Insight Editions · No. 69
Fifty Major Political Thinkers
Ian Adams and R.W. Dyson
Ian Adams and R.W. Dyson survey fifty political thinkers from Plato to Jean-François Lyotard, outlining their lives, arguments, influence, and debates over authority, freedom, and justice.
A study guide to Fifty Major Political Thinkers by Ian Adams and R.W. Dyson. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
Fifty Thinkers, One Long Argument
How the book is built
The entries run in rough chronological order (Godwin follows Wollstonecraft, and Hayek and Gandhi follow Berlin), which lets a reader trace three broad eras. The classical and medieval entries (Plato to Marsilius) ask what the good life is and how political authority relates to God and the Church. The early modern entries (Machiavelli to Wollstonecraft) build the vocabulary of sovereignty, rights, contract and revolution. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries bring the great ideologies (liberalism, socialism, conservatism, anarchism, fascism) and then their critics.
The five broad eras that the fifty entries pass through.
Two styles of entry are visible. The classical and early modern entries are close textual readings that weigh the arguments of a few works; many modern entries treat a thinker as the representative of a movement, so that Kropotkin stands for anarchism and Beauvoir for second-wave feminism. The book closes with a glossary of about fifty terms, from anarchism to utopia.
| Era | Entries | Main questions |
|---|---|---|
| Classical and medieval | Plato to Marsilius (6) | The good life; Church and state |
| Renaissance and early modern | Machiavelli to Kant (9) | Sovereignty, contract, rights |
| Age of revolutions | Burke to Bentham (7) | Reform, revolution, utility |
| Ideologies | Fourier to Gandhi (18) | Class, nation, liberty, race |
| Since 1945 | Popper on (10) | Justice, ecology, critique of reason and postmodern doubt |
About this book
Fifty Major Political Thinkers by Ian Adams and R.W. Dyson, 2003. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
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How the Fifty Were Chosen
The selection is Western, with one exception, Gandhi, whose ideas were shaped by the West; the authors plead limited expertise elsewhere and note that other volumes in the series cover non-Western traditions. The scientific study of politics is also left aside. Any shortlist, they argue, has three kinds of entry: names impossible to exclude (Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke), a penumbra of cases most knowledgeable people would include, and a class of controversial entries left to editorial discretion.
The Preface's three kinds of entry in any shortlist of greats.
The criteria are power of reasoning, originality and influence, balanced case by case. Choice is hardest after the French Revolution, the age of mass politics. For recent centuries a further criterion, representativeness (thinkers "more representative than outstanding"), explains the entries for anarchism, feminism, ecologism, black emancipation and, most controversially, fascism. The authors concede that the book is thin at its modern end, since no one can predict which recent theorists posterity will rank as major, and they point readers to the Routledge Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Political Thinkers, with its 178 entries, for fuller coverage.
Justice, Knowledge and the Rule of the Wise
Life and works
Plato was Socrates' friend and disciple from about 409 BCE until Socrates' death in 399. His early adulthood coincided with the defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE), the oligarchy of the Thirty and the restored democracy that condemned Socrates. That condemnation, the entry says, defined his career. He wrote three large political works, the Republic, the Statesman (Politicus) and the Laws, and founded the Academy.
Thrasymachus and the challenge of injustice
The Republic opens with the Sophist Thrasymachus, who argues that laws are rules made by the strong for their own advantage, that justice means compliance, and that the just man is an amiable fool. Injustice, on this view, is "better and stronger" than justice, and the tyrant is the happiest of men. Plato blames the Sophists, with their scepticism about knowledge, for much of the political disorder of his youth.
Thrasymachus's argument, which the Republic sets out to refute.
The just city and the just soul
Socrates replies that justice is to the soul what sharpness is to a knife: the virtue that lets it perform its function. To find it, he builds an ideal city, Kallipolis, in which producers, auxiliaries and guardians each do their own work. The soul has the same three parts, reason, spirit and appetite, and it is just when reason rules. Few people are just because most lack knowledge.
| Class in the city | Part of the soul | Virtue |
|---|---|---|
| Guardians (rulers) | Reason | Wisdom |
| Auxiliaries (soldiers) | Spirit | Courage |
| Producers | Appetite | Moderation |
| Whole city or soul | Each part in its place | Justice |
Knowledge, as against opinion, is of the unchanging Forms, above all the Form of the Good. The best state is therefore an aristocracy of philosophers who do good because they know it. They will not legislate; they will govern at their own discretion.
Knowledge of the Forms qualifies philosophers to rule; most people live by opinion.
The later Plato
In the Statesman and the Laws Plato revised, without abandoning, his faith in the rule of the wise. The entry links the change to second thoughts about the theory of Forms (the self-critical Parmenides anticipates Aristotle's objections) and, more importantly, to his failure as adviser to Dionysius II of Syracuse from 367 BCE. The Laws settles for a "second-best" state governed by detailed law, since true philosopher-rulers are not to be found in practice.
Later reception
Plato's influence runs through Neoplatonism, Augustine and the medieval Church into modern debates about expertise. The Republic's proposals for the guardians, common property, common families and equal education for women of the ruling class, show how far he was willing to subordinate private life to the unity of the city. The noble lie, a founding myth of metals in the soul, raises the question of whether stability may rest on a useful falsehood.
Athens after defeat, and Thrasymachus's four claims
Plato's early adulthood sat inside the wreckage of the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE). The Thirty Tyrants, with his uncle Critias among them, turned oligarchic hope into slaughter; the restored democracy of 403 then condemned Socrates (399) on charges of impiety and corrupting the young. The Seventh Letter records Plato's conclusion that existing states are bad and that trouble will not cease until philosophers rule or rulers become philosophers.
Republic: three classes mirror three parts of the soul.
Thrasymachus's challenge, as the entry reconstructs it, packs four claims: the good life is boundless gratification; justice means compliance with law; laws are devices of the strong; the ruler prospers when subjects are just and he is free of limit. Socrates answers that every craft, even a robber band, needs internal limits; justice is not a convention of the strong but a condition of coherent action. The rest of the Republic builds Kallipolis as a large-scale proof that the just soul and the just city share one structure.
- Three classes, three parts. Producers / appetite / moderation; auxiliaries / spirit / courage; guardians / reason / wisdom; justice as each part doing its own work.
- Forms and the Good. Knowledge is of unchanging Forms; opinion tracks appearances. Only those who know the Good may rule, and in the Republic they rule by discretion, not statute.
- Noble lie. A founding myth of metals in the soul binds classes without open force; the entry notes how far private life (common property and families among guardians, equal education for women of that class) is subordinated to civic unity.
- Later turn. After the failed advice to Dionysius II of Syracuse (from 367) and second thoughts about the Forms (Parmenides), the Statesman and Laws settle for a second-best city. Magnesia is ruled in detail by law under a Nocturnal Council; civic virtue becomes the will to obey accumulated law.
Cave, decline of cities, and Magnesia's laws
The Cave allegory maps education: from shadows to firelight puppets to sunlit Forms; the return to the cave is the philosopher's political duty. Books 8-9 narrate constitutional decline: aristocracy → timocracy → oligarchy → democracy → tyranny, each soul-type matching a city-type. Democracy's freedom births the tyrant who promises liberation.
- Why philosophers hesitate. The best would rather contemplate; compulsion and duty, not ambition, put them in office in Kallipolis.
- Laws. Magnesia's detailed code, preambles that persuade, and the Nocturnal Council checking doctrine show Plato's late preference for law-ruled second-best over pure discretion.
- Counterarguments. Popper's open-society attack; Aristotle's critique of unity and common wives/property; democratic readers who salvage Socratic questioning without the guardian state.
The Political Animal and the Good Life
Life and works
Aristotle was born at Stagira, a Greek colony in Thrace, and joined Plato's Academy in 367 BCE. He later tutored the young Alexander and founded his own school, the Lyceum. The entry draws mainly on the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics, which it treats as a single inquiry into the human good.
Teleology and happiness
"Man is by nature a political animal." Every being has a telos, and the human telos is eudaimonia, happiness or flourishing. Because only humans reason, the human good is rational activity well performed. The highest happiness is contemplation (sophia), but for most people, most of the time, happiness lies in practising the moral virtues in everyday life.
From Aristotle's teleology to the need for the polis.
Moral virtue lies in a mean between excess and deficiency: courage between rashness and cowardice. Finding the mean needs practical wisdom, phronesis, the skill of the phronimos. Virtue comes from habituation, through training and repetition, which is why it depends on the community.
Why the polis is natural
The entry gives three reasons. The polis supplies the economic prerequisites of morality; it provides the education that forms virtuous habits; and it meets our social nature, since no one finds happiness alone. A being who needs no polis, Aristotle says, is either a beast or a god.
| Rulers | Correct form | Perverted form |
|---|---|---|
| One | Kingship | Tyranny |
| Few | Aristocracy | Oligarchy |
| Many | Polity | Democracy (rule of the poor) |
Ethics and the best constitution
Aristotle's interest in constitutions is moral as well as analytic. Politics is worthwhile only when arrangements secure the good of all, not of a section. In practice he favours polity, a mixed constitution resting on a large middle class, which is the most stable of the realistic forms. He also defends natural slavery and excludes women from citizenship.
The entry's three reasons why the polis serves the human good.
Later reception
Aristotle also studied how constitutions decay. Revolution comes when groups feel unjustly treated, the rich because equality ignores their contribution, the poor because inequality ignores their equal birth. Stability depends on moderation, a strong middle class and education in the spirit of the constitution. Through Aquinas, and later civic humanism and communitarianism, his view of politics as the shared pursuit of the good life remains a standing alternative to liberal neutrality.
Telos, the mean, and the mixed constitution
Aristotle left the Academy after Plato's death, spent formative years with Hermias at Assos, tutored the future Alexander, then founded the Lyceum (335). The Nicomachean Ethics and Politics survive as student assemblages; textual seams matter, but the spine is clear: the polis is the natural setting for a fully human life.
Aristotle's sixfold scheme and the practicable best.
- Happiness. Highest happiness is contemplative (sophia); secondary happiness is the practice of moral virtue. Virtue is a mean relative to person and situation, found by phronesis (practical wisdom), not by fixed rules alone.
- Why the polis. Economic needs, moral education, and social nature make the household and village incomplete; only the polis can house the good life. Man outside the state is "either greater than human or less than human" (Politics 1:2).
- Correct and deviant. Kingship / tyranny; aristocracy / oligarchy; polity / democracy. The polity (mixed rule leaning on the middle class) is the practicable best for most cities.
- Stability and revolution. Stasis comes when groups feel unjustly treated: the rich because equality ignores contribution, the poor because inequality ignores equal birth. Education in the spirit of the constitution and a strong middle are the stabilisers.
- Citizen and good man. In the best city the virtue of the good citizen and the good man coincide; elsewhere they can diverge.
Household, slavery, and why the middle holds
The Politics begins from the household: natural associations meet graded needs; the village is intermediate; the polis alone is self-sufficient for the good life. Rule over slaves (Aristotle's "natural slave" doctrine), over children, and over free equals are different kinds of rule; collapsing them is a conceptual error that also ruins constitutions.
- Six constitutions. Kingship / tyranny; aristocracy / oligarchy; polity / democracy. Polity is rule by the many for the common good; democracy in his bad sense is mob rule for the poor alone.
- Middle class. The most stable city rests power with a large middle: not rich enough to be hated, not poor enough to covet; they neither plot nor envy as easily.
- Education. The regime's spirit must be taught; laws alone do not hold if habits contradict them.
- Best city. Ideal sketch (Books 7-8) with common meals, controlled property, and leisure for virtue among citizens; the polity remains the advice for ordinary cities.
- Afterlife. Scholastic recovery via Aquinas; civic humanists; modern republicans; and the standing dispute over natural slavery and the exclusion of women and labourers from full citizenship.
Correct vs deviant| Correct (common good) | Deviant (rulers' good) | | Kingship | Tyranny | | Aristocracy | Oligarchy | | Polity | Democracy (as faction of the many) |
The Two Cities
Life and works
Augustine was born at Thagaste (modern Souk Ahras, Algeria) to a Christian mother whose efforts to teach him the faith he resisted. After years as a teacher of rhetoric and a follower of the Manichees, he was converted in Milan, became Bishop of Hippo and wrote, among much else, the City of God.
Sin, grace and predestination
The summary begins with original sin. Adam and Eve were created with free will and misused it; their descendants inherit a nature bent towards love of self. God, foreseeing this, resolved to rescue a few through grace, which lets them place love of God above love of self. Who is saved is decided by predestination, not merit.
Augustine's two cities: invisible communities, not Church and state.
The two cities
Humanity is divided into two cities defined by two loves: the City of God (love of God) and the Earthly City (love of self). Medieval readers took these as the Church and the empire, but the entry insists this is not what Augustine meant. Membership depends on God's choice, and on earth the two cities are mingled until the Last Judgement.
Coercion and obedience
His views on the duties of Christian princes evolved during the Donatist controversy (about 391 to 417). He first thought religious difference should be met with argument, but in letters of 408 and 417 he defended coercion of heretics: force cannot change hearts, but it can bring people to hear the truth. He offers no theory of obligation; rebellion against even a wicked ruler is never justified, since tyrants too are sent by God.
| Question | Augustine's answer |
|---|---|
| Why does the state exist? | As remedy and punishment for sin |
| Can it be truly just? | No; only the City of God is |
| May heretics be coerced? | Yes, in his later view |
| May tyrants be resisted? | No; endure and obey |
Later reception
Augustine also gave political thought a famous definition. A people is a multitude united by agreement on the objects of its love, so Rome was a people, though not a just one; the pirate who told Alexander that he was called a robber for doing with one ship what an emperor did with a fleet makes the point. Without justice, kingdoms are great robberies.
Two loves, two cities, and political realism
Writing after the sack of Rome (410), Augustine refuses both pagan nostalgia and Christian triumphalism. The City of God sorts humanity by the object of love: love of God versus love of self. The two cities are invisible communities mingled on earth until Judgement; they are not simply Church and Empire.
Augustine relocates the highest good beyond classical politics.
- People and justice. A people is a multitude united by agreement on the objects of its love; Rome was a people, though not a just one. Without justice, kingdoms are great robberies (the pirate's retort to Alexander).
- Political use. Earthly peace is a real but limited good; Christians may serve in armies and offices for order, not as an ultimate end. Coercive power is a remedy for sin, not a natural perfection of the classical polis.
- Against classical optimism. Where Aristotle tied flourishing to the city, Augustine relocates beatitude. That move sets medieval and early modern debates about how much the earthly city can claim.
The Body Politic
Life and works
Also called John Little, he was born in Salisbury and educated mainly in France. After ordination he joined the household of Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, as a secretary, served Thomas Becket and ended his life as Bishop of Chartres. His Policraticus, a rambling treatise of about 250,000 words finished around 1159 and dedicated to Becket, spends much of its length on the follies of courtiers.
The organic analogy
"The place of the head in the body of the commonwealth is filled by the prince." Priests are the soul, the senate the heart, judges and governors the eyes and ears, soldiers and officials the hands, and peasants the feet. The image is classical and biblical: for St Paul we are one body with Christ as head. The soul rules the head, so the prince is subject to the Church, and what the Church confers it can remove.
John of Salisbury's body politic: the Church as soul rules the princely head.
Law and tyranny
Is the prince "not bound by the law" (legibus solutus)? John concedes that no one can enforce the law against him, but insists that he must obey it from love of justice. A prince who rules by law is the image of God; a tyrant is the image of Lucifer, and killing him is lawful and even right, though John adds that prayer is often the wiser remedy.
