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A Tocquevillean analysis of the democratic peace research program and modern liberal foreign policy
Get PDFtextAlexis de Tocqueville is widely hailed as one of the most insightful students of democracy and as one of the most perceptive observers of America. While this high praise is fully deserved, Tocqueville was more than simply the author of Democracy in America. Indeed, he completed the journey that inspired his seminal work before he was out of his twenties. The remainder of his life was devoted to the practice of politics. Both as an involved citizen and as a member of the Chamber of Deputies, Tocqueville researched and wrote extensively on French foreign policy. His most notable works are several reports endorsing French colonial projects in Algeria and articles advocating for the emancipation of slavery in the French Caribbean colonies. In this essay I argue that one cannot truly understand Tocqueville the student without analyzing Tocqueville the politician. Approaching his career as a consistent whole, rather than two distinct and incongruous parts, opens new avenues of investigation into his works. First, his incisive examination and critique of the distinct mildness engendered by equality of conditions in America helps fill several theoretical gaps in the democratic peace research program. Second, his arguments in support of both French imperial enterprises as well as the emancipation of slaves reveals that his diplomatic career was animated above all by the desire to forestall the further proliferation of this democratic mildness, which he viewed as one of democracy’s most dangerous vices. Examining his foreign policy positions in light of the lessons he learned in writing Democracy in America is the only way to discover the consistent goal of his life—namely, to educate and guide the future generations of democracy—and thus to understand Tocqueville as he understood himself.Governmen
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Between theory and practice in Plato’s “the Republic” and “Laws"
No full textOne of the most comical implications of Socrates’ (in)famous suggestion that "philosopher-kings" be made to rule the city alone is how far the illustrated model of the "philosopher kings" in the “the Republic” diverges from and falls short of being a genuine or complete philosophers on the model of Socrates himself. Why would Socrates propose the “Third Wave” if it is untenable, even in theory, and what does this suggest about the possibilities for radical political revolution in a democratic system? The activity of philosophy, as practiced by Socrates, is extremely problematic from the city’s perspective, and must be radically transformed if it is to be coetaneous with political life. In “Laws”, Plato presents use with a political philosopher who appears to actually succeed in this endeavour. The Athenian Stranger, as a character-type representative of the genuine philosopher, is noticeably different from Socrates. He is able to present himself, not merely as a theoretician or conceptual idealist, but a man with keen insight into the practical world of political institutions and legal practice. What changes would “philosophy” or the “philosopher” have to undergo in order to be made civic-minded or, atleast, legally permissible? Would these be antithetical to the core of Socratic political philosophy, properly understood? This essay seeks to shed light on the prior questions through an analysis of key differences in the character and rhetorical approach or “action” of Socrates and the Athenian Stranger in either dialogue.Governmen
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Politics, religion, and philosophy in Al-Farabi's Book of Religion
Get PDFtextThis thesis offers an interpretation of Al-Farabi’s Book of Religion, in which the tenth- century philosopher addresses more directly than in any of his other works the relationship between human and divine wisdom. Believing Farabi to be a philosopher in the full sense of the term, I attempt to approach his writing in the spirit of his own approach to the writings of Plato and Aristotle. I argue that the discussions of religion, philosophy, and political science found in the text constitute a single teaching, through which Farabi addresses some of the most fundamental questions facing man as both a political and spiritual animal.Governmen
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Examining ambition : an interpretation of Plato's Alcibiades
Get PDFtextThe relationship between Socrates and Alcibiades was infamous in antiquity. Alcibiades’ notorious betrayal of the Athenians during the Peloponnesian war helped to bring about Athens’ downfall, and the charges of corrupting the young and impiety for which Socrates was ultimately executed point unambiguously to the misdeeds of his most renowned and treasonous pupil. In Plato’s Alcibiades, Socrates approaches Alcibiades for the first time, claiming to have the power to bring the youth’s grandest and most tyrannical political hopes to a culmination. What does the ensuing conversation tell us about the nature of Alcibiades’ ambition and about Socrates’ intentions in associating with him? In this essay, careful attention is paid to the structure and unity of this underappreciated dialogue in order to uncover Plato’s teaching about the roots of political ambition and the approach of Socratic philosophy. The resulting analysis reveals that Socrates is interested in recruiting politically ambitious students because of how powerfully youthful political ambition seeks the good by means of just, noble, and honorable activity, and that Socrates’ hope is to awaken Alcibiades to the ambiguous and unquestioned character of his belief that the greatest human good can be obtained in the world of politics. Having recognized this as central to the Socratic project, we can consider how and to what extent political ambition relies on some misapprehension about the relationship of the good and the advantageous to the just and the noble.Governmen
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Francis Bacon and the philosophic method of the Americans
Get PDFtextThe philosophy of Francis Bacon has an important and often overlooked place in the development of American political thought. John Dewey cites Bacon as the forefather of his own highly influential philosophical school, American pragmatism. I argue that, though Dewey is in many ways correct to look to Bacon as his predecessor, he overlooks or collapses certain crucial tensions in Bacon’s philosophical project. This causes Dewey to misinterpret the political implications of the philosophic project to which he himself is an heir. By exploring the tensions that Bacon maintains, and Dewey collapses, between human knowledge and human power, science and democracy, and progress in the sciences and progress within states, I hope to shed light on the true implications of Bacon’s philosophical project for American political thought.Governmen
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Competing Enlightenment approaches to religion and toleration : Hobbes, Locke, Tocqueville and Rawls
