WEEK 6: STATECRAFT

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.