|
Архитектура Аудит Военная наука Иностранные языки Медицина Металлургия Метрология Образование Политология Производство Психология Стандартизация Технологии |
|
|
Архитектура Аудит Военная наука Иностранные языки Медицина Металлургия Метрология Образование Политология Производство Психология Стандартизация Технологии |
How did the different political-philosophical tendencies in English thought perceive India?Стр 1 из 14Следующая ⇒
INDIA
How did the different political-philosophical tendencies in English thought perceive India? English had respect and interest for Indian culture. Orientalism - study of Eastern societies by Western scholars, often leading to distortion of history. India was seen as ‘religion, spirit, nature, the exotic, adventure, danger, romanticism, myth, feminine’. British reaction at home were divided: conservatives: dignity of Indian culture and Indians should be educated in their own language and culture orientalists: it was the duty of English to stay and interfere in India’s development How did attitudes towards India by the English evolve (3 stages of the Raj)?
Three stages of the Raj: Wave 1: English arrive as traders in 1700, set up the East India Company. After the whites settled permanently, they began to bring their families to India - this put an end to mixed marriages. Discovery Indo-European language system: whites started to learn Indian languages. The real turning point was the Black Hole of Calcutta incident, when the Nawab of Bengal attacked British Calcutta. At that time British were at the sea, leaving a number of British women and children in the city. The Nawab put these women and children temporarily in prison, called the Black Hole. Around 50 of the died from suffocation (удушение) and dehydration. The British used this accident for vicious retaliation (возмездие) and imposition of direct rule.
Wave 2: English saw themselves as Missionaries. 1813 - official entry of Christian missionaries to British India, attempt to Christianize India. The missionaries had little success, the exception being among tribals and low caste Hindus.
Wave 3: 1857-1858 - 3rd wave begins. English turned away from trying to Christianize the natives to trying to Anglicize and civilize them. Indian Mutiny (‘First war of independence’ for Indians’, Rebellion) against the British East India Company, but it ended unsuccessfully. How was Indian thought influenced by English thought?
One major thing that English did was replacing the multiplicity of legal voices and the centuries of case law with a single voice, that of Jones’ Manu. Manu’s Laws became an instrument in the British vision of an ancient Sanskrit text-based uniform Hinduism which could serve as the uniform religion of all Hindu subjects. Also, The Bhagavad Gita was translated into English, and this book had a place in Hinduism - only a small literate elite used it for spiritual inspiration. The British interpreted the Gita as laying the way for Christianity - at least for the small aristocratic laters of the Indian population. Finally, the British admiration for the Gita led to reform movements among Hindus who sought to fashion Hinduism into something agreeing with British tastes. What does the case of Ambedekar tell us about the role of caste in modern India? Ambedkar was a Dalit (неприкасаемый) who agreed with Gandhi that untouchability had to be stopped in the new India. Gandhi thought that you could still keep caste, while Ambedkar thought you couldn’t. He criticized Islam and Hinduism. In 1956 5 million Dalits led by Ambedkar converted to Buddhism, because Buddhism is against the cast system. However, in India Ambedkar and other Dalits were considered as untouchables, so inequality existed, even though Ambedkar himself had bachelor degree in Columbia University and the London School of Economics. He was fighting for the rights of untouchables. Ambedkar was quite successful in his attempts because untouchables started to be treated much better and had special privileges when applying to university or job. Caste discrimination became prohibited, criminal action. ENLIGHTENMENT
i. What different forms did the Enlightenment take in England, America, Scotland, France, Germany and Russia? What different roles did Reason and religion play? mention: Kant, Adam Smith, Voltaire, John Wesley the Methodist, Catherine the Great of Russia, Edmund Burke, Tom Paine. ii. How did science and business (the Joint Stock Company) influence the new political idea of the Social Contract? iii. For seminar teachers: What different form did the idea of the Social Contract take in the thought of Locke, Hobbes and Rousseau?
European politics, philosophy, science and communications were radically reoriented during the course of the “long 18th century” (1685-1815) as part of a movement referred to by its participants as the Age of Reason, or simply the Enlightenment. Enlightenment thinkers in Britain, in France and throughout Europe questioned traditional authority and embraced the notion that humanity could be improved through rational change. The Enlightenment produced numerous books, essays, inventions, scientific discoveries, laws, wars and revolutions. The American and French Revolutions were directly inspired by Enlightenment ideals and respectively marked the peak of its influence and the beginning of its decline. The Enlightenment ultimately gave way to 19th-century Romanticism.
FERGUSON
FUKUYAMA
Fascism, communism, nationalism and religious fundamentalism are possible alternative ideologies to liberalism that F considers: in what way does he consider each of them a failure and non-viable? What, in his opinion, is the relationship between religious fundamentalism and liberalism? Fascism was destroyed as a living ideology by World War II. This was a defeat, of course, on a very material level, but it amounted to a defeat of the idea as well. What destroyed fascism as an idea was not universal moral revulsion against it, since plenty of people were willing to endorse the idea as long as it seemed the wave of the future, but its lack of success. After the ear, it seemed to most people that German fascism as well as its other European and Asian variants were bound to self-destruct.
