Introduction to Political Philosophy: Lecture 1 Transcript

What is political philosophy?

September << back

11, 2006
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 in some ways might seem a case of putting the cart
before the horse, or the cart before the course maybe, because how can you say, how can we say what political philos ophy
is in advance of doing it? 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 the field of political science.
Yes, all right. It exists alongside of other areas of political inquiry like American 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 oldest and 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 thi s respect it 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 social sciences, 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 recogniz e, not without dangers, often severe dangers of its own. Why study just these thinkers and not other s?
Is not any so-called list of great thinkers or great texts likely to be simply 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 ca n
easily degenerate into a kind of antiquarianism, into a sort of pedant ry. We find ourselves easily intimidated by a list of
famous names and end up not thinking for ourselves. Furthermore, doesn't the study of old books, often very old books, risk
overlooking the issues facing us today? What can Aristotle or Hobbes tells us about the world of globalization, of terrorism, of
ethnic conflict and the like? Doesn't political science make any progress? After all, economists no longer read Adam Smith. I
hesitate to... I don't hesitate to say that you will never read Adam Smith in an economics course here at Yale, and it is very
unlikely that you will read Freud in your psychology classes. So why then does political science, apparently uniquely among
the social sciences, continue to study Aristotle, 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 alive to them throughout the semester. Yes? Okay. One
reason I want to suggest that we continue to read these books is not because political science makes no progress, or that
we are somehow uniquely fixated on an ancient past, but because these works provide us with the most basic questions that
continue 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 do not, but their questions are often put with a kind of
unrivaled clarity and insight. The fact is that there 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 refut ed, or replaced, or historically superceded; they remain in many ways constitutive of our
most basis outlooks and attitudes. They are very much alive with us today, right. So political philosophy is not just some ki nd
of strange historical appendage attached to the trunk of political science; it is constitutive of its deepest problems.
If you doubt the importanc e of the study of political ideas for politics, consider the works of a famous economist, John
Maynard Keynes, everyone's heard of him. Keynes wrote in 1935. "The ideas of ec onomists 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 their frenzy 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 "academic scribblers" who have written books that continue to impress and create the forms of
authority with which we are familiar. But one thing we should not do, right, one thing we should not do is to approach these
works as if they provide, somehow, answers, ready-made answers to the problems of today. Only we can provide answers to
our problems. Rather, the great works provide us, so to speak, with a repository of fundamental or perman ent questions that
political scientists still continue to rely on in their work. The great thinkers are great not because they've creat ed some s et of
museum pieces that can be catalogued, admired, and then safely ignored like a kind of antiquities gallery in the Met ropolitan
Museum of Art; but rather because they have defined the problems that all later thinkers and scholars have had to use in
order to make sense of their world at all. Again, we still think in terms of the basic concepts and categories that were creat ed
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, "E very question must have a correct answer, for every question one answer." That itself is an
eminently contestable proposition. Among the great thinkers there is profound disagreement over the answers to even the
most fundamental questions concerning justice, concerning rights, concerning liberty. In political philosophy, it is never a
sufficient answer to answer a question with a statement "becaus e Plato says so," or "because Nietzsche says so." There are
no final authorities in that respect in philosophy because even the great est thinkers disagree profoundly with one another
over their answers, and it is precisely this disagreement with one another that makes it possible for us, the readers today, to
enter int o their conversation. 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 to rely on our own powers of reason and
judgment, in other words the freedom of the human mind to determine for us what seems right or best. Okay?
But what are these problems that I'm referring to? What are these problems that constitute the subject 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. Amo ng
the oldest and still most fundamental questions 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? What constitutes the
ground of human dignity? Is it freedom? Is it virtue? Is it love, is it friendship? And of course, the all important question, even
though political philosophers and political scientists rarely pronounc e it, namely, quid sit deus, what is God? Does he exist?
And what does that imply for our obligations as human beings and citizens? Those are some of the most basic and
fundamental problems of the study of politics, but you might say, where does one ent er this debate? Which questions and
which thinkers should one pick up for ones elf?
