1. Is socialism dead? The questions about the survival of socialism arose out of the Soviet Communist demise;
2. Yet, Soviet Communism was only one of many socialist experiments, not the paradigmatic case of actually existing socialism;
3. Indeed, Leninism and Stalinism may even represent a narrowing of socialist possibilities; other (preceding) versions are religious and secular socialist utopias, anarchism, social-democratic movements and (the following) anticolonial and postcolonial liberation struggles
4. Four reasons to study socialism today:
1. The death of socialism in its Bolshevik guise frees the Left to reassess its rich history;
2. The continued importance of class conflict in contemporary politics (poverty remains a persistent problem for some groups);
3. The vision of human liberation and fulfillment that socialist ideas offer;
4. The need to distinguish what is Marxian (Marx’s actual idea) from what is Marxist (ideas espoused in his name);
The Origins of Socialism
1. The origin of the term is unknown; perhaps, it was first used in 1835 to refer to the utopian socialist community of New Lanark founded by the English industrialist Robert Owen;
2. Definition referring to Owen and Fourier: socialism proposes that a society living together should share all the wealth it produces
3. Albert Fried’s definition: socialist conviction that each person’s obligation to society as a whole is the absolute condition of his equality, that society is a brotherhood, not collection of strangers drawn together by interest (the usual interpretation of the contract), that the individual derives his highest fulfillment from his solidarity with others, not from the pursuit of advantage and power;;
Utopian Socialism
1. Utopian socialists believe that all of society—rich and poor—will voluntary join socialist utopias after observing how they operate; Charles Fourier’s idea of the phalansteries;
2. Religious utopian socialism: the United Society of Believers (Shakers), led by Mother Ann Lee moved from England to America and founded their first community, Niskayuna, in 1776 near Albany, New York;
3. According to the Shakers, Ann Lee represented God’s second coming in the form of a woman who should redeem the sins of Eve; they were organized as celibate families of brothers and sisters and ruled by strict sexual taboos; those families were governed by Elders and Eldresses; the latter were organized in communities led by a Holy Anointed Mother and Father;
4. Although Marx was an atheist, some of his themes sound similar to religious socialism: liberation theology and spiritual themes; Marx regarded religion, especially Christianity, as politically conservative primarily because it asks human beings to surrender control over their destiny to divine powers;
5. Marx’s account of labor under capitalism parallels the human condition after the Fall; in both cases, humans suffer because they are separated from essential aspects of their being, other people, and their God.
6. Schumpeter describes Marx as a secular prophet who espouses socialism as the new millennium;
Hegel
1. According to Marx, history is dialectical and materialist; dialectics refers to the humans’ self-creative process; according to Engels, dialectics comprehends things and their representations, ideas, in their essential connection, concentration, motion, origin, and ending;
2. According to Marx, Hegel’s greatest contribution was a concept of history as a process of man’s self-creation through the activity of labor;
3. Hegel sees human creation as vehicles in which a higher power—a self-manifesting and self-knowing Idea or “Spirit”—assumes historical form;
4. According to Marx, this should be put upside down “if you would discover the rational Kernel within the mystical shell;” Marx turned to the materialism of Ludwig Feuerbach, a Left Hegelian, who argues that Hegel, by portraying humanity as a manifestation of “Spirit,” denies humans real, material, sensuous existence; Feuerbach: “Spirit,” if it exists at all, is a creation, or, more precisely, a projection of human beings’ own creativity;
5. According to Marx, Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into human essence, but the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. It is reality in its ensemble of social relations;”
6. The hope that human beings can live meaningful lives: Marxism bases that hope on humans’ self-creative capacities as species-beings; according to William Adams Marx traces human creations to the social “foundations of economic life and revolutionary practice, instead of attributing them to an eternal cause, be it God or Nature;
7. Marx’s critique of political economists: in their civil society, the individual appears detached from individual bonds; worse still, the various forms of social connectedness confront the individual as a mere means towards his private purposes, an external necessity; political economists tear apart the dialectic relationships between individuals, societies, and history; this allow them to achieve their aim to present production as encased in eternal natural laws independent of history, at which opportunity bourgeois relations are then quietly smuggled in as the inviolable natural laws on which society in the abstract is founded;
8. According to Marx, the materialism of political economists is mechanic, static, or both; rather than isolated individuals, human beings are social animals who can only individuate themselves in the midst of society;
9. Marx’ structure and superstructure of society; the economic structure includes the mode of production or technologic base, a division of labor, class relationship, and property ownership; superstructure is composed of the various aspects of legal, political, and intellectual life; there is a circular relationship between them;
10. Yet, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life;
11. Although Marx says social relations are independent of human will, he does not mean that people cannot affect them—only that they act within a context that limit their options;
Class, Capitalism, and Consciousness
1. Classes are defined by their relationships to the productive forces of a society; only the structural relationship between its members and the mode of production establishes a class; class relationships are conflictual, not symbiotic;
2. The classes in conflict under capitalism are the bourgeoisie and the proletariat;
3. Marx uses the concept of class in the objective sense (objective relationships that are empirically verifiable), and in the subjective sense (the question of class consciousness: how does a class, especially the proletariat become a revolutionary force?);
4. According to Marx, capitalist societies have four major problems, each of which contributes in a different way to the creation of a revolutionary proletariat:
