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FR2501: French thought and the history of ideas |
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This part of the module is taught in the first period of teaching. It forms part of an introduction to political thought in France. In the first instance, we shall be focusing on the political thought of Benjamin Constant, an early nineteenth-century political thinkers whose work continues to have an important bearing on how we conceive of freedom, of the individual, and of the relationship between the private and the public domains. We will also look at how liberal thinkers like Constant are read and received - sometimes controversially - in contemporary thought. The reading list for this part of the module provides details of some of these sources.
The main text by Constant which we shall consider is 'De la liberté des anciens comparée à celle des modernes' (1819), though we shall also look at some sections of an earlier book of his, De l'esprit de conquête et de l'usurpation (1814). Both of which are available in an edition of De l'esprit de conquête et de l'usurpation published by Ephraïm Harpaz (Paris, Garnier-Flammarion, 1986) available in the campus bookshop. The later essay, 'De la liberté des anciens comparée à celle des modernes', which is quite short, represents a good starting point in reading Constant. We will also read works by a number of contemporary thinkers, notably Marcel Gauchet, who has written extensively on Constant, and Michel Foucault, who comments on liberalism and its bearing on how we understand politics today in lectures he gave in 1978-79 and which have been published posthumously.
Political thought is a response to pressing questions about how we should organize our lives in society. A notable claim which we shall seek to evaluate in the course of our work is the idea that political thought can be said to frame our understanding of the conditions of modern life in distinctive and significant ways. We shall see that a characteristic version of this claim maintains that typical disjunctions of modern life can only fully be grasped in the framework of political thought. Political thought is also a distinct form of discourse: in other words, writing on politics can be a way of intervening in a specific political debate. Political thought is, in other words, the medium through which values and institutions can be fashioned.
Political thought compels us, then, to think about the questions of language and of reading that it raises. For an introduction to this approach to political thought, you could begin by reading the essay by Anthony Pagden mentioned on your reading list.
Constant's political thought is informed by his response to new conceptions of the characteristic social conditions of modern life, notably, for instance, in the work of Adam Smith. The period of the French Revolution, in turn, gives an acute urgency to specifically political features of modernity and Constant argues for representative government as the political system best suited to sustain the freedom of the moderns. We shall see in our work that thinking about the freedom of the moderns raises a series of important further problems, among them the nature of political consent, the nature of the relationship between values and social and political structures, the significance of the residual public sphere. In the latter part of the lecture series, we shall address these and other questions in contemporary political thought.
A striking feature of recent intellectual history is the rediscovery and reappraisal of the work of Constant and of other French liberal political thinkers. We shall see accordingly how the history of political thought impinges on political debate and political theory today, and on our understanding of social and economic forces. We shall also look at the revival of interest in liberalism in France today and how it gives rise to a debate about the nature of government in the work of Michel Foucault and Marcel Gauchet.
In this part of the module, we shall be concerned with a number of interconnected issues:
This part of the module is assessed by essay at the end of the first period of teaching. The essay titles which will be set will give you the opportunity of writing on Constant, or on Constant in relation to other political thinkers (whether of his own time or of today).
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