Warly Pablo Modern Political Theories

David Hume

David Hume was an 18th century Scottish philosopher who was a key figure in what was known
as a Scottish enlightenment. Hume was a big fan of John Locke and a large degree of his legacy
was concerned with taking Locke's empiricism and running with it to the ridiculous extreme. The
big thing for Hume was skepticism which in philosophy is the epistemological position that true
knowledge is completely unattainable and for all intents and purposes the real world if there even
is one is unknowable because empiricism claims that all knowledge is derived from the senses
whom concluded that the only statements that mankind can make about the world are those
which place human experience in the absolute center of reality because human experience is as
close as we can ever get to the truth. David Hume was somewhat notorious in his time for
holding an unpopular and dangerous idea you may have heard of it it's called atheism although
he couldn't really come out and say it because atheism was taught by death and enlightenment
Scotland Hume thought the idea of God was nonsensical specifically because there's no way of
arriving at the idea through sense data and for Hume sense data was effectively all that existed so
solidly did. Hume believe in sense that was the center of reality that he even put for the
controversial concept known as bundle theory which is the idea that features of objects are all
that exists there is no actual object of which they are the features. Try to understand and imagine
an apple and you're imagining something round green shiny and revolting traditionally we call.
These properties they're not the Apple itself simply features of the Apple ways in which the
Apple projects itself into the world. For Humes bundle Theory there is no actual Apple
underneath it all only the properties exist and he defended this by daring you to imagine an
object without properties strip the apple of its properties and you wind up reducing it to literal
non-existence more controversial though, is the implication of bundle theory to the idea of you if
this is true that you don't exist either and in fact human believed that there was no such thing as
the self. There’s just a whole bunch of sense data out there colliding with your brain giving you
the fabulously erroneous illusion that you want to think that exists this presents a stunning blow.
However, one difficulty the Hume had throughout his life is known as the problem of induction
which basically points out that all science is based on a logical fallacy the induction fallacy states
that just because something happened in the past we can't assume it's going to happen again no
matter how often it seems to happen if all the apples you've ever seen in your entire life have
been green you still can't make the statement that all apples are green because one day someone's
going to hand you a red apple. This is philosophically a problem for science because science is
based on the idea that under the same conditions everything always happens exactly the same
way and if an event can be reproduced and we have knowledge about that infant.

Montesquieu

He was a French commentator and a political thinker. He thought about a lot of things he came
up with the idea of separation of powers which is as it implies dividing power into three different
branches. It consists of legislative branch, the executive branch, and the judicial branch which
together combine to make the separation of powers. The separation of powers was used to
prevent tyranny which he believed came from sole ruler with too much power. This also led to
our modern-day Philippines Constitution. See how much influence Montesquieu's thoughts have
had on our lives. He believed that the government should be ruled and by the reflective thought
of the people. Montesquieu was insatiably curious and mortally funny. He constructed a
naturalistic account of the various forms of government and of the cause that made them what
they were and that advanced are constrained and Development. Montesquieu also wrote two
books his best-known work was a spirit of laws. His second book was Persian letters which was
responsible for his rise to fame. It made fun of the Parisian life and French institutions the spirit
of laws and Persian letters whereas two most important works while these two works share
certain themes such as dealing with the horror of ruler on with absolutist power or despotism.

