Download rousseau and kant and more Schemes and Mind Maps Political Philosophy in PDF only on Docsity!
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU
“Man was born free and everywhere he is in chains” is probably the best quotation to summarize all Rousseau’s political thought. According to Rousseau, the modern state is directed to its own preservation and to that of its subjects, but this constitutes a way of life precisely contrary to that which would make men happy. Money is the standard of human worth, and virtue is forgotten. Civil society is a state of mutual interdependence among men, but the men are bad and the majority are forced to give up their own wills to work for the satisfaction of the few. The result of the one-sided concentration on preservation is the destruction of the good life which is the only purpose of preservation. Rousseau attacks the hopes of Enlightenment, denying that progress in arts and sciences improves morality and asserting that such progress always lead to moral corruption.
The first stage of Rousseau’s reflection leads to admiration of the past. Virtue in the classic sense meant good citizenship and the qualities that necessarily accompany it. Only on the basis of courage, self-sacrifice, and moderation can a city, in which the great majority govern themselves, be founded. Rousseau is a Republican, because he believes men are naturally free and equal. Anyway, if Rousseau admires the practice of antiquity, he does not accept Plato and Aristotle’s theories. No political teaching can suffice which merely describes how to construct a stable order. Rousseau joins the moderns in their denial that man is by nature political. The city, or the state, is a purely human construction originating in the desire for self preservation, As such, man is conceivable without political society.
Justice consists in maintaining the privileges of those in positions of power. Inequalities can be justified in terms of preservation of the regime. The laws institute and protect these differences of rank. With Rousseau, for the first time, history becomes an integral part of political theory. Man is a different being at different epochs, although for Rousseau he still has a primeval nature which dominates all transformations brought about by time. Since man is not primarily political and social, he must be divested of all qualities that are connected with life in a community if we ant to understand him as he is by nature. The first is reason. The definition of a man can no longer be that he is a rational animal. This first animal-man has only the simplest needs of the sort that are usually easily satisfied. Considered in this way, it may be said that all men are by nature equal. They have only physical existences. There are two characteristics which distinguish man from the other animals. The first is freedom of the will. Man is not a being determined by his instincts. The second is his perfectibility. Man is the only being which can gradually improve its faculties and pass its improvement on to the whole species. On the basis of this two fundamental characteristics of man, it can be said that natural man is distinguished by having almost no nature at all, by being pure potentiality. The needs of men are not such as to make them competitors, but they have at last become dependent on one another.
Rousseau discovers the origin of inequality in the foundation of private property. For different men have different skills and talents which enable some of them to increase their possessions. A state of war necessarily ensues between the haves and the have-nots. At this stage man has developed all his powers, and he has made himself miserable. His soul has become enslaved to other men. He seeks for money and honor instead of reflecting on his real wishes. Vanity has taken the place of the original self-love. Nature no longer suffices. According to Rousseau, Hobbes is right when he says that the men who are constrained to found civil society are hostile to one another and afflicted by infinite desires. He is wrong only in asserting that this is the nature of man. There was an earlier state which defined the essential character of ma's freedom. Locke is right when he asserts that the purpose of civil society is to protect property. He also is wrong only in asserting that property is natural to man. Man is naturally free, and civil society takes his freedom away from him; he is dependent on the law, and the law is made in favor of the rich. Civil society can't be grounded on natural right; nature dictates only self-interest. Nature is too low to comprehend civil society; this is what Rousseau’s predecessors had not understood, according to him.
The social contract forms an artificial person, the state, which has a will like the natural person; what appears necessary or desirable to that person is willed by it and what is willed by the whole is law. Civil society is simply the agreement among a group a group of men that each shall become a part of the general will and be obedient to it. As a result, each remains as free as he was before, because he obeys nothing but his transformed will. The movement from the natural state to the civil state produces a very great change in man. Formerly he was an amiable beast; now he has become a moral being. In the state of nature man acted only from instinct; now he must consider his action in relation to principle so that the words choice and freedom take on a moral sense. If a man continues to act according to his private will, he can be said to degrade himself to the level of animals. He gives up his freedom and puts himself in the power of others. Society is justified, therefore, in forcing him to be free, in constraining him to exercise his will in the proper way. Education and punishment are the instruments of this constraint.
