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.
Locke on Consent
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En provenance du cours de Yale University
Moral Foundations of Politics
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À partir de la leçon
The Social Contract Tradition I
This module looks at classical formulations of the Social Contract Tradition, locating them in historical context, but then shifts to the contemporary debates as they relate to politics today.
Rencontrer les enseignants
Ian ShapiroSterling Professor of Political Science and Henry R. Luce Director
The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale
Okay, let's now focus on Locke's theory of Politics.
And as I said, this is also shaped by the workmanship ideal that we spent so
much time talking about already.
Basic idea, we own the commonwealth because we make the commonwealth.
It's our property.
So, right away you can see this is somewhat different
than Hobbes because it's giving us some authority over our creation.
Unlike Hobbes, for Locke the contract
doesn't extinguish our right to resist, and I'll come back to that.
It binds us irrevocably to the commonwealth, but
our obedience to the government is always conditional.
So Locke is gonna make a distinction between our being bound to
the collective and our being bound to the government of the day.
And we're gonna give up our right of self defense to the collective but
not to the government of the day.
Not irrevocably.
For one thing, Locke insists that we all have the power to leave.
We've only given our tacit consent, he makes a distinction
here between express consent, which he says is irrevocable.
He says that once we have by actual agreement, and
any express declaration, like taking an oath or something like that,
given the consent to be of any commonwealth, we're perpetually and
indispensably obliged to be and remain unalterably subject to it, and
can never again be of liberty in the former state of nature.
But if we've only tacitly consented, which is what most people do, you're just
born into a country or you move into a country, then you're at liberty to go and
incorporate yourself into any other commonwealth, or to agree with others
to begin a new one, in any part of the world they can find free and unpossessed.
So, tacit consent doesn't mean you're obliged to the state.
>> Yes, but this is only partially true because for
most of the people in the world, it's not possible to leave.
Where to go?
How to leave the country?
>> Where can you go?
And that takes resources and all of that.
And that's certainly true.
So it might sound thin gruel.
And, indeed, Nozick, who we're going to talk about later, but
you can tell from his jokes about the labor theory of value last time,
always has a great one liner up his sleeve, Nozick says that Locke's
theory of tacit consent isn't worth the paper it's not written on.
Right, so this is the stock critique of Locke's idea of tacit consent.
And I think it's valid up to a point, but
people who make that critique miss something about tacit consent and
its differences with expressed consent that actually is important,
because they don't understand something about the context in which he was writing.
Cuz Locke isn't really so
interested in talking about tacit consent itself, but rather he wants
to talk about the conditions under which consent can be withdrawn.
And so he's writing in a context in which
all obligations of subjects are seen as irrevocable.
Remember for Filmer, everybody's a property of the king, right?
And indeed, in Filma's story, children are the property of their parents.
They can be put to death or sold into prostitution or slavery.
They can do whatever they like with their children.
Absolute obedience to the person in authority of you.
And even David Hume makes the point
when he writes about the social contract, that if you indeed try to leave
your native country, most of the time the authorities are going to come after you.
They're gonna come after you, even if you go and
form a new settlement of the kind that Locke talks about.
And Hume says they would be completely entitled to do that,
because you would be their subject, right.
So that was the conventional view of Locke's day,
was that there are no rights just to pack up and leave.
And indeed as late as the Napoleonic Wars, which go on until 1815,
the British still refused to recognized the rights of merchant sailors
who had declared themselves Americans to resist impressment into the Royal Navy.
So, when the British were fighting the French,
they would go and grab people off merchant ships and
impress them into the navy, that's the notion of impressment.
And so you're a subject.
And these people would say no, we're not, we're Americans.
This is after the American Revolution.
And the British said, forget about it.
And this is one of the causes of the War of 1812.
So even when agreement is expressed, there are limitations on it.
But certainly this is the notion of tacit consent which Locke is
pressing here, that is as I said, a departure.
But once we get to express consent, that too is limited
in a couple of important ways that it's worth just fleshing out.
First, as I started to say but didn't go into any detail yet,
we are bound in perpetuity to the majority in our country but
we're not bound to subordinate ourselves to the government, right?
So he says every man, by consenting with others to make one body politic under one
government, puts himself under an obligation to every one of that society,
to submit to the determination of the majority, and to be concluded by it.
Or else his original compact, whereby he and others incorporated into one
society would signify nothing, and be no compact if he be left to be free,
and under no ties other than that which existed in the state of nature.
So that is irrevocable.
Submitting yourself to the majority.
And we'll talk later in the course about why the majority rather than
the unanimity or some other way of deciding the will of the community is.
You can't escape the will of the majority except by leaving.
But the other thing is that there's a trust relationship
between you and the government which can be dissolved if it's violated.
So Locke says, whenever the legislators endeavour
to take away and destroy the property of the people, or reduce them to slavery
under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people.
Who are there upon absolved from any further obedience and
are left to the common refuge of God, which has provided for
all men against force and violence.
By this breach of trust, they forfeit their power
that the people have put in their hands quite for quite contrary ends, and
it devolves to the people, who have a right to resume their original liberty,
and by the establishment of a new legislative, provide for
their own safety and security, which is the end for which they are in society.
What I've said here concerning the legislature in general holds true also
concerning the executive.
The people have, by law, antecedent and paramount to all positive laws of men,
reserved the ultimate determination to themselves, which belongs to all mankind.