Marx, speaking Hegel's language, asserted that liberal society contained fundamental contradiction that could not be resolved within its context, that between capital and labor, and this contradiction has constituted the chief accusation against liberalism ever since. But surely, the class issue has actually been successfully resolved in the West. But the root causes of economic inequality do not have to do with the underlying legal and social structure of our society, which remains fundamentally egalitarian and moderately redistributionist, so much as with the cultural and social characteristics of the groups that make it up, which are in turn the historical legacy of premodern conditions
While they may constitute a source of conflict for liberal societies, this conflict does not arise from liberalism itself so much as from the fact that the liberalism in question is incomplete. Certainly a great deal of the world's ethnic and nationalist tension can be explained in terms of peoples who are forced to live in unrepresentative political systems that they have not chosen.
Modern liberalism itself was historically a consequence of the weakness of religiously-based societies which, falling to agree on the nature of the good life, could not provide even the minimal preconditions of peace and stability
Huntingdon
Why? Communist ideology with the end of the Cold war started to weaken, which allowed the Iron Curtain to be replaced by the Velvet Curtain. As the ideological division of Europe has disappeared, the cultural division of Europe between Western Christianity, on the one hand, and Orthodox Christianity and Islam, on the other, has reemerged
What is Sufism? there is another trend in medieval Islam, Sufism. Sufism is mysticism. It has its roots in the prayer and fasting of Muhammad and his Night Journey and Ascent to Heaven. However, gradually, like philosophy, Sufism was drawn into the fold of orthodox Islam, so that Islam at its richest contains philosophy, mysticism, tradition and law – a synthesis found in most influential form in al-Ghazali 2. What is ‘radical Sufism’? What is ‘orthodox Sufism’? At times Sufis behaved (a bit like the philosophers) as if the orthodox law-based practice of Islam did not apply to them, as if they were beyond that. In their intimacy with God, some saw themselves as almost divine, and their followers considered the saints (wali in Arabic = friend of God) as superior to the prophets and Muhammad. However, gradually, like philosophy, Sufism was drawn into the fold of orthodox Islam, so that Islam at its richest contains philosophy, mysticism, tradition and law – a synthesis found in most influential form in al-Ghazali. 3. What is the difference between Shi’ite and Sunni Islam?:
Mainstream orthodox Sunni (traditional) Islam came to be associated with an imperial system, headed by the Caliph, which differed little from the Byzantine and former Persian empires that early Muslims had seen as being degenerate religiously and politically. The Shi’ites believed that Muhammad’s cousin, Ali, should have become leader of the community. Islam would then have been led by truly religious figures, imams, rather than worldly political figures and it would not have sunk into compromise 4. What are the problems in talking of an Islamic "Middle Ages"?
The main problem of talking about Islamic "Middle Ages” that this term began to be used in Italy in the 16-17 centuries, i.e. during the Renaissance. It implies a "middle" age between a bright Classical era (Greece and Rome), and the rebirth (renaissance) of classical learning and scholarship, with this middle era being also a 'dark ages'. . This schema, in other words, ignores the role of the more advanced Christian and Islamic East in helping Western Christendom emerge from a period of stagnation (a judgment that some would also question). What are qiyyas and ijma? Qiyyas in Islamic law is the process of dedactive analogy in which the teachings of the compared and contrasted with those of the Qur'an. Ijma is an Arabic term referring to the consensus or agreement of the Muslim scholars basically on religious issues. MODERN RUSSIA
MODERN CHINA
1. Why was Japan considered the ‘hope of Asia’ at the beginning of the 20th century? In the 1853 ‘free-trade’ agreement with trading posts in Japan was set up between Britain, Holland, and Russia. As a result, many Japanese had been educated in the West, Western clothing had been adopted. Such transition to the Western culture happened due to the fact that traditional ruling class (homogeneous and small) actually pursued, supported this modernization. Then, Japanese managed to persuade British to give up their territories in Japan by presenting themselves as Anglophiles (clothing, education, constitution). Few years after Japan won a war against China over Korea and a major war against Russia in 1904-1905. As a result, Japanese were no longer ashamed to stand before the world as Japanese. Japan was the first non-European country to resist colonization.
