Political Philosophy

Isaiah Berlin Latvian-British political philosopher and historian of ideas, one of the greatest liberal thinkers of the 20th century. Famous for the distinction between negative and positive liberty, and for his defense of value pluralism against all forms of political utopianism. Key Concepts Negative liberty: the absence of external interference — I am free when no one prevents me from acting. It is freedom from (from obstacles, coercion, interference). Berlin associates it with classical liberalism Positive liberty: the capacity for self-governance, to be one’s own master and realize one’s potential. It is freedom to (for autonomy, for self-realization). Berlin warns that it can be distorted to justify paternalism or authoritarianism Value pluralism: fundamental human values (liberty, equality, justice, fraternity) are objectively real but incommensurable — they cannot be reduced to a single hierarchy without destroying something genuine. Against all moral monism Critique of utopianism: any doctrine claiming to have found the final solution to human problems (Marxism, extreme Enlightenment rationalism) tends toward totalitarianism — the pursuit of perfection is the enemy of liberty Counter-Enlightenment: a tradition of thinkers (Vico, Hamann, Herder) who criticized the universalist reason of the Enlightenment and valued particularity, history, and culture Two concepts of liberty: seminal essay (1958) that structured the liberal-communitarian debate for decades Influenced by Locke, Hume, Mill — British liberal tradition Kant — autonomy and dignity Herder and Vico — cultural pluralism and historicity Machiavelli — incompatibility of political values Influenced John Rawls — debate on liberty and justice Communitarianism (Taylor, Walzer, MacIntyre — against Berlin) Contemporary liberalism and normative political theory Hannah Arendt — political thought Works Four Essays on Liberty (1969); Vico and Herder (1976); The Crooked Timber of Humanity (1990); The Sense of Reality (1996). ...

John Rawls American political philosopher; A Theory of Justice (1971) relaunched normative political philosophy after decades of dominance by positivism and utilitarianism. The most influential work of 20th-century political philosophy. Key Concepts Veil of ignorance (veil of ignorance): to determine principles of justice, imagine an “original position” where the parties do not know their place in society (class, race, gender, talents) — the veil ensures impartiality Original position: hypothetical contractualist thought experiment — what principles would rational agents choose behind the veil? An update of Kant and Rousseau against utilitarianism Two principles of justice: Principle of liberty: each person has an equal right to basic liberties compatible with the same liberties for all Difference principle: socioeconomic inequalities are just only if: a) connected to offices open to all and b) benefit the least advantaged members of society Lexical priority: the principle of liberty takes precedence over the difference principle — liberty is not sacrificed for economic gain Justice as fairness (Justice as Fairness): society as a system of fair cooperation among free and equal persons Political liberalism (Political Liberalism, 1993): revision — the principles of justice need not rest on a comprehensive philosophical foundation, but on “overlapping consensus” among different reasonable doctrines in a pluralistic democracy Influenced by Kant — practical reason, autonomy, categorical imperative Rousseau — social contract and general will Locke — natural rights and limited government John Stuart Mill — liberalism (but criticizes utilitarianism) Influenced The whole of contemporary political philosophy (mandatory point of reference) Robert Nozick — Anarchy, State, and Utopia (libertarian critique of Rawls) Habermas — Rawls-Habermas debate on public reason Theory of international law and global justice Works A Theory of Justice (1971); Political Liberalism (1993); The Law of Peoples (1999); Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001). ...

Kwame Nkrumah Kwame Nkrumah (21 September 1909 – 27 April 1972) was born in Nkroful, Gold Coast (present-day Ghana). He studied in the USA (Lincoln University and University of Pennsylvania) and the United Kingdom (London School of Economics), where he developed his Pan-Africanist ideas in contact with figures such as C.L.R. James and George Padmore. He returned to the Gold Coast in 1947, led the independence movement, and became the first president of Ghana in 1957 — the first sub-Saharan African country to gain independence in the postwar period. He was deposed in a military coup in 1966 while in Hanoi. He spent the rest of his life in exile in Guinea-Conakry, where he died in 1972. Nkrumah is regarded as one of the founding fathers of modern Pan-Africanism and a central figure of the Organisation of African Unity (founded 1963). ...

