Enduring ideas 1

okay in this lecture we'll be discussing um the next section of enduring ideas um this section we're going to you know talk about the idea of political philosophy um some of the origins of Western political philosophy and then we'll kind of unpack some of the assumptions about it um I've been thinking about this and like I think I would be I'd say this about every idea right is that you can have both a sympathetic and a critical reading of these ideas and so there's certainly value in getting ideas from anywhere but just because we have

gotten ideas from some places doesn't mean we shouldn't be a little bit critical of them so throughout this chapter I'm going to bring in um I'll do the sympathetic reading I'm going to we can be sympathetic to most ideas but then there's also ways in which we have to be critical of them right so we have to look at history I mean I was the director for almost the last decade of the international relations program at Western which is a combination of the history and political science departments and we start off those courses with the

kind of discussion of you know political science likes to abstract and think about Dynamics um just like other fields the anthropology likes to look at the social and cultural history of things sociology tries to understand social dynamics and Norms um and then political science tries to think about those things in terms of contestation and governance whereas history tries to situate those ideas in their context and there's a danger of presentism where this idea that we use Concepts in the present and we don't really think about their context or history and so we're going to bring

in a little bit of that context in history on top of the the reading for today just to to do that so we talk about these and and we'll do it and especially going forward we'll certainly situate this in in terms of thinking about different authors like I did last week thinking about the non-western Traditions thinking about black theorization and history to try to to to unpack some of these assumptions about modernity I I don't know what modernity means I know how it is deployed but I don't have a good sense of that which is

modern because you know we have seen how basic ways like social networking like the most modern forms of technology of of um you know of Facebook can be used to propagate the oldest ideas the Flat Earth idea right so just because something is new it still has to be situated in Social context you take a phone back to the 1400s it looks great until the battery dies um it can't do anything it also doesn't connect to the internet it has no infrastructure there it's not meaningful technology is not meaningful without its social context so we're

going to think about the ways in which that matters in terms of ideas and dealing with this so we're going to examine the way in which political philosophy kind of is a distinct form of inquiry how we think about Concepts like freedom and Justice and Order and authority and then you know what is the purpose of government and what is a good life entail it we'll I'll extend this and we'll deal with different voices traditional texts and the next couple readings we'll deal with that as well um if we St it's it's weird to do

these readings um I had this I think somebody commented last year you know um if you don't like these textbooks why do you use them well because they're textbooks because somebody's done the hard work of you know it's hard to create a Wikipedia it's hard to create an encyclopedia it's hard to create a textbook but in doing so you have to summarize and condense ideas to such a point in order to increase their legibility that you lose a lot of what makes politics politics which is contestation right so we started discussing the idea that that

these ideas are essentially contested and then we immediately move to well listen to these ideas because they matter which is a contestation at all it's disciplining so we have to to think about those things listen you know the biggest myth about how we think about political thought is that somehow like we're indoctrinating you listen we would love to indoctrinate you it is so hard to teach political ideas because everybody comes to it with their preconceived notions about what matters and what doesn't and so we we have to understand that these analytical insights of of how

we frame things like political philosophy are kind of embedded with in a context and a voice that is speaking them right and if we're taking them out of their context and we're talking about them without that voice we have to be conscious of of who's making those decisions so these kind of univocal framings of knowledge are the idea that there's a single speaker is very much in the western Canon and is very much based in this kind of monotheistic understanding of the world so then it asserts things like Universal human nature ideas that we'll get

to with like we could be sympathetic listen I think lots of people are self-interested and fearful um does that mean that we should characterize all people as self-interested and fearful I I think that it that we make the leap especially in politics from the contingent and then we do an analysis and then we say it's Universal which it's that leap that I'm not convinced by and so we have these ideas that I will resist inevitably and then everybody just falls back into about ideas of human nature as if somehow humans are distinct from the natural

world in ways that make us be able to articulate Universal visions of that and considering as we talked about last time we'll talk about again that Aristotle begins with basically arguing that only well only citizens are humans which is still kind of how we frame things because our rights-based model still goes to the state and rights are still for Citizens we can see that just in terms of pay and and things like that and right how do we pay and who gets who gets remunerated for their work socially reproductive work we'll talk about um you

