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.
The Federalist Papers
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Moral Foundations of Politics
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從本節課中
Democracy
This module deals with the nature of, and justifications for, democratic politics, and their relations to Enlightenment and Anti-Enlightenment political thinking.
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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
So let's talk about these gents.
Who, who, who do you think these people are?
>> The founding fathers?
>> The, okay, the founding fathers.
Can you put names to them?
>> Yeah. >> Who is the first?
Who's the one on the left who who looks quite aristocratic?
Hamilton.
>> And was actually accused by his critics of
wanting to recreate the English Aristocracy.
Yes. Alexander Hamilton.
Was he ever an American President?
>> No. >> No, he was a, but he was a,
he had many roles in, in the American government.
And including creating the, the first national bank.
Yeah who is, who's in the middle there?
>> Madison?
>> Yeah, he, that's Madison.
Madison was a very shy man.
He was, he was, he was the president of, the fourth president of the United States.
Was not thought to be a very successful President by the way.
He spent most of his time as President fighting the war of 1812 against Britain,
which was a, a rather absurd war which nobody won but
consumed most of a, a big chunk of his Presidency.
But he was the principal, author of the, of the Federalist Papers,
which we're going to in a, in a minute here.
And, he wrote the ones that have had enduring significance.
And then who is the gent on the right over there?
>> John J.
>> Yeah.
He was older.
He didn't play that central a role.
But really, it was the, the bulk of the work was done by Madison and Hamilton.
And, just a footnote to you before we dig into this is, they, they,
though they worked together on, on this enterprise,
they became the bitterest of enemies later.
And that's another story for a different course, but
it's certainly worth knowing about.
So they wrote something called the Federalist Papers.
What were the Federalist Papers?
What, why, what, we all hear about them in high school, but
what were the Federalist Papers?
>> It was the collection of essays they wrote in the newspapers.
>> In, in which newspapers?
You're right.
Which newspapers?
>> In New York newspapers?
>> In New York state.
And why did they do that?
>> In support to, of.
There was a problem with the confederation at the time.
So, to support constitution.
>> So the confederation had a very weak central government.
There was a general perception that America almost lost the war of
independence because the central government was so weak, and
particularly didn't have the power to tax or to raise armies.
And the state's had not delivered the armies that were needed when they were
needed to fight under General Washington,
and the whole thing had been a complete shambles.
People thought the war had almost been lost and
took a lot longer to win than it should have taken.
And so there was general agreement that the confederation system
was dysfunctional and they needed to create a stronger federal government.
And a constitution had been written in Philadelphia,
and it had to be ratified by the states.
And actually the Articles of Confederation said it had to be ratified by
every single state.
They knew they weren't going to get it ratified by every state, so they said oh,
well, you know, if we get most of them, that'll be good enough.
But they knew that if they couldn't get New York the thing would collapse.
So the Federalist Papers were written in order to build support for
the Constitution in New York.
The didn't use their own names, they used the name, Publius.
Who was a Roman consul reputed to have restored the Roman republic.
It was like a pen name but I think, you, people pretty much knew who was,
who was really behind the Federalist Papers.
And they were published, you know, every, every week, every ten days are they, and
then most of them are four or five pages long.
Dealing with one or
another aspect of the constitution that they were trying to get enacted.
They are probably the single most important piece of political theory
to come out of America, to come out of the United States.
Probably we'd say the second most important would have been Rawls' Theory
of Justice but so certainly
enormously influential in the design of the American system and
in its influence subsequently.
They were published between October 1787 and August 1788, by which time
it was clear the constitution would go through in New York.
So the principle author I said was James Madison.
And he took deadly seriously the problem that Toefield would
later identify, namely the notion of factions.
The idea of, of a faction being a group that could tyrannize over other groups.
It, a faction could be a majority faction as he, as it would be called or
a minority faction.
Here, he defines factions, he says.
By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether a majority or
a minority, who are united by some common impulse that they share among themselves,
but that is adversed to the other citizens,
and therefore to the permanent interest of the community.
So that's a notion of a faction.
And he thought that the, the, that you couldn't get rid of them.
Right? He says here,
the latent causes of faction are sown into the nature of man, and
we see them everywhere, brought into different degrees of activity,
according to the different circumstances of civil society.
So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities,
that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and
fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and
excite their most violent conflicts.
Those who hold and those who are without property
have forever formed different interests in society.
So that's an obvious cause of faction between property owners and
the property list.
Those who are creditors, those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination.
A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercatol, mercantile interest,
a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests,
grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes,
actuate, actuated by different sentiments and views.
The regulation of these various and
interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation.
So that is the biggest problem, that you going to, in a democracy,
going to have factions that are going to pursue their factional interests at
the expense of others.
Now, you could in principle have a society without factions,
but Madison is not very optimistic within that front.
If we think back to ancient Greece, which is to Athens,
which after all is the sort of original model for thinking about democracy.
It avoided factional conflict in vary artificial ways.
Why do you think I say that?
What, what was true of ancient Athens?
>> You know what, since.
>> Well how did they avoid having conflicts of interest?
In Athenian democracy?
>> Oh they exclude other people so.
>> Who did they exclude?
>> The slaves, the women.
>> Yeah they excluded slaves, they excluded women.
And, of course, all foreigners were called barbarians, right.
So only a single, basically, only adult male citizens had the right to vote.
And so the, and the, and, of course, it was a very small community.
So it was, it was in that sense made artificially
homogenous by excluding people who had very varied interests.
And Madison doesn't think that that's very realistic.
So having a society without factions would make the problem go away,
but he doesn't think that's going to happen.
And as we've seen, he says, even if you didn't have,
as we now have in 18th century America, debtors and creditors,
property owners and propertyless, who obviously all have different interests.
