1. Postmodernists hold that politics pertains to the creation and contestation of identities; Socrates maintained that politics is “that concerned with the soul:” differently constructed political regimes yield differently constructed souls;
2. According to the Greek classical philosophy, legislators were engaged in the ordering of souls of their citizens: padeia―the shaping of the character;
3. Hence, according to Plato, the responsibility of people’s wickedness lay not with the people themselves but with the politicians responsible for their education and government; Plato critique to Pericles opens the debate of leadership vs. populism;
4. The legal system is necessary for maintaining order only in the conditions of the absence of a proper education in virtue; yet laws cannot produce justice―only an education in virtue can;
5. Greek philosophy was the practice of performing reconstructive surgery on the soul, and its chief surgical instrument was the reason; a well-organized soul: reason rules over passion and appetite; a well-ordered soul is a well-ordered city; thus, Plato suggests what is now know as a combination of modern and postmodern orientations to suggest that a concern for the construction of identity allows for the better regulation of interaction;
6. Yet, for a just political order, statecraft and soulcraft must be practiced together: note the endogenous relationship between Plato’s claim highlighted at point 3 and its claim highlighted at point 5; therefore, whereas legislators engage in soulcraft for the benefits of statecraft, philosophers engage in statecraft for the benefit of soulcraft: hence philosophers engage in political theory, that is, determining the nature of the good regime;
7. In order to achieve their task, philosophers build a “city in speech.” Yet the process begins with a conversation aiming at ordering the soul of the individual; afterward, the construction of a city in speech is proposed as a means to view justice on a sufficient large scale;
8. Philosophy literally means the friendship of wisdom; it can be achieved only through reason by suppressing passions and appetites;
9. According to Plato, dialectics serve to strengthen reason;
10. Dialectics process: 1) begins with a simple question; 2) collect answers; 3) submit them to further inquiry; 4) discover unstated assumptions and logical inconsistencies; 5) submit the latter to further inquiry; ultimately defeat them and go to the original point and admit that ignorance is in order: here begins knowledge and one is free from ungrounded opinions and ready to explore the realm of knowledge;
11. The endogenous relationship between the use of reason and the mastering of passions and appetites;
12. Plato affirms that human beings are reincarnated after they die; before they are born they have a contact with the divine; their memories are erased once they are born; only those who maintain enough of such memories posses enough reason―those are divinely selected: hence, implicitly, the divine nature of statecraft and soulcraft;
13. Embodied in the rule of the philosopher king, reason ensures happiness of the whole city just as the rule of the reason in the well-ordered soul ensures the happiness of the individual―the best-ordered city is “the city whose state is most like that of an individual man;”
14. According to Plato, political structures mirror the order or disorder found in the souls of citizens, hence there are as many types of political regimes as there are souls: 1) aristocracy corresponds to the soul that loves goodness and justice; 2) timocracy to the soul that loves honor and glory; 3) oligarchy to the soul that loves wealth; 4) democracy to the soul that loves freedom and pleasure; and 5) tyranny to the soul that loves domination; the best regime is not democracy: it leads to anarchy and the latter to tyranny; the best regime is aristocracy and that is not dangerous because its leaders are actuated by reason rather than desire for domination;
15. Yet Aristotle criticizes Plato’s views: according to him, the problems is that the political realm is defined by its plurality, while the individual soul is defined by its organic unity; reducing plurality to unity is a dangerous ambition: it is neither easy to achieve nor easy to maintain (as communists came to realize soon); the aristocratic rule is built on the lie about the divine right of aristocrats to rule;
16. Theorists have argued against Plato’s model of an unchecked and indisputable power: Montesquieu writes that to prevent abuse of power by power holders, it should exist a check to power―the American system of checks and balances has been proved successful so far;
17. Yet Plato believed that the philosopher king was immune to power’s infectious grip; he is not interested in power and takes it over only to serve his citizens;
18. The corruption might come from below, from a people who suffers a dearth of power, hence Acton inverted: a lack of power also tends to corrupt and an absolute lack of power corrupts absolutely;
19. The danger of the rule of the philosopher king: a critical mind is imperative for the dialectical activity of the philosopher → uncritical belief leads someone to be to misologic (to despise rational argument → cynicism takes root in the soul;
20. Plato fails to discern the inherent plurality of political association; rather than looking for the absolute truth through dialectics, he could have searched for the relative truth that might be explored through democratic practices; three are the major elements that would lead there: freedom, reason, and justice;
21. Note here the critique coming from feminists and culturalists;
FREEDOM
1. Hegel: the history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom;
2. Orlando Patterson: At its best, the valorization of personal liberty is the noblest achievement of Western Civilization; at its worst, no value has been more evil and socially corrosive in its consequences, including selfishness, alienation, the celebration of greed, and the dehumanizing disregard for the losers, the little people who fail to make it;
3. Does to much liberty present threat to the political community? What limits, if any, should be placed on our freedom?
4. This is not to say that individual liberty and collective welfare battle each other in a zero-sum game, where an increase in one value necessarily entails a corresponding decrease in the other;
5. Edmund Burke (1729-1797): freedom is a blessing and a benefit; yet liberty is dangerous if it is taken too far;
6. The case of free speech: freedom of speech is not a freedom to say anything to anyone at any time in any place; in the same vein, freedom of speech means more than the right to speak: it includes the right to be heard;
7. The trouble with the notion of liberty stems from the fact that such a word means different things to different people at different times;
Positive and Negative Liberty
1. Isaiah Berlin: positive liberty is a form of empowerment, a freedom to do or achieve something; negative liberty is freedom from interference, coercion or confinement; according to Berlin, due to the militant nature of positive liberty, negative liberty is less dangerous than positive liberty; yet, (related to the advocacy of the lack of restrictions) what is negative about negative liberty is that it denotes an absent of constraint
2. Negative liberty: is closely linked with the concept of privacy, of the private realm over which the individual exercises complete jurisdiction; J. S. Mill: freedom requires protection not only from the reach of monarchs but from democratic majorities as well; negative liberty generally includes an individual’s rule not only over his body and mind, but also over his personal possessions—most negative libertarians consider private property as an extension of the self;
3. Positive liberty: to be positively free goes beyond being negatively free; it entails possessing the means necessary to accomplish something specific, a particular task at hand; according to positive libertarians, negative freedom to do something does not mean that one will actually be able to do it; positive liberty thus requires more than the absence of constraint; it requires the capacity or ability to accomplish specific tasks or fulfill specific desires; to be positively free is to be self-directed and capable of realizing one’s will; Berlin: positive liberty is a mastery over the self; positive liberty is a public liberty;
4. Yet Marx views the achievement of positive liberty through the achievement of negative liberty: the most critical loss of freedom occurs not for the victims of his own appetite but for the victims of ideology;
5. Positive libertarians are interested in public liberty; negative libertarians are primarily interested in private liberty;
6. For positive libertarians, negative liberty is only the precondition for true freedom; Rousseau: freedom is a form sovereignty and it cannot be represented; it must be directly exercised (note the difference with Arendt); Rousseau: true, we must be law abiding citizens (hence losing our freedom to law) yet, those must be laws done by us (hence, to be free we must participate in lawmaking); this assumes that we are all alike and want the same;
7. According to Rousseau, while the state of nature is a state of unmitigated liberty, civilization changes all that; yet he thinks that absolute negative liberty is impossible for modern humans; in order to limit the negative effects of negative liberty, Rousseau advocates the increase of positive liberty, the desire and ability to adopt the interests of society as one’s own;
8. Rousseau’s patriotic remedy is primarily grounded in political equality while Marx’s revolutionary remedy is firmly rooted in economic equality;
9. The dangers of positive and negative liberties;
10. The tradeoff between positive and negative liberties;
11. Both positive and negative libertarians equate freedom with mastery (for the former, mastery over the self; for the latter, mastery over property); the positive and negative effects of both liberties on nature; positive libertarians celebrate the mastery of nature as a testimony to humanity’s higher rationality; negative libertarians foster the mastery of nature in their concerns for the sovereign rights of property owners;
12. Martin Heidegger’s (1889-1976) “letting be” liberty should not equated with sovereignty;
13. Hannah Arendt (1906-75): freedom is not a kind of mastery or sovereignty; it is a public event that escapes individual or collective control; it appears primarily in the open spaces of the political realm whenever the actions of citizens intersect and create new relationships; freedom becomes manifest in the very novelty of the results; therefore, sovereignty as the capacity to control the outcomes of action is not freedom; freedom is a letting be of the future and its potential for novelty.
