So let's get started. What we're going to do today is talk about the shape of the course, what makes it distinctive, and what is reasonable to expect to take away at the end of these lectures. The course is organized around the Enlightenment tradition of political and moral philosophy, the reaction against the Enlightenment. And finally, the democratic tradition. The Enlightenment is a philosophical movement that began in the 17th century, really gained a head of steam in the 18th century, and fundamentally recast what people thought about every walk of life. Not just politics as we're going to be focusing on, but philosophy, art, literature, science, everything that shapes the intellectual universes within which we operate. The Enlightenment produced a backlash that we're going to call the anti-Enlightenment tradition, and we're going to spend some time looking at that as well. And then finally we're going to look at the democratic tradition that has shaped most political and moral argument over the past 100 years or so. The enlightenment tradition that we are going to start with really divides up into three sub traditions that I am going to be looking at under the headings of utilitarianism, this is the idea that society should be organized to maximize the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Marxism, this is the radical critique in some ways of enlightenment thinking, though not as radical as people often suppose. And that's the tradition of thought organized around ending exploitation and domination in society and producing some kind of final human liberation. And the third enlightenment tradition is the social contract condition which roots the legitimacy of government in the consent of the governed. The metaphor or the idea of an agreement at the core of government. So that's sort of the big picture of the intellectual traditions that are going to concern us, but let me say a little bit about how our particular discussion of them is going to be distinctive. For each tradition, we're going to do three different things. We're going to start with a classic statement, so for instance, I mentioned the utilitarian tradition, and we'll look at the classic statement of that tradition by the 18th Century, British think that Jeremy Then we will trace the subsequent evolution of that condition down to the present. All of these traditions, in one form or another, continue to be living vital traditions that have advocates, critics defenders people who engage with them in one form or another. And so we'd get some sense of how that tradition evolved and, and shaped contemporary conversations. But then, thirdly, we're also going to look at applications. We're going to look at debates about such topics as inequality, the welfare state, affirmative action and a host of related issues. Then we're going to see how these debates play out in the concrete policy disagreements in actual political conflicts. But there's another sense in which this course is distinctive. And we're going to look at each tradition through two lenses, if you like, which I call internal analysis and external analysis. What do you think I might mean when I say, internal analysis? >> Underlying logic of the argument? >> Exactly right. So, the notion of internal analysis is, is it a valid argument? Should I believe it? Where did the premises come from? Are they plausible premises? Is the, is the reasoning from the premises to the conclusion sound reasoning? When people make empirical claims about how the world actually operates, are they good claims? Are they valid? Are they defensible? So as, as I say, internal analysis is about the validity of arguments. Whether or not at the end of the day we should believe them. What do you think external analysis might be? >> Maybe a comparison of these arguments to other arguments. >> Yes, maybe a comparison of these arguments to other arguments. That's a little bit of what I have in mind. But really what, when I say external analysis, what I mean is ideology. All of these arguments, in addition to being philosophical arguments have become rocks that people throw at one another in the political world. They are used to attack or defend particular institutional arrangements. Particular ways of organizing politics. Particular goals of political movements, whether conservative or revolutionary. And we're going to look at the ways in which these arguments operate in the world. So whereas when we're doing internal analysis, the question is should I believe the argument? When we doing an external analysis we're going to be asking what practices in the world does this argument legitimate or illegitimate? And indeed what, this concept of legitimacy is going to be a major theme in the course. What is it that makes governments legitimate? When should we obey the government? When should we, when we are, when are we entitled to disobey the government? Perhaps when are we even obliged sometimes to disobey, the government? So it's, it's the combination of looking at these traditions from a classic statement through their evolution into contemporary debates and applications on the one hand, and the lenses of both internal and external analysis on the other, that make this course distinctive.
