Political philosophy or political theory is the philosophical study of government, addressing questions about the nature, scope, and legitimacy of public agents and institutions and the relationships between them. Its topics include politics, liberty, justice, property, rights, law, and the enforcement of laws by authority: what they are, if they are needed, what makes a government legitimate, what rights and freedoms it should protect, what form it should take, what the law is, and what duties citizens owe to a legitimate government, if any, and when it may be legitimately overthrown, if ever.
John Bordley Rawls was an American moral, legal and political philosopher in the modern liberal tradition. Rawls has been described as one of the most influential political philosophers of the 20th century.
Philosophy of sex is an aspect of applied philosophy involved with the study of sex and love. It includes both ethics of phenomena such as prostitution, rape, sexual harassment, sexual identity, the age of consent, homosexuality, and conceptual analysis of more universal questions such as "what is sex?" It also includes matters of sexuality and sexual identity and the ontological status of gender. Leading contemporary philosophers of sex include Alan Soble, Judith Butler, and Raja Halwani.
Michael Laban Walzer is an American political theorist and public intellectual. A professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, he is editor emeritus of Dissent, an intellectual magazine that he has been affiliated with since his years as an undergraduate at Brandeis University. He has written books and essays on a wide range of topics—many in political ethics—including just and unjust wars, nationalism, ethnicity, Zionism, economic justice, social criticism, radicalism, tolerance, and political obligation. He is also a contributing editor to The New Republic. To date, he has written 27 books and published over 300 articles, essays, and book reviews in Dissent, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harpers, and many philosophical and political science journals.
Francis Lieber was a Prussian-American jurist and political philosopher. He is most well known for the Lieber Code, the first codification of the customary law and the laws of war for battlefield conduct, which served a later basis for the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 and for the Geneva Conventions. He was also a pioneer in the fields of law, political science, and sociology in the United States.
Sheldon Sanford Wolin was an American political theorist and writer on contemporary politics. A political theorist for fifty years, Wolin became Professor of Politics, Emeritus, at Princeton University, where he taught from 1973 to 1987.
Judith Nisse Shklar was a philosopher and political theorist who studied the history of political thought, notably that of the Enlightenment period. She was appointed the John Cowles Professor of Government at Harvard University in 1980.
Frank Isaac Michelman is an American legal scholar and the Robert Walmsley University Professor Emeritus at Harvard Law School.
Stephen Macedo is an American political scientist who serves as the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Politics at Princeton University, where he was the former director at the University Center for Human Values. Macedo served as the president of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy from 2018 until 2021.
Carl Joachim Friedrich was a German-American professor and political theorist. He taught alternately at Harvard and Heidelberg until his retirement in 1971. His writings on state and constitutional theory, constitutionalism and government made him one of the world's leading political scientists in the post-World War II period. He is one of the most influential scholars of totalitarianism.
Law, Legislation and Liberty (1973–1979) is a work in three volumes by Nobel laureate economist and political philosopher Friedrich Hayek.
Injustice is a quality relating to unfairness or undeserved outcomes. The term may be applied in reference to a particular event or situation, or to a larger status quo. In Western philosophy and jurisprudence, injustice is very commonly—but not always—defined as either the absence or the opposite of justice.
Gertrude Lübbe-Wolff is a German academic and senior judge. She served as a justice of the second senate of the Bundesverfassungsgericht from 2002 to 2014, having succeeded Jutta Limbach in this position.
Alessandro Ferrara is an Italian philosopher, professor of political philosophy at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and former president of the Italian Association for Political Philosophy. He currently teaches legal theory at Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome and political theory at Loyola University Chicago.
Political ethics is the practice of making moral judgments about political action and political agents. It covers two areas: the ethics of process, which deals with public officials and their methods, and the ethics of policy, which concerns judgments surrounding policies and laws.
Manuel Andreas Knoll is a contemporary German scholar and Professor of Political Theory and Philosophy. After three full professorship awards in Istanbul (2011-2023), in January 2024 he moved back to Munich University (LMU) where he is a Privatdozent.
Melissa S. Williams is an American academic who specialises in democratic theory and comparative political theory. She was the founding director of the University of Toronto's Centre for Ethics. As of 2018, she is a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto.
James E. Fleming is an American legal scholar who serves as the Paul J. Liacos Professor of Law at the Boston University School of Law. He is a scholar in standard constitutional theory and constitutional interpretation, with special attention to criticizing originalism and defending moral readings of the U.S. Constitution, developing a civic liberalism concerned with protecting rights and instilling civic virtues, and justifying rights to autonomy and equality as central to constitutional self-government.
Joseph Marko is an Austrian legal scholar and political scientist.
Alexander Somek is an Austrian legal scholar.
