Wednesday--American Revolution Quiz

1. During the period leading to the Revolutionary War, England was attempting to extract revenues from its American colonies in order to

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 Britain as we often accuse our allies in of being in in relation to us—sponging off their defense expenditures.

2. For years, the imperial center in London had left its American colonists to enjoy an immense amount of local control and home rule because the British empire was

a.	being ruled by an inattentive king.
b.	preoccupied by a war with France.
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 Boston society and future president of the United States,

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.

Adams’ willingness to take on unpopular causes followed him and his descendents. His presidency ended in one term, mainly because of his unpopular decision to head off war with France. His son, JQA, who was President from 1824 to 1828 was similarly universally admired and universally disliked. He is depicted in the largely accurate movie Amistad (spelling?) defending mutinous slaves. His grandson, Henry, was a diplomat and famous contrarian. His memoirs, The Education of Henry Adams, is included in the University of Chicago’s Great books series of the 100 or so greatest books of all time. I don’t know if it is that good but he is a great writer. The Adams family still lives in the same place. They are independently wealthy but still, as a family, have a sense of duty. His 7^th generation grandson volunteered to join the Army as a helicopter pilot. He was killed there last year.

4. The Declaration of Independence was written by

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 Kyrgyzstan!

5. The relationship between Congress and the states under the Articles of Confederation was much like the contemporary relationship between the

a.	state of Louisiana and its parishes.
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 Massachusetts was sent to negotiate a new treaty with the British to cover disputes left over from the war. The British government responded that it would

a.	set a blockade around Boston Harbor.
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 Rhode Island legislature, dominated by representatives of small farmers, artisans, and shopkeepers, frightened businessmen and property owners throughout the country by instituting

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.

Revolution

Ok, now we start our first substantive chapter on the American Revolution. Try to actually have an opinion in what you write this week. Don't feel you just have to tell me what you read, make a comment on what you read.

This week

This week we wrap up the principles of politics and start looking at actual cases, in particular, the American Revolution. Before we do that, we have one day of Tocqueville, and an introduction to the alternative to the rational actor model, bounded rationality, or, as Lindbloom calls it in his famous article, "the science of muddling through."

Both of these authors are great to read and I hope they both, in particular Tocqueville, become life-long friends.

Quiz Results

The class average on the quiz was 59%. Actually, that is better than the first quiz usually is.

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.

Syllabus and Updates

I have updated the Syllabus up to the midterm. I want to leave open the possibility of changing course once we see how things go.

Let me apologize for all the fumbling around I did in class looking for quotes. I took the wrong volume of Orwell with me this morning.

It is important to note that Orwell’s point isn’t that Gandhi’s methods are ineffective, simply that they might not work with a power less liberal than Great Britain:

“It is difficult to see how Gandhi's methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again. Without a free press and the right of assembly, it is impossible not merely to appeal to outside opinion, but to bring a mass movement into being, or even to make your intentions known to your adversary. Is there a Gandhi in Russia at this moment? And if there is, what is he accomplishing?”

The other main point is that being “human” and being a saint are two different and, ultimately, incompatible things. Here is the passage from the essay on Gandhi I was looking for:

“The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals. doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid.”


Let’s also keep in mind the distinction that we drew in class discussion between rationality in the economist’s sense of choosing the means most likely to achieve a given set of ends, and rationality in the sense of having reasonable ends (or goals) in the first place. This is a key concept in the textbook and one that that lies behind most all of the authors' analysis of politics.

As we begin reading the book, keep in mind that even though this is a textbook, we want to read it critically. That is to say, we don’t want to take their word for anything. They won’t lie, but they may not tell us the whole truth, and what they may sincerely believe to be true might not be so.

Our text has a very specific take on political science, not so much in the sense of being liberal or conservative (though I suspect you will catch which side of that divide they are on soon enough), but in the methodolocial sense. They are writing from the point of view of the dominant school of thought in American political science which is commonly known as “Rational Choice.” It is an attempt to apply the sort of reasoning that grows out of economics to politics, particularly in the sense of “means-ends” rationality that we discussed today in class. Keep this in mind as you are reading.

Feel free to focus on whatever strikes a chord with you in the reading in your reflection papers. Remember that I want one per week from each of you. You can post for any day you please, but it must be posted by 6:00 to count. Also, try to read what your classmates write as well.

Finally, make sure your name is on your posting. The computer only puts up your email name.

A New Semester Has Begun!

Ok, so we didn’t have time to get to this in class discussion, but here is what I wanted to say about the theories that we came up with.

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?