Policraticus and the body politic
John of Salisbury's Policraticus images the kingdom as a body: Church as soul, prince as head, officers as organs. The prince is under law; tyranny is debated with classical and biblical examples. Medieval constitutionalism speaks in organic metaphor.
John of Salisbury: medieval constitutional imagery.
Natural Law and the Christian Use of Aristotle
Life and works
Thomas was born in the castle of Roccasecca near Aquino into a wealthy aristocratic family and educated at Monte Cassino, where his uncle was abbot. Despite family opposition he joined the Dominicans and studied in Paris under Albertus Magnus. His political ideas appear in De regimine principum and in the Summa theologiae.
From Augustine to Aristotle
Through the dominance of Neoplatonism mediated by Augustine, Aristotle's ethics and politics had been almost unknown in the Latin West until the thirteenth century. Once recovered, they let Thomas see political life as natural, not a remedy for sin, and civic happiness as a worthwhile end. The best government is kingship, since rule by one is most natural, but the king's task reaches beyond externals to the virtue and salvation of his subjects.
Aquinas's fourfold typology of law.
The four laws
Law is a rational pattern, somewhat like Plato's Forms. Eternal law is God's plan for the universe. The part that concerns human conduct and is accessible to reason is natural law, whose first precept is to do good and avoid evil. Natural law is too general to guide action, so human law makes it specific; an unjust human law is "no law at all". Divine law, revealed in Scripture, directs us to our supernatural end.
| Law | Source | Known by |
|---|---|---|
| Eternal | God's reason | God alone, fully |
| Natural | Eternal law in human nature | Reason |
| Human (positive) | Rulers apply it | Promulgation |
| Divine | Revelation | Scripture, as interpreted and taught by the Church |
Thomas treats tyranny less fatalistically than Augustine: a tyrant who grossly abuses power may be resisted by public authority, though private tyrannicide is rejected. Matters came to a head after his death, when Bishop Tempier of Paris condemned a long list of Aristotelian doctrines in 1277.
Later reception
Thomas also defended private property as a human arrangement consistent with natural law, while holding that in extreme need taking another's goods is not theft. His doctrine of just war (legitimate authority, just cause, right intention) shaped later international law, and his natural law tradition was revived in the twentieth century by Maritain and Finnis and in debates about human rights.
Four laws, property, and just war
Thomas joins Aristotle's natural teleology to Christian revelation. Eternal law is God's reason; natural law is that reason as participable by human intellect; human law specifies it for communities; divine law is revealed for salvation. Human law that contradicts natural law lacks full binding force.
Three political applications of Thomist natural law.
- Common good. Political authority aims at the temporal common good; the ruler is under law in a moral sense even when not under a human court.
- Property. Private property is a human arrangement consistent with natural law (stewardship and peace), yet in extreme need taking another's goods is not theft.
- Just war. Legitimate authority, just cause, and right intention; later international law and rights talk (Maritain, Finnis) rework this grammar.
- Tyranny. Unjust rule may be resisted under conditions; the entry places Thomas between Augustinian pessimism and Marsilian popular sovereignty.
Common good, tyranny, and the Aristotelian graft
Thomas's prince serves the common good; law is an ordinance of reason for that good, made by who has care of the community. A tyrant who seeks private good may be resisted under conditions that avoid worse disorder; deposition theory sits between passive obedience and Marsilian popular sovereignty.
- Infidel rule. Dominion is not automatically void by unbelief; conversion politics is constrained.
- Virtue and grace. Natural virtues are real; infused virtues and grace perfect them. Politics remains a natural science of the earthly common good, incomplete for salvation.
- School. Commentaries on Aristotle's Ethics and Politics (partial) make the pagan polis speakable inside Christendom; later Spanish scholastics and New Natural Law extend the grammar.
The Defender of the Peace Against the Papacy
Life and works
Marsilius (Marsiglio dei Mainardini) was born in Padua, studied medicine at Padua and Paris, and became Rector of the University of Paris in 1312 or 1313. His Defensor pacis, finished in 1324, was dedicated to Ludwig of Bavaria, then in conflict with Pope John XXII. When his authorship became known in 1326 he fled with John of Jandun to Ludwig's court; Pope John XXII condemned the book in the bull Licet iuxta (1327).
The sufficient community
A state is a perfect or sufficient community, exactly as Aristotle described the polis: one in which people can live the full human life. Government should be by law, the best safeguard against partial interests. Law should come from the universitas civium, the whole body of citizens or at least its "weightier part" (a phrase whose meaning, the entry admits, is not entirely clear). Laws made by one or a few serve particular interests, and people obey more readily laws they have made themselves.
Marsilius: authority from the citizens, law over everyone, Church without coercive power.
Against clerical power
If the state is governed by law, no citizen is exempt. Priests are no longer a people apart; their role is to teach and administer sacraments, not to coerce. Marsilius goes further and challenges the Church's own government: authority in the Church belongs to a general council of believers, and papal primacy is a human arrangement, not divine right.
Defensor Pacis against papal coercion
Marsilius of Padua's Defensor Pacis (1324) locates coercive authority in the universitas civium (corporation of citizens). Law binds clergy and laity; the Church's role is teaching and sacrament, not temporal sword. Peace is the end of the civil order.
Defensor Pacis against papal political claims.
- Conciliar echo. Popular and conciliar strands against papal plenitude of power; early modern resistance theory remembers the move.
Virtù, Fortuna and the Republic
Life and works
Machiavelli was born in Florence into an ancient but impoverished family. He served the republic as a diplomat on missions to France, the Holy See and Germany until the Medici returned in 1512, when he was dismissed, imprisoned and tortured. In enforced retirement he wrote The Prince (1513) and the Discourses on Livy.
Human nature and power
Machiavelli ignores the religious issues of medieval thought and is broadly hostile to Christianity, whose meekness he thinks unfit for a cut-throat world. "All men are bad" (Discourses 3:4), and their root vice is selfishness: first the desire for security, then, once secure, for power and glory. Rational consent and good example cannot rule such creatures. The prince must rely on force and deceit, and the only art he need master is war.
From Machiavelli's view of human nature to the prince's methods.
The traditional view held that a good ruler must be a good man. Machiavelli replies that a prince who always acts virtuously will be ruined among so many who are not; he must learn "how not to be good" and use cruelty "well", swiftly and once. It is safer to be feared than loved, though he must avoid being hated.
Virtù and fortuna
Much in life lies in the hands of Fortuna, and good conduct does not guarantee success. Since characters are fixed while circumstances change, success depends on matching one's methods to the times. Virtù is the prowess that lets an individual meet the blows of fortune and master them by whatever means are needed. Fortune, he says in a notorious image, is a woman who yields to the bold.
| Theme | The Prince | The Discourses |
|---|---|---|
| Focus | The new prince | The republic, above all Rome |
| Main problem | Gaining and holding power | Delaying corruption |
| Key resource | The ruler's virtù | Civic virtue, good laws and conflict channelled by institutions |
The republic
Though power is easiest to study in a new prince, Machiavelli concludes that a republic is healthier than a monarchy. Its problem is to delay the slide into tyranny. Rome succeeded because the conflict between nobles and people was channelled into laws and institutions that let men compete creatively. The entry insists the two books are neither different nor contradictory: both see politics as individuals trying to keep what they have and acquire more.
Virtù meets fortuna: the core of Machiavelli's account of political success.
Later reception
The Prince was dedicated to Lorenzo de' Medici in the hope of regaining office, which partly explains its tone. Its final chapter calls for a redeemer to free Italy from the barbarians, showing the patriot behind the technician. Later readers have seen him as a teacher of tyrants, a satirist exposing princes (Rousseau), a founder of political science or, with Isaiah Berlin, the thinker who revealed that Christian and pagan values cannot both be fully realised.
Force, fortuna, and the republican Discourses
Machiavelli entered Florentine service in 1498 (the entry's 1494 is wrong; see lens), was tortured after the Medici return (1512), then wrote The Prince (c.1513), the Discourses (c.1516), The Art of War (c.1520), and a causal History of Florence. He treats politics as muted warfare: subjects and neighbours are potential enemies; war postponed to one's detriment is folly.
Two Machiavellis and the closing national project.
- Human nature. Men are bad; they chase security and power. A prince should be feared rather than loved if he cannot be both, and must master force and deceit.
- Virtù and fortuna. Success is fitting methods to the times; fortune is a river that floods the unprepared.
- Cesare Borgia. Admired for effectiveness, not virtue; the entry reads this as fascination with power as phenomenon, not only with outcomes.
- Discourses. The republican Machiavelli praises Rome's tumults, mixed orders, and civic religion as engines of greatness; Christianity's meekness, he thinks, softens peoples for conquest.
- Patriot end. The Prince's last chapter calls for a redeemer of Italy from "barbarians"; Berlin later treated him as exposing the clash of Christian and pagan value systems.
Cesare, Christianity, and republican tumult
The Prince studies new princes who seize or receive states. Cesare Borgia is the case study in combining cruelty well, killing rivals, and using fortune while it lasts; his fall shows fortuna's limit when the structural base (the papacy of Alexander VI) vanishes. Military force is the core art; mercenaries and auxiliaries are traps.
- Virtù. Not Christian virtue but aptitude and will to shape events; retain Italian spelling in commentary, as the entry does.
- Discourses on Livy. Republics outlast princedoms when they channel class conflict; Rome's tumults between patricians and plebs produced laws and greatness. Religion is useful civic cement; genuine Christian meekness, Machiavelli thinks, unfits a people for harsh politics.
- Patriot close. The last chapter of The Prince is an exhortation to liberate Italy from "barbarians"; Berlin later read the oeuvre as tragic honesty about incompatible value systems.
- Reception. "Machiavellian" as insult; republican recovery (Pocock, Skinner); realism in IR; the entry's service-date error stays flagged.
Utopia
Life and works
More was born in London, the son of a successful lawyer, and grew up partly in the household of John Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury. He trained in law, entered Parliament, served Henry VIII and became Lord Chancellor in 1529. A friend of Erasmus and a leading Northern Renaissance scholar, he refused to accept the king's supremacy over the Church and was beheaded for treason in 1535; he was canonised in 1935.
The island
Utopia opens with a debate on whether a scholar should enter public service, and on the poverty, vagrancy and crime facing Henry's officials. The traveller Raphael Hythloday then describes an island founded by King Utopus where no one owns property. Everyone works, meals are communal, needs are met from common stores and gold is used for chamber pots. Yet the society is strictly authoritarian: almost everything outside routine needs official permission.
Four features of More's island.
| Feature | Utopia | Tudor England |
|---|---|---|
| Property | Communal | Private, enclosure spreading |
| Work | Six hours for all | Idle rich, desperate poor |
| Religion | Varied worship tolerated | One church enforced |
What did More intend?
The Utopians are tolerant of varied forms of worship within a consensus on a creator and basic moral principles. Their rational society is harmonious and happy, but it cannot be More's own ideal, the entry argues, if only because it is not Christian. The book is a work of Renaissance humanism, showing more faith in human reason than most medieval thought.
Utopia as mirror
Utopia (1516) invents the genre: common property, six-hour workdays, religious tolerance within limits, and strict discipline. Is it blueprint, satire on Europe, or both? More the Lord Chancellor later persecuted heretics; the tension is the point.
More's island: critique or blueprint?
The State of Nature and the Mortal God
Life and works
Hobbes was born at Westport near Malmesbury, Wiltshire; a wealthy uncle sent him to Magdalen Hall, Oxford. He became tutor to the Cavendish family and, around 1630, discovered Euclid, after which demonstrative reasoning became a mainstay of his method. On a tour of 1634 he met Mersenne in Paris and Galileo in Florence. He planned a three-part work on body, human nature and society, but with civil war looming he wrote the political part first.
He fled to France in 1640, contributed the third set of objections to Descartes's Meditations (1641), and published De cive and Leviathan (1651) before returning to England. His theory, the entry stresses, is that of a man who lived through both the Civil War and the scientific revolution.
Hobbes's argument from the state of nature to the sovereign.
The state of nature
Hobbes became convinced around 1630 that everything can be explained as body in motion. Humans are driven by appetite and aversion, above all fear of violent death. Since people are roughly equal in their ability to kill one another, and compete for scarce goods, security and glory, the condition without government is "a war of every man against every man". There is no industry, no arts, no society, and life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short" (Leviathan 1:13).
The covenant and the sovereign
Reason shows that peace is necessary, that it requires mutual agreement not to harm, and that breaking the agreement is self-defeating. But "the force of words" is too weak to bind, so everyone must authorise one person or assembly to act for all. This is "the generation of that great Leviathan", the "Mortal God" to whom we owe peace.
| Question | Hobbes | Locke (Chapter 11) |
|---|---|---|
| State of nature | War of all against all | Governed by natural law |
| Purpose of the state | Peace and security | Protection of property and rights |
| Sovereign power | Absolute, undivided | Limited, held on trust |
| Right of resistance | Only for self-preservation | When trust is broken |
Later reception
Hobbes's absolutism did not make him a friend of tyranny or of the divine right of kings. Authority rests on the consent of the governed, not on God's direct appointment, and the sovereign may be one man or an assembly. Royalists distrusted him for justifying obedience to any effective power, including Cromwell's, and the clergy for his materialism; Parliament even considered investigating Leviathan for atheism in 1666.
Mechanism, right of nature, and the sovereign machine
Hobbes's late love of geometry (Aubrey's Euclid story) models Leviathan as demonstration: from materialist psychology to the need for an undivided sovereign. Good and evil name pleasure and pain; reason calculates felicity; death is the worst evil. Each has a right of nature to use power for self-preservation.
Hobbes's demonstration from mechanism to absolutism.
- State of nature. Equality plus scarcity plus diffidence yield war of all against all; life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Laws of nature are rational articles of peace, but without a common power they lack teeth.
- Covenant. Subjects authorise one man or assembly; the sovereign is not party to the covenant in the same way and cannot be justly punished by subjects for breach.
- Absolutism without divine right. Authority rests on consent to effective power, not God's appointment of kings. Royalists and clergy both distrusted him; Parliament eyed Leviathan for atheism in 1666.
- Liberty. Freedom is the absence of external impediments; inside the commonwealth it is whatever the law silent leaves. The sovereign may be one or many; the point is unity of will.
Laws of nature, authorisation, and Behemoth
Laws of nature are rational precepts forbidding what destroys life; the first is to seek peace, the second to lay down the right of nature when others will too, the third to keep covenants. Without a common power they are advice, not enforceable law.
- Authorisation formula. "I authorise and give up my right of governing myself to this man, or to this assembly… on this condition, that thou give up thy right to him." The multitude becomes one person; subjects own the sovereign's acts.
- Limits. Right to resist immediate death; silence of the law is liberty; counsel may be offered. No right to a share in government as such.
- Civil War mirror. Behemoth reads the English conflict; Liberty, Necessity and Chance presses determinism. Geometry supplies the method; materialism supplies the psychology; absolutism is the political output.
- Critics. Locke and republicans reject undivided sovereignty; Hume softens contract; twentieth-century realists keep the conflict model without the covenant.
Property, Power and Oceana
Life and works
Harrington inherited a large fortune while young, travelled in Europe and was a groom of the bedchamber to the captive Charles I. After the king's execution he wrote The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656). Suspected of plotting after the Restoration, he was arrested in 1661 and imprisoned in the Tower, and his health never recovered.
The balance of property
Oceana is a lightly disguised England ("Emporium" is London, "Leviathan" is Hobbes). Its central principle is a causal link between economic distribution and political power: whoever holds the land holds the government. Since Henry VII and the Tudors, land had moved from nobility to commons, so monarchy was no longer sustainable.
Harrington's causal link between property and power.
