History of Political Ideas

1
History of Political Ideas

• 3rd lecture
• Ideas of Early Modern Age and Enlightenment

2
Political Thinking on Way to a Secular Society

• The Church remained an important social power for
  centuries after the twilight of the Medieval
  Ages. However from the 14th Century AD the
  central, mundane, secular power of the king
  became ever stronger.
• In the late medieval society, in the early,
  matured and late Renaissance, and in the early
  modern society (16-17th Century AD) the basic
  questions of political thinking became what
  makes the central political power legitimate
  (independently from the Church)? What (secular,
  non-ecclesiastic) goals must the monarch or the
  governor must strive after? What factors and
  institutes are necessary (if any) in order to
  control the central power and defend the people
  from a possible tyrant?
• These thinkers raised the question of source and
  nature of political power in a secular manner.

3
Late Medieval Political Theory. Marsilius da Padua

• An important predecessor of modern political
  thinking was Marsilius da Padua (1290-1343) of
  Italy. He wrote an important book Defensor
  Pacem, The Protector of the Peace. We could
  treat him as a forerunner of modern political
  thought, because the secular motifs were emphatic
  in his book.
• According to Marsilius citizens are living in a
  political society not due to their nature but due
  to the recognition of the benefits of living
  together in a state. Creating a state is not a
  natural event but a voluntary act of a community.
• It is the community who creates the laws and
  rules of the particular society. What makes a
  political order and a system of law legitimate?
  According to Marsilius if the will of the
  majority of society serves as the basis for a
  social and legal system, then the latter is
  legitimate. If it is not legitimated by the will
  of the majority of citizens, then this social
  order is illegitimate.
• Only the will of majority could be the source of
  the legitimacy of political and social order.

4
Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)

• Father of modern political theory. First and
  foremost aim of governance of the society is
  success. He tried to articulate a realistic
  theory of political power in his book The
  Prince, (Il Principo). He said we must treat the
  norms and techniques of successful political
  action and strategy independent from the
  prescriptions of the moral. That who seeks
  moral, should rather remain inside private life.
  It is result what is important in business and
  political life .
• He delineated a highly individualistic picture of
  society and social sphere. He praised the
  individualistic virtues and eminence of a person.
  Result and achievement what really matters in his
  opinion.
• He did not say that Goal sanctifies the means
  a phrase which is often attributed to him, but he
  did say If you want a certain goal, then you
  must also want the means which lead to this
  goal.
• He despised the Church and religion in general as
  a form of superstition and ignorance, and
  regarded religion as a mean to rule and
  manipulate people, who are less educated. His
  works were on the Index of forbidden literature
  of the Catholic Church for centuries.

5
What shall a prince do? Should he make himself
loved or rather feared?

• What is the best strategy to rule and control a
  people? Should the people love the prince or
  should they rather fear him?
• Machiavelli told if he could manage the both it
  would be the best, but if it is not possible to
  be loved and feared in the same time, it is
  better to be feared than to be loved. Because
  people are usually unreliable they offer their
  blood, honor and loyalty when there is no danger
  and need at all, and when the prince needs their
  loyalty in real, they betray him if they do not
  fear him enough.
• If it is unavoidable to shed blood, the prince
  shall do better if he trust someone to take the
  role of the butcher, and to kill everyone who is
  actually or potentially a danger, or simply to
  set a bloody example. After the bloodshed the
  prince could throw this butcher or hangman to the
  anger of people, saying, that this man went too
  far, ignoring his personal orders.
• The prince shall use the means of sword and
  intrigue, of bare (military, political) power
  and of deceive, of manipulating the people and
  his opponents.

6
The limits of using the power

• What are the taboos, the borders of useing and
  abusing the political power? The prince must know
  that the citizens are the most sensible
  concerning their honour or reputation, and their
  private property. Accordingly the prince must
  respect the women and private property of the
  citizens under any condition. He could shed blood
  if it is necessary, but he cannot loot, otherwise
  he will be a subject of despise of the citizens.

7
Contract-theory

• Early and matured Modern Age is a period of
  economic upswing. Consequently economic life
  influenced very deeply the intellectual life
  also. Thus the most popular theory of
  interpreting the source of political legitimacy
  was in the Modern Age the social contract theory
  of political power.
• According to social contract theory the people,
  who are not yet citizens, give up some of their
  rights, in order to create a central political
  power with a monopoly of violence. The legitimacy
  of central political power rests on the implicit
  or explicit agreement of the citizens (who first
  became citizens as members of a state), on an
  explicit or implicit social contract between
  the members of society and between these members
  and the central power.