Laozi (老子) Essential historical note: The existence of Laozi as an individual historical figure is debated among specialists. The historian Sima Qian (c. 145–86 BCE), in the Shiji, records several traditions about Laozi without being able to decide between them — an indication that the uncertainty is ancient. The text attributed to him, the Dàodéjīng (道德經, “Classic of the Way and Virtue”, also called the Laozi), may be a compilation of material from different sources; modern scholarship places the current form of the text in the 4th or 3rd century BCE. The figure of Laozi as an ancient sage who supposedly met Confucius and then left China westward is probably legendary. ...

Léopold Sédar Senghor Léopold Sédar Senghor (9 October 1906, Joal, Senegal — 20 December 2001, Verson, France) was a poet, philosopher of culture, and statesman. The first president of independent Senegal (1960–1980) and the first African elected to the Académie française (1983), he was also, alongside Aimé Césaire and Léon-Gontran Damas, one of the founders of Négritude in 1930s Paris. While Césaire gave the movement its poetic force, Senghor set out to give it a systematic philosophical and aesthetic elaboration, making of it a general theory of the African contribution to human civilization. His work is today the object of both recognition and lively controversy. ...

Marilena Chaui Marilena de Souza Chaui (born 1941 in São Paulo) is one of Brazil’s most influential living philosophers and professor emerita at the University of São Paulo, where she trained and spent her entire teaching career. Her work brings together a deep command of Spinoza’s philosophy and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology with a critical, politically engaged reflection on Brazilian society. A staunch defender of the public university and a leftist intellectual, Chaui has also become a major public figure without ever relinquishing academic rigour. Her textbook Convite à Filosofia (1994) is among the most widely read introductions to philosophy in Brazil, and her reading of Spinoza, consolidated in A Nervura do Real, is an internationally recognised contribution to scholarship on the Dutch philosopher. ...

Martha Nussbaum American philosopher, professor at the University of Chicago. One of the most influential contemporary thinkers, she works at the intersection of ethics, political philosophy, law, and literature. Trained in the Aristotelian tradition, she developed with Amartya Sen the capabilities approach as an alternative to utilitarianism and contractualism in theories of justice. She argues that emotions have cognitive content and are essential for ethical judgment. Key Concepts Capabilities approach: justice is not measured by GDP or aggregate utility, but by the real capabilities each person has to be and do — to live, to have health, to think, to participate politically, etc.; a list of 10 central capabilities as a minimum threshold of human dignity The fragility of goodness: the good life depends on external conditions (luck, relationships, body) that escape our control — against Stoic and Platonic self-sufficiency; vulnerability is constitutive of moral excellence Emotions and reason: emotions are not irrational impulses but evaluative judgments (appraisals) — fear, compassion, indignation contain cognitive assessments of what matters; ethics without emotions is blind Cosmopolitan justice: obligations of justice do not stop at national borders — duties to all of humanity, inspired by the Stoics and Kant Humanistic education: the humanities (philosophy, literature, arts) are indispensable for forming democratic citizens capable of empathic imagination and critical thought Animal capabilities: extends the capabilities approach to include the rights of non-human animals Influenced by Aristotle — virtue ethics, phronesis, the good human life John Rawls — justice as fairness (but critiques the limits of contractualism) Amartya Sen — development as freedom; capabilities approach Kant — cosmopolitanism and dignity Stoics — ancient cosmopolitanism Influenced Human development theory (UN Human Development Index) Philosophy of law and human rights Contemporary animal ethics Philosophy of education Works The Fragility of Goodness (1986); The Therapy of Desire (1994); Cultivating Humanity (1997); Women and Human Development (2000); Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (2001); Frontiers of Justice (2006); Creating Capabilities (2011); The Monarchy of Fear (2018). ...

