‘Two-Dimensional’ Analysis Can Deepen Understanding of Politics

We use concepts to think about politics, and these concepts often classify people, actions or institutions into discrete categories. Most classifications are one-dimensional. But two-dimensional classifications can sometimes be more useful.

For example, we can classify people as men or women (one-dimensional). We can also classify people as wearing glasses or not wearing glasses (also one-dimensional).

Combining the two one-dimensional categories, we can distinguish between men wearing glasses, men not wearing glasses, women wearing glasses, and women not wearing glasses. This two-dimensional classification system gives us four categories of people.

Politically, the distinction between a radical and a conservative is one-dimensional. However we can add a second dimension in which we distinguish between someone’s goals and how they propose to get to their goals.

People often have difficulty figuring out my political orientation. This is because I am radical in wanting to change many aspects of today’s world, but conservative in advocating peaceful reforms rather than violent revolution or military action to attain my goals.

Historically, two-dimensional political analysis has been rare. As far as I can tell, with the possible exception of the Nolan Chart, there are only two major examples, one of which was Aristotle’s classification of government into six separate types with three different categories in one dimension and two in the other dimension.

Aristotle (384 BC-322 BC) held that government could be controlled by one person, by a few people, or by “the many.” He also noted that each of these three types of rule could be either bad or good.

In Aristotle’s good forms (monarchy, aristocracy, or polity) , the ruler(s) govern in the general interest. In the bad forms (tyranny, oligarchy, or democracy), they govern only in their own interest. (For Aristotle “democracy” meant mob rule and was bad!)

Oddly enough, the other major example of a two-dimensional political classification is my own “periodic table” of human associations.

My three-by-three periodic table contains nine different categories of association and clarifies many things.

It demonstrates that we use the word “laws” to refer to three entirely different aspects of government: genuine laws, pseudolaws, and bylaws.

My periodic table agrees with Aristotle in its sharp distinction between laws, which apply to everyone, and pseudolaws, which only apply to some people and exempt those who govern from rules imposed on other people.

My table differentiates genuine laws from pseudolaws by placing them in separate locations, even though they are both enforced by sanctions. It shows that bylaws, unlike pseudolaws and genuine laws, are enforced by withdrawn or terminated inducements rather than by sanctions.

My table clarifies the difference between government’s two different roles as a trustee by placing them in separate locations: trustee for the public, and trustee for specific individuals or groups of individuals.

Government’s role as trustee for the public potentially includes distributing an equal social dividend to every man, woman, and child subject to its jurisdiction. The Alaskan oil dividend is an example.

Government as trustee for specific individuals protects children whose parents abuse their responsibilities as trustees, and it protects the interests of children in divorce proceedings. Government as trustee for particular groups runs Indian reservations and operates public schools for the benefit of all children.

Aristotle identified the basic question in evaluating any government: whether it governs for the general welfare, or for the exclusive benefit of its leaders.

In his famous “Letter From A Birmingham Jail” (1963), Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote: “An unjust law is a code that a majority inflicts on a minority that is not binding on itself. This is difference made legal. On the other hand a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow that it is willing to follow itself.”

My periodic table differs from Dr. King only in that it does not concede that the unjust codes to which he refers rise to the dignity of being laws in the first place.

Paul F. deLespinasse is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Computer Science at Adrian College. He received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1966 and has been a National Merit Scholar, an NDEA Fellow, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and a Fellow in Law and Political Science at the Harvard Law School. His college textbook, “Thinking About Politics: American Government in Associational Perspective,” was published in 1981. His most recent book is “The Case of the Racist Choir Conductor: Struggling With America’s Original Sin.” His columns have appeared in newspapers in Michigan, Oregon and other states. Read more of his reports — Click Here Now.