On Plato’s ‘Statesman’ — The Royal Weaver
Virgin Justice, Zeus’ own daughter,
Honored and revered among the Olympian gods …
Sits down by the Son of Kronos, her father,
And speaks to him about men’s unjust hearts
Until the people pay for their foolhardy rulers’
Unjust verdicts and biased decisions.
Guard against this, you bribe-eating lords.
Judge rightly. Forget your crooked deals.
- Hesiod, (active between 750 and 650 BC), ‘Works and days’.
What makes a good ruler? Is there a world leader at present that you respect and think are doing a good job? Is there one you can think of from history?
‘For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places’.
- Paul of Tarsus, (c. 5 — c. 64/65 AD), ‘Ephesians’, 6:12.
‘Then, Adeimantus, I said, the worthy disciples of philosophy will be but a small remnant: perchance some noble and well-educated person, detained by exile in her service, who in the absence of corrupting influences remains devoted to her; or some lofty soul born in a mean city, the politics of which he contemns and neglects; and there may be a gifted few who leave the arts, which they justly despise, and come to her; — or peradventure there are some who are restrained by our friend Theages’ bridle; for everything in the life of Theages conspired to divert him from philosophy; but ill-health kept him away from politics. My own case of the internal sign is hardly worth mentioning, for rarely, if ever, has such a monitor been given to any other man. Those who belong to this small class have tasted how sweet and blessed a possession philosophy is, and have also seen enough of the madness of the multitude; and they know that no politician is honest, nor is there any champion of justice at whose side they may fight and be saved. Such an one may be compared to a man who has fallen among wild beasts -he will not join in the wickedness of his fellows, but neither is he able singly to resist all their fierce natures, and therefore seeing that he would be of no use to the State or to his friends, and reflecting that he would have to throw away his life without doing any good either to himself or others, he holds his peace, and goes his own way. He is like one who, in the storm of dust and sleet which the driving wind hurries along, retires under the shelter of a wall; and seeing the rest of mankind full of wickedness, he is content, if only he can live his own life and be pure from evil or unrighteousness, and depart in peace and good-will, with bright hopes’.
- Plato, (429? — 347 B.C.), ‘Republic’
See my article On Plato’s ‘Republic’ — Philosopher Kings. For Socrates’ internal sign, see my article On Plato’s ‘Apology’ — The Subjective Principle. As for Theages, whoever he was, there is a Platonic dialogue of that name though there is some dispute as to whether it is by Plato, the theme of which is how to become wise:
SOCRATES:
‘What then, Theages, if we should make use of Euripides? [c. 480 — c. 406 BC] For he some where says, Tyrants are wise, by converse with the wise. If then some one should ask Euripides — In what say you, Euripides, do tyrants become wise by the conversation of the wise? just as if he had said, Farmers are wise, by converse with the wise — and we had asked him — In what are they wise? What would he have answered?’
………
THEAGES:
‘You have for some time, Socrates, been laughing at and playing with me’.
SOCRATES:
‘What then, do you say that you do not desire this wisdom, by which you may rule over all the citizens? And doing this, would you be any thing else but a tyrant?’
THEAGES:
‘I would pray, indeed, I fancy, to be a tyrant over all men, or, if not of all, of the greatest part; and I think that you, and all other men, would do the same, and perhaps still more, to be a god. But I did not say that I desired this’.
SOCRATES:
‘But what then, after all, is this which you desire? Do you not say that you desire to rule over the citizens?’
THEAGES:
‘Not by violence, nor as tyrants do; but I desire to rule over the willing, in the same manner as other men of note in the city’.
Friedrich Nietzsche, (1844- 1900), refers to this passage in ‘The Will to Power’:
‘I am writing for a race of men which does not yet exist: for ‘the lords of the earth’.’
‘In Plato’s Theages the following passage will be found: ‘Every one of us would like if possible to be master of mankind; if possible, a God!’ This attitude of mind must be reinstated in our midst’.
‘Englishmen, Americans, and Russians’.
- ‘The Will to Power’.
But then is statesmanship, leadership, being a ruler and managing public affairs, as Jacinda Ardern, (1980 — ), observed, at bottom just a spectator sport, a means of controlling the dumb plebeians, the sheep, (see below for what Plato says about that), through deception and hypocrisy?
