EVIL IN POLITICS / REVIEW

Lecture 2: The Tyrant and the Wise. The Invention of Political Philosophy.

Thesis: The first political thinkers thought of politics as a theory of justice/ethics. Politics isn’t
a human invention, it is part of a greater whole, which involves objective norms. Politics
should be a way to achieve human perfection through action. Politics is a way to achieve
wisdom. As a result, evil in politics is tyranny (= a government without wisdom and order). In
a context of political decline, wisdom and politics are thought of separately.

Historical context: Ancient Greece. Formation of the polis in city-states.

Philosophia literally means ‘to love wisdom’. Political philosophy is a normative reflection on
politics. It is a reflection of the origin of political institutions.

1) Plato: Wisdom and Politics

Socrates uses the dialogue to develop his philosophical theory: it uses irony to show
contradictions, contradictions to discover ignorance, awareness to seek truth.

→ The Socratic paradox: “I know that I know nothing”.

The Republic​, Plato: dialogue on justice between Thrasymachus and Socrates. They ask
themselves what is the essence of justice. Plato uses the utopia of Kallipolis to illustrate his
theory on justice and political order.

→ A human being is composed and ruled by three different things, which determine their
role as a citizen of Kallipolis: producers and merchants are ruled by their appetites (love for
profit and money, ruled by temperance); soldiers and guards are ruled by their will (love for
victory and honor, ruled by courage); rulers are governed by their reason (desire for
wisdom). In the soul and the city: the rational part should rule, the spirited part should act to
support the rule of the rational part, the appetitive part should accept being governed.

Both soul and city are therefore capable of exhibiting temperance, courage wisdom, from
which results justice.

Two additional rules for Kallipolis: communism (abolition of private families and limitation on
private property) and feminism (education and jobs opened to women).

⇒Faces of evil = disorder, democracy and tyranny. The tyrant is the least happy because he
is governed by his appetites, that are never satisfied. The defective regimes are the
following:
- Democracy = degeneration of oligarchy. Freedom is the supreme good. Lower class
takes power. Ruled by the desire for profit and money. Leads to anarchy.
- Tyranny = degeneration of democracy. No power to maintain order. Society exists in
chaos. The tyrant is consumed by his lower passions. Leads to civil war and the
destruction of the Polis.
 2) Aristotle: Politics and Human Perfection

Aristotle’s ethic is a type of perfectionism. The ethically best life is the one that realizes the
human essence to the highest degree. His theory is also eudaimonistic: happiness = goal.

Politics​: a human being is by nature a political animal. The political community is based on
the nature of the individuals, which is to live in political community in order to achieve its
potentialities at the highest degree. Human beings acquire virtues of character in
self-sufficient city-states.

Correct Deviant

One ruler Kingship Tyranny

Few rulers Aristocracy Oligarchy

Many rulers Polity Democracy

Correct constitution aim at the common benefit, deviant one at the benefit of the rulers. The
goal of the ideal constitution is a “complete activation or use of virtue” (happiness).

→ Middle constitution: based on the middle class, as a mean between the extremes. It
combines democracy, oligarchy and aristocracy, but it is more stable ad more just than
oligarchy and democracy.

3) Epicurus, Seneca: Against Politics

Basis of Epicurus’ theory = materialism and eudaiminism.

→ From materialism he argues that the soul and the gods have a corporeal nature. As a
result, we should neither fear death nor the gods.

Ethics is based on sensations: the elementary sensations of pleasure and pain are the
fundamental guides ot what is good and bad. There are three types of desires:
- Natural and necessary: life, happiness
- Natural and merely natural: pleasant things
- Empty: never satisfied

Hedonism: limited and well balanced pleasure = aim of life

Seneca is a Stoician, inspired by the teaching of Plato on virtues. He holds that evil comes
from human ignorance.

Epitecus distinguishes:
- Prohairetic things: in our power, we can change them
- Aprohairetic things: not in our power, we can’t change them → Politics is evil in
politics.
According to Epicurus, someone who is incapable of living prudently, honorably, and justly
cannot live pleasurably, and vice versa. Wisdom is the chief of the virtues: on it depends all
the rest.

Politics and ethics are separated. The kind of community where human perfection and
happiness can be reached is a community of friends, not a political community.

→ Political community = realm of empty desires, unhappiness = evil

Lecture 3: Dealing with Evil in Historical Times. Politis, Promise, and Salvation.

1) Dealing with Evil in Historical Times: The Earthly City and the Heavenly City.
Augustine. ​City of God

The separation between terrestrial life and eternal life is an important shift introduced by
monotheism and particularly developed by Christianity.

Augustine argues that there are three circles of human society are the family, the political
community and the world. He relies mainly on oppositions.

In the heavenly city live peoples of the Christ, chosen by God, who live according to their
faith. Life eternalis is the supreme good. People are united and live in peace, order and
tranquility.

→ This is opposite in the earthly city, where there is no true justice. Individuals are governed
by emotions and passions, therefore reason is corrupted. Vices govern virtues. Conflict is at
the center of the political life and there are devastating wars all around the world.

Wisdom and happiness are separated from the terrestrial life and even from historical times.
Nature, human life, reason as a source of knowledge, and politics, lose their value. They are
corrupted by the original sin.

As a result: (1) philosophy should be governed by theology, (2) the state should be
submitted to the religious authority, (3) to achieve human perfection means to reach
salvation in the realm of God. Politics is always evil.

2) Politics and Salvation. Interpreting the Divine Law with Human Reason

The most important issues they had to rethink were the relations between: politics and
religion; human reason and revelation; philosophy and theology.

→ Averroes, Maimonides and Aquinas found solutions to accommodate Aristotle’s doctrine

with the Revealed or religious dogmas and to avoid different kinds of evil: fanaticism, division
of the faith community, civil war.

