introduction to political philosophy

8/10/2019 Introduction to Political Philosophy

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Introduction to Political Philosophy: Lecture 1 Transcript

Professor Steven Smith: Let me start today by asking the question, "what is political philosophy?"Custom dictates that I say something about the subject matter of this course at its outset. This insome ways might seem a case of putting the cart before the horse, or the cart before the coursemaybe, because how can you say, how can we say what political philosophy is in advance of doingit? Anyway, let me try to say something that might be useful.

In one sense, you could say political philosophy is simply a branch or what we call a subfield of thefield of political science. Yes, all right. It exists alongside of other areas of political inquiry likeAmerican government, comparative politics, and international relations. Yet in another sense,

political philosophy is something much different than simply a subfield; it seems to be the oldestand most fundamental part of political science. Its purpose is to lay bare, as it were, the fundamental

problems, the fundamental concepts and categories which frame the study of politics. In this respectit seems to me much less like just a branch of political science than the foundation of the entire

discipline.

The study of political philosophy often begins as this course will do also, with the study of the great books or some of the great books of our field. Political philosophy is the oldest of the socialsciences, and it can boast a wealth of heavy hitters from Plato and Aristotle to Machiavelli, Hobbes,Hegel, Tocqueville, Nietzsche, and so on. You might say that the best way to learn what political

philosophy is, is simply to study and read the works of those who have shaped the field--yes, right?But to do that is, I recognize, not without dangers, often severe dangers of its own. Why study justthese thinkers and not others? Is not any so-called list of great thinkers or great texts likely to besimply arbitrary and tell us more about what such a list excludes than what it includes?Furthermore, it would seem that the study of the great books or great thinkers of the past can easily

degenerate into a kind of antiquarianism, into a sort of pedantry. We find ourselves easilyintimidated by a list of famous names and end up not thinking for ourselves. Furthermore, doesn'tthe study of old books, often very old books, risk overlooking the issues facing us today? What canAristotle or Hobbes tells us about the world of globalization, of terrorism, of ethnic conflict and thelike? Doesn't political science make any progress? After all, economists no longer read AdamSmith. I hesitate to... I don't hesitate to say that you will never read Adam Smith in an economicscourse here at Yale, and it is very unlikely that you will read Freud in your psychology classes. Sowhy then does political science, apparently uniquely among the social sciences, continue to studyAristotle, Locke and other old books?

These are all real questions, and I raise them now myself because they are questions I want you to be thinking about as you do your reading and work through this course. I want you to remain aliveto them throughout the semester. Yes? Okay. One reason I want to suggest that we continue to readthese books is not because political science makes no progress, or that we are somehow uniquelyfixated on an ancient past, but because these works provide us with the most basic questions thatcontinue to guide our field. We continue to ask the same questions that were asked by Plato,Machiavelli, Hobbes, and others. We may not accept their answers and it's very likely that we donot, but their questions are often put with a kind of unrivaled clarity and insight. The fact is thatthere are still people in the world, many people, who regard themselves as Aristotelians, Thomists,Lockeans, Kantians, even the occasional Marxist can still be found in Ivy League universities.These doctrines have not simply been refuted, or replaced, or historically superceded; they remainin many ways constitutive of our most basis outlooks and attitudes. They are very much alive withus today, right. So political philosophy is not just some kind of strange historical appendageattached to the trunk of political science; it is constitutive of its deepest problems.


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If you doubt the importance of the study of political ideas for politics, consider the works of afamous economist, John Maynard Keynes, everyone's heard of him. Keynes wrote in 1935. "Theideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong,are more powerful than is commonly understood....Practical men," Keynes continues, practical men"who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slave

of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling theirfrenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back" [ The General Theory of Employment,

Interest and Money , Chapter 24]. So this course will be devoted to the study of those "academicscribblers" who have written books that continue to impress and create the forms of authority withwhich we are familiar. But one thing we should not do, right, one thing we should not do is toapproach these works as if they provide, somehow, answers, ready-made answers to the problemsof today. Only we can provide answers to our problems. Rather, the great works provide us, so tospeak, with a repository of fundamental or permanent questions that political scientists still continueto rely on in their work. The great thinkers are great not because they've created some set ofmuseum pieces that can be catalogued, admired, and then safely ignored like a kind of antiquitiesgallery in the Metropolitan Museum of Art; but rather because they have defined the problems thatall later thinkers and scholars have had to use in order to make sense of their world at all. Again, westill think in terms of the basic concepts and categories that were created for us long ago. Okay?