Mary Wollstonecraft Mary Wollstonecraft was a British writer, philosopher, and advocate for women’s rights, whose A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is considered one of the founding texts of modern philosophical feminism. A contemporary of the American and French revolutions, Wollstonecraft applied Enlightenment principles of reason and equality to relations between the sexes, challenging the division between public and private spheres that excluded women from full citizenship. Key Concepts Rational Equality (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792): Her central argument — women and men share the same rational nature. If reason is the foundation of dignity and rights, as the Enlightenment thinkers hold, then women have the same entitlement to political and educational rights as men. The exclusion of women from the rational sphere is inconsistent with the very principles of the Enlightenment. ...

Mencio Note on sources: The dates of Mencius (孟子 Mèngzǐ, “Master Meng”; personal name Kē 軻) are conventional estimates — c. 372–289 BCE — based on traditional historical chronologies. The text Mèngzǐ (孟子), compiled in 7 books (piān), is considered more unified than Confucius’s Analects, although it also involved contributions from disciples in its final redaction. Mencius is honored in the Confucian tradition as the “Second Sage” (Yàshèng 亞聖), immediately below Confucius. ...

Michael Sandel Michael Sandel (b. 1953, Minneapolis) is an American political philosopher and professor of government at Harvard since 1980, known both for the rigour of his philosophical critique of Rawlsian liberalism and for the enormous public reach of his course “Justice”, one of the most popular classes in Harvard’s history. Sandel is a central figure in the so-called liberal–communitarian debate of the 1980s, although he himself resists the label. His doctoral thesis, published as Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982), offered one of the sharpest philosophical critiques of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. In the following decades he broadened his scope to the critique of the commodification of social life and of meritocratic ideology. ...

Richard McKay Rorty was an American philosopher who taught at Princeton, the University of Virginia, and Stanford. He began as an analytic philosopher formed in the Wittgenstein-Sellars tradition, but Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) projected him as one of the most radical critics of the Western epistemological tradition. Rorty is the principal representative of neopragmatism, which combines the American pragmatist heritage (Dewey, James) with elements of continental philosophy (Heidegger, Derrida) and late analytic philosophy (Wittgenstein, Quine, Sellars). ...

Robert Nozick was an American political philosopher and professor at Harvard, whose Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) became the most systematic and rigorous libertarian response to John Rawls’s theory of justice, reorienting anglophone political-philosophical debate for decades. Beyond political philosophy, he made original contributions to epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics. Key Concepts Rights as Side Constraints (Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 1974): Nozick holds that individual rights are side constraints on action — not factors to be maximised within a calculation, but limits that cannot be violated even when violation would produce better outcomes for the greatest number. Individual dignity prohibits using persons as mere means to others’ ends. ...

