Political Philosophy

Does history have a meaning? A thread, a direction, perhaps even a law governing the succession of empires, revolutions, and ideas — or is history merely, as Macbeth put it, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”? This apparently simple question actually conceals two very different questions, and confusing them accounts for much of the muddle surrounding “philosophy of history.” The first question is speculative: what is the meaning, the motor, or the law of the historical process as a whole? The second is critical or epistemological: how do we know the past, what kind of science (if any) history is, and what it means to “understand” a human event. This article traces the most influential answers to the first question — from Augustine to Fukuyama — and shows how, in the twentieth century, the second question turned against the first, in a movement of suspicion running from Dilthey to Popper and Lyotard. ...

At the heart of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880) there is a chapter that took on a life of its own and became one of the most discussed texts in political philosophy, theology, and literature: “The Grand Inquisitor.” It is a “poem” — so its fictional author calls it — that condenses, in a few pages, the most formidable objection ever made against human freedom. This article examines it from within: its plot, its argumentative architecture, and the layers of reading that have made it inexhaustible. ...

Few moral theories have been as influential — and as attacked — as utilitarianism. Its central idea is disarmingly simple: the right action is the one that produces the greatest amount of well-being for the greatest number of those affected. Born as a reforming philosophy in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, it shaped criminal law, welfare economics, public policy and, more recently, animal ethics and the fight against global poverty. This article lays out its structure, its main authors, and the objections that dog it. ...

Feminism is not a single doctrine but a heterogeneous family of theories and movements — often in tension with one another — that share the claim that the relations between the sexes involve inequalities deserving critical examination. As an object of philosophical study, it is also one of the most contested fields in contemporary thought: it is internally divided into currents that disagree about the diagnosis, the causes, and the remedies, and it draws vigorous objections from outside. This article maps the history (the model of “waves”), the main currents, the central concepts, and — with particular attention — the criticisms feminism has met, from within and from without. ...

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the revolution was expected to spread across industrialized Europe. It did not: the German and Hungarian uprisings of 1918–1919 were crushed, and Western capitalism survived. Out of that defeat was born one of the richest traditions of twentieth-century thought — Western Marxism. Faced with the failure of revolution in the West and the hardening of Soviet Marxism into a state dogma, a group of thinkers reopened the questions that orthodoxy had closed: why did the masses not rebel? How do culture, ideology, and consciousness sustain domination? What place do philosophy and aesthetics have in political struggle? This article surveys that tradition, from its founders in 1923 to Althusser’s structural turn. ...

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. A student at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris (1935 cohort), 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. ...

Antonio Gramsci Antonio Gramsci (22 January 1891, Ales, Sardinia — 27 April 1937, Rome) was an Italian philosopher, journalist, and Communist leader, one of the most original figures of twentieth-century Marxism. In Turin he founded the journal L’Ordine Nuovo (1919) during the factory-council movement, and in 1921 he helped found the Italian Communist Party, of which he became general secretary. Elected to parliament, he was arrested by the Fascist regime in 1926; at his trial the prosecutor declared that “we must stop this brain from functioning for twenty years.” It was in prison, under harsh conditions, that Gramsci wrote his decisive work — the Prison Notebooks — composed between 1929 and 1935 and published after his death. ...

Aristotle Born in Stagira, in Macedonia, around 384 BCE, the son of Nicomachus — physician to the Macedonian court — Aristotle entered Plato’s Academy at the age of seventeen, where he remained for some twenty years, until his master’s death. He later tutored Alexander the Great and, in 335 BCE, founded the Lyceum in Athens, a school whose members became known as Peripatetics (from their habit of discussing while walking). With Alexander’s death and the wave of anti-Macedonian feeling, he left Athens in 323 BCE — so that the city, according to ancient tradition, “might not sin twice against philosophy” — and died the following year in Chalcis. The body of texts we have inherited from him is the largest and most systematic of antiquity, spanning logic, physics, biology, psychology, metaphysics, ethics, politics, rhetoric, and poetics. ...