History of Political philosophy

 Political philosophy is the branch of philosophy that studies how the relationship between people and society should be, and includes fundamental questions about government, politics, laws, freedom, equality, justice, property, rights, political power, the application of a legal code by an authority, what makes a legitimate government, what rights and freedoms should it protect and why, what form should it take and why, what obligations do citizens have towards a government legitimately (if any), and when they can legitimately topple him (if ever). While political science investigates how political phenomena were, are and will be, political philosophy is in charge of theorizing how these phenomena should be

In a vernacular sense, the term "political philosophy" often refers to a general perspective, or a specific ethics, belief, or attitude, about politics that need not belong to the technical discipline of philosophy. Charles Blattberg, who defines politics as "responding to conflicts with dialogue," suggests that political philosophies offer philosophical considerations of that dialogue.

 

Political philosophy has a broad field of study and is easily connected with other branches and sub-disciplines of philosophy, such as the philosophy of law and the philosophy of economics. It is strongly related to ethics in questions about what kind of Political institutions are suitable for a group depending on what way of life is considered suitable for that group or for the members of that group. The best institutions will be those that promote that way of life.

 

The metaphysics, the main controversy is about whether the fundamental entity on which rights and obligations must fall is the individual, or the group. Individualism considers the fundamental entity to be the individual, and therefore they promote methodological individualism. Communitarianism emphasizes that the individual is part of a group, and therefore gives priority to the group as a fundamental entity and as a unit of analysis.

 

The foundations of political philosophy have varied throughout history. For the Greeks the city was the center and end of all political activity. In the Middle Ages, all political activity focused on the relationships that human beings must maintain with the order given by God. From the Renaissance on, politics adopted a basically anthropocentric approach. In the modern and contemporary world, many models emerge and coexist, ranging from totalitarianisms to participatory democratic systems (among which there are many variants).

 

Some influential political philosophers were: in the UK, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham and James Mill; in France, Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire; in Italy, Cesare Beccaria, Giambattista Vico and Giuseppe Mazzini; and in Germany, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

 

Contemporary political philosophy

 

From the end of World War II until 1971, when John Rawls published his Theory of Justice, political philosophy declined in Anglo-American academia, as analytical philosophers expressed skepticism about the possibility that normative judgments had cognitive content. and political science turned to statistical methods and behaviorism. In continental Europe, on the other hand, the postwar decades saw an enormous flowering of political philosophy, with Marxism dominating the field. This was the time of Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser, and the victories of Mao Zedong in China and of Fidel Castro in Cuba, as well as the events of May 1968, which sparked a growing interest in revolutionary ideology, especially the New Left. Some continental European emigrants to Britain and the United States, including Karl Popper, Friedrich Hayek, Leo Strauss, Isaiah Berlin, Eric Voegelin, and Judith Shklar, fostered the continued study of political philosophy in the Anglo-American world, but in the 1950s and 1960’s, they and their students stood against the analytic establishment.

 

Communism continued to be a major focus especially during the 1950s and 1960s. Issues such as colonialism and racism were major issues that emerged at the time. In general, there was a marked tendency towards a pragmatic approach to political questions, rather than a philosophical one. Most of the academic debate centered on one or both of the following pragmatic themes: the application of utilitarianism to public policy problems, and the application of economic models (such as rational choice theory) to political questions. The rise of feminism, LGBT social movements, and the end of colonial rule and the political exclusion of minorities such as African Americans and sexual minorities in the developed world, enabled feminist, postcolonial, and multicultural thinking to become meaningful. This posed challenges to the idea of ​​the social contract by philosophers such as Charles W. Mills, in his book "The Racial Contract", and Carole Pateman in her work "The Sexual Contract", focusing on the fact that the social contract excluded people of color and women, respectively.

 

In Anglo-American academic political philosophy, the publication of John Rawls's “ Theory of justice” in 1971 is considered a landmark. Rawls used a thought experiment, the original position, in which representative parties choose principles of justice for the basic structure of society from behind a veil of ignorance. Rawls also offered a critique of utilitarian approaches to political justice issues. Robert Nozick's 1974 book "Anarchy, State, and Utopia" responded to Rawls from a libertarian perspective, gaining academic respect for his views.

Contemporaneously, with the emergence of analytical ethics in Anglo-American thought, several lines of philosophy emerged in Europe between the 1950s and 1980s aimed at criticizing existing societies. Most took elements of Marxist economic analysis, but combined them with a more cultural or ideological emphasis. Within the Frankfurt School, thinkers such as Herbert Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Jürgen Habermas combined Marxist and Freudian perspectives. For their part, several other thinkers, still heavily influenced by Marxism, placed new emphasis on structuralism and on a "return to Hegel." Within the line of poststructuralism thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Claude Lefort and Jean Baudrillard can be placed. The Situationists were more influenced by Hegel; Guy Debord, in particular, transferred a Marxist analysis of commodity fetishism to the realm of consumption and examined the relationship between consumerism and the dominant ideological formation.

 

Another debate developed around the various critiques of liberal political theory made by Michael Walzer, Michael Sandel, and Charles Taylor. The liberal-community debate is often considered valuable in generating a new set of philosophical problems, rather than a profound and illuminating clash of perspectives. These and other communitarians (such as Alasdair MacIntyre and Daniel A. Bell) argue that, against liberalism, communities are prior to individuals, and therefore must be the center of political focus. Communitarians tend to support greater local control, as well as economic and social policies that encourage the growth of social capital.

 

A pair of overlapping political perspectives emerging towards the end of the 20th century are republicanism (or neo-republicanism, or civic republicanism) and the capabilities approach. The resurgent republican movement seeks to provide an alternative definition of freedom from Isaiah Berlin's positive and negative forms of freedom, namely, "freedom as non-domination." Unlike liberals who understand freedom as "non-interference", the idea of ​​"non-domination" implies that individuals are not subject to the arbitrary will of any other person. For a liberal, a slave who is not interfered with, may be free, but for a republican the mere status of a slave, regardless of how that slave is treated, is reprehensible. Prominent Republicans include historian Quentin Skinner, jurist Cass Sunstein, and political philosopher Philip Pettit. The capacity approach, initiated by the economists Mahbub ul Haq and Amartya Sen and developed by the jurist Martha Nussbaum, understands freedom along allied lines: the real capacity to act. Both the capacity approach and republicanism treat the election as something that must be funded. In other words, it is not enough to be legally capable of doing something, but to have the real option to do it.

 

One of the most prominent themes in recent political philosophy has been the theory of deliberative democracy. The seminal work is from  Jurgen Habermas in Germany, but the most extensive literature has been in English, led by theorists such as Jane Mansbridge, Joshua Cohen, Amy Gutmann, and Dennis Thompson.