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Educated first in the seminary due to a growing interest in politics, in 1910, Salazar enrolled in law school, where he soon distinguished himself among Catholic circles as a conservative thinker and an expert in the field of economics and finance. After the mentioned military coup – by which the new government “inherited” a country in a difficult economic situation – he was therefore included first in the Ministry of Finance and then handed over control over the budgets of all ministries, with a veto right overall spending. Working to restore the dignity of Portugal and create such Portuguese as Portugal needed to become great again, and given the dependence of the new regime’s survival on financial consolidation, he soon surpassed the control of military circles and – along with President General Óscar Carmona – became the central national figure. On the 28th of June 1928, he finally gained the position of prime minister, which he then – combining it with various ministerial positions in certain periods – retained until the end of the 1960s.

Since his rise to power and a certain part of his reign coincided with the Fascist rule in Italy, and soon also the Nazi rule in Germany, as well as the reign of Francisco Franco in neighboring Spain (often also suspected of the same thing, albeit with some more justification), the perception of the Salazar’s regime is marked by the frequent labeling of it as Fascist. But while some of its features really were similar to that of the mentioned Fascist regimes, much of Salazar’s ruling skill shows a departure from these alleged role models. In this essay, we shall therefore show their similarities and differences while trying to explain how and why such a way of governing survived for such a long period of time in one Western European country, outliving even its creator for a few years.

* * *
Assuming that the reader is familiar with the basic features of Fascism, without presenting them in more detail, we must first look at the real and possible points of contact of that system with the system present in Portugal from 1933 to 1974. As already mentioned, Salazar’s rise to power coincided with the period of Mussolini’s and Hitler’s rule and thus necessarily led to certain contacts and consequent influences on Portugal and its leader. However, it is necessary to distinguish between the real influences derived from Fascism itself and the common features of the two (or three) regimes that only seem to be originally Fascist, while in fact they have their roots in the same, non-Fascist source. Given the contemporary tendency to crude categorization – with Fascism, in particular, playing the role of a huge ideological box into which, regardless of their real nature and often incompatible differences, almost all ideologies and movements that deviate from the Left mainstream are crammed – emphasizing the fact that similar is not the same as equal is of the greatest importance. However, from the points of contact between Salazar’s regime and Fascism, it is necessary to single out two or three of the basic ones, while for the others usually mentioned, it will be explained why their similarity is actually only apparent or nonexistent at all.

The greatest concrete resemblance to Fascism Salazar’s Portugal achieved in the economic field, namely, as in Mussolini’s Italy, and with the same goal of overcoming – in Marxist terms – class struggle by setting goals common to both the owners of the means of production and the workers, a corporate system was introduced into the Portuguese economy. By embedding Corporatism, together with the right of the state to intervene in order to protect the moral integrity of its citizens and the state itself, into the new 1933 constitution, Salazar tried to – at least in theory – base Portuguese economy on the Catholic social teaching – competitiveness remained, but with the common interest of the nation as the fundamental criterion, which enabled the wider possibilities of the state intervention in certain fields of production. However, despite the creation of the Corporate Chamber as a representative body of all social classes, Portuguese Corporatism still served primarily as an extended arm of the state control over society, resulting in filling the key positions with the people the regime sought to reward or bind to itself, which was followed by corruption and over-reliance on the state, to some extent comparable to that still present in (post)socialist countries.

The second, more pronounced, point of contact with Fascist European regimes came during their greatest expansion in the period of World War II. Seeking – and ultimately succeeding, as attributed to him even by the political opponents – to keep Portugal out of the new global conflict, Salazar nevertheless established economic cooperation with Nazi Germany, primarily in the trade of tungsten, needed for the development of the German war industry, in return receiving large quantities of gold, often abducted from the victims of Nazi genocidal policies. However, at the same time, assistance was provided to the refugees from Nazi violence, including the Jews. But, given its crucial geostrategic position and despite its declared neutrality, Portugal suffered pressure for cooperation from other warring parties; despite the efforts to remove all foreign influence and the threat of German retaliation, Salazar eventually allowed the Allies to use the Portuguese Azores as military air bases, which played some role in the survival of his regime after 1945.
Finally, as in many other countries, including the neighboring Spain, already during the interwar period a movement with the aim of turning the country in a Fascist direction emerged in Portugal. After several years of activity, during which they gained the greatest popularity among students and junior officers, the National Unionists or Blue Shirts, gathered around Francisco Preto, were finally suppressed due to, according to Salazar, their inspiration with certain foreign models, exaltation of youth and cult of force through direct action and the principle of the superiority of state political power in the life of society, and the aspiration to organize the masses behind one leader. Although it should be borne in mind that a significant part of the motivation for stifling the movement was the removal of a potential threat to his own rule, in the quoted words, it is possible to read a direct condemnation of some of the main elements of the Fascist ideology.