The equal commonwealth
The aim is an "equal commonwealth" in which self-interest and public interest do not conflict, based on the rule of law rather than men. An agrarian law caps landholdings at an annual value of £2,000. Government has a senate that debates and a popular assembly that decides, like two girls dividing a cake: one cuts, the other chooses. Rotation in office and the secret ballot keep it responsive, and compulsory public schooling runs from nine to fifteen.
Property balance and Oceana
The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) argues that the balance of property fixes the balance of power. When land passes to the many, monarchy and aristocracy become unstable; an equal commonwealth with agrarian laws, rotation in office, and a written order is the fit form.
Harrington: property distribution fixes the constitution.
- Against Hobbes. Interest and material distribution, not only covenant psychology, explain stable rule.
- Influence. American and French constitutionalists; later property-and-power sociology.
Consent, Property and the Right of Revolution
Life and works
Locke was born into a Puritan family in Somerset; his father fought for Parliament. He studied at Christ Church, Oxford, took a medical degree in 1675 and joined the Royal Society. From 1667 he was physician and adviser to Anthony Ashley Cooper, later Earl of Shaftesbury, whose exclusionist politics drove Locke into exile in Holland. He returned in 1689, after the Glorious Revolution, and published the Two Treatises, the Essay Concerning Human Understanding and the Letters Concerning Toleration.
The state of nature and property
The First Treatise answers Filmer's Patriarcha (published 1680). In the Second, Locke uses a state of nature as an explanatory device, not history. It is governed by the law of nature, which grants rights to life, liberty and property. God gave the earth in common, but a person who mixes his labour with it makes it his own, within limits: leave enough for others and let nothing spoil. Money removes the spoilage limit and so legitimises unequal holdings.
Locke's account of how property arises.
Government on trust
Because enforcing natural law privately is "inconvenient", people consent to form a society and entrust power to a legislative, bound by standing laws. When government invades property or acts arbitrarily, it is dissolved and the people "are at liberty to provide for themselves" (Second Treatise ch.19).
Government on trust and the right of revolution.
Later reception
The entry recalls that the Treatises were long read as a justification of 1688 after the event. Peter Laslett's edition of 1960 showed that most of the work was written around 1679-83, during the Exclusion Crisis, as a call to resistance rather than a defence of a settled revolution. Locke's labour theory of property later fed both classical liberals and early socialists, who asked why those who labour should not own what they produce.
Property, trust, and resistance
Locke's Two Treatises (published 1689, largely written in the Exclusion years) answer Filmer and sketch a limited government. The state of nature already has a law of nature: life, liberty, and property. Property begins when labour is mixed with the common earth, limited by spoilage and "enough and as good" left for others; money later allows unequal holdings without formal breach of that law.
Property provisos, trust, and the edges of civil power.
- Consent and trust. Society forms by consent; the legislative holds power on trust. When trust is broken, the people may erect a new government.
- Separation. Legislative and executive should be distinct; federative power handles external affairs. Absolute monarchy is inconsistent with civil society because there is no common judge above the king.
- Toleration. The Letter Concerning Toleration draws a line between civil care of life and goods and the salvation of souls, with famous limits (atheists, and in his text Catholics as politically dangerous).
- Dating. Laslett showed the Treatises are mainly 1679-83 resistance writing, not a post-1688 apology.
Filmer, federative power, and the provisos
The First Treatise dismantles Filmer's Patriarcha: political power is not Adam's patriarchal bequest. The Second builds from natural law and consent. Beside legislative and executive stands federative power (war, peace, leagues), often held with the executive but distinct in function.
- Provisos. Spoil limit and "enough and as good" for others; money, by tacit consent, allows unequal accumulation without formal breach. Labour-mixing is the origin story; land is the paradigm property.
- Trust and dissolution. Legislative supremacy under trust; when princes or assemblies act contrary to the trust, power reverts to the people. 1688 is read as restoration of a violated constitution, not as holy rebellion for its own sake.
- Toleration letters. Civil magistrate cares for life and goods; churches are voluntary; atheists (and, in Locke's text, Catholics as political threat) are the hard cases.
- American echo. Life, liberty, and estate → Jefferson's pursuit of happiness; revolution theory travels.
The Spirit of the Laws
Life and works
Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, was born at La Brède near Bordeaux, educated at the Oratorian college of Juilly and read law at Bordeaux. The Persian Letters (1721), a satire on French life seen through the eyes of two Persian travellers, made his name. He travelled in Europe from 1728 to 1731, lived for a time in England, and published The Spirit of the Laws in 1748.
Laws and circumstances
The book is long and notoriously shapeless. It begins with laws as "necessary relationships deriving from the nature of things". Government arises from common human needs, but needs are expressed differently in different places, so laws must fit the climate, terrain, religion and manners of each people. The relativism is tempered by a belief in natural justice.
Montesquieu: laws must fit the circumstances of each people.
| Government | Nature | Principle |
|---|---|---|
| Republic | People or part of it rule | Virtue |
| Monarchy | One rules by fixed laws | Honour |
| Despotism | One rules by caprice | Fear |
Liberty and the separation of powers
The constitution most compatible with liberty is monarchy of the English kind (Book XI). Old feudal monarchies balanced king, nobles and clergy; in England this equipoise had become a formal separation of powers, legislative, executive and judicial in different hands, acting as checks and balances.
Later reception
Montesquieu is also a founder of comparative politics and sociology, since he tried to explain laws by social causes rather than judge them by abstract reason. His praise of commerce as a source of gentle manners (doux commerce) and peace influenced the Scottish Enlightenment, and his warnings against despotism made him a favourite of liberal reformers across Europe. Catherine the Great borrowed heavily from him in her Instruction (Nakaz) of 1767.
Spirit of the laws and the English model
The Spirit of the Laws (1748) treats law as relative to climate, terrain, religion, commerce, manners, and size. Despotism, monarchy, and republic each have a principle (fear, honour, virtue). Liberty is security under law; the English constitution's separation of powers is admired as a machine that checks ambition with ambition.
Montesquieu: laws must fit a people's circumstances.
- Moderate government. Separation and balance beat pure forms; slavery and religious persecution are attacked as contrary to spirit and commerce.
- Influence. American founders, Madison's ambition-counteracting-ambition, and later sociology of law all drink here.
Passion, Convention and Utility
Life and works
Hume was born into the minor landed gentry of Scotland and read law at Edinburgh before turning to philosophy. Religious opposition blocked his candidacies for chairs at Edinburgh (1745) and Glasgow (1752). His Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40) fell flat, so he recast it in two Enquiries and wrote Essays Moral and Political and a History of England.
Reason, the slave of the passions
"Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions" (Treatise 2:3:3). Hume's target is the belief that morality can be demonstrated by reason. Moral judgements come from sentiment, and one cannot derive "ought" from "is", a point the entry calls a category mistake that Hume rightly identified.
Hume's two premises and their moral conclusion.
Government and the original contract
People are naturally sociable, and government grows from practical responses to needs. Hume cannot see why the origin of government matters so much: all forms "established by custom and authority" are equally legal. In "Of the Original Contract", an essay "every admirer of Locke ought to read", he shows that almost no government rests on consent; we obey because of habit and because obedience is useful.
Sentiment, utility, and the is-ought gap
Hume's empiricism makes reason the slave of the passions: reason finds means and relations of ideas; ends come from feeling. Morality is not deduced from pure reason; the famous is-ought paragraphs warn against sliding from descriptive premises to duty.
Hume: reason alone cannot yield moral obligation.
- Justice as artificial virtue. Property, promise, and government arise as useful conventions that sympathy and interest sustain; not as innate ideas.
- Government. Allegiance rests on utility and habit more than on original contract. Resistance is justified when tyranny destroys the point of government, but Hume is wary of enthusiastic rebellion.
- Parties and religion. Essays analyse faction, superstition, and enthusiasm; the History of England (six volumes in the finished work) reads politics as contingency and interest.
- Influence. Smith, utilitarians, and later conservative sceptics all draw from the anti-rationalist moral psychology.
Corruption, Freedom and the Rule of the General Will
Life and works
Rousseau was born in Geneva, the son of a Calvinist watchmaker; his mother died at his birth. After wandering in Savoy and Italy he reached Paris and the circle of the philosophes, especially Diderot. His early Discourses offended them, and Emile and The Social Contract (both 1762) outraged the authorities; both books were burned in Paris and Geneva. The Confessions and Reveries were published after his death in 1778.
History as corruption
The Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750) rejected both tradition and the Enlightenment faith in progress: civilisation had made people worse. The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755) pictures natural man as a free, solitary creature moved by self-love and pity. Property, dependence and comparison (amour-propre) brought inequality and a fraudulent contract that entrenched the rich.
Rousseau's story of corruption and its political remedy.
The social contract
Return to nature is impossible, but natural freedom can be exchanged for the freedom of the citizen. Each gives himself wholly to the community, so that, obeying the General Will, each obeys only himself. Whoever refuses to obey may be "forced to be free", the entry's "infamous and chilling" phrase.
| Concept | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Will of all | Sum of private interests |
| General Will | What all want as citizens, for the common good |
| Sovereign | The assembled people, making laws |
| Government | Executive that applies the laws |
The General Will emerges because Rousseau imagines a simple society of farmers and artisans with no rich or poor, citizens who vote without factions or discussion, and a civil religion and lawgiver to shape them. Sovereignty always belongs to the people and cannot be represented.
Later reception
Rousseau's influence on education (Emile), on Romanticism and on the Jacobins, who revered him, was enormous. His idea that society, not nature, corrupts people runs through socialism and later critiques of consumer culture. Kant credited him with teaching respect for the common man, and his insistence that legitimate law must be self-imposed inspired Kant's idea of autonomy.
Amour-propre, General Will, and forced to be free
Natural man in the Second Discourse is free, solitary, and moved by amour de soi and pity; property and amour-propre birth inequality and a false contract that locks in the rich. The Social Contract asks how men can live in society yet remain as free as before.
Rousseau: natural goodness, social corruption, civic remedy.
- Double relation. Each gives up natural rights and becomes both subject and citizen of the sovereign people. Freedom is obedience to self-imposed law.
- General Will. Not the sum of private wills (volonté de tous) but the will aimed at the common good. Those who refuse may be "forced to be free": compelled to obey the general will they share as citizens.
- Size and virtue. Small, relatively equal republics; civil religion; suspicion of representation as alienation of sovereignty. Emile trains the natural man who can become that citizen.
- Influence. Jacobins, Kant (respect for the common man; autonomy), Romanticism, and later critiques of consumer corruption all drink from this well.
Positive freedom, size, and civil religion
"Forced to be free" uses a positive idea of freedom: true freedom is obedience to the law one has prescribed to oneself as citizen, not the negative liberty of unchecked appetite. The criminal is forced back into the general will that defines civic freedom.
- Lawgiver. A founder may design institutions and civil religion, then step aside; the people remain sovereign.
- Government. Executive is a commission of the sovereign; when government usurps, the social compact dissolves. Small states, relatively equal property, and sparse luxury keep the general will audible.
- Emile and the burned books. Emile and The Social Contract (1762) were burned in Paris and Geneva for religious content; the Savoyard Vicar's natural religion offended both churches and some philosophes.
- Reception. French Revolution (selective), Kantian autonomy, Romantic authenticity, totalitarian readings of the general will, and democratic theorists of participation all claim pieces.
Autonomy, Republic and Perpetual Peace
Life and works
Kant spent his famously regular life in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad), rising from humble origins to become its university's most distinguished professor. The three Critiques (1781, 1788, 1790) and the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) made his name; his politics lies in essays such as Idea for a Universal History (1784) and Perpetual Peace (1795). Hume's scepticism, he said, woke him from his "dogmatic slumber".
Phenomena, noumena and duty
Kant answered Hume by distinguishing the world of phenomena, as structured by our minds, from things in themselves, the noumena. We act as free beings, members of the noumenal world, when we act from duty against self-interest. Morality rests on the categorical imperative: act only on a maxim you could will as a universal law, and treat humanity always as an end, never merely as a means.
Kant's two standpoints and the moral law.
The republican constitution
A society of rational, autonomous beings needs republican government: civil liberties, equality before the law, representation and the separation of legislative from executive power. In absolutist Prussia this was radical, though Kant denied any right of rebellion. He did not think world government feasible; perpetual peace would come through a league of republics settling disputes by law.
| Definitive article of Perpetual Peace | Content |
|---|---|
| First | Every state's constitution shall be republican |
| Second | International law shall rest on a federation of free states |
| Third | Cosmopolitan right limited to universal hospitality |
Autonomy, publicity, and perpetual peace
Morality is autonomy under the categorical imperative; persons are ends, never mere means. Politics should approximate a republican constitution (separation of powers, representation) and a federation for perpetual peace. Enlightenment is emergence from self-incurred immaturity; public use of reason must be free.
From the categorical imperative to cosmopolitan hope.
- Right. Coercion is justified only to protect equal external freedom under law.
Prescription, Prejudice and the Reflections
Life and works
Burke was born in Dublin and studied at Trinity College. Like Hume he abandoned law for letters, publishing A Vindication of Natural Society (1756) and an Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). From 1765 he was an MP and secretary to Lord Rockingham. He attacked George III's idea of monarchy (Present Discontents, 1770), blamed British misgovernment for American unrest, pursued Warren Hastings, and in 1790 published Reflections on the Revolution in France.
Against rationalism
Burke distrusts what Oakeshott would call "rationalism" in politics: conduct guided by a priori principles rather than experience. Arrangements that have survived long trial embody the accumulated wisdom of generations; "prejudice" in this sense is reason at work over time. Society is a partnership between the living, the dead and those yet to be born.
Burke's case for prescription over abstract reason.
Revolutionary change is therefore a leap into the unknown, and reform should be gradual and ad hoc. Burke does not invoke a golden age; he accepts that the origins of things are unrecoverable, and justifies institutions by their present working, a doctrine of prescription.
Later reception
Burke's thought includes a defence of representation: in his Speech to the Electors of Bristol (1774) he told voters that an MP owes them his judgement, not obedience to instructions. He defended parties as honourable connections pursuing a shared principle. His conservatism was therefore Whig and parliamentary, and his later admirers range from nineteenth-century Tories to modern liberals worried by utopian schemes.
Prescription against abstract rights
Burke defends the British constitution as an entailed inheritance: reform by repairing the fabric, not by geometric rights of 1789. Prejudice and prescription store the species' wisdom; the social contract is between living, dead, and unborn.
Burke against revolutionary rationalism.
- America and India. Conciliation with the colonies; impeachment of Hastings: empire under law and manners, not abstract sovereignty alone.
- French Revolution. Reflections (1790) as the conservative classic; Paine answers in Rights of Man.
Common Sense and the Rights of Man
Life and works
Paine was born into a modest Quaker family in Thetford, Norfolk, apprenticed to his father's trade of corset-making and later worked as an excise officer, losing the post after campaigning for better pay. Encouraged by Franklin, he emigrated to Philadelphia, where Common Sense (1776) sold perhaps 150,000 copies and helped prepare the Declaration of Independence. Back in Britain he answered Burke with The Rights of Man (1791-2), was indicted for seditious libel and fled to France.
Radical liberalism
Paine's thought is a straightforward radical-liberal ideology. The past is the story of tyranny and ignorance; society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness. Government cannot be the property of any family, so he is a democrat, and each generation must be free to act for itself.