Plato discuss the ideal ruler in the ‘Statesman’ which advances the following principal ideas:
1. The problem confronting the Athenian Stranger and Socrates is that of defining the ideal statesman.
2. The statesman, or king, is a member of the class of those who direct action, he initiates directives, and he is distinguished from those who build lifeless things by the fact that his concern is with a living herd, the citizenry.
3. The art of statesmanship is not a function of the kind of state to be governed, a good statesman can rule no matter what the form of government,
4. Laws are necessary in a state, but the ruler is more important than the laws, in many cases he must judge when the laws do not apply.
5. The statesman is superior to other men who practice the various arts of ruling men in that he must decide which of the other arts must be used for the benefit of the state, in that sense, statesmanship is the art of all arts.
In Plato’s political works he is mainly concerned with an analysis of the nature of the individual and the state which is an appropriate reflection of the individual. For Plato looked upon the state as analogous to the individual, and he believed that the type of individual found in the state determined the sort of state it would be. In the ‘Republic’ he searches for justice in the state to discover the nature of justice in the person, and after he describes the ideal state and its ruler, he traces its decline by pointing to the concomitant decline in the soul of the individual. In the ‘Laws’ he concentrates on the second-best state, a government of laws not men, and works out the constitution applicable to it. In the ‘Statesman’ written most likely between the ‘Republic’ and the ‘Laws’, Plato attacks the problem of defining the king who would rule in the best state, distinguishing him from sham rulers.
Plato looked upon ruling as an art, and, as with other arts, it has its subject matter which only an expert can master. People who are ill turn willingly to a physician expertly trained in the art of medicine to cure them, people who are in need of transportation between lands separated by an open sea turn to a pilot expertly trained in the art of seamanship to guide them across perilous seas, yet in the most important problem they face — conducting themselves as citizens in the state which involves their very happiness — they seem content to trust their fortunes to people untrained in statesmanship, who know nothing of the art of governing. It is as if they turned to the first person they met for medical help, or trusted anyone at all to sail across dangerous waters. Plato believed that intelligent human beings, ignorant of an art in which they had no training, when they needed help for which the art was beneficial, would willingly turn to the expert for advice. He believed that if he could spell out the art of ruling and training necessary to be an expert in it, intelligent people would willingly turn to true statesmen to rule them.
The Athenian Stranger points out that we are to seek a definition of the statesman as a kind of expert, and, hence, a division of forms of knowledge will be necessary. For to be an expert takes knowledge, and since this is knowledge of statecraft, statecraft should be separated from that which is other than statecraft. In addition we must also separate knowledge into that which is applied and that which is pure. The Stranger points out that the ruler’s art is closer to mental than manual labour, and thus the distinction is needed, for the former is theoretical or pure rather than practical or applied. (In our discussion we will use statesmanship and kingship and statesman and king as interchangeable terms respectively).
In his search for a proper definition, the Athenian Stranger makes us of the logical technique of defining his terms by proceeding from the most general to the more particular, thus specifying what the statesman is as accurately as he can. He begins by examining appropriate subdivisions of the division of theoretical knowledge, the art of counting (which has nothing to do with applied work), and that of master builder, charged with directing action. The king is found in this class, which can itself be divided into those who give initial directives (the king) and those who pass on to others commands that are given to them (the king’s ministers).
As one who issues commands, the king aims at the production of something.That which is productive may itself be divided into the lifeless and the living. The king, who is a member of the directive class, may be distinguished at this juncture from the master builder, for whereas the builder produces lifeless things, the king is concerned with ordering living creatures, in flocks rather than singly. These, it must be remembered, are flocks of tame rather than wild creatures, of men rather than animals. The art that we are looking for, then, is that of shepherding mankind, it is the art of government, and the expert, the man of knowledge concerning this art, is the statesman or king, who is herder to a human tame flock. It is a peculiar herd in that its members challenge the herder, and various members claim that they themselves are the true herders of mankind. (Thus it is not easy to get men to accept willingly the expert in governing as properly ruling over them, they do not recognise the art for what it is). Farmers, doctors, merchants, teachers, others, all put in their claims, some point out that even the statesmen is fed by them
Plato turns to one of his famous myths to aid us in our quest. This myth relates the reversal of the movements of heaven and earth and the changes that this brought about. Before the reversal, every herd of living creatures was watched over by a heavenly daemon. The herds were all under the great god Cronos, and they lived an idyllic existence. The reversal changed all this, when Zeus took over, the daemons left the human flocks and, unattended, they were prey to wild beasts. Men were forced to learn to protect themselves, they had no crafts and were at the mercy of nature.With mastery of crafts came protection from and the control of nature, since the gods had abandoned the flocks, human herders had to take over. The Athenian Stranger points out that the mistake they were making in defining the statesman was that they confused him with the divine herder, did not define his manner of rule, and forgot that nurture was to be subsumed under the flock in discussing the herder’s function. The herder is concerned with people in flocks and it is to this fact that we must turn in our search for a definition.
