390
PARTISAN REVIEW
for whatever reasons-people begin to make a philosophy out of
history as it presents itself to the professional eyes of the historian.
Nearly all modern explications of the so-called "historicality" of man
have been distorted by categories which, at best, are working hy–
potheses for arranging the material of the past.
Fortunately the situation of the political sciences, which in the
highest sense are called upon to pursue the quest for meaning and to
answer the need for true understanding of political data, is quite
different. The great consequence which the concept of beginning and
origin has for all strictly political questions comes from the simple
fact that political action, like all action, is essentially always the be–
ginning of something new; as such, it is, in terms of political science,
the very essence of human freedom. The central position which the
concept of beginning and origin must have in all political thought
has been lost only since the historical sciences have been permitted
to supply their methods and categories to the field of politics.
It
was
indicated, as a matter of course, for Greek thought in the fact that
the Greek word
arche
means both beginning and rule, and it is still
fully alive, though generally overlooked by modern interpreters,
in
Machiavelli's theory of political power, according to which the act
of foundation itself, that is the conscious beginning of something new,
requires and justifies the use of violence. In its full significance, how–
ever, this was discovered by the one great thinker who lived in a
period which in some respects resembled our own more than any
other in recorded history, and who in any case wrote under the full
impact of a catastrophic end, which perhaps resembles the end to
which we have come. Augustine, in his
Civitas Dei,
said:
Initium
ergo ut esset, creatus est homo, ante quem nullus luit.
("That there
might be a beginning, man was created before whom nobody was.")
Here, man has not only the capacity of beginning, but is this be–
ginning himself.
If
the creation of man coincides with the creation
of a beginning in the universe (and what else does this mean but
the creation of freedom?), then the birth of individual men, being
new beginnings, re-affirms the origin-al character of man in such a
way that origin can never become entirely a thing of the past;
while, on the other hand, the very fact of the memorable continuity
of these beginnings in the sequence of generations guarantees a
history which can never end because it
is
the history of beings whose
essence
is
beginning.