So one thing you will quickly note is that there are no permanent answers in a study of political philosophy. A famous mathematician once said, "Every question must have a correct answer, forevery question one answer." That itself is an eminently contestable proposition. Among the greatthinkers there is profound disagreement over the answers to even the most fundamental questionsconcerning justice, concerning rights, concerning liberty. In political philosophy, it is never asufficient answer to answer a question with a statement "because Plato says so," or "because

Nietzsche says so." There are no final authorities in that respect in philosophy because even thegreatest thinkers disagree profoundly with one another over their answers, and it is precisely thisdisagreement with one another that makes it possible for us, the readers today, to enter into theirconversation. We are called upon first to read and listen, and then to judge "who's right?" [and]"how do we know?" The only way to decide is not to defer to authority, whoever's authority, but torely on our own powers of reason and judgment, in other words the freedom of the human mind todetermine for us what seems right or best. Okay?

But what are these problems that I'm referring to? What are these problems that constitute thesubject matter of the study of politics? What are the questions that political scientists try to answer?Such a list may be long, but not infinitely so. Among the oldest and still most fundamentalquestions are: what is justice? What are the goals of a decent society? How should a citizen be

educated? Why should I obey the law, and what are the limits, if any, to my obligation? Whatconstitutes the ground of human dignity? Is it freedom? Is it virtue? Is it love, is it friendship? Andof course, the all important question, even though political philosophers and political scientistsrarely pronounce it, namely, quid sit deus , what is God? Does he exist? And what does that implyfor our obligations as human beings and citizens? Those are some of the most basic andfundamental problems of the study of politics, but you might say, where does one enter this debate?Which questions and which thinkers should one pick up for oneself?

Perhaps the oldest and most fundamental question that I wish to examine in the course of thissemester is the question: what is a regime? What are regimes? What are regime politics? The term"regime" is a familiar one. We often hear today about shaping regimes or about changing regimes,

but what is a regime? How many kinds are there? How are they defined? What holds them together,and what causes them to fall apart? Is there a single best regime? Those are the questions I want usto consider. The concept of the regime is perhaps the oldest and most fundamental of political ideas.


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It goes back to Plato and even before him. In fact, the title of the book that you will be reading partof for this semester, Plato's Republic , is actually a translation of the Greek word politea that meansconstitution or regime. The Republic is a book about the regime and all later political philosophy isa series of footnotes to Plato, and that means that it must provide a series of variations, so to speak,on Plato's conception of the best regime. But what is a regime? Broadly speaking, a regime

indicates a form of government, whether it is ruled by the one, a few, the many, or as morecommon, some mixture, a combination of these three ruling powers. The regime is defined in thefirst instance by how people are governed and how public offices are distributed by election, by

birth, by lot, by outstanding personal qualities and achievements, and what constitutes a people'srights and responsibilities. The regime again refers above all to a form of government. The politicalworld does not present itself as simply an infinite variety of different shapes. It is structured andordered into a few basic regime types. In this, I take it to be one of the most important propositionsand insights of political science. Right? So far?

But there is a corollary to this insight. The regime is always something particular. It stands in arelation of opposition to other regime types, and as a consequence the possibility of conflict, oftension, and war is built in to the very structure of politics. Regimes are necessarily partisan, that isto say they instill certain loyalties and passions in the same way that one may feel partisanship tothe New York Yankees or the Boston Red Sox, or to Yale over all rival colleges and institutions,right? Fierce loyalty, partisanship: it is inseparable from the character of regime politics. These

passionate attachments are not merely something that take place, you might, say between differentregimes, but even within them, as different parties and groups with loyalties and attachmentscontend for power, for honor, and for interest. Henry Adams once cynically reflected that politics issimply the "organization of hatreds," and there is more than a grain of truth to this, right, althoughhe did not say that it was also an attempt to channel and redirect those hatreds and animositiestowards something like a common good. This raises the question whether it is possible to transform

politics, to replace enmity and factional conflict with friendship, to replace conflict with harmony?Today it is the hope of many people, both here and abroad, that we might even overcome, mighteven transcend the basic structure of regime politics altogether and organize our world aroundglobal norms of justice and international law. Is such a thing possible? It can't be ruled out, but sucha world, I would note--let's just say a world administered by international courts of law, by judgesand judicial tribunals--would no longer be a political world. Politics only takes place within thecontext of the particular. It is only possible within the structure of the regime itself.