1. Contradictions;
2. Exploitation;
3. Alienation;
4. Fetishism.
Democratic Socialism, Revolutionary Communism, and a Third Way
Marx’s Theory of Revolution
1. Two phases of Marx’ revolution: the initial phase, which he calls proletarian dictatorship or crude communism, still carries the birthmarks of capitalist society, and they account for many of its flaws—during this phase, (bourgeois equal rights are achieved); the second phase implies the transition to the communist society where the principle is: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs;
2. Politically, the dictatorship of proletariat also represents a transitional phase; although Marx is not able to show us how the institutions of that regime would work (hence offering us no political theory cue); the most that we know from Marx on that issue are his praises about the political institutions of the Paris Commune: 1) replacement of the standing armies by the armed people; 2) introduction to universal suffrage, immediate recall, and workers’ wages for government officials; 3) integration of executive and legislative powers in a single body to clarify responsibility; 4) separation of church and state;
Democratic Socialism
1. Eduard Bernstein’s (SDP) central concern was the gap between socialist theory and practice, more specifically, the tension between revolutionary rhetoric and electoral strategies;
2. Bernstein argues that history proceeds, not through dialectical contradictions, but through organic evolutionism; liberal capitalism evolves gradually and steadily toward democratic socialism;
3. According to Bernstein, Marx was too materialistic and too deterministic—a Calvinist without God;
4. Bernstein points out that the economic contradictions Marx anticipated have not emerged; what Marx saw as economic crisis, Bernstein portrays as trade cycles;
5. Bernstein insisted that the socialist revolution must occur through democratic means—or not at all;
Revolutionary Communism
1. The program for organizing a revolutionary communist party was outlined by Lenin in his What Is to Be Done? Lenin focuses on the Communist Party, more specifically its revolutionary vanguard, as the mechanism for transforming society during and extended dictatorship of proletariat;
2. Lenin’s two consciousnesses of proletariat: 1) trade union consciousness; 2) revolutionary consciousness;
A Third Way
1. The New Left chapter in the story involves an initial attempt to combine the anti-communist, anti-utopian politics of the Old Left with an American-inspired vision of participatory democracy;
2. Tom Hayden (one of the original authors of “The Port Huron Statement) and Dick Flacks describe Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) as a fusion of paths that yielded a vision informed by a democratic American radicalism going back to Thomas Paine, one that attempted to transcend the stale dogmas of the dying left as well as the liberal celebration of the New Frontier as Camelot; they trace the concept of participatory democracy articulated there to John Dewey, a democratic populist, and C Wright Mills, a plain Marxist;
3. Among the political goals of SDS was renewed emphasis on domestic politics, including social reforms and voting rights, fueled by the civil rights movement;
4. The fusion of populist democracy and left-wing politics did not survive the pressure of events, among them the Vietnam War, multiple assassinations, and violent repressions of antiwar protesters at the 1968 Democratic Convention; the democratic left splintered into left-wing extremists, including the Maoist-inspired Weathermen, and the counterculture, which combined an existentialist celebration of individuality with renewed interest in utopian social experiments
5. Hayden and Flacks also articulate the crucial question the New Left poses in the history of socialism: perhaps the two stands—the grassroots radical democratic thrust and the need for an organization with a program—can never be fused, but neither can one live without the other;
6. Norberto Bobbio’s distinction between an “included middle”—a position between the opposing poles—and an “inclusive middle”—a higher synthesis of the poles; the included middle is essentially practical politics without a doctrine, whereas the inclusive middle is essentially a doctrine in search of practical politics.
Monday, March 31, 2008
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
WEEK 9: CONSERVATISM
1. For conservatives, ideology consists of philosophical abstractions that simplify complex realities, inflame popular passions, and undermine political order;
2. Contrarily, the public interest may be presumed to be what men would choose if they saw clearly, thought rationally, acted disinterestedly and benevolently;
3. Conservatism differs from other ideologies in the five following ways:
1) It is commonly defined in relations to changing historical contexts, rather than to
abstract principles of justice;
2) It is a disposition of temperament rather than a belief system;
3) If it is a belief system at all, it is one with many internal tensions;
4) Conservatives tend to unite around specific issues;
5) Conservatives find it easier to identify what they are against than what they are for;
According to Russell Kirk, conservatives share at least six basic principles:
1) Conservatives believe that a higher moral or spiritual order rules over nature and society; compared to this higher wisdom, human reason is small and frail;
2) Conservatives have great affection, even reverence for the complexity and mystery of tradition;
3) There is a hierarchy of orders and classes in every society;
4) Fourth, property and freedom are inextricably intertwined;
5) Citizens are attached to a government only when it engages their moral imagination;
6) Conservatives recognize that every society eventually undergoes changes, but they prefer that change be gradual;
Conservatism in America
1. If the United States was born liberal, then conservatives had little other than liberalism to conserve; Peter Steinfels: the Federalists stressed a cautious, pessimistic liberalism less as a vehicle for betterment than as a bulwark against folly;
2. John Adams (like Burke) opposed the French revolutionaries’ concept of equality and sameness; according to him, although every being has a right to his own, as clear, as moral, as sacred, as any other being has, this hardly suggests that all man are born with equal powers and faculties, to equal influence in society, to equal property and advantages through life;
3. Adams defends an aristocracy that is a meritocracy; a balanced or mixed government such as that established in the US Constitution is the answer to this question (it is obvious that, as Love points out, the implications of popular government are disturbing to American Conservatives); Since Adams, unlike Burke, was not inclined to view aristocracy as incorruptible, according to him separation of powers provides a structural solution to the problem of power; Adams’ argument about the resemblance of the US democracy with the three different orders of man sees a democratic House to balance aristocratic despotism; an aristocratic Senate to balance democratic licentiousness, and a quasi-monarchical executive to veto both House and Congress;
4. Critics charged Adams with misunderstanding of the US democracy;
5. Fisher Ames: America could not avoid the dangers of democracy since its materials for a government were all democratic;
6. To avoid the excesses of democracy in America, the Federalists combined their conservative themes with a more pessimistic liberalism: natural aristocrats must earn their status; no social order has a monopoly on virtue; institutional arrangements stand in for traditional authorities; and mechanical analogies largely replace organic metaphors;
7. Only in the South, where slavery challenged America’s commitment to liberty and equality, could liberal influences pay a less significant role in conservative politics; to defend their way of life, southern thinkers invoked another conservative theme: the little platoon; Calhoun: slavery is instead of an evil, a good—a positive good; according to him, the South is the balance of the system—the great conservative power, which prevents other portions, less fortunately constituted, from rushing into conflict; He goes on: by attacking slavery, northerners destabilize the nation and ultimately threaten the security of their own property;
8. The growing American conservatism during the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty first century has been explained by themselves as a reaction to “the cumulative inadequacies of liberalism;” according to conservatives, liberalism loses quality with time;
9. While Reagan presidency moved conservatism to the center of national politics, partly by blurring the lines between economic conservatives (or free market liberals) and European-style social conservatism, as Anne Norton (2004) points out, in our time, American conservatism has departed from the cautious principles of this tradition;
10. Irving Kristol (1976): if the traditional economics of socialism has been discredited, why has not the traditional economics of capitalism been vindicated? The answer was to be found in liberal capitalists’ tendency to think economically, that is, to accept the revolutionary premise that there is no superior, authoritative information available about the good life or the true nature of human happiness;
11. There are, according to Kristol, three ways in which a liberal capitalist mentality undermines the ethical foundations required for a healthy society: 1) a secular society can neither reconcile citizens to their fate nor restrain them with the promise of heaven; 2) because the state is merely the servant of private interests, liberal democracies cannot compel sufficient political loyalty from their citizens; 3) the doctrine of free-market capitalism gradually undermines even the bourgeois virtues—honesty, sobriety, diligence and thrift—required to achieve economic prosperity;
