World Order Final

5/4/26

What is the aim of Leviathan by Hobbes?

How to produce peace instead of war.

Once one has dismantled society, one is left only with its constituent parts, what are these parts?

Individuals

Hobbes makes an assumption about human purpose. What is it?

Self preservation in the context of resource scarcity, and will do what is necessary to ensure it, even at high costs to others.

Absolute natural equality

Nature is not hierarchical, we are all equal. Basically, class, gender, race does not matter, we all still have the power to kill each other.

What is the rational response to the laws of nature?

To recognize the right of nature and natural liberty.

How to we rational beings escape the state of nature?

By obeying the laws of nature, we form a covenant to each uphold a social contract.

How does Hobbes’ view differ from Aristotelian (Thucydidean, Machiavellian) notion of humans as political animals?

For Aristotle, citizens are the state (republicanism). For Hobbes, the state conjures the citizens (prior to the sovereign state, in the state of nature, individuals make up a “multitude”.

What power does the soverign hold?

Absolute power. They monopolize the legitimate use of violence and thus keep the peace.

What can the sovereign not do?

Kill you

What does Hobbes take this assumption about human purpose to imply?

Absolute natural equality

What is the rational response to the laws of nature?

Right of nature (held by every person to preserve their own life) and natural liberty (the absence of external impediments)

How to rational beings escape the state of nature?

The social contract

What does the rational social contract establish?

The sovereign power

What one right do we keep when we “covenant” to give absolute power to the sovereign?

The right not to be killed

Why must the sovereign be all powerful?

Otherwise, we regress to the state of nature.

On rational reflection, individuals must abandon their own judgement concerning what is right, true, as long as others do what?

Do likewise, each individual aligns their judgements with those of all other individuals, the social contract establishes a “civil society”.

If this is how the rational individual acts, how does the Hobbes Foole act?

They act irrationally. They ignore the “light of reason”, proceeding to increase their own power by trying to seize the power of sovereignty and become the sovereign.

What are the means of survival?

We have a natural right to these means insofar as they are necessary to the ends of survival.

According to Hobbes, this law of nature is revealed to us by our inherent capacity for?

Reason

For Locke, in the state of nature, victims of violations must enforce the law of nature themselves, which is unsustainable. So, how do rational individuals respond?

Social contract

Why is Locke’s definition of social contract different than Hobbes?

Locke’s is milder, the outcome is not as absolutist.

What does the social contract establish?

Political power

If read NARROWLY, Locke is a founder of a distinct strand of liberalism, known as?

Libertarianism

If read BROADLY, Locke is a founder of another distinct strand of liberalism known as?

Progressive liberalism

What does the social contract establish?

Sovereign political power

What is government power limited to?

Upholding natural law (so natural rights) for the public good.

Life, liberty, health, and property are our civil interests. How do we defend them?

By voluntarily contracting to give sovereign power to the state, “licensing power”.

What does the social contract oblige citizens (the contractors) to do?

To obey state commands when they conform to natural rights and to resist state commands when they undermine natural rights.

Locke was religious. For him, religion is concerned with what end?

Salvation

Territorial dynastic states gave way to what kind of states?

Nation states

The treaties of westphalia establish 2 principles of international law, what are they?

Equal sovereignty and non-intervention.

3 periods of modern history of IR

1648-1789: Treaty of Westphalia and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. 1794-1914: End of French revolution, congress of Vienna, WWI. 1919-1939: Treaty of Versailles, fascism, liberal international order

Relations between nations between kings and princes of different nations. Making international law what?

A set of rules governing the mutual relations of individuals in their capacity as rulers.

What shift in international order took place in the second period (1794-1914)?

A compromise was struct between political and economic power, transforming various national economies into a single world economy (birth of capitalism).

How does Carr qualify “democratic appeal”?

The nation/people did not include all the people (not common people).

Nationalism does a lot of work to smooth over something Aristotle and Machiavelli in particular would have recognized, what might it be?

Conflict within the nation between the few and the many.

Carr asks why nationalism did not prompt more instead of less international conflict?

Because it upheld international solidarity. The rights of nations were consciously derived from the rights of man.

Mercantilism gave way to what economic doctrine?

Laissez-faire.

What kind of actor is the UN?

A non state actor (intergovernmental organization).

