Innumerable are the works of history and political science which treat of the relations between only two peoples. This is, after all, rather surprising, for international life is complex and multilateral, and it can readily be asked what right one has to isolate such purely bilateral relations. Isn't this a bit artificial? If we compare individual human beings with nations, we note that the former live in social groups, and each of them knows an appreciable number of persons outside those groups. Nevertheless it is sometimes useful to study the privileged relations which exist between a husband and wife, between two friends, between two adversaries, between a minister and his principal collaborator. Let us start from the principle that such studies can help us to understand better both man and the society of man.

The epics present actions of men rather than theories of politics. Epic political accountability thus will not be found as a political idea but in an action which the people take or might take that brings them into a tense and potentially disastrous confrontation with their leaders. One such confrontation demonstrating popular accountability in the Odyssey will be analyzed, and a major speech in the Iliad will be examined to determine the importance of popular accountability in epic polity.

My object in this paper is to compare two texts in the history of ideas which are, on the face of it at least, very different from one another. John Henry Cardinal Newman's Development of Christian Doctrine remains one of the classic expositions of an evolutionary thesis; T. S. Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions already ranks as a near-classic statement of a revolutionary case. The contrast is, I think, not quite as stark as may appear at first sight: though Kuhn writes of revolutions, his concern, no less than Newman's, is nevertheless with “development”; and though his subject matter is the history of science, his concern too is, or once was, with “dogma.” What I most want to stress, however, is not this verbal correspondence, which may as it stands be intriguing rather than convincing, but a series of substantive parallels which flow from a mode of argument common to both these texts: the extensive use of political imagery in defining the structures of ideas in question and in explaining the character of their history.

During his lifetime (1858–1932) Graham Wallas's pioneering contributions to the study of politics were widely acknowledged. Thus, his Human Nature in Politics (1908) was rightly acclaimed as a turning point in British and American political science, away from the study of political institutions and toward the study of political behavior. With his later works, notably The Great Society (1914), Our Social Heritage (1921) and The Art of Thought (1926), Wallas's influence spilled over into other fields of social inquiry provoking a chain of serious debates among the pundits of various disciplines. And the term “Great Society,” by which Wallas meant a complex, mechanized industrial society, the monster-child of the Industrial Revolution, became a household phrase in the 1930's among the New Deal liberals in the United States, where, according to historian Samuel Eliot Morison, he had been the most influential English political philosopher since Herbert Spencer.

The legitimate goals of political communities and the proper objectives of law have been themes of political philosophy since its inception. Philosophers' disagreements about the nature of political life and law have occasioned divergent accounts of the best or ideal government and have generated an even deeper controversy as to whether the best case should be the measure of political phenomena in the first place. For the purpose of analysis, three kinds of political theories can be distinguished. Characteristic of the first kind is the belief that people can attain a wide range of excellences and that the function of a political community is to foster in a direct manner the best or most complete form of human excellence, regardless of how rare the individuals who profit from this guidance. Accordingly, a central concern of “idealistic” or “utopian” political philosophy is elaborating the nature of the absolutely best political order and the conditions of its emergence. Among the central activities of governments so conceived are moral and intellectual education, as presented, for example, in the works of Plato and Aristotle. A second kind of political theory shares the belief in a multiplicity of hierarchically ranked human ends but denies that the highest possibility for human development should serve as the foremost principle determining political institutions and governing political decisionmaking.