12. The five features that apply to the American neo-conservatism:
1. Neo-conservatism is not at all hostile to the ideas of a welfare state, but it is critical to
the Great Society version of this welfare state;
2. Neo-conservatism has great respect for the power of the market to respond efficiently to
economic realities while preserving the maximum degree of individual freedom (supply-
side neo-cons versus demand-side Keynesian liberals;
3. Neo-conservatism tends to be respectful to traditional values and institutions; religion,
the family, “the high culture” of Western civilization;
4. Neo-conservatives affirms the traditional American idea of equality but rejects
egalitarianism—the equality of conditions for all citizens—as a proper goal for government
to pursue;
5. Neo-conservatism believes that American democracy is not likely to survive for long in a world that is overwhelmingly hostile to American values;
The New/est Right
1. Critics explain the failure of the Reagan revolution by charging conservatism as perhaps a European import, American in its pragmatic temperament but alien in its fundamental principles;
2. The conservative recession: according to Charles Kesler, until conservative learned the art of democratic statesmanship, they would remain a social movement, not a political party;
3. Yet, thanks to Bush administration, neo-conservatism began enjoying a second life, at a time when its obituaries were still being published;
4. Kristol—the historical task and political purpose of neoconservatism would seem to be this: to convert the Republican party, and American conservatism in general, against their respective wills, into a new kind of conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy;
5. The subtle shift: 1) stimulating economic growth by cutting taxes, even when it creates larger deficits; 2) acceptance—and even praise—of the expansion of state power as a prerequisite for the security of modern democracies; 3) an unexpected alliance between neo-conservatives, many of whom are secular intellectuals, and religious fundamentalists; 4) geographic borders no longer limit neo-conservatives’ concept of national interest.
2. Contrarily, the public interest may be presumed to be what men would choose if they saw clearly, thought rationally, acted disinterestedly and benevolently;
3. Conservatism differs from other ideologies in the five following ways:
1) It is commonly defined in relations to changing historical contexts, rather than to
abstract principles of justice;
2) It is a disposition of temperament rather than a belief system;
3) If it is a belief system at all, it is one with many internal tensions;
4) Conservatives tend to unite around specific issues;
5) Conservatives find it easier to identify what they are against than what they are for;
According to Russell Kirk, conservatives share at least six basic principles:
1) Conservatives believe that a higher moral or spiritual order rules over nature and society; compared to this higher wisdom, human reason is small and frail;
2) Conservatives have great affection, even reverence for the complexity and mystery of tradition;
3) There is a hierarchy of orders and classes in every society;
4) Fourth, property and freedom are inextricably intertwined;
5) Citizens are attached to a government only when it engages their moral imagination;
6) Conservatives recognize that every society eventually undergoes changes, but they prefer that change be gradual;
Conservatism in America
1. If the United States was born liberal, then conservatives had little other than liberalism to conserve; Peter Steinfels: the Federalists stressed a cautious, pessimistic liberalism less as a vehicle for betterment than as a bulwark against folly;
2. John Adams (like Burke) opposed the French revolutionaries’ concept of equality and sameness; according to him, although every being has a right to his own, as clear, as moral, as sacred, as any other being has, this hardly suggests that all man are born with equal powers and faculties, to equal influence in society, to equal property and advantages through life;
3. Adams defends an aristocracy that is a meritocracy; a balanced or mixed government such as that established in the US Constitution is the answer to this question (it is obvious that, as Love points out, the implications of popular government are disturbing to American Conservatives); Since Adams, unlike Burke, was not inclined to view aristocracy as incorruptible, according to him separation of powers provides a structural solution to the problem of power; Adams’ argument about the resemblance of the US democracy with the three different orders of man sees a democratic House to balance aristocratic despotism; an aristocratic Senate to balance democratic licentiousness, and a quasi-monarchical executive to veto both House and Congress;
4. Critics charged Adams with misunderstanding of the US democracy;
5. Fisher Ames: America could not avoid the dangers of democracy since its materials for a government were all democratic;
6. To avoid the excesses of democracy in America, the Federalists combined their conservative themes with a more pessimistic liberalism: natural aristocrats must earn their status; no social order has a monopoly on virtue; institutional arrangements stand in for traditional authorities; and mechanical analogies largely replace organic metaphors;
7. Only in the South, where slavery challenged America’s commitment to liberty and equality, could liberal influences pay a less significant role in conservative politics; to defend their way of life, southern thinkers invoked another conservative theme: the little platoon; Calhoun: slavery is instead of an evil, a good—a positive good; according to him, the South is the balance of the system—the great conservative power, which prevents other portions, less fortunately constituted, from rushing into conflict; He goes on: by attacking slavery, northerners destabilize the nation and ultimately threaten the security of their own property;
8. The growing American conservatism during the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty first century has been explained by themselves as a reaction to “the cumulative inadequacies of liberalism;” according to conservatives, liberalism loses quality with time;
9. While Reagan presidency moved conservatism to the center of national politics, partly by blurring the lines between economic conservatives (or free market liberals) and European-style social conservatism, as Anne Norton (2004) points out, in our time, American conservatism has departed from the cautious principles of this tradition;
10. Irving Kristol (1976): if the traditional economics of socialism has been discredited, why has not the traditional economics of capitalism been vindicated? The answer was to be found in liberal capitalists’ tendency to think economically, that is, to accept the revolutionary premise that there is no superior, authoritative information available about the good life or the true nature of human happiness;
11. There are, according to Kristol, three ways in which a liberal capitalist mentality undermines the ethical foundations required for a healthy society: 1) a secular society can neither reconcile citizens to their fate nor restrain them with the promise of heaven; 2) because the state is merely the servant of private interests, liberal democracies cannot compel sufficient political loyalty from their citizens; 3) the doctrine of free-market capitalism gradually undermines even the bourgeois virtues—honesty, sobriety, diligence and thrift—required to achieve economic prosperity;
12. The five features that apply to the American neo-conservatism:
1. Neo-conservatism is not at all hostile to the ideas of a welfare state, but it is critical to
the Great Society version of this welfare state;
2. Neo-conservatism has great respect for the power of the market to respond efficiently to
economic realities while preserving the maximum degree of individual freedom (supply-
side neo-cons versus demand-side Keynesian liberals;
3. Neo-conservatism tends to be respectful to traditional values and institutions; religion,
the family, “the high culture” of Western civilization;
4. Neo-conservatives affirms the traditional American idea of equality but rejects
egalitarianism—the equality of conditions for all citizens—as a proper goal for government
to pursue;
5. Neo-conservatism believes that American democracy is not likely to survive for long in a world that is overwhelmingly hostile to American values;
The New/est Right
1. Critics explain the failure of the Reagan revolution by charging conservatism as perhaps a European import, American in its pragmatic temperament but alien in its fundamental principles;
2. The conservative recession: according to Charles Kesler, until conservative learned the art of democratic statesmanship, they would remain a social movement, not a political party;
3. Yet, thanks to Bush administration, neo-conservatism began enjoying a second life, at a time when its obituaries were still being published;
4. Kristol—the historical task and political purpose of neoconservatism would seem to be this: to convert the Republican party, and American conservatism in general, against their respective wills, into a new kind of conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy;
5. The subtle shift: 1) stimulating economic growth by cutting taxes, even when it creates larger deficits; 2) acceptance—and even praise—of the expansion of state power as a prerequisite for the security of modern democracies; 3) an unexpected alliance between neo-conservatives, many of whom are secular intellectuals, and religious fundamentalists; 4) geographic borders no longer limit neo-conservatives’ concept of national interest.
