When do governments deserve our allegiance, and when should they be denied it? This course explores the main answers that have been given to this question in the modern West. We start with a survey of the major political theories of the Enlightenment: Utilitarianism, Marxism, and the social contract tradition. In each case, we begin with a look at classical formulations, locating them in historical context, but then shift to the contemporary debates as they relate to politics today. Next, we turn to the rejection of Enlightenment political thinking, again exploring both classical and contemporary formulations. The last part of the course deals with the nature of, and justifications for, democratic politics, and their relations to Enlightenment and Anti-Enlightenment political thinking. In addition to exploring theoretical differences among the various authors discussed, considerable attention is devoted to the practical implications of their competing arguments. To this end, we discuss a variety of concrete problems, including debates about economic inequality, affirmative action and the distribution of health care, the limits of state power in the regulation of speech and religion, and difficulties raised by the emerging threat of global environmental decay.
It is Unjust for Chamberlain to Make So Much Money
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Moral Foundations of Politics
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The Social Contract Tradition II
This module looks at classical formulations of the Social Contract Tradition, locating them in historical context, but then shifts to the contemporary debates as they relate to politics today.
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Ian ShapiroSterling Professor of Political Science and Henry R. Luce Director
The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale
I want to spend a little bit of time coming back now,
as I promised you to this very important distinction that Nozick makes,
between compensation and redistribution.
And just to recap going in, so we know what we're talking about, his point was
that redistribution is, is up, it is, it's a pattern.
If you want to redistribute to produce some pattern,
you've gotta get people to agree on the pattern, and they don't.
And so, you're going to have to coerce people to accept your pattern.
That was the first, the problem with it.
The second one, we've now seen is, even if you instituted it, and
you let markets run, they would upset, the markets would upset the pattern, and
you'd then have to coerce people to recreate the pattern.
So redistribution, people would,
wouldn't come about naturally, as a result of voluntary transactions, right?
Compensation is less demanding, both epistemologically and politically.
Because if, if you punch me in the face, the only thing that has to be computed
is how much damage you did, and there might be some problems
around the edges with that, but it's still much less difficult than redistribution.
And so he talks about compensation, the, the independence for the fear.
The fear we all experience, as a result of the possibility that those
independents out there turn out to be terrorists, right?
But, in a way, this argument proves too much.
So, this is, this is what I want you to think about for a minute.
He's, his argument was, well, the fear that the independents might turn out
to be terrorists reduces all of our utility, so we force them to join, and
then, we ask a question,, could we have compensated them and still be better off?
And if the answer is yes, we do it.
yes, it involves some interpersonal judgments.
We went over that, but it's unavoidable, so we do it.
but, we all know that there's always
the possibility of unemployment in a market system.
So, why couldn't somebody just say to Nozick, well,
okay, fear of independence, we do that, but why wouldn't fear about unemployment?
Coerse people to say, well, we better have unemployment insurance,
in case we lose our jobs, and force everybody to accept that.
And that all we have to say is if, if in principle we can compensate the people,
who didn't want to have unemployment insurance for a system that has it and
still be better off, we could have that.
>> Why, the real, it's a really slippery slope.
I mean, you, you can't compensate everybody for
every potential fear, they might have, but anything.
>> Okay. >> I mean,
if you're, you can be, you can be sort of, have a fear of being unemployed.
But you can have a fear, you know, any number of any,
in any other things, and you can't be cons, compensated for every rational or
irrational fear you might have.
>> But so isn't that a problem for Nozick, rather than for
us then, because he starts with this idea that we sho,
that fear of independence is something which is okay to compensate people for.
>> Yeah, it's absolutely a fear, it makes it that compensation is
potentially as burdensome as the concept of redistribution could be,
because it can be just as vague.
>> Just, well, okay, I'm not so much thinking here as,
we'll get to vagueness questions, there are vagueness questions.
But it's more, the, the issue I'm saying is once you say,
fe, fear after all is kind of an externality, it's not that these,
these independents are running around threatening.
Or you know,
they might be harmless anarchists sitting in a field reading Tolstoy.
>> [LAUGH] >> Right?
But we, we say, well, we can't live with that fear, right?
But then one fear, why is one fear different than another fear?
Right? So, so the, the problem here is that
the argument if either proves to little, in that it doesn't justify for
simply incorporating the independence, or it proves too much, because then you
can say, well, fear of unemployment, fear of not having a pension.
You can, pretty soon, crank it up.
And essentially, translate everything we call redistribution into
the compensatory idiom.
Right? So, this suggests that this, this idea of
the ultra-minimal state or the, the classical na, night-watchman state,
being the only justifiable state, it's the only unique solution is dubious.
Right? That, that he's playing fast and
loose in that sense.
But let's come to the second topic you were bringing up.
Which is just say, a little more I,
I didn't quite understand what you were getting at?
That, that there's compensation isn't different from redistribution because?
>> Well, it ca, it can be just as vague, I mean, if, if you're, say, you know,
I hit you in the face.
You know, you can say compensation is clear-cut, and
you just look at the medical bill.
You know, I mean, what, what amount of money do you owe, let's match that,
you're back to where you began.
But it's not just about money,
it can be about the potential humiliation you suffered.
It can be about the missed work days.
It can be about-
>> Mm-hm. >> You know, the the hit to your pride,
because, you know, I, I bested you in some physical altercation.