Immanuel Kant

Kant came up with the idea for which he is perhaps still most famous what he called the
categorical imperative. The categorical imperative states “act only according to that maxim by
which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law”. What it can mean by
this this was only a very formal restatement of an idea that's been around for a long time
something we meet with in all the main religions. Do unto others as you would have them do
unto you. Kant was offering a handy way of testing the morality of an action by imagining how it
would be if it would generally practice and you with a victim of it. Similarly, if you have an
affair and keep it quiet from your partner you might feel that's okay but the categorical
imperative comes down against this because you would then have to embrace the idea that it
would be equally okay for your partner to have affairs and not tell you. The categorical
imperative is designed to shift our perspective to get us to see our own behavior in less
immediately personal terms and thereby recognize some of its limitations. Kant went on to argue
that the core idea of the categorical imperative could be stated in another way act so as to treat
people always as ends in themselves never as mere means. This was intended as a replacement
for the Christian injunction for universal love the command to love one's neighbor to treat a
person as an end. For Kant meant keeping in view that they had a life of their own in which they
were seeking happiness and fulfillment and deserved justice and fair treatment. The categorical
imperative Kant argued is the voice of our own rational selves. It's what we all truly believe
when we're thinking sensibly it's the rule our own intelligence gives us. Kant extended is
thinking about the categorical imperative into the political sphere he believed that the central
duty of government is to ensure liberty. But he says that there was something terribly wrong with
the ordinary definition of freedom or Liberty. It should not be thought of in libertarian terms as
the ability to do just whatever we want we are free only when we act in accordance with our own
best natures and we are slaves whenever we are under the rule of our own passions or those of
others as can put it. A free will and a will under moral laws are one and the same so freedom.
Isn't an absence of government a free society isn't one that allows people more and more
opportunity to do whatever they happen to fancy. It's one that helps everyone become more
reasonable the good state represents the rational element in us all it rules according to a
universally valid will under which everyone can be free. So government ideally is the
externalized institutionalized version of the best parts of us.

Revolution and Counterrevolution

What I noticed is that Edmund Burke was the father of modern conservatism and Thomas Paine
was the father of modern progressivism. Burke wasn't the kind of conservative who denied the
necessity of change but in a kind of piecemeal reform that as change becomes imperative that
you don't oppose it but if in fact it bit if it's part of the culture and the society and it might
enhance people’s values or their development of those values then you can you know carry out
certain reforms. In contrast, Thomas Paine articulated that every generation has the right to
overthrow that which exists and and ignore the sort of legacy of a previous generation.

Romanticism and Idealism

Romanticism is best understood as a reaction to the birth of the modern world and some of its
key features industrialization urbanization secularization and consumerism. A core romantic
belief the romantic movement has permanently changed our sensibilities as the world has grown
ever more technological and rational. Romanticism has come to stick up for the irrational the
untrained the exotic the childlike and the naive there is naturally something a bit adolescent and
immature within Romanticism but then again there can be something rather heartless cold
dogmatic and arrogant in many aspects of modernity one hopes. This isn't going to be the end of
the story that we may in the future learn to soften the worst sides of modernity through the best
sides of Romanticism in order to create a more evolved alternative what one might term an age
of maturity.  Idealism is the claim that reality is dependent upon the mind rather than independent
of the mind. Thus as the mind and soul are unobservable aspects of reality idealism is a
metaphysical system. Absolute idealism according to this system all objects are identical with an
idea and the claim that knowledge is itself the system of ideas. It is also known as an objective
idealism and this is the sort of idealism promoted by Georg Hegel unlike the other forms of
idealism there's only one mind in which reality is created.

Utilitarianism

Modern utilitarianism was founded in the 18th century by British philosophers Jeremy Bentham
and John Stuart Mill. They agreed that actions should be measured in terms of the happiness or
pleasure that they produce after all they argued happiness is our final end. Think about it like this
many things that you do, you do for the sake of something else. Like you study to get a
good grade or you work to get money but why do we want good grades or money there are
different answers we could give like maybe we're seeking affirmation for our intelligence or the
approval of our parents or a degree that will give us a career that we want. But why do we want
that particular career? why do we want approval?. We can keep asking these questions but
ultimately our answer will bottom out in “I want what I want because I think it will make me
happy”. That's what we all want it's one of the few things everyone has in common and
utilitarians believe that's what should drive our morality like something that's really intuitive and
there's really nothing more basic than the primal desire to seek pleasure and avoid pain so it's
often said that utilitarianism is a hedonistic moral theory. This means the good is equal to the
pleasant and we ought morally to pursue pleasure and happiness and work to avoid pain but
utilitarianism is not what you'd call an egoistic theory. Egoism says that everyone ought morally
to pursue their own good in contrast to that utilitarianism is other regarding. It says that we
should pursue pleasure or happiness not just for ourselves but for as many sentient beings as
possible. To put it formally, we should act always so as to produce the greatest good for the
greatest number. This is known as the principle of utility. Utilitarianism is a really demanding
moral theory. Because for me utilitarianism says we live in a world where sometimes people do
terrible things and if we're the ones who happen to be there and we can do something to make
things better we must even if that means getting our hands dirty. When Bentham and mill first
proposed their moral theory it was in a form now known as act utilitarianism sometimes called
classical utilitarianism and it says that in any given situation you should choose the action that
produces the greatest good for the greatest number.