In tending people we find that sometimes rule has to be enforced and that at other times it is willingly accepted. It is important that this distinction be made, for upon it depends the distinction between a tyrant and a king. The true statesman has his tending freely accepted by herds of free bipeds. If the state is to function properly, the rulers must be accepted willingly by the subjects, in any form of government the ruled must obey the laws or face sanctions provided by the law.
In order to understand what kingly duties entail, the Athenian Stranger continues, we must first distinguish those activities which are no part of statesmanship from statesmanship. First of all are those practical activities which contribute to the basic needs of the community and without which the community would not survive. (Nevertheless it is not the kingly art to produce these things). Under this category we find such workers as those who preserve what has been produced, those who produce the support of things, (the carpenters, for example), those who defend us from cold as well as from enemies — such men as builders and weavers, those who provide diversion for us, the poets and musicians, those who produce the basic materials to be used in other crafts, the skinners, the lumbermen, and so on, and those who provide food and nourishment for the community. We also find in the community other groups such as slaves or merchants, civil servants and priests, but the statesman is not to be confused with any members of any of these groups, for none has independent authority and none is a ruler. Nor must we confuse the statesman with those who pretend to teach one how to rule, those who boast of their ability to argue any side of an issue, the sophists who walk the land. The Athenian Stranger promises to discuss them more fully later (he does so in the ‘Sophist’. See my article, On Plato’s ‘Sophist’ — the Image Makers). He then proceeds to discuss various types of states to see if the statesman fits one more than another.
There are three major types, each with two subtypes. In monarchy we have rule by one, and this may be exemplified by a tyrant or a constitutional monarchy. The next type is that in which a few wield power, this may be seen in an aristocracy or, when wealth is the criterion for rule, an oligarchy. Lastly, we have the rule of many, called a democracy. The many have control either by force or by consent. Given that these are the forms of government, can we thus discover the art of rule. For Plato, the art of statesmanship is not a function of the type of state. If we find a statesman capable of ruling, then, whatever the constitutional form of government under which he rules, he is to be regarded as a ruler. Plato goes on tho say that this is so whether there are subjects who are rich or poor, willing or unwilling, and regardless of whether there is a code of laws.
At this juncture, the young Socrates questions whether a good governor can govern without laws. (It is here that we reach the midpoint, as it were, between the Republic and Statesman, works concerned, respectively, with the best government and its ruler, and the Laws, a work which discusses the second-best government, a government in which the laws are prior in importance to the character of the ruler). The Athenian Stranger answers that the art of kingship includes the art of law making, but that the political ideal is not full authority for laws but rather for a man who understands the art and has the ability to practice it. If we consider a law as an unqualified rule of human behaviour, then it cannot with perfect accuracy prescribe what is right and good for each member of the community at any one time — this takes a king. We need laws, however, because the legislator cannot give every individual his due with absolute accuracy, general codes of conduct must be spelled out for the bulk of the citizenry. In any particular case, if the statesman can legislate better than the laws, he should be permitted to do so, no matter what. Here Plato includes the possibility of forcing the citizen to accept this kind of ad hoc ruling.
