- 6 months ago
Liberty and the rights of individuals form the backbone of American politics. But what is “liberty” anyway? In this episode of Crash Course Political Theory, we learn the fundamentals of Classical Liberalism and how 17th-century philosophers impact politics today.
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00:00Should Americans get to own guns?
00:03If you live in the U.S. like I do, you can't get away from this debate.
00:08And it feels like there's no agreement in sight.
00:11Some people argue that they have a constitutional right to own guns.
00:15Meanwhile, others argue that they have the right to live in a country free of gun violence.
00:22The thing is, in a liberal democracy like ours, both arguments kind of hold up.
00:27Which raises the question, how do you protect everyone's rights at the same time?
00:33I'm Ellie Andersen, and this is Crash Course Political Theory.
00:42Last time, I asked if democracy is failing.
00:45And a big reason it can feel that way is because we can't agree on what liberalism,
00:50the bedrock of democracy, actually means.
00:53How liberal rights and how the government protects them are core questions of liberalism.
00:58And no, I don't mean liberal as in your cousin who wears Birkenstocks and voted for Obama.
01:03Liberalism is a political philosophy of its own.
01:06A centuries-old one that focuses on liberty, or freedom.
01:10To understand how we got here, I had to go on a bit of a journey.
01:14All the way back to the 1600s.
01:17Back then, most of Europe was ruled by churches and noblemen.
01:21That system was great for the people in charge.
01:24They had a lot of rights.
01:26But not so much for the people they ruled.
01:28Turns out, you get to do whatever you want when you're running the show.
01:31Must be nice.
01:33So, a few philosophers proposed a fairer system,
01:36where all people have certain essential rights and the government protects those rights.
01:41But there was a catch.
01:43To get that protection, the citizens would have to give up a little of their freedom.
01:47To me, this sounds like a terms-of-service agreement.
01:51Before you call a car with a ride-sharing app, you have to agree to some terms.
01:55You'll give the service your real name, pay for your ride,
01:59and let them track your location while you're in the car.
02:02They promise to send a car that's safe to ride in, protect your information, and charge a fair price.
02:08You give up some of your freedom, and the service provider agrees to protect the freedoms you still have.
02:13That was the bargain that thinkers like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau proposed.
02:20Give up some of your freedom to the state, and the state will protect the rest.
02:26Rousseau named this theory the social contract.
02:29And if you didn't have a social contract, well, Hobbes thought life would be pretty bleak.
02:34He worried if everyone had the freedom to do whatever they wanted, it would be chaos,
02:39a lawless dystopia to rival the exodus at the end of Coachella.
02:42We're trapped!
02:43He called this the state of nature, and said the only way to avoid it was to make a government.
02:49But not just any kind of government.
02:51Hobbes thought the best way to enforce a social contract was to give all the power to one absolute authority,
02:58which he called a Leviathan.
03:00Unfortunately, he wasn't referring to a giant sea monster, which would have been metal.
03:04On the other hand, Hobbes' contemporary John Locke wasn't into the whole single authority thing.
03:10He pointed out that an all-powerful government would probably create your garden-variety oppression.
03:16But he did agree that the key to a healthy society was individual rights, especially the right to property.
03:23This idea is the seed of libertarianism.
03:26But the more I read these thinkers, the more I realized that they really only cared about liberty for some.
03:31Like, Locke helped draft the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, a legal document that aimed to give every free man
03:39quote, absolute power and authority over enslaved people.
03:44He wanted liberty for all free white men.
03:48Bit of a flaw in your logic there, John.
03:50The social contract and the right to personal property make up the core of classical liberalism.
03:56And Europeans brought them along when they founded the United States, along with guns, wheat, and a lot of disease.
04:03But Locke and Hobbes don't quite cut it in terms of understanding what liberalism really is today.
04:09In order to get closer to my answer, I had to jump forward to the 1970s.
04:14Let's go to the tape.
04:18The civil rights movement had recently ended, securing more rights for Black Americans.
04:23Second-wave feminists were marching for women's equality.
04:26And the income gap was widening, calling attention to the gulf between rich and poor.
04:32So the question became, in a diverse society, how do we make sure everybody has liberty?
04:41Some philosophers tried to answer this question with modern liberalism,
04:45which wouldn't just protect individuals, but would also, ostensibly, produce a more just and equitable society.
04:52One guy you really can't avoid once you start reading about this stuff is John Rawls, who floated a thought experiment.
04:59Imagine there are a bunch of people in a room trying to make a fair society.
05:05They don't know what their life is like outside the room, what race or gender they are,
05:09if they're rich or poor, disabled or not, etc.
05:13They're behind what Rawls called the veil of ignorance.
05:17And they have to choose some principles of justice that will be good for everyone.
05:22Rawls thought a just world is one where everyone benefits.
05:26This is the theory of justice as fairness.
05:30He figured everyone in the room would pretty much agree on the equality principle,
05:34that everyone should get the same access to rights and opportunities.
05:38If one person has the right to own property or go to school or eat a whole pizza in one sitting,
05:44don't judge me, everyone has that right.
05:47But that wouldn't mean everyone has the exact same life.
05:49Rawls thought there would always be some inequality.
05:53And that was okay, as long as two things were true.
