This view, well known to ancient Greeks, intends to identify the main orientation of administration. Here are two emerging questions: (a) What is an administration and what should we administer for? (b) Are the rules that can be applied to each category of administration universal or do they change depending on individual cases or for individual reasons? Modernity has introduced separate rules for each category and told people that they can administer themselves on their own. Democracies still prosper on these two assumptions. But is this the truth? This question is important.
Modernity has severed reason from its divine or transcendental origin and individualized it. Now individualized reason does not accept other criteria beyond or above itself. The assertion that reason is self-sufficient provides it with grounds for its existence. It follows that reason, which is supposed to endow us with a map of thinking, changes depending on every individual. Yet we know that this does not hold true in practice, and this throws us back to the concept of "universal reason," which is still nothing but the outcome of intellectual accumulation formulated by the "Western Enlightenment." Despite the fact that this matter has not been exhaustively discussed, it is of vital importance.
This implies that the phenomenon that we call "individual reason" does not correspond to anything in practice and that there is no reason in existence other than the Western reason and that if there is really any such reason, it is not valid. Widening our scope, we realize that "local or national cultures," "cultural diversity," "cultural pluralism" and similar concepts are nothing but abstract discourses or empty rhetoric. All individualized reason and all national cultures imposed by modern nation-states on their respective nations aim to cast all diverse forms of thinking into a stereotyped mold, while national cultural policies intend to eradicate all traditional customs, local conventions and active practices of daily life. Without this process, neither the nation's state-building process can be completed, nor can the modernization process be considered as properly functioning. The projects for transformation or reform that the Western world designs for the other societies all try to attain this goal and the best follow-up to all development, transformation and reform is implemented by the Western world itself. Of course, politics is closely related to this.
Thus, for ancient Arabs, the word "siyaset" (politics) etymologically means the art of administration, and we can liken it to the relationship between a horse and a stableman. It is the duty of the stableman to train and instill discipline into an ill-tempered house. A wise and skilled stableman will dexterously domesticate a wild or ill-tempered horse.
What the ancient Greeks understood from politics and administration was probably different. They were seeking ways to achieve happiness. If the primary orientation of living in this world is to be happy, then what brings about happiness is good and beneficial. This leads to the orientation of the administration for the "common good and common benefit." Yet, this gives rise to this basic question: Am I able to secure my own happiness using my own reason or should I seek happiness by relying on the reason of others?
Politicians of modern times do not think in the same vein as the ancient Arabs or ancient Greeks. Politics now regulates the relations of power. It is relatively autonomous, and it aims to be successful. For this reason, politics does not accept intervention from other sources -- particularly so from religious ones.
