Political Thought: A Student's Guide

by Hunter Baker, David S. Dockery (Editor)

Overview

Politics affect everyone everywhere. Yet most people do not know how to communicate or think methodically (much less unemotionally) about the issues at hand. What we need is for our thinking to be grounded in the basic framework of order, freedom, justice, and equality.

Award-winning professor Hunter Baker helps political amateurs gain a foundational understanding of the subject and encourages seasoned political observers to find a fresh perspective in this book. Learn how to fruitfully consider and discuss politics, and gain a greater capacity for evaluating political proposals and the claims that go with them.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781433531224
Publisher:	Crossway
Publication date:	07/31/2012
Series:	Reclaiming the Christian Intellectual Tradition
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	128
File size:	779 KB

About the Author

Hunter Baker (PhD, Baylor University; JD, University of Houston) serves as provost and dean of faculty at North Greenville University in South Carolina. Baker also serves as an associate editor for the Journal of Markets and Morality and as a contributing editor for Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity. He is also a research fellow of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.

Hunter Baker (PhD, Baylor University; JD, University of Houston) serves as provost and dean of faculty at North Greenville University in South Carolina. Baker also serves as an associate editor for the Journal of Markets and Morality and as a contributing editor for Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity. He is also a research fellow of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.

David S. Dockery (PhD, University of Texas System) serves as president of the International Alliance for Christian Education as well as president and distinguished professor of theology at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Previously, he served as president of Union University and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He is a much-sought-after speaker and lecturer, a former consulting editor for Christianity Today, and the author or editor of more than forty books. Dockery and his wife, Lanese, have three married sons and seven grandchildren.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

BEGINNING WITH THE FAMILIAR

Aristotle famously identified the family as the primary unit of political society. One might be tempted to object and insist on the primacy of the individual, but the Greek philosopher's reasoning was that there is no society without the family. Hillary Clinton wrote a book on the theme of an African proverb that says, "It takes a village to raise a child." Aristotle insisted, more basically, that it takes a family to form the basis of the broader society.

Whether one centers political analysis on the individual, the family, the village, the nation-state, or the world community, the family is the first place in which we must interact with each other. It is our first society. The novelist Pat Conroy once said that each divorce results in the death of a small civilization. And he is right.

In part because of these reasons, I would like to begin our thinking about political thought with some personal reflections on family. My other motivation is that this is an introductory text. Many people are intimidated by phrases such as political thought or political philosophy. If we begin by talking about something virtually all of us can understand, such as the family, we can take a subject that may seem overly complicated or cerebral and make it more accessible. Families have features such as leadership, order, fairness, debate, restrictions, coercion, and freedoms. There are priorities, decisions, boundaries, budgets, and many other aspects that mirror political life. Rather than speak of families generally, I propose to talk about mine and the one in which my wife was raised. Through our experiences, you will be able to spot some fundamental ideas about politics.

I was raised in a family that had and has its own way of doing things. In this family, I had a great deal of freedom to decide what I was going to do. I don't mean that I determined my own bedtime or made my own rules, but rather that I had the discretion to figure out what to do with my time outside of musts such as attending school.

While our family often ate together, sometimes we didn't. On occasion, my folks would eat and talk in the kitchen while my sister and I ate sandwiches of our own heterodox design in front of the television (white bread, sliced ham, and A-1 steak sauce!). There were large unstructured patches of time available in any given day. I spent many happy hours alone in my room reading comic books, building with Legos, creating tents out of sheets and folding chairs, and even writing stories at my little desk. Other times, I wandered outside just looking around or playing games of imagination. Through sheer repetition over long hours, I taught myself how to play basketball by heaving up endless shots toward the hoop that seemed so far away when I began. I learned tennis in a similar fashion, beating fuzzy green spheres into the masonry on the side of our house and learning how to predict their rebound.

There were also more structured periods. I often had baseball practices and games to attend. My father and I regularly played catch for about thirty minutes or an hour after he came home from work. Friends and I frequently organized pickup games of football (we played it full contact with no pads or helmets) in each other's yard.

