Prof: This course
presumes no prior knowledge of its subject matter.
That is to say you can take
this course without having done any political philosophy before.
The materials we're going to
look at in this course can be approached at a number of levels
of sophistication. Indeed you could teach an
entire course on just John Stuart Mill,
or John Rawls, or Karl Marx,
or Jeremy Bentham, and this means that some of you
who may have had some prior acquaintance with some of these
texts will be able to explore them in a different way from
newcomers. But the course is designed,
as I said, to be user-friendly to people who are doing this for
the first time. There are a few parts of the
course in which I make use of technical notations or diagrams.
Now, it is true,
it's just as fact about human beings that if you put a graph,
or a chart, or a curve up on a diagram there are certain
people, some subset of the population
that get a knot in their stomach,
they start to feel nauseous, and their brain stops
functioning. I can totally relate to it
because I'm actually one of those people by disposition.
And what I can tell you about
our use of charts, and diagrams,
and notations in this course is they're simply shorthand for
people who find it useful. But I will do nothing with
diagrams and charts that I don't also do verbally.
So if you don't get it the one
way you'll be able to get it the other way.
So you should never feel
intimidated. As I said, for people who find
graphs and charts useful they're a form of shorthand,
but obviously if they intimidate somebody and they
make what's being said opaque then they're being
self-defeating. And as I said,
I will always walk verbally through anything that I also do
with charts and diagrams. Secondly, related to that
point, it's my commitment to you that this is a course that's
done from first principles and everything is explained from the
ground up. I might forget that contract
sometime and use a term that you don't understand.
I might use a word like
"deontological," and you'll sit there and you'll
be thinking, "What does that mean?"
And the high probability is
that if you don't know what it means there are probably seventy
other people in the room who don't know what it means either.
And so if you put up your hand
and ask what it means you'll be doing those sixty-nine people a
favor because they wanted to know what it means as well.
So we shouldn't have any
situation in this course in which I'm using some term and
you can't follow what I'm talking about because you don't
understand what it means. It is a rather embarrassing
fact about political philosophers that they don't say
in words of one syllable what can be said in words of five
syllables. But part of my job here is to
reduce them to words of one syllable.
That is, to take complex
theoretical ideas and make them lucid and intelligible to you.
And I see that as a big part of
what we're doing here so that your takeaway from this course
three months from now will include feeling very comfortable
with the language of political philosophy and the central
terminology in which it's conducted.
So hold my feet to the fire on
that if you need to. If I use words you don't
understand put up your hand and stop me.
I will from time to time throw
out questions and we'll have a microphone that we can pass
around so that people can answer the questions.
It's one of the ways in which I
gauge how well the communication between us is going,
so you should expect that.
So this is a course about the
moral foundations of politics, the moral foundations of
political argument. And the way in which we
organize it is to explore a number of traditions of
political theorizing, and these are broadly grouped
into a bigger distinction that I make between Enlightenment and
anti-Enlightenment thinking. That is to say we're going to
start of by looking at the Enlightenment.
Now you might say,
"Well, what is the Enlightenment?
How do you know it when you
trip over it?" and that is a subject I'm going
to get to on Wednesday and Friday.
But for right now I'll say just
dogmatically, and I'll elaborate for you
later, that the Enlightenment revolved around two ideas.
The first is the idea of basing
our theories of politics on science--
not on religion, not on tradition,
not on superstition, not on natural law,
but on science. The Enlightenment was born of
an enormous optimism about the possibilities of science.
And in this course we will look
at Enlightenment theories that put science at the core of
political argument. The second main Enlightenment
idea is the idea that individual freedom is the most important
political good. And so if you wanted to get the
bumper sticker version of the Enlightenment account of
politics, it is, "How do you
scientifically design a society to maximize individual
freedom?" Now, within that,
we will look at three Enlightenment traditions.
We'll look at the utilitarian
tradition, the Marxist tradition, and the social
contract tradition. And again, I'll just give you
the one-line version now and then we're going to come back to
all of these, of course, in much greater
detail later. The utilitarian tradition says
that the way in which you create a scientifically organized
society is you maximize the greatest happiness of the
greatest number. This is the slogan of
utilitarianism. Maximize the greatest happiness
of the greatest number. You'll find there're huge
disagreements among utilitarians about how you measure your
happiness, and how you maximize it,
and how you know when you've maximized it and so on,
but the utilitarians all agree that that's the goal,
and if you can do that you will do more to maximize human
freedom than anything else. The Marxist tradition has a
very different theory of science,
what Marx called the science of historical materialism,
but it too was based on this idea that we can have impersonal
scientific principles that give us the right answer for the
organization of society. One of Marx's famous one-liners
was that we will eventually get to a world in which politics is
replaced by administration, implying that all forms of
moral disagreement will have gone away because we will have
gotten technically the right answers.