Averroes’ starting point is a certain aspect of evil in politics: fanaticism, intolerance, that are
triggered by an erroneous method of interpretation of the Quran, or of God’s revelation. He
believes that the political chief should prohibit the reading of science books and prevent the
men of science from disclosing the results of their research since the mass of people is
ignorant. Averroes wants to show that philosophy is recommended or mandatory for the
wise. But philosophy is not recommended for those who are not able to reason.

Reason vs. Revelation: There is no contradiction between reason and revelation, or between
philosophy and religion. Revelation is the truth. Revelation asks to practice rational
reasoning in order to discover the truth. Revelation is the new source of law.
The various type of human intelligence:
- Mass of people: God revealed his law through images and narratives, with rhetoric.
- Theologians: people able to reason in a dialectical way
- Elite: people able to reason. God revealed his law through hidden messages,
symbols, metaphors

Revival of Aristotelianism in the Middle Ages. Averroes has a positive vision of human
reason. For those who are able to do demonstrations, human reason is a tool to discover the
truth concerning the beings created by God, therefore, to know their creator, God. The
human natural capacities are not depreciated, as they were by Augustine, neither is human
life. To the contrary, human reason is a tool given by God in order to seek and discover his
essence, to build a science of God.

→ Human reason is a tool to avoid evil in politics: fanaticism, division, war.

Maimonides based his political theory on two premises:

- Aristotle’s thesis on human beings as political animals
- Diversity between human beings, as a threat to political society (irrationality)

Maimonides has a positive vision of human reason. As an Aristotelian, he considers that any
knowledge, any science is based on reason. He reconciles reason and Revelation, that are
both created by God and given by him to human beings. Thus, there is no contradiction
between reason and revelation, philosophy and theology.

Maimonides’ solutions:
- The law: human law, aims at improving life in its political and social dimensions vs.
divine law, higher goal = personal perfection
- The chief: political leader and prophet = intermediary between human beings and
God. He has political virtues and the intellectual knowledge of God

He deduced five types of political regimes based on the articulation of political authority and
religious authority. The ideal chief is both a human chef and a prophet. Thus, evil in politics
(tyranny, divisions, war) can be avoided.

Aquinas. Philosophy is the science of beings and principles accessible to natural reason. By
contrast, theology is the science of principles and truths revealed by God. This raises two
dilemmas: Should politics rely on philosophy or theology? Should philosophy be subsumed
to theology, or theology subsumed to philosophy?
There is a political good since politics is natural. The goal of politics is the common good or
the public good. There are two kinds of perfect communities, the Church and the polis.
Therefore, politics has both an inherent or natural goal and a supernatural goal.

Aquinas’ solutions: four different kinds of laws (= ​a certain rule and measure of acts whereby
man is induced to act or is restrained from acting)
- The eternal law: the community is governed by Divine Reason, which is not subject ot
time. Identical to the mind of God.
- The natural law: derives from divine law and concerns mainly the human beings
(rational beings). = law with moral consent (more general than human law) =
expression of eternal law
- The human law: participates to divine law and adds precisions useful for the
organization of the political community. = positive law = laws actually enacted and put
in force in our human communities.
- The divine law: appear historically t humans through revelation, as divine commands

Lecture 4: No Good, No Evil. The Art of Politics, Republicanism, and Civic

Humanism.

Machiavelli was “the first modern political philosopher who explicitly rejected all earlier
political philosophy as fundamentally insufficient” (L. Strauss). He wrote during the
Renaissance (first half of the 16th century), during a time of political turmoil in Italy.

1) The Prince​ (1513): Authority, Legitimacy and Power

Machiavelli based his argument on:

- Historical experience, facts and examples
- The internal logic of political power without judging it from moral point of view.

In ​The Prince​, Machiavelli defines various types of principalities and princes; describes how
to maintain composite principalities; gives practical advice on a variety of matters; and finally
focuses on the prince qualities.

Machiavelli is in direct opposition to a moralistic theory of politics. The only real concern of
the political ruler is the acquisition and maintenance of power.

→ Machiavelli teaches the rules of political power. Power defines political activity. Politics is
power. Authority and legitimacy don’t matter for political decision-making and political
judgement. What matters is the power to be obeyed. Politics is defined in terms of the
supremacy of coercive power.

Fortuna designates the course of things. It refers to the goodness Fortuna (personification of
luck in Roman religion) and the wheel of fortune. She represents life’s capriciousness,
political instability. Machiavelli’s fortune leads to human misery, affliction and disaster: it
refers to all circumstances that human beings cannot control.
Machiavelli employs the concept of virtù to refer to the range of personal qualities that the
prince will find necessary to reach the most important goals: to ‘maintain his state’ and to
‘achieve great things’. The prince or the ruler is a person of virtù when he has a “flexible
disposition.” The prince can behave in a completely evil fashion, if necessary, or if it is
required by the circumstances.

→ Politics is the art of creating safety or security in a hostile world. There is no good, no bad,
therefore, no evil in politics. Machiavelli identifies authority or legitimacy, and power.

2) The ​Discourses on the Ten Books of Titus Livy​ (1517): Liberty and Conflict

Machiavelli distinguishes the ’vivere sicuro’ (live securely) and the ‘vivere libero’ (live freely):
- A minimal constitutional order is one in which subjects live securely. Strong
government.
- In a fully constitutional regime, the goal of the political order is the freedom of the
community (vivere libero). Active participation of the people.

The French monarchy is a model for the ‘secure’ polity. The French regime seeks security
above all else (for the people as well as for their rulers). Any government that takes vivere
sicuro as its goal generates a passive and impotent populace. Such a society can never be
free (vivere libero). Hence it is only minimally, rather than completely, political or civil.

By contrast, in a fully developed republic such as Rome's, the actualization of liberty is

paramount. Both the people and the nobility take an active role in self-government.
Machiavelli holds that society is divided into two groups:
- The nobility and the aristocracy want freedom simply in order to command others.
- The vast majority of people do not want to be dominated, they resist.