And this judgement they cannot part with.
It being out of a man's power to submit himself to another,
as to give him a liberty to destroy him.
God and nature never allowing a man so
to abandon himself as to neglect his own preservation.
And since he cannot take away his own life,
neither can he give another a power to take it.
So, you have a residual right against the government, right?
And that parallels your inextinguishable right to what you could
get from the common land when we were talking about property.
But so that puts on the table a big puzzle, another puzzle.
Which is okay, so you have, according to Locke,
in some circumstances if you think the government has violated your trust,
the trust you gave it, you can resist the government.
You're entitled to do that.
You have a right to do that.
And indeed, if you think the government has violated natural law,
you might even have an obligation.
Right, if you remember when we we're talking about Locke's theory of
reading the scriptures, way back?
If the scriptures tell you that the state is actually violating natural law,
you may be obliged to resist the government.
Right, what does that remind you of?
>> The possibility of an obligation to resist.
>> Mm-hm.
>> Harkens back to the Eijkman problem.
>> Exactly,
that Eijkman might have had a natural law obligation to resist the German state.
And that's fine, but if most people don't agree with you, what's gonna happen?
Most people agree with you, it's fine.
You will remove the sovereign,
which is ultimately was done in 1688, and Locke supported that.
But what happens if most people don't agree with it?
>> Off with your head.
>> Yeah.
As Locke says, you will get your reward in the next life.
But why worry?
This life is short and then that's eternity, right?
>> Yeah, but there is a problem with that because this argument could be easily
applied by really just terrorists, because that's what they're doing.
Suicide bombers, they commit all of these
horrible acts of violence with this argument of Heavenly reward.
So, the problem here is like okay, we can resist but in which form?
So this is for me a question and maybe,
this is where maybe Neill can come in with a question of harm.
That your resistance actually producing the harm onto the society and
both to the state.
>> So I think that's a very perceptive observation.
I think that certainly Locke would say that people we think of as
terrorists today, they're certainly entitled to resist.
Whether they're entitled to kill people is another matter.
I think he would be more like Mill in that respect.
He would say no.
But at the end of the day if somebody just said,
I do not recognize the authority of this government.
There's no nasis onto which you can say they have to.
There afterall is no earthly authority
entitled to settle disagreements about what natural law means.
But Locke wouldn't allow that you could kill others, so
in that sense I think he would resist the terrorist move.
Okay, but because of that, because of the fact that there's
always the danger that others won't agree with you, and
yes, you can say well I'll go to Heaven, so what.
You know, maybe you won't go to Heaven.
So he doesn't think that people are gonna do this lightly.
People are not gonna resist the government lightly.
And of course what you cannot do is just resist one law that you don't like.
You have to resist the whole.
As long as you don't engage in trying to overthrow the government,
you're bound to obey it, you can't selectively disobey.
So you really have to be willing to undertake a revolution.
So Locke says and so nobody should think that this right
to resist lays a perpetual foundation for disorder, for it operates not till
the inconveniency is so great, that the majority feel it and
are weary of it, and find a necessity to have it amended.
People will resist only when there is a long train of abuses,
prevarications, and artifices, all tending the same way.
So there's not gonna be a revolution every five minutes.
The stakes are too high.
Most people are not gonna lay their lives on the line
until it reaches the point where it's intolerable.
And that's a good thing because you don't wanna have a revolution lightly.
So the conclusion for now is our natural rights are indefeasible,
that means we don't give them up, and they always trump the social contract, but
asserting them involves exceedingly high stakes politics.
So those are the basic outlines of the classical social contract
theories of Hobbes and Locke.
And usually all social contract theorems begins by reference to those arguments,
but they've long been identified two major problems with them.
One is that, in fact, they're natural law arguments,
but many people are skeptical that there's any such thing as natural law.
Bentham was the first person to say, natural law,
natural rights are dangerous nonsense, nonsense on stilts.
But he certainly was not the last person to make such comments about the doctrine
of natural law.
Even when people agree that there is such a thing as natural law,
they generally won't agree on what natural law is.
Even in the 17th century, if you look at natural law thinkers,
they pretty much affirmed positions that we would think of today as extending
from the far right to the far left.
In some way, even more like anarchists.
So natural law, it seems, is too slim a basis on which to
generate the idea of what constraints there should be on a social contract.
Either people are skeptical of the very existence of natural law or
they don't agree on what it means.
And the second big problem is that there never was a social contract.
It's a metaphor.
Even when we think of the constitution making of the American engaged in.
They violated the rules of the Confederation,
which had required unanimity.
They couldn't get it and they said nevermind.
And, of course, the Confederation was imposed on other
dissatisfied people, notably, Native Americans.
So, there never was this kind of original moment.
So, people criticized the social contract tradition for
pretending that there was this moment.
If there's a metaphor for something that never happened, maybe
it's gonna distort our view of politics in important ways if we embrace it.
And so anyone who's gonna defend the social
contract is gonna have to have a way of dealing with these two problems.
And what's interesting is that in
the 1970s we get this massive revival of social contract theory,
by a man called Jon Rolls, who we're gonna start talking about next time.
But one of the first things we have to confront is that if you're going
to revive social contract theory, you have to deal with this fact that first of all,
nobody agrees on what natural law is, and there never was a social contract.
So we'll start with those two problems next time.
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