“Betrayal” is a strong word. No doubt someone seeing the title of this chapter might charge it with being combative and judgmental. We are obliged to explain its usage. Beginning in the nineteenth century and solidifying in the twentieth, there came into being the view that the sum and substance of political theory was the “history of political theory.” The thrust of this view was that “theory evolved.” From this point of view it would not be possible for one theory to be a betrayal of another. Change of any sort was progress, and in everything progress was inevitable. A certain “process” determined things: a “historical process.” Like all accepted views, however, this view deserves to be questioned. We need to consider the possibilities that (1) somewhere along the line there was a conscious and deliberate reversal, and (2) the possibility that a given new view is in fact a betrayal or at least a reversal, a deliberate reversal of an old one. We need to be open to the possibility that thought does not think itself and does not simply happen as part of the historical process of thought. Maybe sometimes somebody actually thinks, and thinks purposefully. This is not to deny that some thought is careless.

For nearly two thousand years, from Socrates up to and including Machiavelli, philosophers adhered to the Platonic and Aristotelian notion of an alliance between the thoughtful and the powerful as the best political order. The Platonic core of that alliance was the iron-clad insistence on the absolute supremacy of the thoughtful over their allies, the powerful. For those two thousand years, every philosopher who gave attention to politics adhered to that Platonic core. This adherence persisted despite the fact that throughout the Middle Ages – roughly from the fourth to the fourteenth century – philosophy stood not only in a state of tension with politics but also in a state of tension with revealed religion.