An introduction to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's 1840 book, What is Property?Pierre Joseph Proudhon was the first self-declared anarchist. He wrote What is Property in 1840. He was not a wide-ranging and difficult writer, he wasn’t a system builder, he was critical of utopianisms, and was fascinated with contradictions.For Proudhon, The ideal society was a contractual one – where individuals are free to arrange their relationships under conditions of justice. But for justice to flourish, its laws had to be known to all.Proudhon looks at the justifications for property - occupation and labor - and argues that they both really only justify possession.Proudhon ultimately argues that all possession has a dual nature. A part that is ours by virtue of needing it for the flourishing of our own liberty, and a part that is society’s who have contributed to its value, and still has a right to it based on need. Another way of saying this might be that everything is only borrowed.His theory of property can be summed up by his phrase:‘‘The right to product is exclusive – jus in re ; ¬the right to means is common – jus ad rem’Proudhon is one of the most important figures in the history of socialist and radical thought.As George Woodcock writes he argues that ‘property is incompatible with justice, because in practice in represents the exclusion of the worker from his equal rights to enjoy the fruits of society.'Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: http://patreon.com/user?u=3517018 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

An introduction and overview of the British/Latvian philosopher, Isaiah Berlin's 1958 classic lecture on Two Concepts of Liberty.Berlin thought that where philosophers, politicians, and commentators had talked about the idea of freedom as one definable concept, throughout the history of modern thought you could identify two different ideas about what freedom or liberty meant.He called them negative and positive liberty. And in short, they’re the freedom from, and the freedom to. Negative freedom is the freedom from coercion, interference, authority.But positive liberty, he writes, 'derives from the desire on the part of the individual to be his own master. I wish my life and my decisions to depend on myself and not on external forces of whatever kind.’It’s the desire to Self-directed, self-determined, independent, competent; it's the the will to self-mastery, to autonomy. I want to be the master of my own life, to choose for myself.I also look briefly at critiques, including Gerald MacCallum's triadic formulation of liberty.Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: http://patreon.com/user?u=3517018 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In his 1977 essay, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”, Michel Foucault criticizes the traditional historical method and makes an argument for why a ‘genealogical’ approach is important. But what is genealogy?It’s a history of us. Of the attitudes and dispositions we embody today. The way we approach and do things. These things often seem like they don’t have a history, that they’re human nature. That they’re normal, eternal, unchangeable. Genealogy attempts to uncover how they’ve changed over time – how there are different ways of approaching them. It uncovers how they’re not the way they are because they’ve gradually improved; they’re not part of an inevitable linear progression through history. They’re contingent.Genealogy often examines attitudes, beliefs, presuppositions. – Morality, discipline, sexuality. It addresses a traditional history that assumes simple movement forward over time. It draws out, uncovers, and critically examines the origins of a specific conception of what’s morally good, or the source of a particular way of disciplining societal criminality, or the genesis of attitudes about what it means to be a feminine woman.Foucault is influenced by Nietzsche, the first person to show that morality – our ideas of what’s good and bad - has a history, has changed over time.He is searching for the 'origins' of the genealogical method in Nietzsche.Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: http://patreon.com/user?u=3517018 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

'Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights).'This is American philosopher Robert Nozick’s bold pronouncement at the beginning of anarchy, state, and utopia, a 1975 book that is largely a response to Rawl’s 1971 A Theory of Justice. It's the classic modern defense of libertarian political philosophy.For Nozick, the rights that individuals have are natural, of fundamental importance, and completely, universally, unequivocally inviolable. These rights, he argues, must be respected at all costs.They aren’t designed by institutions, or dreamed up by revolutionaries, written into contracts and protected by lawyers. They are part of being human.How then is a state justifiable? Taxation, the rule of law, a system that forces its citizens to pay for roads, schools and hospitals is surely a violation of an individual's natural rights as a human to be free to make their own choices.‘Boundary crossing’, as Nozick calls it, crossing the line and infringing upon a person's freedom, is surely only permissible with consent.This, loosely, is the position of the anarchist. The anarchist argues that because of the inviolability of individuals, no state can be justified.For Nozick, this is the fundamental question of political philosophy: whether there should be any state at all. He wants to justify what he calls a minimal state. One that simply protects an individual’s right to freedom, and nothing else. He wants to argue that this is both justified philosophically, and, could develop from a state of nature historically. Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: http://patreon.com/user?u=3517018 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I respond to some of your comments on the Rawls video, specifically thinking about utilitarianism, rights, race, and radicalism.Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: http://patreon.com/user?u=3517018 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What does it mean for a body – flesh and bones – to be politicized? For the rhythm of heartbeats, the density of muscles, and the flow of the arteries to be molded and shaped by power?What's the best way to rank citizens on a scale? To make the child’s body still, obedient, but strong? How far can we go in engineering modern utopian bodies? Is it possible to forge the iron of the national body through recommendations or if not, by force?Throughout the 19th century, bodies emigrated in droves from the country to the city. Their stomachs were hungry, for food, for work. They crowded flesh on flesh into slums. “Little Ireland” in Manchester had two toilets between 250. 5 or more often slept in one bed. Cesspools and dunghills were everywhere.At the same time, factory owners needed these bodies to be productive, energetic, malleable.We take a look at the Philosophical Radicals, who were inspired by Jeremy Bentham, Edwin Chadwick, Social Darwinism, Eugenics, and enforced sterilization. The 1846 Nuisance Removal Acts, Robert Bayden-Powel and his concerns about national degeneration that led to the development of the Scouts, productivity during the First World War, and the development of eugenicist thought and societies.Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: http://patreon.com/user?u=3517018 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