A political regime is a Republic when the opposition between the aristocracy and the people
takes place in a public institution (the parliament) that contains the opposing desires of these
various social groups. It creates a dynamic of freedom.

→ Machiavelli's praise for the role of the people in securing the republic is supported by his
confidence in the generally illuminating effects of public speech upon the citizen body.

M​achiavelli’s position resembles civic humanism in some ways. Hans Baron, “Civic
Humanism” (1925) = the fusion of two distinct ideological currents of Florentine thought:
- Apolitical humanism
- The tradition of patriotic resistance by the Florentine city-state to imperial domination.

Lecture 5: Human Savagery, War and the Sovereign. Social Contract Theories
and Modern Political Science. Thomas Hobbes.

State of nature = state of war. The sovereign is the one able to transform the state of nature
in a civil state, by way of a social contract. Hobbes was the first one to imagine the social
contract, he was later followed by Locke and Rousseau.
Hobbes is the author of ​The Leviathan​ (1651). He is a defender of political absolutism: his
conception of absolutism is the core value of his conception of sovereignty. The sovereign
holds total power of all institutions of civilian and political life, he is the unity and the
incarnation of the people. He has complete control over every aspect of civil life.

→ The state of nature shows that all human beings are equal: we have universal natural
rights. In the civil state, the sovereign holds his power thanks to the consent of the people.
Therefore, he must protect the rights of the governed.

Hobbes is considered by many intellectuals as the first modern political thinker (after
Machiavelli): he created the political language of absolutism and liberalism.

1) Evil in Politics and ​The Leviathan

During his lifetime, Hobbes was a very controversial author. He believed that war, and
especially civil war, were the greatest evil in politics. In the introduction of ​The Leviathan, ​he
describes civil war as the death of political sovereignty. He actually wrote the book during
the English civil war.

Hobbes describes the state of nature by the following (and very famous) quote: “man is a
wolf to man”. He built his theory against the supreme evil that is civil war. Hobbes describes
the state of nature as a state of war.

→ In his opinion, the sovereign is the solution, who he calls the Leviathan. He is a terrifying
monster from the Bible. Hobbes believes that the sovereign should govern by creating fear,
otherwise people will disobey the law and the political society will fall into a civil war.

In Hobbes’ political theory, the Leviathan is a moral God:

- He has absolute power; he provides salvation; he allows us to live in peace and to
achieve reasonable objectives.
- He is moral in the sense that he is mortal: he can be killed by God or by civil war

2) The Scientific Method in Political Theory. Against Aristotle.

The most important difference between Hobbes’ and Machiavelli’s theory lies in the method.
Machiavelli based his political theory on facts while Hobbes based his on science (more
formal, analytical, but also abstract).

→ Hobbes built his method against Aristotle. He believes that all natural phenomenons must
be understood through the principle of causality, which is completely anti-Aristotelian. The
human body is not involved into a big project, but should be explained in terms of causality
and mechanisms. When you know he causes of a creation you have a certain power, you
can create or recreate. It is a way for the conquest of nature. This emphasizes Hobbes’
desire to create a kind of immortal commonwealth, based on science.

Hobbes was revolutionary, at least in his method. His goal was to create a political
organization that would resist a crisis.
 3) Social Contract Theory

The state of nature:

- Individuality. Individualism is a recent expression and Hobbes contributed to it. When
he talks about individuals, Hobbes refers to the morale agency. Morality became the
basis of philosophy, and for Hobbes it is the same, the individual is the starting point
of his political theory. The state of nature results from abstraction. Hobbes believes
that the state of nature is not an empirical reality. In the state of nature, people have
regularly continuous contact with each other, but those interactions are not regulated
by an institution or law, which leads to maximized insecurity. Authority is a human
creation.
- War. The state of nature is a state of war, it is not a permanent fighting, but it is a
state of permanent fear. The situation is similar to a cold war. Therefore, peace is not
natural, only human beings and science can create it.
- Human passions (= emotions). The state of nature creates certain contests and
favorizes certain passions. There are three principal cause of quarrel: competition,
diffidence and glory. The desire to dominate results from the absence of authority. In
the Bible, it is written that the Leviathan is the king of pride, who creates fear.

The sovereign described by Hobbes is an artificial person: he is created by the social

contract, he is a collective creation of the people in the state of nature. He is a representative
of the people with the authority to represent them and to make decisions. The sovereign is
the unity of the diversity of the people. He has absolute power and he is the only source of
law.

→ The sovereign has all powers, this is why he is compared to God.

According to Hobbes, human savagery if so powerful that we need a political monster to

govern us. This is one of the paradoxes of modern political theory. He promoted a complete
political domination based on a fundamental inequality between the sovereign and the
subject. He based the origin of the subject on consent and fear, he is created through an act
of freedom, but the authority of the sovereign is not compatible with the idea of political
freedom. Politics is a human creation. Hobbes’s idea of virtue is to create a sovereign. The
idea that you want to live in peace, you need to renounce to the idea of freedom.

Lecture 6: A New Good Human Nature? Enlightenments, Revolution, and

Empire. Alexis de Tocqueville.

Alexis de Tocqueville wrote several essays on Algeria. He was a strong supporter of brutal
colonization. How to reconcile the celebration of the right of the citizen in ​Democracy in
America​ and the subjection of the native in Algeria that he was promoting at the same time?

In France, Tocqueville is understood as the most important liberal thinkers: he was a

supporter of the separation of power and was against slavery. But they paid no interest on
his thoughts on Algeria. He is an apologist of violent conquest, and defended the
subordination of non-Europeans. Tocqueville’s ambivalence on freedom and on imperialism
highlights the ambivalence of the Enlightenment.

1) Democracy in America​: How the Check the Democratic Powers?

