The Individual and Utopia

A Multidisciplinary Study of Humanity and Perfection

Clint Jones, Cameron Ellis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317027577
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Central to the idea of a perfect society is the idea that communities must be strong and bound together with shared ideologies. However, while this may be true, rarely are the individuals that comprise a community given primacy of place as central to a strong communal theory. This volume moves away from the dominant, current macro-level theorising on the subject of identity and its relationship to and with globalising trends, focusing instead on the individual's relationship with utopia so as to offer new interpretive approaches for engaging with and examining utopian individuality. Interdisciplinary in scope and bringing together work from around the world, The Individual and Utopia enquires after the nature of the utopian as citizen, demonstrating the inherent value of making the individual central to utopian theorizing and highlighting the methodologies necessary for examining the utopian individual. The various approaches employed reveal what it is to be an individual yoked by the idea of citizenship and challenge the ways that we have traditionally been taught to think of the individual as citizen. As such, it will appeal to scholars with interests in social theory, philosophy, literature, cultural studies, architecture, and feminist thought, whose work intersects with political thought, utopian theorizing, or the study of humanity or human nature.

PART I
Contextualizing the Individual and Utopia

Chapter 1
The Individual’s Place in Paradise: The Limits, Promise, and Role of Reason in Modern Conceptions of Utopia¹

Charles Joshua Horn

Introduction

The dominant theme during the enlightenment throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the use of reason rather than faith in establishing a foundation for how to create a better world. This theme manifested itself in science, politics, literature, art, and philosophy. In each case, rationality was touted as a superior guide to the betterment of humanity. Generally speaking, this is a fairly simple concept to grasp—scientists, political theorists, authors, artists, and philosophers all privileged the power of the intellect over the emotions, superstition, and dogmatism. In practice, this meant that if one desired to construct a better world, the tools one needed to use were those of which anyone could potentially have access. Thus, the authority of church and state, which traditionally had come from God alone, started to fade in favor of egalitarian beliefs that everyone should have access to knowledge and that reason ought to be the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong, good and evil, and virtue and vice.

An interesting consequence of the enlightenment was that their utopian ideals were forged in the fires of reason. Unfortunately, the use of reason in all intellectual endeavors, though ubiquitous during this period, was not a stable concept. It was not as if reason began to be privileged on a certain date in history, ran its course, and then fell out of fashion on another date. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed the rise and fall of reason as the necessary guide for the creation of a better world. This chapter will trace the trajectory of the priority of reason by looking through the lens of some of the most important movements in political philosophy during the enlightenment. In the first section, I will articulate some of the major guiding principles of the Social Contract Tradition as it originated, developed, and was ultimately criticized, all on the grounds for what reason was capable, and ultimately, incapable, of understanding. In the second section, I will demonstrate how reason was taken to be the necessary epistemological condition for morality, and by extension, certain conceptions of the state. In the third section, I will explain how reason was importantly limited toward the end of the enlightenment and that despite these limitations, utopian ideals were still thought to be not only possible, but necessary.

Natural Law and the Social Contract Tradition

The first part of our journey begins with the single most important political theory to develop during the enlightenment, namely, the social contract tradition. Although this theory is much older than the modern landscape,² there is little doubt that the ideas prevalent in the enlightenment helped the theory find a broad audience. Social contract theory is the tradition according to which justice, morality, and legitimate political authority are derived from the mutual agreement of rational agents. The theory is both complex and the details and the development is subtle as the system progressed from one thinker to the next; but, in each case, the agreement that the agents come to is one that is substantiated by reason. Needless to say, one of the intricate details which developed is an understanding of which particular rights that reason establishes. To understand which rights we have according to contract theory, we must begin on the most foundational level, that is, through human nature. Through human nature, we can begin to understand differing conceptions of utopia. Put simply, human nature establishes what reason demands; reason guides us to rights; and the protection of rights informs the organization and obligations of the sovereign in utopia. The differences in each step will ripple down the line until we have variations in conceptions of the ideal world order.

The first truly dominant defense of social contract theory came in the thought of Thomas Hobbes. He articulated, primarily in his 1651 masterpiece, Leviathan, that political authority derived from the consent of those governed. Based upon the natural progression to utopia, we should begin with his depiction of human nature. Hobbes held that humanity in its natural state would reside in a perpetual condition of fear. This fear, he argued, was a necessary consequence of the natural equality amongst humanity. Unlike Aristotle, who had maintained that humanity was in a natural state of inequality,³ Hobbes believed that the fear from natural equality was substantiated by our equal capacity to harm one another. He writes,

Nature has made men so equal, in the faculties of the body, and mind; as that though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind than another; yet when all is reckoned together, the difference between man, and man, is not so considerable as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit, to which another may not pretend, as well as he. For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination, or by confederacy with others, that are in the same danger with himself.⁴

It is easy to imagine then why the perpetual condition of fear would lead to a state which he calls “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”⁵ It is precisely because this state of nature is so horrendous that Hobbes believed that humanity would pull together to consent to be ruled by a sovereign authority which could keep them safe. Reason, therefore, is the catalyst for removing oneself from the state of nature. Reason compels us to “seek peace, and follow it”⁶ and to “lay down this right to all things; and be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himself.”⁷ Without some form of political coercion to take us away from the state of natural inequality and fear, seeking peace and surrendering rights is impossible. According to Hobbes, there must be someone to enforce the contract. Therefore, sovereign authority is established to provide security to those who consent to be governed.

