Prof: We're going to
start today by talking about the Enlightenment,
and I want to offer one prefatory caution about any way
of dividing up the history of ideas,
any way of periodizing, if you like,
the history of ideas, which is that there's no single
right way to do that, and indeed any way you do it
obscures in some ways important things.
So, for example,
sometimes people divide up the history of Western political
thought into the ancients and the moderns.
And the ancients are thought to
have certain characteristic preoccupations that change
around sometime around the sixteenth century with
Machiavelli, or in the seventeenth century
with some of the folks we're going to be talking about today,
and so we get this picture presented that there's a
fundamental difference between ancients and moderns.
On the other hand,
another way of dividing up the history of the tradition is
between naturalists and anti-naturalists.
So naturalists are people who
think that understanding nature and understanding human nature
is the key to political theorizing,
whereas anti-naturalists look for something else,
whether it's God's law or transcendental platonic forms or
something like that. And so we can have a division
of the tradition between naturalists who generally trace
all the way back to Aristotle, and anti-naturalists who trace
all the way back to Plato. It's not that the distinction
between naturalists and anti-naturalists is better or
more accurate than the distinction between ancients and
moderns; it's just a different kind of
distinction that highlights different features of these
thinkers for different purposes. So I just say that as a caution
because now we're focusing on the Enlightenment as a
characteristic move in Western political thinking that really
starts in the seventeenth century and comes into its own
in the eighteenth century, but I don't want you to reify
that idea. These Enlightenment thinkers
we're talking about do in fact have important points of
continuity with medieval and ancient thinkers,
some of which will come up in our discussions.
Nonetheless,
I think it's useful to focus on the Enlightenment as a
distinctive term in Western political thinking,
and that's going to structure our discussion going forward.
And the first three traditions
we're going to consider in this course,
namely utilitarianism, Marxism, and the social
contract are all variants of Enlightenment thinking.
But before we get into the
nitty-gritty of those traditions,
I want us today to take a step back and think more generally
about what the Enlightenment was,
what this Enlightenment move is that I'm pointing to as setting
the outer philosophical boundaries of these first three
traditions that we're going to be considering starting next
Wednesday. And as I said in my
introductory lecture, the Enlightenment really
involves a twin commitment as far as politics is concerned,
and that is first and foremost a commitment to science as the
basis for theorizing about politics.
A commitment to science rather
than a commitment to tradition, or religion,
or revelation, or anything else.
Rather the idea was that
science is going to provide the right answers for thinking about
the correct political organization of society.
And secondly,
the core political value for Enlightenment thinkers is this
notion of individual freedom to be operationalized or realized
through a doctrine of the rights of the individual.
We'll see shortly that one of
the distinctive moves of the seventeenth-century writers
about politics is that they stopped talking so much about
natural law and start instead to talk about natural rights,
the rights of the individual to realize their purposes through
politics. And so the Enlightenment,
as I said, revolves around this twin
commitment to the idea of importance of science as the
basis for theorizing, and the importance of
individual freedoms realized through a doctrine of individual
rights. And we're going to use John
Locke as a window into this early Enlightenment thinking,
separately initially from his role as one of the early social
contract theorists that we'll be dealing with in a few weeks.
But first we're going to focus
on this idea of science. Now, let's think about what
science is, what it's all about. I have three diagnostic
questions here, and the reason I put them up
will become plain in a second. It has to do with the fact that
the early Enlightenment theorists,
the seventeenth-century theorists, thought that the
hallmark of genuine knowledge, the hallmark of science,
was certainty. You might all have come across
in one philosophy course or another, the famous Cartesian
idea, Descartes' idea. Anyone read Descartes who can
tell us what he's most famous for?
Student:
> Prof: Do what?
Student:
> Prof: The Cogito did you
say? Student:
> Prof: Yeah, Descartes.
What was his idea?
Student:
> Prof: Systematic doubt.
You're dead right.
Why was he interested in
doubting things, anybody?
This is a bonus question
because Descartes is not on the syllabus, but why was he
interested in trying to doubt things?
What was he looking for?
Yeah?
Student: He was looking
for what you can truly be certain about.
Prof: Exactly.
He was looking for absolute
certainty; that the hallmark of genuine
knowledge is certainty. So he was asking himself,
"What is it that we can have certainty about?"
And as you probably know,
Descartes had his own answer to that question.
What was it?
Student: "I think,
therefore I am." Prof: Correct.
