Prof: This course
presumes no prior knowledge of
its subject matter.
 
That is to say you can take
this course without having done
any political philosophy before.
 
The materials we're going to
look at in this course can be
approached at a number of levels
of sophistication.
Indeed you could teach an
entire course on just John
Stuart Mill,
or John Rawls,
or Karl Marx,
or Jeremy Bentham,
and this means that some of you
who may have had some prior
acquaintance with some of these
texts will be able to explore
them in a different way from
newcomers.
But the course is designed,
as I said, to be user-friendly
to people who are doing this for
the first time.
There are a few parts of the
course in which I make use of
technical notations or diagrams.
 
Now, it is true,
it's just as fact about human
beings that if you put a graph,
or a chart, or a curve up on a
diagram there are certain
people,
some subset of the population
that get a knot in their
stomach,
they start to feel nauseous,
and their brain stops
functioning.
I can totally relate to it
because I'm actually one of
those people by disposition.
 
And what I can tell you about
our use of charts,
and diagrams,
and notations in this course is
they're simply shorthand for
people who find it useful.
But I will do nothing with
diagrams and charts that I don't
also do verbally.
 
So if you don't get it the one
way you'll be able to get it the
other way.
 
 
 
So you should never feel
intimidated.
As I said, for people who find
graphs and charts useful they're
a form of shorthand,
but obviously if they
intimidate somebody and they
make what's being said opaque
then they're being
self-defeating.
And as I said,
I will always walk verbally
through anything that I also do
with charts and diagrams.
Secondly, related to that
point, it's my commitment to you
that this is a course that's
done from first principles and
everything is explained from the
ground up.
I might forget that contract
sometime and use a term that you
don't understand.
 
I might use a word like
"deontological,"
and you'll sit there and you'll
be thinking,
"What does that mean?"
 
And the high probability is
that if you don't know what it
means there are probably seventy
other people in the room who
don't know what it means either.
 
And so if you put up your hand
and ask what it means you'll be
doing those sixty-nine people a
favor because they wanted to
know what it means as well.
 
So we shouldn't have any
situation in this course in
which I'm using some term and
you can't follow what I'm
talking about because you don't
understand what it means.
It is a rather embarrassing
fact about political
philosophers that they don't say
in words of one syllable what
can be said in words of five
syllables.
But part of my job here is to
reduce them to words of one
syllable.
 
That is, to take complex
theoretical ideas and make them
lucid and intelligible to you.
 
And I see that as a big part of
what we're doing here so that
your takeaway from this course
three months from now will
include feeling very comfortable
with the language of political
philosophy and the central
terminology in which it's
conducted.
 
So hold my feet to the fire on
that if you need to.
If I use words you don't
understand put up your hand and
stop me.
 
I will from time to time throw
out questions and we'll have a
microphone that we can pass
around so that people can answer
the questions.
 
It's one of the ways in which I
gauge how well the communication
between us is going,
so you should expect that.
 
 
So this is a course about the
moral foundations of politics,
the moral foundations of
political argument.
And the way in which we
organize it is to explore a
number of traditions of
political theorizing,
and these are broadly grouped
into a bigger distinction that I
make between Enlightenment and
anti-Enlightenment thinking.
That is to say we're going to
start of by looking at the
Enlightenment.
 
Now you might say,
"Well, what is the
Enlightenment?
 
How do you know it when you
trip over it?"
and that is a subject I'm going
to get to on Wednesday and
Friday.
 
But for right now I'll say just
dogmatically,
and I'll elaborate for you
later, that the Enlightenment
revolved around two ideas.
 
The first is the idea of basing
our theories of politics on
science--
not on religion,
not on tradition,
not on superstition,
not on natural law,
but on science.
The Enlightenment was born of
an enormous optimism about the
possibilities of science.
 
And in this course we will look
at Enlightenment theories that
put science at the core of
political argument.
The second main Enlightenment
idea is the idea that individual
freedom is the most important
political good.
And so if you wanted to get the
bumper sticker version of the
Enlightenment account of
politics,
it is, "How do you
scientifically design a society
to maximize individual
freedom?"
Now, within that,
we will look at three
Enlightenment traditions.
 
