Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
Enlightenment (Scottish (Smith (Ideas (He thinks market price & cost…
Enlightenment
Scottish
Smith
Texts
- Study of Moral Sentiments
- The Wealth of Nations
Context
- 18th Century
- Idea emerging that man is malleable
- Shaped by our environment
- Scotland / England Union:
- Scotland was not as commercialised
- at Centre of enlightenment
Ideas
The Impartial Spectator: Self-interest is constrained by our desire to be approved
- We are able to reflect and imagine
- We develop moral rules be experiencing pain
- We regulate our own behaviour
- We judge ourselves from others POV
- This allows us to judge ourselves impartially
Moral Sentiments:
- Self preservation is natural
- we avoid pain & seek pleasure
- we prefer tranquility to disruption
- We want to live "in harmony with expectation".
Division of labour
- Leads to greater efficiencies
- Unequal Commercialism is better than egalitarian savagary
- It is a direct result of trading
- Once we are trading, it makes more sense to do one thing well and trade
- Constrained by the size of the Market
- It makes us dependent on others
- Dependent on Market prices
- Which is dependent on cost
He thinks market price & cost will balance each other out
- as long as the aren't limited by mercantilism, corn laws etc...
*Market is opaque
- You can direct it without ruining it
Things he hates:
- Sitting on wealth
- The poor law - it ties people to a location
- Mercantalism
- Apprecnticeships - they tie people to jobs
The role of the State:
- There must be some rule of law to maintain and protect:
- Property
- Ownership
- Infrastructure of market
- State is also required for:
- Infrastructure
- Education
- Artes and culture - to stop pin makers going mad
Critique
Foucault
- Smith moves the argument of grain from a moral register to the epistemological register
- The moral argument becomes irrelevant if we solve the problem
- The "subject of interests" is an original concept
- It gives people the justification for doing things for themselves
- but also brings about the "subject of rights"
- Smith diminishes our vision of what Politics should be - This is Arendt's argument about politics as merely the "Global management of household duties"
Wolin
- His model of the impartial spectator has been simplified to just self and other
- What about being viewed by our id, ego, society, different groups... #
ME:
- Clearly he did not foresee that a rich person can eat much more than a poor person
- He doesn't foresee that we will be actively wasteful and produce unproductive "trinkets"
- Whilst the market is neutral to gender, race etc... the market will not overcome existing biases, you need politics for that
- this is similar to the argument around algorithms #
Hume
Ideas
- We are simply habit-forming creatures
- It has become our habit to seek reason in what is actually chaos #
- We must establish rules of justice #
Ferguson
Ideas
- Growth in commerce will corrupt the republic
Background
Age of Reason
- Thomas Paine describes the age of Reason
- 'Through rational study & reflection we can make definite progress' #
Scientific Revolution
- scientific societies became the only safe space for intellectual discussion (used to be close to theology)
- The world becoems place to be studied empirically not just theorised
The Reformation
- Radical schism in the church caused by Martin Luther
- Each man has a direct relation with God, therefore relation to state is political
- more precise definition of political authority is now required # #
Global Trade Increases
- World is commercialised
- Resulting in bigger states
- More questions of what liberty is #
Sattelzeit
- 1750 - 1850 - The period between early and late modern age
- coined by Reinhart Koseelek
- The world became more anthropocentric, less focus on God
- Many concepts had new meanings by the end
Revolution
- This word changes from meaning cyclic to starting afresh
- France and US both want to break the cycle of starting a new society and then it being corrupted
German
KANT
Context
- He reacts to Hume
- Creates a reasoned framework of Philosophy
- Determine that reason must exist outside of us, by looking at the way we think
- says Locke's Empiricisim doesn't allow for experience & knowledge
- A series of perceptions is not enough to create knowledge #
#
IDEAS
In your role as a servant you must obey, but it your role as a citizen you must use your own rationality to criticise
- 'Internal order' & "world peace"
Human freedom gives us a hypothetical right to own anything
- this is a problem for Kant, it brings us conflict
- therefore, freedom must be regulated but in a universal manner
For freedom we need the law
- therefore, we have no right to resistance (Agrees with Hobbes, disagrees with Lock & Rousseau)
- The right to resistance is inconsistent with a constitution
Global trade & international law will bring peace
- "even a nation of reasonable devils must come to the conclusion of lawful obedience" #
Critique
Hegel
- Kant's morality provides no content, just a rule
- This rule is evidently sometimes flawed:
- If everyone gave money to the poor, there would be no poor.
- This rule becomes rationally impossible and so immoral in Kant's eyes. Yet surely giving to poor is not immoral?
- Kant's ethics force people into a conflict between reason & desire
- For Hegel ignoring desire is unnatural. By not recognising the tension between desire & reason you fail to give people a reason to be moral that is based on their own desires.
Arendt:
- Obedience in Kant's terms is oxymoronic
- He states that simply following order's is not enough but that rationalises that through reason everyone should obey the same ideas
- ME: His flaw is that he assumes everyone's thinks in the same way or even with the same system of morals #
Jacques Lacan:
- Formalising his subject means that everything is procedural, which means you can be the opposiet of what Kant wants
- Willing a universal assumes good intent #
ME:
- If a space is created where you are allowed dissent, i.e. as a citizen, in your head, with your friends, does that count as dissent?
Texts
- What is Enlightenment?
- Perpetual Peace
French
Rousseau
Context
- 18th Century
- France is beginning to take up Lockean ideas of humans gainign knowledge of the world through experience
- France is debating where civility comes from, nature or nuture?
- Rousseau takes opposite view to Smith
- He thinks the civilisation of humans is barbaric
- Rousseau is held up as an example of supporting republics & participatory democracy
- He says you cannot divest your part to play, morally, you must be involved.
Ideas
Humans in their natural state are simple but noble
- We are driven to look after ourselves but guided by reason & compassion
- We have simple needs and pains
- We are not naturally cruel #
The Vices of Culture occur through society, not nature
- Increase contact with others makes us care about what they think
- vanity
- competition based on self-image, not survival
- Then we build families
- Then agriculture & property introduce inequality and dependencies on society
- The pain of lack of comfort becomes greater than the initial relief it brought
- War is formed through society, not nature
- He agrees with Locke & Kant
- Disagrees with Hobbes & Smith
Humans are malleable, so maybe we are perfectible
- The Social contract needs to create a 'new person'.
- Everyone must give everything to everyone at the same time as giving to nobody (not state or sovereign)
General Will
- Not just the aggregate of all individual wills
- We need to overcome our individual will and want the good of all
*
- Is this what Habermas tries to create via discourse?
De-Naturing
- One must become a citizen
- You give away your natural rights in place for civil rights
Rousseau requires a 'Law Giver' to make everything work
- A perfect, compassionate authority
- Lock & Hobbes require something almost identical
- Rousseau praises religion for how effective it was at making people obey rules
- ME: Godel's incompleteness theorem
Texts
- A Discourse on the Origins of Inequality
- The Social Contract
Critique
Arendt
- There is a paradox - you need a people to form a constitution, but you need a constitution to determine the people #
He has non-rational pre-conditions
- Shared sentiments
- Belief in some authority #
Is there actually any practical way to establish a general will? #