so we'll start with our early modern political thought again these you know we can talk about Aristotle doing virtual signaling like these categories of of modernity don't make a ton of sense to me but we just use them as shorthand um so early modern political thought um is framed as this the the rise of Christianity and the decline of the Roman Empire and the link to the Islamic World we'll come back to some of these texts in the next couple weeks um dealing with this but specifically the the textbook talks about you know the the idea of Luther challenging the authority of the Catholic church and Machiavelli that we've talked about before with the prince this idea of you know um rulers may need to to know how to be compassionate but that's just a form of manipulation because you need to know how to do evil if you must and so Machiavelli you this quote in the text the fact that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief amongst those who aren't virtuous or those who are not virtuous if a prince wants to maintain his role he must learn how to not be virtuous and make make use of this or not according to his needs so it takes that self-interested argument to a logical extension directed at the ruler alone right know how to do evil this idea that the common people are always impressed by appearances and results so I don't know what the difference between a politician and an influencer is I guess it's the ability to enact laws and change the structures but they're doing very similar things just one's doing it I don't know we would argue one's doing it right for self-interest and one's doing it for public good I don't know I believe that a lot of influencers believe in what they're doing for why they're doing it I don't know the difference so I think it's I think they're akin to one another um and so this is where we get the emergence of liberal ideas in the separation of political Authority from religious Authority this this distinction that happens over time I'll kind of unpack a little bit of these assumptions and How We Do It um so liberalism focuses on individuals rights consent and Authority as challenges to this traditional structure that said there's an ordained monotheistic Foundation of my power and authority um and so you know we we want to make Society less um conflictual especially after times of War we we organize systems of cooperation and we look towards I don't know if we call it idealism there's an idealist tradition in this containing arbitrary power and Rule so Hobbs is kind of one of the classic political theorists of The Sovereign Nation State because he wrote Leviathan which is based on this imagery it uses this imagery of a Before Time of a state of nature Before Time where there was lots of conflict right so similar to Great Law of Peace and and even Aristotle this idea that those pursuing self-interest so life is nasty brutish and short right solitary poor nasty British and short so part of where he gets this is from these travelogues these kind of you know encounters he's reading it's bad information he's getting fake news let's frame it that way he's getting fake news from the early encounters with indigenous peoples in North America who of course because of the religious framings see the them as as outside the the realm of God and therefore frames them as either barbarians or or in in terms of savagery as outside the bounds of Law and and Order and reason truth and monotheistic God um and so this idea then using these travel logs to talk about solitary poor nasty British and short is a misreading of of what's going on and and a lack of reading of of those texts right it's it's a framing it's very similar to the great love piece but framed backwards right um and so it becomes a thought exercise of a ratio this Blank Slate um it also for me I always think of you know if in the state of nature life is solitary nationality brutish and short then humans wouldn't be there because we because of our big brains and all the rest of it we don't have the capability of other mammals to survive immediately out of the womb which means that you're going to have to be cared for and there's going to have to be structures and institutions to care for you if it was nasty British and short we would hit a dead end right that would denovians we would be a subset of the types of the humanoid species that didn't survive so it's an oversimplification right um and so what hubs is doing with that that though is establishing well because of that it is inherently rational for us to surrender those natural rights of of pursuing maximal self-interest in a system of Anarchy towards one where um we create a government that ensures our protection so this is a way it it's weirdly taking the the Leviathan this this Sovereign and we we say Sovereign in the sense that it is still a type of authority that is very similar to a monarch but as a monarch has a foundation of authority from a monotheistic or religious tradition in the west anyway we can get into these other Frameworks when we get to them um the idea here is that that that Authority shifts from being one based in faith to one based in reason so this is a critique of the church-based model and I will the sympathetic reading of all this liberalism stuff is these are radical ideas those are radical they're still radical ideas that that we should you know we just had this happen with the queen dying why should there be a king of England these ideas that he's articulating are like no there shouldn't be a king of England there should be a government of England and so we absolutely understand the kind of the critique here now there's two logical consequences that come from this like the monarch The Sovereign then becomes something that we can't challenge because it was a decision made in the past so you know this about tacit consent right if you don't vote you've got nothing to complain about even if that system has been used as a tool of Oppression over your people's for as long as it has existed and so there's this weird Foundation that we shift from the idea that everyone is a you know a subject of a monarchical rule ruler that has I mean in Canada we're still part of the Commonwealth so we are still subjects of the king and because we are subjects of the king that's a relationship we can't choose our way out of whereas political Authority is is based in the same way in that it's only reasonable to choose a collective Sovereign that acts in our best interests right and so the question of of the king of England is a historical political cultural and