Political Philosophy

When we want to know whether a society is just or whether a life is going well, what should we measure? Income? Wealth? Reported happiness? The capability approach, developed by the Indian economist and philosopher Amartya Sen (b. 1933) and the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum (b. 1947), answers differently: what matters is what people are actually able to be and to do — the real freedoms they have to live the life they have reason to value. It is one of the most influential contributions to political philosophy and normative economics in recent decades, at the frontier between the two disciplines. ...

Democracy as a Philosophical Problem Democracy is not merely a political regime — it is a first-order philosophical problem. It raises questions about the nature of legitimacy (why do collective decisions bind those who disagree?), about the relationship between facticity and normative validity (how can positively enacted norms aspire to rational validity?), and about the very possibility of a public space of shared reasons in societies marked by deep value pluralism. Deliberative democratic theory is the twentieth century’s most systematic attempt to answer these questions from a philosophical standpoint rooted in the Enlightenment tradition. ...

The Encounter That Defined an Era In 1971, John Rawls (1921–2002) published A Theory of Justice — a work that revived normative political philosophy after decades of positivist dominance. Three years later, in 1974, Robert Nozick (1938–2002) responded with Anarchy, State, and Utopia, which became the most rigorous libertarian critique of the Rawlsian program. Both were professors at Harvard. The debate they conducted — personally amicable, philosophically radical — remains the most productive confrontation in twentieth-century Anglo-American political philosophy. ...

Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) is one of those rare names whose work divides the history of philosophy into a before and an after. Before him, political philosophy belonged to the genre of the “mirror of princes” — treatises that prescribed to rulers the classical moral virtues (prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance) and obedience to divine law. After him, politics became an autonomous domain, with its own logic, irreducible to morality or theology. This rupture is so decisive that many historians make the birth of modern political philosophy coincide with the writing of The Prince (1513). ...

Why should we obey the State? What makes a law legitimate rather than a mere order imposed by force? In the history of Western philosophy, these questions found their first systematically modern formulation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with three thinkers who changed forever the vocabulary of politics: Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The three give radically different answers, but share a method: contractualism — the idea that political legitimacy must be thought from a hypothetical pact among free individuals. ...

Few concepts have persisted across the entire history of philosophy with as much tenacity as justice. From fifth-century Athens to twentieth-century lecture halls, the question has remained essentially the same: what is just? The answers, however, vary dramatically — and it is precisely in that variation that the philosophical interest lies. This article traces the major landmarks in Western reflection on justice, from Socrates’ confrontation with Thrasymachus to the contemporary theories of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. ...

Few twentieth-century thinkers confronted the relationship between politics, violence, and freedom with as much intellectual courage as Hannah Arendt (1906–1975). A German Jew driven into exile by Nazism, Arendt witnessed the totalitarian catastrophe firsthand and turned that experience into the driving force of a philosophical body of work that defies classification — neither conventionally liberal, nor Marxist, nor conservative. Her thought reaches for something prior to all ideologies: understanding what it means to act in a world shared with others. ...

Few philosophical concepts have traversed as many centuries, traditions, and disciplines as alienation. From the metaphysical externalization of Spirit in Hegel to the denunciation of dehumanized labor in Marx, from Feuerbach’s religious projection to Debord’s society of the spectacle, alienation designates a condition in which human beings become estranged from themselves, from the products of their activity, or from their own social relations. To trace the genealogy of this concept is to follow one of the most persistent lines of force in modern and contemporary philosophy. ...

Few contemporary philosophers divide opinion as sharply as Judith Butler. For some, she is one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century — someone who revolutionized our understanding of gender, sexuality, and power. For others, she is the ultimate symbol of a philosophy that lost itself in the labyrinth of its own language, producing deliberately obscure texts to mask shallow ideas. To understand why Butler provokes such extreme reactions, we must first grasp what she actually says — and then have the intellectual honesty to identify where the argument falters. ...

Achille Mbembe Joseph-Achille Mbembe was born in 1957 in Otélé, Cameroon. He trained in history and philosophy at the Sorbonne (Paris I) and received his doctorate from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). He is currently a senior professor at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Mbembe is considered one of the most influential African intellectuals today, with work that articulates African history, postcolonial theory, political philosophy, and cultural criticism. He writes in French; his principal works have been translated into English, Portuguese, German, and other languages. ...