05:57First, everyone should get the same chance at a better life.
06:01Someone can have a higher paying job as long as everyone has an equal opportunity to get that job.
06:06And second, inequality should give the most benefit to the people who have the least.
06:11Like, the person getting paid more should have a job that helps everyone, especially the least advantaged.
06:18He called this the difference principle.
06:20This is where we can see partisan views of Rawls in some of our most pressing political debates today.
06:27A progressive interpretation says government works only if it helps the most marginalized people.
06:32If it doesn't, it's unjust, and it's the state's responsibility to correct it.
06:38This might mean establishing a universal basic income or health care for all, what's called distributive justice.
06:44A conservative interpretation says more or less the opposite.
06:48If everyone has the same access to opportunities, then inequality is the result of individual choices.
06:54This is part of the anti-welfare argument that giving people so-called handouts doesn't serve them or the broader society.
07:02Which brings us back to one of the trickiest and most persistent problems liberalism faces.
07:08What happens when one person's freedoms conflict with another's?
07:12Like, should someone's right to self-defense trump another's right to live?
07:17Does a right to free speech cover hate speech?
07:20Should governments have access to private data if it lets them prevent crimes against children?
07:26My questions could go on for days.
07:29Luckily, 20th century theorist Isaiah Berlin helped me out.
07:33He describes two ways of thinking about liberty.
07:36But when I was first getting started in this field, I made myself a solemn promise.
07:41Never try to approach dense political theory without being properly prepared.
07:45So here are the two ways of thinking about liberty.
07:54Negative liberty is the absence of obstacles.
07:58If you have negative liberty, nobody's interfering in your life or blocking your way.
08:03This is that classical liberalism kind of liberty.
08:06Leave me and my stuff alone.
08:08Positive liberty, on the other hand, is the presence of self-determination.
08:12If you have positive liberty, you can have control over your life and make the decisions you want.
08:19Here's another way to think about it.
08:21Imagine that a person decides to apply for a job at the mall.
08:24She goes right up to the store, resume in hand, and nobody stops her.
08:28This is negative liberty.
08:30No person or entity is interfering in her decision to apply.
08:34Now, let's say this person's real dream is to study archaeology.
08:38But she comes from a low-income family, so she's unable to go to college and pursue that dream.
08:44In that way, she's driven by her circumstances, not her own sense of purpose.
08:50She doesn't have positive liberty.
08:52Berlin thought positive liberty was too abstract to work in the real world.
08:57Like, how can you attribute everything to self-determination when there are always so many factors?
09:02But others argue that focusing on negative liberty, overt obstacles like laws against women or people of color attending college, for instance,
09:12ignores the fact that people and the choices they make are shaped by their social environment in subtler ways, too.
09:19Even without those kinds of obvious obstacles, other things interfere, like race and class privilege, social norms, and even language itself.
09:29Like, maybe our jobseeker's family has limited income in part because of bygone racist housing laws.
09:35The obstacle has been removed, but there's still inequity there in terms of generational wealth.
09:42Or say every professor in the local university's archaeology department is white and male.
09:47Even if she could afford to go there, she may not be set up to succeed by the culture of the institution.
09:54So here's what I learned.
09:55Whatever way you slice it, liberalism is all about individuals' rights.
10:00And protecting them means stopping people from interfering in the rights of others.
10:04But in a diverse society with legacies of inequality, that's easier said than done.
10:12To maintain equality, should a society ignore the differences among people, or should it emphasize difference?
10:20Some philosophers, like Chandran Kukathas and Kwame Anthony Appiah, say that liberalism already protects people of all cultures.
10:29If everyone has individual liberties, we don't need to do anything special for particular groups.
10:35Thinkers in this tradition advocate for less intervention from the state.
10:39Which is why some argue against measures like affirmative action,
10:43saying that it's an overcorrection that could create unfair advantages.
10:48Others, like Will Kimlicka, think we need to go beyond individual rights,
10:52and give people with historically marginalized identities group rights too.
10:58He says that we need to reinterpret classical liberalism to make it multicultural,
11:03which would mean rebalancing the scales to correct legacies of unequal treatment.
11:08And then there are the thinkers, like Bhikkhu Parekh, who think we need to upend the whole system.
11:14Liberalism can't solve the problems it created, he says,
11:17especially when it's rooted in European colonialism.
11:21Because, spoiler alert for every Crash Course History series,
11:25colonialism created a lot of inequality.
11:28These debates are ongoing, and they'll keep shaping the future of American politics.
11:34How do we protect everyone's rights?
11:37And what do we do when they conflict?
11:39Journeying into liberalism gave me a framework for answering these kinds of tricky questions.
11:44But it's definitely not a blueprint.
11:46Applied to different situations, the path forward can look different.
11:50But understanding liberalism better is essential to making sense of American politics.
11:57And deciding what we want liberty to look like today.
12:01Next time, we'll dive into identity politics. See you then.
12:04Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course Political Theory,
12:07which was filmed at the Bastille Studio and was made with the help of all these nice people.
12:12If you want to help keep Crash Course free for everyone forever, you can join our community on Patreon.
12:20Click
12:21And
12:29Trust
12:30To
12:32Maybe
12:34To
12:35To
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