1. During the period leading to the Revolutionary War,
| a. | subsidize the East India Company. |
| b. | pay for providing military protection. |
| c. | supplement the low salaries in the House of Commons. |
| d. | compensate for travel expenses of colonial representatives to Parliament. |
B, we were in much the same position in comparison to
2. For years, the imperial center in
| a. | being ruled by an inattentive king. |
| b. | preoccupied by a war with |
| c. | in the midst of quelling the Irish rebellion. |
| d. | pursuing a deliberate laissez-faire policy toward its territorial possessions. |
B
3. The British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre were defended by a pillar of
| a. | John Adams. |
| b. | James Madison. |
| c. | Thomas Jefferson. |
| d. | George Washington. |
A. the authors use this fact to illustrate the conservatism and upper-class loyalties of the Founders, but I argue it is more an illustration of Adam’s character—a belief in order and a willingness to take up unpopular causes. In Adam’s case, we have unusually good evidence of his motivations because of the extensive and intellectually serious correspondence he had with his wife, Abigail.
4. The Declaration of
| a. | James Madison. |
| b. | Thomas Jefferson. |
| c. | George Washington. |
| d. | Alexander Hamilton. |
B. BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB! Who does not know this? No one misses this. No one misses this in
5. The relationship between Congress and the states under the Articles of Confederation was much like the contemporary relationship between the
| a. | state of |
| b. | United Nations and its member states. |
| c. | General Motors and its subdivisions such as Chevrolet, Pontiac, and Cadillac. |
| d. | Disney Corporation and its media networks, production companies, and resorts. |
B. Keep this in mind. In fact, the UN is somewhat stronger institutionally than the Articles of Confederation, something to think about, for better or worse.
6. During the winter of 178687, John Adams of
| a. | set a blockade around |
| b. | relinquish control over the lands to the west. |
| c. | negotiate with each of the thirteen states separately. |
| d. | require war reparations before signing any new treaty. |
This is a key point. The theory of democracy tells you that the majority rules, but majority of what? Democratic theory has no answer for the question “of what?” There are always people that aren’t included in the group that could be added and subsets of the group where you can find a different majority.
7. Between 1783 and 1785, the
| a. | free trade policies. |
| b. | economic policies including drastic currency inflation. |
| c. | generous agricultural subsidies and severely protective tariffs. |
| d. | eminent domain activities for an extensive statewide park system. |
B. “Free trade” is an idea that wasn’t yet common, even though it had already received its classic statement in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. The government wasn’t sufficiently well organized to offer agricultural subsidies even if it had wanted to at that time. It is the idea of printing money and inflating the currency that is really the problem at this point in history. Think about whose interests are affected and how by such a policy.
As an aside to our discussion today, we mentioned Aristotle’s classifications of government. Here it is in full:
| Aristotle's Typology of Government | ||
| Rule by | Good | Bad |
| One | Monarchy | Tyranny |
| Few | Aristocracy | Oligarchy |
| Many | Polity | Democracy |
First, note that “autocracy” is not there. The reason is that Aristotle had a two dimensional classification scheme. The first dimension is just the size of the ruling class. The second dimension is whether it rules in the interests of all or of only itself.
This latter distinction is foreign to contemporary political scientists. Recall that we like to keep normative judgments, judgments about good and bad, right and wrong, out of science. Aristotle, though he was very interested in getting the objective, observable facts (empirical investigation), had no trouble with making normative judgments.
So instead of his “Monarchy/Tyranny” distinction, we have boiled it down to the one observable fact they have in common: the fact that there is only one person in charge: autocracy.
Notice, also, that democracy was in Aristotle’s Bad list, what he called the degenerate forms. Aristotle didn’t think that rule by the many was necessarily bad, but even if it started out good (Polity—recall that poly means many) it would generally go bad (democracy).
Though the founders didn’t use Aristotle’s terminology in the same way, they certainly shared his concerns, as we shall soon see.
All of the theories that we came up with had one common feature: they talked about us and them.
This is the way we usually think about politics. We assume that there is this group, and this group has goals and objectives. The group makes choices about the best way to achieve its goals. The group is affected by the world. “We” are so powerful that we ignore the world, or “they” have a religion that commands them to sacrifice themselves in freeing “their” land from infidels.
Now, as Michael recognized in his comment about our interventions into foreign civil wars, “they” are not always as homogeneous, as unified, as we might assume. But in general, we think of large groups as if they were individuals writ large. A group has feelings, like envy and anger, and the group makes decisions about the best way to achieve its goals. It has a mind that can be distracted and not pay attention to things like how much anger and envy it might have excited.
All of this is perfectly normal. It falls under the first of our 5 principles of politics—rationality. When we assume that the decisions and actions of a group can be explained by the group’s purposes and goals, we are assuming that there is a unified group, that the group is a sort of individual writ large.
We can often explain a lot by thinking in this way. There are many cases where a group of people are so unified (such as a democracy that has just been attacked) or they are under a such a tight system of command (such as a nation under a totalitarian dictatorship) that we can think of the nation or the group as one thing with goals and intentions. And we can explain the group’s behavior, whether that group is a country or members of a religion, as deriving from the group’s goals and choices about how to meet those goals.
But often we can’t. In fact, quite often we can’t. There may be some goal that all the members of the group agree on but that they can’t work together achieve because of communication difficulties or not having a way to structure incentives effectively. We call these Collective Action Problems. They may mostly agree on a policy but their decision making procedures lead to a minority’s views getting undue weight in the decision making process. Such phenomena fall under the Policy Principle. They may have formed a mental habit that they don’t re-examine critically in light of new information, leading them to get blind-sided by new developments. Or, they may have delegated a task to a sub-group, an organization, that, overtime, becomes like a living being itself with its own goals and interests, and its own distinctive way of looking at the word. This is a Principle-Agent problem. These sorts of accounts also fall under what political scientists often call the Institutional Principle. Finally, they a group may not evaluate all the options open to it because some event or choice they made in the past has closed off some options or made others more prominent than they should be on the rationality principle. We group these under the rubric or Path Dependency or, as our book calls it, History Matters.
The point of throwing all these new words at you is to help you start to explore new possibilities for explaining the actions of groups, whether they are nations, religions or loose associations of the like-minded. Over the next week we will go over what these terms mean in detail. The goal is to help you build a mental check-list, a set of possible explanations that you can bring to any new situation that you are trying to explain. None of these ideas are really new to you, but by describing them with abstract, technical terms we will help you to apply these ideas to wider sets of phenomena.
Before we do that I would like us to read two short pieces of writing by George Orwell. I have emailed you links to these articles.
In the first, Orwell talks about problems in the way the English language is used in politics and what to do about it. See if you can find one of our principles of politics in his account.
In the second he talks about Mahatma Gandhi, and in particular discusses Gandhi’s recommendation for how his principle of non-violence might have applied to the Jews of Germany in the period leading up to WWII. Would you consider his advice Rational?