theoretical question about why they exist and the foundation of their Authority and we still understand that there's lots of people who believe in the Commonwealth believe in those tradition believe that they they establish a history and that allow us to link to a culture that we wouldn't otherwise be able to link to so so that would be the sympathetic reading now lock um does something similar um I I will expand on the text only because I I don't think they're capturing the Revolutionary potential of of either Hobbes or lock against traditional forms of authority right that we need to be more sympathetic in these readings we're trying to do it matter-of-factly and I don't know who the matter-of-factly for I guess it's for the textbook authors so that you don't offend I don't know it's it's weird um so the idea here is that you know why would free people ever establish this Sovereign Authority there has to be some mechanism by which we choose this otherwise it's just domination right like we just say States dominate us it's it's not a whole lot different than than the previous system where by the the king or the ruler dominated us because they had the capacity to do so they have power right they had weapons they had you know forces whatever um and so the idea here is that um property asserts uh articulation of authority that says that no no there's a distinction between we are all in the Canadian State and the idea that that Canadian State then owns all the property within it now technically we can get into this but I mean we know this is the case with eminent domain um where if the the city decides it needs to run a highway through your property it has to compensate you for the loss of it but it it has the ultimate authority to do so and so we do have that all property is still State based but the liberal system is moving towards a theory of property that is more individuated right so it gives you rights as an individual against this state and so um the rule of law as a mechanism of liberalism is against the idea of arbitrary rule that the the state can just simply decided the the to do whatever they want that we need a mechanism of checks and balances or some form of um just appeal to a decision right that that a liberal Democratic Society or liberal Society needs the ability to to challenge authority right on a on a minute level um and so politics is a necessary evil to protect individual freedoms we need these adjudicatory mechanisms because we will have different individuals making claims and we have to adjudicate those complaints and so Authority rests with a conditional consent of the government um but it is a challenge to existing types of authority because the context of what law is talking about is that liberalism is a critique of existing Authority and so the the holdover in particular with religion even when we have these theories these Hobson theories of a sovereign nation state is that Authority is still back based in the idea that you have a higher rank that you have the ability to order others around because you know you're a you have a high position in government or the church that you have esteem because you are superior to your inferiors that they because you are in esteemed you should give tokens of esteem to those people who are in higher positions of authority we see this all over the way we still do this all the time in that we look we with the right honorable we still have mechanisms by which someone who serves in Canadian government is given a title and that title is It's respectful for us to use that title in relation to them so we have that and so that's also part of their hierarchy of standing and so certain people's interests count more than others and the those peoples whose interests count more are reflected higher than others so we do this through a whole bunch of different ways but normally all three are joined together now the problem was in Lock's time is that British history was just had pervasive domination and subordination so this goes back to kind of feudalism and all the rest of it but the idea that there's a you know Lords or Masters or Bishops or priests or captains or guilds all have authority even in the household like the the the reinforce the the patriarchy of the patriarch of the household is the powerful one right um and so in this case the religious Authority the religious autonomy of even things like the Anglican Church the angular church has its own system of Courts its own systems of censorship its own systems of Taxation and excommunication from the church meant you couldn't read for public office uh women were subordinated to their husbands they couldn't own property apprentices were bound to service without pay they the people in charge were free to withhold any amount of pay without prorating them all of these are forms of arbitrary Authority based in hierarchy tradition and esteem not based in a kind of any type of rational uh framework right they were rationalized using ideologies such as God the the king the Pope the patriarch or Humanity as inherently sinful as to justify why these systems were in place in order to tax you because you're sinful they as a consequence of that you must give a tithing to the church right this this is why we have those mechanisms the problem of course is the bodies resist control the easiest and most kind of common one in Western political art is there's Robin Hood it is a lord who chose to be one of the um the commoners and to steal from from a corrupt system right the The Little John and um uh the the Sheriff of Nottingham they were corrupt and so his idea of um being Noble was against a system of laws that were corrupt um but these are oh there's all sorts of bodies that would join him and that would joined in those his bodies always resist right I mean this is we might get this later but James C Scott has this this framework of the basically like the history of of humans is that they resist Authority and they run away from it they just go hide they hide in the woods literally hide in the woods in order to escape these systems of Taxation Authority and all the rest of it and so um we have all these iterate bodies these entertainers the traitors the Cobblers who are developing their own mechanisms outside of State Authority because they have capacities to do so I can make shoes for you and don't tell anybody I'm going to do it we still have all sorts of black markets that exist today we have all these we have um still the the legalization of cannabis but there's still a thriving marketing cannabis outside those