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Category: Political Theory
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okay so we will start with concepts of governance um this is just the idea that um we will try to understand what we mean by governance and how it relates to power um this is an image so this is um I asked
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dally the the AI image generator to generate an image of what governing ideas look like and it reproduced a what looks like a a boardroom with duplicates of the same I guess white dude with glasses and plastic hair which probably
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is is not a bad way to think about these things in that larger a lot of these Frameworks that we have come up with and that we we think about reproduce um kind of structures of power and dominance just like the data sets that train these AI Frameworks they reproduce
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the biases we have in society they reproduce the hierarchies we have in society and then they invert them and show them back to us in ways that are amusing and kind of creepy um all right so um we're going to start here these These are the objectives of
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what we're going to deal with in these series of lectures we're going to introduce the idea of Concepts conceptualization and critical Concepts so part of the reason that that we deal with this text this critical Concepts text um this one here in in terms of this
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um is I like the idea of one critical means both things right it can be an important but it can also mean to challenge or or change the ways that we traditionally think about things so I'm okay with that as a way to do it now I have problems so they give you when you
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get this textbook they give you some slides with it and I end up challenging the challenging right so there's no ways that we can that we will ever agree on these these Frameworks so what we do then is we come up with what are kind of analytically useful ones so they're not
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pure Theory they're not the perfect ideas and they're not just practice they're not just examining specific events and that's kind of what politics is right it's it's that middle ground between like thinking about ideal things and thinking about the ways in which we practice the way ways in which we do
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things so there's kind of going to be three different sections on this about power two so the ability to get somebody to do something or your ability to do something power over would be just like the ability to make claims over things or or make demands and then power
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knowledge which will say is this fucodian Legacy this Legacy of um uh Foucault that kind of haunts I would say politics and how we think about politics um and that's a good and a bad thing and
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we'll talk about why that's the case um I will say too that you know would I try to I'm trying to do sympathetic and critical so I'm sympathetic to all of many of let's say many of these different positions but I'm also going to be critical of them um which I think we should do to all of our own Concepts and ideas you know why
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is it that I believe the way I do well I have some sense of why I do but I'm also caution conscious of the the ways in which I'm reproducing my own kind of biases and and prejudices about how I think about things and so we're going to situate
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um crisis within current politics and society and consider how politics might move forward maybe we'll do that a convinced crisis is a good starting point um so when we talk about this often when we do politics or talk about thinking about power and politics and
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governance we start with Aristotle that has to do with a reproduced Western Canon and that this idea of coming up with these analytical Concepts these ideas that stem from Aristotle's reading of Plato and so it's this idea that
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somehow man and and I think it is important just like the the the Dali reproduction of governing ideas produces man as the governor that this is a very specific gendered understanding of of the political animal right again
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throughout this week we'll see the ways in which tautologies follow all over the place we Define politics in terms of politics right so um so the idea here though as a political animal is that um the political animal is is that which has the capacity
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um for political speech so we know that that some animals can make noise that are clearly trying to communicate you know hunger pain your cat your dog tells you what it does but we don't consider that to the level of political speech
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um because it's not clearly articulating a vision or an idea of governance or power or authority that said remember that in in ancient Greece it was only the citizens who had political power even Aristotle himself he was a medic was basically an immigrant a migrant and
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so he didn't have full citizenship so he wasn't even the ones that he was talking about here so this was very hierarchical in the understanding of political animals um and so the idea here is that politics was an inescapable force in everyone's lives but because of this inescapable
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level of politics there's a whole bunch of complicated stuff we'll get into without the course and we'll deal with later is the idea then that there was only a certain number of people who had the capacity the time to to contemplate these issues other people were working laboring
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um the the cow is is pulling the you know the the wagon throughout the streets of the horses pulling the wagon throughout the streets it can make noise to communicate but we don't consider those having the capability to be contemplative to have that space and so again the citizen and who has the
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capacity to do so and this is has to do with division of labor and all the rest of it is that the um that those who have the time to contemplate it are the ones who can do so so we need to be conscious of the ways in which we're kind of our very concepts of politics is already embedded in certain types of Privileges
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and ways that we think about the world so politics then is um you know the ways it shapes our interests our Fates fuels competition and conflict again this is a very specific way to understand it I think there's Cooperative relationships here as well that that doesn't do this and so we get some kind of different
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conceptions or ways in which we try to capture these political ideas these questions are just kind of rhetorical devices that I'll use especially in person but here as well for you to think about ideas or see if you can answer them for yourself but I try to answer them for myself I don't always have good
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answers um like this question here and so when we're dealing with Concepts and remember this is critical Concepts what we're dealing that is trying to get these these Visions these they use the example in the book of this flash of lightning this way to view our cell the world and
