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  • 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

  • philosophy 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 this 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 recognize, not without dangers,

  • often severe dangers of its own.

  • Why study just these thinkers and not others?

  • 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 can easily

  • degenerate into a kind of antiquarianism,

  • into a sort of pedantry. 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 refuted,

  • 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 kind of strange historical appendage attached to

  • the trunk of political science; it is constitutive of its

  • deepest problems. If you doubt the importance 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 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 their frenzy

  • from some academic scribbler of a few years back" .

  • 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 permanent

  • questions that political scientists still continue to

  • rely on in their work. The great thinkers are great

  • not because they've created some set of museum pieces that can be

  • catalogued, admired, and then safely

  • ignored like a kind of antiquities gallery in the

  • Metropolitan 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 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, 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 "because Plato says so,"

  • or "because Nietzsche says so." There are no final authorities

  • in that respect in philosophy because even the greatest

  • 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 into their

  • conversation. We are called upon first to

  • read and listen, and then to judge "who's

  • right?" "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.

  • Among 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 pronounce 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 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 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 perhaps the oldest and most

  • fundamental 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 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 more common, some mixture,

  • a combination of these 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 government. The political world does not

  • present itself as simply an infinite variety of different

  • shapes. It is structured and ordered

  • into a few basic regime types. In this, I take it to be one of

  • the most important propositions and insights of political

  • science.

  • 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 feel 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 he 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 friendship,

  • 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, 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 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

  • democratic regime, properly speaking,

  • in Democracy in America, he started first with our

  • formal political institutions as enumerated in the Constitution,

  • such things as the separation of powers, the division between

  • state and federal government and so on,

  • 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 are 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 determined over long

  • centuries the shape 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 example 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

  • country, 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 further 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 requiring judgment based on

  • deliberation and experience?

  • Is a streak of cruelty and a willingness 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 CEO, 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 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 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 advisor to the

  • Medici. Hobbes was the tutor to a royal

  • household who followed the King into exile during the English

  • Civil War. And Locke was associated with

  • the Shaftsbury Circle who also 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 Jacques Rousseau,

  • "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

  • whose 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 study of the regime, as we've seen,

  • 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 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 these 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?

  • Even 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 believe,

  • 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 more

  • fundamental. And this finally raises 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 political 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 later 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 virtue

  • 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 because 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 anywhere. This makes it difficult,

  • you could say and this is Aristotle'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 philosopher can never be

  • truly loyal to anyone or anything but what is best.

  • Think of that: it raises a question about

  • 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 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 philosophy 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

  • allegiances 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 quest,

  • 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 tribute 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 Wednesday.

  • Okay? It's nice to see you back,

  • and have a very good but thoughtful September 11^(th).

Professor Steven Smith: Let me start today by asking the

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