The overriding theme of my childhood was bounded freedom. There were limits all around me. I had to finish homework. I had to be in bed by a certain time (reading if not sleeping). I had to go to school. A number of family activities were not optional. But what I remember so clearly was the great liberty I had to pursue my interests and desires. My family was a happy one, though it bucked the typical image by being one in which each member had a lot of time to him- or herself. I loved that.

The life I had as a child is a good example of a political idea that has had special resonance in America. The idea is ordered liberty. Ordered liberty means that to the degree a person is willing to govern himself, he can be free of a lot of external control over the details of his life. In other words, part of the reason I may have had a lot of liberty in my childhood is that I had little tendency to misuse it. (Committing acts of mischief never held any attraction for me. My internal moral compass was fairly strong.) In this way of thinking, we move toward the true meaning of liberty. We tend to think of liberty as a synonym for freedom or an absolute release from constraints of any kind, but to do so is to fail to think deeply enough. It is true that words such as liberty and confinement are effectively opposites, but it is also true that "liberty" is often opposed to another word, which is license. Used in this way, license refers to a wrong use of freedom or a wrong direction of human agency. Liberty implies a correct use of freedom.

Before I go further, I must admit that there are some drawbacks to the type of upbringing I describe. My folks did not exercise a great deal of control over the books I read, shows I watched, music I listened to, or videos my friends and I rented. (The one real constraint I recall is my father personally asking me not to see the film The Exorcist because of the disturbing images he recalled from the movie. Without question, I honored the request and still do.) In the course of the high school years, I probably consumed a lot of books and other media that were less than appropriate for a young person. And that kind of thing, of course, is one of the costs of freedom.

My wife, on the other hand, grew up in a different sort of family. Her comings and goings were more limited. Her parents made firm rules about things such as the kind of music she could listen to. Popular music in the style of Top 40 rock and roll was off-limits. They had a much stronger bent toward group activity. Freedom was less of a value than living out a certain type of excellence that was centered on being a good Christian. For her family, this meant avoiding a variety of influences that were viewed as corrupting or worldly. It also meant choosing to spend a great deal of time doing things such as memorizing Scripture. The family also put a lot of work into traveling together and developing a record of memorable experiences as a group. Unsurprisingly, they achieved what they set out to do. They are a tightly bound unit with an incredible collection of slide shows from their journeys!

Based on the description I've offered so far, you can see that my wife's family was not about something like ordered liberty in the way mine was. In the Baker family individuals had wide discretion in how to order their lives as long as they avoided crashing certain boundary lines. Instead, her family identified a specific type of excellence centered on group participation and Christianity. The parents provided substantial guidance (and good, old-fashioned parental coercion) in that direction with the goal of producing the desired result. If we were to associate a political ideal with her family, it would be something like civic excellence or civic idealism.

Today when we visit her family, I experience a bit of culture shock (something that is not unusual for those who cross family lines via marriage). Now, the dissonance I feel is not centered on the Christian confession that I have come to embrace. The trouble for me is that for a period of several days I have to reconcile my own desire for broad discretion and liberty with my wife's family ideal of group participation. I want to wander, go off by myself for a couple of hours, and just make sure I get back for the important parts. To me, that sort of accountability to the group seems perfectly reasonable. To them, especially the women, my model represents preferring the self to the group and rejecting the collective effort to make memories together.

My wife experiences a parallel but opposite sort of disconnect when she is the Martin among the Bakers. We get together at some rented cabin or at my parents' home, where people pretty much break off and do what they want. There are times when we all gather for some meal or activity, but there is a great deal of spinning away from the nucleus as individuals or subgroups and charting separate paths in the context of the overall family vacation. Having grown up in a very different type of family, she feels as though the activities are too fragmented and that there is not enough togetherness. For her, love expresses itself through careful planning and cohesiveness, but my family tends to feel happy and reunited sharing the same general area and periodically doing something as a group.

You may be reading this and thinking the description is very personal and not really related to politics, but what I am describing in terms of different types of families and the ways they interact is the same fundamental dynamic that is present in politics. Both types of people (and other types!) live together in political communities. The same values and instincts contend with one another. Should we all be highly plugged into a community collectivity with our lives tightly wound together (often in nonoptional ways)? Or should we place a very high value on individual discretion? What is more important?