HEGEL AND MARX
Hegel:
World-spirit By the term, “World Spirit,” Hegel means the sum total of human thought, its speech and its culture. His stance is entirely subjective, and he believes in no external truth or ultimate reason. According to Hegel, truth may be correct from where you stand at a certain position in time, but it may change from generation to generation. His philosophy is a method of understanding and thinking in a productive way about the progress of history.Therefore, according to Hegel, world spirit is identical to reality. Folk-spirit (Volksgeist)
The word Volksgeist itself was coined by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) to denote the separate spiritual essences of the diverse nations that characterized the present stage of human history and that would, through a dialectical process, produce the uniform "world-spirit" which spelled history's end. *Буквально переводится как «национальный дух» Dialectic Hegelian Dialectic is a mechanism to arrive at a final truth or conclusion. Right now you probably use the Aristotelian method for arriving at truth, which is to observe all the facts of the situation and then make the most logical conclusion based from those observations. Hegel explained a process where truth is instead arrived through the friction and conflict between one force (the thesis) and its opposite (the antithesis). The final result from that clash, the synthesis, is the best conclusion. In all likelihood, the synthesis is not the final and absolute truth. It becomes the new thesis where a new antithesis forms to oppose it. The conflict between them leads to a second synthesis. This process repeats until the final synthesis is revealed, which theoretically is absolute truth. Alienation It is a basic idea of Hegel's philosophy that whatever is, is, in the last analysis, Absolute Idea (Absolute Mind, Absolute Spirit, or, in popular language, God) and that Absolute Idea is neither a set of fixed things nor a sum of static properties but a dynamic Self, engaged in a circular process of alienation and dealienation. Nature is only a self-alienated (self-estranged) form of Absolute Mind, and man is the Absolute in the process of dealienation. The whole of human history is the constant growth of man's knowledge of the Absolute and, at the same time, the development of self-knowledge of the Absolute, who through finite mind becomes self-aware and "returns" to himself from his self-alienation in nature.
Finite mind, however, also becomes alienated. It is an essential characteristic of finite mind (man) to produce things, to express itself in objects, to objectify itself in physical things, social institutions, and cultural products; and every objectification is, of necessity, an instance of alienation: the produced objects become alien to the producer. Alienation in this sense can be overcome only in the sense of being adequately known. Again, it is the vocation of man as man to serve as the organon of the self-knowledge of the Absolute. To the extent that he does not perform this function, he does not fulfill his human essence and is merely a self-alienated man. Right and left Hegelianism The German philosophers who wrote immediately after the death of Hegel in 1831 can be roughly divided into the politically and religiously radical 'left', or 'young', Hegelians and the more conservative 'right', or 'old', Hegelians. The Right Hegelians followed the master in believing that the dialectic of history had come to an end—Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit reveals itself to be the culmination of history as the reader reaches its end. Here he meant that reason and freedom had reached their maximums as they were embodied by the existing Prussian state. And here the master’s claim was viewed as paradox, at best; the Prussian regime indeed provided extensive civil and social services, good universities, high employment and some industrialization, but it was ranked as rather backward politically compared with the more liberal constitutional monarchies of France and Britain.
The Young Hegelians drew on both Hegel's veneration of Reason and Freedom (as the guiding forces of history) and his idea that the 'Spirit' overcame all that opposed reason and freedom. They felt Hegel's apparent belief in the end of history conflicted with other aspects of his thought and that, contrary to his later thought, the dialectic was certainly not complete; this they felt was (painfully) obvious given the irrationality of religious beliefs and the empirical lack of freedoms—especially political and religious freedoms—in existing Prussian society. It is important to note that the groups were not as unified or as self-conscious as the labels 'right' and 'left' make them appear. The term 'Right Hegelian', for example, was never actually used by those it was later ascribed to, namely, Hegel's direct successors at the Fredrick William University (now the Humboldt University of Berlin). (The term was first used by David Strauss to describe Bruno Bauer—who actually was a typically 'Left', or Young, Hegelian.)
Alienation Marx had a specific understanding of the very sharp experience of alienation which is found in modern bourgeois society. Marx developed this understanding through his critique of Hegel. According to Hegel, through their activity, people created a culture which then confronted them as an alien force. But for Hegel human activity was itself but the expression of the Spirit (or Zeitgeist) which acted through people. In the first place, Marx insisted that it was human labour which created culture and history, not the other way around; in other words spirit was a human product, not the other way around. But secondly, practice changes the material world, practice was therefore objective; the labour process was therefore an objectification of human powers. But if the workers related to their product as an expression of their own essence and recognised themselves in their product and were recognised by others in their work, then this was not the basis for alienation; on the contrary, this was the only genuinely human relation. Dialectic From German philosophy--in particular that of Hegel--Marx took dialectics. Hegel was an idealist who believed that the whole of human history was a continual movement, through contradiction, toward absolute reason. He used an analogy from the physical world to illustrate his approach. Marx argued that dialectics could be rescued from Hegel's idealist outlook--"turned on its head" to reveal a "rational kernel within the mystical shell." Formal logic, or what philosophers have sometimes called "metaphysics," sees things as static and unchanging: A always is equal to A, and can never become B. To the extent that this approach sees movement, it is one "thing" acting on some other "thing." To the extent that there are cycles, they are endlessly repeating cycles. Dialectical materialism Materialism suggests that the world is material by its very name. Everything is caused, oriented, moved and developed by matter. Matter decides and determines everything in the society. Matter has the objective existence. From matter we get materialism that can be seen, observed material and its true value can be ascertained. A matter is knowable. It can be known on the other hand. To Hegel the world is ideal by its very nature. Ideas determine the matters or reality. Reason is the essence of reality. Idea is what it is as against what is not. Ideas run the world but matter runs the one that have a subjective existence. Matter has a subjective existence. In fact, this is an egg-hen question as to which idea is first or matter is first. Marx says “My ideas of dialectics are not only different from Hegel but also are its direct opposite.” Hence Marx believes that the idealists are superficial about their position. In fact, Marx idea is nothing but the material world reflected by human mind and translated into human thought. Marx believes that which is ideal is also material.