* * *
In order to elaborate in more detail the aforementioned aversion to Fascist ideology in Salazar’s political worldview, it is first necessary to define it. In short, Portugal at that time could be described as a traditional autocracy, and Salazar as a reactionary, relying on Catholic conservatism. Namely, realizing the state to which the Portuguese nation was brought by the political factionalism and fruitless party competition of the Liberal period (until 1926), Salazar began to perceive democracy, and for the most part the politics itself, as an obstacle, not a means of reaching solutions. Considering that the country, therefore, needed political detoxification, he reduced the party life to the existence of the União Nacional party, whose representatives occasionally met in the National Assembly, whose de facto only task was to maintain the status quo within which The New State (Estado Novo) could develop. At its core was Salazar’s paternalistic attitude toward the Portuguese as a people currently incapable of broader political participation, whose development, therefore, required the guidance of a well-meaning leader. However, although Salazar relied heavily on the aforementioned Catholic social doctrine, believing that the authority came from God and not from the social contract, it should be emphasized that the Catholic Church in Portugal never acquired the status it enjoyed in the neighboring Franco’s Spain. Finally, the main theoretical framework of the political system remained the constitution, written as a mixture of democratic and authoritarian elements.

But, although creating a sort of one-party state, unlike the Fascists in Italy and especially the Nazis in Germany, Salazar never sought to turn the only allowed party into the leading force of society. As already mentioned, the goal was not the political fanaticism of the masses and their gathering in the movement but quite the opposite. In the same context, it is therefore necessary to interpret the very absence of Salazar’s pronounced public appearance. Leading a life bordered by asceticism and imbued with daily work routines and never wearing a military or any other uniform, Salazar rarely gave public speeches and only occasionally accepted the honors which, with the lag of time, could be placed in the sphere of the cult of personality. As a result, in foreign political circles, Portugal was often perceived as a dictatorship without a dictator. In addition, unlike the Fascist regimes, based on the ideas of Futurism and Modernism, Salazar’s goal – despite the aforementioned tendency to transform the Portuguese – was never to create a new man in the Fascist, especially not in the Nazi sense of the term. Moreover, in order to maintain the mentality and the way of life he considered useful, Salazar tried to delay the processes of modernization of rural areas of the country, thus damaging them in the long run and accelerating their depopulation after opening the opportunity to go abroad, where emigrants actually became even more exposed to what the state sought to avoid.

Finally, despite his shared aversion to Communism and its perception as the greatest danger to civilization, Salazar’s attitude towards Fascism (or, more precisely, all totalitarianism) is clearly evidenced by one of his many speeches said in a similar tone: We must put aside the inclination to form what might be called a totalitarian state. The state, which in its laws, ethics, politics, and economy subordinates everything to national or racial interests, would appear to be an omnipotent being, the principle and an end in itself, to which all individual or collective action would be subject; it might even bring about an absolutism worse than that which preceded the Liberal regimes. […] Such a state would be essentially pagan, incompatible with the character of our Christian civilization, and leading sooner or later to revolutions like those that infected the older, historical systems of government and, who knows, to religious wars more terrible than those of the old.

* * *

After the presentation of Salazar’s attitude towards Fascist regimes, it is necessary to finally answer the question of how such a system – although not Fascist, authoritarian, and undemocratic nevertheless – managed to survive for so long, especially if we keep in mind that it ruled over a Western European country and a NATO member. From the foreign policy perspective, the answer is, as expected, provided by the Cold War context – although Salazar’s regime had occasionally clashed with the US (especially during the Kennedy administration, insisting on leaving the African colonies as soon as possible) and other Western bloc countries, its geostrategic position on the very edge of the European continent made it an essential factor of defense in the event of a continental Soviet attack. As with many other undemocratic regimes, including the Communist Yugoslav one, Western powers were therefore willing to look through Salazar’s policies as long as they performed their function in the common defense mechanism.

However, much more interesting is the interpretation given in the above-mentioned biography of Salazar by Tom Gallagher about the causes of the internal political transfer of leadership over the country to one man over several decades. According to his interpretation, in the first half of the 20th century, Portugal was such an economically and socially disordered country that one of the only few consensuses that existed among its conflicting political circles was the willingness to leave the fixing of such a mess to someone else. In the person of António de Oliveira Salazar, such a statesman was found, and – although, besides periods of growth, it also suffered economic downturns even during his era – for a while, Portugal had a stable leadership and a secure political direction. However, after Salazar’s death, the same problem arose again, now further exacerbated by the years of (self-)imposed political passivity, within which the next equally capable and willing statesman failed to develop. After a decade of regime changes – including a Communist one – Portugal joined the European Economic Community in 1986, leaving the dictation of national policy to the supranational political bodies in Brussels.

The case described, therefore, encourages asking some questions: In the context of the evident weakening of interest in participating in democratic processes due to frustration with political scandals and falsehoods of the multi-party system in which both (or more) leading parties show little difference in concrete plans, caring only about their own interests, what is the future of modern national (and European) democratic systems? Will national political bodies, tired of internal conflicts and often unnecessarily ideologized and politicized, constantly repeating scenarios, end in handing over their sovereignty to external entities, or will in some of them appear statesmen who, like Salazar, will take matters into their own hands, with whether a long-term positive or negative result?

Saša Vuković
mag. hist.

Footnotes

[1] With 41.0% of the vote, Salazar was named the greatest Portuguese by viewers of the then-popular TV-show Os Grandes Portugueses, modeled on the BBC’s 100 Greatest Britons (in which Sir Winston Churchill was named the ‘winner’) and broadcasted on the state television RTP. The next in line, Communist leader Álvaro Cunhal, got 19.1% of the vote. Most of the other “top ten” candidates were rulers from the time of the peak of Portuguese power and great researchers from the Age of Discovery. The main source of this and most other information presented in this article is Salazar’s recent biography by Scottish political scientist and historian Tom Gallagher, Salazar: Dictator That Refused to Die, published in 2020.

