Many of today’s most contentious political debates fundamentally come down to questions that concern the nature of the individual: When and to what extent should people be considered responsible for their actions? What does equality mean? How should freedom be defined?
These four videos from Then & Now explore these questions. They show that the concepts we use to constantly interpret and reinterpret the individual have a history, were invented and developed with particular purposes in mind, and are at the root of many of our most persistent political debates.
The Invention of Individual Responsibility
How much responsibility should individuals be assumed to have for their behaviours, good and bad, and how much do these behaviours result from forces out of our control? This is, at heart, a fundamentally philosophical question, and how you answer it will likely determine your views on everything from social welfare to criminal punishment to taxation. This video explains how the idea of individual responsibility was invented and developed over the 19th and 20th centuries to justify small state capitalism, enabling us to put a level of responsibility on people for their fortunes that was hitherto unheard of.
Free Will is Political
The question of whether individuals have free will has been argued over by philosophers for centuries. But it is also a political issue. This is because how much free will you believe individuals have will likely determine how much you believe we, as a society, should hold each other responsible for our actions. This video discusses the political ramifications of the free will debate, looking at the thoughts of philosophers as varied as Plato, Spinoza and P. F. Strawson.
Isaiah Berlin: Two Concepts of Liberty
What is liberty? In 1958, Isaiah Berlin identified two different forms of the concept: negative liberty and positive liberty. The former, embodied in the thought of philosophers like Locke, is freedom from coercion, interference, and authority. The latter, positive liberty, found in thinkers like Rousseau, is the freedom to be self-determined, independent, and competent. Berlin associated negative liberty more with the liberal democracies of the West, based on individual rights. In positive liberty he saw the potential for totalitarianism when it was combined with a prescriptive, singular idea of what the individual should be. As a result, Berlin’s dichotomy had immense geopolitical relevance when it was conceived at the height of the Cold War and continues to do so today.
The First Critics of Modern Life
Writing and thinking two hundred years ago, the romantics identified a set of problems that have only become more clear to us – and have only become more dire – in the time since. Witnessing modern life at its industrial inception, figures like William Blake and Friedrich Schiller provide the most clear-sighted critiques of modernity because they also saw what came before it – and therefore what was lost to us in the Industrial Revolution. This video considers modern life and weaves its way towards the conclusion the romantics ultimately came to: that nature and civilisation should not be antithetical to one another, nor merely coexist, but should become synthesised.
Who are we really? This video considers the responses of some of the most important existentialist thinkers – Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Sartre – to the question of authenticity. In their quest to find the authentic individual the existentialists had to consider what is not authentically ourselves – the masks we choose to wear, the chains imposed on us, and the bad faith we often live in – and their thinking on the issue of authenticity therefore can tell us a lot about the society we live in. In this process of stripping away what is not authentic in the modern individual, they embarked on a search for the true core of human experience.
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