REASON
1. The most common foundation of Western values is reason;
2. Foucault: What is this Reason that we use?
3. Plato: law as embodiment of reason; liberty and law are linked → the existence and exercise of reason is a necessary condition for the existence and exercise of liberty;
4. Kant: freedom should be defined as the public use of reason in all matter;
5. Aristotle and Plato: freedom was best established and bounded by law and that law should be the embodiment of reason;
6. Aristotle and Plato: reason should regulate the appetites and passions of the soul just as it should regulate the citizens of the polis;
7. Aristotle (unlike Plato): the faculty of reason is not located in a single caste, namely the philosophers; nor reason constitutes an abstract, purely intellectual faculty within the soul; Reason was a practical faculty; Phronesis (prudence) is that faculty of the soul that blends the capacity for abstract thought with the capacity to make judgments about concrete world;
8. Critique of the Western notion of reason;
9. Three concepts of rationality: economic, political, and ecological reason.
Economic reason
1. Economic principles and conventions structure a wide range of our individual and collective thought and behavior, including aspects of social and political life not formally economic in nature;
2. Different authors give different meaning to rationalism; Weber: a thing is never irrational in itself, but only from a particular rational point of view; yet according to Weber, there exists an ideal type of rationality: it allows one to secure the best means to one’s ends by systematically measuring the costs and benefits of various actions and opportunities; rationality routinizes aspects of thought, life, and the world that would otherwise remain unpredictable and disorderly; the Protestant (Calvinist—from John Calvin, 1509-64) ethics: a steadfast and calculated devotion to duty became of paramount importance; ironically, that attempt to heighten religious devotion produced an increasingly secular ethic: the deprecation of spontaneity and the celebration of duty led to a preoccupation with work for its own sake, which was quickly translated into “wealth for its own sake;”
3. The weaknesses of Weber’s argument: the initial development of capitalism even before Calvinism and the case of capitalist development in a catholic country such as Italy;
4. Rational choice theorists: all human thought and behavior, to the extent that it is rational, is amenable to economic analysis;
5. THE PRISONER’S DILEMMA;
6. Efficiency versus selfishness;
7. Bounded rationality; Herbert Simon: actors select those means found satisfactory (rather than the most efficient) given his cognitive limitations, the availability of information, and the constraints place on his time and resources;
8. Parsimony (the ability to imply a great range of testable hypotheses from few assumptions) versus accuracy in rational choice theory;
9. James March: the rational actor not only frequently fails to employ the most efficient means but also fails to pursue stable goals; we often cannot efficiently pursue our goals through instrumental action because our goal only become formulated in the midst of action.
Political reason
1. Platonic, Aristotelian and scholastic understanding of substantive reason: it is not restricted to devising efficient means to serve given ends; it is capable of determining what the ends of action ought to be; substantive reason does not simply determine the means to reach some goals but the goals themselves;
2. This view has been rejected by those who stress the immaculate nature of rationality; David Hume (1711-76): reason is and ought only to be, the slave of passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them; Bertrand Russell: reason has a perfectly clear and precise meaning; it signifies the choice of the right means to an end that you wish to achieve; it has nothing whatever to do with the choice of ends; Herbert Simon: reason is wholly instrumental; it cannot tell us where to go; at best it can tell us how to go there;
3. Aristotle: reason is a civic virtue; it is achieved only through its practice; we become just by performing just actions; we become reasonable by exercising reason; Poiesis (craft production) is not the same as Praxis (political action);
4. Hannah Arendt: who we are is not a sovereign entity; it is part of a web of human relationships that allows for expression of freedom through public action;
5. In a truly political life, one cannot solely pursue the maximization of preconceived interests and goals because one is entering into a process whereby goals and interests, along with values and identities, become shaped and reshaped, formed and transformed;
6. Jürgen Habermas: rationality in political life is achieved by removing restrictions on communication so that all may participate in public, unrestricted discussion, free from domination.
Ecological reason
1. Garret Hardin: THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS (1968);
2. Environmental theorists: not the efficient pursuit of economic gains but an expansive orientation to sustainable living constitutes the key features of an ecological rationality; environmental theorists are engaged in transforming the meaning and practice of rationality;
3. The critics of the ecological reason charge that much of the modern environmentalism is a broad-based assault on reason;
4. The importance of ecological rationality is that it does not discount the future; the effects of its present operation do not undercut its own or any other future rational activities;
5. One means to gain this future focus is for long-term ecological and social costs to be figured into prices paid for goods and services (or taxation);Only a rationality that prompts us to make decisions from the standpoint of a political community sufficiently extended in time (and space) can marshal itself against the ecological destructiveness of short-term economic efficiency; hence, ecological rationality is a form of reason that extends one’s obligations and concerns both in time and space.
Monday, February 25, 2008
Friday, February 15, 2008
WEEK 5: HUMAN CONFLICT
1. As we saw during the previous lectures, for modern individualists, identities are the stable cause rather than the changing effect of political actions and relationships;
2. In contrast, postmodernists maintain that identities are not independent variables but products of a social environment that is infused with changing relationships of power;
3. The US Declaration of Independence, 1776 (analyze its relationship with the contemporary autonomous individual Americans;1) Jefferson’s suggestion that his words simply reflected the preexisting identity of the American colonists tells only half the story for the same words have heavily contributed to the construction of contemporary American identities; 2) Jefferson’s assumptions about the autonomy and independence of individuals were themselves products of a particular social, economic, and historical context;
4. Craig Calhoun about contract theory: The individuals joining in the social contract… were prototypically educated, property-owning male speakers of the dominant language of the nation. Thus individualism ironically repressed difference;
5. Yet words’ meaning might change with the change of the historical context where they are used: in our century, Jefferson’s words have been employed by women, African Americans, native people, and other minorities to assert their political, civil, and economic rights;
6. Identities provide us with sets of (conceptual, psychological, and emotional) lenses that allow us to make our way in the world;
7. The politics of identity is concerned with the way in which differences are politically generated and negotiated;
8. Identity politics generally refers to political movements (ethnically or racially defined organizations, for example) that base their power on the assumed uniformity of interests and values among their members;
9. Politics is about the exercise of power that does not slip over the line into the realm of force. Violence erases difference by destroying the other or by eliminating the other’s opportunity for meaningful resistance or self assertion;
10. Politics is threatened whenever the exercise of power suppresses difference in order to mimic a harmonic existence;
11. True harmony never occurs in political life. When claims of complete harmony are made, politics is in jeopardy.
LIMITING POWER AND RESPECTING DIFFERENCE
1. Affirmation of difference should not: 1) create unnecessary divisions or become an apology for neglect, provincialism, or narrow partisanship; it should broaden our beliefs, values, and interests, not to narrow them; 2) become an apology for divisiveness when it does not exist genuinely; we should also avoid the assumption of homogeneity;
2. The exercise of power in collective life is unavoidable; we need to determine which uses of power are good and ought to be cultivated and which uses of power are pernicious and ought to be avoided;
3. For methodological individualism, identity is mainly exogenously given; it is related to some inner human inclinations toward rational behavior; identity is mainly unchangeable;
4. Postmodernists: one sense of self and identity is largely a product of the relatively anonymous and ambiguous forms of power that embed one in a network of social relations;
5. Martin Luther King, Jr.: People will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
6. Judgments: political life demands good judgment; it must be publicly defensible on practical, ethical, and epistemological grounds; it helps us to refrain from both thoughtlessly yielding to power and thoughtlessly rejecting its use;
7. On human behavior toward power: a normative assessment with Golden Rule flavor: resists power exercised on you and allow others to resist power that you exercise on them;
8. Way of resisting power: 1) an appeal to ethics (the Golden Rule); 2) Sheldon Wolin: defend the diversity of your own environment; 3) Alasdair MacIntyre: understand oneself by way of social relationships we form.
