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Demagoguery—let us define it as the art of political pandering— is as old as democracy itself (the word comes from a classical Greek term meaning simply “leader of the people”). c. thought it dangerously vulnerable to unscrupulous politicians who played on the hopes and fears of the people to advance their own careers. Such people were usually highly effective orators who could arouse passions and sway decisions in large popular assemblies. These rhetorical skills helped why leadership is still necessary [ 13 ] them to gain public office and sometimes (like Hitler) to usurp legitimate processes of democratic decision making and set themselves up as tyrants.

Imperial devolution may not be avoidable, as was probably true in the Yugoslav case in spite of the active abetting of Serbian nationalism by Slobodan Milosˇevic´ and others in the old Yugoslav Communist leadership. At the same time, the Yugoslav solution—the bloody breakup of the nation into its constituent parts—is not necessarily desirable as an alternative to it. From this perspective, imperial states cannot be considered simply illegitimate, or imperial statecraft something entirely beyond the pale of contemporary respectability.

11 The classic articulation of the notion of prudence appears in the thought of Aristotle. In his two great works, the Politics and the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle in effect founded the discipline of political science in what may be called its prescientific form. Aristotle’s term for the discipline of political science (politikeˆ ) can equally be rendered “political expertise” or “statecraft”: there is no sharp distinction for him between the theory of politics and its practice. According to Aristotle, prudence or practical wisdom (as the term phroneˆsis is sometimes translated) is the mode of knowing proper to political science.