Aimé Césaire Aimé Fernand David Césaire (26 June 1913, Basse-Pointe, Martinique — 17 April 2008, Fort-de-France) was a poet, playwright, and politician, one of the founding voices of twentieth-century anticolonial thought. Educated in Paris at the École Normale Supérieure, it was there, in the vibrant milieu of black students from the French colonies, that he helped forge — alongside the Senegalese Léopold Sédar Senghor and the Guianese Léon-Gontran Damas — the Négritude movement. Later elected mayor of Fort-de-France (1945–2001) and a deputy in the French National Assembly, he was one of the architects of the 1946 law that turned Martinique into an overseas department — a decision he would later reassess critically. He was also Frantz Fanon’s teacher at the Lycée Schœlcher. ...

Al-Farabi Abū Naṣr Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Fārābī (c. 872–c. 950) was one of the greatest philosophers of the medieval Islamic world, called by the tradition “the Second Teacher” (al-Muʿallim al-Thānī) — the first being Aristotle. Born in the region of Farab (present-day Kazakhstan/Uzbekistan), he worked principally in Baghdad and Aleppo under the patronage of the Hamdanid court. His work spans logic, political philosophy, metaphysics, philosophy of music, and theory of the sciences. ...

Amartya Sen Amartya Sen (b. 1933, Santiniketan, Bengal) is an Indian economist and philosopher whose work has dissolved the border between economics and ethics. He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998 for his contributions to social choice theory and welfare economics. A professor at Harvard, Sen studied in Calcutta and Cambridge and served as master of Trinity College. Marked in his youth by the Bengal famine of 1943 — which killed millions and in which he lost a relative — he devoted himself to understanding the causes of poverty and deprivation and to rebuilding the normative foundations of economics. In intellectual partnership with the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, he developed the capability approach. He received the Bharat Ratna, India’s highest civilian honour, in 1999. ...

Carl Schmitt Carl Schmitt is one of the most influential — and most controversial — jurists and political theorists of the twentieth century. Born in Plettenberg, Westphalia, on 11 July 1888, and died in the same city on 7 April 1985, Schmitt produced a vast and systematically coherent body of work spanning legal theory, theory of the state, political philosophy, and international law. His membership of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) in May 1933 and his intellectual activity during the Third Reich mean that his reception is inevitably marked by ethical and political tension. His subsequent estrangement from regime structures (around 1936, following attacks from the SS) did not dispel the controversy. Nonetheless, the analytical rigour of his work continues to generate first-order philosophical and legal debate. ...

Charles Taylor Charles Taylor (b. 1931, Montreal) is a Canadian philosopher and professor emeritus at McGill University, widely regarded as one of the most influential voices in contemporary political and moral philosophy. Trained at Oxford, where he wrote his doctorate under Isaiah Berlin, Taylor brings together the continental hermeneutic tradition — especially Hegel, Heidegger, and Gadamer — and Anglo-American analytic debate in a rare synthesis. A Catholic convert, he is often associated with communitarianism, though he resists rigid labels. His work investigates the historical conditions of modern identity, the limits of naturalism in the human sciences, and the place of the religious in secular societies. He received the Templeton Prize in 2007 and the Kyoto Prize in 2008. ...

Cicero Roman philosopher, orator, and statesman. The most important figure in transmitting Greek philosophy to the Latin world. His eclecticism synthesized Epicureanism, Stoicism, and the skepticism of the New Academy. He coined much of the Latin philosophical vocabulary — essentia, qualitas, moralis — that shaped all subsequent Western philosophy. Key Concepts Natural law: there is a universal moral law, grounded in reason, that transcends the positive laws of each people — the foundation of Western natural law theory Res publica: the republic as “the people’s affair” (res populi); the state is only legitimate when it serves the common good and respects the law Duty (officium): ethical life consists in fulfilling duties arising from reason, human social nature, and the roles each person occupies — systematized in De Officiis Academic probabilism: influenced by the skepticism of the New Academy, he argues that in the absence of certainty we should act according to what seems most probable (verisimile) Humanitas: the ideal of full human formation combining philosophy, rhetoric, and civic virtue; the Roman equivalent of the Greek paideia Highest good (summum bonum): debate among schools — for Stoics, virtue; for Epicureans, pleasure. Cicero leans toward Stoicism but presents arguments from all schools Influenced by Plato and Aristotle — politics, ethics, theory of knowledge Zeno of Citium — Stoicism (cosmopolitanism, natural law, duty) Epicurus — addressed critically Carneades — skepticism of the New Academy Influenced Augustine and all medieval philosophy — Latin vocabulary and natural law Thomas Aquinas — natural law theory Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Rousseau — republican theory Locke and Kant — natural rights and moral duty Renaissance humanism — ideal of humanitas Works On the Republic (De Re Publica, 54 BC); On the Laws (De Legibus, 52 BC); Tusculan Disputations (Tusculanae Disputationes, 45 BC); On Duties (De Officiis, 44 BC); On the Nature of the Gods (De Natura Deorum, 45 BC). ...

