When do governments deserve our allegiance, and when should they be denied it? This course explores the main answers that have been given to this question in the modern West. We start with a survey of the major political theories of the Enlightenment: Utilitarianism, Marxism, and the social contract tradition. In each case, we begin with a look at classical formulations, locating them in historical context, but then shift to the contemporary debates as they relate to politics today. Next, we turn to the rejection of Enlightenment political thinking, again exploring both classical and contemporary formulations. The last part of the course deals with the nature of, and justifications for, democratic politics, and their relations to Enlightenment and Anti-Enlightenment political thinking. In addition to exploring theoretical differences among the various authors discussed, considerable attention is devoted to the practical implications of their competing arguments. To this end, we discuss a variety of concrete problems, including debates about economic inequality, affirmative action and the distribution of health care, the limits of state power in the regulation of speech and religion, and difficulties raised by the emerging threat of global environmental decay.
Politics in the Enlightenment
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Del curso dictado por Yale University
Moral Foundations of Politics
1173 calificaciones
De la lección
Enlightenment Political Theory
This module explores what makes a government legitimate. More specifically, was the Third Reich illegitimate and was Eichmann breaking some kind of higher law here?
Conoce a los instructores
Ian ShapiroSterling Professor of Political Science and Henry R. Luce Director
The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale
Last time I mentioned to you that the first three traditions
we're gonna be discussing in this course, the utilitarian tradition,
the Marxist tradition, and the social contract tradition,
are all really encapsulated in a larger tradition which I call the Enlightenment.
Now that's a term we often hear bandied about.
What comes to mind when you hear the word enlightenment?
>> It comes the shift from the natural law theory to knowledge.
>> Okay what comes to mind when you hear the word enlightenment?
>> I think separation of church and
state and I think artistic development and freedom.
>> Those are all part and parcel of the Enlightenment and
it was after all a massive movement that had its
effects on every walk of thinking on every, on arts, on the sciences, on music.
You name it, the Enlightenment reordered it.
But we of course in this course are only interested in one dimension of it
which I'm calling the Political Enlightenment.
And so we're going to zero in on that and
we're going to talk about the basic assumptions of the Enlightenment which
shaped those three traditions that we're going to be looking at starting next time,
namely the utilitarian, the Marxist and the social contract traditions.
The Political Enlightenment as I'm gonna talk about it has 17th century roots.
This is important because generally speaking people think of the Enlightenment
as an 18th century phenomenon.
But one of the things we're gonna see in this course is that it actually
starts importantly for thinking about politics in the 17th century.
And it had an enduring impact on the 19th, 20th, and even into the 21st century as
we will see we are still all in important respects creatures of the Enlightenment.
So let's focus first on it's 17th century roots and
here we're gonna look at its roots through the eyes of John Locke.
And let me say a couple of things about John Locke because
John Locke is gonna have a long shadow in this course.
He is a famous 17th century political theorist, but
he's gonna play three distinct roles in the course.
He lived throughout much of the 17th century.
He died in 1704.
And he's gonna be seen in this course first and
foremost as an early Enlightenment thinker about science.
I'll get to that in a minute.
But secondly as a classical exponent of the social contract,
when we get to the social contract tradition later.
And then finally, although often less commented upon by scholars,
John Locke is one of the most important early theorists of democracy.
So he's gonna come back to us again in the last part of the course
when we get into issues of democratic theory.
Who was John Locke?
When you hear the word John Locke what comes to mind?
>> It comes to mind that he was a theorist of natural law.
>> He was a theorist of natural law, so that's certainly one of the things
that he was and we're gonna talk about his theory of natural law today.
But Locke, also, he was a multifaceted person.
He, for much of his life,
actually was a rather something of an underachieving academic, but towards
the second half of his adult life he became associated with Lord Shaftesbury.
Who was a leader of the discontented faction
in English politics that would eventually remove the king from the throne.
So Locke although in many respects for most of his life had been quite
conservative, became associated with a radical political grouping
in 17th century English politics as a member of Shaftesbury's Circle.
And actually, Shaftesbury always felt greatly indebted to Locke
because Locke performed surgery on him and, at least in his belief,
saved his life at one point.
He, John Locke, was the author of two of the most important works of political
theory ever written in the last several centuries.
His Two Treatises on Government were for a long time thought
to have been published in 1690 as a justification or
legitimation or in defense of the revolution of 1688.
More recently scholars have discovered that it
was actually written in 1681 so it was not anything to do with 1688.
However it was written in the course of planning for something called
the Monmouth Rebellion, which was a failed version of 1688.
So it's not that surprising that it turns out to have
been confused as a justification for 1688.
He's also the author of something called A Letter Concerning Toleration.
It's actually his third letter concerning toleration, the famous one.
Published in 1690, we're not entirely sure when it was first written.
The tremendously important document in the history of the modern west and
we'll also talk about that some later on today.