RACE, RELIGION AND OTHERNESS
1. Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: despite being famous an explorer, Columbus (1451-1506) never really explored the other; he remained a captive of Christian, European identity;
2. Differently, in 1519, Montezuma, the Aztec emperor, mistook Hernán Cortés (1485-1547) for Queztalcoatl and allowed him access to the Aztec capital;
3. Bartolemé de cLas Casa (1474-1566) asserted the humanity of the native people; yet the natives were seen by him simply as potential converts;
4. Politics is about the exercise of power that does not slip over the line into the realm of force; violence erases difference by destroying otherness; the attempt to impose harmony is also dangerous; politics is threatened whenever the exercise of power suppresses difference in order to mimic a harmonic existence; true harmony never occurs in political life—when claims of complete harmony are made, politics is in jeopardy;
5. Genocide—the destruction of a race or people.
GENDER AND IDENTITY
1. Kate Millett’s feminism (Sexual Politics) and the debate between the personal and the political: “personal is political;” according to feminists, privacy should not be abolished and our lives become wholly politicized: certain distinctions ought to be maintained between the public realm and the private realm; feminists contest the way the line separating these realms traditionally has been drawn and that line is not so thick, so straight, or so impermeable as is often assumed; that line is itself a political demarcation;
2. Patriarchy as oligarchic politics;
Development of feminism
3. In ancient Greece, women could neither own property nor vote;
4. The Industrial Revolution diminished the economic power of women;
5. Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97), A Vindication of the Right of Woman, 1792: despite all the grand talk of equality, Paine and the republican revolutionaries left women wholly out of the picture;
6. John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill, The Subjection of Women, 1869: women equality is the surest test and most correct measure of the civilization of a people or an age;
7. Abigail Adams and her plea with her husband John Adams;
8. 1848. The Women’s Rights Convention, Seneca Falls, New York, the first gathering of women for publicly asserting their rights: We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal;
9. Women’s suffrage movement: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony; 1920—the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution granted American women the right to vote;
10. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1952 and Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 1963 challenged the notion that women find fulfillment only in childbearing and homemaking; de Beauvoir: gender roles are largely a function of the historical period and cultural environment―”one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman;”
11. Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, 1970, wrote from a Marxist perspective: we should blame the division of labor that keeps women at home; that division of labor is built at the expense of women; they find themselves subordinated because pregnancy weakens them physically; in order to resolve this situation, women must give up their motherhood and human reproduction must be performed by machines;
12. Equality under the law and equality of opportunity: the dilemmas of the affirmative action;
13. Gender justice demands the pursuit of equality grounded in the recognition of difference; it demands that this recognition be translated into cultural mores no less than political policy and legislation;
14. Women segregation;
15. Mary Daly argues that women who worship a male deity are subject to a subtle form of psychological self-deprecation; women should assert their equality in religious matters.
16. Equality versus difference and masculinity versus femininity;
17. Hence the question of feminine epistemology and ethics versus masculine epistemology and ethics; Carol Gilligan: the mores that structure men’s and women’s ethical choices differ; women’s “morality of care” (Nancy Chodorow: a communitarian epistemology)/(dangerous self-sacrifice) versus men’s “morality of rights” (Nancy Chodorow: an individualistic epistemology)/(selfish individualism); those are not innate structures within the male and female psyche: they may be artifacts of culture;
18. Gilligan’s solution: balancing these moralities;
19. Chodorow’s solution: fathers should take a greater role in childbearing;
20. Liberal feminism, socialist feminism, conservative feminism, and radical feminism;
21. Liberal feminism fights for women rights through the rule of law; critics of liberal feminism point out that liberalism has no place for women as women―women must think and act like independent men to fit into a liberal world;
22. Women in the role of the victim: the danger is that this perception might actually lead to the reinforcement of such a position.
CLASS AND IDENTITY
1. Karl Marx (1818-83): the greater division in human society is not the gender but the class one; the former will be resolved with the latter; contemporary feminists disagree by pointing out that this neglects the significance of the biological reproduction); yet, insofar as the economic oppression affects gender politics, many feminists rely on Marxist theory;
2. Marx began with the critique of liberalism in religious issues: he acknowledged the role it plays in guaranteeing “religious freedom;” yet Marx argued for “liberation from religion”―the end of religious belief altogether; Marx: religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people;
3. Marx studied the dynamics of economic disparities; they create alienation;
4. Alienation is the condition of keeping humans strangers from themselves, from the world, and from their full potential as human beings;
5. The naturally existing poverty versus the artificially produced poverty: the latter is a product of economic inequality;
6. According to Marx, humans are in essence “species being,” inherently collective or communal in nature; yet the communal life is destroyed by the alienation, but for the poor this is more severe;
7. Four ways of alienation: 1) from the product of their labor; 2) from the processes of labor; 3) from their fellow human beings; 4) from themselves.
8. The solution: social revolution that would abolish private property;
9. The critique of idealism; Hegel (1770-1831): action follows thoughts; Marx: ideas are the effect not the cause of the material conditions in which we live; hence, humans must be raised in the proper social and economic environment;
10. Marxism (the labor theory of history) emerged as a mixture of Hegelian belief in progressive historical development and Feuerbach’s materialism;
11. Ideology: a system of ideas that distorts or inverts reality but becomes widely accepted as true owing to the power of whose interests these ideas primarily serve;
12. Marxism: moral values, religious beliefs, and social relationships are all products of the “forces of production” = means of production + the mode of production;
13. The discrepant development of the latter two brings social tensions and social enhancement;
14. Communistic society would end alienation in all its forms; the end of labor division: “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs:” the end of history (along with the class struggle);
15. Communist society would be born only out of particular historical conditions and revolutionary struggle, not out of wishful thinking;
16. Bakunin, a Russian anarchist, theorized the proletarian revolution but opposed the dictatorship of proletariat;
17. Marxist fallacy: “circumstances make man just as much as men make circumstances;” note this switch from cause-effect to endogenous relationship between circumstances and men;Socialists reject revolutionary methods in favor of strong governmental regulations―gradual reform and taxation is sufficient to avoid inequality; nationalization only of vital branches of economy; socialists are concerned in preserving individual liberties that the revolution might quash; socialists are skeptical of the possibility of a fully egalitarian society.
2. In contrast, postmodernists maintain that identities are not independent variables but products of a social environment that is infused with changing relationships of power;
3. The US Declaration of Independence, 1776 (analyze its relationship with the contemporary autonomous individual Americans;1) Jefferson’s suggestion that his words simply reflected the preexisting identity of the American colonists tells only half the story for the same words have heavily contributed to the construction of contemporary American identities; 2) Jefferson’s assumptions about the autonomy and independence of individuals were themselves products of a particular social, economic, and historical context;
4. Craig Calhoun about contract theory: The individuals joining in the social contract… were prototypically educated, property-owning male speakers of the dominant language of the nation. Thus individualism ironically repressed difference;
5. Yet words’ meaning might change with the change of the historical context where they are used: in our century, Jefferson’s words have been employed by women, African Americans, native people, and other minorities to assert their political, civil, and economic rights;
6. Identities provide us with sets of (conceptual, psychological, and emotional) lenses that allow us to make our way in the world;
7. The politics of identity is concerned with the way in which differences are politically generated and negotiated;
8. Identity politics generally refers to political movements (ethnically or racially defined organizations, for example) that base their power on the assumed uniformity of interests and values among their members;
9. Politics is about the exercise of power that does not slip over the line into the realm of force. Violence erases difference by destroying the other or by eliminating the other’s opportunity for meaningful resistance or self assertion;
10. Politics is threatened whenever the exercise of power suppresses difference in order to mimic a harmonic existence;
11. True harmony never occurs in political life. When claims of complete harmony are made, politics is in jeopardy.
LIMITING POWER AND RESPECTING DIFFERENCE
1. Affirmation of difference should not: 1) create unnecessary divisions or become an apology for neglect, provincialism, or narrow partisanship; it should broaden our beliefs, values, and interests, not to narrow them; 2) become an apology for divisiveness when it does not exist genuinely; we should also avoid the assumption of homogeneity;
2. The exercise of power in collective life is unavoidable; we need to determine which uses of power are good and ought to be cultivated and which uses of power are pernicious and ought to be avoided;
3. For methodological individualism, identity is mainly exogenously given; it is related to some inner human inclinations toward rational behavior; identity is mainly unchangeable;
4. Postmodernists: one sense of self and identity is largely a product of the relatively anonymous and ambiguous forms of power that embed one in a network of social relations;
5. Martin Luther King, Jr.: People will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
6. Judgments: political life demands good judgment; it must be publicly defensible on practical, ethical, and epistemological grounds; it helps us to refrain from both thoughtlessly yielding to power and thoughtlessly rejecting its use;
7. On human behavior toward power: a normative assessment with Golden Rule flavor: resists power exercised on you and allow others to resist power that you exercise on them;
8. Way of resisting power: 1) an appeal to ethics (the Golden Rule); 2) Sheldon Wolin: defend the diversity of your own environment; 3) Alasdair MacIntyre: understand oneself by way of social relationships we form.
