so as I said I kind of have to supplement this here because the transition from feudalism to capitalism just kind of happens organically in the textbook um it doesn't really have a theory of social change it doesn't really see liberalism as a challenge to this religious Authority it just kind of says that oh well we decided these ideas were better right I mean yes they were better for some and not better for others so we we have to think about how that's the case and this is always the question listen I posed this in all my classes and all that are we are we punching up or punching down are we thinking top down are we thinking bottom up right like what way are we going about things and so the enclosure movement the emergence of capitalism was in part about the elites being concerned that we don't have a system of control and governance if Robin Hood can just take off to the forest if the free people can just simply evade our systems of governance if they can live off the land without needing us then how are we going to establish our Authority and our capacity to do thing and so as I talked about in the previous lectures it's this idea of you know these Market forces are pushing against um the religious obligations of the poor having to when I'm poor and I'm having to give you taxes and rent and I can't afford them and there's a free access to food and rent over there I'm just gonna do it and so part of what we see with the emergence of capitalism and liberalism is the emergence of private property as a challenge to religious Authority and one of the ways in which this struggle is is comes out is that governance structures increasingly try to limit the idea of public spaces so this is the enclosure movement so we take that public field and we make it private property and we say you can't TR you can't um use it and so what do you do if you're a peasant like some will Rebel and fight but others will be like okay I gotta go somewhere and I can't live here anymore so I'll go to the to the city I will urbanize um because at least there I can work and get access to resources and so we see this this emergence from the feudal era to the early kind of emergence of capitalism in a liberal Revolution as the enclosure movement and the urbanization and industrialization the ability to take labor and shift it from areas where in the past for example the church had an obligation to feed the poor and so part of the poor laws in in Britain was about making the church not feed those poor and make those poor work and we still have this in the the Protestant work ethic today the idea this this idea that emerges again the internalization the way in which they they those systems of rule say no no no it's not just that you have to believe in this system now no no the system has to it has to there's an ethic that you don't want that we have to put into you by forcing you into urban centers and then saying hey if you want to survive here you're going to have to work and so work talking and this Mass industrialization is also about an increase of productivity because you have economies of scale and you have this this kind of constant not to get too marxisted Reserve pool of Labor right that allows you to do stuff and so when we're we're talking about this the the Renaissance is the the kind of this emergence of the idea that well we've got these Concepts and ideas coming from uh ancient Greece to challenge the religious authority of the state we've got the Reformation this idea this this changing of the way in which we organize society and then the 17th century this Enlightenment this idea that um reason is more important than faith and so this is The Enlightenment is that is that we are moving away from a system where we're all just sinful and we've got to respect our positions and authority to one that says no we can choose what types of systems and ways in which we go about things so this is a massive transformation of social order that is presented as a kind of linear narrative in the text and so the idea of the sources of political and legal Authority here is not clear uh in the reading of the textbook but it's really just this this idea of the absent subject being one that is a subject of religious authority to one that is subject to the reason to the idea of reasonable and so the rise of capitalism and market economies is also vote private property and individual property rights as challenged to the the traditional property rights of the lands and the Lords and the and and all of the church and all of those mechanisms of that it's also about this idea of Labor being a commodity that you have now we have eight hours in the past we've had 12 to 14 hours of Labor in us every day that someone could extract by making sure that if you want to have access to food and shelter you have to put that labor into to the market system you can't just sit and at the church and let them feed you and sit about and lay about you have to have an ethic of work right and so this liberal Revolution frames this revolution largely as well it's the reasonable Choice it's reasonable because we made sure that the systems and structures uh you've got reason chosen for you um and so the transfer transformation for organic hierarchical traditional Society to individual fluid and pluralistic Society okay um in the textbook it's represented by the American and French Revolution but absent is the Haitian revolution and the Haitian revolution took those same principles and applied them to race and said what what no no no we we are slaves uh and in this system no we are free people too and we can think and do all the rest of that and let's throw at the French and the French responded with an Indemnity to the value of the loss of their slaves that they imposed on the new uh free Haitian State uh which they were paying until the 1940s so yeah uh anyways uh so this weird idea of revolution is is you know revolutions normally characterized by Massive and violent social upheaval um in this liberal narrative oh it's just the logical of the