Paine's opening contrast in Common Sense.
| Issue | Burke | Paine |
|---|---|---|
| Source of rights | Inheritance and prescription | Nature, equal for all |
| Authority of the past | Binding partnership | Each age is free |
| French Revolution | Destructive folly | Liberty reborn and the rights of man proclaimed |
Later reception
Paine's later Age of Reason (1794-5), a deist attack on revealed religion written partly in prison, cost him much of his American popularity. He died in New York in 1809, poor and largely shunned; only six people attended his funeral, and William Cobbett later dug up his bones to bring them to England, where they were lost. His reputation revived with the labour and radical movements, and he is now honoured as a founding voice of American independence and of social democracy.
Common Sense to Agrarian Justice
Common Sense (1776) attacks monarchy and hereditary rule; Rights of Man answers Burke with natural rights and generational sovereignty; Age of Reason assaults revealed religion; Agrarian Justice proposes a stake for each from ground-rent, a proto social minimum.
From American independence to social rights.
Culture, Language and Nation
Life and works
Herder was born in a remote part of East Prussia, the son of a village schoolmaster, and studied under Kant at Königsberg. He became a Lutheran pastor and later court preacher at Weimar, where Goethe was his friend. His major works include the Treatise on the Origin of Language (1772) and the Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784-91).
From Enlightenment to Romanticism
Herder began within the Enlightenment but became arguably the most significant single figure in the turn to Romanticism. A language embodies a whole way of life, the collective experience of a nation. History is made of national cultures, each with its own value, rather than of a single march of reason.
Herder's chain from language to the cultural nation.
Nation against state
The cultural nation, not the sovereign state, is the true basis of political identity. The state is artificial, the nation a product of natural growth. Herder did not set tradition against progress, only against shallow Enlightenment ideas of progress, and he was hostile to imperialism and racism, opposing European domination of other peoples.
Language, Volk, and against empire of culture
Herder roots humanity in language and way of life. Each Volk has its own centre of happiness; forced uniformity (imperial or Enlightenment cosmopolitan) mutilates. Progress is plural, not a single ladder with Europe at the top.
Herder's cultural nationalism.
- Culture before state. Nationalism here is cultural and linguistic first; later ethnic nationalists harden it.
- Goethe. Weimar friendship matters for the Sturm und Drang context; the entry's meeting year is contested (see lens elsewhere).
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Life and works
Born in Spitalfields, London, Wollstonecraft had a disrupted childhood. With her friend Frances Blood she opened a school in Islington in 1784 and came under the influence of the rational dissenters Price and Priestley. After Frances died in childbirth she turned to writing: Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1786), a novel, a Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) against Burke and, in 1792, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. She married Godwin in 1797 and died after giving birth to the future Mary Shelley.
The argument
She rejects the assumption that women's subordination is fixed by nature. Rights rest on reason, and women are rational creatures whose minds are stunted by an education that trains them to please. Give girls the same education as boys, and women will become better companions, mothers and citizens.
Wollstonecraft's liberal argument for women.
Rights of Woman
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) argues women are rational and must share education and civic virtue if they are to be good citizens, wives, and mothers. Dependency and coquetry are produced, not natural. She answers Burke and Talleyrand from a radical liberal stance.
Wollstonecraft's liberal feminist core.
Political Justice and Philosophical Anarchism
Life and works
Godwin was born at Wisbech, the son of a Presbyterian minister, and served as a minister himself before his faith "evaporated" between 1778 and 1783. In London he wrote An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, revised in 1795 and 1797, and the novel Caleb Williams (1794). He married Wollstonecraft in 1797; her death and the scandal of his candid Memoirs of her (1798) damaged him, and his last thirty years were marked by debt and obscurity.
Reason against the state
Human beings are perfectible: their characters are formed by circumstances, and truth, freely discussed, will prevail. The chief obstacle is the state, which corrupts rulers and ruled alike. Even promises, property and marriage are suspect when they bind people against the dictates of present reason.
Godwin's optimistic road to a society without government.
Perfectibility without government
Political Justice argues that truth wins in free discussion; government and marriage are crutches that private judgment should outgrow. Perfectibility is gradual enlightenment, not a putsch. Property inequality corrupts; sincerity is a political virtue.
Godwin's anarchist optimism.
- Anarchism avant la lettre. Individualist, rationalist, anti-coercive; later anarchists diverge toward mutualism and collectivism.
Spirit, Freedom and the State as Ethical Life
Life and works
Hegel was born in Stuttgart, the son of a provincial official, and was a remarkably late developer. After years as tutor, editor and headmaster he became professor at Heidelberg and then Berlin (1818), where he dominated German philosophy. His politics is set out in the Philosophy of Right (1821). The entry notes that he is less studied in the English-speaking world than he should be.
The odyssey of Spirit
The entry asks us to imagine an empty universe in which only Geist exists. Mind, still unconscious, turns into its opposite, matter, then returns to itself through life and finally human consciousness. Each civilisation expresses a zeitgeist in its morality, art, religion and philosophy, and each is superseded dialectically when its contradictions mature.
The dialectical odyssey of Spirit as the entry reconstructs it.
History climaxes in Hegel's Germany: the Prussian state, Protestantism and his own philosophy. Mind or God is not a separate being but ourselves, the collective mind, which can understand itself only through human thought.
Freedom and the state
History is the history of freedom. Hegel's freedom is positive, drawn from Rousseau and Kant: being free is acting rationally and morally. The Greek polis absorbed the individual; Rome and Christianity brought individualism; the modern state reconciles the two.
| Sphere | Principle | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Family | Love, unity | Immediate ethical life |
| Civil society | Particular interests, market | Freedom and division |
| State | Universal ethical will | Synthesis of both |
Hegel was the first theorist to insist on a clear distinction between civil society and the state. The state embodies the ethical will of the whole people, a version of Rousseau's General Will. Parliament voices the conflicts of civil society, and the executive harmonises them.
Later reception
The Philosophy of Right's preface contains Hegel's famous claim that "what is rational is actual and what is actual is rational", and its image of philosophy as the owl of Minerva, which flies only at dusk: philosophy understands an age when it is already passing. The state includes a constitutional monarch, a professional civil service (the "universal class") and estates representing corporations, not individuals, a structure liberals find too authoritarian.
Spirit, ethical life, and the rational state
Late-blooming Hegel published the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), then the Encyclopedia and Philosophy of Right (1821). History is Spirit's odyssey toward freedom; philosophy is the owl of Minerva, flying at dusk. "What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational" is a claim about intelligible structure, not a blank cheque for every fact.
Philosophy of Right: nested spheres of Sittlichkeit.
- Master and slave. Recognition struggle in the Phenomenology shows self-consciousness needing another; labour and fear reshape the slave's world.
- Ethical life (Sittlichkeit). Family, civil society (market, corporations, police), and the state as the concrete universal. Abstract right and morality are incomplete without this institutional nest.
- State form. Constitutional monarchy, professional civil service as "universal class", estates representing corporations rather than atomised individuals. Jacobin populism is rejected.
- Reception. Right-Hegelians, Young Hegelians, Marx, Green, and later communitarians (Taylor, MacIntyre) all start from different cuts of this system.
Freedom's institutional path
Hegel's Philosophy of Right nests freedom: abstract right (person, property, contract), morality (intention and conscience), then ethical life. Family is immediate unity; civil society is the system of needs, corporations, and police (administration) where Lockean and Smithian individualism live; the state is the concrete universal in which particular and universal wills reconcile.
- History. Oriental world (one free), Greek-Roman (some free), Germanic-Christian world (all free as persons). Commercial societies (Britain, Holland) teach social and economic individualism; the rational state must house that individualism without dissolving into atomism.
- Owl of Minerva. Philosophy paints grey on grey when a form of life has grown old; the Philosophy of Right reads the post-Napoleonic constitutional monarchy as intelligible, not as a call to restore every abuse.
- Estates and civil service. Representation through corporations and estates, not only numerical majorities; the bureaucracy as universal class. Jacobin terror shows what happens when abstract freedom storms institutions.
- Counter-readings. Marx inverts base and state; liberals fear absorption; communitarians recover Sittlichkeit against atomised rights.
War, world history, and the Prussian question
Hegel treats war as a moment in which the state's ethical substance can override private comfort; world history is the court of judgement among peoples. Readers dispute how far the Philosophy of Right apologises for the Prussian restoration: the text praises constitutional monarchy with estates, not raw despotism, yet its "actual is rational" line was ripe for abuse.
- Young Hegelians. Bauer, Feuerbach, and Marx invert or dissolve the system; British Idealists (Green, Bosanquet) baptise a milder Hegel for liberalism.
Utility and Reform
Life and works
Bentham was born in Houndsditch, London, went to Westminster School at seven and to Queen's College, Oxford, at twelve. He trained for the bar but never practised, and spent years promoting the Panopticon, a model prison. His key works are A Fragment on Government (1776) and An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (written 1780, published 1789). His dissected, mummified body sits in University College London.
The felicific calculus
Bentham was the most notable early exponent, though not the founder, of utilitarianism. Nature has placed us under pain and pleasure; right action produces the greatest happiness of the greatest number. A felicific calculus weighs pleasures by intensity, duration, certainty, nearness, fecundity, purity and extent. His style is fearsome, and he is not always the clearest of thinkers.
Bentham's two sovereign masters and the calculus of utility.
From jurisprudence to democracy
After about 1809, through his friendship with James Mill, Bentham turned to political reform. Like Burke he despised abstractions: natural rights are "nonsense upon stilts". But unlike Burke he concluded that rulers pursue their own interest, so only democracy, with a wide suffrage and the secret ballot, can align government with the general happiness (Plan of Parliamentary Reform, 1817).
| Dimension | Question asked of a pleasure |
|---|---|
| Intensity and duration | How strong, how long? |
| Certainty and nearness | How likely, how soon? |
| Fecundity and purity | Will it breed pleasures or pains? |
| Extent | How many people are affected? |
Later reception
Bentham coined words still in use, including international, maximise and codification, and his campaign for codified law influenced reformers from Spain to Latin America. The Westminster Review, founded with his money in 1824, spread the views of the philosophic radicals. Critics from Mill to Rawls objected that summing happiness ignores the separateness of persons, allowing the suffering of a few to be outweighed by the pleasure of many.
Felicific calculus and legal engineering
Bentham's two sovereign masters are pleasure and pain. Utility is the greatest happiness of the greatest number; every law and institution is a machine to be redesigned. Natural rights are "nonsense upon stilts" when used to block reform.
Bentham: from sovereign masters to legal engineering.
- Codes and prisons. Panopticon as inspectable architecture; tireless drafting of constitutional and criminal codes; influence on administrative state and legal positivism.
- Democracy. Adult male suffrage (later wider), secret ballot, annual parliaments in radical phases; government as trustee of the governed's interest.
- Versus rights talk. Locke and declarations are attacked as obstacles to calculation; Mill later softens this with higher pleasures and liberty as a rule.
Harmony, Passion and the Phalanx as a Model Community
Fourier's life and system
Fourier was born in Besançon to a prosperous cloth-merchant family that lost its fortune in the Revolution; he himself narrowly escaped execution by the Jacobins. Working as a commercial traveller, he developed a theory of history in thirty-two stages ordained by God, leading through "civilisation" and socialism to Harmony, which would last 70,000 years before declining.
Just as Newton had shown how attraction and repulsion produce cosmic equilibrium, Fourier claimed to have discovered the laws of passionate attraction in human society. Civilisation frustrates the passions; a rightly ordered society would harness them, so that even unpleasant work becomes attractive.
Fourier's road from civilisation to Harmony.
The phalanx
The building block of the new society is the phalanstère, or phalanx, of about 1,700 to 1,800 people, a number calculated from the varieties of human temperament. Members rotate between jobs, women are emancipated (Fourier thought them superior in most things), the phalanx replaces the family as the focus of loyalty, and education is common. Property is not abolished: members hold shares and profits are divided between labour, capital and talent.
| Thinker | Model | Key idea |
|---|---|---|
| Saint-Simon (1760-1825) | Rule by industrialists and scientists | Planned industrial society |
| Fourier (1772-1837) | Phalanx of 1,700 to 1,800 | Liberated passions, attractive work |
| Owen (1771-1858) | New Lanark, New Harmony | Character formed by environment |
Passions, phalanx, and Harmony
Fourier reads civilisation as systematic frustration of passions. Attractive labour in the phalanx (roughly 1,600-1,800 persons) matches tastes to tasks; Harmony replaces commerce and marriage-as-prison. Wild cosmology sits beside sharp satire of boredom and adultery under "civilisation."
From frustrated passions to the phalanx.
- Influence. Utopian socialism before Marx; later cooperative and intentional communities borrow the phalanx idea selectively.
Attraction and anti-civilisation
Fourier inventories passions (including the cabalist, butterfly, and composite) that civilisation frustrates. Attractive labour rotates tasks; children form "little hordes"; commerce and monogamy are prime targets of satire. Marx and Engels praised the critique of civilisation while rejecting the cosmology.
Alienation, History and Revolution
Life and works
Marx was born in Trier, the son of a lawyer from a Jewish family that had converted to Lutheranism. He studied law and philosophy, fell in with the Young Hegelians, and edited a radical newspaper until it was suppressed. In exile in Paris he met Engels, son of a Rhineland mill-owning family, whose study of Manchester convinced him of the future of industry. They wrote the Communist Manifesto (1848); after the failed revolutions Marx settled in London, where he researched in the British Museum and published Capital, volume 1, in 1867.
Labour and alienation
In the Paris Manuscripts of 1844, not widely known until the twentieth century, the human essence is labour: we express ourselves by shaping nature. Where workers' products are expropriated by owners of the means of production, labour becomes alienated, from the product, the activity, fellow humans and our own species-being. Capitalism intensifies exploitation, and political rights alone cannot end it.
The four forms of alienation in the Paris Manuscripts.
Historical materialism
The basic fact of any society is its mode of production. The economic base determines the legal, political and ideological superstructure: "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness" (1859). The state protects ruling-class property. When forces of production outgrow relations of production, a revolutionary class rises.
| Mode of production | Ruling class | Exploited class |
|---|---|---|
| Ancient | Slave owners | Slaves |
| Feudal | Nobility | Serfs and peasants |
| Capitalist | Bourgeoisie | Proletariat |
| Communist | None (classless) | None |
Capitalism's end
Revolution brings a dictatorship of the proletariat, then a classless society in which the state withers away: "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs".
Base and superstructure: the base determines; the dashed line marks limited feedback.
Later reception
Marx's account of the state and revolution was sketchy. The Civil War in France (1871) praised the Paris Commune as a model of workers' self-government, and the Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875) distinguished a lower phase of communism, paying according to work, from a higher phase, distributing according to need. The gap between these sketches and later communist states is a central theme of the entries on Bernstein, Lenin and the Frankfurt School.
Alienation, surplus value, and the unfinished politics
The Paris Manuscripts (1844) make labour the human essence: shaping nature is self-expression. Under private ownership of the means of production, workers are alienated from product, activity, others, and species-being. Political rights that protect property, Marx thought, sanctify isolation; only communism restores the human relation to nature and fellows.
Marx's path from critique of capitalism to sketched politics.
- Base and superstructure. Mode of production (forces + relations) is the base; law, state, religion, art, and "ruling ideas" form the superstructure. The state protects ruling-class property; ideology wins consent where force alone cannot (false consciousness in later shorthand).
- Capital. Competition, wage labour as commodity, machinery and division of labour intensify exploitation. Surplus value (unpaid labour time) is the secret of profit in the mature theory; crises and a growing proletariat prepare revolution.
- Politics sketched. Manifesto (1848); Civil War in France (1871) praises the Paris Commune; Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875) distinguishes lower communism (to each according to work) from higher (according to need). The dictatorship of the proletariat is named more than designed.