[1] Along with several smaller colonies scattered along the African and Asian coasts, the two most important and largest Portuguese colonial estates were located on the territory of the present-day states of Angola and Mozambique. Along with them, as one of the most prestigious, it is necessary to highlight Goa on the Indian subcontinent. Called The Ultramar, in Salazar’s time – and especially since the beginning of the decolonization pressures – these colonies were presented as an integral part of Portugal, or as its overseas provinces, which the motherland therefore cannot and must not give up, as it would lose its international significance. In addition, the idea of Lusotropicalism was developed. Of course, in addition to some that – like the mentioned Goa, which was taken over by Nehru’s India in 1961 – were lost during Salazar’s rule, other colonies finally gained independence during the 1970s, sparking a wave of hundreds of thousands White Portuguese settlers returning to the country already affected by the economic crisis.

[1] After a series of strokes and a temporary coma, Salazar was replaced by Marcello Caetano as the actual head of the state. In that period, however, the regime was already living its last years, and not even the replacement of The New State by The Social State under the motto of evolution as a part of continuity could save it from the fall of 24^th of April 1974, less than four years after Salazar’s death. In the following months, an attempt was made to carry out a Communist revolution, and in 1975 the country again found itself on the brink of a possible civil war. Avoiding this, it then faced a series of difficulties inherent to the states in political transition, with multipartyism transformed into a struggle between a few only seemingly different parties, concerned primarily by their own interests.

[1] António Costa Pinto, The Blue Shirts – Portuguese Fascists and the New State (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 112.

[1] Apart from the Papal encyclicals on social issues and the situation in Portugal itself, a significant impact on Salazar’s mentality also had the texts of the French thinker Charles Maurras.

[1] For example, in Portugal civil marriage remained valid, Church communities were taxed, and property nationalized in the 19th century – despite a sense of aversion to the Liberal authorities taking such and other actions during the period – was not returned. Reasons for the satisfaction of the Catholic circles, however, were sufficient throughout the existence of the regime, and the previous Catholic political activity was redirected to the charitable and educational spheres.

[1] Of course, this does not mean that there has been no governmental repression of the political opponents, either by sending them to the more distant positions or by the more direct action by the secret police (PVDE/PIDE), including imprisonment, torture and liquidation; the Portuguese Communists came under special attack. But, as mentioned, most of the potential opponents of the regime have been “removed” by their inclusion into the system, i. e., by giving them favorable economic and other positions.

[1] Although he delivered the quoted speech as early as 1934 – so before the manifestation of the full extent of the totalitarian state in Germany and even in the Soviet Union – Salazar maintained the presented attitude towards their regimes throughout all his life; Tom Gallagher, Salazar: Dictator That Refused to Die (London: Hurst & Company, 2020), 69.

This essay, here slightly modified, was originally published on the Croatian website Heretica .com on November 19, 2021. I would like to thank Mr. Matija Štahan, the editor of the mentioned site, for his kind permission to republish it.

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Lefort, a French philosopher deeply influenced by phenomenology and existentialism, views “the political form” as an inherently open and indeterminate space. For Lefort, the essence of democracy lies in its ability to maintain this indeterminacy by ensuring that power remains an “empty place.” In The Political Forms of Modern Society, Lefort describes modern democracy as refusing to allow any single entity or ideology to fully occupy the seat of power, thus preventing the crystallization of authority. He emphasizes that this openness is essential for a democratic society because it allows continuous debate, contestation, and the questioning of power. Democracy, for Lefort, thrives on the tension between unity and division, a dynamic necessary for preserving freedom and pluralism in society.

Pierre Manent, another French philosopher, offers a distinct perspective on “the political form,” rooted in classical political thought and Christian theology. In works such as Metamorphoses of the City, Manent delves into the concrete organization of political communities, particularly the nation-state. For Manent, the political form is not about the abstract contestation of power but about forming a stable, coherent political community. He sees the nation-state as the central political form of modernity, providing the necessary framework for collective self-government and shaping individuals’ identities and moral outlooks within a society. Manent is more skeptical than Lefort of radical indeterminacy, viewing it as a potential risk to political stability and the common good. In Manent’s view, the political form is about establishing a durable framework within which a shared moral and political life can flourish.

Lefort’s and Manent’s understandings of democracy and the political form differ fundamentally in how they view conflict. Lefort argues that conflict is intrinsic to the democratic political form. In his view, a democratic society must remain open to diverse perspectives and challenges to authority, and the perpetual contestation of power is not merely a symptom of democracy—it is essential to its functioning. Democracy, for Lefort, exists in a state of constant negotiation and redefinition, where the conflict serves as the means to prevent authoritarian closure. The open, indeterminate nature of democracy, as described in his Les Formes de L’Histoire, protects it from becoming tyrannical.

In contrast, Manent acknowledges the inevitability of conflict but is more focused on how political forms can channel this conflict into productive outcomes. For him, the nation-state serves as the structured space where conflicts can be resolved without jeopardizing the integrity of the political community. His book Democracy Without Nations? Outlines his argument that the weakening of the nation-state poses a risk to the coherence of political life, leading to fragmentation and a loss of common purpose. While Lefort champions a model of democracy where conflict remains open and unresolved, Manent seeks a political form that provides stability by balancing order with the presence of disagreement.

