Notes on "A History of Political Theory" -- Episode 20

For episode 19, see here

The Theory of the Nation State

XX. England: Preparation for Civil War
 A. Lines between rival political ideas not clearly drawn in early 17th Century
      England.
       1. No need to support royal absolutism with the theory of divine right.
       2. None had to seek theoretical defense for right to resist.
 B. Thomas Moore's Utopia (1516) was political satire expressing dislike of 
      growing acquisitive society.
       1. Harked back to Platonic conception of community of cooperative
           classes.
       2. Illustrated "looking back" from coming economic age.
 C. Richard Hooker argued that Puritan refusal of obedience to establish church
      was denying all political obligation.
       1. Reason was accepted universally as soon as it was understood.
       2. Law of reason was manifestly binding on all men.
       3. Man cannot satisfy all their needs in isolation and therefore form society.
       4. Ground of political obligation is common consent by which men agreed
           to be ordered by someone.
       5. Society could never withdraw its consent to authority it has set up after
           the fact.
       6. Ecclesiastical law of England not contrary to Christian faith and therefore
           binding -- as was all law -- upon all Englishmen.
 D. Calvinists and Catholics objected to royal supremacy in the Church as an 
      invasion of it's spiritual independence.
 E. Independents split church from state, seeing the former as a voluntary
     association.
 F. Erastianism of John Seldon saw the relationship between religion and the
     king in utilitarian, secularist and rational terms not common or typical
     for times.
 G. King, courts and Parliament each seen as having inherent powers, none
      claimed supremacy until the civil war.
 H. First conflict between king and courts over royal prerogative.
       1. Francis Bacon defended the right of the King to overrule the courts.
       2. Chief Justice Edward Coke argued for supremacy of common law over
           the King and Parliament.
      3. Coke saw law as indigenous growth within the realm that defined all
          rights and obligations.

Next week:  Thomas Hobbes


     

Notes on "A History of Political Theory" -- Episode 19

For episode 18, see here

The Theory of the Nation State

XIX The Modernized Theory of Natural Law
 A. Political philosophy released from association with theology in early 17th
      Century.
       1. Possible because gradual recession of religious conflict,
       2. Gradual secularization of issues of political theory,
       3. Secularization of intellectual interests bought on by the spread of
           scholarship to antiquity,
       4. Progress in mathematics and physical sciences.
 B. Althusius -- Calvinist, anti-royalist
       1. Separated jurisprudence and politics in reaction to Bodin
       2. Based natural society on contract
           i. contract explained relations between ruler and ruled (contract of
            government)
           ii. also explained existence of any group whatever (social contract)
       3. State is built up from series of contracts of lesser social groups 
           down to the individual level
       4. Sovereignty resided in the people as corporate body and could not
           be alien to it
       5. Government holds power for the sovereign
 C. Grotius -- Natural Law
       1. On the state, less clear than Althusius
       2. Importance was on conception of law regulating relations between
           states
       3. Sought to base common (natural) law in pre-Christian thought
       4. Argued against view of natural justice as motivated by
           self-interest and therefore merely a social convention
           i. appeal to utility is ambiguous since man is inherently social
           ii. maintenance of society is a major utility
           iii. peaceful social order is intrinsic good and conditions required
             for it just as binding as those which serve private ends
           iv. certain conditions or values must obtain if society is to persist
             and are thus necessary to man's nature
           v. these natural conditions are the basis of positive law of states
           vi. natural law no more arbitrary than arithmetic
       5. His attempt to rigorously ground reason part of move toward 
           "demonstrative" systems of philosophy
       6. Natural law seen as basis for social and philosophical geometries

Descartes' method (427): "resolve every problem into its simplest elements; proceed by the smallest steps so that each advance may be apparent and compelling; take nothing for granted that is not perfectly clear and distinct."

