Democracy and Human Rights

30 credits
Spring teaching, year 1

In contemporary political philosophy rights are often described as the necessary foundation of democratic government. The democratic polity could not function, it is thought, without the establishment of and adherence to particular rights. Having respect for human rights enshrined in law is often said to ensure liberal governance. Equally, the democratic values of individual equality and of trust and compromise help to foster a political culture respectful of rights. This module scrutinises the presumed fit between rights and democracy, by looking at the origins of modern ideas about rights and about democracy, from Aristotle's defence of the natural slave and scholastic ideas about rights to the seventeenth-century attempt to create a minimalist natural law and beyond. During the enlightenment era, and especially in France and in Scotland, authors put forward modules for reform, intended in part to curb the perceived excesses of commercial society, and at the same time to protect certain civil liberties. In the eyes of some reformers, such as the physiocrats, the assertion of rights was the key to French revival in economic and political arenas, but this was premised on the avoidance of democracy. For the physiocrats, as for so many early modern authors, there was no necessary connection between democracy and rights, and the main goal of politics was to avoid the kinds of violence and irrationality associated with mob rule, and with the active role of the people as political agents. The module commences with study of the first attempts to establish political systems based upon rights, and the very different contemporary criticisms and justifications of democracy. While democracy was often seen to be a source of internal division, a dangerous motor of extremism and unnecessary innovation, and a cause of international instability because of the usual support of the people for external wars, democracy could equally be described as a form of government both just and wise, sustaining a polity whose patriotic populace were devoted to the public good. The module goes on to study authors who saw democracy and rights as mutually sustaining, from Condorcet and Thomas Paine onwards, and how such authors addressed the issues of necessity in politics, and strove to secure national unity, commercial success and national defence. The module ends by studying current presumed connections between universal human rights and democratic governance.ce.

Religion and Enlightenment

30 credits
Spring teaching, year 1

Half a century ago, friends and foes of the Enlightenment were at least agreed that this phenomenon in European history was characterised by anti-clericalism and some degree of critical distance to religion. Today and for several years many scholars are defending an Enlightenment that is, if not a religious movement, at least intimately intertwined with religion. So while the concept of `Enlightenment values has retained its colloquial meaning in ordinary language, its basis in scholarship has been steadily eroded.

Those in need of a clear concept of Enlightenment that is serviceable for public debate may be excused for thinking that the state of scholarly work has become exceptionally divided and confusing, especially concerning the issue of religion. The scholarly discussion has been so intensive and complex, that often it can be hard to see the simpler and more basic issues, and one cannot help but get a feeling that scholars are talking past each other, because they try and fail to mean the same thing by Enlightenment and religion.

Much of the work that has been done has consisted in using the relationship between Enlightenment and religion to re-define the concept of either or of both. In fact, much of the discussion has been a succession of encounters between different kinds of history. More particularly, it has become a debate about the role of intellectual history in our understanding of the past, and since this form of history itself has undergone quite fundamental changes in the same period, it is hardly surprising that the outcome has been as unhelpful for the beating of drums as it has been encouraging for the necessary scepticism of scholarship.

This module examines the relationship between religion and enlightenment across the Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, and radical Protestant worlds, in addition to scrutinising the relationship between enlightenment and Judaism, Islam, and the forms of religious practice in the Orthodox world. Traditional perspectives on the relationship between enlightenment and atheistic or anti-religious beliefs with also been examined.

Toleration and Persecution

30 credits
Autumn teaching, year 1

The main aim of this module is to provide you with sound knowledge of the most important turning points in early-modern controversies about the nature of toleration and persecution. The module will survey key texts in their historical context, and examine themes that organise our understanding of toleration and persecution from the fall of Rome to this day. At the end of the module, you will be conversant with the great thinkers in this field, will be able to identify historical trends, and to understand and contextualise current controversies.

The centralised state and its "monopoly on violence", in Max Weber's famous phrase, is a recent historical development. For most of European history, popes, church councils, kings, emperors, princes, greater and lesser nobility, and autonomous city governments vied for the right to lay down the law and to punish transgressors. When these authorities collided, the debate over toleration and persecution acquired complex layers of meaning. What the Church persecuted, the secular authorities sometimes preferred to tolerate, and vice versa. Their confrontations, which shook the whole of Europe, alternated with periods of co-operation. The Church established ethical and some legal standards, but on the whole had to rely on secular power for enforcement. The history of the interplay between Church and political authority illuminates all debate about persecution and toleration, from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment.

In order to understand these developments, special attention will be paid to the ideas of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Machiavelli, Luther, Calvin, Botero, Bodin, Beza, Thomas Munzer, Grotius, Hobbes, Milton, Locke and writers of the English, American and French revolutions. The themes that the module covers are The Two Kingdoms; Reason of State; the history of human rights; theories of just war; sects and heresies; docile minds and docile bodies; salons, refugees and publications. Focus will be on early modern Europe, but with an eye on extra-European events, such as the role of persecution and toleration in the rise and demise of colonial empires.

War and Empire

30 credits
Autumn teaching, year 1

This module seeks to provide you with foundational knowledge of modern political thought by recovering some of the most influential debates between canonical and lesser-known figures, with the aim of listening to past voices and understanding them in their own terms. The focus of the module is the gradual superiority of early modern Europeans in the arts of war, which led to the establishment of global empires, and the associated sense that European political and economic life was different, and more especially its intellectual life. The module guides you through current controversies in the historiography of political thought from the Ancient World to the Cold War. Although social, economic and biographical information may be pertinent to the understanding of individual texts, the intention is to relate each authors writings to the prejudices and presumptions of their own time; understanding what they were seeking to do not by criticising it, but by reconstructing the arguments deemed convincing and justificatory by the authors themselves. A selection from the following themes will be considered: The Greek Commonwealth; the legacy of Rome's empire; Charlemagne and cosmopolitan kingship; Machiavelli and republican empire; Jean Bodin, absolutism and mixed government; Grotius, Hobbes and modern natural law theory and theories of war; Pufendorf, federal unions and commercial monarchy as the basis of modern empire; John Law, public credit and patriotism; Mandeville and Fenlon: Epicureanism and Augustinianism as the basis of imperial endeavour; Montesquieu, the science of legislation and the prospects for Europe; Hume and Rousseau: unsocial sociability and reform politics in republics and monarchical empires; Vattel, universal monarchy and perpetual peace; Frederick the Great and Voltaire: reason of state; Adam Smith, the natural progress of opulence and opposition to radical projectors; Paine, Burke and the future of Britain question; Constant, the nature of the modern republic and British supremacy in Europe; Jeremy Bentham's and James Mill's ideas about utilitarianism, empire and the superiority of European nations; John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx on representative government and political economy as the basis for European empires; Tocqueville and North America; Weber, bureaucracy and the comparative study of religion and empire; Gramsci and Schmitt on liberal empire and cosmopolitanism in international relations; Chomsky, just-war theory and aspirations to global peace.