Base and superstructure Simply put, base refers to the forces and relations of production—to all the people, relationships between them, the roles that they play, and the materials and resources involved in producing the things needed by society. Superstructure, quite simply and expansively, refers to all other aspects of society. It includes culture, ideology (world views, ideas, values, and beliefs), norms and expectations, identities that people inhabit, social institutions (education, religion, media, family, among others), the political structure, and the state (the political apparatus that governs society). Marx argued that the superstructure grows out of the base, and reflects the interests of the ruling class that controls it. As such, the superstructure justifies how the base operates, and in doing so, justifies the power of the ruling class. Marx theorized that the superstructure effectively grows out of the base and that it reflects the interests of the ruling class that controls the base (called the “bourgeoisie” in Marx’s time). Ideology
According to Marx, various positions and beliefs held by people, be it religious, moral and so on, are created and conditioned by their material circumstances. This is true, as Marx points elsewhere, to both historical circumstances and class, social and economical circumstances (and here we can see why "class consciousness" is such an important term in Marx's philosophy). For Marx it is not enough to claim that people create their own images, ideologies and so forth, as suggested by Feuerbach and others. For Marx in "The German Ideology" people's ideas and ideologies are conditioned by the historical formation of powers of production and relations of production (these ideas by Marx are elaborated later in "The German Ideology"). This is the ground for Marx's famous distinction between economical base (which includes the forces of production, relations of production and division of labor) and the "superstructure" which includes culture, ideology, religion etc. for Marx, the superstructure is determined by the material base, and not as the Idealist philosophers would have it. Historical progress The Marxist theory of historical materialism sees human society as fundamentally determined at any given time by the material conditions—in other words, the relationships which people have with each other in order to fulfill basic needs such as feeding, clothing, and housing themselves and their families. Overall, Marx and Engels claimed to have identified six successive stages of the development of these material conditions in Western Europe. In contrast to many of his followers, Marx made no claim to have produced a master key to history, but rather considered his work a concrete study of the actual conditions that pertained in Europe. As he put it, historical materialism is not "an historico-philosophic theory of the marche generale imposed by fate upon every people, whatever the historic circumstances in which it finds itself." Labor theory of value Labor theory of value: The value of any commodity is ultimately derived from the labor used to create it. Use value: whether something is useful or not; produced to satisfy one’s own needs; measured qualitatively. Exchange value: produced to be exchanged for other use values; defined quantitatively. (Under capitalism, the purpose of work is to produce exchange value.) Capitalism obscures the fact that labor is the ultimate source of value. Since workers produce commodities for capitalists (instead of for themselves), these commodities and markets take on an independent existence. This process, the fetishism of commodities, allows for the exploitation of laborers. Workers are exploited because they are paid less than the value they produce with their labor E.g., workers are paid for the value of four hours of labor, but they work eight hours. The value of the four additional hours of work is surplus value kept by the capitalist. Surplus theory of value
Marxian economic concept that professed to explain the instability of the capitalist system. The capitalist pays his workers less than the value their labour has added to the goods, usually only enough to maintain the worker at a subsistence level. Of the total worth of the worker’s labour, however, this compensation, in Marxian theory, accounts for only a mere portion, equivalent to the worker’s means of subsistence. The remainder is “surplus labour,” and the value it produces is “surplus value.” To make a profit, Marx argued, the capitalist appropriates this surplus value, thereby exploiting the labourer. Creativity In this respect, it should be said that human creativity and productivity could be used to change the world as Karl Marx appeals. In general, it should be said that creativity is viewed by the philosopher as an essential part of human nature. Moreover, it is human creativity that actually distinguishes humans from all the other living beings. Thus, it is the really unique characteristic of humans and human nature.