A state in which the ruler is superior to the laws is the best state, but when that is not possible, a government of laws must be adhered to. The Athenian Stranger points out how the laws grow through the experience of legislators in dealing with the affairs of men. The knowledge that is gained is that of a science. As such, it has the force of a scientific truth of the kind that Plato considers infallible. As rules of behaviour, the laws must be obeyed, and no one is to act in contravention to them. The only better situation is that in which a monarch, having achieved the art of statesmanship, applies the knowledge he has gained to a particular situation. The Athenian Stranger hints at the work to be done in the Laws when he points out that imitative constitutions must keep strictly to the laws and never transgress written enactments or established national customs, if they mean to reproduce as far as they can that one real constitution which is government by a real statesman using real statecraft. The various types of government occur when the ideal constitution is copied in various ways, thus, when copied by the wealthy, we call the rule aristocracy, when aristocrats disobey the laws, we call that rule oligarchy. When one governs in imitation of the truly wise ruler we call him king, not realizing that we are contributing to confusion, for a king who imitates the true statesman rules by right opinion without knowing the grounds for the art of statesmanship. When such a one rules not by right opinion, but by his passions, then we call him a tyrant. Although men doubt that any statesman could be superior to the laws without being corrupt, such a statesman is the only one who could govern the commonwealth worthy of the name of best state.
Previously those functions in the state which were important to the very existence of the community were distinguished from kingly duties. But what of those functions which resemble statesmanship, and what of those individuals who practice them? That is, what of generals, judges, rhetoricians, and the like, all of whom function something like a ruler, and all of whom have been suggested at one time or another for the office of ruler? Each of these men, in practicing his art, uses some form of action upon men, it may be force (military action), or by persuasion (oratory or rhetoric), or through interpretation and judgement of the law (legal decisions). The Athenian Stranger holds that the art that decides which of the above forms of action is to be practiced is superior to the particular art decided upon. It is the statesman who decides whether to use persuasion or force against a group of men, or to take no action at all. He can use oratory which is an adjunct of statesmanship but is not statesmanship itself, thus, the statesman is superior to the rhetorician. Similarly, he can decide whether the generals are to fight or whether friendly settlement is possible, thus he is superior to the generals. The duty of the judge is to make honest judgements in accordance with the laws made by the statesman, thus, the judge is subservient to the statesman. As an art, statesmanship is concerned with which of these other arts is to be used on the right occasion in the great enterprise of statecraft. It is the art of arts as the good is the Form of forms. The statesman must develop the best in the conflicting natures of his subjects — he is a royal weaver.
So ends the ‘Statesman’, a dialogue connected to the ‘Sophist’ in which it was asked: philosophy, statesman and sophist, are they three or one? As in the ‘Sophist’ the Eleatic Stranger used the method of division and collection to try and define the statesman, beginning with the position that the statesman is a knower. Statesmanship is no mere knack and kingly knowledge is demanding, for its theory relates directly to practice. But what does the monarch command for? Breeding? The breeding of pedestrian, hornless two-footed animals that mate within the same species, namely humans. The result of their divisions is, the Stranger says, that the monarch looks much like a swineherd. Their method seems to have missed everything distinctive about human statesmanship. So they make another beginning. Rather than divide and collect the Stranger recounts a story. According to his myth the cosmos moves in two different cycles. In the first cycle the god Cronos ruled as king, he took care of everything, human beings sprung from mother Earth with no families or cities. We were born old, gradually grew younger, and finally disappeared into the soil. We were one family at peace with one another and with the other animals, the Earth provided all our needs.
But eventually Cronos the God pilot returned to his look out to contemplate the Whole. He dropped the tiller. The cosmos reversed motion and the cycle of Zeus began, a cycle that started off well but gets worse and worse, human beings are left to hunger, violence, age and death, and when the Universe is about to fall apart Cronos comes back and straightens the ship and the first cycle begins anew. And do you know which cycle we happen to be in right now There are much interesting points of discussion in the myth about happiness, philosophy, and talking with animals, but most basically the myth points out the error in the prior division. For they were describing a ruler who differed in kind from the ruled, the way that a human differs from pigs, or that a god differs from humans. That is not the case now, we have no god to care for us in this cycle, we are alone, in particular alone with our mortality.
With such points in mind the Stranger returns to the search for the statesman. He suggests that the understand statesmanship by comparing it to the humble art of weaving, but first they must explain their use of this example by the example of learning to read in which we compare letters to learn words. It seems that something similar is happening here, they will use the example of weaving to understand statesmanship. A rather round-about approach, the Stranger goes through many divisions to define weaving, and then he declares that this example, like the myth before it, has gone on too long, and as a remedy he recommends they examine the art of measurement. Such an art is related to politics he says for in politics greater and less are measured not mathematically but with respect to what is fitting. We may suppose that irony is in play here for if they have this much trouble in finding due measure in their speeches just how hard it must be for the statesman to find that measure indeed.