RACE, RELIGION AND OTHERNESS
1. Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: despite being famous an explorer, Columbus (1451-1506) never really explored the other; he remained a captive of Christian, European identity;
2. Differently, in 1519, Montezuma, the Aztec emperor, mistook Hernán Cortés (1485-1547) for Queztalcoatl and allowed him access to the Aztec capital;
3. Bartolemé de cLas Casa (1474-1566) asserted the humanity of the native people; yet the natives were seen by him simply as potential converts;
4. Politics is about the exercise of power that does not slip over the line into the realm of force; violence erases difference by destroying otherness; the attempt to impose harmony is also dangerous; politics is threatened whenever the exercise of power suppresses difference in order to mimic a harmonic existence; true harmony never occurs in political life—when claims of complete harmony are made, politics is in jeopardy;
5. Genocide—the destruction of a race or people.
GENDER AND IDENTITY
1. Kate Millett’s feminism (Sexual Politics) and the debate between the personal and the political: “personal is political;” according to feminists, privacy should not be abolished and our lives become wholly politicized: certain distinctions ought to be maintained between the public realm and the private realm; feminists contest the way the line separating these realms traditionally has been drawn and that line is not so thick, so straight, or so impermeable as is often assumed; that line is itself a political demarcation;
2. Patriarchy as oligarchic politics;
Development of feminism
3. In ancient Greece, women could neither own property nor vote;
4. The Industrial Revolution diminished the economic power of women;
5. Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97), A Vindication of the Right of Woman, 1792: despite all the grand talk of equality, Paine and the republican revolutionaries left women wholly out of the picture;
6. John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill, The Subjection of Women, 1869: women equality is the surest test and most correct measure of the civilization of a people or an age;
7. Abigail Adams and her plea with her husband John Adams;
8. 1848. The Women’s Rights Convention, Seneca Falls, New York, the first gathering of women for publicly asserting their rights: We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal;
9. Women’s suffrage movement: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony; 1920—the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution granted American women the right to vote;
10. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1952 and Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 1963 challenged the notion that women find fulfillment only in childbearing and homemaking; de Beauvoir: gender roles are largely a function of the historical period and cultural environment―”one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman;”
11. Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, 1970, wrote from a Marxist perspective: we should blame the division of labor that keeps women at home; that division of labor is built at the expense of women; they find themselves subordinated because pregnancy weakens them physically; in order to resolve this situation, women must give up their motherhood and human reproduction must be performed by machines;
12. Equality under the law and equality of opportunity: the dilemmas of the affirmative action;
13. Gender justice demands the pursuit of equality grounded in the recognition of difference; it demands that this recognition be translated into cultural mores no less than political policy and legislation;
14. Women segregation;
15. Mary Daly argues that women who worship a male deity are subject to a subtle form of psychological self-deprecation; women should assert their equality in religious matters.
16. Equality versus difference and masculinity versus femininity;
17. Hence the question of feminine epistemology and ethics versus masculine epistemology and ethics; Carol Gilligan: the mores that structure men’s and women’s ethical choices differ; women’s “morality of care” (Nancy Chodorow: a communitarian epistemology)/(dangerous self-sacrifice) versus men’s “morality of rights” (Nancy Chodorow: an individualistic epistemology)/(selfish individualism); those are not innate structures within the male and female psyche: they may be artifacts of culture;
18. Gilligan’s solution: balancing these moralities;
19. Chodorow’s solution: fathers should take a greater role in childbearing;
20. Liberal feminism, socialist feminism, conservative feminism, and radical feminism;
21. Liberal feminism fights for women rights through the rule of law; critics of liberal feminism point out that liberalism has no place for women as women―women must think and act like independent men to fit into a liberal world;
22. Women in the role of the victim: the danger is that this perception might actually lead to the reinforcement of such a position.
CLASS AND IDENTITY
1. Karl Marx (1818-83): the greater division in human society is not the gender but the class one; the former will be resolved with the latter; contemporary feminists disagree by pointing out that this neglects the significance of the biological reproduction); yet, insofar as the economic oppression affects gender politics, many feminists rely on Marxist theory;
2. Marx began with the critique of liberalism in religious issues: he acknowledged the role it plays in guaranteeing “religious freedom;” yet Marx argued for “liberation from religion”―the end of religious belief altogether; Marx: religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people;
3. Marx studied the dynamics of economic disparities; they create alienation;
4. Alienation is the condition of keeping humans strangers from themselves, from the world, and from their full potential as human beings;
5. The naturally existing poverty versus the artificially produced poverty: the latter is a product of economic inequality;
6. According to Marx, humans are in essence “species being,” inherently collective or communal in nature; yet the communal life is destroyed by the alienation, but for the poor this is more severe;
7. Four ways of alienation: 1) from the product of their labor; 2) from the processes of labor; 3) from their fellow human beings; 4) from themselves.
8. The solution: social revolution that would abolish private property;
9. The critique of idealism; Hegel (1770-1831): action follows thoughts; Marx: ideas are the effect not the cause of the material conditions in which we live; hence, humans must be raised in the proper social and economic environment;
10. Marxism (the labor theory of history) emerged as a mixture of Hegelian belief in progressive historical development and Feuerbach’s materialism;
11. Ideology: a system of ideas that distorts or inverts reality but becomes widely accepted as true owing to the power of whose interests these ideas primarily serve;
12. Marxism: moral values, religious beliefs, and social relationships are all products of the “forces of production” = means of production + the mode of production;
13. The discrepant development of the latter two brings social tensions and social enhancement;
14. Communistic society would end alienation in all its forms; the end of labor division: “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs:” the end of history (along with the class struggle);
15. Communist society would be born only out of particular historical conditions and revolutionary struggle, not out of wishful thinking;
16. Bakunin, a Russian anarchist, theorized the proletarian revolution but opposed the dictatorship of proletariat;
17. Marxist fallacy: “circumstances make man just as much as men make circumstances;” note this switch from cause-effect to endogenous relationship between circumstances and men;Socialists reject revolutionary methods in favor of strong governmental regulations―gradual reform and taxation is sufficient to avoid inequality; nationalization only of vital branches of economy; socialists are concerned in preserving individual liberties that the revolution might quash; socialists are skeptical of the possibility of a fully egalitarian society.
Monday, February 4, 2008
WEEK 4: MODERNITY AND POSTMODERNITY
Defining Modernity
1. Rengger notices two senses of modernity: modernity as mood and modernity as socio-cultural form. The former, captured by a definition of William Connolly, has almost a personal character; the latter, referring to Anthony Giddens, is defined as “modes of social life or organization which emerged in Europe from about the seventeenth century onwards and which subsequently became more or less worldwide in their influence. This associates modernity with a time period and with initial geographic location.” Only modernity as socio-cultural form interests this essaySee N. J. Rengger, Political Theory, Modernity and Postmodernity (Oxford, UK & Cambridge, USA: Blackwell, 1995), 39-41; and also Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 1.