But finally, he was the quintessential theorist of the early Enlightenment.
And we're gonna talk about that aspect of his thinking first.
Enlightenment political theory, as I'm gonna talk about it,
really revolves around two central ideas.
And I want to put them out and talk about each of them a little bit
because they're gonna come back to us again and again and again in looking
at all of the Enlightenment traditions that we're going to be considering.
So the first one, let's see if you guys can guess what it is.
I'll give you a clue.
Do you know who this gentleman was?
Does that help?
>> Yes it is Francis Bacon.
>> You got it right.
Francis Bacon.
And what do we associate Francis Bacon with?
>> With the theory of knowledge [LAUGH] >> What kind of theory of knowledge?
That's exactly right >> Certainty.
>> Okay, certainty but we'll get to certainty in a little while.
But Bacon was famous as a revolutionary scientist, right?
And a good part of the Enlightenment is commitment to the idea of science.
Not tradition, not superstition,
not religion, not traditional natural law, but science.
Science is the basis for reorganizing every aspect of human life.
And the Enlightenment political thinkers are all famous for,
in one way or another, wanting to come up with theories of politics
that are based on the appeal to science.
So this is a sort of one set point or center of
gravity in all Enlightenment thinking is to look for scientific principles.
Different Enlightenment thinkers will understand
the meaning of science very differently.
We'll see Marx has a very different view of what science is than Jeremy Bentham
does, for example but one way or another they're all
committed to the notion of reordering the political world on scientific principles.
Let's talk about the other central idea, we'll try and give you a clue here.
What does this document call to mind?
>> Constitutions.
>> Yeah, what about the constitution?
I'll give you a little more of a hint here.
>> Rights.
>> Right, the idea of, who has rights?
When we think about rights.
>> Concerning constitutions, everybody.
>> Every.
>> Everyone.
>> Every person, every individual.
So individual freedom,
usually expressed in some doctrine of individual rights is the greatest good,
the Summum bonum, as traditional political philosophers sometimes talked about it.
So, individual freedom is expressed politically in a doctrine that
people have rights as embodied in the Declaration of Independence.
Not the Constitution actually was the document you were looking at.
But every Enlightenment thinker
is committed to some version of both of these ideas.
Every single one of them.
You might be shocked by this.
Most people don't think about, for instance,
Karl Marx as a theorist of individual rights.
But we will see that he was.
And one of the other things we're gonna discover in the course of digging
into these different arguments is that a commitment to science
lives in some tension with a commitment to individual rights or freedom.
Because after all if you think about science is about determinism.
It's about coming up with laws that specify what must be the case.
And if everything is known in a deterministic way what room is there for
individual freedom?
Maybe none.
Maybe not, and indeed we will see that this debate about
the tension between a deterministic theory of the universe and the idea of agency or
freedom or the capacity to choose to do things one way or another,
which defies determinism, is actually even older than the Enlightenment.
In fact, John Locke was tormented
by it in a somewhat different vein in his theological writings.
John Locke, we'll see, was a religious thinker.
And one of the huge debates among theologists in the 16th and
17th century concerned the question whether or
not God was omnipotent.
You might think this is a pretty arcane question and
doesn't have much to do with anything that we're going to be talking about.
But in fact we'll see that this debate in the Enlightenment is
a secular analogue of the logical debate that concerned Locke.
Here was the problem.
If you said God is omniscient,
that means that God knows everything, right?
Right?
What about the notion of omnipotent?
>> That he basically can do everything if he's the most powerful.
>> God can do everything, so on the face of it
that doesn't seem like a contradiction in terms right?
God knows everything and God can do anything.
But theologians were also concerned with the question whether
the laws of nature are timeless universals, whether they can change.
And one strand of thinking said something can't be a law unless it's
a timeless universal.
But others said, well if natural law is timeless universal,
that would mean it binds even God, and God wouldn't be able to change his mind.
They always thought about God in the masculine.
God wouldn't be able to change his mind if he was bound by universal laws that
are unchanging by definition.
And so there was sort of two camps.
There were those who said no for something to be a law it must be timeless and
universal and permanent.
And we don't know what to say about God's omnipotence.
And there were others who said, no, God has to be omnipotent.
And that means, we have to live with the possibility that natural law isn't
timeless, because God might change his mind tomorrow about something.
And Locke wrestled with this problem in some essays we're not gonna talk about.
His essays on the law of nature published in the 1660s.
And he tormented himself over this question and
ended up just throwing his hands up and being unable to resolve it.
But we'll see that he decided that he had to come down on the omnipotent side,
he had to come down on the omnipotent side because he thought that something can
only be a law if it's the product of a will, a volition, a choice, or a decision.
And so we'll see how this played out later on today.
But this is just to give you an indication that the Enlightenment
tension between science and individual rights is a secular transposition
of an older theological debate about whether God is omnipotent or
whether the laws of nature are permanent and unchanging.
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