I'm a Yalie,
therefore I am, right?
Yeah, "I think,
therefore I am." And Descartes thought this was
a particular kind of proposition because the very act of trying
to doubt it affirmed it. You couldn't doubt it.
And so that was what the early
Enlightenment theorists were looking for.
What is it that makes knowledge
certain, puts it beyond doubt? And so I've got up here three
propositions, and we could say the sum of the
interior angles of a triangle equals 180 degrees.
How many people think that that
proposition can be known with certainty?
Yeah, a lot,
I mean, how would you try and doubt it?
You could measure one triangle,
measure the next triangle, measure a third.
After you had measured 5,604
triangles you'd start to say, "Hum, maybe there's a
theorem here. It's not as if the next
triangle I find is going to turn out not to add up to 180.
It's just not going to happen,
right? We know, and that's what we've
come to refer to in modern philosophical thinking as a
priori knowledge. It follows from the nature of
the definitions, the nature of the terms that
the propositional force can't be doubted.
So often we say a bachelor is
an unmarried man. You're not going to go and
start looking at bachelor after bachelor to see if you can find
a married bachelor. There's no such thing as a
married bachelor. So those propositions we tend
to think of today as analytic propositions;
they follow analytically from the definitions of the terms at
issue, or in truths of mathematics.
It seems there's a theorem that
tells you it must be the case that the sum of the interior
angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees.
When we come to what I've
numbered two here, how many people think that that
can be known with certainty? Some of you do.
Anyone not so sure?
Why are you unsure?
Where is the microphone?
What's the source of your doubt?
Yeah, okay.
Student: Well,
it seems like in terms of geology we weren't able to
penetrate what was underneath the earth for a long period of
time, and the knowledge of tectonic
plates even was a new or more modern discovery,
I guess. Prof: Right,
so I think that's exactly right.
The current best empirical
understanding of earthquakes is that it's the movement of
tectonic plates, but science might advance.
There might be changes in
geology, which might lead us eventually to learn,
"Well, yeah, some earthquakes result from
tectonic plate movement, but other earthquakes might
result from something else," or we will learn
that something moves the tectonic plates that we don't
currently know about. This is an ongoing process of
empirical discovery, right?
It's not a proposition that
follows from the nature of the terms, and these we call
empirical propositions in modern philosophy of science.
Sometimes they're called,
if you like the fancy Latin terminology, a posteriori
as opposed to a priori. They're not analytical
propositions, right?
They're a result of observation
and trying to figure out what the causes are behind those
phenomena. So generally speaking they
don't have the same kind of force as analytic propositions.
What about this third one?
Consent is the basis for
political legitimacy. Anyone think that can be known
with certainty? Nobody.
I think that's right.
Most people would say,
"Well, that's a moral or normative judgment of some kind.
Maybe people agree with it,
maybe they don't, but certainly it's not a
scientific proposition, at least not obviously a
scientific proposition. Indeed, even if we took it just
in a descriptive sense, not to mean consent should be
the basis of political legitimacy,
but as a descriptive matter about regimes,
some people would say, "Well,
maybe regimes are based on consent,
but maybe some regimes are based on other things.
Maybe they're based on claims
to divine authority. Maybe they're based on
utilitarianism." We're going to talk about that
next week. So it seems even as a
descriptive matter, never mind as a normative
matter, this is not a scientific proposition in the way that
causal statements about the world are scientific
propositions, and certainly not in the way
that analytical statements about the world can have scientific
certainty. So we could spend more time on
this, and there are indeed nuances in
modern conceptions of science that I haven't gotten to that
would paint a more complex picture of the differences among
these three propositions, but what I want to draw your
attention to now is that in the early Enlightenment,
seventeenth-century thinkers about the nature of science,
Descartes and his contemporaries,
thought very differently about science,
indeed. In the early Enlightenment they
would have agreed that the sum of interior angles of a triangle
equals 180 degrees is a proposition that can be known
with certainty, but interestingly they would
have put this claim here in the same category.
They would have put this claim
about consent in the same category with propositions about
mathematics, propositions behind which
there's a theorem, as we just said when we were
talking about triangles, and they would have relegated
empirical and causal claims to an inferior status.
Now, you might think that is
pretty weird. At least prima facie
that seems pretty weird. And in order to get your mind
into the world in which they lived you have to suspend
disbelief for a moment about your concept of science and try
to get your mind around early Enlightenment conceptions of
science, which involved thinking very
differently. And the reason is that early
Enlightenment thinkers wouldn't say that this is certain because
of the meanings of the words, but rather it's certain because
there's an act of will behind it.
