Taught by professor Steven B. Smith, this course from Yale University offers an Introduction to Political Philosophy, and covers the following ground:
This course is intended as an introduction to political philosophy as seen through an examination of some of the major texts and thinkers of the Western political tradition. Three broad themes that are central to understanding political life are focused upon: the polis experience (Plato, Aristotle), the sovereign state (Machiavelli, Hobbes), constitutional government (Locke), and democracy (Rousseau, Tocqueville). The way in which different political philosophies have given expression to various forms of political institutions and our ways of life are examined throughout the course.
You can watch the 24 lectures from the course above, or find them on YouTube. To get more information on the course, including the syllabus, visit this Yale website.
The main texts used in this course include the following. You can find them in our collection of Free eBooks.
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Unsettling historical parallels between the newly-developing world order and the terrors that scourged Europe in the 1930s and 40s now seem undeniable to most informed observers of contemporary geopolitics. Europeans have their own political crises to weather, but all eyes currently seem trained on the military behemoth that is my own country. “These are not normal times,” admits Jane Chong at Lawfare. Though she critiques Nazi comparisons as needlessly alarmist, she “sees no reason for optimism.” While references to history’s greatest villain abound, we’ve also seen Australian scientist Alan Finkel compare the U.S. leader to Joseph Stalin for the suppression and censorship of environmental data.
The devastation Hitler and Stalin visited upon Western and Eastern Europe can hardly be overstated—and we still find it nearly impossible to comprehend. But not soon after the end of World War II, one of the 20th century’s most probing analysts of political thought attempted to do just that.
Arendt’s renewed relevance recently prompted Melvyn Bragg, host of the excellent BBC Radio program In Our Time, to bring three guest philosophy professors—Robert Eaglestone, Frisbee Sheffield, and Lyndsey Stonebridge—on air to discuss her ideas and influence. Bragg begins with a brief outline of Arendt’s biography, then turns to Sheffield, a lecturer at Girton College, Cambridge, for elaboration. They immediately address one of the most controversial aspects of Arendt’s young life, her affair with her mentor, Martin Heidegger, who joined the Nazi party and remained a true believer in its ideology.
But the conversation quickly moves on from there to encompass Arendt’s multi-dimensional thought. “There’s a great range to her writings,” says Sheffield. A trained classicist, Arendt wrote her dissertation on the idea of love in St. Augustine. Her most philosophical work, The Human Condition, drew on classical concepts to rank human activity into a hierarchy of labor, work, and action. She “wrote on a great range of topics,” Sheffield notes, though “there is a consistent interest in politics and political themes throughout her work.”
Yet Arendt rejected the label of political philosopher and is herself “hard to pin down” politically. Her 1963 book On Revolution, critiqued leftist and Marxist thought and praised the American Revolution for its constitutionalism. She was skeptical of the notion of universal human rights, and her essay On Violence made the argument that violence appears only in the absence of political power, not its ascendency. As we learn from listening to Bragg’s assembled panel of guests, Arendt consistently emphasized two classical concepts: the value of a civic and political order and the importance of the “life of the mind,” also the title of a two-volume work published posthumously in 1978.
To properly honor your cultural role models, don’t try to do what they did, or even to think what they thought, but to think how they thought. This goes at least double for John Cage, the experimental composer whose innovative works can be, and often are, re-staged (go on, have four minutes and 33 seconds of silence to yourself), but it takes a different kind of effort altogether to cultivate the kind of mind that would come up with them in the first place. As a means of activating your own inner Cageness, you could do much worse than read through his personal library, a list of whose books you’ll find at johncage.org.
The volumes number 1126 in total, and if you load the library’s main page, it will present you with a list of ten randomly selected books. (You can get a list of all of them by selecting the “See Entire Library” option on the left sidebar.)