Socialism and Positivism

Socialism the word is thrown around in popular culture and political discourse as both a
pejorative and the compliment. What exactly is socialism, well in its most simple form socialism
is when a population collectively owns and controls the means of production and distributes the
end result proportionately and practice. However, control is usually delegated to the state while
the distribution usually comes in the form of underlying social welfare to satisfy everyone's basic
needs like housing education and healthcare the end all purpose is to guarantee a level playing
field for all members in a society thereby removing class distinctions based on ownership. For
example in the USA's capitalist society high quality education is expensive meaning that those
who can afford it are generally given better opportunities those who can't are forced to compete
at a material disadvantage. This leads to class inequality not on the basis of talent or ability but
on generational wealth by comparison in countries like Finland where high quality education is
free everyone is given the same opportunity to succeed or fail regardless of their financial status.
If that sounds a bit idealistic that's because it's supposed to early socialism was predicated on the
idea that if we could eliminate classes and have true societal equality it would be a utopia.
Another school of thought is Positivism. According to the positivist tradition a law or a norm has
the status of law if a recognized human authority declares it to be laws. Now the content of a law
from a positive perspective is irrelevant from a positivist perspective what we're concerned with
is whether or not the law was enacted by the sovereign morality is irrelevant so the law is valid
and if the sovereign says its valid simple as that for a law to be valid within the positivist
tradition. A law must have the correct pedigree is that the sovereign must follow the established
procedures for law making.

Marxism

The history of al hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle. Free man and slave,
lord and surf, guild master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, a fight that each
time indeed either in revolutionary reconstitution of the society at large or in the common ruin of
the contending classes. The modern bourgeois in the society that has separated from the ruins of
the feudal society has not done away with the class antagonisms. All changes in the society, in
political institutions, in history itself, are driven by a process of collective struggle on the part of
groups of people. The significance of critical utopian socialism and communism bears an ensure
relation to historical development. In proportion as the modern class struggle develops and takes
definite shape. The communist fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the
enforcement of the monetary interest of the working class, but in the movement of the present
they also represent and take care of the movement of the future of that environment. In dialectic
method, each society contains within itself the seed of the society. In my own understanding it is
a material condition of the existence for a new social order and created in the womb of the old
society. The materialistic conception of history the ways societies provides for their material
well-being affects the type of relation that people will have with one another, the social
institutions and the prevailing ideas of the day. Revolution arises from exploited classes agitating
for change. Because of this, this will end to the inevitable doom of capitalism. And with a
classless society the state would wither away.

Liberalism and Aristocratic Conservatism

Liberal traditions are the ideas of freedom of thought and expression, the reduction or
elimination of coercion, the toleration of different points of views. It is also the removal of
restrictions or control on economic behavior, and with the market economy and tend to
emphasize to a greater degree the need for opportunities for people to act and thus pay more
attention to the social environment and to political and economic organizations. Conservatism
has been a response to the principles and activities stemming from the French revolution. It also
believes that society, institutions and methods of procedure have grown in organic fashion and
those therefore social institutions and traditions should be respected. De Tocqueville and Henry
Adams emphasized the need for restrictions on power and the ultimate importance of liberty.

