In his famous essay “What is Enlightenment?” Immanuel Kant explains this concept by saying directly that “Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage” (or, perhaps, “immaturity”).  He continues by decrying “man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! “Have courage to use your own reason!”- that is the motto of enlightenment.”  Our last two classes have addressed a series of thinkers whose ideas were, indeed, “enlightened” and whose arguments challenged and changed the world forever.  In this Blog post, therefore, I want to have you bring to light a particular “enlightened” premise that really intrigued you of late, whether from Luther, Copernicus, Galileo, Rousseau, Locke, Adam Smith, or Kant himself.  This time around, I’m particularly intrigued by what, exactly, you see as a truly “enlightened” idea.  So, outlining your chosen concept, what made it so revolutionary in its own day and age?  And why does this premise still have profound intellectual currency in our own era?  Finally, for this response, I’m really curious about your personal thoughts and opinions on the matter – why, exactly, are you so struck by this particular example of/from Enlightenment thought?  Why does it speak to you through the void of hundreds of years of time?

According to Mark Jendrysik, “The political theorists of seventeenth-century England saw struggles over political and religious organization as the central cause of revolutionary upheaval. Division on questions of political structures and religious belief resulted in civil strife and oppression. . . . John Milton saw a critical cleavage between those who freed themselves from the worship of kings and those who were still enthralled by the royal image. Oliver Cromwell believed faction, brought about by the desire of some men to rule over other men and force their beliefs into a specific pattern, caused the civil war. For Robert Filmer false beliefs about a specious and rebellious “liberty” destroyed natural order. For Thomas Hobbes the critical division in English politics was based in misunderstandings about the nature of sovereign power. Divided sovereignty, or the false belief that there was more than one source of religious and political authority in the world, became for Hobbes the central, overriding cause of disorder. The civil war represented the failure of English sovereigns to maintain necessary control over all aspects of political and religious life. The source of divided sovereignty lay in confusion about the source, nature and goals of political and religious power in the state.” As a result of his cold-hearted application of logical thought to the harsh realities of the English Civil War, Thomas Hobbes emerged as perhaps the quintessential political philosopher in the English-speaking world during the period commonly known as the Restoration era. One way of thinking about Hobbes is to see him as taking up the intellectual mantle of thought begun just over a century earlier by Niccolo Machiavelli (in ‘The Prince’). Like his Italian predecessor (though to a lesser degree), Hobbes has been seen as a kind of cynical commentator on politics and rule. Yet Hobbes DOES offer a different vision of political reality than Machiavelli for a different age, and in this response I’m interested in you bringing the ideas of these two intellectual behemoths into conversation. Specifically, I want you to do two things here: 1) Try and compare/contrast the political thought of Hobbes and Machiavelli. In what way are their approaches, theories, and conclusions similar, but also, in what crucial ways to they diverge? 2) Much like we did earlier with Machiavelli, I want you to pick out a particular quotation from Hobbes’ ‘Leviathan’, and discuss it – trying to address its significance and logic for its own time period and then, in turn, discussing how and why you think it logically applies (or not) to our own day and age.

Few writers are so significant that they leave a literal mark on the language, to the degree that their name becomes synonymous with a particular idea or phenomenon. Nicolo Machiavelli, however, was just such a man, and his book The Prince has been central to the study of political thought since its initial publication in 1532. In the English-speaking world, the author is probably best known or recognized through the adjective based on his name: “Machiavellian”, which Webster’s Dictionary defines as “of or relating to Machiavelli” or, more to the point, “suggesting the principles of conduct laid down by Machiavelli; specifically:  marked by cunning, duplicity, or bad faith.” In other words, Machiavelli’s very name has come to designate an individual whose political behavior is manipulative, deceitful, deceptive, and/or dishonest. To a certain degree, this notion perfectly embodies Machiavelli’s political advice, yet in some ways this premise misses the point or, at the very least, fails to recognize the moral, literary, and political subtleties of Machiavelli’s Prince. For this response, I want you to navigate some of the subtleties brought to the page by Machiavelli, and to do so I want you to do three things. First, identify a particularly contentious idea from The Prince, a piece of advice that would seem, for lack of a better word, quintessentially “Machiavellian.” Quote it for the Blog and then I’d like you to critique that notion in several specific ways. On one hand, I’d like you to try to examine his logic, to try and understand WHY he offers the controversial piece of advice that he does. To help support and explain this statement, you should try to place his comment(s) within the historical context of his day and age (something that he himself does repeatedly in his book). On the other hand, I’d like to see how Machiavelli’s idea might be applicable to our own political moment. Is his particular suggestion for political behavior a wise one, a good way for a ruler to (justly) navigate the challenging political waters of the twenty-first century? Or would his premise be problematic in some way, shape, or form if taken up by a modern-day politician? The Prince is a very challenging and fascinating book of political advice, and it will be interesting to see what you are all able to do by way of examining that advice both as it relates to his own day and age, and also as an applicable premise for our current political realm.

In the opening passages of the Bhagavad-Gita, the “hero” (if you will) Arjuna is overcome by grief on the battlefield.  Not wanting to kill his kin, he puts down his weapons and, dejected, refuses to fight.  But Krishna, his counselor, famously urges him on by saying such things as “your business is with action alone,” that “there is nothing better for a Kshatriya than a righteous battle,” and arguing that if “Killed, you will obtain heaven; victorious, you will enjoy the earth. Therefore arise, O sun of Kunti, resolved to engage in battle!”  Krishna’s advice to Arjuna has been the subject of considerable controversy over the years and is, to say the very least, provocative and complex.  In addition to the Bhagavad-Gita our class has recently considered the challenging ideas of Aristotle’s Politics and Plato’s Republic, all of which are masterpieces of world literature and crucially important remnants of ancient political theory and belief.  For the second Blog post of the term, then, I want you to precisely and directly engage with the politics of one of these major works.  Specifically, I’d like you to select a single passage from one of these works, a passage that you deem provocative, interesting, or somehow problematic.  Then, you should examine the passage itself and try to place it within the broader context of your chosen work and its historical/political/intellectual context.  Finally, you might offer your own two cents’ worth on the passage:  what do you think about the topic and viewpoint at hand, and why?