Hitting refresh a few times will give you a sense of the breadth of Cage’s reading: Emma Goldman on anarchism, Chinese poetry gathered by Kenneth Rexroth, M. Conrad Hyers’ Zen and the Comic Spirit (two of Cage’s driving forces if ever I’ve heard them), How to Play Backgammon, essays on Ulysses (an interest shared with Marilyn Monroe), and even essays on John Cage. Here we’ve assembled a list of ten books from Cage’s library of particular interest to the Open Culture reader:
To those who know anything of Cage’s life and interests, his shelves on healthy eating—on which Dining Naturally in Japan: A Restaurant Guide to Wholesome Foodalso appears, as, naturally given the era and Cage’s acquired northern-Californianness, The Tassajara Bread Book—and especially the eating of mushrooms, come as no surprise, nor might his inclination toward philosophy. But we should note what looks like a particular fascination with the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, evidenced by 22 of the books in his library: his best-known works like the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, but also his letters, lectures, and notebooks, as well as biographies, commentaries, and Wittgenstein and Buddhism, which Cage must have considered an exciting find indeed.
In one of his most quotable quotes, Cage describes college as “two hundred people reading the same book. An obvious mistake. Two hundred people can read two hundred books.” And indeed, 1126 people can read 1126 books—or many more people can each read a different subset of those books. While you could methodically read your way through Cage’s entire library, and would surely learn a great deal in the process, wouldn’t making use of the unthinking guidance of the ten-random-books function, surrendering the direction of this informal education to the kind of chance that places Paul Bowles next to the common fungi of North American and Charles Ives next to Italian futurism, be a much more Cagean way of going about it?
Yesterday we wrote about Albert Camus’ role as the editor of Combat, a newspaper that emerged from a French Resistance cell and played a central role in the ideological conflicts of post-war France. Camus wrote essay after essay about the problems of violent extremism and the complications inherent in forming a new democratic civil order. Although he briefly fought alongside Communists in the resistance, and stood in solidarity with their cause, Camus would split with his Marxist allies after the war and come to define his own anarchist political philosophy, one he described as “modest… free of all messianic elements and devoid of any nostalgia for an earthly paradise.”
Camus gave the fullest exposition of his position in The Rebel, a critique of revolutionary violence on both the left and right. Published in 1951, this compelling, impressionistic work is an ethics as much as a politics–indeed, the two were inseparable for Camus. To proceed otherwise was a form of nihilism that would only end in profound unfreedom. “Nihilist thought,” he wrote in the chapter on “Moderation and Excess,” ignores the limits of human nature; “nothing any longer checks it in its course and it reaches the point of justifying total destruction or unlimited conquest.”
Fascism and Nazism were not far from Camus’ mind when he wrote these words. But he also referred to the increasingly doctrinaire Stalinism of his close friend and fellow existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, who, writes Sam Dresser at Aeon, read The Rebel with “disgust.” Sartre published a scathing review in his journal, Les Temps Modernes. Camus sent a long reply, and Sartre countered with what Volker Hage in Der Spiegelcalls a “merciless” response. “The split between the two friends,” writes Dresser, “was a media sensation,” the kind of popular feud between public intellectuals that may only happen in France.
Animated by Andrew Khosravani, the Aeon video above gives us a brief narrative of the famous falling-out. There may be “no better bust-up in the annals of philosophy than the row between” these “two titans of Existentialism.” The two fought not only over ideas, but over women, including Sartre’s famous partner Simone de Beauvoir. (Camus offended Sartre by turning down her advances.) Both Sartre and Camus “worried about how to make meaning in an essentially absurd, godless world.” But Sartre, Camus thought, abrogated the radical freedom he had written of in works like Being and Nothingness with his acceptance of dialectical materialism and his admiration for an authoritarian regime that imprisoned and murdered its own people.
Camus found the contradictions in Sartre’s thought intolerable, and he begins The Rebel with a philosophical inquiry into the ethics of killing. Can murder be justified in the name of a utopian ideal? Camus was not a pacifist—he had no problem fighting the Nazi occupation. But he categorically rejected revolutionary violence and all forms of extremism in the name of some “earthly paradise.” Sartre and Camus could not agree to disagree and went their separate ways, and Camus died in a car accident in 1960. In a heartfelt appreciation that Sartre penned shortly before his own death 20 years later, he called Camus, “probably my only good friend.”
