In Tolkien: Author of the Century, Shippey says that Acton seems to have been the first to say that power corrupts. We’re very used to the idea, but it isn’t a human universal.
True enough; but I suspect a lot of that comes from the patterns of behavior we’d now label “corruption” being taken for granted by a lot of pre-Enlightenment thinkers.
I haven’t read enough pre-Enlightenment political theory to claim a universal, but the familial model of power (with the leader as a father and subordinates as children; sometimes augmented with an executive officer figure as mother) seems to have been fairly ubiquitous. Seems to me that a lot of actions we’d view as blatant abuse of power might under this model be accepted as the rights of leadership, so long as noblesse oblige is upheld.
In Tolkien: Author of the Century, Shippey says that Acton seems to have been the first to say that power corrupts. We’re very used to the idea, but it isn’t a human universal.
True enough; but I suspect a lot of that comes from the patterns of behavior we’d now label “corruption” being taken for granted by a lot of pre-Enlightenment thinkers.
I haven’t read enough pre-Enlightenment political theory to claim a universal, but the familial model of power (with the leader as a father and subordinates as children; sometimes augmented with an executive officer figure as mother) seems to have been fairly ubiquitous. Seems to me that a lot of actions we’d view as blatant abuse of power might under this model be accepted as the rights of leadership, so long as noblesse oblige is upheld.