- After Engels (1895). No authoritative heir; revisionism, Leninism, and Western Marxism pull apart. Revolutions came in peasant societies; industrial capitalism reformed and grew a middle class the prophecy underweighted.
Modes of production, ideology, and the political sketches
Historical materialism sequences modes of production: ancient (slavery), feudal (serfdom and land), capitalist (wage labour and capital), with an "Asiatic" type where village communal ownership coexists with a despotic tribute state organising irrigation and defence. Each mode contains contradictions that force transformation; capitalism's are competition, falling profit tendencies (in the mature theory), and a proletariat trained by cooperation in the factory yet denied the product.
- Ideology. Ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class; most people most of the time live in false consciousness, mistaking contingent property relations for nature or justice. Religion, law, and political economy can all play this part.
- Paris Commune. Marx's Civil War in France treats the 1871 Commune as the first working-class government: recallable delegates, cheap government, smashed standing bureaucracy. It becomes the empirical hint for the dictatorship of the proletariat: workers as ruling class using state instruments during transition.
- Gotha critique. Lower phase: from each according to ability, to each according to work (still bourgeois right); higher phase: according to need, after scarcity and the division of labour are overcome.
- Counterarguments the entry registers. Industrial societies reformed; middle classes grew; revolutions came in peasant empires; no single heir after Engels (1895). The diagnosis of alienation and commodity form outlived the timetable.
Commodity, crisis, and unfinished politics
Capital I opens with the commodity: use-value and exchange-value; concrete and abstract labour; the fetish that makes social relations appear as relations among things. Surplus value is unpaid labour time; the working day, machinery, and relative surplus value are the capitalist's levers. Crises of overproduction and a reserve army of labour are structural, not accidents.
- Politics unfinished. Marx never wrote the full state theory; letters and journalism fill gaps. The Internationals, the split with Bakunin, and advice to German socialists show a tactician as well as a theorist.
- Entry's close. After Engels, no pope of Marxism; Western Marxists return to culture and alienation; state socialisms claim the name while building party-states Lenin sketched in practice.
Democracy in America
Life and works
Tocqueville was born into an old Norman aristocratic family of royalist sympathies. In 1831-2 he toured the United States with Gustave de Beaumont to study prisons, and wrote Democracy in America (1835 and 1840). He entered politics, helped draft the Second Republic's constitution and was briefly Foreign Minister in 1849. His last major work was The Ancien Régime and the Revolution (1856).
Equality and its dangers
America offers the clearest picture of the egalitarian society Europe is becoming; remarkably, Tocqueville predicts that the United States and Russia will one day sway half the globe. The first danger is the tyranny of the majority, more through opinion than law. The second is individualism, linked to commerce, which draws people into private life.
Tocqueville's three threats to liberty in democracy.
| Danger | Remedy Tocqueville found in America |
|---|---|
| Majority tyranny | Courts, juries, free press |
| Individualism | Civil associations, local government |
| Centralised despotism | Federalism, township democracy |
| Materialism | Religion and mores |
Later reception
The Ancien Régime and the Revolution (1856) argued that the Revolution completed, rather than reversed, the centralisation begun by the French monarchy, and that revolutions often break out when conditions are improving and grievances become intolerable because relief seems possible. This "Tocqueville effect" is still discussed by social scientists. His sense that liberty depends on mores and associations, not institutions alone, was taken up by Mill, who reviewed Democracy in America warmly.
Equality, associations, and soft despotism
Democracy in America sees equality of conditions as Providence's fact. Dangers: tyranny of the majority, individualism that withdraws into private life, and administrative centralisation that yields soft despotism: a tutelary power that keeps people comfortably infantile.
Tocqueville: liberty under equality needs associations.
- Remedies. Local self-government, voluntary associations, religion as moral ballast, and habits of the heart that liberty needs.
- France. The Old Regime and the Revolution finds centralisation already in the monarchy; 1848 and the Second Empire confirm fears.
Utility, Liberty and the Case for Representative Government
Life and works
Mill was the eldest son of the utilitarian James Mill, who educated him at home: Greek at three, Latin at eight, much of Plato by his early teens. He read Bentham, studied Roman law with John Austin, suffered a mental crisis at twenty and found relief in poetry. He worked at the East India Company, married Harriet Taylor in 1851 after a long friendship, and sat as MP for Westminster (1865-8).
Higher and lower pleasures
Utilitarianism (1861) answers Carlyle's charge that a pleasure-based ethic is fit only for swine. Mill argues that pleasures differ in quality: "better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied". The entry calls the attempt "surprisingly inept", marred by fallacy and circularity, an undefended assertion that some pleasures are higher.
Mill's revision of Bentham, criticised by the entry.
On Liberty
On Liberty (1859) holds that the only ground for interfering with anyone's liberty is to prevent harm to others. Its deeper end is not pleasure but truth, clarity and individuality. Mill fears the tyranny of an intolerant public opinion more than of law, and defends free discussion because suppressed opinions may be true, partly true, or keep truth alive.
| Work | Year | Main claim |
|---|---|---|
| On Liberty | 1859 | Harm principle; individuality |
| Utilitarianism | 1861 | Higher and lower pleasures |
| Representative Government | 1861 | Participation; plural voting |
| Subjection of Women | 1869 | Equality of the sexes |
Later reception
Mill's Principles of Political Economy (1848) moved from classical economics towards co-operative socialism, distinguishing the laws of production, which are fixed, from the laws of distribution, which are human choices. As an MP he moved an amendment to the 1867 Reform Bill to give women the vote, the first such motion in Parliament. His defence of individuality made him the patron of later liberal thinkers from Green to Berlin and Rawls.
Liberty, quality of pleasure, and the Subjection
Mill revises Bentham: pleasures differ in kind, not only amount; a dissatisfied Socrates outranks a satisfied fool. On Liberty (1859) states the harm principle: society may coerce only to prevent harm to others, not for the agent's own good alone.
Four pillars of Mill's liberal politics.
- Experiments in living. Individuality is a public good; dead dogma needs lively contest. Free speech is justified by the fallibility of majorities.
- Representative government. Plural votes for the educated (his elitism); fear of mediocre majority; still a democrat relative to his father and Bentham.
- Subjection of Women (1869; written earlier with Harriet Taylor). Legal equality and opening of occupations; marriage as friendship of equals.
- Socialism. Late openness to cooperative experiments; never Marxian class war.
Evolution and the Minimal State
Life and works
Spencer was born in Derby, the son of a dissenting schoolmaster, the only one of nine children to survive. A railway engineer from 1837 to 1848, he became sub-editor of The Economist and then a freelance writer. Social Statics (1851), the ten-volume System of Synthetic Philosophy and The Man versus the State (1884) made him one of the most widely read thinkers of his age.
The law of equal freedom
Fossils in railway cuttings first stirred his interest in evolution. Everything, from the cosmos to society, moves from simple homogeneity to complex heterogeneity. Each person may do as he wills provided he infringes no one else's equal freedom. As individuals adapt, humanity approaches perfect happiness, so the state must not interfere.
Spencer's evolutionary argument for laissez-faire.
Evolution, equal freedom, and the minimal state
Spencer's cosmic evolution runs from homogeneity to heterogeneity; society differentiates like an organism. The law of equal freedom: each may do what they will so long as they do not infringe others' like freedom. State aid, poor laws beyond police functions, and colonial paternalism violate that law and weaken adaptation.
Spencer: laissez-faire as cosmic law.
- Man versus the State (1884). Liberalism has forgotten its limiting purpose; democracy can be as invasive as monarchy.
- Survival language. Later associated with "social Darwinism"; Spencer's own ethics stress sympathy and industrial (peaceful) society over militant hierarchy.
- Authors' verdict. Grand system, dated biology, lasting as a foil for Green and the New Liberals.
Positive Freedom and the Birth of the New Liberalism
Life and works
Green was born at Birkin, Yorkshire, where his father was rector. A fellow of Balliol and later Whyte's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford, he was the first don to sit on Oxford city council. His main works are the Introduction to Hume (1874), the Lecture on Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract (1881), the Prolegomena to Ethics (1883) and the Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation.
Against the orthodoxies
Green answered classical liberalism, Spencer's social Darwinism and utilitarianism. Society is not an aggregate of self-seeking atoms but a moral community, and individuals realise themselves through common goods. Unlike Hegel, he does not make the community identical with the state.
Green's new liberal synthesis.
| Negative freedom | Positive freedom (Green) |
|---|---|
| Absence of constraint | Capacity to do what is worth doing |
| Law as a necessary evil | Law as an enabler |
| Bentham, Spencer | Green, Hobhouse, Hobson |
Positive freedom and the enabling state
T. H. Green fused Hegelian ethical idealism with British liberalism. Freedom is not only non-interference (negative) but the power to realise a worthy self (positive). The state should hinder hindrances: education, public health, limits on contracts that crush personality.
Green's new liberalism.
- Common good. Rights are powers secured for a common good recognised by a community of persons, not bare immunities.
- New Liberalism. Influences later Liberals and Labour reformers who reject Spencerian laissez-faire without embracing Marxian class war.
- Authors' note. Positive freedom can license paternalism; Green's own politics stayed reformist and constitutional.
Rights for a common good
For Green, a right is a power of action secured by social recognition for a common good. Contract freedom that leaves workers unable to develop a moral personality is not true freedom. Factory acts, education, and temperance reform illustrate the state hindering hindrances without becoming a Marxian expropriator.
- Idealism. Self-realisation is social; the eternal consciousness (Green's metaphysical gloss) underwrites moral claim. Later New Liberals keep the politics and drop the metaphysics.
The Death of God and the Revaluation of Values
Life and works
Nietzsche was born near Leipzig, the son of a Lutheran pastor, and was a professor of classical philology at Basel by twenty-four. Ill health ended his post in 1879, and he wrote his major books as a wanderer: The Birth of Tragedy (1872), The Gay Science (1882), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-5), Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and On the Genealogy of Morals (1887). He collapsed into insanity in 1889.
Apollo, Dionysus and Socrates
The Birth of Tragedy, written under Schopenhauer's influence, argued that Greek tragedy fused Apollonian form with Dionysian frenzy and so faced the horror of existence. Socratic rationalism, and later Christianity, undermined this insight.
Nietzsche's story of Western values.
Master and slave morality
Christianity is attacked for its morality and its metaphysics. Master morality calls good what is noble and strong; slave morality, born of resentment, calls good what is meek and humble. Christianity's love of truth bred science, which killed belief in God, leaving the West facing nihilism.
Later reception
Nietzsche's doctrines of the will to power and the eternal recurrence (the test of whether one could will one's life to repeat forever) belong more to his philosophy of life than to politics. He despised nationalism, anti-Semitism and the German Reich, and mocked democracy and socialism as secular forms of Christian slave morality. Political readers have since drawn on him on the right and, through Foucault and others, on the left.
Genealogy, death of God, and open politics
Nietzsche's hammer falls on Christian and democratic slave morality: humility and equality as revenge of the weak. Genealogy of Morals traces guilt, ascetic ideals, and bad conscience. "God is dead" names the collapse of the old value sky, not a joke.
Nietzsche's critique of values and its open political fork.
- Master and slave. Noble affirmation versus reactive ressentiment; democracy and socialism continue the slave revolt in secular dress.
- Übermensch and last man. Revaluation of values versus comfort-seeking mediocrity. No party programme; later fascists abused selective lines; the entry refuses to make him a simple fascist.
- Will to power. Interpretive key to life and culture; politics becomes a field of value-creation, not rights administration.
- Insanity and sister. Collapse in 1889 (age 44); Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche's archive politics distort reception.
Mutual Aid
Life and works
Kropotkin was born into a noble family in Moscow, educated at the elite Corps of Pages and served the Tsar as page de chambre. Service in Siberia made him a geographer and showed him ordinary people organising themselves. Converted to anarchism in the Swiss Jura in 1872, he was imprisoned in Russia, escaped in 1876, was expelled from Switzerland and jailed in France (1883-6), then settled in London. He returned to Russia in 1917 and died in 1921.
The anarchist tradition
The anarchist tradition is only as old as the French Revolution. Godwin saw society as rational individuals needing freedom; Proudhon (1809-65) offered a social, mutualist version; Bakunin (1814-76) developed collectivist, revolutionary anarchism. Kropotkin built on both lines towards anarchist communism.
The anarchist tradition as the entry traces it.
| Thinker | Type | Distribution |
|---|---|---|
| Godwin | Philosophical, individualist | Benevolent sharing |
| Proudhon | Mutualist | Exchange of labour |
| Bakunin | Collectivist | According to work |
| Kropotkin | Communist | According to need |
The free society
In The Conquest of Bread (1892), Fields, Factories and Workshops (1899) and Mutual Aid (1902), Kropotkin argues that sociability is natural. A revolution, which he thought necessary though he abhorred violence, would release it: self-governing communes, work of four or five hours a day, and little crime once private property was gone.
Later reception
Kropotkin was also a respected scientist whose geographical work on Siberia won recognition from the Russian Geographical Society, and he wrote the article on anarchism for the 1910 Encyclopaedia Britannica. His support for the Allies in 1914 split the anarchist movement. Returning to Russia in 1917, he refused office and criticised the Bolsheviks; his funeral in 1921 was the last legal anarchist demonstration in Soviet Russia.
Mutual aid against social Darwinism
Kropotkin's Mutual Aid answers Spencerian and Huxleyan struggle-mythology: cooperation is as "natural" as competition. Anarchist communism abolishes wage labour and the state; free communes federate. The entry places him after Godwin, Proudhon, and Bakunin on the anarchist map.
Four classic anarchist lines the entry maps.
- Russian and European practice. Exile, Le Révolté, and later support for the Russian Revolution turning to criticism of Bolshevik centralism.
Myth, Violence and the Coming of the General Strike
Life and works
Sorel was born in Cherbourg, trained as an engineer and published his first article only at thirty-nine. After retiring from the civil service in 1892 he devoted himself to social theory, moving from Marxism to revolutionary syndicalism and later flirting with nationalism. His best-known books are Reflections on Violence and The Illusions of Progress (both 1908).
Decadence and production
Like Nietzsche, Weber and Spengler, Sorel saw the West in decline. Contemptuous of bourgeois culture and of the corrupt state, he looked to autonomous workers' syndicates to found a new age of production. He was not against private property, which he saw as a support of personal independence.
Sorel's diagnosis and remedy.
The theory of myth
What moves people is emotion, not reason. Myths, "social poetry", are visions of a world transformed by a catastrophic event: the early Christian Second Coming, Mazzini's Italy, the proletarian revolution. They differ from utopias, which are the work of bourgeois intellectuals and lead to reformism. Marxism attracted Sorel not for its science, which he thought spurious, but for its central myth; later he preferred the syndicalist myth of the general strike.
Myth, violence, and the general strike
Sorel despised parliamentary socialism as bourgeois decadence. Reflections on Violence treats the general strike as a mobilising myth: not a timetable prediction but an image that forges militant identity. Violence can be creative when it clarifies friend and foe.
Sorel: myth and violence against parliamentary socialism.
- Versus reformism. Bernstein's path looks like surrender; Bergsonian energy and Nietzschean tones enter the left.
- Ambiguous heirs. Syndicalists, some fascists, and later theorists of political myth all cite him; the entry stresses the danger of aestheticising force.
Against decadence
Parliamentary socialism, for Sorel, shares bourgeois decadence. The myth of the general strike reconstitutes virtue through conflict. Later readers on the right stole the aesthetics of violence; the entry keeps him as a warning about mythic politics.
