• Michel Foucault: Knowledge has not been made for understanding, but for… cutting

My Goals for this class• At the end of the course, you should be

able to – Identify and outline main traditions and

authors within Western political theory, as well as main relations between them.

– Use these ideas and authors to trace beliefs that are dominant within contemporary American society and your own thinking.

Roots of the West

Ebenstein & EbensteinCh. 1

Ebenstein & Ebenstein:

• The West is not a geographical place.• The West is not Western… Origins in the

Mediterranean Sea– Athens, Jerusalem, Rome, Byzantium, Paris, London,

New York… Los Angeles… Where else?– Worldwide expansion

Geographical Mobility of “the West”

Why “Western” Political Theory?What is “the West”?

Ebenstein & Ebenstein: The West is defined by…

• -A set of fundamental, universal ideas

– (Greek) Reason– (Jewish) Ethics – (Christian) Love

Heritage1. Belief in reason (Ancient Greece) 6th century B.C. The

Greek civilization produced an original culture.2. Monotheism and concern with Justice (Judaism). First

society organized around the concept of an only God. consistency between beliefs and practical morality.

“Whereas the supreme Greek ideal was to think clearly, the supreme Jewish aspiration was to act justly.”(5)

3. Love. Christianity incorporated the rationalist Greek tradition and the (Jewish) concern with being morally and religiously consistent. With Jesus & Paul, it added the idea that love founds the relationship between God and humans and thus it should found the relationships between humans themselves.

Sources

Greeks Greek history, society, thought, and art between 6th B.C. to 3 A.D.

Jewish Old Testament & the Prophets + Talmud

Christian New Testament + Augustine + Aquinas + Luther + Calvin

Can… Principles such as…• Reason• Ethics, and • Love Be all embodied at the same time?

Ebenstein & Ebenstein judge Nazism a “renunciation of western values” and communism frequently a “perversion and distortion of western ideas and ideals” (4).

Do you agree with them? Why?What should be said about racism and slavery?

Greek Thought

• Plato & Aristotle represent a decaying Greece…

• (Trend in history? Cicero also represents a decaying Rome, and major historical periods do not

necessarily produce major theorists…ex: the French Revolution)

http://www.wadsworth.com/philosophy_d/special_features/timeline/ptimeline.html

Birth of Western Philosophy/Science

• 6th Century B.C: Pre-Socratic Thought– Ionian communities– Miletus (Tales, Anaximander, Anaximenes)

• No written works of the “Milesian School” were preserved

5th B.C. : Greek “Empire” hundreds of city-city-statesstates

Greek Discovery: concept of Nature

(Physis)• Revolutionary break with Animist

conceptions… that freed reason. Nature can be understood)– Xenophanes vs. Homer

• Laws– Empiricism– Laymen as Intellectuals

Pre-Socratic Thought(& Sophists )

• Humanist (human beings are creative and rational but fallible)

• Empiricist (commitment with empirical observation and discovery of natural laws). Knowledge is provisory

• Democratic (no permanent or absolute truth; truth must result from the confrontation of opinions)

Protagoras & Democritus favored both science and science and democracy democracy (Why?)

Intellectuals• For the first time in history, in Greece a group of

individuals who were not priests, devoted themselves systematically to thinking (+ art) in a way that could be linked to religion but was also independent of it. – Led to the extreme, the development of critical

thinking produced a the critique of religion (ex. Xenophanes)

– Sophists (Protagoras) “man is the measure of all things”

HumanismRealistic and tragic view of Humankind

Life = work of art

Sophists (450-350 B.C.)• Sophist: “skilled craftsman” and “wise and

prudent man.”• Traveled giving lectures and teaching (for a fee)

mostly political skills (middle-classes)– Sophists

• “Education for leadership,” persuasion through rhetoric • Realism (consideration of things as they are and not as they

should be).• Social Contract (Laws & institutions are conventions)• Democratic views (gvt. By consent, the majority has a better

right to decide than any enlightened elite)

• Derogatory connotations due to Plato’s criticisms

From Tales onwards…• All of nature can be understood through Reason,

because it is• Governed by (rational) laws• The laws of Nature express a divine rationality, but

the Gods themselves are subjected to those laws.

The Greek Gods (≠ the Judeo-Chistian God) are not above nature

All of them live together in the Polis

(Universe)

Athens• 590 B.C. Solon’s (Democratic) Constitution• 479 B.C. Defeat of the Persian Empire (peak of Athens’

power). • 430 B.C. Pericles: “Our government is called a

democracy because it is in the hands of the many and not of the few.(…)we regard a person who takes no interest in public affairs, not as ‘quiet’ but as useless.”

• Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.) Defeat• 4th century B.C. 45,000-50,000 citizens (about 150,000

people)• Self-governed polity (Greek invention of gvt. by popular

assemblies)• Conquered in 338 B.C. by Macedon and reduced to a

province of the Roman Empire in 146 B.C.

Philosophy

Philosophy=

Thought + (experimental) Science

= Process of Learning

Socrates (469-399 B.C.)• No written work• Use of knowledge (philosophy) to discover the path

to human self-mastery.– Dialogues (questions and answers… but no final

answers). Critical examination of all positions– Dialectics (knowledge emerges from the very process, in

the movement of asking questions…)

– Beauty + virtue + wisdom= If moral life “depends on knowledge, then virtue, or doing the good, and philosophy, or knowing the good, become identical.” (14)

– Socrates: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

The Dangers of Theory

• Socrates was judged and found guilty, and he chose to drink poison before the prospects of exile (Socrates’ defense is contained in the Apology, written by Plato).

Greek Inventions/Contributions• Philosophy (& science): Rational examination

of nature and human nature– Physical phenomena are “general, universal, and

predictable.”– Materialism vs. idealism

• Secular (vs. priestly) civilization• Politics• (direct) Democracy• Free thought and free speech • (because) Truth is complex

Plato… a decaying Athens

• E & E: “Far from being the culmination of Greek civilization, Plato is the beginning of the end” (15)– Pessimism– Thought control– Anti-democratic– Idealist

Antigone

• What is destiny? How do power and fate relate to each other?

• What do Creon and Antigone respectively highlight and overlook about power?

• Who is right and who is wrong? Or, rather, how are they right and wrong?