History of Political Thought PDF

HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT •Politics: It comes from the Greek word polis = city, polis comes from the word pol "the most". Politics is mainly the exercise of power "to govern" in favour of the most/the polites/the citizens (free and equal members of the polis). In this way, politics (= the exercis...

HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT •Politics: It comes from the Greek word polis = city, polis comes from the word pol "the most". Politics is mainly the exercise of power "to govern" in favour of the most/the polites/the citizens (free and equal members of the polis). In this way, politics (= the exercise of power) achieves its goal, which is justice. The struggle for justice is and always has been, from the beginning of the history of political thought, the goal of politics: laws (from the Latin "legare = bound") are rules that are necessary to preserve the community; whoever exercises power applies laws in order to do the best for the most. • History: is the fruit of a process (this is why we talk about history – the process- of political thought) history of political thought is like a face that changes over the years, some lines remain but not in absolute term (=the transformation of the face of a man during the decades step by step). In order to study and analyse the history of political thought the question “what is justice? Who exercises it? In what does justice consist” is decisive: it all depends on the society/the polis, what bounds people together? Is it the brotherhood determined by blood/tribe/social class/warriors? ->according to the society I come from, I can get a different idea of justice. Polis is not only/mainly a physical space, plastically shown by the walls of the city and its buildings. It can also mean a spiritual space, a community, a brotherhood, a cultural space (= a relationship with my community in a deeper sense) • Culture comes from colere “to cultivate” in a spiritual sense = to venerate; it is a relationship with my community in a deeper sense.In In order to understand justice and who exercises it, we need to know who my neighbour is and what binds me to him: is the community determined by a bloodline? is it a tribe? are we bound because we belong to the same social class? >What is our "otherness"? From the nature of the community depends the idea of justice on which the politics of that community is based; therefore, the education ("paideia") of the youth is of crucial importance, because it is through education that we can preserve a community/society or build a polis: only by teaching a community (and the youth) the elements that bind it together can you preserve the polis. • ->Only by educating the youngest can the polis be rebuilt. Steps in the history of political thought 1. In the history of political thought we describe how ideas mature, the first way the community is defined (in western terms) is as a genos/bloodline/ancestry = the bound are boundaries of blood. At the head of the community we find a basileus, a commander-in-chief who is also the chief of the tribe. In this case, justice is understood as heroic justice: The Iliad is the exemplary model of this first kind of understanding of community/fraternity/justice/politics. The Iliad is the narration of the most important episodes of the war against Troy, launched by a coalition of cities after the kidnapping of Elena (by Priam, the son of the king of Troy); this is where the idea of justice appears: from this moment on, Agamemnon (Basileus of Mycenae) has to do justice to avenge his brother who has been offended (by Paris). The primary law that makes justice here is the law of revenge, which mainly concerns tribe and descent, moreover the exercise of justice is aristocratic because the community is limited to an aristocracy (= power to the best, small groups of ruling people of a certain tribe) and aristocracy means that justice is done by a selected group of heroes. BUT who is a hero? The word hero comes from "Hera", the Greek personification of outer space/air in a spiritual sense = it is the prevailing opinion, influenced by the gods, that influences the hero and at the same time is influenced by the hero. The hero/executor (who does justice) at the same time acts according to this spiritual climate (the air he breathes and lives in) and at the same time helps to determine this climate: the hero isn't someone who swims against the current, rather he determines the mainstream and is determined by it = a Greek hero follows the voice he hears in the air (the voice of God saying "Remember your ancestors, you must take revenge") and acts to do "good politics" = apply the law of revenge rigorously - without mercy. Arete = virtue: to make good politics is to apply the law of revenge vigorously, thus doing the common good. In the Iliad there is no good and bad, we are faced with a tragedy because both sides are determined by the same world view (outlook on life, aristocratic code). In fact, the most important and tragic struggle in Western history between heroes and before the fight they say the same thing, although they belong to opposing parties: only if they apply the law of revenge will they be remembered and be true heroes - + they both know that they have to die. -> The underlying idea is that everything passes, nothing lasts forever. The aim is to preserve the tree (family tree) and eternal glory will be the result of a good application of vengeance justice. As I said, the history of political thought is like a face that changes over the years: some lines of the face change, but they are not absolute: the idea of politics that makes up our civilisation is made up of a synthesis of Athens, Rome and Jerusalem, some expressions remain, but they don't have an absolute meaning. A tragedy of contemporary history in Europe in the first half of the XX century - fascism - was exactly the idea of going back to this synthesis and to the absolutization of some elements. 