What are the main purposes of the UN?

To maintain peace and security, to develop and sustain relations among nations, to promote cooperation and human rights, and to harmonize actions toward the attainment of these ends.

There are 2 things the UN Charter bars the organization from doing that are directly inherited from the Treaty of Westphalia. What are they?

Attempting to secure the goal of collective security in violation of the principle of nonintervention and to promote economic prosperity at the expense of the principle of the sovereign equality of states.

Why has NATO expanded?

The collapse of the USSR and the Warsaw pact nation-states abandonment of Stalinist communism.

Under UDHR, many civil and political rights groups and social and economic rights protect individuals. How?

By facilitating collective exercise of civil and political rights, while sustaining individual rights as rights that no collective or individual can infringe upon.

What are human rights?

Not just negative, human rights protect individuals from coercion.

Francis Fukuyama’s Thesis

The end of the cold war signifies the end of history.

Hegel/Marx arguement

Politics, economics, and social life foster inherent contradictions. Over historical time, these contradictions work themselves out. This contradiction-free post-historical world is the new universal homogeneous state.

Fukuyama follows Hegel’s interpreter Alexandre Kojeve to label the state that emerges at the end of history?

The Universal homogenous state

Are there any fundamental contradictions in human life that cannot be resolved in the context of modern liberalism, that would be resolvable by an alternative political economic structure?

Fukuyama thinks not

Which state most successfully resolves the Hegel/Marx contradiction? When does it begin to do so?

The US after 1991.

There are 2 potential contradictions that threaten to end the end of history, what are they?

Religious fundamentalism and nationalism.

Can oligarchy and democracy coexist peacefully?

Yes

Oligarchs

Actors who personally command or control massive concentrations of wealth.

What is wealth?

The most potent lootable or material power resource

What kind of actors are oligarchs?

Actors who personally control massively concentrated wealth.

What dimension of material power is more revelant to political power, wealth or income?

Wealth because large wealth holdings can command political influence even when income is low or even negative.

To what degree and on which issues to oligarchs exert influence over government politics?

International economic policy, monetary policy, and tax policy.

What are the 4 main mechanisms of oligarchic influence in the US?

Lobbying, electoral impact, opinion shaping, constitutional rules.

What does oligarchic power rely on?

Concentrated wealth

How does oligarchic power differ from elite power?

Concentrated wealth is one thing and self sustaining. Elite power varies and is not self sustaining.

What is the core political project of oligarchs?

Wealth defense

How does the rise of the modern (democratic) state alter oligarchies core political project?

By relieving oligarchs of the need to rule directly.

What does the concept of oligarchy describe?

A political process in which oligarchs deploy their wealth to counter threats to their property and income.

What are the 4 major types of oligarchies?

Warring, ruling, sultanist, and civil

What are the 2 key dimensions along which the 4 types differ?

Direct or indirect rule and fragmented, personalistic, or collective, institutionalized rule

What for Deneen are the 2 dimensions of liberalism?

Classical rightwing and progressive left wing liberalism.

What has happened since the end of history?

Classical and progressive liberals have tacitly agreed that there can be no alternative to liberal ideology.

What is Deneen’s central thesis?

Liberalism (right or left) is no longer viable.

What 3 features does Deneen identify with the success, so failure of liberalism?

Liberalism promotes anti culture, assaults on the liberal arts and humanities, and a new aristocracy, a “liberalocracy”.

Postliberalism

Conservative and liberal beliefs are similar

Liberalocracy

Liberalism today is undergoing a legitimation crisis because of its success in producing a new aristocracy.

What is the core feature of populism?

Charismatic, strong leader who channels anger of the virtuous true people against a malignant elite.

What 2 principles does the liberal democratic form of government unify?

Democracy, a mode of government, and liberalism which defines the zone within which government may operate legitimately.

Objectives of liberalism

1. Elevates individualism and denies what is given and unchosen so cannot accommodate cultural traditionalism.

2. Embraces a debased account of freedom, so unable to distinguish between liberty and license, virtue and vice.

3. It is a form of cultural imperialism, forcing the proponents of traditional values to abandon their beliefs.

4. Liberals cannot be nationalists

5. Requires endorsement of liberal internationalism

6. Endorses propositions that history inexorably progresses toward liberalism