When totalitarian regimes around the world are in power, writing that tells the truth—whether literary, journalistic, scientific, or legal—effectively serves as counter-propaganda. To write honestly is to expose: to uncover what is hidden, stand apart from it, and observe. These actions are anathema to dictatorships. But they are integral to resistance movements, which must develop their own press in order to disseminate ideas other than official state dogma.
For the French Resistance during World War II, one such publication that served the purpose came from a cell called “Combat,” which gave its name to the underground newspaper to which Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus both contributed during and after the war. Camus became Combat’s editor and editorial writer between 1944 and 1947. During his tenure, he “was suspicious,” writes Michael McDonald, and he urged his readers to “be suspicious of those who speak the loudest in defense of democratic ideals and absolutes but whose goal is to instill fear in opponents and to silence dissent.”
Camus witnessed and recorded the liberation of France from the Nazi occupation in moving passages like this one:
Paris is firing all its ammunition into the August night. Against a vast backdrop of water and stone, on both sides of a river awash with history, freedom’s barricades are once again being erected. Once again justice must be redeemed with men’s blood.
After the previously unthinkable event that ended the war in the Pacific, the 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Camus explicitly critiqued the “formidable concert” of opinion impressed with fact that “any average city can be wiped out by a bomb the size of a football.” Against these “eloquent essays,” he wrote darkly,
We can sum it up in one sentence: our technical civilization has just reached its greatest level of savagery. We will have to choose, in the more or less near future, between collective suicide and the intelligent use of our scientific conquests.
Camus heavily documented the early post-war years in France, as the country slowly reconstituted itself, and as coalitions formerly united in resistance collapsed into competing factions. He was alarmed by not only by the fascists on the right, but by the many French socialists seduced by Stalinism. The very next month after the liberation of Paris, Camus began addressing the “problem of government” in an essay titled “To Make Democracy.” Government, writes Camus, “is, to a great extent our problem, as it is indeed the problem of everyone,” but he prefaced his own position with, “we do not believe in politics without clear language.”
By December of 1944, a few months before the fall of Berlin, Camus had grown deeply reflective, expressing attitudes found in many eyewitness accounts. “France has lived through many tragedies,” he wrote, and “will live through many more.” The tragedy of the war, he wrote, was “the tragedy of separation.”
Who would dare speak the word “happiness” in these tortured times? Yet millions today continue to seek happiness. These years have been for them only a prolonged postponement, at the end of which they hope to find that the possibility for happiness has been renewed. Who could blame them? … We entered this war not because of any love of conquest, but to defend a certain notion of happiness. Our desire for happiness was so fierce and pure that it seemed to justify all the years of unhappiness. Let us retain the memory of this happiness and of those who have lost it.
These lucid, passionate essays “include little that is obsolete,” wrote Stanley Hoffman at Foreign Affairs in 2006. “Indeed it is shocking to find how current Camus’ fears, exhortations, and aspirations still are.” Hoffman particularly found Camus’ demand “for morality in politics” compelling. Though “deemed naïve… [by] many other philosophers and writers of his time,” Camus’ insistence on clarity of thought and ethical choice made for what he called “a modest political philosophy… free of all messianic elements and devoid of any nostalgia for an earthly paradise.” How sobering those words sound in our current moment.
When Eichmann in Jerusalem—Hannah Arendt’s book about Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann’s trial—came out in 1963, it contributed one of the most famous of post-war ideas to the discourse, the “banality of evil.” And the concept at first caused a critical furor. “Enormous controversy centered on what Arendt had written about the conduct of the trial, her depiction of Eichmann, and her discussion of the role of the Jewish Councils,” writes Michael Ezra at Dissent magazine “Eichmann, she claimed, was not a ‘monster’; instead, she suspected, he was a ‘clown.’”