In the 17th and 18th century, the idea of freedom and equality seemed to work hand in hand,
they were the central aspects of the emerging society. In the 19th century, political thinkers
began to think that freedom and equality were not going in the same direction (Benjamin
Constant, John Stuart Mill).

→ For Tocqueville there were new forms of social powers: the middle-class of the
bourgeoisie democracy, emerging in France, in UK and in the US.

According to Tocqueville the concept of popular sovereignty had become an existing reality.
The new democratic regime ruled by the people would be more just and less arbitrary. The
problems of politics was to control it.

2) Local Government, Civil Association, Spirit of Religion

There are three different elements that shape the democracy in America:

→ Tocqueville highlights the importance of the local governments, which represent

democracy at a small scale. They are institutions that allow citizen to participate in politics.

→ The second element is the civil association. There were lots of them in the US.
Tocqueville was impressed by their number and diversity, and considered them to be the
core of American democracy. Civil associations were intermediaries between the individuals
and the state. They could resist the power of the central authority.

→ The third characteristic of the American democratic life was the spirit of religion. In
Europe, religion and democracy were opponents, while in the US they were working hand in
hand. According to Tocqueville, democracy needs religion because it can resist egoism, he
thinks that religion restrains materialist interests.

3) The Tyranny of the Majority, the Democratic Despotism

Tocqueville is also deeply worried by the potential of democratic tyranny. He talks about the
tyranny of the majority, inspired by Aristotle, who states that the danger of democracy is that
it represents the interest of one class of the society and not of the society as a whole.

Tocqueville was less sure than Montesquieu that the institutional arrangements would be
sufficient to resist to the empire of the majority. Tocqueville says that the power of the
majority is unlimited and unstable in a democratic regime.

→ Tocqueville was cared by the charismatic demagogues such as Napoleon, who was able
to unite the masses and create war.

The second threat comes from a democratic feature, which is the egoism as a transformation
of the ethics of self-interest.Tocqueville first says that the ethics of self-interest is useful, is
necessary to democracy, but secondly, he shows that it can degenerate and create a new
kind of despotism: democratic despotism.

There is an opposition the ethics of honor, characterized by glory, vanity, competition, and
on the other hand the ethics of self-interest, which is equally spread among the people and
democratic.

→ Tocqueville worried that if despotism were to take root in a modern democracy it would be
a much more dangerous situation than any other despotism, because this new despotism
would be a corruption of the whole society.

4) Tocqueville on Algeria

The Algerian conquest took place between 1840 and 1847, which coincided with the return
of the Bourbon monarchy. In 1837, Tocqueville was running for a seat in Parliament and
wrote two letters in which he supported a political project affirming a great monument to
France’s glory: the joining of Arab and French culture in North Africa.

Tocqueville supported the colonization for economical and strategic reasons, but he also
viewed it as a civilizing mission that would spread the ideas Enlightenment ideas all over the
world. He saw it as a way to civilize the ‘barbarous’ people.

In 1841, Tocqueville travelled to Algeria and wrote an essay, stating that domination and
colonization should not be possible as no peace was possible. He supported a violent
colonization.

5) The Enlightenment, Slavery and Colonization

According to the Enlightenment thinkers, conquest and colonization were racist and unjust.

Paradoxically, in the name of the struggle against slavery, several thinkers of the
Enlightenment supported imperialism. Condorcet opposed imperial domination but he also
hierarchized societies: European societies had the obligation to civilize less advanced
societies by colonizing them. For some slavery itself became an argument in favor of
colonial conquest in order to free the slaves: colonization in the name of freedom and human
progress.

→ Tocqueville refused the idea of a racial hierarchization in general, and he argued for the
abolition of slavery, but he supported the colonization of Algeria.

Lecture 7: Domination and its Critiques (1). What is Emancipation?

This session will refer to the contemporary debates and the critical perspectives on
domination and emancipation. Today, the exploitation of men is evil in politics.

Exploitation vs. Domination. Exploitation is more specific, and it has an economic

perspective: resources, labor and property. Exploitation is a specific kind of domination.
Emancipation: how people become free by ending domination/exploitation. It has a social,
political and ethical aspect.

1) Kant, the Enlightenment, Individual and Collective Emancipation

Most of the thinkers of the Enlightenment promoted individual freedom.

→ Kant wrote an essay on this matter, entitled ​What is the Enlightenment?, ​in which he says
that the “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is
the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another”.

What is important here is the idea of the personal responsibility that individuals and people
have in their own subordination. Although we usually think that the subordinated is the
victim, Kant believes that the subordinated is partly responsible for his situation. Obedience
relies in consent, not on a lack of freedom.

→ Kant has an idealistic view on emancipation.

2) Marx against Idealism: Philosophy, Theory and Practice. Superstructure and

Infrastructure.

Marx disagrees with Kant’s conception of domination and emancipation. Marx argues that
freedom lies on a materialistic basis, he has a materialistic perception of emancipation. He
believes that philosophy must be connected with political practice: “The philosophers have
only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it”.

→ According to Marx, our society is based on a particular economic system: capitalism. To

change the world and make it more egalitarian, we need to get rid of capitalism.

Marx mostly wrote on capitalism: he was not against it, he thought that it was a necessary
step towards socialism and capitalism. He wanted to understand how capitalism would lead
to its self destruction.

In Marx’s view, the material relations shape everything else. Marx thinks that ideas have no
power: history is not driven by ideas but by material interests. The superstructure comprises
ideology, culture, moral values… but all those do not matter. What is important is the
economic basis: economic interests drive everything.

3) Marx’s Analysis of Capitalism

Marx identified a set of problems that are re-inherent to capitalism.

The first contradiction come from the division of labor, which creates alienation. Labor is
incredibly specialized, to make the economy highly efficient.