best ideas Rose to the top as if they weren't imposed and fought and struggled a bit right and so this early liberal democratic theory um is about this idea um that somehow we came up with the best system and that best system just Rose to the top rather than being being imposed directly and so this goes back to the idea of political moral and economic Liberty being linked back to this social contract theory stuff we come up with an idealized system we base it on the abstractions of a very specific historical event in ancient Greece and then we impose it all over the world and so the social contract between the citizens and the state it might not be random that we utilize the ancient Greek model which said that the citizens are the thirty thousand the Forty thousand people um and those other bodies don't count towards political stuff and so the idea here we use all sorts of you know we need we need to restrain the baser human impulses sure whatever reason over our Primal desires okay um and that instead of a system of governance and Rule because of religious Authority now you citizens can choose the best model and so you choose it because uh we understand it to be the best this is a total a political reading of power um I don't know what reason is individually we tend to think like advertising is a great example of this we tend to think people are reasonable but we think people are reasonable and US individual we make our decisions because we we choose to do so we have our own volition but advertising is the explicit idea that we can spend money to make you do what we want you to do which is to say that our reason trumps your reason and then you'll come up with all these reasons as to why you're choosing that product but realistically without our advertising you wouldn't choose that product at all it's a a solution in search of a problem right is is the classic argument about advertising we will will provide you with something that rubs it on its forehead we will provide you with something you didn't know was a problem until now so like um you know any any product that we can come up with can do this and so the question becomes do we think about reason as something an individual does or do we think it's a logic that is in a system so we the system is ruled by the logic of Reason even though there's hierarchy Authority the the existence of religion the role of Faith the ideas of emotion um as because we know that we've got enough study about this now that emotion sets the terrain for the rational right so if you're really mad about something you'll look for reasons to justify that anger if you're really happy about something you'll look for reasons to justify that so we like to privilege reason in this system as if it makes sense so that our systems of rule and governance seem natural and therefore rational and those people who object those 200 and I keep messing the number 260 000 people who don't have capacity to do so they're just not being reasonable why why don't you be more compliant why don't you try to act like we act as good citizens and if you act like us as good citizens maybe you'll get the rights of citizenship um and so there's all of these politics now that we think about in in terms of um how people act and behave and then who acts and behaves in which ways and whether or not it's you know whether or not anger emotion in response to oppression is reasonable or not reason is still the idea of liberalism is that we can reasonably discuss ideas um the problem is is that back to the social contract theory it was um 2023 when the Vatican finally reputed the doctrine of discovery which was the foundation of settler colonial states in North America which is to say that the doctrine of Discovery said that these people we discovered didn't have the capacities that we had and therefore don't have the rights to citizenship but yet we could still enter into agreements with them and so this is the weird part about what we then frame I mean early U. N documents did this over and over again the Civilized is that which is reasonable and those which are uncivilized or those which are unreasonable and therefore don't get to enter into politics not only do they not get to enter into politics they can enter into Arrangements whereby they can grant us full and universal control of their land but they don't have the rights to participate in that system like us because they lack reason it's a weird system of justification that most of these theories have I know based on shelium's work instead of calling it development I call it Improvement because it is an explicit idea that a hierarchical group is deciding for another group that may need to improve and so the problems of this of course are are that um this is number three from the government of Canada's principles about respecting indigenous peoples is uh that the honor and duty of the crown is at stake in the engagement with indigenous peoples in Canada this means something very distinct because of this boundary this distinction about how we think about um social contract theory the Assumption was that the Monarch could enter into a relationship with these peoples and that we would get full total universal control the crown asserted its sovereignty over those lands universally imposing its own laws and customs upon those pre-existing societies under the assumption that they would be granted subject status but not full citizenship rights so what does that mean it means that they cannot buy our constitutional definition going back to the 1763 engage in adversarial relationships with indigenous peoples because they were not granted full citizenship rights but were granted subject rights which is to say they were under the the universal domain of the Monarch but they did not have full political rights remember I mean up until the 60s and 70s if you wanted to vote you had to give up status on reserves like stuff like that it's just Bonkers there's still many many reserves that don't have Democratic processes in place it's a constant