know we know how much socially reproductive work costs but we don't remunerate it because we assume that I guess you love your kids and that should somehow be free even though if you love your kids and you want to go to work and you have to pay for daycare we know exactly how much it costs to love your kids anyways the complicated stuff so just this idea of human versus animal and who deserves rights is kind of constantly contested right contested and so um as we go through these ideas I'm going to do this work

and this is from shilliam's text I teach this now in a third year course on decolonizing politics where we just say listen you know we need to make sure that we recontextualize political thinkers to not treat them univocally not treat them as if their articulations at a specific place in time are Universal they're not they're we're deploying them disciplinarily and strategically in order to achieve certain political ends right say that Western liberal Democratic governance is legitimate and other forms are less legitimate right those type of things and so we have to be conscious of the

ways in which they got to where they were which is often through imposition right so we've got ideas they're great ideas now you must take our ideas because we say they're good and so we just you know we're trying to recontextualize so that we can reconceptualize right so that we don't just fall into this trap of ideas are good because I say they're good right we actually think about the value of those ideas so we do a sympathetic and we do a critical reading and then we say maybe the reason that it's valid is less

of about the fact that it stands on its own but more about the fact that it it came to stand on its own through the imposition of you must read these things because they are disciplinarily the Canon so I I am sympathetic to this too it's a lot easier to think monovokly I just presented a paper in the comments where um you've got three papers here it's like simplify it so that you've got one single line of argumentation so that people can better understand and so we understand better when we have a singular voice so

that's why I want to do the sympathetic reading but I think it's important to do the critical reading as well because we have to we have to kind of deal with both aspects of that and so um what we get then after telling us that all ideas are contested we then argue that the first systematic text came from the ancient Greeks I'm not even sure that's true it might be true it's the ones we use and it's I mean what about all the anyways what about all the uh the languages that have oral Traditions right

so it's really that we can break things down and we can transmit them that that's why that we say that they're systematic um they form a Canon of ideas that is endured over time but sure if we let it um it is shaped by the real world context of Athens um again history don't get trapped in presentism there's lots of different monovocal readings of history and poly vocal readings of History which is to say like listen to different ideas there are accounts of this I mean they're finding all of these texts now I think they

saw one the other day um it's a a letter written I think it was in ancient Egypt from a mother to a son complaining that they don't contact them enough and they don't call them anymore don't visit them anymore um so we also articulate very specific ideas about what happened throughout history and then articulate them in the present some things do happen with consistency over time um and happen all over the place so we talk we'll talk a bit about Pericles in the Peloponnesian War because we just do and then the dissolution of democracy the

rise of fall of of Athens as you know an imagining of the polis of the idea and then you know this Justice versus might and judgment versus Instinct and then what is democracy um actually the political science department at Western has an entire book called what is democracy I did a chapter in it as well that was called hatred of democracy so we don't always agree on these ideas um the textbook references in passing students should also study indigenous Traditions which prevent present alternative ways of to think about Concepts like Authority Freedom belonging and enter

social relations the good dive but we don't get them so I I'm bringing them in because if we're gonna say in the textbook one this is systematic text to they form a candidate of ideas and then four there are other ideas maybe we should engage with some of those other ideas I'll come back to this later in the course but there are very instructive Ways to Think like with basic simple Concepts and this is the sympathetic reading well the stuff we're going to do is that it does help us and we'll come to this later

this is one I use in my other classes but it's like basic stuff so you know we do it in international relations we just say is the nation-state the primary actor in the International System and so if you're a monovocal actor who thinks that we need to learn politics in order to inform those in in power then you say yes and then from there we go do you believe people are inherently selfish or inherently good and so we've used these as kind of shorthands to tell you as quick ways to access which theoretical perspectives might

be useful for whatever it is you're analyzing so we're using these as tools of political understanding the problem is is that we then equate them with universal characteristics of human behavior which may or may not be true and so if we don't believe that states the primary actors then we have to ask the question well what is and so we ask things maybe it's economic exploitation back to last week talking about Marx or it's all just made up like it's all series of social construction so we have different theories for that if we believe it's

exploitation if it's colonialism then we would say you know is is it the primary mechanism or is it not and so we get to that and then is colonialism still happening or we can talk about you know to believe the structure benefits those who are aggressive or do we believe our structures benefit those who cooperate and then are you somewhere in the middle so there's all different ways to think about some forms of political participation so let's start with a kind of reconcept sexualization of political Theory largely based I mean Western is very close to