One of the key distinctions between the two philosophers is their view of the relationship between politics and society. For Lefort, politics is always in flux, with the political form functioning as a space for continuous re-negotiation. He sees the risk of totalitarianism as a byproduct of the collapse of this indeterminacy, where one group or ideology seizes control of power and eliminates the space for contestation. In his work on totalitarianism, Lefort describes how regimes like the Soviet Union attempted to close the “empty place” of power by fusing the state, society, and the individual into a single entity, thus eliminating the pluralism that democracy requires.

Manent, on the other hand, sees political forms as providing the necessary framework for social life to flourish. In his view, the nation-state is not simply a container for political activity but the foundation of political and social identity. Manent is concerned with the erosion of the nation-state in an increasingly globalized and individualistic world. In his essay “City, Empire, Church, Nation,” Manent traces the evolution of political forms from the ancient city-state to the modern nation-state, emphasizing how these forms have been central to the development of Western civilization. For Manent, the nation-state is the culmination of this historical process and must be preserved to maintain a shared moral and political life.

Another area of contrast between Lefort and Manent is their respective concerns with the crisis of modern democracy. In his examination of totalitarianism and democracy, Lefort is deeply concerned with the erosion of pluralism and the rise of authoritarian forms of governance. He argues that the loss of the “empty place” of power leads to the collapse of democratic contestation, creating a political form that seeks to eliminate difference. Lefort’s political theory is ultimately about protecting the openness and indeterminacy of democracy against the threat of totalitarian closure.

Manent, on the other hand, centers on the weakening of the nation-state and the rise of a fragmented, individualistic society. In A World Beyond Politics, He critiques the idea of a post-political world where global governance replaces the nation-state. He argues that without the nation-state framework, modern societies lose their ability to exercise collective self-government and sustain a common good. According to Manent, the result is a loss of political coherence and a drift towards technocracy and moral relativism. His essay “Birth of a Nation” explores how the modern political form, centered around the nation-state, is crucial to exercising self-government and preserving a collective purpose.

Despite these differences, both philosophers are deeply engaged with the question of how political forms respond to the challenges of modernity. Lefort’s concern with the dangers of totalitarianism is paralleled by Manent’s worry about the disintegration of the nation-state. Both see modern democracy as facing a profound crisis, though they diagnose it differently. For Lefort, the crisis stems from the threat of authoritarianism and the erosion of pluralism. At the same time, for Manent, it comes from weakening the political structures that sustain collective self-government.

Claude Lefort and Pierre Manent offer contrasting yet complementary views on “the political form.” Lefort emphasizes the openness and indeterminacy of democracy, arguing that a healthy political form requires constant contestation and pluralism. Manent, by contrast, stresses the importance of stable political structures, particularly the nation-state, as essential for preserving a shared moral order and ensuring the coherence of political life. Their differing views on conflict, stability, and the nation-state’s role reflect broader political theory debates about the balance between openness and order, pluralism and unity, in the organization of political life.

Ultimately, Lefort’s vision of democracy as a space for endless debate and questioning stands in contrast to Manent’s call for a more structured political form rooted in the historical and moral tradition of the nation-state. While Lefort highlights the importance of preserving the openness of political life, Manent focuses on the need for a stable framework within which political and social life can unfold. Their work continues to provide valuable insights into the challenges and possibilities of political organization in the modern world.

Works Cited

Lefort,  Claude.,  The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 1986).

Lefort,  Claude.,  Les Formes de l’histoire. Essais d’anthropologie politique, (Gallimard, Paris, «Folio Essais», 2000).

Manent, Pierre., A World Beyond Politics? Marc A. Lepain, trans., (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2006).

Manent, Pierre., Democracy Without Nations: The Fate of Self-Government in Europe Paul Seaton, trans., (Wilmington, Delaware: Intercollegiate Studies Instituts, 2007).

Manent, Pierre., “What is a nation” Intercollegiate Review, Fall 2007: 23-31

Manent, Pierre., “City, Empire, Church, Nation”. City Journal, Summer 2012. https://www.city-journal.org/article/city-empire-church-nation

Manent, Pierre., Metamorphoses of the City: On the Western Dynamic Marc A. Lepain, trans., (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2013).

Manent, Pierre., “Birth of a nation” City Journal Winter 2013 https://www.city-journal.org/article/birth-of-the-nation

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Every time you make yourself a cup of coffee, maybe while standing nearly lifeless (or half dead) in front of that coffee pot on a particularly dismal Monday morning, it is not difficult to take it for granted that the coffee is there. It’s so obviously there, so how could it be otherwise? But in its thereness, the metaphysical question of being applies. Being is. But how come? However, maybe that coffee is not so very obvious after all. All effects obscure their causes, although, yes, sometimes causes obscure their effects. The truth is, we get used to things, and when we do, it gets easier to take them for granted without gratitude.

I don’t need to tell you, but I will anyway, that coffee is a popular drink. Every year, nearly two and a half billion cups of coffee are consumed worldwide, and at least half of those are by my brother-in-law. But this wasn’t always the case, especially before my brother-in-law turned five. If history had worked out a little differently, maybe we’d all be obsessed with something else entirely, like, say, mint tea. At one point in history, coffee was thought of as a “bitter invention of Satan.” It was shunned in the West because no one wants to end up demonically possessed by a beverage.

