ical government
demands equality, not in the sense that all members of the state should
be equal in ability or should have equal power, but in the sense that
none of them can properly be regarded simply as tools with which the
legislator works, that each has a right to say what will be made of his
own life. The analogy between the legislator and the craftsman on which
Plato insists, breaks down because the legislator is dealing with men
like himself, men who can to some extent conceive their own end in life
and cannot be treated merely as means to the end of the legislator. The
sense of the value of "ruling and being ruled in turn" is derived from
the experience that the ruler may use his power to subordinate the
lives of the citizens of the state not to the common good but to his
own private purposes. In modern terms, it is a simple, rough-and-ready
attempt to solve that constant problem of politics, how efficient
government is to be combined with popular control. This problem arises
from the imperfection of human nature, apparent in rulers as well as in
ruled, and if the principle which attempts to solve it be admitted as a
principle of importance in the formation of the best constitution, then
the starting-point of politics will be man's actual imperfection, not
his ideal nature. Instead, then, of beginning with a state which would
express man's ideal nature, and adapting it as well as may be to man's
actual shortcomings from that ideal, we must recognise that the state
and all political machinery are as much the expression of man's weakness
as of his ideal possibilities. The state is possible only because
men have common aspirations, but government, and political power, the
existence of officials who are given authority to act in the name of the
whole state, are necessary because men's community is imperfect, because
man's social nature expresses itself in conflicting ways, in the clash
of interests, the rivalry of parties, and the struggle of classes,
instead of in the united seeking after a common good. Plato and
Aristotle were familiar with the legislator who was called in by the
whole people, and they tended therefore to take the general will or
common consent of the people for granted. Most political questions are
concerned with the construction and expression of the general will, and
with attempts to ensure that the political machinery made to express the
general will shall not be exploited for private or sectio