We'll look at the utilitarian
tradition, the Marxist
tradition, and the social
contract tradition.
And again, I'll just give you
the one-line version now and
then we're going to come back to
all of these,
of course, in much greater
detail later.
The utilitarian tradition says
that the way in which you create
a scientifically organized
society is you maximize the
greatest happiness of the
greatest number.
This is the slogan of
utilitarianism.
Maximize the greatest happiness
of the greatest number.
You'll find there're huge
disagreements among utilitarians
about how you measure your
happiness,
and how you maximize it,
and how you know when you've
maximized it and so on,
but the utilitarians all agree
that that's the goal,
and if you can do that you will
do more to maximize human
freedom than anything else.
The Marxist tradition has a
very different theory of
science,
what Marx called the science of
historical materialism,
but it too was based on this
idea that we can have impersonal
scientific principles that give
us the right answer for the
organization of society.
One of Marx's famous one-liners
was that we will eventually get
to a world in which politics is
replaced by administration,
implying that all forms of
moral disagreement will have
gone away because we will have
gotten technically the right
answers.
 
Another formulation of that
same idea actually comes from a
different Enlightenment thinker
who we're not going to read in
this course,
David Hume, who said,
"If all moral
disagreements were resolved,
no political disagreements
would remain."
So that's the idea of a
scientific solution to what
appear to be the moral dilemmas
that divide us.
So for Marx we'll see a very
different theory of science,
but for him too,
he thinks that freedom is the
most important good.
 
That might surprise you.
 
Most people think,
"Well, Marx was about
equality.
 
He was egalitarian."
 
We'll see that that's only true
in a somewhat derivative sense
because in the end what was
important for Marx was that
people are equally free,
that they are in a situation of
not being exploited,
and he too, therefore,
is an Enlightenment thinker.
 
Then the social contract
tradition says that the way we
get a scientific theory of
society is to think about what
agreement people would make if
they were designing society for
the first time.
 
If society was going to be
based on a contract,
what would it look like?
 
And this is what gives us the
right answer as to what is--
rational scientific principles
tell us how we should organize
society,
and it's a world in which
people's freedom is preserved
because it's what they choose to
do.
 
Again, as in these other
Enlightenment traditions there's
massive disagreement about who
makes the contract,
how they make it,
what the content of it would
be,
but it's the metaphor of a
social contract that shapes all
reasoning about the way in which
you can organize society
scientifically in order to
preserve freedom.
 
So in the first two-thirds of
the course we're going to work
our way through those three
Enlightenment traditions.
But every current has it
undertow, and even though the
Enlightenment was this
enormously energetic and
captivating tradition that
really starts in the seventeenth
century and gathers steam in the
eighteenth century,
there was always resistance to
the Enlightenment,
both it's preoccupation with
science and its view that
individual freedom is the most
important good.
And so after we're done looking
at the Enlightenment,
we're going to look at
anti-Enlightenment thinking,
and the tradition that resists
the idea that there are
scientific principles around
which society can be organized,
and resist the idea that the
freedom of the individual is the
most important good,
and we'll explore that
tradition.
 
And then in the last part of
the course we will turn to the
democratic tradition which
tries,
at least in the way I will
present this to you,
to reconcile the
anti-Enlightenment critique of
the Enlightenment with those
elements of the Enlightenment
that survive the
anti-Enlightenment critique,
if you see what I'm saying.
 
So democracy becomes the
resolution, at least in the way
I'll describe democracy in this
course.
Thereby hangs another tale that
I want to tell you about this
course.
 
The course is introductory and
presented in a user-friendly way
to newcomers,
but it also is an argument.
That is, I'm presenting an
argument,
a point of view,
which some of you will be,
"I'm persuaded by,"
and that is totally fine.
The idea is not to make you
think what I think or what your
teaching assistant thinks.
 