Revolution
In history, those members of the aristocracy and the church owned the means of production, and the peasants worked for the aristocracy. With the onset of the Industrial Revolution, Marx thought that he would see more of the working poor rise financially and socially. However, this did not materialize. In the industrial society, the aristocracy was replaced by the capitalists (also known as the bourgeoisie). These were the people who owned businesses with the goal of earning a profit, and the working class was replaced by the proletariat, the people who labored for wages. Marx believed that this system was inherently unfair. Under capitalism, Marx believed that the workers would become poorer and poorer and experience alienation. Alienation is seen as the workers becoming more distanced from, or isolated from, their work, resulting in a feeling of powerlessness. To replace this alienation and extreme social class structure, Marx believed that capitalism had to end and be replaced by a socialist system that would make all equal and have all people's needs met. In his work with Fredrick Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Marx stated, ''The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.'' Thus, Marx had called for a workers' revolution where the proletarians would rise up against the bourgeoisie, overthrowing capitalism. To Marx's despair, though, such revolutions occurred in various countries such as Russia and China, but did not occur in the more industrialized nations of the time, like Britain and Germany.
IRRATIONALISM AND FASCISM
//Nietzsche: superman, eternal recurrence, attitudes towards Judaism and Christianity, reevaluation of values, attitude towards Greek, secular, Christian, 'herd' morality/philosophy; connection to fascism/Nazism; atheism; nihilism; will to power Concept of pessimistic late modernity: thought of Bergson, Freud, Weber. reasons for rise of Nazism late modernity and its attitude towards the Enlightenment//
Nietzsche was a German thinker who is the most famous advocate of the irrationality. He claimed that the choices we make and the desires we have that lead to our actions are irrational. Nietzsche’s idea was to embrace the reality – the irrationality of people – and dismiss the current order, the rational one. He believed that the bourgeois society was plagued by rational ideas that made it weak, therefore it should have turned to following instincts and wills instead of logic. Nietzsche denounced the values of Christianity as enslaving, because they were about modesty, the suppression of natural desires, being weak, thus effectively killing the spark of life. However, his criticism was free of denouncing the absence of reason in religions, but he was a critic of Greek and secular philosophies for that exact reason. His famous quote is “God is dead”, and it perfectly expresses his outlook towards religions and moral bases they provide in general In his view, the world was free of any morality, natural rights and etc – a nihilistic view of the society. And to cure it this kind of nihilism (nihilism—the belief that moral and social values have no validity) had to be fought. So here we get the notion of a superman – a man who dares to embrace his pride, who is free of any morality, and acts as he sees fit. A superman is powered by his will to power, it is his heroism and nobility that will revive the society. Amusingly, this vision was later used by fascists to give a reason to their ideas. They viewed the German nation as a nation of supermen that would dominate the world and crush others with their heroism, even though Nietzsche didn’t say it in any of his works. However, as someone noted, all of Nietzsche’s ideas can be used to support the ideas of fascism with a twist.
Bergson, Freud and Weber and be called as pessimistic thinkers of late modernity. An emphasis on logic in rational societies sacrifices spiritual impulses, imagination, and intuition and reduces the soul to a mere mechanism, according to Bergson. He pointed towards the understanding of the limitation of scientific rationalism, and insisted on following intuition and spiritual impulses in order to reveal the ultimate reality. Freud also believed in the power of instincts, however, he was a rationalist. He tried to analyze irrational nature with a scientific approach, claiming that a society forces people to suppress their own instincts that, in turn, leads to neurological disorders, but it is a better alternative to not suppressing your inner self, as people are evil by nature, therefore society is in an ok shape. Weber believed in a rational Western society, but he realized the paradox of reason. The tools used to rationalize society also eliminate the spiritual part of life. Secular rationality has produced still another awesome problem, said Weber. It has fostered self-liberation, for it enables human beings to overcome illusions and take control of the environment and of themselves, but it is also a means of self- enslavement, for it produces institutions, giant public and corporate bureaucracies, that depersonalize life. Weber agreed with Freud that irrationality plays a huge part in a society, and, in particular, it draws attention to charismatic leaders who are often irrational. As a Europe-wide phenomenon, Fascism was a response to a postwar society afflicted with spiritual disintegration, economic dislocation, political instability, and thwarted (разрушенные) nationalist hopes. A general breakdown of meaning and values led people to search for new beliefs and new political arrangements. Fascism was an expression of fear that the Bolshevik Revolution would spread westward. It was also an expression of hostility to democratic values and a reaction to the failure of liberal institutions to solve the problems of modern industrial society. Fascist movements were marked by a determination to eradicate liberalism and Marxism. Fascism drew its mass support from the lower middle class: small merchants, artisans, white-collar workers, civil servants, and peasants of moderate means, all of whom were frightened both by big capitalism and by Marxism. They hoped that Fascism would protect them from the competition of big business and prevent the hated working class from establishing a Marxist state, which would threaten their property. The lower middle class saw in Fascism a non Communist way of overcoming economic crises and restoring traditional respect for family, native soil, and nation. Furthermore, many of these people saw Fascism as a way of attacking the existing social order, which denied them opportunities for economic advancement and social prestige. Fascists were most successful in countries with weak democratic traditions. When parliamentary government faltered, it had few staunch defenders, and many people were drawn to charismatic demagogues who promised direct action. //этот абзац – обрезаная копипаста из информки, тк лучше и короче написать нельзя// Late modernity summarizes the attitudes of those who rejected the ideas of the Enlightenment in the 19th and 20th centuries and belived in irrationality in some way or another. Some rejected the basis of morality, the existence of natural rights. Liberalism, the child of the Enlightenment, was criticized and rejected by many late modernity thinkers. Nietzsche, Pareto, Bergson, Freud, even though he was a child of the Enlightenment, were all a part of this movement. Shattering old beliefs, late modernity left Europeans without landmarks—without generally accepted cultural standards or agreed-upon conceptions about human nature and the meaning of life. Ideologies like Fascism stem down from this variety of ideas. Basically, late modernity questioned the rationality of human nature, and, thus, left the intellectual world disunited, raising pessimistic beliefs around the globe.
