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, justice, liberty, property, rights, law, and 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.
Sir Isaiah Berlin was a Russian-British social and political theorist, philosopher, and historian of ideas. Although he became increasingly averse to writing for publication, his improvised lectures and talks were sometimes recorded and transcribed, and many of his spoken words were converted into published essays and books, both by himself and by others, especially by his principal editor from 1974, Henry Hardy.
Social philosophy examines questions about the foundations of social institutions, behavior, power structures, and interpretations of society in terms of ethical values rather than empirical relations. Social philosophers emphasize understanding the social contexts for political, legal, moral and cultural questions, and the development of novel theoretical frameworks, from social ontology to care ethics to cosmopolitan theories of democracy, natural law, human rights, gender equity and global justice.
John Nicholas Gray is an English political philosopher and author with interests in analytic philosophy, the history of ideas, and philosophical pessimism. He retired in 2008 as School Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Gray contributes regularly to The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman, where he is the lead book reviewer. He is an atheist.
In ethics, value pluralism is the idea that there are several values which may be equally correct and fundamental, and yet in conflict with each other. In addition, value-pluralism postulates that in many cases, such incompatible values may be incommensurable, in the sense that there is no objective ordering of them in terms of importance. Value pluralism is opposed to value monism, which states that all other forms of value can be commensured with or reduced to a single form.
William Eugene Connolly is an American political theorist known for his work on democracy, pluralism, capitalism and climate change. He is the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. His 1974 work The Terms of Political Discourse won the 1999 Benjamin Lippincott Award.
Richard E. Flathman was the George Armstrong Kelly Professor of Political Science, emeritus, at Johns Hopkins University. He is known for having pioneered, with Brian Barry, David Braybrooke, Felix Oppenheim, and Abraham Kaplan, the application of analytic philosophy to political science. He was a leading advocate of liberalism and a champion of individuality. He defended a conception of social freedom according to which it is "negative, situated, and elemental."
Cultural pluralism is a term used when smaller groups within a larger society maintain their unique cultural identities, whereby their values and practices are accepted by the dominant culture, provided such are consistent with the laws and values of the wider society. As a sociological term, the definition and description of cultural pluralism has evolved. It has been described as not only a fact but a societal goal.
Agonism is a political and social theory that emphasizes the potentially positive aspects of certain forms of conflict. It accepts a permanent place for such conflict in the political sphere, but seeks to show how individuals might accept and channel this conflict positively. Agonists are especially concerned with debates about democracy, and the role that conflict plays in different conceptions of it. The agonistic tradition to democracy is often referred to as agonistic pluralism. A related political concept is that of countervailing power. Beyond the realm of the political, agonistic frameworks have similarly been utilized in broader cultural critiques of hegemony and domination, as well as in literary and science fiction.
The Public and Its Problems is a 1927 book by American philosopher John Dewey. In his first major work on political philosophy, Dewey explores the viability and creation of a genuinely democratic society in the face of the major technological and social changes of the 20th century, and seeks to better define what both the 'public' and the 'state' constitute, how they are created, and their major weaknesses in understanding and propagating their own interests and the public good. Dewey rejects a then-popular notion of political technocracy as an alternative system of governing an increasingly complex society, but rather sees democracy as the most viable and sustainable means to achieving the public interest, albeit a flawed and routinely subverted one. He contends that democracy is an ethos and an ongoing project that requires constant public vigilance and engagement to be effective, rather than merely a set of institutional arrangements, an argument he would later expand upon most influentially in his essay "Creative Democracy: The Task Before Us". The Public and its Problems is a major contribution on pragmatism in political philosophy and continued to promote discussion and debate long after its publication.
Pluralism in general denotes a diversity of views or stands, rather than a single approach or method.
Scientific pluralism is a position within the philosophy of science that rejects various proposed unities of scientific method and subject matter. Scientific pluralists hold that science is not unified in one or more of the following ways: the metaphysics of its subject matter, the epistemology of scientific knowledge, or the research methods and models that should be used. Some pluralists believe that pluralism is necessary due to the nature of science. Others say that since scientific disciplines already vary in practice, there is no reason to believe this variation is wrong until a specific unification is empirically proven. Finally, some hold that pluralism should be allowed for normative reasons, even if unity were possible in theory.
Classical pluralism is the view that politics and decision-making are located mostly in the framework of government but that many non-governmental groups use their resources to exert influence. The central question for classical pluralism is how power and influence are distributed in a political process. Groups of individuals try to maximize their interests. Lines of conflict are multiple and shifting as power is a continuous bargaining process between competing groups. There may be inequalities but they tend to be distributed and evened out by the various forms and distributions of resources throughout a population. Any change under this view will be slow and incremental, as groups have different interests and may act as "veto groups" to destroy legislation. The existence of diverse and competing interests is the basis for a democratic equilibrium, and is crucial for the obtaining of goals by individuals.
In the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970–1979), a pluralist democracy is described as a political system where there is more than one center of power.
Articles in social and political philosophy include:
Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property and equality before the law. Liberals espouse various and often mutually warring views depending on their understanding of these principles but generally support private property, market economies, individual rights, liberal democracy, secularism, rule of law, economic and political freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion. Liberalism is frequently cited as the dominant ideology of modern history.
Criticism of democracy, or debate on democracy and the different aspects of how to implement democracy best have been widely discussed. There are both internal critics and external ones who reject the values promoted by constitutional democracy.
Robert B. Talisse is a left-handed American philosopher and political theorist. He is currently Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where he is also a Professor of Political Science. Talisse is a former editor of the academic journal Public Affairs Quarterly, and a regular contributor to the blog 3 Quarks Daily, where he posts a monthly column with his frequent co-author and fellow Vanderbilt philosopher Scott Aikin. He earned his PhD in Philosophy from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2001. His principal area of research is political philosophy, with an emphasis on democratic theory and liberalism.
The Demands of Liberal Education is a 1999 political philosophy book by Meira Levinson that establishes a liberal political theory of children's education that fits the mutual needs of the state and its diverse citizenry. She writes that the intent of a liberal education—an education that follows from a liberal society's values—is to maximize the autonomy of individual children through increasing their capacity for liberty. Levinson argues autonomy as a right to children. The book, published by Oxford University Press, aims to address a lacuna between educational policy and liberal political theory.
