Week 1 - State, Society, Relations Flashcards
john locke and the state vs. society
believed the problem was the state and that the people are good and power should belong to society
Hobbs and the state vs. society
believed the power should belong only to the state
hannah ardent and the state vs. society
coined the BANALITY OF EVIL
- believed that the people responsible for the war caused more war and talked about NATALITY = how human life begins with birth is the central category of political thought
- IDEA OF DECAY
Foucault and the state vs. society
believes the body as an instrument and studied behaviour because they believe power is everywhere
james c scott and the state vs. society
is super interested in why the state likes turning chaos to order… more specifically legibility to better control societies/ modernization/ standardization and to strengthen borders.
Ex: residential school system: the way Americans made Indigenous people “legible”
max weber and his 3 kinds of legible authority on how to get political legitimacy
mneumonic: That Cat Raps!
- Tradition… ex: the royal family/ monarch
- Charismatic leader… ex: Ataturk (founding father of Turkey)
- Rule of law… ex: Jean Jacques Rousseau was obsessed with people not close or serving the state
States and society/ institutions
2 definitions for meaning of life
state and society… how they define the meaning of life sets up institutions that help us answer peace conflict and justice
- States and their corresponding institutions’ objective = the legibility OF society
- States, and their corresponding institutions’ objective = to be perceived as legitimate BY society
civil society
mneumonic: albert and sam did paul bad
Uncoerced associational life distinct from the family and institutions of the state
Ex: NGO’s, going clubbing, book clubs etc
The central idea is the freedom to express freedom
- CS apart from the state: religion (voluntary, pluralistic activities, positive and negative borders)
- CS against the state: terrorist groups and protests (politicizing the non political)
- CS in support of the S: school of civilization
- CS in dialogue with the S: Town hall and labor unions
- CS in partnership with the S: NGOS’s… democratic theorists are really interested in this
- CS beyond the S: international NGOs/ uncontacted Indigenous communities (dissociation from territorial boundaries)
Civil society responds to the acts of legibility and legitimacy by the state.
Civil society is a verb not a noun… cs is an actor
Introduction to Geopolitics by Flint Colin
The practice of identifying and situating power relationships among/ across/ within entities
Geopolitics is the concepts of place, space, scale, region, network, and territory
Human geography is defined as the systematic study of what makes places unique and the connections and interactions between places
The spatial organization of a society reflects its politics, or relationships of power
Sense of place: collective identity tied to a particular place and is best thought of as the unique character of a place
Cosmopolitanism: attachment to no particular place
Diasporas: networks of migrants who establish connections between places across the globe
Geopolitics as the struggle over the control of spaces and places focuses upon power or the ability to achieve particular goals in the face of opposition or alternatives.
michael FOUCAULT and his 6 factors to why he believes power is everywhere
mneumonic: PYMPNT
- Power is exercised through something else
- You can always resist power
- Multiple power relations
- Power is not always repressive
- Not all exercise of power is an exercise of domination
- The relationship between power and knowledge dictates what we think is true
power and pcj
Power is the active bond between states and society as they discuss PCJ
Pcj are sites of power continuously contested by state and society
Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott
He sees legibility = central problem in statecraft and conveys how thoroughly society and the environment have been refashioned by state maps of legibility
He argues that the most tragic episodes of state-initiated social engineering originate in a combination of four elements:
1. Administrative ordering of nature and society
2. High-modernist ideology
3. An authoritarian state that is willing and able to use the full weight of its coercive power to bring these high modernist designs into being
4. A prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans
“The legibility of a society provides the capacity for large-scale social engineering, high modernist ideology provides the desire, the authoritarian state provides the determination to act on that desire, and an incapacitated civil society provides the levels of social terrain on which to build.”
He is very much against imperialism… “i am making a case against an imperial or hegemonic planning mentality that excludes the necessary role of local knowledge and know-how.”
Politics as a Vocation by Max Weber
Believes the state is considered the sole source of the ‘right’ to use violence which has three pure types to this legitimation of this obedience: traditional, charismatic, and legal
vocation = feeling of sustainability/ ones life calling
Organized domination required that human conduct be conditioned to obedience towards those masters who claim to be the bearers of legitimate power
In the end, the modern state controls the total means of political organization, which come together under a single head
Believes there are two ways of making politics one’s vocation
- Either one lives FOR politics or one lives OFF politics
“He who lives for politics makes politics his life, in an internal sense… his life has meaning in the service of a cause.”
“He who strives to make politics a permanent source of income lives off politics as a vocation, whereas he who does not do this lives for politics”
Power actually rests in the hands of those who within the organization handle the work continuously otherwise power rests in the hands of those on whom the organization in its processes depends financially or personally
Believes one cannot yet see in any way how the management of politics as a vocation will shape itself
Civil Society and the State by Simone Chambers and Jeffrey Kopstein
“Civil society is a sphere apart from the state”.
This idea is tied to the liberal constitutional order where those who are interested in the apartness of civil society are often interested in constitutional guarantees of freedom of association
It is the voluntary nature of participation, the plural quality of activities (pluralism), and the negative character of civil society’s boundaries (conceived in spatial terms)… the boundary is negative, designed primarily to keep the state out, not to keep anything in
The creation of civil society requires first the separation of the private and public spheres of authority
Civil society can also be seen as an agent that interacts with and indeed opposes the state.
Civil society can be seen as a creative and critical dialogue with the state
- The public sphere is an extension of civil society, where the ideas, interests, values, and ideologies formed within it are voiced and made politically effective
The difference between good and bad civil society is that good fosters and bad destroys the value of reciprocity.
- One of the essential values for the stability and quality of democracy, reciprocity involves the recognition of other citizens, even those with whom one has deep disagreement, as moral agents deserving of civility
Global vivid organizations do not have a single clear object whose power they are attempting to limit and from whom they are demanding a sphere of legal protection
difference between legibility and legitimacy
legibility: focuses on clarity and comprehension.
legitimacy: focuses on validity and acceptance
