Ian Shapiro opens his Yale course The Moral Foundations of Politics by laying out the question the semester will chase: what makes a government legitimate? After walking through the syllabus and course mechanics, he sketches the five traditions of answers he will cover, three from the Enlightenment (utilitarianism, Marxism, and social contract theory) plus the anti-Enlightenment and democratic traditions. He explains what distinguishes this course's approach from a standard survey and previews the next lecture's case study, the Eichmann problem, as a way into questions of obedience, authority, and moral responsibility. Recorded in Spring 2010 as the first session of Political Science 118, the talk is mostly framing rather than argument, but it maps the intellectual territory clearly enough to function as a real introduction to the field rather than pure logistics.