KANT DEONTOLOGICAL ETHICS Ethical theorists can be roughly divided into two camps: those who consider an action moral or immoral depending on the motive behind it and those who consider an action moral or immoral depending on the consequences it produces. Kant is firmly in the former camp, making him a deontologist rather than a consequentialist when it comes to ethics. (The word deontology derives from the Greek roots deon, “duty,” and logos, “science.”) Kant argues that we are subject to moral judgment because we are able to deliberate and give reasons for our actions, so moral judgment should be directed at our reasons for acting. While we can and should take some care to ensure that our actions produce good consequences, the consequences of our actions are not themselves subject to our reason, so our reason is not fully responsible for the consequences of the actions it endorses. Reason can only be held responsible for endorsing certain actions, and so it is only the actions, and the motives behind them, that are open to moral judgment.
NINETEEN CENTURY IDEOLOGIES
liberalism, nationalism, conservatism, utopian socialism, Social Darwinism, utilitarianism, Romanticism
Liberalism
One of these ideologies was liberalism, which owed much to the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century and to the American and French Revolutions at the end of that century. In addition, liberalism became even more significant as the Industrial Revolution made rapid strides because the developing industrial middle class largely adopted the doctrine as its own.It all began with the belief that people should be as free from restraint as possible.
Economic Liberalism Also called classical economics, primary tenet the concept of laissez-faire( state should not interrupt the free play of natural economic forces).Due to their opinion if individuals were allowed economic liberty, ultimately they would bring about the maximum good and benefit the general welfare of society. Government restrict itself to only three primary functions: · defense of the country, · police protection of individuals, · the construction and maintenance of public works too expensive for individuals to undertake.
Was greatly enhanced by Thomas Malthus (1766-1834). In his major work, Essay on the Principles of Population, Malthus argued that population, when unchecked, increases at a geometric rate while the food supply correspondingly increases at a much slower arithmetic rate, which can cause the overpopulation and starvation of the human race. Thus, misery and poverty were simply the inevitable result of the law of nature; no government or individual should interfere with its operation.(government shouldn't do anything to prevent expected starvation as it is something that is impossible to prevent ,we are gonna die anyway???????`I don't really get that ) Malthus’s ideas were further developed by David Ricardo (1772-1823). In Principles of Political Economy, written in 1817, Ricardo developed his famous “iron law of wages.” Following Malthus, Ricardo argued that an increase in population means more workers; more workers in turn cause wages to fall below the subsistence level. The result is misery and starvation, which then reduce the population. Consequently, the number of workers declines, and wages rise above the subsistence level again, which in turn encourages workers to have larger families as the cycle is repeated. According to Ricardo, raising wages arbitrarily would be pointless since it would accomplish little but perpetuate this vicious circle.
Political Liberalism Politically, liberals came to hold a common set of beliefs. Chief among them was the protection of civil liberties or the basic rights of all people, which included • equality before the law; • freedom of assembly, • freedom of speech, • freedom of press; • freedom from arbitrary arrest. All of these freedoms should be guaranteed by a written document, such as the American Bill of Rights or the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. In addition to religious toleration for all, most liberals advocated separation of church and state. The right of peaceful opposition to the government in and out of parliament. Many liberals also advocated ministerial responsibility, a system in which the king’s ministers were responsible to the legislature rather than to the king, giving the legislative branch a check on the power of the executive. Liberals in the first half of the nineteenth century also believed in a limited suffrage. Although all people were entitled to equal civil rights, they should not have equal political rights. The right to vote and hold office would be open only to men who met certain property qualifications. As a political philosophy, liberalism was tied to industrial middle-class men who favored the extension of voting rights so that they could share power with the landowning classes. They had little desire to let the lower classes share that power. Liberals were not democrats. One of the most prominent advocates of liberalism in the nineteenth century was the English philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). On Liberty, his most famous work, published in 1859, has long been regarded as a classic statement on the liberty of the individual. Mill argued for an “absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment on all subjects” that needed to be protected from both government censorship and the tyranny of the majority. Mill was also instrumental in expanding the meaning of liberalism by becoming an enthusiastic supporter of women’s rights. When his attempt to include women in the voting reform bill of 1867 failed, Mill published an essay titled On the Subjection of Women, which he had written earlier with his wife, Harriet Taylor. He argued that “the legal subordination of one sex to the other” was wrong. Differences between women and men, he claimed, were due not to different natures but simply to social practices. With equal education, women could achieve as much as men. On the Subjection of Women would become an important work in the nineteenth century movement for women’s rights.
