#Lecture 1: Intro to The Thinkers
#What "Modern" Means
- "Modern" here means the 1500s–1850s, not contemporary
- Difference from Ancient Rome → 1500s is not huge; 1500s → 1800s is enormous.
- A period defined by upheavals: Renaissance, scientific revolution, political revolution, industrial revolution
- These thinkers never thought during dull times!
- The throughline for this course:
- Humans as sinful, fallen creatures → dignity, value, purpose of humankind
- Government by consent as a gradually emerging idea
- Individual identity: the notion that you can exist independently from your larger group, shift and shape who you are
- Our surnames used to come from our association with a group. e.g., "Smith" → your family was blacksmiths. In France, "de Tocqueville": de meant "from"
- Pay attention to class, race, gender, and who is speaking
#The Thinkers (and fun facts)
Machiavelli: Rulers need to break the rules of morality to rule. Easiest reading. Wrote The Prince after the Medici tortured him via the strappado (hoisted by bound wrists, shoulders dislocated).
Hobbes: Without an absolutely powerful central state, life is fearful and miserable. Hard as hell to read. In his autobiography: "My mother gave birth to twins: myself and fear." Went through intense education: reading and writing by 4, Greek and Latin by 6, breakdown by 20.
Locke: Individual liberty and sovereignty. Held stock in the Royal African Company, England's slave trade monopoly. Recent scholarship suggests he was paid in RAC shares for government work rather than investing directly, but either way: entangled. Also helped draft the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, which explicitly supported hereditary slavery.
Rousseau: "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." Democratic equality, radical. Fathered and abandoned five children, then wrote Emile, a treatise on how to raise children. Voltaire outed the scandal in an anonymous pamphlet. His own father had abandoned him at ten.
Burke: "The age of chivalry is gone. The glory of Europe is extinguished forever." Founder of modern conservatism. Opposed the embrace of radical ideas, especially in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Argued inherited institutions contain accumulated wisdom that revolutionaries destroy at society's peril.
Wollstonecraft: Takes aim at Rousseau for failing to extend liberties to women. She and her husband William Godwin kept separate residences in the same neighborhood of Somers Town, communicating by notes via servants. Living out their belief that marriage shouldn't extinguish autonomy.
Mill: Freedom isn't just about the state, it's also about social norms and customs. Greek at three, Latin at eight, mental breakdown at twenty. His father designed his education as an experiment. Found his way out of the breakdown through Wordsworth's poetry.
Marx: The dominant ideas of any age are the ones that legitimize the rulers. Died stateless (and in poverty) in London, 1883. About eleven mourners at his funeral in Highgate Cemetery.