Arendt blamed victims who were forced to collaborate, critics charged, and made the Nazi officer seem ordinary and unremarkable, relieving him of the extreme moral weight of his responsibility. She answered these charges in an essay titled “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” published in 1964. Here, she aims to clarify the question in her title by arguing that if Eichmann were allowed to represent a monstrous and inhuman system, rather than shockingly ordinary human beings, his conviction would make him a scapegoat and let others off the hook. Instead, she believes that everyone who worked for the regime, whatever their motives, is complicit and morally culpable.
But although most people are culpable of great moral crimes, those who collaborated were not, in fact, criminals. On the contrary, they chose to follow the rules in a demonstrably criminal regime. It’s a nuance that becomes a stark moral challenge. Arendt points out that everyone who served the regime agreed to degrees of violence when they had other options, even if those might be fatal. Quoting Mary McCarthy, she writes, “If somebody points a gun at you and says, ‘Kill your friend or I will kill you,’ he is tempting you, that is all.”
While this circumstance may provide a “legal excuse,” for killing, Arendt seeks to define a “moral issue,” a Socratic principle she had “taken for granted” that we all believed: “It is better to suffer than do wrong,” even when doing wrong is the law. People like Eichmann were not criminals and psychopaths, Arendt argued, but rule-followers protected by social privilege. “It was precisely the members of respectable society,” she writes, “who had not been touched by the intellectual and moral upheaval in the early stages of the Nazi period, who were the first to yield. They simply exchanged one system of values against another,” without reflecting on the morality of the entire new system.
Those who refused, on the other hand, who even “chose to die,” rather than kill, did not have “highly developed intelligence or sophistication in moral matters.” But they were critical thinkers practicing what Socrates called a “silent dialogue between me and myself,” and they refused to face a future where they would have to live with themselves after committing or enabling atrocities. We must remember, Arendt writes, that “whatever else happens, as long as we live we shall have to live together with ourselves.”
Such refusals to participate might be small and private and seemingly ineffectual, but in large enough numbers, they would matter. “All governments,” Arendt writes, quoting James Madison, “rest on consent,” rather than abject obedience. Without the consent of government and corporate employees, the “leader… would be helpless.” Arendt admits the unlikely effectiveness of active opposition to a one-party authoritarian state. And yet when people feel most powerless, most under duress, she writes, an honest “admission of one’s own impotence” can give us “a last remnant of strength” to refuse.
We have only for a moment to imagine what would happen to any of these forms of government if enough people would act “irresponsibly” and refuse support, even without active resistance and rebellion, to see how effective a weapon this could be. It is in fact one of the many variations of nonviolent action and resistance—for instance the power that is potential in civil disobedience.
We have example after example of these kinds of refusals to participate in a murderous system or further its aims. Arendt was aware these actions can come at great cost. The alternatives, she argues, may be far worse.
The question of whether or not genuine human progress is possible, or desirable, lies at the heart of many a radical post-Enlightenment philosophical project. More pessimistic philosophers have, unsurprisingly, doubted it. Arthur Schopenhauer, cast baleful suspicion on the idea. Danish Existentialist Soren Kierkegaard thought of collective progress toward a more enlightened state an unlikely prospect. One modern critic of progress, pessimistic English philosopher John Gray, writes in his book Straw Dogs that “the pursuit of progress” is an idealist illusion ending in “mass murder.” (Gray has been unimpressed by Steven Pinker’s optimistic arguments in The Better Angels of Our Nature.)
These skeptics of progress all in some way write in response to the towering 19th century figure G.W.F. Hegel, the German logician and philosopher of history, politics, and phenomenology whose systematic thinking provided Karl Marx with the basis of his dialectical materialism. Hegel saw the mass murder brought about by massive political and economic change in his revolutionary and imperial age, but in his estimation, such man-made disasters were necessary occurrences, the “slaughter bench of history,” as he famously wrote in the Philosophy of History.
This suggests a very brutal view, and yet Hegel believed overall that “Reason is the Sovereign of the World; that the history of the world therefore, presents us with a rational process.” For Hegel, the individual personality was not important, only collective entities: peoples, states, empires. These moved against each other according to a metaphysical reasoning process working through history which Hegel called the dialectic. In his animated School of Life video above, Alain de Botton describes the dialectic in the terms we usually use—thesis, antithesis, synthesis—though Hegel himself did not exactly formulate the principle this way.