 D. Natural Law was introduction of normative element into law and politics.
 E. Contained possible ambiguities not immediately apparent.
       1. Differences between factual truth and logical implication
       2. Ambiguity between logical and moral necessity
       3. Critical analysis of these awaited Hume
 F. Unity of system based on some general agreement on what was
       important to insist on:
       1. Obligation to consent
           i. meant there were two parts to political theory -- contract and state
             of nature
           ii. this implied two contract, one as basis of the community and one 
             between the community and governing officials
       2. Human well-being required enlightened intelligence
       3. Middle class notion of individual human nature
       4. Society seen as mode for man not the other way around
       5. Relations in society less real than the individuals in themselves

Next week:  England: Preparation for Civil War
             


 

Interlude: Ex nihilo nihil fit

Wisdom is the highest goal of man; our knowledge as such is obscure, but it is illumined by searching.

Xenophanes in Bruno Snell’s The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought

Some 2500 years ago, having moved beyond the anthropomorphic religion of Homeric Greece, the Greek Pre-Socratic thinkers began seeking to understand reality through reason and observation. They were doing science in the sense of trying to explain the fundamental facts of existence according to logical standards and the kinds of observational tools then available. They sought to explain two basic elements of reality, that anything exists and the process by which things change.

Heraclitus saw only change: “Everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.... It is in changing that things find repose.” For him, the universe was uncreated, it always existed, coming apart and back together again. He saw fire – the most visible form of energy – as the principle force of change, as could be seen in the cool becoming hot and the wet, dry.

Parmenides and the Eleatic School made central the logical claim that nothing can come from nothing. Parmenides, like Heraclitus, saw no reason to explain existence as “to be is possible and not-to-be is impossible.” The Eleatics saw the universe as unique, uncreated, unchanging and unbound. They argued that if the universe was bound in space or time, that would mean that it was not unique. If it was not unique, it could not be the universe. The Eleatics denied the existence of change. Zeno used various paradoxes of logic to argue, for example, that things cannot move as “if anything is moving, it must be moving either in the place in which it is or in a place in which it is not” and neither is possible.

Despite the Eleatics, the fact that things appear to change needed explanation. Empedocles accepted the monist view of reality: the universe is singular and unbounded. He pictured it as a circle containing the All. But while the underlying reality is unchanging, the four basic elements – fire, air, water and earth – produce change by combining and separating driven by the opposing forces of Love (philia) and Strife. Anaxagoras developed this approach further by positing a universe made up of an infinite number of particles of all possible qualities while “in everything there is a portion of everything else.” In the original cosmos, all these fundamental particles already existed but were mixed and therefore left the total without quality. Mind (nous) set them in motion and caused them to be separated into what now exists.

In their answers to the questions of why anything exists and how things change, the pre-Socratics said everything that we can logically say. The cosmology of Empedocles and Anaxagoras could be read as an early premonition of our modern version. Our understanding of reality includes seemingly unchanging fundamental particles and forces making up the changing observable. Love and Strife can be read as Gravity and Dark Energy, one pulling matter together and the other pushing it apart. More generally, the essential dynamic of everything that exists – natural and human – can be seen as either a coming together or a coming apart.

It was while reading Empedocles that I went back to reconsider the modern theory of the creation of the universe from the Big Bang. The Big Bang theory essentially explains nothing. Literally. It does not and cannot explain where whatever it was that went “bang” came from. Ex nihilo nihil fit, nothing can come from nothing. Further following the Eleatics, it is not possible to understand the universe as expanding since that would require space to expand into. Modern cosmology seeks to sidestep this by positing that space itself expands as the surface of a balloon expands as it’s pumped up. (Where does it expand into?) Or perhaps our universe is one of many in some higher dimensional multi-verse. (And in what space and from where does that come?) Obviously, these too explain nothing.

That the universe exists, that we exist, must mean that something always existed. That the universe seems to be expanding may be better understood as an unchanging totality without boundaries of time or space. Everything that exists – in the “past, present or future” actually exists at once, whole. Stephen Hawking once hinted at this by noting that the universe could be understood as one big wave function, a singluar All. That the universe appears to be expanding under the influence of dark energy and will eventually decompose into its constituent particles may simply be the state of this All. It is we – individual living beings – that move through reality that experience change and time.

This leaves the question of why there should be something rather than nothing in the first place unexplained except by the very fact that we exist. I don’t know where any of this leads except to wonder.