What We Call the West

Unlike political scientists and social critics, who can diagnose the illnesses of a specific body politic without speculating on the best possible form of social organization, political philosophers are in the business of evaluating present society against an ideal conception of justice. The interesting corollary of this banal distinction is that the latter camp of thinkers cannot merely rely on the factual record for these comparisons, for the simple reason that every society that has actually existed has been unjust. As a result, Western political philosophy has been, to a surprising degree, a close relative of genre fiction: Plato’s Republic is secretly a masterclass in sci-fi world-building, Machiavelli’s The Prince is a fantasy role-playing game in which the reader is invited to imagine that they’re the sovereign of an imaginary city-state in Renaissance Italy, and the protagonist of much of Enlightenment political thought is not a nonfictional person but the main character in an elaborate work of historical fiction—the famous and infamous Noble Savage.