2. A more detailed definition of the socio-cultural form of modernity is given by Smart when he defines modernity as “the consequence of a process of modernization, by which the social world comes under the domination of asceticism, secularization, the universalistic claim of instrumental rationality, the differentiation of various spheres of the lifeworld, the bureaucratization of the economics, political and military practices, and the growing of the monetary values. Modernity therefore arises with the spread of western imperialism in the sixteenth century…; the domination of capitalism in northern Europe…; the acceptance of scientific procedures…; and the pre-eminently with the institutionalization of Calvinist practices and beliefs in the dominant classes of northern Europe.” Quoted from Bryan S. Turner, “Periodization and Politics in the Postmodern,” in Bryan S. Turner ed., Theories of Modernity and Postmodernity, (London, Newburry Park, New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 1990), 6. (Taken from Ridvan Peshkopia, “In Search of the Private, Public and Counterpublic: Modernity, Postmodernity, and Postsocialism,” New Political Science: a Journal of Politics and Culture 30: 1(March 2008), 23-47, note 1.);
3. According to Thiele, “Modernity arose out of Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution, events of the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries that marked a radical transformation of the artistic and literary world, the religious world, and the world of inquiry and knowledge respectively. These three events intermingled to produce a widespread and thorough challenge to tradition and authority.
Etymology
1. Modernist: someone who shun tradition and focus on modern lifestyle and habits;
2. Modernism versus traditionalism;
History
1. Galileo Galilei (1564-1642); anti-Aristotle; anti-Ptolemy; 1632: pro-Copernicus (1473-15430; 1533: e pur si muove-science versus religion and experiment versus authority-the birth of the modern science; THE BOOK OF NATURE IS WRITEN IN THE LANGUAGE OG MATHEMATICS AND SCIENTISTS HAVE TAKEN OVER THE TASK OF READING IT;
2. Francis Bacon (1561-1626): British philosopher and politician; Novum Organum [New Logic] as opposing Organum of Aristotle and its deductive nature; anti-scholastic; the founder of the inductive notion of science: from the particular to the general; According to Voltaire (1694-1778) Bacon is “the father of experimental philosophy; mastering nature as a central goal for the modernists; according to Bacon, KNOWLEDGE ITSELF IS POWER;
3. By mathematically calculating the mathematics of planetary motion, Johanes Kepler (1571-1630) theoretically refined Copernicus’ theory of the heliocentric planetary system;
4. Isaac Newton (1642-1727) theorized the role of the universal force of gravity;
5. Réne Descartes (1596-1630): understanding the world according to mechanical laws of nature;
6. Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794): the tenth period of human development, the “indefinite” perfectibility of the human race, would become irreversible (notice a teleological view of human development);
Characteristics of Modernism
1. Scientism;
2. Humanism;Progressivism.
Individualism
1. Individualism is a legacy of modernism;
2. The individual is the key unit of analysis;
3. The individual both exercises and is object of power’s exercise;
4. The individual is a rational autonomous moral actor.
The individual understanding of power implies:
1. The nature and degree of power held by individuals;
2. The nature of political processes and institutions that distribute the power held by individuals;
3. The moral and rational standards that the individual ought to aply to the exercise of power or its resistance;
4. Hobbesian versus Lockean individualism (from John Locke 1632-1704);
5. Politics as (Harold Lasswell’s) Politics: Who gets What, When, and How;
6. The government regulation of social interaction is inevitable;
7. Politics precedes and exeeds the distribution of scarce resources and the pursuit of individual interests because it defines the way we define and understand our resources, our interests, our relationships, and ultimately ourselves as individuals;
8. The basic assumption of individualism: The individual is prepolitical;
9. Communitarians disagree: according to them, there are the communities who shape attitudes, values and behavior of their members;
10. Amitai Etzioni’s argument about the historical nature of the individual-community balance;
11. According to the communiarian, politics is also about identity;Alasdair MacIntyre: “What I ought to do?” is dependent upon “Who I am.”
STRUCTURALISM
1. Rather than the power of an individual, structuralism concerns the power exerted by the social environment itself―traditions, customs, practices, and institutions;
2. Methodological individualism: the whole is defined by adding up its parts; Structuralism: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; Émile Durkheim (1858-1917): the society has a life on its own and “although society may be nothing without individuals, each of them is much more a product of society than he is its maker;”
3. Pierre Bourdieu: individuals internalize as “mental dispositions” and “schemes of perceptions and thought” (habitus) the organization of their external reality; The word “field” stands to describe a network of social arrangements that embody and distribute positions and relations of power; habitus is an internalization of social fields;
4. Clause Lévi-Strauss: the myths that ground social life do not find their ultimate origins in the creative efforts of individual authors; they reflect the structure of the collective human mind; cultural institutions are the external projections and manifestations of universal structures, just as sentences are external manifestations of general grammatical rules (set in collective minds);
5. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): the human mind has innate faculties that organize its perceptions of the world according to certain “rational” constrains and categories―(innate mental categories);”
6. Differently, Louis Althusser: individuals are epistemologically and behaviorally molded according to deep patterns that transcend culture and time (concrete economic relations that undergo logical and predictable patterns of transformation); note a tendency to deny the importance of human individuality, volition and freedom;
7. Anthony Giddens: structuration suggests that social structures are both the “medium and result” of human practices;
8. Durkheim, Bourdieu, Lévi-Strauss, and Giddens: individuality and freedom arise only through human interaction, and the latter ever occurs within social structures that constrain, channel, and enable behavior;
POSTSTRUCTURALISM AND POSTMODERNISM
1. Poststructuralism: power is not always or even primarily a tool willfully employed by the individual actor in pursuit of freely chosen interests; (unlike structuralism) power is widely dispersed within the social whole and constantly in flux; no powerful institutions or traditions transform social life across time and space according to a singular, identifiable logic; investigates how particular forms of power achieve particular effects within particular historical periods, cultures, or texts; rejects the notion that there are ahistorical, cross-cultural categories of experience or structures of social experience;
2. Jacques Derrida: deconstruction―the linguistic turn in philosophy;
3. Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913): meaning is not determined by a stable relation of words to concrete things or even to conceptual representations of these things; it is determined by the intricate relation of words to other words; deconstruction focuses on this unstable relativity of language; language constructs identity, and by doing so, to induce action and desire;
4. Postmodernism―a direct heir of poststructuralism: it refers to the widespread cultural sensibility, tendency, or mood that is loosely grounded in and serves as a grounding for poststructuralist theory;
5. Defining postmodernism: Like the case of modernity, there are several (sometimes competing) definitions of postmodernity. According to Eagleton: “Postmodernity is a style of thought which is suspicious of classical notions of truth, reason, identity and objectivity, of the idea of progress or emancipation, of single frameworks, grand narratives or ultimate grounds of explanations. Against these Enlightenment norms, it sees the world as contingent, undergrounded, diverse, unstable, indeterminate, a set of disunified cultures or interpretations which breed a degree of skepticism about objectivity of truth, history and norms, the givenness of natures and the coherence of identities. This way of seeing, so some would claim, has real material conditions: it springs from an historic shift in the West to a new form of capitalism – to the ephemeral, decentralized world of technology, consumerism, and the culture industry, in which the service, finance and information industries triumph over traditional manufacture, and classical class politics yield ground to a diffuse range of ‘identity politics.’” See Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism, (Malden, MA, and Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), vii.