Now, this may sound even
weirder than anything I've said so far,
but consider this passage here written by Thomas Hobbes,
who is writing in the middle of the seventeenth century,
in a minor piece that he wrote, Six Lessons for the
Professors of Mathematics. This is not one of Hobbes'
major works, but I think it's one of the
most succinct descriptions I've ever seen of the early
Enlightenment conception of science.
He says, "Of arts,"
(which for him is a general term to capture knowledge) he
says, some are demonstrable,
others are indemonstrable; and demonstrable are those the
construction of the subject whereof is in the power of the
artist himself, who, in his demonstration,
does no more but to deduce the consequences of his own
operation. The reason whereof is this,
that the science of every subject is derived from a
precognition of the causes, generation, and construction of
the same; and consequently where the
causes are known, there is a place for
demonstration, but not where the causes are to
seek for. Geometry therefore is
demonstrable, for the lines and figures from
which we reason are drawn and described by ourselves (we make
the triangle); and civil philosophy is
demonstrable, because we make the
commonwealth ourselves. Okay, so this is the key to
this what seems like a very weird conception of political
philosophy as equivalent to mathematics.
"[C]ivil philosophy is
demonstrable, because we make the
commonwealth ourselves. But because of natural bodies
we know not the construction, but seek it from the effects,
there lies no demonstration of what the causes be we seek for,
but only what they may be." "Only what they may
be." There's not going to be
certainty about earthquakes, about the causes of
earthquakes. We can make probabilistic
judgments. We can make empirical claims,
but at the end of the day those claims are fallible,
they're corrigible, they might have to be revised
in the face of future knowledge, and science is not going to
ever reach to the level of certainty with propositions of
that sort. And so this is why,
going back to this, I did this ordering of these
propositions on a Hobbesian view.
These two are equivalent not
because of anything about theorems or analytics,
but rather because this will-centeredness.
They're the product of human
conscious action. We make the triangle and we
make the commonwealth, and so we have privileged
access into what goes into that making, but we don't make the
planet. God made the planet and we can
only observe the effects of earthquakes and then try and
guess about their causes, right?
So when we come to John Locke,
who is at one with Hobbes on this point about knowledge,
the term I want to use to capture this early Enlightenment
conception of science is the workmanship ideal,
right? Rather than a priori or
analytic knowledge we're going to talk about knowledge in terms
of this idea of workmanship, maker's knowledge.
And it's important to realize
that in its ultimate foundations, this is actually a
theological proposition. Both for Hobbes,
we're going to leave Hobbes behind now because you didn't
read him and we're going to focus on Locke,
but as I said, they have the same view on this
particular question. So God has intimate knowledge
of the universe because he created it, okay?
And that is this idea that
making is a source of knowledge, right?
So God knows the causes of
earthquakes because he made the earth.
We don't because we didn't make
the earth, but we can have God-like knowledge of what we
create because God gave us the power to create things.
So this is, in the first
instance, a theological argument, okay?
So we are like miniature gods
with respect to what we create. We have the same kind of
maker's knowledge over what we create as God has over what he
created. Now, there are some constraints
on our kinds of knowing because we are also made by God,
and I'm going to get to that in a minute.
But what he did for human
beings that he didn't do for any other aspect of creation on
Locke's telling, is that he gave us this
creative capacity. He gave us the capacity to
behave like miniature gods in the world, and I'll come back to
that. But I did want to alert you to
the fact that for Locke this was actually something of a
tormenting idea. We'll hear a lot more about
Locke later, but one of the most important things you need to
remember about Locke is that he was a Thomist.
He was a believing Christian
theologian throughout his life. And there was a huge debate
that had gone on actually for two centuries before Locke
wrote among theologians, and this was the puzzle that
they were worried about.
The question was,
"Can God change natural law?"
If you said no,
that would suggest that God is not omnipotent,
but if you said yes, that would suggest that natural
law is not a system of timeless universals,
because if God could change natural law maybe he'll choose
to change it tomorrow. And as we were talking about on
Wednesday, remember when somebody asked me
about legal positivism, I said that that was a doctrine
that had rejected the idea of natural law.
The idea of natural law was
that there are some timeless universals that we can appeal
to, to judge actual political institutions.
