7 Ultimately, Aristotle held that physis provided the basis for the emergence of nomos, and thus the natural world profoundly influences the derivative world of human constructs, such as political entities.
To provide conceptual clarity, I adopt Deudney’s concise definition of a republic as “a political order marked by political freedom, popular sovereignty, and limited government.” 6 The republican tradition, which was certainly dominant in ancient Greek thought (Aristotle, Plato, Thucydides), was based in part on Aristotle’s heralded debate between physis (nature) and nomos (convention) and the mutual influence they exerted upon each other. Realpolitik and Liberalism, which originated in the nineteenth century, then are conceptualized as the analytical descendants of this earlier republican school, and facets of both of these successor paradigms may be located in that earlier theoretical progenitor. In the domain of the political, both Rousseau and Hobbes are claimed as part of the Realist tradition, yet, as Daniel Deudney and Nicholas Onuf argue, they are in fact best conceived of as belonging to an antecedent and “republican” tradition of political thought. Such failures erode governmental claims to legitimacy in the eyes of the much diminished and debilitated people. States that fail to protect their citizens from predation may be viewed as in violation of the social contract. 4 One might certainly extend the argument to posit that the state is also obligated to protect the people from pathogenic forms of predation. Indeed, Rousseau recognized that implementation of the social contract effectively entailed an exchange between the sovereign and the governed wherein the latter pledged their fealty (and taxes) to the former in exchange for the protection of their lives and property: “Their very lives which they have pledged to the state, are always protected by it.” 3 Such duties of the state were noted by the English republican political theorist Thomas Hobbes, who argued in Leviathan that the state possessed a fundamental obligation to protect its people from predation by external agents (i.e., foreign militaries) or by internal agents (criminals). That under which the people diminishes and wastes away is the worst. the citizens increase and multiply most is infallibly the best government. All other things being equal, the government under which, without external aids. Then do not look beyond this much debated evidence. And what is the surest evidence that they are so protected and prosperous? The numbers of their population. What is the object of any political association? It is the protection and prosperity of its members.
In The Social Contract, the Swiss republican political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau explicitly linked population health, economic productivity, and effective governance: As the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn stated, “To be accepted as a paradigm, a theory must seem better than its competitors, but it need not, and in fact never does, explain all the facts with which it can be confronted.” 1 On Physis and Republican Theory My analysis does not seek to explain all possible outcomes related to the effects of disease on structures of governance, but rather to generate plausible analytical relationships between variables that will permit further empirical testing and refinement. Most of the change we think we see in life Is due to truths being in and out of favor