John Rawls, as we saw last time on Then & Now, came to the following conclusions about what a just society should like. He said that:‘‘All social values—liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self-respect—are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any, or all, of these values, is to everyone’s advantage.’’But what would this look like in practice? It’s only in recent years that attention has begun to be focused on how this might be implemented politically.Rawls barely addressed this question, but he did suggest two possible systems: liberal or democratic socialism, and property-owning democracy, and while he said that justice as fairness is agnostic between them, he leaned towards the latter.So what is a property-owning democracy?Property-owning democracy means citizens have a real stake in the productive capital of society, some ownership of the means of production.He writes: ‘Property-owning democracy avoids [inequalities], not by redistributing income to those with less at the end of each period, so to speak, but rather by ensuring the widespread ownership of productive assets and human capital (educated abilities and trained skills) at the beginning of each period’.If all citizens have a stake in a sizeable amount of property, access to capital and the productive decisions of society, it prevents power from resting in the hands of the few.Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: http://patreon.com/user?u=3517018 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The American philosopher John Rawls was the most influential political thinkers of the late twentieth century. Born in 1921 and died in 2002, he’s responsible for a renaissance in political philosophy.In this introduction to Rawls, I look at A Theory of Justice, his magnum opus. It was published in 1971 and is a philosophy of what a just and fair society would look like. I like at concepts like the difference principle, justice as fairness, and maximin.Before Rawls, the dominant political philosophy for at least the previous 100 years been utilitarianism. There were and are many different forms of utilitarianism, but they all have their foundations in a simple premise: the greatest good for the greatest number.For Rawls, utilitarianism didn’t adequately account for the intuition that people have inalienable rights that cannot be violated for the greater happiness of others.Rawls writes that the ‘higher expectations of those better situated are just if and only if they work as part of a scheme which improves the expectations of the least advantaged members of society.’It’s this difference principle, also referred to as maximin – maximise the minimum prospects – that leads Rawls to his formulation of the two principles of ‘justice as fairness'.The principles are in lexical order; that is, that the first should always be prioritised over the second. They are:First, each person has an equal right to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties which is compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for all. Second, social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged and (b) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity.The two principles might generally be summed up like this:‘All social values—liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self-respect—are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any, or all, of these values is to everyone’s advantage.’Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: http://patreon.com/user?u=3517018 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I look at the Black Lives Matter protests and the controversial debate around statues like Edward Colston, Cecil Rhodes, and King Leopold II. What can the philosophy of history and civil disobedience tell us about this moment? What exactly is a statue for? What is public history? How do we think about them ethically? And when is Civil Disobedience justified? I look at John Rawls, W.E.B du Bois, and Malcolm X in particular for some answers.Statues are philosophical objects. They are clearly symbolic of something more than the material they’re cast in. They embody phenomena that philosophers often try to understand– publicness, memory, the nature of history, the abstract and the concrete. Across the world – from the coloniser Cecil Rhodes to slaver King Leopold III and confederate president Jefferson Davis - inanimate busts have become a battleground. To their more mainstream defenders, the argument is usually twofold. That first, these monuments are legitimate because they memorialise a past that, for good or bad, is our history. And second, that even if memorialising a particular figure was not legitimate, removing statues extrajudicially at the whims of the mob is itself unethical and, furthermore, has dangerous consequences for democracy.Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: http://patreon.com/user?u=3517018 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I look at the history of the Spanish Flu of 1918 - the worst pandemic in history - asking what lessons we can learn. Avoiding a traditional approach to the story, I look at history’s worst pandemic from a number of perspectives. As a preface, I think about the memory of the flu and remembrance of World War One – why was the Influenza forgotten, while the war memorialised by poets like John McCrae? Then, institutional, looking at the two main institutions involves in the response: the military and the bacteriologists. Then, material, looking at the ways it spread and how quarantines were attempted to stop it. Third, ideologically, how did ideas of the time distort the response. I look in particular at cinemas, religion in Africa, and apartheid.Ultimately, there is a theme that runs through memories of the Spanish Flu: Failure.The historian Niall Johnson sums up Britains failure like this:‘the perception of disease, the fact that it was ‘only’ influenza, the relatively mild nature of the first wave in the spring of 1918, Imperialist or racist views and the ‘superiority’ of the English, the confidence in scientific medicine to find a vaccine, the quest for professional status of the profession, the power of ‘scientific’ medicine prevailing over preventive, and the rejection of state intervention. Many of these contributed to a delay in the reaction and recognition of the existence of a problem, particularly when the second wave arrived in the autumn of 1918.’Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: http://patreon.com/user?u=3517018 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.