Political Philosophy

bell hooks bell hooks — pen name of Gloria Jean Watkins (Hopkinsville, Kentucky, 25 September 1952 — Berea, Kentucky, 15 December 2021) — was an American writer, feminist theorist, and cultural critic. She took the name of her great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks, and deliberately wrote it in lowercase, to shift attention from the author to the ideas. A prolific author, she wrote on feminism, race, education, mass culture, and love, always in an accessible prose addressed to a broad public. ...

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. ...

Chandra Mohanty Chandra Talpade Mohanty was born in 1955 in India and is currently Distinguished Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, Sociology, and the Cultural Foundations of Education, and Dean’s Professor of the Humanities, at Syracuse University in the United States. Her intellectual trajectory sits at the intersection of feminist theory, postcolonial studies, and anticapitalist thought, and it cannot be separated from the lived experience of migration and the critical positioning between the Global North and the Global South. Educated in the United States, Mohanty built a body of work that systematically questions the ethnocentric assumptions embedded in mainstream Western feminism — not in order to abandon the feminist project, but to radicalize it from the standpoint of historical, geographical, and class difference. ...

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. ...

Enrique Dussel Born in Mendoza, Argentina, in 1934, Enrique Dussel had a cosmopolitan formation — he studied in Argentina, Spain, France, and Germany, and also researched the history of the Church in Latin America. After a bomb attack on his home, he went into exile in Mexico in 1975, where he became a naturalized citizen and lived until his death, in 2023. He is the leading name of Latin American Liberation Philosophy and a central reference of decolonial thought. ...

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 Bethesda, Maryland, 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. Trained in the German phenomenological and existential tradition, Arendt wrote her doctoral dissertation on the concept of love in Saint Augustine, under the supervision of Jaspers. The rise of Nazism violently interrupted her path: as a Jew, she was forced to flee Germany in 1933 and, after years as a stateless person in France, emigrated to the United States, where she became a naturalized American citizen. The experience of uprooting, persecution, and the loss of a common world became the lived ground from which her work asks what it means, in the century of concentration camps and mass refugeehood, to preserve a place for human dignity and plurality. ...

Iris Marion Young Iris Marion Young (2 January 1949, New York City — 1 August 2006, Chicago) was an American political philosopher and feminist theorist, Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. One of the most influential political philosophers of her generation, she devoted herself to rethinking the categories inherited from the liberal tradition — justice, equality, citizenship — from the concrete experience of marginalized social groups. Combining critical theory, phenomenology, and feminism, Young argued that a theory of justice centered solely on the distribution of goods is blind to the structures of power, labor, and culture that produce domination. She died of cancer at the age of 57; her final work, Responsibility for Justice, was published posthumously in 2011. ...

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. Born in Riga in 1909, in what was then the Russian Empire, Berlin witnessed the 1917 revolutions in Petrograd — where his family had moved in 1916 — before they returned to Riga and emigrated to England in 1921 — an experience that left a lasting mark on his distrust of promises of collective redemption. Educated and later a professor at Oxford, where he held the Chichele Chair of Social and Political Theory, he devoted himself less to building a system than to the history of ideas, recovering forgotten voices and countercurrents of modern thought. It was in this spirit that he delivered, in 1958, the celebrated inaugural lecture “Two Concepts of Liberty,” a text that organized the postwar political debate by showing that liberty understood as self-mastery (positive) could, taken to its extreme, license coercion in the name of the citizen’s “true self.” ...

Jean-Jacques Rousseau Born in Geneva in 1712 and motherless from birth, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was largely self-taught and led a wandering life before rising to prominence in Paris, where he kept company with the Encyclopedists — from whom he would later break dramatically. Recognition came in 1750, when he won the Dijon Academy’s competition with a discourse that already announced his most provocative thesis: that the arts and sciences, far from improving humanity, corrupt morals. Persecuted after the publication of Emile, condemned and forced into exile, he ended his life tormented, in 1778, leaving behind the Confessions. He is the great critic of the Enlightenment from within the Enlightenment itself. ...

John Locke John Locke was born in Wrington, England, in 1632, was educated at Oxford, and practiced medicine before becoming secretary and physician to the Earl of Shaftesbury, which brought him into the orbit of high English politics. Caught up in the struggles between Parliament and the absolutist Stuart crown, he went into exile in Holland during the reign of James II and returned only in 1689, with the Glorious Revolution, which enshrined the parliamentary order he would help to justify philosophically. He is regarded as the father of classical liberalism and one of the greatest influences on empiricism and modern political thought. ...

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. A professor at Harvard for most of his career, Rawls wrote at a time when many regarded political philosophy as dead, reduced to conceptual analysis or to a history of doctrines. His central problem was to find a conception of justice for the basic institutions of society — the constitution, the economy, the family — that could be accepted by free and equal citizens without appealing to a single comprehensive worldview. Against the dominant utilitarianism, which was willing to sacrifice the well-being of some for the sake of the aggregate sum, Rawls insisted that each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the general welfare cannot override. To articulate this intuition he revived the contractualist tradition of Locke, Rousseau, and Kant, but at a higher level of abstraction: the agreement is not about a concrete government, but about the very principles that should govern the basic structure. ...

Kimberlé Crenshaw Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (born 1959 in Canton, Ohio) is an American legal scholar and professor of law at UCLA and Columbia University. She is one of the founders of Critical Race Theory and the author who coined the concept of intersectionality, now central to gender studies, race studies, and political philosophy, but originally formulated within antidiscrimination law. The problem she starts from is practical and legal. Analyzing discrimination cases — especially DeGraffenreid v. General Motors (1976), in which Black women were left legally unprotected because the company hired (white) women and (male) Black workers — Crenshaw showed that single-axis frameworks (discrimination either by race or by gender) rendered invisible the situation of those who stand at the intersection of more than one axis. ...

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 Beijing, en route to 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. ...

Louis Althusser Louis Althusser (16 October 1918, Birmendreïs, French Algeria — 22 October 1990, La Verrière) was a French Marxist philosopher, the leading name of structural Marxism. A professor at the École Normale Supérieure on rue d’Ulm for decades, he trained and influenced an entire generation (Foucault, Derrida, Jacques Rancière, Étienne Balibar, Alain Badiou). A member of the French Communist Party from 1948, he devoted himself to a rigorous, “scientific” rereading of Marx against the humanist and historicist readings then dominant. His life was marked by severe mental illness: in 1980, during a psychotic episode, he killed his wife, Hélène Rytmann, and was declared unfit to stand trial. ...