Six Nations are there and that part of this long tradition kind of unbroken tradition back to the 1200s 1400s is this political Theory this social contract theory this understanding of of dynamics that is in story based so it can be told and retold so it is articulated as an oral tradition but we could write it down and then it becomes a written tradition and we can make it part of the candidate before Europeans arrived on what they would name North American soil five nations came together and formed the Confederacy they were Guided by the will

of the people and they created a constitution with 117 articles that guaranteed the rights of the people and the responsibilities of their leaders so we'll come back to this as we go through but the idea here is that there are lots of different Traditions that could be used to establish a Canon the fact that we don't isn't because they're not valid it reflects the kind of contingencies and the the experiences that have led us to where we are right now that Constitution the Great Law of Peace still guides those people to this day so who

are they well those Europeans we mentioned would call them Iroquois but that's not really their name they are the hodinoshone people of the Longhouse we don't know exactly when they formed their Confederacy only that it certainly came before the arrival of the Europeans perhaps by as much as a millennium we also know the name of one of its Founders Hiawatha [Music] when big huge games told us that they plans to add Hiawatha as a great leader in their game dominations we got pretty excited the Confederacy he formed is an incredible piece of history of governance

one that has survived for centuries and played an acknowledged role in shaping the United States Constitution and when we asked big huge games so we'll come back to that later as well the I mean I don't care about the big huge Games part that that's irrelevant the idea of its relevance here is that it seems to be as a more consistent form of political organization at least I mean what we would have we would say the 1648 modern nation state is a relatively stable and long-standing former political organization which structures our current world order but

there's clearly other forms that also structure political organizations have persisted for longer they would be interested in sponsoring two episodes about hiawatha's role forming social Confederacy they got pretty excited so here we go but first a disclaimer much of the evidence of the Hoten ashoni confederacy's Foundation has been handed down through the oral tradition and where history privileges the written word a culture that keeps its history through sacred stories will often be left out of the prevailing narrative or Worse told that they have no history at all the huddinoshoni very much have a history and

it's a living history characterized by a variety of perspective and expression our goal here isn't to mandate one principle story that must be believed above all others but to relate one story of Hiawatha as a lens to learn about the living real and vital hudanashoni Confederacy so there's a benefit in having poly vocal Traditions is that everybody can interpret their own things differently that's what I'm doing with this text that's what the text did with the original text right we're all translating it differently we're just privileging the written word over the oral tradition when in

fact the oral tradition is more personal um personal is political here it's it's the way in which we articulate we remember and we think of those who've told us the stories and so we establish those connections between people not just through written texts so there's a a kind of social embodiment in the ways in which we think about political Theory which we do here too we just tend to do it passively rather than actively thinking about it our Story begins in Onondaga territory in a time when people who had once been Brothers Ward with each

other a chief named tarodaho led the Onondaga into battle after battle he was ferocious I have a children's book version of this we can do this very simply political Theory can be articulated very clearly we've got Quantum Mechanics for babies at this point so there's no reasons we can't do these things and this is an oversimplified version that the children's book I have is more nuanced than this video I don't know what that means to the point of viciousness and although he won many battles his victories never brought peace and his lust for violence only

grew stronger so we'll talk about this when we get to Hubs but the idea of life being you know brutal and short or self-interested brutal and short is also in this story and it does form the basis for understanding political Authority and confederation so it's very similar to the political theory of traditions we have in the west lesser Chiefs of his tribe lived in fear of him and tarodaho treated them like scum whose only purpose was to praise and Obey him but one of them did not his name was Hiawatha Hiawatha was grieving his wife

had been taken from him by Raiders long ago two of his daughters had died of illness that couldn't be cured and then his third daughter whom he cherished and tried to protect died in a tragic accident so there's a tragedy that underpins this we'll get to this later there's a lot of especially American political theory that follows from the the the political thinking of Jews fleeing the Holocaust who come to America helps structure how they think about things but this idea of both male leadership as emotional male leadership is not something that we get a