8
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). Leviathan

• According to Hobbes one could find two basic
  sorts of entities in the world natural and
  artificial. Amongst the artificial things the
  greatest and most important is the state. State
  is a huge machine that the people created to make
  their life easier, safer and happier.
• Before creating the state, that is to say before
  political state the people lived in the natural
  state. In this natural state of life life was
  cruel, miserable, brutish and short. No one
  could feel himself or herself in safety, one
  could have been robbed or killed at any moment.

9
The Monarch in Hobbes

• Therefore people recognized that their mutual
  interest is to create a central power, to which
  they cede some of their rights, and which in its
  turn defends the life and property of its
  citizens.
• The utmost function of a state to defend the
  life and property of citizens. This state is
  according to Hobbes the Leviathan, the Great
  Monster, created by the people to their own
  defense. In Hobbes interpretation the head of
  Leviathan must be one single person. Otherwise
  the governance of the state would fell prey of
  meaningless debates
• The Monarch, the governor of the Leviathan, has
  an absolute power by force of the social
  contract, and nobody has the right to question
  his decisions or to resist him.

10
John Locke (1632-1704). The problem with the
Absolute Sovereign

• John Locke accepted Hobbes idea of the social
  contract theory of political legitimacy but he
  differed at the point whether the members of the
  society does not have any right to oppose the
  governor and to question his decisions.
• He said that in Hobbes view it looks like as if
  people, because of troubles foxes and polecats
  causing them, happily surrender to a bloodthirsty
  lion. There must be a much more rational solution
  to the problem of natural state of man.

11
Locke. The Idea of Liberal State

• According to Locke the ultimate source of
  property right is work or labor.
• The power of the Sovereign or of central
  political institution is not unconditional it
  has a clause of resistance. According to this
  clause of resistance people should not obey to
  tyrannic power. They have the resist even with
  power, with weapons, in a military way, to a
  tyrannical central power.
• The central power must serve the prosperity of
  the members of society, it must serve the goal to
  defend the life and property of people. The
  government is responsible to the people. It is
  the idea of the responsible state.
• Absolute freedom of conscience, of science and of
  religion. With one exception according to Locke
  the atheist do not deserve to follow and
  propagate their ideas, because in the case of
  atheist there is no transcendent guarantee of
  their word so one cannot trust someone who
  declares himself/herself to be an atheist.

12
Enlightenment. The Age of Reason

• We call Enlightenment (Aufklärung, Lumière) the
  intellectual and cultural movement in Europe in
  the 18th Century AD.
• It was an age of advanced secularism, at least
  amongst intellectuals of the age.
• Representatives of Enlightenment regarded the
  religion as superstition, something that hides
  the true nature of things from the eye of people,
  and something which is a mere mean of
  manipulation. Ignorance and manipulation most
  thinkers of Enlightenment described religion with
  these two word.
• Crush the monstrous! said Voltaire, an
  intellectual leader of the age, where monstrous
  was the Church itself.
• The thinkers of Enlightenment thought that the
  main source of troubles in the world is
  ignorance. If they spread the knowledge amongst
  the entire society, and if they unfold the laws
  of nature (and of society) as deeply as possible,
  then they will be able to solve all problems in
  the world, and they will be able to build a
  completely harmonious, happy society.

13
Montesquieu. The Spirit of Laws

• According to Montesquieu (1698-1755) the source
  and basis of just governance is the division of
  powers. He elaborated this idea in his book The
  Spirit of Laws, (Lespirit des lois).
• In Montesquieus opinion there are three basic
  governmental forms monarchic, republic and
  tyrannical. In monarchic one person owns and
  exerts power under the reign of laws, in the
  republic the entire people exerts power under the
  reign of laws again, while in a tyrannical system
  only one person owns the power, who does not care
  at all with the laws, nor the prosperity of
  people.
• In his view a basic condition of a just
  governance is the division of power. There three
  main branches of political power juridical,
  executive and legislative power. When all three
  powers are centered in hand, and they are not
  functioning separately, then that system is at
  least potentially a tyrannical one because the
  utmost owner of power could charge and convict
  whomever he wants on trumped.-up charges.