Friday, March 21, 2008
WEEK 8: LIBERALISM, CAPITALISM, AND DEMOCRACY
1. Why does popular sovereignty threaten individual freedom and moral community? How have democrats tried to solve this problem? Why has democracy today acquired more positive connotations than in antiquity?
2. Demo-kratos literally means the power of people;
3. Aristotle feared that the poor would put their interests as a class above the common interests of citizens; he placed democracy among the bad regimes;
4. Aristotle: only in a political community do people realize their full potential as human beings;
5. Idiotes: private persons, people without voting rights;
6. Was Socrates’ execution non-democratic according to the Athenians’ concept of democracy?
7. Aristotle’s liberality: moral control of wealth, courtesy, moderation, prudence, reason―what today is called civility;
8. The origins of liberalism and capitalism are closely connected; the two concepts are best understood together;
9. Kramnick: the simultaneous publication in 1776 of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations is not merely an historical coincidence; it also reflects a convergence of political and economic philosophy;
10. The relationship of liberalism to democracy is more tenuous; despite their rhetoric of rights, most early liberals were far from democratic;
11. Liberalism became democratic only when the people repeatedly demanded it;
12. Joseph Schumpeter’s redefinition of democracy in the terms of modern liberalism: it is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of competitive struggle for the people’s vote;
13. Yet, in a liberal democracy, liberalism remains the dominant partner.
Liberal Individualism and Natural Rights
1. The Lockean concepts: state of nature; natural rights; the social contract; limited government; legitimate revolution;
2. Locke argues that freedom and equality are the natural conditions of humanity; in the state of nature, individuals can act as they choose, since no one has the power to rule over anyone else; the only restraint on natural man is the law of nature, which tells him not to harm himself or other people; when violations of this law occur, everyone is personally authorized to judge and to punish the offender;
3. Many conflicts frequently occur in the state of nature because many people ignore or mistake natural law;
4. Individuals have a natural right to life, liberty, and property; the latter is a predominant right; some people own simply their labor;
5. The law of nature places moral limits on the right to acquire property; yet the introduction of money breaks those limits;
6. Lockean liberalism is not fully democratic, even in the modern sense of representative government: the “industrious” and “rational” explicitly agree to unite in society and to form a government; the rest of the people tacitly consent to their government simply by remaining within its jurisdiction;
7. Locke: if the government abuses its powers, then sovereignty reverts to the people; Thomas Jefferson borrowed this Lockean concept in his American Declaration of Independence by transforming the right to property into a right to happiness;
8. In building his social contract theory, Locke abstracts from the actual human conditions; there are three important effects of this method: (1) For Locke, freedom means “being left alone,” indeed, “being alone;” his individual is simply a “possessive individual;” (2) it allow him to attack a feudal hierarchy and to defend a new liberal capitalist hierarchy that ostensibly bases class standing on merit alone―economic inequalities are moral; (3) the state of nature sets up liberals’ distinction between private and public spheres, individual rights and the responsibilities of citizenship;
Smith’s Economic Invisible Hand
1. Smith: no one is self-sufficient; from here, the need to trade emerges; that promotes division of labor;
2. People are motivated to cooperate by self-interest, not benevolence;
3. Current prices provide the information necessary to balance relationships of supply and demand;
4. In adjusting economic activities to market forces, the individual is led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was not part of his intention; by pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it;
5. Government’s duties according to Smith: (1) protecting the society from the violence and invasion of other independent societies; (2) the duty of protecting every member of the society from injustice or oppression of every other member of it, or the duty of establishing an exact administrator of justice; (3) the duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works and certain public institutions, which it can never be for the interest of any individual to erect and maintain;
6. Thomas Jefferson’s limited government vs. Alexander Hamilton’s “general welfare;”
7. Jefferson was closer in spirit to Aristotle than to Smith, for moral community, not capitalist development, was Jefferson’s central concern;
8. Madison warns against the factional nature of mankind; as he points out, the problem of democracy is how to secure the public good and private rights against the danger of such a faction, and at the same time to preserve the spirit and the form of popular government; according to Madison, the US Constitution solves this problem by applying an economic model to political institutions; ambition must be made to counteract ambition;
9. Ironically, the twentieth-century liberal have come to favor a revival of the very politics of state intervention and paternalism against which classical liberalism fought;
10. Milton Friedman: free markets promote a free society in two ways: (1) freedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself; (2) economic freedom is also an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom;
11. Friedman: the lesson to be drawn from the misuse of Smith’s third duty is that government intervention requires very thorough justification; otherwise, it’s better the temporary harsh but ultimately beneficent policy of letting market forces work;
Utilitarianism
1. John Stuart Mill: I forego any advantage which could be derived to my argument from the idea of abstract right, a sa thing independent of utility; I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions;
2. Mill was the first to adapt liberal ideology to an emerging democratic society;
3. Mill shifts the epistemology from the “natural” man to “the greatest happiness principle;” actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness;
4. Mill: the doctrine of equal rights should be accompanied by a principle of the just distribution of goods; justice requires not only equal rights but also equal opportunities to exercise them;
5. On the grounds of utility rather than rights, Mill claims that a democratic government can legitimately prevent its citizens from harming others, but they must otherwise be free to live as they choose;
6. Democracy is threatened by masses’ mediocrity; to rise above mediocrity, the mass public must be guided by the counsels and influence of a more highly gifted and instructed One or Few;
7. Only liberty protect genius from the masses who cannot easily appreciate or understand it;
8. Mill defends representative democracy on utilitarian grounds: in liberal democracies, citizens’ rights are secure because they posses sovereign power; the danger here is that it can lead to class politics, as well as collective mediocrity.