2. The second step in the history of political thought should be the overcoming of the absolutization of this idea of justice, of the heroic idea of justice based on the rule of law. This took place around the 5th century B.C. and was introduced mainly by educators, who at that time were mainly poets. An example could be the "Oresteia", a tragedy in three plays written by Aeschylus, this trilogy represents a change in civilisation in terms of the birth of a new idea of justice, but also a change in the idea of what a political community is, a polis. - The first play is about the return of Agamemnon, King of Mycenae, from the Trojan War, and his wife, Queen Clytemnestra, is waiting for him with a plan to kill him on his return. She wants to avenge the death of her daughter at the hands of her father, so she kills her husband according to the law of revenge. In the second play, years later, Agamemnon's son, Oreste, returns home. As soon as he hears what has happened, he plans to kill his mother according to the law of revenge. - In the third play, after Oreste has killed his mother, he is pursued by the Furies (Greek goddesses of revenge): it is the ghost of Clytemnestra who goes to the goddesses to ask for justice and to pursue Oreste. He goes to Apollo (who gave him the order to kill his own mother) to help him escape the furies. Apollo decides to send him to Athena (favourite daughter of Zeus, goddess of wisdom "sapere" and goddess of war), who stops this endless chain of revenge and justice: she forbids the Furies to kill Oreste: a trial must answer the question of his innocence or guilt, SO she sets up a trial on the Areopagus: a supreme court in the city of Athens composed of male Athenian citizens who, inspired by her wisdom, will decide by vote; this means that the Furies don't have the last word and that the jury would consider the arguments of both sides. The people decide what is just, and the community is bound by this understanding of justice; it is neither absence of law nor tyranny: Athena created an order with tribunals to avoid this. What is the golden mean between anarchy and tyranny? It's democracy, it's the fruit of a development of Western political thought; the contribution of Greek civilisation to Western thought is inconceivable without democracy (in this context, see the 3rd quote of document 1). • >Athena doesn't just replace the furies, she sets up a jury of independent and impartial men who don't obey the gods but listen to both sides. Only when they have seen who is more convincing will the court decide by majority vote. "Audiatur et altera pars" listen to both sides. This marks the transition to a new order of justice that will last forever. The political outcome of The Oresteia is that stasis (civil war) is avoided and, at the end of the tragedy, Oreste is found innocent. When the court decides this, the Furies threaten to start a bloody civil war BUT Athena convinces them that they can have a new role compared to the past: the Furies are transformed from Furies into "Eumenides = the Precious". They represent that a certain amount of vengeance will always be necessary, but they guarantee that the decision of the majority and the rule of law will be respected, even by force if necessary. In her speech, Athena emphasises that citizenship is more important than blood ties. read: “from South Africa lessons in soft revenge” document 3 lecture 2 sui documenti 1 e 2 lecture 3 + documento “socrates quotes” + “plato’s qotes” Steps of the Atenian democracy we learned: The idea of the duties of citizens is fundamental: the first and most important is to participate in political activity; if I don't participate, I'm useless + the city morally rejects me. Even the ekklesia has its meaning because it defines the assembly of the demos in which they exercise their rights and duties as citizens. Moreover, the polis defines itself through the establishment of the ekklesia: the process by which I participate in the assembly of the polis defines the identity of the polis, and the polis also establishes itself as a people through this, no longer exclusively through the bloodline. can think about a paraller between the ekklesia and the assembly of the people of God in Israel which is the temple in which the people of Israel establish themselves by being in that ekklesia/assembly/temple as people of God ->so ekklesia as physical space but also spiritual in which the polis established itself 1. The year The year 404 BC is a first turning point for Athenian democracy, not only because of the defeat of Athens by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War, but also because after the defeat an oligarchic government is established = the golden age of Athenian democracy will never be the same again. 