syllabus until winter break (including blog post assignment)

Wednesday, 11/30 -- Read Thoreau

Friday, 12/2 -- Continued discussion of Thoreau

Monday, 12/5 -- Read Arendt

Tuesday, 12/6 -- Continued discussion of Arendt

Wednesday, 12/7 -- Read Camus

Friday, 12/9 -- Continued discussion of Camus

Monday, 12/12 -- Read Marx "On the Jewish Question"
Tuesday, 12/13 -- small group discussions, case study preparation

Wednesday, 12/14 -- Continued discussion of Marx

Next blog post:

Written and commented on for Friday 12/9:

How is rebellion a form of citizenship? In what ways should a citizen rebel against the government? In what ways should a government respond to a rebellion? Cite 2 of Thoreau, Arendt, or Camus in your response.

The best form of government is a form where the people are held in respect with the government and the government successfully manages the tyranny of the majority against the individual’s needs.

THESIS

The perfect society is an impossible dream. Any system of government that puts men in charge of one another will be as fallible as the people who created it. Even the most well planned State will eventually crumble.

Thesis (ish)

A sustainable form of government must allow its citizens the highest form of freedom: the freedom to be moral. The government must reflect a collective idea of morality, defined by an overlapping consensus of the citizens; the role of government becomes solely to provide physical security to the citizens by laws and enforcement based on the definition of morality that comes into existence through discussion in the public sphere.

Thesis

For a government to avoid the tyrant, that government must legislate morality and educate every individual so that each person may make contributions to the marketplace of ideas.

Kyle's Thesis

In order for an individual to serve the ideal role in society, the government must instill a sense of responsibility and duty to become enlightened by the use of positive liberties so that each individual is able to contribute positively to the market place of ideas and develop their sense of morality.

Thesis (Team Rocket)

In order for a political society to function and improve, every citizen must fulfill their duty and contribute to the "marketplace of ideas."

Thesis

The purpose of the individual is sacrifice for the creation and maintenance of the state, while the state's purpose is to provide order and longevity to itself using a balanced amount of lies and manipulation to ensure the individual's complacency, while avoiding their revolutionary wrath.

Redheads & Caroline

Tyranny of the majority can be minimized, although not eradicated, through the sublation of citizens that occurs in the marketplace of ideas.

Thesis?

Sorry, Team Rocket. I included a short outline so that my thesis makes more sense. Feel free to comment on the thesis without reading the outline.

Since any social structure leads to discontent and rebellion, the most functional power structure is autonomy, a state of nature.

-Societies created by greed. When the founding principle is greed, upheaval is created by excess desire.

-In order to function, government must satisfy each individual, because without its inhabitant's contentment, the inhabitants have no reason to preserve the society. There is no way to keep everyone happy, though, because so many people have different opinions and desires. There is no possible categorical imperative that can be achieved through the public sphere because there will always be contrasting opinions. Therefore...

-Society fosters discontent and rebellion, government must then combat or prevent the rebellion. Instead of existing for the security of the people, government exists to protect itself and those who agree with its legislations. If people enter a society to protect their security, and then are themselves threatened by the same government, nothing is achieved.

-In a state of nature, men would govern themselves out of necessity, avoiding a state of war and/or a corrupted government. Men might be individually less secure, but as a whole, self-government based on necessity would result in less destruction.

Team Rocket!!!

Government's duty is to protect us and make us feel secure, so that we can contribute our ideas to the "public sphere" and form the perfect state.

Redheads and Caroline

Hey guys: I put my outline too, because I don't feel like I worded my thesis the best ever, so with the outline you can kind of see where I'm coming from with my second sentence.

A society should form a government that is run by the people, and modified through ongoing discussion. Laws should not be overbearing, but citizens have a duty to follow the laws that do exist.

Rousseau—social contract, people form a collective

Rawls—The society must be based upon an agreed upon constitution, and we need to all agree that we can’t impose our world-view onto others.