This is the common shorthand way of understanding how Hegel’s nonlinear explanation of history works: “the world makes progress,” summarizes de Botton, “by lurching from one extreme to the other, as it seeks to overcompensate for a previous mistake, and generally requires three moves before the right balance on any issue can be found.” One particularly bloody example is the terror of the French Revolution as an extreme corrective for the monarchy’s oppression. This gave way to the antithesis, the brutal autocratic empire of Napoleon in another extreme swing. Only decades later could these be reconciled in modern French civil society.
In our own time, we have encountered the progressive ideas of Hegel not only through Marx, but through the work of Martin Luther King, Jr., who studied Hegel as a graduate student at Harvard and Boston University and found much inspiration in the Philosophy of History. Though critical of Hegel’s idealism, which, “tended to swallow up the many in the one,” King discovered important first principles there as well: “His analysis of the dialectical process, in spite of its shortcomings, helped me to see that growth comes through struggle.”
We endlessly quote King’s statement, “the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice,” but we forget his corresponding emphasis on the necessity of struggle to achieve the goal. As Hegel theorized, says de Botton above, “the dark moments aren’t the end, they are a challenging but in some ways necessary part… imminently compatible with events broadly moving forward in the right direction.” King found his own historical synthesis in the principle of nonviolent resistance, which “seeks to reconcile the truths of two opposites,” he wrote in 1954’s Stride Toward Freedom, “acquiescence and violence.” Nonviolent resistance is not passive compliance, but neither is it intentional aggression.
Hegel and his socially influential students like Martin Luther King and John Dewey have generally operated on the basis of some faith—in reason, divine justice, or secular humanism. There are much harsher, more pessimistic ways of viewing history than as a swinging pendulum moving toward some greater end. Pessimistic thinkers may be more rigorously honest about the staggering moral challenge posed by increasingly efficient means of mass killing and the perpetuation of ideologies that commit it. Yet it is partly through the influence of Hegel that modern social movements have embraced the necessity of struggle and believed progress was possible, even inevitable, when it seemed least likely to occur.
The German philosopher and sociologist Theodor Adorno had much to say about what was wrong with society, and even now, nearly fifty years after his death, his adherents would argue that his diagnoses have lost none of their relevance. But what, exactly, did he think ailed us? This animated introduction from Alain de Botton’s School of Life on the “the beguiling and calmly furious work” of the author of books like Dialectic of Enlightenment, Minima Moralia, Negative Dialectics, and The Authoritarian Personalityoffers a brief primer on the critical theory that constituted Adorno’s entire life’s work.
Well, almost his entire life’s work: “Until his twenties, Adorno planned for a career as a composer, but eventually focused on philosophy.” He then became an exile from his homeland in 1934, eventually landing in Los Angeles, where he found himself “both fascinated and repelled by Californian consumer culture, and thought with unusual depth about suntans and drive-ins.”
This eventually brought him to define “three significant ways in which capitalism corrupts and degrades us,” the first being that “leisure time becomes toxic” (due in large part to the “omnipresent and deeply malevolent entertainment machine which he called the Culture Industry”), the second that “capitalism doesn’t sell us the things we really need,” and the third that “proto-fascists are everywhere.”
Even if you don’t buy all the dangers Adorno ascribes to capitalism itself, his core observation still holds up: “Psychology comes ahead of politics. Long before someone is racist, homophobic, or authoritarian, they are, Adorno skillfully suggested, likely to be suffering from psychological frailties and immaturities, which is the task of a good society to get better at spotting and responding to.” In order to address this, “we should learn to understand the psychology of everyday insanity from the earliest moments.” What would Adorno, who “recognized that the primary obstacles to social progress are cultural and psychological rather than narrowly political or economic,” make of our 21st-century social media age? Maybe it would surprise him — and maybe it wouldn’t surprise him at all.
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