2. Another decisive turning point was the trial of Socrates, who was sentenced to death in 399 BC. He was born around 470, the son of a sculptor and his mother a midwife. He served as a soldier in the infantry during the Peloponnesian wars and was a member of the Boulè, the assembly where the representatives of the tribes met. The boulè has the duty and the right to decide which laws/cases/issues the assembly has to decide on; there was very strong pressure from the population to condemn to death 6 "strategoi" (= generals) who didn't help the injured after a naval battle, at that time Socrates is the president of the boulè. In the first moment the Boulè decides not to act under this pressure (it would mean to be influenced by forces which have nothing to do with the legislative process) BUT then the Boulè decides to favour the multitude, Socrates then tries to stop this procedure (which is not legal according to his advice) but he is defeated and the generals are sentenced to death, although the feeling is that this way of proceeding was illegal: you cannot condemn someone without hearing them. There was no precise written law that allowed the President of the Boulé to stop a trial, Socrates acted on the basis of an unwritten law and left no written text (all we know about him is because of his duties - Plato was his favourite). Two years after the collapse of democracy (after the war), the tyrants asked him and others to judge someone who had betrayed the government BUT he refused; a few years later, the polis accused him of impiety in a public trial: he was accused of worshipping gods who were not those of the city and consequently of corrupting the youth (he was a master of paideia = education and founded the "Symposium" where teachers educated the students). The accusation of impiety also has a political meaning: although the Athenian democracy does not absolutize the element of descent, religion is understood as a decisive factor in the construction of identity: it is there to write rites (because through a common worship of God you maintain an identity + society) and if you worship other gods you endanger the identity of the city, its survival and its health = it is justified that you could be condemned to death (Socrates did in fact worship other gods). Socrate’s trial The main source of Socrates' trial is Plato's "Apology of Socrates", and if we compare this source with others, we can assume that some of Plato's points about Socrates are indeed true: Plato will build his political thought on his elements. Socrates is known as the founder of philosophy (=the love of wisdom) BUT which wisdom are we talking about? the worship of which gods are we talking about? as said, they are not the traditional gods of Greek religion. ->So the accusation: Socrates does injustice by corrupting the young and by believing in new gods, daimonia, which are new and not true. Socrates describes these gods in his apology through Plato: at the beginning of the trial, he pretends to base his argument on an objective truth that is independent of how persuasive he is/how clever his arguments are. ->The objective truth is independent of rhetorical skill (in the trial, those who win have the most convincing arguments). During the trial he was accused of being a rhetorical person, of managing to make people think that what he says is true, even if it is only his opinion, and he says: "No, it is exactly the opposite: there is an objective through and I orient my action/my life on the basis of this objective truth". Then he speaks to those who voted for him during the process, while waiting for the final decision, "my diamond/divine voice/spiritual organ often opposed me in the past when I was about to do something wrong BUT now that I have been confronted with what is generally believed, my divine sign does not oppose me or even when I was about to say something during my speech. In this context, he introduces two fundamental concepts into his vision: -"maieutics" = to bring out the sense of truth in everyone - Anamnesis" = the process by which young people remember that these elements (of knowing what is true/good or not) correspond to the truth and that they have always been in them. Socrates speaks of the central role of conscience in political decision-making: if the majority supports something unjust and my conscience tells me to oppose it, I should oppose it. ->Not divine gods not subjective feelings: for Socrates there are objective elements that determine what is right and what is wrong, they are inside us and through maieutics everybody has the possibility to re-discover them. That’s why his sentence “I know but I don’t” became famous Moreover, there are two important points to underline: • There's a very important phrase we find in Plato relating to Socrates: Socrates criticises democracy even though he was a democrat BUT democracy begins to die when the only criterion for action is a majority - the only source of law is the majority or the ability of someone to convince others of his argument. • There is a capacity in human beings to understand the truth, and this capacity is the pre-political basis of political activity. Socrates is a revolutionary master of the paideia because 1. he puts at the centre of the political discourse the subject of objective truth that orients the political action 