Perhaps the oldest and most fundamental question that I wis h to examine in the course of this semester 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
us to consider. The concept of the regime is pe rhaps the oldest and most fundament al of political ideas. It goes back to Plato
and even before him. In fact, the title of the book that you will be reading part of for this semester, Plato's Republic, is
actually a translation of the Greek word politea that means constitution or regime. The Republic is a book about the regime
and all later political philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato, and that means that it must provide a series of variati ons, 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 more common, some mixture, a combination of thes e
three ruling powers. The regime is defined in the first 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' s
rights and responsibilities. The regime again refers above all to a form of go vernment. The political world does not present
itself as simply an infinite variety of different shapes. It is structured and ordered int o a few basic regime types. In this , I take
it to be one of the most important propositions and insights of political s cience. Right? So far?
But there is a corollary to this insight. The regime is always something particular. It stands in a relation of opposition to other
regime types, and as a consequence the possibility of conflict, of tension, and war is built in to the very structure of politics.
Regimes are necessarily partisan, that is to say they instill certain loyalties and passions in the same way that one may fee l
partisanship to the 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 different regimes, but even within them, as different parties and groups
with loyalties and attachments contend for power, for honor, and for interest. Henry Adams once cynically reflected that
politics is simply the "organization of hatreds," and there is more than a grain of truth to this, right, although h e did not say
that it was also an attempt to channel and redirect those hatreds and animosities towards something like a common good.
This raises the question whether it is possible to transform politics, to replace enmity and factional conflict with frien dship, to
replace conflict with harmony? Today it is the hope of many people, both here and abroad, that we might even overcome,
might even transcend the basic structure of regime politics altogether and organize our world around global norms of justice
and international law. Is such a thing possible? It can't be ruled out, but such a world, I would note--let 's just say a world
administered by international courts of law, by judges and judicial tribunals --would no longer be a political world. Politics only
takes place within the context 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 the entire way of life, th e
moral and religi ous 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 character type with distinctive traits and qualities. So the study of regime politics is in part a study of
the distinctive national character types that constitutes a citizen body. To take an example of what I mean, when Tocqueville
studied the American regime or the democ ratic regime, properly speaking, in Democ racy in America, he started first with our
formal political institutions as enumerated in the Constitution, such things as the separation of powers, the division betwee n
state and federal government and so o n, but then went on to look at such informal practices as American manners and
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 and habits helped to constitute the democratic regime. And
this regime--in this sense the regime describes 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 and rights and privileges.
This raises a further set of questions that we will consider over the term. How a re regimes founded, the founding of regimes?
What brings them into being and sustains them over time? For thinkers like Tocqueville, for example, regimes are embedded
in the deep structures of human history that have det ermined over long centuries the shap e of our political institutions and
the way we think about 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 or founding fathers as we might call
them. These statesmen--Machiavelli for ex ample refers to Romulus, 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 count ry, by their conduct
and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good
government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on
accident and force." There we see Hamilton asking the basic question about the founding of political institutions: are they
created, as he puts it, by "reflection and choice," that is to say by a deliberate act 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 furt her question that we will study,
and is inseparable from the study of regimes. N'est pas? Who is a statesman? What is a statesman? Again, one of the oldest
questions of political science, very rarely asked by the political science of today that is very skeptical of the language of
statesmanship. In its oldest 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 for sound statesmanship? How
does statecraft differ from other kinds of activities? Must a good statesman, as Plato believed for example, be a philosopher
versed in poetry, mathematics, and metaphysics? Or is statesmanship, as Aristotle believed, a purely practical skill requirin g
judgment based on deliberation and experience? Is a streak of cruelty and a willing ness to act immorally necessary for
statecraft, as Machiavelli infamously argued? Must the statesman be capable of literally transforming human nature, as
Rousseau maintains, or is the sovereign a more or less faceless bureaucrat in manner of a modern CE O, as, for example,
someone like Hobbes seems to have believed? All of our texts that we will read--the Republic, the Politics, the Prince,
the Social Contract--have different views on the qualities of statecraft and what are those qualities necessary to fou nd 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 philos ophy is an
