POETRY & BALANCED GOVERNMENT (I)

AM | @agumack

"... a well-mix'd state" — Alexander Pope

I have now identified three poems that deal directly with the notions of mixed government, checks and balances and balanced government: (1) Tyrtaeus F4; (2) Alexander Pope's Essay on Man (Epistle III); (3) the anonymously published Le balancier politique (1795). More will eventually pop up. In a dazzling display of erudition, the two historians of the mixed constitution have collected a number of 'political' lines from Homer, Pindar (Pyth., 2.86), Aeschylus and Euripides that mention some of the categories used in writings about balanced government [1].

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No mention is made in these works of Herodotus' quote of the Delphic prophecy that contains —depending on translations— the terms "counter-force", "strength against strength" and "checks" (7.220). My own preferred line is Odysseus' warning to Agamemnon towards the end of Sophocle's Ajax [see]. When Friedrich Schiller writes about the benefits of an independent judiciary, he does so not in a poem, but in one of his historical works [2]. There are some telling 'political' poems by Jorge-Luis Borges as well [see]. But none of them deal directly with the issue of political balance.

Alexander Pope's Essay on Man (1733) is quoted by John Adams —surely one of history's most ardent supporters of balanced government— in his important pamphlet Toughts on Government (1776):

POPE flattered tyrants too much when he said,

"For forms of government let fools contest

Whate'er is best administer'd is best."

As it turns out, Pope was heavily influenced, in political matters, by Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, an author that was closely read by Adams. In his wonderful racconto of Adams as a reader, Zoltán Haraszti writes that "Pope and Bolingbroke met almost daily, carrying on innumerable discussions. Their talks formed the basis of Pope's Essay on Man". And he adds: "In Bolingbroke, he [Adams] found the fundamental tenet of his own political philosophy: Simple forms of government are governments of arbitrary will, and, therefore, of all imaginable absurdities the most absurd" [3].

This is the poem's celebration of the mixed constitution:

[...] jarring interests of themselves create

Th'according music of a well-mix'd state.

In other words: the divergent interests of differents sorts of people —the one (the monarchical/executive principle), the few (the aristocratic/meritocratic principle) and the many (the democratic/deliberative principle)— end up creating the balance that provides the modicum of stability that any government requires. Note that Pope's "well-mix'd state" looks a lot like Aquinas' politia bene commixta. 

[1] G. J. D. Aalders. Die Theorie der gesmischten Verfassung in Altertum (Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1968), pp. 24-26; Wilfried Nippel. Mischverfassungstheorie und Verfassungsrealität in Antike und früher Neuzeit (Bochum: Klett-Cotta, 1980), pp. 12 and 43-44.

[2] "Die Sicherheit des Lebens und Eigentums, die aus mildern Gesetzen und einer gleichen Handhabung der Justiz entsprang, hatte die Betriebsamkeit und den Fleiß in diesen Ländern ermuntert.", Geschichte des Abfalls der vereinigten Niederlande von der spanischen Regierung (1788) [see].

[3] Zoltán Haraszti. John Adams and the Prophets of Progress. Harvard University Press, 1952, pp. 49-79: "Bolingbroke declares himself unequivocally for mixed governments in which monarchical, aristocratic and democratic powers are blended—balanced and checked. Absolute monarchy is tyranny, he wrote, but absolute democracy is tyranny and anarchy both".
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