PHILOSOPHY An introduction

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PHILOSOPHYAn introduction
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LECTURES

• I. What is in a Word?
• II. Virtues and Principles.
• III. Mind and Body.
• IV. Politics in a Globalizing World.
• V. Science and Society.
• VI. The Value of Beauty.

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IV. POLITICS IN A GLOBALIZING WORLD
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• THE SPREAD OF POLITICS
• How does the political landscape looks like??
• POWER AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE SURVEILLANCE
  SOCIETY
• Is political resistance possible?
• THE PERFORMATIVITY OF COMMUNICATIVE POWER
• What does communicative action mean for politics?

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1. THE SPREAD OF POLITICS
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POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

• Political philosophy is philosophy about
  politics.
• Politics is an essentially contested concept.
• How to legitimize the political system?
• Politics happens wherever there is power.
• Which alues underlie politics?

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TWO FORMS OF LIBERTY

• Liberty is a core value of democracy.
• Two forms of liberty
• 1. NEGATIVE LIBERTY gt freedom from.
• 2. POSITIVE LIBERTY gt freedom to.

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THE SPREAD OF POLITICS

• Besides the political centres (The Hague,
  Brussels, etc.) there are also other places where
  people take political decisions (the headquarters
  of big banks and multinationals, etc.).
• Fragmentation of the political field.

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THE CONVERGENCE BETWEEN POWER AND DEMOCRACY

• Democracy as political power legitimized by the
  will of people.
• The separation of powers (Montesquieu).
• The empowerment of people.

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THE DIVERGENCE BETWEEN POWER AND DEMOCRACY

• Autocratic forms of public administration (for
  instance intransparent management).
• Power elites and ruling classes that undermine
  the democratic control by the people.
• Unequal conditions among citizens.

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TRANSFORMATIONS OF DEMOCRACY
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2. POWER AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE SURVEILLANCE
SOCIETY
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PRELIMINARY REMARKS ON POWER

• John Scott Power is the production of causal
  effects.
• Power is a social relation between two agent the
  principal and the subaltern.
• The principal the paramount agent who exercises
  power.
• The subaltern the subordinate agent that is
  affected by power.
• Power is an inteded or desired causal effect in
  their relation.
• Freedom is crucial the agents have a degree of
  autonomy in shaping their relation.
• Power should be seen in relation to the possible
  resistance that others can offer.
• Therefore it makes sense to distinguish
  exercising power from holding power.

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THE TWO MAIN KINDS OF POWER

• POWER-OVER (in French pouvoir) gt the exercised
  power that one agent has over another.
• Analyses of, for example, the sovereign power of
  a state, power elites and ruling classes.
• POWER-TO (in French puissance) gt power as a
  capacity or ability.
• Analyses of, for example, the resistance of
  social movements and the empowerment of women.

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MAX WEBER (1864-1920)

• Power is the probability that one actor within
  a social relationship will be in a position to
  carry out his own will despite resistance
• From Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (1922)

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STEVEN LUKES

• Power is a potentiality, not an actuality
  indeed a potentiality that may never be
  actualized
• From Power A Radical View (1974)

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SOME INITIAL QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

• Can A exercise power over B without knowing that
  he does it?
• Yes!
• Can A exercise power over B in such a way that B
  is not conscious about that?
• Counterintuitive Yes!
• But how?
• Foucault via disciplinary power.

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MICHEL FOUCAULT (1926-1984)

• Main works
• Folie et Déraison (1961)
• Les Mots et les Choses (1966)
• 2. Surveiller et Punir (1975)
• 3. Histoire de la sexualite (1976)

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INNOVATION

• From the study of the macrophysics of power to
  the study of the microphysics of power.
• From a negative conception of power to a positive
  conception of power gt power is not only
  destructive but also productive.

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DISCOURSE ANALYSES

• Discourse gt the way people talk and write.
• Every discourse is based on specific norms.
• People are often not aware of these norms.
• These norms are constitutive for the way how
  people conceive of the world.
• Discourse analyses gt making the power relations
  explicit that underlie discourses.

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MECHANISMS OF EXCLUSION

• Authority.
• The introduction a the forbidden word.
• The marginalization of madness.
• The glorification of scientific knowledge.

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EXPERTISE

• The power of experts is due to their production
  of specific discourses which play an important
  role in disciplining populations.
• The emergence of expertise goes hand in hand with
  the decline of the pre-modern exercise of power.
• Tension between democracy and expertocracy.

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THE CREATION OF DOCILE BODIES

• Surveiller et Punir.
• Towards a new object of punishment.
• Punsishment is not directly related to the body,
  but to the internalised norms of people.
• Withdrawal from the use of violence.
• Adjustment is the goal!

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DISCIPLINARY POWER

• Power is not only a question of represession, but
  also of the transformation of individuals into
  subjects with appropriate motives and desires.
• Normalisation Individuals become socialised
  members of the society because they internalise
  specific norms.
• Discipline gt system of productive social control.
• Bentham developed such a system, which is called
  the Panopticon!