Nationalism

Nationalism was helping to cement unity. The journalist and politician Guiseppi Mazzini
(1805–72) was the apostle of nationalism during the first half of the nineteenth
century. He was exiled by the Austrians from his native Italy in 1831 and spent the
next two decades working unsuccessfully through Young Italy, a secret society
dedicated to beginning a European–wide revolution on the Italian peninsula. In the
revolutions of 1848, he returned to Italy and became president of the short–lived
Roman republic before it fell to French forces protecting the papacy. Mazzini
played an important role in spreading the cause of Italian nationalism and Italian
unity, although his hope for a revolution proved to be greatly delayed. Every
revolution is the work of a principle which has been accepted as a basis of faith.
Whether it invoke nationality, liberty, equality, or religion, it always fulfills itself
in the name of a principle, that is to say, of a great truth, which being recognized
and approved by the majority of the inhabitants of a country, constitutes a common
belief, and sets before the masses a new aim, while authority misrepresents or
rejects it. A revolution, violent or peaceful, includes a negation and an affirmation:
the negation of an existing order of things, the affirmation of a new order to be
substituted for it. A revolution proclaims that the state is rotten; that its machinery
no longer meets the needs of the greatest number of the citizens; that its institutions
are powerless to direct the general movement; that popular and social thought has
passed beyond the vital principle of those institutions; that the new phase in the
development of the national faculties finds neither expression nor representation in
the official constitution of the country, and that it must therefore create one for
itself. This revolution does create. Since its task is to increase, and not diminish the
nation's patrimony, it violates neither the truths that the majority possess, nor the
rights they hold sacred; but it reorganizes everything on a new basis; it gathers and
harmonizes round the new principle all the elements and forces of the country; it
gives a unity of direction toward the new aim, to all those tendencies which before
were scattered in the pursuit of different aims. Then the revolution has done its
work. Zionism feels like—it is a dream, a fear, a passion, and a longing. And today, it is most
profoundly an inexplicable bond to a land that holds everything we are, everything we struggle
with, and everything we aspire to become and another thought is the Zionism so, what it means
to be a ‘Zionist’ has changed in many ways since the time of Theodor Herzl. Originally the
Zionist Movement was grounded in a cultural, Communist vision that came to fruition in the
Kibbutz Movement. It was not a religious vision at all, but rather a dream for a safe land in
which Jews could live. Israel was the place for Jews to establish their own nation so as to no
longer be a separate people residing within a foreign nation. In Israel, we would no longer be
‘the other’. Today, however, Zionists are religious as well. The existence of the Jewish State has
become a religious imperative, a cultural necessity, or for some, a realization of the Messianic
redemption. The Jewish State is an inextricable part of what it means to be Jewish in the
21st century, because being a Jew means identifying with Israel and ultimately dealing with how
our lives are impacted by the existence of our state. Zionism impacts every Jew today.
Social Darwinism, History and Neo-Idealism

Henry Maine in his works in Ancient Law, Maine contrasted early societies in which social
relations are dominated by status with “progressive” (complex) societies in which social relations
are predominantly determined by contract. By status Maine meant “a condition of society in
which all the relations of Persons are summed up in the relations of Family”. These relations are
ascribed to the individual as a member of a kinship group. By contract Maine meant individual
obligation arising “from the free agreement of individuals.” Although Maine explicitly declared
that he could recognize no evidence that proved any society to be entirely destitute of the concept
of contract, his major proposition was that in early societies the individual creates few or no
rights for himself and few or no duties. Rather, he is subject to the traditional rules that govern
his status and to new rules which are issued as commands by the head of his household. Another
philosopher was T.H Green, Green argues that desires are emotional impulses felt by the
individual and recognized by him as forming an indispensable part of his being. In desiring, one
is necessarily acknowledging one's own existence as a person, as one is necessarily self-
conscious. Usually, individuals will desire many objects at the same time. Often, holding them
simultaneously is impossible, and so one is forced to decide which object to actively attempt to
possess; that is, one will have to choose which object to will to possess. In this way, choice
represents the adoption of a motive by the self as the determination of action — that is, as the
will. For example, I may desire to own a book and a statue. However, as I can afford one but not
both, I must choose between them. In choosing, say, the statue, it then becomes my will to
possess the statue. It is no longer merely a desire. My motivation is one on its own whereas my
desire can be one of many. In willing, firstly one must desire. Secondly, one must make the
object part of oneself because, in the act of willing, one necessarily makes the chosen object
impossible to understand without reference to one's act of choice. In Green's terminology, the
nature of the object is in part created by the individual's will to possess it. As he writes, such
objects are “objects which only the intercourse of self-conscious agents can bring into
existence”. For this reason, my relationship to the object is transformed by my choice of it; it is
transformed by my act of willing, because obtaining the willed object is then the source of my
self-satisfaction.
Irrationalism and Psychology