legal systems because people want it differently or don't like the way they're being done or whatever right and so their freedom their existence of Freedom challenges the authority and those those forms of esteem of existing forms of of um um existing forms of hierarchy and Authority um they you know undermine this idea that like the God put that the monotheistic God put everything in a specific order and you're challenging that order if you're challenging that Authority right this is why I'm so um allergic to the idea of natural because the natural was always used to justify why you can't do things or why you should do this right the natural still does that it stands in for the should it's it it undermines the notion of politics politics is about contestation uh natural is about um not challenging right which doesn't even make sense in terms of if you did Natural Sciences which you'll do in it all the rest of it so everything everything is it's constantly changing and challenging things anyways so from these Civil Wars the mid 17th century these Free People increasingly are utilized as kind of let's recruit them like Robin Hood did in order to challenge them Authority so if we want to have a civil war where's where do we get some bodies for that well these people already hate the system let's go get them right and so private property and free trade was challenging the Monopoly of the Anglican Church um this idea there was these famous petitions you don't need to know that it's a written Branch um I just that's the typo there petitions the abolition the abolition of the idea of any religious Authority having the capacity to make decisions over us now this didn't come about but it's the idea that that people were rebelling against too many monopolies patents tariffs fines and that what we need to do is separate all types of authority from a religious order to a secular order and so the the idea was is that you know these guilds and monopolies were forcing these free people to give them taxation or take their money and that they were illegitimate forms of Taxation and we need a system that is totally out of those traditional forms of authority and in the public domain and governed through rules and law law that respect individuals and individuals right to make property right um I don't need to talk about that question now but it's built into these things and so this is from Locke and to reduce the government through all Earth and inferior creatures coming to man Every Man Has property in their own person um this nobody has any right to but themselves so this is an explicit challenge to the idea of a an authority granted by God that makes the system as it is right that this is God's Will and this is saying no no it's not good I I as an individual mix I remember it removes out of the state of nature I mix my labor with something that's my own and it's my property so you don't have any right to it and so this is the origins of what we've got today especially in the Republican Party about like taxation being theft is it comes from this though but it I mean it always has been private property is a rebelling against what was um property was a form of it wasn't yours right it was a form of it was a social good it was something we shared in common um the idea of it being individually yours didn't exist and so liberalism is a radical critique of this system you are taking something again we use the state of nature here you're mixing your labor with things that are found outside in the state of nature and it's that it's your property that you should be able to be left to and no one should be able to take it away from you and so this is an egalitarian justification for private property and contracts that we need the rule of law to establish a foundation that is not arbitrary that it is the same for everybody that we need impartial judges we need the capacity to comport uh enforce Justice and we should end uh arbitrary rule so this is why Locke also supported things like popular sovereignty and franchisement equality under the law equal representation of districts and the supremacy of of the House of Commons as a secular form of authority against traditional religious forms of authority right um and so this is and this is a radical critique um but framing it just as the text does as as this type of it's just so passive right the the ways in which we uh politics were necessary evil to protect individual freedoms is is not just about how Authority rests with a concessional uh conditional consent of the government it's also a critique of existing forms of authority right and so when we get to Rousseau then much later um this is taking that to its next logical extension which is that people not only from a state of nature but every person is born um free and yet their chains are everywhere so it's the next extension of this it's an inversion of traditional Authority a version of traditional Authority is that we're born into a natural system and this is God's Will and this is how things should be and the secular political tradition is no no no no no there's less of that we should have the capacity now that we're born in a system to mix it and make my own property this one's the inversion no we're born free and all the systems and structures are forms of of chains right they're they're doing it and so so people should only be bound by laws they impose on themselves so this isn't this is the it's a logical extension from Hobbes but it's an inversion of Hobbes as well because it says no no this the The Sovereign isn't because we are fleeing a state of nature and we need the protection of rationality no it is the political systems of authority come from our capacity to choose that political Authority and so we need to have individual Freedom by us choosing the systems and structures um all of them right they have to be thoroughly run by liberalism by these Notions of a lack of arbitrary Rule and a system of rules that apply to everyone equally right and so this is it it is I mean this is what Benedict Anderson calls an imagined Community but the rise of the novel and and Rousseau would write novels as well the rise of the novel is a way of of getting everybody to have the same ideas and it creates a nation which is in this way opposed to the state the nation is what gives the state its Authority not the other way around whereas in the past it's always been the the monotheistic Traditions the power of the state the Leviathan as an authority but now this is the inversion it's the nation that gives the state Authority um and