Nationalism
Nationalism arose out of an awareness of being part of a community that has common institutions, traditions, language, and customs. It did not become a popular force for change until the French Revolution. From then on, nationalists came to believe that each nationality should have its own government. Thus, a divided people such as the Germans wanted national unity in a German nation-state with one central government. Subject peoples, such as the Hungarians, wanted national self-determination, or the right to establish their own autonomy rather than be subject to a German minority in a multinational empire. Nationalism threatened to upset the existing political order, both internationally and nationally. A united Germany or united Italy would upset the balance of power established in 1815. By the same token, an independent Hungarian state would mean the breakup of the Austrian Empire. Because many European states were multinational, conservatives tried hard to repress the radical threat of nationalism. At the same time, in the first half of the nineteenth century, nationalism and liberalism became strong allies. Most liberals believed that liberty could be realized only by peoples who ruled themselves. One British liberal said, “It is in general a necessary condition of free institutions that the boundaries of governments should coincide in the main with those of nationalities.” Many nationalists believed that once each people obtained its own state, all nations could be linked together into a broader community of all humanity. Early Socialism (utopian socialists)
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the pitiful conditions found in the slums, mines, and factories of the Industrial Revolution gave rise to another ideology for change known as socialism. The term eventually became associated with a Marxist analysis of human society, but early socialism was largely the product of political theorists or intellectuals who wanted to introduce equality into social conditions and believed that human cooperation was superior to the competition that characterized early industrial capitalism. The utopian socialists were against private property and the competitive spirit of early industrial capitalism. By eliminating these things and creating new systems of social organization, they thought that a better environment for humanity could be achieved. Early socialists proposed a variety of ways to accomplish that task. One group of early socialists sought to create voluntary associations that would demonstrate the advantages of cooperative living. Charles Fourier (1772-1838) proposed the creation of small model communities called phalansteries. Communally housed, the inhabitants of the phalanstery would live and work together for their mutual benefit. Work assignments would be rotated frequently to relieve workers of undesirable tasks. Fourier was unable to gain financial backing for his phalansteries, however, and his plan remained untested. Robert Owen (1771-1858), the British cotton manufacturer, also believed that humans would reveal their true natural goodness if they lived in a cooperative environment. At New Lanark in Scotland, he was successful in transforming a squalid factory town into a flourishing, healthy community. But when he attempted to create a self-contained cooperative community at New Harmony, Indiana, in the United States in the 1820s, bickering within the community eventually destroyed his dream. One of Owen’s disciples, a wealthy woman named Frances Wright, bought slaves in order to set up a model community at Nashoba, Tennessee. The community failed, but Wright continued to work for women’s rights. The Frenchman Louis Blanc (1813-1882) offered yet another early socialist approach to a better society. In The Organization of Work, he maintained that social problems could be solved by government assistance. Denouncing competition as the main cause of the economic evils of his day, he called for the establishment of workshops that would manufacture goods for public sale. The state would finance these workshops, but the workers would own and operate them. Although criticized for their impracticality, the utopian socialists at least laid the groundwork for later attacks on capitalism that would have a far-reaching result. In the first half of the nineteenth century, however, socialism remained a fringe movement largely overshadowed by liberalism and nationalism.
Conservatism
The 19th century was in many ways antithetical to conservatism, both as a political philosophy and as a program of particular parties identified with conservative interests. The Enlightenment had engendered widespread belief in the possibility of improving the human condition—a belief, that is, in the idea of progress—and a rationalist disposition to tamper with or discard existing institutions or practices in pursuit of that goal. The French Revolution gave powerful expression to this belief, and the early Industrial Revolution and advances in science reinforced it. The resulting rationalist politics embraced a broad segment of the political spectrum, including liberal reformism, trade-union socialism (or social democracy), and ultimately Marxism. In the face of this constant rationalist innovation, conservatives often found themselves forced to adopt a merely defensive role, so that the political initiative lay always in the other camp. In opposition to the “rationalist blueprints” of liberals and radicals, conservatives often insist that societies are so complex that there is no reliable and predictable connection between what governments try to do and what actually happens. It is therefore futile and dangerous, they believe, for governments to interfere with social or economic realities—as happens, for example, in government attempts to control wages, prices, or rents (see incomes policy).