As the next short chapter will demonstrate, families are not synonymous with political societies and should not be confused as such. However, the dynamics of freedom, discretion, group activity, individual and joint identification of ideals, supervision, and control all apply in both the family and the political community. For that reason, thinking about how things were in your family is not a bad way of beginning to evaluate political life.

CHAPTER 2

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FAMILIES AND POLITICAL COMMUNITIES

The society grows directly out of the family. Aristotle described a process wherein the family spins off other families. This group of families becomes a village. Villages eventually merge into towns. We can see the merger between paternal power and political power in the similarity between the word for relatives (kin) and the word for the chief of the race or tribe (king).

Indeed, one of the great political problems for the ages has been to determine the degree to which political power should be similar to paternal/maternal power. At the height of the power of monarchies, kings and queens certainly did consider themselves to be something like fathers and mothers of their people. And just as children do not understand everything that is necessary for them to grow and flourish, so, too (the logic went), did the subjects of monarchs lack the capacity to act on their own behalf.

Though throughout much of Western civilization people have enjoyed certain rights that bear some similarity to what we think of as modern democracy, it was not until fairly recently (historically speaking) that the hold of monarchical and aristocratic power was decisively broken in the West. In the wave of breaking away, John Locke argued that paternal power and political power are not the same thing. Grown human beings are not comparable to children in their capacities relative to parents. Instead, they are mature, rational creatures very much like those who would claim the right to rule them. So, though the political society comes into existence through and is sustained by the family, it is not synonymous with the family. Citizens are not children and are not equally subject to coercion (even in their interest) in the same way as children are.

And so, in terms of our historical drift, we have moved away from the tendency (whether enforced or organic) to view political power as paternal power. We look at ourselves as free and rational individuals capable of making decisions about the community matters that affect us and about how we should lead our own lives. But the question of how we will live together (an alternate phrasing of Francis Schaeffer's famous How Shall We Then Live?) remains.

Free individuals still have to make choices about community life as their paths almost inevitably cross. Indeed, we find that we can better satisfy our wants and needs within the context of mutual relationship with other human beings. Thomas Paine called the voluntary phase of this relationship "society" and referred to the necessary evil of the involuntary part of living together as "government." The question boils down to something like, How big do we want this involuntary part to be?

CHAPTER 3

STATES OF NATURE AND SOCIAL CONTRACTS

I began our consideration of the matter of political theory — which some find intimidating — through discussion of the family. We can all understand the family.

There is another device that can help us understand political thought. Many theorists have employed it. The device is political reasoning based on the state of nature. In other words, what kind of politics would human beings have if they lost all of their encrustations of family status, wealth, and tradition? What if we could wipe the slate clean? How would human beings move from nature to government?

One of the most popular television programs of the last decade, Lost, began with a jetliner crashing on a mysterious island in the middle of the Pacific. Some of the episodes dealt with issues of how strangers stripped of the accoutrements of civilization would live together. (Don't worry: there are no serious spoilers here for those who intend to watch the show.)

To give an example, consider a character introduced to us as "Sawyer." After the plane crashes and people are recovering from shock and taking care of each other, Sawyer rummages through the remains of the aircraft and luggage and creates a cache of medicine, tools, books, and other items that he keeps to himself. He forcefully insists these items are his property. One of the fundamental tensions in the early shows revolves around his claim. Others don't recognize his claim as a morally legitimate one. Sawyer resorts to the threat of force to keep what he has taken. The situation portrayed is useful in helping us think about property. What is it? When do we think someone has a right to it? What makes property claims legitimate?