Perpetual issue but what's interesting here then it means the state cannot by our constitution take an adversarial relationship with indigenous groups because the honor and duty of the crown is bound up in those it goes back to the idea of social contract theory and social contract theory saying that only reasonable people can be full citizens as a justification for making sure that those those 260 000 people can live and work within that system but not have political status and so we have to think about those issues when we're dealing with social contract theory which this textbook does not do any of at all which is weird um they say there's a need to do it but they don't get around to doing it in part probably because they're you know my age and they think that they can't think these things it's it's too I've got my ideas it's last year when I introduced Chachi PT to students and they're like no I can't use that it's I I'm I'm in my fourth year I'm done with learning some people are done with learning some people never started learning hopefully you guys will start learning we'll we'll see anyways so what this means is we're back to this stuff again right so Thomas the state power is necessary to protect individuals from one another it's to keep a check on state powered that it's supposed to have reason as the foundation of this and democracy is the mechanism by which citizens can check the power of the state from arbitrary actions it's starting from the assumption that people left on their own it's kind of this residual notion that people are inherently evil and so the nasty brutish and short supposition has an inherently negative view of people whereby you know it's it's sorry the state has to do this otherwise you guys are going to kill each other right and so this this assumption we have to wonder to what extent we've escaped these religious Notions of the attitudes of how we think about these things we also have law computer again government as a means to protect life liberty and private property the state shouldn't regulate the market again we have this tension built into that so it the government should protect life liberty and private properties the government should protect property but shouldn't be involved in the market so we can see this most clearly with with intellectual property right so um when somebody copies someone else's song let's say Ed Sheeran um to what extent should the state be involved in deciding that no you've now stolen that person's song by doing your own version of it too closely to their version without their permission that's a complicated system to tell me that the state shouldn't regulate the market when the market is asking to be regulated through social contract all the time and through contract all the time and so democracy as a means to protect the market from the state it's kind of it's weird and so that's what I said there's so little revolutionary discussion here about the role of the market as a revolutionary Force the role of private property is a revolutionary Force the role of of protecting life against the idea that the state should be able to take Life as a revolutionary all that's gone it's just well this is how we have things now and so even when we get to John Stuart Mill this idea you know that free thinkers we should be free from conventional morality so it's not just that we should have and I understand this like listen when we have indoctrination by the state we should have the capacity to challenge that but that's a very specific understanding of rule as well right we think that they're probably you know I think that free thinkers shouldn't be able to drive on the wrong side of the road I think we're okay with that one right because of the social harm as a consequence of your free thinking and so we have to understand this and this is the boundary that he sets up a idea of social harm we'll come back to this withdrawals is that we should allow free thinking we should encourage free thinking but if the state's the one doing the encouragement can we really understand that and this distinction between the public and the private is asserted over and over again um you know the the idea that the systems the constitution in the U. S that is set up um is is bound up in the origins and the institutions of its creation but we like to think that somehow they've they aren't there or that we recognize the errors of those ways and the errors of those ways mean that they don't exist and so I got into this with Chachi PT just asking because I asked did this basic like to what extent is slavery entrenched in the Constitution it's in the Constitution all over the place in the U.
S and so Chachi BT says it's deeply entrenched and I asked it well wait a minute here maybe it's deeply entrenched in the U. S but the rest of the world was largely not universally but largely against slavery when the U. S was still using slavery the British were critical of it now that's not to say there are lots of examples of British colonies and and British companies using slavery around the world but at the time their Global Norm was against it so we have this idea of it being deeply entrenched it's in the Constitution but at the same time it disappears right so it was deeply entrenched but it wasn't deeply entrenched it was so deeply entrenched that it could be removed it was so deeply entrenched that everybody else disagreed that it was no idea um and so you know concedes yes the global Trend at the time was increasingly against the institution of slavery but you know these injustices exist over time so I'm not sure how to frame these issues should we frame them in the logical progression of rule so that the Americans just rule realized that the rightness of the ways that slavery was wrong if even though everybody already was telling them at the time when they created the Constitution slavery was wrong the Haitian revolution was an example of literally Haitians demanding the same rights as the American and the French and saying slavery is wrong and yet the U.