It's rather to make you
understand the logic underlying
your own views better than you
have before,
and perhaps see the appeal of
views you have hitherto rejected
more clearly than you have
before.
So the idea is to enhance the
sophistication of your own
understanding of politics,
not to have you parrot my
views, or teaching fellows'
views,
or anybody else's views.
 
It's rather to understand the
nature of your own views and how
they might connect or live in
tension with the views of
others.
 
One thing you're going to find,
I should also say just as a
matter of truth in advertising,
we're going to look at a number
of what I would call
architectonic theories of
politics,
the theories that try to give
the whole answer.
 
This is Jeremy Bentham.
 
This is his scientific theory.
 
These are all the pieces.
 
This is how they fit together
and this is what it means for
the organization of schools,
and prisons,
and parliaments,
and all the rest of it.
He's got an architectonic
theory of the whole thing.
John Rawls, as well,
you'll see an architectonic
theory of the whole thing.
 
One of the takeaway points of
this course is going to be that
architectonic theories fail.
 
There is no silver bullet.
 
You're not going to find a
takeaway set of propositions
that you can plaster onto future
political dilemmas.
What you're going to find
instead, I think what's going to
help you in this course,
what's going to be the useful
takeaway,
is rather small and medium
sized insights.
 
You're going to find things to
put in your conceptual bag of
tricks and take and use
elsewhere,
and they're going to be very
helpful to you in analyzing a
whole variety of problems.
 
I think if you talk to other
students who've taken this
course that tends to be the most
useful takeaway that you get,
that you'll find.
 
When somebody brings up an
argument,
say, about what people are
entitled to you'll have a whole
series of questions you would
ask about that argument that you
wouldn't have asked if you
hadn't taken this course.
So you'll find a lot of small
and medium sized bits and pieces
that you can take and use in
other contexts,
but you're not going to find a
one-size fits all answer to the
basic dilemmas of politics.
 
Let me say one other thing
about this course as being an
argument, that the argument's
presented from a particular
point of view.
 
You might say,
"Well,"
looking through this syllabus,
"Hmm, this guy is pretty
arrogant.
 
I mean, here we have John
Locke, John Stuart Mill,
Jeremy Bentham,
and he's got his own,
some of his own work here on
this syllabus.
Who does he think he is?
 
I mean, these are the greats of
the tradition and he's putting
his own work here?
 
It takes a lot of chutzpah to
do that."
And let me tell you a little
vignette that I think will give
you the spirit in which my work
is on this syllabus.
When I was an undergraduate
there was a great Kant scholar
called Stephan K�rner
who was here in the Yale
Philosophy Department for many
years and also taught at the
University of Bristol in
England.
And I attended his lectures on
Kant,
and he stood up in the very
first lecture and he said,
"Kant was a great
philosopher,
und I am a minor philosopher,
but with me you have the
advantage that I am alive."
 
So this is the spirit in which
my work is there,
and it's not remotely intended
to be a suggestion that 200
years from now or 300 years from
now people will be reading it or
that it stands on a par with the
classic works of the tradition.
But one of our agendas in this
course is not just to get you up
to speed in the great text of
these different traditions,
but to give you some sense of
how people who currently do this
for a living argue about these
ideas.
So in each one of the five
traditions that we look at,
we're going to begin with a
classic formulation.
So Jeremy Bentham is the
locus classicus of
classical utilitarianism.
 
He's the major formative
statement of that view.
So we'll start with Bentham,
but then we will bring
utilitarianism up to the present
day.
We'll explore how the
utilitarian tradition evolved
since the eighteenth century and
we will bring you up to
contemporary considerations
about utilitarianism,
what people argue about in the
journals today,
and the book literature,
and so on.
Likewise with Marxism,
we'll start with Marx and
Engels themselves and then bring
you up to contemporary debates
about Marxism.
 
Social contract tradition,
we'll start with John Locke who
has famously formulated the
social contract idea in the
seventeenth century,
but we'll bring it up to modern
contract theorists like Robert
Nozick and John Rawls.
The anti-Enlightenment
tradition we go back to Edmund
Burke,
the great anti-Enlightenment
thinker,
an opponent of the French
Revolution,
but we'll bring
anti-Enlightenment thinking up
to contemporary thinkers like
Alasdair MacIntyre.
 