We return once more to the search for the statesman, they separate away other various types of arts and would be statesmen. These also-rans lead the Stranger to speak about inferior or imitation regimes, monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, oligarchy and tyranny. In other words, all the regimes we are used to in practice. What makes them inferior is that they do not rule by knowledge, rather they proclaim their legitimacy on the basis of things like law, popular will, or the consent of the governed, and none of these are legitimate claims compared with knowledge, in fact the best rule would be for a prudent person to sit beside each of us and tell us what to do. The Stranger thereby clarifies what we suspected, that the rule of the true statesman is impossible in practice. Where would we find all these wise men to sit by our sides all day? Why would they be willing to do so? Who would put up with them? This would be literally a nanny state. Should we not then question the Stranger’s conclusion in which he states that the true statesman will weave together the virtues of courage and moderation? First, in the best citizens’s souls by education, then by weaving these citizens together through marriage based upon a marriage scheme based upon knowledge and not upon choice. Of course he says nothing about the objections the livestock er .. I mean the citizens may have to this breeding scheme.
So, the dialogue begins by likening the monarch to a swineherd, offers a disheartening myth, indulges in ill-measured treatment of measurement, and concludes with an ironic description of the true monarch in imitative regimes. This must make us doubt the possibility of a truly rational politics, the so-called philosopher kings seem as mythical as Cronos. But at the same time it may better allow us to appreciate the longings inherent in politics, longings that lead citizens to busy themselves with such things as marriage, morals and myths. All human beings long for wholeness, consciousness of our incompleteness, and longing for more. This makes us different from swine and appreciating this reality may be the point that links the statesman and the philosopher, even if the kinds of wholeness that most people pursue fall very short of the god who drops the tiller to contemplate the Whole.
And this is where Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s, (1770–1831), ‘Philosophy of Right’, comes in, hand firmly upon the tiller while contemplating the Whole to weave it into a complete and beautiful tapestry, if I may be allowed to mix up my metaphors. As he wrote in his Preface:
‘It is this very relation of philosophy to actuality which is the subject of misunderstandings, and I accordingly come back to my earlier observation that, since philosophy is exploration of the rational, it is for that very reason the comprehension of the present and the actual, not the setting up of a world beyond which exists God knows where — or rather, of which we can very well say that we know where it exists, namely in the errors of a one-sided and empty ratiocination. In the course of the following treatise, I have remarked that even Plato’s Republic, a proverbial example of an empty ideal, is essentially the embodiment of nothing other than the nature of Greek ethics; and Plato, aware that the ethics of his time were being penetrated by a deeper principle which, within this context, could appear immediately only as an as yet unsatisfied longing and hence only as a destructive force, was obliged, in order to counteract it, to seek the help of that very longing itself. But the help he required had to come from above, and he could seek it at first only in a particular external form of Greek ethics. By this means, he imagined he could overcome the destructive force, and he thereby inflicted the gravest damage on the deeper drive behind it, namely free infinite personality. But he proved his greatness of spirit by the fact that the very principle on which the distinctive character of his Idea turns is the pivot on which the impending world revolution turned.
What is rational is actual;
and what is actual is rational.
This conviction is shared by every ingenuous consciousness as well as by philosophy, and the latter takes it as its point of departure in considering both the spiritual and the natural universe’.
- ‘Philosophy of Right’, 1820.
Unsatisfied longings indeed, such as we have seen to be manifested in Plato’s ‘Statesman’, whereas the ‘Philosophy of Right’ exemplifies the speculative method of cognition, whereby ‘what is rational is actual and what is actual is rational’ serves as an affirmation in the face of utopian moralising. Rather we should ‘recognize reason as the rose in the cross of the present’, and not expect philosophy to predict or prescribe the course of future events: ‘When philosophy paints its grey in grey. then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy’s grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva [or Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, associated with the owl] spreads its wings only with the fall of dusk’. This accords with Plato’s contention concerning the importance of knowledge of statecraft, the separation of statecraft from that which is other than statecraft, and the separation of knowledge into that which is applied and that which is pure, (the real, being rational, it is therefore intelligible), and it answers Aristotle, (384–322 BC), whose ‘Politics’ begins: ‘[t]hose who suppose that the same person is expert in political rule, kingly rule, managing the household and being a master of slaves do not argue rightly’.