But a regime is more than simply a set of formal structures and institutions, okay? It consists of theentire way of life, the moral and religious practices, the habits, customs, and sentiments that make a

people what they are. The regime constitutes an ethos , that is to say a distinctive character, that

nurtures distinctive human types. Every regime shapes a common character, a common charactertype with distinctive traits and qualities. So the study of regime politics is in part a study of thedistinctive national character types that constitutes a citizen body. To take an example of what Imean, when Tocqueville studied the American regime or the democratic regime, properly speaking,in Democracy in America , he started first with our formal political institutions as enumerated in theConstitution, such things as the separation of powers, the division between state and federalgovernment and so on, but then went on to look at such informal practices as American mannersand morals, our tendency to form small civic associations, our peculiar moralism and religious life,our defensiveness about democracy and so on. All of these intellectual and moral customs andhabits helped to constitute the democratic regime. And this regime--in this sense the regimedescribes the character or tone of a society. What a society finds most praiseworthy, what it looks

up to, okay? You can't understand a regime unless you understand, so to speak, what it stands for,what a people stand for, what they look up to as well as its, again, its structure of institutions andrights and privileges.


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This raises a further set of questions that we will consider over the term. How are regimes founded,the founding of regimes? What brings them into being and sustains them over time? For thinkerslike Tocqueville, for example, regimes are embedded in the deep structures of human history thathave determined over long centuries the shape of our political institutions and the way we thinkabout them. Yet other voices within the tradition--Plato, Machiavelli, Rousseau come to mind--

believed that regimes can be self-consciously founded through deliberate acts of great statesmen orfounding fathers as we might call them. These statesmen--Machiavelli for example refers toRomulus, Moses, Cyrus, as the founders that he looks to; we might think of men like Washington,Jefferson, Adams and the like--are shapers of peoples and institutions. The very first of the

Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton even begins by posing this question in the starkest terms."It has been frequently remarked," Hamilton writes, "that it seems to have been reserved to the

people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whethersocieties of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection andchoice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accidentand force." There we see Hamilton asking the basic question about the founding of politicalinstitutions: are they created, as he puts it, by "reflection and choice," that is to say by a deliberateact of statecraft and conscious human intelligence, or are regimes always the product of accident,circumstance, custom, and history?

But the idea that regimes may be created or founded by a set of deliberate acts raises a furtherquestion that we will study, and is inseparable from the study of regimes. N'est pas ? Who is astatesman? What is a statesman? Again, one of the oldest questions of political science, very rarelyasked by the political science of today that is very skeptical of the language of statesmanship. In itsoldest sense, political science simply was a science of statecraft. It was addressed to statesman or

potential statesmen charged with steering the ship of state. What are the qualities necessary forsound statesmanship? How does statecraft differ from other kinds of activities? Must a goodstatesman, as Plato believed for example, be a philosopher versed in poetry, mathematics, andmetaphysics? Or is statesmanship, as Aristotle believed, a purely practical skill requiring judgment

based on deliberation and experience? Is a streak of cruelty and a willingness to act immorallynecessary for statecraft, as Machiavelli infamously argued? Must the statesman be capable ofliterally transforming human nature, as Rousseau maintains, or is the sovereign a more or lessfaceless bureaucrat in manner of a modern CEO, as, for example, someone like Hobbes seems tohave believed? All of our texts that we will read--the Republic , the Politics , the Prince , the SocialContract --have different views on the qualities of statecraft and what are those qualities necessaryto found and maintain states that we will be considering.

All of this, in a way, is another way of saying, or at least implying, okay, that political philosophy is

an imminently practical discipline, a practical field. Its purpose is not simply contemplation, its purpose is not reflection alone: it is advice giving. None of the people we will study this semesterwere cloistered scholars detached from the world, although this is a very common prejudice against

political philosophy, that it is somehow uniquely sort of "pie in the sky" and detached from theworld. But the great thinkers were very far from being just, so to speak, detached intellectuals. Platoundertook three long and dangerous voyages to Sicily in order to advise the King Dionysius.Aristotle famously was a tutor of Alexander the Great. Machiavelli spent a large part of his career inthe foreign service of his native Florence, and wrote as an advisor to the Medici. Hobbes was thetutor to a royal household who followed the King into exile during the English Civil War. AndLocke was associated with the Shaftsbury Circle who also was forced into exile after being accusedof plotting against the English King. Rousseau had no official political connections, but he signed

his name always Jean Jacques Rousseau, "citizen of Geneva," and was approached to writeconstitutions for Poland and for the island of Corsica. And Tocqueville was a member of the French National Assembly whose experience of American democracy deeply affected the way he saw the


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future of Europe. So the great political thinkers were typically engaged in the politics of their timesand help in that way to provide us, okay, with models for how we might think about ours.

