POLITICAL
PHILOSOPHY

Political philosophy begins where obedience grows uncertain. Two questions stand at its threshold and have not ceased to vex thinkers from Athens to the present hour: By what right does one human being command another? And by what measure shall we call any social order just?

• Authority — Why must I obey? Force, consent, divine sanction, tradition, utility, or reason?
• Justice — Who gets what, and on what ground? Desert, need, equality, liberty, or fairness?
• Liberty — What may the state forbid me, and what must it leave to my own judgment?
• The Common Good — Is there a public interest distinct from the sum of private wills?

In the Republic, Plato proposes that justice is not a contract among the strong but the harmony of the soul writ large in the city. As the soul has three parts — reason, spirit, appetite — so the polis has three classes: the philosopher-rulers who know the Good, the auxiliary guardians who defend, and the producers who labor.

Aristotle, more empirical than his teacher, observed that the polis comes into being for the sake of mere life and continues for the sake of the good life. Humanity, alone among animals, possesses logos — speech and reason — and is by nature ordered toward the political community. He who can live without it is either a beast or a god.

• The polis is prior to the individual — not in time, but in nature; the whole gives meaning to its parts.
• Six regimes — Monarchy, Aristocracy, Polity (just); Tyranny, Oligarchy, Democracy (corrupt).
• Mixed regime — The best practical constitution blends elements of the few and the many; a strong middle class is its anchor.
• Distributive justice — Equals treated equally, unequals unequally, in proportion to relevant merit.

Writing amid the carnage of the English Civil Wars, Hobbes envisioned the natural condition of mankind as a war of every man against every man. In that state, he wrote his most famous lines, life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

To escape this terror, rational persons covenant together, surrendering their right of private judgment to a single sovereign — the Leviathan, an artificial person whose body is composed of the multitude. Absolute, indivisible, and undivided, this Mortal God alone can guarantee peace. To divide sovereignty is to invite the return of war.

Where Hobbes saw a state of nature defined by fear, Locke saw one governed by reason: a condition of perfect freedom but not of license, in which all are equal and independent, and none ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions. Government is instituted not to grant these rights, which are antecedent and natural, but to secure them.

“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” With this incendiary sentence Rousseau opens The Social Contract and indicts every existing regime. The puzzle, as he frames it, is to find a form of association which defends and protects the person and goods of each, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before.

• The General Will — not the sum of private interests (the will of all), but the rational will of the citizen body aimed at the common good.
• Popular Sovereignty — sovereignty resides inalienably in the people; it cannot be represented, only exercised.
• Civil Liberty — we exchange natural independence for moral freedom, obedience to a law we prescribe ourselves.

For Marx, the political question cannot be answered without first answering the economic one. The history of all hitherto existing society, he and Engels declare, is the history of class struggle. The state is not a neutral arbiter standing above the fray but, in any class society, an instrument by which the dominant class secures its position.

Mill, writing in an age fearful of the tyranny of the majority no less than of kings, proposed a single, simple principle to govern the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control. It is, he wrote, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is self-protection.

Rawls revived political philosophy in the analytic age by means of a thought-experiment of remarkable elegance. Imagine, he asks, that we are to choose the principles of justice for our society from behind a veil of ignorance — not knowing our class, race, sex, talents, or conception of the good. What rules would a rational, risk-averse person consent to from such an Original Position?

From this position, Rawls argues, we would choose two principles. First, equal basic liberties for all. Second, social and economic inequalities are tolerable only insofar as (a) they attach to positions open to all under fair equality of opportunity, and (b) they work to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged — the famous difference principle.

Three years after Rawls, Nozick replied in Anarchy, State, and Utopia with a stark counterpoint: individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them without violating those rights. Patterned theories of justice — redistributing according to need, merit, or the Rawlsian formula — require constant interference with the free choices of free people.

• Entitlement Theory — A holding is just if acquired justly (initial acquisition) or transferred justly (voluntary exchange, gift, inheritance). History matters, not pattern.
• The Wilt Chamberlain Argument — Any pattern of distribution is overturned by free transactions. Liberty upsets patterns.
• Minimal State — Only a state limited to the protection of persons, property, and contracts is justified. Anything more violates rights.
• Taxation as Forced Labour — Taking the fruits of one’s labour for redistributive ends is, on Nozick’s view, on a par with forced labour.

The contemporary scene is no settled consensus but a contest of approaches, each illuminating what others obscure. Liberalism, communitarianism, republicanism, critical race theory, feminist political theory, and post-colonial thought all stake claims on the unfinished question of how we should live together.

• Authoritarian Resurgence — The 21st century has seen democratic recession, illiberal majoritarianism, and renewed contests over the rule of law.
• Global Justice — Cosmopolitan thinkers ask whether the demands of justice halt at borders, or extend to the species as a whole.
• The Digital Polis — Platforms, algorithms, and surveillance reshape the public sphere and the conditions of free political agency.

Sealed and set forth this Second day of May, in the year MMXXVI.