lot of and that we need to think more more about in order to understand kind of the complexities of masculinity and Leadership rather than just frame everything as a single univocal way of doing things Hiawatha found himself looking back on a lifetime of war with regret this sorrow he felt must surely be shared by everybody who had lost a child or a loved one war seemed to him like the worst cause of this grief since unlike illness or Misfortune War could be avoided at least he believed it couldn't so there's some it happen to know

a couple talking about the universal negative as a political Theory so we don't actually share a universal you know characteristics or biology or whatever in common in ways that we can say that this is human nature but we should certainly share the experience of loss and so framing a political Theory through the idea of loss is an interesting negativity that is shared by others and so um there's there's a lot of different political ways to think about it but this is an interesting way to start our discussion he called the Council of all the Onondaga

Chiefs including taradaho to propose a piece according to stories he'd heard their brother tribe the Mohawk had embraced a peaceful way of life and were no longer Waging War on anyone Hiawatha said if we Unite with them we can protect each other we'll have no more need of War taronaho hated that idea so this is a classic idealism like this is the platonic ideal versus the kind of practical assertion of yes we can have a peaceful Society but you're going to have people who are just going to say well that's unrealistic and I'm not going

to participate in it war was his identity it was the Foundation of his power everyone who looked up to him did so because they feared his strength he told Hiawatha that if he liked this Mohawk piece so much maybe he should go live with them so let's be clear the U.S military spends more on their military than the rest of the world combined it's just an addendum and the remaining Chiefs cowed by tarodaho didn't disagree so Hiawatha left he traveled to the current home of the Mohawks and sought the man he'd heard stories about the

man who had convinced them to give up their warring ways and embrace peace his grandmother had given him a different name but now everybody called him The Peacemaker Hiawatha waited patiently outside the walls of the mohaka village where The Peacemaker lived until The Peacemaker came to him when they met Hiawatha gave him a string of shining purple and white beads called Wampum the white ones represented peace he said and the dark ones represented War so he had created a string with white beads on either side of the dark beads to show his desire for peace

to overcome War The Peacemaker had never before seen Wampum used to convey a message and he liked this stranger immediately The Peacemaker welcomed Hiawatha into his long house when he heard what Hiawatha had proposed among the Onondaga his face lit up but as they talked it became clear that he didn't want just the Onondaga and the mohawk allies he believed all people could live together in peace as the Creator intended of course he and Hiawatha agreed that the easiest place to start would be with the five nations who already shared similar languages the Onondaga the

Mohawk the Oneida the Cayuga and the Seneca going back to taradaho would be pointless Hiawatha knew he would never listen because he never listens to anything but Power they needed allies they would need to recruit the other nations first but how the other nations didn't know him they wouldn't listen to him they needed somebody who could reach out to the chiefs of every nation they needed someone Whom The Warriors wouldn't attack on site they needed to guns to say she had become something of a legend among the Warriors her long house stood at a Crossroads

and many warriors sought Refuge with her on their marches she was a Seneca woman but she allowed anyone to stay in her Longhouse as long as they agreed to keep her peace so political neutrality right the neutrals are really important referees matter that we do need neutrals and neutrals have an important role in the relationship between those who believe in peace and those who believe in war because they try to sit and adjudicate or sit out those problems in order to mediate them often when Warriors of different nations came to her on the same day

she would feed them dinner from the same soup bowl tradition dictated that anybody who shared food became kin and they were forbidden to fight each other thus in her own way gigansase had been forging small alliances across the five nations for years they visited jagonsase at her Longhouse and The Peacemaker explained that he wanted to build one just like it one that brought together all five nations under one Great Law of Peace women like her would be the backbone of this new piece because women were keepers of the earth and leaders of the Clans Clan

mothers would be empowered to choose the Chiefs to remove them if they failed in their responsibilities to call councils and to review new laws he asked jagansase to be his Messenger to the women's councils in all the nations and to bring his message of righteousness health and power and she replied that is indeed a good message I so I don't know if I'm going to do the whole thing here I guess we we can I will just say it as a foreshadow later when we get to tocqueville uh Benjamin Franklin reviewed the the Confederacy as

a foundation for thinking about the separation of powers in the U.S now the extent to which that's a direct influence I mean there is always there's there's a longer political tradition about thinking of separation of powers but it's certainly not um part of the recontextualization here is to think about the ways in which American Democratic exceptionalism comes from a system of political structures that that aren't really replicated anywhere else in the world especially with the ways in which the three branches of government are so distinctly even and often combative between each other so it the

idiosyncrasy of the American system is that it's not easily replicated elsewhere and there could be a tradition going back to this thinking about those so yeah I guess I'll finish it out it's only four minutes you take hold of it I embrace it together she and Hiawatha journeyed to the nearby tribe of the Oneida as envoys of the peacemaker's message the Oneida were the little brothers of the Mohawk so they were more inclined than anyone else to accept the piece which the Mohawk now embraced those who knew jaganza say trusted her and welcomed her and