So we can appeal to natural law
in the context of the Eichmann problem we were discussing to
say that Nazi Germany was an evil regime, right?
We appeal to this higher
natural law. Well, Locke had been concerned
about this theological problem with natural law that if you say
it's a timeless universal that seems to undermine the idea of
God's omnipotence because God can't be an all-powerful figure.
But if on the other hand you
say, well, God can change natural law then that undermines
its possible universality. And Locke struggled with this.
If you become experts on the
seventeenth century and you go back and read his essays on the
law of nature written in the 1660s you'll see him really
torturing himself as to how to resolve this.
He never really resolved it,
but in the end he came down on what we're going to call the
command theory, the workmanship theory,
the well-based theory that-- he said, "We have to say
that God is omnipotent and let the chips fall where they may
for the timelessness of natural law."
He was never entirely
comfortable with it, but he couldn't let go of that
proposition for reasons I've already alluded to;
that he thought something couldn't have the force of a law
without being the product of a will.
And so it's God's will that's
the basis of natural law in God's case,
and God's knowledge of his creation is traced back to this
idea of the workmanship ideal, maker's knowledge.
So God has maker's knowledge of
his creation. We're going to see two
important other features, additional features of this
workmanship ideal that I'm just going to mention now and then
I'll come back to. One is that it translates over
also into normative considerations.
That is to say,
not only does God have workman's knowledge,
creator's knowledge of what he creates, but he also owns what
he creates. He has rights over his creation.
We are God's property because
he created us. The world is God's property.
The universe is God's property.
You own what you make.
God made everything,
so ultimately God owns everything.
And just as we can behave as
miniature gods in understanding our creation,
we can also behave as miniature gods in owning what we make.
So we will see later this
affects his theory of property and his theory of the state,
because we're going to have rights over the state which we
create. We're going to get to all of
that later, okay? But so it's a unified theory,
this workmanship ideal, that goes both to the question
of knowledge and to the question of ownership,
rights, entitlements, everything is traced back to
this workmanship ideal. The second point that I'm just
going to mention now and will come up later,
it'll come up most dramatically when we come to consider Marx,
is that what gave Locke's theory its internal coherence
was that it was a theological argument.
None of this really makes any
sense unless you start from this proposition that God created the
universe and has maker's knowledge and maker's authority
over the universe. Everything flows from that.
As I said, in Locke's
understanding he gave us this unique capacity to create as
well, but we're answerable to him in ways that'll come up
later. But none of this makes sense
without the theological assumptions behind it.
One of the big projects of the
Enlightenment which is going to concern us one way or another
throughout the course is what happens if you try to secularize
the workmanship ideal. That is to say,
you'll see in the labor theory of value that Marx embraces,
which is at the core of his political theory,
and modern social contract theorists like Nozick and Rawls
and many others, what you're going to find is
that people want to hold onto this basic structure of
thinking. People find this workmanship
ideal intuitively very appealing,
but they're going to try and detach it from its theological
moorings because they either don't believe the theological
argument for one reason or another,
or they find it problematic, or they want to convince people
that this idea that making creates ownership is powerful
and important regardless of your religious convictions.
And so one of the big
challenges and projects of the Enlightenment is going to turn
out to be: how, if at all, can we retain the
structure of the workmanship ideal while shedding its
theological foundations? But that's getting ahead of
ourselves. So what I want the takeaway
point for today to be is that this is the early Enlightenment
conception of science. It's a workmanship ideal that
appeals to certainty, which was the Cartesian
preoccupation and the Hobbesian preoccupation,
but it does it in a different way.
It doesn't look for what we
today think of as analytic propositions,
rather it looks for propositions that can be known
with certainty because we introspect into our own will and
understand with certainty what we have created,
okay?
And now let's start to
transition to talking about individual rights,
and we do this by moving from
God's knowledge of his creation to God's ownership of his
creation. Just to sum up this workmanship
ideal, Locke says, The state of nature has a law
of nature to govern it, which obliges every one:
and reason, which is that law,
teaches all mankind, who will but consult it,
that being all equal and independent,
no one ought to harm another in his life,
health, liberty, or possessions (I'll come back
to that): for men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent,
and infinitely wise maker; all the servants of one
sovereign master, sent into the world by his
order, and about his business; they are his property,
whose workmanship they are, made to last during his,
not during one another's pleasure: and being furnished
with faculties, sharing all in one community of
nature, there cannot be supposed any
such subordination among us, that may authorize us to
destroy one another, as if we were made for one
another's uses, as the inferior ranks and
creatures are for ours. So this idea should give you a
sense in which Locke's theory of individual rights are basic and
are rooted in the workmanship ideal.