→ “The division of labor offers us the first example of how, as long as man remains in
natural society, that is, as long as a cleavage exists between the particular and the common
interest, as long, therefore, as activity is not voluntarily, but naturally, divided, man’s own
deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being
controlled by him.”
As long as there is a division of labor, we are not free, we are enslaved. Capitalism makes
human beings expendable.

Primitive accumulation; Capitalists/Bourgeois get rich while workers are paid very little in
order to make profit. Profit is another word for exploitation = exploitation of man by man.

Crisis are endemic to capitalism: Marx says that we are able to produce too much, and so
capitalist crisis are abundance crisis. Factories are so efficient that there is unemployment:
not everyone needs to work in order to produce for everyone. Unemployment should be
called ‘freedom’ according to Marx.

Capitalism is bad even for capitalists. Within Bourgeois families, everything is based on
economic interests, even marriage. Bourgeois are evil. The Bourgeois family is created for
financial reasons. Marx wanted people to be free from financial constraints, in order for them
to make choices freely.

Capitalism is not only based on the material life, but it is also a set of ideas and values,
linked to this social organization. The economy generates an ideology. The biggest evil in
capitalism is not that there are corrupted people at the top, but that it teaches everyone to be
conformist, anxious, competitive…

4) What is Emancipation? Political Emancipation, Human Emancipation

Marx was a thinker of freedom. In a communist society, where nobody has one specific
sphere of society, there is freedom. Freedom is the kind of life that is not regulated by
specialization, it comes from emancipation.

→ “Each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general
production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow”.

He describes the human rights as a set of rights that aims to protect only one right: the right
to property. The right to freedom is a right to become owner and to be protected as an
owner. Rights are the expression of the Bourgeois’ revolution.

There are two kinds of emancipation

- Political emancipation = separation between the state and the church. The political
power becomes independent and autonomous, it is no longer submitted to a religious
authority.
- Human emancipation = actual emancipation of human (not of the state) from
oppression.

Lecture 8: Domination and its Critiques (2). Race, Gender and Politics.

1) Preliminary Remarks: What is Critique?

The modern turn in political theory: goal = freedom (Kant, Marx) vs. happiness/perfection
(ancient philosophers)
Marx considers freedom as a primary feature of his political utopia, and many others
consider it as politics’ major goal. The modern conception of happiness lies in the boundary
between public and private affairs. It wasn’t the case for ancient philosophers, who
considered happiness as a public issue, as what we have when we attain perfection. For
monotheist thinkers, happiness accompanies our own salvation. Politics should be
subordinate to religion.

→ For modern political thinkers, evil in politics is domination, and the only way to gain
freedom is through emancipation.

In the ​Communist Manifesto​, Marx advocates for an egalitarian society. But equality is not
his highest goal. In his utopian society, nobody has an exclusive sphere of activity, instead
individuals can be accomplished in any subject they want: “it is possible to do one thing
today, another one tomorrow”. Freedom is thus Marx’s highest goal.

→ Marx is still different than the other modern political thinkers, for him human beings are
not naturally free. Kant believes that freedom is something that we are naturally endowed
with and that we need to develop by using our reason. Max does not believe in human
nature, that he considers to be a very abstract concept.

The Enlightenment made an idealistic critique, and according to Marx this critique is not truly
critique. A true critique is made in a precise analysis of the economic, social, historical and
political context. This is what Marx did when he criticized capitalism.

→ Freedom can be obtained when we oppose something, it comes through struggle.

2) After Marx: Critique of Critique. The need for differentiated Critique. Gender and
Race

Marx considered that everyone shared the same experience of alienation: the manner the
workers were exploited by the bourgeois, themselves alienated by the bourgeois family.

→ This poses many issues: men vs. women, white people vs. black people… Marx concept
of domination is too homogeneous. Therefore, we need to develop a new kind of critique.

3) Simone de Beauvoir, ​The Second Sex​ (1949)

This book is considered to be the feminist manifesto, the modern feminist current is based
on it. Simone de Beauvoir makes a critique of Marx and Engels’. She asserts that Engels’
historical materialism is fundamentally incapable of accounting for the origin of women’s
subjugation.

→ The submission of women to men does not exist because of property, and it existed long
before capitalism. Women suffer domination asserted by male workers, who are dominated
by the bourgeois. To emancipate the workers from the bourgeois domination does not mean
that women would be freed from their submission to men.
Simone de Beauvoir defines women as the second sex, because women are defined in
relation to men: “Humanity is male and man defines woman not in relation to herself but as
relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being”.

→ “He is the Subject, he is the Absolute, she is the Other”. Women are considered to be the
recessive gender.

There are many gender stereotypes, that focus on: strength, qualities, money, submission…

De Beauvoir also quotes philosophers such as Aristotle, “the female is a female by the virtue
of a certain lack of qualities”, and Aquinas, who referred to woman as the “imperfect man”,
the “incidental being”.

She argues that feminity is not natural, but rather a social and historical construction. She
criticizes conceptualism, saying that there are no fixed entities that determine given
characteristics: “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman”

→ Distinction between sex and gender.

Simone de Beauvoir concludes that “the bond that unites her to her oppressors is not
comparable to any other”. When the subject consents to hi own subjection and oppression,
this is “an absolute evil”.

4) James Baldwin, ​I am not your Negro

I am not your negro, ​is a documentary film based on James Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript
Remember this House. ​James Baldwin was an American novelist and a social critique. He
played an important role for the gay liberation movement. He became a celebrity for
championing the cause of Black Americans in the 1960s. James Baldwin supported the
non-violent movement headed by Luther King. He thought that Christianity in the US was
strengthening segregation.

→ The Little Rock 9 was a group of nine Afro-American students who was enrolled in the
public school. It led to the Little Rock Crisis.

Lecture 9: A Hopeless World? Radical Evil, Banality of Evil.

Focus on mass crimes, murder, genocides, crimes against humanity… Why?