Welfare-State Liberalism and Social Rights
1. There is also a spiritual component to liberal arguments for the rights of man to life, liberty and property; for Locke, the right to property extends from the products of human labor to divine creation;
2. Jefferson echoes Locke when he argues in the Declaration of Independence that the American colonists are defending natural rights “endowed by their Creator;”
3. Thomas Hill Green and his socialist-liberalism: the mere removal of restraints on individuals does not constitute freedom in any meaningful sense; although state should not legislate morality, it should help to create circumstances that will allow all individuals to develop their faculties fully; freedom, here, becomes “a positive power or capacity of doing or enjoying something worth doing or enjoying;
4. Thus, more extensive resistance to the forces of wealth and privilege, to the sources of economic and political power, was required to save liberal capitalism;
5. Roosevelt’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society programs; Democratic Party: the government has the definite duty to use all its power and resources to meet new social problems with new social controls—to insure to the average person the right to his own economic and political life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
6. Welfare-state liberalism is not intended to provide relief or to encourage dependence; its purpose is to create an America in which every citizen shares all the opportunities of his society, in which every man has a chance to advance his welfare to the limit of his capacities;
Contemporary Challenges
1. Communitarian liberals are those who combine communal aspects of ancient democracies with the individual freedoms of liberal societies;
2. Isaac Kramnick: individuals tend to be ambitious, restless, fearful, competitive, insecure, uneasy people;
3. Robert Bellah: possessive individuals escape the “race of life” only in their private lives; yet many people cannot fully convey their sense of self in these liberal and capitalist terms; a completely emty self that operates out of purely arbitrary choice is theoretically imaginable but performatively impossible; peoples’ actual lives are shaped by “communities of memory and hope;” the liberals are aware of such limitations—Locke: the society cannot tolerate atheists since promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bounds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist; Friedman includes paternalism (care for those who cannot care for themselves) among the functions of government;
4. Yet liberalism does little to sustain the communal ties on which it ultimately depends— the case of hate speech; yet, critics of multiculturalism fear that it promotes a “politics of identity” that further fragments American society; Bellah: genuine communities form around deep commitments to shared values; since liberal individualism cannot easily sustain genuine community, it also cannot easily counter political fragmentation or authoritarian groups; it might even contribute to them;
Politics and Markets
1. Critics of liberal individualism (Theodore Lowi) see Smith’s invisible hand, the notion of that capitalist market are self-correcting, as a utopian ideal;
2. What happens when markets fail to produce prosperity?
2. Demo-kratos literally means the power of people;
3. Aristotle feared that the poor would put their interests as a class above the common interests of citizens; he placed democracy among the bad regimes;
4. Aristotle: only in a political community do people realize their full potential as human beings;
5. Idiotes: private persons, people without voting rights;
6. Was Socrates’ execution non-democratic according to the Athenians’ concept of democracy?
7. Aristotle’s liberality: moral control of wealth, courtesy, moderation, prudence, reason―what today is called civility;
8. The origins of liberalism and capitalism are closely connected; the two concepts are best understood together;
9. Kramnick: the simultaneous publication in 1776 of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations is not merely an historical coincidence; it also reflects a convergence of political and economic philosophy;
10. The relationship of liberalism to democracy is more tenuous; despite their rhetoric of rights, most early liberals were far from democratic;
11. Liberalism became democratic only when the people repeatedly demanded it;
12. Joseph Schumpeter’s redefinition of democracy in the terms of modern liberalism: it is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of competitive struggle for the people’s vote;
