Humanities Homework Help

Your task is to choose ONE citation from each section and to write a critical commentary/analysis. You should consider the context of the citation, who is speaking, and why they say what they do. Feel free to draw on your knowledge of Kant, Malthus, and Weber when writing your commentary.

Please do not write a summary of the book or the life of the theorist. An analysis is a focused piece of writing.

I recommend that you make a plan or outline of your intended analysis before you start writing. This will help you gather your thoughts and place them in some kind of logical order. Ultimately, with any piece of writing, you are telling a story. Your analysis should be convincing, should illustrate your knowledge, and it should be interesting for someone to read.

Be sure to write precise, clear sentences. Analyses are normally one page in length, double-spaced, and written in Times New Roman 12 point font.

Remember to:

• Include a cover page with your name, the professor’s name, the class, date, etc.
• Start a new page for each answer.
• Number your answers clearly.
• Check spelling and grammar.

Section 1 – Immanuel Kant

1. From What is Enlightenment?

‘The citizen cannot refuse to pay the taxes imposed upon him; presumptuous criticisms of such taxes, where someone is called upon to pay them, may be punished as an outrage which could lead to general insubordination. Nonetheless, the same citizen does not contravene his civil obligations if, as a learned individual, he publicly voices his thought on the impropriety or even injustice of such fiscal measures.’(56)

2. From The Metaphysics of Morals.

‘The oceans may appear to cut nations off from the community of their fellows. But with the art of navigation, they constitute the greatest natural incentive to international commerce, and the greater the number of neighboring coastlines there are (as in the Mediterranean), the livelier this commerce will be. Yet these visits to foreign shores, and even more so, attempts to settle on them with a view to linking them with the motherland, can also occasion evil and violence in one part of the globe with ensuing repercussions which are felt everywhere else. But although such abuses are possible, they do not deprive the world’s citizens of the right to attempt to enter into a community with everyone else and to visit all regions of the earth with this intention.’(172)

Section 2 – Thomas Malthus

3. ‘The love of independence is a sentiment that surely none would wish to be erased from the breast of man; though the Parish Law of England, it must be confessed, is a system of all others the most calculated gradually to weaken this sentiment, and in the end may eradicate it completely.’(Chapter 4)

4. ‘The lower classes of people in Europe may, at some future period, be much better instructed than they are at present; they may be taught to employ the little spare time they have in many better ways than at the alehouse; they may live under better and more equal laws than they have ever hitherto done, perhaps, in any country; and I even conceive it possible, though not probable, that they may have more leisure; but it is not in the nature of things that they can be awarded such a quantity of money or subsistence as will allow them all to marry early, in the full confidence that they shall be able to provide with ease for a numerous family.’ (Chapter 14)

Section 3 – Max Weber

5. ‘The decisive fact is that this whole human apparatus – the ‘machine’, as it is revealingly called in English-speaking countries – or rather the people who control it are able to keep the members of parliament in check, and can even impose their will on them to a considerable extent…In other words, the creation of such machines means the advent of plebiscitarian democracy.’

6. ‘This takes us into the area of ethical questions, for to ask what kind of human being one must be in order to have the right to seize the spokes of the wheel of history is to pose an ethical question.
One can say that three qualities are pre-eminently desirable for a politician: passion, a sense of responsibility, judgement.’

REQUIRED

TEXTS

Kant, Political Writings (‘What is Enlightenment?’ ‘The Metaphysics of Morals.’ ‘Perpetual

Peace.’)

http://www.bard.edu/library/arendt/pdfs/Kant-Polit…

Malthus, An Essay on Population

http://www.esp.org/books/malthus/population/malthu…

Weber, Politics as a Vocation (PDF)

http://fs2.american.edu/dfagel/www/class%20reading…