- History of the 20th/21st century: Rwanda for instance
- Mass crimes involve deportation, systematic rape, torture, disappearance of persons
= intent to destroy a national, ethnic or religious group. High scale, systematic
dimension, and intention to ban a whole outside of humanity. This is the worst evil in
political practice.
- New problems for criminal justice
- They seem normal in a society when they are supported by the legal power. This is
what Hannah Arendt calls ‘banality of evil’.
Hannah Arendt (1906-1975): She grew up with the most crucial political event of her time.
She is one of the prominent thinkers in political theory of the 20st. Her views were very
controversial: like her comparison between Nazism and Stalinism (in ​The Origins of
Totalitarianism ​1951). The book that generated the most controversy is​ Eichmann in
Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil​ (1961). It is one of the most important books on
justice for mass trials.

1) Before Eichmann Trial

After WW2, the allied powers established two tribunals to prosecute axis power leaders
accused of war crimes:
- The International Military Tribunal, which sat in Nuremberg, prosecuted German
leaders
- The International Military Tribunal for the far east in Tokyo prosecuted Japanese
leaders

These trials were a turning point in the history of justice. They allowed for the first time the
conviction of political, administrative servants. It was possible to punish the worst evil in
politics.

Eichmann was a German Nazi. He was one of the major organizers of the Holocaust, and a
member of the SS. He was the “special expert” in charge of arranging for all deportations
into occupied Poland. Eichmann formulated a plan to deport 600 000 Jews into the General
Government in Poland. He attended the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, where a
plan for a “total solution of the Jewish question” was adopted.

→ Eichmann had fled in Argentina to avoid allies’ capture. His identity was discovered by the
MOSSAD, who captured him and sent him to Jerusalem.

Before the trial, Jaspers and Arendt corresponded on how Eichmann should be judged:
What legal system to use? What kind of proportionality between the crimes committed and
the punishment? Is it sufficient to ensure justice?

→ Jaspers believed that the legal basis of the trial was dubious. He denied the right to Israel
to judge Eichmann in the name of the Jewish people and he also stated that no human court
had the power nor the means to judge crimes of the scale.

→ On the other hand, Arendt argued that the legal basis of the trial was not problematic
because Eichmann was already indicted by the trial of Nuremberg, plus, he could have been
judged by a German court, but the country never asked for it’s extradition.

2) Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil​ (1961)

The trial received prominent media coverage. It was important for law, for history and for our
understanding of evil in politics. The charges against Eichmann were numerous (war crimes,
membership in a criminal organization, crimes against humanity and crimes against the
Jewish people).
→ The chief prosecutor objectives were to produce a comprehensive record on the
Holocaust and to show Eichmann guilt.

To defend himself, Eichmann argued that he had no choice, that he was following orders
and that he was bound by an oath of loyalty. But it was not sufficient, and he was found
guilty of all the crimes listed above.

In her book, Arend made several observations about Eichmann, who presented himself as a
disciple of Kant. He referred to Kant’s perception of duty: the legislator was Hitler, and
Eichmann was attempting to follow him.

For Arendt: Eichmann inability to think by himself was showed by his constant use of clichés.
“Everybody could see that this man was not a murder, but anybody could have suspected
him to be a clown”.

→ Finally, she says that Eichmann was banal. He was neither a fanatic or a sociopath. He
was motivated by professional rather than ideological goals. His actions were motivated by
stupidity. The banality of evil is the fact that everyone has some Eichmann in himself.

Kant on radical evil: All human beings have the propensity to choose personal interest over
moral law. It is radical in the sense that it is rooted in the human nature.

→ Arendt: borrows Kant’s “radical evil” to describe the Holocaust in ​The Origins of
Totalitarianism​. But here she uses the term to denote a new form of moral doing. Here evil is
connected to a political regime.

cf. Milgram’s experiments on obedience

Lecture 10: Hell is Other People. Political Unity or Plurality

→ Characterization of the relationship that different groups or individuals establish between

themselves. One is considered to be a virtue: tolerance, and the other one to evil:
intolerance.

Jean-Paul Sartre, ​Huit Clos​: “Hell is other people”.

Tolerance describes the way we should build with differences. It is considered to be a polity
value, as a way to live together. However, this concept faces several paradoxes:
- The paradox of truth: there are two sides of tolerance, acceptance and rejection. It is
essential that the tolerable belief/practice is objectionable.
- The paradox of power: toleration involves freedom and a hierarchy, a relationship of
inequality, power and domination. It is temporary.
- The paradox of virtue: : it seems to be morally right or even morally required to
tolerate what is morally wrong. From an historical perspective, toleration is not a
virtue, it shows the ambivalence.

Toleration comes from the latin “tolerare”, which means to put up with countenance or suffer.
Toleration refers to the acceptance of non-interference with beliefs, ways of life, values, that
one considers to be wrong but tolerable. It is not a virtue to tolerate vice or error, it is not a
virtue to let them spread. Toleration here is weakness.

1) Short History of Toleration

French Wars of Religion (1562-1598): prolonged period of war and popular unrest between
Roman Catholics and Huguenots (Reformed or Calvinist protestants).
- Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre in 1572
- 1598: Edict of Nantes, which granted Huguenots substantial rights and freedoms,
revoked by Louis XIV

Toleration before the 17​th​ century:

- In Christian theology: ​credere non potest nisi volens
- Augustine: individual conscience sometimes must be subjected to force
- Aquinas developed a number of reasons for limited and conditional toleration. But he
also drew strong limits against tolerating any form of heresy.
- Maimonides and Ibn Rushd (Averroes)
- In Protestantism, Luther defended the idea of the individual conscience bound only to
the word of God. Therefore, Luther, followed by Calvin, criticized the authority of the
catholic church, and also the authority of the state. But they both changed their
minds. They defined absolute dogmas to which everyone should adhere, regardless
of freedom of conscience. And according to them, the state was allowed to use
violence against heretics (i.e. against dissident Protestants)

Pierre Bayle: ​A Philosophical Commentary on These Words of the Gospel ​(1686), toleration
as freedom of conscience.