Legend has it that coffee was discovered around the year 850 A. D. by a poetically inclined Ethiopian goat herder named Kaldi. Kaldi saw that his goats would all gravitate towards a kind of cherry tree and that, after eating its berries, the goats would be noticeably more energetic. Kaldi tried the cherries himself, and he felt just heck-gosh-darn-it marvelous. Poetry flowed out of him, and his eyes widened to a world of wonders in a new way. He began waxing Heideggerian about how man is not the lord of being, but the shepherd of being, and that was long before Heidegger showed up to confuse philosophy undergraduates.

Kaldi brought the cherries to an Islamic monastery where its devout dwellers experimented until the first form of coffee came into existence. As you would expect, when such a miracle is discovered, it spreads quickly. Not everyone was a fan, but, in general, coffee began to trend. When the West caught a whiff of the stuff, this ambivalent stance towards it continued. A mix of fascination and terror. The criticism seemed to outweigh praise until Pope Clement the 8th tried coffee and said these great words: “This Satan’s drink is so delicious that it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it.”

Well, thank Clement for that. But all of this brings me to the horrible realization I had today that my coffee had cooled down while I was reflecting on the history of coffee. I realized as that cold coffee touched my lips and as I shuddered at the brutality of that experience that we are often so busy getting caught in the vortex of the twenty-four-hour news cycle or the details of the history of some or other beverage that we forget that just by contemplating coffee long enough, we might end up proving the existence of God and better understanding something of modern politics. It’s easier to do so, in fact, when you notice how your coffee changes. So, let’s contemplate change for a moment, shall we? We’ll get to the theology and politics of it in a moment.

Everything changes, you know. Things that are once were not, and will one day not be again. You and I are included in this, I’m afraid. And change can happen in different ways. Filling my cup: a quantitative change. Spilling my coffee: a location change. Coffee cooling down: qualitative change. Digesting the coffee: substantial change to the coffee and, although debatable, to me. Change would occur even if we lived in a simulation, and for that reason, it would need to be explained.

If I were drinking my coffee with Aristotle or St. Thomas, they would remind me that change involves the actualization of a potential. It involves making real what could be real. Coffee has the potential to get cold. I can heat it up again, too, but I’m too busy writing this thing to do that. All created beings are a mixture of actuality and potentiality, and these facets of being interact with each other. They interactualise. For a potential to be made real, something that possesses a certain actualizing power has to impart that actuality to what doesn’t have it, as when the room’s temperature cools the coffee down. Everything needs a real changer for change to happen.

Now, to make this very straightforward fact more interesting, let’s think of an isolated moment in the life of some coffee. The coffee is on my desk, next to me. It is approximately three feet off the ground because of the desk. The desk is approximately three meters from the ground because my house is on the first floor of a block of flats, and the block of flats is supported by a foundation, which is supported by the ground, under which is the turbulence and tormenting heat of lava, and so on. I’m thinking vertically here about the fact that the coffee is where it is in space and not just in time because it is dependent on other things, which are dependent on other things, which are dependent on yet other things. And so on. The coffee has no power on its own to be where it is. The coffee can only be where it is because it depends on the desk, and the desk can only be where it is because it depends on the floor.

I mention this more vertical way of thinking, from cup to table to floor to building to foundation to ground, and so on, because I don’t want you to make the mistake of thinking that we require something like an initial starting point, like a big bang, for all of this to exist as it does. Aristotle, for instance, believed in the Carl-Saganancity of a universe that always ways and will always be, as if time itself is not a creature, although I think it is.

An atemporal or vertical way of thinking about coffee helps us consider how various actualities depend on other actualities, which depend on other actualities in turn. Change cannot happen apart from this atemporal dependence. Moreover, each thing, which depends on other things at any given moment, clearly is not self-sustaining and self-supporting and so requires something else, which in turn is not self-sustaining or self-supporting. This is true at the microscopic and subatomic levels, too, as we dive into the coffee, its water and caffeine, molecules and atoms and quarks and gluons, and so on.

The obvious contingency of the thing—the fact that it is not self-supporting—doesn’t disappear but becomes increasingly glaringly apparent the more you look at things. Not only does nothing fully account for itself, but nothing self-actualizes itself, including the subjects of Maslowian psychology. All potentials are actualized by things that are not the thing itself, even quite apart from some historical-temporal explanation. The potential of my coffee cup to be there, feet off the ground, is actualized, for instance, by the table it is on.

Now think, as much as you are able to, about everything. Think about the sum total of everything that exists. Metaphysically, we are asking about all of that, all of us included. If I am walking in a forest and I happen to come across a giant cup of coffee floating inexplicably in the middle of a beautiful clearing without apparent reason or support, I would be likely to ask the question of how it got there. Well, while that is no doubt disturbingly inexplicable, it is no less strange that there is anything at all here rather than nothing. It would be weird for a giant, unsupported coffee cup to be in the middle of a clearing in the forest, but it is far weirder that there is a giant, unsupported universe right in the middle of—well, in the middle of what exactly?