imminentlypractical discipline, a practical field. Its purpose is not simply contemplation, its purpose is not reflection alone: it is
advic e giving. None of the people we will study this semester were 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 the world. But the great thinkers were very far from being just, so to speak, detached intellectuals. Plato undertook
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 in the foreign service of his native Florence, and wrote as an adviso r to
the Medici. Hobbes was the tutor to a royal household who followed the King into exile during the En glish Civil War. And
Locke was associated with the Shaftsbury Circle who als o was forced into exile after being accused of plotting against the
English King. Rousseau had no official political connections, but he signed his name always Jean Jac ques Roussea u,
"citizen of Geneva," and was approached to write constitutions for Poland and for the island of Corsica. And Tocqueville was
a member of the French National Assembly whos e experience of American democracy deeply affected the way he saw the
future of Europe. So the great political thinkers were typically engaged in the politics of their times and 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 st udy of the regime, as we've seen, as I've just tried to
indicate, rooted in, in many ways, the practical experienc e of the thinkers we'll be looking at; but the study of regime poli tics
either implicitly or explicitly raises a question that goes beyond the boundary of any given society. A regime, as I've said,
constitutes a people's way 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 democratic regime such as ours, the study of
political philosophy is in many ways a kind of immersion into what 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 with all the others, okay? Underlying this cacophony of regimes is the question always, which of thes e regimes 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 best regime? E ven to raise such a
question seems to pose insuperable obstacles. Isn't that a completely subjective 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 aristocratic republic in which only the few best habitually rule; or is the best regime as the moderns belie ve, a
democratic republic where in principle political office is open to all by virtue of their membership in society alone? Will the
best regime be a small closed society that through generations has made a supreme sacrifice towards self-perfection? Think
of that. Or will the best regime be a large cosmopolitan 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 being with a certain set of
character traits. Is that type the common man, is it found in democracies; those of 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 m ore fundament al.
And this finally rais es the question of the relation between the best regime or the good regime, and what we could say are
actually existing regimes, regimes that we are all familiar with. What function does the best regime play in politic al science?
How does it guide our actions here and now? This issue received a kind of classic formulation 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 lat er on in
the Politics--for the good citizen you could say patriotism is enough, to uphold and defend the laws of your own country
simply because they are your own is both necessary and sufficient. Such a view of citizen virt ue runs into the obvious
objection that the good citizen of one regime will be at odds with the good citizen of another: a good citizen of contemporary
Iran will not be the same as the good citizen of contemporary America.
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 becaus e it is good. Some sense of this was
demonstrated in Abraham Lincoln's judgment about Henry Clay, an early idol of Lincoln's. Lincoln wrote of Clay, "He loved
his country," he said, "partly because it was his own country" --partly because it was his own country--;"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 of freedom. That idea was not the property of one particular country, but it was constitutive of
any good society. The good human being, it would seem, would be a philosopher, or at least would have 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 best regime embodies a supreme paradox, it would seem. It is superior
in some ways to all actual regimes, but it has no concrete existence any where. This makes it difficult, you could say and thi s
is Aristotle's point, I think, this makes it difficult for the philosopher to be a good citizen of any actual regime. Philosophy wil l
never feel fully or truly at home in any particular society. The philos opher can never be truly loyal to anyone or anything b ut
what is best. Think of that: it raises a question about issues of love, loyalty, and friendship.
This tension, of course, bet ween 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 philosophy would be unnecessary or redundant. It would
wither away. Political philosophy exists and only exists in that... call it "zone of indeterminacy" between the "is" and the
"ought," between the actual and the ideal. This is why political philos ophy is always and necessarily a potentially disturbing
undertaking. Those who embark on the quest for knowledge of the best regime may not return the same people that they
were before. You may return with very different loyalties and allegianc es than 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 ques t,
for this desire for knowledge 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 have realized it when you walked
in to this class today, but the study of political philosophy may be the highest tri bute we pay to love. Think of that. And while
you're thinking about it you can start reading Plato's Apology for Socrates which we will discuss for class on Wednes day.
th
Okay? It's nice to see you back, and have a very good but thought ful September 11 .
[end of transcript]