John Locke: ​A Letter Concerning Toleration​. He based his defense of toleration on political
arguments, rather than religious or on theological ones. His thesis is that toleration rests on
the necessary separation of Church and State, whose powers should be limited.

John Stuart Mill: He argues that the modern conception of toleration is no longer
preoccupied with the question of religious harmony but is instead based on the separation
between the public and the private spheres. Toleration supports the freedom that we should
have in order to develop our individuality. This is the liberal version of toleration.

2) Four Schools of Thought

The permission conception: as members of the majority, we accept the fact that some
people think, act or live differently, as long as their differences remain within the private
sphere.

The coexistence conception: As members of a group, or as individuals, we accept the fact

that other groups or individuals think, act or live differently, we pursue our own goals and
seek peace and a good relationship with the other groups.

→ Rawls, ​Theory of Justice​ on the veil of ignorance.

→ The state doesn’t represent nor embodies the majority that would be superior to the
minority. Freedom of conscience is limited by the common interest. Therefore, toleration is
based on equality.

The respect conception: As members of a group, or as individuals, we accept the fact that
other groups or individuals think, act or live differently, we respect members of other cultural
life-forms or religions as moral and political equals.

The esteem conception: As members of a group (in terms of culture, opinion, religion, sexual
orientation, and so on), or as individuals, we accept the fact that other groups or individuals
think, act or live differently, we take the beliefs of the others to be ethically valuable
conceptions that are in some way ethically attractive and held with good reasons.

→ Michael Walzer and post modern toleration.

3) Is Toleration a Democratic Virtue or is it Anti-Democratic?

The problem. ​Democracy is self-government by the people. This kind of collective

organization should gather different people together in institutions and public debates. What
is important is that this form of inclusion must not eliminate differences. This inclusion should
allow differences to exist side by side. Is toleration is essence of democracy?

The test: conscientious objection. It is a claim to an exception in the name of a particular

belief, and also in the name of freedom of conscience. This is not civil disobedience.*

→ When there is an exception, the one who grants the exception has the power to refuse it.
It depends on his arbitrary will. For the one who benefits from the exemption, he needs to
recognize the exceptional situation he finds himself in. By recognizing this exception, he also
recognizes the arbitrary power. So, he recognizes and then legitimizes the relationship of
domination.

Even when we understand toleration as cooperation and coexistence, toleration involves a

contradiction: toleration always leads to inequality. Thus, toleration leads democracy to
contradictions.

On the contrary, the concept of equality is the most inclusive. Toleration is not the core of
democracy. Equality is the core of democracy. But a democracy demands exemption,
exception, objection, and dissent. They encourage public debate. Minorities and opposing
opinions keep democracy honest.

Lecture 11: Disagreement in Politics. Social Conflicts, Deliberation, and

Democracy.

Human beings have different forms of societies and political organizations: political life is not
natural but rather a human creation, they change through the action of the members.

→ What is the purpose of political organization?

 - Freedom. The state was created for the sake of freedom. The state was created to
protect the law, and it is through the law that human beings can be free.The role of
the state is to limit individual freedom so that people can coexist (Rousseau).
- Security. The state was created so that individuals might live in peace and security,
because without the state “man is a wolf for man” (Hobbes). For a community to be
safe, one must be able to take binding decision.

Negative liberty is the absence of obstacles, barriers or constraints. Negative liberty is the
absence of obstacles, barriers or constraints.

→ The rule of the majority turns into the rule of unanimity. A condition of social stability is to
be able to decision as a group, through discussions and debates. In a democracy, the
people is the sovereign. Political decisions are thus the decisions of the people, but the
people are not in unity.

1) Liberal Paradigms

These theories are based on an elitist conception of democracy. It is a conception for which
democracy must not be the government of the people by the people, who is dangerous.

In his book ​Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy​ (1942), Joseph Schumpeter states that
citizens are apathetic, manipulative and unable to make the rights decisions, because they
do not have a unified homogeneous will. He proposes a new conception of democracy,
based on the competitive struggle of parties to win votes in elections. This competition takes
place between elites and interest groups.

→ This is an economic model. Schumpeter uses market theory. He thinks that citizens are
like consumers who choose products. He views democracy as a market.

Kenneth Arrow, in his book ​Social Choice and Individual Values ​(1951), says that if people
have different interests and vote differently it is not rational to think that the collective
decision is the majority decisions because the minority still exists. This is a critic of
aggregative democracy.

In the 1960s and 1970s, new theories of democracies were developed, especially theories of
participatory democracy:

- Participation of all the citizens = condition of political freedom

- Democracy is more than the vote, it is a way of life.
- Conflicts and disagreements should not be erased by the vote, but should lead to a
common public language.

Participatory mechanisms are then invented to involve citizens in collective decisions:

consultation procedures, forums, etc.

Jon Elster, ‘The Market and the Forum”. He argues that there are interactions between
citizens’ preference and the political options that are offered. For instance, if politicians or
someone who speaks in the public space says that we must resist an authoritarian power,
then the option to resist becomes possible.
What is important is the rule of deliberation. Deliberation is not a market, but rather a forum.
It is essential to analyze the way citizens develop their preferences. However, the core of
democracy is not so much the vote as the moment or the process of creating citizens’
political preferences.

→ The political virtues of deliberation: it obliges us to take others into account. When one
deliberates, one confronts his interests with the common good and the general interest. This
confrontation enables to make a rational decision.

2) Theories of Deliberative Democracy

According to the procedural model, a political decision is fair and legitimate if it has been
made following certain procedures. What matters is not the content but how the decision is
made. A political decision that is legitimate by virtue of the procedure may not be fully just or
fair. Legitimacy is a weaker idea than justice.