But this goes in a slightly different direction as well. Not only is this study of the regime, as we'veseen, as I've just tried to indicate, rooted in, in many ways, the practical experience of the thinkers

we'll be looking at; but the study of regime politics either implicitly or explicitly raises a questionthat goes beyond the boundary of any given society. A regime, as I've said, constitutes a people'sway of life, what they believe makes their life worth living, or to put it again slightly differently,what a people stand for. Although we are most familiar with the character of a modern democraticregime such as ours, the study of political philosophy is in many ways a kind of immersion intowhat we might call today comparative politics; that is to say it opens up to us the variety of regimes,each with its own distinctive set of claims or principles, each vying and potentially in conflict withall the others, okay? Underlying this cacophony of regimes is the question always, which of theseregimes is best? What has or ought to have a claim on our loyalty and rational consent?

Political philosophy is always guided by the question of the best regime. But what is the bestregime? Even to raise such a question seems to pose insuperable obstacles. Isn't that a completelysubjective judgment, what one thinks is the best regime? How could one begin such a study? Is the

best regime, as the ancients tended to believe, Plato, Aristotle, and others, is it an aristocraticrepublic in which only the few best habitually rule; or is the best regime as the moderns believe, ademocratic republic where in principle political office is open to all by virtue of their membershipin society alone? Will the best regime be a small closed society that through generations has made asupreme sacrifice towards self-perfection? Think of that. Or will the best regime be a largecosmopolitan order embracing all human beings, perhaps even a kind of universal League of

Nations consisting of all free and equal men and women?

Whatever form the best regime takes, however, it will always favor a certain kind of human beingwith a certain set of character traits. Is that type the common man, is it found in democracies; thoseof acquired taste and money, as in aristocracies; the warrior; or even the priest, as in theocracies?

No, no question that I can think of can be more fundamental. And this finally raises the question ofthe relation between the best regime or the good regime, and what we could say are actuallyexisting regimes, regimes that we are all familiar with. What function does the best regime play in

political science? How does it guide our actions here and now? This issue received a kind of classicformulation in Aristotle's distinction of what he called the good human being and the good citizen.For the good citizen--we'll read this chapter later on in the Politics --for the good citizen you couldsay patriotism is enough, to uphold and defend the laws of your own country simply because theyare your own is both necessary and sufficient. Such a view of citizen virtue runs into the obvious

objection that the good citizen of one regime will be at odds with the good citizen of another: agood citizen of contemporary Iran will not be the same as the good citizen of contemporaryAmerica.

But the good citizen, Aristotle goes on to say, is not the same as the good human being, right?Where the good citizen is relative to the regime, you might say regime-specific, the good human

being, so he believes, is good everywhere. The good human being loves what is good simply, not because it is his own, but because it is good. Some sense of this was demonstrated in AbrahamLincoln's judgment about Henry Clay, an early idol of Lincoln's. Lincoln wrote of Clay, "He lovedhis country," he said, "partly because it was his own country"-- partly because it was his owncountry--;"but mainly because it was a free country." His point, I think, is that Clay exhibited, at

least on Lincoln's telling, something of the philosopher, what he loved was an idea, the idea offreedom. That idea was not the property of one particular country, but it was constitutive of anygood society. The good human being, it would seem, would be a philosopher, or at least would have


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something philosophical about him or her, and who may only be fully at home in the best regime.But of course the best regime lacks actuality. We all know that. It has never existed. The bestregime embodies a supreme paradox, it would seem. It is superior in some ways to all actualregimes, but it has no concrete existence anywhere. This makes it difficult, you could say and this isAristotle's point, I think, this makes it difficult for the philosopher to be a good citizen of any actual

regime. Philosophy will never feel fully or truly at home in any particular society. The philosophercan never be truly loyal to anyone or anything but what is best. Think of that: it raises a questionabout issues of love, loyalty, and friendship.

This tension, of course, between the best regime and any actual regime is the space that makes political philosophy possible. In the best regime, if we were to inhabit such, political philosophywould be unnecessary or redundant. It would wither away. Political philosophy exists and onlyexists in that... call it "zone of indeterminacy" between the "is" and the "ought," between the actualand the ideal. This is why political philosophy is always and necessarily a potentially disturbingundertaking. Those who embark on the quest for knowledge of the best regime may not return thesame people that they were before. You may return with very different loyalties and allegiancesthan you had in the beginning. But there is some compensation for this, I think. The ancients had a

beautiful word, or at least the Greeks had a beautiful word, for this quest, for this desire forknowledge of the best regime. They called it eros, or love, right? The quest for knowledge of the

best regime must necessarily be accompanied, sustained, and elevated by eros . You may not haverealized it when you walked in to this class today, but the study of political philosophy may be thehighest tribute we pay to love. Think of that. And while you're thinking about it you can startreading Plato's Apology for Socrates which we will discuss for class on Wednesday. Okay? It's niceto see you back, and have a very good but thoughtful September 11 th.

introduction to political philosophy

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