Evolutionary Socialism
Life and works
Bernstein came from a Jewish working-class family in Berlin, left school early and worked in a bank. When Bismarck's anti-socialist laws drove the party underground he edited its paper from exile; deported from Switzerland, he settled in London, became a close friend and executor of Engels and met the Fabians. He co-wrote the Marxist Erfurt Programme (1891), but after Engels's death in 1895 his ideas changed, leading to The Preconditions of Socialism (1899). He returned to Germany in 1901 and sat in the Reichstag.
What Marx got wrong
Bernstein blamed Hegel for Marxism's habit of predicting history a priori. He rejected the labour theory of value, and with it the forecasts of concentration of capital, class polarisation and growing misery. German workers had in fact won real gains; the middle classes were growing, not vanishing.
Bernstein's revisionist argument.
| Issue | Orthodox Marxism | Bernstein |
|---|---|---|
| Capitalism | Heading for collapse | Adapting, not collapsing |
| Workers' condition | Growing misery | Improving through reform |
| Route to socialism | Revolution, proletarian dictatorship | Parliament, gradual reform |
| Democracy | A tactic | Precondition of socialism |
The movement is everything
"What is generally called the ultimate goal of socialism is nothing to me; the movement is everything." The phrase outraged the orthodox. The best reading, the entry suggests, is that socialism is the process of gaining more representation, equality, welfare and security; reform is not a tactic but socialism itself. Democracy is its necessary condition.
Orthodoxy fails; democracy becomes the method
Bernstein joined the SPD, was exiled after the Anti-Socialist Laws, edited the Sozialdemokrat from Zurich then London, and absorbed Fabian gradualism and English trade-union practice. Engels's literary executor at first, he then broke with the prediction of collapse.
Bernstein's revision: reform as the content of socialism.
- Failed forecasts. No polarisation into two classes; a growing middle strata; capitalism adapting via cartels, credit, and democracy rather than collapsing into crisis.
- Revision. Socialism is the movement, not a sudden leap: expand democracy, unions, cooperatives, and social legislation. The final goal (Endziel) matters less than the path.
- Fight with Kautsky and Luxemburg. They charged him with abandoning Marxism; he replied that loyalty to Marx's method required updating the theorems.
- Legacy. Evolutionary socialism becomes mainstream social democracy; Lenin and Luxemburg define themselves against him.
Predictions revised, movement retained
Bernstein kept Marx's ethical demand for a classless society while dropping the timetable. Cartels, credit, and the franchise changed capitalism's surface; a growing middle strata of clerks and technicians blurred the two-class sketch. Trade unions and cooperatives were not waiting rooms for catastrophe but present means of socialisation.
- Evolutionary socialism. Democracy is both the road and a large part of the content. The SPD should win majorities, pass social legislation, and transform property relations step by step.
- Luxemburg's reply. Reform or Revolution charged that revisionism dissolves the final goal; Bernstein answered that an empty Endziel without a living movement is dogma.
- Long arc. Twentieth-century social democracy largely took his path; revolutionary Marxisms defined themselves against it.
Rationalisation, Authority and the Vocation of Politics
Life and works
Weber was born in Erfurt, the son of a prominent lawyer and National Liberal deputy. He held chairs in economics, law and political science, but gave up teaching after a breakdown in 1897 and wrote major comparative studies of law, religion and economy, including The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-5).
Beyond Marx
Called "the bourgeois Marx", Weber admired Marx but challenged his explanations. Adequate explanation must include the participants' own understanding (Verstehen), and ideas can shape history. Certain Protestant ideas, the secular calling and the anxiety of predestination, fostered the disciplined accumulation on which capitalism rests.
Weber's account of modernity.
Rationalisation
Modernity means the triumph of instrumental means-ends reasoning, in economics and above all in organisation: bureaucracy is the most efficient form of administration. Science has given us a convincing picture of the world but has disenchanted it, undermining religion and every rational foundation of value. Values retreat into private, subjective faith.
| Type of authority | Basis of legitimacy | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Traditional | Custom, inherited status | Patriarch, monarch |
| Charismatic | Extraordinary personal qualities | Prophet, revolutionary leader |
| Legal-rational | Impersonal rules and offices | Modern bureaucratic state |
Later reception
In Politics as a Vocation (1919) Weber distinguished an ethic of conviction, acting on principle whatever the result, from an ethic of responsibility, answering for foreseeable consequences, and argued that the mature politician must combine them. Science as a Vocation insisted that scholarship cannot tell us how to live. These lectures are still among the most widely read texts in political theory and public ethics.
Legitimacy, vocation, and the iron cage
Weber wrote no single normative treatise, yet his sociology yields a political theory of modernity. Domination is legitimate as traditional, charismatic, or legal-rational. The West's peculiar rationalisation (bureaucracy, calculable law, science) is tied historically to the Protestant ethic's worldly asceticism and to Greek intellectual inheritances inside Christianity.
Weber's three pure types of legitimate Herrschaft.
- Disenchantment. Extended knowledge and control strip metaphysical foundations; value becomes a choice among warring gods. The "iron cage" of bureaucratic rationalisation threatens freedom even as it delivers efficiency.
- Politics as a Vocation (1919). Ethic of conviction (act on principle whatever the result) versus ethic of responsibility (answer for foreseeable consequences); the mature politician needs both. Science as a Vocation denies that scholarship can tell us how to live.
- Germany. National Liberal family background; later parliamentary candidacy; fear of both caesarist demagoguery and leaderless bureaucracy.
- Reception. Oakeshott, Hayek, Marcuse, and the Frankfurt School all inherit the bureaucracy anxiety from different sides.
Protestant ethic, three authorities, two ethics
The Protestant Ethic (1905) denies that capitalism arose from economic factors alone. A secular vocation and Calvinist anxiety about election (worldly success as possible mark of grace) redirected ascetic energy into methodical accumulation; once running, the machine no longer needs the religious spark.
- Three legitimacies. Traditional (sacred yesterday); legal-rational (enacted rules, bureaucratic staff); charismatic (devotion to an exceptional person, unstable unless routinised).
- Iron cage. Bureaucracy and calculable law deliver power and wealth; they also enclose life in a Kafkaesque machine. Socialism, Weber feared, would tighten the cage by fusing economic and political administration.
- Disenchantment. Science explains without blessing; values become warring gods. The politician in Politics as a Vocation must marry an ethic of responsibility to an ethic of conviction without confusing them.
- Method. Ideal types, Verstehen, value-freedom in science (values choose problems; methods stay honest). Political theory inherits the typology even when it rejects the resignation.
Class, status, party
Beside Marx's class, Weber adds status (honour, lifestyle) and party (organised power). Markets distribute class chance; status groups close off social honour; parties live in the house of power. Political sociology after him rarely returns to a single hierarchy.
The Vanguard Party, Imperialism and the Seizure of Power
Life and works
Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov was born in Simbirsk (later Ulyanovsk) on the Volga, into a middle-class family; his elder brother was hanged in 1887 for plotting against the Tsar. He became a leader of the illegal Russian Social Democratic party and spent years in Siberian exile and abroad.
The vanguard
A legal mass party on the German model was impossible under Tsarist repression, and left to themselves workers would develop only "trade-union consciousness". Lenin proposed a small party of professional revolutionaries run by democratic centralism. The split of 1903 produced the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks.
Lenin's revision of Marx.
Imperialism and the weakest link
Capitalism had not collapsed in the advanced countries because imperialism exported its crisis: monopoly finance capital exploited colonies and used super-profits to buy off a labour aristocracy. Russia, industrialising with foreign capital and with unbribed workers, was the weakest link. After the Tsar fell in February 1917, the Bolsheviks seized power in November (October, old style).
| Idea | Marx | Lenin |
|---|---|---|
| Agent of revolution | The proletariat as a whole | The vanguard party |
| Where revolution starts | Advanced capitalism | The weakest link (Russia) |
| Dictatorship of proletariat | Temporary class rule | Rule of the party |
Later reception
State and Revolution (1917) argued that the bourgeois state must be smashed, not taken over, and replaced by a proletarian state modelled on the Paris Commune that would wither away. In power, Lenin built the opposite: the Cheka, the ban on factions (1921) and the one-party state. The New Economic Policy (1921) restored some markets, a retreat Lenin justified as temporary before his death in 1924 opened the way for Stalin.
Vanguard, imperialism, and dual power
Lenin revises Marx for a peasant empire at the "weakest link" of imperialism.
How Lenin retools Marx for Russian conditions.
- Imperialism (1916). Monopoly capital exports; colonies and finance divide the world; war among powers opens revolutionary chances in the periphery.
- State and Revolution (1917). Smash the bourgeois state; temporary dictatorship of the proletariat; soviets as new form; then withering. Practice under War Communism and the Cheka diverged sharply.
- April Theses and October. Dual power with the Provisional Government; peace, land, bread; seizure justified as soviet power.
- Authors' verdict. Brilliant tactician; the party-state template for later communist regimes; Marx's emancipatory horizon narrowed into apparatus.
The Total State
Life and movement
Mussolini was the son of a socialist blacksmith and a schoolteacher. A socialist journalist, he broke with the party to support entry into the First World War. Italy's disappointing gains fed demands for a strong, united nation; his squads of fascisti grew, and after the March on Rome in 1922 he took power. The Axis with Hitler (1936) led to defeat; dismissed in 1943 and installed by the Germans in the north, he was shot by partisans in 1945.
Doctrine
Fascist theory comes from Mussolini and above all the philosopher Giovanni Gentile (1875-1944). The state represents the unified people and division is anathema; the individual must be subordinated and if necessary sacrificed. Fascism is explicitly totalitarian: "everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state".
Four pillars of fascist ideology.
| Fascist theme | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Organic state | Nation as body, corporatism |
| Leadership | Il Duce, der Führer |
| Social Darwinism | Struggle proves the best |
| War | Highest expression of national unity |
| Anti-intellectualism | Instinct, will, action |
The economy was organised through corporations of workers and employers, in fact dominated by fascists, planning with the state. Italian fascism, unlike Nazism, prided itself on modernity and the creation of a "new man".
Later reception
The entry stresses that fascism defined itself by what it opposed: liberalism, with its individualism and parliamentary talk, Marxism, with its class struggle and internationalism, and conservatism, which it found too passive. Nazism shared most of these features but made race its central principle, whereas Italian fascism put the state first and adopted anti-Semitic laws only in 1938.
Nation, total state, and the Gentile script
Italian fascism gathers Futurist violence, d'Annunzio's Fiume theatre (1919), war veterans, and Giovanni Gentile's Hegelian actualism. Mussolini and Gentile's 1932 Enciclopedia entry is the best-known doctrinal epitome.
Mussolini/Gentile fascism as anti-liberal unity.
- Against liberalism and socialism. Pluralism, party conflict, and class war are diseases; the total state claims to speak for a unified people and to be a "middle way" that transcends both.
- Leader and myth. The Duce as destiny; youth, virility, and sacrifice as the "new man"; war as proving ground.
- Institutions. Corporatism pretends to organise producers; in practice it subordinates labour to party and state.
- Hitler parallel. Shared enemies and leadership cult; racial obsession is stronger in Nazism than in early Italian fascism, though Italy later adopted racial laws.
- Authors' verdict. A thin, opportunistic ideology with murderous practice; Gentile's philosophy cannot redeem it.
Corporatism, war, and thin doctrine
Fascist corporatism claimed to organise employers and workers in state-supervised syndicates; in practice it crushed independent labour and left capital subordinate to party priorities. War was praised as the health of the people; the Ethiopian adventure and later Axis alliance showed the foreign-policy face of the myth.
- Gentile's actualism. Reality is act of spirit; the state is the concrete ethical will. That Hegelian varnish cannot erase the regime's violence and anti-pluralism.
- Authors' judgement. Opportunism dressed as destiny; useful as a negative lesson in what happens when unity is forced from above.
Race Pride, Black Nationhood and the Redemption of Africa
Integration or separation
For almost a century after abolition, African Americans were segregated and denied full citizenship. Responses divided into integrationist (the dominant view, demanding equal rights within America) and separatist. Booker T. Washington preached patient self-help; W.E.B. Du Bois and the NAACP (1909) demanded civil rights at once.
The two broad responses to the denial of rights.
Life and the UNIA
Garvey was born in Jamaica, the youngest of eleven children of a stonemason, and trained as a printer. After travels in the Caribbean and London, and inspired by Washington's Up From Slavery, he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association in 1914. In 1916 he moved to Harlem, where the UNIA published Negro World, ran the Negro Factories Corporation and launched the Black Star Line. Convicted of mail fraud, he was jailed in 1925, deported in 1927 and died in London in 1940.
| Leader | Strategy | Goal |
|---|---|---|
| Booker T. Washington | Self-help, accommodation | Economic progress first |
| W.E.B. Du Bois | Protest, NAACP | Full civil rights |
| Marcus Garvey | Separatism, race pride | A free Africa, black nationhood |
Ideas
The UNIA aimed to unite "all the Negro peoples of the world" in a nation of their own. Garvey wanted a black civilisation created free of white influence and a United States of Africa offering citizenship to the diaspora. The "Back to Africa" label misleads: he did not see a mass exodus as the main solution, and he backed full citizenship while remaining a separatist.
Later reception
The integrationist case was based on the demand for the full constitutional rights promised after the Civil War; the separatist case held that white America would never grant them and that black people must build their own institutions. The movement's revival in the 1950s and 1960s, under Martin Luther King and then Malcolm X and Black Power, replayed this debate, with Garvey's influence strongest on the separatist side.
UNIA, Black Star, and provisional Africa
Marcus Garvey, Jamaican-born, built the Universal Negro Improvement Association into a mass diaspora movement claiming millions and branches on four continents. Harlem was the hub; Negro World carried the message internationally.
Garvey's organisational armoury for black nationhood.
- Programme. Race pride; economic self-help (Negro Factories Corporation); a black church option (African Orthodox Church); paramilitary African Legion and Black Cross nurses; annual conventions culminating in the 1920 Declaration of the Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World.
- Black Star Line. Steamships to link Africa, the Caribbean, and North America; poor ships and fraud charges wrecked it; Garvey was imprisoned for mail fraud (1925), then deported.
- Versus Du Bois. Integration and civil-rights gradualism versus separation, African redemption, and nation-building. The entry frames them as the two broad answers to denied rights.
- Afterlife. Rastafari, later Black Power motifs, and pan-African symbolism outlived the organisational wreck.
Separation, symbolism, and wreckage
Garvey's separation was strategic nation-building, not mere retreat: a black economy, black steamships, and an African homeland as horizon. The Liberian base failed; the Black Star Line's rotten ships and mail-fraud conviction (1925) destroyed organisational credit even as the symbols (red-black-green, parades, titles) seeded later movements.
- Du Bois conflict. NAACP gradualism and Talented Tenth leadership versus mass pageantry and diaspora nationalism; each accused the other of harming the race.
- Authors' place. Essential in any map of black political thought; organisational failure does not erase the programme's clarity.
Totalitarianism, Evil and the Life of Public Action
Life and works
Arendt was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Hanover and studied with Jaspers and Heidegger. She fled Nazi Germany in 1933, was interned in France and reached the United States in 1941, working for Jewish organisations and in publishing. Her books include The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958) and Eichmann in Jerusalem.
Totalitarianism and the banality of evil
The Origins of Totalitarianism reconstructs Nazi and Stalinist rule as a novel form of government resting on ideology, terror and the masses of isolated individuals, a bureaucratisation of terror. Eichmann in Jerusalem portrayed Eichmann as an unimaginative bureaucrat rather than a monster: the "banality of evil". Both remain controversial.
Arendt's hierarchy of activities in The Human Condition.
Labour, work and action
The Human Condition ranks three activities. Labour meets biological needs; work fabricates a durable world of things; action, at the top, is the capacity to intervene in public by word and deed and begin something new. Her model is the Greek polis, which cannot be recreated, but whose spirit reappears in councils and revolutions.