According to Nietzsche, the will to power is the fundamental building block of all
reality. This is why everything can be interpreted as it is. Matter arises as a willing
into power of atomic particles. At every level of appearance we find the will to
power at work, but ultimately, all we ever encounter is appearance. Appearance is a
manifestation of the will to power and power is a matter of effect, as the earth
rotates the sun because of the power exerted on it by the sun. The will to power is in
effect in individuals who are also composed of many centers of will to power which
are competing for domination. Nietzsche’s enthusiasm for what he called
“transvaluation” stemmed from his contempt for Christianity and the entirely of the
moral system that flawed from it. Transvaluation would mean the exaltation of life
rather than the exaltation of suffering. Nietzsche is critical of the very idea of the
objective truth. That we should think there is only one night way of considering a
matter is only evidence that we know become inflexible in our thinking. Such
intellectual inflexibility is a symptom of saying “no” to life, a condition that a
healthy mind is flexible and recognizes that there are many different ways of
considering a matter. There is no single truth but many. His famously known story
of the Zarathustra is one of the lessons I really remembered because he said that we
must remove all or we must not follow any rules that the institutions are dictation
and rather we should follow what we think is good for us.

The Elitist (Elitism)

In the ruling class, Mosca argued the existence in all societies of a political class, a
minority wielding power, no matter what the formal political organization. Sharing
a common outlook and based on political formula, the members of the class
managed the affairs of the nation, controlled the possession of power and occupied
the places of honor. Pareto’s treatment of an elitist ruling class was based on
psychological analysis of human behavior into the human impulses and the great
contribution of Michels in political parties, was his iron law of oligarchy, based
primarily on his analysis of the German Social Democratic Party, but equally
applicable to all organizations. Hierarchy and domination were inevitable, but not
rigidity or static relationships. All of the stated names were interested in the way
which control was maintained.

Anarchism, Democratic Socialism and Marxism

Lenin’s overall strategy for proletarian revolution was evidently vindicated in October 1917.
After the October Revolution, the concept of hegemony – class leadership of the oppressed –
begins to appear far more frequently in Lenin’s writings, and it appears in a more developed
form. In 1918, in The State and Revolution. No other class other than that of workers has been
prepared by its position in the mode of production for such a role; No other class is organized
through labour in such large groupings and social conditions; No other class has the skills to
continue production and lay the foundations for the new socialist society in the eventuality of the
overthrow of the bourgeoisie. To Gramsci he recognized that in advanced capitalist society, such
an assignment is not completely accurate. Civil society and the state become so inextricably
linked that both must be tackled concurrently. If we consider the influence that powerful figures
in society can have upon the state and vice versa: whether it be wealthy donors to political
parties having a say in policy or decision making; or media tycoons who have such a vast
influence upon the population that they play a decisive role in who is elected to office; it is clear
that the power in society does not simply lie within the state proper. The Civil hegemony of
Gramsci was Civil hegemony is the leadership of the oppressed classes on the terrain of civil
society; and War of Position is the steady, incremental advance of the proletarian-led alliance of
the oppressed to subordinate the dominant hegemony, and when possible, manouvere for control
of the apparatuses of the state. While Trotsky, his ideas are distortions of Marxism and have led
to no socialist revolution, no revolutionary movement even, and have had no practical success
because of the fatal ideological flaws of Trotsky’s dogmatism and idealism.  Communist
revolutionary leaders follow Joseph Stalin and harshly criticize Trotsky.  Here are communists
on Trotsky, as well as some of Trotsky’s own anti-communist words.