Another formulation of that
same idea actually comes from a different Enlightenment thinker
who we're not going to read in this course,
David Hume, who said, "If all moral
disagreements were resolved, no political disagreements
would remain." So that's the idea of a
scientific solution to what appear to be the moral dilemmas
that divide us. So for Marx we'll see a very
different theory of science, but for him too,
he thinks that freedom is the most important good.
That might surprise you.
Most people think,
"Well, Marx was about equality.
He was egalitarian."
We'll see that that's only true
in a somewhat derivative sense because in the end what was
important for Marx was that people are equally free,
that they are in a situation of not being exploited,
and he too, therefore, is an Enlightenment thinker.
Then the social contract
tradition says that the way we get a scientific theory of
society is to think about what agreement people would make if
they were designing society for the first time.
If society was going to be
based on a contract, what would it look like?
And this is what gives us the
right answer as to what is-- rational scientific principles
tell us how we should organize society,
and it's a world in which people's freedom is preserved
because it's what they choose to do.
Again, as in these other
Enlightenment traditions there's massive disagreement about who
makes the contract, how they make it,
what the content of it would be,
but it's the metaphor of a social contract that shapes all
reasoning about the way in which you can organize society
scientifically in order to preserve freedom.
So in the first two-thirds of
the course we're going to work our way through those three
Enlightenment traditions. But every current has it
undertow, and even though the Enlightenment was this
enormously energetic and captivating tradition that
really starts in the seventeenth century and gathers steam in the
eighteenth century, there was always resistance to
the Enlightenment, both it's preoccupation with
science and its view that individual freedom is the most
important good. And so after we're done looking
at the Enlightenment, we're going to look at
anti-Enlightenment thinking, and the tradition that resists
the idea that there are scientific principles around
which society can be organized, and resist the idea that the
freedom of the individual is the most important good,
and we'll explore that tradition.
And then in the last part of
the course we will turn to the democratic tradition which
tries, at least in the way I will
present this to you, to reconcile the
anti-Enlightenment critique of the Enlightenment with those
elements of the Enlightenment that survive the
anti-Enlightenment critique, if you see what I'm saying.
So democracy becomes the
resolution, at least in the way I'll describe democracy in this
course. Thereby hangs another tale that
I want to tell you about this course.
The course is introductory and
presented in a user-friendly way to newcomers,
but it also is an argument. That is, I'm presenting an
argument, a point of view,
which some of you will be, "I'm persuaded by,"
and that is totally fine. The idea is not to make you
think what I think or what your teaching assistant thinks.
It's rather to make you
understand the logic underlying your own views better than you
have before, and perhaps see the appeal of
views you have hitherto rejected more clearly than you have
before. So the idea is to enhance the
sophistication of your own understanding of politics,
not to have you parrot my views, or teaching fellows'
views, or anybody else's views.
It's rather to understand the
nature of your own views and how they might connect or live in
tension with the views of others.
One thing you're going to find,
I should also say just as a matter of truth in advertising,
we're going to look at a number of what I would call
architectonic theories of politics,
the theories that try to give the whole answer.
This is Jeremy Bentham.
This is his scientific theory.
These are all the pieces.
This is how they fit together
and this is what it means for the organization of schools,
and prisons, and parliaments,
and all the rest of it. He's got an architectonic
theory of the whole thing. John Rawls, as well,
you'll see an architectonic theory of the whole thing.
One of the takeaway points of
this course is going to be that architectonic theories fail.
There is no silver bullet.
You're not going to find a
takeaway set of propositions that you can plaster onto future
political dilemmas. What you're going to find
instead, I think what's going to help you in this course,
what's going to be the useful takeaway,
is rather small and medium sized insights.
You're going to find things to
put in your conceptual bag of tricks and take and use
elsewhere, and they're going to be very
helpful to you in analyzing a whole variety of problems.
I think if you talk to other
students who've taken this course that tends to be the most
useful takeaway that you get, that you'll find.
When somebody brings up an
argument, say, about what people are
entitled to you'll have a whole series of questions you would
ask about that argument that you wouldn't have asked if you
hadn't taken this course. So you'll find a lot of small
and medium sized bits and pieces that you can take and use in
other contexts, but you're not going to find a
one-size fits all answer to the basic dilemmas of politics.
Let me say one other thing
about this course as being an argument, that the argument's
presented from a particular point of view.
You might say,
"Well," looking through this syllabus,
"Hmm, this guy is pretty arrogant.