Ronald Dworkin American legal and moral philosopher, professor at Yale, Oxford, and New York University; Dworkin’s work constitutes the most influential critique of legal positivism in the 20th century and a comprehensive normative theory integrating law, political morality, and ethics. Key Concepts Principles vs. rules: against Hart, Dworkin argues that legal systems include not only rules (which apply in an all-or-nothing fashion) but also principles and policies. Principles such as “no one may profit from his own wrong” have weight and dimension; they do not derive from any rule of recognition — which shows that positivism is an insufficient descriptive theory of law Critique of discretion: Hart concedes that in “hard cases” judges exercise discretion, thereby creating new law. Dworkin rejects this: even in hard cases there is a right answer (the one right answer thesis) — the judge discovers existing law rather than creating it Rights as trumps: in Taking Rights Seriously (1977), individual rights are “trumps” that override arguments of collective utility or policy — no social goal can justify violating them. Dworkin defends an egalitarian liberalism grounded in equal concern and respect Law as integrity: in Law’s Empire (1986), law is neither a collection of brute facts (positivism) nor a list of natural values (natural law theory) but an interpretive practice. Law as integrity requires judges to treat the legal system as expressing a coherent set of moral principles Chain novel (chain novel): a metaphor for the interpretive process — the judge deciding a hard case is like a writer continuing a novel by many authors; he must be faithful to earlier chapters while making the work as good as it can be Judge Hercules: an ideal (not real) figure endowed with superhuman capacity to find the decision that best fits the system’s principles and renders it morally most coherent. The implicit normative claim: actual judicial decisions should approximate this ideal Equality of resources: in Sovereign Virtue (2000), just distribution requires that resources be divided so that no one envies another’s share, correcting disadvantages imposed by brute luck (illness, disability) while respecting personal choices Unity of value: in Justice for Hedgehogs (2011) — the title evoking Isaiah Berlin’s hedgehog that knows “one big thing” — Dworkin argues that ethical and moral values form a coherent system: living well and treating others justly are not competing demands but mutually dependent ones Religion without God: Religion without God (2013, posthumous) extends the unity-of-value thesis to a secular religious attitude that recognises intrinsic value and beauty in the universe without presupposing a personal God Influenced by H.L.A. Hart — the positivism Dworkin critiques in depth Lon Fuller — “inner morality of law” and the integrative function of principles John Rawls — egalitarian liberalism, debates on equality Isaiah Berlin, Kant, and the American liberal tradition Influenced The whole of contemporary legal philosophy (mandatory point of reference) Carlos Nino, Robert Alexy, and debates on the balancing of principles American and European constitutional adjudication Debates on judicial review and constitutional interpretation Works Taking Rights Seriously (1977); A Matter of Principle (1985); Law’s Empire (1986); Life’s Dominion (1993); Freedom’s Law (1996); Sovereign Virtue (2000); Justice in Robes (2006); Is Democracy Possible Here? (2006); Justice for Hedgehogs (2011); Religion without God (2013, posthumous). ...

Thomas More English humanist, jurist, and statesman. Lord Chancellor of Henry VIII; refused to recognize the king as supreme head of the Church and was beheaded. Canonized by the Catholic Church (1935). Author of the concept of utopia. Key Concepts Utopia (Utopia, 1516): description of an imaginary island with a communal society, without private property, religious tolerance, work for all, equality. The name is a Greek wordplay: ou-topos (no place) / eu-topos (good place) Implicit social criticism: Utopia functions as a critical mirror of Tudor England — private property, idle nobility, and the execution of starving thieves are the true absurdity Christian humanism: friend of Erasmus (who dedicated Praise of Folly to him); reform of society should come from moral and religious education, not from revolution Martyr of conscience: refused to compromise faith for political convenience — “I am the king’s good servant, but God’s first” Influenced by Plato — Republic (ideal city) and dialogues Erasmus — Christian humanism and intellectual friendship Lucian of Samosata — satirical dialogues Influenced Utopian tradition: Campanella (City of the Sun), Francis Bacon (New Atlantis) Political philosophy and 19th-century utopian socialism Marx — critique of private property (distant precursor) Christian-social political thought Works Utopia (1516); History of Richard III (c. 1513); Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation (1534, written in the Tower of London). ...

W. E. B. Du Bois William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868–1963) was an African-American sociologist, historian, philosopher, and activist born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. In 1895 he became the first African American to earn a PhD from Harvard, with a historical dissertation on the suppression of the Atlantic slave trade; he also studied in Berlin, where he absorbed the craft of German social science. His work inaugurated African-American urban sociology with The Philadelphia Negro (1899) and, with The Souls of Black Folk (1903), established a philosophical vocabulary for thinking about modern Black experience. He was a co-founder of the NAACP (1909) and a central figure in pan-Africanism. In 1961 he joined the Communist Party; he then moved to Ghana, where he acquired citizenship and where he died in 1963. ...

Xunzi Xunzi (荀子 Xún Zǐ, “Master Xun”; personal name Kuàng 況), who lived around c. 310–c. 235 BCE, is, alongside Confucius and Mencius, one of the three great thinkers of classical Confucianism. He was active during the Warring States period and was a figure of prestige at the Jixia Academy in the state of Qi. His philosophy stands out for its argumentative rigour and its naturalism: whereas other Confucians grounded morality in a morally engaged celestial order, Xunzi grounds it in human culture, ritual, and deliberate education. ...