The substantive conception of a democracy provides a safeguard against the risks that is
involved by the proceduralist conception. A decision is fair if it results from debate, from
public deliberation and if it is consistent with principles of justice expressed in fundamental
rights and freedoms. The legitimacy of political decision rest on the conformity with
substantive values.

Jürgen Habermas shows that in deliberation, one respects both procedural and substantive
rules. Substantive values (human rights, fundamental freedoms) and formal criteria
(deliberative procedures, democracy as the will of the people) are inseparable.

3) Objections: Inclusiveness in Public Debates

Nancy Fraser has been conducted a debate with Habermas for many years. She wants to
perfect the concept of public space developed by Habermas. She relies on historical studies
to develop two things:

1-Historically, public space has been based on exclusions: women, people of color, the poor,
have been excluded.

→ Regarding gender, Nancy Fraser says that after the French and the American Revolution,
public space was built on a certain ethos, in opposition to the culture that was developed in
the salons, which provided informal education for women.

→ Regarding class, Nancy Fraser argues that the origin of public space lies in civil
associations. These associations were not accessible to everyone. They were reserved for
the Bourgeois, and by serving as a model for the public space, they made the Bourgeois the
universal model for the public space.

2-Historically, it has existed public counter-spaces, such as associations created by women

and for women at the end of the 19th century. African Americans has built a common public
space in churches, where they fought against racism, created news papers, organized
conventions…
Lecture 12: Globalized Politics and Moral Responsibility. Three Major
Contemporary Issues.

Kant, ​Religion Within the Bounds of Bare Reason. ​“Freedom will never arrive; for, one
cannot ripen to freedom if one has not previously been set free (one must be free in order to
be able to use one's powers purposively in freedom)”.

1) What is Globalization?

David Held, David Goldblatt, Anthony McGrew, Jonathan Perraton, ​Global Transformations.

Globalization can be characterized by a new relationship between the local and the global.
Local actions can have global consequences. Conversely, the global can depend on the
local. Globalization is this change of scale of human actions. It's a change that concerns
space. It's a change that concerns also time, because actions can be done very quickly.

Globalization is also characterized by the multiplicity of networks: communication networks,

production networks, trade and sales networks.

Globalization is this intensification of indirect interference between human beings.

2) Global Poverty. Thomas Pogge.

Global poverty is one of the embodiments of evil in politics.

- The number of people living below the extreme poverty line ($ 1.90 per day and per
person) in the world has fallen by just over $ 1 billion in thirty years (from $ 1.9 billion
in 1981 to 800 million in 2013), according to the World Bank.
- 150 million children work in the world while international standards prohibit it. 70
million in dangerous conditions. The 85 wealthiest concentrate as much wealth as the
poorest 3.5 billion. The cumulative wealth of the richest 1% of the world has
exceeded that of the remaining 99%.

Within the moral debate, Pogge argues that there are three options:
- Most of us believe that these duties are rather feeble, meaning that it isn’t very wrong
of us to give no help at all.
- Some have argued that our positive duties are quite stringent and quite demanding.
- Others have defended an intermediate view according to which our positive duties,
insofar as they are quite stringent, are not very demanding.

According to Pogge, we do have positive duties to rescue people from life-threatening

poverty. He promotes a third way of thinking about the justice of a radical inequality. He
focuses on the role that the design of the global institutional order plays in the persistence of
severe poverty. He holds that global poverty derives from the global economic order. We are
preserving our great economic advantages by imposing a global economic order that is
unjust in view of the massive and avoidable deprivations it foreseeably reproduces.
→ Pogge holds that the global poor have a compelling moral claim to some of our affluence
and we, by denying them what they are morally entitled to and urgently need, are actively
contributing to their deprivations. This is an injustice.

Three types of responsibility:

- Global institutional arrangements are causally implicated in the reproduction of
massive severe poverty.
- Governments of our affluent countries bear primary responsibility for these global
institutional arrangements and can foresee their detrimental effects.
- Citizens of these affluent countries bear responsibility for the global institutional
arrangements their governments have negotiated in their names.

3) Ethics for a Globalized World

Kant is the one who coined the conception of morality as autonomy. The ethics of autonomy
id based on two beliefs:
- All individuals can live according to a self-government morality (principle of freedom).
- All of us have an equal ability to see for ourselves what morality calls for (principle of
equality).

This ethics of autonomy is based on the abilities of the individuals. We ourselves legislate
the moral law. This is not selfishness or subjectivism: it is the affirmation that the individual is
the source of morality. The individual becomes the center from which all morality, all ethics,
has to be understood.

Globalization puts us in relation with human beings who are at a distance, but on whom we
act. We are more interdependent than ever. We are linked by larger networks. Our concept
of moral responsibility can no longer be limited to actions that we do directly. We need to
articulate the concept of dignity with that of interdependence. We need to think of
responsibility not only at the individual level, but at the collective level.

According to Amartya Sen, despite unprecedented increases in overall opulence, the

contemporary world denies elementary freedoms to vast numbers-perhaps even the majority
of people. Sometimes the lack of substantive freedoms relates directly to economic poverty,
to the lack of public facilitates and social care. ln other cases, the violation of freedom results
directly from a denial of political and civil liberties by authoritarian regimes.

Martha Nussbaum developed that freedom is not an abstract faculty in the individual, but it is
a relationship we have with the world, with our environment. We can be free if our
environment gives us abilities to act. It is a new conception of freedom as interaction.

Both A. Sen and M. Nussbaum approach emphasizes functional capabilities or "substantive

freedoms", such as the ability to live to old age, engage in economic transactions, or
participate in political activities.

We need to think of forms of collective responsibility that do not associate either causal
responsibility or blameworthiness with discrete individuals; and do not locate the source of
moral responsibility solely in the free will of individual moral agents.