The claim that society is too complex to be improved through social engineering naturally raises the question, “What kind of understanding of society is possible?” The most common conservative answer emphasizes the idea of tradition. People are what they are because they have inherited the skills, manners, morality, and other cultural resources of their ancestors. An understanding of tradition—specifically, a knowledge of the history of one’s own society or country—is therefore the most valuable cognitive resource available to a political leader, not because it is a source of abstract lessons but because it puts him directly in touch with the society whose rules he may be modifying.
Conservatism has often been associated with traditional and established forms of religion. After 1789 the appeal of religion redoubled, in part because of a craving for security in an age of chaos. The Roman Catholic Church, because of its roots in the Middle Ages, has appealed to more conservatives than has any other religion. Although he was not a Catholic, Burke praised Catholicism as “the most effectual barrier” against radicalism. But conservatism has had no dearth of Protestant, Jewish, Islamic, and strongly anticlerical adherents.
Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism, the theory that persons, groups, and races are subject to the same laws of natural selection as Charles Darwin had perceived in plants and animals in nature. According to the theory, which was popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the weak were diminished and their cultures delimited, while the strong grew in power and in cultural influence over the weak. Social Darwinists held that the life of humans in society was a struggle for existence ruled by “survival of the fittest,” a phrase proposed by the British philosopher and scientist Herbert Spencer.
The social Darwinists—notably Spencer and Walter Bagehot in England and William Graham Sumner in the United States—believed that the process of natural selection acting on variations in the population would result in the survival of the best competitors and in continuing improvement in the population. Societies, like individuals, were viewed as organisms that evolve in this manner.
The theory was used to support laissez-faire capitalism and political conservatism. Class stratification was justified on the basis of “natural” inequalities among individuals, for the control of property was said to be a correlate of superior and inherent moral attributes such as industriousness, temperance, and frugality. Attempts to reform society through state intervention or other means would, therefore, interfere with natural processes; unrestricted competition and defense of the status quo were in accord with biological selection. The poor were the “unfit” and should not be aided; in the struggle for existence, wealth was a sign of success. At the societal level, social Darwinism was used as a philosophical rationalization for imperialist, colonialist, and racist policies, sustaining belief in Anglo-Saxon or Aryan cultural and biological superiority.
Social Darwinism declined during the 20th century as an expanded knowledge of biological, social, and cultural phenomena undermined, rather than supported, its basic tenets.
Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism, in normative ethics, a tradition stemming from the late 18th- and 19th-century English philosophers and economists Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill according to which an action is right if it tends to promote happiness and wrong if it tends to produce the reverse of happiness—not just the happiness of the performer of the action but also that of everyone affected by it. Such a theory is in opposition to egoism, the view that a person should pursue his own self-interest, even at the expense of others, and to any ethical theory that regards some acts or types of acts as right or wrong independently of their consequences (see deontological ethics). Utilitarianism also differs from ethical theories that make the rightness or wrongness of an act dependent upon the motive of the agent, for, according to the utilitarian, it is possible for the right thing to be done from a bad motive. Utilitarians may, however, distinguish the aptness of praising or blaming an agent from whether the act was right.
Romanticism
Romanticism, attitude or intellectual orientation that characterized many works of literature, painting, music, architecture, criticism, and historiography in Western civilization over a period from the late 18th to the mid-19th century. Romanticism can be seen as a rejection of the precepts of order, calm, harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality that typified Classicism in general and late 18th-century Neoclassicism in particular. It was also to some extent a reaction against the Enlightenment and against 18th-century rationalism and physical materialism in general. Romanticism emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental. Among the characteristic attitudes of Romanticism were the following: a deepened appreciation of the beauties of nature; a general exaltation of emotion over reason and of the senses over intellect; a turning in upon the self and a heightened examination of human personality and its moods and mental potentialities; a preoccupation with the genius, the hero, and the exceptional figure in general, and a focus on his passions and inner struggles; a new view of the artist as a supremely individual creator, whose creative spirit is more important than strict adherence to formal rules and traditional procedures; an emphasis upon imagination as a gateway to transcendent experience and spiritual truth; an obsessive interest in folk culture, national and ethnic cultural origins, and the medieval era; and a predilection for the exotic, the remote, the mysterious, the weird, the occult, the monstrous, the diseased, and even the satanic.
Thanks for reading! Text collected by Karen
INDIA
How did the different political-philosophical tendencies in English thought perceive India? English had respect and interest for Indian culture. Orientalism - study of Eastern societies by Western scholars, often leading to distortion of history. India was seen as ‘religion, spirit, nature, the exotic, adventure, danger, romanticism, myth, feminine’. British reaction at home were divided: conservatives: dignity of Indian culture and Indians should be educated in their own language and culture orientalists: it was the duty of English to stay and interfere in India’s development |
Последнее изменение этой страницы: 2019-03-22; Просмотров: 823; Нарушение авторского права страницы