أفكار عصر التنوير وأنواع الديمقراطية منهج الحكومة الأمريكية الوحدة 1 الدرس 1

Hello. This is the first conversation about AP Government and Politics course. And today I'll briefly be talking about unit one and the beginning of unit one of the course. Now unit one as you all know is entitled Foundations of American Democracy and the first part of it which is covered in lesson one is about the philosophical ideas and the Enlightenment history that impacted the early thinking of the American nation, something that leads to the Declaration of Independence and then eventually to Articles of Confederation and also to the Constitution. But today I'll briefly be talking about the Enlightenment influences and the early thinking of democracy and then also what is democracy and what kind of democracies exist and this will constitute part one of my discussion of unit one. So if you look at any discussion of the AP Gov curriculum the first unit is always about the foundations of American Democracy and in that then you are supposed to know certain things, you know, where does the idea of natural rights come from, what kind of democracies are there? So that is discussed in lesson one. So first of all, what was Enlightenment? So generally speaking Enlightenment or the Age of Reason is the period starting 18th century in Europe, mostly in France and in England where scholars and philosophers start thinking the world differently. Instead of looking at the world and things in it from metaphysical or religious point of view, they foreground reason. Right? So, the main philosophers, of course, are John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Rousseau in France, right? And And like if you go to sciences, Newton. So, lot of new ideas are emerging. So, some ideas about human beings are also being crystallized. And what is that? That that reason can serve us to solve our problems, that individuals can exist as individuals and have individual identities. And then some of them go and define property rights. What does it mean to be governed, right? All of these ideas are what we call the Enlightenment ideas. So, if you look at the early leaders or what people call the founding fathers of United States, they were highly influenced by these Enlightenment ideas. Now, out of these, there is one important idea that you need to know, and that is the concept of natural rights. Right? Where does it come from? So, the idea of natural rights comes from the work of John Locke, right? And And actually the pursuit of happiness and life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness is actually rewriting of one of his quotes, right? Life, liberty, and property is what he had philosophized about. Then the idea of, let's say, popular sovereignty. That comes from the work of Rousseau. He's the one who wrote about it. And separation between different powers, the judicial and the executive, that comes from the ideas of Montesquieu. So, these were the philosophical underpinnings of people who were thinking about becoming free nation before the Declaration of Independence. So, if there is question about natural rights and enlightenment influences, these are some of the ideas about it. Now, that takes me to the second part of this lesson, and that is about what kind of democracies do exist or did exist. Now, the term democracy derives from demos and kratos, right? Demos, the people, and kratos, meaning power. So, if you literally translate it, it is popular power. So, democracy in that sense is power governed by the people. Right? Now, if you look at the social contract theory of which John Locke was proponent, so was Rousseau and Thomas Hobbes, these three philosophers tried to theorize how did government come to be. And in order to theorize that or philosophize that, they imagined world before the arrival of government, right? And that's what they called the state of nature. Now, in state of nature, according to Thomas Hobbes, things were brutal, people were brutal to each other, so they needed strong sovereign, Leviathan, that is the title of his book, right? To govern people. And so, people sign contract with prince who's the most powerful, and they, in return for protection of themselves and their property from each other, they give the prince the right to rule. That is social contract. In Locke, it's slightly different. John Locke thinks of the state of nature and not as brutal, but imagines that human beings in their early stages were social animals and were builders of communities and all and shared their resources and based on that, they decided to then give contract to prince to govern them. But in Locke, that contract is revocable. All right, the prince is responsible to the people. But if you think about these concepts, what you're realizing is that an understanding of democracy is emerging. And the deeper understanding is that democracy is always connected to the people and it's the people who govern themselves through the representatives whom they give the power. Right? So, if you look at the last part of this lesson and highly recommend using any textbook or the app, right? And you will see the different kinds of democracies. So, we have the participatory democracy in which everyone participates, right? The Greek democracies used to be like that, small states, everyone at one point or the other had the power. There are civic societies which govern themselves collectively through collective civic decision-making. Then there is pluralist theory of democracy, which is about which is about different groups coming together to make decisions. Right? And then there is the idea of elitist theory of democracy where people believe that certain elite group has the right to govern them or whatever. Now, if you look at the American system, American system is constitutional democracy. That means that there is constitution that governs the role of different branches of government and people and the government is governed by the spirit and letter of that document. Now, also part of the natural rights debate in this part of the course is also what what are natural rights and then what are the American early beliefs, right? So, individualism, right? Property rights, pursuit of happiness, so life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. These are considered rights that no one grants you, but that you already have because you are human being. So, everyone is born with life, so they have right to life. They have right to live as free citizens and then they have right to legally within the limits of the law follow whatever they want in life to be happy, Now, do keep in mind and this is slight caveat to this is that while all these framers of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence are talking about life, liberty, freedom, and pursuit of happiness, quite few of them are slave owners, okay? And slavery is one issue that they do not tackle during the early stages nor until the later stages until the Civil War, right? So, this kind of roughly concludes this brief foray into the first unit and the first lesson about the nature of American democracy and about different types of democracies and the question of natural rights. That's all. hope this is useful to you. I'll be back with more as this learning process progresses. Thank you so much.