6. Postmodernism does not so much celebrate the power of human agency as worries about its fragility;
7. While acknowledging the power of institutions, postmodernists caution us not to conclude that these are the only institutions that shape our lives;
8. Our identities are the product of a panoply of protean social forces;
9. Discourses and other social forces can be only investigated piecemeal, from the ground up;
10. One must begin with individual practices, particular institutions and singular events that are themselves the products of the sorts of power being investigated;
11. One’s investigation must originate from one’s own particular standpoint, largely a product of social power―a perspectivist position;
12. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900): objectivity as traditionally conceived is a nonsensical absurdity; note the ironic nature of postmodernism: one’s truth is depended upon one’s identity;
13. The three major features of modernism: 1) social construction of identity; 2) its perspectivist denial of epistemological or ethical foundations; 3) and its ironic demeanor;
14. There is no a single human nature; human identities are continually being constructed within protean social environments;
15. According to postmodern theorists, human identities are continually being constructed and contested within protean social environments owing to the interaction of specific forms of power;
16. Explicitly, even basic individual desire and will are less the trademark of individual autonomy that constructs of social environment;
17. Yet, implicitly, people can chose who they are or what they want to be;
18. Yet social constructivism is not a method employed only by postmodernist authors; IR and Comparative Politics social constructivism: the Copenhagen School and the securitization;
19. Gramsci: the dominant class uses political and cultural tools to manipulate the order strata of society into accepting, and even endorsing, unjust and exploitative social relations;
20. For modernist theorists, people process their experiences into opinions, attitudes, values and actions through predispositions that are products of socialization; for postmodernist theorists, the world itself is the product of symbols, gestures, discourses, and dramas of social life; reality itself is socially constructed;
21. Finally (for this part of the lecture) postmodernists suggest that there are no independent “facts” or “data” about the world at all; knowledge always comes prepackaged within its particular social context.
IDENTITY AND THE EXERCISE OF POWER
1. The power to create and shape identities in unevenly exercised in society because some entities possess greater power than others;
2. Today, the challenge rests with the surplus of information and difficulties for masses to select among it;
3. The elitist nature of power-Gaetano Mosca (1858-1941) and Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923): the circulation of elites according to meritocracy;
4. According to Giovanni Sartori, the threat to democracy are not elites but masses influenced by demagogues (a tinny example from the occurring campaign: “change” and “lifting embargo toward Cuba”);
5. C Wright Mills opposes any kind of oligarchy;
6. Postmodernist theorists have been criticized of missing the focus from the concrete forms of power exercise to some ambiguous ones; their perspectivist take makes difficult to come up with some objective categorization of “good” and “bad;” ironically, this attitude might keep postmodernist theorists from demanding social change;
7. Postmodernist (constructivist) undermining of environmental efforts;
8. Postmodernist (constructivist) undermining of political participation and endeavor (and of human efforts for betterment);
9. Who is able to contest identity? Affluent intellectuals and educated people who take advantage of their academic, political and civil freedoms, it follows; Thiele: Is modernism parasitic upon modernist values and victories that it simply rejects?
10. Foucault: power-a spider net without a spider: everyone is caught in its web; everyone is object and subject of power; the “capillary nature of power; power is exercised on us through our enmeshment in an ubiquitous network of relations; its influence is greater when it is exercised hidden from our view;
11. Note the similarity between Foucault’s view with Alexis de Tocqueville’s (1805-1859) “Democracy in America”: the tyranny of the majority;
12. There is a personalistic power; yet it is amalgamated in the spider web of social networks and becomes impersonalistic: the spider web gets a life on its own;
13. Then, if the power is exercised equally to each of us (which we know it is not true), the question “who benefits?” arises (Anatole France- 1844-1924: the example of the law against begging);
14. Hence, it is obvious that one’s identity is constructed by multiple relations of power (not just the influence of power holders)―hence by social environment where one lives: it’s power is not exercised according to a predefined design that overtly serve individual interests-it’s power has a more anonymous form;
15. The blurriness of the notion of human autonomy: Foucault for instance claims that how scientists come to view the world, their role in it, and themselves is largely a product of the dominant mores with their social and professional environment;
16. Hobbes hopes to escape the anarchic war of all against all: Leviathan would serve the purpose (note here that Hobbes assumes individuals as independent agents); Foucault attempts to demonstrate that our identities are largely formed by a social Leviathan (here, individuals are seen as entrapped in a web of social network: we need to encourage them to struggle for autonomy under such conditions; Hobbes sees power as an individual Leviathan; Foucault rejects the notion that power is limited to something wielded against individuals;
17. In the postmodern world, power is not only a repressive force that constrains us; it is a creative force that makes us who we are;
SOCIAL POWER AND INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM
1. Mores and norms form us but also restrict us (normalization, according to Foucault); Foucault: we should fight for our autonomy;
2. Habermas: why fighting for individual autonomy when we can never escape the social web?
3. Foucault: power itself is grounded on the freedom of the individual to respond in any number of ways: options are available;
4. Yet unmitigated autonomy remains impossible and it remains a nonsensical concept: to exercise individual autonomy one must first become an individual-yet one can only become an individual by normalization (hence loosing autonomy); as a conclusion, freedom is reached and expressed through our shifting positions within the social web of power;
5. The political problem is to balance the exercise of power with the exercise of freedom by resisting specific forms of power;
6. Jean Baudrillard melds postmodernism with an extreme form of structuralist determinism (neomarxism/Maoism): the total destruction of individuality in the modern world;
7. Power is not always bad; yet it is always dangerous;
8. Behaviorism: the investigation of the power of social environment to shape individual values and behavior; John Locke: individuals are born blank slates and are formed according to the worldly experiences acting upon them;
9. Accordingly, if we master these experiences, we can create the type of person(s) we want to;
10. Postmodernist reject this exercise by claiming that there exist no single human identity; moreover, any attempt to understand human behavior scientifically will lead to efforts to control human behavior scientifically; behaviorism might intensify efforts to suppress diversity;
11. B. F. Skinner: Walden Two: “operant conditioning” as a technique to technologically build a just society; yet it is a collectivist society: a society which functions for the good of all cannot tolerate the emergence of individual figures;
12. B. F. Skinner: Beyond Freedom and Dignity; in order to resolve the contemporary social problems, we need to abandon the prejudices about freedom and autonomy (hence abandon the latter) and abolish autonomous man;
13. Yet, according to behaviorists, we abandon our autonomy for the sake of understanding the environment that control us and change it;
14. Similarities between the postmodernists and behaviorists: the individual is wholly malleable, a function of its social environment; the webs of social power are inescapable; we are all necessarily caught in the game of mutual manipulation and control; power is the medium in which humans exist; power both shapes and sustains us; we cannot gain ultimate freedom; freedom is the experience of temporary getting a better grip on the reins of power;
15. Differences: Foucault―hyper- and pessimistic activism on the part of individuals who suffer the effects of power (opposing them); Skinner: hyper- and optimistic activism on the part of social engineers involved in constructing ever stronger and stickier webs of power (strengthening them).
A COMPREHENSIVE REVIEW
1. Postmodernism rejects grand theories that seek to explain everything;
2. Jean-François Lyotard (1924-98): postmodernism is chiefly characterized by an incredulity toward metanarratives (contrary to behaviorists); they shun also they own grand story: the social construction of identity (note here the postmodernists’ ironic demeanor);
3. Skinnerian modernism celebrates only the scientific aspect of modernism; yet it shuns the individual/agent element of it; behaviorists and liberals both believe in progress but the former base it on the submission of the laws of society to science while the latter on human autonomy;
4. Postmodernists reject the scientific element of modernism: there cannot be there any objective knowledge―Newton physics versus quantum physics and chaos theory: Einstein theory of relativity;
5. Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle: such things as time, space, matter, and causality are no longer understood as the unchanging foundations of a singular reality that is available for objective examination;
6. Postmodernists build on the assumption of the relativity and instability of nature (and knowledge);
7. Postmodernists reject the modernist faith in the autonomy and freedom of the individual;
8. Postmodernist spurn the modern faith in progress, whether scientifically or humanistically grounded; advances occur but at high expenses;
9. Differences between modern and postmodern political theory: the former are primarily interested in investigating the regulation of social interaction, while the latter are primarily interested in studying the social construction of identity;
10. However, as Thiele points out, political theory is about both the constitution and the connection of the selves;
11. Basically, both modern and postmodern political theorists are concerned with that realm of public affairs wherein various forms of power meet resistance and wrestle with freedom.The preservation of freedom is not to be gained in the futile attempt to escape politics. Politics is pervasive. Freedom is found only by self-consciously entering the political fray.
1. Rengger notices two senses of modernity: modernity as mood and modernity as socio-cultural form. The former, captured by a definition of William Connolly, has almost a personal character; the latter, referring to Anthony Giddens, is defined as “modes of social life or organization which emerged in Europe from about the seventeenth century onwards and which subsequently became more or less worldwide in their influence. This associates modernity with a time period and with initial geographic location.” Only modernity as socio-cultural form interests this essaySee N. J. Rengger, Political Theory, Modernity and Postmodernity (Oxford, UK & Cambridge, USA: Blackwell, 1995), 39-41; and also Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 1.
