Afrogouvernance - By Gustave Botela Lipo - March 15th, 2008.
Democracy and virtues
The study of the reports of democracy
and virtuousness requests two preliminary comments.
On one hand, on the same subject, it is careful to begin by raising an ambiguity
being fond of the vocabulary.
1-Politician
2-Man of State.
Term "politician" defines a citizen who exercises officially a
central or local political power or who gets ready to exercise a political load, by exhausting juridical or lawful specific, medium
means, authority, influence, persuasion, force, which political art includes.
This expression has normally a very general sense,
not taking into account talents and virtues of the man, of its successes or of its chess. She can acquire a little pejorative approval
sometimes if they compare it to the expression "Man of State» which indicates a politician whose talents are acknowledged and certified
by an experience lived, by acknowledged, carried off successes.
On the other hand, the wording of chosen title restricts our
analysis specifically to the democratic regimes of opinion where, as part of a state of right, human rights inspire definition and
respect for rights and for duties of the citizens.
International relations are treated by drawing inspiration from traditions
of the right of people there. Will hold us therefore systematically regimes out of the way where reigns arbitrary power and where
the violence of some clamps down without other control than the violence of others.
In the contemporary domain of human business,
the time is not any more, at least since Machiavelli, where they pretended they will determine characters and rules of a « perfect
State ». It would not either know how to be a matter to draw the portrait of a man of State improved in regime of freedom under the
reign of public opinion and in a State of right.
First, because the eminence of a politician depends on two layouts of wholly
independent criteria one of other one and which must however be taken one and the other in consideration. It is, on one hand the effectiveness
of authority and action of this man, success of its firms, on the other hand the value of accomplished writings, a value that, itself,
can vary with cultures, and measure, for instance, in terms of greatness, potency, prosperity, justice and spiritual elevation.
Then,
to take advantage from these criteria, it is necessary to take into account, on one hand, the truth and the amazing complicacy of
historical situations and circumstances on which a politician must act a political function, on the other hand, of extreme variety,
complicacy of the personalities achieving.
In culmination, every historical situation is unique, every political personality
is unique, and all the more that she is stronger, what is ordinarily case. And it is still needed, so that action of policy is efficient,
so that it is a kind of convenience between situation and man. There are men made as torments, others in which peace suits.
In
some, the authoritarian exercise of power succeeds. Others operate better by negotiation. Political art is itself miscellaneous and
must agree in requirements and in obstacles of situations.
Hegel liked himself celebrating the role of some "big individualities" it
was those capacities of which agreed on the conditions of an instant of history.
The exercise of political power is a very personal
art, an art to order human business, in a nation or between nations, in function and in spite of freedom always underlying of the
men and clean freedom to the citizens, with that they draw away of unpredictability and uncertainty in it cloth of passions and firm
belief, cogitation, opinions and acts.
A political work is a work of wholly curious art, a genuine creation with original characters,
incomparable as such. Because any policy is in the order of culture. It is an unpredictable masterpiece, in constant mutation, subjected
to uninterrupted tests. The biggest state men remain fragile and all the more able of errors, errors and chess as their successes
make them surer of themselves.
In such conditions, it is not even a question of establishing the ideal type of the politician,
some more the man of state. While becoming aware of the importance of compensation and correlations which can intervene between the
elements of a personality, they can only try to put in an obvious place talents and virtues which intervene or that seem necessary
for success or for value of the activity of the politicians.
As a result, you should be always necessary forget only institutions,
the rules of right count much less than the men, their talents and their virtues. Right is always only a parapet, one given inert
and immobile. It is the morals which count because, by interpreting a posterior the right happened of their presence, they transmit
him an orientation, effectiveness, a life. By thinking about sense, about load which virtues in democracy can take, it is in played
morals, therefore in active men in a democracy, that they grant their fair importance.