Action, plurality, and the banality of evil
The Human Condition ranks labour (life process), work (durable world), and action (new beginnings among equals). The social crowds out the public; totalitarianism invents lonely masses and ideology that explain everything. Eichmann in Jerusalem names the banality of evil: thoughtlessness inside a criminal system.
Arendt: the human condition and the recovery of politics.
- Revolution. On Revolution prefers the American council impulse to the French pity-and-terror path.
- Authors' note. Biography slips (first US post, Eichmann year) are in STATUS.
Two Concepts of Liberty and Value Pluralism
Life and works
Berlin was born in Riga; his family fled to Russia in 1915, witnessed the revolution and moved to England. At Corpus Christi, Oxford, he took Firsts in Greats and PPE, became a fellow of All Souls and lectured at New College. In 1957 he succeeded G.D.H. Cole as Chichele Professor, and in 1966 became founding President of Wolfson College. Most of his work took the form of essays; "Two Concepts of Liberty" (1958) appears in Four Essays on Liberty (1969).
Two concepts
Negative liberty is the area within which a person is left alone: "the wider the area of non-interference, the wider my freedom". Positive liberty is self-mastery, being one's own master. Berlin warns that positive liberty can be inflated into a "real self" or collective will that justifies coercing people for their own good.
Berlin's two concepts and the pluralism behind his preference.
| Negative liberty | Positive liberty | |
|---|---|---|
| Question | How far am I left alone? | Who governs me? |
| Ideal | Non-interference | Self-mastery |
| Danger | Neglect of the poor | Coercion in the name of the true self |
Two liberties and value pluralism
Negative liberty is non-interference; positive liberty is self-mastery, which can become coercion by those who claim to know your "real" will. Value pluralism: ultimate ends clash; politics is choosing without a cosmic guarantee. Prefer negative liberty as safer under pluralism.
Berlin: prefer negative liberty under plural ends.
Spontaneous Order and the Road to Serfdom
Life and works
Hayek was born in Vienna, studied law and political science and worked with Ludwig von Mises on trade cycles. He held a chair at the London School of Economics (1931-50), then at Chicago (1950-62), Freiburg and Salzburg, and won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1974. His main political works are The Road to Serfdom (1944), The Constitution of Liberty (1960) and the trilogy Law, Legislation and Liberty.
Knowledge and spontaneous order
Hayek's technical work was on capital, money and the trade cycle. His central political argument is about knowledge: the information needed to run an economy is dispersed among millions and transmitted only through prices. Social institutions such as law, language and markets are a spontaneous order, the product of human action but not of design. He is a determined critic of what Popper calls historicism.
Hayek's knowledge argument against planning.
Liberty under law
Planning requires coercion, concentrates power and ends in serfdom. Liberty needs a constitution of general, abstract rules applying equally to all; "social justice" is a mirage, since a spontaneous order has no distributor. The entry finds Hayek versatile though not always coherent, turning an economic case for laissez-faire into an argument about liberty.
Later reception
Hayek's later work turned to cultural evolution: rules and institutions survive because the groups that follow them prosper, not because anyone designed them. In The Constitution of Liberty he denied being a conservative, preferring the label "Old Whig". Critics argue that his evolutionary account sits uneasily with his call for deliberate constitutional design, such as his model constitution with a separate legislative assembly elected for fifteen-year terms by age cohorts.
Knowledge, prices, and spontaneous order
The Road to Serfdom warns that planning concentrates power; Individualism and Economic Order and later law books argue that dispersed knowledge can be coordinated only by prices in a spontaneous order. Legislation should be general rules, not commands toward a shared end.
Hayek's epistemic case for markets.
Truth, Peaceful Resistance and the Struggle for Swaraj
Life
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi ("Mahatma" means great-souled) was born in western India and studied law in England from 1888. In South Africa from 1893 he fought the pass laws and racial discrimination, developing satyagraha. Back in India he led the Non-cooperation Movement (1920), the Civil Disobedience Movement (1930) and Quit India. Distressed by Hindu-Muslim violence after independence, he was assassinated by a Hindu militant in 1948, aged seventy-eight.
Satya, ahimsa and satyagraha
Gandhi's basic belief is in satya, truth, which he also calls God, the ruling principle of the universe. All human beings share in it, so differences of race, caste and religion are irrelevant. Its practical expression is ahimsa, non-violence, and satyagraha, "truth-force", the non-violent resistance that seeks to convert the opponent rather than defeat him.
Gandhi's chain from truth to self-rule.
| Concept | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Satya | Truth, identified with God |
| Ahimsa | Non-violence in thought and deed |
| Satyagraha | Non-violent resistance, truth-force |
| Swaraj | Self-rule, personal and national |
| Sarvodaya | The welfare of all |
Later reception
Gandhi's Hind Swaraj (1909) set out a critique of modern industrial civilisation, railways, lawyers and doctors included, and called for self-reliant villages based on hand spinning, symbolised by the charkha. His methods inspired Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela's early campaigns and many later movements of civil resistance, though Ambedkar and others criticised his defence of caste duties in their idealised form.
Satya, ahimsa, satyagraha
Truth (satya) and non-violence (ahimsa) ground satyagraha: firmness in truth through non-violent resistance. Swaraj is self-rule of person and nation; sarvodaya is welfare of all. Critique of modern industrial civilisation (Hind Swaraj) sits beside mass politics against the Raj.
From truth and non-violence to self-rule for all.
The Open Society and the Case for Piecemeal Engineering
Life and works
Popper was born into a Jewish family in Vienna and knew members of the Vienna Circle, though he rejected their verification principle. Logik der Forschung (1934) made his name. He left Austria in 1937 for Canterbury University College in Christchurch, New Zealand, where he wrote The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945). He then taught at the London School of Economics and was knighted in 1965.
Falsifiability and historicism
A theory is scientific if it can be falsified, not if it can be verified. Marxism and psychoanalysis, which explain everything, fail the test. Historicism, the belief that history has laws that allow prediction, is false, because the growth of knowledge, which shapes history, cannot itself be predicted (The Poverty of Historicism, 1957).
Popper's method applied from science to politics.
Enemies of the open society
The Open Society traces closed, tribal thinking to Plato, Hegel and Marx, each of whom claimed to know the destiny of society. In an open society individuals take responsibility for decisions, and institutions allow rulers to be removed without bloodshed. Reform must be "piecemeal social engineering", gradual changes whose effects can be monitored and corrected, not utopian engineering.
| Utopian engineering | Piecemeal engineering |
|---|---|
| Blueprint of the ideal society | Fight the most urgent evils |
| Sweeping, irreversible change | Small, testable changes |
| Silences critics | Needs criticism to learn |
Later reception
Popper's political ideas also include the paradox of tolerance: unlimited tolerance may lead to the disappearance of tolerance, so a society may refuse to tolerate the intolerant when they reject argument for force. He reformulated the question of politics from "Who should rule?" to "How can bad rulers be removed without violence?", which he took to be the essence of democracy.
Open society and piecemeal engineering
The Open Society and Its Enemies indicts Plato, Hegel, and Marx for historicism: prophecy of inevitable stages that excuses violence. Science advances by conjecture and refutation; politics should use piecemeal social engineering, not utopian blueprints. The open society protects criticism and individual responsibility.
Popper against Plato, Hegel, and Marx as enemies of openness.
- Falsification. Demarcation of science from pseudo-science becomes a political ethic of fallibility.
- Critics. Historians dispute his Plato/Hegel readings; the political moral (protect dissent, distrust prophets) travels farther than the scholarship.
Rationalism, Tradition and Civil Association
Life and works
Oakeshott read history at Cambridge, where he fell under the influence of the idealist McTaggart and came to admire Hegel and Bradley. A fellow of Gonville and Caius, he succeeded Harold Laski at the London School of Economics in 1951. His books include Experience and its Modes, Rationalism in Politics (1962) and On Human Conduct (1975).
Modes of experience
Experience divides into modes, historical, scientific and practical, each a coherent but partial world; politics belongs to practical experience. Political activity always takes place against a background of traditions and practices that must be accepted as given; it consists in "pursuing the intimations" of that tradition.
Oakeshott against rationalism.
Against rationalism
The rationalist treats politics as the application of technique, ignoring practical knowledge that can only be learned by doing. Politics is "an art of repair": in his 1951 inaugural lecture we sail a "boundless and bottomless sea" with no harbour and no destination, the task being to keep afloat on an even keel.
| Nomocratic (civil association) | Teleocratic (enterprise association) |
|---|---|
| Rule of general laws | Pursuit of a common goal |
| Citizens pursue their own ends | Citizens enlisted in a project |
| Oakeshott's preference | Planning, war, ideology |
Rationalism, tradition, and civil association
Oakeshott's "Rationalism in Politics" attacks the politics of the book: technique that ignores practical knowledge embodied in traditions. The state as civil association (rules among strangers) differs from enterprise association (shared purpose). Pursue the intimations of a concrete tradition; do not redesign society from first principles.
Oakeshott: politics as attending to arrangements, not a project.
- Hobbes. Admiring interpreter; authority as condition of conversation, not a plan for virtue.
- Authors' place. High Tory scepticism without simple reaction; influence on Anglophone conservatism.
The Second Sex and the Making of Woman as Other
Life and works
Beauvoir was born in Paris into a bourgeois family and studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, where she met Sartre, her lifelong companion. She taught in Marseilles, Rouen and Paris before writing full time. The Second Sex appeared in two volumes in 1949, a succès de scandale; she also wrote novels, memoirs and The Ethics of Ambiguity.
Existentialist feminism
Beauvoir adapted Sartre's categories from Being and Nothingness (1943), above all Subject and Object, Self and Other. Freedom, especially the freedom to choose, is the supreme human value. Man has made himself the Subject, the absolute, and woman the Other, confined to immanence while men pursue transcendence.
Beauvoir's existentialist analysis.
Biology is not destiny
She rejects biological determinism, though she concedes that reproduction makes freedom harder. Women accept male sovereignty in marriage through economic dependence and their reproductive role. Motherhood may fulfil some women but not all; women need child care, contraception and abortion, and paid work. Femininity is a myth constructed by civilisation, and there is no eternal battle of the sexes.
| Wave | Period | Main aims |
|---|---|---|
| First wave | c.1850-1920 | Vote, property, education |
| Second wave | 1960s-1980s | Equality at work, sexuality, family |
| Later forms | 1990s onward | Difference, intersectionality |
Later reception
Beauvoir's influence was slow to build in the English-speaking world, where the 1953 translation by H.M. Parshley cut and distorted the text; a fuller translation appeared only in 2009. In France she supported the Manifesto of the 343 (1971), in which women declared they had had illegal abortions, and the campaign that led to legal abortion in 1975. Later feminists criticised her for taking male transcendence as the norm.
Woman as Other, situation, and liberation
The Second Sex (1949) applies existentialism: one is not born but becomes a woman. Man claims the Subject; woman is cast as Other, pushed toward immanence while men claim transcendence. Myths of the Eternal Feminine naturalise the hierarchy.
The Second Sex: constructed Otherness and freedom.
- Situation. Biology is real but not destiny; economic dependence, marriage law, and bad faith sustain subordination.
- Liberation. Work, contraception, education, and reciprocity with men; not a war of the sexes as end-state.
- Influence. Second-wave feminism; debates with materialist and difference feminists.
Critical Theory and the Critique of Affluent Society
Marcuse and the Institute
Marcuse was born into a prosperous Jewish family in Berlin. After war service his revolutionary hopes ended with the failed German revolution of 1919; he studied with Husserl and Heidegger and joined the Institute for Social Research. The Institute, founded in 1923 and led from 1930 by Max Horkheimer, moved to Columbia University in exile; Horkheimer and Adorno returned to Frankfurt after the war, while Marcuse stayed in America.
Critical theory
The School rejected both SPD orthodoxy and Soviet Marxism-Leninism as mechanical and too economic. The publication of Marx's Paris Manuscripts in 1932, which Marcuse was among the first to review, revealed a humanist, Hegelian Marx. Horkheimer's 1937 essays defined critical theory: no theory is value-free, and positivism, which gives science a monopoly of knowledge, serves domination.
From Marxism to critical theory.
Influenced by Weber, they feared the spread of instrumental reason. Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) argued that the Enlightenment's dream of mastering nature turned into the domination of humanity.
| Work | Year | Thesis |
|---|---|---|
| Reason and Revolution | 1941 | Hegelian roots of Marxism |
| Eros and Civilization | 1955 | Freud plus Marx; non-repressive society |
| One-Dimensional Man | 1964 | Affluence as soft totalitarianism |
One-Dimensional Man
One-Dimensional Man attacked advanced capitalist and communist societies alike. Consumerism creates false needs; critical thought is absorbed, and opposition is "repressively tolerated". Hope lies with outsiders, students and the marginalised. Marcuse became a hero of the New Left, but the revolutionary fervour fizzled out in the 1970s and he turned to aesthetics.
From Dialectic of Enlightenment to the Great Refusal
Marcuse, with Horkheimer and Adorno, rebuilt Marxism after orthodoxy failed to explain fascism and consumer capitalism. Positivism's monopoly of knowledge and capitalism's commodification jointly produce one-dimensional thought: critique is absorbed as style.
Marcuse and the Frankfurt path from critique to refusal.
- Enlightenment dialectic. The drive to dominate nature becomes domination of humans; instrumental reason empties ends. Nazi barbarism is not a relapse but a possibility of this modernity.
- Authoritarian personality. Studies of prejudice and submission (with colleagues) treat fascism as character structure under monopoly capitalism, not only as accident.
- One-Dimensional Man (1964). Advanced industrial society delivers comfort that integrates the working class; true needs are replaced by false ones; opposition becomes affirmative culture.
- Great Refusal. Liberation sought among students, minorities, and Third World struggles rather than the classical proletariat; 1960s New Left made him a reluctant icon.
- Authors' worry. Critical theory's gloom and thin institutional programme; still a sharp diagnosis of administered freedom.
Discourse, Discipline and Power
Life and works
Foucault was born in Poitiers, the son of a surgeon, had a troubled youth and studied philosophy and psychopathology. Briefly a Communist, he turned to Nietzsche and structuralism. His books include Madness and Civilization (1961), The Order of Things (1966) and Discipline and Punish. He held a chair at the Collège de France from 1970 and died of AIDS-related illness in 1984.
Epistemes and discursive formations
The early books trace the origins of modern conceptions of madness, clinical medicine and "man". A discursive formation is a complex of concepts and practices that defines its objects: psychiatry creates the madness it treats. These rest on epistemes, frameworks of knowledge succeeding one another from the Renaissance to the classical and modern periods, much like Kuhn's paradigms.
Foucault's concepts in sequence.
Power and knowledge
After 1970 Foucault turned from epistemes to power, deeply interwoven with knowledge. Discipline and Punish traces the modern prison and Bentham's Panopticon: power that observes, normalises and trains bodies spreads through schools, factories and hospitals. Power is not simply possessed by a ruling class; it is a capillary network that also produces resistance.
| Phase | Key works | Central concept |
|---|---|---|
| Archaeology | Madness, Clinic, Order of Things | Episteme, discourse |
| Genealogy | Discipline and Punish, Sexuality I | Power-knowledge |
| Ethics | Sexuality II-III (1984) | Care of the self |
Later reception
Foucault's later lectures introduced the concepts of biopower, the management of populations' births, health and deaths, and governmentality, the arts of governing conduct that run from pastoral power to modern liberalism. These lectures, published long after his death, have become central to political theory, sociology and studies of neoliberalism.
