In this syllabus we have neither a survey of ancient political thought, nor a survey of the early modern period. Instead, I have tried to place texts that express the contrasts between ways of thinking in the sharpest relief. Between a virtuous man as Aristotle conceived of him and the man of virtú who emerges in the Prince. In short, if one of the themes of the Ancient Political Thought class was the unity of the ethical and political life, here is where those two realms get ripped apart.
We also see another thread emerging. The author is in conversation with those he read; each are asking questions which are rooted in specific historic circumstances; but how are the questions re- articulated? and How does the style of writing relate to the substance of the text? On the one hand, you only find the most profound question if you go as deep as possible into every detail, the uniqueness and unexpectedness arises. On the other hand, what you want to learn is what is there apart from all of the specifics that could be “applied” in the future.
One of the things we learn from ancients is that we need to identify what is the beginning, and go to the beginning. We need to examine our first principals and define our terms. In an effort to go back to the beginning, the early modern thinkers dive into the thought experiment of the origin of society, to retrace how civilization came to be civilized. Why would people allow themselves to be yoked? What does what happened then have to do with now, and where are well all going based therein?
When we get to Rousseau and Kant we go back to the question of the relation of the ethical and political life. This time self governance living under the law one gives oneself only is the recipe for self unity — how would that be possible in the social setting of a polity, that has morphed into the modern town? What is the role of morality in the development of citizenship in a republic? Questions of consent of the governed and legitimacy of state power arise.
What does it mean to be free, what is going to ruin our republic, what is the source of my unfreedom, what is the relationship between freedom and happiness?
Introduction What is Politics?
Part I: From Ancient to Modern Politics
How did the ancients think about politics?
The state should aim to be eternal, the republic is the best form of state for stability.
Polybius On the Forms of States
150 BCE
Ancient Republicanism becomes modern
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics circa 335 – 323 BCE. This is where we learn that the median is the message, i.e., bravery the virtue is somewhere between cowardice or being over come with fear, or on the other extreme foolhardiness or just going balls to the wall with no regard, and this is also not courage. Courage is the mean.
vs
Niccolo Machiavelli The Prince 1513 If I wanted to feel Machiavelli’s childhood before reading his oevre, I would read Italo Calvino’s Baron in the Trees. If I were to cast him in a role, he would be moreno and wiley. If I were to frame two shots, in one he would be on top of a hill, on the other in a crowd in the lowest part of the city. If I were to re read this text, I would have Timothée Chalamet read it outloud.
Commonwealth as Artifice and the birth of liberalism
Thomas Aquinas vs. 1265- 1267. We have to have some representative of this vast space and time between the ancients and moderns and Aquinas is typically called upon to fill this long historical void. Aquinas could be described as how Aristotle got Christianized and into the middle ages.
How the portrait of the Greek form of the Just (approached by means of reason) King gets mapped onto various Biblical examples.
As soon as we put Aquinas into the history of political thought we have another marker in our mind. We are growing in sensibility of Athens and Rome and now, Jerusalem too?
One of the major questions arises in the history of philosophy regarding how to consider theology. What are we looking to know through a philosophical lens versus what does the text look like when the primary place is not given to reason but to faith and the stories are heard?
Problem here is that in the political arena, we want to give an account of the Just so we can measure our authority figures by it. The Bible recounts teachings regarding ultimate authority figures, power, covenants, inheritance, salvation, protection, and following the law.
However, while the dominant sense of philosophy is the metaphor of vision, the dominant sense when it comes to comprehending the Bible is listening. This distinction is not going to get us anywhere because epic poetry was an oral tradition and so was the Socratic dialgoues, so there is listening at the beginning of philosophy and there is also an important role for vision in faith.
The attitude is different. When you read a text to find a logos, or account of something, versus if you come to the teachings with a heart of faith. Since we want to focus on a history of political philosophy, we may want to leave theology to the side but it keeps creeping in. One because the authors in the tradition knew about the dominant theological tendencies of their time, and the second due to the themes related to community, body, covenants, authority, power, etc. found in the Good Book.
So we are after logos of politics that does not require faith, because that is another topic. Nevertheless, we will have our third marker, Jerusalem in our mind. And when we read we can think about if a text is owing something more to, or in the tradition of concepts we have learned from Athens, Rome, or Jerusalem. This will also help us read Strauss later.
One of the reasons that Aquinas is a lighthouse in the history of political thought is due to his approach to the question of natural law, which is a question inspiring contemporary thought on both the right and left today. This makes me feel a certain urgency in re-reading the classics specifically on the topic of natural law. According to Aquinas, God is the author of natural law, that is what we need to follow. So authority is related to the creation of what is eternal?
How can positive law can model itself after natural law? What does it mean to be guided by natural law?
What is the difference between divine and posited law?
Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, selections 1642
Here we are getting some clarification. Natural right just means power. Natural law has something to do with a path. People need norms and laws, want to get out of chaos.