Here we are, and here everything is, and when you really think about it, rather than just taking it for granted, you discover that it is rather strange that anything exists at all, especially since everything in the system of the entire universe is clearly not a self-supporting thing. And it isn’t good enough to merely state the fact of everything’s self-evident presence, as scientistic atheists do, because the description in itself is not an explanation. If someone dies drinking poisoned coffee, as someone does in Keigo Higashino’s thoroughly enjoyable novel Salvation of a Saint, merely describing the crime scene is not sufficient to solve the question of who poisoned the victim and why. In other words, answering any question at one level is hard to answer on the required levels for the answer to be sufficient.

Nothing we know of in the universe is self-supporting, so why would the universe itself be self-supporting? It will also not do to constantly point to causes of change that are themselves open to change because then you have to simply point to another cause for change, which is itself also changing and changeable because, in that case, we are dealing not just with infinite regress but with the silly idea that just because you add yet another level to your hierarchy of being that you have in fact solved the problem—because you really haven’t. All you have done is defer it. This is why mechanical explanations don’t ultimately destroy mystery. Just because you know how a machine works doesn’t mean you have properly understood the mystical presence of the machine itself.

My point is this. We’re not just interested in what changes our coffee from warm to cold coffee. We are interested in why coffee exists in this very moment, as isolated from all other moments. We’re also not just asking about the chemical composition of coffee because that doesn’t answer the question; it merely rephrases it. We’re not thinking about history because that’s just another way to defer the question of being. We are asking the metaphysical question: Why is there coffee instead of nothing?

What actualizes the potential of the sum total of everything in the coffee as well as everything that is the universe? We’re interested in what actualizes the universe itself (and the coffee): what actualizes anything’s potential to be, given that everything is so obviously loaded with potential? We don’t really need to ask about the whole universe at all and how it came to be, of course. We need only ask about any simple, everyday thing, like a cup of coffee. Its thereness is astonishing, isn’t it?

To avoid infinite regress, we can now posit that there must be an Unactualised Actualiser, or what Aristotle calls the Unmoved Mover. We need something that is so actual that it does not have any potential at all. As soon as something has a potential, after all, it would require something else to actualize that potential, and that would merely put us on the cosmic infinite regress path all over again. Thus, the Unactualised Actualiser would have to be absolutely unchangeable. It would need to have no parts because if it had parts, it would be dependent upon those parts for its existence, and we’d end up with yet more regress. It must be so real that it does not require anything else to explain its own reality.

If we’re taking the natural order of things as seriously as I’m trying to, then this is the only logical explanation available to any of us regarding why there is something rather than nothing, at least insofar as change is our main consideration. If you decide to contest this logic, your own logic would need to be on the basis of a more logical possibility.

We can, of course, simply settle for the fact that everything just is. We, at least most of us, can believe our senses and accept that they are not lying to us. But if we want an explanation and if we trust the basic inferential logic of how things depend on other things and that the sum total of all dependent things must require something singular and independent upon which everything can rest, it is not just possible but necessary to trust that an Unmoved Mover is the only possible answer. It is a logical necessity.

There are myriad ways to fine-tune the above argument, which is really the shortest version of it I could give without risking boring you. But I have another reason for bringing this up. And that reason is political. Because politics always rests on some or other metaphysics. This metaphysical division of being into actuality, the technical name being act, and potentiality, the technical name being potency, suggests a fantastic array of powers of actualization and potentiality.

Even in our most basic understanding of the world, we know that there are harmonious and inharmonious ways that act and potency can interact. Here’s a harmonious interactualisation: I drink the coffee, which ignites a little spark in me, and I move on to enjoy my day. Here’s an inharmonious version of this: I drink several cups of coffee in a row, and soon enough, I feel insanely anxious, become restless, get a headache, get dizzy, and my heart rate goes nuts. The political dimension of this simple interaction with coffee would be that my interactions with others, as now affected by my interaction with coffee, could be better or worse, depending on the proportion between actuality and potentiality in this specific interaction. Harmony, which is what we should be aiming for and which the ancients described in terms of the life of virtue, involves difficulties in our interactions, too, such as the difficulty of getting out of bed and making coffee. Why does it not make itself? Ah, yes, I’ve already implied an explanation for that.

Well, politics is much more complicated than this, of course. But you get the idea. It’s a matter not just of what interacts but also of a certain proportion between the things that interact. In some places and times, there has been harmony. As suggested in the Genesis story in the bible, harmony is achievable in terms of how certain aspects of creation allow for and limit each other. In her marvelous book, The Need for Roots, Simone Weil uses this principle to discuss certain needs for the soul, noting that “needs are arranged in antithetical pairs and have to combine together to form a balance. Man requires food but also an interval between his meals; he requires warmth and coolness, rest, and exercise. Likewise, in the case of the soul’s needs.” She notes our soul needs a political order that balances liberty and responsibility, equality and hierarchism, honor and punishment, truth and freedom of opinion, security, and risk, as well as private property and collective property.

Arguably, there are reasonable ways to consider all such things. But, in our time, something glaringly bothersome makes even reasonable consideration close to impossible.

It’s worth noting that there are also things that have a certain kind of existence that are completely imaginary. Let’s imagine, say, coffee that tastes exactly like tea. I can throw these antithetical ideas together quite easily to create a pure logical possibility. This is not a real potential, of course, because it is not grounded in the nature of real things. It is fiction, which, even to be a fiction, must exist somewhere—that is, in my mind—even if it isn’t truly realizable. If my coffee really tasted like tea, it would actually be tea and not coffee. Just because it is thinkable does not mean it is actualisable.

