Political Philosophy
Rousseau
De la liberté des ancient comparée à celle des modernes
Rousseau is the culprit of many of the evils associated with the illiberal tendencies with liberal democracy. Liberal democracy is the idea that we need in democracy, but is countered by the ideas that we put into a constitution. Many people have worried that Rousseau allowed for illiberal democracy. He doesn’t sufficiently think through the liberal notion of democracy.
Hegel worries that there is pure subjectivism in Rousseau, there is no relation between subjective and objective values. If your view clashes with the general view, then your view is basically just wrong if it isn’t the same. When comes the objective arguments? You could in theory figure out the general will without asking what the general will. Could there ever be a situation in which all the individuals are wrong about what the general will is?
Isaiah Berlin argued that a danger in Rousseau is that we can force people to be free. The forcing could be a mechanism that brings about what the revolutionaries likes. Berlin likes Constance.
Constance prioritises individual liberty over collective liberty.
Constance explains that what Rousseau stands for no longer fits with contemporary society, but fits better with ancient society, like that of Athens. There there was lots of collective liberty but not personal liberty. Me individually could be extorted today because the majority doesn’t like me.
It is about the definition of liberty. In Greece, freedom was seen as the ability to collectively self-determine. We are not free when there is a dictator like Xerxes who comes and takes over our country. Unfreedom is when we collectively cannot determine our own lives. But today, says Constance, we have come to have a different notion of freedom; of the individual. We worry about society coming into my private sphere and telling me how I ought to live, restraining my religious freedom, or my right to speech. Today we think about Private Jouissance, private pleasures. Liberty has become an entirely individual notion. In modern society you are not free if the majority restrains your individual freedom. We worry that in the democratic forum, I have a lifestyle that the others don’t like, and they could forbid me from having it. Just to be sure, this is about definitions. Negative liberty for Berlin is the modern liberty of Constance, and positive liberty is that of ancient liberty.
Rousseau is basically the figure in Constance’s work who is anachronistic. We have a fundamentally different world, but Rousseau still lives in the old. And the problem is that Rousseau has been extremely influential. The general will of Rousseau is unconstrained. And as such it is dangerous; we may have tyranny of the majority.
Constance really worries about what others in Paris thinks of him; and lives a really disagreeable lifestyle, which is why he wants to guard himself against the majority. He worries also at the end of the essay that it would be dangerous if a dictator actually took power over us: but it would also be dangerous if we forget that an internal dictator may arise. So we have to participate in a representative democracy. Rousseau wanted a direct democracy, and hated representative. Still what is important is that we participate: please participate.
Thinking it through, you don’t actually need a democracy in the idea of negative freedom. A dictator could do this job just as well as anyone else. Democracy is like an annoying side-thought in the negative liberty-idea. We may need democracy for certain actual things, but fact of the matter is that democracy itself has no intrinsic use.
In the book that the professor portrays, Rousseau is the hero of liberty. Whilst the view of Constance is more problematic. She is in favor of ancient philosophy. She tries to show that altough we associate the origin of liberalism and modern liberty with Hobbes and Locke and secularism, this only really came very late. The French revolution is not the birth of the modern liberal form, but is the last time that ancient liberty really came into force. The counter revolution really is the revolution of modern liberty. She argues that it is only late in history that we discovered in negative liberty, and it is like a side-track that we need to get off of. A counter-revolution in the sense that many land-owners were afraid of all these democratic experiments and wanted some guard-breaks against the perils of democracy. They wanted to restore the monarchy to protect the private property of the land-owners. Modern liberty is not born out of a protection of the minority as Constance thinks it, but really it was not the weak minority that was protected, but the rich and wealthy. By installing a liberal democracy we ensure that it is properly restrained.
For Rawls, the main problem of utilitarianism is that it allows for the idea that we have one group to the advantage of others. One group as an instrument for the others. Rawls says that no, we need certain liberal guard-rails to make sure that democracy never goes astray. The general will for Rousseau if you think about it is quite similar to justice, which is what we all are looking for. Rawls does not see himself as an enemy of Rousseau, but thinks it is an instrument at reaching the general will.
Marx
The main architect of class based socialism.
He creates really a whole vocabulary for the map of political philosophy.
The most important thing is that he is a critic of capitalism and proponent of socialism. Marx used the term and socialism and communism interchangably. Many people have come to use communism as the last stage of communism. Within Marx there are however two stages in the socialist alternative. Marx spends all his time on the perils of capitalism. He didn’t do much to talk about his own theory of justice. There were several marxists for this, like not thinking that he should make a blueprint for what is to happen. Someone will have to realise these things and he himself cannot know that. He thinks a lot of things cannot be known yet. We don’t know much about the alternative for Marx.