>> Okay, but, you know, when we have tort, tort cases,
people put in pain and suffering, they put in, lost and, loss.
They put all that stuff in, and the court figures it out.
The jury decides something.
>> But it takes a jury and a court system to figure it out.
>> Yeah. >> It's complicated.
>> Yeah. >> It's full of effort, and
that's why it can be just as-
>> But Nozick still wants to say it's qualitatively different from
trying to decide what is, you know, whe,
whether you should compensate, suppose you have a lot more money than I do.
We don't get into the question of whether it's right that you
have more money than I do.
We just get into the question of what damage did you do to me.
That's the only question that has to be answered now-
>> Right. >> So that's a sense in,
which he, he wants, he would push back, I think, at this, if you, if you,
if he were here, at what you're saying.
Any, anything else, though, that, I mean, I think your intuition that,
that there's less to this distinction than meets the eye is right, but
you haven't quite articulated it.
Wo, think about some more political cases maybe.
>> Okay, for instance, what he was saying there is
a problem with compensation because you don't know where to put the cap on it and
how far you can go in compensating something for someone for something.
And for instance, if you look at the political cases at in politics and
secessionist movements, for instance, they can claim all sort of injustice.
>> They always do, right?
They always. >> And they do.
>> Okay. >> And they have the case of Kosovo,
right?
where- >> Uh-huh.
>> They were given a territory based on
this argument of past injustices.
>> Okay, so they're always going to think there's a past injustice.
Let's think of some actual cases.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union,
the descendants of Tsar Nicholas said, well,
now it's time to give us the property back that was seized in 1917 by the Bolsheviks.
Right?
That was a, that was a specific identifiable harm, right?
Or, if you look at the South African transition that occurred in 1994
off the end of apartheid, King Goodwill Zwelintini,
the, the Zulu king, said, wait a minute, nevermind the Africaners.
The British in the 19th century, they grabbed a lot of land-
>> [COUGH] >> From the Zulus.
We, we'd now is the time, thank you very much,
to, to rectify that past injustice and give it back, right?
Well, you read any book on the early American Republic about the extortion of
Indian lands, so-called purchases that were made at the barrel of a gun.
And Native Americans say, you know,
we don't want these, these lousy little reservations, thank you very much.
How about the millions and millions of acres in the Northwest and
in the Southwest that, that were was basically, extorted from us.
Give it back, right?
or, you know, to take a current one that's,
I say currently, in the news, it's always in the news.
That the Palestinians and Israelis arguing about
the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean.
And so, you know, they say, well, the 1967 borders, the 1948 borders, and they argue
back, it all the way back to the Hebrew Bible, as to whose property this is.
So, the, the idea that compensation, because it's backward-looking and
aimed at fixing a particular identifiable injustice,
the problem with that is exactly, the one you identified, with respect to Kosovo,
that wherever you stop, in your backward-looking fix-it moment,
somebody is going to say, wait a minute, why stop there,
we need to go back further, because there was an injustice before that.
>> Mm-hm.
>> Right?
And so you see this come up over, and over, and over again, and
you get into the same thing, and arguments about affirmative action, for example.
It's compensation for harms, then to minorities, and ap, and,
and other disadvantage group, when, by whom, how far do you go back?
Why is it that people should lose jobs today, who,
who didn't have slaves, who didn't do the, you know?
So you get into exactly the same debate and
the notion that they're any less charged to any less politically explosive
than debates about redistribution, it, it's far from obviously true.
Indeed, if you look at the political science literature on regime transitions,
what you find is, the consensus is,
the sooner you can get people to stop focusing on the injustices of the past,
the better your chances are for building a viable regime.
Because the, if you focus people on the past wherever you stop,
it's going to turn out to be arbitrary, and
the, the people who think you should have gone back further are going to have
their sense of outrage ignited by the, the place at which you choose to stop.
You know, so if, if, we, if we eh, if,
the, if the Crimea is now going to be part of Russia, after all,
the, the Tatars will have a different story to tell and so on.
So that the, the conventional wisdom in, in,
in regime transitions is it's actually better to get people focused on
the future than focused on the past, which might suggest a very different approach.
So this idea that, that compensation is, is somehow less politically,
or philosophically demanding than redistribution turns out to be debatable.
There is no it there's no technical answer to these questions, right?
They're, they're political choices, they depend upon the balance of forces,
at the, at the time, and what they're going to be able to achieve.
There so, in short, coming back to our large Enlightenment theme,
there is no way to, to give a technical scientific answer, and
therefore there's no way to deliver on that aspect of the Enlightenment
to establish the supremacy of individual rights of anybody to anything.
And so it seems like on the one hand the,
the enormous investment of sci, in the idea of science is in jeopardy.
And secondly, the idea that individual rights,
always respecting individual rights, is the most important way to go, is also in
jeopardy, at least if we want to say, that it's given some scientific basis.
So, having gone through the utilitarian tradition, the Marxian tradition, and
now the social contract tradition from the classical formulations to their
contemporary manifestations, we see that the Enlightenment project in many ways is,
is unrealized and particularly unrealized with respect to its twin commitments to
science and the derivation of unassailable conception of individual rights.
And so, you can't wring the politics out of politics,
it's become a repetitive refrain.
But what we're going to do next, is go and look at the condition which says, okay,
so let's give up on the Enlightenment tradition completely, and
abandon the scientific search for principles of individual freedom.
And that's what we'll do next time.
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