We are God's creations.
We are his property and that
means, as he says here, we can't be one another's
property. We can't own one another.
You might say,
"Well, don't parents make their children?
Don't parents own their
children?" and indeed, Sir Robert Filmer,
who Locke was arguing against in the first treatise,
took exactly the view that parents own their children.
But Filmer had a very different
conception of the theological foundations of the universe.
Filmer, who was a defender of
absolutism, Filmer said God gave the world to Adam and his heirs
through a system of primogenitor or inheritance.
And so there were a lot of
folks running around in seventeenth-century England,
for example, saying, "Well,
if you pay me I can prove that you're a closer descendent of
Adam than the next guy." This was the notion that the
lineage to Adam was important, and indeed that the Kings and
Queens of Europe got their political authority because they
were the most direct living descendants of Adam and Eve.
So it was this idea God gave
the world to Adam, and he to his children,
and children and children. And in absolutist thought they
took very serious the idea that parents own their children and
can indeed sell them into slavery or worse because they're
their property. Locke says, "No,
God makes the child and uses the parents as his
instrument." The parents simply act out an
urge that's implanted in them, but they can't fashion the
intricacies of the child. And, of course,
they can't put a soul in the child,
so the child is God's creation and we are all God's creation,
unlike the view developed by Filmer.
And so when we think about the
doctrine of individual rights the first thing to see is that
this workmanship idea gives us a fundamental different status
than anything that had existed before in Western political
thinking. Because we are created by God,
we are all equal in the sight of God,
and we have the capacity to function as miniature gods
because of this capacity to create things that we have,
right? Secondly we're all equal before
God. We're equal, as he says here,
Whether we consider natural reason,
which tells us that men being once born have a right to their
preservation and consequently to meat and drink,
and other such things as nature affords their subsistence:
or revelation which gives us an account of those grants God made
of the world to Adam, and to Noah,
and his sons, it is very clear that God,
as king David says, has given the earth to the
children of men; given it to mankind in common.
So we are all equally created
by God. We all have the same rights to
the common as everybody else and there's no sense in which it's
Adam and his heirs that have-- there's no sense that Adam and
his heirs have some kind of priority.
Thirdly, it's very important
for Locke, and a very radical move to say that there is no
authoritative earthly interpreter of the scriptures.
Anyone guess why I might say
that? There may be ambiguities in
what the scriptures mean, and one person says it means X
and one person says it means Y. Okay, we have a volunteer over
there. Why is it important for Locke
to say that nobody on earth can settle those disagreements?
Student: Because that
person would supposedly be closer to God being an
interpreter of the word of God. Prof: Right.
That person would set
themselves up as being closer to the word of God being the
interpreter of the word of God. "[E]very man ought
sincerely to inquire into himself by meditation,
study, search, and his own endeavors attain
the knowledge of, cannot be looked upon as a
peculiar..." I'm sorry. I'm misreading.
"[Those things that]
every man ought sincerely to inquire into himself,
and by meditation, study, search,
and his own endeavours attain knowledge of,
cannot be looked upon as the peculiar possession of any sort
of men." I think a word has been dropped
there, but the meaning of it is that
authoritative knowledge can't be the peculiar possession of any
particular person. "Princes,
indeed, are superior to men in power, but in nature equal.
Neither the right nor the art
of ruling does necessary carry along with it the certain
knowledge of other things and least of all of true religion.
For if it were so,
how could it come to pass that the lords of the earth should
differ so vastly as they do in religious matters?"
So political leaders differ
with one another about religious matters,
and that itself tells you that you can't rely on anybody to
settle them because nobody has more privileged access than
anybody else to God's knowledge. So it's the beginning of what
we will later come to refer to as a Lutheran idea of the
relationship between man and God,
but the idea is that everyone must read the scriptures for
themselves, and if God wants to speak to
you he will speak through the scriptures,
and if somebody else reads them differently,
nobody on earth can settle that disagreement.
Nobody has the right to settle
that disagreement. Everybody must settle it for
themself. And that's going to turn out to
be hugely important in politics because if people start to
believe that the ruler of the society is violating natural
law, there's nobody who can say they
don't have the right to hold that belief.
What it means they can do in
practice is another matter that we'll get to later.