Technically, then, we are dealing here with something that has so little actuality that it is nearly completely all potentiality. If a person were to believe that one can really actualize something that has no being, he would essentially be equating himself with the ultimate actuality. He would quite literally be thinking of himself as equal to God, who is not a mere logical potential but a logical necessity. While I grant that you may not accept the existence of God on the basis of anything like what I have said, even so, the vast majority of people would agree, given the degrees of actualizing power readily and even obviously perceptible in the world, that to assume the ability to call a new nature into existence by what amounts to sheer will is a rather astonishing sort of hubris.

But it is this very hubris that is at the heart of the entire liberal political project.  To look at our current political moment both metaphysically and historically, we start to see that alarmingly far back, even before Sartre inverted essence and existence, the modern project was already obsessively concerned with falsification. The idea that we can only determine what is true after antagonizing being, which is what modern science does, is already to place actuality at the service of potentiality. But this idea leaked into everything, including theology, philosophy, and culture.

Way back, the conception of personhood in the heads of nominalists, even before Descartes, was already tending to think of logical possibility—meaning a pure object of thought without any material being—as superior in a way to potency proper. The conception of personhood at play was one of pure thought imaginatively but not actually cut off from reality. It was a blank slate before Locke and Rousseau. It was, in short, a fiction. Its reality was rooted not in being and its natural division of act and potency but in the mind, which can easily invert that division without even noticing that it is an inversion.

Politics, for a long time now, has been de-ontologized. It’s why it’s so easy to get caught up in political discussions that have almost nothing to do with actual political concerns; that is, with what it means to live well in the world, given that we interact with and intellectualize each other, and given that we even have the potential to denigrate each other if we cannot perceive harmonious interactions wisely. Theoretical relations are now more commonly entertained than real relations.

Sure, you could look at this lengthy meditation and accuse me of doing the same. But, part of why I have traversed the whole universe, from my coffee cup to God to the realm of the political, is because I ultimately have a very simple point to make. The political has to be, in the richest sense, universal. But the truly universal is not a false universal absolutely ripped from context. It is intimate as well. It pertains to various actualities and how they play off each other and give of themselves to each other. It pertains to the lives we really live. And the truth is that where the so-called political yanks us away from concrete particulars, it is no longer really political. It destroys the tensions between those antithetical pairs that Weil mentions without even considering what they mean, we cannot figure out what it means to live together, and we cannot possibly encounter wholeness. Right now, what is being sacrificed for the sake of so many fictions, the absolute fiction of money included, is everything from families to nations to harmonious geopolitical solutions, all in the name of reconceptualizing the world as a realm of pure artificiality.

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Aristotle says that the politeia as a thing not only refers to the ruling part or body (the politeuma) that actually held ruler or control over the given political community but also the very way of life and overall political culture that shapes that given political community. The polis—which was the form of the political community at the time of the Ancient Greeks—was understood to be an aggregation of the various households (oikoi) who shared the same space or territory and in doing so generally shared a common life together as a single community. Thus given the household (oikos) itself was an aggregation of different relationships that are found living within it (i.e., the husband-wife, parent-child, sibling-sibling, and master-slave/servant relationships). The nature of the polis needs to be understood as an aggregation of discrete parts whose only real unity arises out of their common shared life together in that shared space. And the political is the inter-arrangement, structure, or order of which part of the polis rules (that is to say has authority and control) over the whole community and thus to rule for the benefit of the whole community and not merely themselves or their friends and family.

Aristotle at first suggests that the politeia could be understood to be defined by two characteristics—(1) the number of rulers and (2) the justice of the ruler’s rule. As to the characteristic of the number of rulers (1), he presents us with a very common-sense division between the one, the few, or the many. As to the characteristic of the justice of the ruler’s rule (2), it is divided between the rulers ruling for the benefit or utility or good of themselves or for the sake of the whole community. Here Aristotle does not insist as Plato had that justice would require that rulers rule only for the sake of the ruled, but that that they ought to rule for the sake and benefit of the whole community and not some particular part. And if the rulers ruled for their own interest at the sake of the others in the community such rule would resemble in character despotic rule or mastery—which is understood to be rule over slaves/servants where the rule is for the sake of the rulers and not the ruled.

Out of the juxtaposition of these two categories, Aristotle presents the first typology of politeias:

What is interesting in this first typology of politeia is the name given for the politeia of the rule of the many for the common advantage is the same word for the thing he is trying to classify—politeia.  Thus, Aristotle uses the same word to signify one particular type or variety that he uses to label the whole class of things he is trying to describe.  It would be like if he had given a list of species or one of the specie was called specie. 

Aristotle in doing this had many commentators and translators perplexed about what to do with this politeia called politeia.  And using politeia to refer to a specific variety of politeia was rather unique to Aristotle, as neither Thucydides, Hesiod, Xenophon, or Plato did this.  Plato speaks of the timocracy, the rule of the warriors or honor lovers—Aristotle is wholly about such a regime in his Politics.  And because of this most translators and commentators opt to call this particular form of politeia a polity or something like a constitutional rule or a republic (but that would be problematic as the Latin for politeia is res publica).