To be sure, the sovereign could provide other sorts of protections, but at minimum, the role of the sovereign is to protect the life of the governed. Further, once sovereignty is established by the consent of the people, authority is irrevocable. There are no protections for breaches of contract, as it were. This must follow, Hobbes argues, because once the rights are surrendered, they can never be reclaimed. In other words, revolution against an unjust authority is simply politically impossible and morally impermissible.

It is precisely the inability to justify revolution that we see one of the first major shifts in social contract theory. John Locke famously articulated in the Second Treatise on Government that revolution was justified if and only if there was a breach of contract between the sovereign and citizenry.⁸ It should not be overlooked that Locke is able to make such a claim because the contract is not between the citizenry alone, as it was in the case in Hobbes’s system. Instead, Locke maintained that no rational agent would consent to abandon all of their rights for the mere promise of protection. And certainly no rational agent would consent to be ruled by an authority that has no rules. Locke writes, “As if when men quitting the state of nature entered into society, they agreed that all of them but one should be under the restraint of laws, but that he should still retain all the liberty of the state of nature, increased with power, and made licentious by impunity. This is to think that men are so foolish that they take care to avoid what mischiefs may be done them by polecats or foxes, but are content, nay think it safety, to be devoured by lions.”⁹ So, for Locke, although the sovereign exists due to the consent of the governed, there is nevertheless a built in protection in that the contract exists between the ruler and the ruled.

Locke could not be clearer; it is contrary to reason to consent to be governed when the resulting state of affairs would be more dangerous. Furthermore, Locke does not envisage a state of nature quite as perilous as that of Hobbes. Whereas Hobbes held that the original state was a war of all against all, Locke defended a view according to which the state of nature is merely “men living together according to reason, without a common superior on Earth with authority to judge between them.”¹⁰ To be sure, it would be incorrect to attribute to Hobbes a position wherein the state of nature is not governed by reason. For both Hobbes and Locke, reason is the guiding principle of the state of nature and ultimately the justification for the state. The difference is how each figure believed that reason would be used in the absence of an objective arbiter. Whereas Hobbes believed that human nature would compel us to be relatively independent because other agents are seen as potential threats, Locke believed that the state does not arise from fear, but instead from convenience. According to Locke, the state of nature is still governed by the law of reason. It just happens to be the case that it is undesirable to always be the executor of the natural law.

Social contract theory is further developed and defended by many other thinkers in the early modern period, most notably by the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Instead of providing even more details about the development of the view, it would more fruitful for our purposes to examine one of the most scathing criticisms of this popular political theory. David Hume, the famous empiricist and skeptic, is most well-known for his contributions to epistemology and moral philosophy. However, like Aristotle, Hume’s political philosophy is a natural progression from his ethical theory. Hume was adamant than any conclusions that we can draw about the world, whether they be metaphysical, moral, or political, must be on the basis of our observations in the world; put differently, all knowledge must ultimately derive from experience.

Hume’s empiricism manifests most notably in his famous critique of causation and religion. Hume argued that, strictly speaking, we do not observe causation in the world. We merely observe a series of events and on the basis of that observation, we conclude that one event causes another event. For Hume, we judge causality by habit or custom—not by reason. Hume writes, “When it is asked, What is the nature of all our reasonings concerning matter of fact? The proper answer seems to be, that they are founded on the relation of cause and effect. When again it is asked, What is the foundation of all our reasonings and conclusions concerning that relation? It may be replied in one word, experience.”¹¹

Similarly, Hume criticizes religion on empirical grounds too. He argued that traditional a posteriori arguments for the existence of God failed. The most influential a posteriori arguments for the existence of God are the cosmological and teleological arguments. Cosmological arguments all begin with observations of the world and then try to work backward to a first cause. Teleological arguments also begin with observations of the world, but then also try to demonstrate that the world was designed by a deity. Hume criticizes cosmological arguments on the grounds that we have no basis to conclude tha...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Contextualizing the Individual and Utopia
• Part II Mind, Body, Soul, and the Utopian Individual
• Part III Marginalized and Alternative Interpretations of the Individual and Utopia
• Index