Are Revolutions justified? - Professor Lea Ypi, London School of Economics
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- čas přidán 5. 02. 2024
- Authors who think about the justifiability of revolution are often divided between those who criticise it on grounds of institutional legalism and those who endorse it on grounds of idealist moralism. Moralists think that since the ends of revolution are right, revolution can never be wrong. Legalists think that since the means of revolution are wrong, revolution can never be right. In this lecture Lea Ypi revisits their arguments and offers an alternative that tries to cut across the divide. She examines revolution not in relation to the justice of individuals but grounded on a philosophical theory of history that focuses on collective progress.
Lea Ypi is Professor in Political Theory in the Government Department, London School of Economics, and Adjunct Associate Professor in Philosophy at the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. Before joining the LSE, she was a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College (Oxford) and a researcher at the European University Institute where she obtained her PhD.
Professor Ypi has degrees in Philosophy and Literature from the University of Rome, La Sapienza, and has held visiting and research positions at Sciences Po, the University of Frankfurt, the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin, the Australian National University and the Italian Institute for Historical Studies.
who came here after the Spectator article ? :)
haha ME. i guess i might have to thank him for introducing me to this amazing lecture
Great talk. I loved Lea’s comment on Imperialism and Colonialism.
Muy buena conferencia!!
great talk!
Super interesting.
💜
good ideas
@OP: Are these ever uploaded to podcast apps to just be able to listen to the talk? I like...never find myself sitting down to watch an hour of video, but I'm walking the dog for an hour every day.
So funny, I just started this and thought I will have to turn it into an mp3 instead so I can listen to it on a run.
Pay for a CZcams subscription (I think $11 a month) and you can listen to it on your phone and it won’t turn off when your phone screen times out. You also get CZcams music streaming with that package too. And NO commercials on CZcams videos.
With the brave browser you can listen to the soundfile without watching the video
Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, had we changed it we might not be facing species extinction now.
Well, democracy as we have it has never been kind to “actually selfless” people trying to become electable. It’s been a known struggle to expand who can vote (strata, women, people without property etc.). There’s too little talk about how the path towards electability is a dark parallel here.
When the aristocracy saw their loss, the party system took over. As a politically active person through many years, you are NOT vetted by the public, but indeed by the members of the party you joined - actually delegates of the publicly open part of party conference.
The ‘honest’ political wannabe (indeed an honest thinker) is a threat both to incumbent local leaders, but also for support by the corporate sector. Also, “bad news” (critique) is not good for getting votes on a national level, sadly. Media and the “need to be positive” to win, are just two factors.
Today, this goes for all large parties, as even left leaning parties need corporate support. Money decides more than we’d like to admit, even though voters know this.
Read up on this, it’s a hurdle we need to overcome. Ypi also has good insights on this matter.
Anyone can walk away and be free. It doesn't require justification. So what happens when a sizeable proportion of society decides to walk away, but the establishment refuses to allow it?
Being truly free is irreconcilable with the concept of liberty. A free agent doesn't care whether liberty is granted or not.
A truly free person doesn't understand the concept of rights and finds it incomprehensible that they can be granted by some higher authority or somehow be insisted upon as something natural or god given. To a free person, free will is simply something that is acted on or not. A truly free person will not be coerced or controlled in any way.
Truly free person isn't a detached idiot.
@@firstal3799a truly free person isn't limited by their prejudice.
Great. Kants need for a public universal morality is the biblical golden rule.
The bibble promotes terrorism and is not worth the paper it's been printed upon.
don't the legalists simultaneously reason that their perceived ends justify the means of their status-quo?
Realistically, we're all guilty here. Those that want to uphold the status quo, deep down know that the violence is happening somewhere else, outside of their sight. They just don't want it near them. The revolutionaries who are angry enough to do violence, are usually only this angry out of ignorance and inability to make sense of the world, so they lash out like children. Progress is only possible through civil conversation among scientifically literate people that understand what it takes to produce and caretake civilization. Society is a technical and technological endeavor, especially now that this involves feeding 8 Billion human beings and counting.