Confucius (Chinese: Kǒngzǐ 孔子, “Master Kong”; Jesuit Latinisation: Confucius) was born in the state of Lu (present-day Shandong province, China) in 551 BCE and died in 479 BCE. He was a teacher, public official, and moral reformer who, after a life of frustrated political efforts, devoted himself to teaching and to the study of the ancient Chinese classics. His thought is known principally through the Lunyu (Analects 論語), a compilation of sayings and dialogues made by his disciples and the later tradition — the historicity of individual passages is a matter of debate among specialists. ...

Frantz Fanon Frantz Omar Fanon was born on 20 July 1925 in Fort-de-France, Martinique (then a French colony). A psychiatrist, essayist, and political militant, he is the most influential figure of African and Caribbean anticolonial philosophy. Trained in medicine and psychiatry in France (Lyon), he served as chief of psychiatry at the Blida-Joinville Hospital in Algeria from 1953. Confronted with the atrocities of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962), he joined the FLN (National Liberation Front) and became one of the principal intellectual voices of the anticolonial cause. He died of leukemia in Washington D.C. on 6 December 1961, aged 36, days after the publication of Les damnés de la terre. ...

Giorgio Agamben Giorgio Agamben is an Italian philosopher born in Rome in 1942, professor at the universities of Verona and Venice (IUAV), as well as at various European and American institutions. His work articulates historical-philological analysis, political philosophy, ontology, and theory of language around a genealogical project on the biopolitical paradigm of the West. He is one of the most translated and debated contemporary thinkers. Key Concepts Homo Sacer (Homo sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 1995): Revisiting a figure from archaic Roman law, Agamben describes the homo sacer as one who can be killed by anyone without it constituting homicide (occidi), but who cannot be sacrificed (immolari). This figure articulates bare life (nuda vita / zōē) — the mere biological fact of living — excluded from politically qualified life (bíos). ...

Hannah Arendt German-American political philosopher, Jewish, student of Heidegger and Jaspers. Thinker of totalitarianism, political freedom, and human action. One of the most original voices of the 20th century. Key Concepts The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951): totalitarianism (Nazism and Stalinism) is a radically new phenomenon — not classical tyranny; it is based on total terror, ideology, and the destruction of public space and human singularity The Human Condition (vita activa, 1958): three fundamental activities: Labor: metabolism with nature, production of the necessary (animal laborans) Work: fabrication of durable objects, artificial world (homo faber) Action: the initiation of the genuinely new among humans — the only directly political activity; reveals who one is (not what) Banality of Evil (Eichmann in Jerusalem, 1963): Adolf Eichmann was not a monster, but a bureaucrat without thought; radical evil does not require perversity — mere absence of reflection (thoughtlessness) suffices Public space: politics as a space of appearance among equals, where words and actions reveal identity — against the privatization of political life Natality (counterpart to Heideggerian mortality): each human being is a new beginning — the capacity to initiate something radically new is the basis of political freedom Influenced by Heidegger — fundamental ontology, analysis of existence (but criticizes his Nazi engagement) Karl Jaspers — existentialism and communication Aristotle — vita activa, politics as the highest mode of life Kant — judgment, sensus communis, political philosophy Influenced Contemporary political philosophy Studies on totalitarianism and democracy Theory of moral judgment Judith Butler — precariousness and political life Works The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951); The Human Condition (1958); Between Past and Future (1961); Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963); On Revolution (1963); The Life of the Mind (posthumous, 1978). ...