However, the first phase, of socialism, is about nationalising the means of productions, like natural resources, factories and mills, and these will be put under the control of the workers that work in them. They produce wealth, and they own that wealth. Healthcare must be free but wages will be largely extent. In what we could call the last stage, this really looks close to a state of anarchism, a stateless society in which the government has withered away, and the market system is abolished. Here the principle is from each according to their ability to each according to their needs. People will be able to unleash their creative forces by working in a way that helps you and in which the proceeds go to those that need it. The labour will not be alienated but will be done because one wants to do labour.
Many of the theories you have seen so far in this course are seen by Marx as ideology. Ideology, is a story told by those in power, to make you believe that the current system is the right thing to do. The story about the social contract in Hobbes and Locke, is made to think that current society is great. For Locke the current liberal society that protects property rights, would be a story that is produced for the sake of defending his own class. The declaration of the right’s of men in the French revolution is also an example of this: it seems fantastic, individuals are safeguarded, but it is an event of the kind of rules, principles and conventions that best advance the interest of the leading class. Human rights is a story invented by capitalism to seperate people and to create stability in the current system. It is important to understand what lies behind this for Marx.
Marx is a very complicated figure when it comes to talking about the right thing to do. Because in Marx, altough his private life consisted of getting the revolution under way, and his writings seem to be full of moral denigration of the things he argues against and praise for the things he want to come to be, there is no thought about justice or morality. He thinks these are fundamentally ideological concepts, he doesn’t want to work out a theory of morality. But that is a bit strange; because the private life has a lot of the moral jargon which seems to be geared to making sure capitalism fails, but rejects talking about justice and morality. So try to read the text in terms of what Marx likes and dislikes. He also wants to bring about change.
Habermas critiques many theories of justice: he says that many liberals today write their theory of justice from their desks, but it needs to be applied in reality.
Habermas has argued for this or that position in German society quite a lot, yet at the same time agrees fundamentally that we cannot have a blueprint for society.
Two central concepts: alienation and exploitation.
The first is stressed in his early writings, and the latter is central in his economic theory of capital. These two notions are both morally charged. So it is almost impossible to use these terms as purely descriptive terms.
Feuerbach and Hegel
In one of his early pieces, Critique of the philosophy of right, Marx develops the left-wing hegelian critique. Feuerbach is also one of these people. He talks about christianity and God and the heavenly family as a way to alienate human beings. He thins that concentrating on a semi-platonic reality will make us less think about reality, whilst in reality we should be thinking about the here and the now.
Marx in a feuerbachian way ends up saying that religion is the opium of the people. It is an interesting statement. It is in contrast to Feuerbach, that religion is the cause of alienation, it is actually the result of alienation, or a symptom of alienation. He means that religion is opium because it helps people to deal with a difficult reality. It is a sigh of the oppressed. Proletarians are exploited and alienated and religion is a way to cope with that. It’s not the drug that causes alienation, but rather capitalism, and opium helps you to deal with that. Religion is rather the heart of a world lacking it.
So we should start change one the level of material configurations. After a change on a material basis, the rest is going to follow. So we want to start from matter.
Alienation and species-being. When we think of alienation even in everyday language, there are two things that should belong together but have come apart. I belong to something or someone and that’s the proper way it should be, and then it comes apart because of something else. This happens when we are deprived of the potential to creatively shape ourselves and our environment.
What distinguishes humans from animals is creativity. Human beings in alienation are reduced to beings with less capacity than they could.
It is capitalism that causes this coming apart. Labour is no longer in the service of human beings and their creative potential, but rather is in the service of capital. So capitalism is really a system in which we exchange things in order to make a profit. We want to increase money through exchange, specifically by changing goods and selling them on the market.
There are four types:
Alienation from the product
From the activity
From species-being
From man to man
Products come to dominate and oppress us. Fetishism around material goods. Labour becomes physically and mentally debilitating. Other people become simply means to my own profit.
Species-being, Gattungswesen, workers work for their own surival, and the labour they perform alienates people from human nature itself. I have a certain human nature like being a creative force through labour, and capitalism reduces the human being to a proletarian worker who needs to do uninteresting and debilitating work. So I am alienated from what I could be as a member of the human species.
Many people in capitalism may worry about not having a stable job, that’s not really what Marx talks about. Imagine that proletarians had a good wage, so well-paid work, that doesn’t seem to feature for him. Maybe if we pay workers twice as much, maybe we’ll solve exploitation, but alienation would remain.
Hegel
Many contemporary theorists love him and find him not sharp enough, so they try to have a better reading of Marx. The best known who did this is Jerry Cohen. He founded a group called the no-bullshit marxists. In contrast to many vague references to Marx, they wanted to bring rigour to Marx. So they were unsatisfied with the ways in which Marx grounded his theory in Hegel. They try to explain everything through exploitation more than the first. The advantage of his reading is that it brings Marx to analytical rigour, but the disadvantage is that it doesn’t work with the dialectical Marx.
The simplest thing you will ever hear about Hegel is Aufhebung. The sublation of a thesis and an anti-thesis. In Aufhebung something is preserved of the previous two positions but the distinction between the two is overcome. This is the structure of both thought and reality itself. Reality undergoes these basic evolutions.