so when we think about these things the idea of the public interest I just like to think about the ways in which we reproduce common imagine communities so we don't read novels anymore I mean some of us do but we don't read them like the way that popular culture read them in this time where we had a shared sense of identity because we all read the same things if you want to look at nationalism in a contemporary form we would look at forms in which it's produced I I mean if we look in the U.S case the easiest example in the U.S case is these are the top watched broadcasts in 2022 if you want to see the one thing that Americans share in common it is Sport and so it is Sport because they can like we talked about they can identify with their team or with their you know their athlete or whatever it is that their their brand would that they're doing and the top 100 events I think we have the Oscars in there the Olympics but and uh what is Thanksgiving parade is number 40 there so which we could unpack but um the idea here is that sport is what we do in the novel in the past and it's the sport today it ties us all together uh I had quote from gradel just to be a disturber uh here um talking about how this is a quote I can't find the video CBS seems to have scrubbed the video if somebody wants to track it down it'd be great this is Roger Goodell saying that um the main thing in American Life in American popular culture the dominant thing that people watch on TV the the primary form of identification is socialist at the center of the capitalist system I've got Roger Goodell who is the um the commissioner of the NFL saying asked aren't you guys doing socialism we try to combine socialism and capitalism we share all the revenues we uh restrict players into a draft there's cell Recaps and we depend on public tax money and the idea here is godell says well the reason that we do that is because we want everyone to feel that they have hope when the season starts and so this is allows us is this financial engineering this socialism allows a small team in Green Bay Wisconsin to compete with a metropolis like New York it binds the country together and so nationalism then from Rousseau is the thing that binds together the general will that idea that we all share something in common is what serves as the basis of Authority for institutions for laws for everything else so we need to get rid of old forms of authority and make sure the only forms of authority we have are created through the general will of the nation right the freedom that freedom is what we should establish in Liberty property and security we should resist depression and make laws through representatives and this of course is the precursor to both the French and American Revolutions as well as the Haitian revolution and that this also with Wollstonecraft is the foundation of Rights and writes as articulated of claims like the Wilson across Vindication of the rights of women equal rights amendment in the U.S has never been passed but we have this idea that rights as a challenge to existing forms of authority and so nationalism helps us do that um we'll just go on to Mill I'm just talking about these questions of Liberty how to realize Freedom inequality and the Industrial Revolution he argues that we need to articulate these visions of autonomy um they're basically social harm is individual harm is a problem for us all he says that you know we need to include more and more so it takes what is the general will as the idea that the rights of the people so let's be clear these are still largely males who are property owning and have this capacity and that we have people like Wilson craft saying why isn't it women they've been saying that since then to the present and still debate but Mill is taking this to the next extension that Liberty will only function if we ensure Liberty happens so it's not just that the nation that we are born free and everywhere we're in Chains we know we have to now use the state as a mechanism of Freedom right so this is kind of we're logically building on one another that individual autonomy should exist only as long as long as it doesn't cause social harm to others so societal benefits are something that allow us to have more voices and more diversity that women should have the right to vote that children shouldn't be stuck because of their orphaned in a situation of poverty and oppression that these are equality is something that will help us all um benefit so the state should be used to maximize the individual's capacity right we don't want you informity we want individuals having the right to thrive right and so you know you have should have as much individual autonomy that doesn't cause harm to others um now this problem of course is that it's bound up in so the synthetic reading here is that yes of course we want to encourage individual autonomy and we should resist the forms of State Authority even the national will that imposes one form of authority on everybody else not everybody likes the NFL and so when we put money and funding into stadiums or public resources we are making choices from the majoritarian and so this is an effort to bring out reinforce the individual against the majority and say that we need to do this and that individuals should be free as long as they don't cause harm to others now the problem of course with this is is that this is all bound up in what we can think and see we can focus on the rights of women the state's support for a child's upbringing and focus on the family but these articulations of harm are largely framed in visual terms and we don't really think about the types of questions we talked about last time the ways in which our social structures cause harm but this is the idea of I mean it would be interesting to have a political science that says a precautionary principle like other Sciences dude or Do no harm or make sure that what you're doing is well established before you do it unfortunately because of our open system of politics people continually experiment on us all the time and there's lots of different ways in which they do that I talked about those last times in which we just take something and throw it out there we take technology because it's modern and say oh what what harm could it do to have a site where people sign up in order to say which school they're in and see which other people are there and share their friends and interests and that's Facebook right and then it it can be supporting its erection and and genocide Mass killing around the world um and so I might need to