In another story line, one of the characters decides to try to reform Sawyer. He tells him that the other members of the mini-civilization are thinking of banishing him from their midst. Sawyer is a hard man who doesn't see things others' way. At first, he intends to simply leave because he will only live on his own terms. Then he realizes that he may actually need others to help him live. He tries to fish and comes up empty-handed. Upon recognizing that he is somewhat dependent on other members of the community, he makes efforts to show kindness and avoid banishment. The story here teaches us that we are not fully self-contained individuals. Yes, we have our own minds and abilities, but we do not truly live apart from others. We need each other in a variety of ways, many of them never realized because of how much we take for granted. It begins when we are children, who need our parents, and continues throughout our lives as the fruits of cooperation make it easier for us both to survive and to achieve our own goals. What does this interdependence mean for government? What are the just bounds of community imperatives? What are the rights of the individual?

THE SOCIAL CONTRACT THINKERS

The famed social contract thinkers — Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau — used the state of nature as a device for figuring out the just claims of the state against the freedom of the individual. Social contracts are cessions of some portion of personal sovereignty by individuals to a government in exchange for the superior protection of the rest of their rights and freedoms. We leave the state of nature to enter political society. While it is true that we give up our autonomy, we gain certain protections that should be worth the trade.

Their efforts were driven by a couple of important social developments. All three men came from a Europe that was marred by the religious wars that followed the Reformation. Although it is true that the Reformation successfully curbed many of the abuses that the Catholic church of the time engaged in and brought about a more democratized Christianity in which many could access the Scriptures, one of the negative results was a degree of political destabilization. The reforms completely disrupted the old formula of one king, one people, and one church. At times, the Catholic Church and monarchs had battled each other, but the Reformation complicated things further. Now, different nations had different churches. Rulers embraced versions of the Christian faith that were sometimes at odds with the preferences of many of the people. Tolerance of religious differences was not a characteristic of European culture at the time. Persecution and war were the preferred methods of restoring equilibrium to the old order.

In addition, Europeans were dealing with the claims of monarchs as they had for centuries. To what degree are people empowered to choose their ruler? Are monarchs free to hand their authority down to heirs? Do rulers have power over matters such as religion, publication, and opinion? By stripping politics down to its bare essence through the device of the state of nature, these thinkers (Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau) sought to solve the problems of religious difference and to determine the justice of claims of rulers.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Political Thought"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Hunter Baker.
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All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Series Preface,
Author's Preface,
Acknowledgments,
SECTION 1: WAYS TO BEGIN THINKING ABOUT POLITICS,
1 Beginning with the Familiar,
2 The Difference between Families and Political Communities,
3 States of Nature and Social Contracts,
SECTION 2: MAJOR THEMES,
4 Order, but Not Order Alone,
5 On Freedom (and Liberty),
6 Justice,
7 A Brief Attempt at Describing Good Politics,
SECTION 3: ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS ON THE CHRISTIAN CONTRIBUTION,
8 Focus on the Christian Contribution,
9 Concluding Thoughts,
Questions for Reflection,
Glossary,

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Political Thought is a wonderful introduction to the study of politics. Hunter Baker writes as a true teacher, offering not only rigor and clarity but also a personal touch. He shows his reader that the study of political thought is not just an abstract exercise for dreary academics, but an application of practical reason to the question of how we are to live together in freedom and order to advance the common good. While introducing the student to the greatest political philosophers in history, Professor Baker takes great care in showing the indelible marks these thinkers have left on our civilization, and how they, for good or ill, have shaped the way Christians should critically assess their place in civil society and its political institutions.”
—Francis J. Beckwith, Professor of Philosophy and Church-State Studies and Associate Director of the Graduate Program in Philosophy, Baylor University

“What is the purpose of politics? How should we order our lives together? In lively and engaging prose, Hunter Baker surveys the answers that great thinkers have given to these enduring questions. His book is an excellent, accessible introduction to the fundamental themes of political discourse—and to why these matter for the rising generation.”
—George H. Nash, author, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945

“Hunter Baker provides an accessible and insightful primer on the various streams of thought and action at play in American public life. A notable merit of Baker’s work is that it examines clear alternatives while at the same time doing justice to the dynamic variety in and between different schools of thought. Baker paints a clear and compelling picture of the political landscape and in so doing provides a valuable service both for those learning about politics for the first time and for those seeking a refresher and a summary of political thought.”
—Jordan J. Ballor, Research Fellow, Acton Institute for the Study of Religion & Liberty; author, Ecumenical Babel