2. A more detailed definition of the socio-cultural form of modernity is given by Smart when he defines modernity as “the consequence of a process of modernization, by which the social world comes under the domination of asceticism, secularization, the universalistic claim of instrumental rationality, the differentiation of various spheres of the lifeworld, the bureaucratization of the economics, political and military practices, and the growing of the monetary values. Modernity therefore arises with the spread of western imperialism in the sixteenth century…; the domination of capitalism in northern Europe…; the acceptance of scientific procedures…; and the pre-eminently with the institutionalization of Calvinist practices and beliefs in the dominant classes of northern Europe.” Quoted from Bryan S. Turner, “Periodization and Politics in the Postmodern,” in Bryan S. Turner ed., Theories of Modernity and Postmodernity, (London, Newburry Park, New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 1990), 6. (Taken from Ridvan Peshkopia, “In Search of the Private, Public and Counterpublic: Modernity, Postmodernity, and Postsocialism,” New Political Science: a Journal of Politics and Culture 30: 1(March 2008), 23-47, note 1.);
3. According to Thiele, “Modernity arose out of Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution, events of the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries that marked a radical transformation of the artistic and literary world, the religious world, and the world of inquiry and knowledge respectively. These three events intermingled to produce a widespread and thorough challenge to tradition and authority.
Etymology
1. Modernist: someone who shun tradition and focus on modern lifestyle and habits;
2. Modernism versus traditionalism;
History
1. Galileo Galilei (1564-1642); anti-Aristotle; anti-Ptolemy; 1632: pro-Copernicus (1473-15430; 1533: e pur si muove-science versus religion and experiment versus authority-the birth of the modern science; THE BOOK OF NATURE IS WRITEN IN THE LANGUAGE OG MATHEMATICS AND SCIENTISTS HAVE TAKEN OVER THE TASK OF READING IT;
2. Francis Bacon (1561-1626): British philosopher and politician; Novum Organum [New Logic] as opposing Organum of Aristotle and its deductive nature; anti-scholastic; the founder of the inductive notion of science: from the particular to the general; According to Voltaire (1694-1778) Bacon is “the father of experimental philosophy; mastering nature as a central goal for the modernists; according to Bacon, KNOWLEDGE ITSELF IS POWER;
3. By mathematically calculating the mathematics of planetary motion, Johanes Kepler (1571-1630) theoretically refined Copernicus’ theory of the heliocentric planetary system;
4. Isaac Newton (1642-1727) theorized the role of the universal force of gravity;
5. Réne Descartes (1596-1630): understanding the world according to mechanical laws of nature;
6. Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794): the tenth period of human development, the “indefinite” perfectibility of the human race, would become irreversible (notice a teleological view of human development);
Characteristics of Modernism
1. Scientism;
2. Humanism;Progressivism.
Individualism
1. Individualism is a legacy of modernism;
2. The individual is the key unit of analysis;
3. The individual both exercises and is object of power’s exercise;
4. The individual is a rational autonomous moral actor.
The individual understanding of power implies:
1. The nature and degree of power held by individuals;
2. The nature of political processes and institutions that distribute the power held by individuals;
3. The moral and rational standards that the individual ought to aply to the exercise of power or its resistance;
4. Hobbesian versus Lockean individualism (from John Locke 1632-1704);
5. Politics as (Harold Lasswell’s) Politics: Who gets What, When, and How;
6. The government regulation of social interaction is inevitable;
7. Politics precedes and exeeds the distribution of scarce resources and the pursuit of individual interests because it defines the way we define and understand our resources, our interests, our relationships, and ultimately ourselves as individuals;
8. The basic assumption of individualism: The individual is prepolitical;
9. Communitarians disagree: according to them, there are the communities who shape attitudes, values and behavior of their members;
10. Amitai Etzioni’s argument about the historical nature of the individual-community balance;
11. According to the communiarian, politics is also about identity;Alasdair MacIntyre: “What I ought to do?” is dependent upon “Who I am.”
STRUCTURALISM
1. Rather than the power of an individual, structuralism concerns the power exerted by the social environment itself―traditions, customs, practices, and institutions;
2. Methodological individualism: the whole is defined by adding up its parts; Structuralism: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; Émile Durkheim (1858-1917): the society has a life on its own and “although society may be nothing without individuals, each of them is much more a product of society than he is its maker;”
3. Pierre Bourdieu: individuals internalize as “mental dispositions” and “schemes of perceptions and thought” (habitus) the organization of their external reality; The word “field” stands to describe a network of social arrangements that embody and distribute positions and relations of power; habitus is an internalization of social fields;
4. Clause Lévi-Strauss: the myths that ground social life do not find their ultimate origins in the creative efforts of individual authors; they reflect the structure of the collective human mind; cultural institutions are the external projections and manifestations of universal structures, just as sentences are external manifestations of general grammatical rules (set in collective minds);
5. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): the human mind has innate faculties that organize its perceptions of the world according to certain “rational” constrains and categories―(innate mental categories);”
6. Differently, Louis Althusser: individuals are epistemologically and behaviorally molded according to deep patterns that transcend culture and time (concrete economic relations that undergo logical and predictable patterns of transformation); note a tendency to deny the importance of human individuality, volition and freedom;
7. Anthony Giddens: structuration suggests that social structures are both the “medium and result” of human practices;
8. Durkheim, Bourdieu, Lévi-Strauss, and Giddens: individuality and freedom arise only through human interaction, and the latter ever occurs within social structures that constrain, channel, and enable behavior;
POSTSTRUCTURALISM AND POSTMODERNISM
1. Poststructuralism: power is not always or even primarily a tool willfully employed by the individual actor in pursuit of freely chosen interests; (unlike structuralism) power is widely dispersed within the social whole and constantly in flux; no powerful institutions or traditions transform social life across time and space according to a singular, identifiable logic; investigates how particular forms of power achieve particular effects within particular historical periods, cultures, or texts; rejects the notion that there are ahistorical, cross-cultural categories of experience or structures of social experience;
2. Jacques Derrida: deconstruction―the linguistic turn in philosophy;
3. Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913): meaning is not determined by a stable relation of words to concrete things or even to conceptual representations of these things; it is determined by the intricate relation of words to other words; deconstruction focuses on this unstable relativity of language; language constructs identity, and by doing so, to induce action and desire;
4. Postmodernism―a direct heir of poststructuralism: it refers to the widespread cultural sensibility, tendency, or mood that is loosely grounded in and serves as a grounding for poststructuralist theory;
5. Defining postmodernism: Like the case of modernity, there are several (sometimes competing) definitions of postmodernity. According to Eagleton: “Postmodernity is a style of thought which is suspicious of classical notions of truth, reason, identity and objectivity, of the idea of progress or emancipation, of single frameworks, grand narratives or ultimate grounds of explanations. Against these Enlightenment norms, it sees the world as contingent, undergrounded, diverse, unstable, indeterminate, a set of disunified cultures or interpretations which breed a degree of skepticism about objectivity of truth, history and norms, the givenness of natures and the coherence of identities. This way of seeing, so some would claim, has real material conditions: it springs from an historic shift in the West to a new form of capitalism – to the ephemeral, decentralized world of technology, consumerism, and the culture industry, in which the service, finance and information industries triumph over traditional manufacture, and classical class politics yield ground to a diffuse range of ‘identity politics.’” See Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism, (Malden, MA, and Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), vii.