The social contract constitutes the sovereign. There must be a government, and it may be monarchic, aristocratic or democratic, but its right to rule is derived from the people and exercised only so long as it pleases them. Several consequences follow from the fact that the sovereign is the only source of legitimacy. In the first place, sovereignty is alienable. No man or group of men can be given the right to make laws in the place of citizen body. This means that representative government is a bad form of government. The individuals must be citizens in the classical sense, and this requires a very severe, self- imposed morality. Rousseau is not a libertarian in the modern sense of the word; every man cannot live as he likes, for that would end the possibility of agreement and destroy the sources of the moral energy necessary to self-control. Moreover, the expression of the general will must be guaranteed by the suppression of faction. Each citizen alone can't hope to have his private will prevail and recognizes that if everyone voted according to his passions there would be no order. This is why parties must be forbidden.
Immanuel Kant
Kant’s political teaching may be summarized in a phrase: republican government and international organization. It’s a doctrine of the state based upon law and of eternal peace Kant’s enterprise might be said to have as its point of departure the tension between science and morality. Happiness is the satisfaction of our empirical, natural inclinations while virtue is obedience to the moral law. The one belongs to the order of nature, the other to the order of freedom. Having separated the two realms of morality and nature, Kant tries to reunite them by producing intermediaries and correspondences between them. Law, history and politics appear as the composite criterion for evaluating that reunion. Kant’s radicalization of Rousseauism – his transformation of the generalization of desires or wills into the universalization of maxims – and the consequences he draws from it in his doctrine of postulates, produce a morality both apolitical and inapplicable to politics. The essential problem of Kant’s politics is the nature and the philosophic and moral status of the rights of man.
From Rousseau, Kant adopts the primacy of morality over philosophy, but the primacy of action over contemplation implies the primacy of freedom over nature; the primacy of practical reason implies the critique of theoretical reason. The primacy of practical reason has a twofold consequence: it brings relief from the unknownability of the world as it is in itself by giving equally to all men the access to the deepest truth, which is the moral truth, and through the continuous challenging of the merely empirical world by practical reason, leads to the emancipation of men’s moral and political formulations from the experience of the past. The new conception of reason moves, through the primacy of practice, to the radical distinction between the “is” and the “ought”.
Morality consists in acting not merely conformably to the law but out of respect for law to which it renders absolute obedience. The transition from the primacy of morality through the dignity of the moral subject to the equality of all men, poses an important problem. Does the dignity or absolute value of the moral subject as legislator belong to all men or only to those who fulfill their duty, to man as capable of acting morally or to man as acting morally? The dignity that belongs only to the moral man imposes precisely on him the duty of treating all men with a certain respect. Men are not equal in dignity but one has the duty to treat them as though they were. The moral worth of an action proceeds from the goodness of the will by which that action is animated. That a man should act only according to the criterion of his action’s universalizability is called by Kant the “categorical imperative”. There is only one categorical imperative and that is the imperative of universality. But Kant elaborates this universality by giving three alternate formulas for the categorical imperative. (The second formula seeks the objective principle by which the will is to determine itself).
Kant stresses the difference between the idea of an ethical community and that of a political society. Kant’s morality goes beyond Rousseau’s politics in radicalizing, on the moral level, the reciprocity of rights and duties and the primacy of both over virtue. The primacy is made
emphatic in the “Metaphysics of Morals”, where Kant distinguishes legal duties and
state in which they come under external constraint and in which alone the rights on
man can be respected. Kant’s state construction is based upon the absolute primacy
of every man’s innate right to external liberty. He distinguishes three political powers, which are the general will manifested in three persons: the supreme power,
or sovereignty, in the person of the legislator; the executive power in the person of
the governor; the judicial power in the person of the judge.
This is why Kant regards the political problem as incapable of perfect solution: man is an animal that needs a master, but the master is himself a man.
Kant has a conception of history as governed by antagonism and the central theme is the part played in history by war. The evil is necessary, but it’s overcome by the progress of enlightenment which conduces to a general pacification based on liberty, equilibrium and emulation. Politics, law and history remain for Kant in an ambiguous or unresolved relation to morality, the two sides of the relation being in a state of mutual need and mutual repulsion.
Even if Kant fails to reconcile external and internal, necessity and freedom, nature and morality, the evidence of physics and the testimony of conscience, his political philosophy achieved victories on the field of the concrete political phenomena and on the coherence of the system as a whole.