substantiate that claim WhatsApp has been implicated in in organizing groups that have participated in forms of targeted attacks on minority groups around the world so something that starts with a you know a fundamental principle remember Mark Zuckerberg famously is up on stage saying move fast and break things takes modernity and just throws it in there because of our open system of politics we slowly move to regulate them but it might be too slow and the harm can already be done so we like to think about harm as something that we can clearly identify but often harm is systemic right all right and then finally we get to tocvo um this is the last of these modern thinkers dealing with Democracy in America um he is the extension of articulating this idea of the tyranny of the majority right so it's not just that we need to protect individuals against majority rule we actually have the ways in which the structures and institutions embedded in the American system um can produce a Conformity of ideas right um us what he calls it characterizes as a soft despotism there is a dependency on the government democracy is reduced to periodic voting so it's not actually a Democratic Society it's a well I mean representative democracy that has high degrees of federalism which reinforce systems of authority that don't actually involve us becoming more democratic on a day-to-day basis citizens imagine themselves as free people but really a flock of animals a government with government as the shepherd so it's weird like we we talk about sheeple now but to talk Phil at 1835 is saying I'm Americans are producing sheeple right that this is the way that that the state actually reinforces ideas and that it's not actually encouraging Freedom uh in the ways in which we we do things and so this is just an image from the original that part of the idiosyncrasies of the American system which is what titokfo was imagining to bring it back is this separation of powers that were established very much this is what Franklin saw as as we have the Great Law of Peace here and we have the systems of federalism in the U.S which are very unique and so the idea here is that we have this kind of progression and because the West loves teleology this logical progression of rational ideas that stem from the ancient Greeks to the present they all reflect different attitudes towards the public the individual and the idea of collective action and self-interest they articulated at different points in time and they developed this logical progression from broad-based understandings of authority and governance to very specific understandings of the ways in which we internalize State Authority and power to make us compliant rather than a challenging system so liberals then are concerned with individual rights and reasons as challenges to forms of authority we would like to think they argue for limited government as a as a critique of those Authority though by De tocqueville we're arguing that that we're internalizing the government is bigger than ever majoritarian government let's be clear um that private property is a challenge to State Authority which still exists over the nation-state that because it has to remember back to the original definition which is a viberian definition Monopoly on the use of violence means the state can take land when it needs to right um and so religious and other minority rights um are now framed differently right so religious Authority used to be this Foundation of political Authority now it is a thing that needs to be um protected as a minority right rather than a majority right now we can talk about U.S and and the Dobbs decision all the rest of it but um the idea being here is that we see like this was the original complaints happening with Aristotle was that there we can have the ideal form but you know systems collapse back into their corrupt forms and one of those forms of corruption is they're creeping ways in which esteem and Authority is built back into the system billionaires tax loopholes offshore allows those Elites that in the past were challenged by liberal authority to reoccupy these systems of authority and so we can argue I mean as that Princeton study did the U.S is closer to an oligarchy than it is a democracy why because we have moments where things go up and down we move towards public goods and away from public goods we see the system as benefiting all or we see it as self-interested and then people interpret that in this open system as ways in which they should respond so I don't trust political Authority I'm going to establish my own system of learning knowledge Rule and laws you don't have any right to do anything over me I'm going to stockpile guns right because I I fear the state's power and authority and so we get these weird Notions about the relationship between freedom autonomy non-interference rights religion they're all bound up together in this this tradition of this tradition of political Authority um yeah we what is absent in all these Frameworks is is leadership um which is a central concern of modern day politics is what type of leader we we get ideas of leadership Machiavellian leadership but we don't actually look at specific leaders um and then this idea of and especially specifically without communism as a counterbalance um this is what fukuyama calls the end of History liberal democracy is our only logical conclusion um it's the best system we have and it stems from all of these Western assumptions about these forms of political Authority moving towards progress and so fuquiamo is very clear the the best form of political uh system that we have is liberal democracy it doesn't mean we're going to actually get liberal democracy and he argued we could we could backslide but we're just backsliding away from the ideal the platonic ideal of liberal democracy and so all of these mechanisms have been disrupted by kovid by populism by inequality alt-right political strong men all of these challenges are what was articulated at the beginning is that like with Pericles he wanted to rule well but the instant he does everything falls apart because people no longer think about how can I act in the best interest of others they only think how can I act in self-interest and so this is the constant tension and this is why these um seem so relevant um I'll stop there that video is is in the textbook in the online textbook um and I'll do a separate video just talking about it and reflecting on it but that is kind of modern political thought um and those are the theories of modern political thinking