I mean, here we have John
Locke, John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham,
and he's got his own, some of his own work here on
this syllabus. Who does he think he is?
I mean, these are the greats of
the tradition and he's putting his own work here?
It takes a lot of chutzpah to
do that." And let me tell you a little
vignette that I think will give you the spirit in which my work
is on this syllabus. When I was an undergraduate
there was a great Kant scholar called Stephan K�rner
who was here in the Yale Philosophy Department for many
years and also taught at the University of Bristol in
England. And I attended his lectures on
Kant, and he stood up in the very
first lecture and he said, "Kant was a great
philosopher, und I am a minor philosopher,
but with me you have the advantage that I am alive."
So this is the spirit in which
my work is there, and it's not remotely intended
to be a suggestion that 200 years from now or 300 years from
now people will be reading it or that it stands on a par with the
classic works of the tradition. But one of our agendas in this
course is not just to get you up to speed in the great text of
these different traditions, but to give you some sense of
how people who currently do this for a living argue about these
ideas. So in each one of the five
traditions that we look at, we're going to begin with a
classic formulation. So Jeremy Bentham is the
locus classicus of classical utilitarianism.
He's the major formative
statement of that view. So we'll start with Bentham,
but then we will bring utilitarianism up to the present
day. We'll explore how the
utilitarian tradition evolved since the eighteenth century and
we will bring you up to contemporary considerations
about utilitarianism, what people argue about in the
journals today, and the book literature,
and so on. Likewise with Marxism,
we'll start with Marx and Engels themselves and then bring
you up to contemporary debates about Marxism.
Social contract tradition,
we'll start with John Locke who has famously formulated the
social contract idea in the seventeenth century,
but we'll bring it up to modern contract theorists like Robert
Nozick and John Rawls. The anti-Enlightenment
tradition we go back to Edmund Burke,
the great anti-Enlightenment thinker,
an opponent of the French Revolution,
but we'll bring anti-Enlightenment thinking up
to contemporary thinkers like Alasdair MacIntyre.
And finally with the democratic
tradition, we'll go back to the Federalist
Papers, which is in many ways one of
the most important statements of what's at issue with democratic
principles, if not a defense of democracy
we'll see later, and bring that up to the
contemporary literature on democracy which is where my own
thinking comes in. But as I say,
you should remember Stephan K�rner's
admonition that you're getting the benefit of the fact that I
happen to be around in the first decade of the twenty-first
century, not that I'm attempting to put
myself on that kind of a pedestal.
Now, I want to say a few more
general things about the course just to give you a sense of the
flavor of what we do here. You might say, "Well,
what is distinctive about this course as compared with other
introductory political theory and political philosophy courses
that you could take around here?"
And I think there are four
senses in which this course is distinctive, not necessarily
better but just different. And so that you can give you
some sense of what it is that you would be letting yourself in
for here. The first is what I've just
mentioned that with each of these five traditions we really
are going to take them from a classical formulation up to
contemporary discussions. So you'll have a,
at least, working sense of how these traditions have evolved
over the course of two or three hundred years and what form
debates about them today take. The second is that this course
is really going to mix the theoretical with the applied.
We are going to look at first
principles. I use the terms foundations
advisedly in the title of the course there.
It's something of a loaded term
in that there are some people who think we should do political
philosophy without foundations. And I'll have something to say
about those arguments later in the course,
but I do want to signal with that term we will be interested
in foundational questions, the most basic questions you
can ask about politics, but we will never limit our
intention to those questions. We will work these doctrines
through a huge array of contemporary problems ranging
from abortion, to affirmative action,
to the death penalty, to all kinds of other things
that are of concern to you as we go through.
So it's very much a part of
what we do in this course is to look at how these doctrines
actually play out on the ground. So we go back and forth from
particular examples to general arguments and back to particular
examples a lot in this course, and in that sense it's more of
a course, I'd say, in applied political
philosophy than many courses one might take,
here or elsewhere. A third distinctive feature of
the course is that I'm going to organize it centrally around one
question, which seems to me at the end of
the day to be the most important question of politics.
And that is the question that I
put in the first sentence of the syllabus there.
When do governments deserve our
allegiance and when should they be denied it?
When and under what conditions
should we obey the government, when are we free to disobey the
government, and when might we even have an
obligation to oppose the government?
Another way,
if you want to translate this into the jargon of political
theory, what is it that makes governments legitimate?
What is the basis for
legitimate government? That is going to be the core
organizing idea or question with which we're going to interrogate
these different traditions that we examine,
utilitarian, Marxist, social contract,
anti-Enlightenment and democratic traditions.