2. in this framework he underlines that a democracy cannot live without this pre-political basis because it becomes a hidden tyranny When Socrates is asked to reject his views in order to avoid the condemnation to death, he refuses to do it, drinks poison and dies BUT before dying he underlines two important aspects: - speaking to the jury: the divine voice inside him that tells him what is good/wrong - speaking to his friend Crito, who suggests him to escape from prison: the respect of the rule of law as a fundament of democracy: in order to preserve the state, you have to respect the law although they seem unjust to you. +: the question of: * truth *of the limits of a democracy based only on the principle of majority will be the two points Plato will develop which will orient his political thought. The collapse after the defeat after the Peloponnesian war has two phases: ❖ Positive aspect = underlines the limits of a democratic system : in Plato's quotations, there is a dialogue between Socrates and Gorgias (the most skilled in the art of rhetoric), which emphasises that the sole aim of rhetoric is to persuade the multitude, which in this case has a negative connotation (it is something that can be controlled with powers of persuasion). on this respect, Gorgias makes an example: if a rhetorician and a physician were to go to any city and had there to argue in the Ecclesia as to which of them should be elected state-physician, the physician would have no chance because the rhetorician, more than any one, would have the power of getting himself chosen because he can speak more persuasively to the multitude. Rhetoric creates belief about the just and unjust, about truth and untruth BUT gives no instruction about them: the rhetorician does not really know anything of what is just or unjust, he has only a way of persuading the ignorant that he, not knowing, seems to know more about these things than someone else who really knows ->there is a perversion of the democratic system: for the rhetor there is no objective just and unjust, everything is relative: the danger is that a rhetor uses the art of rhetoric only to achieve power. Plato's myth of the cave has a lot to do with this: the cave in which people are imprisoned is an image of this situation: in the cave, people look at images on the wall that are offered by someone behind them and they do not see; they think that these are the truth and they orientate their lives according to these images that they think correspond to what is true. Until one of these people escapes and reaches the real world, which is not the world proposed by a good rhetor in the cave who controls the images of reality/has the power to convince what reality, good and bad is = he reaches the real truth; when he goes back to the cave he tries to convince the other slaves that what they see is just an illusion imposed by someone else BUT he doesn't succeed and is rejected by the other slaves. The sense is that Plato, in developing Socrates' intuitions, becomes more and more convinced of the need for a system in which the wise (philosophers, those who have arrived at the truth) rule: the absence of a pre-political foundation made up of a common conscience of truth leads him to a model in which democracy is replaced by a system in which the philosophers rule; this model of Plato's is called kallipolis (= the perfect city). Its structure is pyramidal: a few wise men at the top and then many categories of people living in a community in which everyone has a precise role; this leadership ensures the well-being of the community. It is also defined as a pre-communist system BUT the problem with this model (which Plato recognises) is that it doesn't solve the problem of conscience (it is given to some leaders/philosophers, but there is no guarantee that a philosopher won't corrupt his soul with time and become a rhetor himself). lecture 4 (recording 5) The second turning point for democracy We said: 1. Democracy is the legacy of Greek Culture to the western political thought (European culture is unthinkable without this legacy) 2. In this framework, the thoughts of Socrate and Plato emerge as an essential part of this legacy, when speaking about Socrates he is seen as a sort of founder of the concept of “conscience” in Greek and western society. Indeed, the trial against him is about the introduction of this concept in the political space. BUT why is the concept of "conscience" so important? Because democracy, the process of making laws according to the will of the majority, is essentially linked to something else: "the eunomia" (a term that Plato interpreted in the most profound way) = the validity of the good law/principles/values, its source is the conscience and the eunomia is the source/criterion of the process of making laws in which democracy is respected (this good law/principles precede the creation of laws and constitute their basis). ->connection between “eunomia” and democracy, which can live only when there is a close relationship between itself and eunomia This means that democracy is never the pure rule of the majority and the mechanism of the creation of laws in a parliament must be subjected to the criterion of the “supremacy of the nomos” = of what is just/true in its intimate essence. ->the law making process must be subjected to the criterion of following the values which are