Even if you didn't have that,
people would find petty disagreements that would soon escalate into factional ones.
So that's just not an option for any, any,
it's not worth our time, a society without factions.
The worst case, he says, is what he refers to as a majority faction.
And that is what Tocqueville, and actually Mill
took the term from Tocqueville that's the problem of majority tyranny.
That's the worst case.
You have a single group that is a majority and a single group that is a minority.
Why do you think he would have called that the worst case?
>> Well, in an election you have one group that's always going to win and
one group more importantly that's always going to be losing.
>> Yeah. >> They're going to get frustrated.
>> The ones who lose are always going to get frustrated, and
what do you think they'll do?
>> Well, they'll either, they'll either get violent or they'll,
they'll defect or both.
>> Yeah.
If they're not strong enough to overthrow the regime they'll probably stop
participating.
What's the point?
You always lose.
So, you, maybe they'll just do nothing, or they might become criminals or
something like that.
And if they're powerful enough they'll try and overthrow the regime.
Right? Or secede or do something else.
Right? It's just not going to work.
And so that's the worst case scenario.
You know, if, if the Sunnis know they're always going to be in the minority
why play, why play the game.
They might as well form militias.
They might as well defect.
They might as well try and take power by force.
So you know, we, we,
here we have a society without any factions not being an option.
And we have the idea that, the worst case being a majority faction.
So what, what, what other alternative is there?
>> That he allow factions.
>> Lot's of factions right.
And this is what modern democratic theorists call cross-cutting cleavages.
And so the intuition here is, that you actually, instead of trying
to work around the divisions, the factional divisions in a society.
Or instead of trying to stomp on them and obliterate them, which is unrealistic, and
would any, in any case require very tyrannical government, use them, right?
Use the factions to make the society stable.
And so the, the notion there is that if you have a lot of, if you have lots of
cleavages in the society, you won't have any permanent majorities.
So on one issue even if you lose this time you might you know like the Boston Red Sox
they can always say there's always next year, we can come back another time.
Maybe I was in a losing coalition today but
next time I might be in a winning coalition.
Or even at a single time you might have a situation where, okay,
I lost on this issue as part of a minority.
But on the,
the following three other issues I might be part of a majority right.
So there's enough uncertainty about the future that you have a reason to keep
playing by the rules rather than accept the risks
of trying to overthrow the system, which are, are huge.
We learned when we started John Locke, you don't, you don't try and
overthrow the system until there's a long train of abuses all turning in the same
direction, because the risks are so high, right.
So part of the idea of cross-cutting cleavage is to keep the risks,
the costs low so that you won't take that risk, right?
And that, and the way you keep the cost low is to say well,
okay, I didn't prevail on this question this time, but I might prevail
on other questions, and I might prevail on this question at a future time.
And so you don't reach that situation that Sunnis in Iraq have reached
where they feel, they might as well reach for their guns.
Right?
So, that's just the notion of cross-cutting cleavages.
It starts with Madison.
And it is,
it is probably the single most important piece of 20th century democratic theory.
The most famous democratic theorists of the, of the 20th century, Robert Dahl,
built a theory of pluralist democracy that is a direct descendent
of Madison's idea of cross-cutting cleavages.
And the second thing that was very innovative here was that he said the way
to do this is counterintuitive, at least it was counterintuitive in his day.
Because in his day,
people generally thought democracy only worked in small communities.
Democracy Athens had been small, and
they talked about the city states in, in Florentine,
Europe as some of them as republics they weren't really very democratic.
We'll get into what republic means in a minute.
But Madison said no.
He said, the smaller the society the fewer probably will be the distinct parties and
interests composing it.
The fewer the distinct parties and interests,
the more frequently will a majority be found of the same party.
Extend the sphere and you take in a greater variety of parties and
interests, you make it less probable that a majority of the whole
will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens.
Or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who
feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other.
So, this is the biggest innovation at, of his day.
And, Republican fear is that we don't want small republics, we want large republics.
So, westward expansion is a good thing, right?
It's going to, [SOUND] he thought, ex, expanding the re
United States to the West would recast the divisions between the North and
the South in ways that would produce cross-cutting cleavages and
more fluid politics and maybe less sharp distinctions.
Turned out it wasn't entirely successful.
We had a ci, a civil war anyway some decades later,
but certainly that was the theory.
Right? So, so Madison is famous not only for
the theory of, of cross-cutting cleavages but for the idea that
the best way to realize it is in a large republic rather than a small republic.
So that, that was, those were his two most important innovations about the society
that's needed for a democratic political system to thrive.
But he also had a theory of institutions.
And after all, what, what they were tr, trying to do
with the Federalist Papers was to defend the, a, a system of institutions.
Because he thought that, the important as the cross cutting cleavages
in the society were, this just isn't enough.
What you really need is what he calls a republican remedy and what you re,
you really need is not a straightforward democracy based on majority rule,
but a non-tyrannical republic.
Here he says in Federalist Number 51, he says, the great security against
a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department,
that same department of government, consists in giving to those
who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and
personal vo, motives to resist the encroachments of the others.
And then in probably what the most famous phrase Madison ever wrote,
he says, ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights
of the place.
It maybe a reflection on human nature,
that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government.
If men were angels, no government would be necessary.
If angels were to govern men, neither external nor
internal controls of government would be necessary.
In framing a government which is to be administered by
men over men however the great difficulty lies in this.
You must first enable the government control the government,
in the next place oblige it to control itself.
A dependence on the people, that he means the cross-cutting cleavages,
is no doubt the primary control of the government, but
experiences toward mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.
And the auxiliary precautions he's talking about is the system of institutions based
on the separation of powers that we think of as the American constitutional order.