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so we're constantly trying to move from our experiences our singular examples to kind of Frameworks that can explain multiple examples or analysis and then sometimes we move beyond that and say we move to Theory so we'll come to this quite quickly with the idea of
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sovereignty so sovereignty is a theory it doesn't have any specific historical framework per se it's a concept or idea that's abstracted out of abstractions and so all of these Concepts like things like childhood or markets or efficiency or error they're all contested right and
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they talk about this in the text the idea that the concepts themselves are contested which means concepts are political the categories and Analysis of understanding isn't is itself inherently political so when we're talking about this we're talking about uh politics power and representation and the easy
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example of this is is why do we have appropriate ages to start voting when do we think we're capable of making um you know forming coherent capacity to make political choices and then when do
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we stop so clearly and we have examples when we talk about Greta and stuff like that we have examples of of adolescents that are clearly articulating political claims but might not have the capacity to vote and so Concepts like childhood is not a universal constant it's largely
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a modern con concept the idea that children shouldn't labor in mines for 15 hours a day it's only developed in like the last hundred years where we have a Prohibition on it and now we're undermining it and so this idea then of when people are capable of doing things
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is constantly malleable and therefore inherently contested right there isn't any universal truth about when you should vote we might universally think the idea of voting is good but then the specifics always come down to the context framework culture ideas and and
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contested Notions about who should and who has the capacity to participate in politics and so politics then is about in in some form contestation or or different ways of cooperating or understanding we'll talk about this when we talk about kind of non-western ways
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of conceptualizing how we think about politics but the idea that that we have to negotiate the ideas that we have um I don't like the idea of hardwired because it creates these boundaries um this this kind of abstraction that
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somehow it's innate for us to articulate these questions and I think back to the question of the political animal um traditionally we have excluded all sorts of voices because we believed they weren't competent to do so or they didn't have a say in the process so we
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can say this easily like somebody who you know moves into a new area how long should they live in that area before they have the capacity to do so the problem is is that in in the kind of the history of settlement has often been a large group of people move into an area
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and then decide that the people in that area shouldn't have any right to do so and only we should have the right to do so so I don't think that these concepts are are Universal I think that we have to think about them as contested as well so hardwire doesn't make any sense they're embedded in our daily experiences
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Concepts and ideas are rarely examined and challenged and I do think there is a value there is a privilege in back to what Aristotle was saying and those who have the capacity to contemplate ideas and I think that's what the academy is doing right we should be conscious of
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that we do have the opportunity to play with ideas and examine them and explore them and be critical about our concept since the name of the textbook but there is a danger of course that we're just Naval gazing right or that we're playing playing doesn't have to be good or bad but playing can be fun um playing can be a way to deal with it
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and so the idea here is that they're trying to make some distinction between Concepts that we use in everyday life and then those Concepts that are politically contested political concepts are highly contested we can make any concept contested I mean John Green has
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a little series about how Lawns are stupid and evil they waste huge amounts of resources in terms of fertilizer and potable water and energy it's just a concept like the lawn that comes over from a British experience at the North America and then the Brits they get more water and so it makes sense to have Lawns but when we bring it over here we
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have to water the lawn to keep them alive and it's not something we want to do but I I rent so I have to keep my lawn as part of my agreement I don't want to have a lawn but I'm not allowed to change my lawn and so this concept that we could say is not contested we can contest any concept so the idea then
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of politics being about contestations this becomes a tautology right so anything contested is political but then everything is political which also means nothing is political right so um so when we think about these things we have to then break them down so we break them down into other forms of analysis okay
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so everything's contested but let's contest it in terms of Justice or let's contest it in terms of equality or democracy or representation or Freedom or power and these different abstractions allow us to move from the idea of contestation if we start that as a starting point into different kind of
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ways in which we organize that that into specific Frameworks and understandings and so this is an example of how something can be banal or contested this is just a woman putting her arm on the scale next to pigs feet
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and so this both demonstrates the ways in which we are mammals and then it raises all sorts of other questions this could just be someone I mean she is this is just funny she's just putting her arm on a scale it doesn't have to be contested but then we could go into the ethics of uh what does it mean that
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we're eating other mammals how similar are we to them should we think about them in terms of ethics and power and politics and representation and then we can do this in terms of global climate change and does it make sense to spend resources on these protein sources that require massive amounts of energy that
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aren't necessarily as sustainable as other forms so immediately we get to all of those questions so this is what we're talking about in political science we are focused on questions that relate to governance politics and power I like using the rhetorical question because the rhetorical question does a lot of
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work for us so asking questions without a clear answer is politics right because we if we had a clear answer we would be able to Define it then it would be uncontested but in politics we can test all the concepts everything from putting your hand on a scale to Watering your lawn right these these are all questions
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related to to governance power and and politics the danger of course is that a lot of the ways that we frame this back to what Aristotle was doing was he was actually here you citizens who have power and authority this is how you should rule which is to say that a lot