The ‘Philosophy of Right’ is an endeavour to integrate into a single theory both freedom of the will and social and political freedom, to sublate reflective, individualist morality into social morality or ethical life, to reject the sharp dichotomy between the individual and the state, and to give an an account of the various intermediary institutions that prepare the individual for citizenship. There is a distinction made between civil society and the state, and an account given of the role of the economy in society, together with an appreciation of its need for regulation, and an appreciation of the role of warfare in the life of a state, and of the fact that a state is essentially one member of a system of states. The idea of right develops out of the concept of right, and the idea of right is the concept of right together with its reality or actualization, for Hegel is not concerned with the merely positive and contingent details of social and political systems, but with their essential, rational structure. The concept of right is the free will, and there are three phases of the will each a successively more adequate notions of freedom.
However, whatever public-spiritedness may be engendered by civil society is largely motivated by self-interest, and therefore there has to be some still greater whole in society that serves to bind people together, something that transcends individual self-interest, and this is the state, which unites people by embodying the spirit of the nation, its traditions, mores and customs. In ethical terms, the state is an advance upon civil society in virtue of the fact that it produces a sense of common citizenship and obligation to the whole, for the state not only unifies the people, it safeguards and supports the spheres of family and civil society, and these more or less private spheres are rendered possible by a public, legal order that protects and regulates them. The state preserves and protects the different sorts of freedoms that express themselves in family and civil society, and it makes a place for the freedoms to be found under abstract right and morality, freedom expressing itself through property claims, and through the conscience of the individual. The state is not simply government, an apparatus of laws, of departments, of authorities, rather, the state is Objective Spirit, it provides a people with a reflection of itself, for freedom is truly realized only through identifying ourselves with our community, true freedom only comes about through membership in the state.
And an Hegelian state is a constitutional monarchy, whereby the role of the monarch is merely to be the final authority, he or she is advised by his or her officials, his or her business is to make their recommendations the policy of the state. Should there be disagreement among the officials, it is the monarch who decides, for such a decider is a practical necessity, society needs to see the spirit of the nation embodied in a single personality and the simplest and most unproblematic way to select such an individual is through hereditary succession. Aside from the role of the sovereign, there is the role of the executive branch of government which includes the judiciary, and public opinion has its say in the legislative branch, though as Hegel sagely observes the state must both respect and distrust public opinion. The legislature should consists of two houses, the upper house consisting of the landed aristocracy, and the lower house essentially made up of representatives of the business class. As for the matter of internal relations and of world history, concerning the issues of how different states or different nations exist in relation to one another, essentially they exist in a state of nature, and because there is no authority, no world government to which the individual states are subject, their relations are fundamentally lawless. Consequently periodic conflicts are inevitable, but states, like individuals, have a lifespan and wars frequently have the effect of ending outworn ways of life, or societal structures, and can galvanize people and cause them to feel a greater sense of national solidarity.
History reveals the coming-into-being of the modern state, which recognizes the inherent dignity and rights of all individuals, making a place for public opinion to speak its mind while never losing sight of the fact that citizens must be educated and guided in the making of sound judgements (there is no need for each of us having our own personal sage telling us what to do). However, the ideal form of the state as envisaged by Hegel is not identical with any form of government existing in his time, (certainly not with the Prussian state which he is often accused of defending, knowing on which side his bread was buttered so to speak), though here and there it bears similarities to many, nor is it identical with any form of government existing in our time though the UK nation approximates to it. Rather it is a state yet to reveal itself in the modern world, it is not an ideal like Plato’s city in the ‘Republic’, and certainly nothing like Karl Marx’s, (1818–1883), communist utopia, (see my articles The Visible Divinity — parts one to three).
Perhaps then the ‘Philosophy of Right’, albeit with considerably more penetration, and with considerably more detail, like the ‘Statesmen’ is ultimately an expression of the longings that are inherent in politics?
O, that estates, degrees, and offices
Were not deriv’d corruptly, and that clear honour
Were purchased by the merit of the wearer!
- William Shakespeare, (1564–1616), ‘The Merchant of Venice’, Act II, scene 9.
