question, "what is political philosophy?"

Custom dictates that I say something about the subject

matter of this course at its outset.

This in some ways might seem a case of putting the cart before

the horse, or the cart before the course maybe,

because how can you say, how can we say what political

philosophy is in advance of doing it?

Anyway, let me try to say something that might be useful.

In one sense, you could say political

philosophy is simply a branch or what we call a subfield of the

field of political science. Yes, all right.

It exists alongside of other areas of political inquiry like

American government, comparative politics,

and international relations. Yet in another sense,

political philosophy is something much different than

simply a subfield; it seems to be the oldest and

most fundamental part of political science.

Its purpose is to lay bare, as it were, the fundamental

problems, the fundamental concepts and categories which

frame the study of politics. In this respect it seems to me

much less like just a branch of political science than the

foundation of the entire discipline.

The study of political philosophy often begins as this

course will do also, with the study of the great

books or some of the great books of our field.

Political philosophy is the oldest of the social sciences,

and it can boast a wealth of heavy hitters from Plato and

Aristotle to Machiavelli, Hobbes, Hegel,

Tocqueville, Nietzsche, and so on.

You might say that the best way to learn what political

philosophy is, is simply to study and read the

works of those who have shaped the field--yes,

right? But to do that is,

I recognize, not without dangers,

often severe dangers of its own.

Why study just these thinkers and not others?

Is not any so-called list of great thinkers or great texts

likely to be simply arbitrary and tell us more about what such

a list excludes than what it includes?

Furthermore, it would seem that the study of

the great books or great thinkers of the past can easily

degenerate into a kind of antiquarianism,

into a sort of pedantry. We find ourselves easily

intimidated by a list of famous names and end up not thinking

for ourselves. Furthermore,

doesn't the study of old books, often very old books,

risk overlooking the issues facing us today?

What can Aristotle or Hobbes tells us about the world of

globalization, of terrorism,

of ethnic conflict and the like?

Doesn't political science make any progress?

After all, economists no longer read Adam Smith.

I hesitate to... I don't hesitate to say

that you will never read Adam Smith in an economics course

here at Yale, and it is very unlikely that

you will read Freud in your psychology classes.

So why then does political science, apparently uniquely

among the social sciences, continue to study Aristotle,

Locke and other old books?

These are all real questions, and I raise them now myself

because they are questions I want you to be thinking about as

you do your reading and work through this course.

I want you to remain alive to them throughout the semester.

Yes? Okay.

One reason I want to suggest that we continue to read these

books is not because political science makes no progress,

or that we are somehow uniquely fixated on an ancient past,

but because these works provide us with the most basic questions

that continue to guide our field.

We continue to ask the same questions that were asked by

Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and others.

We may not accept their answers and it's very likely that we do

not, but their questions are often put with a kind of

unrivaled clarity and insight. The fact is that there are

still people in the world, many people,

who regard themselves as Aristotelians,

Thomists, Lockeans, Kantians, even the occasional

Marxist can still be found in Ivy League universities.

These doctrines have not simply been refuted,

or replaced, or historically superceded;

they remain in many ways constitutive of our most basis

outlooks and attitudes. They are very much alive with

us today, right. So political philosophy is not

just some kind of strange historical appendage attached to

the trunk of political science; it is constitutive of its

deepest problems. If you doubt the importance of

the study of political ideas for politics, consider the works of

a famous economist, John Maynard Keynes,

everyone's heard of him. Keynes wrote in 1935.

"The ideas of economists and political philosophers,

both when they are right and when they are wrong,

are more powerful than is commonly understood....Practical

men," Keynes continues, practical men "who believe

themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual

influences, are usually the slave of some

defunct economist. Madmen in authority,

who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy

from some academic scribbler of a few years back" .

So this course will be devoted to the study of those "academic

scribblers" who have written books that continue to impress

and create the forms of authority with which we are

familiar. But one thing we should not do,

right, one thing we should not do is to approach these works as

if they provide, somehow, answers,

ready-made answers to the problems of today.

Only we can provide answers to our problems.

Rather, the great works provide us, so to speak,

with a repository of fundamental or permanent

questions that political scientists still continue to

rely on in their work. The great thinkers are great

not because they've created some set of museum pieces that can be

catalogued, admired, and then safely

ignored like a kind of antiquities gallery in the

Metropolitan Museum of Art; but rather because they have

defined the problems that all later thinkers and scholars have

had to use in order to make sense of their world at all.

Again, we still think in terms of the basic concepts and

categories that were created for us long ago.

Okay?

So one thing you will quickly note is that there are no

permanent answers in a study of political philosophy.

A famous mathematician once said, "Every question must have

a correct answer, for every question one answer."

That itself is an eminently contestable proposition.

Among the great thinkers there is profound disagreement over

the answers to even the most fundamental questions concerning

justice, concerning rights,

concerning liberty. In political philosophy,

it is never a sufficient answer to answer a question with a

statement "because Plato says so,"

or "because Nietzsche says so." There are no final authorities

in that respect in philosophy because even the greatest

thinkers disagree profoundly with one another over their

answers, and it is precisely this

disagreement with one another that makes it possible for us,

the readers today, to enter into their

conversation. We are called upon first to

read and listen, and then to judge "who's

right?" "how do we know?"

The only way to decide is not to defer to authority,

whoever's authority, but to rely on our own powers

of reason and judgment, in other words the freedom of

the human mind to determine for us what seems right or best.

Okay?

But what are these problems that I'm referring to?

What are these problems that constitute the subject matter of

the study of politics? What are the questions that

political scientists try to answer?

Such a list may be long, but not infinitely so.

Among the oldest and still most fundamental questions are:

what is justice? What are the goals of a decent

society? How should a citizen be

educated? Why should I obey the law,

and what are the limits, if any, to my obligation?

What constitutes the ground of human dignity?

Is it freedom? Is it virtue?

Is it love, is it friendship? And of course,

the all important question, even though political

philosophers and political scientists rarely pronounce it,

namely, quid sit deus, what is God?

Does he exist? And what does that imply for

our obligations as human beings and citizens?

Those are some of the most basic and fundamental problems

of the study of politics, but you might say,

where does one enter this debate?

Which questions and which thinkers should one pick up for

oneself? Perhaps the oldest and most

fundamental question that I wish to examine in the course of this

semester is the question: what is a regime?

What are regimes? What are regime politics?

The term "regime" is a familiar one.

We often hear today about shaping regimes or about