13. Yet, in a liberal democracy, liberalism remains the dominant partner.
Liberal Individualism and Natural Rights
1. The Lockean concepts: state of nature; natural rights; the social contract; limited government; legitimate revolution;
2. Locke argues that freedom and equality are the natural conditions of humanity; in the state of nature, individuals can act as they choose, since no one has the power to rule over anyone else; the only restraint on natural man is the law of nature, which tells him not to harm himself or other people; when violations of this law occur, everyone is personally authorized to judge and to punish the offender;
3. Many conflicts frequently occur in the state of nature because many people ignore or mistake natural law;
4. Individuals have a natural right to life, liberty, and property; the latter is a predominant right; some people own simply their labor;
5. The law of nature places moral limits on the right to acquire property; yet the introduction of money breaks those limits;
6. Lockean liberalism is not fully democratic, even in the modern sense of representative government: the “industrious” and “rational” explicitly agree to unite in society and to form a government; the rest of the people tacitly consent to their government simply by remaining within its jurisdiction;
7. Locke: if the government abuses its powers, then sovereignty reverts to the people; Thomas Jefferson borrowed this Lockean concept in his American Declaration of Independence by transforming the right to property into a right to happiness;
8. In building his social contract theory, Locke abstracts from the actual human conditions; there are three important effects of this method: (1) For Locke, freedom means “being left alone,” indeed, “being alone;” his individual is simply a “possessive individual;” (2) it allow him to attack a feudal hierarchy and to defend a new liberal capitalist hierarchy that ostensibly bases class standing on merit alone―economic inequalities are moral; (3) the state of nature sets up liberals’ distinction between private and public spheres, individual rights and the responsibilities of citizenship;
Smith’s Economic Invisible Hand
1. Smith: no one is self-sufficient; from here, the need to trade emerges; that promotes division of labor;
2. People are motivated to cooperate by self-interest, not benevolence;
3. Current prices provide the information necessary to balance relationships of supply and demand;
4. In adjusting economic activities to market forces, the individual is led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was not part of his intention; by pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it;
5. Government’s duties according to Smith: (1) protecting the society from the violence and invasion of other independent societies; (2) the duty of protecting every member of the society from injustice or oppression of every other member of it, or the duty of establishing an exact administrator of justice; (3) the duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works and certain public institutions, which it can never be for the interest of any individual to erect and maintain;
6. Thomas Jefferson’s limited government vs. Alexander Hamilton’s “general welfare;”
7. Jefferson was closer in spirit to Aristotle than to Smith, for moral community, not capitalist development, was Jefferson’s central concern;
8. Madison warns against the factional nature of mankind; as he points out, the problem of democracy is how to secure the public good and private rights against the danger of such a faction, and at the same time to preserve the spirit and the form of popular government; according to Madison, the US Constitution solves this problem by applying an economic model to political institutions; ambition must be made to counteract ambition;
9. Ironically, the twentieth-century liberal have come to favor a revival of the very politics of state intervention and paternalism against which classical liberalism fought;
10. Milton Friedman: free markets promote a free society in two ways: (1) freedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself; (2) economic freedom is also an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom;
11. Friedman: the lesson to be drawn from the misuse of Smith’s third duty is that government intervention requires very thorough justification; otherwise, it’s better the temporary harsh but ultimately beneficent policy of letting market forces work;
Utilitarianism
1. John Stuart Mill: I forego any advantage which could be derived to my argument from the idea of abstract right, a sa thing independent of utility; I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions;
2. Mill was the first to adapt liberal ideology to an emerging democratic society;
3. Mill shifts the epistemology from the “natural” man to “the greatest happiness principle;” actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness;
4. Mill: the doctrine of equal rights should be accompanied by a principle of the just distribution of goods; justice requires not only equal rights but also equal opportunities to exercise them;
5. On the grounds of utility rather than rights, Mill claims that a democratic government can legitimately prevent its citizens from harming others, but they must otherwise be free to live as they choose;
6. Democracy is threatened by masses’ mediocrity; to rise above mediocrity, the mass public must be guided by the counsels and influence of a more highly gifted and instructed One or Few;
7. Only liberty protect genius from the masses who cannot easily appreciate or understand it;
8. Mill defends representative democracy on utilitarian grounds: in liberal democracies, citizens’ rights are secure because they posses sovereign power; the danger here is that it can lead to class politics, as well as collective mediocrity.
Welfare-State Liberalism and Social Rights
1. There is also a spiritual component to liberal arguments for the rights of man to life, liberty and property; for Locke, the right to property extends from the products of human labor to divine creation;
2. Jefferson echoes Locke when he argues in the Declaration of Independence that the American colonists are defending natural rights “endowed by their Creator;”
3. Thomas Hill Green and his socialist-liberalism: the mere removal of restraints on individuals does not constitute freedom in any meaningful sense; although state should not legislate morality, it should help to create circumstances that will allow all individuals to develop their faculties fully; freedom, here, becomes “a positive power or capacity of doing or enjoying something worth doing or enjoying;
4. Thus, more extensive resistance to the forces of wealth and privilege, to the sources of economic and political power, was required to save liberal capitalism;
5. Roosevelt’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society programs; Democratic Party: the government has the definite duty to use all its power and resources to meet new social problems with new social controls—to insure to the average person the right to his own economic and political life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
6. Welfare-state liberalism is not intended to provide relief or to encourage dependence; its purpose is to create an America in which every citizen shares all the opportunities of his society, in which every man has a chance to advance his welfare to the limit of his capacities;
Contemporary Challenges
1. Communitarian liberals are those who combine communal aspects of ancient democracies with the individual freedoms of liberal societies;
2. Isaac Kramnick: individuals tend to be ambitious, restless, fearful, competitive, insecure, uneasy people;
3. Robert Bellah: possessive individuals escape the “race of life” only in their private lives; yet many people cannot fully convey their sense of self in these liberal and capitalist terms; a completely emty self that operates out of purely arbitrary choice is theoretically imaginable but performatively impossible; peoples’ actual lives are shaped by “communities of memory and hope;” the liberals are aware of such limitations—Locke: the society cannot tolerate atheists since promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bounds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist; Friedman includes paternalism (care for those who cannot care for themselves) among the functions of government;
4. Yet liberalism does little to sustain the communal ties on which it ultimately depends— the case of hate speech; yet, critics of multiculturalism fear that it promotes a “politics of identity” that further fragments American society; Bellah: genuine communities form around deep commitments to shared values; since liberal individualism cannot easily sustain genuine community, it also cannot easily counter political fragmentation or authoritarian groups; it might even contribute to them;
Politics and Markets
1. Critics of liberal individualism (Theodore Lowi) see Smith’s invisible hand, the notion of that capitalist market are self-correcting, as a utopian ideal;
2. What happens when markets fail to produce prosperity?
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
MID-TERM EXAM
March 5, 2008
This assignment counts for 20% of your final grade. The exam is identical to the quizzes, except for the fact that the questions are formatted in a way that their answers would require 500 words rather than 200 words. It contains 10 questions where 5 answer will count as regular answers and any other answer on the top of them will be counted for extra credit evaluation. The assignment due is Monday, March 17, 2008, in class.
1. Bring here the arguments about why freedom is dangerous if it is taken to far;
2. Based on Thiele’s interpretation of Plato and Aristotle, explain why statecraft and soulcraft must be practice together;
3. What’s the difference between Plato’s and Aristotle’s understanding of reason
4. Can we interpret the right to abortion (pro choice) as a negative liberty? Why?
5. Can we interpret gay pride parades as positive liberty? Why?
6. Why economic rationality is parsimonious?
7. How can we escape THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS?
8. Why does Napoleon’s negative connotation of ideology still persist?
9. Do you buy the argument of the end-of-ideology in the contemporary developed capitalist societies? Why?
10. Do you buy Marx’s and Mannheim’s claims that ideologies of the ruling class are always the epoch’s ruling ideas?
GOOD LUCK!
This assignment counts for 20% of your final grade. The exam is identical to the quizzes, except for the fact that the questions are formatted in a way that their answers would require 500 words rather than 200 words. It contains 10 questions where 5 answer will count as regular answers and any other answer on the top of them will be counted for extra credit evaluation. The assignment due is Monday, March 17, 2008, in class.