Mill—government should be changed through a marketplace of ideas, an ongoing conversation

Hegel—the marketplace of ideas works by people sublating and understanding each other

Kant—when people have more responsibility for themselves and their government, they will become more enlightened and wiser

Kant—we must obey laws even if we don’t like them, because categorically we can’t say that everyone should disobey the government

Rousseau—he agrees, disobeying should not be an option

Plato—in Crito he agrees, we must deal with what our society gives us.

thesis statement

In order to strive for enlightenment, citizens must contribute to the marketplace of ideas and the government must ensure that those contributions are positive and progress society closer to the universal morality.

Hegel

If the world exists as a means for G-d to discover his self-awareness, there is ultimately a telos, an end, to this process. The individual is a small piece of a broad process-in Hegel’s metaphysics; individual citizens become the cogs in the larger machine of the history of the world, which is the process of G-d’s self-actualization. Each society is a moment in G-d becoming conscious of himself that occurs through a set of processes in time. Societies are determined by where they exist in history, and the individual exists within a society that is at a point on the trajectory towards G-d’s self-actualization and so therefore it is the society that creates the identity of the individual. The individual as a citizen in society becomes part of a moment in the unfolding of the history of the world. The individual is dictated by society at this moment in time, that is, where the individual exists in the evolution of the history of world. Individuals depend on the recognition of others to identify themselves. The closer each individual gets to gaining self-consciousness through sublation with others, the closer the individual gets to becoming a moral being. Society moves closer to becoming to a state built on morality as opposed to necessity, or composed of individuals that have reached this higher level of self-consciousness, and this progress reflects the process of G-d’s self-awareness on the trajectory towards the telos. This progress occurs when society transitions into a moral state, and this happens when each individual citizen has a sense of morality, which they gain from self-consciousness and recognition from others. The freedom of the individual must guide him/her to do what G-d wants him/her to do, so it cannot be a pathological freedom, individuals must be moral, and have reasons for their actions. As the motive behind the actions of the individual moves from necessity to consciousness, freedom of action becomes enslavement to desire. In Hegel, the individual must apply reason to freedom in order to not be uncontrollably and therefore pathologically free; therein forms the morality of the individual, and by extension, society. By this reasoning the greatest freedom that the individual has is to see that which he/she should do and do it. This resembles Plato’s Republic where one is free to do one’s duty, but that is the greatest freedom one can have. It becomes the role of the individual to find this morality and apply it to the reasons for his/her actions and subsequently create a more moral society, leading to progression on the trajectory of the self-actualization of G-d. The self-actualization of the individual then becomes that of G-d.

Team????

We are part of the process that God is going through to obtain self-consciousness. He can’t achieve self-consciousness until he experiences sublation, which requires other people. True sublation occurs when people are mutually involved in a relationship, and they are risking their lives for one another. Everything the individual, as a citizen, does, is all a part of Gods process but we aren’t slaves to him because we are all morale and have a reason for doing the things we do. We are citizens because of history, and all history is the history of God.
I have a few questions for you guys: If we are just here as a part of God’s process of finding himself, what happens when he discovers himself? Does the world come to an end, or is his self-consciousness unobtainable because we change so frequently? What do we gain from our relationship with God? Also, isn’t God supposed to be omniscient? How is he aware of himself enough to create us?

If the state is god working himself out through self actualization, then the individual as a citizen is a part of the state is part of god's self actualization. So any action by the citizen should be a motion of the state and therefore representative of God's self actualization. This means that we essentially give god himself, because according to Hegel we form ourselves from others perception of us, and this means that god is getting himself from us and what we believe about him. Hegel runs on the idea here that the world was created by god and that the world was his way of defining himself, so in his idea of us we all believe in this so we all try to act in a way that would be an accurate portrayal of God as he believed in him.

Next blog post!

If the state is a part of God's working out of himself through self-actualization, what does that say about the individual as citizen at any particular moment in time?

Use Hegel.

Next paper!

For your next paper, please re-address the seminal questions of the class.

You must cite Plato, Kant, Hegel, and at least one other thinker (Freud, Rawls, Locke, Rousseau) in creating your argument.

5 pages. In folders. On Elise's desk or in mailbox on Monday morning, November 21st.

The questions:

How do structures of power relate to the individual and his or her role in society? What does a study of the link between tyranny and democracy tell us about the proper distribution of social power? How should government balance the needs of the individual and the social?