14
Rousseau and the Social Contract

• A leading figure of French Englightenment was
  Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). He followed
  the idea of social contract, but he emphasized
  the thought that every power and sovereignty
  belong to the people itself. He emphasized the
  thought of Sovereignty of People.
• His main work is Social Contract, (Contract
  Social, 1762). The man was born as a free being,
  notwithstanding he wears chains everywhere. Some
  thinks that they are masters of others, though
  they are slaves even more than the latter. How
  this change could have taken place? I dont know.
  What could do this rightful? This question, I
  suppose, I am able to answer.
• The social contract is the source of every
  political right and legitimacy. The subject of
  social contract is the people itself. When the
  people feels that the basic aims of this contract
  are violated, then it has the right to revolt
  against the violation of the natural rights of
  its members.

15
The will of the all and general will

• Rousseau rejected Montesquieus idea of division
  of powers. He thought that divising of the powers
  of people would be just the same of cuting into
  pieces a human body. The branches of political
  power must form a unified, organic body in his
  opinion.
• Rousseau made a difference between the will of
  the all (volonté de tous) and the general will
  (volonté générale). The will of all is
  everybodys will, that is to say the will of
  every single person, the will of the individuals.
  This form of will could be wrong. The people,
  Rousseau thinks, often do not know what is their
  real interest and need.
• In opposition to this the general will cannot be
  wrong, it intuitively knows always what are the
  true needs and interests of the people. The
  general will is represented by a central
  political institute of the society, which has the
  function represent the entire society.
• In Rousseaus interpretation there is no fixed
  borders between private and public sphere in the
  ideal society of people sovereignty. The people
  live amongst glass walls. It is a collectivistic
  society.

16
David Hume. Custom is the great leader of life

• Eminent representative of Scottish and Brittish
  Enlightenment. David Hume (1711-1776) was a
  founding father of modern conservative political
  theory alongside with the Irish Edmund Burke,
  who criticized harshly the French Revolution and
  Enlightenment.
• According to Hume every working institution of
  present society passed the test of time, and thus
  deserves preservation and maintenance. We should
  be very careful when we want to alter the actual
  society, when we want to transform its
  institutions, because we cannot foresee how these
  changes will influence the entire society, and we
  should rather not make experiments with society.
• The universal link and bondage between people is
  custom and habit. The people do not make any
  social contract or whatsoever but they are
  polished together. The custom helps the
  individual to find her/his way in the life, and
  custom holds together the society as a whole.

17
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). What is
Enlightenment?

• What is Enlightenment raised the question in
  his essay Kant, the leading figure of German
  Enlightenment, (Answer to the Question What is
  Enlightenment?, 1784).
• Enlightenment, said Kant, is mans
• Kant made a difference between the public and
  private usage of reason. He thought that in
  private sphere, when one fulfils his or her
  official obligations, when one does ones work,
  one must always follow the instructions of his
  superior or the official administrative norms and
  instructions of his vocation. Otherwise the life
  of a society cannot go on properly. So the
  private usage of private is limited.
• But the public usage of reason cannot be limited
  in such a way, or the society cannot develop in a
  normal way. Everybody has the right to express
  his or her opinion, his or her critique
  concerning the matters and institutions of
  society.

18
The Perpetual Peace

• In Kants view the history leads to a globalized
  community, where there are no wars anymore, and
  every local and global conflict is treated by one
  harmonized legal system. It is the world of the
  universal civil legal order. It is the world of
  Perpetual Peace, with an overal, completely
  rationally organized society, (or a global
  network of completely rational civil societies).

19
Hegel and the Civil Society as End of History

• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) was
  another important figure of German Enlightenment.
• He rejected very emphatically the idea of social
  contract theory. He thought that it is an
  abstract approach of society. Society, Hegel
  said, is never a bunch of atomic individuals, but
  an organic whole with its own history.
• Hegel followed the organicistic model of society
  which he took over (amongst others) from
  Aristotle, with whom he sympathized very much.
• The source of political legitimacy is the
  traditions and customs of particular peoples.
• The Civil Society with its rational laws means
  the end of history, in Hegels interpretation,
  but there will be no such a happy end of history
  about which Kant was talking. The nations will be
  separated forever (in Hegels view), and each
  develops that form of civil society which is
  characteristic to their own, internal, inherent
  nature.