1. Bring here the arguments about why freedom is dangerous if it is taken to far;
2. Based on Thiele’s interpretation of Plato and Aristotle, explain why statecraft and soulcraft must be practice together;
3. What’s the difference between Plato’s and Aristotle’s understanding of reason
4. Can we interpret the right to abortion (pro choice) as a negative liberty? Why?
5. Can we interpret gay pride parades as positive liberty? Why?
6. Why economic rationality is parsimonious?
7. How can we escape THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS?
8. Why does Napoleon’s negative connotation of ideology still persist?
9. Do you buy the argument of the end-of-ideology in the contemporary developed capitalist societies? Why?
10. Do you buy Marx’s and Mannheim’s claims that ideologies of the ruling class are always the epoch’s ruling ideas?
GOOD LUCK!
WEEK 7: DEFINING POLITICAL IDEOLOGY
1. Daniel Bell: Ideology is an all-inclusive system of comprehensive reality, a set of beliefs, infused with passion that seeks to transform the whole of a way of life;
2. The notion of the end-of-ideology raises several problems; first as Love points out: By what criteria can we assess the truth claims of various ideologies?
3. Second: consensus, rather than indicating genuine agreement might reflect the power of ideology to suppress conflict and silence opposition;
4. Third, ideologies serve many functions: 1) communication, 2) legitimation, 3) socialization, 4) mobilization;
5. Denigrating ideologies may espouse a similarly self-interested position;
6. Often, the celebration of the end of ideology adopts a definition of ideology that is itself anti-ideological (hence ideologized);
7. MacIntyre: might a politics without HOPE be as dangerous, if not more dangerous, than the utopian schemes that precede it?
Defining ideology
1. Oxford English Dictionary: 1) Destutt de Tracy (1754-1836): ideology is the science of ideas; 2) ideology is ideal or abstract speculation and unpractical or visionary theorizing;
2. De Tracy (a positive connotation): ideas originate in sensory experience and their origin can be studied scientifically; ideology is a democratic philosophy, a defense of popular intelligence;
3. Napoleon Bonaparte (a negative connotation): Ideologues are metaphysical factions, dangerous daydreamers, windbags who have already fought the existing authorities;
4. Why has Napoleon’s negative connotation of ideology persist?
5. Marx: 1) like Napoleon criticized the Ideologues’ idealism and associated ideology with metaphysics; 2) unlike Napoleon, Marx traced the origins of ideology to the class conflicts that underlie even democratic politics; 3) Marx’s concept of three basic characteristics of ideologies includes social, functional, and illusory forms of consciousness; 4) Marx points out that societies develop belief systems that fit their historical context; 5) Ideologies function for the ruling class as legitimating illusions; 6) Ideology obstructs democracy by preventing subordinated classes from understanding the sources of their oppression; 7) the difference between political and human emancipation;
6. Freud: Society provides substitute gratifications in order to compensate for the suppressed id: ideologies not only discipline individuals but also provide a largely unconscious sense of security;
7. ESCAPE FROM FREEDOM. Freud: people do not really want to be free; taking responsibility for themselves is too frightening for them; Erich Fromm: perceived threats to psychological security systems can also explain the emergence of political violence;
8. Karl Mannheim: ideology―involves attempts by a ruling class to prevent its own demise; utopia―values what does not yet exist and promotes the changes necessary to create it;
9. The functions of IDEOLOGY: 1) legitimate political systems; 2) help to socialize individuals; 3) mobilize people; 4) fills the need for values in politics, especially democratic politics (why?);
10. Studying ideologies increases citizen’s ability to asses competing truth claims and make informed choices among them;
11. Love: The source of moral standards today is, at best, citizens’ considered, collective judgment (let’s question this assertion from a libertarian perspective);
12. Habermas: 1) anyone should be able to raise any issue for discussion; 2) during discussions, everyone should speak sincerely and seek understanding; 3) any decision reached (and here is the kick) should be applied equally to all;
13. Love’s critique to Habermas: without equal educational opportunities and some economic security, many individuals lack the ability, energy and resources to debate political issues.
Political Theory and Political Ideology
1. Similarities: both involve contemplation, organization of ideas, and demonstration;
2. Differences: only ideology incites people into action;
3. Ideologies are highly simplified, and even distorted version of the original philosophical doctrines;
4. David Ingersoll and Donald Matthews: unlike philosophy, ideology oversimplifies in order to motivate action;
5. The ideology/philosophy distinction raises the issue of the relationship between theory and practice;
6. Daniel Bell: Ideology is the conversion of ideas into social levers;
7. Roy Macridis: history involves a dialectic between philosophical ideas and social needs. An ideology emerges when they converge and, by mediating between theory and practice, plays a crucial role in political change;
8. Robert Haber: simplification may be necessary, but demagoguery, dogmatism, and dehumanization are not, as long as the translation process involves democratic institutions and procedures;
9. Richard Ashcraft: political theorists link historically-rooted political theory with ideology, and great political theory with trans-historical philosophy (philosophical arguments are above politics, outside history or both).
10. Love: approaching philosophy as a form of ideology may contribute to the creation of a more democratic political theory;
11. Benjamin Barber: we need a philosophy that renders judgment in political terms rather than reducing politics to the terms of formal reason;
12. William Connolly: responsible ideology is one in which a serious and continuing effort is made to elucidate publicly all the factors involved in its formulation and in which a similar effort is made to test the position at a strategic point by all available means;
13. Michael Freeden: the first question the student of ideologies needs to pose does not relate to the qualitative substance of the ideology, to its ethical stance or its intellectual weight. It is rather: what has to hold in order for this utterance to make sense/be right for its producers and consumers?
How to study ideologies
Love’s three reasons for studying political ideologies:
1. To understand modern politics;
2. To discus and choose among political values;
3. To democratize political theory;
This suggests that ideologies are best studied in relation to their historical and sociopolitical contexts;
Two important relationships that need attention:
1. Words versus concepts;
2. Philosophical meaning versus popular meaning;
Unlike philosophy that thrives on the constant redefinition of concepts, ideologies aim at cementing the word-concept relationship; by determining the meaning of a concept, they can then attach a single meaning to a political term;
There are at least two ways to understand the structure of ideologies:
1. Linear: ideologies are presented as belief systems with a causal structure; they are composed of the following features: 1) a critique of society as it presently exists; 2) a vision of a better sociopolitical order; 3) a strategy that suggests how to get from here to there;
2. Morphological: construing ideologies as mutually defining clusters and concepts; liberalism’s core is democracy with freedom and equality among its peripheral concepts; Freeden’s four “P”s of ideological composition: proximity (concepts define each other), priority (peripheral concepts orbit a central core), permeability (how ideologies intersect and overlap), and proportionality (the relative space ideologies give particular issues);
How to study ideology:
1. As a separate knower;
2. As a connected knower.
2. The notion of the end-of-ideology raises several problems; first as Love points out: By what criteria can we assess the truth claims of various ideologies?