Acto de creacion
Arend & luxemburgo & kuhn = Robespiere
There is a bizarre set of assumptions in this talk, through which the speaker simply fails to acknowledge, or perhaps does not even recognize, that revolutions just as in wars are often simple attempts by individuals or small groups to seize power and wealth. This is why successful revolutions are so often the precursors to dictatorial or even totalitarian governments. The notion that revolutions generally represent progress seems, not naive, but historically uninformed in the extreme. [What are the results of educated people becoming so very detached from the severe empirical realities of history?]
American revolution was not. So wasn't French revolution. Even Russian revolution of 1917 was a progress from Czar autocracy. It was not a democracy but rather a rule of an intellectual bureaucracy.
@@firstal3799 Greetings FirstAI. There are at least thousands of ‘revolutions’ to choose from… most of them failed. Finding some that are not just simple power grabs is not the point. The point is how naive it is to assume that revolutions are aimed at improving things.
As for the specific revolutions you sited I would opine:
1) I agree with you on the American revolution, an obvious progressive step.
2) The French Revolution is somewhat more problematic. There is a case to be made here that The Terror indicates a murderous power-grab, using populism and democracy as a smoke screen… it’s complicated.
3) As for the 1917 Communist Revolution in Russia, I assert you are simply wrong. A murderous totalitarian regime, the murderous efficiency of which put Hitler’s efforts to shame, is in no sense “progress” over the deplorable Czarist regime it replaced. Populism and communism were smoke screens for a simple power grab, which succeeded so well that idealists still argue it was a good thing, ignoring all the butchery and oppression. The Russian empire was expanded under their revolutionary zeal, and they had preliminary plans to overthrow continental Western Europe. Russia devastated countries under its control, post WWII.
There is another huge problem the speaker had in the video: she assumed that what she views as ‘good’ and ‘progress’ are somehow absolutely true, instead of a weakly supported, wide variety of personal opinions, for which serious and cogent disagreement exists. Well informed people disagree strongly about what constitutes desirable progress, but in modern times there is much monotonic thinking among outspoken academics, with concomitant (mild?) suppression of divergent opinions. The speaker does not seem to understand this very basic idea, either. I would identify this as juvenile and/or narcissistic thinking. [FirstAI, I know this sounds like I am simply insulting the speaker, but this is not so; I am attempting to analyze why she takes such historically and philosophically untenable positions. Well, I didn’t intend to write so much. Thanks for the stimulating response. Cheers.]
@@SystemsMedicine Hi. The speaker has very carefully selected the word 'progress' and 'contribution to history' precisely because regardless of whether it is good or bad it still counts as progress.
@@notfroginthewell Hi Not Frog. The speaker explicitly states in her prepended introduction that she will be examining the “ethics” and “moral progress” in revolutions. [Someone forgot to bring their listening skills with them today. Personally, I think the application of your categories ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are also naive, but don’t take it as an insult, I’m just applying another category.]
ps On re-listening, I think the speaker is so naive as to be goofy. Before, I was merely pointing out the false dichotomy presented by the speaker, I now assert that the analysis is just incorrect, due to this false dichotomy.
Revolutions, as a rule, are not caused by "simple attempts by individuals or small groups" nor motivated by "power and wealth". They are caused by a larger number of people in the form of an immanent critique in practice whereby the people are forcing the ruling class to live up to its own principles, thus achieving progress by questioning and transforming the status quo. This is how society has always progressed. The activity you describe as "simple attempts by individuals and small groups to seize power and wealth" does not fit the model of revolution but rather a variation of the model of "reform", i.e. a violent exchange of power: they want to "reform" the system such that they are the ones in power instead if the current people in power, but they don't want to overthrow the system - the ruling power structure - as such. Ypi does not "fail to acknowledge" this. Rather, she takes some things for granted in order to get to the heart of the issue, otherwise the lecture would be significantly longer than one hour.
Is history justified?
well they're certainly making peaceful dissent impossible, so...
Really? You think peaceful dissent is tolerated to a greater extent in Tehran than UCLA? Grow up.
I should haver a degree. She just spoke obvious things.
You are open society foundation. Soros
Beautiful