità, and that acquired lasting notoriety through the work of one man who has been called the founder of modern political science.

Niccolo Machiavelli and the New Realism

A short treatise by an adviser to the Italian princes of the time did more than anything else to highlight the novelty and contradictions then existing and to leave a lasting imprint on the centuries to come. Niccolo Machiavelli (1469–1527) wrote during the Renaissance when artistic glories and brutal inhumanity coexisted in the same urban space.

He himself had laboriously copied Lucretius out by hand.4 His model prince was Cesare Borgia, employer of Leonardo da Vinci, builder of a canal from the town of Cesena, the same place where Borgia placated the populace by displaying in the public square the body of his hated chief adviser – sawn in half!

Machiavelli’s early sixteenth-century treatise, The Prince (1513), circulated earlier, but printed first in 1532, survives to this day as the benchmark for modern realist accounts of politics. It stipulated that the love of one’s people was the best fortress against enemies from outside. Certainly, that meant keeping faith with them. But then there was a catch.

One of Machiavelli’s most famous passages in The Prince is in chapter 18. It has the title ‘In what way princes must keep faith’.5 It begins: ‘How laudable it is for a prince to keep good faith and live with integrity, and not with astuteness, everyone knows’. But then he goes on to contrast the fox and lion, the one operating by guile, the other by force.

Both methods had to be employed for the purpose of maintaining the state. The prince had to display many qualities. Indeed, ‘he should seem to be all faith, all integrity, all humanity and all religion.’6 But the key word was ‘seem’. He continues, ‘Everybody sees what you appear to be, few feel what you are.’7

Nothing ought to come out of the prince’s mouth that was not full of faith, integrity, humanity and especially religion since people could actually see that, and they could be taken in by appearances. But if necessity dictated, then the prince had to be prepared to do the opposite of what those qualities required.

In treating political power purely in terms of success, Machiavelli aligned the prince with the forces of nature and, in this way, with the long-established meaning of integrity’s completeness. He could easily have written of an integrity beyond morality. Instead, he chose to treat integrity as the value for ordinary people to cherish and, as a result, capable of being manipulated by holders of power.

There has never been a more succinct statement of the pact with the devil that the ruler of a state makes. That is, if perpetuation of that rule is the overriding object. But the blatant immorality of chapter 18 should not detract from the other purposes of rule. For, once established, it is the basis of the well-being of its subjects, of their security, property and commerce.

The ruler was advised to mingle with his people in the festivals he laid on for their entertainment. And ‘nothing does so much honour to a newly risen man than the new laws and measures which he introduces.’8 But, in a world where good and evil coexisted in full gaze, anyone who dared to take charge of events and create something that would last had to reckon with both sides of reality. A ruler ought to be both feared and loved but, on balance, if a choice was necessary, it was better to be feared.

All was to lead to a new scion of the house of Borgia creating an army that would unite Italy. The vision was to shape the future of a nation. There we can see from our vantage point in a world of nation-states how integrity as wholeness has become the outcome of a creative process. Power is itself the means to making a new entity, and the moral qualities have become instrumental in its creation. Power uses integrity to create an integrity, an entity of wholeness.

In his account of power, the twentieth century’s most celebrated advocate of reason as the basis of philosophy, Bertrand Russell, distinguished the ‘power to do’ from ‘power over’.9 Both are needed in technological civilization. Without power, both over his employees and his algorithms, Mark Zuckerberg could not have created Facebook.

Russell pointed to the chasm between the genius heights and the scoundrel depths of the Renaissance and judged Machiavelli to ‘glorify naked power’.10 But it is difficult to imagine Russell’s simple distinction being possible without the brutal clearing of the wilderness of illusion that Machiavelli achieved in one short book of advice for rulers, at a time when he too suffered its excesses along with so many others.

Power is the passage between integrities, the destruction of one and the creation of another, and in the human world the creative process will engage with the standards that guide and lead to the accomplishment, the work of art or the robot. Integrity in both its senses, wholeness and moral worth, combined in the one word in English, will be both means and the target of the power to create, phases in a process that has become an unending upheaval in our lives today.

The seminal influence of Machiavelli on posterity was summed up by Lord Acton, adviser to Prime Minister William Gladstone, a founder of modern historiography, editor of the iconic Cambridge Modern History (1902–10) when he wrote: ‘He represents more than the spirit of his country and his age … The authentic interpreter of Machiavelli … is the whole of later history.’11 Acton continues: ‘He is the earliest conscious and articulate exponent of certain living forces in the present world … Religion, progressive enlightenment, the perpetual vigilance of public opinion have not reduced his empire, or disproved the justice of his conception of mankind.’12

In that world of brutal contrasts, Machiavelli had no difficulty in formulating paradoxes that have both fascinated and repelled generations of students of politics and power to this day. He was one of the early...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 11.11.2024
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Allgemeine Soziologie
• Schlagworte: Corruption • Culture • distrust • Ethical Behaviour • ethics • Governance • History • history of civilisations • history of public life • Integrity • media • media storms • Philosophy • Politicians • Politics • Principles • public life • public officials • public servant • Public Service • scandal • Sociology • Trust • western civilisation
• ISBN-10: 1-5095-5987-6 / 1509559876
• ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5987-9 / 9781509559879