Power-knowledge, discipline, bio-power
Foucault replaces sovereign prohibition with productive power: disciplines make subjects in prisons, schools, barracks, clinics. Discipline and Punish maps the shift from spectacular punishment to normalising surveillance. Sexuality is an apparatus of confession and population management (bio-power), not a secret liberated by speech alone.
Foucault: how regimes of truth shape subjects.
- Episteme and discourse. Ages have rules of what counts as knowledge; the author-function and genealogy unsettle progressive histories.
- Politics. No classical liberation narrative; resistance is local, tactical. Influence on queer theory, governmentality studies, and critiques of the carceral state.
Justice as Fairness
Life and works
Rawls was born in Baltimore and studied at Princeton (1939-43), served in the Pacific and taught at Cornell and MIT before a long career at Harvard. His articles were preliminary exercises for two large books, A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism (1993).
The original position
Rawls asks us to imagine people in an original position, his version of the state of nature, behind a veil of ignorance: they do not know their class, talents, sex or conception of the good. Choosing principles for a society they must live in, they would reason cautiously ("maximin") and agree on two principles.
Rawls's route to justice as fairness.
| Principle | Content | Priority |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Equal liberty | Most extensive liberty compatible with like liberty for all | First, lexically |
| 2(b). Fair opportunity | Offices open to all under fair equality of opportunity | Second |
| 2(a). Difference principle | Inequalities must benefit the least advantaged | Third |
The principles are tested against our considered judgements by reflective equilibrium, adjusting each until they fit. Rawls thinks them rationally necessary and universal; Political Liberalism later recast them as the object of an overlapping consensus among reasonable doctrines.
Later reception
Political Liberalism recast justice as fairness as a political conception for a society divided by reasonable religious and moral doctrines, justified through public reason rather than a comprehensive philosophy. The Law of Peoples (1999) extended the theory to international relations but declined to apply the difference principle globally, a refusal criticised by cosmopolitans such as Pogge and Beitz.
Veil of ignorance and two principles
A Theory of Justice (1971) revives social-contract argument. In the original position, parties behind a veil of ignorance choose principles without knowing their class, talents, or conception of the good. They adopt equal basic liberties first, then the difference principle (inequalities only if they benefit the least advantaged) with fair equality of opportunity.
Rawls: two principles chosen behind the veil.
- Political Liberalism. Later work asks how a stable overlapping consensus is possible among reasonable comprehensive doctrines.
- Versus Nozick and utilitarians. Side-constraint rights and average utility both lose under the veil's maximin logic (as Rawls presents it).
Deep Ecology
The rise of green politics
Environmental policy began in the 1930s with countryside preservation, and after the Second World War a series of disasters and books such as Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) turned it into a mass concern. Green parties followed from the 1970s.
Naess's life and principles
Naess became Professor of Philosophy at Oslo in 1939, aged twenty-seven, and was a celebrated mountaineer. After retiring in 1970 he developed his ecological philosophy, introduced in a 1972 lecture in Bucharest and the article "The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement" (Inquiry, 1973). Deep ecology holds that all living beings have intrinsic value, that richness and diversity of life are values in themselves, and that human population and interference must fall.
Naess's distinction.
Naess applies his principles to society: diversity includes human cultures and implies decentralisation and local autonomy. In "Identification as a Source of Deep Ecological Attitudes" (1985) he linked deep ecology to self-realisation, a widening circle of identification from family to the whole of nature.
| Shallow ecology | Deep ecology |
|---|---|
| Nature valued for human use | Nature valued for itself |
| Technical fixes | Changed values and lifestyles |
| Growth continues | Lower consumption and population |
Shallow and deep ecology
Shallow ecology fights pollution for human welfare; deep ecology affirms intrinsic value in nature and asks for self-realisation that widens the self to the ecosphere. The deep ecology platform points to population, technology, and lifestyle change.
Naess: from reform environmentalism to deep ecology.
Anarchy, State and Utopia
Life and works
Nozick studied at Columbia and Princeton (PhD 1963), taught at Princeton, Harvard and Rockefeller, and became a full professor at Harvard in 1969 and Joseph Pellegrino University Professor in 1998. His political ideas are in Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974), which quickly became a key text of the New Right; his later books, including Invariances (2001), moved away from politics.
From anarchy to the minimal state
In a modernised version of Locke's argument, Nozick shows how a minimal state could arise from a state of nature without violating anyone's rights: protective agencies compete until one becomes dominant and compensates independents. Any state more extensive than this night-watchman state violates rights.
Nozick's invisible-hand route to the night-watchman state.
The entitlement theory
Justice in holdings has three parts: just acquisition, just transfer and rectification of past injustice. Whatever arises from just steps is just. In the Wilt Chamberlain example, fans freely pay to watch a star, upsetting any pattern; to restore it requires continual interference with liberty.
| Rawls | Nozick | |
|---|---|---|
| Justice is | A fair pattern (end-state) | A fair history (entitlement) |
| Redistribution | Required | Like forced labour |
| The state | Welfare state | Minimal state, limited to protection against force and fraud |
Later reception
Nozick's framework for utopia in the book's last part argues that the minimal state is also inspiring: it permits many voluntary communities, each living by its own ideal, as a meta-utopia. He later admitted that his libertarian position seemed to him "seriously inadequate" (The Examined Life, 1989), though he never replaced it; the book's arguments, such as the experience machine, remain staples of philosophy teaching.
Side constraints and the minimal state
Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) answers Rawls with Lockean side constraints. Individuals are inviolable; the state may not redistribute as patterned justice. An invisible-hand story grows a minimal state from protective agencies; anything more violates rights. Utopia is a framework for diverse communities.
Nozick: invisible-hand legitimacy for the night watchman.
The Public Sphere and the Theory of Communicative Reason
Life and works
Habermas was born in Düsseldorf and was research assistant to Adorno (1956-9). He held chairs at Heidelberg and Frankfurt, directed a Max Planck Institute at Starnberg and retired in 1994. His books include The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), Knowledge and Human Interests (1968), Legitimation Crisis (1973) and The Theory of Communicative Action (1981).
The public sphere
In eighteenth-century France, Britain and America an educated public discussed politics in newspapers, pamphlets and coffee houses, creating genuine public opinion. Modern government shrinks this sphere by treating political and moral questions as technical problems for experts, so dodging public debate.
Habermas's arc from the public sphere to communicative ethics.
Interests and communication
Knowledge and Human Interests distinguishes three knowledge-constitutive interests: technical (natural science), practical (understanding) and emancipatory (critique). From the 1970s Habermas argued that every act of speech raises validity claims that imply an ideal speech situation: mutual trust, the force of the better argument and freedom from domination. Freedom, justice and respect are built into communication itself.
| Interest | Type of knowledge | Aim |
|---|---|---|
| Technical | Empirical-analytic science | Control of nature |
| Practical | Hermeneutic disciplines | Mutual understanding |
| Emancipatory | Critical theory, psychoanalysis | Freedom from domination |
Later reception
Habermas's later political theory develops deliberative democracy: laws are legitimate when those affected could agree to them in rational discourse, which requires both human rights and popular sovereignty, the two being "co-original". He has also been a public intellectual in German debates, from the historians' dispute (1986) over the Nazi past to European integration, defending "constitutional patriotism" in place of ethnic nationalism.
Public sphere, cognitive interests, discourse ethics
Habermas inherits the Frankfurt critique of instrumental reason but refuses total gloom. Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) narrates the rise of a bourgeois debating public and its later corrosion by mass media and parties. Knowledge and Human Interests ties knowledge to three cognitive interests: empirical-analytic (work), historical-hermeneutic (communication), critical-emancipatory (self-reflection).
Habermas: three knowledge-constitutive interests.
Habermas from public sphere to discourse ethics.
- Legitimation crisis. Late capitalism steers by money and administration; when technical "problem-solving" fails, class interest shows through and legitimacy cracks.
- Communicative action. Coordination by redeemable validity claims (truth, rightness, sincerity), not only by strategic success. The ideal speech situation is a counterfactual standard, not a utopia to inhabit.
- Discourse ethics. Norms are justified if all affected could accept them in free discourse. Law and democracy become the institutional form of that idea (Between Facts and Norms).
- Versus Lyotard. Consensus can oppress difference; Habermas replies that without some idea of reason-giving, critique itself collapses.
- Life update. Habermas died 14 March 2026 in Starnberg (Suhrkamp / major press).
The Postmodern Condition
Life and works
Lyotard was born in Versailles to a modest family, taught philosophy in schools, beginning in Algeria, where he became a radical and joined Socialisme ou Barbarie. He later taught at Paris VIII and elsewhere. The Postmodern Condition (1979; English 1984), commissioned by the government of Quebec as a report on knowledge in developed societies, made him famous; later works include The Differend (1983).
The end of metanarratives
Knowledge has changed. The industrial age, with its mass production and Enlightenment ideals of reason and progress, is over. Metanarratives such as the emancipation of humanity (Marxism, liberalism) or the progress of knowledge no longer convince. Science now legitimates itself by performance, by what works and sells.
Lyotard's postmodern turn.
Postmodernity is also social: class-based industrial society has given way to a post-industrial, consumer-driven, media-dominated and globalised one in which class and national identities weaken.
| Modern | Postmodern |
|---|---|
| Grand narratives | Little narratives |
| Consensus as goal | Dissent, the differend |
| Universal reason | Plural language games |
Language games and the differend
Drawing on Wittgenstein, Lyotard sees language as many games, each with its own rules and none master of the rest. A differend is a conflict that cannot be resolved because no rule of judgement applies to both sides. Postmodern analysis has encouraged sensitivity to minorities and multiculturalism.
Later reception
Lyotard's comment that we have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole and the one sums up his suspicion of totality in politics. In the Differend he argues that justice lies in bearing witness to wrongs that cannot be expressed in the dominant idiom, such as the testimony of Holocaust victims faced with denial. Critics such as Habermas reply that dissent itself presupposes shared rules of argument.
From Socialism or Barbarism to the Differend
Born in Versailles (1924), Lyotard taught in Algeria, joined the Trotskyist circle around Socialisme ou Barbarie, and was active in 1968. Early work tried to fuse Marxism and psychoanalysis; Libidinal Economy (1974) chased avant-garde subversion. After disillusion he turned to language (Wittgenstein, Derrida). The Postmodern Condition (1979; Eng. 1984), a Quebec report on knowledge, defined the postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.
Lyotard from incredulity to the politics of the Differend.
- Knowledge after industry. Mass production and Enlightenment progress stories fade; science fragments into incommensurable games and legitimates itself by performativity (what works and sells).
- Enlightenment Project. Modernity as reason promising happiness via science, capitalism, and the liberal state (or socialist alternatives). Outcomes include wealth and freedom and world wars, totalitarianism, nuclear and ecological threat; faith collapses.
- Social postmodernity. Post-industrial, consumer, media, globalised society; class and national identities loosen; politics shifts to identity, lifestyle, regionalism, and single issues; mass parties hollow out.
- Language games. No meta-language resolves clashes between forms of life. Metanarratives and even "reasonable" consensus are suspected as oppressive exclusions.
- Differend. A conflict with no rule of judgement applying to both sides; justice is bearing witness to wrongs that lack a hearing in the dominant idiom (e.g. Holocaust testimony under denial).
- Authors' verdict. Endless conflict with little constructive agreement; postmodernity overstates the break; the critique of metanarrative is itself a grand story. Still "challenging and significant," and the book's closing debate partner to Habermas.
Performativity, little narratives, and justice without consensus
Under performativity, universities and labs justify themselves by efficiency and marketable output. Little narratives and local language games replace the big stories of Spirit, Proletariat, or Emancipation. Justice becomes the obligation to hear a differend: a wrong that cannot be phrased in the idiom that judges it.
- Auschwitz as limit. The entry treats Holocaust denial and testimony as the differend's stark case: the demand for "proof" in the denier's game silences the victim's genre.
- Politics. Defence of plurality against terror of unity; weak on institutions that must still decide. Habermas answers with discourse ethics; the volume ends on that quarrel.
Glossary: Key Terms of Political Thought
The glossary covers three kinds of term. Some name ideologies (anarchism, conservatism, liberalism, socialism, communism, totalitarian); some are philosophical (epistemology, metaphysics, idealism and materialism, nominalism, moral relativism, scholasticism); and some are institutional or technical (sovereignty, state, prerogative powers, raison d'état, mode of production, monetarism, laissez-faire).
The three kinds of term in the closing glossary.
| Term | Glossary definition, condensed | Main entries |
|---|---|---|
| Aristocracy | Rule by the best, as against oligarchy, rule by the wealthy few | Plato, Aristotle |
| Civil society | Sphere of free association between family and state, in Hegel's sense | Hegel, Marx |
| Ideology | Ideas that describe the world and prescribe action to keep or change it | Marx, Mannheim |
| Intellectualism | Law valid by conformity to reason, against legal positivism (law as will) | Aquinas, Hobbes |
| Sovereignty | A power within a territory than which there is none higher | Hobbes, Rousseau |
| State | Not one thing: polis, lo stato and nation-state differ | Throughout |
| Totalitarian | Regimes controlling the totality of life in the name of a doctrine | Arendt, Mussolini |
Several definitions are worth noting. State warns against assuming that the Athenian polis, Machiavelli's lo stato and the modern nation-state are the same thing. Liberalism is traced to the seventeenth-century English gentry opposing Stuart absolutism, and conservatism to a mistrust of rapid change. Critical theory is credited to Horkheimer, and nominalism dated to the eleventh century.
Five Questions Across Fifty Thinkers
Who should rule?
Plato's philosopher-kings, Aristotle's polity, Aquinas's king, Hobbes's absolute sovereign, Rousseau's assembled people and Lenin's vanguard are rival answers. A long line, from Marsilius through Locke and Paine to Mill, moves authority towards consent and the people, while Burke, Hegel and Oakeshott stress inherited institutions. The modern consensus on representative democracy emerges late and stays contested by elitists, Marxists and anarchists.
Rival answers to the oldest question of political thought.
Why obey?
Divine order (Augustine, John of Salisbury), natural law (Aquinas, Locke), contract (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Rawls), utility (Hume, Bentham), tradition (Burke, Oakeshott) and charisma or legality (Weber) are the main grounds offered. Hume's critique of the original contract is the hinge: after him, contract theory survives mainly as a thought experiment, as in Rawls's original position.
| Debate | One side | Other side |
|---|---|---|
| State of nature | Hobbes: war of all | Locke: governed by natural law |
| French Revolution | Burke: destructive folly | Paine, Wollstonecraft: rights of man |
| Freedom | Berlin, Hayek: negative liberty | Green, Hegel: positive freedom |
| Justice | Rawls: fair pattern | Nozick: fair history |
| Reason | Habermas: communicative consensus | Lyotard: incredulity and dissent |
Freedom and justice
The quarrel between negative and positive freedom runs from Hobbes and Bentham against Rousseau, Kant and Green, to Berlin's restatement. Justice moves from Plato's harmony of the soul to Marx's critique of exploitation and the late twentieth-century debate between Rawls and Nozick. Feminist (Wollstonecraft, Beauvoir), anti-colonial (Gandhi, Garvey) and ecological (Naess) entries widen whose freedom and whose justice count.
Grounds of obligation, roughly in the order they gained prominence.
Does history have a direction?
Augustine's providence, Kant's hidden plan, Hegel's Spirit, Marx's laws and Spencer's evolution all said yes. Nietzsche, Weber, Popper and Lyotard, in very different ways, said no, or that belief in such direction is dangerous. The book itself ends in this mood of doubt, with Habermas trying to rescue reason and Lyotard suspicious of every grand story.