Hiawatha among them as speakers who relayed the peacemakers message then the great debate began the Oneida had suffered plenty from the war but could they really afford to put aside their weapons and Trust peace to protect them the elders argued that peace had been the way of their people since the land had been given to them that was the past though and now they had many warriors who lived to fight and enemies who wanted to destroy them arguments were levied on both sides and the discussion raged for a full year but The Peacemaker was insistent

war was an aberration a betrayal of The Wishes of the Creator and of the interests of the people if they wanted to be so this will be the theme of this week right so is conflict an aberration or is um or is peace the natural way that we should be right and then what's the best way to achieve that should we do it through government through kind of shared Collective identities or should we figure it out in a different ways he's strong truly strong they would have to lead the way with their own choices they

must choose peace they owed it to all of the casualties of War whose bones lay in the ground whose Futures had been cut short they owed it to themselves to make a new future they could live without fear if they learned to put hatred aside and Unite with a new strength of purpose once they end embraced peace others would follow and they would all gather strength like a ball in the snow his passion impressed the Oneida and his arguments won them over finally they agreed the first Treaty of the Great Law of Peace had been

formed inspired by their success Hiawatha wanted to return to the Onondaga with this message and the news that two tribes had now embraced it tarodaho enjoyed his power but surely he couldn't stand against two tribes United in peace The Peacemaker was willing but jagon SASE had her doubts she had heard terrible stories about taradaho his cruelty in war and his violence toward the women of his own house he has an evil heart she said men like him could never be brought to peace The Peacemaker replied it is exactly men like him that I must speak

to so together they journeyed back to the Onondaga where Hiawatha called together a council taradaho sat across from The Peacemaker and did not listen once again he told them that he had no interest in peace and he wouldn't tolerate any further negotiations if the Mohawk and the naida wanted to embrace this great Law of Peace fine for them that just meant they would leave him alone so he had fewer enemies to defeat and he had every intention of continuing to make war on his enemies Hiawatha left this Council in Low Spirits but the peacemakers hopes

remained bright he told Hiawatha to keep thinking about how to bring taradaho around to the idea of peace and in the meantime the three of them would set out for the lands of the next tribe on their list the Cayuga just as the Oneida were the little brothers of the Mohawk the Cayuga were the little brothers of the Onondaga they had suffered greatly from Tata daho who treated them poorly but demanded that they fight in his Wars they could never refuse for fear that taradaho would turn his much larger Force against them to them an

alliance with the Mohawk and the Oneida sounded like the perfect way forward the Chiefs readily agreed and joined the Great Law of Peace now they had taken an ally from under tataraho's control they had diminished him perhaps they could remove him from Power entirely but that wasn't what The Peacemaker wanted he needed the people to unite to choose so later in the course we'll deal with the analytics of this but this is hegemonic stability Theory basically that if you can establish a powerful relation you can diminish this is kind of a zero-sum uh gain notion

of political power where if you can accumulate a whole bunch of it together then you can undermine someone else's peace and to come together like a family in a family no one was beyond saving luckily Hiawatha now had a plan join us next week as The Peacemaker and his speakers return to confront taradaho okay we're not going to deal with that this has already been way too long I'll just say that there there is a tradition I've seen Nita Crawford talk about this before um of this being the foundation of thinking about um kind of

politics and political Theory um specifically she talks about how when she tried to bring this to the Western Canon at several big names in the fields told her that they couldn't verify the data because it's not in a written form so we have to be clear about the epistle about epistemological understandings about how data when we're dealing with ancient Beginnings is verified and who gets to verify and so that goes back to the question of you know which which disciplines are valid and which forms of information are valid