We're going to look at how does
each one of those traditions answer the most basic questions
about the legitimacy of the state.
As I say, I think it's
ultimately the most important question in politics.
It's not the only question in
politics. It's not the only way to
organize a course in political philosophy, but it is the way in
which we'll organize this course.
We'll focus our questions on
legitimacy, and it'll provide the template for comparing
across these traditions, right?
We will be looking at how
utilitarians, or social contract theorists,
or democratic theorists look at this basic question of what it
is that makes governments legitimate,
how we know that when we fall over it,
and what we should do about it. So that's the third sense in
which the course is distinctive, and the fourth one I want to
mention is that we're going to go back and forward between two
modes of analysis which for want of better terms I call internal
and external, and let me explain what I mean
by those terms. When you look at an argument
that somebody puts forward, and you look at in the way that
I'm describing as internal, what you're basically saying is
does it make sense? Is it persuasive?
Are the premises plausible?
Do the conclusions follow from
the premises? Are there contradictions in
what the person's saying? Does it all hang together?
Should I believe it?
Is it a good argument?
That's what internal analysis
is about, okay. External analysis is looking at
the argument as a causal force in the world.
What social and political
arrangements is this argument used to justify,
or what social and political arrangement is it used to
attack? How does this operate as a
political ideology in the world out there?
What effects does it have if I
embrace this argument? So it's not a question about
whether or not it's a good argument or you should believe
it, but a question about how this
argument is efficacious in the world.
Because there could be terrible
arguments that are nonetheless very efficacious in the world,
right? And there might be very good
arguments that nobody takes seriously in day-to-day
politics. And one of the great
aspirations of the Enlightenment is to produce arguments that
both make good analytical and philosophical sense on the one
hand, and can be influential in the
world on the other, but those things don't
necessarily go together. And we're going to ask a
question, why, in the context of exploring all
of these traditions, if there are good arguments
that are not efficacious, why that is?
If there are bad arguments that
are efficacious, why that is?
But in any case we're going to,
even if we can't answer that why question,
which is a very hard question to answer,
we're going to look at these arguments and these traditions
both internally and externally. You're going to look at them as
arguments and you're going to look at them as ideologies,
as systems of thought that get trafficked in the political
world. And I think that that is
another feature of this course that differentiates it from
other introductory political theory courses.
So I think that gives you
something of a flavor of what is distinctive in what we do here.
Any questions about any of that?
If any of it's puzzling to you
it's probably puzzling to somebody else.
So in the spirit of getting us
going we're going to start with a real world problem.
We're going to start with the
problem of Adolf Eichmann, who was a lieutenant colonel in
Nazi Germany, who was responsible for
organizing the shipment of Jews to Nazi death camps.
And at the end of the war,
he was captured along with a lot of other former Nazis,
and he was inadvertently released.
They didn't realize that he was
a significant player in the organization of the so-called
final solution of the Jews, and they released him and he
escaped. And like many other former
Nazis who escaped he went to Argentina and he lived under an
assumed name for many years until the late 1950s when the
Israeli Secret Service, the Mossad, figured out that he
was there and figured out who he was.
And they sent a group of people
who, essentially commandos,
who captured him, spirited him out of Argentina,
took him to Israel where they brought back the death penalty
which had not existed at that time in Israeli law,
tried him for crimes against humanity,
which was the same concept that had been employed at the
Nuremberg Trials of his cohort after World War II in the late
1940s, crimes against humanity and
crimes against the Jewish people and they executed him.
And at that time young
political theorist, not particularly well known,
called Hannah Arendt, covered the trail for
The New Yorker magazine in a series of
articles which were subsequently published as a book called,
Eichmann in Jerusalem, which is what I'm having you
read for Wednesday's class. And we're going to use this
Eichmann problem as a way into the central conundrum of the
course, which I said is what is it that
gives states legitimacy? When should we obey the
government, when are we free not to, and when should we perhaps
even be obliged to oppose the government?
Because this problem was thrown
into sharp relief by the conduct of Eichmann during World War II.
And I want you to think about
two questions while you read this,
which is essentially, this book is essentially a
compilation of Arendt's New Yorker articles.
The first is up here.
What I want you to do is to
think about what the two things are that make you most
uncomfortable about this man, who you'll get know quite well
through reading this book. What is it about him that is
unnerving? What is it that makes your
flesh crawl about this guy? What are the two things that
are the most appalling about him?
And then the other question I
want you to address is the second one.
What two things make you most
uncomfortable about the events surrounding his apprehension,
and his trail, and his execution in Israel?
Those are your reading
questions for Eichmann in Jerusalem,
and write them down, and bring them with you to
class on Wednesday.