So it's going to provide the
basis for the right to resist the authority of the state,
the right to resist sovereign authority.
When we think about the
Eichmann problem again, then you are ordered to do
something, to send people to a
concentration camp, and you read the scriptures,
and you say, "Well, my reading of the
Bible tells me that this is wrong," there is no earthly
authority who has the right to contradict you.
Tremendously important
philosophical move with huge political consequences.
Of course there was another
consideration here. Who knows--it was not just the
disagreements among the kings and queens of Europe,
but who else might Locke have been thinking about in the 1680s
not wanting to give authority to for interpreting the scriptures?
Some history major,
what was going on in England in the 1670s and '80s,
anybody know? Who were they worried about?
Not just the different kings
competing and authorities--yeah? Student: The Papacy?.
Prof: The Pope,
yeah. Okay, we don't need the mic.
The Pope, of course.
You will see when you come to
read Locke's letter on toleration that he has a very
wide view of toleration, but he doesn't think that
Catholics should be tolerated. We'll get to why later.
But the reason here would be
that the Pope sets himself up as the authoritative interpreter of
the scripture and you can't have that, okay?
You have to have something like
what we would call today a disestablished church.
And indeed that takes us to a
fourth source of individual rights in Locke's thinking,
namely that every individual is sovereign.
The care of souls cannot belong
to the civil magistrate, because his power consists only
in outward force; but true and saving religion
consists in the inward persuasion of the mind,
without which nothing can be acceptable to God.
And such is the nature of the
understanding, that it cannot be compelled to
the belief of anything by outward force.
[...]
And upon this ground, I affirm that the magistrate's
power extends not to the establishing of any articles of
faith, or forms of worship,
by the force of his laws. For laws are of no force at all
without penalties, and penalties in this case are
absolutely impertinent, because they're not proper to
convince the mind. The state can control your
behavior, but it can't make you believe anything.
And this is the source of his
objection to any earthly authority being in the position
to dictate what religion requires,
whether it's the king or the Pope, right?
There is no authoritative
interpretation of the scriptures in this world.
Tremendously important move.
So just to summarize;
we have this workmanship idea that informs the early
Enlightenment conception of science.
It's preoccupied with
certainty, and it's rooted in this creationist theory of
knowledge that we have workman's knowledge of our workmanship.
It also translates over into
the theory of rights because just as we have workman's
knowledge of our creation we also have a workman's authority
over his creation. We own what we make just as we
know what we make. Secondly we own the right to
the world's-- what he's going to later call
"the waste of God," what's given to mankind in
common, just as little or as much as
everybody else. There is nobody who has a prior
claim on the property out there, the animals,
the land; everything that's in God's
creation. We all have the right to use it
and nobody has the right to stop anybody else from using it,
right? We didn't make it so we don't
own it. God made it and he gave it to
us in common. This is in contradiction of
Filmer's view that he gave it to Adam,
and Adam's heirs have inherited both the goods and property in
the world and the political authority in the world directly
from Adam. So it's this basic idea that we
have common rights to the creation that God has put before
us. Third, we have equal access to
the word of God, and that's really important
because the word of God, or natural law is what binds
all human beings. We're all his creation and
natural law is the expression of his will.
We have to obey it,
but what if we don't agree about what it means?
What if we don't agree about
what it means? That's what the second treatise
is about. We're going to talk about that
in a few weeks, right?
But the important point here is
the sovereign doesn't have any right to declare what natural
law means, or the magistrate to compel us
to believe the received interpretation.
And finally each individual is
sovereign over himself because "true and saving
religion," as he puts it,
consists of "inward persuasion of the mind."
You can't be made to believe
things and it's your authentic belief that something is the
right answer, which is essential to its being
the right answer. And this is going to supply the
basis for the right to resist, the right to resist the
authority of the state that is ultimately the right on which
Locke's political theory is constructed.
So this workmanship ideal
informs the theory of knowledge and the theory of rights,
and we're going to see that it doesn't go away.
People try to secularize it,
and we're going to explore the ways in which that they do that
at considerable length. But they try to modify it as
well, but it doesn't go away. And you'll see that one of the
reasons it doesn't go away is that problematic as it might be,
and there are many problems with it,
very few people, very few people in this room,
I will bet, are going to ever want to give it up entirely.
Okay, so we'll start next
Wednesday with classical utilitarianism,
the first of our Enlightenment traditions.
See you then.