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ELECTRONIC SURVEILLANCE

• Power based upon seeing without being seen.
• Panopticon gt model of surveillance developed by
  Jeremy Bentham.
• Computer databases are used to store and process
  personal information on different kinds of
  populations.
• Monitoring the routines of everyday life.

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SURVEILLANCE SOCIETY

• A society that collects precise details of our
  personal lives, stored, retrieved and processed
  every day within huge computer databases
  belonging to big corporations and government
  departments (David Lyon)
• The intensification of surveillance (shopping
  with a credit card, walking down the street or
  emailing are monitored).

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SURVEILLANCE AND THE PRIVATE SPHERE

• To gather information about the private life of
  citizens to control them and maintain the
  governing power.
• Electronic surveillance has panoptic features
  the invisibility of the inspection, the constant
  monitoring of consumer behavior, etcetera.
• The familiar distinctions between the public and
  private sphere dissolve as both the state and
  companies ignore old thresholds and gather of the
  most intimate information.

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SOUSVEILLANCE

• Foucault gt power implies resistance.
• Sousveillance gt surveillance of the surveillance
  as a form of resistance.
• Surveillance undermines one of the core values of
  democracy privacy.
• Sousveillance is a way to say no to this
  development.

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3. THE PERFORMATIVITY OF COMMUNICATIVE POWER
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JÜRGEN HABERMAS

• Main works
• - The structural transformation of the public
  sphere (1962).
• - The theory of communicative action (1981).
• - Between facts and values (1992).

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CLAIMS OF CRITICAL THEORIES

• 1. Cognitive claim to present an adequate
  analysis of the society.
• 2. Normative claim to give a fair judgment on
  the society.
• 3. Emancipatory claim the adequate analysis and
  the fair judgment should help to overcome
  situations of oppression and marginalization.
• 4. Selfreflexive claim to be self-critical.

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THE POSTNATIONAL CONSTELLATION

• The postnational constellation the
  transformation of the westphalian model of
  sovereignty.
• The disaggregation of citizenship rights through
  the extension of cosmopolitan norms.
• The sovereignty-based model of international law
  appears to be ceding not to global justice, but
  to a world order dominated by some actors who are
  not accountable for what they decide.

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INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

• International Relations (IR) is a branch of
  political science that studies foreign affairs
  and transnational issues among states and other
  actors.
• A long time IR was only interested in the
  relations between states.
• Nowadays, it studies not only the actions of
  states, but also the actions of non-governmental
  organizations (NGOs), inter-governmental
  organizations (IGOs) and multinational
  corporations.
• This implies a concern with different issues,
  such as security, terrorism, economic
  development, ecological sustainability, power
  politics, sovereignty, etc.

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PARADIGMS IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

• LIBERALISM
• REALISM
• CONSTRUCTIVISM
• CRITICAL THEORY

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A SOCIOLOGICAL APPROACH
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REALISM

• A paradigm that claims to be realistic in
  comparison to the idealism of the liberal
  paradigm.
• Names Thucydides, Hobbes, Carr, Waltz and
  Morgenthau.
• Presupposition states are, like men,
  self-interested and will pursue their interests
  to the detriment of others and without regard to
  the constraints of law or morality.
• The major problem anarchy among states, because
  there is no central sovereign international
  authority higher than the state.
• States will never give up their sovereignty to an
  international body.
• Metaphor a billiard table in which the balls
  represent sovereign states
• The pursuit of power and national interest are
  the major forces drving world politics.
• The states primary obligation is to its citizens
  and not to a rather abstract interantional
  community.

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CONSTRUCTIVISM

• Phenomena in world politics ideologies,
  identities, institutions, etc. are the outcome
  of social constructions, i.e. the result of human
  interaction.
• Names Kant, Wendt, Sikkink and Risse.
• Metaphor falling between two stools (realism and
  idealism).
• They try to bridge the gap between
  agency-centred theories and structure-centred
  theories agency and structure are mutually
  dependent.
• Norms play an important role in the behaviour of
  different actors.
• Policy is not only a matter of national interest,
  but also of acceptable behaviour.
• Although one cannot explain the outcomes of
  international policitcs, one can understand them.

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THE THREE MAIN ISSUES

• Issue of global justice gt poverty, etc.
• Issue of plurality gt peaceful encounter of people
  with different cultures or a clash of
  civilizations, etc.
• Environmental issue gt global warming, etc.
• How to cope with these issues?
• World State? No option!
• Global governance?

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GLOBAL GOVERNANCE

• Governance without government.
• Business actors establishing their own
  transnational regulatory mechanisms to manage
  issues of common concern.
• The emergence of a global civil society ngos
  and transnational advocacy networks.

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A DISCURSIVE THEORY OF DEMOCRACY

• Contra POSITIVISM (only interested in facts)
• Contra MORALISM (only interested in values)
• Focus on DELIBERATION gt to come to a decision on
  the basis of a debate of all the interested
  parties instead of a decision on the basis of a
  command.