6. Postmodernism does not so much celebrate the power of human agency as worries about its fragility;
7. While acknowledging the power of institutions, postmodernists caution us not to conclude that these are the only institutions that shape our lives;
8. Our identities are the product of a panoply of protean social forces;
9. Discourses and other social forces can be only investigated piecemeal, from the ground up;
10. One must begin with individual practices, particular institutions and singular events that are themselves the products of the sorts of power being investigated;
11. One’s investigation must originate from one’s own particular standpoint, largely a product of social power―a perspectivist position;
12. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900): objectivity as traditionally conceived is a nonsensical absurdity; note the ironic nature of postmodernism: one’s truth is depended upon one’s identity;
13. The three major features of modernism: 1) social construction of identity; 2) its perspectivist denial of epistemological or ethical foundations; 3) and its ironic demeanor;
14. There is no a single human nature; human identities are continually being constructed within protean social environments;
15. According to postmodern theorists, human identities are continually being constructed and contested within protean social environments owing to the interaction of specific forms of power;
16. Explicitly, even basic individual desire and will are less the trademark of individual autonomy that constructs of social environment;
17. Yet, implicitly, people can chose who they are or what they want to be;
18. Yet social constructivism is not a method employed only by postmodernist authors; IR and Comparative Politics social constructivism: the Copenhagen School and the securitization;
19. Gramsci: the dominant class uses political and cultural tools to manipulate the order strata of society into accepting, and even endorsing, unjust and exploitative social relations;
20. For modernist theorists, people process their experiences into opinions, attitudes, values and actions through predispositions that are products of socialization; for postmodernist theorists, the world itself is the product of symbols, gestures, discourses, and dramas of social life; reality itself is socially constructed;
21. Finally (for this part of the lecture) postmodernists suggest that there are no independent “facts” or “data” about the world at all; knowledge always comes prepackaged within its particular social context.
IDENTITY AND THE EXERCISE OF POWER
1. The power to create and shape identities in unevenly exercised in society because some entities possess greater power than others;
2. Today, the challenge rests with the surplus of information and difficulties for masses to select among it;
3. The elitist nature of power-Gaetano Mosca (1858-1941) and Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923): the circulation of elites according to meritocracy;
4. According to Giovanni Sartori, the threat to democracy are not elites but masses influenced by demagogues (a tinny example from the occurring campaign: “change” and “lifting embargo toward Cuba”);
5. C Wright Mills opposes any kind of oligarchy;
6. Postmodernist theorists have been criticized of missing the focus from the concrete forms of power exercise to some ambiguous ones; their perspectivist take makes difficult to come up with some objective categorization of “good” and “bad;” ironically, this attitude might keep postmodernist theorists from demanding social change;
7. Postmodernist (constructivist) undermining of environmental efforts;
8. Postmodernist (constructivist) undermining of political participation and endeavor (and of human efforts for betterment);
9. Who is able to contest identity? Affluent intellectuals and educated people who take advantage of their academic, political and civil freedoms, it follows; Thiele: Is modernism parasitic upon modernist values and victories that it simply rejects?
10. Foucault: power-a spider net without a spider: everyone is caught in its web; everyone is object and subject of power; the “capillary nature of power; power is exercised on us through our enmeshment in an ubiquitous network of relations; its influence is greater when it is exercised hidden from our view;
11. Note the similarity between Foucault’s view with Alexis de Tocqueville’s (1805-1859) “Democracy in America”: the tyranny of the majority;
12. There is a personalistic power; yet it is amalgamated in the spider web of social networks and becomes impersonalistic: the spider web gets a life on its own;
13. Then, if the power is exercised equally to each of us (which we know it is not true), the question “who benefits?” arises (Anatole France- 1844-1924: the example of the law against begging);
14. Hence, it is obvious that one’s identity is constructed by multiple relations of power (not just the influence of power holders)―hence by social environment where one lives: it’s power is not exercised according to a predefined design that overtly serve individual interests-it’s power has a more anonymous form;
15. The blurriness of the notion of human autonomy: Foucault for instance claims that how scientists come to view the world, their role in it, and themselves is largely a product of the dominant mores with their social and professional environment;
16. Hobbes hopes to escape the anarchic war of all against all: Leviathan would serve the purpose (note here that Hobbes assumes individuals as independent agents); Foucault attempts to demonstrate that our identities are largely formed by a social Leviathan (here, individuals are seen as entrapped in a web of social network: we need to encourage them to struggle for autonomy under such conditions; Hobbes sees power as an individual Leviathan; Foucault rejects the notion that power is limited to something wielded against individuals;
17. In the postmodern world, power is not only a repressive force that constrains us; it is a creative force that makes us who we are;
SOCIAL POWER AND INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM
1. Mores and norms form us but also restrict us (normalization, according to Foucault); Foucault: we should fight for our autonomy;
2. Habermas: why fighting for individual autonomy when we can never escape the social web?
3. Foucault: power itself is grounded on the freedom of the individual to respond in any number of ways: options are available;
4. Yet unmitigated autonomy remains impossible and it remains a nonsensical concept: to exercise individual autonomy one must first become an individual-yet one can only become an individual by normalization (hence loosing autonomy); as a conclusion, freedom is reached and expressed through our shifting positions within the social web of power;
5. The political problem is to balance the exercise of power with the exercise of freedom by resisting specific forms of power;
6. Jean Baudrillard melds postmodernism with an extreme form of structuralist determinism (neomarxism/Maoism): the total destruction of individuality in the modern world;
7. Power is not always bad; yet it is always dangerous;
8. Behaviorism: the investigation of the power of social environment to shape individual values and behavior; John Locke: individuals are born blank slates and are formed according to the worldly experiences acting upon them;
9. Accordingly, if we master these experiences, we can create the type of person(s) we want to;
10. Postmodernist reject this exercise by claiming that there exist no single human identity; moreover, any attempt to understand human behavior scientifically will lead to efforts to control human behavior scientifically; behaviorism might intensify efforts to suppress diversity;
11. B. F. Skinner: Walden Two: “operant conditioning” as a technique to technologically build a just society; yet it is a collectivist society: a society which functions for the good of all cannot tolerate the emergence of individual figures;
12. B. F. Skinner: Beyond Freedom and Dignity; in order to resolve the contemporary social problems, we need to abandon the prejudices about freedom and autonomy (hence abandon the latter) and abolish autonomous man;
13. Yet, according to behaviorists, we abandon our autonomy for the sake of understanding the environment that control us and change it;
14. Similarities between the postmodernists and behaviorists: the individual is wholly malleable, a function of its social environment; the webs of social power are inescapable; we are all necessarily caught in the game of mutual manipulation and control; power is the medium in which humans exist; power both shapes and sustains us; we cannot gain ultimate freedom; freedom is the experience of temporary getting a better grip on the reins of power;
15. Differences: Foucault―hyper- and pessimistic activism on the part of individuals who suffer the effects of power (opposing them); Skinner: hyper- and optimistic activism on the part of social engineers involved in constructing ever stronger and stickier webs of power (strengthening them).
A COMPREHENSIVE REVIEW
1. Postmodernism rejects grand theories that seek to explain everything;
2. Jean-François Lyotard (1924-98): postmodernism is chiefly characterized by an incredulity toward metanarratives (contrary to behaviorists); they shun also they own grand story: the social construction of identity (note here the postmodernists’ ironic demeanor);
3. Skinnerian modernism celebrates only the scientific aspect of modernism; yet it shuns the individual/agent element of it; behaviorists and liberals both believe in progress but the former base it on the submission of the laws of society to science while the latter on human autonomy;
4. Postmodernists reject the scientific element of modernism: there cannot be there any objective knowledge―Newton physics versus quantum physics and chaos theory: Einstein theory of relativity;
5. Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle: such things as time, space, matter, and causality are no longer understood as the unchanging foundations of a singular reality that is available for objective examination;
6. Postmodernists build on the assumption of the relativity and instability of nature (and knowledge);
7. Postmodernists reject the modernist faith in the autonomy and freedom of the individual;
8. Postmodernist spurn the modern faith in progress, whether scientifically or humanistically grounded; advances occur but at high expenses;
9. Differences between modern and postmodern political theory: the former are primarily interested in investigating the regulation of social interaction, while the latter are primarily interested in studying the social construction of identity;
10. However, as Thiele points out, political theory is about both the constitution and the connection of the selves;
11. Basically, both modern and postmodern political theorists are concerned with that realm of public affairs wherein various forms of power meet resistance and wrestle with freedom.The preservation of freedom is not to be gained in the futile attempt to escape politics. Politics is pervasive. Freedom is found only by self-consciously entering the political fray.
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