And finally with the democratic
tradition,
we'll go back to the Federalist
Papers,
which is in many ways one of
the most important statements of
what's at issue with democratic
principles,
if not a defense of democracy
we'll see later,
and bring that up to the
contemporary literature on
democracy which is where my own
thinking comes in.
But as I say,
you should remember
Stephan K�rner's
admonition that you're getting
the benefit of the fact that I
happen to be around in the first
decade of the twenty-first
century,
not that I'm attempting to put
myself on that kind of a
pedestal.
 
Now, I want to say a few more
general things about the course
just to give you a sense of the
flavor of what we do here.
You might say, "Well,
what is distinctive about this
course as compared with other
introductory political theory
and political philosophy courses
that you could take around
here?"
 
And I think there are four
senses in which this course is
distinctive, not necessarily
better but just different.
And so that you can give you
some sense of what it is that
you would be letting yourself in
for here.
The first is what I've just
mentioned that with each of
these five traditions we really
are going to take them from a
classical formulation up to
contemporary discussions.
So you'll have a,
at least, working sense of how
these traditions have evolved
over the course of two or three
hundred years and what form
debates about them today take.
The second is that this course
is really going to mix the
theoretical with the applied.
 
We are going to look at first
principles.
I use the terms foundations
advisedly in the title of the
course there.
 
It's something of a loaded term
in that there are some people
who think we should do political
philosophy without foundations.
And I'll have something to say
about those arguments later in
the course,
but I do want to signal with
that term we will be interested
in foundational questions,
the most basic questions you
can ask about politics,
but we will never limit our
intention to those questions.
We will work these doctrines
through a huge array of
contemporary problems ranging
from abortion,
to affirmative action,
to the death penalty,
to all kinds of other things
that are of concern to you as we
go through.
 
So it's very much a part of
what we do in this course is to
look at how these doctrines
actually play out on the ground.
So we go back and forth from
particular examples to general
arguments and back to particular
examples a lot in this course,
and in that sense it's more of
a course,
I'd say, in applied political
philosophy than many courses one
might take,
here or elsewhere.
A third distinctive feature of
the course is that I'm going to
organize it centrally around one
question,
which seems to me at the end of
the day to be the most important
question of politics.
 
And that is the question that I
put in the first sentence of the
syllabus there.
 
When do governments deserve our
allegiance and when should they
be denied it?
 
When and under what conditions
should we obey the government,
when are we free to disobey the
government,
and when might we even have an
obligation to oppose the
government?
 
Another way,
if you want to translate this
into the jargon of political
theory, what is it that makes
governments legitimate?
 
What is the basis for
legitimate government?
That is going to be the core
organizing idea or question with
which we're going to interrogate
these different traditions that
we examine,
utilitarian,
Marxist, social contract,
anti-Enlightenment and
democratic traditions.
 
We're going to look at how does
each one of those traditions
answer the most basic questions
about the legitimacy of the
state.
 
As I say, I think it's
ultimately the most important
question in politics.
 
It's not the only question in
politics.
It's not the only way to
organize a course in political
philosophy, but it is the way in
which we'll organize this
course.
 
We'll focus our questions on
legitimacy, and it'll provide
the template for comparing
across these traditions,
right?
 
We will be looking at how
utilitarians,
or social contract theorists,
or democratic theorists look at
this basic question of what it
is that makes governments
legitimate,
how we know that when we fall
over it,
and what we should do about it.
So that's the third sense in
which the course is distinctive,
and the fourth one I want to
mention is that we're going to
go back and forward between two
modes of analysis which for want
of better terms I call internal
and external,
and let me explain what I mean
by those terms.
When you look at an argument
that somebody puts forward,
and you look at in the way that
I'm describing as internal,
what you're basically saying is
does it make sense?
Is it persuasive?
 
Are the premises plausible?
 
Do the conclusions follow from
the premises?
Are there contradictions in
what the person's saying?
Does it all hang together?
 