Marx uses this dialectical method to explain progress in history. Opposites are aufgehoben through synthesis. This is against static views. Reality and its concepts evolve through time.
Think of Kant as having a more static conception and Hegel having a more dialectical conception. We can think of Rome as what happened in ancient Greece and the anti-democratic questions raised by Socrates. Absolutism, revolution – and absolute freedom. Absolute freedom, repression of terror – constitutional state.
How do Hegel and Marx differ?
Marx sees dialectically the synthesis: capitalism, proletariat – classless society. Hegel is an idealist who emphasises minds, whilst Marx is a materialist. Marx wants to say that matter determines the cause of history and not manifestations of absolute spirit. What explains the changes is always material in nature, it is about the productive forces that determine the course of history. This is very centrally clear already in the communist manifesto. What Marx works out is what we call historical materialism.
’I use historical materialism to designate the view which seeks the ultimate causes and the great moving power of all important historic events in the economic development of society, in the changes in the modes of production and exchange, with the consequent division of society into distinct classes and the struggles of these classes.”
It is central to the manifesto that capitalism will end because it unleashes things that make it end itself. Capitalism digs its grave; but someone needs to fill it.
This is against natural rights theory, because now, Marx, more than before worries against having one conception of human nature. Instead, human nature is a kind, but which has a fundamental malleability.
For Marx, every phase of history is characterised by a class struggle between two opposing classes. The solution is always a new synthesis and a new epoch in history. In each case we see the two classes.
In Marx there is not one state of nature and then an alternative civil society. We also don’t see three stages as in Rousseau, and kind of like in Locke (2.5 stages), in Marx there are simply many stages in history – and history could’ve evolved differently.
There has been agrarian society, slave society, feudal society, and much more. In each case there is a group that rules and one that is subordinated.
Donald Palmer, illustrations of political theory.
We think of the productive forces being the real drivers of history, the foundation of history. Then there is the superstructure about the stories we tell ourselves about society. This superstructure depends on the mode of production, it legitimises it, and covers up dynamics in it. This is the class-function of ideology. He wants to say that the superstructure has an element of stabilising the economic structure of society.
”It is not the consciousness of men that determiens their social being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness”.
Ricour calls Marx a master of suspicion.
In the utilitarian theory we have a completely ahistorical theory. For Marx, theory has to be fundamentally rooted in history. However they are united in not working on a social contract theory. Marx also doesn’t work with the state of nature concept like Locke or Hobbes.
Every time you hear in politics that the market will not like it if we raise the taxes, we have to think about the class function of that statement. Such ideas are not neutral.
The idea is that changes in the productive forces, at the level of the base, determine what really happens. A simple example is how steam power helped end feudalism. We can now organise factories wherever we like, we don’t need water, and we can power things everywhere. So before that there were feudal mills, but now there is steampower: and now there is a new kind of power which feudalism is not made for. The productive forces can become fettered by the entire social system built around it. Then that socialism will end up being destroyed. The productive forces should be unfettered.
Simon Weil has said that this is like hegelian spirit but sometimes matter does what spirit does. If that is the real super agent of history, with a will of its own, it’s a bit weird.
There are now many people in the factories, and they can talk to each other and become aware of their own situation, and so crucially the labour makes the products, and the value that is created is not part of the wage that worker receives back. The wage of the worker is just what is needed to keep them alive and keep them working.
Marx argues that only labour brings about value. The more we mechanise actual work, the less the profit will end up being.
Profit is made through exploitation of labour.
Jonathan Wolfe gives this example: Imagine that you want a nice coat, and you need to work 8 hours for that coat. You need to work 1 day to buy that coat. But, crucial for the person willing to sell the coat to you, is that it didn’t take them 8 hours to prepare the coat. Maybe it only took them about 4 hours to prepare it. So you are paying 8 hours of work to buy something that only took 4 hours to produce. The value I created doesn’t go to me, but to someone else.
There are some people who are critical of the economic basis of this labour theory of value. Some contemporary marxists make a distinction between exploitation and the labour theory of value: Nicholas Vrousalis, tries to come up with a concept of exploitation which goes beyond Marx, which is grounded in concepts like subordination, domination or so. Exploitation is rather about being forced into a certain setting. He wants to think of exploitation like imagine you’re in the desert and you’re really thirsty, and I say that it is 1 million dollars, but it’s really exploitation because there is coercion in what the capitalist can do to you. You are just lining rich people’s pockets. The capitalists organises society, they decide each piece of cost. There is a certain power in determining relationships. If no one is poor, there can still be exploitation. If the capitalists make it so that all side-walks are privately own, but then how can I walk on the pub? This is the kind of worry that Vrousalis has about capitalism. If labour really explains the value, like in Locke, can’t you then take it out of the communist collective resource pot, and privatise it by mixing my labour with it.
Exploitation will end through a proletarian transition. And this is the end of history. Boom.
”nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any bransch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, critisice after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”
Perhaps there are coordination problems still in society, but these are largely seen as technical matters.