3. Second: consensus, rather than indicating genuine agreement might reflect the power of ideology to suppress conflict and silence opposition;
4. Third, ideologies serve many functions: 1) communication, 2) legitimation, 3) socialization, 4) mobilization;
5. Denigrating ideologies may espouse a similarly self-interested position;
6. Often, the celebration of the end of ideology adopts a definition of ideology that is itself anti-ideological (hence ideologized);
7. MacIntyre: might a politics without HOPE be as dangerous, if not more dangerous, than the utopian schemes that precede it?
Defining ideology
1. Oxford English Dictionary: 1) Destutt de Tracy (1754-1836): ideology is the science of ideas; 2) ideology is ideal or abstract speculation and unpractical or visionary theorizing;
2. De Tracy (a positive connotation): ideas originate in sensory experience and their origin can be studied scientifically; ideology is a democratic philosophy, a defense of popular intelligence;
3. Napoleon Bonaparte (a negative connotation): Ideologues are metaphysical factions, dangerous daydreamers, windbags who have already fought the existing authorities;
4. Why has Napoleon’s negative connotation of ideology persist?
5. Marx: 1) like Napoleon criticized the Ideologues’ idealism and associated ideology with metaphysics; 2) unlike Napoleon, Marx traced the origins of ideology to the class conflicts that underlie even democratic politics; 3) Marx’s concept of three basic characteristics of ideologies includes social, functional, and illusory forms of consciousness; 4) Marx points out that societies develop belief systems that fit their historical context; 5) Ideologies function for the ruling class as legitimating illusions; 6) Ideology obstructs democracy by preventing subordinated classes from understanding the sources of their oppression; 7) the difference between political and human emancipation;
6. Freud: Society provides substitute gratifications in order to compensate for the suppressed id: ideologies not only discipline individuals but also provide a largely unconscious sense of security;
7. ESCAPE FROM FREEDOM. Freud: people do not really want to be free; taking responsibility for themselves is too frightening for them; Erich Fromm: perceived threats to psychological security systems can also explain the emergence of political violence;
8. Karl Mannheim: ideology―involves attempts by a ruling class to prevent its own demise; utopia―values what does not yet exist and promotes the changes necessary to create it;
9. The functions of IDEOLOGY: 1) legitimate political systems; 2) help to socialize individuals; 3) mobilize people; 4) fills the need for values in politics, especially democratic politics (why?);
10. Studying ideologies increases citizen’s ability to asses competing truth claims and make informed choices among them;
11. Love: The source of moral standards today is, at best, citizens’ considered, collective judgment (let’s question this assertion from a libertarian perspective);
12. Habermas: 1) anyone should be able to raise any issue for discussion; 2) during discussions, everyone should speak sincerely and seek understanding; 3) any decision reached (and here is the kick) should be applied equally to all;
13. Love’s critique to Habermas: without equal educational opportunities and some economic security, many individuals lack the ability, energy and resources to debate political issues.
Political Theory and Political Ideology
1. Similarities: both involve contemplation, organization of ideas, and demonstration;
2. Differences: only ideology incites people into action;
3. Ideologies are highly simplified, and even distorted version of the original philosophical doctrines;
4. David Ingersoll and Donald Matthews: unlike philosophy, ideology oversimplifies in order to motivate action;
5. The ideology/philosophy distinction raises the issue of the relationship between theory and practice;
6. Daniel Bell: Ideology is the conversion of ideas into social levers;
7. Roy Macridis: history involves a dialectic between philosophical ideas and social needs. An ideology emerges when they converge and, by mediating between theory and practice, plays a crucial role in political change;
8. Robert Haber: simplification may be necessary, but demagoguery, dogmatism, and dehumanization are not, as long as the translation process involves democratic institutions and procedures;
9. Richard Ashcraft: political theorists link historically-rooted political theory with ideology, and great political theory with trans-historical philosophy (philosophical arguments are above politics, outside history or both).
10. Love: approaching philosophy as a form of ideology may contribute to the creation of a more democratic political theory;
11. Benjamin Barber: we need a philosophy that renders judgment in political terms rather than reducing politics to the terms of formal reason;
12. William Connolly: responsible ideology is one in which a serious and continuing effort is made to elucidate publicly all the factors involved in its formulation and in which a similar effort is made to test the position at a strategic point by all available means;
13. Michael Freeden: the first question the student of ideologies needs to pose does not relate to the qualitative substance of the ideology, to its ethical stance or its intellectual weight. It is rather: what has to hold in order for this utterance to make sense/be right for its producers and consumers?
How to study ideologies
Love’s three reasons for studying political ideologies:
1. To understand modern politics;
2. To discus and choose among political values;
3. To democratize political theory;
This suggests that ideologies are best studied in relation to their historical and sociopolitical contexts;
Two important relationships that need attention:
1. Words versus concepts;
2. Philosophical meaning versus popular meaning;
Unlike philosophy that thrives on the constant redefinition of concepts, ideologies aim at cementing the word-concept relationship; by determining the meaning of a concept, they can then attach a single meaning to a political term;
There are at least two ways to understand the structure of ideologies:
1. Linear: ideologies are presented as belief systems with a causal structure; they are composed of the following features: 1) a critique of society as it presently exists; 2) a vision of a better sociopolitical order; 3) a strategy that suggests how to get from here to there;
2. Morphological: construing ideologies as mutually defining clusters and concepts; liberalism’s core is democracy with freedom and equality among its peripheral concepts; Freeden’s four “P”s of ideological composition: proximity (concepts define each other), priority (peripheral concepts orbit a central core), permeability (how ideologies intersect and overlap), and proportionality (the relative space ideologies give particular issues);
How to study ideology:
1. As a separate knower;
2. As a connected knower.
Monday, February 25, 2008
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.
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.
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.
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