Should I believe it?
 
Is it a good argument?
 
That's what internal analysis
is about, okay.
External analysis is looking at
the argument as a causal force
in the world.
 
What social and political
arrangements is this argument
used to justify,
or what social and political
arrangement is it used to
attack?
How does this operate as a
political ideology in the world
out there?
 
What effects does it have if I
embrace this argument?
So it's not a question about
whether or not it's a good
argument or you should believe
it,
but a question about how this
argument is efficacious in the
world.
 
Because there could be terrible
arguments that are nonetheless
very efficacious in the world,
right?
And there might be very good
arguments that nobody takes
seriously in day-to-day
politics.
And one of the great
aspirations of the Enlightenment
is to produce arguments that
both make good analytical and
philosophical sense on the one
hand,
and can be influential in the
world on the other,
but those things don't
necessarily go together.
And we're going to ask a
question, why,
in the context of exploring all
of these traditions,
if there are good arguments
that are not efficacious,
why that is?
 
If there are bad arguments that
are efficacious,
why that is?
 
But in any case we're going to,
even if we can't answer that
why question,
which is a very hard question
to answer,
we're going to look at these
arguments and these traditions
both internally and externally.
You're going to look at them as
arguments and you're going to
look at them as ideologies,
as systems of thought that get
trafficked in the political
world.
And I think that that is
another feature of this course
that differentiates it from
other introductory political
theory courses.
 
So I think that gives you
something of a flavor of what is
distinctive in what we do here.
 
 
 
Any questions about any of that?
 
If any of it's puzzling to you
it's probably puzzling to
somebody else.
 
 
 
So in the spirit of getting us
going we're going to start with
a real world problem.
 
We're going to start with the
problem of Adolf Eichmann,
who was a lieutenant colonel in
Nazi Germany,
who was responsible for
organizing the shipment of Jews
to Nazi death camps.
 
And at the end of the war,
he was captured along with a
lot of other former Nazis,
and he was inadvertently
released.
 
They didn't realize that he was
a significant player in the
organization of the so-called
final solution of the Jews,
and they released him and he
escaped.
And like many other former
Nazis who escaped he went to
Argentina and he lived under an
assumed name for many years
until the late 1950s when the
Israeli Secret Service,
the Mossad, figured out that he
was there and figured out who he
was.
 
And they sent a group of people
who,
essentially commandos,
who captured him,
spirited him out of Argentina,
took him to Israel where they
brought back the death penalty
which had not existed at that
time in Israeli law,
tried him for crimes against
humanity,
which was the same concept that
had been employed at the
Nuremberg Trials of his cohort
after World War II in the late
1940s,
crimes against humanity and
crimes against the Jewish people
and they executed him.
 
And at that time young
political theorist,
not particularly well known,
called Hannah Arendt,
covered the trail for
The New Yorker
magazine in a series of
articles which were subsequently
published as a book called,
Eichmann in Jerusalem,
which is what I'm having you
read for Wednesday's class.
And we're going to use this
Eichmann problem as a way into
the central conundrum of the
course,
which I said is what is it that
gives states legitimacy?
When should we obey the
government, when are we free not
to, and when should we perhaps
even be obliged to oppose the
government?
 
Because this problem was thrown
into sharp relief by the conduct
of Eichmann during World War II.
 
And I want you to think about
two questions while you read
this,
which is essentially,
this book is essentially a
compilation of Arendt's New
Yorker articles.
 
The first is up here.
 
What I want you to do is to
think about what the two things
are that make you most
uncomfortable about this man,
who you'll get know quite well
through reading this book.
What is it about him that is
unnerving?
What is it that makes your
flesh crawl about this guy?
What are the two things that
are the most appalling about
him?
 
And then the other question I
want you to address is the
second one.
 
What two things make you most
uncomfortable about the events
surrounding his apprehension,
and his trail,
and his execution in Israel?
 
Those are your reading
questions for Eichmann in
Jerusalem,
and write them down,
and bring them with you to
class on Wednesday.
 
 
