A Study Of Modern Political Value System Construction In Western Countries

Since the 16th century, the prosperity of commodity economy in politics in Western world has created the dual requests-the establishment of a united nation and the effective protection against arbitrary power, both of which required the concentration of power and the restriction to it. This dual nature formed the "power paradox" in the modernization process. Whether the challenges from the power paradox can be conquered almost decided significantly the success of transition in Western social modernization.Coping with this challenge requires adjustments in all aspects, in which the reform of political value system is as the core issue. From the angle of evolution, the political value system in Western countries is the outcome of the success of dealing with the challenge. From the analysis on their preliminary choices of political value system, there exist both experiences and lessons. From the perspective of historical materialism and evolutionism, this dissertation tries to decode the mode of political value system, on the basis of detailed analysis on the meaning of the three typical political value systems of the British constitutional liberalism, the French radical democracy and German nationalism, in order to make a tentative interpretation of construction pattern of political value system.There are two prerequisites for understanding the construction of modern political value system. First, the political value system, as a conceptual system, is a multiply hierarchical and complex form in which belief acts as its core on the purely formal level. Its core position decides the nature of the whole political value system, and it, constituting the hidden premise of belief in political value, widely lies in the value pre-assumption in the social thoughts. Second, the essence of value system construction of modern politics is meeting the requirement of destructing the "power paradox" in function, which requests political value system to make the adjustments both in connotation and especially in the guidance of the value belief.From the perspective of form premise of political value system, the writer makes the hieratical and constituent analysis of those three political value systems and holds that they have different attitudes towards the power owing to the difference of belief direction. Constitutional liberalism aims at the restriction of unrestricted power; radical democracy turns to the yearning for unrestricted power; nationalism becomes the support of absolute power. Combined with the central mission that the construction of modern political value system should cope with the "power paradox", the writer holds that constitutional liberalism has destructed the "power paradox" in belief direction in contrast to the French radical democracy ignoring the effective alteration of the belief direction and getting involved in the unrestricted power again, while German nationalism went against the thorough adjustment of politics belief direction and gradually got far from the historical issue proposed by the commodity economy.From the viewpoint of historical materialism and evolutionism, constitutional liberalism, radical democracy and nationalism can stand out in many political value systems as a result of historical conditions and social structure acting and impacting complicatedly in those three special countries. The specific value connotation of these three doctrines originates from the value pre-assumption with regional characteristics.Through the analysis and the summary of those three political value system connotations and their historical generative-schemes, the writer holds the idea that coping with the challenge of "power paradox" of the construction in modern political value system should take following points into consideration.First, political value belief need to realize the epoch transition from high-level goal to the practical issues, thus achieve the ideal of controlling the political value aim, shrinking the political boundary and seeking political orders. Only this transition of belief direction is completed, can the construction of the whole political value system find the correct direction to deal with "power paradox" itself.Secondly, the reform of political value must avoid changing radically or hesitating to move forward. It is the most reasonable way of reform to take belief directing reform as the core and change gradually, which can minimize the resistance. During the gradual change of the modern political value system, great efforts should be taken to realize the balance of the time appeal caused by marketing economy and the different appeals in concrete conditions, to combine the innovation of value system connotation and the adjustment of belief direction, and to harmonize the new political value concept and traditional resources.Finally, about the function of coping with the challenge of "power paradox", the construction of modern political value system has general characteristics or universe characteristics of age, white the phenotype of the concrete political value connotation is in nature of individual and localization. Therefore, the modern political value system is the compound unification of universality and particularity.