Get PDFtextI present a critical analysis and comparison of the early modern critiques of Christianity and of the institutional strategies for achieving religious toleration through an examination of the thought of Rawls Hobbes, Locke, and Tocqueville. I argue that the contemporary dialogue over religion is limited by its uncritical acceptance of the American experience with the constitutional regime of religious freedom, which takes its bearings from the scheme of religious disestablishment that Locke articulated in the Letter Concerning Toleration. The aim of my dissertation is to correct this distortion of the history and theory of liberalism, to restore the original theological and practical flexibility of liberal politics, and to articulate competing constitutional arrangements for theocratic reform and transition that are not exhausted by “neutrality.” Instead of presenting a monolithic argument in favor of disestablishment, the early modern liberal thinkers favored a combination of different institutional and educational strategies, tailored to national and local conditions, for reforming the Church and for advancing popular enlightenment. I turn to Hobbes and Hume to recover this case for religious establishment, and contrast and compare their arguments to those of Locke and Smith. In revealing the peculiar strengths and weakness of both church establishment and free exercise, early modern rationalists presented a set of flexible institutional and practical guidelines that could inform political statesmanship in its pursuit of the agenda of popular religious reform. Through an analysis of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and the Old Regime, I show that the uncritical focus on Locke’s regime of disestablishment captures only one side of the complex and multifaceted historical experience of liberalism with religion in Europe and America, and does not do justice to the rich theoretical and political debate that shaped liberalism. Not just Hobbes and Hume, but even Locke himself, in his early Two Tracts and even in the Letter, presented strong practical arguments for and theoretical justifications of limited but real state religious establishments as institutional engines of theological reform. The recovery of this debate is meant to contribute to the capacity of liberal theory to engage in a critical dialogue with non-liberal religion, and to its capacity to articulate competing constitutional and institutional structures that , while unfamiliar to us, may be more suited for theocratic transitions in non-Western and non-Christian societies than the regime of neutrality.Governmen
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Political ambition and piety in Xenophon's Memorabilia
Get PDFtextThis thesis analyzes Books III and IV of Xenophon’s Memorabilia. The Memorabilia is Xenophon’s defense of Socrates or the philosophic life against Athens or the political community as such. In Book III, Xenophon presents six portraits of ambitious young men. These portraits, read closely, unveil the psychological nature of ambition and convey important lessons about the Socratic understanding of healthy politics, as a realm that is necessarily pious. Book IV’s four Socratic conversations with a dim-witted youth named Euthydemus both underscore the lessons of Book III and explore piety itself, as a phenomenon that is necessarily political. These sections of the Memorabilia may be read as an argument for the necessity of a fissure between healthy politics and philosophy – and as a bridge from the one to the other.Governmen
La science politique d'Aristote : L'architecture de l'action
No full textThis dissertation is an examination of Aristotle’s political science. The first part begins by comparing the Aristotelian conception of the human being as a political animal with subsequent conceptions, notably in the political thought of Cicero, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. This comparative analysis shows that human nature is increasingly conceived as apolitical, a major consequence of which is a rejection of the Aristotelian conception of logos (speech, reason) as a natural capacity for reasoning about justice and injustice. It is then demonstrated that modern political science rejects Aristotle’s argument that there is a good for human beings as such which is constitutive of their end (telos), in the same way that modern science abandoned Aristotelian natural teleology. While contemporary currents of political thought, including neo-Aristotelianism, republicanism and communitarianism, make use of certain elements of Aristotle’s thought, they largely fail to recover the critical notions of action and nature.
Having cleared major obstacles that bar our access to Aristotle’s political science, the dissertation moves, in the second part, to a textual analysis of the Politics, which, it is argued, constitutes not a work fractured between its “realistic” and “idealistic” parts, but a unified inquiry into both defective political regimes and the best regime, the guiding question of which is: how to render human beings good. The analysis begins by a consideration of the naturalness of the city and examines the various ways in which the notion of “nature” is used by Aristotle. It is then argued that, according to Aristotle’s presentation, political life is the fulfillment of human nature insofar as it represents the possibility of an ethical and moral life. Accordingly, political science, and legislative or “architectonic” science in particular, is to be devoted to moral education. Aristotle is critical of an education that neglects the virtues necessary for leisure in favour of military virtues alone, while acknowledging that cities must be prepared for war. Through an examination of the legislative science and political prudence, it is shown that Aristotle’s political science is capable of providing action with a moral orientation, without having recourse to metaphysical cosmology.Ph
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Tocqueville on doubt and the demands of democratic citizenship
Get PDFTocqueville’s view of the relationship of doubt to democracy is an important and underexplored aspect of Democracy in America. Illuminating it not only deepens our grasp of his thought, but also adds to broader theoretical debates about political psychology. I deepen our understanding of this theme by elaborating why exactly the democratic social state produces in people the sort of skeptical doubt characteristic of the Cartesian approach to philosophy. I also enumerate what factors in the democratic social state and in human nature set a boundary on the extent to which the exertions of the individual intellect can achieve knowledge. Additionally I draw together different sections of Democracy in America to show how democratic people’s tendency toward this kind of thinking poses serious risks for self-government if left unmediated. Religion, which Tocqueville holds out as the key to restraining that doubt, has seen its authority wane in the time since he wrote. Nonetheless, I argue that other remarks Tocqueville makes in Democracy in America suggest that a robust conception of individual rights can provide a new source of intellectual authority for political and moral debate that is resistant to doubt’s corrosive power.Governmen
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