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of political science is about like how those with powers should govern those with less of it and so we can be a little bit obsessed with wanting to rule or inform ruling which has a bunch of knock-on consequences for those those
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who are being ruled right um you know the Greek city-state the polis the the demos the people that those was based on it's not necessarily an anthropological like we don't do a ton of um historically contextualizing and
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understanding these issues we just borrow them and so we develop these analytics we we decide that those who are citizens have political Authority and then the person who's telling us this doesn't have that Authority and so we have what what we'll
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talk about throughout the course is this long history of reading and misreading texts so reading Aristotle as speaking as an authoritative decider about how politics should be organized misrecognizes the ways in which
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it's speaking to a very specific person in a very specific way Machiavelli is a famously contested idea of this so he Machiavellian means to be devious manipulative and driven by lust for power and control so we say that in politics when we see that we see
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somebody who's Machiavellian we say it's the worst characteristics and this comes from Machiavelli who wanted to in the prince literally say that that uh figuratively the the prince is the one who should Rule and this is how they
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should rule they should rule with no constraint but there's also a way to read that in that he's not a prince and so he's telling a prince to rule in that way but he's also telling all of us that this Prince is gonna be awful and this is why he's going to be awful because it benefits him so maybe we want to
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reconsider being awful and so the question of political science is should we We respect existing Authority or should we challenge existing Authority and and this is this this constant tension we have so when we're talking about governance it is different from government
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governance is the idea of this power and politics the ways in which our societies are ruled our structures are ruled um about structures are ruled in terms of hierarchy but then we have to think about how political life is organized
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often it is idealized because it is like the prince it is writing for the rulers it is writing for a political scientist who wants to go on to run in politics and then be the next prime minister of Canada right they want to know how to rule but that's not really informative
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for the rest of us so the science part we tend to move to studies there's been a big debate about this like certain places like Queens have gone to studies they call the department studies we stay science we say science because it's harder right it sounds like a hard science like we're doing hard Sciences
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um and so then it becomes it could be and we can do it that way we can be very quantitative about it we can be very literal about it we can do it but when we're talking about governance we're doing it in a more General way we can talk about the structures of authority and power how it is that I have to water my lawn right um who decides that I have
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to do that how are those structures embedded and how are those institutions and are they sustainable right how did it happen over space and time so studies goes a little bit broader than science which is a bit more narrow and so we we are really talking about how politics is organized over space and time so we can
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use the example of the Greek city-state as the foundation of how we think about politics and political Theory that's one way to do it we can look at other examples and other experiences and other histories as well there is an inherent danger in doing it this way that we are studying what we consider successful so
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then it's a kind of you know it reproduces the idea that this is the best way to do it when realistically this is just our way to do it a Machiavellian Prince can rule with an iron fist but that doesn't necessarily create the best system it just creates the best system for him or her but more
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often than on him and we'll talk about this case um because gender is embedded in this framework of understanding back to man as the political animal because it would very specifically was framed in those terms and so when we look at Empires or city-states or nation states
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we're studying winners right we're studying the way in which um you know an emperor king or is our Sultan or the Roman Empire the Byzantine emperor the Ottoman Empire has reproduced this notion of this is what success is which is weird because almost all those
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things are gone so we're not sure that that's the best way but this is the way we have done political science and this is the central question here that comes about is that this model of governance then reproduces that that dolly video from the first one it reproduces the idea that that men and specifically like
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the glasses wearing like thinking you know Machiavellian man is the leader and leaders require followers and leaders happen all over the place leadership happens everywhere leadership happens in in households leadership happens in
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Bowling leagues leadership happens in sports teams and so it's not at all clear that this framework or understanding of leadership and politics based on success or his specific understanding of success frame from competition frame from political goals is the best way to understand leadership
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it's just the way we've done it and so I'm giving the gender distribution or the population distribution over his over time it's not at all clear that there have been more male leaders than female leaders or more different ways
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and I mean we'll unpack these gender Concepts later but the idea then is that we have defined leadership very specifically through a set of archetypes that disregards all the other leaders because it doesn't want to look for leadership anywhere but in systems of political structures and political
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Authority and the Emperors are Sultans all the rest of that and so we don't actually ever address the underlying social constructs that allow those people to be leaders and so that's the question here do we actually think there have been few fewer female leaders than men throughout history or is it just a
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construction of power all right so that is our kind of introduction to how we can think about governance um govern who governs how governance happens leadership and this is why we're critical there are certain Frameworks we can understand they're explanatory they have a long history and structure but
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they might also have embedded norms and ways of thinking in them in the way that we study and so every Concept in politics will be contested