Political Philosophy

Luce Irigaray (born 3 May 1930 in Belgium) is a Belgian-French philosopher, linguist, and psychoanalyst, one of the leading voices of so-called difference feminism. Holding doctorates in linguistics and in philosophy, she belonged to the Lacanian circle until the publication of her thesis, Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), whose radical critique of psychoanalysis cost her expulsion from Jacques Lacan’s École freudienne de Paris and her teaching post at the University of Vincennes. ...

Machiavelli Born in Florence in 1469, Niccolò Machiavelli lived through the height and the crisis of the Italian Renaissance republics. For fourteen years he served as secretary of the Second Chancery of the Florentine Republic, on diplomatic missions that brought him before kings, popes, and the formidable Cesare Borgia — a direct experience of power that would mark all his thought. When the Medici returned in 1512, he was dismissed, imprisoned, and tortured on suspicion of conspiracy. It was then, in rural exile, that he wrote The Prince (1513). He is regarded as the founder of modern political science. ...

Marcus Aurelius Marcus Aurelius Antoninus ruled Rome from 161 to 180 CE and is remembered as the last of the “Five Good Emperors” and as the most celebrated example of the ancient ideal of the philosopher-king. Adopted into the line of succession by Antoninus Pius, he received a careful education and turned early to Stoicism, above all through reading Epictetus, to whom he had been introduced by his teacher Junius Rusticus. His reign, far from peaceful, was beset by wars on the Danube frontier, by revolts, and by the devastating Antonine Plague — circumstances in which his philosophy proved less a doctrine than a discipline of inner survival. ...

María Lugones María Lugones (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 26 January 1944 — 14 July 2020, Syracuse, New York) was an Argentine-American philosopher and activist, Professor of Comparative Literature and Women’s Studies at Binghamton University. Her intellectual path weaves together political philosophy, feminist theory, and Latin American decolonial thought in a genuinely singular way: rather than applying Eurocentric categories to the experience of women of the Global South, Lugones set out to refound those categories from what colonization destroyed and what the resistance of the colonized preserved. Her work brings together the women-of-color feminism of North America — especially that of Gloria Anzaldúa — with the decolonial critique of Aníbal Quijano, producing a theory in which race and gender are not separate variables that add up, but dimensions fused within a single structure of colonial power. ...

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. ...

Nancy Fraser Nancy Fraser (b. 20 May 1947, Baltimore) is an American critical theorist and feminist philosopher, the Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor Emerita at The New School for Social Research in New York. An heir to the Frankfurt School tradition, she is one of the most influential voices in contemporary critical theory. Her most celebrated contribution was to reframe the question of justice around the tension between redistribution (the economic dimension) and recognition (the cultural dimension), warning of the risk that struggles for identity and visibility might eclipse struggles for material equality. In recent decades she has broadened that diagnosis into a sweeping critique of capitalism and its relations to feminism, ecology, and democracy. ...

Plato Student of Socrates and the most influential philosopher of antiquity, Plato was born into an aristocratic Athenian family around 428 BCE. His master’s execution in 399 BCE marked him deeply and turned him away from the political career his lineage had reserved for him. After years of travel — which tradition links to contact with the Pythagoreans of southern Italy and to his failed attempts to educate the tyrants of Syracuse — he founded the Academy around 387 BCE, the first institution of higher learning in the West, which would endure for more than nine centuries. His work has reached us almost intact, almost entirely in the form of dialogues, with Socrates as the central character. ...

Richard Rorty 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 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 Hobbes Born in England in 1588 — according to tradition prematurely, amid the panic over the threatened Spanish Armada, which led him to say that “fear and I were born twins” — Thomas Hobbes studied at Oxford and became tutor to the noble Cavendish family. In his travels through Europe, he engaged with the new science of Galileo and with the great philosophers of the continent. A witness to the bloody English Civil War, he went into exile in Paris for over a decade; it was there that he matured the political theory published in Leviathan (1651). He is the founder of modern state theory. ...

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. Thomas More was born in London in 1478, the son of a successful lawyer, and received a rigorous classical education — he studied at Oxford and at the Inns of Court, becoming one of the most respected jurists in Tudor England. His friendship with Erasmus, forged in the early sixteenth century, shaped his intellectual orientation: Christian humanism, which held that society could be reformed through moral renewal and the recovery of good letters, without breaking from the Catholic tradition. Against this backdrop, Utopia (1516) is not merely a literary fantasy but a work of rigorous political philosophy that fuses the Platonic dialogue with Lucianic satire to diagnose the ills of contemporary Europe — land enclosure, noble corruption, dynastic warfare, and the brutality of capital punishment for petty crimes. ...

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. ...