Hobbes takes us back to the beginning, he’s one of the great state of nature thinkers, who posits an initial condition with no laws or outstanding authority. Chaos rather than culture, civilizational collapse, lawlessness, and is quite honest about man’s shortcomings vis a vis any lofty ideals.
Hobbes is a “realist” about humans and wants to think about how to form the ideal civil society and representative of the state.
He experienced the fall out of the Reformation where suddenly every literate man becomes a Bible expert and travels around spouting sermons like he’s selling something. Hobbes drunk dad and brother both carried on as preachers in this way, and Hobbes thought it was rather embarrassing. Also he had seen the destruction of the 30 Years War.
So, while theories of divine right had attempted to legitimate sovereign authority by an account of his closeness to the Pope or God, this meant that post Reformation if youre confession of faith was correct you, by the previous age’s theory, had some sort of claim to political rule.
Part II: Revolution
Montesquieu The Spirit of the Laws 1748.
OK so just to review, positive law is applied on top of a norm abiding social grouping or society. When you are a foreigner, as Montesquieu was in the colonies, you eyesight is far sighted. He experienced cultural norms up close and noticed the geography of the territory; the changing of the seasons, the housing in relation to those, and demands of the earth, all created a character to a people. Any study of political science would at the least need to take the peculiarity of a people based on the land into consideration, and this made smaller government make more sense than larger.
French Revolution and the Enlightenment
J.J. Rousseau, The Social Contract
1762
Immanuel Kant What is Enlightenment? December 1784 This is the text that rings out Sapere Aude, Dare to Know. Take the step, be brave what does knowledge seeking have to do with being brave? Here is where we learn the word critique and what it means to be critical.
The American Revolution
Liberal freedom in the American context
Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776)
When all there was was texts in bars, Common Sense went viral confirming men’s views on the Rights of Man, as he also elucidated in another text. Imagine reading it in the social and historical context, being stirred towards the side of the revolutionaries.
Republican Freedom in the American context
How much governance can a Republic tolerate, and still be a Republic?
Federalist paper #9 is Hamilton, (1787) 14 and 47-51 are Madison. Letters of Brutus were by the Anti-Federalists
Federalist Papers No.9, 14, 47-51vs. Letters of Brutus, No. I, II, and IV
The practices of democracy and its dangers: the freedom to associate and the tyranny of the majority
Alexis de Tocqueville Democracy in America, chs. XII & ch. XV. 1835
Revolution then, what now? The Modern Revolutions freed the people, or did they?
Hannah Arendt ‘What is Freedom?,’ from Between Past and Future 1961
Part III. Modern Domination and Resistance
Racial and Class Domination
Slavery
May 1, 1845
Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass written by himself
Capitalism as bondage: or Law, freedom and economic life
February 21, 1848
Karl Marx and Frederich Engles Manifesto of the Communist Party
Is our desire to be happy making us unfree? Can we be free and happy? What is the relationship between freedom and happiness?
1879 publication date, story set in 16th century Seville, Spain.
Fyodor Dostoyevski The Grand Inquisitor
This text chimes in on Nietzsche’s god is dead theme by suggesting that the modern world couldn’t recognize Jesus if he came up and kissed them on the face. And why? Being christlikeness had been institutionalized in the form of the church whose business it is not to lead men towards existential angst of faith.
The story of Jesus, once institutionalized changed theme completely from freedom to happiness.
This question, can an institution stay in touch with the spirit of its founder or is institutional logic just at odds with anything first moved by Spirit.
Dostoyevski leaves us with the problem of evil. Do we want to be worshipping a god who lets injustice prevail today in the name of a someday or does that seem to somehow belittle or cheapen the experience of both the just and unjust? Do we really think that tomorrow’s utopia justifies the suffering we let slide?
This brings the question of history– how can we know we want to worship this god if we are unsure of the when of the Restoration. It almost makes trying to discover patterns in history as much of a question of reason as a challenge to our faith.
The impatience for liberty in modernity
Michel Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ 1984. I wanted to put this text on the syllabus next to Kant’s because it shows how political philosophers respond to one another across time and circumstance. To show a thread of the critical tradition, how it got from Prussia to Paris.
The best books on this transition from ancient to modern political thought are
Quentin Skinner’s 1997 Liberty Before Liberalism Here I fear it is the time to tell the young people that liberalism used to be a very good word, about the rule of law and not of men. So you were a liberal if you wanted to live under the rule of law, not under the rule of a monarch. So before the modern rule of law (liberalism) what would liberty have meant? Turns out it has a lot to do with political life in a republic. It turns out that the experience of freedom and equality happened in the context of smaller polities.
and
Alasdair MacIntyre’s 1981 After Virtue
I’m almost certain I read this Christmas of 1997 on recommendation after my first quarter at OU. I liked it because it was the first time I read a person reaching from Aristotle to the present time. Asking an ancient political thought question in the modern world. Asking the question, what is the relationship between the ethical and the political life?
At the end of this course you will be able to read and appreciate these relatively contemporary commentaries on what is this big sea change between ancient political thought and modern.