binding guidelines also for the majority = the principle of majority is not enough to maintain democracy alive. This is a turning point in democracy (1st decisive turning point: creation of tribunals) and Socrates is important because he shows the process through which the nomos (good law) comes alive: it is a fruit of hearing the voice of the conscience= the conscience of everyone has a supremacy over every power. the “new god” that he proposes is to live and act under an objective truth OCIO: if the conscience of the people is damaged, then a politician can, with his rhetorical skills, let people think what he wants for his advantage them think to be true and the multitude (bad meaning ≠ democracy, positive meaning) is slave of persuasion and by majority proceeds in a law making process which has nothing more to do with the common good ->on the one hand there is the birth of the concept of democracy, on the other hand there is a great danger that democracy generates in a hidden tyranny Politics is and will always be striving for justice BUT what is objectively true? The source to find out what is just is our conscience; to train the consciences of the young to find the truth has been Socrates’ work as a master of paideia (and that’s why he was so hated): he invites people to act according to their conscience and to have a spiritual attitude open = to keep yourself open to listen and not be bound to a dominant opinion. This process of maieutic can be healthy BUT also very dangerous, especially when you enter in dialog with those who don’t want to hear this conscience. Plato and Socrates describe these people as nihilists/rhetors, one kind of these people are those who are seduced by thirst for power because their mask is the establishment of the will of the majority, but the real face is the total enslavement of the multitude. “Conscience” = “to know in accordance/harmony with something else”, the “something else” is the spiritual organ which allows you to hear the voice that tells you what is true, it is the real principle of eunomos. Two points related to the conscience are extremely important: • “Primate of conscience” means that to follow the voice of conscience is more important than to follow every kind of power: the power found its limit in the voice of conscience Example: authorities asked Socrates to deny what he said on conscience, but he didn’t: he is more obliged to conscience than to the established power (even if those authorities may put him to death, at least he was following conscience) • A new kind of education that Socrates + Plato suggest: an education centred on reaffirming the significance of conscience, a central term which is linked to the term “truth”, when the consciences of people are ill or dead, then democracy is a farse/mask. ->the education as continuous process to keep your conscience healthy is fundamental + the primate of conscience as essential task of education Conscience is higher than any power and Socrates claimed that during his trial BUT, at the same time, he decides to respect the decision until the end, although if he was suffering because of unjust decisions. However, to rebel to such decisions would mean to destroy the system of the rule of law: the polis is based also on its unwritten but important laws, if you run away from laws you destroy the system (seen Eudemide episode) Plato’s thought: a) According to Plato, Politics understood as the laws (are expression of justice) creating process inside of a Parliament/assembly is compared with the body of a man: the body has a soul which orientates it to its wellness and, when the souls is ill, the body makes what it wants thus destroying itself ->soul as another word for eunomia b) Another point in Plato is the role of philosophers as the custodians for truth, but also as a kind of enlightened elite who reached the knowledge of truth and has the best instruments to lead the polis. “Kallipolis” (= the perfect city that Plato proposes) is nothing more than a city led by those who have the deeper sensibility for truth and who have understood what good/truth is BUT this model has enormous limits and the most important pupil of Plato, Aristotle, will underline these limits and will bring the concept of politics to his highest point in pre-Christian era. lecture 5 & 6 – recording 6 & 7 + document “Aristotle quotes” Plato we said: A great turning point is the theory according to which democracy works only if the conscience works and the conscience works only if it is constantly educated, that’s why Socrates is the great father of paideia and political thought; that is why, in accordance with Plato, he was hated by its enemies the rhetors. ->Conscience is stronger than any absolute power and the source of political action. The most important disciple of Socrates, Plato, is: - a philosopher (lover of wisdom, which is the love for that voice we hear within us) - the founder of the first school in Western civilisation where he used to educate his students - develops the aspect introduced by Socrates concerning the absence of democracy and its pre-political and metapolitical cases. there is a strict relationship between education of conscience and proper functioning of politics + democracy. Plato was also involved in politics by: - being a member of the boulè - being the master of the brother in law of a tyrant of Syracuse, Dionysus,