An advocate of natural rights continues his/her presentation[1] …
This posting continues this blog’s review of the natural rights perspective
from the point of view of one who would advocate it. That includes describing how it was affected by
shifts in the study of politics since the years of the mid-twentieth century. This addresses the focus that William
Schubert’s commonplaces of curricular development places on political science.
In a few words, the shifts strived to make the
study of politics more amenable to scientific methods and later, to address political
concerns of a given time – i.e., what would be “popular” issues. In that vein, this posting starts by asking: if that study avoids normative concerns, per
se – that would be what advances justice, social capital, and civic
humanism – then how does it address the motivation that prompts people to abide
by the decisions a political system makes?
That is, why would people obey or acquiesce?
Since systems cannot stand
if they rely only on coercive means, that would be too expensive; they must
depend on other motivations. Most people
do abide because they judge systems to be legitimate. The
source of legitimacy stems from two factors:
one, people sense or understand the practicality of a systemic process
by which to devise decisions, assuming the decisions do not offend any basic
beliefs, and two, general acceptances in how systems operate through processes that
utilize institutionalized steps.
Under these conditions,
the vast number of citizens will obey the decisions. But, as the prohibition of liquor in the
1920s demonstrated, even highly legitimate systems, such as that of the United
States, at times do issue policies deemed illegitimate. In that case, vast disregard for the policy
is very likely to follow. Legitimacy, therefore,
is a central concern of any political system.[2]
As such, legitimacy and its
related political processes are repeatedly considered by policy makers – at
least it is wise that they do so. Ian
Hurd puts this factor into a meaningful context,
Actors
and institutions constantly work to legitimize their power, and challengers
work to delegitimate it. Legitimation is often done by justifying the existence
of rulers or their rules in terms of important normative principles of the
society. However, legitimation may also be attempted through payoffs and
inducements to subordinates. Material incentives and normative appeals are different
strategies for legitimation and their success depends on how the audience
responds to them. It is not possible to make a general statement about the
efficacy of one or the other as a generic legitimating strategy, nor is it
possible to say that legitimacy can only arise by following one or the other.
By contrast, legitimacy itself is a fundamentally subjective and normative
concept: it exists only in the beliefs of an individual about the rightfulness
of rule. [3]
Therefore, no study of politics or governance
can totally dismiss normative concerns, but the natural rights view focuses on
what is natural, that is, material incentives.
But all governments depend on their rule reflecting, to some degree, their
societies’ norms.
Hurd
continues,
It [legitimacy]
is distinct from legality, in that not all legal acts are necessarily
legitimate and not all legitimate acts are necessarily legal. One would hope
for a close coincidence between the two, but it is conceptually necessary to
keep the two separate. The possibility always exists that rulers might impose
laws which the followers find illegitimate, and this possibility ensures that
the two concepts cannot be reduced to one. Moreover, to define what is legal as
the same as what is legitimate means that the government would have the power
to control the categories of legitimate and illegitimate. This would make
legitimacy inherently conservative since it could only buttress existing power
relations. In practice, we see many instances in which citizens come to believe
that their governments are illegitimate and this creates a serious crisis in
governance.[4]
This last point was demonstrated not only by Prohibition, but many would
point to the current situation in which a good number of Americans question the
legitimacy of the last presidential election or the overturning of the Supreme
Court decision, Roe v. Wade. One
result, in terms of the election, was the attack on the US Capitol on January 6,
2021, and one sees growing discontent in terms of voiding abortion rights.
With that said, a more general study, one
civics strives to present, is how policy is formed by political systems – not
just republics or democracies, but by all political systems. Easton incorporates the idea of systems to
the study of politics. Using the
concepts of inputs, outputs, feedback, support, demands, and stress, a basic
analogy, first to a machine, and later to an organism, was applied to a
governmental arrangement within a society.[5]
What conditions must this systems’ construct
address in order to be a legitimate and viable foundation by which to study
government in this nation’s schools? Answering
this question takes on several dimensions.
Eugene J. Meehan provides criteria by which social scientists can judge
constructs. While curriculum developers
and/or implementers of curriculum have different concerns from social
scientists, some of Meehan’s concerns can be incorporated in evaluating constructs
for the purposes of classroom use.
These concerns were previously utilized in this
blog to analyze and evaluate the parochial/federalist construct and will be used
to support the natural rights construct as well. The questions, in shortened form, that Meehan’s
criteria ask are: does the construct
have scope, power, precision, reliability, isomorphism, compatibility, predictability,
and purpose or control? [6]
In other words, given the general goal of a
political systems approach, how does its view of government and politics match
up with the realities of governance and serve as a vehicle by which to present
that reality to secondary students? According
to the construct, those realities manifest themselves through that governance’s
structures, processes, functions, and contexts.
A curriculum, to be viable, must have as one of
its sources reputable subject matter from a relevant discipline.[7] What follows in the upcoming postings are the
evidences regarding the manners in which this construct addresses its subject
matter. This account argues, in the form
of an antithesis – to the thesis, parochial federalism – that the systems approach
provides positive or constructive responses to the questions posed by Meehan’s
concerns.
That is, those postings will cite an array of
evidence that illustrates, describes, and/or explains how the systems approach
offers a viable basis for secondary course work in American government and
civics classrooms. This construct has
done so since its widespread adoption in the planning and implementation of curricular
content in those courses since the 1960s.
The very next posting will focus on the political systems approach, per
se.
[1] This presentation continues
with this posting. The reader is informed that the claims made in
this posting do not necessarily reflect the beliefs or knowledge of this
blogger. Instead, the posting is a representation of what an
advocate of the natural rights view might present. This
is done to present a dialectic position of that construct. This series of postings begins with “Judging
Natural Rights View, I,” August 2, 2022.
[2] David Easton,
The Political System (New York,
NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953) AND David
Easton, A System Analysis of Political
Life (New York, NY: John Wiley and
Sons, Inc., 1965).
[3] Ian Hurd, “Legitimacy,” Encyclopedia Princetoniensis
(n.d.), accessed August 10, 2022, https://pesd.princeton.edu/node/516.
[4] Ibid.
[5]
David Easton, “The Current Meanings of “Behavioralism,” in Contemporary Political Analysis, edited
by James C. Charlesworth (New York, NY:
The Free Press 1967), 11-31.
[6] Eugene J. Meehan, Contemporary Political
Thought: A Critical Study (Homewood,
IL: Dorsey Press, 1967). Here are Meehan’s concerns: Does a construct explain as
many phenomena related to the area of concern as possible; control the
explanatory effort by being valid and complete in its component parts and in
the relationships among those parts; specifically and precisely treat its
concepts, making them clear in their use; explain its components and their
relationships the same way time after time; contain a one-to-one correspondence
with that portion of reality it is trying to explain; align with other
responsible explanations of the same phenomena; predict conditions associated
with the phenomena in question; and imply ways to control phenomena in
question?
For readers of this blog, this blogger
adds two pedagogic questions: is a
construct of such abstraction level that students will be able to
comprehend it and is its content motivating to students?
[7] Ralph W. Tyler, Basic Principles of Curriculum and
Instruction (Chicago, IL: The
University of Chicago Press, 1949).
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