            Yet right after Aristotle presented this six-fold typology in his Politics, he immediately challenges the validity of this just presented typology by making the claim that what truly defines the nature of an oligarchy is not the fact that its rulers are few but that they are the rich, the wealthy.  He argues that even if the ruling rich or wealthy were many (and the largest and most numerous part—even the majority) and not few its rule would remain oligarchic rather than democratic.   And this is as true about the rule of the poor or the vulgar (the demos)—that if the few poor or vulgar ruled over a political community its rule would be democratic in character.   Thus, the number of rulers seems to be accidental to the character of the given politeia.  What is more important and more critical is what exactly is the group that is ruling—who are they? Are they the wealthy/rich or the poor?  Aristotle suggests that what defines and distinguishes one politeia from another is the claim made by each group on who should rule and why. Thus, each politeia advances a specific claim about the justice and justification of its rule over the political community.  

            At Politics 3.10 Aristotle allows each form of politeia to put forward their individual claim (or justification) to rule.  In this particular presentation, Aristotle only does not let two of the six types of politeia present their claim as the other four are allowed to—one is tyranny and the other the politeia called politeia.   Whereas the claim of tyranny is obvious—might makes right—the claim of the politeia named politeia is not.  And given the very strangeness in its very name—one would expect some clarification would be given—but in Book 3 of the Politics, none is given.  So, at the end we have five claims—four explicitly presented in the text, one only implied and they are the following:

In Politics the claim of justice makes by each politeia seems to be what truly defines it.  Yet where we turn to Politics we not only return to the original six-fold typology of politeia of Politics but we once again see Aristotle drop it with the claim that a politeia with a much more complex one that not only has politeia varying across types but there is also variation within each type as well.  Thus, Aristotle suggests that there is a high degree of variation within a specific form of politeia than there is variance among them. 

            Yet what is shocking in Aristotle’s treatment of politeia in Book 4 is that he focuses more clearly on the politieas of democracy and oligarchy.  He says he has already discussed kingship and aristocracy already and argues that what remains is to discuss what has yet to be discussed from the original six forms of politeia—oligarchy, democracy, politeia called politeia, and tyranny, but what happens is somewhat different than promised. Instead, he spends the first three chapters going once again over what the politeia is and what is it composed of, and then he fleshes out the various parts of multitudes (the many) and notables (the few) that exist within and forms most political communities only then and there to give an account of the variations within the democratic politeia.

            After the account of the variations of the democratic politeia, the next chapter he then presents the variations of the oligarchic politeia.  One would expect for him to now turn to the next politeia—either tyranny or the politeia called politeia—but he does not, rather he represented both the account of the variations of democratic politeias and then oligarchic politeias.  Only after this representation of the variations of democratic (which slightly differs from the earlier account) and oligarchic politeias he then gives a blurred account of both aristocracy (which he said he had already discussed) and the politeia called politeia—which unlike the account of the varieties of democratic and oligarchic politeias does not offer clear cut variations for each he seems to all too often blur them both with either oligarchy or democracy.  These two chapters are some of the most confusing and difficult to read and understand in Aristotle’s Politics and remain an endless source of controversy over what exactly he is trying to argue here remains with us till today.

            It is in this more complex form of the politeia that we just mentioned above that Aristotle clearly distinguishes his teaching from that of Plato and Xenophon, as well as Thucydides and Herodotus. In fact, later writers like Plutarch and Polybius—Greeks who are writing and living at the time after Rome has conquered Greece and ruled over it—speak of the politeia as more akin to Plato than to Aristotle, especially Aristotle’s account of Politics book 4, 5, and 6.  The fact that so little is mentioned of Aristotle’s account about politeia among the Roman and early Christian authors it is commonly believed that these authors either did not bother to read or even have access to Aristotle’s Politics.

            Aristotle’s account of the politeia also fundamentally differs from that of Plato’s and Polybius’s accounts by his underscoring that change of politeia will occur between politeia but also within variations as well.  Both Plato and Polybius have a narrow understanding of politeia and thus present change or politeia as of a cyclical path.  In fact, their use of this cyclical change from one form of politeia to the next, in a particular path from kingship to aristocracy, to timocracy (which for Plato is the rule by the warriors), to oligarchy, to democracy, to tyranny.  This circular motion of the cycle of politeia change is one of the reasons such change of a politeia would be called a revolution.  Hence the power of this cyclical vision of political change.  But Aristotle’s account of this change of one type of politeia was radically at odds with his teacher Plato.  Aristotle held that that change could not only occur from one type to another as well as within type from one variation to other but also that there was no one clear set pattern or cycle that political change of politeia would take.  Aristotle would argue that yes some changes were more likely and others less likely but others changes were possible.  He also argues that the cycle did not necessarily repeat in the way Plato presented it.

When we look at what Aristotle shows us about the way political change can emerge and occur from one form of politeia to another, either a change within or among types, we see that he offers a model of political change that is not only as dynamic as many contemporary models of political systems/regimes, but we also find in today’s social scientific study of politics, what we call political science.  Yet Aristotle’s treatment of politeia differs from most if not all contemporary models found in today’s political science because his approach allows both strong quantitative and qualitative characteristics (not requiring the sacrificing of one for the other that is common in most contemporary approaches) that also are highly empirical in character yet offering great prescriptive richness that much empirical political typically lacks.

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